“We have links with Jackson’s Folly,” Hester pointed out. Colin frowned, somehow unsurprised. He’d carefully refrained from looking at any of the data collected by his observation ships in the system — apart from using it to track the Imperial Navy starships — hoping to avoid a sense of guilt, a sense that everything that Jackson’s Folly was enduring was because of him. He knew better, he’d read Stacy’s files… yet he couldn’t help the guilt. It was not logical, but it was true — and very human. “They’re suffering down there.”
Colin frowned, feeling the guilt clawing at his heart. Perhaps Hester saw it in him, because she chose to push harder. “The Blackshirts are destroying every hope and dream the planet ever had,” she said. Colin understood, suddenly, how Jackson’s Folly had gotten its hands on some of the Empire’s technology. They’d had links with the Rim! “We need to help them or there won’t be anything left when we finally defeat the Empire and liberate their worlds.”
“That may be tricky,” Colin admitted. He had nothing against helping Jackson’s Folly, but it would be a dangerous operation, all the more so because the Empire might have left one of Percival’s superdreadnaught squadrons in the system. An equal fight was all very well, but Colin would have preferred to cheat. Besides, if his superdreadnaughts were lost, the Empire would have won. “Let’s see.”
He tapped his console and brought up the latest from Jackson’s Folly. The timestamp under the display warned that the latest reports had been a week old by the time they’d been transferred to the asteroid and then inserted into the superdreadnaught’s datanet. Colin mentally edited that to nine days, as they’d spent two days refitting the ships, repairing minor damage and giving the crew a few hours of liberty on the asteroid.
The enemy superdreadnaughts were gone, but Jackson’s Folly was enveloped by over thirty starships, including two battlecruiser squadrons. The other ships were either monitors — positioned in low orbit to provide fire support to the troops on the ground — or destroyers, prowling the system for enemy starships. The latest reports suggested that Jackson’s Folly had a number of ships hidden in the asteroid belt, which emerged from time to time to pick off vulnerable Imperial Navy starships. The world had done a good job of preparing an insurgency to greet the Imperial Navy and the Blackshirts, but Hester was right. Without some outside help, the Follies were doomed. Stacy Roosevelt and her twisted kin would wind up inheriting a desert, a desert called peace.
“We could hit the orbiting ships,” Hester said. “It would buy the Follies some time to regroup before the Imperial Navy returns to the system to chase us out.”
“And what happens then?” Colin asked, seriously. “The Follies will just suffer worse…”
He broke off as a thought occurred to him. Stacy Roosevelt wasn’t foolish enough to gainsay orders from her Family, not now, not when she would be completely dependent on them. Her family had ordered her to take the world intact, which meant that she couldn’t order the world scorched. And, without her permission, Percival would never dare to order a scorching on his own. It would utterly destroy his career. An officer with a stronger connection to the ideal of the Imperial Navy might order the scorching anyway, destroying a threat to the Empire along with his career, but Percival didn’t have that sort of moral courage. Colin’s lips twitched. Immoral courage would probably be a better term for it.
“We hit; get in, get out and then give them the time they need to regroup,” he said, slowly. He didn’t want to get sucked into a maelstrom. “We cannot make a long commitment to Jackson’s Folly, not when it would pin us to one world.”
“We could do more,” Khursheda pointed out. “We could enter orbit and drop KEWs on any Blackshirt positions. We could destroy most of the occupation force. The Empire would have to fall back until they could round up more Blackshirts to replace the ones we killed…”
“And then they would have to pin down a squadron of their own superdreadnaughts to prevent us from doing it again,” Cordova added. “Or perhaps they would abandon the invasion until they got reinforcements.”
“There will still be a quite considerable workforce of trained workers — workers trained in starship construction and maintenance — on the surface,” Salgak said, in his mechanical voice. Colin smiled inwardly. Even the Geeks liked the idea! Or, at least, were willing to come up with ideas to justify the plan. “We could offer to take them with us to our own construction yards and use them to expand our own workforce. It would improve our own capabilities and help to eventually liberate their worlds.”
Colin kept his face expressionless as he thought. He couldn’t deny that they had a point, that Jackson’s Folly did need help — and that it would provide an opportunity for a cheap victory against the Empire. The downside was that it would force the Empire to rush in reinforcements and rule the planet with a harsher hand, regardless of anything resembling common decency. Or, perhaps, he might be wrong and Stacy Roosevelt would permit Percival to scorch the world and settle for merely occupying the daughter colonies.
He didn’t want to be responsible for mass slaughter. He’d worked hard to avoid leaving any signs that Jackson’s Folly was in any way responsible for his mutiny and rebellion. And yet, the Empire had invaded anyway. What was the use of the rebellion, the value of the Popular Front, if they failed to respond to a world that needed help? Colin knew that hundreds, perhaps thousands, of worlds needed help, yet he could do nothing to help them. Jackson’s Folly, on the other hand, could be helped…
“Very well,” he said. Besides, a smart commander knew not to go against the advice of all of his subordinates, at least not very often. “We will recon the system first, and then jump in and open fire. We won’t stay in the system for longer than a day at most. Commodore Ismoilzoda?”
“Yes, sir,” Khursheda said.
“You will prepare a fleet of fast personnel transports, ones that can carry as many people as possible, equipped with a fleet of shuttles,” Colin ordered. “I want those ships to accompany us to Jackson’s Folly. We will use them to take out as many trained workers and their families as are willing to go and can be stuffed into the ships. Don’t hesitate to push the life support to the limit. They won’t want to go without their families.”
“Yes, sir,” Khursheda said. “How soon do you want the ships?”
“As soon as possible,” Colin said. At least Jackson’s Folly was some distance from Camelot. They should be able to get in and out quite nicely without any warning reaching Percival, at least until it was far too late. “And then we will assemble the fleet and liberate the system, if only for a few weeks.”
By its very nature, Sanctuary Asteroid played host to inhabitants and guests from all over the Beyond. The coordinates had been spread so widely that far too many people knew about its location, including Imperial Intelligence. The spooks hadn’t bothered to pass the information on to the Imperial Navy, knowing that destroying a single asteroid wouldn’t do more than scatter the inhabitants and destroy whatever links it had to the rest of the Beyond. Far better, they had reasoned, to use the asteroid as a base for their own operations, ferreting out the far more interesting — and dangerous — colonies deeper into the Beyond.