A younger woman, barely out of the Academy, laughed. “We heard that anyone who took a starship and brought it to the Shadow Fleet would hold command,” she said. “We would have an entire planet under our command, right?”
“The planet would have to become a democratic state,” Sasha said. “The Provisional Government intends to give each and every planet in the Empire effective first-rank status, including Cottbus and Earth itself. You would be welcome to assume command of the defences, or of the shipyard, or even of some of the starships here.”
Quinn silently canvassed his fellows. “You make a good case,” he said, finally. “I believe that we should join you, however…” He shrugged. “We have to discuss it in private, if you don’t mind.”
One of the handful of enlisted men came forward and escorted Sasha and Charlie out of the club and into a smaller room, which was as bare as a prison cell. Charlie spent a quick moment scanning it for listening devices, but found nothing, not even a simple location beacon. They didn’t talk as they waited as patiently as they could, enhanced ears straining for signs of discussion, or argument. Charlie found himself pacing backwards and forwards, even in the tiny room, knowing just how vulnerable they were. If Quinn and his compatriots decided to sell them out…
He scowled. Sasha had told the truth, but Cottbus was a far larger target than a starship, even a superdreadnaught. Taking even one of the orbital fortresses would be difficult, while the fixed defences were backed up by three squadrons of superdreadnaughts. They would have to be taken as well, unless they could be countered somehow… or was that actually true? What would the superdreadnaughts do if they suddenly found that the orbital fortresses were in the grasp of rebels and traitors? Would they attack at once, or would they wait for Admiral Wilhelm to come running back from wherever he was to recover his base?
And if he decides to stay away, we’ve won, he thought. If Quinn cooperates, we could win the war in one fell swoop.
It was tempting to discuss it with Sasha, but they couldn’t guarantee their privacy, so he waited, pacing, until she finally ordered him to take a seat and wait. They could hear raised voices now, the inner heart of the rebellion arguing over its course of action, and Charlie winced. Quinn had been lucky, so far, but if they were arguing then they might splinter. He’d studied the records of the successful — and unsuccessful — mutinies carefully. Several of the unsuccessful ones had been defeated, not though the efforts of the authorities, but by the mutineers having a falling out and betrayal. If Quinn went the same way…
We can’t even call on the Admiral to help, he thought, grimly. Even if we knew where she was, we couldn’t call on her to help.
The door opened and Quinn stepped in. “We decided to join you,” he said, without preamble. There was a grim note in his voice. He had no illusions, Charlie was relieved to see, about the difficulty of their task. The first mutinies had been easy, but the successive ones had been much harder. “I hope that your help is worth the risk.”
“Oh, trust me,” Sasha said. “It is.”
The next two days passed quickly. Quinn, it turned out, had had cells of rebels scattered all over the planet, most of them in lower-ranking positions that could be used to help confuse the security forces. The Admiral had scattered the cells, but in doing so, he had unwittingly created a second danger. The various rebels had been able to make contact with others who shared the same views, spreading the mutinous sentiments far and wide. Admiral Wilhelm’s base was rotting away under him.
But it wasn’t going to be easy, Charlie warned, and Quinn accepted the lesson. The Admiral’s security forces were carefully positioned to block any rebellion, even if he did have more faith in his people than Admiral Percival had ever shown. The rebels needed to gain control of the high orbitals — or, at least, the fifteen fortresses circling the planet — or the rebellion would be a bloody failure. He doubted, somehow, that Admiral Wilhelm would hesitate to bombard the planet to punish the rebels; despite his claims, there was no trace of a democratic government. Cottbus was controlled directly from the orbiting command fortress and if there was any resistance, Charlie hadn’t seen any evidence of it. The old government, the one established by the founding Clan, was clearly no longer in existence. He couldn’t decide if it were an improvement or not.
He looked down at the computer console in front of him and smiled. The nice thing about computers was that they did as they were told. The access backdoors that Imperial Intelligence had programmed into every system the Empire had produced helped — no one could have shut them all down — but the access they had obtained through Quinn and his people was far more useful. With a little ingenuity, the computers had been convinced that Charlie and Sasha were personnel with every right to go where they pleased, including the orbital fortresses. Quinn himself had been assigned to a rotating personnel pool that saw him on the fortresses every fortnight for a week-long period — apparently to ensure that they kept their edge — but again, it was easy to alter the system so that the rebels were all on the fortresses at the same time. It was even possible to have messages sent from rebel to rebel without monitoring programs picking them up and reporting them.
“It is important not to overuse this facility,” he’d warned, when he’d introduced the secret communications system to the inner circle of conspirators. The news about Admiral Garland’s recent raid had sent the entire planet into a state of shock, forcing Admiral Wilhelm’s viceroy to start running more persistent security measures. “The monitoring programs should class them as part of the general data download shared between the fortresses, but too many signals might alert a human operator, who might not be one of us.”
The second problem had been weapons. The Imperial Navy, in stark contrast to the Shadow Fleet, tended to keep weapons out of the hands of its junior officers and enlisted men, although it saw to it that they had proper weapons training. Colin had solved that problem by enlisting the Marines on his side, but Quinn had no Marine contacts… and, in any case, Admiral Wilhelm’s Marines and tame SD Troopers were not allowed on the fortresses. It was a fairly basic precaution; Admiral Percival, too, had banned Marines from his ships. The only access to the weapons locker on each of the fortresses belonged to the Captain, forcing Charlie to take the risk of uploading new commands into the network, clearing the leader of the rebels to open the weapons lockers at the right time. They had also risked giving the rebels the covert operations pistols that they had brought with them on the Neddy Seagoon.
“These will not shoot through battle armour, so be careful whom you try to shoot,” Sasha had explained, to the handful of rebels who had attended her brief tutorial. The tiny pistols looked rather like children’s toys, ones that might be found in any stocking, but they were deadly in the right hands. “They don’t set off security scanners, so you can smuggle them onto the fortresses without setting off all kinds of alerts, but be careful. If the security forces find even one of these, they will know who is to blame.”
Sandra hadn’t been happy to be left almost completely out of the plans, but someone had to remain behind, if only to report on what had happened to the other two agents. Her links with Andy Gillingham might be useful, while it also gave her an excuse to operate separately from them, although none of them had any illusions about how long that would last. If Admiral Wilhelm’s people caught any of them, it wouldn’t take them long to locate the remaining two members, or at least to put out an alert.