Democracy's Light

Chapter Eight

“She wants to do what?”

“Address Parliament,” Blondel Dupre said, calmly. “Legally, we can’t stop her, I fear.”

Colin scowled at her, feeling old. Blondel Dupre was almost unique on Earth, the only person who had a real feeling for how democracy worked in practice. She had been the First Speaker of Macore when the Empire had finally moved in to invade — after Colin had delayed the conquest by hijacking the superdreadnaughts that would have carried it out and turning them into the Shadow Fleet — and had, somehow, survived a year in hiding before Macore had been liberated. Colin had given her a position in Sector 117’s government and then made her Prime Minister of the Provisional Government. It was something he sometimes regretted.

Unlike almost everyone on Earth, Blondel had never bothered with the rejuvenation and cosmetic treatments that were available for the asking. She looked old enough to be Colin’s mother, with blonde hair that was shading towards grey, while she walked as if she was pained by old wounds. She might well have been; while Colin and the Shadow Fleet had been fighting a relatively clean war, Macore had been in the grips of the SDs and fighting a bitter insurgency against their rule. The statistics of the insurgency made grim reading, with nearly four million people killed, thousands more injured or molested by the SDs. Colin had taken an unholy glee in closing down the Security Detachments after the Fall of Earth and ending the treatments that turned young men into monstrous conscience-less creatures, but it hadn’t been in time to save their victims. The SDs had looted, raped and slaughtered their way across countless planets, earning a fearsome reputation.

“We can’t stop her?” Colin repeated. “Why the hell not?”

“There is a certain degree of… incoherence about our own government,” Blondel said, flatly. “She claims to speak for the entire Cottbus Sector and has papers to back it up, signed by — she claims — people in authority. That makes her, according to our rules, an MP, despite the… incident at Cottbus itself.”

“The destruction of eight cruisers and the deaths of five hundred young men and women,” Colin said, coldly. It bothered him that he was more annoyed about the loss of the ships, rather than the crewmen, none of whom had deserved to die. “I do not regard that as a minor incident.”

“Nor do I,” Blondel said. Colin recalled that Macore would not have taken any such incident calmly. Power to the people sometimes meant letting them make their own decisions. It had all seemed so easy back on the General Montgomery, when they hadn’t even overcome Harmony, let alone Yanasaxon and Morrison. “The problem is that our system is still very fragile.”

She sighed, falling back into a chair. “Parliament isn’t sure of its own role,” she warned. “The old Parliament didn’t have anything to do and did it very well. The new Parliament is caught between reformers who think that they can make reform, factions that want to place their homeworlds ahead of anyone else and MPs who are too scared to lift their hands when they want to go to the toilet, because they think the Provisional Government is going to turn into a dictatorship.”

“Over my dead body,” Colin said, sharply.

“And mine,” Blondel said, absently. “The problem is simple enough. According to our rules, which we created in hopes of forging a new government before someone managed to organise resistance to us, she qualifies as an MP. She must, therefore, be allowed to address Parliament.”

“Politics,” Colin said, rolling his eyes.

“And even if she didn’t, the fact that she has something to say to Parliament has managed to get out into the open,” Blondel continued, ignoring his aside. “My guess is that one of her people spread the word to one of the reporters, so now everyone wants to know what she has to say. We could refuse to allow her to speak, but even if we handled it carefully, we’d still look like we were covering something up behind a wall of Marines.”

“I take your point,” Colin said. “I take it that we don’t have any idea of what she actually wants to say?”

“Nothing,” Blondel said. She shook her head slowly. “It could be anything from a rant on behalf of the old order to a demand for our immediate surrender.”

Colin snorted. “With a single battlecruiser in orbit?”

“They could have their entire fleet out there, lurking just beyond detection range,” Blondel reminded him. “She’s an Ambassador, legally, and offering her any insult is effectively the same as insulting her entire government.”

“What a marvellously time-saving scheme,” Colin said, dryly. Blondel was right. Earth’s deep-space detection network was the most capable in the Empire, but the sheer volume of space between Sol and any other star had defeated it. Emergence signatures might radiate at FTL speeds, but they faded quickly, while anything else a light year from Earth would take a year to reach the outermost detectors. He’d pushed out sensor ships as far as he could, back when he’d been setting up the defences, but it would take minutes for any determined opponent to reach Earth from outside their range. “Of course, they insulted us first…”

He scowled. Blondel was right — again. If they denied Carola Wilhelm — Ambassador Carola Wilhelm — a voice, they might provoke a conflict with Admiral Wilhelm. He suspected that the conflict was effectively inevitable anyway, particularly after the destruction of the Garry Owen and most of its squadron — but if the fighting could be delayed, the delay would serve them well… or would it? Just how far advanced were Admiral Wilhelm’s own plans? What were his plans?

