Democracy's Right

Chapter Fifty-One

“Admiral,” the tactical officer said, very quietly. “I am detecting three squadrons of superdreadnaughts, two squadrons of battlecruisers, three squadrons…”

Colin listened as the words echoed in the air, heralding doom for his rebellion. Percival had finally called for help and reinforcements had arrived, only two weeks after Camelot had fallen and Colin had become the master of Sector 117. The chances were good that it would be a very short mastery; even with the arsenal ships, defeating the advancing force was not going to be easy.

He studied the display, keeping his expression as calm and composed as possible. Showing his subordinates his shock and dismay would have been unhelpful at best, disastrous at work. His crew was working away at their consoles, confident that Colin would find a way to get them out of this fix. Only a day ago, he’d overhead two crewmen refer to him as the Old Man and he’d thought that his heart would burst with pride. It hadn’t been a conventional ascent to Admiral’s rank, but he’d made it and he was accepted by his crew. Now all of his dreams were threatening to turn into dust.

The enemy fleet had actually jumped into the system some distance from the planet, so far away that part of Colin wondered if they’d had a major navigational error. It would have been believable if the fleet had arrived scattered all over the system, or if they’d been using commercial-grade computers and drives, but these were Imperial Navy warships. The enemy commander had flickered into the precise location he’d designated and Colin had a sneaking suspicion that he knew why. The enemy superdreadnaughts would have more than long enough to recharge their flicker drives before they entered missile range. They might not have deduced the true nature of the arsenal ships, but they had certainly deduced that most of the superdreadnaughts orbiting Camelot simply didn’t exist.

“We are picking up a transmission from the enemy fleet,” the communications officer said tonelessly. “They’re transmitting it to the entire system.”

“Let’s hear it,” Colin said. He doubted that the enemy commander’s words would make any difference. They all knew what the Empire would do to them if they were captured alive. “Put it through on speakers.”

“…Is Admiral Quintana, Commanding Officer of Sector 99,” a voice said. It sounded old, but determined. Colin had never met Admiral Quintana, but he knew him by reputation as a fussy old man with a mind like a steel trap. It didn’t bode well for the coming battle. An Imperial Navy Commander with powerful connections and a refusal to be tricked or bullied into making mistakes would be bad enough, but Admiral Quintana also had the firepower advantage. “I speak now to those who have lifted their hands against the Empire.

“If you stand down your ships and surrender without a fight, I am empowered to offer you transport to a stage-one colony, rather than execution or a penal world. Your rebellion will be forgiven, if not forgotten. If you refuse my kind offer, I will advance against your ships and defences and hammer them flat. The Empire cannot tolerate open insurrection. You have ten minutes to decide.”

Colin smiled. Without using the flicker drive, it would take the fleet at least forty minutes to approach Camelot and enter weapons range. There was no reason to add such a deadline, unless the enemy commander hoped that it would encourage a mutiny that would overthrow the original mutineers. Colin, for himself at least, had no intention of accepting the offer. Even if he trusted Admiral Quintana to keep his word — and the Admiral’s superiors to back his play, which he didn’t — it would be a betrayal of everyone who had died in the war to just surrender and allow the Empire to dump him on a colony world. He kept his hands folded in his lap, rather than reaching for the pistol at his belt, trusting his people not to shoot him in the back. No bullet or plasma burst cracked through his skull.

“The message is repeating,” the communications officer said. Colin nodded, sourly. There was no way they could jam it, not with such a powerful broadcast. Besides, that would suggest that the rebel leadership was worried… and that would never do. “They’re alternating the source of the transmission.”

“Curious,” Colin said. The enemy fleet had to be more worried than they were admitting, particularly if they were trying to hide their flagship. He wondered, absently, which ship it was, but the fleet database they’d captured on Camelot didn’t name Admiral Quintana’s flagship. He would normally command his sector from an orbiting battle station and only transfer his flag to a flagship when commanding an operation in person. “Open a channel.”

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

“Admiral Quintana, this is Admiral Walker,” Colin said. “We will not surrender. Join us; help us to reform the Empire… or stay out of our way. We will not be denied.”

He hit his console, hoping — praying — that the enemy commander would listen to reason. Colin was a tactical expert and he knew that the battle was going to be bloody. By keeping his ships on station in orbit, rather than sailing out to challenge Admiral Quintana directly, he would be combining the firepower of his starships and the captured orbital battle stations. In theory, that was enough firepower to stand off even three squadrons of superdreadnaughts, but in practice half of his battle stations would be unable to engage. And Admiral Quintana had been smart enough to come up with a simple way of countering the arsenal ships. Would he try to enter the planet’s gravity field or would he simply content himself with a long-range missile duel? There was no way to know.

“Send a signal to all ships,” he ordered. “Hold your ground and they will break over us.”

