Free Death Sentence by Roger MacBride Allen Page A

she had found the solitude restful, even useful.
    The door swung open. "Come! Now!" one of them shouted. But she was in no hurry. They had kept her under house arrest, with the doors sealed, the windows covered, and all communications cut off. If they were so disorganized as to be in a hurry when it came time for her to depart, that was not her problem. Nor was it her duty to put the Bureaucracy of Order in a good mood. She took her time, preparing herself carefully for departure, then stepping out of the house calmly and slowly, pleased to see that her state of calm was unnerving them even more than she had expected.
    They urged her outside and toward the transport waiting on the landing pad by her house. It was her first time outside since her confinement had begun. They urged her forward, but, just as they reached the transport, the guards paused, as if by habit, as if every prisoner stopped at that point, and they had been trained to expect it.
    No doubt most prisoners stopped to enjoy the feel of fresh air, the sense of a sky overhead, at least the momentary illusion of freedom. But Taranarak stopped to stare in horrified astonishment at the city vista spread out before her.
    Her home was in the hills to the northwest of the city center, and it had a magnificent view of the whole grand sweep of the metropolis. But she had not seen that view for a long time, because they had been petty enough to board up her windows.
    She saw towering plumes of smoke over the city and the marks of fire, disorder, destruction. She heard shouts, cries, the muffled, far-off thud of an explosion. Emergency vehicles of all sorts were rushing through the skies in every direction. She allowed herself to be guided into the aircar and stared numbly out the window as the aircar lifted off. It was bad enough to look down on the city torn by riot. But it was worse, far worse, to realize that it was possible, even likely, that she had caused those fires and riots.
     

     
    The Order Patrol aircar swung south and east toward the center of the city, affording her a terrifying panorama of the city in chaos. The aircar began its descent toward the plaza in front of the Bureaucracy's headquarters. The plaza was in utter turmoil. A burned-out aircar lay on its side, windows smashed, smoke still rising from its interior. Order Squad teams were struggling to hold back a crowd of angry, shouting protesters as workers rushed to assemble a heavy-duty barricade to surround the building.
    It had been dozens of generations since an Order Squad had been forced to deal with violent protest, and it was plain they were woefully unprepared to handle the situation. Everything looked improvised, thrown together, poorly planned.
    The aircar landed with a heavy bump, and she was being bundled out of the vehicle almost before it stopped moving. Just at that moment, the crowd surged forward, almost as if the landing were some sort of cue or signal. The Order Squad teams gave way, and suddenly she was swept up in a sea of angry, shouting Metrannans. She was knocked off her feet, but the crowd was so dense she could not fall down.
    Suddenly, ungentle hands seized her by her right arms, and an Order Patrol officer was pulling her toward the Bureaucracy's main entrance. All of her disdain for the Order Service vanished in that moment, instantly transforming into pathetic, fearful gratitude for their protection.
    As suddenly as the riot had engulfed her, she was pulled out of it and half-thrown through the heavily reinforced doors of the Bureaucracy's main entrance, stumbling through a lobby filled with worried Patrol officers, improvised care stations, command centers, and piles of ruined furniture shoved out of the way in corners or pressed into service as part of an interior barricade.
    They got her into an elevator. They started it up and ushered her out onto an upper floor. It was a place of unexpected normalcy, up high enough that the shouts and cries of the mob outside were