Democracy's Light

Chapter Twenty-Three

Kathy had given Jason Cordova permission to enter her small apartment at any time, the only person she’d given such permission to in her entire life. It didn’t surprise her that, when she arrived home from her office and a short trip to the Jupiter Shipyards, Cordova was waiting for her. He’d done it before, sometimes sneaking up to surprise her and at other times just waiting for her, but this was different. He looked… tired and worn.

“Jason,” she said, in honest surprise. She’d never seen him lose his composure completely. The brash pirate persona he’d pulled around him like a shield, a person who could be loving and tender one moment and boorish and crude the next, seemed to have faded away. He still wore his pirate outfit, as outrageous and clashing as ever, but for the first time since she’d met him, he wore it like a costume, not his natural clothes. He looked like a man wearing his father’s uniform. “Jason, are you all right?”

He looked up at her. His beard slipped slightly, revealing bloodshot eyes. She’d known that the bushy beard was a fake, of course, but she’d never seen it come off without his permission. Underneath, his chin was as smooth and hairless as his own, the result of a tiny change in his genetic code. She’d read somewhere that men who had such changes choose to wear false beards later in life, for reasons lost somewhere in the innermost recesses of the male psyche, but Cordova had never struck her as the kind of person to care about such matters. He’d worn his beard because absolutely no one would recognise him without it. He had walked through the High City wearing the grey tasteless garb of a Family accountant and no one had batted an eyelid.

“No,” he said, finally. He sounded as if he had been crying, although there was no evidence on his face to suggest tears. She could barely process what she was seeing. Jason Cordova had taken on a battlecruiser squadron with a light cruiser and escaped unscathed, laughing and joking all the way, but now he looked almost scared. Something maternal, buried deep inside her, awoke and she reached out to enfold him in her arms. He felt like a man whose heart was racing madly, almost as if he were scared. She doubted that their bedroom gymnastics had had that much effect against him. Holding him was like holding a mouse or a hamster. “Kathy, I…”

He broke off with an effort. “Kathy, the world turned upside down.”

Kathy stared at him, unable to understand. If something had happened, she would have been informed at once, as part of the innermost section of the Provisional Government. It was still too early to hear anything from Cottbus, or from Admiral Garland; the last courier boat had informed them that she intended to proceed to Cottbus and carry out her orders. There had been no great disaster, no fleet engagement in Earth’s orbit, so why was Cordova so… wound up?

“Here,” she said, standing up and pulling him into the living room. She didn’t drink often herself — and she’d been amused to discover that Cordova had decidedly plebeian tastes — but she did have a bottle of fine brandy her father had given to her, back when he’d been trying to worm his way back into her good graces. She poured a healthy portion into a crystal cup and passed it to him, watching with some alarm as he swigged it down like cheap rotgut. She’d only tasted the asteroid-produced booze once, but she’d had the impression that it had taken the lining off her teeth. “Now, what’s happened…?”

“I’m not the person you thought I was,” Cordova said. He took the bottle from her and poured himself a second glass, tossing it down in bare seconds. Kathy frowned and removed the bottle from his sight, silently calculating how much he had drunk. It was possible that he’d drunk much more before she’d arrived home, either from her stash or from a local bar, and his implants weren’t kicking in. “Kathy, everything has changed, again.”

Kathy blinked at him, puzzled. It wasn’t uncommon for con artists to try to pass themselves off as members of the Thousand Families and quite often they succeeded until they were compared against the Imperial Register. There were over two million men and women, after all, who could be counted as part of the Families and no one knew them all. As long as they remained carefully out of the way, instead of posing as someone from the senior Families, they could get away with it for years…

But she knew that Cordova was real.

“They want me to kill him,” he said, thinly. His voice broke again. “They want me to kill Colin!”

“But…” Kathy started. She broke off and thought rapidly. She’d learned to think quickly during her first year at the asteroid mining platform, before she’d met Cordova for the first time, and it was a skill that had come in handy from time to time. She’d learned other skills as well, such as the basic practicality of always having a get-out plan, and she found herself checking out her plan to escape from Earth. There were first-rank worlds or isolated colonies that would be glad to see her. “Jason, who wants you to kill Colin, and why?”

“Tiberius,” Cordova said. Kathy recoiled. He couldn’t have surprised her more if he’d pulled her over his knees and spanked her. She’d liked Tiberius, the Family Head who’d joined the rebel cause, understanding that the Families had to adapt and change to fit their new circumstances. He hadn’t even tried to get her into bed, unlike some of the other young men of the Families, but clearly he’d been playing a deeper game. “He wants me to kill Colin, somehow…”

Something clicked behind Kathy’s eyes. It was almost impossible to imagine anything that could be used to pressure someone like Cordova into agreeing to commit murder, or something that someone as smart as Tiberius could imagine being useable to force him to kill a friend and ally, but clearly Tiberius could think of something. Only one possibility made sense.

