Christopher Nuttall - Democracy's Right

Angrily, cursing his own weakness, Colin strode through the portal and into the brig. Percival looked up at him, his eyes going wide with a hint of fear and panic before he lowered them to the deck, trying to hide his feelings. It didn’t matter. Percival had rarely bothered to hide his feelings from his subordinates and he was out of practice. Colin saw it well before it could be hidden. He took the interrogator’s chair and sat, facing Percival.

“You’re a traitor,” Percival said, finally. Colin shivered, remembering the voice, the strange combination of a high-class accent from Earth and the broader accent of an Academy graduate. Percival must have hated losing the accent that had marked him as one of the Thousand Families, even though he was — by birth — only on the edge of High Society. He’d planned and schemed and fought to claw his way to the top, never caring about who got crushed underfoot. “My patrons will crush you for this.”

Colin snorted. “After everything else I have done,” he said, flatly, “don’t you think that they will have some trouble deciding what crime they’re actually going to execute me for?”

Percival didn’t see the joke. “You are tearing away at the Empire,” he said, softly. “Do you really feel that the rebel underground could run something the size of the Empire? They would tear the Empire apart within a week. We run the Empire because we can take the long view…”

Colin drew his pistol in one smooth motion and held it to Percival’s head. The Admiral’s eyes went very wide. He hadn’t believed that Colin would — or could — kill him. Percival had always been able to game the system and ensure that the outcome, whatever it was, allowed him to survive and prosper. But Colin was outside the system and was no longer bound by its rules. He could shoot and kill Percival; he could do anything to Percival. Colin sniffed in disgust. Percival was so scared that he’d lost control of his bladder.

“Tell me something,” Colin said, fighting down the urge to simply pull the trigger and put Percival out of everyone’s misery. “Do you really believe that mass murder and genocide helps preserve the Empire? You sent your ships to Jackson’s Folly and killed a fifth of the planet’s population. You crushed revolts and slaughtered people who wanted to choose their own way in life. You…”

Percival started to stammer. It took him a moment to speak clearly. “You fool,” he said, as if he expected Colin to pull the trigger at any moment. “The little people are incapable of running their own lives. How do you expect something the size of the Empire to survive if everyone is pulling in different directions? We have a duty to control them to save the Empire and preserve the human race.”

Colin slapped him, hard. Percival cried out, his pale cheek burning red where Colin had hit him, yet somehow he remained upright. Colin stared down at him, fighting the desire to hurt Percival, to tear him apart or shoot him or… there were too many possibilities.

And yet, if he killed Percival in cold blood, what would it mean for the future?

“You’re wrong,” Colin said, holding his voice steady through a colossal act of will. “You are the one tightening your grip so hard that eventually there will be a rebellion that will tear the Empire apart. What makes you special? Only the fact that one of your very distant ancestors did something important, many years ago, long before you were born. You cannot keep stamping down on the human race forever.”

Percival looked up at him. Colin wondered absently if the man was in shock. No one had dared to lift a hand to him in the past, yet now he’d been slapped twice in the same day and found himself stripped of all status. It would have been a dizzying fall. No one deserved it more, yet Colin felt a flicker of sympathy and hated himself for the thought. How could he feel any sympathy for his nemesis at all?

“Answer me one other question,” Colin said. “Answer me… and I will know if you lie. Why did you betray me?”

There was a long pause. “Because you’re nothing,” Percival said. He’d clearly decided to tell the truth, even though it might mean a bullet in the head. His voice became mocking, tearing away at whatever remained of Colin’s self-control. “You were someone with ideas above your station. I fed those ideas as long as I needed you, then I discarded you when you were no longer required and replaced you with someone who was so much more useful. You were never important to me, Walker; I never thought about you after I’d discarded you. You were just a tool.”

His mouth lolled open. “And you thought that it was personal,” he added. “What are you to me? I didn’t care enough for it to be personal. You were nothing.”

Colin lifted the pistol and pointed it at Percival’s forehead. “You want to know something else?” Percival added. “You come in here and condemn me for doing what I had to do to maintain the Empire. You are just as guilty as I am. You helped plan missions that slaughtered rebels and crushed entire planets. You are responsible for many of the acts you whine about now. Your hands are as bloody as mine and consider; without you, would I have become the Sector Commander?”

A red mist seemed to descend across Colin’s mind. It took everything he had not to fire the pistol and kill the Admiral in cold blood. Slowly, he fought for calm. Percival deserved something more… appropriate than a mere bullet in the head.

“You may be right,” Colin said, returning the pistol to his holster. “I may be partly complicit in your crimes. I’ll tell you this, though; I will redeem myself and the service I swore to serve until the end of my days. And in the end, few will remember you. You will just be a figure of fun for historians to chuckle over.”

He stood up and walked to the hatch, turning before he left the cell. “I haven’t quite decided what to do with you,” he added, “but I will tell you this. There is a strong feeling that we should just send you back to the Empire. They’re going to be desperate to find someone to blame for this little… crisis. Perhaps we should give them someone, eh?”

Colin walked out and the hatch hissed closed behind him, cutting off Percival’s parting shot — if he shouted anything. Percival might well believe him. The Empire would want someone to blame and, if Percival was the sole survivor from the higher ranks, it would be him. Their method of execution would be far more imaginative and painful than anything Colin could hand out for him.

He ignored the presence of the Marine and paused long enough to recover his temper, running through breathing exercises he had learned at the Academy. Percival had managed to get under his skin, all the more so because everything he had said had the unmistakable ring of truth. Colin had believed — had chosen to believe — that Percival had it in for him personally, yet Percival’s own words countered that. Colin… had just been there when Percival had wanted a tool. Colin’s own ambition had blinded him about his true place in Percival’s scheme of things.

Eventually, he walked down to the second brig and looked down at the monitors. Stacy Roosevelt was lying on the bunk, staring up at nothing. She had actually tried to hide when the Marines landed to arrest her, but the staff at the resort — for high ranking offices and managers only, of course — had betrayed her at once. She hadn’t been any better than Percival at making friends and winning allies. Stacy was wearing only what she had on when she’d been arrested; a bikini top and a pair of shorts. The impression was that of a young and innocent girl with disturbingly old eyes.

Colin felt his vindictive streak boiling up within him and he walked on, pushing Stacy to the back of his mind. The third brig held someone he didn’t know personally, Spencer O’Conner. The older man — even with regeneration treatments, he was clearly aging and his file claimed that he was over a hundred and thirty years old — was the Roosevelt Family’s manager, the grown-up sent to watch Stacy and the planets the Family had seeded over the years. Colin had been intrigued the moment he’d seen the file, because the choice of O’Conner was odd. He wasn’t a direct family member, so he couldn’t be trusted completely… so why was he out in Sector 117?