Democracy's Right

Chapter Forty-Three

The party had started as soon as the remaining Blackshirts were rounded up, secured and stored in an old freighter until the rebel leadership could decide what to do with them. The inhabitants of the asteroid had spontaneously flowed into the main chamber and started celebrating their victory and their miraculous escape from death or capture. A line of stores had opened, selling food and drink at knock-down prices, while no less than three bands were providing music for dancing with more enthusiasm than skill. It seemed as if the entire remaining population of the asteroid was there, shouting and singing and indulging in a celebration that threatened to shake the asteroid to pieces. No one seemed to care any longer about the danger.

Hannelore gasped in delight as Cordova whirled her around the dance floor. She didn’t know the steps — the dance was nothing like the formal dances she’d learned back at the High City — but it didn’t seem to matter. Hardly anyone seemed to know the steps; the dancers were just whirling around, having fun. The music was of poor quality, part of her mind noted, yet who cared? She was enjoying being alive, as was everyone else. She looked up into Cordova’s twinkling eyes and found herself laughing. They were alive!

She caught sight of Hester, watching from one side of the room with a dour expression, and felt a twinge of sympathy for the older woman. Hester’s husband and children were long gone, thanks to the Empire, leaving her alone. Hannelore was tempted to try to urge her onto the dance floor, but she had a sense that it simply wouldn’t work. Hester simply didn’t have any room in her for love or fun any longer. How could she, when the Empire remained undefeated and might be dispatching something larger than a squadron of battlecruisers to the asteroid? Hannelore was rather surprised that Hester hadn’t ordered the asteroid’s immediate evacuation.

Cordova pulled her into a long line of dancers and passed her to another man, who took her, spun her around and passed her to a third man. This dance seemed to be more orderly, at least, even though half of the dancers were clearly learning as they went along. The man who was at the end took her arm, kissed her and then passed her back to Cordova, who winked at her when she looked shocked. Couples were pairing off all over the dance floor, partners disappearing to celebrate the joy of being alive in a different way, or even making out in public. She blushed when she saw a topless couple kissing and fondling right in the middle of the dance floor, something that she’d never seen back home, not even in the most decedent parties. Cordova noted her surprise and leaned close to whisper in her ear.

“They’re just enjoying themselves,” he said, just before he kissed her on the cheek. The music was slowing down now, becoming a romantic tune, and so he pulled her closer. “Tomorrow we must leave this place.”

Hannelore nodded, feeling a shadow falling over her mood. They might have survived one battle with the Imperial Navy, but they might not survive the next. She didn’t want to think about what might happen if they took her alive, for a simple gene-test would reveal who she was and where she came from. Her family — both of her families — would probably prefer to bury her and forget that she had ever existed, rather than admit that one of their children had gone wrong. She remembered a son, a heir to one of the grandest families, who had vanished under mysterious circumstances. No one knew for sure, but there had been rumours that his own father had strangled him in the night, purely for doing something so horrifying that even the Thousand Families would be shocked. Hannelore had some difficulty in imagining what that might have been, but not any longer. The young man might well have been linked to a rebel faction on Earth.

Cordova seemed to sense her feelings, for he gave her a final kiss and led her over to one of the side tables, which was groaning under the weight of food and drink. Hannelore was surprised that they’d brought out so much food — including foodstuffs that had to have been smuggled in from the Empire — but perhaps it made sense. If the asteroid was being abandoned, what they couldn’t carry would have to be abandoned, at least until the war was won. It seemed that scavengers would come and steal everything that wasn’t actually nailed down.

“Take this,” he said, passing her a glass of a strange red liquid. Hannelore sniffed it carefully, decided it smelled drinkable and took a sip. It left a river of fire burning down towards her stomach. “What do you make of that?”

“Strong,” Hannelore said, between coughs. She had never tasted anything like it before, even when pushing the limits of what was permitted even to one of her high station. “What is it?”

“The name is unpronounceable,” Cordova said, sadly. There was something in his voice, an emotion she couldn’t quite identify. “It comes from Xeno-VII, you see.”

Hannelore took a longer look at the glass and its contents. “You mean that this is an alien drink?”

“Yep,” Cordova said, with a sudden manic grin. “Don’t worry; it’s compatible with our biochemistries. The Crabs don’t consider it an intoxicant; they use it for cleaning their claws after mating, rather like we might go to the shower.” He chuckled, as one does at a joke that isn’t really funny. “We — the Rim — sell a few barrels of this each year to certain parties within the Empire and none of them have the slightest idea where it comes from or what its manufacturers use it for.”

“Oh,” Hannelore said. She found herself giggling as she took another sip. “Why don’t you tell them? They’d have a collective heart attack.”

