The Oncoming Storm

Chapter Twenty-Five<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-comfficeffice" />

“I must say, Captain, that this is a very...disquieting report.”

Kat stood at attention in the Admiral’s office, on <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-comffice:smarttags" /><st1lace w:st="on"><st1:City w:st="on">Cadiz</st1:City></st1lace>. The flight back to <st1lace w:st="on"><st1:City w:st="on">Cadiz</st1:City></st1lace> had been nightmarish – she’d ordered Lightning to alter course at the first sniff of a possible contact, even in hyperspace – and her first report hadn’t been believed when she’d forwarded it to the Admiral. He’d demanded confirmation and, when Kat had provided it, ordered her down to the planet’s surface for a private discussion. For someone who owed Kat the lives of his wife and two of his sons, he wasn’t expressing much gratitude. The nasty part of Kat’s mind wondered if he’d been hoping to be rid of his wife. It was a sentiment she could understand, if not condone.

“Yes, Admiral,” she said, flatly. “I believed that I should bring the Princess back to <st1lace w:st="on"><st1:City w:st="on">Cadiz</st1:City></st1lace> as soon as possible.”

“Of course, of course,” the Admiral agreed. He looked back down at the report. Kat had carefully listed everything from the first distress call to the meeting with Jasmine – and the brief and violent confrontation with the Faithful Companion. Firing on a Theocracy vessel, whatever the provocation, was a serious matter, yet the Admiral seemed to have almost overlooked it in the light of the defector’s identity. “I cannot fault your judgement.”

He looked up, suddenly. “And how is the Princess?”

Kat hesitated. Jasmine had a sense of entitlement that made Kat’s mother look like a piker. The female Marine Kat had assigned to look after her – and, more covertly, keep an eye on her – had been kept busy running errands, or fielding requests for foods and supplies that were hardly part of the Navy’s standard cuisine. Her maids had been almost as bad, occupying a handful of cabins and shying away from any male crewmen, while the bodyguards – confined to a sealed hold – had been complaining loudly about not being able to protect their mistress. Naval regulations forbade armed guests, as a general rule, and Kat had been on solid ground when she’d confined them to the hold. It hadn’t pleased them that the ultimate fate of their Princess had passed out of their hands.

And yet, under the bluster and haughty disdain, Kat had sensed a very real fear underlying Jasmine’s words. If half of her claims had been true – and, knowing the Theocracy, Kat was prepared to believe them – she had chosen to flee and ensure that the Theocracy’s next target received sufficient warning to prepare for the coming invasion. If the Admiral chose to act now, the 6<SUP>th</SUP> Fleet could start powering up and preparing for war – or he could hold a grand party for the ship commanders while their subordinates actually did their jobs. Not all of the 6<SUP>th</SUP> fleet commanders were incompetent, but the ones who were good at their jobs were few and far between. Kat had the uncomfortable feeling that <st1:City w:st="on">Cadiz</st1:City> was going to be the next day that lived in infamy, along with Albion, Terra Nova, <st1:City w:st="on">San Francisco</st1:City>, <st1:State w:st="on">New York</st1:State> and <st1lace w:st="on"><st1laceName w:st="on">Pearl</st1laceName> <st1laceType w:st="on">Harbour</st1laceType></st1lace>, the latest entry in a long history of surprise attacks. And the Admiral didn’t seem to care about the danger.

“She’s desperate,” Kat said, finally. She didn’t like Jasmine, damn it. “She wants safety for herself and her maids and she dragged her bodyguards and the ship’s crew across the border to save herself from a terrible fate. I think she believes what she’s saying. The Theocracy is in the final stages of preparing an attack against the Commonwealth and we have to get ready to meet it now, before they crush us in their opening blow.”

“There is no independent confirmation of her report,” the Admiral said, mildly. “My analysts have been pouring over them ever since you returned and uploaded them to the secure databases. They look authentic, but how could we be sure?”

“I don’t think that we can take the chance,” Kat countered. Her heart was sinking. The Admiral wasn’t going to listen, either to her or to Jasmine. “What if the plans are real?”

“And what if the Theocracy is trying to provoke us into making the first move?” The Admiral asked, coldly. “My analysts are divided on the subject. Some of them think that the attack plans are genuine, but only theoretical – just like the plans we have for military operations against our neighbours. Others think that the Princess faked them herself with the intention of convincing us to put her on the Theocracy’s throne, after we won the war.”

“Assuming we did win the war,” Kat said, dryly. She had to give the Admiral’s theorists credit; she’d never considered that possibility. But then, the Theocracy’s general population would never allow a woman to rule over them, or they’d assume that there was a man in the background, pulling the woman’s strings. “Besides, she is a complete innocent when it comes to military matters. She wouldn’t know how to begin forging attack plans.”

“She could be playing dumb,” the Admiral said. “Looking like an idiot can be a remarkably effective ploy from time to time.”

Kat bit down the comment that came to mind. “Admiral, with all due respect, we cannot afford to take the chance of assuming that the attack plans are faked,” she said. “We need to put the fleet on alert.”

The Admiral quirked one eyebrow at her. “I was under the impression that I commanded 6<SUP>th</SUP> Fleet,” he said, firmly. “It is my belief that we must avoid desperate measures that may be considered provocative by the Theocracy…”

“Tell me,” Kat said, too angry to show proper respect, “exactly what concern is it of the Theocracy’s if we mobilise within the Cadiz System? This space is ours and it is light-years away from the borderline. They have little right to complain if we prepare to resist an attack.”

”A fleet ready for defence is also one ready for attack,” the Admiral said. He leaned forward, his eyes meeting Kat’s firmly. “I am not going to allow a war to start on my watch.”

“Admiral…that choice isn’t in your hands,” Kat said. “It only takes one side to decide to have a war. The Theocracy could use the brief confrontation with the Faithful Companion as an excuse to launch an invasion, claiming that we are the ones intent on war.”

“A poorly handled action,” the Admiral said, coldly. “You should have avoided damaging their ship. A warning shot would have sufficed.”

“A warning shot would have given them more time to target the freighter,” Kat said, as mildly as she could. It wasn’t very mild at all. “I needed to act fast.”

“Quite,” the Admiral agreed. He paused. “Under the circumstances, I am ordering a general blackout on the news of the Princess’s arrival in our space. You and your crew are ordered not to inform anyone about her presence until I can make the final decision about her status within the Commonwealth.”

Kat fought to hold back a smile. “Admiral, I cannot obey that order,” she said. “Royal Avalon Navy regulations clearly state that any contact with a high-ranking defector is to be reported at once to ONI and Navy HQ on Avalon. I transmitted a report back as soon as we returned to <st1:City w:st="on"><st1lace w:st="on">Cadiz</st1lace></st1:City>.”

The Admiral stared at her. “Do you know what you’ve done?” He demanded. “You’ve just put the trigger for the war in the hands of the factions that want to start the war!”

“I cannot simply ignore regulations because they may lead to political embarrassment,” Kat said, carefully. “I had to report her presence on my ship.”

For a moment, she thought that the Admiral would have a heart attack on the spot. Somehow, he controlled himself and calmed down, probably with the aid of specialised implants. He was quite wealthy, after all, and could afford the best. And his wife would have ensured that her meal ticket, her entry into High Society, remained alive. She was nothing without him.

“You and your crew will remain on your ship,” the Admiral said, finally. “Transfer the Princess and her escorts to the orbital station – we can at least try and prevent knowledge of her presence spreading here. After that…”

His eyes narrowed. “Don’t you ever put me in such a position ever again,” he said, sharply. “One bad report from me and your career will come to a screeching halt.”

“Yes, sir,” Kat said. He might have been right, even with her father’s influence in the background trying to save her career. If he was inclined to help…in one sense, the Admiral was right. Jasmine’s arrival was going to be a political ****-storm and her father would find himself in the middle of it.

“Now get out of my sight,” the Admiral snapped. “Go!”

Kat rose to her feet, saluted, and left, keeping her thoughts to herself. The Admiral wasn’t going to warn 6<SUP>th</SUP> Fleet, even if the rest of the Commonwealth went on alert. None of the commanders and crews would even know about the threatened attack until it was far too late. She wondered, angrily, whose side the Admiral was actually on…theirs, or the Theocracy’s? He could hardly have done a better job of weakening 6<SUP>th</SUP> Fleet.

But what could she do about it?

***​

No one would have taken Vanessa – she’d long since lost her family name, the better to protect her uninvolved relatives – for an insurgent, let alone an insurgent leader. She was tall and slim, with long honey-brown hair and a trim figure, mostly hidden behind shapeless overalls of the type worn by a harmless day labourer. An alert observer might have noticed that she carried herself with a confidence unknown to many other women on <st1:City w:st="on"><st1lace w:st="on">Cadiz</st1lace></st1:City>, without the need for a protector in any shape or form. The presence of concealed weapons – a gun, a knife and a poison needle – were invisible to anything other than a determined strip search.

Vanessa had grown up in the poorest part of New Barcelona, permanently under her mother’s eye. She had been twelve, enjoying her last year of freedom before she became a virtual prisoner in her own house, when there had been a demonstration in the nearby park. It had turned violent and Vanessa’s father, both brothers and her mother had been killed by the occupational forces. The brief enquiry said that it was an accident; Vanessa, who had seen everything through a haze of horror, knew that it was murder. Before she became a woman, before her blood had started to flow, Vanessa had become an insurgent. The nearby cell of resistance fighters had, at first, used her to carry messages, but they’d found other uses for her soon enough. Vanessa was attractive enough to attract attention from the occupation forces, attention that she rapidly learned how to exploit and use in the name of freedom. Ten years after her parents had died, she was the cell’s leader, a woman with a fearsome and almost unique reputation…and the effective leader of over a third of the resistance.

It wasn’t an easy role for anyone, particularly a woman. She had had to learn on the job, losing men and priceless equipment as the struggle grew worse. A brief few months in a holding camp – she’d been rounded up in a swoop, without the enemy soldiers knowing who and what she was – had allowed her to learn from true masters. And, more importantly, she’d made contact with the interstellar resistance to the Commonwealth. <st1:City w:st="on"><st1lace w:st="on">Cadiz</st1lace></st1:City> was not alone in the struggle, she’d been told; there were people who could and would help her world, in exchange for their help in return. Vanessa was old enough to know that nothing came for free, and anything that looked too good to be true probably was, but there was no other choice. The bargain had been rapidly sealed and new weapons and supplies had begun to flow to the insurgent cells.

She scowled as she strode into the darkened building. The meeting couldn’t be held anywhere outside the city – the occupiers had grown far more paranoid about road traffic over the last few months – but holding it on her own ground was out of the question. She pushed her way through the semi-darkness, heading towards a patch of light in the distance, right at the other end of a long-empty warehouse. Even if local businesses had been prepared to invest in renovating the warehouse, they’d never dare invest anywhere so close to the <st1lace w:st="on"><st1laceName w:st="on">Central</st1laceName> <st1laceType w:st="on">Palace</st1laceType></st1lace>, the building where the Admiral parked his fat ass. She could hear water dripping in the distance as she pushed open the door and stepped into the lighted office. A blaze of candles greeted her, providing flickering illumination that wouldn’t be detectable by any snooping drone. It had taken years to learn their capabilities – and a moment’s carelessness could lead to the destruction of an entire cell of insurgents – but it had been worthwhile. There was a way to avoid almost any kind of surveillance, once it had been identified.

Crisco – probably an assumed name, she knew – rose to his feet as she entered, a gesture of respect that never failed to annoy her. He wouldn’t have done it for a man. She’d never been able to place his vaguely-Latin features, or identify him as anything other than a mystery. It was good, in a way – what she didn’t know, she couldn’t tell – yet it irritated her. What was Crisco’s own agenda?

“Pleased to meet you again,” Crisco said. Vanessa doubted it. The call had come too quickly, too urgently, for this to be anything other than a significant crisis. What had happened to cause it? She knew of nothing since the attack on the <st1lace w:st="on"><st1laceName w:st="on">Summer</st1laceName> <st1laceType w:st="on">Palace</st1laceType></st1lace>, an attack that hadn’t involved her and her group. Her only contribution had been watching the disaster unfold on television. “My backers insisted that I speak to you at once.”

Vanessa nodded as she took the other seat. It was a cosy little office, mocking the enemy even as it opened up new dangers for the resistance. If all of the insurgent leaders gathered in one spot – and they were discovered by the security forces - the results would be disastrous, decapitating the entire resistance. She had no idea how many other groups were being supported by Crisco and his friends, but she suspected that he had his finger in many pies.

“They were deeply concerned about the attack on the <st1lace w:st="on"><st1laceName w:st="on">Summer</st1laceName> <st1laceType w:st="on">Palace</st1laceType></st1lace>,” Crisco continued, his voice darkening. “If the attack had succeeded in killing Admiral Williams…well, we could hardly expect his successor to be so incompetent. The Marine General is a tough bastard, well known to us from different worlds; he would not have screwed up like Williams has been doing for the last few years.”

“My group was not involved in the attack,” Vanessa said, truthfully. “I would have advised against it, had I known that it was being planned.”

“I don’t doubt it,” Crisco agreed. “You have the longest record of any insurgent leader on the planet.” His gaze sharpened for a moment. “Nonetheless, the attack has forced my backers to consider other possibilities for liberating <st1:City w:st="on"><st1lace w:st="on">Cadiz</st1lace></st1:City> from the Commonwealth. The new regime of shipping inspections, despite complaints from interstellar corporations and other interstellar powers, has been alarmingly effective in cutting our more…traditional lines of supply. So far, they have not captured anything significant, but it is only a matter of time before they get lucky.”

Vanessa was well-schooled in controlling her face – ten years as an insurgent had taught her to lie convincingly – but she couldn’t hold back a brief flicker of despair. The supply of off-world weapons was the only thing keeping the insurgency from falling apart – well, that and the constant stream of atrocities committed by the security forces. There was no shortage of young men willing to carry a gun and go out and get killed for the liberation of <st1lace w:st="on"><st1:City w:st="on">Cadiz</st1:City></st1lace>, but they needed the heavier weapons and equipment to make an impact.

“That’s bad news,” she said, finally. It was an understatement. “We need those supplies.”

“Luckily, there is another possibility,” Crisco continued. “My backers have been considering your ultimate problem. You can win battles – you can kill soldiers or take territory – but you can never win the war. The Commonwealth controls the high orbitals, allowing them to move troops in to retake ground you hold or simply bombard you into submission from high overhead. You simply don’t have any way of defeating them permanently as long as they remain over your heads.

“We have obtained a fleet,” he added. “We believe that we can push the Commonwealth out of the system altogether.”

Vanessa blinked. “A fleet?”

“A fleet,” Crisco said. “In three months, assuming that all goes to plan, we will attack the Commonwealth forces in orbit and destroy them – or force them to retreat. And then you and your fellows will have the perfect opportunity to take control of the planet’s surface.”

“That sounds…remarkable,” Vanessa said. It was far too good to be true. “And what would you want in return?”

“Only the use of your world as a base for striking against other occupied worlds,” Crisco assured her. “Frankly, you have little that we want, although we would be keen to recruit from your population – if you have young men who want more fighting in their lives.”

Vanessa considered it. “And how do you know that the Commonwealth wouldn’t return?”

“<st1:City w:st="on"><st1lace w:st="on">Cadiz</st1lace></st1:City> is an isolated world and there was a huge debate back on Avalon about invading the system in the first place,” Crisco said. “The general public is sick of watching their young men killed in an endless insurgency. One big defeat, one bloody nose that cannot be concealed from the media, and their support for the war would crumble. The public would demand peace and the Assembly would follow their line.”

“And we would be free,” Vanessa said.

“Just stay quiet for the moment,” Crisco advised. “Help is on the way.”

 

Chapter Twenty-Six<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-comfficeffice" />

It had always struck Ambassador Gavin Hastings as odd that, for a planet of religious fundamentalists, Abdullah was a surprisingly beautiful city. It had been built along the coast from scratch – rather than being assembled from prefabricated containers like so many other first settlements – and generations of religious and political leaders had spent wisely in building monuments to the greater glory of God. The rising sun cast its light over domes and minarets, spires and steeples, reflecting light off golden monuments and over the city. It seemed to blaze with light at times, hiding an ugly reality. Abdullah’s population was enormous for such a young world, with the young being indoctrinated into the faith and being sent off to conquer and absorb other worlds. It was impossible to escape the feeling that the Theocracy was a cancer slowly spreading through the galaxy, moving with a slow ponderous inevitability that would not be denied.

He sucked in his breath as the aircar turned and flew towards the Royal Palace, glimmering in the sunlight. It was larger than Camelot Palace, easily the largest palace in the Human Sphere, serving as both the centre of government and residence of the Caliph of the Theocracy. The Caliph was an absolute ruler in the truest possible sense and he kept his servants under his thumb, trusting them to support him – as the ultimate guarantee of their own positions – but watching them carefully, in case any had delusions of grandeur. Behind the palace, there was a blocky building with only one entrance, a direct link to the Palace itself. It was the harem, serving as the home of the wives of the Caliph – at last count, over two hundred different girls, of all shapes and sizes – and the first home of the royal children. The Princes would receive training in government, military skills and skulduggery; the Princesses, if they were lucky, would receive a basic education before being parcelled off to a courtier the Caliph wanted to reward, or punish. The Theocracy might regard women as second-class citizens, but woe betide the man who failed to take good care of a Royal Princess, or fail to meet her expectations. Gavin had heard that Hindu Princes had once given White Elephants – which were sacred and needed expensive care – to nobles he wished to cripple. The Caliph’s had learned the trick and modified it to suit themselves.

Life was cheap on Abdullah. The planet’s citizens had few entertainments and little to do, but pray and breed. Despite the Theocracy’s size, the average citizen lived on poverty rations, distributed by the Clerics to ensure that they remained dependent – and breeding. A permanently-expanding population provided the impetus for further expansion, even if they had to start fighting multi-system political entities. The network of Clerics, religious schools and police forces ensured that the teeming slums didn't become breeding grounds for dissatisfaction, for the Caliphs had mastered a very old and difficult trick. It was possible for someone to rise from the slums and become a great lord, through the military or the clerical service or even as a religious authority. The aristocratic attitude that blood was supreme had never been a feature of Abdullah’s religion, at least outside the Caliph and his immediate family. Indeed, the current Caliph could claim justly to have commoner blood in his veins.

But perhaps that wasn't too surprising, Gavin reflected, as the aircar passed through the security screen and settled on the landing pad. Abdullah – the original Abdullah – had lived during the Wreaker War, convinced that it was his destiny to transform Islam and integrate it with Christianity and Judaism. He’d started preaching such radical ideas as tolerance, harmonious multiculturalism and an acceptance of differences between religious sects. Perversely, the series of catastrophes the Middle East had suffered made it easier for his message to catch on. By the time he’d been assassinated, he had had millions of followers, a following that rapidly became an all-consuming army. The UN had eventually offered to ship his followers to a colony world – and, out of ignorance or malice, included a few thousand refugees from sects that had bitterly resisted the reformers. Abdullah would have cried if he’d lived to see what had become of his dream. A cosmopolitan vision of people living in harmony had become a monster intent on forcing its religion on the rest of the universe, at gunpoint if necessary. And as for its treatment of women...

Gavin allowed the guards to pat him down, before escorting him through the golden doors and into the palace itself. Everything about the Royal Palace was larger than life, leaving him feeling permanently dwarfed, as if the Palace had been constructed for giants. Inside, the designers had shown surprising taste, combining precious metals from a hundred different worlds into a mosaic of Abdullah himself, long before he’d been assassinated. Thousands of supplicants, all waiting in the hope that the Caliph would be pleased to receive them for a brief meeting, looked on in envy as he was escorted through a second pair of doors, into the Caliph’s throne room. Gavin felt his heart twisting inside his chest. The Caliph had always kept him waiting before, which meant that this meeting had to be urgent. Was it the dreaded declaration of war...for a culture that proclaimed that any means were acceptable in wartime, the Theocracy was oddly careful to ensure that there was always a legal declaration of war. It wasn't one of their more endearing traits.

