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

by Christopher Nuttall

  “Pathfinder,” Belinda said. Her body was starting to shake; even as augmented and enhanced as she was, the boost took a toll. She fought to control it; there was no time to allow the shakes to fade away naturally. “And don’t you forget it.”

  She saw the horror in Roland’s eyes and winced, inwardly. Most humans didn't react well to people with extreme genetic modifications, particularly those who lived on high-gravity worlds. A Pathfinder looked more mundane, until they went into action – Roland had just seen her become a blur, tearing through their captors as if they were made of paper. He would never look at her in the same way again.

  “Right,” Roland said. His voice sounded as shaky as Belinda felt. “What are we doing now?”

  Belinda scowled. “This tub doesn't have the power to make orbit – it should have, but it doesn’t,” she said. “If we go back to the Summer Palace ...”

  “We might as well paint targeting crosshairs on our bodies,” Roland finished. “So where do we go?”

  For once, Belinda honestly didn't know. There were no other Marines left on the surface – apart from the retired ones at the Arena. But getting to them would be difficult – she did have the codes to get into Marine HQ, even if it was sealed up, but getting there would be harder still. The Grand Senator had gambled when he’d tried to get Roland into ‘protective’ custody; he could hardly back down now. If he had troops on the surface ...

  “I think we were being taken to Scorpio Base,” she said, slowly. Perhaps they could storm the base ... no, she was being absurd. A full team of Pathfinders or a company of Marines would be able to go through the base, but there was just one of her – and she had to keep Roland safe. “We don’t really want to get there.”

  She checked the display and scowled. Three gunships were providing escort – and she would have bet good money that substantial reinforcements had been held in reserve. After all, if one Grand Senator could plot the effective kidnap of the Crown Prince, why not another? And Prince Roland might have hired more guards for himself ...

  “We need to get away from our escort,” she said, as she checked the weapons panel. The shuttle had most of its original weapons load, although the refitting crew seemed to have stripped out some of the advanced sensors before selling the shuttle to commercial interests. A civilian might not have cared about losing the sensors, provided they had the weapons. How much military training did the Grand Senator have?

  “Good thought,” Roland said. “And then ...?”

  “Run to the Arena,” Belinda said. She couldn't think of anywhere, apart from the Imperial Palace and Senate Hall, more likely to cause an explosion if the Grand Senator’s private army went in heavy-handed. “Sit down and strap yourself in.”

  She brought the weapons online and grinned to herself. Most threat receivers depended on picking up active sensor sweeps, but there was no need to use military-grade sensors to target her missiles when the targets were so close. She programmed the firing sequence into the missiles, then fired them in a single salvo. Two of the escorting gunships were blown out of the air before they had a chance to do anything more than realise that they were dead; the third heeled over and started to fall out of the sky.

  “All right,” she said, as she yanked the shuttle around. “Here we go.”

  The Grand Senator had, thankfully, given his private army IFF codes that would allow them to move unmolested by Traffic Control. Belinda had no idea how well they would hold up after she’d shot down three other shuttles, but she had a feeling that the Grand Senator would have done something to ensure that Traffic Control paid as little attention as possible. After all, if he intended to use his army to cope with his political enemies, he wouldn't want to attract the forces of law and order. The thought made her smirk as she gleefully broke several traffic control regulations, flying by the seat of her pants. If they could outrun any pursuit ...

  She swore as new icons popped up on the display. The shuttle’s IFF processor insisted that they were friendly, but Belinda had no difficulty in recognising the same codes as her own shuttle was using. God alone knew what was going through their heads – or the head of their master – but they knew they had to stop her before it was too late.

  “Crap,” Roland said, when she filled him in. “What are they going to do to us?”

  “They’re locking weapons on now,” Belinda said. Their shuttle didn't have very good defensive systems, she realised. “They may feel that they can force us down ...”

  An alarm sounded as the enemy opened fire, launching four missiles towards their shuttle. Belinda cut the antigravity system for a brief second and the shuttle dropped like a stone, confusing one of the missiles long enough for it to go haywire. She barely noticed the sick expression on Roland’s face as she yanked the shuttle through a tight turn, then skimmed so close to a CityBlock that two missiles slammed into the building rather than going after the shuttle. The fourth missile fell to the handful of countermeasures built into the shuttle.

  Belinda keyed a command into the console, returning fire. The enemy shuttles would probably manage to evade the missiles, but it would buy them a few extra seconds ... she pulled the shuttle around a corner and saw an enemy shuttle racing towards her. Shit, she thought, as she hastily tried to evade. They must have had more support than she'd realised ...

  “Brace,” she snapped, as the enemy shuttle opened fire. A missile rocketed towards them and detonated, far too close for comfort. Alarms sounded, warning her that the shuttle was badly damaged. The bastards might want to take Roland alive, but they were pushing it – or maybe the Grand Senator had decided to write Roland off after all. He might think he could take power without Roland’s unwilling help.

  Belinda gritted her teeth. Their power was failing, there were at least seven enemy shuttles hunting them – and they were rapidly running out of options. Right now, she doubted the shuttle would last long enough to reach Imperial City, let alone the Arena. If they fell out of the sky, they’d fall right into the Undercity.

