Democracy's Light

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Cordova brought the sword down hard… and it shattered on the body armour Colin had woven into his uniform, as planned. The blow still hurt and he found himself staggering backwards, barely aware of the press of the crowd as everyone struggled to get away from the murder scene, or to get towards it to find out what was going on. He dropped to one knee, one hand scrabbling for the pistol he wore on his belt as panic spread everywhere.

“Get down,” someone shouted. The alert signal had brought his bodyguards into the room from the adjoining rooms. It had been simple enough to have Marines inserted into the guest lists; after all, there were so many commoners on everyone’s invitation lists these days. Tiberius had invited everyone who was anyone, too many people for him to know and vet them all, and it had been easy to include a few unexpected guests. Even unarmed, Colin would have backed them against a legion of Household Troops, but they’d been able to slip weapons into the mansion. “Everyone get down on the ground and stay down…”

A burst of light, hot enough to singe Colin’s hair, burned past his ear as he hurled himself to the floor. A woman wearing a long flowing blue dress had opened fire on him with an energy weapon. A Marine shot her with a stunner, but she remained on her feet, weaving drunkenly towards Colin’s position. Her headscarf fell away, revealing a tattoo just above her left eye and confirming her identity. She was a pleasure slave. An armed pleasure slave.

If I get out of this alive, Colin thought, taking aim at her with his pistol, I will have every pleasure slave on Earth removed for their own safety.

The Marine fired again and this time the girl’s head disintegrated into a shower of blood. Colin heard the screams from the innocents lying on the floor, some of them trying to block the entire unpleasant scene from their eyes, others enjoying the chaos with the delight of people who knew that it would never touch them. So few of the Thousand Families had ever wanted for anything material, or even seen violence up close and personal, but now it had touched them right in the heart of their power. The old Empire was dead.

“Sir, stay down,” the Marine snapped. Ben, Colin recalled. His name was Ben, one of the Marines who’d served on the Lightning before the first mutinies. “The entire complex is under attack.”

Colin swore as the noise of fighting and screams started to impact on his ears. The entire reception room had disintegrated into a mass of people, lying on the floor and groaning, even as a pair of Marines escorted Cordova to a safer area on the other side of the room. No one would doubt, now, that he had tried to kill Colin, or that Tiberius had been involved. Only Tiberius could have cleared him to get such a weapon through the security sensors, more than enough rope to hang him and his entire Family with… assuming that they survived the next few hours. The sounds from outside the room didn’t sound encouraging.

“Sada, Miguel, guard the doors,” Ben snapped, as the other Marines entered. The sound of fighting was growing louder, or was it a simple massacre? How many had brought weapons to the wedding. “Sir, the pleasure slaves have gone mad; they’re killing everyone.”

Colin nodded. Cicero made pleasure slaves, growing them in vats deep below their estate… and there were thousands of them. He could see now, in hindsight, how the trick had been done. Cicero had taken pleasure slaves, implanted the knowledge of how to use weapons into their heads, and then sent them out to kill. They would be pathetic against trained and experienced soldiers, or even SD Troopers, but against unarmed men and women? They’d kill thousands before they were brought down.

He coughed, feeling dust catching in his mouth as it shivered down from the ceiling. The building rocked to the force of a massive explosion, too close for comfort. The hundreds of aristocrats who had expected a wedding followed by all the food they could eat whimpered, scared to death for their first time in their lives, even if they couldn’t decide if they were more unsure of their fellows or Colin himself. The handful of Marines couldn’t hold the room forever.

“I take it that you called for help at once,” he said, finally. They’d taken the precaution of stationing a fully armed reaction force near the estate, if too far away to intervene as soon as the shit hit the fan. “What’s their ETA?”

“Five minutes,” Ben said. Another explosion rocked the building. “I don’t think that we should stay here, but I took a tour of the building while I was being patronised by the aristocrats and there’s no cover outside this room. If we slip out the door, we will be trapped and killed; they’re killing everyone they find.”

Colin nodded slowly. As assassination plans went, it wasn’t the best he’d ever heard of, let alone seen in action, but it might still work. It just didn’t make sense, however, no matter how much he considered the variables. Tiberius had wanted him killed publicly, ensuring that there was no doubt that Jason Cordova was the murderer, but how the hell did he plan to avoid getting some of the blame himself?

“Find Tiberius,” he snapped. A quick check of the room revealed that Tiberius was gone, but Alicia was lying on the ground, her white dress burned badly by a plasma bolt. She’d been shot down deliberately, Colin saw, and it was already too late to do anything for her. Had Tiberius planned her death, or was some other player at work? Had someone from the Cicero Clan stuck a knife in his or her leader’s back, even as Tiberius stuck a knife in Colin’s own back? “Why…?”

