Christopher Nuttall - Democracy's Right

“We could hit the orbiting ships,” Hester said. “It would buy the Follies some time to regroup before the Imperial Navy returns to the system to chase us out.”

“And what happens then?” Colin asked, seriously. “The Follies will just suffer worse…”

He broke off as a thought occurred to him. Stacy Roosevelt wasn’t foolish enough to gainsay orders from her Family, not now, not when she would be completely dependent on them. Her family had ordered her to take the world intact, which meant that she couldn’t order the world scorched. And, without her permission, Percival would never dare to order a scorching on his own. It would utterly destroy his career. An officer with a stronger connection to the ideal of the Imperial Navy might order the scorching anyway, destroying a threat to the Empire along with his career, but Percival didn’t have that sort of moral courage. Colin’s lips twitched. Immoral courage would probably be a better term for it.

“We hit; get in, get out and then give them the time they need to regroup,” he said, slowly. He didn’t want to get sucked into a maelstrom. “We cannot make a long commitment to Jackson’s Folly, not when it would pin us to one world.”

“We could do more,” Khursheda pointed out. “We could enter orbit and drop KEWs on any Blackshirt positions. We could destroy most of the occupation force. The Empire would have to fall back until they could round up more Blackshirts to replace the ones we killed…”

“And then they would have to pin down a squadron of their own superdreadnaughts to prevent us from doing it again,” Cordova added. “Or perhaps they would abandon the invasion until they got reinforcements.”

“There will still be a quite considerable workforce of trained workers — workers trained in starship construction and maintenance — on the surface,” Salgak said, in his mechanical voice. Colin smiled inwardly. Even the Geeks liked the idea! Or, at least, were willing to come up with ideas to justify the plan. “We could offer to take them with us to our own construction yards and use them to expand our own workforce. It would improve our own capabilities and help to eventually liberate their worlds.”

Colin kept his face expressionless as he thought. He couldn’t deny that they had a point, that Jackson’s Folly did need help — and that it would provide an opportunity for a cheap victory against the Empire. The downside was that it would force the Empire to rush in reinforcements and rule the planet with a harsher hand, regardless of anything resembling common decency. Or, perhaps, he might be wrong and Stacy Roosevelt would permit Percival to scorch the world and settle for merely occupying the daughter colonies.

He didn’t want to be responsible for mass slaughter. He’d worked hard to avoid leaving any signs that Jackson’s Folly was in any way responsible for his mutiny and rebellion. And yet, the Empire had invaded anyway. What was the use of the rebellion, the value of the Popular Front, if they failed to respond to a world that needed help? Colin knew that hundreds, perhaps thousands, of worlds needed help, yet he could do nothing to help them. Jackson’s Folly, on the other hand, could be helped…

“Very well,” he said. Besides, a smart commander knew not to go against the advice of all of his subordinates, at least not very often. “We will recon the system first, and then jump in and open fire. We won’t stay in the system for longer than a day at most. Commodore Ismoilzoda?”

“Yes, sir,” Khursheda said.

“You will prepare a fleet of fast personnel transports, ones that can carry as many people as possible, equipped with a fleet of shuttles,” Colin ordered. “I want those ships to accompany us to Jackson’s Folly. We will use them to take out as many trained workers and their families as are willing to go and can be stuffed into the ships. Don’t hesitate to push the life support to the limit. They won’t want to go without their families.”

“Yes, sir,” Khursheda said. “How soon do you want the ships?”

“As soon as possible,” Colin said. At least Jackson’s Folly was some distance from Camelot. They should be able to get in and out quite nicely without any warning reaching Percival, at least until it was far too late. “And then we will assemble the fleet and liberate the system, if only for a few weeks.”

By its very nature, Sanctuary Asteroid played host to inhabitants and guests from all over the Beyond. The coordinates had been spread so widely that far too many people knew about its location, including Imperial Intelligence. The spooks hadn’t bothered to pass the information on to the Imperial Navy, knowing that destroying a single asteroid wouldn’t do more than scatter the inhabitants and destroy whatever links it had to the rest of the Beyond. Far better, they had reasoned, to use the asteroid as a base for their own operations, ferreting out the far more interesting — and dangerous — colonies deeper into the Beyond.

The spy felt a sense of relief as she finally returned to the asteroid. Sanctuary hadn’t been used as the meeting place for the Popular Front, even though it was fairly public, and the spy had been nervous about her presence. If someone had thought to ask the right questions, or check her luggage before she left, it might have aroused suspicions. The Rim couldn’t afford anything reassembling due process; if they’d been suspicious, they would have put her out the airlock first and ask questions later. But Sanctuary was far more cosmopolitan and crowded; the spy could afford to get lost in the crowd. In her official capacity, as a senior officer for one of the rebel outfits, he went into a single shop and requested a private meeting. The shop, a cover business for Imperial Intelligence, honoured his request. There was a brief exchange of signs and countersigns and then the spy got to work.

“This is the headquarters of the Popular Front,” she said, passing over the datachip. She’d secured the data and encrypted it using a new encryption system, one directly from Imperial Intelligence. It should be impossible for anyone to decrypt it without the right code, although the Geeks would probably be able to do it if they had a reason to look. “I suggest you pass the information onwards.”

The shop’s owner — a man with thirty years of experience in Imperial Intelligence — nodded. “Of course,” he said, in agreement. He made the chip vanish with the ease of long practice. “We cannot charter a ship for it specifically, but there should be another ship coming in soon and they can take the information onwards.”

The spy nodded. The rebel group she worked for would have been horrified to discover that most of their supplies came directly from Imperial Intelligence. They would have been even more horrified when they realised that Imperial Intelligence could have destroyed them at any time. The spy sometimes wished that things were different, but Imperial Intelligence had done something to her head, back when he’d been inserted into the Rim. She could not be disloyal. Even the mere thought of disloyalty was painful. Obedience was all that she could do.

And even if something happened to her, afterwards, the information would reach the Empire.

“Captain, the Bombardment is reporting that it is running short of KEW projectiles,” the communications officer reported. “They are requesting permission to reload from the Fabricator .”

Captain-Commodore Angelika McDonald sighed. It was rare to need more than a handful of KEWs on any given world; indeed, most worlds, even the ones with memories of independence in living memory, didn’t risk putting up a serious fight. The Empire sometimes ran out of patience with rebellious worlds and scorched them down to bedrock, before dropping terraforming packages onto the remains of the worlds and shipping in new colonists. Jackson’s Folly, on the other hand, seemed to be populated by madmen and women; they just kept fighting, even though their cause was hopeless. The Blackshirts had gone to war with their drug-fuelled barbarity and rage… and were losing. If they hadn’t been able to call in fire support from orbit, they would have been destroyed by now and in this war no one took prisoners.