Democracy's Right: Book 02 - Democracy's Might

by Christopher Nuttall

  “Make sure you tell them that,” Daria said, tartly. “These aren't naval personnel, you know. No offense.”

  “None taken,” Colin said. Independent spacers were often more prideful than military or corporate personnel. If they felt shunned, they were quite capable of simply resigning from the fleet train and going home. “I’ll tour some of the ships once the reloading is complete, if that is acceptable.”

  “It will do,” Daria conceded. She gave him a thin-lipped smile. “Are you still intending to advance on Tyson?”

  “I don’t think we have a choice,” Colin said. “The base is in poor condition, according to the defectors, but given time they could turn it into a proper threat. And there are at least four squadrons of various starships stationed there. I’d prefer to destroy or capture them before we press onwards against Morrison.”

  “They might just cut the ships loose,” Damiani pointed out. “We don’t need more raiders in our rear.”

  “Or send them back to Morrison,” Colin agreed. All of his projections indicated that the Empire would make a stand at Morrison. It was the best place to face the rebel fleet, if they could mass enough superdreadnaughts in place to give Colin a bloody nose. Besides, they’d know as well as Colin did that he had to obliterate Morrison before he could advance on Earth. “No, we have to go after them as soon as possible.”

  He tapped a switch, bringing up the latest intelligence reports. Tyson wasn’t an unusual military base, but there was a surprisingly large commercial presence too. Four orbital fortresses guarded a number of asteroid settlements, orbital industrial notes and a pair of small shipyards, as well as a heavily inhabited planet. And, unlike most of the other worlds Colin had occupied, it could be counted upon to remain loyal to the Empire.

  There are five separate families involved, he thought, remembering how he’d worked his way through the intelligence summaries. They’re actually competing for manpower, so they can’t squeeze the population too tightly.

  “Tyson will also require a heavier occupation force than any prior world,” he stated. How would the locals react when the rebels arrived? Would they stay neutral, join up with the rebels or actually remain loyal to the Empire? There was no way to know. “But I don’t want to secure the surface, beyond the planetary defence centres. We don’t want a repeat of Jackson’s Folly.”

  “No,” Daria agreed. “Our reputation would not survive.”

  Colin nodded. Jackson’s Folly hadn't been saved by the mutinies. Admiral Percival had deployed a second squadron of superdreadnaughts to bring the planet to heel, which they’d done in characteristically brutal fashion, destroying the local defence force with ease. And then they'd landed Blackshirts ... and the insurgency had begun. By the time Colin had liberated Jackson’s Folly for the second time, both sides had inflicted horrendous damage on each other. But the Empire had been winning the war.

  They didn't really care about the Blackshirts, Colin reminded himself, sternly. As far as they were concerned, they were expendable. There were plenty more where they came from. But we couldn't afford those losses, even if we didn't care about giving the Empire a propaganda victory. And we don’t really have to try.

  He looked up at Damiani. “I want you to raid through the systems surrounding Tyson,” he ordered. “Don’t try to take and hold territory, just see if you can make enough of a nuisance of yourself that they send ships from Tyson to try and stop you. Anything that weakens the base’s defences might come in handy. Broadcast our standard call to arms as you approach each system – there may be some rebels there, willing to join us.”

  “Understood,” Damiani said. He looked up at the star chart, mentally calculating travel times. “It will be a week before we’re in position to attack the first world.”

  “I’ll move the main fleet to here,” Colin said, tapping a point a bare two light years from Tyson. “That should give us time to gather intelligence before we jump into the system itself. We can't count on them simply surrendering when they see us approach, not here. I’d be surprised if they weren't trying to rush reinforcements to Tyson already.”

  “We really do need that FTL communicator,” Daria agreed. “It would be so much easier if our intelligence wasn't out of date by the time we received it.”

  Colin nodded. The only bonus was that the Imperial Navy would be in a worse state. By now, he was sure, Colin’s original message to the Empire had reached every last corner of the towering edifice, calling the discontented and the oppressed to war. There was still a trickle of starships coming in to join the rebel forces, starships that had mutinied against their commanding officers. Sooner or later, Colin knew, that would stop. The Empire would station Marines on every ship, preventing future mutinies. But everyone would know that mutinies were now possible ...

  He scowled. The closer they got to Earth, the faster the Empire could react to their presence – and the longer it took to ship supplies from the Rim to the fleet. Thankfully, the Geeks had built up huge stockpiles, but Colin had already made capturing Imperial Navy supply dumps a priority. But the Imperial Navy had to know that too. Colin wouldn't be surprised to know that Tyson and Morrison had orders to destroy their supplies before falling into rebel hands.

  If I’d been in their shoes, he thought, I’d make sure such orders were issued – and obeyed.

  “And if wishes were fishes, we would all be splashing around in the sea,” Colin said, ruefully. “We’ll just have to make do with what we have.”

  “Yes, sir,” Damiani said. “Speaking of which, I will return to my ships and supervise the reloading.”

  “Inform me when you are ready to depart,” Colin ordered. “And good luck.”

