Shadow of Freedom-eARC (6 page)

She paused, looking steadily into Gervais’ and Helga’s eyes across the table, then shrugged.

“He’s pretty tight with the Royals, too, since that business with Princess Ruth, although he’s been a lot more focused on Torch and the Congo System since Berry got crowned Queen. And he and”—the hesitation was so slight that only someone who knew her as well as Gervais did would have realized she’d changed what she’d been about to say—“the Torches have certainly been looking for every way they could possibly hurt Mesa. Hell, Torch has declared
war
on them! And let’s not forget what those bastards tried to do to the entire planet five months ago.

“So, on the surface, there’s a certain plausibility to Mesa’s claims. He hates Manpower’s guts; they’ve tried more than once to kill him—or me, or Berry, or Cathy; and I wouldn’t be surprised if he’d managed to turn up at least some evidence Manpower was about to use those StateSec stumblebums to hit Torch. Trust me, if he’d seen
that
coming, he would’ve done anything he could to prevent it. But he wouldn’t have tried this way. If nothing else, he’d’ve known it wouldn’t work, and he’s spent enough time with Cathy to know exactly how disastrous something like this could be politically—not just for Torch, but for the abolitionist movement in general.”

“Not even if he thought the attack on Torch was going to work?” Helga asked quietly, and Helen looked at her. “I mean, if he found out about the attack and didn’t know Admiral Rozsak would be able to stop it? If he figured your sister and all his friends on Torch were going to be killed?”

“No way.” Helen shook her head firmly. “Daddy doesn’t think that way. Oh, I’m not saying he wouldn’t have made Mesa and Manpower pay big-time if they’d managed to pull something like that off, but he wouldn’t have done it before he
knew
they’d pulled it off. And he wouldn’t have gone about
this
way it even if they’d managed to turn Torch into a cue ball. It’s not the way he thinks, not the sort of thing he’d involve himself with.”

“Grief and hatred can make someone do terrible things,” Gervais pointed out gently, and Helen surprised him with a snort of laughter.

“You don’t have to tell me that. Remember what happened to me on Old Terra? Or what happened to my Mom? Or the way I
met
Berry and Lars, for that matter? But Daddy is a very…guided weapon, Gwen. He’s got really good target discrimination, and he’s just as good at holding down the collateral damage. Besides, nuking a
park?
A park full of
kids?
” She shook her head. “He’d die first. Or, for that matter, kill anybody else who thought that would be a good idea! I’m not saying my Daddy’s a saint, because he’s not. I love him, but nobody who knows him would ever claim he’s an angel. Or, if he is, he’s one of those
avenging
angels with a really sooty halo, anyway. And I could see him not worrying a whole lot about the tender sensibilities of a bunch of slave-trading Mesans. I could even see him using a nuke against some kind of hard target, the kind that wouldn’t kill a stack of civilians when it disappeared in a mushroom cloud. But not this. Never a park.”

“You’re sure?”

“Gwen, I’m
damned
sure Daddy didn’t plan and carry out this strike. I don’t know where he is, and I don’t know why he hasn’t spoken up yet. And, yeah, I’ll admit that scares the shit out of me. He’s got to know how Mesa’s using Green Pines as a club to beat both the Star Empire and the Ballroom, and he’d never let them go on doing it if he could do anything—like surfacing to refute their version—to stop it. But it’s not his style. Oh, yeah, if they’d actually managed to genocide Torch, then he might’ve gone after them on Mesa. He wouldn’t have done it until he
knew
they’d gotten through to Torch, though, and he wouldn’t have done it this way even then. He’d’ve been looking for another target, and when he was done, there wouldn’t be any question about who’d been responsible for it.”

“Why not?” Helga asked, her tone one of fascination despite the topic of the conversation, and Helen gave another, harsher snort of laughter.

“Because if
my
Daddy had gone after a target on Mesa, he wouldn’t have wasted his time on Green Pines. If he was in city-killing mode, he’d’ve gone after Mendel and their entire system government, not some lousy bedroom community. And, trust me, the hole would’ve been a hell of a lot deeper!”

