Original Work Desperate Glory (Morningstar IV)

Chapter Seventeen

“There were no major issues during your absence,” Boothroyd said, once Leo returned to hisa office on Morningstar Base. “A handful of minor hiccups, all handled off the books.”

“Glad to hear it.” Leo sagged into his chair. The flight back to the base had been terse. He’d ordered the crews to be given a week’s rest once they’d arrived, but it was nowhere near a proper replacement for shore leave and they knew it. “First, we were cheated out of shore leave on Culloden and then again on Yangtze.”

“I see,” Flower said. “Was there any good reason?”

“No.”

Leo stared at the terminal for a long bitter moment. The updates from Yangtze hadn’t really explained anything. The rebels hadn’t launched any major offensives; they’d merely jumped a handful of ships into a number of systems, fired off a bunch of missiles and vanished again before they could be tracked down. They hadn’t accomplished anything, beyond stressing out the defenders … perhaps that was the point. No military force could remain on peak readiness indefinitely, no matter what the media claimed, and every feint ground the defenders down a little bit more. They’d be shooting at shadows soon enough, Leo was sure, while the rebels kept their forces in tip-tip condition. How long would it be, he asked himself, before Admiral Blackthrone did something desperate? Or his replacement did something – anything – to take the offensive?

“We could try and set up a pleasure dome,” Boothroyd offered. His tone betrayed his doubts. “Or hire a bunch of entertainers from the nearest world …”

Leo shook his head. Entertainers – whores, in all but name – were rarely allowed on military bases. He’d pushed regulations to breaking point when he’d agreed to allow a pregnant woman on the base, arguing that she was a skilled worker and her husband all the more so; he doubted, despite himself, that he could convince the admiral that entertainers were skilled personnel. Skilled naval personnel, at least … perhaps he could put them on a freighter and claim they weren’t attached to the base at all. He might just get away with it.

You’ll be lucky, he told himself. Do you even have the resources to spare?

“We could also route personnel through a spaceport strip,” Flower said. “That would have the advantage of being legal.”

“And create a gaping hole in our security,” Leo pointed out. Someone would say the wrong thing to a whore and find it reported to an information broker, if not an outright spy. The spaceports were full of brokers and their agents, trying to be the first to get their hands on a piece of information that would change the world. “If it goes wrong …”

The hatch opened. Madeleine stepped into the compartment.

Leo looked up, torn between relief and concern. He’d barely talked to her since the squadron had been ordered away from Yangtze and … he’d intended to ask her to chat after he’d finished hearing from Boothroyd and Flower. That she’d come here … it was their shared office. Leo wasn’t egotistical enough to want a private office, not when he had a cabin already, but … he shook his head. They did need to talk. And she looked thunderous.

“I’ll catch up with you two later,” he said. “Please join me for dinner this evening.”

“Yes, sir,” Boothroyd said.

Flower said nothing, but Leo saw the concern in her eyes as they stood and left the compartment. He’d barely had a chance to tell them anything, yet neither of them were fools. The tension in the air was so thick it was easy to believe it could be sliced with a knife, as silly as that sounded to a rational mind. Leo told himself he should be relieved Madeleine had waited until they returned to the base. An argument on the ship, or in front of a senior officer, could end very badly indeed.

Madeleine waited until the hatch closed behind them, then leaned forward. “What were you thinking when you used Hammerhead as bait?”

Leo blinked, taken aback. That wasn’t what he’d expected. Madeleine had good reason to complain about the way Commodore Jackson had treated her, or the lack of shore leave, but Leo’s trick with Hammerhead? Madeleine was a good officer. He was sure she could see the logic behind his move. And it had worked.

“I let them see weakness,” he said, finally. The rebels might have thought twice if the entire squadron had charged their ship, perhaps running before his missiles struck home. “They let themselves be lured into a trap.”

“You put an entire ship of foreigners at risk,” Madeleine snapped. “Or didn’t that enter into your calculations at all?”

“No!” Leo honestly hadn’t thought about it. Hammerhead had been the closest ship to the enemy contact, the easiest one to detach from the squadron without raising enemy eyebrows … he hadn’t needed any more justification than that. “She was simply the best possible choice.”

Madeleine glowered at him. She was beautiful when she was angry, her cheeks flushing with a smouldering heat … Leo clamped down on that thought hard.

If she was aware of his thoughts, she didn’t show it. “And why did you let them deny us shore leave? It’s discrimination, plain and simple!”

Leo glared back at her. “What would you like me to have done? Challenged Commodore Jackson to a honour duel?”

“I expect you to stand up for your crews,” Madeleine snapped. “You know they’ve been through hell!”

“Yes, I know,” Leo snapped back. “But there are limits to what I can do.”

He scowled at the starchart, the three occupied stars mocking him. He’d been commander of the sector for too long, at too young an age, to find it easy to accept his position now. His exact rank was a mess and his posting even more so … technically, he should be a commodore – at least a brevet commodore – although he doubted Admiral Blackthrone would ever acknowledge him as such. He’d never realised there were limits, not emotionally, until it was too late. And now it had bitten him hard.

“You should lodge a protest,” Madeleine said.

“I did,” Leo said. He stood and paced over to the starchart. “Right now, the admiral has worse problems to worry about.”

He gritted his teeth. The logic of the phony war hadn’t changed in the slightest. Uncovering Yangtze would be a mistake, yet tying Daybreak’s forces down defending a handful of worlds gave the rebels free reign elsewhere. It felt as if the universe was holding its breath, waiting for someone’s nerve to snap … or, more likely, for the rebels to finish their preparations and mount a major offensive. Leo was sure their forces were building up, ready to strike … unless they intended to keep the phony war going for years. It was possible, he supposed, if they had the patience. An endless bleeding sore, against an enemy that refused to stand and fight, would be devastating. Daybreak had never lost a war, but Daybreak had never faced a peer power either.

“We know someone is backing the rebels,” he said, slowly. “What if they just want the rebels to mount a insurgency in deep space, rather than pushing for a decisive battle?”

“What if you concentrate on your duty?” Madeleine’s voice was hard. “And what if you protect your crews from their frustration?”

Leo nodded, conceding the point. The admiral’s frustration had probably fuelled his decision to deny Leo’s crews shore leave. Unable to find a target worthy of his ire, he’d targeted foreigners who couldn’t fight back, using a tissue-thin figleaf of justification to convince himself he was doing the right thing. Jackson had probably felt the same way too …

“I will make an issue of it, the next time I meet the admiral,” he said. “And …”

“An issue of it?” Madeleine cut him off. “You think that’s enough?”

Her tone dripped bitterness and resentment. “I gave my life to the navy! I signed up when I was fifteen and never looked back! The prize was worth the candle, I thought, and now … eleven years of loyal service, eleven years of doing everything from cleaning the tubes to tactical exercises, counts for nothing! Because I was born on Gaul! It was bad enough beforehand, when I was always at the back of the promotion lists, but now …!”

She glared at him. “The best offer I’ve had since then came from Francis Blackthrone,” she snarled. “And that came with strings attached!”

Leo nodded. Francis was smart enough to realise he wasn’t a tactical genius – and so hiring someone who was, or at least capable of growing into one, was a smart move. It would work out very well for him. His hired genius would do the work and he’d take all the credit. He’d probably take her into his bed too … hell, it said something about his family that they’d be happier with a relationship of dubious legality than Francis having a hired tactical expert feeding him ideas from behind the scenes. And if Madeleine had nowhere else to go …

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I know it stinks …”

“It stinks?” Madeleine was suddenly very close to him. Leo was very aware of her scent. It was all he could do to keep his eyes on her face. She was so very close, and his body was suddenly intent on reminding him just how long it had been since he’d lain with anyone. He knew he should back off, order her out of the office or leave himself, but he couldn’t bring himself to do anything. His legs felt as if they’d been turned to stone. “You’re damn right it stinks. What the hell did we do to deserve this?”

Their lips met. Leo had no idea which of them had kissed the other first and he didn’t much care. Her lips were warm and soft and yet driven by an intensity that drove him wild. His arms seemed to move of their own accord, enveloping her as they kissed again and again; her arms ran down his back, slipping into his pants and gripping his rear. Leo gripped her in return, his mind suddenly overwhelmed with sensations. There was no fat on her, nothing but solid muscle and perfection. He was too deep now to pull free. He didn’t want to.

Madeleine growled, deep in her throat, and pushed his trousers free. His manhood sprang out as she dropped her own trousers, then pushed him to the deck. Leo had a moment to realise she wasn’t wearing underway before she lowered herself on top of him, practically pulling him inside her. His hands rose to her breasts, still covered by her tunic, as she started to ride him, the sheer frustration driving her on. It was raw, animalistic; he thought, in a moment when he could think clearly, that she was trying to defeat him as if he were a foe she could best … the thought lingered, just for a second, and then it was gone before he could focus on it. He thrust up into her as hard as he could, heedless of who might be listening on the far side of the bulkhead, and was rewarded by her total loss of control. She pinned him down and rode him harder and harder until he came …

She sagged, falling on top of him a moment later. Leo was too dazed, too drained, to think clearly. His thoughts were slow, sluggish … it felt like hours before he became dimly aware that he was still inside her, his flaccid penis held within her. She seemed as stunned as himself, lying on top of him as if she were a blanket rather than a living person. Her uniform felt grimy to the touch … he wondered, numbly, if his felt the same way to her. It was quite likely.

Fuck, he thought, numbly. Now he was drained, it was all too easy to wonder if he’d made a mistake. Fuck!

Madeleine stared down at him, then rolled over and sat upright. Leo stared at her, feeling his manhood start to stiffen again. Her hair had come loose, ringlets of black hair spilling over her shoulders, and her face was flushed … her bare legs, leading up to a daft tuff of hair between her thighs, were strong and supple, absolutely perfect. There was nothing fake about her, he thought numbly. Her years of naval service had worked well for her.

She muttered something in a language Leo didn’t recognise, then looked at the hatch. “Did we think to lock it?”

Leo shook his head. The chamber was fairly soundproofed, but … he swallowed hard. It wasn’t as if he’d bothered to test the soundproofing. Was there someone outside? He staggered to his feet and hurried over to the hatch, carefully locking it before anyone could come into the chamber. His legs hadn’t felt so bendy since … he bit down on that memory too. It wasn’t something he wanted to relive.

Madeleine stared at him for a long moment, making no move to cover herself or to draw him back to her. Leo couldn’t tell what she was thinking. Had she enjoyed herself or did she think they’d gone too far? Or both? Leo had felt her orgasm – it had pushed him over the edge – and yet, all the pleasure in the universe would turn sour if it cost them their careers. If anyone knew what they’d done …

You do keep letting the little head get you into trouble, a voice said, at the back of his head. It sounded a lot like Flower. And now the big head has to find a way out of it.

“I need a shower,” Madeleine said. She stumbled to her feet and removed her jacket, undershirt and bra in one smooth motion. Leo tried not to stare and failed miserably. Her breasts were small yet perfect, the smooth skin marred by his fingernails; her arms were muscular, her stomach smooth, utterly flat. “Join me?”

Leo nodded and removed his own tunic, impressed by her complete lack of concern about her own nudity. There was no such thing as privacy in the navy, not even in the academy, but there were limits. Most cadets had looked away, granting what privacy they could to their comrades; the rare creep given a dose of barracks-room justice that rarely, if ever, needed to be repeated. It was supposed to get easier when you were onboard ship, but … Leo hadn’t needed to share a cabin, at least at first, and when he had it had been with an older male officer. Here … he stared admiringly as she turned and walked into the washroom, then followed her. The chamber was larger than a washroom onboard ship, with plenty of room for two.

Madeleine turned on the shower and stepped inside. Leo followed, relaxing slightly as the warm water ran down his body, washing away their mingled juices. She turned to face him, her breasts brushing lightly against his chest. Leo raised his lips to hers, kissing slowly and delicately in stark contrast to their earlier kisses, then gripped her waist and turned her around, bending her over slowly. She grunted as he pressed his penis against her womanhood, then slipped inside …

Afterwards, when they were washed, dried, and changed into fresh uniforms, he found himself unsure what to say or do. Should he forget it, pretend it had never happened? Or … should they continue the relationship … did they even have a relationship? It had been sex born out of frustration and misplaced rage, not … it wasn’t the first time he’d slept with someone who wanted to displace her feelings, but still. It could easily blow up in their faces.

He met her eyes, wishing he knew what she was thinking. Did she have regrets? Or did she regret nothing?

“I …” Leo swallowed hard and started again. He could have walked away from most of his relationships, but this one would be tricky to escape. They had to work together to get the fleet ip and running, then take it to war. “What do you want to do? I mean …”

“Smooth,” Madeleine said, sardonically. “What do you want to do?”

“We can pretend this never happened,” Leo said. He’d had hate sex once. The aftermath had been far more hateful than the sex. “We can leave this office separately and … resume our professional relationship. I won’t breathe a word of this to anyone.”

“Really?” Madeleine cocked her head. “That’s odd, for a young man.”

Leo flushed. He’d never really been into bragging about his bedroom conquests … even when he’d been too young and ignorant to understand what bedroom conquest actually meant. The older boys had bragged endlessly about girls they’d slept with – they’d used a very different term – and if they’d done a tenth of the acts they’d sworn blind they’d done, Leo would eat his uniform jacket. And when he grew up a little, he’d learnt that discretion was very much the better half of valour.

“I will respect your decision,” he said, stiffly. The girl had the right to make those choices. Or so his mother had said, as part of a lecture he preferred to forget. “Whatever you choose, I will accept it.”

“Outside, we’re co-workers,” Madeleine said, indicating the hatch. “Inside, that’ll be a very different story.”

Leo nodded, although her tone was odd. She seemed more interested in getting laid than him personally, as if he was nothing more than a glorified toy. He supposed it was more honest than some of his other relationships, and besides he wanted to get laid too.

“Got it,” he said. “I’d better sneak out now.”

Madeleine giggled. It sounded unnatural, coming from her. “Better put your socks on first.”

 

Leo, Leo Leo! Way to go, and there you go again! Maybe this time will turn out better..maybe..

 

Chapter Eighteen

“Why am I not surprised?”

Leo didn’t bother to play dumb. “It just happened.”

“It just happened,” Flower repeated. She made a show of looking around the office. “Your clothes just happened to fall off. Her clothes just happened to fall off too. You just happened to fall into her and she just happened to let you?”

Her lips twitched. “Really?”

Leo couldn’t help smiling. “Yeah. Something like that.”

Flower gave him a long considering look. “You do realise this is going to turn into a major headache, don’t you?”

She went on before Leo could muster a response. “Gayle was a civilian. So was Ruth. Sun might have been a naval officer, but as a spook she was technically outside your chain of command … not that you couldn’t have issued her orders, if the shit hit the fan. Commander Madeleine Chevallier, by contrast, is in your chain of command. You’re her superior officer even through you share the same rank. If someone realises you’re sleeping with her, it is going to give them a clear shot at your hull.”

Leo gritted his teeth. “It isn’t uncommon for two officers of the same rank to be sleeping together.”

“We’re not talking about a pair of lieutenants on a fully-manned battleship, where they’re ninth or tenth in the chain of command,” Flower said. “That might be overlooked, if there’s no reason to think one will wind up in command shortly. We’re talking about a commanding officer on a base sleeping with his immediate subordinate, his second in command. That’s going to be a great deal harder to overlook.”

“Madeleine isn’t going to let our new relationship get in the way when she wants to tell me I’m being an idiot,” Leo pointed out. “She made that clear to me.”

“That may be true,” Flower countered. “But first …”

She leaned forward. “Word will get out. It always does. You’re not in a place your comings and goings will pass unnoticed. The crew will wonder if she can be trusted to represent their concerns to their commanding officer if she’s sleeping with him … and they’ll be right. How can she?”

Leo winced. The XO was supposed to defend the crew against a tyrannical captain … not, he remembered with a flicker of dark amusement, that the academy had put it in quite those words. It was rare, almost unknown, for an XO to be promoted to replace his previous captain; normally, he’d be transferred when he received his promotion. He would be considered too close to the crew to command them properly … Leo wasn’t sure he agreed with that logic, particularly on a smaller ship, but it wasn’t something the navy would change in a hurry. Not that it mattered. He knew Madeleine well enough to be certain she wouldn’t hesitate to tell him if he was stepping well over the line.

“And second, the officers back home, the ones who’ll read your file, won’t know you and they won’t know her,” Flower continued. “Not personally, at least. They’ll judge you by actions that are technically against regulations, regardless of your actual thinking. This could blow a hole in your career. Again. Do you really want to take the risk?”

Leo hesitated, unsure of himself. He liked and respected Madeleine. She was a good officer who really should have been promoted into the command chair, an officer who had been cheated out of a place she’d earned through the actions of someone who wasn’t even from the same fucking world. Sun had screwed Madeleine – and countless others – without ever knowing them. And … he was honest enough to admit, at least to himself, that the sex was great. She’d channelled her frustrations and his into a passionate and yet violent encounter. His manhood twitched at the thought. He wanted to do it again.

“We will be discrete,” he said, glancing at his terminal. Boothroyd and Madeleine were due to arrive shortly. “And …”

“They’ll be watching both of you,” Flower warned. “If her career gets a boost, they’ll wonder if it happened because she was sleeping with you.”

Leo shook his head. He had little to offer Madeleine when it came to promotion, not when he was only a mere commander himself. His patron was unlikely to take her on, given the political situation, and Leo couldn’t really give her patronage himself. A decade or two down the line … maybe, if he continued to rise without detailing his career beyond repair, but now … he felt a sudden flash of hatred and envy, directed at Francis and his wretched family. The bastard was no higher-ranked than Leo himself, yet he could still offer patronage on a scale Leo might never be able to match.

“I doubt it,” he said. “What can I give her?”

His lips twisted, as if he’d bitten into something sour. “Being associated with me is more likely to harm her career than help,” he added. “You know it.”

“You might be surprised,” Flower said. “Your former officers haven’t done badly for themselves.”

Leo shrugged. Very few of his former officers had been chosen by him personally. Reginald had signed off on their transfer to Waterhen, or so Leo assumed, and whatever paperwork had been done had been completed well before he’d been caught in bed with the commandant’s wife. The crew could hardly be blamed for serving under his command – they could hardly be expected to desert or mutiny – and Admiral Blackthrone, to be fair, had probably not held it against them. They’d served under Francis’s command too. If they returned to more regular roles within the navy, their brief period under his command would be nothing more than a footnote in their files. Leo wished them well. They’d been a good crew.

“I hope so,” he said. “And …”

“You’re not going to be dissuaded,” Flower said. “That’s a shame.”

Leo nodded, although he knew she might well be right. One brief tryst might be overlooked – there was some precedent for brief relationships being ignored – but a long-standing affair was quite another. Common sense suggested he should end it now, blame the whole affair on passion and frustration finding an outlet; he knew, even as he considered possible arguments, that he wouldn’t do it. He scowled as the hatch bleeped, then opened. Why was it that he was a brave man in space, willing to put his life in danger time and time again, and yet a coward when it came to ending a relationship that wasn’t even a day old? Could it even be called a relationship?

Madeleine looked no different from her normal appearance as she stepped into the compartment, her hair neatly tied up and her face scrubbed clean. It had been a few hours … he guessed she’d gone back to her cabin, showered again, and then gone back to her duties as if she didn’t have a care in the world. Her manner was stern, businesslike … if he hadn’t known when they’d been doing, only a few short hours ago, he would never have believed it. Her uniform was loose and yet … he bit his lip hard to keep from thinking about the body underneath. She was fit and healthy, muscular without being too muscular …

“Thank you for coming, Commander,” he said. It was hard to keep his face under control. “I’m afraid it is only basic fare.”

“But with some fresh ingredients,” Madeleine said. Her voice was unchanged. Leo had to admire the act, if indeed it was an act. She seemed utterly unaffected by their brief tryst. “It’ll be better than nothing.”

Leo nodded, allowing himself a moment of relief as Boothroyd joined them, followed by a steward pushing the food trolley. His mouth watered as the steward laid out the meal and departed as silently as he’d arrived. The stew was very basic, prepared in vast quantities by the base’s cooks, but it was so much better than ration bars and mass-produced slop that there was really no contest. Fresh beef and vegetables, cooked up in a pot and served with mashed potatoes and greens … he made a mental note to check everyone on the base received at least one serving. It wouldn’t be the first time someone had slipped through the cracks, when there were so many crews serving so many disparate ships, and it tended to breed resentment. There was so little real food on Morningstar Base that he could hardly blame them.

“I hear you had an eventful trip,” Boothroyd said, once starvation was no longer threatening. “Did you learn anything useful?”

“Nothing new,” Leo said. Morningstar Base didn’t have a proper analysis section, no team of tactical experts trying to decipher the data in real time, and he hadn’t been able to glean anything new from the data he’d studied himself. Everything had been forwarded to Yangtze, where the admiral did have a whole team of analysts under his command, but Leo had no confidence the results would be sent back to him in a hurry. If indeed there were any. His own assessment hadn’t turned up anything he hadn’t already known. “The ships were old and outdated, but refitted by a crack team.”

“Mostly,” Madeleine pointed out. “They left a heavy cruiser with a truly shitty cloak.”

“Probably the result of an engineering cock-up,” Leo said. “If they were trying to get the ship into service quickly enough to add her firepower to the fleet, they might have skipped some of the more intensive tests regular shipbuilders carry out as a matter of course.”

“Or they might have assumed the freighters didn’t carry modern sensors,” Boothroyd said. “Or even that they weren’t going to be escorted at all.”

Leo frowned. The freighters had been largely empty and very few pirates would have considered them a reasonable target. The ships themselves weren’t worth that much and the crews wouldn’t have brought in a ransom, if their relatives chose to break the law and pay. Better to let them fly home, get reloaded and then try to capture the ships along with their new cargo. But the rebels weren’t pirates. If the ships were captured, they came out ahead; if the ships were destroyed, they still won. No wonder the commodore had insisted on the convoy being targeted. The normal understandings had changed and it was now a priority target.

“They had to expect something,” Leo mused. “Perhaps they thought we would either miss their arrival or charge them.”

“Or pretend not to see them long enough to recycle the drives and run,” Madeleine offered. “It might have worked.”

Leo mentally reviewed the engagement. It might have worked. Might.

“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “We killed a handful of outdated ships, but … the rest of their fleet remains intact. What are they doing?”

“Trying to grind us down,” Boothroyd said, bluntly. “I saw it before, back during a long drawn-out conflict neither side could win decisively. The bad guys kept up the pressure, forcing us to fire off our ammunition constantly, while never getting anything like enough sleep … here, just forcing us to keep up the patrols is draining our strength, putting immense amounts of wear and tear on our ships as well as our crews.”

“And it keeps us from being able to look for their bases,” Leo added. “But surely they know this game cannot go on forever.”

“It’s never easy to beat an insurgency,” Boothroyd said. “The insurgents move through the local population like fish through water. You can’t easily protect the people from the insurgents and as long as you can’t guarantee their safety they’ll side with the insurgents in self-defence, because the alternative is being killed. The only real ways to win are to convince the locals you can protect them, which can include everything from teaching them how to protect themselves or relocating them to safer quarters that can be kept under careful control, or destroying the local community in order to save it, which tends to make more enemies down the line.”

“I wonder why,” Madeleine said, with heavy sarcasm.

Boothroyd nodded. “You – we - have the same problem, on an interstellar scale,” he said. “You can’t defend every possible target. The enemy can pick and choose targets weak enough to be destroyed easily, or back off when it’s clear they bit off more than they can chew. They can harass worlds and populations that might otherwise side with you – and, frankly, you haven’t treated them well enough to convince them to take risks on your behalf. Even on Yangtze, there are secessionists who want to leave the republic and go their own way.”

“I know,” Leo said, quietly. “How did you win, in the end?”

“We relocated everyone.” Boothroyd met his eyes. His voice was very cold. “We rounded them all up and shipped them to a new set of communities. Everyone was registered in the system, their every movement logged … they were kept under such tight surveillance that it was easy to pick out the insurgents, and their agents, when they started to cause trouble. They were rapidly separated from the remainder and dumped on penal worlds. It was thoroughly unpleasant, for everyone involved, but it worked.”

“At a price,” Flower said.

Leo shivered. He knew how he’d feel if he were ordered to pack up and move halfway across the continent, into a community that might as well be a prison. Privacy had never really been a part of his life – he’d grown up in a small household and there’d been little real privacy even before he’d joined the navy – and yet, the idea of being watched all the time by unsympathetic eyes was horrifying. The new community might be nice, if the builders were allowed to be decent to their unwilling guests, but it would never be his. Boothroyd’s words chilled him because they put a human face, no matter how indistinct, on what had previously been little more than statistics. A few hundred thousand people relocated … the number was a number, the reality a great deal worse.

“We can’t do that here,” he said.

“Yes,” Boothroyd agreed. “And so they’ll keep up the pressure until something breaks.”

“The admiral is trying something different,” Leo commented. “Us. A fleet of older ships that can fill the gaps in his order of battle. And given time, we can fortify the rest of the sector.”

He knew it wouldn’t work even as he spoke the words. There were no shortage of truly insane ideas out there, from planet-sized battleships to ringing an entire system in automated weapons platforms, that could never work in the real world. He dreaded to think how much it would cost to blanket an entire system in weapons platforms, even relatively small units, and even if someone signed off on the cost – which wasn’t about to happen – the whole layout would be effectively useless. An attacker could bypass most of the defences with minimal effort. One might as well try to wrap the whole system in a Dyson Sphere.

Which is another concept that never got off the ground, he reminded himself. The sheer cost alone renders it utterly impractical.

“Maybe, if they give us the time,” Boothroyd mused. “We still don’t know who’s backing them.”

Madeleine frowned. “How long do you think it’ll be before they find someone to blame and strike first?”

Leo cursed under his breath. He didn’t want to think it could happen, but … a combination of frustration and sheer desperation to retain his command could easily drive the admiral into doing something stupid. Or his successor, who would be under more pressure to prove his worth to his superiors. Pick an autonomous world, drum up some evidence to ‘prove’ they were behind the rebels and go hammer them flat … could they get away with it? There would be so many high-ranking people invested in the admiral’s success that the truth might be buried successfully … Leo had heard, from Ruth, that independent journalism had been on the wane for quite some time. Hell, the devastation alone would account for any missing records on the target world. The admiral could easily argue that the proof he needed had been destroyed during the fighting.

“They’d need some pretty solid proof,” he pointed out.

“It wouldn’t be the first time someone has come up with an excuse to crush a supposedly-independent world,” Madeleine countered. “Right?”

Leo grimaced. He’d seen too many interstellar corporations use their connections to Daybreak, and immense clout, to force planets to sign brutally unfair agreements. He wanted to believe it didn’t happen nearer the core worlds, where the republic maintained a stronger presence, but he feared otherwise. The corporations were simply too important to be brought under control. They had too many friends in high places.

“I wish I knew,” Leo admitted.

Flower cleared her throat. “I need to get an early night,” she said, putting down her cutlery. “I’ll see you all later?”

“Me too,” Boothroyd said. “I have drills tomorrow.”

Leo eyed them both, but didn’t argue as they left the compartment. Flower knew … did Boothroyd? The man had been a Drill Instructor in his time and anyone who held down that role for a few years would be a very good reader of men. He probably knew exactly what had happened … and why.

“It won’t end well,” Madeleine said, tiredly. “The resentment is already too great to be calmed easily.”

“I know.” Leo pushed the trolley to one side. He’d call the steward later to remove it. “If we can win this war, there’ll be a window to secure lasting change.”

“Which will be against the interests of the great and the good,” Madeleine pointed out. She stood and made her way towards him. “Do you think they’ll agree without a fight?”

“No,” Leo said. “But one day it’ll be me calling the shots.”

“We’ll see,” Madeleine said. She kissed him, lightly. “Until then …”

 

Chapter Nineteen

Leo had hoped things would change, as time wore on, but the rebels seemed disinclined to move from mild yet unpleasant harassment to outright war. The reports made it clear the phoney war was still underway, with nothing but a handful of brief skirmishes breaking the monotony of endless patrols and desperate attempts to cover up as many weaknesses in the defences as possible before the enemy took advantage of them. The brisk business-like reports from Yangtze suggested the situation was well under control; the briefings Leo received from Francis, during his brief visits to the base, argued otherwise. The situation was steadily deteriorating without many shots being fired and, reading between the lines, the admiral was growing steadily more and more frustrated. Leo didn’t blame him. The admiral needed to do something, to hit an enemy target to prove the rebels didn’t have it all their own way, but there was nothing to hit. Their enemy resolutely refused to stand and fight.

He could feel the frustrations on the base too, despite their brief victories. The lack of shore leave, of even a few hours planetside, was grating on his men. So too was the endless phony war. There were arguments and fights, some which could be settled in the ring – Boothroyd put together a grudge match for two men who hated each other – and others than had to be handled officially. Leo had far less manoeuvring room for the latter, which meant he had to come down on the crewmen involved like a ton of bricks. Four men were sentenced to time in the brig – another drain on his resources – and a fifth had to be dispatched to a penal world, after being drummed out of the navy. Leo had had no choice – the man had raped another crewer – and yet he couldn’t help thinking he’d failed as a CO, if someone under his command had thought he could get away with it. The stresses and strains of the phoney war were no excuse.

It would have been worse, he supposed, if he hadn’t had his strange … relationship … with Madeleine. He wasn’t sure what they had, in all honesty: she showed one face to the command staff and crew, arguing with him freely whenever she felt the need, and quite another when they were alone, with the hatch firmly closed and locked. She could be demanding and dominant one moment in bed, then submissive the next … Leo had never slept with anyone like her and he wasn't quite sure what to make of it. She treated him as more of a fuckboy than anything else and it was hard to tell if she had any real feelings for him, or if he was little more than a penis on legs. It was oddly disconcerting in a manner he could never quite put into words. What were they? He didn’t know. He wasn’t certain she knew either.

She doesn’t really want a relationship, he told himself, one evening. She just wants not to have to go to bed alone.

He spent his days working his way through the ships, as more and more older vessels came online, and running constant drills to train his crews for war. They were getting better in the simulated conflicts, unsurprisingly, but simulations – even makeshift live-fire exercises – were no substitute for the real thing. There could be any number of surprises waiting for them, from better technology to more ingenious applications of the technology the rebels already had. Leo’s engineers had come up with a bunch of ideas, a handful perhaps useful in combat, and he dared not assume the rebels were any less ingenious. The idea of combining two jump drives into one might let them pull off a real surprise, if they were prepared to risk their ships on such a venture. The simulations suggested there was a very real chance the ships would tear themselves apart if they tried.

“They did send us some mining tools,” Flower commented, one evening. Their nightly dinners had turned into planning sessions, to which he made a point of inviting a rotating number of officers. He’d had to assure them there was no such thing as a bad idea, although some of the concepts he’d been offered suggested otherwise. “What do you want to do with them?”

Leo frowned, recalling an old concern. There was no reason to think the rebels knew their precise location, but … there was just no way to be sure. Gayle might have been able to get a note of the location before her cover had been thoroughly blown, and even if she hadn’t there had been plenty of others on Yangtze who could have found a copy of the files before they’d been classified. Leo hadn’t imagined he would have to hide the ex-pirate base from the rebels, a rebel force he hadn’t known existed, and by the time he’d taken precautions it had been too late. Hell, for all he knew, the rebels had managed to get the location from a pirate or information broker. The pirates wouldn’t bother keeping the secret now the base was thoroughly compromised.

And Yangtze is compromised too, he reminded himself. The rebels have too many sources there.

“I want to set up another base,” he said. “Not here. Somewhere nearby, but not here.”

