Christopher Nuttall - Democracy's Light

“These are our demands. You will immediately stand down all starships, orbital weapons and other defences. You will permit them to be occupied by armed Marines who will place them under supervision until the true status of Cottbus can be decided. You will inform us of the true situation within this sector and assist us in establishing civil order, before welcoming the sector into the new Empire. Finally, you will assist us in a full and independent inquest into exactly what happened when our cruisers were destroyed.”

He paused. “If you comply with our demands, we are prepared to offer you and anyone else within your crews amnesty under the terms of the Macore Agreement,” he said. Katy, who was about the only person on the ship who would appreciate the irony, smiled darkly. Macore had not been happy about the amnesty agreement. “You would no longer be permitted to serve in the Imperial Navy, or as part of the political structure and government, but you would be permitted to remain free and independent. Your wealth, however acquired, will not be confiscated. Your families will not suffer for your actions. You could live a free and happy life.”

His eyes met Katy’s eyes. “If you refuse to accept our demands, or choose to ignore this message, we will open fire,” he concluded. “If you choose to fight, the deal will be withdrawn and you will be treated as a war criminal. We await your reply.”

Katy nodded. The communications officer transmitted the signal. “That was harder than I thought,” Goscinny admitted, quietly. “I don’t like pushing people into corners.”

“Nor do I,” Katy said, looking at the display. The red lines that indicated engagement range were growing closer to the fleet. “I also don’t like the look of those defences. If we can talk him into standing down, rather than fighting… well, it’s worth swallowing a little pride.”

Goscinny blinked. “You don’t think he’s going to stand down, do you?”

Katy shook her head.

The minutes ticked away as the fleet drew closer to the planet. As close as they were, the signals shouldn’t have been delayed more than a minute at most. She ran the calculation in her head and decided that ten minutes would be more than long enough for Admiral Wilhelm to decide on a response and transmit it, but she mentally decided that fifteen minutes would be enough leeway. She doubted that he would be feeling very happy after hearing the signal, but she found it hard to care. He had killed several hundred of her fellow crewmen, after all.

Goscinny leaned over to her. “Should it be taking this long?”

“No,” Katy muttered back. The closer they got to Cottbus, the louder the nagging feeling at the back of her neck kept shouting at her. The odds were that it was a trap, but she had no intention of flying into point blank range of a fortress. The system defences could be battered to death before they could hope to fire a missile back at her ships. “Communications, repeat the message.”

“Aye, Admiral,” the communications officer said. He worked his console quickly. “Message sent.”

The tactical officer broke into her thoughts. “Admiral, the probes are picking up a standard warning message from the planet’s defence grid,” he said. Katy could hear the puzzlement in his voice. When she pulled the data from the computers herself, she shared it. A standard warning message made little sense. She couldn’t even recall seeing one, outside exercises. “They’re just transmitting it randomly towards us.”

“A warning message?” Goscinny asked. “What are they warning us about?”

“Unknown,” Katy said. She felt herself tensing again. “Communications, open a channel.”

She waited for the communications officer’s signal. “This is Admiral Garland of the Imperial Navy,” she said. It felt so good to be blunt and direct. “You have chosen to ignore our previous signals. I therefore have no choice, but to assume that you have hostile intentions. Stand down your shields, weapons and drives now , or I will open fire. There will be no further warnings.”

“Targeting scans,” the tactical officer snapped. “We just got pinged by the orbital defences. They swept the fleet and then faded.”

Katy nodded. She’d expected as much. Hell, she’d operated under the assumption that the defenders knew where each of her starships was at any time. Their drive fields alone would see to that. They couldn’t be concealed without a full-spectrum cloaking device.

“Bring up our own active sensors and sweep the system,” she ordered. She keyed a single command into her console and leaned forward. “Prepare to open fire…”

“Missile tracks,” the tactical officer snapped. The display sparkled with hostile red icons. “We’re taking fire!”

At least that settles the question of hostile intent , Katy thought. “All ships, bring up the point defence network,” she ordered. There was something about the entire situation that didn’t quite make sense, but there was no longer time to think, only to react. “Fire at will.”

“Deploy the outermost pods,” Admiral Wilhelm ordered. There hadn’t been any more time to delay. The voice of the rebel fleet’s commander had convinced him of that. It would have been nice to close the range a little more, but she wouldn’t allow him to lead her by the nose any further. “Fire at will.”

The display flickered and updated rapidly as the pods fired their missiles. The idea of missile pods hadn’t been a new one, but they simply hadn’t been a workable concept, until now. The Nerds had invented the concept and, for reasons that made little sense to Admiral Wilhelm, had kept them back rather than introducing them to the rebels. He didn’t understand that — and he didn’t understand why they had come to him and offered their support — but he needed them. They had provided his fleet with something an Imperial Navy fleet had lacked after First Harmony; technological equality. Maybe even, they’d hinted, superiority.

He smiled as the missiles raced towards their targets. The Nerds had solved a problem that had bedevilled missile techs throughout the ages. A missile was too small to carry a power-generating unit — and in any case they were destroyed when they struck their targets — and so they had limited range and speed. A missile in sprint mode would burn out quickly, quickly enough to be useless except at close range, while a longer-ranged missile would be easier for the defender’s point defence to target and destroyed. It was why the rebels had developed the arsenal ships in the first place. They overwhelmed their targets by sheer weight of numbers. The Nerds, however, had managed to extend a missile’s range in sprint mode.

“Keep tracking their point defence and analyse it,” he ordered, calmly. His heart was beating rapidly, as it always did when all of his theories and plans collapsed into a battle, but his voice was calm. “Security, what did you make of that transmission?”

His Security Officer, an old friend, frowned. Imperial Intelligence — and, for that matter, the Hohenzollern Clan, would have been horrified to learn how close Wilhelm and his Security Officer had become over the years. It had been another of Carola’s ideas; she had introduced Jake Russell to the woman who would become his wife and encouraged the relationship. It had turned Jake from a sworn enemy — all Security Officers were the enemy until proven otherwise — into a friend and an ally. Wilhelm didn’t know for sure, but he would bet his last credit that Colin Harper had had a similar arrangement. How else would he have gotten away with it for so long?

“It was odd, wasn’t it?” Jake agreed, calmly. He never sounded emotional over anything, but his wife. “It wasn’t a precise warning, just… a standard warning. I’ll start working on tracking down the person who sent the signal, but if it was programmed into the system, it could have been done weeks ago.”