Democracy's Might

Chapter Thirty-Three

Penny had never really felt nervous around Admiral Wachter, but she did now.

“Admiral,” she said carefully, “are you sure you should be drinking?”

Admiral Wachter looked down at his glass. It held an amber-coloured liquid that probably cost more than Penny would ever make in her life. The sight bothered her; Percival had drunk too, normally before summoning Penny for a little… fun. But Wachter was nothing like that, was he?

“I don’t know,” he said. He put the glass down on the table and looked up at her. “I received orders from Earth. They want the prisoners shipped back to them, immediately.”

Penny blinked in surprise. “Immediately?”

“I had them transferred to a Marine landing craft, then sent to Earth,” Wachter said. “They say they’ll honour my terms, but they don’t want me to keep them. What does that suggest to you?”

Penny had known Percival far too well. “That they don’t intend to honour your terms.”

“Or that they’re stalling,” Wachter added. “That they think they will win the war, even though Wolf 359 is gone.” He snorted. “I’m not supposed to tell you that, by the way.”

“Wolf 359 is gone?” Penny repeated. “But… how?”

“The rebels pulled off a daring operation,” Wachter said, shortly. “There’s a security clampdown, so I don’t really know anything beyond the simple fact that the shipyard is gone. And that leaves Terra Nova as the only remaining Class-III shipyard in the Empire.”

It was more than just that, Penny knew. Wolf 359 had supplied everything from starship components to colony farming equipment. The sudden destruction of the facilities would trigger shortages all across the Empire, probably setting off economic shockwaves that would do real damage to the Empire’s stability… if, of course, the rebels hadn’t been trying to undermine it themselves. No matter what the Thousand Families believed, it wouldn’t be long before the news leaked out. It probably had on Earth.

“They’ve also ordered me not to launch any offences against the rebel-held planets,” Wachter added. “I think they’re still trying to decide what to do.”

Penny winced. The Families Council needed three to four weeks to send orders from Earth to Morrison. By the time they made up their mind and the orders reached their destination, the situation might have changed radically. The rebel fleet was still out there, as proven by their attack on Tabard, and they clearly hadn’t given up on the war. Everyone knew it was only a matter of time before they came after Morrison again.

“We could win this war now, if we launched an offensive,” Wachter said. “But no, we have to remain here. They’re not even ordering us to detach ships to Terra Nova…”

“It would take three weeks to get the ships there,” Penny pointed out. But he had a point. Terra Nova and Earth were the two systems the Empire could not afford to lose. Hell, if the rebels took out the shipyard orbiting Terra Nova they’d win even if they didn’t occupy the system. “Or maybe they’ve sent orders for you to do that and they’re still on their way.”

Wachter snorted and reached for the glass. Penny braced herself and picked it up, moving it carefully out of reach. Wachter gave her an odd look, then withdrew his hand. Penny tried not to sigh in relief. Percival would have given her anything from a beating to summary demotion to the ranks for depriving him of his pleasures.

“It doesn’t help to get drunk,” she said, quietly.

“No, it doesn’t,” Wachter agreed. “Do you realise we also had several new arrivals from Earth?”

Penny swallowed. Wachter had requested repair crews and more warships. He’d received Blackshirts and additional security officers. In theory, the Blackshirts were there to provide prisoner escorts, but Penny suspected that the truth was a little darker. If the Thousand Families decided they could disperse with the Admiral’s services, they could order their conditioned servants to remove him and they would obey.

“Yes, sir,” she said. She took a long breath. “Do you remember what I said to you?”

“I think you shouldn’t say that again,” Wachter said. “You know why I can’t take over the Empire.”

Because you’re loyal, Penny thought. It wasn’t something she really understood. She’d given her loyalty to Percival, not the Empire as a whole. But both of them had betrayed her, Percival by treating her as a slave and the Empire by searching for a scapegoat for the disasters in Sector 117. Wachter, on the other hand, deserved her loyalty. And yet she didn’t understand how he could be loyal to the Empire.

But she had read his file. He was minor aristocracy. If the Empire collapsed into outright civil war, his family would either be absorbed or destroyed by the other families. Could it really be so simple? Could his loyalty be nothing more than calculation? And yet he’d shown loyalty to his subordinates, purged officers — no matter their connections — who had abused their positions and, by doing so, had alienated his own superiors. He was, she decided, a very strange man.

“I think you should get a good night’s sleep,” she said. There was an old joke about a personal aide being nothing more than a nursemaid. But being a nursemaid was better than being a whore. “I’ll alert you if something changes…”

Alarms sounded, echoing through the giant starship. “You and your big mouth,” Wachter said. He reached under the sofa and removed an injector, which he pressed against his arm and triggered. The alcohol would be swept from his system within seconds. “Go to the CIC. I’ll join you in a moment.”

Penny nodded and left the room. The CIC was right next to the Admiral’s quarters, allowing her to enter the compartment within seconds. A couple of officers gave her odd glances and she felt her cheeks heat — they’d probably assumed that she was the Admiral’s lover as well as his assistant — but she ignored them, choosing instead to concentrate on the display. A number of red icons had appeared, alarmingly close to the planet.

