Democracy's Light

Chapter Thirteen

“The bottom line,” Kathy said, “is that the Empire is effectively bankrupt.”

Colin stared at her. “Bankrupt?” He said, astonished. “How… but Percival was always bragging about how rich his Family was.”

“A cunning tissue of lies and deceits,” Kathy said, grimly. “I’ve been working on the financial survey of the Empire for the last few months, ever since you appointed me to this role, and we have finally completed the general survey of the core worlds and the inner sectors. The problem is that for every star system that is a net gain, we have at least five that are drains on our economy, at least as they were established under the Empire. They’re simply not contributing anything important to us, financially speaking.”

She paused. “I don’t know if the Families knew just how bad the situation was, but we certainly had a hand in sparking off the entire crisis,” she continued. “When Roosevelt went bust, it forced the other Families to overstretch their own resources to prevent further disasters, but that naturally weakened their own positions. Worse, very few worlds are paying their taxes and tithes at the moment, which means that we have a shortfall and — even worse — some of the payments the Empire was making to various worlds are still going ahead.”

Colin rubbed his forehead. “Why?” He asked. “Why was the Empire paying them anything?”

Kathy winced. It had taken several weeks to establish the answer and it wasn’t one she liked. “The Families founded the worlds as colonies and invested heavily in them, both to build up additional industry and to prevent them from paying off their debts and taking their place among the first-rank worlds,” she said. Very few planets had made the leap to first-rank status. The game had been rigged to make that almost impossible. They spent centuries paying off the interest on their debts alone. “They were therefore able to force the combined treasury to fund some of the development, claiming that it was vitally important.”

She shook her head. “There are too many different cases for me to come up with a general rule,” she concluded. “The bottom line is that we don’t have anything like the financial resources we thought we had and that we’re not going to be able to improve the situation anytime soon.”

“Headache now,” Colin said, dryly. Kathy nodded in sympathy. She had spent weeks untangling the complex lines of finance and responsibility that ran through the Empire, only to discover that the Empire had been gravely mismanaged. She couldn’t say that she was surprised, but she couldn’t understand why the Thousand Families had let the situation get so far out of hand. How could they have been ignorant of what they were doing? “Why the hell are we even still paying these… monies?”

“The Empire’s vast bureaucracy kept paying them even though we’d taken over the High City,” Kathy explained, reluctantly. There were literally billions of bureaucrats in the Empire and their combined inertia was incredible. The role hadn’t attracted intelligent and honest men, but unimaginative and outright corrupt men and women. The ones who weren’t skimming themselves bonuses from the top were just carrying out their orders as literally as possible, even if the reason for those orders no longer applied. After all, they might get in trouble if they followed orders, but they would certainly get in trouble if they didn’t follow orders, even if the orders were mistaken.

She shook her head. “In the meantime, the ‘no taxation without representation’ meme seems to have caught on everywhere,” she continued. “We have colonies refusing to pay taxes unless we make one concession or another, or colonies that have seized their infrastructure and demanding that we recognise that before anything else is discussed, or… and the speed of communication doesn’t make it any easy. The knock-on effects are shaking the Empire to pieces, slowly, but very surely.”

Colin winced. “And there I was worried about Admiral Wilhelm,” he said. “How do we tackle this problem?”

“Carefully,” Kathy said. “If we take harsh action, we will only make the situation worse.”

“I think that life was easier if we didn’t care if we broke it or not,” Colin said. Kathy had to agree. They’d fought the Empire, but now they were running the Empire they had to maintain it; it was the basis of their power and legitimacy, such as it was. A mass secessionist movement, or even hundreds of worlds demanding special treatment and rights, would be disastrous, yet anything overt they did to prevent it would be almost as bad. The Empire had created a system for sucking thousands of worlds dry, but the Provisional Government had broken the system and rebuilding it, now, would be impossible. “How do you intend to approach it?”

“First, I intend to limit all further payments,” Kathy said, firmly. “In effect, all parties will have to reapply for them, which will give us a chance to see what is actually needed and what is merely… someone attempting to exploit us. They’ll have to present their case here, at the High City, and we can judge them on a case-by-case basis.

“Second, I propose to legalise the seizure of the industries,” she continued. “It won’t go down well with the remains of the Families, but unless we’re prepared to use military force to retake and run them, we can’t recover them anyway. That will allow them to be brought back into the Empire’s overall industrial potential and, just incidentally, push them into producing small craft for their own defence.”

Colin frowned. “A case could be made that that was a breech of the surrender agreement,” he pointed out. “Do you really feel that that it necessary?”

“We don’t have many options,” Kathy said, grimly. “The Thousand Families may have built and exploited the industries, but it wasn’t the Families who ran them. They preferred to leave that to massive workforces who were paid very little and treated with extreme brutality if they attempted to unionise. Now, they’re seizing the workplaces with the concurrence of local authorities and… we can’t do anything about it. We may as well accept it.”