Chapter Four

Fine, misty rain drizzled down from a dim, gray sky. The brisk wind drove the droplets in billowing waves, almost (but not quite) like fog, and the air was cold, its edge sharpened by the approach of winter. The battered old ground car’s side windows had been patched with tape, drafts probed through its interior, and its aged heater’s valiant battle against the chill was dwindling toward defeat. Water splashed against the vehicle’s underside as it jolted down the potholed surface road, and the passenger side’s old-fashioned wiper blade was frozen uselessly in place.

Indiana Graham hunched forward in the driver’s seat, leaning over the wheel and bending down to peer through the lower portion of his side of the windshield where the equally old-fashioned fan-powered defroster had actually managed to produce a very inconveniently placed clear patch. His coat was thick and reasonably warm, although it was also badly worn, but he wore neither hat nor gloves. The slender young woman huddled in the passenger’s seat who looked enough like him to have been his sister (because she was)
was
wearing gloves, but she had her hands tucked into her armpits, anyway. Her breath steamed slightly, and she looked thoroughly miserable.

The car splashed through a deeper, wider puddle, throwing up wings of water on either side. Some of that water splashed in through the tape-repaired rear side window, and she grimaced as it hit her right cheek.

“Ugh! Do you think you could’ve found a
deeper
puddle, Indy?” she demanded, wiping the muddy water off her face with a gloved palm.

“Sorry, Max,” the driver took his eye off the road long enough to dart a smile at her. “I’ll try, but it’ll be hard. Would you settle for one that’s just a lot
wider
? I only ask because I see one coming up ahead.”

“Very funny.” Mackenzie Graham leaned over to look through his side of the windshield, and her eyes widened. “Indy, don’t you
dare!
”

“Sorry,” her brother repeated, perhaps a shade more seriously than before, “but the only way across is through.”

She glared at him, but she couldn’t seem to produce her customary voltage. Probably because Indiana was obviously correct. This pothole stretched clear across the road, and while the security fences that paralleled the roadway were old and neglected, sagging with age, they were still sufficient to confine the decrepit old ground car to the paved (more or less) surface.

Indiana gave her an apologetic smile and tapped the brake, slowing down as they approached the wind-rippled expanse of muddy water. The front wheels dropped into it with a splash that jolted both of them, and the car’s motion took on a distinct floatiness. More water sprayed up on either side, although not so high this time. Then the rear wheels dropped into the same hole and Mackenzie was afraid they were going to lose traction entirely. But they continued churning forward with a lurching, muddy sort of determination, and she grimaced and raised her feet as water found its way in through small rust holes, flooding the floorboards. The incoming tide rose to almost a centimeter in depth, they slowed still further, and she braced herself for the thought of climbing out in the middle of their own private lake when the car finally bogged down. But then—with one last, bouncing sway—they broke free of the pothole and regained solid ground.

“I was really afraid we might not make it that time,” Indiana said, as if he’d read her mind and was voicing her thought for her. She gave him a speaking look, and he shrugged. “Hey, I didn’t pick the spot for this meeting, you know!”

“Yeah, I
do
know,” she agreed.

She didn’t look any happier, and it was Indiana’s turn to grimace in acknowledgment. She was the organizer, the one who kept track of details, but she was also the voice of caution. He was the natural born point man, the fellow who just had to get out in front, couldn’t seem to leave well enough alone or settle for a life of grim, gray obedience to their “betters.” Their father had been like that…which was how he’d ended up sentenced to a thirty-five-T-year term in Terrabore Maximum Security Prison.

So far, Mackenzie had prevented Indy from joining him there, and he was in favor of keeping things that way. All the same, both of them realized that at least some risks had to be run if they were going to do anything about getting their father (and several thousand other prisoners) out of the none-too-gentle arms of General Tillman O’Sullivan’s Seraphim System Security Police.

Among other things.

“I only wish I knew why the meeting got moved all the way out here,” Mackenzie went on after a moment. “I don’t like how easy it would be for O’Sullivan or Shelton to just ‘disappear’ us in a place like this without anyone ever noticing.”

