His mouth broadened into a smile. “They’ll see us coming, of course,” he said. There weren’t that many targets worthy of his fleet. “They’ll know we’re on the way, but they won’t realise the true danger, until it’s too late.”
He straightened up and turned to face Keene. “Captain, contact the other ships and inform them that we will be flickering out within the hour for the first waypoint, and then proceeding directly to a waypoint only a few light years from Earth. Tell them that when we rendezvous there, I want to see their starships at the peak of their condition. I want to see trained crews and sparkling decks. I’ll confer with the other Admirals. You work on the Captains.”
“Aye, sir,” Keene said, rising to his feet.
“And tell them,” Admiral Wilhelm added, “to prepare for victory.”
He smiled as the hatch hissed closed behind Keene. The other Admirals would object, of course, but they would know that there was no choice. They had to make for Earth and, win or lose, they would make a grab for true power, or bring the entire system crashing down. The old order would never be restored.
Carola Wilhelm was starting to see why prison had been such an effective deterrent, at least for someone used to all kinds of mental simulation. Her cell was a small metal cube, three meters by three meters, with a bunk, a sink and a toilet, nothing else. It hadn’t taken her more than a minute to search the entire cell, revealing nothing beyond an uncomfortable pile of bedding and a single plastic cup. A quick check revealed that the cup was unbreakable and suicide, even if she had been contemplating it, wasn’t a possibility. The cell was impregnable by anything short of cutting lasers and perhaps fission blades… and somehow she had forgotten to bring them with her. She hadn’t been searched when she’d been escorted into her new home, but the closest thing she had to a weapon were her fingernails. Escape was impossible.
She lay on the bunk, staring at nothing. There was little in the cell to entertain her, or even to force her to use her mind, not even a possibility of escape. She counted sheep, or played games of chess in her head, but no amount of thinking could distract her from the fact she was bored. She had expected interrogators to come into the cell and start shouting questions, even if they didn’t break out the torture kits, or truth drugs, and she would almost have welcomed the distraction. Instead, she had been left in the cell… and she had no idea how long it had been since she had been a free woman. Going by meals, which arrived through a slit in the wall, she had been there for at least a week, but it was hard to tell. She didn’t even have a pen to make marks on the walls.
The door clicked, bringing her to instant attention. A thin light shone in from outside, revealing a tall slender form, very definitely female. Silhouetted, it was impossible to make out her features, but Carola knew who it was, who it had to be.
“Gwendolyn,” she said, surprised at how hoarse her voice had become. She normally talked throughout the day. “What a pleasure to see you here.”
Gwendolyn leaned forward. When she spoke, her voice was far more serious than Carola remembered. “There isn’t much time,” she whispered. “Getting into here took longer than I expected and the replacement guards will be on shift soon enough. Listen carefully. Your husband took Wakanda around a week ago, interstellar time.”
Carola blinked. “Wakanda?”
“A first-rank world, on the edge of Sector 19,” Gwendolyn said, flatly. Carola nodded, remembering. Wakanda had been so obscure that she hadn’t heard of it until Admiral Wilhelm had begun discussion war plans. It certainly hadn’t remained in her mind. Wakanda was an interstellar backwater. “We don’t know exactly what happened, but its fairly clear that he took the planet.”
“I see,” Carola said. She frowned, cursing her own mind. The stay in jail had taken some of the edge off her thoughts. It felt as if she were trying to think through cotton wool. “Where am I, anyway?”
Gwendolyn gave her an odd look. “Navajo Detention Centre,” she said, after a moment. Carola had worked out that she wasn’t on the moon, in the dreaded Luna Detention Centre, but she didn’t know any other detention centres on Earth. It had been a surprise to learn that they existed. “We need your help.”
“We?” Carola asked, for all the world as if she was a queen — no, an Empress — receiving a supplicant. “Who is this we, Gwendolyn?”
“Figures of influence who want the war to end,” Gwendolyn said. “We can get you free from this place and out to your husband, in exchange for you agreeing to mediate between us and him.”
“Indeed?” Carola asked. It was tempting to agree, but now that the war had started in earnest, hardly necessary. Gwendolyn and the rest of her kind, aristocrats all, didn’t understand that Admiral Wilhelm’s victory meant their end. “And why should I agree to that?”
“Because otherwise you might not survive the next few weeks,” Gwendolyn said. Carola, who had expected the threat, was unmoved. “You don’t understand what is happening here.”
“Don’t I?” Carola asked. It felt so good to unburden herself of scorn and hatred. “You’re rats deserting a sinking ship.”
Gwendolyn seemed amused. “Maybe,” she said, a thin smile playing around her lips, as if she knew something that Carola didn’t know. “Or maybe not. Will you help us?”
Carola smiled. “Sure,” she lied, smoothly. It would provide a few moments of amusement until the end of the war. “Why not?”
“Good,” Gwendolyn said. She glanced down at the timepiece on her wrist. “I’ll be back here soon enough. Goodbye.”
She left, the door clicking and locking behind her.
Carola smiled as she lay back on the bunk. The game was afoot again.
She was quite looking forward to it.
Chapter Thirty-Five
Commander Irving Roberts looked up from his report as the near-planet orbital monitor chirped a warning.
“Report,” he ordered, looking over at one of the tactical officers, operating her station and showing her inexperience with every movement. Schubert had been stripped of all, but a small cadre of experienced officers for the war and it showed. Roberts himself was the most experienced officer on the fortress and, if he hadn’t been suffering from a rare degenerative nerve disease that kept him trapped in a hoverchair, he would have been taken from the planet as well. Admiral Wilhelm had stripped the sector bare for his fleet.
The tactical officer’s voice showed her excitement. “I have a single Mars-class bulk freighter just flickering in from Cottbus,” she said, as the display automatically downgraded the threat level by a degree. A single Mars-class freighter might be used as a warship by a particularly poor or desperate pirate group, but no one in their right mind would try to take it up against a single gunboat, let alone a million-ton fortress. “They’re transmitting an IFF now, sir.”
“Very good,” Roberts said dryly, trying to keep his amusement out of his voice. It was heart-warming how hard the newly-trained crews tried to impress him, seeing him as a sophisticated officer and role model. They would have been less impressed if they had known that his handful of combat missions had all been against pirates, rather than rebels or alien threats. “Hail them and demand to know what they’re carrying and why they’re not being escorted.”