The Shadow of Cincinnatus Read online

  He looked down at the display as more reports came in from the planet’s surface. A handful of locals, no doubt expecting the death penalty as soon as they were identified, had tried to put up a fight. The Marines hadn’t bothered to try to talk them down, knowing it would be futile. Instead, they’d simply called up heavy firepower from a hovertank and blown the enemy building into flaming debris. The bodies would be found and identified later.

  “All the ships have been secured,” Palter reported. The display flickered and updated as the Marines took control of the captured ships, showing their status. “Should I dispatch prize crews?”

  “See to it,” Roman said. It galled him, but Fifth Fleet’s logistics were appallingly weak. The Grand Senate had been willing to build thousands of new warships for the Federation Navy, but they’d been reluctant to pay for new freighters. It was a piece of short-sightedness that, he suspected, would come back to haunt them. Fifth Fleet was far too dependent on a small handful of bulk freighters for his comfort. “And prepare them for transit to Athena.”

  The hours ticked by, slowly. Roman felt growing impatience, even though he knew the invasion was proceeding with astonishing speed. Hitting a more normal colony world, even one without defenses, would take much longer. Hobson’s Choice comprised only a handful of minor settlements, after all. They could literally round up everyone on the planet, load them into prison ships, and drop them off at the nearest penal world.

  It was nearly nine hours before Elf contacted him, privately. “Roman,” she said, once the link was secure. “The planet is under control.”

  “Good,” Roman said. “Any problems?”

  “None,” Elf said. She sounded perturbed. “But there’s an odd shortage of captives.”

  Roman frowned. A planet was a large place – and someone with the proper training or equipment could remain undiscovered for quite some time, if they tried. And finding them would require more time than he had.

  “Did they have a chance to go to ground?”

  “I’m not sure, but I don’t think so,” Elf said. “They only had around twenty minutes of warning before we came down and landed around the settlements. We’re interrogating some of the captives now, but it sounds as though a large number of people have been gone for quite some time.”

  “Someone’s been recruiting,” Roman said, slowly.

  “It looks that way,” Elf agreed. “The missing people are all mercenaries or starship pilots, as far as we can tell. And we know we didn’t capture many mercenaries when we occupied Admiral Justinian’s territory.”

  Roman considered it. “What about our agents?”

  “No sign of them,” Elf said. “They weren’t planning to stay on Hobson’s Choice indefinitely, though.”

  “True,” Roman agreed. The last time he’d visited Hobson’s Choice, he’d helped to insert a number of agents from ONI. And no one had heard from the agents since. “Have the prisoners moved to the ships, then earmarked for interrogation,” he said. If someone was recruiting...pirates? Smugglers? Or Outsiders? “If we offer someone a chance to escape a hellworld, they might talk.”

  “I’ll see to it,” Elf said. Her chuckle echoed down the link. “Easiest invasion I’ve ever seen, Roman. I didn’t lose a single Marine.”

  “We could do with an easy victory,” Roman agreed. The Federation Navy had fought hard in the war, but it had also been badly demoralized. Between the certain knowledge that some senior officers had turned on the Federation, and the Grand Senate’s relentless attempts to control the Navy as thoroughly as possible, there were too many officers frightened to do anything without orders – in triplicate. “Good work, Marine.”

  He took a breath. “Detach a handful of Marines to sweep the surface,” he ordered. There was no point in keeping the entire fleet in the backwater system, but they could leave a few surprises behind. “I’ll assign a destroyer squadron to the high orbitals. If we’re lucky, we should snag a few strays before word gets out and rogues start avoiding the planet.”

  “Aye, sir,” Elf said.

  “And then we’ll set course for Athena,” Roman concluded. He felt a thrill of anticipation at the thought of seeing the Rim. “And see just what’s waiting for us there.”