He keyed his terminal, bringing up the starchart. Morningstar Base was fairly isolated on a human scale, but there were several other stars within two or three jumps … a handful of little interest to a spacefaring civilisations. Four would make ideal locations for a pirate base, he supposed … for all he knew, there was one already there. It wasn’t impossible. The survey mission had found nothing, but that was meaningless. The pirates would have been wiped out a long time ago if they didn’t know how to hide.

Madeleine raised her eyebrows. “You think this base is compromised?”

“It’s a possibility,” Leo said. “How can we be sure the rebels don’t know where we are?”

“We can’t,” Flower said. “What do you have in mind?”

“We set up a secondary base here,” Leo said. He picked a star at random. “Nothing too elaborate, not at first. A supply dump, a handful of facilities … maybe move the modified repair ships there and keep the fixed installations here. Set up a bunch of habitat balloons … again, nothing too elaborate. The point is to have somewhere to run, if the rebels show up in force.”

“And you think they will,” Madeleine said. It wasn’t a question. “Why here? Why not Yangtze?”

Leo felt a flicker of annoyance, quickly suppressed. It was her job to poke holes in his thinking.

“The rebels need to keep up the pressure, but they’re running short of targets that are both easy and important enough to make us go ouch if they’re hit,” Leo pointed out. “We’re a pretty big target, and one that will be hard to defend. If they know where we are, they could jump in, fire off enough missiles to take out the asteroid base and fixed facilities, then vanish again. The ships might survive, if they cast off in time, but without the base their operational capabilities will be extremely limited. Setting up a second base is insurance against that possibility.”

“True,” Madeleine agreed.

“Which leads neatly to the second point,” Leo said. “The exact location of Morningstar II is going to remain a secret. Everyone involved will be transported under silent protocols. They will not know, nor or ever, where they’re stationed. And any attempt to gain access to a navigational system will be considered a court martial offence.”

Madeleine gave him a thoughtful look. “You do realise it will be tricky to keep the crew from figuring out where they are?”

“We crack down on it hard, if they do,” Leo said. If anything, she was understating the problem. The transport captains would need to know where they were going and their crews would have an excellent chance to figure it out; hell, a single amateur astronomer would be able to do a star fix and pick out his location in the endless sea of stars. “There won’t be many who know the truth and they will all keep their mouths firmly shut.”

He paused. “Which leads neatly to the second point,” he added. “We are not going to report this to Yangtze. It stays strictly off the books.”

Madeleine sucked in her breath. “You intend to keep the admiral in the dark?”

“It will be very hard to justify,” Boothroyd added. “Are you sure …?”

Leo looked from one to the other. “There’s a spy somewhere on Yangtze,” he said, flatly. “Probably more than one. The admiral himself may be above suspicion” – he doubted any Blackthrone would commit high treason, not when they benefited so hugely from the system surrounding them – “but his officers? Their aides? Their coffee boys and mistresses and what have you? All it takes is one word in the wrong set of ears and our secret will be out.”

He scowled at the holographic chart. The first thing any rebel agent would want to figure out was how long it took to get from Morningstar I to Morningstar II. Three jumps … there were twenty-seven possible locations within that radius, assuming the jumps were carefully plotted, and if one eliminated the nine stars that were already colonised there would be eighteen remaining. A rebel squadron could survey those worlds, without making it obvious, and if they picked up a stray electromagnetic signal all hell would break loose. No, better not to let anyone outside his circle get any idea the secondary base existed. The rebels wouldn’t be looking for something they didn’t know they had to find.

“I take your point,” Madeleine said. “Is this legal?”

“My orders are a little vague,” Leo reminded her. He’d read through the datapacket time and time again. There was nothing actively barring him from setting up a second base and, arguably, he was doing exactly as he’d been told. If the whole affair blew up in his face, for one reason or another, he would still have a legitimate defence. “There’s plenty of leeway for building a secondary base, in another star system. It won’t cut into our resources that much too.”

And the admiral should be setting up supply dumps of his own, he added, silently. It was standard procedure, and he assumed the admiral was doing precisely that. There’d been no mention of supply dumps in the updates, but that was no surprise. Leo simply didn’t have a need to know. It would be amusing if our teams ran into each other …

He shrugged. “That said, I’ll be giving you the orders in writing,” he said. “If it goes wrong, blame it all on me.”

Madeleine grinned. “I will.”

Leo grinned back. “Such loyalty!”

“I won’t let you face a board of inquiry alone,” Boothroyd said. It was hard to tell if he took Madeleine’s teasing seriously. “I can sign off on this too.”

“Don’t,” Leo said. The chain of command on Morningstar Base was a tangled mess – the admiral’s orders offered little clarity; in truth, Leo hadn’t tried to clarify matters for himself either – and under normal circumstances a marine officer couldn’t sign off on anything of the sort. It wouldn’t help either of them if Boothroyd tried, although Leo appreciated the gesture. It would just land them both in hot water. “Let me take all the blame.”

“I can put together a team,” Madeleine said. “The old pirate gear is still here too – the crap they used to expand the base. We can use that, as it’s off the books, but …”

She shrugged. “It isn’t going to do anything for morale.”

“Keeping people busy keeps them from grumbling,” Boothroyd said. “Or at least keeps the grumbling to a reasonable level.”

Leo nodded. He’d been told that spacers and soldiers always grumbled – and it was a bad sign when there was no audible grumbling – and that a wise commanding officer should simply overlook it. The secondary base project might actually be good for morale, if everyone was concentrating on the task at hand and not mentally rehashing their grievances … although, in his experience, spacers were perfectly capable of doing both at once. He didn’t mind, as long as he got a secondary base out of it. If he needed it, he’d really need it.

“We can try,” Madeleine said. “When do you want to get started?”

“As soon as possible,” Leo said. “Remember, secrecy is of the essence.”

“Of course,” Madeleine said. “I’ll get started shortly.”

Leo nodded. “You’d think they want us to escort more freighters, wouldn’t you?”

“Yeah,” Madeleine said. The bitterness in her voice was faint, yet Leo could hear it clearly. “But they don’t trust us.”

Leo had to admit she had a point. “They will,” he said. “And soon.”

Boothroyd lingered behind as the dinner meeting came to an end. “We haven’t managed to collect any evidence there’s a spy on this base,” he said. The marines would not normally be handling counter-intelligence work, but after the spooks had dropped the ball so spectacularly Leo had asked Boothroyd to handle it. “If there’s been any attempt to get a message out, we haven’t detected it.”

“Yeah.” Leo wasn’t convinced that proved anything. A skilled operator could use a laser signaller to get a message out, during the mission to Culloden, and there would be no evidence to find. The rebel spy – if there was a spy – had to be good at his job. “If they know where we are …”

He met Boothroyd’s eyes. “Everyone who goes to Morningstar II gets hazard pay,” he said, “but they’re also going under strict tight security.”

“I figured,” Boothroyd said. “But don’t let that lull you into a false sense of security.”

Leo nodded. It was difficult, legally speaking, to test everyone with truth drugs and lie detectors unless there was a very good reason – and frowned upon, even when the people involved had known what they’d be facing when they signed on the dotted line. A naval officer was supposed to be trustworthy … and besides, using everything from drugs to strip and cavity searches was asking for trouble. There was no guarantee anyone trustworthy would stay that way after they’d been treated in such a manner, and if they passed the tests they’d be no reason to suspect them of anything.

“It was a great deal simpler on Waterhen, wasn’t it?” He shook his head. “If the admiral had given me a command …”

Boothroyd met his eyes. “You recall Pompey?”

Leo blinked. “The battlecruiser?”

“No, the real Pompey the Great.” Boothroyd shrugged. “We had to study his campaigns in Officer Candidate School. Pompey was a young man – they called him the adulescentulus carnifex, the teenage butcher – whose early career was kick-started by the first of many Roman civil wars. Pompey raised an army through his own resources, led it to link up with Sulla and became one of his most famous and powerful assets. Pompey’s career was meteoric and he didn’t take it too calmly when it slowed down, after Sulla’s retirement and the shift in the balance of power. There were limits to how quickly he could advance …”

He paused. “You have the same problem. You gained a command at a very early age through sheer luck and took full advantage of it. You might be thinking the admiral would – should – give you a heavy cruiser, perhaps even a battlecruiser, and that you’d make admiral by thirty. But the real world doesn’t work that way. Your career is slowing down, because you are young, and … the admiral did you a favour by sending you out here. You’ll get the experience you need to rise higher.”

Leo gritted his teeth, then forced himself to relax. Boothroyd had a point. He might have been dumped into a command chair well ahead of time, but that had been under unique circumstances that had never happened before and probably never happen again. Now … he had made it to commander, he reminded himself, yet … Boothroyd was likely right. It would be a long time before he became a proper captain. Unless they gave him another ancient ship to command …

And I wouldn’t mind, he thought, as long as I could take her into combat once again.

“I know,” he said, finally. Boothroyd’s advice was always good. “I’m just waiting for something to happen.”

“Be glad of the peace, as phony as it is,” Boothroyd commented. “You’ll miss it once the shooting starts in earnest.”

He nodded, then left the compartment. Leo stared down at the terminal for a long moment, without ever quite seeing the words on the screen. It was difficult to fit himself back into an ordered system, after being out on a limb for so long … he hadn’t been a good XO to Francis, to be sure, although he had saved his rival’s life as well as his entire crew. Leo’s lips twitched in dark amusement. Francis had reverted back to his uncle’s staff, a post that was nowhere near as prestigious as it seemed, while Leo had been assigned to Morningstar Base. Perhaps it was Francis who envied him, rather than the other way around. It was quite possible.

And if I had his connections, Leo asked himself, how far would I have risen by now?

His lips twitched again. Francis had made Lieutenant-Commander in three years. Impressive, given that he’d graduated as a midshipman, but not rapidly enough to raise eyebrows or bend regulations to breaking point. And his career had stalled after he’d lost Waterhen to a rebel boarding party … it would take years, at best, for him to recover. His uncle had certainly learned a few lessons about promoting him ahead of time.

Leo had to smile. I guess I’m not doing too badly after all.

 

Chapter Twenty

“Captain, a courier boat has just arrived,” Lieutenant Roscoe reported. “Her occupant is requesting permission to speak with you as soon as possible.”

Which means immediately, Leo mused. If the occupant wasn’t Francis, he’d eat his hat. His uncle does seem to have found a use for him after all.

“Show him to my office once the boat docks,” he ordered, out loud. The office was devoid of anything that might point to Morningstar II, or anything that might tell Francis anything else he didn’t need to know. Leo was fairly certain Francis wasn’t an outright traitor – his loyalty was not in question, even as his tactical skill remained in doubt – but if he saw something and talked about it to the wrong person the secret would be out before the base was up and running. “And then hold all my calls unless they’re urgent.”

He sat back in his chair, tapping his terminal to alert Flower, Boothroyd and Madeleine. They wouldn’t be invited to the meeting – it sounded like a private briefing, rather than something addressed to the senior officers or the entire crew – but he’d discuss it with them afterwards, to show his trust in Madeleine and gain their input. Perhaps it was another escort mission or perhaps it was something more serious … right now, Leo would have happily welcomed an order to escort the admiral when he faced the senate. It would be something, anything, other than running the base, carrying out drills, and waiting for the enemy to strike.

The hatch opened, ten minutes later. Francis stepped into the chamber, wearing a neatly-tailored uniform that drew attention to his rank stripes and the handful of decorations on his chest. Leo wondered snidely if one was awarded for excessive KP, although that struck him as unlikely for all sorts of reasons. One for being wounded under fire – technically true – and another for a jump-capable command … Leo wasn’t sure if Francis had the right to wear it, given that Captain Reginald had been in technical command of the ship, but there was no point in making a fuss about it. If Francis couldn’t wear it, nor could Leo himself.

“Leo,” Francis said. He snapped off a perfect salute. “How good to see you again.”

“Likewise,” Leo said, returning the salute. He wasn’t sincere – and neither was Francis. “What brings you out here?”

“Getting right to the point?” Francis sat, without asking for permission. “I must say you haven’t changed a bit.”

Leo gritted his teeth. Francis’s attitude had always grated on his nerves and now …

“I guess neither of us have changed,” he managed. Francis should have had the attitude knocked out of him at the academy. Or been forced to grow – or resign – by a bad-tempered first middy who hated the spoilt brat who’d been dumped on him. “I take it you’re about to offer me yet another chance to commit suicide?”

“You have to work on your cheery attitude,” Francis told him. He took a datachip out of his uniform pocket and held it out. “There is a war on, you know.”

“I know,” Leo said. “I’ve been fighting it. Have you?”

Francis coloured. “My uncle has kept me working in his office,” he said. “And I’ve been very helpful.”

Leo bit his lip. Francis just brought out the worst in him. “I guess he trusts you enough to give me a private briefing,” he said. “What does he want me to do?”

Francis slipped the datachip into the reader. “This is classified, burn-before-reading, instant court martial followed by death by firing squad if word leaks outside the approved list,” he said. “You are not to share it with your XO, for one thing. She cannot be properly vetted.”

“She’s had ample chance to ruin us, if she wished,” Leo said, resisting the urge to point out that Francis had tried to convince Madeleine to join his staff. His uncle wouldn’t have any trouble coming up with reasons to say no. “I trust her.”

“And spies are very good at seeming trustworthy until they put a knife in your back,” Francis said, cuttingly. “Or didn’t you notice anything odd about Sun?”

He tapped the console before Leo could come up with an equally cutting response. “You may recall this system,” he said, as a holographic star chart appeared in front of them. “You were there when New Dublin fell to the enemy. Nice work.”

Leo scowled. New Dublin had been targeted by the rebels during his covert mission to their territory – and he hadn’t been able to do anything to save the world, beyond trying to slip out a warning to the defenders. Waterhen had been in the midst of a far larger enemy fleet. He might have done some damage, if he’d opened fire at point-blank range, but the remainder would have blown him away very quickly. And then his ship had fallen into enemy hands anyway. He knew he’d been lucky to survive.

“Thanks,” he said, sarcastically. “I take it there’s been no updated report from New Dublin?”

“A survey ship passed through the system two weeks ago,” Francis said. “Her commander had strict orders to avoid getting too close to the planet, for fear she’d be destroyed before she managed to jump out again, but she managed to get some good long-range scans. The rebels are holding the high orbitals, their ships keeping the planet under firm control. The loyalist government is powerless to resist.”

Assuming they even bother to try, Leo mused. New Dublin wasn’t Culloden. The population had few reasons to love Daybreak and plenty of reasons to hate their guts. It was quite likely the government had switched sides at once, planning to point to the orbiting fleet to justify their decision if Daybreak returned and retook the planet. The hell of it was that they would have a point. As long as the rebels held the high orbitals, resistance was effectively futile. They come out ahead no matter who wins.

“We need solid data on just what is happening in the system,” Francis said. “If the rebels have tied down most of their fleet defending New Dublin, we can pin it against the planet and destroy it. If not … where is their fleet? We need to know.”

Leo nodded. New Dublin wasn’t important in the grand scheme of things. The rebels would be fools to fight to keep it, particularly if Admiral Blackthrone had an opportunity to concentrate his fleet against their ships and deliver the decisive battle his superiors expected. They had to know it too, which raised the spectre of New Dublin being a bid to draw Admiral Blackthrone out of position. They were trying something complex, and complexity was normally the kiss of death for any brilliant operational plan entering the real world, but in this case they might be able to pull it off. They’d be enough checkpoints built into the plan to let them cancel it, if they ran into something they couldn’t handle.

“I can’t fault your logic,” he said. “What does this have to do with me?”

Francis puffed up. “You are ordered to take one of your ships and survey the system, a full tactical survey, then report back to my uncle … the Admiral. He will make his final decision once he reads your report.”

“To attack, or not,” Leo mused. The images on the display were already outdated. How many of the icons in front of him had been replaced, or reinforced, over the last few weeks? “We have to get in and out without being detected.”

“Yes.” Francis eyed the display. “I’ll be coming with you, of course.”

Leo blinked. “Over my dead body.”

“That can be arranged.” Francis spoke lightly, but there was a hint of gloating amusement in his tone. “The admiral wants a personal representative on the spot.”

“I see.” Leo kept his face under tight control. What did Admiral Blackthrone think his nephew could do, apart from eying the consoles on the bridge? He wasn’t an analyst nor senior enough to talk to either the rebels or the planetary government. Unless the admiral was more beaten down than he’d thought possible … “Do you have secret orders from the admiral?”

“If I did, I wouldn’t be allowed to tell you.” Francis smirked. “I can tell you that the admiral wants a pair of trusted eyes on the ship.”

“Oh, really?” Leo gritted his teeth. “Would you like me to remove all the foreign personnel too?”

“Yes.” Francis met his eyes. “Leo, this is a security issue. We cannot take chances.”

“I’ll do what I can,” Leo said. His crew were more trustworthy than Francis. “But I have no reason to think they’re traitors.”

Francis looked oddly downcast. “There was no reason to think ill of Sun either.”

“No,” Leo agreed. There was something odd in Francis’s voice. Had they been lovers, once upon a time? The idea was repulsive and yet … Leo’s lips tried to smile. If Sun had slept with Francis to keep her cover intact, she deserved a medal from her real superiors. Leo was loyal to Daybreak, despite doubts he didn’t quite want to admit to himself, and yet there were limits to how far he’d go for the republic. “I take your point.”

“Good.” Francis smiled. “When do we leave?”

“Shortly,” Leo said. He met Francis’s eyes. “One point. I am in command of the ship. You are not in the chain of command, and won’t ever be. If you do anything that might, in my sole judgement, imperil my ship, you will be spending the rest of the voyage in the brig. And I will make certain the report of your activities is forwarded further up the chain. Do I make myself clear?”

Francis purpled. “I’m senior to you!”

“Not any longer,” Leo said. He was a brevet commander. The rank might or might not be confirmed, true, but until his superiors made a final decision he had the right to use it as he saw fit. “Right now, I am your superior officer. And you will treat me like it.”

“Yes, sir,” Francis grated. He sounded pissed. “I understand.”

“Good.” Leo tapped his console. “I’ve taken the liberty of assigning you a cabin. I suggest you get some rest and freshen up. We’ll be departing as quickly as possible.”

“Yes, sir,” Francis said. Leo made a silent bet with himself that Francis was already composing a message to be uploaded to the courier boat. No worries. They’d be well on their way before the admiral could send a reply. “Let me know when the time comes to move onto the ship.”

“She’s a tiny corvette,” Leo said. “You’ll get a cabin to yourself, but” – he shrugged – “if you brought a bunch of suitcases, they’ll have to remain behind.”

Francis scowled. “I brought a knapsack and that’s it,” he said. “Does that meet your exacting standards?

Leo allowed himself a smile. Rumour insisted that Francis had turned up at the academy with a dozen suitcases and thrown a tantrum that would have shamed a five-year-old when he’d been told he needed to send them home. Leo didn’t really believe the story – even the Blackthrone name wouldn’t save Francis’s career, if he did something so childish in front of countless witnesses – but he wanted to believe it. It was the sort of thing Francis would do.

“It will suffice,” he said. “Dismissed.”

Francis scowled, but snapped out another perfect salute and marched out of the room. Leo watched him go, wondering why Francis had spent so much time mastering his appearance and so little mastering the tactical skills he needed to rise in the ranks. His uncle the admiral wouldn’t be his superior for the rest of time … perhaps the older officer was trying to make a man out of Francis before he got killed. If so, it wasn’t working very well. Francis didn’t seem to have learnt anything from his first, and so far his last, command.

He tapped his terminal, dismissing the thought. “Commander Chevallier, report to my office immediately.”

“Aye, sir.”

Leo poured them both coffee, then sat back in his chair and read the new orders while waiting for her. Madeleine had been supervising an engineering team in the hangar. She’d probably need coffee.

“This is a surprise,” she said, as she entered. “I hope you’re not …”

“Francis has arrived, with new super-secret orders for me,” Leo said. He made a show of rolling his eyes. “I’m not allowed to tell you the details, but I’ll be taking Gypsy and going off to test myself against the rebels once again.”

“Super-secret orders?” Madeleine took her coffee and sipped it slowly. “He does love his melodrama, doesn’t he?”

“Yes.” Leo sat back down. “I’ll be leaving you in command in my absence. I don’t know if you’ll be called upon to deploy more ships or not, over the next few weeks, but if so I expect you to use your best judgement.”

Madeleine raised her eyebrows. “And what will Francis have to say about that?”

Leo shrugged. Francis didn’t want any foreigners involved with the mission? Very well. Leo would leave his XO behind. She would be senior officer on station and thus the commanding officer … it was hardly a secret. Anyone capable of reading an organisation chart would realise she was second in the chain of command. If Francis had a problem with it … well, he’d had plenty of time to raise concerns. Leo certainly wouldn’t draw his attention to it.

“I trust you,” Leo said, simply. A flurry of emotions crossed her face, coming and going too quickly for him to read them. “And his opinion doesn’t matter.”

“It might, if his dear uncle backs him up,” Madeleine said. “He might have something to say about it.”

“There’s nothing in the orders about it,” Leo said. They’d been short and sweet, leaving him with a great deal of discretion in how he carried out the mission as long as it was carried out. Leo approved. Francis rarely used one word when an entire sentence would do, and insisted on micromanaging everything himself rather than letting his subordinates choose their own path, but his uncle was clearly made of sterner stuff. “If the admiral wanted to relieve you, he would have said so.”

He met her eyes. “Continue with Morningstar II,” he added. “And don’t let that secret get out until the time comes to make use of it.”

“Of course.” Madeleine looked back at him, her tone sour. “You do realise you’re taking a chance here.”

“Trusting you, or building a secret base?” Leo shook his head. “I do trust you, like I said, and we do need something up our sleeve for when the shit hits the fan.”

“Yeah,” Madeleine said. “You have nerve. I’ll give you that much.”

Leo allowed some of his own frustrations to leak into his voice. “I have a patron who has shown only limited interest in my career, and little else,” he said. “I have to be nervy if I want to get noticed and that means taking risks.”

“And those risks include going to bed with the commandant’s wife?” Madeleine raised her eyebrows. “I’m sure it makes sense somehow …”

“Hah.” Leo had grown up on the poverty line. There was no point in saving for a future if you didn’t know you’d have a future. A woman wanted you … why not? And besides, there had been an undeniable trill in sleeping with an older woman. Her husband being a superior officer had added spice to the affair. “I didn’t put that much thought into it.”

He sighed, inwardly. He knew his flaws – Flower had pointed them out, time and time again – and yet, it was hard to force himself to mature. If he’d followed a standard career path … no, there was nothing to be gained from wondering what might have been. He had been dealt a set of cards and he just had to play them as best he could.

“I could tell,” Madeleine said.

Leo shrugged. “I’ll be leaving Boothroyd and Flower with you,” he said. He’d have preferred to have them on Gypsy, but their presence would just complicate matters. “Please listen to their advice, if you need it; otherwise, the buck stops with you.”

Madeleine nodded. “Got it.”

“And thank you,” Leo added. “If I don’t come back …”

“This isn’t a good time to feel morbid,” Madeleine told him. “Whatever you’re doing, you know how to pull it off.”

Leo shrugged. The mission would be tricky … unless the rebels had already abandoned New Dublin to her fate. He couldn’t even make any solid plans until he reached the system and collected some hard data, ensuring the whole operation would be made up as he went along. And Francis would be peering over his shoulder, breathing down his neck … he grimaced. It was not going to be a fun voyage even before they reached their destination.

“I hope so,” he said. His instructors had made it clear anyone could die in the line of duty, from the captain in his command chair to the lowly midshipman who’d only joined the crew a few days before the final fatal engagement. Naval officers were ordered to prepare wills when they were accepted into the academy, just in case, then revise them every time their circumstances changed. “I’ll see you when I see you.”

Madeleine finished her coffee, then left the compartment. Leo smiled inwardly and turned his attention back to his reports. Madeleine could handle just about everything in his absence – she’d worked closely with him to do the paperwork – but there were some matters that required his personal attention. Not too many, thankfully, yet just enough …

His wristcom bleeped. “Sir,” Maurice said. “Gypsy is ready to depart.”

“Thank you,” Leo said, glancing at the time display. It had taken longer than he'd thought. “I’m on my way.”

Two hours later, Gypsy jumped out for New Dublin.

 

Chapter Twenty-One

It was not a pleasant flight.

Leo had known he disliked Francis, of course, but being cooped up with him in a corvette was somehow worse than either the academy or Waterhen. It felt as if they were sharing the same cabin, even though their quarters were separated by solid metal bulkheads. Francis sought him out all the time, chatting about nothing … Leo couldn’t tell if he was trying to let bygones be bygones, learn about Leo’s tactical concepts so he could copy them, or if he was indulging in a Machiavellian revenge plot to drive Leo insane. There was a brain inside Francis’s too-handsome face, Leo was sure, and perhaps it had finally started to wake up. It was just a shame it was probably too late to save a normal career.

Which means he’ll probably make Fleet Admiral in this thirties, Leo mused, sourly. And then go on to be Emperor of the Universe in his forties.

It was a relief beyond words when they finally reached the final jump point before New Dublin, holding station two light-years from the target star. The primary was no different from any other star at such a distance, just a single tiny dot of light against the endless darkness of interstellar space; there was nothing, save for a handful of stray radio transmissions, that suggested the presence of interstellar life. There was no point in intercepting and recording them, Leo knew; they were two years out of date. Gypsy would have to get a great deal closer if she wanted realtime information.

And that presents a problem, Leo mused, as he sat in his command chair and studied the display. We can’t let them know we’re here or they’ll change everything before the admiral has a chance to take advantage of our sensor records.

He contemplated the problem for a long moment. If they jumped in too close to the planet, the rebels would almost certainly detect their arrival; if he came in too far, he’d waste time he didn’t have sneaking up on the planet. The last update from the admiral’s scouts hadn’t showed any network of rebel sensor satellites, true, but that was meaningless. Sensor platforms were designed to be stealthy, relying on passive sensors to do their work, and a starship could pass within bare kilometres of a platform without ever realising it was there. The rebel could have deployed an entire network, and yet … had they? There was just no way to be sure.”

“Helm, set target coordinates for Connolly,” Leo ordered, finally. The gas giant was large enough to hide their arrival, the surrounding cluster of space junk hopefully making life difficult for rebel sensor suites. The gravity shadow surrounding a gas giant was already immense, and prone to shifting as the moons and asteroids orbited the giant world, and a single flicker of gravimetric energy might just be written off as a random fluctuation if it was noticed at all. “Jump on my command.”

“Aye, sir.”

Francis shifted beside him, but said nothing. Leo was mildly surprised, although he’d bet half his pay that Francis was mentally composing a report to his uncle that outlined every mistake and tactical misjudgement Leo made on the voyage. The fact any major misjudgement would probably result in Gypsy’s destruction, and Francis’s own death, didn’t seem to have crossed his mind. It was unlikely, to say the least, that the omega recorder would last long enough to be recovered.

“Jump,” Leo ordered.

The display blanked, an instant before his stomach twisted violently. Francis gasped and retched beside him, mercifully not throwing up on the deck, as the display came back to life. The immense gas giant appeared in front of him, a glowing blue-yellow ball that would one day be tapped to fuel the planet’s expansion … assuming, of course, the war didn’t blow the entire galaxy back into the Stone Age. It wouldn’t be the first time. Too many planets had been thrown into barbarism during the Great War, not because they’d been bombarded by their enemies but because the supply lines that kept them alive had been lost during the war. Daybreak had saved some, thankfully; others had fallen so far they’d never truly recovered.

Which is something of the point, Leo reminded himself. We have our flaws, yes we do, but the alternative is worse.

“Local space is clear, Captain,” Anderson reported. “There’s no suggestion they detected us.”

“Helm, rig for silent running and then take us towards New Dublin,” Leo ordered. “Tactical, keep our active sensors offline. I don’t want them to have the slightest hint we’re here.”

“Aye, sir.”

Francis glanced at him. “You think their sensors are that good?”

“I think we shouldn’t take chances,” Leo said. “They’ve already shown us a great deal of modern technology.”

And all our enemies will be looking for a silver bullet, his thoughts added. Daybreak was overwhelmingly powerful, her navy capable of taking on the united militaries of every autonomous world and thrashing them soundly. They knew it too, which meant they’d be looking for a technological answer … a weapon so powerful, so advanced, that it rendered Daybreak’s entire fleet nothing more than scrap metal. If the rebels have found one …

The thought haunted him as Gypsy crawled towards New Dublin, the crew barely speaking as the hours passed with terrifying slowness. Leo forced himself to take a break and rest – and ordered his crew and Francis to do the same – and yet, it was hard to get any sleep. They were in a very hostile star system, their sensors stepped down to the point an entire fleet could sneak up on them – just as he was sneaking up on New Dublin – and he wouldn’t have a clue until they opened fire. Cold logic and the fundamental realties of space combat suggested otherwise, but he didn’t believe it. The enemy had gotten lucky before. Why not again?

He felt decidedly unrested when he returned to the bridge. “Status report?”

“Long-range passive sensors are detecting a number of enemy starships orbiting New Dublin,” Anderson said. She sounded as tired as Leo felt. “They’re broadcasting low-level tactical sensor emissions.”

“Which means we can’t get too close to the planet,” Francis said. He managed to look disgustingly fresh, somehow. Leo couldn’t help feeling a twinge of resentment. “They’ll spot us.”

“Yeah,” Leo said. There was something nagging at his mind, something odd … something they were missing. “Helm, keep us on our current course.”

“Aye, sir.”

He leaned forward as more and more data flowed into the display. The rebel starships appeared to have settled in for the long haul, holding postion rather than preparing to leave. Their drives and sensors were powered up, ready to intervene if an hostile fleet arrived, but stepped down to the point they wouldn’t be putting any wear and tear on their systems. Leo eyed the handful of transports warily, wondering if they could shadow them back to the rebel base … if they were heading beyond the Rim. It looked as if much of the system’s spaceborn activity had died away since the invasion. Interesting, given that the rebels insisted they were liberating the system.

Perhaps they don’t trust the locals very much, Leo thought. The ones who cheered their arrival will cheer when they’re hanged too.

His lips twisted. It was hard to blame the locals for hedging their bets. They had to make sure they wound up on the right side, the side that won, or their planet would suffer when the victors demanded an accounting. Daybreak would crush the treacherous government after the real fighting was over, the rebels would probably do the same even though they should understand the problem facing the locals. The local government probably had a contingency plan to handle the issue, no matter the outcome … he shook his head, tiredly, as more and more data flowed into the display. The orbital formations suggested the planet wasn’t being guarded so much as she was under guard.

Francis had the same thought. “Are they keeping the planet in line at gunpoint?”

“They certainly seem to be creating that impression,” Leo agreed. A man couldn’t be held accountable for what he did at pistol-point … probably. The rebels might be threatening the planetary government or they might be pretending, to give the government an excuse for bending the knee when Daybreak returned to teach the rebels a lesson. The deployment pattern would look the same either way. “I wonder …”

His eyes narrowed. There was just something odd about the pattern.

“Helm, hold us here,” he ordered. “Tactical, launch two ballistic drones towards the planet. Don’t let them get close enough to be seen.”

“Aye, Captain.”

“Bit of a risk,” Francis said. “What if they see them anyway?”

Leo shrugged. They could get some solid data by plunging into the system and carrying out sensor scans, then jumping out before the rebels could get organised, but the rebels would know they’d done it. Leo would happily take the risk, if he’d had an attack fleet close enough to strike before the rebels altered their dispositions, but … better to ensure the rebels didn’t know he’d passed through the system without being spotted. The data would remain useful longer if they didn’t realise they needed to change everything.

“They’ll have to get very lucky,” he said. “And if they have some piece of sensor tech beyond anything of ours … the interception will tell us it exists.”

