Barbarians at the Gates (67 page)

“I’m promoting your girlfriend to Major and assigning her command of a Marine Regiment,” Admiral Drake added. “I dare say you’ll find something to talk about on the trip to the Rim.”

“Thank you, sir,” Roman said, blushing. He hadn’t wanted to admit that he was worried about losing her comforting presence on his ship—and in his bed, of course. “I think she’ll enjoy the chance to stretch herself a little farther.”

“Just remember, you’re not out there to invade a whole alien empire by yourself,” Admiral Drake cautioned. “We may have to extend the Rim out to enclose their space—and bring them under our control—but we need to put our own house in order first. The remaining warlords need to be mopped up and crushed; the Survey Service needs to be restarted...there’s too many things we need to do. And we need to secure the space lines so that regular shipping can restart. There are too many pirate ships operating out there because of the war.”

He shook his head. “Be careful out there, Roman,” he said, clapping Roman on the shoulder. “I don’t want to lose any more good people out along the Rim.”

“Thank you, sir,” Roman said. “I won’t let you down.”

* * *

“Tell me something,” Marius said, once they were in a secure compartment. “Was this what the Brotherhood had in mind all along?”

Professor Kratman shrugged.

“Not in particular,” he said. “We believed that something would have to happen in order to force the Senate to reform before the entire Federation shattered. You becoming emperor...”

Marius scowled. It hadn’t taken more than a few hours before High Society—what was left of it—had started clamoring to recognize the emperor. He’d promised himself that there would be a brief and formal coronation, but High Society seemed to think that it needed a grand event with a golden crown. It was galling, in a way; he’d taken supreme power, and he was as much a prisoner as most of the Senate.

“Still, you have to be careful,” his former commander warned. “If you move too quickly, you run the risk of causing an economic disaster. The industrialist strangleholds will have to be broken carefully, or they might destroy the economy out of spite.”

“And even threats won’t deter them,” Marius sighed. He looked up. “I’m appointing you to my cabinet, by the way.”

Professor Kratman blinked. “Why?”

“I want you where I can see you,” Marius said firmly. “I think the Brotherhood has spent too long in the shadows. It’s time to come out into the light.

“And besides,” he added, “I trust you.”

“I don’t think...”

“We’ll discuss it later,” Marius said. He tapped the pistol he wore at his belt. Vaughn’s old pistol, as ready for use as it had been the day it was produced. “I have one piece of unfinished business left to complete.”

* * *

The Marines had been fairly gentle with the Senators and their families, although the Senators had complained loudly and bitterly before being ordered to shut up. Most of their families—including some very young children and a handful of trusted retainers—had been transported to a bulk carrier for the journey to Paradise—a resort world that would suffice as a place of exile—but a number had been kept on Earth. Marius had issued specific instructions for the twelve most senior Senators—including the leaders of both factions—to remain behind, and those orders had been obeyed.

He wrinkled his nose as he stepped into the prison. It was normally used to house involuntary emigrants—men and women who had been arrested on Earth and sentenced to exile—and it was clear that the Senators hadn’t adjusted well to their captivity. Each of them had one hand firmly cuffed to the wall, restricting their mobility and ensuring that they posed no threat to the warder and his men. The room itself stank of piss and shit and human sweat, the feelings of the arrested people who would never see Earth again.

“Admiral,” a voice gasped. “You have to get us out of here!”

It was Alison, formerly the leader of the Socialist Faction. Now, her face had been washed clean by the wardens and her fine clothes had been replaced by a shapeless prison garment. A bruise on her face marked the spot where she’d run into a wall while the Marines were trying to arrest her. Marius had read the report on the incident and it was clear that one of the Marines, an exile from a world under Socialist control, had done it deliberately.

Marius deliberately allowed his eyes to wander away.

“And why,” he said in a tone of feigned unconcern, “should I do anything to help you?”

“But...but...you gave your word of honor,” Alison protested.

The other Senators murmured in agreement. “You promised us...”

“I did, didn’t I?” Marius allowed himself a tight smirk.

He allowed the moment to drag itself out.

“Let me tell you a little story, to help us all pass the time,” he said. “Once upon a time, there was a great chaos in a planetary sector and no one knew which way to jump. And in this sector, there were men and women who had lives and families and friends of their own—just people, ordinary people. And some of these people jumped to the right side, and others jumped to the wrong side. And, as so often happens in human history, the right side won and the wrong side lost. After all, we
know
the right side won because the winners write the history books and they were the winners. Of course they were the right side.”

They were all listening to him, perhaps wondering if he’d gone mad.

“And the people who had sided with the wrong side panicked,” he continued, wondering if any of them had drawn the correct conclusion. It wouldn’t be long before they all understood. “They thought that they were all doomed, because the winners had threatened to kill all the losers. And some of them fled and others tried to do their duty as best as they could, hoping that they could scare the winners or at least hurt them enough to make them back down. But they couldn’t, you see; they couldn’t stop the inevitable wave of fate rolling over them. They were trapped, helpless—and doomed.

“And then the winners came to them and offered them a chance to live. The losers were relieved and delighted. They might have lost, but it wouldn’t cost them their lives; their families and friends would be safe. They accepted the offer gratefully and everyone was happy—well, everyone apart from some of the winners. Once the losers were helpless, they went back on the offer. I’m sure you can imagine the results.”

His voice darkened. “The losers were all slaughtered,” he said. “And the winners went on to win.”

Alison’s voice, when it finally came, was weak and feeble. “But you promised!”