The thought wasn’t as funny as it seemed. The Empire would have reacted harshly against anything that reassembled alien chic, or humans adopting alien ways. There were so many different forms of family unit or social systems across the Empire that Hannelore wasn’t sure why they felt the need to bother, but there was little logic in it. The Empire was built — its sole justification for existing — around defending humanity from aliens and alien influence. The Security Division would probably feel that anyone who drank — and enjoyed — alien-produced wines was a closet alien sympathiser, a traitor to humanity. The poor bastard would probably have wound up on a penal world.

“It’s too good a joke to spoil,” Cordova said. He looked up as a newcomer appeared beside them. “Hester; come and join the party.”

Hester regarded the glass in his hand humourlessly. “I’ll party when I am dead,” she said, in her whispery voice. The scar on her face seemed to throb with agreement. “I want to know if you have completed the plans to evacuate the asteroid.”

Hannelore wanted to protest, to claim that Cordova deserved at least one day off, but he gave her a restraining look. “I have sent for freighters from nearby systems,” he said, calmly, as if he received ill-timed requests every day of the week. “Once they are here, we will begin loading them up and dispersing the population into the Beyond. Sadly, the crew of the Jonnie-Come-Lately devastated on the remaining ships, the ones that the Blackshirts didn’t wreck. I hope that you will be putting them on the List.”

Hester nodded. The Blackshirts had attempted to destroy every starship in the asteroid, but the escaping Jonnie-Come-Lately had damaged the entire spaceport when it had flickered out. Cordova had told her, afterwards, that it had damaged the entire asteroid — not just the spaceport — and the crew was likely to be declared outlaw throughout the Beyond. It wouldn’t mean that they couldn’t go anywhere — starships in the Beyond changed names regularly — but it would ensure that they wouldn’t have any further involvement with the rebellion. She found it hard to blame him for being angry, even though she did worry about what an outlaw crew might tell the Empire. The damaged spaceport would make it harder to evacuate the asteroid.

“We may have to burn through the asteroid’s shell to get the people off, but we will do it,” Cordova continued, grimly. “I’ve already warned everyone to prepare for evacuation, with one bag per person unless they make their own arrangements with other starships. We can come back later for anything we leave behind, if the Empire doesn’t return in force.”

Hannelore looked up, alarmed. “Is there any way they could know what happened?”

“I doubt it,” Cordova said, “unless there was a cloaked starship lurking around and observing everything that happened. We didn’t detect anything of the sort, which doesn’t mean anything, but…”

He shrugged. “We won’t know for sure unless the Empire leaves us alone for longer than a week or two,” he added. “It will take any starship several days to get back to Camelot and report, and then another few days for them to dispatch a squadron of superdreadnaughts — longer, perhaps, if they don’t have one on hand.”

“I see,” Hannelore said. “If…”

Hester interrupted. “You know what we did to them,” she said, tartly. Hannelore gave her an offended look, but she ignored it. “Is there anything they could do with the knowledge?”

“Get ready to face the arsenal ships again,” Cordova said, dryly. “Give them enough time and they will come up with a few countermeasures or — more likely — design and build their own. It isn’t as though the arsenal ships are an invincible weapon.”

He smiled as the dance band struck up another tune. “There’s no such thing as an invincible weapon,” he said, as he put down his glass and reached for Hannelore’s hand. “No matter how impossible it seems, there are always countermeasures. I’m sure that some bright spark on the other side will think of one soon enough.”

Hester looked as if she had bitten into a lemon and sucked out the juice. Hannelore understood. The arsenal ships had demolished an entire battlecruiser squadron in seconds, promising a quick end to the war. If all it took to overthrow the Empire were a few converted freighters, perhaps she could just do it — and then relax, maybe finding a new husband and marrying again. Yet life wasn’t that simple and the war would go on for years.

Cordova pulled her onto the dance floor and whirled her into a crazy dance. “Don’t worry about it,” he said, his voice almost drowned out by the music. A pair of augmented Geeks of indeterminate gender danced past them, their implants whirring and clicking as they moved. “She wants us to win and everything else, even the little niceties, must be sacrificed to that.”

“I understand,” Hannelore said, as he put his arms around her and held her close. She felt her own passion ignite, feeling the urge to celebrate their victory in the oldest possible way burning through her. “Come on. Let’s go.”

Cordova didn’t ask any questions. He merely allowed her to lead him back to the ship.

Thomas looked around the small compartment he’d been given — shoved into would be a more accurate way of putting it — in hopes of some small distraction. Boredom was something he had never gotten used to, even though his unit was expected to be more civilised than the regular Blackshirts. The rebels had given him a blank room with a table, two chairs and a single bunk. They’d also handcuffed his hands to the table, chained his legs to the floor and carefully removed or deactivated any hidden implants within his body. His lips quirked in bitter humour; anyone would think that they had reason to worry.

