The Empire's Corps: Book 03 - When The Bough Breaks

by Christopher Nuttall

  The rooftop had been locked, but Richard had obtained a code-breaker from somewhere and used it to get out onto the roof. She'd been told that the air pollution in the upper levels of Imperial City was minimal, compared to some parts of the planet, yet the wind still stank as it blew across her face. There were no barriers to prevent someone from falling to their deaths if the winds grew much stronger; she couldn't help shivering as she took the weapon Richard offered her. It was a sign of his trust in her, she told herself, that she got to fire one of the shots that would echo around the entire galaxy.

  She looked over at Richard as he peered into the distance, using a pair of binoculars to sweep the sky. He looked even more handsome since they’d been sleeping together, she decided, or maybe it was the shared excitement and danger. The Civil Guard normally didn't bother to patrol the upper levels of residency blocks – hence the growth of gangs and protection rackets – but that was about to change. Richard had warned them, in no uncertain terms, that they couldn't stay around to watch the show. The moment they opened fire, the entire planetary defence network would be alerted. Troops would be rushed to their position as quickly as they could board helicopters or assault shuttles.

  “Tell me,” she said. “How do you know the Prince will fly this way?”

  “Simple,” Richard said. “If you draw a line between Imperial University and the Summer Palace, that line passes over this building.”

  He grinned at her, then resumed peering through the binoculars. “Keep the power blocks ready to slip into place, but don’t insert them until I give the command,” he reminded them, grimly. “If the sensor heads activate too soon, the security officers escorting the Prince will be alerted.”

  Amethyst nodded and waited. She found it hard to feel any concern for Prince Roland; the rumours she’d heard had made the Prince out to be a depraved monster, a man who sucked on the Empire’s teat while millions of students and their families went hungry. No one would be making him eat algae bars, she knew; the best of the imported foodstuffs were reserved for the wealthy and powerful. She’d show them just how their subjects felt about how their lords and masters treated them. The death of Prince Roland would shock the entire establishment.

  “Ah,” Richard said, softly. “Here they come; three targets. The one we want is the one in the middle; the other two are gunships. We have to take them all down or we’re in deep shit.”

  Amethyst held the power block over the slot and waited. Smog was drifting through the sky, but she could see the three aircraft as they came into view, heading northwards. Two of them were bristling with weapons; the third seemed unarmed. Richard barked a command and she slammed the power block in and hefted the launcher. It was already bleeping as its sensor head picked up its targets.

  “Fire,” Richard snapped.

  Amethyst pulled the trigger. There was a wave of heat as the high-velocity missile blasted away from its launcher, heading towards its target. She wasn't quite sure which of the aircraft it had locked onto, but it hardly mattered. There were five missiles in the air and, by the law of averages, at least one of them would go after the Prince. And, at such short range, the countermeasures should have no time to work.

  “Drop the tubes and go,” Richard ordered. “Hurry!”

  Amethyst obeyed, dropping back down the hatch into the block’s interior. So far, none of the residents knew what had happened, but that was about to change. They had to be well away from the rooftop by then ...

  ***

  Belinda swore out loud as she linked into the aircar’s command network. Five missiles, heading towards the aircraft at several times the speed of sound. HVMs, part of her mind identified them; they were moving too quickly to be stopped. One of the gunships started to drop flares and other sensor decoys, but it was far too late. Two missiles slammed into its airframe and it vanished in a colossal fireball.

  “Hang on,” she barked, as their aircar lurched. She’d been impressed by the heavy armour the designers had added, along with the active defences – but then, the active defences had just failed. “One of the missiles is coming right for us!”

  The missile crew hadn't been very well trained, she realised, as the aircar attempted to evade the incoming threat. If they had been trained, they would have made certain of their targets; as it was, both of the gunships were larger targets and the seeker heads had gone after them, rather than Roland’s aircar. But one missile was still coming in ... time seemed to slow down, just before the missile slammed into the aircar’s prow.

  She heard Roland cry out in shock as the aircar lurched violently, flipping over and spinning through the air. They’d been lucky, she realised; if the missile had struck another meter to the right, the warhead would have punched through the doors and detonated inside the cabin, killing them both instantly. As it was, they were going down, yet they were still alive. The pilot was wounded, but he was still trying to put them down as gently as he could.

  An alert flashed up in front of her as the second gunship vanished in a fireball. One of the crewmen had managed to bail out in time, she noted; she hoped that he would manage to land safely, even though they were above the outer edge of Imperial City. By now, assault shuttles and rescue craft should be being scrambled, but she added her own alert to the Marine network, just in case. It was far too possible that someone in the Civil Guard had been bribed to hamper the recovery effort.

  The aircar lurched again as one of the engines failed. For a long moment, it seemed to hang in the air, before falling down towards one of the rooftops. Belinda reached out and took Roland’s hand, seeing his terror reflected in his eyes, a moment before they hit the rooftop. There was a thunderous crash, then silence.

  “Get up,” Belinda barked. The door was jammed, unsurprisingly, but she boosted her strength and pushed it open wide enough to allow her to crawl out. Roland followed her, grimacing at the stench in the air. Belinda didn't have the heart to tell him that it was far worse only a few hundred miles from Imperial City. He’d rarely breathed unfiltered air in his life.

