The Shadow of Cincinnatus (24 page)

Damn Justinian
, he thought.

“Your orders are as follows,” he continued. “I want you to prepare to go on the offensive as soon as possible...”

It says something about the sheer hatred of the Federation among the outer worlds that hundreds of thousands volunteered to join the Outsiders, despite knowing that the odds were – at best – even. But no one was really surprised
.

-The Federation Navy in Retrospect, 4199

Athena, 4098

“I think they like you,” General Stuart muttered.

Chang Li had to smile as she descended the steps from her shuttlecraft and set foot on Athena’s soil. The crowds gathered just beyond the security fence were cheering loudly, as if there had been no real debate over who would win the battle for hearts and minds. Li smiled and waved at them, hoping the crowds wouldn’t have reason to regret their conversion to the Outsider cause after the war. The Federation would be truly merciless if it won the war and imposed its own peace on the Beyond.

She kept waving until she reached the door, then allowed General Stuart to lead her into the building. General Erskine stood just inside, surrounded by a small honor guard. He saluted her, which she returned, then motioned for her to follow him through the corridors. Li was struck by the staggering luxury all around her as she walked, then pushed the thought aside as they stepped into a briefing room. It looked reassuringly mundane.

“The population is relatively quiet,” General Erskine said, as they sat down at the table. “There have been a handful of nasty incidents, but mostly it seems as if they’re waiting to see what happens, rather than rise up against us as a body. It helps that we have countless volunteers already clamouring to join up with us.”

Li smiled. “Are they truly willing?”

“Most of them are,” General Erskine said. “We’re doing our best to vet them now, but we have colossal gaps in our system. We may end up taking them all and praying that none of them have bad intentions.”

“I see,” Li said. “And the remnants of the enemy defenders?”

“We think a number of Marines have managed to scatter into the countryside,” General Erskine said. “Unfortunately, we have no hard numbers; the bastards managed to purge the command datanodes before we got our hands on them. The best we can do is hope they aren’t in any state to cause trouble, but remain watchful anyway. There’s no point in detailing forces to hunt them down right now.”

He paused. “Most of the planet’s industrialists have declared their intentions to seek contracts from us,” he added. “I think they wish to meet with you before you depart.”

“We can certainly make time,” Li said. She hadn’t wanted to spend time pressing the flesh – it reminded her, all too clearly, of her time in the Federation Senate – but she had little choice. Besides, she had to make it clear to them that the Outsiders had no intention of becoming just another distant master. “Is the world ready to join us openly?”

“I believe it may be a year before a provisional government asserts itself,” General Erskine said. “But after that, I don’t think we’d have any real objections to them joining us.”

“The Federation might,” General Stuart growled. “They held Boston.”

Li steepled her fingers. “How bad is it going to be?”

“We need to hack our way around Boston,” General Stuart said. “It will give them time to recover from the shock, particularly since they rejected our offer of a negotiated peace.”

General Erskine looked up. “They just said no?”

“More or less,” Li said. The response had been undiplomatic in the extreme. It was a change from the Federation’s normal approach, where even an ultimatum had some conciliatory words that changed absolutely nothing. She’d once wondered if one of the Federation’s diplomats had read the line about a spoonful of sugar helping the medicine go down and taken it to heart. “The response was largely unprintable. Suffice it to say they are determined to fight to the finish.”

“Unless someone assassinates Emperor Marius,” General Erskine said. “We should consider the possibility.”

Li frowned. Assassinating Grand Senators had been a waste of time; there was always a successor, while there would also be bloody reprisals against the perpetrators of the crime. But an Emperor...Marius Drake might be married, but there were no children. Indeed, it was possible that Lady Tiffany wouldn’t
want
children. Her file suggested she’d been more interested in her research than playing power games with the rest of the Grand Senate brats.

But that might not make any difference
, she thought, morbidly.
She could have children grown in exowombs, perhaps. Maids would take care of them from birth till they were old enough to walk. And if she refuses, a man like Marius Drake is forceful enough to overwhelm her objections and force her to have children
.

