Democracy's Light

Chapter Ten

“Smoothed tongued bitch, isn’t she?”

“I wouldn’t know,” Tiberius said. “Carola Wilhelm was before my time as Heir.”

Colin shrugged. From what he’d heard of Tiberius, he’d originally been a younger son who shouldn’t have ever had a chance to become Head. Only the death of his father and elder brothers had seen him tossed into the seat, but he’d used the time as a younger son to grow more pragmatic than most of the Thousand Families. His success and power had come at a very high price indeed.

“It’s an interesting problem,” Colin said, finally. His first response, once he’d been back in his office, hadn’t been a kind one. Carola was playing games and even though he could see the game, it was still going to be difficult to outmanoeuvre her, let alone her husband. “Do you think that she’s telling the truth?”

“I find her story believable,” Tiberius said. “You revolted and others, including Kathy, joined up with your rebellion. It’s quite possible that others would have done the same, particularly after the Empire’s various enforcement arms collapsed into nothing. Imperial Intelligence was crippled a long time before you took it over and started to reform it. She could be telling the truth.”

“I doubt it,” Daria said, flatly. “There are too many unanswered questions. I’m not an expert in space warfare, but why would they have thought that a pack of eight cruisers posed a threat to Cottbus itself? They had enough firepower around that world to stand off the Shadow Fleet.”

“Not for that long,” Colin said, remembering some of the new weapons the Geeks had developed for the final battles of the war. The odds were good that Admiral Wilhelm wouldn’t have been able to develop most of them, not with the research base his patrons had left him. He might be able to develop arsenal ships and perhaps the new missiles, but he wouldn’t even be thinking in terms of starfighters. “Still, it’s a sign that something clearly isn’t right. They could have issued their declaration of independence to the cruisers instead.”

He shook his head. “Do we assume that it’s a lie and proceed to invade the sector, or do we pretend to accept it at face value?”

“We may have little choice,” René Goscinny said. “I could think of half a dozen first-rank worlds that would… view with alarm any attempt by us to force Cottbus and its assorted worlds back into the Empire. It would certainly suggest to other worlds that we would use force on them if they didn’t play our game and incite more rebellious feeling. Unrest doesn’t work in our favour, Colin, and if we act too quickly, we will only cause more of it.”

Colin scowled up at the display. It was showing the Cottbus Sector, with each of the stars blinking a dull red in the holographic image, suggesting hostility. Even if Admiral Wilhelm didn’t have any allies from the other nearby sectors, it was still going to be a bitch to invade. The defenders could call on a considerable number of starships and their worlds were very well defended. They had space they could trade for time.

And it wasn’t even like the Morrison Campaign. There, the hundreds of worlds that had been briefly raided by the Shadow Fleet had been effectively irrelevant to the campaign. Morrison, Orland, Gaza and Candleford had been important, but the other worlds, like the pleasure planet Paradise Rest, had added nothing to the struggle. He hadn’t bothered to secure them, refusing to tie down his own forces where the Empire could go after them, but now the positions were reversed. He would have to invest, conquer and garrison at least a dozen worlds and, in the meantime, Admiral Wilhelm could be raising havoc in the Empire.

“We have good reason to think he’s lying,” Colin said. He shook his head. “Can’t we convince Parliament of that?”

“It’s not that simple,” Blondel said, softly. “Colin, politics are governed by perception more than reality. The perception of us, now, is that we are talking the talk, but that we might not be walking the walk. We’re telling everyone that we believe in democracy, but that means that we have to accept all the democracy, including the votes that go against us. So far, we have a lot of goodwill and a solid reputation, but that could be destroyed very quickly if we act too fast.”

She nodded towards the display. “There are hundreds of worlds that would bolt from the Empire if they believed that we were just going to be like the old Empire,” she continued. “They may find it… expedient to believe that Cottbus has indeed held a democratic election — because Ambassador Wilhelm touched on so many of their own concerns — and support her. They won’t see it as a case of us destroying a remnant of the old order, but of us forcing our will on people who don’t want to follow us. In the long run, that could prove fatal.”

Her voice darkened. “We might win a war and lose an Empire,” she concluded. “I don’t think that that would be a good victory.”

Daria snorted. “Aren’t you forgetting something?” She asked. There was little love lost between the two women, although Colin had never been sure why. They were cut from similar cloth. “The odds are that Admiral Wilhelm has created a military state, ruled by himself, and intends to either keep what he has or claim more from the other sectors near him. If we do nothing about it, are we not as guilty as him?”

She smiled thinly. “We rebelled against the Empire, which turned a blind eye to thousands of abuses, even the ones it didn’t cause,” she said. She looked Colin right in the eye. “Are we going to turn a blind eye to this particular abuse?”

