Democracy's Might

Chapter Twenty-Nine

General Montgomery’s hull was scorched and pitied with the scars of battle.

Colin stared through the shuttle’s cockpit as he brought it closer to the starship’s hull. The superdreadnaught had never been elegant, but now it was a mess. Giant pieces of armour had been damaged or blown clean off the hull, exposing the soft interior to enemy fire. If the battle had continued for much longer, he saw, the superdreadnaught would have been crippled or destroyed. As it was, they’d been lucky to escape.

He sucked in a breath as he saw the workers swarming over the hull, struggling to fix the damage as quickly as possible. It was far too likely that the Imperial Navy had taken prisoners, he knew, and the prisoners would be made to talk. If so… Colin had ordered the fleet train to jump with them to a random location, but it still bothered him. The loyalists might not be able to find the fleet, yet there was too much danger of the enemy launching a counterattack against worlds currently held by Colin’s forces. Or simply licking their wounds and daring Colin to try again.

“What a ghastly mess,” Daria commented, from behind him. “But you got out alive.”

Colin scowled at her. Losing some of his crew — dead or prisoners — hurt. Shadow, his first command, was in enemy hands, almost certainly bound for the scrapheap. And he’d lost some of his closest allies and friends. The fact that he had survived the battle and escaped enemy captivity didn’t make up for it.

“Yes, I did,” he said, finally. He turned to look back out at the mighty superdreadnaught. “I retreated from a battle I deemed unwinnable.”

“That wasn’t a foolish decision,” Daria said, tartly. “And why exactly are you beating yourself up over it?”

“I let the enemy commander lead me by the nose,” Colin said. He’d badly underestimated his opponent. If the enemy CO had managed the timing a little better, the rebels might have lost the battle decisively. “I led those men to their deaths.”

“They knew the risks,” Daria said. “They all decided that fighting the Empire and trying to destroy it was worth risking their lives.”

Colin rounded on her. “How can you be so bloody clinical?”

“The Beyond is not a place for sentiment,” Daria told him. “Yes, you lost the battle — and yes, it is tragic. But the war is not lost.”

“We’re going to need a few weeks to lick our wounds,” Colin pointed out. “We only have mobile repair ships, not actual shipyards. The damage we inflicted on Morrison’s fleet, on the other hand, will be fixed relatively quickly. They could take the offensive or merely remain where they are, blocking us. And, in the meantime, the Empire builds up its fortifications and…”

Daria caught his arm and held it, tightly. “Do you think we’ve lost the war?”

Colin hesitated, then shook his head.

“Good, because we haven’t,” Daria said. “You got most of the fleet out, intact. You have repair crews to get your ships back into fighting trim. You have new weapons and other surprises on the way. In short, Colin, you have not lost the war. I don’t think there has ever been a commander in history who has never been defeated.”

“I suppose not,” Colin said, reluctantly. The Great Captains of history had all suffered defeats, some worse than others. They’d studied their campaigns in the academy. “But it is going to be chancy…”

“It’s always chancy,” Daria said. She pulled him to her and kissed his lips, hard. “We knew when we started that we might lose. But defeatism doesn’t help at all.”

Colin blinked in surprise, gasping for air. “But…”

“But nothing,” Daria interrupted. She kissed him again. “Now, take us back to the ship. We have funerals to attend, then work to do.”

Colin watched, as dispassionately as he could, as the last of the bodies was slowly pushed out of the shuttlebay by the tractor fields. They’d pulled upwards of two thousand bodies out of the damaged ships, most of which had been badly mangled. He’d actually made the decision to have some of the bodies launched in makeshift coffins, even though they were short on materials they could use to produce them. Morale was already low enough without forcing the crew to see the remains of their friends and comrades.

Imperial Navy tradition called for bodies to be buried in space, cast adrift on a course that would take them inevitably towards the nearest star. Hundreds of years in the future, he knew, the bodies would finally reach their destination and burn to ashes, then become part of the universe itself. It was one of the few traditions that the Imperial Navy shared with some of the Beyonders.

“We knew that we had embarked on a long hard road,” he said, addressing his entire crew. “The Empire was shaken by our rebellion, but it was still strong. Today, we discovered just how strong and capable it could still be.”

He gritted his teeth. The Imperial Navy’s officers rarely worried about morale. To them, the junior officers and crewmen were just there, entitled to hold whatever beliefs and fears they had as long as they obeyed orders without question. But Colin, who had little of the legitimacy the Empire had enjoyed, knew that he couldn’t afford to ignore his crew’s morale, not after he’d set a precedent for mutiny. Besides, he needed to get the best out of them.

But public speaking had never been his forte. “We lost the battle, but we have not lost the war,” he continued. “There are new weapons and tactics on their way. We will return to Morrison and we will defeat the enemy, then advance on Earth. This setback — and it was a setback — will not be allowed to slow us down any more than strictly necessary.

