“Transfer the crews to our ships, then the techs can go to work,” Kat said. They’d have to move the freighters before the enemy realized what had happened and sent a battle squadron to the dull red star, but her most pessimistic estimate suggested it would be at least a week before the enemy could react. “Tell your intelligence staff to offer them a chance to switch sides, if they like. They don’t have much of a future in a POW camp, no matter who wins.”
The XO grinned at her, but said nothing.
“Aye, Captain,” Davidson said. “I think we managed to take some data from the ships; a couple of crews purged their databases, but the others remain intact. The techs can give us a better idea of just what we’re facing.”
“Good,” Kat said. “And pass a message to your men from me. Well done.”
She closed the channel, then looked at the XO. “Pass the same message to the rest of the squadron,” she added. “They did very well.”
“The next time will be harder,” the XO reminded her. “They’ll realize we’re out here soon enough.”
“I know,” Kat said. Surprise had given them a one-sided victory. A squadron of modern destroyers would be hard for the squadron to handle, even with Lightning’s heavy firepower. “But let them enjoy it, for the moment.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
William wasn’t sure what he’d expected when he boarded the Theocratic freighter. A smelly death trap, like the pirate vessels he’d seen, or a starship held together by spit and baling wire, like far too many commercial ships whose owners were running short of money. Or, perhaps, something akin to the Royal Navy’s fleet train. Indeed, his first impression was that there really wasn’t any difference between one fleet train and the other. But the more he explored the hull, the stranger it became.
“They’ve placed religious slogans everywhere,” the Marine said as he led the way onto the bridge. “They’re even written on the command chair.”
“I see,” William said. The bridge was larger than he’d expected for a freighter, but the command chair looked hideously uncomfortable. A pair of inspection hatches had been removed, allowing the Marine techs to access the enemy computer system. “Have you found anything useful?”
“Quite a bit,” one of the techs said. She was a young woman, wearing a uniform that marked her as an Electronic Warfare specialist. “They wanted to purge the system, but they made the mistake of basing it on a commercial design; the purge was simply ineffective and they didn’t try to destroy the datacores physically. Any military system would have been reduced to dust in seconds.”
She smiled as she sat upright. “I don’t think they had much beforehand, to be fair, but they do have quite a few pieces of data,” she added. “This ship moved between a dozen worlds before it ever left enemy space, which it first did a couple of days after the Battle of Cadiz.”
They outran their fleet train, William thought. Intelligence had suspected as much, but it was nice, if a little pointless, to finally have confirmation. They had to call a halt long enough to rearm their ships and make repairs.
He shrugged, then peered down at the datacore. “Can you tell us anything useful about enemy space?”
“I’m hoping we can put it together, in time,” the tech said. “Anywhere this ship went, I think, has to be important. They were carrying weapons, so it’s probable they picked them up at their last destination”—she activated the star chart projector—“here. Logically, that star system is either a supply dump or a manufacturing center.”
“Probably the former,” William grunted. The Theocracy wouldn’t want to risk placing a production node so close to the front lines. Hell, the Commonwealth had wanted to follow the same logic. “Is there much else?”
“There’s a great many religious texts,” the tech said. “I honestly couldn’t find anything resembling manuals, let alone teaching aides; I think they were only ever expected to eat, sleep, and study religion while they were off duty. I’ll forward everything we get to the intelligence staff, sir. They’ll probably be able to draw more from it.”
“Carry on,” William said as Davidson stepped onto the bridge. He turned to face the younger man, who saluted. “What can you tell me about the crew?”
“All male, all largely uneducated,” Davidson said. His eyes darkened with disapproval. “I don’t think they could actually repair anything, if they ran into trouble. The best they could do is swap one component for another—and God help them if they didn’t have a replacement on hand. I had a look at the ship’s paperwork and it’s long on exhortations and short on anything actually practical. Honestly, sir, if I saw this lot applying for a spacer’s certificate, I’d probably die laughing.”
William wasn’t surprised. A spacer’s certificate required a technical education, which required an understanding of the basis of science and engineering. It contrasted oddly with the Theocracy’s insistence on religious education, where questioning was flatly against the rules and probably harshly punished. They’d squared the circle, William realized slowly, by making the system as simple as possible, which would work as long as the crew had spare parts on hand. The idea of making a missing component would not only be beyond them, it would likely be beyond their comprehension.
“They must have a repair crew with better education somewhere,” he mused out loud. “A group who can actually produce newer and better pieces of equipment.”
“Or maybe they don’t,” Davidson said. “Is our tech better than theirs or not?”
“I’m not sure,” William said. “The general intelligence briefings suggested that we have better sensors, but there aren’t many other advantages.”
“That will change,” Davidson predicted. “We simply have a much larger base of trained personnel to draw on, people who may produce the next great invention. They may have determined on war because another ten years of solid advancement would render us invincible, at least to them.”
William gave a trademark shrug. “Are any of the crew worth keeping?”
