Shadow of Freedom

“Dispatch boat?” Blanchard didn’t even try to conceal her surprise at that one. “You’ve got access to a dispatch boat, Michael?”

“In a manner of speaking,” he said with his customary evasiveness. Then he shrugged. “What the hell, if anything happens to me you need to know about this anyway. We have a…call him a friend on the crew of one of the local transstellars’ dispatch boats. I’m not going to tell you which, even now, although I will tell you Landrum knows how to get in touch with him.”

Blanchard nodded again. Joseph Landrum was one of Breitbach’s senior cell leaders. In fact, Landrum had been with the movement longer than Blanchard herself. He was one of the MLF’s smoother operators, too, and she wasn’t surprised Breitbach had chosen him to manage whatever interstellar communications link they’d been able to establish.

“Anyway, the dispatch boat in question will be leaving Mobius in the next couple of days,” Breitbach continued. “Doesn’t have anything to do with us, but that doesn’t mean we can’t make use of it. Especially when, despite the current unpleasantness between the League and the Manties, it’s headed into the Talbott Sector. In fact, it’s heading to Spindle by way of Montana, which is certainly in the right direction, don’t you think?”

“Spindle?” Blanchard repeated, then smiled. “Oh, yes,” she agreed. “Spindle would be just fine with me, Michael!”

June 1922 Post Diaspora

“By this time, even that moron Gold Peak has to realize how badly she fucked up at New Tuscany and Spindle! Their government has to be shitting bricks thinking about the mess she’s dragged them all into. If the order relieving her ass and hauling her home hasn’t gotten to Spindle yet, it’s damned well on its way, Commissioner!”

—Brigadier Francisca Yucel, Solarian Gendarmerie,

To Sector Governor Lorcan Verrochio,

Office of Frontier Security

Chapter Eighteen

“That went more smoothly than I expected,” Mackenzie Graham said, standing by the apartment window and gazing out at Cherubim’s snow-covered streets. Then she turned away from the window…just in time to catch her brother raising his eyebrows in her direction.

“Don’t look so complacent at me, Indiana Graham! And don’t try to pretend you weren’t nervous about all these new arrangements, too!”

“Never had a moment’s doubt,” he told her virtuously.

“Bullshit,” she said tartly, and he chuckled.

“Well, if you’re going to be that way about it, I guess I admit I felt a little bit nervous. A little bit.” He raised a thumb and index finger, perhaps a centimeter apart, and grinned at her.

“Yeah. Sure!”

She shook her head, and the look she gave him was that of a long-suffering sister, not the co-leader of a revolutionary movement.

He only grinned even more broadly (and unrepentantly), but she had a point. The three T-months since their first meeting with Firebrand might have seemed like plenty of time, but given the slow speed with which ships moved between stars, it really wasn’t. In fact, the first shipment of weaponry had arrived over a T-month sooner than they’d expected it could. When the routine notification of waiting cargo containers hit the message account Firebrand had set up, it had come as a total surprise.

Fortunately, as Firebrand had suggested, the cargo agents responsible for sneaking those containers into the smuggling queue really didn’t want to know anything about their contents. That wasn’t how it worked, and if it turned out they contained something with negative consequences, deniability—the ability to say, honestly, “We didn’t know what it was!”—was actually a fairly acceptable defense in what passed for the Solarian legal system. Or, at least, in what passed for the Solarian legal system where little things like smuggling were concerned.

Bruce Graham had been a student of history, and Indiana had become one himself, especially since his father’s imprisonment. He wasn’t in his dad’s league yet, but he also wasn’t confined in Terrabore Prison, which left him free to pursue his self-education wherever it led, as long as he exercised a modicum of caution. He was pretty sure President McCready and General O’Sullivan had no idea how much “subversive” knowledge was tucked away in the Seraphim libraries’ files. Some of it was even in old-fashioned hardcopy books gathering dust in the physical stacks. And from his reading, Indiana had come to realize there’d actually been periods in human history when the courts would never have tolerated the omnipresent corruption of OFS and its sweetheart deals.