Democracy's Might

Chapter Thirteen

“Enemy fleet approaching, sir,” Penny said, as the exercise began. “I read fifty-two superdreadnaughts, nine arsenal ships and seventy-nine smaller ships.”

“Good,” Wachter said. “Let’s see how this goes.”

Penny flinched at his tone, even though his anger wasn’t directed at her. The first two exercises they’d carried out had been absolute disasters, mitigated only by the awareness that they’d identified a pair of incompetent officers who had thoroughly deserved being removed from command. A third officer had been shot for disobeying orders in the face of the enemy, which Wachter had sardonically pointed out would have been forgiven if his disobedience had actually led to a victory. Instead, it had cost a dozen superdreadnaughts.

Or it would have, if it had been real, Penny thought. The rebels could have knocked Morrison over with a squadron of battlecruisers and bad intentions.

She leaned back in her chair, watching as the Morrison Fleet settled down into the compact formation they’d devised for coping with mass missile swarms. There should have been four hundred starships in the formation, but seventy-two of them were still being repaired after competent crews had been assigned to man them. Several starships had been pronounced so wasted that they’d had to be cannibalised, then shipped to the breakers. It was chilling to realise that a few more years would have seen the entire squadron waste away.

“Enemy fleet is locking weapons on us,” the tactical officer reported. “I can’t break the locks.”

Penny smiled. She had no idea how many improvements the Geeks could or would make to rebel sensor systems, but she’d ramped up the simulation enemy’s capabilities as much as possible. It would be impossible to hide from them without using a cloaking device — and that would pose its own problems when so many starships were in close proximity.

“Hold formation,” Wachter ordered. “Let them come to us.”

The first time they’d held the exercise, the incompetent commanders had panicked and ordered their squadrons to scatter. It hadn’t surprised Penny when the simulated rebels had obliterated them — or when the commanders had claimed, afterwards, that the exercise had been a fraud. After all, they hadn’t known the outcome in advance. Wachter had countermanded the orders quickly, but not quickly enough to prevent the rebels from defeating them.

“Yes, sir,” the tactical officer said. “Missile range in seven minutes.”

Penny sucked in her breath. It wasn’t easy to bring an enemy fleet to battle, not when the flicker drive allowed the enemy to disengage and vanish if the battle seemed to be turning against him. The only way to force an enemy to fight was to target somewhere they had to defend, ensuring that the enemy had no choice but to stand and fight. She’d seen that proven often enough as the rebels had danced around Admiral Percival, eventually bringing the full weight of their fleet to bear against Camelot. And then the rebels themselves had had to defend Camelot against attack.

She watched, dispassionately, as the two fleets converged. The enemy commander would probably hold fire until they reached a closer range… unless, of course, the simulation had thought of something new. It wasn’t really innovative — true AI was banned, after the first few attempts at producing it had ended badly — but it was quite capable of surprising people.

“Missile separation,” the tactical officer snapped. Once again, Penny watched as an impossible wave of missiles roared towards her formation. “I read…”

He broke off. “I read over thirty thousand missiles, sir,” he said. “I…”

“Return fire,” Wachter ordered, calmly. “And then reformat the formation for efficient point defence.”

The massive superdreadnaught rocked as it unleashed its first barrage, emptying the external racks and then launching missiles from the internal tubes. It looked puny compared to the sheer throw weight of the arsenal ships, although Penny knew that they had fewer targets. Once they had shot their bolt, the arsenal ships were useless until they could reload. She wasn’t surprised to see them flicker out as soon as their drives recycled.

“All point defence systems online,” the tactical officer said. “Missiles will enter engagement envelope in ninety seconds…”

Penny watched as the timer ticked down to zero. Wachter had redesigned the formation entirely, placing three-quarters of his smaller craft in position to shield the superdreadnaughts. He’d even added gunboats to the formation, although Penny knew that the gunboats would be lucky to get one or two shots off before the missiles roared past them. The ECM might offer more attractive targets to the missiles, she hoped. A missile that wasted itself on an ECM drone pretending to be a superdreadnaught was one that wouldn’t hammer against a real superdreadnaught.

The display seemed to flare with light as the point defence opened fire. Missiles had no shields, nothing to protect them from a direct hit apart from speed and sheer weight of numbers. But the rebels had fired so many that even wiping out two-thirds of them wouldn’t save the Morrison Fleet from taking heavy damage. Penny gritted her teeth as several superdreadnaughts were overwhelmed and destroyed in quick succession, their crews too inexperienced to evade the missiles or simply flicker out when their shields started to collapse. Other ships ran up damage rapidly, including a pair of superdreadnaughts that fell out of formation and lagged behind. Their drives had been badly damaged. One of them would be lucky to make it back to the repair yard under her own power.

“Enemy fleet has taken damage, sir,” the tactical officer said.

Wachter sighed. “Underling’s descriptive inability syndrome again?”