The Caliph himself was surprisingly young, barely twenty-one years of age. But that too wasn't surprising. The Theocracy believed that success was a sign of God’s favour – and the reigning Caliph normally took the throne by successfully assassinating his father, and then having his brothers butchered. As far as Gavin knew, the Princesses were spared...but then they would never have expected to wield power in the Theocracy anyway. The Caliph, the young man who held the power of life and death over seventeen star systems and over forty billion human beings, looked angry. His dark face was twisted with rage.

Gavin went down on one knee. “Most Honoured Caliph,” he said, slowly and clearly, “I thank you for granting me this audience.”

At first, going down on one knee had seemed humiliating. After two years in the Theocracy, watching as the locals performed more humiliating rituals before lesser lords and commanders, it seemed almost normal. Besides, the few meetings he’d had with the Caliph had been in private, with only a handful of witnesses, all thoroughly loyal to the young ruler. There had been no one there to bear witness to his lack of respect and whisper it to those who might see it as a sign of royal weakness.

“You may rise,” the Caliph said, in Standard. Despite the UN’s best efforts, Abdullah was one of the few places where Standard-speakers were rare. It wouldn’t do to have the locals being able to listen to the handful of foreigners permitted into the Theocracy every year. They might have become discontented with their lot. “There has been an...incident along the border between my realm and the Commonwealth.”

Gavin frowned, feeling cold ice trickling down his spine. The border was poorly defined, if only because of the random shifts in hyperspace. It was quite possible for two ships to accuse each other of trespassing, with both commanders being legally in the right.

“Most Noble Caliph,” he said, carefully, “might I ask you to expound upon this...incident?”

The Caliph frowned. “My own sister was treacherously seduced into flying from this place and running for the Commonwealth,” he said. “I sent a ship to rescue her from the vile traitors who seduced her, but the ship was intercepted by a Commonwealth warship, which interfered in the pursuit. My ship was badly damaged and was forced to withdraw, leaving my sister in your hands.”

Gavin hesitated. The Theocracy had only one fate for a girl who had disgraced her family’s honour – death. If the Caliph’s sister had been seduced – and that would be tricky, given how the Princesses were kept secluded until they were married off – it would be a planetary scandal. Hundreds of lesser lords would be wondering if the young Caliph was beginning to lose his grip on power; after all, if he couldn't control his own sister...

And she would be his sister. Not a half-sister, like the half-brothers he’d had put to death, but a woman from the same mother as himself. Someone with such a pedigree would be saved for a remarkably important marriage alliance, not handed out to any random fellow. Losing her would have to throw a spanner in the works, along with many other problems...

“The traitors who seduced her have long been planning to start a war between my realm and your own,” the Caliph continued. “By means of faked documents, they intend to drive a wedge into our friendship and send us careening down a path towards war.”

Gavin frowned. One thing he was sure of was that the Caliph was considering war, sooner rather than later. He needed military success to ensure that his grip on power wasn't challenged – and the Commonwealth was his only real target. But how much of his story was true? Was it a genuine flight from danger, a decoy used to cause confusion, or something worse?

“I must demand that my sister be returned to my realm at once,” the Caliph said. “If she is not returned, I must warn you that the most severe consequences will be forthcoming. Go now and inform your government of my demands. Tell them the choice is theirs, but they must make it soon.”

Gavin bowed and departed, knowing that time would be running out. He had to warn the Commonwealth before it was too late. The StarCom network would carry his message instantly, but would it be heeded? And how much of the Caliph’s tale was actually true?

He looked down at the city as the aircar headed back to the embassy, knowing what lay beneath the glittering buildings. The Theocracy would never be satisfied. It would keep expanding until all of humanity lay under its rule. And the Commonwealth was the next in line.

It might be time to start making peace with himself.

***​

“Do you think he believed me?”

Caliph Saladin, formerly Prince Khalid before he had assassinated his father and claimed his throne, smiled as his oldest friend emerged from the secret booth behind the Peacock Throne. Zulfaqar had been his companion since childhood, a young orphan boy of commoner stock, bought by his father’s servants as a playmate for his latest boy-child. It was forbidden to touch one of the Blood Royal and Zulfaqar had paid the price for the young Khalid’s pranks, something that had taught his nominal master that others paid the price for his mistakes and misdeeds. Khalid had learned to behave – or at least to keep his scheming well hidden – until the day he’d poisoned his father and assumed the throne. His first act had been to murder all of his half-brothers, who might have tried to unseat him from the throne. His second act had been to make his oldest friend Grand Vizier.

It was a neat solution to a problem that had plagued humanity since the dawn of time. How could one group monopolise the reins of power while keeping the other groups down permanently, knowing that the other groups would eventually rebel against the glass ceiling keeping them from real power? The Theocracy had solved the problem by allowing talented commoners to join the nobility – after all, success was a sign of God’s favour. There was no shame in having a commoner in the family tree.

“I think he isn't one of your friends,” Zulfaqar said. He was the only one permitted to avoid flattery when they were alone. “I think he may not believe your story.”

The Caliph scowled. Who would have thought that his sister would have been able to flee? It should have been impossible. A dutiful sister would have obeyed her brother and married the man he had selected as a good match for her, binding another family to the Peacock Throne. Instead, she had run, somehow stealing a freighter and using it to escape...and to the Commonwealth, of all places. And how in the billions of names of God had she managed to download copies of the attack plans?

It was a complete disaster, all the more so because he'd had to purge the security section just to ensure that word didn't leak out to the lesser lords. Any hint of weakness could prove fatal, particularly if it threatened the Theocracy itself. Instead of focusing their energy on overcoming the Confederation, they would consider turning against him instead – and mass purges might result in a general revolt. There were limits to absolute power, limits Saladin hadn't recognised until he’d assumed the throne. A Caliph needed to be surrounded by loyalists to keep his power secure. Purging the loyalists could backfire...Caliphs had been assassinated by those they’d trusted before, often just before or after a purge.

“They may not believe her,” the Caliph said. “She’s a woman, after all, not one of my most trusted Generals.”

The thought would have made him smile, if he hadn’t been staring at possible disaster. No one could be completely trusted in the Theocracy, at least while they were living. There was a black joke floating around that said that promotion to completely trusted was granted only after death. And he'd never worried about his sister and half-sisters before; after all, they were only women. The young Prince he’d been had had a small harem of his own – all sterile, and conditioned to be loyal and loving – since he’d matured. It hadn't left him with a very positive view of female intelligence.

“The Commonwealth prides itself on putting women in important positions,” Zulfaqar reminded him. “They will not dismiss her words because she is a woman.”

“True,” the Caliph agreed. There were lesser lords who would execute a man for pointing out unwelcome truths, but he’d already learned that that merely ensured that people were driving to lie out of desperation. A Caliph couldn't afford to start mistaking wishful thinking for reality, or he might find himself assassinated by a threat his advisors had been too scared to tell him about. “And that means...do we attack now?”

At his command, a hologram flickered into existence in the chamber. Admiral Junayd looked as calm and composed as ever, even though he’d ridden a spy ship into Commonwealth territory and escaped with his life. He was light years from Abdullah, assembling the main strike force in orbit around a dying star; an alarming amount of bandwidth was being diverted to allow even a rudimentary two-way conversation. It would have been impossible in the Commonwealth – two StarCom units orbiting the same planet tended to interfere with each other, permanently limiting the bandwidth – but in the Theocracy vast resources could be diverted, if the Caliph so willed.

“Admiral,” he said. “If we attack now, what are the chances of success?”

There was a long pause, an irritating time delay caused by the StarCom as the message raced to the Admiral and his reply came back.

“Limited,” the Admiral said, finally. “We can take out the Commonwealth 6<SUP>th</SUP> Fleet – the sooner the better, as they will soon realise just how far they’ve allowed their defences to erode – but we would be unable to mount any of the follow-up strikes we had planned. The units that we earmarked for those strikes have not yet arrived at the staging posts, let alone worked up.”

The Caliph nodded, grimly. “And if we launched the attack now?”

“They would have time to prepare to face us,” the Admiral warned. “We would certainly liberate Cadiz and maybe two or three of their other core worlds, but after that they would have time and space to mount a counter attack. The operatives we intended to insert into their space to mount divisionary attacks are not in place, so they would have time to secure their position before it was too late. We would be looking at years of warfare, with no guarantee of ultimate success.”

“Unfortunate,” the Caliph said. The worst of all worlds; even if the Commonwealth didn't believe his sister, they would certainly take a careful look at their own defences. It wouldn’t take long for them to remove Admiral Williams – who appeared to have obtained his post through their incomprehensible political system – and replace him with someone who actually knew to take their trousers down before going for a ****. And then Cadiz would be a much harder nut to crack. “How long would it take before we could mount the full offensive?”

“One month at the very least,” the Admiral said. “Probably two, but once that month is over we should be able to launch the offensive at forty-eight hours notice. Depending on their reaction to your sister, we can either wait until we are ready to move or launch while they’re still scrambling to defend themselves.”

The Caliph said nothing, thinking hard. He could command and the Admiral would obey – unless he wanted a bullet in the back of the neck – and yet..failure would ensure that one of his lords would try a coup. If there was a military disaster...no amount of shifting the blame downwards would save his throne. And yet, if news leaked out about his sister’s defection...

“Prepare to launch the attack as soon as possible,” he ordered. “Expedite your preparations as much as possible. We can leave Cadiz lightly-garrisoned if we need to launch offences further into the Commonwealth – it isn’t as if they have any friends there.”

“Yes, Your Supremacy,” the Admiral said. “God will grant us victory.”

“God helps those who help themselves,” the Caliph said. He smiled. “And may He smile upon our efforts.”

 

Chapter Twenty-Seven<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-comfficeffice" />

It was very quiet in the underground bunker.

“If we are to believe the Princess Jasmine,” the King said, finally, “we could be at war within the next two months.”

“Or sooner,” Prime Minster Bruno Lombardi pointed out. “The incident with the Faithful Companion could easily be treated as an act of war.”

One of the other councillors snorted. “Firing on an enemy vessel engaged in hostile acts within our territory is an act of war?”

“There’s a complicated legal issue here,” Grand Admiral Constance Cinnabar admitted. “The Theocracy has never accepted the treaties that claim that the areas of hyperspace that correspond to locations within a particular political unit’s space are owned by that political unit. Hyperspace’s very nature makes it tricky to point to a particular area and say that it, beyond a doubt, belongs to us, or to them. They’re not alone in claiming that hyperspace is neutral territory either.”

“But they raise a terrible fuss every time an independent freighter wanders a few meters over the borderline,” Lucas Falcone said, sardonically. “We have hundreds of precedents for a stiff view of the entire issue. They object – we point to the cases where their ships have enforced the border in hyperspace and tell them to accept it.”

“Except for the minor issue that the freighter in question was, probably, stolen and carried one of their Royal Family,” Bruno said. He shook his head in disbelief. The whole episode read like something out of a spy thriller. “This is a little more serious than a tramp freighter crossing their border.”

“She has asked for asylum,” the King said, mildly. “Given what fate awaits her if she returns, can we give her back to her brother without condoning her treatment – and that of every other uppity woman in the Theocracy?”

Constance nodded in agreement. “Legally, I think we would have to return the freighter itself, along with any members of the crew who didn’t want to defect,” she said. “It’s stolen property, after all. But there is a wide range of precedents for keeping defectors, no matter how wealthy or powerful. They go all the way back to Old Earth.”

“The freighter isn't worth more than a few hundred thousand pounds,” Lucas Falcone said. He could have bought an entire fleet of freighters out of pocket change. “They’re not angry because of the freighter, they’re angry because the Caliph’s sister has fled and disgraced his family. If it gets out on their side of the border, the Caliph will become a laughing stock.”

“Which isn't really our problem,” the King pointed out. “Besides, if there should happen to be a power struggle on Abdullah, it will buy us some time to keep building up the defences and fix all the problems with 6<SUP>th</SUP> Fleet...”

“Except for the minor detail that whoever becomes Caliph will want to wash away the humiliation in blood,” Constance said. “ONI’s social experts weren't very hopeful. The Caliph maintains his position by being the most bloody-minded bastard on the planet, the most willing to resort to extreme violence to meet his ends. If the current Caliph stays in control, he will want to revenge himself on us; his successor, if there is a successor, will want to prove that he cannot be humiliated in the same manner. There will be war. The only question is when.”

She frowned. “ONI has been studying the plans the Princess brought with her,” she continued. “It’s impossible to be one hundred percent certain, but their general feeling is that the plans are genuine – they’re certainly logical extrapolations of what the Theocracy would have to do if it wanted to invade our space. One thrust will be targeted directly on Cadiz, eliminating 6<SUP>th</SUP> Fleet as a powerful fighting unit; a second and third thrust will be targeted on two other worlds, hammering their defences and occupying their high orbitals. They will be used as springboards for a drive on Avalon itself, a blitzkrieg they hope will end the war before it gets too bloody.

“For those on the occupied planets, a nightmare will descend. The entire political and military leadership will be eliminated. Those who have served in the military will be transferred to detention camps and used as forced labour until they are too weak to stand, at which point they will be eliminated. They will move in settlers of their own, who will assume control of the planet; the remaining population will be permanently subordinated to them. Those who embrace the faith will be welcome; the remainder will be ground down until they submit or die. In short, it will be the end of the world.

“I cannot say how likely it is that they will carry out these plans on Commonwealth worlds,” she concluded. “What I can say is that it is in line with what they have done on other worlds they have occupied; a complete replacement of the planetary leadership and forced indoctrination into the true faith. Even if we recover and push them back out, the demographics of the occupied worlds will be forever changed. We will be forced to engage in mass ethnic cleansing to reclaim the worlds for our own use, something that will not endear us to the rest of the galaxy.”

“In short, we’d better not lose,” the King said, finally. “And Admiral Williams needs to be replaced, at once.”

“We don’t have a case against him yet,” Constance pointed out, grimly. “The IG inspection team is still on its way. His political allies could shield him until then.”

“We could always bring them in on this secret,” Bruno suggested. “Point it out to them that the Theocracy’s claims of peaceful coexistence are lies. Ask them to help us prepare for war.”

“They’d say that we were lying,” one of the other councillors pointed out. “They’ve been so opposed to building up the military and preparing for war that they are unlikely to back down now. Besides, their constituents would punish them for it at the next election cycle.”

“Assuming there is a next election cycle,” Lucas Falcone said. “What are the odds on the Theocracy allowing full and fair elections if they win the war?”

“They won’t,” Constance agreed.

Lucas smiled, humourlessly. “Can we not promote Admiral Williams and assign him somewhere harmless?” He asked, seriously. “It would look like a reward for good service instead of a punishment. Perhaps his political allies would find it hard to come up with convincing reasons why he should refuse a promotion.”

“He would have to be promoted to Fleet Admiral, which would mean that he would have to remain assigned to one of the fleets,” Constance said, sourly. “We cannot simply assign him to a mining colony and tell him to go count sheep.”

The King scowled. “And Commodore Christian?”

“Still on his way, at last report,” Constance said. “We won’t hear anything from him until after he’s reached his base.”

“And he won’t know what’s happened with the Princess Jasmine,” the King said. “We could be at war by the time he comes within striking distance of Cadiz.”

He shook his head. “We have to make some hasty decisions,” he continued. “We need confirmation of Jasmine’s warnings. That would swing the independents and allow us to declare an official mobilisation of the RAN. If her papers are genuine, the Theocracy is assembling its striking force near a dying star, twenty light years inside the border. I want to send a ship across the border to investigate.”

There was a long pause. “They would regard it as an act of war,” Bruno said, finally.

“And sending spy ships into our territory isn't an act of war?” The King demanded, crossly. “I think that we have to accept, right now, that we cannot appease the Theocracy – that every time we bend over backwards to accommodate them we just make ourselves look weak, ripe for the plucking. They seem to think that our border should be open while theirs should be sealed up tight – and we’re just supposed to accept it? It’s time we reacted and took control of events.”

He let out a long breath. “We send a ship sneaking into their territory to check out the reports,” he said. “If there’s an attack fleet in a place where there’s no logical reason to have an attack fleet, unless they actually do plan to attack, we have the proof we need to get the fleet mobilised and have Admiral Williams removed from Cadiz. If there isn't, we will know not to take the Princess too seriously.”

“I think that it might be our only choice,” Constance said, finally. The Grand Admiral ran one hand through her hair. “At the same time, the mission will be hellishly risky. We may be sending a ship and her crew to their deaths.”

The King nodded. He was the supreme commander of the Royal Avalon Navy and he took a considerable interest in its up-and-coming officers. Bruno knew that he read their files carefully before approving promotions, trying to steer capable officers into positions where their talents could do the most good. And yet he didn't have sole control. If he had, Admiral Williams would have been trapped on a gas giant mine, while someone competent prepared the Cadiz system for war.

“I suggest that we also send a formal war warning to our commanders on station,” Bruno said, finally. “If we alert them to watch for trouble...”

“They may fire on any supposed threats and start the war,” another of the councillors said, quickly. “We’d be putting the trigger for the war in the hands of our junior officers.”

“We cannot micromanage events from here,” Constance said. “I think we need to warn them what might be going on and then rely on their judgement.”

“Agreed,” the King said. “A formal war warning – and a single spy ship.”

“One final issue,” Bruno said. “What do we do with the Princess Jasmine?”

The King smiled. “Bring her here,” he said. “If she was willing to speak to the Assembly, she might be able to swing a few votes to our side without waiting for the news from the spy ship.”

Bruno hesitated. The King was unmarried and the Princess Jasmine was stunningly beautiful, to say nothing of exotic and utterly unconnected to the network of marriage alliances that made up High Society. Had the King made his decision because it was the right thing to do, or had he made it because she was a beautiful girl and part of him wanted her? Or was he just being paranoid in his old age? Conservatives didn't like change and wars brought change, too much change. The balance of power in the Assembly would shift, old alliances would be broken, and he might no longer be Prime Minister when the dust settled.

“Good idea,” he said, finally. It was a good idea. God knew there were plenty of Assemblywomen who might be shocked out of their pacifist leanings once they heard what life was like, being a woman in the Theocracy. And yet it bothered him. “We can formally invite her to Avalon.”

Constance chuckled. “I believe that we should not inform Admiral Williams of the spy ship’s mission,” she said, reluctantly. It was a serious breach of naval etiquette to not keep a CO informed of what was going on in his sector, let alone keep him purposely ignorant. “I think that we should send sealed orders through the StarCom network and have them assigned to the right ship without sending them through the Admiral’s office.”

“They wouldn't stay secret,” the King agreed.

“But if Admiral Williams leaked them, it would give us a chance to take a swipe at his neck,” Bruno objected. “He isn't that stupid.”

“Stupidity isn't the issue,” the King said. “He’s the tool of a powerful faction on Avalon. Without their support, he’d be lucky if he was allowed to resign, rather than be dishonourably discharged from the service. He won’t leave his patrons in the dark. The orders remain sealed”

On that note, the meeting ended.

***​

Lucas Falcone was not unduly surprised when his implant registered a private message, asking him to remain behind as the other Privy Councillors were dismissed. As one of the wealthiest and powerful men in the Commonwealth, even though he held no formal position, his support would be essential for a successful war against the Theocracy. Besides, Lucas controlled a number of Assemblymen, a powerful voting bloc that could be used to swing a vote one way or the other. His support could not be casually abandoned, even by the King.

But it wouldn't have been in any case. The King’s father had been nervous about the threat from the Theocracy, nervous enough to push through the annexation of Cadiz and nervous enough to start a major military build-up. His son had inherited his father’s concern, even though there were times when he was more gauche than Lucas would have preferred. And unmarried, something that always helped to steady a young man. Lucas’s wife would have dearly loved him to have one of her daughters, even if it meant that the family would come into the limelight. Lucas himself doubted that the King would choose a wife anytime soon. It allowed him to hold open the promise of a royal marriage to some of the more ambitious courtiers, giving him undue influence. How many of them would happily sell their souls for a chance to claim that they were the King’s father-in-law?