  He closed the link, then settled back in his chair. All things considered, it had been a cakewalk, almost laughably easy. Thousands of captives had been liberated, hundreds of pirates, slavers and smugglers would face justice and Hobson’s Choice would no longer be a thorn in the Federation’s side. And the fleet’s morale would improve as news of the victory sank in.

  Emperor Marius would be pleased.

  Chapter Two

  Drake, Marius. Commanding Officer of the Grand Fleet. Betrayed by the Grand Senate after his victory over Admiral Justinian. Rebelled against their authority and made himself Emperor of Earth.

  -The Federation Navy in Retrospect, 4199

  Earth, 4098

  “I’m not interested in excuses,” Marius snarled. “I want to know what happened and why.”

  General Theodore Ricardo looked unhappy. “We had a riot. On Earth.”

  “I can see that,” Marius snapped. There were times when he thoroughly understood why the Grand Senate had shot so many military officers in the years following the First Battle of Earth. One month of being emperor had convinced him that no one in their right mind would actually want the job. “Why was this one allowed to happen?”

  The general hesitated. He was a short balding man, with an air of nervousness that reminded Marius that Ricardo had no real experience on the front lines. The Grand Senate had left him in command of Earth’s security forces, apparently believing he posed no real threat to their supremacy. Marius suspected they might have had a point. General Ricardo lacked the ability to take a shit without permission from his superiors, written in triplicate and countersigned by every Grand Senator on Earth. Leaving him in command might have been a mistake.

  “The protests swelled beyond our ability to handle them,” Ricardo said, finally. “We were rushing troops to the area when it turned into an outright riot. At that point, we lost control of large parts of Atlanta and had to hold back the troops, then advance when we had mustered sufficient manpower. By that point, a considerable amount of damage had been done to the city.”

  Marius sighed, sitting back in his chair and glowering around the office. It had once belonged to the Federation President and, despite having all of the luxury torn out of it, was still too distracting for his comfort. The president had been a powerless figurehead for nearly a century, ever since the Imperialistic Faction had collapsed following the Blue Star War, but he’d still lived in luxury. And so had the Grand Senate. No wonder they’d been so badly disconnected from their people.

  He shook his head, then looked at the display. Troops patrolled the streets of Atlanta and a dozen major cities, while hundreds of rioters – too greedy or too slow to escape capture – were marched off to hastily-erected detention centers. They hadn’t expected any form of violent response, he knew. The Grand Senate’s policy towards riots among the underclass had been to allow them to burn out in their own time. But then, most of the riots during that period had been staged. This one had been real.

  “It makes no sense,” he muttered. “They want to return to having their wants and needs provided rather than stand up for themselves?”

  “It was inevitable,” Professor Kratman said. The professor – who had become Marius’s Minister of State – seemed unemotional, but Marius could hear an undercurrent of anger in his tone. “The Grand Senate took care of their needs in exchange for their votes. Over the years, it became a formality. And now you’ve removed their access to the social security network.”

  Marius gave him a sharp look. “Was it a mistake?”

  “No,” Kratman said. “The Federation spent far too much money every year just taking care of the population of Earth. But they grew used to sucking at the Federation’s teat and now...well, they don’t know what to d
o without it. And then there’s the birth control measures...”

  “There’s no choice,” Marius said. “Earth’s population is already too high.”

  He looked down at his hands. On Mars, where he’d been born, it was rare for a family to have more than two or three children, keeping the population relatively stable. The planet simply couldn’t afford unrestricted population growth. But on Earth, with food, drink and clothing provided by the government, the population seemed to spend most of its time turning out new children, who would grow to adulthood and start turning out new children of their own. Earth’s crime and infant mortality rate was the highest in the known galaxy, yet the population had continued to expand. It was utterly unsustainable.

  His solution had been simple enough. The government-provided foodstuffs would be laced with contraceptives. Anyone who ate the food would be unable to have children without medical intervention, at least for a year after swallowing the drug. The idea had been to limit population growth as much as possible, while simultaneously encouraging emigration from Earth to the outer worlds. But the population of Earth had been babied so much that relatively few wanted to leave the comfort of humanity’s homeworld.

