Shadow of Freedom

The chairman of the Mobius Liberation Front stood on the balcony of what had been the flagship tower of an early Lombroso Administration public housing project which—like all Lombroso projects—had foundered in a sea of graft, kickbacks, bribery, and bareknuckle extortion. Only one of the projected towers had ever been constructed, and even it hadn’t been finished. The ten uppermost of its seventy floors were inhabitable only by the Mobius equivalent of rats, bats, and cockroaches.

Not that the public housing which had been completed was all that much better, when it came down to it.

Now Breitbach leaned on the balcony’s rickety railing (rather recklessly, in Kayleigh Blanchard’s opinion) and glared out across the darkened city. The fires still hadn’t been completely extinguished, and the pall of smoke was underlit by lingering flames. Rather more attention had been given to putting out the fires than to removing the bodies, of course. It wasn’t as if the dead were in any hurry, was it?

“That’s confirmed?” Blanchard asked, and Breitbach turned to face her, propping his elbows on the railing and leaning back against it.

“Yes,” he said, and she nodded slowly.

Although Blanchard was one of his most senior lieutenants and generally considered his heir apparent, not even she knew all (or even most) of his sources. Unlike most of the liberation movements which had come and perished in the half T-century since Lombroso won the presidency (in a “free, fair, and transparent election” overseen by no less an authority than that paragon of justice and fair play, the Office of Frontier Security), Breitbach had never cherished any illusions about the sheer scale of his task. Before he ever formed the first MLF cell, he’d spent literally years researching everything he could find about successful revolutionary movements. As a result, unlike any of the earlier movements the Presidential Guard had crushed, the MLF was a tightly compartmentalized organization which had been known to ruthlessly eliminate security threats. There were far better ways to die than to be identified by the MLF as a government informer, but there was no better way to guarantee one would die. Or that one’s body would end up deposited in some prominent location as a message to the Guard…and any other potential traitors.

“Do you think Verrochio will send them?” she asked after a moment.

“I think it’s a tossup,” Breitbach said frankly. “If—”

He broke off, then smiled a bit crookedly as Blanchard gently but firmly pulled him away from the deathtrap railing. He gave her a quizzical look, but he also followed the pressure of her tugging hand obediently.

“Better?” he asked.

“Yep.” She nodded. “I’d just as soon you don’t do Lombroso a favor by plummeting to your doom.” She regarded him sternly until he shrugged and leaned against the frame of the door giving access to the balcony from the vermin-ridden tower, instead of the railing. Then she nodded in satisfaction. “Now, you were saying about the intervention battalions?”

“I was saying that if it’s left up to Yucel, and if they’re available, they’ll be here on the fastest transport she’s got,” Breitbach said, his brief amusement fading. “Verrochio would be more likely to vacillate, judging from his record, but Yucel’s like our own dear General Yardley, although from what I’ve heard, Yucel’s probably at least a little smarter than Yardley. Then again, I suppose it would be hard to be stupider than she is!”

His face twisted in familiar disgust, and Blanchard snorted harshly. It had taken Lombroso a decade or two to find someone as willing to kill everyone and let God sort them out as he was, but Olivia Yardley had been the PG’s commander for over twenty-five T-years…mostly because her personal security, unfortunately, was too tight for the MLF to get an assassin into position to let God sort her out. On the other hand, that could be just as well. As Breitbach had just pointed out, she was scarcely a mental giant, and killing her off might simply have made room for somebody less compulsively brutal but ultimately more dangerous. Now, if they could only get someone inside Mátyás’ security…especially if they could convince him that Yardley had been behind it…

“Hongbo’s more of a wildcard,” Breitbach continued, pulling her back up out of her thoughts. “I think he’s smarter—or more likely to think things through, at least—than Verrochio, but that doesn’t mean a lot.”

Blanchard nodded again. That was another thing about Breitbach; he’d done his homework on his adversaries, and his estimates of their actions and reactions had proven accurate again and again.