“There was an issue I wished to discuss privately with you,” the King said, without preamble. “Your daughter has served the Commonwealth well, ever since we gave her that command.”

“Of course,” Lucas agreed. Kat might have been the youngest and strangest of his daughters, but she had the burning desire to succeed that had driven Lucas for most of his adult life. He’d become the CEO at a remarkably early age and then ensured that profits were doubled, without skimping on long-term planning in favour of short-term profits. If nothing else, keeping the corporation’s leadership positions in the family helped to ensure a degree of long-term planning that had allowed them to survive major political changes, on Old Earth and Avalon itself. “I expected nothing less.”

“I believe that she has shown a remarkable independence of mind when confronted by Admiral Williams,” the King continued. “Alerting us to the true state of the 6<SUP>th</SUP> Fleet may have saved countless lives...”

“If we can fix the problems in time,” Lucas said, flatly. He knew that it could be hard to remove an established person from a high position, no matter how incompetent that person happened to be. There was always someone who thought that they were the most successful businessman since legends like Henry Ford, Hank Reardon or Bill Gates. It seemed to be the same in the military. “How long will it take to bring 6<SUP>th</SUP> Fleet to something reassembling battle-readiness?”

“Too long,” the King said, grimly. “I believe that your daughter’s ship will be ideal for the scouting mission.”

Lucas winced. He hadn't been a very good father – he was quite prepared to admit that in the privacy of his own head – but he loved his children. Kat’s decision to run away to Piker’s Peak had shocked him, if only because a naval career meant that she might be killed in action, or through a dreadful accident. And if she were to be sent behind enemy lines...losing her would be bad enough, but what if she were taken prisoner? The Theocracy would have a leaver they could use to blackmail him.

But could any other Captain be trusted with the mission? 6<SUP>th </SUP>Fleet couldn't be entirely composed of poor commanders, playing and partying with the Admiral while their fleet rotted away in high orbit, but who could they trust to handle it? The best choice for the mission, according to the records, might be a crony of the Admiral who would happily tell him what he’d been ordered to do, or deliberately blow the mission in order to ensure that his patron remained in place.

“Yes,” he said, finally. The King was running a hell of a risk. If the relationship between Lucas and the King happened to fall apart, the balance of power would shift in unpredictable directions. And yet...if that happened, Lucas knew that the board would demand a vote of no confidence. He could lose his position overnight and be relegated to an isolated corporate outpost while his successor struggled to rebuild the relationship. The founders of the corporation had build in hundreds of checks and balances. “I am forced to agree.”

“Thank you,” the King said. “I will pray for your daughter’s success.”

The hell of it, Lucas knew, was that prayer was the only thing he could do. He was familiar with the problems caused by interstellar distances and how it forced CEOs like himself to rely on the local offices, but it was even worse for the military. The war might have already begun, yet no one would know until a naval starship got within hailing distance of a StarCom and transmitted an alert, And if the StarCom network went down, it would be weeks – months – before Avalon realised that it was at war. The Navy would be carved up into hundreds of individual units, struggling to survive. It wasn't a pleasant thought.

“Thank you,” Lucas said, finally. He’d barely seen Kat as a child, even in the days following her birth. Where had all the time gone? He’d been busy with his work as CEO, while his children had been brought up by a succession of nannies and tutors, ensuring that they were primed for the corporate life. And how had he failed to get to know the young woman he’d sired? And now it might be too late. “I have faith in my child.”

 

Chapter Twenty-Eight<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-comfficeffice" />

“Captain, you have a sealed communications packet relayed through the StarCom,” Roach said. “It's marked eyes-only.”

Kat frowned. Four days sitting in orbit around Cadiz, jumping every time a hyperspace vortex opened to disgorge another starship; four days completely wasted, knowing that time was running out. Princess Jasmine’s security might have been passed to the Admiral’s orbital base – and she was glad to have her enhanced bodyguards off the ship – but Kat wasn't sure that she trusted the security on the base. The Theocracy had plenty of links with the insurgents on the planet and she wasn't prepared to rule out that they might have some way to get up to the orbital base and assassinate the princess.

“I’ll take it in my office,” she said, standing up. “You have the bridge.”

Once she was in her office, she activated the privacy shield before sitting down at the terminal and placing her palm against the scanner. It read her implant, checked her genetic code and finally scanned her right eyeball to ensure that she was who she claimed to be, before reluctantly unlocking the sealed packet and uploading the data for her to view. The ultra-secure system would automatically wipe the data if anyone else tried to access it, at least before Kat had a chance to view it for herself. After that, she might be permitted to share it with her officers, or she might have to keep it a secret. The whole procedure didn't bode well.

A face appeared in front of her, wearing the white uniform of a Grand Admiral. Kat caught her breath in shock. Grand Admiral Constance Cinnabar had addressed the graduating class at Piker’s Peak, but apart from that they’d never met – and why would a Grand Admiral want to meet such a lowly junior officer, even if she was related to one of the most powerful men in the Commonwealth? There was no logical reason for this message, unless it was somehow connected with the princess.

“Captain Falcone,” the Grand Admiral said, crisply. “This is a sealed message for your eyes only. As you know, the Princess brought warnings to us of a possible attack, but they are not believed by all back home. We believe that we need independent verification, which is where you come in. You are being ordered to cross the border, proceed to the star the Princess claimed was the base for an enemy attack fleet, and discover if there is actually a fleet based there. If so, you are to return at once to Cadiz and alert us through the StarCom network.

“In order that your mission not be compromised from the start, you will receive written orders to escort the Belladonna back to Avalon. The Belladonna will serve as transport for Princess Jasmine and her fellow defectors; once in hyperspace, at least four light years from Cadiz, you will peel off and head to the border. This packet includes the latest intelligence on the border, along with known and suspected enemy positions. I must warn you that your mission will be officially denied if exposed; I advise you to make certain that your ship does not fall into enemy hands. Good luck.”

The message ended. Kat, who hadn't realised that she’d been leaning forward, slumped back into her chair. The mission was challenging...and incredibly dangerous. If the Theocracy did have a war fleet within striking distance of Cadiz, they’d feel a certain determination to ensure that nothing bad happened to it – like a Commonwealth starship poking her nose in, recording their presence and then vanishing back into hyperspace to alert its target. And in order to keep her operation from being compromised, they were creating an illusionary mission...were they convinced that Admiral Williams would betray the mission?

She took a long breath, feeling her pulse racing. There was no denying the danger, or the possible reward for success. If they were caught by the Theocracy’s patrols, they would be destroyed or captured – and somehow she doubted that the Theocracy would honour any of the interstellar conventions on good treatment of prisoners. They would be conditioned, forced to disgorge everything they knew, and then used as mouthpieces for propaganda. And yet it was a mission she couldn't refuse. If she could find proof that there was an attack fleet waiting for the order to advance, even Admiral Williams would be unable to refuse to believe her any longer.

Standing up, she lowered the privacy shield and keyed her wristcom. “Mr. XO, report to my office,” she ordered. The XO had been busy ensuring that the new load of missiles they’d received were in good working order, testing each of them separately. It kept the crew busy; besides, Kat didn't trust 6<SUP>th</SUP> Fleet’s supply officers. “We have a mission to plan.”

***​

Two hours later, Belladonna – a converted heavy cruiser that served as the transport for fact-finding Assemblymen from Avalon – was docked at the orbital HQ. Kat watched as grim-faced Marines escorted the Princess and her escorts onto the converted ship, rolling her eyes at how the Princess complained about the decor. Belladonna reassembled a floating brothel more than a RAN starship on the front lines; there were rumours that claimed that the Admiral’s guests had used it for pleasure cruises rather than anything officially sanctioned by Navy HQ. Kat would have questioned the sanity of any Captain who was happy in command of such a starship, although she supposed that it had its compensations. Part of the crew had been hired away from luxury star-liners and were supposed to know really remarkable ways to exploit zero-gee.

“Captain, Belladonna reports that she is ready for departure,” Roach reported.

“Finally,” Kat said, dryly. Their scheduled departure time had been pushed back twice while the crew tried to settle the Princess and her maids in the converted heavy cruiser. It would be the height of irony if they jumped out just as the Theocracy invasion force entered the system...but then, if the Princess’s stolen documents could be relied upon, they were still some time from being ready to attack. Kat had forwarded copies to ONI – and the Admiral had his own team of analysts still pouring over them – yet neither team had seen fit to inform her of their conclusions. “Order her to disengage from dock and prepare to enter hyperspace as soon as we reach high orbit.”

She felt an odd weight in her chest as Lightning’s main drive came online, slowly propelling the heavy cruiser up and away from Cadiz. As far as anyone – apart from her and the XO – knew, it was just a routine milk run, an escort mission for a starship that should be able to take care of itself. They wouldn't know any differently for another four hours, until the two ships were well away from Cadiz and outside any possible observation – and then Kat would have to tell them the truth. She’d considered off-loading non-essential crewmen before departing Cadiz, but the XO had pointed out that that would alert careful observers that she expected heavy casualties. He had looked as solid as always when Kat had briefed him on the mission, for which she was grateful. She could rely on him to be a rock in the midst of eternal change.

“Signal from Belladonna, Captain,” Roach said. “They are ready to enter hyperspace on your command. They’ve apparently finally sorted out who gets what cabin.”

Kat snorted. “Open a vortex,” she ordered. “Let’s get out of here.”

“Aye, Captain,” Roach said.

“Vortex generator online,” the helmsman said. “Vortex opening...now!”

Space rent asunder, revealing a shimmering spiral of energy leading into hyperspace. There was a brief moment of turbulence as the two starships were pulled through the vortex, and then the familiar eerie lights of hyperspace lit up the display. Kat allowed herself to relax, a little. They wouldn't be entering real danger until they crossed the border with the Theocracy. And then they would be in permanent danger until they escaped.

“Set course for Avalon,” she ordered. “Mr. XO, you have the bridge.”

The next four hours passed very slowly. Kat spent them keeping herself occupied by inspecting every section and running spot checks on maintenance and weapons supplies. The new missiles from Cadiz had all checked out perfectly, apart from one which had appeared to have a glitch in its local control processor. It had been returned to the orbital manufactory and replaced with one that showed no flaw. Kat wasn’t inclined to take chances with her ship’s weapons, not when they might be going to war at any moment. She felt herself grow tense as they approached the breakaway point, even though no one else seemed to feel it. But then, why would they feel it? They knew nothing about the real plan.

She returned to the bridge and exchanged a long look with the XO, before keying the intercom. “Crew of the Lightning, this is your Captain,” she said. What could she say? How could she tell them that they were going into harm’s way on a technically illegal mission? A dozen ideas ran through her head, only to be dismissed one after the other. They’d signed up knowing that danger was part of the job, but this was different. “As some of you may have realised, we are not escorting the Belladonna all the way back to Avalon.”

That, at least, would have been obvious. The Belladonna could look after herself against anything up to and including a light cruiser. Pirates would have to be insane to pick a fight with a ship that looked like a heavy cruiser travelling alone – and they would never have a chance to regret their mistake, if they tried. And none of the normal preparations for a return home had been made.

“We have been entrusted with a very secret and very dangerous mission,” she continued. There was little point in keeping it a secret any longer. “We have been charged with crossing the border and penetrating Theocratic space to discover if they have a war fleet ready to invade the Commonwealth. I need not add that if we die, or fall into enemy hands, it may start the war ahead of time. The stakes could not be higher.

“At this moment, we will go onto full tactical alert – silent running. There will be nothing to betray our presence to watchful eyes as we slip across the border and into the heart of enemy territory. They will be watching, fearful that someday someone will slip across the border to bring relief to the billions trapped in a dour religious world. But they will not see us. We will get in, get the information we so desperately need, and get out again.

“Over the last few months, I have come to know that this crew is the finest crew in the navy. I have faith that each and every one of you will do your utmost to ensure that this mission is a success, to live up to the legend of every other ship called Lightning. One way or another, we will not be forgotten.”

She keyed off the intercom and settled back in her command chair. The die was about to be cast. “Helm, break us away from Belladonna,” she ordered. “Take us towards the badlands.”

Hyperspace seemed to shift around them as Lightning went to full military power, heading away from Avalon and back towards the Four Sisters. Kat felt an odd spurt of Déjà Vu as they kept moving, remembering that they’d encountered the Faithful Companion nearby. If the destroyer was still prowling around, looking for the freighter Kat had abandoned in normal space, there was a good chance that they would detect Lightning before she had a chance to mask her presence by heading towards the Four Sisters. Kat could only hope that they were alone – besides, they were still on the Commonwealth’s side of the border. No one could legally object to their presence there.

The hours passed slowly. Kat felt growing unease as they slipped closer to the Four Sisters, knowing that they were about to start riding the rapids. Surely people as paranoid as the Theocracy’s leaders would picket the Four Sisters, yet...if they didn't, it was the easiest and quickest way into Theocratic space. It was only extremely dangerous to starships. Only someone who seriously wanted to hide would risk traversing the region of hyperspace controlled by the Four Sisters.

“I think I have a workable course, Captain,” Nicola said. “It's narrow, but we should be able to slip through the energy storms and enter enemy territory.”

Kat scowled. Part of her, she hadn't wanted to admit, was half-hoping that Nicola wouldn't have been able to find a course. Crossing the border away from the Four Sisters would be safer, even though there would be a greater chance of being detected by the enemy patrols. And if Nicola was wrong, Lightning would be forever lost to ‘causes unknown.’

“Upload it into the helm,” she ordered, finally. Her voice sounded steady in her ears, but how did it sound to others? The Captain couldn't show fear in front of her crew. “And they rig us for silent running.”

She stared down at the console. Ahead of her, hyperspace rolled and shimmered with towering storms of energy, enough power to vaporise every starship in existence without ever even noticing that they’d been destroyed. It seemed an impassive barrier to her eyes, rolling tidal waves of energy that swept through hyperspace and returned to their source, twisting around the dark gravity wells that represented the Four Sisters. Anyone who tried to fly through a gravity well would be crushed to nothing in less than a second, Kat knew; even their course was incredibly dangerous. But it still offered the best chance for entering enemy space successfully.

“Here we go,” Weiberg said. The helmsman sounded as if he were enjoying himself, much to Kat’s private horror. “Riding the rapids...”

The hyperspace storms broke over her vessel. Kat felt a tingle running down her spine as the entire ship shook, or was she merely imagining it? The sensors started to blur, distorting their results as local space twisted around them, forming into a compressed mass of nothing. She heard a burst of static – it sounded like someone laughing out loud – over the intercom, before it failed amidst a drumming sound that echoed through the entire ship. God was outside, knocking on the hull; the drumming grew louder and louder, and then faded away, just before the next shock began. For a moment, she was convinced that they’d rammed a planet, before logic and reason told her that they weren't dead. And besides, there were no planets in hyperspace.

Her vision began to blur, creating illusions that there were two helmsmen at the helm, or two XOs sitting next to her. She brought up one hand to rub her forehead and discovered, to her shock, that she seemed to have three right hands. It was hard to focus enough to realise which one was the real hand; every time she looked, it seemed to be different. She heard the sound of someone vomiting in the background and swallowed hard, trying to keep herself from following suit. The entire ship lurched around her, as if her very form was being torn apart, and then everything seemed to return to normal. Her head was spinning helplessly, a pounding headache tearing her thoughts apart. It was a long moment before she could even begin to think of the ship...

“We’re in the eye of the storm,” Weiberg said, in a chillingly hushed voice. Kat looked up at the display. They were surrounded by towering whirlpools of energy, spitting death towards Lightning and her crew. “We need to go through another patch to escape.”

Kat nodded, carefully not looking behind her, where one of the officers was cleaning up the mess. God alone knew how many people onboard Lightning had been sick while on duty, or worse. And it wasn't over yet.

“Take us onwards,” she ordered. There was no way to avoid a second trip through the gravity waves. “Now.”

This time, it seemed to be worse. Lightning shook constantly, even as her crew struggled to hand onto some awareness of what was going on around them. Entire systems failed for no apparent reason, only to come back up seconds later, mocking the best efforts of repair techs. Kat found herself clinging onto her command chair as the compensators seemed to shimmer, threatening them all with instant transformation into bloody pulps on the bulkheads, just before space seemed to twist and shimmer in front of them. Lightning was spat back out into normal space through a twisting hyperspace vortex that appeared to have come out of nowhere. The blackness of interstellar space was a hellish relief after the storms in hyperspace...

“Location check,” Kat ordered. Her mouth hurt when she tried to speak. “Where are we?”

Nicola looked up from her console. “Where we were planning to be, Captain,” she said. She sounded weak too, they all did. The trip through the energy storm had left them all drained, even though the reports coming in from all over the ship suggested that no one had been killed. “Theocratic space.”

“Mask us,” Kat ordered. They were in very real danger now. If they were discovered while they were in no state to fight, they were in deep trouble. “Full passive sensor scan; are we alone?”

There was a long chilling pause. “We appear to have arrived undetected,” Roach reported. The display was reassuringly empty of all contacts – and they would all be hostile here, deep in Theocratic space. “There are no enemy ships within detection range.”

Kat and her XO shared a long glance. “We’ll wait here until we have checked the entire ship and ensured that everyone is fit and well,” Kat said. “And then it will be time to go spying.”

 

Your dooin good..

 

Sounds like some the same problems we have in this time to a degree and what may happen next is all up to you.
Great so far ,and have doubt that will only get better.

 

Chapter Twenty-Nine<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-comfficeffice" />

The star system had no name, only a catalogue number. Years ago, a UN-funded survey team had visited the system, discovered that there was nothing there apart from a dying red star and a few asteroids, and then returned home to report that the system was useless. A few years later, a black colony had been established in some of the asteroids, only to be transferred to an Earth-like world when the UN had collapsed and the Theocracy had resurveyed the system. They’d been grateful enough for the rescue that they’d embraced the faith wholeheartedly. Their rocky colonies, hidden from all sensor detection, had become a secret forward naval base.

Admiral Junayd stood on the flag bridge of the battleship Aisha’s Glory, studying the holographic images in the display in front of him. Five squadrons of battleships orbited the dying star, escorted by hundreds of cruisers, destroyers and starfighters. Behind them, the logistics train waited; two hundred freighters, crewed by naval personal. They were something of a problem, he reluctantly conceded; the crews weren’t the best and moving so many freighters off the internal shipping routes had caused an entire string of economic problems. Like all interstellar powers, the Theocracy’s worlds could feed themselves – that had been a UN protocol that, unusually, had been rooted in firm common sense – but the factories, shipyards and industrial nodes were held towards the rear, protected by a formidable array of fixed defences, backed up by powerful fleets. With their output diverted towards the military, the remainder of the Theocracy was feeling the lack.

It wasn't the only problem. The crews of Theocracy ships were permanently indoctrinated with the glory of holy war and the vast rewards offered by God to those who died in combat, spreading the faith across the galaxy. Morale was high onboard the crews of the warships, but the freighter crews were much less enthusiastic about the coming war. What glory was there to be won onboard a stinky freighter? Without the freighters, the offensive would splutter to a halt very quickly, yet the freighter crews didn't see it that way. There was no overt threat of mutiny – freighter crews were held to the same discipline as warship crews and overt grumbling would have been severely punished – but morale was low and the quality of their work, inevitably, had suffered. The Clerics had been preaching the glory of serving the warriors as carriers of weapons and water, yet it hadn't been convincing. It didn’t help that warship crews referred to their freighter-crewing comrades as women, too weak to fight, only useful to carry supplies. There had already been a number of fights, two of which had resulted in deaths.