  He watched Damiani withdraw, then turned to look at Daria. “How is morale holding up?”

  “So far, so good,” Daria said. “The real test will come when we face our first significant defeat.”

  Colin nodded. The Shadow Fleet had been mouse-trapped once before – it had been a relief to discover that Commodore Brent-Cochrane had been killed at Second Camelot – and he knew it was quite possible that it could happen again. Just because Admiral Percival hadn't been able to find his ass with both hands, a full sensor suite and someone screaming the instructions into his ear didn't mean that the other Imperial Navy officers were incompetent. Maybe their main qualification for high rank had been ass-kissing, but they might be equally capable at kicking ass.

  And which side would I be on, Colin asked himself, if Percival had promoted me instead of seeing me as a threat?

  The thought reminded him that he hadn't seen the evils of the Empire, not really. He had officers and men under him who had, men and women who had seen the worst and sworn not to tolerate it any longer, but the younger Colin had been a prideful ass, more intent on winning promotion and reward for his talents than any moral or ethical concerns Would he have turned a blind eye, he asked himself, if Percival had given Colin the rewards he’d been promised? He'd been far too self-centred in those days. Hell, even the mutiny had been more about taking the rewards he’d earned than anything else.

  He looked back at the star chart and shivered. Morrison, by his calculations, would provide the first major test of the expanded fleet. If they lost the battle, they might lose the war. And he had no illusions about what the Empire would do to the worlds Colin had liberated. Local leaders would be butchered, taxes would be raised higher and massive occupation forces would be shipped in to keep the populations firmly under control. They would never have a hope of freedom again.

  Or the Empire itself might collapse. Colin saw it all, in his mind’s eye. The economy would go, taking with it the strands that bound the Empire together. Entire star systems would be impoverished, military commanders would become warlords, Earth and hundreds of other worlds would starve ... and the whole human race would fall into an endless night. It wasn't enough to destroy the Empire, he reminded himself. He had to replace it with something better, something reformed enough to give everyone
a stake in the system.

  Daria coughed. Colin jumped. He’d almost forgotten she was there.

  “So,” she said. “Credit for your thoughts?”

  “I was just contemplating the future,” Colin admitted. “What we’ll do when we win.”

  “Better catch your chicken before you cook and eat it,” Daria advised, dryly. “The future will come when it comes. Right now, your priority is to win.”

  “True,” Colin agreed. “Very true.”

  He held out a hand to her. “Shall we go visit the freighter crews?”

  “Why, I thought you’d never ask,” Daria said, twisting her voice into a mocking aristocratic accent. “Let us go see those whose hard work keeps the fleet going.”

  ***

  The spy had known that the rebels were organised, but she hadn't really realised how organised until she’d spent a month on the rebel superdreadnaught. Unlike the Imperial Navy, where junior crewmen were often left at the mercy of NCOs and bullying rings, the rebels seemed determined to involve everyone in their work. The Senior Chiefs were strong and capable men, all skilled at drawing the very best out of their subordinates, while the officers took a keen interest in what the crewmen did. Indeed, quite a few of the officers were mustangs, crewmen who had been promoted to the ranks. The practice was rare in the Imperial Navy, but the rebels had adopted it with glee.

  It seemed to be working out for them, the spy had to concede. Newly-minted officers might know how to salute, wear dress uniform and precisely just how much they should genuflect to higher-ranking officers, but they didn't often know much about the practicalities of their job or just how closely they should be supervising their subordinates. They tended to leave such matters in the hands of the Senior Chiefs or NCOs, all the while concentrating on how best to take the credit while avoiding blame. But mustangs knew their compartment intimately, inside and out, and they were rarely scared of tough crewmen who might intimidate younger, more vulnerable crewmen. Overall, the efficiency rate had improved remarkably.

  The spy found that galling – and not a little worrying. Being on the superdreadnaught was nothing like being on the asteroid, where it was a dog-ate-dog world at the best of times. She had been conditioned as part of her training, disloyalty to the Empire could only remain as an abstract concept in her mind. It wasn't fair, she told herself, more than once; if she’d been able to switch sides, she might have tried. There were worse causes to die for than reforming the Empire. Hell, merely improving the promotion system alone might help staunch the bleeding.

  But she had been conditioned and, sooner or later, her programming would push her into taking action, even at the risk of her own life.

  It was astonishing, she had discovered, just how much information was openly shared between the decks. On an Imperial Navy starship, the crew were often kept ignorant of what was going on around them, but the rebels didn't seem to care who knew where they were going. The spy found it unbelievable at first, right up until the information was proved accurate. Didn't they realise they had a security problem ... or didn't they care? The spy had no illusions about the former. The Imperial Navy had attacked Sanctuary Asteroid and the only way they could have located the asteroid was through someone passing on the coordinates to Imperial Intelligence. Paranoia had kept the spy passive, despite the growing pressure from her conditioning. What if they were merely watching and waiting for her to betray herself before they acted?

  But eventually the conditioning wore her down.