Penny smiled, even though the tactical officer was flushing bright right. It was a long-standing joke that underlings only gave vague reports, a joke that lost its humour when she’d realised that giving an accurate report might result in being shot for bringing bad news. She glanced down at her display and smiled to herself. Four enemy superdreadnaughts had been destroyed, two more had been badly damaged. Several smaller ships had vanished without trace.

But the rebels were still steering towards the Morrison Fleet. Either they were confident of winning a missile duel or they had something else up their sleeves.

“Hold the range open,” Wachter ordered. There was no point in closing to energy range when the Morrison Fleet held the missile advantage. Now the arsenal ships had shot their load, the rebels had fewer launchers and no external racks. “Continue firing.”

There were Admirals, Penny knew, who would have seen their manoeuvre as a retreat. The rebels were trying to push closer to them, after all, which forced the fleet to fall back against Morrison. But it was working. The rebels were inflicting damage, yes, but they were taking damage too. By the time Wachter could no longer fall back, they would be ground down to dust.

The rebel commander apparently agreed. For a moment, his missile tubes seemed to fall silent — and then his fleet simply flickered out, leaving the defenders in possession of the system. Penny hesitated, wondering if that was the end… and then the END EX signal blinked up on the display. The crew surprised her by cheering, although she had to admit it shouldn’t have been a surprise. It was the first victory they’d won against any opponent, simulated or not.

“Well done, everyone,” Wachter said. He looked over at Penny. “Have that broadcast to every ship in the fleet.”

“Yes, sir,” Penny said. Percival wouldn’t have bothered… but Wachter wasn’t Percival. “Do you want a full breakdown of the results?”

“Later, perhaps,” Wachter said. He stood up. “I want you to join me in my office. We have a great deal to discuss.”

Penny couldn’t help feeling nervous as she followed him off the tactical deck and down to the Admiral’s compartment. If Percival had wanted her to join him in his office, she would have known what that meant. But Wachter wasn’t Percival. All he did, as soon as they were inside the compartment, was wave her to a chair and pour two glasses of a red-coloured wine.

“Mars Brandy,” he said, as he passed her a glass. “A hundred years old, according to the seller. I was saving it for a special occasion.”

Penny took a sip, then almost choked. Mars produced a small number of alcoholic drinks, but most of them were very expensive as well as heavily alcoholic. Something in the genetic modifications offered to the original settlers had given them a strong head for drink as well as resistance to muscular decay. But back then they hadn’t known as much as they did now about modifying the baseline human body.

“Be careful,” Wachter advised. “It can be strong if you’re not ready for it.”

“Tastes smoky,” Penny decided, after another sip. Percival had never wasted the good stuff on her, even though his servants had spent thousands of credits each month filling his wine cabinet. “What are we celebrating?”

“The fleet didn’t do too badly today,” Wachter said. “We might just be able to stand the rebels off from the planet. If we get lucky. If the rebels don’t come up with any new surprises.”

“Yes, sir,” Penny said. “They’re still going to come here, of course.”

Wachter nodded. Nothing they’d done had changed the basic equation. Morrison was in a perfect position to impede the rebel advance, raid their supply lines and generally make a nuisance of itself. The rebels would have to reduce the base, at the very least, and they’d certainly want to capture it.

But it would still take months before they could deem themselves ready for attack. The fleet was one problem, yet the orbital defences were just as badly decayed. Given time, they too could be fixed, but Wachter had made the decision to concentrate on the starships. If nothing else, he’d confided to Penny, they could fall back on Earth, destroying the base’s facilities as they left. The decision wouldn’t make him popular, but it would be the right one to take.

“We do need to delay them, if possible,” Wachter said. “Have you organised the ambush squadrons?”

“Yes, sir,” Penny said. “They’re ready to depart as soon as you give the order.”

She saw hesitation on Wachter’s face and understood. They’d worked hard to train and retrain crewmen, but sending so many ships away from Morrison meant that they would effectively be on their own. What if there were mutineers among their ranks? Or what if some of the crew were planning to desert? It was a persistent problem, one that had only grown worse since the rebellion had begun. Not everyone had joined the Imperial Navy expecting to have to fight.

Idiots, she thought. But to anyone stationed at Morrison, she suspected, it would have seemed a safe bet. Until the rebellion had begun, of course.

“Remind their commanders that I don’t want useless heroics,” Wachter ordered. “We don’t need to lose ships, no matter how gloriously. If the odds are too highly against success, Penny, I don’t expect them to engage. Make that clear to everyone.”

Penny nodded, although she had her doubts. The Imperial Navy was far too used to backseat driving from officers and bureaucrats back on Earth, even though it took weeks to get a message from Morrison to Earth and back again. An officer who hadn’t been there might claim that the battle could have been won… and accuse the officer who had been there of cowardice. It often seemed better, she thought, to have the glorious disaster rather than living long enough to face the sceptics from Earth.

“And I want them to avoid atrocities,” he added. “Any rebels taken into custody are to be treated under the standard Gulliver Protocols.”

“Sir?”

