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Strategos (A Great Captain Roberts Tale!!) - Part 3 - A Light In The Black -
Chapter 30 - The Day's Divinity[]
The two fated words that Changes Everything[]
The Rebels
…will regret crossing swords with the Amaris Empire for this!!!" an actor in a padded fat-suit bellowed.
The audience laughed as Pip and Squeak, the puppet rodents, ran about-in this case, projected animations- stealing from the Usurper's banquet table. "Where is my cheese??" the fat man demanded.
Katrin laughed with the rest of the audience from her balcony box.
"Your majesty…"
She turned, and almost smacked into the bowed head of a Royal Servant.
"Straighten up, Theodore," she hissed. "What's wrong?"
"Great Basileus, there is an emergency that requires you." he almost mumbled.
She glanced at her youngest, who was still enjoying the stage play. "Can it wait?"
"Lord General Lovegood said to tell you 'Broken Mirror', Majesty."
Katrin Guffney-Cameron let out a word she normally slaps her sons for even suggesting. "They're sure?"
"They're certain… I think it might be why he sent me, instead of coming himself…?"
"Have the Nannies collect the children after the play, Theodore. I expect them to be home by midnight, and in bed." She stood. "If I didn't bloody need Sylvester Lovegoode, I'd have put his coward's head on my shelf months ago! Summon my car, I have to go to the Command Center."
Broken Mirror: the location of the Star League-in-Exile's Capital has been discovered by a hostile force or forces.
It was inevitable, she knew, the events had to work out that way eventually…
But it was too soon, and whoever it was, was dangerous enough to warrant the General Staff interrupting her rare outings among the Citizens.
She hoisted her ornate gown and hurried down the stairs, flanked by guards, to head for the Command Center to find out just how bad the situation was.
Echos of Defeat grow Louder[]
"This had damned well…
…better be more than you reporting another Defeat, Lovegoode. I have enough of your predecessors on my shelf to outfit a hairdressing school!" The Basileus was still dressed for the Theater when she stormed in, silk and lace brocade didn't hide her ire.
"This is worse than another defeat in the field." Sylvester Lovegoode was… well, he wasn't his mother. At least the man could actually admit he didn't know something, and had enough intestinal fortitude to pre-emptively admit mistakes and failures. Whether he had enough wit to correct them was still an open question, but he at least had that hyper-serious quality of integrity that stayed her hand over the last few months. Holotanks lit and she could see it. "They have our location. They have several of them, or at least, their spies do, and have been sending back reports, which Intelligence has managed to intercept… so far. I don't think Craswell and Knox are going to be able to stop them all."
"Why?"
"The reports origins keep shifting, it's mobile, and it's hitting networks, sooner or later an HPG message will catch a relay we don't have control of." Lovegoode stated. "When it does, the Alliance will know where… well, where six of our systems are, even if they don't know the names, and they'll know how many forces we have to hold them."
"They didn't get the information from the worlds they've taken before, did they?" she asked.
He sighed, "I don't know, Basileus. An error in data purges, or if they caught a Senior Field Grade or Junior Flag they might have been clued in… But these are not captured images from the base at Grankum, nor Winchester's defenses at Bannerhoft. The images might show events from five years ago, but they were taken by telescope, from five light years out. The rest? Are current affairs-their spy ship has been in our core star systems, and has had time to observe, and to gather comms intelligence."
"You say 'Ship', not ships. The singular, why?"
"Because I am desperately hoping they only got one through, Basileus. And that we can catch them," he confessed. "Though Halford's report suggests otherwise… which caused me to make the decision to interrupt your family time."
<<"I am the Great Captain Roberts!!..">> the girl's voice on the recording ranted, ending in a giggle.
"It might be only the one…" she mused. "Lovegoode, tell Commodore Halford at his next check-in to prioritize running the Pirate Amanda Roberts down. Have the Public Information section begin a campaign to stoke fears in the non-indentured public of our core worlds. There is a vicious pirate on the loose-"
"She IS vicious," Lovegoode dared interrupt. "Two million tons of logistical and commercial shipping in two systems so far in the last two weeks."