The thought nagged at his mind as the drones flew towards their targets. He could imagine faster missiles, more destructive warheads, more powerful energy beams … but they were all improvements on current technology. Waterhen would have been effortlessly trashed by a modern light cruiser; two hundred years ago, she would have effortlessly slaughtered any number of contemporary cruisers … unless their captains managed to get into position to ram her. How would he cope against something totally new, a piece of weapons technology so completely outside his context that he couldn’t even recognise it until it was too late? A weapon so advanced it might as well be magic … he didn’t want to think about it. And yet, what choice did he have?

“Five battlecruisers,” Francis muttered. “Unknown designs. How did they manage to build them under our noses?”

“They probably have a shipyard or two somewhere beyond the Rim,” Leo said. If he could set up a second base on a shoestring – he wondered, suddenly, what was happening back on Morningstar Base – why couldn’t the rebels do the same on a grander scale? “It wouldn’t be that hard to put one together without tipping us off.”

He smiled, although there was little humour in it. The mystery backer could easily construct a set of industrial fabricators, keeping them off the books, and ship them somewhere far beyond the edge of explored space. Once set up, they could start duplicating themselves and then churning out the components to build a shipyard, then an entire fleet of starships. The investment would be immense, at least at first, but once the secret base was set up and running there would be no need for more funds from the homeworld. If they’d started a decade or two ago, the evidence might have already been buried. The last he’d heard, the spooks hadn’t found any trace of a secret black program on any major world.

And Sun might have been hiding the evidence, he thought, sourly. For all we know, she buried it well before embarking on her final cruise.
His eyes narrowed as he studied the power curves. They were oddly familiar and yet … there was something weird about them, something that bothered him on a very primal level. The sensor pulses looked to have been put together by the book, straight out of the latest tactical manual … a little too close to perfect for his peace of mind. The drone couldn’t get too close for fear of being detected – the trajectory couldn’t be altered without alerting the enemy – and yet …

He tapped his console, running a tactical analysis. The emissions really were a little too regular.

A thought crossed his mind. “I wonder …”

Francis glanced at him. “You wonder …?”

Leo said nothing for a long moment, wondering if he dared play a hunch. The admiral would be furious if he’d guessed wrong, pointing out that Leo had deliberately disobeyed orders … he might well be right. No, there was no might about it. The sensible thing to do was to sneak off as silently as they’d arrived, to pretend to be a hole in space until they got back to the gas giant and jumped out of the system. And yet, there were times when the dice needed to be rolled …

“Helm, inch us towards Target Five,” Leo ordered. “Keep the jumpdrive online, ready to get us out of here if the shit hits the fan.”

Francis spoke first. “Are you mad?”

“I’m playing a hunch,” Leo said. “Helm?”

“Course laid in, Captain,” Maurice said. “We’ll clip the outer edge of their sensor envelope in thirty minutes.”

Which is when they’ll definitely see us, Leo mused. The closer they came, the greater the chance of being detected ahead of time. One sensor pulse in the wrong place would be more than enough to blow their cover. But if I’m right …

He felt sweat prickling down his back as they inched towards the enemy ship. Target Five was a battlecruiser, a design comparable to Pompey … a little too comparable for Leo’s peace of mind. Sun had raised the spectre of someone on Daybreak backing the rebels, raising a threat they could defeat to boost their careers to levels that daunted even Leo’s ambitions … he hadn’t believed her, even before her cover had been blown, but now he wondered. The designs were just too close for comfort. And yet, faced with similar design challenges, it stood to reason the designers would come up with similar answers.

“If she sneezes,” Francis whispered, “she’ll blow us away.”

“Yeah,” Leo said. “Fun, isn’t it?”

He smiled as Francis glowered at him, then returned his attention to the display. The battlecruiser was a killer, her missile tubes capable of blowing Gypsy away with a single salvo and her energy batteries powerful enough to vaporise his ship before she knew she was under attack. Her energy curves spoke of a chilling willingness to do just that and he, like a fool, was bringing his ship into her range. If her sensors picked him up now … they’d be lucky if they had more than a few seconds warning before it was too late.

Francis swallowed, audibly. “I hope you know what you’re doing.”

Leo barely heard him. The range was closing, and closing, and closing … and the enemy didn’t react. Leo sagged in relief as he realised his hunch had been correct. The energy emissions really were suspiciously perfect … the battlecruiser was nothing more than an ECM drone, pretending to be a rebel warship. He supposed that explained the lack of local ships and shuttles buzzing the high orbitals. If even one of them saw through the deception, it would be worse than useless.

“She should have seen us,” Francis breathed.

“She doesn’t exist,” Leo said. He had to admire the trick. The active sensor pulses were just powerful enough to convince long-range sensors the battlecruiser was real, while dissuading anyone from coming in for a closer look. “She’s just a drone.”

Francis made a choking noise. “Are they all drones?”

“It looks like it,” Leo said. All the major contacts had the same suspiciously regular energy patterns. If the rebels were intent on convincing him their ships were here, where were they really? The system might have been abandoned shortly after the conquest, which meant the rebel ships could be halfway to Daybreak by now. “They wanted to convince us the system was heavily defended …”

He put the thought aside. “Helm, sneak us back towards the gas giant,” he added. “I don’t want them getting a hint we were here. Not one.”

“Aye, sir,” Maurice said.

Leo grinned at Francis. “We jump out, head straight back to Yangtze,” he said. “The admiral puts together a task force and liberates New Dublin. If we’re lucky, we get to claim the destruction of five battlecruisers; if not, we’ll still have freed a world.”

Francis smiled back. “And even if the rebels know they didn’t lose a single ship, they won’t be able to argue otherwise without admitting their might is nothing more than an illusion.”

“Yeah,” Leo said, slowly. He knew the rebels did have a fleet. He’d seen it in action. “And if their ships aren’t here, where the hell are they?”

“They expected my uncle to strike hard and fast,” Francis said. “And so they pulled out before it was too late.”

Leo frowned. It sounded plausible. The rebels couldn’t know Admiral Blackthrone would play it safe. And yet, it felt wrong. The rebels would be fools to let themselves be beaten so easily – after announcing their existence – unless they had something up their sleeves. Their only hope of victory lay in convincing Daybreak the war would be costly and ultimately pointless. Giving the admiral an easy victory would suggest otherwise. It would certainly discourage planetary governments from switching sides.

“I don’t know,” he said. “It doesn’t feel right.”

“My uncle will make the final decision,” Francis said. He elbowed Leo gently, lowering his voice until Leo was the only one who could hear him. “Perhaps your girlfriend really dropped the ball.”

“Perhaps,” Leo agreed, although he doubted it. Gayle was no fool. She’d pulled the wool over his eyes very effectively. “Or perhaps they want us to think their fleet is here because they’re planning to attack us somewhere else.”

 

Chapter Twenty-Two

“You’re certain those ships are fake?”

Leo took a moment to compose himself. Admiral Blackthrone had ordered him – and Francis – to the orbital battlestation as soon as they’d arrived, clearly concerned about just who might overhear the transmission no matter how heavily it was encrypted. Naval codes were supposed to be unbreakable, but Leo had been cautioned that decryption technology advanced just as fast as encryption and there was no such thing as a truly unbreakable code. Wars had been won and lost because one side assumed their codes couldn’t be cracked, while their opponents were not only gleefully reading their messages but exploiting their advantage mercilessly. Even laser signals couldn’t be wholly relied upon, with so much activity buzzing around the high orbitals. A worker bee in the right place might just pick up enough leakage to read the signal and relay it to the enemy.

“We were far too close for comfort,” Leo said. Beside him, Francis nodded jerkily. “They should have picked us up, at least run a sensor focus to make sure we weren’t a random piece of space junk, and they didn’t. There was no variation in their energy emissions, nothing to suggest their gear was reaching the end of its life … nothing. Their decoys were very good at pretending to be battlecruisers, sir, but they were nothing more than decoys.”

“Which raises the obvious question,” Admiral Blackthrone said. “Where are their ships?”

“Maybe they never existed at all,” Francis said. “They could have been bluffing all along.”

Leo shook his head. Waterhen’s sensor records had been analysed time and time again since they’d made it out of enemy territory. The enemy ships had been real … not, he supposed, that that was any surprise. Illusionary missiles didn’t do damage when they hit their targets. If the rebels had somehow managed to develop ECM systems that could fake a whole battle, the war was within shouting distance of being lost anyway.

“Those ships were real,” he said. “But I have no idea where they are now.”

He studied the starchart for a long moment. Assuming the enemy battlecruisers were technically equal to their Daybreak counterparts, they could have reached Daybreak itself by now … or retreated back into the Beyond, daring Daybreak to follow them. Or found another set of targets … he wondered, suddenly, if the rebels had seen them after all. If the decoys were meant to lure the admiral’s fleet out of position by raising the prospect of an easy victory …

It doesn’t matter if they saw us probing the system or not, he mused. They’ll see the admiral’s fleet leaving this system anyway.

His eyes lingered on the system display. Standard tactical doctrine, and there was no suggestion the rebels agreed, called for one’s fleet to assemble a light-year or so from the target star, then jump into the system as a united body. The rebels could already have a fleet lingering near Yangtze, effectively undetectable unless the defenders got insanely lucky, just waiting for the admiral to uncover the system so they could attack. It would be a complex operation – and they’d have to supply the ships and crews – but hardly impossible. There were plenty of historical examples of more complex operations being pulled off without a hitch.

“They want you to take the bait,” Leo said, out loud. “You go haring off to New Dublin, they sneak into this system and wreck havoc.”

“The thought has crossed my mind,” Admiral Blackthrone said, with heavy sarcasm. “The basic strategic realities haven’t changed.”

Leo flushed. “Yes, sir.”

“If this is a trap, we have no alternative but to spring it,” Admiral Blackthrone continued. “If we don’t …”

Francis stepped forward. “They can’t relieve you of command!”

“They might, if they see me leaving the enemy in firm control of a trio of occupied systems,” Admiral Blackthrone said. “There are already whispers, back home, about my failure to take the war to the enemy.”

“There’s nowhere to hit,” Leo said. It was hard not to feel a twinge of sympathy. Admiral Blackthrone was being berated for failing to solve an unsolvable problem. “We don’t have any targets of real importance, not one.”

Admiral Blackthrone snorted. “And there are plenty of people back home who will overlook such realities because they want this post,” he said. The frustration in his voice was all too clear. “And then they will have to produce a victory, which they can’t.”

Unless we can find a rebel base, Leo mused. But that’s largely reliant on luck.

Admiral Blackthrone cleared his throat. “I can’t redeploy any major units from Yangtze,” he said. “The rebels don’t have to take the system to do a great deal of damage.”

He met Leo’s eyes. “I have a task for you and your ships,” he said. “Fly back to New Dublin, liberate the system and then return to your base.”

“Yes, sir,” Leo said. The prospect of action cheered him up, particularly if most of the rebel ships in the system were nothing more than sensor ghosts. A thought stuck him and he sobered. “What about the political issue? I mean, the local government?”

“They should be hanged,” Francis said. “They chose to switch sides.”

“At gunpoint,” Leo said. “They had no ground-based defences worthy of the name. How could they hold out long enough to be relieved? How could they defy the rebels when the rebels could batter them into submission? Sure, some will be traitors; others were forced into treason at gunpoint. If we don’t draw a line between then …”

“You’ll let traitors get away with treason?” Francis sounded shocked. “They swore an oath to Daybreak!”

“We didn’t give them much choice,” Leo snapped. “And nor did the rebels!”

“I don’t believe this,” Francis snapped. “Uncle, I …”

“Enough.” Admiral Blackthrone spoke quietly, but very firmly. “If you want to argue the matter, you can do it in the officer’s club afterwards. Not now.”

Francis hesitated. “Yes, sir.”

“Yes, sir,” Leo echoed.

Admiral Blackthrone looked from one to the other. “You’ll be assigned a ground assault element. If the planetary government cooperates, the more pro-rebel members can be quietly sidelined by their more pragmatic colleges and put out to grass somewhere. No need for a purge if they were only cooperating with the rebels at gunpoint. If they refuse, the planet will be put under martial law and the government will be investigated thoroughly before it is permitted any further independence. Do I make myself clear?”

Leo tried to hide his grimace. There would be a bloodletting, no matter what he tried to do to stop it. The government would purge the guilty to keep Daybreak from purging them all. Better than the alternative, perhaps, but still ghastly. And when the rebels returned, if they did, there would be another purge. And another. And …

“Yes, sir,” he said. It was more mercy than most officers would have shown – and more than he’d expected from the admiral. Admiral Blackthrone would be in a tight spot when word got home, particularly from those who stood to gain if another semi-independent planet was reduced to a governorship, and his mercy would probably be taken for weakness. Or lack of moral fibre. Or rebel sympathies. “I’ll do my best to ensure the government cooperates.”

“They’ll be a ground-force commander,” Admiral Blackthrone said. “Work with him.”

His eyes moved to Francis. “You’ll remain with Commander Morningstar,” he added. “I hope the two of you can work together. Or at least refrain from killing each other.”

It sounded like a joke. Leo feared it wasn’t.

“Yes, sir,” he said, hiding his annoyance. Was Francis the admiral’s observer? Commissioner? Or was the admiral just trying to get him out of his hair for a while? “I’m sure we can work together.”

Admiral Blackthrone nodded. “Very good,” he said. “Is there any further business?”

“Yes, sir,” Leo said. “Can we talk privately for a moment?”

Francis spluttered. His uncle dismissed him with a wave of his hand.

“I have five minutes,” Admiral Blackthrone said, once the hatch was closed again. “Talk.”

Leo braced himself. “Sir, I would like to remove the restrictions on foreign-born personnel in my command.”

Admiral Blackthrone said nothing for a long moment. “You’re not a bore, Commander,” he said, in a tone that was artfully blank. “Why do you want me to override the admiralty and remove the restrictions?”

“I have commanded Morningstar Base, and the attached squadron, for nearly seven months,” Leo told him. “In all of that time, sir, I haven’t seen a single hint of actual disloyalty. Once I weeded out the crewmen who had no intention of remaining in naval service, and sorted out a handful of minor issues caused by the rest of the crew, there were no suggestions of sabotage or spying or anything. I think we can trust them now.”

“Really?” Admiral Blackthrone met his eyes. “You trusted Sun.”

“So did you.” Leo spoke without thinking, flushing when he realised what he’d said. “We all trusted her.”

“Yes.” There was a hint of warning in the admiral’s tone. “We all trusted her. And she came very close to putting a knife in our backs.”

Leo took a breath. “Permission to speak freely?”

“And there I was under the impression you never waited for permission,” Admiral Blackthrone said, wryly. “You may speak freely, if you wish.”

“Thank you.” Leo met his eyes. “Sun was one person, sir. She had no allies, as far as we can tell, and no connections to any other spy rings within the navy. There’s nothing to be gained by blaming everyone who happens to be born outside Daybreak, sir, particularly when they hail from different homeworlds and don’t have any connection, as far as we can tell, to Sun herself.”

He winced, inwardly. His debriefings had been thoroughly unpleasant. The interrogators had gone through every interaction he’d had with Sun, from simple conversations to passionate sexual encounters, in a manner that left him wondering if they thought he’d been wilfully blind … never mind that he’d been the one to figure out what she really was and take advantage of it to save his crew. He’d only known her a few months and yet they’d put him through the wringer … he dreaded to think how they’d treated her friends and comrades. She had worked beside them, all the while plotting to betray them, and they hadn’t suspected a thing. If she had any close friends or lovers …

“The fact remains, I think we can trust them,” he said. “It’s one thing to suspend any close friends of her, sir, but quite another to take it out on people who have nothing to do with her.”

“As far as you know,” Admiral Blackthrone pointed out. “Standard practice is to ensure spies never know each other’s identities. The fact your foreigners have no ties to her doesn’t prove they’re not spies.”

“No, sir,” Leo grated. “But we have no reason to assume they are spies.”

He took a breath. “We did as much as we could to make sabotage impossible, sir, but there were still countless opportunities for a spy to do real damage. We practically invited them to take their best shot and no one took advantage of the gaps in our security precautions. I think we can trust them.”

“You know better,” Admiral Blackthrone said. “The behaviour of people from different worlds and cultures cannot always be predicted.”

That, Leo supposed, was true. There were cultures that considered women inherently inferior to men or vice versa, cultures that considered their religion a justification for whatever horrible deeds they wanted to perform; cultures that insisted that dying in battle, in defence of the faith, meant instant martyrdom, no matter that their religion forbade suicide. There was no consistency, no universal agreement on the age of consent, freedom of religion, and a hundred other issues that could easily turn into a flashpoint for war. He’d heard of culture clashes between the different groups, clashes that had had to be sorted out with extreme force. Daybreak had often forcibly transferred ethnic minorities from one world to another, just to put a permanent end to the fighting that would otherwise end in genocide. Leo had studied some of the mass deportations. It had always struck him as insane that a group so dependent on the goodwill of the majority would go out of its way to provoke fear and resentment. They had to be mad.

“Yes, sir,” he said, stiffly. “But my people are trained spacers. If they had cultural issues, sir, they would have been noticed beforehand and they would have been discharged.”

“True, perhaps,” Admiral Blackthrone agreed. “If I agree to this, Commander, the buck will stop with you.”

“I know, sir,” Leo said.

“And we still don’t know who’s backing the rebels,” Admiral Blackthrone added. “If your crews come from the treacherous world …”

He shook his head. “We haven’t even been able to trace their equipment back to a single world … not in any useful sense. Too many pieces of kit passing through too many hands before we captured them … we are at war, Commander, and we don’t even know who we’re fighting.”

It could be all of them, Leo thought. There were fifteen major autonomous worlds, all prime suspects, and a multitude of smaller ones. If they all contributed a small amount of funding, each payment too small to attract attention, the whole affair might go unnoticed until it was too late. We’re looking for one enemy, but there could be dozens …

He kept the thought to himself. It was probably nothing more than paranoia. Any conspiracy was inherently vulnerable to someone talking out of turn and the bigger the conspiracy the greater the chance of a leak at precisely the wrong time. Daybreak kept an eye on the autonomous worlds and there was no shortage of locals willing to turn traitor, in exchange for later benefits. Such a vast conspiracy might make a good enemy, for one of the heroes of stage and holoscreen, but the real world rarely allowed such a large group to flourish without being uncovered. Or torn apart by infighting.

“I understand the risks, sir,” Leo said. “But there is also a risk in doing nothing.”

“Really?”

“Yes, sir,” Leo said. “It was reasonable to be concerned, after Sun’s treachery. I think most of my officers and crew understand it, even if they resent it. But the longer they remain under suspicion, the more it will gnaw on them. We could give birth to the very treachery we seek to stamp out.”

He paused. “We could have dismissed them all, sir, or reassured the foreigners we had faith in them. Instead, we are caught between the risk of keeping them on and the risk of permanently alienating them, all the while leaving them in a place they can do real harm.”

Admiral Blackthrone held up a hand. “You have shown a good eye for loyalty,” he said, slowly. “Very well, Commander. You may trust as you see fit, but have a care. If you make the wrong call, there won’t be enough of you left to put in front of a court martial.”

“I understand,” Leo said. “The other issue is shore leave.”

“The facilities here are already overstretched,” Admiral Blackthrone said. “You can borrow one of the mobile entertainment ships, though. She’ll give your crew a good time.”

And why would you say the facilities are overstretched and, at the same time, draw them down still further? Leo didn’t ask the question out loud. There was no point. What do you really have in mind for us?

“Thank you, sir,” he said, instead. “My crews will be grateful.”

“We shall see.” Admiral Blackthrone stood. “Dismissed, Commander. Return to Morningstar Base with Francis as soon as possible, after you arrange an RV point for linking up with the groundpounders. I’ll have the entertainment ship assigned to your command immediately.”

And don’t let the airlock hatch catch you on the way out, Leo added, silently. The admiral was playing a game Leo didn’t understand. Do you want to treat us as a secret naval reserve or what?

“Yes, sir,” he said, standing. “I won’t let you down.”

“Glad to hear it,” Admiral Blackthrone said. He was already turning his attention back to the display. “Good luck.”

Leo saluted, then turned and left the compartment. A guard was waiting outside to escort him back to the shuttle, an understandable precaution that grated on his nerves. The orbital battlestation was teeming with foreigners, mainly locals, and Leo’s presence wouldn’t make the situation any more or less risky. Admiral Blackthrone had to be nervous, after everything Gayle and her father had done; Leo wondered, idly, why he hadn’t moved his fleet to Culloden or another trustworthy world. It would certainly have put them close to the most likely rebel targets.

But also raised the spectre of having our supply lines cut, Leo reminded himself. If the admiral’s fleet is isolated, or forced to retreat, we could be looking at losing three or four sectors … maybe more, before we can regain control of the situation. If we can …

The thought haunted him as he returned to Gypsy, waited impatiently for Francis and then, when Francis had finally arrived, ordering the corvette to jump out immediately. They had a mission to carry out, the sooner the better. Madeleine and the rest could finally prove themselves, while giving the rebels a bloody nose … New Dublin was unimportant in the grand scheme of things, as was his squadron, but the media would turn it into the greatest naval victory since Midway, convincing planets edging towards the rebels to think twice. Or so he hoped.

And yet, as they returned home, he couldn’t shake the feeling the rebels had plans of their own.

 

Chapter Twenty-Three

“My orders are very clear,” Brigadier Horace Walpole said. His face dominated the bridge’s holographic display. “I am to bring New Dublin back to the fold, by any and all means necessary.”

Leo gritted his teeth. It had taken four days to return to Morningstar Base, two more to get the oversized squadron ready to depart, and then a further seven to reach the RV point. He was not in the best of states to deal with an army officer who reminded him of his former headteacher, right down to the implicit threat of immediate violence, nor was he willing to risk bending the admiral’s orders to breaking point. Admiral Blackthrone’s nephew was peering over his shoulder. If Leo bent his orders, he had no doubt Francis would take it to his uncle no matter how many evasions he wrote into his official report.

“You will use minimum necessary force,” Leo said, coolly. “There will be a full investigation, once the fighting is over, and the true guilty parties – the willing collaborators – will be dealt with, while those who were forced to cooperate at gunpoint will be handled gently.”

Walpole flushed. “I do not take orders from an officer barely out of diapers,” he snapped. “You are far too young and idealistic to understand the importance of keeping these scum under control. They made their oaths and they broke them; they will be held accountable. This is not the time to show weakness.”

“Countless planets in this sector are wavering,” Leo said. “If they see our merciful side…”

“They will switch sides anyway, because that is what they do,” Walpole told him. “They are just waiting for the opportunity to put a knife in your back. I do not answer to you, Commander, and you have no legal right to give me orders.”

Leo controlled his anger with an effort. “Any naval officer outranks an army officer,” he pointed, sharply. “And I am the ranking naval officer assigned to the operation.”

“Any naval officer outranks his army counterpart,” Walpole countered. “You, Commander, are by no means my counterpart.”

“But Admiral Blackthrone is,” Francis pointed out. Leo shot him a sharp look as he came forward so Walpole could see him. “He’s your superior officer. He outranks you. Are you refusing to follow his orders?”

Walpole turned purple. Leo would have been amused if he hadn’t been unsure why Francis had spoken up in the first place. To defend his uncle, to push back at an army officer challenging the navy’s long-established superiority, or to put Leo in his debt? The hell of it was that it might work. Walpole, a man old enough to be Leo’s father, might balk at taking orders from such a subordinate – in all senses of the word – but taking orders from a long-serving Admiral was quite another. It would give Walpole a way to back out with honour. Leo gritted his teeth in silent frustration. Whatever Francis wanted in return for his support, Leo was sure the price would be high.

“I will follow instructions from the admiral.” Walpole managed to back backing down sound like victory. “However, I will not take chances with my division. If the locals prove any threat, I will come down on them like the hammer of God Himself.”

His image vanished from the display. Leo scowled as the nearspace display flickered back into existence, revealing the seventy old and converted ships under his command and the five military transports carrying Walpole’s troops. He couldn’t really blame Walpole for being edgy. Admiral Blackthrone had spared five modern destroyers to escort the transports, something that might have bitten him hard if the rebels had realised they’d been sent away from Yangtze, but they’d returned home as soon as Leo’s ships arrived. The rebels might have risked engaging the transports and their escorts if they’d had a chance, in hopes of wiping out the division before it could land and deploy. It would be worth their while. There weren’t many troops in the sector and the prospect to wiping out a division while it was helpless was one they could hardly choose to ignore.

“Thanks,” Leo muttered.

He cleared his throat. “Start the countdown,” he ordered. “We jump in ten minutes.”

“Aye, sir,” Anderson said.

Leo nodded, then turned his attention to the fleet display. The datanet was weak, prone to leakage despite their best efforts; Leo was morbidly certain the enemy would realise the opportunity and try to knock it down first, before taking on the rest of the fleet. He’d put together a handful of contingency plans, including modifying the network nodes to allow for sub-datanets, but the lack of modern equipment made it difficult to be sure any of the plans would work. The systems involved were so outdated that the enemy could probably knock them down with very little effort.

His eyes narrowed as he studied the tiny icon on the display. There was no way to tell, at this range, if New Dublin had been reinforced. The enemy had had just enough time to bring in additional warships, real warships … assuming, of course, that they knew the system had been probed. Did they? Leo knew the admiral had been careful to ensure no one outside a select group knew the target, but there was no way to keep the enemy from noticing the troop transports being sent away from Yangtze. There just weren’t many possible targets. The rebels could get very lucky and put their ships in position to give him one hell of a thrashing.

And that’s why the admiral sent us to do the dirty work, he reminded himself. We’re expendable.

He glanced at Francis. Leo didn’t want to admit it, not really, but Francis was growing up. Just a little. He was showing more signs of common sense than Leo had expected, more awareness of his own position … more willingness to work with his former rival, despite all the bad blood between them. Leo wanted to believe Francis was preparing a knife for Leo’s back and yet … Francis had never really been subtle. Perhaps his uncle had given him a reality check. Whatever else could be said about Admiral Blackthrone, no one could say he was incompetent. Or lacked moral courage.

“Captain,” Anderson said. “All ships report ready to jump on your command.”

Leo braced himself as the countdown reached zero. “Jump!”

Francis opened his mouth to say something, then shut it again as the universe dimmed. Leo felt an invisible hand grip his head, the brief stab of pain so great he was sure his skull had been crushed effortlessly, before the whole sensation was gone so rapidly he could barely convince himself it had ever existed. The engineers had been mucking with the jumpdrive, trying to make the jumps a little more tolerable … clearly, they were only making matters worse. He heard someone groan behind him and carefully didn’t look back, giving the poor bastard what little privacy he could. They’d recover in time to do their job. He hoped.

“Jump completed,” Maurice said. “The datanet is re-establishing itself now.”

Leo nodded. The nearspace display was already lighting up with enemy icons. Nine battlecruisers, too much firepower for his squadron to tackle … assuming, of course, they were real. Their formation was oddly scattered, too far apart for mutual support and yet too close for him to believe they were not working together. He guessed it was meant to suggest a tempting target, something that would lure a particularly aggressive Daybreaker to charge straight into their guns. If he’d had a squadron of modern capital ships under his command, he had to admit he might have fallen for it. The prospect of being able to defeat a squadron of battlecruisers piecemeal was too tempting to be turned down easily. As it was, even one battlecruiser would prove a difficult target for his ships.

And we know the ships aren’t real, he mused. Or do we?

He looked at Anderson. “Did all ships make it through the jump?”

“Yes, Captain,” Anderson said. “The datanet is up and running.”

“Set up the secondary datanets too,” Leo ordered. The enemy had to be wondering if they’d been rumbled. Leo had brought his fleet into the system too far from the planet to have any hope of catching a battlecruiser by surprise, nor was he trying to jump forward to close the range before the enemy formation tightened up. “And then launch four probes towards the planet.”

“Aye, Captain.”

Francis nudged him. “Those ships aren’t real,” he muttered. “They’d have come to full alert by now if they were.”

Leo couldn’t disagree. His arrival couldn’t have gone unnoticed unless the rebels were deaf and blind. They could be microjumping themselves, in hopes of bringing his ships under their guns before they shook themselves out and advanced, or simply concentrating their forces before he had a chance to stop them. More proof, if he needed it, that the battlecruisers were nothing more than sensor ghosts. He reminded himself, sharply, not to take it for granted. The enemy could be playing a very complex game.

“I guess not,” he muttered. The probes were reporting in now, showing the same too-regular energy patterns that suggested sensor ghosts. New Dublin’s high orbitals were coming to life, dozens of freighters breaking orbit and heading away from the planet before jumping into interstellar space. Civilian freighters mostly, no IFF codes … probably part of the grey economy that pervaded the sector. He didn’t blame their crews for running. Their ships could easily be mistaken for warships in all the confusion and targeted by one side or the other. “But they’re clearly up to something.”

He tapped his console. “Signal the fleet,” he ordered. “We’ll go with Plan Three.”

“Aye, sir,” Anderson said.

“And broadcast the surrender demand,” Leo added. “Give them a chance to give up.”

“Aye, sir.”

Leo braced himself. The rebels wouldn’t surrender – if he was right and they only had a skeleton crew manning the defences, that crew would have a way to get out before it was too late – but the planetary government might see sense and surrender once the rebels were gone. No one could reasonably blame them for throwing in the towel after his fleet took the high orbitals, although some people were very unreasonable indeed. He had a sudden mental impression of New Dublin being taken by one side, then the other, then the first side once again … each conquest and reconquest accompanied by executions and punitive strikes until the planet ran out of people willing to serve in the government. It could not be allowed.

“Signal the fleet,” he ordered. “All ships, advance.”

“Aye, sir.”

Leo leaned back in his chair as the range closed rapidly. The enemy battlecruisers didn’t move, didn’t even bring up their active sensors. There were clearly limits to the enemy’s ability to fix his sensors … Leo made a mental note of it, filing the matter for later consideration, then returned his attention to the engagement. The planet made no response to the surrender demand … Leo wondered, suddenly, if the planetary government knew the battlecruisers weren’t real. The rebels could easily have taken over the planetary defence bases, such as they were, and locked them out of the planetary datanet. He doubted the government wanted to take chances. If they were wrong about the battlecruisers, their entire world would pay the price.

Caught between the devil and the deep blue sea, he mused. Poor bastards.

“Sir,” Anderson said. “We’re entering extreme missile range now.”

“We’ll proceed with Fire Plan Gamma,” Leo said. “Ready missiles. Lock targets.”

“Targets locked, sir,” Anderson said.

Leo nodded, leaning forward. “Fire!”

Gypsy shuddered as she unleashed her first salvo. There was normally no point in firing missiles at such extreme range, giving the enemy plenty of time to plot intercept solutions or simply jump out of the way. If they were lucky, they might even be able to evade in realspace rather than microjumping … the range was that extreme. Here … the fake battlecruisers wouldn’t be able to do anything, but hold position and wait to be hit. Unless he was wrong …

“No changes in enemy dispositions,” Anderson reported. “They’re not even trying to alter position.”

“They can’t,” Francis said. “Those ships aren’t real.”

Leo frowned as a handful of plasma bursts registered on the display. The battlecruisers were opening fire … a salvo of missiles fired, aimed right at his ships. Impossible. The battlecruisers were real after all … no, the firing pattern didn’t make sense. The battlecruisers should have been putting out a hell of a lot more point defence, which suggested … a smaller warship, or a modified weapons platform, hiding under the ECM disguise. It might have worked, he noted coolly, if he’d risked a close-range engagement. The enemy had probably hidden a bunch of missile pods under the ECM too.

“Signal the squadron,” he ordered. “All ships are to slow, then engage with point defence.”

“Aye, Captain.”

The display updated rapidly as Leo’s warheads started to explode, blotting out the ECM and revealing a handful of missile pods and automated platforms. They were swept away a moment later, easing all threats to the operation. He tapped his console, dispatching a second flight of drones to watch the high orbitals, then leaned forward as the enemy missiles slipped into his point defence envelope. They were disturbingly modern, equipped with penetrator ECM that made it difficult to get a proper targeting lock; if they’d been fired from close range, he reflected sourly, they might well have done some real damage. Or forced him to jump out, reform his squadron, and try again. As it was, his defences had had more than enough time to prepare. No missiles made it through the defence perimeter.

