Democracy's Light

Chapter Twenty-Nine

I wonder if this is how Percival felt, Colin thought, leaning back in his chair and staring up at the starchart. Sitting here, doing nothing and waiting for the hammer to fall.

The thought made him smile bitterly. He’d issued orders, the best orders he could under the circumstances, and now he had to sit back and wait while others carried them out — or died trying. It wasn’t something that sat well with him. He’d always led the Shadow Fleet into battle, into the firestorms of Harmony, First and Second Morrison and Earth itself, and now that he was too important to be risked, he had to remain on Earth while his friends and subordinates fought the battles without him.

He studied the starchart and tossed possibilities around in his mind. By now, he was sure, Admiral Wilhelm would have attacked Hawthorn and probably taken the planet, unless he’d committed a tiny force to it and Admiral Garland had slapped him back out of his complacency. Colin suspected that the planet had fallen, but he wouldn’t know until the message finally arrived through what remained of the ICN, or a destroyer playing messenger boy. Katy intended, or so she claimed, to raid Admiral Wilhelm’s forward bases, but what if she’d been mouse-trapped and destroyed at Hawthorn? There was no way to know until the messages arrived to update him, by which point they would be dramatically out of date themselves.

You can’t run a war at long distance, he reminded himself, and scowled. The Empire had tried that when he’d launched the rebellion and it had failed. If they hadn’t overridden Joshua from time to time, the rebellion might have failed instead, but they’d chosen to assume that they knew better than the person on the spot. Colin wouldn’t make that mistake himself, but now all he could do was wait, rather than issuing useless orders. It was on the tip of his fingers to start contacting the various departments and hurrying them along, rather than trusting them to know their jobs and leaving them to get on with them, even though he knew it would be futile. By his most pessimistic estimate, Admiral Wilhelm could be halfway to Earth, but the first Colin would know of it would be when the first starships started flickering in to commence the attack.

He ran his hand through his hair, feeling tired and old. He was barely forty years old, but he had changed the Empire… and had found himself left with the task of reforming it, rather than leaving it in the hands of Parliament. The MPs just kept arguing and arguing, rather than coming to any decisions and sticking with them, while the first-rank and second-rank worlds increasingly went their own way. He could dispatch a fleet of ships to bring some of them back into the fold, but that would mean destroying everything he had worked to create. There were times when he seriously considered just taking a starship and vanishing for the Rim, but only the thought of the hundreds of thousands who had followed him kept him in his place. He couldn’t leave them exposed to the reactionaries, not after everything they’d done for him…

Perhaps I should tour the orbital defences, he thought, and considered it for a long moment, before finally dismissing the thought. The defences of Earth, with a little help from the Geeks, were stronger than they had ever been, perhaps even strong enough to challenge Admiral Wilhelm without mobile support. Earth’s solar system, however, was a complex place to defend, if not to attack. Colin had taken Earth himself — it felt like years ago, years since he had trapped himself in a thankless task — and if sheer destruction was the aim, Admiral Wilhelm could do much worse. If Colin had a year, time to bring new starships online and refit old ones, the war could be ended fairly quickly, but he doubted that he would be allowed such time. After all, Admiral Wilhelm, unlike Percival, could read a production chart.

It was almost a relief when his secretary buzzed him. “Mr President” — Colin’s official title was President and Leader of the Provisional Government, something that felt odd in the Empire — “Lady Tyler and Captain Cordova are here to see you.”

“Thank you,” Colin said, hearing Kathy telling his secretary that she was no longer a Lady. “Please send them both in at once.”

He stood up as they entered, watching them carefully. They both looked dead tired, almost as if they were asleep on their feet, but Kathy looked determined while Cordova looked oddly subdued. Colin hadn’t arranged for himself to have a large office, but he’d installed a pair of sofas for close friends and waved them both over to one of them, offering them both a drink. Cordova accepted, quicker than normal, while Kathy declined. They exchanged small talk for a few minutes, leaving Colin puzzled and worried. It had to be bad news, but for once neither of them seemed willing to speak first.

“I’d love to chat about old times for hours,” he said finally, “but I don’t have the time these days.” It was easy to envy Cordova, at least, whose main role was overseeing the Volunteer Fleet — what was left of it — and the system’s defences. “Can I ask you why you decided to come visit me at such short notice?”

“We didn’t want to raise any flags,” Kathy explained, seemingly taking the lead. That was more than just unusual, it was peculiar. Normally, Cordova was completely irrepressible, happily wasting time chatting about girls he’d known once, or bragging about the qualities of his crew. To be fair to him, the Random Numbers did have a remarkable crew, even though some of them had been glad to be back in the Imperial Navy again. “It was important that this meeting passed unnoticed.”

Colin lifted an eyebrow. “I’m intrigued,” he said, “but verbal fencing doesn’t interest me nearly as much as the physical kind. What do you both have to tell me?”

