These snippets will be posted on Mondays and Thursdays.
Shadow Of Freedom – Snippet 01
Shadow of Freedom by David Weber
February 1922 Post Diaspora
“It’ll be easier the next time…and there will be a next time. There always is.”
— Frinkelo Osborne,
Office of Frontier Security, Loomis System.
Chapter One
The wingless, saucer-like drone drifted through the wet, misty night on silent counter gravity. The fine droplets of rain sifted down in filmy curtains that reeked of burned wood and hydrocarbons and left a greasy sensation on the skin. Despite the rainfall, fires crackled noisily here and there, consuming heaps of wreckage which had once been homes, adding their own smoke and soot to the atmosphere. A faint, distant mutter of thunder rolled through the overcast night, though whether it was natural or man-made was difficult to say.
The drone paused, motionless, blacker than the night about it, its rain-slick, light-absorbent coat sucking in the photons from the smudgy fires which might otherwise have reflected from it. The turret mounted on its bottom rotated smoothly, turning sensors and lenses towards whatever had attracted its attention. Wind sighed wearily in the branches of sugar pine, crab poplar, and imported Terran white pine and hickory, something shifted in one of the piles of rubble, throwing up sparks and cinders. A burning rafter burned through and collapsed and water dripped from rain-heavy limbs with the patient, uncaring persistence of nature, but otherwise all was still, silent.
The drone considered the sensor data coming to it, decided it was worth consideration by higher authority, and uploaded it to the communications satellite and its operator in far distant Elgin City. Then it waited.
The silence, the rain, and the wind continued. The fires hissed as heavier drops fell into their white and red hearts. And then —
The thunderbolt descended from the heavens like the wrath of Zeus. Born two hundred and sixty-five kilometers above the planet’s surface, it traced a white line from atmosphere’s edge to ground level, riding a froth of plasma. The two hundred-kilo dart arrived without even a whisper, far outracing the sonic boom of its passage, and struck its target coordinates at thirty times the speed of sound.
The quiet, rainy night tore apart under the equivalent of the next best thing to two and a half tons of old-fashioned TNT. The brilliant, blinding flash vaporized a bubble of rain. Concussion and overpressure rolled out from its heart, flattening the remaining walls of three of the village’s broken houses. The fury of the explosion painted the clouds, turned individual raindrops into shining diamonds and rubies that seemed momentarily frozen in air, and flaming bits and pieces of what once had been someone’s home arced upward like meteors yearning for the heavens.
* * *
“Think you used a big enough hammer, Callum?” the woman in the dark blue uniform of a lieutenant in the Loomis System Unified Public Safety Force asked dryly.
She stood behind the drone operator’s comfortable chair, looking over his shoulder at the display where the pinprick icon of the explosion flashed brightly. The operator — a sergeant, with the sleeve hashmarks of a twenty-T-year veteran — seemed to hesitate for just a moment, then turned his head to look at her.
“Unauthorized movement in an interdicted zone, Ma’am,” he replied.
“And you needed a KEW to deal with it?” The lieutenant arched one eyebrow. “A near-deer, do you think? Or possibly a bison elk?”
“IR signature was human, Ma’am. Must’ve been one of MacRory’s bastards, or he wouldn’t’ve been there.”
“I see.” The UPS officer folded her hands behind her. “As it happens, I was standing right over there at the command desk,” she observed, this time with a distinct bite. “If I recall correctly, SOP is to clear a KEW strike with command personnel unless it’s time-critical. Am I mistaken about that?”
“No, Ma’am,” the sergeant admitted, and the lieutenant shook her head.
“I realize you like big bangs, Callum. And I’ll admit you’ve got a better excuse than usual for playing with them. But there are Regs for a reason, and I’d take it as a personal favor — the kind of favor which will keep your fat, worthless, trigger-happy arse in that comfortable chair instead of carrying out sweeps in the bush — if you’d remember that next time. Do you think you can do that for me?”
“Yes, Ma’am,” the sergeant said much more crisply, and she gave him a nod that was several degrees short of friendly and headed back to her station.
The sergeant watched her go, then turned back to his display and smiled. He’d figured she’d have a little something to say to him, but he’d also figured it would be worth it. Three of his buddies had been killed in the first two days of the insurrection, and he was still in the market for payback. Besides, it gave him a sense of godlike power to be able to call down the wrath of heaven. He’d known Lieutenant MacRuer would never have authorized the expenditure of a KEW on a single, questionable IR signature, which was why he hadn’t asked for it. And if he was going to be honest about it, he wasn’t really certain his target hadn’t been a ghost, either. But that was perfectly all right with him, and his intense inner sense of satisfaction more than outweighed his superior’s obvious displeasure.
This time, at least, he amended silently. Catch her in a bad mood, and the by-the-Book bitch is just likely to make good on that reassignment. He shook his head mentally. Don’t think I’d like slogging around in the woods with those people very much.
Oh, and how much damage is this sort of action doing to the planet’s economy? Keep it up on a big enough scale and sooner or later your empire/league starts to fall apart.
The cost mainly comes from the actual impactor, since the village was allready abandoned.
And given the tech displayed the impactor can be a simple lump of iron. Missile tubes routinely accelerate things much heavier than this impactor to quite respectable velocities.
Excatly. Most of the cost actually doesn’t come from the missile itself (since it is basicaly an aerodynamicaly shaped lump of iron) but from cost of lifting it up into orbit. And you can slash even that by putting mining in the asteroid belt.
Then KEWs are probably literaly cheaper than dirt.
The cost is most certainly higher than that. True, KEWs are not very expensive, but that is the least of the costs incurred here. That KEW, depending on its size and speed, just blasted a few acres to a few square miles of land into a desolate wasteland. That land is now useless for any economically productive purpose and will stay that way for a couple decades without a considerable outlay of money and effort. That is the true cost of indiscriminate use of KEWs.
It’s stated to be a 5,000lb bomb equivalent. That won’t render anything uninhabitable for decades. It’s big conventional bomb sized, not nuke.
But yes, the only possible reason to require officer’s release for KEW strikes is that the potential for collateral damage is quite high. In this case though he was blowing up a destroyed village.
Begins? As Honor noted a couple of books ago, “begin” doesn’t begin (!) to cover it.
Anyone know if the Loomis system is a league protetorate system under a revolt or a system that hasn’t been conquered by OFS yet?
This isn’t an isolated case I think. Wouldn’t it have been better to have a pulser mounted on the drone? Using kew’s on individual persons or sensor ghosts seem’s the hight of waste. Is this happening on a wider scale, the industrial facilities for example?
I doubt this system has the tech to build ships or the launchers for them. The higher tech worlds are under tighter controls than this one seemed to be. OTOH, once word of this gets out, you will see more worlds wonder when it will be their turn under the hammer.
I think the point we were supposed to “get” was that an insurrection had started a couple of weeks before–perhaps after they lost their local wormhole junction.
Must not comment read sample chapters.
Thanks for reminding me. Now I’m going to have to decide whether to dash ahead with the sample chapters–or savor every little snippet bite!
Oops. Found the ARC.
Got the Arc, read it, liked it and began to clamor for more. Terrific book.