At a cost.
“There’s a monument in front of the burned-out buildings,” Wanda said. She frowned. “It’s been defaced.”
“I don’t think it’s been defaced,” Ran said. He walked slowly across the square, avoiding shills and pedestrians without seeming to look at them. “I think it’s just birdshit. Or the local equivalent.”
Ran guessed the permanent population of Taskerville was in the order of a thousand, but there was a floating supplement of at least twice that. The streets were thronged with lizard hunters and oil drilling personnel—and sailors. He’d already noticed several bands of crewmen from the Empress of Earth. Because Taskerville was the center of a frontier region, it had the facilities to entertain the rougher son of starfarers as well.
The square was an open-air market of kiosks and barrows, each covered with a bright sheet against the morning and afternoon rains. The permanent buildings were given over to businesses which required a degree of security: banking, high-stakes gambling, accommodations for wealthy transients, and—on the upper floors—prostitution, both high-volume knocking shops and a modicum of privacy for the independents working the square.
The monument was a Celtic cross, of stone rather than cast concrete and three meters high. Large letters on the crossbar read SACRED TO THE MEMORY OF THOSE WHO DIED THAT FREEDOM MIGHT LIVE, but the double column of names down the vertical post was obscured by years of white streaking.
The creatures that flapped away from Ran’s deliberate approach were winged and seemed to have feathers, so perhaps they were birds.
Ran keyed the chip that had been recorded by his father’s helmet during the final assault. He saw—
Three of the armored personnel carriers in the square were burning. They bubbled with thick black smoke, from lubricants and plastics and the bodies of troops who died when rebel weapons destroyed the vehicles.
A dozen more of the APCs had survived. Their cupola guns fired ropes of pearl-white tracer point blank into the buildings the rebels still held on the north side. Other friendly troops—all of them from the Adjunct Regiments, the mercenaries; there were no Hobilo natives present except for those serving the Prophet Elias—shot from the cleared structures to the left and right, adding to the base of fire that prepared the assault.
The recording lens in Chick Colville’s helmet lurched upward as he and Jive other mercenaries climbed through the top hatch of their vehicle. They jumped down to the pavement of cracked concrete and ran in a squat, as if forcing themselves against a fierce wind.
Colville was the last man. The troopers to either side of him fell, one like a sack of potatoes, the other twisted onto her back, a ragged tear in her thigh and a look of disbelief on her face when her visored helmet rolled free.
The muzzle flashes of the shots that felled them twinkled from twenty meters up the spire of the cathedral. Ricochets sparked away in puffs of powdered concrete.
Chick Colville was slower than his comrades because he carried the flamethrower. The fat nozzle rose into the field of view as he aimed. Recoil from the jet of metallized napalm shifted the viewpoint back a further step, but the flame rod arched between the concrete struts like a thread into the slot of a needle. An explosion cascaded sparks both inside and outside the cathedral.
Ran walked forward, seeing only the projected hologram. Vendors offered fruits at the edge of his awareness. He heard Wanda say harshly, “No, we don’t want any!”
The cathedral’s bronze doors had been blown into the sanctuary; cannonfire had cut completely through the stone post between the right and center portals. There was no one alive in the circular nave. The floor was littered with rubble and bodies.
“Careful, Ran,” Wanda said. Her hand was on his arm, guiding him. “There’s three steps.”
The last snipers had used a scaffolding supported at mid-height by a wooden trellis. It was ablaze. A corpse hung from a crossbeam, and two bodies which had fallen to the floor also burned from Colville’s flame.
The mercenaries preceding him stumbled over litter in their haste to reach the door behind the wrecked altar. An APC’s automatic cannon fired into the nave. White flashes filled the air with shell fragments that, for a wonder, seemed to hit nobody.