“They were bluffing,” Francis said. “Uncle could have recovered the system effortlessly.”

“Maybe.” Leo wasn’t so sure. He knew the rebels had a fleet of real warships. If they weren’t orbiting New Dublin, where were they? The enemy might be planning to mousetrap his fleet – there was no reason they couldn’t be concealing their fleet within a light-hour or two, ready to jump in when he committed himself – but if they were they had to know they weren’t facing a modern squadron. “If the ships aren’t here, where are they?”

He dismissed the thought, raising his voice as the last sensor ghost vanished from the display. The probes were skimming the high orbitals now, watching for cloaked starships or stealthed weapons platforms … or mines. Mines were normally useless in space combat, when the odds of hitting even a single enemy ship were practically nil, but if they were used to cover the high orbitals they’d have to be cleared before the squadron could take possession of the planet. A single stealthed mine could ruin a starship’s entire day.

“The high orbitals appear to be clear,” Anderson reported. Leo wasn’t reassured. A stealthed mine would be difficult to spot until it was too late. “They do seem to have lost a handful of industrial nodes.”

“Looted,” Francis said, and for once Leo had to agree. “They’ll have taken the crews too, I’ll bet.”

Leo nodded, curtly. Trained engineers were in short supply. If he’d been in charge of the rebel occupation force, he’d have made sure to recruit as many as possible and ensure they – and their families – were transported offworld before the hammer came down. He shuddered to think about what might have happened to the remainder, if they refused to serve the rebels. The rebels might have murdered them … it wouldn’t do anything for hearts and minds, of course not, but their training and experience was a resource they wouldn’t want to leave behind. Daybreak was frantically trying to build up the sector’s industry for a reason. Anything that forced Daybreak to fall back on a terrifyingly long logistics chain, rather than relying on local production, would work in their favour.

And while winning hearts and minds is important, he told himself, winning the war is far more so.

He studied the display for a long moment. “Are any of the remaining orbital platforms armed?”

“Not as far as I can tell, sir.” Anderson sounded worried. “However, I can’t guarantee picking up anything that isn’t actively emitting …”

“Noted,” Leo said. The holodramas suggested a trained sensor officer could count the rounds in a missile pod. The real world was rarely so obliging. A missile pod bolted to the hull of a clunky industrial platform would be very hard to spot, as long as it wasn’t using active sensors to find its targets. The enemy could be tracking his ships with passive sensors, carefully locking their weapons on his hulls, preparing to fire at point blank range. “Do the best you can.”

Anderson had her back to him, but he still saw her relax. Some captains expected the impossible … although any captain who climbed his way into the council chair should have a fairly good grip on just what was possible and what wasn’t. Hell, a new graduate from the academy wouldn’t have made that mistake. But Anderson had had a difficult career and … Leo shook his head. He wasn’t going to expect the impossible. It wouldn’t do anything for morale.

“Signal from Brigadier Walpole,” Anderson reported. “He wants permission to land troops.”

Leo hesitated. The shuttles were designed for planetary assaults and yet, they’d be extremely vulnerable if the enemy was biding their time, waiting to lure them into a trap. There could be any number of HVM launchers on the planet below, their operators ready for one final gambit …

“Signal the planet,” he ordered. The admiral had ordered him to recover the planet – and keep as much of the pre-war facilities intact as possible. “Inform them this is their last chance to surrender.”

“Aye, sir.”

Leo leaned back in his chair and waited, one thought dominating his mind. If the rebel fleet isn’t here, he asked himself again, where is it?

 

Chapter Twenty-Four

“Sir,” Anderson said. “The planetary government is hailing us.”

“Put them through,” Leo ordered.

An image of a middle-aged woman appeared in front of them, just old enough to be Leo’s mother. Her hair was red enough to make him wonder if it came out of a bottle, her face lined so deeply he suspected the rebel occupation had left a permanent mark on her soul. She would have been pretty enough if she hadn’t been so clearly terrified, her face nowhere near controlled enough to hide her emotions. Leo felt a twinge of pity for someone who had been designated the sacrificial lamb, then a flash of raw anger at the thought she might be trying to manipulate him. Gayle might have told her how to act, how to speak to him in a manner calculated to get on his good side …

A stream of text ran under her image, identifying her as Vice President Lucille O’Brian … Leo wondered if she was the President now, if he’d been murdered by the rebels or transported away from the planet or even arrested by his own people, now Daybreak had returned to the system and the vaunted rebel fleet revealed to be nothing more than illusions. It was quite possible. New Dublin was naked before his fleet and anyone with any sense knew it. The government had to surrender and hope they were allowed to keep something, anything, of the autonomy they’d once enjoyed.

“Captain Morningstar,” Lucille said. She spoke with surprising firmness, her feelings only slightly betrayed by the tremor in her voice. “Welcome to New Dublin. I …”

She looked down, her face twisting uneasily. “What are your terms?”

Leo felt another twinge of guilt. He forced it aside ruthlessly. “My terms are very simple. You will order your planetary militia to return to their barracks and remain there. You will make no attempt to destroy records or, in any other way, attempt to cover up what happened during the rebel occupation. My troops will take control of the spaceports, all planetary defence installations, orbital industrial nodes and government offices. Any officials who collaborated with the rebels will be dealt with, depending on the exact circumstances, but there will be no general purge as long as you cooperate. I trust these terms are acceptable?”

Lucille looked stunned. They were merciful terms, compared to some. Leo had read reports from officers who thought publically humiliating the planetary government was a good idea, from making them grovel in front of the media to shackling the officials and marching them away in chains. Their planets had been penalised heavily too. Leo had no intention of doing anything of the sort, in line with the admiral’s orders. If the admiral wanted a planet crushed beneath Daybreak’s boot, he could do it himself.

“Yes.” Lucille sounded suspicious. “There is to be no confiscation of our industries. No governor appointed over our heads?”

“Not as long as you cooperate,” Leo said. “Do you accept my terms?”

The words tasted sour in his throat. If she refused, he would have no choice but to land the troops by force … which meant hitting every spaceport, military base and planetary defence centre from orbit before a single soldier set foot on the planet. There would be no way to prevent civilian casualties, nor would there be any guarantee the bombardment would have any real effect. A smart defender would know his ships held the high orbitals and disperse his troops to keep them from being hammered from orbit. A short simple engagement would turn into a long drawn-out insurgency that would leave the planet battered beyond repair.

Poor bitch, he thought, as Lucille gathered herself. She had no choice but to surrender … and she knew it … and yet, her people would likely blame her for capitulation. She would probably be branded a collaborator, forced to seek safety with Daybreak … and it would be unfair, because she had no choice. Leo liked to think he would fight to the death, if roles were reversed, but how could he when the entire world was at stake? She has no choice and she knows it and her entire life is about to be upended …

“I accept your terms,” Lucille said. Her voice was flat. “I trust that is acceptable to you?”

“Yes.” Leo was careful not to rub her face in her defeat. There was no better way to guarantee Lucille would start looking for a way to hurt Daybreak, even though the defeat hadn’t been her fault. “My troops will take control of the orbital facilities immediately and commence the landing in thirty minutes. Is that enough time?”

“Yes,” Lucille said. “And thank you.”

Her face vanished. Leo felt another flicker of pity. “Contact Brigadier Walpole,” he ordered, putting the feeling aside. “Inform him he may begin landing troops in thirty minutes.”

“Aye, Captain.”

Leo leaned back in his chair. Lucille could be plotting something – an ambush, perhaps – but it was unlikely. The entire planet would be punished if they openly broke the terms of surrender … hell, it was quite possible the rebels would have left behind troops with orders to do just that, provoking Daybreak into doing something the rebels could use for propaganda. It might backfire – Leo certainly hoped it would – but there was no way to be sure. If it made people angry, they might not think straight when push came to shove.

And if they think we broke the terms of surrender instead, he reminded himself, it’ll be very hard to get anyone else to surrender.

“Interesting,” Francis said. “You think she’ll keep her word?”

“We’ll see.” Leo tapped his console. “Sergeant-Major, you are cleared to deploy your troops.”

“Aye, sir,” Boothroyd said. “We’ll be back before you know it.”

Leo hoped so. He’d prefer to send Boothroyd to the planet to keep an eye on Walpole … he shook his head, grimly aware that the planet was Walpole’s responsibility. Leo might be the senior officer in the system … except he wasn’t, not really. Walpole was right to argue that Leo wasn’t his superior in any sensor of the word, no matter what orders they’d received from Admiral Blackthrone. Boothroyd’s earlier warnings came back to haunt him. There were too many officers who resented his rise, and his somewhat undefined position within the navy, and too many who simply wouldn’t take him seriously. Walpole was old enough to be Leo’s father. He wouldn’t be very happy about taking orders from him.

“Marines away, sir,” Anderson said.

“Good,” Francis muttered. “You think we’ll get any shore leave?”

Leo swallowed the urge to point out Francis could go down to the planet at any moment, if he wanted to be shot. A lone Daybreaker – naval officer or not – would be a very tempting target for angry civilians … he suspected the spaceport strips wouldn’t be secure, let alone the rest of the planet. There were horror stories about prostitutes cutting off genitals or VR sets being used to ram post-hypnotic commands into the user’s head. Walpole’s men would take control, eventually, but until then …

“I doubt it,” he said. “The planet won’t be truly secure for a very long time to come.”

“They’ll be glad to be liberated,” Francis said. “The rebels won’t have treated them kindly.”

Leo shrugged, unwilling to argue that there was a difference between naval officers and civilians who might, if treated well, happily switch sides. Francis’s grudge against the rebels was understandable, all the more so when he’d made a foolish and embarrassing mistake rather than being beaten in open combat. No wonder his uncle hadn’t found him another command, not even a starship comparable to Waterhen. The risk of a second embarrassment was all too great. Francis would need time to redeem himself and who knew if he ever would?

“We’ll see,” he said. Shore leave was tempting, and here it would be tricky to argue his crew should be excluded, but it would depend on the security situation. “We shall see.”

“Captain,” Anderson said. “The marines have secured the orbital structures. No resistance. They’re proceeding to clear them now.”

“Good.” Leo nodded to himself. The industrial crews would need to be vetted before they were permitted to return to the platforms. “Remind the Sergeant-Major …”

He shook his head. “No, belay that,” he said, instead. Boothroyd knew his job. He didn’t need a young naval officer reminding him to do things he was probably already doing. “He can report in to me when he’s done.”

“Aye, sir.”

Leo nodded. “Signal the fleet,” he added. “Delta Squadron is to survey the system, as previously discussed. The remainder of the fleet is to remain here.”

“Aye, Captain,”

Francis caught his eye. “How long can we keep the fleet at full readiness?”

“Not long enough,” Leo admitted. The jumpdrives would have to be powered down shortly or they’d suffer permanent damage, something near-impossible to fix without a proper shipyard. Most engineers would suggest tearing out the drive installation completely and replacing it, rather than risk a repair, but he had only a limited supply of replacements. “We’re going to have to reduce power shortly.”

And then we’ll be vulnerable if the rebels counterattack, he thought. They could be lurking near the system, biding their time, waiting for us to be at our most vulnerable.

His mood soured as he studied the display. Walpole was launching his shuttles now, the assault craft ducking and weaving as they plunged into the atmosphere, taking evasive manoeuvres even through there was nothing to evade. Their passengers were going to be throwing up on the deck, he thought, unless they were used to it … he didn’t blame the pilots for being careful. Light-speed weapons struck without warning and HVMs weren’t much better, if they were fired from close range. Better to make the passengers unhappy rather than dead.

Francis scowled. “Delta Squadron is taking its time.”

“They have a huge area of space to search,” Leo said. “We’ll see if they find anything.”

He frowned inwardly. New Dublin hadn’t had much time to set up a cloudscoop, develop an asteroid mining industry and establish colonies on the remaining worlds within the system, but they had done quite a bit over the last decade. It would be interesting to see if the cloudscoop was still intact. The rebels could have easily destroyed it, just to force Daybreak to construct a new one or watch helplessly as the planet suffered an economic collapse, but that wouldn’t have won them many hearts and minds. Unless they managed to blame it on Daybreak.

His eyes narrowed as more data flowed into the display. There was little point in searching the system for enemy starships, although he was hopeful the search might turn up something useful or flush their quarry out of hiding. The rebels weren’t fools. There could be an entire fleet creeping up on his ships, using cloaking devices to mask their positions, and he wouldn’t have a clue until they opened fire. He’d deployed a sensor shell of drones around his ships, in hopes of making life difficult for any rebels willing to try, but he knew from experience that such precautions were rarely as perfect as advertised. It was quite possible the rebels would be able to inch through the shell anyway. The consiquences didn’t bear thinking about.

And if they attack now, forcing us to retreat, we’ll be unable to recover the landing force before it’s too late. Leo shuddered, sweat prickling down his back. It was easily the most dangerous moment of the operation, even though there was no sign of the enemy. We could wind up leaving half the troops behind. And their commander.

He didn’t feel any better until the first reports started to come in from the surface. The troops had landed without opposition and taken control of the spaceports, then the rest of the designated targets. Leo breathed a sigh of relief, even though the reports noted that the spaceports had been stripped of nearly everything beyond the basics. Fuel supplies, spare parts for shuttles and starships … hell, they’d even taken the shuttles. Leo had no idea if the rebels intended to use them or simply put more pressure on Daybreak to replace the missing craft, but it hardly mattered. Daybreak wouldn’t bend …

Anderson giggled. “They left the spaceport strip intact.”

“Did they?” Leo allowed himself a tight smile. “They must not have made use of it.”

Francis elbowed him. “I always said the rebels had no balls.”

More proof they only deployed a handful of personnel out here, Leo mused. It was unlikely anyone outside the walls would notice how the red light district’s people were treated. They were rarely regarded very kindly, outside a handful of worlds where working in the district was better than nothing. They simply didn’t need to make use of the facilities.

He tapped his console, bringing up the starchart. Where was the rebel fleet? They had to know their plan had misfired, if they’d intended to mousetrap Admiral Blackthrone. Leo’s fleet couldn’t possibly be mistaken for the admiral’s squadron, no matter how much they wrapped themselves in ECM. Were they planning to hammer Leo anyway? Or … were was their fleet? If they’d set up the decoys a week after their arrival and retreated, they could be on the far side of the republic by now. Or so far into the Beyond there was little hope of finding them. He had the nasty feeling they were just waiting for the penny to drop.

“Signal from the ground, sir,” Anderson snapped. “Brigadier Walpole is requesting fire support!”

Leo sucked in his breath. Walpole, to his credit, had landed at the spaceport with the first assault wave. It might be relatively safe, compared to a high-intensity war zone, but it was still a prime target when – if – the enemy troops launched a counterattack. An assault force armed with relatively primitive weapons, ones that could be built effortlessly in modern fabricators, could do a great deal of damage if they hit something vital. And that meant …

“The spaceport is under attack?”

“No, sir,” Anderson said. “A convoy is being harassed.”

“Show me!”

The display adjusted itself, displaying an orbital image of Dublin City. Leo gritted his teeth as the display zoomed in, revealing an armoured convoy being harassed by a large crowd … it didn’t look as if the crowd were carrying anything really dangerous, certainly nothing capable of damaging a hovertank, although it was hard to be sure. They weren’t in quite the right position for optimum observation.

Walpole’s face appeared in front of him. “Morningstar! I’m ordering you to drop KEWs around the convoy!”

Leo sucked in his breath. “You want me to hammer the convoy myself?”

The brigadier glared. “No, you scatter the KEWs around the convoy to give the bastards a spanking!”

“I …” Leo had to catch himself and start again. That wouldn’t be a spanking. It would be sheer bloody slaughter at best, openly friendly fire at worst. The buildings surrounding the conflict looked large enough to house hundreds, perhaps thousands of innocent civilians … even if they were empty, and there was no way to check, there were hundreds of people on the streets. They didn’t deserve to die. “I’m not going to drop KEWs into a populated area.”

Walpole leaned forward, his nose filling the display. “Now, you listen to me very carefully,” he said, in a tone that would have chilled Leo’s blood a few years ago. His old headteacher had talked in precisely that tone, when he was sentencing naughtier schoolboys to the cane. “This planet is under martial law. My law. I have authorisation to take whatever steps I deem necessary to regain and retain control and now I am no longer in space, I have the final say. You will drop those KEWs now or face court martial.”

“And if the blast takes out our troops too?” Leo was no expect in ground-based combat – his only real experience came from Boulogne and that had been a very different affair – but it looked as though the convoy was holding its own. “There’s nothing to be gained by blowing away our own people …”

“You little shit,” Walpole snapped. “Don’t you think I know the risk?”

He glowered. “This planet could turn nasty at any moment,” he added. “I need to make it clear we won’t take any shit!”

“They surrendered,” Leo pointed out. “That’s a crowd of shitheads, not a military force!”

“You will do as I tell you,” Walpole said. “Drop those KEWs!”

Leo took a breath. “I will not kill hundreds of innocent people so you can make a point,” he said. The rules of engagement concerning such matters were a little vague in places, according to his instructors, but there were limits on planetary bombardment. “If you wish to file an official complaint with Admiral Blackthrone, you may do so. Until then …”

He broke off as the convoy escaped the trap, speeding to its destination. “Until then, Brigadier, we will refrain from mass slaughter. Do I make myself clear?”

“I’ll have you court-martialed for this,” Walpole snapped.

“For obeying orders?” Leo shrugged. There were times when a captain could legally disobey orders, but this wasn’t one of them. “That’ll go down well with the Board of Inquiry.”

Walpole cut the connection, his face vanishing from the display. Leo sagged, suddenly very aware of sweat prickling down his back. That could have ended very badly indeed. Leo had no qualms about killing pirates or rebels, but innocent civilians? That went against everything Daybreak was supposed to stand for.

He took a breath. “Signal the fleet. Secure from Condition One. Alpha Squadron is to remain on alert, Beta and Gamma are to stand down. We’ll rotate until the time comes to return home.”

Francis nudged him. “You do realise you’ve made an enemy today?”

Leo shrugged. “He can get in line.”

 

Chapter Twenty-Five

Leo disembarked from the shuttle and looked around with a vague feeling of discontent.

The spaceport managed to look busy and deserted at the same time, the hangars normally open at all times either closed up or handed over to the new occupation force to use as they saw fit. The massive terminals had been taken over completely, allowing an endless series of shuttles to land, disgorge their troops – and crew on shore leave – and then take off again, seemingly without hesitation. All air transport was grounded, a reminder the skies belonged to Daybreak. Leo wondered, morbidly, if there was even the merest chance they didn’t know it. The occupation force was tiny, compared to the planet itself, but as long as they held the high orbitals it was impossible to dislodge them.

His eyes narrowed as he watched a line of young spacers heading for the red light district. The troops had searched it from top to bottom, vetting everyone in the sector as carefully as possible, then pronounced it open for business. Leo would have preferred to avoid sending his men for shore leave – there was still a risk the rebels would counterattack – but he knew his crews desperately needed a break. A few hours of intercourse and intoxication would do wonders for morale. And yet …

I probably need it too, Leo thought. Walpole had been suspiciously quiet over the last few days, which probably meant he was plotting trouble. A formal complaint to the admiral, perhaps, or something a little more drastic. Leo had already written his report of the affair and sent it back to Yangtze, but there was no way to know which way the admiral would jump. It was quite possible Walpole was one of his clients, or at least a political ally. There might be a court martial waiting for me back home.

“Leo!”

Leo looked up, and breathed a sigh of relief as he saw Madeleine. Bringing them both down to the surface was a risk, but the message she’d sent him suggested she wanted to talk privately – somewhere they couldn’t be overheard by listening ears, human or electronic. Leo had agreed to meet her … he wondered, suddenly, if she wanted to do more than just talk. She looked stunning in her uniform and … he bit down on that thought hard. Walpole’s staff would have the entire area under observation. If they noticed something their boss could use to put Leo in his place …

“Commander,” Leo said. “Did you find somewhere to go drink?”

“Yes, sir,” Madeleine said. She grinned, then turned. “Come with me?”

Leo followed her through the gate into the red light district – the guard made no attempt to check their IDs; Leo made a mental note to do something about it later – and down a street lined with identical pubs and cookie-cutter entertainment centres. There were fewer people on the street than he’d expected, the whores coming out of the alleyways and propositioning spacers as they made their way towards the casinos. It looked oddly tawdry in the daylight, lacking the glamour of the bright lights that lit the area up from dusk till dawn. Leo couldn’t help thinking of a movie set, real as it could be until you walked outside and saw the truth. It was surprisingly disconcerting to see it in daylight. He wasn’t sure what to make of it.

Madeleine led him to a small café and ordered tea. Leo tried not to roll his eyes at the chintzy décor. It was remarkably out of place, a child’s tearoom in the most adult of districts, and yet he had to admit it had a certain charm. The waitress wore a simple maid’s outfit, rather than an absurdly sexy and indeed sexist design, and made no attempt to linger once she’d brought them their tea and biscuits. Madeleine didn’t take chances. She put an electronic scrambler on the table as soon as the waitress was gone.

“You like this sort of place?” Leo was mildly surprised. Flower yes, Madeleine no. “Why?”

“I find they’re good for relaxing,” Madeleine said. “The tea-making is a ritual as much as anything else, even if it is something as simple as letting the tea brew while you pour milk into the cup, then add the tea itself. There’re long arguments over whether or not you should put the milk in first or vice versa, mostly – if you ask me – rather silly.”

Leo had to smile. “What happens if you’re so desperate for a drink you can’t afford to wait?”

“You drink.” Madeleine shrugged. “You seem to have done wonders for crew moral.”

“I convinced the admiral to let me trust you,” Leo said. “All of you.”

Madeleine cocked her head. “You have nerve, to be sure. Most officers wouldn’t go out on a limb like that.”

“Officers without nerve don’t get very far,” Leo said, although he knew there were many different kinds of bravery. Admiral Blackthrone’s decision to concentrate his forces on Yangtze was brave, no matter how many armchair admirals were writing opinion pieces blasting him for a coward. It was easy to be brave when you were countless light-years from the action and unlikely to be penalised in any way if your brilliant plan failed spectacularly. “And it did have to be done.”

He sighed, inwardly. Perhaps it would have been different if his career path had been something resembling normal. An officer was supposed to look out for the crew under him and a CO was supposed to be a father to his men … maybe it was easier to cut a man loose if you’d been a lieutenant or section chief before being promoted to command rank. Walpole had called him idealistic … Leo figured Walpole was right. He had no intention of abandoning men under his command just to make his life a little easier.

“I thank you.” Madeleine gave him an odd look that was somehow more sincere than the expression she wore when they were sharing a bed, their lovemaking more completion than collaboration. “You won the loyalty of the crew.”

“They deserved better,” Leo said. “And I’ll do my best to see they get it.”

Madeleine poured the milk, then the tea. Leo took his cup and sipped it gently. The flavour was stronger than he’d expected, but not unpleasant. A local brand, perhaps. Daybreak practically ran on tea and coffee and each planet had their own varieties … some more flavourful than others. A handful had even become interstellar sensations.

“Yeah,” Madeleine said. “Do you think the taint will ever wear off?”

“I hope so,” Leo said. Daybreak was known for bloody-mindedness, and her leaders were practically bred for stubbornness. They wouldn’t change their minds easily, no matter what happened. So far, the policy hadn’t caused a total disaster. Losing a relative handful of military personnel was an irritant, but little else. “Once they get over their knee-jerk reaction, I think they’ll quietly drop the policy.”

“You don’t know,” Madeleine reminded him, quietly. “Everything we hear from the core worlds is months out of date.”

Leo nodded, sipping his tea. There was no point in arguing the issue. The time delay between something happening along the Rim and word reaching Daybreak, or the other way around, was a fact of life. There were theories that allowed for a degree of FTL communication, from what he’d heard, but so far the researchers hadn’t found a way to turn fiction into reality. The promised breakthrough was a few years away and had been so for decades. Leo would believe it when he saw it.

“Give them time,” he said.

“I hear you picked a fight with the Brigadier,” Madeleine said, changing the subject. “How much of the story is true?”

“How much did you hear?” Leo tossed the question back at her. “And how did you hear anything?”

“His communications staff love to gossip.” Madeleine’s lips twisted into something that could charitably be called a smile, if one used one’s imagination. “Are you really going to meet him for pistols at dawn?”

“No!” Leo was surprised anyone believed that particular rumour. “I’ve just sent a report back to the admiral.”

He scowled. “Was I wrong to refuse to drop KEWs on a civilian target?”

Madeleine said nothing for a long moment. “My instructor would say it depends on the target,” she said. “And what happened in the aftermath.”

Leo gave her a sharp look. He knew the rules as well as anyone. A military target in the middle of a populated area was a legitimate target and to hell with any civilians who happened to be camp out on top of it. The blame for the slaughter went to the bastards who’d surrounded the military target with warm bodies, legally speaking, although practically Leo knew he’d feel guilt even if his actions were considered highly commendable. Daybreak would go to some trouble to capture terrorists using human shields, just so they could be hanged in front of the communitities they’d terrorized. Leo felt no sympathy for them, but … he gritted his teeth. He would sooner sacrifice his career than slaughter hundreds of innocents guilty only of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. And if the admiral disagreed …

“Nothing happened, this time,” Leo said. “But yeah, I take your point.”

He stared down at his tea, his heart sinking. “If it had gone otherwise …”

“It didn’t,” Madeleine said. “Be grateful.”

Leo supposed she was right. If the target zone had suddenly revealed a genuine antitank weapon and used it to slaughter the tankers mercilessly, Walpole would have every right to blame the disaster on Leo. He would argue that Leo had left the weapon – a legitimate military target - intact until it opened fire and he would be right. And then he could carry out his threat to have Leo court-martialed.

He let out a breath, looking up at her. Her shipboard tunic was so bland and shapeless it was hard to believe she was in command of a ship, yet he knew the body underneath was hard and supple and belonging to someone who knew how to use it … he gritted his teeth, shutting down that thought before it went any further. They couldn’t find privacy within the red light district, nor could they go further afield. Walpole had banned spacers from leaving the spaceport and he was probably right. A lone spacer might be attacked at any moment.

Madeleine smiled, rather ruefully. Perhaps she’d had the same thought.

Leo’s wristcom bleeped, breaking the spell. “Captain?”

“Go ahead,” Leo ordered.

“A courier boat just arrived from Yangtze,” Anderson said. “Yourself and Commander Blackthrone are ordered to return as soon as possible, after detaching a handful of ships to maintain orbital overwatch. The remainder of the squadron is to return to base.”

“Understood,” Leo said. He ran through the calculations quickly. The commodore must have acted fast, the moment he received the message. Had he? There was a small chance the orders had been sent before Leo’s message – and whatever Walpole had sent – had arrived. “Is there any datapacket for me specifically?”

“No, sir,” Anderson said. “Just the formal orders.”

“I’ll be up shortly,” Leo said. “Inform the squadron we’ll be leaving at 2100 this evening. All crewmen on shore leave are to return to the shuttles by 2000.”

“Aye, sir.”

Leo closed the connection, then glanced at Madeleine. “At least we got some leave this time.”

“Yeah,” Madeleine agreed. “Some.”

She met his eyes. “Walpole’s message might have forced the admiral’s hand.”

“Maybe.” Leo wasn’t so sure. Admiral Blackthrone would need to carefully examine all the sensor records, or have someone do it for him, before making any sort of preliminary judgement. There wouldn’t be any rush to condemn Leo unless there had been an utter disaster and there hadn’t. “The timing is odd.”

“Perhaps he has another mission for you instead,” Madeleine said. “The scouts might have found a rebel target.”

“I hope so.” Leo stood. “Right now, the admiral is just sitting around waiting to be hit.”

The waitress reappeared, collecting their teapot and cups in an unhurried manner Leo could only admire. He passed her a pair of coins, which she made vanish with practiced ease, before stepping out of the café. The streets seemed a little busier now, lines of spacers and soldiers forming outside bland unmarked buildings that had to be brothels. Leo glanced at his wristcom and noted the time. 1500. There would be enough time for the men to have fun and then get back to the ship, before it was too late. Anyone who missed the flight back to the ships would be in very real trouble, even if it was a genuine accident. Crewmen had been court-martialed for less.

“I’ll see you back home,” Madeleine said. “Don’t hurry back.”

Leo snorted. Madeleine would assume command of Morningstar Base as soon as she returned and she’d be able to enjoy it, right up until he returned himself. He couldn’t really blame her. He’d certainly enjoyed being in command with Captain Reginald hundreds of light-years away …

“I think you’ll have at least a week,” he said. “Unless the admiral decides to send me home in chains after all.”

“Refusing to blow up a lot of innocent people,” Madeleine said. Her voice was light, but there was a hard edge to her tone. “I’m sure you’ll be hung, drawn and quartered.”

She nodded to Leo as they reached his shuttle, then saluted and turned away. Leo clambered into the shuttle and took the pilot’s chair, resisting the urge to call her back for a brief tryst in the shuttlecraft before returning to orbit. He’d made love in more uncomfortable places, true, but … he shook his head, keying the console to bring the shuttle’s systems online before requesting flight clearance from the local terminal. It took longer than he’d expected for the terminal to respond. A petty power play or a simple reminder of just how complicated it could be flying in such airspace. Leo didn’t really care. He had other things to worry about.

His heart sank as the shuttle lifted into the air, the nearby city spread out in front of him, Smoke rose in the distance, a reminder that not everyone on the planet was prepared to bend the knee to Daybreak. Local insurgents or a rebel stay-behind unit? There was no way to know. If their objective was to provoke a major confrontation, or something that they could call an atrocity, they’d probably succeed. Given time …

The flight distracted him as he steered the shuttle back to Gypsy. The corvette looked as battered as ever from the outside, her hull covered with a mishmash of outdated and modern pieces of gear, but he found it hard to care. She was his ship, for the moment, and nothing would come between them … at least until he was reassigned. Admiral Blackthrone couldn’t expect him to command the ragtag fleet indefinitely, could he? The hell of it was that squadron command, at such a young age, would look so good on his record that any attempt to transfer elsewhere wouldn’t be taken seriously. Perhaps he’d underestimated the admiral’s cunning. He’d taken a leaf out of the Deputy Commandant’s book and made it work.

Or maybe I’m overthinking it, he thought, as he docked. The admiral could just be making the best possible use of me.

He told himself not to be silly. He had a semi-independent command. He’d be lucky to have any sort of command if he’d followed a normal career path, and he knew it. He would be very lucky to have made Commander … he didn’t think it could happen without a very powerful patron taking an interest in his career. Francis had made Commander, true, but Francis had three years on him. And even then, his promotion had come ahead of time.

Francis met him at the hatch. “We’re both being called back home?”

“Guess so.” Leo was too tired to play games. “What did you do?”

“Nothing.” Francis’s face twitched, something crossing his mind too quickly for Leo to recognise the emotion before it was gone. “What did you do?”

Refused to kill a bunch of innocent people, Leo thought. But does the admiral even know it?

“Nothing,” he echoed instead. “Did your uncle say anything to you, anything private?”

“There was nothing attached to the orders,” Francis said. “Just the orders themselves.”

He shrugged. “Go get some sleep,” he added. “You need it.”

Leo eyed him, warily. “You too,” he said. “Did you have a good time down there?”

“It was just a break,” Francis assured him. “Nothing to write home about.”

“I’ll sleep once we head home,” Leo said. He suspected Francis was angling for a brief period of command. Leo had no intention of giving it to him. He might have learnt some lessons from his last command, perhaps, but … no. Leo couldn’t take the risk. “There’s too much else to do.”

Francis smiled. “Right you are.”

