Christopher Nuttall - Democracy's Light

Zombies , Colin thought coldly, as he took careful aim with his pistol. He’d offered it to Ben, but the Marine had told him to keep it. He might need a final bullet for himself. The pleasure slaves looked like conditioned slaves, the brain-burned men and women who were used for brute labour on some of the less-developed worlds, but there was no mistaking the weapons in their hands, or their deadly intent. They opened fire, almost at random, and people died. He took aim and started to knock them down, one by one, along with the Marines, but there were always more pleasure slaves to replace the ones that were killed. They literally didn’t care how many they lost…

And then a sweep of plasma fire cut the remainder down. A massive figure in black armour appeared, sweeping the handful of survivors out of existence, before lumbering forward to stand in front of Colin’s position. A hand opened a helmet and Frandsen stared down at him.

“For God’s sake, Colin,” he said. “Don’t do that to me again.”

“Never mind that now,” Colin snapped. “Find Tiberius!”

Daria ran.

She’d known, the minute that the Marines crashed into the estate, that the game was up. The odds still favoured Colin’s death, but there would no longer be any chance to place the blame for the disaster and the massacre on Cordova. That part of the plan had always been the weakest part and, evidently, Colin had managed to break it. The presence of his bodyguards had ensured that he would survive long enough for the truth to emerge. It was time to leave. She ran along darkened corridors, trusting in her hidden inserts to help guide her though corridors she barely knew, while listening to the Marine chatter through their communications systems. They would make their way directly to Colin’s position and save him, if they could.

And then the game would be up. Daria knew Colin well enough to know that he would never be satisfied with any pat explanation that blamed everything on Tiberius. There was no logical reason for the massacre under that explanation. Tiberius hadn’t even had the slightest idea that Daria intended to take his assassination plot and turn it into a bloody slaughter that would remove most of the other possible sources of opposition. Here and there, scattered through the estate, were Family heads, MPs and even commoners seeking advancement into the post-rebellion Empire. Tiberius, if nothing else, would never have sanctioned the slaughter of his own Family.

She concentrated on a code in her head as she reached the lower levels of the estate, passing through a security door that could have stood off a nuclear blast, before racing further down the corridors into the assembly lines. Colin’s decision to order the disbandment of most of the Household Troops, ironically, had come back to haunt him. Tiberius’s old guards would have known to prevent her from entering the very heart of the Family’s power, but now it was too late. It was time to improvise again.

A smile crossed her lips as she finally reached the core of the Cicero Family, the vast computers that protected the Family’s secrets, and threw herself into a chair. It was the work of a moment to bring up the main computer network, which was under attack from several Marine computers, and crash it. It would be useless to her now, but it would also be useless to the Marines, who would have to search the estate section by section, a monumental task under the best of circumstances. By the time they found Tiberius’s body — she silently cursed the shortage of time, for she would have preferred to vaporise it — she would be well away from the estate and climbing into space.

Time to leave , she thought, and headed down a long flight of stairs into the underground transport system. The Cicero Family had established their own network of transports for moving between the different parts of their estate, hidden from all outside observers, even the Empress. Daria would never have known about them if Tiberius’s father, eager to convince her that the Clan could keep secrets, had shown her the system one day, years before Tiberius had been born. The secret would serve her well this day.

She hadn’t planned perfectly, she admitted to herself, but there had been no choice. Her study of the Imperial Navy, back when she’d been an Admiral, had shown her the weakness of too much prior planning… and how many Admirals, Generals and bureaucrats had ridden their plans down to ruin, rather than admit that the plan was failing, or even flat-out wrong. She couldn’t have planned her return so spectacularly from the Rim, or even predicted Colin and his rebellion, but she had prepared possibilities she could use to improvise. There were people in high places, backdoors into all kinds of systems and all kinds elements that she could use to further her aims. The old thrill was back. Her very life would depend on what she did next. The game was far from over.

The small transport capsule was waiting in the tiny station when she entered, already primed to depart by the state of emergency. Red lights were flickering everywhere, casting the small station into a morass of shadows and eerie patches of darkness, but she ignored the lighting. The system was heavily supported and completely disconnected from the estate’s main system. It shouldn’t fail unless the Marines somehow cut the power to the whole planet. She climbed into one of the capsules and issued a simple command.

“Port Haven, now.”

There was a slight sense of acceleration as the capsule rocketed off into the tunnels, accelerating at a speed that would have squashed her back into the seat, if the compensators hadn’t been working. The entire system, she reflected, must have cost the Cicero Family more money than she cared to think about, while it was used so rarely, just to keep it a secret. There were worlds out there in the Empire that could have used such a system to develop their economic systems, but instead they were built for the rich and famous, who didn’t need them. It was something she had determined to change back when she’d been Empress… and, when she reclaimed her throne, she would change it. The sources of opposition, one by one, were being removed.

Port Haven stood on the coast, staring out towards an island that had once been called Britain, home of the McDonald and Hanover Families. The Cicero had built a small retreat there, one that happened to be very small by the standards of the Thousand Families — but still large enough to host over a hundred people in reasonable comfort — that he had used as a getaway estate. Daria, a few months ago, had taken the precaution of adding a shuttle to the small collection of old-fashioned air and space craft that Tiberius’s ancestors had assembled. She’d also rigged the IFF. No matter what alerts had been sent out from the Marines, the orbital defences would not seek to shoot her down, or force her to surrender. They would barely know that she was there.

There was still no time to lose. The shuttle’s systems were military-grade and they came online as soon as she keyed her code into the hatch and scrambled into the pilot’s seat, bringing up the flight program with a single command into the computers. She could have flown the shuttle herself, easily, but she didn’t have time to work out a proper program and nothing attracted attention like a shuttle without a proper flight plan. It was easy for experienced officers to tell the difference between the two states and if they decided to be officious, her plans would come crashing down in ruins.

She leaned back in her chair as the shuttle’s drive fields came online and the craft climbed for space. It wouldn’t be a long flight to the Moon, where she would pick up a small Freebooter starship that had been left there, waiting for her. Joshua and his fleet were bare hours from Earth… and, when Admiral Wilhelm attacked, she would be there to pick up the pieces. The game was far from over.