“Oh,” Penny said. She decided she might as well ask. “Did Percival surrender then?”
“Someone did,” Dave confirmed. “The last I heard before I started flying back towards Earth was that the fortresses were surrendering and that Marines were landing on the stations. Percival may have surrendered or someone with more than two brain cells to rub together might have removed him and surrendered in his place. And no, I don’t know if he is still alive. The leader of the rebellion has a bloody great grudge against him.”
Penny shrugged. There would be time, later, to consider her feelings… but for the moment, all she really felt was relief. Percival had dominated her life for years, yet now it was over, leaving nothing apart from fading memories. The time she’d spent serving him — in all possible senses — might have been wasted, but it could have been much worse. Or perhaps, if events had been a little different, she would have gone over to the rebellion.
“But that doesn’t matter,” Dave continued, unaware of her inner thoughts. “As nice as it would be to drag Admiral Percival before the Thousand Families in chains, it isn’t an option that is open to us at the moment. Our priority is to alert Earth to the scale of the danger.”
Penny looked up, sharply. “We’re on our way to alert Earth?”
“Of course,” Dave said. He grinned at her expression. “This ship may be small, but she has a military-grade drive and top-of-the-line computers. We can make it all the way to Earth without stopping along the way. I admit the food and drink facilities are not all that they could be, but that shouldn’t a problem for you. They’re better than military-issue food processors.”
“All the way to Earth,” Penny repeated, numbly. It took a starship around six months to make the trip from Camelot to Earth, although a small fast design with a military-grade drive might be able to shave a month off the journey. She wouldn’t have wanted to risk it. Burning out a flicker drive would leave a craft stranded in interstellar space, beyond any hope of rescue. “Why do you want me there?”
“So you can testify about the rebellion,” Dave said, patiently. He gave her what looked like a half-hearted apologetic look. “I should warn you that the computers on this ship are programmed to work only with me or another officer with Omega-level clearance. I don’t know what will happen to you at the far end, but if you behave yourself on the trip, I will…”
Penny snorted. “Put in a good word for me?”
“Something like that,” Dave agreed. “You do realise that most of the people who might want to blame you for this disaster are either dead or in rebel custody? You have a good chance at coming out of this smelling like a rose.”
Penny stared at him and then burst out laughing. “You have to be joking,” she said, trying to hold down a choking fit. “Do you know what Imperial Intelligence will do to me?”
“I’m sorry,” Dave said. “Did I say that I worked for Imperial Intelligence?”
Penny blinked. “Are you saying that you’re not working for Imperial Intelligence?”
“I had training from them and little else,” Dave said. He pursed his lips, thinking carefully. “Think of me… as one of the Household Troops. I work specifically for a single Family in the ongoing struggle for supremacy. My… employers were concerned about the Roosevelt Family’s obsessive interest in this sector and dispatched me to keep an eye on them. And you know the rest.”
He shrugged. “This ship doesn’t have a stasis pod and I don’t trust the medical computers far enough to risk sedating you for that long,” he added. “You can behave yourself and have the freedom of the ship or I can lock you into one of the cabins and leave you there until we reach Earth. Should you somehow manage to kill me… well; the ship will still take you to Earth. Have fun explaining my mangled remains.”
Penny pretended to consider it. Assuming he was telling the truth, escape would be impossible even if she did kill or incapacitate her jailor. She wasn’t a computer expert and even if she had been, reprogramming a starship while in transit was a good way to commit suicide. And besides, if he was telling the truth about working for a different Family, perhaps she could make the contacts to save herself from carrying the can for Percival’s defeat.
The thought of going to Earth as a very junior officer, with neither connections nor patron, was terrifying, yet there seemed to be no choice. And the thought of killing Dave seemed impossible. If she tried to kill him — and she was sure now that he had some commando-level training, something she lacked — he would simply imprison her in a tiny cabin for six months. She’d been in superdreadnaughts and cruisers with tiny cabins and compartments for the low-ranking officers, yet she’d never been permanently confined to such a small space. It would drive her mad. And besides, perhaps Dave would be pretty good company. He could hardly be worse than Percival.
“I understand,” she said, finally. “Just tell me one thing. Am I a prisoner?”
Dave did her the honour of considering the question seriously. “I do not believe that you are a prisoner,” he said finally, “but honesty compels me to admit that I cannot release you, or drop you off somewhere apart from Earth.” He grinned at her and Penny found herself wondering why she’d thought he wasn’t particularly handsome. “If you want, consider yourself to be on parole, with me as your supervising officer. I don’t think you’ll get lost on this ship.”
Penny chuckled, feeling the tension slowly starting to drain out of her. It would get worse, she knew, once they reached Earth, but for the moment she was safe. A starship, even a small commercial-issue design, would have an extensive library of entertainment and she could catch up with all the news she’d missed, or the reading Percival had never left her with time to do.
“I shall,” she said, with a wicked smile of her own. Despite her worries she was more than a little fascinated by his job. She had known that there was conflict — subtle rather than violent — between the different Families, yet she had seen little of it. “What Family do you work for?”
“One of the greatest,” Dave said. He refused to be drawn any further, reminding her that what she didn’t know she couldn’t tell. Penny wanted to be offended by his remarks, but he was right — and besides, she didn’t want to make him clam up any further. “Do you want to know the real nightmare?”
“Of course,” Penny said. Her grandma had once told her to make sure that she learned everything she could, because information was the weapon of the weak. Her grandma, the matriarch of her family, had been a font of good advice, even if she had called Penny a whore and worse after she had found out what she was doing for Percival. The Quick family had been commoners, poor compared to even the lowest member of the Thousand Families, but they prided themselves upon honesty and decency. “What can scare the Thousand Families?”
“Opening a planet for settlement, at least the kind of settlement that might pay off its debts, costs a vast amount of money,” Dave said. “It’s growing harder and harder for anyone, even the greatest of the Families, to concentrate that level of wealth for a single purpose. The Empire just sucks up money, from servicing debts to paying for the Civil Service and the Imperial Navy. Few can afford to make the investments needed to create new sources of wealth and even when they do create new sources the money is drained away into the Civil Service. The Empire is bleeding itself dry.”
Penny remembered her own speculations about the Roosevelt Family and felt her blood run cold. If the Roosevelt Family held the entire sector, they — and they alone — would be able to tap it for resources. Sector 117 would feed the Family and nourish it, provided that the Family lasted long enough for the wealth to start flowing. No wonder Stacy Roosevelt had been so keen to terminate the rebellion — and Jackson’s Folly — so quickly. The longer they delayed, the greater the chance of someone else sticking a wedge into the sector and using it to share in the loot.