Shadow of Freedom Read online

“All right, Atalante,” he said. “Given how well Helen’s prescription worked out with Commander Watson, I think we’ll just let President Lombroso and Brigadier Yucel and friends sweat for a little bit before we talk to them, too. See if you can get a response over Ms. Summers’ link, instead.”

  “Yes, Sir.” Lieutenant Montella turned to her console, and Terekhov folded his arms across his chest as he gazed into the master visual display at the blue, green, and dun colored planet so far below.

  Commander Pope stepped up beside him.

  “Do you really think Breitbach’s going to be in a position to answer, Sir?” the chief of staff asked softly.

  “I don’t know, Tom,” Terekhov replied. He twitched his shoulders. “Given what these people have been up to, I just don’t know. If his security held, maybe. But…”

  His voice trailed off, and he shook his head. The news reports had been bad enough on the way in; now that they’d entered orbit and deployed air-breathing recon platforms, it was even worse. Several square blocks of Landing lay in charred, flattened ruins. Most of the destroyed structures—which happened, just coincidentally of course, to lie in the middle of the capital city’s low income housing, far away from the important corporate assets downtown—seemed to have been old-style construction, possibly left over from the city’s earliest days and built out of native materials. Few of those buildings had been more than five or six stories tall, but two much more modern towers had been caught in the holocaust and towered over the ashes at their feet like burned out Sphinxian crown oaks.

  And then, of course, there were the half-dozen or so craters which could only have been created by kinetic strikes. Three of them, not that far from Landing, were surrounded by the tattered ruins of fire and blast shredded towns. None of them liked what that suggested, and not just because of the loss of life they undoubtedly represented. Kinetic weapons were a routine method of supplying fire support for planetary forces and had been for well over a thousand T-years. Over that time, they had been refined into precision weapons, capable of pinpoint strikes and almost infinitely variable effective yields. But no one had been interested in pinpoint accuracy when it came to those strikes. They’d been terror attacks—exactly the sort of attack the Eridani Edict was supposed to prevent, although he was certain Yucel and Lombroso would justify them as “military necessities”—and as he thought about them, Terekhov found himself wishing Watson hadn’t taken his offer to abandon ship. But those scars were at least a week old; they lacked the immediacy of what was happening in Landing even now.

  As Terekhov and Pope watched, the image on one of the secondary visual displays CIC had tied into their air-breathing recon platforms changed, and Terekhov’s blue eyes were colder than arctic ice as he saw the line of bodies hanging from an obviously prefabricated, mass-produced gallows. There must have been twenty-five of them he thought as the platform zoomed in on them, and not all of those bodies had belonged to adults.

  “I want this imagery absolutely nailed down, Stilt,” he said without looking away. He didn’t raise his voice, yet a couple of people on the flag bridge flinched when they heard it. “I don’t want any doubt, any ambiguity, about what we saw or where we saw it before we ever landed.”

  “Yes, Sir,” Commander Lewis acknowledged.

  Helen sat very still at her own console. She wanted to look away from those dangling bodies. They’d obviously been there for a while, judging by the extent of decay. Even as she watched, one of Mobius Beta’s avians landed on the central beam of the gallows. It was one of the local planetary ecosystem’s buzzard analogues, and she felt her gorge trying to rise as it stretched down its long, sinuous neck and began ripping at what had been the face of one of the smaller bodies.

  So this is the ultra-civilized, oh-so-superior Solarian League’s view of “protecting” another planet, she thought grimly. And they have the gall to label the Ballroom terrorists?!

  She felt her hands clenching into fists and made herself sit back, breathe deeply, remember what Master Tye had taught her about channeling anger. It didn’t seem to help as much as usual.

  “Do you think that was Yucel or Yardley, Sir?” she heard Commander Pope ask, and Commodore Terekhov snorted harshly.

  “Do you think it matters?” he asked in reply. “If it was Yardley, she did it with Yucel’s knowledge and support. And from our intelligence reports on Yucel, not to mention what we monitored on the way in, she’s the kind who’s going to be ‘hands-on’ whenever she gets the opportunity.”

