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“Well?” Wilhelm asked her, almost conversationally. He sat back, no longer looming over her, but the threat of sudden change was very real. “Are you going to work for me now?”

“Yes,” Madeline said, finally. There was little point in holding out. He almost certainly wasn’t bluffing about sending her and Stacy to Butcher… where no one would care who they were, if they were lucky. If they were unlucky… well, there were thousands of people there who hated her Clan, not without reason. The sudden shift in the balance of power made her dizzy and she knew she needed time to think, but Wilhelm wasn’t letting her think. He had her over a barrel and knew it.

He smiled. “Yes, what?”

“Yes, sir,” Madeline said, finally. It was a complete surrender, but who knew? Maybe there would be another shift in the balance of power before too long. If the remaining Thousand Families, on Earth, needed her… there might be another shift. “I will work for you.”

“Excellent,” Wilhelm said, projecting an image of false bonhomie. It was another tactic to disorient her and she knew it, but she was ashamed to admit that it was working. Months ago, she would have done the same thing herself… and Wilhelm had clearly been learning from her. “The representatives had been selected, their transport is prepared… and all that remains is to bid them farewell. Shall we go?”

Madeline nodded, not trusting herself to speak.

Chapter Two

“Red Team, this is Red Leader,” a voice said. “Follow me in and watch out for barnacles.”

The starfighters altered course and flashed towards the old superdreadnaught, which was turning ponderously to face them. It had been in such a degraded condition that it hadn’t been allowed to serve with Home Fleet at the Battle of Earth and, when Shadow Fleet technicians had had a careful look at it, had decided that it was beyond recovery. The hulk had been cannibalised of everything useful and then dispatched to the firing range as a target.

“All right, entering point defence range from my mark,” Red Leader continued, his voice changing slightly as he took his flight into harm’s way. “On my command, scatter and engage evasive tactics.”

Space lit up as the superdreadnaught started to open fire, its point defence, optimised for tracking incoming missiles, lashing out towards the starfighters, which responded by running through a series of random evasive manoeuvres, dodging the fire with ease. From his vantage point, Colin Harper watched as the face of naval warfare in the year 4015 changed yet again. A superdreadnaught was normally capable of defending itself against any serious assault, although the salvos the arsenal ships had deployed during the rebellion had dwarfed anything that the pre-rebellion Empire had imagined, and could hope to take out half of the attacking missiles before they slammed home against its shields, but now…

The starfighters weren’t acting like missiles, but more like completely random elements, dancing ever-closer to the massive ship while avoiding everything it fired at them. The superdreadnaught just couldn’t compete as the starfighters slipped into energy range, avoiding the massive blasts from its fission cannons with ease. Weapons that could blast a destroyer or cruiser into free-floating atoms, or severely maul a fellow superdreadnaught could have vaporised a starfighter, if they had been allowed to catch it within its beam. The starfighters laughed at the defences and pressed closer, selecting their targets with ease.

“Entering engagement range now,” Red Leader said, his voice growing in confidence as the starfighters came closer. “Firing missiles… now!”

The starfighter seemed to jerk on the display as it unleashed the two missiles slung below its stubby wings, firing them both towards the superdreadnaught, joined within seconds by missiles from the remaining eleven starfighters. The superdreadnaught ignored the starfighters now, desperately trying to take out the missiles before they could strike the shield, but it was too late. One by one, the missiles reached the shield… and slipped through. Before the superdreadnaught could react, the first one struck home, slamming into the hull and detonating in a blast of thermonuclear fire.

“They didn’t take it out,” Colin said, perversely disappointed. No superdreadnaught had been damaged so easily during the fighting, even during the final moments of the Battle of Harmony, but somehow it was still intact. It was glowing in a dozen places, signs of fires and internal devastation, but it was still manoeuvring. It was, he supposed, a testament to the Empire’s policy of armouring superdreadnaughts past all rhyme and reason. “Can it still flicker?”

“I suspect so,” Commodore David Houston said. Colin had given him command of the 1st Experimental Squadron, suspecting that he would need someone with experience of using the new weapons, after the Battle of Earth. His former Flag Captain had taken to the role like a duck to water. “The ship is completely automated, of course, so no damage control teams, but the download suggests that the damage was mainly centred to the starboard drive nodes and shield generators.”

“But it can no longer project starboard shields,” Salgak rasped. The Geek wore a standard cowl, half-hiding his face, but it failed to hide the cyborg implants that tore and mutilated at his flesh. He might have been handsome once — Colin would not have cared to swear to it, or anything else regarding the Geeks — but he had given it up to seek union with computers and other devices. The Empire had regarded them as a dangerous menace and, even now, few people could look on them without feeling repulsed. Most implants, the handful that had been legal, were hidden beneath the skin, but the Geeks gloried in their difference from the human norm. “A second strike, even without the shield-busting missiles, would complete the destruction of the ship.”

David nodded in agreement. “Any rational Captain, assuming that he survived, would be trying to surrender or flicker out,” he said. It was, Colin knew, a moot point. The remains of the superdreadnaught’s flicker drive had been pulled out to help repair two others that had been captured at Gaul. The computers running the ship couldn’t have flickered out if their lives depended on it. “Should we send in the second flight?”

“Why not?” Salgak rasped. “Let us complete the destruction of an ugly ship.”

Colin didn’t, quite, roll his eyes. The Geeks produced the most remarkable ships in the Empire, including the powerful Independence-class superdreadnaughts that had fought at Earth, but they had their own sense of aesthetics. The Empire, by contrast, tended towards the brute force approach. There was little subtle in a General-class superdreadnaught and they wanted the universe to know it. There was little point in modelling the starfighters as if they had to fly through atmospheres using old-style jet engines, rather than simply using drive fields, but they’d insisted and, as they were doing the construction work, had won the argument. The starfighters, he had to admit, looked rather spectacular.

It was the missiles that made them deadly, however, and they were another Geek invention. The shield-buster missiles simply couldn’t be fired from standard range, which meant that they had to be deployed from very close to the target ship, too close for any hope of survival. The Second Battle of Harmony had featured gunboats, flickering into extremely-close range to launch the missiles, but the concept hadn’t been a success. The entire gunboat force had been wiped out. They were too large to dodge easily and too small to be heavily shielded… although that, too, was a moot point so close to a superdreadnaught’s fission beams. The starfighters, on the other hand…