“Chin up, young man,” Admiral Quintana said. He was known to be pushing a hundred, although his career had seemingly stalled after deciding he liked being an Admiral and refusing to climb any higher. Or perhaps it was an act and there was some reason why Admiral Quintana wasn’t being offered further promotion. The man had more connections than Brent-Cochrane had, certainly more than Percival had boasted. “The rebels will probably see us coming and flicker out, allowing us to take back the system and chase them back to the Beyond.”
Brent-Cochrane shrugged. He doubted it. Whatever the rebels had done at Camelot, it hadn’t been the act of cowards. What they’d done had to be a trick of some kind, although he was damned if he knew how they’d done it. If Percival had seen through it, if he’d had the nerve to avoid surrender… if it had been Percival who had surrendered. Brent-Cochrane’s opinion of his former commander wasn’t kind, yet he doubted that Percival would have surrendered, even on terms. Being a treacherous and small-minded man himself, he always thought of others as sharing the same unpleasant attributes.
But then… Admiral Quintana commanded no less than three squadrons of superdreadnaughts, twenty-seven ships, with over a hundred smaller ships backing them up. Whatever tricks the rebels had up their sleeves, it wouldn’t be enough to save them. Given time, Admiral Quintana could certainly crack Camelot’s defences and punch through to the world below, and then the rebels on the surface would have no choice, but to surrender or die. There was no way the rebels could win.
He rubbed the back of his head as Admiral Quintana turned to the helmsman. “Jon” — he seemed to address all of his subordinates by their first names, a paternalistic conceit that Brent-Cochrane found annoying as hell — “how long until we can make the final jump.”
“Twenty-seven minutes, Admiral,” Jon said. “The drive is currently powered down and is repowering now.”
“Good,” Admiral Quintana said. He leaned back in his command chair, projecting an easy confidence and a slightly fussy image. Brent-Cochrane wasn’t too impressed, although unlike Percival Admiral Quintana did at least have a working brain. But then… he’d been nothing more than an Administrator for the past ten years. Was he really up to commanding a fleet in combat? “Give me a countdown to the jump.”
It was a curious law within the Imperial Navy that the larger the starship, the less open space it seemed to have for the crew. The mass of the superdreadnaught Admiral Wilmslow housed literally thousands of tubes, nooks and crannies, all known to the men and women who served on her lower decks. There, they could use them to snatch a quick rest, set up an illicit still — drunkenness was one of the problems on the lower decks — or any one of a hundred dubious undertakings. No inspection team could find most of the hidden places without a map, alerting those who used them to pack up and hide. The smarter commanding officers tolerated such behaviour as long as it didn’t threaten the safety of the ship. Few argued; a crewman who showed up for duty drunk would be publically flogged for putting the entire crew in danger.
Senior Crewman Stanford Stoutjespyk opened a hidden compartment within the crossroads — the place where several tubes met, allowing the crawlers to stretch before climbing back into the tubes — and produced a counter-surveillance device. It would have upset Imperial Intelligence and the starship’s Security Officer to know that he had it, but Stanford had obtained it on the black market and kept it hidden within the massive ship. Nothing short of dismantling the entire vessel would have located it, or so he told himself. If he’d been caught, he would have been unceremoniously discharged from the service, at least in normal times. With a rebellion flaring out in the nearby sector, the chances were good that he would be charged with plotting mutiny and ejected from the nearest airlock.
He watched as his five guests came wriggling into the chamber. Three of them had the thin lanky forms of young crewmen, while one of them was clearly older and not in the best of physical shape. The fifth, a young woman who hid behind her friend, was not in any fit state to do her duty. She should never have been discharged from sickbay. Stanford’s eyes narrowed as he saw the scars on her face. Her only crime had been to refuse to have sex with a Blackshirt, for which she had been soundly beaten and then raped. It had been the incident that had pushed him into contemplating open mutiny.
Stanford had served in the Imperial Navy for over twenty years, rising to Senior Crewman and holding the position for just under seven years. His job included the duty of taking care of the younger crew, including preventing bullying rings and harassment from growing out of hand, a task he took seriously. The superdreadnaught had been a happy ship — well, as happy as a superdreadnaught ever got — until the mutiny in the nearby sector and the assignment of the Blackshirts to the ship. He’d always gotten on well with the Marines, but the Blackshirts were lazy, undisciplined and uncomfortably paranoid. The rape had merely been the final straw.
He’d picked his allies from crewmen and women he’d known for several years, men and women he trusted… even though there was a risk that there was an informer among them. He couldn’t see an Imperial Intelligence spy deciding to make himself unpopular among the crew, not when doing his job demanded having their confidence. It was a risk, but one he knew had to be taken. And if anyone was going to take it, it had to be him.
“Soon,” he said, making a show of checking his wristcom, “this ship and the fleet will jump into the Camelot System and proceed to crush the rebellion. Do any of you feel that that is a good thing?”
There was no answer. They’d all known that the Empire was all-powerful, that resistance was futile, until the rebel message had burst into the ICN and downloaded itself into every terminal in the starship’s home port. Public Information had issued a statement claiming that the rebel message was a hoax, one intended to cause unrest among the civilian population, but Stanford didn’t believe them. They didn’t understand the grapevine and how information was passed from crewman to crewman; when their commanding officer had picked up the word from Camelot, the crew had heard it too. The rebellion was real.
And that left them with a dilemma.
“I believe that if we defeat the rebels in the Camelot System, the rebellion will be scattered,” Stanford said. “I think that we have the firepower to do that, even if the rebels have more ships than our dear lords and masters believe. And if that happens, that will be the end of the rebellion and the end of our hopes for justice.”
He waved a hand towards the poor girl. “We tolerate such crap because we have no choice,” he added, “except we have a choice now. We have to act and seize this ship.”
“I agree with your point,” Senior Crewman Gonzalez said. “That leaves us with one problem.” He tapped his belt meaningfully. “We have no weapons, no suits of armour… and no plan. And even if we take this ship, what about the others in the fleet?”
Senior Crewman Akkad was looking directly at Stanford. “You have a plan, don’t you?”
“Yes,” Stanford said. He didn’t dare tell them that he had risked his life and liberty and contacted friends on the other ships, spreading the word as far as he dared. With one or more people on each ship plotting trouble, it should be possible to launch a mass mutiny without involving too many people at first. The only sign he’d had that things were going according to plan was the fact that the Blackshirts hadn’t already arrived to arrest him. “I have a plan.”
He smiled to himself. Ironically, if the superdreadnaught still carried its regulation two companies of Marines, it would have been impossible to take the ship. The Marines were trained for fighting onboard starships and probably would have been able to nip the rebellion in the bud. The Blackshirts, on the other hand, knew very little about operating on a superdreadnaught. They’d secured all of the main hatches, rightly enough, but they hadn’t given any thought to the connecting tubes and passageways. The mutineers would have the freedom of the ship from the moment the mutiny began.