Democracy's Right

Chapter Thirty-One

Lightning flickered into the system, already moving at considerable speed. Khursheda heard the sound of retching behind her as the shock hit some of her crew — the drugs to counter flicker-shock were not always effective — and gave them what privacy she could by refusing to look at them. The secondary bridge crew would take over if any of her bridge crew were to be rendered ineffective by the shock.

“Jump complete, Commodore,” the helmsman said. “We have emerged at the targeted coordinates.”

Khursheda nodded. They’d planned their jump carefully, avoiding any large masses with their own gravitational field. Even now, centuries after it was developed, the flicker drive wasn’t understood perfectly, but the human race did know that large gravity masses interfered with precision. The small squadron had flickered from the main body of the fleet to its target, a handful of detected sources within the Jackson’s Folly asteroid belt.

“Sensors are picking up enemy ships,” the tactical officer said. “I confirm the presence of four destroyers and one manufacturing ship. The IFF signal identifies it as Fabricator.”

“Good hunting,” Khursheda said. She studied her display for a long moment, before looking up at the communications officer. There was no way that Fabricator could power up its drive and escape, but the destroyers could run any time they liked… if they abandoned the single most valuable ship in the system. “Demand their surrender.”

“Aye, Commodore,” the communications officer said. The dark-skinned woman worked her console for a few seconds. “They are not responding.”

“Lock weapons on target and go to active scans,” Khursheda ordered. The display sharpened as powerful sensors began probing space, hunting for targets. The manufacturing ship, twice the size of a superdreadnaught, was very clear on the display. The smaller destroyers, moving to cover the larger ship, were tiny. They couldn’t even stand up to one battlecruiser, let alone four of them. “Repeat our surrender demand. Remind them that we will take them alive and treat them decently if they surrender.”

There was a long pause. Khursheda found herself hoping that Admiral Walker was right, that others would wish to join the rebellion or perhaps to stand on the sidelines, without choosing a side. She knew that most of the Observation Squadron had joined the rebellion, as had the superdreadnaught crews, but Admiral Percival had time to prepare for a second round of mutinies. Placing Blackshirts on the various crews was absurd, at least from an efficiency point of view, but it would make any further mutinies impossible. Perhaps the reason why the manufacturing ship wasn’t surrendering was that there was a team of Blackshirts onboard, forbidding surrender by force of arms.

“They’re responding,” the communications officer said. As one, the four destroyers flickered out, vanishing somewhere in the vastness of interstellar space. Khursheda checked the readings from the sensors, but they were insufficient to determine where the destroyers might have gone. Somewhere within fifteen light years was the best the computers could do. The Imperial Navy’s researchers had promised that the ability to refine such projections was within reach, but no one, not even the Geeks, had cracked the underlying problem. “They’re offering to surrender in exchange for amnesty.”

Khursheda exchanged a puzzled glance with her XO. Why would they want Amnesty? It took her a second to realise that the crew of the manufacturing ship clearly feared that they would be blamed for whatever was going on down on Jackson’s Folly, or perhaps handed over to the locals for punishment. Admiral Walker would have done neither, Khursheda was sure. If he could resist the temptation to kill Stacy Roosevelt, he could probably resist the temptation to hurt men who had done nothing to him personally.

“Tell them that as long as they unlock the computers and refrain from causing any damage, we will leave them unharmed,” she promised. Perhaps the crew would be willing to join the rebellion. She keyed her console, linking her directly to the Marine shuttles waiting in the shuttlebay. “Major, you are cleared to launch; good luck.”

The display updated as the two shuttles raced away from her ship. Once the Marines were onboard and the manufacturing ship was secure, they’d take it to the first waypoint and wait for Admiral Walker and the other ships. The captured ship would be taken directly to the Geeks, where it would be used to produce additional material to supply the rebellion. The crew, if they refused to join the rebellion, would be transferred to the uncharted colony and left there until the war was over. Her lips twitched in sour amusement. The rebels, if they went on at such a rate, would end up building up a larger prison world than the Empire.

“The Marines have secured the ship,” the communications officer reported. “They’re warning that it will be at least another hour before the ship can flicker out.”

“We can wait,” Khursheda said. If there did happen to be an Imperial Navy superdreadnaught squadron within range, they would have to abandon their conquest and flicker out… or maybe not. “Tell them to move the ship to this location” — her hand danced over the console, designating a position several light seconds away — “and power down everything, but the essentials.”

“Aye, Commodore,” the communications officer said.

Khursheda sat back in her command chair. The Imperial Navy might return to the system before she could depart, but in that case she would literally hide the manufacturing ship right under their nose. She checked the timer and smiled. Now… all they had to do was wait for the time to leave.

“We’re coming up on the planet now,” the helmsman said. Jackson’s Folly loomed ahead of them on the display, a lovely green-blue world surrounded by red icons. Colin’s probes and sensor teams had been struggling to sort out the Imperial-held space facilities from friendly — or at least harmless — facilities, but it was a nightmarish struggle. There was far too much debris in orbit.