“Believe me, the same thought’s occurred to me,” Indiana said. “On the other hand, they don’t really need to get us out in the country to do that, do they? In fact, the more I think about it, the more sense it would make for them to do exactly the opposite. Come in with all sirens screaming and bust us in the middle of the capital, I mean. SWAT teams everywhere, scags on the rooftops.…Think about the statement
that
would make!”

Mackenzie shivered with more than just the cold as her all too lively imagination pictured the scene her brother had just described.

“Golly gee, thanks, Indy,” she said sourly. “That ought to be good for the odd nightmare or two.”

“Well, there
is
a counter argument to their doing anything of the sort,” he said cheerfully. “If they bust us publicly, they’re effectively admitting there’s a genuine independence movement cooking away under the surface. I don’t think they’d want to do that—especially after what’s been going on over in the Madras Sector.”

“Which means it really might make a lot of sense for them to get us out in the boonies this way before they pounce, after all,” his sister pointed out in an even more sour tone.

“Well, yeah.” Indiana nodded. “Come down to it, though, we’ve gotta take a chance or two if we want to pull this off. Besides, all the codes were right, Max. If O’Sullivan’s scags had all of that, they wouldn’t have to lure us anywhere. They’d probably already know exactly who we are and exactly where we live, too, and they’d just’ve come calling in the middle of the night, instead.”

“You’re making me feel enormously better with every word,” she told him with a glare, and he shrugged.

“Just considering all the possibilities. And while I’m at it, what I’m actually doing is pointing out that this almost certainly isn’t a trap because there are so many other ways they could have dealt with us if they knew about us in the first place and that was what they wanted to do.”

She made a face at him and turned back around to sit straight in her own seat, yet she had to admit he had a point. To her surprise, that actually did make her feel better. Quite a bit, in fact.

“There’s the turn,” she said, removing her right hand from her left armpit to point through the rain-streaked window beside her.

“Got it.”

Indiana guided the ground car through the open, dilapidated gate in the security fence. The rain was beginning to come down harder, turning into distinct drops rather than the fine, drifting mist it had been, and he pulled under the overhead cover of the deserted loading dock with a distinct sense of relief. Not only would it protect the car (such as it was, and what there was of it) from the rain, but it also offered at least some protection against the SSSP’s overflights.

The Seraphim System’s indigenous industrial and technical base left a lot to be desired, as the use of something as ancient and old-fashioned as asphalt rather than ceramacrete even here in the planetary capital of Cherubim indicated. But that didn’t mean better tech was completely unavailable if the price was right, and the scags, as General O’Sullivan’s security troopers were universally (and with very little affection) known, tended to get the best off-world equipment money could buy. Even the Seraphim Army had been known to express the occasional pang of envy, but President Jacqueline McCready knew where to invest her credits when it came to “system security.” Which meant the SSSP had first call on the treasury…and a large and capable stable of surveillance platforms.

Not even the scags had an unlimited supply of them, however. And serviceability was often an issue, since the Seraphim education system didn’t turn out the best trained maintenance techs in the explored galaxy. So the odds were against any of them being used to keep an eye on such a dilapidated and useless stretch of the Rust Belt, as the once-thriving wasteland on Cherubim’s perimeter had come to be known. There hadn’t been anything worth worrying about out here since the transstellars like Krestor Interstellar and Mendoza of Córdoba had moved in and eliminated Seraphim’s once vibrant small-business sector. These days, either you worked as a good little helot for your out-system masters or you didn’t work at all. And God help you if you thought you could scrape up a little startup capital and try to change that situation.

That was what had happened to Bruce Graham.

Mackenzie rolled down her battered window and looked out, peering into the gloomy shadows which had gathered in the corners of the loading dock. It was still only late afternoon, but what with the rain and the onset of winter it looked a lot later (and darker), and she squinted as she tried to make out details.

“I don’t see anybody,” she said after a moment, her voice more than a little nervous.

“I don’t either,” Indiana acknowledged. “On the other hand, we’re a couple of minutes early. He may still be on his way. Or—”

He broke off as a man stepped out of the dim recess from which he’d apparently been examining the ground car. The newcomer moved calmly and unhurriedly, with his collar turned up against the cold and a soft hat of a style which had once been called a “fedora” pulled well down. He looked like a mid-level manager, or possibly someone a little further down the pecking order from that.