The Shadow of Cincinnatus (2 page)

It was a living.
Hogshead
was too old and slow to carry legitimate cargo, even if there hadn’t been a hundred warrants out for her arrest on the more civilized worlds of the Federation. And wasn’t
that
ironic? Loewi knew for a fact that some of the slaves he’d shipped, properly modified, had been sold to high-ranking Federation officers, who would probably dispose of them before returning to Earth. Who gave a shit about the morality of shipping kidnapped women and children when the alternative was poverty and certain death? Or indenture...

He turned back to the console. “Take us out of here,” he ordered. “Now.”

“Gotcha, dad,” the helmsman said. His son worked the console with a practiced ease. “I hear some of them are...”

An alarm sounded. Red lights appeared on the cramped display.

Loewi’s mouth dropped open. For a long moment, his brain refused to accept what he was seeing. There were a hundred and fifty starships decloaking around the planet, spearheaded by five entire
superdreadnaught
squadrons. It had to be a trick of some kind, his brain yammered at him, an illusion created by ECM drones designed to fool far more advanced sensors than
Hogshead’s
outdated sensor suite. But the images had a terrifying solidity that drove all doubts out of his head.

“Dad, I’m picking up a message,” his son said.

“...Is the Federation Navy,” a voice boomed. “Hobson’s Choice is now under military control. Cut your drives and prepare to be boarded. Any resistance will result in the destruction of your vessels. There will be no further warning.”

Loewi thought fast. The idea of outrunning any of the military ships was thoroughly absurd. They could be given forty-eight hours to run and the military would
still
catch up with them before they crossed the Phase Limit. Not that they’d be given the time, he saw, as new icons flared to life on the display. Hundreds of starfighters were launching from carriers, each one more than capable of blowing
Hogshead
into vapor. They were caught like rats in a trap.

His son looked up at him. “Dad?”

“Cut the drives,” Loewi ordered. He knew he was dead. Slaver Captains could be shot without the formality of a trial – and if the bribes no longer protected Hobson’s Choice, there was no point in hoping they would protect him. But at least his children and crew would survive. They’d be on a penal planet, but they would be alive. “Cut the drives and tell them we surrender, then lock down the ship. The mercs might have other ideas.”

* * *

“I think we surprised them, sir,” Palter said.

Roman nodded. There had been seventy starships orbiting Hobson’s Choice when the fleet had decloaked and a third of them had started to try to flee. The others had dropped their drives as per instructions, although there was no way to know if they’d meant to surrender or if they simply hadn’t been able to power up their drives in time to escape. Not, he knew, that it really mattered. The fleeing ships didn’t have a hope of escaping his fleet and making it out into deep space.

“Good,” he said. “Dispatch the Marines. We’ll go with Plan Theta.”

He forced himself to sit back and watch as his fleet’s smaller units moved in to tackle the fleeing ships. A couple cut their drives as soon as the destroyers entered firing range, the remainder kept trying to run until the destroyers opened fire. Roman watched, as dispassionately as he could, as five of the fleeing ships exploded, one by one. They were either pirates or smugglers, he knew, both occupations that earned participants the death penalty. But it was still one hell of a waste.

“The Marines are entering the atmosphere now,” Palter informed him. “There’s no trace of any resistance.”

Roman wasn’t surprised. To all intents and purposes, Hobson’s Choice was an utterly undefended world. There was no government, let alone a military; there was certainly no one willing to fight and die in the defense of a wretched hive of scum and villainy. By the time someone managed to take control, if anyone did, the Marines would already be occupying the major settlements. Resistance would be utterly futile.

More reports came in as smaller parties of marines boarded the surrendered starships. Most of them were smugglers – few pirates would lurk in orbit when they could be back out in space, hunting for their next prizes – but three of them were slavers. Two of the slavers were empty, having returned to Hobson’s Choice for more slaves, while the third was crammed to bursting with young female slaves. They’d been kidnapped, according to the Marines, or sold into slavery by their families. And if the fleet had waited another hour or two before launching the invasion, they would never have had a hope of freedom.

“Move them to the hospital ships,” Roman ordered. How could
anyone
sell their children into slavery? He’d grown up on an asteroid and no one had ever threatened him with anything worse than being sent to bed without his supper. But the Rim of explored space was rarely civilized. A family might decide it was better to sell one child, no matter how horrific it was, than lose everyone. “And then transfer their former captors to the brig.”

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.

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 do 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.