The Wind of Liberty

by Kenneth Bulmer

Genres: Science Fiction; Alien Contact; Space Opera

Synopsis

A planet's destiny trembled in the balance.Waiting, quiet and as dangerous as a timber-wolf, Vickery heard another faint slither of foot on stone. A dark shape flitted past the lighted shop front on the opposite side of the street and vanished into the doorway. Vickery's heard gave one gigantic lunge, and a wolfish smile creased his face. He fired at the shadows and the brilliance of the exploding charge threw everything out in the street into garish highlights...

Release date: June 18, 2012

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 320

Sample

THE destiny of a planet trembled in the balance to-day, and though it was just one small world among so many, on the turn of events depended the lives of millions of men and women. Vickery was passionately concerned that their lives should not be wasted; but, idealist though he was, he retained enough of his core of hard shrewdness to value his own life above any other.

Should he fail in this attempt at subversion here in the plush pent-house home of City Warden Armstrong, then the whole city of New Lincoln would explode into flames to-night. Should he be successful then perhaps only a tenth of the city would be destroyed. Either way, this night New Lincoln would burn.

He stood by the window looking down on the crowds hurrying about their last minute Christmas shopping in the cruel midsummer sun. The apartment was unobtrusively cooled and Vickery felt relaxed and competent despite the pressures of the moment.

“They seem happy, down there,” he said in his rich orator’s voice, not turning his head. “It might be—pleasant to be like that.”

“Christmas Eve,” Armstrong said. He was stout and highly coloured with staring blue eyes and a brain like chrome-steel. His casual lounging clothes in lilac and maroon failed to conceal his armoured vest; his fingers played with a crumpled message flimsy, balling it and smoothing it. “You and I, Vickery,” he said with some deliberateness, “we’d never be happy just being one of the herd.”

Vickery turned so that the sunlight fell across the stubble blueing his long jaw and set fanatical shadows along the hollows of his nose and eye sockets. A thrill of anticipation ran through him, chasing away the indolent relaxation, giving the awareness of challenge to his purpose.

“You would not, City Warden,” he said politely. He left the rest of the dichotomy hanging.

Armstrong picked up the end brusquely. “And neither would you, Vickery. You’ve been on-planet what, now? A month? Six weeks?”

“Something like that,” Vickery said vaguely.

“Tell me, why did you use your real name?”

Vickery laughed. His lean wolf-face broke and showed white fangs. His laughter bubbled in his throat.

“What do you know—or think you know—of me, then, City Warden?” The title now was used with contempt.

Armstrong did not flinch. “I have had a message from Larodin——”

“Ah!” breathed Vickery. “Larodin. A very sweet operation——”

“A million dead and five million injured and untold billions of damage——”

“Yes.” Vickery glared now at Armstrong, his wolf-face saturnine and threatening. “But Liberty! Freedom! Larodin now owns its own soul——”

The City Warden had reached his high position not through preferment or bribe, but by hard-headed efficiency. But, faced with this fanatic, he felt for the first time in many years a twinge of apprehension, of indecision, of he had to admit, of fear. He brushed that aside. His hand reached for the button inset in the arm of the chair.

Vickery said: “Don’t ring for your guards yet, City Warden. If you do they will find only a dead man sitting in your chair.”

Armstrong did not hesitate. He took his hand away from the button. He made the gesture unmistakable. Like any other man, he liked life.

“You told me you were an Earthman, a Terran, Vickery, and that was why I invited you to my home when you arrived.” Armstrong’s poise was admirable. “I cannot believe that now.”

The fact had been hard enough to believe before; Vickery smiled again. He was pushing this fat City Warden and enjoying pushing him, knowing that he and his sort had battened on the people of all the planets, bled them, bred them, profiteered in them and finally stolen their own souls. The F.C. employed high-grade leeches. Gradually, planet by planet, the F.C. were finding that there were others in the galaxy with blood-letting capacities, and they weren’t liking it one little bit.

“I am an Earthman,” he said harshly. “I was born in a little town called Ballintoy in the greenest island in all God’s Universe. You wouldn’t know of it, of course. Our great galactic business empire sucked me in early and I wasted my youth clerking with computers on some ratbag planet out on the Rim. My parents were dead and buried before my first leave——”

“That is common enough in our modern galaxy,” Armstrong interrupted. “With distances as vast——”

“And with instanter communication reserved for you and your toadying class—and the long haul by starship for the underlings like me!” Vickery remembered the agony of that old starship journey, racing across the parses to arrive in Ireland in time only to be able to stand at the graveside and to order the headstone. He had really begun to hate the F.C. then.

Armstrong’s hand remained on his knee, the other hand still crumpling the message flimsy. He made no attempt to reach the alarm button.

“I am sorry, Vickery. But you have come to my city of New Lincoln, the capital city of Sjalberg II, a fine city, a growing city, a city in very good standing with the F.C., and I hear reports that make it quite plain why you have come. You cannot expect me to sit by idly——”

“You?” The contempt lashed the City Warden. “What can you or your sort do now when the whole planet is ready and ripe for Liberty?”

“Are they? Isn’t that rather quick judgment for a man who has been on-planet less than six weeks?”

Again Vickery laughed his wolf laugh.

“My friends have been active. I am merely the focal point, the spark to set the tinder alight, the catalyst. I, Armstrong, am going to set the match to your city tonight—unless you co-operate.”

