Democracy's Light

Chapter Forty-Seven

Two months had passed since the Second Battle of Earth.

Colin watched from the balcony as Parliament was called to order, the first real Parliament representing the entire Empire. It had taken nearly a month to get ships out to Cottbus in the wake of Admiral Wilhelm’s defeat and Joshua’s suicide, but when they arrived they’d been relieved and surprised to discover that the sector was under control and Admiral Garland had occupied most of the planets. The remaining three sectors had lost their warlords in the Battle of Earth, along with their sector fleets, and offered little resistance when the Empire reclaimed them. Like Cottbus, they’d been military dictatorships, governed by men who’d seen a chance for real power at last and taken it. Some warlords still existed out along the Rim, but with all of the Empire’s superdreadnaughts accounted for, they would eventually either come in from the cold or devolve into pirate groups. They wouldn’t remain a threat for long.

He smiled as René Goscinny, newly appointed Deputy Prime Minister of the Empire, stood up and started a long speech. The Empire was changing every day. Now that the Thousand Families had been effectively destroyed, either by Daria or by being removed to a colony world where they could live for the remainder of their lives in peace, economic life in the Empire was changing rapidly. Kathy had told him that the first-rank worlds would have an advantage, now that the monopolies and proscribed technology had been rescinded, in research and development, although some of the new combines would start catching up quickly. It was a Darwinian struggle, the survival of the fittest, but one that would end up serving the Empire well. The first-rank status, conferred upon almost all worlds, would lead to some unrest, but eventually it would all settle down. He smiled again, watching Marius Roodt, the President of the Chamber, and Blondel Dupre, Prime Minister, bring Parliament to order. They might be contentious at times, but after Daria’s desperate attempt to seize the power for herself — again — they had learned a few lessons. The new Empire would be very different to the old. It was almost a shame that he wouldn’t be there to see it.

“You’re still determined to leave?”

Kathy Tyler’s voice stopped him as he left the Parliament Chamber and headed back to his office. She was two months pregnant, according to his reports, but she showed no sign of the baby yet. It was unusual, to say the least, for a high-born mother to carry the baby to term in her own womb, but Kathy had decided that it was the least she could do for her dead lover. Jason Cordova’s death in action had almost broken her, but she’d pulled through and helped push the entire economic restructuring package through Parliament. It hadn’t been a perfect success, but in the long run, the Empire would be stronger than ever before.

“They don’t want me looking over their shoulders now,” he said, as she fell into step beside him. It wasn’t entirely true — he could have carried on as President if he had wanted the post — but he had felt that it would be better to leave. Besides, he really didn’t want the position of President, or Emperor. He’d felt forced to consider the latter during the darkest days of the war, but it wasn’t a post he wanted. Look what it had done to Daria and her allies. “Besides, I wrote the term limits in myself, back at the beginning. If I stayed, I’d be exceeding my own rules.”

Kathy smiled bleakly. “I understand,” she said. “Do you already have a ship lined up for the flight?”

Colin hesitated. “The Jason Cordova,” he said, finally. Kathy winced, but said nothing else. Too many people, heroes and villains, had died in the closing hours of the war. “The Geeks designed her as a battlecruiser, so I should be well-protected out there past the Rim. A handful of experienced hands, but mainly a new crew, now that the Academy is churning out qualified officers rather than well-connected arseholes.”

He scowled. It had been Joshua who’d redesigned the Imperial Navy Academy; Joshua, who had led the Empress’s fleet into battle… and, in the end committed suicide, unwilling to go on. Colin would have had no choice, but to execute him if he had lived, but he missed the older man. Unlike so many from the Shadow Fleet and the ranks of the rebellion, he had understood the underlying problems of the Imperial Navy. His program of careful gradual change had to be continued. There was no real choice.

“Good luck, then,” Kathy said. She held out a hand. Colin shook it firmly. “I’ll see you when you return to Earth.”

She walked off, leaving Colin alone with his thoughts. So many had died; David Houston, Arun Prabhu and so many others, heroes and villains, friends and enemies. The Empire’s civil war had reshaped everything, but it might have ended so badly, or it might have pulled the Empire down to barbarism. They had been incredibly lucky.

And now the first-rank worlds are building superdreadnaughts of their own, he thought, grimly. That was going to be a problem for the new government. They’d devolved the Empire’s government as much as possible, but it wasn’t going to be easy to sort out new lines of responsibility and power. No one wanted to be oppressed again, even if they had to bankrupt themselves to produce a new squadron of superdreadnaughts, or consider limiting the Imperial Navy. The growing threat from pirates out along the Rim as the wave of change reached the Rim would force new deployments, but who knew where that would end? Perhaps the Imperial Navy would assign a squadron of ships to each world and allow them to forge links with their bases, or perhaps…

He shook his head. It wasn’t his problem any more.