“Aye, sir,” the communications officer said.

“And add; whatever happens here, we will not be forgotten as long as the human race endures,” Colin said. Even as he spoke the words, he wondered if he was telling the truth. The Empire had buried more history than he had ever understood, until he’d read some of the forbidden history texts on Jackson’s Folly or out in the Beyond. The generation that controlled the past controlled the future… and the Empire had worked hard to ensure that its history was the only one people remembered. It made him wonder how many great battles, or true leaders of men, or cowardly traitors had been buried, without anyone remembering their names or faces. “What we have started will live on.”

“He refused to surrender,” Brent-Cochrane said, with some amusement. He’d been surprised to discover that Admiral Quintana believed that the rebels would surrender as soon as they saw his fleet, even though they had fought savagely even when his own force had mouse-trapped them at Greenland. Whatever else one could say about the rebels, they were hardly cowards, not when a coward would never have dared to rebel. “I predicted that, didn’t I?”

“Indeed you did,” Admiral Quintana agreed, without malice. He looked over towards the helmsman. “Continue the advance towards the planet.”

Brent-Cochrane settled back into his seat and tried to relax. The fleet had launched an entire swarm of probes as soon as it had entered the system, quartering space to ensure that the rebels weren’t trying to sneak a cloaked fleet in on top of them. It should have been impossible for the fleet to be surprised — there was nothing subtle or particularly clever about the operational plan — yet he knew better than to underestimate the rebels. And Admiral Quintana, for all of his concern, was treating them as a conventional opponent, rebels who would surrender as soon as they smelt the first whiff of grapeshot.

It was hard to gain reliable sensor images at such a range, but the rebel superdreadnaughts appeared to be remaining in orbit, rather than heading out beyond the gravity shadow and flickering away. Brent-Cochrane wondered just what they had in mind. The data suggested that the rebels were going to get brutally hurt even if they won the fight — and there was no way that they could survive a war of attrition. Maybe they intended to make a stand, or maybe all of the superdreadnaughts were drones and the rebel fleet had flickered out days ago, pre-recording the message for the Admiral’s benefit.

He shook his head as the timer continued to tick down towards missile range. Soon enough, they would know what they were facing. Why worry about it now?

Private Andy Barcoo hated the superdreadnaught. He hated the constant throbbing noise in the background, the tiny metallic passageways and — most of all — the hatred he saw in the eyes of the crew. The drug treatments that all Blackshirts received once they passed through Basic Training made them hypersensitive to slights and bad treatment and he had already put two members of the crew in sickbay before the Sergeant — a real asshole if ever there was one — had reprimanded him severely. His jaw still hurt where the Sergeant’s reprimand had connected, threatening to knock out a few of his teeth. The Blackshirts healed quickly — another effect of the drugs — but the pain lingered on. Andy had begged for some additional painkillers, yet the Sergeant had — instead — assigned him to guarding the armoury. It wouldn’t do for any of the superdreadnaught’s crew to get their hands on weapons. They were just one step up from occupied people in Andy’s view and everyone knew that occupied people lied all the time.

He held himself rigid, even though there was no sign of the Sergeant. Obedience had been beaten into him at the Training Centre, to the point where he literally could not disobey an order, unless it contradicted the regulations that had also been hammered into his head. Andy had been on campaigns where the Blackshirts had been empowered to do whatever they wanted to the local population — and had been ordered to have as much fun as they could — but being on the superdreadnaught was boring. He was uneasily aware that only a thin wall of metal separated him from the cold vacuum of space.

Andy looked up as he heard someone heading down the corridor towards his position. He’d been ordered not to actually block the passageway, only to prevent anyone from gaining access to the armoury without permission, and so he stepped back just before the person turned the corner and walked right towards him. She was a crewwoman — there were no female Blackshirts — wearing a shipsuit that had been opened to reveal the tops of her breasts and expose just enough of her that he wanted to see more. Andy felt a sudden wave of lust burning through his mind, interfering with rational thought, yet another side-effect of the treatments he’d undergone. If he hadn’t been ordered to remain where he was, he would have reached for the girl and drawn her to him. As she drew closer, he was suddenly very aware of her perfume, a smell that seemed to trigger glands he hadn’t known he had. He wanted her desperately.

“We’re going into battle soon,” the girl said. Her voice was rich and very feminine. “I need to relieve myself first” her tongue licked her lips, revealing precisely what she meant by relieve herself — “and I was wondering if you could help.”

She leaned forward, giving him a magnificent view of her breasts, and put her arms around him. He bent down to kiss her, pushing his lips against hers, yet just as he pushed his tongue into her mouth he felt something get pushed against the back of his neck. Andy realised, in a moment of horror, that he’d been tricked and threw the girl hard against the bulkhead, but it was already too late. The world was dimming around him as the drug took effect and he collapsed onto the deck. Darkness swallowed him a moment later.

