David Weber - Torch of Freedom

"Climb in, all of you!" she said, heading for the shuttle's cabin. "We can still make our schedule. Barely. Brice, seal them in."

The crates were segregated by sex. Zilwicki, Cachat and the man Brice didn't know in one. Yana and the two new women in the other. The crate inhabited by the men was crammed full. The one inhabited by the women was . . . not.

"There's still room for you," said Nancy.

Brice summoned every ounce of duty and discipline he could muster. "Sorry. Can't. I'm the co-pilot. But I'll be seeing you soon anyway. Uh, all of you."

It didn't take long to seal the crates. Then, seal the bay. Nonetheless, by the time he climbed into his seat in the cabin, Sarah was yelling.

"—fault if we get arrested!" The shuttle began to lift. "And don't expect me to bail you out!"

Sarah could be dense, sometimes. Brice was pretty damn sure that if Mesan customs—much less police—arrested them and discovered they were smuggling superspies and who-knew-what-else off the planet, making bail would be the least of their problems.

"What happened?" demanded Albrecht Detweiler as his son Collin's face appeared the small display.

"We don't know yet, Father," Collin replied. "Gamma Center's gone, but we still have no idea why it happened. The 'how' is clear enough, of course. Some way or another, Scorched Earth got triggered. Beyond that . . ."

With most communications systems in the vicinity of Green Pines disabled, Collin and Albrecht were relying on their personal com equipment. Collin's wife and children had left some time earlier for the family get-together that would soon be taking place at his parents' villa. That villa was incredibly luxurious and incredibly secure—only a relative handful of people even knew it existed, and still fewer knew who lived there. Unfortunately, it was also the better part of eight hundred kilometers from the capital, which made it an inconvenient commute even by aircar. The circuitous (and constantly varied) routing Albrecht's security staff demanded only made that worse, so Collin had sent Alexis and the kids ahead while he dealt with a handful of last minute details of the sort his job threw up only too routinely. There was no point having them kick their heels here in Green Pines rather than splashing around in the surf with grandparents determined to spoil them rotten, after all.

But those same routine tasks were the reason he'd been at home when the disaster happened. Since "home" was the penthouse on one of the high-rent residential towers that fronted Pine Valley Park, he had an excellent view of the wreckage which had once been Suvorov Tower and the Gamma Center. Now he stood gazing out through the crystoplast wall of the dining room, shaking his head slowly, as he continued his report to his father.

". . . was another explosion in one of the old industrial areas, about twelve kilometers away, just about simultaneously."

"Nuclear?"

"Apparently so, Father. At least, we've gotten reports of high radiation readings from the first responders in the area."

He noticed an aircar approaching from the west. Its approach looked damned shaky, even at this distance, a corner of his mind noted. Not that it was especially surprising. It might well have taken damage from the explosion, and even if it hadn't, the pilot was undoubtedly badly rattled. From his approach angle, he must have been almost on the fringes of the blast itself . . . no wonder he was making for the park's parking apron. In his place, Collin would certainly want to put his car on the ground as quickly as possible!

Those were just idle thoughts, however. The focus of his mind was elsewhere.

David Pritchard managed to land the aircar on the parking apron without wrecking it. But the landing was about as rough as any landing an aircar could survive without suffering significant damage.

He could see a pair of city cops turning towardhim, and he snarled. They weren't even security legbreakers—just two of those pretty, duded up, glorified nannies who took care of the kinds of people who lived in Green Pines. The kind of people David Pritchard hated from the very bottom of his soul. The kind of people he could see beyond the cops, laughing and talking while their kids played in the park, enjoying the morning sun. They were turning now, those happy faces, staring at the huge plume of smoke rising to the west. He could see their owners gesticulating at the rising cloud, could almost hear their babbling curiosity.

From the look on the cops' faces—concern, mostly—he realized the men must assume that he himself was a scorpion in good steading. Someone whose vehicle had been damaged by the blast, perhaps, and who'd had to set it down wherever he could and as quickly as he could.

He scanned the area, for a few seconds. There was no way to escape, in the time he'd have.

So be it. He'd expected as much. He pulled out the device's control unit and began keying in new timing instructions.

"—may as well leave and come here, Collin. The first responders are already blanketing the area—the same at the other location—and what seems to be an army of security people has gotten there also. You won't be able to add anything important from Green Pines."

"On my way then, father." Collin tucked away his com unit and headed for the door to the corridor beyond. He didn't bother to stop for a jacket, since the weather was so pleasant today.

"Hey!" one of the cops shouted suddenly. "That guy's a seccy! He doesn't belong here!"

He and his partner both paused for a moment in disbelief. Sure enough. And now that they looked at it from close up, they could see that a lot of dents and nicks in the aircar were vintage wear and tear, not anything produced by the rough landing.

Any seccy intruding into Pine Valley would have had a hard enough dat under any circumstances. On this day, with their coms screaming about nuclear explosions and the evidence of those same explosions rising before their very eyes . . .

One of them reached for his pulser.

David figured six seconds was enough time. But after he keyed the final code, he discovered he had nothing to say. No final words, no speech. His fury was simply too great.

So, the last sight two Green Pines City Police had was of a face distorted with rage, screaming something they couldn't hear because the seccy was still inside the cockpit.

One of them was something of a lip reader, though. So he figured out that what the seccy was shouting was just "Fuck you!" repeated again and again.

As he waited for the elevator, Collin called Albrecht again. "Father, have you heard anything from Benj—"

At that proximity, the radiation from the blast barely had time to penetrate the protective glass that formed the penthouse's walls on three sides before the hydrodynamic front arrived. As tough as they were, those windows had never been designed—nor could they have been—to withstand that sort of overpressure. They disintegrated into thousands of slivers which would have ripped Collin Detweiler apart if he'd still been standing there. As it was, everything inside the penthouse from the furniture down to the bedding was turned into shreds and the shreds themselves ignited by the thermal pulse.

Ceramacrete was incredibly strong, however—and the buildings at Green Pines had been designed with the possibility in mind that they might be subject to attack from terrorists. The ceramacrete towers in Nouveau Paris which surrounded the Octagon had managed to survive its destruction during Esther McQueen's coup attempt—and that blast had been far more powerful than the one set off in Green Pines.