But best of all, as far as she was concerned, was that there was no way that she could be blamed for the operation’s successes and failures. She hadn’t been in command; indeed, even Percival wouldn’t have had the nerve to put her in a command position, not over someone as well-connected as Brent-Cochrane. His Family would go ballistic and Percival’s career would feel the effects; there was no way that the Roosevelt Family would back him that far, not after such a foolish action. Brent-Cochrane would have the glory if the war was a success – she carefully didn’t look at Stacy Roosevelt, who was occupying another chair, her face pale and expressionless – and, unluckily for him, the blame if things continued to go badly wrong.
“And so he wants reinforcements,” Percival demanded, finally. “Did he bother to suggest from where I should draw those reinforcements?”
Penny concealed her smile. She’d briefed Percival that there were relatively few Blackshirt divisions left in the sector, certainly not ones that could be pulled away from their current duties and reassigned. The Empire’s rule was, not entirely surprisingly, rarely popular and if the Blackshirts were called away, a safe rear area might no longer be safe. Percival might have the authority to scorch second-rank or third-rank worlds, yet his superiors would not be too happy with any such action. Planets were expensive and terraforming a world after it had been scorched was a tedious, time-consuming project.
“No, Admiral,” Howe said. For the first time, he looked uncertain. Penny almost sympathised. How could he know how far his patron would back him? “He merely wishes you to know that accomplishing the objective of breaking Jackson’s Folly to the will of the Empire will require either reinforcements or mass slaughter.”
Percival scowled, his face turning an alarming shade of purple. “I will consider your master’s orders,” he said, in a tone that suggested that Brent-Cochrane had better watch his back. Penny shrugged to herself. Percival had never faced such a series of interlocking catastrophes before and it was bringing out the worst in him. How long would it be, she wondered, before he started searching for a scapegoat? If she knew him at all – and, after five years of service, she knew him very well – it wouldn’t be long at all. “I suggest that you transfer your chips to the intelligence staff here and then get some rest. I may wish to talk to you later.”
Howe, at least, was bright enough to recognise a dismissal when he heard one. Bowing his head to Stacy, he saluted Percival, turned and marched out of the quarters. He’d probably find his way to the relaxation centre and have some fun with the girls there, before getting some sleep – or perhaps he was canny enough to go straight to his assigned quarters and get some rest. There was no way to know, but then, Penny didn’t really care.
“Penny,” Percival said, turning back to face her. She nodded, concealing her own apprehension. “Do you agree with the report from Commodore Brent-Cochrane?”
Penny kept her face expressionless. It could be a set-up, an attempt to shift the blame, or it could be a genuine question. With Percival, either was possible. “Jackson’s Folly is unusually well-armed for a world,” she said, carefully. “Occupying the surface is one thing; crushing the planet’s determination to fight on is going to take much longer. On the other hand, the planet’s high orbitals are in our hands and the locals have no way of displaying us from those positions. Our ultimate victory is assured.”
“Yet we need the planet’s population relatively intact,” Stacy pointed out. Just for a second, she sounded the age she appeared, a teenage girl far out of her depth. Penny felt no sympathy. Even if Stacy had been in command, even if the mutiny hadn’t taken place, the results would have been identical. “We need to exploit the world and its daughter colonies, not destroy it.”
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 i
gnore 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.”
Penny crossed her legs again and keyed the terminal, bringing up a chart of Sector 117. “There are thousands of possible targets,” she said, “depending on just what the rebels have in mind. They could go after our shipping” – the Annual Fleet still hadn’t appeared, leading her to wonder if the rebels had jumped and destroyed the fleet – “or they could target the various Family-owned worlds in the sector, weakening our position and embarrassing us at home. Only a handful of worlds can hope to stand their fleet off for longer than a few hours; if we assume that they won’t go after such worlds…”
“Really,” Derbyshire interrupted. “And what grounds do you have for assuming such a thing?”
Penny refused to allow him to fluster her. “The rebels do not have access to any shipyards capable of repairing a superdreadnaught,” she said. “Repairing a superdreadnaught, even in a shipyard, is not a trivial task. They would probably prefer to keep their superdreadnaughts undamaged for as long as possible.”
