“Come on,” Fitz said. “Let's go and meet Archie.”
The planet’s atmosphere smelt wrong to her, almost as soon as she stepped out of the shuttle. It was cool, yet dry, with a faint smell of something dead slowly drying out in the sun. Perhaps the entire planet was dying slowly, she told herself as Fitz followed her out of the shuttle, closing the hatch behind them. The terraforming program hadn't been unleashed on a dead world, one that could be brought to life with some care and attention, but on a living world that might have started to fight back. Her eyes stung as the wind shifted course and blew right across them, making her eyes sting due to the little flakes of dust in the air. She found herself blinking rapidly to get rid of them.
Archie turned out to be a tall aristocrat, wearing a white suit and a large hat that kept the sun out of his eyes. He carried a small whip curled up at his belt, along with a gun and a grim expression that just dared anyone to pick a fight with him. The vast hordes of natives outside the walls could have overwhelmed him and the rest of the plantation staff within minutes if they’d chosen to charge, but somehow they remained broken. They’d probably had a demonstration of what human weapons could do if they rebelled openly against their overlords. Mariko had learned, while learning how to use the armoured combat suit, that some planets kept a QRF of armoured soldiers on standby in orbit at all times. They could get to any rebellion and crush it before it got out of hand.
“It’s good to see you again, Uncle,” Fitz said. Mariko would never have known that he had sounded just as sickened as she was by what Archie’s relatives had done on Greenland, if she hadn't heard him on the flight down to the planet’s surface. “Auntie Jo sends her regards.”
“Jo worries too much,” Archie said. He had a gruff voice, but one with an undertone of smug satisfaction that Mariko didn't like at all. “And who is this radiant beauty that you have brought to see me?”
“This is Mariko, my current retainer,” Fitz said.
Archie took Mariko’s hand and shook it firmly, all the time allowing his eyes to run up and down her body.
“I’m afraid that she’s currently assigned to me, and me alone,” Fitz said, sounding regretful.
“What a pity,” Archie said. “Anyway, if you will both come into the house, I’ll have some drinks served at once.”
Mariko managed to keep herself from flushing, although she wasn't sure how. Retainer didn't just mean assistant or servant to the aristocracy. It also included courtesan or whore. But at least Fitz seemed to have ensured that Archie wouldn't be pawing at her tonight.
Archie waved towards a woman on a house in the distance. “I’m afraid that Cecelia is currently on horseback, and you probably won’t see her until dinner. But once she is here, you will get an earful about her horses.”
Fitz didn't quite groan.
“I look forward to it, Uncle,” he said. Mariko could tell that he was being untruthful. “But I’m afraid that your wife did have some concerns she wished me to discuss with you.”
“Ah, women are always worrying,” Archie said, as they walked inside. He elbowed Fitz gently. “You just can’t get a woman to relax unless you have enough money or power to convince her that you will take care of her. Why I married Jo, I will never know.”
“You wanted to unite your assets with her share in this plantation,” Fitz said, rather dryly. “Does Lady Mary still have interests in this planet?”
“Lady Mary owns the plantation two hundred miles from here,” Archie said.
Mariko glanced at Fitz, who winked at her when Archie wasn't looking.
“She doesn't sell as much as we do,” Archie told them, “but what she does sell is very good. I keep offering to buy her plantation and operate it properly, yet she keeps refusing. Jo might have been able to talk her round, but Jo...seems to think we should double our security here.”
“Or possibly triple it,” Fritz murmured. So far, Mariko hadn't seen any signs of any security. “Do you not have a starship assigned from the sector fleet?”
“Ah, that would cost too much in bribe money for the ship and her commander,” Archie said, firmly. “Right now, the Slimes know better than to pick a fight with us. Why, if it wasn't for us, they’d still be grubbing in the mud, trying to rub two sticks together to make fire. Instead, they have access to all the tools of our superb civilisation to improve their lives.”
“I think that that is what Jo’s worrying about,” Fitz said. The irony slid past Archie and vanished somewhere in the haze. “Right now, some active security might be a very good investment.”
“Relax,” Archie said. “A handful of tiny attacks are nothing! If they attack us, well...they know what they will get. And who cares if a convoy or two gets shot at by the rebels? It isn't as if they can actually do any damage in the long run. Relax.”
***
“Is it just me,” Mariko said, when they’d been shown to their rooms and checked them for bugs, “or is Archie completely insane?”
“He’s been absolute master of the universe for so long that he has problems recognising that that could change,” Fitz said. He’d pulled a small terminal out of his belt and started to tap away on it. “The Slimes could charge up to his house and paint the walls with WE ARE GOING TO KILL YOU HUMAN BASTARDS and he wouldn't notice. He is right about one thing: the Slimes might kill every human on the planet, but that won’t deter the Imperial Navy from retaliating. The Slimes would die in their millions as fusion beams pour down from the skies high overhead.”
