Shadow of Freedom

The black-uniformed Gendarmerie battalions marched past the reviewing stand, body armor gleaming like polished ebony, shouldered flechette guns sloped at precisely the right angle, boot heels crashing on the ceramacrete pavement in perfect unison. They actually looked like soldiers, Hongbo thought. For that matter, whatever her other failings—and God knew they were legion—Francisca Yucel genuinely had instilled a level of discipline and training that was unfortunately rare among Solarian Gendarmes. He never doubted that the megalomaniac in her loved watching them train, sort of like a little girl playing with toys she knew could kill people. That didn’t mean she hadn’t turned them into a far more effective unit along the way, however, and this business of passing in review before the sector governor had been her idea, as well—a way to help promote and support their morale, their esprit de corps, as she put it.

Esprit de corps, right! he snorted mentally. Bunch of thugs and leg-breakers is what they are. This batch just happens to be even better at it than most of the others!

Yet that was precisely what Frontier Security had always wanted, when it came down to it. He knew that as well as Yucel did, but unlike her, he wasn’t convinced it was a good idea, especially in this case. Turning them loose with what amounted to a free license to break heads—or worse—especially in a theoretically independent star system, struck him as an excellent recipe for increasing unrest and hatred in the Protectorates.

And it’s not as if we don’t have enough of that to go around already.

He listened to the steady beat of boot heels and cursed himself for having crawled into bed with Mesa and Manpower all those years ago. It shouldn’t be this way. It was only supposed to be another of the comfortable little arrangements OFS officials formed all the time. But this arrangement was different. Unlike anyone else in the Madras Sector administration, he knew Manticore was right about the Mesans’ involvement in both New Tuscany and Crandall’s attack on Spindle because they’d used him to help set those events in motion, and he wondered what snake was going to crawl out from under a rock next.

As he watched the pair of intervention battalions marching past the reviewing stand, a cold, hard lump in his chest suggested he might just be looking at that next serpent.

* * *

Lorcan Verrochio was unaware of what his vice commissioner was thinking, but Junyan Hongbo might have been surprised by how his nominal superior’s thoughts paralleled his own. Verrochio wished passionately that he hadn’t let Yucel talk him into authorizing this deployment, and he wished even more passionately that she wasn’t commanding it in person. But she’d talked him into that, too, and it was too late to change his mind now.

You said you wanted this whole thing settled fast, he reminded himself, and she’s got a point. No one else in the Sector could settle something like this as quickly as she will. The only question is how many eggs she’s ready to break for her omelette.

That worried him, because he suspected the answer was “a lot,” and that could be disastrous with all the attention being focused on the Madras Sector and the Manties’ Talbott Quadrant. God only knew what some bleeding heart innerworld newsy might do with an “exposé” of OFS “brutality” out in the Protectorates! In fact, the mere thought of what someone like Audrey O’Hanrahan would do with Yucel’s idea of the best way to deal with restive populations was enough to tie Lorcan Verrochio’s stomach in knots.