Torch of Freedom

You know, Jack, he told himself almost whimsically, you were just thinking about inflicting 'significant damage,' weren't you? And Bardasano's the most effective security type the Alignment's had in decades. So I guess this comes under the heading of serendipity.

His forefinger came down on a single macro, and he watched over the lift car's internal pickup as Bardasano's head snapped up in astonishment. The lift car stopped, alarms began to wail all over the Center, and Jack McBryde bared his teeth in a smile. Security doors slammed shut throughout the Center, and 'fire alarms' started screaming in the commercial tower above it. There probably still wouldn't be time for Suvorov to be completely evacuated—and for all of the evacuees to get far enough clear—but the casualty count had just been materially decreased, and that was good.

The main computers cycled through another level of commands and asked for the next one. He entered it, then sat back, waiting, watching over the lift car pickup as Bardasano snatched out her personal minicomp and started entering commands of her own.

I guess this is where I find out whether it's going to take her as long as I thought it was or not, he reflected, and opened his desk drawer.

He took out the pulser, checked the charge indicator, and made sure there was a dart in the chamber. If it turned out she could invade the system more quickly than he'd thought she could, he was going to have to settle for a much less spectacular goodbye.

* * *

David Pritchard was shrieking with rage as his aircar approached the sports stadium.

'I am sick of you spineless bastards! You hear me? Sick to fucking death of your whining and pewling and whimpering—fuck you! Fuck you! I'm blowing this bomb!'

* * *

Bardasano was still punching keys when McBryde's computer accepted the last authorization code he'd entered and asked for one more. This one had to be given orally, with voiceprint authentication.

'Scorched earth,' he said very carefully.

'Scorched Earth acknowledged,' an emotionless computer voice said. 'All sequences successfully entered and acknowledged. Execution enabled. Do you wish to proceed, Chief McBryde?'

Jack McBryde looked at the people in the lift car one final time.

Good luck, Herlander, he thought softly at the tormented man who had become his friend. Give them hell for me . . . and Francesca.

Then he cleared his throat.

'Execute Scorched Earth,' Jack McBryde said calmly.

Chapter Fifty-Four

Luckily for the inhabitants of the city, Gamma Center was deeply buried. No part of the Center proper was less than fifty meters underground; most of it was considerably deeper than that—and the nuclear device triggered off by Scorched Earth had been deliberately positioned at the very base of the huge subterranean complex.

The people who'd guided the Mesan Alignment for centuries and had built Gamma Center were far removed from the half-crazed ancient despots whose response to disaster was often to burn their cities down around them. Scorched Earth was not a suicide program in the normal sense of the term—although, if triggered, it would certainly kill everyone in the Center at the time.

But its purpose was rational, not emotional—and certainly not hysterical. Scorched Earth was not designed to kill people, much less to kill people outside the Center who just happened to be living in the city. That would happen, but only as a byproduct. No, the sole and single function of Scorched Earth was to destroy the Center itself, so completely and thoroughly that no enemy could possibly glean anything from its ruins.

The bomb amounted to a shaped charge on a gigantic scale. It was specifically designed to cause maximum damage to the Center itself—and minimal damage to anything beyond.

It worked as planned, too. Unfortunately, 'minimal damage' when done by a fifty kiloton nuclear device, no matter how well planned and executed, is only 'minimal' by the peculiar standards of people who design and build nuclear weapons.

By anyone else's standards, Scorched Earth was a holocaust.

* * *

The explosion wasn't triggered until almost three seconds after McBryde spoke the final words, and during those three seconds, the sabotage programs from his chip had time to upload themselves out of the Center's computers. Not many of them, compared to his original plans, but one hell of a lot more than any of the Alignment's cybersecurity teams had ever imagined might come at them from inside their primary firewalls. Or might carrywith them so many perfectly valid access and authorization codes. This wasn't an attack on the system from outside; it took the form of perfectly legitimate (insofar as computers considered such things, at any rate) instructions from an authorized superior.

Once the first tier of the network started going down, watchdog systems sprang into action, of course, but not quickly enough to prevent some fairly awesome destruction. Some of the planet's cybernetic systems very few of the major subsystems escaped altogether unscathed.

The military was much less severely affected, for several reasons. First, because by the very nature of things the military preferred standalone systems wherever possible. Secondly, because Alignment Security was very carefully partitioned off from the official Mesan secret services and the star system's official military forces, which meant access points were strictly limited. Third, because in the case of the military, the gateways which existed were under the control of the admirals of the clandestine Mesan Alignment Navy, and without much more time to work with, McBrydes cybernetic saboteurs were unable to wiggle their way through. Fourth, because McBryde had possessed nowhere near as much access to the MAN's authorization codes. And, fifth, because there simply wasn't time for his programs to get through before the Gama Center—and its computers—ceased to exist.

But there werefar more links from Alignment Security's primary net to most of the other, openly maintained civilian intelligence agencies, and those were under the control of the Alignment, not the agencies which didn't even know they'd been penetrated. Indeed, they were specifically set up to allow Alignment Security to sneak in and out of the 'official' databanks tracelessly—to co-opt those banks data without anyone outside Alignment Security's ever being the wiser. The people who had designed the system had always realized that all those backdoors hopelessly compromised the official agencies' security, but since the Alignment was the one doing the compromising, they hadn't lost much sleep over the thought.

As it happened, it still took precious time for McBryde's programs to squirm through, yet they got through much more quickly than they had in the military's case. Not only that, but he'd prioritized his attacks carefully.

Only one attack fully succeeded, even so, but it was the one upon which he'd lavished the most care and effort, and he wasn't taking any chances on simply erasing the data he was after. Oh, no. His attack came equipped with the specific security codes for the computers in question, triggering the command sequence which reformatted their molecular circuitry itself. Turned those computers' memories into solid, inert chunks of crystalline alloy from which Saint Peter himself could not have recovered one single scrap of data. And because the man who'd prepared that attack came from so high inside Security itself, he'd known where all the backups were maintained . . . and how to reach them, too.

In that one successful attack, over ninety percent of all Mesan records concerning the Ballroom—those of the 'official' agencies' and the Alignment's alike—simply vanished. And since Mesa still considered Torch an extension of the Ballroom, all the Alignment's data on Torch went with it.

All gone, except for whatever scraps survived in partial form in other locales. No doubt there were enough of those scraps to reconstitute much of that data in the fullness of time, yet it was a task which would take literally years . . . and never be anything remotely like complete.

The day after Scorched Earth, Jeremy X himself could have walked openly down the streets of any Mesan city, giving DNA samples at every corner, without anyone being the wiser, unless he was spotted by one of the very