“The captain and a couple of his officers were a little better educated than the rest,” Davidson said. “I’ve taken the liberty of separating them from the others, so we can draw intelligence from them without contamination. The others would be in deep shit if they actually had to fend for a living.”
“Good,” William said. “Do you have a manifest?”
“Here,” Davidson confirmed. “Weapons, mainly; I think they were meant to be mated with the janissaries as soon as they reached their destination. I’ve taken a few samples for study, but it doesn’t look as though they’ve produced anything new.”
“That’s something, at least,” William said. “Can we use them?”
“Not yet,” Davidson said. “But we will see.”
William nodded. “I’ll check out the rest of the ship, then get back to Lightning,” he said flatly. “The captain will be calling a meeting at 1800; you’re expected to attend.”
“Of course,” Davidson said. “It will be my honor.”
“If the data is to be believed,” Lieutenant (Intelligence) Sandra Byzantium said, “this convoy was en route to Cadiz. They were meant to make a stop here, as predicted, so the courier boat could confirm that it was still safe to proceed. If they were told to wait, they would fall back to here”—she tapped a location on the star chart—“and await orders. This star system—it’s called Aswan—is apparently a forward deployment base.”
“Probably where they massed one of their attack fleets,” the XO muttered.
“Probably,” Kat agreed. It wasn’t much, but at least they were starting to put together a map of enemy space. “Do we know much about it?”
“Very little,” Sandra admitted. “The UN Survey Service swept through the system in 2270, but they found very little beyond a couple of Mars-class worlds and a single gas giant. There was never any attempt to settle the system, according to
the records. I think there were too many Earth-class worlds in the nearby region.”
“So no local population,” Kat mused. “Could the Mars-class worlds have been terraformed?”
“Probably, but someone would have had to make the investment,” Sandra said. “There’s no record that anyone actually did until the Theocracy absorbed Aswan within its borders.”
She paused, then continued. “I have also identified a handful of smaller worlds,” she said. “This one”——she tapped a point on the display——“is apparently a penal world. The Theocracy has been sending people there for daring to disagree with its policies rather than simply killing them outright. There’s no explanation in the files, but according to the prisoners the world is borderline habitable and the Theocracy is hoping the prisoners will make it more habitable or die trying. One of the freighters we were forced to destroy was a prison ship, according to the prisoners; it dumped its passengers there, then joined the convoy into occupied space.”
“To take more prisoners,” Davidson said. He gave Kat a sharp look. “Captain, they could be dumping POWs there.”
Kat nodded slowly. “So we should try to rescue them, if possible,” she said. “How long would it take us to get to the penal world?”
“Five days, assuming we fly a straight-line course,” Sandra said.
“Which we can’t, because we may need to evade enemy ships,” Kat said. She looked down at her hands for a long moment. Cold logic suggested she would be better hitting a major world, but she couldn’t leave POWs in enemy hands. “What sort of defenses does it have?”
“Unknown,” Sandra said. “There’s almost no tactical data stored in the captured datacores at all.”
“They do have a mania about security,” Davidson agreed. “Even a maggot with a couple of weeks at boot camp would know more than the enemy spacers.”
“Then we’ll have to sneak into the system and find out,” Kat said. “Do we have any update on how long it will be before they realize they’ve lost a freighter convoy?”
“The courier boat was meant to head directly to Aswan, once it passed on its message,” Sandra said. “I’d assume no more than five days, perhaps less. They would have been expected to fly like the clappers.”
“Of course,” Kat said. There would be some leeway—even the Theocracy had to understand that keeping schedules on an interstellar scale wasn’t easy—but how much? Better to assume the worst. “We’ll leave here as soon as reasonably possible.”
She looked at Davidson. “Which leaves us with a dilemma,” she added. “What do we do with the prisoners?”
“Transfer them to the janissary ships, then send them all back home,” Davidson said. He ticked off points on his fingers as he spoke. “We can’t keep them asleep indefinitely, not with the gas their masters use; we can’t butcher them; and we can’t abandon them in deep space . . .”
“We could abandon them on the penal world,” the XO suggested. “At least they’d have a chance to survive. Sending them back to Admiral Christian’s forward base runs the risk of having them intercepted in transit.”
Kat considered it briefly, then frowned. “Can we hope to extract any useful information from them?”
“Probably not,” Davidson said. “Most of them are utterly ignorant of anything we might consider useful, and the janissaries, at least, are outright dangerous. Better to wash our hands of them as quickly as possible.”
“Then we drop them on the penal world,” Kat decided. “As for the remaining ships, we’ll move them to the first RV and hold them there. They might come in handy.”
“Aye, Captain,” the XO said. “We could probably use the transport ships to spring POWs from the penal world.”
“Yep,” Kat agreed. She took a breath. “I’ll want to see a breakdown of everything we know about enemy space, now that we’ve captured some data.”
“Of course, Captain,” Sandra said. “I’m preparing a complete download now.”
“Good,” Kat said. “Dismissed.”
