|
tlb
Fleet Admiral
Posts: 4442
Joined: Mon Sep 03, 2012 11:34 am
|
ldwechsler wrote:And if there somehow was an impartial trial, a good defense lawyer would ask exactly how Zilwicki and Cachat set off nuclear devices. And the answer would be that they did not.
Weird Harold wrote:Well except for that third nuke Anton triggered personally. 
ldwechsler wrote:What third nuke? I only remember two.
And Zilwicki and Cachat might not even have been aware of the bombs. Certainly not of the McBryde bomb and they would have actively opposed the one in the park.
You guys are very zealous prosecutors.
I recommended that people reread Torch of Freedom; that clearly has not happened. So here are the relevant portions: Chapter Forty-Five
...
"Yes. When we run—assuming we do, but we'd be fools not to count on it—we'll have left a completely false trail. Assuming you can get Carl Hansen and his people to take care of their end of the deal, so far as anyone on Mesa will ever be able to figure out, you and I and Yana exist only as scattered molecules."
Victor grunted. "The technical side of it's not a problem. That bomb will vaporize anything within two hundred meters. Whatever DNA traces they'd expect from a normal explosion will simply be too scattered to be usable, even with Mesan or Beowulfan techniques and equipment. The real problem is . . ."
He shook his head. "Let's just say that the people Saburo put us in contact with aren't as tightly wrapped as I'd like. They're not crazy, as such, but . . ."
"Fanatics," said Anton. "I do hope you notice that I didn't add any wisecrack such as 'and coming from Victor Cachat, that's saying something.' "
"Very funny. The problem is that tepid, wishy-washy people like you, whose commitment to anything beyond immediate personal matters is like mashed potatoes, just don't grasp all the fine distinctions between 'fanaticism' and 'fervor' and 'zeal.' "
Victor took a deep, slow breath. Not to control any anger—by now, the banter between him and Anton produced nothing more intense than occasional irritation—but to give himself time to try to figure out how to explain his concern.
"You just . . . don't really know, Anton. That's not a criticism, it's just an observation. From the time you were a kid, you lived in a world with wide horizons."
...
Furthermore, while they were young, and suffered from the haphazard education that all seccies received, they were very far from dull-witted or incapable. To Anton and Victor's surprise, for instance, when the group had been asked to provide them with a powerful explosive device, they'd proudly presented them a few days later with a low-yield nuclear device. Nothing jury-rigged either. The device was a standard construction type used in terraforming, designed and built by a well-known Solarian company. The best Anton and Victor had expected had been something chemical and homemade.
He chuckled. "That was quite a scene, wasn't it? Funny—well, sort of—now that it's over."
* * *
"Impressive," said Anton, gazing down on the nuclear demolition device. He was doing his best not to let his surprise show.
Enough of it must have shown, though, to cause the chests of the young firebrands gathered in the basement of a modest seccy home to swell with pride. Their informal leader Carl Hansen said: "A cousin of—well, never mind the details—told us he could get his hands on one of them."
Anton nodded. He didn't want to know the details, anyway. "How'd you disable the locator beacon?"
Hansen's face went blank. He and the other youngsters in the room—David Pritchard, Cary Condor and Karen Steve Williams—exchanged glances.
"What's a locator beacon?" asked Williams.
Victor leaned away from the device—fat lot of good that would do!—and whistled soundlessly. He looked even paler than usual. Anton was pretty sure his own face looked about the same.
Moving carefully—fat lot of good that would do!—he pulled the com out of his pocket. A quick scanning search of the nuclear device yielded the port he needed.
For something like this, Anton wanted a physical connection. So he pulled out the rarely-used cable attachment and plugged it into the port.
"What are you doing?" asked Cory.
"He's going to disable—try to disable—the locator beacon," Cachat said tonelessly. "Hopefully, before anyone in charge finds out the device isn't where it's supposed to be."
...
On the positive side, the incident had solidified Anton and Victor's credentials with their local contacts faster and more surely than probably anything else would have done. But the same capability the youngsters had shown, when coupled to their ignorance of so many things and the narrow viewpoint Victor was describing . . .
Anton made a face. "You're worried they'll go off half-cocked."
