Cordova frowned. “Tiberius himself, Pompey and Gwendolyn,” he said, finally. Colin swore. Three people… and even assuming that it was the entire Cicero Family, there was no proof… and dealing with them as quickly as he would have liked would have destroyed the rule of law he was trying to build! The thought was maddening; the enemy skulked in the shadows, doing whatever they pleased, while Colin was bound by the laws he had signed into existence himself. “He implied that there were many others…”
“Of course,” Colin agreed, savagely. There were around two million people who could be reasonably counted as part of the Thousand Families. Some, such as Stacy Roosevelt, had vanished into space, their fates unknown. The remainder had stayed on Earth and either thrown themselves into the Provisional Government, or hid in their estates and tried to pretend that nothing had changed. The latter, in particular, would be happy to support Tiberius, even if he sought to make himself Emperor…
And yet there was the nagging sense that he was missing something important.
He pushed it to one side as he looked up at the starchart. “Do you think that they might be allied with Admiral Wilhelm? It might explain how his forces advanced so fast…”
Cordova considered it. “I doubt it, unless Admiral Wilhelm is merely someone’s puppet,” he said, after a moment. “He seems equally determined to bring down the Thousand Families, assuming we believe everything that Carola said to us… and we know she lied several times. She might well have lied about that as well, except I have a feeling that she was telling the truth. A man in his position would have to be a fool to miss the chance that fate — and we — offered him.”
“True,” Colin agreed. It might be time for another chat with Carola, although dealing with her was an irritating problem. Legally, her very status was vague, although there was a motion afoot in Parliament to declare her a rebel against the Provisional Government and treat her as such. Daria had proposed it, as he recalled, but the MPs were dragging their feet. If Admiral Wilhelm won the war, he would probably be out for revenge on anyone who hurt his wife. It didn’t say much about their confidence in the war effort, but a great deal about their sense of self-preservation. “Leave that for the moment.”
He looked down at his table for a long moment. “I’m going to have to bring Vincent and Neil in on this,” he said, thinking hard. His Head of Security and the Commander of the Marine Detachment couldn’t have gone bad, for the very simple reason that if either of them had, he had already lost without knowing that he was at war. “I need the pair of you to keep me informed if Tiberius contacts you and…”
He paused. A thought had just occurred to him. “I could send you out of the system,” he said, to Cordova. “You’d be out of his reach and…”
“I think he’d pressure me to stay where I was,” Cordova admitted. “Besides, you don’t have a good role for me away from here and that might tip him off to the truth. If he learns that I came to you, he’ll step up his own plans and try to take you out…”
“He can’t, unless he can counter the Shadow Fleet,” Colin said, and wondered if that were actually true. He’d planned in terms of a fleet engagement, but if Tiberius smuggled a standard nuke into the High City, it would rather neatly decapitate the Provisional Government. Was Tiberius that ruthless? He would also take out several hundred lower-ranking Family Members. “I wonder…”
He broke off as his intercom buzzed. “Yes?”
“Mr President, we just had a flash signal from System Command,” his secretary said, grimly. Colin knew it was bad news just from her voice. “There’s been a shuttle accident. Grand Admiral Joshua Wachter is dead!”
Chapter Thirty
“Admiral, the freighter has just returned from Ysalt.”
Admiral Katy Garland nodded once as the green icon popped into existence on the display. She’d sent the Freebooter ship into the system ahead of her fleet, just to provide an up-to-date reconnaissance report, and it seemed that her gamble had paid off. Admiral Wilhelm’s forces might have been using Ysalt as a supply base, but they’d clearly decided that it wasn’t worth the effort of providing it with a strong mobile component to enhance the fixed defences.
Unless they’re lurking under cloak and it’s a trap, she thought, rather sourly. She’d been caught out that way once before and this time she would be more careful, far more careful. Admiral Wilhelm had to know that she would be searching for vulnerable points in his defences, but would he know that she’d located one of his supply bases at Ysalt? How could he know, unless he knew that the freighter that had just flickered through the system — and the previous Freebooter ships that had paused in the system, hoping to sell their wares — were spying for her. If he knew that…
She shook her head and concentrated on the images flickering up in front of her. Ysalt had been heavily fortified back when the Empire had been expanding into the Cottbus Sector, but cold-blooded calculations had ‘proven’ that Ysalt was actually less useful as an fleet base than Cottbus. It actually possessed a small independent population, stubbornly refusing to commit themselves to the Empire, and forcing them to comply would have been pointless. They had had nothing that the Empire actually wanted and, as long as they stayed on the planet, they weren’t even a bad example as far as the Empire was concerned. Their only real use had been to convince the Imperial Navy that Cottbus was a much better base for future operations.
And that logic had just been turned on its head. Ysalt was the closest world in the Cottbus Sector to Earth and a logical supply base. Starships, particularly superdreadnaughts, might be able to fire and recharge their energy weapons effectively indefinitely, but missiles had to be constructed at industrial nodes, forcing the Admiral to run supply convoys through his space and into hostile space controlled by the Provisional Government. The Shadow Fleet had used covert bases and hundreds of freighters, but according to the analysts, Admiral Wilhelm shouldn’t have had enough freighters to supply his fleet. If it were to be operating in the direction of Earth, striking deep into the heart of the Empire, it would need a supply base. She doubted that Ysalt was the only one — no commander worth his salt would put all his eggs in one basket — but it made a convenient target.
“We’ll go with Plan Theta,” she decided, finally. The handful of starships in the system — the ones she could see, she reminded herself — wouldn’t be enough to deter her from launching the attack. They would probably choose to flicker out and run rather than be destroyed in a stand-up battle. “Helm, begin the countdown. We flicker out in five minutes.”
“Aye, aye, Admiral,” the helmsman said. A countdown timer appeared on the display as warnings echoed through the starship, warning the crew to brace themselves against flicker shock and nausea. No amount of bracing, in Katy’s view, would compensate for the effects of flicker shock, but the crew had to be warned. The handful of people who boasted of no ill effects after flickering through interstellar space tended to be liars, or deluded. “Flicker drive locked on coordinates and powering up.”
Katy leaned back in her chair and braced herself. The crew’s morale had skyrocketed after the brief violent encounter at Hawthorn, although she knew that they had barely dented Admiral Wilhelm’s war machine. He could suck up the loss of a handful of superdreadnaughts and keep going, although even he had his limits. The thought of just how many superdreadnaughts were going to be lost, on both sides, during the war chilled her. The Empire had never built enough, as far as the Imperial Navy was concerned, and replacements were slow in coming. The post-war Empire, whoever ended up running the government, was going to be very weak.