“Dispatch Marine teams to the orbital manufacturing facilities,” Colin ordered. According to the intelligence they’d picked up, the facilities the locals had built — the facilities Stacy Roosevelt had been so eager to capture intact — were currently occupied by the Blackshirts, who supervised the workers while holding their families hostage. Even so, it wasn’t a safe place to be a Blackshirt; the locals were alarmingly good at trapping and killing the invaders. It helped that the Blackshirts were neither trained nor equipped to operate in orbit. “Prepare to isolate targets on the ground.”

The Blackshirt commander — General Branford, according to intelligence — had been smart, smart enough to shut down his advanced tracking systems and try to hide. Colin’s own sensors could track some movement on the planet’s surface, but it was hard to distinguish between enemy movement and friendly activity. His communications officers were attempting to listen to communications from the planet’s surface, yet they were finding it hard to pull out anything useful from the babble. Only a handful of Blackshirt signallers were still transmitting, marking their locations as targets for KEW strikes.

Colin scowled. In some ways, it was the single most dangerous part of the operation. His superdreadnaughts — the only ships with large supplies of KEW projectiles to drop — were going to be operating close to the planet, so close that they would be trapped within its gravity shadow. If an enemy fleet happened to arrive, Colin would find himself trapped against the planet, forced to punch his way out rather than simply flickering to safety. And if that enemy fleet happened to consist of superdreadnaughts… Colin liked to think that the Popular Front could go on without him, but it wasn’t certain. Nothing was truly certain in life. He’d been living on borrowed time since he’d launched a mutiny against the Empire.

He smiled, pushing the dark thoughts aside. “Inform the Marines that they are cleared for launch,” he added. Whatever happened, he knew that his people would give their all. “They may engage the enemy at will.”

Colonel Neil Frandsen hooked into the assault shuttle’s sensors as it launched from the Marine transport, the pilot already gunning it down towards the planetary surface. Neil allowed himself a moment to enjoy the sight of a lovely world before he started to check up on the other shuttles. One had developed a drive fault and was being held back — a problem that occurred more frequently than the Marines liked to admit — but the remaining ninety were already spinning through space.

“Prepare to flicker,” he ordered. The shuttles were so small that they could flicker — with reasonable accuracy — far closer to the planet than any capital ship. Unlike the penal world, where there had been no counter-fire to speak of, Jackson’s Folly was occupied by the Blackshirts, who knew that they could expect no mercy from the locals. “On my mark… flicker!”

The shuttle seemed to go black for a terrifying second, then it was suddenly buffeted by the atmosphere as it materialised in the air. The craft lurched suddenly, dropping several feet before the drive systems caught on and powered it through the air, leaving him feeling delighted. They’d survived the jump! He linked back into the Marine combat network and noted the absence of two shuttles, both having vanished during the jump. If they were lucky, their drives had failed or they’d reappeared somewhere else. If they were unlucky, they had materialised within the planet and had been killed before they’d had any time to realise that something had gone wrong.

“I am picking up enemy sensors,” the pilot reported. Through his mental link, Neil could see them as red bands of light sweeping through the sky. As he had hoped — when he had sold Admiral Walker on the plan — their sudden appearance had alarmed the Blackshirts. “They are attempting to lock onto us.”

“Good,” Neil said. He laughed, knowing that non-Marines would consider him insane. “Go to evasive manoeuvres and call in strikes from high overhead.”

“Don’t teach your grandma to suck eggs,” the pilot countered. The gee-forces increased as the shuttle started to slip into evasive manoeuvres. The small formation was coming up on Freedom, the city that had served as the capital of Jackson’s Folly. It looked like a war zone now, even from the shuttles. “Time to ejection is two minutes and counting.”

Neil grinned. This, the chance to make a forced landing on a hostile planet, was what he lived for. It was what war was all about, something that the Imperial Navy would never understand. And as for the Blackshirts… his grin widened. Killing them never got old.

“Sir, we have incoming enemy shuttles,” the operator reported.

General Branford cursed. He had hoped that digging into Freedom — the absurdly-named city — would provide a degree of protection from orbital strikes. His men had trapped most of the city’s population in with them, using them as shields against both insurgents and rebels. As far as he could tell, there had been no link between Jackson’s Folly and the mutineers, but now one was definitely forming. Besides, Public Information had to get some things right, if only by accident.

“Order them to open fire as soon as the enemy enters range,” he ordered, coldly. The enemy commander had to be a Marine. No one else would be insane enough to flicker into the atmosphere, just to mount a raid. It had to be a raid. If the rebels had the firepower to defeat the Imperial Navy, they’d be off trashing Camelot or even Earth, rather than liberating Jackson’s Folly. No, it was a raid. “And then order the forces on the ground to disperse.”

