“I would be honoured,” she lied. It was quite possible that Cordova wanted to take her to bed instead. It wouldn’t be that uncomfortable — it wasn’t as if she were a virgin, or that he was unattractive — but it would have felt like she was betraying her crew. “And then you can tell me all about the Popular Front.”
Her father had told her, once, to learn everything she could. Knowledge was power, he’d told her, and power was always worth having. If she was to be Cordova’s guest — or prisoner — she might as well learn what he had to tell her, and how he intended to justify himself to the universe.
And besides, it might be fun.
“I would be delighted,” Cordova said. “Shall we say my quarters, at nine?”
Chapter Twenty-Four
Commander Khursheda Ismoilzoda — now a Commodore in the rebel fleet — knew that others saw her as prim and unimaginative. It was an appearance she had taken pains to cultivate, if only because — as a young, unattached and attractive female officer in the Imperial Navy — it provided a form of protection. The young sharks — high-ranking officers intent on cutting a romantic swath through lower-ranking officers and crew — could be discouraged if one looked stern enough. It had helped her rise — if slowly — through the ranks and had marked her as a safe pair of hands. Her tactic had worked until she had refused the wrong person and had been banished to Jackson’s Folly.
Unlike Colin, who had personal reasons for rebelling against the Empire, Khursheda had grown up on Earth and learned to despise the Empire from a very early age. Earth’s teeming billions lived in poverty, a poverty only made worse by the fact that their social superiors refused to allow them any chance to make their own decisions. The poor lived their lives without hope and, whenever they fell afoul of the Empire’s laws, found themselves exiled into space. It was no wonder that there were so many applicants for newly-opening colony worlds… and that the Empire had logistical problems shipping so many people off-world. Millions departed Earth each year, only to be replaced by millions more born to poor and hopeless mothers. The poverty trap was grinding and almost unbeatable. Khursheda had beaten it by joining the Imperial Navy as a young girl and excelling in her training, to the point where she had been granted a commission and the chance to rise within the Navy.
As far as she knew, however, she was the last survivor of her family. Her parents had died when she was very young, killed in one of the endless gang wars that raged through Earth’s teeming cities. Two of her brothers had been killed by the Blackshirts — she still didn’t know why, despite searching though Stacy Roosevelt’s files — and three of her sisters had been sold into sexual slavery by the time they reached their menses. They’d been lucky. Khursheda knew that there were children, boys and girls who were barely born, sold into slavery. And her sisters, like so many others, had been worn out and killed by their new job. Their pimps hadn’t cared; they’d just gone on to the next few girls, of which there was an inexhaustible supply.
“Captain” — as there were so few trained command officers, Khursheda was serving as both Captain of Lightning and Commodore of the rebel squadron — “we have emerged within the Camelot System.”
Khursheda nodded, feeling her heart starting to beat faster in her chest. Colin had given her the mission because she was reliable, yet now — so close to a force that could destroy her and her entire squadron — she wanted to flee and flee far. If Percival’s crews were on the ball, if they had a squadron of superdreadnaughts on alert — or even a squadron of battlecruisers — her tiny squadron risked complete destruction. If it had been up to her, she would have preferred to carry out her mission somewhere else, but there had been no other choice. The geography of the Interstellar Communications Network dictated their actions.
“Remain on yellow alert,” she ordered. They had emerged towards the edge of the system, safely away from any possible threat. Percival’s sensors might have picked up their arrival, but he probably wouldn’t think much of it, not when civilian ships appeared at the edge of the system all the time. A military starship with military-grade computers could risk jumping right into the heart of a system, yet few civilians would dare take the risk. There was too great a chance of appearing too far from one’s destination. “Are there any threats within detectable range?”
Colin and Khursheda had discussed the possibility at length. If Percival was thinking ahead — or, more likely, someone in his employ was thinking ahead — he might just have a battlecruiser or two guarding the ICN station. It was what Colin would have done, if he’d had the forces on hand to cover all the bases. Percival might not have considered the risk worthwhile — after all, Colin might have turned up with his entire fleet and picked off a battlecruiser squadron — yet it was well to be careful. Khursheda had no illusions. She couldn’t hope to outfight the Sector Fleet if it came after her.
“No, Captain,” the sensor officer said. “The only object within detectable range is the ICN station.”
Khursheda nodded. “Take us towards it,” she ordered. She looked over at the communications officer. “Keep transmitting our false IFF signal. We don’t want them getting suspicious and alerting higher command.”
Colin’s original thought had simply been to blow the ICN network and force Percival to devote additional starships to convoying information all over the sector. Daria — backed up by Hester — had put forward an alternative suggestion. There was no need to destroy the entire network, or even parts of it, when the rebels could put it to work on their own behalf. Khursheda didn’t like Daria — there was something about the woman that rubbed her up the wrong way — but she had to admit that it was a good idea. It might even work.
The Geeks had reprogrammed her starship’s IFF transmitter to pretend that it was a battlecruiser on detached duty from the nearby Sector 99. Khursheda was fairly sure that, sooner or later, the Imperial Navy would cotton on to that trick and the IFF codes would have to be altered, but until then it should work neatly. She would have preferred to use codes from a starship known to be in the sector, yet there was too great a chance of one of the starships they encountered knowing that the ship they were impersonating was somewhere else. It was a risk, but a calculated one.
Part of her was depressed by how easy it was to start thinking of the loyalists in the Imperial Navy as enemies, but it wasn’t hard to understand. The Imperial Navy had no shared loyalty, not when everyone knew that promotions happened because the promoted were well-connected, or were sleeping with their superiors, or other criteria that had nothing to do with merit. Khursheda, for all of her stern appearance, hadn’t felt much loyalty towards the Navy as a whole. All she had needed was someone to encourage her to rebel.
“And then prepare our message,” she added. “I want to transmit it as soon as they verify our identity.”
Lieutenant Neil Schmitt loved his job. Most Imperial Navy officers would have regarded a transfer to the Interstellar Communications network as a demotion, if not a permanent career freeze, but Neil had never been particularly ambitious. All he really wanted to do was read his books and watch the universe go by, an aim made much easier by his new assignment. He’d been transferred over as a young Midshipman and, by volunteering to stay longer than he absolutely had to, he’d been granted promotion. From just another operator on the vast station, he had become its commander, a position that afforded him certain rights.
The Empire — and the Federation before it — had spent billions of credits on attempting to develop a workable form of faster-than-light communication. And, for all of their investment, they had nothing to show for it. In theory, there were plenty of ways to transmit a signal faster than light, but in practice the only way to do it was to have the message carried on a starship. It was incredibly frustrating for the Empire’s rulers, who wanted to control their Empire, yet had to account for the massive time delay built into the system. If Earth had wanted to send a signal out to Camelot, it would take nearly six months for the message to reach its destination and then another six months for Earth to get any reply. It was partly why Admiral Percival and his fellow Sector Commanders received so much latitude, in an Empire that didn’t think highly of individual initiative and enterprise. They needed the authority to deal with a small crisis before it became a larger one.