  “Agreed, Sir.” Pope nodded. “But if it was Yardley’s Presidential Guard thugs who actually carried out the hanging instead of the Gendarmerie, you know Yucel’s going to claim it was all the local authorities of an independent star nation. She sure as hell didn’t have anything to do with it!”

  “And?” Terekhov turned his head to look at the commander. “No matter what really happened here she’ll claim that in front of any tribunal. Or she would, if the opportunity ever arose.” He smiled thinly. “And no tribunal or court of inquiry we could possibly impanel is ever going to prevent Abruzzi and his E&I shills from claiming it was Lombroso or Yardley. Unless, of course, they decide they can actually convince the Solly public we did it in the process of crushing the courageous local resistance to our callous imperialistic invasion. Then, having produced all of these perfectly serviceable atrocities, we decided we’d record them all and use them so our propaganda could fasten responsibility for them onto that splendid patriot and democratically elected president, Svein Lombroso, and Mobius’ stalwart ally and defender, Brigadier Yucel.”

  Commander Pope, Helen noticed, looked like he really wished he thought Terekhov was joking with those last two sentences. For that matter, she wished she thought that.

  The commodore saw his chief of staff’s expression and grimaced.

  “The last thing anybody on the other side’s going to be interested in at this point is accurate reportage,” he pointed out. “They’ve never felt any compunction about distorting the truth to justify their peacetime policies; why in heaven’s name should they hesitate for a minute to manufacture atrocities out of whole cloth in wartime? And they won’t even have to manufacture these. We’ll have provided the visuals; all they’ll have to do is cut and edit and modify the audio.”

  “Should we be providing it at all, then, Sir?” Pope asked, his eyes troubled.

  “Of course we should. Sooner or later this war’s going to be over. When that happens, accurate records are going to be essential, and not just from a dry, historical perspective. Even more importantly, we need to show our people what this is really about right now, while it’s happening. That’s the real reason I want Stilt to make sure we have every bit of this absolutely certified and verified. I’d love to see some of the people in Old Chicago responsible for this”—he tossed his head in the direction of those pitiful, decaying bodies—“treated to the same penalty, but I don’t see that happening unless we actually physically occupy Old Terra, and somehow I don’t see that happening, either. We can always hope, though. And in the meantime,” his voice dropped, turning as icy as his eyes, “I want this evidence available when we deal with the people who actually did it.”

  “Yes, Sir.” Pope nodded firmly. “I understand. But it’s—”

  “Excuse me, Commander,” Atalante Montella interrupted respectfully. Pope and Terekhov turned towards her, and she looked at the commodore. “I don’t have Mr. Breitbach, Sir,” she said, “but I do have Ms. Blanchard.”

  “Do we have visual, or just audio?” Terekhov asked.

  “Both, Sir. The signal quality isn’t very good, though.”

  “Put her on the main display,” Terekhov directed, and turned towards the display as a woman’s image appeared on it. She was dark-haired and dark-eyed, with a strained, exhausted face smudged with dirt. An ugly bruise discolored her right cheek and temple, and a Solarian built pulse rifle was slung across her shoulder as she crouched over what was obviously a handheld com.r />
  “Ms. Blanchard, I’m Commodore Aivars Alexsovitch Terekhov, Royal Manticoran Navy,” he said. “We’re here in response to Ms. Summers message.”

  “Summers?” Blanchard’s voice was as exhausted as she looked, and she shook her head. “Was that the name?” She grimaced. “I didn’t know. Operational security.”

  “I don’t think operational security’s going to be an issue very much longer,” Terekhov told her grimly.

  “Maybe not. It’s the only reason some of us are still alive, though.” She scrubbed her hand across her face, smearing the dirt.

  “I can believe that. Are you ready to trust me, though?”

  “You had this com combination, and we saw the explosions from down here.” She shrugged. “We’ve been getting our asses kicked for the last week. I don’t see the bastards deciding they have to get tricky at this point.”

  “So I’ll take that as a yes?” he asked dryly.

