Torch of Freedom

  He gazed around the silent briefing room, and Maddock could almost hear his audience's thoughts. The PNE's "new" ships were effectively SLN castoffs, and he knew Luff and many of his ship commanders had reservations about them. And rightly so, he reflected, given how weak their missile defenses were. The MAN was equally aware of that weakness, although Maddock hadn't admitted anything of the sort to his ex-StateSec pupils, since neither the Solarian League Navy nor the official Mesan System Navy, had any concept of just how outclassed they truly were. The Alignment had seen to it that all of the new battlecruisers had Aegis, the SLN's most recent (and, in Maddock's considered opinion, hopelessly belated) bid to increase counter-missile salvo density, and it had upgraded all of the PNE ships' electronics to current first-line Solarian standards. It was clear from the StateSec holdouts' reactions that they were impressed but not exactly overawed by the capabilities of their new fire control and EW systems, but it was equally clear they remained less than enthralled by the paucity of point defense clusters and counter-missile tubes. Maddock had been privately amused watching them upgrade the software of the vaunted Solarian League Navy's defensive systems. They'd made that their very first priority, and, amused or not, he had to admit that they'd probably enhanced their vessels' missile defenses' efficiency by somewhere around twenty-five percent.

  They'd still be dogmeat going up against the Manties, and they know it, he reflected. Fortunately, they're only planning on going up against Havenite hardware. We had to come up with a hell of a lot of ships to get them to sign on for this operation, anyway, of course. And the Cataphracts—let's not forget them! But Luff's probably right about what a swath they'd be able to cut through Theisman's light units.

  He suppressed a thin smile at that thought, since ultimately, they weren't going to have the chance to do anything of the sort.

  Pity about the ships, he thought. Of course, they're only SLN crap, which means they're all obsolescent—at best—against our own current hardware or the Manties. But at least we're about to get a chance to field test the Cataphracts and see how they work out against a live opponent. Too bad the opponent in question's going to be too outclassed to give us a more meaningful yardstick on their penetration capabilities.

  "However . . . distasteful some of us may find the discharge of that obligation to be," Luff told his officers, "Operation Ferret is nothing less than part of the price we must pay to liberate our homeland, and the overriding importance of that must outweigh any other consideration."

  He paused yet again, gravely, letting his eyes circle the table, sweep the faces of his audience, then allowed those eyes to harden.

  "Second," he resumed, his voice as hard as his eyes, "it would be as well to remember that these are not slaves being liberated from the hold of a slave ship somewhere. I'm sure Captain Maddock's and Commander Milliken's superiors are unlikely to be surprised by the fact that, despite our sincere gratitude for their support, we scarcely see eye to eye with them on the general issue of genetic slavery. In this instance, however, we aren't talking about liberating slaves or freeing the victims of someone else's mistreatment. We're talking about dealing with a terrorist organization. If any of your personnel are having trouble remembering that, I recommend you require your ships' companies to view the HD of the ghastly atrocities these people visited upon their prisoners following the 'liberation' of Verdant Vista. Remind them of that brutality and cruelty, and I think you'll find their reservations manageable."

  He smiled very thinly, then turned his own attention to Maddock.

  "And now, I understand, Captain Maddock has a few last-minute words for us. Captain?"

  "Actually, Commodore," Maddock replied gravely, "I have very little to add to what you've already said. The only thing I'd really stress at this time is that it's important to remember Battle Fleet is only beginning to assess the Cataphract's capabilities. It still isn't operational with the SLN, and it won't be, for quite some time, given how . . . conservative we all know the Sollies are about adopting new hardware."

  And especially given the fact that the SLN doesn't even have a clue it exists, I suppose, he added silently, and smiled at the exiled Havenites around the table.

  "That's why we have no real body of doctrine for its employment. Our current estimates are that the . . . target will be covered by somewhere between a minimum of four and a maximum of ten of the new frigates the Manties have been supplying to the system. Our tech people's analyses suggest that they're probably pretty damned nasty for anything anyone else would call a 'frigate,' but they wouldn't pose any significant threat to your forces even without the Cataphract. It's also possible, however, that the Erewhonese Navy will have detailed a division of light cruisers or even heavy cruisers to back up those frigates. We don't really expect it, but it's clearly possible, given Erewhon's strong support for the . . . earlier incident in the system. If that should be the case, we're going to be confronting at least some Manty-grade hardware, which could make the entire operation substantially more expensive. With Cataphracts in the tubes, however, we anticipate that you should succeed with zero or at least negligible damage."

  He paused, looking around the table, and reflected that everything he'd just told them had the highly unusual status of actually being the truth. Not the whole truth, perhaps, but still the truth.

  "That's all I have, Sir," he said, nodding respectfully to Luff.

  "I'm sure we'll all bear it in mind, Captain," Luff replied, then waved one hand at Citizen Commander Hartman.

  "And now, Millicent, I believe you and the rest of the staff have a few points you wanted to make, as well?"