He clenched his fist in outrage. As a loyal servant of the Empire, he knew his duty; he had to bring Jackson’s Folly into the Empire, whatever it took. It hadn’t been a peaceful deployment. The locals were armed to the teeth and reluctant to bend the knee to the Empire, forcing him to deploy his forces and strike back at rebels and insurgents. The bastards wore no uniforms and fought without honour. They were to blame for the massive death toll. Branford took no pleasure in slaughtering hostages, or in exterminating traitors, yet there was no choice. The insurgents had made it so.

“The enemy shuttles are entering range,” the operator said. Branford nodded. Some of his encampments had been struck from orbit, but others had been spared, spared because of the human shields gathered around them. “The defences are opening fire… now!”

“They’re opening fire,” the pilot said. “Prepare for ejection.”

Neil braced himself as his suit was picked up and thrown down through the hatch, out into the open air. The sky was filling with green flashes of light as plasma cannons attempted to smash the shuttles out of the sky, yet they were already too late. The men and women of his Marine Regiment were already deploying. The enemy were clearly reacting too late to prevent it. A handful of shuttles vanished in fireballs — others launched missiles back towards their tormentors, hoping to knock them out before more shuttles died — but the remainder kept going, turning away from the enemy base. Neil barely had a second to see the ground coming up towards him before he landed, feeling the jerk even through the compensator field enveloping his armoured combat suit.

He fell into the Marine command network at once, deploying his suit’s weapons and looking for targets. A group of Blackshirts were already running towards them, trying to deploy, when they were scythed down by the Marines. Moving as one, their training coming to the fore, the Marines attacked savagely, heading directly towards the Blackshirt base. The Blackshirts, instead of using armoured suits, preferred to use armoured vehicles. It was a mistake, Neil knew, one he intended to exploit. The plasma cannons his Marines carried could punch through anything the Blackshirts had on hand.

The fighting grew more savage as they raced through the city, as if they were all of one mind. The locals, at least, had the sense to stay out of the way, although fragments of chatter his suit picked up suggested that some of them were taking the opportunity to attack the Blackshirts and score a little payback for the suffering and torment they’d undergone. Neil was right in the heart of it, fighting alongside his men and feeling a little bit of himself die when a Marine fell. The Blackshirts had broken out their heavy plasma cannons, powerful enough to burn through a Marine armoured suit, firing almost at random. The cannons didn’t survive long when the Marines saw them, hitting them with their own weapons and causing them to explode with colossal force, but it hardly mattered. A handful of Marines were killed before they could react. Neil saw a running Blackshirt, his body ablaze with white fire, and felt sick. The Blackshirt had been too close to one of the plasma cannons when the containment field had exploded. He snapped off a mercy shot and put the poor bastard out of his misery.

“Onwards,” he snapped. The fighting had become kinetic, with the Marines responding to threats as they appeared, but they kept pushing towards the main base. The Blackshirts had taken over the city’s governmental buildings and converted them into their headquarters. The level of defences around them looked oddly paranoid, but then the locals had been very good at slipping explosive devices and even armed men through the gaps. He wondered, absently, why the Blackshirts had bothered to place their headquarters there, yet it hardly mattered. Perhaps they’d seen it as a way to mark their claim on the local real estate.

The fighting became a blurred series of impressions as they assaulted the main base. They tore through barriers intended to keep out vehicles, running right into the Blackshirts and their final stand. Neil realised that they were using their drug injectors, rendering themselves largely immune to pain and fear. Marines didn’t use the drugs, largely because they affected the brain as well, turning the Blackshirts into soulless killing machines with little sense of right or wrong. He saw a Blackshirt run right at them, firing madly, and cut him down. Others resisted the temptation to seek self-immolation and held out until the Marines cut through them, like a knife through butter. The final defences were destroyed and the Marines pushed onwards, into the building. Neil checked the map he’d downloaded and installed in his HUD and smiled. If he knew the General’s reputation, he would be in the main office, the one that had belonged to the planet’s President.

General Branford lifted a pistol as the Marines burst into the office, but he wasn’t hopped up on battle drugs and Neil knocked it from his hand before he could do anything. The General looked… as if he didn’t want to surrender, yet didn’t want to go on fighting anyway. There was something cold and hard in his gaze, as if he thought he could get out of anything. Neil looked at him and felt sick. The ordinary Blackshirt was drugged, to the point where he could never be justly held accountable for his actions, but the General… the General had known all along what he was doing. When Neil had faced such a choice, he had refused; the General… had carried out his orders.

Neil reached out with one armoured hand, ignoring the General’s protests, and crushed his head like a grape. It felt as if he was cleansing the Empire, crushing all that was rotten and unwholesome within it… and it was personal. Branford had carried out the orders Neil had refused to obey.

“It’s over,” he said, with a sigh. Without their leader, the remaining Blackshirts would be unable to coordinate any resistance. The locals could deal with them, at least until reinforcements arrived from Camelot. By then, the rebels would have quit the system. “We’ve won.”