Kathy took a breath. “Tiberius is planning to have you killed and intends to have Jason do his dirty work,” she said, and started to outline the entire story. Colin listened, keeping his face blank through sheer force of will, as she explained that Jason Cordova had been born a Cicero and that, long ago, he’d spared an entire planet of Dathi from destruction. “I think that he intends to mount a coup.”

“I doubt that there’s any doubt about that,” Colin said absently, his mind racing as he grappled with the new information. He hadn’t thought much about Cordova’s loyalties since the Fall of Earth, deciding that if he was an Imperial Intelligence plant, he’d never been activated in time to save the Empire from the rebellion. His very inaction — and loyal service as part of the Shadow Fleet — had spoken in his favour. He hadn’t considered the possibility of a deeper game… and one played by one of the handful of Family Members he had come to trust. Everything Tiberius had done, since the Fall of Earth, took on new and sinister meaning. “I wonder…”

He focused in on Cordova, seeing, for the first time, the quiet desperation that hid behind the act. The Captain who’d led his ship to the Rim rather than commit genocide, always aware that he was vulnerable, and every man’s hand would be turned against him if the truth leaked out, dependent upon a Family he hated to conceal the truth. He’d been pompous, and pushy, and sometimes plainly crazy, just to hide his real self from the universe. He’d led his crew on a long voyage of the damned. There were legends of starships that had lost their flicker drives in interstellar space and forced to crawl slower-than-light to the nearest world, but Cordova’s ship had been lost forever. They had had no hope of returning home until the Empire was overthrown.

“You spared the Dathi,” he said, carefully. Colin had wondered, privately, if the Dathi threat had been manufactured. There might have been a war thousands of years ago, but no one had seen a living Dathi since then, not as far as he had known. The Empire had had every incentive to manufacture a threat — after all, they couldn’t prove that the race had been exterminated, and they had been spacefarers — and Colin had suspected that it was a manufactured threat. “What happened to them?”

“I looked it up after I returned to Earth,” Cordova said, vaguely. There was something bitter and broken in his voice, a sense that there would never be any safety for him, or Kathy. “The world was destroyed, having first been catalogued as a human world, and then several asteroids were dropped on the wrecked world. There won’t be any trace of them left there now.”

Colin nodded. The Empire might have revealed the truth… if Cordova had obeyed orders and destroyed them from the start. Public Information would have had a field day, proclaiming Cordova the man who’d saved the Empire, never mind the fact that a non-technological planet was utterly harmless to anyone in the Empire. Instead, he’d left them with a poisoned chalice and a nightmarish blow to the very heart of their power. If the population had realised that one of the Thousand Families was prepared to spare the Dathi…

He directed his thoughts back to more immediate problems. “Personally, I don’t think that you did the wrong thing,” he said, addressing Cordova. It would have been hypocritical to accuse him of wrongdoing, after Colin had been working to free the other races held in bondage by the human race, but it was also the truth. A planet of aliens — any aliens — who were no threat to anyone but themselves didn’t deserve to be scorched. Hell, Gaul hadn’t deserved the attempted scorching either. “Politically, we won’t be able to make a big thing of it, but as far as I’m concerned you did the right thing.”

He leaned forward. “And what, exactly, did Tiberius make you do?”

“He sent two of his people to Harmony to meet with me,” Cordova said. He seemed to be regaining his confidence, perhaps realising that Colin wasn’t going to drop a hammer on him and ruin his life. Just telling someone — anyone — had to be a huge relief. “They made contact with me and gave me a piece of artwork to remind me of what I’d done — or rather, refused to do — and told me to wait for orders. I don’t think that they knew the truth. Anyone who has survived as the Cicero wouldn’t have shared that kind of information with just anyone, even his closest allies. They asked me, from time to time, for information, but nothing too significant.”

“Holding you in reserve,” Colin said, thoughtfully. It made a certain kind of sense. No one in their right mind would just throw an asset like Cordova away. “They must have been worried about you simply cutting your losses and vanishing.”

“It wasn’t just me,” Cordova said, flatly. “It was the crew of my ship. They were all involved in my decision and would have suffered for it. I couldn’t get them all to hide, even out on the Rim.”

“They’ll have a pardon,” Colin said, and meant it.

“Pardoned for what?” Kathy asked, sharply. She leaned forward, as if she could change reality by sheer force of will. “If they weren’t guilty of anything, how could they be pardoned?”

Colin shrugged. “It might be important to explain that they haven’t done anything wrong,” he said, putting the matter to one side for the moment. The blunt truth was that the vast majority of the population would consider that they had done something wrong in not exterminating the entire planet and committing genocide. “Jason, Kathy, what do they want you to do now?”

