Authors: Christopher Nuttall
... Or the Governor might wind up making the choices for them.
***
Sandy had watched in horror as portals opened and disgorged a small squadron of Colonial Militia starships. There seemed to be no way to avoid a direct confrontation, one where she would have to fire on her fellows or try to sabotage the starship’s systems, risking certain death if – when – she was caught. But instead the CO made the decision to retreat, leaving the remainder of the system alone. She barely managed to hide
her relief as she worked her console, trying to manipulate the system.
One aspect of Federation Navy hardware that was rarely found in commercial systems was just how closely everything was linked together. At a pinch, systems intended to monitor the health of the crew could be pressed into service as life support monitors. Given enough time, Sandy knew, she could set up a subroutine that transmitted messages automatically and then wiped them from the records, but she hadn't enough time to be sure the message would remain undetected. Instead, she sent a brief message in a high-security militia cipher and prayed that she could remove all traces of its existence before the raiders ran a security check. If they’d been watching ...
... But her collar didn't activate, killing her or stunning her. Nothing happened.
Instead, the portals opened up in front of the ships, allowing them to escape into hyperspace. Sandy watched, beyond being surprised, as they dropped a static bomb in their wake, then headed out on a course that seemed largely random. Which it might well be, she reminded herself. The raiders would normally be safe from detection, but there would be military warships racing towards the system and one of them might well catch a sniff of the raiders and give chase. They wouldn't want to set out on a direct-line course towards their base.
“Well done,” her supervisor said, as the section stood down from battle stations. “Get some rest. We’ll discuss your performance tomorrow.”
Sandy nodded and left with the rest of the crew. Thankfully, she’d been moved to a new set of sleeping quarters, ones quite close to a computer node. With a little bit of luck, she could get into the system, erase all traces of the message and then get out again before anyone noticed. Because if she couldn’t ...
She knew she was no coward. She’d joined the military and stayed in when she could have resigned, after the end of the war. But this was different. The hammer could be lowered at any time, without a hope of resistance. She touched the collar and shuddered, slightly. As far as she could tell, there was no way to get rid of it without the proper code. None of her half-baked schemes for removal seemed likely to succeed.
I hope Jess finds something
, she thought, as she reached the shared cabin.
Because otherwise we’re screwed
.
***
As the shuttle circled around, President Coffey surveyed the remains of the spaceport with a growing sense of absolute displeasure. There was little left of the once-proud structure; there was a giant crater where the main buildings had once been, rendering the spaceport effectively useless. Billons of credits up in smoke, just like the orbital battlestation he'd been told guaranteed his world’s safety. It was gone now, along with the sense of security. They were naked against a hostile universe.
The only consolation was that the spaceport’s defenders had clearly torn the attackers a new asshole or two. A handful of wrecked shuttles lay on the ground, shot out of the sky before they’d had a chance to realise that they were under attack. The Colonial Militia didn't have the endless teams of specialists the Federation Navy could deploy, but a handful of engineers and soldiers were crawling over the wreckage, looking for clues. Coffey hoped they’d find something, yet he wasn't hopeful. Anyone prepared to piss off the Colonial Militia to this extent had to be utterly paranoid about hiding their origins, let alone their starships and bases.
“Take us back to the city,” he ordered.
The pilot nodded and obeyed, pulling the shuttle around so Coffey could see the smoke rising from the distance. Thankfully, there had been no indiscriminate bombardment, but what there had been had been quite bad enough. Over two thousand civilians dead, mostly for being too close to military targets. Coffey wondered, bitterly, if they’d even
heard
the warnings. Or if they’d been confident that the planet was secure until it was far too late.
He looked up towards the darkening sky and scowled. Twenty-one Colonial Militia starships were in orbit now, but he knew that the raiders wouldn’t bother to return. Why would they when they’d hit their targets and withdrawn in good order? They’d flattened the alien camp with dirty warheads – the one survey team he’d dispatched towards the camp had reported that it would be weeks before it could be approached without proper protective gear – and looted the spaceport. What else did they want?
The shuttle dropped down and landed next to the schoolhouse, where the surviving members of the government had assembled, along with their senior military leaders. It had shocked Coffey to realise that the senior survivor was a mere Captain; the others had died, either in orbit or during the fighting on the ground. Captain Bester had been lucky; he’d been in one of the emergency fallback locations, which had been completely unknown to the raiders. That secret, too, had never been shared with anyone off-world.
“Mr. President,” the Vice President
pro tem
announced. She’d been a junior congresswomen,
seventeenth
in the line of succession. Now, she was Vice President ... and utterly unqualified for the post. “Welcome back.”
Coffey nodded brusquely, then sat down at the head of the table. Someone had doodled on it, he noted, as the others sat too. Half of them were still stunned, either at the devastation or at their sudden elevation to power. Even Captain Bester looked exhausted. Yesterday, he'd been a junior supply officer. Now, he was effectively the CO of what remained of the planet’s military.
“We have completed our preliminary investigation,” Bester said. He was a surprisingly fat man for a military officer, but supply officers weren't held to the same standards as combat troops. “We now know how the enemy took out the orbital battlestation. They used security codes from Fairfax to dock with the station, then triggered an antimatter mine. It was a major security breach, sir.”
