Christopher Nuttall - Democracy's Might

“Tell me something,” Jeremy said, after a moment. “What guarantee do I have that you’ll keep your word this time?”

The man looked like he had bitten into a sour apple. “The word of an Imperial Intelligence officer?”

Jeremy made a rude noise, but said nothing.

“Fine,” the man said, tiredly. He looked behind Jeremy, at the two men who’d been standing behind him. “Take him to the mind-ripper.”

General Montgomery’s hull was scorched and pitied with the scars of battle.

Colin stared through the shuttle’s cockpit as he brought it closer to the starship’s hull. The superdreadnaught had never been elegant , but now it was a mess. Giant pieces of armour had been damaged or blown clean off the hull, exposing the soft interior to enemy fire. If the battle had continued for much longer, he saw, the superdreadnaught would have been crippled or destroyed. As it was, they’d been lucky to escape.

He sucked in a breath as he saw the workers swarming over the hull, struggling to fix the damage as quickly as possible. It was far too likely that the Imperial Navy had taken prisoners, he knew, and the prisoners would be made to talk. If so… Colin had ordered the fleet train to jump with them to a random location, but it still bothered him. The loyalists might not be able to find the fleet, yet there was too much danger of the enemy launching a counterattack against worlds currently held by Colin’s forces. Or simply licking their wounds and daring Colin to try again.

“What a ghastly mess,” Daria commented, from behind him. “But you got out alive.”

Colin scowled at her. Losing some of his crew — dead or prisoners — hurt . Shadow , his first command, was in enemy hands, almost certainly bound for the scrapheap. And he’d lost some of his closest allies and friends. The fact that he had survived the battle and escaped enemy captivity didn’t make up for it.

“Yes, I did,” he said, finally. He turned to look back out at the mighty superdreadnaught. “I retreated from a battle I deemed unwinnable.”

“That wasn’t a foolish decision,” Daria said, tartly. “And why exactly are you beating yourself up over it?”

“I let the enemy commander lead me by the nose,” Colin said. He’d badly underestimated his opponent. If the enemy CO had managed the timing a little better, the rebels might have lost the battle decisively. “I led those men to their deaths.”

“They knew the risks,” Daria said. “They all decided that fighting the Empire and trying to destroy it was worth risking their lives.”

Colin rounded on her. “How can you be so bloody clinical ?”

“The Beyond is not a place for sentiment,” Daria told him. “Yes, you lost the battle — and yes, it is tragic. But the war is not lost.”

“We’re going to need a few weeks to lick our wounds,” Colin pointed out. “We only have mobile repair ships, not actual shipyards. The damage we inflicted on Morrison’s fleet, on the other hand, will be fixed relatively quickly. They could take the offensive or merely remain where they are, blocking us. And, in the meantime, the Empire builds up its fortifications and…”

Daria caught his arm and held it, tightly. “Do you think we’ve lost the war?”

Colin hesitated, then shook his head.

“Good, because we haven’t,” Daria said. “You got most of the fleet out, intact. You have repair crews to get your ships back into fighting trim. You have new weapons and other surprises on the way. In short, Colin, you have not lost the war. I don’t think there has ever been a commander in history who has never been defeated.”

“I suppose not,” Colin said, reluctantly. The Great Captains of history had all suffered defeats, some worse than others. They’d studied their campaigns in the academy. “But it is going to be chancy…”

“It’s always chancy,” Daria said. She pulled him to her and kissed his lips, hard. “We knew when we started that we might lose. But defeatism doesn’t help at all.”

Colin blinked in surprise, gasping for air. “But…”

“But nothing,” Daria interrupted. She kissed him again. “Now, take us back to the ship. We have funerals to attend, then work to do.”

Colin watched, as dispassionately as he could, as the last of the bodies was slowly pushed out of the shuttlebay by the tractor fields. They’d pulled upwards of two thousand bodies out of the damaged ships, most of which had been badly mangled. He’d actually made the decision to have some of the bodies launched in makeshift coffins, even though they were short on materials they could use to produce them. Morale was already low enough without forcing the crew to see the remains of their friends and comrades.

Imperial Navy tradition called for bodies to be buried in space, cast adrift on a course that would take them inevitably towards the nearest star. Hundreds of years in the future, he knew, the bodies would finally reach their destination and burn to ashes, then become part of the universe itself. It was one of the few traditions that the Imperial Navy shared with some of the Beyonders.

“We knew that we had embarked on a long hard road,” he said, addressing his entire crew. “The Empire was shaken by our rebellion, but it was still strong. Today, we discovered just how strong and capable it could still be.”

He gritted his teeth. The Imperial Navy’s officers rarely worried about morale. To them, the junior officers and crewmen were just there , entitled to hold whatever beliefs and fears they had as long as they obeyed orders without question. But Colin, who had little of the legitimacy the Empire had enjoyed, knew that he couldn’t afford to ignore his crew’s morale, not after he’d set a precedent for mutiny. Besides, he needed to get the best out of them.

But public speaking had never been his forte. “We lost the battle, but we have not lost the war,” he continued. “There are new weapons and tactics on their way. We will return to Morrison and we will defeat the enemy, then advance on Earth. This setback — and it was a setback — will not be allowed to slow us down any more than strictly necessary.

“We did well against the best the Empire could offer,” he concluded. He’d reviewed the sensor logs and noted, much to his relief, that his ships were often far more efficient and capable than the Imperial Navy’s fleet. But it hadn’t been enough to make a difference. “Next time, we will do better.”

He finished his speech and closed the channel, knowing that everyone on the fleet had heard his voice. Would they believe him, he wondered, or would their morale be utterly crushed by defeat? A third of them hadn’t even joined the rebellion until after the Battle of Camelot. They hadn’t seen defeat — or the way Colin had danced around Admiral Percival, reluctant to risk a direct encounter until he’d stacked the decks in his favour. Now… how would their morale hold up after a defeat?

It was a draw , he told himself. But he knew that was nonsense. They’d inflicted considerable damage on the Imperial Navy, but the enemy CO had bested him and retained his grip on Morrison. Perhaps, if Colin had had the reserves to spare, he would have considered it a victory. But he didn’t have anything to spare. Even the makeshift warships that added to his point defence were too valuable to throw away casually.

He was still mulling it over as he strode into the conference room, twenty minutes later.

“I have a report from the repair crews,” he said, once the brief exchange of formalities was completed. He’d never enjoyed the Empire’s obsession with formal protocol. Besides, they’d mutinied against their superiors. There was no point in pretending to be something they weren’t. “We are looking at three weeks before we get back up to full combat effectiveness.”