Christopher Nuttall - Democracy's Right

Penny shrugged, smiling inwardly. The Roosevelt Family had spent a vast amount of political capital on securing control of Sector 117 — although incomplete control — and Jackson’s Folly, seeing the world and its daughter colonies as valuable assets. They wouldn’t be too happy with seeing the worlds reduced to dust and ash, or for the trained and experienced workforce living in place to be slaughtered mercilessly. Stacy Roosevelt had fallen from prospective heir to Family Head to an embarrassment, a family disgrace better packed off to some mining colony along the Rim, where pirates might kill her and spare the family additional embarrassment. Or maybe she would be allowed to retire gracefully on Earth, or one of the pleasure worlds. It wouldn’t do for the commoners to see an aristocrat being so firmly broken. It might give the lower orders ideas.

“And we will accomplish that goal,” Percival assured her. “It may just take a little longer than we planned.”

He turned to Penny, his eyes drifting over her tight uniform jacket before looking up at her face. “That still leaves us with the problem of the treacherous Commander Walker and his merry men,” he said, darkly. It was so unusually focused for him that Penny blinked in surprise, unable to conceal her reaction. “How do we stop him from upsetting our noble patrons any further?”

“Simple,” Derbyshire said, with all the ease of a man who knew that he wouldn’t have to carry out the plan — or bear the responsibility for failure. “We find and destroy his fleet.”

Penny snorted, before she could stop herself. “Sir, with all due respect, that task isn’t easy,” she said. “The entire Imperial Navy is a grain of sand compared to the sheer immensity of this sector alone, never mind the entire Empire. Locating his fleet would require luck more than judgement, something we could hardly count upon receiving. At the moment, he gets to pick and choose the time and place of his attacks. That isn’t something we can do for ourselves. There is literally nowhere for us to strike.”

“And so we move against their families,” Derbyshire said, changing tact. Penny winced. She had hoped that they wouldn’t consider such a tactic. “We know who the rebels are…”

“We know who some of the rebels are,” Penny countered. “Do you want to round up the families of the innocent along with the guilty?”

“They’re all rebels, therefore they are not innocent,” Derbyshire pointed out, coldly. “We round up their families and make it known that, unless they surrender, their families will bear the brunt of the price for treason.”

The Empire, Penny knew, took a dim view of treason — or indeed any dissent at all. The ringleaders were often publicly executed, just to ram the point home, while their subordinates would be transported to penal worlds, accompanied by their families. In theory, the tactic would work — it would certainly upset the rebels, including those who had been pressed into rebellion by their peers — but in practice she wasn’t so sure. Besides, most of the rebel ringleaders had no families, or had been estranged from them.

“They just raided a penal world,” Percival pointed out, coming to her rescue. “Where would you suggest sending their families?”

Derbyshire flushed hotly. “There are other penal worlds,” he said. “We can even use their families as bait in a trap.”

“I misspoke,” Percival said, coldly. “How many other penal worlds are there in this sector?”

Penny smiled, although she fought to turn it into a frown. There was only one penal world in Sector 117, the very same world that had been raided by the rebels. If Percival sent a vast number of prisoners into another sector, he would have to explain why he wasn’t sending them to his own penal world, which would mean explaining that he had a rebellion on his hands. Percival’s only hope of career survival — and perhaps even saving his life — lay in capturing or killing the rebels before the Roosevelt Family dumped him and the Imperial Navy relieved him of command and ordered him home to face a Board of Inquiry. Percival was neither senior enough nor well-connected enough to avoid facing the consequences of his failure.

The idea of using the rebel families — the Empire believed in guilt by association — as bait in a trap wasn’t a bad one, but Penny could see several problems with it. The real problem, of course, was that it was obvious . The rebels would have to be fools to ignore the possibility — and, so far, the rebels had played it smart. Percival might have wracked his brains trying to understand why the rebels would have hit a penal world — instead of flying straight to Camelot with blood in their eye — yet Penny understood. The penal worlds were the ultimate threat, a warning that anyone with dissident or criminal tendencies could be plucked from their lives and deposited on a hellish world where they would have to fight every day to survive. Walker and his rebels, by rescuing people from a penal world, had challenged the entire system. And, in doing so, they’d risked very little.

“I will work with my contacts to determine who along the Rim is supporting them,” Derbyshire said, changing the subject rapidly. “They must have a base of operations somewhere and we will find it. And then we will have something to hit.”

Penny wasn’t so sure, but she understood the logic. Commander Walker — using his superior’s authority — had requisitioned enough supplies from Camelot to keep the Observation Squadron going for several years, but it wouldn’t be enough to feed the appetites of nine superdreadnaughts. He’d need a base and a source of supply, although she could guess how he intended to continue supplying his ships. There were thousands of corrupt procurement officers in the Imperial Navy and someone with the right contacts could get his hands on almost anything. It wouldn’t be too difficult, with enough money…

Which raised another question, she knew. How exactly did the rebels intend to fund their rebellion? Coming to think of it, what was their actual goal? To overthrow the Empire, or was it merely to get revenge on Percival? And, if the former Imperial Navy officers had made contact with other rebel factions, as the attack on the penal world suggested, what did they want?

She pushed the issue to one side and smiled. “There are good reasons to believe that they have allies from outside the Imperial Navy,” she said. “The simplest course of action is to detach several squadrons of light cruisers and destroyers, using them to run recon missions though the Beyond and search for any hidden colonies. They can attempt to locate any rebel bases, with the added advantage that if we are noisy enough, someone may give them up rather than run the risk of us locating other hidden colonies.”

Percival nodded. “Good thinking,” he said. “And once we find them, we send in the superdreadnaughts and force them to stand and fight.”

“If they will stand and fight,” Derbyshire sneered. “What’s to stop them from flickering out and vanishing somewhere further past the Rim?”

“Nothing,” Penny agreed, “Except, of course, the fact that we’d have forced them to abandon their base and made them look weak in the eyes of the Beyond. They know that the Empire is strong, yet the rebels will give them hope. If we can destroy that hope…”

She allowed the thought to sink in, and then continued. “On the downside, that is a very long-term project, one with no guarantee of success,” she said. It was true enough. Searching a single star system for a hidden colony was a long and tedious task; searching along the Rim, or out into the Beyond, would take centuries. Somehow, she doubted the rebels would stand still and allow Percival to hunt for them. “We need to lure them into a trap.”