Christopher Nuttall - Democracy's Light

You can’t run a war at long distance , he reminded himself, and scowled. The Empire had tried that when he’d launched the rebellion and it had failed. If they hadn’t overridden Joshua from time to time, the rebellion might have failed instead, but they’d chosen to assume that they knew better than the person on the spot. Colin wouldn’t make that mistake himself, but now all he could do was wait, rather than issuing useless orders. It was on the tip of his fingers to start contacting the various departments and hurrying them along, rather than trusting them to know their jobs and leaving them to get on with them, even though he knew it would be futile. By his most pessimistic estimate, Admiral Wilhelm could be halfway to Earth, but the first Colin would know of it would be when the first starships started flickering in to commence the attack.

He ran his hand through his hair, feeling tired and old. He was barely forty years old, but he had changed the Empire… and had found himself left with the task of reforming it, rather than leaving it in the hands of Parliament. The MPs just kept arguing and arguing, rather than coming to any decisions and sticking with them, while the first-rank and second-rank worlds increasingly went their own way. He could dispatch a fleet of ships to bring some of them back into the fold, but that would mean destroying everything he had worked to create. There were times when he seriously considered just taking a starship and vanishing for the Rim, but only the thought of the hundreds of thousands who had followed him kept him in his place. He couldn’t leave them exposed to the reactionaries, not after everything they’d done for him…

Perhaps I should tour the orbital defences , he thought, and considered it for a long moment, before finally dismissing the thought. The defences of Earth, with a little help from the Geeks, were stronger than they had ever been, perhaps even strong enough to challenge Admiral Wilhelm without mobile support. Earth’s solar system, however, was a complex place to defend, if not to attack. Colin had taken Earth himself — it felt like years ago, years since he had trapped himself in a thankless task — and if sheer destruction was the aim, Admiral Wilhelm could do much worse. If Colin had a year, time to bring new starships online and refit old ones, the war could be ended fairly quickly, but he doubted that he would be allowed such time. After all, Admiral Wilhelm, unlike Percival, could read a production chart.

It was almost a relief when his secretary buzzed him. “Mr President” — Colin’s official title was President and Leader of the Provisional Government, something that felt odd in the Empire — “Lady Tyler and Captain Cordova are here to see you.”

“Thank you,” Colin said, hearing Kathy telling his secretary that she was no longer a Lady. “Please send them both in at once.”

He stood up as they entered, watching them carefully. They both looked dead tired, almost as if they were asleep on their feet, but Kathy looked determined while Cordova looked oddly subdued. Colin hadn’t arranged for himself to have a large office, but he’d installed a pair of sofas for close friends and waved them both over to one of them, offering them both a drink. Cordova accepted, quicker than normal, while Kathy declined. They exchanged small talk for a few minutes, leaving Colin puzzled and worried. It had to be bad news, but for once neither of them seemed willing to speak first.

“I’d love to chat about old times for hours,” he said finally, “but I don’t have the time these days.” It was easy to envy Cordova, at least, whose main role was overseeing the Volunteer Fleet — what was left of it — and the system’s defences. “Can I ask you why you decided to come visit me at such short notice?”

“We didn’t want to raise any flags,” Kathy explained, seemingly taking the lead. That was more than just unusual, it was peculiar. Normally, Cordova was completely irrepressible, happily wasting time chatting about girls he’d known once, or bragging about the qualities of his crew. To be fair to him, the Random Numbers did have a remarkable crew, even though some of them had been glad to be back in the Imperial Navy again. “It was important that this meeting passed unnoticed.”

Colin lifted an eyebrow. “I’m intrigued,” he said, “but verbal fencing doesn’t interest me nearly as much as the physical kind. What do you both have to tell me?”

Kathy took a breath. “Tiberius is planning to have you killed and intends to have Jason do his dirty work,” she said, and started to outline the entire story. Colin listened, keeping his face blank through sheer force of will, as she explained that Jason Cordova had been born a Cicero and that, long ago, he’d spared an entire planet of Dathi from destruction. “I think that he intends to mount a coup.”

“I doubt that there’s any doubt about that,” Colin said absently, his mind racing as he grappled with the new information. He hadn’t thought much about Cordova’s loyalties since the Fall of Earth, deciding that if he was an Imperial Intelligence plant, he’d never been activated in time to save the Empire from the rebellion. His very inaction — and loyal service as part of the Shadow Fleet — had spoken in his favour. He hadn’t considered the possibility of a deeper game… and one played by one of the handful of Family Members he had come to trust. Everything Tiberius had done, since the Fall of Earth, took on new and sinister meaning. “I wonder…”

He focused in on Cordova, seeing, for the first time, the quiet desperation that hid behind the act. The Captain who’d led his ship to the Rim rather than commit genocide, always aware that he was vulnerable, and every man’s hand would be turned against him if the truth leaked out, dependent upon a Family he hated to conceal the truth. He’d been pompous, and pushy, and sometimes plainly crazy, just to hide his real self from the universe. He’d led his crew on a long voyage of the damned. There were legends of starships that had lost their flicker drives in interstellar space and forced to crawl slower-than-light to the nearest world, but Cordova’s ship had been lost forever. They had had no hope of returning home until the Empire was overthrown.

“You spared the Dathi,” he said, carefully. Colin had wondered, privately, if the Dathi threat had been manufactured. There might have been a war thousands of years ago, but no one had seen a living Dathi since then, not as far as he had known. The Empire had had every incentive to manufacture a threat — after all, they couldn’t prove that the race had been exterminated, and they had been spacefarers — and Colin had suspected that it was a manufactured threat. “What happened to them?”

“I looked it up after I returned to Earth,” Cordova said, vaguely. There was something bitter and broken in his voice, a sense that there would never be any safety for him, or Kathy. “The world was destroyed, having first been catalogued as a human world, and then several asteroids were dropped on the wrecked world. There won’t be any trace of them left there now.”

Colin nodded. The Empire might have revealed the truth… if Cordova had obeyed orders and destroyed them from the start. Public Information would have had a field day, proclaiming Cordova the man who’d saved the Empire, never mind the fact that a non-technological planet was utterly harmless to anyone in the Empire. Instead, he’d left them with a poisoned chalice and a nightmarish blow to the very heart of their power. If the population had realised that one of the Thousand Families was prepared to spare the Dathi…

He directed his thoughts back to more immediate problems. “Personally, I don’t think that you did the wrong thing,” he said, addressing Cordova. It would have been hypocritical to accuse him of wrongdoing, after Colin had been working to free the other races held in bondage by the human race, but it was also the truth. A planet of aliens — any aliens — who were no threat to anyone but themselves didn’t deserve to be scorched. Hell, Gaul hadn’t deserved the attempted scorching either. “Politically, we won’t be able to make a big thing of it, but as far as I’m concerned you did the right thing.”