Leo nodded as he made his way to the bridge. Four hours to reload the crew, five hours before jumping out. They could afford to take the shorter route to Yangtze if they were flying alone, he decided, rather than following a path that might be infested by rebel raiders. They should be there in a few days, ready to face the music … he gritted his teeth, unsure what to expect. It could be anything from a commendation and a new mission to an inquiry, perhaps followed by a court martial. Who knew just what the admiral was thinking? Or what Francis might have sent to him? Leo sure as hell didn’t.

Whatever it is, I’ll face it, he promised himself. And at least I didn’t kill thousands of innocents for no good reason.

 

Chapter Twenty-Six: Leo/Admiral Blackthrone

“Jump completed, sir,” Maurice said.

Leo nodded, curtly. He could still feel the aftershocks. Better than the last jump, he supposed, but still pretty rough. The display cleared rapidly, revealing even more spaceborne activity around Yangtze. The system appeared to have developed still further, a handful of new IFF beacons clearly visible within the asteroid belt as well as orbiting the gas giant. He allowed himself a moment of pride, recalling just how much of the original discretionary funds he'd dedicated to developing the system’s industrial potential … it might be outmatched by the resources the admiral had funnelled into it, but it was still a good start.

“Contact System Command, inform them of our arrival,” he ordered. They’d come out further from the planet than he’d expected, a reminder the navicomputer wasn’t up to modern standards. Something else he’d pull out and replace, if he had an unlimited budget, although if he had had an unlimited budget he would have churned out modern warships instead. “And then take us towards the planet. No need to hurry.”

“Yes, sir,” Maurice said.

Leo leaned back in his chair, wondering if he’d ever see the ship again. Walpole’s report could have been worse than he thought, or he could have misjudged the admiral’s response … traditionally, naval officers protected their peers against army officers – and vice versa – but it was quite possible the admiral would take advantage of the complaint to aim a blade at Leo’s back. He might just claim to be too biased to stand in judgement of Leo and send him back to the core worlds, while handing the squadron to Francis or someone else who could be trusted to obey orders. Leo hoped to hell it would be someone, anyone, else. Francis had already blotted his copybook as far as the squadron was concerned.

“Captain,” Anderson said. Her voice was low, urgent. “We’re picking up some local distortion …”

The display blazed with red icons, far too close for comfort. Leo sucked in his breath … starships were jumping into the system, right on top of him! The risk of a collision was incalculably low, unless they got incredibly unlucky, but the newcomers were easily close enough to detect him. Gypsy wasn’t even cloaked! He’d never considered trying to sneak up on Yangtze. It would have been a good way to get killed.

“Go to silent running, now,” he snapped. There was no point in signalling System Command. The newcomers weren’t trying to hide their presence. Thankfully, there were so many ships jumping into the system that their sensors would have trouble isolating his ship from the remainder. “And bring the cloaking device online!”

“Aye, sir,” Anderson said.

“Cloak us as soon as the device is powered up,” Leo added. “Don’t wait for orders. Just do it.”

“Aye, sir.”

Leo gritted his teeth, sweat prickling down his back. It was a race now, a race to make his ship as stealthy as possible before the newcomers rebooted their sensors and started scanning local space. Leo wouldn’t care to bet against his ship being detected, if the rebels acted fast. They were already shaking out their formation, flickering bursts of encypted communication darting from ship to ship. Leo felt a twinge of envy. They’d clearly drilled endlessly to ensure their datanet could be put together as quickly as possible, as quickly as any Daybreaker squadron. More proof, if he’d needed it, that the rebels were far more than simple pirates …

“Sir,” Anderson snapped. “The cloaking device is coming online … now!”

Francis practically ran onto the bridge. “What’s happening?”

“The system is under attack,” Leo said. The lights dimmed as the starship cloaked. “If the rebels have seen us …”

He let out a breath. “We might just have gotten away with it.”

Francis eyed the display. “Really? Oh goody.”

Leo knew what he meant. The rebels were masking well, using ECM to hide their true numbers and weaponry, but Gypsy was close enough for her to get an accurate count even using passive sensors. There were nearly sixty modern warships – or older ships refitted with modern technology – shaking out into an attack formation, backed up by fifty-seven freighters and other converted civilian craft. A formidable force, true, but Admiral Blackthrone should have the edge in firepower even if he was outnumbered.

“They’ve finally shown themselves,” Francis said. “Uncle will kick their asses all the way back to their homeworld.”

“Yeah, maybe,” Leo said. He disliked an opponent who did precisely what Leo wanted him to do and he suspected Admiral Blackthrone felt the same way. The rebels could have kept their interstellar insurgency going indefinitely, so why throw caution to the winds, mass their fleet and attack a superior force on its home ground? Admiral Blackthrone had every edge he could possibly ask for, except raw numbers, and … it just didn’t feel right. “Why are they throwing away their edge?”

His mood darkened as he studied the rebel warships. The newer craft were of unfamiliar design, nothing that pointed to a particular shipyard … more proof the rebels had a shipyard of their own, orbiting a dim star beyond the Rim or simply floating in the immensity of interstellar space. There was nothing unconventional about their designs, as far as he could tell with passive sensors, but he couldn’t squash the feeling they were being played. The rebels had to have something nasty up their sleeves, unless they intended to demonstrate their power and then jump out before the admiral’s ships closed with them. He wished for an active sensor scan, but it was impossible. They’d be blown away before they managed to relay the results to the admiral.

“Sir, they’re picking up speed,” Anderson reported.

“Helm, hold us here,” Leo ordered. There was so much sensor distortion there was little hope of the rebels spotting them, he hoped, but he didn’t intend to take chances. “It looks as if we’re going to be spectators.”

“It looks as through the war is going to end,” Francis said. “They can’t win, right?”

“It looks that way,” Leo agreed. The whole scene was making him uneasy. “They have to be up to something.”

His mind raced. Pin the admiral’s fleet against the planet? Not unless they had far more firepower than he’d thought. Bombard the orbital installations … or the planet itself? Perhaps, but the admiral’s ships would be tearing them apart as they did? Provoke the admiral into doing something stupid … perhaps, but what could he do? The rebels were being stupid and one thing he knew the rebels weren’t, by any definition of the word, was stupid. It made no sense …

And that meant he was missing something.

But what?

***

The report from Brigadier Horace Walpole made grim reading.

Admiral Alexander Blackthrone read it twice, once to get the high points and once to make sure everything was placed in context, and then sat back at his desk to have a think. Walpole’s complaints were, at face value, entirely justified … but reading between the lines, Alexander was inclined to think Commander Morningstar had a point. The younger officer’s report made it clear that Walpole had tried to order KEW strikes on a populated area, so close to his own troops there was a very real risk of friendly fire. And Francis had backed him up.

Alexander’s lips twitched. That was odd. Francis’s hatred of the young officer had been notable even before Leo Morningstar had saved Francis from the consequences of his own mistakes. He would have died dishonoured and Alexander, his commanding officer as well as his uncle, would likely have faced consequences too. Alexander owed the younger man a debt for that and … he had chewed Francis out, in no uncertain terms, but it was hard to tell if he’d ever grow into a worthwhile young officer. Some toadying captain had promoted him ahead of time – there were days when Alexander was tempted to look up the man’s name and make sure he never saw promotion again – and now it was too late for Francis to get the seasoning he needed before he was promoted into a command chair. He was growing up, but slowly. Very slowly.

They’ll be here soon, he told himself. And then you have to decide …

The alarms howled. “Admiral to the CIC! Admiral to the CIC!”

Alexander stood and hurried for the hatch. The system was under attack! Part of him felt relieved that the rebels had finally shown their hand, giving him the chance to win the victory everyone expected him to win; part of him worried the rebels might have something nasty up their sleeves. The spooks had failed to put together a coherent picture of just how much firepower the rebels had assembled – their best estimates were nothing more than guesswork – and there was just no way to be sure what they were facing. If their fleet was too powerful for his squadron to tackle …

He burst into the CIC. “Shut that racket off,” he ordered, as he took his chair. “Put what you’ve got on the main display!”

“Aye, sir,” Commander Syeda Padua said.

Alexander nodded, curtly. The display was already updating. The rebels had jumped into the system … too far away to gain any advantage through surprise, he noted coldly, and yet close enough to make it impossible to ignore their presence. They could snipe his ships and industrial nodes from a distance, if he left them in place … they might be expecting, even planning, for him to come to them. And yet, it looked as if they were planning to come to him. That was odd. His squadron had the advantage of firepower, unless the rebels had come up with something totally new, and they were backed up by the orbiting and planetside defences. The rebels had to know it too.

“ Concentrate the squadron, as planned,” he ordered, silently congratulating himself on sending Leo Morningstar and his ragtag fleet to New Dublin. It was just possible the rebels had screwed the pooch, if they’d assumed the fleet that liberated the planet had come from Yangtze rather than Morningstar Base. “Deploy long-range sensor probes, isolate the datanet from the planetary network.”

“Aye, sir,” Syeda said.

Alexander forced himself to relax, studying the rebel formation as they shook themselves into order and started their advance. They were well trained, he noted coldly; it was clear they’d been reading Daybreak’s tactical manuals. That was no surprise … he studied the patterns for a long moment, wondering if he could pick out anything belonging to a different tradition, but he couldn’t see anything that pointed to a specific homeworld. He hadn’t really expected to. The rebels would be fools to give away their origin so easily. Not that it mattered. There would be prisoners, in the aftermath of the coming engagement, and they’d tell the spooks just where they came from. And then …

“Sir, the squadron is standing by,” Syeda reported. “Your orders?”

“Signal the fleet,” Alexander ordered. The enemy couldn’t be allowed to devastate the high orbitals. Ideally, he’d be able to drive them away before accurate sniping became possible. “All units are to advance on my command.”

The display bleeped. “Sir, we’re picking up a message!”

“Put them through,” Alexander ordered.

“… Is the Secessionist Alliance,” a female voice said. “Attention, Daybreak Navy. We have come to liberate this system from your clutches. If you resist, you will be destroyed. This is your one chance to stand down and withdraw from this sector. If you do so, without disabling or destroying any of the system’s infrastructure, you will be permitted to do so without impediment. If you try to fight, or damage the system’s infrastructure, you will be destroyed. This is the Secessionist Alliance …”

Alexander ground his teeth. “How many people heard that?”

“It’s a repeating wide-beam transmission,” Syeda said, quietly. “The entire system heard it.”

“I see.” Alexander studied the display for a long moment. He was mature enough to back down and retreat if it was clear he was outmatched – better to lose his career than his ships and crews – but he wasn’t. The rebel ships couldn’t outgun him. There was no way they could cram enough weapons into those ships to match his ships, let alone outgun them. If he backed down now, he’d be court-martialed and hanged. “Signal the fleet. All units will advance to engage the enemy.”

“Aye, sir,” Syeda said. She paused. “Do you want to reply?”

“No.” Alexander shook his head. There was no point in arguing when the two sides could not possibly come to an agreement. The enemy wouldn’t accept anything less than a withdrawal from the system and that was impossible. Daybreak didn’t run. And yet … “We’ll speak to them with our guns.”

His eyes narrowed. “And order all ships to power up their jumpdrives, holding them in readiness,” he added. “I want to be able to jump out if need be.”

“Aye, sir.”

Alexander leaned back in his chair, studying the squadron display. Months of training had borne fruit, his ships and crews slipping into their assigned slots without hesitation or confusion. His datanet was up and running, the subnets ready to take over if something happened to the flagship … it was unfortunate the rebels knew which ship he was on, unless their spies were wasting their time, but there was nothing that could be done about it. He tapped a command into his terminal, checking that the fleet datanet had been properly isolated from the rest of the system. If he’d been in their shoes, he would have tried to get into the datanet and bring it crashing down. He had no intention of giving them that chance.

“Sir,” Syeda said. “We’ll be within optimum weapons range in nine minutes.”

Unless they open fire earlier, Alexander mused. The rebels had one advantage. Yangtze couldn’t be moved. Any missile aimed at the orbital facilities could easily miss its target – tiny on an interplanetary scale – and hit the planet behind it, inflicting terrifying damage even if the warhead failed to detonate. The rebels would probably have taken precautions to ensure it couldn’t happen – the navy did the same – and yet there was no way to be sure. We’ll have to try to intercept every warhead before it is too late, forcing us to split our point defence.

He frowned as the rebel fleet continued its advance, closing the range with grim determination. The enemy was doing precisely what he wanted and that bothered him. Were they so keen to immolate themselves against his guns? Or did they have something nasty up their sleeves? Or were they merely planning to jump out at the last moment, leaving him with a great deal of wear and tear on his equipment and a difficult explanation to make to his superiors. Someone with a comfy armchair and a complete lack of naval experience was bound to come up with a detailed and impractical explanation of how Alexander could have beaten the rebels without losing a single ship. And someone else would believe it.

“Entering optimal firing range in seven minutes,” Syeda said. “They’re bringing their active sensors online.”

“Lock missiles on their hulls,” Alexander ordered. The enemy had kindly revealed their exact locations to his sensors. The readings would have to be checked, just in case someone was trying to be clever, but it would be easy to separate sensor drones from actual starships. “Prepare to fire on my command.”

“Aye, sir,” Syeda said. “Picking up targeting emissions now.”

They must be making very sure of their targeting, Alexander thought. The rebel pattern suggested a lack of real fleet experience. It was something out of a tactical training simulation, an exercise for new cadets, more than something anyone would try in real life. His lips twisted as he imagined a rebel officer with The Book resting on his lap, checking and rechecking every step on the page before issuing orders. It isn’t as if they need to bother.

Syeda looked up. “Sir, they’re emitting some very odd gravity pulses.”

“A signal to their allies behind us?” Alexander frowned. He couldn’t think of any other explanation. There was no logical reason to do anything of the sort unless the rebels intended to jump out, after launching one hell of a barrage of missiles at his ships. “Or …”

“The gravity pulses are getting stronger,” Syeda said.

Alexander frowned, unease gnawing at his mind. A weapon of some kind? Perhaps a modified mass driver? It might not be as pointless as it seemed, if the mass driver could ram a projectile up to the speed of light … it wouldn’t be a very accurate weapon, but if the rebels could fire hundreds of projectiles they’d be bound to hit something. The planet, if nothing else. There’d be very little warning before they reached their targets.

And no way to destroy them before they hit the ground, he thought. If that’s what they’re doing … Yangtze is fucked.

An alarm sounded. “Sir, the gravity field just skyrocketed …”

Alexander saw it, too late. The gravity field was weak, compared to a planet or a star, but it was more than enough to prevent his ships from jumping out. The rebels had lured him away from the planetary defences and now they’d trapped his ships in realspace, leaving them hopelessly exposed unless they managed to compensate for the effect or surrendered. The first hint of panic yammered at the back of his mind, forced down by training and discipline. He’d thought the rebels were impaling themselves on his guns. It was starting to look as though it was the other way around.

He heard his voice quiver as he spoke. “All ships, stand ready to receive incoming fire!”

The display sparkled with red light. “Sir,” Syeda said. “They’ve opened fire!”

 

Chapter Twenty-Seven: Leo/Admiral Blackthrone

Leo watched, helplessly, as the disaster started to unfold.

He’d been told, once, that tactical surprises normally came from misinterpreting data. In hindsight, it was normally all too clear what had gone wrong and why … here, now, he thought he knew what they’d missed. The arsenal ship was useless in space combat, unless you opened fire from point-blank range, but it made perfect sense if you had a way of keeping your targets from jumping out of the combat zone. The haze of gravitational force surrounding Admiral Blackthrone’s ships was clear proof they were trapped, unable to escape. Their captains might risk a jump – Leo had done something similar, on Boulogne – but the risk of damaging their ships was too high. The freighter he’d used had never flown again. The admiral’s ships needed to get out of the gravity field first and that was likely to be impossible …

“Do something,” Francis said. He sounded torn between pleading and ordering. “Now!”

Leo shook his head, helplessly. There was nothing they could do. Launching every weapon they had at the enemy rear would merely get them swatted, for nothing. The enemy had already empted their arsenal ships – it looked as if the converted freighters were drawing back, out of the gravity field – and destroying them would be pointless. There was no genius plan, no desperate roll of the dice that could save the squadron from certain destruction. He’d wondered where the rebels had been hiding their fleet. He knew now.

“Do something,” Francis repeated. “My uncle …”

“I’m sorry,” Leo said. “There’s nothing we can do.”

He shuddered as the tidal wave of missiles converged on their targets. They had underestimated the rebels and thousands of crewmen were about to pay for it with their lives. There was no way to escape, no way to fight back … no way, even, to surrender. Admiral Blackthrone’s squadron was the most powerful friendly formation for five sectors and it was about to be brutally destroyed. The sheer scale of the disaster was almost beyond calculation. No wonder the rebels hadn’t tried too hard to get him to disperse his ships. They’d been preparing their fleet to deliver the killing blow.

The trick won’t work twice, he told himself. We won’t be surprised again, not like that. And yet …

He gritted his teeth. All they could do was watch. And pray.

***

Alexander forced himself to think.

It wasn’t easy to imagine weapons that were both new and plausible. Faster missiles and more powerful energy weapons were easy to comprehend, something completely new was harder to imagine and harder still to know if it should be considered a reasonable possibility or nothing more than magic. The gravity field projector … in hindsight, perhaps it was something that should have been anticipated. The rebels hadn’t pulled a rabbit out of their hats. But …

He shook his head. “Signal Melbourne and Sysco,” he ordered. The two starships were outside the gravity field. “They are to jump out immediately, then set course for Hardcastle Base. The admiral needs to know what happened here.”

“Aye, sir,” Syeda said. Her voice was calm, despite the tidal wave of death bearing down on them. “Signal sent.”

Alexander nodded, running through his options. Surrender wasn’t a possibility. There was no way to be sure the rebels would treat his men well, if it wasn’t too late to at least try to strike his colours. The rebels might not have their missiles under very tight control. The range was short, compared to most interplanetary distances, but the time delay between sending a command and it being received was still a factor. His point defence would do what it could, of course, yet it would likely be overwhelmed by the sheer weight of enemy fire. He ground his teeth as he remembered being shown around the rebel arsenal ship, puzzling over just why they’d constructed it. He knew now.

“Open fire,” he ordered. The rebels had presumably bolted missile pods to their hulls to increase their throw weight. He hadn’t. It had seemed pointless only a few short minutes ago. “Launch all the ECM drones we have, aim half at the enemy fleet to confuse their point defence and keep the remainder back to draw their missiles off target.”

“Aye, sir.”

Alexander ran through their remaining options. The rebels hadn’t concentrated their missiles on Pompey and the other capital ships, something that puzzled him until he realised they intended to cripple as many of his ships as possible with their first salvo. Their second and third couldn’t possibly match the intensity of the first, which gave him a fighting chance as long as he survived to make use of it. He didn’t have that luxury. His only hope was to take out the gravity generators and pray his fleet lasted long enough to make use of it.

“Locate the gravity generators, target them specifically,” he ordered. “And the signal the squadron. The battle line will advance, best possible speed, to engage the enemy.”

Someone sucked in their breath, behind him. He ignored it. They were already too deep within the enemy’s missile envelop to turn and flee, not without the enemy ships battering them to pieces before they made it clear and escaped. They had to close the range instead, aiming to take out the gravity generators and – if not – take out as many rebel ships as possible before their final inevitable destruction. If they made it through the first wave of missiles …

A dull rumble echoed through the battlecruiser as she picked up speed, the rest of the squadron spreading out around her as she charged the enemy fpormation. Alexander gritted his teeth as the enemy missiles went to sprint mode, accelerating into the teeth of his guns; the point defence fought hard, scything down hundreds of missiles, but hundreds remained. Some were drawn aside by the ECM drones, expanding themselves uselessly; the remainder threw themselves on his ships. The damage mounted rapidly, nuclear warheads tearing through his hulls and bomb-pumped lasers stabbing deep into his ships … he winced, inwardly, as a dozen starships were destroyed in quick succession. It was already the greatest naval disaster for decades and it was going to get worse … he cursed under his breath as Hamilton vanished from the display, her captain an old friend and lover who had just died under his command. Pompey shuddered as a missile struck home, alerts howling as the blast tore at her hull. He’d been lucky. If the enemy had targeted his ship specifically …

Not luck, he reflected. He would be lucky if he was merely allowed to resign. He’d probably be court-martialed. They want me to return home, bringing the news of my own defeat.

He leaned forward, trusting his staff to direct operations as he studied the results of his missile strikes. It looked as if they’d taken out two of the gravity generators, but there were at least four more … they’d had to concentrate their fire, allowing the other enemy ships the freedom to defend the important ships without worrying about their own safety. The enemy was already launching another salvo; his own ships belched missiles in response. He gritted his teeth as he realised there was a very real chance they’d shoot themselves dry. His ships had never had to fire off so many missiles so quickly …

Something else that’s just changed, he reflected. He felt like an old wet-navy battleship commander facing aircraft for the first time. The old-style officers hadn’t realised how much naval combat had changed until it was far too late. What else is going to change before this day is done?

“Sir, they’re altering their formation,” Syeda reported. “They’re moving to shield their gravity generators!”

“Keep us plunging down their throats,” Alexander ordered. The rebel energy weapons would be as good as his, he was sure, and there was going to be a bloody slaughter. There was no other choice. “And redeploy as many ECM drones as possible to cover us.”

“Aye, sir,” Syeda said.

“Signal the fleet,” Alexander ordered. “If we take out the gravity generators, all units are to withdraw through random jumps and rendezvous at Point Delta. Any ship that is unable to jump at that point”- he gritted his teeth; the order did not come easily – “is to attempt to surrender once the jump-capable shops have escaped. It is vital we preserve as much of our fighting power as possible.”

Alexander felt, more than heard, the horror running through the CIC. Daybreak did not surrender. Not ever. It was the navy’s creed. You never gave up. You won or you clawed the bastard as he took you down, so someone else might have a chance against him. The idea of surrendering a starship, let alone a dozen or more, was unthinkable. And yet, there was little hope of getting the crippled ships out. The rebels would capture or destroy them.

He tapped his console, adding a private note to the logbook and copying it into the datanet. The order was his and his alone. No other officer would be blamed for carrying it out. Hopefully. The nasty cynical side of his mind, the one that knew his family had enemies who would do everything in their power to tear him down, pointed out the blame would likely to stain his clients too. There would certainly be more than enough to go around.

Another shudder ran through Pompey. Alexander gritted his teeth. It wouldn’t be long now.

***

Leo had seen hundreds of engagements in deep space in the history records, from two or more starships clashing to fleets consisting of hundreds of ships on both sides, and he’d fought in a dozen or more minor engagements himself, but the engagement unfolding in front of him was a nightmare beyond all understanding. No one had ever speculated that one fleet might be able to trap their enemy in real space, keeping them pinned down … no one outside bad science-fantasy authors who, in hindsight, might not have been so bad after all. The enemy had a wonderful advantage, perhaps more than one. They could turn off the gravity generators and escape if it turned out they’d bitten off more than they could chew.

He forced his mind to think, to find a way to help the admiral before it was too late, but nothing came to mind. His corvette had limited firepower, nowhere near enough to make a difference … the only idea that seemed even halfway possible was to use drones to distract the enemy and his ship was too close for the distraction to work for more than a few moments at best. He snapped orders, deploying the drones anyway … he had to do something. But there was nothing else he could do.

“We could jump all the way to the base,” Francis offered. “Get the fleet. Counterattack …”

His voice trailed off. It wouldn’t work and they both knew it. Even if they risked a long jump, their only real hope of reaching the base and returning in time, they’d almost certainly arrive well after the battle was done and dusted. The fleet wouldn’t be ready for such a hasty deployment either … Leo ground his teeth at the thought. Madeline wouldn’t be making preparations for a deployment she didn’t know was coming, any more than he’d thought to do it himself. The strategic situation had just been flipped and there was nothing he could do about it.

“We can only watch,” Leo said. Admiral Blackthrone was entering energy weapons range now. “And pray …”

***

“Fire,” Alexander ordered.

The two fleets converged rapidly, energy weapons licking and clawing at hulls as the range narrowed with terrifying speed. He had a moment of satisfaction when he saw a rebel destroyer evaporate, his massive energy batteries vaporising the entire ship before anyone could take to the lifepods; his lips twisted, grimly, as he realised the rebels were trying, too late, to open the range again. They had overplayed their hand, just a little … not as much as he might have wished. Their energy weapons were tearing holes in his ships too …

“Sir, Tiberius has taken heavy damage,” Syeda reported. Pompey’s sister ship was being targeted by four rebel ships, their energy weapons digging into her hull. The energy weapons were oddly overpowered … it looked as if the rebels were prepared to risk losing the weapon, perhaps even the ship, in exchange for the chance to inflict horrendous damage. They’d clearly done a great deal of planning for the engagement. “Her CO has ordered the crew to the lifepods.”

“Let’s hope the rebels treat them well,” Alexander muttered. The rebels would … wouldn’t they? He wasn’t so sure. Daybreak hadn’t treated rebel POWs very well in the past and the rebels might feel justified in mistreating his POWs in return, hoping to make it clear that any prisoner mistreatment would be repaid in kind. The laws of war allowed a certain amount of reprisal. “And …”

He cursed. Tiberius had vanished from the display.

The ship shook, again. “Sir, their gravity field is weakening!”

“Signal all ships, they are to run test cycles and jump out the moment we’re clear,” Alexander snapped. Jumping so close to a gravity well was always risky, but his fleet was losing the battle of attrition. Better to get the hell out than stick around to be slaughtered. “Don’t wait for orders, just go!”

“Aye, sir,” Syeda said. The display flickered as an enemy ship fired on Pompey, the battlecruiser returning fire with savage intensity. “Sir …”

The air seemed to dim. Alexander felt as if he were wading through dark waters … no, trapped forever in a single moment of utter timelessness. He could neither move nor speak … was this hell, he asked himself, or something else? Perhaps he would never know … perhaps it was true hell. He thought he heard someone scream … and then everything snapped back. A thump ran through the ship, as if God Himself had reached down and slapped the battlecruiser; the gravity failed, just for a second, before restoring itself. The display went blank. It didn’t reboot.

“Report,” Alexander ordered, harshly. Had they made it clear? Or were they about to be blown to pieces by an enemy they couldn’t see? “I said, report!”

Syeda staggered to her feet and checked her console. “Sir, we made it clear,” she said. “We … we appear to be two light-years from Yangtze!”

And the rest of the fleet will have jumped randomly too, Alexander thought, numbly. The display came back online, revealing kilometres upon kilometres of empty space. Shit.

“We’ll jump once we have made repairs,” he said. “We have time.”

He stood and made his way back to his cabin. His firearm was in his drawer … he could put the gun to his head and pull the trigger, expiating his failure with blood … was it the simple fact that the navy still needed him that stayed his hand, he asked himself, or was he too cowardly to end his life? He had just presided over the greatest naval defeat in decades … he didn’t even know how bad it was, not in any real sense. How many ships had made it out? Was his ship the lone survivor of the squadron?

They need me, he told himself. He could best serve the navy by facing his trial with his head held high. His defeat would be examined, every last detail noted and logged as a warning to every other commanding officer, now and future. He would be the whipping boy, taking the blame on himself so the rest of the squadron could return to their duties. And when that is done, we shall see.

***

“Activate the drones,” Leo snapped. The squadron was escaping … barely. “And then pull us back.”

“Aye, sir,” Anderson said.

Leo barely heard her. The squadron had been shot to pieces. It was hard to keep track in all the distortion, but it looked as if only twelve starships – at most – had made it clear. Five more were battered so badly they were effectively crippled, one leaking plasma from her drive section; the remainder were gone, nothing more than atoms drifting through space. His sensors were picking up a handful of lifepods … god, he hoped the rebels would treat the prisoners well. If they didn’t …

“They’re surrendering,” Francis breathed. “They can’t …”

“They have no choice,” Leo pointed out. The cripples couldn’t move or fight. The most they could do was trigger the self-destruct when the enemy tried to board and that would convince the rebels not to risk their lives trying to take prisoners. “There’s nothing else they can do.”

He cursed under his breath. The surrender protocols hadn’t been used in decades. The crews were supposed to wipe and then destroy their datacores, but would they think to do it? Or were their ships too badly damaged for them to try? Or … what if one of the crewmen had kept a personal log? It was against regulations, but they weren’t harshly enforced. There’d been no reason to think the ship would fall into enemy hands. The bastards could learn a great deal from even a drifting hulk …

“Helm, keep pulling us back,” Leo ordered. They needed to return to Morningstar Base. It was only a matter of time until Yangtze fell and he dared not assume all files would be destroyed before the rebels took control. “We’ll jump out once we’re clear.”

“Aye, sir.”

“And then what?” Francis sounded grief-stricken. He might just have seen his uncle die. “What do we do next?”

“We find a way to make them pay,” Leo said. He pushed as much confidence into his voice as he could. “That’s what we’re going to do.”

But in truth, he didn’t have the slightest idea where to begin.

 

Chapter Twenty-Eight

“Shit,” Madeleine said.

Leo couldn’t disagree. The flight back to Morningstar Base had been nerve-wracking, at least partly because he’d feared the base would already have been attacked, his ships and crews caught with their pants down in the wake of their victory at New Dublin. He’d spent the trip studying the sensor records, trying to determine how many known rebel ships had been missing from their order of battle, but the recordings were too distorted for him to draw any real conclusions from his work. The only thing he had been able to determine was that it had been Gayle who’d transmitted the message to Yangtze, although it had been oddly impersonal. A recording? Or a deepfake?

“The war has just turned real,” he said, although the war had been real for months. He’d been fighting it all along. “It’s only a matter of time until they come for us.”

“If they know where to find us,” Madeleine pointed out.

Leo scowled. There was no way to be sure what the rebels knew. He’d never bothered to take precautions against Gayle, back when she’d seemed little more than a helpless ingénue, and it was quite possible she’d collected all sorts of data. She’d certainly known he’d captured a pirate base … hell, there was no reason she couldn’t have purchased the coordinates from an information broker or convinced a pirate who’d been lucky enough to escape capture to share them with her. It was what he would have done, in her place. God! How much had he told her, when they’d been sharing a bed? He’d certainly bragged a little more than he should have, he recalled with a mental cringe, and she’d looked impressed …

“We have to assume the worst,” Boothroyd said. The marine looked around the table. “This base has been compromised, and the rebels will be here at any moment.”

“Yes.” Leo looked at the starchart. Assuming the rebels had access to the latest gravitational charts, they could be on top of the base in less than an hour. They’d have to have started out at once … he gritted his teeth. They had no way to know what was happening on Yangtze, and no way to know how many ships the rebels had devoted to hinging down what remained of Admiral Blackthrone’s fleet … there was just no way to be sure. “We’ll start evacuation procedures immediately.”

He glanced at Flower. “Get all non-essential personnel onto the ships immediately,” he ordered, grimly. “Grab all the equipment on the evacuation list and transfer it to the freighters, then prepare to pull out the remaining crew. We’ll leave behind anything that isn’t extremely important … right now, we need to get our people out of the firing line.”

“Understood.” Flower studied the display for a long moment. “With your permission, sir, I’ll transfer the supplies to pallets and mount them on starship hulls. They’ll survive one jump and we can leave them in interstellar space until we have time to collect and transfer them to the new base.”

Leo nodded. “See to it,” he said. His eyes shifted to Boothroyd. “I want full security, all sections. If we have any enemy agents onboard, they’ll never have a better chance to do us harm. If anyone causes trouble, deal with them.”

“Yes, sir,” Boothroyd said.

“Commander, you and I will organise a reception for the enemy when they arrive,” Leo said, to Madeleine. “We can’t fight them, not here, but we can give them a bloody nose. They certainly won’t catch us by surprise again.”

“Unless they have something else up their sleeves,” Madeleine said. “What else can they do?”

