Christopher Nuttall - Democracy's Might

The spy had known that the rebels were organised, but she hadn’t really realised how organised until she’d spent a month on the rebel superdreadnaught. Unlike the Imperial Navy, where junior crewmen were often left at the mercy of NCOs and bullying rings, the rebels seemed determined to involve everyone in their work. The Senior Chiefs were strong and capable men, all skilled at drawing the very best out of their subordinates, while the officers took a keen interest in what the crewmen did. Indeed, quite a few of the officers were mustangs, crewmen who had been promoted to the ranks. The practice was rare in the Imperial Navy, but the rebels had adopted it with glee.

It seemed to be working out for them, the spy had to concede. Newly-minted officers might know how to salute, wear dress uniform and precisely just how much they should genuflect to higher-ranking officers, but they didn’t often know much about the practicalities of their job or just how closely they should be supervising their subordinates. They tended to leave such matters in the hands of the Senior Chiefs or NCOs, all the while concentrating on how best to take the credit while avoiding blame. But mustangs knew their compartment intimately, inside and out, and they were rarely scared of tough crewmen who might intimidate younger, more vulnerable crewmen. Overall, the efficiency rate had improved remarkably.

The spy found that galling — and not a little worrying. Being on the superdreadnaught was nothing like being on the asteroid, where it was a dog-ate-dog world at the best of times. She had been conditioned as part of her training, disloyalty to the Empire could only remain as an abstract concept in her mind. It wasn’t fair, she told herself, more than once; if she’d been able to switch sides, she might have tried. There were worse causes to die for than reforming the Empire. Hell, merely improving the promotion system alone might help staunch the bleeding.

But she had been conditioned and, sooner or later, her programming would push her into taking action, even at the risk of her own life.

It was astonishing, she had discovered, just how much information was openly shared between the decks. On an Imperial Navy starship, the crew were often kept ignorant of what was going on around them, but the rebels didn’t seem to care who knew where they were going. The spy found it unbelievable at first, right up until the information was proved accurate. Didn’t they realise they had a security problem… or didn’t they care ? The spy had no illusions about the former. The Imperial Navy had attacked Sanctuary Asteroid and the only way they could have located the asteroid was through someone passing on the coordinates to Imperial Intelligence. Paranoia had kept the spy passive, despite the growing pressure from her conditioning. What if they were merely watching and waiting for her to betray herself before they acted?

But eventually the conditioning wore her down.

There was no such thing as a master override code for a superdreadnaught command core. If there had been, the spy knew, the Geeks would have taken advantage of it long ago. Everyone knew that the Geeks had unhealthy relationships with computers, even going so far as to directly link their brains to computer cores and dump information directly into their heads. If there had been a master code, the entire Imperial Navy could simply have been deactivated.

But there were a handful of backdoors, for someone who knew the right codes and how to use them.

The spy had been nervous as soon as she entered the access code, once she found a place to work where she could be certain of being undiscovered. It was impossible to remove the backdoors, she had been assured, without disintegrating the entire computer core and rebuilding it from scratch, but someone could easily have inserted a flag into the system to sound the alert when the backdoor was used. She braced herself, yet nothing happened. But if they were still waiting…

Carefully, she inserted a string of commands into the system, then shut down the backdoor and made her way out of the component. No armed Marines were waiting to grab her, no officers staring her in disapproval… she seemed to have managed to insert the commands and then pull out without detection. She was still sweating, however, when she reached the mess and picked up a tray of food. If she’d been detected, she knew there would be no hope of escape.

“You should have tasted the food before we rose up,” a voice said. She looked up to see a junior crewman, one of the old sweats. “It tasted like something someone scraped out of the back end of a cow.”

The spy smiled. “Horrible,” she said. Imperial Navy rations had never been very good at the best of times — and some senior officers had actually sold off the naval rations and replaced them with commercial crap, allowing them to pocket the difference. “Why don’t you tell me all about it?”

They were still deep in conversation when the superdreadnaught — and its fleet — resumed its journey towards Tyson.

Admiral Ravi Lanai knew that she was not a great leader.

It wasn’t something that bothered her, normally. She’d been an administrator for far longer than she’d been a starship officer, let alone a commander. Her patronage links had helped her to reach Tyson, where she’d found herself beholden to five different families rather than just one. It gave her an unusual freedom of action, but it also forced her to try to keep the balance between the families.

Tyson wasn’t actually a bad place to live or work. The system hadn’t originally been considered for a naval base — the files stated that Tyson was the only system in the sector that could reasonably serve as base, but Ravi suspected that someone had paid huge bribes to get the bureaucrats to agree — and much of the population was civilian. The combination of civilian presence and multiple aristocratic families created an odd dynamic, one that gave more freedom to the inhabitants than they could expect anywhere else. And Ravi, the CO of the system’s defences, rather enjoyed it. She didn’t have to bow and scrape to enjoy her position and the authority that came with it.

But the rebellion had upended all of her plans. If someone drew a line between Earth and Camelot, Tyson would be on that line — or at least close enough to make reducing the base a rebel priority. Ravi had watched in dismay as hundreds of senior administrators bugged out, taking their servants and slaves with them, while leaving her with orders to hold the planet as long as possible. They had clearly lacked any faith in her ability to hold the line. Not that Ravi could really blame them, to be fair. It had been decades since she had set foot on the command deck of a starship.

She’d half-expected the blow to fall instantly, even though cold logic told her that it was unlikely. Three months had passed since the Battle of Camelot, giving her time to prepare — although she was grimly aware that, lacking any superdreadnaught element, she could only bleed the rebels as they attacked the system. She’d also deployed a handful of smaller ships in nearby systems, some of which had reported the rebels flickering in, devastating the defences and then flickering out again. For once, Ravi was actually grateful that the administrators had recalled urgent business on the other side of the Empire. If they’d been on Tyson, watching as nearby investments were blown into fragments, they would have pestered her to send ships to defend them. But against the sheer weight of rebel firepower, it would be suicidal…

Unlike some officers she could mention, she had never seen the urge to fill her quarters with servants and pleasure slaves. Sleeping alone was one of her great pleasures and she wanted to enjoy it, even if she knew the rebels were steadily advancing towards her position. She was tucked up in bed, half-asleep, when the alarm sounded, followed by the voice of her XO calling her to the command centre. Ravi snapped awake, silently thankful for her habit of sleeping in her underwear, then grabbed her trousers and jacket and pulled them on. She would look dishevelled, she knew, but it hardly mattered. She’d met too many officers who focused on spit and polish at the expense of fighting. No doubt one of them would have sniffed at her looks, if he had been on the command deck.