Commodore (16 page)

Meanwhile, every week we cranked out more trained volunteers. It was phenomenal, how the numbers rose as the exponential effect of the volunteer-sergeants kicked in. By now we had volunteer-sergeants running entire training centers, and we'd commandeered practically every classroom on the planet. Sure, the sergeants with the most responsibility were all humans—most, in fact, had been leaders of one sort or another in civilian life. The Rabbits didn't resent this, however, and understood the necessity so long as the sergeants were fair and diplomatic in their dealings. Some weren't, naturally enough; these were immediately busted back to private as a direct result, while a couple of the worst offenders were kicked out of the service entirely. But the others… Well, given the proper training a few might've made good officers in the
real
armed forces, if I were any judge. And it was all for the good that an internal pecking-order was emerging. When the Imperials came for real, I fully expected the planetary command structure to collapse. Once it did the volunteers would largely be on their own, leaderless and poorly-armed against a pitiless enemy.

My dinners, in fact, proved so successful in raising morale and unifying support against the upcoming invasion that Jean (in his role as a future House Lord) and I started inviting humans to dinner as well. We didn't do it nearly as often—partly because the commander was up to his neck in preparations—so our focus was on the higher-ranking types. Still, we accomplished a lot in terms of winning the opinion-leaders over to the new way of things. "How much longer could you have kept them in chains anyway?" Jean would ask over after-dinner cocktails in the drawing room, imagining I was out of earshot. Then he'd nod towards me. "After all that David's already accomplished, I mean? This way at least they'll fight the Imperials for you; without them you don't stand a chance." Meanwhile, my own shtick was to appear as confident, capable and intelligent as possible, sprinkling my conversation liberally with facts and figures regarding how well the Marcus planets were being served in economic terms by a free Rabbitry. In the end I think we did a lot of good; certainly the Wilkes nobles appeared to be a little more at peace with the whole manumission-thing. Not that they ever had a choice, of course. But at least they seemed a bit more open to the brighter side of it all.

Soon I was doing seven dinners and seven training-class introductions a week. This left me little time for anything else, but that didn't matter anymore because the die was long-since cast and all the important decisions made. Now it was just a matter of pumping out as many volunteers as possible, each of them as well-armed and well-trained and well-motivated as possible. I could contribute best to the last of these goals, so that's how I spent my time. Meanwhile Heinrich was working out a formal defensive perimeter for us to fall back on and hold as long as we could. He was better trained and suited for that than any of the rest of us, so we left it to him and ate, ate, ate our way through the long, brutal weeks.

I gained eight pounds on a planet supposedly undergoing strict food rationing before the Imperial marines finally made their first appearance. "Don't worry sir," Nestor said as he let my uniform pants out for the second time. "Knowing you, you'll probably pace the extra pounds right back off again."

And I did exactly that. For the Imperials had somehow rounded up no less than six assault vessels and two aerospace-carriers worth of marines to drop on our heads. Even worse, they were clearly waiting for more arrive before getting started, so as to be absolutely certain of the outcome this time around.

29

All through these months of wining and dining, Jean, Heinrich and Governor Vorsage's propaganda staff worked double overtime. We'd realigned the command arrangements, now that the nature of the threat had changed. Heinrich was now in charge of everything related to the 'traditional' defense of Wilkes Prime. His oversized job consisted of working out what we should abandon to the enemy, what it would be worthwhile to defend, and what ought to be demolished so as to deny it to the Imperials. This was an even more complicated task than it at first appeared, mostly because we couldn't know if we royalists were ever going to take the planet back or not. Seeding the fuel-farms with plutonium, for example, sounded like a great idea unless you suddenly inherited the cleanup job and needed the things in a hurry. What little free time I had went to assisting him with this task, and though the resulting plan was mostly his I was pleased to have contributed an idea or two. For example, I'd learned while the blaster-factories were being set up that Wilkes Prime imported all its hand tools and most of its fastening hardware. Both were always in tight supply. So rather than blow up important infrastructure items like railroad trestles and the valuable fuel-farms, we simply took as many out of service as possible and then removed so many nuts and bolts and such—the more highly-specialized the better—that they could barely support their own weight. Then we tossed both fasteners and tools alike into the scrap furnaces and melted them down to nothing. That way the facilities could be brought back on line inexpensively, but most assuredly not quickly. Which was, I deemed, good enough.