“They want me to kill you,” Cordova said, carefully. “They offered to allow me back into the Family if I killed you, perhaps with other rewards as well…”

“Charming,” Colin said. Surprisingly, he felt almost happy. He had a real enemy to fight, even though he was slightly disappointed in Tiberius. The Cicero had been a valuable ally, or so he had thought. Combat on the ground, in the shadows, wasn’t his forte, but now he knew about the threat. “And do you want to kill me?”

They exchanged glances. “No,” Cordova said, finally. He stroked his beard thoughtfully. It was nearly a minute before he spoke again. “I want my crew pardoned, or officially forgiven, and nothing else.”

“I want this conspiracy defeated,” Kathy said, flatly. “They can’t turn the clock back, no matter how they try.” Her voice hardened. “Colin, this is a clear breach of the truce that ended the war, the agreement that preserved something of their power in exchange for them not bringing the Empire down around our heads. We can go after them openly now.”

She reached over and took Cordova’s hand. “They can’t turn the clock back,” she repeated. “We were having problems keeping the Empire stable despite everything, because of all their workers who wanted to be treated better, and who wanted power and promotion for themselves. We couldn’t keep trying to square the circle forever, but now we don’t have to try. They’re a clear and present threat and can be removed, simply and quickly.”

“Perhaps not,” Colin said, grimly. She was right, in a sense; it would be easy to go after Tiberius and the remainder of the Cicero Family, but would it end there? Who else was involved in the conspiracy? Tiberius had kept an open house, as far as the remainder of the Thousand Families were concerned, even including some of the MPs. How many of them had been subverted and brought under his thumb? He might even have Household Troops under his control, despite the agreement to remove them all from Earth. How far did his influence really spread? “How many others do you know about as being directly involved?”

Cordova frowned. “Tiberius himself, Pompey and Gwendolyn,” he said, finally. Colin swore. Three people… and even assuming that it was the entire Cicero Family, there was no proof… and dealing with them as quickly as he would have liked would have destroyed the rule of law he was trying to build! The thought was maddening; the enemy skulked in the shadows, doing whatever they pleased, while Colin was bound by the laws he had signed into existence himself. “He implied that there were many others…”

“Of course,” Colin agreed, savagely. There were around two million people who could be reasonably counted as part of the Thousand Families. Some, such as Stacy Roosevelt, had vanished into space, their fates unknown. The remainder had stayed on Earth and either thrown themselves into the Provisional Government, or hid in their estates and tried to pretend that nothing had changed. The latter, in particular, would be happy to support Tiberius, even if he sought to make himself Emperor…

And yet there was the nagging sense that he was missing something important.

He pushed it to one side as he looked up at the starchart. “Do you think that they might be allied with Admiral Wilhelm? It might explain how his forces advanced so fast…”

Cordova considered it. “I doubt it, unless Admiral Wilhelm is merely someone’s puppet,” he said, after a moment. “He seems equally determined to bring down the Thousand Families, assuming we believe everything that Carola said to us… and we know she lied several times. She might well have lied about that as well, except I have a feeling that she was telling the truth. A man in his position would have to be a fool to miss the chance that fate — and we — offered him.”

“True,” Colin agreed. It might be time for another chat with Carola, although dealing with her was an irritating problem. Legally, her very status was vague, although there was a motion afoot in Parliament to declare her a rebel against the Provisional Government and treat her as such. Daria had proposed it, as he recalled, but the MPs were dragging their feet. If Admiral Wilhelm won the war, he would probably be out for revenge on anyone who hurt his wife. It didn’t say much about their confidence in the war effort, but a great deal about their sense of self-preservation. “Leave that for the moment.”

He looked down at his table for a long moment. “I’m going to have to bring Vincent and Neil in on this,” he said, thinking hard. His Head of Security and the Commander of the Marine Detachment couldn’t have gone bad, for the very simple reason that if either of them had, he had already lost without knowing that he was at war. “I need the pair of you to keep me informed if Tiberius contacts you and…”

He paused. A thought had just occurred to him. “I could send you out of the system,” he said, to Cordova. “You’d be out of his reach and…”

“I think he’d pressure me to stay where I was,” Cordova admitted. “Besides, you don’t have a good role for me away from here and that might tip him off to the truth. If he learns that I came to you, he’ll step up his own plans and try to take you out…”

“He can’t, unless he can counter the Shadow Fleet,” Colin said, and wondered if that were actually true. He’d planned in terms of a fleet engagement, but if Tiberius smuggled a standard nuke into the High City, it would rather neatly decapitate the Provisional Government. Was Tiberius that ruthless? He would also take out several hundred lower-ranking Family Members. “I wonder…”

He broke off as his intercom buzzed. “Yes?”

“Mr President, we just had a flash signal from System Command,” his secretary said, grimly. Colin knew it was bad news just from her voice. “There’s been a shuttle accident. Grand Admiral Joshua Wachter is dead!”