Leo shrugged. The rebels had produced one nasty surprise. It was logical to assume they might have produced others, but there was nothing to be gained by letting himself be paralysed by fears of a weapon that might – or might not – exist. If they had something that could take out a battlecruiser with a single shot, they’d have used it at Yangtze. He’d watch for other surprises, of course, but he wouldn’t let himself be terrified into submission either.

“I dare say we’ll find out, when they show us,” he said. He’d be surprised if the rebels deployed front-line forces to deal with his ships. They’d be more worried about hunting down what remained of Admiral Blackthrone’s squadron. They certainly wouldn’t give him a chance to study any superweapon before they could point it at a real threat. “Until then … we’ll carry out our duty or die trying.”

He took a breath. The rebels had made their move … he made a silent bet with himself that every world across the sector had risen in rebellion, or would do so the moment they realised Daybreak had taken one hell of a bloody nose. Culloden might remain loyal, but the rest … he wouldn’t put money on it. Their industrial bases were small, compared to the core worlds, yet the rebels would still find them useful. The defeat could easily wind up setting off a chain of uprisings across four sectors, each successive revolt triggering off the next. Hell, for all he knew, New Dublin was already back in enemy hands.

“We’ll deploy two scouts to Yangtze, in hopes of learning what the enemy is doing, and two more to New Dublin,” he said. “A third will fly directly to Culloden, to warn them they might be under attack at any moment.”

Assuming they haven’t been attacked already, his thoughts added, darkly. The whole purpose of the garrison worlds was to give Daybreak a secure base for maintaining control of the sector, shipping lanes, and mounting counterattacks once the navy recovered from its shock and went on the offensive. The rebels knew it too. They’d probably marked Culloden as a priority target. By the time we find out, it will be too late.

He took a breath. “Any questions?”

Francis spoke with quiet intensity. “I think we should make contact with the squadron.”

Or what remains of it, Leo pointed out, silently. We don’t even know where they’ve gone.

He scowled. Francis had been oddly subdued during the flight, his thoughts consumed by the awareness his uncle might be amongst the dead. It wouldn’t just be the admiral, either. Francis had been on the man’s staff. He presumably knew a bunch of senior officers and staffers … he might even have had friends. The old Francis hadn’t had any real comrades, merely toadies, but the new one … he had grown up a little over the last few months. Perhaps if they hadn’t known each other at the academy they’d have been able to work together without friction.

“I understand, but we don’t know where to find them,” Leo said. “Yangtze was the only major base in the sector, even Culloden doesn’t come close …”

Francis smiled, tiredly. “My uncle has a contingency plan,” he said. “I know where to find them” – he cleared his throat – “I know where they should have gone. Let me take a courier boat and see.”

The admiral never bothered to tell me about any such plan, Leo thought, with a twinge of annoyance. The reasoning made sense – what Leo didn’t know, he couldn’t tell if he fell into enemy hands – but it was still irritating. How was he supposed to get back in touch with the rest of the squadron if he didn’t know where to find it? And if the admiral’s plan is compromised …

He looked up. “How many people knew about his contingency plan?”

Francis hesitated. “His captains, I believe, and a handful of staffers. All Daybreakers.”

Leo sensed Madeleine shift and shot her a warning look. “You’re sure?”

“I believe so,” Francis said.

Leo considered it for a long moment. It was rare for naval personnel to turn traitor – and, in truth, he’d never heard of a senior officer betraying his peers. A man who’d reached a captain’s chair had no reason to put a knife in their backs. And yet … how many others might have overheard the discussion, or heard about it later, or … who knew? The officers themselves might be above suspicion, perhaps, but what about their staff? Or their lovers? Or …

It would give you a chance to get Francis out of your hair, his thoughts pointed out. And he’d be doing something useful into the bargain.

“Take one of the courier boats,” Leo ordered. “Make sure you scrub the main datacore if they catch you” – that was another worry; he had no idea if the rebels had taken any intact datacores or, if they had, what information might have been stored on them – “and come back here when you’re done. No, we’ll set up a RV point somewhere nearby. I’m not giving you any coordinates the enemy doesn’t already know.”

The old Francis would have argued. The new one merely nodded.

“If you get captured yourself …”

“I won’t talk,” Francis injected.

Leo shook his head. There were plenty of ways to force information from an unwilling donor and the rebels knew most of them. It was unlikely Francis had any conditioning to make it impossible for him to divulge information, or suicide implants designed to murder him if the monitoring software decided he was being interrogated. Leo had never heard of either being used outside the various intelligence services … not, he supposed, that it mattered. If the rebels took Francis alive, there was no way in hell they wouldn’t try to force information from him. He might be a low-ranking officer, compared to his uncle, but he’d been close enough to higher-ranking officers to know plenty of things the rebels wanted to know too.

“They’ll do whatever it takes to make you talk,” Leo said. “Drugs. Torture. Bribes. Women … whatever it takes, they’ll do it. I suggest you don’t let yourself fall into enemy hands.”

He went on before Francis could formulate a response. “You can leave in an hour. Make sure you write your report before you go. And good luck.”

“Yes, sir,” Francis said. “Thank you.”

Leo kept his thoughts to himself. There was no way to be sure the remaining ships would follow the contingency plan. They’d been jumping out randomly … some ships wouldn’t have survived the jump, or burned out their drives, or been followed by rebel warships. Their captains might think twice about making their way to the RV point too, if they were worried it might have been compromised. They might head to the nearest military base instead, or … who knew? He had no idea if Admiral Blackthrone was even alive. He’d gone through the records, time and time again, but there was no clear answer. The admiral’s ship had been lost within the haze.

If it works, we get back in touch, he thought. If it fails …

“There’s no denying the simple fact we’ve taken a beating,” he said, addressing the table. It was worse than a mere beating. It was Pearl Harbour and Midway and New Washington rolled into one, a surprise attack that had not only crippled the fleet but also made it impossible to respond in a hurry. “I won’t try to sugarcoat it. We’ve been hit, and hit hard, and it will take us months, perhaps years, to recover.

“But we are Daybreak. We don’t give up. We lose battles, sometimes, but we don’t lose wars. We will recover, we will rebuild, we will go on the offensive and we will make the rebels sorry they ever picked a fight with us. Dismissed.”

The table rose, except Madeleine. Leo waited for the others to leave before glancing at her. “Yes?”

“We need some kind of counter to their gravity field projectors,” Madeleine said, quietly. “Most of our ships aren’t designed for long-range missile duels.”

“Yeah,” Leo said. He was too tired to think of her as anything other than a subordinate. “It seemed a good idea at the time.”

Madeleine smiled, humourlessly. “It was, until the rules changed. I suppose it explains the arsenal ship.”

“I know.” Leo kicked himself, mentally, for not even considering the possibility. In hindsight, the rebel plan was obvious. “We’re going to have to work on our point defence too. And our targeting.”

“There are some things we can do,” Madeleine said. “Perhaps if we overload the jumpdrives, or rig two jumpdrives to jump together …”

“Run it past the engineers,” Leo said. Two jump fields in close proximity was asking for trouble, from what he recalled, and it would be difficult to keep them from tearing the ship apart. “Perhaps we could scattershot missiles through a jump field and get them to materialise inside the enemy ship. Or rig up mass drivers to bombard the enemy from a safe distance.”

He looked down at the table. It wasn’t likely to work. They would have to be very lucky to score even a single hit and even then … he scowled. Hitting something the size of a planet was tricky enough, when jumping from place to place, and even the largest starship was tiny compared to a planetoid. The engineers would think about the problem, he was sure, but Morningstar Base lacked the resources to reverse-engineer the rebel tech and devise countermeasures, let alone put them into mass production. He made a mental note to ensure copies of his sensor records were dispatched to Daybreak, as well as the nearest military base. The admiral might not have time to do it himself.

Assuming he is still alive, Leo reminded himself. If he’s dead …

He scowled. Who was in command, if Admiral Blackthrone was dead? It would be easy to determine under normal circumstances – there was a clear chain of command, determined by a combination of seniority and combat experience – but now …? He didn’t know how many officers were still alive, let alone able to take command. There were horror stories about officers being court-martialed because they’d been next in the chain of command, the legal commanding officer, and yet neglecting their duty because they hadn’t known they were in command. Or others finding themselves in hot water because they’d assumed they were in command and acting accordingly. Was he in command? It didn’t seem likely, unless the entire fleet was gone, but there was no way to be sure.

Madeleine cleared her throat. “Did you get enough sleep on the flight home?”

Leo gave her a sharp look. “What are you, my mother?”

“Every good XO is supposed to take care of her CO,” Madeleine said, with a sweet smile he knew to be fake. “Get some rest. You’ll be no help to anyone if you’re not well-rested.”

“Get the missile pods deployed,” Leo said. She was right, but he didn’t want to rest. Not now. “If they come knocking, I want to give them a bloody nose.”

“Of course.” Madeleine met his eyes. “You’re doing better than my last commanding officer.”

Your last commanding officer didn’t stick up for you when you got slimed, Leo thought. If he ever met the asshole, he was going to give the man a piece of his mind. If you had a loyal XO who’d served you well, you didn’t let her get penalised for an accident of birth. All I have to do is nothing and I’d still be far superior to him …

“Thanks” he said, instead.

“I’m serious,” Madeleine said. “He would have been completely stunned by the defeat. You’re looking for a way to hit back.”

“Thanks,” Leo said, again. He knew better than to sit on his arse doing nothing. The enemy would come for them, sooner rather than later, and the best he could do was get his ships and personnel out of the firing line before it was too late. “Right now, we need to run.”

“I’ll take care of it,” Madeleine said. “Rest.”

She left the compartment, the hatch hissing closed behind her. Leo sat back in his chair and stared at the starchart. Most populated systems still glowed a reassuring green, but the information was several days or weeks out of date. They’d be in enemy hands now, Leo assumed, as the secessionists came out of the shadows to take control. His earlier thoughts returned to mock him. Individually, the younger worlds couldn’t add much to the enemy forces; collectively, they could give the rebels everything from personnel to military supplies. If nothing else, they’d drain Daybreak’s resources …

He wondered, suddenly, what had happened to Walpole. The wretched man might be under attack right now, or had his positions blasted from orbit … it would be bitterly ironic, Leo reflected, if his troops had been hammered by KEWs, the weapons Leo had refused to deploy on his behalf. Walpole might be dead now, or fighting for his life, or blissfully unaware the balance of power had shifted radically. It wasn’t as if anyone cared about New Dublin now Yangtze itself had come under attack.

And who knows what’s happening there? Leo knew just how much effort had been funnelled into building up the planet’s industrial base. The rebels would want it intact … would they want it desperately enough to refrain from bombarding the planet into surrender? Or … who knew? The sooner we find out, the sooner we can retake the offensive.

He scowled. Unless Admiral Blackthrone had an entire battle fleet up his sleeves, one he’d never bothered to mention to Leo, there was no way to retake the offensive in a hurry. And that meant the war would last for longer than anyone had planned …

The rebels planned well, he told himself, bitterly. And now we have to find a way to turn their success into failure, to buy time for the rest of the fleet to arrive and teach the rebels a lesson.

But he knew, as he rose to make his way to his cabin, that their time was running out.

 

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Leo had expected to be attacked as soon as the rebels could muster the firepower to do it, a task that shouldn’t have taken them a few hours after the Battle of Yangtze. It was clear the rebels had been hurt in the fighting, thankfully, but they still had more than enough starships to bring a hammer down on Morningstar Base. He worked his crews to the bone, evacuating everyone he could to Morningstar II and transporting supplies into interstellar space, both to keep them busy and to ensure he was able to continue operations after the rebels took out the base. And yet, as hours stretched into days, he started to wonder if he’d made a mistake. Perhaps the rebels didn’t know where to find him after all.

“Morale isn’t great, sir,” Tanya Xavier reported. Quite how the heavily-pregnant woman had become the de facto morale officer Leo didn’t know, but he wasn’t about to look a gift horse in the mouth. “There’s all kinds of crazy rumours going around.”

“I’ll worry about it later,” Leo told her. “You need to be on one of the ships getting out of here before it’s too late.”

He sighed inwardly, then resumed his work. The asteroid base had never been designed to serve as a fortress – and the only reason he’d had any problem capturing it was because he’d wanted to take the base largely intact. Blowing it away from a safe distance would have been easy. The pirates would have been unable to do anything, but watch helplessly as his projectiles hammered the base to dust. Now … they’d deployed hundreds of missiles around the base, as well as a number of oversized weapons platforms they didn’t have the crew to dissemble, yet he knew it wouldn’t be enough to give the enemy anything more than a bloody nose. There was nothing that could be done about that either.

Unless they come in fat and happy and I can do much worse, he told himself. But there’s no guarantee of that either.

He paced the corridors, watching the thrumming activity as the base was evacuated. Some sections were already empty, eerily silent in a manner that chilled him to the bone; others were still crowded, the crews bringing in mattresses so they could rest between duty shifts. Morale was in the crapper, unsurprisingly; Leo had insisted everyone work their asses off to ensure they didn’t have a chance to brood. A more conventional crew would be fired up, looking for a way to hit back, but his crew was a mixture of the dregs of the service and foreigners. They were lucky no one had done anything stupid. Leo knew he’d have to come down on anyone who did like a ton of bricks.

It was five days before his wristcom bleeped an alert. “Sir, long-range sensors are picking up starships jumping into the system,” Midshipman Mariner reported. “At least seven contacts, perhaps more.”

“Alert the crew,” Leo ordered. “All remaining personnel are to head for the evacuation ships at once. No one is to be left behind. Transfer fire control to Gypsy and then evacuate the command centre yourself.”

“Aye, sir.”

Leo took one last look at his base, then turned and made his way to the airlock. They’d managed to empty the hangar a couple of days ago, thankfully, but they were still going to be leaving behind a ton of equipment that was going to have to be destroyed to keep it from falling into enemy hands. The beancounters were going to have a fit, he reflected sourly, although compared to the stockpiles orbiting Yangtze his stockpiles were both tiny and outdated. He hoped the admiral had managed to give the order to destroy them, before it was too late. The rebels didn’t need the help.

He stepped through the airlock and hurried up to the bridge. Gypsy was already powering up, the rest of the freighters slowly disconnecting from the asteroid and sneaking out into interplanetary space. The red icons on the display suggested the rebels weren’t quite sure where the base actually was – the coordinates hadn’t been that precise – but they’d zero in on the asteroid cluster shortly. He sucked in his breath as he took his command chair. Five outdated heavy cruiser, four modern destroyers … too much for his squadron to handle, even if half of his ships hadn’t already been dispatched to Morningstar II. No, there was no hope of victory. All he could do was give the enemy a bloody nose and then vanish before it was too late.

Madeleine’s face appeared on the display. “Porcupine is ready to depart, sir,” she said. She was all business … part of him felt a twinge of regret, even though he knew better. “Our fire control datalinks are up and running. We’ll be ready to take over if need be.”

“Good.” Leo watched the last freighter undock from the asteroid and head into interplanetary space. “Put yourself in overwatch position, watch from a safe distance. Don’t let yourself be caught. You’ll be in command if anything happens to me.”

And won’t that put the cat amongst the pigeons, he thought. There was no way any other Daybreak officer would be happy with a foreigner commanding the ships, as outdated as they were. What’ll happen if I don’t make it home?

His eyes narrowed. Francis hadn’t made it back either … Leo wondered, sardonically, when he’d ever been concerned about Francis. Perhaps he was still looking for his uncle or … Leo shrugged. It wasn’t a problem right now. He had to get his ships and crew out of the trap before it was too late.

Madeleine shot him a brilliant smile. “Good luck, sir.”

Leo closed the connection and studied the tactical display. The rebels were slowly advancing on the asteroid cluster, their formation suggesting they were still searching for a target … or that they wanted him to think they didn’t know where to find him. It was a shame the rebels hadn’t waited a few more days. Leo could have emptied the base of everything that could be moved, shut it down completely, then dared the rebels to waste their time looking for a base that looked like an asteroid, in a cluster of other asteroids. But it was not to be.

“Signal the freighters,” he ordered, quietly. “They are to jump out to the RV point as soon as they’re clear of the asteroids.”

“Aye, sir,” Anderson said.

Leo allowed himself a moment of relief. The corvette might be able to outrun the enemy if they were unable to jump clear, perhaps, but the freighters would never be able to escape if they were trapped in realspace. He cursed under his breath, all too aware the tactical equation had altered beyond recognition. Their plans assumed they’d be able to jump clear of anything they couldn’t handle … that might no longer be possible, if the rebels had outfitted all their ships with gravity generators. The engineers had assured him the generators required a great deal of power, which suggested they couldn’t be mounted on anything smaller than a heavy cruiser, but he dared not take it for granted. A cunning engineer could strip out most of a destroyer’s interior, cram fusion cores and a gravity generator into the hull, and use it to trap his ships. Or worse.

The rebel fleet kept moving, their vectors altering slightly as they neared the asteroid cluster. A handful of probes darted ahead, active sensors sweeping space for anything resembling a threat … Leo had to admire their caution in the face of an unknown and powerful foe. The idea of hiding in an asteroid belt was absurd, in most places, but not here. He could position a warship behind an asteroid and ambush his enemies … it was a shame, really, he didn’t have the firepower to make it work. He’d have to settle for taking one crack at the enemy.

“Sir,” Anderson said. “The freighters have jumped out.”

Leo nodded. The rebels might have seen them … it didn’t matter. They already had a rough idea of where to find the base. The rest would come in time. His time was running out.

“Arm the missile pods,” he ordered. The rebels weren’t trying to trap him in realspace. Did that mean their ships didn’t carry gravity generators? Or were they being careful, unwilling to trap their own ships too? The one advantage to their new weapon was that it kept their ships pinned down too … Leo made a mental note to take advantage of it, if he ever got the chance. “Fire on my command.”

“Aye, sir,” Anderson said.

The rebel fleet slowed as it neared the asteroid cluster, a pair of shuttles launching from the lead ship and diving into the asteroids. Leo shook his head in disappointment. He’d hoped the rebels would be a little more careless, although they weren’t wrong not to take chances. The last thing they needed was a defeat that would make them look like fools, if not losers, when they were trying to woo the galaxy to their banner. Leo had no illusions – there was no way he could take out all nine starships, and even if he did it would be little more than a pinprick – but even a minor victory for him would be a setback to the rebel cause. They knew it too.

He tapped his console, bringing up the targeting systems. The rebels weren’t trying to hide. Their active sensors were sweeping space with casual intensity, sweeping over hundreds of pieces of space junk … and the missile pods hidden within the debris. The odds were good they’d miss the pods, he told himself, although it depended what kind of sensors they used. There’d been no time to wrap the pods in something that’d give them a rocky silhouette, if the rebels used the right kind of sensors, and that meant …

“They’re activating targeting sensors,” Anderson snapped. “They saw something.”

Leo didn’t hesitate. He tapped a final command into the system and watched, with a flicker of vindictive glee, as the missile pods opened fire. The enemy hadn’t come as close as he’d hoped – he could have wiped them out if the missiles had been fired in sprint mode - but they were more than close enough for him to give them a fright. The enemy point defence came to life, too late, as the missiles roared towards their targets. They swatted seventy missiles out of space, according to his sensors, but the remainder slammed home. Two rebel ships were destroyed, two more badly damaged. The remainder continued their advance.

“They’re targeting the base, sir,” Anderson said. “They’re engaging with mass drivers …”

“Clever,” Leo muttered. The base was a fixed target. The rebels could smash her into rubble, then sift through the rocks to see what remained. He’d hoped they’d try to board and storm, but … it looked as though they were too smart to put their heads in that particular noose. “Send the self-destruct code.”

“Aye, sir.”

Leo felt a pang as the asteroid base exploded, the nuclear warheads reducing much of the rocky interior to atoms and blasting the remainder out at terrifying speed. It hadn’t been Waterhen, his first command, but … the base had been his. His prize, his base of operations … he wondered, with a pang of guilt, just how many personal possessions had just been blown to atoms. The crew had been warned not to bring anything too valuable, but there was always something, from photographs of family and lovers to private datachips and heirlooms. If the owner couldn’t stuff it in his pocket, they would have had to leave it behind …

Anderson looked up. “The base has been destroyed, sir,” she said. “Long range sensor reports suggest nothing survived.”

“Good.” Leo told himself, firmly, that there was no reason to worry. The base’s datacores had never held the secret of Morningstar II. They would have been wiped and destroyed in any case, as part of the self-destruct sequence. What little was left of them would have been destroyed again, just to be very sure. It was astonishing what hackers could draw from a damaged datacore, given time, but now … if the hackers could get anything out of free-floating atoms, they probably deserved it. “Switch the remaining platforms to autonomous mode.”

“Aye, sir.”

“Helm, pull us back,” Leo added. “Prepare to jump.”

“Aye, sir,” Maurice said.

Leo leaned back in his chair. The rebels had slowed their advance to a crawl, picking their way into the asteroid cluster … he was surprised they were bothering. They had to have seen the blast and it didn’t take a genius to work out that the base had been destroyed. They’d have reason to worry about extra traps too … it was a shame Leo hadn’t really had time to put together a proper ambush. He could have harassed the rebels for hours, perhaps days, before beating a final retreat.

“Signal Porcupine,” Leo ordered. “She is to jump out as planned.”

“Aye, sir,” Anderson said.

“Helm, jump us out too,” Leo added. “There’s nothing to be gained by sticking around.”

He braced himself for the jump, but the sensation still made him feel unwell. The drive recycled as quickly as possible, while the crew kept a wary eye on the sensors, then made a second semi-random jump. If the enemy could track them … Leo shook his head. It was impossible to get even a vague idea of where the first ship was going unless you were very close to their hull and if the rebels had managed to get that close they’d have killed him by now. Madeleine would be making her own set of semi-random jumps, just to be sure they lost anyone trying to chase them, before they headed for Morningstar II. The rebels wouldn’t have a hope of tracking them down in a hurry.

But if they have the resources to search the possible locations, he told himself, they might catch us after all.

He studied the starchart for a long moment. Admiral Blackthrone’s squadron had been destroyed and the few ships remaining had been scattered. His own squadron wasn’t a major threat to the rebel capital ships, not unless they ganged up on a lone ship and overwhelmed her by sheer weight of numbers. That would give the rebels a window of opportunity to take the worlds that hadn’t risen in their support, if they wanted to try, and survey stars that might serve as a base for his fleet. They’d know they had several months, at least, before any sort of counterattack could be organised. He’d make good use of that time too.

“Set course for Morningstar II,” he ordered. If the security precautions had failed … they were dead. A spy in the wrong place … he told himself, firmly, that he’d made certain no message could get out, but the more freedom he gave his crew the more opportunity a spy would have to outwit him. Right now, he wasn’t feeling very confident. “Take us home.”

“Aye, sir,” Anderson said.

The display blanked again. Leo gritted his teeth as the translucent pain swept through him and vanished once again, turning his attention to the display to distract himself. Morningstar II orbited an oversized gas giant, just barely too small to become a star … he wondered, idly, what would happen if someone swept up all the space junk in the system and aimed it at the gas giant, trying to bulk it up to the point it collapsed into a star. It would be an interesting theoretical experiment, if a little impractical. He couldn’t see Daybreak wasting the resources needed to carry it out.

But as long as the gas giant is surrounded by tons of space junk, it should provide enough cover for us, he told himself. And we set out to keep this base hidden from the start.

“Scan for enemy ships,” he ordered. “Anything?”

“Nothing, as far as we can see,” Anderson said. “We’re the only starship in the system.”

Hah, Leo thought. The rebels could have a cloaked ship watching from a safe distance … hell, there could be a black colony hidden somewhere in the system too. That would be a real disaster. The colonists would have ample motive to rat his fleet out to the rebels. He’d had the system monitored carefully, and his sensor crews hadn’t picked up anything, but … There’s just no way to be sure.

“Signal from base, sir,” Anderson said. “They’re welcoming us home.”

“Good.” Leo closed his eyes for a long moment, suddenly very tired. “Did all the freighters get here safely?”

“Yes, sir,” Anderson reported.

Leo allowed himself a tight smile. A day or two of rest and refitting, perhaps, and then he could take the offensive. Raid Yangtze, harass the new defenders; find a rebel convoy and blow it into atoms … perhaps even save Walpole from a well-deserved fate. The lack of intelligence made planning any operations dangerously hard, but … he smiled again. When had that stopped him before?

“Take us in,” he ordered, quietly.

He leaned forward, studying the display. The base was another asteroid, indistinguishable from the rest. There was no reason to think the rebels knew where they were and yet … he hated having to hide. The rebels had had it all their own way for too long, first pinning down Admiral Blackthrone’s ships and then destroying them. The sooner he took the offensive, the better. If he knocked them back hard …

We need time, he told himself. The rebels would be moving to take full advantage of their victory. He knew it. The longer they had to prepare, the harder it would be to dislodge them. And time is the one thing we don’t have.

 

Chapter Thirty

The cabin was cramped, little more than a rocky chamber with a mattress, a ramshackle lighting system and a shower that had been stripped out of one of the outdated ships and installed in a makeshift cubicle linked to an equally makeshift network of water piping running through the asteroid base. There was no real shortage of water – the asteroid was surrounded by countless pieces of water-ice space junk – and normally, the plumbing and all the other facilities would be put together very quickly, but the engineers didn’t have time. Leo didn’t care. It would suffice and that was all he needed.

He sat up, feeling both sated and oddly empty. He’d invited Madeleine to the cabin, feeling a twinge of unease and guilt as he’d made the call, and … they’d fucked. Hard. It hadn’t been making love and it hadn’t been sex, not as much as it had been two grim and desperate people burning off steam in each other’s bodies. She had ridden him, dominated him; he had dominated her … they’d been competing as much as anything else, fighting it out in a manner that both appealed to him and disturbed him in a very primal way. His body ached from where she’d clawed him in the final moments, stabbing pains running down his back … he wondered, suddenly, if he were bleeding. Her fingernails had driven hard into his skin.

“Fuck,” he muttered. The haze was lifting now, reminding him that his squadron was still on the run. There had been no sign of the enemy, but that was meaningless. The hammer could come down at any moment. “Fuck me.”

“What, again?” Madeleine sat upright, her breasts bobbling invitingly. “Really?”

Leo shook his head, ruefully. “I was just thinking about the war.”

“Charming,” Madeleine said, darkly. “And there I was thinking you were thinking about me.”

“The latest set of reports are … not good,” Leo said, ignoring her jibe. They weren’t lovers. He wasn’t sure what they were, friends or rivals with benefits perhaps, but they weren’t lovers. “We’ve lost most of the sector.”

He glowered at his hands. It was galling to realise just how many worlds had slipped out of Daybreak’s hands. Most had managed it without a fight, either convincing the local Daybreakers to leave or forcing them to surrender. A calculated move, Leo thought, and one that might well work. Daybreak defended its citizens and could be relied upon to avenge their deaths, but it would be a great deal harder to whip up outrage if the victims surrendered or left of their own free will. The handful of worlds that had killed Daybreakers had punished the murderers themselves … Leo had no idea how that would work out. Would it be enough? Or would he be ordered to launch punitive strikes?

“So I hear,” Madeleine said. “It’s all outdated, of course.”

“And we’ve heard nothing from the admiral, or his successor,” Leo added. “Where are they?”

“Dead, or stranded,” Madeleine said. “We may never see them again.”

Leo scowled. “Don’t even joke about it.”

He cursed under his breath. It was so easy to jump from star to star that it was difficult to remember just how big interstellar space truly was. A starship without a jumpdrive would need at least five years to travel from Daybreak to the nearest star, and that was assuming the realspace drive lasted that long … which it wouldn’t. The handful of slowboaters used very different drives to move from star to star, taking decades … he shook his head. If a modern ship became stranded in interstellar space, it would be stranded for a very long time indeed. Her crew would need to be very lucky to make it safely home.

“I’m sorry,” Madeleine said. He heard her moving behind him, felt her breasts rubbing against his back. “But we may be the last mobile force in this sector.”

Leo didn’t want to believe it, but he had no choice. “How did it happen so quickly? How …”

Madeleine let him go and moved back. Leo turned. She had a very serious expression on her face.

“You’re young,” she said. “And yet you’ve seen enough to know Daybreak isn’t a good master. You know that.”

Leo hesitated, feeling naked and vulnerable. “Yeah …”

“You go look at it,” Madeleine said. “Planets forced into unfair agreements with Daybreak-backed corporations. Local shipping companies forced to compete with interstellars that have sweetheart deals with the navy for priority access to shipping lanes and supply depots. Mass relocation of populations, mining rights that drain without giving anything in return … you know how it works. And when they object, quite reasonably, we send in the navy to give them thermonuclear spankings.”

She snickered, although there was no humour in her tone. “That’s what we think of it. Spankings. A minor punishment suitable for children. But to the victims they’re the end of the world.”

Leo gave her a sharp look. “What’s your point?”

“Daybreak has mistreated this sector – Daybreak has mistreated a lot of sectors,” Madeleine pointed out. “You know it. And you shouldn’t be surprised they hate us.”

“I’m not,” Leo said. “It’s just that the alternative is worse …”

“Out here, there’s little damage from the war,” Madeleine said. “The colonists here don’t remember those days. There aren’t many people alive who do. They don’t buy into our grand reason for existence, Leo; they don’t believe we’re genuinely looking out for the whole universe when we force them to join us, or else. They think it’s just an excuse to exploit the hell out of them and they hate it.”

“We’re doing the right thing,” Leo said. “Aren’t we?”

“We’re doing well by doing good,” Madeleine said. “And they’re not blind to it.”

She scowled. “It’s easy to convince yourself you’re doing the right thing. You might be right. But because you are so confident, you can easily start excusing the damage you do – as you do – and justifying more and more unpleasantness. It’s in your self-interest to do it, so you justify itself to you. And that whole toxic stew of self-righteous on one side and victimisation on the other is finally starting to boil over.”

“I don’t feel self-righteous,” Leo said. “I ...”

He met her eyes. “I was born on Daybreak,” he said, a flash of anger running through him. “You weren’t. What’s your excuse?”

Madeleine flushed. “There weren’t many options for me, back on Gaul. The local navy doesn’t recruit women. My community … women can’t own property. My father did what he could, but in the absence of a male heir his estate would go to one of my distant cousins, who would effectively inherit me too. If I married instead … either my husband wouldn’t inherit because he wouldn’t be a direct relative, or he would get everything and it would still be his even if we separated. Which is very difficult to do.”

Leo blinked. “That’s disgusting.”

“Quite,” Madeleine agreed. “Daybreak was the best of a set of bad options. My father understood. Everyone else called me a traitor. Harsh words were exchanged … I don’t think I’d ever be welcomed back, no matter what happens between now and my retirement. And … I was loyal. I got stabbed in the back anyway.”

“I …” Leo couldn’t imagine Madeleine letting herself be treated as some kind of property. His mother had been strict, at times, but she’d never acted as though Leo or his sisters were nothing more than extensions of herself. There were laws against child abuse. And … how the hell were women not allowed to own property? It was understandable, perhaps, on a primitive world, but Gaul was a modern planet. “I see why you left.”

“Yes,” Madeleine said. “I was loyal and … tell me, did Daybreak not bring this on itself?”

Leo hesitated. He was loyal too. He believed in the cause, if not some of the actions taken in the name of interstellar unity. He understood that some of those actions were horrific, from a moral point of view, and they caused great misery even if it was for the greater good. Sure, in the short term, resettling ethnic minorities on their own world was painful and thoroughly unpleasant, but in the long term it worked out in their favour. And yet … there were too many people who stood to gain from such unpleasantness, or found a way to turn it in their favour.

“Daybreak doesn’t just recruit people like me,” Madeleine pressed. “They try to recruit scientists and engineers, technical genius and … even stars of stage and screen. The best and the brightest, in all walks of life, are recruited, offered the chance to move to Daybreak and put their skills to work on behalf of the republic. All in the name of the greater good, of course, but it helps keep the autonomous worlds from turning into a potential threat. The brain drain is all too real.”

