Torch of Freedom

'What does that mean?'

'It means Jeremy's right. You are a security expert's nightmare.'

'You tell her, Hugh!' came Yana's approving voice from behind them.

'Yeah,' chimed in Lara. 'You are the walrus.'

Chapter Twenty-Five

Once they arrived back at the palace, they found a small delegation waiting to meet them. Jeremy X was there, along with Thandi Palane, Princess Ruth, and two men Hugh didn't know. One of them had a treecat perched on his shoulder.

'Should we meet in the audience chamber?' Berry suggested.

Jeremy shook his head. 'The security precautions there are sub-standard, as I've told you a gazillion times.' Sternly: 'And this time, damnation, you will listen to me. We'll meet in the operations room. It's the only place in the palace that's really secure.'

Berry didn't argue the point. In fact, she almost—not quite—looked a bit chastened.

The two Amazons and Saburo politely detached themselves. Jeremy led the rest of the group to an elevator, which was just large enough for all of them to fit into it. The elevator took them down . . .

A long, long, long way. Wherever they were headed, Hugh realized, it had to be a place specially constructed for a specific purpose, and almost certainly by Manpower. They were going far deeper than could be explained by any normal architecture, and there hadn't been enough time since the foundation of Torch—not with everything else to be done—for the new nation to have completed such a project.

Hugh's spirits picked up. That was old training at work. The simplest and still surest way to make a room secure from any spying apparatus was to bury it deeply in the earth. Judging from the time it was taking the elevator to get there, and Hugh's estimate of their speed, this room must be at least a thousand meters below the surface, and probably closer to two thousand. About the only particles that would penetrate to that depth, at least reliably, were neutrinos. To the best of Hugh's knowledge, not even Manticore had managed to build detection equipment that used neutrinos.

Sound detection was far easier, of course, since depth actually provided some benefits. But that was easy to block.

Jeremy must have sensed Hugh's curiosity. 'Manpower built this buried chamber to cover its most secure computers—read 'really deep dark and secret, burn-before-readingrecord archives.' Which, of course, meants they were also their most incriminating records, as well as the most sensitive. And then the incompetent clown charged with destroying the evidence neglected to punch in the instructions in the proper sequence, during the rebellion. Probably because he was shitting his pants. So the chamber computers locked down instead of slagging the molycircs and everything stored in them. And then he couldn't get them to unlock and let him back in because— apparently—he either never had the access code for that little problem in the first place or (more likely, my opinion) he simply forgot what the hell it was. Probably because he was shitting his pants. Then he just ran away—see prior explanation—and apparently got killed in the general mayhem. We're not positive, because it took us—Princess Ruth, that is—almost two days to unseal the chamber. By then, few of the bodies anywhere in the headquarters area had enough left for good physical identification. And the DNA records were mostly destroyed because the slaves who stormed the record office reduced the library files to teeny, tiny, throughly stomped upon and incinerated chunks of circuitry. Along with the technicians and clerks who'd maintained those records.'

Berry grimaced.

But Jeremy just smiled. Thinly, but it was a smile. Whatever else might be preying on his conscience, the massacre of so many of Manpower's management and employees during the rebellion was obviously not one of them.

Hugh didn't blame him in the least. He'd seen some of the vids taken at the time himself, and had just shrugged them off. Yes, some of what had happened here had been hideous—but there was a good reason Manpower's slaves called most of its employees 'the scorpions.'

Hugh's parents and all of his siblings had been shoved into space unprotected and died horrible deaths, just so a slaver crew might claim they'd had no cargo. Hugh wasn't any more likely to lose sleep over the butchery of anyone connected with Manpower than he was to lose sleep over the extermination of dangerous bacteria. So far as he was concerned, anyone who voluntarily joined Manpower forfeited any right to be considered a human being any longer.

That didn't mean he had approved of the Ballroom's tactics. Some he had, most he hadn't. As a rule, Hugh had been inclined toward Web Du Havel's view of the matter. But, as with Du Havel, for him the issue was purely one of tactical effectiveness. By any reasonable moral standard, anyone connected to Manpower deserved any fate meted out to them. Such, at least, was Hugh Arai's opinion—which he'd held rock solid since the age of five.

The elevator came to a stop.

'How deep—'

'One thousand, eight hundred and forty-two meters,' Berry said. 'I asked myself, the first time. The place still gives me the creeps.'

From the elevator, it was a short walk down a wide corridor—there was plenty of room there for additional computer systems, if they were needed, although it was currently empty—and then into a circular and very spacious chamber. Looking around at the equipment lining much of the wall space, Hugh recognized them as security- proofing devices.

State of the art, too. Much of the equipment had been made on Manticore, he was pretty sure.

At the very center of the chamber was a large and circular table. Torus-shaped, rather. Keeping an actual 'center' in a table with that great a diameter would have been pointless and sometimes even awkward. Instead, the open center had a robot standing idle, ready to move papers and material around, and Hugh could see where a portion of the table could be slid aside to allow a person to enter that central space.

In short, it was a state-of-the-art conference table. Probably designed and built somewhere in the Republic of Haven. The table itself was made of wood—or possibly a wood veneer—and Hugh thought he recognized it as one of the very expensive hardwoods produced on Tahlmann.

Jeremy had been leading the way, but once they reached the chamber Berry took charge. Young she might be, and generally disinclined toward the trappings of royalty. But it was already clear to Hugh that when she wanted to be, the queen was quite capable of taking control of things.

'Please, everyone, take a seat. Judson and Harper, since I presume your presence here means you're the ones making the report, I'd recommend you take those two seats over there.' She pointed to two seats on either side of some discretely recessed and subdued equipment. Hugh recognized it as the control center for sophisticated displays.

That equipment, judging from what he could see of it, had been made on Erewhon. Combined with the origins of most of the other equipment present—all the lighting equipment was obviously Solarian, probably made somewhere in Maya Sector—this chamber was a testimony in itself to the material support Torch had gotten from its many powerful sponsors.

Once they were all seated, Berry gestured toward the two men Hugh wasn't familiar with. 'Hugh, since you've never met them, let me introduce Harper S. Ferry and Judson Van Hale. They both work for Immigration Services. Harper's a former member of the Audubon Ballroom; Judson's parents were both genetic slaves although he was born free on Sphinx and was a forest ranger before coming here.'

That explained the treecat. Hugh nodded at both of them, and they nodded back.

'As for Hugh, he's a member of Beowulf's Biological Survey Corps—'

That news heightened Ferry's interest, quite obviously. As was true of many people in the Audubon Ballroom, he was aware that the BSC was not the innocuous outfit its name suggested. Just as obviously, it didn't mean anything to Van Hale.

'—who came here for reasons I don't think I'm at liberty to discuss in front of the two of you'—she smiled at them—'unless the nature of your report changes things.'