Because the battleships were never actually tested against a serious threat, she thought, answering her own question. They weren't deployed against most rebels because that would have been smashing flies with sledgehammers.
She looked up, realising that Patterson was still there. “Yes?”
“I have finalised plans for the security reformatting,” Patterson said. “Do you wish to inspect them?”
“Later,” Rani said. “For the moment, I have work to do here.”
She watched Patterson go, then turned back to the attack plans. A little fiddling here and there, she told herself, and then they could go to work. And then she’d be back in space at the head of her fleet, where she belonged. She didn't dare trust any of her subordinates, even Sampson, with that much firepower. Besides, with the divided command structure on Corinthian, her subordinates would be too busy busting their balls to prove themselves loyal in her absence, rather than plotting against her.
So tell me, Bainbridge, she thought, coldly. What would you think of me if you could see me now?
Bainbridge had had to die; if there were any remaining loyalists on Trafalgar, he might have proved himself a rallying point for a counter-mutiny. It had been quick, which was more than he'd deserved. Rani had spent her first few months of exile devising ever more unpleasant ways for the corrupt and well-connected officer to die. But in the end, he’d taken a bullet through the head. There had been no time for indulging herself.
You’d hate me, she thought, feeling a flicker of grim amusement. What have you done, in all of your life, that matches what I have done?
***
Jasmine sat on the rooftop and peered upwards into the darkness, watching as lights moved rapidly across the sky. Corinthian had never lost the ability to reach space, unlike several worlds that had joined the Commonwealth after they’d been liberated from the pirates, and had been settled long enough for low orbit to be filled with industrial and habitat stations. It was hard to pick out the real stars against the orbital band of light ...
She pushed the thought aside, rubbing her eyes. Everything was prepared now, or so she thought; the cells were active, weapons had been distributed and H-Hour was barely four hours away, when Sergeant Harris would lead the assault on the hostage camp. After that ... Jasmine knew that her remaining cells were ready to start their attacks, both real and diversionary, but she had no idea how many of them would perform, when the shit hit the fan. Even the planners on Han had known more about their forces than she did about theirs.
Keep It Simple, Stupid, she reminded herself, although in truth she had avoided anything simple when she’d devised the plan. The more elements involved, the more that could go wrong ... even timing might be a problem when they were operating over several different time zones. Thankfully, Corinthian – like the Commonwealth worlds – used Imperial Standard Time as well as local time. Everything should go off at the right time.
She scowled as she stood up, fishing through her pocket for a stimulant. Using drugs anywhere near combat was normally forbidden, but she didn't see any choice. She hadn't had much time to rest over the last few days, even though she’d insisted that Blake and the others get as much sleep as they could. Afterwards, when the mission was completed, she promised herself that she would sleep for a week. If they held the orbitals under their control, as well as the insurgent cells, the rest of the planet would be theirs too.
And then the locals would have to put their planet together again ...
Jasmine chewed the stimulant slowly, shaking her head at the thought. It was quite likely that the operation would fail – or succeed imperfectly. There would be time enough to worry about the future after Corinthian was secure and Admiral Singh was dead. It was far too possible that the locals would fight a civil war afterwards, but ... she shook her head again. There was no point in worrying until after the Admiral was dead. It would just distract her from fighting the coming battle.
Walking over to the hatch, she dropped down into the building, nearly landing on top of a pair of rebels. They’d been outfitted with guardsmen uniforms, complete with a yellow armband to identify them to other friendly forces, as well as enough weapons to fight a minor war. They both straightened when they saw her, coming to a parody of attention that probably owed its existence to bad war movies. Jasmine smiled, returned their makeshift salutes and headed onwards. The final state of the operation was about to begin.
Blake stuck his head out of the door, nodding to her. He was meant to be sleeping, Jasmine reminded herself, but it looked as though he couldn't sleep either.
“Get your body armour and weapons here,” he carolled. “Hurry up before they’re all gone.”
Jasmine surprised herself by laughing. “Thank you,” she said, as she stepped into the room. Carl was sitting at one of the desks, painstakingly counting out bullet magazines they’d stolen from the guardsmen. “Are we ready?”
“As ready as we’ll ever be,” Blake said. “And most of the enemy forces are surrounding the red light district.”
Jasmine grinned. Hopefully, that would keep most of the Admiral’s forces busy until it was far too late.
“Good,” she said. She took a piece of body armour and buckled it on, silently cursing the guardsman who’d designed it under her breath. The bastard hadn't seen the wisdom of designing armour for people with breasts. She picked up a rifle and grinned at them. “Shall we go?”
Chapter Forty-Two
But this should not have been surprising. Admiral Singh, denied the chance to rise to a position matching her abilities by the Empire, saw fit to create one where she would be the prime determinate of everything that happened. As such, the system was highly personalised – and lacked any provisions for the succession. But then, Admiral Singh had no interest in looking past her death.
-Professor Leo Caesius, Authority, Power and the Post-Imperial Era
“Dawn,” Chester said, grimly. “Is everyone in position?”
