Democracy's Right

Chapter Eleven

“You understand what you have to do?”

Lieutenant-Commander (Gunboat) Markus Wilhelm nodded. He was a tall dark-haired man; seemingly too young for his rank and position, but gunboat pilots never lasted long. The Imperial Navy used them for reconnaissance and communication missions, even though they were easy targets to anyone with the right sensors and weapons. The Academy encouraged skilful young cadets to try out for gunboat duty, although Colin suspected — in his darker moments — in the hopes that ambitious and capable cadets would either get themselves killed or burn out early.

“Yes, sir,” Wilhelm said. Gunboats traditionally carried only two crewmen, in this case Markus and his wife Carola. The Imperial Navy didn’t discourage husband and wife from serving together, although having a pair in the same gunboat was unusual. Colin suspected that Wilhelm had paid someone a pretty hefty bribe back in the past. That, too, was not unusual. “It will be an easy mission.”

Colin smiled, concealing his concern. Gunboat pilots had a great deal in common with the pilots of assault shuttles, or Marines; if they had any doubts at all they never showed them to their superior officers. The remainder of the Imperial Navy joked that they were too stupid to feel fear, or even common sense. Colin had long been fascinating by the unexplored possibilities offered by the Imperial Navy’s gunboats, but Admiral Percival hadn’t allowed him to try out some of his more interesting ideas. If there was one advantage to being a rebel, he had decided, it was that he could experiment without anyone moaning in his ear about budgets and acceptable expenses.

“I hope that you are right,” Colin said. Even so, he’d decided to give the tactic its first run in a barely-defended system, just in case it wasn’t as workable in practice as theory suggested. “Get in, make your readings and get out again; no heroics.”

“Of course, sir,” Wilhelm said. He made a show of checking his wristcom. “With your permission, sir…?”

“You may board your ship,” Colin said. He’d obtained the old bulk freighter through Daria, but he’d never bothered to give the ship a name. Traditionally, renaming a freighter was left up to the freighter crew; Markus and his wife could argue over the ship’s name. “Good luck.”

“We’ll do our bit,” Wilhelm promised him. “You just be ready and waiting for us.”

The pilot marched out of Colin’s stateroom, leaving him alone and staring at the star chart displayed in front of him. It had been two days since he had decided to launch the raid on Garstang, two days in which he had been making frantic preparations for the mission, along with a thousand other things. Even when he had been working for Admiral Percival, back when Percival had been a mere Commodore, he hadn’t really understood how many responsibilities an Admiral had. The Observation Squadron had been thrown together for a single mission; it hadn’t been a formal fleet. His rebel fleet, whatever else it was, was a formal fleet and had to be treated as such. Colin had too much to do and too little time to do it in.

He studied the series of expanding spheres on the display and frowned. Unless something had gone badly wrong, Admiral Percival would definitely have received his declaration of war by now… and would have had time to alert the nearest systems. There was no way to know for sure, but Colin knew better than to assume the worst. He’d run the calculations based on the least-time approach so beloved of the Imperial Navy and the word would be spreading throughout the sector. It was possible that Admiral Percival would want to conceal the scope of the disaster — reading through the secured files on the superdreadnaught, it was surprising how much had been concealed, even from the Imperial Navy’s personnel — yet Colin doubted he would be that stupid. Percival’s only hope for avoiding disaster — the complete termination of his career, as well as becoming a scapegoat for the mutiny — was to stop Colin before the rebellion got out of hand. He would have to warn the rest of the sector to watch out for his ships.

Colin smiled to himself. Admiral Percival’s only hope of defeating his force was to bring him to battle with an equal or superior force. That was basic tactics; even Percival had mastered those. Yet… where would Colin strike? Given the sheer number of possible targets, Percival had an impossible task ahead of him; he had only two other superdreadnaught squadrons to cover hundreds of possible targets. Colin could keep dancing around him forever or eventually set an ambush of his own. If Percival didn’t ask for help from other sectors, Colin knew, it would be hard for him to stop the rebellion. But then, at the same time, Colin could win battles, but never the war. Sooner or later, he would have to take the fight to Percival’s home base, Camelot itself.

An hour later, they gathered in Colin’s quarters, the same cabins that had once belonged to Stacy Roosevelt. Reasoning that the rebellion needed funds, Colin had torn out the artworks and most of the decorations, handing them over to Daria to sell onwards. Instead, he’d brought in a handful of comfy chairs and a single drinks dispenser; unlike Stacy, he didn’t need an army of servants taking care of him. The servants, Colin had been amused to discover, had volunteered as a body to join the rebellion and had gone into the personnel pool. Without Stacy’s taste in interior design, the quarters were palatial, large enough for Colin to feel as if he were rattling around inside the rooms. They felt so empty.