Victor shrugged. "Not exactly. They're not fools, far from it. I'm mostly worried that, first, they'll slip on security. To really do counterespionage properly you need to be patient and methodical more than anything else. That's . . . not their strength. So I think they're more open to being penetrated than they think they are. Second, I'm worried that if things do start to come apart, they're more likely to react by helping the process than trying to dodge it, if you know what I mean. Especially some of them—like David Pritchard. Who was just assigned the task of handling the device, if we need it."
Anton grimaced again. He hadn't attended the last meeting of the group. ("The group" was the only name they had. In that, at least, showing more of a sense for security than they did in other ways.) The decision to put Pritchard in charge of the device must have been made there.
There wasn't anything wrong with David Pritchard, exactly. But Victor and Anton both sensed that the youngster had a level of quiet yet corrosive fury that might lead him off a cliff, in the right circumstances.
...
Chapter Fifty-One
...
Anton looked around the table. "Is everyone clear on what needs to happen?"
Carl Hansen gave his three subordinates a quick glance. "Yes, I think so. David, you've got the trickiest assignment. Any questions?"
David Pritchard shook his head. "No, it's straightforward enough. After whoever-it-is-whose-name-remains-unknown leaves this 'Gamma Center' place—which I'll be told by a signal from Karen—I park the air car in the lot of the sports stadium next door and walk away, giving myself plenty of time to get clear. Cary will trigger the device we've already planted in the old Buenaventura tower as soon as word comes from Carl that he's on his way to the spaceport with whoever-it-is. Then I blow mine."
"It probably won't even scratch the 'Center,' " Hansen said, "given how deep it's buried. But it should do some major damage to Suvorov Tower." Like the other members of his group, Hansen had only the vaguest notion, even now, of what the Gamma Center truly was, but he didn't have to know what it was as long as he knew it was important to the authorities he hated with every fiber of his being. "Suvorov's right on top of it," he continued, "so the scorpions're bound to assume the Center's the real target of whatever is happening."
Pritchard had a sour look on his face. "I still don't understand why we're taking so much effort to keep the casualties down. That part of the city, the only seccies around will be servants and janitors."
"Which is exactly why we're doing it this way, David." Karen Steve Williams was making no effort to hide her unfriendliness. "Those servants and janitors are our people too, you know, even if you don't care about them. As it is, we'll be killing a few of them. But at least this way—and it'll help a lot that it's on a Saturday—it shouldn't be too bad."
Cary Condor nodded. "I agree with Karen. David, try to hold the bloodlust to a reasonable minimum, will you? It'd be a different story if you could park the air car in Suvorov's own garage—"
"Better still, park it right in the middle of Pine Valley Park," Pritchard said savagely. Pine Valley was the park at the exact center of Green Pines, and Green Pines was inhabited only by freeborn citizens—and wealthy and very well-connected ones, at that. The Gamma Center's hidden location was well inside the Green Pines city limits, but it was on the commercial side of the city.
"Yeah, sure, that'd be great—except there's no way you're parking an air car in or near either place and getting out safely. Not with the security they've got. The parking lot of the sports stadium is as close as we can realistically get."
...
His pangs of conscience centered on the fact that they'd be using nuclear devices. He'd never been comfortable with that. Initially, he'd argued that they could substitute fuel-air bombs, which could do just as much damage as small nuclear explosives. He'd given up that argument when their local contacts insisted they didn't have the resources to build homemade bombs of that type—which, of course, was an obvious . . . prevarication. True, unlike nuclear devices, there was no civilian use for fuel-air bombs that made the alternative of just buying them on the black market feasible, but that wasn't really the point, either. He could have whipped up a suitable fuel-air bomb for them in two or three hours using commercially available hydrogen, a portable cooking unit, and a cheap timer, and he knew they knew it.
Which meant that the real reason they "didn't have the resources" was because they wanted to make a statement, and he had serious reservations about making the statement in question.
Partly, of course, it had been his hope and expectation at the time that this sort of "flamboyant" (to put it mildly) escape method would never be necessary anyway. There'd been no way, of course, to predict or even envision the sort of espionage treasure trove that Jack McBryde and his companion represented.
