The Barbarian Bride (The Decline and Fall of the Galactic Empire Book 3)

by Christopher Nuttall

  He leaned forward. “Did the Emperor say why he wanted the Professor caught?”

  “No, sir,” Commodore Yu said. “A federal warrant doesn’t need a reason.”

  Roman nodded, thoughtfully. Professor Kratman had visited him, shortly before the fleet had departed Boston, warning Roman that the Emperor was no longer stable. And he’d been right, tragically right. The signs had been there for all to see, if they dared look.

  “Put out a statement, inviting the professor to turn himself in,” he ordered, finally. The Emperor might have been acting out of vindictiveness — he had shot the remaining Grand Senators personally — but somehow Roman doubted it. Hadn’t Marius Drake once served under Captain Kratman? “And if he does, have him shipped to Valiant.”

  Commodore Yu frowned. “Is that wise?”

  “I think I’d like to know what the Emperor thinks he’s done,” Roman said. “And besides, he was a minister in the Emperor’s government. He probably knows a great deal we should know.”

  “Aye, sir,” Commodore Yu said. “If he turns himself in, I’ll have him shipped back to you.”

  Roman dismissed her, and turned back to the display. He’d have to send a courier boat back to Nova Athena, asking the Outsiders to bring their ships and supplies forward as quickly as possible, then send another group of courier boats to the other admirals. If they turned on the Emperor, it would shorten the war... he refused to think about the deaths it would cause, if the civil war expanded. There was no choice.

  And put a set of pickets through each of the Asimov Points, he thought, tapping orders into the console. The enemy might just try to counterattack while we’re desperately preparing an offensive of our own.

  He sat down, hastily reviewing Emperor Marius’s possible options. Any normal admiral would launch a counterattack as soon as possible, just to keep Roman from getting too comfortable, let alone launching a further attack. It was what he’d done, back when the Outsiders had announced their existence by attacking Athena. But Emperor Marius would have to worry about securing his rear, something Roman hadn’t needed to consider. He might just keep going until he had his fleet safely back at Earth.

  But he can send other squadrons to counterattack, or harass my supply lines, Roman reminded himself. It was a fairly standard tactic. The Emperor wouldn’t need any real imagination to think of it. I need to worry about my rear now.

  The hatch chimed. He keyed a switch, opening it. Elf stepped inside, looking tired.

  Roman smiled, rising. “Welcome back to Boston.”

  “It seems to be fairly stable,” Elf said, as she gave him a tight hug. “But there could easily be underground cells just waiting for the order to cause trouble.”

  “I know,” Roman said. He’d ordered stay-behind cells to be formed, just in case Boston fell to the Outsiders. The irony of having one of those cells carry out an underground war against him was chilling, but he had to admit it could happen. “I have every confidence in your ability to secure the fleet.”

  “I just wish it wasn’t another civil war,” Elf said. “It’s impossible to judge just where everyone’s loyalties lie.”

  Roman opened his mouth to answer, but the intercom buzzed. “Admiral, this is Lieutenant Thompson,” a voice said. “We’ve just received a message from the planet. Professor Kratman has been located and is currently en route to the ship.”

  Elf blinked. “That quick?”

  “He just walked in and announced himself,” Lieutenant Thompson said. “Admiral?”

  “Inform me when he arrives,” Roman said. He closed the channel, then looked at Elf and smiled. “Answers, finally.”

  “Yes,” Elf agreed. “Now tell me, do you know the questions?”

  “I hope so,” Roman said.

  Chapter Eight

  Once scattered, the Federation Navy lost all contact with its long history, its long traditions and, eventually, its reason for existence.

  —The Federation Navy in Retrospect, 4199

  Boston, 4101

  Roman had first met Professor Kratman when he’d been a young cadet, struggling to earn high marks through nothing more than sheer merit. The Professor had never been dull; he’d opened their minds, taught them to think and, sometimes harshly, rebuked them for parroting what they learned in books and files. Roman had respected him deeply, even though he hadn’t always liked him. But the man before him now was a shadow of the professor Roman remembered. He looked thinner and paler, his white hair reduced to a faint wisp covering his head. Being on the run for several weeks had evidently not agreed with him.