  “Exactly.” She managed a quick, fleeting grimace of a smile. “Oh, and by the way, we’re happy as hell to see you.” She shook her head again. “I’ve got to say, when Michael told me you folks were backing us, it surprised the hell out of me.”

  “You’re not the only one,” he said even more dryly. Then his eyes narrowed. “On the other hand, you just mentioned ‘Michael.’ Am I correct in assuming that was a reference to Michael Breitbach?”

  “Yeah.” She made a face. “After all this time, knowing you know both of our names makes me a little nervous. Nothing personal.”

  “Understandable. But may I ask why we got you at this combination and not him? My understanding from Ms. Summers was that this was Mr. Breitbach’s combination.”

  “It is.” Her weary voice was suddenly leaden. “Unfortunately, he’s not here to answer.”

  “What happened?”

  “He was on his way to meet with one of our cell leaders and there was a sweep through the area. He didn’t come back.” She raked the fingers of her right hand through her short cut, filthy looking hair.

  “Do you think Yucel and Lombroso know who they caught?”

  “No way.” She shook her head hard. “It would’ve been all over what’s left of the news channels if they knew they’d gotten him. He was unarmed, and he wasn’t even carrying his com…which is why I happen to have it.” Her image moved dizzyingly on the display as she swept the hand holding Breitbach’s com around for emphasis. “I’m guessing they figure he’s just one more civilian they’ve swept up.”

  “All right.” Terekhov nodded. “That makes sense.” He pursed his lips for a moment. “I haven’t contacted Lombroso or Yucel yet. What’s your situation? The real situation, I mean, not what they’re putting out on the information channels.”

  “To be honest, it’s almost as bad as they’re saying it is,” she admitted, setting the com down on a table or desk of some sort and perching herself on an overturned trash can. “Lombroso and that bitch Hadley started the sweeps a couple of weeks before Yucel got here. Beatings, casual brutality, secret arrests, something more imaginative when they had time for it. That kind of thing. Then they started the public executions.” Her jaw tightened. “Not just for people who were actually caught doing something ‘criminal,’ either. They were making examples, and they didn’t even pretend they weren’t.”

  She fell silent for a moment, nostrils flaring, and Terekhov waited patiently.

  “We couldn’t hold our people when that kind of shit started. If Michael hadn’t moved—and hadn’t made sure everyone knew he was moving—he’d have lost control and Hadley would’ve picked us off one at a time as each cell tried something on its own. And he had a pretty good ‘nothing left to lose’ plan already in place. We damned near took Hadley, the PG’s HQ, and the President’s Palace in the first eighteen hours. Killed a bunch of the bastards, and shot up at least two thirds of their remaining armor.”

  For a moment, her eyes were fierce, proud. Then her shoulders slumped.

  “Damned near wasn’t good enough, though. We had three quarters of the capital, five other cities completely, and most of the countryside on this continent, but we couldn’t break into the final compound, and then Yucel got here. Landed her damned intervention battalions and launched orbital strikes on half a dozen smaller cities and towns that had come over to our side. That’s when Michael pulled us out of the other cities. He wouldn’t give them any kind of excuse to do the same thing to a major population center. But he figured they wouldn’t try the same crap on Landing. Too much real estate they don’t want to lose, and any strikes would be too damned close to them. He was right about that, too, so they’ve been coming after us house by house.” She bared her teeth. “We’ve been costing them, but you’ve seen the news channels.”

  “Yes, I have.” Terekhov’s eyes were fiery blue ice. “We haven’t seen any imagery about the orbital strikes, though. Do you have a casualty estimate from them?”

  His tone was calm, almost conversational, but his expression wasn’t.

  “Best guess is somewhere around four hundred and fifty thousand,” Blanchard said.

  “I see.” Terekhov looked at her for a moment or two, then inhaled sharply. “Our recon platforms show you holding a crescent around the southern and western edges of the capital. Is that accurate?”

  She nodded.

  “And Yucel and Lombroso hold the area around the Presidential Palace?”

  “They hold everything we don’t,” she said frankly. “Everything from the sports center to the tower complex just east of where I am now.” She managed a tired grin. “I’m assuming you’ve got my signal located?”

