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“It’s morning,” a male voice said.
Sarah sat upright, too cranky to play any morning games. It had been a long night. She’d known there was no point in loitering around the radio station, hoping to hear good news from Mountebank, but she hadn’t been able to keep herself from doing just that until Bryce had convinced her to go to bed. They’d found comfort in each other, a comfort she knew was illusionary. The war had taken a dark turn. And yet, she wasn’t the sort of person to simply give up. The atrocity on the distant island, if nothing else, offered a grim warning of just what would happen to anyone who tried to surrender.
She rubbed her eyes, then stood and headed for the shower. The master bedroom had been stripped of almost all of its furnishings, creating the odd impression they were squatting in an abandoned building. She could see faded patches on the walls that had once been hidden by giant pieces of furniture, or paintings of self-satisfied aristocrats that had been torn down and thrown on the bonfire. Her lips twitched in droll amusement as she stepped into the bathroom. The giant bathtub, easily large enough for three or four grown adults, had only been left in place because it was secured to the floor. She was tempted to try it, but it would send the wrong message to her followers. Besides, she didn’t have time. She showered quickly, then pulled on her tunic and headed outside. They’d have to go down for breakfast.
It’s almost like home, she reflected, although - in truth - Earth hadn’t been home for over a decade. The giant CityBlocks, where the inhabitants had gathered for meals in huge communal dining halls, had been destroyed, smashed flat by rocks falling from the sky. It was hard to wrap her head around how many people had died, wiped from existence so completely their bodies would never be found. If my parents made it out ...
She shook her head. Her parents had probably disowned her, when they’d realised she’d been arrested and deported without even a pretence of a trial. They wouldn’t have had a choice. They’d worked their asses off to build a decent social credit score. Having a daughter who’d been arrested would ruin it, raising the ghastly spectre of a fall back to the lower levels - and, if they were really unlucky, the Undercity. Sarah shuddered at the thought. Her sister had been twelve, when Sarah had been deported. She’d been young and pretty and she wouldn’t have lasted a week in the Undercity, if the family had fallen so far so fast. Sarah liked to think her parents had emigrated, that they’d taken ship to a distant colony world, but she’d never know. Even if they had, she would never see them again. It was unlikely they had even the slightest idea what had happened to her, after she’d been deported ...
The thought mocked her as they made their way down to the breakfast hall and took their places in line. Sarah had done what she could to avoid rationing, but supplies of everything beyond the very basics were limited. One could have as much algae-based mush as one wanted - she’d made sure of that, by setting up factories and vats - yet everything else ... she shook her head, mentally, as she took a bowl of bacon-flavoured porridge and sat down. If there was anything more than a hint of real bacon in the mix, it was a tragic accident.
She kept her mouth closed and listened as rumours swept around the hall. The government forces had won effortlessly. The government’s forces had been thrown back into the sea to drown. The government’s troops had mutinied and refused to fight the rebels, turning their guns on the aristos and blowing them away. The invasion was nothing more than a major raid and the government would be withdrawing soon, perhaps within the day. Sarah sighed, inwardly, as the stories got wilder and wilder. No one trusted the media, be it government or rebel-controlled. She knew they had a point. And yet ... it meant the truth, whatever it was, wouldn’t be believed.
Bryce winked at her. “We couldn’t possibly be that lucky.”
Sarah shrugged. One rumourmonger was insisting a passing starship had intervened in their favour and dropped KEWs on the government’s fleet. It wasn’t true - and she knew, if it was, it would cause no end of problems. Why would outsiders help the rebels, if they didn’t want to gain control of the planet’s only source of foreign exchange? They could easily wind up being just as oppressive as the aristos, if not worse. Sarah hated the aristos - she made no bones about it - but even she had to admit they were smart enough to view the planet as a long-term investment. Offworlders might not be anything like as careful with a planet that had simply fallen into their hands.
She finished her porridge, then led the way down to the meeting room below the old mansion. There were guards everywhere - one report from Mountebank insisted the government had been able to get into the command post, even though it should have been inaccessible - and they had to pass through two checkpoints before they could get into the room itself. It was irritating, but there was no choice. They still didn’t understand how the CP on Mountebank had been infiltrated. She would have expected the government to bomb it, not get someone inside the complex. And who knew how much intelligence had fallen into enemy hands?
They didn’t know that much, she thought. She’d worked hard to keep the rebellion as decentralised as possible, even as they’d taken land and started the long process of turning into a rival government. Even if they were all taken alive - she was too much of a realist to assume that prisoners couldn’t be made to talk - they can’t tell what they don’t know.