And that wasn't the only problem. The original attack plan had called for ten squadrons of battleships, operating as a single unit, with smaller forces heading behind enemy lines to take out communications nodes and causing havoc in the rear. Instead, they were launching a much weaker offensive, unless the Caliph decided to hold it back for another month. Worse, keeping the fleet at permanent readiness to depart within forty-eight hours was placing immense wear and tear on the engines. Half of his battleships had already reported problems, none serious enough to keep the ship out of the line of battle, but enough to make their ability to make full military power questionable. He looked up towards the fixed gateway, positioned ten light minutes from the dying star, and scowled. The gateway would betray their presence – or at least that something was going on in orbit around a dying star – but it was necessary. They couldn't risk leaving ships behind. The coming battles might be won or lost because of the presence or absence of a single ship.

“Admiral?”

Admiral Junayd turned to see Captain Qismat, the battleship’s commander, approaching him, one hand forming the salute of submission and respect to a powerful superior. It was a protocol that Admiral Junayd would sooner have dispersed with altogether – and it would be dispersed once they were on their way – but he couldn't allow cracks in the edifice of power to appear now, not when everyone was so tense. The hierarchy that held the Theocracy together might be called into question.

“Yes, Captain?”

“We just received an update from Abdullah, Admiral,” the Captain said. Admiral Junayd wondered if he resented being effectively downgraded to a mere messenger boy. There was no way that he was going to pass up on the opportunity to command a battleship as well as a fleet, at least for the moment. Being offered a promotion was always the same; a refusal to accept the promotion meant that you would never be promoted again. It had amused him to discover that the same rule held true in the RAN. “The remaining squadrons of cruisers are on their way. ETA is estimated at three weeks.”

Admiral Junayd nodded. Once a starship entered hyperspace, there was no way to contact it until it reached a StarCom node and linked into the network. It meant that interstellar operations were always somewhat cumbersome, a lesson the UN had never learnt until it was far too late. The squadrons might be needed back at their homeports, but they would never know until they reached their destination, by which point it would be far too late. It was one of the reasons why the Caliph, for all his faith that God would lead them to victory, had refused to downgrade the Abdullah Fleet. What was the prospect of success against the Commonwealth if Abdullah itself was lost to the enemy?

“Good,” he said, finally. It wasn't that good; if it had been up to him, he would have had the entire fleet concentrated and advancing on Cadiz by now. The Princess Jasmine had stolen enough information to thoroughly alarm anyone who didn't have his head buried up his own ass; surely, even Admiral Williams would be pushed into taking defensive precautions. 6<SUP>th</SUP> Fleet would be outgunned by his force, but no one really knew how Theocratic and Commonwealth vessels would compare when push came to shove. The Commonwealth had a generally higher technological base, although intelligence wasn't sure how well that would transfer to their military potential. It was one reason why the Theocracy had invested so much energy in convincing scientists and researchers to move to the Theocracy and put their hard-won expertise to work improving the Theocracy’s own tech base. It was astonishing how many of those scientists had kinks that could be exploited, or tastes that the Commonwealth was unwilling to meet.

There were times when he questioned the very basis of his own society, thoughts he knew would earn him a bullet in the back of the head if any of the Clerics even suspected their existence. No state based on religion had lasted for long, and they’d always been dead inside long before their final fall from grace. A handful had evolved to become more tolerant, more welcoming of different points of view, but they were the exceptions. Sooner or later, the human mind sought to break free of its chains. The Theocracy would do whatever it needed to do to ensure that it inherited an entire galaxy, yet would it inherit a rotting corpse? Or would it be dead inside by the time it finally fell apart?

The thought was sickening, yet what could he do about it? He served at the pleasure of the Caliph. Admiral Junayd had been surprised that he’d been permitted to keep his life and his rank, but that wouldn't last, not if the Caliph suspected him of vaguely considering rebellion against the Peacock Throne. Strong Caliphs survived because they kept their strong subjects under firm control. And besides, he was loyal to the Theocracy. How could he consider not doing his duty?

“Inform the fleet I wish to perform additional exercises,” he said, finally. The Captain nodded and hastened to obey. “Have the intelligence officers assume the worst; each Commonwealth battleship is at least twice as capable as our own.”

“Yes, sir,” Captain Qismat said. “I hear and obey.”

***​

Everyone knew that a sophisticated gravimetric scanner could pick up a hyperspace vortex at forty light-minutes and a StarCom unit at over a dozen light years. Kat had masked Lightning’s presence as best as she could, altering course every time the sensors even hinted that there might be a patrolling scout ship out there, but returning to normal space risked exposure. She’d ordered them to open the gateway one hundred light minutes from the dying star Jasmine had named, knowing that their mission might come to an abrupt end.

“Bring all weapons to full readiness,” she ordered. “Take us out; now!”

Hyperspace twisted around them and gave way to the darkness of normal space. Lightning roared out of the vortex and instantly cloaked, drawing a veil of invisibility around her presence. If the Theocracy had scattered sensor platforms around the dying star, they would have noticed the brief flare of a vortex and sent starships to investigate – assuming that they didn’t write it off as a sensor glitch. She had to assume the worst; they would pick up their arrival and they would send a small fleet to investigate. The seconds ticked by as they separated themselves from their point of entry, watching carefully for any hunting starships...

“No contacts,” the XO said, finally. Kat allowed herself a moment of relief, before turning her attention to the dying red star in the distance. There were no current files on it in the RAN’s database, but the UN files they’d inherited stated that the system was effectively useless – except as a staging post for an invasion force. It was within easy striking distance of Cadiz, yet so useless that no one would visit the system, unless they were hunting for hidden pirate bases. “I think we’re clear.”

Kat nodded. Even the Theocracy couldn't afford a sensor shell of platforms so far from a useless star. Avalon itself was covered by a relay network that would detect anything up to fifty light minutes from the edge of the system – she assumed that Abdullah had similar coverage – but only a handful of worlds were worth that investment. And then there were the watchtowers positioned within hyperspace, watching for the first signs of an attacking fleet. She shook her head. If she’d been responsible for keeping an entire fleet concealed until the time came to launch it into action, she would have made sure that there was a swarm of destroyers patrolling the edge of the system. Just because Lightning couldn't see them didn't mean that they weren’t there. A starship with all of its active systems shut down would be nearly impossible to detect except at very close range.

“Keep us under cloak,” she ordered. “Launch the sensor platforms and focus them on the dying star.”

Long minutes ticked by as the massive platforms were deployed from the starship and activated. Each platform was composed of passive sensors, rather than anything that radiate a betraying emission, but they were so sophisticated that they would pick up almost anything, assuming that there was anything to pick up. Kat – and the RAN – was gambling that the Theocracy wouldn’t have put their entire fleet in silent running, knowing that doing that would compromise their efficiency. But the Theocracy was run by fanatics. Who knew what they would consider a reasonable thing to do?

The thought made her smile. She – and the entire RAN – had to worry about what civilians would order them to do, civilians who knew little of the Navy actually functioned. The Theocracy’s forces had to worry about the Clerics, and the Clerics had actual authority to override the vessel’s commander if necessary. Their efficiency would be badly weakened, if some reports were to be believed; the Faithful Companion had certainly challenged a vessel far more powerful than itself because the Cleric had insisted. Unless it was all a trick...

“Picking up radio chatter from the star,” Lieutenant Roberta Dickson reported. The sensor tech had been transferred onboard from Cadiz Station, after a brief argument with the beancounters who controlled the naval station. Kat had finally pointed out that Lightning needed a dedicated sensor tech and invited them to protest to the Admiral. Roberta’s reassignment had been immediate. “I can’t pick out individual phases yet, but it's definitely there.”

“We already know that something isn't right there,” the XO growled. “They’ve got a working StarCom.”

Kat nodded. StarCom units were expensive. The Commonwealth had constructed links to all of its major worlds and naval bases, but the cost had been staggering, even for a rich interstellar power. There was no logical reason why the Theocracy would set up a StarCom in orbit around a dying red star, unless they were operating a secret naval base there. The StarCom would provide an instant link back to Abdullah, allowing the Caliph the final say on when the attack could be launched. She wondered, absently, how the Theocracy’s naval officers liked being on the end of a long leash. In their shoes, she wouldn't have enjoyed it at all.

The hours ticked by slowly as more and more information started to filter into the system. Roberta never left the bridge, watching her console carefully and running analysis programs on each of the snippets of information. The radio chatter was definitely Theocratic – they only picked up a handful of words in Standard – but most of it was either humdrum or encrypted. Kat had the latest downloads on broken Theocratic codes, yet none of them were able to unlock the encrypted transmissions. Roberta wasn’t too concerned, even though she hadn't trained as a spook. At such distances, the chances were good that the radio signals had become corrupted, or drowned out by radiation from the star.

“We’re going to have to go closer,” the XO said, finally. Kat had already come to the same conclusion. Even the best of the passive sensors couldn't track individual starships at this range and what they had picked up was far from conclusive. And yet she didn't want to go any closer. Just being here, nearly ninety light minutes from the star, was enough to send shivers down her spine. Cold logic told her that they couldn't be detected – if they had been detected, they would have been jumped by now – but cold logic was no consolation against the irrational fear gripping her mind.

“Keep the sensor platforms deployed,” she ordered. The course was already displayed in front of her, a line that would take them in towards the star. They shouldn't be detected; no one could detect a cloaked starship at such distances. “Take us in, very slowly. I don't want to lose the platforms.”

Slowly, more data started to flow into the sensor platforms. Something was definitely taking place in the star system ahead of them. The data wasn't conclusive yet, but the information suggested the presence of an entire fleet, chattering away in serene confidence that no one was listening. Roberta activated the translation programs and managed to unlock a handful of messages, some referring to repair work on the fleet. The XO pointed out that that level of repair work was consistent with keeping a fleet permanently ready to depart at a moment’s notice. It was enough information to thoroughly alarm anyone, but it wasn't enough. They’d never have another opportunity to take a careful look at the Theocracy’s attack fleet.

“We need to go closer,” Roberta said, finally.

“We can’t risk taking the ship any closer,” Kat said. They’d been tracking a number of Theocratic starships on patrol, roaming the system. The pattern didn't suggest that they’d caught a sniff of Lightning, but the closer they went to the star, the greater the chance of detection. “We could launch remote probes...”

Roberta looked up at her. “I could take a shuttle into the system with the sensor platforms in tow,” she said. Kat stared at her, openly astonished. The idea had occurred to her, but she didn't want to think about it. “I could slip close to their ships and they would never know that I was there, while I read the names off their hulls and count the missile tubes...”

“Are you out of your mind?” The XO demanded. “Do you know what will happen to you if they capture you?”

“I know,” Roberta said. She gulped, something that told Kat just how nervous she was about the whole idea. And yet...she was right. They did need the data that only a close sweep could provide, and risking the entire ship on such a mission was foolish. Lightning was the only way to get the information back to the Commonwealth. “Captain...someone has to do this.”

Kat wanted to fly the mission herself, if only because she would not have to order someone else to die. There were other people, more qualified to fly a shuttle...and yet, Roberta was their expert on deployed sensor arrays. She could fly the shuttle into the system and pull out more data than anyone else. In some ways, Roberta reminded Kat of herself, willing to risk anything just to succeed in her chosen field. And she was right. Risking Roberta’s life was a small price to pay when the entire Commonwealth was threatened.

“One sweep,” she ordered, finally. “We’ll dogleg around the system and pick you up on the other side. Don’t try to navigate once you’re launched; let us do the steering. Keep relaying everything to us through a secure laser...”

She broke off. “Good luck,” she added, feeling a lump within her chest. She couldn't escape the feeling that she was sending Roberta to her death. Her father had never had to order someone to die. The weight of command fell around her again, mocking her. How many others would she have to order to their deaths in her career, assuming she survived the opening days of the war? “You’re going to need it.”

 

Can't say enough good things about your writing in general, and this story is just another fine example. Very exciting story! Looking forward to more.

 

Chapter Thirty<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-comfficeffice" />

Roberta was alone.

Lighting was several light minutes behind her, the only link between the unnamed shuttle and the heavy cruiser a thin communications laser, utterly undetectable unless the enemy ships happened to intersect the communications beam itself. She was the single most isolated human in the system, with no other humans anywhere near her. It struck her, as the sense of isolation grew stronger, that this was how the early astronauts must have felt, back before the human race had started exploding into space in a big way. All of a sudden, the whole mission seemed insane, the craziest idea that she’d ever heard – and it had been her idea!

Years ago, she’d allowed herself to be channelled into sensors after a disastrous exercise had resulted in the – simulated – loss of a starship. Her CO had pointed out that she’d hesitated and frozen at the wrong time, even though she’d known it was a simulation...and a commanding officer could not afford to freeze. She should have given orders, even if they had been the wrong orders. There had been no escape from a boring sensor monitoring station at Cadiz until she’d been snatched up by Captain Falcone. And if she pulled off the spying mission, no one would ever be able to consign her to a boring position ever again.

She ran a hand through her short brown hair as she considered her trajectory. Without the drive fields that propelled starships through the vastness of space, the shuttle would continue drifting right through the heart of the enemy position and then onwards into the darkness of space. The gossamer-thin sensor platforms surrounding the shuttle would suck in all the data they could and relay it to Lightning, ensuring that some news would get out even if disaster struck and she was killed – or, worse, captured. She found herself shaking and cursed her ambition under her breath. It was definitely a crazy idea.

Logic told her that she should be undetectable. The shuttle was tiny, certainly compared to the battleships she was sure were floating in orbit around the dying star. Only a visual scan would reveal that she wasn't anything other than a very small asteroid, drifting towards the star where she would meet her end. And logic wasn't any comfort when she could sense the looming presence of an entire battle fleet. She was sure that they could see her, their sensors tracking her position, just waiting for the right moment to vaporise her and the shuttle. Her heartbeat was so loud that she could hear it in her ears, even though she’d taken pills to help with the stress. She wanted to spin the shuttle around and flee for her life.

“No,” she told herself firmly, as she began to study the data flowing into the sensor platforms. “I will not give into fear.”

The seconds ticked away, each one feeling like an hour, as the enemy facilities slowly came into view. A handful of asteroids, the only thing in the system worth taking, were surrounded by a small cluster of basic industrial nodes – and hundreds of starships. It looked as if the Theocracy had decided to make the fleet as self-sufficient as possible, hardly a poor decision when shipping missiles from a central deport could delay planned offensives, or force fleets to withdraw because they’d shot themselves dry and could no longer defend themselves. The RAN did the same, with orbital fabricators in orbit around every major world, including Cadiz. She’d had to monitor their construction rates during her time with 6<SUP>th</SUP> Fleet.

Her heartbeat began to echo in her ears again as she picked up a flight of starfighters. God – there were several entire wings of starfighters in the fleet, enough to give Cadiz’s defenders a severe headache on their own. Some of the larger capital ships she was detecting had to be carriers, she knew, but it was impossible to pick them out yet from the rest of the flock. Even the best analysis programs couldn't pull out information that wasn't there. None of the Theocratic ships were broadcasting IFF signals. And if the starfighters swooped too close to her position, they might decide to use her for target practice. She swallowed a curse as a second flight of starfighters lanced towards the first flight, before she realised what was going on. They were drilling, endlessly; preparing themselves for war. If Admiral Williams had shown even half as much enthusiasm for military drill as the unknown Theocratic commander, 6<SUP>th</SUP> Fleet would have been much more than a ramshackle force protecting a planet that didn't want to be protected.

She refocused the sensors on the starships, trying to make them out. Most of them were small – destroyers, light cruisers and a handful of types the sensors couldn't identify – but there were at least six squadrons of big boys in the fleet. Battleships or carriers, she decided, although she couldn't sort them out yet. Hellfire; that was enough firepower to take on all of 6<SUP>th</SUP> Fleet, even if it had been in prime condition. She cursed the Admiral even as she narrowed the sensors, trying to work out how quickly the enemy could launch for Cadiz. Luckily, they weren't trying to hide; their betraying emissions were revealing far too much about themselves. Her best estimate was that they would be able to depart within twenty-four hours of the order being given.

Another flight of starfighters appeared from one of the bigger ships, allowing her to identify it as a fleet carrier. No one knew for sure how many starfighters a Theocratic carrier could deploy, but judging by size and launch tubes Roberta suspected that it was roughly akin to a Commonwealth design. On the other hand, all of the starfighters appeared to be space-superiority designs, rather than configured for planetary assault or torpedo missions against capital ships. Her analysis computers were fairly sure that at least six of the bigger ships were carriers, but it was impossible to be sure. The last major war had been the Breakaway Wars and starfighters had just been in their infancy then. It was hard to predict how the Theocracy’s designs would have developed in the absence of any actual war to allow the designers to use actual data in producing their starfighters. They might have to wait for a real war before they began learning from experience.

But maybe that wasn't too surprising. Roberta had heard rumours that the Theocracy had been running intelligence operations within Commonwealth space – and there was far too much information available about the RAN in the public domain. The Theocracy would be able to learn how their enemies solved problems, while keeping their own designs well hidden behind an impenetrable border. It crossed her mind that she was the first person getting an up-to-date look at their latest designs, a thought that chilled her as well as excited her. Getting the information back to the Commonwealth might prove tricky.

She sucked in a breath. The shuttle was drifting closer to the battleships now, each one powerful enough to swat her ship and never even notice the effort. The mighty ships symbolised doom for 6<SUP>th</SUP> Fleet, maybe even the Commonwealth as a whole. How did their designs compare to the Commonwealth’s designs? If she was lucky, she was about to find out.

***​

Kat paced her bridge, feeling the seconds ticking by slowly. The constant flow of data from the shuttle was worrying her, even though it represented success in her mission. If she was reading it correctly, the Theocracy was on the verge of launching its attack. They might be doomed to watch the fleet departing and end up having to race past it – perhaps through it – to warn Cadiz before the fleet came down on them like the hammer of God.

The thought was distressing. For the first time, she found herself wondering if command had really been worth the price she’d paid for it. Going into danger herself was one thing – she’d done that every since she’d graduated from Piker’s Peak – but sending someone else into danger, while she watched from a safe – well, safer – vantage point was quite another. Roberta had volunteered for the mission, even suggested it, yet Kat was, in the final analysis, responsible for her crew. The thought kept echoing through her mind, mocking her. She had just sent one of her crew to almost certain death.

And they were alarmingly close to a powerful fleet that could destroy them with ease, if it noticed their presence. Kat knew that they were undetectable at this range, yet the presence of the patrolling destroyers worried her. A single betraying emission, or a single sweep with active sensors, would expose them – and they would be attacked, perhaps destroyed. She hadn't felt so exposed in the Summer Palace, where the insurgents had only dumped her in with the younger hostages because they hadn't realised who she was – but there, at least, she’d been able to take control of the situation. And she’d broken free, helped the children escape and even escaped herself. Here, in the heart of darkness, she was just a spectator, watching helplessly while a young lieutenant took all the risks. Was command really worth it?

It was, she told herself; the evidence they were securing might just alert the Commonwealth to the oncoming storm that was about to break over Cadiz. And yet...and yet...she was only watching as someone else risked her own life to save countless others. Kat knew that she couldn't have abandoned her ship, let alone flown the mission herself, but it didn't help. The guilt gnawed away at her – and it would do so until the day she died.

***​

The battleships were coming into view now, each one two kilometres of sullen death and destruction to anything that dared to stand in their way. Roberta swallowed her fear and concentrated on studying what few clues she could discern from passive sensors as the battleships drifted into view. There appeared to be two separate classes of battleship within the fleet, four squadrons of gigantic starships, each one armed to the teeth. Her optical sensors picked up missile tubes covering their hulls, suggesting that the larger design possessed a greater throw weight than the comparable Commonwealth design. She forgot her fear as she squinted at the battleships, trying to deduce what their point defence capabilities might be, before realising that either they were hiding their capabilities or they were significantly inferior to Commonwealth designs. That might explain the vast numbers of smaller ships keeping station with the battleships. Assuming equal or superior datanet systems, the smaller ships would keep the enemy missiles away from the battleships, allowing the battleships to mass their fire on their targets.

