“I’m sure.” Admiral Mason sneered again. “You seem to have a knack of falling headfirst into a bucket of shit and coming out covered in diamonds. It won’t last, and the first time your luck fails you will be the day your universe collapses. Don’t disobey orders again, or even your mentor won’t be able to stop you being busted down to Ensign and assigned to an isolated mining colony so far from Earth that they think FTL travel is a joke.”
“Yes, sir,” Roman said.
“Now get back to your ship,” Admiral Mason ordered. “I’ll read your plan and inform you of my decision.”
It wasn’t common for starships—even the superdreadnaughts and carriers—to have more than a handful of cells in the brig. If the starship did need, for whatever reason, to restrain more than a handful of prisoners, it was easy to seal off a section and use it as a makeshift jail. Without power tools or weapons, the prisoners couldn’t hope to escape. Roman had turned one of Midway’s holds into a prison for most of the prisoners—and they had complained non-stop about the accommodation, even though they weren’t in danger of being tortured and raped—but he’d kept Henrietta separate. He’d have to transfer the other prisoners to Golden Hind and they couldn’t be allowed to learn that she was still alive.
Midway’s brig consisted of two sections. A Marine guard stood outside one section, under strict orders not to enter the brig or allow anyone else to enter without Roman’s permission. Inside, there was a force field hemming the prisoner into a small cell, allowing visitors a chance to speak to the prisoner in private. Unlike a civilian jail cell, every moment in the brig was recorded by hidden sensors, but Roman had used his command authority to deactivate them. There would be no record of this prisoner.
Henrietta was lying on the bunk when he walked through the hatch and stopped outside the force field. She looked as if she had been sleeping, but her eyes were hollow when she pulled herself upright and stared at him. Elf had checked her thoroughly and reported that she was in good health, yet it would have surprised Roman if she wasn’t a little traumatized. Her life had turned upside down several times since the war began. And she knew that if a senior officer learned of her presence on the ship, she’d be executed. She was completely at his mercy and she knew it.
“Thank you for coming,” she said. Her voice was soft and weak, vulnerable. “I was running out of books.”
Roman nodded. A prisoner, even a crewman placed in the brig for a brief spell, could not be allowed to access the ship’s computers, even the recreational files open to all. In earlier days, he’d been told, computer-skilled personnel had hacked into the security systems and made their escape. That was supposed to be impossible now, but the regulation still remained in force.
“Tell me something,” he said suddenly. “Did your father give you a choice when he sent you to marry Hartkopf?”
“What do you think?” She sneered. “My father is ambitious, and my mother is as bad as he is, if not worse. Girls are pawns to them, to be sold on the marriage market in order to improve their social position. I was told that I was going to marry him, and nothing I said changed their minds. Do you think I wanted to marry a man who’s over ninety years old?”
“I don’t know if you’re any better off here.” Roman shrugged. “I may have to quietly ship you elsewhere before the shit hits the fan.”
“It’s better than waiting for an old bastard to deflower me, just because Daddy wants access to his starships,” she said. “You need to watch my father. He will do anything to satisfy his ambitions.”
“I see,” Roman said. He wished for a trained interrogator, but that wasn’t a possibility. “And what does your father actually want from all this?”
“Empire, of course,” Henrietta said. “He wants to be Lord and Master of All.”
Her face twitched. “Compared to that,” she added, “what is the happiness of a single daughter? He has four more.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Humans have saddled themselves with many strange ideas about how best to govern humanity. Some believe in the value of monarchy, others in the voice of the people and still others in communism or fascism. The Federation wisely allowed the settlement of worlds that attempted to follow a designed governing system, rather than one that evolved by chance. Not all of the experiments, it should be noted, worked…
…The Federation, in fact, rarely interferes in a planet’s internal affairs, as long as they follow the Federation Protocols…
Marx System, 4095
“Commodore?”
Commodore Joseph Truing turned to face the young officer and—barely—refrained from rolling his eyes. Joseph was over a hundred years old, thanks to anti-aging treatments he’d accepted when he’d joined the Federation Navy, and Lieutenant Harwich looked as if he’d barely started to shave. He was eager enough, anyway, even if he did have a habit of reporting every random flicker on the detectors as an incoming enemy attack. It was hard to believe, Joseph thought to himself from time to time, that he had ever been that young.
“Yes, lieutenant? What have you detected this time?”
Admiral Justinian’s military machine was, somewhat to his regret, less formal than the Federation Navy. Proper military discipline would come in time, Joseph was sure, but until then he’d just have to suffer. He didn’t regret signing up with the admiral when his recruiters had found him on the colony he’d chosen as a retirement home, yet there were times when he wondered if Justinian’s grand plan to reshape the Federation would succeed. The news from the war front, heavily censored through it was, was not good. The war had stalemated.
The youngster managed to look offended, even though he was also keen to show off. “We picked up a signal from a starship that just entered the system…ah, entered the system some hours ago,” he reported. “The Governor-General is requesting a meeting between his ships and our squadron for transfer of classified material. There is also an ID header from Secretary Festal directing us to comply with the request.”
“Interesting,” Joseph said thoughtfully. A month ago, the Secretary and his staff—and the admiral’s daughter—had entered the Marx System through the Asimov Point and headed off towards The Hive and the Asimov Point that would take them deeper into Hartkopf’s territory. Joseph had strongly recommended an escort, but Hartkopf’s ambassadors had warned that their superior would not accept armed ships in his territory before the treaty was signed. “Do they say why, I wonder?”
“No, sir,” Harwich said. “They’re just repeating the same message.”
Joseph nodded. Admiral Justinian preferred to rely on military men in his government, but he’d had to accept a number of civilian experts, including the Secretary of Foreign Affairs. The title was something of a joke, Joseph had privately concluded, yet it might have had a point. An alliance with Hartkopf might be just what Justinian needed to turn the tide of the war. And that meant that anything Joseph did wrong might imperil the alliance.
He looked down at the display. The admiral hadn’t been able to spare any more units, leaving Joseph with nothing more than a squadron of heavy cruisers and a handful of gunboats, but the fortresses defending the Asimov Point were modern and powerful. They could hold it against anything less than a couple of squadrons of superdreadnaughts, backed up by assault carriers and starfighters. Even if his entire force was destroyed, the Asimov Point would be safe, and so would the inhabited planets through the distortion in time and space.