“We’ll be back at Commonwealth House in ten minutes,” the pilot said. “Our flight path is already being cleared.”
Kat sat upright and peered out of the window as the aircar picked up speed, heading directly towards the city. It was illuminated by bright sunlight, but the glowing buildings that had been featured in enemy propaganda were long gone. They’d been replaced by tawdry constructions that fell down if someone coughed, barracks put together from prefabricated components, and layer after layer of makeshift slums. She didn’t envy the marines who had to patrol the district. Their technological advantages shrank rapidly in such an environment. Nor did she envy the people who had to live there. She’d been on stage-one planets with better accommodations for the poor and dispossessed.
But most stage-one planets have no trouble finding work for their people, she reminded herself, as the aircar banked over the city and settled down on the landing pad. Here, there’s no work for anyone.
Kat shook her head, despondently. The facts and figures she’d seen simply couldn’t convey the sheer level of hopelessness gripping Ahura Mazda. The vast majority of the population had no work and no prospect of getting any work, save perhaps for the lowliest of jobs. She’d seriously considered forcing people to work or starve—street cleaning and rubbish collection was terminally undermanned—but the Refugee Commission had convinced her superiors to overrule her. It didn’t look as though most of the locals wanted to go back to work. The few who did were often attacked by their former fellows . . .
She stood as the aircar landed neatly, clambered out, and made her way to the briefing room. A handful of armed marines were on guard, suggesting the situation was serious. Kat wouldn’t have expected any enemy attack to make it so far inside Commonwealth House, but she understood the importance of being ready for anything. An attacking force would probably bring a bomb along and blow themselves and the building to hell rather than try to capture hostages. They knew better, these days, than to think they’d be allowed to take the hostages out of the building.
And none of us would want to be their hostages anyway, she thought as she strode into the briefing room. General Winters, Commodore Fran Higgins, and Captain Janice Wilson rose to greet her. We’d sooner die.
“Be seated,” she said tersely. There was no time for formal protocol. “What’s happened?”
“Aberdeen just dropped out of hyperspace,” Fran said. The commodore looked deeply worried. “She’s reporting a major enemy attack on Judd.”
Kat felt the bottom drop out of her stomach. “The missing enemy ships?”
“We haven’t completed the analysis of the records yet,” Fran said, “but we believe so. The enemy fleet was definitely operating Theocratic superdreadnoughts.”
“Most of them have to be sensor ghosts,” Winters said. “They are not flying hundreds of superdreadnoughts.”
“Show me the records,” Kat ordered.
She forced herself to calm down as the recording started to play. Hundreds of enemy ships . . . Winters was right. Most of them had to be sensor ghosts. She wasn’t quite sure what to make of it. ONI had never been entirely sure how many enemy starships had escaped destruction, as the Theocracy had managed to destroy far too many of its records before the hammer came down. But she was fairly sure there couldn’t be more than ten superdreadnoughts unaccounted for. A hundred? No, they couldn’t exist. The war would have been lost within the first year if the Theocracy had an extra hundred superdreadnoughts.
Curious, she thought as the recording started to repeat itself. They showed us enough ships to make sure we knew most of them were fakes.
She looked up at Fran. “What about the other cruisers?”
“We’re unsure as yet,” Fran said. “Captain Layman should have been able to disengage.”
“She had her drives and weapons stepped down,” Winters growled. “Admiral, that was fucking careless handling. Aberdeen had to flash-wake her vortex generator to get out.”
Kat winced, inwardly. A general, even a marine general, criticizing a commanding officer from another service was a severe breach of etiquette. Captain Layman would have to be judged by a board of her peers, not by someone who wasn’t versed in the finer points of starship operations. But she couldn’t disagree. Captain Layman had kept her drives and weapons offline and paid a steep price for it. Perhaps she had managed to disengage in time to escape. Or . . . perhaps she was already dead.
We’ll find out, she promised herself.
She looked at Janice. “Does ONI have anything to add?”
Janice looked uncomfortable, but held her ground. “My office hasn’t had a chance to really come to grips with the recordings,” she said. “However, our preliminary assessment is that only three or four of those superdreadnoughts are actually real. Furthermore, they clearly have access to some advanced technology. I’d go so far as to suggest they might have opened up communications with another interstellar power.”
“That would mean war,” Fran said. “They’d have to be insane.”
“They’d just have to be very careful to ensure they had plausible deniability,” Janice corrected. “They won’t have given anything that can be traced straight back to them, just stuff that could be purchased on the black market. There’ll be a line of cutouts between them and the actual source of supplies.”
She shrugged. “That said, they may be using some advanced tech from the war that we never knew existed. There’s a lot we don’t know about enemy R&D.”
Because they didn’t know it themselves, Kat thought, remembering the battleship they’d faced in the Jorlem Sector. They might have designed something game-changing and never realized it.
She cleared her throat. “Best case, Captain Layman managed to land a couple of hits before being blown away,” she said. “Does anyone dispute it?”
Her eyes swept the room. No one answered. Kat nodded to herself. Even one enemy superdreadnought would be more than enough to take the high orbitals and lay waste to the planet below. A handful of antimatter bombs would exterminate the entire population . . . She shuddered.
