“I’m not surprised,” Peter said. There was so much confusion on the datanet that everyone had to be a little unsure of themselves. Which actions were legal and which were outright treason? His lips trembled at the thought, even though it wasn’t really funny. Whoever lost would be the traitors, of course. “Do we have any updates from the orbital fortresses?”
“Five of them appear to be firmly under Admiral Fisher’s control,” Duke Rudbek said, after a moment. “I’m not so sure about the others. One of them appears to have dropped out of the datanet entirely.”
Peter nodded. Admiral Fisher had been one of his father’s clients, although ties had weakened somewhat in the year since his father’s death. He was a good, and more importantly reliable, man—a man who understood the importance of keeping Planetary Defense separate from the Royal Navy. And he knew what the opposition had been trying to achieve.
Another hour went past, slowly. The king’s household troops fought bravely, once the reinforcements arrived, but they were badly outnumbered. A handful surrendered, but the remainder fought to the death. Peter couldn’t help wondering what the king had done to deserve such loyalty, although it hardly mattered. Perhaps the troops were colonials, or perhaps they expected to be executed if they were captured. He found it hard to care.
“Parliament is secure,” Duke Rudbek said. Peter’s datapad bleeped, confirming that the jamming field was gone. “And troops are on their way to the palace.”
Peter scanned the reports that had started to flow into his datapad. Shootings, bombings, entire installations going off the air . . . Some of the most alarming reports had been updated before he saw them, suggesting that they’d been based on false data. But even the handful of confirmed reports were terrifying. The entire planet appeared to be at war with itself.
He scowled. Two of the orbital battlestations had dropped out of the datanet, while the datanet itself was starting to have problems. Someone had loaded chaos software into the datacores. Peter was no computer expert, but even he knew how dangerous chaos software could be. It mutated so rapidly that it could turn on its programmer before he had a chance to realize that something had gone wrong. The king had to be desperate.
“We have to find the king,” he said as a string of new reports scrolled across his screen. “If we can capture him, we can put an end to this madness.”
“Yes,” Duke Rudbek said. “But where is he?”
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
TYRE
“Admiral,” Kitty snapped, “we just picked up a FLASH alert from the planetary defenses.”
Kat looked up. “Sound red alert,” she ordered. Alarms howled through the ship. A FLASH alert meant that the system was about to come under attack. It had never been used in drills. “Bring the fleet to battlestations!”
She stood as the display rapidly updated, alerts popping up all over the high orbitals. She’d expected to see vortexes opening and enemy starships pouring out, but instead all hell seemed to have broken loose in orbit. A number of orbital battlestations had dropped out of the datanet, and the datanet itself was flickering, as if it was on the verge of failing completely. She couldn’t believe it. The datanet had so many redundancies built into it that nothing short of complete destruction of the entire network would silence it.
“Battlestation Thirteen reported armed men in the CIC, then went silent,” Kitty said as she and her crew struggled to make sense of the torrent of information pouring into the sensors. “Battlestation Nineteen made a similar report, but insisted that all the men were killed before they could do serious damage.”
She looked up, her face pale. “Home Fleet . . . Admiral, Home Fleet also reported men attempting to take control of the ships.”
Kat felt her blood run cold. “Order our squadron put into lockdown,” she ordered. “Full internal security protocols. And get me a direct link to the planet!”
“All links to the planet are down,” Kitty reported. “I can’t get a secure link to anyone.” An image popped up in front of her. “A state of emergency, another one, has been declared over the whole planet,” she added. “Global News is reporting that the king ordered the arrest of a number of aristocrats for high treason, but his men were met with armed resistance.”
Kat sucked in her breath. Had the king discovered Admiral Morrison’s backer? Or . . . had something gone spectacularly wrong? The tension had been so high that pundits had been openly predicting civil war. There were quite a few factions, now, that would have an excellent motive to try to capture both the orbital defenses and Home Fleet. Someone was clearly trying to seize unfettered control of the military.
And the hell of it is that I don’t know who’s doing what, she thought as more reports flowed into the network. A third of them contradicted another third, while the remainder were clearly untrue. Tyre City had not been nuked. Her sensors would have detected the blast even from their distance. What is going on?
“Two of the battlestations are bringing up their weapons, Admiral,” Kitty reported. “They’re sweeping space for targets.”
“Order the fleet to prepare to move out of range,” Kat said. They were outside conventional missile range, but she was sure the orbital battlestations would have extended-range missiles. “And try to figure out what’s happening to Home Fleet.”
She sucked in her breath as she studied the display. Home Fleet’s formation was starting to look ragged. Some ships were remaining in the datanet, sharing information with the rest of the fleet, but others had dropped out completely. She wondered, morbidly, just who was trying to mount a coup and who was trying to mount the counter-coup. Someone could easily have seen a cough as a signal to start something violent. God knew that had happened before. How much
