Christopher Nuttall - Democracy's Light

“David, we’re going to need you,” he said, keying his private channel. He’d hoped not to have to deploy the final surprise, but there were four squadrons of superdreadnaughts out there, with escorts. They would get hurt, but they had the firepower to punch though Earth’s defences and force them to surrender. “Get your people into position now…”

“Admiral,” the tactical officer said, “we’re picking up a message from the fleet.”

“On screen,” Colin ordered.

Daria’s face appeared in front of him. She’d altered her face slightly, he saw, but it was still recognisably her. It took him a moment to realise that she now reassembled herself as she had been fifty years ago, before she had been forced to flee Earth and take up residence along the Rim. Unlike so many others who had fled the Empire, she had barely altered herself, either in a display of bravado or vanity. Cordova had told him, when they’d had a moment to chat before he had left to go to his starship, that there had even been a fashion to have pleasure slaves in the image of the Empress.

“They like to think that they were fucking her,” he’d said. “It was a power thing for that generation.”

Daria’s voice was icy cold. “I am the Empress Janice,” she said, her face cold and very composed, as if she had spoken to God personally and received answers she didn’t like. “I was forced to flee Earth by men and women of the Thousand Families who feared that I would upset their tidy little doomed worlds. I had acted to save the Empire from the doom that overtook it. My reward was to be forced to flee, with dogs snapping at my heels, and hide along the Rim until my time came again.”

She paused. “My time is now.

“In the name of the Empire, I call upon Earth to surrender without further struggle,” she continued. “Your position is hopeless. Bombarding the planet would be an easy task for my fleet. Your defences cannot hope to stand us off for long, nor do I have any incentive to spare the lives of those who oppose my rightful return to the throne. Give up the struggle, surrender yourselves, and you have my word that you will be treated with honour. Fight… and you will be destroyed. You have five minutes to decide.”

“Open a channel,” Colin ordered, as Daria’s image vanished from the display. He waited for the communications officer’s nod. “Daria — Janice — this is Colin Harper, President of the Empire. Your time is over. You know this as well as I do. The old order died the day that Earth fell — indeed, before then, when I led my people into revolution and exposed the Empire’s weakness. Admiral Wilhelm, Stacy Roosevelt, Tiberius Cicero and even you attempted to restore the old order, but its time has passed. The Empire’s iron grip is no more. You may win this fight, you may destroy Earth and all who defy you, but you will not be able to restore the Empire you once ruled.”

He took a breath. “I’m sorry, but I won’t surrender, I can’t,” he continued. “The new order, one where democracy and justice and the rule of law push the Empire into reformation, must survive… and it will survive. The worst you could do is shatter the Empire and push us all into barbarism. You could not rebuild the old order.

Penny looked up at Joshua. His face was expressionless.

“You can stop this now,” Colin continued, almost pleadingly. “End this. Surrender your fleet. We won’t kill you, or any who followed you, even after what you did at the Cicero Estate.” Penny saw Joshua’s head jerk at that. “Please, end this now, before more people have to die.”

The signal stopped. “The Cicero Estate?” Penny asked. “What happened there…?”

“I don’t know,” Joshua said. He tapped his console. “I know who will, however…”

Daria’s face appeared in front of them. “Continue the advance,” she ordered, crisply. “If Colin is bound and determined to make a fight of it, we will finish him and…”

“Tell me something,” Joshua said, cutting her off. “What happened at the Cicero Estate?”

“Nothing you need to concern yourself with,” Daria said, her face expressionless. “Concentrate on the advance, Admiral. Victory is within our grasp.”

“No,” Joshua said, angrily. “You will tell me what happened at the Cicero Estate.”

They stared at each other for a long moment. “Tiberius Cicero had a plan to… remove Colin from play,” Daria said, finally. “It went spectacularly wrong, he ended up dead, and I had to flee.” Penny saw Joshua wince. He’d liked the young Cicero. Tiberius had even brought him out of retirement to command the fleet at Morrison. “Colin is currently blaming the entire disaster on me because I was the only survivor on the wrong side.”

Joshua lifted an eyebrow. “Indeed?”

“Indeed,” Daria said. They locked eyes again for a long chilling moment. “Attend to your duty, Admiral.”

The tactical officer interrupted. “Admiral, we have something odd approaching from the direction of Earth,” he said. Penny felt a moment of relief that the confrontation had been ended, although she wasn’t sure any longer what side she was really on, or even what side Joshua was on. “It doesn’t match anything in the tactical database at all.”

“Show me,” Joshua snapped, pushing Daria to one side. He paused as he stared down at the odd readings. Penny followed his gaze, but couldn’t make head or tail of them. It was almost as if they were about to be attacked by shuttles in a boarding action, never mind the fact that it would be certain suicide. “What the hell are they?”

“All Reds, this is Red Leader,” Captain Edward Stalker said, as the fighters roared towards their targets. They couldn’t see the superdreadnaughts ahead of them, but the live feed coming directly into their heads from the computers and sensors showed them everything. The superdreadnaughts looked like an impregnable wall of sheer force, glaring around them with implacable sensors, but they were puzzled. The starfighters had been crossed several times by sensor scans. “Mark your men and prepare to dance.”

He concentrated, designating superdreadnaught targets for each of the starfighters. Individually, no starfighter could inflict much damage, even with the shield-buster missiles, unless they loaded antimatter warheads and they weren’t desperate enough to break that taboo, but as a mass, they were almost unstoppable. They also had weaknesses. Like every manned ship, they were limited to speeds that the compensators could compensate for, or their pilots would be killed long before they reached firing range. The enemy, once they had a chance to adapt and see what they were up against, would sweep starfighters out of space with ease.

A voice crackled away in his helmet. “Missiles launched, now,” it said, as the orbital fortresses opened fire. A spread of missiles, seemingly targeted on the superdreadnaughts, but in fact targeted on their smaller escorts, would provide a distraction. One threat wouldn’t be lethal, but combined, they could be horrifyingly dangerous, at least according to the simulations. Stalker and his men would be the first to try their ships and tactics out for rear. “Impact, twenty-seven seconds and counting.”

“You heard the man,” Stalker said, linking back into the command network. His own target, a massive Admiral -class superdreadnaught, blinked on and off in his mental vision, permanently marked as a target for the two missiles carried under his wings. There was little point in designing the craft to fly through atmospheres, but the Geeks had insisted… and, besides, they did look awesome. “Prepare to kick in the drives and move.”