Christopher Nuttall - Democracy's Right

“I shall,” she said, with a wicked smile of her own. Despite her worries she was more than a little fascinated by his job. She had known that there was conflict — subtle rather than violent — between the different Families, yet she had seen little of it. “What Family do you work for?”

“One of the greatest,” Dave said. He refused to be drawn any further, reminding her that what she didn’t know she couldn’t tell. Penny wanted to be offended by his remarks, but he was right — and besides, she didn’t want to make him clam up any further. “Do you want to know the real nightmare?”

“Of course,” Penny said. Her grandma had once told her to make sure that she learned everything she could, because information was the weapon of the weak. Her grandma, the matriarch of her family, had been a font of good advice, even if she had called Penny a whore and worse after she had found out what she was doing for Percival. The Quick family had been commoners, poor compared to even the lowest member of the Thousand Families, but they prided themselves upon honesty and decency. “What can scare the Thousand Families?”

“Opening a planet for settlement, at least the kind of settlement that might pay off its debts, costs a vast amount of money,” Dave said. “It’s growing harder and harder for anyone, even the greatest of the Families, to concentrate that level of wealth for a single purpose. The Empire just sucks up money, from servicing debts to paying for the Civil Service and the Imperial Navy. Few can afford to make the investments needed to create new sources of wealth and even when they do create new sources the money is drained away into the Civil Service. The Empire is bleeding itself dry.”

Penny remembered her own speculations about the Roosevelt Family and felt her blood run cold. If the Roosevelt Family held the entire sector, they — and they alone — would be able to tap it for resources. Sector 117 would feed the Family and nourish it, provided that the Family lasted long enough for the wealth to start flowing. No wonder Stacy Roosevelt had been so keen to terminate the rebellion — and Jackson’s Folly — so quickly. The longer they delayed, the greater the chance of someone else sticking a wedge into the sector and using it to share in the loot.

“So what,” Dave asked, “happens when the money runs out?”

His face twitched into a humourless smile. “The Thousand Families will start fighting over a shrinking pool of resources,” he answered his own question. “And then all hell will truly break loose. That’s why we have to terminate this rebellion as quickly as possible. The loss of Sector 117 is no great threat to the Empire, but it will make the edifice shiver and start to collapse. And then the whole Empire will collapse into debris?”

Penny said something that she would never have dared say in front of Percival. “Is that such a bad thing?”

Dave didn’t explode, or hit her. He just smiled. “Look at it this way,” he said. “The Empire, as bad as it is, is the only thing holding the edifice together. If the Empire breaks apart, trillions of people will lose everything — and that assumes that we don’t drop down all the way into civil war. There will be a colossal disaster right across human space. Billions will die.”

Penny sighed. “You don’t understand,” she said, tiredly. She remembered accessing — in private — the message the Popular Front had uploaded into the ICN. “The civil war is already here.”

The days on the small starship — it turned out that it was called the Hatta Mari , for reasons Dave refused to discuss — slowly started to blur together. Dave was amusing company and Penny did find herself with enough time to catch up on her reading. She also found herself joining him for evening viewing, where he showed her some of his collection of forbidden entertainments, some of which made her laugh. The Empire’s Public Entertainment Division simply didn’t amuse her like the forbidden shows. Dave was careful not to tell her where he’d obtained the recordings, although Penny found herself suspecting that he had some pretty extreme connections of his own. He certainly didn’t seem to be worried about her tattling on him to his superiors.

“It feels like a holiday,” she said, one evening. Her time sense was also starting to blur; the ship was making several jumps, followed by a pause to allow the drive to cool down and recharge. Nothing short of a courier boat could have matched the small starship’s pace and yet, Earth was still thousands of light years away. One day, she was sure, the researchers would find a way to flicker instantly anywhere… but probably not under the Empire. The Thousand Families discouraged technological advancement. “Is that what you had in mind?”

Dave smiled. “I wanted you to relax your mind,” he said. “You’re too stressed to be of much good to my patrons, so I wanted you to relax.”

Penny smiled back. It was odd how relaxed she felt in his company. “And I’m sure that you had no ulterior motives,” she said, wryly. Dave chuckled. “How do you think we will fight the war?”

Dave shook his head. “I think that for us the war is over,” he said, deadpan. It had been a catchphrase on one of his entertainment shows. “It all hangs on the Thousand Families and Earth now. If we don’t convince them…”

Penny made up her mind and reached for him, pulling him towards her for a kiss. Dave turned and kissed her back, his mouth exploring hers, even though there was a sort of curious dispassion in his act. Percival had wanted her to submit; Brent-Cochrane had wanted to mark his territory… but Dave’s reactions were different. And, somehow, having chosen to have sex with him herself made all the difference to her. She made love to him with all the passion and fury that she could muster.

Afterwards, she lay back in his arms and knew that he was right. For the moment, for her at least, the war was over.

“The war is not over,” Admiral Quintana insisted. The short portly CO of Sector 99 bristled with firm determination. “The loss of Camelot only pins them to one location.”

Brent-Cochrane couldn’t disagree with the logic. Admiral Quintana’s sector fleet had paused long enough to stop at one of the relay stations — a precaution Brent-Cochrane had suggested — and discovered to their horror that Camelot had fallen. It was impossible to believe that the rebels possessed nearly ninety superdreadnaughts — it would have required capturing and crewing the squadrons from the seven nearest sectors — yet how had they produced such a massive missile salvo? He wanted to hate Percival for throwing away his ships, but how could anyone have anticipated such a meatgrinder?

Admiral Quintana carried on, ignoring his subordinate’s concerns. “The rebels will have to maintain their fleet at Camelot or we will just walk in and repossess the system,” he said. He’d been saying it again and again since they’d found out about the Battle of Camelot, as if he was desperately trying to convince Brent-Cochrane — or himself — of the truth of his words. “We will go in, prepared for such a huge salvo, and retake the system.”

Brent-Cochrane chuckled darkly. “And how does one prepare for such a large salvo?”

“We get the hell out of its way,” Admiral Quintana said, dryly. Brent-Cochrane laughed, more to himself than to anyone else. The only realistic defence against such an attack was not to be there when the missiles started to home in on one’s position. Percival’s superdreadnaughts hadn’t had their flicker drives spun up and ready, probably concerned about wear and tear on the generators. It would be just like Percival to thank a victorious officer by demoting him for not taking care of his ships. “We jump into the system here” — his finger stabbed at the display — “and advance in normal space. The rebels will have plenty of time to see us coming, but we’ll use the time to keep our drives humming, ready to spin up and jump us some distance from their target. And then we will see how many salvos they can fire.”