Christopher Nuttall - Democracy's Light

Finally, fashionably late, came the remainder of the original council. Lord Bolivar, Lady Hashim, Lord Rothschild and Lady Ngyuen. Their Families had benefited from the new order, which was more than could be said for most of them, and they still wielded enormous influence. Their influence was fading, however, as their industries were steadily taken over by their workers, or by the planets that hosted them, and they were growing desperate. Once the masters of the universe, their whims and fancies altering the destinies of billions, they had become shadows of their former selves.

Tiberius smiled. It was going to be an interesting meeting.

“Thank you all for coming,” he said, once the final pleasure slave had left the room. He had once trusted them implicitly, but after one of them had murdered Lord Roosevelt, apparently on the Empress’s orders, he no longer trusted them. Several very quiet investigations hadn’t managed to find anything out of the ordinary about the pleasure slaves, which Daria herself had given his father permission to manufacture, but they might have been programmed to do anything. They were the perfect assassins. No one, until Lord Roosevelt had been killed, had suspected them in the slightest. “I apologise for rushing you slightly, but there is a great deal of ground that we must cover and, I fear, very little time. We cannot afford for this meeting to become public knowledge.”

“You mean this conspiracy,” Joshua said, calmly. He nodded across at Daria. “Dare I assume that the presence of the Empress has something to do with the secret of this meeting?”

The Clan Heads gaped. They hadn’t known. Tiberius forced his face to remain blank, although he was surprised to learn that Joshua knew — and perhaps had always known — just who the Empress actually was. Gwendolyn had known, but had Joshua also been a member of her conspiracy, even though he’d been a junior officer at the time?

Daria smiled, her face relaxing slightly. “So you do know,” she said, calmly. Suddenly, it was easy to see the aura of command around her, the calm certainty that her orders would be obeyed. She’d probably found running the Freebooters League relaxing after running the Empire. “I wondered if you had realised the truth.”

“Elementary, my dear Tiberius,” Joshua said, speaking more to him that to Daria. “There were rumours of the return of the Empress on Earth. You told me about them yourselves. There weren’t many possible candidates for the role once I started studying them in earnest and she was the most logical candidate. The others could all be accounted for, one way or the other, and I could eliminate them.”

He paused. “And besides, you didn’t change your face that much,” he added dispassionately, speaking directly to Daria. “Once I was thinking along those lines, it was easy to recognise you for who you were.”

“Of course,” Daria agreed. “A genetic test would have revealed the truth, if compared to the Imperial Registry. Someone who looked radically different from the Empress Janice would actually gain more suspicion that someone who looked almost like her, so…”

She smiled, and it was a cold and calculating smile. “And now you know,” she said. “Where do you stand?”

Joshua leaned forward. “I stand for what I’ve always stood for,” he said. “The reformation of the Empire and a unified humanity. I believe that that is hardly a secret to you, Your Majesty.” He took an unhurried look around the room. “And what does this… gathering of the Clans stand for?”

Tiberius spoke into the stunned silence. “Colin Harper, the founder of the rebellion and the guiding presence behind the Empire, is on the verge of making a pair of colossal mistakes,” he said, calmly. He could still feel the tension in the air. The Clan Heads had reason to distrust anyone who tried for the Imperial Throne… and Joshua and Penny were rogue elements. It would be irony indeed if the conspiracy fell apart because they couldn’t stand the thought of being involved with the Empress. “We have to decide upon a response…”

“You mean a way of seizing power for yourselves,” Joshua said, his voice cutting through the bullshit like a knife through butter. “Let us not mince words here, Tiberius. There’s nobody here, but us traitors.”

He leaned back and relaxed. “And it’s interesting to note who isn’t here,” he said. “What about Lady Kathy? What about Jason Cordova? What about some of the MPs? What about Ambassador Wilhelm?”

“Kathy Tyler is very firmly on Colin’s side,” Daria said, her voice almost expressionless. “She has been handed a thankless task, but she is determined to complete it successfully. In effect, whatever loyalties she had to the Thousand Families have been completely lost. Jason Cordova is a different matter, but he is not a person to feel much loyalty towards his Family. The MPs are unimportant, whatever Colin may happen to think, while Ambassador Wilhelm represents a warlord we cannot compromise with. Her presence here would be far too revealing, in any case.”

Tiberius, silently relieved that Joshua hadn’t blurted out the truth about Cordova’s Family, leaned forward. “Colin intends to grant the alien races effective independence from the Empire, and, for those that work for us, full civil rights,” he said. “He also intends to push through a devolution of government, with the net result that most worlds will wind up with first-rank status in a few years and hopefully simply the Empire. It will not, however, achieve his aims. It will tear the Empire apart.”

“Because the descendents of those you tricked into debts don’t want to keep paying interest on debts they didn’t incur?”

“Among other matters, yes,” Tiberius conceded. There was little wrong with Joshua’s mind, but he was starting to wonder if inviting him had been the wisest decision. God only knew what side he was really on, in his head. “At the moment, we have a serious problem with Cottbus Sector. I have spoken to Ambassador Wilhelm myself and while she talks a good game, she isn’t going to budge on the important issues. She wants Cottbus to be recognised as a completely independent state as a precondition of any further negotiations and she has been signing deals left, right and centre to ensure that she has thousands of supporters.”

“And the Cicero Clan has been attempting to see what it can get out of her,” Lord Rothschild said, stroking his lips with a tissue.

“As has the Rothschild Clan,” Lady Ngyuen said. Lord Rothschild nodded without emotion. “We have all attempted to deal with her since the moment she set up shop in her… so-called Embassy. What other choice did we have?”

“I think that we can safely assume that there is going to be a war with Cottbus,” Daria said, calmly. “The unity of the Empire demands such a war. Even if Admiral Wilhelm doesn’t take his own shot at the Imperial Throne, we — the Empire — cannot allow an entire sector to break away. Colin knows this as well as we do. His representatives may attempt to sweeten the pot for Admiral Wilhelm, but the bottom line is that the breakaway cannot be tolerated. That means war.”

“A war you have been pressing for,” Joshua pointed out. He smiled thinly at her expression. “I don’t think that we want to do anything to weaken Colin, or the Empire, further when we might find ourselves at the wrong side of a firing squad if Admiral Wilhelm actually wins the war.”

“He has one sector fleet,” Tiberius said, sharply. “Colin can call on much more firepower than he can…”

“So could the Empire when fighting Colin and the rebels,” Joshua said. He sounded as if he were enjoying himself. “You should know, Your Majesty, that having deployable firepower isn’t quite the same thing as having that firepower somewhere where it actually can be used. The Empire had plenty of superdreadnaughts that never saw combat against the rebels.”