Torch of Freedom

by David Weber

  Especially not in light of what he was actually going to do now.

  * * *

  When Anton came back out of the kitchen, Victor still had everyone in the diner completely subdued. That included a new person whom Anton didn't recognize. She must have had the bad luck to walk in a short while ago.

  It also included the man Anton had dragged out from under the table. He was kneeling not far from Victor, with his hands clasped behind his back.

  Again, Anton grabbed him by the collar and hauled him to his feet. "You're coming with us, fella."

  As he headed toward the rear exit, he heard Victor saying to the people held captive: "Here's how it is. We have associates standing guard outside both doors, front and back. Anyone who tries to leave within five minutes will be shot. No warning, no discussion, you will simply be dead. Once five minutes are up"—he pointed to the far wall—"according to that time display, you can leave the diner. Go anywhere you want. My own advice, take it or leave it, is that you'd be wise to pretend you were never here. This place has no recording or security equipment, except whatever these corpses brought with them, and we took care of that. So you can probably get away with it."

  He started walking across the room toward the back exit. "Or you can report the incident to the authorities, who will certainly treat you with the respect traditionally given to seccies. It's your choice."

  Half a minute later, he and Anton and the two women and their captive were in the escape passageway.

  There, they stopped. Anton shoved the captive against the wall and stepped back. Victor stepped forward, the gun in his hand.

  Lajos Irvine was petrified. He was about to die, and he knew it. There was no mercy at all in those black eyes and the gun hand was as steady as a bar of steel.

  A few seconds passed. Maybe five, although it seemed like fifty.

  "I'm just not positive," said the black-eyed man.

  "It's your call," said the waiter.

  The black-eyed man stepped back. "He needs to be out for at least four hours."

  "Not a problem." The waiter came to stand right in front of Lajos. He looked as wide as the sea.

  "I'd say this was going to hurt me more than it hurts you, but that'd be ridiculous."

  The sledgehammer fist didn't hurt at all, oddly enough. Or, if did, Lajos could never remember.

  * * *

  From the beginning, Jack McBryde had realized that simply defecting wasn't enough—not in light of all he'd contributed to the Alignment first. That was the real reason he'd chosen to attack the Center's secure data network and every other computer system he could reach. There were backups, of course, but there was at least a chance of inflicting significant damage on the Alignment's most secure data systems, and that was definitely worth trying.

  Only now he wasn't going to have that opportunity. There wasn't going to be enough time. Which meant there was only one way he could hope to take out a meaningful chunk of truly significant data, and since it was painfully clear to him that he wasn't going to be getting off Mesa after all . . .

  He tapped a combination into his personal com. It was a one-time, untraceable combination—one he'd set up through his own security connections, even as he'd hoped he'd never need it. It buzzed only once, and then Herlander Simões's voice answered. McBryde could hear the tension in it, the recognition that he wouldn't have been calling on this combination unless something had gone seriously wrong.

  "Yes?" Simões said.

  "Eggshell," McBryde replied, and heard an audible inhalation as the emergency codeword registered.

  "I—" Simões began, then stopped. There was the harsh sound of someone clearing his throat. "Understood. Thanks. I . . . won't forget."

  "Good." McBryde wanted to say something more himself, but there wasn't time, and there wasn't much he could have said, anyway. Except—"Be well. Clear."

  * * *

  Feeling stunned, Herlander keyed off his com.

  "What does that mean?" asked Yana.

  "It means he's been . . . he's going to . . ." He burst into tears. "He's the only friend I have."

  * * *

  They were practically running down the passageway, now. Anton wasn't happy about that at all. First, it broke every rule of tradecraft. Secondly, there was a genuine risk of tripping over something in the dim light. And there were plenty of "somethings" to trip over, too. The floor of the passageway was littered with debris. Unlike some of these underground tunnels, this one was little-used. That was a good part of the reason they'd selected it, of course. But all they needed at this point was for someone to get injured in a fall.

  They simply had no choice. The incident in the diner had not only delayed them, it had also made clear that something had gone wrong. What that something might be, they still had no idea. But whatever time they might have, it was running out.

  * * *

  Jack killed the circuit connecting him to Simões and began punching more keys. It was a long, complicated sequence this time—one carefully designed so that no one would ever enter it by accident—and he felt his stomach knotting with tension as the security fences went down, one by one, each seeking and demanding its own confirmation. He was probably the only person on the entire planet who had all of the required security codes, and even he wasn't supposed to have all of them. It was supposed to be a "two-man" rule situation, but McBryde had always recognized that if they were actually needed, there might not be time to get the designated "second man" online before it was too late.

  I never realized how long this took, a corner of his mind thought distantly as he entered yet another in the queue of required commands and codes. If I had, I would have suggested streamlining things. How does anyone expect to have the time to go through all this rigmarole in a genuine emergency situation? It's stupid, that's what—

  The mental sentence broke off in mid-thought as a boldly tattooed woman and three of her personal aides appeared in the field of view of the pickup he had focused on the Center's main entrance. He watched the uniformed sergeant springing to his feet as he recognized Isabel Bardasano and swore softly.

