But . . . He supposed it was better than nothing. And he knew there was no point in continuing the argument any longer.
"Yeah, yeah, fine. I understand the plan."
Victor and Yana finished their final walk-through of the escape passageway. It had originally been built to be one of the conduits for the city's underground transport network. About a century earlier, the city had discontinued most of that network, but had seen no reason to demolish what existed. In fact, they'd spent some money shoring it up and making sure it was stable. The expense of tearing apart buildings which had been erected on top of the areas in order to do a proper job of filling in the conduits would have far greater. So would the repair cost of having parts of the city collapse if those old underground passageways started corroding.
Since then, the abandoned passageways had been put to different uses by different people. Not surprisingly, the city had a large population of indigents, including a number of people who were not sane. Many of them lived down there. Criminals used the passageways for any number of purposes—and paid off the police to keep them from inspecting too often or too carefully. Merchants used them to store perishable goods, under what amounted to dirt-cheap climate controlled conditions. And, finally, the passageways were used by the underground, smuggling escaped slaves to freedom.
This particular passageway could be reached from a hidden entry in the basement of one of the tenements not far from Steph Turner's restaurant. The passageway ran for fully two kilometers thereafter under the city's streets. They'd use the next-to-last exit, which would put them within easy walking distance of the delivery van that would take them into the spaceport itself. By the time they reached the van, Carl Hansen and the two Mesan defectors should already have arrived. All of them except Carl and Victor—Carl as the driver; Victor as his helper—would be hidden in the crates in the van's interior. Unless the security guards at the spaceport insisted on physically searching the van, including breaking into the crates, everything should work fine. Among the many items Victor had obtained from the ever-helpful Triêu Chuanli had been shipping containers that were not only environmentally sealed but even had equipment designed to block the sort of instrumental inspection that security guards were usually satisfied with.
It wasn't likely at all that these guards would insist on a physical search. That area of the spaceport was given over to shipments to and from the smaller and less reputable freighters in orbit. It was taken for granted that a certain amount of smuggling was being carried out. Carl's bribes should be enough to do the trick.
If not . . . Well, Victor was there. With the same Kettridge Model A-3 tucked up his sleeve. There was at least a chance—not a bad one, either—that he could kill all the guards before they could send out a warning. From there, they might be able to make it to the Hali Sowle's tender and get into low orbit before anyone really knew what had happened. There were so many such tenders coming and leaving that unless the authorities spotted which one they were in, they might be able to get aboard the Hali Sowle undetected.
Hopefully, of course, it wouldn't come to that.
"Well, that's it," Yana said. "Victor, I have to say it's been a real pleasure sleeping with you night after night after night in the sure and certain knowledge that I would get no thrills whatsoever."
"Oh, stop whining. If I had given you any thrills—and Thandi found out—you'd get the thrill of a lifetime."
Yana grinned. "A very short lifetime."
"They don't call her Great Kaja for nothing."
On his way back from the safe house where he'd had the meeting with Hansen's group, using a different underground passageway, Anton decided to wrestle with his conscience. There wasn't any time left. He'd either pin the damn thing down or he'd have to concede defeat—which would mean reopening those parts of the plan with Victor that he wasn't happy about.
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 home-made 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 an "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.
They knew that setting off nuclear devices on Mesa itself would constitute a massive—indeed, qualitative—increase in the already-murderous intensity of the struggle between slaves and their creators. The plans of those slavemasters to violate the Eridani Edict would do the same, of course. But, at least once, it would be slaves who struck the first such blow.
Zilwicki had real doubts about the wisdom of that course of action. Even Victor did, if not to the same degree as Anton. But there was a momentum to this fight that, at certain places and times—and he suspected this was one of them—overrode all caution.