Democracy's Right

Chapter Twenty-Nine

“Captain, the Bombardment is reporting that it is running short of KEW projectiles,” the communications officer reported. “They are requesting permission to reload from the Fabricator.”

Captain-Commodore Angelika McDonald sighed. It was rare to need more than a handful of KEWs on any given world; indeed, most worlds, even the ones with memories of independence in living memory, didn’t risk putting up a serious fight. The Empire sometimes ran out of patience with rebellious worlds and scorched them down to bedrock, before dropping terraforming packages onto the remains of the worlds and shipping in new colonists. Jackson’s Folly, on the other hand, seemed to be populated by madmen and women; they just kept fighting, even though their cause was hopeless. The Blackshirts had gone to war with their drug-fuelled barbarity and rage… and were losing. If they hadn’t been able to call in fire support from orbit, they would have been destroyed by now and in this war no one took prisoners.

Jackson’s Folly had plenty of time to prepare for the Empire and even through their overt preparations had failed the covert preparations were working far too well. Fabricator was the third manufacturing ship to operate within the system’s asteroid belt, melting down asteroids and converting them into KEW projectiles. The last two had been lost to treacherous tricks by the defenders, methods of war — her lips twitched in amusement — that were not included in tactical handbooks. If she lost that ship, her supply of KEWs would be cut off until a new manufacturing ship arrived in the system; she had requested a replacement in advance, but Admiral Percival — it seemed — was refusing to deploy any additional ships out to the system. He didn’t understand the problems she was facing.

She spun her chair around until she could see the live feed from the Blackshirt command garrison, down on the surface. General Branford was holding forth, decreeing the mass slaughter of civilian hostages and the use of lethal chemical weapons, before urging his troops upwards and onwards for the glory of the Empire. Branford the Butcher, some called him, although never in his hearing; a man who had broken an alien race to the Empire’s will. His supporters, and there were many, had never concealed the fact that he’d done it by slaughtering three-fourths of the alien race and demonstrating his willingness to complete the task and adding a third exterminated race to humanity’s reputation. Angelika wondered, despite herself, if Branford hadn’t been given secret orders to exterminate the planet’s population, without making it obvious just what he was doing. He was certainly killing enough of them in reprisal raids. Even his fellow Blackshirts, drug-addled through they might be, had started to question his tactics. Her lips twisted into a droll smile. Branford might end up being the only person dismissed from the Blackshirts for excessive violence. The joke, never spoken where a senior officer might hear, was that that was how a person got in.

“Order them to pull out of orbit and head to Fabricator,” she ordered, reluctantly. She had only five monitors at her disposal, all spaced around the world to provide complete coverage, and pulling one of them out of orbit — if only for a few hours — would put a crimp in her ability to provide fire support. Her warships carried KEWs, of course, and she would redeploy a group of heavy cruisers to provide additional support, yet they couldn’t deploy as many as the monitors. Intensive use would mean shooting them dry. “Assign a destroyer group to escort them through the flicker and back.”

“Aye, Captain,” the communications officer said. Angelika nodded. The young man might have had good connections — explaining why he was serving on a starship’s bridge just after graduating from the Academy — but he was also fairly competent and she could trust him to deal with it. His birth was actually an advantage in dealing with officers who outranked him by several orders of magnitude, although he hadn’t realised that — or that he could go much further. “The 44th Destroyer Flotilla is ready to escort the monitor.”

“Good,” Angelika said, returning her gaze to the main display. Jackson’s Folly was, at least on the surface, a fairly typical system, but it contained nasty traps for the Empire. There were a handful of raiding starships out there — including one that had destroyed one of her other manufacturing ships — and hundreds of hidden bases scattered through the asteroids. Her mining crews sometimes discovered enemy spacers waiting to kill them, or stumbled over abandoned installations, installations that didn’t seem to be listed on any file they’d captured on the planet. The natives had clearly wiped all of the data, if they’d had it in the first place. “Once that is done, schedule me a conference call with the senior officers. I want to discuss matters with them.”

“Aye, Captain,” the young man said. He was too young to recognise a symbol of… maybe not entirely defeat, but certainly an admittance that things were not going according to plan. Normally, Angelika would have played host to the senior officers on her flagship — the battlecruiser Violence — but now she didn’t dare take a commanding officer away from his or her ship. The insurgents were proving far more effective than anyone had dared fear. No one was quite sure what had happened to the light cruiser Rainbow, yet the insurgents had been boasting over their success over the planetary datanet, despite every attempt to shut it down. It wasn’t more advanced than the Empire’s system — indeed, it was genuinely inferior — but it had been designed as a distributed system, rather than the centralised systems used by Imperial worlds.