Colin scowled. He had to admit that she had a point. Like it or hate it, the Empire had kept a firm lid on thousands of petty human conflicts, often over the strangest things. New Kabul’s civil war had been brought to an end by the mass slaughter of the armies and leaders involved, hundreds of thousands of pirates and wreckers had been mercilessly hunted down… and that was only the beginning. The demise of the Empire had brought all of those crises back into existence and forced them to either act to prevent them, which meant that they would be accused of being imperialistic, or watching helplessly as thousands of innocents were slaughtered. The refugee crisis alone was unbelievable and would have been a lot worse if more starships had been available.

Daria pressed her case. “We know nothing for sure, beyond the fact that Cottbus lured our ships into an ambush and destroyed them once they were past any hope of escape,” she continued. She tapped the table to underline her words. “That is the only thing we know. The details about it being an democratic state, wanting independence from the Empire, are what we’ve been told. It looks like a Jonah Rotten to me.”

There were some chuckles. The original Jonah Rotten had been an Imperial Navy Q-Ship. It had looked like a harmless bulk freighter, operated by an independent shipping firm, until the pirates had slipped into weapons range. The freighter had hit their ship with enough fission beams to cripple it, boarded it and then, once they’d completed their mission, launched the surviving pirates into space. Pirates, who wanted to get home and spend their ill-gotten loot, had given every other bulk freighter a wide berth from then on for a few years. It had been one of the more successful tactics the Imperial Navy had deployed.

“At the very least, we should assume that this isn’t right,” she concluded. “I propose that we move the 2^nd Fleet out to Hawthorn anyway, as we planned, accompanied by a team of people who can...investigate their claims. We can send in covert operatives as well, people who can land on their worlds without being noticed; hell, the League has been discussing expanding into that territory. We get in there, we find out what the hell is going on, and if he’s created a military state, we act against it.”

“We could probably sell that to the first-rank worlds,” Goscinny said, finally. He sounded rather reluctant, but accepting. “They might insist on sending along their own representatives…”

Colin smiled. “René, why don’t you go?”

Goscinny nodded. “I think that that would probably be the best choice,” he said. “I’ll be wanting danger money, of course.” Colin laughed. The Empire was barely in the black and money was very tight. Paying danger money might have had a serious effect on the economy. “More seriously, if you’ll give me a day or two, I can assemble a team from the first-rank representatives on Earth, including a handful of MPs.”

“And they might be taken and altered,” Daria warned. “If that happens, they will come back singing Wilhelm’s praises and we’ll be no wiser than we already are.”

“I know,” Goscinny said. He sounded a little nervous, but refused to surrender. “I’ll just have to take the risk.”

Brave man, Colin thought. Imperial Intelligence had had a long history of ‘altering’ people who rebelled against the Empire, using their mental technology to turn them into puppets, or loyal servants of the Empire. Some of them hadn’t even known that they were slaves to the Empire and had believed, truly, that they were still working against it, even as they led rebel bands into traps or worse. They never lasted long — the human mind didn’t like such control and eventually collapsed — but while they lasted, they could be devastating. Trust became impossible when you never knew who could be unknowingly working for the Empire.

“Good,” Colin said. He looked around the room. “We’ll send the 2^nd Fleet out to Hawthorn and send some representatives with it. They can investigate the situation and discover just what we’re actually dealing with. Are there any objections?”

There were none.

“I have a proposal,” Grand Admiral Joshua Wachter said. “If we’re sending out Admiral Garland, she should be ordered not to initiate hostilities, but to launch covert surveillance missions into the sector to discover what might actually be going on. A handful of picketing destroyers might be more useful than any agent on the ground.”

Colin scowled. He was an Imperial Navy officer, or at least he’d been an Imperial Navy officer, and every bone in his body was calling out for him to crush the potential threat before it crushed him. He might have become a politician, but he still had problems accepting the give and take of politics, even if there was no choice. Blondel was right. If they acted harshly and quickly, it would destroy their reputation.

“We also need to clarify her status,” Blondel continued. Her firm voice demanded respect. “In hindsight, we had little choice, but to allow her to address Parliament. We need to decide, now, what she is and how we should deal with her.”

She stood up and started to pace. “She’s either a Member of Parliament herself, in which case Cottbus is actually a part of the Empire, or an Ambassador, in which case we have effectively recognised Cottbus’s independence,” she continued. “At the moment, she seems to be both; hell, we’ve treated her as both. We could maintain the fiction that she’s a non-voting MP or something, but…”

“Cicero sent Ambassadors to us during the rebellion,” Colin said, not missing the sharp glance that Joshua sent Tiberius. He evidently hadn’t known that little detail, which was interesting. It was definitely something to think about later. “We do have a certain amount of precedent.”

