Christopher Nuttall - Democracy's Right

He clenched his fist in outrage. As a loyal servant of the Empire, he knew his duty; he had to bring Jackson’s Folly into the Empire, whatever it took. It hadn’t been a peaceful deployment. The locals were armed to the teeth and reluctant to bend the knee to the Empire, forcing him to deploy his forces and strike back at rebels and insurgents. The bastards wore no uniforms and fought without honour. They were to blame for the massive death toll. Branford took no pleasure in slaughtering hostages, or in exterminating traitors, yet there was no choice. The insurgents had made it so.

“The enemy shuttles are entering range,” the operator said. Branford nodded. Some of his encampments had been struck from orbit, but others had been spared, spared because of the human shields gathered around them. “The defences are opening fire… now!”

“They’re opening fire,” the pilot said. “Prepare for ejection.”

Neil braced himself as his suit was picked up and thrown down through the hatch, out into the open air. The sky was filling with green flashes of light as plasma cannons attempted to smash the shuttles out of the sky, yet they were already too late. The men and women of his Marine Regiment were already deploying. The enemy were clearly reacting too late to prevent it. A handful of shuttles vanished in fireballs — others launched missiles back towards their tormentors, hoping to knock them out before more shuttles died — but the remainder kept going, turning away from the enemy base. Neil barely had a second to see the ground coming up towards him before he landed, feeling the jerk even through the compensator field enveloping his armoured combat suit.

He fell into the Marine command network at once, deploying his suit’s weapons and looking for targets. A group of Blackshirts were already running towards them, trying to deploy, when they were scythed down by the Marines. Moving as one, their training coming to the fore, the Marines attacked savagely, heading directly towards the Blackshirt base. The Blackshirts, instead of using armoured suits, preferred to use armoured vehicles. It was a mistake, Neil knew, one he intended to exploit. The plasma cannons his Marines carried could punch through anything the Blackshirts had on hand.

The fighting grew more savage as they raced through the city, as if they were all of one mind. The locals, at least, had the sense to stay out of the way, although fragments of chatter his suit picked up suggested that some of them were taking the opportunity to attack the Blackshirts and score a little payback for the suffering and torment they’d undergone. Neil was right in the heart of it, fighting alongside his men and feeling a little bit of himself die when a Marine fell. The Blackshirts had broken out their heavy plasma cannons, powerful enough to burn through a Marine armoured suit, firing almost at random. The cannons didn’t survive long when the Marines saw them, hitting them with their own weapons and causing them to explode with colossal force, but it hardly mattered. A handful of Marines were killed before they could react. Neil saw a running Blackshirt, his body ablaze with white fire, and felt sick. The Blackshirt had been too close to one of the plasma cannons when the containment field had exploded. He snapped off a mercy shot and put the poor bastard out of his misery.

“Onwards,” he snapped. The fighting had become kinetic, with the Marines responding to threats as they appeared, but they kept pushing towards the main base. The Blackshirts had taken over the city’s governmental buildings and converted them into their headquarters. The level of defences around them looked oddly paranoid, but then the locals had been very good at slipping explosive devices and even armed men through the gaps. He wondered, absently, why the Blackshirts had bothered to place their headquarters there, yet it hardly mattered. Perhaps they’d seen it as a way to mark their claim on the local real estate.

The fighting became a blurred series of impressions as they assaulted the main base. They tore through barriers intended to keep out vehicles, running right into the Blackshirts and their final stand. Neil realised that they were using their drug injectors, rendering themselves largely immune to pain and fear. Marines didn’t use the drugs, largely because they affected the brain as well, turning the Blackshirts into soulless killing machines with little sense of right or wrong. He saw a Blackshirt run right at them, firing madly, and cut him down. Others resisted the temptation to seek self-immolation and held out until the Marines cut through them, like a knife through butter. The final defences were destroyed and the Marines pushed onwards, into the building. Neil checked the map he’d downloaded and installed in his HUD and smiled. If he knew the General’s reputation, he would be in the main office, the one that had belonged to the planet’s President.

General Branford lifted a pistol as the Marines burst into the office, but he wasn’t hopped up on battle drugs and Neil knocked it from his hand before he could do anything. The General looked… as if he didn’t want to surrender, yet didn’t want to go on fighting anyway. There was something cold and hard in his gaze, as if he thought he could get out of anything. Neil looked at him and felt sick. The ordinary Blackshirt was drugged, to the point where he could never be justly held accountable for his actions, but the General… the General had known all along what he was doing. When Neil had faced such a choice, he had refused; the General… had carried out his orders.

Neil reached out with one armoured hand, ignoring the General’s protests, and crushed his head like a grape. It felt as if he was cleansing the Empire, crushing all that was rotten and unwholesome within it… and it was personal. Branford had carried out the orders Neil had refused to obey.

“It’s over,” he said, with a sigh. Without their leader, the remaining Blackshirts would be unable to coordinate any resistance. The locals could deal with them, at least until reinforcements arrived from Camelot. By then, the rebels would have quit the system. “We’ve won.”

“I wish I could say that this was rare,” Hester said, in her whispery voice. She had insisted on accompanying the fleet, despite Colin’s objections. “I wish I could say that Jackson’s Folly was the only world to suffer in such a manner.”

Colin nodded, hiding his own shame. He hadn’t understood until it had almost been too late. If Percival had given him the rewards and patronage he’d wanted, that he’d earned, he would never have allowed himself to see the festering corpse the Empire had become. His petulance — there was no other word to describe it — had opened his eyes to the truth, and yet… even then, he had never allowed himself to see the full horror of the Empire.

Jackson’s Folly had a population of six billion souls, scattered over the system; its daughter colonies, between them, had another ten billion. Under the Empire’s iron heel, at least a billion had died, either through the bombardment, the fighting, hostage executions, starvation or plain outright sadism. The Blackshirts had crushed resistance as harshly as they could, yet it had continued, flaring up whenever they thought that an area was pacified and the forces there could be moved elsewhere — at which point they discovered that the region was not pacified at all. They had prescribed horrible punishments, for everything from owning a weapon to giving Blackshirts dirty glances, but still the insurgency had continued. Perhaps they would have won in the end, with a commander willing to permit the most barbaric acts against the insurgents and those who sheltered them, yet most of the planet would be shattered. The industries that Stacy Roosevelt had wanted so desperately would be destroyed in the crossfire.