Democracy's Right

Chapter One

Night was falling over Jackson’s Folly as Commander Colin Walker walked down the street towards the isolated bar, keeping a safe distance from the crowds of spacers milling about and trying to relax before they boarded their shuttles and returned to their ships. Like almost every other planet Colin had visited, Jackson’s Folly possessed a place where spacers could come to relax after serving on their ships — and be separated from their hard-earned wages by bars, girls and other entertainments. He smiled to himself grimly as he saw a group of Imperial Navy crewmen lining up in front of a brothel, swapping pipes of recreational drugs while waiting for their turn at the girls. The Observation Squadron allowed a third of its crewmen to take shore leave at any given point and they didn’t hesitate to take advantage of it. Anything beat serving on starships waiting in orbit for the hammer to fall.

Colin scowled as he turned the corner and passed a group of local law enforcement personnel, watching the Imperial Navy crewmen nervously. It hadn’t taken long for the Imperial Navy to wear out its welcome on Jackson’s Folly — if they had any welcome at all — yet dealing with rowdy crewmen risked provoking an incident. With factions in the Empire’s local Sector Command keen to provoke an incident, in order to annex Jackson’s Folly and its daughter colonies to the Empire, giving them any ammunition at all was a dangerous idea. The entire planet knew that it was only a matter of time before the Empire finally decided to move against them and the presence of the Observation Squadron was nothing more than a chilling reminder of the sheer power arrayed against them. Jackson’s Folly might, if they had another two hundred years of relative independence, been able to stand off the Imperial Navy, but it was too late. The datachip in his pocket felt heavy as he strode down the street, reminding him of what it carried. The die was about to be cast.

He noticed a handful of spacers looking at him, wondering who and what he was, and smiled, for he looked nothing like the sober XO of HMS Shadow. He was tall and gaunt, with a balding head and piercing blue eyes, his face covered with two days worth of stubble. The gun he carried openly on his hip wasn’t an Imperial Navy-issue weapon, a touch intended to convince any observers that he was from one of the independent starships orbiting the planet. The leather jacket he wore over a standard shipsuit only added to the ensemble. Once the meeting was done, he would return to a small apartment on the planet, change back into his uniform and catch the first shuttle back to Shadow. No one would know that he had even left the ship.

A cry split the air — a cry of happiness from one of the local casinos, where spacers gambled away most of their wages — and he smiled, even though it was a bitter reminder that he could never be as happy or carefree as them. A group of Imperial Navy crewmen spilled out of the building and headed towards the nearest crewman’s bar, where they would drink away their winnings. Colin envied them at that moment, knowing that they still believed in the Imperial Navy… or perhaps they just didn’t care. None of them had ever climbed high enough to understand the true nature of the system they served, or to be able to do anything about it.

The thought was a bitter one. A decade ago, Colin had been a young and ambitious tactical officer, intent on winning his own command before he was twenty-five. He’d been easy prey for Commodore Percival, who had been equally intent on securing a promotion to Admiral and being appointed Sector Commander. Colin had been proud when Percival had approached him and offered the young officer his patronage, the patronage that he needed to reach higher rank. It hadn’t been easy, but Colin had carried out his side of the bargain and accomplished the impossible; he’d made Percival look good. And Percival had received his coveted promotion.

In return, Percival had exiled him to a patrol base with little hope of escape.

The shock had opened Colin’s eyes and revealed the true nature of the Empire. His shattered dreams were nothing compared to its vast crimes against humanity. The Thousand Families ruled the Empire with a rod of iron, suppressing dissidence and rebellion… and Colin had helped them do it. The system was guilty and he, who had served the system, was guilty too. He didn’t want to admit it, but he had no choice; if he’d been promoted, he would have continued to serve the Empire. As it was, he’d spent ten years putting together a plan of his own. His hand touched the datachip in his pocket again. One way or another, the die was definitely about to be cast.

