My own country celebrated its Independence Day this week, so I thought I’d publish a couple of excerpts (one today, one yesterday, one the day before yesterday) from the opening chapter of my novel Scapegoating a Hero, which deals in part with the fictional country of Jaiya gaining its independence.

Rijal – or the new orders he carried – were expected on the bridge. He could tell that much when he got there, because Captain Ferrule was sitting in his chair with the decryption pad on his clipboard.
This was a notebook filled with thin, disposable sheets of paper, each one showing the substitution key that the Imperial Navy was using on a particular day.
“Sir,” Rijal said, and handed the radio operator’s transcription over to Ferrule.
He hoped against hope that he was mistaken, that the pattern he had seen in the Captain’s behavior was a false one, or perhaps a plan Ferrule would turn back from once he saw that history and his superiors were both against him.
RIjal stood as calmly as he could, while the Captain matched each letter and number in the message to its counterpart on today’s page in the decryption pad, and figured out what other letter or number it was a substitute for.
A pitifully slow process, compared to what Rijal could do, or to what these new machines called computers could do. But computers were gigantic devices, as big as the receiving halls in the old princely palaces scattered across Jaiya, not something the Imperial Navy could squeeze into a heavy cruiser.
A chill ran down Rijal’s spine when he noticed that Ferrule wasn’t writing anything down on the encrypted message. Usually Ferrule transcribed the meaning of his orders as he decoded them, below the original message.
The regulations neither required it nor forbade it, and the Captain found it a useful memory aid.
But if Rijal was right about Ferrule’s plans, then the Captain didn’t care what was really in the orders this time.
Executive Officer Brand stood at the Captain’s right-hand side, with Rijal at the Captain’s left. There would be little risk of Brand trying anything when Ferrule made his move and Rijal countered with his own. Brand glanced at what the Captain was doing, and frowned. Perhaps he too had seen the change in Ferrule’s routine.
Rijal moved so that he had his back to an empty corner of the bridge, with the Captain’s chair in front of him, and the doorway off the bridge to Rijal’s right. Apart from Ferrule and Brand, the nearest bridge officer was about seven feet away to his left. Less than ideal, but it was all he could do to limit the risk of the Imperials jumping him when he made his move.
Then Captain Ferrule scowled, grunted to himself and locked the message up in the little safe next to his chair. Then he tore the top page out of the decryption pad. Per regulations, Rijal was required to file the discarded page with the carbon copy of the message the ship had received. He tensed for what would come next.
Ferrule crumpled up the page and threw it at Rijal as hard as if it were a stone. Rijal caught it left-handed, as if he had walked into a paper-ball fight between his subordinates.
“Well, you fools have gone and done it now,” the Captain said.
Rijal had seen something like this coming, but Brand looked shocked and puzzled.
“Sir?” The Executive Officer asked.
“They’ve killed the Viceroy,” Ferrule said flatly, and then, with a nasty edge of glee in his voice: “Our orders are to shell the blasted city back into the stone age, where it belongs.”
A stunned silence fell over the bridge for a fraction of a second. It was all Rijal needed to pull out his pistol.
“You’re lying, Captain,” he said. Then Rijal spotted movement out of the corner of his eye. “No, stay put if you value the Captain’s life or your own,” he said to the junior officer who had just jumped up from his station. “Please.”
Rijal went on. “I don’t want anybody’s blood on my hands but if it’s a choice between you and all the civilians of Goodbay….” He let the sentence trail away as the young man sat back down.
“Surrender your sidearm, Lieutenant,” Brand said, in the same tone of voice he would have used if he were talking to a rambunctious puppy. “There’s no need for this.”
Rijal felt the sweat trickle down his back, and hoped he looked calmer than he felt.
“I’m afraid I must disagree, Lieutenant.” At least his voice and hands didn’t shake.
Ferrule glared at him. “Rijal, isn’t it? Always so correct and by the book. But deep down you’re just a backstabbing savage like the rest of them.”
“If it takes a backstabbing savage to stop you from becoming a terrorist, Captain, then I hope I am equal to the task,” Rijal said. “Commander Brand, you know something of my…skills. I decrypted the message on my way to the bridge. It reads: ‘Pact Signed. Sovereignty Recognized. Proceed to main docks to collect former Viceroy Worlington.’”
Rijal could spare only a glance at Brand but he could see the wheels turning in the Commander’s head as he struggled to put the pieces together.
“Commander, I have a carbon copy of the message in my left pocket. The Captain has just given me today’s decryption key. If I give them both to you, will you review them and determine what the message says?”
Brand nodded.
Rijal kept the gun in his right hand dead-level as he lowered his left hand to pull out the paper. A vision slammed his mind: if he moved too quickly, the young navigation officer would panic and jump him. Still he kept the gun steady as his left hand crept down slowly to the pocket.
As he pulled it out, struggling to hold onto the crumpled decryption page at the same time, another vision hit Rijal: him reaching out in front of the Captain’s seat, and Ferrule lunging at him in a panic. He kept the gun steady as he stretched his left hand behind the Captain’s chair, as far as it could go.
“Commander, if you please?” Rijal tried to keep the desperation out of his own voice. Everything depended on his reading of Brand’s character. If he was wrong, one of the horrifying visions pounding in his brain would come to pass.
Brand took the two papers from Rijal’s hand and held them up side by side. He worked through them even more slowly than the Captain had. Then he tucked them away in his breast pocket and drew his own sidearm.
“Surely you’ve seen what that vermin has done!” Ferrule snarled. “He’s altered the carbon copy!”
“Lieutenant Rijal has some…peculiar abilities,” Brand said. “But even he cannot change an encrypted message to the exact opposite of its true meaning with a few penstrokes. Captain Ferrule, you are hereby relieved of duty for dishonorable and seditious conduct.”
“It’s a lie,” Ferrule protested.
Rijal’s visions had showed the Captain trying something desperate at this point, but instead the man seemed to crumple in his seat. Ferrule said nothing as Brand made arrangements to transfer him to the brig.
Rijal continued to hold the pistol in a tight-knuckled grip, only surrendering it to Brand once the master-at-arms had taken Ferrule into custody.
Rijal and Anora had not yet met when all this happened, but Rijal would go on to marry Anora almost ten years after they had both helped Jaiya win its freedom from the Empire. She was not in love with him when they married, but that would change….