Meanwhile Jean worked on the nontraditional resistance that had always lain at the heart of our plan. There was no way to foresee what would need to be done when, so he oversaw the placing of thousands of tiny arsenals and supply caches all over Wilkes Prime, assigning each to a local volunteer sergeant. A few of these contained high-quality milspec gear, though most held only cheap locally-produced blasters, mines and above all many, many rocket launchers. He also worked out a simple drop-box system that allowed one unit to contact another with at least some degree of security, and began picking out the finest sergeants to become volunteer captains. These he trained at a special, highly-secretive facility not too far from the ruins of the Wilkes Palace. These men, mostly of the non-blue-blooded merchant class of Wilkes society, were rushed through a course on what amounted to advanced guerilla warfare techniques. Jean taught some of the classes personally, and I managed to drop in to speak to most of them as well. "No planet can be held against the will of its inhabitants," I explained to them. "None. Ever. Not so long as both sides have access to anything like the same level of technology. Such a planet can be taken, yes. But it can never,
ever
be held!" Then I told them rousing tales of Mao, the Yugoslavian resistance, Ho Chi Minh and even the recent Marcus uprisings until the fire glowed bright in their eyes. It was a lie, of course—there were exceptions to every rule, and over the grand sweep of history the people's will to resist had been broken by every imaginable means from brute force to cultural absorption. But it was very nearly true, or at least the spirit of it was. With their own Noble House essentially decapitated and disempowered, there was little danger of the serfs of Wilkes choosing an even more aristocrat-centered way of life under a foreign nobility they had no reason whatsoever to love. And while the occupying Imperials could and would be murderous enough, well… So could we Rabbits, if it meant being free. There'd never been a knife made that couldn't cut two ways and sheer brutality was no exception; it was my full intention to teach whoever the Imperials sent out to lead the occupation forces this most painful of all lessons.

The Governor's propagandists in many ways had the most difficult problem. Eventually, we all knew, the Imperials would add up two and two, come up with the correct answer of five, and realize that I'd blown up the Palace. Indeed, they almost certainly had to have already done so, since the Wilkes people wouldn't have done such a thing to their own leadership and I was the only other nuclear-armed individual at the table. Yet though their propaganda was now beamed down to Wilkes Prime from so many sources as to be unjammable, they'd never so much as breathed a syllable on the subject. Clearly they were saving it for a special occasion—to dishearten the populace after my capture, perhaps, or maybe to dump on us right as their 'liberating' forces landed. There was only one way to remove the sting from such an announcement, and that was to beat the Imperials to the punch. Yet despite the urgency it had to be done slowly, carefully… even lovingly. Bit by bit the facts behind the Wilkes-Hashimoto conspiracy began to 'leak' out, including rather heavy-handed hints that the Hashimotos had been dragged in against their will and that the leadership of the House of Wilkes, and of Wilkes alone, was the driving force behind it all.

Governor Vorsage's media experts were true masters of their art, it didn't take me long to decide. Every day's newspages contained new hints and subtle foreshadowings as to the extent of the conspiracy, until one day an "unnamed but formerly highly-ranked source" spilled his guts to a prominent reporter and told all. Or almost all, rather. Yes, the former assistant chief of the Wilkes intelligence service was honest and complete in his accounting of who had corrupted and coerced who, and when and how they'd done so. The truth served our purposes perfectly, after all, so there was no reason why we'd ask him to lie. Of course he omitted the part about how we loyalist types had figured out that he wanted to live, and had permitted him to keep on doing so as long as he cooperated with us. That was something the public had no need whatsoever to know. In the end he did such a good job that we let him keep his estate and personal wealth as well.