Colin pushed open the door and stepped into the bar. It was a typical spacer’s bar, with drink on tap, a number of female bartenders and a pair of women doing a pole-dancing routine on the stage. Colin glanced up at them for a moment, taking in the handful of spacers watching them while getting thoroughly drunk, and then walked through the second set of doors and into the Captain’s Club. The bar catered to trader captains who wanted to pick up commissions and share lies about their exploits with their fellow captains and the horde of admiring groupies that congregated around them. Business had been falling recently, Colin knew; the presence of the Imperial Navy was a powerful deterrent to independent traders who might operate on the wrong side of the law. He picked up a glass of beer from the inner bar, sampled it quickly, and stepped into one of the private cubicles. His fellow conspirators looked up at him as he took his seat. They knew, he suspected, just what he had to say.

He pulled a privacy generator out of his pocket and placed it on the table, where it linked into the other privacy generators — one per person — and created a jamming field surrounding the room. In theory, the generators would make it impossible for any kind of surveillance probe or sensor to operate within their field, keeping their conversation strictly private. In practice… Colin knew that it was something of a gamble. Imperial Intelligence had successfully pressed for the devices to be banned all across the Empire, but it was easy to obtain them with the right connections. A suspicious mind might wonder if Imperial Intelligence already knew how to penetrate the fields — or even to detect them — and had passed the ban merely to lure criminals and rebels into a false sense of security.

“Thank you all for coming,” he said, as he took his seat. “The balloon is about to go up.”

He glanced from face to face as the news sank in. The six inner members of his conspiracy — they were far from the only members, but they were the most important — had all known that time was running out. Ever since Colin had approached them, one by one, and started talking about rebellion against the Empire and the Thousand Families, their lives had been hanging by a thread. A single careless word could have betrayed them to one of the army of security officers on the Observation Squadron.

“A dispatch boat arrived five hours ago,” Colin continued, pulling the datachip out of his pocket and inserting it into the reader he’d bought with him. “It carried this dispatch for Captain-Commodore Howell. Commodore Roosevelt” — he kept his voice level with an effort — “will be arriving with her superdreadnaughts within one standard week, travel times permitting. Once she arrives, Jackson’s Folly will be declared a world in rebellion against its rightful masters and she will take whatever steps are necessary to place them under Imperial control. We have to act now.”

He keyed the reader and watched as the message played itself out in front of his small group. Commodore Roosevelt, one of the more well-connected officers in the Empire and a client of Admiral Percival, clearly had plans for Jackson’s Folly and its people. The Roosevelt Family was already the dominant power in Sector 117, which bordered Jackson’s Folly and its daughter worlds. They intended, Colin suspected, to get their own claims in first and prevent the rest of the Thousand Families from looting the system.

That thought, too, was a bitter one, but it had to be faced, even though he had dared to hope that Jackson’s Folly would be able to stand off the Empire. Centuries ago, just before the Great Interstellar War, Tyler Jackson had believed that the two main human powers — the Federation and the Colonial Alliance — would go to war, destroying several hundred years of human expansion and settlement. He’d invested in nineteen massive colony ships, each one larger than anything built before, and recruited thousands of colonists to head out into the great unknown, thousands of light years from Earth. They’d spent a hundred years travelling before they’d even started to look for a new home and, when they’d finally discovered an Earth-like world, they’d settled on it and started to build their utopia. It hadn’t worked out too badly for them, Colin conceded; seven hundred years of growth had led to the settlement of thirteen daughter colonies and a thriving economy. If they’d only travelled a little further away…

But they hadn’t and the Empire had stumbled across their worlds. Jackson’s Folly’s population — the Follies, as they called themselves, partly in jest — might have hoped that the Empire would leave them alone, but Colin knew better. The Observation Squadron was only the first step towards annexing Jackson’s Folly to the Empire, if only to prevent their example from causing unrest among the Empire’s teeming population. Now… a squadron of superdreadnaughts, the most powerful starships in existence, would ensure that Jackson’s Folly would have no hope at all of successful resistance. The Follies had done what they could, when they realised the sheer scale of the threat, but it was too late. They were at least fifty years behind the Empire, at least in the technological field. The Observation Squadron alone could have punched through their defences, although it would have been costly. The superdreadnaughts were merely icing on the cake.