“Defence network powering up now,” the tactical officer reported. “All starships are reporting their status…”

“No need to panic,” Wachter’s voice said, from behind her. “We saw them off once and we can do it again.”

Penny turned to smile at him, then shook her head in amazement. Wachter had changed his jacket, shaved his chin and donned his cap, within barely five minutes. He looked an Admiral now, she decided, as he moved up to stand beside her. She flushed as he winked at her, then studied the display. The enemy fleet was building up speed.

“The report from the spy was clearly in error,” Wachter said. “Unless, of course, half of those superdreadnaughts are drones.”

He quirked his eyebrows at Penny, inviting her to comment. “They’re… they’re not having any problems keeping up,” Penny said. “So they’re either real superdreadnaughts or smaller starships pretending to be superdreadnaughts.”

“Very good, Captain,” Wachter said. He looked over at the tactical officer. “Launch an extra spread of drones. I want to see the letters on their hull.”

Penny nodded in understanding. Drones and smaller ships could use ECM to pretend to be something they weren’t, but they’d never be able to fool visual observation. The only question was if the drones would survive long enough to get close enough to use optical sensors. But then, the way the rebel fleet was just charging at the planet, it seemed they’d definitely have their chance.

“Concentrate our own fleet in blocking position, but keep us within the orbital defence network’s envelope,” Wachter ordered. There were no fancy tricks this time. The rebels would have to engage the loyalists within the gravity shadow or try to lay siege to the planet. “And then prepare to engage the enemy.”

Colin watched, as dispassionately as he could, as the enemy ships launched their first set of recon drones. After what he’d done at Tabard, he wasn’t too surprised that the enemy was trying to make sure the squadrons of superdreadnaughts bearing down on him were actually real. They’d also have to wonder just how much of what the spy had sent them was true. It should keep them busy for a while, Anderson had said, but Colin had his doubts. At worst, they could simply draw the right conclusions through analysing the previous battle.

“Engage the drones with point defence,” he ordered. The Morrison fleet was clenching up, like a man trying desperately to hide something in his fist. The enemy was disdaining tactical flexibility, daring him to come after them and enter the gravity shadow. If they knew about Wolf 359, and they probably did, they’d be leery of taking any losses. “Make them work to get a look at us.”

He studied the reports from his own drones and scowled. Most of the enemy ships seemed to have been repaired, although it was difficult to be sure. They’d played games with IFF signals, just like the rebels. He looked up at the main display, silently calculating the odds in his head. If the new weapons worked, they might just have a chance to do real damage to the Empire’s fleet without taking heavy losses of their own.

And if they don’t work as advertised, Colin thought, we will still have a chance.

“Open hailing frequencies,” he ordered.

“Channel open, sir,” the communications officer said.

“Admiral Wachter, this is Colin Walker,” Colin said. “You are outnumbered and outgunned — and you are loyal to the Empire. Surrender now and help us rebuild the edifice into something we can all be proud of. We guarantee good treatment of your officers and men, even the ones who don’t want to join us.”

He allowed his voice to darken. “But if you don’t surrender,” he added, “we will have no alternative, but take the system by force.”

It wouldn’t have worked, Colin suspected, on any other officer. But Admiral Wachter genuinely cared for his men. Perhaps, just perhaps, he’d see reason.

Penny cursed inwardly the moment she heard the damned message. Admiral Wachter had enemies, men and women who suspected the worst of anyone who was actually competent. If they heard the rebel message, one of them might decide to try to remove Wachter now, before it was too late. And yet, if the Morrison Fleet lost its commander in the midst of a battle, the rebels would almost certainly win.

“No response,” Wachter ordered, tiredly. “Launch gunboats. I want every one of those ships locked down.”

“Aye, sir,” the tactical officer said.

“Those superdreadnaughts look real,” Wachter commented. Penny looked down at the reports from the drones, then nodded in agreement. “Which means that the information we were sent is probably all lies intended to mislead us.”

He smirked. “Good thing we were told not to launch any offences, right?”

Penny had to chuckle. If they’d taken everything in the spy’s message at face value, it would have seemed the perfect time to launch a counteroffensive, which would have left Morrison weakened when the rebels returned to the system. As it was, aristocratic indecision and bureaucratic stonewalling had worked in their favour. It would have been laughable if it hadn’t been so lucky.

Wachter turned his attention back to the tactical display. “General orders; target the superdreadnaughts — and only the superdreadnaughts. Everything else can wait.”

“Aye, sir,” the tactical officer said.

“The rebels are locking weapons on our ships,” the sensor officer snapped. Red lights flared across the display as the rebels locked on. “They’re preparing to fire!”

Wachter and Penny exchanged glances. “Interesting,” Wachter mused. “They’re out of range. And they can’t flicker into range, not within the gravity shadow. I wonder what they have in mind.”