“I think so,” Kate said. She'd become his de facto XO. “What happens if they’re not?”
“We’re in deep trouble,” Chester said. He’d coordinated attacks without communication systems during exercises, but never during actual wartime. If someone was out of place, the fog of war would hide the fact until it was far too late. “On my mark, launch the flare.”
He scowled as he peered down at the hostage camp. They'd done all the preparations they could, but common sense told him that Murphy was probably going to put in an appearance. His plan to use mortars to shell the space between the two fences had had to be abandoned, just out of fear that the shells would fall into the camp itself. He didn't dare risk harming any of the hostages.
And the guards won’t be that constrained, he thought, looking at the guard towers. A single command and the heavy weapons they’d mounted on the towers would rip through the camp, killing or wounding most of the hostages. We have to take them out before the command can be issued.
He gritted his teeth, then looked over at Kate. “Launch the flare,” he ordered.
Kate lifted the flare gun, pointed it into the sky and pulled the trigger. There was a green flash of light as the flare was launched into the sky, then ignited, casting an eerie green light over the hostage camp. A moment later, the RPG teams opened fire, lobbing missiles into the guard towers and blowing them apart. The snipers, meanwhile, went after every guard foolish enough to stand out in the open.
Harris flipped his radio on and barked a command. “Drop shells on the guardhouse,” he snapped. They’d positioned the mortars close enough to fire, but nowhere near close enough for the gunners to actually see their targets. He'd calculated the firing angles as best as he could, yet it was still a risk. There just wasn't any other choice. “Now!”
A brilliant flash of light blasted up from where the guardhouse had been, followed rapidly by two more. The first had come down within bare meters of its target, he realised, but the other two had made direct hits, punching through the co
ncrete and utterly destroying the guardhouse. A handful of shots were fired as guardsmen scrambled over from where they’d been visiting one of the hostage huts, only to be gunned down by the snipers. They’d clearly never expected a serious attack.
Maybe they were right, he thought, wryly. They parcelled out the farmer hostages among the guardposts, not to a single camp. The camp was reserved for Admiral Singh’s inmates.
His radio buzzed. “We’ve got them pinned down in their camp,” Jeff reported. He’d had some genuine military experience, enough that Chester had taken the risk of putting him in command of the detachment charged with keeping the rest of the guardsmen out of the fight. “But we can't go in after them!”
“Just keep them pinned down,” Chester reminded him. The guard barracks were constructed from prefabricated blocks of cement, if he recalled correctly. Heavy weapons would rip them apart, but there was a distinct shortage of such weapons on Corinthian. “There's no point in killing the bastards.”
He jumped down and led the charge towards the camp, pulling the cutting touch of his belt as he reached the fence. It would have been unbreakable to a person using only their bare hands, but the torch burned through the metal links as though they were made of paper. Quickly, he checked the space between the fence for mines, seeing no telltale signs of their presence. As soon as he was sure, he moved through the gap and cut open the next part of the fence.
“Get the recovery teams in now,” he ordered, as he ran into the camp. “Hurry!”
He put his hands together and bellowed orders. “WE’RE HERE TO TAKE YOU OUT OF THIS CAMP,” he shouted, in his best parade ground voice. “GET OUT NOW, HURRY!”
Several doors opened, revealing stunned faces who stared at him. “Get out,” Chester snapped, angrily. The former hostages looked undecided. “The Admiral is going to have this place bombed soon.”
That got their attention. The former hostages started to move out of their huts, really too slowly for Chester’s liking. The insurgents grabbed them and pushed them towards the gap in the fence, leaving Chester to glance through the various houses and make sure that no one was left behind. Several of the hostages were hiding under their beds, as if they thought that it would give them some actual protection. Chester shouted at them to get moving, helping one middle-aged lady along with a kick, then moved on to the next place. Their beds would have provided about as much protection as armour made from paper.
He finished sweeping through the houses – it really was more like a resort than a prison camp – and then turned to follow the hostages out of the camp, just as a pair of aircraft flash by overhead. Chester scowled – someone must have sent out an alert before they were killed – and then smiled as he saw a HVM climbing up to smash one of the aircraft out of the sky. The pilot didn't have time to eject before his aircraft exploded into a fireball, the debris spiralling down to crash somewhere on the other side of the mountains. He looked around for the second aircraft and saw nothing. The other pilot must have decided that discretion was the better part of valour.
Admiral Singh has to be looking down at us right now, he thought coldly, as he looked up into the early morning sky. The flames burning through parts of the camp would have been noticed even if there hadn't been a distress call. I wonder what she’s thinking.
He considered it, running through the calculations yet again. If the nearest garrison was under attack, the troops pinned down, there wouldn't be any attack from that direction. That meant that Admiral Singh’s next closest garrison was over forty minutes away, at least on the ground. In her place, he would have sent airborne infantry into the area, just to try to recover the hostages before it was too late. Or would she concluded that it was too late and that she might as well call in KEW strikes in the hopes of catching some of the insurgents?
