Shadow of Freedom

“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.