“And they just go?” Leo hadn’t thought there was any compulsion. “Really?”

“Yes.” Madeleine met his eyes. “Think about it. Daybreak can offer a hell of a lot, from money and resources to galactic-level fame. Why wouldn’t they go? It isn’t as if their homeworld can stop them.”

She shrugged. “People like me get a chance to prove we’re more than just a womb on legs,” she said, the bitterness in her voice poisoning the air. “Others … get whatever they want, as long as they’re loyal. But what did my loyalty get me?”

“I’ve been trying to fix it,” Leo reminded her. “The admiral let me trust you …”

“This is a ragtag fleet in the ass-end of nowhere,” Madeleine snapped. “If the entire squadron got wiped out tomorrow, it wouldn’t weaken Daybreak in any real way and you know it. The admiral can take chances with us. He’d probably be glad to test our loyalty in a manner that doesn’t put his fleet at risk.”

“His fleet is gone,” Leo said. The admiral himself might be gone too. “We’re all he has left.”

Madeleine choked out a laugh. “God help him.”

“God helps those who help themselves,” Leo said, firmly. He hadn’t given up when he’d been exiled to the sector and he was damned if he was giving up now. “I won’t let the admiral put you down again.”

“Really?” Madeleine’s tone dripped sarcasm. “Just how badly does the admiral outrank you again?”

Leo flushed. “You’re under my command,” he said. “I have the final say …”

“And I am sure that the admiral will respect that,” Madeleine said. “He might just relieve you of command and then relieve me too.”

“He might,” Leo agreed. On one hand, there were times when a lowly midshipman could give orders to an admiral and expect them to be followed; on the other, a vengeful admiral could make sure the midshipman’s career met a sudden and very final end. “But I will do my best to make sure that doesn’t happen.”

“We shall see.” Madeleine sounded unimpressed. “You know as well as I do that no one is going to be in a trusting mood after the last engagement.”

Leo leaned forward. “I’ll do what I can,” he said. “Really, I will.”

“I believe you.” Madeleine cocked her head. “But I don’t think it’ll matter.”

“Right now, we might be the only fighting force in the sector,” Leo said. He looked back at her. “Do you want to leave …”

Madeleine gave him a sharp look. “Why don’t you just slap me instead, if you want to” – her voice became a parody of a minor child – “hurt me?”

“I wouldn’t dare,” Leo said. He’d felt her muscles. He was no slouch in the fighting department – Boothroyd was a good and sometimes vicious teacher – but Madeleine was tough. She would be a dangerous opponent, particularly with them both naked. One good hit between his legs and he’d too busy screaming to beg for mercy. “And I won’t keep you here if you don’t want …”

Madeleine jabbed a finger at his chest. “I gave my word. I gave my service freely. And I won’t break my oath because …”

Leo met her eyes. “I’m sorry.”

“Do you think Daybreakers are the only ones who keep their word?” Madeleine looked back at him. “My oath means something to me.”

“No,” Leo said.

He scowled, more to himself than to her. A couple of years ago, he might have given a different answer. He’d been taught that Daybreakers were expected to be forthright and manly, to give their word and keep it even at immense personal cost, while foreigners were shifty and untrustworthy, prone to evading the subject and dancing around issues rather than addressing them properly. A Daybreaker would challenge his opponent openly; a foreigner would resort to sneaky below-the-belt tactics such as whisper campaigns and other filthy tricks, subtle campaigns that would vanish like snowflakes in hell when they were dragged into the light and the foreigner exposed for the coward he was. He’d seen enough since then to know better. There were decent foreigners and oathbreakers who shared his homeworld …

And telling us the foreigners were wily shifty bastards probably served a political purpose, he mused. It’s harder to feel pity for a sneak even if the sneak has no better way to fight back.

His fist clenched. There had been a lad at school who’d snitched to the teachers time and time again, a wet dishrag of a young man who had been repulsive even when he’d been minding his own business. Leo had never picked on him – his mother would have sorted him out if he’d picked on anyone – but he’d never felt any reason to be kind to him either. In hindsight, he wondered if that had been a form of bullying too.

Madeleine leaned forward, until her lips were practically brushing against his. “I keep my word,” she said, firmly. “And if you don’t … it doesn’t give me leave to break mine.”

“I won’t,” Leo said. He wanted to reach for her and, at the same time, wanted to talk. “I wish things were different.”

She snorted. “Daybreak allows you to wish now? Standards have slipped.”

“Hah.” Leo drew back, just a little. “We need to go on the offensive.”

Madeleine surprised him by giggling. “You’re the first man I’ve met who used a planning session to avoid fucking.”

Leo blinked in surprise at the sudden change. “Are you messing with me to keep me off balance or just messing?”

“A bit of both.” Madeleine drew back and sat cross-legged on the mattress. “What do you have in mind?”

“We give Francis a few more days,” Leo said. “If he doesn’t make it to the RV point, we assume the worst and act accordingly.”

Madeleine crossed her arms over her breasts. “What’s the story between you two, anyway?”

“He’s the admiral’s nephew,” Leo said. “Something like that, anyway. Most of those families are rather complex, or so I’ve heard. He had little trouble getting into the academy because” – it irked him to give Francis any credit – “he isn’t quite as stupid as he acts. I embarrassed him when he was in his fourth year and I was in my first, then beat the shit out of him. He was not pleased.”

“I’m not surprised,” Madeleine said. “Why …?”

“He insulted my mother,” Leo said. “Anyway … I managed to embarrass him again, twice, when he was put in command of Waterhen. I saved his ass too” – in hindsight, he wondered if that was why the admiral had left him in the command chair – “and sent him back to his uncle. He seems to have grown up a little since then.”

“Always good to hear,” Madeleine said. “And there I was thinking the system was a meritocracy.”

Leo winced. It was true, at least in theory. A skilled officer who proved himself would always have the edge in wartime. But having a well-connected family could help your career … sometimes. Francis had been given a chance because of his uncle, but that chance wouldn’t get him very far if he fucked up. And he had …

“It can be,” he said. “But …”

“Those who have connections can use them,” Madeleine said. “The way you’re going, you’ll be able to promote me to Grand Admiral soon enough.”

Leo grinned. “Give me a few years and we’ll see,” he said. He knew he was being teased. “If they give me a modern ship, would you like to be my XO?”

Madeleine’s face went blank. Leo kicked himself. That had been a dumb thing to say.

“I think I would prefer to stay here,” Madeleine said, coolly. She didn’t sound angry at him, not specifically, but … she was naked and yet there was no hint of vulnerability around her. “If you get moved on, I can command a squadron.”

Unless Francis gets moved into my role, Leo thought. He didn’t say that out loud. It might make sense from his uncle’s point of view …

He wondered, suddenly, what Francis would do without his uncle. The Blackthrone family had other members in high places, but not all would be willing to take on someone who’d blundered as badly as Francis. Leo would certainly think twice, and to hell with anyone who suggested otherwise. Francis was a liability and there was no point in pretending otherwise.

But they might not see it that way, he mused. And he is family.

He ground his teeth. Sooner or later, he’d be high-ranking enough to do something about it. Until then … he’d wait. It was all he could do.

“Good thinking,” he said, to her. “You’d be very good at it.”

Madeleine scowled. “As long as the crews are well-trained, they can do anything.”

“Yeah.” Leo knew that wasn’t true. “I guess they can.”

 

Chapter Thirty-One

“Jump completed, sir.”

Leo sucked in his breath. The lack of actionable intelligence beyond a handful of long-range sensor reports was dangerous, although he’d taken steps to ensure their arrival went undetected as long as possible. His report would claim the mission was a reconnaissance in force, assuming he lived long enough to write it, but the rebels would no doubt claim they’d beaten off a major offensive if they saw him running with his tail between his legs. Better to withdraw quietly, if the operation went belly-up, than hand them another propaganda victory. It was bad enough reading gloating reports of the Battle of Yangtze, each one crediting the rebels with destroying increasing numbers of Daybreak ships while losing ever fewer of their own. There was little point in remarking that the rebels had, according to their own claims, destroyed the entire navy several times over. No one would believe the exaggerated claims, but they sure as hell would believe Daybreak had taken a bloody nose.

“Good,” he said. It was a risk taking his squadron, or even a small fraction of his ships, out on a raiding mission, but he couldn’t sit on his ass and do nothing. The rebels were consolidating their gains and the longer he gave them to do it, the harder it would be to dislodge them. “Did they see us?”

There was a long pause as Anderson worked her console. “I don’t believe so, sir,” she said. “The freighters should have covered us.”

Leo eyed the display warily. The squadron had jumped into the system behind a trio of freighters so outdated it was a minor miracle they were still flying. Their jumpdrives were so crude, by modern standard, that there was a very real risk their next jump would be their last, their arrival so … energetic … he could bring the rest of the ships in behind them and reasonably assume they’d go unnoticed. The rebels might suspect them anyway, but … if nothing else, the Rim was about the only place anyone could reasonably expect to see older freighters still plying the spacelanes. It was worth a try. The longer his entry went undetected, the better.

“Launch two recon probes, then set up the datalink,” he ordered. “And then take us towards the planet.”

“Aye, sir.”

Leo leaned back in his chair, feeling torn between excitement – and the relief of finally doing something – and fear. The operation could go spectacularly wrong and if it did … the rules of engagement were a little vague on precisely what he could and could not do now the phony conflict had exploded into a real shooting war. His operation hadn’t been authorised by higher authority … there was a case to be made he was the highest authority in the sector and another that he was exceeding his authority well past the point of no return. A Daybreaker CO was expected to be aggressive, to take the fight to the enemy as much as possible, but he was also expected to act as part of a larger force and work towards the greater goal. Independent operations were highly commended if they worked and condemned if they failed … his lips twisted in dark amusement. If the operation failed, Gypsy would be reduced to free-floating atoms drifting in space. They’d have some trouble finding enough of his body to pick up with a pair of tweezers, still less put him in front of a court martial.

He braced himself as the planet came into view. Calypso had never attracted much attention when he’d been in command of the sector, a stage-two colony well on the way to establishing itself as a major player in the sector’s economy. Daybreak had invested heavily in the system and it had been generally believed it would become an industrial node in the next few decades, supporting the development of the sector and later expansion beyond the Rim. It was perversely disappointing that the planet had switched sides as soon as the rebel fleet arrived, although Leo wasn’t too surprised. The investment had come with major strings attached and, sooner or later, those strings would have been pulled.

And now she’s switched sides, he thought. The rules of engagement allowed punitive strikes on planetary infrastructure. Leo had no intention of going that far, but he did need to rattle their cage a little, to remind them that Daybreak was far from a spent force and she had a long history of winning battles and wars. If the rebels think they can protect them …

The display updated, the drones skimming apart to flash past the planet on ballistic trajectories. A lone rebel starship – she looked odd, as if someone had built a heavy cruiser on a battlecruiser hull – was clearly visible, not even trying to hide. Her IFF blazed her secessionist credentials for all to see, nailing her colours to the mast in a manner that couldn’t be ignored. Leo gritted his teeth. It was difficult to sort fiction from reality, when all his makeshift intelligence crews could do was eavesdrop on planetary communications from a safe distance, but it sounded as though the rebels were already setting up a constitutional convention, trying to claim the legitimacy that came with being a formal government. They were certainly rolling the dice.

Not that we’d let them, Leo thought, coldly. We can’t tolerate a rival interstellar power and they know it.

“I’m picking up some modern sensor pulses from the enemy ship,” Anderson said.

Leo looked up, alarmed. They were still at extreme range, and operating in stealth mode, but … “Can they see us?”

“I doubt it, but there’s something odd about her sensors,” Anderson said. “Their dispersal pattern is weird.”

“Can you explain it?” Leo silently kicked himself for not requesting an analyst team from the admiral. His analysts had remained on Yangtze, where they were now presumably enemy prisoners. Or dead. Leo had no way to be sure. There was no way he could risk sending a ship to probe the one system he knew to be teeming with enemy warships and sensor platforms. “Are they looking for cloaked ships?”

“No, sir.” Frustration tinged Anderson’s voice. She was a skilled officer, but she wasn’t a proper analyst nor did she have the datacores normally available to the analyst staff. “Their dispersal pattern is just … odd.”

Leo studied it for a long moment. The pattern was slightly random, suggesting the starship wasn’t another sensor ghost … although it was hard to be sure. The starship design was definitely odd … the rebels might have come up with a new design, getting as far as putting the lead ship into production before discovering the design wasn’t as good as they thought. It would hardly be the first time. Daybreak had a handful of unique ships in service, vessels that had never quite lived up to their potential. It was good to know the rebels had the problem too.

“Keep an eye on her,” Leo ordered. The squadron was drawing near its target. “Are the system defences online?”

“A handful of platforms are active,” Anderson reported. “The remainder appear to be powered down.”

Which doesn’t mean they can’t be brought up in a hurry, Leo mused. No military force could remain at peak readiness forever, no matter what journalists and bad fiction writers thought. The wear and tear, on men and machines, would prove unsustainable very quickly. Even a wholly automated defence system, rare when keeping a human crew in the loop was often the only thing standing between the automated platforms and disaster, couldn’t operate for long without maintenance and rest. They’ll bring them online the moment they get a sniff of our presence.

“Helm, alter course,” he ordered. “Aim to keep the rebel cruiser between us and the planet.”

“Aye, sir.” Maurice sounded doubtful. The lone cruiser wouldn’t mask the oncoming ships if the planetary defences brought their active sensors online. The locals would certainly know what to expect from the region of space surrounding them. “We’ll be in effective weapons range in ten minutes.”

“Hold your course,” Leo ordered. “And reduce speed when we reach extreme missile range.”

“Aye, sir.”

Leo felt sweat prickling down his back as he waited, feeling the seconds crawling by. The enemy ship was an unconventional design, which hinted it might carry unconventional weaponry. A gravity generator? Leo wished, not for the first time, that they had some hard specs on the wretched design. There was no way to know if the analysts had a proper grasp on its power demands, for example, or if their estimates were so wildly wrong that they didn’t even count as guesswork. If the device was easier to power than they thought, a mere destroyer could pin his squadron in realspace and shoot his ships to pieces from a safe distance. The lack of information was worse than anything else. Who knew what else the rebels could do?

“Sir, the freighters are being hailed by the locals,” Anderson reported. “They’re being told to prepare themselves to be boarded.”

“Smart move,” Leo muttered. No planetary defence command with half a brain would let a trio of unknown starships into the high orbitals without making very sure of their bona fides … not in the middle of a shooting war. “Order the freighters to jump out when the shooting starts” – he ignored the little voice at the back of his mind, whispering the freighters might be pinning down when the gravity generators were activated – “or when the locals try to board.”

“Aye, sir,” Anderson said.

Leo counted down the last few seconds as his ships slipped into engagement range. The lone cruiser didn’t seem to have spotted them, but that was meaningless. Leo would have pretended not to see the incoming ships, if he’d been in command, while plotting their courses and preparing a missile strike. There was just no way to be sure what the enemy had seen – if anything. Perhaps it would have been wiser to come in under cloak, but the freighters would have disrupted the cloaking device when they arrived and that would have given the game away.

Maurice didn’t look up from his console. “Sir, we’re entering missile range now.”

Leo leaned forward. “Lock weapons on target,” he said. “Fire on my command.”

He sucked in his breath. Firing from extreme range was a risk – and probably a waste – but closing the range against an enemy that presumably outgunned him was asking for trouble. A handful of ideas ran through his mind, too late to be used in the ongoing engagement; he made a mental note to consider them once he returned to Morningstar II. He could have a planning session with Madeleine and … he forced the thought out of his hand. this was not the time to let himself become distracted. The enemy ship would try to kill him the moment she realised he was sneaking up on her.

“Weapons locked,” Maurice reported.

“If they scan us, or open fire, fire at once,” Leo ordered. The narrower the range, the greater the chance of scoring a hit … but also the greater risk of being detected. What sort of sensor suite did that ship have? A modern ship would be bound to see them at a certain point … she’d probably open fire on anything that got too close, on the assumption that anyone who tried had very bad intentions. “Don’t wait for orders.”

“Aye, sir,” Anderson said. “I …”

The alarms howled. “She pinged us,” Anderson added. “Firing … now!”

Gypsy shuddered as she unleashed her first salvo. The remainder of the squadron opened fire a second later. Leo cursed the timing under his breath … a few moments more and they’d have been in sprint mode range, cutting the time the enemy would have to react down sharply. The enemy crew were well trained, their automated servants coming online and spewing plasma bolts towards the oncoming missiles; their ship belched a salvo of missiles a moment later, aimed at two of Leo’s ships. He guessed their sensors hadn’t quite isolated their targets before all hell broke loose. Bad luck on their part, although it was easily fixed. They’d have no trouble locating ships that had opened fire. It was the one thing decoys and sensor drones couldn’t do.

“Bring the point defence online,” Leo ordered, sharply. His datanet was already up and running. “Fire at will.”

“Aye, sir.”

Leo leaned forward, watching his missiles slice into the enemy point defence. Their crews were very good. They’d been caught by surprise, rushing to battle stations even as his first salvo came howling in, yet they were still swatting missiles out of space before it was too late. Good, but not good enough. Their ship was about to be battered into a pulp, bomb-pumped laser beams stabbing into their hull while nuclear warheads slammed into their armour, shattering it beyond repair …

The enemy ship vanished. Leo cursed.

“She jumped clear, Captain,” Anderson reported. “I couldn’t get a proper read on her jump field, but it seems she made a random jump.”

Leo nodded, gritting his teeth in frustration. Either the enemy captain had kept his jumpdrive on standby, despite the risk of damaging systems that couldn’t be easily replaced, or he'd had the wit to order his jumpdrive flash-woken regardless of the danger of accidentally crippling his own ship. A brave man … or a coward. Perhaps both. It had been the right thing to do despite the near-certainty of facing pointed questions from his superiors when he returned to base. A destroyed ship was useless. Hell, depending on how matters shook out, the rebels might not even have found out what happened to her for quite some time.

“Noted,” he said. “Can you get an idea of distance?”

“No, sir,” Anderson said. “Computer analysis suggests she jumped at least one light-year, but it is impossible to be sure.”

“Never mind.” Leo hadn’t expected anything better. They’d been too far away for a proper read and the missiles would have distorted their readings even if they’d been a great deal closer. The enemy ship wouldn’t be back in a hurry and that was all that mattered. Her engineers would need to check her jumpdrive with a fine-toothed comb before she could return to the battlefield. “Order the missiles to self-destruct.”

“Aye, sir.” Anderson sounded surprised, but did as she was told. “Done.”

Leo nodded. It was wasteful, although there was little chance of recovering and refurbishing the missiles even if they enjoyed unchallenged control over the system. Their drives weren’t designed for repeated use, quite reasonably, and it was normally cheaper to churn out new missiles from scratch. Better to blow them himself than risk accidentally striking a planet. Or create a major hazard for spacefarers.

“Signal the planet,” he ordered. The planetary defences were online now, but making no attempt to engage his forces. That wasn’t surprising. The defenders didn’t have much of a mobile force, and nothing larger than a gunboat, and unless he screwed up by the numbers he could just keep plinking at the planet from a safe distance until the defences were smashed beyond repair. “I want to speak to the planetary leader.”

“Aye, sir,” Anderson said. Leo doubted there’d be any delay. The Prime Minister would have been alerted the moment his fleet showed its hand. His security staff had probably taken him to the bunker by now, if they had any sense. “He’s online.”

Leo nodded as the Prime Minister’s image appeared on the display. “Prime Minister,” he said. “I am Commander Leo Morningstar, Daybreak Navy. You may have heard of me.”

His lips twitched. He’d be surprised if the Prime Minister hadn’t heard of him. He’d been the most famous Daybreaker in the sector … probably still was, with the possible exception of Admiral Blackthrone or Governor Steven Brighton. Leo had never met the Prime Minister personally, never taken any real notice of him, but … the PM didn’t have that luxury.

“Commander,” the Prime Minister said. He sounded as though he was trying to be firm and failing miserably. “Welcome to …”

Leo cut him off. “I’m not a diplomat, so I’ll keep this short. The rebels – the Secessionists – have told you their fleet gave us a bloody nose. They’re right” – there was no point in denying it, not when the rebels had enough hard sensor data to convince even the most sceptical person in the galaxy that the battle had been fought and won- “but we are far from defeated. We have lost battles before, true, yet we have never lost a war. We will recover, we will go on the offensive, and we will eventually defeat our enemies.

“You have to make a choice. The rebels will lose. You don’t have to take your planet down with them. Stay out of the fighting, remain neutral, refrain from giving aid and comfort to the enemy and we will be understanding, when the time comes for accountability. However, if you join the enemy, we will show no mercy. There will not be a second chance.”

He tapped his console, closing the channel. It was debatable if he had the ability to offer any sort of guarantees to worlds and systems caught in the middle and it was quite possible Admiral Blackthrone’s successor would disavow him. That would make life interesting … he felt a twinge of pity for the PM, mixed with a grim awareness the older man could hardly be let off the hook. If he took his planet wholly into the rebel camp …

“Helm, jump us out,” he ordered. The mission hadn’t been a complete success, but … it would hopefully knock the rebels back, just a little, and force them to rethink their deployments. The more time Leo bought for the navy, the better. “Take us home.”

“Aye, sir.”

 

Chapter Thirty-Three

“Jump completed, Captain,” Maurice reported.

“Noted,” Leo said. Their arrival had been rough, deliberately so. The energy splash should have been seen right across the system. The rebels couldn’t possibly have missed it. “Launch two drones, then signal Captain Chulym. She is to deploy Task Force Two as planned.”

“Aye, Captain,” Anderson said. She paused. “Long-range sensors are picking up capital starships orbiting Yalta. They’re not trying to hide.”

Leo nodded. They’d jumped in too close to the planet to approach unnoticed, too far away to give themselves any advantage of surprise. The rebels would know better than to think he’d made a mistake, which meant they’d suspect he had something up his sleeve. It was true. The real question, the one he’d asked himself time and time again while planning the mission, was if they’d realise just what he had in mind. And if they did, what could they do about it?

They need a victory as much as we do, he reminded himself. One defeat was remembered longer than a thousand victories, as long as the fate of entire worlds and sectors hung in the balance. They need to prove they can protect their allies when we return to the sector.

“Deploy the ECM drones,” he ordered. They were too far from the planet for the enemy sensors to pick out individual ships, unless they had some sensor tech right out of science-fantasy. He'd made sure to bunch up his formation, blurring drive signatures together to confuse the enemy and suggest his force was stronger than it actually was. The rebels needed to be lured into making a mistake and the easiest way to do it was to tempt them, to offer them the chance to take out the remainder of Admiral Blackthrone’s fleet. “Bring them online on my command.”

“Aye, sir,” Anderson reported.

Leo leaned back in his chair, forcing himself to wait as they near the planet. Yalta was a major transhipment point for a reason, her government seething under Daybreak’s control of the sector and the rules placed on her use of her own territory. They’d clearly been preparing for trouble for quite some time, he noted; his sensors were picking up a handful of warships broadcasting Yalta IFF codes instead of anything new. The rebel squadron holding position in the high orbitals looked more like guests than a defensive force. Smart of them, Leo reflected. They knew they needed to win hearts and minds as well as battles.

“I’m picking up seventeen rebel warships, broadcasting Secessionist IFF codes,” Anderson reported. “Twelve appear to be proper warships; the remainder converted freighters.”

Arsenal ships, Leo guessed. Most converted freighters were worse than useless if they faced proper warships. And that means they’re carrying gravity generators too.

He shook his head. “Helm, accelerate along our planned vector,” he ordered. “Communications, transmit the recorded message, then bring the ECM drones online.”

Francis chuckled. “Do you think they’ll believe it?”

Leo shrugged. The deepfake was as good as they could make it, but a modern analysis kit would rapidly reveal the whole recording was about as real as the alien starships reported by drunken asteroid miners. The rebels might not bother to run it through any sort of analysis software if they wanted to believe it, yet it didn’t matter. The recording would hopefully keep them guessing for a few moments longer, buying Leo time to get his surprise into place. And if it didn’t work …

We die, he thought, coldly.

“No response,” Anderson reported.

“Surprise, surprise,” Francis muttered.

Leo nodded in agreement. The recording demanded the complete and total unconditional surrender of the planet, in no uncertain terms. There were no compromises, no guarantees Yalta wouldn’t face any kind of punitive treatment or collective punishment … he’d written the speech to make the locals angry, to put them in a place where they had to fight to the death or surrender without a fight. He made a silent bet with himself that they’d fight. Even if the local government had the sense to realise a fight would only end badly, the population would not. No one wanted to play Petain, Vakhno or Hawthorne, to collaborate in hopes of migrating the occupation … no matter that the only other choice was letting the invaders run the occupation themselves. It was a shameful place to be, and he’d be worried about anyone who wanted to be there. The collaborators were often more hated than the occupations themselves.

Something is going to have to change, he thought, numbly. One day, he’d have the rank and status to do a little politicking himself. Daybreak loved war heroes. It listened to them. If I can get them to listen to me …

“Sir,” Anderson reported. “The enemy fleet is altering formation. They’re moving to block our advance.”

Leo smiled as he studied the display. It looked as if the locals and the rebels hadn’t had much time to train together, let alone work out how to cooperate in an engagement. There was a very real risk he’d be able to defeat the rebels and then turn his attention to the planet, blasting orbital installations from long range or luring their mobile forces out for a fight well away from the orbital defences. Or was that what they wanted him to think? The rebels weren’t stupid and there was a very good chance they’d read the same tactical manuals, as well as running endless simulations to get the mistakes out of their system before they had to take actual starships into battle. They might be trying to lure him onto their guns instead, relying on Daybreak’s tendency for aggression to tempt him into making a fatal mistake. It was what he would do.

“Hold our course,” he ordered. “And deploy four more stealth drones.”

“Aye, Captain.”

“They’re screwing up on purpose,” Francis muttered. “Look at the deployment.”

“Yeah.” Leo had to agree. The rebel ships were moving with an odd combination of competence and incompetence, a well-drilled fleet shifting into a tactically disadvantageous position. “They’re shielding the arsenal ships and …”

His eyes narrowed. Were there more rebel ships? The range was too wide to scan for any sort of cloaked starship and the uncloaked ships were putting out enough emissions to conceal their cloaked sisters. It would be a neat trick, if they could pull it off … they might assume he’d seen through their first deception, patted himself on the back for his perception, and completely miss the second until it exploded in his face. Not that it mattered, he supposed. His fleet wasn’t anything like as powerful as it looked and getting into a missile duel with the visible enemy ships would be utterly disastrous. He had to break off at just the right moment or lose everything.

“They’ll want us to come a little closer,” he said. “And we’re going to give them what they want.”

An odd flicker of unreality ran through him. Was he actually discussing tactics with Francis, of all people? Francis, who thought his family connections made him superior to all? Francis, who had thought having three years on his victim made him a tactical genius? Francis … he shook his head, feeling an odd little twinge of dark amusement. His mother had told him, often enough, that if he didn’t learn his lessons as a child the universe would teach him harsher lessons as a grown adult. Leo supposed she had a point. He didn’t recall feeling that way at the time though.

He put the thought aside. “They’ll have to pin us down shortly,” he added. “Bets on when they’ll bring the gravity generators online?”

“Not yet,” Francis said. “They’ll want us well within range first.”

Leo nodded. There was no point in pinning the fleet down, trapping it in realspace, if they could simply outrun their enemies. The rebels would be accelerating from a standing start … he dared not assume their acceleration curves were any less than his own, which meant they should be able to keep him in missile range if they timed it properly. He mentally considered the vectors … the rebels would be best-advised to bring the generators online in twenty minutes. Unless their drives were better than he thought …

“We’ll open fire at Point Alpha,” Leo said. Close enough to give the rebels a bloody nose, close enough to force them to devote their efforts to point defence rather than shooting missiles at his ships … far away enough, perhaps, for the rebels to be wholly successful at defending their own hulls. They would think he’d wasted his missiles for little return. “And then we’ll run.”

He leaned forward as the range narrowed. The rebels waited, obligingly. There was no hint their uncloaked ships were shielding cloaked vessels, apart from their formation, but Leo wasn’t bothered. The rebels could hide an entire fleet between their formation and the planet and yet it wouldn’t be a problem, at least until it was too late to intervene. In their shoes, Leo would try to cut off his line of retreat, which would mean sending ships away from the planet …

And maybe convince the local government that the rebels can’t be trusted, Leo thought. If they think they’ll be abandoned, they might switch sides once again.

His lips twisted. A couple of planets had suffered rebel coups, and then counter-coups mounted by loyalists, and then counter-counter-coups … it was going to be a nightmare figuring out who was on what side when the war came to an end, no matter who won. The planetary governments would be playing both ends of the war against the middle … he shook his head. That was a problem for someone far higher up the chain of command. The odds of him having to deal with it were very low.

“Captain, they’re bringing targeting sensors online,” Anderson reported. “They’re sweeping our ships.”

Which means they might just figure out that half our ships are sensor ghosts, Leo mused. It wasn’t easy to calculate the precise moment the penny would drop. Suspiciously regular drive fields and sensor emissions were masked by real starships. We might have less time than we thought.

“Prepare to fire on my command,” he ordered. The range was still too wide … perhaps too wide. It couldn’t be helped. Their trick wouldn’t work if the enemy saw through the deception. “We’ll go with Fire Plan Gamma.”

France glanced at him. “Not Delta? Or Alpha?”

Leo shook his head. “We don’t want their ships to feel ignored,” he said. Spreading his fire over so many targets was asking for trouble, quite apart from the extended range which would give the enemy plenty of time to plot point defence intercept solutions, but it would keep the untargeted ships from covering the targets. There was an excellent chance of crippling or at least damaging many vessels, rather than destroying them outright, slowing pursuit. “And we don’t want them not trying to chase us either …”

Anderson’s console bleeped an alarm. “Sir, we’re picking up gravimetric fluctuations,” she snapped. A rustle of alarm ran around the bridge. “They’re locking us into realspace!”

Leo shivered, despite himself. It was hard not to feel the gravity field pressing around him, even through he knew it was nothing more than his imagination. The rebels weren’t projecting that strong a field, although it was more than strong enough to trap his ships in realspace. That might change, he reflected grimly. Projecting a gravity field strong enough to crush his ships, as if he'd flown right into a black hole, wasn’t entirely impossible, according to the theorists. It just required more power than any starship could produce. But if the rebels had had one breakthrough, they might have had others …”

“Signal the fleet,” he ordered. They were committed now. There was no longer any room to back off and evade contact. “All ships are to open fire, then come about.”

“Aye, sir.”

Gypsy shuddered as she unleashed her first salvo. The engineers had outfitted her and her sisters with all the missiles they could, practically cramming them into her holds as well as bolting disposable missile pods to her hull. They’d even drawn up plans for towing missile pods, arguing that if the enemy wanted to trap them in realspace all the normal arguments against such clever concepts no longer applied. Leo suspected it was just a matter of time until someone started drawing up missile-heavy battleships with their own gravity generators, capable of trapping an enemy and then pounding him into scrap, but right now … he needed to fight with the weapons he had on hand. There was no time to wait for newer and better ships to come off the drawing board.

The enemy returned fire a moment later, a surprisingly small salvo when they had arsenal ships in their fleet. Leo’s eyes narrowed, even as he felt his ship come about in a huge circle and make a dive for open space. The enemy should have thrown a much bigger punch in their opening move, trying to overwhelm his defences by sheer weight of numbers … why hadn’t they? Did they suspect his ships were faster than they were … not unreasonable, if they hadn’t penetrated the deception. Battlecruisers like Pompey were designed to outrun anything they couldn’t outfight and there was nothing wrong with his realspace drives. The rebels might have decided it would be a colossal waste of missiles if they couldn’t pin him down …

“Sir, the rebel ships are moving in pursuit,” Anderson reported. “Acceleration curves within expected parameters.”

