Shadow of Freedom

Well, they probably had problems of their own, even then. On the other hand, I think I’d trade my problems for theirs, if I had the option. Which I don’t.

“All right,” Mackenzie said, shifting from put-upon sibling back to co-conspirator, “now that we’ve got them, what do we do with them?”

“Now that,” Indiana conceded, “is a pretty good question, Max.”

For the moment, the containers were sitting in a warehouse he and Mackenzie were pretty sure was off the scags’ grid. It was located in the heart of the Rust Belt, and while it was in better physical shape than their meeting place with Firebrand, that wasn’t saying a lot. But it was mostly weathertight, at least, and the containers themselves were hermetically sealed and virtually indestructible. Of course, getting them there had been a not-so-minor challenge. The Krestor Interstellar shipping barcodes which had ensured their passage through customs without inspection would have stood out like sore thumbs in the Rust Belt, and so would any of the spaceport’s more modern cargo vehicles.

But Firebrand’s colleagues had anticipated that. The containers were sized to fit inside standard cargo trailers of the sort Seraphim had built for its own use before Krestor and Mendoza of Córdoba arrived to “rescue” its economy. Even better, they were equipped with built-in counter-grav units, so the trailers hadn’t ridden suspiciously low on their suspensions. It also made the containers much easier to manhandle with strictly limited manpower once they reached their destination.

“I’m still not happy about the transport arrangements,” Indiana went on. “Oh, they worked this time, but we had to put the whole thing together on the fly. Now that we’ve got them under cover, I want to take a little longer to think before we start moving them around.”

“Works for me,” Mackenzie said fervently. But then she cocked her head, looking up at her taller brother. “It works for me, but at the same time, I don’t want to leave them sitting in one big, undigested lump where we could lose all of them in a single disaster if the scags get lucky!”

“Me either. But the more we spread them around in smaller caches, the more likely one of O’Sullivan’s informers’ll stumble across one of them. Or, for that matter, that the recon platforms’ll spot something.”

“Not if we get them out into the country,” Mackenzie argued. “I’m thinking about handing them over to Saratoga.”

Indiana started to reply, then stopped, thinking about it. “Saratoga” was Leonard Silvowitz, a Seraphim Independence Movement area leader. He didn’t know he was taking instructions from Indiana and Mackenzie, both of whom he’d known for years, since he’d been a silent partner in the business effort which had led to Bruce Graham’s arrest. As far as their SIM roles were concerned, he knew them only as “Talisman” and “Magpie,” and his communications with them were indirect and circuitous.

“You know,” Indiana said slowly, “that might not be a bad idea at all. I’m not crazy about putting him at risk this early, but the Farm would be a good place to stash them, wouldn’t it?”

“The Farm,” fifty kilometers north of Cherubim, had been a part of Leonard Silvowitz’ modest business empire: a commercial farming operation which had employed several dozen people and shown a tidy profit supplying fresh vegetables and dairy products to Seraphim’s more urbanized areas. Unfortunately, that very profitability had drawn the attention of Krestor Interstellar’s local manager, and the Macready Administration had “suggested” Silvowitz lease the operation to Krestor at about twenty percent of what it was actually worth. Krestor had then proceeded to fire virtually all of Silvowitz’ employees, some of whom had been with him for as much as twenty or thirty T-years, and replace them with automated equipment.

Technically, Silvowitz still owned the Farm, although he had no control over its operation, and Krestor hadn’t been interested in his employees’ housing (since there were no longer any employees to be housed). Those once sturdy, reasonably comfortable units were slowly decaying into ruin, like most of Seraphim, but they were still there, and Indiana and Mackenzie had planned on using them as a training site when the time came. They were far enough out to be beyond the scags’ normal zone of interest, and there was enough traffic transporting the Farm’s produce to the city and the necessary supplies back to its fields to cover quite a lot of movement on the SIM’s part.

“I think it would be a good place, or I wouldn’t have suggested it,” Mackenzie pointed out. “At the same time, there’s always the chance some service tech out there to work on a broken down cultivator or harvester might spot something.”