Shadow of Freedom

Chapter Eighteen

“That went more smoothly than I expected,” Mackenzie Graham said, standing by the apartment window and gazing out at Cherubim’s snow-covered streets. Then she turned away from the window…just in time to catch her brother raising his eyebrows in her direction.

“Don’t look so complacent at me, Indiana Graham! And don’t try to pretend you weren’t nervous about all these new arrangements, too!”

“Never had a moment’s doubt,” he told her virtuously.

“Bullshit,” she said tartly, and he chuckled.

“Well, if you’re going to be that way about it, I guess I admit I felt a little bit nervous. A little bit.” He raised a thumb and index finger, perhaps a centimeter apart, and grinned at her.

“Yeah. Sure!”

She shook her head, and the look she gave him was that of a long-suffering sister, not the co-leader of a revolutionary movement.

He only grinned even more broadly (and unrepentantly), but she had a point. The three T-months since their first meeting with Firebrand might have seemed like plenty of time, but given the slow speed with which ships moved between stars, it really wasn’t. In fact, the first shipment of weaponry had arrived over a T-month sooner than they’d expected it could. When the routine notification of waiting cargo containers hit the message account Firebrand had set up, it had come as a total surprise.

Fortunately, as Firebrand had suggested, the cargo agents responsible for sneaking those containers into the smuggling queue really didn’t want to know anything about their contents. That wasn’t how it worked, and if it turned out they contained something with negative consequences, deniability—the ability to say, honestly, “We didn’t know what it was!”—was actually a fairly acceptable defense in what passed for the Solarian legal system. Or, at least, in what passed for the Solarian legal system where little things like smuggling were concerned.

Bruce Graham had been a student of history, and Indiana had become one himself, especially since his father’s imprisonment. He wasn’t in his dad’s league yet, but he also wasn’t confined in Terrabore Prison, which left him free to pursue his self-education wherever it led, as long as he exercised a modicum of caution. He was pretty sure President McCready and General O’Sullivan had no idea how much “subversive” knowledge was tucked away in the Seraphim libraries’ files. Some of it was even in old-fashioned hardcopy books gathering dust in the physical stacks. And from his reading, Indiana had come to realize there’d actually been periods in human history when the courts would never have tolerated the omnipresent corruption of OFS and its sweetheart deals.

Well, they probably had problems of their own, even then. On the other hand, I think I’d trade my problems for theirs, if I had the option. Which I don’t.

“All right,” Mackenzie said, shifting from put-upon sibling back to co-conspirator, “now that we’ve got them, what do we do with them?”

“Now that,” Indiana conceded, “is a pretty good question, Max.”

For the moment, the containers were sitting in a warehouse he and Mackenzie were pretty sure was off the scags’ grid. It was located in the heart of the Rust Belt, and while it was in better physical shape than their meeting place with Firebrand, that wasn’t saying a lot. But it was mostly weathertight, at least, and the containers themselves were hermetically sealed and virtually indestructible. Of course, getting them there had been a not-so-minor challenge. The Krestor Interstellar shipping barcodes which had ensured their passage through customs without inspection would have stood out like sore thumbs in the Rust Belt, and so would any of the spaceport’s more modern cargo vehicles.

But Firebrand’s colleagues had anticipated that. The containers were sized to fit inside standard cargo trailers of the sort Seraphim had built for its own use before Krestor and Mendoza of Córdoba arrived to “rescue” its economy. Even better, they were equipped with built-in counter-grav units, so the trailers hadn’t ridden suspiciously low on their suspensions. It also made the containers much easier to manhandle with strictly limited manpower once they reached their destination.

“I’m still not happy about the transport arrangements,” Indiana went on. “Oh, they worked this time, but we had to put the whole thing together on the fly. Now that we’ve got them under cover, I want to take a little longer to think before we start moving them around.”

“Works for me,” Mackenzie said fervently. But then she cocked her head, looking up at her taller brother. “It works for me, but at the same time, I don’t want to leave them sitting in one big, undigested lump where we could lose all of them in a single disaster if the scags get lucky!”

“Me either. But the more we spread them around in smaller caches, the more likely one of O’Sullivan’s informers’ll stumble across one of them. Or, for that matter, that the recon platforms’ll spot something.”

“Not if we get them out into the country,” Mackenzie argued. “I’m thinking about handing them over to Saratoga.”

Indiana started to reply, then stopped, thinking about it. “Saratoga” was Leonard Silvowitz, a Seraphim Independence Movement area leader. He didn’t know he was taking instructions from Indiana and Mackenzie, both of whom he’d known for years, since he’d been a silent partner in the business effort which had led to Bruce Graham’s arrest. As far as their SIM roles were concerned, he knew them only as “Talisman” and “Magpie,” and his communications with them were indirect and circuitous.

