Shadow of Freedom-eARC (3 page)

And he also needed Senga MacQuarie and her Unified Public Safety Force to prop up the entire Prosperity Party edifice. Fortunately for MacCrimmon, MacQuarie was still a relative newcomer to the cabinet (her predecessor and mentor, Lachlan MacHendrie, had been one of MacMinn’s “old comrades” until his recent death due to unspecified “medical problems”). She needed him as much as he needed her, at least for now.

“Part of the problem,” Osborne continued, “is that the LPP didn’t make a clean sweep of the MacRorys after the Revolution. A miscalculation on the MacMinns’ part, but it’s a little hard to blame them for that one, really.” He grimaced. “Tavis III probably meant well, but he’d never been a strong king, and most people didn’t really seem to mind when he ‘voluntarily’ abdicated in the Party’s favor. I expect Keith and Ailsa didn’t want to risk generating sympathy for the dynasty after the fact by having him assassinated, since as near as I can tell he died of genuinely natural causes shortly after the Revolution. But they didn’t prune back his family, either, probably because Clan MacRory had so many relatives scattered around the system. Oh, they banned them from politics—such as they were and what there was of them—and kept a close eye on them, but they didn’t really go after them or ‘encourage’ them to emigrate. And as long as things went reasonably well, that didn’t matter all that much, but after SEIU moved in and started turning the screws on the locals, a lot of people started remembering the good old days and ‘Good King Tavis.’ Of course, by that time he was safely dead, but his son was still around.”

“And he started conniving to regain power, did he?”

“No.” Osborne shook his head. “Or not as far as I’ve ever been able to discover, anyway. There were enough people who
wanted
him to by then, but it looks to me like he was smart enough to realize he wasn’t going to accomplish anything through any sort of open reform process and that he’d only get a lot of people killed if he tried something more…energetic. Unfortunately for him, that didn’t prevent MacQuarie’s predecessor from arranging a fatal ‘traffic accident’ for him fifteen years ago. Got his older son in the same ‘accident,’ too. The bad news from their perspective was that they missed his younger son, Mánas. The good news was that he’s no idiot. He understood exactly what had happened to his father and his brother, and he stayed as far away from politics as he could for as long as he could. Which was working out just fine…until SEIU promoted Zagorski to System Manager.”

He grimaced, and Venelli felt herself grimace back. As a general rule, her sympathy for Frontier Security’s minions was distinctly limited. In this case, however, she’d had the dubious pleasure of meeting Nyatui Zagorski shortly after her arrival in-system, and she hadn’t enjoyed the experience.

“What
is
his problem?” she asked.

“Disappointment,” Osborne replied. “He expected better than he got, and he wasn’t happy with the consolation prize.”

“Seems like a pretty sweet deal for him to me,” Venelli observed, waving one hand at the planets on the smart wall. “Of course, I’m only a naval officer. My perspective may be a bit more limited than his—him being such a mover and shaker of the universe, and all.”

Osborne’s lips quirked at her ironic tone, but he shook his head.

“That’s part of his problem, really. I think he seems himself as exactly that—a mover and a shaker—and he feels…deprived of a platform worthy of his profound talents. Unfortunately for him, SEIU’s not one of the major transstellars. It’s more of a middleweight, and Loomis is worthwhile, but it isn’t in the same category as one of the real pot-of-gold propositions, and Loomis isn’t the top rung of even its ladder. Worse, Zagorski was assistant system manager in Delvecchio, which
is
SEIU’s crown jewel, for ten years. I’m pretty sure he expected to move up to system manager there when his boss got recalled to the home office, which would finally have made him a really big fish in his own personal pond. Only somebody with better family connections got Delvecchio, and
he
got Loomis as a consolation prize. I think that really pissed him off, and he arrived in get-rich-quick mode. He wants to squeeze as much as he can out of Loomis as fast as he can, partly for what he can skim off the top, but also—I think—because he’s hoping that a spike in system revenues on his watch may still get him promoted to something even better.”

“Great.” Venelli snorted harshly. “If I had a credit for every time one of these assholes screwed the pooch out here trying to look good for the home office I could buy
Hoplite
as my private yacht and retire!”

