Shadow of Freedom

“Good place to meet, too,” he went on, looking around the restaurant. “In most ways, anyway. Lots and lots of ambient noise, people talking loud enough no one’s in a good position to hear what anyone else is saying, and a clientele of regulars who recognize a newcomer in a heartbeat. Makes it hard to plant somebody on you, but it’s got its downsides, too.” He shook his head wryly. “Trust me, I got quite a few second glances when I turned up! Enough to make any good spy nervous.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Indiana told him. Harahap cocked an eyebrow at him, and Mackenzie leaned forward slightly in her brother’s support.

“We’ve been regulars here since before our father was arrested, Firebrand,” she told him. “People may have wondered who you were when you walked in. In fact, that’s one of our better defenses. Nobody in here is real fond of the police, McCready, or the scags, trust me, but they know the two of us. The fact that you’re meeting us here makes you one of them, provisionally, at least.”

Harahap looked at her thoughtfully for a moment, then nodded.

“Which brings us to the reason you wanted to talk to us in the first place,” Mackenzie went on. “We didn’t expect to be hearing from you again quite this soon.”

“And I didn’t expect to be back here quite this soon,” he told her, picking up his water glass. He took a sip and grimaced slightly. “On the other hand, this isn’t the sort of profession where you get to count on reliable schedules.”

“So why this schedule change?” Indiana asked.

“Things are heating up between us and the Sollies,” Harahap told him. Which was true enough in its own way, assuming he was reading his tea leaves correctly, if not in the sense his listeners’ might expect. “It’s not general knowledge out of this way yet, but the Sollies sent a fleet—over four hundred ships-of-the-wall—to take out the Manticore System.”

Indiana’s eyes widened in shock and the beginning of dismay, but Harahap shook his head quickly.

“Didn’t work out very well for the Sollies,” he said with a thin smile. “As a matter of fact, Admiral Harrington handed them their asses, if you’ll pardon my language. Blew the hell out of them, and captured every surviving unit.”

Indiana sat back abruptly and Mackenzie’s eyes brightened.

“You kicked their asses?” Indiana asked. “Really?”

“Like they’ve never been kicked before,” Harahap assured him with a delight which was completely unfeigned. He suspected some of his actual superiors might have preferred for the Manties’ victory to have been just a tad less overwhelming, but that didn’t dampen his enthusiasm for seeing the SLN kicked flat on its back one single bit. Even when he’d worked for the Solarian Gendarmerie, Damien Harahap had loathed the Solarian League. It had simply been the best game in town.

The brother and sister looked at one another, and he was impressed by how well they controlled their obvious glee. He could see it, sitting across the table from them, but he doubted anyone else could.

“It’s going to be a while yet before anyone else on Seraphim knows about this,” he went on, not bothering to mention that the only reason he knew already was that more and more Mesan Alignment dispatch boats were equipped with the streak drive no one else possessed. “When it does, though, the transstellars are going to be more than a little unhappy. Especially since we’re busy closing down all the warp termini, as well.” He chuckled nastily. “The bottom’s about to fall out of a hell of a lot of the League’s interstellar economy, and people like Krestor Interstellar and Mendoza are going to take a hammering. For that matter, the federal government’s going to take an incredible beating when so much of its revenue stream goes belly up.”

Indiana and Mackenzie nodded in understanding, and he shrugged.

“The thing is—and the reason I’m here is—that things are moving faster than we ever really anticipated.” Which, he reflected, was damned well true. In fact, it was probably as true for a real Manticoran as it was for the Alignment at the moment! “That means we’ve got both additional opportunities and additional risks to think about.”

“I can see that.” Indiana’s expression was thoughtful, his tone cautious. “Exactly how does that affect us here in Seraphim, though? I mean, obviously it does, or you wouldn’t be here so far ahead of schedule.”

“No, I wouldn’t,” Harahap acknowledged. “First though, have the weapons shipments gotten through all right?”

“Yeah.” Indiana nodded. “You took us by surprise by getting the first one in here so quickly, but everything’s worked like clockwork so far. We’ve gotten them out of the capital to a secure location, too. And we’ve started establishing secondary weapons caches now.” He shrugged slightly. “We’re still working out the best way to handle training our people, and I won’t pretend we wouldn’t like to have more guns to go around, but we’re in a lot better shape than I would’ve believed we could’ve been a few months ago.”