Torch of Freedom

by David Weber

  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-reading record 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, thoroughly 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 that had probably been 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."

  "Which it certainly will," said Jeremy. "But, at least for the moment, Harper and Judson don't need to know the ins and outs of it. I'll simply add that I've known Hugh since he was five years old. He claims me as some sort of godfather, a notion which is preposterous on the face of it. Still, I'll vouch for him."

  He turned toward Berry. "May I?"

  "Please do."

  The war secretary leaned forward on the desk. "This morning, alerted by some peculiarities, these two agents began an investigation. Everything unfolded very quickly, and by mid-afternoon a man was dead at one of our pharmaceutical camps and our brand new star nation—this is my opinion, at any rate—finds itself confronted by a new and serious threat. More precisely, has discovered a serious threat. I doubt very much if it's actually new. That's one of things we need to find out."

  By then, he had everyone's attention. He turned toward Van Hale and Ferry. "Take it from there, please."

  Harper S. Ferry cleared his throat. "I'm afraid we don't have any visual records beyond the basics, so a lot of this is going to be verbal. A little over two months ago, on February ninth, Genghis here"—he nodded toward the treecat on Van Hale's shoulder—"detected an unusual emotional aura coming from one of the newly arrived immigrants. A man by the name of Ronald Allen."

  "It wasn't really that unusual," Judson interrupted. "Allen was certainly uneasy, especially when he caught sight of Genghis. But a lot of immigrants are nervous when they arrive, and treecats often cause uneasiness in people. It was mostly just a matter of Genghis feeling that the 'mind glow' tasted a
little . . . odd."

  Everyone at the table looked at the treecat; who, for his part, returned their scrutiny with an appearance of indifference. It might be better to say, casual insouciance.

  Which, it probably was. Everyone in the room was very familiar with treecats and their abilities.

  Van Hale continued. "It was enough for me to bring the matter to Harper's attention, and he set an inquiry into motion."

  "Nothing special," said Harper. "Just the sort of routine double-check we launch any time there's anything that appears to be possibly amiss. Still, it's my fault that I forgot the matter and didn't follow up on it. And, unfortunately, the clerk who handled the inquiry didn't notify me immediately when an anomaly turned up. Instead, she just launched a routine double-check herself."

  "Strip her damn hide off, when you get the chance," Jeremy growled.

  "Don't think I'm not tempted. But I won't, beyond making sure she understands her mistake, because the responsibility was ultimately mine." Harper made a face. "By the time Judson reminded me of the case—which was just this morning—weeks had gone by. Allen had gotten a job as a roustabout with one of the pharmaceutical companies—they're almost always hiring, with the boom we're having—and wasn't residing in the capital any longer."

  "What was the anomaly?" asked the queen.

  "As I believe you know, Your Majesty—"

  "We're in private, here," she reminded him just a bit tartly. "Please call me Berry."

  "Ah . . . Berry. As I think you know, we scan every ex-slave immigrant's tongue marker as soon as they arrive. Partly as a security device, but mostly as a health measure. A lot of Manpower's genetic lines are subject to medical problems, some of which are severe. Many of those conditions are susceptible to preventive or ameliorative treatment. But it's often the case that the person in question isn't even aware of their medical problem. By doing the automatic scans, we give our medical services a leg up."

  She nodded. "Yes, I knew that. But what was the anomaly?"

  "Ronald Allen's number turned out to be a duplicate. Another immigrant named Tim Zeiger, who'd arrived a year earlier, has the same number."

  Berry looked puzzled. "But . . . how is that kind of mistake possible?"

  "It's not," Jeremy said flatly. "Those bar codes are genetically programmed into the slave at fertilization, Berry, and the process used to assign them is about as close to fool-proof as human endeavors get. This isn't the kind of situation where 'mistakes' happen."

  "Then how . . ." The young queen's face, pale by nature, turned even paler. "Oh . . . my . . . God. That means Manpower had to have deliberately violated their own procedures. And the only reason they would have done that was in order to . . ."

  She looked at Jeremy, seeming in that moment to be even younger than she was. "They've been penetrating the Ballroom, Jeremy."

  "All too true. And Torch, now. This Ronald Allen never claimed to be a Ballroom member, nor do we have any indication that he's ever joined."

  For a moment, Jeremy's expression lightened. "Mind you, it's still possible he had. For reasons I presume are obvious, it's never been the Ballroom's custom to maintain precise and readily accessible membership records."

  A nervous little titter went around the table. But it was over very quickly.

  "Sending in counter-agents to penetrate revolutionary regimes is a tactic at least as old as the Tsarist Okhrana," Jeremy went on after a moment, "and that's because, properly done, it's as effective as hell. But, of course, there are always those little problems, as well, aren't there? Like this one."