It was an hour later when he arrived at the detention centre. He might not have had any official status any more, apart from Commanding Officer of the Jason Cordova, but General Neil Frandsen wasn’t going to allow him to remain unprotected. He had assigned an entire platoon of Marines to Colin’s personal guard, despite his objections, and an oversized Company to Colin’s ship. The Marine Corps had come through the civil war and rebellion almost unchanged, although Colin had signed orders to expand their recruiting base before he had left office. They were still the unyielding guardians of honour and, perhaps, the dream that had inspired the Empire.

“Stay here,” he ordered, before stepping into the cell. The single figure looked up from her chair. Carola Wilhelm, he realised, had loved her man. He was dead now, at Joshua’s hands, and she was alone. Their power base had been shattered by the rebellion on Cottbus. Even if she escaped — and she had, briefly, with Gwendolyn’s help before being recaptured — she had nowhere to go. “Hello, Carola.”

Carola’s voice was battered, almost old. “Fuck you.”

“Your husband is dead,” Colin said. “Your lies have been exposed. Most of your allies on Earth have been arrested and either sentenced to exile or a penal world. That just leaves the issue of what to do with you.”

Carola snorted. “And what are you doing here?”

“Tying up loose ends,” Colin said, flatly. “There’s a general amnesty for those who served under your husband, or Daria, provided that they surrender and make a full accounting of their actions while they worked for the enemies. Some of them, the people who betrayed their oaths, have been sentenced to penal colonies, but others are harder to deal with. Your husband might have mutinied, but so did we.”

“You couldn’t prosecute him without calling into question your own actions,” Carola said. She laughed, rather dryly. “You betrayed your oaths as well, didn’t you?”

“Yes,” Colin said. He leaned forward. “You seem to fall into a grey area. You swore no oaths, but you definitely waged war on the Empire. We’re offering you a choice. The remaining members of the Thousand Families, those who don’t want to serve with the new order, have been moved to Paradise Rest, a former pleasure world…”

“I’ve heard of that place,” Carola said, flatly. “They’re going to be bored out of their tiny minds. There’s nothing there, but pleasure systems that won’t work without the staff, right?”

“Something like that,” Colin agreed. There were enough Family Members to create a whole new colony, if they worked together. If not… well, they weren’t his problem. If they all starved to death, or down to a level where they could live off the land, it would be their own fault. “Your choice is simple. You can join them, or you can join the population on one of the penal worlds instead.”

“Some choice,” Carola said, angrily. “A lifetime with the most boring people in existence, including some who would cry for hours if they broke a nail, or life on a hellish world of suffering and death.”

Colin didn’t deny it. Penal worlds were worlds that were on the margin of being habitable, often populated by unpleasant animals or even diseases that could leap the gap into humanity. The Empire dumped its criminals and outcasts on them in the hope that they could tame the world and make it a profitable colony. Most of them died in the first year, but there were always replacements. The Empire was never short of criminals, rebels, or people who merely offended someone in power.

“It’s your choice,” he said. “Whichever one you choose, Carola, there will be no turning back.”

“Paradise Rest,” Carola said. She looked up at him defiantly. “If I go there, I’ll be running the place within the year.”

Colin shrugged. “Good luck, then,” he said. He keyed his communicator as he walked out the door. “Have my shuttle pick me up from here.”

The Marines insisted on sweeping the shuttle before allowing Colin to board, but they finally cleared it and allowed him to take the pilot chair, bringing up the shuttle’s drives and taking it into orbit. Earth glowed below the shuttle as he turned the ship towards the waiting battlecruiser, his first command that he hadn’t actually hijacked from its former commanding officer. The shuttle docked in the shuttlebay and he realised, with some surprise, that he had a reception committee.

“Welcome onboard, sir,” his new first officer said, once they were alone. “How does it feel to be back on a starship?”

“Wonderful,” Colin said, looking over at Penny. As one of the handful of others who fell into the same grey area, no one was entirely sure what to do with her, so he had offered her the post of first officer. It might have been dangerous, but he owed it to another survivor of Admiral Percival’s selfishness. “It’s like I’ve never been away.”

He settled into the Captain’s chair and felt, for the first time since Admiral Percival had betrayed him, years ago, that he was happy.

