Christopher Nuttall - Democracy's Right

“Well enough,” he said, after a moment’s thought. “They’ve definitely got the promise. We weeded out a handful of trouble-makers and people who simply couldn’t follow instructions and the remainder are undergoing heavier training now. We’re short of equipment for them, but we are working on obtaining equipment from elsewhere.”

Daria smirked, rather like a cat. “It’s astonishing what falls out of a freighter’s closed hatches if you bribe the right person,” she said. “We may not be able to offer Marine-grade armour, but we can certainly obtain Blackshirt-level armour.”

“That will reduce our effectiveness to some degree,” Frandsen warned. “The Blackshirt armour isn’t configured to a specific user.”

“We’ll just have to live with it,” Colin said, grimly. The Popular Front had a surprising amount of industrial capability, but it wasn’t up to the task of delivering Marine-quality armour. The latest report from the Geeks had been that the Annual Fleet’s supplies had been unloaded and were being put to work now, fuelling the rebellion. “That leaves the question of our new ships. Where do we stand with those?”

Salgak looked up, his implants whirring and clicking as he spoke. “The preliminary arsenal ships are projected as being completed in three weeks,” he said. “We expect that there will be a short period of shakedown trials before the ships can be deployed as part of the fleet, but we will monitor the process closely and probably shave a few days off the working-up period for any later ships.”

Colin smiled. The Geeks were talking as if they were working slowly, but he knew that they were working at an astonishingly high-speed. No Imperial Navy shipyard could match them, not now they had the supplies from the Annual Fleet to work with and whatever other resources Colin could throw at them. Given twenty years, they might build up a fleet that would outclass the entire Imperial Navy, but they didn’t have twenty years. The Empire knew that they existed and, now, the news was spreading outside Sector 117.

He looked up at the holographic display, now reset to its default mode. The expanding circles suggested just how rapidly the message was moving through the Empire, towards Earth. In nine months, perhaps less, the entire Empire would know about the rebellion. The Thousand Families would react, certainly; they’d cut ships loose from Home Fleet and whatever other reserves they had on hand, sending them to the sector to reinforce Admiral Percival and seek out the rebel bases. Time was not on their side.

“Good,” Colin said. “Once we have a sufficient number of supporting ships on our side, we will move against Camelot and punch out Percival’s fleet. Until then…”

He looked around the room. Between Cordova, Khursheda and himself, a number of Imperial worlds had been hit. Apart from Piccadilly, none of them had been particularly important or wealthy, but the mere act of hitting them would give them prominence in Percival’s mind. He would be tempted to spread out his fleet in hopes of picking off one of Colin’s raiding parties, reducing the forces he had on hand to cover the most important worlds. Colin had no way of knowing if he would give in to that temptation. He had most of the systems under covert observation, but it took time for word to get from one system to another, leaving the information hopelessly out of date when he received it.

The rebels hadn’t had it all their own way either. Several of Cordova’s ships had been picked off when they’d run into a squadron of Imperial Navy heavy cruisers, who had chased them until the raiders could power up their flicker drives and escape. One of Khursheda’s cruisers had been destroyed by an Imperial Navy battlecruiser during a duel over a resource-rich system on the way back home from Camelot. If the war became a war of attrition, Colin knew, the Empire had far more ships and men to spend on such a process. His fleet would be ground away.

“We need to hit Greenland,” he said, reluctantly. Greenland was actually another Roosevelt system, with similar levels of defences to the last world they’d hit — and, this time, they wouldn’t allow a squadron of superdreadnaughts into firing range without ironclad proof of identity. His ships would have to duel with at least one fully-alert orbital battlestation and while his superdreadnaughts would have superior firepower, Colin knew that he was going to get hurt. “It’s the only other target that will force Percival to disperse his forces still wider.”

“Perhaps it is the logical target,” Hester said, in her harsh voice, “but it is not the target we need to hit.”

Colin looked up, surprised. When he’d allied himself with Hester and helped her to form the Popular Front, they had agreed that he — Colin — would have supreme authority over the military. There were no others along the Rim — with the possible exception of Cordova — who had his military training or experience, although he did have to admit that the Rim had thousands of ships and crews experienced in hit and run attacks. If there had been a major disaster, he would have expected some complaints over how he ran the military, but they’d won every major battle so far.

“We have links with Jackson’s Folly,” Hester pointed out. Colin frowned, somehow unsurprised. He’d carefully refrained from looking at any of the data collected by his observation ships in the system — apart from using it to track the Imperial Navy starships — hoping to avoid a sense of guilt, a sense that everything that Jackson’s Folly was enduring was because of him. He knew better, he’d read Stacy’s files… yet he couldn’t help the guilt. It was not logical, but it was true — and very human. “They’re suffering down there.”

Colin frowned, feeling the guilt clawing at his heart. Perhaps Hester saw it in him, because she chose to push harder. “The Blackshirts are destroying every hope and dream the planet ever had,” she said. Colin understood, suddenly, how Jackson’s Folly had gotten its hands on some of the Empire’s technology. They’d had links with the Rim! “We need to help them or there won’t be anything left when we finally defeat the Empire and liberate their worlds.”

“That may be tricky,” Colin admitted. He had nothing against helping Jackson’s Folly, but it would be a dangerous operation, all the more so because the Empire might have left one of Percival’s superdreadnaught squadrons in the system. An equal fight was all very well, but Colin would have preferred to cheat. Besides, if his superdreadnaughts were lost, the Empire would have won. “Let’s see.”

He tapped his console and brought up the latest from Jackson’s Folly. The timestamp under the display warned that the latest reports had been a week old by the time they’d been transferred to the asteroid and then inserted into the superdreadnaught’s datanet. Colin mentally edited that to nine days, as they’d spent two days refitting the ships, repairing minor damage and giving the crew a few hours of liberty on the asteroid.

The enemy superdreadnaughts were gone, but Jackson’s Folly was enveloped by over thirty starships, including two battlecruiser squadrons. The other ships were either monitors — positioned in low orbit to provide fire support to the troops on the ground — or destroyers, prowling the system for enemy starships. The latest reports suggested that Jackson’s Folly had a number of ships hidden in the asteroid belt, which emerged from time to time to pick off vulnerable Imperial Navy starships. The world had done a good job of preparing an insurgency to greet the Imperial Navy and the Blackshirts, but Hester was right. Without some outside help, the Follies were doomed. Stacy Roosevelt and her twisted kin would wind up inheriting a desert, a desert called peace.