Hannelore shrugged and made up her mind. She would take the rebel offer, assuming they were sincere. If not… well, she would be in a position to do something about it.
“Call your leader,” she said, sitting up. “Tell her that I have decided to accept.”
“Splendid,” Cordova said, holding out a hand. “Welcome to the Popular Front.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
“Do you trust her?”
Daria nodded, although her eyes were hard. “I think that she is about as trustworthy as any member of the Thousand Families ever gets,” she said. Colin snorted. That wasn’t a particularly strong recommendation. “On the other hand, we do have testimony from her former crew and they think quite highly of her. She’s no Bleeding Heart” — the term for an aristocrat who set out to improve the lives of the poor, if they wanted it or not — “but she’s definitely someone we can work with.”
“We can also keep an eye on her,” Anderson said, reluctantly. He’d been one of the strongest voices arguing against keeping Lady Hannelore Ellicott-Chatham anywhere near the rebel fleet or the Popular Front. “If she decides to do something stupid, we don’t give her a second chance.”
Colin nodded. “Agreed,” he said. He looked up at Cordova, who was perched on a stool that allowed him to display his latest uniform to best advantage. Colin suspected that, if one of Imperial Intelligence’s assassins managed to get into the room and opened fire, Cordova would be the first target. He had the most striking appearance. “And how do you feel about her?”
Cordova didn’t look surprised at the question. “She has a great deal of potential,” he said. “If she’d had the resources of the Roosevelt Family behind her, she would have gone far. And she reminds me a little of myself, someone who was always held back by law and custom. I thought that I would give her the opportunity to rebel.”
Colin smiled. Unless he missed his guess, Cordova found Lady Hannelore — she would have to ditch the title if she wanted to join the Popular Front, at least in public — attractive. He supposed that he couldn’t blame him, not when she was pretty and charmingly intelligent to boot, but it risked opening up a security breach. He didn’t need Anderson to remind him of the time that Imperial Intelligence had used pillow talk between an officer and his mistress, who was working for Imperial Intelligence, to condemn him for aiding and abetting criminal acts against the Empire. The story had broken up relationships all over the fleet.
“We will see how she works out,” he said. He looked over at Colonel Frandsen. “How are the first batches of new recruits working out?”
Frandsen considered. It wasn’t usual for a Colonel to take part in training recruits — normally, even in the Marine Corps, they would rarely see anyone higher than a Captain until they had graduated — but nothing had been usual since they had rebelled against the Empire. Besides, Frandsen had insisted on monitoring the training himself and Colin hadn’t had the heart to refuse. They couldn’t afford mistakes caused by inexperienced officers and Frandsen had two tours at the Marine Corps Training Centre under his belt.
“Well enough,” he said, after a moment’s thought. “They’ve definitely got the promise. We weeded out a handful of trouble-makers and people who simply couldn’t follow instructions and the remainder are undergoing heavier training now. We’re short of equipment for them, but we are working on obtaining equipment from elsewhere.”
Daria smirked, rather like a cat. “It’s astonishing what falls out of a freighter’s closed hatches if you bribe the right person,” she said. “We may not be able to offer Marine-grade armour, but we can certainly obtain Blackshirt-level armour.”
“That will reduce our effectiveness to some degree,” Frandsen warned. “The Blackshirt armour isn’t configured to a specific user.”
“We’ll just have to live with it,” Colin said, grimly. The Popular Front had a surprising amount of industrial capability, but it wasn’t up to the task of delivering Marine-quality armour. The latest report from the Geeks had been that the Annual Fleet’s supplies had been unloaded and were being put to work now, fuelling the rebellion. “That leaves the question of our new ships. Where do we stand with those?”
Salgak looked up, his implants whirring and clicking as he spoke. “The preliminary arsenal ships are projected as being completed in three weeks,” he said. “We expect that there will be a short period of shakedown trials before the ships can be deployed as part of the fleet, but we will monitor the process closely and probably shave a few days off the working-up period for any later ships.”
Colin smiled. The Geeks were talking as if they were working slowly, but he knew that they were working at an astonishingly high-speed. No Imperial Navy shipyard could match them, not now they had the supplies from the Annual Fleet to work with and whatever other resources Colin could throw at them. Given twenty years, they might build up a fleet that would outclass the entire Imperial Navy, but they didn’t have twenty years. The Empire knew that they existed and, now, the news was spreading outside Sector 117.
He looked up at the holographic display, now reset to its default mode. The expanding circles suggested just how rapidly the message was moving through the Empire, towards Earth. In nine months, perhaps less, the entire Empire would know about the rebellion. The Thousand Families would react, certainly; they’d cut ships loose from Home Fleet and whatever other reserves they had on hand, sending them to the sector to reinforce Admiral Percival and seek out the rebel bases. Time was not on their side.
“Good,” Colin said. “Once we have a sufficient number of supporting ships on our side, we will move against Camelot and punch out Percival’s fleet. Until then…”
He looked around the room. Between Cordova, Khursheda and himself, a number of Imperial worlds had been hit. Apart from Piccadilly, none of them had been particularly important or wealthy, but the mere act of hitting them would give them prominence in Percival’s mind. He would be tempted to spread out his fleet in hopes of picking off one of Colin’s raiding parties, reducing the forces he had on hand to cover the most important worlds. Colin had no way of knowing if he would give in to that temptation. He had most of the systems under covert observation, but it took time for word to get from one system to another, leaving the information hopelessly out of date when he received it.
The rebels hadn’t had it all their own way either. Several of Cordova’s ships had been picked off when they’d run into a squadron of Imperial Navy heavy cruisers, who had chased them until the raiders could power up their flicker drives and escape. One of Khursheda’s cruisers had been destroyed by an Imperial Navy battlecruiser during a duel over a resource-rich system on the way back home from Camelot. If the war became a war of attrition, Colin knew, the Empire had far more ships and men to spend on such a process. His fleet would be ground away.
“We need to hit Greenland,” he said, reluctantly. Greenland was actually another Roosevelt system, with similar levels of defences to the last world they’d hit — and, this time, they wouldn’t allow a squadron of superdreadnaughts into firing range without ironclad proof of identity. His ships would have to duel with at least one fully-alert orbital battlestation and while his superdreadnaughts would have superior firepower, Colin knew that he was going to get hurt. “It’s the only other target that will force Percival to disperse his forces still wider.”
“Perhaps it is the logical target,” Hester said, in her harsh voice, “but it is not the target we need to hit.”
Colin looked up, surprised. When he’d allied himself with Hester and helped her to form the Popular Front, they had agreed that he — Colin — would have supreme authority over the military. There were no others along the Rim — with the possible exception of Cordova — who had his military training or experience, although he did have to admit that the Rim had thousands of ships and crews experienced in hit and run attacks. If there had been a major disaster, he would have expected some complaints over how he ran the military, but they’d won every major battle so far.