“You probably could,” Osborne agreed. “In this case, he decided to raise the quota on silver oak. In fact, he doubled it. Then he raised it
again
. There’s a lot of timberland on Halkirk, but it’s not unlimited, and the Halkirkians know it. He’s basically clearcutting their most valuable planetary resource, and they don’t like it. He doesn’t care, of course. Even at the rate he’s going through them, there are enough stands of silver oak to keep him in business for another ten or twenty years, and he plans on being long gone by then.”

Venelli felt as disgusted as Osborne looked. Slash-and-burn tactics like Zagorski’s were entirely too common in the Verge, and they accounted for at least half of the Solarian League Navy’s headaches.

“When the new logging policies came in, a lot of people who’d been willing to keep their heads down rather than attract the UPS’ attention started remembering Good King Tavis a lot more affectionately,” Osborne continued. “Mánas MacRory may not have cherished any political ambitions, but his nephew Raghnall—his older brother’s son—knew MacCrimmon and MacQuarie weren’t likely to take his word for it. So, without mentioning it to anyone—including Mánas—he started organizing the ‘MacRory Militia.’ As far as I can tell, it was supposed to be a purely defensive move on his part. I think he just wanted to put together something tough enough to make MacQuarie think twice about assassinating his uncle the way MacHendrie assassinated his father and his grandfather. Unfortunately, it didn’t work out that way.

“The level of unhappiness really started spiking about two years ago, and MacQuarie began seeing conspirators under every bed in Elgin. I’m pretty sure she was deliberately exaggerating in her cabinet reports as a way to suck in more resources for UPS, but that didn’t mean she was completely wrong, either. In fact,” he sounded like someone who disliked what he was admitting, “my own sources indicate that someone here on Halkirk had actually begun some serious organizing and established some out-system contacts for small arms and some heavy weapons. It’s a fairly recent development, and I still haven’t been able to nail down exactly whose idea it was. It wasn’t the MacRorys, though; I do know that much. By now, three or four different groups have come out of the woodwork under the umbrella of MacLean’s ‘Loomis Liberation League’s Provos,’ but that happened later, after MacQuarie realized there really
was
someone here in Loomis who was genuinely interested in shooting back and decided she’d better nip it in the bud. She leapt to the conclusion that it
had
to be the MacRorys, unfortunately, and she tried to take Mánas into ‘protective custody.’ And that, Captain Venelli, was when the shit hit the fan and I put in a call for someone like you.”

“You couldn’t find a smaller sledgehammer?” Venelli asked caustically, and the OFS officer shrugged.

“I didn’t want a sledgehammer at all. Unfortunately, Zagorski didn’t leave me much option. He wants results—
fast
results—and he’s got a big enough marker with somebody further up the chain than me to get them.”

“I guess what I object to the most is how frigging
stupid
this all is,” Venelli said. “On the other hand, I suppose I should be used to stupidity by now.”

“There’s enough of it lying around, anyway,” Osborne agreed. “I don’t recall seeing a more spectacular example of it lately, though.”

He shook his head, and Venelli realized there was more than just disgust in his eyes. There was anger…and even regret.

“I’ve assisted in—even officiated over—some pretty ugly things in my time, Captain,” the OFS officer told her. “It comes with the territory, and I’ve got to admit the pay is pretty good. But sometimes…sometimes it isn’t
good
enough, and this is one of those times.”

* * *

Innis MacLay lay on his belly, peering cautiously out of the sixtieth floor window. For Halkirk, that made his present perch a tall building, although the gleaming ceramacrete towers SEIU had constructed in the heart of the city dwarfed it. Two of those towers were far less pristine than they had been, marked by the dark scars of multiple missile strikes and streaked with smoke from the fires which had consumed whole floors of their interiors, and MacLay showed his teeth briefly as he remembered watching the explosions ripple up and down their flanks. That had been when he thought the Provos had a real chance.

Now he knew better. They’d had the damned Uppies on the run for the first couple of weeks, and maybe as many as a third of the smaller cities and towns had come in on the LLLP’s side, or at least declared their neutrality. But that had been before they found out the frigging OFS had called in the Solly navy.

His eyes went bleak and hard as he recalled the first kinetic strikes. MacCrimmon and MacQuarie hadn’t seemed interested in taking prisoners. Maybe they’d just wanted to avoid the expense of building bigger reeducation camps on Westray, or maybe they’d been scared enough they struck out in panic. Or maybe they were just such bloody-minded bastards they’d decided to eliminate as many of the opposition as they could while the eliminating was good. MacLay figured he’d never find out for sure which it had been, and it didn’t much matter, anyway. There’d been no warning, no call to surrender, no threats of orbital strikes at all. There’d been only the terrible white lines streaming down through the skies of Halkirk to pock the planetary surface with brimstone.

