Democracy's Right

Chapter Forty-Nine

Although she suspected that she wasn’t somewhere most citizens of the Empire would be pleased to be, Penny took her time with her shower and ablations. Her body hurt from being stunned — and probably drugged to keep her under — and she wanted time to think. She allowed the warm water to wash down her body, wiping away the stain of being touched by Percival and his goons, all the while trying to work out where she was now. Her thoughts kept running in circles until she finally dismissed it; there was no way that she could deduce anything from what little she’d seen.

Stepping out of the shower compartment, she was amused to discover a neatly-folded pile of clothes, all in her size. There was a standard Imperial Navy shipsuit — without rank markings, she noted with wry amusement — and a standard pair of undergarments. It occurred to her, as she started to pull them on, that unseen watchers were probably enjoying the sight, but she’d lost most of her body modesty back at the Academy. Besides, if she was in the hands of Imperial Intelligence or one of the other security forces, body modesty would soon be the least of her worries. No one was interrogating her or threatening to try her with treason and blow her out an airlock.

Once she was dressed, she stepped up to the hatch and — somewhat to her surprise — it opened. Her first glimpse of the passage outside confirmed her suspicions that she was on a small craft, perhaps a shape barely larger than a gunboat. There were some luxury yachts, pleasure craft owned by high-ranking officers and aristocrats, which had roughly the same dimensions. The craft wouldn’t be very large, certainly not more than one or two decks, with most of the rear made up of engine. Judging from the drive noise she could hear in the background, the tiny ship had been outfitted with a military-grade drive. Very few, whatever their rank or station, would have been permitted such a drive for their own private craft. She walked down the corridor and up to the bridge hatch, which hissed open as she approached. The interior of the bridge barely deserved that name. It was small, compact, and designed for a tiny crew. A single person, with the right knowledge and training, could operate the entire ship.

“Well, come on in,” a voice said. She saw a chair spinning around, revealing the man she’d seen when she’d woken up. He might have been the only person she’d seen, but it didn’t mean that he was the only person on the ship. A small craft could carry upwards of thirty people, depending on interior design. “How are you feeling now?”

“Refreshed,” Penny said, shortly. She took the chair he waved her to and checked the nearest display. It wasn’t showing a standard Imperial Navy display, but it was easy to understand. She was gratified that her early deduction of the size of the starship was accurate. “What am I doing here?”

The man leaned back in his chair and Penny took the opportunity to study him. He was unusually tall, with a long lanky body and a pair of hands that were always in motion. His face, striking rather than handsome, was topped by an unruly mob of brown hair. She couldn’t tell for sure, but he appeared to have some kind of combat training, although she couldn’t identify the discipline. He wore nothing apart from a single unmarked shipsuit and a standard-issue wristcom.

“The short answer is that you’re here because your testimony will be required,” the man said. He paused, anticipating her next question. “You may call me Dave, if you wish.”

Penny frowned, stroking her chin. At least Dave seemed to be more pleasant company than Percival. “You’re Imperial Intelligence,” she guessed, finally. “You were sent here to keep an eye on Percival.”

“In a manner of speaking,” Dave said. She was certain that his name wasn’t Dave, but if he’d gone through the full Imperial Intelligence program, he probably didn’t recall what his name actually was, or where he had been born, or anything else that gave him a tie outside of Imperial Intelligence. “I had orders to keep an eye on the Roosevelt Family and their clients in this sector.”

Penny found herself giggling for the first time in far too long. “You poor bastard,” she said. “You had to control Stacy Roosevelt!”

Dave chuckled back. “No, I merely had to keep an eye on them,” he said. “When the rebellion began, I started to observe more closely and decided that the situation was likely to grow out of hand. When the rebel fleet attacked Camelot, I resolved to secure a living witness and jump out of the system before Percival could surrender or die.”

“Oh,” Penny said. She decided she might as well ask. “Did Percival surrender then?”

“Someone did,” Dave confirmed. “The last I heard before I started flying back towards Earth was that the fortresses were surrendering and that Marines were landing on the stations. Percival may have surrendered or someone with more than two brain cells to rub together might have removed him and surrendered in his place. And no, I don’t know if he is still alive. The leader of the rebellion has a bloody great grudge against him.”

Penny shrugged. There would be time, later, to consider her feelings… but for the moment, all she really felt was relief. Percival had dominated her life for years, yet now it was over, leaving nothing apart from fading memories. The time she’d spent serving him — in all possible senses — might have been wasted, but it could have been much worse. Or perhaps, if events had been a little different, she would have gone over to the rebellion.

