Democracy’s Right

(Colin’s War, Book One)

Cover Blurb

The Empire – a tyranny stretching over thousands of worlds, run by the corrupt and evil Thousand Families.  Freedom, justice and liberty are a joke.  Resistance is futile.  From the formerly independent worlds crushed by the Empire, to the slaves and workers bred for their role, to the personnel of the Imperial Navy itself, rebellion seethes, but freedom seems a dream…

The Rebel – Colin Harper, betrayed by a superior officer, assigned to a useless backwater and forced to become compliant in terrible crimes, has a plan.  He and his fellows will seize their ships and provide a focus for a galaxy seething with helpless rage under the Empire’s rule…

And set the galaxy on fire.

A mighty island fortress
The Guardian of the East
An up-to-date Gibraltar
A thousand planes at least,
It simply can't be taken
'Twill stand a siege for years
We can hold the place forever
And bring our foes to tears.
Our men are there in millions
The defences are unique…

But the Japs did not believe you
SO THEY TOOK IT IN A WEEK.

***

What plan, if any, they'd evolved,
May possibly one day be solved.
Meanwhile, I hold that arrogance,
Brute force and bloody ignorance,
Indifference and clumsy bluff,
Are unmistakably the stuff
On which these gentlemen relied,
To mask the rotten core inside.

When placed in charge of nincompoops,
Even the very best of troops,
Will rapidly deteriorate,
To something worse than second rate,
Whilst men without experience,
Develop into an offence.

Poems written by an anonymous British POW in Japan, after the Fall of Singapore, 1942
Prologue

“And, I present now, the winner of the match, Commodore Percival!”

Lieutenant Colin Harper watched as Percival rose to his feet and took the stage.  It was hard to keep his face composed in the proper dispassion required for a formal presentation, but he managed it somehow, despite the excitement of knowing that six months of hard work were going to pay off.  He’d seen to it that Percival’s forces had completely defeated the opposing force and won the war games, mainly by throwing out standard doctrine and employing crazy tactics to shock and awe them into submission.  They hadn’t been able to keep up…

And it was all his work.  Officially, the records would credit Percival, but everyone who really counted knew that it had been Colin and his tactical team who had produced the victory.  The deal had been simple enough; Colin would produce victory…and, in exchange, he would receive enough patronage – and public recognition – to ensure that he received a command within a year.  A small destroyer, a light cruiser…Colin didn’t care.  He knew that he was born for command and, if he had command of a small ship on independent patrol, there were more than enough chances for glory.  The patronage might even see him raised to the peerage, or even offered command of a cruiser squadron, somewhere out along the Rim.

“Thank you, thank you all,” Percival said, as the cheers died down.  If the crowd knew – or cared – that Percival hadn’t produced the victory that had humiliated the other side, they didn’t show it.  The opposing Commodore hadn’t even bothered to show up at the ceremony, a gesture of defiance and breech of etiquette that would only be allowed for one of the Thousand Families.  The man had won his position through the family name…and hadn’t been smart enough to find a competent tactical officer.  “It was a glorious victory and the opposing crews are buying the beer.”

There was a second round of cheering.  The crews had definitely been taking as much advantage of their opponents as they could; tradition demanded that the losers buy the beer, adding an extra note to their humiliation.  Many of the losers would be in debt to the loan sharks within the week, unless their ships were called away to deal with an emergency, but that wasn't likely to happen.  The Sirius Sector was the most secure Sector in the Empire, excepting only Earth.  What could happen that would require the services of a dozen superdreadnaughts?  The closest possible enemy was over a thousand light years away.

Percival ran through the remainder of his speech, but Colin barely heard it.  The Commodore probably didn’t actually want to give the speech, but it was Tradition and even one of the Thousand Families couldn’t avoid that.  Besides, they’d won…and the flush of victory made up for a lot.  Percival thanked a number of people before, finally, turning to the important issue.

“There is one person who deserves the reward and promotion,” Percival said.  Colin felt excitement welling up within his breast.  In moments, he would be standing on the stage in front of thousands of his peers, being hailed as the – secret – architect of victory.  “One person who deserves the awards and recognition.  I call” – Colin braced himself – “Commander Stacy Roosevelt to the stage.”

Colin almost stood up.  Only numb shock and absolute disbelief kept him in his seat, watching helplessly as Stacy Roosevelt, an air-headed beauty of fifty so incompetent that even her connections couldn’t win her promotion to Captain, walked up onto the stage.  He could only be glad, when his mind started functioning again, that no one was looking at him; they’d have seen his expression.  Somehow, calling on all the training and discipline he could command, he pulled his fury down to a dull burning fire.

Percival had screwed him.  In hindsight, it was easy to see how…and why.  The Commodore had known that Colin would have his job, sooner or later, and heaven forbid that such a post should go to a commoner.  All the time he’d been making promises to Colin – and some of his staff – he’d probably been making deals with Stacy as well, trying to see what she could give him in the way of influence and patronage in exchange for promotion.  Stacy could offer him access to a whole new strata of power; Colin could barely offer him anything, but tactical expertise…and who needed it, with the Empire at peace?

“Thank you,” Stacy said.  Even her voice had a nasal tinge to it.  “It is my pleasure to accept…”

Colin watched her and Percival and thought cold thoughts.  He’d known that the Navy was riddled with patronage and corruption, but he’d honestly believed that he had had a chance of overcoming the obstacles placed in the way of commoners who aspired to command.  He could have become the foremost commanding officer in the Navy, but Percival had sensed the threat to his own position and acted to keep Colin down, exploiting his skills while keeping him harmless.  As a tactical officer, as a mere commoner, Colin had nothing to build a patronage network of his own, nothing he could use to parlay his skills into a power base.  

And he wasn't alone.  There were thousands, perhaps millions, of other commoners, kept down by a system that feared them even as their skills and abilities were exploited.  He could have protested, he could have made a fuss, but nothing would change; no commoner could stand against one of the Thousand Families.  The aristocrats would close ranks to protect their own.  If he disturbed the ceremony now, he would merely be arrested…and, if he were lucky, exiled to a prison world somewhere.  There was nothing he could do to stop Stacy accepting rewards that were rightfully his.

Raw hatred threatened to come bubbling up and overcome his mind, but he forced it back down, sealing it inside his mind.  There was nothing he could do, now.  He watched, his face a blank mask concealing seething hatred, and felt the first glimmerings of a plan forming at the back of his mind.  He could do nothing, now, but if he waited, pretended that he had accepted his role in Percival’s scheme of things, he would have an opportunity to extract revenge.  As Stacy stumbled through her speech, the plan took on shape and form…

It would be chancy.  His estimate made it clear that the odds of success wouldn’t be high, but it could be done.  By the time he accepted the transfer to Lightning and the squadron flickered out for Macore, the plan and his hatred solidified in his mind.  The first steps were easy to take…and then he was committed.

They would bring down the Empire…or die trying.

Chapter One

The woman who called herself Daria, escorted by her two hulking bodyguards, walked straight down the main avenue of Spacer City, ignoring the sidelong glances and muttered whispers that followed her.  Spacer City was no place for an unescorted woman, but it was uncommon to see an woman escorted by two obvious bodyguards, rather than pimps protecting their livelihoods or merchant crewmen protecting their female crewers.  Daria fitted neatly into neither category; just by the way she walked, she proved herself a woman of power.  Those who knew who she was kept away from her, knowing that being too close to her could be dangerous, while those who remained ignorant took in the bodyguards and stayed away.  Anyone who could afford to hire augmented bodyguards out on the Rim was rich and dangerous enough to make real trouble.

Daria caught a glimpse of her reflection as they stopped outside the small bar.  She’d chosen her appearance carefully, both to hide her origins and befuddle the male mind, and it never creased to amuse her.  She was tall, almost inhumanly tall, with long red hair that reached down her back, pale skin and bright green eyes.  Even dressed in a basic shipsuit, wearing the single gold star of her rank, she was stunning…and few would look past the appearance to realise that there was a very sharp mind underneath.  It was a tough life out on the Rim and she’d realised, quickly, that she had to use every advantage she had to keep herself at the forefront.  The Freebooters were not inclined to accept or tolerate weakness in the ranks.

“In here,” she said, and watched as one of her bodyguards checked the room out.  A handful of patrons, mainly higher-ranking Imperial Navy crewmen, glanced up as she entered, but otherwise paid her no attention.  They might not have known who she was, but the bar wasn’t a place to pick up a partner for the night, even though some of them might have considered trying to ask her to dance.  Half of the shady business deals on Macore were handled through the bar.  It wasn’t a social place.

“Clear,” the bodyguard said, finally.

“Thank you,” Daria said, and stepped fully inside the bar, allowing her eyes to adjust to the dim lighting.  The bar was equipped with the latest in counter-surveillance technology – she could see the faint shimmer of a standard dampening field – and, in theory, all discussions would be completely private.  Imperial Law forbade civilian possession of such devices, through, and when the Integration was complete, it would probably be harder to operate.  Daria wasn't too worried.  In her experience, everyone had a price, even Imperials from the Families.  “Where is…ah.”

The rear of the bar was divided into a series of small cubicles, as bare and unfurnished as a monk’s cell, the very bareness of the walls making it much harder to affix any kind of bugging device to the area.  The man waiting for her in the section grinned once at her as she took her seat, waved a Navy-issue detection wand over her, and sat back.  A moment later, Daria activated her own personal privacy shield, isolating them completely from the outside world.  They could talk in perfect privacy.

“I got your message,” she said, without preamble.  “Colin; what is so important that you had me risking a return here, now?”

Colin Harper shrugged.  Like most of the Imperial Navy officers, he’d had anti-aging treatments at a very early age, leaving him with the appearance of a seventeen-year-old teenager.  He hadn’t indulged in any form of vanity treatments, as far as she knew; his dark good looks, attractive in a bland sort of way, was his natural appearance.  It bespoke a certain self-confidence, or a lack of concern for appearances, and she suspected that it was the former.  She’d known him for three years and, during that time, she’d learned more about him than he would have felt comfortable knowing.

“The situation has changed,” he said, once he’d produced his own privacy shield.  The two fields merged together, making the task of any watcher much harder, as they would have to filter out two sets of harmonics.  The Security Detachment soldiers on Macore would probably find it suspicious, but almost everyone who was anyone used anti-surveillance devices.  “We may have to move faster than we had anticipated.”

Daria frowned once.  “How much faster?”

“I got a heads-up from my…source at Harmony Base,” Colin said, his dark eyes sombre.  “It seems that the Imperial Court has finally come to a decision on Macore.”

“Already?”  Daria asked, surprised and concerned.  She’d expected several more years, at least.  “I take it the decision was the one that everyone knew was inevitable, right from the start?”

Colin snorted.  “Was there any doubt?”

“No,” Daria said.  “I suppose the outcome was to be expected.”

There was a long moment of silence while they reflected on the problem.  Macore lay over ten thousand light years from Earth, the core of the Empire, and had been settled largely in isolation.  The original settlers had almost bankrupted themselves to afford the colony fleet and had taken out loans from the old Federation, finally committing themselves to a repayment schedule that would have awed a loan shark.  If everything had gone to plan, they would have found themselves paying off the debt for nearly five hundred years, but instead they’d taken the fleet and vanished into interstellar space.  The Federation, caught up in the Dathi War, hadn’t checked up on the colony fleet for nearly twenty years…and, after searching the empty world they’d declared as their destination, had concluded that the colony fleet had been lost in space.  Such things happened.

And, four years ago, an Imperial scoutship had stumbled across Macore.  The colony fleet had come much further than anyone had believed possible and had settled a world, establishing their own civilisation.  They might have hoped that Macore – a fairly wealthy world with seven daughter colonies – would have been able to meet the Federation without being bled white by the interest or exploited by corporate interests, but in the time since contact had been lost, everything had changed.  The Empire had arisen to replace the Federation…and it continued to maintain the debt.  Macore, when it had been discovered, had been presented with a simple choice; repay the debt, including the centuries of acuminated interest, or be ‘repossessed.’  Their independence would come to an end.

“It took them three years to decide that the current inhabitants were liable,” Daria said, shaking her head.  “Three years.  I suppose there wasn't anything else important to worry about back on Earth.”

“My source wasn't clear – there are limits to what they can pick up from the Thousand Families at such a distance – but there was a great deal of horse-trading going on under the table,” Colin said, dispassionately.  Daria wasn't fooled; she’d known him long enough to see the slow-burning anger under his calm voice.  “The Roosevelt Clan and the Kendal Clan have considerable interests in this sector and if they obtained a…claim on Macore itself, they would be well-positioned to secure the sector for themselves.”

“You mean bleed the sector white to feed their bloated hearts,” Daria snapped, unwilling to dissimulate, even now.  It had been nearly sixty years since she’d realised just how rigged the game was – so many people never realised that the game was rigged at all – and even now, it made her blood boil to think of it.  Macore would lose all of its individuality and become just another drab world – at best.  There were worse fates in the Empire.  “How long do we have?”

“Perhaps a month,” Colin said.  “My…source said that Admiral Percival” – and, for the first time, she heard a note of hatred creeping into his voice – “will probably receive official orders within the week and will act on them.  Given how…indolent he is, we can expect the first official piece of news within a fortnight and the…enforcers within the month.  It would be nice if he was lazy enough to delay for two months, but we could hardly count on it.”

“No,” Daria agreed.  “Real money, even by the Families and their standards, is at stake.”

“He won’t be allowed to delay,” Colin said.  “The demand to Macore will be simple; pay up or else.”

Daria felt an odd trace of dismay.  “Macore cannot pay,” she said, shaking her head.  “They might be able to pay for the original colony fleet, but they couldn’t meet the interest, not without…”

She shook her head.  “They couldn’t…”

“That’s the point,” Colin said.  “They can’t pay.  Even if they could, the Families would just keep tacking on additional demands until they found something that Macore literally couldn’t give them, and then bring down the hammer.  I suspect that none of the Empire’s financial institutions would agree to give Macore a loan that might cover the first instalment…”

“They’ll fight,” Daria predicted.  “How many of the people alive today signed those agreements with the Federation?”

“That won’t bother them,” Colin said.  “The issue of generational debt has been settled by a dozen court cases, after a thorough and impartial study of all the evidence, and confirmed by the Imperial Parliament.  The ancestors of the current population incurred the debt; the current population is liable for repayment.  And as for fighting…?”  He shrugged.  “How much chance does Macore have?”

Daria held his eyes.  “How much are you going to give them?”

Colin lifted his eyebrows in an exaggerated gesture of surprise.  “I do beg your pardon?”

Daria refused to back down.  “The Freebooter League has been supplying Macore with as much as we can,” she said, “but Macore is still at least ten years behind the Empire.  You know that as well as I do, probably better.  If the Sector Fleet comes knocking at the door, Macore is going to go down, without even scratching the paint on one of those damned superdreadnaughts.  The government knows that, but what can they do, other than fight or surrender?  Whatever they chose, they lose, right?”

“Right,” Colin said.

“And you’ve been building a…network,” Daria said.  “You’ve shown your hand more than once, when you tipped us off about Imperial Navy operations in the sector, and you’ve ensured that we got some access to the latest technology from the fleet.  You know the stakes as well as I do…and you know that if the Observation Squadron is broken up, your network is broken up as well.  Colin, tell me something; what are the stakes here for you?”

Colin said nothing for a long moment.  She could almost hear the gears turning behind his eyes as he thought quickly, even though his face betrayed nothing of his innermost thoughts.  Despite his young age, Colin had once been one of the most promising tactical minds of his generation, someone who should have gone far…and would have, in any other organisation.  As a Freebooter, Colin would have been a holy terror, founder of a group that rivalled her own, or exceeded it.  Perhaps she, too, would have been pulled under his banner.

And yet, could he trust her?  The Rim wasn't a place that rewarded trust, not when Imperial Intelligence and the Security Detachment were poking into every nook and cranny.  An indiscreet comment in the wrong place could lead to an investigation and, given Colin’s lack of family connections or patronage, wouldn’t need much evidence to convict him of treason and exile him to a prison world, if they didn’t simply shoot him on sight.  He needed to trust, and yet…how could he?

Her voice was very soft.  “Macore doesn’t have a chance, does it?”

“The Observation Squadron alone could trash everything they have in a stand-up fight,” Colin said.  There was an almost absented tone in his voice.  His thoughts were elsewhere.  “The heaviest unit in the Squadron is a battlecruiser, but they’re a generation more advanced than the battleships that make up the core of Macore’s fleet.  It would be painful, but it could be done, which is probably the reason why the Observation Squadron was dispatched in the first place.  If Macore decided to make a fight of it, there would be no problems with dispatching a fleet to crush resistance…”

He shrugged.  “Now, of course, they’ll just send in the superdreadnaughts,” he added.  “Resistance will get them nothing, but a few tens of thousands dead.”

Daria said nothing for a long moment.  “And so…what are we going to do?”

“You know what the network is for,” Colin said, finally.  She watched the conflicting emotions on his face and shivered.  He’d bared himself to her.  “I don’t want to go renegade, not like so many others; I want to tear down the Empire.”

“I see,” Daria said, finally.  She’d guessed at some of what lay behind Colin’s smile, but…the Empire was vast, expanding almost automatically now, integrating world after world into its tendrils.  The handful of non-human races encountered by exploration starships were simply invaded and assimilated as well.  Resisting it was difficult enough, and barely possible, but destroying it?  It didn’t seem doable, somehow.  “Can you do that?”

“The Empire only seems like a monolith,” Colin said, a new urgency in his tone.  “It can be challenged and beaten, if treated properly.  Everyone else who fought the Empire played to the Empire’s strengths.  We can play to its weaknesses and bring it to its knees.”

“And it might swat Macore anyway,” Daria said.  “Do you intend to use Macore as a base against them?”

Colin shook his head.  “As you said, Macore is likely to be targeted with the full force of the Imperial Navy,” he said.  “It’s not a moving target.  We must not give them an excuse to scorch the planet and be done with it.  I don’t intend to have anything to do with them, not once we have the ships in our hands…”

Daria listened as he finished outlining his plan.  “And this doesn’t bother you at all?”

“No,” Colin said.  He gave her an almost-puzzled look.  “Should it?”

“I’ve met plenty of Imperial Navy officers who I would be happy to throw out of the airlock,” Daria said.  “I’ve met ones who were on the take, and others who were total bastards, but you’re the first I’ve met who has planned to overthrow the Empire.  You swore an oath to uphold the Empire and the Imperial Law that binds it together and now you’re planning to shatter it.  Doesn’t that bother you at all?”

“I used to believe in the Empire,” Colin said.  “I used to think that it was better than any of the alternatives and if innocent people got mashed in the gears, it was the price for maintaining law and order across the stars.  I excused all of the excesses because I believed that they were…necessary to keep the Empire strong.  I thought that someday the system could be reformed from within…

“And then I had to face reality.  The Empire is…corrupt, run by the Families for their own benefit and no one else.  There are excesses and nightmares out there that makes what is going to happen to Macore look like nothing.  I looked at my own life and saw nothing, but eternal service to an Empire that doesn’t even notice the billions upon billions of lives blighted by its existence.”

He leaned closer.  “Does that answer your question?”

Daria smiled.  “Enough,” she said.  She suspected that he’d left part of the story out – the Empire was large enough that most of the…excesses were hard for anyone to grasp – but she could live with that.  The Freebooters League would follow her if there were a real chance at victory.  They knew what would happen to them, eventually, if the Empire kept expanding.  Even law-abiding independents were forced out of the markets and into debt with the massive shipping cartels that dominated the interstellar shipping lanes.  “Are you committed to this goal?”

Colin laughed harshly.  “What other choice do I have?”

“You could betray us all to the SD bastards,” Daria pointed out.  It had to be faced and faced squarely.  The remainder of the Freebooters would be slow to trust an Imperial Navy officer, whatever his reasons for joining them.  “You’re a respected officer…”

“They’d kill me anyway, just on suspicion,” Colin said.  “They don’t hesitate to use maximum force against the Socialists, or the Democrats; every time one of those movements rears its ugly head, the SDs come down on them hard.  They’ll view us all as being part of a political movement, carrying a political virus – freedom – and they’ll eventually kill us all.”

“Unless we win,” Daria said.  She winked at him with real amusement.  In some ways, hearing his speech was reassuring; he’d committed himself now.  “What are the odds of actual victory?”

Colin shrugged.  “One in ten,” he said.  “One way or another, even if we lose, the Empire’s complacency won’t survive.  I find a certain irony in the fact that they will have to become us in order to beat us, don’t you?”

Daria shook her head.  “This is all just academic to you, isn’t it?”

“Not since I realised just how high the stakes actually were,” Colin said.  He stood up and picked up his privacy device.  He held it in one hand, without resetting it or pocketing it.  It would be too revealing if the SDs found it.  “I’ll leave a message for you at the standard drops when…I assume the Geeks and Nerds are with us on this?”

“They said that they would be there when we needed them,” Daria assured him.  She looked down at the bare table and smiled wanly.  “If you can pull the first step off…”

“I can,” Colin said, with absolute confidence.  “What made you think that I was the only person involved in this?  If this be treason, then let us make the most of it.”

Chapter Two

It wouldn’t have surprised the SDs, or the commanding officers of the Observation Squadron, that their junior officers met regularly to discuss the Squadron’s affairs.  They had the responsibility of running the Squadron, after all, and sharing information was the only way to ensure that they didn’t end up with an embarrassing disaster, either by failing to grant proper honours to a visitor from Earth or something more dangerous.  Colin, as the executive officer of the flagship, had been organising such meetings since the Squadron had been assembled and, in doing so, had built up what appeared to be a fairly standard patronage network.

The SDs or any outside Security Officers would have been more surprised if they’d discovered that there was no patronage network.  The only way to progress within the fleet was to play the patronage game – as Colin had discovered to his cost – and everyone who became a commissioned officer would have little choice, but to attempt to develop their own network of junior officers who owed them their advancement.  The entire fleet was riddled with such networks, from Admirals who owed their positions to their Families and who brought up junior officers who could help make them look good, to Captains who selected their senior crewmen personally, just to ensure that everything ran smoothly.  No one would have been surprised to know that Colin had such a network, even though he was a lowly Commander, but they would have been terrified when they discovered what the network really was.  The surest proof that no one knew, Colin had often reflected, was that he was still alive.

“Welcome onboard,” he said formally, once the eight men and women who formed the core of his little group had taken their seats.  He’d hosted the meeting in the Lightning’s formal lounge – again, something that was technically against regulations, but a common practice – and waited long enough for them to select their refreshments and settle in.  It also gave him time to check the compartment’s security.  “We received a courier boat from Harmony last night, as you may be aware.”

There were nods.  “What isn’t common knowledge, at least not yet, is that the courier boat contained instructions from Admiral Percival for the Squadron,” Colin continued.  “The orders were exactly what we were expecting.”

He paused.  “The formal declaration regarding the Macore Colony Fleet debt will be made a week from today, backed up by a squadron of superdreadnaughts that will intimidate the natives into surrendering without a shot being fired,” he said, confirming their worst fears.  “Macore will be absorbed into the local interests within the sector, which in turn will become Clan holdings.  Captain Stoutjespyk” – the commanding officer of the Lightning and the effective CO for the Observation Squadron – “has been ordered to conduct a tactical survey of the system, just in case the natives intend to use force.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Commander Sosaku Tsuji said, tightly.  Tsuji might have looked perfectly Japanese – like all settlers of Edo and its daughter worlds, Tsuji’s ancestors had been engineered to ensure that they retained their oriental appearance, even though that led to charges of vanity – but there was no mistaking the brain that hid under his smile.  “Nine superdreadnaughts could trash everything they have without breaking a sweat.”

“True,” Colin agreed.  “I understand, from the more…informal notes accompanying the dispatch, that Admiral Percival is being urged to ensure that there is a fight, one that Macore can only lose.  There are, after all, important established interests that want to ensure that Macore gets…chastised for even thinking about not joining the remainder of humanity in the Empire.”

There was a long pause.  The Empire might have been willing to use extreme force to keep control of humanity, but it could be surprisingly legalistic.  Macore, joining the Empire on its own terms, would have retained a great deal of autonomy, a status that it could use to prevent outside interests from bleeding the small cluster of stars white.  If they resisted integration, something that was now almost inevitable, they could be crushed and brought into the Empire on the Empire’s terms, which meant that they could effectively be enslaved and no one would lift a hand to prevent it.  The Clans that ended up with the right to exploit Macore would strip it bare and it would become just another factory world, owned and operated by an outside power.  Resistance would be futile.

Colin scowled.  They would fight, and they would lose, both in space and on the ground.  He'd studied the various Socialist and Democratic uprisings carefully, as well as the Wrecker raids from outside the Rim, and they had been defeated, mainly because they couldn’t present more than a local threat.  They might throw the Empire off a world for a few months…and then the Empire would gather it’s strength and crush them, leaving a ruined world and a struggling population even deeper in debt.  Macore couldn’t win; the trumped-up charges would see to that.  They wouldn’t even stand a fighting chance.

“A month,” Commander Katy Garland said.  “Is that our time limit, then?”

“Yes,” Colin said.  He looked around the room.  They were all intelligent men and women, intelligent enough to understand the trap that faced them all, intelligent enough to know that they would never be permitted to rise much higher in the fleet.  The Imperial Navy frowned on allowing commoners into high-ranking positions; there were limits to what even the patronage system could do.  The mere assignment to the Observation Squadron had probably doomed their careers.  In his case, it was a parting shot from Admiral Percival; in theirs…

They’d been on duty long enough for him to sound them all out.  One by one, they’d become committed to the group, to the goal of shattering the Empire’s complacency, but deep inside, most of them had believed that the call would never come.  Something the size of the Empire couldn’t be challenged, or so the conventional wisdom ran; it was just too big and too powerful to defeat.  He’d convinced them that it could be done, but still they’d hesitated…until the hangman had arrived.

“It’s time to move,” he said.  “We need to seize control of the Observation Squadron and put the first step of the plan into operation.”

Commander Arun Prabhu lifted a single elegant eyebrow.  Like Tsuji, he’d been engineered to meet another ideal of perfection, the Brahmin.  His world had recreated the Hindu caste system and enforced it with a combination of genetic engineering and heavy policing, but Prabhu had broken free and joined the Imperial Navy.  His family had been wealthy back on his homeworld, but in the navy, he’d been just another commoner.  He’d reached his current position through sheer brilliance and determination, but his intensity had worried enough of his superiors to ensure that he would never be promoted to a command position.  Colin was, in fact, rather surprised that Prabhu remained alive.

“I understand your point,” Prabhu drawled, “but can we take the superdreadnaughts?”

He didn’t, Colin noted with a hint of amusement, express any doubt about taking the Observation Squadron.  That would have been easy enough; the Imperial Navy lost a handful of starships every year, either through crewmembers going renegade, or through the Captain deciding that the life of a pirate suited him better.  It would be straightforward to remove the nominal commanding officers – the Observation Squadron was another way of removing deadbeats from important posts – and take the ships, but the superdreadnaughts were another matter.  If they couldn’t be taken, reasonably intact, the rebellion was doomed from the start.

Colin had simulated it extensively.  It depended on the exact assumptions fed into the simulators, but the most optimistic outcome had been mutual destruction of the two forces.  Nine superdreadnaughts were an almost unstoppable force, even if they were ponderous and hard to manoeuvre, and the Observation Squadron’s twenty-nine ships were all smaller and far less protected.  The more likely outcome had been the squadron getting wiped out for the loss of one or two superdreadnaughts.  Capturing the superdreadnaughts would turn them into a real threat; failing to capture them would just leave them as another fleet of pirates, if better equipped than the others.

“We can,” he said, flatly.  “All we have to do is get a force of armed Marines onboard them.”

Prabhu looked over at Captain Neil Frandsen.  “And can even you do that?”

Colin concealed his private amusement.  There were exactly three groups permitted to carry arms onboard Imperial Navy starships; senior officers, SD troopers…and the Marines.  Where the SDs were a blunt instrument, the Marines were a scalpel, the most highly-trained force in existence.  They were also disliked and distrusted by the senior officers, who suspected their loyalties.  The Marines had a bond that made them very loyal to the ideal of the Marines, a training course that taught them to take the initiative in everything they did and the weapons and experience to pose a serious threat to the established order.  There were few Family boys and girls in the Marine ranks and those that were, much to the chagrin of the Families, tended to be absorbed into the Marines.  They were the most egalitarian unit in the Empire.

“It won’t be easy,” Frandsen admitted.  He’d been the second most dangerous recruit and Colin had only approached him because they needed the Marines, but he’d had his own reasons to throw in his lot with the rebels.  “The original plan was to wait for the superdreadnaughts to dock at Orbit One, as per standard procedure, and board them then.  Once we punched through the airlock, we could take them quickly, if not easily.  If they’re coming in armed to the teeth, expecting trouble, they won’t dock at the station until the system is thoroughly under their control.”

“I hate to be cold-blooded about this,” Tsuji said, “but should we not let them go ahead with slaughtering the defenders and then strike?”

Colin shook his head.  “If we let them have time to get established, they’ll realise that we seem to have lost our commanding officers,” he pointed out.  “The new Commodore” – and he thought cold thoughts about her – “will certainly want to inspect the ships and…well, we could hardly keep her from realising that something is very wrong.  I thought about trying to take her hostage, but if she’s still winning friends and influencing people, her exec is likely to dare us to kill her.”

Frandsen laughed.  “I don’t suppose that you have any friends on her flagship?”

“None in a position to help us,” Colin said.  He’d considered that as well, but there was no way that he could have influenced the choice of superdreadnaughts at such a distance.  Admiral Percival had probably just selected a handful of ships and pushed them together into a temporary squadron, if only to help conceal his ally’s incompetence.  “We need an alternative.”

“We can’t stand down, not now,” Major Vincent Anderson said flatly.  “If they take over Macore directly, and it seems that unless they surrender, that’s exactly what they’re going to do, the SDs and the Inspectorate General will be into everything.  They may not discover our presence, but they will certainly make it much harder for us to conduct operations, let alone move ahead with the real plan.  The more elements here, well…”

He shrugged.  Colin couldn’t fault his logic, or the way the others tensed up when the Security Officer spoke.  He was, after all, the person who should have discovered their conspiracy and reported it to the Empire, rather than joining it.  It still bothered Colin that while there was no question that Anderson hated the Empire, he didn’t know why he had such strong feelings.  He’d hacked into the database one evening and read through the files, even the ones that were supposed to be open only to the Captain, and found nothing.  The man’s past was one of loyal and devoted service to the Empire, but he’d tested him and Anderson hadn’t taken any of the opportunities to betray them to the SDs or even the Captain.

“I know,” Katy said.  She had a determined glint in her tone.  Her commanding officer was a sexist bigot with wandering hands.  “We move now, or we don’t move at all…and I, for one, am sick of waiting.  Colin, we have to move, now.”

Commander Thomas Pearson scowled.  “Yes,” he said, “but how do we deal with the nine very large and powerful superdreadnaughts bearing down on us?”

Colin smiled.  “Carefully,” he said, and winked.  The Empire had many weaknesses, after all, and the prime one was its supreme confidence in its servants.  He didn’t understand it – the evidence suggested that not everyone, particularly those who got mashed in the gears, could be considered trustworthy – but it was useful.  “For a start, we’re going to give Admiral Percival the tactical survey he wants…”

“He probably knows it all already,” Kady pointed out.  “Macore hasn’t managed to expand their defence forces to dangerous levels, unless they’ve been hiding something we haven’t noticed, but…”

Commander Simon Horvat shook his head.  “They haven’t added anything that might pose a danger to us, let alone the superdreadnaughts,” he said.  He’d met and married his wife on Macore, something that had probably torpedoed whatever was left of his career, and had an interest in not seeing the world ground beneath the Imperial jackboot.  “Their battleships won’t last longer than ten minutes, at most.”

“We’re going to create a threat,” Colin said, calmly.  “We’re going to create a fictional report, one that will have to be hand-delivered to each of the superdreadnaughts, as per standard procedure.  The Marines will be in the shuttles, armed to the teeth and prepared for action.  Once they dock with the superdreadnaughts, they will take the superdreadnaughts.”

All eyes turned to Frandsen.  “Can your people do that?”

“There will not be any effective resistance at first,” Frandsen said.  “The crewers won’t be armed and the superdreadnaughts only carry a handful of Marines.  Once we crash the computer network, they can surrender and be taken off the ship, or freeze to death.”

“We might also find allies onboard the superdreadnaughts,” Katy mused.  “We’re hardly the only ones who’ve been marginalized by the Empire.”

Colin nodded.  The life of the ordinary crewmen and women wasn't a kind one.  They tended to sign up for ten years of service, but not all survived the experience, between bullying and hazing among the lower ranks, to official harassment.  A good Captain could forge his crew into a single effective weapon, but a poor Captain – or worse, a disinterested one – might end up discovering that he had destroyed his crew’s morale, creating a crew that tore itself apart at the drop of a hat.  The senior officers couldn’t be trusted – any superdreadnaught Captain would be sure to surround himself with his trusted sycophants – but the junior officers and crew would probably be interested in joining the rebellion.  The danger would be killing too many of them when the starships were boarded.

“We’ll have to take some basic precautions,” Frandsen said, putting Colin’s thoughts into words.  “The odds are that there are a handful of spies in the crew, people who might report back to the SDs if we took them into our confidence.”

“They probably can be identified, given time,” Anderson said.  He’d fingered seven such spies within the Observation Squadron for Colin.  Two of them, Colin had been shocked to discover, had been on his list of junior officers to recruit.  One of them had even had a fatal shuttle accident, just to ensure that he didn’t have a chance to pass on what he might have learned.  “Unless we take them into an inhabited system, what are they going to do?  Transmit a radio message?”

Colin laughed.  By the time any such message reached the Empire’s borders, the rebellion would have occurred and the outcome would have been decided, one way or the other.  It was another weakness of the Empire; it took, literally, three months to send a message from Harmony Base to Earth.  The only way to move messages between the stars was on starships; no one, despite an intensive research program, had managed to develop a means of FTL communication.

“One week,” he said, firmly.  The meeting couldn’t go on forever, after all, or some others would wonder why it was taking so long.  There was always the danger that Anderson didn’t know about all the spies.  “In one week, we’re going to move on the starships and take command.”

“Understood,” Pearson said.  The others signalled their own agreement.  They’d known that that was coming.  “I take it that you will inform the others?”

“Yes,” Colin said.  “A tactical survey requires that I touch base with everyone, after all.”  He glanced around the table.  “We’re committed, now, so if anyone has any doubts, speak now or forever hold your tongue.”

There was a long silence.  “Good,” Colin said, standing up.  “In that case, I think we’d better return to our ships and put the first steps of the plan into operations.”

“One point,” Horvat said.  “What about Macore?”

Colin hesitated for a fraction of a second.  “What about Macore?”

“They’re going to start preparing to fight,” Horvat said.  “What happens if they decide to jump us before we’re ready to deal with the superdreadnaughts?”

“We can’t risk telling them anything,” Colin said.  “Quite apart from the fact that the SDs have been busy down there, and they have a few turncoats down on the surface working for them, we’re going to have to leave the system.  If we leave anything that suggests that they were involved in this, the Empire will scorch the planet, so…”

He held Horvat’s eyes.  “I understand your feelings here, Simon, but we’ll just have to take the risk,” he added.  “If they jump us, we’ll have to fight them off, just like loyal and obedient servants of the Empire…and the Thousand Families.”

Chapter Three

“Glad you could make it, Colin,” Captain Stanford Stoutjespyk said, as Colin stood to attention in the Captain’s quarters.  “I trust that you had a pleasant evening?”

“Yes, sir,” Colin said, concealing his contempt behind a well-practiced façade of polite interest.  Stoutjespyk wasn’t, by far, the worst Captain in the Imperial Navy, but he wasn’t suited for his role.  He was not only lazy and indolent, but something of a lush as well, allowing Colin to effectively run the starship while he drank and entertained his fellow commanding officers.  “I managed to chase down the report on the drive fluctuation in Reactor Three.”

“Excellent,” Stoutjespyk said, absently.  Colin had thoughtfully prepared a whole series of documents, covering the entire fluctuation, all of which would be filed away and never accessed again.  The Inspectorate-General would have a few things to say to Captain Stoutjespyk – or they would, if he hadn’t had excellent family connections.  No self-respecting fleet officer liked paperwork, but regulations insisted that every little problem be documented, in triplicate.  There were times when Colin suspected that the excess of paperwork was a subtle revenge on the fleet by some disgruntled clerk in Human Resources.

Stoutjespyk smiled thinly. “Cindi, my dear, please fetch the good Commander a drink,” he said, looking back towards the bedroom.  “Perhaps some of the latest from the Kent Estates…”

“Of course, sir,” a female voice said.  Colin heard the noise of clinking glasses and smiled inwardly; the Captain was making an early start on his drinking.  “It’s coming right up.”

Cindi stepped into the light and held out a tray with two glasses.  Colin took his gravely, taking a polite sip before placing it down on the table, mentally shaking his head in awe.  Cindi was the product of a combination of genetic engineering, bred into her family line before she was born, and later tinkering to ensure that she fitted the Captain’s tastes perfectly.  Her presence onboard the Lightning was – technically – against regulations as well, but someone of Stoutjespyk’s rank could have almost anyone declared a crewmember.  Blonde, blue-eyed and perfect, far too good to be true, her presence on the ship was the cause of plenty of lower deck speculation on just what they did together.

Stoutjespyk took a long swig of his own glass and allowed Cindi to refill it.  Colin had never considered himself a wine-snob – and, truthfully, he had never been rich enough to develop expensive tastes – but watching the Captain treat it as if it were a glass of water, or rotgut produced in an illegal still somewhere within the starship was a biting reminder of the difference in their status.  Stoutjespyk’s career, assuming he didn’t really screw up, was assured; Colin would be lucky to make Captain on his own, regardless of his suitability for the rank.  It was no wonder that it had been so easy to build his little conspiracy.

“We have our orders from the Admiral,” Stoutjespyk said, finally, after more small talk.  Colin, who knew what the orders were already, said nothing.  “We have to conduct a proper tactical survey of the system, at once.”

“Ah,” Colin said, calmly.  “I assume that the Admiral intends to deal with the locals as soon as the superdreadnaughts arrive?”

“Of course not,” Stoutjespyk assured him.  “The locals might be upset, but they’d have to be crazy to pick a fight with the superdreadnaughts, so I expect they’ll accept their role within the Empire.  The courts made a fair and impartial survey of the information provided by ourselves and confirmed that the Admiral’s view of the situation was the correct one.”

I’m sure, Colin thought, wryly.  He took the datapad Stoutjespyk offered him and scanned it quickly.  The orders were brief and to the point, but included enough background information to allow him to read between the lines and deduce the shape of the deals that had been cut, back on Earth.  The main point, as he’d expected, was that the Macore Colony Fleet had definitely intended to avoid paying back their loans, by ignoring the planet they’d selected and proceeding onwards into interstellar space.  That, as far as the courts had been concerned, proved that the loss of contact had been no accident and therefore the descendents were liable for the debt and the centuries of interest.

“All signed and sealed then,” he said, dryly.  It was only of academic interest now.  “Do you want me to conduct the tactical survey as soon as possible?”

“Please see to it,” the Captain said, graciously.  It was his responsibility, at least according to the instructions, but Colin dreaded to think of what would happen if Stoutjespyk carried out the survey himself.  The golden ring he wore on one finger glinted in the light.  “Let me see the results as soon as you have them.”

“Of course,” Colin said.  He leaned forward.  “Sir, we should also put the Squadron on a war footing.”

Stoutjespyk, to give him his due, at least listened to suggestions.  “A war footing?”

“There will be rumours of the court’s decision by now,” Colin said.  It was perfectly true.  “Macore might decide to jump us and try to destroy the squadron.  If we’re ready for it, we might avoid a fight.”

“See to that as well,” Stoutjespyk said.  Colin carefully kept his face blank, despite the flush of victory; putting the ships on a war footing, with drills and unexpected exercises, would serve to cover up all kind of movements.  “The Admiral would not be happy to learn that we neglected preparations for war.”

“Yes, sir,” Colin said.  He bowed politely to Cindi.  “If you’ll excuse me…”

Outside the Captain’s quarters, he nodded once to the Captain’s personal bodyguard and set off down the corridors, down towards his office.  There were times when he suspected that Cindi was really too good to be true – no one was that dumb in real life – and that she was actually Imperial Intelligence’s asset on the starship, but Anderson had been convinced that she was nothing more than what she appeared to be.   A brain-burned pleasure slave, someone who was little more than property, was rare outside the Core Worlds, but Stoutjespyk certainly had the connections to obtain one.  Perhaps, once they had seized the ships, something could be done about her, or maybe the best they could do would be to give her to someone who would take care of her.  The very concept of such slavery made him sick.  Whatever replaced the Empire, he was determined that it wouldn’t include genetic slaves and mentally-altered people.

He stepped into his office and secured the door, before sitting down in front of his terminal and composing his thoughts.  The most important problem was seizing the Captain’s ring…before he could use it to crash the computers and render Lightning completely useless without a full refit.  The ring wasn't just decorative; it gave the Captain complete access to his ship’s systems and complete authority over everything that took place on his ship.  It was, in theory, linked to one person only, but the Nerds and Geeks had developed a way of cracking the ring’s protections and using it for themselves.  Once they took the ships, unlocking them would be straightforward…

The next few hours were spent composing orders for the other ships.  Colin knew that he was about to make himself unpopular with the other officers, even the ones who were part of the conspiracy, but there was little choice.  Every department, in every ship, would be ordered to carry out a full series of checks on their systems, followed by a set of simulated war games, as close as the fleet could come to exercising without actually manoeuvring in space.  The accountants back on Earth disliked actual drills, citing the vast costs of firing off dummy missiles into space, but any fleet commander worthy of the name knew that they were necessary.  They’d stack the deck in their favour as much as possible, if only by checking that their starships were in perfect condition and their crews prepared for the drills, but they would carry them out.  Colin’s orders were typical; war games were hardly as random as they should have been.  It was a rare war game, particularly not a live-fire exercise, when the outcome was not already known in advance.

Idiots, he thought, as he composed the orders.  They were common orders; the drill, such as it was, wouldn’t be a surprise to anyone.  It would look good and that was about all.  He’d directed one of the rare random war games, back when he'd been on then-Commodore Percival’s staff, and that had been a fascinating experience.  They’d learned more from an hour of random unplanned manoeuvres than from days of standard exercises.  On the other hand, Percival had set him up and promised him the world, only to renege on his promise to Colin, instead keeping a different promise, to an incompetent bitch from the Families.  Colin was looking forward to that meeting.  

Once he’d finished dispatching the orders, he stood up and left his office.  It was time to make himself even more unpopular and inspect the ship.  If nothing else, it would provide a chance to check in with everyone and ensure that they were ready.  Nothing could be left to chance.

***
“The components have all been replaced,” Engineer Ahmed assured Colin, as he peered into Reactor Two.  The power fluctuation wouldn’t have been dangerous, not as long as they refrained from going to full military power, but it would have been an embarrassing note on their readiness report.  The squadron hadn’t seen any action, outside of tackling a handful of pirates, since it had been formed and dispatched to Macore, but any problems would be seized upon by the Admiral and his staff, particularly if they were looking for a scrape goat.  “I have updated the logs as per regulations.”

“Of course,” Colin said, choosing to ignore the slight defensiveness in the man’s voice.  Ahmed, like himself, had been detailed to the Rim, paying for a superior’s mistakes.  The first time Colin had inspected the Engineering Compartment, he'd discovered enough falsities in the readiness reports and the logs – a court-martial offence – to have the entire crew executed for gross misconduct.  Instead, he’d chewed Ahmed out and had been surprised by the man’s renewed devotion to duty, even though he had to carry out random checks.  “Show me” – he glanced down at the datapad – “Flux Oscillator #23.”

“Here, sir,” Ahmed said, opening the correct compartment.  Colin inspected it quickly, comparing serial numbers, and then closed it again.  “It’s been logged and inspected by the other crew.”

“Excellent,” Colin said, and made a note on his datapad.  The remaining checks of the compartment revealed no discrepancies.  Ahmed had done wonders in reshaping his department, once he had realised that he had a superior who wasn’t interested in avoiding blame, but only results.  The crew might consider Colin a bastard, behind his back, but they respected him.  “We’ll be engaging in a lockdown drill in three days, so prepare for it as normal…”

The inspection of the shuttlebay, the sickbay and the armoury passed without incident, much to Colin’s private relief.  The starships maintained a quiet competition amongst themselves and Lightning, thanks to his efforts, had kept the lead…and, so far, as in no danger of falling behind.  He paused to watch a simulated gunnery drill, where the point defence officers struggled to repel a wave of missiles intended to destroy the ship, and smiled with pride when they successfully preserved the ship long enough for the drives to cycle and flicker out.  The attack drills were less successful, but the weapons officers were correcting all of the problems even as he watched, learning from their mistakes.  Colin had ordered a degree of randomness programmed into those particular simulations…

His wristcom buzzed.  “Commander,” Lieutenant Commander Clifford Trout said, “I have the updated tactical survey for your perusal.”

“Save it for the moment,” Colin ordered.  Trout should have been a Commander by now, if not a Captain in his own right, but a habit of speaking his mind had earned him, instead, a posting to Lightning.  He would have made an ideal destroyer Captain, but without the connections, he would be lucky to rise any higher.  He was yet another member of Colin’s little group.  “I’m going to inspect Marine Country.  Once I’ve completed the inspection, we’ll discuss the survey.”

He smiled to himself as Trout signed off.  There was little point, one way or the other, in worrying about the tactical survey.  He doubted that Macore would risk everything in attacking the Observation Squadron…and, even if they did, they would lose.  That wasn't the problem, but if they attacked, they would almost certainly scuttle Colin’s plans as well.  He’d thought hard about contacting them, perhaps through Daria and the Freebooters, but if Imperial Intelligence or the SDs picked up a hint that Macore had been involved, they’d drop an asteroid on the planet.

Marine Country was, by tradition, almost completely isolated from the remainder of the ship.  The smaller ships, destroyers and light cruisers, had the entire crew jammed together, but Lightning and her fellow battlecruisers, to say nothing of the much larger superdreadnaughts, could afford to isolate the Marines.  Command inspections of Marine Country were rare, but Colin had been careful to establish a track record of regular inspections, providing a cover for discussions with Captain Neil Frandsen.

“You’ll be pleased to hear we’re all ready,” Frandsen assured him, once Colin had sat down in his office.  The Marines could be informal to the point of rudeness sometimes, mainly as a mark of their independence, but Colin found it somewhat refreshing.  It certainly beat the exaggerated deference offered by some of the lower ranks.  “If pirates try to board any of the nearby freighters, we’ll be ready to deal with them.”

Colin nodded.  The Marines were allowed the independence they enjoyed for a number of reasons, but the most important one, or at least the most important one that anyone would admit to, was that they were the best.  They had a long track record of boarding hijacked freighters and pirate ships and recovering them and their crews, alive and intact.  Frandsen and his department was the only one on the ship that persistently scored perfectly during inspections.  The Marine Company embarked on Lightning was the deadliest fighting unit, man for man, for a thousand light years.

Frandsen leaned closer.  “We can speak freely here,” he said, softly.  “How are you feeling?”

“Excited and nervous,” Colin admitted.  It was, if anything, an understatement.  He’d started the ball rolling and now…all he could do was wait.  He almost wanted to launch the coup now, just to get it over with and done before something went wrong.  The unplanned exercises he'd conducted had realised that something always went wrong.  “What about your people?”

“They’re ready,” Frandsen said, calmly.  Colin wanted to ask him, openly, why he was so confident, but it was something he couldn’t ask.  Not now.  Maybe it could be discussed after the rebellion.  “I assume that we’re going to hold the lockdown drill on schedule?”

“Yes,” Colin said, flatly.  The chaos of a lockdown would keep the starship’s crew, apart from those involved in the coup, out of the way until it was too late.  He suspected that most of the crew would be quite happy to join, once the mutiny was a foregone conclusion, but during the actual takeover they couldn’t risk someone having cold feet.  Humans, at least in his experience, tended to prefer the familiar to grasping a chance at a new life.  “I know that you prefer not to be informed in advance, but…”

Frandsen snorted.  “What a terrible display of cheating,” he said.  The Marines had always opposed the planned exercises and drills.  They’d claimed that they didn’t prove anything and Colin suspected that they were right.  Annoyingly, back when he’d taken up his position, they’d aced the drills despite lacking the advance warning of the other departments.  “I suppose I can let it pass, just this time.”

“Good,” Colin said.  It was hard to admit that there was nothing more that he could do, at least to ensure success, but now, all he could do was wait…and play the role of a loyal Commander of the Imperial Navy.  Captain Stoutjespyk would be expecting the summery of the tactical survey, and he’d have to prepare exercises, but all of that was routine.  The real plan would have to wait.  “Have you looked through your records for the superdreadnaughts?”

“They haven’t provided us with the updates yet,” Frandsen admitted.  Colin scowled; it was typical.  The bureaucrats back on Earth insisted on having a report, in triplicate, for every wasted rivet on every ship in the fleet, but they were much slower about sending out the latest updates, fleet lists and other information.  Information was power, after all, and the Navy’s lords and masters would want to keep as much as possible their exclusive property.  “I don’t even have an update from Marine sources on Harmony.”

“So we might have allies on the superdreadnaughts, or we might have…none,” Colin said.  It would be another problem.  They needed the ships and, ideally, they needed the crews as well.  The Freebooters were enthusiastic, but they lacked the experience to actually crew and operate the latest Imperial ships.  The crews would probably be quite happy to come over to the rebels, but there was no way to prime them in advance, not without risking everything.  “I guess we’ll just have to be careful.”

“Very careful,” Frandsen agreed dryly.  He grinned up at Colin.  “Now, if there was nothing else, I have some drills for the boys and girls.”

Colin smiled.  “Good luck,” he said, standing up.  Frandsen wanted to get on with drilling his beloved Marines…and Colin had work of his own to do.  “Let me have your report as soon as possible.”

Chapter Four

The evidence was very clear.

Major Vincent Anderson smiled to himself as he carefully erased any signs of Colin’s plans from the main computer and sat back in his office.  The post of Security Officer was rarely a demanding one, but few people really appreciated just how much access the Security Officer had to the starship’s systems, from the main computer files to the hundreds of surveillance devices scattered through the starship.  Colin had been good, better than anyone else Anderson had met or heard of, but even his plans had eventually become clear.  His patronage network was far more than just a patronage network…and Anderson had been tantalised.

He had considered carrying out his duty and reporting it to the Captain, or perhaps arresting Colin and his fellow conspirators directly, but instead he had waited.  There was little real chance for promotion for him either, or any meaningful role in the future, regardless of his success rate.  He’d once hoped to rise high, but it hadn’t taken long before he’d realised that he was in a dead end job, regardless of the power of his position.  The crewmen of Lightning might dread and fear him, but he would never have even the prospects they had; he knew too much.  Power, real power, would always be denied him; at best, he would remain a Security Officer for the rest of his life.  It wasn’t likely that he would have a chance to make such an impact that they would have to promote him.  What sort of chances did Security Officers have to shine?

Like Colin, he knew he could do better.  Given the chance, he knew he could rise higher in the hierarchy, but that chance would never come, not under the Empire.  The men and women who wielded such vast powers within the Empire feared people with ambition, even their own; indeed, one reason the fleet was in such a state was because they rarely allowed competent people to rise, regardless of their origins.  Anderson had a perfect view of the corruption and decadence spreading through the Imperial Navy, from starships and personnel that didn’t exist in reality to commanding officers taking bribes from pirates and even rebels, and he hated it.  He would have loved to clear it all out and start again, but the very structure of the Imperial Navy and its promotion prospects ensured that he would never have the chance, not under the Empire.

He didn’t care, really, what Colin wanted to replace the Empire with, as long as he had that chance.  He had thrown his lot in with Colin without hesitation and that meant taking actions to shield Colin from discovery, until it was too late.  The danger, of course, was that some rebel who was unaware of his involvement would roll a fragmentation grenade into his cabin, under the impression that they were doing Colin a favour, but that risk just made life worth living.  For the first time in far too long, Anderson felt as if he were living again.

Time for the final step, he thought, and keyed his communicator.  “We have ten minutes until the lockdown,” he said, once his handful of constables had responded.  He had only seven men to maintain order on the starship, although he could call on help from the Marines if additional muscle was required, but it was more than enough for the real task.  “Proceed at once to arrest the targets, Code Blue.”

He smiled again as he closed the channel.  The Imperial Navy was riddled with spies and agents, reporting back to Imperial Intelligence, the SDs, or even individual Clan Heads.  Anderson wasn't supposed to know about them, but most of them had betrayed themselves to experienced eyes within the first months of their arrival on the starship – and on the Observation Squadron.  His constables knew nothing of the plans for the rebellion, but he could use them to arrest a handful of crewmen under the Code Blue protocols, regardless of their guilt or innocence.  He’d carefully selected the targets to ensure that he made a clean sweep of the spies…or, he acknowledged grimly, the spies he knew about.  It was very possible that there were others too careful to betray themselves.

His terminal chimed and he turned back to work.  The latest courier boat was on the verge of flickering out and he had to examine the crew’s messages first, just to ensure that they didn’t reveal anything that was regarded as classified.  Normally, it was a bitch of a job, but now…now, he just pushed the scramble key and transmitted a message file full of gibberish to the tiny starship.  It would look like a glitch in a communications node…and if the spies had sent any warning, it would be hopelessly scrambled.  He sat back and forced himself to relax.

There were only ten minutes to go.

***
The Lightning’s command chair had been designed by Captain Stoutjespyk personally and reassembled, more than anything else, an extremely comfortable throne.  It  stood on a raised dais, allowing Colin to peer down into any of the stations without making it obvious, while a pair of smaller consoles kept him updated on the status of the starship.  Lightning looked perfectly normal, but he could tell from countless tiny signs that the crew were preparing for the lockdown drill, ensuring a perfect result.

His lips twitched.  One way or the other, it would be a lockdown drill that no one would ever forget.

The timer bleeped and he keyed his console.  “Now hear this,” he said, knowing that his voice would be booming out all over the ship, “security emergency, deck nine.  Lockdown protocols in effect…now!  I repeat, lockdown protocols in effect.”

He glanced over at the tactical officer.  “Initiate lockdown protocols,” he ordered.  

Trout didn’t hesitate.  The lockdown alarm started to sound and the lights dimmed, coded panels blinking a warning to the entire crew, while the protocols went into effect.  The lockdown was intended to prevent anyone from moving about the starship without proper authorisation from the bridge, regardless of their authority; right now, compartments were being sealed all over the starship.  The sleeping crewmembers, off duty, would be locked into their cabins and wardrooms, while the on-duty crew would be secured in their compartments.  It would be a serious problem if Lightning were to be attacked while in lockdown, as the damage control teams couldn’t move around the ship, but while they were safe, it wouldn’t pose a danger.

Here goes nothing, Colin thought, and keyed the intercom again.  “Now hear this,” he added.  “We have a security breach, decks nine, ten, eleven and twelve.  Counter-boarding protocols are now in effect.  Marines, man your stations!”

He glanced up at the display, wondering when the Captain would call him to demand what the hell was going on.  Stoutjespyk hadn’t authorised an expansion of the lockdown drill.  Colin had timed the drill so that the Captain would be in his cabin, and trapped by the lockdown, but if he used his command authority, he could leave his quarters and head to the bridge.  He’d rigged the computers, he hoped, so that they would be convinced that there was an air leak just outside the Captain’s cabin, but the Captain could still override them.  

The displays lit up, revealing the armoured Marines moving through the ship, hunting for fictional attackers…and, just incidentally, taking up positions that would allow them to dominate the ship.  Armed and armoured, resistance would be utterly futile, although Colin suspected that none would be offered.  No one junior to a Lieutenant was allowed to carry arms on an Imperial Navy starship, unless there was a very real chance that the starship would be boarded.  That happened about as often as a star going supernova.  The Marines recovered a handful of crewmen who’d been trapped in sealed corridors when the lockdown went into effect, but otherwise had no problems reaching their positions.

Right on cue, the communicator buzzed.  “Colin, what the bloody hell is going on?”

“Lockdown protocols, sir,” Colin said, calmly.  Inside, he was singing with excitement.  He’d known that he would have to go down to the Captain’s cabin personally…and, if he were lucky, the Captain would order him down in person.  “The crew are securing the ship as per orders.”

He glanced over at another display.  The data network that linked the starships in the squadron together were reporting that all of them had gone into lockdown…and, he hoped, that the transfer of power was proceeding smoothly.  A misstep here could ruin dozens of carefully-constructed plans, even if most of the starships were firmly under control.  It would be ironic, indeed, if Macore picked this moment to launch an attack, but the last tactical survey had reported that their starships were still in low orbit, trapped within the gravity shadow of the planet.

“I never ordered a complete lockdown,” the Captain protested, angrily.  “I certainly didn’t order counter-boarding drills!”

“They’re part of the preparations to go on a war footing,” Colin said.  “I’ll be down in a few minutes with the report, sir.”

“See that you are,” Stoutjespyk growled.  He wouldn’t venture out of his cabin until the all-clear had been sounded and the starship returned to normal.  “I expect to see you in two minutes exactly.”

“Yes, sir,” Colin said, biting down the response that came to mind.  He'd almost stolen Stoutjespyk’s starship from under him and all that remained was dealing with the Captain himself.  It was much more elegant, he’d decided when he’d drawn up the plan, than the traditional firefight on the bridge, while ensuring that the starship remained completely intact.  “I’m on my way now.”

He stood up.  “Trout has the bridge,” he said.  “Commander, you have your orders.  You know what to do.”

“Yes, sir,” Trout said.  “Good luck.”

Colin opened the bridge’s airlock with his command authority and left the bridge.  The three armoured Marines who had taken up position outside the hatch saluted him before two of them went into the bridge to provide reinforcements to Trout, while the third remained outside to block access.  There were only three locations on the starship that had to be held to control the ship completely – the bridge, engineering and life support – and his conspirators manned all of them.  The Marines would merely serve to safeguard what they’d taken, in the unlikely event of an organised attempt to retake the ship by the crew, although he doubted that any such attempt would even be made.  Captain Stoutjespyk might have been able to rally the crew, if only because too many crewmen would believe that the rebellion was doomed to fail, but no one else had the rank…or wasn’t already part of the conspiracy.

He passed two more Marines as he walked down the corridor.  The starship felt different to him now, almost still and silent, despite the ever-present humming of the drive.  The command deck, the most heavily protected section of the starship, was built around the bridge, a serious design flaw that no one had ever bothered to correct.  Colin could see their logic – anything that penetrated that far could probably take out the ship completely – but it still galled him, even as it made his life easier.  The Captain’s cabin was also guarded by a pair of Marines, watching for any intruders…or any attempt to leave the cabin.  Under lockdown protocols, even the Captain wasn't supposed to leave where he’d been caught, but Colin had prepared on the assumption that Stoutjespyk might leave his cabin.  A high-ranking officer had a different attitude to rules and regulations than a junior…

The thought made him smile.  The Academy had lost a handful of cadets when a member of the Families had ignored safety regulations, peerlessly convinced that they didn’t apply to him.  Colin wouldn’t have minded that, except the idiot had managed to get five other people killed as well, all junior cadets with their lives ahead of them.  He knew perfectly well it was safe to step into the compartment, but he still felt a twinge of alarm at stepping into a section where the computer was warning of an air leak, even through no such leak was possible.  They’d been trained from Selection to listen to such warnings.

One hand checked the laser pistol he wore at his belt; the other pressed the buzzer and waited for admittance.  The door hissed open, protesting all the way, as the Captain used his command authority to override the safety warnings.  Colin took a breath and stepped into the cabin, composing himself.  It was going to be harder than he had thought and he almost wanted to withdraw, but he'd committed himself a week ago to going through with the scheme.  Too many people were counting on him now.

“Colin,” Stoutjespyk snapped.  “What exactly are you doing?”

Colin felt his eyes flicker around, like a man trapped on a road by advancing headlights.  It made him look trapped…and allowed him to check for Cindi.  The girl was nowhere to be seen.  She wasn't allowed to leave the Captain’s quarters, which meant that she was probably still in the bedroom, unless she was cooking Stoutjespyk his breakfast.  He didn’t consider her a threat, but he had to take her into custody as well.  She was too dangerous, at least potentially, to leave running around on her own.

“I’m carrying out a drill,” he said, defensively.  Let Stoutjespyk think that he was cowed, for the moment.  “Captain, I beg leave to report that your starship completed the lockdown drill thirty seconds in advance of any other starship.  The Puncher completed its drill after us, but we still beat them…”

“That should show Captain Hazelstone why we hold the Gunnery Cup for the Squadron,” Stoutjespyk said, triumphantly.  “That still doesn’t explain why you ordered the drill enhanced with a counter-boarding drill.”

“No, I suppose it doesn’t,” Colin said.  There wasn't any more time.  He drew his laser pistol in one smooth motion and brought it up to take aim.  “I’m sorry, sir…”

He squeezed the trigger.  The beam was invisible in the clear air of the cabin, but he saw a red hole appear in Stoutjespyk’s forehead, burning through to his brain and killing him instantly, before he had a chance to do anything.  Colin jumped forward and caught the body before it hit the ground, reaching for the ring and removing it, before carefully pocketing it.  It would have to be unlocked before he used it for himself, but once that was done, he would wear it with pride.  He would probably never have earned one legitimately.

A scream caught his attention.  Cindi, as naked as the day she was born, had come through when she’d heard the sound and seen the body.  Colin pointed his pistol at her, feeling adrenaline pumping through his body, and she fainted dead away.  He chuckled – at least her nakedness proved that she wasn't carrying anything dangerous, although her body would still have to be scanned for implanted weapons and other surprises – and opened the hatch, calling in the Marines.

“Take her down to the brig and put her in one of the stasis cells,” he ordered, tightly.  “Once I leave, seal this cabin completely; no one gets in without direct orders from me.”

“Yes, sir,” the lead Marine said.  He picked up Cindi with one armoured hand, moving with surprising gentleness for a man of that size, and carried her out through the hatch.  “Good luck, sir.”

Marines, Colin thought, shaking his head.  Now that it was done – the Captain dead, the ship under his command – it almost felt like an anticlimax.  He’d known that it would be easy, provided everything went according to plan, but now he wasn't sure what to feel.  Stoutjespyk hadn’t been hated, or detested, he’d just been lucky enough to have the connections required to win a coveted command.  There were other Captains he would have shot and then happily passed water over their graves, but Stoutjespyk…

He shook his head again and searched the cabin quickly, looking for any other surprises.  He found nothing apart from a personal – and illegal – computer terminal, one not linked into the starship’s main computers.  That too was a breach of regulations and he wondered, absently, what Stoutjespyk had stored on it.  It could be anything from pornography and entertainments illegal even to one of his station, to blackmail material.  He made a mental note to have one of the Geeks access it and see if it contained anything interesting, picked up one of the Captain’s unearned medals, and left the cabin.  Behind him, the Marine sealed the cabin and remained on guard.

“All present and correct, Captain,” Trout assured him, when he returned to the bridge.  “The other ships are all signalling that they are under the control of the senior officer involved in the operation.”

“Good,” Colin said.  He sat down in the command chair.  It felt, somehow, different, knowing that it was his.  He’d despised the Captain’s choice of a throne, but now he understood the impulse that had driven him to have it created.  “And our own status?”

“The ship is fully under your control,” Trout reported.  “The only incident was a small fist-fight in a corridor, apparently because one of the crew attacked another.  There are no other details as yet.”

“See to it that I get a report, Commander,” Colin said.  It was almost ironic.  When he’d been Stoutjespyk’s first officer, he would have investigated the fight and discovered its cause.  Now, he would be too busy to undertake any research or investigations himself.  “I think its time we told them what’s going on.”

He keyed the intercom again.  “Attention, all decks,” he said.  He’d had time, at least, to plan what he would tell the crew once he’d taken the ship.  “This is Commander Harper.  I have taken command of the Lightning…”

Chapter Five

The ring didn’t look like anything very special.

It was a plain golden wedding ring.  The only ornamentation was a simple dark Imperial insignia, with Lightning carved neatly into the inside of the ring, but it felt heavy.  Colin had had it unlocked and bound to him personally; merely wearing it had given him a sense of power and achievement, as if it was right that he wore the ring and embraced the responsibilities that came with it.  He hadn’t realised just how much access the Captain had had to his ship’s computers; the mere possession of the ring was enough to unlock every sealed databank on the ship.  The Imperial Navy, which forbade the use of private computers, had studied everything that its personnel had put into the computers.

He’d also taken the time to read the Captain’s secret orders.  He wasn't too surprised to discover that they definitely pointed towards Macore being invaded and integrated by force, regardless of their wishes in the matter, and that Stoutjespyk had been ordered to provoke an incident within the week.  Doubtless, he decided, Commodore Roosevelt was regarded as too incompetent to provoke an incident, something that showed remarkable insight on Percival’s part.  If he’d shown that kind of insight when he’d been a mere Commodore himself, he wouldn’t have needed Colin to help him win an unplanned exercise.  Once the incident had been provoked, Macore would be crushed by the division of SD soldiers who were accompanying the superdreadnaughts, something that Stoutjespyk had carefully not told him.  The world would be brought into the Empire and that was definite.

“The worst that happened was a shootout on the Resolution’s hanger deck,” Commander Simon Horvat said, grimly.  The other starships had been taken intact, but Resolution’s Captain had been lucky enough – if luck was the right word – to realise that a mutiny was under way and try to escape.  A few minutes longer and he would have made it into space, although Colin didn’t know how he intended to actually escape permanently in a shuttle, unless he wanted to go to ground on Macore and wait for the superdreadnaughts.  “We caught him, but everything was a little shaken up by the incident…”

“If that’s the worst that happens, we’ve been pretty lucky,” Colin said, flatly.  He’d feared that there would be a counter-mutiny within hours, but none had materialised.  “How many of your crewers want to jump ship?”

He listened to their responses thoughtfully.  The vast majority of the crews had decided to throw their lot in with the mutineers, as he had expected, but quite a few had decided that they were better off with the Empire.  Colin hadn’t been willing to risk a mutiny himself by keeping unwilling crewmen on his ships, so he had decided to transfer all of the unwilling crewmen to Macore, once they’d taken the superdreadnaughts.  The Empire’s forces would probably pick them up later.  A handful of the spies, too, had volunteered to remain with the squadron, but Colin hadn’t been disposed to trust them.  Keeping them around was too dangerous.

“So, we won,” Katy said, finally.  “If we have three days until the superdreadnaughts arrive…”

“A minimum of three days,” Colin said.  The vagaries of interstellar traffic meant that the starships might be delayed, or rerouted to avoid gravity shadows cast into flicker-space by planets or stars.  “Still, we have to prepare for their arrival at any moment.”

He looked around the room carefully.  “Do any of you feel that we should take our winnings and run?”

“I think,” Tsuji said, flatly, “that if we run now, we will never be more than another renegade fleet, if a better-armed one.  We owe it to the rest of the Empire to take the superdreadnaughts so that we can launch a proper rebellion.”

“True,” Colin agreed.  “Neil, how are the Marines coming along with their preparations?”

“There are one thousand Marines on the squadron,” Frandsen said, seriously.  “I’ve had small groups assigned to each of the starships, just in case someone decides to try to take the ships back, and I’ve combined the remainder into combat groups aimed at each of the superdreadnaughts.  Once we board, taking the ships will be possible, but while we’re in transit…I hope your story is a damn good one.”

“It is,” Colin assured him.  He’d written it personally, a mixture of truth and outright lies suggesting that Macore was much stronger than anyone had anticipated.  Strong enough, in fact, to pose a significant threat to the superdreadnaughts themselves, unless they took precautions.  The message he would transmit as soon as the starships flickered in would inform them of the imaginary threat and tell them that he was sending a classified data packet to each of the starships.  “I suspect that Roosevelt will fall for it without questioning.”

Prabhu leaned forward.  “And if she doesn’t?”

Colin shrugged.  “If we can’t get onto all of the starships at once, we’re screwed,” he said, dryly.  “If they realise the danger, the squadron will flicker out and head to the rendezvous outside the Rim.  We can’t fight them in a stand-up battle and we’re not going to try.  There will be other opportunities to take the superdreadnaughts and raise a real rebellion.”

“Leaving Macore behind to be targeted in punishment for our actions,” Horvat said.  His voice betrayed his doubts.  “What is going to happen to them?”

“They’re going to be bled white anyway,” Tsuji snapped, unwilling to entertain doubts.  “If we succeed, maybe we can save them from their fate, but if we don’t even try…”

Colin held up a hand.  “We don’t have much choice,” he said, softly.  The meeting couldn’t turn up anything now.  “We have three days to prepare, so we will do everything in our power to make sure that the boarding parties have every chance of success.  Meanwhile, we have to loot the base here and transfer as much as we can to the logistics ships.  We’ll meet again just before the superdreadnaughts arrive.”

***
The next three days passed slowly.  Colin already knew just how much work the Captain of a starship had to do – he’d had to do most of it for Lightning’s former commanding officer – but it was harder when normal discipline had taken such a blow.  He had a good hard core of senior officers, mainly ones he had trained himself, but he had to loan several of them out to the other starships, creating holes in the command roster.  Trout was shaping up nicely as a first officer, but he was also needed at the tactical stations, commanding the tactical section, which limited the amount of time he could handle Colin’s former tasks.  Other officers had similar problems, although as time went on, Colin was able to slot more experienced junior officers, or even crewmen, into important slots.  Mustangs, crewmen who became officers, were rare in the Imperial Navy…but in Colin’s experience, crewmen often knew far more than the young Midshipmen straight out of the Academy.  In his force, Mustangs would be common, if only because they had a shortage of Midshipmen.

He’d spent an hour going through the personnel records, attempting to locate possible future officers, but it had been a futile endeavour.  He’d known that the Imperial Navy kept details records on everyone who had ever served in it, but he hadn’t realised just how…slanted some of the reports were, although hindsight told him that he shouldn’t have been surprised.  His own report was written in such a way that the word ‘incompetent’ seemed to dance through without ever once being spoken, while others were even worse, apart from the spies and the handful of Family members.  They tended to have perfect reports suggesting that they were the reincarnation of various past military leaders, while everyone else was carefully kept down.  Colin was amazed and vastly amused, when he had finished reading his own report, to recall how much responsibility the Captain had lavished upon him.  His record, if the Captain had bothered to read it, should have told him to never leave Colin unsupervised.

I guess that Percival didn’t bother to suggest that the record actually be read, he thought finally, dismissing the records.  They weren’t particularly useful, although there had been some interesting details about the past of some of his officers, most notably Anderson.  There had been no clue as to why a Security Officer had thrown his lot in with the rebels, something that still bothered Colin, but the records had admitted that Anderson had probably been too good at his job for a senior officer’s comfort and had been exiled from a comfortable and responsible post on a superdreadnaught to the Lightning.

A chime at the door caught his attention.  “Come in,” he called, blanking the screen.  He wasn't too surprised when Anderson entered the room.  The Security Officer looked, as always, picture-perfect, despite having lost all of his constables to the makeshift prison on a freighter.  “How are the preparations coming along?”

“Fairly well,” Anderson said.  He looked oddly nervous for a long moment.  “Who do you intend to appoint as Security Officer on the other starships?

Colin frowned.  The other Security Officers hadn’t been part of the conspiracy and, when the mutiny had taken place, had either been arrested or killed.  Three of them had died in the hours following the mutiny by vengeful crewmen, prompting Colin to move the survivors to the freighter, just to keep them alive.  He didn’t really care what happened to them – few Security Officers were popular – but he didn’t want to start a massacre.  It would be easy to convince others to surrender if they believed that they wouldn’t be killed out of hand.

“I don’t know,” he admitted.  Truthfully, it had been a very minor matter; the Marines could handle whatever limited policing was actually required.  “Do we actually need other Security Officers?”

“We’re going to need them,” Anderson said, firmly.  “At the moment, everyone is pretty convinced that you’re firmly in charge, but that’s going to change.  If the next step of the plan works, we’re going to be heading well away from the Empire for six months, and that’s plenty of time for people to change their minds.”

Colin scowled, allowing the near-orbit display to catch his attention.  One of Daria’s Freebooter freighters was docking at Orbit One, preparing to take on a massive cargo, mainly spare parts from the Imperial Navy’s supply dump.  Colin intended to take as much as he could from the system before the superdreadnaughts arrived and the matter was decided, one way or the other, but doing it and keeping the government of the planet below from realising that something had happened wasn't easy.  It was frustrating, in a way; he could have had their help, if he cared to sacrifice them to the Empire.

He turned back to Anderson.  “You think that someone will betray us?”

“Legitimacy is an odd thing,” Anderson said.  “The Empire, like it or not, was legitimate authority for this part of the galaxy.  You challenged that authority and, if only on this squadron, you broke it.  You destroyed that legitimate authority.”

He leaned forward.  “But you didn’t replace it with something just as unchallengeable,” he added.  “Your authority, if you’ll pardon the expression, comes right from the barrel of a gun.  Someone else could try to take it from you the same way.”

Colin remembered the expression on Stoutjespyk’s face when he’d been shot and shivered.  It was true enough; he’d seized authority, but until the Empire was beaten he was nothing more than a mutineer.  Someone else might mutiny against him and, if they were lucky, the Empire might even welcome them back.

“Yes, there are thousands of people with the squadron who hate the Empire as much as you do, if not more,” Anderson said.  “That doesn’t automatically translate into all of them following your vision of how we should continue the fight.  Someone might decide to remove you, or one of the other new Captains…hell, one of them might decide to oppose you.  You need someone watching your back.”

“I don’t care about people expressing their discontent,” Colin said, thoughtfully.

“You should,” Anderson said.  “Answer me another question.  What is your position on drugs and other stimulants on the ship?”

Colin nodded in understanding.  The use of any intoxicant was specifically banned onboard any starship – and some, the most dangerous, were forbidden even to the Families.  There had always been a number of secret stills hidden away in compartments, rigged up by crewmen who were unwilling to go without alcohol and without any promotion prospects to ruin, and that was generally ignored, as long as the users didn’t turn up for duty drunk, but anything stronger drew a harsh response and punishment.  A starship could take a lot of punishment, but they couldn’t afford a drunken crewman at a sensitive station…

But, now that the old form of discipline had been broken, there had already been incidents.  Several crewmen had gotten drunk and had a fight, others had turned on unpopular superiors and beaten them to within an inch of their lives, and others were starting to slip.  Colin could see Anderson’s point, all right, but re-establishing the Security Officers didn’t sit well with him.  Security Officers were prone to abusing their positions.

“Have a list of candidates on my desk tomorrow morning,” he ordered, finally.  He’d check all of the candidates before confirming any of them.  “Tell them that I will not tolerate any abuse of their positions for any reason; they’re there to keep order, nothing else.”

“Of course,” Anderson said.  He saluted and turned to leave the office.  “For what it’s worth, sir, I think you’re doing an excellent job.”

“Thanks,” Colin said dryly, as the door hissed closed.  “There are too many complications in all of this.”

He looked back at the display.  The freighter was moving away now, carrying its irreplaceable cargo out towards the hidden bases along the Rim, where forces gathered to oppose the Empire.  It wasn't going to be easy, but if they could take the superdreadnaughts…

He shook his head.  There was no point in dwelling on it now.

***
“I have something of a sense of Déjà vu,” Colin muttered to Trout, as they conducted the inspection of the starship.  If nothing else, they had managed to get the starship back into fighting trim, although the crew was still acting a little unsure of themselves.  They’d chosen to remain with the ship and Colin, even thought that meant taking up arms against the Empire, and he would have bet good money that some of them had hoped that inspections would be cancelled.  “I did this only a week ago.”

“It’s part of your duty, sir,” Trout reminded him.  It was also Trout’s duty, now, but Colin had no intention of pulling a Stoutjespyk and leaving his first officer to handle all the inspections.  The crew responded better, he was confident, if they believed that the Captain was taking a personal interest in his ship.  If the report on Colin had been accurate, Lightning would have been the worst ship in the fleet, just through the crew slacking their duties.  “Besides, the tactical section wants to show off.”

Colin had to smile.  Trout had taken advantage of the mutiny to transfer out a pair of problem cases – both from the Families, taking advantage of Stoutjespyk’s position to build up experience without actually being in danger – and the tactical section had been improved remarkably.  There had been a third tactical officer from the Families who had shown real promise, but Colin hadn’t been willing to risk keeping him in a position of power.

“Commence simulation,” Trout ordered.  The simulated superdreadnaught, looming towards the battlecruiser, spat a wave of missiles towards the ship.  Colin tensed, despite knowing that it was only a simulation – it would be real soon enough – and watched as the point defence started to rake down the missiles, destroying them one by one.  The superdreadnaught belched a second wave of missiles, and then a third, her parameters clearly set as high as they would go.  Trout, if nothing else, didn’t attempt to aid his people by giving them an inferior opponent, even though there were few superdreadnaughts that could match that rate of fire.  “And…cut!”

He grinned up at Colin.  “Simulation complete, sir,” he said.  “We survived the experience!”

Colin looked over towards the junior tactician.  “Analysis?”

She blushed, casting a nervous glance at Trout.  “We survived, but we didn’t take out the primary target,” she said, her voice shaking.  Colin’s coup had probably saved her from being selected by a senior officer as a bedmate, although that had been rare on Lightning.  “The superdreadnaught remained completely untouched and if we had maintained the engagement, we would have lost eventually.”

Colin’s eyes fell to the engagement summery.  “Quite right,” he said.  Lightning had taken five simulated hits and the shields had been weakening when the drives had recycled and they’d flickered out.  “Excellent work, Midshipwoman Quincy.”

“You just won yourself a new convert,” Trout said, once they were outside the compartment.  “I don’t know what put her into her shell, but you just helped pull her out of it.”

“Good,” Colin said.  “We need quick and creative minds.”

He smiled.  Perhaps they could build a strong crew after all.  “In fact…”

He broke off as his wristcom buzzed.  “Captain, this is the bridge,” Lieutenant Parkinson said.  “We’re picking up major flickers on the edge of the solar system.”

Colin shared a glance with Trout.  “Analysis?”

“The superdreadnaughts have arrived, sir,” Parkinson said.  “They’re going to be here within three hours.”

“Good,” Colin said, firmly.  Trust Stacy Roosevelt to do the inconvenient thing and be early!  He wondered, for a moment, if it wasn't her in command, before deciding that it didn’t really matter.  They were committed to taking the ships anyway.  “I’m on my way.”

Chapter Six

“Commodore on the bridge!”

Captain David Houston straightened up in his chair as Commodore Stacy Roosevelt, escorted – as always – by two hulking bodyguards, stepped onto the bridge.  The Commodore, by rights, should have been on the Flag Deck, but she’d been making a perfect nuisance of herself over the last few days and why should the arrival at Macore be any different?  She’d harried and pressed him to expedite their movements from Harmony Base, insisted on conducting personal inspections of the ship that had left several members of the crew in the brig, and generally usurped as much of his authority as she could.  He might wear the golden ring of a Captain, but Stacy Roosevelt had the connections to make his life very hard if she so chose, which meant that he had no choice, but to go along with her.

“Report, Captain,” she ordered, as she took the secondary command chair.  Her nasal voice, accented with hints of the High City back on Earth, echoed unpleasantly in his ears.  It wouldn’t have been so bad if she’d been even minimally competent – he’d known some complete bastards who’d known exactly what they were doing – but he doubted that Stacy was even fit to command a garbage barge.  Her normal means of operation seemed to be threatening her subordinates with relief if they didn’t meet her demands.  “Where are we now?”

“We’re on the verge of flickering into the Macore System,” David informed her, as calmly as he could.  A year or two, no less, and he’d either be a Commodore himself or Stacy would be assigned somewhere else.  Rumour had it that she was Admiral Percival’s lover, but anyone who had spent more than a few minutes in her company tended to doubt it.  Admiral Percival was high enough to fill his bed with pleasure slaves if he wanted, so he wouldn’t want a bitchy shrew, would he?  “Once we arrive, we can re-calculate and flicker directly to Macore itself.”

“We should have flickered there directly,” Stacy informed him.  “Why do we have to waste time on the edge of the system?”

David winced.  Any first year cadet – hell, anyone who read any of the innumerable romances about life in the Imperial Navy – would have known the answer to that.  Her ignorance would have been embarrassing for a cadet, let alone the woman who held the power of life and death over the ninety thousand officers and men of the superdreadnaught squadron, let alone the three hundred thousand SD troopers in their transports.  She could issue the wrong order and cause a disaster if some junior officer didn’t take the risk of countermanding her…and that poor bastard would probably end up being ‘rewarded’ by being assigned to some post in the middle of nowhere.

“The star system’s gravity shadows have not been plotted yet,” he said, carefully.  It was hard to keep a note of contempt out of his voice.  “Once we reach the outskirts of the system, we will chart them out for the final flicker to Macore.”

