Christopher Nuttall - Democracy's Light

Wilhelm nodded, stroking his chin thoughtfully. A standard warning was, by its nature, imprecise. It warned anyone approaching to use extreme care, on the assumption that there was danger ahead, but it was rarely used because there were more specific warning signals for almost any emergency. Any infiltrator on the shipyard could have sent a proper warning, if they knew about the plans for the ambush, but instead… they had been maddeningly imprecise. The rebel commander had to be completely puzzled.

“It’s possible that Imperial Intelligence had a sleeper on the shipyard they never told me about,” Jake hazarded, after a long moment. “They could have programmed him to remain out of the way until he was needed… and the rebels might have recovered the proper command codes to make use of his services.”

“Leave it for the moment,” Wilhelm said, watching the display. If they lost the battle, the activity of one or a thousand infiltration agents wouldn’t change their fate. “I suggest that you concentrate your efforts on supervising the evacuation and track down the spies later.”

He’d planned for that as well. A shipyard wasn’t just the facilities, although they were important and cost time and money to build, but also the workforce. The thousands of trained men and women who worked on the shipyard — and now far more motivated after he’d had incompetents who’d gained their positions through connections weeded out ruthlessly — had to be preserved. If the war went well, they’d be needed to expand the shipyards… and if it went badly, they became a bargaining chip. He could even follow the Nerds suggestion and send them to hidden facilities along the Rim.

“Understood,” Jake said. “Good luck.”

Wilhelm snorted and turned back to the display. The rebel fleet might have been surprised — although he doubted it — but they’d reacted well. He’d taken care to have the missile pods aimed at the superdreadnaughts, although striking the smaller ships would have guaranteed several kills, and the rebels were taking ruthless advantage of that ‘mistake.’ Their smaller craft, bristling with point defence weapons and tactical sensors, were wiping missiles out of space by the hundreds, despite their speed. They’d improved their targeting, he saw, just as the Nerds had predicted. It made him wonder what else they’d improved.

Gunboats, bristling with point defence weapons themselves, sped ahead of the main fleet, hunting for the semi-stealthed pods. He had to admire the bravery of the crews, even if they were on the opposite side; a popular Imperial Navy joke had it that most gunboats couldn’t even fart loudly in their own defence. They wouldn’t be any match for a destroyer, let alone anything bigger, but they made useful additional point defence platforms and scouts, if only because they were so completely expendable.

“The gunboats are engaging some of the missile pods,” the tactical officer reported. “Do you want me to flush the remaining pods?”

Wilhelm nodded once. The pods would be easy targets for any prowling gunboat. “If they’re targeted, yes,” he ordered. “Try and pick off a handful of the gunboats with the energy buoys if they can take them out. If not, leave them to their work. They’re just wasting energy if they shoot up empty pods.”

He smiled. A missile pod that had expended all its missiles was useless, at least until it could be recovered and reloaded. They were such simple creations that the orbiting industrial facilities would be able to produce thousands more within a week, if he ordered them; the real bottleneck would be the missiles. The fleet had an insatiable demand that would only grow larger as the war progressed.

“And keep scanning their fleet and locating every ship,” he added. “The information will come in handy when we spring the trap.”

Katy frowned as she studied the display, trying to understand what she was seeing. For someone who was regarded as competent, if not dangerously competent, there was a certain degree of incompetence around Admiral Wilhelm’s defences. On one side, he had introduced a new and terrifying range of missiles, capable of entering sprint mode for longer… and on the other side, he hadn’t even used them properly. A mass attack on her superdreadnaughts, targeting one or two for preference, might have inflicted damage, but instead he’d fired them off in fits and starts. She’d wondered if the first attack had been a mistake, as insane as it seemed, but the pattern was only continuing.

The Jefferson lunched as it launched another spread of probes down towards the planet. Whatever was going on with the missile pods — if that was what they were — wasn’t affecting Admiral Wilhelm’s point defence. They’d picked off several probes already and the ECM surrounding the shipyard and the orbital fortresses was massive, almost as good as their own. That wasn’t something she’d expected and it worried her. If Admiral Wilhelm had made one major advance and duplicated one of the Geeks advances, what else had his people managed to duplicate?

They couldn’t have had Carola copy them from Earth, she thought, slowly. Even if she managed to gain access, they wouldn’t have had time to put them all into production, which suggests that they either developed them on their own or someone else boosted their technology. Who?

She pushed the line of thought aside as unproductive, and distracting in a combat zone, and turned back to the display. The fleet was still battering its way through the missile pods, but the gunboats were wiping them out, often before they could fire. A handful of gunboats had been lost, one of them to a missile pod that had fired on the tiny starships, but the remainder were still active. She’d half-expected Admiral Wilhelm to detach a squadron of destroyers to deal with the gunboats, but he had resisted the bait and allowed her craft to continue clearing the defences out of their way.

The superdreadnaught shivered as a single missile struck home against the shield, it’s comrades wiped out by the point defence network. Alone, it couldn’t hope to do anything beyond making the ship shake, but she checked the readouts anyway, wondering if Admiral Wilhelm had breeched the taboo on antimatter. The sensors reported that it was a standard nuclear warhead, perhaps designed to weaken her shields without damaging the starship significantly, but she couldn’t escape the feeling that something was waiting for her to make a mistake.

“Admiral, the gunboats have reported that they have cleared all of the threatening missile pods,” the tactical officer said, breaking into her thoughts. “The Squadron Commander is requesting permission to clear the unthreatening pods out of the way before they can become a threat.”

An hour ago, Katy would have dismissed the possibility, but now there was little choice, but to clear all of the possible threats. “Order them to engage at will, but be prepared to return to the fleet at any moment,” she ordered, calmly. It wasn’t as if the gunboats would be any help if there were a major clash of starships, although their contribution to the point defence would be severely missed. “Bring up the targeting pattern and prepare to engage the fortresses.”

The tactical officer blinked. “The fortresses, Admiral?”

“The fortresses,” Katy said. The superdreadnaughts were a serious threat under other circumstances, but the fortresses were actually more dangerous within a gravity shadow… and she had no intention of entering the gravity shadow until the fortresses had been disabled or destroyed. Besides, if she were reading Admiral Wilhelm rightly, he would be commanding from one of the fortresses. It was just possible that they would decapitate the enemy command structure. “Analysis Team, have you located the enemy command and control centre?”