Christopher Nuttall - Democracy's Light

Katy blinked. The Havoc , technically the Havoc-II , as the first Havoc had been crippled and scrapped at First Morrison, was her flagship, an Invincible -class battlecruiser. It was an older ship than the newer Geek-built starships, but it had been refitted just after the Fall of Earth and she’d been assigned it as her flagship. It wasn’t quite the same as having sole command of such a glorious starship, but it was as close as she would come to command, ever. Even without the stigma of being captured, she was too high-ranking to command again.

“Very determined,” she said. An Admiral should command from a superdreadnaught, according to the Great God Tradition. The Imperial Navy had existed for over a thousand years and nothing as minor as a rebellion and the universe turned upside down would change its habits in a hurry. She’d fought tooth and nail to keep the Havoc as her flagship and only Colin’s intervention had convinced the Navy Board to allow her to have her way. “I thought that Joshua had agreed not to press the issue?”

Colin shrugged. Katy could see their point, at times, but she didn’t care. A battlecruiser depended more on speed than firepower and armour. Salvos that a superdreadnaught could laugh off would blow it into flaming plasma, but she had always detested the ponderous superdreadnaughts. A superdreadnaught might have been safer for an Admiral, by far, but she disliked that logic. An Admiral should share the risks with her officers and men.

“We have a problem out towards Cottbus,” Colin said, and rapidly outlined the situation. “We don’t know exactly what’s going on out there, or just what Admiral Wilhelm is playing at, or who’s playing with him… but we suspect that it’s not going to be good. At best, he’s posturing to get better treatment, but it’s already cost us several hundred lives and I’m not laughing.”

He leaned forward. “I want you to take command of a task force I’m dispatching to Hawthorn and deal with the problem,” he continued. “I trust that you can command three squadrons of superdreadnaughts from the Havoc without much difficulty?”

Katy scowled. He had, perhaps intentionally, placed her in a blind. If she continued to command from a lowly battlecruiser the odds were that the enemy wouldn’t realise and would concentrate all their firepower on the superdreadnaughts. The Havoc simply didn’t carry enough firepower to be noticeable when superdreadnaughts clashed in the night. If she moved her flag to a superdreadnaught, she might never be able to return to a battlecruiser. It was a problem that would require some thought.

“It should be possible, assuming that it’s a well-drilled force,” she said, carefully. She picked up a terminal and ran through the limited information on Cottbus and the Sector Fleet assigned to Admiral Wilhelm. “Only three squadrons of superdreadnaughts?”

“They’re all new Independence -class ships,” Colin said. He didn’t miss the gleam in her eye. The Independence -class superdreadnaughts had been built by the Geeks and had nearly twice the effective firepower of a General -class superdreadnaught, a missile-armed brute. Nine of them could take on eighteen Generals with a fair chance of coming out ahead. “I’m going to detach several squadrons of escorting starships and at least two squadrons of the latest arsenal ships as well, just to add to your firepower. You’re going to be fairly weak in the supporting elements, I’m afraid, but we can’t spare you anything else at the moment unless we get another Tenaha.”

“I see,” Katy said. The Tenaha Sector had thrown its lot in with the new order and the Provisional Government as soon as Earth fell to the Shadow Fleet. They hadn’t had a large arsenal of capital ships, but they’d had several squadrons of escorting ships, which had promptly been added to the Imperial Navy’s roster. The sheer magnitude of the problem, however, seemed to defy easy solutions. “I take it that there’s no sign of relief on the horizon?”

Colin shook his head. “The first-rank worlds have assigned several of their squadrons to the general pool of escort vessels, but they’re concentrating on trying to acquire superdreadnaughts now, so their production of smaller ships is actually being hampered because experienced personnel are being assigned to the larger ships,” he said. “The Geeks are doing what they can, but we need to build up a hard core of superdreadnaughts ourselves before someone on the Rim starts trying to cause trouble…”

“Which might have just begun,” Katy injected.

“Exactly,” Colin said. “Oh, the good news is that we’re killing pirates every time we encounter them, but there are so many that it’s only a drop in the bucket. We just don’t have enough ships to escort every convoy and every time we delay a convoy — when we can delay a convoy — it has an effect on the local economic situation.”

He shook his head. “I doubt that we’ll have many starving worlds,” he added, “but there are enough worlds on the edge that the slightest disaster might tip them over into civil war and mass unrest.”

Katy followed his logic and winced. The Empire, to give it due credit, had insisted on every newly-settled world becoming capable of feeding itself as fast as possible, avoiding some of the disasters that had plagued early colonisation efforts. The problem was that not every world, particularly the later ones, lived up to that promise… and they didn’t always have the infrastructure to repair damaged components or farming units. The Empire had exploited that problem ruthlessly — she remembered the Annual Fleet, which the Shadow Fleet had captured in its first raid on the Empire — and as long as the Empire had been in existence, it had worked fine. Now… the entire system was falling apart and billions of lives were at risk.

“I see,” she said, finally. It made her wonder if Colin ever regretted having started the rebellion. “How does this all play into the tax situation?”

Colin smiled, humourlessly. “They want protection in exchange for their taxes, but we need the taxes in order to build them the ships to protect them, but because we’re not protecting them they’re trying to invest elsewhere, such as in their own shipyards…”

He allowed his voice to trail off. “The bottom line, Katy, is that we need to squash this problem with Admiral Wilhelm as quickly as possible,” he concluded. “That’s why we’re sending you out there.”

An image of the Empire’s sectors appeared in front of him. “You’ll be several weeks from Earth, even assuming we manage to keep that section of the ICN up and running, so I’ll expect you to use your own judgement,” he said. “Take the fleet to Hawthorn, scout the Cottbus region and find out what’s going on. If you find that you don’t have the firepower to take him out, stay back, conduct a tactical survey of the sector and wait for reinforcements.”

“In other words, a return to raiding,” Katy said, wryly. Colin nodded cynically. The Shadow Fleet had raided worlds on the long march towards Morrison, if only to unsettle the Thousand Families and force them to spread their forces thin, but it had barely worked. Admiral Wachter had been too canny to fool that easily. “Do you want me to take out his shipyard?”

“If you can capture it, Kathy will be delighted,” Colin said. Katy had to smile. She liked Kathy Tyler, even though she could be far too enthusiastic half the time. “If not, then take it out and hamper his plans to build up a new navy. If we can’t have it, we can’t let him use it.”

“Yes, sir,” Katy said. She stood up. “Am I to assume that there’s a time limit?”