“But that doesn’t matter,” Dave continued, unaware of her inner thoughts. “As nice as it would be to drag Admiral Percival before the Thousand Families in chains, it isn’t an option that is open to us at the moment. Our priority is to alert Earth to the scale of the danger.”

Penny looked up, sharply. “We’re on our way to alert Earth?”

“Of course,” Dave said. He grinned at her expression. “This ship may be small, but she has a military-grade drive and top-of-the-line computers. We can make it all the way to Earth without stopping along the way. I admit the food and drink facilities are not all that they could be, but that shouldn’t a problem for you. They’re better than military-issue food processors.”

“All the way to Earth,” Penny repeated, numbly. It took a starship around six months to make the trip from Camelot to Earth, although a small fast design with a military-grade drive might be able to shave a month off the journey. She wouldn’t have wanted to risk it. Burning out a flicker drive would leave a craft stranded in interstellar space, beyond any hope of rescue. “Why do you want me there?”

“So you can testify about the rebellion,” Dave said, patiently. He gave her what looked like a half-hearted apologetic look. “I should warn you that the computers on this ship are programmed to work only with me or another officer with Omega-level clearance. I don’t know what will happen to you at the far end, but if you behave yourself on the trip, I will…”

Penny snorted. “Put in a good word for me?”

“Something like that,” Dave agreed. “You do realise that most of the people who might want to blame you for this disaster are either dead or in rebel custody? You have a good chance at coming out of this smelling like a rose.”

Penny stared at him and then burst out laughing. “You have to be joking,” she said, trying to hold down a choking fit. “Do you know what Imperial Intelligence will do to me?”

“I’m sorry,” Dave said. “Did I say that I worked for Imperial Intelligence?”

Penny blinked. “Are you saying that you’re not working for Imperial Intelligence?”

“I had training from them and little else,” Dave said. He pursed his lips, thinking carefully. “Think of me… as one of the Household Troops. I work specifically for a single Family in the ongoing struggle for supremacy. My… employers were concerned about the Roosevelt Family’s obsessive interest in this sector and dispatched me to keep an eye on them. And you know the rest.”

He shrugged. “This ship doesn’t have a stasis pod and I don’t trust the medical computers far enough to risk sedating you for that long,” he added. “You can behave yourself and have the freedom of the ship or I can lock you into one of the cabins and leave you there until we reach Earth. Should you somehow manage to kill me… well; the ship will still take you to Earth. Have fun explaining my mangled remains.”

Penny pretended to consider it. Assuming he was telling the truth, escape would be impossible even if she did kill or incapacitate her jailor. She wasn’t a computer expert and even if she had been, reprogramming a starship while in transit was a good way to commit suicide. And besides, if he was telling the truth about working for a different Family, perhaps she could make the contacts to save herself from carrying the can for Percival’s defeat.

The thought of going to Earth as a very junior officer, with neither connections nor patron, was terrifying, yet there seemed to be no choice. And the thought of killing Dave seemed impossible. If she tried to kill him — and she was sure now that he had some commando-level training, something she lacked — he would simply imprison her in a tiny cabin for six months. She’d been in superdreadnaughts and cruisers with tiny cabins and compartments for the low-ranking officers, yet she’d never been permanently confined to such a small space. It would drive her mad. And besides, perhaps Dave would be pretty good company. He could hardly be worse than Percival.

“I understand,” she said, finally. “Just tell me one thing. Am I a prisoner?”

Dave did her the honour of considering the question seriously. “I do not believe that you are a prisoner,” he said finally, “but honesty compels me to admit that I cannot release you, or drop you off somewhere apart from Earth.” He grinned at her and Penny found herself wondering why she’d thought he wasn’t particularly handsome. “If you want, consider yourself to be on parole, with me as your supervising officer. I don’t think you’ll get lost on this ship.”

Penny chuckled, feeling the tension slowly starting to drain out of her. It would get worse, she knew, once they reached Earth, but for the moment she was safe. A starship, even a small commercial-issue design, would have an extensive library of entertainment and she could catch up with all the news she’d missed, or the reading Percival had never left her with time to do.

“I shall,” she said, with a wicked smile of her own. Despite her worries she was more than a little fascinated by his job. She had known that there was conflict — subtle rather than violent — between the different Families, yet she had seen little of it. “What Family do you work for?”

