Christopher Nuttall - Democracy's Right

His intercom buzzed. “Sir, this is Private Willis,” a voice said. “We have moved Nix to his new quarters.”

“Thank you, Marine,” Colin said. Nix would get a second chance, although one in which he would be supervised for the rest of a very short and uncomfortable career. Colin intended to beach him when he had the chance. “You can report back to your duty stations now.”

Grinning, he turned back to his notes.

“And what,” Neil demanded, “do you call that?”

He glared at the new recruits, who looked nervously back at him. They had no formal military training at all, not even the quick and dirty training given to the Blackshirts. What they did have was a willingness to fight and die for their homes, the colonies along the Rim. Some of them were experienced fighters, yet they had never been properly trained . The difference was only unimportant to someone who had never served and Neil had been a Marine for over thirty years.

“You are not taking part in a dance,” he snapped, casting a jaundiced eye over the recruits. “This training is supposed to teach you how to be precise! You stand straight when at attention, do you understand? And when I tell you to about-face, I want to hear you cry out when your fucking tool gets caught in your pants!”

He shook his head as the recruits looked miserable. They’d signed up without truly understanding the machine they’d joined, the Marine Corps; not as it was, but as it would be. Neil rather thought that his old Drill Sergeants would have approved, although they would probably be trying to kill him, if he ever saw them again.

“Fifty push-ups,” he added. “Drop and give them to me now!”

He concealed a smile as the recruits dropped and started to do push-ups. They’d thought that doing fifty was bad, the first time around… and then he’d shown them that he could do over five hundred, while only using one hand. It had impressed them more than most of them had wanted to admit.

They weren’t bad kids, he admitted, in the privacy of his own head. A little rough, a little unresponsive to discipline, but the Marine Corps had taken worse and converted them into the finest Marines in the Empire. Or even outside it. The Marine Corps had been his family, one that had been shamed when they had been ordered to carry out a massacre. He would redeem it, whatever it took.

He caught sight of a small skinny guy, struggling with the final push-ups. The young man had the heart, all right; the only question was if he’d last long enough to grow the body. Neil knew what the Marine Corps meant, even if the new recruits didn’t; war. War meant fighting and fighting meant killing. And deaths, friendly deaths. The Empire liked to conserve its Marines, although the blackshirts were regarded as expendable, yet… there were always deaths. There were times that he wished he’d been killed in the moment of his greatest victory, when he’d taken the superdreadnaughts for the rebellion. And yet he had lived.

Neil looked out over the sweating backs of the young men and women and wondered, despite himself, which one would be the first to die.

“Welcome to Sanctuary,” Cordova announced, as they stepped off the shuttle and into a massive rocky hanger deck. Unlike visiting an Imperial Navy starship, or a private firm, there was no welcoming party to greet them. “What do you think of the place?”

Hannelore looked around her, but it was nothing special, not unlike the habitats she had visited and intended to create at Tyler’s Star. There seemed to be no security, apart from a single flight controller, and nothing barring the way into the heart of the asteroid. She couldn’t see any safety systems, but she found herself hoping desperately that they were there. A space habitat was not always a safe place to live.

She’d actually enjoyed the two weeks she’d spent on the Random Numbers . Cordova had been the perfect gentleman, encouraging her to talk about her own life and asking insightful questions about the High City on Earth, even some that suggested that he had some insider knowledge of the place. In return, he’d told her about the Popular Front, about hundreds of rebel and insurgent groups working together to force the Empire to reform, or destroy it. Despite herself, Hannelore had found herself horribly intrigued and fascinated. Could it be that the Empire could be reformed, rather than destroyed? She’d known, of course, just how badly the system was rigged. The Roosevelt Family might even have managed to take the whole Tyler’s Star project off her hands and give it to one of their allies. She’d kept it as quiet as she could in hopes of avoiding their interest.

Cordova had explained, regretfully, that while she wasn’t a prisoner in a standard sense, the rebels couldn’t allow her to go home. The truth was that Hannelore didn’t want to go home. If she went home now, she would be exposed as a failure, along with the whole Tyler’s Star project. The Thousand Families wouldn’t throw her into the gutter to die — there were standards, even for the lowest families — but they wouldn’t allow her another chance to prove herself. She would be given a small stipend and expected to join the thousands of family members partying, drinking and drugging themselves to death. The only alternative would be to retreat into herself and mind everyone else’s business, like Great Aunt Grace. The memory of the long-nosed elder woman, poking herself into everything, made her shudder. She was not going to wind up like that.

“It looks like an ordinary asteroid habitat,” Hannelore said, as they passed through a small airlock and into a bustling crowd. She’d shopped at the great shops on Earth, yet there was something about the market in front of her that drew her attention. Great piles of clothes competed with books and datachip stores, while some of the sellers were openly displaying weapons or other illegal supplies. She picked up one of the books and discovered, to her surprise, that it was written in a language she didn’t recognise. The Empire had attempted to stamp out all languages apart from Imperial Standard, yet she supposed she shouldn’t be surprised to discover another language — or thousands of them — thriving along the Rim. “Or maybe…”

She saw Cordova smile as it sank in. There was nothing fake about the market in front of her, none of the urgent need to be fashionable surrounding the High City’s great shopping malls, or none of the fugitiveness that surrounded the shops for the lower classes. There was no fear in the air, no sense that the Imperial Tax Authority might descend on the shoppers to demand its cut of the proceeds, or that the Blackshirts might march into the compartment and arrest everyone just for being in the presence of subversive literature. The people living along the Rim or out in the Beyond might live in permanent fear, terrified that the Empire might one day discover them and send starships to capture or destroy their asteroids, but they didn’t let it wear them down. The kind of grinding, ever-present fear she’d sensed on other worlds simply didn’t exist here.

“Of course,” Cordova said, when she finally managed to put it into words. “The people here are free ! They can do what they like and if they don’t like their companions, they are free to set up an asteroid habitat of their own and live apart from them. We have millions of different groups out here. Look!”

His long finger pointed towards a pair of short figures, moving from stall to stall. The two green aliens, almost child-like in their motions, seemed to be welcome on the asteroid, rather than being hissed at as they would be on most Imperial worlds. The Empire encouraged anti-alien feeling and racism, yet the Rim seemed to accept all comers. The two aliens, she noted through numb shock, were also doing the one thing that would guarantee them a death sentence back in the Empire. They were carrying weapons… and no one seemed to find that alarming.