“But would they understand that?” Mariko asked. “If they were a pre-space race before they were discovered, would they even comprehend that starships and orbital weapons even exist?”
“There were a few thunderbolts from the skies back when the planet was being settled,” Fitz said, absently. “I assume they know what they face, even if they don’t really understand it. But they’re not stupid and if the Secessionists are involved, chances are that they understand exactly what will happen if they rise up in revolt.”
Mariko winced. A modern planet, with a combination of ground-based planetary defence centres and orbital weapons platforms, could reasonably hope to hold off the Imperial Navy for days, perhaps weeks. Taking a defended planet by storm was never an easy operation at the best of times. But Greenland possessed no defences at all, not even a handful of orbital weapons platforms. A single gunboat could take up position in orbit and systematically bombard the planet back to the Stone Age.
Fitz looked up from his console.
“Lady Mary owns the Halfway Plantation, two hundred and thirty miles from here,” he said, changing the subject. “And, incidentally, the Halfway Plantation is the only place that hasn't reported any rebel activity at all. They're on the coastline so you’d expect to see thousands of deserters, or rebel attacks, but none have been reported. A small staff operates the place for Lady Mary and generally only supplies Tuff with Water of Life...” He grinned at her. “Fancy another excursion tomorrow morning?”
Mariko blinked. “You think they’d just let us go?”
“I think that Archie wouldn't think that we would be in any real danger,” Fitz said. “We can take a hovercraft and set out on a course that will bring us right up to the border between the two plantations, and then...see what happens to us. I’ll ask Mai to launch a pair of stealth drones to overfly the plantation and take a careful look for any signs of trouble. This isn't Tuff – it will be a great deal harder to conceal something without leaving signs that can be picked up from orbit.”
He stopped as there was a knock on the door. “Come in,” he called, once he’d buried the terminal under the pillow.
A maid stepped in and bowed.
“Yes?” he asked, sounding every bit the bored, jaded aristocrat.
“Lord Archie and Lady Cecelia would be pleased to see you in the drawing room,” the maid said, with a bow. She was pureblood human, oddly. On a world with so few humans, having one as a servant was a sign of wealth and power. “Aftern
oon tea will be served in ten minutes.”
“Come on,” Fitz said. He recovered the terminal, then stood and held out a hand. “Let’s go see what they have to say for themselves.”
***
Five minutes after meeting Lady Cecelia, Mariko became convinced that she was the most boring woman in the entire galaxy, even more boring than some of her mother’s older friends. The only thing that seemed to cross – or canter across – her mind were horses, of which she owned an entire stable that she’d been raising on Greenland. She had a private starship that allowed her to attend hundreds of different horse fairs right across the galaxy, only coming back to Greenland to inspect her livestock and keep a wary eye on her subordinates, who – she seemed convinced – spied on her genetic experimentations and stole horse DNA for her rivals. A woman old enough to be Mariko’s grandmother should not be so boring – her father’s mother had been exciting until the day she'd lain down and died – but Cecelia was just too tedious for words.
She wasn't even the strangest member of the dysfunctional family that ruled the plantation and upwards of a hundred thousand aliens who were slaves in all but name. Two of the younger sons were well on their way to becoming spoiled brats, casting lustful looks at the maids as if they wanted to rip their clothes off on the instant and make love to them. One of the girls was a screaming child who seemed to expect everyone to pay attention to her right now – and the other one was silent and withdrawn, as if she had grown up too much in the shadow of her louder sister. Even the servants seemed almost part of the family, if very junior members of it. But then, they were humans on a world where there couldn't be more than a couple of thousand humans at most.
“I tell you, the population in sector four just keeps rising,” one of the older women was saying, with a vehemence that seemed quite unsuited to the topic at hand. “We should never have given the Slimes modern medicine and insights; right now, every egg they lay pops out a healthy young Slime. If something doesn't happen soon to the birth rate, we’re going to be drowning in Slimes. I think we need to consider spaying them as they reach their maturity, before they can start popping out more eggs.”
Mariko shuddered at the calculating disdain in the woman’s voice. She wasn’t being cruel; it would have been easier to accept if she was just being sadistic. But instead, she was merely calculating the advantages and disadvantages to the plantation if the birth rate continued to rise. Mariko knew enough, from the reports, to know what happened if a primitive population got hold of modern medicine. There was always a colossal population explosion, which evened out over the next hundred years or so. But on a planet as fragile as Greenland, an additional few thousand mouths to feed might be disastrous.
“But they wouldn't thank us for sterilising them,” a younger man pointed out. “It’s not as if they have much of a life working for us...”
“It’s for their own good,” the older woman insisted. “They don’t have the perspective we do to know that a population explosion would be bad for them...”
Fitz took Mariko’s arm and steered her away gently before they realised that she had been listening. “Come and look at this,” he muttered in her ear, as they approached the balcony. They could look out over the plantation as the sun slowly sank in the sky, turning the air fiery red as it sunk below the horizon. “Listen.”