The admirals, Colin knew, were either so full of themselves that they felt as if they deserved such quarters for their own — even though Colin could have installed an entire company of Marines in the compartments — or kept a mistress in their private living space. Colin couldn’t do either, at least not until the rebellion was underway. He’d just have to endure using the quarters, although he intended to seal off most of the rooms and forget them. A single bed and bathroom was all that he needed. Converting the day room into a meeting room had been easy enough. Percival, of course, would never have allowed those he considered his inferiors into his quarters.

“I’m afraid that she does have a point,” Anderson said, once they had passed through the discussion concerning security and the number of people who had volunteered to join the rebellion. He’d warned that many of them might be Imperial Intelligence agents, something Colin understood, but could do nothing about — at least, not yet. Stacy Roosevelt’s files hadn’t included the names and identities of the spies scattered along the Rim. “What is going to replace the Empire?”

Colin rubbed his forehead. His own carelessness was coming back to bite him, hard. He’d been so focused on gaining control of a sizable fleet — and avoiding the attention of Imperial Intelligence or the Security Division — that he hadn’t given much thought to what was coming afterwards. When he’d thought about it, he’d thought about cleaning up the Imperial Navy, destroying the patronage system and ensuring that talent — not birth and connections — was used as a guide for promotion.

But Hester had been right. After his meeting with her, he’d been approached by representatives from many other groups… and they had all wanted to know what was coming after the Empire. A group of Unreformed Marx — refugees from the Marx Systems, overrun by the Empire centuries ago — had insisted that the Empire become communist, a word Colin had to look up in the secured files. Other visitors had opposed that suggestion quite vigorously, putting forward their own ideas. Colin was starting to understand why the Rim and the millions of outsiders living there hadn’t posed a significant threat to the Empire. They spent their time arguing over what would replace the Empire. The thought made him smile. The mice might have just as well voted to replace the cat with a dog — but that still left the problem of getting rid of the cat.

And, it seemed, the weaker the group — and few of them had any real firepower — the more insistent they were that their views be adopted and heeded. Colin had heard proposals for total freedom — the complete break-up of the Empire, replaced by thousands of independent worlds — to limited reform, or replacing the Empire with another entity that would use the power of the Empire to ensure social reform. The Thousand Families were to be put against the wall and shot, or to be allowed to move peacefully to another world, or even to be allowed to continue as industrial powers. No one seemed to have any coherent plan for the Empire and everyone seemed willing to pick up their toys and go home if their views were not adopted.

Colin would have preferred to forget about the problem, at least until the war was over and the Empire had been defeated, but Hester had pointed out that that was impossible and he had to admit that she was right. They needed to have some rallying call, some reason to fight, if not now then certainly when they announced themselves to the Empire as a whole. And yet, it would have to be chosen carefully. Colin had no love for the current power system, but he understood the value of the Empire and humanity’s unity. Breaking up the Empire would shatter the unity that protected the human race.

And then there was the alien question…

“I suppose you could declare yourself Emperor Colin I and invite people to flock to your banner,” Daria said. Her face twitched into a smile. “That would be traditional for reformers.”

“No, thank you,” Colin said. The Empire had four monarchs in its history, three Emperors and one Empress. The First Emperor had founded the Empire, only to discover that his fellow aristocrats didn’t like the thought of him elevating himself above the rest of them. They’d torn him down and forced him to flee for his life. The Second and Third Emperors had tried to concentrate enough power in their hands to ensure their absolute control, but they’d both been broken down; the sole Empress, too, had vanished under mysterious circumstances. Even Stacy Roosevelt’s secure files were vague on the subject. No one outside the Thousand Families knew for sure what had happened. “I don’t want to be Emperor.”

“It’s a dirty job, but someone has to do it,” Anderson said, wryly. “How many of those whiners do you want influencing the rebellion?”

“Many of those whiners, as you call them, represent a point of view,” Khursheda pointed out, tartly. As a native of Earth, Khursheda had good reason to push for complete reform, even at the cost of breaking up the Empire. “Do you intend to reject their help out of hand?”

“Do they actually have anything to contribute?” Anderson countered. “We have nine superdreadnaughts. How many starships do they have?”

“Some of them have small attack fleets,” Daria said, softly. “Others are all talk and no action.”

“So we deal with people who can bring assets to the table,” Colin said. “There’s no point in talking to groups that cannot or will not assist it.”

“Except that we will need to rally support from inside the Empire,” Daria said, thoughtfully. She glanced across at Mariko, who passed her a datapad. “We will have to reach out to new allies — the various underground movements on occupied planets — and at the same time we have to prevent the Empire from uniting against us. And that means trying to break up the unity of the Thousand Families.”

Colin scowled. There were certainly billions of people — within the Core Worlds, if not elsewhere — who would have a certain loyalty to the Empire, believing it to be the only hope of humanity. There were even entire worlds along the Rim that worshipped the Imperial Navy, if only because the pirates were worse and the Navy was the only thing standing between them and certain death. They could sneak around the Rim until the heat death of the universe, if necessary, but if they actually wanted to win they would eventually have to go after the Core Worlds and face the sheer might of the Empire.