The room shook again. “Sir, they’re trying to break in through the main doors,” Ben said, grimly. “I think that we’d better start preparing some blockades.”

Colin watched as the Marines went to work, co-opting people to help from the handful who seemed to be dealing with the shock and trauma. It wasn’t something he’d expected to see, but he’d fought in space, when he’d understood how combat worked. He’d never fought hand-to-hand, or killed more than one person with his own hands, and it was an introduction to a whole new world. He glanced down at his timepiece and swore again. By the time the Marines arrived to liberate the handful of survivors, Tiberius could be halfway across the planet, or heading out into space.

Tiberius didn’t know how he was still moving through the concealed tunnel. He’d barely had a second to realise that the pleasure slave, the second line of attack if Cordova failed them, was taking aim at him before Alicia had shoved him out of the way. It hadn’t saved her from taking a shot to the chest and he had known, the instant he saw the wounds, that she was dead. The man who’d shot the pleasure slave, trying to clear some room in the formal hall, had saved his life, but somehow Tiberius knew that it had been a coincidence. Daria had intended to kill him.

The tunnel had been carefully concealed. Daria had assured him — although he was starting to lose faith in what she told him — that the tunnel was invisible to anyone without the latest sensors. The only proof that she was telling the truth had been a lack of anyone following him, but as he crawled further, he keyed his implant to access the estates internal security systems and realised that Daria’s plans went far further than she’d told him. All over the estate, the pleasure slaves were revolting, killing men, women and children with a chilling dispassion for lives. They were, after all, just following their programming.

He cursed himself for a fool as he forced himself onwards, trying to reach the command centre. There was almost no one apart from the handful of remaining guards who was armed… and he would have bet half of his entire holdings that they’d all been suborned by Daria before she started operating to reclaim the Empire. He thought, seriously, about trying to make his way to the spaceport and using a shuttle to reach the yacht in orbit, but somehow he was sure that that way out would be blocked as well. Pleasure slaves might not think, in any sense that a human would understand the term, but Daria had commanded men and ships in action. She would be quite capable of identifying every possible angle of escape and countering it. She had, after all, had advance warning of the crisis.

The corridor terminated in the interior of the mansion, deep within the private quarters that belonged to the inner circle of the Family. He remembered, with a growing sense of shame and guilt, that he’d brought Alicia here once, despite the disapproval of some of the Family, just to show her his rooms. He’d slept with her then, before the end of the war and the Fall of Earth, and he had led her to her death as effectively as any Judas goat. She’d been bright and full of life and he’d taken it all away from her, just because he had wanted to save his own miserable life. He staggered along the corridor, wishing desperately that he’d thought to provide himself with a weapon, but he’d always had men and women ready to risk their lives in his defence. A Family Head shouldn’t carry a weapon, his father had said, and he had followed it to the death. Daria had even encouraged him in that belief.

He reached the control room and peered inside. Daria was sitting in a chair, holding a single weapon on her lap, watching as the display showed images from inside the mansion. She looked up at him, saw him, and beckoned him inside imperiously. He came, helplessly, and knew that he would have come even without the weapon in her hand. He was seeing the true Daria now, the hidden truth behind the mask she’d worn for Colin and the other rebels, and it chilled him to the bone. His father had backed a sociopath to reform the Empire. He hadn’t had time to regret his mistake.

“You lied to me,” he said, between gasps. The screens were showing scenes of horror spreading through the mansion. Pleasure slaves killed robotically as they advanced through rooms that should have been safe. He saw a naked girl, her face chillingly blank, picking up children and snapping their necks, one by one. How many of the Empire’s elite had attended the wedding ceremony? How many of them were now dead or trapped without hope of escape. “Why?”

Daria smiled. The building shuddered again as the display switched to an outside view. Marine landing craft were racing towards the estate, ducking and weaving to avoid fire from ground-based weapons while firing back with HVMs of their own. It would take them time to clear their way into the estate, Tiberius realised, and by the time they fought their way to the reception area, almost everyone would be dead.

“Why not?” Daria asked, her mask slipping back into place. The bloody scenes of carnage seemed nothing, but a mere distraction. “Why should I not purge the Empire of all who would oppose me?”

Tiberius found himself gasping for breath. “Why?” He pleaded. “You’re killing us all.”

“I was born to one of the Thousand Families on the wrong side of the sheets,” Daria said, calmly. There was a mocking undertone in her voice, a hint of cold amusement at how events had played out. “I was never wanted anywhere and so my father sent me into the Imperial Navy, just to get rid of me. I was his little embarrassment, you see, someone he couldn’t disown, but also someone he couldn’t accept. I hope that you used birth control when you started to sow your wild oats, my dear.”

