“I think the stories are reasonably believable,” she said, finally. “But we couldn’t have lost over two hundred superdreadnaughts in a single battle.”
Gaunt snorted. “How do you figure that?”
“There are barely three hundred superdreadnaughts in the entire Empire,” Adeeba said. “The Empire couldn’t assemble such a force, not now. There hasn’t been a fleet that large since the First Interstellar War.”
Frandsen coughed. “Interesting,” he said, with a wink. “But if there have been attacks this close to Earth, what do we do about them?”
Adeeba considered it. “Wait until we know more?”
Gaunt gave her a sharp look. “You don’t want to take the offensive?”
“We have no way of knowing just how badly our fleet was damaged at Morrison,” Adeeba said. “Sure, we can’t have lost ships we don’t have, but we don’t know the real story. All we can do is prepare… or risk losing everything if we strike too soon.”
“I wish I disagreed with you,” Gaunt said. She looked around the tiny apartment. “Are you all right, here?”
Adeeba shrugged. There was barely enough room to swing a cat, but the neighbours were quiet — Earth’s inhabitants tended to ignore their fellows, unless they looked particularly weak — and there would be plenty of warning if the security forces caught on. Besides, it let her think about their planned operations in peace.
“It could be better,” Frandsen said.
“Worse too,” Gaunt commented. “It is actually larger than a holding cell.”
She gave him a thin-lipped smirk, then continued. “We may need you to help us train for operations in orbit,” she added. “Can we count on you?”
“Of course,” Frandsen said. “What do you have in mind?”
Gaunt smiled, showing her teeth. “Wait and see.”
Chapter Thirty-Two
“Jump completed, sir.”
Colin nodded, grimly. It had taken longer than he’d expected to repair his fleet, something that had left him feeling increasingly antsy as the days wore on. His most optimistic calculations suggested that it would take at least two months for the Morrison Fleet to repair its own damage, but it was quite likely that Admiral Wachter wouldn’t wait to go on the offensive. He, as much as Colin himself, understood the value of keeping the enemy off balance
“Take us towards the planet,” he ordered. “But do not take us into the gravity shadow.”
Tabard had been settled in the same year as Morrison itself, but it had never really taken off into a fully-developed world. The files suggested that the system’s lack of a gas giant had muted investment, even though there were gas giants only a handful of light years away. By now, there were only a handful of facilities in the system, all belonging to minor families or the planetary government. Oddly, Tabard’s sheer lack of importance ensured that the planet had a degree of independence others would never be able to enjoy.
Unless one happens to renounce technology altogether, Colin thought, as the squadron shook itself down into formation. Then you would have nothing the Empire wanted, apart from a potential dumping ground for criminals.
He looked down at the reports from his ships, grimly. Seven weeks of intensive work had repaired most of the damage, but some of the ships really needed some time in a proper shipyard. The engineers had warned him that they couldn’t be overstressed or their makeshift repairs would collapse, something that Colin had found darkly amusing. People didn’t go to wars to relax and nor did their starships. The best he could do was keep the damaged ships in the rear.
“Picking up a courier boat,” the sensor officer reported. “She jumped out; destination unknown.”
Probably Morrison, Colin thought. Admiral Wachter would know that Colin and a dozen rebel starships were attacking the system within moments, assuming that all went according to plan. If he took the bait… Tabard was barely four light years from Morrison. His response force could be on the way within minutes. And if the enemy didn’t take the bait, Colin could at least wreck the system’s facilities in the course of testing his repaired ships.
“Transmit the standard warning,” he ordered. “Tell them to evacuate their facilities or die on them.”
The planet came closer in the display, barely defended and utterly vulnerable to anything larger than a destroyer. Colin wasn’t surprised — and a little relieved — to see the orbital installations hastily launching lifepods, most of them rapidly dropping out of orbit and heading down towards the surface. The system CO had probably taken one look at the nine superdreadnaughts on his display and crapped himself. Maybe he’d be executed for not even firing a shot at the rebels, but at least he’d preserved his people’s lives.
Alarms shrilled as new icons flickered into the system. “Contact, sir,” the tactical officer said. “Two squadrons of superdreadnaughts and escorts; I say again, two squadrons of superdreadnaughts and escorts.”
“Good,” Colin said. He glanced at the status display — the flicker drives were powered up, ready to jump — then smiled. “Alter course towards them.”
He didn’t expect to win — he didn’t even intend to stay in the system long enough to fire a second barrage — but it didn’t matter. All that mattered was giving the enemy a fright… and accomplishing the second half of the plan.
“Send a signal to Seeker,” he added. “She is to follow her special instructions, then rejoin the fleet later.”
The spy had worked hard over the past seven weeks, much to her private annoyance. Her conditioning kept pushing her to sabotage the ship, forcing her to believe that she could get away with it without being detected. Maybe, on an Imperial Navy starship, it would have been right, but the rebels were far better trained than the average naval crew. They checked and rechecked everything, catching even the tiniest of mistakes. There was no way that outright sabotage could have gone unnoticed. Besides, the best she could do was blow up the superdreadnaught. The rebels would still have the rest of their fleet.
She had tried to distract the conditioning, which nagged at her relentlessly, by gathering data on the rebel fleet. The damage control officers were allowed to access all kinds of information, even material that would have been denied to them under normal circumstances. She’d taken it, stored it in her datapad and told herself that she was doing good. But, now the Imperial Navy had met them at Tabard, she had to send them the data. There was no way her conditioning would allow her to delay a moment longer.
Obeying the orders from her supervisor, she clambered into the tubes and crawled towards the access point. There were few crewmen who really liked the tubes; she’d worked hard to develop a reputation as someone who could navigate them with ease. It ensured that her supervisor often sent her out on her own, without a partner who would notice her activities and alert the Marines. The rebels, thankfully, believed in allocating people to the sections where they could do the most good. Ironically, it should have worked in their favour, but now it worked against them.
She reached the access point, spliced in the datapad and went to work.
Colin smiled to himself as a message blinked up in his personal display. The spy had gone to work, precisely as anticipated, and was trying to upload information to the enemy. Hopefully, the spy hadn’t noticed that most of the information the newcomers had been allowed to access was fake and badly understated, but it wouldn’t matter. The important thing was that they now knew where they could find the spy.