Lady Madeline Hohenzollern scowled at him. Markus Wilhelm was a short barrel-chested man, wearing a carefully tailored uniform that somehow made him the focus of every person in the room. As the Hohenzollern Sector’s Commanding Officer, he had once been one of her clients, carefully promoted and rewarded to ensure his loyalty to the Hohenzollern Clan. Six months after the Fall of Earth and the success of the Rebellion, she needed him, more than he needed her. The question she had never been able to answer — yet — was if he knew that. So much had changed in the two years since Colin Harper, a lowly battlecruiser first officer, had first raised the standard of revolt, right on the other side of the Empire.
“They came here to demand that you submitted to their authority and renounced your ties to the Clan,” she said, shortly. “You had no choice, but to open fire.”
Wilhelm shrugged. “I had hoped that I would be able to induce them to dock — all nine of them — and replace their crews with people loyal to me,” he said. “They smelt enough of a rat, however, to ensure that any perfidy on my part would be noticed… and so I destroyed them.” He shrugged again. “We always knew that we wouldn’t be able to remain unnoticed forever.”
“How true,” Madeline said. “And now, what will the rebels do?”
She’d fled Earth in the wake of the surrender, after Home Fleet had been blasted to plasma by the rebel Shadow Fleet, and set course for the Hohenzollern Sector. Her Clan owned almost the entire sector, including the massive shipyard complex orbiting Cottbus, and it was a natural place to begin her counterattack. The discovery that the rebels — and the entire population of the Empire — hated her and her Clan enough to tear them apart had shocked her… and filled her with new determination to return in triumph and wreck vengeance on her foes.
When she’d reached Cottbus, however, she’d been surprised to discover that Admiral Wilhelm had already been making preparations for continuing the war. Admirals had been officially discouraged from forming links with their compatriots — in the old days, Imperial Intelligence would have looked sharply at any Admiral who didn’t have a rivalry with his neighbouring Admiral — but Wilhelm had somehow linked up with at least three other Admirals… and apparently had been doing so even before the Fall of Earth. She’d attached herself to him at once, hoping that she would be able to exercise control, but she was completely dependent on him and knew it.
“They’ll come here, of course,” Stacy Roosevelt said, from her position in the corner of the room. Her perfect face twisted into a moue of disgust. “They’ll come here and die.”
Wilhelm and Madeline shared a long look. Stacy Roosevelt had first-hand experience of rebel perfidy… when they’d stolen an entire squadron of superdreadnaughts out from under her nose, instantly transforming Colin Harper from yet another Rim Warlord to a genuine threat. She’d been returned, probably in the hopes that her presence would hamper the Empire’s war effort, and attempted to take control of the Roosevelt Clan in the wake of the murder of its head, officially at rebel hands. (It still bothered Madeline that she had no idea who had ordered the assassination, although there was no shortage of suspects.) She’d succeeded just in time for the Roosevelt Clan to collapse completely… and had insisted on accompanying Madeline to Cottbus, convinced that she was the victim of a ghastly plot. The only thing she was good for, in Madeline’s increasingly exasperated opinion, was cannon fodder.
“Eventually, yes,” Wilhelm agreed, his own exasperation carefully concealed. He seemed to think that there might be a use for her in the future. “They do, however, have vast problems; someone else might have decided to rebel against the rebels as well. The implications of them having sent a squadron of cruisers to pass on their message are interesting. They may not feel that they have the strength to send out a stronger message, in stronger ships.”
He nodded towards the display. “And in any case,” he continued, “the delay suits us well. The longer we have to prepare, the better. If they give us long enough, we can start dictating terms to them. Perhaps it is time to commence stage two.”
Madeline followed his eyes. Cottbus had been a major industrial hub even before her Clan had taken it over and developed it into one of the Empire’s major success stories, a world that produced goods and supplies for an entire sector. Now, the tempo of activity that had begun when news of the rebellion finally reached Earth had only increased, with new starships under frantic construction and older ones being repaired and refitted to modern standards. Home Fleet, and most of the inner Sector Fleets, had been allowed to degrade, but Wilhelm was rapidly restoring his ships to battle condition. They would be a formidable threat if the rebels allowed them time to build up and deploy towards Earth.
The combined firepower of three sectors was a formidable force, even with the starships suffering from benign neglect. Seven squadrons of superdreadnaughts, twelve squadrons of battlecruisers and hundreds of heavy cruisers, light cruisers and destroyers, if they remained concentrated, would force the rebels to sit up and take notice. They might not be able to retake Earth yet — Wilhelm had disabused her of that notion right at the start — but the rebels would be forced to either come to terms with them or make a major deployment of their own to counter the loyalist forces. They might have been good, but standard doctrine warned that a three-to-one advantage was required in space warfare… and making such a commitment would draw almost the entire rebel fleet into the sector, away from Earth. The possibilities were endless.
“Stage two is doomed to failure,” Stacy said, petulantly. She’d been excluded from that planning session and resented it. She thought that she was important merely because of her name and social status, but Madeline outranked her and Wilhelm didn’t care. “Why the hell should they respect us?”
Madeline smiled. “If we tell them that we liberated this sector from the evil and oppressive rule of the Hohenzollern Clan, but we don’t intend to join the new order, they’re going to have to make some hard decisions,” she said. “They can talk to us — after all, they’re going to want the shipyards here if nothing else — and respect us as equals, allowing us to send representatives to their new Parliament. Carefully chosen representatives, of course. If they want to try to take us by force, what sort of message will they send to the other worlds and communities in the Empire?”
“If they invade this sector at once,” Wilhelm added, “they’ll tell them that they’re just the same as the old order, only more ruthless. If they start building up to confront us, they’re going to have to continue expanding their own armed forces, when they really need to reduce their commitment to building new starships and work to repair the economy. I suspect that eventually they’ll decide to invade us anyway… but by then, we will be formidable enough to convince them that it might be a bad idea.”
He strode over to his desk and tapped a command into his terminal. “We’ve chosen very carefully,” he said. “The people who will be going to Earth as our official representatives to their new Parliament are all very closely tied to the Hohenzollern Clan and myself. They will speak for us and put forward the view that while we have no objections to rejoining the Empire, we insist on policies that will prevent further disruption, such as altering the economic base of the Empire, or in giving aliens and slaves civil rights and suchlike. All a stall, of course, but they will have to pretend to take it seriously.”