“…It has been deemed, by the Imperial Judiciary, that after a careful and unbiased study of the evidence, that Tyler Jackson took loans from various combines to outfit his colony fleet,” Commodore Roosevelt continued, her youthful face contrasting oddly with the syrupy hypocrisy of her words. Colin felt hatred deep within his breast and he pushed it down angrily, needing to keep his thoughts clear. Commodore Stacy Roosevelt had claimed the position Colin had earned, after he’d ensured that Commodore Percival would be promoted to Admiral and given control of an entire Sector. It had taken Colin ten years to climb back up to his current position and, by then, his hatred of his betrayer had become hatred of the entire Empire. It was a brutal system that was sucking the life out of the entire human race. “They therefore owe interest payments on the order of several trillion credits to their heirs of those combines — that is, the Roosevelt Family. If they refuse to pay, their assets will be taken and used to pay their debts.”

Colin tapped the reader and the image vanished. It still puzzled him how the Empire could have taken so long to make a decision that everyone in power knew was inevitable, but then Jackson’s Folly represented the largest prize the Empire had seen in quite some time. The handful of isolated Rogue Worlds or the black colonies along the Rim were hardly worth the effort involved in subjecting them to Imperial rule. Jackson’s Folly, on the other hand, had its own industrial base and a trained workforce, one that could be put to work for the glory of the Roosevelt Family and the expansion of the Empire. Whichever Family ended up with the lion’s share of the proceeds would be in a position to control the next wave of expansion past Sector 117. The Roosevelt Family’s enemies had probably considered it worth the attempt to prevent them claiming supreme — or even sole — control over the independent system. Their delaying tactics had finally run out.

“So, that’s it then,” Daria said. The red-haired woman smiled, humourlessly. “It’s time to either shit or get off the pot.”

Colin, despite himself, smiled, for Daria had a talent for cutting right to the heart of any problem without delay. She was the leader of the Freebooter League; a union of independent starship captains trying to remain free of the massive shipping combines that shared out the Empire’s shipping trade between them, a position that had made her a target for Imperial Intelligence and its secondary security units. If they had known that Colin had made contact with her — and, through her, the rebels and black colonies past the Rim — they would have had a collective heart attack. The price on her head just kept growing.

He studied his other conspirators openly. Commander Khursheda Ismoilzoda was a dark-skinned woman, who had been exiled to the Observation Squadron after refusing the sexual advances of a well-connected superior officer. Unusually for the Imperial Navy, she was from Earth itself, having fought her way off the planet and into the Imperial Navy. The scar that ran down her cheek was a chilling reminder of her early life before she’d escaped into space and left Earth behind forever. Lieutenant-Commander Dave Howery, in contrast, was taller than Colin, with short brown hair and an irrepressible smile. Like Colin, he had trusted in the wrong superior officer; his patron had ensured that Howery had taken the blame for his patron’s mistake, a mistake that had led directly to a very valuable starship spending several months in a shipyard while its drive nodes were stripped out and replaced.

Colonel Neil Frandsen was very different. Short and stocky, as all Marines seemed to be, he had been exiled to the Observation Squadron after refusing orders from a superior officer. The Marine unit under his command had captured half of a black colony, including hundreds of non-combatant women and children, but the fighters were still holding out in the other part of the colony, presenting the Marines with a formidable tactical challenge. His superior had ordered him to start executing the women and children in order to make the fighters surrender, an order Frandsen had refused in horror. He’d been relieved of command and ordered back to the transport ship, a decision that had saved his life when the rebels had blown the colony and killed themselves rather than submit to the Empire.

Major Vincent Anderson, Security Officer, was the final member of Colin’s inner circle and perhaps the most important. Colin still didn’t understand why the Security Officer had come to him and asked to join, rather than arresting him for planning to rebel against the Empire. Anderson, whose bland face was somehow instantly forgettable, had been worth his weight in any substance Colin cared to name, identifying Imperial Intelligence’s agents within the squadron and even a handful down on the planet. After all, they all reported to him. Colin knew that there might well be agents who didn’t report to Anderson — the Empire wasn’t very trusting, even of its most loyal servants — but they could be handled. Or so he hoped. It was quite possible that Imperial Intelligence was playing a waiting game and planning to wipe out his entire conspiracy in one sudden blow.