  She glanced around, scanning for possible threats. Her implants reported energy fluctuations in the aircar’s surviving antigravity generator – it might explode at any moment – but nothing else immediately threatening. The absence of any rescue mission, on the other hand, was worrying. She ran around the aircar and glanced into the cab, but knew at once that there was no point in trying to recover the pilot. The force of their landing had killed him.

  “Get over there,” she ordered, pointing towards a small structure in the middle of the rooftop. Some cityblocks had gardens on the roof for children to play, but this one was clearly too poor to afford it. There was nothing on the metal apart from scratches where something heavy might have stood, once upon a time. “Hurry!”

  She took a final look at the aircar as Roland obeyed, then stuck her hand into the pilot’s cabin and recovered the emergency pack. Roland could run swiftly – she’d helped him to learn by chasing him around the gardens in the Summer Palace – and he was already at the structure. Belinda swung the pack over her shoulder and raced towards him, leaving the aircar behind. If it was about to explode, they didn't dare stay on the roof.

  The door leading down into the CityBlock was locked. Belinda, still drawing on the boosting drug in her bloodstream, kicked it as hard as she could. The lock shattered, allowing them to tumble downstairs into the semi darkness. It would have to serve as a rudimentary form of shelter. She heard Roland gasp at the stench – it was far worse inside the block – but ignored him. There had to be a rescue mission on the way, so where were they?

  She reached inside the emergency pack and found the locator beacon. The pilot, thankfully, had been reassuringly competent; the beacon had clicked on automatically the moment he’d declared an in-flight emergency. Her implants tested it, confirmed that it was sending out a signal, then linked into the Marine network. It seemed that there was a great deal of confusion over what had happened to Prince Roland. Half of t
he reports seemed to suggest that he was dead ...

  “We’re not dead,” Belinda snapped. At least the Marine network was working properly. “Get a recovery team here now ...”

  The ceiling seemed to shake as the aircar finally exploded. Belinda braced herself, half-expecting the rooftop to cave in, but the metal sheathing the CityBlock held up under the blast. At least that didn't need constant maintenance. She put her head up and peered back at where the aircar had been. There was a nasty scar on the metal, but little else.

  “This place stinks,” Roland said, crossly. “Do people actually live here?”

  “Yes,” Belinda said. She was in no mood to shield the Prince from the lives of the less fortunate. They were supposed to be his subjects, after all. “The lucky ones live here.”

  She recalled the last report she’d seen, back when her former company had operated briefly on Earth, and hit him with the details. “There are CityBlock units that are completely controlled by criminals, where the Civil Guard never venture,” she said. “Those unfortunate enough to live there are completely at their mercy. Men are press-ganged into small armies and forced to fight wars with the other gangs. Women are forced into prostitution, selling their bodies to survive. By the time they turn thirty, they will already have had children and started to burn themselves out. Very few people live longer than forty years in those blocks.

  “Other places seemed to be more civilised,” she added. “There’s a Civil Guard presence; outright gangsters keep their heads down. But life is still no bed of roses. If you’d been born there, the best you could hope for is a cheap apartment, shared with your family, where you could eat ration bars and watch bad entertainment programs until the day you died. I remember meeting girls who had grown up in such places. They felt that being raped was commonplace, that it was nothing to complain about – and if they did, who would listen? And who cared if they carried their attacker’s baby or not?”

  Roland stared at her. “But it can't be that bad ...?”

  “Of course it is,” Belinda snapped. “I could show you scenes of horror, worse than any of your porn, taking place only a few miles from the Summer Palace.”

  Her IR implants caught the flush on Roland’s face. She’d scanned his private collection of porn a few days after she’d first met him ... and she'd been lucky that she hadn't looked at it before meeting him. Collecting dominance porn was often a sign that someone knew that they had very little power in their lives, but if she hadn't known Roland first she might have given up on him completely, right at the start. His collection had been thoroughly disgusting.

  “Those students are luckier than they know,” she added, tartly. “They come from the better class of residency blocks, places where the worst to fear is boredom. There, they speak in whispers of the Undercity, if they speak of it at all. They think that they can better themselves through whining and demanding more and more from the Empire. But in truth the Empire has nothing more to give. How long will it be before the bough breaks and the cradle falls? How long will it be before the Empire destroys itself?”

  She saw the Marine shuttle flying through the air and climbed out onto the roof. “Come on,” she said, softening her voice. “It’s time to get you home.”

  Roland scrambled up beside her, his fine clothes smeared with dust and filth. Belinda’s implants provided a few suggestions of what had happened in the upper levels, but she knew them to herself. The Prince almost certainly didn't want to know. Instead, he looked grim, almost broken, reminding her of more than a few recruits who had made it through Boot Camp – only to discover that the worst was yet to come.

  Her implant buzzed. “Specialist, the Civil Guard is attempting to secure the CityBlock the assassins used as a base,” the dispatcher reported. “Do you have any visuals?”

