Shadow of Freedom: Chapter Nine

    “I don’t like it,” Rosa Shuman said, sitting well back in the outrageously comfortable, throne-like chair behind her desk. She was turned half away from her single guest, looking out through her office windows over the capital city which had been named (with dubious humor) “Capistrano” by the colony’s original settlers. “I don’t like it at all. Those Allenby yahoos have always been too big for their britches.”

    “I’m not going to argue with you about that, Rosa,” General Felicia Karaxis replied in the sort of tone very few other people would have dared use with the president of the Swallow System Republic. Felicia Karaxis wasn’t “other people,” though. She commanded the Swallow System Army, and since Swallow had a unified military, that meant she also commanded the security forces responsible for keeping one President Rosa Shuman seated in that throne-like chair. She also knew where most of the bodies were buried on Swallow…especially given how many of them she’d planted herself.

    “I’ve been telling you for years that we needed to go in there and clean them out,” Karaxis continued, leaning back in her own chair and reaching into her tunic’s inside pocket for one of the thin cigars she favored. She found one, extracted it, and began peeling it out of its sealed wrap as she continued. “Let me make a sweep through their damned mountains with air cav and infantry. I’ll sort the bastards out!”

    “Believe me, I’d love to let you,” Shuman replied, although if she was going to be honest she was a bit less confident than Karaxis about just how simple it would be to “sort the bastards out.” She hated the entire Allenby clan with a pure and burning intensity not even Karaxis could match, but she wasn’t going to take them lightly.

    “I’d love to let you,” she continued, “but Parkman and those other bastards over at Tallulah don’t want us spoiling the tourist trade.”

    “Tourist trade!” Karaxis snorted harshly, exhaling smoke. “If I were him, I’d be a lot more worried over what Floyd and Jason might send to visit him than over getting out for a little skiing!”

    Shuman rolled her gray eyes. Felicia might be a bit short on tact, she thought, but she did have a way of cutting to the heart of things. And if it had been possible for there to be anyone in the entire Swallow System more hated than Rosa Shuman, it would probably have been Alton Parkman, the Tallulah Corporation’s system manager. Hell! Shuman hated his guts, for that matter! Not that she was in much of a position to do anything about it.

    At the same time, she had to admit Parkman did have a point…of sorts, at least. Swallow wasn’t a particularly wealthy star system, and the Tallulah Corporation wasn’t much as Solarian transstellars went. Of course, even a relatively poverty-stricken star system represented a very large amount of money, and as the system’s legal president — duly appointed as vice president by her since deceased husband, Donnie, and his legal successor under the constitution he’d personally drafted — Shuman was in a position to skim off quite a bit of it. Parkman was in an even better position, since Tallulah (like quite a few of the transstellars) was prepared to wink at 8its managerial personnel’s graft, tax evasion, and outright theft as long as they continued to show a healthy bottom line. It was Tallulah’s version of an incentive program.

    Swallow basically represented a captive market for Tallulah, whose faithful minions Donnie and Rosa Shuman had crafted a tariff policy guaranteed to close anyone else out of the system’s economy. Of course, Donnie had gotten a bit too greedy later and tried to insist on taking a bigger slice of the pie, which was how he’d come to suffer that tragic air accident and Rosa had tearfully inherited the presidency. Aside from her husband’s untimely demise, however, Rosa had little about which to complain. She knew that, and she was perfectly happy to settle for Donnie’s original deal with Tallulah and OFS. A population of over four billion human beings, forbidden the opportunity to trade with anyone else, could produce a very healthy bottom line, with plenty to go around, and Swallow had done just that for Tallulah for the better part of fifty T-years. But the “tourist trade” Parkman was worried about added another nice, solid chunk of change to the Tallulah balance sheets.

    The Cripple Mountains were among the more spectacular mountain ranges in explored space. Broken Back Mountain, the Cripples’ tallest peak, was almost two hundred and fifty meters taller than Old Earth’s Mount Everest, and three more of the Cripples’ mountains were at least as tall as Everest. The rest of the mountain range was scaled to match, providing superlative skiing, some of the most rugged and towering (and beautiful) scenery in the galaxy, and opportunities for mountaineering, camping, hunting, and fishing in a genuinely unspoiled wilderness paradise. True, that same “wilderness paradise” could kill the unwary in a heartbeat, yet that only added to its appeal for the true aficionado, and Tallulah Travel Interstellar had a complete lock on that part of the system’s economy, as well.