  And when there are no real comforts, Marius thought, that becomes truly pathetic.

  “But we are short of manpower to handle the riots,” General Ricardo said. “We should consider making concessions...”

  Marius looked up at him, angrily. “Would you suggest we give in to pressure? To threats of violence? To riots that only make life worse for the rioters?”

  He sighed. What sort of idiots thought that destroying shops, houses and infrastructure would encourage investment in their areas? Or that it would improve their lives?

  “I would suggest that we are moving too fast,” Ricardo said. “We should consider slowing down.”

  “But that would be seen as a sign of weakness,” Kratman pointed out, sharply. “We cannot afford to suggest that we would surrender, if pushed hard enough.”

  Marius tapped the table, sharply. “No, we can’t,” he said. “The reforms will continue, General, until the time has come when they will no longer be needed.”

  “Yes, sir,” Ricardo said. “And the prisoners?”

  “Exile,” Marius said, shortly. There was no point in organizing trials. “They can do something useful on a colony world.”

  He rubbed his temple, feeling a pounding headache building up under his skull. If he’d known just how much stress being emperor would cause him, he might have seriously considered going into exile after the Grand Senate had tried to kill him. Or, perhaps, seizing some of the more productive sectors for himself and leaving the Grand Senate to administer the Core Worlds themselves. But the Grand Senate, for all its honeyed words, had never given a damn about the population. Marius, for all of his harshness, was trying to help.

  But no one likes to have medicine forced down their throats, he reminded himself.

  “That raises another problem,” Ricardo said. “We need more transport.”

  “The shipyards are turning out more freighters,” Marius said. “They will come.”

  “But slowly,” Lawrence Tully said. The Comptroller of Earth sighed. “We have to move carefully to avoid destroying the remains of the economy.”

  “We need them now,” Ricardo snapped. “And not just for transporting prisoners...”

  “The problem,” Tully snapped back, “is that the entire economy is hanging on a knife-edge. A single false move could completely destroy it, shattering the entire Federation.”

  Marius gritted his teeth. The headache was growing worse.

  “We have to sort out who owns what,” Tully continued, as if he hadn’t said the same thing over and over again, at every meeting they’d held. “And we have to sort out the legal basis...”

  “Enough,” Marius said. If the meeting went on, he’d do something he’d later regret. Or, worse, that he wouldn’t regret. “General, have the prisoners moved to a detention camp and hold them there until they can be transported to a colony world. Keep the troops on the ground and make it clear that any attempt to raise a second riot will result in harsh repression and exile. Find the leaders, if you can, and have them arrested too.”

  “That will be difficult,” Ricardo said. “The old leaders are gone.”

  Marius sighed. The Grand Senate had once controlled the protest movements on Earth, something that had puzzled him until he’d realized just how effective it was at keeping the lower classes from developing effective ways to make their voices heard. Everything from trade unions to outright anarchist groups had been controlled by the Grand Senate, a web of patronage that had given them staggering levels of control over Earth. But that network was gone now, leaving a new generation free to take its place. God alone knew how it would develop in future.

  “Do your best,” he said. He raised his voice. “Dismissed.”

  Professor Kratman hesitated at the door, then left when Marius glowered at him. The others left even quicker, as if they were glad to be out of his presence. Marius watched them go, then sat back in his chair and tried to think. There were too many problems on Earth for any of them to be solved quickly, no matter what he did. And then there were the persistent problems caused by the Grand Senate’s mismanagement of the rest of the Federation. A good third of the settled worlds were restless, only held back from trying to declare independence by the certain knowledge that it would draw a harsh response from the Grand Senate. But the Grand Senate was gone.