  There's still time, he told himself. It takes a good six minutes to get to my office from there, even using the high-speed lift. And I think I can probably slow things down at least a bit . . .

  * * *

  "Thank God," said Carl Hansen, as Victor and Anton came out of the tenement. Then, seeing the two women with them, he frowned. "Who're they?"

  "Never mind right now. They're coming with us. Something's gone wrong."

  Yana emerged from the back of the van. "No kidding something's gone wrong." She hooked a thumb over her shoulder. "Our passenger in there got a call a little while ago from He Who Is Not To Be Named. He's been found out, he's trapped in the center, and . . ."

  Victor nodded. "He'll suicide. Good man."

  Yana's grin was purely feral. "Oh, he's not going out alone, Victor. Not by a long shot."

  That was one of the few times in his life Anton ever saw Victor Cachat's eyebrows raise in surprise. It would have been worth a chuckle except they had too much to figure out and decide.

  "If he's going to blow the Gamma Center, we should alert Cary to wait and blow the Buenaventura at the same time. If we're lucky, the Mesans will think the acts were coordinated ahead of time."

  He was a bit relieved at the prospect of setting off the device hidden in the basement of the Buenaventura this early on a Saturday morning. The tower itself was abandoned, and situated in an old industrial area that was mostly vacant. There were bound to be some casualties, but at least they'd be kept to a minimum.

  Unfortunately, from Anton's viewpoint, they couldn't simply abort the explosion. Destroying the Buenaventura was the key to their faked escape records—which they now probably needed more than ever.

  There was no longer any point, however, in setting off the explosion at the sports stadium. First, because David Pritchard might very well get killed when McBryde detonated the nearby Gam
ma Center. Secondly, what was the point anyway? David's bomb couldn't possibly do as much damage as McBryde's measures would.

  Carl was keying the new instructions to Cary. "Okay, that's done," he said a short while later. "What's next?"

  "Send instructions to Karen and David. Tell them to get the hell out and go to ground. If they go into hiding now, I think they've still got a decent chance of eluding the manhunt that's about to come down. Which is going to be one hell of a manhunt."

  Hansen's face seemed to get a bit drawn, but he typed out the instructions quickly and surely.

  "What about me, Anton?" he asked quietly.

  "You'll have to come with us, Carl. There's no way around it now."

  Hansen shook his head. "No. I'm not leaving my people on Mesa in the lurch."

  Anton set his jaws. "Carl, if you wait to run until we've launched for the Hali Sowle, there is almost no chance you won't be spotted."

  "I understand that. But I'm not changing my mind."

  "Leave it, Anton," said Victor. "He's full-grown and it's his choice—and it's the same choice I'd make, in his position." He started climbing into the passenger seat in the front of the van. "Now, let's get going."

  * * *

  After driving for perhaps three minutes, in the direction of the spaceport, Carl pulled out his com to see if there'd been any reply to his messages. He didn't expect there would be, since there was really nothing to say and each transmission carried a slight risk of being intercepted.

  Sure enough, there was nothing from Cary or Karen. But from David Pritchard . . .

  "Oh, hell and damnation," he sighed.

  "What's the matter?" asked Victor.

  Carl handed him the com. "Read it for yourself."

  Victor looked at the screen.

  FUCK YOU

  COWARDS

  FUCK YOU

  "He's lost it."

  "Big time," said Carl.

  * * *

  It was obvious Bardasano didn't have a clue how deep Jack's own internal rot had truly spread. If she had, she'd have come in with sirens screaming, three battalions of security troops, and enough heavy weapons to suppress a full-bore slave rebellion. And she would have used her own security overrides to completely shut down the Center, too. From her expression, she really was more than a little pissed off over his shenanigans—what she thought were his shenanigans, at any rate—but she wasn't moving with anything like the urgency she would have shown if she'd even suspected what was really going on. Which was why Jack McBryde still had control of the Center's computers and internal security systems.

  On the other hand, she's got the ultimate override access authority for every security system on the damned planet, he reminded himself. She can always take that control away from me if something convinces her that's a good idea.

  Which was true enough, but entering her own authorization codes would take at least a little time, and in the meanwhile . . .

  He watched Bardasano and her aides pile into the lift car while he kept his other eye focused on his computer display.

  Only three more entries to go, he thought, and punched up a separate subsystem.

  You know, Jack, he told himself almost whimsically, you were just thinking about inflicting "significant damage," weren't you? And Bardasano's the most effective security type the Alignment's had in decades. So I guess this comes under the heading of serendipity.

