Christopher Nuttall - Democracy's Light

“We?” Carola asked, for all the world as if she was a queen — no, an Empress — receiving a supplicant. “Who is this we , Gwendolyn?”

“Figures of influence who want the war to end,” Gwendolyn said. “We can get you free from this place and out to your husband, in exchange for you agreeing to mediate between us and him.”

“Indeed?” Carola asked. It was tempting to agree, but now that the war had started in earnest, hardly necessary. Gwendolyn and the rest of her kind, aristocrats all, didn’t understand that Admiral Wilhelm’s victory meant their end. “And why should I agree to that?”

“Because otherwise you might not survive the next few weeks,” Gwendolyn said. Carola, who had expected the threat, was unmoved. “You don’t understand what is happening here.”

“Don’t I?” Carola asked. It felt so good to unburden herself of scorn and hatred. “You’re rats deserting a sinking ship.”

Gwendolyn seemed amused. “Maybe,” she said, a thin smile playing around her lips, as if she knew something that Carola didn’t know. “Or maybe not. Will you help us?”

Carola smiled. “Sure,” she lied, smoothly. It would provide a few moments of amusement until the end of the war. “Why not?”

“Good,” Gwendolyn said. She glanced down at the timepiece on her wrist. “I’ll be back here soon enough. Goodbye.”

She left, the door clicking and locking behind her.

Carola smiled as she lay back on the bunk. The game was afoot again.

She was quite looking forward to it.

Commander Irving Roberts looked up from his report as the near-planet orbital monitor chirped a warning.

“Report,” he ordered, looking over at one of the tactical officers, operating her station and showing her inexperience with every movement. Schubert had been stripped of all, but a small cadre of experienced officers for the war and it showed. Roberts himself was the most experienced officer on the fortress and, if he hadn’t been suffering from a rare degenerative nerve disease that kept him trapped in a hoverchair, he would have been taken from the planet as well. Admiral Wilhelm had stripped the sector bare for his fleet.

The tactical officer’s voice showed her excitement. “I have a single Mars -class bulk freighter just flickering in from Cottbus,” she said, as the display automatically downgraded the threat level by a degree. A single Mars -class freighter might be used as a warship by a particularly poor or desperate pirate group, but no one in their right mind would try to take it up against a single gunboat, let alone a million-ton fortress. “They’re transmitting an IFF now, sir.”

“Very good,” Roberts said dryly, trying to keep his amusement out of his voice. It was heart-warming how hard the newly-trained crews tried to impress him, seeing him as a sophisticated officer and role model. They would have been less impressed if they had known that his handful of combat missions had all been against pirates, rather than rebels or alien threats. “Hail them and demand to know what they’re carrying and why they’re not being escorted.”

He frowned down at the console, stroking his chin, as the tactical officer leapt to obey. In theory, it was impossible for a starship to be intercepted between the stars, but in practice it was fairly easy to do so, given a degree of luck or sometimes foreknowledge. The Empire rarely used convoys, but Admiral Wilhelm had organised a convoy system for the Cottbus Sector, although most of the escorts had been called off to the war front. The planet’s government had been worried about the possible economic downturn caused by the war, but Roberts’ concerns were simpler. If a freighter was travelling without an escort, what had happened to its escort?

“And ask them for an update,” he added. If nothing else, it would make for a welcome change from the boredom of tracking the STL craft that mined the asteroids and gas giants in the system. “I want their full details as soon as possible.”

The thought made him smile. A military crew would have answered at once; a freighter crew would tend to delay as long as possible, either to make their official oppressors annoyed, or just because they didn’t have anyone on the bridge when the signals were transmitted. It was a permanent point of friction between the civil and military communities, a cause of considerable bad feeling. Personally, Roberts didn’t really care, but the Imperial Navy as a whole had found it annoying. They would have preferred freighters to follow military discipline at all times.

“They’re identifying themselves as the Star of Humber ,” the tactical officer said. The name meant nothing to Roberts. Freighters tended to carry all kinds of names, rather than the strictly-formalised nomenclature of the Imperial Navy, and a single name meant nothing. It was quite easy to alter an IFF beacon to send out a false signal and nothing short of an inspection tour would reveal the truth. A freighter rarely had its name engraved on the hull. “They’re claiming that they had no escort; they came directly from Driscoll and that they’re carrying farming machinery.”

Roberts smiled. That explained the lack of an escort. Farming machinery was useless to pirates; indeed, shipping it on an interstellar freighter was normally a waste of money. Basic farming equipment could be produced at any local industrial node, unless it was destined for a newly-settled world… and there were several third-rank worlds in the sector that would pay through the nose for farming gear, even when every freighter in the sector was supposed to be serving the war effort.

“Understood,” he said, calmly. The Mars -class ships were old enough to require frequent refuelling from an orbital facility. Schubert, it so happened, had a good reputation for cheap fuel. The four gas giants in the system provided enough fuel for the entire spacefaring community, military and civilian. Mining them was a well-understood practice after two thousand years in space. “Clear them for docking at one of the stations and pass their communications code to the station manager. They can see how much the crew is willing to pay for a fuel load.”

He turned his gaze back to the display, watching the freighter advancing ponderously into the gravity shadow, heading down towards one of the commercial stations. They would, he noted absently, be passing fairly close to his fortress and considered using them for a tracking exercise, before dismissing the thought. The freighter crew might have come to his world in hopes of a cheaper deal on refined spaceship fuel, but that wouldn’t excuse scaring hell out of them when their ship was lit up by military-grade targeting sensors, suggesting that they were about to be used for target practice.

“They’re not moving quite rightly,” the tactical officer said, puzzled. She would have been a pretty girl under any circumstances, but right now she was frowning. Roberts ordered his chair to hover over to her position, allowing him to peer over her shoulder and down at her display. “They’re moving as if they’re holding back some of their drive field…”

She stopped, unable to explain what she was seeing. It took Roberts a moment to see it and he had to admit that if she hadn’t seen it, without knowing what she was looking at, he might well have missed it. The freighter was holding a fairly low speed, roughly a third of what such a ship should be capable of in a gravity field, but it looked as if it were ready and raring to run. It would have committed several breeches of orbital manoeuvring regulations if it had sped up, but the drive field was flickering as if they intended to move much faster… and if they had more power to burn.