Read Shadow of Freedom-eARC for Free Online

bleakly. The thought might be tempting, but he wasn’t about to act on it, and he knew it. Just as he knew the real reason he wanted to paint Nyatui Zagorski’s office walls with his brains.
    Osborne had served OFS well, for longer than he liked to remember, but this was the worst. Somehow he’d always managed to avoid the details like this one, but now he’d climbed down into the sewer with the worst of them, and he’d never be clean again.
    And the worst of it , he thought in the cold, cruel light of honesty, is that now that I’ve done it once, it’ll be easier the next time. And if I stay with it long enough, there will be a next time. There always is .
    He stood for another few minutes, gazing at the blazing apartment building, wondering how much longer it would stand before its skeleton collapsed into the inferno, wondering if there was anyone still alive inside that furnace, praying for death.
    Then he turned and walked silently away.
    * * *
    It was still and dark in the smoke-choked sewer under the city of Elgin. There was no light, no movement…no life. Not any longer, and a data chip folio settled slowly, slowly through the bloody water into the sludge below.

March 1922 Post Diaspora

    “Trust me, the hole would’ve been a hell of a lot deeper!”
    —Ensign Helen Zilwicki,
    Royal Manticoran Navy

Chapter Three
    “Just a second, Gwen,” Captain Loretta Shoupe said as she followed Lieutenant Gervais Winton Erwin Neville Archer out of Admiral Augustus Khumalo’s office space aboard HMS Hercules .
    Gervais had just finished delivering a late-hour briefing to Khumalo and Shoupe, his chief of staff. There’d been a lot of those briefings over the last three weeks, and it didn’t look like getting better anytime soon. The entire Spindle System was still somewhere between astonishment and euphoria over the devastating defeat Admiral Gold Peak’s Tenth Fleet had inflicted on the Solarian League Navy, but the Navy remained too busy to celebrate as it scrambled frantically to deal with the enormous flood of POWs it had so suddenly and unexpectedly acquired. Despite which—or perhaps because of which, given the exhaustion quotient of her crew—the ancient superdreadnought flagship of the recently created Talbott Station was quiet around them.
    “Yes, Ma’am?” Gervais replied, turning to face her.
    “You know Ensign Zilwicki pretty well, don’t you, Gwen?” Shoupe’s tone made the question a statement, Gervais thought, and wondered where she was headed.
    “Yes, Ma’am,” he said again. Despite the monumental rank disparity between a mere ensign and a senior-grade lieutenant, he’d come to know young Zilwicki, Sir Aivars Terekhov’s flag lieutenant, very well, as a matter of fact.
    “I thought you did,” Shoupe said now. She actually looked a bit uncomfortable, but she went on steadily. “The reason I ask is that—like everyone else, I suppose—Commander Chandler and I are trying to get some kind of handle on this story coming out of Mesa. I don’t want to intrude on her or pressure her, but the truth is that we really need any insight she could give us about this.”
    Gervais nodded respectfully, despite a quick flare of anger. Commander Ambrose Chandler was Khumalo’s staff intelligence officer, and like Captain Shoupe, he was usually on Gervais’ list of good people. And Gervais even understood exactly why they were looking for any “insight” they could get. The horrendous ’fax stories about what the Solly newsies had dubbed the “Green Pines Atrocity” had reached Spindle the day after the battle—less than nineteen hours after Admiral O’Cleary’s surrender, in fact—and he didn’t envy Admiral Khumalo or Baroness Medusa (or, for that matter, Lady Gold Peak) when it came to dealing with this one’s implications. None of which him any happier about where he was pretty sure Shoupe was headed.
    “Yes, Ma’am?” he said in as neutral a voice as he could manage.
    “I