He hadn’t believed that the battlecruisers had been destroyed at first, not until he’d pulled the live feed from one of the drones and seen the expanding clouds of plasma where the battlecruisers had been. The rebels had demanded his surrender and, after making an attempt to save the lives of his men, he’d surrendered. He’d been promised that his men wouldn’t be killed outright, but nothing else, leaving him to wonder what the rebels had in mind. Very few Blackshirts survived falling into the hands of the enemy, if only because the enemy had plenty of grudges to pay off. Offhand, he couldn’t recall a single world that had been pleased to see the Blackshirts, although quite a few planetary leaders had called them in to provide armed support when they began unpopular steps like raising taxation.

The hatch — it was strong enough to keep him in even without the handcuffs — hissed open, revealing a man in Marine combat dress. Thomas lifted an eyebrow. He’d assumed that the rebels and traitors would have abandoned their uniforms once they abandoned the Empire, yet this one seemed to cling to his uniform, even in the face of someone who hadn’t abandoned his oath to the Empire. The Marine was older than him, his face marked by combat and regeneration treatments, yet there was something timeless about his expression. Despite himself, Thomas recognised a fellow soldier, a kindred soul.

“Just call me Neil,” the Marine said, by way of greeting. Thomas placed him as Colonel Neil Frandsen, one of the rebels from the original mutiny at Jackson’s Folly. “You and your men behaved remarkably well.”

“I do not allow drugged-up morons in my unit,” Thomas said, stiffly. Quite apart from any moral issue, a Blackshirt drugged up couldn’t be trusted in a spacesuit, let alone an armoured combat suit. “I was ordered to take the asteroid and its population intact, not slaughtered or mistreated.”

“So you were,” Frandsen agreed. “Why do you serve the Empire?”

Thomas blinked at the question. “The Empire has been good to me,” he said. It was true enough. “Even if it hadn’t been good to me, it has been good for the vast majority of the human race. Is that a good enough reason for you?”

Frandsen smiled, but it didn’t quite touch his eyes. “We’re attempting to reform the Empire, not destroy it,” he said. “Why not come and join us?”

“And what happens while we are busy reforming?” Thomas asked, slowly. “The aliens jump on us. The Empire keeps us united against their threat.”

“The aliens we know are no threat to us,” Frandsen said, flatly. “They have no military power, nothing they can use against us… a single starship could destroy any one of their worlds and there would be nothing they could do about it.”

“The last time we trusted aliens,” Thomas countered, “we were nearly exterminated as a race. And that wouldn’t have happened if we hadn’t been disunited, ready to weaken ourselves by fighting over who got to be in charge. We cannot risk that happening again.”

“And yet there is no proof of a threat from aliens in the Beyond,” Frandsen pointed out. “Or do you know something that was kept from the rest of us?”

Thomas flushed, and then realised that Frandsen was trying to get under his skin. He pushed his anger down and concentrated on the topic at hand. “I swore an oath to serve and protect the Empire for as long as I live,” he said. “I won’t deny that there is room for improvement, but maintaining the fundamental unity of the human race is far more important than allowing everyone to head off in a different direction. How long would it be before we started fighting each other? Your grand rebellion might succeed only to break up as you fought over who actually got to replace the Empire and take power.”

Frandsen smiled. “I understand your position,” he said. He sounded sad, yet there was something in his voice that worried Thomas. “I felt the same way myself once. I used to believe in the ideals of the Empire. And then… I was ordered to commit mass slaughter on behalf of the Empire. I refused.”

He looked up, his eyes meeting and holding Thomas’s eyes. “And one day you’re going to have to make the same choice yourself,” he said. “What do you think would have happened to the people on this asteroid if you’d succeeded?”

Thomas shook his head. “Better to kill them, to kill everyone in the Beyond, than to wreck the Empire,” he said. He pushed as much pride as he could into his voice. “It remains the only thing holding the human race together and we need unity, or the aliens will destroy us.”

“You’re one of the Followers of Darwin,” Frandsen said.

Thomas shook his head. The Darwinists believed that all races were in permanent competition, one that could only end with one race destroying all the others. They had urged the extermination of every known alien race and at least one of their members had actually put theory into practice. They claimed it was an issue of the survival of the fittest. Thomas believed that they were purely racists, nothing more. As long as the aliens were controlled and knew their place, he had no objection to bringing them into the Empire.

“No,” he said. “I think…”

He broke off as Frandsen’s wristcom bleeped. “My commander has returned,” Frandsen said. He stood up. “If you won’t join us, your men will be transported to a place where they will be safe, at least until the end of the war. You may find yourself being tapped for messenger duty.”

Thomas watched him leave. As the hatch hissed closed behind the Marine, he shook his head. Frandsen talked a good game, he knew, but preserving the Empire was vital. It was all that kept humanity from tearing itself apart, weakening it to the point where the aliens could rise up and exterminate the human race. He rattled his chains mournfully and settled back in his chair, trying to find some comfort. God along knew how long they were going to leave him there.