"Well, then the truth supports the narrative. This vicious raider Must Be Stopped." She sighed, "I have to make a public address, to remind our public what's at stake…"
Firming one's Resolve[]
The Memorial on…
…Meridian Park was where Katrin told the driver to stop. She walked across manicured grounds under shade trees under the near-noon of midnight, to the poured marble structure. She didn't stop until she was in the shade of the neo-classical open building, surrounded by statues of the best of her ancestors.
Elizabeth II, Cameron, who led the effort to consolidate the surviving remnants of the Star League away from the Ninth's base at Bannerhoft. Her successor, Sylvia The Great, who reformed things when the weight of refugees and chaos threatened to expose everything. She who created the Indenture system to handle the overflow of otherwise useless, hungry mouths.
Leonardo Guffney-Cameron, her great-grandfather, who oversaw the reform of the Indenture when it became clear that giving rights to so many more not raised to the Star League's ideals was crippling the nation.
None of them had truly faced the danger that she was facing. The closest had been in her grandfather's time, when the FedSuns created a puppet state at Thazi, and that creation threatened to reveal their location to the vicious brutality of the House Lords.
"What would you say about where we're at now, I wonder?" she mused, looking to Sylvia the First's statue. "How would you deal with it? We're losing this war."
The marble had no answers for her.
Then again, it's just a statue. "She'd run, I expect. Sylvia was never the best at handling direct confrontations." her Desmond manifested. "Her mother? Her mother would be digging in her heels to fight to the last, but Sylvia always relied on her husband for that."
"Desmond… bringing a cold bucket to a photo-op?" Katrin noted. "We're marking time instead of ready for war."
"I'm not saying anything you don't already know, Kat. The Core worlds of this remnant are populated by people who've benefited from the horrors and miseries of the outlying territories, safe from the wars of succession and constant back-and-forth. They have lived under a stable rule that your family has kept stable."
"Indenture to slavery, slavery to slave-raiding." she observed.
"Necessary, all of it. Elizabeth would be horrified. Sylvia not so much. By her day she'd realized that it isn't genetics that make someone a person, it's quality."
"Would be, Desmond or is?" Katrin demanded quietly. "We may have to acknowledge that, publicly. You've seen the Roberts girl. Can you be certain Elizabeth perished, as her granddaughter claimed?"
The AI's manifestation in her vision flickered. "No. They took Devil's Breath, and we agreed not to kill her when she was sent there… but Kat, she was crazy. What she wanted to do wasn't possible, she had to be removed. Eternal life leads to a personal disconnect, and Elizabeth was about as close to an eternal as can be achieved."
"Go back to sleep, Desmond. Leave me to my own thoughts."
The manifestation vanished.
"You had it easy, Sylvia." she spat at the monument, and strode back to her waiting car.
If we run or lose, what becomes of my children? The thought chilled her. "We can't afford to lose."
Necessitates of War[]
The Star-Lord class…
…transport JumpShip broke under the fire, spilling helium in a cloud with the rest of the debris as her core was shattered by the lasers.
The cargo dropships which had been coming in to dock spun, broken eggs in waning fire and debris, their defensive fighters already burst like pimples by the air group.
"CAG, recall all fighters and shuttles, Helm, make ready to jump." Amanda Roberts ordered.
Two targets, two weeks ago, two targets this week, and two weeks to charge. "It really is easier to murder, than to capture, isn't it??"
Lori nodded, "It really is… everywhere, but morally."
"Lori, send the report on this engagement back home. They'll probably block it at the relay, but we're not really reporting to OUR people so much as 'encouraging' our opponents to pursue."
"Aye, Ma'am."
"Lori?"
"Yes?"
"I had more fun when we were stealing things and freeing people," Amanda said. "This feels… dirty."
"It's necessary, Ma'am."
"I know… it's just… horrible."
"War is," Lori assured her.