Angelika leaned back in her command chair, rubbing her eyes and silently cursing Admiral Percival under her breath. The superdreadnaughts had intimidated the locals, all right; they’d overshadowed anything the rebels and insurgents could do to them. And yet… the Admiral had seen fit to withdraw the superdreadnaughts, judging that the smaller ships could handle the pacification of the system without the presence of their older cousins. Angelika had a nasty suspicion that she’d been set up to fail. Perhaps Admiral Percival, whose drunken advances she had refused one night, had deliberately planned to embarrass her in front of the Roosevelt Family. Or perhaps it was worse. Stacy Roosevelt, the silly girl who had somehow managed to lose nine intact superdreadnaughts to a mutiny, might have been looking for someone to distract attention from her failure.

She’d expected the conquest to be easy, until she’d run her eye down the list of prohibited targets. No one had ever heard of such a thing, not in the Empire; the whole reason for developing the monitors in the first place was to make it clear that there was nowhere to hide from the Empire’s wrath. And yet, she had a whole list of places that she couldn’t drop a KEW, or she’d spend the rest of her life on an isolated asteroid settlement or mining colony. It made little sense to her, for what was the point of using monitors if there were safe areas, areas where the insurgents and rebels could congregate and plot their war against the Empire.

At least it isn’t my ass on the line, she thought sourly. The insurgents didn’t seem to have realised that there were areas off-limits for KEWs, thankfully. If they had, the Blackshirts occupying those areas would be facing far more determined attacks. As it was, the factories, universities and industrial development complexes were safely in the Empire’s hands, although no one knew how long that would last. She lifted her eyes to the master plot and scowled. The orbiting industrials were also off-limits, even if the rebels retook them and started to use them to produce new weapons of war. She had been told, quite firmly, that she was only authorised to deploy Blackshirts to recover them.

“Captain, the conference call is scheduled for 1450,” the communications officer said. Angelika nodded; forty minutes from local time, just long enough for her to have a shower and a change, hopefully allowing her to appear less stressed. She’d trained her subordinate captains to make the best use of their battlecruisers — and, in doing so, had probably encouraged them to think of ways to unseat her. She wouldn’t be too surprised to discover that one or more of them had sent secret — and accurate — reports to their patrons, rather than the pap Public Information was putting out about a highly-successful campaign. The bastards were creating an illusion that, unless someone came up with a brilliant new tactics, could only rebound on the Empire.

“Good,” she said, again. She stood up and looked over at her XO. “You have the bridge.”

“I have the bridge,” the XO responded, already heading over to the command chair.

Angelika took a moment to check the ship’s status before heading for the hatch and out into Officer Country, barely managing to conceal the yawn that threatened to burst out and overwhelm her. The Blackshirt on duty outside her cabin snapped to attention, one hand almost cracking against his helmet, but she ignored him. The Blackshirts had been making themselves unpopular since they’d been brought onboard to replace the Marines, yet they’d been behaving themselves since she’d introduced one of them to the joys of breathing hard vacuum. No one raped one of her crew and got away with it.

She took a look at her bed, wondering if she could get away with thirty minutes of sleep, but she shook her head. She was too tired to risk it, not when she had to speak to her subordinates. Being late for that would certainly cause some of them to wonder if she was going soft. Shaking her head, she undid her tunic and headed over to the shower, knowing that her steward would pick up the dirty uniform and put it in the wash. The warm water felt heavenly after so long on the bridge. She swallowed another yawn and tried to put Jackson’s Folly out of her mind.

“I think they’re serious about keeping this system,” Markus said, as the freighter advanced into the inner system. The freighter-gunboat combination seemed to work, so Admiral Walker had ordered them to do it again, only in a far more dangerous system. Markus didn’t really care about the danger; even the Imperial Navy would hesitate before firing on an obviously harmless freighter, at least one thousands of kilometres from the planet’s surface. “Take a look at that!”

The Geeks had modified both freighters, but they’d had a great deal more time to work on the Sidonie and it showed. They’d rigged a sensor suite that was far better than anything the Imperial Navy had deployed to its starships, even the recon cruisers that were used to plot out targets before the Imperial Navy flickered in and destroyed them. The Survey Service itself didn’t have such excellent gear. Even operating on passive mode, the sensors were still sucking in awesome amounts of data and filing it into the gunboat’s secure storage module.

Jackson’s Folly was not just occupied; the Empire was already attempting to exploit it. Starships hung in orbit around the world itself, striking regularly down at the surface, while others prowled the asteroid belts. The cloudscoops at the gas giant were ringed by a squadron of destroyers while freighters were unloading orbital weapons platforms, as if they feared an attack. Markus wasn’t sure if they knew or suspected that the rebels were on their way — he had no time for the Popular Front nonsense — but it hardly mattered. All that mattered was that the last reports had been out of date. There were over sixty starships in the system, which suggested that whoever was in command had screamed for additional help and actually received it.