He looked up at the blank display.  The flicker drive could, in theory, take them right to Macore, but the drive didn’t work within a gravity shadow, cast into flicker-space by anything large enough to have a reasonable gravity field.  A starship in flicker-space that ran into a gravity shadow would be lucky if all that happened was the drive burning out and being dumped into normal space; it was far more likely that someone back on Earth would class the ship as ‘missing, believed destroyed, cause unknown.’  Worse, the combination of planetary-sized masses in any star system would create waves of gravity shadows washing across the system, providing a largely random hazard to any unprepared starship.  The General Montgomery, for all of its size and power, would be blown apart if it flew into a gravity shadow.

“It doesn’t matter,” Stacy said, turning away from the display.  “I want you to proceed to the planet in normal space.”

David quirked an eyebrow.  “Can I enquire as to the reason for your decision?”

“The natives will need to take a good look at us,” Stacy said, firmly.  “The voyage to their planet will give them amble opportunity to take a look and realise just how badly they’re outgunned.”

David sensed the thought running around the bridge; great, three more hours of her company.  Imperial Navy tradition dictated that the Captain was absolute master on his or her ship, but Stacy had acted against that tradition, if she knew it existed.  David suspected that she had spent the Academy Years having fun, rather than doing any actual study, and her course scores had been altered by instructors who owed her family a favour.  That wasn’t unknown among the Families, but bearable if the Family scion was smart enough to take advice – and Stacy wasn’t that smart.

“Of course, My Lady,” he said.  If nothing else, it would allow them a chance to update the charts of the system.  A well-surveyed system could be navigated much more effectively than a barely-known system…and, so far, the Observation Squadron hadn’t sent them any updates on the system.  “They are unlikely to attack us…”

“They do not know their place,” Stacy informed him.  “They might attempt to attack us when we flicker in, but if they take a good look at us, they will realise that resistance is futile.”

Are you not going to provoke something, then?  David thought, with wry amusement.  He knew, although he hoped that Stacy didn’t know he knew, the contents of her orders – all her orders.  She was actually right that if they made a good display, Macore might submit without a fight, but that wouldn’t provide the excuse that Admiral Percival wanted to crush them.  He almost felt sorry for them; through no fault of their own, they were pawns in an Imperial power struggle.  He was going to slaughter them if they attacked…but he knew his duty.  Besides, what other choice did he have?

“Very good, My Lady,” he said.  “I will bring the squadron to battle stations just before we flicker into the system.”

“No,” Stacy said, firmly.  “I want to show them that nine superdreadnaughts have nothing to fear.  We will not go to battle stations unless we are attacked.”

David fought down the comment that came to mind and nodded.  “As you command, My Lady,” he said, hating himself.  Grovelling to her was hardly worthwhile.  “It shall be done.”

The helm officer saved him from further humiliation.  “Captain, we will return to normal space in twenty seconds,” she said.  “Counting down…now.”

David tensed.  He’d made flickers into combat zones before, but this was different – Macore wasn’t, officially, a combat zone.  They could have set a trap for the superdreadnaughts, if they were very lucky, but no sane tactician would plan in hopes of a miracle.  They’d plan to meet his ships…where?  In orbit, where they could call on the firepower of their orbiting stations as well, or somewhere in the midst of the system.  His stomach turned over as the starship flickered into normal space…

“Local space is clear,” the tactical officer reported.  “No enemy starships detected within active sensor range.”

They’ll know we’re here, David thought, coldly.  Nine superdreadnaughts would emit enough energy, when they returned to normal space, to be easy to detect.  The waves of energy would already be speeding across the system far faster than the speed of light.  The display was lighting up as the sensors picked up starships crossing the system, each one a tiny flicker on the display, a handful already altering course to avoid the Imperial starships.

“Smugglers,” Stacy snapped.  The irony was that she was probably right.  Imperial Intelligence had been reporting on how Macore had been trying to build up its tech base with smuggler help.  “You should chase them down.”

“We can’t,” David said.  The commercial ships might not be flickering out, but they would if he sent ships after them, assuming that a superdreadnaught would have a chance at actually overhauling the freighters.  Anti-piracy patrols required light cruisers and destroyers, not a ponderous superdreadnaught.  “We’ll shut them down once we occupy Macore’s high orbitals and the observation squadron can be redeployed to hunt them down.”

Stacy snorted.  “Take us into the system,” she said, speaking directly to the helm officer.  It was yet another breach of protocol, but David ignored it.  “We want them to have a good look at us.”

***
“Nine superdreadnaughts, ten Apollo-class heavy transports,” the sensor officer said.  Colin nodded slowly.  He’d expected as much, although he was disconcerted to realise that there were actually more troop transports than the orders had specified.  It was possible that Percival had managed to scrape up more SDs from somewhere, or maybe had had other plans for the transports.  There was no way to know, at their distance, what they were actually carrying.  “They’ll be here in five hours at their current speed.”

“Interesting,” Colin mused.  There was no logical reason why the superdreadnaughts weren't flickering into the system, not once they’d had the time to map out the system’s gravity shadows, but there was little point in not taking advantage of the mistake.  “Communications, transmit the recorded message.”

“Aye, sir,” the communications officer said.  She pushed a string of commands into her console.  “Message sent, sir.”

Colin realised that he was holding his breath.  The message was a work of art, in his view, and had he remained alive, even Captain Stoutjespyk would have had problems realising that he hadn’t actually recorded it.  The message had been perfectly written to convey a sense of massive urgency, without actually providing any useful details, while promising that the details would be forthcoming as soon as the ships reached shuttle range.  Stacy was likely to throw a fit when she watched it – he allowed himself to contemplate the prospect of her having a heart attack for one shining moment – but she’d obey.  Admiral Percival would be surprised to discover that he’d issued additional contingency orders to Stoutjespyk, but Stacy wouldn’t dare to question them openly.  Even she had to be bright enough to know that failing to follow her superior’s – and patron’s – orders would mean certain disgrace.

Percival would have to make an example of her, Colin thought, and smiled.  The Navy might have been riddled with patronage and abuse of authority, but even that followed some rules.  The patron had to keep their subordinates in line, or they would become a laughing stock; the system worked both ways.  The patron would give promotion, or reward, and in turn the subject would work for the patron.  Stacy might defy almost everyone else who wasn’t on the same social level as herself, but she couldn’t defy Percival, particularly not when Percival’s own patrons would be watching carefully.

The thought was amusing.  If they were really lucky, Percival himself would be removed from office, although that might be too much to hope for.  Stacy would probably end up being blamed for the debacle, whatever happened…if they won.  If not, it wouldn’t matter that much, would it?

He turned back to the display.  The message wouldn’t have reached Stacy yet.  He almost wished he could see her face when she watched it.

“Keep me updated,” he said, to the sensor officer.  “They might decide to flicker in and if that happens, we have to launch the shuttles at once.”

“Yes, Captain,” the sensor officer said.

Colin nodded and keyed his console.  “Major, are you ready?”

“We’re ready,” Frandsen assured him.  Colin had given him the automatic courtesy promotion of any other Captain; there could only be one Captain on a starship.  “As soon as they enter range, we’ll punch out and be on our way.”

“Good,” Colin said.  He sat back in his chair.  All they could do now was wait.  “Good luck, Neil.”

“Marines make their own luck,” Frandsen said, a hint of amusement in his voice.  “Punch us out at the right time and we’ll do the rest.”

***
David watched in grim amusement as Stacy’s face went very pale.  The message from Captain Stoutjespyk had been clear – too clear.  The prospect of actually having to fight a real battle was bad enough for her, although he would have appreciated a real test for his massive starship, but the strict orders left no room for interpretation.  Something had clearly gone very wrong on Macore…and the information, whatever it was, was so sensitive that Stoutjespyk was sending it via shuttles, to all of the superdreadnaughts.

“He can’t do this,” Stacy said, shocked.  David would have felt sorrier for her if she hadn’t been such a shrew to his crew, apart from the handful of junior Family members onboard.  “He can’t…”

“The orders came under a priority code from Admiral Percival himself,” David said, enjoying her discomfort.  It wasn't easy to keep any traces of that from his voice, but he managed it.  Stacy wouldn’t have responded well to any private gloating on his part.  “He has the authority to issue such orders…”

“I’m the ranking officer,” Stacy protested.  She didn’t even seem to care that they were having the…discussion in front of the others on the bridge.  They didn’t really exist for her.  “He doesn’t have the right to issue such orders to me.”

“Actually, he does,” David said, managing to sound suitably regretful.  “He’s in possession of information that is too sensitive to send to us directly, yet too important not to withhold until we reach the observation squadron.  Under Navy Regulation…”

“I don’t need chapter and verse,” Stacy snapped.  Her voice was starting to rise alarmingly.  “I need to know what the hell is going on!”

“He is entitled to insist that we follow his orders, under Admiral Percival’s priority code, until you are fully briefed on the situation,” David said, watching her breakdown with carefully-hidden amusement.  “Once the shuttles dock and you are briefed, you will be superior officer again and can issue whatever orders you like.”

He paused.  It wasn't something that happened very often, but it was easy to see why; Stacy wasn't the kind of person who could be trusted with a delicate situation.  Admiral Percival actually had a working brain, unlike his subordinate, and had issued a copy of his priority code to Captain Stoutjespyk, authorising him to take command of the superdreadnaughts – in his position as ranking officer of the Observation Squadron – until Stacy could be fully briefed.  He would have loved to be a fly on the wall in that meeting; the odds were that a mere Captain would be laying down the law to her.

“And once you see the tactical data…”

Stacy looked at him.  “How do you know that it’s tactical data?”

“What else would it be?”  David asked, rationally.  “The only thing that could justify anything like this would be the discovery that Macore has a few tricks up its sleeves…and they would have to be pretty unpleasant tricks to cause Captain Stoutjespyk to issue such orders.  Logically, they have a real fleet, rather than the handful of ships Intelligence recorded them as having, and Captain Stoutjespyk wants to brief you quietly before launching a raid to destroy them.”

He leaned closer.  “And when Admiral Percival discovers that you commanded the fleet that crushed their secret fleet, he’ll see to it that you get promoted,” he offered, feeling oddly like a demon tempter.  Stacy would have visions of vast rewards, but unless she obtained a higher-ranking patron than Admiral Percival, she wouldn’t be able to rise much higher.  “All you have to do is wait…and let it fall into your lap.”

“Yes,” Stacy said, sounding almost human.  Having been given a reasonable explanation that suited her view of the universe, she was happy again.  David was tempted to suggest that they went to battle stations, just in case, but knew that she would refuse the suggestion.  “All we have to do is wait.”

***
“I just picked up an acknowledgement pulse,” the communications officer said.  “The flagship sent nothing else.”

“Good,” Colin said, watching the display.  The red icons were crawling closer.  “How long until they reach shuttle range?”

“Thirty minutes,” the tactical officer said.  “They haven’t gone to battle stations, I think…”

Colin nodded.  He had seriously considered waiting for them to enter orbit, inside Macore’s gravity shadow, and lighting them up with the Lightning’s tactical sensors, but that would have been too dangerous.  If the superdreadnaughts had opened fire with their energy weapons, most of the observation squadron would have been destroyed within seconds.  Macore might have been caught in the crossfire as well.  Stacy might have been an incompetent, but whoever she had babysitting her would have reacted in time to salvage the situation.  No, boarding the ships was the only solution…and that would only work as long as the superdreadnaughts weren’t suspicious.

“Neil, thirty minutes,” he said, keying the intercom.  He was tempted to address the crew, but there was no time…and, besides, they all knew what was happening.  He was proud of them.  They had had the potential to be a good crew after all, despite the Empire and Captain Stoutjespyk.  “Helm, move us out of the gravity shadow.”

The dull thrumming of the drive grew louder.  “Underway, sir,” the helm officer said.  “We’ll be out of the gravity shadow in two minutes.”

Colin nodded.  If the Marines failed, the only hope for the squadron was to flicker out and run before the superdreadnaughts caught them.  There would be other chances, he hoped, at capturing some real firepower, but losing this chance would mean that the Empire would be on alert.  The next shot at superdreadnaughts would be far more dangerous.  This had to succeed.

“The superdreadnaughts are entering shuttle range,” the tactical officer said.  The display was growing brighter as the massive ships approached the planet.  “The shuttlebay is ready to launch the craft.”

Colin took a breath.  “Neil, good luck,” he said.  “Punch the shuttles!”

Chapter Seven

“Punch it!”

The shuttle had been docked on Lightning’s hull, rather than held within the hanger deck, to allow for a quick launch.  When Colin issued the order, the pilot undocked and brought up the shuttle’s drive field, rocketing it away from the battlecruiser towards the hulking mass of the superdreadnaught in the distance.  It wasn't visible to the naked eye, but Captain Neil Frandsen tied his combat armour into the shuttle’s sensors and studied the superdreadnaught as they flew closer, knowing that their mission wasn't going to be easy.

General Montgomery wasn’t a very pretty starship, he mused, as it took on shape and form.  The Imperial Navy didn’t go in for decorative starships, but battlecruisers and light cruisers were sleek arrow shapes, illuminated by their running lights.  The battle wagons, by contrast, were crude shapes, each one packing enough firepower to turn the entire star system into slag.  They represented the ultimate culmination of the Empire’s standard doctrine for space combat; find a target the enemy had to defend and hit it, forcing them into a battle on the Empire’s terms.  The Empire had never encountered a foe who could muster the same level of firepower, not since the War, and the tactic normally worked perfectly.  It was probably what they had in line for Macore.

“Two minutes until we enter their shuttlebay,” the pilot called back.

Good, Frandsen thought.  They’d simulated the entire mission repeatedly, but there was nothing quite like reality for testing concepts, when the enemy might no the unexpected and unpredictable.  His Marines were looking forward to the challenge of taking a superdreadnaught almost on their own, all thirty of them.  Frandsen just wished that he had been able to equip them with the heavy battlesuits, rather than standard combat armour, but that would have made it impossible to negotiate the corridors of the starship, let alone the maintenance tubes.  Standard armour would have to do.  

He drew in his breath as the starship loomed up in front of him.  The last time he’d seen a superdreadnaught had been back during the Dol-Far campaign, back when the Marines had been ordered to forgo their normal mode of operations and carry out a punitive raid on the surface of a planet.  His commanding officer had refused the order – it would have meant carrying out atrocities that would have made the SD blanch – and had been rapidly charged with insubordination, found guilty and executed by firing squad.  The honour of the Marines had been forever tarnished by that failure and he was determined that nothing like it would ever happen again, even if he had to rebel.  Colin’s scheme, perhaps, offered the only chance he’d ever have to put an end to it.

The display, at his command, showed the shapes of the SD transports.  Professional dispassion warred with very personal loathing as he remembered clean-up efforts after the SDs had been through a rebellious planet.  They weren’t real soldiers – a Company of Marines, he was sure, could hold off all of the troopers on the transport – and all they were really good for was atrocities, but that was why the Empire used them.  The mere possibility of an occupation by SD troops was often enough to compel a planet to surrender and give the Empire whatever it wanted.  Rumour had it that the troopers were drugged and brainwashed into becoming monsters…and Frandsen had a nasty suspicion that rumour was right.  Nothing else seemed to explain it.

He brought himself back to reality as the shuttle entered it’s final approach.  “Integrate,” he ordered, and triggered the mental command in his armour.  It came online smoothly, meshing perfectly with his mind and body until they were one, a man who was almost superhuman.  He looked at the world through the armour’s senses and found it good, sensing the presence of his team behind him, clad in their own armour.  Telltales lit up, reporting that all of them were online and linked into the Marine network, while downloads from the shuttle’s sensors flooded into their brains.

“Online,” he said, and heard their verbal responses.  The man-machine link that was the heart of a Marine combat team wasn’t something that everyone could cope with, even with all the buffers built into the system; people had been known to go insane through being interlinked to a combat suit.  The powers of a superhuman god had just been given to his entire team…and it was easy, with the sheer intensity of the link, to believe that it was a permanent condition.  It was easy to believe that they were invincible…when a crew-served plasma weapon would burn through the suit like it wasn’t there.  “Stand by…Jake, do you have the weapon of last resort?”

They’d played cards for it and Jake had lost.  “Yes, sir,” he said.  The antimatter mine he carried in his backpack, detonated inside the superdreadnaught’s vast covering of protective armour, would destroy the ship utterly.  No protection ever designed would save it if the antimatter mine detonated inside.  The danger was that the mine would be detonated by accident.  “I have it primed and ready.”

“Good,” Frandsen said.  “Stay back and let us handle the main part of the fighting.”

He ignored Jake’s snort as the shuttle floated over the hull of the superdreadnaught, passed a dozen point defence batteries, tracking the shuttle as it approached, and slipped into a shuttle back access hatch.  He was a little surprised that they hadn’t been asked to dock on one of the outside access ports, but he’d known a few Captains who hadn’t liked authorising that, although he’d never understood why.  A battlecruiser’s lines might be spoilt by a shuttle docked on the outside, but a superdreadnaught could hardly be said to have smooth lines…and, in any case, who would see them?   The gravity field seemed to shimmer as it interacted with the starship’s field…and then they were inside, passing through the forcefield that kept the air inside the ship and coming in to land, close to the access hatch.

“We just received an order,” the pilot said, as he locked the shuttle firmly to the deck.  “The Commodore wants to see the Captain’s messenger at once.”

Frandsen laughed.  “Well, let’s not disappoint her,” he said.  “Move out!”

The shuttle had been designed to allow the crew to exit rapidly, a piece of standard over-design that Frandsen knew many senior officers regarded as useless, if not an outright challenge to precedence.  This time, it came in handy as Marines spilled out of the shuttle and raced towards the shuttlebay’s control compartment, positioned perfectly to keep an eye on everything that happened to the small fleet of shuttles, landing craft and other small ships.  The officer on duty would be issuing a warning even now; the Marines reached it and burst inside, firing a single burst of stun pulses into the room.  The officer, a junior Midshipman, was caught before he could do more than gape at them.

Idiots, Frandsen thought, as the Marines secured the shuttlebay, stunning the handful of maintenance people they discovered.  The Midshipman should have had ample time to sound the alert, or maybe even seal the shuttlebay, but he’d hesitated…because he’d known he’d be blamed if it were a mistake.  The Captain would have punished him with a report that would have kept him as a Midshipman for the next few decades, or maybe even lopped off his head if his mistake made the Captain look bad, and the moment of paranoia had frozen him.  The Marines didn’t share that particular weakness.

“Hack it,” he ordered, and watched as Jake went to work.  The superdreadnaught’s crew didn’t even know what was happening, but that would change.  Once the main computers had been subverted, it would be much easier to complete their mission, although he doubted that they could trigger some of the security systems.  Anderson had warned that they were kept separate from the rest of the system and could be vastly dangerous if given the wrong code.  “Squads, move out by the numbers…”

“Hacked,” Jake reported.  His armour had extended a pair of tendrils into the main computer and his mind was racing through the system at the speed of thought.   “I can trigger a lockdown now, with codes set to us only.”

“Trigger it,” Frandsen ordered.  A lockdown would ensure that most of the crew would be out of their way.  “Squad One; with me!”

Five men followed him as he reached the hanger deck hatch and passed through, moving rapidly along the corridors towards the connecting passage.  The other squads would head for engineering and life support, as they had on the Lightning, while Frandsen’s own team would target the bridge and the commanding officer of the ship.  By now, that worthy had to be going frantic…and trying to use his command authority to work out why the lockdown had been triggered.  If he was an able officer, he would even be able to have the lockdown cancelled, although standard procedure dictated that the lockdown shouldn’t be cancelled until the reason was understood and dealt with.  They were sometimes used to prevent accidents from spreading too far; he’d been a junior Private when a transport had suffered a coolant leak and used a lockdown to save the remainder of the crew.

A superdreadnaught is a much larger ship, he reminded himself, as they passed a pair of stunned crewmen.  The Marines stunned them in passing and kept moving.  If they took the ship, the crewmen would get medical care, but if they didn’t, they’d probably be happier being out of it when the mine detonated and blew the ship into dust.  They could probably isolate any leak if one happened without needing to put the entire ship into lockdown…

They ran on.

***
“Captain, what the hell is happening?”

It was, David had to admit, a very good question.  The shuttle had docked, yes, and he’d passed on Stacy’s orders that the officer onboard report to her at once.  Instead of a frantic officer beating feet to the bridge, however, there had been nothing…and then a lockdown had been triggered.  David, who knew perfectly well that no lockdown drill had been planned, nor had there been any reason to think that there would be a need for a lockdown, had been puzzled…and worried.  Something was very wrong.

“I don’t know,” he said, accessing his console.  The computer network seemed to have suddenly become sluggish.  He was used to having an answer almost at once, but now…the computer almost seemed to be thinking about it.  He keyed in his personal code, holding the ring close enough so that the scanner could read the hidden chip within the ring, and accessed the security monitors.  They should have shown him an image of the shuttlebay, but instead…they showed nothing.  The cameras were out.  He flicked through a series of other cameras and saw the lockdown procedure being enacted, apart from one corridor, where a pair of crewmen lay on the deck.

“They’re sleeping on duty,” Stacy snapped.  David almost jumped; he’d been so engrossed with the security cameras that he hadn’t realised she was coming up right behind him.  “Have them punished at once.”

“I doubt it,” David said.  Now that he looked closely, he could see that the crewmen had fallen there, rather than simply lying down and going to sleep.  Their positions looked very uncomfortable.  He skimmed through the next few sensors and finally caught up with the Marines.  “We’re being boarded!”

Stacy stared at him.  “Don’t be ridiculous,” she said, angrily.  “Who would dare to board us?”

“Macore,” David said, feeling a mixture of fear and awe.  Somehow, Macore had taken the Observation Squadron without a fight…and had then used the ships to lure the superdreadnaughts into a trap.  They’d been boarded by armed Marines…and, with the damage to the main computer, he couldn’t even coordinate a response.  “We need to warn the other ships…”

A quick check proved that the communications system had been rigged.  It failed the second the communications officer tried to send a warning signal.  David tuned out Stacy’s angry rant about incompetence, directed mainly at the unfortunate communications officer, and tried to think.  Armed Marines – or Macorian soldiers wearing Marine combat armour – had boarded his ship, which meant…

His hand dropped to the laser pistol he wore at his belt.  “Arm yourselves,” he ordered, ignoring Stacy’s gasp of shock at the interruption.  “They’re going to be coming here!”

***
The command deck of the superdreadnaught was far better protected from incoming enemy fire than the Lightning’s command deck, Frandsen noted cynically as the Marines reached the access hatch and dealt with the guard standing there.  There was little point in having a guard there onboard the ship, unless it was for purely ceremonial reasons, but if they’d had a whole platoon there, it would have made life much harder for the Marines.  They could have taken out Frandsen’s team and even threatened the positions of the others.  Instead, there had only been one guard, and the Marines barely paused over his stunned body.  He hadn’t even been a Marine!

“Open the hatch,” Frandsen ordered tartly, wondering what had happened to General Montgomery’s Marines.  The superdreadnaught should have carried at least two Companies and he’d gone to some lengths to ensure that they were sealed in as well, just in case they managed to stash some weapons in their barracks.  He keyed his communicator.  “Jake, report.”

“They know about you now, I think,” Jake said.  “The Captain is using his override and I have to screw with each order separately; I can’t lock him out of the system.  I think you’d better hurry.”

The hatch hissed open and two Marines slipped through.  There was a brief flare of green light as stun pulses knocked out the handful of crewmen who’d been caught in the corridors – including, Frandsen noted with wry amusement, a chef who’d been carrying a first-rate meal to the Commodore – before the Marines advanced on the bridge.  Frandsen muttered orders to two of his men to circle the entire corridor and make sure they stunned everyone before they prepared to break into the bridge; that compartment, alone on the entire ship, could be sealed off from the inside.

“Squads, report by the numbers,” he ordered, and listened quickly.  Engineering and fallen and the only significant injury had been a broken arm.  Life support had been seized and the Marines had attempted to drop sleepy gas into the ship’s air circulation system, but the computer had refused to carry out the command without a direct order from the Captain.  “Good; stand by.”

The bridge hatch should have been sufficient to stand off a heavy plasma cannon, so Frandsen didn’t even try to break it down.  Instead, he had one of his men fiddle with the circuits underneath the hatch, attempting to trigger an emergency alert.  It wasn’t standard procedure and if it shorted out the hatch, they would have to try to seize control from the flag deck, but it could be done.  There was a moment’s pause and then the hatch rotated.  Frandsen winced as his armour sent up a series of alerts, warning of laser beams striking his breastplate, and fired a burst of green stun pulses inside the compartment.  They couldn’t risk damage to the bridge controls.

He stepped inside the bridge.  “Put your hands on your heads now,” he thundered, using the suit’s audio systems to broadcast the instruction.  “You are all my prisoners.”

“You have no right to take my ship,” a woman’s voice said.  Frandsen had never met Stacy Roosevelt in person, but it was easy to recognise her, even without Colin’s description.  He’d thought at the time that Colin had been allowing personal hatred to blind him, but instead he saw now that he'd understated the case, if anything.  “Who the hell do you think you are?”

Several replies came to Frandsen’s mind, but he chose the simplest one of all.  He lifted his arm, sighted on her, and fired a stun pulse into her temple.  She crumpled to the ground.  The pulse had hit her hard enough to ensure that when she awoke, she’d have a terrible headache.  The ship’s Captain looked at him, his face a conflicting mixture of emotions, and then pulled off his ring.  Frandsen accepted it gravely.

“Signal the flagship,” he ordered.  “Mission accomplished.”

***
“That’s all of the starships reporting in,” Trout said, shaking his head in awe.  “Five of them fell without a fight, three of them had to be taken against resistance and one of them…one of them they had to threaten to blow before the Captain saw sense and surrendered.  One of the transports managed to run….”

It won’t be so easy next time, Colin thought.  Even with the advantage of surprise, four of the ships had managed to organise resistance…and if they’d taken a few simple precautions, they would have been able to hold off the Marines long enough to escape.  The antimatter mines would have only ensured a draw, nothing else.

“Please extend my congratulations to the Marines,” he said, “then pass on a message to all ships.  We’ll start Bug-Out within the week.”

“Yes, sir,” Trout said.  He didn’t argue; the transport that had managed to escape would be at Harmony within a few days, reporting on exactly what had happened to the superdreadnaughts.  They’d respond at once and this time…well, they wouldn’t let Colin board them with Marines.  They’d come in hot and loaded for bear.  “What do you want us to do with the remaining SDs?”

Kill them all, Colin thought, but he pushed that thought aside.  “Tell the Marines to keep them in their stasis tubes for the moment,” he said, calmly.  They wouldn’t be going anywhere, after all, and as long as they were in stasis, they wouldn’t have the slightest idea of what was going on.  “When we’ve sorted out Harmony, we can dump them somewhere they can’t hurt anyone else.”

Chapter Eight

David Houston had served on battlecruisers before, but there was something indefinably different about this one, the Lightning.  Perhaps it was the fact that the ship had recently been refitted, before the deployment to Macore, or perhaps it was the confidence that comes from knowing that it was a good – and winning – ship and crew.  He had expected to come face-to-face with someone from Macore, but instead the Marine had been quite happy to explain what was going on, and why.  The ships had been taken in a mutiny, a rebellion, led by one of David’s old friends.  

He wasn't sure how to feel about that.  Colin had been one of the brightest tactical officers of their generation, the first in their class, and yet the Empire and the Families had kept him down.  David understood, as only a fellow sufferer could, how Colin had felt and how he had planned to take his revenge, but he’d broken his oaths.  Where did David’s own loyalties lie?  He wasn't sure himself…and, now that parts of the Imperial Navy had fallen into open mutiny, he had the feeling that it was a question that was going to be asked, time and time again.  The Empire couldn’t allow such a challenge to its power and authority to go unpunished, which meant that when Admiral Percival heard about the results of the mutiny, he would almost certainly dispatch another superdreadnaught squadron to eradicate the mutineers.  The ships might have been taken, but it took weeks, at best, to work up a superdreadnaught crew, time that Colin wouldn’t have.  Admiral Percival’s response, headed by an Admiral or Commodore infinitively more competent than Stacy Roosevelt, would be at Macore within a fortnight at most.  

The presence of the Marine was just a warning, he understood.  Colin had asked to meet with him personally – asked, rather than sent Marines to demand it – and David had reluctantly agreed.  The Empire would be searching for a scapegoat, after all, and he would have bet most of his pay that Stacy would try to put the blame on him, assuming they both survived long enough to be recovered.  It was quite possible that Stacy’s own career wouldn’t survive, but David would go down with her; her patrons would see to that, just to ensure that they didn’t get any of the blame themselves.  The Empire could be quite savage to those who failed it…

“Come on in, David,” Colin said, when they reached the Captain’s cabin.  The Marine waited outside, his expressionless face somehow warning of horrific consequences if David did anything to harm his old friend, while Colin waved him to a chair.  “How are you feeling?”

David had to laugh.  “I’ve felt better,” he said, noting that Colin had taken the seat opposite him, rather than sitting behind the Captain’s desk.  “I’ve just lost the greatest amount of tonnage since the War and all without a shot being fired.”

“My sympathies,” Colin said, sincerely.  “We didn’t know that it would be you in command of the queen bitch’s flagship.”

“In command,” David snorted.  Stacy had seen to it that his authority, such as it was, had been repeatedly undermined.  He’d have had to spend months re-establishing it if the deployment had proceeded as planned…but that was a moot point now.  “It was almost worth seeing the look on her face as the Marine stunned her.  What are you going to do with her?”

“Probably dump her here and leave her for Percival to pick up and blame for the defeat,” Colin said, with a sudden hint of malice.  David found himself chuckling again.  Percival would blame her for the defeat if there was no one else to take the blame, particularly with the Inspectorate-General looking for scapegoats.  Nine superdreadnaughts and nine transports, nearly three hundred thousand SD troopers…oh, and the starship crews as well – someone would definitely have to take the blame.  “I thought about shooting her out of hand, but that would be too kind.”

David shook his head.  “Colin, they’re going to come after you and crush your little rebellion,” he said.  “You can’t win this one.”

“Why not?”  Colin asked.  “They have to find us to crush us and we’re not going to be found.”

“You’re not going to stay at Macore, then,” David said.  That made sense; as long as Colin’s force was tied down defending a particular target, standard doctrine could be brought into play and the rebels would be crushed by overwhelming force.  “Where do you think you can hide?”

Colin snorted.  “Even a superdreadnaught is tiny compared to a single star system,” he said.  “We have places to hide along the Rim, so…”

He shrugged.  “David, why don’t you join us?”

David wondered, suddenly, if that had been what Colin had had in mind all along.  “I don’t know,” he admitted.  “It goes against all of my oaths and…Colin, can you win the war and bring the Empire crashing down?”

Colin’s face went expressionless.  “What makes you think I want to bring the Empire crashing down?”

“It’s you or them now,” David said.  “You have to win or be destroyed.  What other choice do you have?”

“We can win,” Colin said, flatly.  He held David’s eyes for a long moment.  “Why not join us?  What’s left for you back there?”

David hesitated.  “And what are you going to do afterwards?”

“I beg your pardon?”  Colin asked.  “After the rebellion?”

“Something has to replace the Empire,” David pressed.  “What are you going to create to replace the Empire?”

“That depends on how we win, I suppose,” Colin said.  “The Families will have to be broken up, of course, and the Navy purged of their influence.  Parliament will have to be reformed so that it becomes the democratic forum it was always intended to be and all planets will be given first-rank status.”

David nodded thoughtfully.  First-rank worlds were worlds that joined the Empire on their own terms and were allowed to retain a considerable level of autonomy.  They had voting rights in Parliament and even their own defence forces, although they weren't permitted superdreadnaughts.  It was a status that other worlds desperately wanted; first-rank worlds could refuse to be exploited, while the remainder couldn’t muster any defence against ravenous corporations, owned by the Families.  It was one of the reasons why the Socialists made so much headway, although their revolts were always too limited, without a fleet to defend what they took.  The Imperial Navy could crush them with ease…

But now Colin had a fleet.  “What are you going to do with my crew?”

“It depends,” Colin said.  He studied his hands for a long moment.  “The spies and other agents will be dumped on Macore for Percival, if he wants them.  The remainder will be offered the choice between joining us and waiting for Percival.  I suspect that most of your crew will be happy to join us.”

“Yes,” David said, grimly.  He liked to think that he had been a good Captain, but plenty of crewmen probably disagreed, starting with those who had been dumped on by the Families or their senior officers.  Stacy had probably alienated the entire crew all on her own.  The superdreadnaughts were always massively over-crewed; if Colin was careful, he could probably draw down half of the crew and send them to other starships.  He had the manpower to crew a considerable fleet.  “Colin…”

He made his decision.  “What role do you have for me?”

“General Montgomery needs a commanding officer,” Colin said, very seriously.  His voice was flat, almost cold.  “I need a flag captain for the ship and someone suggested that you had the makings of a good officer at one time.”

David wasn't sure if he should be amused or insulted.  “Do you trust me that far?”

Colin waved a hand in the air, carelessly.  “If you go back to the Empire, what will happen to you?”  He asked.  “Stacy will be quick to place the blame on you and, with her patrons, you will be made to take the blame.  You’d do nothing, but provide them with an ready-made scapegoat for the entire debacle.”

He leaned closer, earnestly.  “And besides, what happens if you do go back and, by some miracle, they don’t kill you?”  He asked.  “You won’t advance any further in Imperial service – you don’t have the patrons or the Family connections.  You’ll be lucky to retain command of a superdreadnaught, always passed over by incompetents with strong connections…and you may even end up rebelling, like me.

“Or you could join me.”

David lowered his eyes.  Colin was right.  That was the hell of it.  He’d believed in the ideal of the Imperial Navy since he’d been a child, but when he’d joined the fleet and started to rise in the ranks, he'd started to understand the truth.  It wasn't your competence that mattered, but who you were and who you knew.  The humiliation of knowing that younger, better-connected fools were promoted over him; if he’d had any illusions about that, they had been shattered by Stacy Roosevelt.  The handful of Family members who were competent were the bitterest of all; they rarely advanced as well.  He’d never understood why.

“I have a condition,” he said, finally.  Colin lifted an eyebrow, inviting him to continue.  “I want you to agree to listen to me when I give you advice.”

Colin smiled.  “I dare say that that should be possible,” he said, wryly.  “Dear Stacy got on your nerves that much?”

“If she’d listened to me,” David said, “we would…”

He broke off, sheepishly.  “You know what I mean,” he said.  “If I’m to do this, I want to know that it will be worthwhile.”

Colin smiled.  “I understand,” he said.  “I’ll listen to everything you say, although you do understand that I might not act on it all.”

“Of course,” David said.  “It will be a honour serving with you.”

“Welcome to the rebellion,” Colin said, shaking his hand.  “Now, go get your ship back into fighting trim.”

“Yes, sir,” David said, and struck a perfect salute.

***
“Do you trust him?”

Colin shrugged.  “I think he’s got as much reason as the rest of us to hate the Families,” he said.  “We’re short on experienced commanding officers and if we have to fight leaving this system…”

Anderson frowned.  “He’s part of the Imperial Navy, someone with a direct link to the Sector Commander,” he said.  “Can he really be trusted?”

“That’s true of most of us,” Colin pointed out.  “Just by serving as Stacy’s Flag Captain, David was probably earning all the patronage needed to rise to Admiral, although it would probably not have been forthcoming.  Percival doesn’t have a good reputation for keeping his word to his clients, does he?”

“You spread those stories yourself,” Anderson said.  Colin nodded; he’d been young and furious and he’d wanted to hurt Percival, even if it cost him his career.  He wouldn’t have cared if he’d been summarily drummed out of the service; it would have been better than making a pair of incompetents look good.  Instead, Percival had seen to it that he was assigned to Macore, along with all the others he wanted to get rid of.  “Shouldn’t we keep an eye on him?”

Colin nodded.  “We’ve moved two-thirds of the General Montgomery’s crew around and replaced them with some of our own people,” he said.  “If he has a patron-client network on that ship, we’ve broken it up, while now we can see to it that a Company of our own Marines are on each of the superdreadnaughts.”

He shrugged.  “We’re going to have to run hundreds of drills, if only to get the crews all settled in again, but it can be done,” he said.  “If he does have thoughts about double-crossing us, the Marines and his new first officer” – the prior first officer had been a Family member marking time until his next promotion – “will see to taking the ship before he can get back to Harmony.  The same goes for the other superdreadnaughts, although two of the Captains probably cannot be trusted and will be left here with the remainder of the loyalists.”

Anderson nodded.  “And what about Macore itself?”

“The best we can do is abandon them completely,” Colin said.  “We cannot defend them, so…”

“Yes, sir,” Anderson said.  He didn’t seem to have any problems with the notion, Colin noted, unlike some of the other officers.  The battlecruiser Puncher had taken Simon Horvat’s wife and her extended family onboard, along with a handful of other dependents, ensuring that they would survive the Empire’s return to the system.  Once Harmony Base had fallen, the rebels could return to Macore and liberate them…if there was anything left to liberate.  “Would you like an update on the security officers?”

“Yes,” Colin said.  So far, there hadn’t been any complaints about it, which he regarded as a good sign.  Stacy’s personal computer files had been full of complaints from her subordinates about security officers and their poking into every compartment and department on the ship.  “What have you accomplished so far?”

“I’ve got a handful of people on every ship,” Anderson reported, with more than a little pride.  “It’s much less intrusive than anything we had before we…rebelled, but it’s been enough to catch a couple of crewmen experimenting with hard drugs, grown secretly in the hydroponics departments.  The interesting thing is that both of them were punished by their own section mates before we could file formal charges against them or remove them from their positions and throw them in the brig.”

Colin frowned.  “Punished?”

“They were beaten by their fellows and the drugs were destroyed,” Anderson said.  “Officially, it was a fight between the pair of them, but…”

“Interesting,” Colin said.  There had always been a degree of self-imposed discipline in the Navy, but that was the first time he’d heard of it being taken to that degree.  It was something that would have to be investigated.  Was it a sign that the crewmen were starting to take a real interest in preserving their ships, or the start of something much more sinister.  Colin had meant his promise to them that a competent person could rise far in his force, but there would always be someone who thought that they had been left behind on purpose by some biased superior.  It wasn't a comfortable thought.  “Let me have a full report on the situation.”

“Of course,” Anderson said.  “I’ll use the crew transfers to slip in a few more, although some of the newer agents have been expressing doubts about what they’re doing, or agreeing only to inform on subversive activities, assuming that there are any.”

The statement was delivered in such a wounded tone that Colin laughed.  The Imperial Navy Security Officers hadn’t been just interested in the security of the ships, but in everything from discontent to who was sleeping with who.  The regulations didn’t attempt to prevent sexual relations onboard starships – it would have been impossible, not least because of the number of patron-client relationships built around sex – but the security personnel kept track of it, if only because it might be useful information one day.  A crewmember who had joked about killing his superior might discover that it had been noted, logged, and later brought out as evidence against him.  No one knew who all the informers were…and so crews had learned to be careful.

Now, everything was changing.  

“I think we’d better settle for that,” Colin said, thoughtfully.  His fleet wouldn’t reward informers who denounced people for sexual relations, or religious qualms, or anything else that didn’t threaten the safety of the ship and the fleet.  “I’ll have to visit Macore in person, so please would you see to the transfer of everyone, but the SD troopers?”

“Having them along is dangerous,” Anderson pointed out.  His voice tightened; the SD troopers intimidated almost everyone, including those who should know better.  Their reputation preceded them.  “You should just have them all killed, now.”

“They’re in stasis,” Colin pointed out.  “I thought about leaving them here and taking the transports, but they’d just be used against Macore.  They can stay in those tubes until we have a place to dump them or we don’t have a choice, but to open them to space and kill them all.”

“If you say so,” Anderson said, doubtfully.  He stood up and bowed.  “I shall see to it directly.”

Colin watched him leave the cabin, and then called up a near-orbit display.  His fleet was growing nicely now, with nine superdreadnaughts and twenty-nine smaller craft, not counting the transports and Daria’s Freebooter cargo ships.  By the time they had to leave, three days by his most paranoid estimate, they would have stripped the supply dumps bare, transporting them all to the hidden bases along the Rim.  When Admiral Percival arrived – if he came in person, which Colin doubted – he would discover that the cupboard was bare.  Even better, Stacy’s computer had included a complete convoy schedule for the next six months, giving them a chance to accomplish a great deal of raiding.  No pirates ever born had had access to nine superdreadnaughts for their raids…

The plans expanded further in his head.  Raid the convoys and strip them bare, not only to obtain all the supplies they were carrying, but to challenge the Admiral and force him to spread his forces too thin.  He’d have to handle it himself, or his political enemies would be demanding his head…and if Colin’s forces struck hard enough at Percival’s patrons, they would be demanding his head as well.  They’d want him to Do Something about it…and the cold hard logic of military realities warned that there was nothing – at least, nothing easy – that Percival could do.  They’d probably get his head…

They’re not going to know what hit them, he thought, and smiled.  I love it when a plan comes together.

Chapter Nine

There was little real difference, at least in general terms, between Macore and any other Earth-type planet.  It orbited slightly further from its primary than Earth, but overall it could have passed for Earth, although with different continents.  It hadn’t developed any higher form of life when the colony fleet entered orbit and sent down robots to conduct the first checks to ensure that the planet was habitable…and since humans had arrived, Macore had permanently lost its chance to develop an intelligent race of its own.  That wasn’t uncommon in explored space; humanity had only encountered twenty other intelligent races in their part of the galaxy, while two of them had died at humanity’s hands.  The Dathi, who’d launched a war of extermination against the human race, and the Monstron, who’d been destroyed by accident.  The others had been integrated into the Empire as subhuman life forms.

They’re not even regarded as human, Colin thought, as the shuttle flew over First Landing before coming in to land.  Almost every human-settled world had a city named First Landing – imagination seemed to take a backseat to sentimentality – and he’d seen dozens of them, but Macore’s First Landing was something special.  It wasn't built in the style of the Empire, with grey functional buildings and little in the way of development, but in a different style, wide open and welcoming.  First Landing had been planned, he’d been told, from the start and it showed; the only buildings permitted within the city limits had to match the remainder of the city.  The colonists referred to it as a mixture of classical Greek and Roman – whoever they were – but Colin had had different thoughts.  If this was what humanity could achieve without the stranglehold of the Empire, perhaps it was time for that stranglehold to be destroyed.  Indeed, he’d wondered if his decision to rebel, to cast his fate upon the winds, had as much to do with Macore’s development as Percival’s betrayal.

The shuttle touched down neatly near a groundcar.  Colin stepped out, feeling the sudden shift between the artificial gravity of the shuttle and the natural gravity of the planet beneath his feet, and took a long breath.  The air onboard a starship was sterile and dry, apart from one of the luxury liners, and it was good to taste natural air again.  There were some spacers who claimed that worlds stank, and that only starships were liveable, but Colin had never shared that feeling.  Landing on a human-compatible world was almost like coming home.

“Commander Harper?”

Colin was surprised, at first, and then he remembered that he hadn’t told the natives about his self-promotion.  “Yes, thank you,” he said, as the young man helped him into the ground-car.  If he’d recognised and understood the golden ring Colin wore on his finger, he said nothing.  “Government House please, as fast as you can.”

The brief drive through the streets was almost an education in itself.  Private vehicles were banned within First Landing – they were the only vehicle on the road for most of the time – and pedestrians swarmed around, visiting shops or cafes or maybe just having a good time.  First Landing was really too sedate for most of his crews’ taste – they preferred Spacer City, where there were bars, whores and legal gambling – but Colin had spent hours wandering the city, wearing civilian clothes.  It was a wonderful place…

And yet, an air of fear seemed to hang over the entire city.  Macore’s government wasn't a secretive government and so the population knew just how limited their independence was going to become.  They knew – and feared – the arrival of the superdreadnaughts, and even though the superdreadnaughts hadn’t made a move, they feared.  They knew Macore couldn’t stand off the Imperial Navy and they knew their likely fate.  Macore would face the same fate as hundreds of other worlds, bled white to feed the insatiable appetite of the Families.  Thousands of citizens, mainly independent spacers, had fled Macore, carrying with them all they owned, because the new order would have no place for them.  Independent spacers were not welcome in the Empire, not when their cargos could be carried by one of the Family-owned shipping lines and they would probably have their ships confiscated to service the debt, if they remained at Macore.  What other choice did they have?

“Sir, we’re here,” the driver said.  Colin blinked.  He’d been lost in his own thoughts and hadn’t realised that they’d reached Government House.  “Would you like me to wait for you here?”

“Please,” Colin said, and climbed out of the car.  Government House was hardly guarded, something that still struck him as amusing, although it might be a desperate attempt to avoid giving offence.  He’d known Family members who’d insisted on only having their own guards around them.  “I’ll be back soon enough.”

The inside of Government House was surprisingly functional.  Colin strode past portraits of former First Speakers and their Cabinets, wondering at how well the system worked.  As he understood it, Macore elected nine Speakers, who formed the core of the government, with the senior Speaker serving as Head of State.  They seemed at once to be all-powerful and very limited, not least because they served one nine year term and then were forbidden any other political office.  The system worked, somehow, although Colin was pretty sure it wouldn’t have worked on a starship, where even the Imperial Navy and the Freebooters agreed that clear lines of authority were a must.  Macore had nine daughter worlds and a thriving economy, so they had to be doing something right.

“Welcome back, Commander,” First Speaker Blondel Dupre said.  Colin had met her several times before – Captain Stoutjespyk had ordered him to handle relations with the planet, although there hadn’t been any real issues, apart from a handful of drunken brawls – and rather liked her.  She had a tendency to speak her mind.  “Why did you ask us to prepare secure accommodation on the surface?”

Colin suspected that they actually knew what was going on.  They had an intelligence service of their own and had probably subverted a few of his crewmen when they’d been down on the planet, but they wouldn’t reveal any of them.  Carefully, he explained what had happened and what he was going to do with the ships.

“I need you to hold on to the loyalists until the Imperial Fleet recovers them,” he concluded.  The three Speakers had all gone very pale.  “Macore won’t be blamed for any of this, but I can’t spare the transport to ensure that they return to Harmony.”

“You took an entire fleet from under the noses of their commanders?”  Blondel asked, finally.  “Are you out of your mind?”

“No,” Colin said.  He was tempted to explain why, to ask them to join him, but they couldn’t contribute anything, not even a diversion.  He would have liked to have brought the Macore Defence Force with him, but that would have pointed an arrow right at the planet itself.  The Imperial Navy would scorch Macore if they thought the government was responsible for their defeat.  “I want you to consider yourselves acting under threat of force.”

Blondel lowered her eyes.  Colin could almost read her thoughts; the fear of knowing what would happen to her world, the sudden burst of hope when she realised what had happened to the fleet, the crushing knowledge that it wouldn’t be enough to save Macore…and Colin’s lifeline, thin and sparse through it was.  Macore had Families, entire Clans, that wanted to strip the world bare…and they wouldn’t thank Percival for scorching a whole new source of wealth.  Why should they, they would ask, have to spend billions of Credits on rebuilding the sector when the infrastructure was there already?  That was one of their reasons for wanting Macore firmly under their thumb and if Percival destroyed it…

He could get away with it if Macore was in rebellion, but it’s not, Colin thought gleefully.  They’re obeying me because I’m pointing a gun at them; they can’t be blamed for that.

“I understand,” she said, finally.  Her two fellow Speakers, Bethann Rosie and Hester Hyman, nodded.  There was a lot that had to be left unsaid.  They would probably be delighted to offer all the support that Macore could, but if they did that, they risked being regarded as Colin’s collaborators.  “We’ll agree at the point of a gun, of course.”

“We will come back,” Colin promised.  They spent a brief half hour discussing the care and treatment of the prisoners and the loyalists – they were to be treated very well, but Stacy was to be kept separate from the others, just for her own safety – and then Colin stood up to leave.

“Good luck,” Blondel said, as he left.

Colin’s next trip was to the freighter Persimmon.  The ship had been co-opted into the Observation Squadron as a transport long before he’d planned and launched his mutiny and now served as a temporary holding pen for the loyalist prisoners who couldn’t be kept in more open quarters.  Stacy had been given a private cabin, more to keep her isolated from the others rather than because of her rank, not least because it would make it easier for the other prisoners to claim that they had had no orders from her.  They hadn’t, after all; it was Stacy’s responsibility to plan a jailbreak, not theirs, as long as she was senior officer.  Colin passed the pair of armed Marines and peered into the cabin through the security monitors.

Stacy looked…furious.  She’d recovered, according to the medical staff, from the effects of a stun pulse at close range, but she still looked angry.  She had to know, unless she was stupider than even Colin gave her credit for being, that she had lost all nine of her superdreadnaughts, the single worst defeat that any Imperial Navy Commodore had suffered outside of wartime.  The tacticians and the historians would excoriate her for her failure, pointing out that she should have seen it coming and taken precautions, even though the official record would probably be doctored.  That had happened before; Colin’s victory in the unplanned exercise, back when he’d thought that Percival would keep his word, had been rewritten into Stacy’s victory.

Whoever controls the past controls the future, Colin thought, grimly.  Anderson would have read and perhaps censored any mail sent from Lightning to any other ship or anywhere outside the Navy, just to ensure that any discontent or politically inconvenient truths remained out of sight.  The Families controlled the media almost completely, apart from a handful of independent media outlets from the first-rank worlds, and they were often denied access to the Imperial Navy.  The official story of the mutiny would probably claim that Colin had been killed in the first uprising…and, in time, would be completely erased from history.  Other ships had gone renegade – Daria knew some of them and their commanders – and their histories had been wiped, or assigned to other, more deserving, ships and their crews.  If they failed…

He smiled.  They’ll post an outright lie – or lies – about us, he thought, and then we’ll disprove it, in ways that they won’t be able to deny.

“She hasn’t been any trouble, apart from mealtimes,” the Marines assured him, when he asked.  “She demands meals that the cooks have never heard of and bitches when she gets the same rations as all of the other prisoners, or us.  It’s like she never had proper food in her life.”

“She had a chef on the General Montgomery,” Colin said, mischievously.  That unfortunate had been very eager to volunteer to join the rebel fleet and even had a qualification as a gunner to boot.  He’d actually come in handy, although he didn’t know what he would do with the other staff.  The beautician and the private nurse wouldn’t be useful for anything, although the designer could design rebel uniforms, given half the chance.  “Open the hatch.”

The Marine blinked.  “Sir, I must warn you…”

“She’s no danger,” Colin said.  He stepped forward as the hatch opened.  “Hello, Stacy.”

He hadn’t been sure what he expected to feel when he saw her.  He’d barely known her when he’d been on then-Commodore Percival’s staff…and what little he'd seen hadn’t been favourable.  Like Cindi, she was clearly the product of heavy engineering and then redesign, but when Cindi had managed to wear her looks with pride, Stacy wore them as if they were a mask, something she’d just thrown on for the day.  She looked beaten and defeated, but still furious, railing against the universe for what it had thrown her.  She was, he reflected dryly, probably trying to compose a story that wouldn’t get her thrown out of the Navy in disgrace.  Her connections would probably save her from being executed for dereliction of duty and gross incompetence, but she’d be a laughing stock…

“You!”  Stacy hissed.  She might not have remembered him after taking the credit that was rightfully Colin’s, but she’d been told exactly who was behind the rebellion, and why.  “What do you think you are doing?”

“You haven’t changed a bit, have you?”  Colin asked.  “You still think the universe owes you everything…”

“You bastard,” Stacy shouted.  “Don’t you know what they’re going to do to me?”

“Well, yes, actually,” Colin said, unable to prevent a trace of gloating from slipping into his voice.  Rubbing her nose in her defeat would be cruel, but somehow it was hard to resist.  She deserved every bit of the pitiful punishment that would be meted out from high above even her lofty station.  “You’re going to take the blame like a true officer of the Imperial Navy.”

Stacy opened her mouth for another blast.  “Oh, shut up,” Colin said.  Stacy closed her mouth to her with a snap.  Colin suspected that no one had spoken to her like that since she was born.  He’d never looked into her family history, not the way he’d studied Percival’s family, but it was clear that her line had a tradition of producing spoilt brats.  “You’re not the one in charge here and I could give you to the SD troopers, or pirates, if I chose.  Be quiet and listen.”

For the first time, he saw real fear in her eyes.  “I’m going – unless you decide to cause more trouble – to leave you and some others where the Admiral will find you,” he continued.  “You can tell the Admiral anything you like to try and get out of trouble, but I’d advise telling him the truth; he has too much at stake himself to tolerate any lies from you.  He’ll be trying to get out of trouble by blaming you.  You are also going to tell the Admiral something else.”

He leaned closer, watching how she shrank back from his gaze.  “You are going to tell him that we the dispossessed, the outcasts, those he and the Empire have mistreated…are coming for him,” he said, very softly.  “You are going to tell him that we are going to destroy him and bring the Empire to its knees.  Understand?”

Stacy stared at him.  “I can’t tell him that!”

“You’re going to tell him that,” Colin said.  Bullying her felt…strangely unsatisfying.  She had just crumpled too easily.  “You’re going to pass on the message exactly as I gave it to you, understand?  It’s all that will save you from taking all the blame.”

He gave her a little shake.  “Understand?”

“Yes,” she said, bitterly.  “I understand.”

“Good,” Colin said, straightening up.  “You’ll be transported down to the planet within the hour, so once you’re there, why not behave yourself for a change?  You’re going to need friends in low places.”

He tapped on the hatch for the Marine to let him out.  “Keep an eye on her,” he ordered, once the hatch had slid closed.  “She’s probably thinking about harming herself, rather than talking to the Admiral, so don’t let her if she tries to kill herself.”

“Yes, sir,” the Marine said.

Colin returned the salute and walked back to the docking port, where his shuttle was waiting.  He doubted that Stacy would commit suicide, but she was in an impossible position, caught between the certainty of vast – from her point of view – punishment and the fear of knowing what would happen if she didn’t pass on the message.  She wouldn’t want to face the Admiral, but Percival wouldn’t give her any choice, if only to avoid the blame himself.  He keyed his communicator as he walked and gave orders that the remaining prisoners were to be shuttled down to the planet, where they would be held until they were recovered.

He found himself tossing ideas around as the shuttle flew back to the General Montgomery.  He’d been forced to move his flag there, if only to make the point that the rebel fleet now included superdreadnaughts, which meant that Commander Trout would be effectively commanding the Lightning.  The thought was almost sad; he’d moved from first officer to fleet commander in one step, and would never really know the joy of having his own command.  Trout’s promotion would have to be finalised sooner or later, or else Colin would be no better than the Families and their officers, collecting the rewards without doing the work.

The problem wouldn’t go away.  He had people who were qualified for the posts, but lacking the experience, or even the chance to gather it while serving under lazy or indolent commanders.  They’d have to drill the crews as hard as they could, trying to find the new commanders for the fleet, particularly when they started to expand.  If they could seize Harmony and the entire sector, they would have an industrial base under their command.  That would give them the base for expanding further and challenging the Empire on even terms.

He pushed the thought to one side.  First things first…

Two days later, the fleet flickered out for the Rim. 

Chapter Ten

No humans had visited – or at least settled – the Harmony System before the Empire had started its permanent expansion into the Sector.  Four rocky worlds, one barely within the habitable zone for terraforming, and two gas giants made up the system; the handful of asteroids were barely worth mining, not when there were other systems with far more value only a few light years away.  The Imperial Navy had claimed the system for itself and had started to terraform Harmony itself, while constructing its own shipping yard and construction base in orbit around the planet.  It wasn’t roughly centre of the entire Sector, as Doctrine demanded, but it was close enough that it would only take a week to send starships from Harmony to any planet within Admiral Percival’s area of responsibility.

Captain Penelope Quick, known as Penny to her friends and intimates, stood on the observation deck and gazed down on the grey shape of the planet below.  Vast clouds were moving over the land as the terraforming process continued, although it would still be years before life could exist freely on the forbidding world, without any life support system.  It had surprised her, at first, to know that Admiral Percival preferred to live on an orbiting station – it wasn't the most secure of locations, even deep within Harmony’s gravity shadow – but it had only taken a quick study of the reports to understand why.  Harmony’s atmosphere was being built up, slowly, and seeded with genetically-engineered biological packages to alter it into something humans could breathe.  Conditions down on the planet were not entirely habitable, despite the terraforming boast that a world could be made liveable within ten years, and at the moment, Penny wouldn’t have sent convicts and traitors down to the planet.  Instead, it provided the perfect backdrop to her mood.

She’d chosen, for what seemed like good reasons at the time, to accept Admiral Percival’s offer.  As a rising star in the Advanced Tactical Course at the Academy, a successful posting under one of the foremost Admirals in the Navy would shine on her record, as would the patronage she would glean from the Admiral in exchange for her services.  She hadn’t realised, at the time, that it had also included her sharing the Admiral’s bed whenever the fancy took him, but that was far from uncommon in the Navy, and it wasn't as it the Admiral had really warped tastes.  He was, sexually at least, boring…or found her boring.  Penny was starting to suspect that her usefulness to him was coming to an end.

He’d promoted her, from Lieutenant to Commander, and then to Captain, but she’d never seen service on a starship since she’d been a lowly Midshipwoman.  There were Family members who rose high without ever seeing a starship, but they had connections, the type of connections that Penny lacked.  If the Admiral tired of her, it was unlikely that she’d ever be allowed to command a starship, or even serve on one.  Her rank was too high to allow her to take up a subordinate position, but she lacked the experience or the connections to serve as a commanding officer.  Percival’s patronage could take her far, but if he was beginning to tire of her…

She scowled.  She’d kept her appearance young, in line with the Admiral’s tastes, and she was ruefully aware that she looked like a sulking teenager, for all of her forty years.  Harmony Base probably had room for an experienced diplomat who had experience talking high-ranking people out of doing stupid things, but it wouldn’t be command.  She was little more than a standard REMF…and it was all her fault.  She couldn’t even blame it on Percival.  If she’d said no to him…

He might have forced me anyway, she thought grimly, watching twinkling lights flickering down on the planet.  The terraforming crew was still hard at work.  She’d seen them when they’d visited the orbiting base, just to catch a break from their work, and had been impressed; they hadn’t seemed daunted by the scale of their task at all.  But then, they’d only had to reshape an entire world, not rise in the ranks of the Imperial Navy.  Even her connection to Percival would be a liability; there were plenty of Family members who despised him, not entirely without reason.

Her communicator buzzed.  “Captain, we have a priority dispatch from the 343,” the dispatcher said.  Penny blinked, puzzled; the SDs – not known for imagination – had simply numbered their transports, but the 343 had been dispatched to Macore, two weeks ago.  Percival had written their orders personally.  “It’s classified for the Admiral and his staff only.”

Penny pulled her terminal out of her belt and pressed her thumb to the small sensor.  “My terminal is open,” she said, feeling her heart starting to race.  An unplanned return to Harmony could mean a lot of things, but matched with a priority dispatch, it could only mean trouble,  “Transmit it to me.”

The terminal bleeped as it received the message.  Penny opened the message, passed through the second layer of security checks, and read the message quickly.  It was short on many details, she noted absently, but the gist of the message was clear.  Commodore Roosevelt’s fleet had been taken intact…

For a dreadful moment, Penny wondered if it was another unplanned exercise.  She had a very low opinion of Stacy Roosevelt, but even she couldn’t have lost nine superdreadnaughts, not to Macore.  The Observation Squadron alone should have been able to cope with anything Macore might have deployed to attack it, while the superdreadnaughts should have been invincible.  Shock held her paralysed for a second and then her training reasserted itself.  Exercise or not, she had to cope with it as if it were the real thing…which meant taking it directly to the Admiral.

“Thank you,” she said, keying the communicator.  It was always good to be gracious to one’s social inferiors.  You never knew when you might need a friend in a low place.  “Tell the Captain to hold position and wait for the Admiral to contact him directly.”

Returning her terminal to her belt, she started to walk along the corridors, projecting an image of calm composure, while her thoughts raced inside her mind.  She’d been in bases where there were decorations everywhere, but Harmony was too new to have picked up its own distinctive character yet.  The only decorations were a handful of drawings produced by the pair of children on the base.  Admiral Percival’s apartments were right at the centre of the base, protected from any threat by kilometres of material, and it took her nearly seven minutes to reach them.  She used the time to think about how she was going to approach the Admiral…

The change was startling, even to her.  Percival might not have known taste if it had come up and hit him on the head, but he’d heard somewhere that all Admirals and Family Members had to have expensive tastes, so he’d bought up several million credits worth of fancy artwork to decorate his apartment.  Items from one painting style clashed with items from other painting styles, statues of brave warriors glared disdainfully at naked women, while gold and silver shone everywhere.  The Admiral hadn’t even brought his own art expert or curator onto the base, preferring instead to rely on his own sense of taste, although Penny liked to think he didn’t want to be told the truth about himself.  The less said about the painting he had hanging over his bed, the better.

“The Admiral is just taking breakfast,” Jan informed her.  Jan was old enough, literally, to be the Admiral’s grandmother.  She’d served his Family for generations and was completely devoted to the Admiral.  She was cook, cleaner and general servant, commanding the Admiral’s personal staff with an iron rod.  “I shall show you in as soon as he has finished.”

“This is urgent,” Penny said.  Jan wasn't a bad person, but she’d spent too long working on the High City.  “I need to see him now.”

She stepped through the door into the Admiral’s stateroom without further delay, somehow unsurprised to see Percival digging his way through a massive plate of scrambled eggs and bacon.  Her mouth watered, despite herself; very few others on the base would have having fresh eggs and meat, not when force-grown foodstuffs were cheaper.  The Admiral had a private supply sent in from his Family, although he had often spoken of his desire to set up a private farm down on Harmony, when the world was fully habitable.  Penny had suggested buying food from the various settled worlds in the sector, but Percival had been adamantly opposed; their food wouldn’t have the same cachet as a private farm’s produce.

“Penny,” Percival said, as he looked up and saw her.  The silky tone in his voice didn’t fool her for a moment.  “I do trust that this is important.”

Penny looked at him for a long moment, trying to gage his mood.  Percival somehow – she didn’t know how, because he used the latest technology to keep himself in trim – managed to convey an impression of fat meanness, despite his slim appearance.  His lanky dark hair fell over a slightly chubby face, which she had been told was actually his real genetic appearance.  She'd thought that that spoke well of him when she’d first heard that, as it suggested he had the confidence to wear his own face, but closer acquaintance had taught her that Percival rarely cared about his appearance.

“It is, sir,” Penny said, standing to attention.  Percival cast his eyes over her, then back to his breakfast, and then finally looked back at her, inviting her to continue.  “There has been an…incident.”

Percival tilted his head slightly.  He wasn’t really a stupid man.  Penny had often thought that if he devoted the same amount of intelligence to fleet operations as he devoted to rising within the Thousand Families and Imperial Society, he would have been the greatest Admiral the Imperial Navy had ever produced.  Penny wasn’t directly involved with his schemes to rise to become Clan Head, but she’d seen enough of them to know that he had one goal and followed it ruthlessly.  Percival had the finest genetic heritage that money and science could produce and had another hundred years, at least, to climb the ladder.  An ‘incident’ could end up looking very bad on his record.

And he had to know that this was important.  Penny would not have interrupted his breakfast unless it was important.  Normally, there would be time to consider all of the aspects of any particular situation, unless Harmony itself was under attack, but if Penny had come to see him…

“An incident,” he said, finally.  “What’s happened?”

“The 343 has returned from Macore,” Penny said.  She wasn't sure if Percival would understand the implications, so she spelled them out.  “That indicates that the ship spent, at most, a day there before returning here.  Worse…the Captain claims that the superdreadnaughts were…taken.”

Percival stared at her.  “Taken?”

“Yes, sir, ” Penny said.  “The report says that Commodore Roosevelt was ordered, under your priority code, to accept a fleet of shuttles, one to each of the superdreadnaughts, carrying updated tactical information.  The shuttles docked…and were apparently full of armed soldiers, who took the ships.  The last download from the Admiral Togo reported that the soldiers had an antimatter mine and were threatening to blow the ship.”

“My God,” Percival said.  His mind latched onto the most likely explanation.  “If this is a drill, I’ll have the bastard crucified and…”

“It’s not a drill, sir,” Penny said, and explained her reasoning.  No one in their right mind would inflict a drill on the senior officer in the sector; indeed, only the Grand Admiral on Earth had the right to order such a drill.  The sheer improbability of the entire story was actually a point in its favour.  She couldn’t recall, off-hand, a time when a superdreadnaught had been boarded by hostile forces.  It should have been completely impossible.  “Macore has apparently risen in rebellion and took the Observation Squadron as well.”

“The Observation Squadron was taken as well?”  Percival demanded.  “How did they ever manage to do that without tipping someone off?”

Penny had wondered about that.  The easiest way to do it would be to have people already onboard the ship, but that would have been difficult, although she could see some ways to handle the issue of weapons and coordinated planning.  The difficult part would be doing it before the Captain or senior crew could shut down or wipe the computers, leaving the starship as nothing more than a slightly odd asteroid.  If a single starship had been crippled, there hadn’t been any sign of it from what the 343 had seen, despite its limited sensors.  

But in the end, it didn’t matter.

“Commodore Roosevelt obviously made a dangerous blunder,” Penny said, privately enjoying the possibility.  Stacy had been a pain in the neck ever since she had been dispatched out from Earth…and she’d stayed long enough for Penny to realise that her tactical reputation was a complete fake.  She even had a private suspicion that the real reason she’d been dispatched had been to get rid of her.  Even Percival had been heartily sick of her, but she was central to his plans to rise high, perhaps through an official marriage.  “No one in their right mind should have allowed shuttles to board without a full security check.”

“Obviously,” Percival sneered.  He seemed lost in thought for a long moment, before scowling down at his cooling breakfast.  It would have to be put aside.  “I want to talk to the SD Captain as soon as possible.”

“Of course, sir,” Penny said.  She reached for her communicator.  “I’ll have him brought here at once.”

She watched Percival push his food away and start to think.  She could almost hear wheels spinning in his head, trying to figure out a way to contain the disaster, for disaster it was.  He was probably already seriously considering using Stacy as a sacrificial lamb, except that would ruin some of his own plans, while making permanent enemies out of her Clan.  They might know the truth about her as well as anyone else, but they wouldn’t want to convey the impression that they wouldn’t defend one of their own.  She almost felt sorry for him, despite the way he treated her; he’d never expected anything like this.

And it was opportunity.

“Sir, you need to take decisive action,” she said, coming closer and sitting on the table, too close to him for comfort.  He was so distracted that he didn’t even reprimand her for breaking attention without orders.  “The situation can still be recovered.  Even if Macore took all of the ships without problems, they’re still going to have to find crew for them all and that will take time.  If you act now, you can save everything…”

Percival looked up at her, rather more hopefully.  It was true that superdreadnaughts were massively over-crewed – it was possible to run a superdreadnaught with only two hundred crew on board, if you didn’t mind accepting the risks – but Macore wouldn’t have anyone with real experience in operating Imperial ships.  They might have a handful of renegades in the ships who were willing to help them, but they would probably know that Admiral Percival’s remaining ships could crush them and the vast majority of the crews would probably refuse to cooperate.  It would take time to work up the ships, time Percival could avoid giving them, simply by moving at once.

“You still have two superdreadnaught squadrons here,” she said, softly.  “Dispatch both of them to Macore, now, and recover the ships.”

“That would leave Harmony uncovered,” Percival pointed out.  “I can’t take that risk, not now.  It won’t be that hard to train up new crewmen.”

Penny kept her face blank.  It was true enough that most crewmen were taught nothing of the why and how of how things worked, but even learning how to apply that to something the size of a superdreadnaught would take time.  The more senior a crewman was, or an officer, the more they would need to know.  It would take time for them to learn everything they needed, even if there were a few traitors on the crews…

“I’m going to dispatch Commodore Gallatin and his ships,” Percival decided, finally.  There was a firm note to his voice that told Penny that pushing it any further would be unwise.  The battlecruiser squadron would be able to cope with Macore’s defence fleet, but not with a single one of the superdreadnaughts, unless the battlecruisers were willing to soak up an awesome amount of damage.  Nine superdreadnaughts would wipe them out and never even notice the return fire.  “You will go with them and give me a personal report of everything in the system.  If the superdreadnaughts can be taken, in your estimation, you are to take them.”

The Commodore is going to love that, Penny thought.  Commodore Gallatin, commanding officer of the 45th Battlecruiser Squadron, had the overriding virtue of being competent, certainly when compared to Commodore Roosevelt, but he was also prone to resent interference in his command.  Percival’s patronage had ensured that he got to retain command of his ships longer than most Commodores, but he acted as if he were unaware of that.  He was competent, however, and that made up for a lot.

“If not, you are to break contact and return here,” Percival added.  Penny nodded; the orders were fairly standard for a reconnaissance in force.  “I will expect to see you back here within two weeks.  Until then…”

He leaned closer.  “Don’t fuck up,” he said.  One hand reached for her right breast and squeezed it tight, a reminder of the power he held over her.  “I would hate to have to break in a new aide.”

Chapter Eleven

“My God,” Daria breathed, impressed and awed.  “He actually did it!”

The star system had no name.  The Imperial Navy scoutship that had flown through it had reported that the was little in the system, but a handful of asteroids and comets, not even anything large enough to merit the title of  ‘small planet.’  It had, therefore, been classed as useless, given a mundane and instantly forgettable catalogue number, and was then abandoned.  There was very little point in developing the system when there were far more interesting and potentially wealthy systems scattered around the sector, let alone the Rim.

And that had suited the Freebooter League just fine.  The techniques for establishing a space habitat had been well understood since before the human race had taken its first tentative steps into space, and it wasn't as if there was a shortage of material.  A pair of asteroids had been hollowed out, expanded and converted into habitats, while several others had been converted into miniature industrial centres.  The system would never be a productive centre, not like Earth or AlphaCent or even Harmony, but the Nerds and Geeks who ran the system could produce almost everything the Freebooters might need.

Her eyes tracked the icons as they appeared on the display.  Nine superdreadnaughts, five battlecruisers, twenty-five smaller craft, all advancing towards the habitats.  Their appearance would have caused a panic in almost every other Freebooter system, although the Empire was not normally in the habit of utilizing superdreadnaughts to chase pirates and shut down black colonies, but she’d warned her people.  The single IFF transmission, identifying the ships as being part of the Shadow Fleet, had reassured her.  Colin wouldn’t have used that code unless the ships were firmly under his command.

“It looks that way,” Salgak said.  The Geek’s face, half-hidden behind a mass of cybernetic implants, was unreadable, but there was no mistaking the concern in his tone.  It wasn't that surprising; normally, the only time he would have seen Imperial starships would be when they were trying to shut down a Geek operation.  “Are you sure that your man is dependable?”

Daria smiled.  “I believe that there will be no going back for him,” she said.  Colin would hardly be the first Imperial officer to go renegade – there were at least thirty in the Freebooter League alone – but none of them had ever stolen a full battle fleet from under the noses of its commanding officers.  The nerve alone was impressive; if the Empire ever caught up with Colin, it would have some problems deciding which of his crimes they were actually going to execute him for.  They’d probably end up cloning him so they could make a proper example of him.  “Are you sure that your people are dependable?”

Salgak nodded, slightly affronted.  The Empire regarded the Geeks as terrorists, mainly because the original Geeks had carried out research into areas of science the Empire had, for reasons of its own, sealed off and forbidden.  The Geeks might not have developed a working AI – one of their holy grails – but they had produced enough surprises for the Empire to try to hunt them down.  They’d even supplied – through Daria – Macore with some Imperial-grade tech, although not enough to hold off the inevitable.  If the planet had had ten more years…

Daria shook her head.  Colin’s presence here meant that Macore had been left unprotected, although there had been no other choice.  She'd withdrawn as much of her organisation from the planet as she could – it helped that almost every independent trader had fled before the superdreadnaughts arrived – and transported Colin’s supplies to the Geek base, but it had all been a gamble, until the ships arrived.

“Now we can start making some real plans,” Salgak said, gleefully.  The Geeks hadn’t taken much persuading to get them involved with the rebellion; they were sick of the Empire’s limits on proper research, or the fact they had to hide out along the Rim, far from the centre of the Empire.  “Do you know that we should be able to improve the missiles in a few weeks?”

“You’d better make sure that the ships can fire them,” Daria reminded him, dryly.  The Geeks – in a dead heat with their long-standing rivals the Nerds – had come up with a missile that boasted a fifty percent improvement on standard missiles, only to discover that the weapon was also too large to be fired from a standard Imperial missile tube.  She doubted Colin would be happy to discover that his weapons had been reengineered and rendered useless…and, worst of all, the Empire probably knew exactly how to duplicate the improved weapons.  There were parts of the Rim that leaked like a sieve.  “Speaking of which, what did the Nerds come up with?”

Salgak’s implants twitched.  No one had been able to explain to Daria why the Geeks and the Nerds were at each other’s throats most of the time.  There seemed, as far as she could tell, to be little difference between them; they were both composed of renegades from the Empire and various first-rank worlds.  Indeed, the first-rank worlds provided more of the Rim’s manpower and resources than the Empire would be comfortable knowing, if it didn’t already know.  It had been a long time since Daria had been at the core of the Empire, but back then, they had been reluctant to breach the treaties that brought the first-rank worlds into the Empire.  The last thing the Empire needed was a rebellion so close to Earth.

“They were working on new plasma weapons,” he said, finally.  “They were going to stage a demonstration for you…”

He broke off as a communication came in through his implants.  “Commander Harper is coming over in a shuttle and hopes that you will be there to greet him,” he said, changing the subject.  “I shall escort you to the shuttlebay.”

Daria followed, wincing slightly.  The Geeks had augmented themselves beyond rhyme or reason – and definitely beyond Imperial Law.  Salgak had claimed that he had been a genius before he’d been forced to flee his homeworld, but now, with direct access to literally unimaginable realms of data, his mind had expanded.  There was no disputing the achievements of the Geeks, but Daria had a private suspicion that the real reason why the Geeks hadn’t crushed the Empire – apart from the lack of any mass-production capability – was that most of them went mad before they passed a hundred.  Salgak was barely on the verge of human…and he was one of the moderates.  There were Geeks who were attached permanently to massive computers and were literally unable to walk or even feed themselves.

They hadn’t bothered with spinning the asteroid to generate gravity.  Instead, they’d installed a standard gravity generator, one that provided Earth-standard gravity for the inhabitants.  Daria had been concerned that that would make the asteroid detectable, if the Empire even started to hunt in earnest for them, but she’d used her passive sensors to scan the asteroid and hadn’t been able to pick up a hint of its presence.  As long as they were careful, half the Imperial Navy could search the system and wouldn’t even come close to them, unless they got very lucky or started blasting asteroids at random.  They’d even installed a forcefield curtain to allow shuttles to dock without having to close the shuttlebay doors.

Salgak seemed to smile as the shuttle came in to land.  “Impressed, yet?”

“Very,” Daria said.  The Geeks had done well.  A completely secret base that only a handful of people knew about, let alone it’s location.  The Empire probably knew more about the Freebooter League and it’s hidden bases than she wanted to think about, and when the war started in earnest, they would destroy all the ones they knew about, but they couldn’t find this one.  “Thank you.”

“Just make sure that we get our rights,” Salgak hissed back.  “I’d hate to think that all of this was for nothing.”

Colin was grinning as he stepped out of the shuttle.  Daria hadn’t organised any formal reception – it wouldn’t have impressed the freebooters anyway – but she rather suspected that he didn’t want it, and besides…she wanted to talk to him in private.  He didn’t look any different, not on the surface, but there was a definite sense of freedom in his smile.  For the first time, he was choosing his own path.

“Success,” he said, with a wink.  The grin was threatening to break into a glowing smile.  He hadn’t even winced when he’d seen Salgak, although Daria had known people who had been queasy, even physically sick, when they’d seen a cyborg.  “I took the ships.  How about you?”

Daria had to laugh.  “I got the bases and I got the word out,” she said, feeling a weight lifting from her shoulders.  She hadn’t realised how tense she’d been until the starships had arrived, under rebel control.  “We should have plenty of recruits, even from outside the freebooters.”

“Not pirates,” Colin said, seriously.  “If we start using real pirates, we’re going to lose whatever goodwill we have.”

At Salgak’s insistence, she showed Colin around the asteroid, or at least the parts that were suitable for human habitation.  It wasn't a well-defended base – they couldn’t hope to stand off more than a destroyer, and only then if the destroyer commanding officer was an idiot – but it was very well concealed, and equipped to serve as a major fleet base.  The supplies that Colin had been looting from the Imperial Navy’s supply dumps would keep the entire squadron going for several months, maybe even a year if they were lucky, and by then they would either have captured an industrial base or been destroyed.  She had heard enough about Percival to believe Colin’s tales about him, but the Imperial Navy did have quite a few competent officers, including some who had genuinely loyal crews.  One of them would be sent after Colin soon enough.

She allowed Salgak to monopolise Colin while she considered his demand.  The Freebooter League had had a policy of refusing to accept pirates, not least because pirates – real pirates – were regarded as universal enemies.  She’d formed the League to provide the independent spacers with some real muscle, including spacers who went through the Rim and the various independent worlds in the sector, but some of her people were probably pirates, when they could get away with it.  The life of an independent spacer was hard enough without the Empire breathing down their necks, looking for any opportunity to legally screw the freebooters, and she could hardly blame some of them for piracy.

And, of course, once they started recruiting…

“I’ve put out the call to all of my contacts,” she said, once they were settled in her apartment.  It was little more than a cave, cut within the rocky asteroid, but it felt more like home, insofar as anywhere apart from her ship could be home.  Colin probably felt the same way to.  “We should have a few thousand ships and outfits coming to have a look at us.”

“Not here, I hope,” Colin said, sipping his wine.  She’d saved it for a special occasion.  “Most of them will try to sit on the fence.”

“No, at Patrick’s Asteroid,” Daria said.  She wasn’t offended by the unspoken comment that one of the freebooters might try to betray them.  Life along the Rim wasn't easy and she was sure that some of the mercenary outfits had done work for the Empire from time to time.  They would probably be happy to trade a vast payment for betraying the rebel fleet.  “They won’t believe in the fleet until they see it.”

“Most of them will probably take one look and run the other way,” Colin said, with wry amusement.  “Did you invite the renegades?”

“Those I know about, yes,” Daria said.  “They might be interested, or they might be happy enough as independent units.”

“True,” Colin agreed.  “And it’s possible that a handful might still be working for the Empire.”

Daria nodded.  No one knew just how many smaller ships, ranging from destroyers to light cruisers, the Empire possessed, including the Empire itself.  It wasn't unknown for entire flotillas to exist only in the computer datafiles, while their ‘commanding officers’ pocketed the funds and the pay of the non-existent crews.  The Inspectorate-General claimed that corruption was rare within the fleet and only a handful of ships didn’t exist, but all that proved was that they had a good hack writer writing their reports.  The Families had set the tone for the remainder of the Navy and they stole as much as they could, only legally.  If the Empire had actually run into another Empire, an alien race with a similar rate of expansion, it would find itself in serious trouble.

But it also meant that no one knew for sure which renegades were real and which were Imperial Intelligence’s pawns.  There were some who engaged in acts of outright piracy and others who fought a clean war – and, just to confuse observers still further, hundreds of starships that had been sold off, legally.  They were supposed to have been demilitarised, but the Geeks or Nerds would be able to rearm them with the latest weapons, in exchange for future favours.  Daria was sure of a handful of them, but there were others she wouldn’t touch with a bargepole.

“We’ll just have to take some precautions,” she said.  She tapped a switch and brought up a holographic chart.  “We’re going to be expanding in any case, so we’ll keep this system here” – she pointed out a red dwarf star – “as an open base.  Anyone who comes there can be checked out and redirected elsewhere, while if the Navy turns up and starts searching the area…”

“They find nothing,” Colin said, obviously relishing the thought.  Massive sweeps of the Rim would only tie up Percival’s starships on a fool’s errand.  It was a cheerful thought, although Daria doubted that Percival would be that stupid.  How would she handle the issue if she were in command?

I’d scream for reinforcements, she thought.  Would Percival do that?  He’d have to convince his superiors that the rebellion posed a major threat, and that would mean admitting to what had happened to the superdreadnaughts, for which he would probably end up getting the blame.  Worse, he wouldn’t just need any reinforcements, but superdreadnaughts, and superdreadnaughts were thin on the ground.  The closest Daria knew about were seven hundred light years from Harmony and would have to be moved from a different Admiral’s jurisdiction.  The turf fight alone would take months.

“I don’t know,” Colin admitted, when she posed the question.  “He might swallow his pride and request a major fleet deployment, but that would mean convincing the Navy Ministry and the Families that such a deployment, with all the massive costs it would entail, would be necessary.  There would be plenty of Family members who would be quite happy to stall for a few months, just to make Percival sweat a little.  He could probably get his hands on a few hundred more light units if he asked, however, and that would add another danger.  Some of those light unit skippers are very good.”

Daria nodded.  The memory of being chased through an asteroid field by a trio of destroyers wouldn’t fade in a hurry.  God alone knew what they’d thought she’d been guilty of – unless they'd known who she was and decided that killing her was in the Empire’s interest – but they’d come very close to destroying her ship.  The Freebooters League might have died with her.  

“And one of them might try to follow us back here,” she added.  “Can that be done?”

“Not easily,” Colin said.  “They’re good, but they’d have to be very lucky, even if we didn’t take even the most basic precautions.  The problem is that they might be deployed around the Rim, in hopes of getting lucky.  Nine superdreadnaughts are not easy to hide when they’re actually powered up and moving.”