“We did well against the best the Empire could offer,” he concluded. He’d reviewed the sensor logs and noted, much to his relief, that his ships were often far more efficient and capable than the Imperial Navy’s fleet. But it hadn’t been enough to make a difference. “Next time, we will do better.”

He finished his speech and closed the channel, knowing that everyone on the fleet had heard his voice. Would they believe him, he wondered, or would their morale be utterly crushed by defeat? A third of them hadn’t even joined the rebellion until after the Battle of Camelot. They hadn’t seen defeat — or the way Colin had danced around Admiral Percival, reluctant to risk a direct encounter until he’d stacked the decks in his favour. Now… how would their morale hold up after a defeat?

It was a draw, he told himself. But he knew that was nonsense. They’d inflicted considerable damage on the Imperial Navy, but the enemy CO had bested him and retained his grip on Morrison. Perhaps, if Colin had had the reserves to spare, he would have considered it a victory. But he didn’t have anything to spare. Even the makeshift warships that added to his point defence were too valuable to throw away casually.

He was still mulling it over as he strode into the conference room, twenty minutes later.

“I have a report from the repair crews,” he said, once the brief exchange of formalities was completed. He’d never enjoyed the Empire’s obsession with formal protocol. Besides, they’d mutinied against their superiors. There was no point in pretending to be something they weren’t. “We are looking at three weeks before we get back up to full combat effectiveness.”

“Ouch,” Anderson said. The security officer looked rather perturbed. “Can’t they cut corners?”

“Not any more than they are already,” Colin admitted. He pulled his datapad from his bet and looked down at the report. “It isn’t going to be easy, whatever happens. Some of our ships really need shipyards.”

He scowled. “Five of them will have to be sent back to Camelot,” he added. “There’s nowhere closer we dare send them.”

There were nods. The worlds they’d overrun during the advance were vulnerable, should the Empire start putting together raiding squadrons. Camelot was relatively safe, although Colin knew that wouldn’t last. Given time, the Empire could mass the Imperial Navy and start rolling up the rebel worlds, one by one. And then they could start scouring the Beyond for the hidden shipyards and industrial nodes.

“However, the new weapons systems are here,” Colin added. “By then, we should have the ships outfitted and ready to take the offensive.”

And hope it’s enough to win the battle, he added to himself. Because, if it isn’t…

He pushed the thought to one side and looked around the table. “We took a hammering,” he admitted, softly. “But we will not allow it to get the better of us.”

“There is another problem that should be raised,” Anderson said. “During the fight, the enemy specifically targeted this ship. They were able to deduce the identity of our flagship.”

Colin nodded. He’d gone over the records carefully, trying to determine how the Imperial Navy had identified the ship, only to draw a blank. It shouldn’t have been possible to identify General Montgomery, let alone deduce that it was the command ship. Unless the enemy had something else up their sleeves… it looked like a wild coincidence, but Colin didn’t believe in them.

“My staff went through everything,” Anderson continued. “Even so, it took us nearly an hour before we found it. Someone on the ship deliberately identified us to the enemy.”

Colin blinked. “How?”

Anderson flushed, embarrassed. “There are some functions hardwired into the computer core,” he admitted. “One of them, it seems, allows someone with the right codes to upload a message directly into the communications system, which is then transmitted and wiped from the system. We wouldn’t have noticed it at all if the automated recording systems we added to the sensor suite hadn’t noted the message. Minutes after the message was sent, this ship was targeted by the enemy.”

He shook his head. “We’ve placed flags in the system to alert us if someone tries to use it again,” he added, “but we can’t actually remove it without destroying the entire computer core.”

Colin wasn’t entirely surprised. Imperial Intelligence and ONI had control over the monitoring systems within the Imperial Navy. Why wouldn’t they have secret programs buried within the computer cores? It would take years for the core programming to be examined, line by line, particularly anything that wasn’t directly connected to flight, weapons or life support. Even the ship’s Security Officer wouldn’t know about hidden backdoors, not when any spies or informers would be expected to keep an eye on him too. It was sheer luck that they’d stumbled across this one…

Daria put their feelings into words. “Someone is betraying us?”

“Yes,” Anderson said. He paused, just long enough for Colin to realise that it wasn’t likely to be good. “I think the spy is one of the newer crewmembers.”

“Oh,” Daria said, irked. She’d brought most of them with her from the Beyond. “And how do you figure that?”

“Two points,” Anderson said. “One; we didn’t have a problem until after the Battle of Camelot, as far as we know. Two; someone definitely betrayed the location of Sanctuary Asteroid to the Imperial Navy. It’s possible that two different spies are involved, but it’s a bad habit to multiply suspects without good cause.”

Colin had to admit Anderson had a point. If they’d missed a covert informer during the first mutinies, they would probably have been betrayed well before the Battle of Morrison. Unless the informer had gone silent for months before making contact… he considered the possibilities briefly, then shook his head. It was unlikely that any informer would just let him cause havoc in Sector 117 when they could have betrayed him at any moment.

“If that is true,” he said carefully, “how many suspects do we have?”