He turned back to the tactical officer. “Bring our point defence to full alert,” he ordered. “If they have extended their missile ranges, I want to be ready.”

Penny wasn’t sure she believed it. The problem with extended missile ranges was the same as firing missiles from standard extreme range. Enemy point defence systems had longer to track the missiles and plan out their interceptions while the missiles were on their way. It was odd for the rebels to do something stupid… and firing missiles from extreme range would be stupid. Unless, of course, they had boosted their missile swarms by an order of magnitude. A few hundred thousand missiles would seriously damage the fleet, no matter when and where they were fired.

“True,” Wachter said, when she said it out loud. “And the rebels have never been stupid. And that means they have something up their sleeves.”

“Experimental missiles are locked on target,” the tactical officer said. “Set one is ready for launch.”

Colin nodded, grimly. The Geeks had worked wonders, as always, but they had only been able to produce a few hundred of the experimental missiles. Even their modified ECM projectors only numbered in the tens. Given time, they could probably produce thousands of them… but by then the Empire would have rebuilt its shipyards and started churning out new superdreadnaughts. And the experimental missiles wouldn’t be enough to tip the balance.

“Fire,” he ordered.

There was a second disadvantage with the experimental missiles; they were over twice the size of the standard missile. They couldn’t be fired from internal tubes, they had to be mounted on the hull. And if someone managed to land a shot on the hull before the missiles were launched… Colin had considered the risks, then chosen to accept them, but he hadn’t been too pleased about it. There were just too many unknowns involved. If he’d had his way, there would have been months of tests before the systems were deployed in combat.

The superdreadnaught shuddered, gently, as the first barrage was launched. It looked pitiful compared to the massive barrages both the rebels and the loyalists had deployed in the past, but it was fired from well outside standard missile range. The missiles picked up speed rapidly as they flashed towards their targets, advancing on the Imperial Navy starships with deadly intent. Their size made them easier targets, Colin noted dispassionately. The Imperial Navy had to be looking forward to wiping the entire barrage out .. unless, of course, they realised there was a trick. Admiral Wachter would definitely realise that there was a trick.

But what could he do about it?

“Three minutes to scatter, sir,” the tactical officer reported. “Seeker heads are updating their own programming constantly, as per projections.”

Colin gritted his teeth. There were good reasons against building anything too smart, he knew, horror stories that dated all the way back to the days before the Empire. An AI smart enough to think on its own might start asking why it had to take orders from the fleshy humans surrounding it — or, even if it didn’t start acting malevolently, it might ride roughshod over human interests and concerns to get what it wanted. But the Geeks didn’t seem to care about the risks. Salgak had even talked about the possibilities of using AI to reform the Empire’s economy and make the jump to a post-scarcity society.

“The Thousand Families have really buried quite a lot of possibilities,” he’d said, his implants clicking and whirring as he spoke. “And we don’t have the resources to explore them ourselves, not out here. But when we rule the Empire, we will have the resources to utterly transform the existing economic paradigm.”

Colin hadn’t been sure what to make of it. Utterly destroying the Thousand Families — if it could be done without destroying the Empire as well — seemed a good thing, but who knew if the new universe would actually be better than the old. He’d said as much and Salgak had demanded to know, rather rudely, why he’d even bothered to rebel if he was scared of change. Even if the rebels won, they couldn’t change everything as long as they accepted the old order. But technology could change the entire face of humanity.

He pushed the thought aside as the missiles reached the edge of the enemy’s point defence envelope.

“Scattering now, sir,” the tactical officer said.

Penny didn’t understand what she was seeing — and that meant it had to be a trick. The enemy missiles were colossal, easily targeted by the point defence network. None of them would last long enough to attack anything, even the gunboats at the edge of Wachter’s formation. Hell, it was almost as if the enemy wanted the missiles destroyed.

“Admiral,” the tactical officer said, “the missile drives just cut out. Completely.”

Wachter swore. “Bring active sensors to full power,” he ordered. “Start sweeping space for targets.”

Penny frowned. Wachter understood… but she didn’t. The missiles might be following ballistic trajectories, yet that would just make them even easier targets. It was unlikely that the active sensors would have difficulty tracking them, while even if they did have problems the computers could still predict where the missiles would be…

And then the display suddenly spangled with red icons. Hundreds of red icons, right on top of them.

“Carrier missiles,” Wachter commented, as the point defence network hastily recalculated its firing solutions. “I’ve heard it theorized, but never actually put into practice.”

Penny understood, too late. The enemy might as well have fired a barrage at point-blank range. They were already slipping through the point defence, roaring past the smaller ships and falling on the superdreadnaughts like wolves on a lamb. General Clive went to full alert as four missiles slammed into her shields, rocking her violently; four other superdreadnaughts were less lucky. Two of them took serious damage and a third exploded into a radioactive fireball. The fourth lost her external racks to a lucky hit.

And then the tactical officer swore out loud.

“Report,” Wachter snapped. “Calmly, if possible.”

“Admiral,” the tactical officer said, “we just lost the point defence network!”