    Unfortunately, the descendants of the people who’d homesteaded the Cripple Mountains were about as hard to tame as the mountains themselves, and Floyd Allenby was a case in point.

    “I’m telling you, Rosa,” Karaxis said, jabbing the air with her cigar as if it were a pointer or a swagger stick, “sooner or later we’re going to have to go in to deal with the Allenbys, and the longer we put it off, the worse it’s going to be when we do. Let me go in quick and dirty and will see how long this ‘Cripple Mountain Movement’ of theirs lasts!”

    Shuman considered pointing out that it had been Karaxis’ security people who’d killed Floyd Allenby’s wife eight T-years ago. To be fair, they hadn’t meant to. Sandra Allenby’s air car had simply happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. In fact, Shuman had acknowledged that Sandra’s death had been a terrible accident and offered a very generous financial settlement. Unfortunately, Floyd Allenby didn’t seem to think a surface-to-air missile came under the heading of “accidents,” and he’d wanted blood, not money. A lot of those Cripple Mountains rednecks thought that way. In fact, his entire damned family seemed to agree with him.

    “Felicia,” the president said, “we can’t afford to kill off Allenbys in job lots — especially right now — for a lot of reasons. You know the way they think. If we go in after any of them, we have to go after all of them, and the effect of eliminating the biggest, most highly skilled, and most profitable group of guides would not make our Mister Parkman very happy. And to be honest, I don’t think your people would really enjoy going after them on their own ground. I don’t doubt you could deal with them in the end,” she continued quickly (and not entirely accurately) when she saw Karaxis’ expression, “but it wouldn’t be a pleasant experience and I’m pretty sure it would take longer than either of us would believe at this point. Even worse, they aren’t exactly the only bunch up in those mountains who’d raise all kinds of hell if you went after them the way you’d have to make them give up Floyd or the others.”

    Karaxis growled something unintelligible around her cigar, eyes angry, but she couldn’t very well dispute what Shuman had just said.

    “Besides,” the redhaired president continued, “as near as we can tell, even the Allenbys are still split over whether or not they should be supporting Floyd. All of them hate our guts, but for right now at least a majority of the clan doesn’t seem to feel that going up against us openly is a winning strategy.”

    “Because they aren’t all completely crazy after all,” Karaxis grunted. “If they ever come out in the open where we can get at them, we’ll chop them into husky bait!”

    “I’m sure that’s a factor in their thinking,” Shuman agreed. “The problem is that they’re so damn bloody-minded. If we step on their toes hard enough, they may just decide they don’t care how ugly things could get. Don’t forget what old Simon was like!”

    That reminder seemed to give even Karaxis pause, and the general nodded soberly.

    “At least Floyd never got prolong in time,” Shuman continued. “He’s — what? Thirty? Thirty-five? — by now. Give him a few more T-years, and he’s likely to decide this ‘liberation movement’ of his is a game for younger men. Looked at that way, time’s on our side, wouldn’t you say?”

    Karaxis gave an unconvinced-looking nod. Shuman suspected the general was thinking about Simon Allenby, Floyd’s grandfather. Old-age hadn’t slowed Simon up noticeably. According to tradition — and Shuman was pretty sure the tradition was correct — Simon Allenby had fought his last duel at the tender age of ninety.

    And he’d won.

    Handily.

    Hadn’t even had to kill his opponent, only crippled him for life.

    “Either way, Felicia,” the president said with a shrug, “I couldn’t green light that kind of operation right now even if I were completely convinced it was a good idea. Not with that pain-in-the-ass Luther and his other Nixon Foundation buddies here in the system.”

    Karaxis’ frown turned into an active glower. Shuman understood perfectly, since she, too, would have liked nothing better than to arrange a creative (and hopefully fatal) accident for Jerome Luther and the rest of the Nixon Foundation team investigating all those ridiculous allegations of human rights violations here in Swallow. She would have gone ahead and authorized the accident without hesitation if Parkman hadn’t warned her that the Nixon Foundation’s expedition was being financed by one of Tallulah’s competitors in hopes of turning up something egregious enough to justify Frontier Security intervention. Tallulah was currently involved in a bidding war to buy OFS off, but until that was resolved, they had to be cautious about creating pretexts Frontier Security could use to mandate régime change…and hand Swallow (and its cash flow) over to someone else. Or, even worse, turn the entire system into a direct OFS protectorate, which would put the bulk of the system economy straight into Frontier Security’s pocket.

