“Like what?” Legaux asked.
“Like a direct order from the Emperor himself,” St. James replied.
“But why?”
St. James shrugged and looked towards Natasha. “It’s only a guess, mind you, but the Cabal had plans to release Marianne from prison, and that could have triggered a recall.”
“It sure as hell could,” Alice growled. “The Emp would freak.”
“Yeah,” Ed said happily. “He sure would.”
“So what now?” Jenny asked.
“Get ready for the next battle,” St. James said grimly. “The marines could return, or even worse, the Hudathans could arrive. One of Pierre’s people, a Sergeant Major Booly, watched the Naa torture a Hudathan agent to death.”
“Ex-Sergeant Major Booly,” Legaux said bleakly. “He deserted.”
St. James raised an eyebrow. His voice was as cold as an Arctic gale. “Really? Well, he’ll turn up sooner or later, and when he does, shoot him.”
Natasha, unused to the ways of the Legion, was shocked. To hear the man she loved, or thought she loved, casually sentence someone to death troubled her. Had she been wrong about him?
“So,” Ed asked, “how would you rate our chances if either one of them attacks?”
St. John spread his hands. “We’re okay for food and ammo, ditto the fuel and parts, but short on people. Between the reinforcements sent to the rim and the casualties suffered during the last few days, we’re very thin on the ground. So thin that either force could beat us within three or four days.”
The ensuing silence lasted a long, long time.
21
What goes around comes around.
Human folk saying
Circa 1995
Planet Earth, the Human Empire
Smoke boiled up from the city of Lancaster and stained the sky black. A breeze, just in from the Pacific Ocean, pushed the haze towards the east. The cloud made a fitting backdrop for the drama being played out on the street in front of Palmdale’s municipal building.
Bullet holes marked the structure’s marble façade, windows gaped empty, and uniformed bodies lay where they had fallen. The Legion’s dead had been buried, so these were clad in marine green or police blue. Good men and women for the most part, following orders from on high, and dying for no good reason.
Marianne Mosby, commanding officer of the Legion’s free forces on Earth, stood at the top of a long flight of stairs. She felt the wind tug at her uniform and looked down into the square. A statue of the Emperor stood on a pedestal, its head missing, an arm pointed towards the stars. In joy? As a warning? It was impossible to tell.
Most of Mosby’s forces were elsewhere, fighting their way towards the Imperial Palace, but 250 men and women stood before her, witnesses to what would happen.
They might be dressed in the remnants of prison uniforms and armed with a wild assortment of weapons, but her legionnaires looked like what they were. Soldiers. But like all soldiers, especially those recruited from the bottom of society’s barrel, some were better than others. In the wild semi-crazed days since their escape from prison, there had been incidents of theft, rape, and yes, murder. Actions for which no leniency could or should be shown. Colonel Jennings, her XO, stood toward the bottom of the stairs and read the findings.
“... And so,” Colonel Jennings concluded, “having been tried and found guilty, you are hereby sentenced to death. May god have mercy on your souls.” The words had been amplified and echoed back and forth off the surrounding buildings.
The five men and women stood on the roof of a large hover truck. A decal in the shape of an enormous loaf of bread graced its side. Their hands had been tied behind their backs and nooses placed ’round their necks. Yellow rope, like the kind sold in hardware stores, led up and over a gracefully curved light standard. None wore hoods.
Mosby forced herself to examine their faces. One, a private named Torbo, looked familiar. The rest were strangers. A woman with multicolored tattoos on both arms tried to spit on Jennings. She was thirty yards short. The officer turned and looked in Mosby’s direction. She felt herself nod.
Jennings gave an order and a pair of legionnaires, both equipped with drums that said “Palmdale Tech” along their sides, started a steady rhythm. Turbines screamed, pieces of paper skittered sideways, and the truck came off the ground. It wobbled slightly and a man started to fall. A companion moved in to prop him up. The truck moved forward. The legionnaires stumbled off the roof one at a time. Their necks snapped as they hit the end of the rope. They swung from side to side, their boots arcing through the air.
