Flag In Exile

corrupt society.'

'But this...!' Burdette's voice was a bit stronger, and a hint of color flowed back into his ashen face, and Marchant sighed sadly.

'I know, My Lord, yet it was God's will. We had no way to know children would be present, but He did. Would He have allowed the dome to collapse when it did if it wasn't part of His plan? Terrible as their deaths were, their souls are with Him now, innocent of sin, untouched by the world's temptations, and their deaths have multiplied the effect of our plan a thousand fold. Our entire world now sees the consequences of embracing Manticore and the Protector's 'reforms,' and nothing, My Lord, nothing, could have driven that lesson home as this has. Those children are the Lord's martyrs, fallen in His service as surely as any martyr ever perished for his Faith.'

'He's right, William,' Mueller said quietly. Burdette turned to his fellow Steadholder, and Mueller raised one hand. 'My inspectors have already found the substandard ceramacrete. I'll wait a day or so before announcing it, long enough for us to check and recheck the analyses, so that no one can possibly question our conclusions, but the proof is there. The proof, William. There's no way that harlot or the Protector can weasel their way around it. We didn't pick the moment it would collapse; God did that, and in doing so he made our original plan enormously more successful than we'd ever dared hope.'

'Maybe... maybe you're right,' Burdette said slowly. The horror had faded in his eyes, replaced by the supporting self-righteousness of his faith... and a cold light of calculation. 'It's her fault,' he murmured, 'not ours. She's the one who drove us to this.'

'Of course she is, My Lord,' Marchant agreed. 'It takes a sharp sword to cut away Satan's mask, and we who wield the Lord's blade can only accept whatever price He thinks mete to ask of us.'

'You're right, Edmond,' Burdette said in a stronger voice. He nodded and looked back at the HD, and this time there as a slight, sneering curl to his lip as he listened to the reporters grief-fogged voice.

'You're right,' Steadholder Burdette repeated. 'We've set our hands to God's work. If He demands we bear the blood price, then His will be done, and may that harlot burn in Hell for all eternity for driving us to this.'

Adam Gerrick walked into the conference room, and his face was terrible. The young man who'd left for Mueller Steading that morning had died with the collapse of his shining dream. The Adam Gerrick who'd returned to Harrington was a haunted man, with the joy of accomplishment quenched to bitter ashes in his eyes.

But he was also an angry man, filled with rage and determined to find out what had happened. He'd find the man whose greed was responsible for this carnage, this murder, he promised himself, and when he did, he'd kill the cold, calculating bastard with his two bare hands.

'All right,' he said harshly to his senior engineers, 'the Mueller inspectors have barred us from the site, but we still have our own records. We know what was supposed to go into that project, and we are going to find out what actually went into it ... and how.'

'But...' The man who'd started to speak closed his mouth as cold, burning eyes swiveled to his face. He licked his lips and looked appealingly at his colleagues, then turned unwillingly back to his superior.

'What?' Gerrick asked in a liquid helium voice.

'I've already putted the records, Adam,' Frederick Bennington said. 'I've checked everything that went to the site and compared expenditures in every category against what we still have in invoice.'

'And?'

'And it all checks!' Bennington said forcefully. 'We didn't skimp anywhere, Adam, I swear it.' He laid a mini-comp on the table. 'There are the records, and they're not just mine. I'm in charge of procurement, and that makes me the logical suspect. I know that. So when I pulled the records, I took Jake Howell from Accounting with me, and I brought in three inspectors from the Harrington Bureau of Records. These figures are solid, Adam. We checked them five times. Every single item we bought and shipped to that site met or surpassed Sword code standards.'

'Then someone swapped them on-site,' Gerrick rasped. 'Some bastard skimmed the code materials and replaced them with crap.'

'No way, Adam.' Despite his own shock, Bennington's voice was flat with assurance. 'Not possible. We're working round-the-clock shifts, and we've maintained continuous on-site visual records. You know that.' Gerrick nodded slowly, his expression suddenly intent, for Sky Domes was in the midst of a motion efficiency study, and that required detailed visual records of all their procedures.

'All right,' Bennington went on, 'if anyone had stolen materials from the site, we'd have at least some evidence of it on record. But every air lorry that entered or left that site is on chip, Adam, and aside from the disposal lorries headed for reclamation or the landfill, none of them, I repeat, none of them, left loaded. All materials movement was into the site.'

'But I saw the ceramacrete,' Gerrick said. 'One of the inspectors crushed it, Fred. Just crushed it in his hand, like... like so much packing material!'

'I can't help that,' Bennington replied. 'All I can tell you is that we have certified records that it couldn't have been substandard materials.'

'Records no one will believe.' Howard Clinkscales' voice was harsh as he spoke at last, and every eye turned to him. 'We may know they're accurate, but who's going to take our word? If Adam saw substandard materials, then there are substandard materials on the site. We don't know how they got there, but we can't dispute their existence, and our Steadholder is Sky Domes' majority stockholder. If we make our records public, all we'll do is destroy any last vestige of trust in her. Burdette and his supporters will scream that we doctored them, that her inspectors signed off on their falsification because she told them to, and we can't prove that didn't happen. Not with physical proof of wrongdoing sitting right there in Mueller.'

He looked around the table, and his heart felt old and frozen as he saw the understanding on the engineers' faces. But Adam Gerrick shook his head, and there was no surrender in his eyes.

'You're wrong, Lord Clinkscales,' he said flatly. The regent blinked at him, unaccustomed to being contradicted in such a hard, certain voice. 'You're not an engineer, Sir. No doubt you're right about what will happen if we turn Fred's records over to the press, but we can prove what happened.'

'How?' Clinkscales’s desire to believe showed in his voice, but there was little hope behind it.

'Because we...' Gerrick waved at the men around the table '...are engineers. The best damned engineers on this damned planet, and we know our records are accurate. More than that, we have a complete visual record of everything that happened at that site, including the collapse itself. And on top of that, we've got not just the plans and the final specs that went into them, we've got all the original calculations, from the first rough site survey through every step of the process.'

'And?'

'And that means we have all the pieces, My Lord. If Fred's right about the quality of the materials we shipped to that site, then someone, somewhere, made that dome collapse, and we've got the data we need to figure out how the bastard did it.'

'Made it collapse?' Clinkscales stared at the younger man. 'Adam, I know you don't want to believe it was our fault, dear God, I don't want to believe it!, but if it wasn't a simple case of materials theft, what else could it be? Surely you're not suggesting someone wanted it to collapse!'

'When you eliminate all the impossible factors, whatever’s left must be the truth. And I am telling you, My Lord, that if that dome was built with the materials we specified and if the plans we provided were followed, then the collapse I saw this morning could not happen.'

'But...' Clinkscales paused, and something happened in his eyes. The man who'd once been Planetary Security's commanding general looked suddenly out of them, and his voice changed. 'Why would anyone