  “I can have food and drink brought in, if you wish,” he said, as the Professor took a seat in Roman’s quarters. He keyed his terminal, sending the food order. “What happened to you?”

  “Suspected it would be better to absent myself for a while,” Kratman said. His voice, too, was raspier than Roman remembered. “Marius, I fear, was starting to suspect me. I’d acted too openly against him.”

  Elf leaned forward from where she sat on the sofa. “In doing what?”

  “Talking to you, for a start,” Kratman said. “The Emperor’s paranoia was growing stronger, much stronger. I believe it wouldn’t have been long before I was removed, on one pretext or another.”

  He met Roman’s eyes, a hint of the old fire sparkling to life. “What happened at Nova Athena?”

  “The Emperor attempted to commit genocide,” Roman said, bluntly. He ran through a brief explanation, ending with the return to Boston. “Why? Why did this happen?”

  “I believe I explained the problem to you, the last time we met,” Kratman said. “The task of running a military is very different from the task of running an entire government, even without the stress of a major war. Marius Drake, sole ruler of the Federation, was cracking under the pressure. I suspected trouble a long time before I obtained proof that he was growing dangerously addicted to drugs and alcohol.”

  Elf snorted. “What was he meant to do?”

  “Not get addicted, for one,” Kratman said, shortly. “He knew the dangers; he was one of the smartest young officers I ever met...”

  “And you helped put him in power,” Elf said.

  “I wish I’d had a better solution,” Kratman admitted. “A period of military rule — ten years, as he promised us — seemed the ideal solution. We could streamline the regulations, pare the bureaucracy down to the bone and end the many — many — injustices perpetrated in the name of the Federation. We could loosen the bonds on our industries, making them more competitive and, at the same time, expand our industrial base. The conditions that allowed for the rise of the Grand Senate would take longer to re-emerge, I hoped.

  “Instead, we had a major war to fight,” he added. “And the Emperor was utterly unwilling to compromise with the Outsiders. Instead of recovering, our industry has started to collapse; instead of growing, our economy has continued to decay. And the bureaucracy, the bane of billions upon billions of people, has actually managed to grow.”

  “The Outsiders appeared at a very bad time,” Roman observed.

  “Yes,” Kratman said, flatly. “They did.”

  The hatch opened, revealing a pair of stewards carrying trays. Roman watched as they put the food on the table and retreated, then motioned to Kratman to eat. The Professor tucked in with considerable enthusiasm, suggesting he’d been going hungry for the last couple of weeks. Whatever he said, Roman doubted that dropping off the grid had been easy, even on a heavily-populated world like Boston. The war economy kept much of the planet under tight control. He nibbled companionably and waited, as patiently as he could, for Kratman to finish.

  “Marius Drake is not a man accustomed to failure or frustration,” Kratman said, when he’d eaten half of the reconstituted scrambled eggs and bacon. “Indeed, I believe trouble was brewing, deep within his mind, as Operation Retribution set off on its ill-fated voyage. The... agreement... he reached with the Grand Senate may have helped, a little, but their attempt to kill
Marius pushed him over the edge. Now, he is forced to come to terms with the limits of absolute power at the same time as he has to fight a major war. He simply can’t get blood from a stone.”

  “It doesn’t matter how many orders he issues,” Elf said, quietly. “All that matters is how many of them can be obeyed.”

  “Correct,” Kratman said. “He’s been taking drugs and drinking too much, sleeping too little and eating a very poor diet...

  “And he’s been lashing out at people he sees as potential threats to his plans, apparently unable to see how his actions are counter-productive. The strikers, for example, were pushed to strike because their working conditions were intolerable. Marius, in crushing the strikes and making examples of the ringleaders, has only made matters worse for the economy. The workers may not be on strike, but they sure as hell aren’t working very hard.”

