Democracy's Might

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Hammer was an unusual arsenal ship. Unlike her peers, she had been designed to launch missiles one by one, without triggering their drives. Hidden behind a sensor mask, she could unload her missiles into space without being detected, even alarmingly close to the Terra Nova shipyards. No one had a clue that she was there.

Captain Kosovo felt his implants itching as he accessed the live feed from the ship’s passive sensors, downloading it directly into his head. Being so close to Earth bothered him, even though cold logic insisted that they were completely undetectable. The Geeks had not existed so long as a collective without knowing when best to take precautions and going so close to the Enemies of Science was not something they cared to do. But there was little choice. One by one, the missiles were pushed out and down towards their target.

“All missiles deployed,” the weapons officer said, finally. He didn’t bother to look at his commander as he spoke. Their minds were already touching in the computer network. “Forty minutes to likely detection range.”

Kosovo allowed himself a tight smile. The fortresses protecting the Terra Nova Shipyard — which didn’t actually orbit Terra Nova itself, yet another hint of the Empire’s regretful imprecision — were buried deep in the gas giant’s gravity shadow. Under normal circumstances, they would have plenty of warning before an enemy attack fleet could get into range. Even now, with Morrison gone and Earth itself about to come under attack, the fortifications were not at full alert. But then, he considered, the imps had no idea how to maintain their systems. Every time they went to battlestations, they took years off their technology’s lifespan.

Pathetic, he thought.

It didn’t help that the missiles were another Geek invention. They looked like standard Imperial Navy-issue missiles, but the Geeks had coated them in stealthy materials that would absorb radar and sensor pulses directed at them. There was no way they could remain hidden once their drives went active, of course, yet as long as they remained on their ballistic trajectories they would be effectively impossible to detect. They could drift right through the massive sensor network protecting the shipyard as if they weren’t there.

“Steer us out of the gravity shadow,” he ordered. “And then hold us at the planned observation point.”

The Geeks had two interests in joining the war. One was in securing the right to experiment as they pleased, without their technology being considered disruptive and threatening to the natural order. The other was in actually testing their more interesting theories and concepts. Kosovo knew himself to be far from the Geek ideal, yet even he was fascinated by the thought of actually seeing some of the new technology in war. Who knew if theory would live up to practice?

He glanced around his bridge. An Imperial Navy inspection team would have had a fit if they’d seen it, for it didn’t look clean or tidy at all. The consoles were open, exposing their innards; wiring lay everywhere and all four bridge crewmen were connected to the processors though implants inserted into their skulls. It was a mess. And yet, it was faster and more efficient than anything the Imperial Navy possessed. The Geeks looked forward to the day when everyone could merge with computers and expand their minds. They were sure that it would be a step closer to redesigning the human race as a whole.

“And send a laser signal,” he added. “The missiles are on their way.”

The gas giant didn’t look anything like as spectacular as Jupiter, Colin considered, as the rebel fleet crept closer to the gravity shadow. It was a massive blue-green ball of light, hanging in the darkness of space; there were no rings or clouds of space dust orbiting it for the tourists to admire. The gas giant’s only companion was a moon half the size of Earth, a moon that had been terraformed long ago. Now, it served as the barracks for the millions of shipyard workers and their families.

He had to admit that the shipyard itself looked impressive, though. There were hundreds of construction slips, industrial nodes and asteroid resource bases, surrounded by dozens of orbital fortresses and a small formation of enemy ships. Someone in the Bernadotte Family had to have paid out a large fortune in bribes, he decided, or perhaps there was some elaborate quid pro quo involved. The Household Troops were not supposed to have access to so many superdreadnaughts, no matter how important their possessions were.

“Admiral,” the sensor officer reported. “The enemy superdreadnaughts are powering up and inching out of the gravity shadow.”

Right on time, Colin noted. He glanced at the countdown and smiled to himself. Cordova would be demonstrating in the Sol System, showing himself and a fleet of illusionary superdreadnaughts to the enemy. He’d planned on the assumption that the enemy fleet wouldn’t withdraw, but it was nice to see the plan working. It would be a great deal easier to secure the shipyard without the superdreadnaughts.

“Keep us well away from their flight path,” he ordered. “We don’t want to be detected now.”

The cloaking devices had two major flaws, both of which had been hammered into his head at the academy. They couldn’t hide everything, thus a starship too close to a cloaked ship might well be able to detect it. And it was impossible to raise shields or fire weapons without breaking the cloak. If the enemy superdreadnaughts picked up a sniff of their presence, the rebel fleet would be hammered before it had a chance to respond. But as the superdreadnaughts advanced out of the gravity shadow, they missed the rebels completely. One by one, they flickered out towards Earth.

“They’re gone, sir,” the sensor officer reported.