It wasn’t a reassuring thought. She knew, all too well, just how corrupt the Grand Senate had become, simply through being able to pass power down the generations without a real challenge. Emperor Marius’s family might follow the same pattern, except they would have no true peers, no one who could challenge their petty cruelties. Marius himself might be a fine man – and she had to admit he was – but what would his children or grandchildren be like? She wasn’t sure she wanted to know.

“We should,” she said. The first wave of bombings and other attacks had shocked the Federation, but it had also galvanised the security forces to root out the moles, root and branch. It would be far from easy to get an assassin close enough to Admiral Drake to make the kill, not since the Grand Senate had already tried to kill him. “But I don’t see how.”

“I will consider it,” General Erskine said. He paused. “But, for the moment, the war itself goes on.”

General Stuart nodded, then keyed a switch. A 3D holographic starchart appeared in front of them.

“We cannot attack Boston directly,” he said. “The defenses aren’t much more advanced than the defenses of Athena, but Commodore Garibaldi has had ample time to make improvements, prevent chaos software from infecting the whole system and repair his fleet before we were ready to attack. Now, we might win if we stormed the system, but the cost would be staggeringly high. Our best case would see us losing a third of our fleet merely trying to break through the Asimov Point, let alone storming the planet and its orbital facilities.”

Li frowned. “Don’t we have supporters on the planet itself?”

“Not enough,” General Erskine said. “Commodore Garibaldi has already taken precautions against another uprising.”

“So we will angle our attacks, instead, against worlds closer to Boston,” General Stuart said. “We will gain control of three separate Asimov Point chains, forcing Commodore Garibaldi to split his forces to cover the planet as well as the system. Eventually, we will be able to punch through and take Boston, forcing Commodore Garibaldi into a missile duel that will play to our strengths.”

“Until they duplicate the long-range missiles for themselves,” Li said. She looked down at the table. “How long will it take them to copy our weapons, now they’ve seen them in action?”

“Unknown,” General Stuart said. “Assuming they don’t have any samples to work from, I’d say at least six months to come up with a workable design and another six months to start mass production. But they may have a similar concept on the drawing board already, in which case the time to mass production will be considerably shorter.”

“All of that assumes they are in position to keep researching newer technology,” Li said. “We did hammer their production yards pretty hard.”

“Not hard enough,” General Stuart said. “They will be able to recover, if they have time.”

“Which brings us all the way back to taking out Boston,” Li added. She looked him in the eye. “We’ve tested ourselves against them now, General. Can we take the system?”

“I believe so,” General Stuart said. “But time is not on our side.”

Li nodded. The Outsiders had swept over nearly two hundred worlds, not counting the asteroid settlements and other minor habitations, but most of them were largely irrelevant to the overall outcome of the war. Their settlers might be enthusiastic, yet they brought nothing to the table. All they could really do was eliminate the Federation’s supervisors and pray the Outsiders won the war. The Federation would not be merciful if it returned to the sector to discover that countless investments had been destroyed, or nationalized.

She sighed. The Federation would not be merciful. It was practically becoming a refrain.

We won the first battles
, she thought.
But now the Federation is alert and knows we’re out here. The next battles will be far harder.

“Then you may commence preparations to take the system at once,” she said. “But remember not to risk everything on one blow.”

General Stuart nodded. “Understood,” he said. “We won’t let you down.”

* * *

“This isn’t a bad place to take leave,” Lieutenant Caleb Roebuck said, without irony. He and Uzi sat together in a cafe, drinking beer and watching as their subordinates had their fun. “I could spend a few years here.”

Uzi had to smile. “I suppose you could,” he agreed. “But there really isn’t anything remarkable here.”