She took her chair - there was no point in standing on ceremony - and waited for the room to fill up. Gathering so many leaders in one place was a risk, no matter how many precautions she took, but she feared there was little choice. The island’s datanet wasn’t worthy of the name - the government hadn’t invested in anything beyond a very limited network - and she suspected it was compromised to the point that anything they said online would be immediately relayed to the government’s intelligence officers. Radio was even worse. The government would intercept the transmissions, then know where to aim their missiles. She dared not assume the government was stupid. The war had removed a great many blockheads from the enemy chain of command.
And they have an offworlder leading their armies, she reflected. I wouldn’t have expected them to give up so much power, just to please the townies.
The doors closed, leaving the leaders alone. Sarah cleared her throat. The room was as secure as they could make it, although she feared the offworlders might have tech that would let them eavesdrop on everything the rebels said. There were too many horror stories, everything from nanotech bugs to implants that turned rebel leaders into unwitting spies for the government, for her to know what to take seriously. They’d invested heavily in counter-surveillance tech, but ... was it enough? She ground her teeth in frustration. It was easy, all too easy, to second-guess herself into paralysis.
“The rumours are true,” she said, without preamble. “The government has established a solid lodgement on Mountebank.”
She waved a hand at the map on the wall. It had been updated repeatedly over the last few hours, although she was grimly aware it was almost certainly out of date. The situation was settling down, if the latest reports were accurate, but that could change at any moment. She couldn’t hope to exercise any control over the combat zone. The locals were completely isolated. It would be hard, even for experienced sailors or fishermen, to run the blockade and convey supplies to the besieged city.
“So far, the government troops seem unwilling to storm Mountebank City itself,” she added, calmly. “Indeed, their offensive was targeted against a weak spot in the island’s defences, catching the defenders out of place, and they did their best to avoid challenging the defenders directly. They overran a number of strongpoints in their path, but otherwise chose to isolate rather than smash when they had a choice. Right now, they have the city under siege. It seems unlikely they will risk pressing matters.”
She paused, allowing them a moment to take in her words. “The bad news is that we have confirmation. The government’s forces did gun down surrendered prisoners, including a number of women and children.”
There was a sharp intake of breath. “Incredible,” Colonel Caroche said. He was an older man, who’d been in the rebellion longer than Sarah had been alive. “Do they want us to fight to the last?”
“It would suit them,” Colonel Jayne said. Her scarred face bore mute testament to the horrors of life as a plantation wench, before she’d escaped into the jungle and joined the nearest rebel force. “Let’s face it. Even if we surrender tomorrow, they will never feel comfortable around us again. They could never trust us not to bide our time, then launch a second rebellion when the aristos forget the lessons of this one. Slaughtering us is their only viable option.”
“And then, who would work the plantations?” Colonel Bolos snorted, rudely. He was younger than the others, a rare townie in their ranks. “They’re not going to work the fields themselves, are they?”
Sarah smiled, despite herself. She’d seen too many aristos - men who liked hunting and shooting, women who swanned around wearing fancy dresses - to imagine them working the fields like common labourers. Bolos had a point, she conceded. The plantations were worthless without workers to tend the crops, then drain the sap and prepare it for processing into something a little more useful. The government might wage and win a genocidal war, only to discover - too late - they’d cut their own throats.
“There’s no shortage of new slaves,” Jayne growled. “They’ll just bring in more from Earth.”
“Earth is gone,” Sarah reminded them flatly. “I doubt they can get so many slaves from other worlds.”
She tapped the table, before the discussion could move any further away from the subject at hand. “The government has yet to put out an official story,” she said. “Our spies on Kingston insist the massacre was perpetrated by a rogue soldier, but it seems unlikely.”
“We were told that atrocities would not be condoned,” Bryce added. “If a rogue really did commit the crime, I’d expect General Windsor to make an example of him.”
“Unless it was some aristo fop, who’ll get a slap on the wrist and nothing more,” Jayne growled. “It isn’t as if he gunned down anyone important.”
“The point is that surrender is no longer an option, if it ever was,” Sarah said. “And that the government has proved it can land an army on our soil and take effective control of our territory.”
“Mountebank is very isolated, compared to the other islands,” Caroche said, waving a hand at the map. “They’ll have a harder time of it elsewhere.”
“And they can’t storm the city unless they want to be chewed up and spat out,” Jayne added, sharply. “How many of their troops will they have to leave there, if they don’t want us simply retaking the island when their backs are turned?”
“Fewer than you might think,” Bryce cautioned. “They can keep the city cut off from the rest of the island with a relatively small number of troops, at least for the moment. “
“Which means they’ll be coming for the rest of us,” Sarah said. “We may be on the defensive, at least for the moment, but we are far from helpless. We’ll lure them into killing grounds, then smash them.”
