The spy felt a sense of relief as she finally returned to the asteroid. Sanctuary hadn’t been used as the meeting place for the Popular Front, even though it was fairly public, and the spy had been nervous about her presence. If someone had thought to ask the right questions, or check her luggage before she left, it might have aroused suspicions. The Rim couldn’t afford anything reassembling due process; if they’d been suspicious, they would have put her out the airlock first and ask questions later. But Sanctuary was far more cosmopolitan and crowded; the spy could afford to get lost in the crowd. In her official capacity, as a senior officer for one of the rebel outfits, he went into a single shop and requested a private meeting. The shop, a cover business for Imperial Intelligence, honoured his request. There was a brief exchange of signs and countersigns and then the spy got to work.
“This is the headquarters of the Popular Front,” she said, passing over the datachip. She’d secured the data and encrypted it using a new encryption system, one directly from Imperial Intelligence. It should be impossible for anyone to decrypt it without the right code, although the Geeks would probably be able to do it if they had a reason to look. “I suggest you pass the information onwards.”
The shop’s owner — a man with thirty years of experience in Imperial Intelligence — nodded. “Of course,” he said, in agreement. He made the chip vanish with the ease of long practice. “We cannot charter a ship for it specifically, but there should be another ship coming in soon and they can take the information onwards.”
The spy nodded. The rebel group she worked for would have been horrified to discover that most of their supplies came directly from Imperial Intelligence. They would have been even more horrified when they realised that Imperial Intelligence could have destroyed them at any time. The spy sometimes wished that things were different, but Imperial Intelligence had done something to her head, back when he’d been inserted into the Rim. She could not be disloyal. Even the mere thought of disloyalty was painful. Obedience was all that she could do.
And even if something happened to her, afterwards, the information would reach the Empire.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
“Captain, the Bombardment is reporting that it is running short of KEW projectiles,” the communications officer reported. “They are requesting permission to reload from the Fabricator.”
Captain-Commodore Angelika McDonald sighed. It was rare to need more than a handful of KEWs on any given world; indeed, most worlds, even the ones with memories of independence in living memory, didn’t risk putting up a serious fight. The Empire sometimes ran out of patience with rebellious worlds and scorched them down to bedrock, before dropping terraforming packages onto the remains of the worlds and shipping in new colonists. Jackson’s Folly, on the other hand, seemed to be populated by madmen and women; they just kept fighting, even though their cause was hopeless. The Blackshirts had gone to war with their drug-fuelled barbarity and rage… and were losing. If they hadn’t been able to call in fire support from orbit, they would have been destroyed by now and in this war no one took prisoners.
Jackson’s Folly had plenty of time to prepare for the Empire and even through their overt preparations had failed the covert preparations were working far too well. Fabricator was the third manufacturing ship to operate within the system’s asteroid belt, melting down asteroids and converting them into KEW projectiles. The last two had been lost to treacherous tricks by the defenders, methods of war — her lips twitched in amusement — that were not included in tactical handbooks. If she lost that ship, her supply of KEWs would be cut off until a new manufacturing ship arrived in the system; she had requested a replacement in advance, but Admiral Percival — it seemed — was refusing to deploy any additional ships out to the system. He didn’t understand the problems she was facing.
She spun her chair around until she could see the live feed from the Blackshirt command garrison, down on the surface. General Branford was holding forth, decreeing the mass slaughter of civilian hostages and the use of lethal chemical weapons, before urging his troops upwards and onwards for the glory of the Empire. Branford the Butcher, some called him, although never in his hearing; a man who had broken an alien race to the Empire’s will. His supporters, and there were many, had never concealed the fact that he’d done it by slaughtering three-fourths of the alien race and demonstrating his willingness to complete the task and adding a third exterminated race to humanity’s reputation. Angelika wondered, despite herself, if Branford hadn’t been given secret orders to exterminate the planet’s population, without making it obvious just what he was doing. He was certainly killing enough of them in reprisal raids. Even his fellow Blackshirts, drug-addled through they might be, had started to question his tactics. Her lips twisted into a droll smile. Branford might end up being the only person dismissed from the Blackshirts for excessive violence. The joke, never spoken where a senior officer might hear, was that that was how a person got in.
“Order them to pull out of orbit and head to Fabricator,” she ordered, reluctantly. She had only five monitors at her disposal, all spaced around the world to provide complete coverage, and pulling one of them out of orbit — if only for a few hours — would put a crimp in her ability to provide fire support. Her warships carried KEWs, of course, and she would redeploy a group of heavy cruisers to provide additional support, yet they couldn’t deploy as many as the monitors. Intensive use would mean shooting them dry. “Assign a destroyer group to escort them through the flicker and back.”
“Aye, Captain,” the communications officer said. Angelika nodded. The young man might have had good connections — explaining why he was serving on a starship’s bridge just after graduating from the Academy — but he was also fairly competent and she could trust him to deal with it. His birth was actually an advantage in dealing with officers who outranked him by several orders of magnitude, although he hadn’t realised that — or that he could go much further. “The 44th Destroyer Flotilla is ready to escort the monitor.”
“Good,” Angelika said, returning her gaze to the main display. Jackson’s Folly was, at least on the surface, a fairly typical system, but it contained nasty traps for the Empire. There were a handful of raiding starships out there — including one that had destroyed one of her other manufacturing ships — and hundreds of hidden bases scattered through the asteroids. Her mining crews sometimes discovered enemy spacers waiting to kill them, or stumbled over abandoned installations, installations that didn’t seem to be listed on any file they’d captured on the planet. The natives had clearly wiped all of the data, if they’d had it in the first place. “Once that is done, schedule me a conference call with the senior officers. I want to discuss matters with them.”
“Aye, Captain,” the young man said. He was too young to recognise a symbol of… maybe not entirely defeat, but certainly an admittance that things were not going according to plan. Normally, Angelika would have played host to the senior officers on her flagship — the battlecruiser Violence — but now she didn’t dare take a commanding officer away from his or her ship. The insurgents were proving far more effective than anyone had dared fear. No one was quite sure what had happened to the light cruiser Rainbow, yet the insurgents had been boasting over their success over the planetary datanet, despite every attempt to shut it down. It wasn’t more advanced than the Empire’s system — indeed, it was genuinely inferior — but it had been designed as a distributed system, rather than the centralised systems used by Imperial worlds.