“We’ll just have to live with it,” Daria said, pulling herself to her feet.  “What else do you have to do now?”

Colin studied the chart.  “I have to dump two hundred and fifty-something thousand SD troopers somewhere,” he said.  “Is there any world here that isn’t too habitable?”

“You should just kill them,” Daria said.  There wasn't a single freebooter who would say anything good about the SDs, let alone lift a hand to save them.  “If not…here.”

She tapped a world marked on the tactical display.  “It may not have intelligent life, but it’s got a nasty species of wildlife that seems to like eating humans,” she said.  “I heard a rumour that the Families were going to develop it as a Big Game hunting preserve, but apparently the project fell through and the caretaker stations were withdrawn.  It’s perfect.”

The tactical display vanished.  “But on to the most important matter,” she added, thoughtfully.  “Have you decided what you’re going to tell them?”

Colin shook his head.  “I hate writing speeches,” he admitted.  “I used to write Percival’s and they sounded awful to me.  If he hadn’t been a Commodore, and then an Admiral, no one would have cheered.  They’d have thrown blunt heavy objects instead.”

Daria laughed.  “You’re dealing with one of the most suspicious and paranoid groups of people in the universe,” she said.  She smiled at his expression.  “They can smell bullshit from light years away.  Tell them the truth, the truth and nothing, but the truth, and at least they’ll listen.  Still…”

She paused, meaningfully.  “They’re going to need a sign that victory is actually possible,” she added.  “Can you deliver them that?  Something they cannot mistake as luck?  I’m not asking for a massive raid on Harmony itself, but something that they would understand and be able to grasp.”

Colin’s eyes gleamed.  “Yes,” he said.  “I think I have the perfect target in mind.”

Chapter Twelve

“You all know who I am,” Colin said, facing the packed hall.  It was large enough to play soccer in and it was completely packed with spacers.  “I stole a fleet and a crew and I intend to make war against the Empire.”

There was a long pause.  He’d discovered that he hated giving speeches as well.  The audience might not have been throwing things – they respected Daria too much for that – but they managed to emit a general feeling of disbelief and distrust.  He’d studied them before Daria had welcomed him onto the stage and seen a mixture of people, mainly human males, but with a handful of women and aliens as well.  The women would probably be worse than the men, he knew, although Daria had sworn that they were all perfectly respectable, as far as that went.  There weren't many independent female spacers and those he’d met had all been as tough as nails.

“There will be some of you who will wonder if I – we – can succeed,” he said, after a moment.  “The Empire is vast and powerful, armed to the teeth, while we skulk around in the shadows, fearful of the moment when we are discovered and have to flee for our lives.  We have watched our homeworlds brought under the Empire’s authority, while we were forced to flee, unable to return home or even to rebuild somewhere else.  They will look at the odds and calculate that we cannot succeed, so why risk their lives?

“We can succeed!  The Empire is vast, but it is far from all-powerful.  You have made careers and lives by moving through some of the loopholes and I have used others to steal an entire battle fleet.  The Empire isn’t as strong as it seems and it has been decaying for decades, centuries.  We can challenge it now and defeat it, if we all work together.”

He fought to keep his voice even.  “This is the chance for some of you, exiles from your own homes, to take them back from the Empire,” he said.  “I cannot promise that it will be easy, but it can be done, if we move fast.  I intend to launch a series of blows against the Empire now, blows that will bring it to its knees, and I invite you all to join me.  We can do it.”

The crowd seemed to mutter.  Some of them, the rebels or the exiles, seemed quite eager to try to fight.  They were tired of watching the Empire slowly remake their worlds into nightmares.  Others, freebooters and other free traders, needed to remove the Empire before it crushed them all into dust or forced them to give up their independence, a fate worse than death as far as they were concerned.  Mercenaries would fight for whoever paid them – Colin had an idea that would ensure that the rebellion had a sizable war chest – and wouldn’t care about the cause, although they would be loyal as long as they were getting paid.  The Black Colonists and the other refugees would probably want to remain hidden, although Colin knew that the Empire probably knew where most of the Black Colonies where.  They just didn’t care enough to bother placing them under Imperial authority, although the rebellion would probably change that.  Percival would probably lash out at any target he felt even remotely viable.

“I will be taking names and ships in my apartments,” Colin finished, a little grandly.  “The Shadow Fleet won’t remain here” – he’d brought the entire fleet, just to show the assembled crew that the ships were real – “but when you are convinced that we can win, you will be able to make contact with us.  We will welcome you all.”

***
I feel like a Lord at Court, he thought, an hour later.  Very few of the assembled audience had tried to speak to him in the assembly room, but a surprising amount of them had come to speak to him privately.  Mercenaries had talked briefly about what they could do for the rebellion, although they’d been reluctant to commit themselves, with only a handful of exceptions.  Some hated the Empire enough to sign up as ground troops, with a handful of attack ships, but most of them would wait until they could be paid.  Colin, who intended to obtain all the credit chips they could desire, wasn't too put out by that, although he had refused to guarantee high positions.  Rank in the Shadow Fleet would be earned.

The most determined group, apart from the Freebooters, had been the exiles.  The Imperial Intelligence reports hadn’t managed to convey just how many exiles there were along the Rim, including several thousand – at least – from Macore.  The sheer size of the hidden civilisation had been hard to grasp, but if Daria had been telling the truth, there would be tens of thousands more on the way as word spread.  Nine superdreadnaughts were a powerful argument in favour of victory, or at least forcing the Empire to take notice, and some of them had even had experience in the Imperial Navy.  They’d all have to go through a refresher course, just to make sure that their experience remained current, but once that had been completed, they could be dispatched to other ships.

“Yes, we can use your attack fleet,” Colin said, more times than he could count.  The reports had also missed – or had simply not included – the sheer number of fighting outfits out on the Rim.  “Yes, you can remain in command of your ships, but we will only provide repair and replacement services to ships that actually take part in the fighting and follow orders from the flag.  No, we won’t give you spare parts now, unless you sign up with us.  Yes, we can wait for you to believe that we can win.”

“Most of them will come around,” Daria said, after each unsuccessful discussion.  Colin was starting to feel more than a little exposed on the asteroid – Patrick’s Asteroid was hardly a secret location – and he was uncomfortably aware that some of the visitors might try to track the Shadow Fleet, if not whistle up some of the Empire’s ships, but perversely he was almost looking forward to it.  By his most pessimistic calculation, they should be able to wait almost a week at Patrick’s Asteroid before Percival could get a fleet out to intercept them, if he took the risk.  Knowing Percival, Colin suspected that his first moves would be conservative ones, unless he had subverted some genius of a tactical officer.  “You’ve already embarrassed the hell out of the Empire.”

“Yes, but that and two credits will buy me a mug of bad coffee,” Colin said, feeling oddly discouraged.  The majority of the conversations had been non-committal, even those who had been willing to sign up, because they hadn’t wanted to compromise their independence.  Random raids on the Empire would be worse than useless and he’d slapped down any suggestion that they should carry out atrocities to win.  There was nothing more likely to get someone calling up Percival and selling them out.  “Who’s next?”

“Someone you might actually know,” Daria said.  “Captain Jason Cordova.”

Colin lifted an eyebrow as Captain Cordova was shown in.  He’d actually heard of Cordova, although he’d graduated from the class two years before Colin’s own graduation, as the story had been hard for even the Public Information Department to hush up.  Cordova had had Family connections and a bright career ahead of him, except he’d gone renegade from the Imperial Navy, renaming his starship and embarking on a career of piracy.  His Family had disowned him several times, his name had been formally struck from the Graduation Rolls of the Imperial Academy…all of which had only enhanced the legend.  Indeed, Cordova had served as one of Colin’s own idols when he’d planned his own mutiny…

He was shorter than Colin had expected, dressed in a swashbuckling gold and purple outfit that clashed hopelessly with Colin’s sense of taste, topped by a tri-cornered hat and a bright green feather.  It was almost hard to pick out the face under the outfit, which, Colin decided, was the point; without that outfit, Cordova would probably be unrecognisable.  Colin peered through the outfit to see a surprisingly ordinary face, and mischievous eyes.

“So, I understand you’re planning a rebellion?”

Colin had to laugh.  He wasn't sure of why, but there was something about Cordova that rubbed him up the wrong way.  Someone with Family connections couldn’t, probably, be trusted, except Cordova had been on the run from the Empire, complete with heavy cruiser and loyal crew, for almost ten years.  If he was for real, his name alone would bring in more ships and crews, but if he was Imperial Intelligence’s idea of a plant…

“Something like that, yes,” Colin said, finally.  “Why did you decide to leave the Empire?”

Cordova shrugged.  “Long story,” he said.  “Why did you decide to steal an entire battle squadron?”

“I was bored,” Colin lied.  Cordova laughed in delight.  “Why did you leave the Empire?”

“They managed to cover that up?”  Cordova asked.  Colin nodded.  “I should have listened to my second’s advice and broadcast the story far and wide.  The short version of the story is that there was a rebellion on some godforsaken planet, and so Captain Cordova and the heavy cruiser Capricorn were ordered to suppress it.  The moron in charge of the planet’s integration into the Empire had managed to offend nearly everyone on the planet, so he got killed, along with most of his staff.”

He frowned, darkly.  “And when I got there, the situation was quite beyond recovery,” Cordova added.  “The remaining traces of Imperial authority ordered me to scorch the planet, killing everyone on the surface, just to mete out a lesson.  It turned out that the reason they were so keen on it was that there were some rare elements under the seabed and they wanted to mine them, which would have been…fatal for the planet.”

Colin stared at him.  That sort of atrocity was rare even within the Empire.  There was very little on a planet’s surface that couldn’t be found in asteroids and gas giants, where it was easier to mine and no unfriendly natives.  The story was at least reasonably believable, but none of that explained why Cordova had fled the Empire.

“I refused, you see,” Cordova admitted.  “The miners were in defiance of the agreements they'd forced on the natives, so I used that as grounds to refuse the request for a scorching.  You’d think I’d get a medal for that, but instead the Admiral tried to remove me from command and…to cut a long story short, I took my ship and fled for the Rim.  There were plenty of worlds, including your beloved Macore, that were quite happy to hire a heavy cruiser and we made quite an interesting career.”

“They exiled one of the Families for that?”  Colin asked.  “Why didn’t you use your connections…?”

“They were in bed with the Clan that wanted to mine the world and destroy the biosphere,” Cordova explained.  “I made a single overture to them and nearly walked straight into a trap.  Does that answer your question?”

“I suppose,” Colin said.  The story was believable, and he doubted that any of the Family Members he’d met would have had the patience to endure such a deployment away from the Empire, and a faked career wouldn’t have fooled the freebooters.  He still didn’t like Cordova, though, and he wasn't sure why.  “Can you take orders?”

“My old Admiral would probably say no,” Cordova said, reasonably.  Colin snorted with understated amusement.  It said something about Cordova that he had refused such inhuman orders.  It said a great deal more about the Empire that he had been punished for it.  “You want me to swear to your flag, right?  Why should I?”

Colin tensed.  “I command the Shadow Fleet,” he said.  “The men and women on my committee have all proven themselves, one way or the other.  I can offer you a place once you prove yourself, but until then…”

“I have to prove myself,” Cordova said, tightly.  Colin could understand his feelings – he had been uncontested lord and master of his own ship – but he couldn’t allow them to spoil his plans.  Cordova would probably end up on the committee anyway, given a few months, if only by acclimation.  Spacers who wouldn’t follow Colin, an unknown, would follow Captain Cordova.  “How do you want me to prove myself?”

Try me, his green eyes dared.

Colin looked down at the datapad in his hand, where he had been recording the details of the ships and crews that had agreed to sign up with the Shadow Fleet.  It was a sparser list than he had hoped and, of those ships, not all of them were effective warships.  It was sad, but true that freighters rarely made good warships, although the Geeks had been talking about a whole new concept that should give the Shadow Fleet some unexpected firepower.  Some of the mercenaries companies might be extremely powerful on the ground, but sitting ducks in space, as his Marines had been on their flight to the superdreadnaughts.  If Stacy had been a little more paranoid…

He shook the thought away and concentrated on Cordova.

“They’re not going to be pleased that you’re keeping records,” Cordova observed, seeing enough of the datapad to guess the contents.  “Two of those ships, by the way, are barely worth the effort of refitting them, if you had a hidden yard somewhere, while one more should have been scrapped years ago.”

Colin lifted his eyebrows.  “You know them?”

Cordova took the datapad.  “Martin’s Murderers,” he said.   “I always felt that Old Martin’s sense of humour left something to be desired.  Ten ships, all old-style light cruisers – used to be twelve, but they had to cannibalise them – three of which would have been scrapped long ago, under a sane regime.  Martin’s a pretty good sort of chap, but he made a few deals with the wrong people and really needs heavy-duty protection.”

He smiled thinly.  “I doubt they’re half as combat-ready as they claim,” he added, thoughtfully.  “Rumour has it that they tried to raid an asteroid and a bunch of Rockrats beat hell out of them.  Rumour is probably a liar, as always, but they’re not in good shape.”  He skimmed down the next two groups.  “They’re good, but rough; they’re known for being harsher than they need to be.”

Colin smiled, suddenly seeing a chance to kill two birds with one stone.  “You still want a role with the Shadow Fleet?”

“I want to go home,” Cordova admitted.  “Is that so hard to understand?”

“No,” Colin said.  Best of all, the volunteer companies weren't part of the Freebooter League.  “I’m offering you the role of Commodore of the Volunteers, with command over these ships and men.  Interested?”

Cordova smiled.  “And what do you want me to do with them?”

Colin tapped a switch and watched the tactical display shimmer into view.  The projector wasn't standard Imperial issue, but something from one of the independent worlds, probably one that had been absorbed by the Empire years ago.  It wasn't clear, but it was good enough to show the sector, and Admiral Percival’s area of responsibility.

“Arian, here,” he said, nodding towards an icon as it sprang into clear view.  “The Roosevelt Clan owns a sizeable portion of the asteroid belts and is using them to feed the creation of a shipyard in the system, while using their monopoly to drive the independent asteroid miners out of work…”

“Or forcing them to sign up with the corporation,” Cordova said.  “I am not unfamiliar with how these things work.”

Daria nodded.  “They’ll be in debt, their children will be in debt, and their children’s children will be in debt…”

“Yep,” Cordova said.  He grinned, hugely.  “I assume you want to shoot the asteroid miners up a bit?”

“Just the ones that work for the corporation,” Colin said, firmly. It wouldn’t be easy to draw the distinction, but Cordova could, if he lived up to his reputation.  “That should make freezing the independents out a little harder.”

“And force Percival to spread his forces a little thinner,” Cordova added.  “That should drive the little bastard up the wall.”

Colin blinked.  “You know him?”

“Know him?”  Cordova asked.  “I had the pleasure of having him as my Lieutenant once.  Apart from a remarkable talent for luring young crewwomen into his bed, there wasn’t much else to remember, although he did try to take the credit for Admiral Gomez’s successes against those pirates in Sector 49.  I think she was being sarcastic when she said he’d rise far.”

Colin snorted.  “Can you do it?”

“Of course,” Cordova said.  He doffed his hat to Daria.  “With your permission, I will start making the preparations at once.”

He swept out of the room with a final bow.  “Interesting person, isn’t he?”  Daria asked.  “Much of that reputation is fairly earned.”

“It is?”  Colin asked.  “What do you think of him?”

“Interesting, like I said,” Daria said.  Her voice darkened for a moment.  “Had a brief affair with him once, just to see what he was like in bed.  Ambitious, though, which I suppose comes with the bloodline.  Watch your back.”

“I see,” Colin said.  “I don’t think I wanted to know that.”

Daria laughed.  “You should try life on the Rim for a few years,” she said, dryly.  “So, what are you going to do to prove that the Empire can be beaten?”

Colin tapped the display.  “I went through dear Stacy’s – I wonder if the Admiral’s recovered her yet – records carefully,” he said.  “They happened to include the exact timing and schedule of the Annual Fleet.”  He winked.  “They might have included a massive escort of lighter ships, but I’ll bet my life they won’t have thought to include superdreadnaughts.  Why should they have?”

He grinned at her.  “Let’s see Percival get out of this one…”

Chapter Thirteen

“All hands to General Quarters.  This is not a drill.  I repeat, all hands to General Quarters.  This is not a drill.”

Penny Quick pulled herself out of her chair, checked her shipsuit quickly, and stepped out of her cabin.  A lowly Lieutenant Commander had vacated his cabin for her, offering her quick access to the battlecruiser’s flag deck, but Indestructible didn’t feel like home.  The four days of travel between Harmony and Macore had been rather tense, not least because Commodore Gallatin was not one of Admiral Percival’s clients.  He hadn’t been very vocal about it, but Penny was sure that he was convinced that one of the reasons she’d been sent with his squadron was to spy on him, in preparation for his removal.  The formal mealtimes had been particularly tense and she’d ended up spending most of the trip in her cabin, considering possibilities.

The flag deck was surprisingly crowded with gorgeous young officers, all men.  Commodore Gallatin had, as almost every other senior officer did at one time or another, surrounded himself with people who matched his tastes perfectly, although he’d also included competence as part of his required attributes.  Penny was cut off from the ship’s rumour mill because of her rank and position, but her orderly had reported that rumour had it that the path to the Commodore’s favour ran through his bed.  Surprisingly, the crew seemed to work together well; that wasn't always the case.  Commodore Gallatin had to be a more effective leader than most.

“Ah, welcome,” Commodore Gallatin said, as Penny entered the compartment.  If he had doubts about her still, he wasn't showing them.  “In five minutes we will arrive and find out what is really going on.”

Penny nodded tightly, not trusting herself to speak.  Commodore Gallatin hadn’t hesitated to let her know that he thought it was all a drill dreamed up by Percival; the concept of an entire superdreadnaught squadron being boarded and captured was beyond belief.  He’d certainly spared no effort to convince her that he was taking it seriously, including getting her to sign off on the expense of deploying scout drones, but his real attitude shone though.  Penny would have preferred to believe that he was right, but she knew better; it was no drill.

Commodore Gallatin smiled at her.  He looked middle-aged, presenting a mature considering appearance, with greying hair and a neat goatee.  Warm eyes that could switch to ice or fire within seconds twinkled at her as he pulled up the main tactical display and pretended to study it.  Penny was sure that he had it memorised by now – he’d spent hours researching the system with her – but she studied it herself, unsure if she should comment.  Commodore Gallatin was taking a risk, possibly a fatal one, by flickering in so close to the planet.

“It’s no risk at all,” he assured her, following her line of thought.  “We got the latest survey records from the SD troopship and simulated the gravity shadows – and besides, coming out of flicker-space at the standard arrival points would be asking for trouble, wouldn’t it?  We might do that and run straight into a hail of missiles…”

Penny smiled weakly.  Standard tactical doctrine kept the arrival coordinate fairly random, just to ensure that the enemy couldn’t use their heavy starships to set an ambush, but most systems had a designated arrival point for commercial and military starships.  Commercial ships rarely risked flickering in much closer to the primary, while military starships disdained risks, but preferred not to risk triggering a response from military ships already on station.  A starship arriving came in blind and defenceless and, if fired upon, might be destroyed before it knew it was under attack.  It was much safer to arrive further away and announce yourself before coming in closer.

But Commodore Gallatin had decided to take the risk of coming out much closer to Macore.  On paper, she had to acknowledge that it wasn't a terrible risk.  Even a superdreadnaught was tiny compared to the mass of a star system and they couldn’t cover every possible arrival point, even if they had a million superdreadnaughts.  In practice, in her experience, commanding officers who tried to be clever ended up flying into unexpected surprises and getting hammered.  Macore’s only hope of victory would be to bleed the Empire badly enough to make it give up…and that would induce them to take risks.  They’d already crossed the line.

“Yes, sir,” she said.  It was almost a shame that the Commodore didn’t need an aide, or a Flag Captain.  Working for him would probably be more interesting than working for Percival.  “What happens if they’re definitely under enemy control?”

“We break, scatter and run,” Commodore Gallatin said, giving her a reproving look.  There were officers who were too scared of the review board to swallow their pride and retreat if it looked as if they were going to lose, but Commodore Gallatin didn’t have that particular problem.  “Once we get back to Harmony, we can whistle up the remains of the Sector Fleet to deal with them.”

Penny smiled as Commodore Gallatin keyed his console.  “Now hear this,” he said, his voice transmitted over the entire ship.  “Emergence in fifty seconds, I repeat, fifty seconds.  All hands, brace for emergence.”

He smiled up at her.  “How often have you jumped right into a combat zone?”

Penny felt the universe twist around her as the starship came back into normal space, it’s drive fields already scrabbling for purchase on the fabric of space and time.  A wave of nausea washed over her and she found her knees weakening; she swallowed desperately to prevent herself from throwing up on the deck.  She’d met a handful of people who claimed not to be bothered by a high-speed return to normal space, but in her experience, they were all liars.  Even experienced crewmembers were sometimes vomiting on the deck when their ships came out of flicker-space.

Her head swam for a long moment…and then everything snapped back to normal.  Commercial ships preferred to come out of flicker-space at low velocity, just to minimise the effects on the passengers and crew, but military starships rarely did that unless they were damaged and limping home.  The official explanation was that it gave the crew a chance to grow used to the effect, but Penny suspected that no one ever actually got used to it.  She might never have made a combat jump, but she’d been on enough starships to feel the effects, every time.

“Launch drones,” Commodore Gallatin ordered.  His voice showed no trace of any unsteadiness.  “Tactical, report!”

“We made it in clear,” the tactical officer reported, from the bridge.  Commodore Gallatin paused long enough to shoot Penny a victorious look.  “We are currently tracking a handful of civilian craft and Macore Defence Fleet craft, but no Imperial starships within sensor range.”

“That doesn’t prove much,” Commodore Gallatin growled.  “Extend the drones; send half of them down towards the planet and the other half in a shell around our position.  If they’re trying to sneak up on us, I want to know about it.”

He scowled as the tactical display started to fill up with icons.  Penny watched, saying nothing, as the tactical staff identified freighters, asteroid miners and other commercial ships, but no Imperial starships.  It was possible that they might be hidden under cloak, or powered down and pretending to be asteroids, but there was no logical reason for either step.  Superdreadnaughts weren’t the most capable units for cloaked ambushes, even assuming that they’d gotten them into position for an ambush, not least because their cloaks wouldn’t conceal everything.  They were just too powerful to conceal.  

The Macore warships could be picked up in orbit around the planet.  The drones were spiralling down now, their active and passive sensors probing away, looking for clues.  Penny was almost impressed; she’d seen other worlds that had attempted to build a new space-based industry before, but Macore had done well.  They’d cheated, in a way, with the use of the Colony Fleet, but their work was still nothing to sneer at.  If they’d had another century, they would have been big enough to give the Empire a fight.

Nine daughter worlds, a population that numbers in the high billions and a respectable commercial fleet…and a government that represents a nightmare for our lords and masters, she thought, thinking hard.  Other colonies had been integrated with their governments almost intact, their kings and emperors and suchlike brought into the Thousand Families, as much as they might wish to deny it.  The Thousand Families claimed descent from humanity’s ancient ruling classes, although Penny knew enough forbidden history to doubt that the claim had any real validity.  The Clans had grown out of massive commercial interests, not because of special bloodlines.

“No sign of the superdreadnaughts, or the remainder of the ships,” Commodore Gallatin said, finally.  “We could take the Macore Defence Fleet, but we’re not here to pick a fight.”

Penny felt an odd trace of respect.  There were commanding officers who would have started a fight, just to gain a little respect from their superiors, or because they were supremely convinced of their own invincibility and technology.  She’d read the reports on the battleships orbiting Macore carefully and they could be taken by the battlecruisers, although it wouldn’t be a completely one-sided battle.  That was why Commodore Roosevelt had been ordered to take her superdreadnaughts to Macore.

Commodore Gallatin smiled thinly.  “Open a channel,” he said.  “I want to speak directly to their leader.”

“First Speaker,” Penny supplied.

The response was almost immediate, unsurprisingly.  Macore’s sensor network would have tracked the battlecruisers as soon as they emerged within the system.  Their First Speaker would have been informed at once and she – Macore seemed to prefer female elected representatives, for some reason – would have waited, nervously, for the fleet to open communications…or to open fire.

“This is First Speaker Dupre,” the First Speaker said, as she appeared on the display.  “Welcome to Macore.”

Commodore Gallatin’s lips tightened.  “First Speaker, I am in no mood to play games,” he snapped.  “The Imperial Navy assigned an observation squadron and a superdreadnaught squadron to this system.  We were informed by the lone returnee of that squadron that the ships had been boarded and taken by your people.  I am empowered to demand an explanation and the return of the ships.”

Penny was almost impressed.  The First Speaker didn’t flinch.  “We didn’t take the ships, as the crewmembers waiting for you on our world” – there was a slight stress on our – “will testify.  You will discover, instead, that they were taken by your own people.  Can I invite you down to the planet to discuss recovering the loyalists?”

Commodore Gallatin and Penny exchanged a long glance.  “Prepare my shuttle,” Commodore Gallatin ordered finally, cutting off the First Speaker.  “Penny, you will accompany me to the surface.  Captain Quigley, you will retain command of the fleet.  If you do not hear from us, every hour on the hour, you are to destroy Macore’s fleet and it’s remaining defences.”

“Yes, sir,” the Flag Captain said.

“Good,” Commodore Gallatin said, angrily.  “Penny, come with me.”

***
The explanation seemed completely unbelievable, but it had the ring of truth…and explained exactly how Stacy Roosevelt had been caught with her pants down.  The loyalists all shared the same story; the Observation Squadron’s senior officers had mutinied against their commanders, after which they had taken the superdreadnaughts with the help of the Marines and unloaded the loyalists onto the surface.  The loyalists didn’t know what had happened after that, but the Macore sensor arrays had tracked the superdreadnaughts flickering out to an unknown destination.  Penny checked the records without any sense of hope and discovered, not entirely to her surprise, that there were tens of thousands of possible destinations.

They wouldn’t have flickered out for their destination from here, she thought, sourly.  Anyone attempting to evade pursuit wouldn’t have left such an obvious trail for us to follow.  They probably flickered out to some interstellar coordinate and then altered course.

Commodore Gallatin seemed to have other concerns.  “Who is the superior officer among the prisoners?”

“Commodore Roosevelt,” the First Speaker assured him.  She’d insisted on accompanying them to the camp – which, Penny noted with a faint sense of unreality, was more like a luxury resort than a prison camp.  “She has been a most unwelcome guest.”

“Really,” Commodore Gallatin said.  “I would never have expected that from her.”

Penny’s thoughts were elsewhere.  The rebels – if their declaration was accurate and they weren't simply pirates with much greater firepower than any normal pirate group – hadn’t even done the Empire the favour of removing her.  If they’d killed her, it would probably have improved the Sector Fleet’s morale incredibly, which was probably why they’d left her alive.  Percival would be relieved to have someone else to take the blame, but blaming Stacy would get him into trouble with his own patrons.  Percival might be a genius when it came to political warfare, but it would be difficult for him to survive with all of his prestige intact.  At best, he would lose some of his patrons and maybe even a few clients.

“I need to talk to her,” Commodore Gallatin added.  “Penny, you will accompany me.”

“I wouldn’t miss it for the universe,” Penny said.  She could ignore his commanding manner for the reward of seeing Stacy try to explain herself to a social equal.  “Where are you keeping her?”

Stacy, it seemed, had been given apartments worthy of a queen.  Penny took one look and knew that she wouldn’t be able to afford such apartments on her holiday, if Percival ever allowed her to go on leave without him.  Stacy looked terrible, almost as if she had been crying constantly, and Penny would have bet good money that she hadn’t appreciated the apartments at all.  Macore could have shoved her into a dungeon somewhere, after all.

“Stacy,” Commodore Gallatin said, taking the lead.  As a fellow Commodore, he was entitled to be informal, although Penny – personally – would have been as formal as possible, just to make the point that Stacy’s career had come to a halt.  “Tell me, in your own words, exactly what happened to you.”

“They’re keeping me a prisoner here,” Stacy snapped, pulling herself to her feet.  “You’re here with the fleet, so scorch this world and burn them…”

“I hardly think that scorching the world with you on it would be a good idea,” Commodore Gallatin snapped.  “Stacy, I need you to tell me exactly what happened.  You’re the senior officer, so act like it!”

It took nearly an hour to get the story out of Stacy.  It wasn't easy.  Penny found herself admiring Commodore Gallatin’s patience as he worked away on her, asking questions, seeking clarification…and offering little in the way of comfort.  Stacy had lost everything, after all, and in her view, it hadn’t been fair!  She hadn’t been defeated in battle – she’d never been in a battle – but she’d been tricked and cheated out of her command.  It wasn't her fault, she said, again and again, even though she had to know that someone would have to take the blame.

The story itself tallied, more or less exactly, with what Macore’s First Speaker had told them.  The Observation Squadron had invoked priority codes to board the superdreadnaughts – apparently with the squadron’s commanding officer’s codes, although the other loyalists believed that he'd died when his squadron had mutinied, which meant that some secure codes were hardly secure – and, once they’d boarded the ships, had taken them.  That was believable, at least; armed and armoured Marines would go through a largely unarmed crew like a knife through butter.  Stacy had been captured by them, treated gently…and she would never forgive them.

“You can’t leave me here,” she protested, afterwards.  Commodore Gallatin shrugged.  “You really can’t…”

“I suppose she should go back to face the Admiral,” Penny said, with Commodore Gallatin quirked an eyebrow at her.  Stacy would have been better off remaining on Macore, but Admiral Percival wouldn’t have allowed her to stay there, not when he was trying frantically to cover his own ass.  “Can we find room for her on the squadron?”

“Of course,” Commodore Gallatin said.  “Stacy, stay here for the moment.  We’ll come and take you back in an hour.”

The handful of other senior officers among the loyalists told the same story, although one of them, a Captain, explained that they’d had to threaten to blow his ship to force him to surrender.  Penny decided, after a moment’s thought, that if that was the best showing the Imperial Navy had put on, the Empire was probably doomed.  The senior officers, at least, could be transported in the battlecruisers; the remaining loyalists, all junior officers and crew – and not many of the former – would have to travel in a requisitioned Macore ship.  Obtaining one of those, at least, would be easy.

“I’m ordering the Penetrate back to Harmony,” Commodore Gallatin said, finally.  They’d paused long enough for a private discussion.  “You, darling Stacy and some of the others from this camp will go back with it.  The remainder of the battlecruisers will wait here, observing Macore, until the Admiral decides how he wants to react.”

“Yes, sir,” Penny said.  “He’s not going to be happy.”

“No,” Commodore Gallatin agreed.  “We might get lucky and they might come back here, but I doubt it.  The next move is in their hands.  I suggest you try to make sure that Stacy gets all the blame, so competent officers come forward.  I don’t know if you noticed, but the mutinies were pretty much concentrated among the senior officers, at least at first…and, of course, they took the SDs with them.  With the proper reprogramming, they might even fight for the rebels.”

Penny nodded.  A third of the sector’s ground force had been taken away.  The Admiral was not going to be happy.

Chapter Fourteen

Paperwork, Colin thought, disgustedly.  Paperwork.  I mutiny against the Empire, end up leading the rebellion, and I still have to do paperwork?

He scowled down at the terminal.  The General Montgomery was supposed to embark an entire staff for the commanding officer, but Stacy Roosevelt hadn’t bothered to form a proper staff, choosing instead to leave matters in the hands of the ship’s Captain.  David was a competent officer, but he hadn’t had the experience or the seniority to ride herd on the other Captains in the squadron.  The superdreadnaught’s crew were competent, at least, but Stacy’s insistence on carrying out inspections herself – and her gross incompetence in doing it – had wrecked morale, although now David was free to conduct the inspections himself.  Colin expected a report on the true state of his ship momentarily.

The other question was how to sort out personnel.  Some of it was easy enough, others were much harder…and he hadn’t realised just how much grumbling he would unleash when he had begun promoting.  Competence wasn't an easy thing to prove without actually trying someone at a job, but the person promoted seemed to believe that the job was theirs for life, while those left behind started to resent it.  While he’d been a Navy Officer, he’d wondered why pirate crews were so small, but he understood now.  The larger the crew – and superdreadnaughts routinely carried ten thousand officers and men, not counting the Commodore’s personal staff – the smaller the share of booty, let alone positions of responsibility.  It was a headache that would require a proper staff to handle, and Colin barely had any staff.

And I showed that killing the Captain and launching a mutiny is dead easy, he thought, wryly.  He didn’t expect a mutiny, not yet, but it would take time to get the crew into a new style of discipline.  If he were to promote the wrong person, it could cause offence, although most of the people he intended to turn into mustangs were genuinely liked and respected by their fellows.  Colin hadn’t spent enough time with the crewmen, as opposed to enlisted officers, but they were making progress on clearing out the bullies and incompetents.  It helped that he was quite willing to punish any misbehaviour quite severely, when back in the Imperial Navy, discipline was the task of the Senior Crewman, who was often part of the problem.  A superdreadnaught could be riddled with gangs and worse, but it wasn't visible to senior officers, not until now.

He pushed that matter to one side and turned to the senior officers.  He’d had to promote Captain Arun Prabhu and Captain Thomas Pearson to take command of the two Captain-less superdreadnaughts, moving the former First Officers to take command of other superdreadnaughts.  That had left moving their former first officers – who had been Lieutenant Commanders a month ago – into command slots, which meant in turn that those starships were commanded by inexperienced officers.  It didn’t help that some of the renegades who’d arrived at Patrick’s Asteroid had demanded positions consummate with their former ranks, or even overall command and a place on the committee.  Colin had told them, flatly, that any such positions would have to be earned, while raiding some of their crews for experienced personnel.  It wasn't hard, at least, to pick out someone who had had real fleet experience and they were well worth their weight in gold.  Many of them, like him, had realised that they would never get anywhere in the fleet, and commercial ships bored them.

A chime at the door distracted him.  “Come,” he said, unsurprised to see David there.  The Captain would have completed his inspections.  “Take a seat.  How was the inspection?”

David grinned.  Colin had had to remind himself, several times, that David was the Captain and the Admiral of the Shadow Fleet, as he’d come to style himself, had to stay out of his bailiwick.  It wasn't easy, not when he'd been a Commander himself only a month ago, but he’d learned fast…and David, to be fair, had repaid his trust.  The crew moves had allowed him to move some of Anderson’s men onto the ship, just in case, but David now faced the same choice as they all did.  Victory – or death.  The Empire would regard them all as traitors.

“We’re better than we were a month ago,” David said, his grin growing wider.  “The inspection I carried out four days ago was very careful and found plenty of problems that were never found in the previous round of inspections.  The inspections I carried out together had all of them fixed, apart from a plasma conduit in Reactor Three that we don’t have a replacement unit for.”

Colin nodded.  Stacy’s inspections hadn’t focused on replacement components and general readiness, but appearances and decorum.  The result had been inevitable and standards had started to slip, sometimes sharply. What was the point, crewmen had asked themselves, in keeping the records up to date and the components replaced when the inspector never even looked at them?  Where was the reward of knowing that they’d done a good job, when Stacy had issued demerits like water for little matters like oil marks and imperfect uniforms.  Morale had plummeted and so had the condition of the ship.  The superdreadnaughts were over-designed and it hadn’t been a major problem, but if David had ever had to take his ship into battle, it would have been with a flawed weapon under his command.

“Perhaps we’ll find some in the convey,” he said, finally.  It was easy to find an excuse to put the paperwork out of his mind.  “What was your impression of Captain Cordova?”

David shrugged.  “You don’t trust him either?”  Colin lifted an eyebrow.  “I remember you when you were younger.  If you were sure of yourself, you wouldn’t even dream of asking anyone else’s advice, but if you had doubts you would ask someone for a second opinion.  Not a bad trait in a commanding officer, in my view, although it would be better done in private…”

“We are in private,” Colin reminded him.  “What do you think of him?”

“Too good to be true,” David said.  “Oh, he’s definitely got experience on Imperial ships – that wasn't faked – but he’s almost exactly what we need.”

“Yeah,” Colin said, his thoughts elsewhere.  “He is.”

He’d sent Captain Cordova on a raiding mission with the various volunteers because he didn’t entirely trust him, but he’d picked the target with a certain amount of malice aforethought.  The asteroid mining facilities belonged to allies of Cordova’s Family and the remainder of his flotilla was made up of former pirate ships.  Colin had laid down the law, firmly, that the replacement for the Empire, whatever form it took, would amnesty anyone who joined them, provided that they behaved themselves.  If some of the ex-pirates decided to hold a loot, rape and massacre, Cordova would have to stop them, or be disgraced.

Politics, he thought, disgustedly.  The Shadow Fleet’s committee consisted of his co-conspirators, Daria and Salgak.  David and a couple of the other newcomers, once they had proved themselves, would probably be invited onto the committee, but it was Colin’s creation.  He trusted the people on it, but as the Shadow Fleet expanded, it would be harder to prevent others from wanting a seat on the committee.  There were, as Daria had pointed out, several thousand people who would insist that Cordova, or someone else they trusted, got a seat, or they would leave.  If they left, they might consider betraying the Shadow Fleet…

“He’s got the respect of people who probably think the pair of us are dangerously effeminate stereotypes,” David added, thoughtfully.  “If he can keep them in line…”

“I’m not worried about that,” Colin said.  He would have bet on a Marine platoon against any of the mercenary companies, particularly since he'd seen some of the mercenaries close-up, when they’d been trying to impress him.  Some of them were very dangerous indeed, others would be more dangerous to their own people than to the enemy.  He hadn’t realised just how many outfits there were, or how many of them would want more than just payment for their services.  They wanted a chance to shape the future.  “I just don’t trust him.”

It sounded petulant, even to his ears.  “What do you think I should do with him?”

“Test him,” David said, “which I believe is what you are doing.  If he carries out the strike as you ordered, he’s certainly going to blot his copybook in the eyes of the Families, so even handing you over won’t guarantee his safety.”

“If he’s who he claims to be,” Colin said.  “If he’s Imperial Intelligence’s idea of a plant…”

He scowled.  Daria had told him, several times, that no one had any reason to question Cordova’s credentials, and he would have dearly liked to believe that he was just being paranoid, but there was still that quiet nagging doubt at the back of his mind.  If Cordova was a plant, he hadn’t betrayed anyone in the time he’d spent along the Rim, in-between raiding Imperial shipping and planets for supplies.  It was a long time for Imperial Intelligence to watch without sending in the Imperial Navy – they could have wiped out half the freebooter bases in a fortnight with what Cordova knew – but it was possible…

And Daria trusted him.  Daria, who had grown up in an environment where trust could be fatal, if it were given to the wrong person.  That spoke well of him, but Colin hadn’t grown up without learning to trust his own instincts, even though the more rational part of his mind insisted that it was only a reaction to Cordova’s heritage.  The accent of a Family scion hadn’t vanished completely, after all…

“True,” he said, finally.  “We’ll give him the rope and see if he hangs himself.”

He stood up as the timer bleeped.  “Ten minutes to engagement,” he said, reminding himself of what he’d been trying to forget.  The paperwork had helped him to forget that they were lying in wait.  “You’d better take your station on the bridge.”

“Yes, sir,” David said.  He leaned forward.  “Colin, I haven’t felt so…alive in years.”

“Yeah,” Colin said, as he put down the terminal and composed himself.  “Me too.”

The General Montgomery’s flag deck was much larger than that of the Lightning, although that was unsurprising; she’d been intended to serve as the flagship of a much larger task force, after all.  The General-class of superdreadnaughts were heavy missile-armed ships, suitable for pounding their targets into scrap from a distance, while their partners in the Admiral-class were designed for close-quarters combat.  Standard Imperial Navy doctrine was to use the Generals at long range, but Colin had turned that on its head, placing his Generals in line with his Admirals, something that was normally only risked during drills.  It wouldn’t conceal the exact identity of the ships, not once they opened fire, but it would significantly reduce the missile flight times.

“Admiral on the deck,” Lieutenant Gillespie announced, as Colin entered.  The brief moment when every back straightened was more than just a formality, it was a gesture of respect, and one honestly earned.  “Admiral, your task force is fully at your command.”

“Thank you,” Colin said, as he took his seat.  It faced the main tactical display directly, allowing him to follow the overall battle, or to zero in on a particular action.  He’d sat in an Admiral’s chair before, back when he'd been a tactical officer under Percival, but that hadn’t been real.  This was real.  The Empire might not have promoted him to Admiral, but he’d earned the chair, if only by taking it.  “All ships, stand by for engagement.”

The Annual Fleet was, according to the official story, a convoy transporting Imperial goods and services, including industrial nodes, weapons and equipment, from the more advanced yards in the Core to the newly-opened sector.  The truth, Colin knew, was more interesting; the Clans that controlled the massive industrial centres closer to Earth weren't interested in competition, so they’d insisted on shipping out the equipment, rather than let it be produced locally.  Indeed, one of the reasons why there were so many Clans interested in Macore was because there was a local industry that could be enhanced and therefore break the monopoly.  It was the most regular convoy of the year…and, unless Percival had acted very quickly, had no reason to expect trouble.

And even if they do, what can they do?  Colin asked.  In their place, he would have cancelled the convoy altogether, until a stronger escort could be organised, but that wouldn’t be an option for the Clans.  The penalty clauses would start kicking in if the material was a day late, let alone a few weeks and they would hate the concept of having to pay more out than they really wanted to pay.  The quid pro quo of retarding the sector’s development had been the promise that the materials would be provided…and their enemies would be waiting for a chance to strike.  The convoy’s escort would be more than enough to deal with pirates, but hardly enough to deal with nine superdreadnaughts and their escorts.

His smile grew wider as he contemplated the tactical situation.  The flicker drive wasn't the most precise system in existence and a tiny calculation error at one end could leave the starship hundreds of light years off course.  Standard doctrine, then, insisted that convoys make smaller hops through flicker-space, pause long enough to recycle their drives and recalibrate, before continuing their journey.  It made perfect sense when there was no threat waiting for them, but in their place, he would have altered the convoy’s course, or maybe even scattered the ships.  Interception would have been much harder on a random series of vectors.

The details they'd recovered from Stacy’s files had been surprisingly precise, but very few people would have dared to tell her that she had no right to the information, even if she had no need to know.  The Geeks were still hacking their way through her files, and those belonging to Captain Stoutjespyk, but they were unlocking more information than Colin had believed possible.  Percival would have that to explain to his superiors as well, unless he managed to somehow place that particular issue on someone else, but that would be much harder than the debacle at Macore.  He should have told Stacy that the information was not for her and left it at that, but he hadn’t…and his enemies would seize on that.  Even if it hadn’t been his fault, he would have still have been at fault, just for not knowing, or caring.

Colin smiled.  Perhaps we should hope that he doesn’t get summarily put in front of a wall and shot, he thought, dryly.  They might send someone competent out here instead.

The convoy escort, according to Stacy’s files, was commanded by a Commodore Lizzie Harwinton and consisted of forty ships, nine of them battlecruisers.  That wasn't the standard doctrinal use for battlecruisers – they were intended for fast slashing raids, not being tied to a convoy – but it added to the firepower deployed to protect the transport ships.  The remainder, heavy cruisers for close-escort and destroyers for scouting, was less important, although they could hurt the superdreadnaughts in a knife-range fight.  Colin had no intention of fighting a standard battle; Lizzie Harwinton was supposed to be competent and genuinely liked by her crews, although with a name like that she was probably one of the Families.  A client branch of the Kennedy Family, if he recalled correctly, which gave her an incentive to succeed.  Failure would mean collective punishment.

Poor bitch, he thought, as he tensed.  They didn’t have a precise time, but with everything riding on the convoy, he would be surprised if they weren't perfectly on time.  The Clans preferred to ignore bothersome details like the mechanics of interstellar travel or the problems caused by random gravity shadows and Commodore Harwinton would have had to push her crews to the limit just to make the deadline.  Stacy’s private notes had even speculated that some Clans were deliberately trying to sabotage the Annual Fleet, just to make like harder for the Kennedy’s, although it struck him as being insanely risky.  The Kennedy’s wouldn’t take that calmly.

“Bring the fleet to red alert,” he ordered, watching as the lights dimmed and the drumbeat echoed through the ship.  The crew had already been on alert, but red alert meant only one thing; action was imminent.  The weapons were unlocked, waiting only for targeting data before they opened fire, pounding their targets into dust and debris.  “Stand by for action…”

“I have an energy spike,” the sensor officer reported.  A new icon sprang into life on the display.  Another followed it, and another, as space started to roll and boil with interdimensional energies.  Colin had seen it happen at close range, watched as lights flickered into existence from nowhere, but watching it happen on the display was strange, almost unreal.  Space was being warped right in front of his force; he could almost feel the vibration as the shockwaves rolled though space and struck his ships.  “Seven spikes…ten…fifteen…emergence!”

A destroyer flickered into view, followed rapidly by two more, and then a heavy cruiser.  Was it his imagination, Colin wondered, or did the craft literally flinch when it realised what was waiting for the convoy?  He hadn’t bothered to cloak his fleet, counting on surprise and the brief moment when a starship was blind and dump upon returning to normal space to hide them, just long enough.  Other ships were arriving, their drives cycling down as they returned to normal space, and time had suddenly run out.  Their time had run out...

“All ships,” Colin ordered.  There was a dryness in his throat, a tension.  “Open fire.”

Chapter Fifteen

“Incoming missiles!”

Commodore Harwinton sat up in her seat as the tactical officer’s panicked shout – there was no other way to describe it – echoed through the compartment.  The entire tactical display, automatically, had switched to a tactical display, showing nine superdreadnaughts…which were pumping missiles towards her ships at a staggering rate.  Sheer disbelief held her stunned for a long moment – there were no superdreadnaughts under enemy control, were there? – before she reacted, but it was almost too late.

“Red alert,” she snapped, her fingers unsnapping the covered red button on her command chair and unlocking the main weapons consoles.  The point defence – thank God – was on a separate system, even though the crews wouldn’t be able to cope with such an onslaught, leaving their survival in the hands of the computers.  “Raise shields and get me some info!  Who are they?”

The first wave of missiles slashed into her warships.  Four of her destroyers were blown into atoms before they even had a chance to raise their shields, standard thermonuclear warheads detonating against their hulls and melting them like frozen water, while two heavy cruisers were crippled.  The follow-up attacks, launched to capitalise on the success of the first attacks, were targeted more precisely; she saw one of her battlecruisers wink out, hammered by almost a hundred missiles from two superdreadnaughts.  Two light cruisers followed her into oblivion; a third heavy cruiser blew apart seconds later.  Her force was being torn apart and, it was clear, the only think that had prevented their complete annihilation within seconds had been their formation around the convoy.

They want the convoy, she thought, as the low thrumming of the point defence pulsars, laser cannons and neutron bolts started to echo through the ship.  The enemy missiles hadn’t targeted them specifically, but it would only be a matter of time, even though they were being careful to avoid hitting any of the freighters.  The data network between her ships that should have woven them all into a single coordinated unit hadn’t even had a chance to form before they knocked it down.  Whoever they were, they were good…

“They’re Imperial ships,” someone shouted.  Harwinton couldn’t believe it, but then she looked at the data scrolling up on the display, identifying the ships.  They were all under Admiral Percival’s command, part of his superdreadnaught force…and here they were, engaging in the greatest act of treason since Empress Janice had used her command of Home Fleet to seize the throne and reign as Empress for twenty years, before she had been forced to flee Earth.  “Commodore, they’re our ships…”

“Return fire,” Harwinton ordered, sharply.  The tactical programs would have hesitated to fire on other Imperial ships and she had to handle it personally.  Had it really been only thirty seconds since the entire situation had gone to hell?  She pressed her fingers against the sensors, authorising unrestricted fire.  “Get me some options, damn it!”

The battlecruisers – the remaining three battlecruisers – opened fire, spiting against the wind.  The remaining cruisers joined them, but their combined firepower couldn’t have matched a single superdreadnaught, let alone nine of them…but she couldn’t run.  There was no time to recycle the drives, no room to alter their positions…and she had to cover the convoy.  The popguns on the freighters might add a little something to the point defence, but they couldn’t help cover her ships.  The enemy probably had all the time in the world…and, if by some miracle she actually beat them, they could just flicker out and escape.

“Send, directly to the convoy, all ships,” she ordered, as her ship fired another salvo of missiles.  The enemy ships were moving forward now, concentrating their own firepower on the remaining battlecruisers.  “All ships are to scatter and run.  I repeat, scatter and run!”

The order had been drilled, repeatedly, but no one had ever had to use it for real, not on the Annual Fleet.  If the freighters obeyed, they would be breaking formation now – and probably panicking as well, part of her mind reminded her – and trying to put as much distance as they could between themselves and their mysterious enemies.  They might have time to recharge their drives and flicker out, if they were lucky, or she might just be delaying their doom.  Pirates would quite happily loot, rape and kill their way through any freighter crew foolish enough to resist them, but the superdreadnaught crews wouldn’t – she hoped.  Whatever the hell Percival was playing at, she doubted that discipline had fallen that far…

Her mind couldn’t grasp it.  What the hell is he doing?

“Bring us about,” she ordered.  Her Clan wouldn’t thank her for surrendering and, in any case, they had to win the freighters time to flicker out.  Her crew obeyed without argument; they’d learned to trust her, even if she was one of the Families.  They were all going to die with her, but at least they’d die for something worthwhile.  “Take us right down their throats.”

Her teeth clenched as the battlecruiser started to move.  She had only five ships left in barely two minutes of fighting.  She couldn’t recall if anyone had ever lost so badly since the Dathi War.  The only hope now was to close to energy range and hope she could hurt them in her ships’ final moments of existence.  The tactical display flashed red as the enemy locked onto her ships, taking careful aim, and then belched a final hail of missiles.

I should have surrendered, she thought, as the missiles struck home.

***
The final enemy battlecruiser vanished in a ball of plasma.

Colin stared at it, almost unable to grasp what it meant.  Three thousand men and women, some loyalists, some who would have joined the rebels if given half a chance, had just been wiped out in a split-second.  He hadn’t been able to risk allowing Commodore Harwinton a chance to deploy, or to stall long enough for her drives to recycle and flicker out, and so there hadn’t been any choice, but to strike at once.  It brought home to him, as killing Captain Stoutjespyk, taking the superdreadnaughts and fleeting to the Rim had not, that he was committed.  He’d just slaughtered over twenty thousand Imperial Navy personnel.

I might have known some of them, he thought, slightly dazed.  He hadn’t recognised any of the names, but his graduating class had included thousands of officers, some of whom might have served under Harwinton.  He’d killed them all, as surely as if he'd placed a laser pistol to their heads and burned a hole through their brains, without even offering them a chance to surrender.  The thought was a galling one; was he, at bottom, any better than the pirates he had warned to behave themselves?

“Open communications,” he ordered, and his voice was as hard and cold as stone.  The communications officer nodded, signalling that the channel was open.  “This is Admiral Harper of the Shadow Fleet.  I am ordering you to surrender your ships, stand down your weapons, shields and drives, and prepare to be boarded.  Any resistance will result in the destruction of your vessels.”

He keyed off the communicator as the Marine shuttles started to launch from his ships.  He’d promoted Captain Frandsen to Colonel, on the grounds that the newer Marine compartments would need a commanding officer he trusted, but Frandsen had insisted on leading one of the boarding parties personally.  The former SD transports had been emptied and were currently being converted to serve as transports for the Shadow Fleet, although most of the mercenaries preferred their own transports.  The Shadow Fleet’s capture of the Annual Fleet, and the supplies and equipment it contained, would provide a major boost to their morale.  Once the Geeks got to work on the supplies, they would be halfway to building their own shipyard.

“They’re signalling their surrender,” the communications officer said.  “So far, they appear to be behaving themselves.”

Colin nodded.  Resistance tended to lead to unpleasant repercussions when pirates were involved.  The most violent pirate groups tended not to last very long, if only because the Rim communities rarely had much to do with them, but all pirates could be unpleasant if they thought they’d been cheated.  The first encounter with slavery along the Rim had been a shock, even through slavery was legal within the Empire, provided all the paperwork was in order.  Cindi, the Captain’s mistress, had been a slave, one altered to be submissive and obedient.  The Doctor had told him, regretfully, that removing the dominants that had been programmed into her system would be almost impossible.  The more adaptable pirate crews allowed their victims to live if they surrendered without a fight…

But how would the Imperial Navy transports react?  They would never have been targeted before by pirates, because they always travelled in convoys.  They had been used to the protection of the Navy – and, against common pirates, their confidence would have been more than justified – but now, now they had seen their escort blown into flaming plasma within minutes.  Would they surrender, or would they be stupid and try to fight?

“This is Frandsen, on the 486,” the communicator buzzed, finally.  “The crew surrendered without any resistance.”

“Good,” Colin said, relieved.  The crew might even join them, or, if not, they would be repatriated back to the Empire.  There hadn’t been any choice, but to slaughter the escort – and the Empire’s propaganda would certainly call it an atrocity – but maybe showing mercy would win them some friends in the long run.  “Check the main computers, then unlock them…”

“I do know my job,” Frandsen said, wryly.  Colin smiled, embarrassed.  Frandsen would ensure that they didn’t take any unwanted surprises back with them to the Rim, and the hidden bases there.  The Geeks would see to distributing the technological bounty, while the money chits they’d captured, intended to pay the Clan’s workforce, would serve to buy mercenaries.  Best of all, the Clan couldn’t even revoke the chits, or they would undermine confidence in their own resources.  “The ship will be perfectly safe…”

“We have a runner,” the tactical officer interrupted.  The display automatically focused on a smaller freighter, one right at the edge of the formation.  The light ship, really a converted old-style cruiser, was turning away from the fleet.  The Marine shuttle, closing in on it from the rear, went into evasive patterns, just in time to avoid a murderous burst of plasma fire.  “Admiral, they’re attempting to run.”

Colin’s jaw tightened.  “Bring the Denton around, order them to intercept…”

“Flicker,” the sensor officer said.  On the display, the small cruiser flickered out.  “They’re gone.”

They must have had a military-grade drive, Colin thought, coldly.  The unknown Captain certainly had balls, that was for sure.  He might have been an Imperial Intelligence officer – Imperial Intelligence liked converted cruisers – but even if not, he had certainly earned his pay.  He had probably been able to flicker out as the final escorting ships were blown out of space, but he’d waited, just long enough to obtain as much information as he could.  He’d only run when it had become obvious that he was about to be boarded, which meant Percival would know exactly what had happened to his ships.  It might even make him look good, even though it had exposed just how inadequate the convoy system actually was.  He might call it a success, but he would know just how hard it would be to prevent a repeat performance.

“Order the Denton to stand down,” he said, countermanding his previous order.  The destroyer Captain was known to be eager; without countermanding orders, he might try to follow the cruiser all the way to Harmony.  Even if that were possible, he wouldn’t have bet against the cruiser being armed to the teeth, instead of demilitarised.  The destroyer wouldn’t have stood a chance.  “I want the remaining ships boarded as quickly as possible.”

He considered the problem while the remaining freighters were boarded.  There were no more runners, thankfully, but a few of the crews tried to fight with their bare hands and were stunned by the Marines.  The ship was still a few days away from Harmony, so even if it had a military-grade drive, it would still be unable to whistle up any help in time to make a difference.  If there had been a superdreadnaught squadron on random patrol, it would still require a great deal of luck to succeed in forcing an interception…and anything smaller would be merely throwing good money after bad.  Losing the cruiser was annoying, if only because of what it could have told the Geeks and his intelligence squad, but it was hardly fatal.

“Admiral, we have secured the remaining ships,” Frandsen said, breaking into Colin’s thoughts.  “The crews are secured, the main computers are unlocked and we are ready to move.  Do we have permission to depart?”

“Yes,” Colin said, hiding a smile.  “The battlecruisers will accompany you to the rendezvous system” – the freighters, possessing mainly commercial drives, weren’t capable of matching the military-drive ships for speed – “and we’ll meet you there.  Do you want to off-load the crews first?”

There was a brief pause as Frandsen checked with his subordinates.  “I don’t think so,” he said, after a moment.  “They can’t pose a threat to us and even if they do eliminate the entire boarding party, their ships will be locked into the flight to the rendezvous system.  The worst they can do is knock out the drive…”

“Which will leave them stranded in interstellar space,” Colin said.  They wouldn’t be rescued.  No one would have a hope in hell of even finding them.  “Understood; we’ll see you in two weeks.”

“Keep a light in the window,” Frandsen said.  “Frandsen; out.”

The tactical display bleeped as, one by one, the freighters started to flicker out.  The battlecruisers altered course, moving through a victory roll – Colin saw Tsuji’s hand in that – before they too flickered out and vanished.  The final battlecruiser vanished and Colin, despite himself, started to relax.  They had won!

“They’re not going to be able to cover this up,” he mused, smiling at the thought.  “Signal to all ships; well done.”  His gaze passed over the display.  “Sensors, have you picked up any traces of lifepods?”

“No, sir,” the sensor officer said.  “I’ve been scanning continuously since the fighting ended, but I have picked up nothing, apart from cooling wreckage.”

I killed them, Colin thought.  It was possible that a dozen, or a hundred, lifepods had escaped, but if their inhabitants had disabled their beacons, they wouldn’t be able to pick them out from all the other wreckage.  Normally, any lifepods would be picked up, regardless of side, but if the inhabitants believed that they would all be slaughtered, they might take the risk of remaining silent and praying that Admiral Percival would dispatch a rescue mission.

“Transmit an open message,” he ordered, finally.  “Offer to take any survivors onboard.”

There was a long pause.  “Message transmitted,” the communications officer said.  Colin waited, silently praying.  “I have received no response.”

“I understand,” Colin said.  He keyed his console.  “It’s time to take our leave.  All ships, flicker out for the first waypoint…now.”

The tactical display blanked as the flicker drive engaged.  There was, literally, nothing outside the ship in flicker-space.  They were completely alone.  Starships, even ones flying in formations, never saw other starships within flicker-space.

“Stand down from red alert,” Colin ordered, and pulled himself to his feet.  His joints ached as if he had been sitting down for hours.  He keyed his intercom again. “Captain, I want a full report on our combat performance and suggestions for improvement within the day.”

“Yes, Admiral,” David said.  Colin smiled at his tone.  Very few Imperial officers would ask their subordinates for open suggestions and those who would tended to claim the credit for them later.  Colin had no intention of stealing anyone’s thunder.  “I’ll deal with it.”

“Consult with the other departments as well,” Colin added.  “Let’s see how well they think we did.”

***
“We fired off around twenty percent of our standard weapons,” David said, five hours later.  Colin had had a chance for a shower and a nap, but he still felt tired.  His dreams had been inhabited by the dead crews he’d slain in merciless combat.  There were times, almost, when he envied Percival his upbringing, when men and women were nothing more than pawns for him to move around at will.  “Overall, departments performed well, though the ECM crews really require more seasoning.  If we had been facing other superdreadnaughts, it could have turned into a real battering match.”

Colin nodded.  Superdreadnaught on superdreadnaught tactics tended to be very simple and brutal.  A three-to-one advantage was generally considered necessary to guarantee victory and even then, the loser would normally have a chance to retreat and flicker out.  The battlecruisers they’d faced hadn’t even touched his hulls, but it hadn’t been for lack of trying.  If they’d had more firepower and advance warning, they would have made life rather more interesting than he would have liked.

And, of course, the ECM senior chief had been a loyalist.

“There wasn’t any major combat related damage and the handful of repairs were all comparatively minor,” David added.  “I got brief downloads from the other ships before they flickered out and none of them showed any significant damage.  You did well, boss.”

“I killed them,” Colin said.  It wasn't something he could have said to anyone else.  “I just reached out and swatted them like bugs.”

“And what choice did you have?”  David asked.  “You chose to launch the rebellion, so…what choice did you have?”

“Thank you,” Colin said, sourly.  “I’m glad to know that I can always count on you to cheer me up.”

“More seriously, think of the expression on Percival’s face,” David said.  “I wish I could be there to see it.  Maybe we’ll get lucky and he’ll have a heart attack.”

Chapter Sixteen

The Admiral was not happy.

Penny held herself to attention as he thundered and raged, mostly directed at a cringing Stacy.  The flight back to Harmony hadn’t been a peaceful one; Stacy had, after the first hour of realising that she was safe again, had demanded better quarters, then an immediate attack on Macore, and then finally a private chef of her own.  The battlecruiser’s Captain had ignored her as much as possible, leaving Penny to deal with her, while awaiting the Admiral’s response to the disaster.  Stacy had seemed to be under the impression that a quick private chat with Percival was all she needed to avoid the blame, but nearly twenty minutes of angry shouting later, even she was starting to crack.  It felt as if he’d been shouting for hours.

“What the hell were you thinking, allowing your ships to be boarded?”  Percival demanded.  “You practically welcomed them onboard your ships, all of your ships!  You know as well as I do that you should have only brought them onboard the flagship, whatever priority codes they had, and you should not have allowed them to dock with all of your ships!  Were you deliberately trying to lose your ships?”

Stacy flinched again.  “My Lord,” she whined, “they were using your priority codes…”

“And you were the senior officer,” Percival snapped.  “You had command on the spot.  You could have ordered the other shuttles to hold off while you examined the data package for yourself, whatever private priority codes they were using.  You – instead – chose to believe that it was more important to allow them to dock…and it cost you nine superdreadnaughts.  You’re going to be a fucking laughing stock right across the Empire!  I don’t think that anyone has ever lost more than a pair of superdreadnaughts since the Dathi War – certainly not to a boarding party!  What the hell were you thinking?”

It was, Penny decided, a little disingenuous.  If the boarding parties had used Percival’s private codes, then Stacy would have been right to not hesitate, particularly if she’d had a reason to believe that they were real.  Penny had spent enough time with her on the battlecruiser, listening to her protests and whining and general fury at the unfairness of the universe, to suspect that Percival had included a set of secret instructions with the standard deployment orders.  Given how important Macore was to his patrons, which meant that it would be equally as important to Stacy, she found it quite believable that there might have been secret orders, which would have weighed on Stacy’s mind.

Or maybe she’s just an idiot, she thought, dryly.  The Admiral often chewed people out, but for once he was chewing out a person who genuinely deserved it.  Stacy’s attempts to defend herself were coming to nothing – as indeed they would, when – if – a review board had the chance to study the records of the disaster – but the really interesting point was how far he could go to punish her.  Punish her too lightly and she’d learn nothing, punish her too harshly and her Family would be angry with him…

“My Flag Captain urged me to accept the shuttles,” Stacy added, her voice pleading.  “I only followed his advice…”

“Of, for crying out loud,” Percival snapped, irritated.  “You were the Commodore in command of the fleet!  You could have issued whatever orders you liked and they would have been obeyed.  You didn’t have to be swayed by him, did you?”

He raged on.  If Stacy had been as overbearing on the command deck as Penny suspected she had been, it would be hard to blame Captain Houston for throwing his lot in with the rebels, or maybe even having been a part of the rebel conspiracy from day one.  He might even have seen through the shuttles, realised what they were, and allowed them to board, just to be rid of his superior.  Doubtless, Public Information would come up with some story – bribes, perhaps, which his superior had been on the verge of exposing – to cover it, but there was no mistaking the scale of the disaster.  A handful of competent officers had challenged the might of the Empire.

“Enough,” Percival snapped, finally.  “Penny, I want you to consider the problem and how we’re going to resolve it.”  He turned a murderous glare on Stacy.  “You can leave the pair of us alone now.  She doesn’t need someone to prevent me from strangling her.”

Penny saluted, turned, and left the room.  She didn’t allow herself the smile that had been threatening to break out on her face until she was safely back in her quarters, where she knew where the surveillance devices were.  She had a feeling that Imperial Intelligence and the SDs were going to be studying the take from every surveillance device in the entire sector – which should take them several years – just to see what signs of treachery they could find.  A smile at the wrong time might be disastrous.

The memory of Stacy’s face, however, would stay with her until the day she died.  

***
It was two hours later when she was called back into the Admiral’s quarters, and, by then, the situation had taken a major turn for the worse.  The crazed idiosyncrasies of the gravity shadows that made FTL travel so dangerous had ensured that she had arrived home barely before the news of the attack on the Annual Fleet.  The intelligence ship that had been attached to the fleet might have had a military-grade power plant, but it had lacked a military-grade drive, which meant that it’s report had been delayed.  It was nothing short of disastrous; the escorting formation had been blown completely out of space, while the freighters had been captured and taken.  By now, they could be almost anywhere…

Hellfire, she thought, feeling shock and a certain sense of awe settling into her mind.  The rebels weren’t playing games – and the report made it quite clear that the ships involved in the ambush were the rebel superdreadnaughts – and, while Percival had been barely aware of one problem, a second had appeared.  The loss of the Annual Fleet meant significant problems for his patrons, while his enemies would feel the urge to use it to stick a knife in his back.  Countless agreements between the Families, made without any regard for anything, but pure profit, had just been damaged beyond repair.  

The issue wasn't the basic goods and industrial components; they could be manufactured in the sector.  Indeed, given enough time, the sector could start producing superdreadnaughts.  The problem lay with the more advanced components, ones that were regarded as propriety, and could not – legally – be duplicated outside official shipyards.  The loss of the Annual Fleet would force the sector to start manufacturing them themselves, which would not please the Clans who owned the monopoly, which would, in turn…

It began to dawn on her that Colin Harper – who, according to Stacy, was the leader of the rebels – was in a stronger position than he knew.  It would be months, at least, before the news got back to Earth, but when it did, there was going to be a political firestorm.  Just by raiding the convoy, he'd created a situation where local industrial factions, even those owned by a Clan, would owe him…and, best of all, they couldn’t be blamed for it, even under Imperial Law.  They hadn’t been the ones who’d lost the Annual Fleet, had they?  It wasn't their fault that the penalty clauses had had to be invoked, was it?

She’d studied, carefully, a tactical display of the sector, but she had had to admit defeat.  The superdreadnaughts had all been refitted with the latest military-grade drive.  If they’d started at once, they could have been on their way to Earth, although even nine superdreadnaughts could do little against Home Fleet, but die bravely.  If they were remaining within the sector, as seemed more likely, they could be anywhere within an expanding volume of space…and they would need to be very lucky to even get a shot at them.  Nine superdreadnaughts…the more she thought about it, the worse it seemed.  They would be lucky to intercept it with something that could even fight them on equal terms.  Battlecruisers, cruisers and destroyers would just be blown to plasma.

Percival looked calmer when she was shown into his office and there was no sign of Stacy.  “I sent her down to the planet,” he said, by way of explanation.  Penny smiled, despite herself; no one, not even Stacy, could mistake that for a reward.  “I have been thinking.”

Penny said nothing.  In her experience, Percival might have been a genius when it came to organising his own advancement, and that of his Family, but he wasn't a genius at space warfare.  That was why he kept her around – her and other tactical students – and, going from what Stacy had said, there was something very personal in Colin Harper’s war.  She hadn’t had a chance to study his record – and she knew from long experience that it might not be complete – but she would have bet half her salary that Colin had once served Percival as his tactical servant.  Percival might even have dumped Colin for her; she, unlike Colin, could sleep with him.  She’d met plenty of men who were thoroughly heterosexual, but Percival avoided even hints of a homosexual relationship.  It said something, she decided, about his basic insecurities.

“We have to find and locate those ships before they can do any damage,” Percival said.  “I need a way of finding them quickly.”

“It’s too late,” Stacy said, and reported – quickly – on the Annual Fleet.  Percival’s face seemed to darken and she braced herself, wondering if he was about to shoot the bearer of bad news.  Instead, Percival brought up the tactical display and studied it quickly, his face darkening still further.  “Admiral…”

“I should have shot her,” Percival said, almost as if he were speaking to himself.  “I could have just burned her down right there and then, on the deck.  I could have strangled her with my bare hands.  I could have…”

Penny winced inwardly.  Legally, Percival was quite right; any commanding officer had the legal right to execute his subordinates, for a real or perceived offence, without trial.  It was rare, however, and even Percival would have hesitated to execute a Commodore, no matter how incompetent.  The only time Penny had ever heard of such an execution, in living memory, had been a Captain publicly beheading a rapist on his flagship.  It was more normal to hold a Captain’s Mast, allow the accused a chance to defend himself, and then hand out punishment.

He turned to face her.  “Penny, how do we stop him?”

Penny looked back at him.  For the first time in their relationship, she felt herself to be in a strong position.  Perhaps, the stronger position.  “What did you do to him?”

“I…offered him patronage in exchange for his services and he accepted,” Percival said, slowly.  “He served me well, but he wanted to climb too high, too fast, so I gave him the post of first officer on a battlecruiser.  He didn’t have any serious patrons, so I thought…”

Penny could fill in the rest.  Percival would have made promises, an ambitious and terrifyingly smart – yet naïve in the ways of the Empire - young officer would have believed them and given Percival his service.  Afterwards, Percival simply couldn’t have fulfilled the expectations he’d allowed to rise…and, instead, cast the young man out to a battlecruiser posting on the Rim.  It might not have been a dead end, but without any patrons, it probably would have been the end of a promising career.  Some officers, treated like that, would have gone renegade, but Colin…Colin had started a real revolt, one that would challenge the Empire.

She considered, for one brief moment, trying to reach Colin and offering him her services.  Certainly, Percival gave her no real reason to be loyal to him, not with the example of what had happened to Colin and a dozen others to illustrate her eventual fate, and she had no illusions that he loved her.  If she had believed that Colin could win, she would have started considering ways to reach him, perhaps bringing a starship of her own to the rebellion, but she knew that he could only lose.  Nine superdreadnaughts could cause a vast amount of damage in a comparatively short space of time, but then the Empire would gather the force to rip Colin’s rebellion to shreds and crush him utterly.  The odds were vastly in the Empire’s favour.

“We cannot risk finding him without at least one of the superdreadnaught squadrons,” she said, wryly.  For anything smaller, finding the superdreadnaughts would be the last thing they wanted to do, unless they could tail the ships at a distance.  “We’re going to have to risk deploying at least one of the squadrons away from Harmony.”

Percival winced.  He had two superdreadnaught squadrons, enough to be fairly certain of victory if they could both be steered into Colin’s path, but deploying either one would leave Harmony partly uncovered.  There were powerful fixed defences built in around the shipyard and the other industrial stations, as well as the planet itself, but nine superdreadnaughts could still cause a great deal of damage.  There were other worlds in the sector with vast fixed defences, but without mobile units to back them up, the best they could do was stand Colin off from the planet.  Practically, Penny doubted that they could hold nine superdreadnaughts off for long…

And then what?  Standard Imperial Doctrine insisted that a planet should surrender once its orbiting defenders had been reduced to cooling debris.  If a world didn’t surrender, the attackers would be able to land their ground forces, but – at best – Colin had about three thousand Marines.  If they’d all joined him, and their absence from the camp on Macore suggested that they had, he still wasn't going to be able to take and hold any world, even with orbital fire.  Would he go so far as to scorch a world that refused to accept his authority?

“We can’t let him get a foothold anyway,” Penny said, as reassuringly as she could.  “You need to ask for reinforcements from the Empire.”

Percival scowled.  “If I do that now, without a success, they won’t be happy,” he said.  That unhappiness, Penny knew, would translate into his removal from office…and the ruin of her career as well. “They won’t want to cut superdreadnaughts from any of the interior fleets to support us.”

“Then we need a victory,” Penny said, practically.  She picked up the terminal and tapped a command into it.  A nine-star system appeared on the display.  “Macore.”

“Harper isn’t from Macore,” Percival pointed out.  “What role did they have in the rebellion?”

“They gave aid and comfort to the enemy,” Penny said, dispassionately.  Colin had done everything he could to avoid landing Macore with part of the blame, but Percival needed – desperately – a victory.  It might also serve to lure Colin’s forces out of hiding and into a killing zone.  “I suggest that you move, now, and order the reduction of Macore’s orbiting defences and the invasion of the planet’s surface.”

She brought up more details before Percival could interrupt.  “The rebels took the SD transports, so you could recall detachments from Plainsman, Torq and Ian’s World,” she continued.  “Once massed here, they can be dispatched to Macore to occupy the world and break their independent sprit.  Harper would have to risk coming into the open to prevent us from landing them and that would give us a chance to take a shot at his forces.  In the meantime…”

Percival thought of an objection.  “What if Harper attacks the transports while they’re coming here?”  He asked.  “The rebels are not likely to be fond of the SD troopers.”

“No,” Penny agreed, remembering why Percival needed her.  “The transports will have orders to flicker out on random vectors.  Harper’s forces won’t be able to intercept them even if they have forces in place to make a stab at it.  Once they’re massed here, they will flicker out under heavy escort – very heavy escort.”

She paced over behind him and started to massage his shoulders.  “Harper’s rebels have to be lucky all the time,” she said.  “We only have to be lucky once.  If we cover the vulnerable spots where they might attack, and start scouting the Rim for their base – and he has to have set up a base somewhere, if only to store the supplies – we should be able to put a stop to the rebellion.”

The thought made her smile.  The rebellion had to have been planned for a long time.  Imperial Intelligence, which monitored crewmen and senior officers onboard starships, would have to explain its failure to pick up even a hint of the planning and preparations.  Penny had figured, judging by the people who weren't abandoned on Macore, that some of the Security Officers had even joined the rebellion, or had been killed by the rebels.  She would push the former possibility forward, both for Percival’s sake…and her own.  The longer Imperial Intelligence had to cover itself, avoiding its own share of the blame, the longer she would have to plan without their interference.

Percival relaxed slightly under her touch.  “And if we can’t find the base?”

“Someone will talk,” Penny assured him.  Imperial Intelligence was very good at getting confessions out of people, even those who believed that they could never be forced to admit to anything, even their real names.  Truth drugs, lie detectors and old-fashioned torture would get details out of anyone.  “Someone always talks.”

She smiled.  “And when they do, we can bring the massed might of the Empire down on the rebels and crush them once and for all,” she added.  “That, I think, will redeem everything else, don’t you?”

Chapter Seventeen

Kathy Tyler sat back in her office and rubbed her hands together with glee.  After a long moment, she opened one of her drawers and pulled out a small bottle of dark red liquid.  The alcoholic Phoenix, so called because it had interesting effects on the human body, was technically banned from the orbiting shack, but Kathy and most of the workers had generally ignored such regulations.  She poured herself a small glass – the small bottle alone cost more than all of her workers made in a year put together – and sipped it, feeling the liquid sliding down her throat.  It was an expensive way of celebrating, but she felt like she deserved it.  She'd turned the entire system into a profitable field for further expansion.

She smiled as she sat back and contemplated the situation.  Her Family had developed the advanced mining techniques and offered them to a senior Clan, accepting their patronage in exchange for the start-up funds to get the entire industry going…and Kathy had been selected as the manager!  At twenty-five, she was young for such a post, but her Family had needed someone senior there, and who better, but the Heir?  Kathy stood to inherit her Family’s wealth, resources and everything else, along with their ties to other Families, when her father died…and so she had been offered the chance to make a name for herself.  She wasn't entirely fooled – part of the reason, she was sure, was to prevent her from hastening her father’s demise – but it was worth doing.  On the High City, she was nothing more than the Heir to a very minor Family, but out here, she was a Queen!

The thought had never failed to amuse her.  She’d grown up in the High City – most Heirs did, along with their relations – and she’d hated her peers from a very early age.  The Families might be equals, in theory, but there was a pecking order…and while a penniless member of a senior Family might be loaned money without any expectation of it being repaid, a junior Family was very near the bottom.  She had grown up expected to follow the seniors, the Heirs to the senior Families, regardless of how stuck-up, conceited and infuriating they were.  Her parents had expected her to make friends and influence people who could be helpful to the Family, but most of the girls had been stuck-up idiots, leading their cliques with disdainful abandon, while the boys…the boys had expected their inferiors to open their legs, on demand.

And so she had been sent to Arian.  The Roosevelt Clan – her Family’s Patrons – owned most of the belt, purchased merely to prevent other Clans from laying claim to it, and they’d been happy to allow her Family to sublet them.  Kathy had worked hard, using the staff she’d brought with her and others she’d hired in the sector, and set up the new mining complex in record time.  A week after the complex had finally been completed, she’d ordered a test…and it had worked perfectly.  High-grade metal had been extracted from the target asteroid, with greater efficiency than previous methods, while wastage and spillage had been cut to a bare minimum.  According to her calculations, if she hired freebooters to provide transport – and not a Clan-owned shipping line – she should be able to sell competitively to the entire sector.  There were planets that had almost no asteroid mining industry and they would buy from her, while she would be quite happy to set up additional stations in their asteroid belts.  The sector was going to be big, according to her father’s last letter, and she would be in on the ground floor.  The bigger Clans could have the shipyards and industrial nodes; she would be happy just supplying the metals.

An alarm rang.  “Kathy” – it had taken her weeks to convince the miners not to call her ‘My Lady’ – “we have contacts, several contacts, approaching the station.”

Kathy blinked.  “Customers?”

“I don’t think so,” the miner said.  “I think you’d better come to the command centre.”

When they’d been told that Kathy had been exiled to the Rim – or at least to Sector 117, which was right on the edge of the Rim – her peers had been divided into two schools of thought.  The first had believed that Kathy had committed some vast indiscretion that had resulted in her being sent away from the remainder of her family, the second had believed that she wouldn’t last a week out there without being raped and murdered.  After all, they’d tittered, with all the airs and graces of people who had never had to cope with reality, everyone knew what commoners were like.  They’d joked about it, as if it was a vast joke, but Kathy had been pleasantly surprised by most of the miners.  They’d been on the verge of being pushed out completely by the bigger corporations and she’d been quite happy to agree to their terms, which would have guaranteed all of them a stake in the future, or in the mining machines.

The command centre was something of a mess.  She hadn’t been worried about appearances since the day she’d taken her father’s aircar apart, just for something to do, and as long as it was functional, she didn’t care.  It wasn't outfitted to serve as more than a basic coordination centre for the mining ships and the remote survey craft, but it was normally more than enough.  Her father had insisted on her purchasing far more systems than she had thought she needed, a little foresight that might actually have come in handy.

“Kathy,” Jan said, as she entered the centre.  It normally never needed more than one person on duty at all times; Jan, a former asteroid miner, had been crippled in an accident.  Imperial medical science could have given him back his legs, but by the time he'd entered Kathy’s service, he’d grown used to using an antigravity floater.   It had struck Kathy, at the time, as horrendously unfair that Jan, a handsome and gentle man, had been denied medical care because of his lack of wealth, something that the chattering bitches at the High City never saw.  “They’re coming towards us on attack vector.”

Kathy’s blood ran cold.  “Attack vector?”

“Yes,” Jan said.  Nine red icons, blinking on and off the display, were definitely approaching them.  “The largest reads out as a cruiser-sized ship, but I can’t get any IFF signal off it, while the others are definitely modified ships.  They haven’t transmitted anything to us, not even a demand for surrender or…”

Kathy scowled.  “Did you try to raise them?”

“Nothing,” Jan said.  “They should have at least acknowledged, if they were warships on random patrol or training missions, but nothing.  They’ll be reaching their powered missile envelope within five minutes; less, much less, if they flicker in closer.”

They have to be pirates, Kathy thought, stunned.  The Arian System was supposed to have a permanent Navy presence, but with a lot of luck, the pirates could raid the asteroid facilities and escape before the Navy caught up with them.  Most asteroid mining facilities were hardly worth the risk involved, but her station was special; it was possible, perhaps even probable, that one of her rivals had paid the pirates for the raid.  If they managed to steal parts of the mining systems, they would be able to reserve-engineer it…and, if they were wealthy enough, would be able to bribe a judge into claiming that no patents had been infringed.

Jan keyed the radio again.  “This is the Tyler Mining Complex to unidentified ships,” he said, grimly.  “Please respond.  You are trespassing on private property.  Please respond.”

“Nothing,” Kathy said.  It was unlikely, to say the least, that all of the ships were having communications problems at the same time.  “Jan, send a signal to the Navy patrollers…”

“That would be dangerous,” Jan said, grimly.  “It’ll be almost an hour before it reaches the Navy base and, by then, the bastards will have come and gone.  The Navy might be able to flicker out to us instantaneously, but it’ll all be over when they arrive…”

Kathy stared at him.  “The defences?”

“Can’t stand off nine warships,” Jan said.  There was a bitter tone to his voice.  “I think…”

The radio hissed suddenly.  “This is the Shadow Fleet,” it said.  It was a harsh voice, created in a computer, but there was no doubting the source.  “You have three minutes to begin your evacuation procedure and evacuate your remote platforms and construction shack.  At the end of that period, the platforms and shack will be destroyed, along with anyone left within the mining camp.”

Hot tears of rage stung Kathy’s eyes.  “They can’t do this!”

“They can,” Jan said, altering his board.  A procedure Kathy had never expected to have to use for real – thank God they’d drilled it anyway – came up in front of them.  “You have to issue the evacuation command before they open fire.  A single missile without a warhead will punch through the shack like a knife though butter.”

Kathy wanted to refuse, wanted to dare the pirates to open fire and cause a slaughter, but there was no choice.  “All hands, this is Manager Tyler,” she said, using her formal title to prevent dissent.  There were too many miners who had their entire lives wrapped up in the project’s success.  “You are ordered to evacuate to the lifepods at once, I repeat, at once.  This is not a drill.  Abandon your projects and move!”