“Helm, bring up the drive field,” he ordered, calmly. “Set course for the Rim.”

A series of dull thumps echoed through the starship as it settled into orbit, waking Stacy Roosevelt from a fitful sleep. Naked and alone, her hands secured behind her in the private cell, she knew that she was trapped and helpless. The rebels who had liberated her from the prison cell at Cottbus — God alone knew what had happened to Lady Madeline Hohenzollern, as if she cared — had promptly put her in another one. There was apparently a warrant out for her arrest… and, when the ships had arrived from Earth to report that Admiral Wilhelm had been defeated, she had found herself being tried and sentenced. She had gone to sleep in her cell on Cottbus and woken up in a very different cell, being treated like a common prisoner.

The hatch hissed open as her restraints unlocked themselves from the wall. She struggled against them, as she had several times in the last few days — if they had been days — but it was futile. She tried to struggle to her feet, but it was so hard with her hands bound that she felt a brief moment of pleasure when she was able to stand upright. She glared towards the hatch, expecting some leering commoner or depraved guard to come to molest her, but there was nothing.

“You will depart your cells,” a cold voice said, so coldly she knew that a machine produced it, rather than anyone human. “You will depart your cells and fall into line.”

It wasn’t the sort of voice that anyone, even Stacy, would dare to challenge. She limped over to the hatch, feeling her legs trembling from disuse, and staggered out into the corridor. There were other cells, an entire line of them, housing their own naked captives. Some of them looked terrified, others looked defiant and a few even pleaded their innocence, but they were all bound. Male, female, even a pair of aliens, they were naked and at the mercy of their captors.

“You will walk through the door and into the holding area,” the voice ordered them. This time, the floor sparkled and stung anyone who dared to hesitate. Stacy found herself moving faster than she would have believed possible, following the bare buttocks of a tough-looking man, wondering just what was going to happen to her. She wasn’t even sure where she was. The holding area was just as dark and drab as the remainder of the vessel, with shelves of clothing and small bags of equipment, waiting for them

“You will now pay attention,” the voice intoned. Stacy felt her cuffs unlock and pulled her hands free gratefully. Now she could see them properly, she realised that she was wearing metal bracelets that had been bound to each other magnetically. “You have been condemned to a permanent sentence on the planet Cozen. You will be aware that Cozen is a penal world. You will also be aware that there will be no return from the surface.”

The voice paused to allow the prisoners to vent their frustrations, and then continued, as if it hadn’t even been listening. “You will dress yourselves in the outfits provided and inspect the contents of your bags,” it continued. “You are advised” — she heard the stress on that word — “to listen carefully to the following lecture. It covers what is known about the world that will be your home for the rest of your lives.”

Stacy tuned it out, knowing that someone in the group would help her. Someone always had helped her, even in the worst moments of her life, and she was sure that it would always continue. The voice coldly described horrors such as monstrous creatures and deadly insects, some of which could kill with a single bite. She barely heard it covering the monsters as she felt a hand settling on her behind, and then reaching around to fondle her most sensitive places. No one had touched her there without her permission.

She spun around, seeing a leering commoner, and slapped him across the face. It should have been enough to stop him in his tracks. Instead, he smacked her back, punching her right on the nose. She fell to the ground, screaming in pain; she’d never been hurt like that before. Her assailant, as naked as she was, leaned over her. She couldn’t take her eyes off his penis as he pressed her down, ignoring her protests. The thought of what would happen when he forced his way into her, or when he started to take her, consumed her. She tried to close her legs, but he pushed them open hard enough to hurt…

Something snapped in the air and her assailant fell back, rubbing his own rear.

“You will pay attention,” the voice said, and continued describing the horrors awaiting them. Stacy screamed at the voice, demanding medical treatment for what she was sure was a life-threatening injury, until something snapped again. Pain flared out over her back, forcing her back down and, somehow, she kept her mouth shut. Her assailant leered at her, his face a dark promise of what awaited her, but he made no other move. It wasn’t as if she had anywhere to go.

“This lecture is concluded,” the voice said finally. It didn’t even sound if it was enjoying a captive audience. “You will now board your transport capsules.”

The interior of the capsule was as dark and cold as the grave. Stacy had barely had time to dress, despite the blood seeping into her outfit, before the transport capsule moved and plummeted down towards the planet. Her new home. She would spend the rest of her life there, she saw now, servicing commoners with her body, for she had nothing else to offer them. She had nothing, but a title that meant nothing and a mind that knew nothing they needed. Her life was about to become hell.

Stacy screamed all the way down.