The rebel commander apparently agreed. For a moment, his missile tubes seemed to fall silent — and then his fleet simply flickered out, leaving the defenders in possession of the system. Penny hesitated, wondering if that was the end… and then the END EX signal blinked up on the display. The crew surprised her by cheering, although she had to admit it shouldn’t have been a surprise. It was the first victory they’d won against any opponent, simulated or not.
“Well done, everyone,” Wachter said. He looked over at Penny. “Have that broadcast to every ship in the fleet.”
“Yes, sir,” Penny said. Percival wouldn’t have bothered… but Wachter wasn’t Percival. “Do you want a full breakdown of the results?”
“Later, perhaps,” Wachter said. He stood up. “I want you to join me in my office. We have a great deal to discuss.”
Penny couldn’t help feeling nervous as she followed him off the tactical deck and down to the Admiral’s compartment. If Percival had wanted her to join him in his office, she would have known what that meant. But Wachter wasn’t Percival. All he did, as soon as they were inside the compartment, was wave her to a chair and pour two glasses of a red-coloured wine.
“Mars Brandy,” he said, as he passed her a glass. “A hundred years old, according to the seller. I was saving it for a special occasion.”
Penny took a sip, then almost choked. Mars produced a small number of alcoholic drinks, but most of them were very expensive as well as heavily alcoholic. Something in the genetic modifications offered to the original settlers had given them a strong head for drink as well as resistance to muscular decay. But back then they hadn’t known as much as they did now about modifying the baseline human body.
“Be careful,” Wachter advised. “It can be strong if you’re not ready for it.”
“Tastes smoky,” Penny decided, after another sip. Percival had never wasted the good stuff on her, even though his servants had spent thousands of credits each month filling his wine cabinet. “What are we celebrating?”
“The fleet didn’t do too badly today,” Wachter said. “We might just be able to stand the rebels off from the planet. If we get lucky. If the rebels don’t come up with any new surprises.”
“Yes, sir,” Penny said. “They’re still going to come here, of course.”
Wachter nodded. Nothing they’d done had changed the basic equation. Morrison was in a perfect position to impede the rebel advance, raid their supply lines and generally make a nuisance of itself. The rebels would have to reduce the base, at the very least, and they’d certainly want to capture it.
But it would still take months before they could deem themselves ready for attack. The fleet was one problem, yet the orbital defences were just as badly decayed. Given time, they too could be fixed, but Wachter had made the decision to concentrate on the starships. If nothing else, he’d confided to Penny, they could fall back on Earth, destroying the base’s facilities as they left. The decision wouldn’t make him popular, but it would be the right one to take.
“We do need to delay them, if possible,” Wachter said. “Have you organised the ambush squadrons?”
“Yes, sir,” Penny said. “They’re ready to depart as soon as you give the order.”
She saw hesitation on Wachter’s face and understood. They’d worked hard to train and retrain crewmen, but sending so many ships away from Morrison meant that they would effectively be on their own. What if there were mutineers among their ranks? Or what if some of the crew were planning to desert? It was a persistent problem, one that had only grown worse since the rebellion had begun. Not everyone had joined the Imperial Navy expecting to have to fight.
Idiots, she thought. But to anyone stationed at Morrison, she suspected, it would have seemed a safe bet. Until the rebellion had begun, of course.
“Remind their commanders that I don’t want useless heroics,” Wachter ordered. “We don’t need to lose ships, no matter how gloriously. If the odds are too highly against success, Penny, I don’t expect them to engage. Make that clear to everyone.”
Penny nodded, although she had her doubts. The Imperial Navy was far too used to backseat driving from officers and bureaucrats back on Earth, even though it took weeks to get a message from Morrison to Earth and back again. An officer who hadn’t been there might claim that the battle could have been won… and accuse the officer who had been there of cowardice. It often seemed better, she thought, to have the glorious disaster rather than living long enough to face the sceptics from Earth.
“And I want them to avoid atrocities,” he added. “Any rebels taken into custody are to be treated under the standard Gulliver Protocols.”
“Sir?”
“No atrocities,” Wachter said. “Anyone involved in prisoner abuse will be shot. Make that clear to them too.”
Penny swallowed. The Gulliver Protocols were so old that no one had bothered to even pay lip service to them in centuries. They dated all the way back to the days before the formation of the Empire, when there were dozens of smaller human political entities waging a constant battle for supremacy that had been ended by the First Interstellar War. The Imperial Navy had never honoured the protocols, not when fighting humans and certainly not when fighting aliens. She wasn’t even sure she knew what they said.
She understood Wachter’s logic. People would fight to the death if they thought there was no way out, no matter how hopeless the situation seemed. But the Thousand Families would want blood; worse, they would want to make horrific examples of every rebel they could catch, just to dissuade others from following in their footsteps. Wachter could lose his position over trying to treat captured rebels decently.
If it had been Percival, she would have watched gleefully as Percival was stripped of rank and status, then shipped to a mining colony safely out of the way. But Wachter wasn’t Percival…
“Sir,” she said, carefully, “there will be objections…”
“I was charged with winning the war,” Wachter pointed out, smoothly. “Treating prisoners decently will certainly help win the war before the entire Empire comes apart.”
“Yes, sir,” Penny said. Percival would probably have slapped her by now, just for daring to raise objections. “Sir… this could cost you your position.”
Wachter surprised her by laughing. “They could, if they wish,” he said. “And if they tell me to go back home and stay there, I will do it. But as long as I am in command, I will not tolerate any atrocities carried out against helpless victims. We can offer the rebels transit to a penal world rather than simply executing them on sight.”
“There are penal worlds to which death would seem preferable,” Penny said. Percival had threatened her with one, once. He’d claimed that something in the atmosphere destroyed intelligence, leaving behind mindless animals where humans had once been. It had seemed amusing at the time, Penny remembered with a flicker of shame. Now… it was no longer funny. “Sir…”
“Don’t worry about me, really,” Wachter said. He finished his glass and placed it neatly on the table, then picked up a datapad and passed it to her. “I’d like you to take a look at this.”
Penny tapped the screen, activating the pad. It lit up, showing her an essay entitled False Gravimetric Pulses and Flicker Fields. Penny considered herself something of an expert in working her way through long-winded intelligence reports, but the scientific terms in the report meant nothing to her. Irritated, she scrolled forward until she reached the summery and scowled. It didn’t seem to be very practical at all.