Mosby felt sick to her stomach but kept her face impassive. It was horrible, but as Chien-Chu had pointed out the day before, so were the crimes they had committed. There was a political component too, because if the Cabal was to have any hope of toppling the Emperor, they needed popular support, support that would be hard to come by if her troops raped and murdered the very people they had to protect. No, it had to be done, but the executions were a stain on an otherwise successful effort.
The revolt had begun when a specially trained cadre of corporate security people had dropped out of the sky and into the middle of the prison’s parade ground. The attack occurred when Commandant Tough Shit Gavin had least expected it, right during the heat of the day, when the legionnaires were busy “walking the wall” from one end of the grinder to the other.
The first indication that something was wrong came when ten lighter-than-air freight platforms appeared on radar and ignored all attempts at communication. Gavin could have launched antiaircraft missiles or called for air support, but didn’t. Yes, the platforms had entered restricted airspace, and yes, they had refused to acknowledge his calls, but they were clearly civilian. Hell, they had “Chien-Chu Enterprises” painted across their flanks in twenty-foot-high letters, for god’s sake. No, it was a mistake of some sort, and one he would soon straighten out.
Mosby remembered feeling a sense of satisfaction as the big black shadows drifted across the parade ground, knowing the time had come, knowing her people were ready. She remembered how the exoskeleton-mounted guards had tried to herd them inside, how they had screamed when the legionnaires pulled them down, how it felt to hit them with her fists.
No mercy was shown to the yards guards, or to those that spilled out of the armory, weapons chattering as they machine-gunned the crowd. Hundreds died that day, swept away in the storm of lead, but thousands had survived, and, armed with weapons dropped from above, began to fight. Black-clad security troops had joined them, repelling down from the hovering platforms, firing as they came. The battle was over a scant one hour and fifteen minutes after it began.
Mosby had searched for Gavin, planning to kill him with her own bare hands, but arrived too late.
A group of specially trained security people had located the prison’s computer-controlled life support system, liberated the brain boxes stored there, and plugged them into their cybernetic bodies. Within minutes Mosby’s forces were 362 cyborgs stronger. All of the quads and most of the Trooper IIs left the prison to defend against the possibility of a counterattack, but five went in search of Gavin. They found him cowering in a corner of his office.
There were various rumors about what they’d done to him, but Mosby had seen the body and had a theory of her own. She thought the borgs had played catch with him. She imagined Gavin being thrown back and forth until the trauma killed him. The blood-smeared office seemed to support her hypothesis, as did the commandant’s broken-doll body, but she’d never know for sure.
Jennings appeared at her elbow. Glass crunched under his boots. He gestured towards the bodies. “Shall we cut them down?”
Mosby looked and shook her head. “No, not today. I want people to see and remember.”
Jennings nodded. He needed a shave but looked good anyway. Mosby hadn’t thought about her appearance in days.
A sergeant major dismissed the troops. They broke into groups and headed for the mi
smatched convoy that waited nearby. A trio of Trooper IIs faced outwards watching for trouble. Jennings gave her a quizzical look.
“So, what’s next?”
Mosby looked towards the south, where the ancient city of Los Angeles had stood hundreds of years before, and the Emperor’s mother had made her home. She couldn’t see the high-rise towers but knew they were there. She smiled.
“It’s time to visit an old friend of mine. The same one that threw us into prison and sent the Navy against Algeron.”
Jennings nodded. “Sounds like a plan. Let’s go.”
Exactly why the complex had been constructed, and left off the building’s architectural drawings, was known only to Madam Dasser and her immediate family. But whatever the reason, it made a rather handy headquarters, and being located only miles from the Imperial Palace made it even more secure, since the Emperor’s secret police had searched the structure above countless times and declared it clean. That, plus the fact that the building was owned by a front company not known to be part of Dasser Industries, meant the Cabal had a place to gather.
