Christopher Nuttall - Democracy's Light

“Spread out,” Frandsen ordered, through his armour. “I want this entire blasted place mapped and searched. Anyone you find, cuff them and put them on the lawn. Move!”

He looked down at Colin, who had insisted on accompanying the Marines. Frandsen had tried to talk him out of it, but Colin had decided that he wanted to stay in the building under Tiberius was found, and it had proven impossible to dissuade him. Colin was now surrounded by a trio of armed Marines who eyed everyone near him cautiously and looked ready to commit bloody mayhem on anyone who stepped over the line and got too close. Frandsen, who would have preferred him on one of the Independence -class superdreadnaughts, had issued orders that if they ran into serious trouble, Colin was to be dragged out of the building rather than left exposed to serious danger.

The interior of the building was deathly quiet now. The Marines advanced cautiously, shining lights into rooms where the lighting had failed, along with most of the power. Someone had crashed the estates computers, rendering it impossible for the Marines to hack the systems from outside, although Frandsen suspected that it would be impossible to do so anyway. The Cicero Family had had access to the latest systems from their research labs, years before the Imperial Navy had ever seen them deployed, and their computers were seriously protected. Without support, without even a chart of the interior of the building, they were blind. They had to search the massive estate room by room.

He cursed as the internal HUD on his armour’s visor updated again. The Marine combat suits were sharing their sensor readings, allowing the Marines to build up a picture of the interior, but it was slow going. The entire building seemed to be full of bodies, from men and women who had died quickly and fairly cleanly to people who had died in screaming agony. The highest of the Thousand Families and the lowest of the low had died together. Death was very democratic.

“The pleasure slaves seem to be dying,” one of the Marines sent. The bursts of actual fighting — he had carefully steered Colin away from any known centres of enemy activity — were dying down as the pleasure slaves collapsed. There seemed to be no reason for their deaths, not even wounds or poison, but they were dying. Their faces remained chillingly dispassionate as they dropped to the ground and lay still. “Sir, we found seven survivors here, barricaded in a room.”

“Get them out onto the lawn,” Frandsen sent back, and left it. Marines weren’t SD Troopers or even enlisted men, although those stereotypes had been falling ever since Colin and Joshua had started reforming the Imperial Navy. The Shadow Fleet had always had a high percentage of mustangs, while the pre-revolution Imperial Navy had almost none. He could trust his men and women to handle the prisoners without further ado. “I wonder if…”

They turned into a new section before he could finish, revealing a very different layout. He knew, without thinking, that they had stumbled across the heart of the building, the nerve centre of the Cicero Family. There were fewer bodies here, mostly a handful of conditioned servants, but most of the servants would have been pleasure slaves. Whatever Tiberius had done to reprogram them and turn them into mindless killers had clearly been terrifyingly strong. He didn’t even know how he had slipped an assassin through the Roosevelt’s Clan’s security scans — and no one would have allowed a pleasure slave into their apartments without the most through scans imaginable — but it had worrying implications. What if ordinary men and women could be conditioned in the same way?

“Shit,” someone said, as they checked out a massive room. There was only one body there, a small child. It was a girl of barely seven years. Her throat had been torn open by superhuman strength. “Sir…”

“Focus,” Frandsen barked. He had seen the aftermath of pirate raids that had been cleaner and less horrific. “Check out the next room and…”

“We found Tiberius,” the point team sent. “Sir, he’s dead.”

Colin had half-expected to find Tiberius hiding somewhere within his estate. He’d decided to remain with the Marines, despite Frandsen’s increasingly urgent pleas and warnings, because he wanted to talk with Tiberius before they moved him to a detention centre, but there would be no information from Tiberius now. His body had two neat bullet holes, one through his chest and the other through his head. There was no question that he was dead. It might have been possible, with the prompt use of a stasis tube and a Imperial-grade medical centre, to save him if it had been attempted at once, but the body had been alone too long.

“A standard Thumper-XXI,” Frandsen said, softly. Colin was impressed. He’d been taught to use weapons in the Academy, but he couldn’t have named the weapon used to kill Tiberius without a full analysis. Frandsen sounded inhumanly confident. “It might have been something simpler, or older, but I suspect it was most likely a Thumper. The bullets went through the body and swelled up inside, ensuring certain death. Either of the two bullet wounds would have provided enough shock and trauma to kill him.”

He looked down at Colin. “You don’t have to be here now,” he said, seriously. “You could go back to the landing craft and get transport back to the High City.”

Colin shook his head. He had barely thought about the implications, but the more he considered what had happened as he calmed down, the odder it seemed. He could understand Tiberius trying to assassinate him and even sending a friend to carry out the deed, but why the massacre? Why slaughter thousands of people, including many of the members of his own Family, just to get at Colin. If the aim had been to destroy the government, it might have succeeded… hell, he wasn’t sure if he had a government any longer. How many of the MPs had attended the wedding? How many of them had survived?

The task of reforming the government seemed hopeless.

“Check around the area,” he ordered, knowing that Frandsen would already have seen to it. Hundreds of Marines had arrived and were spreading through the building. If there were any more survivors, they would be found and escorted out to the lawn, where they would wait until their role in events could be established. Many of them would be traumatised and shocked, but there was nothing that Colin could do for them. Earth hadn’t seen a bloody massacre since the last time humans had fought humans on the surface of their homeworld. The Dathi had never even come close to bombarding the planet.

We’re not going to recover from this , he thought, and felt something die within his soul. The Provisional Government had been almost destroyed. He would probably end up with the blame for the entire massacre, even though he hadn’t done anything, but risked himself in an attempt to obtain proof that Tiberius intended to turn on him. It had been a mistake, one that had risked lives; Cordova’s life, Kathy’s life and Colin’s himself… and, of course, everyone else in the building. His determination to uphold the rule of law, whatever the cost, had led to the deaths of thousands of people, many innocent.

“It wasn’t your fault,” Frandsen said, softly. The other Marines had scattered to secure the area. “You did what you thought you had to do.”

“That was the problem,” Colin replied, bitterly.

“If Tiberius wasn’t behind this — and that man didn’t commit suicide — then you have another enemy out there,” Frandsen said, ignoring Colin’s response. “I can’t think of any way in which he could have committed suicide — and in any case, the weapon is missing — so someone else killed him. Who?”