“You’re a Cicero, aren’t you?” She said, reaching out and holding him. The more she thought about it, the more she knew she was right. The only people who might have a claim on Cordova’s loyalties, apart from the rebels, the Provisional Government and Kathy herself, were his Family. His mysterious unnamed Family. A Cicero! It made perfect sense. The Cicero Family would have had the clout to ensure that Cordova’s past was carefully hidden… and, unlike so many of the other families, they had adapted well to the brave new galaxy.

Not as well as we thought, she thought angrily. Her surprise was rapidly being replaced by rage. The Provisional Government wouldn’t survive Colin’s death. It would dissolve rapidly into a mass of competing factions, allowing Tiberius and the remainder of the Families to quietly reassert control behind the scenes. It wouldn’t be long before the new order fell apart, to be replaced by a version of the old order, run by someone smart enough to prevent a second rebellion for years…

Or perhaps it would be worse. Colin had broken centuries of unthinking supremacy and submission to Earth. The first-rank worlds would fight to keep their independence; after Gaul, they would have no choice… and they were arming to the teeth. Colony worlds, established and then systematically raped by the Thousand Families to feed their bloated appetites, would fight against any restoration of the debt-peonage that had held them in bondage. Warlords like Admiral Wilhelm — and even the remains of the Shadow Fleet, she thought darkly — would launch their own bids for supremacy. The Empire would fall apart into a nightmare of civil war.

The vision held her transfixed, for she had feared something like it once she started to understand — truly understand — the underlying power and structure of the Empire. The Shadow Fleet had fought a fairly clean war, without scorching a single world, but that would change. The Empire might have threatened to scorch Gaul, and they’d certainly come too close to succeeding, but if it all fell apart hundreds of worlds would be scorched, or even just targeted with a handful of shipkillers or antimatter bombs. The devastation would blow humanity back to a handful of worlds, burning in the night, leaving the remains of humanity back in the Stone Age. It would be the end of civilisation.

“Yes,” Cordova said, finally. “I was born Jason Cicero, forty years ago on Earth, and banished from the Family fifteen years ago, wiped out of all the records.” His voice darkened slightly, dipping towards depression. “I looked myself up in the Imperial Register after we took Earth. They wiped me completely from the records. My mother probably told everyone, right up to the day she died, that she only had three sons.”

Kathy blinked. “And you’ve never tried to talk to your brothers?”

Cordova shrugged. “What would we have to say to one another?”

Kathy nodded, thinking hard. “When does he want you to kill Colin?”

“He didn’t say,” Cordova explained. His voice tightened, but focusing on the question seemed to be helping him concentrate. She’d never seen him so weak and vulnerable before and it bothered her… and it bothered her that it bothered her. Had she really been looking for a man who would be a font of strength, rather that someone who was intelligent and smart enough to be good company? “He just wants me to be ready to move when the order came.”

“I see,” Kathy said. She didn’t know much about the security surrounding Colin, but she knew that it was extensive, based around the well-founded belief that he had far too many enemies. The Government section of the High City was wired completely by Imperial Intelligence, with armed and armoured Marines on call… and she’d been assured that it would take a major assault by armed soldiers to break through the defences. The Household Troopers had been disbanded, hadn’t they? The Third Emperor, whose name escaped her, had used them to make himself Emperor, but Colin had ordered all of the Household Troops disbanded. Even if Tiberius had kept some of them back, without triggering off alarms, they would still have to break through the Marines. “Jason, I need to ask you a question.”

He looked up at her, already knowing what she was going to ask. “Jason, what does he have on you?” Kathy asked. The mere detail of Jason Cordova being a Cicero wouldn’t have that much effect — hell, she could see it working out in their favour. Her father had made considerable political capital because there was a Tyler at the heart of the Provisional Government, despite Kathy’s refusal to use her position to help expand the Family fortunes, and there was no reason why Cicero couldn’t do the same. “Why does he even think that you’ll do as he says?”

“It’s a long story,” Cordova said. He turned, facing away from her. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

“You have to tell me,” Kathy said, softly. It had to be something bad, really bad, but what? The Families had been known to forgive mass slaughter and child molesting, or even worse crimes. The memory of one of her few friends, brain-wiped and altered by her own father, rose up unbidden from her mind. If her father hadn’t fled Earth after the Shadow Fleet had arrived, Kathy would have had him killed for that crime. He had effectively murdered his own daughter. She couldn’t imagine anything that would have had such an effect on Cordova… but Tiberius evidently could. “What does he have on you, Jason?”

