Hannelore looked up, alarmed. “Is there any way they could know what happened?”
“I doubt it,” Cordova said, “unless there was a cloaked starship lurking around and observing everything that happened. We didn’t detect anything of the sort, which doesn’t mean anything, but…”
He shrugged. “We won’t know for sure unless the Empire leaves us alone for longer than a week or two,” he added. “It will take any starship several days to get back to Camelot and report, and then another few days for them to dispatch a squadron of superdreadnaughts — longer, perhaps, if they don’t have one on hand.”
“I see,” Hannelore said. “If…”
Hester interrupted. “You know what we did to them,” she said, tartly. Hannelore gave her an offended look, but she ignored it. “Is there anything they could do with the knowledge?”
“Get ready to face the arsenal ships again,” Cordova said, dryly. “Give them enough time and they will come up with a few countermeasures or — more likely — design and build their own. It isn’t as though the arsenal ships are an invincible weapon.”
He smiled as the dance band struck up another tune. “There’s no such thing as an invincible weapon,” he said, as he put down his glass and reached for Hannelore’s hand. “No matter how impossible it seems, there are always countermeasures. I’m sure that some bright spark on the other side will think of one soon enough.”
Hester looked as if she had bitten into a lemon and sucked out the juice. Hannelore understood. The arsenal ships had demolished an entire battlecruiser squadron in seconds, promising a quick end to the war. If all it took to overthrow the Empire were a few converted freighters, perhaps she could just do it — and then relax, maybe finding a new husband and marrying again. Yet life wasn’t that simple and the war would go on for years.
Cordova pulled her onto the dance floor and whirled her into a crazy dance. “Don’t worry about it,” he said, his voice almost drowned out by the music. A pair of augmented Geeks of indeterminate gender danced past them, their implants whirring and clicking as they moved. “She wants us to win and everything else, even the little niceties, must be sacrificed to that.”
“I understand,” Hannelore said, as he put his arms around her and held her close. She felt her own passion ignite, feeling the urge to celebrate their victory in the oldest possible way burning through her. “Come on. Let’s go.”
Cordova didn’t ask any questions. He merely allowed her to lead him back to the ship.
Thomas looked around the small compartment he’d been given — shoved into would be a more accurate way of putting it — in hopes of some small distraction. Boredom was something he had never gotten used to, even though his unit was expected to be more civilised than the regular Blackshirts. The rebels had given him a blank room with a table, two chairs and a single bunk. They’d also handcuffed his hands to the table, chained his legs to the floor and carefully removed or deactivated any hidden implants within his body. His lips quirked in bitter humour; anyone would think that they had reason to worry.
He hadn’t believed that the battlecruisers had been destroyed at first, not until he’d pulled the live feed from one of the drones and seen the expanding clouds of plasma where the battlecruisers had been. The rebels had demanded his surrender and, after making an attempt to save the lives of his men, he’d surrendered. He’d been promised that his men wouldn’t be killed outright, but nothing else, leaving him to wonder what the rebels had in mind. Very few Blackshirts survived falling into the hands of the enemy, if only because the enemy had plenty of grudges to pay off. Offhand, he couldn’t recall a single world that had been pleased to see the Blackshirts, although quite a few planetary leaders had called them in to provide armed support when they began unpopular steps like raising taxation.
The hatch — it was strong enough to keep him in even without the handcuffs — hissed open, revealing a man in Marine combat dress. Thomas lifted an eyebrow. He’d assumed that the rebels and traitors would have abandoned their uniforms once they abandoned the Empire, yet this one seemed to cling to his uniform, even in the face of someone who hadn’t abandoned his oath to the Empire. The Marine was older than him, his face marked by combat and regeneration treatments, yet there was something timeless about his expression. Despite himself, Thomas recognised a fellow soldier, a kindred soul.
“Just call me Neil,” the Marine said, by way of greeting. Thomas placed him as Colonel Neil Frandsen, one of the rebels from the original mutiny at Jackson’s Folly. “You and your men behaved remarkably well.”
“I do not allow drugged-up morons in my unit,” Thomas said, stiffly. Quite apart from any moral issue, a Blackshirt drugged up couldn’t be trusted in a spacesuit, let alone an armoured combat suit. “I was ordered to take the asteroid and its population intact, not slaughtered or mistreated.”
“So you were,” Frandsen agreed. “Why do you serve the Empire?”
Thomas blinked at the question. “The Empire has been good to me,” he said. It was true enough. “Even if it hadn’t been good to me, it has been good for the vast majority of the human race. Is that a good enough reason for you?”
Frandsen smiled, but it didn’t quite touch his eyes. “We’re attempting to reform the Empire, not destroy it,” he said. “Why not come and join us?”
“And what happens while we are busy reforming?” Thomas asked, slowly. “The aliens jump on us. The Empire keeps us united against their threat.”
“The aliens we know are no threat to us,” Frandsen said, flatly. “They have no military power, nothing they can use against us… a single starship could destroy any one of their worlds and there would be nothing they could do about it.”
“The last time we trusted aliens,” Thomas countered, “we were nearly exterminated as a race. And that wouldn’t have happened if we hadn’t been disunited, ready to weaken ourselves by fighting over who got to be in charge. We cannot risk that happening again.”
“And yet there is no proof of a threat from aliens in the Beyond,” Frandsen pointed out. “Or do you know something that was kept from the rest of us?”
Thomas flushed, and then realised that Frandsen was trying to get under his skin. He pushed his anger down and concentrated on the topic at hand. “I swore an oath to serve and protect the Empire for as long as I live,” he said. “I won’t deny that there is room for improvement, but maintaining the fundamental unity of the human race is far more important than allowing everyone to head off in a different direction. How long would it be before we started fighting each other? Your grand rebellion might succeed only to break up as you fought over who actually got to replace the Empire and take power.”
Frandsen smiled. “I understand your position,” he said. He sounded sad, yet there was something in his voice that worried Thomas. “I felt the same way myself once. I used to believe in the ideals of the Empire. And then… I was ordered to commit mass slaughter on behalf of the Empire. I refused.”
He looked up, his eyes meeting and holding Thomas’s eyes. “And one day you’re going to have to make the same choice yourself,” he said. “What do you think would have happened to the people on this asteroid if you’d succeeded?”
Thomas shook his head. “Better to kill them, to kill everyone in the Beyond, than to wreck the Empire,” he said. He pushed as much pride as he could into his voice. “It remains the only thing holding the human race together and we need unity, or the aliens will destroy us.”
“You’re one of the Followers of Darwin,” Frandsen said.