  He shook his head. “And his new security apparatus is out of control,” he added. “I don’t know just how much Marius knows about what they’re doing, but they’ve been arresting journalists, commentators and generally casting a long shadow over public debate. Fear is spreading, Roman, and it’s destroying us.”

  Elf shot Roman a sharp look. “Wasn’t that true of the Grand Senate?”

  “The Grand Senate, for all of its flaws, enjoyed a certain legitimacy,” Kratman said. He shrugged. “If only because it remained in power for so long, no one could remember anything else. And, until the Imperialist Faction self-destructed, it did manage to do a fairly decent job of running the Federation.”

  “There are many who would disagree with that,” Elf pointed out.

  “Yes, there are,” Kratman agreed. “No system of government is perfect, Major. There has never been a time in human history where there weren’t discontented people of one stripe or another, people who had grudges against the system or merely thought they were the ones who should be in charge.”

  “A fairly common delusion,” Elf noted.

  Kratman nodded as he took another bite of his food. “Most of the problems facing the Grand Senate — and Marius Drake — came from the simple fact that the Federation is really too colossal to be micromanaged effectively. Marius, I suspect, really should have understood that from the start.”

  “Because micromanaging a military operation across thousands of light years is simply impossible,” Roman said. He’d studied the problem at the academy a long time before he had to face it for himself. “By the time messages reach Earth and return with new orders, the situation has moved on.”

  “Correct,” Kratman said. He tapped the table, meaningfully. “Lacking legitimacy, Marius needs to secure his power through other means. And those methods, Roman, are alienating the Core Worlds from him.”

  “But if he didn’t,” Roman said, “he couldn’t fight the war.”

  “I know,” Kratman agreed. “The timing was unfortunate. And now Marius Drake is going mad.”

  “You could have stopped him,” Roman said. “You could have tried to warn him...”

  “He didn’t listen to me,” Kratman said. “By the time I realized there was a major problem, Roman, he’d already concluded I wasn’t saying anything he wanted to hear.”

  He shook his head. “It isn’t that he doesn’t understand the problems,” he added, after a moment. “It’s that he sees defeating the Outsiders as the ultimate priority, with everything else second to that goal. His loyalty to the Federation, the same loyalty that kept him from becoming a warlord in his own right, drives him forward on a single-minded crusade to restore the Federation’s unity. And anyone who stands in his way is, by definition, a traitor to the Federation.”

  “And you can do anything to traitors,” Elf said.

  “Exactly,” Kratman said. “I don’t think it will be long, Roman, before Marius starts using the military to force reform. And the results are likely to be disastrous. Earth, for example, requires patient handling, not dictatorship. Or, for that matter, being cut off from all government support and told to actually earn itself a living.”

  Roman leaned forward. “Very well,” he said, tartly. “We’ve agreed the Emperor is a madman. We have to overthrow him before it’s too late.”

  “Removing him from power isn’t the only issue,” Kratman said. “The question is what comes next? What do we put in his place?”

  “There is Lady Tiffany,” Elf offered. “She’s the Empress, to all intents and purposes.”

  Kratman shook his head. “She has no authority, no influence, that doesn’t come from Marius Drake,” he said. “She certainly doesn’t command any fleets in her own right. The best she can hope for is to be ignored by those who do.”

  Roman nodded, reluctantly. After Admiral Justinian and Marius Drake, the only people with power were the ones who controlled military formations. Even if Lady Tiffany hadn’t been the last surviving member of the Grand Families — at least, the last one on Earth — she wouldn’t have any power herself. If something happened to her husband, she’d fall with him.

  He sighed. No wonder Marius Drake had started to slide down the slippery slope.

  “Shouldn’t we win the war first?” He asked. “This might all become academic if we wind up facing a firing squad.”

  “Marius did not have a plan of transition,” Kratman said, frankly. “To my certain knowledge, Roman, he was making it up as he went along. He couldn’t have planned for the Outsiders, I know, but still... he had little more than good intentions. And the pathway to hell is paved with good intentions.”