    “That’s why I said I don’t like it,” Shuman continued. “If we let ourselves be provoked into a large-scale operation in the Cripples, it’s bound to get out and that busybody from Nixon will jump right onto it. I think he genuinely believes his foundation can ‘make a difference’ out here, and if we give him a toehold…”

    She let her voice trail off and shrugged, and Karaxis glowered some more.

    “All right,” the general said finally. “I understand your reasoning, and I don’t want to upset the apple cart any more than anyone else does. But if these rumors my people are picking up are accurate — if Allenby and the others are genuinely planning to start some kind of active guerrilla campaign — we’re going to have to respond. And when we do, it’s going to escalate. That’s why I’m still convinced it would be better to go in fast and hard now, break as many eggs as we have to nip this thing in the bud, instead of letting it drag on and turn into something even bigger and messier.”

    “I agree there’s a risk of that happening, and I’ve pointed that out to Parkman. His theory is that as long as we restrict ourselves to reactions to the other side’s provocations, we can pass it off as a standard law enforcement response to criminals, not a military campaign against some kind of political resistance organization. To be honest, I think what he’s really hoping is that Luther and those other Nixon pests will get tired and go home before this reaches the messy stage. Once we get them out of here, I’ll be a lot more willing to go ahead and turn you loose. We just need to keep a lid on things for a few more T-months. Maybe a whole T-year.”

    “I’m willing to keep a lid on it,” Karaxis said sardonically. “The question is whether or not Allenby is!”

    “What do you reckon the odds really are, Floyd?” Jason MacGruder asked.

    “Odds of what?” Floyd Allenby hawked up a gobbet of phlegm and spat it into the campfire. “Whether or not it’s going to snow? Or what the snow bear hunting’s going to be like this year?”

    “How ’bout whether or not we’re gonna be alive this time next year?” MacGruder suggested.

    “Oh, that.” Allenby shrugged and looked back down at the snowshoe he was mending. “Couldn’t tell you that, Jason. Looks to me like there’s only one way to find out.”

    “Figured that was what you were gonna say,” MacGruder said gloomily, and Allenby smiled down at his work.

    MacGruder was his second cousin, with the same brown hair and brown eyes — not to mention the beak-like Allenby nose — although MacGruder favored the tall and lanky side of the family while Allenby came from its compact, broad shouldered, fireplug side. There wasn’t much to choose between them in a lot of ways, but MacGruder did have a positive gift for looking on the gloomy side.

    Not that there was all that much of a side that wasn’t gloomy at the moment.

    Allenby finished replacing the broken rawhide lacing, knotted it, and carefully trimmed off the excess length. He set the repaired shoe aside and leaned closer to the fire to pour a cup of coffee from the battered black pot. Then he sat back again, leaning against the flat stone face which helped to both conceal their fire and to reflect its heat back into their tiny encampment.

    “You know,” MacGruder said in a thoughtful tone, leaning back against his own bedroll and folding his arms behind his head, “our mighty liberation movement’s bitten off quite a mouthful here, Floyd.”

    “Yep,” Allenby agreed.

    “‘Pears to me we’re just a tad outnumbered,” MacGruder continued. “Something like, what, around three or four-thousand-to-one?”

    “‘Bout that.”

    “With air cars, recon drones, sting ships, armored personnel carriers, tri-barrels. Heck, Floyd, they’ve even got tanks, I hear!”

    “Heard that, too,” Allenby agreed, sipping the scalding hot coffee.

    “Don’t think those odds might be a little steep even for an Allenby, do you?”

    “Maybe just a little.”

    MacGruder made a disgusted sound, but his lips twitched, and Allenby smiled down into his cup. Then he stopped smiling and looked back up.

    “The truth is, Jason,” he said much more seriously, “this is probably a losing hand. You sure you want to sit in?”

