Christopher Nuttall - Democracy's Light

“I could give you a dozen possible ways to get him off that shuttle without being noticed, or to convince observers that he had boarded the shuttle, or even to use a cloned body to fake his death,” Anderson said, equally flatly. The two men didn’t get along very well. The Marine tended to think in terms of straight battles, while the Security Officer thought in terms of plots and counter-plots. “I cannot prove, to my own satisfaction, that Grand Admiral Wachter died in that shuttle. I consider it quite possible that he may not have been on the shuttle at all.”

Colin frowned. Conspiracy theories made his head hurt. “I see,” he said, finally. “If he wasn’t killed, then why was his death faked?”

“There are several possibilities,” Anderson said, ticking them off on his fingers. “One, he wanted to leave your service and decided to do it in a manner that would leave few questions behind. He worked with his own people, including his loyalists from Morrison, and set up the faked death scene so that he could vanish.”

“It would have killed the pilot himself, and Penny Quick,” Colin said, dryly. “Or were their deaths faked too?”

“Second, the Admiral is required for something else that Tiberius has in mind and therefore has to drop out of the public view… and, just incidentally, out of the Grand Admiralship you created for him,” Anderson said. “The death scene is set up and the Admiral leaves the system to do whatever Tiberius wants him to do.”

Colin nodded. “And the third possibility?”

Anderson shrugged. “Third, Joshua Wachter was actually killed, by one of his enemies,” he said, finally. “The man wasn’t — isn’t — actually short of enemies, from reactionaries down here to men and women who lost friends and relatives in the Battle of Morrison. It’s even possible that Tiberius ordered him killed, for whatever reason made sense to him.”

Frandsen smiled. “Why would Tiberius kill someone whose death would certainly draw unwanted attention?”

Anderson smiled. “He might have been loyal to Colin,” he said, nodding in Colin’s direction, “or alternatively refused to do whatever Tiberius wanted. I don’t think that that’s particularly likely, not after Tiberius was the person who recommended Joshua for Morrison, but it is a possibility. Frankly, sir, we don’t have enough evidence to point the finger at anyone, not in this position. We are left with an unsolved mystery.”

Colin stared down at the table thoughtfully. “Are you certain that it was murder?”

“We studied the shuttle’s records carefully,” Anderson said. “The drive should not have destabilised so badly without alarms going off everywhere; the craft certainly should not have been allowed to fly. There was no trace of any damage when it was inspected prior to use, nor is there any reason to suspect that the maintenance crews are lying. The only possibility is a deliberate piece of sabotage within the shuttle’s computer core, done competently enough to pass an inspection, yet utterly lethal when triggered. The shuttle might have been prepared for years before it was finally turned into a murder weapon.”

“What a cheerful thought,” Colin observed. He considered the thought for a long moment. A person who could sabotage one shuttle could do the same to others. “How many shuttles do we have on the planet?”

“Thousands,” Anderson said. He frowned. “I’ve ordered a check of all of their computer cores, just in case, but my gut feeling is that Wachter’s shuttle was specially prepared for its mission. The crews do run regular checks on their craft and discovering a killer program would have resulted in all of the shuttles being grounded until we had had a chance to inspect them all.”

Frandsen thumped the table. “Enough of this,” he said, angrily. “We know who was behind the murder, or the faked death, so what are we going to do about it?”

“We have no proof linking Tiberius to the Admiral’s death,” Anderson said, flatly. “We do not have grounds, under the new laws, to haul Tiberius in for questioning, even gentle questioning. We could ask him to make an attestation under a lie detector, but he would be quite within his rights to refuse, as indignantly as he liked.”

“And that,” Frandsen snapped, “would prove that he had something to hide.”

Anderson sighed. “ Everyone has something to hide,” he said. “Anyone, even someone who is completely innocent of anything that could be called an offence, even under the Empire’s harshest laws, would fear a lie detector test, or the use of truth drugs. Everything they knew would come pouring out of them; the secret shames, the truths they would die rather than confess, the dark truth about what they’re really like, their sexual fantasies… everything and anything. No one will blame him for refusing to go through such a session. They will, instead, blame us for forcing him to submit.”

He leaned forward. “And even if we do find proof, what then?”

“Stamp on it sharp,” Frandsen said. “If he’s guilty, can’t we strip him of his power and position and dump him on some godforsaken penal world?”

“It’s not that simple,” Colin said, tiredly. He ran his hand through his brown hair. “We are attempting to build the rule of law here… and the law applies to everyone, even traitors — suspected traitors.”

“You know he’s a traitor,” Frandsen pointed out. “You have all the proof you need to convince yourself. What more do you need?”

“Yes, I do,” Colin agreed. “I know, but we have to convince the Empire that he is a traitor, rather than me merely stamping on someone who happened to disagree with me and creating a martyr. I could name seven MPs who will be quite happy to lambaste me for hammering Tiberius without a full confession, in triplicate, and others who will add their weight to secession campaigns. The Empire could fall apart over this.”

He shook his head. “Vincent, can’t you get covert access to his estate?”

“Not easily,” Anderson admitted. “The Thousand Families have always controlled their estates ruthlessly; it’s not like the High City, where we have domination and overall control. I couldn’t slip someone into his staff without them going through personality conditioning, which would render them useless, and I would have great problems breaking through their counter-surveillance techniques.”

He paused. “But this may not be the first murder that Tiberius has ordered, if indeed it was a murder,” he continued. “Lord Roosevelt was murdered by his own pleasure slave, one sold to him by” — he paused for dramatic effect — “Tiberius.”

Colin scowled. He disliked the entire concept of pleasure slaves — and forced personality reconditioning, for that matter — and had signed a number of laws into existence banning the former and placing the latter under strict supervision, but it hadn’t prevented the practice from continuing. There was little that could be done for the existing pleasure slaves — they couldn’t be re-educated or even freed from their condition — while anyone with any degree of paranoia, which suited the Thousand Families perfectly, would only want conditioned servants. It was possible to prevent conditioning from having an impact on a subject, but any halfway competent medical doctor would be able to tell that the conditioning had failed, giving rise to all kinds of questions.

“I see,” he said. “How many more of them are there on Earth?”

“Several thousand,” Anderson said. “They’re not even regarded as human, so there isn’t a precise count, but the High City alone has over nine hundred working within the city, mainly pleasuring visitors.”

Colin shuddered. The concept was revolting. One might as well bed down with an animal, or commit incest with a blood relative. The pleasure slaves might look human — they tended to maintain an innocent demeanour that could be both haunting and stunningly attractive — but they were little more than children, mentally. They would remain at the apparent age of twenty for thirty years, then age and die rapidly, unless they were put to sleep first. It wasn’t murder, according to the Empire. They weren’t human.