Christopher Nuttall - Democracy's Light

“Get down,” someone shouted. The alert signal had brought his bodyguards into the room from the adjoining rooms. It had been simple enough to have Marines inserted into the guest lists; after all, there were so many commoners on everyone’s invitation lists these days. Tiberius had invited everyone who was anyone, too many people for him to know and vet them all, and it had been easy to include a few unexpected guests. Even unarmed, Colin would have backed them against a legion of Household Troops, but they’d been able to slip weapons into the mansion. “Everyone get down on the ground and stay down…”

A burst of light, hot enough to singe Colin’s hair, burned past his ear as he hurled himself to the floor. A woman wearing a long flowing blue dress had opened fire on him with an energy weapon. A Marine shot her with a stunner, but she remained on her feet, weaving drunkenly towards Colin’s position. Her headscarf fell away, revealing a tattoo just above her left eye and confirming her identity. She was a pleasure slave. An armed pleasure slave.

If I get out of this alive , Colin thought, taking aim at her with his pistol, I will have every pleasure slave on Earth removed for their own safety .

The Marine fired again and this time the girl’s head disintegrated into a shower of blood. Colin heard the screams from the innocents lying on the floor, some of them trying to block the entire unpleasant scene from their eyes, others enjoying the chaos with the delight of people who knew that it would never touch them. So few of the Thousand Families had ever wanted for anything material, or even seen violence up close and personal, but now it had touched them right in the heart of their power. The old Empire was dead.

“Sir, stay down,” the Marine snapped. Ben, Colin recalled. His name was Ben, one of the Marines who’d served on the Lightning before the first mutinies. “The entire complex is under attack.”

Colin swore as the noise of fighting and screams started to impact on his ears. The entire reception room had disintegrated into a mass of people, lying on the floor and groaning, even as a pair of Marines escorted Cordova to a safer area on the other side of the room. No one would doubt, now, that he had tried to kill Colin, or that Tiberius had been involved. Only Tiberius could have cleared him to get such a weapon through the security sensors, more than enough rope to hang him and his entire Family with… assuming that they survived the next few hours. The sounds from outside the room didn’t sound encouraging.

“Sada, Miguel, guard the doors,” Ben snapped, as the other Marines entered. The sound of fighting was growing louder, or was it a simple massacre? How many had brought weapons to the wedding. “Sir, the pleasure slaves have gone mad; they’re killing everyone.”

Colin nodded. Cicero made pleasure slaves, growing them in vats deep below their estate… and there were thousands of them. He could see now, in hindsight, how the trick had been done. Cicero had taken pleasure slaves, implanted the knowledge of how to use weapons into their heads, and then sent them out to kill. They would be pathetic against trained and experienced soldiers, or even SD Troopers, but against unarmed men and women? They’d kill thousands before they were brought down.

He coughed, feeling dust catching in his mouth as it shivered down from the ceiling. The building rocked to the force of a massive explosion, too close for comfort. The hundreds of aristocrats who had expected a wedding followed by all the food they could eat whimpered, scared to death for their first time in their lives, even if they couldn’t decide if they were more unsure of their fellows or Colin himself. The handful of Marines couldn’t hold the room forever.

“I take it that you called for help at once,” he said, finally. They’d taken the precaution of stationing a fully armed reaction force near the estate, if too far away to intervene as soon as the shit hit the fan. “What’s their ETA?”

“Five minutes,” Ben said. Another explosion rocked the building. “I don’t think that we should stay here, but I took a tour of the building while I was being patronised by the aristocrats and there’s no cover outside this room. If we slip out the door, we will be trapped and killed; they’re killing everyone they find.”

Colin nodded slowly. As assassination plans went, it wasn’t the best he’d ever heard of, let alone seen in action, but it might still work. It just didn’t make sense, however, no matter how much he considered the variables. Tiberius had wanted him killed publicly, ensuring that there was no doubt that Jason Cordova was the murderer, but how the hell did he plan to avoid getting some of the blame himself?

“Find Tiberius,” he snapped. A quick check of the room revealed that Tiberius was gone, but Alicia was lying on the ground, her white dress burned badly by a plasma bolt. She’d been shot down deliberately, Colin saw, and it was already too late to do anything for her. Had Tiberius planned her death, or was some other player at work? Had someone from the Cicero Clan stuck a knife in his or her leader’s back, even as Tiberius stuck a knife in Colin’s own back? “Why…?”

The room shook again. “Sir, they’re trying to break in through the main doors,” Ben said, grimly. “I think that we’d better start preparing some blockades.”

Colin watched as the Marines went to work, co-opting people to help from the handful who seemed to be dealing with the shock and trauma. It wasn’t something he’d expected to see, but he’d fought in space, when he’d understood how combat worked. He’d never fought hand-to-hand, or killed more than one person with his own hands, and it was an introduction to a whole new world. He glanced down at his timepiece and swore again. By the time the Marines arrived to liberate the handful of survivors, Tiberius could be halfway across the planet, or heading out into space.

Tiberius didn’t know how he was still moving through the concealed tunnel. He’d barely had a second to realise that the pleasure slave, the second line of attack if Cordova failed them, was taking aim at him before Alicia had shoved him out of the way. It hadn’t saved her from taking a shot to the chest and he had known, the instant he saw the wounds, that she was dead. The man who’d shot the pleasure slave, trying to clear some room in the formal hall, had saved his life, but somehow Tiberius knew that it had been a coincidence. Daria had intended to kill him.

The tunnel had been carefully concealed. Daria had assured him — although he was starting to lose faith in what she told him — that the tunnel was invisible to anyone without the latest sensors. The only proof that she was telling the truth had been a lack of anyone following him, but as he crawled further, he keyed his implant to access the estates internal security systems and realised that Daria’s plans went far further than she’d told him. All over the estate, the pleasure slaves were revolting, killing men, women and children with a chilling dispassion for lives. They were, after all, just following their programming.

He cursed himself for a fool as he forced himself onwards, trying to reach the command centre. There was almost no one apart from the handful of remaining guards who was armed… and he would have bet half of his entire holdings that they’d all been suborned by Daria before she started operating to reclaim the Empire. He thought, seriously, about trying to make his way to the spaceport and using a shuttle to reach the yacht in orbit, but somehow he was sure that that way out would be blocked as well. Pleasure slaves might not think, in any sense that a human would understand the term, but Daria had commanded men and ships in action. She would be quite capable of identifying every possible angle of escape and countering it. She had, after all, had advance warning of the crisis.