Colin smiled. The timing had been perfect. “Order the missiles to engage as soon as they enter terminal attack range,” he ordered. “And then prepare to sound battlestations.”

Commodore Wilma Bernadotte watched the superdreadnaughts vanish, silently cursing the Families Council under her breath. The agreements that allowed the Bernadotte Family to operate superdreadnaughts of its own had never stipulated that they would be under Imperial Navy command, but the conditions attached to deploying an additional squadron of superdreadnaughts to Terra Nova had changed that — and not for the better. Now the Families Council was panicking and Terra Nova was being stripped of its defences, right after the loss of Wolf 359.

Wilma would have liked to gloat about the Sandakan Family’s misfortune. After all, losing Wolf 359 would hurt the Empire — but it would ensure more demands for products from Terra Nova. The economic slowdown that had seen half the slips left empty and industrial nodes idle would come to an end, she knew, once people realised they could start ordering their products from Terra Nova instead. And the Bernadotte Family would be well-placed to start taking advantage of its sudden prominence. There was no way the other two shipyards could be replaced in less than a decade, assuming the money could be found to rebuild them. Until then, Bernadotte would reign supreme.

She ran a hand through her purple hair as she surveyed the tactical display. The Bernadotte Family owned the gas giant and its companion moon completely, forbidding all others from entering the colossal gravity shadow. It ensured that anything that showed itself was considered a smuggler, a pirate or a rebel spy. Wilma had standing orders to engage anything that didn’t carry a secure IFF beacon, issued by the family. Even the Imperial Navy wasn’t allowed to enter the gravity shadow without her permission.

But she couldn’t help feeling worried. The shipyard was dangerously exposed — and almost certainly on the list of rebel targets. She’d seen what had happened at Morrison… and even though she’d ordered her crews to take precautions she couldn’t help worrying about losing her own point defence. The colossal investment she’d made in orbital weapons platforms and automated systems would be wasted if her point defence network went down. In fact…

Her thoughts were rudely interrupted by alarms howling through her command station. Red icons flared to life on the display, impossibly close to the defences. For a long moment, Wilma’s mind refused to accept what she was seeing. The passive sensor network would have picked up any starships, cloaked or not, that had come so close to the defences. There was no way those missiles could be real…

She understood, even as her crews scrambled to reach their duty stations. The rebels — and it had to be the rebels — had launched their missiles on ballistic trajectories. They’d solved the problem of burning out the missile drives by simply not activating them at all, right up until the moment detection was inevitable. And then the drives had gone active.

Her point defence was still frantically powering up, she realised. It was too late.

Colin felt his smile grow wider as the fleet dropped its cloak and went to full military power, heading down into the gravity shadow. The sneak attack hadn’t worked perfectly, but it had worked well enough to let the missiles get close to their targets. Normally, the enemy’s confidence in their defences would be fully justified. Now… the Geeks had upset their calculations once again.

Not that stealth missiles are beyond the Empire’s powers, he thought. They just never put the concept into practical use.

“One minute to impact,” the tactical officer reported.

“Transmit our message after the first impact,” Colin ordered. “And then prepare to engage the enemy.”

Wilma watched helplessly as the first laser head detonated, sending a ravening pencil of energy lashing out and burning against her station’s shields. Others followed, punching through the shields and digging into her hull. The station groaned like a living thing as the hull was broken in a dozen places, then shuddered violently as contact nukes slammed in and detonated against the hull. Red lights flared up on the status display until the entire board seemed to be coated in red light, seconds before all power failed.

And then the world seemed to explode into light around her.

“Five of the fortresses are gone, sir,” the tactical officer reported. “Three more are badly damaged; the remainder are largely untouched.”

“Transmit the message,” Colin ordered. There was nothing the defenders could do, now, to prevent him from ripping the shipyard to shreds. But there was a chance to make them surrender. “And then take us into bombardment range.”

Lieutenant Kitty Fergusson had never expected to find herself in command of one station, let alone the entire defensive network. But her CO was enjoying himself on the moon, having anticipated a week or two without any real trouble, and her other superiors were either dead or out of touch. She eyed the expanding cloud of debris that had been Defence Station Alpha and shivered, barely able to keep her shock under control. A station that had been supposed to be damn near indestructible had been blown into fragments, with ease.

The whole situation seemed like a nightmare. She pinched herself, only to discover that it was real. The enemy fleet was neatly out of range of the intact fortifications, but it was perfectly placed to shatter the shipyard itself. Given a few minutes, trillions of credits worth of investment would be utterly destroyed. The rebels had pulled off a daring attack and won.

“Lieutenant,” the communications officer said, “we are picking up a rebel message.”

Kitty almost cringed. She knew she’d only been promoted because her relatives happened to include a number of loyal Bernadotte clients. And, she suspected, because her CO rather liked looking at her, even though he’d never tried to lure Kitty into bed. She couldn’t think of any tactic that might drive the rebels off, certainly not without devastating the shipyard in the process. And if she destroyed it herself, her family would be expelled from the patronage network and left to grovel for scraps in the gutters. She knew what happened to those who failed so disastrously.