Roebuck looked disbelieving. The spaceport strip consisted of nothing more than a dozen brothels, five gambling halls – they would have been called casinos, Uzi had heard, but there was a tax on casinos that didn’t apply to gambling halls – and at least thirty places to eat, drink and pick fights. He didn’t have the heart to tell Roebuck that there were places for shore leave on Earth where hundreds of thousands of spacers could be catered for at the same time, then pushed out when they ran out of money. There was no shortage of ways to separate a spacer or a soldier from his money and the people who ran the shore leave facilities knew all of them. By Earth’s standards, the spaceport was really quite small.

“But tell me,” Roebuck said. “Who are they?”

Uzi followed his gaze. A pair of near-naked women, wearing nothing more than silver thongs, stood there, smiling cheerfully at spacers and soldiers alike. They couldn’t have been more obviously prostitutes if they’d carried signs around, although they had a certain innocence that suggested they were part-timers, rather than dedicated prostitutes.

“They’re probably part-timers,” he said, finally. “They’re often inexperienced.”

Roebuck gave him a sharp look. “Part-timers?”

“The wages here aren’t very high,” Uzi said. “When a large number of ships arrive in orbit and their crews come down for shore leave, the young girls often come to the port and offer themselves, in exchange for a few credits. They book a hotel room and service three or four spacers a day, then they stagger off home and clean themselves as best as they can. Some of them find they like it and join the brothels, others swear never to do it again until they really, really, really, really need the money. And some of them die on the streets”

“I...they’re just...” Roebuck swallowed and started again. “But why?”

Uzi felt a sudden urge to shock the younger man. “Why do they do it? Because they need money. And why do they die?”

He smiled, humorlessly. “The brothels have rules,” he said. “You can have just about anything you want, as long as you book in advance. Get your kicks by slapping girls? You can find a girl willing to be slapped by you for a few extra credits. But step over the lines you paid for? You can expect to be yanked off the girl by a security guard and tossed naked into the streets.”

Roebuck looked sick.

Uzi went on, enjoying himself. “But the girls who come for a day or two have no protections,” he added. “They’re innocents, too. They don’t realize that someone might want more than a quick blowjob or a hasty screw in a hired bedroom. Some of them are beaten, some try to back out when they realize they’re actually selling themselves for money...and some are killed by the brothel owners. They don’t like the competition.”

“That’s...that’s awful,” Roebuck said.

“It could be worse,” Uzi said. “I was once hired to train soldiers on one side of an insurgency. Their leaders had a habit of kidnapping women from the other side of the insurgency and raping them, then telling the poor bitches they had a choice between working for them or going back home. And most of them stayed with the kidnappers, even though the choice was quite genuine. They could have gone home if they’d wished.”

Roebuck’s eyes widened. “
Why
?”

“Because their menfolk would have killed them for daring to be raped,” Uzi said. “You see, they felt that a proper woman simply couldn’t be raped. They genuinely believed that to be true. So, by definition, any woman who was actually raped was not a proper woman and had betrayed her family. She had to die.”

“And this was tolerated?” Roebuck asked. “The Federation let it happen?”

“The Federation was backing the side that was trying to crush those bastards,” Uzi said, just to see what sort of response he got. To Roebuck – and the other Outsiders – the Federation was the source of all evil. “It never bothered to just crush them from orbit.”

There were other tales he could tell, he knew, but he kept them to himself. The mercenaries had been forced to blend in with the locals, even share some of their pursuits. And some of them had made looting, raping and burning seem almost normal.

Roebuck shook his head. “We’re fighting to stop it,” he said. “We won’t let it continue.”

“I’m glad to hear it,” Uzi said, dryly. “You do realize there’s a contradiction there?”

He smiled, then explained when Roebuck looked puzzled. “You talk about freeing the colony worlds from the iron grip of the Federation, allowing them to develop in their own way,” he pointed out. “But at the same time, you’re wanting to stop cultural practices that would be a great deal worse without the Federation’s interference. For every world birthed from a decent culture, Lieutenant, there is one birthed from a nightmare that was booted off Earth, centuries ago. And which ones do you consider worth protecting?”