Chien-Chu found himself an unknown number of stories underground, sitting in a darkened room, viewing video of what had once been his estate. Nola sat beside him and did her best not to cry. The Cabal had grown since the early days, adding hundreds of new members, but the executive committee had been limited to only five people. All were present and wore the usual loose-fitting robes.
The holo had been shot twenty-four hours after the secret police had attacked and there wasn’t much left to see. The house and all that it contained had been blown up. Then, to make sure that Chien-Chu got the point, the wreckage had been burned. Two of the chimneys still stood, as did a ragged section of brick wall, but the rest of the place had been reduced to little more than blackened rubble. Smoke drifted up from a fire that still burned somewhere beneath the debris.
“I’m sorry,” Madam Dasser said, “but my estates were targeted as well.”
“And mine,” Ari Goss added.
“Mine too,” Zorana Zikos said.
“And ours,” Susan Rothenberg put in.
Chien-Chu sighed. “It was to be expected, I guess. We had to come out in the open, and the moment we did, they attacked.”
Nola noticed something that struck her as both sad and funny. She made a choking sound. “They missed something, though . . .”
Madam Dasser turned in her direction. “They did? What?”
Nola pointed to the holo. “Look ... Sergi’s sculptures are completely untouched!”
They saw that the rusty metal plates the merchant had welded together stood exactly as they had before, and laughed.
“Perhaps the secret police assumed that someone had already destroyed them,” Zikos said dryly.
Chien-Chu smiled and took his wife’s hand. “Laugh if you will, but at least I have a second career, and how many of you can say the same? We can’t be revolutionaries forever, you know.”
“Sergi has a point,” Rothenberg said. “We must plan for success. What happens when the Emperor is deposed?”
“We’re a long way from having to worry about that,” Goss said soberly.
“Maybe,” Madam Dasser replied, “and maybe not. Let’s take a look at the report that our combined intelligence and marketing research staffs put together.”
She touched a button and the holo dissolved into a thousand shards of light. They swirled, chased each other in circles, and came back together. A set of eight summaries, graphs, and charts appeared in front of them, and being business people, they sat up and paid attention. Dasser narrated.
“Here’s the way things look. The good news is that cross-cultural, multi-location opinion research indicates that the public agrees with our plan to fight the Hudathans out on the rim, and want new leadership. Once we got around the Emperor’s propaganda machine and gave the population some real news, billions of people came over to our side. The stuff from Spindle was especially effective. Citizens want military action and they want it now.”
“So what’s the bad news?” Zikos asked cautiously.
“The bad news,” Dasser answered, “is that the people don’t trust us. Crazy or not, the Emperor represents stability, and people like that, especially when compared to people like us. Here, take a look at this.” She used a light wand to highlight some statistics. “Because we’re business people and fit the common definition of ‘rich,’ they’re afraid of what we might do after the Emperor is deposed.”
“Which makes perfect sense,” Chien-Chu said softly.
“But it’s not fair!” Rothenberg exclaimed. “We risked everything! The Emperor closed our companies, destroyed our homes, and sentenced us to death!”
“So I’ll bite,” Zikos said grimly. “What’s the answer?”
Madam Dasser grinned. “Our communications people recommend a phased approach. They point out that a cabal made up of faceless men and women, all of whom have questionable motives, is inherently more threatening than a single person. Especially within a society where all authority has been invested in a single individual for such a long time.”
“So we should choose a front man,” Goss said thoughtfully.
“Or woman,” Rothenberg said stiffly.
“Exactly,” Dasser agreed. “The communications people further recommend that this person be the member of the Cabal who has the warmest personality index, the least threatening physique, and the greatest similarity to cross-cultural icons such as the Buddha, Mahatma Gandhi, the late Empress, and Santa Claus.”
Everyone in the room looked at Chien-Chu. He held a hand up in protest. “No!”
