Torch of Freedom

'home' was the penthouse on one of the high-rent residential towers that fronted Pine Valley Park, he had an excellent view of the wreckage which had once been Suvorov Tower and the Gamma Center. Now he stood gazing out through the crystoplast wall of the dining room, shaking his head slowly, as he continued his report to his father.

'. . . was another explosion in one of the old industrial areas, about twelve kilometers away, just about simultaneously.'

'Nuclear?'

'Apparently so, Father. At least, we've gotten reports of high radiation readings from the first responders in the area.'

He noticed an aircar approaching from the west. Its approach looked damned shaky, even at this distance, a corner of his mind noted. Not that it was especially surprising. It might well have taken damage from the explosion, and even if it hadn't, the pilot was undoubtedly badly rattled. From his approach angle, he must have been almost on the fringes of the blast itself . . . no wonder he was making for the park's parking apron. In his place, Collin would certainly want to put his car on the ground as quickly as possible!

Those were just idle thoughts, however. The focus of his mind was elsewhere.

* * *

David Pritchard managed to land the aircar on the parking apron without wrecking it. But the landing was about as rough as any landing an aircar could survive without suffering significant damage.

He could see a pair of city cops turning towardhim, and he snarled. They weren't even security legbreakers —just two of those pretty, duded up, glorified nannies who took care of the kinds of people who lived in Green Pines. The kind of people David Pritchard hated from the very bottom of his soul. The kind of people he could see beyond the cops, laughing and talking while their kids played in the park, enjoying the morning sun. They were turning now, those happy faces, staring at the huge plume of smoke rising to the west. He could see their owners gesticulating at the rising cloud, could almost hear their babbling curiosity.

From the look on the cops' faces—concern, mostly—he realized the men must assume that he himself was a scorpion in good steading. Someone whose vehicle had been damaged by the blast, perhaps, and who'd had to set it down wherever he could and as quickly as he could.

He scanned the area, for a few seconds. There was no way to escape, in the time he'd have.

So be it. He'd expected as much. He pulled out the device's control unit and began keying in new timing instructions.

* * *

'—may as well leave and come here, Collin. The first responders are already blanketing the area—the same at the other location—and what seems to be an army of security people has gotten there also. You won't be able to add anything important from Green Pines.'

'On my way then, father.' Collin tucked away his com unit and headed for the door to the corridor beyond. He didn't bother to stop for a jacket, since the weather was so pleasant today.

* * *

'Hey!' one of the cops shouted suddenly. 'That guy's a seccy! He doesn't belong here!'

He and his partner both paused for a moment in disbelief. Sure enough. And now that they looked at it from close up, they could see that a lot of dents and nicks in the aircar were vintage wear and tear, not anything produced by the rough landing.

Any seccy intruding into Pine Valley would have had a hard enough dat under any circumstances. On this day, with their coms screaming about nuclear explosions and the evidence of those same explosions rising before their very eyes . . .

One of them reached for his pulser.

* * *

David figured six seconds was enough time. But after he keyed the final code, he discovered he had nothing to say. No final words, no speech. His fury was simply too great.

So, the last sight two Green Pines City Police had was of a face distorted with rage, screaming something they couldn't hear because the seccy was still inside the cockpit.

One of them was something of a lip reader, though. So he figured out that what the seccy was shouting was just 'Fuck you!' repeated again and again.

* * *

As he waited for the elevator, Collin called Albrecht again. 'Father, have you heard anything from Benj —'

At that proximity, the radiation from the blast barely had time to penetrate the protective glass that formed the penthouse's walls on three sides before the hydrodynamic front arrived. As tough as they were, those windows had never been designed—nor could they have been—to withstand that sort of overpressure. They disintegrated into thousands of slivers which would have ripped Collin Detweiler apart if he'd still been standing there. As it was, everything inside the penthouse from the furniture down to the bedding was turned into shreds and the shreds themselves ignited by the thermal pulse.

Ceramacrete was incredibly strong, however—and the buildings at Green Pines had been designed with the possibility in mind that they might be subject to attack from terrorists. The ceramacrete towers in Nouveau Paris which surrounded the Octagon had managed to survive its destruction during Esther McQueen's coup attempt—and that blast had been far more powerful than the one set off in Green Pines.

Collin Detweiler's tower was far enough from ground zero to be well outside the fireball. Moreover, the interior walls protected him from the effects of radiation as well as keeping the fires in the outer apartments from spreading into the inner corridors and elevator shafts.

So, he was still alive when the rescue teams arrived. Battered into a pulp by the effects of the blast, with multiple broken bones and contusions and lacerations seemingly covering his entire body. Barely alive, but alive— and given modern emergency medical techniques, that was enough to ensure his survival.

* * *

'You did WHAT?' shrieked Andrew Artlett, less than two minutes after the shuttle began disgorging its contents in one of the cargo bays of the Hali Sowle.

* * *

'There goes another one, E.D. What do you want me to do?'

Helplessly, Trimm stared at the screen. Yet another ship was leaving orbit. That was hardly unusual, in and of itself, given the traffic that came in and out of the Mesan system. But there were now at least twice as many ships leaving as there normally would have been.

Whatever had happened down on the surface of the planet to have caused this chaos, it had obviously spooked a lot of ship captains.

She still had no idea which ship was which. But—for once—that jackass Blomqvist had proved to be useful. His jury-rigged system for gauging ship tonnages seemed to be working pretty well. So at least E.D. could separate the big boys from the flotsam and jetsam.

'What's their mass?'

He studied the screen for a few seconds. 'I make it about a million tons. Give or take a quarter of a million, you understand.'

Trimm waved her hand. 'Doesn't matter. It's a small fry. No point in worrying about it with everything else on our plate. I'm not sending out what few pinnaces we have available to check anything smaller than four million tons.'

* * *

Less than an hour after they made their upward alpha translation, Andrew Artlett was completely and totally vindicated.

Mainly because they'd just made an unscheduled—and most unpleasant— downward translation.

'Congratulations, you stupid goofballs. The hyper generator is now officially defunct. We're damned lucky it lasted long enough for the failsafes to throw us back into n-space before the stabilizer went. Of course, that was all the good luck we got issued. You may have