Shadow of Freedom

Yet now the system which had worked so well for so long found itself confronted by a level of unrest, verging on outright insurrection in some areas, such as it had never before experienced. Despite the newscasts, despite the spokesmen, despite the public arrests and the rumors of secret arrests, despite the publicly announced executions and the unexplained disappearances of agitators and protesters, anonymous posters became daily more aggressive, more vituperative, on the public boards. The graffiti multiplied, the vandalism spread, and government employees had been assaulted. Over three dozen of them had been hospitalized, and one of them had actually died! And just trying to keep count of the ever mounting avalanche of threats against Trifecta employees was using up more and more police resources. Not to mention Guard resources, like Clavell’s own Scorpion platoon and the infantry platoon attached to it while they sat here guarding the approaches to Summerhill Tower. He understood the need to reassure Trifecta’s personnel of their own and their families’ safety, but parking this much firepower in the middle of a residential district in the middle of the night seemed a little excessive.

But perhaps it wasn’t, he thought. After all, things had gotten even uglier over the last week or so. They’d been fairly quiet here in Landing itself—since the Trifecta Tower attack, anyway—but just the day before yesterday a mob had gathered outside a regional police station in the city of Granger, pelting it with stones and improvised incendiary devices in a protest over the hanging of three convicted seditionist agitators. Eleven officers had been injured, two of them seriously, before the mob had finally been dispersed, and there were conflicting reports about the anarchists’ casualties, although SINS was flatly denying the ridiculous claims that over sixty of them had been killed.

Clavell didn’t know about that, although he rather hoped the newsies were wrong about how low the anarchist casualties had been. The more he heard about the way things were going out in the boonies, the more in favor he was of showing the yokels the error of their way before things got completely out of hand. Or even spread to Landing, for that matter!

Some of his fellow Guardsmen scoffed at his worries, and he was careful not to be too vocal about them. But he heard things, even when he wasn’t supposed to. Like that shootout in Brazelton, for instance. SINS hadn’t so much as mentioned it, and even the Guard’s daily intelligence reports had treated it as only one more minor incident in a sleepy little town of no more than a hundred and twenty thousand or so. Clavell wasn’t so certain, though. True, Brazelton wasn’t Landing, and the security assets concentrated here in the capital were a lot better than anything a provincial town boasted. And, true again, they were talking about small town cops who probably hadn’t had a clue what real security measures were all about. But even having said all of that that, he personally might have argued that the assassination of a city police chief—and the successful ambush of his entire six-man security detail—came under the heading of a fairly major incident, no matter where it happened. Of course, everybody from General Yardley on down was denying Chief Brinkman was dead, and confidence that the perpetrators would soon be run to earth was high, but Clavell figured he could believe as much of that as he wanted to.

Stupid, he thought, checking the time again and then scanning the Scorpion’s displays. What? They think scuttlebutt isn’t going to pass the word around anyway? And given the fact that at least half—probably a hell of a lot more than half, since the official report says ‘less than half’—of the bastards got away, the other side sure as hell knows how much damage it did. I mean, go ahead and put a lid on it for the proles. Fine. I’m all in favor of that. But don’t hand a line of obvious bullshit to the Guard, for God’s sake!