But a vote was taken and a spokesperson was chosen.
Sun streamed in through the pyramid’s transparent sides, warmed the Emperor’s back, and threw his shadow across his mother’s tomb. Fascinated, he raised his arms, watched his duplicate take on the shape of a cross, and made it move. He had come to talk with her, to ask her what to do, but the voices made it hard to think. They were fighting again, arguing over what he should do, but never coming to any sort of conclusion.
“He’s insane, you know.”
“And who wouldn’t be with a fruitcake like you running around inside his head?”
“Stop it! We must cooperate, work as a team, or the entire empire will be lost.”
“So?”
“So the Emperor could be killed, if he dies, we go with him.”
“Sounds good to me,” another voice said grimly. “Anything would be better than this.”
“Your Highness?”
It took the Emperor a moment to realize that this particular voice had originated from outside the confines of his own mind. He allowed his arms to fall. The voices died to a whisper.
“Yes?”
“The Legion has forced their way into the city. They will be here in an hour or two.”
The face looked familiar. The Emperor forced himself to concentrate. “Admiral Scolari! What are you doing here? I sent you to Algeron.”
Scolari forced herself to remain calm. It was as bad as she had heard ... maybe worse. “You ordered my return, Your Highness, and judging from what I’ve seen, it was an excellent idea.”
“Oh,” the Emperor said vacantly. “Of course. Sorry about that, it slipped my mind.”
“Yes, Highness,” Scolari replied dryly. “Now, with your permission, I suggest that we depart for the spaceport. Your Highness will be a great deal safer up in orbit.”
The Emperor brightened. “Up in orbit! Yes. That would be fun. Let’s go.”
Scolari felt depressed as she followed the Emperor up a flight of steps, through a blastproof door, and out into the afternoon sun. The return trip had been long and stressful. What would the Legion do while she was away? Where would the Hudathans strike next? And what awaited her on Earth? The reality was worse than anything she’d imagined.
The Emperor had slipped further into madness, the Cabal had come out into the open, Mosby was on the verge of occu
pying the Imperial City, and the rest of the military were sitting on their hands. Well, most were anyway. Some commanders had done what they could.
A fighter screamed by a few hundred feet overhead, launched missiles towards Mosby’s forces, and stood on its tail. Sun glinted off the plane’s canopy as it fought for altitude.
Scolari squinted upwards, searched for the plane’s insignia, and winced when a quad-launched SAM hit the aircraft and blew it up. Flaming debris tumbled through the air and fell on some government buildings. One caught fire and more sirens joined those already bleating in distress.
Damn those cyborgs anyway! The moment this was over, Scolari would track them down, kill them one by one, and start her own cyborg corps.
Two squads of heavily armed marines closed in around them as they walked towards the waiting vehicles. Scolari had considered a chopper but decided against it for security reasons. Like the fighter, a helicopter would have been vulnerable to all sorts of ground fire. The Emperor seemed oblivious to the danger that surrounded him.
Doors slammed and engines revved as the convoy headed out. The streets were empty. The bureaucrats had gone to ground and were hiding deep within their comfortable caves waiting for a winner to emerge. Then they would appear one by one, swear allegiance to whatever was handy, and go back to work. It made Scolari sick.
The command car bounced over something hard and the Emperor stared out the window.
Mosby entered the palace mounted on a Trooper II named Logan. She shifted her weight from side to side as the cyborg made his way up the steps, scanned for signs of opposition, and finding none, proceeded inside. His pods made a thumping noise as they hit the hardwood floors, and unprotected by the pads normally worn inside buildings, left dents in the wood. Bio bods, their weapons at ready, were right behind.
Mosby had expected stiff resistance, but the marine guards had deserted their posts or been ordered to withdraw. Both possibilities were fine with her. There had been more than enough killing. What she wanted was the Emperor. Not to kill him, since that might create a martyr, but to tell him it was over. Not that she was likely to get the chance. The palace seemed deserted.
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