  A shudder ran through the shuttle as one of the power cores died. They were going down. Belinda tried to steer the shuttle, but it was starting to act more and more like a flying brick, falling faster and faster as the power died. She tried to send a distress signal to the Marine network, only to discover that the jamming was still active. Not that it would have mattered much, she reminded herself. There were no other active Marines on Earth.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. Perhaps it would have been better if she’d let Jamey take them to the base instead. Roland might not have been conditioned – and there might have been a chance to break free. “We’re going down.”

  The shuttle plummeted out of the sky. Belinda conserved what power she could, then threw it all into the antigravity nodes. They screamed in protest, but held just long enough to slow their fall. She prayed that it was enough to keep them alive ...

  ... As they crashed headlong into the Undercity.

  Chapter Thirty

  Perhaps the greatest danger lay in the poor infrastructure of Earth – and, to some extent, the entire solar system and the core worlds beyond. Earth’s vast cities required obscene levels of maintenance, very little of which was forthcoming. As the Empire’s funds dried up, so did their maintenance crews – and the decay started to mount up. Eventually, something had to break.

  -Professor Leo Caesius, The End of Empire

  Earth’s population, Jolo Lafarge had been told when he’d finally found a job in an algae plant, was colossal. The official population alone was nearly ten times the size of Terra Nova’s population – and Terra Nova, humanity’s first extra-solar colony world, had been settled for over five thousand years. No one knew for sure just how large the population actually was, but Jolo had heard estimates that ranged from seventy billion to well over a hundred billion. It seemed impossible that any single planet, no matter how advanced, could support so many people.

  He looked down at the bubbling algae in the vats and shivered. A
lgae grew and multiplied at astonishing speed, even before the geneticists had gone to work. The massive vat below him was capable of turning out a new crop of algae ready for processing every four hours, enough to feed thousands of people for several weeks. Once ready, the algae was processed into ration bars and distributed to the hungry. It might taste like shit – the geneticists couldn't or wouldn't improve the algae’s natural flavour – but it kept them alive. A man could live on algae alone.

  But he wouldn't be living for much longer, Jolo knew, as he stood up and headed towards the manager’s office. Very few people wanted to spend the rest of their lives in an algae plant, but Jolo was one of them. He’d fallen in love with the whole concept the day he’d been shown how the system worked and, as he had nothing in the way of qualifications, it had seemed like a good career. It even paid better than many other jobs – after all, it was important. Jolo had worked his way up through the ranks until he had been promoted to Floor Supervisor. The positions above supervisor required qualifications that had nothing to do with the job, qualifications that Jolo lacked. It had rarely bothered him; his superiors didn't do more than issue a handful of useless orders and then stay in their offices, pretending to work. At least they stayed out of his hair.

  He stepped into the manager’s office and nodded politely to the little man sitting behind the desk. Manager McNulty wanted every inch of paperwork to be filled out perfectly – Jolo had never bothered with paperwork since he’d become Supervisor, which was part of the reason his section was way ahead of the others – and proper respect from his subordinates. And yet he wasn't the worst manager the plant had seen. There had been the one who’d gotten drunk and thought that it would be safe to take a swim in the largest vat ...

  “Supervisor,” McNulty said. He had a thin nasal voice, as if he was permanently sneering at the world. Like the other managers, he never actually socialised with the workers outside of office hours – not that they cared, of course. If anything, they were grateful. “What can I do for you.”

  “I need to shut down the vats,” Jolo said, bluntly. “All of them. The entire production run needs to be sterilised.”

  McNulty blinked at him. “Shut down all of the vaults?”

  “Yes,” Jolo said. He’d learned that the best way to get along with his nominal superiors was never to give them any ground. “There are ... problems with the current production run.”

  The system for producing algae was surprisingly basic, so much so that every newcomer eventually started offering suggestions for expanding production. But the system that had been worked out over centuries was stable, while altering the process could have unexpected side effects. Now, with a demand for increased production from the Grand Senate, some of the vats had been imperfectly cleaned between production cycles. Jolo had yelled at the workers responsible, but the damage had been done. Parts of the production run in the vats right now were decaying. Already.

  McNulty didn't ask for technical details. That was odd; normally, he insisted being given every last detail. Instead, he just looked as if he was weighing some very difficult choices.

  “Problems,” he repeated, finally. “Disregard them and carry on.”

  Jolo stared at him. “Manager,” he said, “the production run is contaminated!”

  “We have strict orders from the very highest levels to ensure that production continues at this expanded rate indefinitely,” McNulty informed him. “We are to disregard all problems.”

  “If the algae is released onto the market,” Jolo said, “people will die!”

  McNulty looked back at him. “I was under the impression that all ration bars were treated to prevent them actually harming people,” he said. “Was I, in fact, incorrect?”

  “Right now,” Jolo said tightly, “we have algae from at least two different batches mixed up together in the vaults. The production life cycle is destabilising – a problem made worse by the insistence that we speed up production as much as possible. I do not know if it is possible to process the bars properly – or if they will be safe for human consumption in any case. We need to ditch the current production run and clean the bloody equipment thoroughly!”