Anton knew that, as a purely practical proposition, his reluctance to use nuclear devices was pointless. You could even argue—as Victor certainly would—that it was downright silly. The human race had long since developed methods of mass destruction that were more devastating than any nuclear device ever built. The former StateSec mercenaries who'd soon be trying to destroy Torch on Mesa's behalf wouldn't be using nuclear weapons. It would take far too many of them, and why bother anyway? They'd be using missiles, of course, but they'd be using them as kinetic weapons. Accelerated to seventy or eighty percent of light-speed, they'd do the trick as thoroughly as any "dinosaur killer" in galactic history, but it wouldn't be because of any nuclear warheads! For that matter, a few large bolides—nothing fancier than rocks or even ice balls—could have done the job just fine, if the attackers had only had the time to accelerate them to seventy or eighty thousand KPS, which was barely a crawl by the standards of an impeller-drive civilization. It would simply be faster and simpler to use missiles than piss around with rocks and ice cubes.
That said, for a lot of people in the modern universe—and Anton happened to be one of them—nuclear weapons carried a lingering ancient horror. They had been the first weapons of mass destruction developed and used by human beings against each other. For that reason, perhaps, they still had a particular aura about them.
Of course, that was exactly the reason Hansen and his group—certainly David Pritchard—were so determined to use nuclear explosives. Not only were they in the grip of a ferocious anger going back centuries, but the knowledge which Anton and Victor had given them that Mesa planned to destroy Torch had given that fury a tremendous boost. Stripped to its raw and bleeding essentials, the attitude of Hansen's people could be summed up as: So the scorpions want to play rough, do they? No problem. Rough it is.
...
Chapter Fifty-Three
...
Yana emerged from the back of the van. "No kidding something's gone wrong." She hooked a thumb over her shoulder. "Our passenger in there got a call a little while ago from He Who Is Not To Be Named. He's been found out, he's trapped in the center, and . . ."
Victor nodded. "He'll suicide. Good man."
Yana's grin was purely feral. "Oh, he's not going out alone, Victor. Not by a long shot."
That was one of the few times in his life Anton ever saw Victor Cachat's eyebrows raise in surprise. It would have been worth a chuckle except they had too much to figure out and decide.
"If he's going to blow the Gamma Center, we should alert Cary to wait and blow the Buenaventura at the same time. If we're lucky, the Mesans will think the acts were coordinated ahead of time."
He was a bit relieved at the prospect of setting off the device hidden in the basement of the Buenaventura this early on a Saturday morning. The tower itself was abandoned, and situated in an old industrial area that was mostly vacant. There were bound to be some casualties, but at least they'd be kept to a minimum.
Unfortunately, from Anton's viewpoint, they couldn't simply abort the explosion. Destroying the Buenaventura was the key to their faked escape records—which they now probably needed more than ever.
There was no longer any point, however, in setting off the explosion at the sports stadium. First, because David Pritchard might very well get killed when McBryde detonated the nearby Gamma Center. Secondly, what was the point anyway? David's bomb couldn't possibly do as much damage as McBryde's measures would.
Carl was keying the new instructions to Cary. "Okay, that's done," he said a short while later. "What's next?"
"Send instructions to Karen and David. Tell them to get the hell out and go to ground. If they go into hiding now, I think they've still got a decent chance of eluding the manhunt that's about to come down. Which is going to be one hell of a manhunt."
Hansen's face seemed to get a bit drawn, but he typed out the instructions quickly and surely.
"What about me, Anton?" he asked quietly.
"You'll have to come with us, Carl. There's no way around it now."
Hansen shook his head. "No. I'm not leaving my people on Mesa in the lurch."
Anton set his jaws. "Carl, if you wait to run until we've launched for the Hali Sowle, there is almost no chance you won't be spotted."
"I understand that. But I'm not changing my mind."
So the seccies found nukes to use and Anton disabled the locator beacon (that passage reads as though there is just one, but later there are two). In discussing the plan they realized people would die and even mentioned Green Pines, but said no because David would not be able to escape. They knew that the seccies, particularly David entrusted to drive the car with a bomb, were not level headed and might snap. Finally they knew that the Gamma Center would be destroyed and tried to adjust plans. There is the Gamma Center explosion, the basement of the Buenaventura explosion that hid their escape and the bomb that David was to put next to the Gamma Center (which instead went to Green Pines) adding up to three explosions. Further point: Carl Hansen knew that Victor and Anton were not killed in any explosion and even knew the name of their escape ship, so he must not have lived to face interrogation. Why would the Detweilers assume that McBryde was responsible for the Buenaventura explosion? How could he even requisition a nuke without inviting comment? And how would he know to plant it there? So, given that they knew one explosion was due to the seccies, why not consider that it could have been to destroy evidence? |