    “You don’t want to go around insulting people by asking a man a question like that,” MacGruder pointed out, looking up at the huge, brilliant starscape above the Cripple Mountains’ thin atmosphere.

    “I’m serious, Jason. I think we’ve got a chance, or I wouldn’t be doing this, but having a chance isn’t the same as having a good chance.”

    “And what does Vinnie have to say about that?” MacGruder inquired politely.

    “You know what Vinnie has to say about it.” Allenby’s voice was suddenly harsher and much colder than it had been, and a look of apology filled MacGruder’s eyes as they flicked to his cousin’s face.

    Vincent Frugoni was the brother of Sandra Frugoni Allenby, Floyd Allenby’s dead wife. Like Sandra, he’d been born off-world. He’d been ten T-years younger than Sandra when Doctor Frugoni had come out to Swallow after their parents’ deaths. Sandra had been in the Tallulah Corporation’s employ at the time, but it hadn’t taken her long to realize what was going on in Swallow, at which point she’d resigned and set up her own practice in the Cripples. Vincent had been delighted with her decision, and they’d both always felt comfortable around the stubborn, hard-working, bloody-minded folk of the Cripple Mountains. In fact Vincent was even more stubborn and bloody-minded than most of Swallow’s clansmen. In a lot of ways, killing his sister had been just as big a mistake as killing Floyd Allenby’s wife.

    Leave it to that bitch Karaxis to piss both of them off with one frigging SAM, MacGruder thought now. And me, too, come to that.

    Blood and family meant a lot up in the Cripples. Sandra Allenby had been as treasured for who she was as for her medical skills or the fact that she’d married one of their own, and MacGruder was an old-fashioned clansman, just like Allenby himself. He’d have rallied around his cousin even if he’d never met Sandra, but like everyone else who’d known her, he’d loved her. It would have been personal for him, anyway, but he was honest enough to admit to himself that it was even more personal than it might have been.

    “What I meant, Floyd,” he said in a softer, less bantering tone, “was whether or not Vinnie thinks we can pull it off, not whether or not it’s a good idea.”

    “To be honest, I’m not sure whether or not he thinks we can actually bring Schuman and Karaxis down,” Allenby admitted after a moment. “I think he’s convinced we can at least make both of them wish they’d never been born, but actually knock off the government?” He shrugged. “That’s a lot steeper order. All I can say is he thinks there’s at least a chance, and if this contact of his comes through for us, we may have a lot better chance than I thought we did when we started.”

    “Makes a man a little nervous counting on ‘contacts’ he’s never met,” MacGruder observed.

    “Naw.” Allenby shook his head. “Doesn’t make a man a little nervous, Jason. Not ‘less he’s the kind of idiot couldn’t count to eleven without taking his shoes off, anyway.”

    MacGruder chuckled, although in his saner moments he knew Allenby was right about that. At the moment, their Cripple Mountain Movement consisted of a grand and glorious total of just under four hundred volunteers. Given the imbalance between the imported equipment of Karaxis’ military and the civilian weaponry available to them, angering even that many enough to step forward had been a monumental achievement on the Shuman Administration’s part. And virtually all of those four hundred were Cripple Mountains clansmen and women, which meant that even family members unwilling to take up arms themselves would greet any outside pursuers or investigators with hostile, willful ignorance of the guerrillas’ whereabouts.

    Some of the CMM’s members wanted to open a large-scale campaign of attacks on the Tallulah Corporation’s infrastructure, but for the moment, Allenby was restricting their operations to keeping their mountainous stronghold free of the system security forces. There’d been perhaps a dozen serious clashes between his people and Karaxis’ over the last local year or so, and their frequency seemed to be accelerating, yet they were still the exception, not the rule. In fact, most of them had been the result of accidental collisions between the two sides, not something either of them had planned.

    Things had begun to accelerate in other ways, though — especially since First Sergeant Vincent Frugoni, Solarian Marine Corps (retired) had returned to Swallow. Frugoni shared his dead sister’s blond hair and blue eyes, and his face, while undeniably masculine, was an almost painful reminder of Sandra. He was also — as his sister had been — a prolong recipient, which neither Allenby nor MacGruder was. Twenty years older than either of them, he looked more like someone’s adolescent brother than the tough, decidedly nasty character he was, and he kept a well honed artfully innocent expression ready for instant use at need.

