Shadow of Freedom

“On balance,” he continued, “I think it’s more likely they will send the battalions than that they won’t, especially if Guernicke signs onto the request, too. After what happened in the Talbott Sector, they’ve got to be feeling nervous about the possibility of any of us getting uppity. I think Verrochio’s probably running scared, if only because of how he expects his bosses to react. And if he is frightened, he’s going to be even less inclined to irritate—or disappoint—someone like Trifecta, which is only going to make him more likely to embrace the iron fist approach.”

“Wonderful,” she muttered.

“Actually, it’s not the intervention battalions I’m most worried about,” Breitbach said, and Blanchard’s eyes widened in surprise. “I’m more concerned about the possibility of his sending along a couple of Navy destroyers to ride herd on their transport and possibly provide a little orbital fire support.”

“You think they’d use starship weapons on planetary targets?” Blanchard couldn’t hide her alarm, but Breitbach shook his head.

“I doubt they’d use them on any target in an urban area, if only because of how that would piss off the Lombroso toadies the city in question belongs to. And we’re not going to give them any nice, isolated targets out in the countryside where they could make big craters without pissing off Lombroso’s supporters. No, I’m more worried about their managing to effectively interdict any additional arms shipments.”

Blanchard cocked her head, frowning in thought for a moment or two, then nodded slowly. The Guard’s brutal reaction to the peaceful demonstrations had surprised the MLF. Despite the general effectiveness of its penetration of the régime’s middle echelons, no one in the movement had had a clue what was coming in time to even contemplate doing anything about it. In this instance, despite what had happened, that was probably a good thing, Blanchard thought. If they had known, they might have been drawn into the open, into a standup fight with the Guard, too early. Their stockpile of modern weapons, like the antitank launchers which had taken out a total of five Scorpions before they themselves were destroyed, was growing steadily, but it was nowhere near large enough yet.

And if they wound up with a couple of Frontier Fleet destroyers in orbit around Mobius Beta, the system’s capital planet, the chance of getting any additional arms shipments delivered would become virtually nil.

“So what do we do?” she asked.

“For the moment, we use what happened today.” Breitbach bared his teeth. “One of the things you can always count on a thug for is plenty of martyrs. God knows I never would’ve supported anything like the demonstrations if I’d expected Yardley would react this way, but now that she has—now that she’s managed to kill that many people—I think she’s going to hate what Thomas and his people do with that death toll. The hard part’s going to be convincing people that this time we aren’t inflating the body count, really.”

Blanchard nodded. Thomas Marrone headed the MLF’s agitprop section. There were undoubtedly many better and more stylistically refined writers in the universe, but Marrone had a gift for putting the people of Mobius’ hatred and fury into words at any time. Probably that was because that hatred and that fury were so deeply his, as well. There was no cynicism, no ideology, in his hard-hitting anonymous posts or the graffiti slogans and cartoons with which he’d decorated more than one wall even in downtown Landing. There was only outrage, wrath, and passion, and the people who saw and read his messages knew it.

“I just hope Thomas doesn’t take any chances along the way…again,” she said.

“I do, too.”

Breitbach’s expression tightened for just a moment, for Marrone’s one weakness as a revolutionary was the very passion which made him so effective in his role of spokesman and propagandist. He wanted—needed—to be hands-on, and the Guard had damned nearly caught him putting up one of his own graffiti less than three months ago. Breitbach had read him the riot act over that episode, ending by pointing out how disastrous it would have been for the Liberation Front if Lombroso’s thugs had gotten their hands on a member of their central committee. Marrone had argued that they probably would have figured he was only one more rank-and-file member of the movement, or even no more than a sympathizer, but his heart hadn’t really been in it.

“I hope he doesn’t, and I don’t think he will,” Breitbach said now. “I think I scared the crap out of him by pointing out what Mátyás could get out of him in the end if anyone did figure out who he really is. Of course, I also think I’ll have another little conversation with him about it before we turn him loose on this one, just to be on the safe side.

“In addition to anything we do here locally, though, I think it’s time we sent off our own dispatch boat. If Lombroso and Xydis are running to Verrochio, we need to do some running of our own.”