Shadow of Freedom

“Good.” Michelle took a final pull at her beer, then leaned forward and set the empty bottle on the coffee table. Dicey gave her a disgusted look as her lap moved under him, then relented and gave her a parting head butt of affection before he hopped down. She smiled as the cat meandered out, then looked back at Lecter. “I’d like to have him underway within the next twelve hours.”

“I’ll see to it, Ma’am.” The chief of staff tossed back the last of her whiskey and set the glass beside Michelle’s bottle. Then she rose, nodded respectfully to Michelle, and headed for the day cabin’s door.

Michelle watched her go, then she climbed out of her own chair and keyed the holo display above her desk, frowning at the steadily blinking icon of the star called Saltash.

I sure as hell hope it isn’t some kind of set up, Cynthia, she thought after her vanished chief of staff. I talk a good stiff upper lip and all that, but I really, really don’t want to step into it all over again with the damned Sollies.

It was like picking her way without a map through a waist-deep swamp she knew was filled with patches of quicksand and poorly fed alligators. There was so damned much treachery, so many crosscurrents of deception, so much Solarian arrogance and resentment, and so many things which could go disastrously wrong. The temptation was to fort up, go strictly onto the defensive to avoid the kind of mistakes which could only make the situation worse. But as she’d told Lecter, that wasn’t an option in this case. If Lörscher was right about what was going on in Saltash, Michelle had to act.

And I hope to hell this doesn’t go as badly for Zavala’s squadron as things went for it in New Tuscany, too, she thought.

Chapter Nine

“I don’t like it,” Rosa Shuman said, sitting well back in the outrageously comfortable, throne-like chair behind her desk. She was turned half away from her single guest, looking out through her office windows over the capital city which had been named (with dubious humor) “Capistrano” by the colony’s original settlers. “I don’t like it at all. Those Allenby yahoos have always been too big for their britches.”

“I’m not going to argue with you about that, Rosa,” General Felicia Karaxis replied in the sort of tone very few other people would have dared use with the president of the Swallow System Republic. Felicia Karaxis wasn’t “other people,” though. She commanded the Swallow System Army, and since Swallow had a unified military, that meant she also commanded the security forces responsible for keeping one President Rosa Shuman seated in that throne-like chair. She also knew where most of the bodies were buried on Swallow…especially given how many of them she’d planted herself.

“I’ve been telling you for years that we needed to go in there and clean them out,” Karaxis continued, leaning back in her own chair and reaching into her tunic’s inside pocket for one of the thin cigars she favored. She found one, extracted it, and began peeling it out of its sealed wrap as she continued. “Let me make a sweep through their damned mountains with air cav and infantry. I’ll sort the bastards out!”

“Believe me, I’d love to let you,” Shuman replied, although if she was going to be honest she was a bit less confident than Karaxis about just how simple it would be to “sort the bastards out.” She hated the entire Allenby clan with a pure and burning intensity not even Karaxis could match, but she wasn’t going to take them lightly.

“I’d love to let you,” she continued, “but Parkman and those other bastards over at Tallulah don’t want us spoiling the tourist trade.”

“Tourist trade!” Karaxis snorted harshly, exhaling smoke. “If I were him, I’d be a lot more worried over what Floyd and Jason might send to visit him than over getting out for a little skiing!”

Shuman rolled her gray eyes. Felicia might be a bit short on tact, she thought, but she did have a way of cutting to the heart of things. And if it had been possible for there to be anyone in the entire Swallow System more hated than Rosa Shuman, it would probably have been Alton Parkman, the Tallulah Corporation’s system manager. Hell! Shuman hated his guts, for that matter! Not that she was in much of a position to do anything about it.