“No atrocities,” Wachter said. “Anyone involved in prisoner abuse will be shot. Make that clear to them too.”

Penny swallowed. The Gulliver Protocols were so old that no one had bothered to even pay lip service to them in centuries. They dated all the way back to the days before the formation of the Empire, when there were dozens of smaller human political entities waging a constant battle for supremacy that had been ended by the First Interstellar War. The Imperial Navy had never honoured the protocols, not when fighting humans and certainly not when fighting aliens. She wasn’t even sure she knew what they said.

She understood Wachter’s logic. People would fight to the death if they thought there was no way out, no matter how hopeless the situation seemed. But the Thousand Families would want blood; worse, they would want to make horrific examples of every rebel they could catch, just to dissuade others from following in their footsteps. Wachter could lose his position over trying to treat captured rebels decently.

If it had been Percival, she would have watched gleefully as Percival was stripped of rank and status, then shipped to a mining colony safely out of the way. But Wachter wasn’t Percival…

“Sir,” she said, carefully, “there will be objections…”

“I was charged with winning the war,” Wachter pointed out, smoothly. “Treating prisoners decently will certainly help win the war before the entire Empire comes apart.”

“Yes, sir,” Penny said. Percival would probably have slapped her by now, just for daring to raise objections. “Sir… this could cost you your position.”

Wachter surprised her by laughing. “They could, if they wish,” he said. “And if they tell me to go back home and stay there, I will do it. But as long as I am in command, I will not tolerate any atrocities carried out against helpless victims. We can offer the rebels transit to a penal world rather than simply executing them on sight.”

“There are penal worlds to which death would seem preferable,” Penny said. Percival had threatened her with one, once. He’d claimed that something in the atmosphere destroyed intelligence, leaving behind mindless animals where humans had once been. It had seemed amusing at the time, Penny remembered with a flicker of shame. Now… it was no longer funny. “Sir…”

“Don’t worry about me, really,” Wachter said. He finished his glass and placed it neatly on the table, then picked up a datapad and passed it to her. “I’d like you to take a look at this.”

Penny tapped the screen, activating the pad. It lit up, showing her an essay entitled False Gravimetric Pulses and Flicker Fields. Penny considered herself something of an expert in working her way through long-winded intelligence reports, but the scientific terms in the report meant nothing to her. Irritated, she scrolled forward until she reached the summery and scowled. It didn’t seem to be very practical at all.

“I wouldn’t say that,” Wachter observed, when she said that out loud. “Where did the rebels get their ships?”

“They mutinied,” Penny said. “They stole the ships.”

Wachter smiled. “And so we know their ships inside out,” he said. “They’re not new construction, they’re ships we designed and built.”

Penny didn’t follow. It was possible that there was some override programmed into the superdreadnaughts that would allow the Imperial Navy to regain control… no, that wasn’t likely to exist. The Geeks or Nerds would have taken advantage of such backdoors if they existed. Even command datanets could be deactivated manually if necessary.

“I don’t understand,” she confessed. Wachter’s mind seemed to move in strange patterns, rather than anything she recognised. But then, her own mind had been badly damaged. “We can project an illusionary gravity field… but what practical good does it serve?”

“One of the problems with the flicker drive is that the larger the ship, the further you have to be from a gravity well to use the drive safely,” Wachter said, slipping into lecture mode. “So you can have gunboats and shuttles jumping into a planet’s atmosphere, but superdreadnaughts have to be well away from the gravity well to make their own jumps. We are so paranoid about losing a superdreadnaught that we program safety interlocks into the drives to prevent them from activating when they are too close to a planetary mass.”

Penny nodded. There was a story about an officer who had tried to jump a battlecruiser into a planetary atmosphere. No one knew what had happened after that, but he and his ship had never been seen again. The general conclusion was that the flicker field had snapped out of existence, scattering the ship’s atoms across five light years.

She smiled as light dawned. “They won’t be able to jump out,” she said. “They’d be trapped.”

“At least until they take out the safety interlocks,” Wachter said. He shrugged. “By its very nature, the trick will only work once. As the gravity field isn’t real, they might be able to jump out safely once the interlocks are removed.”

“Clever,” Penny said. She would never have considered the possibility — and neither would have Percival. He had only believed in brute force. It might have worked if he’d had the squadrons to apply it properly. “Why hasn’t this been done before?”

“The basic idea was discussed hundreds of years ago, but it rather relied on intimate knowledge of what the enemy’s technology was programmed to do,” Wachter said. “How often did that happen during the wars?”

Penny shook her head. She would have been surprised if it had happened at all.

But it would work here, she was sure of it. Wachter was right. They did know what technology the rebels were using — and how best to disrupt it.

“I’m putting you in command of establishing the network of stations we’ll need,” Wachter said. “Draw whatever resources the engineers require, but don’t let word get out to anyone of what we have in mind. The Geeks might figure it out if they see what we’re doing.”

He smiled at her. “And if it works,” he added, “we could win the war in one fell swoop.”