Angelika leaned back in her command chair, rubbing her eyes and silently cursing Admiral Percival under her breath. The superdreadnaughts had intimidated the locals, all right; they’d overshadowed anything the rebels and insurgents could do to them. And yet… the Admiral had seen fit to withdraw the superdreadnaughts, judging that the smaller ships could handle the pacification of the system without the presence of their older cousins. Angelika had a nasty suspicion that she’d been set up to fail. Perhaps Admiral Percival, whose drunken advances she had refused one night, had deliberately planned to embarrass her in front of the Roosevelt Family. Or perhaps it was worse. Stacy Roosevelt, the silly girl who had somehow managed to lose nine intact superdreadnaughts to a mutiny, might have been looking for someone to distract attention from her failure.
She’d expected the conquest to be easy, until she’d run her eye down the list of prohibited targets. No one had ever heard of such a thing, not in the Empire; the whole reason for developing the monitors in the first place was to make it clear that there was nowhere to hide from the Empire’s wrath. And yet, she had a whole list of places that she couldn’t drop a KEW, or she’d spend the rest of her life on an isolated asteroid settlement or mining colony. It made little sense to her, for what was the point of using monitors if there were safe areas, areas where the insurgents and rebels could congregate and plot their war against the Empire.
At least it isn’t my ass on the line, she thought sourly. The insurgents didn’t seem to have realised that there were areas off-limits for KEWs, thankfully. If they had, the Blackshirts occupying those areas would be facing far more determined attacks. As it was, the factories, universities and industrial development complexes were safely in the Empire’s hands, although no one knew how long that would last. She lifted her eyes to the master plot and scowled. The orbiting industrials were also off-limits, even if the rebels retook them and started to use them to produce new weapons of war. She had been told, quite firmly, that she was only authorised to deploy Blackshirts to recover them.
“Captain, the conference call is scheduled for 1450,” the communications officer said. Angelika nodded; forty minutes from local time, just long enough for her to have a shower and a change, hopefully allowing her to appear less stressed. She’d trained her subordinate captains to make the best use of their battlecruisers — and, in doing so, had probably encouraged them to think of ways to unseat her. She wouldn’t be too surprised to discover that one or more of them had sent secret — and accurate — reports to their patrons, rather than the pap Public Information was putting out about a highly-successful campaign. The bastards were creating an illusion that, unless someone came up with a brilliant new tactics, could only rebound on the Empire.
“Good,” she said, again. She stood up and looked over at her XO. “You have the bridge.”
“I have the bridge,” the XO responded, already heading over to the command chair.
Angelika took a moment to check the ship’s status before heading for the hatch and out into Officer Country, barely managing to conceal the yawn that threatened to burst out and overwhelm her. The Blackshirt on duty outside her cabin snapped to attention, one hand almost cracking against his helmet, but she ignored him. The Blackshirts had been making themselves unpopular since they’d been brought onboard to replace the Marines, yet they’d been behaving themselves since she’d introduced one of them to the joys of breathing hard vacuum. No one raped one of her crew and got away with it.
She took a look at her bed, wondering if she could get away with thirty minutes of sleep, but she shook her head. She was too tired to risk it, not when she had to speak to her subordinates. Being late for that would certainly cause some of them to wonder if she was going soft. Shaking her head, she undid her tunic and headed over to the shower, knowing that her steward would pick up the dirty uniform and put it in the wash. The warm water felt heavenly after so long on the bridge. She swallowed another yawn and tried to put Jackson’s Folly out of her mind.
“I think they’re serious about keeping this system,” Markus said, as the freighter advanced into the inner system. The freighter-gunboat combination seemed to work, so Admiral Walker had ordered them to do it again, only in a far more dangerous system. Markus didn’t really care about the danger; even the Imperial Navy would hesitate before firing on an obviously harmless freighter, at least one thousands of kilometres from the planet’s surface. “Take a look at that!”
The Geeks had modified both freighters, but they’d had a great deal more time to work on the Sidonie and it showed. They’d rigged a sensor suite that was far better than anything the Imperial Navy had deployed to its starships, even the recon cruisers that were used to plot out targets before the Imperial Navy flickered in and destroyed them. The Survey Service itself didn’t have such excellent gear. Even operating on passive mode, the sensors were still sucking in awesome amounts of data and filing it into the gunboat’s secure storage module.
Jackson’s Folly was not just occupied; the Empire was already attempting to exploit it. Starships hung in orbit around the world itself, striking regularly down at the surface, while others prowled the asteroid belts. The cloudscoops at the gas giant were ringed by a squadron of destroyers while freighters were unloading orbital weapons platforms, as if they feared an attack. Markus wasn’t sure if they knew or suspected that the rebels were on their way — he had no time for the Popular Front nonsense — but it hardly mattered. All that mattered was that the last reports had been out of date. There were over sixty starships in the system, which suggested that whoever was in command had screamed for additional help and actually received it.
“I’ve found their manufacturing craft,” Carola reported, from where she was going through the data. The Geeks had programmed in the best analysis algorithms that Markus had ever seen, but in the absence of true AI it was impossible to rely completely upon them. “There’s only one of them, unless there’s another on the far side of the system.”
“Could be,” Markus agreed. The Sidonie had deployed massive and stealthy sensor platforms, allowing it to soak up data at an astonishing rate. An active manufacturing ship wasn’t easy to hide. The Empire might have intended to hide an additional ship in the system, but that would — naturally — limit its utility. “Or maybe the reports are true and the locals scored some spectacular successes.”
The hour ticked by slowly as more information flowed into the gunboat’s systems. The deployment patterns of Imperial Navy starships, the use of freighters and heavy convoy escorts even over small distances, the regular use of KEWs against planetary targets… even transmissions, broadcast using standard encryption protocols. The Imperial Navy had realised that the mutiny meant that the mutineers — and the Popular Front — had access to their coding systems, but the Blackshirts hadn’t made the same deduction, or perhaps they just didn’t care. Markus watched some of their transmissions, signals showing burned out buildings, local inhabitants hanging from the nearest tree and shuddered. No one wanted to fall into the hands of the Blackshirts. He shut the signals off in disgust. The intelligence crew would want to look at them — and the propaganda department would want to use them to illustrate the horror of the Empire — but he didn’t want to look at them again. It was just another reminder that, before the mutiny, he had been fighting for a monstrous regime. He would never wipe away the shame, or cleanse his hands of blood.