But if she does that, she’ll kill off her own hostages too, he thought. The very idea of human shields was enough to make him sick, but he had to admit that it was effective. If she fired on the wives and children of her personnel, she was likely to face a mutiny even without the rebels cells Lieutenant Yamane had been carefully fostering within enemy ranks. All she can do is try to get reinforcements here as quickly as possible.
They’d set up the recording studio in a small hut on the other side of the mountains, carefully hidden from enemy view. As soon as they arrived, Chester and the insurgents sorted out the most important hostages and pushed them in front of the cameras, ordering them to tell the world that they had been liberated. Once the messages were recorded, Chester uploaded them along a landline to a hidden transmitter, several miles away. There, they were automatically uploaded onto the datanet.
Ten minutes later, a streak of light fell down from the heavens and blasted the transmitter into atoms, but it was far too late. The damage had been done.
“Get the hostages back to the camp,” he ordered, doing his best to ignore the shocked and screaming children. They were idiots, he realised; they hadn't even understood that they were captives. The adults had done them no favours trying to hide it from them, not when it left them ill-prepared for rescue. “Smack the kids if you have to, just get them well-hidden by the time the enemy comes for us.”
He smiled, then sobered. They were throwing almost everything the insurgency had been able to muster at the enemy garrisons, fighting to keep them tied down. If Admiral Singh escaped death and regained control, she would come out ahead. The insurgency would have spent itself in one desperate day. He looked towards the west, seeing plumes of smoke rising up into the clear blue sky. The Admiral wouldn't be so strong after this day was concluded, he told himself. But if she won the battle, it might not matter.
***
Trevor’s heart was beating so loudly that he was surprised that the others couldn't hear it as they reported to his cabin. He’d taken advantage of the days between the delivery of the weapons and H-Hour to ensure that they all knew what they were doing, but it had been very difficult without the ability to speak freely. Now, with time almost up, he passed out the weapons and tapped out orders on a sealed datapad.
“Good luck,” he said, feeling so nervous that he could barely walk. Part of him thought that he was going to throw up. “Let’s go.”
He’d concealed the weapons in the toolboxes maintenance crewmen were expected to carry everywhere. Now, seven of his cellmates followed him, while the others headed down to the power core and the armoury. The command core wasn't actually that far from his quarters – he didn't rate a cabin in Officer Country – but it felt like thousands of miles as they walked towards their destination. He couldn't help feeling that he was being pushed along by events that were completely outside his control. His lips moved in silent prayer as they reached the airlock that separated the command core from the rest of the station. Once they were inside, they would be almost impossible to dig out before it was too late.
Here we go, he thought, as they stepped into the airlock. He reached into the toolbox and produced the stunner, just as the first airlock slammed shut behind them. A moment later, the second airlock hissed open, revealing the massive command core. Trevor sucked in a breath – the sight was hellishly impressive, no matter what else could be said about it – and lifted the stunner. They’d been warned, in no uncertain terms, to stun everyone and sort them out later. A single verbal command from the fortress’s official command could blow the entire mission.
It was somehow difficult to press down on the trigger. The stunner seemed to be resisting him, almost as though it were a living thing in its own right, until someone turned to look at them. Her mouth dropped open; somehow, Trevor managed to fire the stunner at the same instant, sending her crumpling to the deck. A moment later, the rest of his cellmates followed suit, waving their stunners over the consoles, making sure that no one was missed. Twenty seconds after they entered the command core, it was theirs.
Trevor wanted to collapse, to sag with relief until he hit the deck himself, but there was no time. Instead, he reached int
o his toolbox, found a pre-prepared datachip and looked around for the slot on the command chair. According to the briefing, the command network’s primary access point was right under the CO’s ass. Trevor pulled back the cushion, wondering what sort of mindset had hidden the slot there, and slotted the datachip into the reader. There was a long moment when he worried that it might have failed – or that it had all been a test that had destroyed his career – and then the screen lit up with cool green letters.
ACCESS GRANTED, it read.
“Good work,” one of his cellmates said. “What now?”
Trevor sat down at the main console. Like almost everything built by the Imperial Navy, it was standardised – although it was also more complex than anything else he’d seen in his career. If there had been more time to practice ... but there hadn't been anything like enough time.
“We contact the ship,” he said, activating the command network. So far, no one seemed to have noticed that the station had been taken over. “And then we trigger the internal security system.”
The designers had expected a mutiny, it seemed. If triggered, the internal security system filled the station with knockout gas – apart from the most vital locations. A simple facemask could protect someone from the gas, if they thought to don them in time. He keyed the command sequence into the console, silently praying that it would work. A moment later, he looked through the security monitors and saw crewmen stumbling over and collapsing onto the deck. The station was theirs.
“No alert yet,” another cellmate reported. “No one seems to have noticed that we’ve gone off the air.”
“Good,” Trevor said. He keyed another series of commands into the system. “And now we wait.”
The Empire's Corps: Book 04 - Semper Fi Page 40