  He nodded to Harper, who worked briefly at the display controls, and a hologram sprang up in the open center of the table. It was a crude hologram, with peculiar lacunae in the imagery. Hugh recognized what he was seeing immediately. As was true of police officials most places in the modern universe—or even people whose jobs involved at least some policing functions—Harper S. Ferry and Judson Van Hale had been legally required to carry vid-recording equipment at all times and turned on whenever they were functioning in an official capacity. That was partly for the purpose of protecting suspects from possible police misconduct, but mostly because such records had proven time and again to assist the police themselves.

  The crudity and sometime raggedness of this particular hologram was caused by the fact that it was a computer composite of only two vid-recorders—both of them located on the officers' shoulders, from the apparent height of the viewpoints, and both of which had been subject to violent motions during the critical last period.

  Still, the record was clear enough. Whatever motives or incentives might have been driving the man named Ronald Allen, they'd been powerful enough to lead him to commit suicide, after only a moment's thought. Even though he'd only seen it second-hand, Hugh knew he'd never forget that image of Allen staring into the trees for two or three seconds, before he clenched down on his poison tooth. A man taking one last brief look at the world, before he deliberately and consciously ended his own life. Hugh wouldn't be surprised if either Harper or Judson—maybe both—would need some psychological treatment in the near future. That sort of vivid and gut-wrenching image—never mind that Harper was a hardened Ballroom killer and the man who died worked for Manpower—was exactly the sort of thing that could trigger post-traumatic stress disorder.

  The final image was of a dead man's mouth, pried open with a stick to show the bar code on his tongue. There was something particularly horrifying and gruesome about the sight, and the expression of everyone sitting around the table was a bit haggard when it finally faded. In fact, Berry's complexion was almost completely white when Jeremy spoke again, harshly.

  "There's no way known for that kind of genetic tongue-marker to be faked cosmetically," he said, his voice flat and hard. "Not against the kind of scanning we do, at least. There's no way to remove it that isn't both difficult and damned expensive—Manpower made sure of that, the bastards—and the thing will grow back even if you simply amputate the tongue and use regen to grow it back again. Trust me, we've already determined that both the codes in this instance are as genuine as genuine can be. Duplicates, yes; fakes, no."

  "But why?" Berry asked in the tone of someone just as happy to have something to distract her from the memory of a dead man's poison-frothed tongue. "Why bother to use a duplicated number? After all, Manpower designs the numbers in the first place. Why not just use new numbers altogether, set aside for the purpose?"

  Jeremy shook his head. "The process used to assign and imprint numbers isn't all that complicated, really, Berry—not for someone who's designing complete human genotypes! Trust me, we know how it works—and from too many independent sources—to doubt that Manpower can, and does, make damned certain there aren't going to be any accidentally duplicated numbers. They've got a lot of reasons to want to be sure of that, including their own security concerns and the need to be able to positively and absolutely identify any individual slave's specific batch in case some genetic anomaly turns up and they need to track down anyone else who may have it. Keeping the numbers straight—both before and after a slave is decanted—isn't a minor consideration, given that they produce slaves at so many different breeding sites, and they've put a lot of effort into developing procedures to do just that.

  "If they started screwing around with those procedures, they might poke a hole in them they don't want. Oh, they could set aside the occasional batch number. In fact, I think they probably do, if they need lots of them. But they'd have to set aside the entire batch each time, given their procedures, so I doubt they do it very often. If they did, the bar codes would have to 'clump,' and there'd always be the chance—probably a pretty good one, actually—that somebody might notice an association between batch mates doing suspicious things. It might not be too likely in any single agent's case, but statistics play no favorites. Sooner or later, somebody would be likely to notice the clumping—or, for that matter, just notice an age spread, or a genetic variation, or any number of little
differences batch mates shouldn't have. And if that happened, then those agents would be sitting ducks. Manpower might as well have their tongues marked shoot me now."

  He shook his head again. "And Manpower knows it, don't think they don't. No, there's a good reason they'd use duplicate numbers, especially from different batch numbers—whenever they could be certain the numbers in question were available, at least. Among other things, that would give them a lot more potential age variations, not to mention letting them randomize batch numbers to avoid that particular association. And how much safer could it be to reuse a given number than in a case where they knew the legitimate 'recipient' was already dead? Which, in this case, they did—or thought they did—since the aforesaid legitimate recipient was aboard a ship they knew had blown the hell up. It's really a pure fluke that we found out."

  Hugh had already reached that conclusion himself, but he had a rather more burning question on his mind.

  "How?" he asked simply. He and Jeremy looked at one another in silent understanding, their expressions grim, and Berry frowned at the two of them.

  " 'How' what?" she demanded after a moment.

  "How can you use a person bred to be a genetic slave—and with no way to ever disguise the fact—as a counter-agent?" Jeremy asked in reply. "How do you do that without running the constant and tremendous risk that he or she will turn on you—and a turned agent is far worse than having no agent at all. Anybody who's familiar with the ABCs of espionage and counterespionage knows that much."

  Ruth interjected. "Counterespionage is to espionage what epistemology is to philosophy, Berry. The most fundamental branch. How do you know what you know? If you can't answer that, you can't answer anything." She flashed a quick, nervous smile. "Sorry. I know that sounds pedantic. But it's true."