“So what I suggest is this,” Daria said. “We put together a Popular Front — call it the Popular Front for Reforming the Empire, or maybe just the Popular Front for Reform. Both of them sound nicely vague. We don’t want to make too many promises that we can’t or won’t keep. As far as the underground organisations along the Rim are concerned, we welcome anyone who wants to join the Popular Front, but once they join they are committed. If they back out, we won’t heed their views any longer.”

She smiled. “And if there are minor Family members out there, or even Sector Commanders thinking about their own role in a reformed Empire, they are much more likely to get behind a movement to reform the Empire than one to destroy it,” she added. “There are quite a few younger members of the Thousand Families who would like their own shot at the golden ring, rather than be forced to bow and scrape to their superiors. There are always opportunists who would be quite happy to jump to us if there was something in it for them.”

“That would mean allowing the Thousand Families to have some role in a post-war Empire,” Anderson pointed out. “How long would it be before they clawed back their pre-war power?”

“It would not be a significant problem,” Salgak buzzed. The Geek seemed unmoving, inhumanly still; even his lips didn’t move. “The Thousand Families are dependent upon their control of the Empire’s laws to maintain their monopolies. Should such laws be removed — if the rule of corruption was replaced by the rule of law — they would be forced to adapt or be destroyed. They have no experience of actual competition against their equals. Their power would eventually be broken or forced into more… constructive channels.”

“You’re talking about a hell of a gamble,” Anderson pointed out. “What happens if you are wrong?”

“We have run thousands of thousands of calculations,” the Geek stated, flatly. “If the Thousand Families were to be destroyed, the result would be economic chaos. The entire system that maintains the Empire would collapse. Trillions of humans would starve; entire worlds would be instantly impoverished. The Imperial Navy would be scattered and fall into the hands of petty warlords. It would be a disaster beyond calculation. The Empire would be replaced, not by a universe of freedom and liberty, but by a new dark age.”

Daria nodded, soberly. “We can reduce the power of the Thousand Families gradually, or replace them slowly,” she said. “Destroying them all at once will result in chaos.”

“Assuming that people know that,” Khursheda said. “It is my observation that people generally cannot see past the end of their own noses. We cannot realistically expect factory workers in a poorly-run factory to continue working for the Thousand Families even after we have overthrown the Empire. I’m sure that keeping them in bondage would be good for the Empire as a whole, but they’re not going to see it that way.”

“True,” Daria said. “Do you have another suggestion?”

“We break up their combines,” Khursheda said. “The factory workers get the factories they work in; the Thousand Families can go to a penal world and remain stuck down on the surface for the rest of their worthless lives.”

“That would guarantee that the Families would unite against us,” Daria said, sharply. “I submit to you that having the Empire united is not in our interests.”

“We could always wait until we win,” Anderson pointed out. “Once we win, we can take whatever steps we like.”

Colin tapped the table and they fell silent. “We cannot make too many promises now,” he said, “but we do have to form a political group.” He looked up at Daria. “You and Hester can draw up the charter for the Popular Front while we’re at Garstang, one that will allow us to appeal to both rebel groups and forces still within the Empire. Our goal will be to reform the Empire, including granting first-rank status to all worlds, rather than to destroy it completely. That will ensure that every world has a say in Parliament.”

“Of course,” Daria said. She smiled up at him. “You do realise that not everyone will think that that goes far enough?”

“I know,” Colin said. “I think, however, that we have a war to win before we can make any real promises. Don’t you?”

He tapped the display, bringing up the star chart. “Once we have returned from the penal world, we will sign the charter and then start the war against the Empire,” he continued. “A couple of successful strikes against Admiral Percival will allow us to announce ourselves through the ICN and see how many other rebellions and mutinies we can spark off. And, after that, who knows?”

“They will already have taken precautions against other mutinies,” Anderson said, softly. “And if a planet dares to rebel, now, they will be crushed. Percival won’t allow any challenge to his authority to go unpunished.”

Colin nodded. “All we can do is give them hope,” he said, softly. “And that, really, is all they need. Once we defeat Admiral Percival and liberate the sector, we should have new allies, willing to join us in our war.”

“Which leads neatly to the final issue,” Daria said. “What about Jackson’s Folly?”

Colin winced. By his most optimistic calculations, Admiral Percival would have dispatched a second fleet to Jackson’s Folly by now, one that wouldn’t be met by a mutinous Observation Squadron. And then…

“There’s nothing we can do for them,” he admitted. He felt a twinge of guilt. The Empire might have decided Jackson’s Folly’s fate as soon as it had stumbled across the world and its daughter colonies, but he’d made their position a great deal worse. “They’re on their own.”