She frowned, stroking her chin as she contemplated the issue. There were reasons that the Commonwealth built multiple-purpose starships, rather than have battleships armed only with missiles incapable of looking after themselves. The Theocracy might discover that their ships had less tactical flexibility in a mobile battle, although they would be rather effective at engaging fixed defences. Just like the defences in orbit around Cadiz, Sparta, Greenland...and Avalon itself. It fitted in with the Theocracy’s ‘attack, attack, attack’ philosophy. And yet, if they had to fall back on the defensive, they would find themselves in a tricky situation.

The shuttle drifted closer and closer. She stood up from the console and pressed her face against the transparent porthole, wondering if she could see the battleships with her eyes. There was nothing, apart from drifting lights that could have been stars, rather than enemy battleships. It wasn't too surprising; the Theocracy wouldn't have allowed a small asteroid anywhere near their ships, even if they didn’t realise that it was actually a shuttle. The sensor network was almost overloading now, storing more and more data – and convincing her that the Theocracy was definitely on the verge of attacking. Time was running out for them all.

***​

All eyes were watching the main display, as information flowed in from the shuttle and the sensor platforms, but Commander Jeremy Damiani watched the Captain. Despite himself, he was more than a little worried about her. She didn't have the experience that would keep her calm when faced with a situation where all she could do was wait. Someone had once described military life as being ninety-nine parts boredom and one part sheer terror, but sheer terror would be preferable to being bored. He snorted, inwardly. Not that he had ever felt that at the time, of course.

He’d never been on a mission behind enemy lines before – there hadn't been any enemies, apart from pirates and they were easy to kill once located – but he had been on stealth missions, and he had had to send people into danger without going himself. It spoke well of the Captain that she worried about her people, yet there had to be limits. Everyone who joined the navy, either through enlisting as a crewman or going through Piker’s Peak as a would-be officer, took the same oath, swearing to put their lives between their homeworlds and danger. Roberta was young and determined to succeed – just like the Captain – and yet she was expendable, compared to the desperate need to get the information home. He couldn't disagree with Roberta’s conclusion. Zero hour for the invasion was not far off. No one would run their ships with such disregard for basic maintenance, let alone wear and tear on the drives, unless they intended to start moving very soon. How quickly could they get the fleet on the way to Cadiz?

There was no way to know. In theory, a properly trained and drilled fleet could be set into motion in a few hours, but there were always glitches. A planned departure would work much better than one hastily ordered, even in the Theocracy. There would be crew off-ship, officers trying to get ready for the original mission before being told to drop everything and prepare for departure...even starship components missing because the crew were busy replacing them. He’d been on the Mountbatten when the 5<SUP>th</SUP> Fleet had been ordered to depart to secure Cadiz and the chaos had been unimaginable. A number of senior officers had been politely thanked for their service and dismissed from the RAN.

He looked over at the Captain. She was trying to hide her tension from the crew, but it wasn't enough to fool him – or anyone who had served for a few years in the RAN. At least she wasn't on the verge of cracking up, unlike some officers he'd known who had been promoted beyond their competency. It hadn't been that long ago that an wretched coward had been put in front of a firing squad – despite his highly-placed relatives – for fleeing a pirate ship, despite having enough firepower to exterminate the pirate ship without even needing to open fire with his primary armament.

I’m sorry I doubted you, he thought, ruefully. Kat was command material, all right. A little more seasoning and she’d be perfect. And I just hope I have the chance to tell you that.

***​

The battleships were even more intimidating as the shuttle drifted closer. It was impossible to say for sure, but Roberta suspected that they could actually pull a higher speed in normal space than any comparable Commonwealth design. Or maybe they were just real sticklers about multiple redundancy. The RAN had the same bug up its ass about having everything double and triple backed up, regardless of the cost. She’d heard that the Assembly had several Assemblymen who questioned the vast expense time and time again, trying to convince the Navy to lower its requests for more funding. None of them had ever served in the military. None of them knew that redundancy might make the difference between victory or defeat, life or death.

She pushed the thought out of her mind, studying the remaining details. She’d been right; fewer point defence weapons than a Commonwealth battleship. That would be interesting if two battleships ever duelled each other, as if that would happen outside of an entertainment program with a bad plot and worse acting. And then...

Roberta had switched her gaze to the carriers when disaster struck. Red lights blinked up on her console as active sensors swept over the shuttle...and locked on. Roberta keyed a distortion packet into the sensors, hoping to disrupt the enemy sensor lock, but there was no chance of disrupting it permanently. The enemy starfighters were already closing in on her. Some bright spark in their tactical sensor compartment must have finally realised that she wasn't behaving like an asteroid, or something like that. She’d never know for sure.

“I’m sorry, Captain,” she said. It would be her last transmission. “Get out of here!”

She keyed a second command into the sensor arrays as the enemy starfighters swooped down on her. The arrays disintegrated as molecule disintegration fields reduced them to their component atoms, rendering it impossible for the Theocracy to learn anything from the dust. Or so she hoped; they’d learn a great deal just through her mere presence at their staging base. A third set of commands wiped the shuttle’s databanks, just before the starfighters zoomed past her, so close that she could see the pilots in their cockpits, staring at her. She raised her hand and waved back, just before something struck the shuttle and sent her tumbling down into darkness.

***​

“Captain, they got the shuttle,” Roach reported. “She’s gone.”

Kat spun around. There would be a time-delay; several minutes between the shuttle’s destruction and the loss of the communications laser that had alerted them to her destruction. The enemy would already have time to react, which meant that they could be on their way already, heading right for her command. There would be time to mourn Roberta later.

“Get us out of here,” she ordered. “Best possible speed; now!”

 

Great stuff.

Your stories get better and better.

 

Chapter Thirty-One<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-comfficeffice" />

“What?”

Admiral Junayd couldn't believe his screens. Only moments ago, Perimeter Control had started tracking what looked like a rogue asteroid, only to discover that it had been a shuttle – an enemy shuttle! The secrecy of the attack fleet had been badly compromised; even if they did destroy the shuttle, it wouldn’t stop the mothership from returning to the Commonwealth, warning them of the oncoming storm.

“Get the destroyer screen out there now,” he snapped. This was disaster, a disaster that might see his head removed from his shoulders. The Caliph would seek to avert blame from falling on his own head, weakening his position – and if that meant beheading a trusted Admiral, it was a small price to pay for his power and position. “Send the alert to all ships – I want to be ready to move out now!”

His subordinates leaped to obey, leaving the Admiral alone with his thoughts. The enemy vessel had to be lurking some distance from the fleet, or they would have detected its presence before it managed to launch a spying shuttle right into the heart of the fleet. Where would it be? Keying the console, he plotted the shuttle’s course backwards, out into interstellar space. The shuttle had come from somewhere along that line, and not too far away either. A shuttle had only limited life support for its crew.

“Focus the destroyer screen along this line,” he ordered, uploading the instructions into the shared command network. Hopefully, if God was with them…but He’d been with them before, when the shuttle’s presence had been discovered. It could have slipped through the entire fleet and escaped back to interstellar space. “Bring up every active sensor we have and…”

“Admiral, a hyperspace vortex is opening,” the sensor officer reported. A spinning red vortex had appeared, eight light minutes from the attack fleet. The Admiral cursed under his breath as the vortex closed, presumably allowing the enemy ship into hyperspace. Her Captain must have the reactions of a cat, unless he’d been planning to leave already and had just been spooked by the loss of the shuttle. But no, that wasn’t the enemy way. The Theocracy would quite happily order a shuttle to its death to gain information; the Commonwealth took a gentler view of events. They would have sent an unmanned probe if they’d felt that escape was impossible.

“Order the destroyer screen to race into hyperspace and run the intruder down,” the Admiral ordered. The enemy ship had a head start; enough, perhaps, to outrun or lose the destroyers somewhere in hyperspace’s colossal energy storms. “And then spin up the StarCom and get me a direct link to Abdullah.”

It crossed his mind that he could refrain from telling the Caliph the exact truth, but he banished that thought with considerable irritation. He owed his master an accurate report, even if it cost him his head. And if they could get the fleet ready to advance in time, they might just be able to hit <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-comffice:smarttags" /><st1lace w:st="on"><st1:City w:st="on">Cadiz</st1:City></st1lace> before it was too late.

If…

***​

The eerie lights of hyperspace surrounded Lightning, but Kat couldn’t relax. There was no way of avoiding detection now; the second they’d opened the vortex they would have set off alarms all over the system. The enemy fleet would know that they had been discovered. Her mind ran over it again and again. What would the enemy do if they knew that their plans had been uncovered? The answer was chillingly simple; if they could, they would launch an immediate offensive and try to crush the RAN before it could prepare for battle. And 6<SUP>th</SUP> Fleet would take weeks, at the very least, to work up for combat. And that assumed…

She pushed the thoughts aside. The sensors were still scanning hyperspace, looking for possible targets. If they were very lucky, they’d be able to hide in the hyperspace distortions caused by nearby energy storms before enemy ships broke into hyperspace after them. If not, it would be a flat-out race for <st1:City w:st="on"><st1lace w:st="on">Cadiz</st1lace></st1:City> with a massive enemy fleet snapping at her heels. She gritted her teeth as the helmsman poured on the speed, boosting Lightning to a remarkable speed in hyperspace, circumventing the speed limit Einstein had deduced so long ago. And yet she knew that it might not be enough.

No message could be sent to a starship in transit, or patrolling the borders, but if the Theocracy had established a StarCom unit somewhere near the border, orders could already be flashing out ahead of her to establish a blockade. Kat had no choice, but to shape her course for <st1:City w:st="on"><st1lace w:st="on">Cadiz</st1lace></st1:City>, a fact that would be just as obvious to the enemy commander. If she tried to head into the badlands and trust the Four Sisters to conceal her again, she would be giving the enemy a clear shot at <st1:City w:st="on"><st1lace w:st="on">Cadiz</st1lace></st1:City>. How quickly could they mobilise, she asked herself again and again, comparing what Roberta had seen with what she knew of fleet operating procedures. They’d had their drives permanently at the ready; Lightning and her crew might just have arrived a day or two before the offensive was scheduled to kick off.

An alarm sounded and, even though she wasn’t surprised, she felt her blood run cold. “Captain,” Roach reported, “we have at least five vessels in hyperspace, shaping pursuit courses towards us.”

Kat studied the display, where five red icons had materialised like angry bees. Most RAN officers cursed the speed limit for radio and laser transmissions within interplanetary space, but Kat was silently delighted. The enemy might have had a destroyer screen operating a light week from the dying star, or even further away, yet they wouldn’t know what was going on until messages from the command station reached them – and by then Lightning would have more than lived up to her name. She would have passed them at several times the speed of light before they received the orders to give chase.

“They read out as destroyers,” Roach said, slowly. “I don’t think that there’s anything heavier that would even begin to be able to catch us, even in hyperspace.”

The XO snorted. “But if they cripple us, they can wait for one of the battlewagons to arrive and complete the job of exterminating us,” he pointed out. “They might be hoping that we will turn and fight.”

Kat shook her head. It galled her to run from an enemy force – bravely taking to her feet, she beat a very brave retreat echoed in her mind for a second – but there was no other choice. Lightning couldn’t stand up to even one of the battleships and even though she was confident she could take out all of the destroyers, the price might be crippling damage that would strand them behind enemy lines. They might be doomed to drift through hyperspace until the life support ran out, leaving them suffocated and slowly freezing to death. She’d heard tales of badly damaged ships that had limped home, or had stumbled across a fixed vortex and escaped back into normal space, but they were only stories. The truth was that a seriously damaged starship in hyperspace would never be seen again.

“Keep us moving,” she ordered, “and keep an eye on what’s ahead of us. They may be trying to cut us off from the border.”

She sat back in her chair, trying to project a veneer of confidence. Inside, she was sweating; they were just too ignorant about Theocratic space. What might be waiting for them? Border patrol ships, a secondary unit of the attack fleet, watchtowers like the ones established near Avalon…or something else, something she’d missed. There were just too many possibilities. She looked up at the enemy ships on the display, noting that one of the blips was larger than the other four. Two ships flying close together, a distortion effect caused by hyperspace, or a bigger starship? There was no way to know until it got into firing range.

Anyone who wanted to be an officer in the RAN had to be able to read a tactical display, even if they didn’t quite master navigation within hyperspace. If she was right, the enemy ships would have a chance to enter firing range in less than six hours, assuming that they maintained the same level of acceleration. They might give up the chase…but that would mean returning to the Theocracy and admitting failure. They’d be signing their own death warrants. No, she was grimly certain that they would fight to enter firing range and then start pounding away at Lightning as soon as they could. And then…a single hit to the drive nodes would cripple them, leaving them easy meat for the bigger boys in the attack fleet.

“Make sure the tactical crew gets some rest,” she ordered the XO. “We will need them fresh and active in six hours.”

***​

The Caliph’s image fizzled into view in the private briefing compartment. He didn’t look pleased. Admiral Junayd silently bade farewell to his five wives and nine children and then briefly outlined what had happened. Halfway through the briefing, the Caliph’s face darkened with rage. Perhaps he was thinking of his treacherous sister – her treachery could hardly be denied, not now – or perhaps he was thinking of beheading a failure or two. The Admiral silently prayed that if he were to suffer, his wives and children would be spared the penalty for his failure. But how could anyone have expected the Caliph’s own sister, a mere woman, to turn into a spy and then escape to the Commonwealth?

“I understand,” the Caliph said, finally. “How long until they reach <st1:City w:st="on"><st1lace w:st="on">Cadiz</st1lace></st1:City>?”

Admiral Junayd considered, briefly. “Assuming a least-time course – and assuming that we fail to bring them to battle and destroy them before they reach the border – “twenty-nine hours before they reach <st1:City w:st="on"><st1lace w:st="on">Cadiz</st1lace></st1:City>,” he said, flatly. “Once they reach the system, they can flash an alert to the rest of the Commonwealth.”

The Caliph smiled, darkly. “Not if we act now,” he said. “Are your heavy units ready to move out now?”

“Yes, Your Supremacy,” the Admiral said. “We won’t have the troop levels we intended to deploy to <st1:City w:st="on"><st1lace w:st="on">Cadiz</st1lace></st1:City>, however. They weren’t scheduled to join us until…”

The Caliph waved a hand dismissively. “That is of little concern,” he said, firmly. “Flash a signal to the operatives on <st1:City w:st="on"><st1lace w:st="on">Cadiz</st1lace></st1:City>. Tell them that the time is now. They are to put the silencing plan into action immediately, and then start priming the insurgents for action. Once our fleet arrives, they will serve as our ground forces until the army can be mobilised and landed on <st1:City w:st="on"><st1lace w:st="on">Cadiz</st1lace></st1:City>.”

And the insurgents will be crippled, Admiral Junayd thought, with a certain cold amusement. The overall plan had always called for the destruction of the local resistance – hopefully after it had served its purpose – and now it looked as if it might be possible without the Theocracy needing to remind the galaxy of its true purpose too soon. Once the other galactic powers learned what absorption by the Theocracy actually meant, they would all start rearming as fast as possible, leaving the Theocracy facing an alliance of the entire Human Sphere. That could not be allowed.

“Yes, Your Supremacy,” he said. He’d checked before the brief and fuzzy communications link had opened. “I can be moving within nine hours, heading right for <st1:City w:st="on"><st1lace w:st="on">Cadiz</st1lace></st1:City>. The divisionary operations on other worlds will have to be brought forward as well.”

“See to it,” the Caliph said. “May God go with you.”

His image vanished. Admiral Junayd hesitated for a moment, sweat congealing down his back and staining his uniform, and then marched out of the briefing room, heading for the CIC. There was a war to fight…and, if they were very lucky, they might even take <st1lace w:st="on"><st1:City w:st="on">Cadiz</st1:City></st1lace> before the Commonwealth really comprehended that it was under attack.

***​

“Enemy vessels entering firing range,” Roach reported. “They’re locking onto our hull.”

Kat hesitated. Firing on Theocracy vessels without being fired on herself was, technically speaking, an act of war. It was definitely in breach of her orders, even if she was morally certain that the Theocracy was about to invade her homeworld. A moment later, the entire debate became academic. The Theocratic vessels had opened fire.

“I count twenty-one tracks,” Roach said, grimly. Kat nodded. That matched with the theory that the enemy craft were all destroyers. “Point defence is online and ready to engage.”

“Return fire,” Kat ordered. It was a shame that they didn’t have any missile pods, but deploying them in hyperspace would slow the ship down – and besides, it was alarmingly easy for an enemy missile to take out the pods before they could be launched. Most tactical manuals suggested just punching out all the missiles in one pod before the enemy could wreak them, but it wasn't always that easy. “Aim to slow our targets down, rather than destroy them.”

The enemy missiles flooded down on Lighting, their exact positions hazy in the distortions of hyperspace. Point-defence plasma cannons and rail-guns went to work, firing bursts of superhot plasma and tiny bursts of compressed matter into their path, trying to take out as many missiles as possible. Lightning had one advantage that her pursuers lacked; the enemy missiles had to work to catch up with her, while her own were falling back towards their target. As if to counteract the advantage, all six enemy destroyers – Roach had finally isolated six targets – had their point defence linked together. It made them, collectively, a very dangerous threat. They could survive the far greater rate of fire Lightning could pump out at them.

Seventeen of the enemy missiles were picked off; two more were lost in hyperspace as their drives failed, or they lost their targeting locks and peeled off after a set of decoys. The final two swooped down on Lightning and detonated just short of the hull, blasting bomb-pumped lasers into the armour. Kat heard Lightning scream as the bursts burnt through sections of her armour, but her drives survived intact. She glanced down at the damage report, cursed under her breath, and then gave thanks for small mercies. The damage was relatively minor.

“Keep firing,” she ordered. One of the enemy destroyers started to spin helplessly just after it was hit, seconds before a quick-thinking Captain ordered the drive shut down. She fell behind the chase seconds later, stranded in hyperspace until another ship could rescue them and tow them out of hyperspace. A second ship had been damaged, but remained in the chase, even though they’d clearly lost some of their point defence weaponry. “Don’t let them keep picking away at us.”

The battle continued to rage as the enemy ships tried to get closer to Lightning, only to discover that that only exposed them to her missiles at close range. Another one of the enemy ships died, but managed to spit out another bomb-pumped laser into Lightning’s armour. Kat silently blessed the geniuses who’d invented the armour, thanking God that they’d managed to come up with something capable of absorbing blows that would have obliterated a starship from the Breakaway Wars. Roach’s skilful deployment of Lightning’s ECM drones helped, distracting some of the enemy missiles from reaching their targets. Nuclear fire blossomed out in hyperspace, only to be absorbed seconds later by hyperspace’s own intrinsic energy state, exciting energy storms into existence. Kat watched the storm forming with a kind of helpless fascination; had they discovered a way to turn hyperspace itself into a weapon? The thought was terrifying.

“We’ll be crossing the border in seven minutes,” the helmsman reported.

Kat shared a glance with the XO. After what they’d seen, she seriously doubted that the Theocratic Navy would allow them to escape, even if it meant sending their ships across the border, an act of war. Her lips twitched; after everything that had happened over the past few weeks, both sides would have causes for war coming out of their asses. The Commonwealth would have the report that the Theocracy was preparing for war – and arming pirates to attack Commonwealth shipping – and the Theocracy would have this intrusion, and God alone knew what else.

“Captain,” Roach said, suddenly. “The enemy ships are breaking off!”

Kat blinked in astonishment. Why had the enemy simply abandoned the pursuit? Had the Commonwealth been played all along, or had the enemy simply decided that they weren’t going to run Lightning down and chosen to escape just before they ran into the 6<SUP>th</SUP> Fleet?