He turned to face her, looking around for the bottle she’d placed out of sight. “It’s a long story,” he repeated. “I grew up here — well, not here; the Cicero Estate — as a third-tier son. I didn’t have any real hope of becoming the Cicero, so they decided that I could serve the Family — and therefore the Empire — by going into the Imperial Navy.”

Kathy smiled. She’d wondered if Jason Cicero had actually been one of Tiberius’s dead brothers, but apparently not. A third-tier Family Member was somewhere in-between, trusted to handle matters that couldn’t be left to outsiders, rewarded and feted to the best of the Family’s considerable ability, but not often offered real power. Their birth made them part of the Family, but not important parts of the Family. Several thousand such young aristocrats had joined the Provisional Government after the end of the war, seeing it as a chance to carve out wealth and power for themselves without having to kowtow to first-tier members who’d gained their positions through an accident of birth.

“I discovered I was good at it,” Cordova continued. His voice grew more confident as he remembered. “I might have gotten into the Academy because of who my Family were, but I tried to make them proud and I was good at it, really I was. I graduated third in my class and there was no influence used to give me that position. They knew I was that good.”

Kathy nodded. The Imperial Navy’s series of academies for senior officers were political to a terrifying degree, often graduating complete incompetents because of who they were, or whom they were related to. Colin hadn’t graduated well, she recalled, even though going by scores alone he should have been in the top ten. Others, such as Admiral Percival, had been told repeatedly that their Family Names meant more to the Academy than skill or competence. The smarter ones tended to find clients to help them carry out the duties they were so ill-prepared to carry out. The hatreds that ran through the Academy were legends…

“I earned my position,” Cordova said. “I didn’t know that they were not going to allow me anywhere near a superdreadnaught squadron, but even when I realised that I would never be allowed to rise above Captain, I didn’t care. I became a Midshipman, and then a Lieutenant and then a Commander… and finally they made me Captain of a light cruiser. I met Admiral Percival along the way and I think I embarrassed him a bit.”

Kathy snorted. Admiral Percival had been beyond embarrassment. His incompetence had been the subject of private whispers and jokes among the Imperial Navy before Colin had rebelled, taken a superdreadnaught squadron from one of his clients, and then killed him at Harmony. Now, he was used as a textbook case of what not to do at the new Imperial Academy. It was, she’d decided long ago, better than he deserved.

“And for a few years I was happy,” Cordova continued. He sounded happier too. “We patrolled the Rim, we chased down and killed pirates and we watched as the Empire continued to expand. I spent years hunting down Captain Morgan and his infamous Morgan’s Hold, but it was my victory in the end… and I loved it. There was no chance of promotion, but I didn’t care! I had a good ship and a good crew — and we punched out a heavy cruiser once in an exercise, which probably took about ten years off everyone’s life — and we were happy.”

Kathy saw, behind his torn face, a image of the Captain he had once been and smiled. The Empire wouldn’t want to risk putting someone so competent in a senior position — the last person they’d trusted in a sensitive position had been Janice Windsor, who had made herself Empress with the support and backing of Home Fleet — but Cordova hadn’t shared Colin’s burning ambition and resentment. He’d been happy with the cards he’d been dealt… so what had gone so wrong?

He looked up at her. “And then I got priority orders,” he said. “I was to take the John Rayland to this world, right on the edge of the Rim. The orders didn’t allow me any leeway. I was to investigate the world, prove or disprove a report that had been filed with Imperial Intelligence… and if the world was what the report claimed it was, I was to scorch it without further ado. They gave me the mission, I think, because of who I was. They trusted me to carry it out without question.

“We should have known, we should have prepared for it,” he said, breaking off. “They were spacefarers after all. Macore’s fleet went further, so why couldn’t they?

“And we found the world. It only took one look to know what we were dealing with, a harmless world, but one under a sentence of death. I refused. They were completely harmless. No space flight, barely anything beyond water-powered junk, no threat at all. I could have blown them to dust and ash and they wouldn’t have a hope of hitting back. I said that it was pointless. We never even figured out how to talk to them. We might have more success without the pressure of the war.”

“But…”

He ignored her. “I didn’t realise at the time,” he explained. “I didn’t understand the pressures involved. I told them no and that was a mistake. They ordered me to scorch the world and sent a squadron of battlecruisers along to enforce their decision. A completely harmless world, far less dangerous than Gaul, burned to ash.”

Kathy stared at him. “But why?” She asked. It made no sense to her. Why would the Empire destroy a possibly-valuable assert. A developed colony world was almost priceless, with or without the original inhabitants. “Why did they want to wipe out such a harmless world?”

“Don’t you understand?” Cordova asked, almost pleading. “They weren’t rebels, or traitors, or missing colonists. They weren’t even human. They were Dathi! They were Dathi and I wanted to spare their lives!”