She winced as she closed the intercom.  “You go,” she said, bitterly.  “I’ll stay…”

“Now you’re being silly,” Jan said, and caught hold of her arm, dragging her forward with his floater.  Kathy opened her mouth to argue, and then closed it with a snap.  “You proved that the concept works, didn’t you?  You’ll have a chance to set up again and you’ll have banks pouring all over themselves to lend you money, now that you know it works.  You don’t want to get killed out here.”

Kathy said nothing as he dragged her into one of the lifepods and thrust her into the far corner.  “You’ll have to handle the launch sequence,” he said, as he pulled himself in behind her.  The cramped confines of the pod pushed at her mind.  “I can’t reach, you see, not with the floater.”

“You…idiot,” Kathy said, glad to have something to take her mind off the growing disaster.  Standard emergency procedure drills assumed that everyone on the station could trigger a lifepod if one was required, a simple procedure if one could reach the controls.  The floater made it impossible for Jan to use a lifepod on his own.  “You should have told us…”

The lifepod’s engines fired, kicking them out into interplanetary space.  The gravity field tightened, providing limited compensation for the sudden shift, and then faded away altogether, leaving them floating in space.  Kathy fought to remember the procedures; the lifepods signals, in theory, would be strong enough to be heard all over the system, while anyone who heard the signal was obliged to recover them.  The pirates would not, she was sure, try to save them, but the Navy…

“Here they come,” Jan said, peering out of the viewport, his face an expressionless mask.  Kathy followed his gaze and saw a streak of light flaring out in space, striking her beloved complex directly and blowing it into flaming debris.  She tensed, expecting a chunk of flying debris to strike their pod, but they remained untouched by the rapidly expanding wavefront.  The pirates had just blown the work of two years to dust.  “My Lady…?”

Kathy hadn’t realised that she’d been crying.  “Never mind me,” she said, angrily.  “What about the others?”

“I can’t tell,” Jan admitted.  “The sensors on this heap of junk are next to useless.  They should have left their platforms at once, but I can’t even pick up their distress beacons, not with this.  The ships…I can only see them because they’re putting out one hell of a lot of energy and…”

He broke off, suddenly.  “They’re launching more missiles,” he said.  Kathy saw twinkling bursts of light in the distance, briefly marking the death of her dreams.  “They’ve destroyed the remains of the complex.”

Kathy silently promised her people that she would rebuild, whatever the cost.  “They’re just going to get away with it, aren’t they?”  She asked, bitterly.  “They’re just going to fly away…”

“Not quite,” Jan said.  “One of the ships is coming this way.”

Blue light flared around them and, for the first time since they had been propelled out of the construction shack, Kathy felt gravity pulling at her body.  The pod was moving again, almost impossibly, pulled towards a looming shape in the distance.  The pirates had to know who she was, then; they’d decided to take her for ransom, offering her back to her Family for a considerable sum of money.  Part of her mind wondered idly how much she would be worth, the remainder wondered what would happen if her family or their patrons refused to pay.  Would she have paid for one of the clique girls from the High City?

“I’m sorry,” she said, reaching out to squeeze Jan’s hand.  It was all her fault, she decided.  If she hadn’t been on the platform, they wouldn’t be taking her prisoner…and Jan, she was sure, was worthless.  He’d be lucky if they just put him to work on their ship.

“It wasn't your fault,” Jan reassured her.  “You gave everyone here the best chance they had of actually surviving and prospering.  Don’t be angry for that.”

Gravity shifted again – for a moment, Jan was actually hanging upside down – and steadied as the pod was dumped unceremoniously in a hanger bay.  Kathy cursed her oversight under her breath; she should have armed her pods with nuclear demolition charges, or even outright warheads.  No starship smaller than a superdreadnaught could have coped with a nuclear blast inside the hull and it might have repaid the pirates for the damage they’d inflicted on her project.  It would have meant her death as well, but no one would have paid ransom for a corpse.  

“That’s a standard Imperial shuttlebay,” Jan said, puzzled, as they felt the sensation of a starship flickering out.  The starship was already safe from pursuit.  “This ship used to belong to the Navy.”

Kathy shrugged.  Her mind was elsewhere.  “They won’t get anything,” she swore.  “I won’t pay them a centicredit.”

“You might be better off telling them who you are from the start,” Jan advised.  “You might get home eventually.”

The pod shook once.  Jan shrugged, gave her a, unreadable look, and opened the hatch, floating out into the midst of the shuttlebay.  Kathy pocketed the small laser pistol that was part of the survival kit, checked her outfit to ensure that nothing was showing that might indicate her rank, and followed him.  She doubted that they’d allow her to keep the weapon, but merely knowing that it was there was a burst of confidence in itself.  The shuttlebay looked surprisingly clean and bright to her eyes – she’d been told that most pirate ships were poorly maintained – and the crew…the crew were wearing Imperial uniforms.

“Welcome onboard the Random Numbers,” the leader said.  He looked older than Kathy would have expected a Commander to look, almost as if he had been denied cosmetic and anti-aging treatments.  “The Captain is quite looking forward to dining with you, Lady Kathy.”

Kathy, dazed, focused on the important matter.  “You know who I am?”

“Of course,” the Commander said.  “We picked you up specifically.”

Kathy exchanged a puzzled look with Jan as they were escorted along a series of corridors, each one seemingly identical and unmarked, confusing enough that she lost her bearings within seconds.  It wasn't as if it would have mattered, but it would have been nice to know where she was on the ship, although she was fairly sure she had a vague idea.  The Imperial Navy standardised all its ships, which meant that they were definitely approaching the command deck, housing the bridge and the senior crew’s quarters.  But…

She’d expected everything from being thrown in a cell until her Family paid up to immediate gang rape, not a welcoming from a historical novel.  She would have almost preferred to be thrown in a cell, where she could at least have known what was going on, not being treated as a honoured guest.  There were some strange people out along the Rim, but most of them couldn’t have commanded a cruiser without provoking a mutiny.  They’d known who she was, they’d targeted her, which meant…what?  Was this all some scheme to steal the mining technology?

Crazy, she thought, wishing she could have a private chat with Jan.  His impressions would be very useful.  He might even know what was going on, which was more than she did, but they couldn’t talk with their escort following them.  They might not look hostile, but…it struck her, then, that the ship was old.  Maybe not old in the sense of having been in space for hundreds of years, but old in the sense that components were starting to decay, threatening its continued existence.  The thought kept her mind busy as they approached a pair of double doors, which hissed open as they approached.

“Welcome onboard,” a jovial voice said.  Kathy blinked, taking in an outfit right out of a historical novel.  Bright colours clashed together in a manner that would have given the fashion mandarins of the High City fits.  “Lady Kathy, I bid you welcome to my humble home.”

Kathy, too tired to be polite, scowled at him.  “Who are you?”

“Captain Jason Cordova, at your service,” the man said.  He winked at her and waved her to a chair.  Kathy, bemused and surprised, could only obey.  The sense of unreality was growing stronger and stronger.  “I think we’re going to be the very best of friends.”

Chapter Eighteen

“Commodore, we have three superdreadnaughts inbound on a Harmony vector.”

Commodore Gallatin looked up, relieved, as the sensor officer made his report.  He’d feared that the hijacked superdreadnaughts – and he was sure that even Stacy’s patrons wouldn’t be able to get her out of trouble for that particular burst of incompetence – would return to the Macore system, either to check in with the planet or on a random raid.  The eight remaining battlecruisers under his command wouldn’t be able to do more than flicker out if the rebels attacked, something that galled at him, even as he had to admire the brilliance of Colin’s scheme.  The rebel had shown an awesome amount of nerve, first in hijacking his own ships…and then biding his time for the superdreadnaughts to arrive, and hijacking them as well.

“Confirm their identities and ensure that they are fully briefed,” he said, warningly.  It wouldn’t do to assume that they were friendly just because they came in on a Harmony vector.  It was just as likely that Colin was trying to be clever.  “If they’re friendly, order their commanding officer to communicate with me at once.”

“They’re friendly,” the communications officer confirmed.  “General Roland, General Franks and General Petain.”

Commodore Gallatin nodded.  He was fairly certain that he wouldn’t face a mutiny from his own men.  It was true that he had cherry-picked his officers to be handsome young men, but he certainly hadn’t mistreated them.  In his experience, even commoners had thoughts of their own and treating them well could bring rewards.  The absence of General Ryan, Commodore Tamworth’s flagship, meant that he was the overall commanding officer on station, but he wasn't convinced that that was a reward.  The rebel ships would outnumber the superdreadnaughts if they arrived to engage the Imperial ships, even though he was sure that they would take a bite out of the rebels before they were destroyed.

The message package appeared on his monitor – it would be a cold day in hell before he allowed a shuttle to dock, whatever orders it was carrying, without the shuttlebay fully sealed off – and he opened them with his fingerprints.  The orders were what he had expected, effectively; he was to move at once against the Macore Defence Force and destroy it, along with their fixed defences, in preparation for an invasion.  Personally, he would have preferred to stand off and batter the planet into submission, but reading between the lines, he suspected that Percival had realised that that would involve destroying the industries and workforce on the surface and forbidden it.

“Sound Red Alert,” he ordered, as he finished reading the messages.  The orders didn’t specify a time limit, but he would have preferred to finish the engagement before the rebels could arrive to complicate matters.  He was fairly sure that some of the freighters moving in and out of Macore were actually rebel ships, if some of the wilder theories about Colin’s forces were accurate, and it didn’t take military-grade sensors to track superdreadnaughts.  “Signal all ships; we will proceed against Macore and reduce their defences.”

“Yes, sir,” the communications officer said.  Commodore Gallatin would have preferred to be on the bridge himself, but that wasn’t the best place to command an engagement, not one that included starships that weren't normally part of his squadron.  “The squadron is acknowledging.”

“Good,” Commodore Gallatin said.  Heads would have rolled if the squadron hadn’t responded at once.  The Logistics Corps would have a few harsh words to say when they realised how much wear and tear he had ordained on his equipment, but it had ensured that his ships had remained ready for anything, all though the fortnight they had remained in orbit.  Refitting would be an absolute pain in the neck, but it would have been more than merely worthwhile if the rebel superdreadnaughts had appeared.  He wouldn’t have lost his ships with reactors and drive fields stood down.  “Open me a channel to the Macore flagship.”

He’d studied the Liberty and her sisters with some interest.  Macore’s Colony Fleet had left before the compensator problems had been fully cracked, allowing the construction of superdreadnaughts and other large military starships.  They had known about colony starships, which were far larger than superdreadnaughts, but the largest military starship they had been able to build had been a battleship. The Imperial Navy had junked most of its battleships as superdreadnaughts had come on line, although some of the first-rank worlds maintained them in their defence fleets, but ton-for-ton, the Liberty-class was more effective.  Macore had taken the design further than he had believed possible and, operating in task groups, they would have been formidable with superdreadnaught support.  If Macore had deployed more escorts, they might even have been able to defeat the superdreadnaughts, particularly with Commodore Roosevelt in command.

“This is Commodore Gallatin, Imperial Navy,” he said, as soon as the channel opened.  “I have orders to occupy your world’s high orbitals.  I am calling on you to surrender your ships to avoid unnecessary bloodshed.”

There was a long pause.  “Channel closed, sir,” the communications officer reported.  “They weren’t interested in replying.”

“Idiots,” Commodore Gallatin muttered.  He would have been quite happy, whatever Percival’s need to hurt something, to accept a peaceful surrender.  The display was changing rapidly as the recon platforms picked out signs that Macore was bringing her fleet to battle stations.  They had twenty-seven battleships, forty-one smaller ships, two of them ex-Imperial design…and not a hope in hell.  It wouldn’t be enough to stop him from taking the high orbitals.  “Signal to all ships; form up on the General Roland.  We’ll go with Plan Alpha-Romeo.”

The enemy commander – Imperial Intelligence had claimed that he was called Admiral Gates – was playing it cagey.  The battleships, escorted by the smaller ships, were forming up just inside the gravity shadow.  They had nowhere to run, he reflected, unless they set off to the Rim, but none of them broke.  It was a tactic that would offer them the greatest chance of scoring hits before they were overwhelmed, but it was somehow disappointing, at least to him.  They had to know that it was futile, didn’t they?

“Launch a second shell of recon drones,” he ordered.  If the rebels were planning an ambush, he would be ready for it.  No one, not even Home Fleet, could sneak so close under cloak without being detected.  “Superdreadnaughts, fire as soon as we enter powered missile envelope.”

The green icons of the Imperial starships crept closer to their targets.  He watched, dispassionately, as the powered missile envelope crept closer and closer, finally covering the glowing red icons. The superdreadnaughts flexed…and unloaded a massive barrage of death towards the enemy ships, each missile tipped with a standard nuke.  One of the reason why battleships had fallen out of favour was that they didn’t have the power reserves to generate shields that could stand up to a modern battle, or the speed and point defence to avoid hits.  A handful of hits would suffice to disable or destroy a battleship…”

“Emergence,” the tactical officer snapped.  “Nine ships on direct attack vector!”

For a chilling moment, Commodore Gallatin thought that they were the rebel superdreadnaughts, before the display stabilised and revealed light cruisers, racing towards them and already launching missiles.  They’d emerged within the fleet’s sprint missile envelope, but they’d had a massive stroke of luck; the General-class superdreadnaughts carried only a handful of heavy energy weapons.  He wondered if they’d somehow developed sensors that would allow them to operate within flicker-space, but he realised, watching them fire, that they had fired almost at random.  They would be relying on the missile warheads to find their targets and, already, the cruisers were getting burned out of space.  No cruiser ever built could stand up to superdreadnaught energy weapons…

He turned his attention back to the main struggle and scowled.  The Macore ships mounted far better point defence than Intelligence had predicted and they had used it to sweep most of the missiles out of space, while firing back with their own, every missile targeted on a single superdreadnaught.  His squadron closed in to cover the ship, firing their point defence weapons to take down the missiles themselves, which distracted them from the other threats.  He had to hand it to the defenders; they’d struck right at the heart of his fleet’s confidence, even to the point of using kamikaze tactics.  Their final light cruiser rammed a battlecruiser amidships and both ships vanished in a ball of fire.

“Check with Intelligence,” he ordered, as his superdreadnaughts continued to pound at the defenders.  “Ask them, as sardonically as you can, if there’s anything else they forgot to tell us.”

The Macore fleet was taking a battering, he saw.  The superdreadnaughts had taken a leaf from their opponent’s book and were concentrating their fire on a handful of battleships, forcing their enemies to cover them with their own smaller ships.  Their point defence might be better than predicted, but it only took a handful of hits to destroy a battleship, allowing the superdreadnaughts to move on to other targets.  As the range shortened, the missiles started to be reprogrammed in flight, targeting new ships when their old targets were destroyed.  The enemy force would be destroyed.  It was just a matter of time…

“Commodore, we have a handful of freighters entering the battlefield,” the tactical officer added.  The ships had been waiting in Macore Orbit for as long as the battlecruisers had been there, waiting for what…?  “They’re advancing on a direct course towards our position.”

“Burn them out of space,” Commodore Gallatin ordered.  Normally, freighters would not be attacked unless they were a clear and present danger, but images of Q-Ships and other unpleasant surprises were dancing through his head.  Imperial Intelligence had more than a few ships that looked like perfectly innocent freighters, but were armed to the teeth, even capable of fighting a heavy cruiser.  “Redirect fire from the battlecruisers to hit them…”

The missiles raged towards their targets and struck home.  The freighters disintegrated in massive explosions.  Commodore Gallatin scowled down at the display, puzzled, but pushed the matter aside for the moment.  If they’d intended to draw fire to keep their battleships alive for a little longer, they’d succeeded, but they hadn’t accomplished anything else.  The remaining battleships were coming under increasingly heavy attack and were falling, one by one, to die in bursts of flame.  The remaining ships moved forward, desperately trying to get into energy range, only to be blown out of space when the superdreadnaughts engaged with sprint mode missiles.  The final battleship died five minutes from ramming a superdreadnaught.

“Launch drones,” Commodore Gallatin ordered, as the battle started to fade.  If there were any enemy starships left, they were very well hidden indeed.  They might have been cloaked and were trying to sneak away, but he doubted that.  They might have been enemies of the Empire, but there had been no doubting their bravery.  “I want everything in orbit that carries a weapon pegged down before we move into the gravity shadow.”

He watched as the display was rebuilt in front of him.  His confidence in Imperial Intelligence, never high at the best of times, had been seriously shaken.  Who knew what Macore might have hidden in orbit around their world?  There was certainly enough space junk in orbit to hide anything from an orbital weapons platform to a few thousand mines.  The official defences might be nothing more than the icing on the cake.  He wasn't surprised, when the scans were finally completed, to discover that there was more than had been reported.  The turncoats Imperial Intelligence had recruited had probably been working for Macore’s counter-intelligence service all along.

“Begin targeting procedure,” he said, to his staff.  The orbital weapons platforms wouldn’t be that much of a challenge, not like the massive structures that had been built up around Earth, Harmony and the other Imperial Navy bases.  They would have been difficult to take on without an entire fleet of superdreadnaughts.  “I want the orbital industrial stations left strictly alone, unless they open fire.  The remainder…take it all out.”

The battlecruiser thrummed slightly as it started to spit out smaller missiles.  They weren't much use against shielded capital ships, but against orbital stations they were lethal.  He was surprised, as the missiles raced towards their targets, to see shuttles being used in an antimissile role, an idea that the Imperial Navy had never been able to duplicate.  The Holy Grail idea of a working starfighter had been a dream since before man had been able to fly, but the closest any research centre had been able to come to it had been the gunboats, which really weren't much use outside of security patrols.  There were some private one-man ships, but they were easy to target if they tried to engage point defence systems.  The shuttles fought valiantly and died, one by one, in tiny flashes of light.

“Clear as much of the space junk out of the way as you can,” he added, as the missiles struck deeper and deeper into Macore’s orbital space.  The debris would mostly fall towards the planet below, burning up in the atmosphere, but some of the larger chunks would cause real damage if they were allowed to impact.  There were Imperial Navy commanders who would have lost no sleep over an accidental genocide, but Commodore Gallatin liked to think he was somewhat more civilised.  Besides, Percival’s patrons would be unhappy with him if he slaughtered a useful workforce.  “Take down the remainder of the defence platforms, now.”

It was shaping into a textbook demonstration of the weakness of limited fixed defences.  The attackers could, and did, dominate a section of the sky, while some of the defences couldn’t engage them because they were on the other side of the planet.  The fleet settled into orbit, watching carefully for attackers from the ground, while they systematically wiped out the defenders.  The handful of lifepods floating in space chose to attempt to re-entry and land on the planet, rather than be picked up by the Imperial starships, although Commodore Gallatin didn’t blame them.  Any of them who was picked up would be interrogated to discover the true situation on the planet below.

“Colonel Singh, you’re up,” Commodore Gallatin ordered.  He’d kept a close eye on the Marines on his ships ever since Stacy’s officers, those that hadn’t chosen to desert, had confirmed that Marines had been involved in taking the ships, but so far nothing had happened to arouse suspicion.  “The habitats are at your mercy.”

Macore had orbited nine permanent asteroid habitats, three more than was standard for a world in the sector, all of which hadn’t taken part in the battle.  The Marines would secure them, carefully, and prepare their inhabitants for a possible return to the surface, if it was deemed necessary to destroy them.  Commodore Gallatin suspected, based on previous operations, that the asteroids would become the bases for the occupation and administration force, which was currently being assembled at Harmony.  The Marines had strict orders to be as gentle as possible, but if some idiot tried to resist, the administrators would have no hesitation about using collective punishment.  It was, they claimed, the only way to keep the natives in line.

“The shuttles are away, sir,” the tactical officer reported.  His voice was brisk.  He had no doubts, or, if he had them, he refused to show them to his superior.  “The sweeps of the surface have revealed only a handful of ground-to-space weaponry, none presented tactically.”

Commodore Gallatin nodded.  It was rare for a world to have much in the way of ground-based weapons, not least because they would certainly draw fire from the invading fleet.  Nuclear weapons might be a pinprick in space, but on a planet’s surface they could be devastating.  Imperial Doctrine limited defences to space under normal circumstances, and, for once, there was no sign that Macore disagreed.  The weapons would have to be secured when the landing force started to land, but until then…

“Secure from Red Alert,” he ordered, as the final traces of debris started to fall into the atmosphere.  The population would look up into the skies and see wreckage falling and burning up across the sky.  “The superdreadnaughts are to return to the standard jump coordinate and prepare to return to Harmony.  The remaining ships are to hold their positions and wait.”

The thought was bitter in his mouth.  “And signal all ships,” he added.  “Well done.  I want a full report on combat and repair status within three hours.”

He studied the display thoughtfully.  They would have to visit and secure all the habitats and facilities across the system, which would take time, but there was no particular hurry.  Whatever threat Macore presented had been destroyed with its fleet – they couldn’t do anything from the ground, unless they wanted to commit suicide -  leaving the remaining daughter worlds and industries ripe for the plucking.  Public Information would hail it as a great victory, but with just one battlecruiser destroyed and three more ships lightly damaged, he knew better.  It had just been a massacre of men and women who’d deserved better.

And maybe that's why he decided to rebel, he thought, as he stared at the composite image of the world below.  He possessed the high orbitals.  He could demand surrender now, but doctrine was inflexible.  He had to wait for the SDs and their equipment before the landings could begin.  Once they landed, there would be no doubt that Macore was indeed under occupation.  They would take over the cities, install a proper administration staff and start converting Macore into yet another Imperial Colony, to be bled white and stripped of everything.  The inhabitants would be lucky to be left with the remains.  The Empire had won a victory…

But at what cost?

Chapter Nineteen

“You were successful, then?”

Colin smiled as Salgak examined the manifest.  The Geek’s face seemed to have changed in the weeks since Colin had seen him, with the addition of more implants and devices marring the cool perfection of his skin.  It was a sight that never creased to fascinate and disturb him; what, he wondered sometimes, would the Geeks create without the pressures of the Empire?  They didn’t have access to the vast industrial nodes the Clans had built and maintained, but even without them, with the bare facilities available along the Rim, they were formidable.  

“Yep,” he said, unable to repress the smile from growing.  It had been a long trip back to the Rim, with dark dreams of the slaughtered crewmen flickering through his mind, but success had washed all of that away.  The first rebel assault had been an overwhelming success.  “The ships and facilities are at your disposal.”

“The money will have to be used to fund smaller rebellions and buy mercenaries,” Daria said, from her position in the corner of the room.  “I understand that representatives from the Democratic Underground and the Socialist Parties of the Universe will be at Patrick’s Asteroid within the weeks, there to see what we can do for them.”

Colin rolled his eyes.  He’d barely met any socialists, but from what he’d seen, they were incredibly arrogant, even to the point of believing that they should be directing the rebellion.  It wouldn’t have been a good idea to let them.  They took root on a world suffering under the Imperial boot, raised a rebellion…and then fled when the Empire crushed the rebels from space.  Their rebellions never worked in the long term, not even worrying the Empire, just because they couldn’t defeat the Empire in space.  Their attack fleet, according to scuttlebutt along the Rim, was a joke.  They certainly didn’t have nine battleships and dozens of smaller starships.

“And what are we going to tell them?”

“Tell them to spread the word and start preparing cells for fomenting rebellion as far across the Empire as possible,” Daria said, absently.  “Once we have the cells established on the surface of various planets, they can wait until we have control of the High Orbitals before they rise up in rebellion and slaughter the Imperials on the ground.  I doubt that Percival or his replacement would hesitate to order mass bombardment just to keep a world in line, not after the…embarrassment of losing the Annual Fleet.”

Colin nodded.  The news would have reached Percival by now, according to his most optimistic calculations, and he would have loved to have seen his face when he heard the report.  The thought was delightful; the loss of nine superdreadnaughts would have looked bloody…awkward on Percival’s resume, but the capture of the Annual Fleet would look worse.  His patrons would find themselves pressured to dump him by other Clans, while he wouldn’t even be able to claim ignorance, because Colin had killed the officer in command of the escort flotilla.

He’d considered attempting to demand their surrender, but he'd known, when he’d simulated the entire ambush, that it would have led to introducing random variables into the situation.  The enemy commander, who was supposed to be competent, could have stalled long enough to send secret orders to her ships through the data network, ordering them to flicker out or to fire on their own ships, maybe even triggering their self-destruct systems.  It seemed a logical precaution, viewed through the Empire’s careless view of the universe, to have the freighters rigged to blow…and they couldn’t take the chance.  The convoy’s supplies and resources were desperately needed along the Rim.

“No,” he said, reflecting on the Percival he had known.  “I doubt that he would hesitate for a second.”

Salgak paused, a bright red laser beam flickering out from his forehead to the computer monitor, reading the information directly into his brain.  He’d explained, in a half-hearted attempt to convert Colin to the wonders of being a cyborg, that it was so much easier to come to a decision with all the information downloaded into a person’s brain, but Colin suspected that the Empire might have had a point, for once.  The ban on enhancement beyond a certain point – and completely forbidden outside the government and the military – might have been intended to keep the rest down, as a normal human couldn’t match a cyborg, but as they grew older, cyborgs showed increasingly erratic behaviour.  The Marines had only limited augmentation and even they tended to become wilder in their old age.

“We have received a download from one of the freebooter scout ships,” he said, returning his attention to the other two.  “Macore has been invaded by the Empire.”

Colin nodded.  He’d expected as much, but he hadn’t understood just how many natives of Macore there were along the Rim, including hundreds in the forces that had railed to join him and the rebellion.  They would want their homeworld assisted, if possible, and he was dully certain that that was exactly what Percival was hoping he’d do.  It was an obvious move – and, he would have been prepared to bet, one of Percival’s superdreadnaught squadrons was waiting near Macore, just for him to show himself.

“They have destroyed the fleet and orbital defences, but so far they haven’t actually landed,” Salgak added.  “The scouts are keeping an eye on the system, but the jackboots are checking the remainder of the system and the scouts might have to flee if they’re discovered.  The commander wants to know what we’re going to do about it.”

They should have fled, Colin thought numbly.  He should have suggested to Macore’s First Speaker that her ships come with him, but it wouldn’t have happened.  Macore’s people felt a loyalty to the planet that he had long lost for the Empire, if he’d ever had it in the first place, and they had been sworn to die in its defence.  They wouldn’t have stood a chance.

“A question for the committee, I think,” Daria said.  The calculating note in her voice surprised Colin, but anyone who could gain control of the freebooters and then ride herd on them – and a woman, to boot – had to be very cold-blooded.  There were times when he thought Daria would be quite happy to slaughter and loot her way across the Empire.  “If there is something we can do for them, we will.”

“Yes,” Colin agreed.  “Until then, continue preparing the asteroids for the arrival of the freighters and their goods.”

Daria followed him as they walked out along the laser-cut corridor.  Colin had seen asteroids that had been hollowed out by lasers before, but this was something different, built in an age where technology no longer needed such crude methods.  It was a reminder of just how much the Empire kept for itself, or what it forbade to its citizens and the refugees along the Rim, while the Clans grew fat on what they harvested from the people.  Imperial Taxes might not seem high, but they had been growing higher every year…and worlds were falling behind on their payments.  No wonder so many people fled to the Rim.

“They’re going to want us to do something,” Daria said, when they were alone.  Colin wasn't entirely convinced that there was a square metre on the asteroid that was unmonitored by the Geeks – all asteroids had computers and sensors running through them – but they weren’t normally interested in blackmail.  “They’re going to look at the Annual Fleet, something none of them could take, and they’re going to be impressed, but they’re also going to want us to take on the forces covering Macore.”

“That won’t be easy,” Colin said, and explained his reasoning.  “If we lose the superdreadnaughts, or even get them seriously damaged, we’re beaten.  The remaining ships can’t sustain the rebellion on their own.  If I know Percival, the bastard will be calling in as many light units as he can and using them to search for us, even if he can’t call for more superdreadnaughts without admitting how bad the situation has already become.”

“It’s not that bad from his point of view,” Daria added, thoughtfully.  “He’s responsible for two hundred worlds, not counting Macore and it’s daughter worlds, and how many of them have we hit?  One.”

Colin nodded, sourly.  There could be no disputing the fact that Captain Cordova and his flotilla had performed well, destroying the Clan-owned mining facility and embarrassing the Imperial Navy, which was sworn to defend it.  Other raids, using smaller warships and ex-pirate vessels, would have to be launched, operating in numbers that would force the Empire to deploy larger forces themselves to cover every possible target.

“True,” he said.  “I think we’d better start drawing up a list of targets and assigning them to task groups.  Once we start sweeping the sector clear of Imperial traffic, maybe even Imperial warships, Percival is going to have to respond and respond hard.”

He scowled.  “If only he could be induced to uncover Harmony,” he added.  “If we wreck too much of the industry here, we’re going to limit what we can take and use for ourselves, once we actually start occupying worlds.  The Empire might even start destroying it themselves…”

Daria snorted.  “Percival won’t do anything like that,” she said.  “His patrons would boil him in oil.”

“If we hit him hard enough, he won’t have anything left to lose,” Colin said.  “I wonder…”

He paused as a rocky shape moved ahead of them.  “This is someone I want you to meet,” Daria said, tightly.  The shape lumbered closer in the semi-darkness.  “You need to listen to him.”

Colin had seen aliens before, but he'd never met a Rock-Monster before.  He’d seen images of them in the Academy, but few of them left their homeworld, even in the Empire’s service.  It stood, on five rocky legs, about half Colin’s height; if it had been smoother and still, it might have been mistaken for an oddly-shaped table.  Rocky sections moved across its skin, revealing traces of its interior, as it paused in front of Colin.  He couldn’t see any eyes, but somehow he was sure that it was studying him.

“You…are…the…human…rebel…interrogative?”

The voice, Colin realised with a shock, didn’t come through a vocal implant, but through the creature’s own mouth, moving slowly and painfully to form human speech.  Colin remembered long-forgotten courses at the Academy, when he’d learned that the Rock-Monsters – their real name was utterly unpronounceable – had real problems speaking human languages.  To speak directly to a human was a gesture of respect.

“Yes,” he said.  “That’s me.”

“What…will…you…make…of…your…empire…interrogative?”

Colin blinked.  “I don’t know,” he admitted.  The question hadn’t worried him when he'd been plotting the mutiny, because he hadn’t allowed himself to grow overconfident and forget the basics.  “I want an Empire where everyone can live their lives in freedom.  I want…”

The Rock-Monster interrupted.  “Humans…and…” – a strange, unpronounceable noise, like two rocks being crushed together – “or…humans…alone…interrogative?”

“I don’t understand,” Colin said.  “What do you mean?”

“Humans…come…to…our…world…and…make…us…work…for…them,” the Rock-Monster ground out.  It seemed to mash rocks together for a long moment, completely without reason.  “We…slaves…for…humans…there.”

“I’m sorry,” Colin said.  The Empire’s view on alien life was simple.  If they could be useful to the Empire, they were brought in as slaves, or second-class citizens at best, working for the human race.  If they weren't useful, they could be restricted to their own world or worlds, while dangerous races might be pruned back from time to time.

“When…you…rule…your…people…what…will…become…of…mine…?”

Colin winced.  He hadn’t expected that question, or that issue, to arise so quickly.  Practically, he could see problems with promising alien freedom right from the start, because the Empire would use it against them.  Public Information ran weekly specials on alien life that made aliens seem like idiots, dangerous threats, funny or some combination of the three, justifying the Empire’s hold on their worlds.  He remembered, with a flicker of guilt, that he'd had a Rock-Monster toy when he’d been a child, a plush toy he'd slept with and loved.  Idealistically…

“Would your people be a danger to humanity?”

“We…don’t…use…same…worlds…fact,” the Rock-Monster said.  Colin remembered, now, that they’d been found on a world that made Mercury look welcoming.  This one’s presence on the asteroids was rare.  The freebooters must have rescued it from slavery.  “We…do…not…impinge…on…you.”

“Then I will do what I can to free your people,” Colin promised, although he knew it wouldn’t be easy.  There were Imperial Navy commanders who advocated unpleasantly crude solutions to the ‘alien problem.’  “Will you fight for us?”

“We…fought…before…and…lost,” the alien said.  “We…wait.”

Until we can prove that we can win, Colin thought.  “I understand,” he said.  “I will do what I can, I promise.”

The Rock-Monster shambled off down the corridor.  “He’s actually one of my Captains,” Daria said, as they resumed their walk.  “He’s quite respected on his own ship, but on a planet…”

Colin nodded.  “I do understand,” he said.  “What more would you ask of me?”

Daria said nothing.

***
“Welcome back onboard, sir,” Anderson said, as Colin disembarked from the shuttle.  The superdreadnaught was too large to dock anywhere outside of an Imperial transit station or a shipyard, so the Shadow Fleet had been holding station near the asteroid, under cloak.  If the Empire scouted the system, they would discover nothing, even if they studied each of the asteroids individually.  “I have a report to make to you.”

Colin nodded.  He should have made time to read the reports while the superdreadnaught was flying back to the asteroid, but Anderson hadn’t been able to collect enough of them while they’d been in flicker-space, isolated from the universe.  He’d promised the security officer an afternoon, but there was just so much to do and so little time to do it all in.  He allowed Anderson to lead the way back to his cabin, where he ordered a drink and sat down.

“All right, I’m at your disposal,” he said, seriously.  “What do you have to report?”

“Very little from the main body of the fleet itself,” Anderson said.  “There was some grumbling about the promotions of the second and third officers – not because they were disliked, but because they weren't seen as being competent – but I believe that that will fade as the officers grow into their roles.  I don’t think that it’s a cause for major concern, unless it expands.”

Colin nodded.  The Empire might have kept some people down, including himself, but it had also kept incompetents without Family connections down, and it wasn’t always easy to tell the difference.  The Empire had probably never heard of the concept of a person rising to the level of his or her incompetence – the Families saw to it that many were promoted to levels far above their competence – but it worked out in practice.  The only real way of knowing if someone could handle the pressure of the job was to test them.

Ideally, his relationship with his former commander should have been a learning experience for them both.  He should have absorbed what it meant to command a starship from him, while the Captain should have mentored him, knowing that one day Colin would have advanced to his own command.  Instead, the Captain had left Colin doing all the work, without any of the reward.  It almost made him wish for a tyrant who knew what he was doing.

“I’m less sanguine about the mercenaries,” Anderson continued.  “We have only limits ways of monitoring them.  Most mercenary groups are very close-knit and don’t talk to outsiders, so getting someone inside to watch is pretty difficult.  The ones who have relations on Macore or the other worlds will stick with us until the costs start to bite, while the ones who are in it for the money…”

Colin nodded.  The Empire could always outbid the rebels.  They’d captured the Annual Fleet, which meant that they could at least afford to hire some of the mercenaries, but once they ran out of cash the mercenaries would leave.  Their code of honour forbade them from simply deserting the rebels as long as they were paid – or else no one would trust them enough to purchase their services again – but once the cash ran out, both sides would understand the departure.  Percival might even sweeten the pot by offering permanent Imperial contracts to the ones who betrayed the rebels.

“And there is the final issue,” Anderson concluded.  “Captain Cordova.”

Colin was almost disappointed.  “What did he do?”

Anderson smiled thinly.  “He raided the asteroid mining facility, as per instructions,” he said, “and then took one of the lifepods onto his ship, rescuing a young lady who was the Family manager for the mining project.  I could be wrong, sir, because I only have a single agent on his ship, but it looks as if he’s courting her.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“She’s not a prisoner and she doesn’t seem to be being held for ransom,” Anderson said, forbearing to mention that both practices had been forbidden by Colin personally.  “Instead, he seems to be showing her everything about his ship, and having late-night dinners with her, adding to the legend.”

“His legend,” Colin said, flatly.  “Is he actually compromising our own security?”

“I don’t think so, but we don’t know what he might be sharing with her on the pillows, as it were,” Anderson said.  Colin smiled behind his hand.  For a person who watched the worst of human nature, Anderson could be something of a prude.  “I could be wrong, sir, and it might be something completely innocent, but I thought I’d better bring it to your attention.”

“Thank you,” Colin said.  Politics, he thought, in disgust.  Cordova’s success meant that he could hardly be denied that position on the Committee, which would leave him in a position to do considerable damage if he was actually working for Imperial Intelligence.    “I’ll bear it in mind.”

Chapter Twenty

“First Speaker, I think they’re on their way.”

Blondel Dupre nodded as she sat back in her chair.  Macore’s commitment to aggressive equality – or at least to ensuring that everyone got the same chance at rising within society – had ensured that the Speakers had uncomfortable chairs in Government House, although she privately suspected that that had been one of the Founder’s little jokes.  They’d set out to establish a human civilisation light years from the Federation, in hopes that the decay affecting the Federation wouldn’t affect them, but by the time they’d made contact with the remainder of humanity, the Federation had been replaced by the Empire.  It had been a far more uncomfortable neighbour.

Despair flickered through her mind as the soldiers preferred to defend Government House.  She’d watched from her bunker as the Imperial ships slowly, but surely exterminated the defence fleet that Macore had taken years to build up, despite the covert help from the underground movements and the Geeks.  They’d offered technological data and support in exchange for protection, but they hadn’t stayed long, once they’d realised how naked Macore actually was.  If they’d started an aggressive defence program as soon as they’d arrived…

But they hadn’t.  The Founders had believed that the Federation and the Outsiders would fight a civil war once the Dathi War had come to an end, so they hadn’t prioritised military research.  Macore might as well have been alone in the universe until the first wave of Rim-bound refugees had passed through, bearing warning of the Empire’s expansion into their latest sector.  Colonies were being founded near Macore, part and parcel of the Empire’s expansion program, and Macore was badly outmatched.  She had dared to hope that they would be able to build up a fleet that would force the Empire to deal with them on their terms, but it had been impossible.  The trumped-up charges of debt flight, levelled at the Founders and their descendents, had seen to that.  Macore would fall.  The only question was how badly they could hurt the SDs before they completed their occupation.

It would have been easy to hate Colin for his actions, but Blondel knew that he hadn’t changed anything, not in the long run.  He’d even kept Macore alive as an independent state for another month, simply by kidnapping the SDs who would have brutally ground her people into the dirt, but their time had run out.  They might not have landed at once, after they’d smashed her space forces, but now they were coming to finish the job.  Landing City was about to be attacked.

The display flickered and updated as kinetic energy weapons struck down from high above, obliterating the defence bases Imperial Intelligence had known about, along with a handful they weren't supposed to know anything about.  Her counter-intelligence service had kept on top of Imperial Intelligence’s attempts to subvert some of her people, but they’d evidently missed someone…or they’d underestimated the Empire’s ability to pick out bases from space.  The Empire certainly had a lot of experience in occupying worlds, after all, and they had no interest in keeping the former defenders and law enforcement forces around.  Macore knew what was coming, all right, and those lucky enough to survive the fighting would soon wish that they were dead.  The SDs would arrest and enslave any who survived.

“The bases were evacuated, First Speaker,” General Hastings assured her, from his position.  He was checking and rechecking an old-style plasma rifle, determined to play his part in the defence of his city.  “The soldiers were either brought here or sent underground.”

Blondel nodded, darkly.  Macore’s advance knowledge of its intended fate had led to a whole series of preparations designed to make the Empire’s life miserable for years to come.  A whole underground resistance organisation had been formed, one that would be hard to eradicate completely without scorching the surface of the planet, and every adult Macore citizen had a gun.  The Empire’s forces would have real problems picking out the insurgents from the citizens, while if they resorted to punitive measures, they’d destroy what they’d come to seize.  They could have destroyed Landing City from orbit, or simply laid siege to the city, but their own doctrine called for setting an example.  They would come to take the city by storm.

Idiots, she thought, even as she understood the mindset.  The SDs were recruited from the poor downtrodden youths of the Empire, looking for something – anything – to take them away from the humdrum drudgery of their lives.  Six months of heavy training and conditioning later taught them the basics of handling weapons and armour, while slowly removing whatever restraints and ethics they might have had.  The SDs were expendable, as far as the Empire was concerned, and that bred a brutality unmatched by any other formation since the War.  There was, after all, an almost-unlimited supply of cannon fodder.

The noise of landing craft rose in the distance as they fell down around the city.  She stepped over to the window and peered out into the distance, watching as the craft fell to the ground.  She couldn’t pick out the SD vehicles from here, but she could see their flyers, buzzing up and around the landing craft, watching for possible threats.  The stream of landing craft seemed endless, each one carrying at least five hundred SD troopers, armed and ready to kill.  Their masters didn’t care if half of the ships were shot down while they descended, or if some of the orbiting ships became a little too enthusiastic and hit the ground forces from orbit, something that was alien to Blondel’s mindset.  She’d grown up in a world where everyone was valued and, according to the social matrix created by the Founders, had a chance to rise high.

She scowled, bitterly.  The Empire seemed like a nightmare, compared to Macore, and yet it was going to win.  There could be no doubting that.  They were going to crush her people, break them down into good little slaves, while looting Macore for their own oversized coffers.  They didn’t care about fairness, or the little people, but why should they?  Their society wasn't built around caring for people…

“They’re moving,” General Hastings muttered.  Blondel nodded, watching as the flyers pulled out of their circling orbits and started to fly out, over the city.  A hail of missiles and plasma fire met them, knocking some of them out of the sky, while their comrades retaliated with their own weapons, calling down heavy strikes on anywhere that hid an antiaircraft weapon.  Explosions ran through her city, blowing her beloved buildings apart, almost hiding the sound of weapons as the ground forces advanced.  “Those tanks were a surprise.”

Blondel peered at them though her enhanced retinas, a gift from the Geeks.  The SD tanks were monstrous vehicles, as large as buildings, crushing entire defence positions beneath their treads.  They were terror weapons, plain and simple, smashing their way into the heart of the city.  She watched, feeling part of herself die, as the defenders were pushed back by a sheer wall of firepower, crushed and slaughtered in their thousands.  The Empire might have cared, she realised, if they’d made a stand in the industrial stations, but Landing City…?  What did the Empire care if the city were destroyed?  It would help break her people.

She ducked, instinctively, as the flyers swooped by overhead, their weapons yammering away at anyone careless enough to show their faces.  Landing City had been evacuated of anyone who didn’t want to fight, but she wished that so many hadn’t stayed, determined to fight.  The Empire would slaughter everyone within the city if they were provoked enough; she was surprised that the flyers hadn’t simply put a plasma bolt through her window and her out of her misery.  Or, perhaps, it wasn't that surprising; they would want to capture the remains of the government, after all, and set up in Government House.

The fighting seemed to have gone on for hours.  She listened to the reports from positions before they were overrun and contact was lost, feeling knives twisting deep inside her heart.  A detachment, caught in the open, slaughtered without mercy.  A surrendering force accidentally crushed by a tank.  A group of female soldiers gang-raped by SDs before their senior officers forced them back into the advance.  Her city, shattered and broken, by the advance…

“They’re here,” General Hastings said.  Government House had been surrounded.  “Good luck, First Speaker.”

Blondel walked, unsteadily, back to her seat as the building shook under her, echoing with the sounds of firing.  The Empire needed the building intact, she saw now, and cursed the decision not to set up a demolition charge.  They could have denied it to the enemy, even if it had been the first major building on Macore, but instead she’d chosen to keep it.  Alone in her office, she heard the firing growing closer and closer, before the door was blown off its hinges and three black-clad soldiers rushed in.  She closed her eyes, expecting to die at any moment, but instead they grabbed her, searching her roughly before throwing her to the ground and handcuffing her.  Strong hands started to pull at her trousers before a sharp voice, echoing through the room, made them let go.

“First Speaker,” the newcomer said.  Blondel looked up to see a scared face, peering down at her, wearing the uniform of a senior officer.  The SDs didn’t have a formal rank structure beyond the basics of Sergeant, Colonel and General, but she realised that she was probably looking at the commander of the rape of her city.  Her body hurt, but somehow that was nothing, compared to her rage.  “I dare say you’d like to surrender?”

Blondel spat out blood and a tooth.  She’d hit the ground harder than she’d realised.  The genetic heritage that the Founders had sequenced into their children had given her a greater pain tolerance than a standard human, but she was dimly aware that she should be screaming in pain and wondered if they’d drugged her, somehow.  It was hard to focus her mind, but she managed to compose herself enough to make a gesture of defiance.

“Go…fuck…yourself,” she said.  It hurt to speak, but she wanted to say that before they dragged her outside and killed her in front of her own building.  “Get…”

“No, I don’t think I shall,” the SD said.  His voice was pleasant, as if they were discussing the weather over a cup of tea.  Blondel looked into his eyes and saw nothing, but cold dispassion, a complete lack of concern that was somehow worse than hatred and rage.  He was, she saw, a sociopath, willing to do anything to further his own advancement and unfettered by a conscience.  The perfect person to break a world to the Empire’s will.  “You will speak to your people and order them to surrender to us.”

Blondel laughed.  “You don’t know my people,” she said, feeling more blood trickling down from her cheek.  “They won’t honour any surrender orders.  They won’t listen to me if I begged them to surrender to you on my hands and knees.  They know this world far better than you and they’ll keep fighting until you give up from losing too many people.”

“It has been tried before,” the SD said, dispassionately.  “Acadia, Wilson’s Paradise and Craggy Island.  They all tried to set up resistance movements that would last, they thought, forever.  We broke them all, one by one, and made their people betray them to us.  Those worlds now provide much of the manpower for the SDs in this sector.  You will become our most loyal servant on your world.”

“No,” Blondel said.

“Oh, yes,” the SD said.  She saw, now, a cold inhuman pleasure hiding behind his eyes.  “When the mind techs have finished with you, you will do anything to please me.  You will even spend your hours thinking of new ways to please me.  You will do anything…and, deep inside, you will know what you once were.  You will be the great traitor your world has ever known.”

He looked at his men.  “Take her to the landing craft,” he ordered.  “I want you to hold her there until I come for her.”

“Wait,” Blondel said, desperately.  “What is your name?”

The SD shrugged.  “What do you care?”

Blondel struggled to pull herself into a sitting position.  “So I know who to kill, later,” she said.  “Who are you?”

“General Thomas,” the SD said.  “Believe me, you won’t be able to even think of killing me, later.”

He waved at her, inanely, as the SD troopers marched her down the stairs and out into the lobby.  The fighting had completely devastated the area, leaving dead bodies strewn everywhere, from both sides.  She saw an SD medical team moving among the living, aiding the lightly wounded, while neatly cutting the throats of the seriously wounded, leaving them there to die.  The handful of prisoners, badly wounded themselves, were watched carefully by armed soldiers.  Her escort pulled at her, leading her to the right and down out into the open air; she recoiled as the smell struck her.  Her city was burning.

She staggered and would have collapsed if her escorts hadn’t held her up.  The park had once been a pleasant place to play, but now SDs were using it as a burial pit, dumping bodies into a hole and using their lasers to burn them to ash.  The city had been wrecked, with buildings smashed and utterly blown apart, leaving thousands of bodies lying everywhere.  If there were survivors from her forces anywhere around, they were keeping a very low profile.  She listened, in hopes of hearing a shot, but heard nothing.  The only noise in the air was the humming of the skimmers.

“You don’t have to hold me,” she protested, twisting against their grasp.  The troopers didn’t let go; she remembered, going from the intelligence reports, that they were conditioned to obey orders.  It would be nice to think of them as automatons, but it was much more complex than that, complex enough to distract her as they marched her towards a skimmer.  They said nothing as she was pushed inside and firmly secured to the seat – as if they expected her to break the handcuffs at any moment - before one of them sat next to her and the other took the controls.  The vehicle hummed into the air and started back towards the looming shape of the landing craft.

Blondel wept, then, as she saw where the enemy forces had passed.  The city no longer existed, not really, leaving only piles of rubble.  They'd smashed everything for as far as the eye could see, leaving nothing, but an object lesson for resisters.  She looked around, hoping to see some signs of life, but all she saw was dead bodies and rubble.  The troopers seemed to be avoiding the area completely as well.

I shouldn’t have stayed at my post, she said, even though there had been no choice.  The men and women who had volunteered to defend the city had all been volunteers and she couldn’t have left them there to fight on their own.  She’d expected to die at her desk, as a First Speaker should die; she hadn’t anticipated capture.  Thomas had been right.  Once the mind techs were finished with her, she would do anything she wanted them to do.  The Empire had raised mental tampering to an art form.

The explosion surprised her; the skimmer, destabilised, was knocked over onto its side.  Blondel’s body screamed in pain as all her old wounds were reopened, while her silent companion struggled to get out and fight back.  She heard the sound of lasers firing at close range and a hint of a scream, just as the vehicle righted itself and came down hard on the smashed road.  Her escort took aim, only to be burned through by a laser beam, fired by one of their assailants.

“First Speaker,” a voice said.  Blondel realised, in shock, that she’d been rescued.  The soldier didn’t waste time looking for the keys; he simply took aim and used his laser to burn her free.  “You’d better come with us.”

The piles of rubble, Blondel realised, had hidden the entrance to a cellar…and, through the cellar, the sewers.  The Empire’s forces hadn’t smashed them…and they wouldn’t have any charts they could use to explore.  She followed the soldier and his three mates to the entrance and then, down into the darkness.  One of them struck a lamp and illuminated their passage down into the bowels of the Earth.

“Are you all right?”  The soldier asked, finally.  “We couldn’t get you out in a more gentle manner, I’m afraid.”

Blondel could have kissed him.  “I’m fine,” she said, recalling information that floated to the surface of her mind.  She didn’t know everything about the resistance, but she knew where to go to make contact with it, information that the Empire would probably have extracted from her mind.  The Geeks had offered interrogation-proof implants for her people, but she’d rejected the concept at the time.  “When can we get out of the city?”

“Tonight, I think,” the soldier said.  “They have the outskirts pretty well demolished, but there’s more cover to the north, where they didn’t do so much damage.  They’ve got a few hundred prisoners, but if we’re lucky, we can evade their patrols and slaves.  If we wait much longer, they’ll get the entire city sealed off and searched, just to find any others like us.  Their sensors are better than ours, unfortunately, and this little hide-out won’t last forever.”

Blondel smiled.  “Thank you,” she said.  General Thomas’s words mocked her.  The resistance might be nothing more than kicking and scratching on their way to the gallows, but they had to try.  

Besides, Colin was still out there, somewhere.

Chapter Twenty-One

“Well, what do you think?”

Kathy followed Cordova out of the airlock into the asteroid and stared at him.  There was nothing particularly special about the asteroid, as far as she could tell.  It had the traditional half-hidden smell of burning rock, the hints of human life and the sensation of timeless age, but nothing particularly special.  She’d spent nearly two weeks in Cordova’s company and she was starting to suspect that he was just a little mad.  He was an interesting piece of company – and she supposed it was preferable to being gang-raped or sold for ransom – but he was an enigma.

The first dinner with him had been interesting in its own right.  She hadn’t realised that he’d been from the Families himself, not at first, and talking about some of the newcomers to the scene pleased him, even as it gave her an odd sense of homesickness.  He’d told her his story and assured her that they were two of a kind, both rebels who’d opposed the Families and their order of things, even while admitting that he’d destroyed her platforms to prevent her from strengthening her Family’s position.

“They would have taken your platforms eventually,” he had assured her.  “This way, you get to spend some time with me instead.”

Kathy had had to laugh, which had made her wonder if she was being drugged, but it had seemed pointless.  Cordova had spent days with her, helping her to remember everything she could about life back in the High City, memorising names and faces.  It had been decades since he’d last been there, but it was astonishing how many of the faces were the same, and the underlying balance of power hadn’t changed at all.  He’d even expressed the opinion that the entire Macore Crisis was really a power play by several of the junior Clans, trying to amass the weight needed to rise higher in the hierarchy, although that plan had gone spectacularly wrong.  His explanation about the rebellion – how it had formed and who was behind it – had seemed unbelievable at first, but Kathy had been a smart observer.  It was easy to believe that someone could have used the Families arrogance against them.  Her Family, forced by pressures from high above to be innovative and flexible, had done the same.

“Come on,” he said, catching her by the arm and bestowing a kiss on her cheek.  “Let’s come and meet the neighbours.”

Kathy flushed.  The memory of the times they’d spent in bed together rose up to embarrass her.  She couldn’t believe that she had started to cling to him, even if she needed a real hero, and he represented something of her old world with the new.  Jan had talked to her every day as well, but Cordova had promised that he would be returned as soon as possible, or given employment somewhere along the Rim.

“Tell me something,” she said, trying to get a rise out of him.  “Aren’t you worried that I might tell the Navy where to find you?”

Cordova laughed.  “My dear, you may be an excellent asteroid miner, but you’re not a navigator,” he said, grinning.  He leaned in to steal a kiss.  He’d insisted on her wearing fine clothes he’d selected for her, something she was sure would make her stand out on the asteroid; she hadn’t worn anything so daring since her Graduation Ball.  “Where – exactly – are you?”

Kathy scowled.  “Of course,” Cordova said, with a flashing grin.  “You could tell them that you were held on an asteroid and they’d think you were a bit dumb.  There’s billions upon billions of asteroids in the galaxy alone – and even if I tell you the Sector…”

“We’re on the Rim,” Kathy protested, stubbornly,

“Yep, but have you think about what the Rim actually is?”  Cordova asked.  “It’s not a neat little dividing line between the Empire and the great unknown – it is the great unknown.  You’re thousands of light years from Earth and hundreds of light years from the nearest fleet base; even if we return you to your platforms, where would you tell them to look?  They wouldn’t even bother to try.”

He took her hand again as the door hissed open.  “Now, remember you’re with me and keep the chin up,” he advised.  He leaned closer to whisper in her ear.  “They can smell your fear.”

The interior cavern of the asteroid was packed with people, all dressed in their own costumes.  For a moment, Kathy thought that she had been taken to a fancy ball, but then she realised that they were their clothes.  The inhabitants wore everything from basic shipsuits, torn and grubby, to outfits even more flamboyant than Cordova’s pirate outfit.  Some girls wore nothing, not even a pair of panties, as they wandered through the massive chamber, but even they were overshadowed by the aliens, gathered in their own group.  Kathy had never seen a real breathing alien before and she was fascinated, taking in the hulking shape of the Gagoon and the smaller mouse-like Raventh, even as she wondered why they were here.  Aliens were forbidden from Earth by ancient law, and she knew most of the other worlds had similar laws, but why here?  Jan had once told her that the people on the Rim could be the most reactionary of all.

“Come on,” Cordova hissed, pushing his way through the crowd.  He was clearly well known among the group; they looked at him, smiled and stepped out of his way, a deference she hadn’t seen since she’d left the High City.  They allowed her to pass through as well, clearly seeing her as his companion, as he pushed his way up onto the platform, where a tall man wearing a basic Imperial Navy uniform spoke to the crowd.  

Cordova nodded at him.  “That’s Colin Harper, our illustrious leader,” he said.  “He just blew hell out of the Annual Fleet.”

“…Cannot promise victory,” Colin was saying, his voice echoing out over the chamber.  “I cannot swear that all of us will survive.  I can promise you, however, that we can and will show the Empire one hell of a fight and knock it, once and for all, out of its complacency.”

Kathy felt real fear for the first time since she’d been brought onboard the Random Numbers.  Colin was milking the crowd for all it was worth, but if Cordova was telling the truth, he could have recited the annual statistics of the Empire and he would still have been cheered.  One hand felt the handle of the laser pistol, hidden within her garments, and she thought about drawing it and burning him down, but the mere attempt would seal her doom.  Cordova winked at her, clearly only half-listening to the speech, leaving her to wonder how much he knew.  Had he brought her in the hope she would assassinate his rival?

Afterwards, proceedings moved to a smaller room.  “This is Kathy, Lady Tyler,” Cordova said, introducing her to Colin.  He even managed to give her title perfectly.  “She’s the Heir to her Family, an accomplished asteroid miner and damn good in bed.”

Kathy flushed, her embarrassment not helped by the redheaded woman next to Colin barking out a harsh laugh.  She looked almost regal herself, even if she was only wearing a basic shipsuit with just a single mark of rank, but Kathy had to remind herself that she might well be a pirate queen on the Rim.  Her life was in her hands…and yet, looking at her, there was something oddly familiar about her.

“Welcome to the Rebellion, Lady Tyler,” Colin said.  He didn’t seem to have found Cordova’s joke very funny, although that might have been because he didn’t seem to like Cordova very much.  Kathy wished, now, that she had spent more time studying people, rather than her asteroid mining tools.  “I hope that you will find a place amongst us, working for a living.”

Yeah, right, Kathy thought.  Cordova was clearly playing his own game.  She had the uncomfortable sense that she’d been turned into a pawn, without even knowing the rules of the game.  Cordova had hinted, to be fair, that she could set up new platforms out on the Rim, working for the Rebellion, but if she did that…she’d be lucky to be merely executed when the Empire caught up with them.  The Rebellion looked powerful, but she had to remind herself that it might be trying to convince her that it was stronger than it actually was, if Cordova ever kept his promise to send her back to the Empire.  What sort of message would they give her to take back to the High City?

Colin sat back in his chair and nodded to the redheaded woman.  “Daria, please send in the socialists,” he said, ever inch the man in command of the situation.  “Let’s see what they want from us.”

Kathy found herself leaning forward as the door opened, curious.  The entertainments at the High City mocked the socialists relentlessly, portraying them as shifty men who travelled through space, encouraging hard-working and content workers to desire rewards and bonuses above their station.  They carried a political disease that – always – had to be burned out by the Imperial Navy, killing as few of the workers as possible, but slaughtering the socialists without mercy.  They deserved it.  Everyone knew that.  

When she’d left the High City, she had gained a slightly different perspective, but she still disliked the socialists.  They came to a world, bearing promises and dreams, but the worlds they touched were worse off after the revolution had run its inevitable route.  The milder cases had their taxes increased and their workforce conscripted directly into the factories, while the more rebellious works were partly scorched.  The socialists might have meant well, but how could so much pointless death and suffering aid a cause, any cause?

Cordova touched her shoulder.  “Whatever happens,” he muttered, too softly for her to hear, “don’t say anything.  Understand?”

Kathy nodded as his hand tightened on her body.

The socialists looked disappointingly normal.  The three men and two women were wearing standard shipsuits, perhaps a little less clean and tidy than others, without markings or insignia.  Their faces were instantly forgettable, as benefited people who wanted to remain hidden, and almost identical; the only way she could pick out the women was by seeing their breasts.  They all had close-cropped black hair, blue eyes and unreadable expressions.  In an emergency, she guessed, they could change their appearances with only a few modifications, enough to fool an automated visual recognition program.

“Welcome to the Rebellion,” Colin said, wryly.  “I understand that you wanted to remain nameless, but we would like something to call you, if only for the records.”

The lead man smiled.  “You may call me Alpha,” he said.  “My two companions from the socialists” – he nodded to one of the couples – “are Beta and Gamma.”  He nodded at the other couple.  “The representatives from the Democratic Underground are Delta and Epsilon.”

“It is not particularly imaginative,” Delta – the woman – acknowledged, “but it serves its purpose.”

Kathy frowned.  The woman’s voice had been almost identical to the man’s voice.  She wouldn’t have been able to tell them apart in the dark, which might have been the point; the Empire’s surveillance devices would have had problems telling who was who.  The socialists had probably done it just to confuse their enemies.  Kathy wasn't sure if she was an enemy, even though she’d been raised to hate them, but she was confused.

“I understand,” Colin said.  He leaned back in his chair as the representatives found chairs of their own.  “Thank you for coming.”

“The invitation was one that we couldn’t refuse,” Alpha said.  “We couldn’t come until we had some proof that you weren't a plant, but once our sources told us that you had successfully hijacked the Annual Fleet, we were willing to make contact and see if we could help each other.  Admiral…what do you want?”

Colin lifted an eyebrow.  “And what do you want?”

“Our two groups have had a…basic philosophical dispute over the replacement for the Empire since we were founded,” Alpha admitted.  “The Democrats believe that a democratic system, with universal franchise and elections, is the most logical path forward for rebuilding the human race.  The Clans will be broken up or forced to come to terms with their workers.  The Socialists believe that the means of production should be owned by the government, for the people, and the people would get their basic rights guaranteed by the government.  The Clans would be broken up and the government would confiscate their possessions.”

“It strikes me,” Colin said, after a moment, “that you would have real problems with both of them.  Holding the Empire together isn’t easy – it’s the key to our victory – and you’re asking for much greater government involvement.  I can’t see any such system surviving on an interstellar scale.”

“There are issues that will have to be worked out,” Alpha acknowledged.  “It is possible that some compromise between the two views will be the end result, although any government will end up being decided by the people.  What we both agree on is that the Clans and their persistent abuse of their power needs to be curtailed sharply.”

“We are in agreement on that, at least,” Colin said.  His face went unreadable for a long moment.  “Where do you stand on the aliens?”

There was a brief moment as Alpha and Gamma shared a glance.  “There are differing opinions,” Alpha said, finally.  “Some of us believe that they should be offered the same rights and responsibilities as humanity, others would be willing to abandon the alien worlds and withdraw the garrisons.  Humanity, as a whole…”

“Is rather xenophobic,” Colin said.  There was an odd note in his voice.  Kathy, despite herself, was fascinated.  Colin was less flamboyant than Cordova, but he seemed to burn with a distant intensity that showed through, from time to time, in his voice.  “There are aliens who are willing to join us, in exchange for freedom.”

“We have no subgroups on alien worlds,” Alpha said, “but we would be prepared to learn.”

Colin laughed.  “Good,” he said.  “Now, what are your capabilities at the moment.”

Kathy watched as the visitors shared more glances.  They probably didn’t want to lay all of their cards on the table, if only because Colin might have ambitions to be Emperor, the fourth Emperor of the Empire.  They might have to rebel against him as well, or perhaps whoever replaced him.  Colin had to have backers somewhere, rich wealthy backers…it dawned on her, suddenly, that her Family might be one of his backers.  The whole situation might be part of a massive power play.

“We have cells on most of the worlds in this sector,” Alpha said.  “We had some links with Macore and her government, but with the Empire crushing them under their jackboots, we don’t know the exact status of the cells there.  We could expand rapidly and start shipping in weapons for a rebellion, but…”

“Rebellions get crushed,” Colin said.

“Then move on Harmony, now,” Delta said.  “You have a resourceful and loyal crew and more starships than we ever dreamed of deploying.  Crush Percival before he can be reinforced and smash his ships.”

“I would like nothing better,” Colin said, flatly.  “It won’t work, however, and they would destroy us even if we succeeded.  They would have us outnumbered and we don’t – yet – have the systems we need to reverse that.  Percival only has to get lucky once and we’re beaten.”

“And if we start kicking off rebellions, you could cover them,” Alpha said.  “Wouldn’t that force Percival out to fight on your terms?”

“We couldn’t cover every possible target,” Colin said.  He leaned closer.  “Can you obey orders?”

Kathy shivered at the tone in her voice, silently cursing Cordova for bringing her to watch and listen.  The rebels couldn’t let her go back to the Empire now, could they?  There was a very simple answer to the problem, as well, even if Cordova had really grown fond of her.  All they had to do was put her in front of the mind techs, if there were mind techs along the Rim, and they would remove her memories, replacing them with their own imperatives.

The thought reminded her of one of her old friends.  She’d been smart, brilliant even, born to one of the highest Families…and rebellious.  If she’d been the Heir, she might have been permitted her rebellious moments, but as the second born, she was too dangerous to keep around.  One day, her father had taken her to the mind techs and had her reprogrammed, replacing intelligence with compliance and submission, wiping her memories clean.  The bright intelligent girl had died that day, replaced by an air-headed bimbo barely able to take care of herself.  The remainder of the young Family Members had been terrified for weeks, those who’d known her as a friend.  The rest had just thought it was funny.

“Yes,” Alpha said, unaware of her thoughts.  How could he know what she was thinking?  He probably didn’t even know who she was.  “What would you have us do?”

“I want you to prepare your cells, as far as you can into the Empire,” Colin said.  “We can have weapons and equipment shipped into the Empire and, perhaps, a few mercenaries to help train your people.  Once the call comes, they can rise at once and knock out the Empire’s garrisons.  By then, we should have taken the Imperial Fleet out of the equation, at least for a few months, maybe even a year.”

Alpha frowned.  “You seem very confident,” he observed.  There was a sceptical tone in his voice, eerie and engineered though it was.  “Do you believe that you can take the rest of the Sector Fleet out?”

“Yes,” Colin said, flatly.  There was no doubt in his voice.  “I do.”

Chapter Twenty-Two

“What are you going to do with her?”

Cordova shrugged.  “We may need someone to carry a message back to the Empire,” he said, “someone they won’t simply dismiss or shoot out of hand.  Kathy, Dear Kathy, won’t be shot if we send her back, not like you and me.”

Colin frowned.  It had proven impossible to keep Cordova off the committee, not after his victory – and, more practically, his success in tying the volunteer ships into a functional task force.  It was a very different task from commanding the ex-Empire ships and crews and he respected Cordova for his success, even though there was still that quiet nagging doubt.  Cordova might have been adding to his legend, but Colin wasn't comfortable with allowing a Family Heir to wander around the asteroids.  It would have been perfectly safe, the nasty part of his mind whispered, to allow Stacy to wander freely, but Kathy was clearly someone different.

“And nothing else?”  He asked, finally.  “You appear to be very close to her already.”

Cordova winked.  “Oh, she’s good in bed,” he said.  His voice tightened.  “And there is a more practical reason, of course.”

He leaned forward.  “You haven’t been thinking much about what is to come after the Empire is defeated,” he said.  “I understand why – you had to accomplish the first parts of your plan before you could start thinking in the long term – but it’s a serious problem now.  What are we going to do when we beat the Empire?  Do we really want to break up the Clans?”

Colin felt a hot flash of anger.  “I am not going to tolerate any others like Percival,” he said.  “Why should we not break up the Clans and dump the Families on a penal world?”

“Because that would destroy the remains of the economy of the Empire,” Cordova said, seriously.  “People on the outside always see the Families and the Clans as monolithic, but the truth is that there are levels and factions even within the ruling members.  For every one like Percival, there’s a younger one like Kathy, someone who has ambitions and is competent…and therefore a threat to the established order.  Kathy doesn’t know it, or maybe she does, but her success wouldn’t have lasted.  Her patrons would have eventually taken it for themselves.”

He leaned forward.  “You’re a student of military history,” he said.  “I’m a student of social history, including the ones that were banned, mainly to stop the lower orders getting ideas.  It wouldn’t do to have them think that there was a way to rebel against the Thousand Families and their Empire, would there?  Every successful rebellion has needed, desperately, the services of those it disposed, the people with the skills to keep the Empire running.  If we dump all of the Thousand Families onto a prison world, we lose them…and if we make that our public war aim, we’re going to encourage them to resist.  Who really wants to be dumped on a penal world?”

Colin nodded.  Penal worlds were rare within the Empire, worlds that were barely habitable and therefore unlikely to attract any willing settlers.  The Empire dumped convicts on the planet with a survival kit, promising them that if they succeeded in colonising the world, their descendents would be welcome to join the Empire.  The worlds weren’t monitored too closely – no one really cared about the criminals – but from what he’d heard, they were hellish.  No one in their right mind would want to go to one of them.

“I’ll add an extra problem,” Cordova added.  “Every rebellion – well, almost every rebellion – has led to a worse regime fairly quickly.  Our friends the socialists may not know this, but previous successful socialist rebellions led rapidly to tyranny, in the name of the people.  The democrats didn’t do much better, although they tended to allow the voters to vote the bastards out, even though some of them refused to go.  The only successful socialist state was a planet colonised during the First Expansion Period, one designed from the start to be socialist, and that world was softening even before the Empire absorbed it and sent its leadership to re-education camps.”

He shrugged.  “You need to think, hard, about what kind of system you intend to replace the Empire,” he said.  “What do you have in mind?”

The hatch hissed open, revealing Daria and two of Colin’s Captains, before he could answer.  Anderson and the remainder followed soon afterwards.  Colin had decided to hold the Committee meetings on the General Montgomery – on the grounds that it was a location he controlled completely – and, unlike some commanders, recognised that that would mean that the arrivals would be delayed.  The superdreadnaught was just too large to dock at the nearby asteroid.

Cordova, the honest part of his mind admitted, was right.  He hadn’t given much thought to what he wanted the Empire as a whole to be.  He’d wanted to clean out the Imperial Navy and make it what it had once been, a service to be proud of, but how could he extend that to the whole of the Empire?  Salgak, he knew, would want all the limitations on scientific research lifted and little in the way of government oversight, Daria would want the massive shipping cartels broken up, Macore and thousands of other worlds would want independence…and they were the easy ones.  What about the billions who would want revenge on those who had stamped on them?  What about Imperial Navy commanders who had scorched entire planets?

And what about the fundamental unity of humanity?

Colin had studied the foundation of the Empire, although he had his doubts as to how accurate the information presented at the Academy had been, and he knew that the need for a united human race had pushed the Empire into being.  The Dathi War had killed billions of humans and, through disunity, had come very close to being the end of the human race.  The founders of the Empire had preached unity, allowing worlds to retain a measure of autonomy, but not independence.  The Empire had mutated, over time, into the nightmare, but it was still united.  What would happen if it broke up into a number of successor states?

The last Captain entered the room.  “This meeting is now in session,” Colin said, pushing his thoughts to the back of his mind.  The future of the post-Empire universe would have to wait.  “Salgak, if you would like to begin?”

The Geek’s implants hissed and spun as he turned to face the table.  Colin had been growing used to the mutilated face and the hissing, although atonal voice, but he still found it better not to look too closely at the sight.  Salgak might have sworn blind that it was part of the development of humanity, but Colin felt that it would have been possible to have the implants buried under the skin, instead of visible to all.  The Geeks had marked themselves as a gesture of defiance.  They might have access to countless databanks and the massed calculation power of thousands of computers, but they were still human.

“We have transported the contents of the freighters to the yard complex,” Salgak said.  His implants buzzed and twitched as he spoke, hunting endlessly for nodes they could link into, even on the superdreadnaught.  Colin had never understood the holding orders for captured Geeks until he'd actually met one.  A Geek could insert all kinds of commands into computers, using their uncanny insight into the way they worked to avoid Imperial safeguards.  “The process of building our own starships is now underway.”

Colin nodded.  The Rim had a surprising number of shipyards, some established by refugees from the Empire, others established by pirates or freebooters, although most of them were hardly capable of building anything larger than a cruiser.  Macore had invested the resources in establishing a secret shipyard, although Colin had known about it before launching the mutiny, which probably meant that Percival knew about it as well.  Imperial Intelligence had picked up on their preparations.  If the freebooters could get all of the shipyards working together, they might be able to present the Empire with a real challenge.

Cordova had a more practical concern.  “And how long will it be until we can start building our own superdreadnaughts?”

“We believe that we could start construction within six months,” Salgak said.  “None of the currently known and allied yards were ever designed to work on superdreadnaught-sized ships.  We will have to establish new yards of our own and then construct the manufacturing nodes, but that is only a matter of time.  In addition, we have started a program of refitting older units to Imperial standard, which will add additional mobile firepower to the Shadow Fleet.”

“That leaves weapons,” Colin observed.  The Shadow Fleet had fired off more missiles during its last engagement than Colin felt comfortable with, even though he had stockpiled literally thousands of missiles along the Rim.  “Have you been able to duplicate the Imperial missiles?”

“We had the ability to duplicate them a long time before you arrived,” Salgak said, scoring a point.  “There should be no problem with designing standard and specialised missiles, including an intriguing new line of development that might help to offset the Empire’s advantages in numbers.  A focused modification of a missile drive field would allow the missile a chance to slip through a defensive shield.”

Colin sensed the shock running around the table.  “If it was so easy,” he said, finally, “why hasn’t the Empire started to deploy them?”

“It is not easy,” Salgak said, as if he’d been insulted.  “The power demands for maintaining such a focused drive field, which only offers a fifty-fifty chance of penetrating the shield, are astronomical.  Using such missiles within sprint mode range would still cause them to burn out long before they reached their target.  They would have to be fired from within energy range to have a hope of breaking through while still under power.  It would not be easy.”

“No,” Cordova agreed.  For once, he and Colin were in perfect agreement.  “No one in their right mind would want to take a starship that close to an enemy superdreadnaught.”

Salgak shrugged heavily, his implants whirring away.  “I merely bring you inventions and weapons,” he said.  “The deployment of such weapons is up to you.”

Colin tapped the table.  “The weapons are interesting,” he agreed, “but that’s not why we are here.  Percival has acted as we expected and moved to seize Macore.  A freebooter remained under stealth and recorded the entire battle.”

He pressed a button on his terminal and started the playback.  The committee watched with varying degrees of interest as Percival’s force moved in on Macore, blew it’s way through the defence fleet, and finally captured the high orbitals.  The freebooter had been brave enough to sneak closer to a fleet that could have vaporised him without even noticing; Imperial Intelligence, Colin was sure, couldn’t have done a better job.

“Brutal,” Captain Clifford Trout said, finally.  The Lighting’s new commanding officer studied the display thoughtfully.  “They just hacked right through them.”

“They had three superdreadnaughts, only three,” Captain Arun Prabhu added.  “They must have been terrified that we were lurking within the system.  They never took their superdreadnaughts into the gravity shadow and just used long-range missiles.  They should have dispatched an entire squadron.”

Colin nodded.  “A week later, they landed ten thousand SD troopers on Macore and invaded Landing City,” he said, carefully not looking at Captain Simon Horvat.  His wife’s family had lived there.  The SDs hadn’t bothered to prevent signals from being transmitted from the ground, recording their advance; General Thomas probably thought that it enhanced his reputation.  

“Only ten thousand?”  Cordova asked.  “They must be feeling overconfident.  Macore was a frontier world for a long time and still has plenty of weapons washing about.”

“My source at Harmony now confirms that they are assembling another wave of reinforcements for the occupation force,” Colin said.  It hadn’t been easy to maintain contact, although with a little help from the Geeks, once the signals were sent, it would be almost impossible to intercept them.  “My belief is that they intend to garrison the planet pretty thoroughly, serving as an example to the other worlds, while taking control of the planet’s industry.”

He paused.  “The question is simple.  Do we attempt to liberate Macore?”

There was a brief burst of discussion.  “I think that we have little choice, but to run interference on the occupation,” Cordova said, finally.  “If we punch out the forces occupying the high orbitals, they’ll just come back again and re-take the planet, unless we station the entire Shadow Fleet there.”

“Which would pin us down and make us vulnerable,” Colin reminded him.  It was odd, thinking of superdreadnaughts as part of an interstellar guerrilla war, but that was exactly what they were fighting.  “It is quite possible that Macore is intended to force us to concentrate on covering them while Percival calls up reinforcements and hunts us down, even if he has to search every star along the Rim.”

It was Daria who broke the logjam.  One group believed that the Shadow Fleet had a moral duty to intervene, while the other side believed that it was a trap and therefore the fleet should concentrate it’s efforts somewhere else.  Colin had been tossing the arguments around in his head, leaning in favour of intervening, but he couldn’t add his own opinions, not if he wanted theirs.  The original rebels would feel bound to follow his opinions, which would leave the other feeling isolated.

“We have thousands of people from Macore in the fleet,” she said.  “Some of them were freebooters since I founded the Freebooter League, others are new recruits, people who fled the planet before the invasion began.  They joined us in the hope that we could free their planet one day.”

She paused.  “We owe them,” she said.  “I understand that we cannot liberate the planet directly, but surely we can do something else, something to show them that we are trying.”

Colin nodded.  “My source reports that Percival is currently assembling a new force of SD troopers at Harmony, before dispatching them to Macore,” he said.  “He is apparently very annoyed that we kidnapped the last batch of SDs” – currently trying to survive on a very hostile world – “and has been assembling them from various other worlds.  This force is going to be dispatched within a week, under escort.”

“Providing us with a shot at removing the SDs before they can land,” Cordova said, thoughtfully.  “They’re not going to give us the convoy schedule ahead of time this time, are they?”

“No,” Colin admitted.  “They’re probably going to randomise all the waypoints and move as quickly as possible.  We’re going to have to take up position in the Macore System and ambush them as soon as they arrive.”

“Chancy,” Captain Simon Horvat muttered.  “What happens if they send along a force we can’t handle as an escort?”

“We break off and abandon the mission,” Colin said, flatly.  He doubted that Percival would risk sending too many ships away from Harmony – if he lost that world, his career would be completely over – but it would be a problem.  If they were lucky, they'd have a chance to intercept and destroy a small portion of his fleet.  “We also need a diversion.”

He keyed a command into the display and watched as a star chart shimmered into view.  “The success of the last raiding mission was good as a proof of concept, so we’re going to expand it now,” he said.  “Captain Cordova will lead his flotilla on a series of raids through these worlds, starting at Garnet and moving randomly through that part of the sector, before nipping in at Harmony before retreating.”

Cordova smiled.  “It would be a challenge,” he said.  “You want us to raid Harmony?”

“Not exactly,” Colin said, hearing the faint note of doubt in Cordova’s tone.  His reputation came with a price, after all.  “On your voyage, you are to upload the message we prepared to every communications network in the system.  The final point, at Harmony, will succeed in confusing them.  Even if they succeed in preventing the message from leaving Harmony…”

“They will not,” Salgak said.  “They lack the ability to decipher the message worm in time to wipe it from their systems.”

Anderson spoke for the first time.  “Are you sure of that?”  He asked.  “Imperial Intelligence has some pretty good webheads.”

“They are not permitted more than minimal direct interface with the computers,” Salgak grated.  Anderson had touched a nerve.  “Our message worm does not actually seek to harm their systems, or to misuse them, but to actually use the systems in the correct way.  They will be unable to remove it quickly, unless they physically destroy the message storage cells, and even then, the message will have started its long voyage.  We estimate that it will cover the entire Empire within six months.  It will move far in advance of any warning.”

He paused.  “Assuming they have help from the Nerds,” he added, “they will still be unable to prevent the message from moving through their systems.”

“All right, all right,” Colin said.  He didn’t understand all of it, but he’d learned to trust the Geeks when it came to technology.  Imperial Intelligence wouldn’t be able to prevent them from using their own systems and broadcasting to the entire Empire.  If they were really lucky, other crews would mutiny and come to join the rebels.  His source had warned that Percival was already taking precautions against just such a mutiny on Harmony.  “Jason, I’ll speak to you tonight about the exact forces allocated to your force, once we assemble the Shadow Fleet for the move to Macore.”

He paused, glancing from face to face.  “We’ve had a pretty easy run so far,” he added.  “Now it gets harder, much harder.  Dismissed!”

Chapter Twenty-Three

“But, My Lord, I’m telling you that it cannot be done,” William Derbyshire protested.  “We cannot even begin to do it.”

Penny sat back and watched, with a certain amount of pleasure, as Imperial Intelligence’s Head of Station struggled to justify his continued service…and, judging from Percival’s expression, his life.  Penny doubted that Percival would execute him on the spot – he was too squeamish for that – but he might just order William taken outside and shot.  The failure needed a scapegoat, after all, and she couldn’t think of anyone more deserving.

“That…little shit Harper has a friend somewhere on this base,” Percival said, every word coldly furious.  “I want that person located and mind-burned, not silly excuses.  You failed in your duty to catch the mutineers before they launched their mutiny, you failed to protect the Annual Fleet and now you bring me excuses.  Who on my base is supplying him with information?”

That, Penny admitted, wasn't entirely fair.  No one had anticipated losing Stacy Roosevelt’s private database, let alone the routine updates sent from command to command, including the exact details of the Annual Fleet.  They might as well have given Colin Harper the fleet on a plate, but no one had known that he was planning a mutiny…and the escorts would have been sufficient to hold off any conceivable pirate attack.  Pirates were businessmen, after all; they wouldn’t want to see their ships blown apart by the Imperial Navy, no matter the reward.  How could they even spend it if they were dead?  

And as for finding Colin’s ally…

There were upwards of two million Imperial Navy personnel in the Harmony System at any one time, not counting the crews of starships that came into the system for rest and refitting.  Assuming that the spy wasn't a member of the Thousand Families – and Percival seemed to think that it might even be a member of a rival Clan – that removed only two hundred and seven suspects from the list.  Colin had proven that it didn’t even have to be a senior officer, which meant that it could be anyone, even some clerk in the shipping office.  Hell, there might even be a sensor-stealthed starship hiding somewhere in the system, monitoring all comings and goings.  It would be almost impossible to track it…

“We cannot haul everyone in for interrogation,” Derbyshire was protesting.  “There are already rumours spreading through the base of what happened at Macore.  If we start acting paranoid, all of those rumours would be confirmed and all hell could break loose.”

Of course it could, you silly bastard, Penny thought, irritated.  Imperial Intelligence wasn’t a popular department.  If there was a mutiny on Harmony, Derbyshire and his men would be the first against the wall, perhaps even before Percival himself.  The competent intelligence officers were bad enough, but a bad apple would be even more disliked, using his access to the security systems for blackmail, or worse.  The failure to discover Colin’s plot in advance, particularly since Colin had apparently been assisted by the security officers, who were supposed to nip such plots in the bud, had only fed the paranoia.  