Even the Imperial propagandists had a hard time dealing with solid, verifiable facts; they were still sputtering and avoiding the subject when the Wilkes treachery made the transition from mere speculation into unquestionable fact in the minds of the populace. As a result they missed their last potential window for action, small as it was. Three hours after the local "story of the century" broke and before any of the local reporters did their own addition and publicly came up with five on their own, I held a press conference and acknowledged that I was the one who'd given the order and also that the conspiracy was the reason why. The result was first stunned silence, then a veritable gabble of questions. I answered almost none of them on the grounds of military necessity, until a blonde reporter who reminded me very much of the one I'd watched die in the bombing asked me if I still felt such an extreme action was justified. "Yes," I replied. "I'd do it again in a minute. I regret the deaths of so many innocents, of course. I mourn them more deeply and completely than most of you can imagine. Yet killing most of the leaders all together at once was the only way there could be any hope for anyone at all, and I couldn't come up with any other method that would leave the planetary defenses intact and yet be effective and certain within the amount of time available. So I gave the order." For a long moment I looked out at the sea of reporters, meeting as many eyes as I could. "The responsibility is mine and mine alone. I can only hope that I don't ever have to give another such order again." That created yet another stunned silence, which I took advantage of to turn the conference over to Governor Vorsage.

Thus the Imperials lost another crucial weapon. And thus I spent yet another long, sleepless night, haunted by the vision of the young reporter. Yes, I'd learned, she'd indeed had a baby. A son, in fact.

Who she'd named after the hero of the day—David Birkenhead Williams, in his case. And who I in turn had made an orphan.

30

"It couldn't be helped, sir," Nestor said as he delivered my tea the next morning. I was bleary-eyed, drained, and essentially dead on my feet from the sleepless tossing and turning of the night before. My aide knew well what was bothering me—he was as fully aware of the circumstances as I was, and even though it was probably wrong for me to show favoritism towards one victim over another I'd asked him to keep tabs on little David for me. "It was better than abandoning the planet to the Imperials, sir. And better than invading ourselves, as well. For almost everyone, in the long run. You shouldn't let it gnaw at you so much. In fact, you should be proud of coming up with such a good plan to begin with. It's
working
, sir."

I sighed and nodded, then looked deep down into my cup as Nestor bustled off to perform his other duties. Currently my bed was a military bunk bolted to the wall of a former broom closet. I sat on the edge of the thin, unyielding mattress for a long moment. On a certain level it would've been far better for little David and all the rest of the innocent, non-political citizens of Wilkes Prime if I'd never come at all, if I'd allowed their leadership to sell them out to a total tyrant without a fight. My own homeworld had suffered terribly under the Imperial boot, yet the kind of ever-escalating never-say-die fight that I planned for this one would be far more destructive in every possible way. More dead, more ruins, more terrible psychic scars on a population that still didn't have a clue as to the degree of horror they were facing. And for what? I was most acutely aware of how closely my methods were coming to resemble those of the Emperor—total ruthlessness had been the secret to his success, and the more bloodthirsty and atavistic I grew in reply the nearer I came to accomplishing his ruin. But what was it all for, anyway? The Emperor was fighting for personal power and aggrandizement, of that there was no doubt. He could almost be said to be fighting for fighting's sake, and his entire leadership along with him. That was clearly wrong and evil, and also something that could definitely not be said of James or the vast majority of his officers, myself included. So in terms of that one measure, at least, I could solidly claim that we held the moral high ground. This war
wasn't
of our making, we didn't launch surprise attacks and snatch up worlds whenever we thought we could get away with it, and we never took lives without reason. We
did
, however, kill whenever it was sufficiently expedient for us to do so—little David's recent loss of his parents attested to that in spades. And so for that matter did my private stash of death warrants. I'd been forced to fill out a pair of them in order to have two high-ranking Wilkes nobles executed for treason without public trial. There'd been no doubt whatsoever of their guilt—they stood condemned from their own mouths and had sworn vengeance on James and I at all costs. With the Imperials ready to land literally at any moment and not half enough non-Wilkes noblemen available on the planet to constitute a jury… Well, I
could've
put them into a cell, I supposed, and stationed half a squad of marines there to shoot them the moment the Imperials threatened to take the facility. But I badly needed the marines elsewhere, it so happened—there were never enough of them to go around. And under no circumstances could I risk allowing the pair to escape and possibly form the nucleus of a puppet House under the Emperor. So I whipped out the death warrants, and…