“That hardly appears likely.”

Vickery crossed the room from the window, his feet soundless on the pile, and leant on the table, knuckles down and face thrust forward. Armstrong remained unmoved.

“I hope to convince you that it is very likely. In the galaxy there is a wind of liberty blowing!” Vickery gestured largely. “Ordinary men and women are tired of your authority, of your orders and directions that extend into every part of their daily lives. Word has spread of the worlds that have thrown off the yoke. You cannot suppress ideas, Armstrong. You cannot for ever choke the dreams and aspirations of mankind.”

“All this is very fine and fancy free.” Armstrong had heard all this before from the various hotheads he had had from time to time to discipline. “But we have proved that our system is more efficient——”

“Efficient! Is that all, then, that your puny mind can conceive?”

“I think it something worth striving for.”

“Look at Larodin. Now they are in command of their own destiny. They have thrown off the yoke imprisoning them. Now they are men again and can stand up in the galaxy and look out with clear eyes.”

“Look, Vickery. Get on with your proposition. It is necessary that I hear it so that it may be read into your prosecution at your trial for treason.”

“I am pleased you have a recorder running. Perhaps others may hear the truth and the whining excuses and pleas of the Wardens——”

Armstrong was stung into saying hotly: “The Wardens are a dedicated corps of men and women, Vickery. We run the planets for the F.C. It takes a man, Vickery, to create. Any fool can destroy.”

“Cheap words and cheap thought. I destroy the evils of the F.C. so that my friends may create better worlds for themselves and their children. Worlds, Armstrong, free from the oppressive blight of the F.C.”

“Before we came to set the old empire aright——”

“Yes, yes! I know it all. The great Terran Solar Empire crashed into ruins and anarchy blazed among the stars. And then the businessmen got together and organised their Friendly Combine. My God! The F.C., the mighty and potent instrument that subjugates millions of planets, the brain child of a group of grubby businessmen. It makes the blood of a fighting man run cold.”

The two men glared at each other. The clash of wills was an almost palpable thing in that still room high in the sunshine of the tallest tower of New Lincoln.

“I have three legions under my hand,” said Armstrong softly.

Equally softly, Vickery answered. “Not so, City Warden, not so. For the men of Legion Eighteen and nearly all of Legion Fifty-Five are with the common people.”

The words rocked about Armstrong’s ears; but he rallied strongly. “I don’t believe you. All the men of my three legions are loyal to the F.C. Every single damn one of them!”

The very vehemence of his words betrayed him, in his own eyes as in Vickery’s.

“Remember Larodin, Armstrong,” Vickery said gently.

The City Warden crumpled the message flimsy and tossed it pettishly on the floor. He swallowed to clear the dryness in his throat.

“How long——” he began.

Vickery cut him off.

“This is my proposition. It is a fair one. You know that the people of the galaxy are tired of being herded about, told to do this and ordered to do that, numbered, labelled, molly-coddled by your businessmen’s combine as though they were infants. You know they grumble but obey—but what you will not admit is that you know that they are acting to free themselves, to take back into their own hands the right to make their own decisions, to live their own lives, to earn their own bread and to say good-bye for ever to machine-law. Is freedom so weak a plant——”

“You said something about a proposition?”

“Forgive me, Armstrong. Of course, demagoguery is not necessary for a City Warden. You are a machine man, and you deal in machine facts. Well, Armstrong, my proposition is a simple one. I offer you the chance to work with me and with my friends on planet. We have Legion Eighteen and Legion Fifty Five in our pockets; they have seen the wisdom of our words. But Legion Five Two Seven, a new legion, I understand, is based out at Lesser Holm, right around the planet. A word from you would prevent much bloodshed.”

“You expect me to turn traitor——?”

“Wait, wait. The alternatives are these. You join us and we take over the planet, free the bonds of the F.C. and set the world on its own feet, free. Or you refuse, and many lives will be lost, the legions will meet in battle—and you know what that’s like—New Lincoln will go up in flames. And, City Warden, you, naturally, will be the first to lose your life.”

Moving quite slowly but with the steady purpose of a lettuce-bound tortoise, Armstrong levered himself from his chair and stood up. His lounging robes slid down with a soft hiss of artificial silk to cover his armoured vest. He rested a hand negligently on the arm of his chair, well away from the alarm button. His square, fat face with the prominent blue eyes showed no readable expression; to Vickery he seemed the embodiment of all the gross privilege that had battened upon the people of the galaxy and enriched itself at the expense of sweated labour and starvation—enforced discipline. In that moment Vickery hated him and his like and rejoiced that he should have so large a share in their undoing.

Even so, Vickery was forced to speak first.

“Well, Armstrong? What do you say?”

“Just this, Vickery.” The City Warden’s tones were wine-rich and full, they belled in the room. “You have convicted yourself out of your own mouth. Yes, I have a tape running; and my guards have been listening to it. All right,” he said, not speaking to Vickery. “Take him away.”

Vickery laughed. They say that if you look closely into the eyes of a wolf you will find they are bright and full of merriment. So looked Vickery then.

The gun in his hand steadied on Armstrong’s head.

“Call your guards,” he said, mocking. “And they will find only a dead man. I promise you.”

Between the chair before which bulked the gross form of Armstrong, the City Warden, and the table on which Vickery, the Freedom Fighter, had been leaning, lay a small space of carpet, perhaps f. . .