Shadow of Freedom

He stopped pounding long enough to jab one hand at his office windows, which overlooked the columns of inky-black smoke rising from the heart of the of the city of Landing’s financial district. The firing had finally stopped an hour ago, but the lower stories of three major towers were roaring infernos, and God only knew how much damage those fires were going to do before they were extinguished. And not just to locally owned property, either. Two satellite offices of Lombroso’s major transstellar sponsor were part of the bonfire, as well.

“I’ve been telling you for months something like this was coming!” the President continued. “For months! I’ve been warning you about the rumors, the malcontents my security people have found! But did you believe me? Hell, no, you didn’t!”

“Mister President, please, calm yourself,” Angelika Xydis said in her most soothing tones. Her raised hands made stroking motions in midair. “I agree this is terrible, Sir. But the situation’s a long way from out of control!”

“A long way from out of control?!” Lombroso stared at her incredulously. “I lost over a hundred men. A hundred men! That’s more Guard troopers killed in one afternoon than in the last fifty T-years. D’you think those malcontent anarchists don’t realize that? Aren’t going to be emboldened by their success?”

Xydis bit her tongue.

Officially, she was a State Department employee, the Solarian League’s trade attaché on Mobius. Actually, as everyone realized perfectly well, the trade mission was where the local Office of Frontier Security’s representative (one Angelika Xydis, as it happened) hung her hat. As a mid-level OFS bureaucrat, Xydis had seen more strongmen like Lombroso than she cared to recall. More than one had gotten his ass in a crack through sheer, stupid incompetence, too. And it was amazing how many of them would have fixated—just like Lombroso—on the losses their security troops had taken as something likely to embolden their local opposition instead of reflecting on the fury the two or three thousand civilian casualties were going to engender!

Because, of course, they are civilians. They don’t matter, Xydis thought grimly. Why, oh why, have all these back-planet jackasses heard all about the stick but don’t even have a clue about the carrot? Who do they think supports the lifestyles to which they’ve become accustomed? Their security goons, or the workers they kill off in job lots at moments like this?

Not that Lombroso had a corner on the unthinking brutality market, she reflected, glancing at the two Mobians standing attentively behind the president.

General Olivia Yardley, CO of the Presidential Guard, was a fairly typical blunt object in Xydis’ opinion. A bit more imagination than many a uniformed enforcer, perhaps, but not a lot, and the Guard reflected its commander’s personality, which explained a great deal about its reactions this morning.

Whereas Yardley wore the Guard’s black uniform—and why did all of these back-planet thugs think black was the only possible color for their uniforms?—the man standing next to her was in civilian dress with a SUPP lapel pin in the red, gold, and black which indicated he’d been one of the Party’s original cadre. He was also a general, however: General Friedemann Mátyás, the commander of the Mobius Secret Police, an organization that didn’t officially exist…which had always struck Xydis as a silly thing to pretend. Everyone knew about the MSP. It would have been pretty stupid to rely on the terror of a secret police no one knew existed, after all! But Lombroso and Mátyás seemed not to understand that “secret police” was supposed to mean that nobody knew who was in it, not whether or not it existed in the first place.

Still, Mátyás was at least smarter than Lombroso, and his MSP was the System Unity and Progress Party’s primary counterintelligence service. Over the five decades of Lombroso’s régime, Yardley and Mátyás had done a fairly impressive job of crushing all effective opposition. They hadn’t managed to make him any less hated along the way, though. And while Mátyás seemed at least marginally aware of the potential downside of slaughtering his own planetary workforce in job lots, Yardley—like Lombroso—was clearly more focused on the casualties her guardsmen had taken.

Xydis considered the refreshing frankness of pointing out that she and Lombroso could always get more security troopers where the last batch had come from. Or, if not there, they could import them from off-world prisons or lunatic asylums! In fact, she considered—briefly, of course—reminding the system president who truly propped up his régime.