David Weber - Torch of Freedom

But there werefar 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.

Only one attack fully succeeded, even so, but it was the one upon which he'd lavished the most care and effort, and he wasn't taking any chances on simply erasing the data he was after. Oh, no. His attack came equipped with the specific security codes for the computers in question, triggering the command sequence which reformatted their molecular circuitry itself. Turned those computers' memories into solid, inert chunks of crystalline alloy from which Saint Peter himself could not have recovered one single scrap of data. And because the man who'd prepared that attack came from so high inside Security itself, he'd known where all the backups were maintained . . . and how to reach them, too.

In that one successful attack, over ninety percent of all Mesan records concerning the Ballroom—those of the "official" agencies' and the Alignment's alike—simply vanished. And since Mesa still considered Torch an extension of the Ballroom, all the Alignment's data on Torch went with it.

All gone, except for whatever scraps survived in partial form in other locales. No doubt there were enough of those scraps to reconstitute much of that data in the fullness of time, yet it was a task which would take literally years . . . and never be anything remotely like complete.

The day after Scorched Earth, Jeremy X himself could have walked openly down the streets of any Mesan city, giving DNA samples at every corner, without anyone being the wiser, unless he was spotted by one of the very few Mesans who'd encountered him personally and survived the experience.

Among the other cybernetic systems which were damaged were those of Mesan customs. The damage was . . . odd, and seemingly quirky.

E.D. Trimm stared at the main screen in her operations center, unable to believe what she was seeing. All the many ships were still shown. They could still track any of them, whether approaching or leaving or in orbit. Presumably, if they scrambled furiously, they could open up manual lines of communications if any of the ships was in danger of colliding with another.

But the rest of the information was lost. Gone. Vanished.

" Which ship is which ?" she half-wailed.

"I can still figure out tonnages," said Gansükh Blomqvist. "I . . . think."

"Oh, wonderful. My day is complete."

David Pritchard's aircar was caught in the blast and blown wildly off course. He barely managed to avoid a wreck. Rather, the automatic pilot did. David's aircar skills were pretty rudimentary, as was true of most seccies.

When his head cleared he saw that he'd overflown the stadium. He looked back, and despite his fury, his eyes widened as he saw the shattered wreckage of what had been Suvorov Tower. The structures of counter-grav civilizations were tough almost beyond belief, and Suvorov had been the better part of a kilometer tall, yet so broad that it looked almost squat. Now it looked like the broken, smoke and flame spewing fang of some hell-spawned monster. The towers on either side were heavily afire, their facades badly shattered, yet they'd coffer-dammed much of the blast effect. Suvorov might be a total loss, andseveral square blocks of Green Pines' commercial district had been savagely mangled, but—as the people who had planted that charge had planned—the residential portions of the city were untouched.

"Warning. Warning," the autopilot squawked. "Unsustainable damage. Cannot remain airborne longer than five minutes. Land immediately."

Pritchard stared at Suvorov for a moment, then whipped his head around. Pine Valley Park was now clearly visible ahead of him, the dark-blue waters of its central lake dotted with model sailboats.

"Manual control," he commanded.

Ganny Butre's clan, including Ganny, didn't put much stock in the so-called "wisdom of age" except when the phrase was applied to Ganny herself. So the pilot of the shuttle that waited for Anton and Victor on the tarmac was Sarah Armstrong, all of twenty-two years of age—and her co-pilot was Brice Miller, eight years younger than she was.

Why were they the pilots? Because they were the best Ganny had at the moment. Simple as that. A lot of things were simple for the clan, probably because they were often too ignorant to know better.

"I don't think that's a good idea," said Brice dubiously. He watched as Anton and Victor and Yana and a man he didn't know and two women he'd never seen before but one of whom was already of great interest because she was about his own age continued to unload one of the crates. They were unceremoniously dumping everything it held into a refuse bin that Yana had brought up from one of the nearby maintenance centers. (The mechanics hadn't objected. Partly because Yana gave them her biggest smile but mostly because she gave them an even bigger bribe.)

"Got no choice," grunted Anton, lifting out a piece of equipment only he could have picked up unassisted. "Got to make room for Steph and Nancy."

The big piece of equipment went into the bin. Brice thought there was something familiar-looking about it, but couldn't remember why at the moment.

Most of his mind was elsewhere. She must be the Nancy one.

Sarah was practically dancing back and forth with anxiety. In her case, though, not because of the cargo they were jettisoning.

"Hurry it up, folks," she hissed. "If we lift off more than thirty seconds behind schedule, customs will have a fit. You could sharpen sticks in their assholes, each and every one. I think they send them all to obsessive-compulsive disorder school for advanced training."

Anton heaved another piece of gear into the bin.

"Why can't we just ride in the shuttle?" asked the younger of the two women. She seemed bright-eyed, alert and curious. That, combined with the big knife in her hand, made her thoroughly fascinating. She was sort of pretty, too.

Brice screwed up his courage. "No room except in the bays. And they're not pressurized. You'd die, outside of the crates."

The girl looked at him. "Who're you?"

"Brice. Brice Miller. I'm the co-pilot."

"The co-pilot, huh? How old are you?"

"Uh . . . almost fifteen. Next month."

"I'm Nancy. Nancy Becker. I turned fifteen four months ago. So I'm older than you." Having established that critical point of status, however, the girl's expression became quite warm. "Already a co-pilot. That's really cool."

Brice still thought dumping the contents of that crate was probably a bad idea. But he didn't care any longer. Not in the least, littlest, tiniest, teeniest bit.

The crate now emptied, it and its twin were hoisted into the cargo bay with the lift that Sarah had already rented. (For considerably more than she could have gotten it with a bribe—but she was only twenty-two. Still young and naïve.)