Christopher Nuttall - Democracy's Light

They fired, their missiles plodding towards their targets… and then the enemy missiles roared into their formation. The Black Panther , a battleship that dated all the way back to the foundation of the Empire and the fleet’s flagship, was targeted by twenty missiles, but ten would have been more than sufficient. The battleship blew apart into a burning fireball, lost with all hands. They hadn’t even had a chance to launch any life pods and escape the doomed ship.

Zulu couldn’t take his eyes off the display. A pair of cruisers that comprised Wakanda’s only modern ships — although with a definition of ‘modern’ that would have surprised most purists — were wiped out almost simultaneously. A flight of gunboats, useless for anything, but the simplest boarding action, were picked off neatly with individual missiles. The point defence network, barely capable of operating under the best of conditions, shattered and the remaining ships were blown apart, one after the other. Ships that had been outdated years before the Geeks and Nerds started to upgrade rebel ships to outmatch Imperial Navy ships died, one by one, and no one escaped alive. His console wasn’t showing even a single life pod.

“My God,” he breathed. There were over two hundred thousand personnel in the Wakanda Space Navy and two thirds of them had been on the starships. They were all dead… and the engagement wasn’t even over. The enemy ships were pushing through the debris, such as it was after the fearsome exchange of fire, and advancing on the orbital defences. Zulu knew, with a kind of numb disbelief, that they would have absolutely no trouble with the handful of orbiting fortresses, including his own. “We’re all dead.”

He looked around for the commodore. He was sitting on the floor, staring at nothing, a faint smell drifting up to touch Zulu’s nostrils. He’d just seen his uncle die, Zulu remembered, and watched the world turned upside down. It would have been easy to feel sorry for him, but Zulu remembered the way he’d treated his subordinates and no longer cared. He looked over at the communications officer and winced.

“Contact them,” he ordered. He no longer needed to care about the commodore. It was almost worth the possibility of imminent death. “Tell Admiral Wilhelm that we surrender.”

There was a long pause. “I’m picking up nothing from the incoming fleet,” the communications officer said. His voice twisted sharply as another voice, screaming something, rose up and then faded. “The Clan Head is screaming at us to pluck up our nerve and fight.”

“Ignore him,” Zulu ordered, savagely. He mentally traced out a firing pattern for the city of T’Challa. It would have been easy to destroy it, so easy, and Wakanda would be free of its government. Why could they not have done it before? “Repeat the signal…”

An alarm sounded. Admiral Wilhelm’s ships were locking their weapons on the station. They wouldn’t have any problems destroying it. The shields were outdated and the point defence network was already broken without having fired a single shot.

“I don’t think they’re interested in surrender,” the communications officer said. “I think…”

“No shit,” someone said, from the rear of the bridge. Zulu heard the note of defeat, and yet of victory, and smiled. They had escaped the government and were free men, for the few seconds it would last. “Should we not fire back?”

Zulu shook his head. “Why bother?”

The superdreadnaughts opened fire.

A minute later, the final defenders of Wakanda died at their posts.

Grand Admiral Joshua Wachter’s obituary took up nearly two pages of one of the more respectable — insofar that respectable could be used when there hadn’t been a free press for more than nine months in the Empire — newssheets, and various pages of the less respectable ones, which had turned from compiling the real lives of the Thousand Families to honour the death of a great man. His early service to the Empire was recounted in fulsome detail, his great achievements lauded to the skies, and his untimely death mourned in a hundred different ways. Hundreds of pages included personal tributes, including a touching one from Tiberius Cicero, Colin and even some of Joshua’s bitterest political enemies. It would be easy to believe that an Emperor had died.

Penny looked up into Joshua’s eyes as the small transport prepared to return to normal space. “The reports of your death, it seems, have been very much exaggerated,” she said, dryly. She had been surprised when Daria had insisted that Joshua ‘die’ in a faked shuttle accident — with enough force-grown tissue from them both to make the accident very convincing — but it made a certain kind of sense. Joshua, no more than any other mortal, couldn’t be in two places at once. “How does it feel to know that everyone believes that you are dead?”

Joshua shrugged, his eyes studying the barren bulkhead as if it was a distraction from more pressing matters. “It has much to recommend it,” he said, solemnly. She would have bet a great deal that he was thinking about his past… and how he’d come to fake his own death, just to ensure that he was free to serve the Empress. “We could just go onwards, out to the Rim, and hide from the universe.”

Penny stared at him. She’d served with Joshua, and under Joshua, ever since she had returned from Sector 117 to report on the growing rebellion… and the loss of Harmony to Colin’s forces. Joshua was that rarity, an Imperial Navy Admiral with a genuine sense of honour and tactics, and she’d blossomed under his tutelage. They’d fought at Morrison together, the first Imperial Navy unit to give the rebels a bloody nose, before effectively betraying the Empire and preventing the mass slaughter of the Gauls. They’d somehow managed to come out of the entire rebellion as heroes, despite having fought on the wrong side, and Penny was surprised that Joshua had just given that up, even for the Empress. They had slipped all the way over the line to outright treason.

She couldn’t say that she was really loyal to the Empire. She’d conceded, long ago, that if Colin had invited her to join his conspiracy, she would have accepted and attempted to knife Percival in the back. It wouldn’t have bothered her. Whatever loyalty she’d had before she’d been invited to join his personal staff — with some very personal duties — had faded away in long unpleasant nights and planning sessions where her advice was frequently ignored. The only thing that had kept her in service after her return to Earth had been Joshua… and his undoubted loyalty to the Empire, if not the Thousand Families. If Joshua had made himself Emperor, she would have followed him gladly, but instead…

Her gaze switched to the viewport. It was blanked out, preventing them from staring out into flicker-space, which was normally deeply disturbing to the human mind. Most people saw nothing, not even lights or strange energies, but there was nevertheless a very real sense of… something lurking out beyond the horizon. Human imagination had filled the weird dimension with ghouls and monsters, creatures that ate entire starships for dinner, but no one had ever proved their existence. It was just one of the tales spacers told when they were all alone in the dark.

She looked back at Joshua. “Do you want to leave?”

Joshua sighed. “I want to keep the Empire strong and stable and we need her to do that,” he said, finally. She knew who he meant. “We need to keep the Imperial Navy strong and we need to prevent the first-rank worlds from gaining the power to tear the Empire apart. We even need to stop Admiral Wilhelm before he takes Earth and burns out the core of the Empire.”