That was what had broken the Resistance’s back. The first wave of strikes had taken out a dozen towns and the regional city of Conerock, whose city council had been the first to go over to the Liberation League when the Provos seized the local UPS stations and the hub airport. No one knew how many had been killed, but Conerock’s population had been over eighty-five thousand all by itself, and there’d been precious few survivors.

So now they were left with this, he thought grimly. There was no surrender—not for the Provos, not for the hard-core, like Innis MacLay. They wouldn’t last long in the camps, anyway, even assuming they’d live long enough to get there, and he was damned if he’d give MacQuarie and General Boyle the satisfaction. Besides, his wife and kids had been in Conerock, so they could just drag him out of his last burrow when the time came, and his teeth and claws would savage them the whole way. When he got to Hell, he’d walk through the gates over the souls of all the Uppies he’d sent ahead to wait for him.

It wasn’t much for a man to look forward to, but he’d settle for what he could get, and—

He stiffened, eyes narrowing. Then his jaw clenched and he reached for the old-fashioned landline handset. The sound quality wasn’t good, but it was a lot more secure than any of the regular coms, and not even Solly sensors could localize and identify it against the background of the city’s power systems.

“Yes?” a voice at the other end answered.

“MacLay, on the roof,” he said tersely. “They’re coming. I’ve got eyes on at least a dozen tanks and twice that many APCs headed down Brownhill towards Castlegreen.” He paused for a moment. “I think they’ve figured out where we are.”

Silence hovered at the far end of the line for seconds that felt like hours. Then—

“Understood, Innis. I expect you’ll see a couple of missile teams up there in a minute or two.”

“I’ll be here,” MacLay replied, and put down the phone.

He moved from his observation post to the French doors that gave access to the apartment’s small balcony. The protective sandbags piled just inside them weren’t visible from ground level…and neither was the heavy, tripod-mounted tribarrel behind them. The field of fire wasn’t perfect, and MacLay was under no illusions about what the Uppies heavy weapons teams would do to his improvised perch once they located his position. But a man couldn’t have everything, and he expected he’d probably get to add at least a round dozen of them to his family’s vengeance first.

* * *

“It’s time for you to go Megan,” MacFadzean said flatly as she hung up the phone. “They’re headed straight for us, and we don’t have a prayer of stopping them.”

“And where do you expect me
to
go, Erin?” MacLean asked almost whimsically. “You want me to go hide in the logging camps? Put other people at risk for helping hide me?” She shook her head and reached for the pulse rifle leaning in the corner behind her. “I think not.”

“Don’t be stupid!” MacFadzean’s voice was sharper and she glared at the other woman. “You’re the League chairwoman—the one who can speak for us! Get the hell out of here, lie low, and then find a way to get off-world.”

“And do
what?
” MacLean demanded. “We’re
done
, Erin—we’ve lost, and nobody else in the entire galaxy gives one single solitary damn what happens here on Halkirk!”

“That’s not true,” MacFadzean said. MacLean stared at her in disbelief, and she shook her head. “I…didn’t tell you everything,” she said after a moment, looking away rather than meeting her friend’s eyes. “Our supplier for the weapons…he offered more than just guns, when the time came.”

“What are you talking about?” MacLean’s eyes had narrowed.

“He told me he could get us naval support.” MacFadzean turned back to face her fully. “When we were ready, if I got word to him, he was going to arrange things so
we’d
be the ones with starships in orbit.”

“That’s crazy! How was he supposed to do that? And why didn’t you
tell
me about it?!”

“I didn’t tell you about it because you already didn’t trust him,” MacFadzean’s voice was flatter than ever. “You may even have been right. Probably he and his friends
were
only helping us for their own ends, but he told me he wasn’t really a freelance arms dealer after all. That that was just his cover, a way to provide deniability if the wheels came off. He told me he was actually speaking for his own government, that his queen was ready to come into the open to support us if it looked like we might pull off our end of it, and I believed him. Hell, maybe I just
needed
to believe him! But if you can get off-world, find a way to contact him, maybe—”