The Shadow of Cincinnatus (34 page)

This was unfortunate as rumors were never very accurate. The original police action on the moon netted several hundred strikers, most of whom were released without charge. By the time the rumors reached Earth, they claimed the military had shot several thousand strikers and raped thousands more
.

-The Federation Navy in Retrospect, 4199

Earth, 4100

“I don’t think you should be taking those,” Tiffany said.

Marius scowled at her, then softened. “I keep having headaches,” he said, tiredly. “What do you think I should take?”

“I think you should rest,” Tiffany said. She’d been more solicitous recently, something that pleased and annoyed Marius in equal measure. It was nice to have someone caring for him, but Tiffany had her own work to do. “You’re pushing yourself too hard.”

Marius snorted. For better or worse, the buck stopped with him. That had been true since his first command, years ago. Now, he was emperor and he had to oversee everything personally. He just didn’t have enough subordinates he could trust to handle their responsibilities without supervision.

“I don’t have time,” he said. A holiday sounded nice – he hadn’t had a proper holiday since before the Justinian War; besides, they hadn’t had a proper honeymoon either – but where would he find the time? Somehow, he knew it wouldn’t be easy. “There’s too much to do.”

Tiffany stepped up behind him and began to rub his back, her fingers stroking his skin. It felt good, so good that Marius wanted to relax into her ministrations, but he knew there was no time. He’d condemned enough senior officers for spending time with their mistresses instead of doing their duty that he didn’t feel right about enjoying himself. Besides, he had yet another set of meetings to attend. Everything had been so much simpler when he’d been in command of the Grand Fleet. His crew had known their jobs and got on with them.

And Blake shot me
, he thought, sourly. The betrayal still hurt, even now.
I guess he knew his job too
.

The communicator bleeped. “Sir?”

Marius heard Tiffany grunt in irritation as he stepped away from her and walked over to the communicator. “Yes?”

“There’s trouble on Earth, sir,” the operator said. “I...”

“Define trouble,” Marius said. It was irritating as hell to know that his subordinates were nervous about bringing him bad news – but then, the Grand Senate had been known to shoot the messenger. They hadn’t been the only ones either. “What is happening?”

“There’s a riot, sir,” the operator said.

“A riot,” Marius repeated. He allowed his voice to darken. Couldn’t anyone tend to anything these days without asking him for instructions? “And this is important enough to call me?”

“General Thorne requests a meeting, sir,” the operator said. “He’s already on his way.”

“Very well,” Marius said. “Show him into my office when he arrives.”

“You have to come back here afterwards,” Tiffany said. “I have some other ways to relax you.”

Marius shook his head. “I have too much work to do,” he said. “And none of it can be passed down to someone else.”

He kissed her on the cheek, then stepped through the door and into his office, pulling on his dressing robe as he walked. It wasn’t what anyone expected an emperor to wear, he was sure, but the Federation didn’t really
have
a proper uniform for a supreme ruler. The Grand Senators had always worn suits and ties, each one made by designers who charged more than an admiral earned in a year for each suit. Marius had suspected, when he’d looked at the books, that it was just another attempt to prevent outsiders from trying to run for election and overturn the system. Chang Li had been the only successful outsider – in more ways than one – for decades.

And she was a treacherous bitch
, he thought, nastily. Forgiveness wasn’t one of his virtues, not when the whole Federation was at stake.
How long was she planning our downfall
?

He sat down at his desk and pressed his hand against the terminal, allowing it to scan his ID implant. A long list of documents appeared in front of him, all demanding his personal attention and signature. Everything, he noted with some irritation, from personal files to industrial production plans for the next five years. Replacing the infrastructure the Outsiders had destroyed was a long hard chore.

And the Grand Senate burned out too much of our infrastructure
, he reminded himself.
Were they that confident that they could win the war in time to save themselves?

There was a person who might be able to answer. But Marius had no time to face him.

“Sir, General Thorne is here,” his aide said.