Percival, on her advice, had kept the true state of affairs from everyone, but his senior officers, although that wouldn’t last.  Rumour spread faster than anything else on starships and the base and it wouldn’t be long before some indiscreet dispatcher revealed the truth.  What would happen then?  Penny knew that she was loyal, but she’d be surprised if she wasn’t under suspicion, along with everyone else who wasn't a member of the Families.  Derbyshire had plenty of incentive to finger her…

“You will work overtime until you find the spy,” Percival said, finally.  His paranoia had only swollen since the first reports had come in, turning from general suspicion to a focused belief that some other Clan was behind everything, just to make him look bad.  Penny’s more rational estimate was that no other Clan would be insane enough to encourage someone to take nine superdreadnaughts and start a rebellion, no matter how much they hated Percival and his patrons, but she hadn’t been able to convince him.  It seemed much more likely that Colin’s rebellion was exactly what he’d told Stacy it was, a genuinely popular uprising from the lower decks, but Percival wouldn’t – couldn’t – believe it.  “Haul in anyone, no matter how important…”

He broke off.  Penny was almost relieved.  Percival couldn’t have ordered a full-scale interrogation of anyone from the Families, not without clear proof of high treason, or no one would lift their voices in his defence.  He was thinking, at least, about the future, which meant that there was still a chance for survival.  Penny had no illusions about her future – or her complete lack of one – if Percival fell.  His Family clients would be able to find new patrons, but she…she would lucky if she was dispatched to a boring station out on the Rim.

“No, inform me if the suspect is from the Families,” he countermanded himself.  “If it’s a commoner, interrogate them at will, but inform me if it’s a Family suspect.”

He glared at Derbyshire for a long moment, just long enough to make the Imperial Intelligence officer uncomfortable.  “Now, go and find the spy,” he ordered.  “You are dismissed.”

Derbyshire left, looking understandably relieved.  Penny said nothing as Percival paced the room, muttering to himself under his breath, and busied herself skimming through the latest series of reports from Arian.  The Roosevelt Clan’s representatives in the sector had already sent Percival a series of imperious demands for action, salvation and compensation, not necessarily in that order, although they were curiously muted on the subject of the missing manager.  They hadn’t improved Percival’s mood, or his sense of being persecuted; the Roosevelt Clan could cause real trouble for him.  

And, of course, he couldn’t give them what they wanted.  If the manager had indeed been kidnapped, and not, as he had suggested, been disappeared by her patrons, she would be trapped somewhere on the Rim, or on a pirate starship.  There were plenty of stories of pirate captives stealing starships and escaping back to the Empire, but they were just stories, although sometimes captives would be rescued by the Marines and the Imperial Navy.  The odds against a rescue, particularly of an important person who might bring a massive ransom, were dauntingly high.  If Lady Tyler was still alive, and hadn’t been merely raped to death, she was beyond salvation.

Worse, it was a forerunner of trouble to come.  Admiral Percival had three hundred starships to cover the entire sector, but most of them were light units.  The superdreadnaughts had to be held in reserve to cover Harmony, which left the task of patrolling the sector to the smaller craft.  Under normal circumstances, that wouldn’t have been a problem, but with a pirate – no, a rebel – fleet employing superdreadnaughts and battlecruisers, they were dangerously exposed.  She’d suggested ensuring that the ships operated in task groups, each one powerful enough to escape if they were attacked by superior force, but that order might not have reached all of the far-flung units by now.  It was so…slow.

They have the advantage because they can choose their targets, Penny thought.  We won’t know if a battle has been fought until days or weeks afterwards, if anyone survives to tell us.  Units on the display may have died long ago, or gone renegade themselves, and we won’t know about it until far too late.

“We need an advantage,” Percival said, his words breaking into her thoughts.  “Are you sure that your plan will work?”

Penny hesitated.  He was calling it ‘her’ plan, which wasn’t a good sign.  Normally, he was quite happy to steal all of her ideas and claim them as his own.  She had learned to accept that as the price for his patronage and the other rewards he could bring her, but it meant that her future was tied tightly to his.  The records claimed that they were his ideas…and the records wouldn’t lie, would they?

“It’s our best shot at a quick victory,” Penny offered finally.  “As long as Derbyshire shows the same level of competence…”

“He is one of the Families,” Percival said, dryly.  “Show him some respect.”

Penny was careful to keep her face blank.  The Thousand Families consisted of hundreds of thousands of members, ranging from legitimate children to bastards and cloned heirs.  The Empire considered them a suitable cadre for most of the higher positions and, if they had all been competent, capable and willing, it’s confidence would have been quite justified.  Penny had seen enough of the higher levels of society to know, however, that most of them were worthless incompetents.  The ones who were competent were few and far between…and, if what Percival had said once could be trusted, weren't always highly regarded by their peers.  They might have Imperial ambitions.

Derbyshire’s family line was loosely connected to Percival’s, although even a space navigation expert would have had problems parsing the entire line out.  The genealogy of the Thousand Families was more than a little confusing, as clients moved between patrons, often sealing them with marriage alliances, while important posts were offered to those with the most to lose.  Derbyshire’s status, as she understood it, was dependent on Percival.  He had nothing to gain by unseating him, so he’d been offered a position that couldn’t be entrusted to a commoner, or someone with an independent support base.  It was, from the outside, frustrating and hateful.  The one time Penny had been to the High City, on Percival’s arm, had been an education.  She’d been treated as a servant.

“As you command,” she said, finally.  “The plan should work, assuming that they pick up on it.”

Percival nodded, sourly.  He’d wanted to put the entire base into lockdown as soon as the potentials for a second series of mutinies had crossed his mind, but Penny had talked him out of it.  Lockdown worked fine on starships, for a short period of time, but it would have brought Harmony Base to a screeching halt.  The shipyards would close down, industrial facilities would be unable to produce components, while if there were any rebels on the station, they would have gone firmly to ground.  If it had been easy to catch them, Derbyshire would have done it, but instead…Penny had seen an opportunity.  

Logically, she’d argued, the rebels had to have some kind of link into the Interstellar Communications Network.  The network of courier boats and volunteer starships that made up the ICN was massive, used by everyone who had interests in communications, from the Imperial Navy to commercial factions and private citizens.  Officially, according to its propaganda, the Empire maintained the network as a gift to its new worlds, even including Macore.  In reality, the network allowed Imperial Intelligence and the Censors a chance to read every piece of mail before passing it on to its destination, if they chose to do so.  The entire system was so complicated that the Thousand Families treated it with extreme care, trying not to drag it into the incessant faction fights between the Clans.  They all needed the system to work.

Penny had reasoned that the Censors wouldn’t pick up the rebel messages; after all, anything could be a message, from an order for new components to the sporting results.  Shutting the system down was impossible, so it would be simple enough to monitor it instead, watching for a message…and giving the enemy spies a chance to send the messages she wanted them to send.  Colin would want reports on fleet movements, so she’d ensure he got them, while a set of sealed orders would ensure that the ships went to different locations.  No one would know any better until the fleet reached a specific point, where Commodore Tamworth would open his orders and change course.

“It’s still dangerous,” Percival said, grimly.  “We should at least have forbidden the base personnel from sending any messages.”

“Which would have warned the spies that we were after them,” Penny said, reasonably.  “They would have hidden and we would have needed to be very lucky to pick up their identities.  Besides, we couldn’t have forbidden the contractors from sending messages, not without irritating their patrons.”

She looked up at the display.  Seven transports waited there, patiently awaiting the order to depart and transport the SDs onboard to Macore.  Nine transports had arrived, but Percival had distributed the SD companies through his ships, hoping to prevent a second series of mutinies.  Penny had suggested, very strongly, that the SDs were kept on a tight leash, but Percival had been reluctant to issue strong orders.  The mutinies had shaken his confidence in his ships and men badly.

Personally, Penny suspected that a few weeks in the close company of the SDs would lead to a few mutinies.  The SD troopers weren't trained to be anything, but brutal expandable fighters.  They were hardly suited for the interior of a starship, not when their perception of others had been limited through conditioning to ‘superior’ and ‘inferior.’  The former was to be obeyed without question; the latter was to be treated, at best, as a dangerous prisoner.  There was a reason why Marines were preferred for shipboard duties, but Harmony’s entire force of Marines had been sent far away from the base, until their sympathies could be assessed.

“The ships will depart on schedule for Macore,” she added.  “Have you reviewed the latest reports?”

“They’re still fighting,” Percival said, absently.  “General Thomas promised that there would be a quick victory.”

Penny snorted.  Ten thousand SDs couldn’t hold down an entire planet, not even with fire-support from orbit, and Macore was seething with anger and repressed rage.  They might know that they couldn’t win in the long term, or that they might push the Empire to the point where they ran out of patience and scorched the planet, but they had lived with the tension of waiting for the hammer to drop that they were almost glad to fight.  The Empire might have miscalculated, Penny thought, even though the supplies of SD troopers were effectively unlimited; Macore might be hammered into submission, but only as a ruin.  

“Once we move reinforcements there, he will be able to mount far more sustained counter-insurgency operations,” Penny assured him, calmly.  General Thomas’s miscalculations wouldn’t be blamed on her.  “We chose to speed up the timetable and it doesn’t really suit us to have Macore fall, too quickly.”

“If Commander Harper takes the bait,” Percival said.  He stood up and paced around the office, wearing a pattern into the expensive carpet.  “Are you sure that he will take the bait?”

Penny rolled her eyes.  They’d been over it a dozen times.  “There are two possible outcomes,” she said.  “He takes the bait or he doesn’t.  If the former, then we have a chance to fight him on our terms.  If the latter, we managed to get massive reinforcements through to Macore, despite his best efforts.  Either way, we win.”

It wasn't quite perfect, but she’d done the best she could.  She’d urged Percival to call for reinforcements at once – there were two whole superdreadnaught squadrons, only a fortnight away – but he’d refused, choosing instead to wait until he’d scored a major victory.  She’d done what she could to offer him the chance, but if it failed, she would be blamed.  The best case would mean the end of the rebellion, but the worst case would still work in their favour…although Percival wouldn’t see it that way.  The rebels couldn’t have access to a major shipyard, could they?

There was a chime at the door.  “Admiral, Commodore Tamworth is here for his orders,” Jan said.  “Do you wish to see him?”

“Yes, please,” Percival said.  It wasn’t uncommon for him to keep people waiting, but now he had to finish laying his plans.  “Send him in, then hold all calls until he leaves.”

Commodore Tamworth was a tall handsome man, with short dark hair and a surprisingly pleasant face for a man who was reputed to have scorched three worlds, before being dispatched to Sector 117 and Percival’s command.  Penny studied him with some interest, half-wishing that she’d attached her career to his instead, even though he was a lesser Family Member than Percival.  He also had a reputation for tactical competence and quick-thinking while under fire, although he had never been in a real fight with an equal opponent.  Very few senior officers of the Imperial Navy had.  

“Commodore,” Percival said, without preamble.  “I trust that you received the data packet from my aide?”

Tamworth half-bowed.  “Yes, My Lord,” he said, firmly.  “My ships can depart at once.”

Percival smiled wryly.  “These are for you,” he said, reaching into his jacket and producing a white envelope, stamped with his seal.  “Do not mention them to anyone until you pass the first waypoint, then open them and carry them out at once.  Your success will be heavily rewarded.  Your failure will carry a high price if you are found to be at fault.  Do you understand?”

Tamworth took the envelope and studied it.  “Yes, My Lord,” he said.  He had to know what the envelope contained, but he would have to contain his curiosity until the ships had flickered out.  He placed it neatly in his own jacket.  “I will not fail.”

“No,” Percival agreed.  There was a wry note to his voice, a suggestion that failure might not be Tamworth’s fault.  The timing would have to be precise and space warfare was not, by nature, precise.  Plenty of plans had failed because the planners had tried to be clever.  “Good luck.  Dismissed!”

Penny watched Tamworth salute, make a neat about-face, and march out of the office.  She smiled as the door hissed closed and then turned to look at the display, showing the transports…and, beyond them, another set of glowing icons, waiting in the dark.

Chapter Twenty-Four

“Flickering in…now!”

The General Montgomery shivered as the starship flickered in, a good few light-hours from the verge of the system.  Colin braced himself as the flicker-shock passed over him, swallowing hard to prevent himself from actually throwing up on the deck, then caught himself as the display lit up.  They'd come in so far from any gravity shadow to avoid detection, but if Commodore Gallatin and General Thomas were feeling paranoid, there’d be a handful of destroyers on scouting duty.

“Nothing detected within sensor range,” the sensor officer said, running through the scans.  “Passive sensors report that we’re clear.”

Colin scowled.  A star system was vast.  The empire Imperial Navy could be hiding within the system, drives, shields and sensors stepped down, and they wouldn’t know about it until they brought up their drives.  Active sensors might have revealed anyone trying to hide, but they certainly would have revealed the Shadow Fleet’s presence to anyone with detection systems.   If there was a destroyer lying in wait, the brief fluctuation in the cloaking field might have been detected as they flickered in, spoiling the ambush.  Macore was familiar territory, but now it was effectively occupied by the Empire.  The outlying settlements and mining stations would either be occupied or under observation themselves, unable to escape or even fight when the Empire came for them.

“Laser links established,” the communications officer added.  “The fleet is checking in, sir.  No problems reported as yet.”

Colin watched as the display started to fill with icons, each one signalling the presence of a starship somewhere further within the system.  Macore had once had hundreds of freighters and STL ore miners working the system, but now there were only a handful of starships within range, probably working under Imperial supervision.  The administrators, if they had arrived, would be keen to reboot Macore’s economy as quickly as possible, if only so they could loot it.  They'd probably start pushing the ships back into operation as soon as they arrived, sweetening the pot with a few deals aimed at Macore’s native corporations, offering them a place within the Empire.  It had worked in hundreds of other worlds and they would see no reason to change their methods, not even with Macore.  After all, it was only a difference in scale.

He steepled his fingers as he contemplated the image.  At first, the Empire would make little headway, but later, they would win converts, if only people who wanted a peaceful life.  Cordova’s advice had been to study history outside of military history and Colin had taken it, downloading a few hundred banned history texts and studying them when he hadn’t been on duty, encouraging David Houston and others to do the same.  The chances of continued resistance depended on the perception of success, either through liberation from the outside or military victory, which meant that Colin’s raid had to be a success.  They had to embarrass the Empire in a manner they couldn’t deny…

“All ships have checked in, sir,” the communications officer said.  “No sign of any potential problems.”

And so we start wondering who’s creeping up behind us, Colin thought.  “Signal to all ships,” he ordered, calmly.  “Download the pre-planned course.  On my command, take us out.”

The display altered as the fleet started to move, hidden behind a cloaking field.  Colin knew, better than most, the weaknesses in the cloaking fields.  The Geeks kept promising that they could develop a perfect cloak, but Colin suspected that it would only work perfectly as long as the ship was lurking somewhere, without drives or shields.  Either would disrupt the cloak, causing detectable traces of energy to appear, which might be tracked by an enemy ship.  The course he'd plotted out would keep them away from any known sensor station or enemy ship, but there might always be someone hiding under a cloak of their own, watching for trouble.

“Stand down from battle stations,” he added.  There was little point in keeping the crew at battle stations for the two days it would take to creep into position.  “I want a permanent sensor watch kept; inform me at once if anything changes.”

The hours passed slowly.  Imperial Intelligence ships, Colin had once heard, flickered in light-days or even light-weeks away from the target star, accepting the long flights into the system as the price for being certain of avoiding discovery.  It was common for the more developed systems to have a network of observation stations floating along the verge, watching for any unwelcome visitors, but only someone with more resources than sense would extend them much further.  An outright attack fleet would flicker in much closer, while spies would be able to avoid detection, unless a quite impossible number of stations were built and deployed.

He spent the first hour skimming through the reports laser-beamed from Macore to the freebooters, reminding himself that they would be out of date by at least a fortnight.  The SDs had established positions on the first continent, but they'd almost completely ignored the second continent, while they had spread themselves very thin.  It didn’t make sense, even for SDs, to launch such an invasion; they barely had the manpower to secure a handful of small cities.  They should have waited for reinforcements before landing and allowing the insurgency to get out of hand.  He could understand them choosing to destroy Macore’s fleet, just in case it had links to the Shadow Fleet, but actually landing?  It didn’t make sense.

“I relieve you, sir,” the deputy officer of the watch said, interrupting his thoughts.  “Captain Houston sends his regards, sir, and says that you’re to have a good night’s sleep.”

“Oh, did he?”  Colin asked, shaking his head.  David was clearly looking after him, although Colin wasn't sure that he actually wanted to be looked after, or to be away from the flag deck if something happened.  David was right, though; the fleet’s commander couldn’t go into battle tired, or on stimulants.  Percival, ironically, probably had the right idea.  Choose good people, let them get on with it, and then claim the credit.  “Inform me, at once, if anything happens.”

He hadn’t had time to have Stacy’s cabin redecorated, although he had had some of the more disturbing artworks pulled out and distributed to a handful of collectors on the ship.  It was larger than anything he would have ordered for himself – if the Geeks ever designed a newer class of superdreadnaughts, he was determined that the commanders wouldn’t have such palatial apartments – and he almost found it uncomfortable, like leaving the Midshipman’s Wardroom again.  He wondered, with a sudden bout of pain, what had happened to the others from his Middy Cruise.  Would any of them be rounded up by Imperial Intelligence, suspected of being part of his conspiracy, or would they be on opposite sides in the fighting?

Sleep didn’t come easy and he was on the verge of ordering a sedative from the sickbay when he finally shuffled off into an uncomfortable sleep, torn with nightmares.  He saw, again, the men and women he’d condemned to death in the Annual Fleet, slain without a chance to defend themselves against his attack.  It hadn’t been a honest fight, his mind kept reminding him, and he could have demanded surrender…

The morning, once he had checked in with David and the tactical staff, was spent studying history.  Cordova had recommended that he study the Early Technology Period on Earth, as well as the Outsider Rebellions and even the handful of Emperors, although it was hard to get impartial histories of their careers.  While they'd been alive, they had been feted; when they died, or had been disposed, they were treated as fools and pontoons who had offended against the natural order.  The Families, it seemed, wanted any others who might be tempted to make a grab for absolute power to be very aware of the consequences.  It was certainly a good explanation for why Percival, and Stacy, were tolerated.  They weren't a threat to the Families.

Cordova had been right, he realised, as he read onwards.  It was impossible to pick up fine detail in such a short period of time – and it was difficult to see who he could trust to study for fine detail, as research into pre-space history was generally forbidden by the Empire – but the same threads kept appearing time and time again.  A revolution would be launched, either through prior planning or through a sudden burst of anger, and it would either be crushed or it would succeed.  If the latter, it would risk breaking apart as it tried to hold the country together, or end up being a worse tyranny than the one it had broken.  It wasn't enough, he saw now, to hate the Empire, he needed a dream to replace it.

I was too limited, he thought, in a moment of self-criticism.  He'd thought in terms of overthrowing the current power structure and breaking the Families’ hold on the Imperial Navy, but he needed a replacement, one that would attract others to his banner.  Cordova, damn the man, had seen that…and neither Daria nor Colin had recognised the need, not at first.  Daria had introduced him to the Rock Monster to show him just how many different types of people were going to be affected by the rebellion, and how hard it was going to be to reconcile them all.  Colin was pretty sure that there would be a few thousand crewmen on his ships who would turn at the slightest suggestion of granting rights to non-humans.  They’d grown up surrounded by the legend of the Dathi War and how close humanity had come to complete extinction.  Give the aliens rights one day, they’d argue, and the next they’d have their hands wrapped around humanity’s throat.  The Families had even encouraged the racism; after all, it was nice to have someone very firmly on the bottom of society.

Bastards, he thought, hunting through his notes.  The rebellions that had succeeded had worked, as far as he could tell, because they’d had a base of legitimate authority, something for their people to fall back on.  The rebellions that had failed had done so because they lacked that common heritage.  The Outsider Rebellion had been the most successful in human history; they had had common law and a government that had been separate from the Federation.  Breaking the bonds had been simple enough.

He summoned up a tactical chart of Sector 117 and studied it through new eyes.  He'd treated it as a tactical puzzle, he saw now, one where he would take the ships, use them to take the sector – and Harmony – and then use the sector as a springboard for pressing the war against the Empire.  He’d seen the entire problem in terms of people like himself, screwed and abused by the system, but the problem was much greater than that.  It wasn't enough to destroy the Empire; he needed to create a replacement, something that would serve in its place.  That wasn't going to be easy.  There were few grounds for trust between the worlds, or the fleet; without Daria, it would have been much harder to get the freebooters and the Rim-Dwellers involved in the rebellion.  They would need local autonomy and, yet, links to the Empire’s successor.

Work it out, step by step, he thought, carefully.  He’d have to discuss the concept with Daria – and maybe even Cordova – but he was sure he was on to something.  Each world to get a single representative in Parliament, which was currently a talking shop, with the power to vote only on issues that affected the entire Empire.  A constitutional monarch might be required, but he didn’t want such a role.  Who would?  Meanwhile, the Clans…

That was going to be the sticking point, he saw.  They would need the Clansmen who, like Kathy, were skilled and competent enough to be useful, but they also needed to break the power of the Thousand Families.  The socialists spoke in terms of giving the corporations to the state, but that wouldn’t be much better than the current situation, if at all.  The democrats spoke in terms of giving the corporations to their workers, but they would still face the incentive to screw as much as they could out of their customers.  The money would just be going to a different place.

The problem refused to fade from his mind.  There simply wasn't an easy answer…or maybe it had been staring him in the face all the time.  The reason the Annual Fleet existed was because a handful of Clans had a monopoly on certain products, a monopoly that wouldn’t survive the rebellion.  The representative Parliament wouldn’t allow the monopolies to stand, let alone the laws the current Parliament had enacted, at the behest of the Families, to make exploitive commerce legal.  The Clans would become business interests, forced to adapt or die out in the face of real competition, which would – slowly – level the playing field without causing a major economic collapse.  The Geeks and their development of newer technology would only add to the pressure for innovation…or death.  Slave workers, in fact or name, didn’t have any reason to strive, did they?

And the employment laws would change as well.  The workers had few rights in the Empire, but that could be changed, if only to allow them to resign from their place of employment.  It would be hard to do that safely – the history texts revealed several instances of the poor voting themselves more benefits and sapping the state – but it could be done.  The Clans would have to start treating their workers better, or they would soon have no workers…

And if I don’t win this war, it’s not going to matter, he thought, as he re-read his notes.  They would all have to be discussed by the Committee, which would examine all of his plans to ensure that they were actually workable, but he was sure he had found a solution.  All they had to do was win the war.

***
The Shadow Fleet finally reached its designated location, floating in Interplanetary Space between Macore and Amos, the third planet in the system.  Colin had been expecting to discover that they’d arrived too late, but they seemed to be actually ahead of schedule.  The messages from the planet, aimed out at the colonies, spoke of constant underground warfare, but no sign that the enemy had received reinforcements.

Colin scowled at the images sent back by the probe.  The Imperial Navy had pulled back the superdreadnaughts that had taken part in Macore’s last battle, but they'd left twenty smaller ships in orbit around the world, including nine battlecruisers.  They were lurking just outside the gravity shadow, making it hard to plot a successful interception, but it hardly mattered.  If he went after them, they’d just flicker out and report his presence, spoiling the ambush.  This time, they didn’t have inside knowledge, which meant that if they failed to make the ambush at Macore, they wouldn’t be able to ambush the force at all.

Standard procedure was to route ships through well-known waypoints, just in case there was a drive problem and a ship became stranded in interstellar space, but they wouldn’t be doing that with the SD convoy.  The odds against a successful interception, when the convoy might appear anywhere within hundreds of light years, were so high as to be almost infinity.  No sane commander would bet on such an interception without inside information; pirates either lurked around the verges of a star system or well-known waypoints.

“Contact,” the sensor officer said suddenly, as the display lit up with a series of new icons.  Even at a glance, Colin could see that they were on the other side of Macore, entire light-minutes away.  “I have nineteen ships; four of them battlecruisers.  They made one hell of a splash, sir.”

Colin nodded.  That matched the report from Harmony.  “All ships,” he ordered, calmly, “commence Plan Beta.”

“Data sent,” the sensor officer said.

“The fleet has acknowledged,” the communications officer said.  “They’re standing by.”

“Good,” Colin said.  “Drop the cloak…and flicker!”

Space twisted around the superdreadnaught as it flickered out and back in again, a bare ten thousand kilometres from the convoy, well within energy range.  The convoy’s escorts wouldn’t have had any warning at all; one moment, everything would have been clear, the second…they’d be staring at nine superdreadnaughts.  Colin had gambled that they wouldn’t be able to react in time to take shots at his unprotected hulls…and, as shields snapped into place, it became clear that he'd won the bet.  They’d missed their best chance to hurt his forces.

“Transmit the surrender demand,” he ordered.  There was no point in a simple slaughter now.  It was even possible that the commanders would surrender, rather than explaining the defeat to Percival.  “Tell them…”

New red icons spangled into existence.  “Sir,” the sensor officer said, “I am picking up other starships, coming in on attack vector.”

That explains the splash, Colin thought, coldly.  They’d brought more ships along, under cloak, and retuned their drives to hide their arrival.  A simple trick, and yet he’d fallen for it, allowing his contempt for Percival to blind him to the possibility.  The man had more backbone than he had thought, risking Harmony by cutting loose one of his superdreadnaught squadrons.  The ship’s IFF signals were easy to pick out; the General Ryan, which meant the 34th Superdreadnaught Squadron, under Commodore Tamworth.  He had nine superdreadnaughts, fully a match for his own force, even with the escorts.  It was going to be an interesting engagement.

“Well,” he said, calmly, “it seems we’re going to be busier than we had thought.”  They couldn’t even avoid engagement, not until the drives had recycled.  The enemy force would have plenty of time to batter at them.  “All ships, prepare to engage.”

Chapter Twenty-Five

“Identification confirmed, sir,” the tactical officer said.  “Those are the rebel superdreadnaughts?”

“I would hate to imagine that they were anyone else’s superdreadnaughts,” Commodore Tamworth said, dryly.  The Empire was the only interstellar power allowed to have superdreadnaughts.  Any of the first-rank planets that tried to build them, regardless of their excuse, would forfeit all their rights at once.  The only reason they would want to build them, after all, would be to resist the Empire.  “Give me a timer display.”

He leaned back in his seat as the two forces converged.  He hadn’t expected the plan to work, but he’d underestimated Percival – or, more likely, his mistress.  The sealed orders had ordered him to meet up with the SD convoy at one of their waypoints – not random after all – and escort them under cloak, while ordering them to overstrain their flicker drives to create a splash when they arrived, concealing the presence of his ships.  He’d expected to be dealing with angry reports from the accountants – overstraining drives took years off their lives – but instead no one would be complaining.  They had the core of the rebel fleet in their sights!

“Prepare to engage,” he ordered, silently cursing the Admiral’s paranoia under his breath.  If he’d had faith in the plan, he could have sent the second superdreadnaught squadron with his force, even though that wouldn’t have left him as the senior officer.  Eighteen superdreadnaughts to nine would have ensured victory, but nine to nine meant that losses were likely to be equal on both sides…and no one had fought a genuine superdreadnaught duel for centuries.  The basic superdreadnaught design hadn’t changed, but the weapons and sensors had been improved…and no one knew how the fight would end.  Standard procedure called for concentrating fire, but that would leave some of the enemy ships able to fire at will, without being worried about incoming fire.  “Tactical, mark the targets.”

He smiled.  The rebels would probably be desperately recycling their drives, trying to escape.  By his most unfavourable estimate, it would take them five minutes to reenergize their drives and vanish…and by then, he could hammer them into submission.  They might even be desperately counting on a mutiny in his ranks, but between the SDs on the ships and his own relaxed command style, he didn’t think that that was likely.  

The display flickered and changed as a new wave of red icons appeared.  “The enemy have opened fire,” the tactical officer reported.  Commodore Tamworth cringed, despite himself; he had never been on the receiving end of such an assault.  Each superdreadnaught could launch literally hundreds of missiles at a time and the rebels were taking full advantage of their capabilities.  Either they had stockpiled thousands of missiles somewhere along the Rim, or they had a secret production station…or maybe they understood that if they didn’t win the battle, their rebellion was going to come to a screeching halt.  “Time to impact; one minute, twenty seconds.”

“They have targeted the SD convoy as well as us,” the secondary tactical officer added.  Commodore Tamworth nodded.  That was a sneaky thought on the part of ex-Commander Harper.  If they destroyed the SDs, they could claim a victory, but they couldn’t expend all of their missiles on assaulting the convoy.  That would leave his ships unengaged.  “The escorts are moving to intercept.”

“Good,” Commodore Tamworth said.  He keyed his intercom.  “All units, open fire.”

The superdreadnaught heaved as the first wave of missiles launched from its tubes, their drives kicking them up to speeds that would have crushed a human, despite the best that compensation technology could do.  The two waves of missiles flared towards each other and passed through – the chances of an impact with actually minimal – racing towards their targets.  The superdreadnaught heaved again as a second wave of missiles was launched, and then a third, while the point defence weapons started to fire, burning the enemy missiles out of space.  There were so many missiles – and the superdreadnaught such a big target – that a few hits were inevitable, but General Ryan and the other ships of her class were wrapped in the most powerful defence shields known to man.  Superdreadnaughts were extremely hard to damage if alert and ready to return fire…and, he knew, it was going to become a battering match.  The seconds ticked away…

A shock ran through the entire starship.  “Four hits to frontal shield, standard nukes,” the tactical officer said.  “No major damage.”

“Swell,” Commodore Tamworth commented.  “Helm, take us forward; I want to close the range.”

“Yes, sir,” the helm officer said.  The superdreadnaught shuddered again as a second wave of missiles crashed against its shields.  Enough firepower to destroy a city several times over had made almost no impression on the massive ship.  “Bringing up the drives now.”

Another wave of missiles were launched.  “Two SD transports were destroyed,” the secondary tactical officer added.  “A battlecruiser has been badly damaged and is requesting permission to disengage.”

“Granted,” Commodore Tamworth said.  There were commanders who would have refused to allow anyone to disengage, believing that it was a sign of cowardice in the face of the enemy, but even a battlecruiser was vulnerable to the colossal exchange of firepower between the superdreadnaughts.  “Tell them to flicker out to the first waypoint as soon as their drives recycle and wait for us there.”

The enemy ships were growing closer.  Soon, they would be in energy range.

***
The timer was counting down slowly, too slowly.  “Pull us back,” Colin ordered, knowing that it wasn't going to be easy.  Something the size of a superdreadnaught, two kilometres long, wasn't something that could be stopped on a dime, short of shorting out the drive field and cancelling all the velocity.  They’d come in on attack vector, expecting to close with a handful of escorts, but instead they had walked right into engagement range of nine superdreadnaughts.  “Concentrate fire on the superdreadnaughts now; escorts are to provide point defence cover for our superdreadnaughts.”

He winced.  The heavy enemy ships were ignoring his escorts to concentrate on his superdreadnaughts, while he'd risked firing a few salvos at the convoy, hoping to knock out some of the SD troopers before they could be deployed on the planet below.  It hadn’t failed – he’d taken out some of the transports – but it had risked giving the enemy superdreadnaughts an advantage in the battering match.  They were pounding away at his ships now, trying to hammer them into submission, while closing in and trying to get to energy range.

Part of his mind was fascinated.  No one living had seen a superdreadnaught duel and all they had to go on was simulations, which predicted that it would be a long fight.  The rest of his mind knew that even if they won, they would lose some of their ships in the engagement, perhaps including General Montgomery itself.  The engagement could not be allowed to come to energy range, let alone rage on until a victor emerged, because that victor would have only a few ships left.  A rebel superdreadnaught damaged so badly that it couldn’t flicker out, or be repaired, would have to be abandoned…

General Montgomery seemed to brace herself as the tidal wave of enemy missiles roared towards her, launching her own salvo of equal fury towards the enemy.  The point defence computers, working at speeds no human mind could match, not even the Geeks, wove the thousands of point defence weapons emplaced on the hull of the superdreadnaught into a single cohesive whole.  The point defence weapons of the escorts and even some of the other superdreadnaughts were added to the waves of fire being poured into the oncoming missiles; only seven missiles survived long enough to slam home against the shields.  Seven nukes detonated, almost simultaneously, sending shockwaves running through the entire ship, but causing very little damage.

“No significant damage,” the engineering officer reported.  Colin’s lips twitched; they’d spent months drilling the damage control teams, but so far there had been little for them to do.  They’d still be waiting in their shielded compartments, suited up and ready to move, only to be told to wait.  “Minor power fluctuations in Shield Generator Nine, but nothing that cannot be handled, or switched over to Eight or Ten.”

Colin nodded.  The superdreadnaught’s shields were interlocking fields, generated by twenty-one shield generators, each one as powerful as the generators that protected Lightning or other battlecruisers of her class.  It wouldn’t be enough to knock out one shield generator, not against a superdreadnaught; the multiple redundancy built into the system meant that the attackers would have to knock all of them out before their missiles started detonating against unshielded hull.  Even that wouldn’t be immediately fatal; General Montgomery’s armour was heavy enough to take a direct nuclear hit and survive.  It would take multiple hits to batter the superdreadnaught into submission…

Which is why they’re closing to energy range, he thought.  As long as the shields held, the point defence could keep sweeping most of the hostile missiles out of space, something that worked for the other side as well.  It was hard to pick up accurate sensor readings through the haze caused by the multiple detonations and heavy weapons fire of the battle, but it seemed likely that the enemy superdreadnaughts weren’t particularly damaged either.  Energy weapons, however, would tear away at the shields and cause a series of localised penetrations, tearing into the hull and burning into the ship’s interior.  They would inflict equal damage on the enemy ships, but the Empire simply had more ships to lose.  Mutual destruction of both fleets worked in their favour.  The rebellion would come to a screeching halt.

The ship shivered as it struggled to alter course, bringing it’s other weapons to bear on the target.  Interlocking fire control systems linked missiles together into a single attacking force, closing in on the enemy ship and trying to break through their point defence.  Isolated swarms of missiles, too weak to break through the point defence, were retargeted on the escorts, trying to blow away their contributions to the superdreadnaught point defence.  It wouldn’t be long, Colin knew, before the enemy fleet adapted and carried out the same tactic…unless they were focused on taking out his superdreadnaughts.  By the time the range stabilised, they would be just inside sprint mode range…

“We have altered course,” the helm officer reported, through the intercom.  Colin knew that David would be calmly issuing orders to his crew, allowing him to carry on with the business of running the fleet.  “Range now stabilising…”

Colin watched as the vectors converged.  The enemy fleet had been picking up speed as soon as the rebels had flickered in.  They were still pulling a higher velocity than the rebels, but now the rebels themselves were picking up speed, trying to pull away from the Empire’s ships.  He couldn’t see any fault in the helm officer’s predictions; by the time the range stabilised, they would be in sprint missile range.  The real question was if they had escaped energy weapons range, or not.  The increased battering when they entered sprint missile range might knock out drives and isolate some of his ships…

“Concentrate fire on the enemy flagship,” he ordered, suddenly.  It was a breech of standard tactics, but standard tactics would leave them with two destroyed fleets.  “I want all ships to fire a full salvo, targeted on the enemy flag.”

“Aye, sir,” the tactical officer said.  His hands danced over the console, issuing the orders to the entire fleet, overriding local fire control systems.  “Salvo ready…”

“Fire,” Colin ordered.  The superdreadnaught shuddered as it unleashed a massive spread of missiles.  “Return local fire control to the other ships.”

He watched as the massive cloud of missiles raced away from the ships, their flight paths converging as the tiny brains inside the missiles directed them towards their targets, focusing all their power onto one objective.  There were good reasons why such a concentration of firepower was rare, but it might distract the enemy enough for the final seconds to tick down and allow his fleet to escape.  It wouldn’t destroy the enemy superdreadnaught, not unless it had been crippled already and his sensors had missed it, but it would probably inflict at least some damage…

***
“Incoming enemy missiles swarm,” the tactical officer snapped.  “Commodore, they’ve thrown the kitchen sink at us!”

Commodore Tamworth straightened in his chair.  ‘Kitchen sink’ was an old term, so old it pre-dated the Empire, for a massed assault from all enemy starships.  Each superdreadnaught had fired a single massive salvo, all targeted on the General Ryan.  The point defence had been coping well with the fire from a single enemy superdreadnaught, but the massed fire of all of them would be much harder to deflect…

His Captains, at least, were showing some initiative and taking advantage of the pause to retarget and engage the enemy ships again.  Commodore Tamworth knew that he had a good reputation among his Captains for allowing them to use their own heads – although he had a short way with any Captain who overdid it – but it wouldn’t help his ship.  The point defence network had been focused on defending the entire fleet, not a single ship.  He barked orders as the computers struggled to cope with the new situation, rapidly reclassifying the other superdreadnaughts as expendable while all weapons and sensors were brought to bear on protecting General Ryan, but it was almost too late.

The swarm of missiles flashed through the hail of point defence fire – losing only two-thirds of their number in the process – and roared down on the superdreadnaught.  The enemy commanders had added a second trick to their assault, he realised; they'd targeted the missiles precisely on the point where two shields normally overlapped.  The sudden sense of vulnerability – naturally, the rebels would understand superdreadnaughts as well as his own people – surprised him, but he held on to his nerve.  The enemy ships were going to take a beating as well.

“All hands,” the Captain’s voice bellowed, over the intercom.  “All hands, brace for impact.”

A rolling burst of thunder echoed through the ship as the first missiles struck home.  It went on and on, seemingly without end, as components burned out under the battering and entire sections of the shields simply failed, unable to prevent their generators from overloading as they strove to cope with the massive assault.  A handful of missiles actually slipped through the shields and detonated against the hull, sweeping entire sections clean of point defence weapons and even melting a handful of missile tubes, but inflicting no serious damage.  Red icons blared out on the display as he switched it to an internal report, trying to assess the damage, but it was easy to see that nothing vital had been hit.  The nightmare scenario – an explosion that triggered another explosion inside the ship, blowing the entire ship apart – hadn’t even come close.

“Major damage to sections…”

Commodore Tamworth tuned out the report, trusting the Captain and his damage control teams to handle the repairs.  It had been years since they’d had any real experience – and none on the superdreadnaught itself – but they’d been holding drills since he’d taken command of the squadron.  He was confident that if the problems could be handled, they would be handled.  The remainder of the squadron had used the time well, hitting the enemy hard, but it hadn’t been enough.  The enemy ships were on the verge of making their escape.

“Squadron orders,” he snapped.  “All ships are to concentrate their fire on General Montgomery.  I repeat, all ships are to concentrate their fire on General Montgomery.  Fire!”

The superdreadnaught might no longer have been able to fire a full round of missiles, but it was still dangerous.  He watched as the entire fleet fired as one, locking onto their target and attempting to repeat the rebel success.  General Ryan hadn’t been significantly damaged, although the series of reports indicated that they’d lost at least forty crewmen in the blasts, and the drives were still working.  The enemy wouldn’t be able to knock them out of the fight that easily.

***
Colin had been expecting it, but it was still a shock to see the massive wave of missiles fired from the enemy ships, their flight vectors marking their target.  The timing had been an accident, but if they timed it properly, they would still be able to escape, leaving the enemy cursing the loss of the missiles.  Commodore Tamworth, if it was indeed him in command over there, hadn’t acted quickly enough.  In his place, Colin would have ordered a massed attack at once…

“Cycle up the flicker drive,” he ordered, watching the stream of red icons.  They'd have to time it properly.  When the missiles entered terminal attack range, there was no way that they could be recharged, depriving the enemy fleet the opportunity to reuse them.  It would be a petty victory, but one he would savour.  “Stand by…”

The enemy missiles closed in, almost touching the point defence engagement envelope.  “Flicker,” he ordered.  “Get us out of here!”

Time and space twisted around them and they were gone.

“Stand down from Red Alert,” Colin ordered, as they left the battle far behind them.  Normally, he would have an updated report from the fleet before they flickered out, but one wouldn’t be forthcoming until they reached the first waypoint.  They'd have to flicker out again as soon as they arrived.  Commodore Tamworth might even be bold enough to try to follow them, although it was tempting to try to set an ambush and wait for him.  “All hands, well done.”

David opened a private channel.  “One more victory like that and we are ruined,” he said.  His voice sounded as tired as Colin felt.  “We need a different set of tactics.”

“Or maybe a different set of weapons,” Colin said.  He smiled, despite the crushing tiredness that threatened to overwhelm him.  “I’ve just had an idea.”

Chapter Twenty-Six

The station wasn't manned, operated only by a set of powerful computers, right on the verge of true AI.  Without the limiters built into the system, it would have probably evolved into something reassembling intelligence, but creating a genuine AI was forbidden by Imperial Law.  There were enough non-human intelligences around, the Thousand Families had felt, that there was little point in creating an additional, largely unpredictable, intelligence.  The computers weren't programmed to be curious, or even to mimic human emotions; they waited, patiently, to carry out their appointed tasks.

Their sensors noted, absently, the spark of energy revealing the presence of a starship flickering into nearby space.  That was not unprecedented, or even unexpected, and the computers paid it little heed.  Most navigators tried to come out near the communications stations anyway, so that if they ran into trouble, they would be assured of some help, and it was a frequent occurrence.  The laser beam flickering across the interplanetary void, establishing a secure communications link with the station, was more unusual, but the computers were incapable of feeling surprise.  Besides, it was not uncommon for Imperial Intelligence ships, or even Imperial Navy vessels, to establish private links with the remote stations.  The code sequence matched an Imperial Intelligence override code and the computers automatically began the secure process.

The message that flickered across the interplanetary void was stored in a secure cell, analysed by a tiny fraction of the linked computers controlling the station, while it was prepared for its journal.  The first header in the message ordered the station to convoy it to every courier boat that visited the station for up to a week.  The second header ordered the station to transmit it to the planet deeper inside the system once that week was up.  The third header included priority codes and ordered the computers to wipe all traces of the message, including from the secure storage that normally served as an emergency backup system, once the first two tasks had been completed.

A human might have noticed that something was amiss, or suspected trouble, but the computers were not programmed to take the initiative in such a fashion.  The codes were in order, so as far as they were concerned, the message was in order.  The orders would be carried out to the letter…and, by the time anyone realised that something was wrong, the message would be on its way across the Empire.

***
“Well, what do you think?”

Kathy gave Cordova an odd look.  “You just pirated a little of the Interstellar Communications Network,” she said, puzzled.  Cordova was treating it as if it had been the greatest victory in the history of the Empire.  She hadn’t been able to resist the invitation to a position on his starship when they went to war, something part of her brain kept reminding her would make her culpable in the eyes of the Empire, but she wasn't going to perform for him.  “What’s so great about that?”

Cordova refused to be crushed.  “The message headers were engineered so that the message would be sent from station to station without question,” he said, grinning.  “In a week, that message is going to be all over the sector; in a month, everything this side of Earth is going to have a copy in their mailboxes.  By the time they realise what’s happening, they will be permanently behind the spread of the message, unable to prevent it from reaching every component of the Empire.  The truth will out.”

He grinned at her.  “And, best of all, the only way they can stop us from doing it again, and again, is by shutting down their own greatest advantage,” he added.  “Helm, take us forward, into the fire!”

Kathy winced as the starship flickered through interplanetary space and emerged near a convoy of sublight ships.  The ICN had been the Empire’s greatest achievement, some said, a regulated form of interstellar mail delivery that the Thousand Families billed as their gift to the universe.  In reality, she knew, everything that was sent through the ICN was trapped in filters for study before it was transmitted…unless it had the proper priority codes.  As a member of the Thousand Families, Kathy had been given a set of priority codes, but she hadn’t used them very often.  Her father had warned her that more senior Families might peek into the mail, no matter how secure it was supposed to be.  The thought was galling, but she had to admit that if she’d been able to take a peek into a rival’s mail with no chance of being caught, she would have considered it.  It would have made her feel like a voyeur, but it would have been worthwhile.

The thought made her feel slightly dirty.  She had been brought up to consider the Thousand Families as a united force and the discovery that they were nothing of the sort had been more than a little disillusioning, but it was worse to discover that they might have been reading the mail.  If it was so easy to hack the system, and Cordova made it look perfectly easy, than she couldn’t see some of the senior Families refusing the chance to peek.  How could they not?  They would know more about the inner workings of some of the junior Families than the Family Heads would know.  They would learn about bidding levels, family projects, possible blackmail information…the possibilities were endless.

And what if Cordova used it for himself?  The rebels might not have realised yet, but if they could pull information out of the ICN, they could use it to gain insight into the workings of the Empire.  Old classes she’d taken as a child on how the ICN worked slid back into her mind and she realised that it wasn't a complete disaster, not yet…unless they decided to start reprogramming stations closer to Earth.  The paranoia alone, when the Empire finally realised how the trick had been done, would bring the ICN to a halt.

The Random Numbers shivered, bringing her back to reality.  Cordova had discarded caution and led his flotilla on a direct charge at the sublight ships, each one larger than a superdreadnaught, but far less powerful.  Kathy had seen similar ships in almost every system with an asteroid mining industry.  They were used to transport refined ores from the asteroids to the industrial stations.  The absence of any flicker drive – a cost-cutting measure – meant that they were hopelessly vulnerable to pirates, even though they were also fairly worthless.  Refined ore was rarely worth transporting to another star system.

“Aim for their drives,” he ordered, as the cruiser spun towards the largest of the freighters.  The ship was too large to move or evade; Kathy watched, with a certain feeling of Déjà vu, as the ship fired lifepods into space, the crew abandoning their ship before the missiles slammed home.  “Fire!”

He grinned over at Kathy, inviting her to share in the joy of the hunt.  “There’s no point in wasting nukes on these ships,” he said, as the ship’s energy weapons burned into the freighter’s hull. “They’re too big and dumb to destroy easily, so we’re not going to bother trying.  We’ll just burn out the engines and run.”

The display flared once as the freighter’s engines exploded, leaving the remains of the ship drifting in space.  “Got them,” Cordova exulted.  “How about that?”

How about you pick on something your own size?  Kathy thought, but didn’t ask.  The remainder of the flotilla were finishing off their own targets, evading the tiny bursts of return fire with ease, before forming up again on the Random Numbers.  Space heaved and twisted nearby – she looked up in alarm as klaxons started to howl – revealing the arrival of a heavy cruiser.  The Imperial starship had timed it well.  They were close enough to catch and engage the rebels, but not close enough for an attack against their unshielded hull.  It came about, focused on the Random Numbers, and started to close in.

“Oh, dear me, whatever shall I do?”  Cordova asked, winking at her.  The flicker drive had probably recycled by now, allowing the rebels to escape, but Cordova wasn't the type of person to run from a fight if there was a chance of victory.  “Helm, bring us about and take us down their throats.”

He paused to speak to Kathy as the starship came about.  “That ship probably expected us to run,” he said.  “If it was just me, I would run, but we have seven other ex-Imperial ships here and a real cause.  That's more than that bastard over there has.”

Kathy frowned.  “Do you know him?”

“He wouldn’t be commanding a heavy cruiser on permanent duty here if he were any good,” Cordova said, wryly.  “We’re only fifteen light years from Harmony and they could have put a much more powerful force into the system within hours.  Percival probably decided that the planet wasn't worth taking a competently-handled ship out of his patrol forces and assigning it here.”

He shrugged.  “Either that or the Captain’s someone who pissed him off,” he added.  “We’ll know in two minutes.”

Kathy watched as the enemy starship closed in rapidly, opening fire – targeting the Random Numbers directly – as soon as it entered range, while Cordova held his fire until the range closed enough to guarantee hits.  The heavy cruiser didn’t seem to flinch as the other ships engaged it as well, but it’s point defence rapidly became overwhelmed, while the Random Numbers had the support of the other ships.

“I wish the Geeks had managed to duplicate all of the modern computer systems,” Cordova added, as the ship started to rock under the impact of multiple hits.  “The modern point defence network system is much better than anything I had back when I wore the black.  If that officer is competent…”

A second series of shockwaves ran through the hull.  “He is competent,” Cordova said, in a tone of mock-wonderment.  “He must have pissed off Percival then.  No wonder he’s not running for his life.”

Kathy stared at him. “You are insane,” she snapped.  “You’re giving a fucking tactics lesson in the middle of a battle!  How the hell do you know that?”

“The reason the old system was pulled out of most Imperial ships was that it was predicable at the wrong times,” Cordova said.  She realised, with more insight to his character than she had really wanted, that he was adding to his own legend.  “A competent Captain with enough nerve – and our foe here has it – can trick it, leaving us more exposed to his fire.  Given equal odds, he might even have won the fight, but…”

A final series of missiles crashed home on the enemy ship, sending it spinning across space, out of control.  “The drive field got destabilised,” Cordova said, before Kathy could even ask what had happened.  “Probably lucky for us too.  Ramming a ship directly isn’t easy, but ten gets you twenty that that guy would have had a try at hitting us.”

He keyed the intercom.  “All ships, hold fire,” he ordered, as the Imperial ship span away.  Lifepods were spewing from it, spinning through space helplessly, at Cordova’s mercy.  “A shame we don’t have time to pick up the lifepods, but at least we’re not going to use them as target practice.”

Kathy stared at him.  “There are people who would do that?”

“There are pirates who would consider it the height of humour,” Cordova said, darkly, a reminder that she could have fallen into worse company.  “Helm, bring us about and take us to the first waypoint.”

He looked back at Kathy.  “It might have been worth recovering the ship, if this was a proper war, but we couldn’t afford the time for salvage,” he explained.  “There’ll be heavy task forces on their way here from Harmony by now and if they catch us…”

Kathy’s chest heaved as the starship flickered out of the system.  Cordova and his squadrons had left a trail of bloody debris as they raged from system to system, picking off isolated outposts and even a handful of starships, or even raiding planetary defences and forcing the Empire to scramble their forces to defend themselves.  The course Cordova had plotted for his units had been almost completely random, designed to make any ambushes impossible, but they’d still lost ships.  Some of the ex-pirate ships had been destroyed, a handful of the ex-Imperial ships had been damaged and one had had to be abandoned under fire.  Whatever anyone might say about Cordova’s sanity, or lack of it, there was no questioning his courage.  

“Stand down from Red Alert,” Cordova said, as they left the system behind them.  The plan was simple enough; the Imperial Governors on the various targeted worlds and systems would be screaming for help, forcing Percival to either ignore them – which would mean them complaining, loudly, to their patrons – or spreading his own forces thin to cover them all.  Percival probably wouldn’t lose any sleep over mass slaughter, but the loss of the industrial equipment, carefully targeted on their sweeps, would annoy his patrons.  Even if the rebellion were to be defeated, utterly, the after-effects would be felt for years.  “Coming?”

Kathy accepted his arm – she didn’t feel safe on the bridge without him, even if the crew was supposed to be the most disciplined pirate crew on the Rim – and allowed him to escort her off the bridge.  It was at moments like that when she realised just how old the starship actually was, despite their best attempts to keep it running, leaving signs for even someone like her to see.  The ship felt old enough to be sent to the breakers, although Cordova claimed that the Random Numbers had plenty of years left in her. The paintwork was starting to fade, some of the fittings and less vital components were starting to degrade, and the lights were flickering on and off.

“It’s not easy to get top-of-the-line spares out here on the Rim,” Cordova had explained, in a moment of embarrassment.  “It’s easy to bribe some quartermaster and get some gear out of him, but anyone who gets any of that doesn’t want to give it up easily.  We couldn’t raid many of the convoys without support from the other pirates and they…well, let’s just say that they don’t have savoury habits.  How very like the High City, without the plumbing.”

She looked up at him as he opened his cabin.  It was a gesture of trust, he'd claimed, that he left it unlocked when he wasn't there, trusting his crew to leave his quarters untouched.  He also didn’t bother with a bodyguard, or even any real security, although she suspected that he was actually more than capable of taking care of himself.  Weaklings didn’t last long on the Rim, although the nearly-intact crew of a heavy cruiser was clearly a special case.

“So,” she said, only to break the silence, “what now?”

“Now I send you to heaven and back,” Cordova said, with a wink.  Kathy flushed again.  “How’s that for a pick-up line?”

“I meant with the war,” Kathy said.  “What are you going to do now?”

Cordova shrugged.  “We shot off most of our missiles in the final engagement,” he said, thoughtfully.  “Doubtless Admiral Colin will take me to task for expending them all, although he’s not as bad as some of the bureaucrats I had to deal with back when I was in the Navy.  Can you believe that one of them actually asked me to account for each missile I fired, individually, in the midst of a battle?  I was fighting for my life and the lives of everyone on the convoy I was trying to cover and the bastard demands a strict accounting of everything, or he’ll take it out of my salary.”

Kathy laughed.  “He didn’t,” she said.  “Who would do that?”

“People who don’t want to go get a better job,” Cordova said.  “”People who couldn’t get a better job, even if they tried.  People who don’t allow the harsh realities of the universe to affect them, or people who think that the entire universe can be rendered in numbers.  That’s something of the problem with the Empire, my dear Kathy; it tries to render the entire universe in numbers.  The people – their lives, their loves, their hates, their fears, their hopes, their joys – are nothing, but numbers to them.”

“You’re from the Thousand Families,” Kathy said, softly.  “Why didn’t you try to change things?”

Cordova laughed.  “When I was younger, I used to read the forbidden histories,” he said.  “The people who tried to change things tended to end up being killed by their own people.  We’ve had three Emperors and they were all killed; one Empress, and she was disposed and forced to flee.  God alone knows where she is now.  Probably sitting on some pleasure asteroid somewhere laughing at us.”

He shook his head as he poured them both glasses of some brown liquid.  Kathy didn’t know what it was and didn’t much care.  “I suppose that’s why I signed up with Colin,” he admitted.  There was something in his voice that didn’t quite match.  “He’s something who hasn’t lost his desire for change.”

Kathy sipped her drink carefully, wincing slightly at the taste.  There were some fine drinks from the Rim, but mostly the Rim-dwellers drank cheap booze made by hidden stills on starships, or sometimes more professional drinks from the black colonies.  She’d seen enough people passed out in bars on Patrick’s Asteroid, drinking to banish the horrors of their lives, to know how some people might end their careers.  The Rim wasn't kind to those who gave in to weakness.

“And you,” Cordova added, as he pulled her towards him.  Experienced fingers undid the clasp on her shipsuit, pulling away her garment.  “You haven’t given up either.”

Chapter Twenty-Seven

“Well, it could have been worse.”

Colin gave Salgak what was intended to be a quelling glance.  “It could have been worse?”

“Of course,” Salgak said.  There was a faint hint of amusement in his voice.  “You could have lost a ship.”

Colin snorted as the Geek accessed the computers directly and called up an image of the superdreadnaught’s interior, scanning the files far faster than a normal person could manage, images flickering past faster than Colin could follow.  It was an advantage, at least, that he was fairly sure the Empire wouldn’t be able to duplicate.

“I have nine superdreadnaughts that got a bit knocked about,” he said, dryly.  “We were ambushed and we walked right into it.  We killed, at most, several thousand SDs and four smaller ships, but we had to run for our lives.  We were damn lucky not to lose any smaller ships ourselves.  Oh, and before I forget to mention it, the crew morale took a serious blow.”

“This is war,” Salgak said, sardonically.  He turned away from the computer to peer at Colin through his one human eye.  “You cannot expect the enemy to do exactly as you would like, all the time.  Given all the information at your disposal at the time, you made the right choice and you weren’t too proud to beat feet when it became clear that you had bitten off more than you could chew.”

He turned back to the computer display.  “It’s a shame that you couldn’t pick up accurate data on what happened to the enemy flagship when you hammered it,” he said, almost wistfully.  “Could your source find some of that data for us?”

“Perhaps,” Colin said.  “We have to be careful about what we send into the Harmony system, or Imperial Intelligence will pick up on it.  In Percival’s place, I’d restrict all that data and keep it firmly to myself.”

“I wouldn’t,” Salgak said.  The Geek paused the display and nodded towards a holographic image of a shield generator.  “The damage to your ships was all relatively minor.  The Empire’s fanatical insistence on standardising everything may actually come in useful for once” – there was a wry note in his voice; the Geeks had once claimed that the Empire’s firm standards helped to crush their souls and imaginations – “and replacing all of the damaged components is the work of a week, nothing more.  The worst problem was a power fluctuation in one of the shield generators, requiring the replacement of that shield generator with one of the spares.”

He paused.  “Their problems will be considerably worse,” he added.  His implants whirred and clicked as he considered possibilities.  “Depending on the exact details, they could have that ship out of service for as long as two months, unless they’re willing to accept that it won’t have full levels of point defence and even assault weapons.  I’d actually go so far as to predict that their interior levels of damage would be considerably greater than you project.  They’ll need to tell their commanders what happened to the General Ryan and why.”

Colin scowled.  There was a simple reason why few sane commanders would accept such a technique; it had left eight of his opponents completely unengaged, allowing them to catch their breath and press the offensive.  He could see the Geek suggesting that they used the tactic all the time, which might destroy a handful of enemy ships, but cost them greater overall damage.  His tactic had been born of desperation, not out of cold calculation, and the enemy commander had clearly been thinking along the same lines.

“It might be possible to use this ourselves,” the Geek said.  “We have been researching newer classes of warship since we became aware of the freebooters and your own plans.  Superdreadnaught design hasn’t changed much in the past three hundred years, although we have seen room for improvement, but Mandy has a proposal to put before the committee.  Given a month, we might be able to even the odds a little.”

Colin lifted an eyebrow.  Mandy might have been pretty once, but she’d covered her head completely in implants, viewing the world through cybernetic senses she claimed were vastly superior to anything merely human.  It was a wonder that she could walk around without inflicting an injury on herself.  Her body looked more than a little attractive, the peak of physical perfection, but she’d ensured that few would want to sleep with her.  She was also one of the most accomplished designers he’d met in his long career.

“A new proposal?”

“Arsenal ships,” Salgak explained.  “The enemy superdreadnaught point defences can be overwhelmed.  You proved that yourself at Macore.  The problem is hitting them hard enough to overwhelm them, combined with warheads designed to take advantage of brief shield failures to inflict serious damage on the hulls under the shield.  Imperial weapons were designed around the concept of breaking down shields, as shields protected the hulls, but if the shields could be reduced…”

“Your shield-jamming concept,” Colin said, thoughtfully.  “Can they be combined?”

“Probably not,” Salgak said.  “The basic concept behind a superdreadnaught is that they combine firepower with protection.  They are, in short, extremely hard to destroy.  A battleship that rammed a superdreadnaught might successfully destroy the ship, shields or no shields, but would be burned out of space by energy weapons if it tried.  The arsenal ships would have even less protection than the modified freighters some of the freebooters deploy.  They would be hopelessly vulnerable to an enemy ship that got into striking distance.”

Colin considered the concept thoughtfully.  It might work, particularly as it would be a complete surprise to the enemy, but only once.  The easy counter would be the one he’d used himself – simply flickering away from the tidal wave of missiles.  There was a reason why superdreadnaught tactics normally involved picking a target the enemy had to defend and attacking it; it forced the enemy to seek battle on the Empire’s terms.  The only target Percival simply had to defend was Harmony…and if the arsenal ship concept failed, the Shadow Fleet would face twice their superdreadnaught strength, plus escorts, plus the fixed defences.  It would get very chancy.

“And the shield-jammers?”  He asked, finally.  “Can we deploy them?”

“We’re still working on a deployment concept,” Salgak explained.  “We have been unable to find a solution to the massive power demands” – Colin heard the note of frustration in his tone – “although we are sure that one must exist, and therefore we must find a new deployment concept.  The issue is actually rather more complex than the arsenal ships, which are really just glorified freighters and therefore can be built surprisingly quickly.”

“True,” Colin said.  It took the Empire six months to build a superdreadnaught, using the handful of superdreadnaught-rated yards in the Core, and he was sure that the Geeks could improve upon that.  Back when he’d been working for Percival, he’d been convinced that the Empire was risking it’s own security; if something happened to those yards, it would take years to rebuild the construction capability.  He’d considered possible methods for striking directly at the yards, but the timing issue would make such a deep-strike option unthinkable.  It would take nearly four months before they knew if they’d succeeded or failed.  “What sort of ideas do you have?”

“At the moment, the best concept is modified gunships,” Salgak said.  “The Macore Defence Force actually came up with the basic concept, although we didn’t share any of the shield-jamming tech with them, and we modified their concept.  They’re going to be infinitively more complex than any other project, so don’t ask for a schedule yet.”

“Fine,” Colin said.  He looked up at the superdreadnaught, visible through the porthole.  General Montgomery looked surprisingly undamaged for a starship that had fought in the most savage battle since the Dathi War, but her shields had taken the brunt of the fighting.  She was close enough for everyone on Freedom Base to see.  “One week, you said?”

“One week,” Salgak confirmed.  “You could take her back into battle as she is, but we’d like to run through a series of checks on the computers and the weapons, as well as replenishing everything.  You fired off one hell of a lot of missiles.”

Colin laughed at his reproving tone.  “Use them or lose them,” he reminded the Geek.  “If we hadn’t fired them, we’d be dead, or standing in front of a wall, waiting for the tearing shots and the end of our lives.”

Salgak’s implants clicked for a moment.  “Of course,” he agreed, finally.  “Your death would be inconvenient at the moment.”

***
“They would have made pretty good Marines if they’d been given a chance,” Frandsen said, when Colin finally visited the new Marine training centre, in Freedom Base.  Frandsen had complained bitterly about the lack of a planetary base, even one that happened to be shared by the abandoned SDs, but in the end he'd come to accept that a planet-bound base would be hopelessly vulnerable.  “They’re untrained, but they’re tough and determined.”

Colin watched as forty men and women went through their paces, watched by a pair of Marine Sergeants.  “We had to invent most of the procedure for them,” Frandsen added, sounding rather affronted.  “Normally, we’d take in younger recruits from the colonies, with maybe a handful of older people looking for a challenge, and sift them pretty thoroughly.  Half of them would drop out within the first few weeks, either because they couldn’t hack the discipline, or the lifestyle, or thought they could get away with murder.  The remainder would be broken down and rebuilt as Marines, then fitted with their implants and armour…did you know that the Geeks offered to rebuild us completely?”

“They did?”  Colin asked.  “What did they suggest?”

“They thought that we were halfway to becoming like them anyway, so they offered us permanent links with the armour, direct computer interfaces and even heavy implanted weapons,” Frandsen said.  “They even offered to take a Marine’s brain out of his body and stick it in a robotic tank.”

Colin snorted.  “And you said?”

“Fuck off,” Frandsen said, with a laugh.  “I’m not quite ready to give up sex yet.”

“No,” Colin agreed.  “It might work for some people…”

“It won’t work for us,” Frandsen said.  “Marines are more than just people with weapons and some special training; there’s an entire mindset behind it that would only be undermined by the implants they were suggesting.  You can’t record what makes a Marine in a computer and then download it into a million recruits; you have to train them to actually use their own training, not someone else’s bright ideas…”

“It works for them because they’re linked directly into their systems,” Colin mused.  He’d wondered about that, but Frandsen was right; it wouldn’t be possible to use the technology to create new soldiers.  “I wonder if the original brain-burning systems came out of a similar program.”

“The SD troopers use them for their training,” Frandsen said.  “That’s why they’re the bastards they are.  All of their humanity got washed away by the training, along with everything that makes a soldier more than just an idiot with a weapon.  Give them equal odds and a fast-moving situation and they’d be fucked.”

“You sound as if we should be sorry for them,” Colin said.

“You should,” Frandsen said.  “They’re not responsible for their own actions.”

He shrugged as he turned back to his trainees.  “We don’t have the armour to outfit more than a few hundred of them, so the best will be fitted for the armour we have and the remainder will be outfitted with the best we can produce out here,” he continued, changing the subject.  “The best of them already know lessons we have to risk lives and instructors teaching, such as why it’s a bad idea to go outside in a vacuum without a spacesuit, but they’re not taking to discipline well.  Given enough time, we’ll have additional Marines, but I hope you don’t want us to hit a defended world.  The losses would be…rather high, even against SD troopers and their supporting units.”

Colin nodded.  The socialists and the democrats had been dispatched to various worlds in the sector with instructions to locate rebel factions – there were always rebel factions – and help tie them into the rebellion.  The shipments of weapons and other supplies were already on their way, hidden within shipments of innocent supplies…and even the Empire would have problems searching every starship entering orbit.  Colin was sure that some would be picked up by the Empire, if only by random searches, but even if Imperial Intelligence broke one planet’s resistance movement, they weren't going to be able to use that victory to break others.  The socialists had finally explained, at his gentle prodding, that any form of attempt to disclose vital information, either freely or under torture, would result in a mental breakdown.  The Empire would get nothing from them.

But if the resistance units didn’t have support from high orbit, it was going to be – at best – a bloody victory.  The Empire didn’t maintain large garrisons on any world, but as long as they kept control of the high orbitals, they could hold the planet down and wait for reinforcements.  It was a dangerous problem; he could be fairly sure of defeating any local picket ships, and the fixed defences, in almost every system, but Percival could simply move his own superdreadnaughts back in and take the system back.  He would have to launch a series of raids, at the risk of offering new targets for Percival’s rage…

“Give me a few months and we’ll have new Marines,” Frandsen offered, as the Marines finished their moves and marched into the next room.  “Weapons practice is next, sir; do you want to watch?”

The standard Marine-issue combat weapon was the Mark XII Plasma Rifle.  Colin had used it himself back when he’d been a junior officer, carrying out ceremonial guard duties as a Midshipman, and had learned to use it.  It spat bursts of superhot plasma that burned though skin and bone as if they were paper.  Marine Armour could survive shots from similar rifles, although repeated hits could weaken the armour’s structure, but the heavy crew-served plasma cannons could burn through the armour with ease.  The SD forces liked to use heavy tanks, mainly for their intimidation value, but Colin would have bet on the Marines and their battlesuits.  Besides, the tanks could take a target, but there would be no guarantee of having the target intact afterwards.

“Not too bad,” Frandsen said, as they watched the firing.  The plasma rifle was very different from any projectile weapon – it had almost no kick at all, for one – and it wasn’t always easy to aim, but Marines trained with it for hours each day.  “I’m a little worried about the power packs, though, so don’t be surprised if I send a few Marines around to…reason with people.”

Colin quirked an eyebrow.  “We have problems with the power packs?”

“The Marine Corps used to make their own,” Frandsen reminded him.  “The Family industrial nodes sometimes made faulty ones, which either failed or exploded when we tried to use them, and caused something of a sink a few years ago.  We may have the same problem with packs produced locally along the Rim, even though there won’t be any real malice involved – I hope.  The Geeks produce excellent packs, but some of the others don’t have their quality, or their experience.  As it is, we have to check all of them.”

Colin scowled.  “And an exploding plasma pack isn’t a pretty sight,” Frandsen pushed.  “It could wipe out a whole platoon.  We have to keep a sharp eye on all of the items produced for the war, sir.  A failure at the wrong time will cost lives.”

“I know,” Colin said, watching as one of the Marine trainees destroyed a simulated battlesuit with a series of neat shots.  “Politics, again…”

“It’s not politics,” Frandsen said.  “Lives are at stake, sir.”

Colin nodded.  “If we pressure people who are doing their best, they’re going to hate us,” he said.  “Here, on Freedom Base, we’re surrounded by people with as much to lose as we do, but on the other asteroids there are people who might call up the Imperial Navy to…settle any disputes.”

“That won’t end well for them,” Frandsen predicted.  “The Imperial Navy might simply destroy or depopulate the asteroid.  They wanted us to do that once, back when I was on the 5th MEU, and the Colonel refused.  I don’t know what happened to him, but we were all reassigned and sent elsewhere.  They don’t have the manpower to garrison all of the black colonies and their populations would be…useful workers, somewhere else.  It has happened elsewhere.”

“Yes,” Colin said.  He wasn't blind to the implications of Frandsen choosing a training session to make his case, but he understood Frandsen’s concerns.  He even shared them, although there were other concerns.  “I seem to be turning into a politician, regardless of my own feelings or desires.”

Frandsen snorted.  “A fate worse than a fate worse than death,” he said.  “You’re doing fine.  I’ve seen much more cocky young officers who did worse and didn’t even know it.”

“Thanks,” Colin said.  “Do you wish to accompany me to Patrick’s Asteroid?”

“Another planning session?”  Frandsen asked.  “Not if I can avoid it, sir.”

Colin laughed.  “See you in a week, then,” he said.  He returned the salute of the Marines waiting for their turn at the firing line.  “By then, we might even have a plan to rub the Empire’s nose in its failure to kill us.”

“Yeah,” Frandsen said.  “If you’re really lucky, you might even be able to convince Percival to have the person who came up with the plan shot.”  He laughed.  “Or would that be cheating?”

Chapter Twenty-Eight

The spy had been watching in growing horror as the rebellion took on shape and form, a horror that had expanded into outright terror when he had realised the full shape of the Shadow Fleet and the scale of damage it could – and had – wreck upon the Empire.  Rebel groups were numberless along the Rim, from professional rebels like the socialists and the democrats to the last survivors of conquered and integrated worlds, but none of them posed a significant threat, despite their lofty proclamations and promises.  Most of them lacked any real firepower, while they were torn apart by disputes over seniority and the future of the post-Empire universe.  The spy, who had been on Patrick’s Asteroid for years, had been more amused than threatened by the previous rebel groups.  Most of them hadn’t even managed to make the Empire notice them.

He hadn’t had much choice in the matter.  He’d been a pirate when his leader had flown them all into a trap and he’d been the only survivor of his ship.  Imperial Intelligence had gone to work on him – he still had nightmares about what the mind techs had done to him – and when they’d finished, they’d offered him the choice between working for them and spending the rest of his life on a penal world.  He’d accepted, planning to ditch them as soon as possible, only to discover that the mind techs had left him with one final surprise.  Betraying the Empire, even failing in his mission, simply wasn't possible.  He was compelled to carry out the terms of his agreement.

It hadn’t been a difficult task, at first.  Patrick’s Asteroid was what the Imperial Navy called a Known Colony, a settlement too small to bother with and known to most of the people who lived on the fringes of the Empire.  They’d placed a handful of spies there over the years, just to report on what was going on, but communications were hard.  The handful of covert operations ships visited every year, but without them, the spy was effectively cut off from his masters.  His brain knew that that was the case, so he wasn't forced to do anything, but he was growing quietly desperate.  This rebellion would be different.

No one had managed to unite all of the rebel groups, let alone the pirates and freebooters, in all of history.  They simply had too many disagreements for that.  Imperial Intelligence didn’t even have to urge the process along.  Put a socialist and a democrat together and they would argue over the future, completely ignoring the fact that the Empire remained as vast and powerful as ever.  Now, however, the rebels were being unified into the Shadow Fleet, and the spy knew that it was his duty to report it.  The problem was that he couldn’t report it.  Patrick’s Asteroid was becoming one of the hubs of the rebellion and, as such, was under close guard.  A mistake – and he wasn't even allowed to make a deliberate mistake – would be fatal.

The door hissed open, revealing a tall girl with a pair of tough-looking bodyguards.  Her appearance was far from exceptional along the Rim, while the bodyguards were standard for anyone who could afford them, but the spy viewed her with a mixture of relief and hatred.  The bitch – or so he thought of her, as he had never known her name – was one of his handlers, one of the people who monitored the Rim.  He had often wondered how many others there were like him, mind-warped and bent to the service of the Empire, but he wasn't allowed to ask.  He had been told, once, that if he were interrogated, his brain would melt down to mush.  The less he knew, the better.

“A pleasure to see you again,” she said, without preamble.  The cold ice in her eyes would have dissuaded the most ardent lover on the asteroid from getting too close.  There were tales told about the sexual habits of female pirates, the pirate queens, and even though most of them were exaggerated, few wanted to test them.  A woman leading a group of pirates would be far tougher than all of them put together…and completely ruthless.  “What do you have for me?”

The spy fumbled among the outfits, babbling on about this and that, while the bodyguards searched for any surveillance devices that might have been hidden within the shop.  A lowly tailor might not have been a threat, at least in the eyes of Patrick, who ran the asteroid, but it was better not to take precautions.  The shopping area was supposed to be neutral ground, but the various rebel groups often ignored such principles in the name of a higher cause.

“Clear,” the leader said finally.  “You can speak freely.”

The spy flicked the sign to ENGAGED and looked up at the bitch.  He wasn't sure if the terror he felt at her presence was real or something the mind techs had added to his mind to make him a little more malleable, but it was impossible to defy her or hold anything back from her.  Normally, he had very little to report, but now…now he found himself spilling out everything he knew about the rebellion, and the Shadow Fleet.  He watched, as if in a dream, as his mouth talked.  She listened carefully, her face impassive and very cold, to what he knew…and then his speculations.

The only real danger from the Rim was if someone managed to unify all the rebel groups into one force – that much was well known.  Colin had managed to unite most of them and, as his forces scored more and more successes against the Empire, others would come out of the woodwork to join him, fearful of being left out of the post-Empire universe.  Personally, the spy didn’t rate their chances as being too high, but if he’d had a free choice, he wouldn’t have hesitated to join them.  It would have been revenge against an Empire that had turned him into a mockery of a man and sent him to spy on his former comrades.  At least a lowly tailor wasn't told the exact details of every operation.

“I see,” the bitch said, when he had finally finished spilling out everything he knew.  The only downside to Imperial Intelligence’s meddling was that he had to tell them everything, and that could take time.  Previous agents had been detected because they’d kept records and notes about pirate groups.  It wasn’t uncommon for a female pirate to take over the shop for long periods, but he’d been talking for almost an hour.  “Do you know when that…Colin will be here next?”

“No, My Lady,” the spy said.  He was actually fairly sure that the bitch wasn't one of the Families, but the title did no harm.  He had a nasty suspicion that if she ordered him to kill himself, he would do so.  He certainly hadn’t been able to disobey her in any way.  “He does not advertise his movements.”

“Smart,” the bitch said, sourly.  She was, the spy saw suddenly, nervous herself.  She was probably already expecting to have to take the blame for the intelligence failures that had led to Colin’s success.  “Do you think that you could join the rebels?”

The spy’s heart leapt, before realising that she intended him to spy on them.  “I could, but not as one of their senior people,” the spy admitted, trying to push the negatives.  It helped that he believed that he was actually telling the truth.  “If I joined them, I would be bringing nothing to the rebellion, but myself.  They won’t give me a senior position with nothing…”

“A senior position might not be needed,” the bitch mused.  She stood up in one smooth motion.  “You will continue to watch and observe until we make contact with you again.”

“Yes, My Lady,” the spy said.

The bitch picked up one of the outfits at random and motioned for him to pack it up.  The spy sighed inwardly, knowing that she wouldn’t pay for it, even through it did help to maintain both of their covers.  He hadn’t inquired, but he suspected that the bitch had a reputation on the Rim, even if it was probably largely imaginary.  Given enough time and resources, Imperial Intelligence could create a cover story that would stand up to scrutiny, at least on a public place like Patrick’s Asteroid.  The more isolated colonies would probably insist on digging deeper before they accepted anyone into their ranks.

He watched as she departed, every inch the pirate queen, and sat down heavily into his chair.  His friends on the asteroid would probably be teasing him about his work for one of the pirate queens, perhaps even being the only man to see her naked, but none of them would stand by him if they knew he was a spy.  They’d be screaming for him to go out the airlock.  In their place, he would have done the same.

***
Colin had chosen, for once, to hold the committee meeting on Patrick’s Asteroid and so Daria had reserved a room for them in the secure section.  He would have preferred to keep the meeting on the superdreadnaught, but he’d been assured that it was important to show confidence in the wake of the draw – or victory, or defeat – at Macore.  The official story that Public Information had been churning out had been that the rebel fleet had been intercepted and effectively annihilated, although few people on the Rim believed everything the Empire said, they would have wondered if Colin hadn’t shown off his fleet.  The nine superdreadnaughts were lurking near Patrick’s Asteroid, scaring some of the clients away just by their mere presence, and reassuring everyone that the rebellion was still in being.

“We got overconfident and we had our fingers burned,” he said, by way of introduction.  The former Imperial Navy personnel had analysed the battle carefully, while the Geeks had copied all the files and transferred them to one of their organic processors for further study.  “In hindsight, we acted in a predicable fashion and got trapped.  Had they brought both superdreadnaught squadrons to the party…”

He didn’t need to spell out the possible consequences.  For the first time in three hundred years there was real data on what happened when superdreadnaughts went up against superdreadnaughts and the results were not encouraging.  A two-on-one advantage, or so the simulations claimed, would have cost them at least two ships by the time they flickered out, leaving the remainder of the fleet badly damaged.  It was yet another reminder that they didn’t – yet – have a yard capable of repairing or building superdreadnaughts.  Percival’s ships had probably already returned to Harmony for their repair work.

“In the meantime, Captain Cordova” – he nodded to Cordova, sitting at one end of the table, wrapped in his finery – “has raided a number of targets and convoys,” he added.  “Captain?”

“Of course,” Cordova said.  He took off his hat and grinned around the table as he stood up.  “We won.”

He sat down again as a series of chuckles ran around the room.  Colin kept his facer carefully blank, but he wasn't unaware of the undertones; Cordova, deliberately or otherwise, was reminding everyone that he’d scored a series of victories, while Colin had flown right into a trap.  A pirate king would probably have had Cordova shot for that imprudence, but Colin didn’t have that as an option, not if he wanted to keep the rebel fleet together.  Too many of them already viewed Cordova as a hero.

“Thank you,” Colin said, dryly.  “Do you have an exact report for us?”

Daria spoke into the silence.  “Seventy-one ships, in four flotillas, were sent out,” she said.  “Nineteen were destroyed.  One group were jumped by a prowling Imperial Navy battlecruiser and the entire group was blown out of space.”  Her voice grew icy.  “They didn’t win anything, but their own deaths, did they?”

Cordova sighed, loudly.  “You know as well as I do that nothing is guaranteed in raiding warfare,” he said.  “I took them in on the best information I could and fought according to the rules laid down by the Admiral.”  He nodded to Colin.  “I did not deliberately lead any of my ships into an ambush.”

“You appear to be taking their deaths lightly,” Daria said, tightly.  “The Freebooter League will not take them so calmly.”

“This is war,” Cordova said, flatly.  “War means fighting and fighting means killing.  We destroyed thirty-two freighters, seven warships and damaged a handful of other craft.  Yes, we lost people in the fighting, but they all knew the risks.  We have to keep the Empire’s forces off balance.”

“Enough,” Colin said, before they could start a real fight.  Disputes on asteroids were often settled by duels and he didn’t want to lose either of them, although he had a nasty suspicion that Cordova had pushed the attacks much harder than he had ordered, or anticipated.  The ships that had been jumped by the battlecruiser should have flickered out at once.  No sane pirate or ex-pirate would try to fight a battlecruiser at close range.  “We need to decide what we are doing now, not trying to spread blame.”

There was a long pause.  “I would like to suggest returning to Macore,” Horvat said.  “I suspect, however, that the remainder of the superdreadnaughts we fought might well have remained there.  They would pose a significant threat if we were to engage anywhere within that system.”

Colin nodded at his bitter expression.  His wife’s world would have to wait.  “True,” he agreed.  He called up the tactical display and focused in on the Macore Union.  “As you know, Macore gave birth to nine daughter worlds before they became aware of the expanding borders of the Empire.  These daughter worlds each have a small observation squadron in orbit.  I propose to go after the observation squadrons…and then three other targets.”

He tapped the display.  “Pollack, Pollock and Peach were all settled under an Imperial Remit,” he said.  He had a private suspicion that the list of approved names was coming to an end.  “The Roosevelt Clan has strong interests in the first two and the third is almost completely under the domination of the Roman Family.  It has actually been suggested that the Roosevelt Clan will eventually accept the Roman Family into its wing and Peach will serve as part of the dowry, but…”

“It doesn’t matter,” Cordova said.  Of all of them, he was the one most capable of understanding the Families; he’d been one.  “I suspect that Peach will remain under the wing of the Romans for the foreseeable future.  Like all worlds, it’s quite a solid investment if you get in on the ground…and they own it.   I don’t think they would be so quick to give it up to the Roosevelt Clan, unless they have some reason to suspect that the world is going to be devalued.”

Daria laughed.  “It’ll be devalued if we attack it,” she offered.  “Are you going to take the chance to offer surrender this time?”

Colin nodded.  “Yes,” he said, flatly.  “When we engage the observation squadrons, we will attempt to convince them to surrender and perhaps join us.  My source on Harmony warned that the Empire has been loading SD troopers onto its ships…”

“Oh yeah, that's going to be popular,” Tsuji muttered.  Colin couldn’t disagree with the sentiment.  He’d be surprised if the SD troopers were behaving themselves.  “I can’t think of anything more likely to start a mutiny than a few weeks of them onboard ship.”

“We can, but hope,” Colin said.  “Of course, if they refuse to surrender and don’t run, we will have no choice, but to engage them.  I expect that each and every one of you will do their best to prevent a slaughter, but if it’s them or us…”

He scowled as the conversation ran around the table.  The observation squadrons might come over to the rebellion…depending on who was in command.  Percival had been shuffling task forces around like chips on a gambling table and he had to admit that it was an effective strategy for confusion.  He couldn’t guarantee encountering friends when they engaged, or even that his friends would be able to seize control of the ships and come over to the rebellion.  He’d thought that he’d known the price for rebellion, even a successful rebellion, but he saw now that he hadn’t even started.