  “That is impossible,” McNulty said. “The production speed must be maintained.”

  Jolo took a breath. “The equipment is designed to endure a standard production cycle,” he said. “By speeding the cycle up, you are stressing the equipment and pushing it past it’s design parameters. Sooner or later, something else is going to break – and when it does, the entire production line will go with it.”

  He forced himself to calm down. Maybe McNulty could be reasoned with. “We just need to ditch this production run and do some maintenance,” he offered. “We can catch up later.”

  “If we don’t meet our quota, there will be consequences,” McNulty said.

  “We can’t meet our quota,” Jolo insisted. He didn't know who had dreamed up the quota, but it was clear that they knew nothing about algae farming. “It isn't physically possible!”

  “Make it possible,” McNulty snapped.

  Jolo stared at him for a long moment, a dozen retorts flashing through his head. He could quit; he could tell McNulty that he wouldn't share any responsibility, no matter how small, for a mass poisoning. But he had a wife and two children and if he quit ... the Emergency Committee’s new rules stated that anyone who quit his job willingly would not be able to claim the BLA. And if he were fired ... he didn't know. It would all have to be sorted out by the courts and that would take years, at the very least. His family would have starved to death by the time the courts came to a decision.

  He saw no way out of the trap. Do what he was told, and bear some responsibility for a mass poisoning, or resign and watch his family starve. He wanted to tell McNulty precisely what he thought of him ... but then, it wasn't really McNulty’s fault. The orders had come from far higher up the food chain; no one would be punished, he knew from long experience, as long as they obeyed orders. Common sense was never allowed a look-in.

  If he'd been on his own, he told himself, he would have the determination to resign rather than take any responsibility. But he wasn't on his own.

  “Yes, sir,” he said. At least he could oversee the cleaners when the current batch was finished and make sure it didn't happen again. “I’ll see to it personally.”

  Four hours, he thought numbly as he left the office. One more hour to complete production; two hours to bake the algae into ration bars and a final hour to insert them into the distribution chain. And then lethal ration bars would be on the streets, waiting to strike down the unwary.

  He thought wistfully of the power outrages they’d been having in the apartment block, power outrages that had been blamed on the student revolutionaries. Maybe one of them would take down the algae plant’s power and they’d have to dump the entire production run as it spoiled ...

  But nothing happened.

  ***

  “Well, you useless slut,” a voice barked. “How much did you make this morning?”

  Bella barely opened her eyes from where she lay on the bed. Seventeen men, four of them sadists who couldn't get hard unless they heard a woman scream ... after the last had gone, she’d pressed an injector tab to her neck and allowed the drug to overcome her. The pain in her body faded away into insignificance as she relaxed into the high, even though she knew it wouldn't last. She’d been using Calm for so long that it rarely affected her for longer than ten minutes.

  “God, you’re useless,” Ravi, her pimp said angrily. His face twisted with disgust as he stared down at her naked body. “Or have you been holding back on me again?”

  “No,” Bella slurred. Fear was driving the drug’s effect out of her mind. The one time she had tried to hold back a tip, Ravi had somehow known what she’d done – and beaten her to within an inch of her life. She’d healed, with a little help from an underground doctor, but the scars on her mind had never faded. Ravi owned her, body and soul. Escape was impossi
ble. “Nothing ...”

  “Then one of them must have stiffed you,” Ravi sneered. He caught her arm, pulled her upright and glared into her eyes. “You dumb slut! Why didn't you get the money first?”

  “I ... I did,” Bella protested. His grip was hurting her, but she knew better than to protest out loud, or even show any sign that it bothered her. “I was just trying to take as many customers as possible.”

  “God knows why they want you,” Ravi snapped, as he let go of her. She fell back onto the bed, arms and legs flailing helplessly. “You’re a fucking mess, barely even worth your room and board.”

  He was right, Bella knew. Once, she had been moderately attractive, attractive enough to land a man who would take her out of the very lowest level of Rowdy Yates Block. She had found a man, but Ravi’s seduction had masked a darker motive. The slip into prostitution had started gradually; by the time she’d realised Ravi’s true nature, it had been far too late. Even if she ran, she had nowhere to go. He'd gleefully pointed it out to her the first time she had tried to stand up for herself.

  Whores didn't last long in the very lowest levels. A few months of servicing random men took its toll – and as her beauty declined, so did the quality of her customers. Some of them were diseased, she was sure, but Ravi hadn't allowed her to refuse anyone. Bella was seventeen years old; she looked forty, at least. It wouldn't be long before Ravi threw her out completely and left her to fend for herself. She’d wind up dead, either through murder or simple starvation.

  “And don't cry,” Ravi added. “You know I hate that.”

  He caught her legs and held them upwards, then started slapping the backs of her thighs. Not hard enough to cause permanent damage, but hard enough to remind her of her place. If she was so careless again, it would be worse; Ravi was a past master at hurting her and his other whores without leaving any proper bruises. He certainly wouldn't pay for her to visit the doctor again.