Shadow of Freedom

And then, of course, there were the half-dozen or so craters which could only have been created by kinetic strikes. Three of them, not that far from Landing, were surrounded by the tattered ruins of fire and blast shredded towns. None of them liked what that suggested, and not just because of the loss of life they undoubtedly represented. Kinetic weapons were a routine method of supplying fire support for planetary forces and had been for well over a thousand T-years. Over that time, they had been refined into precision weapons, capable of pinpoint strikes and almost infinitely variable effective yields. But no one had been interested in pinpoint accuracy when it came to those strikes. They’d been terror attacks—exactly the sort of attack the Eridani Edict was supposed to prevent, although he was certain Yucel and Lombroso would justify them as “military necessities”—and as he thought about them, Terekhov found himself wishing Watson hadn’t taken his offer to abandon ship. But those scars were at least a week old; they lacked the immediacy of what was happening in Landing even now.

As Terekhov and Pope watched, the image on one of the secondary visual displays CIC had tied into their air-breathing recon platforms changed, and Terekhov’s blue eyes were colder than arctic ice as he saw the line of bodies hanging from an obviously prefabricated, mass-produced gallows. There must have been twenty-five of them he thought as the platform zoomed in on them, and not all of those bodies had belonged to adults.

“I want this imagery absolutely nailed down, Stilt,” he said without looking away. He didn’t raise his voice, yet a couple of people on the flag bridge flinched when they heard it. “I don’t want any doubt, any ambiguity, about what we saw or where we saw it before we ever landed.”

“Yes, Sir,” Commander Lewis acknowledged.

Helen sat very still at her own console. She wanted to look away from those dangling bodies. They’d obviously been there for a while, judging by the extent of decay. Even as she watched, one of Mobius Beta’s avians landed on the central beam of the gallows. It was one of the local planetary ecosystem’s buzzard analogues, and she felt her gorge trying to rise as it stretched down its long, sinuous neck and began ripping at what had been the face of one of the smaller bodies.

So this is the ultra-civilized, oh-so-superior Solarian League’s view of “protecting” another planet, she thought grimly. And they have the gall to label the Ballroom terrorists?!

She felt her hands clenching into fists and made herself sit back, breathe deeply, remember what Master Tye had taught her about channeling anger. It didn’t seem to help as much as usual.

“Do you think that was Yucel or Yardley, Sir?” she heard Commander Pope ask, and Commodore Terekhov snorted harshly.

“Do you think it matters?” he asked in reply. “If it was Yardley, she did it with Yucel’s knowledge and support. And from our intelligence reports on Yucel, not to mention what we monitored on the way in, she’s the kind who’s going to be ‘hands-on’ whenever she gets the opportunity.”

“Agreed, Sir.” Pope nodded. “But if it was Yardley’s Presidential Guard thugs who actually carried out the hanging instead of the Gendarmerie, you know Yucel’s going to claim it was all the local authorities of an independent star nation. She sure as hell didn’t have anything to do with it!”

“And?” Terekhov turned his head to look at the commander. “No matter what really happened here she’ll claim that in front of any tribunal. Or she would, if the opportunity ever arose.” He smiled thinly. “And no tribunal or court of inquiry we could possibly impanel is ever going to prevent Abruzzi and his E&I shills from claiming it was Lombroso or Yardley. Unless, of course, they decide they can actually convince the Solly public we did it in the process of crushing the courageous local resistance to our callous imperialistic invasion. Then, having produced all of these perfectly serviceable atrocities, we decided we’d record them all and use them so our propaganda could fasten responsibility for them onto that splendid patriot and democratically elected president, Svein Lombroso, and Mobius’ stalwart ally and defender, Brigadier Yucel.”

Commander Pope, Helen noticed, looked like he really wished he thought Terekhov was joking with those last two sentences. For that matter, she wished she thought that.

The commodore saw his chief of staff’s expression and grimaced.