The superdreadnaughts opened fire.
A minute later, the final defenders of Wakanda died at their posts.
Chapter Thirty-Two
Grand Admiral Joshua Wachter’s obituary took up nearly two pages of one of the more respectable — insofar that respectable could be used when there hadn’t been a free press for more than nine months in the Empire — newssheets, and various pages of the less respectable ones, which had turned from compiling the real lives of the Thousand Families to honour the death of a great man. His early service to the Empire was recounted in fulsome detail, his great achievements lauded to the skies, and his untimely death mourned in a hundred different ways. Hundreds of pages included personal tributes, including a touching one from Tiberius Cicero, Colin and even some of Joshua’s bitterest political enemies. It would be easy to believe that an Emperor had died.
Penny looked up into Joshua’s eyes as the small transport prepared to return to normal space. “The reports of your death, it seems, have been very much exaggerated,” she said, dryly. She had been surprised when Daria had insisted that Joshua ‘die’ in a faked shuttle accident — with enough force-grown tissue from them both to make the accident very convincing — but it made a certain kind of sense. Joshua, no more than any other mortal, couldn’t be in two places at once. “How does it feel to know that everyone believes that you are dead?”
Joshua shrugged, his eyes studying the barren bulkhead as if it was a distraction from more pressing matters. “It has much to recommend it,” he said, solemnly. She would have bet a great deal that he was thinking about his past… and how he’d come to fake his own death, just to ensure that he was free to serve the Empress. “We could just go onwards, out to the Rim, and hide from the universe.”
Penny stared at him. She’d served with Joshua, and under Joshua, ever since she had returned from Sector 117 to report on the growing rebellion… and the loss of Harmony to Colin’s forces. Joshua was that rarity, an Imperial Navy Admiral with a genuine sense of honour and tactics, and she’d blossomed under his tutelage. They’d fought at Morrison together, the first Imperial Navy unit to give the rebels a bloody nose, before effectively betraying the Empire and preventing the mass slaughter of the Gauls. They’d somehow managed to come out of the entire rebellion as heroes, despite having fought on the wrong side, and Penny was surprised that Joshua had just given that up, even for the Empress. They had slipped all the way over the line to outright treason.
She couldn’t say that she was really loyal to the Empire. She’d conceded, long ago, that if Colin had invited her to join his conspiracy, she would have accepted and attempted to knife Percival in the back. It wouldn’t have bothered her. Whatever loyalty she’d had before she’d been invited to join his personal staff — with some very personal duties — had faded away in long unpleasant nights and planning sessions where her advice was frequently ignored. The only thing that had kept her in service after her return to Earth had been Joshua… and his undoubted loyalty to the Empire, if not the Thousand Families. If Joshua had made himself Emperor, she would have followed him gladly, but instead…
Her gaze switched to the viewport. It was blanked out, preventing them from staring out into flicker-space, which was normally deeply disturbing to the human mind. Most people saw nothing, not even lights or strange energies, but there was nevertheless a very real sense of… something lurking out beyond the horizon. Human imagination had filled the weird dimension with ghouls and monsters, creatures that ate entire starships for dinner, but no one had ever proved their existence. It was just one of the tales spacers told when they were all alone in the dark.
She looked back at Joshua. “Do you want to leave?”
Joshua sighed. “I want to keep the Empire strong and stable and we need her to do that,” he said, finally. She knew who he meant. “We need to keep the Imperial Navy strong and we need to prevent the first-rank worlds from gaining the power to tear the Empire apart. We even need to stop Admiral Wilhelm before he takes Earth and burns out the core of the Empire.”
Penny frowned. She had wondered, in her darkest thoughts, if Daria was pulling Admiral Wilhelm’s strings as well. A war situation could be exploited with ease by anyone ruthless enough to do so, and Daria certainly didn’t lack for either courage or cunning. It was how she had survived so long. Penny remembered discussing the mysterious Daria, back when she had worked for Percival, but none of them had gotten near the truth. As far as they knew, the Empress had died somewhere in the vastness of interstellar space, even if no one had ever discovered a body.
She leaned forward. “Do you think that Admiral Wilhelm is working for her?”
“I doubt it,” Joshua said, after a moment. He sounded as if he had been distracted from some greater thought. “I knew him when he was a mere Commodore. I’m surprised that the Hohenzollern Clan decided to have him promoted. He always was an ambitious little bastard, with a wife who was as good as scheming as anyone else I have ever met. Sending her to Earth was a stroke of genius, on so many levels.”
He shook his head. “Why should he cooperate with her when he could claim the prize for himself?”
“I see,” Penny said. She didn’t understand all of the role Daria had assigned to Joshua — she had the oddest feeling that she was merely placing pieces in position for later use — but she could guess at the eventual plan. Joshua’s competence as a fleet commander was not in doubt. If Daria had been telling the truth, she even had a fleet for him to command. “What happens if he wins?”
“The Empire falls apart,” Joshua said, flatly. He gave her a tight bitter smile. “That cannot be allowed.”
The transport’s lights flickered once, warning them to brace themselves, before it returned to normal space. The display cleared and revealed a starscrape, with stars blazing endlessly in the darkness of space. When Penny had been younger, she’d been surprised to discover that stars didn’t twinkle in space, but the effect was caused by the light filtering through the atmosphere before it reached the surface. The transport tilted slightly, compensating for its arrival vector, before altering course and heading towards a set of running lights, blazing out in the distance.
Penny leaned forward as the transport moved closer to the massive bulk. It took on shape and form slowly, illuminated only by running lights and the occasional twinkle of maintenance drones, but it was easy to make out the shape of a General-class superdreadnaught. No one would ever give the designer of the starship class an award for good design, not when the idea had been to design an intimating ship rather than one that was aesthetically pleasing, but it did have a certain haughty grandeur.
“Four squadrons,” Joshua said, his voice unreadable. “There are four squadrons of superdreadnaughts here, enough to tip the balance against Admiral Wilhelm, if they were deployed with the Imperial Navy.”
Penny looked back at him. He had keyed the terminal and brought up a near-space display, using the handful of tuned-down IFF beacons to locate the different starships, waiting patiently near a space station that someone — and it was easy to guess who — had established, years ago. The level of forward planning was astonishing, let alone the sheer brazen nerve in stealing so much from Home Fleet, although she could see how it had been done. Corruption was so epidemic in the Imperial Navy that Daria, who’d commanded Home Fleet before making herself Empress, could have stolen enough war material to outfit a much larger fleet. She remembered, bitterly, just how badly Admiral D’Ammassa had stripped the Morrison Sector Fleet, just to earn himself billions of credits, and shivered. Joshua’s appointment as the Imperial Navy’s supreme commander, his reward for serving the Empress, would lead to the eradication of corruption.