For a moment, there was nothing...and then there was a long mournful howling from the Slimes in the field. The howl rose in pitch until Mariko felt shivers running down her spine, understanding that the Slimes were mourning a world gone forever. They might not know precisely what the human race had done to them, but they certainly knew that something had happened. The undercurrent of loss and helpless rage seemed to cross species barriers. How could anyone mistake the Slimes for barbarians?
And how could anyone expect them to remain slaves forever?
Fitz nodded back toward the crowd inside the lighted room. None of them seemed to hear the howl, or to care. They just chatted about nothing as their time slowly ran out.
“We go out on our trip tomorrow,” Fitz muttered. “And pray to God that we’re in time.”
Chapter Fourteen
“Do you know how to drive this thing?”
Mariko nodded. The hovercraft was almost brutally simple, little more complex than an aircar. Apart from making sure that the cushion of air remained firmly under the hovercraft’s lower body, there really wasn't much else to do, but steer. The technology had been familiar for thousands of years.
“Enjoy your drive,” one of the innumerable ladies called. The wink she sent towards them suggested that she expected that they intended to stop somewhere along the way and make love. Mariko would have flushed if she hadn't been too busy checking the hovercraft’s systems. “Don’t forget to get back in time for dinner.”
Fitz nodded politely, waved his hat towards them and settled down into his seat. “Get us out of here,” he ordered, tightly.
The hovercraft roared to life at Mariko’s command and headed down towards the gate, which opened automatically at their approach. She felt the vehicle shake right and left before she managed to master it properly and take it out of the gate, onto the wide road leading northwards. On each side, she saw endless lines of plants – and thousands of aliens tending them. The Slimes looked uncomfortable as they moved, slowly and with infinite care, from one plant to the next.
“I’ve called Mai and told her to monitor us from orbit,” he told her.
Mariko glanced upward, but of course there was no sign of Bruce Wayne. “What do you expect us to find?”
“I don’t know yet,” Fitz said. He sounded irritated; he’d had to spend the morning listening to Lady Cecelia babbling on about horses and how her latest cross-bred horse had won the Imperium’s Grand Planetary Race. In some ways, she seemed just as insane as Tuff when it came to splicing several different animals together into a new breed. “Ideally, we should find some clues on Lady Mary’s plantation while we try to order some of her Water of Life for the ship.”
Mariko smiled as the hovercraft picked up speed. They’d worked out an elaborate cover story for their visit, only to discover that Archie and the rest of his family hadn't even bothered to ask why they were going. The family had been so unconcerned that Mariko had wondered if they too were tied in with the rebels, because it seemed madness not to keep close track of the handful of humans on the planet. If some of the reports were to be believed, quite a few humans had vanished since day one.
She looked over at the Slimes and shivered. They seemed to be obediently working on the plants, as ordered by their human masters, but there was something in the air that suggested that they were just biding their time. Their position was so hopeless that even a futile revolt, one that forced the Imperial Navy to scorch the planet, must have seemed a better deal than continuing to work for their human overlords. How long would it be before they marched on the plantations' houses and burned them and their masters to the ground?
Mariko considered herself a loyal citizen. Edo had been part of the Imperium since its inception, five thousand years ago. What few records of the Warlord Era had survived suggested that it had been disastrous for the human race, with entire planetary populations wiped out on a whim, and the Imperium – as unpleasant as it was – was a definite improvement.
And yet...the planters on this world had effectively destroyed an entire alien civilisation just to grow a few grapes. How could she blame any of the aliens on the planet for joining the Secessionists? What did they have to lose, apart from their chains?
Edo enjoyed the same limited autonomy as most of the other developed worlds, but there were hundreds of thousands of worlds that were at the mercy of their core world masters. It hadn't been something she’d understood when she’d left Edo, yet now she was starting to see why the Secessionists kept trying to overthrow the established order.
So many worlds would have become gardens by now if they hadn't had to keep repaying their founding loans
to the Core Worlds, or allow themselves to be raped by older and richer worlds and corporations. It was a chilling thought, but might the Secessionists have a point? And what about the countless alien races ground under by humankind?
“I asked myself the same question,” Fitz admitted, when she chanced bringing the subject up. “Does the Imperium even deserve to survive?”
He looked over towards the endless rows of vines, thinning out as they reached the edge of Archie’s plantation, and scowled. “Maybe we should have treated the other races better from the start. Maybe we should have constructed a political system that wasn't weighted so heavily in favour of the older worlds. But that doesn’t change what we have to deal with right now. If we granted aliens the same rights as human beings, the Imperium would fall apart within a decade, followed rapidly by genocide.”
She looked at him in alarm.
“The Slimes aren't the only race that hates us,” he reminded her. “They’d all turn on the human race, and only a handful of us would survive.
On The Imperium’s Secret Service (Imperium Cicernus) Page 13