Shadow of Freedom-eARC Read Free

been right…but it wouldn’t have made any difference in the way things’ve finally worked out, now would it?
    She looked up at the command post’s shadowed ceiling, her eyes bitter with hate for the starships which had rained down death and ruination all across her homeworld, and wished with all her exhausted heart that she had been able to get a messenger to Partisan.

Chapter Two
    “How much longer do you expect this crap to go on?” Captain Francine Venelli’s tone was harsh. “I’ve got better things to do with my time than sit here in orbit killing a bunch of backwoods ground-grubbers, and my people don’t like it.” She glowered at the neatly dressed civilian on the other side of the briefing room table. “They don’t like it at all. For that matter, neither do I. And it’s not like there aren’t enough wheels coming off at the moment that I can’t find plenty of other more worthwhile things to worry about!”
    “I don’t know how much longer, Captain,” Frinkelo Osborne replied as calmly and reasonably as he could. “I wish I did. And, while we’re being so frank with each other, I wish you weren’t here doing this, either.” He shook his head, his expression even more disgusted than Venelli’s. “It’s like using a hammer to crack an egg. Or maybe more like spanking a baby with an ax!”
    Venelli’s blue eyes narrowed and she sat back in her chair. She’d dealt with more Office of Frontier Security personnel in her career than she could have counted—certainly a lot more of them than she could have wished! Too many of them, in her experience, were entirely in favor of using hammers on eggs, if only to discourage the next chicken from getting out of line. Of course, as a mere advisor to President Ailsa MacMinn’s Loomis Prosperity Party administration, not a full-fledged system or sector commissioner, Osborne might still be far enough down the food chain to believe there were more important things in the universe than his own bank balance.
    Or maybe he’s just smart enough to realize what KEWs are likely to do to the source of his bank balance , she reminded herself. I wonder how many hectares of silver oak we’ve turned into cinders so far?
    She kept her mental grimace from reaching her expression and glanced at the spectacular live feed from the exterior view projected on the briefing room’s smart wall while she considered that depressing question.
    Her “squadron”—the battlecruiser Hoplite , the light cruiser Yenta MacIlvenna , and the destroyers Abatis and Lunette —had been improvised on very little notice when Loomis’ request for assistance came in. Now her ships orbited the planet Halkirk, the Loomis System’s primary inhabited planet, and the direct visual of the smart wall was magnificent. Indeed, under other circumstances, the captain, who was something of a connoisseur of planetary oddities, would probably have enjoyed her visit to the star system. Unlike the majority of systems, Loomis had two planets smack in the middle of the G7 primary’s liquid water zone. In fact, Halkirk and its sister planet, Thurso, were not only in the liquid water zone but orbited a common center of mass seven light-minutes from the star as they made their way around it. Yet while they might be sisters, they were far from twins.
    Halkirk was all greens and browns—especially browns—with far less blue than Venelli was accustomed to seeing, since sixty percent of its surface was dry land. Some of it, like the continental interiors, was very dry land, as a matter of fact, although the smaller, mountainous continents of Stroma and Stronsay were quite pleasant. In fact, they were actually on the damp side, thanks to ocean currents and prevailing wind patterns, and even “small” continents were very large pieces of real estate. Hoy and Westray, which between them accounted for better than seventy percent of Halkirk’s total land area, or another story entirely, of course. Venelli