  His forefinger came down on a single macro, and he watched over the lift car's internal pickup as Bardasano's head snapped up in astonishment. The lift car stopped, alarms began to wail all over the Center, and Jack McBryde bared his teeth in a smile. Security doors slammed shut throughout the Center, and "fire alarms" started screaming in the commercial tower above it. There probably still wouldn't be time for Suvorov to be completely evacuated—and for all of the evacuees to get far enough clear—but the casualty count had just been materially decreased, and that was good.

  The main computers cycled through another level of commands and asked for the next one. He entered it, then sat back, waiting, watching over the lift car pickup as Bardasano snatched out her personal minicomp and started entering commands of her own.

  I guess this is where I find out whether it's going to take her as long as I thought it was or not, he reflected, and opened his desk drawer.

  He took out the pulser, checked the charge indicator, and made sure there was a dart in the chamber. If it turned out she could invade the system more quickly than he'd thought she could, he was going to have to settle for a much less spectacular goodbye.

  * * *

  David Pritchard was shrieking with rage as his air car approached the sports stadium.

  "I am sick of you spineless bastards! You hear me? Sick to fucking death of your whining and puling and whimpering—fuck you! Fuck you! I'm blowing this bomb!"

  * * *

  Bardasano was still punching keys when McBryde's computer accepted the last authorization code he'd entered and asked for one more. This one had to be given orally, with voiceprint authentication.

  "Scorched Earth," he said very carefully.

  "Scorched Earth acknowledged," an emotionless computer voice said. "All sequences successfully entered and acknowledged. Execution enabled. Do you wish to proceed, Chief McBryde?"

  Jack McBryde looked at the people in the lift car one final time.

  Good luck, Herlander, he thought softly at the tormented man who had become his friend. Give them hell for me . . . and Francesca.

  Then he cleared his throat.

  "Execute Scorched Earth," Jack McBryde said calmly.

  Chapter Fifty-Four

  Luckily for the inhabitants of the city, Gamma Center was deeply buried. No part of the Center proper was less than fifty meters underground; most of it was considerably deeper than that—and the nuclear device triggered off by Scorched Earth had been deliberately positioned at the very base of the huge subterranean complex.

  The people who'd guided the Mesan Alignment for centuries and had built Gamma Center were far removed from the half-crazed ancient despots whose response to disaster was often to burn their cities down around them. Scorched Earth was not a suicide program in the normal sense of the term—although, if triggered, it would certainly kill everyone in the Center at the time.

  But its purpose was rational, not emotional—and certainly not hysterical. Scorched Earth was not designed to kill people, much less to kill people outside the Center who just happened to be living in the city. That would happen, but only as a byproduct. No, the sole and single function of Scorched Earth was to destroy the Center itself, so completely and thoroughly that no enemy could possibly glean anything from its ruins.

  The bomb amounted to a shaped charge on a gigantic scale. It was specifically designed to cause maximum damage to the Center itself—and minimal damage to anything beyond.

  It worked as planned, too. Unfortunately, "minimal damage" when done by a fifty kiloton nuclear device, no matter how well planned and executed, is only "minimal" by the peculiar standards of people who design and build nuclear weapons.

  By anyone else's standards, Scorched Earth was a holocaust.

  * * *

  The explosion wasn't triggered until almost three seconds after McBryde spoke the final words, and during those three seconds, the sabotage programs from his chip had time to upload themselves out of the Center's computers. Not many of them, compared to his original plans, but one hell of a lot more than any of the Alignment's cybersecurity teams had ever imagined might come at them from inside their primary firewalls. Or might carry with them so many perfectly valid access and authorization codes.

  Once the first tier of the network started going down, watchdog systems sprang into action, of course, but not quickly enough to prevent some fairly awesome destruction. Very few of the major subsystems escaped altogether unscathed.

  The military was much less severely affected, for several reasons. First, because by the very nature of things the milita
ry preferred standalone systems wherever possible. Second, because Alignment Security was very carefully partitioned off from the official Mesan secret services and the star system's official military forces, which meant access points were strictly limited. Third, because in the case of the military, the gateways which existed were under the control of the admirals of the clandestine Mesan Alignment Navy, and without much more time to work with, McBryde's cybernetic saboteurs were unable to wiggle their way through. Fourth, because McBryde had possessed nowhere near as much access to the MAN's authorization codes. And, fifth, because there simply wasn't time for his programs to get through before the Gama Center—and its computers—ceased to exist.

  But there were far more links from Alignment Security's primary net to most of the other, openly maintained civilian intelligence agencies, and those were under the control of the Alignment, not the agencies which didn't even know they'd been penetrated. Indeed, they were specifically set up to allow Alignment Security to sneak in and out of the "official" databanks tracelessly—to co-opt those banks' data without anyone outside Alignment Security's ever being the wiser. The people who had designed the system had always realized that all those backdoors hopelessly compromised the official agencies' security, but since the Alignment was the one doing the compromising, they hadn't lost much sleep over the thought.

  As it happened, it still took precious time for McBryde's programs to squirm through, yet they got through much more quickly than they had in the military's case. Not only that, but he'd prioritized his attacks carefully.