“Unless they’ve somehow established a shipyard in the Beyond,” Percival added. He sounded as if his previous delight had turned sour. “They could be turning out their own superdreadnaughts.”
“If that were the case,” Derbyshire said, “we’d have seen newer superdreadnaughts pointed at us by now, built by the underground movements based along the Rim.”
Penny nodded. “And there is another factor to consider,” she added. She looked up at her patron, feeling her insides churning. Percival wasn't going to like this at all, not even slightly. “Commander Walker has a grudge against you personally.”
“Ungrateful piece of shit,” Percival said. His voice had turned savage, as if he were so angry he had to fight to get the words out. “I take him from the gutter, build him up into a fine young officer and this is how he repays me?”
Penny doubted that it had been that way at all. Reading between the lines, she suspected that Percival had used Commander Walker as a tool and then discarded him when his usefulness was over. The secure files had been quite indicative, with carefully-written statements in Walker’s file that suggested he was too ambitious to be trusted with high command. Her lips twitched, humourlessly. Percival had been quite right about that, although not for the right reasons. He’d just seen it as squashing a bug with unsubtle ambitions.
“Regardless, he has a grudge,” Penny said, calmly. “And that grudge is going to lead him to strike against you – and to pick targets that hurt you.”
“Camelot itself, then,” Percival said. His voice broke off, suddenly. “I see what you mean.”
Penny smiled. “You’re a Roosevelt client, so hurting the Roosevelt Family hurts you, because it makes you look incompetent,” she said, firmly. “There are nine worlds within the sector that would make good targets, with the dual aim of embarrassing you and weakening the Roosevelt hold on this sector. Those worlds will be targeted by the rebels, certainly soon if not now.”
She keyed the terminal. “We call the superdreadnaughts back from Jackson’s Folly, but we leave decoy drones in their place,” she said. “Commodore Brent-Cochrane moves his squadron to the most likely target and lurks there, under cloak. When the rebels show up, he moves to intercept and destroy them.”
“Defeating the rebellion in one blow,” Percival agreed. His grin grew wider, like a shark’s. “I must compliment you. Sending you on invasion missions as an observer clearly helps you to think.”
Penny smiled, modestly. It wouldn’t remain her idea for very long.
“I will cut the orders for Brent-Cochrane at once,” Percival added. Penny didn’t miss the long look Stacy gave him, warning him that he had better ensure that the Roosevelt Family’s interests were protected. “And then” – he reached out and ran a finger down her arm – “perhaps we can celebrate in private.”
Penny nodded, keeping her true feelings concealed with the ease of long practice. There was no point in pointing out that the rebels hadn’t been beaten yet. It would only have upset him.
Chapter Eighteen
“So,” Hester said. “Are you enjoying yourself?”
Colin shrugged. It had never occurred to him that he might suffer from a fear of crowds. In the Imperial Navy Academy, he’d been packed in with other cadets of his own age, while senior cadets had ruled with a rod of iron, keeping trouble-makers in line with beatings and demerits. The cramped, almost claustrophobic conditions hadn’t bothered him; indeed, he’d been having trouble sleeping in the massive Admiral’s quarters that had been set aside for Stacy Roosevelt. He certainly had never experienced any discomfort on starships, even as a young Midshipman.
And yet…standing in the centre of the massive room, exchanging small talk with everyone – they sought him out personally – made him want to run off and hide, perhaps back onboard the superdreadnaught. He’d been in formal balls be
fore as one of Percival’s aides, yet there he’d been very much a wallflower, too lowly to be noticed. Here, he was the centre of attention. Everyone from underground leaders to starship commanders and cult leaders had come to see him, him personally. It was almost too much to bear. He would have preferred to face a fleet of superdreadnaughts wearing only a towel.
“I have been worse,” he said, gravely. Hester had effectively taken over his social schedule, introducing him to the real movers and shakers along the Rim. Some of them had been keen to work with the rebels, hoping that one day they would be able to return to the worlds the Empire had taken; others had been less willing to cooperate, either through fear of the Empire or simple disinterest. “Is all of this really necessary?”
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