“I hate the not knowing,” he said, grimly. Back when he’d commanded the Shadow Fleet, he had been fairly certain that the Empire couldn’t strike back at him; they had lacked any grasp of where his bases actually were. They couldn’t have hoped to locate them, except through sheer luck… and, to be fair, they had located one of the bases. They just hadn’t been able to find a target Colin had to protect and hammer it, forcing him to deploy in its defence…

But all that had changed. Any astrographic database would include, as a matter of course, the location of Earth and almost all of the Imperial Navy bases, including the ones that Colin had taken over in the wake of the Fall of Earth. Admiral Wilhelm would have plenty of targets to hit, while Colin couldn’t grit his teeth and ignore his blows, not if he wanted to keep confidence in the new government. If Admiral Wilhelm were alone, it would be bad enough, but if others had joined him… the results would be bad.

“They have managed to turn the tables, haven’t they?” He asked. Blondel nodded, once. “Very well. When does she want to address them?”

“The next session of Parliament is scheduled for two days from today,” Blondel said, after checking her terminal. “I suggest that she speaks then, unless she feels that it can wait longer…”

“Fine,” Colin said. If Carola refused to accept that offer, it would indicate all kinds of interesting things about her real purpose on Earth. The wife of an Admiral — apparently one from a happy marriage — wouldn’t be just an Ambassador, even if that were her primary purpose. Perhaps her real purpose was intelligence gathering. “I look forward to it with baited breath.”

He waited until Blondel had departed before he accessed his terminal and brought up the Imperial Intelligence files on Admiral Wilhelm and his wife. It still astonished him just how much information Imperial Intelligence had collected, just in the performance of their duties, even vague details like favourite ice cream and coffee blend. He’d struck a deal with the former Head of Intelligence, after the Fall of Earth, accepting the files in exchange for not shooting them all out of hand, but they had barely been able to study a relative handful in the six months since their victory.

The thought made him smile. Anderson had told him, after checking out Colin’s own file, that someone had edited it to cover themselves once the news of the rebellion had reached Earth. He’d been listed in terms that had ensured that promotion was no longer a possibility, but the new file had claimed that he had subversive inclinations, if not thoughts of outright treachery. The law of CYA, which pervaded the entire Empire, hadn’t spared Imperial Intelligence. The only wonder was how the Empire had lasted so long.

A social climber, he decided, finally. The reports listed everything; every party, every connection, even every brief love affair. It would have been tempting to dismiss her, but he suspected, from Kathy’s experience, that anyone who had climbed so high would be far more intelligent than they allowed people to suspect. Carola, it seemed, had worked to boost her husband’s career… and had apparently succeeded. Admiral Wilhelm had been appointed as Sector Fleet commander some years before Colin had launched the rebellion… as a Hohenzollern client.

I wonder if Lady Hohenzollern is there, he thought, absently. It would make a fine hiding place for her and the others who fled…

He dismissed the thought and tapped his communicator. “Vincent, I want to see you in my office,” he said, without preamble. “Come as soon as possible.”

Anderson arrived within ten minutes. “I was checking out some leads,” he said, by way of explanation. “What can I do for you, boss?”

Colin smiled. “The Ambassador,” he said. There was no need to expand on who the Ambassador was. “What do you make of her?”

“She’s managed to organise herself a small living space and embassy on the edge of Soul Rider,” Anderson said, referring to one of the more eccentric sections of the High City. In fact, if Colin recalled correctly, it had been designed and built by the Hohenzollern Clan, centuries ago. It was an odd coincidence… if it was a coincidence. “So far, she doesn’t seem to have done much, beyond looking up a few contacts from her days here. We managed to tap into the calls and they were mainly inanities and other shit. I think she’s planning to hold a party within a week.”

“So she doesn’t plan to leave in a hurry,” Colin said, thoughtfully. “That’s interesting.”

“Or she intends to leave right after she’s spoken to Parliament and doesn’t want us to know it,” Anderson suggested. “She hasn’t actually made any preparations for a party yet, as far as we know; no food, drink or entertainment. Of course, that could change, but…”

Colin nodded. “Who did she call?”

Anderson listed seven names. “There’s no one there from the… highest reaches of power, now or pre-rebellion,” he said. “The Wilhelm Family were apparently clients of the Hohenzollern Clan and wouldn’t have had any major links with the Cicero Clan, or the Roosevelt Clan, or anyone else. The only oddity is that one of the people she called was Lord Tyler.”

It took Colin a moment to make the connection. “Kathy’s father,” he said. It promised to be a worrying development. “What did she say to him?”

“Very little of interest,” Anderson said. “I can send you the recordings if you would like, but they were really basic greetings and a brief exchange about how lucky Tyler was to have recovered his daughter. I got the impression that Lord Tyler wasn’t entirely pleased about that.”

Colin snorted rudely. Lord Tyler had made a surprising amount of political capital out of his martyred daughter and then Kathy had ruined it by turning up alive. He’d then tried to exploit her position in the Provisional Government to enhance his Family, which had barely escaped ruin in the wake of Roosevelt’s collapse, but Kathy had refused to play ball. Lord Tyler hadn’t been too happy about that either.