Would it even have been possible without the Empire’s attempts to prevent us from forming a united Navy?  He thought.  The Empire had worked to keep officers from becoming too friendly, or too close, particularly ones who didn’t have to work together.  It had prevented a coup, if that had been the intention, but it had created a seriously flawed weapon.  How many intelligent young men and women, like himself, had been sidelined for not having the right connections, or for being so much better than those who had the connections?  Hatred and resentment ran deep in the Imperial Navy – he had tapped it himself – and so…they might come over to him, but now Percival was warned.  Future mutinies weren't going to be so easy…

And yet, the message was going out now, reaching everyone.  The entire Empire would know what had happened at Macore, and how the rebellion had begun, and millions would be tempted to join him.  The Empire seethed with rebellion and hopeless hatred, but now…everything had changed.  Percival wouldn’t be able to react in time…he pushed that happy thought aside and focused back on the table.  There was work to be done.  

“And,” he concluded, “once we have launched those strikes, it might be time to start thinking about going after Harmony and hitting Percival right where it will hurt.  If we can do that, we might just turn this rebellion into a new universe after all.”

Chapter Twenty-Nine

A cold wind blew as the fighters assembled in the woods.

Blondel Dupre watched as the men and women checked their weapons, equipment and the suicide charges on their belts.  The month Macore had spent under occupation had introduced them all to just how advanced – and brutal – the Empire’s concept of counter-insurgency warfare actually was, from hidden sensors and mind-warped citizens to systematically tracking down the families of killed insurgents and executing them in public.  They might have only a hundred thousand troopers, against four billion natives, but they were good.  Bit by bit, Macore was being beaten down by the Empire.

She winced as she pulled herself to her feet, cursing the enemy trooper who’d winged her as she fled the city.  Quick-heal drugs and a brief spell in a medical bay had healed most of the wound, but there were still bursts of phantom pains from her leg, as if her body couldn’t quite believed that it was healed.  The enemy had probably wanted to take her alive and parade her in front of her people, before she was warped into one of the Empire’s servants, a fatal mistake for him.  Her soldiers had shot him down before he could call for help, escaping into the countryside and remaining firmly under cover.  The Empire’s starships, high overhead, peered down with cold mechanical eyes, watching for signs of insurgent activity and calling in kinetic strikes or ground forces.

The proclamations from the Empire’s ‘Government of Administration’ were growing more and more bombastic by the day, promising Macore a new age of peace and prosperity, while warning of horrific punishments for those who joined the insurgency.  The SDs were using genetic readers to register everyone – a citizen without an ID card had no rights, as far as they were concerned – and anyone who was related to an insurgent was killed.  The insurgents, now, had to use the suicide charges to destroy all of their remains, before they could be recovered.  The fighting had been growing more and more brutal every day.

She glanced up as a flight of enemy flyers flew overhead, searching for insurgents.  The massive roads between Macore’s cities were obvious targets for the insurgents, or, for that matter, civilians trying to escape and find somewhere where there were no Imperial forces, and so they were patrolled heavily.  Sometimes, the Empire would stop a vehicle on the roads and search it in an almost-civilised manner, while at other times they would simply blast the vehicle from a distance and watch it burn.  The insurgents responded by targeting SD troop transports and checkpoints, like the checkpoint lower down, just outside the woods.

“I got the report back,” the communications expert said.  Macore’s main communications network had been thoroughly subverted by now, with Imperial webheads launching tracking and subversion software into the network to prevent the insurgents from using it, but they wouldn’t be able to shut down the backup so easily.  The only way to do that would be to destroy all of the nodes…and that would take them years, unless they scorched the planet.  It had been designed in anticipation of occupation and had been deliberately hard to find.  “There are fifteen of the Blackshirts and two of the walking dead.”

Blondel shivered and saw several of the other soldiers doing the same.  The Empire had captured, in its first sweeps, several hundred police and law enforcement officers and sent them to the mind techs.  Normally, counter-insurgent operations relied on winning hearts and minds, but the Empire had a nastier solution; the mind techs had gone to work on the men and produced willing collaborators, without any of the problems real collaborators would have had.  Rumour had it that some of the walking dead had killed themselves, or allowed resistance men to kill them, but they couldn’t be trusted.  The Empire had turned them into monsters, tapping their knowledge to aid the SD troopers, while keeping the men themselves as an example.  The Empire was fond of examples.

“You don’t have to come, Speaker,” Captain Palter muttered, as the soldiers prepared to move out.  “You shouldn’t be risked.”

“I need to do this,” Blondel said.  It was the only way that despair could be held at bay.  The Empire had cut up the pre-war insurgent network, simply by occupying many of the key points and using their walking dead to spread confusion and dissent, and she had little accurate information on what was happening on the other side of the world.  The Empire should have been engaged constantly by insurgent armies, but there was no way to control them all, yet alone plan joint operations.  “My life doesn’t matter anymore.”

The soldiers fanned out through the woods as they headed down to the road.  They didn’t look like soldiers, much to Blondel’s private amusement, but farmers or herders, hidden among the local population.  They stayed well away from civilian populations, however, knowing that the Empire wouldn’t hesitate to massacre civilians caught in their path.  They would probably be caught with weapons – Macore had plenty of dangerous animals and weapons were almost universal outside the cities – and that would brand them as partisans, even if they weren't.  The lucky ones would be killed instantly.  The unlucky ones would become walking dead.

There must be some limits to the process, she thought, trying to distract herself from the nightmare.  They could just turn all of the workers into walking dead if they could do it to everyone, or without some side effects, but what?  Why haven’t they just done it to everyone they needed and killed the rest?

The small force stopped on the edge of the road.  The checkpoint was down in front of them, barely visible in the gloom.  The checkpoint would be covered by a handful of Imperial sensors – and it had cost several dozen lives before the insurgents had worked out how to fool them – but the SDs themselves wouldn’t be on patrol.  They’d been ordered to stay with the checkpoint and they would obey orders.  Blondel had been told, by Colin, that they weren't allowed to have imagination.  It was literally burnt out of them.

No wonder they’re such bastards, she thought, remembering the pair who’d almost raped her, before transporting her off to be processed and turned into one of the walking dead.  They don’t have anything in their heads, but the conditioning that turns them into brutal thugs and enforcers for the Empire.  They can’t even begin to feel compassion, or pity, or mercy, or anything that we could use to defeat them.  They’re just walking dead themselves!

“Spread out,” Captain Palter hissed.  The soldiers spread out.  Blondel wasn’t entirely surprised to discover that she was at the rear.  The other soldiers didn’t know who she was – they believed that she was just another volunteer, perhaps – and Blondel almost welcomed it.  She’d altered her face and hair, just to prevent facial-recognition software from picking her up and alerting the Empire – they’d send the entire SD force to capture her, secure in the belief that her capture would end the war – but it was still odd not to be recognised.  “Fire!”

The soldiers in the lead opened fire at once, pouring a torrent of bullets, tipped with an explosive charge, onto the checkpoint.  The Empire might have preferred to use energy weapons, but tracking projectile weapons from orbit was much harder, even with the best of sensors.  The handful of insurgent groups that had had plasma cannons and ground-to-air laser systems had been wiped out quickly.  The checkpoint, hammered by the exploding bullets, shattered; Blondel saw, as in a dream, one of the walking dead wander right out into the path of the bullets, blown apart into a haze of red mist.  The SDs responded quickly and returned fire from their positions, sending streaks of light through the air, but they were pinned down.  They were unable to move and unable to stay where they were.  Their remaining cover would be blown away within seconds and bullets would tear through their bodies.

“Flyers,” someone hissed.  Blondel couldn’t hear them over the noise of the shooting, but she knew that they would respond almost at once, vectoring in all the automated flyers in the area.  The insurgents had learned that and used it to set a trap.  Predictability was the worst sin in warfare, but it was one the SDs committed time and time again.  They really weren't allowed imagination on a tactical level.  “Get ready…”

Blondel lifted the missile launcher to her shoulder and waited.  They might not have dared to use active sensors, although she couldn’t see how it mattered now, but passive sensors were more than enough to cope with flyers.  The drones operated on a standard drive field, after all, and even if they had stepped down their emissions, they could be tracked simply by the effect they had on the air.  The sensor head powered up at once, tracking the lead flyer, and she fired the missile into the air.  It was such a primitive weapon, in its way, that the flyer was completely unprepared for it.  An explosion, followed by a crash some distance away on the road, marked her success.

“Great shot,” one of the soldiers said.  The noise of approaching vehicles was growing louder.  The Empire was fond of sending its tanks along the roads to back up the checkpoints – the vehicles were almost indestructible without heavy weapons; even IEDs failed to do significant damage – and once they arrived, they completely dominated the area.  The insurgents would be swatted like flies.  “Time to leave, I think.”

A whistle blew.  Normally, it would be only audible to a dog, but they all carried sensors that would pick up the high-pitched sound that was the signal to break off the conflict and retreat.  A final series of explosions crashed down on the checkpoint, attempting to finish off the remaining SDs, before the insurgents fell back and vanished into the undergrowth.  Blondel smiled all the way back to the camp.  They’d hit the Empire a blow and remained unhurt.

If only she could convince herself that they had a chance…

***
“The Roosevelt Clan is not happy, General Thomas,” Andrew Thornton said.  “They are demanding a full accounting from you.”

“Doubtless,” General Thomas sneered.  The Thornton Family was a lower-status Family afflicted to the Roosevelt Clan, mainly because they controlled some industries that the Clan Head wanted for Roosevelt.  He privately suspected that the Roosevelt Clan Leadership regretted the deal; they might have the industries now, but they also had to patronise the Thornton Family, which – like all such Families – was intent on climbing up to the highest levels.  “And so they send you to get it?”

He smiled.  Thornton didn’t know it, but General Thomas had been a Roosevelt client since well before he'd been promoted to General, let alone been given command of the integration of Macore.  He had no illusions as to the truth of the young man’s comments, although the Clan Head on Earth wouldn’t have read the reports of the first landings yet, but he refused to allow them to sway him.  Besides, he suspected that the real reason that Andrew Thornton had been sent out to Macore was an unexpressed wish that the expected insurgency would kill him.

The smoke from the burning town rose up in front of him and he smiled.  The inhabitants shouldn’t have been providing aid and comfort to the insurgents, let alone their fighting men and women.  It had been the last mistake the townspeople had ever made; his forces had surrounded the town, sealed it off from all possibility of help, and then driven inwards, killing everyone they met.  The only survivors had been some of the younger and prettier women, who had been spared long enough to…serve some of the troopers.  If they survived that, their throats would be cut.

He turned back to Thornton.  “So, how are you feeling?”  He asked.  The chance to play games with his mind was rising.  It would certainly be something different from mass slaughter.  That was just routine.  “You could always join in…”

Thornton looked sick, he was amused to note, although part of him tried to whisper that he would have felt sick too, once upon a time.  The young men and women from the High City knew nothing of the realities of life in the Empire, or even the price that others paid to maintain them in their status, and when they came face to face with it…

“No, thank you,” Thornton said, swallowing hard.  General Thomas, who had made a private bet with himself that the young man would be actually sick, concealed a smile.  It was so much easier to treat people as numbers and prune them when they couldn’t be seen, wasn't it?  “You did promise to have this world prepared for further expansion.”

“I did, didn’t I?”  General Thomas agreed.  He lit a cigar, purely because he knew it would irritate the younger man, and puffed away for a long moment.  “I also told you that it might take as long as five years to subdue Macore properly.”

He led the way back to his command skimmer and stepped into his operations room.  “You do know how large a planet actually is, don’t you?”  Thornton nodded, his face flushing at the mockery.  “There are four billion people on this planet, most of whom don’t like us.  We can keep most of the population penned up in the cities, but that ties down our forces, which means that the insurgents can flourish outside the cities.  We can break up any large force from orbit, which means in turn that the insurgents cannot drive us off the planet, but we have to endure their attacks while wearing them down.”

Thornton stared at him.  “Can’t you go after them?”

“It is not actually easy to detect and track a person in the mountains, or the forests,” General Thomas said, dryly.  “If we could do that, we could break the insurgency in an afternoon.”

“But it’s done back on the factory worlds,” Thornton said.  He frowned down at the displays.  “Why can’t you do it here?”

“Every man, woman and child born on the factory worlds is implanted with a tag that can, when queried, report their location to the central computers,” General Thomas reminded him.  “Macore was not kind enough to implant its entire population for us and even if they had, I wouldn’t have trusted their system.  We have some teams working on tagging the workers and their families, but that task won’t be completed for a few months, if not a year.  We might even run out of tags…”

He nodded towards the map.  “So we watch, we wait, and when the insurgents attack we go in with all guns blazing,” he concluded.  “As I reported to Clan Roosevelt, we can hold the planet down for years, until they accept their fate, but we won’t be able to crush the insurgency quickly.”

“So things like…that are required?”  Thornton asked, jerking a finger towards the airlock.  The smell of the burning town had been swept away by the air conditioning, but it still lingered on their clothes.  The scent of dead or dying humans was harder to wash from the memory.  “Those people…”

General Thomas laughed.  “Is it so much harder to accept it when you see them die?”

Thornton looked sick again.  “And do you enjoy it so much?”

“Listen, kid,” General Thomas said, not unkindly.  Playing with the young man’s mind was amusing, but if he could turn him into a patron, it might be useful later.  “I grew up on Tanstafl.  I would have been a dirt-poor miner if I was lucky, a whore if I wasn't, because my sainted mother had been a prostitute who’d forgotten to use birth control.  From the moment I was born, I was treated like a slave, and when the recruiter came around, I aced their tests because I was scared they were going to send me back.  I would have been happy to be conditioned like the SDs just to escape my world, but instead they offered me a commission…”

“They accepted someone with your background?”

“Of course,” General Thomas said.  “They wanted someone who would do anything, no questions asked, and so they chose someone who knew what it was like at the bottom and had no desire to remain there.  I commanded troops – first a platoon, then a company, then entire brigades – and grew into just what they wanted, someone who would consider mass slaughter just a means to an end.  That’s what the Empire means, son, and that's what they sent you out here to do.  You signed those kill-orders yourself and I carried them out, faithfully.  My reward is the knowledge that my family won’t ever go back to that hell.  Your reward is the chance to impress your patrons.”

He shrugged.  “Now, we’re on our way back to the base,” he said.  He clapped Thornton on the back.  “You know the perfect cure, of course.  Once you get back to your quarters, get hideously drunk and spend the night with your maid, and then report for duty in the morning.  There are other kill-orders to sign.”

The craft floated into the air and raced back towards Landing City.  He turned to his maps and charts, skimming through the series of reports from his subordinates, listening with half an ear for sounds from the next compartment.  He'd wondered, rather maliciously, if the young man would try to throw himself out of the ship, instead of trying to carry on in his job.  If he started to look, really look, at what made the Empire, he would either accept it or embrace it.  It would be amusing to know which choice Thornton would make.

After all, he was a young man.

Chapter Thirty

“Explain it to me again,” Percival said, his voice low and deadly.  “Exactly what have the rebels done…and why can’t we fix it?”

The object of his focused fury was a young female webhead, someone who would not, normally, be noticed by anyone as high-ranking as an Admiral, unless she was invited to share his bed.  Penny watched her slowly going to pieces under his stare and decided that that wasn't going to happen anytime soon.  The girl – her name was Jane, apparently – was on the verge of a complete collapse.  A single word from Percival could ruin her career and get her exiled to the Rim.

“It’s really quite simple,” Jane stammered, finally.  “It’s…”

“It’s all right,” Penny said, more to prevent the explosion she saw coming rather than to help Jane.  Her superiors should be the ones facing an outraged Admiral, but they’d been quick to pass the buck down to Jane, a junior.  “Start at the beginning, go on to the end, and then stop.”

Jane tossed her a quick grateful look and collected herself.  “There are two ICN communications nodes in each system,” she said.  “There’s one just outside the gravity shadow generated by Harmony itself and there’s a second right on the edge of the system.  They both serve to store and transmit message packages, but the one near Harmony also serves as a message buffer so that any outgoing messages can be studied by the Censors before they are allowed to be transmitted out to the courier boats.”

“That much I know,” Percival said, his voice losing some of his anger.  “What did they do to my systems?”

“The messages are filed according to their coded headers, which instruct the computers as to how they are to be handled,” Jane said, her voice a little more confident as she stepped onto firmer ground.  “A civilian message is held, a commercial message or a military message is forwarded according to instructions and then left unread.  It’s treason to open any of those messages without permission, so the orders are carried out to the letter and any curiosity is carefully suppressed.  The headers determine where the messages go and, when the boats swing by for pick-up, they are transmitted out to the ship and then stored or wiped, depending on orders.”

She paused.  “And, in this case, the messages were given Imperial Intelligence headers and treated accordingly,” she continued.  “From what we have been able to establish, the messages were introduced into the system three weeks ago, just after Second Macore, probably by a pirate ship.  The headers gave very specific orders; a copy of the message was to be transmitted to every courier boat for a week, complete with further distribution orders, and then it was to be transmitted to be planet and then wiped from the node.  The orders were carried out without question.”

Percival scowled.  “Why?”

“They carried Imperial Intelligence headers,” Jane admitted.  “No one could look at them.  The computers didn’t even think there was anything odd in it.  They were just forwarded on according to instructions.”

“And the courier boat crews didn’t even have access to the messages,” Penny added.  “No one knew what they were carrying until it was too late.”

Percival nodded.  “All right, they had the right headers,” he said.  “What did they actually do?”

“The first part of the header told the computers to distribute a copy to every courier boat that entered the system, regardless of its destination,” Jane said.  “The second part activated when the message reached a new node and ordered the computers to hold it for a day, and then distribute it to every registered address in the system, after which it was to be wiped from the nodes again.  Everyone within the system who had an email address was sent a copy of the message.”

“I see,” Percival said.  “I want you to secure the system from any further…spamming attacks.”

Penny had to conceal her amusement at his tone.  Spamming the ICN was regarded as a serious crime, even though it’s direct effects were barely worth mentioning, and any convicted sender could be expecting to face a life sentence on a penal world.  Normally, the nodes would have trapped, isolated and wiped any rogue messages, but this message had carried an Imperial Intelligence code.  By the time anyone human had realised what was happening, it had already been distributed right across the sector…and was still spreading.  Penny could, with a little effort, calculate exactly when it would arrive on Earth.  She had to admire the mind behind the idea.  There was a simplicity about it that would defeat the best minds of the Empire.  They couldn’t even prevent the message from spreading.  By the time any warning arrived in an uninfected system, the message would have been and gone.

“That’s…not possible,” Jane protested.  Her voice was starting to quaver again.  Penny was sure that she saw a tear in her eye.  “The system cannot be secured against such an attack without locking out everyone else with access to those codes.”

“Like Imperial Intelligence, and the ships on deployment, and the Governors,” Penny said, slowly.  New codes could be issued, perhaps fairly quickly, but by the time they had everyone updated, the rebels could have sent a thousand messages.  “Can you at least prevent them from using the same codes?”

“Yes, but the headers…they’re all Intelligence’s,” Jane said.  “They’d only have to alter the headers slightly to send a new message.”

“Very good,” Percival said, suddenly.  “You are dismissed.”

Jane left, just a little bit too quickly.  “We win one battle and we lose one that is perhaps more important,” Percival said, once the door had hissed closed behind her.  “That message is going to reach everyone.”

“Yes, sir,” Penny said.  She saw his meaning at once and winced.  Percival hadn’t reported anything up the chain to Earth, in hopes that he could present them with a victory before they started handing out the blame.  The first news Earth and the Families would have of the disaster, therefore, would be Colin’s message…and the mere fact that the message had arrived would be signal enough.  Worse, there were plenty of Imperial Navy officers who might join Colin, if they knew the rebellion was there to join.  The message would alert them as well.  “On the other hand, we did win a victory.”

“Maybe,” Percival said.  He looked up at the display again, showing the rebel attacks, growing bolder and bolder as they pushed in closer to Harmony.  None of the attacks had actually threatened the Empire’s grasp on any of its worlds, but just by being pushed so close, they mocked his inability to catch any of the raiders.  Worse, the raiders had even broken their own pattern and mobbed Imperial Navy ships, picking off isolated vessels and their crews.  “Was it really a victory?”

“We gave them one hell of a shock,” Penny assured him.  “They’re the ones who cut and ran, not us.  Commodore Tamworth deserves the medal you gave him a thousand times over.”

“Yes, but we’re still not closer to tracking down Harper,” Percival said.  “And we have another old ghost rising now; Cordova himself.  I thought he was dead, but here he is again, risen from the dead to torment us anew.”

His face tightened.  “Penny, can we deal with them?”

Penny blinked, surprised.  She had never seen Percival on the verge of just giving up, but he had had a history with both of the rebels, particularly his former commanding officer.  Cordova’s decision to desert had surprised him at the time, while he'd worried that if it came to a fight between them, he'd be beaten easily.  He couldn’t hide behind his superior birth and social standing when it came to the former aristocrat.  Cordova was his nightmare given shape and form.

“Yes,” she said, firmly.  It would have been easy to give in to fear and panic, but she knew that the odds were still firmly on Percival’s side.  They had more superdreadnaughts and smaller ships and, if they could continue burning through the raiders, they would dissuade others from joining the rebels.  If they could steer Colin into another trap…except he wouldn’t fall for the same trick again.  “We can still beat them, but we need reinforcements.”

“Admiral Quentin is going to want me dead,” Percival said, with a sudden burst of humour.  Admiral Quentin, the commanding officer of Sector 96, had had a long history with Admiral Percival and had never forgiven him for beating him out for control of Sector 117 and the chances for personal profit, although he was probably silently grateful that he’d lost by now.  Penny suspected that Admiral Quentin would have a fair idea of what was actually going on by now.  “First I beat him to this sector and then I requisition all of his ships.”

He shrugged.  “Want to bet that the bastard holds back half of the Sector Fleet?”

Penny smiled.  “No bet,” she said.  She wouldn’t have taken it even if she felt he wasn't actually right.  Admiral Quentin disliked Percival intensely.  “In the meantime, we have some other options…”

The Admiral’s console bleeped.  “Excuse me,” he said.  “Jan, I said, specifically, no calls.”

“Yes, Admiral, but this is urgent,” Jan said, firmly.  She’d been with Percival too long to be intimidated by him.  “Mr Derbyshire believes that he has had something of a breakthrough.”

“Ah,” Percival said.  “Order him to report to me at once.”

When Derbyshire arrived, five minutes later, he had company.  A blonde-haired girl, wearing a pirate outfit, one that showed off a surprising amount of leg and cleavage, was escorted into the office with him.  Penny sensed Percival’s silent desire even as he nodded, impatiently, for Derbyshire to begin.  He'd said, before Derbyshire arrived, that it had better be important, but the girl had caught his eye.  Penny suspected that that might have been the point.

“This is Erika,” Derbyshire said.  It might well have been a false name.  “She holds a commission in Imperial Intelligence as one of our operatives out on the Rim.”

“That explains the uniform,” Percival said, taking her arm and holding it for just a little longer than necessary.  “Welcome back to Harmony.”

Erika didn’t smile.  “If you knew what I’d been doing with that hand, you’d be rushing around to gargle with coolant or acid,” she said.  Her voice was as cold and harsh as the grave.  Penny looked closer, seeing the signs of ill-treatment and a bitter life.  Covert operatives along the Rim tended to go native, or ended up having to be withdrawn before they went mad, those that survived.  Imperial Intelligence didn’t have a rank structure as such, at least not out in the field, but anyone who had survived for as long as Erika had would be regarded as senior.  “I risked a great deal, including breaking my cover permanently, in order to get here.”

“Erika has been operating as the pirate queen Cleopatra,” Derbyshire explained.  “In doing so, she has become part of the Rim community and has been perfectly placed to watch for signs of rebel activity.  She recently discovered something of great importance.”

“As part of my duties, I visited a number of emplaced agents along the Rim,” Erika said.  Her voice hadn’t become any warmer.  “As you know, there are hundreds of asteroids within the Rim that we know about, but instead of occupying them we have decided to monitor them covertly, both to catch corrupt officials supplying the pirates with equipment they cannot obtain from the Geeks, and to watch for pirate bases and planned raids.  In most cases, we find leads to the former, only to discover that they are too highly placed to remove…”

Her voice tightened slightly as Percival stared at her.  “They were members of the Families who supply weapons to the pirates,” she added.  “I have provided proof of their activities, but they have not been removed.”

Percival looked honestly shocked.  He might have been, in Penny’s considered opinion, a major-league asshole, but he wasn't a traitor.  “Please send me the names,” he said, tartly.  “I will do what I can.”

Penny gave him a sidelong look, and then looked back at Erika.  She’d been marked, badly, by what she’d seen and done as a pirate.  She’d had to act the part perfectly in a world where women were often treated as whores at best, one where she had had to be prepared to kill at any moment, either a single attacker or an entire shipload of innocent victims.  Percival might have found her attractive – and, physically, Erika was attractive – but Penny doubted that she’d be interested in anything Percival could offer her, unless it was revenge.

“There was a considerable change in the Rim by the time I reached Patrick’s Asteroid,” Erika informed them.  “The rebels were unifying under one leader.  The Freebooters were becoming involved in the fighting.  The Geeks were moving to produce more war material than ever before.  I finally discovered that Patrick’s Asteroid was the centre of rebel activity in that part of the Rim…and that it was frequently used for meetings.  The rebels even brought their superdreadnaughts near the asteroid to show them off and convince the fence-sitters that they hadn’t been destroyed.”

“Bastards,” Percival said, with a certain amount of annoyance.  “Is Patrick’s Asteroid serving as their main base?”

“I do not believe so,” Erika said.  “Cleopatra” – she spoke the name as if she were a separate person – “is not actually part of their innermost council.  She was invited to take part in raids, but she is regarded as an uncontrollable monster by many and is probably not going to be offered a higher position.”

Penny nodded.  There were levels even among thieves.  Penal worlds showed that child molesters and rapists suffered worst at the hands of their fellow criminals, while murderers and sociopath-types were watched carefully.  The men who’d had no choice, but to kill, were respected, but those who had been vile rarely survived their first years.  Cleopatra existed in a world where she had to be tougher than anyone else, but that very toughness could only be earned through ruthless violence, and so she had picked up a reputation for sadism and evil.  They wouldn’t believe that she could be a plant, but few of them would be inclined to love her.

“Their main base will be somewhere less public,” Erika added.  “I believe, however, that if Patrick’s Asteroid was to be seized without warning, the Marines might be able to take prisoners, including some who might know the locations of their secret bases.  It might even lure their superdreadnaughts into a fight.”

Patrick frowned, bringing up a starchart and studying it absently.  “Could we risk sending the superdreadnaughts so far from Harmony?”

“Probably not,” Penny said, although she was tempted.  If only they could guarantee that the enemy superdreadnaughts would be there – or, alternatively, wouldn’t be there.  Either way would offer opportunities for success.  She doubted that they would snare too many of the rebel leaders – Colin was smart enough to keep important information strictly compartmentalised – but it would be hitting back.  “A battlecruiser raid should pack enough firepower to fight or run, depending on what they find.”

Percival nodded.  “Did you discover anything about their future plans?”

Erika shook her head.  “If they have plans, they kept them firmly to themselves,” she said.  “There’s a lot of propaganda out there about how the homeless can return home, and how the Empire will be driven from space, world by world, but not all of it is theirs.  There are hundreds of different factions involved and not all of them are involved with the rebellion, although there is some grumbling over that.”

She snorted.  “All of them think that they should be in charge,” she added.  “They don’t really trust a former Imperial Navy officer.  Cordova is respected by many more outside the main core of Colin’s Shadow Fleet, but not everyone trusts him as well, even if he did throw away everything to be part of the Rim.  The person everyone trusts is Daria, the leader of the Freebooter League, but she seems to be taking a backseat to Colin and the other leaders.”

Percival scowled.  “Daria?”

“No one knows where she comes from, or even if it’s her real name,” Derbyshire offered.  “The file on her is actually pretty inconclusive.  As far as we know, she’s not linked with anyone, but the Freebooters, but there was clearly a great deal of collusion between her and Colin before the first mutiny.  She’s been around on the Rim for at least ten years – she founded the Freebooters League, as far as we can tell – but her origins are unknown.  A real shadowy type.”

“That’s not uncommon along the Rim,” Penny pointed out.  No one, not even the Freebooters, really knew everything about the Rim.  “There are plenty of people there who want to forget the past and make a new life for themselves.”

“True,” Derbyshire agreed.  His eyes narrowed as he called up files from his memory implant.  “Daria’s case is a rather odd one, however.  She comes out of nowhere to create the most powerful faction in the Rim, until Colin arrives with his fleet, and then remains in the background?  Something’s not right with that image, sir.”

“That is all academic at the moment,” Percival said.  “Penny, please see to launching a fleet to hit Patrick’s Asteroid.  Use the sealed orders dodge again so that the spy here, whoever he is” – he gave Derbyshire an icy look – “doesn’t pick up on it.”

“Yes, sir,” Penny said.

Percival smiled.  “And you, Erika, would you like to join me for dinner?”

“I killed a man over the dinner table once,” Erika said, calmly.  She smiled, for the first time, in fond reminiscence.  “I would be honoured to accept your invitation.”

Chapter Thirty-One

“I have a track on the Ajax,” the sensor officer reported.  Colin nodded as a new set of icons blossomed into view on the display.  “She’s maintaining a random patrol position with her squadron, just above the gravity shadow.”

“Smart of her,” Colin mused.  The Shadow Fleet, or at least its heaviest elements, had spent the last week slipping into the system.  So far, they had remained completely undetected.  “A pity we can’t tell if Eddie is still in command, but…”

His eyes returned to the display.  Athena, the main planet in the system, had been settled directly from Macore, and as such was already in the midst of an economic boom.  The settlers hadn’t just established a ground-based colony, but – in defiance of the Empire’s normal colonisation practice – they’d also established the beginnings of a space-based industry.  They’d even started to establish ties with the other independent worlds in the sector – and probably along the Rim as well – before the Empire nosed into their life.  Athena was competing directly with some of the Family-owned services and, as such, had been marked down for occupation.  The odds were that the Ajax and her sisters were there to make sure that they didn’t get any smart ideas about resistance.

The freebooters might not have had – officially – access to the ICN, but they had their own system, one that made use of starships to convoy messages.  It wasn't as secure or convenient as the ICN, but it served to keep the Shadow Fleet informed of developments across the sector, such as the arrival of a small observation squadron at Athena.  The development might not have made a major impact on Colin’s plans, but the chance to punch out a small heavy cruiser squadron was worth a little risk.  He’d worried that it was another trap, hence the care he was using to sneak into the system without using the flicker drive, but so far, no trap had tried to spring shut.

“Alter course towards her,” he ordered, slowly.  The heavy cruisers would be able to run if they saw the superdreadnaughts coming towards them, although he hoped that the cloaking devices would allow them to get into weapons range before they were detected, but if they were lucky, they wouldn’t have to fight.  “Laser signal to the squadron; bring the fleet to battle stations.”

“Aye, sir,” the communications officer said.  An alarm started to echo through the ship.  Colin knew Captains who wouldn’t bother with bringing the ship to full alert if they faced such pitiful opposition, but he’d learnt at an early age that it was better to take precautions rather than have to recover from a surprise.  Besides, five heavy cruisers, competently handled, were nothing to laugh at.  Eddie Abingdon, if it was still him in command of the Ajax, was no slouch.  “The fleet is responding.”

“Good,” Colin said.  The icons of the heavy cruisers were growing closer.  “On my mark, drop the cloak and bring up the shields.”

Cloaked tactics were studied extensively at the Academy, but cadets learned fast that there was no such thing as a standard cloaking mission.  A cunning or lucky enemy commander might detect some of the leakage from the cloak, or turbulence caused by the drive field, and – instead of retreating at once – carefully prepare an ambush.  The cloaking devices absorbed so much power, even for a superdreadnaught, that they would be denied any shields or weapons.  A careful enemy might even manage to destroy the fleet before they opened fire.  Colin doubted that anyone could react in time to destroy nine superdreadnaughts, but they couldn’t afford serious damage, not now.  The rebel shipyards weren't ready to handle superdreadnaughts.

The fleets inched closer.  “Now,” he ordered.  The lights sprang up to full intensity as the cloaking field faded away.  “Bring up the shields…now!”

The enemy commander – he doubted that it would be Eddie in overall command of the flotilla – didn’t look as if they’d been preparing an ambush.  Their ships had heeled over, trying to avoid travelling further into missile range, although they were within range for the superdreadnaughts.  Colin could have fired at once and probably destroyed half the ships, but he had had another idea.  The superdreadnaughts advanced, slowly, on the heavy cruisers, but held their fire.

“Open a channel,” he ordered.  “I want to talk to them.”

“Channel open, sir,” the communications officer said.  “They can hear you.”

“This is Admiral Colin Harper of the Shadow Fleet,” Colin said.  Truthfully, he felt a little strange calling himself an Admiral, even if it was the only way to command the rebel fleet.  It might have been honestly earned, although the Empire would hotly dispute that, but it didn’t feel his.  Not yet.  “You are outnumbered and outgunned.  I can destroy your ships at any moment.”

That wasn't entirely accurate – they could flicker out if they wanted to escape – but it would suffice.  “I call upon you to surrender your ships,” he said.  “I promise good treatment and swift reparation to the Empire if you surrender now, leaving your ships and computers intact.  Your position is hopeless.  Surrender now and you will live.”

There was a long pause.  “We are picking up a signal,” the communications officer said.  “I’m putting it through now.”

“This is Commodore Hewitt,” a voice said.  The display flickered, to reveal a middle-aged man wearing a Captain’s uniform.  Colin guessed that the Commodore rank had been given to him by Percival as a brevet rank, just to ensure that his chosen officer was in command of the squadron, or he would have been wearing the proper uniform.  “The Belford and her squadron will never surrender to you and your motley crew of rebels.  Give up now and I swear that we will give you a fair trial.”

The fear in his voice was almost overpowering, fear of Colin, fear of Percival, fear of death…Colin might have felt sorry for him, were he not holding several thousand people at risk.  Percival had probably told him that if he failed to engage the rebels, he would be shot – or lose all of his patronage – and he was too scared to fail his family by not dying bravely.  It was idiocy to even think that five heavy cruisers could make a dent in nine superdreadnaughts, but he was too scared even to run.

“Commodore, please be reasonable,” he said.  “I can destroy your ships and crews with ease.  If you surrender, they will live.”

“We’re picking up another signal,” the communications officer injected.  “It’s directly from the Ajax.”

Colin smiled.  “Eddie,” he said.  “How good of you to join us.”

“Abingdon, you are not cleared to open discussions with the rebels,” Hewitt thundered.  “Sign off this line at once.”

Abingdon ignored him.  “Colin, what do you think you’re doing?”

Colin took a moment to compose his thoughts.  Edward – Eddie – Abingdon had been one of his classmates back at the Academy, one of the hundreds who’d chosen to be streamlined into the smaller ships training courses, believing that that was a surer course to actual command.  He might have had the last laugh too; Colin had only ever been a Commander, while he’d been a Captain, if only of a heavy cruiser on patrol.  He had also been something of an idealist.

“I am taking down the Empire,” he said, finally.  “Eddie, I meant the offer sincerely.  Surrender your ship and your crew and yourself will not be harmed.”

“Colin, the Empire is too important to destroy,” Abingdon said.  “Even if I believed that you could defeat the Empire, and you have nine superdreadnaughts against the massed might of the Imperial Navy, you would be shattering the fundamental unity of the human race.  You know as well as I do that the only thing preventing a repeat of the Outsider Wars and the other atrocities committed during the First Expansion Period is a strong Empire.  You’re not doing the right thing here.”

Colin scowled.  “Eddie, I was on duty at Macore,” he said.  “The SD troopers have landed and, by now, they had probably killed half the planet.  That world you’ve been watching is in line for the same fate.  You probably have orders on the way to reduce its orbital defences, just as I was ordered to do.  What price the Imperial Navy if we allow – and assist – such atrocities to take place?”

He lowered his voice.  “We like to think of ourselves as above the fray,” he said.  “We look down on the SDs, or the planetary occupation forces, but the truth is we’re just as bad.  We do it, we’re the ones who make it happen and the ones who bear the brunt of the response.  Sooner or later, we would have probably been given orders to scorch a world, just to make a point.  We’re not innocent in any of this.  We’ve been active collaborators from the day the Imperial Navy took shape.”

“I am not…unaware of the horrors,” Abingdon admitted.  Most people, Colin knew, would have claimed ignorance.  Abingdon’s idealism was still intact, then.  “They’re unpleasant, yes, but they are necessary to maintain the Empire…”

“But for what?”  Colin asked, feeling sweat prickling down his spine.  If he failed to convince Abingdon, he might not be able to convince others.  The entire conversation would be being watched by the bridge crews, at least, of the entire squadron.  “How far in the Imperial Navy do you think that you will rise?”

There was a long pause.  “I asked for nothing more than my own ship,” Abingdon said, a little stiffly.  He’d understood the point, all right.  “Your ambition…”

“I have watched, time and time again, idiots and morons promoted ahead of myself, or you, or others with competence and integrity, because of their connections,” Colin said, flatly.  “For the crime of being too competent, you were sent out here on patrol, while I was consigned to permanent subordination.  We don’t serve the Empire, if we ever did, let alone humanity as a whole.  We serve the Thousand Families, who suck the lifeblood out of the entire Empire and make us partners in their crimes.”

He paused, again.  “We didn’t go to war against Macore because they were a threat to us,” he pushed.  “We went to war against them because they were competing with the Roosevelt Clan…and winning.  Thousands, millions…perhaps billions of their people are going to die, just because a Clan had it’s nose put out of joint.  What are we if we stand by and allow it to happen?  What are we if we actually help the Clan rape Macore?

“Eddie, it’s time to stop pretending and get off the fence,” he concluded.  “Join us, if you like; you’d be welcome.  Or, failing that, you could save the lives of your crew by surrendering your ship.  You’re a skilled tactician, but you can’t win against nine superdreadnaughts and you know it.  Even Hewitt knows it…”

“This is foul treason,” Hewitt snapped, breaking back into the conversation.  Colin realised that he must have realised that everyone in his squadron was listening and making up their minds.  “You all – we all – swore an oath to the Empire.  We swore to uphold it and defend it…and, through that, defend the entire human race.  We stand between humanity and the alien threats out in the darkness, we do whatever needs to be done to ensure the Empire remains united, we do…”

“It strikes me that you never did anything without permission from a Family,” Abingdon said, with sudden amusement.  “What happened to Captain Rai?”

Hewitt blinked.  “She was removed from command for questionable judgement,” he said, surprised.  “I was given her post as a quick solution…”

“Too quick,” Abingdon said.  “Far too quick.  I knew Captain Rai.  She was good and clever and wouldn’t have gone along with the Empire’s plans for Athena.  Was she removed before she even had a chance to object?”

“It’s possible,” Colin offered.  He started to plead, desperately.  “Eddie, even if you stay with the Empire, they’re not going to allow you to retain your command.  They’re going to be suspicious of you just for knowing me.  Please, come with me…”

“Abingdon, I am ordering you now to break communications and report to the brig,” Hewitt snapped.  The display changed suddenly as his ship altered it’s targeting locks, targeting the Ajax.  “Your first officer will take your ship back to Harmony and…”

“No, sir,” a new voice said.  Colin heard the pleading in his tone and shivered.  The Imperial Navy was disintegrating in front of his eyes.  The image switched to wide-screen, showing the Ajax’s bridge…and the crew refusing to move against their commander.  “I cannot accept your order.”

“This is mutiny,” Hewitt protested.  The targeting locks strengthened.  “I am giving you ten seconds to comply or I’ll open fire.”

“I have the combined missile batteries of nine superdreadnaughts locked on the Belford,” Colin injected pleasantly, before Hewitt could carry out his threat.  Hewitt almost seemed to have forgotten about the superdreadnaughts.  “If you fire a single shot, I’ll blow you away.”

Hewitt whirled to glare at Colin.  “I’ll see you burn for this,” he swore.  His face was contorted by fury and a terrifying fury.  He had been completely unmanned by a situation when the lower orders no longer took orders without question.  “I’ll…”

A beam of red light cut through his skull.  Hewitt tumbled to the floor, dead.  “I’m sorry, sir,” another new voice said.  “Admiral Harper, I’m Commander Hanson.  I’d like to surrender this ship to you.”  He paused.  “And I think I’d also like to request asylum, if I can.”

Colin laughed, feeling the tension slowly draining away.  “You’d be welcome,” he said, recognising the real request.  “And thank you.  You saved a lot of lives today.”

***
Of course, Colin decided, an hour later, it hadn’t been that simple.  The Belford had had a small force of SDs onboard and they’d had to be secured and disarmed before they could be dumped down on the planet below to wait for pick-up.  Two of the other ships had almost been torn apart by fighting before the Marines from the Shadow Fleet had docked and turned the tide, leaving them in a mess.  It would take several weeks, at least, to repair them…and they would have to limp all the way to the Rim.

“I still don’t like this,” Abingdon admitted, afterwards.  They were sharing a brief moment on the General Montgomery before the Ajax left for the Rim and Patrick’s Asteroid.  They’d be met there and steered to one of the more secret bases.  “Colin, even if you win, what replaces the Empire?”

“Everyone asks me that question,” Colin admitted.  At least he had a better answer now, although the plans were still being discussed along the Rim.  No one would be entirely happy, with the possible exception of Kathy.  She’d get her own company without the rest of the Families.  “I’ve been working on future plans, all of which you are welcome to read and offer your own thoughts about, but I never thought of myself as a politician.”

“Not much of a speechwriter either,” Abingdon needled slightly.  Colin flushed.  “I received your message and yes, I was tempted, but…Colin, this war could go on for years.”

“I know,” Colin said.  He looked down at the table, and then looked up into his old friend’s eyes.  It was important that he convince him personally.  “Eddie, if I hadn’t rebelled, I would have bourn part of the responsibility for the rape of Macore.  I already helped Percival move up the ladder and into a position where he could shape the entire sector…”

“You were young,” Abingdon said.  “You couldn’t be blamed for not knowing what sort of person Percival was, or what would happen in the long run.”

“I was stupid and naive,” Colin said.  It wasn’t something he could tell anyone else, with the possible exception of David, not when it might be taken as a sign of weakness.  “I should have known…”

“But you didn’t,” Abingdon said.  He’d never had any patience for whining back when he’d been a cadet and that didn’t seem to have changed.  “Colin, I do know what you went through, but…”

“But it was nothing,” Colin snapped.  “I suffered not at all compared to the people on Macore, or any one of a thousand other world, just for getting in the way of the Empire and the Thousand Families.  The Imperial Fleet has their blood on its collective hands and we have the duty to stop it, whatever it takes.  What would you have done when they came to you and told you to scorch Athena?”

“They wouldn’t have done that,” Abingdon protested.  The horror in his voice and face, Colin judged, was sincere.  “The world wasn't in rebellion…”

“They’re undercutting the Empire and the Clan-owned shipping lines,” Colin said.  “That counts as rebellion as far as the Clans are concerned.  Macore is still putting up a fight, and so they might decide that Athena would be better off with a new population, after the old one had been removed.  There’s no shortage of people on the Core Worlds who want to go elsewhere, is there?”

Abingdon nodded slowly.  “Very well,” he said.  He stroked his chin and winked at Colin, inviting him to share the joke.  “You’ll have me and my ship, as long as you don’t turn into the fourth emperor, deal?”

“Deal,” Colin said.  He held out a hand and, after a moment, Abingdon shook it.  “So…”

“So,” Abingdon asked, “what now?”

“You lead the squadron back to one of my bases,” Colin said.  “You can take a few messages from me so you get a warm reception.  I, meanwhile, have an appointment somewhere else.  Once we’ve transported the loyalists down to the planet, we have to flicker out in a hurry.  We’re going to singe Percival’s beard.”

Chapter Thirty-Two

The squadron flickered out of space in the designated arrival zone.

“We have arrived,” the helm officer said, though the intercom.  “All drives and systems are performing at optimum.”

“Good,” Colin said.  “Communications, transmit our package to the star system’s defenders.”

“Yes, sir,” the communications officer said.  He pushed a button on his console.  “The package is being transmitted now.”

Colin tensed as he took his seat.  The two weeks between Athena and Pollack had been spent in careful preparation, but the first part of the plan depended on everything going right…and that was a recipe for disaster.  He'd built as many safeguards into the plan as he could, but if the mission were blown too soon, the only option would be to retreat as fast as possible.  This close to Harmony, Percival could have his ships on them within hours.

“They’re acknowledging,” the communications officer said.  “Pollack System Command welcomes us to the system and is offering a data dump on developments since our message arrived.”

“They must have had some problems,” Colin observed,  “Accept the download and reassure them that we will be there for them.”

The display flickered slightly as the superdreadnaughts moved ponderously towards the planet and its orbiting asteroids.  The Pollack system had been settled directly by the Roosevelt Clan and all of the seven or eight million – sources differed, as far as Colin could tell – were working directly for the Clan.  They would spend their lives on Clan service, unable to rise past a certain level, while their children would be indoctrinated into the system and brought in as entry-level workers.  It was a feudalist system at its purest, with each and everyone in their place, despite which resistance was not uncommon.  Colin’s message would have ignited some fires in the system…

The Roosevelt Clan had intended the system to be one of their nodes for further development and exploitation and so they’d invested billions of credits in the rapid development of Pollack.  All of the Families had an insane amount of money, but Roosevelt had poured it out like water, just to get properly dug into the sector.  The world had barely been open for seventy years and, already, they had no less than fifty asteroids in orbit, massive defence stations and an entire fleet of asteroid miners.  It was impossible to be sure, not without capturing and studying one of the miners directly, but he would have bet good money that they’d already stolen and duplicated Kathy’s miner design.  The shipyards and industrial stations would need constant feeding.

He frowned as he skimmed through the download.  Subversive organisations were not uncommon on Clan Worlds, although it wasn't easy to maintain a resistance group, and some of them had managed to establish secret groups outside, away from the factories.  A world was vast, after all, and the escaping workers had clearly found ways to ditch their tags and hide.  Most of them wouldn’t last the first winter, but those that did were strong and launched raids on their former masters.  His message had triggered a series of attacks that the Clan security forces had had to crush and, according to the download, the manager had been screaming for help from Harmony.

There’s a slight shortage of SDs, Colin thought, and smiled.  Percival had routed all available SD troopers to Macore to complete the invasion and occupation, but in doing so, he had actually caused a shortage everywhere else.  He was probably begging the other nearby sectors to send him all the forces they could spare, but if his message caused rioting and rebellions everywhere it touched, anyone who had any military power would be reluctant to let go of it.  

“They just ran us through a confirmation filter,” the communications officer said, breaking into his thoughts.  “I think we passed.”

“If we didn’t, we’d be hearing from their defences,” Colin said, smiling to himself.  They’d gambled and announced themselves as Commodore Tamworth and his superdreadnaught squadron, with an additional ship to replace the damaged General Ryan, but the minute anyone managed to take a look at the markings on the hull, the game would be up.  If Percival had changed the IFF codes, which would have been what Colin would have done in his place, the Pollack System Command would have known that they were being tricked…and, if they held their fire long enough, they might be able to damage or destroy his ships.  “Have they increased their signalling since we arrived?”

“Not since they cleared us to pass the outer levels of their defences,” the communications officer said.  “The handful of transmissions we picked up were encrypted and…sir, if they were using lasers…”

“Don’t worry about it,” Colin said.  Commercial encryption programs were supposed to be easy to unlock, but the Roosevelt Clan had developed their own, military-grade or higher.  It was technically illegal…but then, they were part of the government.  The Families rarely punished their own unless they really stepped out of line.  “If it’s a trap, we’ll see soon enough.”

He looked over at the downloads from the stealthed drones they’d scattered around the system in the first minutes of their arrival.  They hadn’t reported any sign of cloaked ships waiting in ambush, but he knew, better than anyone else, that that didn’t mean anything.  The entire Imperial Navy could be waiting somewhere out there, under cloak or merely in stealth mode, and the first they’d know about it would be when the drives started to power up.  Once they entered the gravity shadow cast by Pollack, they'd be committed.

“Take us in,” Colin ordered, pushing the doubts out of his mind.  The defenders were about to have one hell of a shock.  If they were really lucky, they’d end up shooting at Percival and his forces when they came to relieve them.  “Tactical, what defenders do you have?”

“Seventeen fortresses, one command fortress, and thirty-seven starships, heavy cruiser-sized or smaller,” the tactical officer said.  “They appear to be using a standard hierarchical command pattern; all links run back to the command fortress.”

Colin nodded.  That wasn't too surprising.  The command fortress packed almost as much firepower as a superdreadnaught…and didn’t have to reserve power for drives and shields.  Fully aware and alert, it would be a dangerous opponent, even for the entire squadron.  Pollack’s combined defences would be a match for the entire Sector Fleet.  If they suspected something, they'd open fire as soon as the superdreadnaughts entered missile range.

“Inform them that Commodore Tamworth wishes to consult with the commander of the defences in person,” he ordered.  Unless the Roosevelt Clan was having an attack of trust, their commander would be on the command fortress and almost certainly a senior Family member.  That didn’t mean that he would be incompetent – Cordova proved that Family Members could be competent – but it would suggest a certain degree of independence from the Imperial Navy.  In theory, any Imperial Navy officer would be superior to a local defence commander, but in practice, few officers would try to boss around anyone from the Roosevelt Clan.  “We’ll come into close orbit of the fortresses and hold position there.”

He tensed again.  If it was a trap, he’d just told them when they’d have a perfect opportunity to blow his ships to flaming plasma, superdreadnaughts or not.

“And send a signal to all ships,” he said.  “We engage at medium range – acknowledge.”

The relief on the flag deck was almost amusing.  They’d probably worried that he would take the squadron into energy range before engaging, something that would have ensured mutual destruction, at best, even with the advantage of surprise.  The fortress couldn’t evade their beams, but in compensation it mounted much heavier beams than even a superdreadnaught…and an awesome amount of point defence.  The combined fire of nine superdreadnaughts would have an effect, but how much of one?  No one had tried to assault a command fortress since the design had been finalised and the first had been built.

“All units acknowledged,” the communications officer said.  There was no need to use active sensors, not with such a big and active target, so the defenders would have no warning.  “They’re standing by.”

“Good,” Colin said.  He lifted his hand as the starship closed into medium range, and then brought it down sharply.  “Fire!”

The superdreadnaught shuddered as it unleashed it’s first massive barrage.  A moment later, it rolled and brought the secondary tubes to bear, firing a second wave of missiles, interlinking with the missiles fired from the remaining eight superdreadnaughts.  A tidal wave of destruction raged towards the fortress, while shields and point defence came active and searched for targets.  The fortress had been completely surprised.  They hadn’t even had the point defence fully on alert, let alone had missiles primed and ready to go…

Colin smiled to himself as the first wave of missiles slammed home.  The fortress, so large that it could barely be seen with the naked eye, shuddered under the attack, as warhead after warhead detonated against the shields, knocking them down and slamming into the unprotected hull underneath.  Warhead after warhead exploded against the hull, burning into the fortress’s armour and punching through.  It was so large, so massive, that it wasn’t destroyed in a single explosion, but in a series of shattering blasts, each one more powerful than the last.  There was literally nothing left of the station.

“My god,” someone breathed, in the rear of the flag deck.  He sounded completely shocked.  “What have we become?”

Colin didn’t look round to see who had spoken.  “Retarget the other fortresses, now,” he snapped.  “Fire at will!”

The enemy fortresses, to give them due credit, had been racing to battle stations as soon as Colin’s ships opened fire, launching missiles towards the superdreadnaughts in an ever-increasing swarm.  Four fortresses were within missile range of his ships – the planners had designed it so that their systems would interlock together and allow them to cover each other – and all of them were pouring out missiles.  Colin could still pick out the signs of confusion and panic, but the defenders were overcoming it and firing back.  They might have drilled endlessly for this moment, but they would never have anticipated losing their command fortress in the opening blows.

“Focus our fire on Fortress Nine,” he ordered.  The target fortress was the closest and had reacted fastest to the attack.  Knocking it out would offer them increased possibilities for further attacks.  If nothing else, they’d have a chance to actually take on the remaining fortresses one by one.  They might even fly under the fortresses and dare them to fire, knowing that a miss would send a warhead plunging down towards a planet.

He braced himself.  “Fire!”

The superdreadnaught rocked violently again.  “Incoming enemy fire,” the tactical officer snapped, sharply.  Some of the fortresses were firing at their extreme range, trying to damage or destroy his ships before they could escape, but it only gave the point defence computers extra time to plan their countermoves.  The Geeks had talked about missiles that would actual evade intelligently on their final approach to the target, but unless someone overcame the power storage bottle problem, it wouldn’t be any more than a dream.  “All hands, brace for impact…”

Four missiles hit the superdreadnaught in quick succession.  “No major damage,” the tactical officer reported.  The display altered again as seven superdreadnaughts pounded away at Fortress Nine.  The fortress had had its shields raised and point defence ready to burn any threatening missiles out of space, but some of them were still breaking through to slam against the shields.  The data was sparse, but suggested that the fortress had lost half of its shield generators already…

It blew apart in a brilliant fireball.

“What the hell happened to it?”  Colin asked, astonished.  It shouldn’t have exploded like that, even if the shields had gone down and the missiles had been slamming into the hull.  “Did we hit something explosive?”

“Unknown,” the tactical officer said.  “There shouldn’t have been anything dangerous stored within that part of the fortress.”  He paused.  “Well, nothing that dangerous anyway.”

“It could have been a power feedback curve in the main reactors,” the engineering officer put in, sounding as if he didn’t believe his own words.  The odds against such a dangerous power curve blowing up an entire starship, let alone a fortress, were astronomical.  “Starships and stations have cut-outs in place to prevent a deadly feedback, but if one of them failed at a critical time it could have been fatal.”

Colin shrugged.  “Pull us back,” he ordered, as the planet rotated below them.  He could have bombarded the factories and complexes on the surface, or even the more vital ones in low orbit, but he wanted to make a point.  The rebellion could – and had – hit them right at the very heart of the Roosevelt Clan’s interests in the sector.  Defences that should have been able to stand off the entire Sector Fleet had crumpled before the attack.  “I need an updated damage report.”

The wave of missiles didn’t abate as the starships glided away from the planet.  The point defence network caught most of them, but a handful still managed to break through…and thank God he hadn’t risked going any closer.  The fortresses were moving up the defending starships, which were staying well out of range of the superdreadnaughts, and using them to augment their own point defence.  The Shadow Fleet could pound them harder, maybe even take out a handful more fortresses, but that would almost certainly mean a loss of their own.  He couldn’t afford to lose a superdreadnaught.

He flicked through the reports quickly.  None of his ships had taken serious damage, but two of them had lost some of their shield generators, forcing them to withdraw before missiles started to lance through the gaps and strike against the hull.  They had, however, expended over half of their onboard missile stocks, which meant that they should leave before they expended them all.  A warship couldn’t afford to be caught without defences, not now.

“They’re ordering their light cruisers to follow us,” the tactical officer said, as the pounding finally faded away.  The superdreadnaughts were moving out of the gravity shadow now and preparing to leave.  One of them fired a parting spread of missiles at the traffic control station on the edge of the gravity shadow, mocking them…and their failure to recognise the danger.  Colin’s lips twitched.  They’d probably been spared the blame for the disaster.  “I think they want to try to shadow us home.”

“Fire on them if they enter range,” Colin said, once he'd checked the display.  It would take a luckier and better-positioned crew to shadow them all the way to Patrick’s Asteroid.  They’d be lucky if they managed to follow the fleet to the first waypoint, let alone the Rim.  “If not, ignore them.”

He’d hoped that the System Command would send the remaining starships in the system after them, but judging from their positions, they’d decided not to risk pursuit.  He couldn’t fault the decision – without superdreadnaughts of their own, the forces would probably be destroyed if they risked an engagement with his ships – but it was a shame.  The crews would all be Roosevelt loyalists, not Imperial Navy, and destroying them would almost be a pleasure.  There was no way that they would join the rebellion.  

“They just received a courier boat from Harmony,” the tactical officer said.  Colin looked over at him in surprise as a new icon appeared on the display.  “The ship just flickered in, on the other side of the planet.”

Colin tensed before remembering that the courier boat would have had to have been sent before the Shadow Fleet commenced its attack.  It wouldn’t be convoying information about reinforcements – he wondered, in a moment of wry humour, if it carried updated codes and IFF signals for the Imperial Navy – but something else, probably not something anyone on Pollack wanted to hear.  He thought, briefly, about trying to intercept the courier boat, but it was already heading down into the covering field of the fortresses.  There’d be a chance at reading the mail later.

He keyed his console.  “All ships, prepare to flicker out to the first waypoint,” he ordered.  The results of their strike were already starting to become clear as the stealthed drones fell within the remains of the defences.  They’d be tracked and wiped out eventually, when the defenders started sweeping orbit for mines and any other hidden surprises left behind as a parting shot, but until then they would provide useful data.  He’d dawdled long enough to pick up everything they could send.  “Flicker!”

Space twisted around the superdreadnaught and they were on their way.  “Stand down from Red Alert,” he ordered, formally.  The lights came on again around the flag deck and the crew relaxed.  “David, how are we looking?”

“Took a few shocks to the shield generators and a lot of minor damage, but otherwise we’re pretty good,” David said, from the bridge.  “I don’t want to think about what will happen when we go up against a full superdreadnaught squadron again.”

Colin smiled.  “If we’re lucky, Percival will find himself forced to cut loose some of his superdreadnaughts to cover Pollack and the other Roosevelt Worlds,” he said.  “They can actually make a real stink about this back home.  While his forces are off covering Pollack, hoping we’ll come back and strike them again, we can move in on Harmony and put an end to the first part of the war.”

David laughed.  “You really think it’ll be that easy?”

“No,” Colin smiled, “but I have hope.”  He grinned up at the display.  He wasn't entirely blind to the implications of several other crews having prepared mutinies against their commanders and their SD…supervisors.  They might have thousands of friends and allies they hadn’t met, yet.  “Take us back home, David.  We have a campaign to plan.”

Chapter Thirty-Three

“We are coming up on the emergence point, sir,” the helmsman said.  “Do you want to bring the ship to battle stations?”

Commodore Gallatin scowled inwardly.  There was no helping some people.  The helmsman had been a fairly new recruit to the crew and he was very good in bed, but he was allowing his relationship with his commanding officer to push him in…unwise directions.  It was rumoured, and largely true, that the path to promotion in Commodore Gallatin’s 45th Battlecruiser Squadron ran through the Commodore’s bed – if the person in question was a man – but he wouldn’t allow it to affect discipline any more than strictly necessary.  The helmsman would need to be disciplined.

“That would be suitable, yes,” he said, sardonically.  The discipline would have to come after the successful completion of the mission.  Admiral Percival had been very clear on the matter.  The Empire needed a clear and unambiguous success and Commodore Gallatin had been chosen to get it.  “Being the ship to battle stations and stand by for emergence.”

The squadron was nearly seventy light years away from the closest world owned by the Empire.   Their course had taken them directly into the Rim.  Technically speaking, the Rim was always expanding away from the Empire as refugees, pirates and renegade imperials carved out settlements and colonies for themselves, but when most people thought of the Rim, they thought of it as an impossibly disciplined line of black colonies surrounding the edge of the Empire, populated by pirates and strange alien races.  The reality was a little more confusing; there were parts of the ‘Rim’ that were technically within the Empire’s space – and Macore had been part of the Rim before it had been rediscovered – and operated with hardly any Imperial oversight.  A tiny harmless colony, with a small population and hardly any resources, could be safely ignored.  If they wanted their privacy, and they had nothing the Empire wanted, they would generally be left alone.

Back during the First Expansion Period, colony expeditions had gone off in all directions, founding worlds based on a particular religious, ethnic and cultural pattern.  The Second and Third Expansion Periods had been more focused on establishing stable colonies that could be made profitable – and, learning from the lessons of the First Expansion Period, kept firmly under control – but that hadn’t prevented rogue groups from setting off into the unknown.  Indeed, it was rumoured that one rogue group had actually given the Dathi advanced technology for their war against the Federation, but Commodore Gallatin knew perfectly well that the dates didn’t quite add up.  The Dathi had been in space longer than humanity…and, now, all that remained of them were dead worlds circling uncaring stars.

Unless there are some left along the Rim, he thought, as the timer ticked down.  There were always rumours of new alien threats, but most of them were hoaxes, or simple cases of mistaken identity.  Patrick’s Asteroid, lying outside the officially-settled regions of space, might even be mistaken for an alien habitation, although if there had been a major space-faring civilisation anywhere nearby, the Empire would have encountered them by now.

“Emergence in twenty seconds,” the helmsman said, choosing not to notice some of the glances his fellow crewmen were shooting him.  “Ten seconds…”

Commodore Gallatin winced as the shock of emergence ran through him.  He might have been imagining it, but the shocks seemed to be getting worse, even though he was still a young man.  He dry-heaved twice, before catching himself as the display returned to normal and returning his attention to the display.  Small icons popped up, reporting that the starship was coming to battle stations, but he ignored them, focusing on the image of the system as it unfurled in front of him.  Their arrival seemed to have been a total surprise.

Patrick’s Asteroid itself was a fairly typical rocky asteroid, spun up and inflated by technology that had been old when the human race had been taking its first steps into space, almost unremarkable in its sheer ordinariness.  It might have even have escaped a casual scan of the system by a scoutship – the Rim was too large to chart properly, even by the Survey Service – but he had inside information.  The asteroid was surrounded by a handful of other asteroids, probably simple manufacturing stations, but there was nothing else that made it interesting.  The two planets in the system, both tiny rocky worlds, would never attract interest from the Clans, not unless they ran out of more habitable worlds.  A black colony could hide there for years.

“Launch probes,” he said.  Logically, the enemy fleet – the Shadow Fleet, they seemed to have decided to call it – would be somewhere else, but it was just possible that they were flying right into an ambush. Commodore Gallatin hadn’t grown into an experience officer by assuming that Imperial Intelligence was omniscient.  It was wise to take everything they said with a grain of salt.  “How many ships are in the system?”

“Seventeen active ships detected,” the tactical officer said.  “Two of them just flickered out, destination unknown.”

Commodore Gallatin frowned.  Patrick’s Asteroid wasn't large enough to cast a proper gravity shadow.  The entire enemy fleet – if that was what it was – could escape the battlecruisers with ease, although Patrick’s Asteroid itself couldn’t flee.  The largest FTL starship in history, the massive colonist-carriers that had seeded hundreds of new worlds during the First Expansion Period, had been twenty kilometres long.  They wouldn’t have time to evacuate the asteroid before his forces arrived in position to shoot up anyone trying to leave; the best they could do, he reasoned, would be to have the handful of active ships flee.

Unless they’re going to whistle up some help, he thought.  “Open a channel,” he ordered.  He waited for the communications officer’s nod.  “This is Commodore Gallatin of the Imperial Fleet.  This system is now under my control.  You are ordered to stand down your shields, drives and weapons.  Failure to do so will result in you being fired upon without further warning.”

He looked over at the tactical officer.  “Inform the Marines,” he ordered.  “We’re going for a rapid boarding of the asteroid.”

“Yes, sir,” the tactical officer said.  He paused as new icons blinked into existence.  “Sir, I have remote defence platforms lighting up now, targeting us.”

“Good,” Commodore Gallatin said, coldly.   “Fire at will.”

***
Kathy had been half-asleep when the alarms had suddenly brought her out of her dreams, right back into awareness.  For a moment, she hadn’t even known where she was, half-convinced that she was back home in the High City, before the lights had come on to reveal a naked man diving for his clothes.  Cordova’s back, she noted inanely, was covered in scars, almost as if someone had tried to literally flog the skin off his back.

“What’s happening?”  She said, covering her eyes.  The sudden chance in illumination had hurt.  “Jason, what’s going on?”

Cordova tossed a glance at the small display beside his bed.  “We’re under attack,” he said, wryly.  His voice didn’t even show the slightest trace of panic.  “Grab your shipsuit, if nothing else, and come with me, now!”

She stared at him for a moment, and then leapt out of bed, reaching for her shipsuit.  If the hull were breached, it would be the only thing keeping her alive.  It felt odd pulling it on without anything else, even underwear, but there was no time.  It was a good thing, a silly part of her mind whispered, that the shipsuits weren’t transparent, or she would have showed everyone everything she had.  As it was, the suit felt uncomfortably tight around her body as it smoothed out and prepared to keep her safe.

“Come on,” Cordova snapped.  The note of command was back in his voice, she noted, even though he had taken the time to snatch up most of his outfit.  He had claimed, when she’d asked him about it, that looking confident and in control was half the secret of being a commander, although when he was naked, he didn’t look that different from anyone else.  “We might have to…you know, run!”

He winked at her as they walked – he held her back from running – onto the bridge.  The display was surrounded with red icons, warning of enemy warships inbound on Patrick’s Asteroid, while there were only a handful of friendly ships around.  Two of them vanished even as Kathy watched, not destroyed, but running for their lives.

“Nine battlecruisers…that makes them a full squadron, probably,” Cordova said, as he settled down in his command chair.  “We’re in an interesting position here, my dear.  If we stay powered down, they won’t notice us unless they do a sweep, but if they do, we’re dead.  What should we do?”

Kathy flushed in surprise.  The last thing she’d expected was a request for tactical instructions.  “You fail that test,” Cordova said, mischievously.  He raised his voice to his crew.  “Power up the shields and flash-wake the drive.”

The enemy battlecruisers were closing in on Patrick’s Asteroid.  “Ah, they see us now,” he added, thoughtfully.  “Two of their ships are being diverted to deal with the flotilla…it must be someone overconfident.  Anything less than a superdreadnaught is an insult, damn it.”

Kathy, still smarting from his casual insult, scowled at him.  “Can’t a single battlecruiser take on a heavy cruiser and win?”

“Of course, if we were alone,” Cordova said.  He waved a gloved hand at the display, where newer icons were blinking up as the raiding ships powered up their drives.  “As it is, it’s going to be close, even if they don’t bother to cut a third battlecruiser loose from the squadron.  I have nine cruisers” – he paused as one of the ships flickered out – “eight cruisers and several support ships.  The question, of course, is simple.  Do we attack them to keep them off the asteroid, or is the asteroid already lost?”

He winked at her.  “Get me a link to the asteroid,” he ordered.  “I want to talk to the person in charge.”

The redheaded woman’s appearance, Kathy realised in a moment of shock, was as much a surprise to Cordova as it was to her.  “Daria?”  He stammered.  “I didn’t know that you were on the asteroid…”

“No,” Daria agreed, flatly.  Her relationship with Cordova, as far as Kathy could tell, seemed to be a tart one.  They both respected each other, but felt that the other was more than a little crazy, although that seemed to be a defining trait on anyone out on the Rim for more than a few months.  The Freebooters and Cordova might have had friendly relationships, but they also had their disagreements, mainly about what they actually wanted.  “It was supposed to be a surprise.”

“Sure was,” Cordova agreed.  “Surprised everyone except the Imperials.  Can you get off the asteroid pretty quickly?”

“We’re already within their engagement range,” Daria said.  She leaned closer.  “I need a honest answer, Jason; can you beat them?”

Cordova hated to admit defeat.  “Not all nine, no,” he said, his gaze flickering back to the display.  “We could take one, perhaps two, of those big brutes, but to deal with the rest we need the rest of the fleet, or Colin’s superdreadnaughts.  A single superdreadnaught would eat them for lunch.”

“That’s not an option at the moment,” Daria said.  Cordova looked, just for a second, annoyed.  He hadn’t appreciated being denied any information on the location of Freedom Base.  It was purely for the ex-Observation Squadron starships.  “The Shadow Fleet is weeks away.  I’ve sent a request for help, but I don’t know if anyone can respond.”

“I see,” Cordova said.  “We’ll buy you what time we can, but it won’t be very long.”

“Just win us ten minutes,” Daria said.  “If we have that long to prepare, we can give them one hell of a fight when they try to board.”

Her face vanished from the display.  “How does she know that they’re going to board the asteroid?”  Kathy asked.  “How can she hope to be right about that?”

“Patrick’s Asteroid is big, but it’s not big enough to absorb several perfectly-targeted nuclear missiles,” Cordova commented, tapping his console and sending orders to the remainder of the flotilla.  “If the battlecruisers were just bent on destruction, they’d have opened fire by now on the asteroid itself, instead of pussy-footing around with the defence platforms.  No, they want the asteroid and the people onboard alive.  It suggests that they know more about us than I would prefer.  Rather worrying, that…”

He turned back to his crew.  “Bring up the weapons and drives,” he ordered, as the enemy battlecruisers closed in.  “Open fire!”

***
“The enemy ships have opened fire,” the tactical officer reported.  “Phoenix and Millennium are taking fire from the ships, Sword is taking fire from the platforms.”

Commodore Gallatin nodded.  The discovery of the eight cruisers, all known raiders, hadn’t displeased him in the slightest.  Even if the Marines failed to take anyone alive – and the Marines could hardly be regarded as completely trustworthy these days – the entire flight had just been proven worthwhile.  Destroying the raiders would definitely put a crimp in the enemy plans…and one of them, he saw now, was the Random Numbers.  Ridding the universe of that failed embarrassment of a Family Member would be worth a great deal to Admiral Percival, perhaps even enough patronage to ensure he remained commander of the squadron for as long as possible.

“All ships, return fire on the platforms, but do not strike the asteroid,” he ordered.  “I’ll have the balls of any gunner who hits the asteroid, even by accident.”

He watched as the platforms, one by one, were destroyed.  It was ironic, but he had to be careful, particularly when there was a spinning asteroid involved.  A single hit in the wrong place and gravity would tear the asteroid apart.  The starships were a more minor problem, but they were moving in and out of range, using the chance to launch spreads of missiles towards his ships, but evading them before they could return fire.  The missiles weren't any more dangerous than standard Imperial missiles, but the stately dance of starships was wasting time.

“Order the Dauntless and the Defiant to flicker out to support,” he ordered.  The two battlecruisers flickered out…and reappeared in the midst of the raiding fleet, their weapons already blazing out.  They’d launched, relying on their previous scans instead of waiting for their sensors to pick up the pirate ships again, and the pirates had had no chance to evade.  Two of their ships, hit hard, exploded, while a third flickered out and vanished.  “Good, now…”

He broke off as a new alarm sounded.  One of the enemy raiders had flickered in, right on top of them.  The helmsman swore aloud and pushed the battlecruiser into an evasive manoeuvre, escaping by the skin of their teeth.  Commodore Gallatin privately forgave him the earlier cheek as the enemy raider, deprived of its chance to ram and rid the universe of a battlecruiser, staggered under fire from his ship.

“Good,” he said, nodding to the younger man.  The enemy fleet seemed to be falling back into the darkness.  “All ships, form up on the flag and prepare to approach the asteroid.”

***
“Five ships gone,” Cordova said, flatly.  “Daria, we can’t stay any longer.”

There was a long pause before Daria answered.  “I understand,” she said, flatly.  The odd thing, Kathy saw, was that she did understand.  Cordova’s flotilla had signed up to raid, not to be committed to a hopeless battle.  The runners might not be welcome back with the flotilla, not after they’d run, but hardly anyone on the Rim would blame them for their decision.  “Stay close and observe as long as you can, and then break off and inform Colin.  If I don’t make it…”

She shrugged.  “Ah, he knows what I was going to say,” she said.  “Roast Percival’s balls over an open fire for me, something like that.”

Cordova laughed.  “It will be done, even if I have to roast all of Harmony with him,” he said.  Kathy realised that he wasn’t joking.  “Good luck.”

The image vanished.  “Now we wait,” Cordova said, as the enemy battlecruisers broke off their chase.  Their icons turned and headed back towards the asteroid.  “They’re not going to allow us to distract them any more, so…”

He shrugged.  “We’re on the sidelines now,” he added.  “All we can do is watch.”

***
Patrick’s Asteroid was growing closer now, studied and probed repeatedly by the drones as the fleet closed in.  Weapons emplacements on the rock were carefully noted and targeted with smaller missiles, knocking them out without doing any real damage.  The asteroid shuddered under the blows, but the Geeks had done their work well and it held together, despite the pounding.

“Captains Osborne and Felix report that their drives have recharged,” the communications officer said.  The display updated as the remainder of the battlecruisers closed in and fell into formation around their flagship.  “They can now flicker out on command.”

“Understood,” Commodore Gallatin said, thoughtfully.  If the superdreadnaughts did arrive, he intended to fire a spread of missiles and flicker out, leaving them with a wrecked asteroid and a damaged fleet.  They'd certainly be a lot more paranoid about their security in the future, although Imperial Intelligence had known about Patrick’s Asteroid for decades.  “Colonel Douglas, are you ready?”

“Yes, sir,” Marine Colonel Douglas said.  The solid confidence in his voice was more reassuring than anything else.  Commodore Gallatin had known Douglas for years.  “My people are good to go.”

Commodore Gallatin smiled.  “Give them hell,” he said.  His hand came down on the console, tapping a particular sequence into the command systems.  It required command authorisation, now, to allow the Marines to move.  “Land the landing force!”

Chapter Thirty-Four

“Quiet!”

Daria had once said, only partly in jest, that she’d made a career out of remaining calm when others had been panicking.  There were always opportunities to be had when something – anything – was happening, no matter how bad or disastrous it seemed at the time.  Patrick himself might have been going to pieces as he watched the casual destruction of his asteroid’s defences – it might have been only a basic habitat, but it provided him with a life and status above the ordinary – but Daria refused to panic.  There was no need to panic.

“All right,” she said, as the chatter died down.  They were all looking for her to get them out of this mess.  “We’re armed and they can’t kill us all without blowing the asteroid, right?”  She didn’t wait for answers.  “We can’t surrender, because they’d shoot us, but we have help on the way.  The superdreadnaughts are coming.”

That was a lie – and she was silently grateful she’d spoken to Cordova in private – but it would serve.  “Now, all we have to do is hold them off from boarding the asteroid and taking us alive,” she continued.  “I want everyone with a weapon assigned to support and back up the local defence guys, ok?”

She barked out orders as the control room, the nerve centre of the asteroid, started to settle down and respond to the crisis.  A standard Empire asteroid habitat would have emergency procedures drilled into its inhabitants from a very early age, but they would mainly consist of finding the shelters and remaining out of the way – or sight, if the asteroid was being raided by pirates.  The inhabitants of Patrick’s Asteroid were armed to the teeth, well used to violence and slaughter, and were defending themselves in the certain knowledge that capture meant certain death.  The mind techs might play games with a few of the men and women on the asteroid, but the vast majority would be charged, walked past an Imperial Navy Captain and then thrown out an airlock.  It was the traditional means of execution for a pirate.

The Geeks had designed an extremely capable computer and communications system for the asteroid and she made use of it, ordering squads forward to take up defensive positions around the asteroid.  For once, there were no arguments over precedence, priority or command; everyone knew that their backs were firmly pressed against the wall.  If they were arrested, they were dead…and so they prepared to fight, with all the determination of trapped rats.  The Empire might hold the Rim-dwellers in contempt, but Daria had been among them long enough to know that they were dangerous, if they could all be pointed in the right direction.  That was the tricky part.

She stroked her chin thoughtfully as she contemplated the onrushing Marine landing craft.  Where would they land?  They could reach anywhere on the outer shell of the asteroid within minutes, but where would they choose as a target?  The spaceport, rotating at one end of the asteroid, seemed a tempting target, but Daria knew better.  Almost every asteroid spaceport, rotating counter-wise to its asteroid, was rigged for quick release in case of emergency…and if the Marines landed there, she wouldn’t hesitate to blow it.  A normal asteroid would probably be boarded somewhere where the Marines could deploy, but Patrick’s Asteroid wasn't normal.  She scattered her people around, providing a quick response force and reserves held back for when she knew where they were landing, and waited.  There wasn’t long to wait.

***
“Check in,” Marine Colonel Douglas ordered, as the landing craft started their final approach.  One by one, the twenty Marines in the small craft linked into the combat network, becoming more than human as they merged into a whole.  “Stand by…”

The images being fed directly to his brain showed the exterior of the asteroid, a rocky dark mass, barely illuminated by the light from the dim star.  He'd wondered, back when he’d first realised that the Marine Corps was under suspicion, about rebelling himself, but when he’d realised that the rebels were working with pirates, he had decided that he wasn’t going to join them.  The Marines were normally the first to see what pirates had left behind them after their raids and they cultivated a hatred for the men – and the handful of women – who would perform such atrocities for a handful of credits.  He hadn’t been unaware of dissent spreading through the ranks, and he hadn’t been surprised to realise that a handful of the Marines from Harmony had vanished somewhere into interstellar space, but he’d made his own choice.

“I won’t try to keep you,” he’d said to the men and women he had to lead into battle.  He trusted them all with his life and those of their fellow Marines and so it had been heartbreaking even to admit that his beloved Corps was on the verge of tearing itself apart, along with the Imperial Navy.  “If you believe the message and you want to go join the rebels, go now and don’t look back.  I won’t stop you.  If you want to stay with the Corps, then stay, but no changing your mind in combat.”

It had been an uncomfortable discussion and, in the end, only a handful of his people had left.  He suspected that that had been because of the unique character of the Marine Corps.  Where the Imperial Navy encouraged rivalries and rewarded incompetence, the Marines were a close-knit brotherhood, where the Corps was all.  The rank and file had debated the issue of the rebellion with an openness denied to those who crewed and operated the Navy’s starships, and, in the end, those who had left had done so without hate.  They might never find the rebellion – and he was uncomfortably aware that they might kill some of their former comrades on the asteroid – but he would have sooner gone into battle with an understrength force than have men behind him who didn’t want to be there.  They didn’t make good soldiers.

“Ten seconds,” he said, as the pilot finally selected a location and turned the landing craft towards it.  “Here we go.”

The landing craft (asteroid) was a conical design, equipped with a fusion drive on the underside of the craft.  It wasn't used for propulsion, but for burning through hulls, slicing their way into the target.  The temperature seemed to rise as the drive fired, burning into the rocky hull of the asteroid, even while it struggled to overcome the drive field that was pushing them against the asteroid.  Douglas tensed as updates flickered in from the other Marine craft, noting that they had also begun burning through the asteroid’s hull…and warning that no one knew who would be first into the asteroid.  A standard asteroid had a thinner layer around the habitation section, but the pirate asteroid might be very different.  The Marines had fought their way through habitats that were perfectly standard and habitats that were little more than warrens, dug into the rock.  Imperial Intelligence’s briefing had suggested that Patrick’s Asteroid was the latter, but Douglas knew better than to trust it completely.  They had been wrong before.

For a second, the heat of a star burned within the asteroid.  “We’re through,” the pilot said.  The fusion flame from the drive should have fried anyone lying in wait as it finally cut through the hull.  Douglas wouldn’t have wanted to remain in the area once he knew that there were Marines attempting to break into the asteroid.  “Good luck, sir.”

He was first into the hatch as it swung open, as it should be.  The Marine Corps taught that an officer should always lead his men in battle and Douglas firmly shared that opinion.  The SD troopers might have been commanded by men sitting in orbit drinking coffee while their slave-soldiers fought and died, but the Marines fought and died together.  Warning telltales blinked up in his virtual vision as he half-ran, half-crouched through the long tunnel, still extremely hot after the fusion burn, but he ignored them.  The enemy would be responding almost at once.  Whoever got to the end of the tunnel first would probably win the ensuring firefight.

The tunnel ended in a melted chamber.  It could have been anything from a brothel to the collective toilet facilities of the entire asteroid, but with rock having run like water, it was completely unrecognisable.  It gave off an eerie cave-like appearance, completely deserted – if there had been guards waiting for the burn-through, nothing remained of them – with a handful of tunnels leading out into the asteroid.  He would never admit it, but he was relieved to see them; the embarrassment of knowing that they’d only burned into a bubble in the rock or a chamber that they’d sealed themselves would have been humiliating.  He wouldn’t have been allowed to forget it in a hurry.  The other Marines followed, brief updates flickering from Marine to Marine as they took in the chamber and secured the access points, while launching tiny scanner-drones into the asteroid.  They wouldn’t last long, not if the enemy was organised and ready to fight back, but while they lasted, they would build up an image of how the asteroid went together.  In time, they would build up a complete map of the asteroid and use it to plan the final stages of the conquest.

Behind him, he was vaguely aware of the second landing craft coming in to dock with the first, which had been converted into an airlock for the second craft.  The pilot, a Marine himself, handed over control to the second craft and ran for the hatch, while the second, much larger craft, started to unload it’s Marines into the asteroid.  It would undock, once it was empty, and return to the battlecruisers for another load of Marines.  He suspected that the enemy would choose to attack the Marines, just to prevent them from reinforcing further, but as the minutes crept by, no attack materialised.

“Platoon One, with me,” he ordered, as the reinforcements arrived.  The beachhead could now be held against almost anything the pirates might throw at it.  “Platoon Two, take the second corridor.  Platoon Three, you’re in reserve.”