“That bastard needed to brush his teeth properly,” Crewwoman Singe said, in disgust. She spat on the bulkhead before kicking the unconscious Blackshirt in the groin. “Where the hell did he learn to kiss?”

“I doubt that it’s on the curriculum at wherever they’re trained,” Stanford said. He took a moment to check the Blackshirt and then turned to the armoury. The Blackshirts had clearly felt that only one guard had been required — there were two armoury compartments on the ship, both of which were being raided — and on first glance it was easy to see why. The hatch was made of battle steel and should have been resistant to anything short of a heavy laser cannon or fission beam. The superdreadnaughts, however, had emergency systems that could be used to unlock a hatch manually if necessary, allowing them access to the armoury. “Take his gun and use his cuffs… belay that; undress the bastard first and then use his cuffs to secure him.”

He opened the small inspection hatch and peered into the tiny maintenance compartment. The moment he started to fiddle with it, an alarm should sound on the bridge, which meant that if his ally hadn’t managed to bypass the system successfully, they were going to be in a fight right from the start. He looked down at the naked Blackshirt, wondering if he’d been the one who had raped a crewwoman, before reaching into the compartment and altering the chips. There was a hiss and the hatch started to glide open. Two of his crewmen caught it and pushed it all the way back, allowing his team to swarm inside.

“Take the rifles and the grenades,” he ordered. They’d all been given basic weapons training, but none of them had any experience with powered armour. If they’d had a few Marines to help them… but the Marines had been off-loaded and no one knew what had happened to them. “Make sure you take the communicators and switch them to a private band.”

The first team collected their weapons and headed out of the compartment, as they had planned. The second team would remain and guard the armoury, using it to arm the crewmen while hopefully denying its contents to the loyalists. The other teams would get their own weapons and then carry out their part of the plan. He watched as the first team opened a hatch into the tubes and headed out, unseen, towards the engineering compartment. Once they were in place, they would force their way inside and take control.

“Pass me the uniform,” Stanford ordered, and started to don the Blackshirt’s outfit. It wasn’t a good fit, but Imperial Navy uniforms rarely were at first and he assumed that that was true of the Blackshirts as well. He found a shiny surface and inspected himself. He looked alarmingly realistic.

“You look terrifying, boss,” one of the crewmen said. “You’d better mind that we don’t shoot you by accident.”

Stanford nodded. He’d considered the possibility when he’d first come up with the plan, but he’d deemed that the risk was worth it. The Blackshirts might be completely unfamiliar with the superdreadnaught, yet they still had more weapons and far more experience in using them. If they could deal with their commanding officers in one fell swoop, it might be worth any risk. Besides, he had no intention of allowing anyone else to take the risk.

“If anyone does, I’ll have him cleaning toilets for the next millennium,” he threatened, as he checked the Blackshirt-issue plasma pistol. Unlike the standard weapons, it included a reader that checked for a Blackshirt implant before it would fire. Stanford knew how to remove it, but as he examined the pistol he was amused to discover that its former owner already had, even though he’d probably been told not to even think about it. It wasn’t too great a surprise. The systems did tend to fail and that would be disastrous in combat. “Jake; you have command here, but stay in touch. Don’t fuck up.”

“I won’t,” Jake promised. “Good luck, mate.”

Stanford nodded and collected his two escorts. With the Blackshirts taking over security roles on the starship, they had developed a habit of arresting crewmen for various offenses and demanding a bribe before they were set free. His two escorts would look like crewmen who had been unable, or unwilling, to pay the bribe and would be spending the next few hours in the brig before their salaries were docked or some other punishment was assigned. As long as they kept their weapons out of sight, they should be fine.

It felt odd walking through the starship in a Blackshirt uniform. The crew they encountered, the ones who were not involved in the mutiny, shied away from him, the fear in their eyes sending chills down his spine. The men were bad enough, but the women were terrified and found ways to get away from him, even though he wasn’t even leering at them. It tore at his heart as he pushed his two charges into Marine Country and through the hatch leading into the main security compartment. From the small compartment, the Marines could have handled any security or behaviour problem on the starship.

“You,” a voice demanded. Stanford half-turned to see a Blackshirt officer bearing down on him, his face set in a permanent expression of anger. “Why have you brought those pieces of human waste here?”

Stanford could have made an excuse, but the more he talked, the less likely it would be that anyone would fall for his disguise. “For support,” he said, and lifted his weapon. He took aim before the Blackshirt could react and shot him through the head. His two companions drew their own weapons and plunged into the security compartment. “Kill them!”

Forty seconds later, every Blackshirt in Marine Country was dead.