She waited for the lieutenant to leave, then looked at the two men. “Our first strike was a complete success,” she said. “But where do we need to improve?”
“We were quite lucky,” the XO said. “Not just in our choice of targets, but in the escorts they attached to their convoy. We might not get so lucky the second time.”
“There were some glitches with the boarding parties, which will be extensively detailed in my report,” Davidson said darkly. Kat knew he’d want a chance to fix the problems before anyone else get involved. “At least we know where to concentrate, now that we’ve got a real success under our belts.”
Kat nodded. “Detach one of the patrol boats and send it to Aswan,” she ordered. “I don’t expect any heroics, but I want some good passive sensor sweeps of the system. If it is a forward base for the enemy, I want to know if we can hit it or if it’s too strong for anything smaller than a superdreadnought squadron.”
“Aye, Captain,” the XO said.
“Once that ship is underway, take the rest of the squadron and our prizes into hyperspace and set course for the first waypoint,” she added. “Once there, we can set course for the penal world. If we run into something bigger than us . . . well, at least they won’t be able to recover those freighters.”
The XO saluted cheerfully. “We’ll be costing them more and more freighters as we continue the attacks,” he said as he rose to his feet. “If nothing else, they’ll need to pull ships back from the front line to chase us.”
“That’s the plan,” Kat said. “Let me know once we have an ETA to the first waypoint.”
She ran her hand through her hair as the XO headed to the hatch and stepped through it into the corridor beyond.
“It could have been a great deal worse,” she said softly. There weren’t many people she would confide her doubts to, but Davidson was definitely one of them. “We could have run into something much bigger than us.”
“Of course,” Davidson said. He didn’t seem inclined to worry about it. “But you would have broken contact, if you’d been detected at all.”
He took a long breath. “The interrogations didn’t reveal much useful information,” he added, “but some background data was quite worrying. Our captured prisoners told us about the propaganda the Theocracy is putting out. Apparently, the Commonwealth not only started the war; it’s butchering prisoners on sight and sacrificing them to the devil.”
“They clearly didn’t believe it,” Kat observed. The Commonwealth hadn’t had much opportunity to take prisoners, but mistreating anyone taken into custody was strictly forbidden. “Or they would never have surrendered.”
“They took a chance, after we proved ourselves willing to shoot anyone who tried to escape,” Davidson said. “Kat, I’ve got intelligence teams working with the prisoners, trying to put together a picture of enemy society. It isn’t very reassuring. You know we thought things were bad on Cadiz? It’s far worse on worlds that have been part of the Theocracy for decades. Much of the population accepts, like sheep, that what they’ve been told is true, that there’s no point in actually thinking for themselves . . .”
“We knew that,” Kat pointed out.
“It’s a nightmare,” Davidson said. “You know, as well as I do, just how modern technology can be used for population control. Everything they tell us makes it clear that the Theocracy keeps its population under very tight control indeed. Men are given a very basic education, mostly centered around religion, then pushed into jobs or the military; women are kept at home, then married off to have the next generation of babies. Their population density is unbelievable.”
“Perhaps we shouldn’t believe it,” Kat said. “They could be lying.”
“We have them under constant monitoring,” Davidson assured her. “Even a heavily augmented operative would have problems lying successfully—and these men d
o not have any augmentations. No implanted weapons or senses, no booster caches; they don’t even have basic neural links or any other form of implant. I don’t think they’re trying to lie to us.
“The commander of the first freighter to surrender is the seventh of fifteen boys; apparently, he has five sisters he rarely saw before they were married off. His oldest brother has seven children; his second-oldest brother has nine. These aren’t members of the aristocracy, I think; they’re common citizens.”
Kat frowned. She was the youngest of ten children, but large families weren’t normal on Tyre, at least outside the aristocracy. Raising children cost money, after all, and not everyone was wealthy enough to give ten children a reasonable upbringing. She vaguely recalled, from history texts, that large families had once been the norm, when the planet was being settled, but that hadn’t lasted more than a few decades. If the Theocracy had started with a couple of thousand settlers, and each of them had had five children and each of their children had five children more . . .
She ran through the math in her head, then cursed. “No wonder they started to expand,” she said. In the days before spaceflight, large families had been a defense against disease and deprivation, but modern medicine ensured that all children grew to adulthood. “They needed more living space.”
“So it would seem,” Davidson said. “They take the concept of having dozens of children quite literally.”
He sighed. “And that explains, I think, their high level of social control,” he added. “They don’t dare relax their system for fear of an explosion. If their population started to question their leaders, all hell would break loose.”
Kat shuddered, remembering stories of Earth’s last days. The UN had been a poor master; too large to be effective, too powerful to be trusted. No wonder that so many people had fled Earth . . . and no wonder that the colonies had fought desperately to avoid being occupied by the UN. In the end, they’d seen no alternative other than the complete destruction of humanity’s homeworld. Billions had died in one day, leaving Earth a scorched wasteland of destruction. And now . . .
Falcone Strike (Angel in the Whirlwind Book 2) Page 13