She spoke in vague terms, outlining the defensive preparations that had been made since the rebels had taken control of their core islands. She’d hoped to have enough time to build an army and land it on Kingston, but the government - thanks to General Windsor - had built up its own forces quickly enough to make it impossible. The rebels had a great many advantages, if her calculations were correct, yet ... it might be better, from their point of view, to let the government make the next move. Mountebank really had been an isolated target. If the government wanted to win, their next target would be a great deal harder to overwhelm before it was too late.
“We are gambling everything on them walking right into our gunsights,” Jayne pointed out, curtly. “Would it not be better to hit them first?”
“Most of their territory is effectively worthless, from a strategic point of view,” Bryce countered. “There is nothing to gain by striking aristocratic retreats. It’ll annoy them, sure, and probably lead to demands the other retreats are protected, but it won’t weaken them overall. We can take steps to slow their operations, including minelaying operations in their waters, but actually invading Kingston is beyond us.”
“For the moment,” Sarah added. “If we can sink most of their navy, we can take an island near Kingston and develop it into a base for a proper invasion.”
“Perhaps, if you’d pushed harder, we would have Kingston by now,” Jayne snapped. “And the war would be over.”
“It wouldn’t have worked,” Bryce said. “The government refused to let itself be isolated or crushed in the first few moments of the operation. Once the army got underway, any hope of taking the capital quickly enough to prevent the government from decamping and continuing the fight from a safe distance was gone. We came very close to a major disaster, Colonel, and we were very lucky to escape. As it was, we wrecked a sizable percentage of the harbour facilities and delayed any counter-offensive for quite some time.”
Sarah sighed, inwardly, as Jayne looked around the table for support. It had been her decision to withdraw, rather than risk an engagement the rebels would probably have lost. The plan had been drawn up before the government started hiring offworlders to train and lead its armies ... she cursed under her breath, all too aware the offensive’s failure had left them in a precarious position. They’d risked picking a fight with offworlders, including whatever remained of the Marine Corps, when they’d blown up the spaceport. Sarah’s backers insisted the Marine Corps was dying, along with the empire it had served, but it was hard to be sure. It wasn’t as if New Doncaster was strong enough to tell even a minor interstellar power to go pound sand.
“We do not have time to go over this again,” she said, calmly. “Right now, our priority becomes meeting and defeating the government when it launches the second invasion.”
“Quite,” Bryce agreed. “We may not have as many weapons as the government, let alone aircraft, but we do have enough to give them a very hard time. Our small stockpile of off-world weapons and tech will be held in reserve, waiting for the right moment to strike.”
“The plans have been laid,” Sarah said. “Once we know where they’re going, we will be ready for them.”
She smiled. She’d made sure that everyone old enough to carry a gun was given one and taught how to use it. The government was going to discover, when it invaded, that every single blade of grass hid a rebel with a gun, a man - or a woman - ready to sell their lives dearly. And the government had played into her hand, when it had allowed the prisoners to be executed. No one would surrender now, whatever promises were made. They’d fight to the last.
“They won’t get a moment’s peace,” Jayne agreed. “Last time, they had the advantage of surprise. This time, we’ll see them coming.”
Sarah nodded. “It won’t be easy,” she said. The plans were vague because no one knew precisely where the enemy would strike, although she had a suspicion it would be one of the core islands. The government didn’t have enough time to play a waiting game, particularly if it intended to roll back the concessions it had made after the insurgency had turned into a full-scale war. “But we have the time we need.”
She paused. “And we will continue to appeal to the townies,” she added. “I dare say they’ll be as shocked by the atrocity as we are.”
“It is their sons who are putting their lives on the line,” Caroche agreed. “Can we use it to split them?”
Bolos shrugged. “The government offered them what they wanted, in exchange for their support,” he said. “It will be hard to better the offer, unless we find something they want more.”
Sarah nodded, coldly. The townies might have been effectively disenfranchised, but they’d been far better off than the debtors and indents. They’d had something to lose. Now ... she was entirely sure the aristos planned to cancel the reforms as soon as they were no longer needed, yet how could they convince the townies of that? The smarter ones would be playing a waiting game, quietly making their position unassailable for the moment the first war came to an end. They wouldn’t commit themselves completely until they knew there was no longer any room for sitting on the fence.
“We can push the news as much as possible,” she said. “But we need to know what actually happened first.”
She stood. “Good luck to us all,” she added. There was a very good chance she wouldn’t see them again, at least for a month or two. “Return to your bunkers and prepare for combat.”