Shadow of Freedom

And if he can’t convince Dueñas to play ball, I’m no worse off than I was before, he thought. In fact, if I lose a couple of dozen gendarmes and then hand over the Manties “to prevent further bloodshed,” I may even be able to make a case for its being Dueñas’ fault for ordering me not to cough them up in the first place. If I phrase my report right, make it clear I was prepared to go all the way and only backed down to save Solarian lives from a homicidal neobarb once it became obvious my civilian superior had misread the situation disastrously, the Gendarmerie will be in a hell of a lot better position to hammer Frontier Security over this instead of our carrying the can.

* * *

“Well, time’s up, My Lady,” Gutierrez said.

“Indeed it is,” Abigail agreed. “So I suppose we should go ahead and get this ship off the field. If you’d be so good, Mateo?”

“Of course, My Lady.”

Gutierrez nodded and glanced around to be sure all his people were where he’d told them to be before he stepped cautiously to the edge of the corridor down which Kristoffersen had departed in such high dudgeon. He extended a sensor wand into the corridor’s mouth, and the multi-spectrum pickup projected a detailed heads-up view of the passageway onto the inside of his skinsuit helmet. He cycled through the visible spectrum into infrared and then into ultraviolet and grunted in unsurprised satisfaction as he spotted the web of tripwire lasers covering the last third or so of the forty-meter corridor. The blast doors at the far end, where the spoke-like axial passage actually entered Victor Seven, were closed, but someone had cut what looked suspiciously like firing loopholes through the heavy-duty panels.

A little closer inspection showed that the tripwires he’d picked up were connected to anti-personnel mines which had been attached to the bulkheads and deckhead. The mines were covered with nanotech chameleon skin designed to blend into the alloy to which they’d been affixed, but the people who’d emplaced them were gendarmes, more skilled in thuggery than any sort of actual military training. They hadn’t even bothered to detach the laser sensors from the mines; they’d left them mounted on the mine housings, and with that for a starting point, it wasn’t hard for his sensor wand to locate the mines by their internal powerpacks.

“You know, My Lady,” he said absently, still cataloging threats, “if we were willing to get in line and march straight down the middle of the passageway here—and maybe go ahead and paint big bulls-eyes on our chests, too—they probably could get a lot of us.”

“I know how good you are, Mateo,” Abigail replied soothingly. “There’s no need to be nasty to them just because they aren’t. I’m sure they’re doing the very best they can.”

“The scary thing is you’re probably right about that.”

He studied his HUD for a few more moments, then nodded.

“’Bout what we expected, My Lady. Not much finesse, but let’s be fair. It’s a straight corridor into the first blast door. How much room for finesse is there?”

“I suppose that depends on a lot of factors,” she said with a crooked smile. “Go ahead and get their attention, Mateo.”

“Aye, aye, My Lady.”

* * *

The gendarmerie squad on the far side of those blast doors had failed to notice Gutierrez’ sensor wand, but Sergeant Clinton Abernathy, the squad’s leader, had grown increasingly nervous as the minutes ticked by. This wasn’t the kind of crap he’d signed up for, and the rumors about what this particular batch of neobarbs had already done only made bad a lot worse.

He didn’t like any part of this, and he failed to share Major Pole’s confidence that these people would back down in the face of a demonstration of manly determination. Perhaps that was because he and his squad had been chosen to do the initial demonstrating.