  “We know where you are,” Terekhov agreed with a brief answering smile. “What about the eastern side of town, in closer to the Presidential Palace?”

  “That’s mainly been cleared. I mean, they’ve run out all the civilians, except for a handful of residential towers dedicated to off-worlders and corporate employees.”

  “And I gather from the newscasts that they’re holding their prisoners in the soccer stadium?”

  “That’s right.” She nodded again. “President Lombroso Memorial Soccer Stadium. Son-of-a-bitch just loves naming things for himself.”

  “What can you tell us about their security situation around the stadium?”

  “Not much. They’ve pushed us too far back. I’m guessing you can see more from orbit then we can see from down here.”

  “You’re probably right about that.” Terekhov nodded again. He stood thinking, arms still folded across his chest, then nodded slowly, more to himself than to Blanchard.

  “Thank you, Ms. Blanchard,” he said. “I think it’s time I had a few words with President Lombroso and his associates. Perhaps I can convince them of the error of their ways.”

  * * *

  Brigadier Francisca Yucel took another quick, angry turn around the luxurious office she’d been assigned in the Lombroso Arms Tower. The Lombroso Arms was across President Lombroso Boulevard from the Presidential Palace, and its thick ceramacrete walls made it virtually impervious to anything the rebels had been equipped with when she first arrived. It also gave her a commanding height as an observation post and a ground-based communications station.

  “Her” office was huge, lavishly decorated, with floor-to-ceiling windows that looked directly down on the roof and ornate façade of the Presidential Palace. She’d enjoyed its comfort since her arrival, and her communication section had set up along with the rest of her staff in the larger office suite next door. Her lofty perch had let her oversee the systematic destruction of the scum who’d been about to kick Lombroso’s worthless ass before she arrived, and she’d felt nothing but satisfaction as the effort progressed. She probably could have finished it sooner, but she’d wanted to be sure these worthless proles never forgot. That they never again even dared to think of raising their hands to Frontier Security or its allies.

  Only now the fucking Manties had turned up and that worthless asshole Watson hadn’t even tried to sto
p them. He’d just rolled over and blown up his own ships so the Manties didn’t even have to waste any missiles on them! One of these days she’d settle his cowardly ass the way it deserved to be settled, but for now she had to deal with the goddamned Manties.

  You didn’t believe it, did you? she asked herself viciously. Didn’t want to. Wang did, damn him. But not you. You knew better.

  She snarled, burying the fear she didn’t want to admit under fresh anger. They hadn’t had anything to go on, really. A couple of hints from interrogation. Nothing concrete, and God knew the lying bastards would say anything—invent anything—if they thought it was going to keep somebody they cared for alive.

  Admit it, she told herself. You did believe the Manties were involved, it just never occurred to you they might be this involved. You figured you had plenty of time to settle these fuckers’ hash before anyone back in Spindle even knew you were here. Jerk their goddammed rebels out from under their feet, and they wouldn’t have any ‘spontaneous uprising’ to support. But you didn’t have time, did you?

  No, she hadn’t, and she gritted her teeth as she remembered how positive she’d been that the Manties would back down. That even they had to realize taking on the Solarian League was nothing more than glorified suicide. Obviously they were even stupider than she’d thought, and even now she took a grim, vengeful satisfaction from the thought of what this was going to cost them in the end. They’d pay one day—pay in spades!—for everything they’d done, for all their treachery and deceit.

  But this wasn’t “one day.” This was today, and today the Manties were sitting up there in orbit, and they hadn’t even tried to talk to her or that idiot Lombroso yet. They were just sitting there, letting her sit down here and rot, but it wasn’t going to work. She had their fucking number. If they thought they were going to waltz in here and—

  “Excuse me, Ma’am.”

  “What?” she snarled, wheeling around to face the Mobian communications tech who’d dared to enter her office.

  “There someone on the com asking for you, Ma’am,” the Presidential Guard tech said nervously, sweat beading his forehead. “He says he’s somebody named Terekhov. Commodore Terekhov.”