  "Yes, Sir, we do." Hartman looked around the table. "First," she began, "there's the question of—"

  Chapter Forty-Five

  "Hali Sowle, you are cleared to leave orbit." E.D. Trimm checked the screen again, more out of habit that anything else, just as a final precaution against the very remote possibility that an unauthorized flight—or possibly even a bolide, as statistical unlikely as that was—might have blundered into the freighter's projected course.

  "Hali Sowle, signing off."

  Just routine. By now, two weeks later, Trimm had only a vague memory of having done an additional check on the Hali Sowle. That was in the records, of course. But she was no more likely to check old records for no reason—the volume of traffic in and out of Mesa was truly enormous—than she would be to start going to work with a hop, skip and a jump rather than taking the perfectly functional tube.

  Besides, this shift she'd had the good luck to be partnered with Steve Lund, and they'd been in the middle of a friendly argument about the latest fads in women's apparel when the call from the Hali Sowle had come in. As soon as the freighter starting moving, E.D. went back to the debate.

  There were times she regretted Steve's sexual orientation. In some ways, he'd have made a better husband for her than the one she had. But it wasn't a perfect universe, after all.

  * * *

  "Well, I'd say that went perfectly." Friede Butry sagged back in her seat a little. She'd been more tense than she'd needed to be, a phenomenon she ascribed to her advancing years. In her youth, she'd have thought nothing of taking risks far greater than this one had been.

  "À bientôt, Anton and Victor. Good luck."

  "What does that mean, Ganny? A ban-ban—" Brice Miller struggled with the unknown word. He was perched on one of the other seats on the freighter's command deck. Like everything else on the Hali Sowle, the seat—like Ganny's own—exhibited those characteristics which were euphemistically referred to as having seen better days.

  "Ah byan-toe. It's French. It means 'see you later.' Well, more or less. Like most words in other languages, it doesn't translate perfectly neatly. Some people might translate it 'see you soon.' "

  "How soon will we see them? And where did you learn to speak French?"

  "Answering the questions in order, I have no idea when we'll see them again. Maybe never. But if you're asking what
you should have been asking, we'll probably be back here in the Mesa system within ten days. Two weeks, at the outside, but I'd bet on the ten days. The variable is whether or not the Imbesi arrangements work as planned, and those people strike me as well organized. As for where I learned French . . ."

  She pursed her lips, studying the astrogation screen. Looking at the screen, rather. Her mind was elsewhere.

  "It's a long story, youngster."

  "We got time. Tell me."

  * * *

  "You've got cruddy tastes in clothes. Of course, I guess that's to be expected, growing up in Nouveau Paris."

  "You should talk. Do you ever wear anything other than Scrag chic? Which seems to run entirely to leather."

  "I look good in leather. Hey, that's an idea. Maybe we should try it."

  "Don't be vulgar."

  "I'm not vulgar, I'm bored. You are really lousy in bed."

  "Of course I'm lousy in bed. I don't do anything. And that's hitting below the belt."

  "Big deal. Far as I'd know, there's nothing down there anyway."

  Anton heard a slight choking sound. At a guess, he thought Victor was trying to suppress a laugh. Fortunately, the momentary lapse was small enough that the scrambling equipment would disguise the slight break from what was supposed to be the body language of a couple having a quiet but rather fierce argument.

  The equipment they had wasn't really top of the line. For that, they'd have needed Manticoran gear which could potentially cause trouble. But the stuff they'd obtained on the black market in Neue Rostock—Victor's contact Thiêu Chuanli was a veritable cornucopia of handy items—was plenty good enough for their purposes. The equipment not only protected against sound detection efforts, which any well-designed scrambling equipment would do, but it also produced just enough in the way of visual distortion to make lip-reading impossible and even interpreting body language all but impossible for any but a trained expert—and then, only if the people being interpreted were incapable of acting at all.

  Victor Cachat, on the other hand, was a pretty decent actor. As you'd expect from a secret agent. And Yana had a natural flair for it.

  They wouldn't have to keep it up for much longer, anyway. Anton was almost done. He kept his head down, concentrating on the personal com device in his hands. To any observer, the little not-so-dramatic scenario in the underground passageway would appear to consist of a couple having a quarrel, which their friend and companion was politely ignoring by taking care of some personal business while he waited for them to be done.

  Unlike the scrambling equipment, the com device was top-of-the-line, cutting edge equipment. More precisely, it was bleeding edge equipment, specially designed for Anton by one of Manticore's top electronics firms, for a cost that was normally associated with the price of air cars, not personal handheld communication equipment.

  Anton could afford it. Or, rather, Catherine Montaigne could afford it. Anton was stubborn about not relying on Cathy for his personal financial needs, but he didn't hesitate to tap into her enormous fortune when it came to his professional work.

  "—you manage that, anyway?"

  "Not my fault that you—"

  Anton keyed in the final instructions. "We're just about done with the sandbox, kiddies," he murmured, loud enough for Victor and Yana to hear him.

  That done, he slid the com into his pocket. He made no attempt to disguise the motion, or the device itself. He was just a man finishing some routine work. To anyone who examined it, the com unit would seem to be a perfectly normal if somewhat expensive item produced in the Solarian League. Only if someone really attempted to break into the device would they be able to discover otherwise—and, by then, the com unit's self-destruct mechanism would have been triggered and there'd be nothing to examine but a small pile of smoldering slag.