He ignored the good-natured grumbling running through the communications link and started to lead the way up the passage.  The heat of the fusion drive had billowed out through the corridor as the Marines broke through, leaving the corridor’s original fitting melted and useless, but it was still accessible.  The drones swore that it led ‘upwards,’ into the heart of the asteroid, but it was quite possible that they were going in the wrong direction.  A warren asteroid could be endlessly confusing to a newcomer.  They passed their first body, a man burned and melted into the rock, and checked him, before reaching a blockade.  Someone had, rapidly, sealed off the burn-through with a heavy blast door.  The drones hadn’t been able to get past it.

“Wallace, Stan, set up the plasma cannon,” Douglas ordered, as the Marines fell back.  A plasma cannon could be hazardous to its users in a confined space, but all the Marines wore standard battle armour.  The heavy weapon would burn through the door like it wasn’t there.  “Fire!”

His visor automatically darkened as the cannon fired a single burst of superhot plasma, so bright it burned his eyes, towards the door.  It shattered and blew inwards, smashing though objects the defenders had set up to make it stronger, although that had been a waste of effort.  The defenders were waiting on the other side; a hail of fire, everything from plasma weapons to projectile guns, poured down towards the Marine positions.

Neat, Douglas thought, sourly.  The enemy commander had been smart.  The projectile weapons were useless against the Marines – their armour could handle almost any number of them – but the energy weapons were a different matter.  Worse, the projectiles might hit the plasma cannon, causing the weapon to explode.  If that happened, even battle armour wouldn’t protect the Marines gathered around it.  The Marines reacted at once, a pair of them firing a spread of nearly random shots back into the compartment, while three others launched heavy concussion grenades into the chamber.  The explosions gave them time to rush forward and take up positions just inside the chamber, pouring fire towards their opponents.

He followed them in and snapped off a quick shot towards a half-revealed defender.  The chamber had once been some kind of shopping mall, with stalls and piles of produce everywhere, but now it was being torn apart by the fighting.  The enemy forces had taken up positions where they could fire on the Marines, but their cover wasn't perfect and the Marines were firing back.  Their shooting wasn't very accurate either, although in such confined quarters it didn’t need to be, as long as they were aiming in the right general direction.  Pirates, in his experience, weren't good shots – they rarely picked on someone who could fight back – but they won time while they held the Marines back.  Of course, they wouldn’t have anyone coming to their rescue, but the longer they fought, the longer they remained alive.

“Now,” he sent.  Four Marines launched a spread of grenades right into the heart of the enemy positions.  Shattering explosions blasted through as the grenades detonated, while the Marines ran forward, trusting in their armour to shield them from the blasts, heading right for the enemy positions.  The pirates had been wearing skinsuits, a not-unwise precaution when holes were being burned in the asteroid’s hull, but no body armour.  Only a handful had survived the brutal assault and most of them were badly wounded.  A couple tried to fight on and were brutally suppressed, cuffed, and dumped in the centre of the chamber, the remaining pirates were cuffed and given basic medical care.  Douglas had been once inclined to dismiss that as pointless – they were going to be executed anyway – but they couldn’t be allowed to die before they were interrogated.  They might have captured the Grand High Cyclops of the Pirate Lodge.

The Marines searched the chamber and rapidly discovered that all the exits had been sealed.  Douglas wasn't entirely surprised.  He had been careful to ensure that his Marines could have retreated if they’d bitten off something more than they could chew, but the enemy commander had evidently rated the entire pirate band as expendable.  That lowered the odds that they’d captured or killed someone important, but it wasn’t completely impossible.  Pirate leaders might have been brutal thugs or mass murderers, but they didn’t lack for courage, if only because someone else would have bumped them off long ago.  He ordered the plasma cannon to be set up again while inspecting the handful of pirates.  None of them looked particularly important and two of them, he guessed, would be spilling everything before the interrogators even got to work.

“Nothing important or revealing,” one of the Marines sent.  “No maps or anything useful, just piles of loot.”

Douglas shrugged.  He hadn’t expected the pirates to leave maps of the asteroid lying around, although he would have been glad to take advantage of them if they had been discovered.  The Marines were slowly building up an image of the interior; if they went one way, he reasoned, they would link up with another Marine Company and secure a larger chunk of the asteroid.  He detailed one of his platoons to open that particular hatch while preparing to open a second set of hatches that should, if the image they were building of the geography was accurate, lead further into the asteroid.  It was an annoying, but true fact that the asteroid’s command centre and vital points, such as the life support system, could be anywhere…and, unlike a starship, securing life support didn’t give them automatic powers of life and death.  The carpet under his feet wasn't real carpet, stolen from a hijacked liner, but a genetically-engineered grass that had been around since the dawn of space travel, automatically recycling the air.  The asteroid might have lacked a real biosphere, although even that wasn't certain, but it certainly maintained itself.

“Now,” he ordered.  The plasma cannon fired again.  He braced himself, expecting a second volley of fire, but nothing came at them.  The corridor ahead of them was dark, cool, and seemingly uninhabited.  He launched a spread of drones ahead of the Marines and saw, as they buzzed through the area, that the defenders had pulled back to a second set of hatches.  He couldn’t be certain, but he guessed they had broken into sleeping quarters and the defenders had abandoned them as undefendable.  That didn’t mean that passing through them would be easy.

Carefully, the Marines pressed onwards.  The first IED was discovered within a metre of the hatch, quickly concealed…but not perfectly.  They’d had more challenging problems back at the training centre.  The next two were better-hidden, but the Marines were experienced at spotting traps, detonating them both before they came within blast range.  The handful of rooms were quickly searched, one of them carefully trapped and marked down for later attention, the other with a naked dead girl on the bed.  Douglas checked her quickly, but the cause of death was obvious; her throat had been quickly and brutally cut.

Bastards, he thought.  The girl could have been anything from a lifelong slave to a prostitute to a kidnap victim killed to prevent her family recovering her without a ransom.  It wasn't the missing Kathy Tyler, he was relieved to discover, but her face was completely unknown.  She could have been anyone.  He made a note of the location of her body, so that they could return and see to it that she was treated properly after the asteroid was secured, and returned to the advance.

The asteroid would fall.  It was just a matter of time.

Chapter Thirty-Five

“Is there nothing you can do?”

Cordova shook his head.  Random Numbers was floating at a safe distance – if any distance could be called ‘safe’ when a battlecruiser could flicker in and attack before they realised that it had left the main fleet – from Patrick’s Asteroid, watching as the battlecruisers launched wave after wave of transports towards the asteroid.  The heavy cruiser might have escaped the fighting largely unscathed – Cordova’s famous luck again – but it couldn’t intervene without getting blasted to plasma.

“No,” he said, flatly.  “All we can do is watch – and wait.”

Kathy said nothing.  The irony was bitterly amusing.  She had been a kidnap victim, and then a seduced passenger on the ship, and yet she was worried over the fate of an asteroid inhabited by pirates and other monsters in human form.  Cordova might have been a gentleman – he played the role to excess – but other kidnap victims hadn’t been so lucky.  Her duty was to root for the battlecruisers, surely, and yet…part of her hoped that they would lose.  She didn’t even understand why!  She didn’t want to be on the Rim and part of her had been hoping that Colin would send her back with a message soon, but the rest of her had been enjoying the chance to discuss her new technologies and techniques with the Geeks.  She might even have been happy on the Rim working with them.

And she had seen the misery.  Not just that of her own miners, but that of the refugees and outcasts, doing what they could to survive.  She had felt weak and powerless in the High City, compared to those born to higher Families, but she had been deluding herself.  True misery and grief existed along the Rim and on places like Macore, where the SD troopers ran riot, and the Empire, far from helping the dispossessed, exploited them.  They did what they had to do to survive.

And she had seen the opportunities.  The rebellion would need people like her, people with a foot in both camps…and competent enough to be useful.  She prided herself that she wasn't a parasite, that she’d paid her own way, even though she would never have gotten as far as she had without Family connections, and the chance to help shape the future of the Empire and the entire human race was irresistible.  She'd seen some of Colin’s concepts for the future and had found them attractive.  On a level playing field, she would have owned the entire High City within the year, but as a junior girl from a junior Family…

As simple as that, she joined the rebellion.

***
“They’re breaking out of the mall,” someone shouted.  “They’re coming up the service shafts.”

“Order Gary and his band to move down and reinforce the defenders there,” Daria ordered, keeping her voice calm.  It had been a long time since she had commanding troops in combat and she was painfully aware that her pirates and freebooters weren't trained or equipped as well as the Marines, but she hadn’t lost the knack.  Just pretending that everything was perfect, and that it would all work out in the end, seemed to work wonders.  “Tell Tom to move his own forces to the 17th Access Point and prepare to defend that position.”

She scowled down at the display.  The asteroid’s internal communications system was holding up – the Marines had tried to hack it, but it was too different from anything else in the Empire to go down easily – but they were knocking out most of the surveillance systems as they passed the sensors.  Patrick had been something of a voyeur and had had cameras and monitors everywhere, but the only way to tell where the Marines had occupied was by noting which cameras were no longer responding to signals.  They were shooting them out as they passed.  She had tried to send a group behind enemy lines, using one of the maintenance tunnels, but the group had apparently been wiped out.  The Marines were good when it came to breaking through barriers, but they were devils when it came to manoeuvre warfare.  It would probably have saved time, she acknowledged sourly, if she’d shot the men herself.

And the asteroid was falling.  The Marines had broken through in three distinct sections, two habitation sections and one commercial sector.  So far, they’d managed to link two of the occupied areas together, while pushing further through the maze of corridors into the interior of the asteroid.  Her own forces were still powerful, but the Marines were moving faster than she had anticipated.  The only hope was to hold them back long enough for help to arrive – and she had absolutely no idea if any would come in time – and they were running out of time.  As the Marines learnt more about how the asteroid went together, they would deduce the location of the command centre and come for her.  There would be no escape.

I wonder if they know me, she thought, suspecting that the same thought would be shared by most of her people.  Imperial Intelligence had probably been trying to keep tabs on the Freebooter League since she had founded it, after arriving on the Rim, but how much would they know about her?  They couldn’t know everything, or they would have spared no effort to find her…but it was possible that they might just have had suspicions.  Perhaps they had intended to track down the League from Macore, once they had the planet firmly under control.  She’d certainly established enough links with the government…and wasn't that an irony?

Another camera failed.  “They’re moving through Corridor Nine,” a voice whispered in her ear, through the earpiece she wore.  “They’ll be at Strongpoint Twelve within ten minutes.”

Daria nodded.  “I understand,” she said.  Strongpoint Twelve had been designed to be impossible to break through, but the Marines didn’t seem to know the meaning of the word.  “Keep me informed.”

***
The rocket slammed into Douglas’s armour and sent him flying backwards, crashing into the rocky wall in a tangle of arms and legs.  Dull pain, dampened out slightly by the implants, flared through his body, while red telltales flashed up in front of his eyes.  The armour had protected him, barely, but it hadn’t been able to prevent him from being slammed against the wall.  He paused long enough to confirm that the armour was still operative, before slowly pulling himself back to his feet and recovering the plasma rifle.  A quick check revealed that the weapon had been damaged and rendered useless.  He had been lucky that the power pack hadn’t exploded under the abuse.

“Pass me a rifle,” he ordered the medics, when he got back to the shopping mall – or whatever it had really been.  The fighting had only gotten more intense and seven Marines had been wounded, one badly.  He picked up the Marine’s rifle, unlocked it with his command code, and returned to the front.  The guarding Marines waved him through after checking his identity carefully; the enemy had already tried to launch a sneak attack through a maze of tunnels none of the Marines had suspected.  The attack, if it had been a little earlier, would have wiped out the aid station.

They’d fought their way up to a flight of stairs, leading further into the asteroid, but now there was seemingly unmovable opposition.  The stairs might as well have been designed to trap Marines, even Marines in light battle armour; anyone who tried to make their way up the stairs would be gunned down before they could do anything.  The defenders, worse, had plasma cannons of their own…and they could burn through battle armour as if it were paper.

“We’re going to have to dust it,” Sergeant Booker said, as Douglas returned to the position.  They might have cleared out most of the outer shell, but the Marines were still watchful, still aware that there were enemy forces everywhere.  “Sir, I need your permission to use the debonders.”

Douglas didn’t hesitate.  “Set them up,” he ordered.  The growing picture of the asteroid’s interior showed that the Marines would be fairly safe using them if they fell back several meters.  Molecular debonders were not regarded as safe weapons by any definition.  Douglas had known hardened Marines who freely admitted that they gave them the willies.  “Hurry!”

“Done,” Booker called.  “Fall back, now!”

The Marines fired a final volley of grenades up the stairs – uselessly, as far as Douglas could tell, although it did keep the enemy’s attention focused – and fell back.

“Clear,” Douglas shouted.  “Fire in the hole!”

Booker transmitted the activation signal to the debonders.  For a long moment, nothing seemed to happen…and then a tidal wave of dust collapsed, just in front of them.  The debonders had undone all of the molecular bonds within range of the disruption field, regardless of what they were holding together; rock, flesh, bone…

“Move,” Booker shouted.  The Marines ran forward, powered leg armour pushing them upwards through the dust and up onto the next level.  Resistance was minimal at first, but rapidly hardened, although the handful who’d only been touched by the field surrendered almost at once.  They’d watched their legs or arms dissolving into dust and had been terrified out of their minds.  “Forward!”

The next position fought with a stubborn determination that Douglas could almost admire, had they been Marines, or even SD troopers.  He had wondered if they would face one of the rebel Marine units, which would have been an interesting and chancy fight, but the tactics had been all wrong.  Marines with armour would have fought a mobile war through the passages, not tried to set up blockade after blockade.  It would have been impossible to repeat the debonder tactic – the fire was too intense – and grenades had to be used to clear the blockade, before they could push onwards.  The reinforcements rushed forward, clearing the remains of the blockade and securing the prisoners, before Douglas could advance further.  There was no way to know for sure, but he felt, with his instincts, that he had just won the decisive victory.  The heart of the pirate base was within his grasp.

The fighting rolled forwards until they reached a final room, heavily guarded and secured.  The Marines concentrated their fire on it and cleared the defenders away, before burning through, expecting to break directly into the control room.  Instead, they broke into a darkened room, barely lit by emergency lighting.  Douglas bought up his lights and saw, positioned neatly in the middle of the room, a single chair.  Sitting in the chair…

For a moment, he thought he was looking at an alien; it was wrapped in metal and connected to the main system through hundreds of wires.  A closer inspection revealed that ‘it’ was human, a young girl, barely out of her teens.  He almost felt sick when he realised that it wasn't a costume, or some strange fashion, but implants that were boring directly into her body.  Her face was marred and broken by metal, while, looking at her, he wasn't even certain if she could move!  She seemed to be one with the machine.

“My God,” Booker breathed.  The horror on his face was visible even through the armour.  He had two daughters about her age.  “What did they do to her?”

One blue eye – the other had been replaced with an implant that seemed to dig right into her eye socket and on into her brain – opened and peered at them.  The sight was sickening, but it also told him what they were seeing, a Geek.  The Marines had broken into a handful of hidden techno-bases in their time, illegal research centres exploring the forbidden regions of science, but actually seeing a Geek was rare.  They normally preferred to work from behind the scenes, hidden somewhere out on the Rim.

“Nothing I did not wish done,” she said.  The voice came from everywhere, from her blackened and twisted mouth, glinting with metal, and from speakers mounted on the wall.  It was an obscene cacophony of voices, each one stranger and darker than the last.  It chilled his blood.  “Burn in hell…”

Douglas barely got out of the room before she exploded.  The blast was…weird, almost like a mixture of a debonder and a proper explosive, but when they picked themselves up again and went back to look, there was nothing left of the Geek.  The lights were flickering and failing all around them; he realised, in a moment of sick fascination, that the Geek had been the asteroid’s computer centre.  No wonder they hadn’t been able to hack into it.

“Come on,” he said, as they regrouped.  There could be no clearer demonstration of the rightness of their cause.  The people who could do that to themselves, or to innocent victims, needed to be stopped.  “It’s time to put an end to this.”

***
“Nightingale is dead.”

Daria sighed as the computers went over onto the backup systems.  It had been a weakness in the system from the start, but one the Geeks swore was unavoidable, although Daria suspected that there had been other priorities at work.  Nightingale might have volunteered for the role of central computer, a task that had given a crippled ex-slave a role in the community and a chance to have a life, but she had been a Geek though and though.  They might have wanted to ensure that they could remove her if she wanted to leave.

“I understand,” she said.  There would be time to mourn later, if there was a later.  The backup systems were old, so old that she doubted that anyone alive had used them when they had been first introduced, but they would suffice.  As long as they held out, she could still coordinate the defence and make the Marines pay a price in blood for taking her life.  “Tell the defenders that they’re going to try coming up the shaft towards the command centre and I want that held.”

Patrick looked up from where he had been staring into space.  “How do you know,” he challenged, “what they’re going to do?”

Daria gave him a smile that should have chilled him to the bone.  “Because that is what I would do in their place,” she said.  She would have moved to seize the shaft, if only because there might have been something important connected to it, and there was no sign that the enemy commander was stupid.  Rather the opposite, in fact. “Perhaps…”

She looked down at the console as an alarm sounded.  “Or maybe…”

***
“It was a Geek?”

“It appears so,” the communications officer said, as the images appeared on the display.  Commodore Gallatin was too experienced to feel much when he looked upon the mutilated girl, but some of his other officers were less experienced.  The muffled comments he heard suggested that they were just as shocked.  “The Marines think that she was actually the computer centre for the entire asteroid.”

“Weird,” Commodore Gallatin said.  Judging from the poor girl’s position in the asteroid, she had been kept far closer to possible danger than he would have allowed, unless there was some reason why she couldn’t be moved.  Perhaps they’d just left her there and the entire asteroid computer system had grown up around her.  “Tell them to push on towards the command centre and…”

“Emergence,” the tactical officer said.  “Three ships, heading towards the asteroid!”

Commodore Gallatin smiled.  “They must not have realised that it’s under attack,” he said.  The thought wasn't that funny.  The newcomers might be the superdreadnaughts.  “Can you identify?”

The tactical officer frowned.  “They read out as modified bulk freighters, but I don’t recognise the design,” he said.  “They’re actually larger than superdreadnaughts, five kilometres long, but they’re not registered…”

“Perhaps they’re from an unknown colony world,” Commodore Gallatin said.  There were some shipyards along the Rim, but none of the ones the Empire knew about had been capable of building ships that sized.  The image on the display was reassuring.  They were massive blocky ships, as unimaginative as any other freighter, barely capable of making enough speed to give a superdreadnaught a chase.  The designer had stuck a military-grade drive in, he saw, but the ships were too large for even that to be useful.  “Order them to heave to and prepare to be boarded.”

He smiled as the ships seemed to alter course.  They were already well within missile range from all nine of his ships, although even a single battlecruiser could take them out with ease.  They might have been bigger than superdreadnaughts, but unless their designers had included superdreadnaught-style armour, they weren’t going to be able to survive a single hit.  Their shields were pitiful compared to a destroyer’s shields…and yet, they were making out as if they were going to fight.

“Fire a warning shot,” he ordered.  There was no need to hurry.  The freighters would be lumbering along for hours before they escaped his missile range.  It looked almost as if they were panicking.  “One single…”

The freighters opened fire.  Commodore Gallatin stared, unable to believe his eyes, as a thousand missiles blasted out of the lead freighter, aimed directly at his ships.  The impossible torrent of icons failed to vanish from the display, racing towards his position…not even a superdreadnaught could fire so many missiles in a single salvo.  It couldn’t be real!

“Cycle the drives,” he shouted, ten seconds too late.  “Get us out of here.”

The missiles slammed against the battlecruiser’s shield, flattened them, and smashed into the ship.  The battlecruiser blew apart in a tearing burst of plasma.  The other battlecruisers, targeted as well, failed to even mount a defence.  Ten seconds after the Indestructible died, the final battlecruiser of 45th Battlecruiser Squadron followed it into oblivion.  The battle was over before they even had a chance to fire back.

Chapter Thirty-Six

Penny rubbed her cheek where Percival had struck her.

“Stupid bitch,” Percival shouted, too angry to even think.  “You told me they wouldn’t go after Pollack!”

Penny caught herself before she gave in to the first flash of anger and hit him back.  Displays of temper were not uncommon and they had been growing more and more frequent, but it had been the first time he’d actually struck her physically.  Violence against the lower orders was so…unlike him that, for once, she was lost for words.  He didn’t even play discipline or dominance games with her in bed.  There were some aristocrats, Family Members, who cared so little for their subordinates that they would use violence, but Percival wasn't that kind of person.  Rapidly, she reviewed her exit plan and winced.  Her service to Percival would, ironically, mark her out as a danger to the rebellion.  Perhaps she should just grab a flight out of Harmony and vanish somewhere into the Core Worlds.

“I just had the Lord High Manager of Pollack in here,” Percival thundered, choosing not to mention that the Lord High Manager had run like a rabbit to Harmony, the only world in the sector with better defences than his own.  “He wants the rebellion stamped out, now, and wants me to commit vast numbers of my forces to Pollack and the other industrial nodes.  If it’s not done yesterday…”

Penny kept her face blank with an effort.  She could imagine the conversation.  Percival would have been confronted, for the first time since he’d taken over the sector, with a personality fully as demanding and entitled as his own, with the backing of the most powerful Clan in the sector.  The Roosevelt Clan wouldn’t allow him to get away with making a token gesture of support.  They’d want the entire Sector Fleet massed at their worlds and the other worlds could burn, for all they cared.

But she had been right, damn it, except Colin had pulled another trick out of his sleeve.  No one had even thought about the danger of Colin using his superdreadnaughts and trying to pose as Commodore Tamworth’s squadron…and everyone knew that the only power with superdreadnaughts was the Imperial Navy.  The largest anyone else had was a battleship…and while Pollack’s defenders would have been suspicious if a fleet of battleships had arrived, they would barely have questioned a fleet of superdreadnaughts, particularly ones with the right codes.  The ships had arrived, waltzed right through defences that should have daunted the entire Sector Fleet…and blown the command post away with the first salvo.  No one would have done anything like that unless they were a little bit desperate, and perhaps mad, but the results couldn’t be hidden.  One of the best-defended worlds in the sector had been humiliated…and everyone on the ground had seen the fortress explode.

The factories, either orbital or based on the ground, hadn’t been touched, but everyone knew Colin could have destroyed most of them with his opening shots.  It hardly mattered.  There had been an endless small-scale rebellion on Pollack before the attack, but now it was a much larger rebellion, with real hope for success.  The corporate goons were finding it much harder to keep the entire planet, or even just the sectors that the Clan controlled directly, in lockdown, while acts of resistance were becoming increasingly brazen.  Before, the rebels had feared that there was no hope; now, they had hope…and help from outside.

It was the old problem, Penny knew.  The Clans would probably like to keep the workers in total ignorance of the universe, even try to introduce a religion or worldview that would do all the hard work of keeping them down, but it rarely worked completely.  The routine work could be handled by robots, even though humans were cheaper, but the more advanced work needed trained workers and it was impossible to prevent them learning that the Clan didn’t create and operate the universe, let alone the factories.  For every worker who accepted his place in the Clan’s scheme of things, there were a dozen who wanted to be free.

The Roosevelt Clan, in line with the other Clans and Families, had created a highly-efficient police state on their private worlds. The problem was that the more effective the police state actually became, the more production suffered, if only because of the increased levels of security checks.  It only became worse when the security forces were punished for failures that weren't their fault, so they became unreliable…and the pattern reached all the way up to the junior scions sent out to run the factories.  They might have been Family, but they weren't allowed to change policy or even relax slightly…and they were punished for failure.  Penny had a sneaking suspicion that many of them, offered the choice, would go over to the rebels, if they were offered protection from their former workers.

She almost smiled as Percival continued ranting.  She was a whore, in effect, and she had sold herself to him, but he needed her now.  He might not think much of her, he certainly wouldn’t even consider marrying her and bringing her into his Family, but he knew that he needed her.  The real question was if she needed him?

“So you give him what he wants,” Penny said, when he had calmed down enough to listen to her.  She kept an eye on his fists, prepared to brace herself if he took another swing at her, and smiled when he forced himself to relax.  He wasn't a great tactician, not outside the political sphere, but he knew that beating her into a pulp wouldn’t help.  “He wants support, so you offer him that support.”

Percival waved a hand in the direction of the display, the holographic lights flickering over his hand.  “And from where?”  He asked.  He nodded towards the icons that represented task forces, still – in theory – orbiting threatened planets.  Several ships had just vanished, several taken by mutineers who had flickered out towards the Rim, while others had been ripped apart by infighting.  “I have one superdreadnaught squadron that I can deploy; I need to keep the other one here to cover Harmony.  If I send that squadron to Pollack, I won’t be able to redeploy it…and, seeing that one of its ships is in the yard, it would actually be outgunned if it engaged the enemy.”

He looked over at her, his eyes bitter.  “So, where do you suggest I pull forces from to cover Pollack?  What about Pollock?  What about the other Roosevelt worlds?”

Penny said nothing.  “I could split up the fleet and send three superdreadnaughts to each of the major worlds, but that would leave us open to a single overwhelming punch,” he added.  “So tell me, where do you suggest I pull starships from to cover a single world?”

“A single world owned by a Clan with real clout,” Penny said.  She studied the display for a long moment.  “You have SD garrisons on Fairfax, Dartmoor and Good Wishes.  Pull those off and send them to Pollack.  It might be a good idea to pull off some others, maybe even a division from Macore, and add them to the reinforcement force.”

“Those worlds were restive before Harper decided to launch his idiot rebellion,” Percival pointed out.  “If I pull off the garrisons, they will revolt – again.”

Penny smiled.  “So what?”

Percival gaped at her.  “So what?”

“Those worlds don’t present any kind of real threat,” Penny said.  “We discovered them when they’d fallen back to barbarism and started climbing back up again.  The most advanced world had barely reached rockets and nuclear weapons when our ships appeared in their skies and they certainly didn’t present any problem when it came to occupying them.  Pull out the garrisons and maybe they will revolt, but they can’t threaten the remainder of the sector, let alone the Empire.”

She paused.  “That’s about a million troopers in all,” she added, trying to sound more confident than she felt.  “They all go to Pollack.  Pollack’s native resistance movement gets crushed, or at least held down, and the Roosevelt Clan is happy with you.  You use that to get them to add their weight to your request for assistance to Admiral Quentin, who has at least two additional squadrons of superdreadnaughts he can spare.  Once they arrive, you can broaden out the patrols and start harassing the harassers back.”

Percival frowned.  “And if he decides to stall a little longer?”

“He wouldn’t dare, not if the Roosevelt Clan got behind and pushed,” Penny assured him.  Politics at such a high level were murky, but she had studied them long enough to be fairly sure that Roosevelt had far more clout in the sectors near Sector 117 than any other Clan…and they would certainly have clients in high places.  Even if Admiral Quentin weren’t a Roosevelt Client himself, he would have subordinates who were bound to the Clan.  “The last thing he would want is to risk Roosevelt pushing for his removal.”

Percival smiled.  Penny could almost guess at his thoughts.  The last time Roosevelt had pushed for someone’s removal, a junior officer had assassinated him and claimed the reward.  It wasn't legal, but no one would dare raise a complaint, not outside the High City itself, where few would care.  Roosevelt was rich and powerful enough to make its own law.

“And then…what does Colin do next?”

Penny considered that.  “He fired off most of his missiles in the engagement,” she said, gently feeling her cheek.  It still hurt.  “He has to return to his base along the Rim to rearm his ships before he can do anything else.”

“Are you sure of that?”

“Pollack has one of the best scanning networks in the sector,” Penny said.  Apart from Harmony’s network, she didn’t think that there were any better networks within the sector, even the other Roosevelt worlds.  “They fired off nearly three thousand missiles in the engagement and that represents a considerable expenditure, even for a superdreadnaught squadron.  They may raid a handful of smaller targets on the way home, but they have to go home, the sooner the better.”

She looked up at the display again, silently commanding it to show the maximum distance Colin’s ships could travel.  The only good thing, as far as she could tell, of what was rapidly becoming a civil war was that the capabilities of the other side’s ships were well-understood.  Colin’s ships had to be within an expanding sphere centred on Pollack…and, although that wasn't always helpful, it showed that they wouldn’t have reached the Rim, not yet.  The tactical display obscured the true scale of space, and how tiny a superdreadnaught was on such a scale, but even if Colin had pushed his ships to the limit, risking burning out his drives, he couldn’t be outside that sphere.

“And we sent a squadron into the Rim to raid one of their asteroids,” she added.  “That will force him to take precautions against Imperial Intelligence learning of the locations of his secret bases.  If we captured someone who knew that location, or even if that person is missing, he will have to assume that they have been compromised.  He will have to move his bases before we can get Commodore Tamworth out there, which will force him to concentrate on saving as much of the rebellion as he can, and so…”

She smiled.  “He might launch a handful of smaller raids, just to annoy us, but I doubt he will risk anything as dangerous as Pollack again,” she concluded.  “Once the reinforcements arrive, you can expand your grip on the sector and position them for taking advantage of any intelligence breakthroughs.  The fleet Colin has is powerful, but without a secure base and time for maintenance…”

Percival smiled as the picture formed in his mind.  There was a general rule in the Imperial Navy that every starship needed one day in a shipyard for every day on deployment, although that rule was often honoured more in the breach than observance.  Colin had been pushing his superdreadnaughts hard – indeed, it was unlikely that any other superdreadnaught force had been pushed so hard since the War – and his ships would be feeling the effects.  If the Imperial Navy could push him onto the run, they might wear him down…or even force him to surrender.

“Assuming that the battlecruisers succeed,” he said, pessimistically.  “If Commodore Gallatin fails, we won’t know about it for weeks.”

“I doubt he will fail,” Penny said.  “We now know that the superdreadnaughts were not in a position to intervene.  Even if there was something tougher there, perhaps the five battlecruisers that were part of the old Observation Squadron, Commodore Gallatin would have the option of retreating if he felt himself to be outmatched.  The asteroid wouldn’t generate a gravity shadow and so…all he’d have to do is spin up the drives and flicker out.”

She allowed her voice to soften.  “Commodore Gallatin is a good officer and a skilful commander,” she said.  She might as well have killed his career.  Competence wasn't rewarded in the Imperial Navy and it wasn't as if there wasn't enough dirt on his homosexual exploits to kill his career.  “He also has the moral courage to retreat if he feels outmatched.”

Which is more than can be said for some others, she added, silently.  The Court of Inquiry into Commodore Hewitt’s failure at Athena would probably be a whitewash – Hewitt had been one of Percival’s chosen hatchet men – but everyone knew the truth.  If Hewitt had taken the chance to flicker out and escape before Colin had started broadcasting to the squadron, he might still be alive and the traitors might never have decided to throw their lot in with the rebels.  It was possible, too possible, that the other ships that had vanished out in the darkness of interstellar space had also thrown their lot in with the Shadow Fleet.

“We’ll see,” Percival said, grimly.  He scowled up at her, his eyes drifting over the bruise on her cheek.  “And what do we do if the Lord High Manager demands that we send all of our superdreadnaughts to Pollack?”

Penny scowled.  His eyes, falling now to her uniform, wandered, making her wonder just what had happened when he’d had that dinner with the Imperial Intelligence officer.  Normally, he would have boasted about any new conquest to her, as if to remind her that she wasn’t irreplaceable, but he hadn’t said a word about it.  It might have been the worst night of his life, or maybe she’d just left him, or maybe…hell, maybe he had been a gentleman.  Who knew?  She knew him well and he could still surprise her at times.  

“If he does that, he can go to hell,” Penny said, with sudden candour.  Percival laughed in amusement.  “He cannot demand that you leave Harmony uncovered.”

“He doesn’t care about Harmony,” Percival said, still smiling.  “You know I can’t tell him that.  He thinks we’re here to do is beck and call.”

You mean we’re not?  Penny thought.  She had grown to be comfortable with that, although she knew she’d lost all of her ideals as she’d risen in the ranks, but it was odd to see Percival so concerned.  On the other hand, if he did as the Lord High Manager wanted, he would lose his position, merely for leaving the base at Harmony uncovered.  No one, not even his patrons, would lift a finger in his defence.  But if he didn’t…

“Be diplomatic,” she urged, reflecting that it was hardly Percival’s strong suit.  “Remind him that if Harmony is lost, Pollack and the rest of the sector will fall quickly and that will be far more costly, in the long run.  He can’t order you to do the impossible, can he?”

Percival snorted.  “I suspect he thinks he can do what he likes,” he said.  Penny carefully concerned her smile.  Percival had pretty much the same problem.  The difference was that Percival was self-centred to an astonishing degree, while the Lord High Manager was very aware that failure to defend and maintain Pollack would be disastrous to the Clan as a whole.  “You have met him, haven’t you?”

Penny nodded.  “Good,” Percival said.  “Now, go visit the medic and have that…wound seen to, then have the deployment orders cut for the SDs.  We may as well try to keep the bastard happy.”

“Yes, sir,” Penny said.  She composed herself and stood to attention.  “I shall see to it at once.”

She left, resisting the urge to collapse until she was safely back in her own quarters, alone.  Percival, much to her private relief, hadn’t ordered her to share his rooms, something she suspected was because of his selfishness.  He wouldn’t want to share his bed while he was sleeping, even with his pretty young lover.  Penny would have liked a cuddle afterwards, from time to time, but a man as selfish as Percival, who hadn’t even bothered to apologise for hurting her, wouldn’t worry about her pleasure.  She’d met men who liked giving pleasure, or knew that it was their only way to get the girl back into bed, but Percival didn’t need to care.  He had been surrounded from an early age by girls who just couldn’t say no.

Afterwards, she pulled herself together and wiped quick-heal on her cheek.  The drugs were expensive and using them without permission or a medical check was forbidden, but Penny had no qualms about using her position to conceal the usage.  She couldn’t have wandered the station with a bruise; everyone would have known who had given it to her and the knives would have been sharpened.  Her position had been built on a thousand shattered careers, a thousand damaged lives…and some would want revenge.  If her position looked weakened, if her patron looked to be tiring of her, they would strike…

And that, she reflected, was the real truth of the Empire.

Chapter Thirty-Seven

“The concept was a success, then?”

Salgak nodded.  “Deploying even one of the arsenal ships risked exposing their existence to the Empire, but we believe that the danger involved in losing Patrick’s Asteroid and the people present on the rock outweighed it,” he said.  “The Empire doesn’t know what happened to the ships and won’t until its far too late.”

“Unless there was a stealthed ship observing from a distance,” Colin said, grimly. He’d meant to move his plans forward, but deploying one of his secret weapons forced his hand.  If the Empire knew about the arsenal ships, any halfway competent officer could come up with a counter.  “But yes, you did well.”

He smiled at the memory.  The destruction – the annihilation - of the battlecruisers had trapped nine hundred Marines on Patrick’s Asteroid, on the verge of breaking through and seizing the command centre, which would have given them the asteroid…and trapped them there.  The Empire didn’t know how close it had come to breaking up a chunk of the rebellion; if they’d managed to kill Daria, and even Cordova, he didn’t know who else could hold the Freebooter’s League together.  The Marines hadn’t known it, but they’d been in a stronger position than they knew.

But they had been trapped.  Digging them out would have been costly and destroying the asteroid would have killed Daria and the rest of the inhabitants, so Cordova had managed to talk both sides into a deal.  The Marines surrendered and were promised a flight back to the Empire, unless they wanted to join the rebels, but few had chosen to leave their people.  Colin suspected that that would always be the case with the Marines.  The entire group, or effectively the entire group, would come over, or not.  They didn’t have the weaknesses in the starship crews, or the histories that would lead them to rebel against the Empire, and not all of them felt that the rebellion was worthwhile.  Colin had promised himself that he would respect such decisions – and he would – but it was a shame to lose such men.  They would have been welcome on his side.

He looked down at the display and smiled.  He hadn’t expected to come back to the Rim and discover that his forces had been enhanced by one battlecruiser, four heavy cruisers, nine light cruisers and a destroyer, but that was what he had found.  His message had reached ears that had heard rumours, and had felt the heavy weight of the SD troopers on their backs, and launched mutinies.  The SD troopers might have been intended to keep the ships loyal, but they lacked the training and skill to carry out their mission, once the crewmen and junior officers refused to be intimidated.  He’d read reports that suggested that several other ships had been torn apart by internal fighting, vital components and sections shot up by ignorant or terrified SDs, weakening Percival’s forces still further.

Treat people like they’re traitors and they become traitors, he thought, with a certain amount of vindication.  The newcomers had the same basic story as himself, or the others who had formed the original committee; they’d been held down, either by birth or competence, and had hated the system, but had felt helpless to challenge it.  He’d shown them that the system could be challenged, convinced them that it could be done, and as the ripples from his message and the rebellion spread further into the Empire, he knew that others would make their own bid for freedom.  

His communicator buzzed.  “Admiral, this is David,” David’s voice said.  “The committee members are just coming onboard now.  Would you like them shown to the conference room?”

“Yes, please,” Colin said.  He smiled.  This was one committee meeting that could not, would not, be held on an asteroid.  Patrick’s Asteroid was being cleaned out and abandoned even as the committee met to discuss the final stroke of the first phase of the war.  It would require total security and only the superdreadnaughts could guarantee that.  Besides, he rather suspected that Daria had lost her taste for asteroid habitats.  “We’ll be there in two minutes.”

Daria looked…tired, but happy, when she was shown into the conference room.  Colin stood up to welcome her and surprised himself by giving her a hug; he hadn’t realised, until that moment, how much he would have missed her if she had been captured or killed.  She had brought the freebooters and most of the Rim to the rebellion, but she was also a friend, someone who had risked much on his behalf.  The courage she’d shown by standing her ground on the asteroid deserved a medal, but the rebellion wasn't issuing medals, not yet.  Colin had also promised himself that he wouldn’t have medals designed until Harmony Base was in his hands and the rebellion was on a secure footing.  

“It’s good to see you again,” he said, as he showed her to her seat.  “You probably saved most of the asteroid by yourself.”

“Well, that’s debatable, but thank you anyway,” Daria said, with a grin.  Her face, normally cold and thoughtful, shone for a moment.  “The Geeks deserve most of the credit for bringing their ships to the party.”

“We could not have left you trapped there,” Salgak assured her, his implants clicking and whirring as he inched towards his seat.  A laser beam flickered out, attempting to communicate with the superdreadnaught’s computers, only to be rejected.  Satisfied, the Geek sat down.  “We do not blame you for the death of our friend.”

Colin nodded.  He’d heard the story from Daria and a couple of others.  The Geeks had rescued a slave girl who had been crippled by her former master and brought her into their collective.  She’d been beyond repair – the Geeks hadn’t been able to fix the nerve damage her former master had inflicted – and so they’d integrated her into the asteroid, giving her another body of a sort.  The thought was almost sickening…and yet, she’d been quite happy.  The Geeks had claimed that, one day, it would be possible to integrate human brains into the controlling systems of a starship…and had even predicted that, one day, all of humanity would have a mechanical body.  Colin hadn’t believed him.  If nothing else, how would the man-machines have sex?

Cordova came in, his smile bright enough to light up the room on its own.  “Ah, the hero of Pollack returns,” he pronounced, clapping Colin on the shoulder.  “You have more nerve than I do and I’m the sneakiest bastard on the Rim.  If you don’t believe me, just ask me.”

Colin smiled.  Losing Cordova wouldn’t entirely have been an unmixed disaster – he still didn’t trust the man, although he was fairly certain that he wasn't a plant now – but the rebellion needed heroes.  Cordova had shown considerable nerve himself, first by attacking the battlecruisers to win Daria time to prepare her defences, then in lurking along the edge of the asteroid cluster, watching the battlecruisers as they invested and invaded the asteroid.  He might have been conceited and full of himself half the time, with a willingness to say things that no one else would dare, but there was no denying his nerve.

“It was nothing,” he said, only part-truthfully.  If the fortresses had been warned, or if they’d realised that there had been something wrong with the IFF signals he’d been sending them, they could have held their fire until they had all of the superdreadnaughts within range…and then burned them out of space.  Their opening salvo could have been completely devastating.  “I had the advantage of surprise and sheer disbelief that anyone could be so stupid as to try something as boneheaded as sneaking in without shields…”

Cordova laughed.  “You want to bet that the next superdreadnaught they’ll see, they’ll try to blow out of space without asking questions later?”

“The thought had occurred to me,” Colin said.  The Roosevelt Clan would be screaming for support and reinforcements from Percival, who would have to cut loose some of his own superdreadnaughts and tie them down defending a fixed target.  Normally, that would have been a good thing, but now…now it was an irritating problem.  “Still, we can, but hope.”

He tapped the table as the hatches sealed.  “This meeting is now called to order,” he said, taking his seat.  “It’s good to see you all again, alive and well.”  He paused.  “As you may have noticed, we have some new friends with us, escorted to this place by the freebooters.  Does anyone, now, have any doubts about them?”

“I know Lieutenant Carson, off the Bullet,” Captain Sosaku Tsuji said.  “He was an effective officer, but he struck a superior once and was condemned to be busted down to Lieutenant for the remainder of his career.  I don’t know why they didn’t simply discharge him from the service, but I do believe that he is trustworthy.  He certainly has no cause to love the Families.”

Colin listened impassively as two other Captains added similar stories.  The problem, however, was one that wouldn’t fade in a hurry.  The smallest ship in the Imperial Navy, the gunboat, had a crew of ten.  The destroyers had two hundred…and it went upwards from there.  A superdreadnaught might have as many as four thousand crewmen onboard without straining the life support, although three thousand was more common.  The last week alone had brought nearly ten thousand new recruits to the Shadow Fleet and not all of them were known to his people.  How could they vouch for people they didn’t even know?

Anderson and his men will have to keep an eye on them, he decided, grimly.  A single Imperial Intelligence agent within the crews could be a disaster, assuming that they remained undetected, although most Imperial Intelligence agents on the original ships had been discovered quickly.  He still had a nagging suspicion, however, that they had been meant to uncover the known spies…and missed the real agents.  There were just too many people involved in the rebellion.  It proved, in hindsight, just why the Empire had been so confident that rebellion on such a scale was impossible, although they’d missed the tendency of people to obey orders and ask questioned later.

“It’s something we’re going to have to watch,” he said.  “On a related note, it is quite possible that some ships will attempt to surrender without a fight, so give them a chance to do so if you can without risking your ships and crew.  Newcomers don’t get to go to Freedom Base or the shipyards, not now, so forward them to Weeping Child.  They can be met there and integrated into the Shadow Fleet.”

He paused.  “But that is not what I intended to discuss today,” he said, grandly.  He tapped a single command into the console and a star system appeared in front of them.  “Harmony Base.”

There was a brief wave of conversation.  “I believe,” Colin said, lifting his voice above the noise, “that we have a window of opportunity to hit the base directly and take or destroy the Sector Fleet.  If we can occupy the base, we will be able to finish liberating this sector and gear up for striking right into the heart of the Empire.”

“If,” Daria said.  “Do the arsenal ships really add that much to your strength?”

“Used properly, yes,” Colin said.  “There are other possibilities as well.  If Percival does send off one of his superdreadnaught squadrons to Pollack or the other Roosevelt worlds, we would have a chance of actually fighting on superior terms, even with the fixed defences.”

“I like it,” Cordova preened.  He took off his hat and waved it in Colin’s direction, sending a gust of cold air across the room.  “It’s the last thing they will expect.”

“But risky,” Daria said.  “If we win, if we take Harmony Base, how long will it be before the Empire can mount a counterattack?”

“It depends on the exact variables,” David said.  He’d been the only person Colin had discussed the plan with before the meeting.  He had also helped to shape it.  “The best case, from their point of view, is at least six months.  They won’t have accurate intelligence of what is going on here, they won’t have a base in the sector and they won’t be able to trust all of their own people.  It’ll take them that long to mass overwhelming firepower, secure their flanks, and advance against us in a conventional war.”

He paused, with a twisted grin.  “If we’re really lucky, some kindly soul on Earth will assassinate the Families and the entire Empire will convulse,” he added.  “Even if they don’t, there is going to be an awesome political crisis.  Roosevelt Clan as a whole will probably get a lot of the blame for the entire disaster, but they’re too big and powerful to be taken down easily, so they probably won’t even submit to the slap on the wrist the other Families will give them.  They’ll want to keep their own clients in positions of power here, which the other Families will hate…”

Daria shook her head.  “The prime purpose of the Empire is to keep the Families in power,” she said.  “If they’re faced with a challenge on a massive scale, and this is a challenge on a massive scale, they won’t decide to do the hard work for us and have a civil war.  They’ll put their differences aside to unite against the common foe – us.”

“Probably,” Colin added.  “We’re not just fighting this war against the Roosevelt Clan, but the entire Empire.  It would be nice if they did the hard work for us, but we couldn’t count on it.”

He looked around the table.  “The strike on Harmony will involve all of the ships and men we have assembled,” he said.  “There will not be anything held back in reserve.  Battles have been won or lost before on the presence or absence of a single ship and I will not risk losing because we held ships out of the battle.  I want every ship we have fully repaired and replenished within a week, and then assembled at the jumping-off point here.”  He tapped a coordinate on the chart, a red star barely within the Empire’s borders and completely uninhabited.  “Officially, the target is Macore; we’re going back there to liberate them, once and for all.”

“This will require complete security,” Anderson added.  “If word gets out ahead of time it could prove disastrous.  If they knew we were coming, they could mass everything themselves and crush us when we arrived.”

Colin nodded.  “Percival has junior commanders and assistants who are competent,” he added.  “We got burned once before because of the failure to anticipate an ambush, so we are not going to allow any word of the mission to leave this room.  I will personally behead the person who, for whatever reason, lets it slip that we’re going to Harmony until the fleet is at the first waypoint.  Understand?”

He allowed his gaze to cross the room.  “No idle chatter,” he said.  “No attempt to impress the young boys and girls.  No pillow talk.  It stays with us until we launch the fleet on the mission.  If any of you have a problem with that, say so now.”

There was a long pause.  “We can do this,” he said.  “I have faith that we, free men and women, can take on and defeat Admiral Percival and his entire fleet.  Dismissed!”

***
“You laid it on a bit thick there,” Frandsen said, afterwards.  They were alone in the conference room, the others having departed to start preparing the mission.  “Why do I have the feeling that you’re more nervous than you care to let on?”

“Because you’ve been in the services for years and you have seen hundreds of young officers become men?”  Colin offered, absently.  The icon representing Harmony Base still glowed above the table.  By its very nature, failure meant the complete destruction of the rebellion, although it might cause some other group of young officers to gamble themselves.  “You’re right.  I am nervous.”

He frowned.  The standard doctrine, written out in the fires of the Dathi War, didn’t call for direct do-or-die strikes right into the teeth of enemy fire.  The Dathi would have exterminated the human race if they’d won, so risking entire fleets would have been…unwise.  Indeed, one of the reasons the human race had folded into the Empire had been because of just such a disaster, caused by political pressure.  Colin had studied that particular campaign while he’d worked for Percival.  It had been a disaster that had made General Custer look competent and insightful.  Everything that could have gone wrong had gone wrong.

“We came closer to outright disaster at Patrick’s Asteroid than I had believed possible,” he added.  He hadn’t realised, not really, how much rested on him until he'd had to confront the possibility of disaster.  It wasn't just him and a handful of friends, but millions, even billions, of people.  “If we had lost Daria and the others, if they had been interrogated, we might have lost Freedom Base as well.  We could have been defeated utterly and…”

“I doubt it,” Frandsen said.  “You might have been able to pull the rebellion back together.  The core weakness of the Empire is that defeats always have to be someone’s fault.  You don’t have to do that.”

Colin smiled.  “If nothing else,” he said, “I would love to see Percival’s face when he realises that we’re bearing down on him.  He might even surrender the minute he realises he’s about to be in a battle for the very first time.”

“You don’t really believe that, do you?”

“No,” Colin said.  He laughed and then reached over and switched off the display.  The icon flickered and vanished into thin air.  “It’s just wishful thinking.”

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Penny studied the strategic display with a vague feeling of discontent.

There were three hundred stars within Sector 117’s formal boundaries, although a third of them were effectively useless and uninhabited, but all were supposed to be under Percival’s protection.  In a very real sense, he was also responsible for the Rim, or at least the section of the Rim bordering Sector 117, but he barely had the ships to handle his normal responsibilities.  Patrolling Sector 117 wasn't anyone’s priority back him, not as long as the Roosevelt Clan’s worlds were secured, and so Percival had been forced to carry out the responsibilities without the numbers he needed.

But even that wouldn’t have been fatal without Colin’s rebellion.  The majority of the worlds in the sector presented no threat at all, not to the Empire and not to the Imperial Navy.  A handful weren’t even worth the effort of garrisoning them, although in the coming century, most of them would probably find that they’d been selected as a colony site, regardless of the original settlers.  That wouldn’t have presented a major problem…but now, now leaving a handful of ships scattered around could prove disastrous.

Icons circled stars, marking the position of small squadrons that might have creased to exist days ago, or had rebelled and vanished into the Rim.  Question marks circled a handful of icons, ships that had signalled a mutiny…and then, what?  No one knew and Percival couldn’t spare the ships to investigate.  The most encouraging report they’d received had been of a derelict cruiser, one torn apart by internal fighting that had wrecked the life support, but by now a pirate crew would probably have recovered the ship.  It might even have been recovered and pressed back into service by the rebels.  

And Percival had reacted as she had known he would…and, she suspected, Colin Harper knew he would as well.  He'd pulled back most of his ships, concentrating on defending the Roosevelt Worlds and Harmony itself, even though he had partly defied the Roosevelt Clan.  Three superdreadnaughts had been dispatched to Pollack with specific orders.  If the rebels attacked in strength, the Captains were to flicker out, abandoning the world to its fate.  She couldn’t fault, for once, his orders, but it would burn his links to the Roosevelt Clan personally.  It was almost a pity that she had no such links herself.

If I had, they might even have supported me if I’d killed him, she thought, remembering the pain when he’d slapped her.  It had happened before, but she was far too lowly to be boosted high, even if she did do the Clan a favour.  Besides, Percival’s only real hope was to dig in and wait for reinforcements, only a month off.  She couldn’t have done any better even if she’d been promoted to Admiral, or even one of the fancier ranks in Clan Military Units.  The Imperial Navy held those in abject concept, not without reason.  Who in their right mind would have let nine superdreadnaughts into point-blank range of a command fortress without checking them first?  

It could have been worse, she thought, with a moment of wry humour.  They’d insisted on searching the new superdreadnaughts, just in case, when they’d arrived, but they weren’t being allowed within the defence perimeter.  They might have fired on the reinforcing superdreadnaughts.  I wonder how they would have explained that…

She turned her attention back to the display.  The propaganda put out by the Public Information Department kept swearing that the rebels were on the verge of defeat – having acknowledged that there were rebels, once Colin’s message had started its flight through the ICN – but she doubted that anyone believed it.  The Public Information Department had been pumping out anti-Macore propaganda since the invasion had begun, but most of it was unbelievable, even to the most credulous of observers.  Horror stories about valiant SD troopers being slaughtered by foul tricks might have been creditable back home on Earth, where they thought that anyone who lived out on the verge of the Empire was a barbarian dressed in animal skins, but Macore was well-known in Sector 117.  Sympathy lay firmly with them…and the lies only weakened the Empire’s credibility.

If we can hold out until the reinforcements arrive, we might be able to secure the sector and even push into the Rim, Penny thought, grimly.  If not…

And Commodore Gallatin and the 45th Battlecruiser Squadron hadn’t returned, or reported back.  It was possible, she supposed, that Commodore Gallatin had found leads to other rebel bases out on the Rim and gone after them, but he should have sent a message in a captured ship, if not one of his own battlecruisers.  Try as she might, she couldn’t help, but regard that as ominous.  If the rebel superdreadnaughts had been elsewhere, and she knew that that was the case, as they’d been blowing hell out of Pollack at the time, what had Commodore Gallatin run into that he couldn’t handle or escape?  The question nagged at her, but there was no answer.  There shouldn’t have been anything.

It wasn't something she wanted to discuss with Percival, not after she’d assured him that Commodore Gallatin would have defeated the rebels without their superdreadnaught being in the picture, but there was little choice.  It wasn't as if she had anywhere else to go, after all.  She just hoped he wouldn’t hit her again.

***
It was a curious fact in the Imperial Navy that the larger the starships, the smaller the responsibility placed on every Midshipman’s head.  An ambitious Midshipman would do well to be assigned to a smaller ship, where he might find himself holding down a Lieutenant’s responsibilities from time to time, while a superdreadnaught often struggled to find real work for the fifty Midshipmen assigned to fill out her crew.  The young officers, barely out of the Academy, found themselves competing for tasks that might get them noticed, a double-edged sword at best.

Midshipman Cody Campbell was different.  Unlike most of his fellows, he had been a Lieutenant, entitled to his own cabin and responsibilities, when he had ended up taking the blame for his Captain’s mistake.  The superdreadnaught’s drive field had flickered, once, when the ship was coming into dock at a shipyard and had crystallised part of the yard.  The accident hadn’t killed anyone, but it had been embarrassing and Campbell had found himself the oldest Midshipman in the fleet, by at least ten years.  There were a handful of Midshipmen who served out their entire term at that rank, but they were mostly assigned to isolated bases and, like their counterparts on smaller ships, held much higher responsibilities.  Campbell found himself the focus of a great deal of pity and scorn, although few of the ‘young gentlemen’ who had come out of the Academy would have dared to put on airs and graces with him.  He found himself, more than once, serving as a mentor to scared young Midshipmen.  It would have been more rewarding if there had been a chance for further promotion, but his Captain had a long memory.

It had taken considerable time and effort, but he had finally managed to create a hidden niche in the superdreadnaught, one that was completely unmonitored by the spies and agents on the ship.  Most of them betrayed themselves to his experienced eyes very quickly – there was something endearing about a new Midshipman on his or her first cruise and most of them didn’t have it – but it was dangerous to assume that they would always be noticed.  He’d served on the ship long enough to know most of the crew by name, which was probably more than the Captain could do, but some of them would be agents as well.

And then there were the SD troopers.  He’d been considering something drastic before Colin’s message had downloaded itself into the superdreadnaught’s communications systems, but they provided all the recruitment incentive he could want.  It had only been two weeks ago when he'd done his best, knowing how inadequate it was, to comfort a crewwomen who had been cornered, alone, by three SDs.   Choosing the men and women of his little conspiracy had been easy, after that, but planning had been difficult.  Seizing a superdreadnaught intact wasn't easy, even without the SDs, but he had a plan for them.  They would probably have killed themselves several times over without the ship’s crew watching over them and keeping them from doing something stupid.

The compartment filled up quickly.  Five of the Midshipmen, old enough to know the score, young enough to believe it could be changed.  Nine senior crewmen, including the Senior Crew Chief himself, a webhead and one of the shuttlebay crew, filled out the small group.  It seemed insanely small compared to the three thousand crewmen on the superdreadnaught, including the officers, but Campbell knew that that didn’t matter.  If they could snatch control of the ship, the others could choose a side without being able to regain control of the ship.

“You know why we’re here,” he said.  Officially, the crew rosters showed them as being on duty, but the Senior Crew Chief had done some creative scheduling work and some barefaced lying to ensure that they could all be here.  The Captain and the Security Officer had a touching faith in the computer records, which would insist, later, that all of the group had been in different compartments when they had been plotting mutiny.  “I believe that we need to consider moving soon.”

He looked around the compartment.  “We’re currently assigned to Harmony Base,” he said.  In theory, the crew were ignorant of their location, as they were of anything that didn’t impinge on their responsibilities, but in practice they often knew as much as the Captain and his officers.  “I believe that the rebels” – they shared a long glance – “will be coming to Harmony soon.”

The Senior Crew Chief frowned.  “How do you know that?”

“I used to be on the tactical course,” Campbell reminded him.  He had been, so long ago that it felt like another life, been a mediocre tactical student.  He might never have been an Admiral or Commodore – although, without the breeding, that was unlikely anyway – but he might have made a good commander.  “Harmony is the key to the sector; whoever controls it, controls the sector.  If the rebels hold it, they will have a chance to make their gains permanent…and our lords and masters agree.  Why else would the squadron have been confined here for the last month?”

There were nods.  “Logically, the rebels will come here and when they do, they will have to engage the General Lee,” he continued.  “If that happens, we will be blown to flaming plasma, unless we seize the ship before the rebels open fire.”

Midshipwomen Li gave him a puzzled look.  “But we’re on their side,” she protested.  “Why would they fire on us?”

“They’re not going to know that,” Campbell pointed out.  Li would probably end up warming a senior officer’s bed soon enough, although he had tried to keep her out of sight.  The combination of guileless innocence and soft oriental features, all natural, would prove irresistible.  “As far as they will know, we are the enemy.  As long as we work to keep this ship running, we are the enemy.  They won’t be able to risk leaving us unengaged in the hopes we’ll return the favour.  They’ll have to engage us.”

He shook his head.  “No, we have to be ready to move,” he said.  “Gavin, are you sure you have access?”

Gavin O’Hara laughed.  “I checked an hour ago,” he said.  The Marines might have been moved off the superdreadnaught, but their weapons and equipment had been left behind…and the shuttlebay crews had access to their lockers.  If the Marines had remained onboard and had been willing to assist, taking the ship would have been easy, but the weapons alone would level the balance. “I still have access, sir.  The codes work perfectly.”

Campbell smiled.  It was going to be a costly oversight, although an understandable one; the senior officers rarely had much to do with the Marines.  They were a whole other subculture on the ship.  Normally, all weapons on the ship would be stored in the weapons lockers, open only to the Captain and a handful of officers, and the junior crewmen would have no access.  A mutiny might fail without weapons, even with the widespread discontent and hatred, but with the Marine weapons, it could be done.

“Good,” he said.  He looked over at the webhead.  “You can’t simply crash the entire system without rendering the ship defenceless?”

The webhead shook her head.  “It’s all one system,” she explained.  “It’s not possible to separate them out and crash a specific section.  We would take out the internal security systems, but we would also take out everything else, at least until the system was rebooted.  It could take hours to repair the damage and in that time…”

She didn’t have to spill out the alternatives.  A drifting powerless – to all intents and purposes – ship would be an easy target.  They might even be fired upon by their own squadron if they were suspected of being under rebel control.  The rebels wouldn’t know what was going on and might engage them as well.

“And, worse, what if the squadron wins the fight?”

Campbell shrugged.  “If we try and fail, we all die,” he said.  The loss of the power alone would guarantee a slow death if they didn’t secure control and bring the life support back up.  “If we try and succeed, we will be free.  If worst comes to worst, we will be a fully-armed superdreadnaught right in the enemy’s rear, in a perfect position to hit them from behind.”

He looked around the compartment.  “I can’t promise that other ships are going to join us,” he concluded.  “It could all end badly.  All I can promise is that we will try.”

***
Percival, Penny was surprised to discover, was in a good mood.  She’d expected anything from depression to rage, but he seemed to be quite happy, almost cheerful.  Jan had prepared him a large meal and he even invited Penny to share it, chatting happily about nothing until they’d finished the meal.  Penny, who could count the number of times she’d shared a meal with him on the fingers of one hand, ate slowly and waited for the news.  It had to be good.

“The Roosevelt Clan’s senior member in this sector just stood in judgement of Stacy,” Percival explained, when they had moved to the living compartment.  He sat on a sofa, pulling her down to sit beside him, grinning unpleasantly.  “As part of a complex political deal pulled together by my fine self, Stacy will get the blame for the entire disaster from start to finish, allowing me to act in the service of Clan Roosevelt without any problems at all.”

His grin grew wider.  “I just had to call her at once and give her the good news,” he added.  “She was…not pleased.”

Penny could imagine.  Stacy wouldn’t be keen on taking the blame for anything.  “I see,” she said.  If Percival had secured his position, then her position was also secure, as long as she pleased him.  “What’s going to happen to her?”

Percival smiled lazily.  “Well, I imagine they’ll be sending her the suicide kit right about now…”

Penny lifted her eyebrows.  “Really?”

“Nah,” Percival said.  He stood up and started to pace the room in delight.  “She’ll probably be sent back to Earth in the next transport, where they’ll probably argue for the next few years over what is to become of her.  If they throw her out of the Clan altogether, they might just mind-burn her and send her to slave away somewhere owned by one her enemies, or they might just send her to live in exile.  There are a handful of others who have done that…”

He laughed.  “You know, perhaps they’ll even exile her to the Rim,” he said.  “Wouldn’t that be funny?”

Penny said nothing.  The thought of anyone, even Stacy, being mind-burned was creepy.  She'd seen mind-burned people before, serving the Families, men and women who had been altered into mindless slaves.  The Empire considered it the ultimate punishment for the ultimate crimes, but even the knowledge that they’d raped children or committed terrorist acts didn’t seem to numb the horror.  The Empire being the Empire, their numbers probably included a lot of people who had been forced to take the blame, perhaps now including Stacy.  Even a penal world would have been preferable.

And – not a reassuring thought – she might end up that way.

“I suppose it would be funny,” she said, trying to avoid thinking about it.  It would have been merciful compared to what Stacy deserved, but did even she deserve to have her personality erased and replaced with that of a mindless slave?  Of course, there were plenty of people on the Rim who knew her…

“Yep,” Percival said, sitting beside her.  “I think this calls for a celebration.”

His hands were pawing at her breasts, his hot mouth on hers, when the communicator buzzed.  It was the emergency signal, used only if there was a real problem, and she pulled back from him, trying to recapture her breasts and zip up her jacket.  Percival ignored her as he reached for his communicator and brought it to his mouth.

“This had better be important,” he growled.  Penny wasn't too happy herself.  She didn’t like having to sleep with Percival, but being interrupted was almost intolerable.  “What is happening that is so damned important…?”

“Admiral, this is Pearson in Tracking,” the voice said.  He sounded terrified, but not, Penny judged, of Percival.  That in itself was worrying.  “We just picked up flicker-signatures, lots of flicker-signatures.  There’s no doubt at all, sir, we’ve confirmed it twice.  The rebel fleet is here, sir!”

Percival’s mouth dropped open.  “Here?”

Chapter Thirty-Nine

The Shadow Fleet flickered into the system in a glorious wave of light.

“We have completed emergence,” the tactical officer said, as the fleet checked in.  Colin watched as, one by one, the ships appeared on the display.  The icons of recon drones, launched from the outskirts of the fleet, flashed as they spread out, a pair racing down towards Harmony itself.  “The enemy fleet appears to have been completely surprised.”

Colin shrugged.  He had given serious thought to coming out right on the edge of Harmony’s gravity shadow – the system had been carefully surveyed and there would have been only limited risk – but there was little point.  Percival, either through reasonable caution or extreme paranoia, had kept his ships down within the gravity shadow, out of range for a surprise attack.  It was overdoing it a little, Colin felt, but it helped.  He would have plenty of time to deploy the Shadow Fleet to engage the enemy.

He looked down as the final ship checked in.  The Shadow Fleet was now, probably, the single most powerful fleet to challenge the Empire, ever.  The hard core of nine superdreadnaughts was backed up by nineteen battlecruisers, one hundred and seventy heavy cruisers, ninety-one light cruisers and two hundred destroyers, not counting the combat-capable civilian ships that had been pressed into service.  Only half of the lighter ships had come directly from Percival’s forces, either through mutiny or surrender, but the Empire’s insistence on standardisation had defeated it.  The older ships, ones sold or stolen long before Colin had been born, might not have been as advanced as the current ships, but they could certainly fire the same missiles.  The Rim-dwellers might have lacked formal training, but they had experience in splicing together older components to keep their ships going.  The results would have horrified the Inspectorate-General, but the ships flew…

His eyes fell to the final set of icons.  The ten arsenal ships, sitting just behind the superdreadnaughts and wrapped in their own deceptive ECM.  Anyone looking at them, if they could when they had nine superdreadnaughts bearing down on them, would mistake them for freighters until they got close enough to get a visual image of the hull.  Percival, he suspected, would be too busy looking at the superdreadnaughts to think about other threats.  Colin had designed his formation to be as tempting as possible to someone with an aggressive mindset.  If they brought up their superdreadnaughts, they would have a clear shot at destroying the entire Shadow Fleet.

The ships spread out into their formation as they advanced on the planet, drones spreading out ahead of them.  Harmony’s defences made Pollack look undefended, with no less than thirty fortresses, two command fortresses and hundreds of automated weapons platforms, backed up by two hundred starships, led by fifteen superdreadnaughts.  The report had been true then, Colin noted, as the images became clearer; Percival had parcelled out some of his superdreadnaughts to one of the Roosevelt worlds.  It was annoying – he had hoped for a clean sweep – but it would have to be tolerated.  It was unlikely in the extreme that the missing ships would return, even if Percival sent a courier boat at once, in time to be decisive.

He keyed his intercom.  “Jason, Daria, remember to keep your ships back,” he warned, using the private link between the fleet commanders.  “If this goes wrong…”

“You worry too much,” Cordova said.  His voice, Colin saw, hadn’t lost its ability to be insufferably irritating.  He sounded as if they were bringing a superdreadnaught to crush a nut, rather than a far more even fight.  “We know what to do, sir, and we won’t fail you.”

Colin smiled.  The Shadow Fleet had discarded several dozen ships that had been commanded by people who didn’t want to risk them in a serious battle.  Their loss wasn't a major problem, not now; the remainder of the fleet was committed.  There would be, could be, no surrender.  They would win, or die.

“Good,” he said.  “On my mark, then…and good luck.”

He broke the communications link and looked up at the display.  Percival’s defenders were finally coming alive.  It was a pity that they hadn’t been able to sneak up again, as they had at Pollack, but the odds of that succeeding, even against Percival, would have been unlikely.  The defenders would have known where all of their superdreadnaughts were.

The ship had been at battle stations since before they had emerged into the system, tension running through the entire ship, matched with a strange sense that this was the last battle.  Colin knew better.  They might take the system, but the rest of the Empire would be enraged; indeed, they already had his message racing through their own system.  They would gather their forces to crush the rebellion like a nut.  Taking Harmony would only be the last battle if they lost…

He keyed his console again.  “This is Admiral Colin Harper of the Shadow Fleet,” he said.  “I call upon Harmony Base and Admiral Percival to surrender.  I call upon…”

***
The command fortress was large enough to have a full-sized command deck, but Penny would have been surprised if Percival had set foot in it more than a handful of times since he had accepted the command.  She’d used it from time to time in her role as his personal assistant, but a lowly Captain shouldn’t have been issuing commands, not when the system was under attack.  Percival took the command chair at the centre of the room, watching the display as the swarm of red icons descended on the system.

“Admiral, Commodore Tamworth is reporting that the defence fleet has formed up and is requesting orders,” an operator said.  Penny was glad that she didn’t look around as she spoke, her eyes glued to her console, or she would have seen Percival’s pale and stricken face.  The very concept of anyone daring to attack Harmony had been beyond his imagination, once he had invested billions of credits in the defences, and yet…Colin had dared.  She wondered, with more insight that she knew into his character, if he was a little…scared of Colin, a little convinced of his own inferiority.

“Admiral, the fortresses are coming online now,” a second operator said.  The display updated as, one by one, the fortresses linked into the command network.  Harmony and the orbiting installations would be heavily protected.  The fortresses alone mounted more launchers than Colin’s entire fleet.  “They’re ready for operations now.”

“Admiral, Commodore Lomar is requesting permission to launch drones towards the enemy fleet,” a third said.  Penny looked down at Percival, who looked almost hypnotised by the descending hammer.  “Admiral…?”

Penny looked up at the fleet and made her own calculations.  The Shadow Fleet looked impressive, but most of its strength was illusionary, apart from the nine superdreadnaughts.  Without them, they wouldn’t be able to take on the mobile units, let alone the fortresses.  The hard core of the Shadow Fleet was outnumbered by Commodore Tamworth’s hard core, while his smaller ships could take care of Colin’s smaller units and keep them out of the fight, preventing them from supporting their superdreadnaughts.

And yet, Colin was acting as if he didn’t know that.  His force was advancing, with all the calm certainty of a glacier, or an Admiral who knows that he has already rigged the exercise in his favour, and it was taking a toll on Percival.  His very lack of fleet experience made it easy for him to imagine all kinds of disastrous scenarios, from a superweapon that would devastate Harmony with a single shot to a trick that would allow Colin to take the world without a shot being fired, all without any basis in cold hard reality.

“Admiral,” she said, so quietly she hoped that none of the operators heard.  She didn’t want to imagine what it would do to their morale if they realised that their commander was taking advice from a mere Captain.  “Admiral, keep the superdreadnaughts back, where they are tied into the defence network and…”

“Admiral, we are picking up a communication from the rebel fleet,” an operator said.  “It’s coming in on all channels.”

“…Call upon Admiral Percival to step down and surrender his command,” a new voice said.  It was cold and harsh, yet seemingly confident in its own superiority.  A voiceprint check revealed that it was indeed Colin Harper.  “We, the dispossessed, have come to reclaim what was ours.  We, the human race, had come to claim the freedom that is our birthright.  We, those punished and blamed for the mistakes of our superiors, have come for them.  We, those kept down and suffocated by a vile system, have come to regain our freedom.”

Percival was almost stammering. “That’s him,” he said, almost whispering.  “It’s him!  He’s come for me!”

Penny ignored military protocol and placed her hand on his shoulder.  “He can’t get you,” she whispered, feeling as if she was comforting a child.  “You’re safe.  He can’t break through the defences.”

“He did the impossible before,” Percival said.  “He did and…”

Colin was still speaking.  “We come to remove the yoke of the Thousand Families from the human race,” he said.  Penny stared, unable to believe that anyone would dare…and yet, if Percival collapsed, it might work.  “We offer mercy to those who surrender.  Those who refuse to join us, who do not wish to stand with us, will not be killed.  You will be repatriated back to the Empire, or one of the worlds in this sector, if you so choose.  We will be gracious in defeat…”

“Shut it off,” Admiral Percival snapped, coming to his feet.  An operator, wordlessly, did the deed.  A sudden silence fell in the command centre.  “Direct orders to Commodore Tamworth,” he snarled.  “I want his force to engage and crush the enemy force at once.”

Penny stared at him.  The sudden change was almost as unnerving as watching him falling apart.  “Sir,” she said, softly, “if you keep the superdreadnaughts in the network…”

“Shut up,” Percival snarled.  His face twisted into a snarl.  “He’s going to be spreading that all over the goddamned system!”

Penny wilted and sat back in her chair.  Her mind, frantically, tried to convince herself that Commodore Tamworth had the firepower to handle the rebel fleet, even without the additional firepower of the fortresses…and he did, but she couldn’t escape the feeling that Colin had carefully baited a trap.

***
Campbell had been putting his plan into operation before he even heard the broadcast.  The organised chaos of a starship going to battle stations was the perfect cover for any private operations and it was easy enough to get the seventy men and women he had chosen for the conspiracy into the same place.  The SDs, as unused as they were to starship operations, wouldn’t even know or care that they were in the wrong places.  An officer who saw them and took a closer look might not even notice, not in the midst of chaos.  When a ship went to battle stations, the crew dropped everything and ran to their stations, regardless of where they were.  It was the only time that a normal crewman might run through Marine Country.

“All right,” he said, quickly.  There would be time for everyone involved to meet formally later.  He had kept the only complete list of rebels in his head, swearing privately to take a suicide pill rather than allow the SDs to interrogate him, just to safeguard the remainder of the plotters.  If one cell were broken, the others would remain untouched.  “You know your missions and you have your equipment, so…”

He glanced quickly at the small groups.  The Marines hadn’t just been armed to the teeth, they’d had magnetic boots and even light body armour as well, although they couldn’t have worn the combat armour without having it fitted.  It would have been nice to have it, but…they had to make do with what they had.

“We’re starting to move out now,” the webhead said.  Her implant was firmly locked into the main computer now, watching through its sensors.  “In two minutes, we’ll be outside the fortress engagement range.”

Campbell tensed.  He had actually taken part in combat operations and had found them terrifying, but the others were completely inexperienced at fighting, at least with weapons and armour.  Some of them looked confident, looking forward to burning down bullying officers and crew, others looked terrified, which was a far more reasonable attitude.  He’d trained quite a few young Midshipmen to look after themselves, teaching hand-to-hand fighting merely as a hobby, but he couldn’t have taught them about weapons.  They’d have learned the basics in the Academy, but that wouldn’t have been real…

“Ok,” the webhead said.  Her voice became slightly vague as she concentrated on the messages spreading through the computer network.  “We’re clear, if only for a given value of clear.”

“Good,” Campbell said.  He took one last look at his team.  “Do it.”

The effect was almost instantaneous.  One moment the superdreadnaught had been humming along as normal, the next it was plunged into darkness as the lights failed and, seconds later, the gravity field faded away as well.  He heard silence, true silence, for the first time in years, broken only by gasps and shouts.  The ever present thrumming of the drives was gone.  Here and there, emergency lighting came on, illuminating darkened corridors…and it wouldn’t be long before panic swept the crew.

“Move out,” he ordered.  It was harder than he remembered to use magnetic boots to walk, but he managed it.  Everyone else, particularly the SDs, would be floating around, trying to pull themselves towards their emergency stations. The crew hadn’t done any zero-gravity drills for months…and the SDs, who normally remained on planets, probably hadn’t done any at all.  “Keep your radios with you; signal only if there is a problem or you have completed your assigned tasks.”

He smiled as he led the way out through the darkened corridors.  The sudden crash would have killed all communications, except the Marine communicators.  He would be able to coordinate…and no one else, not even the Captain, would be able to get any station to respond.  By the time they reached the bridge, which wouldn’t be more than ten minutes, it wouldn’t be hard to seize…unless, of course, one of the other superdreadnaughts decided to blow them out of space.

***
“Commodore, we have a problem.”

Commodore Tamworth barely spared the officer a glance.  The entire defence force, the largest group of starships he had commanded in his entire career, was advancing against an enemy whose behaviour seemed to defy logic.  It wasn’t easy to command an entire force, not when it had varying levels of training and ability, and it was pushing his abilities to the limit.  If Percival had allowed them time for proper training and drills…

He shook his head, dismissed the thought, and turned to the officer.  “Yes?”

“Commodore, the General Patton has crashed, completely,” the officer said.  “It’s completely dead in space.”

Commodore Tamworth’s eyes went very wide.  ‘Crashed’ had only one meaning in the Imperial Navy, the total and complete loss of all power, leaving a starship helplessly becalmed.  It wasn't easy to do it, even in simulations, without inside help and even then it was difficult without the Captain’s authorisation, which meant…

He glared down at the display.  Assuming that the General Patton had been disabled by sabotage, he was down from fifteen superdreadnaughts to fourteen.  The good news, such as it was, was that the General Patton wouldn’t be switching sides, but it was completely out of the fight.  Looking at some of the other ships, mainly the smaller ones, he started to realise that Colin’s second message had fallen on receptive ears.  Too many ships were starting to inch out of formation…

“I just picked up an emergency dispatch from the Admiral Rosenberg,” the communications officer added.  “The Captain was trying to say something, and then there was shooting on the bridge and we lost connections…”

Commodore Tamworth flinched.  “Did you say shooting?”

“Yes, sir,” the communications officer said.

“The Admiral Rosenberg is falling out of position,” the tactical officer added.  “I have no idea who’s in control of the ship.”

“No,” Percival agreed.  “Warn the other ships that they might have hostiles onboard, I repeat, hostiles onboard.  Prepare a…”

He broke off.  The Marines couldn’t be trusted, could they?  The SDs on the General Patton were probably too busy being space-sick to actually cope with anything as minor as a mutiny.  The Admiral Rosenberg might be in the middle of an armed uprising, if there had been shooting, which suggested that at least one of the senior officers had decided to join the rebellion.  Thirteen superdreadnaughts left…and at least two of them were commanded by tyrants.  Percival had approved of them, which meant that their crews were probably on the verge of mutiny right now.

Commander Harper must be laughing his head off, he thought, looking up at the display.  The two fleets were still converging, but he had four additional superdreadnaughts and enough firepower to win, even if half of his smaller ships changed sides.  Perhaps…

The display kept changing as the enemy ECM interfered with his sensors.  At one point, he though that the entire fleet had flickered out, at another, they were reporting a thousand superdreadnaughts descending on his position.  It was an amateurish trick and one that surprised him, coming from an experienced and competent commander; it was quite easy to pick out the real superdreadnaughts from the decoys.  It was hard to create convincing sensor ghosts at such close range.  Even the targeting scans, locking onto his ships, failed to alarm him.  When superdreadnaughts were involved, it rarely mattered who got off the first shot.

And you’re coming right into the gravity shadow, he thought coldly.  You won’t escape this time…

“Commodore, we have an energy spike…”

Red icons appeared out of nowhere, more than could possibly exist.  “No!”  

Chapter Forty

“Admiral, three superdreadnaughts have fallen out of formation.”

Colin peered at the display, frowning.  Percival, as he’d gambled, had sent out his mobile forces to engage the Shadow Fleet, but now his forces were showing signs of splitting apart.  One superdreadnaught had gone completely dead and two more were falling out of formation, leaving him to wonder just what was going on.  The dead ship wouldn’t be helping anyone until they fixed the problem and brought the ship back to life, but the other two could be trying to fool him.  After what had happened at Macore and Patrick’s Asteroid he wasn't going to assume that he had a monopoly on being sneaky.

But if they were friendly, or controlled by rebels, they needed to be recovered, not destroyed.

“Retargeting priorities,” he ordered, watching as the remaining icons drew closer.  The Empire’s forces were just barely within missile range, but they were holding their fire until they could hit him without allowing his point defence plenty of time to calculate a defence solution.  He didn’t have that luxury.  His sucker punch would only work if the enemy forces remained inside the gravity shadow – and, ideally, out of mutual support range of the fortresses.  “Target the superdreadnaughts that have remained in formation only, I repeat, target the superdreadnaughts that have remained in formation only.”

The Empire’s targeting software was having problems keeping up with the converging forces.  The sheer volume of missiles from the arsenal ships was unprecedented, but the Geeks had engineered fixes that would allow his targeting software to designate targets, if only in vague terms.  Locking them down to only firing on twelve superdreadnaughts made it a little easier, but he was grimly aware that no one had ever tried anything like this before.  The destruction of the battlecruisers at Patrick’s Asteroid had been minor.  A failure here might put the war effort back years…

“Weapons locked,” the tactical officer said.  Colin looked up at the red icons, surrounded by targeting icons, and said a silent prayer for the men inside the metal hulls.  Some of them would be loyalists, others would want to revolt, but had no hope of victory…and some might, even now, be moving to take control of their ships.  It was temping to cling to that thought, to hold fire until the last possible second, but that would expose his fleet to unnecessary danger.  “Admiral?”

Colin took a breath.  “All ships,” he ordered.  “Execute Fire Plan Alpha.”

The superdreadnaught rocked as it unleashed it’s first spread of missiles.  It was a massive salvo, but tiny compared to the blossoming waves of death pouring out of the arsenal ships, just behind his own ships.  The sheer number of missiles was beyond calculation, even by his own scanners; they merged into one terrifying mass, racing towards the enemy ships.  He knew that they had just fired over twenty thousand missiles, but it seemed unbelievable.  Surely, he thought, there was nothing that the Empire’s loyalists could do to avert disaster.  The tidal wave of missiles would sweep them away like leaves in the wind.

The enemy’s answering fire, when it came, was almost pitiful.

***
For a moment, almost too long, Commodore Tamworth could only stare.  The sight was impossible.  No amount of superdreadnaughts could fire that many missiles, not in a single salvo…and yet, the red icons refused to vanish.  They had fired at medium range, giving his point defence a chance to act…for all the good it would do.  If they wiped out half of the onrushing missiles, the remainder would still inflict horrific losses on his formation.

“Return fire,” he ordered, sharply.  It was the stock order, straight out of the tactical manual, and the right one.  The missiles had already been retargeted on the ships that had fired the largest numbers of missiles, the computers assuming that they were the most dangerous in the enemy formation.  His mind kept gibbering, trying to convince himself that the missiles didn’t, couldn’t, exist…but they did.  Years of training and experience brought calm, of a sort, even as he knew he was probably issuing his last orders.  “Point defence to full alert, prepare to engage.”

The tactical computers were constantly updating the display, providing a near-certainty that the missiles were targeted on the superdreadnaughts – the loyal superdreadnaughts.  The point defence systems were weaving together a network of point defence units and weapons that should have been able to stop anything, but he knew, as ship after ship dropped out of the network, that his fleet was disintegrating around him.  Even the most loyal of loyalists would hesitate to continue the fight against an enemy who could fire off twenty thousand missiles in one shot…and he knew that such loyalists were rare.  He was loyal, because the Empire had been good to him, but how many others could say the same?  They were more likely to consider surrender as preferable to inglorious death.

“Missiles entering engagement range,” the tactical officer said.  There was a dull deadness in his voice that was worse than any panic, any excitement.  He had already given up.  “The point defence is engaging.”

Missile after missile started to die as the point defence weapons hacked them from the sky, but there were always hundreds more to replace every destroyed warhead.  ECM and decoys, launched frantically by their desperate operators, failed to lure more than a tiny handful of the missiles away from their targets.  The missile seeker heads had already locked onto the superdreadnaughts and refused, now, to be diverted from their targets.  A handful broke off, confused, and fell upon smaller ships, but the vast majority converged on the superdreadnaughts.  His forces, Commodore Tamworth realised, had wiped out almost half of the missiles, but it wouldn’t be enough.