“Too bad,” he said, finally. “Anything else?”

“Reading between the lines, I had the impression that they’d had an affair at one point, but there’s no way to know for sure,” Anderson concluded. “The only other suspicious detail is that Ambassador Wilhelm has instituted a very severe counter-surveillance regime in her embassy. I had some bugs in the building, but they were all found and deactivated within hours. She’s got some good people with her.”

“And the Tau Ceti Convention forbids us from bugging the embassy,” Colin concluded, sardonically. “If someone else actually bugs the embassy, they’d even be within their rights to go to war.”

He scowled. The Tau Ceti Convention, like the Moscow Accords, had been dragged up from the past to fill a need, but it was somewhat vague and open to interpretation. It dated from the days of the Federation and had been crafted to prevent further struggles between the Federation and what would become the first-rank worlds, but no one had used it for centuries. The embassy was effectively foreign soil and, by recognising it as an embassy, they were giving credence to Cottbus as an independent state, but what other choice was there? They couldn’t allow the Ambassador to use a battlecruiser as an Embassy!

“Yes, sir,” Anderson agreed. “I will keep an eye on her and let you know the minute the situation changes.”

“Please,” Colin said. “What is she doing now?”

“Researching,” Anderson said. “She’s studying all kinds of details on the new government, pulling them up from the database, so my guess is that she’s preparing for her speech. Past that…”

He shrugged. “Unless you want a more rigorous approach…”

“No, thank you,” Colin said. He shook his head. “Just keep a close eye on her and any others who happen to show up.”

“Understood,” Anderson said. “One other matter that has come to my attention; the first-rank council has been meeting, several times, over the last few days.”

Colin frowned. The first-rank worlds had covertly organised themselves to fight the Empire as a contingency plan, one that they’d put into operation after the Empire had attempted to scorch Gaul. They were used to working together without being detected, but now, with so many of their people in the new government, they were making waves.

“I see,” he said, finally. “How is this alarming?”

“Over the six months since we won the war, they met, on average, twice a month,” Anderson said. “They discussed matters of only limited interest and planned sessions in Parliament. Over the last two weeks, however, they have met seven times… and I have no idea what they discussed. Like pretty much every other player in the game, they took out our bugs and everyone else’s as well.”

Colin rolled his eyes. Everyone who was anyone had allies, spies and surveillance devices everywhere, trying to be the first to discover something that could be used for their own purposes. The first-rank worlds had had a superb intelligence network into their former masters, even touching Earth itself, and they were masters at countering the Empire’s probing spies. There was no reason to think that they were up to anything alarming, or so he hoped, but Anderson was right. It didn’t bode well.

“Keep an eye on it,” he ordered, finally. There was just so much to keep track of. “Inform me if anything changes.”

He turned his attention back to his terminal as Anderson saluted and left the office. Back when he’d founded the Shadow Fleet, he’d been surprised to discover just how much paperwork was still necessary, despite being on the run from the Empire and the prospect of a violent death somewhere in the near future. The government he’d created to run the liberated sectors had required yet more paperwork… and the Provisional Government was worst of all. He had to see hundreds of documents, requests, pleas and threats… and without looking at them, he couldn’t tell what was urgent and what could be safely ignored. Everyone seemed to think that he could devote himself exclusively to one issue, but he had so much to deal with that he could barely shovel half of it onto his subordinates.

I should just ignore anything that’s not marked urgent, he thought, sourly, as he opened yet another message. The sender seemed to believe that Colin had no other priority, but a pet scheme to terraform a few hundred worlds in order to create more living space. Colin junked it after reading the first few lines. The human race had been in space for nearly two thousand years, but only a handful of worlds had ever been terraformed. Mars had been terraformed, back in the days before the flicker drive, and a handful of others had been marked down for attention, but mostly there were plenty of habitable worlds without needing to go to the expense of a full terraforming project. The Empire did try to terraform some worlds, such as Harmony, on the cheap, but mostly it wasn’t worth the effort.

He keyed his terminal absently and opened a new message file. “Record for Admiral Garland,” he ordered. Katy and her fleet were still assembling at Jupiter. For once, the timing issue had worked out in their favour. “Katy, I am attaching details of the recent contact from Cottbus, but as far as I can see, this changes nothing. Unless the speech in front of Parliament is something radical, like an offer of surrender in exchange for amnesty, I suspect that you will still be in the fire. Hold the fleet until after the speech, then be ready to move out on a moment’s notice.”

The terminal paused at his command. I could send the starfighters along with her, he thought, considering the possibility. It was unlikely in the extreme that Admiral Wilhelm would have anything to match them, although he would probably have arsenal ships by now. That cat was very definitely out of the bag. He shook his head after a moment. The starfighters were still an untested weapon of war.

He rekeyed the terminal. “I want a full report on your current status no later than a day after receipt of this message,” he concluded. “I have a feeling that the shit is about to hit the fan.”