“Tiberius will definitely not be happy,” Colin said. Kathy nodded, but held her ground. “Very well. And the third?”

“I intend to put out as many contracts as possible to the new firms and companies,” Kathy concluded. “They will be paying taxes to the Empire, if they succeed, and I intend to force them into proper competition. The Thousand Families used to keep the shipping lines sewn up as tight as possible, but now there will be others, including the Freebooters.”

Colin smiled. “Daria will be happy about that,” he said. “Recognition at last.”

Kathy nodded. She rather like Daria, although she had the odd nagging feeling that she’d known Daria some time before, even though she had never seen her in her life before she’d been transported to Patrick’s Asteroid. The Freebooters had been pushing their way into areas once dominated by the Family-owned shipping lines, aided and abetted by starship crews deserting the Families and signing up with the Freebooters, and prices were falling everywhere. If the pirates could be beaten — and very few pirates would dare to tangle with the Freebooters — the Empire might be on the verge of an economic renaissance, if they could hold out long enough.

“Yes,” she agreed. “I think that if we hang on and stanch most of the bleeding, we should be able to save the Empire from complete collapse. The worst problem, however, is that we may no longer be able to afford the starship construction program.”

“We can’t lower our guard, not now,” Colin said, slowly. “Admiral Wilhelm alone is a serious problem, Kathy, and there are rumours of other warlords out along the Rim.”

“I know,” Kathy said. “The figures, however, don’t lie. If we carry on the current construction program, we will be unable to continue it past four months, unless something changes radically. The Empire never produced many superdreadnaughts for precisely that reason. If you think about it” — she was vaguely aware that she was teaching her grandmother to suck eggs — “the Imperial Navy should have been several times its pre-war size, but…”

“I’ll think about it,” Colin promised, holding up a hand. “Now, have you considered my proposals for the future government of the Empire?”

Kathy nodded. Colin had proposed, with support from most of his inner circle, a federal structure, devolving local autonomy down on every inhabited world, provided they honoured the Empire’s control over interstellar affairs. The rule of law, as Colin had explained it, would govern the Empire. There would no longer be massive abuses of power by the Thousand Families, or even Parliament itself.

“I only have one concern,” Kathy said. “We need to make it clear that Imperial Law governs all commercial activity. Far too many of our current problems stem from planets and governments refusing to pay their debts, rightly or wrongly, and we cannot allow that to continue. We will have to be prepared to sanction anyone who breaks interstellar law.”

Colin nodded. The Empire had had a nasty habit of luring entire worlds into debt-peonage, with thousands of descendents scrabbling to pay off debts incurred by their ancestors, debts that were carefully organised to make it impossible for them to escape. Imperial Law had backed the Families — of course — and anyone who defaulted had had to face the SD Troopers. Very few had dared to rebel, but now that the SD threat had been removed they were refuting their debts and trying to stand on their own. Kathy couldn’t blame them — and she felt that it would be morally wrong to force them to continue to pay when the original debts had been paid back long ago — but it was just another nail in the Empire’s coffin.

“We will,” Colin promised. He leaned forward. “And the alien provisions?”

Kathy nodded slowly. After weeks and months of debate, Colin was finally pushing the alien question through Parliament, asking them to remove the Imperial yoke from their worlds and allow them to develop in peace, without further interference from the human race. Some of them, who lived where no human could live safely, would even be allowed to colonise and spread their seed across the Empire. It was the most controversial package in Parliament’s history and bets were already being laid as to the results. The pundits were expecting blood on the walls and riots in the streets.

They might have had a point. Kathy was aware, from her own work, just how anti-alien the vast majority of the human population actually was, even though few of them would have met an alien. Public Information had been spreading horror stories about the alien menace ever since the Empire had been founded, accusing them of everything from cannibalism to attempted genocide, encouraging hatred for the different. An investigative reporter, after the Fall of Earth, had concluded that Public Information had lied repeatedly — although that wasn’t a surprise — and had actually manufactured several alien threats. The human race knew eight living alien races, but Public Information, never ones to let the truth get in the way of a good story, had invented three more, monstrous creatures intent on eating their way through the human worlds. They had found images in old human entertainment programs and given them a reality all of their own.

“The alien worlds add very little to our overall economy,” Kathy said. “The Rock-Monsters help some mining efforts, but others have little to do with the Empire. I suspect that we would be fine if we abandoned their worlds. As long as we don’t pledge ourselves to help them rebuild their economies or anything, we should be fine if we just abandoned them.”

Colin frowned. “And if we did help them?”

“It would be a strain,” Kathy said. She frowned. She rarely offered political advice, but this was important. “It would also be very unpopular.”

“God damn it,” Colin said, suddenly. The frustration in his voice made Kathy blink. “Why is doing the right thing so hard?”

“Because most people don’t think that it is the right thing,” Kathy said, slowly. “The process of re-educating them is going to take centuries, literally, and we don’t have the time to do it for every man, woman and child in the Empire. I think its one of the problems that just has to be dealt with, the sooner the better.”