“Then show him in,” Marius ordered. “Please.”

General Thorne looked tired, Marius noted, as he was shown into the room. But at least he was reliable, unlike so many others. He saluted Marius curtly, then sat down on the other side of the desk and rested his hands on his lap.

“General,” Marius said. “What’s happening?”

“A major series of riots, student riots,” General Thorne said. “These were clearly planned in advance.”

Marius cursed under his breath. “The Outsiders?”

“Almost certainly,” General Thorne said. “They knew about the strike, somehow, but the rumors were vastly inflated.”

“I thought we had that under control,” Marius said.

“We did,” General Thorne countered. “As far as we can tell, word didn’t move from Luna to Earth...but somehow it reached Earth anyway. And then the riots began.”

Marius groaned. “I see,” he said. He reached for another pill and swallowed it, without bothering with water. “What’s the current situation?”

“We have riots on twelve separate campuses, sir,” General Thorne said. “They started at more or less the same time, too. That
cannot
be a coincidence.”

“Evidently not,” Marius said. The pill wasn’t working. His head felt as thick as ever. “And are they under control?”

“We have the campuses sealed off, sir,” General Thorne reported. “But they have managed to get word out into the datanet. We may see other riots soon.”

Marius gritted his teeth. Earth’s datanet was unusual in many ways; unlike any of the others, it included large sections that were almost completely outside government control. There were archives of data dating back thousands of years in the datanet, some harmless pornography, but others considered politically dangerous. The Grand Senate, for all of its power, had failed to bring the datanet to heel. And students, for all of their general ignorance, tended to make the best WebHeads. They probed the datanet for hidden sections, then infested the uncontrolled cores and made them theirs.

“Bastards,” he said. “What do they actually
want
?”

“The first set of demands were for the release of the strikers,” General Thorne said. “After that, their demands became a little more extreme. Right now, they want free elections, free unions, a resumption of government-backed social programs...and quite a few other things, all of which would cost us dearly if we attempted to implement them.”

“Idiots,” Marius said. What sort of moron thought the Federation would be inclined to just roll over and give them whatever they wanted, if they rioted? The Federation hadn’t submitted to the Outsider demands and the Outsiders were invading Federation space with a huge fleet. “I assume you have a plan to deal with them?”

“Yes, sir,” General Thorne said. “I have four regiments of security troops on their way to each of the campuses. On your command, they will storm the campuses and deal with the students. They will go into detention camps and be held until we have established their role in these events, then you can deal with them as you see fit.”

“Good,” Marius said. Students. Why hadn’t they done something useful with their lives, like joining the Navy? Or emigrating to a world that could actually handle them? Or even taking vocational training? “I think we’ll add them to the list of involuntary emigrants.”

“Yes, sir,” General Thorne said.

“After that, we should take a long hard look at just what role the universities play in our modern society,” Marius added. He’d left them alone because many of the students had parents who were actually working, which made sending their children to university all the more inexplicable. “And start expanding the vocational training courses.”

He sighed, cursing – yet again – the Grand Senate. There just weren’t enough trained people to serve as teachers for the vocational courses, which meant that expanding the whole system was going to take time, longer than he cared to admit. If there hadn’t been a war on, perhaps it could be done at a calmer pace, but there
was
a war on. And they had to win the war. Defeat would mean the end of human unity...

God help us
, he thought.

“See to it,” he said, out loud. “And then inform me when the operation is completed.”

He watched General Thorne leave the office, then looked down at the endless stream of documents he had to read and sign. Some of them, thankfully, had summaries at the front, but others were just too detailed for him to read quickly. Didn’t the writers realize he didn’t have
time
to parse out every last detail? He wrote an angry note at the bottom of one particularly lengthy report, then closed the terminal and rose to his feet. The longer he stayed in the office, the greater the chance he’d snap at someone who didn’t deserve it. He changed quickly, then walked towards the door.

