Democracy 1: Democracy's Right (29 page)

He didn't want to be responsible for mass slaughter.  He’d worked hard to avoid leaving any signs that Jackson’s Folly was in any way responsible for his mutiny and rebellion.  And yet, the Empire had invaded anyway.  What was the use of the rebellion, the value of the Popular Front, if they failed to respond to a world that needed help?  Colin knew that hundreds, perhaps thousands, of worlds needed help, yet he could do nothing to help them.  Jackson’s Folly, on the other hand, could be helped...

“Very well,” he said.  Besides, a smart commander knew not to go against the advice of all of his subordinates, at least not very often.  “We will recon the system first, and then jump in and open fire.  We won't stay in the system for longer than a day at most.  Commodore Ismoilzoda?”

“Yes, sir,” Khursheda said.

“You will prepare a fleet of fast personnel transports, ones that can carry as many people as possible, equipped with a fleet of shuttles,” Colin ordered.  “I want those ships to accompany us to Jackson’s Folly.  We will use them to take out as many trained workers and their families as are willing to go and can be stuffed into the ships.  Don’t hesitate to push the life support to the limit.  They won’t want to go without their families.”

“Yes, sir,” Khursheda said.  “How soon do you want the ships?”

“As soon as possible,” Colin said.  At least Jackson’s Folly was some distance from Camelot.  They should be able to get in and out quite nicely without any warning reaching Percival, at least until it was far too late.  “And then we will assemble the fleet and liberate the system, if only for a few weeks.”

***

By its very nature, Sanctuary Asteroid played host to inhabitants and guests from all over the Beyond.  The coordinates had been spread so widely that far too many people knew about its location, including Imperial Intelligence.  The spooks hadn't bothered to pass the information on to the Imperial Navy, knowing that destroying a single asteroid wouldn't do more than scatter the inhabitants and destroy whatever links it
had to the rest of the Beyond.  Far better, they had reasoned, to use the asteroid as a base for their own operations, ferreting out the far more interesting – and dangerous – colonies deeper into the Beyond.

The spy felt a sense of relief as she finally returned to the asteroid.  Sanctuary hadn't been used as the meeting place for the Popular Front, even though it was fairly public, and the spy had been nervous about her presence.  If someone had thought to ask the right questions, or check her luggage before she left, it might have aroused suspicions.  The Rim couldn't afford anything reassembling due process; if they’d been suspicious, they would have put her out the airlock first and ask questions later.  But Sanctuary was far more cosmopolitan and crowded; the spy could afford to get lost in the crowd.  In her official capacity, as a senior officer for one of the rebel outfits, he went into a single shop and requested a private meeting.  The shop, a cover business for Imperial Intelligence, honoured his request.  There was a brief exchange of signs and countersigns and then the spy got to work.

“This is the headquarters of the Popular Front,” she said, passing over the datachip.  She’d secured the data and encrypted it using a new encryption system, one directly from Imperial Intelligence.  It should be impossible for anyone to decrypt it without the right code, although the Geeks would probably be able to do it if they had a reason to look.  “I suggest you pass the information onwards.”

The shop’s owner – a man with thirty years of experience in Imperial Intelligence – nodded.  “Of course,” he said, in agreement.  He made the chip vanish with the ease of long practice.  “We cannot charter a ship for it specifically, but there should be another ship coming in soon and they can take the information onwards.”

The spy nodded.  The rebel group she worked for would have been horrified to discover that most of their supplies came directly from Imperial Intelligence.  They would have been even more horrified when they realised that Imperial Intelligence could have destroyed them at any time.  The spy sometimes wished that things were different, but Imperial Intelligence had done something to her head, back when he’d been inserted into the Rim.  She could not be disloyal.  Even the mere thought of disloyalty was painful.  Obedience was all that she could do.

And even if something happened to her, afterwards, the information would reach the Empire.

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 44
th
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.