“Seventy-nine,” Anderson said. “They were the ones who were both at Sanctuary and then came here after Camelot fell. If we include people who weren’t at the asteroid, the figure rises to one hundred and fifty-four. I’ve been trying to find ways to trim the figure down, but we don’t have the internal security precautions of an Imperial Navy crew. It’s simply not possible to remove anyone from consideration.”

And if the informer really did go silent after we mutinied, Colin thought, we won’t even look at the right person as a suspect.

“All right,” Daria said. “I’ll assume that you are correct about there being a spy. What do we do about it?”

“We might be able to use this,” Colin mused. “Maybe lure the enemy into a trap…”

“The problem,” Daria interrupted, “is that the crewmen on this ship are not imps. They will not stand for any form of… rigorous interrogation.”

Colin nodded. The Imperial Navy’s solution to the problem would be to interrogate all the possible suspects, using truth drugs and lie detectors — and direct brain access, if they had some reason to focus on a particular suspect. But Colin couldn’t afford to use such methods, not when it would start a mutiny. Hell, Colin knew just how bitterly such methods were resented by Imperial Navy crewmen. Why should the Beyonders be any different?

He looked over at Anderson. “Can’t you isolate which unit was used to send the message?”

“The message was wiped completely from the datanet,” Anderson admitted. “If the recorders we added hadn’t been independent from the datanet, they would have been wiped too and we wouldn’t have had a clue that we had a security problem.”

“Very well,” Colin said. “But you can detect it if another such message is sent?”

“Yes,” Anderson said. “Now we know what to look for, we can detect the hidden programming being accessed. And we can probably isolate the sender.”

Colin smiled. “Then we keep the whole thing as quiet as possible,” he said. “We will need at least three weeks before we can resume the offensive. That should give us long enough to figure out how to duplicate the spy’s messages and send a few of our own.”

“Perhaps,” Anderson said. “The message was enciphered. It may take months to crack the code.”

“Or it might have been nothing more than gibberish,” Daria pointed out. “All that mattered is that it came from this ship.”

“True,” Anderson agreed.

Colin tapped the table. “Right now, we need to focus on repairing our ships and resuming the offensive,” he said. “Vincent” — he looked over at Anderson — “keep the search quiet, but see if you can identify the spy. Once we’re ready to resume the offensive, we will reconsider our plans.”

He looked around the table. “This is a complication we didn’t expect,” he admitted. “But, in hindsight, we should have expected it. We knew Imperial Intelligence worked hard to riddle the Beyond with spies and informers. The bastards simply got lucky.”

Daria nodded. “And not all of them had files on Camelot,” she said.

Colin met her eyes in a moment of silent understanding. Imperial Intelligence had maintained files on Camelot, files which had identified a dozen spies within the Beyond who were primed to report back whenever the various underground movements managed to get organised. One of them had been the treasurer of a specific underground movement, who — thankfully — had not had a chance to report back before Camelot had fallen. Another had been a well-known bartender. Both of them had been trusted by the Beyonders.

“We will not fail again,” Colin said. “Dismissed.”

Daria nodded and strode out, followed by Mariko. The others followed, stepping through the hatch until Colin and Anderson were the only two left in the compartment. Colin turned to look at the security officer as the hatch hissed closed and quirked his eyebrows.

“There’s something I didn’t want to bring up in front of everyone else,” Anderson said. “My analysts have been plodding through the recordings of the battle.”

Colin nodded. It was rare for intelligence analysts to produce anything immediately useful during a battle, but post-battle analysis often revealed useful facts that could be taken into account during future operations. But then, the truly important fact was one Colin had already deduced. The enemy CO was crafty and enjoyed an unprecedented freedom of operation. Whoever he was, Colin knew, he had fought well and given the rebels their first real defeat.

“This included a great deal of enemy message traffic,” Anderson continued. “Much of it was useless, of course, but a couple of interesting factoids did emerge. Sir… the enemy commander is Admiral Wachter.”

Colin cursed his own oversight. How the hell had he missed that? But then, Wachter had been removed from his last post on active service for daring to question the Imperial Navy’s personnel management schemes. And that had been before Colin had even joined the Imperial Navy.

“He’s a living legend,” Colin mused. “Why him?”

“He is minor aristocracy,” Anderson pointed out. “They might consider him a safer bet than someone with no aristocratic ties at all.”

“Or they might think they would be empowering a second Empress,” Colin countered.

“Or they might think it’s time to shit or get off the pot,” Anderson said, crudely. “What does it matter, Colin, if the Thousand Families are destroyed by us or another Empress takes power? They’re still screwed.”

“And they might manage to beat another Empress,” Colin mused. He shook his head. “He does live up to his legend, doesn’t he?”

“Yes, sir,” Anderson agreed.

Colin smiled, then looked up at the star chart. Morrison was still glowing an angry violent red. And with Admiral Wachter in command, who was really surprised? But Colin couldn’t afford to allow the man’s reputation to blind him…

Next time, he promised himself, it will be different.