The Lost Stars: Tarnished Knight

Well, that news wasn’t planet-shaking. A single HuK didn’t have much capability. But it was a small piece of good news, so she wouldn’t turn her nose up at it, and she desperately needed every warship she could get her hands on. I’ve put up a good front. I wonder if Drakon suspects how much I haven’t told him, especially about how worried I am with such a small flotilla to stave off any attempt at reconquest by the Syndicate Worlds government. They say the stars help those who help themselves, but the shipyards here can only produce warships up to the size of heavy cruisers, and that only one or two at a time if I order them to build nothing else. The government on Prime would have heard about the revolt here eventually, but C-625 will bring word to them much faster than I’d hoped. Thanks to Black Jack, Prime doesn’t have much, but it won’t take much to brush aside a flotilla built around four heavy cruisers. It will take my own HuKs a while to reach the jump points for the stars they’re visiting, and then a while for the jump transits. Time I don’t have to spare.

If we don’t find more warships soon, this may be a very short-lived revolution.

CHAPTER SEVEN

THREE days without a disaster. That made it three good days.

Drakon sat going over the latest reports. The citizens were suitably enthusiastic about real elections for low-level local officials, and the propaganda about taking it all slow seemed to be working to keep all but the hotheads happy. The hotheads themselves were being monitored by the police, and if they got too warm, they would find themselves being cooled off the hard way.

He paused, watching a vid of snake families being lifted to the merchant ship that would haul them to Prime. Crowds of citizens watched the shuttles lift, cheering wildly. Having spilled the blood of the actual snakes, the people seemed satisfied with expulsion from the star system for the family members. As the shuttles closed on the merchant ship, the virtual windows in their passenger compartments would show a dozen heavy cruisers and numerous smaller warships approaching the planet or orbiting nearby. The majority of those warships were illusions, but hopefully the deception would fool the families, who would surely be interrogated when they reached Prime. Win/win. Iceni had a good idea there. I just wish we could be sure we have eliminated or found every snake in this star system.

I’m actually certain that we haven’t. There are more out there somewhere. If those four turned snakes I’m hiding try anything or contact anyone, I’ll know it the instant it happens, but I doubt that they were tied into anything like deep-cover programs. That’s not how the snakes worked. They kept as many secrets from their own lower-level workers as they did from the rest of us.

Everything seemed to be going well, but Iceni had been increasingly moody and irritable as the days went by. “Malin,” he called over the command circuit, “do we have anything new on what President Iceni is doing?”

“I learned a short time ago,” Malin offered, “that the commander of one of the heavy cruisers, someone named Akiri, has been transferred to an assignment on the surface of the planet. His new title will be Adviser to the President on mobile forces issues.”

“Adviser to the President, huh? Which entails what?”

“We have no specifics on the job, General,” Malin replied.