“I know,” Colin said. “I intend to introduce the bill within a week and then withdraw the remaining garrisons within a month. We’ll keep an eye on the aliens, just in case, but overall we won’t have anything further to do with them. How does that sound?”

“I’m not the one you have to convince,” Kathy said. “I can provide expert economic testimony if you would like, but…”

“I know,” Colin said. “There are times when I wish I could just throw the whole Empire aside and leave.”

“That would condemn billions to death,” Kathy said. She leaned forward. She had never been that close to Colin, but she liked and respected him, enough to want to help him. “Give it a year, maybe two, and the entire Empire will have been reformed. The process will be unstoppable. Isn’t that worth fighting for?”

Kathy wasn’t entirely surprised to see the aircar waiting for her when she came out of the Parliament building, passing the Marine guards and stepping down into the streets. Jason Cordova had said that he would try to come and meet her, but as he’d been working on Earth’s massive defence network, there had been no promises. Kathy had learned to accept that part of their relationship, even though it dragged. When one of them was free, the other might be halfway across the system.

Perhaps we need a holiday as well, she thought, as she reached the aircar… and stopped dead. It wasn’t Cordova. Gwendolyn Cicero looked up as the hatch hissed open and smiled at her, crossing her long legs and leaning back to show off her perfect body. It would have been an alluring sight under other circumstances, but Kathy was too annoyed to care. She had been looking forward to seeing Cordova again.

“Come on in,” Gwendolyn said. Her voice was as perfect as Kathy remembered. “The water is fine, you know.”

Kathy didn’t smile. She had known Gwendolyn from her days before she’d left Earth to try to find her Family’s fortune. Gwendolyn was smart and heartbreakingly pretty, but she was also one of the social queens who had made her life hell. She was over fifty years old, but she looked barely of legal age, even in the Empire. Their paths hadn’t crossed since her departure — she hadn’t met Gwendolyn when she’d come to Harmony as an Ambassador from the Cicero Clan — and she wasn’t pleased to meet her now. In her view, Gwendolyn represented everything that was wrong about the Thousand Families.

“Is it?” She said, as she stepped into the cab. The meeting wasn’t a coincidence. Gwendolyn had gone to some effort to ensure that she met Kathy… and it wouldn’t be for anything mundane. They could have spoken over the communications network for something as simple as a party invitation. Kathy decided to be blunt. “What do you want?”

The aircar, at a muttered command from Gwendolyn, rose up into the air and set course for Kathy’s small house. “Nothing, really,” Gwendolyn said, calmly. Kathy didn’t believe her for a minute. No one would go to so much effort unless they had an ulterior motive. “I was merely wondering if you intend to attend the wedding of Tiberius and Alicia?”

Kathy almost smiled at the scorn in Gwendolyn’s voice. It was no secret that Gwendolyn thought that she should have been the Cicero — it was a fairly common delusion among the second-tier aristocrats — and her dislike of her superior was obvious. It was also unbelievable. The decision to come to meet her wasn’t something that fitted her question.

“I have been invited,” Kathy said. She would have preferred not to attend — she disliked social occasions because of all the backbiting, led by people like Gwendolyn — but Tiberius had invited her personally and that made it almost impossible to decline. “I think I might be attending.”

“How wonderful,” Gwendolyn gushed. Kathy eyed her suspiciously. “Perhaps a blend of silks and satins…”

“Perhaps you should stop the game and tell me what you want,” Kathy snapped, running out of patience. “I don’t believe that you came here merely to question my dress sense.”

“Well, we wouldn’t want a repeat of the catfight between Lady Elysium and Lady Ayasia, would we?” Gwendolyn asked. Kathy had to smile. The two snobs had both purchased the same dress from an exclusive fashion designer. “That was very disruptive…”

“And the real reason?”

“It’s quite simple,” Gwendolyn said. “I have been asked by Ambassador Wilhelm to arrange a meeting between her and you, concerning — I believe — trade deals between the Empire and the independent state of Cottbus. Would you like to meet her?”

Kathy stared at her. She’d seen Carola in Parliament, but she agreed with Colin; they needed some answers about what was actually going on in Cottbus before they actually made any decisions about it’s future. Gwendolyn shouldn’t have had any ties to Cottbus at all and she wondered, vaguely, if it was some kind of power play.

“No,” she said, finally. Her house was just coming into view and the aircar began its descent. “I’m not interested.”

The aircar settled neatly on the ground. “Are you sure?” Gwendolyn asked, coldly. “You’re in a very exposed position…”

Kathy rounded on her. “I am part of the Provisional Government,” she snapped. “If anyone is in an exposed position, it’s you!”

She climbed out of the aircar and walked quickly up the path to the door, aware of Gwendolyn’s eyes following her until she opened the door and entered the house. If she was actually dealing with Carola…

I have to discuss this with Jason, she thought, grimly. This changes everything.