Omega Force: Rebellion (OF11), стр. 21

"What a hopeless idiot," he muttered. He was careful to say nothing else aloud as he was certain the Machine had somehow compromised the security of his office and listened to every word uttered in it.

Scleesz had at least been honest with the poor, clueless admiral about one thing: if he'd been chosen for that assignment, it was for a reason. What that reason could possibly be was beyond him, however. The Eshquarian situation was an unmitigated disaster. The Machine had ordered the strike through its puppets in the Military Affairs Committee, and it had been fast tracked from the council to the ruling tribunal where all five Grand Adjudicators had voted unanimously to uphold the strike order.

While the initial surprise attack had been an overwhelming success, the aftermath had been anything but. Their own fleet had failed to track down and destroy the Eshquarian military, the bulk of which escaped, and that forced them to maintain a much larger peace keeping force in Imperial space than they could afford to. The other sovereign powers, the Saabror Protectorate and Cridal Cooperative most notably, were now aware that the ConFed was no longer content being just an economic bully and intended to rule by force. Intelligence reports indicated the Cridal could be reaching out and building secret alliances in the face of this aggression.

What most people didn't know, what he himself had only recently become aware of, was that the ConFed military wasn't nearly as immense or powerful as they made others believe. It was a lot of smoke and mirrors and bluster. A good portion of their in-service hulls were obsolete classes and not being maintained very well. Centuries of being the only superpower had left the military fat and complacent, unable to meet its obligations despite the enormous percentage of the budget they absorbed. If the Eshquarian situation couldn't be resolved quickly and the modern battlegroups recalled back to the Core Worlds, he was certain that others would begin to realize they'd been cowering all this time under a threat that didn't actually exist.

This put Scleesz in a difficult position. He might have been a bit hasty when he'd agreed to join Saditava Mok's insurrection, and now his dual loyalties were racing towards a conflict with each other. Open war would be the end of the ConFed and, for some time, it would be a return to the pre-unification days where the strong preyed on the weak at will with no thought that someone might step in. The ConFed was corrupt beyond belief but, for the most part, it kept the peace and stopped the large-scale events like planetary genocide. If he continued to help Mok, and that crazy human, Burke, kick off a rebellion, he feared that it would lead to an even greater level of suffering than if they simply learned to exist within the new rules.

There was also the factor that he would likely not survive no matter who was eventually victorious thanks to his proximity to the Machine. He may have given the appropriate platitudes about honor and doing the right thing, but the reason he found himself in this position in the first place was because he was a being of flexible morality with a strong survival instinct. He had no doubt Burke would die for his ideals, and Mok accepted a certain level of risk tied to his own lifestyle, but Scleesz very much liked his comfortable life and had no desire for it to end. So, now, his choice was to either pick a side and commit to it, or just ignore both and continue to look out for himself above all else.

"Councilman, your presence is required in the Grand Assembly."

"Thank you, I'll be right there," Scleesz said to the AI assistant that ran his office. He went to the hidden bar and poured himself a stiff double, knocking it back in a single gulp before straightening his robes and leaving the office. On the walk from the administrative complex where the councilmembers had their offices to the Grand Assembly, the hall where the council deliberated, he realized just how much he missed the days prior to the Machine's arrival when the most pressing thing on his mind was which of his mistresses he'd be visiting that night.

"We're tracking forty-two targets on passives."

"That's all of them," Fendra said. "At least in this group. When the ConFed seized control of the ships they shuffled them around so that all the cruisers, destroyers, and the two battleships were in this formation. The frigates and support ships were moved someplace else."

"And these ships were all left with skeleton crews?" Jason asked.

"Just enough spacers left aboard each to keep the reactors in maintenance mode and the air breathable," Fendra confirmed. "No engines, no weapons, and no coms. From the power readings we're seeing here—or lack of them—I'd say that they're still in that same storage mode."

The Phoenix hung in space a few million klicks from where Fendra had promised they would find the missing Imperial fleet, and she'd delivered. Forty-two capital warships sat in interstellar space along the edge of the gaseous region that denoted one of the navigational boundaries of the Concordian Cluster. The intense white light from a nearby Type-F star lit the nebula formations up from within and gave the scene outside the canopy a surreal aspect.

"This is creepy," Twingo said. "What could possibly be the purpose of keeping these ships intact and space worthy?"

"The ConFed in planning something, but damned if I know what it is," Jason said. "Lucky, you're still sure about this?"

"The same thing that makes the ships difficult to find will be the same thing that makes them easy to approach," Lucky said. "They will have limited passive sensor coverage and no active scans running."

"It's a good thing they were too stupid to move all the ships away once they'd taken procession," Jason