“Good,” she said, fighting to hide her surprise. Or perhaps the explanation was very simple; the Theocrats probably had orders not to cross the border without permission and had simply broken off when Lightning had managed to cross herself. “Take us towards <st1:City w:st="on"><st1lace w:st="on">Cadiz</st1lace></st1:City>, best possible speed.”

She looked up at the XO. “I need a damage report,” she said, grimly. Nothing vital had been hit, or Lightning would have slowed to a half and been swarmed by the enemy destroyers, but any damage was bad news. She suspected that there wouldn’t be time to undertake repair work on <st1:City w:st="on"><st1lace w:st="on">Cadiz</st1lace></st1:City>.

“Aye, Captain,” the XO said. “And might I suggest that you get some sleep?”

Kat rubbed her eyes. Her bed sounded very attractive to her right now, but her office had a sofa and it was right next to the bridge. “I’ll be in my office,” she said, finally. “Alert me if anything happens, and I mean anything. We’re at war.”

She handled the bridge over to Roach, who looked as tired as Kat felt, and stumbled into her office. It seemed impossible to roll the sofa over and turn it into a bed, so she just lay down on the sofa and closed her eyes. Sleep didn’t come easily and when it did, it was filled with dark dreams. There was no avoiding the truth. They were at war.

And even the Admiral would have to believe, wouldn’t he?

 

Chapter Thirty-Two<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-comfficeffice" />

Everyone knew that it was impossible to punch a communications beam through hyperspace, at least for any reasonable distance. The experts had worked out complicated schemes for relay stations that would have allowed them to transmit a signal over several light years, but most of the schemes had fallen apart on grounds of cost. Hyperspace’s seemingly random energy storms would wipe out the relay stations every so often, shattering part of the communications net. The only way humanity had found to transmit signals at FTL speeds was through creating an artificial singularity that could be resonated in tune with another singularity on the other side of the galaxy. Singularities could be very dangerous, so the relay stations were constructed in orbit and heavily defended. They were secure against an attack from the outside.

Lieutenant Sissy Fletcher shivered inwardly as the shuttle approached the StarCom station in orbit, passing through the network of orbital weapons platforms configured to obliterate any attacker intent on taking out the StarCom. Her mouth was dry and her entire body was shaking; she couldn’t understand why the guards hadn’t realised that she was terrified and picked her up for interrogation, rather than allowing her into the heart of the system. If only she hadn’t met her man, if only she hadn’t started to gamble, if only…

It had started fairly innocently, one leave on <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-comffice:smarttags" /><st1:City w:st="on"><st1lace w:st="on">Cadiz</st1lace></st1:City>’s moon. The Hades Bar catered for RAN personnel who couldn’t go down to the planet, allowing them a chance to spend their pay in relative comfort and ease. Sissy had been young and inexperienced, too naive to realise the age-old truth that all games of chance are invariably rigged by the owners. They existed to separate young officers from their pay and Sissy, in the course of one leave, had fallen into debt. Somehow, she hadn’t been able to break the addition, gambling again and again, always convinced that the next one would pay off handsomely and she would be able to clear her debts. And somehow it had never happened. Before she knew it, she’d found herself owing over five hundred thousand pounds to a gambling syndicate renowned for its brutal response to non-payment of debts.

Sissy had found herself in the syndicate’s office, facing two stern-looking men – clearly enhanced bodyguards – and the manager, who was looking down at the young officer as if she was a piece of dust he’d scraped off the floor. She’d had no choice, but to pay – but she had no money. Her salary couldn't cover her expenses and she knew better than to ask for help. The RAN took a dim view of officers who got themselves into trouble with gambling and loan sharks, at least officers without powerful connections and patrons back home. She’d expected to find herself disgraced – if she made it out of the office alive – but the manager had an offer for her. She could work for him and repay her debts. He would even through in a gambling allowance to see if she could earn enough to repay without further compromising himself.

The first request had been simple. StarCom message traffic was heavily restricted, with priority given to military and government communications. All Sissy had to do was insert a message for the manager, sending an encrypted transmission to Greenland, another planet in the Commonwealth. A second request had followed, and a third, until Sissy had found herself more compromised than ever. If she took it to her superiors, she would find herself on a penal colony. They had her firmly in their grip and escape was impossible. She’d told herself that she was earning enough to ensure a comfortable life – and plenty of gambling – but she’d known that it would have to come to an end. And this time, it was the most dangerous request of all.

She had one hand in her pocket, curled around a simple unmarked datachip. The manager’s flunky had given it to her only two hours ago, before she’d boarded the shuttle back to the StarCom installation. His instructions had been simple and concise; she had to get the chip into the station, insert it into a console inside the secure zone and then allow it to run within the computers. If she succeeded, she’d been told, her debts would be forgiven and she could go free. It was worth the risk, she told herself, even though she doubted they would ever let her go. Perhaps she could swing a deployment to a different star system, or go home and change her name, escaping into the shadows of Avalon...

The Marines on duty glanced at her, checking out the young and attractive Lieutenant, and then looked away before their Sergeant tore them a new asshole for being distracted on duty. Sissy almost collapsed with relief, even as part of her wished that the Marines had been a little more observant. Surely they’d seen her nervous she was...maybe they were inside, waiting to snatch her away from the rest of the operators on the station. She felt almost as if she was watching her walk from outside her own body, as if events were moving onwards with an inevitability that belayed the struggles of the puny humans who populated the universe. The final secure hatch slid open, revealing the heart of the StarCom operations system. A circular chamber, manned by nearly thirty officers, with consoles that tracked and regulated the message packets in the transmission buffers. She almost cringed as she sensed the charge in the air, the faint sense of being too close to a singularity. Her console was glowing up at her, invitingly. No one had moved to stop her from taking her seat.

She barely heard the last shift’s operator as he blathered in her ear, telling her that nothing particularly important had happened during the last shift. Instead, she pulled up the main transmission queue and scanned the list, looking for anything that should be held back until the main buffers had been empted into the nothingness of singularity-space. The StarCom could dispatch thousands of messages every second, but there were millions of messages, coming in and out of Cadiz. It had once awed her to think that she could transmit a message from one end of the Human Sphere to the other. Now, it was the chain around her neck, holding her down. If she transferred away, the gambling syndicate would have no reason to keep allowing her to avoid repayment of debts. She’d seen enough evidence of their ruthlessness over the years, even against RAN personnel, to know that she’d wind up dead in an air corridor, or forced into a brothel once she’d been dishonerably discharged from the RAN.

An hour passed slowly. Carefully, trying to avoid glancing around, as if the motion was totally natural, she pulled the datachip out of her pocket and inserted it into the console’s slot. There was a long pause that felt like years, perhaps decades, and then the console bleeped once. The program within the datachip was already working, without her command. It would have been impossible to insert a program from outside, but Sissy was inside the firewall that protected the singularity-controlling computers from outside intrusion. Ten minutes later, the alarms went off as the singularities started to spin out of control.

Sissy stumbled out of the control room with the other operations, heading down towards the emergency escape pods. Behind them, internal safety systems struggled to push the singularities back out of existence, rather than risk them tearing the station apart before evaporating with a colossal release of energy. It would make one hell of a weapon, Sissy’s instructors had taught her, if only they could figure out how to generate and perpetuate singularities without losing control and seeing them evaporate into nothingness. The background whine of the generators rose to a screeching howl, forcing the operators to cover their ears, and then faded away into nothing. Sissy realised, with growing horror, just what she’d done. The omnipresent sensation, the sensation that scientists swore was nothing more than imagination, of being close to a singularity was gone. Cadiz was cut off from the rest of the Commonwealth.

They caught up with Sissy two hours later, but by then it was far too late.

***​

Kat half-expected to fly out of a hyperspace vortex right into a battle as Theocracy forces laid siege to Cadiz. Lightning had been forced to reduce speed after crossing the border, with one of the fusion reactors on the verge of overloading and fusing into a useless hunk of radioactive metal. They’d limped back through hyperspace, jumping at every sensor reflection as if it was an entire enemy fleet, and emerged some distance from Cadiz itself. If there was a battle going on, Lightning was in no state for a fight.

“Scan clear, Captain,” Roach reported, as the display started to fill up with icons. All green and blue, thankfully; no glowering red icons illuminated the display. “I’m picking up traffic from System Command.”

Kat nodded. “Send the signal,” she ordered. Outside of training exercises, no one had ever flashed a Code Red – attack imminent – to their superior officers. Even using it without extremely good cause was a court-martial offence, but it was the only way to alert the system to the oncoming storm. “And get me a private link with the Admiral.”

“Captain,” the XO said, grimly, “the StarCom is down.”

Kat swallowed a most unladylike word. Without the StarCom, getting a message – a warning – back to the rest of the Commonwealth would take several days. StarCom units had more multiple redundancies built into their design than a battleship, or even a civilian orbital pleasure palace. For Cadiz’s StarCom to go down now...it could only mean enemy action. Someone had sabotaged the StarCom to isolate Cadiz, ensuring that it would be days before the Commonwealth received the warning. The Theocracy would have time to launch its invasion before the alert could be passed back to the Commonwealth.

She keyed her console, bringing up the strategic star chart of the Commonwealth. The closest StarCom was at Bristol Deep, a system that boasted no habitable worlds, but large asteroid fields and a pair of gas giants that made establishing and operating an excellent industrial base an easy prospect. Her father’s corporation and several others had invested heavily in the system, the only thing keeping it from being recognised as a Commonwealth member system in its own right being the limited population, just a few million below the number required for autonomy. The corporations had rigged the game in their favour, although they did treat their workforce relatively well. They didn't need a mass uprising within the system, one that might threaten their profit margins for the next century.

“Prepare a course for Bristol Deep,” she ordered, sharply. Bristol Deep also had a large naval base, if she recalled correctly, although most starships in the sector would have been based at Cadiz. The corporations had lobbied heavily for establishing a base there, one that had been loudly denounced as pork barrel plundering of the public purse by some of the Assemblymen. Her lips twitched humourlessly. It might turn out to the best investment the Commonwealth had ever made. “Greg?”

“We’re ready,” Bone said. Kat winced. Bone and his Marines had volunteered, one and all, to head to Cadiz and help set up defences on the planet’s surface. Kat had called the idea suicide, but she hadn't been able to bring herself to overrule him on the issue, not when the Marines were determined to fight. The occupation forces weren't ready for a real fight, Bone had pointed out, and needed as much help as they could get. Afterwards, Kat hadn't been able to shake the feeling that she was sending the entire company of Marines to their deaths. She told herself quite firmly that she wouldn't mourn one of them any more than the others. Her heart said otherwise. “I think that...”

“Captain,” Roach said. “The Admiral is requesting a secure line.”

“Launch the Marines, and then put him through to my office,” Kat said, nodding to the XO. She’d declared a Code Red, for crying out loud! What had been keeping the Admiral? A hunting trip? Another round of endless parties? Picking his nose? A wave of bitterness threatened to overwhelm her as she remembered the deadly battleships floating in orbit around a dying red star. How many people were going to die because the Admiral had neglected his duties? “Let me know the moment anything changes.”

She stormed into her office and sat down at the desk, placing her fingers against the scanner. The Admiral’s face appeared in front of her. For once, he seemed actually alert, although the nasty part of her mind suggested that that had more to do with the fact she’d just given him a chance to chop off her head than anything more useful.

“Captain,” he said. By now, the entire fleet would have received the Code Red alert. They’d be rushing to battlestations – and, she hoped, learning how to overcome their deficiencies. If they were really lucky, the Admiral’s cronies would be stuck down on the planet’s surface, leaving the harassed XOs to fight their ships. It would improve efficiency enormously. “What is the meaning of this?”

“The Theocracy is preparing to attack us,” Kat said. She belatedly remembered that the Admiral hadn't been told anything about her mission, if only to prevent him scorching it or leaking it before the Belladonna had departed for Avalon. “Their fleet is already on the way.”

“Preposterous,” the Admiral snapped. “Captain, I am ordering you to report to groundside at once and...”

“Under a system-wide Code Red, a commanding officer who leaves her ship may be liable for court-martial for dereliction of duty,” Kat said, sweetly. She had had it with the Admiral! If she had a chance, she promised the ghosts of Roberta Dickson and the five members of her crew who had died when the bomb-pumped lasers had burned through her hull, she would challenge the Admiral to face her on a Court of Honour. The RAN frowned upon duelling and it would probably mean the end of her career, but it would be worth it. “Admiral, my sensor department is uploading the records to you now. There are at least four squadrons of battleships and two squadrons of carriers bearing down on Cadiz, right now.”

She pushed on before the Admiral could speak. “And you’ve just lost your ability to alert the Commonwealth,” she added. She’d checked the timing; Cadiz’s StarCom had failed nearly three hours before Lightning had arrived, suggesting that someone in the Theocracy had flashed a ‘go’ signal to agents already in place. The brief update she’d been able to download from the StarCom operating station had said that the station's computers had been heavily contaminated by perversion viral software and that it would take weeks, if not months, to clean out the system before repowering the station and spinning up the singularities. Kat rather suspected that they didn't have that long. “The timing isn't a coincidence, Admiral. They had someone in place in our StarCom for God knows how long. And now we know about her – why would they do that, unless keeping their agent a secret was no longer a concern? There is an entire war fleet bearing down on us, Admiral!”

There was a long pause. Just for a moment, Kat wondered if the Admiral was on the verge of a heart attack. His face had paled, as if he had been suddenly forced to confront a reality he would prefer to deny. Kat knew the expression from her mother’s social circles, when some unfortunate on the edge of High Society had been told that he or she was no longer welcome within the circle of endless parties, receptions and gossipmongers that made up the centre of their world. If he did have a heart attack...

She glanced down at the display. The Marine shuttles were halfway to Cadiz, heading down towards the Marine Corps base established on an island, safely away from the insurgency. It would only take another forty minutes before the Marines were safely on the ground, where they would link up with the Marines deployed to the surface. She wondered suddenly if the Admiral was trying to countermand the Code Red, even though it would ensure his court-martial when Avalon found out. A Code Red took priority over everything else, at least in the eyes of the RAN.

“You were sent to provoke them,” the Admiral said, finally. Kat opened her mouth to deliver a stinging rebuttal, but he spoke over her. “The warmongers finally got their chance to start a war.”

Kat almost smiled. The Admiral’s usefulness to his patrons had just come to a screeching halt. With a Code Red involved, Naval HQ would take a very careful look at Cadiz’s response to the alert and the Admiral would be lucky to escape court-martial. Maybe they’d accept his resignation, if only to get rid of him as quickly as possible. All he could do now was accept the Code Red and...

An alarm shrilled. “Captain, we have multiple hyperspace vortexes opening up nearer the planet,” the XO said. On the screen, the Admiral’s face had gone pasty white. A moment later, his image vanished from the display. “They’re here.”

Kat caught her breath, torn between two absolutes. Her heart told her to stand and fight – and Greg Bone, her former lover, was still in transit, an easy target if the enemy happened to notice the Marine shuttles. Cold logic told her that Lightning was in no state to join the fight; the only choice was to alert the Commonwealth as quickly as possible. And if that meant abandoning her personnel...

“Open a vortex,” she ordered. She didn't recognise her own voice. “Take us to Bristol Deep.”

 

Time for war. Great story Chris.

 

"Her Captain must have the reactions of a cat"

Cute

 

Oh Maaaaan. I'm on the edge of my seat!


. . and if I ever meet Lieutenant Sissy Fletcher I'm going to kick her butt. Girl or not!

 

Chapter Thirty-Three<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-comfficeffice" />

“Code Red,” the loudspeaker blared. “I say again, Code Red! This is not a drill. Code Red; I say again...”

“Someone shut that racket up,” Commander Nicky Seaford snapped. “Report!”

“Lightning’s CO declared a Code Red,” Lieutenant Cindy Rollins reported. The sound of the alarm mercifully faded away. “Attack imminent…”

The Commander swore, just loudly enough for her to hear. The station’s commander was down on the planet below, enjoying himself while his crew tended to their duties. She watched as the command datanet came online, yet without the Admiral’s authority ordering automated units to combat stations it wouldn’t be complete. They’d been caught with their pants down, quite literally. She cursed the Admiral and his cronies under her breath even as the station’s crew rushed to battle stations; no one in their right mind would declare a Code Red unless it was genuine.

“Commander,” one of the officers reported, “the station is at battle stations.”

“Bring up combat systems and flash-transmit a warning to civilian craft,” the Commander ordered. They’d taken far too long to come to alert, even though no enemy warships had yet materialised within the system. “Order them to head away from the planet and into empty space. The enemy shouldn’t target them if they’re not in the way.”

Unless they’re sadists, or just want to make sure that no word leaks out, Cindy thought, coldly. She would have liked to believe that it was a drill, or some sadist’s idea of a joke, but the loss of the StarCom was alarming. <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-comffice:smarttags" /><st1:City w:st="on"><st1lace w:st="on">Cadiz</st1lace></st1:City> was cut off from the rest of the Commonwealth…and if they’d taken out the other StarCom units nearby, it would be weeks or months before the Commonwealth knew that it was at war. She knew from her tactical courses that speed of communications was often decisive in determining the outcome of wars – and the Theocracy had just crippled the Commonwealth’s ability to respond.

She glanced down at her console. “Civilians are acknowledging,” she said. “Sir…”

Alarms rang, loudly. “Commander,” she snapped, as new icons appeared on the display. “We have at least seventeen hyperspace vortexes opening within twenty thousand kilometres of the planet!”

The displays updated with terrifying swiftness. Standard interstellar convention forbade opening up vortexes so close to a planetary atmosphere, even though there was no real danger provided that the vortex didn’t intersect the planet’s material body. Anyone emerging that close was almost certainly hostile; automatically, automated weapons platforms began to lock onto the vortexes and prepared to open fire. It was already too late; the first ships were already appearing out of hyperspace.

Cindy blinked in surprise. “Freighters?”

There was no mistake. The starships were larger than battleships, but with the wallowing signature of cargo freighters, starships so large that they could never set down on a planet’s surface. Automatically, the automated weapons platforms held their fire, even as System Command started directing angry demands for explanations to the freighters. And then the display sparked with red lights as the freighters seemed to break apart into thousands of smaller objects.

”Missiles,” she snapped. The display kept updating as thousands of missiles roared towards the orbital defences, and 6<SUP>th</SUP> Fleet. “They’re missile carriers!”

“And makeshift carriers,” another officer reported, from her console. Behind the missiles, the darker red icons of starfighters were lancing out into interplanetary space, preparing to follow the missiles into the teeth of <st1:City w:st="on"><st1lace w:st="on">Cadiz</st1lace></st1:City>’s defences. Cindy cursed as the automated systems overrode her commands and retargeted themselves on the missiles, ignoring the starfighters. A single missile impacting with the planet at such speeds would wreak havoc on a planetary scale, turning the Planet of the Hotheads into the Planet of the Dead. It meant that the orbital installations and starships were almost completely on their own.

”Launch all the reserve starfighters,” the Commander ordered. It was a command that should have been given minutes ago, but the ready fighters had only just been launching from the stations and orbital carriers. Cindy saw, right in front of her, just how badly 6<SUP>th</SUP> Fleet had allowed standards and training to slip. The ready fighters should have been launched within one minute of the alert, yet the pilots had been lazing about and the deck crews had been scratching their asses. She wouldn’t have wanted to be in their place when the IG inspected them in the aftermath of the battle…and then she shook her head. The scale of forces arrayed against <st1:City w:st="on"><st1lace w:st="on">Cadiz</st1lace></st1:City>, as reported by Lightning, would ensure that the battle could only have one ending.

The swarm of missiles roared down on the orbital installations. Tactical doctrine didn’t call for spending missiles on automated weapons platforms, but it was clear that the Theocracy had decided to rewrite the manual on planetary assaults. In some ways, they were slipping through a chink in the system, one opened by the overriding priority to save the planet from a single missile impact. One by one, automated weapons platforms began to die, their software – slaved to the command network – refusing to allow them to defend themselves until it was almost too late. Other missiles closed in on orbital industrial stations, something that puzzled Cindy; the Theocracy would want to take the installations intact, if possible. Maybe they’d just misidentified the industrial stations as armed fortresses.