  By the time he'd put away the com unit, Victor and Yana were embracing each other. Nothing passionate, just the sort of embrace with which a pair of lovers resolve a quarrel. Or, at any rate, end it for the moment.

  "Okay," he said, almost as softly. "One more to go."

  They walked off, the three of them side by side. There was plenty of room, since the underground passageway was more in the nature of a large open space. The area was primarily used for the storage of private vehicles.

  "I'm sick of arguing with him," muttered Yana. "It's like trying to pick a fight with a rutabaga."

  "Save it for the next stop, Yana," cautioned Anton.

  "What's a rutabaga?" asked Victor.

  * * *

  That night, in Anton's room—not the one he still maintained in the back of Turner's restaurant, but another one he'd obtained without using Saburo's contacts—he and Victor and Yana held another of the meetings they tried to hold at least every three days.

  "It still seems like sorcery to me," Victor complained. "And spare me that tired old cliché about a sufficiently advanced technology being indistinguishable from magic. This is not all that advanced, damnation."

  "Yes and no," said Anton. "The technology itself isn't especially advanced, true enough. State of the art is about the best you can say for it. But the specific programs that we developed are . . . I don't know if 'advanced' is the word I'd use. It's more like 'esoteric.' There just aren't very many people who work on this level of security programming, Victor. Sure, there are plenty of people who could have figured out how to bypass the security systems and implant false records, but so far as I know there are only two people in the whole galaxy who'd know how to prevent anyone from being able to detect that it was done afterward, even with a thorough investigation. One of them is named Anton Zilwicki and the other is Ruth Winton."

  "Modest, isn't he?" said Yana. "At least he gave the woman some credit too."

  Anton smiled. "In some ways, she's better at this that I am. The truth is, Ruth's reached the point where she's operating on a plane I don't even usually reach. I'm mostly acting as what you might call her crosscheck and rudder, these days. She's still prone to being over-confident."

  Victor ran fingers through his hair. "And you're sure it'll work?"

  "Yes. When we run—assuming we do, but we'd be fools not to count on it—we'll have left a completely false trail. Assuming you can get Carl Hansen and his people to take care of their end of the deal, so far as anyone on Mesa will ever be able to figure out, you and I and Yana exist only as scattered molecules."

  Victor grunted. "The technical side of it's not a problem. That bomb will vaporize anything within two hundred meters. Whatever DNA traces they'd expect from a normal explosion will simply be too scattered to be usable, even with Mesan or Beowulfan techniques and equipment. The real problem is . . ."

  He shook his head. "Let's just say that the people Saburo put us in contact with aren't as tightly wrapped as I'd like. They're not crazy, as such, but . . ."

  "Fanatics," said Anton. "I do hope you notice that I didn't add any wisecrack such as 'and coming from Victor Cachat, that's saying something.' "

  "Very funny. The problem is that tepid, wishy-washy people like you, whose commitment to anything beyond immediate personal matters is like mashed potatoes, just don't grasp all the fine distinctions between 'fanaticism' and 'fervor' and 'zeal.' "

  Victor took a deep, slow breath. Not to control any anger—by now, the banter between him and Anton produced nothing more intense than occasional irritation—but to give himself time to try to figure out how to explain his concern.

  "You just . . . don't really know, Anton. That's not a criticism, it's just an observation. From the time you were a kid, you lived in a world with wide horizons."

  Zilwicki snorted. "Not usually the way the highlands of Gryphon are described!"

  "Try growing up in a Dolist slum in Nouveau Paris. Trust me, Anton. The difference is huge. I'm not talking in terms of any scale of misery, mind you. I'm simply talking in terms of how narrow a view of the universe you're provided with. When I entered StateSec Academy, for all practical purposes I had no re
al knowledge of the universe beyond what I'd grown up with. Which wasn't much, believe me. That's . . ."

  He paused for a moment. "I know a lot of people think I'm inclined toward zealotry. I suppose that's fair enough. What has changed, as the years have passed, is that my understanding of the universe has become . . . well, very large. So while I still retain the fundamental beliefs I had as a teenager, I can now put those beliefs in a much better context. I can, for instance, spend hours discussing politics with Web Du Havel—as I have, any number of times—listening to his basically conservative views without automatically dismissing those views as the self-serving prattle of an elitist."

  Anton smiled. "Web just doesn't fit that pigeonhole, does he?"

  "No, he doesn't. And while I still disagree with Web—for the most part, though by no means always—I do understand why he thinks the way he does. To put it another way, my view of things hasn't changed all that much, but it's no longer monochromatic. Does that make sense?"

  Anton nodded. "Yes, it does."

  "All right. If my view of the world was monochromatic, growing up in a Nouveau Paris slum under the Legislaturist regime, try to imagine just how little there is in the way of subtle shadings for a young man or woman who grew up here, as a seccy under the thumb of the Mesan regime."