Shadow of Freedom

The thunderbolt descended from the heavens like the wrath of Zeus. Born two hundred and sixty-five kilometers above the planet’s surface, it traced a white line from atmosphere’s edge to ground level, riding a froth of plasma. The two hundred-kilo dart arrived without even a whisper, far outracing the sonic boom of its passage, and struck its target coordinates at thirty times the speed of sound.

The quiet, rainy night tore apart under the equivalent of the next best thing to two and a half tons of old-fashioned TNT. The brilliant, blinding flash vaporized a bubble of rain. Concussion and overpressure rolled out from its heart, flattening the remaining walls of three of the village’s broken houses. The fury of the explosion painted the clouds, turned individual raindrops into shining diamonds and rubies that seemed momentarily frozen in air, and flaming bits and pieces of what once had been someone’s home arced upward like meteors yearning for the heavens.

* * *

“Thank you used a big enough hammer, Callum?” the woman in the dark blue uniform of a lieutenant in the Loomis System Unified Public Safety Force asked dryly.

She stood behind the drone operator’s comfortable chair, looking over his shoulder at the display where the pinprick icon of the explosion flashed brightly. The operator—a sergeant, with the sleeve hashmarks of a twenty-T-year veteran—seemed to hesitate for just a moment, then turned his head to look at her.

“Unauthorized movement in an interdicted zone, Ma’am,” he replied.

“And you needed a KEW to deal with it?” The lieutenant arched one eyebrow. “A near-deer, do you think? Or possibly a bison elk?”

“IR signature was human, Ma’am. Must’ve been one of MacRory’s bastards, or he wouldn’t’ve been there.”

“I see.” The UPS officer folded her hands behind her. “As it happens, I was standing right over there at the command desk,” she observed, this time with a distinct bite. “If I recall correctly, SOP is to clear a KEW strike with command personnel unless it’s time-critical. Am I mistaken about that?”

“No, Ma’am,” the sergeant admitted, and the lieutenant shook her head.

“I realize you like big bangs, Callum. And I’ll admit you’ve got a better excuse than usual for playing with them. But there are Regs for a reason, and I’d take it as a personal favor—the kind of favor which will keep your fat, worthless, trigger-happy arse in that comfortable chair instead of carrying out sweeps in the bush—if you’d remember that next time. Do you think you can do that for me?”

“Yes, Ma’am,” the sergeant said much more crisply, and she gave him a nod that was several degrees short of friendly and headed back to her station.

The sergeant watched her go, then turned back to his display and smiled. He’d figured she’d have a little something to say to him, but he’d also figured it would be worth it. Three of his buddies had been killed in the first two days of the insurrection, and he was still in the market for payback. Besides, it gave him a sense of godlike power to be able to call down the wrath of heaven. He’d known Lieutenant MacRuer would never have authorized the expenditure of a KEW on a single, questionable IR signature, which was why he hadn’t asked for it. And if he was going to be honest about it, he wasn’t really certain his target hadn’t been a ghost, either. But that was perfectly all right with him, and his intense inner sense of satisfaction more than outweighed his superior’s obvious displeasure.

This time, at least, he amended silently. Catch her in a bad mood, and the by-the-Book bitch is just likely to make good on that reassignment. He shook his head mentally. Don’t think I’d like slogging around in the woods with those people very much.

* * *

“Confirm impact, Ma’am,” Missile Tech 1/c George Chasnikov reported. “Looks like it drifted fifteen or twenty meters to planetary west of the designated coords, though.” He shook his head. “That was sloppy.”

“Was the problem at their end, or ours?” Lieutenant Commander Sharon Tanner had the watch. She also happened to be SLNS Hoplite’s tactical officer, and she punched up the post-strike report on her own display as she spoke. “I’m not real crazy about ‘sloppy’ when we’re talking about KEWs, Chaz.”

“Me neither, Ma’am,” Chasnikov agreed sourly. “Reason I brought it up, actually.” He shook his head, tapping a query into his console. “I hate those damned things,” he added in a mutter Tanner knew was deliberately just loud enough for her to hear.

She let it pass. Chasnikov was an experienced, highly valued member of her department, a lifer who would stay in SLN uniform until the day he died, and every TAC officer he ever served under would be lucky to have him. That bought him a little extra slack from someone like Sharon Tanner.