The door hissed open as he approached and stepped through, then hissed closed behind him.

“Sir?” His aide said. “I...”

“I’m going for a walk,” Marius said. “Stay where you are.”

He shook his head as he walked through the door, nodded to the Marines, then started to wander through the President’s House. It had been a long time since it had served as any form of administrative center and it showed; there were large art galleries that had been left completely untouched, while the former offices had been closed down years ago. Marius wandered down a long deserted corridor, looking at paintings so old that half of them had no known origin, then made his way to the elevator. It pinged open on his approach, then took him down into the basement. The guard in front of the prison cell looked up, then jumped to his feet and saluted as Marius approached.

“As you were,” Marius ordered. “Open the door.”

The hatch hissed open, revealing the cells. All but one of them were empty.

“Admiral,” Blake Raistlin greeted him cheerily. “My trial seems to have been abandoned.”

“There’s a war on,” Marius growled. “But somehow I’m sure you know that, don’t you?”

“I’m in a cell,” Raistlin said. As always, his voice was faintly mocking. “The only amusement I get comes from being bent over the bunk by one of the guards.”

“There are never less than three guards supervising you whenever you are taken to the shower,” Marius snapped, refusing to rise to the bait. “And they wouldn’t abuse you, whatever happened.”

“One could argue that being locked up indefinitely without a trial is cruel and unusual punishment,” Raistlin pointed out. “Or to have a trial suspended for no valid reason...”

Marius smiled. “Correct me if I’m wrong,” he said, “but weren’t there a great many officers held on Luna without trials by the Grand Senate?”

Raistlin’s eyes narrowed. “I thought you claimed to be better than us,” he said. “I’ve been in better hotels, if you happened to think you were giving me a holiday...”

Marius cut him off. “Tell me,” he said. “What were your people
thinking
?”

“I imagine power, sex and money, perhaps not in that order,” Raistlin said. “Or did you have something specific in mind?”

“We’re trying to expand training opportunities for people,” Marius said. “There’s no shortage of work, but there’s a major shortage of people trained and able to actually
do
the work. We need to train more people as fast as possible...”

He shook his head. “But how many of those people will never be trained properly because the facilities to train them don’t exist? What were your people
thinking
?”

“They probably felt they didn’t want anyone to question their power,” Raistlin said. “And I dare say it worked for hundreds of years.”

“The Outsiders think differently,” Marius said. “I shudder to think of what would have happened if Admiral Justinian hadn’t given us due warning of what we might face, in the future. The Outsiders would have held a definite tech advantage when they fell on us.”

“Then you owe us,” Raistlin said. “Without the Grand Senate, you wouldn’t be ready for war.”

Marius’s eyes narrowed. “Explain.”

“The Grand Senate fucked around with Admiral Justinian,” Raistlin said. “So he rebelled. His rebellion pushed you to prominence, but it also got rid of a shitload of deadwood in the Federation Navy’s upper ranks. And it also forced the Federation to start developing new weapons and tactics, which gave you a better base for facing the Outsiders.”

Raistlin smiled. “See? You owe us.”

“I will not even
try
to unpick that...that piece of insane troll logic,” Marius said. “And I will
certainly
not believe you intended it to happen. It was a fuckup from start to finish.”

“True,” Raistlin agreed, without heat. “But you have to admit you did well by it,
Emperor
.”

He stood, then prostrated himself on the ground, banging his head off the hard metal floor.

“All Hail Marius, the Great Emperor of Humanity,” he said. “Supreme Master and God of the Universe...”

“Get up,” Marius snapped. He’d never liked watching people prostate themselves, certainly not to other humans. “You’re making a fool of yourself.”

“It isn’t like I have much else to do,” Raistlin pointed out. He made kissing sounds as he rubbed his head on the floor. “And besides, what do I actually have to look forward to? You won’t keep playing with me for the rest of my natural life. One day, you’ll actually grow tired of trying to nail me legally and simply have me shot.”