And, even if she did want to fight, would the others follow her?

“Let me hear it,” she said.

“The battle is over,” the rebel leader said. “Your position is hopeless. You can choose between joining us, accepting internment or being slaughtered. If the former, you will be welcome; we will reward those who join us with promotion and responsibilities they could not have dreamed of under the Thousand Families. If you choose, instead, to be interned, you will be treated well. But if you choose to fight, you will be rapidly destroyed. You have five minutes to make up your mind.”

Kitty felt stares boring into the back of her head. She’d never really had to face tough decisions in her life, let alone one that might draw disagreement from her subordinates. The thought of them turning on her had been unthinkable only mere hours ago. Now, she had to consider their reaction. Would they follow her if she sought to fight? Or would they simply stick a knife in her back and surrender themselves?

But, in the end, she knew the fight was hopeless.

“Signal the rebels,” she ordered, quietly. “Tell them that we surrender.”

“They’ve surrendered, sir,” the communications officer said.

Colin let out a sigh of relief. Destroying the shipyard would have been easy, but they needed the shipyard to start rebuilding the damage caused by the war. But it was also possible that Home Fleet could sortie and recover the shipyard before the war could be brought to an end.

“Order the freighters to move in,” he ordered. “I want them everyone on the shipyard loaded onto the freighters as quickly as possible.”

He allowed himself a smile. The shipyard was useless without the trained personnel to run it — and the Empire didn’t have a large pool of trained manpower. Much of the people they did have had died at Jupiter or Wolf 359; even if they stripped smaller shipyards of their personnel it would still take weeks or months to restart operations. In the long run, Colin calculated, the Empire would be unable to put the shipyard back to work until the matter was settled, one way or the other.

“Send the Geeks a note of congratulations,” he added, “then take us back to the edge of the gravity shadow. It’s time to head onwards to Earth.”

The display showed Earth clearly, only one jump from Terra Nova. By now, Colin suspected, the Thousand Families would be utterly overwhelmed. They probably knew that Terra Nova had been attacked, if his calculations were correct. Unused to making quick decisions, they would have to decide between sending superdreadnaughts rushing back to Terra Nova — and they’d already missed the best opportunity for a genuine victory — or keeping them in position to defend Earth. Politically, he suspected, it would be impossible to decide before it was no longer an issue.

“Send a courier boat to the RV point,” he ordered. “I want a full download from Captain Cordova.”

He watched the courier boat flicker out, then he turned back to monitoring progress within the gravity shadow. Thankfully, there was no resistance. The shipyards and orbital fortifications were rapidly emptied of their personnel, allowing the freighters to start climbing back up towards the edge of the gravity shadow. Once they jumped out, the personnel would be held at the RV point until the war was over. Or, if it took too long to win, they would be shipped back to Morrison or Jackson’s Folly and put to work there.

“There’s too many people on the moon to evacuate,” the coordinator warned. “Sir…”

“Leave them,” Colin ordered, after a moment. The civilians wouldn’t be harmed by the Empire, of that he was sure. It would shatter the bonds holding the patronage networks together beyond repair. “Just make sure you confiscate all of the shuttles and anything else they could use to reach orbit.”

He watched as the remaining freighters flickered out, then glanced down at the report from the courier boat. Cordova had done well, according to the cloaked ship that had monitored Sol after Cordova had flickered out. The enemy had taken a bloody nose, then had been forced to watch helplessly as the rebels retreated, untouched and untouchable. They had to be fuming with rage…

Not that it matters now, he thought. We’re about to win or lose the war.

He keyed his console. “All hands, this is the Admiral,” he said. “We are about to flicker to Earth, the homeworld of humanity — and the heart of the Empire. The battle we will fight will determine the fate of humanity for a thousand years. If we win, we can reform the Empire and end the colossal abuses of power that have destroyed trillions of lives. And even if we lose, we will ensure that the Empire’s colossal self-confidence will no longer survive. They will change or die.

“Think of your friends, your families, all of those who have suffered at the hands of the Empire,” he continued. “This is our best chance to end their suffering, once and for all, and build a new order. This day, win or lose, will be remembered. Let us give them something to recall.

“I expect each and every one of you to do your duty, one final time.”

He took a breath. Earth, the homeworld of humanity… he’d never really expected to enter the Sol System with a battle fleet, not until he’d started to plan the first mutiny. Even then, he’d known the odds were against him. But the Empire was a rotting corpse, already dead; he knew he had the opportunity to win.

And even if they didn’t win, they would be remembered. Others, one day in the future, would use the memory to encourage them to go for their enemy’s throats…

“Jump,” he ordered.