“Good,” Leo said. He’d been worried he might have to make a deliberate mistake. Any competent commander would think twice about steering his ships into a swarm of missiles, even if his point defence was extremely good. The rebel CO was evidently willing to take chances in pursuit of his prize. And his ships didn’t seem any faster than Leo’s own. “We’ll see if they keep up the chase.”

He gritted his teeth, inspecting the projected vectors on the display. The whole scene felt wrong, as if he was imposing arbitrary limits on himself and expecting the enemy to follow them too. No wonder Admiral Blackthrone had handled the engagement so badly … no one had ever expected to be in a position where they couldn’t jump out if they were clearly losing. He’d done about as well as he could, under the circumstances, yet … everything he’d known about space combat had suddenly become worse than useless. There were few officers who wouldn’t have been caught by surprise, then found it hard to adapt to the new world order.

No wonder battleship admirals found it so hard to understand the threat aircraft posed, he mused, as the first wave of missiles neared their targets. Aircraft were harmless until they weren’t …

The display updated as his missiles slipped into the enemy point defence network. The point defence was good, Leo noted coldly; their datanet wove their ships into a single entity, coordinating their point defence fire to maximise their chances of wiping out the incoming missiles. Their training was actually better than his … he ground his teeth in frustration. They’d known what to prepare for, of course, and they’d taken it very seriously. Only a handful of missiles made it through the point defence to slam into their targets. Leo allowed himself a moment of vindictive fury as three enemy ships were hit. Not destroyed, but … at least one wouldn’t be returning to the battleline in a hurry. They’d need to take her back to the shipyard if they didn’t want to lose her in her next engagement.

“They moved to cover the arsenal ships,” Francis noted. He sounded as though he was trying distract himself. “Interesting.”

“They’re not expendable as long as they’re armed to the teeth,” Leo agreed. It was a shame he didn’t have more missiles of his own. He could have threatened to blow the arsenal ships away, forcing the enemy to use their missiles or lose them. “I’m surprised they haven’t used them yet.”

The enemy missiles, fired at extreme range, swept into his defences. Leo forced himself to watch as the damage started to mount, the enemy – it seemed – aiming to cripple rather than destroy his ships. He snapped orders for the evacuation of one ex-patrol ship, cursed savagely as two more died in quick succession … the enemy were picking up speed, making it harder for him to recover any lifepods. He hoped to hell the rebels treated their POWs well … he feared otherwise. Daybreak hadn’t been kind to any rebel prisoners, had it …?

“Sir,” Anderson said. “They’re accelerating now.”

“Shit,” Francis muttered.

Leo shrugged. The enemy had timed it well. They’d keep his fleet pinned in realspace, while pounding him to bits from a relatively safe distance. If he stayed where he was, they’d always be at his back; if he tried to close the range, the enemy would destroy him well before he slipped into energy weapons range. It looked as though he’d fucked up by the numbers.

“Sir,” Anderson reported. She glanced up from her console, her voice grim. “The enemy CO is demanding our surrender.”

“Demand his instead,” Leo ordered. There were stories of sizable enemy forces surrendering to lone Daybreak Navy starships. Those stories tended to fall apart on closer examination, but … let them think him arrogant enough to demand their unconditional surrender even though he was coming off worst. They might think it a final desperate bluff. “And give him a time limit.”

“Aye, sir,” Anderson said. There was a long pause. “They’re firing again …”

“I think that was the answer,” Francis said.

A giant fuck you written in missiles, Leo thought. He hadn’t expected anything else. The enemy knew they had the edge. Why the hell would they surrender? Perfect.

 

Hi, everyone

My family and I need to visit Singapore this weekend, so there won’t be any more chapters until Monday. Normal service will resume then.

Please comment <grin>

Chris

 

Chapter Thirty-Four

“They’re holding the range open,” Anderson reported, as the enemy ships belched another salvo of missiles. “Why …?”

“They think they have the edge,” Leo said. The gravity field was projected ahead of his ships, making it impossible for him to get out of the trap before it was too late. The missile-heavy rebel ships could shoot his ships to pieces, forcing him to decide between a long drawn-out engagement that would end badly or shortening the engagement – and not in a good way – by bringing his ships around and narrowing the range. “Let them think as much, for the moment.”

“Aye, sir,” Anderson said.

“Cutting matters a little fine, aren’t you?” Francis sounded edgy, as if he’d finally realised they were in very real danger. A plan that relied on the enemy doing as you expected was a bad plan – the enemy always had plans of his own – although in this case the enemy really had to do as Leo wanted or watch helplessly as Leo escaped the gravity trap and vanished. “What if they don’t catch up in time?”

Leo shrugged. “Then we jump out and declare victory anyway,” he said. It wasn’t a brilliant plan, and he was sure a bunch of armchair admirals would gladly take it to pieces, but better a victory on points than total annihilation. “They can’t settle for anything less than a complete victory.”

His lips quirked. The rebels had won a major victory. There was nothing to be gained by denying the obvious. But they’d hurt themselves in a way, because they’d raised expectations in a manner they’d find very hard to meet. A long conflict, a war of interstellar attrition, favoured Daybreak. The rebels would see their allies slipping away, as confidence in rebel victory started to fall … perhaps even switching sides in hopes of buying Daybreak’s favour. It would be tricky to time it properly, to save themselves from rebel retaliation, but if they pulled it off … a missile slammed into his hull, shaking the ship violently. He dragged his mind back to the here and now. The rest of the war had to wait.

“Sir,” Maurice said. “We are entering the breaking line.”

“Keep our IFFs active,” Leo ordered. That was a risk, with the enemy right behind him, but right now it was one had to take. He hoped the rebels weren’t asking themselves why he’d kindly given them all the targeting data they needed. “And hold our course.”

“Aye, sir.”

Leo felt sweat prickling down his back. The enemy were firing again, their missiles lancing towards his ships. They might ruin everything with a single lucky hit, either by hitting a vital spot or … there had been no time to test the plan, not outside a simulation chamber. It would either work perfectly or his name would go down in history as the greatest fool Daybreak had ever produced, at least until someone actually managed to ram an asteroid. There was no middle ground.

Unless they realise the danger before it is too late, he reminded himself. The enemy were using active sensors, trying to separate his real ships from the sensor ghosts. They clearly weren’t taking his IFF codes for granted. They might be able to break off …

The thought mocked him as they flew through the danger zone. If something went wrong … he glanced at Francis, pale and sweating, and felt a twinge of sympathy mingled with contempt. On one hand, Francis hadn’t had to accompany the squadron; on the other, Francis was hardly the only person who’d been dragged into danger. There were thirty-seven crewmen on Gypsy who had no control over their fate, thirty-seven men and women who would die in a heartbeat if the plan went wrong. The fact Leo would die with them was probably no consolation.

“Sir,” Maurice said. “We’re clear of the danger zone.”

“Hold our course,” Leo ordered. The enemy were entering the danger zone themselves now. “Bring up the full ECM suite … now.”

“Aye, sir,” Anderson said. She ran her hand down her console. “ECM going live …”

Leo sucked in his breath. The range was too wide for the enemy to be blinded, if it was even possible, but they’d have some trouble sorting the real contacts from the sensor ghosts. The enemy CO would have to make a decision very quickly … would he alter course, risking Leo escaping his trap, or would he assume Leo was trying to bluff him and maintain course and speed? Leo was gambling on the latter. The enemy knew far too much about his ships and if he tried to reverse course, narrowing the range, he’d never get close before they managed to peer through the sensor chaff and locate their targets. It would look like a final desperate gamble.

Or a panicking man, Leo thought. Gayle knows I don’t panic. Do they?

He keyed his console, bringing up the vectors. If the enemy’s analysis of the situation disagreed with his own … there was just no way to know. Their sensors might miss some details or they might be misled by his ECM … either way, he told himself, they’d get a fright …

“Sir, the enemy is opening fire with energy weapons,” Anderson snapped.

“Trigger the mines,” Leo snapped. The enemy had seen the ambush and were doing the only thing they could, trying to take the mines out before it was too late. He wondered idly what they’d seen and how, then dismissed the thought. The mines had been thrown together in a hurry and lacked anything resembling proper stealth coating. “Now!”

He grinned, savagely, as the mines detonated, each one unleashing a bomb-pumped laser beam into the enemy hulls, at practically point-blank range. Several ships exploded, two fell out of formation … one vanishing in a tearing plasma blast a second later. Leo cursed under his breath as he saw the lack of lifepods, the rebels either having no time to abandon ship or choosing to die rather than risk falling into enemy hands. Daybreak’s reputation worked against it, Leo noted, not for the first time. He made a mental note to raise the issue with the admiral. There was no reason they couldn’t treat rebel prisoners kindly. They weren’t pirates.

“Seven ships destroyed outright, four more heavily damaged,” Anderson reported. “Their gravity field is fading.”

“Bring us about,” Leo ordered. “And focus targeting sensors on the hulls.”

“It worked,” Francis said. He couldn’t have sounded prouder if it had been his idea. “They ran right into the trap.”

Leo smirked, just for a second. Most tricks rarely worked a second time – the enemy command would know what had happened, when the surviving ships returned home – but this one might. The rebels would have to choose, in every engagement, if they should give chase and risk running into mines or if they should back off, letting their enemies escape. His eyes narrowed as he saw rebel shuttles, moving between their ships. They were evacuating the damaged starships …

“Close the range,” Francis urged. “Take them out!”

“Not yet,” Leo said. The enemy had taken a beating. Leo outgunned them, now they’d fired off most of their missiles, and it was unlikely they’d stick around to continue the engagement. A victory would be costly and defeat would be disastrous. “Let them evacuate and retreat in peace.”

Francis stared at him. “Leo, you’re going to let them go?”

“There’s no way to keep them from escaping,” Leo pointed out. The battered enemy ships had to have lost most of their crews. His imagination pointed out that they’d be crewmen trapped in isolated compartments, so cut off from the rest that no one would even know they were there until it was far too late. “They’ll just jump out now if we close the range too quickly.”

And perhaps we can establish more honourable rules of war if we don’t slaughter prisoners out of hand, he added, silently. Or force them into blowing up their own ships to keep from falling into our hands.

The damaged enemy ships self-destructed, one by one. The rest of the rebel squadron seemed to glower at the victors, just for a second, then jumped away. Their commander had to be seething, Leo reflected. A battle in which he’d held most of the cards had been lost because of the joker in the deck. He wondered how the rebel command would react, when they heard the news. The navy wouldn’t be very kind to him, if he’d let himself fly into a trap … particularly when the trap involved a creative use of common technology, rather than anything new and unexpected. The rebel CO would probably not be given a second chance. He might even eat his own gun.

“All enemy units have left the system,” Anderson confirmed, formally.

“Helm, take us back to the planet,” Leo ordered. A shiver ran through him. He was going to have to strike the planet and strike hard, to teach then a lesson, and yet … he didn’t want to do it. There was no way in hell he’d fire on population centres or on anything, really, that wasn’t a military target … it was what he was expected to do. “Communications, raise the planetary government.”

“Aye, sir,” Anderson said.

“They should surrender now,” Francis said. “Their defenders can’t hold the line forever.”

Leo shrugged. “The rebels will organise a counterattack as quickly as possible,” he said. He had no idea where the rebels were basing their reinforcements, so he had a right – even a duty – to assume they were close. Good. It would give him an excuse for not laying waste to the planet’s surface. No doubt he’d be accused of being soft, by armchair tacticians who argued moderation in war was imbecilic, but those people never had to pull the trigger themselves. “We can’t afford a second engagement, not now.”

Francis shot him a sharp look. He did have a fairly complete military education and he knew the rebels couldn’t put together a major counterattack, certainly not in a hurry. They’d have to be very lucky to have a squadron holding position near Yalta, one in a place to intervene before it was too late, and … it was unlikely. Leo kept his thoughts to himself. He was not going to slaughter millions of innocent civilians whose only crime was being in the wrong place at the wrong time. If someone wanted those poor bastards dead, they could do it themselves.

“Sir,” Anderson said. “I have been unable to open a link to the planetary government.”

“They’re shitting themselves,” Francis muttered.

Leo shrugged. “Open a wide-beam transmission,” he ordered. He waited for the nod before proceeding. “Attention, high orbitals. This is Commander Leo Morningstar of the Daybreak Navy. Your planet has been declared in revolt against the Daybreak Republic. I intend to destroy the orbital defences and industrial nodes in response. You have” – he checked his display – “thirty minutes to evacuate the nodes before I open fire. Any resistance will result in a complete sweep of the high orbitals. There will be no further warnings.”

He tapped his console, closing the channel. “Tactical, prepare a ballistic KEW bombardment pattern,” he ordered. “I don’t want to get too close to those orbital defences.”

“Aye, sir.”

Leo leaned back in his chair, praying the defenders would do as they were told. The high orbitals were crammed with installations, asteroid habitats and space colonies as well as defences and industrial nodes. If he took them all out, he’d be sentencing tens of thousands of helpless people to death. A handful of freighters were already departing, jumping out without even bothering to get well clear of the planet; he swallowed, hard, as he saw lifepods departing the industrial nodes, dropping out of orbit as quickly as possible. They were supposed to have enough lifepods for everyone – it was a legal requirement – but did they? Leo had no way to know. The requirements were often ignored, this far from the core. There wasn’t anyone charged with inspecting the local installations …

You missed a trick there, a voice whispered at the back of his head. You could have handled it while you were in sole command of the sector.

He shook his head. Waterhen had been alone. She couldn’t be everywhere at once and enforcing shipping laws had seemed more important, to him, than checking up on safety regulations. A corporation that ignored basic safety would pay a price, when the cold equations of interplanetary realities came to bite, and smarter corporations and planetary governments would handle the matter themselves. Not that it mattered here, he reminded himself. The industrial nodes were about to be wreaked.

“Sir, their patrol ships are jumping clear,” Anderson reported.

“Keep an eye out for them trying to be clever,” Leo ordered. The patrol ships alone couldn’t stop his squadron, but he wouldn’t put it past the enemy to try. He was about to blow away billions of dollars of investment, none of which would be rebuilt in a hurry. “Otherwise …”

“The government must be cowering,” Francis said. “Why don’t they call and beg?”

“They know we can’t stay,” Leo guessed. He would have preferred to occupy the system and make use of the industrial nodes himself, but that would have tied down his ships and given the rebels a perfect shot at him. “They’re hoping they can outlast us.”

He glanced at the timer. Daybreak’s reputation for ruthlessness was working in his favour, for once. No one doubted he would carry out his threat to destroy the orbital nodes and so they were abandoning their positions, even against the orders of their government. Leo hoped to hell the government didn’t punish them for running, once they were safely on the ground and the engagement was over. Weak men often took their weakness out on those weaker than them and the runaways would make an excellent target, if the government needed someone to blame for the disaster. They were trained engineers, true, but would that be enough to protect them?

And what is the difference between what they might do, a little voice whispered at the back of his head, and what we’re doing here?

He ignored the voice as the timer reached zero. If the nodes hadn’t been evacuated … they had had more than enough time, if they’d kept up with their emergency procedures. If not … he had given them fair warning. More than he should, according to regulations. The admiral would have excellent grounds to scold him, if he wished … perhaps even court-martial him. He needed a scapegoat for the disaster and Leo would make an excellent target, if the politics were lined up properly. It might not save the admiral, but it would give him the chance to take Leo’s career down with him.

“Fire,” Leo ordered, quietly.

Gypsy shuddered as she unleashed her first spread of ballistic projectiles. The rest of the squadron followed suit, targeting the defence platforms. The enemy’s active sensors came online, their automated systems trying to take out as many of the projectiles as possible before it was too late … Leo bit down hard on the urge to widen his targeting selection, to lash out at the rest of the high orbitals for daring to resist. It was already too late, really … he leaned forward, gritting his teeth, as the orbital defences were smashed one by one. The industrial nodes followed a moment later.

“All targets damaged or destroyed,” Anderson reported.

“Cease fire,” Leo ordered. There was nothing to be gained by smashing the facilities any further. They’d need to be rebuilt from scratch, unless the enemy had gotten absurdly lucky. “Signal the fleet. All units are to jump to Point Omega on my signal.”

“Aye, sir,” Anderson said.

Leo took one last look at Yalta, feeling a twinge of guilt. The world had just lost thousands upon thousands of hours of work, even though the industrial nodes had been devoted to serving the rebels before they’d been destroyed. Perhaps it would have been better to occupy the world instead … no. It was impossible. He’d been as merciful as he could, but there were limits. The admiral would never forgive him if he’d let the planet get away with switching sides. Yalta would suffer, true, but it wouldn’t be destroyed.

And the rebels have been given a bloody nose, Leo thought. It hadn’t been a complete victory, but he’d proved the rebels couldn’t be relied upon to defend their allies. They’ll look weaker now.

He took a breath. “Jump.”

The universe darkened, again. Leo gritted his teeth as a dull pain shot through his head, coming and going so quickly he wondered if he’d imagined it. The display blanked and rebooted, the remainder of the squadron appearing in front of him … Madeleine was out there, in Porcupine … he wondered, suddenly, what she made of the whole affair. Nothing good, he was sure. It could have been her homeworld under the gun …

“Quick change of plans,” Francis said, passing Leo a datachip. “Admiral’s orders. Once the mission is complete, and it is, you are to report here on the double.”

Leo blinked. “You could have mentioned that earlier.”

“Admiral’s orders,” Francis said. He gave Leo an odd little smirk, a reminder he had birth and family connections .. Leo felt a surge of hatred, catching himself before he could punch Francis once again. The bastard couldn’t fall too far, not with his family ready to catch him, while Leo … one failure could easily see him plummeting to his doom. “He was very insistent I only tell you after the mission.”

“I see,” Leo said. He could believe as much or as little of that as he pleased. “I guess we’re making a detour on the way home.”

“Yeah,” Francis said. “He wants to speak to you personally.”

 

Chapter Thirty-Five: Leo/Admiral Blackthrone

Leo kept his thoughts to himself as the shuttle flew towards Pompey.

The battlecruiser was heavily scarred, despite the best efforts of her damage control teams. The rest of the once-proud squadron was in little better shape, the handful of freighters and mobile repair units somehow managing to look more formidable than the actual warships. Leo couldn’t tell just how damaged they truly were, but they looked mournful as they orbited the dull red star – so unimportant it had no name, just a catalogue number – and waited for the enemy to find them. Francis had insisted the fallback position had never been entered into any datacore, and only a handful of officers had known it existed, but Leo wasn’t so sure. If one of those officers breathed a word to the wrong person …

He put the thought aside as the shuttle docked, the hatch opening to reveal a young midshipwoman waiting for him. Leo tasted a bitter scent in the air as he stepped onto the battlecruiser, the stench of damaged components mingling with sweat, blood, tears and defeat. The battlecruiser had been modern, compared to Waterhen, but now … her hull would be repaired, her magazines would be reloaded and, given time, her crew’s morale would recover once again. But she would need a victory to wash away the taint of defeat … he put the thought out of his head as he was shown to the admiral’s office, all too aware it would be hard to go on the offensive. There were only a handful of ships left.

Leo sucked in his breath as he stepped into the admiral’s office. Admiral Blackthrone looked to have aged a decade in the space of six month. His handsome face seemed oddly lined, his head was bowed as if it were being pressed down by some great weight. Leo felt a chill run down his spine as he realised the admiral’s morale might have been broken along with his ships, that the admiral might no longer be capable of commanding his squadron. And yet, relieving him wasn’t something that could be done easily. The fleet was so badly hammered that it was hard to tell who was next in the chain of command.

“Commander,” Admiral Blackthrone said. He stood and came around the desk, motioning for Leo to sit while he took the other chair. “There is much we need to discuss.”

“Yes, sir,” Leo said. A shiver ran down his spine, a shiver of fear that he might be about to be fired … an awareness he didn’t know what was going on. The admiral’s face was so lined it was hard to believe Leo wasn’t in trouble, despite everything. “My report …”

The admiral spoke with a grim fatalism that chilled Leo to the bone. “When I get home, if I do, I will be court-martialled,” he said. There was a hint of defeat in his tone, a suggestion he had already given up. “Don’t try to disagree. I have presided over the greatest naval defeat in our long history and the loss of countless worlds to a rebel force that seems to have come out of nowhere. The Board of Inquiry will tear apart every decision I made over the last few years, taking its time to reach a decision that every member of the board knew was inevitable right from the start. I will not be permitted to resign. The best I can hope for is a dishonourable discharge and exile.

“I do not think I will be that lucky.

“I did not go on the offensive, as a good admiral should. I tied my fleet down; my fallback positions were weak, barely developed by the time I needed them. The one real offensive move involved you and your ships, Commander, and it was nowhere near enough to turn the tide. My critics will attest I should have deduced the existence of the gravity generators, from the capture of the arsenal ship, and they may be right. Certainly, few will argue otherwise. Daybreak will need a scapegoat, and that scapegoat will be me. Too many proud ships and lives have been lost for anyone to argue otherwise.”

His words hung in the air for a long cold moment. Leo swallowed, hard.

“I have lost control of the sector. Dozens of systems are now in enemy hands, along with their resources. We may lose control of several more sectors before we manage to regain the initiative – and, of course, we still have no idea who is backing the rebels. No commander in our long history had ever lost so badly, Commander, and …”

He paused. “Better I face the court-martial than the rest of my officers. I will serve Daybreak one final time by accepting the blame. Because, in the end, the responsibility was mine.”

Leo hesitated. “Sir, I …”

Admiral Blackthrone held up a hand. “The decision has been made, Commander,” he said. “It is not up for dispute.”

“Yes, sir,” Leo said.

He swallowed, again. The admiral had made mistakes. He had. But he’d also been caught by surprise. Everything he’d done had made perfect sense at the time, from keeping his ships near Yangtze to sending Leo to raid New Dublin; it was only in hindsight his mistakes had turned out to be disasters. Leo had never liked the admiral, and it had taken him some time to come to respect him, but he didn’t deserve to have his career destroyed. His missteps should not have been as disastrous as they turned out to be.

“I owe you an apology,” Admiral Blackthrone added.

Leo blinked. “Sir?”

“I thought you had been promoted far above your level of competence,” Admiral Blackthrone said. “The circumstances that put you in command of Waterhen should never have been allowed to take place. Your missteps during your first cruise could easily have gotten you killed and your ship destroyed and it was only through luck that you survived. I heard too much about you from Francis, too, and it coloured my opinion. Putting him in command of Waterhen over you was a mistake.”

Leo honestly wasn’t sure what to say. “Sir, I …”

Admiral Blackthrone met his eyes. “You saved Francis’s life and career, despite his … missteps,” he added. “And you brought us the intelligence we needed to prepare for war.”

He looked down at his hands. “I wish things had been different. If I’d realised your potential from the start, perhaps they would have been.”

Leo swallowed. The admiral sounded as if he were putting his affairs in order before …

“Sir,” he said. “What’s done is done. We cannot change the past. We can only learn from it and move on.”

The admiral’s lips twitched. “True, as far as it goes,” he said. “But sometimes the past holds us back.

“We underestimated the rebels. That much is clear. They hit us with one outside context weapon and they may have others. The spooks and engineers veer between assuring me the rebels have nothing new, apart from the gravity generator, and coming up with all sorts of ideas for superweapons that might, or might not, be practical. We have moved from holding the rebels in contempt to considering them supermen, able to construct magical weapons from nowhere and deploy them with terrifying speed. Cold logic says otherwise, of course, but cold logic is meaningless against such a shock as the one they gave us.

“We saw them as just another ragtag fleet. They’re clearly a great deal more.”

“Yes, sir,” Leo said.

“Word will be reaching Daybreak about now,” Admiral Blackthrone said. “Orders for my relief will be heading my way shortly. Hopefully, they’ll be sending some heavy reinforcements too, but they will likely take months to arrive. The rebels will have near-complete freedom to harass the sector, and its neighbours, until then. I intend to knock them back on their heels.”

Leo met his eyes. “You intend to go on the offensive?”

“Yes.” Admiral Blackthrone tapped his terminal. A starchart appeared in front of them. “I have deployed four scouts to keep an eye on Yangtze, following contingency plans I had hoped never to use. The enemy has successfully taken the high orbitals, along with most of our industrial base, but the planetary defences were strong enough to keep the rebels from landing in or near Yangtze City. Governor Brighton remains in Government House and, thankfully, the troops and militia have been able to set up defence lines to protect the region.”

He brought up an image of the capital and continued. “That will not last. Given time, the rebels will either crack the defences on the ground or bring in heavier units to take out the PDCs. The planet will fall. The governor and his staff will have no choice, but to surrender or die.”

Leo nodded. Governor Brighton was a thoroughly decent man. He didn’t deserve to be paraded as a prisoner, nor did the locals working for the government deserve to be hanged as collaborators. Leo knew hundreds of people on Yangtze who had sided with Daybreak, who had worked – directly or indirectly – for Leo and his successors … they didn’t deserve to die because they’d tried to make a better life for himself. And yet, getting the governor and his staff – and the rest of the refugees – out of the system would be tricky. The rebels had had plenty of time to take control of the high orbitals and deploy defences of their own.

“We have little hope of recovering Yangtze, unless the enemy foolishly abandons her,” Admiral Blackthrone said. “However, we can get in and recover as many of our personnel as possible … assuming the rebels cooperate. Your mission, if you choose to accept it, is to command one prong of our operation. This may very well be one last throw of the die. Mine, certainly.”

“Yes, sir,” Leo said. He’d have to take a look at the operational concept, perhaps modify it … he grimaced, inwardly, as he realised he’d likely be outranked by the staff officers who’d drawn it up. The admiral might support him or he might not. “How many people can we get off the surface in time?”

“Unclear,” Admiral Blackthrone admitted. “The shuttles on the ground have been reconfigured for heavy-lift, and we should be able to get ten thousand or so souls into orbit on each flight, but it depends on how much time the rebels give us. If we fail to lure them out of place, Commander, those shuttles will be sitting ducks. My most optimistic estimate is that we’ll be able to lift forty thousand, but that might be too optimistic. Twenty thousand might be more accurate.”

Or even less, Leo thought. He hadn’t seen the simulations, but he knew Yangtze. The rebels would see the shuttles the moment they were launched and if they reacted quickly, they could slam the door closed before it was too late. Getting even one flight of shuttles into orbit will be tricky as hell.

“We’ll do our best, sir,” Leo assured him.

“It won’t be a great victory, unless the enemy makes a horrific mistake,” Admiral Blackthrone said. “Don’t be in any doubt about it. We will give them a bloody nose, but this war will not be won or lost because of a single battle. We may never win a complete victory. But as long as we keep up the fight, we can deny them a victory too.”

“Wars are not won by evacuations,” Leo quoted.

“Quite,” Admiral Blackthrone agreed. “My planning staff is waiting for you. Given that you’ll be in command of an independent force, I will be giving you considerable freedom to plan and execute your side of the operation. You know the goal, Commander. Make it happen.”

“Yes, sir,” Leo said.

“I’ll be assigning Francis to serve as your de facto XO,” Admiral Blackthrone continued. “He’ll help sort out any issues you mjight have with other commanding officers.”

“Yes, sir,” Leo said.

Admiral Blackthrone hesitated, as if he wanted to say something else, then visibly changed his mind. “I’m formally promoting you to Commander. Given your time in grade, and relative youth, I am not doing you any favours. I’ve updated my report to Daybreak to explain my reasoning, and I have asked my relatives to intervene on your behalf, but I can’t make any promises. I may have damaged your long-term career, for which I am truly sorry.”

He took a box from his pocket and held it out. “There’s no time for a proper ceremony,” he added. “But you might be better off without one.”

Leo nodded slowly, taking the box and opening it to reveal a Commander’s insignia. “I … thank you, sir.”

“Good luck, Commander,” Admiral Blackthrone said. “Dismissed.”

Leo saluted, then left the compartment.

***

Admiral Alexander Blackthrone watched Commander Morningstar leave, feeling oddly guilty. The young man was impressive – in hindsight, it would have been wiser to offer him patronage rather than a rebuke – and it felt wrong to assign him to a mission that would likely get him killed. No competent naval officer would have any doubt about the risks inherent in the operation, when the enemy could trap the fleet in realspace and blow it apart from a safe distance … Alexander had done what he could, over the last few days, to minimise the threat as much as possible, but there was no way to remove it completely. There was a very good chance the whole operation would end in disaster.

And are you signing off on the plan because you need to save the governor and give the rebels a bloody nose, he asked himself, or because you want to restore come of your honour before you face a court martial back home?

The thought mocked him. A Daybreaker was supposed to set a good example – and sometimes that meant admitting to the crime, then taking whatever punishment was coming his way like a man. It was his duty to live his life as an example to everyone else and yet … the idea of just tamely conceding defeat was unthinkable. He owed it to himself to take one final shot at the enemy. If he couldn’t beat them himself, and it was growing clear that they’d underestimated the rebels from the start, then he could at least make sure they knew they’d been in a fight. He would buy time for the rest of the navy to mobilise and take the offensive.

His hatch hissed open. Francis stepped into the chamber.

“Uncle?” Francis sounded worried. “You wanted to see me?”

“I read your report very carefully,” Alexander said, motioning Francis to a chair. “Why did you complain about the lack of punitive strikes on Yalta?”

Francis sat, reddening. “They betrayed us, sir,” he said. “They needed to be taught a lesson.”

“A dead man cannot learn anything,” Alexander pointed out, dryly. “And while fear can keep people in line, sometimes, it can also provoke resistance. Punishment, by its very nature, must not be either arbitrary or excessive. One would not punish a small child by cutting off his head, I assume, nor would one let a rapist go with a caning. A reputation for inconsistent punishment will only undermine us, in the years to come. We are at war.”

He studied his nephew carefully for a long moment. Francis was growing up, a little, but the changes were coming in fits and starts. It was a shame there weren’t many commanding officers willing and able to take him in hand, steering him to make use of his undoubted talents while migrating his less positive traits. Francis lacked the tactual skill of a Leo Morningstar; he also lacked the thirst to succeed, the drive and determination his rival had in spades. Alexander understood, better than he would ever admit to anyone. Francis had grown up with a silver spoon in his mouth, provided with everything he needed to do well. Leo had grown up with nothing. It had hardened him in a way Francis could never match.

If only there were more years between them, Alexander mused. It would be easier to ask an older Leo to take care of a younger Francis.

“You’ll remain with Commander Morningstar, for the moment,” he said, out loud. “On paper, you will be his XO. As far as we are concerned, you are there to learn from him. This is not going to be a short war, Francis, and it is vitally important you prepare yourself for the challenges to come. Leo Morningstar can teach you things you need to know.”

Francis looked mulish. Alexander understood. There were three years between the two young men and the social gap was nearly unbridgeable. It was hardly uncommon for a younger officer to be in command of an elder, but in this case …

“I know it will be difficult,” Alexander said. “But wartime brings opportunities as well as dangers. You do well here and you’ll likely see promotion sooner rather than later; you do poorly and … any hope of promotion will vanish. Do I make myself clear?”

“Yes, sir,” Francis managed. He was too young to hide his feelings, not from an older and far more experienced officer. “I won’t let you down.”

“Learn from your experiences,” Alexander said. “And good luck.”

He stood and held out a hand. Francis shook it, then paused.

“Sir … Uncle … are you not expecting to return?”

“I don’t know yet,” Alexander said. His court martial was a certainty … and so was the outcome. “But whatever happens, I expect you to do your duty. You have promise, Francis. Live up to it.”

Francis hesitated, then nodded. “Aye, sir.”

“Good,” Alexander said. A dozen other thoughts crossed his mind, only to be put side. He had said all he needed to say. Francis would be on his own soon enough. He would make his own fate. “Dismissed.”