“One of the greatest,” Dave said. He refused to be drawn any further, reminding her that what she didn’t know she couldn’t tell. Penny wanted to be offended by his remarks, but he was right — and besides, she didn’t want to make him clam up any further. “Do you want to know the real nightmare?”

“Of course,” Penny said. Her grandma had once told her to make sure that she learned everything she could, because information was the weapon of the weak. Her grandma, the matriarch of her family, had been a font of good advice, even if she had called Penny a whore and worse after she had found out what she was doing for Percival. The Quick family had been commoners, poor compared to even the lowest member of the Thousand Families, but they prided themselves upon honesty and decency. “What can scare the Thousand Families?”

“Opening a planet for settlement, at least the kind of settlement that might pay off its debts, costs a vast amount of money,” Dave said. “It’s growing harder and harder for anyone, even the greatest of the Families, to concentrate that level of wealth for a single purpose. The Empire just sucks up money, from servicing debts to paying for the Civil Service and the Imperial Navy. Few can afford to make the investments needed to create new sources of wealth and even when they do create new sources the money is drained away into the Civil Service. The Empire is bleeding itself dry.”

Penny remembered her own speculations about the Roosevelt Family and felt her blood run cold. If the Roosevelt Family held the entire sector, they — and they alone — would be able to tap it for resources. Sector 117 would feed the Family and nourish it, provided that the Family lasted long enough for the wealth to start flowing. No wonder Stacy Roosevelt had been so keen to terminate the rebellion — and Jackson’s Folly — so quickly. The longer they delayed, the greater the chance of someone else sticking a wedge into the sector and using it to share in the loot.

“So what,” Dave asked, “happens when the money runs out?”

His face twitched into a humourless smile. “The Thousand Families will start fighting over a shrinking pool of resources,” he answered his own question. “And then all hell will truly break loose. That’s why we have to terminate this rebellion as quickly as possible. The loss of Sector 117 is no great threat to the Empire, but it will make the edifice shiver and start to collapse. And then the whole Empire will collapse into debris?”

Penny said something that she would never have dared say in front of Percival. “Is that such a bad thing?”

Dave didn’t explode, or hit her. He just smiled. “Look at it this way,” he said. “The Empire, as bad as it is, is the only thing holding the edifice together. If the Empire breaks apart, trillions of people will lose everything — and that assumes that we don’t drop down all the way into civil war. There will be a colossal disaster right across human space. Billions will die.”

Penny sighed. “You don’t understand,” she said, tiredly. She remembered accessing — in private — the message the Popular Front had uploaded into the ICN. “The civil war is already here.”

The days on the small starship — it turned out that it was called the Hatta Mari, for reasons Dave refused to discuss — slowly started to blur together. Dave was amusing company and Penny did find herself with enough time to catch up on her reading. She also found herself joining him for evening viewing, where he showed her some of his collection of forbidden entertainments, some of which made her laugh. The Empire’s Public Entertainment Division simply didn’t amuse her like the forbidden shows. Dave was careful not to tell her where he’d obtained the recordings, although Penny found herself suspecting that he had some pretty extreme connections of his own. He certainly didn’t seem to be worried about her tattling on him to his superiors.

“It feels like a holiday,” she said, one evening. Her time sense was also starting to blur; the ship was making several jumps, followed by a pause to allow the drive to cool down and recharge. Nothing short of a courier boat could have matched the small starship’s pace and yet, Earth was still thousands of light years away. One day, she was sure, the researchers would find a way to flicker instantly anywhere… but probably not under the Empire. The Thousand Families discouraged technological advancement. “Is that what you had in mind?”

Dave smiled. “I wanted you to relax your mind,” he said. “You’re too stressed to be of much good to my patrons, so I wanted you to relax.”

Penny smiled back. It was odd how relaxed she felt in his company. “And I’m sure that you had no ulterior motives,” she said, wryly. Dave chuckled. “How do you think we will fight the war?”

Dave shook his head. “I think that for us the war is over,” he said, deadpan. It had been a catchphrase on one of his entertainment shows. “It all hangs on the Thousand Families and Earth now. If we don’t convince them…”

Penny made up her mind and reached for him, pulling him towards her for a kiss. Dave turned and kissed her back, his mouth exploring hers, even though there was a sort of curious dispassion in his act. Percival had wanted her to submit; Brent-Cochrane had wanted to mark his territory… but Dave’s reactions were different. And, somehow, having chosen to have sex with him herself made all the difference to her. She made love to him with all the passion and fury that she could muster.

Afterwards, she lay back in his arms and knew that he was right. For the moment, for her at least, the war was over.