Christopher Nuttall - Democracy's Light

He looked down at the computer console in front of him and smiled. The nice thing about computers was that they did as they were told. The access backdoors that Imperial Intelligence had programmed into every system the Empire had produced helped — no one could have shut them all down — but the access they had obtained through Quinn and his people was far more useful. With a little ingenuity, the computers had been convinced that Charlie and Sasha were personnel with every right to go where they pleased, including the orbital fortresses. Quinn himself had been assigned to a rotating personnel pool that saw him on the fortresses every fortnight for a week-long period — apparently to ensure that they kept their edge — but again, it was easy to alter the system so that the rebels were all on the fortresses at the same time. It was even possible to have messages sent from rebel to rebel without monitoring programs picking them up and reporting them.

“It is important not to overuse this facility,” he’d warned, when he’d introduced the secret communications system to the inner circle of conspirators. The news about Admiral Garland’s recent raid had sent the entire planet into a state of shock, forcing Admiral Wilhelm’s viceroy to start running more persistent security measures. “The monitoring programs should class them as part of the general data download shared between the fortresses, but too many signals might alert a human operator, who might not be one of us.”

The second problem had been weapons. The Imperial Navy, in stark contrast to the Shadow Fleet, tended to keep weapons out of the hands of its junior officers and enlisted men, although it saw to it that they had proper weapons training. Colin had solved that problem by enlisting the Marines on his side, but Quinn had no Marine contacts… and, in any case, Admiral Wilhelm’s Marines and tame SD Troopers were not allowed on the fortresses. It was a fairly basic precaution; Admiral Percival, too, had banned Marines from his ships. The only access to the weapons locker on each of the fortresses belonged to the Captain, forcing Charlie to take the risk of uploading new commands into the network, clearing the leader of the rebels to open the weapons lockers at the right time. They had also risked giving the rebels the covert operations pistols that they had brought with them on the Neddy Seagoon .

“These will not shoot through battle armour, so be careful whom you try to shoot,” Sasha had explained, to the handful of rebels who had attended her brief tutorial. The tiny pistols looked rather like children’s toys, ones that might be found in any stocking, but they were deadly in the right hands. “They don’t set off security scanners, so you can smuggle them onto the fortresses without setting off all kinds of alerts, but be careful. If the security forces find even one of these, they will know who is to blame.”

Sandra hadn’t been happy to be left almost completely out of the plans, but someone had to remain behind, if only to report on what had happened to the other two agents. Her links with Andy Gillingham might be useful, while it also gave her an excuse to operate separately from them, although none of them had any illusions about how long that would last. If Admiral Wilhelm’s people caught any of them, it wouldn’t take them long to locate the remaining two members, or at least to put out an alert.

“You two had better be careful,” she’d said, when Sasha had told her the plan. “If you don’t come back, I’ll kill you personally.”

Charlie was still smiling at the thought when he boarded the shuttle, hidden in the midst of a group of other enlisted men, some of whom had been summoned from all over the planet. Admiral Wilhelm had been rotating his personnel, for no clear reason, but it worked in their favour. Very few of the enlisted men and women would know each other if they had never worked together before, so they wouldn’t notice that they suddenly had two newcomers. Even if they knew some of their fellows, they wouldn’t know all of them, or so the plan went. If they were wrong…

He put it out of his mind as the shuttle lifted off the ground and headed towards the command fortress. If they were wrong, they were dead. If they were right, they might still die, but they would have given it their best shot. There was no reason to be nervous. The panic caused by the raid on Schubert provided more than adequate cover for their mission.

But I’m still nervous , he acknowledged, if only to himself. It had been years since he had had to pose as an enlisted man, but the skills had never been forgotten. It helped that the Empire only expected enlisted men to obey orders and show no initiative of their own. There were no portholes in the shuttle — it had been designed for lower-ranking personnel, not tourists or senior officers — but he could imagine the atmosphere giving way to the darkness of space. It might become his tomb

And that , he thought, with a flicker of amusement, would be a damn silly way to die .

“Are you nervous?”

Tiberius flinched, half-convinced that Alicia knew everything. He hadn’t told her anything about Daria, or about Cordova, or the plan to unseat — assassinate — Colin, even though she was his lover. She wasn’t Family and, therefore, couldn’t be really trusted. The fact that Daria knew enough to bring down half of the Thousand Families was bad enough; he didn’t want to think about what could happen if Alicia and he ever had a falling out. Marriage, particularly Family weddings, rarely lasted more than a few decades.

He scowled as the ground passed by under their aircar. He’d been brought up to know that he would have a partner chosen for him by his father, just to ensure that the Cicero Family remained prominent among the Thousand Families, who would be from a Family that needed to be aligned with his Family. The act of marriage, even if it had been in name only, would have altered the balance of power for a few years, before the tides changed and the balance altered again. Alicia wouldn’t have been chosen for him, unless her Family somehow managed to develop something the Cicero Family needed; it would have been far more likely for him to marry someone like Kathy Tyler. Instead, he’d inherited the Headship and found himself choosing his own bride.

“Slightly,” he said, as the small building appeared over the horizon. By long-standing agreement, the Imperial Register was neutral ground. The handful of people who ran it had no allegiance to any Clan or Family, choosing instead to remain out of the political struggle and remain above the fray. His father had once said that they were the only honest people on Earth, although he had added, in his deliberately cynical voice, that everyone had their price, or their breaking point. “Aren’t you?”

The building rose up in front of them, a fairy-tale castle, built using the latest materials. It should have fallen crashing to the ground under its own weight, but the metal struts hidden under the shining stone held it in the air, despite looking too thin to hold up anything. The designer had allowed his imagination to run wild, creating a housing for the Register that looked magnificent, and yet slightly silly. Tiberius had wondered, when he had last seen the building, if that were the point. The entire concept was more than a little outdated.

They were greeted, as the aircar landed, by a woman wearing a monkish robe. “Welcome to the Register,” she said, in a voice that was flat and devoid of all emotion. The custodians of the Imperial Register cared nothing for social graces, or even for the people they dealt with every week. Her face, hidden within the robe, was almost impossible to see, while the shapeless robe robbed her of every trace of femininity. “Please follow me.”