  Life was much simpler on the command deck of a superdreadnaught, he told himself. Even when he’d been trying to keep the political commissioners from interfering in military operations, it had been so much simpler than trying to reform Earth, let alone the remainder of the Core Worlds. I knew what I was doing there.

  He rose to his feet, guided by an impulse he didn’t fully understand, and walked through a sealed hatch that led down into the lower levels of the President’s House. It was a larger building than most people realized, although it had been decades since the government had been based out of it. Now some of the old offices had been reactivated, but others had been left alone. Marius had no intention of surrounding himself with a small army of bureaucratic sycophants, not when such inhuman creatures had played a large role in the Grand Senate’s decline and fall. But his plans to reform the bureaucracy had floundered on the cold hard fact that he needed the bureaucracy to make his reforms effective.

  I should have had Tully shot, he thought, as he passed a trio of armed guards. But he was too effective at his job.

  The secure door hissed open, revealing a detention facility. Quite why there was a detention facility in the basement of the President’s House was beyond him, even though he’d spent an hour digging through the archives last month in search of the answer. Maybe he didn’t want to know the answer. At least one of the Federation’s early presidents had been forced to endure a nasty separation from his wife before leaving office. He pressed his finger against another scanner, then opened the hatch. Inside, there was a line of detention cells. Nine out of ten were empty.

  He walked to the occupied one and keyed a switch. The forcefield turned transparent, revealing a young man sitting on the bench, looking down at the solid metal floor. He’d once been relatively handsome, Marius recalled, and cut a swath through his superdreadnaught’s female crew. Now, dressed in an orange prison uniform, he looked tired and worn, perhaps even on the verge of madness. Marius might have kept him alive, but he hadn’t bothered to provide any form of mental simulation. After what the man had done, Marius had decided, he was damned if he was doing anything to make imprisonment any easier to bear.

  “Hello, Blake,” he said.

  Blake Raistlin turned to look at him. His dark skin was pallid and his eyes were sunken, as if he were too tired to sleep. Marius hadn’t looked like that since the dreaded final exams at the Academy, back before the Blue Star War. But Blake Raistlin had far more to bear than just the ris
k of failure, after years of hard work. His failure had cost his family everything, including their lives. Marius had shot some of them personally.

  “Admiral,” Raistlin said. His voice was almost a whisper. “How nice of you to visit.”

  Marius studied him for a long cold moment. “You’re still a prisoner,” he said. “How does it feel?”

  “I stopped caring,” Raistlin said. “And you’re a prisoner too.”

  “True,” Marius agreed. Being emperor was like being in prison. He was all-powerful...but, at the same time, he was limited. And he couldn’t go anywhere without a cordon of heavily-armed guards. “But you’re the one in the cell.”

  Raistlin shrugged, expressively. “Why have you kept me alive?”

  Marius felt a sudden surge of blind hatred. He’d trusted Raistlin, he’d depended on the young man...and, when the orders had arrived, Raistlin had tried to kill him. And Tobias, his friend, had died saving his life. He should be alive now, Marius knew, perhaps serving as an advisor or even as co-emperor. Instead, he was dead and buried and nothing would ever be the same again.

  “Because I can,” Marius said. “And because we might need a show trial to distract the masses.”

  Raistlin laughed. “Being emperor not all it was meant to be?”

  “Your people left behind one hell of a mess,” Marius said. “Didn’t they give a damn about the population of Earth?”

  “Of course not,” Raistlin said. His voice lightened, slightly. “They were only raised to give a damn about their families.”

  He paused, dramatically. “Why are you here, Admiral?”

  Marius looked through the forcefield, considering his answer. In truth, he wasn’t sure himself why he’d come. Raistlin could be left to rot away, eating tasteless prison food and drinking water, until the day his mind finally gave out. Or he could be put on trial. Or he could simply be taken out back and have a bullet put through the back of his skull. Marius had killed the senior Grand Senators personally. It would be no challenge to kill Raistlin himself.