Shadow of Freedom

It wasn’t that he had any qualms about breaking heads if the President told him to, he reflected. That was his job, after all, and Svein Lombroso understood that men and women of proven loyalty deserved to be rewarded. The perks that went with Clavell’s career choice were fairly awesome, when he came down to it, and it wasn’t as if the work had ever been especially difficult. Break the occasional head, send a few unionists or protesters to the hospital, pull the occasional stint guarding one of the concentration camps, make your own quota on arrested malcontents…all fairly straightforward and routine. If there weren’t enough protesters or genuine malcontents around when you needed them to look good on your annual efficiency reports, it wasn’t too hard to find someone to stand in for them, and it wasn’t as if the courts were going to waste time listening to protestations of innocence, anyway.

There’d been the occasional—very occasional—moment when Cadet Clavell or even Lieutenant Clavell had questioned the system and his own participation in it. But Captain Clavell, older and wiser than those younger personae, knew someone had to maintain order and public discipline, and if the someone in question was rewarded for his efforts with special privileges, better pay, and the respect which the authority he represented properly deserved, that was no more than he merited for all the sacrifices he’d made. And he’d never much worried himself about the Intelligence pukes’ claims that hundreds of plots against the Presidency simmered perpetually away. He’d never seen any sign of it, at any rate—not on any organized basis. The people who might have made real trouble knew better than to cross swords with the Guard or poke their heads up to be broken.

Until the May Riots, at least.

But the Riots—and the White Whore attack—had changed all that. Now, every time he looked around someone was painting anti-government graffiti, or vandalizing a government office or a System Unity office, or sabotaging public transportation. The police were everywhere, backed up by the Guard’s ominous presence more and more openly. Arrest totals were soaring (and executions were climbing), and System Information and News made sure the proles knew about it. Commentators and government spokesmen underscored the many ways in which a tiny handful of malcontents, rabble-rousers, radicals, and anarchists like the so-called “freedom fighters” of the thoroughly misnamed Mobius Liberation Front poisoned the society around them. Presidential news secretaries bemoaned the imposition of the ever sterner security measures which a handful of violent extremists had made necessary and the way in which those measures intruded into the lives and personal affairs of the huge majority of citizens who wanted only to obey the laws and get on with their own lives. Stern penalties, however reluctantly enforced, were the only argument vicious criminals like the “Liberation Front” seemed able to understand, however, and so the President had found himself with no option but to seek the death penalty for crimes against the state in hopes that imposing that punishment upon those whose guilt had been proven might deter others from their predatory actions against a law-abiding society.

And beneath the surface, behind the newsies and uniformed law enforcement personnel, underscoring the drama of public trials, convictions, and sentences, were General Mátyás’ secret police. No one spoke about them—not openly, anyway. Everyone knew they were there, but no one knew who they were. They did their work in the shadows, without fanfare or glory, accountable only to their own superiors, General Mátyás himself, and the Presidential Special Courts whose task it was to deal with the most hardened enemies of the state. It was their invisibility that made them most intimidating, the knowledge that they were perpetually on guard, unseen and ready to pounce. And it was the silence which enveloped and erased the enemies of the state with whom they dealt which deterred the troublemakers who might otherwise have dared to defy the forces of public order.