  Belinda shook her head, although the dispatcher couldn't see her. “No,” she said, out loud. Something might have been recorded by the aircar’s defences, or the gunships, but they were all gone. Twelve men had died, unable to do more than watch their doom racing towards them. “I don’t have anything.”

  It was unlikely that the Civil Guard would find anything either, she knew. The CityBlock was a towering edifice with thousands of rooms and passageways, inhabited by people who cared little for the forces of law and order. And there were dozens of ways out of the maze ... she would have been surprised if the Civil Guard caught anyone. The terrorists might well have made their escape good before the Civil Guard arrived in force. Even if they hadn't, half of the residents of the block would be unregistered. Finding and identifying the terrorists might prove difficult.

  The Marine shuttle touched down and two armoured Marines stepped out, intending to provide covering fire. “Get in,” she ordered Roland quietly. “We’ll go straight back to the Palace.”

  Roland said nothing as they flew back towards the Summer Palace. Belinda was privately impressed; she’d expected him to start complaining about the stench. Marines often smelled bad after several days of uninterrupted fighting – Belinda was used to it; besides, there was no point in bitching about it – but whatever they’d trodden on while they’d been inside the block was truly awful. She couldn't help feeling sorry for the inhabitants. God alone knew what happened inside the massive building.

  Or, for that matter, what was going on inside Roland’s head.

  ***

  “Well, pooh,” Richard said.

  Amethyst glanced over at him in surprise. As he’d promised, their escape from the CityBlock had been almost pathetically easy. They’d been outside the cordon long before the Civil Guard had arrived in force and started to clash with outraged residents, who might not give two rusty credits for the Prince, but hated the Civil Guardsmen with a white-hot passion. Several other nearby blocks had started to shed people too, advancing towards the Guardsmen with grim intent. It had looked as through another riot was about to break out by the time they left the scene.

  “The Prince survived,” Richard elaborated. “It seems that his pilot was very lucky or very skilled.”

  “Oh,” Amethyst said. The excitement was fading away, leaving her with the dull awareness that they’d killed a number of men – and yet they’d missed their target. “There will be another chance, won’t there?”

  “I’m sure of it,” Richard said.

  He said nothing else as they made their way back towards the safe apartment he’d hired under an assumed name. Amethyst had been surprised at his paranoia, but he’d told her that staying too long in one place could be disastrous. Thankfully, a number of students had fled the university after the riots, providing a convenient excuse so that no one would miss her. She’d told Jacqueline that she was staying with her new boyfriend, but nothing else.

  “We’ll lie low for a few days,” he said, as he dismissed the others. They had their own safe apartments, presumably in other blocks. Amethyst hadn't been told where they were hiding themselves and, she assumed, they didn't know precisely where Richard and her were staying. “And maybe we can enjoy ourselves too.”

  “I don't know,” Amethyst admitted, as soon as they were inside the apartment. “How many innocent men did we kill?”

  Richard caught her shoulder and spun her around so he could look into her eyes. “They’re not innocent,” he said, flatly. “Every one of those men was working to uphold the Empire – and keep people such as you and I down. They willingly chose to serve the Grand Senate, knowing just how corrupt it had become. I will shed no tears for them.”

  His eyes hardened. “Or are you no longer willing to fight for the right to be free?”

  “I am,” Amethyst protested. The look in his eye scared her; she wanted to run, but she’d gone too far. Attacking the Crown Prince was probably treason. “I will fight.”

  “Good,” Richard said. “Now, go get into the shower. I’ll join you in a few moments.”

  Shaking, Amethyst obeyed.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Defining nihilism is not an easy t
ask. At their core, they were effectively death-worshippers, believing that mass slaughter was a holy act. Their fanatics would seek self-destruction, committing terrorist attacks intended to kill as many civilians as possible. They did not seek death, but they did not avoid it either. For the Empire, the nihilists made a bad situation worse.

  -Professor Leo Caesius, The End of Empire

  “And why are you wasting water? There are entire planets suffering from drought!”

  Belinda snorted as she heard the voice of her first Drill Instructor echoing in her memory. The recruits had been expected to shower quickly, to be in and out of the shower in two minutes, no matter how much mud they’d waded through on the exercise field. Now, she could afford to take as long as she wanted to wash, but habit drove her out of the shower after barely five minutes. Besides, she didn't want to share the shower with Roland for any longer than necessary.

  But there had been no choice. Judging by the faces the maids had pulled as soon as they’d returned to the Summer Palace, they both stank terribly, worse than raw recruits at Boot Camp. Their clothes would probably have to be burned or, more practically, dropped into a molecular disintegrator. Roland still looked pale, Belinda decided, as she watched him washing himself desperately. It would be a long time before the memory of the smell faded from his mind. He hadn't even been able to stare at her, even though she’d been naked.

  Belinda grinned briefly at the thought as she stepped out of the shower and started to dry herself with a long white towel. The Prince was holding up better than she would have expected, although it was possible that he simply didn't appreciate just how close he'd come to death. Belinda did; a few seconds either way and they would both have been blown to atoms. Pathfinders weren’t unafraid to die, but they knew how to put their feelings aside and carry out their missions. The Prince had no such training.