The superdreadnaught General Caesar was the first to be hit.  A hundred missiles fell on the shields and detonated, knocking massive feedback bursts through the system and burning out a pair of shield generators.  The suddenly unprotected section of the hull found himself being struck, time and time again, with nuclear warheads…but not all of them were standard warheads.  Two out of every ten had been configured to detonate against standard armour and melt through, exposing the soft innards of the ship.  A warhead detonated inside the hull, and then another, and then a series of explosions started to disintegrate the vessel.  The mighty superdreadnaught blew up in a sheet of flame.

Commodore Tamworth barely had time to notice as the General Ryan staggered under the weight of fire.  No one had ever destroyed a General-class superdreadnaught.  Everyone knew that they were the single most powerful class of starships in existence, ships that were almost indestructible by any number of lesser warships, even the massed power of a hundred battleships.  Everyone knew that the sole possession of them made the Empire invincible…except one had just been blown away, almost in passing.  Two more superdreadnaughts followed the first into oblivion, while the others rolled and shivered under the enemy assault.  A fourth superdreadnaught exploded, a fifth attempted to surrender, but it was too late.

Alarms rang in the bridge as consoles exploded, victims of massive unstoppable power surges running through the ship.  He saw two young Midshipmen, too young to know what it all meant, run for the fires with suppressors, trying to keep the starship alive for a few more minutes.  The smell of burning and cries for help filled the air, but no one would be able to help.  The superdreadnaught had been damaged before, but now the enemy attacks were digging right into its vitals.  It wouldn’t be long before they either smashed the ship completely or the reactors exploded.  They hadn’t been designed to take this sort of punishment.

A shockwave picked him up and threw him to the deck.  It was heaving under his bare fingers; he tried to pick himself up, only to be knocked down again as the ship rocked again.  He caught sight of the internal monitors and saw nothing, but a flashing display of red lights, the damage mounting up too quickly for anyone to handle.  The damage control teams had been drilled endlessly, taught to seal off damage and perform basic repairs while under fire, but they’d never anticipated such a wave of destruction.  That failure of imagination, he realised, would cost the Empire dearly.

He looked up, again, as the display sparked into a web of lights, that flickered and faded out of existence.  The gravity field failed a moment later, followed by the lights, leaving the bridge illuminated only by the burning consoles.  The emergency systems, he realised numbly, were down as well, completely.  A ship that could turn an entire planet into burning radioactive ash was dying…and he could do nothing.

A hand caught him.  “Commodore,” someone said.  His head was spinning.  He couldn’t even recognise her.  “Commodore, we have to get to the escape pods…”

“No,” Commodore Tamworth said, through a mouthful of soot.  “No point.”

She pulled at him.  He wondered, vaguely, if they were the only people left alive on the ship.  The escape pods were all on the outer hull.  Even if they managed to leave the bridge and navigate all the way to the nearest escape pod, it would take hours.  The passages and corridors couldn’t be intact and all of the doors would have failed.  He felt himself bumping into the overhead bulkhead, the dizziness overwhelming him, as a new series of explosions rocked the ship.  They were lucky it had survived as long as it had.

He opened his mouth to say something.  An apology, or a command to get out and save herself, but it was too late.  He had a fleeting impression of a wall of fire…and then only darkness, and silence.

***
 Colin watched dispassionately as the wave of missiles crashed down on his force.  “Not yet,” he repeated, watching the missiles calmly.  It would have to be timed perfectly.  “Not yet…”

The missiles had been targeted on the arsenal ships.  Colin had been honestly surprised at first – he would have thrown everything at the enemy superdreadnaughts, in hopes of evening the score a little – before remembering that the tactical software generally assumed that the target firing the most missiles was the most dangerous target.  His superdreadnaughts had fired off two more salvos in between the first massive salvo and the enemy approach, but the missile heads, being only as smart as the instructions they received from their masters, were targeted on the arsenal ships.

The point defence network wove an invisible web of protection around the targeted ships as the missile roared closer.  Free of the requirement to cover themselves and reserve some of their own firepower for self-defence, the superdreadnaughts and the remainder of the fleet were killing the missiles, one by one.  He timed it, carefully, as the missiles came in…”

“Now,” he ordered.  “Flicker!”

The arsenal ships vanished.  Deprived of their targets, the missiles fell into predicable paths while their onboard seeker heads computed the variables and hunted for new victims.  The slight pause was enough to wipe out most of the remaining missiles, while the handful that survived threw themselves into the midst of the superdreadnaughts.  Only a couple survived to slam home against the chosen target’s shields.

Colin smiled and turned his attention back to the battle.  He'd known it would be bad, but he hadn’t really understood it until he’d launched the attack.  Twelve superdreadnaughts had been targeted…and nine of them had been destroyed.  It had probably been the single greatest loss the Imperial Navy had suffered for centuries, not just in manpower and ships, which were replaceable, but confidence.  The advantage of knowing that they had the greatest, most powerful ships in the known universe would be lost, replaced with a fear of anything that might vaguely be an arsenal ship.  The reports of the battle would convince them to start building their own arsenal ships, but in the meantime, they would be leery about engaging any other rebel formation.

“Signal to all ships,” he ordered.  It was easy to sound confident after that.  His crews would have seen the devastation they’d caused and their own morale would skyrocket.  “The battle line will advance and engage the enemy.”

The tactical display altered as the two fleets converged.  He’d played it cagey at first, toying with Percival’s mind – although it was probably too much to hope that he’d been on one of the superdreadnaughts – while looking as if he were reluctant to engage directly.  Now, the firepower advantage had fallen to his side and he had no qualms about accepting engagement.  The interesting question, the really worrying question, was how many of those ships were going to surrender?

He keyed his console thoughtfully.  “This is Admiral Harper of the Shadow Fleet,” he said.  “Your ships are outgunned and outmatched.  If you signal your surrender, we will not engage you.  Please, power down your shields, drives and weapons, or get killed in hopeless battle.  I repeat…”

It sounded, he realised, as if he were begging, but that was the truth.  He didn’t want to slaughter more people, even if the battle was going to be more even than he had admitted.  The fortresses would almost make up for the loss of the superdreadnaughts, while he had no more arsenal ships.  Salgak had promised to have the first of the modified gunboats in service, but they would still be on their way.  He might have to bleed his fleet white, unless Percival saw sense and surrendered, just to break through his defences.  They were still formidable.

The formation ahead of them was breaking up.  The three damaged superdreadnaughts were not in any fit state to continue the fight.  Colin decided that he wouldn’t fire on them unless they fired first, although he doubted that they were fit for anything, but the breakers.  It would probably be quicker to build a new superdreadnaught from scratch than repair the ships.  It was quite possible that no one had been left alive on the ships.  The damage had burned through the armour and rampaged through the far less well-protected interior.

The smaller ships looked scattered.  Some were inching their way out of formation.  Others had powered down their weapons and drives, but had kept their shields up, protecting them from the vengeance of their former comrades.  A handful were signalling their surrender, their icons turning from hostile red to cautionary yellow, although Colin suspected that they wouldn’t cause trouble.  Even the most fanatical SD would think twice about surrendering and then attacking his captors, although someone like Percival would probably think that it was a great idea.  It would make it much harder for anyone to accept surrender in future.

He keyed his console as the fleets converged.  “Neil, I need you to prepare to board as many ships as possible,” he said.  One of the undamaged superdreadnaughts was now signalling a surrender – that ship would have to be secured first – and the other looked as if it might follow.  It was hard to tell what was happening from such a distance, but as long as they didn’t open fire, he would give them the chance to surrender.  “We’ll drop you as soon as we can.”

“Understood,” Frandsen sent back.  “We’re ready.”

Colin braced himself as the enemy formation finally formed up.  A quarter of the ships were either surrendering or attempting to cut across the planet and flicker out, while the remainder had clearly found a new senior officer.  They might not be able to hold the planet, but they would certainly try to bleed his fleet, rather than surrender.  Percival didn’t deserve such loyalty, even if it was enforced by an SD garrison on each of the ships, but he had no choice.  He had to engage.

“Open fire,” he said, softly.  The superdreadnaught launched its first salvo towards a squadron of battlecruisers.  The enemy ships returned fire, concentrating their fire on a single superdreadnaught, which he had to agree was probably their best option, apart from surrender.  It might knock out one of his superdreadnaughts and the repair work would win the Empire time to build up its own forces.  “Keep broadcasting the surrender demand.  I want to give them every possible chance to surrender.”

The missiles slashed into the battlecruiser formation.  Colin couldn’t even understand what they were doing there.  Everyone knew – it had been proven in hundreds of planned and unplanned exercises – that battlecruisers had no place in the wall of battle.  Maybe Percival was in command, he thought bitterly, as three battlecruisers died, while a squadron of destroyers made a suicide run at his ships.  They were burned out of space before they even managed to fire off a single missile.

And the enemy formation came apart.  “Sir, most of them are signalling surrender now,” the communications officer said.  Colin smiled in relief.  They had to have killed the second commanding officer in the brief struggle.  “The remainder are running.”

Colin nodded.  The ships would probably escape to Pollack or another world, spreading the word.  It wouldn’t matter.  They didn’t have to firepower to quickly mount a counter-attack.  He tapped a command into his console, launching the Marine landing craft towards the surrendering ships, where they would secure them and ensure that they weren’t playing games.  Once the ships had been secured, the crews could be processed and offered the choice between joining the Shadow Fleet and returning to the Empire.

He turned back to the display.  The fortresses still stood, but they stood alone.  No one was coming to aid them.  One way or another, it would end now.  Percival would have the choice between surrendering and facing Colin’s judgement, or fighting and watching as his fortresses were destroyed, one by one.  Perhaps some kindly soul would see sense and assassinate him before surrendering.  Maybe he would abandon his people and run.

“Percival…”

Chapter Forty-One

Percival was losing it completely.

Penny watched him as he screamed orders to his people, demanding that they capture, torture and kill Colin Harper, perhaps not in that order, and winced.  She had been certain that Percival’s misstep wouldn’t be a disaster, even if it would be a costly win, but Colin had outsmarted them.  In hindsight, it was obvious…and yet, no one in the Empire had even considered the possibility.  The Empire’s strength rested on its superdreadnaughts, so it was obvious that enemies would seek to overcome it, but the Empire had been so focused on preventing anyone else from constructing superdreadnaughts that they’d missed another threat.

Freighters weren’t warships, everyone knew that.  They handled badly, even with military-grade drives, and they had lousy protection.  They simply weren't set up to handle weapons without a near-total refit.  Indeed, no matter how many missiles and energy weapons were crammed into the hull, a determined opponent with a warship could defeat them…but the rebels hadn’t been limited by the conventional view.  They’d simply crammed thousands of missiles and missile launchers into a massive bulk freighter, launched all of the missiles in one massive wave…and then flickered out when the defenders counterattacked.  The assault had been so powerful that it had burned the hard core of the defending fleet right out of space.

Part of her mind – the part that had once been a promising tactical officer – identified possible weaknesses in the enemy tactic that could be turned against them.  It would be straightforward to build equally-expendable units and deploy them in combat.  Improving and expanding the point defence network was possible.  It might even be possible to increase the armour and defences on superdreadnaughts or smaller craft.  The rest of her mind considered Percival as her commander shouted impossible orders.  Whatever he was feeling, there was little excuse for taking it out on everyone else.

In theory, he was in a strong position…but reality played little part in his calculations, not now.  He might have the network of fortresses covering the planet, including his own multi-million ton command fortress, bristling with weapons and defences, but he felt beaten.  The final reports from dozens of starships, of mutiny and desperate knife-edge struggles for command, had pushed him over the edge.  Blind by upbringing and experience to the weaknesses in his command, their sudden appearance had shocked him to the core, almost as tyrants throughout history must have felt when they discovered that the downtrodden and oppressed had decided to fight back.   Penny knew that there were commanding officers who earned and rewarded loyalty from their people, receiving- in return – devotion and obedience.  Percival had even studied under one such commander, Jason Cordova, and yet he had learned nothing.  Only a loyal and devoted crew would follow seemingly-insane orders…and Percival had never sought to install such loyalty.  He had demanded it as his birthright.

Her eyes swept the compartment.  Percival’s decision to invite a small company of SDs into the command centre had probably cost him what little loyalty he’d earned.  They watched, suspiciously, as operators performed their tasks, even though they didn’t understand any of their actions.  Only Percival’s presence prevented a bloodbath, or the further crippling of the defences, but even with him, the entire command centre was on the verge of collapse.  They knew, unlike him, that it wasn’t hopeless…but they also knew that Percival would never take the steps required to save their lives.  The options were simple; abject surrender or a long drawn-out struggle.  Either one, under a competent officer, would be possible…unless the rebels produced another trick.  Penny had seen classified reports on possible future weapons, briefs sent to Percival by his superiors, and some of them were terrifying.  If the rebels had not only developed them, but put them into mass production, Harmony was doomed.

“They’re boarding the traitorous ships,” an operator said.  Penny watched the back of his head, aware of his tension…and his awareness of the SDs.  She could have drawn her laser pistol and burned a hole in Percival’s back, but she would have been shot down seconds later, if she even got so far.  She had considered simply shooting him anyway, but it was too late.  “Once they take them…”

He broke off, sharply.  Penny could finish the thought herself.  The rebels had paused long enough to ensure that all of the surrendered ships had actually surrendered, despite Percival’s increasingly hysterical orders to the ships to resist to the last drop of blood.  She hoped, even though it was almost treacherous to hope, that Colin’s fleet hadn’t picked up those orders.  The safest way to handle the ships would be to put a missile in them and that would slaughter thousands more.

But once they took them, they could advance against the fortresses.  The fortresses were tough, but they were effectively immobile.  They lacked drives or any other means of manoeuvring except in a very limited manner.  If five or six fortresses in close proximity were taken out, the enemy fleet would be able to bombard the surface and the low-orbiting industrial nodes with impunity.  The surface of Harmony might actually be improved by the bombardment, but the loss of the industrial nodes would be disastrous, in the long term.  

And, worst of all, all Colin had to do was break off and nothing would save Percival’s career.

”Bring the fortresses to full alert,” Percival said.  It was an order right out of the tactics handbook, except the minor detail that the fortresses had been on full alert since the enemy fleet had appeared and it was the ninth time he had given the order.  His face, pale and sweating, probably didn’t improve their confidence either.  They knew their commander was breaking down, and yet…they didn’t dare to remove him.  “Inform all commanders to be prepared to engage…”

Penny pulled herself together.  “My Lord,” she said, as quietly as she could, “you must surrender.”

Percival stared at her.  Her betrayal, as he would see it, would merely be the latest shock.  For someone who had, almost literally, been born with a silver spoon in his mouth, he had a surprisingly large persecution complex.  He had given her rank and power, and in return he had demanded her support and her body.  The latter might have been more demanding until the rebellion had begun.

“Surrender?”  He repeated.  It had probably been meant to be firm and resolute, but it came out as a frightened squeak.  “Penny, you…”

Penny spoke, again, as if he were a wayward child.  “My Lord, the enemy have offered to guarantee the safety of everyone who surrenders,” she said, nodding towards the display.  The movement of Marine landing craft looked to be coming to a halt.  The tracking system reported that every surrendered ship now had at least a small group of Marines, probably armed with an antimatter mine, onboard.  Cooperative or not, taken by mutiny or armed force, they were out of the game.  The handful of retreating ships were flickering out as they crossed out of the gravity shadow.  “We cannot stop them if they come to take this station.”

She pressed forward, slightly.  “If they fire another of those volleys at us” – she was fairly sure that the rebels couldn’t, but she didn’t know for sure – “they will destroy this station and the remainder of the defences.  Everyone onboard the ships, including you, will be killed.  If you surrender, they all will live…”

“Except me,” Percival said.  She wasn't surprised that he thought only of himself.  “He wants me dead, remember?”

Percival, Penny privately conceded, was probably the only person – with the possible exception of Stacy Roosevelt – who Colin would be tempted to simply shoot on sight.  Even if he didn’t, it wasn't as if Percival was short of people who wanted to kill him…and unpopular or bullying officers had been lynched by rebel crews.  Still, Colin might think that returning Percival to the Empire would be a blow against the Empire, if Percival could have been appointed anything senior to Chief Dog Catcher.

“He has a pretty good track record for keeping his word,” Penny pointed out.  Percival, lacking any such record himself, probably didn’t recognise one when he saw it.  “If he does kill you, no one else will surrender to him…”

Percival looked up at her.  She met, almost unwillingly, his eyes and flinched back, seeing terror and a numbing horror fighting for dominance.  “Get out,” he said, softly.  “Go!”

Penny blinked.  “Sir…?”

“Get out,” Percival shouted, waving at one of the SDs.  Penny felt him grab her arms before she could react.  “Get her out of here!”

The trooper had been genetically-engineered to be strong.  Penny knew that struggle would be useless, but even walking out with dignity was impossible with him dragging her out of the hatch, into the main body of the station.  Two eyes looked down at her, wondering where to take her; Percival, after all, hadn’t issued any instructions.  Penny tensed, preparing to launch a wicked kick at his groin, when someone else came up behind them.  She looked up to see a man wearing the uniform of a senior SD, but one she didn’t recognise.

“Hold her,” he ordered.  Before Penny could react, the guard had grasped onto her arms and was holding her still.  She struggled, but couldn’t break free.  “One moment, please.”

The newcomer produced a device from his belt and pressed it against Penny’s head.  She had barely a moment to recognise the neural jammer before he activated it and the world went away…

***
The massive shape of the command fortress was growing larger in the viewscreen as the starships inched closer.  Colin had an uncomfortable sense of Déjà vu; he’d seen something similar at Pollack, but then they’d been sneaking up under false IFF codes.  Now, the defenders of the fortress knew very well who they were…and had been running hundreds of tactical scans, some of them redundant.  The mystery of their odd behaviour – running a tracking projection on his ships would have been easy even with passive sensors – baffled him and he ordered the launch of additional drones.  It was possible, just barely, that they were preparing an ambush…

A light winked on the display as yet another automated buoy died under his fire.  Percival’s paranoia had led him to scatter thousands of them around in high orbit, remotely controlled by the command fortress, but they didn’t present a serious threat to his ships.  He’d had the entire network charted out by the drones before he advanced and it was straightforward to pick them off his chosen route.  The platforms combined the worst of both worlds – immobile and defenceless – and were normally used to support fortresses.  He didn’t intend to give Percival that option.

Another burst of icons announced the activation of a missile-launching platform, blasting out a lethal cargo towards his ships. The point defence system tracked and destroyed most of the missiles before they even entered terminal attack range, while the lone survivor of the salvo was barely noticed as it slammed into a superdreadnaught’s shields.  In their place, Colin would have aimed at the smaller ships – he also wouldn’t have wasted the platforms, but that was a given – in hopes of actually destroying a ship, but all of the platforms were targeted on the superdreadnaughts.  It might have worked in a basic space-warfare simulation, one of the many the Imperial Navy created to lure young minds to a life onboard ship, but not in real life.  It took dozens of missiles, hitting almost simultaneously, to knock down a superdreadnaught shield.  A single hit or two wasn't going to bother them…

But it was irritating.  The fleet was closing in on a fortress that was covered by at least three other fortresses.  In order to take out the command fortress, the fleet would have to engage all four of them, which meant spreading their firepower.  It would be bare minutes before they had to open fire or break off; he was certain that Percival would open fire as soon as they entered missile range.  He had hoped that Percival would see sense and surrender, or someone else would remove him, but instead…the fortress was as armed and ready for action as ever.

He looked over at the tactical officer.  “Update and commit us to engagement,” he ordered.  The tactical computers would have been planning the engagement while they were creeping closer to the enemy fortress.  Now, the fire plans for the entire fleet would be locked…and the engagement would be seconds away.  “Communications…?”

“There’s no response, sir,” the communications officer said.  Colin grimaced.  He had given serious thought to contacting Percival directly and begging for surrender, but Percival – damn him – would probably just take it as a sign of weakness.  “They’re lasing pretty heavily with the other fortresses, but nothing to us.”

Colin bowed his head.  “Launch commit,” he ordered.  He looked over at the tactical officer.  “You may fire at will.”

“Yes, sir,” the tactical officer said.  The superdreadnaught shuddered, again, as it launched the first salvo.  Colin was ruefully aware that if they pressed too close, they would probably shoot themselves dry and have to break off for a rendezvous with the replenishment ships.  Reloading the ships under fire was almost impossible.  “Missiles away.”

The fortress sparkled with malevolent red icons.  “Enemy have returned fire,” the tactical officer added.  “I repeat, incoming fire.”

***
It was very tense in the command centre.

“Admiral, the enemy have opened fire,” an operator said.  Red icons flared to life as the salvo, not as large or as powerful as the one that had wiped nine superdreadnaughts out of existence, but powerful enough to damage the station, roared towards them.  “Admiral…?”

“Return fire,” Percival screamed.  “Destroy them!”

Obediently, the operators brought the point defence online and authorised it to open fire.  What else could they do?

***
Colin’s eyes blurred as the missiles raced towards their target.  The fortresses formidable point defence was burning missile after missile out of space, but the combined firepower of nine superdreadnaughts and nearly a hundred smaller ships was too many for complete elimination.  Thirty-two missiles struck home against the fortress’s prow shields, trying to break through in an orgy of thermonuclear fire.  It wasn’t enough to crack the shield, or even burn out a shield generator, but it would have shook them.  The power cascading through their network might even damage vital components.

“Incoming fire,” the tactical officer reported.  The fortress designers had replaced all the space that was normally, on a superdreadnaught, used for drives with missile storage bays, all of which were pumping their cargo into the missile launchers.  It gave the fortresses an impressive weight of fire, but looking at the patterns, Colin had a vague suspicion that someone on the other side liked them.  They were allowing the computers to run the battle, without any human input at all, and that made them predicable.  “Point defence has engaged.”

Colin smiled as the missiles ran right into the deadly web protecting his ships.  The fortress was firing off nearly five hundred per salvo, but only a tiny number were getting through, slamming into his ships.  The General Cunningham, the lead ship, was taking a beating, but the other ships were almost unaffected.

He keyed his intercom as the damage mounted.  “Irfan, get the hell out of there,” he ordered.  The rapidly mounting damage would soon prove catastrophic even to a superdreadnaught.  “You can’t…”

The superdreadnaught’s shields failed.  The Empire’s forces lacked the Geek-designed missiles, but that only prolonged the agony as the General Cunningham was pounded into scrap.  Two minutes after it’s shields failed, the superdreadnaught was lost in an expanding ball of flame.

“Press it in,” Colin ordered.  There was no time to mourn the dead.  The rate of fire increased as the ships slipped closer to their targets.  “Ignore the other fortresses; concentrate fire on the command unit!”

***
It happened very quickly.  The two operators closest to the SDs turned, as if they were going to ask for orders, and threw themselves at the guards, desperately struggling for their weapons.  As Percival watched in horror, the entire compartment seemed to dissolve into a frantic mass, fighting it out desperately for the weapons, while the fortress kept echoing with the sound of impacts.  An SD managed to shoot down an operator, but the others kept fighting, fired by frantic determination and fear.  The SDs were stronger and better trained, but the operators were desperate…

”Stop this,” Percival shouted, clinging on to his command chair as the station resounded with the sound of another hit.  Red icons climbed up the display as damage mounted.  “Stop this now!”

The fighters ignored him.  For the first time since he had grown old enough to speak, no one was interested in what he had to say.  His voice became louder, and then a whine.  “Stop it!”

One of the SDs, taking aim at one of the operators, fired a single shot.  The plasma stream burned through the operator’s body and slashed into the side of Percival’s head.  He died before he could even scream in agony.

***
“Sir, the fortress is losing it’s shields,” the tactical officer said.

“I saw,” Colin said.  “God help them all.”

The missiles, one by one, were no longer slamming into the shields, but into the unprotected hull.  Explosions burst out on the side of the fortress, burning away missile launchers and energy weapons, while others dug into the hull before exploding.  The fortress’s interior was even better armed than a superdreadnaught, but nothing physical could handle such blasts at close proximity.  The armour melted and broke under the fire, while the nuclear fury took the path of least resistance and raced along corridors and passages.  A minute after the first missile had slammed into the unshielded hull, the fortress disintegrated in a series of tearing explosions.

“Sir,” the tactical officer said, “I picked up an odd reading.”

Colin lifted an eyebrow.  The other fortresses were falling silent now.  “An odd reading?”

“Yes, very odd,” the tactical officer said.  “It was almost as if a cloaked ship had fled the station.”

Colin laughed.  “Maybe Percival ran,” he said, absently.  “That would be just like him, wouldn’t it?”

Chapter Forty-Two

“So it wasn't him?”

“The download from the command fortress to the other fortresses was clear enough,” Salgak said, calmly.  The Geek had remained behind with the supply and replenishment ships, but, Colin was amused to note, seemed to be fitting in well on Harmony.  He’d already linked his laser-communicator into the command fortress network and commenced a long search for unpleasant surprises.  “Admiral Percival, or whoever was in command of the fortress, was on the command deck the second the download cut off, when the fortress blew.”

Colin felt oddly empty.  He had imagined a final confrontation between himself and Percival, the former putting forward powerful attacks of self-justification, the latter cowering under a wave of verbal revenge.  The desire for revenge had fuelled his determination to burn down the entire rotting Empire and build something new on top of it, but now…now it felt almost like an anticlimax.

“I don’t suppose that it might have been someone else?”

Salgak shrugged, his implants whirring as he linked into another datafile.  “The person in command wore an Admiral’s command ring,” he said.  “The only one issued to the Sector was to Percival himself and there is no record that the ring was passed to another user.  Indeed, the stream of data from the ring itself suggests that it was never removed.”

He smiled thinly, revealing the glint of metal.  “I believe that it is very likely that he was on the fortress when it exploded,” he said.  “I doubt that anyone survived to tell the tale.”

“No,” Colin mused.  It sounded flippant, so little compared to the fighting yet to come, but it was…unless you knew that the fortress had had a crew of nearly four thousand officers and men, all blown to atoms in the twinkling of an eye.  “We never found any survivors.”

The other fortresses, much to his relief, had surrendered after some face-saving discussions, although those hadn’t been pushed very hard.  The Marines had secured most of the fortresses and the vast majority of their crewmembers had indicated that they wanted to join the rebellion, although he wasn't surprised to discover that not all of them had been willing to switch sides.  The few thousand or so officers and men who wanted to return to the Empire had been transported to the surface of Harmony, where they would remain until the bulk freighter carrying Colonel Douglas and his men arrived from Freedom Base.  They could all return to the Empire as a single, unthreatening group.

But no one, apparently, had survived the destruction of Percival’s fortress…

“And the cloaked ship?”  He pressed.  “Was that just a flight of fancy?”

“I do not know,” Salgak said.  He sounded annoyed for the first time, although it was hard to tell over the buzzing and whirring.  “I have analysed all of the records from the Shadow Fleet.  They suggest that something was present, although honesty compels me to admit that it might have been a sensor ghost, and therefore not actually a real contact.”

Colin blinked.  “You have access to the fortresses and their records,” he said.  “What did they see?”

“Nothing,” Salgak said.  The Geek sent a signal into the room’s processor, ordering it to display an image of the fortresses as they orbited Harmony.  “I have analysed the records and my conclusion is that they were ordered to ignore any contacts with a particular signature.  The operators would simply never have been allowed to see it; in effect, it might as well never have been there.  If it was a craft docked at the command fortress, the records of its exact nature, or even whoever put it there, were lost with the fortress itself.  It may remain a mystery.”

Colin scowled.  The first few days of occupying Harmony had gone by in a blur of confused activity.  Once the surrenders had been accepted, he had seen to it that the industrial facilities were occupied, with their workers – an invaluable resource – offered the same deal as the former Navy crewmen.  He'd offered them a sweetener through, at Daria’s advice, and promised that they could buy out the facilities once the war was over, giving them a stake in remaining at Harmony.  He worried, sometimes, that he was creating a new corporate class – which was how the Thousand Families had begun their regime – but it couldn’t be helped.  Besides, they would have Anderson keeping a close eye on them.

It bothered him, somewhat, how closely he had come to rely on the former Security Officer.  It was true that the rules were different, and that he had to keep a sharp eye on people who might be tempted by the vast bounties that Percival and his subordinates had offered for him, but it offered a single man vast power.  The best he could do was keep an eye on him and hope that he was only empire-building…

“And there’s nothing else you can tell me about it,” he concluded.  “You don’t even have a vague idea of who might have used it?”

“Beyond the obviously limited number of people who might have a valid reason and authorisation to dock with the command fortress, no,” Salgak admitted.  “It might have been anyone from Imperial Intelligence to the Lord High Manager for the Roosevelt Clan.  The latter is actually quite likely.”

He bowed once, a slow stately bow, and turned to walk out the door.  Colin noted, not for the first time, that the Geek shuffled along, as if he were bowed down by some great weight.  It puzzled him, still, why anyone would do such a thing to themselves, even in defiance of the Empire.  The sheer weight of the implants, the ones openly visible to his eyes, would be hard to carry, even for a genetically-engineered man.  The Empire’s ban on such implants was more understandable – they put too much power in the hands of people who weren't entirely stable – but even they used implants, at least to some degree.  The Marines used them in an active role, while billions of worker-slaves on corporate worlds had them monitoring their every move.

And they still find ways to rebel, Colin thought.  The alliance with the Socialists and Democrats had been an eye-opener into the dark corners of the Empire, the ones he’d never heard about, never seen, not until he’d started the rebellion.  The genetically-engineered men and women, on factory worlds, free from infection and disease, but also designed with limits.  The Thousand Families had worked to design ideal slaves…and, in time, they might have succeeded.  Daria had told him about worlds where men and women were born, purposely, with learning disorders, preventing them from thinking properly.  Even they found ways to rebel.

And even that was a minor horror, compared to some of the others.

He brought up the strategic display and smiled at it.   He had intended to sit in Percival’s chair and put his feet on Percival’s desk, but when the battle had been over, Percival’s entire office had been nothing, but free-floating atoms in space.  It was odd, even after General Montgomery’s stateroom, to think that the massive quarters were his, although he wouldn’t stay at Harmony for long.  He would find someone with experience at commanding fortresses, or at least service on them, and offer them the role.  Luckily, Percival’s paranoia had ensured that Harmony was still adequately defended.

The icons for Macore, Pollack and the other important worlds still glowed a dull red, but that would change.  As soon as Harmony had been secured, Colin had dispatched a squadron of battlecruisers to Macore, with orders to liberate the world, either through negotiation or force.  Blondel Dupre – if she were still alive; Percival’s records suggested that she was, but there was no way to know how the situation might have changed – would be unhappy if the SDs were included in the general amnesty, but it would be quicker than trying to remove them from Macore by force.  They wouldn’t have a hope once the Imperial Navy ships orbiting the planet surrendered, or fled, or were taken out, but they wouldn’t know that.  They were regarded as expendable, after all.

Actually, she’s going to be furious, Colin said.  It was a compromise and not one he liked, but he would accept it as the price of avoiding a major fight.  The garrisons on Pollack and the other Clan Worlds might put up more of a fight, but when they realised that Percival’s force had been destroyed, they would probably accept his offer, contingent on them refraining from sabotage or wrecking.  If they agreed – probably calculating that they would recover the worlds when the Empire struck back – they would be allowed to return to the Empire, or invited to join the rebels.  If Kathy was any example, the junior Family Members might just accept such an offer…

And, with the industrial nodes under his control, the rest of the sector would be mopped up quickly.

He was still smiling, and considering future operations, when Daria was shown into the office.  

“It’s been a long time since I was in one of these,” she said, by way of introduction.  The former commander of the secondary command fortress had lacked Stacy Roosevelt’s appalling taste – and they’d managed to capture her again – but it was still impressively decorated, with several examples of forbidden artwork.  The painting of two nude women making out, painted by someone called Lombardi, was impressive, but if it had been owned and displayed by anyone lesser, it would have provoked an investigation.  “I hope not going to keep that…thing.”

Colin followed her finger.  The image of the single Dathi would have provoked horror almost everywhere.  Possessing an image of the Dathi wasn't actually illegal, but with Public Information’s endless reminders of how close humanity had come to extermination and how important the Empire was in preserving the human race, anyone who displayed such an image would be regarded as suspect, at best.

“I have no idea,” he said, dryly.  A thought struck him.  “When were you last in one of these?”

“There was a…disagreement with one of the Imperial Shipping Office goons,” Daria said, tossing her head.  “The bastard had the nerve to bring me in front of the local System Commander and demand that I be thrown onto one of the penal worlds.”  She smiled thinly.  “I was bribing the System Commander, so it didn’t get very far, but I wouldn’t have wanted to risk it again.  Greedy bastard wiped out my profits for that season.”

“I’m surprised you even managed to bribe him,” Colin said.  The Imperial Shipping Office, which had the undeclared goal of absorbing or terminating all the independent shippers into Family shipping lines, had massive clout.  “How much did he want?”

“It wasn’t money,” Daria said, tightly.  “Let’s just say that he wanted something from the Rim and leave it at that, shall we?”

She looked up at the display.  “I’m surprised you’re not joining in the celebrations,” she said, changing the subject.  “Aren’t you going to make an appearance at one of the parties?”

“Not if I can avoid it,” Colin growled.  It had been easier to plan a rebellion when it had been just him and a handful of trusted friends.  Now, it was so big that it wasn't easy to keep track of everything that was going on.  Worse, now that Harmony was secure, most of the crews seemed to be acting as if the war was already over.  It was barely even begun.  “I have too much work to do.”

“I thought you once told me that the secret to command was to find the right people, pass the job to them, and then back them to the hilt,” Daria said, reprovingly.  “Don’t we have others who could handle the routine tasks?”

Colin smiled.  “It’s not just the routine tasks,” he said.  “Each of the fortresses requires, at least, a thousand crewmen to operate properly.  They also require a commanding officer and experienced subordinates.  I don’t have many people with experience in Fortress Command – it was a whole different section of the Imperial Navy – and I don’t know if I trust all of the people here.  Percival had plenty of time to plant his own people among them…”

“And Percival is dead,” Daria pointed out, not without a certain amount of delight.  “Will they remain loyal to the Empire?”

Colin had wondered about that.  “It depends on what they are,” he admitted.  “If they’re Imperial Intelligence agents, they’ll go to ground and remain underground until they have a chance to get back in touch with the Empire.  Salgak is working on it, but they will probably have access to hidden backdoors in the main computers, which means…well, they could slip a message to them right under our noses.”

He grinned.  “And, of course, we just blew out the ICN hub for this sector,” he added.  “That's something else we’re going to have to make a decision about.  Do we keep it, or destroy it, or what?

“But that doesn’t matter at the moment,” he continued.  He smiled at her face, illuminated by the holographic starchart.  “If the agents worked directly for Percival, they’ll probably vanish into the general population and we’ll never have to worry about them.  If we put the wrong person in the wrong place, we could have a disaster on our hands.”

Daria considered it.  “And you can’t keep a garrison of Marines on each station?”

“For a few months, yes, but our Marines are largely trained in shipboard operations,” Colin said.  “We could have devoted more time to training for operations onboard stations, but it wasn’t considered a priority.  If we do that, we show them that we don’t trust them, which may not help them to trust us.”  He snorted.  “How many of us started rebelling because we felt that we were unable to accomplish anything because we were never regarded as trusted?”

“True,” Daria said.  She contemplated the map for a long minute.  “How do you intend to handle it, then?”

“Everyone we have with some fortress experience is going to be seconded here ands put in charge, with crews drawn down as much as we can,” Colin said.  “That won’t be so much of a problem, not with the massive demand for manpower we also have, but…it’s not a perfect solution.”

“Nothing in life is ever perfect,” Daria said.  “You should know that by now.”  She switched the display to an image reflecting the entire Empire.  “So, how long so we have?”

“I wish I knew,” Colin said.  “The Shadow Fleet needs to be reorganised with all the new ships and personnel…and, of course, we have to restock the ships.  Once that’s done, I think we will have to raid Admiral Quentin at Yanasaxon, maybe even knocking Sector 96 out of the fight before they can concentrate and respond to us.  A handful of arsenal ships can handle that.  In fact…”

He paused.  “If we had the volunteers, I’ve had something of an idea,” he said, altering the display to show Earth and the Solar System, the birthplace of the human race.  “The problem is that it’s a suicide mission.”

He contemplated the image thoughtfully.  The humans who had ventured out from Earth, hunting for a new life away from a rapidly decaying Earth, wouldn’t have recognised the system.  Earth itself had been almost depopulated, populated – now – only by the Thousand Families and their servants.  The Moon and the Ring, the network of asteroids orbiting Earth, provided Earth’s powerful industry, while Mars and the moons of Jupiter housed the majority of the system’s population.  They might have clung to the tatters that remained of their independence, which had ended during the years of the Federation, but everyone knew that it was a joke.  The nearest first-rank world, with limited independence, was two hundred light years from Earth.  

“You’ll have volunteers if you asked,” Daria said.  “What do you want them to do?  Ram a superdreadnaught into Earth?”

“No,” Colin said.  He explained slowly.  “Do you still think we’ll find volunteers?”

“Of course,” Daria said.  She leaned closer.  “All you have to do is ask.”

She was very close to him and he was suddenly, almost overpoweringly, aware of that.  Her lips crept towards his, so slowly that he couldn’t say which of them had started the moment, when the door hissed open.  They sprang apart as Salgak entered, shuffling along as usual, so distracted that he didn’t even notice that they had been on the verge of kissing.

“Salgak,” Daria said, angrily.  “Didn’t your mother teach you to push the buzzer first?”

Salgak ignored her.  “This is important,” he said.  He was so distracted that his implants remained still, almost perfectly silent.  “I have been probing the classified databanks on the fortress.  They received backups of everything that was entered into the command fortress’s computers.  Admiral Percival received a standard advance warning from Admiral Quentin.”

Colin realised what he meant in a sudden flash of horror.  “He’s coming here?”

“Yes,” Salgak said.  “Admiral Quentin and at least two squadrons of superdreadnaughts, with escorts, are on their way.  He’s coming directly, under the impression that he will meet Percival here, but he’ll be coming loaded for bear.”

“Or us,” Colin said.  He looked up at the display, mentally calculating times in his head.  It was rare for anyone, even an Admiral keen to enjoy a rival’s embarrassment, to keep to the posted schedule.  There was slippage in everything.  “How long do we have?”

“Assuming that he kept the promised schedule, ten days,” Salgak said.  “After that…he could arrive at any moment…and how can we hide a missing fortress?  The minute he arrives, he will know what’s happened…and move at once to recover Harmony.  We have ten days to prepare for him.”

There was a long pause.  “Well,” Colin said, finally, “I guess I made a mistake when I sent those ships away, didn’t I?”

Chapter Forty-Three

Admiral Quentin settled back into his command chair as the Admiral Carpathia flickered into the Harmony system, privately relishing the coming meeting with Percival.  Quentin, himself a scion of the highest of Families, disliked Percival and the chance to engage in polite superiority – if not outright gloating over his misfortune – was too good to resist.  Quentin had competed with Percival for the assignment to Sector 117, seeing it as a chance to expand his own domains and ensure that his future within the Families was secure, but Percival had won the political struggle.  He might have lacked Quentin’s birth, although Percival himself would have disputed that, but his political skills were unmatched.

And now he was begging for help.  Quentin didn’t intend to admit it, not publicly, but he’d stalled as long as he could when the first reports of the rebellion had reached Yanasaxon.  It wasn't that he hadn’t believed him – Percival’s incompetence was hardly a secret among the Families, and he personally detested the man – but it hardly seemed likely that a handful of rebels could topple the Empire.  There were plenty of people who had shared that delusion, but most of them tended to end up on penal colonies, if they managed to survive being captured.  The penal worlds had an endless demand for warm bodies; it was sad, but true that most people sent to one of them didn’t last a year.  Even if the rebels really had managed to take a handful of superdreadnaughts, and that had been even more unbelievable, what damage could they do to the Empire?  A competently defended world could stand them off…and who cared, really, about the other colonies?

He smiled at the thought.  The Empire employed hundreds of tricks to put a legal gloss on its rule, but his Family had been fond of offering recovery services that were, somehow, never repaid.  A struggling colony might receive help, but it would still be paying off the debt hundreds of years later…and, of course, it would be enforced by the Imperial Navy.  A colony that had been bombarded by rebel forces, in a pointless display of spite, would be an opportunity.  Percival might have been given an opportunity to lay the grounds for a successful future, but knowing Percival, he would find some way to waste it.  Quentin had stalled, not least, because he was sure that Percival would blunder.  The thought of all the Families and Clans he had courted, in his bid to win control of a sector, turning on him was amusing.  The last thing Quentin wanted to do was put a stop to it.

And, in any case, he was forbidden – normally – to leave his sector.  It was questionable if he was even allowed to send a handful of smaller ships into Percival’s sector, although that could be explained by Percival’s demand for help, and he had used that as his excuse to stall…until the Roosevelt Clan started piling on the pressure.  They had demanded, in no uncertain terms, that Percival had to be helped, whatever the costs.  Quentin had his own supporters, and backers, but he was very aware that a single misstep where Roosevelt could see would probably be disastrous, at least for him personally.  The Lords and Ladies on the High City wouldn’t hesitate to abandon him if Roosevelt sought to extract revenge…and so he had dispatched a squadron and taken personal command.  If he couldn’t have the pleasure of watching Percival lose his sector, he could at least enjoy watching Percival trying to be grateful.

But Percival was not responding.

He frowned at the display, watching as it updated rapidly.  He’d brought the fleet out of flicker-space several light-minutes from the planet, merely to enjoy prolonging the approach, in the certain knowledge that it would irritate Percival.  They should have received a query from System Command, if not Percival personally, by now, but they hadn’t even been pinged.  He was certain that Percival’s scanners knew he was there – the flicker radiation would have been instantly noticeable – so what was he doing?

Maybe he’s just trying to play it cool, Quentin thought, but he knew that that wasn't the answer.  Percival wouldn’t have issued orders not to send an IFF query, not with a fleet of enemy superdreadnaughts running around, so what was going on?  The silence was somehow ominous, chillingly so…and, for the first time, Quentin wondered if Percival had actually not been exaggerating the threat.  Had something happened to Harmony?

He looked over at his flag captain.  “Andrea, what do you make of the system?”

Captain Andrea Chang shrugged.  “I’m not sure,” she said.  She’d been with him for years, first as a Lieutenant and then, later, as a Captain.  She actually handled the superdreadnaught fairly well – she was genuinely popular with her crew, which was rare for a superdreadnaught – and she knew she could speak her mind in front of him.  “He didn’t even send a signal…”

The cold feeling in Quentin’s chest congealed.  Percival had had a unique set of signals for communicating with his fellow Admirals…and he hadn’t used them.  It was possible, he supposed, that Percival was still in bed and no one dared to wake him, but that would have been a breach of protocol.  It wasn’t possible that anyone, even Percival, would remain out of contact, not with a goodly portion of another Sector Fleet bearing down on him.  He should have transmitted the signal at once…

And he wasn't even sending a welcoming committee.

“Launch probes,” he ordered, tartly.  The bureaucrats would probably complain about the expenditure, but he could pass the blame onto Percival.  If something was wrong, the probes would find it before the main body of the fleet ran into something they couldn’t handle.  “Pass the signals to the other ships; I want them to go to general quarters, but without raising shields or charging weapons.”

Andrea gave him an odd look.  “You want them to remain defenceless?”

Quentin considered it.  He had thought, at first, that he should go to full alert, but Percival’s defenders – if that was Percival over there – would have regarded it as a sign of hostile intent.  If starships were actually mutinying, they might even wonder if Quentin had lost his entire superdreadnaught strength, or if he had joined the rebels.  The agony of indecision held him for a long moment, but finally he made up his mind.

“Yes,” he said, “but I want them ready to snap up the shields at a moment’s notice.”

***
Colin scowled down at the display as the red icons continued their leisurely flight towards Harmony, tossing ideas and concepts around in his head.  Ideally, he would have pretended to be Percival long enough to get Admiral Quentin within the gravity shadow and under the guns of the arsenal ships, before revealing that the rebels owned the base, but that wasn't going to be possible.  Percival’s personal IFF codes had died with him – there were no copies outside his personal terminal, which had been destroyed – and posing as Percival without the codes would have been impossible.  Worse, the handful of people who could have claimed to have taken command in the wake of a disaster or rebel attack were all loyalists.  They wouldn’t agree to help him lure a fleet of superdreadnaughts to their doom.

Quentin, he saw, had brought eighteen superdreadnaughts – two full squadrons – to the system.  He might not be suspicious, not yet, but the longer he waited to receive a signal, which was never going to come, the more chance he would smell a rat.  Colin didn’t know Quentin personally, not like Percival, but the vague reports he’d had suggested that the man was regarded as competent, if unimaginative.  The files on the Navy Database hadn’t been helpful.  Percival had been held up as an ideal commander – the file had practically dripped with gushing tones – while Colin himself had had four lines.  There was no easy way to predict…

An alarm sounded.  “Admiral, we have a problem,” the tactical officer said.  “A starship just brought up its drives, far too close to the incoming ships.”

Colin cursed.  The ship’s commander had been extremely good – and extremely lucky.  Keeping the drives offline had ensured that they wouldn’t be detected until they moved…and they’d probably been lurking there since the First Battle of Harmony.  They might have been one of the ships that had fled, or another that had been out of position and gone to ground when the rebels attacked, but it hardly mattered.  It wouldn’t take more than a few minutes for them to update Quentin on the true state of play.

“General signal to the fleet,” he ordered.  He would have to go with a very basic plan and hope.  Everything could unravel very quickly.  Quentin didn’t know it, but unlike Percival, he was very close to destroying the rebellion.  “Prepare to advance and engage the enemy.”

The display updated slightly as the Shadow Fleet fell into a more purposeful formation.  Colin would have preferred to force Quentin to come to him at Harmony, where he would be supported by the fortresses, and if he had waited another few weeks, he would have been confident about the outcome.  The fortresses were barely manned, however, let alone drilled…and an engagement so close to the industrial stations could prove disastrous.  They would have to opt for a classic engagement in deep space.

“The fleet’s responding,” the tactical officer said.  “They’re standing by.”

“Good,” Colin said.  “The battle line will advance to engage the enemy.”

***
“I see,” Quentin said, as the download finished.  The news would have been bad enough under other circumstances, although he was slightly cheered by the news of Percival’s death in combat, but it was disastrous now.  Harmony under rebel control meant, inevitably, that most of Sector 117 would be lost.  “Andrea?”

“We have two choices,” she said, tightly.  “We can advance and crush the rebel fleet here, or we can fall back and prepare a counter-offensive from Yanasaxon.”

Quentin considered it.  The remains of his Sector Fleet wouldn’t have added much to his force, if he fell back, but combined with the fortresses defending Yanasaxon it would have provided a barrier.  There was a lot to be said for delaying the rebels until the Imperial Navy could mass and crush them, but if the reports of mutinies were actually true, it would give them time to spread their infection throughout the Empire.  They would have a chance to obtain more ships, spread more rebellion…and make the final price for crushing them much higher.

Or, seeing that the rebels were coming out to engage, he could crush them.

“We advance,” he ordered.  He would smash the rebel fleet, unless it fled…and in that case, he would recover Harmony.  The rebellion would never survive the loss of either one.  “Bring the fleet to battle stations…and prepare to advance.”

“I have a suggestion,” Andrea said.  She spoke rapidly for two minutes.  “Admiral?”

Quentin laughed.  Andrea could be so devious at times.  “See to it,” he said.  She’d studied the download from the light cruiser from a tactical point of view.  “And Andrea…?”  She looked over at him.  “Well done.”

***
The two fleets converged slowly in normal space, neither commander willing to risk the confusion that would have been caused if either fleet had flickered through space to close the range instantly.  Colin watched as the reports from the probes came in, updating them constantly on the state of the enemy force, each ship’s fields and emissions being studied carefully.  They showed the signs of limited maintenance and general wear and tear – although he would have bet good money that the insides were nice and clean, perfectly shipshape – that marked ships that rarely saw real action.  The odds were good that some supply officer, in the perfect confidence that the ships would never see action, had sold off some of the supplies, or simply not bothered to do his job properly.

The thought made him smile, remembering all the inspections he had carried out, back when he’d been on the Lightning.  It was simple enough to prevent such outright negligence, but it required a commander who was willing to actually take care of his ship…and they were often lacking.  Even if they were, the shortages of spare parts and supplies caused by corruption made maintenance difficult, particularly when there was no ongoing mission.  The Empire would discover, when it finally awoke to the seriousness of the rebellion, that it had a deeply flawed weapon in its hands.  By Colin’s most pessimistic estimate, it would take them years to correct all the problems, sack incompetent or greedy officers, and then install new values within the Navy.  He doubted, somehow, that they would have the will to force through the reforms.

“Squadron Three, lock onto the superdreadnaughts,” he ordered, knowing that the command would be passed on to the arsenal ships.  “Squadron One, prepare for volley fire.”

How much, he wondered, did Quentin know?  How much had the mystery ship – it seemed to be a light cruiser, although it was hard to be sure at such range – seen?  If Quentin had a perfect record of the battle, was he studying it…or was he confident that eighteen superdreadnaughts to eleven, not counting the escorts, was enough to win a victory?  Under normal circumstances, he wouldn’t have been wrong; certainly, without the arsenal ships, Colin would have hesitated to engage.  If Quentin hadn’t realised that the arsenal ships existed, there would be a quick slaughter…

He scowled.  He hadn’t realised how much he had come to rely on his insight into Percival’s mindset to guide his tactics.  Percival had been comforting, in a way, a person who he could rely on to do the predicable thing.  He might have had help from juniors with more insight, or understanding of tactics, but he made the final choices himself.  Admiral Quentin might be more of the same, or he might be a tactical genius who had nerve and skill.  The missile envelopes were almost overlapping now as the fleets settled into their final approach; there was nothing subtle about it at all.  Quentin might be simply carrying out a basic plan, or he might have something up his sleeve.

Vectors and tactics span through his head.  The basic pattern of the engagement was already set.  Quentin had picked a target that Colin had to defend, forcing an inferior force into battle on dubious ground.  That, at least, was standard doctrine…but it was standard doctrine because it worked.  The Empire had used such tactics since before the arsenal ships had been invented, back when humanity had first been forced to fight an interstellar war, back before the Empire itself.  They worked…and nothing the Geeks had invented had changed the fundamentals.  Not yet.

“Firing range,” the tactical officer said.  “They’re solidifying their locks on us.”

Colin nodded.  “All ships,” he ordered.  “Open fire.”

The arsenal ships fired as one.  A moment later, the superdreadnaughts followed, launching thirty thousand missiles towards their targets.

***
The rebels, Quentin had determined, were intent on keeping Harmony.  That was the only explanation for their willingness to risk a close engagement with his fleet.  It would have been simple for them to run, but instead they closed…and opened fire.  He’d taken a brief look at the records that had been downloaded, but they didn’t suggest the sudden shock of seeing so many missiles bearing down on his ships.  For the first time, he admitted that, perhaps, Percival really had run into something he couldn’t handle.  The sheer weight of fire was unbelievable.  It was so vast that the tactical sensors were having problems distinguishing one missile from its partners.

“Time it,” he ordered, trying to remain calm when all his instincts were screaming at him to run, run, and never look back.  The missiles were hugely intimidating.  “Andrea, signal to all ships; they are to fire when the enemy missiles reach the two-minute mark.”

“Understood, sir,” Andrea said.  The superdreadnaught started to roll as it belched out its own first salvo.  The massed fire of eighteen superdreadnaughts was tiny compared to the sheer weight bearing down on them, but it would be enough to hit back.  The rebel forces would have to defend themselves, if nothing else.  “Commencing volley fire now.”

Quentin felt his hands gripping the arms of his command chair.  It was a gift from his mother when he had been promoted to Admiral, a rather snide recognition that he owed his position to his connections, rather than to native ability.  He was rather proud of himself for not screaming in panic, looking at the missiles, and proud of his crew for not coming apart.  The timing had to be perfect, but…for once, he felt like a real commander, as if he had earned the right to sit in the chair.

And if I get this wrong, part of his mind whispered, they won’t find a trace of me or anyone else from this ship.  The images of Commodore Tamworth’s quick and sharp defeat, even recorded from several light-seconds away, had been terrifying.  The man hadn’t known what he was facing, but Quentin almost envied him.  It took all of his determination not to break and run, for he knew the truth.  A single mistake could cost him the entire Sector Fleet.

“One minute,” Andrea said.  “Drives are ready and hot.”

“Coordinates locked in,” the helmsman added.  “We are ready.”

Quentin smiled.  “Flicker!”

Chapter Forty-Four

Colin swore as the enemy icons flickered once and vanished.

“They made a short-range hop,” the tactical officer said, grimly.  “They’re currently approaching the planet.”

“Flicker us out,” Colin ordered, as the wave of enemy missiles roared down on them.  The obvious counter to the arsenal ships was simply to get out of the way, which meant that the arsenal ships had shot themselves dry – for nothing.  It had been a worthwhile gamble, but he’d lost.  The enemy fleet was completely untouched and he couldn’t risk additional damage to his force.  “Standard short-range jump.”

He winced as space and time twisted around them, the tactical display altering to match their new position, out of range of the enemy fleet.  There were several reasons why flickering wasn’t considered a normal part of combat operations, not least the wear and tear on the ships and their crews, but Admiral Quentin had altered the standard tactics…and won his gamble.  The rebel fleet would face his on even terms…and, given the numbers disparity, it would actually work in his favour.

Or would it?

“Bring us about,” he ordered, as a new idea crystallised in his head.  He hadn’t wanted to test out the Geeks gunboat idea in combat, but if that could give them an advantage, it had to be tried.  “Take us in on an intercept course.”

Admiral Quentin, he reasoned, couldn’t know how weak the fortresses were, or he would have dived on them and wrecked havoc, forcing Colin to cut loose starships to defend Harmony – or abandon it.  The destruction of Harmony, however, would be a secondary objective; if he could take out the Shadow Fleet, it would bring the rebellion to a sudden and undignified end.  His remaining ships could recover Harmony or merely seal it off from the rest of the galaxy, until the Empire returned to the sector and recovered their base.

He nodded as the enemy fleet started to alter course in response.  Quentin didn’t know, couldn’t know, that the arsenal ships had all been expended.  He didn’t dare enter the gravity shadow until he had obliterated Colin’s fleet.  He would be looking to fight a conventional battle, one where the numbers were in his favour…and would be totally surprised by the Geeks and their gunboats.  There was a very good reason why no one would expect it; no one in their right might, or who wasn't desperate, would consider the tactic.

“Order the arsenal ships to break off and return to the replenishment ships,” he ordered.  He’d ordered the replenishment ships to remain at the first waypoint, waiting in interstellar space, as a precautionary measure…and one that had just paid off.  It might be hours before the arsenal ships could return, but when they did, they would be loaded for bear.  Perhaps he’d even have something for them to engage.  “The remainder of the fleet is to form up on the flag.”

He paused.  “And get me a laser link to the command fortress,” he added.  “I need to speak to them on a secure line.”

***
Quentin had allowed himself a feeling of relief as the fleet had flickered away from the onrushing missiles.  It had been easy, in hindsight, and yet the memory of the missiles, certain to destroy his ships, would remain with him for the rest of his life.  He had thought, even, that some of them would have come with his ships through the flicker, even though cold logic told him that that was impossible.  The survival of the enemy fleet, by performing their own flicker, wasn't a surprise.  He would have done the same in their place.

“Launch a second spread of drones,” he said, as the sensors stabilised and started reporting accurate information.  He’d taken a major risk by coming out along the edge of Harmony’s gravity shadow, with the very real possibility that one or more of his ships would run into it and be destroyed, but it had been necessary.  It offered them both a chance to engage the fortresses…and obtain accurate information on their status.  “I want you to locate the command fortress.”

“It’s missing,” Andrea said.  Quentin nodded sourly.  Percival’s command fortress was gone.  It had to have been destroyed.  Towing a fortress away wasn't easy, even if there had been a point to doing it.  “The enemy fleet is reforming and preparing to advance on us.”

Quentin smiled, contemplating the prospect of a second flicker, one that wasted more missiles, but it would be pointless.  Dancing all over the system wouldn’t gain either side anything.  He considered, for a brief moment, simply breaking off the engagement and returning to Yanasaxon, there to wait for reinforcements, but he still had the advantage.  Besides, if he knew Percival, the idiot had probably passed up a chance to kill the rebellion in its cradle through his own cowardice and stupidity.

The data on the fortresses was not reassuring.  He’d hoped that they had been damaged, but their tactical emissions suggested that they were fully active and ready to engage if he came within missile range.  Without the enemy fleet, and their arsenal ships, he might have trusted to his fleet to break through the fortresses, or even laid siege to the system and waited for them to die on the vine.  Its presence, however, was his priority.  He couldn’t break off and leave it intact, or his career would be over.

“Good,” he said, as the display updated again.  “Take us into battle formation and advance on the enemy.”

He broke off as new icons flickered into existence.  “What the hell?”

***
Jackson Cuthbert had never been an Imperial Navy officer, or even a crewman.  He’d grown up on an asteroid colony, one of the hidden colonies which housed a population determined to hide from the Empire, either for fear of discovery or because they wanted to be free.  His ancestors had been members of an isolated and distrusted religious sect, back when the Empire had been younger, and with persecution increasing, they had decided to hide.

The Empire’s attitude to religion was simple.  The Thousand Families didn’t care what religion the lower orders followed, apart from the handful who were nominally part of one religion or another, as long as they remained hard working and respectful.  Religions that encouraged submission, acceptance of a person’s born status and limited curiosity about the universe were encouraged, religions that encouraged questioning or rebellion were stamped on.  Jackson’s ancestors had watched some of their fellows mind-burned to promote the Empire’s ideology, or used against their own people, and had fled to the Rim.  Now, with the rebellion, some of them had come back to fight.

“Flicker,” he ordered.

The gunboat was the smallest ship in service that could carry a flicker drive and travel faster than light.  It never quite fitted into the Imperial Navy’s wall of battle, being too small to mount adequate shielding and defences, while too large to be able to avoid enemy fire for long.  The Geeks, lacking the standard willingness to accept what everyone knew as final, had expanded the concept, fitting them with missiles and even a handful of energy weapon launchers to provide some limited defence.  He braced himself against the shock, feeling the wave of sickness passing through him, and then pressed his hands to the controls.  They were in the midst of the enemy formation.

He threw the gunboat into a series of evasive manoeuvres as the ship almost rammed an enemy superdreadnaught.  The Imperial ships were so large, and so close, that he could have seen them with the naked eye, close enough for them to take aim at him.  Most point defence weapons weren't intended to be fired at targets that had shields, but a handful of explosions indicated that some of the gunboats had triggered automated defences and had been blown out of space.  His ship had barely survived a close encounter with a pulsar cannon burst, not the most accurate weapon in existence, and now his shields were raised.  He might survive two seconds under heavy energy weapons fire, instead of being wiped out in a heartbeat.

“Lock on to the target,” he commanded.  The three crewmen on the gunboat were all volunteers, knowing that they were considered expendable, even by the Shadow Fleet…and that the odds for their survival were low.  Jackson knew why he was here, but the other two had never volunteered their stories, although they both shared haunted looks whenever they thought about the past.  They could have been anything from slaves to people who’d said the wrong thing at the wrong time.  “Prepare to engage.”

The superdreadnaughts were blazing away at them now and he cursed the unfairness of a universe that allowed them to fire without any restraints.  They could have fired at each other for hours with their point defence weapons without making any impression on the shields, or the armour, protecting the superdreadnaughts.  They might even have dismissed the gunboats as being a decoy, no threat at all, rather than a potentially lethal danger.  That would change the minute their first missile struck home.

“Locked on,” the weapons officer said.  The lights dimmed slightly as the power was diverted to the missile’s storage cells.  The gunboat, among its many other weaknesses, could only fire one missile at a time.  “Ready to engage.”

Jackson nodded, muttering a silent prayer under his breath.  The Cult of Thor had preached strength, self-determination and freedom…and, for that, they had been forced to flee.  Today, the Empire would learn why the cult had once been feared, feared so much that they had even been denied a world of their own.

“Fire,” he snapped.  The entire gunboat jerked as the missile launched from the rack.  “Power up a second missile…

The burst of plasma fire wiped the gunboat, and its crew, out of space.

***
Quentin watched in numb disbelief as the gunboats were hacked out of space, one by one.  He would have understood an attempt at ramming his ships, which might have equalised the odds, but the gunboats seemed utterly pointless and futile.  They died, in tiny flickers of energy, only a handful surviving to launch their missiles.  They had been fired from well within energy range, too close for the point defence to  engage them before they slammed home, but what good would they do?  Even if the rebels had packed the missiles with antimatter, and the small explosions that marked the deaths of the gunboats suggested otherwise, they would still not take out a single superdreadnaught.

The first missile approached the superdreadnaught’s shields, touched it, and passed right through the shield.  Quentin gaped, unable to believe what he was seeing, just before the missile slammed into the hull.  The explosion shook the entire ship.  The rebels hadn’t just managed to create a missile that could slip through the shields without being destroyed, but they had invented a more powerful warhead as well!  Red icons flickered up as the superdreadnaughts, suddenly alert to the danger, strove to burn them all out of space, but it was too late.  Missiles slammed home, most of them passing through shields that should have caught them, and damaged ships.

“Four superdreadnaughts took moderate to serious damage,” Andrea reported, as the network linking the ships updated.  Red icons dampened down as later details came in, downgrading the problems.  “Damage control parties are already being assembled and tackling the damage.”

Quentin stared at her.  The world had just turned upside down.  Missiles didn’t get through shields.  They had to batter down the shields.  If the rebels had somehow produced a missile that could…they’d be at Earth within the year!  A thousand years of experience with long slow grinding wars that had produced, finally, results had been altered overnight.  And yet, Andrea was calm!  Was there anything they could do, apart from running…or being blown out of space?

“The enemy fleet is closing in,” he said.  Panic whispered at the back of his mind.  He was sure, or perhaps he just wanted to believe, that no one would blame him for running when faced with impossible weapons.  “We should run!”

“Maybe not,” Andrea said, calmly.  “If they had such missiles in standard use, why wouldn’t they deploy them on their ships?  Why wouldn’t they allow us to think we had the advantage, come into missile range, and fire them at us?”  Another small fleet of gunboats winked in as she spoke, the point defence firing on them within seconds of their arrival.  “Why would they bother firing off the missile ships if they could simply blow us away?”

Quentin had to smile.  At least one of them had kept her head.  “So…what does that mean?”

“It means that the battle can still be won,” Andrea said.  “Those missiles may be on the gunboats, but they’re not on the superdreadnaughts.  If we engage them, now, we can still win.”

“I see,” Quentin said.  He looked over towards the display.  “Continue on current course.”

***
“They’re not breaking off,” the tactical officer reported.  He sounded vaguely surprised.  “They’re still heading on a direct engagement vector.”

Colin nodded.  The single greatest flaw with the shield-busting missiles was that they couldn’t be launched from anything, but point blank range.  Salgak was sure that there was an answer to the problem, given time, but for the moment…the only way to launch the missiles was from the gunboats.  They would have to fight a conventional battle with the superdreadnaughts…and, for all the dancing around both sides had done, the odds hadn’t really changed at all.  They still favoured Admiral Quentin.

“I understand,” he said.  There was no other choice, but to take a leaf from the last battle they’d fought on even terms, at Macore.  “Do we have a lock on his ship?”

“Yes, sir,” the tactical officer said.  He smiled thinly as he probed the invisible network linking the enemy ships.  “They are using a standard Omega-Pattern data network.  He is currently based on the Admiral Carpathia.”

Colin smiled in sudden amusement.  The original Admiral Carpathia had been the Federation’s Chief of Naval Operations at the end of the Dathi War, a post he’d held until the Federation had become the Empire ten years later.  His military competence had been impressive enough, but his real place in the history books – those the Empire allowed – had come when he’d betrayed the last lingering ideals of the Federation to support the Families and become the first head of the Imperial Navy.  Percival might even have been a distant descendent.

”Target the Admiral Carpathia,” he ordered.  The Omega-Pattern formation was a strong one, but to a person who understood it, it showed exactly which ship was in command of the fleet.  If they could take the Admiral Carpathia – and Admiral Quentin – out, the enemy fleet would struggle to re-establish its data network.  Colin’s own fleet might have used a weaker network, but it would be much harder for them to identify the flagship.  

And even if Colin himself were taken out, someone else would take up the fight.

“Fire!”

***
“The enemy have opened fire,” Andrea said.  There was a heavy satisfaction in her voice as she read the raw data, before it came up on the display.  “They do not appear to have any additional arsenal ships with them.  The salvo density is high, but within their observed capabilities.”

“And thank God for that,” Quentin said, in honest relief.  If a second monstrous salvo had been fired, he would have ordered a retreat.  It would have proved that they didn’t know enough about the arsenal ships.  “Return fire.”

The superdreadnaught rumbled as it unleashed its first mighty salvo.  Quentin felt oddly reassured.  He might be about to die, and there was nothing certain about any superdreadnaught on superdreadnaught battle, but he knew what he was doing.  He was playing by conventional rules again…

The console bleeped an alarm.  “Ah, Admiral, they’ve targeted us,” Andrea said, grimly.  Quentin blinked, not comprehending.  Enemy fleets normally targeted his ships.  “They’ve targeted us personally, sir; their entire salvo is targeted on this ship.”

“Spin up the drives,” Quentin shouted, a second too late.  They had escaped once before into flicker-space, why not again?  “Get us out of here!”

The wave of missiles raged through the point defence and tore down on the superdreadnaught.  Free of the need to worry about covering themselves, the other shops fought to cover their flagship, even as the smaller ships were rapidly classed as expendable to save the larger ships.  It was too late.  Two hundred missiles made it through and slammed right into the Admiral Carpathia…

The superdreadnaught blew apart in a blinding flash.

***
“The Admiral Carpathia has been destroyed,” the tactical officer said.  “Their network has been disabled.”

Colin nodded.  That had become immediately obvious.  His point defence was still woven into a seamless whole, while theirs was scattered, every ship trying desperately to fend for itself.  Superdreadnaughts mounted enough point defence, on their own, to cover themselves against most threats, but now…now, they faced too many missiles and a coherent foe.  By the time a new commanding officer emerged, and the network was rebooted, it would be too late.

And for the Empire as well, he thought.  Quentin hadn’t chosen any subordinate because he hadn’t expected to die.  His mistake had cost lives and would cost many more, unless they fled or surrendered.  If they fled, they would remember what had happened and go back questioning the Empire, wondering if they too should rebel.  The Thousand Families might have been in charge, but they made up only a tiny percentage of the Imperial Navy’s personnel…and they did little to inspire loyalty.

It was their weakness.

It was their greatest mistake of all.

“Signal all ships,” he said, as the two fleets converged.  The advantage had to be pressed before it was too late.  “The battle line will advance against the enemy.”

An hour later, it was all over.

Chapter Forty-Five

Penny opened her eyes.

She was lying on a comfortable bed, feeling as if she had drunk too much the night before, without bothering to take anything that might have helped her body cope with the hangover.  It was a moment before she remembered that she hadn’t drunk anything the night before, but she’d been stunned by an SD officer.  It had been years since she’d felt the effects of a neural jammer, when she’d still been a Midshipwoman at a party that had gotten out of hand, but it was something that she would never forget.  It was nearly five minutes, or so she thought, before she could mover her head to take in the rest of her surroundings, and another ten minutes before she could even moan.  She couldn’t remember how long it had taken, last time, to recover, but she was sure that it hadn’t been as bad.

“Here,” a calm voice said.  She felt a small straw being pressed to her lips and she sucked, suddenly realising how thirsty she was.  The water tasted slightly recycled, as water generally did on any kind of spacecraft, but it was almost like the finest wine to her.  It quenched her thirst and renewed, somehow, her body.  “I had to keep you under longer than I would have liked, but you will recover.”

Penny felt some of the pain recede and managed to sit up, finally catching a glimpse of her new friend, or was he her captor?  He wore no uniform, no rank badges, but she was somehow sure that he was a senior officer, despite his apparently young age.  His face was instantly forgettable, so…average that her eyes almost passed over him, despite his blond hair and brisk good looks.  If she had taken a look at him, during a random meeting, she would have dismissed him, either as someone who wasn't important, or as someone who was arrogant enough to reshape themselves into a handsome face.  It was a long moment before she could speak and, when she did, the words came slowly.

“Who are you?”

“Brigadier Alfred Gorham, Imperial Intelligence, at your service,” he said.  He managed to perform a neat little bow that almost made her smile.  “I apologise for…kidnapping you from Admiral Percival’s fortress, but as the fortress was destroyed minutes after I cast off, I dare say you can find it in your heart to forgive me.”

Penny had to laugh, even though it hurt.  “You’re not Derbyshire,” she said.  It was so hard to focus her mind, but one thought was clear.  Neither Percival nor herself had known about Gorham’s presence on the fortress.  A Brigadier, if he were telling the truth about his rank, would have been instantly noticeable.  “What were you doing on the fortress?”

Gorham shrugged.  “It won’t surprise you to know that not everyone thought highly of your former commander, now free-floating atoms around Harmony,” he said.  “My instructions were to keep an eye on him.  I had wide authority, and I should have acted to remove him earlier, but that would have…caused a faction fight back home.  When I realised that the fortress was likely to be destroyed, I acted to save and bring with me someone who might be able to provide insight into the last few weeks of Admiral Percival’s command.  You were chosen on the entirely reasonable grounds that removing you was simple; I merely pulled rank on the SD guard escorting you out and got him to help me move you to my ship.”

Penny’s eyes narrowed.  “How did you get the ship onto the fortress?”

“Don’t ask questions you don’t want the answer to,” Gorham advised, as he helped her to her feet.  Her legs wobbled under her, but she managed to stand under her own power.  “I would really advise a shower, followed by some food and then a proper natural sleep, perhaps not in that order.”

“I won’t be distracted,” Penny said.  She wasn't sure why he would bother, or even why he was being so…decent to her, but she was past caring.  Percival had died – and it surprised her how little that actually bothered her – and she was being taken…where?  It was quite possible that she would end up being blamed for everything.  “What’s going to happen to me?”

Gorham shrugged.  “I’m going to take you directly to Earth,” he said, flatly.  His eyes sharpened for a moment and she realised, with a sudden chill, that she was alone with a very dangerous man.  “You might decide that it would be safer to go somewhere else, the Rim, perhaps.  I should warn you that this ship might look like a private yacht, but Imperial Intelligence designed it from the ground up and its systems will not respond to you.  If you somehow manage to get rid of me, you will be trapped in the ship and eventually delivered to Earth anyway.”

He smiled, suddenly.  “There is no reason for making it an unpleasant trip,” he added.  “As far as I am concerned, you are not under arrest, or any such tiresome formality.  If you like, I can put you in a stasis pod, or you can remain awake and active for the whole trip.”

Penny had to smile.  If he were telling the truth, and it would be easy to set up a starship to perform as he had claimed, he didn’t need to bother with handcuffs, or stasis tubes.  He just had to leave things as they were and eventually she would be delivered to Earth anyway, just as he had said.  He might have enjoyed her company, and any Imperial Intelligence agent worth his salt would want to pick her brains first, but he didn’t have to do anything to restrain her.  

And, oddly, it felt like she was free.  She might have to account for Percival’s defeat, and watch as the blame was smoothly transferred to someone with lesser standing, but at least she wouldn’t have to help him any longer.  He wouldn’t dominate her life any more, or use her as his tool, while she might even come up smelling of roses.  Perhaps, if she tried, she might even make a new life for herself.  Percival had hidden nothing from her…and she knew where some of the skeletons were buried.  It might just save her career.

“I’ll stay awake,” she decided, as she checked her uniform.  The laser pistol was gone, of course, but everything else was normal.  “You mentioned a shower?”

“Right in that compartment,” Gorham said.  He grinned, transforming his face completely.  “Use as much water as you like, then get dressed and you can join me for dinner.”

He paused.  “And, after that, perhaps you and I can get our stories straight.”

***
“You wanted to see me?”

“Yes,” Kathy said.  She was oddly nervous, facing Colin, despite the reassuring presence of Cordova behind her.  Colin had no reason to love the Thousand Families and he might decide against her, just because of her birth.  Why not?  It had been done to him.  “I want to stay with you and the…well, whatever you end up calling the rebellion.”

“Freedom Alliance seems to be the general consensus,” Colin said.  He’d shuffled off some of the more useless representatives onto a committee for choosing names, titles, ranks and other trappings, all of which would be meaningless if the Empire successfully counterattacked.  “Why do you want to stay with us?”

“It’s because of my enormous…”

“Thank you,” Kathy said, quickly, flushing.  For a man so experienced and dedicated, Cordova could be remarkably childish at times.  He could switch between a serious and cunning tactician, to a extroverted personality, to Male Romantic Lead…all of which seemed to merge into a bundle of contradictions.  She wondered, at times, if she’d ever met the real Cordova, or if anyone else had.  “It’s actually more serious than that.”

“I’m crushed,” Cordova declared.  Colin gave him a warning look.  “It’s true, honest!”

“I was out here because my Family wanted to try to boost their standing, but it’s clear that the Roosevelt Clan would have taken everything, given time,” Kathy said.  It hadn’t taken her long, with access to the records on Pollack, to prove that to her own satisfaction.  The humiliation of seeing her designs – well, technically her Family’s designs – being built there had sparked a desire for revenge.  “I might have been kept around as a manager, but it would be more likely that I would have a superior, one who would hold the purse strings.  Can’t have the young bloods getting uppity, can we?”

Colin nodded.  “That is not an uncommon story,” he said.  He placed his fingertips together thoughtfully.  “What do you want?”

“You need an industrial manager and an experienced staff,” Kathy said.  She’d been kept at arm’s length from most of the effort, but she’d seen enough to guess what was going on.  “Most of the experienced people you need are Roosevelt Clansmen, people who are badly involved with Roosevelt or other Clans, or lynched by their own people.  You have, at a guess, a small pool of experienced manpower.  I’m offering my services if you will have me.”

Colin said nothing for a long moment.  “One question,” he said, finally.  “Why?”

Kathy, who’d thought that she’d answered that question, shrugged.  “I wouldn’t be able to accomplish anything,” she said, finally.  “The Tyler Family has probably already sold out its interest to Roosevelt or one of the other Clans.  Even if you released me and I went back at once, I would still be branded a failure.  The best I could hope for is being used as a bartering chip for future relations.”

She leaned forward.  “But if I do this, everyone will remember my name.”

Colin smiled.  “I can understand that,” he said.  His smile deepened suddenly.  “Very well.  You will be welcome.  I have someone else left to carry the news back to the Thousand Families, so we don’t need you for that.”

He stood up and shook her hand.  “Welcome to the rebellion,” he said, without letting go of her hand.  His voice sharpened.  “We don’t need new versions of what we have – what they have.  I understand that you will be ambitious, and I respect that, but you won’t be allowed to establish a second set of Families.”

“I understand,” Kathy said, reading the underlying threat.  Colin would expect her to behave.  She had no problems with that.  “I will do the best I can.”

***
Colin smiled as Cordova escorted Kathy out, wondering at their relationship, before his next visitor arrived.  There were any number of people who wanted to see him, but normally he was able to fob them off, reserving his time for the really important business.  Unfortunately, no one could fob First Speaker Blondel Dupre off, or tell her that she couldn’t see him.  She was important business.

She looked older than when he’d seen her last – had it really been almost a year ago?  It had clearly been worse on her than on him, even though she’d been though proper medical care and attention since the battlecruisers had returned to Macore and liberated the planet.  The fighting had marked her, deep down inside, worse than it had marked him, even though he had known he was fighting against friends and acquaintances who had remained loyal to the Empire.  She had seen her homeworld devastated by the SDs and the Empire.

“I am not happy,” she said, flatly.

Colin frowned.  “Why?”

“You agreed to grant General Thomas and Andrew Thornton protection from Macore’s justice,” Blondel said, angrily.  “What – exactly – were you thinking?”

“I was thinking that accepting their surrender, on terms, was better than having to destroy large chunks of Macore in order to save it,” Colin said, coldly.  “The SD troopers would not have surrendered without orders from their superiors and they were dug into the cities and towns.  Destroying them from orbit would have damaged the cities still further, as would trying to take them out by general attack.”

He met her eyes and sighed inwardly.  “And, of course, a reputation for accepting surrenders would serve us better in the future,” he added.  “If they had been handled over for you for trial, how would others have reacted?  Why should they surrender if they were offered nothing, but a quicker death?”

“That’s all very well from your aseptic perspective,” Blondel said, icily.  “You didn’t see the blood, or the terribly small and broken bodies after the Blackshirts raged through a town, killing everyone in sight.  You didn’t have to watch as your family was tortured or be forced to dig your children’s grave.  The people of Macore want justice.”

Colin bowed his head.  He could understand her point…and yes, if Percival had been captured, it would be hard to accept sending him back to the Empire, unharmed.  The human race had a need for justice, if not outright retribution, and the citizens of Macore, the survivors, wouldn’t be happy unless they saw the pair of butchers dangling from a tree.  Far too many of the occupiers had been lynched in the first days after the liberation.  He couldn’t blame the citizens, but they were just making things harder for the future.  If nothing else, how could they convince others like Kathy to join when they might be lynched?

“I’m sorry, then,” he said, knowing how inadequate it was.  “I have a special mission for young Thornton, anyway.  Someone has to carry the news back to the Empire and he’s elected.  Besides, he’s not going to be welcome there with that message.  It’s quite possible that they will shoot him after they’ve heard it.”

Blondel scowled.  “Fine,” she said.  She settled back into her chair and glared at him.  “What did you want to talk to me about?”

Colin tapped the display, projecting a starchart into the air.  “I need someone to organise the rebel groups into one force,” he said.  There were worlds directly liberated by the Shadow Fleet…and worlds that had liberated themselves.  The latter had to be organised into a force that could support the Shadow Fleet, or the rebellion was doomed.  The previous rebellions had suffered from a conviction that throwing the Empire off-planet was all that they needed to achieve, ignoring the Empire’s willingness to counter-attack.  It was a mistake he didn’t dare repeat, or Sector 117 would join Sector X as a region of dead and lifeless worlds.  “Interested?”

“You cannot be serious,” Blondel said.  “I’m due to leave office in a few weeks.”

“Then take on this role,” Colin said, seriously.  He smiled at her.  “You have experience in running a democratic society.  You can actually compromise and get people working together.  You have the ability to handle the task and the awareness, the very costly awareness, of what will happen if we fail.  I need you for this role.”

“And if I made you turning the two murderers over to me as the price for my service?”

Colin said nothing.  “No, I thought not,” Blondel said.  She smiled, suddenly.  “Very well.  If you want me, then I shall serve.  If I don’t get lynched by my own people, then I’ll do it for you.”

“Thank you,” Colin said.  “That’s all I can ask.”

***
“You were a little hard on her,” Daria said, later.  They stood together on the fortress’s observation deck, looking down at the planet below.  The terraforming staff had agreed to continue their work, although Colin hadn’t worried about Harmony, knowing that it would be years before the planet became quality real estate.  By that time, the rebellion would either have succeeded or been crushed.  “She’s been through hell.”

“So have you,” Colin pointed out.  He sobered, thoughtfully.  “Did I do the right thing?”

“In asking her to become your Prime Minister or in allowing Thomas and Thornton to return to the Empire?”  Daria asked.  Her voice became thoughtful, but her face was almost perfectly still.  “I cannot approve of the latter, but I do understand the decision.  As for inviting her to join the committee…well, I don’t think there was any other choice.”

“You sound as if you don’t believe yourself,” Colin observed.  It made little sense to him.  If Daria had wanted the role herself, she would have told him so.  “Who else should I have appointed to that position?”

“That’s not the point,” Daria said, patiently.  She peered down towards the planet below.  “The larger any given body of men and women gets, the harder it is for it to come to any decision.  That’s true of the Thousand Families and it will be true for the Committee.  There would have been time, afterwards, to start planning for the future.”

Colin shrugged.  “It came home to me after they hit us at Macore,” he said.  “If we lose, the Empire will resume control of the Sector, but if we win, the entire Empire will collapse into civil war.  We saw a very minor taste of it here, but it’s going to be worse in the Core Worlds, or even in the more-developed sectors.  What comes after the Empire, but chaos?”

He smiled.  “And the James Thin came in today,” he added.  Daria looked a question at him.  “She’s a heavy cruiser, attached to Sector 99’s Sector Fleet, and her crew mutinied and came to join us.  The message is spreading, Daria, and that’s how I know we’re going to win.”

His voice rose with excitement.  “How will they cope with a dozen such mutinies, a hundred, or a thousand?  How will they cope with hundreds of planets rising up at once?  How can they handle us when their weapons might break in their hands?”

Daria shrugged.  “That’s no guarantee of victory,” she said.  She smiled, rather wistfully.  “I thought the same once.  The Empire is still out there, isn’t it?”

The Story Will Continue In

Democracy’s Might

Coming Soon!