  “I don’t want to take power for myself,” Roman insisted.

  “You may not have a choice,” Elf said. She gave him a sharp look. “Without a strong central authority, the Federation will not survive.”

  Kratman looked up. “Should the Federation survive?”

  Roman blinked in shock. He’d never been wedded to the concept of the Federation, not like Marius Drake, but he’d served it all his adult life. The idea of simply allowing the Federation to disintegrate into chaos was horrific. Billions upon billions of lives would be lost, through everything from starvation to military action, as galactic civilization crumbled into dust. The Outsiders would not hesitate to take advantage of the chaos, nor would rogue warlords intent on building up empires of their own. One colossal state would be replaced by dozens of others.

  “At least, should it survive in its current form?” Kratman added. “The system the founders created was tailor-made for abuse. On one hand, the out-worlds had very little influence in federal policy; on the other hand, there were so many voters in the core that their votes were concentrated in a small number of hands. The rise of the Grand Senate, an aristocracy in all but name, was inevitable.

  “Marius tried to reform the system from within and failed. The effort of trying drove him mad. You may need to replace the system with something else, something more durable, something that learns from the mistakes of the past.”

  “And something that pushes the Core Worlds to become more than just parasites on the rest of the Federation,” Elf added. “A system that rewards actual work.”

  Roman held up a hand. “Right now, I have to concentrate on preparing the fleet for our push towards the Core Worlds,” he said. “Professor, the Outsiders should be arriving within three weeks to a month, now we’ve secured the system. I want you to sit down with them and sort out an effective plan of transition, one that takes us to a successor state that will salvage human unity without creating another nightmare.”

  “It might take longer than you think to hammer out something that will be moderately acceptable to everyone,” Kratman warned. “There are far too many issues that need to be addressed. For a start, Roman, what do we do about aliens?”

  “Tricky one,” Elf said. She sounded darkly amused. “Keep them in bondage, risk uprisings and interstellar wars; let them have their freedom, risk having the Emperor declare a crusade against the alien-lovers. What do you think, Professor, that the Brotherhood will think of that?”

>   Kratman sighed. “The truth, Major, is that the Brotherhood may well be a spent force,” he said. “Our ability to influence events has been weakening over the last five years.”

  Roman blinked. “I thought the Brotherhood was all-powerful?”

  “Smoke and mirrors,” Kratman admitted. “Oh, we were in position to shape public opinion, even to influence decisions made at the very heart of the federal government. We had people emplaced in the bureaucracy, the media, the military... but our ability to take direct action was always very limited. It was better, we felt, to gently shape public discourse rather than put a dam in its path. And, as long as no one started a purge, we were able to punch well above our actual weight.”

  “Because no one had any real idea of your true strengths and weaknesses,” Elf said. “They allowed themselves to be intimidated by you.”

  “Yes,” Kratman said. “And, to be fair, they found us useful. We played a vital role in ensuring that aliens remained firmly under control.

  “Now, though, the ruler of Earth is a man who won’t be intimidated, a man who pays no attention to public opinion or our spokesmen. I suspect, when he finally returns home, that the Emperor will take strong action against us. He knows we’re no longer on his side.”

  “Brilliant,” Roman said, sarcastically.

  He looked down at the table, fighting to keep the disbelief off his face. The Brotherhood had cast a long shadow over humanity ever since the First Interstellar War, when the newborn Federation Navy had discovered just what the Snakes did to their human prisoners. An anger had been awakened, matched with a steely determination to ensure that no alien race was ever in a position to threaten humanity ever again. And the Brotherhood, a secretive organization to push for human supremacy, had been born.

  And yet, it had all been a bluff?

  “For the moment, then, we will leave the alien problem off the table,” Roman said. He rubbed his forehead, wondering if Marius Drake had felt the same way when he’d contemplated the problem of reforming the Federation. “We...”