Freedom

Not even though the hired thugs of the interstellar appetite waiting to rape her world and the corrupt regime of local despots waiting to help them do it had murdered Drazen and his entire cell. Had burned them like so many logs in a fire and butchered over ninety other people—friends, colleagues, brothers and sisters of the armed struggle, some of whom she'd known for literally two-thirds of her entire life—with them.
She would not weep.
They may have destroyed Camp Freedom, she told herself fiercely, but they don't know about the other arms caches. They don't know the Movement still has modern weapons, still has dozens of times the firepower and capability we had at the beginning!
She told herself that, and resolutely refused to consider the fact that whatever the FAK might have, the government had the Star Kingdom of Manticore.
* * *
"So now what do we do?"
Vice President Vuk Rajkovic looked around the table at the members of "his" Cabinet, although less than a quarter of them had been chosen by him.
"What do you mean, Mr. Vice President?" Mavro Kanjer asked.
"You know perfectly well what I mean, Mavro," Rajkovic told the Secretary of Justice flatly. "You were there when Van Dort told us what Aleksandra didn't tell us." Several people shifted uneasily, and Rajkovic stabbed them with an angry glare. "All of you know, by now. Don't pretend for one moment you don't! And if any of you want to try to, I'm officially informing o