Singh realized his daydreaming of the high consul’s patronage had stretched into an awkward pause. Before he could reply, something shifted at the edge of his vision. Someone walking toward him with the purposeful stride of a messenger making a delivery. Except that the person striding toward him was Langstiver. The man who’d brought him the news of the new and glorious discovery. A small group of Belters were following him. He assumed Langstiver was coming to demand a reward for his information.
“I don’t want—” Singh began, but his Marine guard had put one hand on his chest and shoved him back. Kasik nodded at him sharply one time, then spit berry-colored saliva all over his face.
The Marine yanked Singh to the ground, hard, then knelt over him, shielding him with her body. Her knees pressed into his spine until it hurt. Singh heard her shouting orders, muffled by her helmet, to the rest of her detail. And then he heard nothing but the deafening ripping-paper sound of multiple rapid-fire weapons opening up. His guard was sitting on top of him and blocking his view, but the space between her thigh and calf as she crouched created a small triangular window on the carnage.
Langstiver and half a dozen other people were dancing backward as four Laconian Marines cut them to pieces with streams of high-velocity plastic safety rounds. It felt like the firing went on forever, like the bullets were keeping the assassins from falling. In reality it could only have lasted a few seconds. He experienced a little discontinuity in his consciousness, like he’d fallen briefly asleep, though that was impossible, and his Marine had yanked him to his feet and was shoving him back toward the administrative offices. The other members of her fire team slowly backed toward them, weapons at the ready.
Lieutenant Kasik still stood near the carts, not having moved during the entire firefight. He looked like he’d spit raspberry pie filling onto his lips, and he was twitching like an epileptic experiencing a grand mal. Singh understood something that had been eluding him.
“Kasik’s been shot,” he said. The pie filling on his face was the ruins of his lips from where the bullet had exited. The spray of red on Singh’s face and uniform wasn’t spit, it was his aide’s blood.
“Medical has already been alerted,” his Marine said, thinking he was talking to her.
“But no,” Singh said. She didn’t understand. “He’s been
She shoved him through the admin-building door and slammed it shut behind her. Just before it closed, the shocked silence that had followed the gunfire ended, and from a hundred voices outside the screaming started.
Kasik died on an operating table three hours after the attack. According to the report, he’d been shot in the back of the head, the bullet fracturing the occipital lobe of his skull and nicking his medulla oblongata. It then passed through the back of his throat and nearly severed his tongue, before shattering five teeth and exiting through his lips. Singh read the surgeon’s section of the incident report half a dozen times. Each time felt like the first.
None of the Marine security detail had been harmed in the exchange of fire, though several civilians had received minor injuries from bullet fragments, and one boy of nine had broken his arm while attempting to flee down a short flight of steps. All seven of the Belter radicals who’d attempted the assassination were dead. The intelligence people were digging into their past associations to see if the rebellion had roots that spread farther.
Rebellion.
The word felt wrong to Singh. The most Langstiver and his accomplices could have hoped for was his death. It would have done nothing to hand control of the station back to the Belters who’d once run it. Trejo would simply have assigned another officer to fill his place until a new governor could be dispatched from Laconia. It was all so short-sighted. So
What struck him most—what offended him as much as the still-implausible idea that he’d watched Kasik be murdered—was the monstrous ingratitude of it. The hubris of believing that Duarte’s path for humanity’s future was worth killing innocent people to resist. And after Trejo had been so generous with them.
He tapped the monitor lying on his desk, and the comm officer in security replied with a crisp, “Yes, sir.”
“Please have Colonel Tanaka report to me in my office immediately.”
“Sir, yes sir.”