“Missiles incoming,” the tactical defence officer reported. Cindy felt her chest heave inside of her at the realisation that, for the first time in her life, she was under fire. The enemy missiles were fanning out, hoping to confuse the automated ECM systems that would attempt to decoy as many of the missiles as possible away from their targets. They needn’t have bothered. The command network that should have turned the entire system – automated weapons platforms, orbital command posts and starships – into a single fighting entity was already fragmented. She didn’t want to admit it, even to herself, but the orbital installations were on their own. “Point defence online and opening fire.”

She pulled back her display as additional vortexes flickered into existence. No freighters now, but warships; battleships, heavy cruisers…and carriers. The Theocracy carriers were already crash-launching their fighters, sending them forward in a brutal wave of death that roared down on the scattered fighters trying to defend <st1:City w:st="on"><st1lace w:st="on">Cadiz</st1lace></st1:City>. A green icon vanished from her display as a series of missile strikes struck the carrier Harmony and blew her into radioactive plasma, along with all ten thousand of her crew. Cindy couldn’t recall offhand if Harmony’s Captain had been one of the ones who preferred to remain on his ship rather than enjoy the fleshpots of <st1:City w:st="on"><st1lace w:st="on">Cadiz</st1lace></st1:City>, but if he was down on the planet, he might have seen his ship die. The IG would not be merciful when the final report of the battle was written, if it was ever written. For all she knew, the Theocracy was busy stomping Avalon and had only diverted small forces to mop up <st1:City w:st="on"><st1lace w:st="on">Cadiz</st1lace></st1:City>. After all, it wasn’t as if occupying the planet would require troops to mop up the Commonwealth’s occupation force. The locals would happily slaughter the entire garrison and dance in their blood.

The lights faded as all power was diverted to the point defence lasers, the last line of defence. Cindy watched as missile after missile winked out of existence, only to be replaced by an endless stream of missiles that seemed to come out of nowhere. Dear God in Heaven; they’d packed those freighters to the gunnels with missiles! They’d be useless in a standard battle, but as the opening shots in a planetary assault, they couldn’t be beaten. And with so much of the orbital defences firepower already being diverted to protect the planet, they couldn’t even hit the freighters before they shot themselves dry.

She closed her eyes as the swarm of missiles lanced in towards the station. The decoys were doing what they could, but the command missiles had a firm lock on the station now and wouldn’t be deterred. It wasn't as if the station had the heavy armour of a battleship either. A missile struck the station, slammed through the armour and detonated inside the superstructure. Cindy had a moment to realise that time had run out…and then the world seemed to explode into a mass of white flame. And then there was nothing.

***​

By long tradition, the CO of a Theocratic Navy fleet rode his battleship into the fires of a planetary assault. Admiral Junayd had always liked that tradition, even though it meant that there was a passing chance of his own annihilation in the opening moves of the battle. He’d taken care to ensure that his deputy was on one of the ships in the rear – there was no point in risking both commanders in action – and make sure to update his will. One of his brother’s wives had just presented him with a new son and the Admiral had sworn to make sure that he was duly remembered – and included in the generous post-mortem grants paid out by the Caliph to the families of any of his soldiers or spacers who died in action.

“Report,” he barked, as the eerie lights of hyperspace gave way to normal space. The battle was already underway, as he had expected. It had been chancy slipping past the watch posts the RAN had established at the edge of the system, but somehow they’d made it. God had clearly smiled on them, not least in the way the missile-armed – and expendable – freighters had managed to unleash their full complement of missiles without being destroyed. The enemy fleet was already burning below him.

”We have hit the infidels hard,” the Fleet Operations Officer reported. Admiral Junayd had deduced that he was a spy some months ago and had made sure to keep the young and overly enthusiastic young man under his eye at all times. The Caliph would see no signs of disloyalty from his most loyal Admiral. “Their orbital defence network is in tatters and their fleet is still powering up. We have caught them utterly unprepared for us.”

Admiral Junayd allowed himself a moment of relief. The infidel spy ship hadn’t made it back, then. Or maybe it had and Admiral Williams, a fool if ever there was one, had chosen to dismiss the warnings. Exactly why the infidels had allowed him such power – and so little supervision – was beyond him, but it hardly mattered. God had smiled on the Theocracy once again.

“Then take us in, fast,” he ordered. The enemy fleet was smaller than his own, bitterly outnumbered, but that didn’t mean that they would see the folly of resisting God’s anointed and surrender. Indeed, if they managed to escape into hyperspace, they’d have a chance to rearm and then come back to face him with blood in their eyes. The Theocracy would never have a better chance to cripple the RAN. No other system would allow their defenders to sink so low. “Open fire as soon as we enter range.”

Aisha’s Glory shivered around him as her drives went to full power, taking her in towards the blue-green world up ahead. Behind her, four entire squadrons of battleships followed, already meshing together into a single unit far greater than the sum of its parts. The carriers were already falling back, having released their starfighters to assault the infidels and wear them down before the battleships arrived to finish the job. Normally, he would have had to spare escorts to ensure that the infidels didn’t think about sending their own ships to pick off largely-defenceless carriers, but here the infidels were in too much confusion to even think about hitting back.

He smiled. His tactical instructor had once told him that every defensive move had to be a prelude for taking the offensive. It was a truism that the Commonwealth’s defenders had forgotten, back when they’d first annexed <st1:City w:st="on"><st1lace w:st="on">Cadiz</st1lace></st1:City>. They could have built defences that would have deterred the entire Theocratic Navy, but instead they’d been content to fortify the world and little more. It was a lack of forethought, he told himself, that would cost them dearly.

“And send a signal to the planet,” he added, as an infidel cruiser winked out in a flash of light, her debris drifting down towards the planet below. “Tell them that its time to rise and take their freedom.”

***​

“Have you got through to the Admiral?”

“No, Commander,” the communications officer said. “The communications network keeps breaking down – I think someone has inserted a virus into the network. I can’t get a steady communications link to the planet, let alone a secure link…”

Commander Fran Higgins felt her knuckles going white as she squeezed the command chair’s arms with all her strength. Thirty minutes ago, she’d been working on a routine reload of the battleship’s missile pods, a task that had been delayed too long already, sullenly aware that Defiant’s Captain was down on the planet, sharing tall tales with the Admiral. And then Lightning had declared a Code Red and the **** had well and truly hit the fan. Only their good luck had saved them from being targeted in the opening salvo of missiles, for Defiant’s point defence crews had been as fat and slow as the rest of the ship. The battleship had been spared the destruction that had broken over Michael Dalton and Onslaught, but she suspected that it was only a matter of time. They’d been so out of practice that they’d still been rushing to battle stations when the enemy missile-carriers had opened fire.

“Purge the network,” she ordered, flatly. Only the Captain could give that command, but the Captain wasn’t on the bridge – or even on the ship. Even the thought of the court-martial he’d face – if he survived – didn’t cheer her. “Get a secondary link established with the remaining ships; plug them into our network.”

“Commander, that…”

“Do it,” Fran snapped. It might not be technically permissible, under regulations, but there was no other choice. 6<SUP>th</SUP> Fleet was taking a pounding and each ship was fighting as an individual unit, rather than a combined entity. Defiant’s apparent immunity to enemy fire wouldn’t last. “And for God’s sake find out who’s senior!”

There was a long chilling pause as the network, finally, started to reform on the display. None of 6<SUP>th</SUP> Fleet’s subordinate officers had been trained to use their initiative in any way, Fran recalled bitterly, even with a powerful enemy fleet breathing down their necks. The fleet was scattered, trying to remain in orbit while deflecting or destroying incoming enemy missiles. Ironically, it looked as if Commonwealth ECM was a little better than their opponent’s ECM, but that advantage wouldn’t avail them much while they were trapped against the planet. She bit off another curse as the update finalised, with most of 6<SUP>th</SUP> Fleet’s command structure destroyed or trapped down on the planet.

“Form the fleet up around Defiant,” she ordered. She would probably end up facing a court-martial herself, assuming she survived the battle. A mere Commander taking command of an entire fleet? And yet it looked as if she was the senior surviving officer. Commodore Hayworth had gone down with Onslaught, while Commodore Breckinridge was missing, location unknown. “Link our point defence systems together and prepare to withstand incoming attack.”

The enemy fleet was powerful enough, she realised with another curse, to overwhelm 6<SUP>th</SUP> Fleet even if it had been in fighting trim. With the command network so badly fragmented and broken, it was going to be a bloody slaughter. Defiant shuddered as her main missile batteries opened fire, launching hundreds of missiles towards the oncoming enemy force, but it wouldn’t be enough to deter them. They’d already blown their way through most of the fixed defences, smashed System Command and, for some reason, blown apart one of the asteroid habitats established around the planet. Her best guess was that they’d hoped to cripple the orbital defences by forcing them to fire on chunks of rock that would otherwise have impacted the planet and inflicted staggering amounts of damage on a largely innocent population.

She shuddered as she considered the display. The enemy fleet was opening fire now on her makeshift formation and they weren’t going to survive. There was only one possible alternative to destruction, but she didn’t even want to think about it. And yet there was no choice.

“Mr Thomas,” she ordered, formally. “You will open a hyperspace vortex.”

She sensed the shock that ran around the bridge. The RAN did not retreat, but then the RAN had never fought a serious opponent before, only pirates and the occasional bloody border skirmish. If 6<SUP>th</SUP> Fleet stayed where it was, it would be destroyed, for nothing. Her duty was to preserve as much as possible of the RAN’s fighting power for a later return to <st1:City w:st="on"><st1lace w:st="on">Cadiz</st1lace></st1:City>. If anyone thought that the system was worth recovering…

“Now,” she ordered. The swarm of enemy missiles was getting closer. “Take us out of here.”

She tensed as a shimmering whirlpool of energy appeared in front of the fleet. It was possible that the Theocracy – if they had the ships to spare – had stationed forces in hyperspace to track and destroy any escaping ships. But doing that properly in hyperspace would require a fleet so much larger than the RAN that their victory was almost certain. One by one, the remaining ships of 6<SUP>th</SUP> Fleet slipped into hyperspace and vanished.

“Set course for Bristol Deep,” she ordered. She had to report to higher authority – and then probably face a court-martial for retreat in the face of the enemy. “There’s nothing we can do for Cadiz now.”

 

Chapter Thirty-Four<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-comfficeffice" />

“Captain,” Rifleman Jones said, “the fleet’s bugging out.”

Captain Greg Bone nodded. “And tell me,” he asked, sardonically, “do you blame them?”

“Bunch of pansies,” Rifleman Frost said, from where she was checking and rechecking her SIW-45. “They keep their fleet all neat and trim and then they run for it when they might get blood on the decks.”

“Stow the chatter,” Greg snapped, although he didn't disagree with Frost. Admiral Williams had made damn sure that the 6<SUP>th</SUP> Fleet couldn't defend itself; it’s surviving ships had no choice, but to fall back and regroup somewhere else. And they were leaving the Marines trapped in the Cadiz System. All of a sudden, transhipping Lightning’s Marines to the planetary garrison was starting to sound like an invitation to have their heads kicked in. The Royal Avalon Marine Corps might be about to discover what their more famous forbearers had felt at a place called Leyte Gulf. “They can probably hear you yammering away.”

The thought didn't comfort him as the shuttles raced towards the planet. Cadiz’s upper atmosphere was flaring with light as the remains of countless automated orbital weapons platforms – to say nothing of a massive asteroid habitat – fell to their firey death down below. The burning embers of a once-proud space-based industry might just shield them as they strove to reach the surface before the Theocracy’s warships took control of the high orbitals. He knew their capabilities – and demonstrated ruthlessness – too well to doubt that they would pick off the shuttles from orbit, if they were still flying. In theory, the shuttles could power down and start drifting through space away from the planet, but where would they go? Marine assault shuttles were designed for hard landings on planetary surfaces, not making intersystem trips to the asteroids. Their life support would run out pretty quickly. Besides, the Theocracy would secure the main asteroid bases and the gas giant mines as soon as they had secured the high orbitals looking down on Cadiz. It would suit them to watch the insurgents tear down the garrison as much as possible before they actually started landing troops.

Some of the asteroid miners would hold out in the asteroids – asteroid-miners were a notoriously independent breed – but there was no way of locating them without using radios, which would invite the Theocracy to come kill them. No asteroid miner would dare answer an open and unencrypted radio transmission, quite rightly. No, their only hope for survival, let alone hitting back at the enemy, lay in hitting the ground as soon as possible and escaping into the undergrowth.

He logged into what remained of the command network and tried to make sense of the transmissions, but nothing seemed to fit together. The Admiral was silent, either through shock, treachery or one of his staff having cut his throat while he was still trying to make sense of the way his universe had just turned upside down. In his absence, thousands of contradictory orders were being shouted over the network, half of them in the clear and open to the enemy as much as their intended listeners. It sounded as if the ground-based forces were panicking as much as anything else, half of the voices seemed to think that they should resist to the last, the remainder seemed to insist that surrender was the only logical choice. Greg wondered, absently, if the Admiral’s staff, realising that their fancy uniforms were about to get dirty, had decided to surrender, or if the Theocracy was broadcasting fake surrender orders over open channels. They didn't carry the standard identification codes, so he disregarded them.

“We’re following that piece of junk down,” the pilot said, grimly. He sounded tense, even though he’d carried out planetary assaults before, back at the RAMC training ground on Avalon itself. This time was a little different. The piece of junk – the remains of one of the massive orbital industrial nodes that should have been spared – was large enough to pose a danger to the planet itself, if it was allowed to reach the surface. It was quite possible that the remaining defences would blast it, rather than allow it to impact, something that would seriously threaten the shuttle itself. “Here we go...”

The shuttle began to shake as it dived down into the upper atmosphere. Greg could feel it protesting at such abuse, even though it was easily rated for hot entry into a combat zone. They didn't dare use active sensors – with the command net in such disarray, it was easy to imagine themselves being picked off by a friend instead of an enemy – but passive sensors were providing an alarming amount of data, none of it good. The Theocracy’s fleet was slowly advancing on the planet, carefully picking off anything that might have been able to offer resistance. They weren’t hurrying, he noted, but why would they have had to hurry? The entire planet was at their mercy.

His lips twisted into a snarl. If they’d moved quicker, they might have picked up the shuttles before it was too late. As it was, Greg and his company of Marines had a chance to get down to the ground. He studied the display fed into his combat suit’s HUD, trying to pick out a likely impact point for the shuttle. Assuming that everything went well, they were probably going to land within ten kilometres of New Barcelona. They’d planned to land at the spaceport, but at least one of the authenticated transmissions had claimed that the spaceport was under heavy attack – the insurgents, of course. It would be just like the Theocracy to arrange matters so that the forces most likely to fight them were pitted against each other, leaving the surviving force weaker and ready to be plucked from the vine.

“Aw, ****,” the pilot said. “Brace, brace, brace...!”

Greg felt his suit tensing around him, just as the piece of space junk they were following down disintegrated ahead of them. He saw a fiery mass breaking up, chunks of debris spinning away, back towards the shuttle before gravity took hold and pulled them down towards the planet. The entire shuttle rang like a bell as...something struck the hull, hard enough to leave them all shaking; a second later, the internal compensators failed. Greg felt his chest spinning crazily as the shuttle lurched from side to side, like a insect trying desperately to avoid being swatted by a man. A final crash, hard enough to convince him that the shuttle’s armoured hull had been breached, shook the craft, before the flight levelled out. Below them, the remaining chunks of space debris burned away in the upper atmosphere.

“We’re holed,” the pilot said, with a string of curses that would have shocked Greg’s mother. “We’re going down...”

The shuttle heeled over sharply, sending them all tumbling backwards, and then levelled out, seconds before it span again. Greg heard at least two of the Marines being noisily sick, despite all the enhancements they’d had inserted into their bodies. The spinning compensator field, flickering in and out of existence, was pushing them beyond anything they’d experienced in a simulator, or even in a training exercise. Part of Greg’s mind starting taking notes for an improved training course when they returned home; the remainder was concentrating on not being sick himself. God help them if the Theocracy happened to spot them...

“I can't keep her together much longer,” the pilot said. There was a hard edge in his voice that betrayed his stress, even though he tried to keep his voice calm and level. “I suggest that the time has come to abandon ship.”

Greg nodded. “It doesn't matter where we land, as long as we’re together,” he said. He raised his voice. “All right; get into position and stand by to drop out of the ship!”

He leaned back to the pilot. “Blow all the remaining decoys,” he ordered. “And then jump yourself; leave the shuttle on autopilot...”

The shuttle lurched again, violently. “Understood,” the pilot said. He keyed the autopilot and then jumped up. Unlike the rest of the Marines, he wore a light suit of combat armour, barely suitable for any form of combat. “Blowout in three, two, one...”

Greg swore aloud as the shuttle’s hatches opened and the Marines streamed out into the open air. Gravity asserted itself a moment later and they began to fall, heading down towards a forest far below. Brilliant flashes of light could be seen in the sky as his suit tumbled over and over, the remaining pieces of space junk meeting their fiery end. The antigravity unit cut in a second later, slowing their fall just enough to ensure they would survive the landing. A wave of greenery washed up and at him, followed by a hideous crashing noise as he hit the forest canopy and fell through to the ground below. The antigravity unit breathed its last, just as he fell into swampy ground. He cursed again as the combat suit started to slip, its weight seeming to make his struggles to extract himself almost impossible. It took everything he had just to get onto firmer ground.

“Sound off,” he ordered, using a low-power microburst transmission. The combat support detachments swore blind that the transmissions were undetectable by any known enemy sensor, at least at anything beyond minimum range, but he wasn't too keen about using them anyway. An invading force would be likely to deploy drones to sniff out even the merest hint of a transmission...and then call in fire from orbit to annihilate the imprudent survivors of the fall. “Who’s left?”

“Leggy is hurt bad, sir,” Sergeant Boyce reported. The solid Sergeant had been in the Marine Corps since before Greg had been born. Rumour had it that he’d served in one of the predecessor units, before the human race had even reached into space. “Her suit’s busted and her arm is pretty torn up.”

Greg winced. One hundred Marines in a company; fifty of them in a shuttle. The other shuttle hadn’t been hit badly, apparently, but they were already out of contact. His scowl only deepened as the rest of the roll call came in; four combat suits were broken beyond immediate repair – they had no logistics train with them – and two Marines were hurt. And there was no way of getting them to a secure medical centre, let alone a hospital. He checked his suit’s maps and scowled. They’d come down on the wrong side of New Barcelona, away from the spaceport. It was a ten mile hike to the nearest piece of habitation.

You’ve been required to run ten miles – more – in your training, he mocked himself. Of course, back then they hadn't been hacking their way through the undergrowth. It could easily take hours to get out of the forest and by then...the Theocracy would have landed its troops. They’d just have to dig in and prepare an insurgency of their own, at least until the Navy came back for them. If he knew Kat – and they’d been lovers, back when the universe had been a simpler place – she would move mountains to recover the Marines she’d sent into the fire.

On the other hand, combat suits didn't last forever and hacking their way through an almost-impenetrable forest would drain their power cells at an alarming rate. And without combat suits, they couldn’t hope to match their enemy...

“Come on, ladies,” he said, once they’d made what provisions they could for the wounded, “only ten miles to go. Move out.”

***​

The President’s Mansion – now used by Admiral Williams and his cronies – was under attack. Insurgents had taken up firing positions just outside the secure zone and were pouring fire into the defenders, while mortars and other heavy weapons – carefully hoarded for just this moment – were bombarding the mansion from a safe distance. The occupying forces had deployed laser point defence systems to protect themselves from incoming shells, but it drained their power. And the mansion wasn't the only building under attack. Every building that had served or supported the occupying power – and their collaborators – was under attack.