Colin’s lips twitched. If the game was easy, he reminded himself, anyone could play.

“We can take the ships, of course,” Anderson said. Colin nodded. Taking the Observation Squadron wouldn’t be hard, not with the Marines and most of the senior crew on his side. “The real problem is taking the superdreadnaughts. If something goes wrong…”

“We lose,” Colin agreed. The Imperial Navy suffered quite a few mutinies each year, with starship crews taking their ships and vanishing out somewhere beyond the Rim. The Empire would not be significantly concerned if the entire Observation Squadron went rogue, for the largest combat unit in the squadron was a battlecruiser. Colin knew that he could cause havoc within the sector with the Observation Squadron, but it wouldn’t be a threat to the entire Empire. For that, he needed superdreadnaughts — and no mutiny had ever succeeded onboard a superdreadnaught. “The timing will be tight, but we will not lose.”

“And then we have to capture the Annual Fleet,” Daria reminded him. “If we can do that, we become a major threat to the entire Empire.”

Colin nodded. There was no shortage of rebels in and outside the Empire, but without a proper military they couldn’t hope to overthrow the Thousand Families or even fight them to a standstill. Back when he’d been stranded on the patrol base, he’d realised that as long as the Empire held most of the industrial nodes and shipyards in human space, it was effectively unbeatable. It stretched across thousands of light years and had trillions of humans caught within its rule. Even so, its main weakness was its ponderous nature. It would take time for the Empire to deploy massive reinforcements to Sector 117, reinforcements that would arrive too late — if Colin took a squadron of superdreadnaughts.

“This is it,” he said, softly. It had taken two years to build up the conspiracy, two years of knowing that a single mistake would bring Imperial Intelligence down on his head. “This is the best chance we will have for years, if at all. If we don’t move now, we may as well admit that we’re never going to move at all.”

There was a long pause. They had all — the Imperial Navy and Marine officers, at least — sworn to uphold the Empire. It had taken time for their faith in the Empire to be badly shaken and destroyed, lifting the scales from their eyes and showing them the true nature of the beast they served. Colin remembered the naive young officer he had been and winced. There had been a time when he had been proud to wear the blue uniform of the Imperial Navy, back when the universe had been full of promise. Now… now he knew that he had worked to keep worlds under an iron hand.

“The factions out past the Rim won’t wait,” Mariko said, slowly. Daria’s aide spoke softly, but with genuine conviction. Where Daria was bold and brash, Mariko seemed to fade into the background, barely noticed by anyone. She was small, with classical oriental features, yet there was nothing wrong with her mind. Colin privately admired her, although he would have been hard pressed to say what he admired about her. “They had great hopes for Jackson’s Folly.”

“True,” Frandsen agreed. “I suggest that we move now. If we allow Jackson’s Folly to be invaded and occupied, we become just as guilty as those we used to serve. We can take the ships, Commander. You only have to give the word.”

“Yes,” Anderson agreed. “We have to jump now or never.”

Colin nodded. “Commodore Roosevelt said that she would be here in a week,” he said. He knew better than to rely on that statement. The vagaries of the Flicker Drive and schedule creep made all such statements estimates at best. “If we move in one day from now…”

He listened to their comments, drawing up the final version of the operations plan, and then they scattered, heading back to their ships. Colin left last, finishing his beer and walking back out onto the streets. Unlike most spacer bars he’d visited, the beer tasted better than something that had come out of the wrong end of a horse. It would be a shame to lose Jackson’s Folly. The worlds had so much potential.

Colin shook his head as he walked back to the small apartment. They didn’t dare ask anyone on the planet for help, even for the smallest detail. If the Empire suspected that Jackson’s Folly was involved in Colin’s rebellion, their response would be swift and brutal. The planet would be scorched, killing all seven billion humans on the surface. It could not be allowed.

He pushed the thought out of his head. They would have to operate alone, but they could do it. Besides… what did they have to lose?