  There was no such thing as a master override code for a superdreadnaught command core. If there had been, the spy knew, the Geeks would have taken advantage of it long ago. Everyone knew that the Geeks had unhealthy relationships with computers, even going so far as to directly link their brains to computer cores and dump information directly into their heads. If there had been a master code, the entire Imperial Navy could simply have been deactivated.

  But there were a handful of backdoors, for someone who knew the right codes and how to use them.

  The spy had been nervous as soon as she entered the access code, once she found a place to work where she could be certain of being undiscovered. It was impossible to remove the backdoors, she had been assured, without disintegrating the entire computer core and rebuilding it from scratch, but someone could easily have inserted a flag into the system to sound the alert when the backdoor was used. She braced herself, yet nothing happened. But if they were still waiting ...

  Carefully, she inserted a string of commands into the system, then shut down the backdoor and made her way out of the component. No armed Marines were waiting to grab her, no officers staring her in disapproval ... she seemed to have managed to insert the commands and then pull out without detection. She was still sweating, however, when she reached the mess and picked up a tray of food. If she’d been detected, she knew there would be no hope of escape.

  “You should have tasted the food before we rose up,” a voice said. She looked up to see a junior crewman, one of the old sweats. “It tasted like something someone scraped out of the back end of a cow.”

  The spy smiled. “Horrible,” she said. Imperial Navy rations had never been very good at the best of times – and some senior officers had actually sold off the naval rations and replaced them with commercial crap, allowing them to pocket the difference. “Why don’t you tell me all about it?”

  They were still deep in conversation when the superdreadnaught – and its fleet – resumed its journey towards Tyson.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Admiral Ravi Lanai knew that she was not a great leader.

  It wasn't something that bothered her, normally. She'd been an administrator for far longer than she'd been a starship officer, let alone a commander. Her patronage links had helped her to reach Tyson, where she'd found herself beholden to five different families rather than just one. It gave her an unusual freedom of action, but it also forced her to try to keep the balance between the families.

  Tyson wasn't actually a bad place to live or work. The system hadn't originally been considered for a naval base – the files stated that Tyson was the only system in the sector that could reasonably serve as base, but Ravi suspected that someone had paid huge bribes to get the bureaucrats to agree – and much of the population was civilian. The combination of civilian presence and multiple aristocratic families created an odd dynamic, one that gave more freedom to the inhabitants than they could expect anywhere else. And Ravi, the CO of the system’s defences, rather enjoyed it. She didn't have to bow and scrape to enjoy her position and the authority that came with it.

  But the rebellion had upended all of her plans. If someone drew a line between Earth and Camelot, Tyson would be on that line – or at least close enough to make reducing the base a rebel priority. Ravi had watched in dismay as hundreds of senior administrators bugged out, taking their servants and slaves with them, while leaving her with orders to hold the planet as long as possible. They had clearly lacked any faith in her ability to hold the line. Not that Ravi could really blame them, to be fair. It had been decades since she had set foot on the command deck of a starship.

  She’d half-expected the blow to fall instantly, even though cold logic told her that it was unlikely. Three months had passed since the Battle of Camelot, giving her time to prepare – although she was grimly aware that, lacking any superdreadnaught element, she could only bleed the rebels as they attacked the system. She'd also deployed a handful of smaller ships in nearby systems, some of which had reported the rebels flickering in, devastating the defences and then flickering out again. For once, Ravi was actually grateful that the administrators had recalled urgent business on the other side of the Empire. If they’d been on Tyson, watching as nearby investments were blown into fragments, they would have pestered her to send ships to defend them. But against the sheer weight of rebel firepower, it would be suicidal ...

  Unlike some officers she could mention, she had never seen the urge to fill her quarters with ser
vants and pleasure slaves. Sleeping alone was one of her great pleasures and she wanted to enjoy it, even if she knew the rebels were steadily advancing towards her position. She was tucked up in bed, half-asleep, when the alarm sounded, followed by the voice of her XO calling her to the command centre. Ravi snapped awake, silently thankful for her habit of sleeping in her underwear, then grabbed her trousers and jacket and pulled them on. She would look dishevelled, she knew, but it hardly mattered. She’d met too many officers who focused on spit and polish at the expense of fighting. No doubt one of them would have sniffed at her looks, if he had been on the command deck.

  She stepped through the hatch and onto the command deck, ignoring the Marine’s salute as she stared at the display. A handful of red icons had appeared, several million kilometres from the outer edge of engagement range. She didn't need more than a moment to identify the ships as rebel, even though they were Imperial Navy designs. The drive fields were very definitely ships that were known to have fallen into rebel hands.

  “Admiral,” her XO said. “I’ve sounded battlestations; the entire defence network is coming online ...”

  “Good,” Ravi said, when he had finished. At least the rebels were giving them time to prepare, although it was odd. Did they think they could bluff her into surrendering? Some of the reports from her spy ships had suggested just that, although none of the other targeted systems had been so heavily defended. “Launch one courier boat to Morrison, then send two more out under stealth. I want them to have a full report of what happens next.”

  “Understood, Admiral,” the XO said. “I’ll see to it at once.”