Christopher Nuttall - Democracy's Right

Jackson’s Folly had plenty of time to prepare for the Empire and even through their overt preparations had failed the covert preparations were working far too well. Fabricator was the third manufacturing ship to operate within the system’s asteroid belt, melting down asteroids and converting them into KEW projectiles. The last two had been lost to treacherous tricks by the defenders, methods of war — her lips twitched in amusement — that were not included in tactical handbooks. If she lost that ship, her supply of KEWs would be cut off until a new manufacturing ship arrived in the system; she had requested a replacement in advance, but Admiral Percival — it seemed — was refusing to deploy any additional ships out to the system. He didn’t understand the problems she was facing.

She spun her chair around until she could see the live feed from the Blackshirt command garrison, down on the surface. General Branford was holding forth, decreeing the mass slaughter of civilian hostages and the use of lethal chemical weapons, before urging his troops upwards and onwards for the glory of the Empire. Branford the Butcher, some called him, although never in his hearing; a man who had broken an alien race to the Empire’s will. His supporters, and there were many, had never concealed the fact that he’d done it by slaughtering three-fourths of the alien race and demonstrating his willingness to complete the task and adding a third exterminated race to humanity’s reputation. Angelika wondered, despite herself, if Branford hadn’t been given secret orders to exterminate the planet’s population, without making it obvious just what he was doing. He was certainly killing enough of them in reprisal raids. Even his fellow Blackshirts, drug-addled through they might be, had started to question his tactics. Her lips twisted into a droll smile. Branford might end up being the only person dismissed from the Blackshirts for excessive violence. The joke, never spoken where a senior officer might hear, was that that was how a person got in .

“Order them to pull out of orbit and head to Fabricator ,” she ordered, reluctantly. She had only five monitors at her disposal, all spaced around the world to provide complete coverage, and pulling one of them out of orbit — if only for a few hours — would put a crimp in her ability to provide fire support. Her warships carried KEWs, of course, and she would redeploy a group of heavy cruisers to provide additional support, yet they couldn’t deploy as many as the monitors. Intensive use would mean shooting them dry. “Assign a destroyer group to escort them through the flicker and back.”

“Aye, Captain,” the communications officer said. Angelika nodded. The young man might have had good connections — explaining why he was serving on a starship’s bridge just after graduating from the Academy — but he was also fairly competent and she could trust him to deal with it. His birth was actually an advantage in dealing with officers who outranked him by several orders of magnitude, although he hadn’t realised that — or that he could go much further. “The 44th Destroyer Flotilla is ready to escort the monitor.”

“Good,” Angelika said, returning her gaze to the main display. Jackson’s Folly was, at least on the surface, a fairly typical system, but it contained nasty traps for the Empire. There were a handful of raiding starships out there — including one that had destroyed one of her other manufacturing ships — and hundreds of hidden bases scattered through the asteroids. Her mining crews sometimes discovered enemy spacers waiting to kill them, or stumbled over abandoned installations, installations that didn’t seem to be listed on any file they’d captured on the planet. The natives had clearly wiped all of the data, if they’d had it in the first place. “Once that is done, schedule me a conference call with the senior officers. I want to discuss matters with them.”

“Aye, Captain,” the young man said. He was too young to recognise a symbol of… maybe not entirely defeat, but certainly an admittance that things were not going according to plan. Normally, Angelika would have played host to the senior officers on her flagship — the battlecruiser Violence — but now she didn’t dare take a commanding officer away from his or her ship. The insurgents were proving far more effective than anyone had dared fear. No one was quite sure what had happened to the light cruiser Rainbow , yet the insurgents had been boasting over their success over the planetary datanet, despite every attempt to shut it down. It wasn’t more advanced than the Empire’s system — indeed, it was genuinely inferior — but it had been designed as a distributed system, rather than the centralised systems used by Imperial worlds.

Angelika leaned back in her command chair, rubbing her eyes and silently cursing Admiral Percival under her breath. The superdreadnaughts had intimidated the locals, all right; they’d overshadowed anything the rebels and insurgents could do to them. And yet… the Admiral had seen fit to withdraw the superdreadnaughts, judging that the smaller ships could handle the pacification of the system without the presence of their older cousins. Angelika had a nasty suspicion that she’d been set up to fail. Perhaps Admiral Percival, whose drunken advances she had refused one night, had deliberately planned to embarrass her in front of the Roosevelt Family. Or perhaps it was worse. Stacy Roosevelt, the silly girl who had somehow managed to lose nine intact superdreadnaughts to a mutiny, might have been looking for someone to distract attention from her failure.

She’d expected the conquest to be easy, until she’d run her eye down the list of prohibited targets. No one had ever heard of such a thing, not in the Empire; the whole reason for developing the monitors in the first place was to make it clear that there was nowhere to hide from the Empire’s wrath. And yet, she had a whole list of places that she couldn’t drop a KEW, or she’d spend the rest of her life on an isolated asteroid settlement or mining colony. It made little sense to her, for what was the point of using monitors if there were safe areas, areas where the insurgents and rebels could congregate and plot their war against the Empire.

At least it isn’t my ass on the line , she thought sourly. The insurgents didn’t seem to have realised that there were areas off-limits for KEWs, thankfully. If they had, the Blackshirts occupying those areas would be facing far more determined attacks. As it was, the factories, universities and industrial development complexes were safely in the Empire’s hands, although no one knew how long that would last. She lifted her eyes to the master plot and scowled. The orbiting industrials were also off-limits, even if the rebels retook them and started to use them to produce new weapons of war. She had been told, quite firmly, that she was only authorised to deploy Blackshirts to recover them.

“Captain, the conference call is scheduled for 1450,” the communications officer said. Angelika nodded; forty minutes from local time, just long enough for her to have a shower and a change, hopefully allowing her to appear less stressed. She’d trained her subordinate captains to make the best use of their battlecruisers — and, in doing so, had probably encouraged them to think of ways to unseat her. She wouldn’t be too surprised to discover that one or more of them had sent secret — and accurate — reports to their patrons, rather than the pap Public Information was putting out about a highly-successful campaign. The bastards were creating an illusion that, unless someone came up with a brilliant new tactics, could only rebound on the Empire.

“Good,” she said, again. She stood up and looked over at her XO. “You have the bridge.”