“Not for something like this,” Daria said firmly. “The two situations are not exactly compatible. We knew, back then, that it was us or them. There was no thought of a compromise, nor could we have worked one out even if we had considered it. This is something different. Cottbus could become an independent stellar nation… and that is something that we cannot allow. It would shatter the Empire.

“There are still sectors governed by the last remains of the old order,” she continued, altering the display to show the nine sectors that probably only had an inkling that something had changed on Earth. “If we allow this precedent to stand, we will have those sectors declaring independence as well… and we won’t have a legal leg to deal with them. How could we invade and liberate them from tyranny when we left one alone because of legal quibbling?”

“That’s the sort of logic that worries the first-rank worlds,” Goscinny said. “The Empire didn’t interfere — often — with our internal customs. The price for our acquiescence to the Empire’s overall rule was internal autonomy. Yes, the Empire did move into our spheres more and more as time went on, but it didn’t interfere with our customs.”

He paused. “Gaul has several customs that most of you will find a little odd,” he said. “They’re not even the strangest, or perhaps the most outrageous, customs, covering everything from sex to religion and everything in-between. What they — we — regard as traditional customs you will find unpleasant, perhaps even repulsive. A threat to them will still be taken very seriously.”

“I seem to recall,” Joshua said, “one of my best officers coming from a world where she would be regarded as having no role, but being barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen. I fail to see why such customs should be tolerated.”

“You may be right,” Goscinny acknowledged. He leaned forward, dismissing the argument. “The point is that such customs are very important to the first-rank worlds and interfering with them will only provoke anger.”

“I think we’re getting a little off-topic here,” Colin said, before the argument could grow any further. He could see, as he often could these days, both sides of the issue. It might have been the price of playing politics, but he suspected that he was losing his idealism, or even his determination to do what was right, regardless of the cost. “We will investigate Cottbus and proceed from there. Once we know what we’re dealing with, we can decide what to do next.”

He watched as, one by one, they filed out of the room. He hated to admit it, but there were times when he wished he’d just gone renegade or maybe even remained a mere Commander, permanently under Percival’s thumb. There, he hadn’t even known how lucky he was, while now the whole weight of the Empire rested on his shoulders. He couldn’t even put it down without risking the loss of everything they’d fought for. Billions of lives rested in his hands…

Politics, he thought, in disgust.

The Embassy, as she had decided to call it, was small, but functional. Carola had set up a pair of rooms for herself and her bodyguards, a second pair for her assistants, and little else. There was no point in cramming the building full of luxuries… and besides, she was trying to signify a major break with the past. The Cottbus Embassy didn’t need luxury, or wealth, but a businesslike attitude.

“I want you to hire a long-range courier boat,” she ordered one of her assistants, as she paced around her office. “I’ll provide the secure data packets for Markus to read, once they get to Cottbus. Make sure you pick one of the independent firms and not something owned by the Families.”

“Yes, Ambassador,” the aide said, and headed out the door.

Carola threw herself into her armchair — her sole concession to luxury — and rubbed her hands together with glee. It had all worked perfectly — well, almost perfectly. She had hoped that Parliament would vote to accept her as Ambassador without further delay, but it seemed that saner voices had prevailed. That was hardly a surprise; they didn’t have any means of verifying what she’d told them and they would be foolish to accept her without finding some way to verify her claims. It would take them at least two months to come close to identifying the truth… and by then, she would have her hooks deep into Earth’s population.

She smiled as she reached for her terminal and scrolled through the messages. As she had expected, the number of messages had skyrocketed after she had addressed Parliament, with everything from requests for dinner with MPs to offers of business relations from various firms and Family-owned corporations. She would turn down the latter, of course, and rely on the former; they would have to back her politically, or discover that their own government was hurting them. It was a neat little trap that the rebels couldn’t hope to escape, unless they tore down their own rules. She doubted that they would do anything of the sort.

In the end, she suspected, they would probably try to move in on Cottbus anyway, only to discover that Admiral Wilhelm wasn’t alone after all. The war would be long and bloody, but by then, she was confident of victory. The Empire was ripe for the taking… and it would be her, in the end, who sat beside her husband on the Imperial Throne.

Her other assistant knocked on the door. “Ambassador, we have a direct call for you,” she said. Carola looked up, annoyed. There had been hundreds of direct calls for her, most of which she had been forced to reject. Her time was too short to exchange inane pleasantries with everyone who thought that they were important. “I believe that you should take this one.”

“Oh, really?” Carola asked. She had made her position on direct calls quite clear. They weren’t allowed to talk to her unless it was something very important indeed. “And why is this one so important?”

“It’s someone you might remember,” the aide said. “It’s Gwendolyn Cicero.”