“You know,” Indiana said slowly, “that might not be a bad idea at all. I’m not crazy about putting him at risk this early, but the Farm would be a good place to stash them, wouldn’t it?”

“The Farm,” fifty kilometers north of Cherubim, had been a part of Leonard Silvowitz’ modest business empire: a commercial farming operation which had employed several dozen people and shown a tidy profit supplying fresh vegetables and dairy products to Seraphim’s more urbanized areas. Unfortunately, that very profitability had drawn the attention of Krestor Interstellar’s local manager, and the Macready Administration had “suggested” Silvowitz lease the operation to Krestor at about twenty percent of what it was actually worth. Krestor had then proceeded to fire virtually all of Silvowitz’ employees, some of whom had been with him for as much as twenty or thirty T-years, and replace them with automated equipment.

Technically, Silvowitz still owned the Farm, although he had no control over its operation, and Krestor hadn’t been interested in his employees’ housing (since there were no longer any employees to be housed). Those once sturdy, reasonably comfortable units were slowly decaying into ruin, like most of Seraphim, but they were still there, and Indiana and Mackenzie had planned on using them as a training site when the time came. They were far enough out to be beyond the scags’ normal zone of interest, and there was enough traffic transporting the Farm’s produce to the city and the necessary supplies back to its fields to cover quite a lot of movement on the SIM’s part.

“I think it would be a good place, or I wouldn’t have suggested it,” Mackenzie pointed out. “At the same time, there’s always the chance some service tech out there to work on a broken down cultivator or harvester might spot something.”

“That was always going to be the case when we started training out there, anyway,” Indiana replied. “And these containers are a lot sturdier and more weathertight than I expected, so he could hide them out in the woods instead of one of the barns where your service tech might be poking around. Or someplace even better than that.”

He smiled at her, and she frowned back for a couple of seconds. Then her expression cleared.

“You’re thinking of Culver Hill, aren’t you?”

“That’s exactly where I’m thinking about.” Indiana nodded. He and his sister had spent a lot of childhood summer nights camping out by the small lake just east of Culver Hill. Which was how they happened to know about the cave system that ran for kilometers under the hill itself. The caves were on the damp side, but with the containers’ hermetic seals…

“That’s not a bad idea at all,” Mackenzie said approvingly. Then she grinned. “How did you happen to have it?”

“Very funny.” Indiana scowled at her. “But since I seem to be doing the intellectual heavy lifting today, I hereby nominate you to figure out exactly how we’re going to get them to the Farm in the first place.”

“Well, the first stage is to let Saratoga know they’re coming,” Mackenzie pointed out. “We’re going to need him to take a look at the caves and be sure he can get them in. Even with the counter-grav, moving them’s going to be a pain, especially without a lot of warm bodies to help, and there are some pretty narrow spots just inside the caves’ entrance.”

“Agreed. But let’s not tell him what we’re planning to send him.” Indiana’s expression was considerably more serious than it had been. “There’s no point telling him the guns have arrived if it turns out he can’t handle them.”

Mackenzie nodded soberly. One of their guiding principles was that what someone didn’t know, someone couldn’t spill accidentally…or under the sort of the duress Tillman O’Sullivan’s scags were expert at applying.

“All right.” Indiana gave a brisk nod of his own. “I’ll put the message together and get it into the secure drop for Osiris.” “Osiris” was Janice Karpov, Indiana and Mackenzie’s contact with Silvowitz. “If I get my butt in motion, I can probably make the drop this evening still.”

“Just don’t take any stupid chances, Indy,” Mackenzie said a bit sharply. He looked at her, and she scowled again, more darkly than before. “You’ve always just had to run right out and start playing with your toys, ever since you were a kid, and some things really don’t change, do they? I swear, I’ve known five-year-olds with more patience than you have! Well, discretion, anyway.” She snorted. “Those weapons aren’t going to get all old and worn out sitting there for an extra day or two.”

“I know they aren’t, Max.” Indiana’s tone was more soothing than agreeing, but Mackenzie was willing to settle for that. Getting him to admit she had a point would probably have been expecting too much, but that wasn’t the same thing as his not knowing she had one.

“If I can make the drop without pushing too hard, I’d still prefer to get it done tonight,” he continued. “All the same, we didn’t set up secure communications routes just so I could blow things when a really important message comes along, did we?”

“That wasn’t why I thought we were doing it, no,” she agreed.

“Point taken,” he capitulated. Then he grinned. “You know, I know all about secure communications and how important they are, but still, I’d really love to see Uncle Leonard’s face when he finds out he’s about to receive an entire battalion’s worth of small arms and support weapons!”