David Weber - Torch of Freedom

This particular passageway could be reached from a hidden entry in the basement of one of the tenements not far from Steph Turner's restaurant. The passageway ran for fully two kilometers thereafter under the city's streets. They'd use the next-to-last exit, which would put them within easy walking distance of the delivery van that would take them into the spaceport itself. By the time they reached the van, Carl Hansen and the two Mesan defectors should already have arrived. All of them except Carl and Victor—Carl as the driver; Victor as his helper—would be hidden in the crates in the van's interior. Unless the security guards at the spaceport insisted on physically searching the van, including breaking into the crates, everything should work fine. Among the many items Victor had obtained from the ever-helpful Triêu Chuanli had been shipping containers that were not only environmentally sealed but even had equipment designed to block the sort of instrumental inspection that security guards were usually satisfied with.

It wasn't likely at all that these guards would insist on a physical search. That area of the spaceport was given over to shipments to and from the smaller and less reputable freighters in orbit. It was taken for granted that a certain amount of smuggling was being carried out. Carl's bribes should be enough to do the trick.

If not . . . Well, Victor was there. With the same Kettridge Model A-3 tucked up his sleeve. There was at least a chance—not a bad one, either—that he could kill all the guards before they could send out a warning. From there, they might be able to make it to the Hali Sowle 's tender and get into low orbit before anyone really knew what had happened. There were so many such tenders coming and leaving that unless the authorities spotted which one they were in, they might be able to get aboard the Hali Sowle undetected.

Hopefully, of course, it wouldn't come to that.

"Well, that's it," Yana said. "Victor, I have to say it's been a real pleasure sleeping with you night after night after night in the sure and certain knowledge that I would get no thrills whatsoever."

"Oh, stop whining. If I had given you any thrills—and Thandi found out—you'd get the thrill of a lifetime."

Yana grinned. "A very short lifetime."

"They don't call her Great Kaja for nothing."

On his way back from the safe house where he'd had the meeting with Hansen's group, using a different underground passageway, Anton decided to wrestle with his conscience. There wasn't any time left. He'd either pin the damn thing down or he'd have to concede defeat—which would mean reopening those parts of the plan with Victor that he wasn't happy about.

His pangs of conscience centered on the fact that they'd be using nuclear devices. He'd never been comfortable with that. Initially, he'd argued that they could substitute fuel-air bombs, which could do just as much damage as small nuclear explosives. He'd given up that argument when their local contacts insisted they didn't have the resources to build home-made bombs of that type—which, of course, was an obvious . . . prevarication. True, unlike nuclear devices, there was no civilian use for fuel-air bombs that made the alternative of just buying them on the black market feasible, but that wasn't really the point, either. He could have whipped up a suitable fuel-air bomb for them in two or three hours using commercially available hydrogen, a portable cooking unit, and a cheap timer, and he knew they knew it. Which meant that the real reason they 'didn't have the resources' was because they wanted to make a statement, and he had serious reservations about making the statement in question.

Partly, of course, it had been his hope and expectation at the time that this sort of "flamboyant" (to put it mildly) escape method would never be necessary anyway. There'd been no way, of course, to predict or even envision the sort of espionage treasure trove that Jack McBryde and his companion represented.

Anton knew that, as a purely practical proposition, his reluctance to use nuclear devices was pointless. You could even argue—as Victor certainly would—that it was downright silly. The human race had long since developed methods of mass destruction that were more devastating than any nuclear device ever built. The former StateSec mercenaries who'd soon be trying to destroy Torch on Mesa's behalf wouldn't be using nuclear weapons. It would take far too many of them, and why bother anyway? They'd be using missiles, of course, but they'd be using them as kinetic weapons. Accelerated to seventy or eighty percent of light-speed, they'd do the trick as thoroughly as an "dinosaur killer' in galactic history, but it wouldn't be because of any nuclear warheads! For that matter, a few large bolides—nothing fancier than rocks or even ice balls—could have done the job just fine, if the attackers had only had the time to accelerate them to seventy or eighty thousand KPS, which was barely a crawl by the standards of an impeller-drive civilization. It would simply be faster and simpler to use missiles than piss around with rocks and ice cubes.

That said, for a lot of people in the modern universe—and Anton happened to be one of them—nuclear weapons carried a lingering ancient horror. They had been the first weapons of mass destruction developed and used by human beings against each other. For that reason, perhaps, they still had a particular aura about them.

Of course, that was exactly the reason Hansen and his group—certainly David Pritchard—were so determined to use nuclear explosives. Not only were they in the grip of a ferocious anger going back centuries, but the knowledge which Anton and Victor had given them that Mesa planned to destroy Torch had given that fury a tremendous boost. Stripped to its raw and bleeding essentials, the attitude of Hansen's people could be summed up as: So the scorpions want to play rough, do they? No problem. Rough it is.

They knew that setting off nuclear devices on Mesa itself would constitute a massive—indeed, qualitative—increase in the already-murderous intensity of the struggle between slaves and their creators. The plans of those slavemasters to violate the Eridani Edict would do the same, of course. But, at least once, it would be slaves who struck the first such blow.

Zilwicki had real doubts about the wisdom of that course of action. Even Victor did, if not to the same degree as Anton. But there was a momentum to this fight that, at certain places and times—and he suspected this was one of them—overrode all caution.

For a moment, hearing a slight rustling noise to his left, Anton stopped and turned toward it. That was just a reflex action on his part, making clear to anyone who contemplated attacking him that such a course of action would be most unwise.

Perhaps it was inevitable. Perhaps even beneficial. Anton had no hope that the people behind this "Mesan Alignment" scheme could be brought to see reason. Just the information McBryde had already given them made it obvious that, for all their intellect and acuity, they'd abandoned reason centuries ago. But maybe they could be intimidated, in the same crude manner that Anton was even now intimidating whoever lurked in that darkness to the side of the passageway.

Probably not. Almost certainly not. But was it still worth a try?

What decided him in the end, though, was none of that. It was nothing more sophisticated than the impulses driving Hansen and Pritchard and their people. These Mesan Alignment people and their Manpower stooges were, after all, the same swine who had kidnapped one of his daughters, tried to murder another, tried to murder his wife—him too, of course, but he held no grudge about that—and were now trying to murder his daughter again.