And the Theocracy is dying with them, Kat told herself. This is the end.
“Admiral, the majority of the freighters are offering to surrender,” Kitty said. “But they want ironclad guarantees of their personal survival.”
Kat frowned. That didn’t sound like the Theocracy. Pirates? Smugglers? Or simply the unreliable officers the enemy CO would normally have had executed if he hadn’t been so desperately short of manpower. ONI had concluded that the superdreadnoughts hadn’t had full crews, and Kat was inclined to agree with the intelligence. The Theocracy had been running short of experienced officers and crew long before the end of the war.
“Agree,” she said. If the enemy crews had conducted atrocities, they’d spend the rest of their lives on a penal colony. “But they are to cooperate.”
She glanced down at her display. “And send marines to secure the asteroid base as well as the freighters,” she added. “I want to know everything they’ve been doing.”
“Aye, Admiral.”
Kat allowed herself a thin smile. They’d won. There might be a handful of smaller ships out there, destroyers or frigates that had been hunting for targets while their base had been attacked, but they wouldn’t pose a long-term threat. Asher Dales and the other liberated worlds would be safe enough with a couple of destroyers each. The compromise King Hadrian and the Opposition had worked out wouldn’t please everyone, particularly the fire-eaters on either side, but the agreement would calm down the entire sector. Pirates, freebooters, and would-be empire-builders couldn’t take root when the planets were defended and spacelanes were regularly patrolled.
And many of the liberated worlds will become our allies, in time, she told herself. And new markets for our goods too.
“Order the communications ship to power up the StarCom,” she said. “I’ll need to send a message home as soon as possible.”
“Aye, Admiral.”
“And invite Sir William to join me,” Kat added. “We have a lot to discuss.”
She returned her attention to the display. The marines were going through the ships now, steadily arresting their crews and powering the vessels down until they could be searched from top to bottom. A number of crewmen were claiming to have been kidnapped and forced into servitude, but they’d still be kept under arrest and separated from the other prisoners until the truth could be established. Hopefully, Kat told herself, they wouldn’t have been forced to commit atrocities. They didn’t need that sort of stain on their record.
She studied the display, her eyes tracking the damaged ships. The Theocratic Navy was dead now, dead and gone. There would be people on Ahura Mazda who’d refuse to believe it, of course, and do their best to make sure that others didn’t believe it . . . It didn’t matter now. A handful of destroyers would be more than enough to keep control of the high orbitals and back up the provisional government. Who knew? Perhaps this final crushing defeat would be enough to convince the bitter-enders to give up.
Sure, she told herself. And pigs will fly.
Lieutenant Chas Potter tried hard not to feel nervous as he glided through the gash in the superdreadnought’s hull and dropped down to the deck. His combat suit flashed up a series of warnings, reminding him that there was neither atmosphere nor gravity. He wondered, wryly, if whoever had programmed the suit’s systems thought that marines were idiots. The gash in the hull was pretty clear proof, as far as he was concerned, that there was no atmosphere. The only real question was just how much of the ship had vented. There was a very good chance that there were compartments, deeper within the hull, that had remained pressurized.
He signaled for his squad to follow him, then headed down the corridor. The enemy ship was dark and creepy, illuminated only by his helmet’s lights. Bodies drifted through the shadows, some mutilated so badly that there was little hope of identifying them. Not, he supposed, that it mattered. The bodies would probably be sent plunging into the nearest star after they’d been logged, unless they happened to have living relatives on Ahura Mazda. He couldn’t help wondering just how many of those relatives would be keen to claim any connection to the dead men.
Probably none of them, since they were on the wrong side all along, he thought. He’d seen enough of enemy society to know that a connection to a defeated military unit wouldn’t be taken lightly. They’d be happier if they had a chance to claim the men died long before the end of the war.
“The CIC should be through here,” he said as the marines made their way deeper into the ship. The ship’s internal systems had apparently failed completely. Hatches that should have slammed closed at the merest hint of a hull breach had remained open, allowing the entire vessel to vent. He suspected deliberate sabotage. A failure on such a scale was largely unprecedented on a warship. The only compartment that had remained sealed was the CIC. “We’ll have to break through the hatch.”
His squad set the charges, then took cover as they detonated. The hatch exploded inwards, revealing a blackened compartment. Chas frowned, wondering, for an insane moment, if the ship’s consoles had actually exploded. That only happened in bad movies, where the scriptwriters thought that starship designers concealed explosive packs under consoles to make sure they exploded at the right moment. But the CIC had been completely destroyed.
“The blast went off inside the compartment,” Sergeant Smyth said. He was the squad’s explosives expert as well as Chas’s second-in-command. “And it was largely contained by the bulkheads.”
“Thus ensuring the complete destruction of everyone in the room,” Chas finished. The
