Her eyes opened in wonder. Could it be, she asked herself, that the Roosevelt Family was overextended? The Thousand Families prided themselves on their long-term view, investing early in new sectors, planets and industries to maintain their position, yet the Roosevelt Family had definitely been going well over the standard pattern. They’d even forced most of the other Families out of the sector, keeping it all to themselves… why? To make themselves even more immensely rich than they already were?
Or perhaps because it was their last desperate gamble, one last shot to avert disaster. The Empire’s economy had been slowly freezing up for centuries, a result of the deadening effects of patronage and bureaucracy. If the Roosevelt Family was in serious trouble… who knew what might happen to the Empire as a whole? Families had come and gone before, yet the Roosevelt Family was colossal, with interests everywhere. Could it be that they were weaker than anyone dared think?
And, she asked herself, what would happen if the rebels kept destroying their investment?
They’d be able to carry on for some years, using their connections and the sheer unlikelihood of the situation to hide the truth, but eventually it would come out… and what would happen then? She thought about the hundreds of worlds that belonged, directly or indirectly, to the Roosevelt Family, with the trillions of humans and aliens inhabiting them. What would happen to those helpless lives? Or, for that matter, what would happen to the remainder of the Empire? Would the fall of one Family lead to the fall of others? Or would the remainder of the Families congratulate themselves on having avoided such a fate, pat the Roosevelt Family’s head and buy up all their assets? Somehow, she doubted that the Families could work together to save the Empire. They’d be saving it from themselves.
“It is not a complete disaster,” Brent-Cochrane said. His voice was calm, very composed, yet Penny could hear an underlying note of delight. Percival wouldn’t survive the loss of his patrons, not with all the enemies he’d made over the years. “We do have new options, ones that we lacked before.”
Percival glowered at him. “And what would those be?”
“We don’t have to worry about preventing the news from spreading,” Brent-Cochrane said. “So we contact the Sector Commander of Sector 99 — he’s my Uncle, unless he’s been promoted by now — and ask him to send reinforcements. Even a single additional squadron of superdreadnaughts would be a bonus for us… and he has three squadrons under his command. We ask him to deploy them here and we make further attacks prohibitively expensive for the rebels.”
Percival’s lips moved, but he said nothing. Penny could almost read his thoughts; calling in help, even from the nearest sector, would take time… and certainly reinforce the suggestion that Percival was grossly incompetent and also partly responsible for the mutiny. Coming to think of it, she wondered, what would happen if Sector 99’s Sector Commander turned up and tried to take command? He might be able to dislodge Percival… and if he really was related to Brent-Cochrane, he might place Percival’s subordinate in his place.
And yet, now the message blackout had been broken, the news would be spreading and failing to ask for help would certainly count against him. And, Penny suspected, Brent-Cochrane would send a message of his own to his uncle, if he hadn’t already. Percival had to know that too, which meant that he was trapped. He had to ask for help and hope for the best. She could almost sense his frustration, boiling off him in waves. She hoped, with a burst of malice that was almost worthy of Percival himself, that it choked him.
“I will communicate with Sector 99,” Percival said. She smiled inwardly at his desperation. The message was racing relentlessly towards Earth. Six months — no, less than six months now — and the Thousand Families would know just how badly Percival had bungled the rebellion. A year from now, Percival might receive orders telling him to travel to Earth to be executed, or maybe — if his connections came through — a simple relief from command. “I want you to find the rebels.”
“We will return to our position and wait,” Brent-Cochrane said. “The rebels will eventually fall into our lap.”
“You will go,” Percival said. “Captain Quick will remain with me. I have much to discuss with her.”
Brent-Cochrane kept his opinion on that, if he had an opinion, to himself.
“Yes, sir,” Penny said. Inwardly, she was singing. She could endure any amount of discomfort if it meant she got to watch as Percival received his just deserts. “I’ll remain here.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
“I presume,” Colin said with deadly calm, “that you have some kind of explanation for this?”
The crewman in front of him, a man who would never have set foot in Officer Country at all back when the superdreadnaught had fought for the Empire, looked uncomfortable and nervous. He was standing between two burly Marines, shaking so badly that he could barely stand to attention. Colin studied him carefully, silently noting the unshaven face and rat-like eyes. The crewman didn’t cut a very convincing — or reassuring — image.
But then, no one would have expected the fleet’s commanding officer to deal with the matter personally. Colin had only intervened to make the point that such issues would be taken seriously.
“We noted the problem with the atmosphere scrubbers two weeks ago,” Colin said, when the crewman said nothing. The Marines who had arrested him hadn’t told him why he was under arrest, but Colin suspected that the crewman knew perfectly well why Colin had sent for him — either that or he was guilty of something else. “Crewman First Class Nix… why were they not replaced?”
Nix flushed. It wasn’t traditional to spell out a crewman’s full rank. It was almost inevitably the prelude to a chewing out, if not summary demotion. The lower decks maintained themselves through harsh discipline, overseen by the NCOs, and a shared belief that attracting the attention of the senior officers was a bad idea. Colin hoped that Nix understood how much trouble he was in; if not, Colin would feed him the problem step by step, and then inform the crewman of just how he was going to be punished.
He smiled, inwardly. If nothing else, it was incredibly rare for an Admiral to handle such matters. His mere involvement would be a stern message to the crew.
“My department was busy coping with the reloading of the missile tubes,” Nix said, finally. His shaking hadn’t improved. “We didn’t have time to switch out the atmosphere scrubbers. Sir, My Lord, those scrubbers are good for at least another two months…”
His voice died away as Colin looked at him, feeling a sudden urge to draw his pistol and shoot Nix though the head. On the face of it, Nix was quite right; the superdreadnaught — indeed, all military starships — was over-engineered and could have lost half of the scrubbers without the crew finding it hard to breathe. But then, Nix’s real offence hadn’t been anything to do with not replacing a scrubber. His offence was far worse.
“You may be right,” Colin said. Nix sagged against one of the Marines. Only a complete idiot would have mistaken Colin’s tone for forgiveness. “You may have been able to leave the scrubbers in place without causing an immediate problem. Now tell me… what else did you do?”
Nix flushed. “I did nothing else, My Lord,” he protested. “It was the only shortcut…”
“I read your 666, Nix,” Colin said, sharply. “Would you like to know, I wonder, just what it said?”
The Imperial Navy loved paperwork — indeed, Colin had sometimes thought that the fleet could probably have used its piles of paperwork to bombard anyone intending to attack the Empire. Everything had to be logged; the loss of even a single bullet had to be noted and, eventually, would provoke an inquiry from the bureaucracy. Everyone on a warship had their own set of paperwork to fill out, most of which Colin had gleefully abandoned once the rebellion had started, yet there were some pieces of paperwork that could not be rejected or converted into toilet paper.