“I thought those bloody stations were supposed to be damn near indestructible,” the President snapped, angrily. “Or was that just bad propaganda?”
“The station wasn't designed to contain an antimatter explosion inside its shields,” Bester admitted. “Normally, no ship would be allowed to dock without verification of her
bona fides
. In this case, they used codes from Fairfax to bypass the standard security checks.”
“Which leads us back to Fairfax,” Coffey said. “The leak came from there?”
“No one else should have had the codes,” Bester said. He swallowed, nervously. “Someone on the planet must have been bribed or threatened into handing them over.”
“Change all of our codes,” Coffey ordered. It might well be locking the barn door after the horse had been stolen, but they had to learn from the whole disaster. “I want absolutely
nothing
shared with Fairfax until we have this damn leak plugged, understand?”
He glared from face to face, thinking hard. It had to be a leak; the chances of Fairfax
authorising
the attack were less than zero. They'd have to be completely out of their minds, particularly as such an attack could shatter the Bottleneck Republic. But he didn't know who he could trust any longer. If there was such a high-placed leak ...
“I will speak to Representative Asimov personally,” he continued. “He will demand answers for us – and we will get them - or we will look to our own protection.”
“Mr. President,” Bester said carefully, “our best case estimate gives us ten years before we can replace everything that was lost. Right now, we probably could not afford to replace the battlestation without going into serious debt. And
that
assumes that we don’t get into a trade war with the rest of the republic.”
Coffey scowled. Xenophon had gone, within hours, from being an important world in the republic to being a charity case. Bester was right; the last thing they needed was a political tussle that could affect their ability to rebuild. But he was damned if he was trusting Fairfax with anything that impacted on his planet's security, not any longer. Their leak had cost thousands of lives. God alone knew how many more would be lost in the coming weeks and months.
“I know,” he said, “but we have no choice. Right now, we don’t know who we can trust.”
General Gustav Mannerheim knew that he was an uncomplicated soul. It had all seemed so simple during the war; stop the Dragons or the Dragons would crush the colonies and turn any survivors into slaves. And the Dragons themselves had never been particularly subtle, or inclined to sneak around; they’d just charged at their targets and tried to hammer them flat. Why not? They’d always had the biggest hammer in space, at least until the TFN had taught them that there were bigger powers out there. They hadn't
needed
to be subtle.
His life had been shaped by the war. Starship commander, squadron commander, fleet commander ... and finally supreme military officer in the Bottleneck Republic. It had made a stranger of his daughter, particularly when he’d cast such a long shadow that she’d transferred to the Federation Navy to make a career of her own; it had cost him his first wife when she’d died while he'd been fighting on the front lines. And, along the way, it had cost him thousands of brave men who had died facing the Dragons. There were days, he admitted silently, that he’d considered putting his pistol to his head and ending his life. Why not leave the troubles of peace to the next generation?
But he knew his duty. Indeed, he had nothing else left. The farm was well-maintained without him, his daughter had her own career ... it was a shame that she hadn't managed to produce grandchildren yet, but she had decades of life ahead of her. Maybe one day she would meet a worthy man – if such a paragon existed – and get married, then pregnant. But until then ...
He shook his head and turned back to the chamber. It was crammed with representatives, one from each member world of the Bottleneck Republic, and reporters, half of them from the Federation. The General couldn't help eying them with some suspicion, noting just how warily the politicians treated the Federation’s media. By the time their dispatches reached Earth, they would have been reprocessed into something that suited the media’s institutional prejudices or its backers political aims. Any relationship to the truth would be coincidental at best.
“There was a leak on Fairfax,” Representative Asimov was shouting. “Someone here betrayed our world to the enemy!”
There was a roar of agreement from around a third of the representatives. The General had seen the report and knew that Asimov was almost certainly correct, even though he had no idea who had chosen to leak information to the raiders. It had to be someone in a very high position, but all such individuals were known and trusted by him. But that wouldn't impress anyone, nor should it. The security precautions had proven alarmingly weak.
“Nor is this the only leak,” another representative bellowed. “Who told the raiders where the Governor’s ships were going?”
That
was another mystery, the General knew. No one on Fairfax, apart from the Governor’s staff, had known where the ships and their supplies were headed. He could believe that the Governor might have leaked information intended to make her look good, but why would she send the information to the raiders rather than the media? Hell, why not send it to the media and let the raiders pick it up from them? It simply didn't make sense!
“The militia needs to be redeployed,” Representative Asimov said, angrily. “Or we need to call for help from the Federation.”
The General kept his face impassive, even as he winced inwardly. Every day, the Governor or one of her lapdogs asked why the colonies – she never called them the Bottleneck Republic – spent so much of their money on the military. She pointed out, correctly, that even the cheapest warship cost more than the farming equipment they needed to produce food and the freighters they used to move the food from planet to planet. But the scars of the war ran deep, too deep for any outsider to understand. The Bottleneck Republic would sooner bankrupt itself building up a military than see their work destroyed by a second war.