    He’d also spent twenty-seven T-years in the Solarian Marines, rising to the second highest noncommissioned rank available, and under his tutelage the four hundred members of the CMM had attained a level of training and tactical sophistication light-years ahead of the majority of Felicia Karaxis’ so-called soldiers.

    That wasn’t enough to offset the imbalance in the equipment and technical capabilities available to the two sides, of course. Although…

    “Tell me true, Floyd,” MacGruder said finally, his expression unwontedly sober. “You know I’m with you all the way, however it works out. Bastards’ve got it coming, and I’m ready to give it to them, however it comes out at the finish line. But do you really think these people — these ‘Manties’ — are ready to help out?”

    “I don’t know. Not really,” Allenby admitted, returning honesty for honesty. “If half the stuff we’re hearing is true, they’re going to need every edge they can get, though. Makes sense to me they’d want to…distract the Sollies’ attention, and you know as well as I do how it really works out here. Frontier Security’s not backing Tallulah just because of that asshole Parkman’s beautiful eyes! They’re getting a cut from every credit Tallulah rakes off from Swallow, and if the League’s got a real war on its hands for the first time in its life, it’s going to need all the cash it can squeeze out of the Protectorates…and us. So if the Manties can make it hard for them to do that, it’s got to help Manticore, right?”

    “Even I can get that far,” MacGruder said dryly. “What bothers me is whether or not they’re going to give a fart in a windstorm what finally happens to us.”

    “Fair enough.” Allenby nodded. “And while I’m being fair, why should they give a fart in a windstorm? They don’t know us, and they sure as hell don’t owe us anything! But the truth is, it’s not going to take a lot of effort on their part to provide us with the guns and the support weapons we’d need to take Karaxis on. It’s not like we’re going to be some kind of long-term heavy burden on them. In fact, this is about the cheapest way they can get into the Sollies’ henhouse, when you come down to it. And if they promise to help us and then don’t come through — if they don’t provide what they’ve agreed to and just leave us hanging — it’s going to get out. I’m thinking anyone ballsy enough to take on the League isn’t going to want the rest of the galaxy to think they just use up allies and throw them away. Might make sense to them in the short term, but in the long term it’d do them a lot of damage with all the independent star systems. And if they’re going to survive facing up to the League, they can’t afford to piss off the independents, Jason. They’re going to need access to markets out here to replace the ones they’re going to lose in the League. And they’re going to need allies, not just trading partners. Somehow I don’t think someone who goes around screwing people over and then throwing them to the ogre wolves is going to find a lot of people willing to stick their necks out for them against something like the League.”

    MacGruder’s eyebrows rose. Sometimes, listening to his cousin speak, Allenby’s rustic mountain accent could fool even him into forgetting the acuity of the brain behind those brown eyes. But then Floyd would come up with a piece of analysis like that and remind him.

    “I’m not saying the Manties are going to back us out of the pure goodness of their hearts any more than I think OFS is backing Tallulah because they love Parkman so much,” Allenby continued. “I’m just saying we both have reasons to be pissed off as hell at Frontier Security, and if it makes sense to the Manties to go after Schuman and Karaxis — and Parkman — here in Swallow, it makes sense to me to let them help us do it.”

    “Put that way, makes sense to me, too,” MacGruder admitted after a moment. He considered what his cousin had said in silence for several seconds, then cocked his head.

    “So when do we expect to hear back from Vinnie?” he asked.

    “Sometime in the next week or so.” Allenby refilled his coffee cup again. “I don’t think Karaxis even realizes Vinnie’s back on-planet, but the only place he could make contact is in Capistrano, so we’re not going to know how it went until he’s had time to get back here without attracting anyone’s attention. So” — he shrugged — “about a week or so.”

    “And just how are the Manties planning on getting weapons shipments through to us when Tallulah controls all the traffic into and out of Swallow?” MacGruder sounded as much honestly curious as skeptical, and Allenby snorted a laugh.

    “Damned if I know!” he admitted cheerfully. “That’s up to Vinnie and this Manty super secret agent he’s hooked up with.” He shrugged. “If Mister ‘Firebrand’ can come up with a way to get the guns to us, though, I’m pretty sure we’ll be able to figure out what to do with them after he does.”