Her voice had become openly mocking. “I cut my way to the top through sheer brilliance and a complete lack of concern for anyone else,” she continued. “I hit the glass ceiling, of course, just as Colin himself hit it, but I had allies. Your father, among others, wanted to reform the Empire, and so they picked harmless little Janice as their Empress. They might as well have given the fox the keys to the henhouse.”

Tiberius stared at her. “But you wanted to reform the Empire,” he protested. “They wanted you to begin a reform program…”

“Of course they did,” Daria agreed, “and so do I. They taught me to imagine how things could be changed. I imagined a universe without the Thousand Families.”

She laughed. “How many of your kin will die together?”

The building shook again. On the display, armoured Marines were pouring out of their landing craft and flowing — too late — into the building. Tiberius knew a moment of hope, even though he knew whatever remained of the Provisional Government would blame him for the massacre. There was nowhere left for him now. The Marines might as well shoot him and get it over with.

Daria read his thoughts. “Yes,” she agreed. “They’re not coming to save you, Tiberius.”

She levelled the gun directly at his head. He flinched, trying to leap out the way, but it was too late. The gun barked once, there was a brief stabbing pain in his head… and then nothing. Nothing, but darkness.

“Forward, at the double,” General Neil Frandsen snapped, as he led the Marine Company into the Cicero Mansion. He shouldn’t have been anywhere near the action, or so his subordinates had argued, but there was no way he was going to leave his superior and friend in the midst of danger. The battle armour made short work of the main entrance and he crashed through into the first reception hall, into a scene of horror. Dead bodies, men and women, young and old, lay everywhere, their bodies wracked with deadly wounds. None of them had had a chance.

“Disruptor wounds,” one of the Marines noted, as they moved quickly through the building. Frandsen could only nod in agreement. Disrupters had been banned for centuries — although Imperial Intelligence and the SDs had been known to use them as terror weapons — because they not only killed, they killed people in terrible agony. Whoever had planned the massacre wanted the dead to suffer. No one would use a disruptor in cold blood. “Sir, movement…”

Frandsen’s visor lit up as the first hostile came into view. For a moment, his gaze focused on the perfect naked body, and then warning tones sounded as the suit’s sensors took in the disruptor in her hand. She fired a single green burst of light at him that the suit countered, before one of the Marines neatly put a bullet through her forehead. Her dead expression, utterly unmoved by what she’d been doing and what the Marines had done to her, haunted him as others, their faces as expressionless as hers, appeared from the side corridors. The Marines tried to get them to surrender, but it was useless. They didn’t even hear their words before they were shot down.

The teams split up as they advanced further into the building, powered armour smashing through walls and floors as they moved towards their fellows. Colin was still alive, Frandsen hoped desperately, but if they were under siege… Whoever had planned the massacre had been clever, he acknowledged without particular heat, but they didn’t have effective tools. A group of Marines would have conducted a mobile defence. The defenders, whatever they were, merely hurled themselves on the Marines, trying to bring them down by sheer weight of numbers. Against powered combat armour, that was a losing game, one that could only result in a slaughter. Blood spilled everywhere as they pushed their way further into the building…

“We’re coming,” he said, keying his transmitter. If Colin didn’t have at least a pair of Marines with him, he was probably dead. The pleasure slaves, or whatever the hell they were, had formed a ring around the main hall, one that was defended by heavy weapons. He led his team around the defenders and punched them out as quickly as he could. “Colin, can you hear me?”

“Yes, Neil,” Colin said, finally. “I don’t know how long the doors will hold out, but we’ll hold as long as possible…”

The signal cut off sharply.

Pushed and prodded by the Marines, and Cordova, who had been released on the grounds that it no longer mattered what anyone thought, the trapped men and women had built a formidable barrier using every piece of furniture in the room. Colin didn’t have any illusions about how long it would last if the pleasure slaves brought up heavy weapons, however, and ordered as many people as possible to crouch away from the doors. A moment after they made contact with the advancing Marines, the doors blew open into dust and the pleasure slaves started their advance.

Zombies, Colin thought coldly, as he took careful aim with his pistol. He’d offered it to Ben, but the Marine had told him to keep it. He might need a final bullet for himself. The pleasure slaves looked like conditioned slaves, the brain-burned men and women who were used for brute labour on some of the less-developed worlds, but there was no mistaking the weapons in their hands, or their deadly intent. They opened fire, almost at random, and people died. He took aim and started to knock them down, one by one, along with the Marines, but there were always more pleasure slaves to replace the ones that were killed. They literally didn’t care how many they lost…

And then a sweep of plasma fire cut the remainder down. A massive figure in black armour appeared, sweeping the handful of survivors out of existence, before lumbering forward to stand in front of Colin’s position. A hand opened a helmet and Frandsen stared down at him.

“For God’s sake, Colin,” he said. “Don’t do that to me again.”

“Never mind that now,” Colin snapped. “Find Tiberius!”