Vanessa watched from the top of one of the tallest buildings in the city as the insurgents pressed in on the mansion. The defenders seemed to be in some disarray; understandable, as the insurgents had announced their arrival by driving a truck loaded with high explosives up to the checkpoint – with all the right paperwork – and detonating it right in their face. Their strongpoint was now nothing more than a burning crater, while the insurgents were pressing closer and closer. Vanessa could see tracers as some of the defenders fired from the mansion itself; the Admiral and his subordinates, perhaps, suddenly aware that their valuable lives were under threat. They didn’t seem to be thinking very tactically, but perhaps their shock excused them; they hadn’t thought to open fire on the taller buildings. It would have shattered the insurgent command and control network, at least for a few vital minutes.

“Order the trucks into the rear of the secure zone,” she ordered. Their benefactors had warned them not to use the secure transmitters until the battle had finally begun, but they were certainly proving their worth. She wasn't quite sure whose fleet had emerged from nowhere and smashed the orbital defences, but the streaks of fire in the sky and the absence of KEW strikes proved that the Commonwealth’s stranglehold had been broken. “The defenders are trying to rally; deal with them before they can launch a counterattack.”

Advanced weapons from outside or no, the defenders still packed a punch. They had training and discipline, something that the insurgents generally lacked, although they seemed to be having problems serving as a coordinated force. Their combat suits allowed them to take risks the insurgents couldn’t dare, yet even they were valuable. Insurgents saw combat suits ripped open, saw the red blood inside splashing across the tarmac, and took heart. The enemy was not invincible. They were winning.

She didn't hear the engines as the first of the trucks drove forward, the insurgents silently allowing them to enter the secure zone without challenge. Hopefully, the enemy would be equally distracted; the insurgents had nailed all of their spying drones with HVMs in the opening seconds of the battle. If they were lucky...her mouth twisted into a bitter smile as the lead truck made it up against the wall. It could go no closer, but it hardly mattered. She shielded her eyes as hundreds of tons of high explosive detonated, shattering the wall and smashing effortlessly through buildings that had stood for a hundred years, buildings that served the occupying force as barracks and supply houses. The remaining trucks drove forward, driven by grim-faced men who had seen their families killed by the occupiers, trying to get as close to the remaining buildings as they could before they were killed. Unsurprisingly, the enemy had realised the danger, but their soldiers were still stunned. Only one truck was nailed short of its intended target and its cargo, detonated by remote control, still hurt the enemy.

“Send in the final set of trucks,” she ordered, coldly. There was no point in rushing the remaining defenders, not now. If their explosives experts, forced to experiment hundreds of miles away in the isolated mountains, where the occupiers rarely went, were right, they should be able to shatter the secure zone completely. “Now.”

She allowed herself a moment to dwell on the future. She’d never really considered what sort of world might replace the Commonwealth occupation. The pre-war Cadiz hadn't been the most stable of societies, but now – after the insurgency – she found it impossible to believe that her people would fragment into factions again. Theirs was a society shaped by violent resistance to an outside power. And her? Would she return to the life expected of a young girl of Cadiz? Maybe not; after tasting power, would she want to give it up?

Her lips curved into a smile. There would be time to worry about that later.

It was time to put an end to the fighting, forever.

***​

Admiral Williams sat at his desk. He’d sent away all his aides, all the sycophants and hangers on, all the people he’d promoted and added to his personal staff because they happened to be well-connected at Court. He was alone...and, he was coming to realise, he’d been alone for a very long time. His wife’s ambitions, his children’s greed and hunger for social status – and his own – had shaped his life. He’d allowed himself to be used as a tool, only to discover that his value as a tool was almost nothing. And Cadiz was burning down around him.

He’d turned off the terminal. His subordinates could handle the defence, without him; there was little left to defend in any case. The soldiers guarding the mansion would do their best, of course, but he knew enough to know that their best wouldn't be enough. What could they do once the Theocracy had taken the high orbitals? And how could he have been so stupid? He'd shirked his duty in the worst possible way.

A distant rumble, like thunder, caught his attention, followed by a rattle of gunfire. It was close, too close. Time was running out. Quickly, almost desperately, he scrabbled in his desk drawer, recovering the fine pistol he’d been presented with by one of his aides, a few years ago. What had happened to the fellow, he asked himself; what had he earned through his sycophancy? He’d been assigned to one of the orbital stations, he reminded himself; he would almost certainly be dead now.

Quite calmly, he put the pistol to his temple. It felt cold against his head. He found himself trying to think of acceptable last words, as if his death would somehow expiate his shame. No RAN officer had ever lost an entire planet, until now. His finger squeezed on the trigger...

An explosion shook the building. The shockwave threw him off his chair and sent him crashing against the wall. Part of his mind registered the pistol going off and wondered if he'd been hit, just before darkness overcame him. And then there was nothing, but pain.

 

OK.. you are doing good, i like it so far.. but I need more.. don't stop now, you got me go!

 

Good action and combat imagery. You write very well, and the story flows well. Great work. Looking forward to more. Or moar, if you prefer, lol.

 

Chapter Thirty-Five<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-comfficeffice" />

Flames billowed up from all over New Barcelona as the Janissary shuttle flew over the city, suggesting that the city was far from pacified. The central government had fallen, according to the reports from the forward agents embedded with the insurgents, but individual units of Commonwealth soldiers were fighting with savage bravery. They would all be eventually exterminated, of course, but in the meantime they were inflicting heavy losses upon the Janissaries – and the insurgents. The spaceport, which had been marked down for capture rather than destruction, had been held by a force of Commonwealth Marines who had held out for nearly three hours, leaving a wreaked spaceport in the aftermath of their last stand.

Admiral Junayd watched from the porthole as the shuttle banked and headed down towards the Governor’s Mansion. The defences the Commonwealth occupation forces had painstakingly constructed around their governing centre were shattered, a handful of stumps all that remained of walls that could have once stopped a missile. He’d known that the newly-appointed governor – already on his way from the Theocracy, along with five divisions of reserve-eulachon troops – had intended to move into the mansion, but it didn’t look as if it would be possible. The building was intact, but every window had been shattered and it looked as if it had suffered severe structural damage. It looked to be permanently on the verge of collapsing into rubble.

The shuttle grounded itself just outside the mansion and a line of Janissaries ran forward, rapidly securing the shuttle before any watching enemy soldiers could take a crack at the Theocracy force’s ultimate CO. Admiral Junayd felt the planet’s gravity – slightly higher than Abdullah’s gravity – take hold of him as the shuttle’s drive fields faded away, leaving him feeling slightly heavier. It wouldn’t have bothered the Janissaries; they were specially engineered for service in far higher gravity fields, a legacy of their punishing training regime on a world with a gravity field twice Earth-norm. Even the weakest of the Janissary Corps was far stronger than any of his fellow dwellers in the Theocracy, an advantage that allowed them to switch from spearheading an assault into enemy territory to crushing dissent and unbelief at the Caliph’s command. They were feared throughout the Theocracy. Soon, they would be feared throughout the Commonwealth as well.

Colonel Ali met him as he stepped out of the shuttle and breathed his first breath of <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-comffice:smarttags" /><st1:City w:st="on"><st1lace w:st="on">Cadiz</st1lace></st1:City>’s atmosphere. It stank of fire and blood and burning human flesh; in the distance, he could hear the steady rattle of gunshots. The Colonel, a tall man wearing the black uniform and silver skull badge of a Janissary, didn’t look too pleased to be reporting to a naval officer, but rivalries between the ground and space components of interstellar military forces were a fact of life. Even the Janissaries were not immune to questioning the worth of starship officers in their comfortable ships when they were slugging their way through a muddy field down below, exposed to enemy fire that would kill them – or leave them so badly wounded that they would never make a full recovery. It hardly mattered; the Caliph had placed the Navy in command of the assault and no one would argue, at least if they liked breathing.

“Admiral,” the Colonel said. The Admiral saluted, one fist pounding against his chest. The Colonel didn’t return it; in a combat zone, the junior officers never saluted their superiors. There was too great a chance of an enemy sniper lurking nearby, ready to pick off the superior officers and plunge the attack into chaos. “Welcome to <st1:City w:st="on"><st1lace w:st="on">Cadiz</st1lace></st1:City>.”

The Admiral smiled. “Report,” he ordered. Another distant rattle of gunfire underlined his words. “What is the current situation?”

“We’re dropping most of my unit around the city now,” Ali said. He’d led the attack in person, as it should be; his unit had dropped right onto the Governor’s Mansion. Any resistance, already weakened fatally by the insurgency, had been quickly and brutally crushed. “The roads leading out into the countryside are being secured and civilians are being turned back, by force if necessary. Most of the infidel military units have been shattered by the sudden attack and the insurgency; the remainder are being hunted down as we speak. Some of them have melted into the countryside and vanished, for the moment, but those that have tried to hide in the city are being tracked down.”

They shared a smile. After the long occupation, any remaining Commonwealth soldiers who tried to hide in the city would be betrayed by their neighbours quickly, before the natives had a chance to realise what Theocratic rule meant for their world. The lucky ones would be those that surrendered to the Theocracy’s forces, for there were strict orders to take prisoners where possible. And the unlucky ones would be tortured and killed by the insurgents.

“Broadcast an offer to accept surrender,” the Admiral ordered, simply. “And what about our own forces?”

“Two hundred men were lost when their shuttles were picked off by rogue SAM units with HVM missiles,” Ali said, grimly. “Nearly forty more have been killed or wounded in action when we stormed the spaceport. And I’m afraid that eight men have been put aside for service in a penal battalion.”

Admiral Junayd scowled Even the Janissaries, the most brutally disciplined of the Theocracy’s forces, had their weaknesses – and the vast honours granted to them in peacetime sometimes went to their heads. Misbehaving with locals outside of combat operations was often winked at, even by the Clerics, but in combat it could prove fatal.

“I see,” he said. “And what were their offences?”

The Colonel’s eyes narrowed, suspecting that his authority was being tested. “One case of friendly fire, three cases of shooting enemy soldiers who were trying to surrender and four cases of rape or molestation,” he said. “They will spend at least a month in the penal battalion before being returned to their original unit – if they survive.”

“Good,” the Admiral said. The penal soldiers were disarmed, forced to wear orange uniforms that shamed them in front of their brethren and forced to perform the most difficult and dangerous tasks in the army. They could be used to clear minefields, test for clear air and anything else that might have killed a perfectly good infantryman – and, if they survived, returned to their units suitably punished. The survival rate was around one in ten, often less in wartime. “How many prisoners did we take?”

The Colonel led him over towards one of the few remaining sections of intact war. Three dozen men and women knelt there, their hands on their heads, watched carefully by armed Janissaries. They didn’t look very dangerous to the Admiral, but no one would risk relaxing their guard, at least until detention camps could be established and they could start working their way through the prisoners, trying to discover if they’d caught anyone worth conditioning into an obedient servant of the Caliph. A number of the prisoners were wounded, at least two of them badly enough to warrant immediate medical attention. The Admiral shrugged; they’d receive treatment once the Theocracy’s medics had finished with their own wounded, if there were supplies left. A soldier who surrendered had no honour, but then most of the prisoners were clearly not soldiers. They looked more like the clerks and beueaaccats who’d helped run the planet, while the Commonwealth had ruled.

“Make sure that they are kept away from the insurgents,” Admiral Junayd ordered, flatly. “I don’t want to lose any prisoners before they can be interrogated.”

The Colonel’s radio buzzed. He listened for a long moment. “Admiral,” he said, “they’ve found the Admiral.”

Admiral Junayd looked up sharply. “Is he alive?”

“They think so,” the Colonel said. He was already striding towards the mansion, his long legs eating up the distance. The Admiral followed him, his mind racing with possible options for an alive and conditioned Admiral Williams. Up close, the mansion looked stronger than he’d thought, although it was clearly quite badly damaged. Hundreds of dead bodies littered the floors, most of them Commonwealth soldiers making a desperate last stand when the attackers had stormed the building. Others were civilians; his stomach twisted in his chest when he realised that some of them were children, cut down before they could grow into adults. The Theocracy’s counter-insurgency techniques might be based around the theory that nits bred lice, but it still disgusted him to see the small and broken bodies. They could have been shipped back to Abdullah and placed with good families, raised in the faith.

The Admiral’s office was a mess. It had clearly taken a heavy blow, probably from one of the truck bombs the insurgents had driven into the gardens once the walls had been knocked down. The Admiral himself lay on the floor, blood leaking from a nasty scar on his forehead, two medics attending to him. Someone was clearly thinking, Admiral Junayd noted with approval; a live enemy commander was worth the loss of a few wounded soldiers. They’d called the medics away from the hastily-established infirmary.

He caught sight of an antique pistol on the ground and realised, with a thrill of contempt, what the Admiral had been trying to do. He couldn’t even commit suicide properly! Shaking his head, he turned back to look down at the enemy commander. The Theocracy couldn’t have asked for a better gift from God.

Enjoy your treatment, he thought, coldly. By the time you die, you’ll have betrayed your Commonwealth a thousand times over.

***​

Vanessa had walked down to the mansion when the black shuttles had started to land, disgorging troops in powered combat armour. At first, she’d feared that the Commonwealth had won the battle in orbit and were sending down Marines to even the odds for the garrison, but her embedded officer had reassured her that they were friendly. It didn’t quite reassure her; the newcomers, once they’d secured the area, had snatched, disarmed and captured her insurgents with just as much brutality as they’d shown to the surviving garrison troops.

Up close, there seemed to be more reason to worry that something was badly wrong. The newcomers were swaggering around as if they owned the city, their forces slowly fanning out and clearing civilians from every building within a mile of the mansion. Even the Commonwealth had not cracked down so hard, although the Commonwealth had never had to look for the remains of another military force. She could still hear crackles of gunfire in the distance as survivors fought to get out of the city, or perhaps to go underground – or perhaps to surrender to the newcomers. Her insurgents had too many grudges to pay off to accept surrenders and she knew better than to try to make them. The old rule about never giving an order one knows won’t be obeyed was never truer than in an irregular force, without any real discipline or hierarchy.

“Over there,” the embedded officer said, pointing to a pair of officers who had just emerged from the mansion. One of them was wearing a black set of combat armour; the other was wearing a dark red shirt with a set of golden rank badges. It struck her, a moment too late, that the shirt was the colour of blood. “The Admiral will be pleased to see you.”

Vanessa kept her face as still as she could as she met the eyes of the Admiral. He was a tall man, with an air of authority that contrasted oddly with his apparent youthfulness; a rejuvenated person, she realised, like so many from the Commonwealth. And yet there was a strange air of…intensity around him that reminded her of the more fanatical insurgents, the ones who had knowingly volunteered for their own deaths. His eyes flickered over her tight shirt and then locked onto her face. The armoured man didn’t even try to conceal his distaste.

“Admiral, this is Vanessa,” the embedded officer reported. “She is the leader of the local insurgent cells.”

“Pleased to meet you,” Vanessa said. Something was badly wrong; it struck her, then, that they might have been wrong to believe the honeyed promises of a Commonwealth-wide resistance movement. She pushed forward, chillingly aware of the abyss opening just beneath her feet; they might have made a terrible mistake. “When can my forces take over the security of the city?”

There was a long pause. “You will tell your forces to disarm and report to our people,” the Admiral said, flatly. “We will take over control of your planet.”

The bare-faced effrontery of it caught her by surprise. “We’re your allies,” she protested, shocked. It might have been safer to play along until she was out of range of their guns, but she couldn’t help herself. “This is our planet…”

A silent signal must have passed between them, because the armoured man lifted a gauntlet and shot her with a blue-white pulse of light. The jangler pulse struck the body armour she was wearing below her shirt, deflecting just enough of the blast to stop her from dropping into unconsciousness, but not enough to keep her nerves from jangling and her body collapsing to the ground. Her entire body seemed to be crawling with static electricity; no matter how much she struggled, she couldn’t force her body to move. She even seemed to have lost control of her breathing. Dark spots teetered on the edge of her vision.

She was barely aware of strong hands rolling her over, pulling her hands behind her and tying them with a plastic cuff. Someone picked her up effortlessly, carried her to a vehicle, and tossed her inside. Vanessa landed badly, cracking her head against the metal side of the lorry, and collapsed into darkness. Her final thought was that they had defeated the Commonwealth only to find a far worse set of masters.

***​

“Still nothing?”

“Still nothing,” Sergeant Boyce confirmed. He’d spent a few months in a signals and intelligence unit, the only one of them with even marginal skills in intelligence gathering. Not that it had come in very handy; all Commonwealth signals seemed to have faded away, to be replaced by signals from Theocratic forces as they roared down to the distant city. Greg and his men had tracked nearly a hundred heavy-lift shuttles heading for the spaceport and they’d tried to estimate how long it would take for the Theocracy to ship in enough troops to allow them to start patrolling the countryside, but the truth was they simply didn’t have enough data to make any proper estimates. “If there’s anyone else out there on our side, they’re being very quiet about it.”

Greg nodded. The locals had never bothered to build a proper road network linking their cities together, for reasons that made little sense to him. It had been the occupying forces that had constructed the massive Highway One – the ring road that ran from city to city – in the hopes of breathing new economic life into the planet. Instead, it seemed to have worked as a place for insurgents to plant their bombs and snipe at passing vehicles. They’d finally hacked their way out of the forest to discover that there was no traffic at all, in either direction. But then, the farms that fed New Barcelona were on the other side of the city. Any would-be refugees would head there.

And there was the minor detail that they’d watched enemy shuttles landing to the east, on empty land. What were they doing there?

He winced as a shuttle flashed by overhead, heading down towards the city. The Theocracy would have total control of the air by now. They’d picked up an HVM unit using active sensors, just before firing on a group of shuttles – and being smashed from orbit before they’d realised that they’d actually brought a pair of shuttles down. Anyone else would definitely be quiet, if only because of the certain knowledge that a single betraying emission would mean death.

“Captain,” one of the watchers hissed, “we have company.”

Greg narrowed his eyes, allowing his enhancements to sharpen his vision. Four trucks were making their way along the highway, heading east. One of them was a low boxy vehicle, bristling with guns; the other three appeared to be cattle trucks, carrying humans. Prisoners, he knew; men and women who’d been captured by the Theocracy. Even the most optimistic reports had made it clear that no one wanted to be captured alive. The Theocracy didn’t care for its own soldiers and would hardly care about the enemy.

He knew they should do nothing, but he wanted to hit back at the Theocracy. Whatever the cost…

“Get ready,” he hissed. The Marines scrambled into ambush positions, watching the oncoming convoy. It was clear that they had no fear of attack; they weren’t taking any precautions at all. They drove right into the kill-box without even a hint of concern. “Now!”

The Marines opened fire. A plasma burst could be detected from orbit, but a suit-launched HVM was impossible to detect except at very close range. The armoured vehicle exploded into a fireball, killing its crew before they could get off a distress call, and the Marines ran forward, breaking open the cattle trucks. There was no time to be gentle; they yanked the prisoners out and pushed them towards the forest. It wouldn’t be long before the Theocracy realised that something had gone very wrong.

A girl caught his eye as he pulled her out. She was young, with aged eyes that watched him without apparent interest. Something about her nagged at his mind, but there was no time to solve the mystery. Time was not on their side. He picked her up – even without her hands bound, it was clear that she could barely walk – and raced towards the forest. Behind them, the four vehicles went up in fire.

Two helicopters raced overhead, too late. Greg watched them from the safety of the forest, knowing that even the best sensors would have difficulty tracking them within the canopy of trees. For a long moment, they waited, and then they headed back to the city. There was too much to do for them to spare troops to search for the escaped prisoners. He found himself chuckling as he put the girl down, deployed the knife from his suit and cut her bonds. They’d singed the Caliph’s beard and escaped!

Enjoy it, a voice whispered in his head. It will get harder from here.