Christopher Nuttall: Democracy's Right

“A dispatch boat arrived five hours ago,” Colin continued, pulling the datachip out of his pocket and inserting it into the reader he’d bought with him. “It carried this dispatch for Captain-Commodore Howell. Commodore Roosevelt” — he kept his voice level with an effort — “will be arriving with her superdreadnaughts within one standard week, travel times permitting. Once she arrives, Jackson’s Folly will be declared a world in rebellion against its rightful masters and she will take whatever steps are necessary to place them under Imperial control. We have to act now.”

He keyed the reader and watched as the message played itself out in front of his small group. Commodore Roosevelt, one of the more well-connected officers in the Empire and a client of Admiral Percival, clearly had plans for Jackson’s Folly and its people. The Roosevelt Family was already the dominant power in Sector 117, which bordered Jackson’s Folly and its daughter worlds. They intended, Colin suspected, to get their own claims in first and prevent the rest of the Thousand Families from looting the system.

That thought, too, was a bitter one, but it had to be faced, even though he had dared to hope that Jackson’s Folly would be able to stand off the Empire. Centuries ago, just before the Great Interstellar War, Tyler Jackson had believed that the two main human powers — the Federation and the Colonial Alliance — would go to war, destroying several hundred years of human expansion and settlement. He’d invested in nineteen massive colony ships, each one larger than anything built before, and recruited thousands of colonists to head out into the great unknown, thousands of light years from Earth. They’d spent a hundred years travelling before they’d even started to look for a new home and, when they’d finally discovered an Earth-like world, they’d settled on it and started to build their utopia. It hadn’t worked out too badly for them, Colin conceded; seven hundred years of growth had led to the settlement of thirteen daughter colonies and a thriving economy. If they’d only travelled a little further away…

But they hadn’t and the Empire had stumbled across their worlds. Jackson’s Folly’s population — the Follies, as they called themselves, partly in jest — might have hoped that the Empire would leave them alone, but Colin knew better. The Observation Squadron was only the first step towards annexing Jackson’s Folly to the Empire, if only to prevent their example from causing unrest among the Empire’s teeming population. Now… a squadron of superdreadnaughts, the most powerful starships in existence, would ensure that Jackson’s Folly would have no hope at all of successful resistance. The Follies had done what they could, when they realised the sheer scale of the threat, but it was too late. They were at least fifty years behind the Empire, at least in the technological field. The Observation Squadron alone could have punched through their defences, although it would have been costly. The superdreadnaughts were merely icing on the cake.

“…It has been deemed, by the Imperial Judiciary, that after a careful and unbiased study of the evidence, that Tyler Jackson took loans from various combines to outfit his colony fleet,” Commodore Roosevelt continued, her youthful face contrasting oddly with the syrupy hypocrisy of her words. Colin felt hatred deep within his breast and he pushed it down angrily, needing to keep his thoughts clear. Commodore Stacy Roosevelt had claimed the position Colin had earned, after he’d ensured that Commodore Percival would be promoted to Admiral and given control of an entire Sector. It had taken Colin ten years to climb back up to his current position and, by then, his hatred of his betrayer had become hatred of the entire Empire. It was a brutal system that was sucking the life out of the entire human race. “They therefore owe interest payments on the order of several trillion credits to their heirs of those combines — that is, the Roosevelt Family. If they refuse to pay, their assets will be taken and used to pay their debts.”

Colin tapped the reader and the image vanished. It still puzzled him how the Empire could have taken so long to make a decision that everyone in power knew was inevitable, but then Jackson’s Folly represented the largest prize the Empire had seen in quite some time. The handful of isolated Rogue Worlds or the black colonies along the Rim were hardly worth the effort involved in subjecting them to Imperial rule. Jackson’s Folly, on the other hand, had its own industrial base and a trained workforce, one that could be put to work for the glory of the Roosevelt Family and the expansion of the Empire. Whichever Family ended up with the lion’s share of the proceeds would be in a position to control the next wave of expansion past Sector 117. The Roosevelt Family’s enemies had probably considered it worth the attempt to prevent them claiming supreme — or even sole — control over the independent system. Their delaying tactics had finally run out.

“So, that’s it then,” Daria said. The red-haired woman smiled, humourlessly. “It’s time to either shit or get off the pot.”

Colin, despite himself, smiled, for Daria had a talent for cutting right to the heart of any problem without delay. She was the leader of the Freebooter League; a union of independent starship captains trying to remain free of the massive shipping combines that shared out the Empire’s shipping trade between them, a position that had made her a target for Imperial Intelligence and its secondary security units. If they had known that Colin had made contact with her — and, through her, the rebels and black colonies past the Rim — they would have had a collective heart attack. The price on her head just kept growing.

He studied his other conspirators openly. Commander Khursheda Ismoilzoda was a dark-skinned woman, who had been exiled to the Observation Squadron after refusing the sexual advances of a well-connected superior officer. Unusually for the Imperial Navy, she was from Earth itself, having fought her way off the planet and into the Imperial Navy. The scar that ran down her cheek was a chilling reminder of her early life before she’d escaped into space and left Earth behind forever. Lieutenant-Commander Dave Howery, in contrast, was taller than Colin, with short brown hair and an irrepressible smile. Like Colin, he had trusted in the wrong superior officer; his patron had ensured that Howery had taken the blame for his patron’s mistake, a mistake that had led directly to a very valuable starship spending several months in a shipyard while its drive nodes were stripped out and replaced.

Colonel Neil Frandsen was very different. Short and stocky, as all Marines seemed to be, he had been exiled to the Observation Squadron after refusing orders from a superior officer. The Marine unit under his command had captured half of a black colony, including hundreds of non-combatant women and children, but the fighters were still holding out in the other part of the colony, presenting the Marines with a formidable tactical challenge. His superior had ordered him to start executing the women and children in order to make the fighters surrender, an order Frandsen had refused in horror. He’d been relieved of command and ordered back to the transport ship, a decision that had saved his life when the rebels had blown the colony and killed themselves rather than submit to the Empire.

Major Vincent Anderson, Security Officer, was the final member of Colin’s inner circle and perhaps the most important. Colin still didn’t understand why the Security Officer had come to him and asked to join, rather than arresting him for planning to rebel against the Empire. Anderson, whose bland face was somehow instantly forgettable, had been worth his weight in any substance Colin cared to name, identifying Imperial Intelligence’s agents within the squadron and even a handful down on the planet. After all, they all reported to him. Colin knew that there might well be agents who didn’t report to Anderson — the Empire wasn’t very trusting, even of its most loyal servants — but they could be handled. Or so he hoped. It was quite possible that Imperial Intelligence was playing a waiting game and planning to wipe out his entire conspiracy in one sudden blow.