David Weber - Shadow of Freedom

“Great.” Venelli snorted harshly. “If I had a credit for every time one of these assholes screwed the pooch out here trying to look good for the home office I could buy Hoplite as my private yacht and retire!”

“You probably could,” Osborne agreed. “In this case, he decided to raise the quota on silver oak. In fact, he doubled it. Then he raised it again . There’s a lot of timberland on Halkirk, but it’s not unlimited, and the Halkirkians know it. He’s basically clearcutting their most valuable planetary resource, and they don’t like it. He doesn’t care, of course. Even at the rate he’s going through them, there are enough stands of silver oak to keep him in business for another ten or twenty years, and he plans on being long gone by then.”

Venelli felt as disgusted as Osborne looked. Slash-and-burn tactics like Zagorski’s were entirely too common in the Verge, and they accounted for at least half of the Solarian League Navy’s headaches.

“When the new logging policies came in, a lot of people who’d been willing to keep their heads down rather than attract the UPS’ attention started remembering Good King Tavis a lot more affectionately,” Osborne continued. “Mánas MacRory may not have cherished any political ambitions, but his nephew Raghnall—his older brother’s son—knew MacCrimmon and MacQuarie weren’t likely to take his word for it. So, without mentioning it to anyone—including Mánas—he started organizing the ‘MacRory Militia.’ As far as I can tell, it was supposed to be a purely defensive move on his part. I think he just wanted to put together something tough enough to make MacQuarie think twice about assassinating his uncle the way MacHendrie assassinated his father and his grandfather. Unfortunately, it didn’t work out that way.

“The level of unhappiness really started spiking about two years ago, and MacQuarie began seeing conspirators under every bed in Elgin. I’m pretty sure she was deliberately exaggerating in her cabinet reports as a way to suck in more resources for UPS, but that didn’t mean she was completely wrong, either. In fact,” he sounded like someone who disliked what he was admitting, “my own sources indicate that someone here on Halkirk had actually begun some serious organizing and established some out-system contacts for small arms and some heavy weapons. It’s a fairly recent development, and I still haven’t been able to nail down exactly whose idea it was. It wasn’t the MacRorys, though; I do know that much. By now, three or four different groups have come out of the woodwork under the umbrella of MacLean’s ‘Loomis Liberation League’s Provos,’ but that happened later, after MacQuarie realized there really was someone here in Loomis who was genuinely interested in shooting back and decided she’d better nip it in the bud. She leapt to the conclusion that it had to be the MacRorys, unfortunately, and she tried to take Mánas into ‘protective custody.’ And that, Captain Venelli, was when the shit hit the fan and I put in a call for someone like you.”

“You couldn’t find a smaller sledgehammer?” Venelli asked caustically, and the OFS officer shrugged.

“I didn’t want a sledgehammer at all. Unfortunately, Zagorski didn’t leave me much option. He wants results— fast results—and he’s got a big enough marker with somebody further up the chain than me to get them.”

“I guess what I object to the most is how frigging stupid this all is,” Venelli said. “On the other hand, I suppose I should be used to stupidity by now.”

“There’s enough of it lying around, anyway,” Osborne agreed. “I don’t recall seeing a more spectacular example of it lately, though.”

He shook his head, and Venelli realized there was more than just disgust in his eyes. There was anger…and even regret.

“I’ve assisted in—even officiated over—some pretty ugly things in my time, Captain,” the OFS officer told her. “It comes with the territory, and I’ve got to admit the pay is pretty good. But sometimes…sometimes it isn’t good enough, and this is one of those times.”

* * *

Innis MacLay lay on his belly, peering cautiously out of the sixtieth floor window. For Halkirk, that made his present perch a tall building, although the gleaming ceramacrete towers SEIU had constructed in the heart of the city dwarfed it. Two of those towers were far less pristine than they had been, marked by the dark scars of multiple missile strikes and streaked with smoke from the fires which had consumed whole floors of their interiors, and MacLay showed his teeth briefly as he remembered watching the explosions ripple up and down their flanks. That had been when he thought the Provos had a real chance.

Now he knew better. They’d had the damned Uppies on the run for the first couple of weeks, and maybe as many as a third of the smaller cities and towns had come in on the LLLP’s side, or at least declared their neutrality. But that had been before they found out the frigging OFS had called in the Solly navy.

His eyes went bleak and hard as he recalled the first kinetic strikes. MacCrimmon and MacQuarie hadn’t seemed interested in taking prisoners. Maybe they’d just wanted to avoid the expense of building bigger reeducation camps on Westray, or maybe they’d been scared enough they struck out in panic. Or maybe they were just such bloody-minded bastards they’d decided to eliminate as many of the opposition as they could while the eliminating was good. MacLay figured he’d never find out for sure which it had been, and it didn’t much matter, anyway. There’d been no warning, no call to surrender, no threats of orbital strikes at all. There’d been only the terrible white lines streaming down through the skies of Halkirk to pock the planetary surface with brimstone.

That was what had broken the Resistance’s back. The first wave of strikes had taken out a dozen towns and the regional city of Conerock, whose city council had been the first to go over to the Liberation League when the Provos seized the local UPS stations and the hub airport. No one knew how many had been killed, but Conerock’s population had been over eighty-five thousand all by itself, and there’d been precious few survivors.

So now they were left with this, he thought grimly. There was no surrender—not for the Provos, not for the hard-core, like Innis MacLay. They wouldn’t last long in the camps, anyway, even assuming they’d live long enough to get there, and he was damned if he’d give MacQuarie and General Boyle the satisfaction. Besides, his wife and kids had been in Conerock, so they could just drag him out of his last burrow when the time came, and his teeth and claws would savage them the whole way. When he got to Hell, he’d walk through the gates over the souls of all the Uppies he’d sent ahead to wait for him.

It wasn’t much for a man to look forward to, but he’d settle for what he could get, and—

He stiffened, eyes narrowing. Then his jaw clenched and he reached for the old-fashioned landline handset. The sound quality wasn’t good, but it was a lot more secure than any of the regular coms, and not even Solly sensors could localize and identify it against the background of the city’s power systems.

“Yes?” a voice at the other end answered.

“MacLay, on the roof,” he said tersely. “They’re coming. I’ve got eyes on at least a dozen tanks and twice that many APCs headed down Brownhill towards Castlegreen.” He paused for a moment. “I think they’ve figured out where we are.”

Silence hovered at the far end of the line for seconds that felt like hours. Then—

“Understood, Innis. I expect you’ll see a couple of missile teams up there in a minute or two.”