“Just imagine it,” Marius said. “Being told that the sentence of death—for you and your family and your friends—had been passed, and there was nothing you could do to avert it. Just imagine the hopelessness and despair. And then the joy and relief when you discover that you’re going to live after all. Your friends and family will be safe!”

He smiled darkly, daring them to speak.

“And then you get orders to board an old freighter,” he added. “And perhaps you wonder...but you convince yourself that all is fine; you know you’re going to have to leave your home, so maybe you’re leaving quicker than you expected. And then you realize that you’re sealed in and there’s no way out, yet perhaps that too makes sense...

“And then you realize that the air is being let out of the hold,” he said. His hand grasped Vaughn’s pistol as he drew it from his holster. “And you realize that you’ve been betrayed, and you’re going to die, and there is nothing you can do about it. You watch as your children struggle to breathe, their faces turning purple with the lack of oxygen, the life draining out of their eyes as they run out of air. And then you choke to death yourself, knowing that you were betrayed...”

He lifted the pistol and pointed it at Alison’s head. “Imagine how that feels...”

The former Senator stared wildly at him.

“But you gave your word,” she gasped. “You swore...”

“I did,” Marius agreed.

He pulled the trigger. The pistol jerked in his hand—he was more used to plasma pistols than projectile weapons—and splattered her brains over the bulkhead. He turned as the Senators started to scream for help and mercy, knowing that neither would ever come. The pistol barked again, then again and again, until all of the Senators were dead.

Automatically, he returned the pistol to its holster, refusing to look away from what he had wrought. He’d executed twelve people in cold blood. In the end, the men and women who had ruled half the galaxy had died by his hand, yet he didn’t feel anything but cold satisfaction.

The innocent dead had been avenged.

Shaking his head, he walked out the compartment and sealed the hatch behind him.

“Clear up the mess and dump the bodies in the incinerator,” he ordered the warden, who had enough sense not to ask the questions that were clearly running through his mind. Cuffs or no cuffs, enough unwilling colonists had managed to kill their fellows while in the holding pens to make disposing of their bodies a regular occurrence. “Once that’s done, forget everything that happened today.”

Not waiting for an acknowledgement, he strode away, back to the shuttle that had brought him to the prison. His mind was elsewhere, considering the future. For humanity to survive the coming storm from beyond the Rim, hard decisions would have to be made about the future. He had never wanted power, certainly not on this scale, but he wouldn’t shrink from using it. Humanity would be safe, whatever the cost.

Once he was back in the shuttle and heading back to orbit, he keyed his communicator. “Tiffany, contact my Cabinet and inform them that we will be meeting in one hour,” he told her. “We have a lot of work to do.”

End of Book One

The story will continue in:

The Shadow of Cincinnatus

Coming 2015

There is a line I remember from a science fiction book I read (unfortunately, I have forgotten which one) that ran “
if the Empire knew what sort of lessons could be learned by studying history, they’d ban it
.” It may be a coincidence, but I never had a proper history class at school. What little I did have was boring.

Anyone who knew anything about young men—boys—would have known that they would be interested in wars and great heroes of the past. It goes without saying that most of the history lessons I received did
not
cover areas of history I considered to be interesting. We spent six months studying Lancashire Cotton Weaving—boring—and relatively little time studying World War One. I probably don’t need to add that the version of World War One we learned about was the stereotypical one, where conscripted infantry were made to stand up and walk very slowly towards the enemy, where they would be mown down by machine guns, while their officers remained behind and enjoyed themselves.

And that doesn’t include the political bias that was woven into the material. In my later years, one of my teachers was a Scottish Nationalist who painted a very unpleasant picture of Margaret Thatcher. Another refused to acknowledge that Britain had ever had an empire. A lecturer on the American Civil War called it “The War of Northern Aggression.” In short, what little formal history I was taught was unsatisfying.

I was lucky enough to be able to read from a young age and that gave me access to a vast selection of history books and sources that my teachers pretended didn’t exist, or didn’t matter. I read stories of wars, of men who built empires and men who broke them, of entire areas of history that my teachers had declared
verboten
. In my youthful imagination, I saw myself flying with the RAF in 1940, invading France with Eisenhower and Monty in 1944; waging war beside Clive and watching as Caesar crossed the Rubicon. As I grew older, I delved deeper into the underlying reasons behind wars and their outcomes, for even dull economics could be made interesting.

I do not claim to be a historian. I have certainly had no formal training in researching history. But then, I have never felt the lack.

Those who do not learn from history, as the saying goes, are condemned to repeat it. This lesson, echoing down the ages, still applies today. Let us consider, for example, the events that led up to the insurgency in Iraq. The Coalition merrily assumed that the Shia—who had suffered horribly under Saddam—would rise up in support of the invasion. This was, as a cursory look at the history of the region would have shown, a naive assumption. In 1991, the Shia rebelled against Saddam, under the impression that the West would come to their aid. The West did nothing to stop the slaughter. It was easy to predict, even without hindsight, that the Shia wouldn’t risk rebelling again. Why should they trust the Coalition to protect them?

I cannot claim, either, to be a specialist in any given area of history. My interests have always been wide-ranging and, if I cannot give you precise details on the Court of the Sun King, I can tell you why the French Empire never matched the British Empire. (Think economics and relative power projection capabilities.) However, in studying different societies and how they interact (internally and externally) I have come to two conclusions about human societies.

-First, any system of government is affected by entropy. It can and it will decay. There will be a massive growth in governmental responsibilities, bureaucracy and quite probably a separation of the rulers (the political class, however defined) from the ruled. If you imagine the government as a human body, imagine its arteries slowly being jammed with fat.