The Shadow of Cincinnatus (3 page)

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 risk 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.

But that wouldn’t make the young man
suffer
, he knew.

He’d been betrayed. A military organization couldn’t survive without trust – and trust was one thing that had been in short supply, after the mutinies and rebels and the imposition of a small army of political commissioners. Raistlin had been trusted, even though Marius had known of his family connections. There had seemed no grounds upon which to reject the talented young man. But, as soon as the orders came, Raistlin had tried to kill his commanding officer. The betrayal could not be allowed to go unpunished.

And you want to make him suffer
, he thought.
Shooting is far too good for him
.

“Because I can,” Marius said. He paused. “Would you like to know what happened to the rest of your classmates? The ones who served the Federation Navy over their families?”

Raistlin started to giggle. There was more than a hint of insanity in the sound.

“Admiral,” he said, “what do you think you’ve built?”

Marius stared at him, more disturbed than he would have cared to admit. “What do you mean?”

“Riding a tiger is perfectly safe,” Raistlin said. He giggled again, then caught himself. “It’s when you try to get off that you start having problems. My family rode a tiger for far too long and could never muster the courage to try to get off. Each little compromise, each one a good idea at the time, built up into an overwhelming structure we could never free ourselves from.

“And here you are,
Emperor
,” he added. “How long will it be until you become everything you accused
us
of being?”

“You’re the last of the Grand Senatorial families,” Marius snarled. It was a lie, but close enough to the truth. The lower-level aristocrats had been exiled to a distant world where they would be left alone. It hadn’t occurred to him until much later that they might be happy to have left Earth for more reasons than merely being allowed to keep their lives. “And when you’re gone, you will be nothing.”

Raistlin rose to his feet and walked up to the forcefield, which spat and crackled at him as he stopped. “Look at yourself,” he mocked. “What happened to the proud commanding officer who stood unmoved on the bridge as his ship plunged into battle?”

“He found himself having to clean up a mess that should really have been solved hundreds of years ago,” Marius said, gathering his temper. “What happened to the young lieutenant who had the entire universe ahead of him?”

“He did his job,” Raistlin said. “He followed orders.”

He smirked at Marius’s scowl. “Tell me, Admiral,” he said. “When you were born, on Mars, the planet of war, were you ever exposed to any culture?”

Marius frowned, puzzled. Mars wasn’t a barbaric backwater any longer. Hell, it hadn’t been anything of the sort since the First Interstellar War. These days, it was as civilized as Earth, perhaps more so. The population hadn’t forgotten just how thin the line between life and death could be, even now.

“There’s a song,” Raistlin said. “From an opera.
Many a king on a first-class throne, if he wants to call his crown his own, must manage somehow to get through, more dirty work that ever I do
.”

Marius gave him a dry look. “I’m no stranger to dirty work,” he said.

“But are you prepared, Admiral, for the dirty work you’ll have to do as emperor?” Raistlin asked. “You’re not the person I knew and respected any longer. The job is changing you beyond recognition. What will you be in ten years,
Emperor
? Will you really give up the job?”

“Yes,” Marius said.

He took a moment to gather himself. “You will be put on trial, eventually,” he stated, flatly. “And then you will join your family in death.”

“See?” Raistlin said. “You’re not the person you used to be.”

“Neither are you,” Marius said.

He hit the switch, darkening the forcefield, then turned and walked away from the cell. It was hard to say which of them had gotten the better of the encounter, even though Raistlin was in a cell and Marius...was in a prison of his own making. He shook his head as he strode past the Marines, too distracted to acknowledge their salutes. No, he knew which of them had come out ahead. Raistlin was right, in so many ways.

But he’s still the one in a cell
, he reminded himself, as he made his way back to his quarters, where his wife was waiting for him.
And he will die soon
.

D’Artagnan, Lady Tiffany Eleanor Diana Katherine. Wife of Admiral, later Emperor, Marius Drake. Forced into marriage with him, she rapidly formed a bond with her husband that survived the attempt on his life and remained with him as he took on the position of Emperor...

-The Federation Navy in Retrospect, 4199

Earth, 4098

Marius had never considered himself a marrying man, even though it was an unspoken rule in the Federation Navy that admirals should marry, if only to have a hostess when assigned to command remote bases and fleet deployments. Indeed, he’d assumed he would never be promoted beyond vice admiral after his deployment to the Rim and never really considered looking for a wife. And yet, one had been provided for him by the Grand Senate. It still surprised him, years later, that he’d actually fallen in love with her.