“I’ve found their manufacturing craft,” Carola reported, from where she was going through the data. The Geeks had programmed in the best analysis algorithms that Markus had ever seen, but in the absence of true AI it was impossible to rely completely upon them. “There’s only one of them, unless there’s another on the far side of the system.”

“Could be,” Markus agreed. The Sidonie had deployed massive and stealthy sensor platforms, allowing it to soak up data at an astonishing rate. An active manufacturing ship wasn’t easy to hide. The Empire might have intended to hide an additional ship in the system, but that would — naturally — limit its utility. “Or maybe the reports are true and the locals scored some spectacular successes.”

The hour ticked by slowly as more information flowed into the gunboat’s systems. The deployment patterns of Imperial Navy starships, the use of freighters and heavy convoy escorts even over small distances, the regular use of KEWs against planetary targets… even transmissions, broadcast using standard encryption protocols. The Imperial Navy had realised that the mutiny meant that the mutineers — and the Popular Front — had access to their coding systems, but the Blackshirts hadn’t made the same deduction, or perhaps they just didn’t care. Markus watched some of their transmissions, signals showing burned out buildings, local inhabitants hanging from the nearest tree and shuddered. No one wanted to fall into the hands of the Blackshirts. He shut the signals off in disgust. The intelligence crew would want to look at them — and the propaganda department would want to use them to illustrate the horror of the Empire — but he didn’t want to look at them again. It was just another reminder that, before the mutiny, he had been fighting for a monstrous regime. He would never wipe away the shame, or cleanse his hands of blood.

It would have been nice to make contact with the locals and promise support, maybe collect some information from them, but they’d been specifically ordered not to attempt anything of the sort. The Imperial Navy didn’t seem to be paying attention to a damaged bulk freighter that was limping towards Jackson’s Folly — perhaps assuming that they could deal with her long before she reached the planet — yet that could change, if the Imperial Navy felt that it had a reason to look. The stealthed platforms and probes they’d launched, if they were detected, would mark the Sidonie out as an espionage ship. His lips twitched. Besides, there was no hope — as far as the enemy knew — of escape. The bulk freighter design took hours to power up its flicker drive.

Ninety-nine percent of combat operations, he’d been told when he’d started to train at the Academy, was nothing, but solid boredom. The life of a gunboat crew was normally anything but… yet now, he was bored. It was, by any standard, the most successful recon mission of his life… and yet, it wasn’t exciting. He hadn’t jumped into the system and weaved a random evasive course while using his sensors to plot out targets, leaving enemy pursuit in the dust when he triggered his flicker drive and jumped out again. Markus looked over at Carola and smiled to himself. They’d known that when they qualified as a gunboat crew — and as husband and wife — that they might die together. It had been considered better than one of them living to mourn the other.

“The monitor is flickering back to the world,” Carola said, suddenly. They’d noted the arrival of a monitor in the asteroid belt, something that had puzzled him until they’d realised that it was visiting the fabrication ship for resupply. How many KEWs had they dropped? He’d never heard of a monitor shooting itself dry before, even during the most intensive combat operations. And there were no less than six monitors — perhaps more — in orbit around Jackson’s Folly. How much fighting was there on the planetary surface?

The thought made him wince. The human race had largely abandoned armies since it had climbed into space, for no organised army could survive when the enemy controlled the high orbitals. The First Interstellar War had been fought out in space, with worlds bombarded with everything from asteroids to radioactive bombs and biological weapons. Even the Blackshirts were more of an occupation force than a real army, while the Marines were a precision unit. Just how bad was it down on the surface? He shook his head. The Blackshirts, he knew, deserved little sympathy. They deserved death, or worse.

“I think we’ve pushed our luck far enough,” he said, finally. The Sidonie was on the verge of crossing the security line surrounding the planet. The Imperial Navy would definitely send a ship to investigate their arrival now. “Shall we go?”

The Geeks had also redesigned the interior of the freighter, reasoning that they might be able to prevent the gravity compression caused by the flicker drive from destroying the ship. Markus settled down in his chair, checked that Carola was ready, and then powered up the drive. A moment later, they were gone from the system, leaving a mystery behind for the Imperial Navy. It wouldn’t puzzle them for long.

From three light years away, Jackson’s Folly was completely indistinguishable from any other star, just another steady pinprick of light shining out in the darkness. The sight left Colin feeling oddly homesick, even though he had never been back home since he’d taken the oath at the Academy. He still remembered the child within who had gazed up on the stars and wanted to be out there among them.

His wristcom buzzed. “Sir, we have a full download from the gunboat,” his Flag Captain said. “The targeting patterns have not changed significantly, but there are some additional targets in the system. I request permission to deploy the battlecruisers to go after their manufacturing ship.”

“Granted,” Colin said. He smiled as a thought struck him. “Tell them to try to take it intact if possible.”

He took one last look at the stars and turned, heading out of the observation blister. “I’m on my way,” he said. “Order the fleet to begin jump preparation. It’s time to go to war.”