The Shadow of Cincinnatus

The Decline and Fall of the Galactic Empire
Book 2

Christopher Nuttall

The Shadow of Cincinnatus
This is a work of fiction. All concepts, characters and events portrayed in this book are used fictitiously and any resemblance to real people or events is purely coincidental.

Copyright © 2014 Christopher G. Nuttall

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except brief extracts for the purpose of review, without the permission of the publisher and copyright owner.

First Edition, December 2014

Cover art by Malcolm McClinton

Printed in the United States of America.

Contents
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine

Prologue

From: Meditations on Power: The Terran Federation, The Empire and Marius Drake (4502 A.D)
What is power?
Some would say that power is the ability to shape events to your pleasing. Some would say that power is the ability to do things denied to other people. And some would say that power is the way to get what you want, when you want it, no matter what others might have to say about it. When asked to choose between sex and power, the cynic will always choose power.
Why? Because power can be used to obtain sex.
But power can also be used to obtain more power. This was certainly true of the Grand Senate of the Terran Federation. An august body, comprised of members who had practically inherited their seats, it reached for more and more power over the Outer Worlds and the Colonies. The Colonies rebelled, of course, but the Senate fought and won the Inheritance Wars, ending the threat of the Federation snapping in two. It should have been the end.
The Grand Senate grew lazy and complacent. It fought a pointless war, purely out of greed, with an alien race that ended up costing more blood and treasure than it had anticipated. It chose to ignore growing problems along the edge of explored space, secure in its power and position. But even the more paranoid members of the Grand Senate failed to realize that it was placing more and more power in the hands of its military leaders. One of them, Admiral Justinian, rebelled against the Federation, intent on claiming power for himself.
It should not have taken long for the Federation to crush the upstart. The Federation Navy outmassed the rebels by over a hundred to one. But other military commanders had rebelled, diverting the Federation’s forces, making the Grand Senate take steps to ensure that no future military commander could ever hope to gain enough power to challenge the Senate. And yet, their actions ensured that no quick and decisive war was possible. No Admiral dared take chances when his actions might be taken out of context and used against him. No General dared make plans of his own without fear of being accused of plotting a coup. The Grand Senate was effectively strangling its own ability to make war.
Eventually, Admiral Marius Drake – a hero of the early fighting – came to terms with the Grand Senate. He would marry into their ranks and defeat their enemies. This he did, leading the forces of the Federation to a stunning victory over Admiral Justinian. But the Grand Senate, no longer trusting him, chose to try to kill him. His best friend died saving his life.
And so Admiral Drake led his fleet against Earth, captured the Grand Senate and proclaimed himself Emperor.
Alas for Drake, he was about to discover the limits of power.

Chapter One

Garibaldi, Roman. One of the fastest-rising stars of the Federation Navy and a personal protégé of Admiral (later Emperor) Marius Drake. After his role in the failed peace mission to Admiral Justinian, Garibaldi was assigned to Fifth Fleet as her commanding officer...
-The Federation Navy in Retrospect, 4199

Hobson’s Choice, 4098
“You know,” Elf said, as she ran a hand through her short blonde hair, “this is the very definition of using a sledgehammer to crush a nut.”
Roman Garibaldi gave his friend, lover and ground-forces commander a mischievous look, using one hand to brush the brown hair out of his eyes as he looked up at the gathering fleet. It was smaller, in terms of numbers, than the giant fleets that had fought the Inheritance Wars, but it was an order of magnitude more deadly, the most powerful fleet assembled in the last decade of intermittent warfare. Calling the fleet a sledgehammer sent to crush a nut was a definite understatement.
“More like using a sledgehammer to crush an atom,” he said, after a moment. “Or slamming an entire asteroid into a planet to kill a single person. Or...”
Elf snorted, rudely. “Does it bother you?”
Roman shrugged, then shook his head. He’d been on the receiving end of superior firepower – vastly superior firepower – often enough to feel a certain kind of satisfaction at having superior firepower on his side for once. Maybe there were naval officers out there who liked the idea of a fair fight, of matching themselves against an enemy commander with equal strength, but it wasn’t a sentiment any sensible officer could allow himself in combat. Besides, the more firepower brought to the party, the smaller the chance of a real fight.
Not that they have much chance anyway, he thought, with a tinge of amusement. A handful of light cruisers would be more than enough to take the high orbitals of Hobson’s Choice.
He looked up at the running lights of Fifth Fleet. It had only been a month since his most recent promotion and he couldn’t resist a thrill of delight at seeing so many ships under his command, although he knew he was far from the only young officer promoted into occupying a dead man’s shoes. The war with the rogue Admiral, Justinian, had been good for eliminating much of the dead weight in high-ranking positions, if nothing else. And yet, seeing so much responsibility resting on his shoulders worried him. He’d barely been a Captain long enough to grow accustomed to his ship before he’d been promoted to the flag deck.
“You’re thinking again,” Elf teased him. “It’s a terrible habit right now.”
“I know,” Roman said, gravely. “But I need to try to plan for everything.”
Elf tapped his shoulder. “You should know that isn’t possible,” she said, sternly. “All you can do is be prepared to adapt to change at a moment’s notice.”
Roman let out a sigh. “Yes,” he said. “But will there be any change here?”
“Probably not,” Elf said. “But we have been surprised before.”
“Yeah,” Roman drawled. “Better to be careful.”
He shrugged. Hobson’s Choice had been a thorn in the side of the Federation for years, ever since the world had been claimed by an eccentric who had thrown open the doors to anyone who wanted to operate outside the Federation’s gaze. Now it served as a clearing house for pirates, smugglers, slavers, rebels and all the others who were more than a little unwelcome on Federation worlds. A vast amount of bribes, paid out to senior officers and sector governors, had ensured that the world remained undisturbed by the Federation Navy. But now everything had changed. Hobson’s Choice was about to get a very unwelcome surprise.
His wristcom buzzed. “Admiral,” Flag Captain Scott Palter said, “the 143rd has just reported in. They’re ready to move.”
“Good,” Roman said. “Order the fleet to begin cloaking procedures. I’m on my way.”
“Good luck,” Elf said. She leaned forward and kissed him on the cheek, then headed to the hatch. “Leave some of them for us, will you?”
Roman watched her go, then looked back at the fleet. There was another reason for bringing the entire formation to Hobson’s Choice, even if it was a staggering level of overkill. Fifth Fleet had been put together in a hurry, from starships that had seen service in the recent war to new-build starships just out of the yards, with crews that had barely graduated from the academy. The mission would, he hoped, iron out any problems long before they ran into anything larger than a pirate ship or two. Even if the warlords were gone, there were plenty of other threats out there.
He smiled, then turned to walk through the hatch and down to CIC himself. It still astonished him that he’d been given command of so many ships, even if it was unlikely he’d ever command a ship personally again. That irked him, more than he cared to admit. He’d never expected to become a Commodore, not with his lack of connections. Starship command had seemed the highest achievable goal. And now he was a Commodore, holding down an Admiral’s billet. His family would be proud.
The hatch to the CIC opened up in front of him, revealing a handful of consoles, a large command chair and a giant holographic tank. Lights flickered and flared within the tank, dimming to grey as the ships went into cloak, each one tagged with the starship’s name and current status. The temptation to micromanage was almost overpowering, Roman had discovered, finally understanding why so many senior officers had issued so many unnecessary orders. One look was enough to tell him that Fifth Fleet’s formation looked a little ragged.
An officer with less experience of actual war-fighting would see that as a problem, he thought, as he took his seat. But anyone with any sense would know better.
He looked up at the display, then glanced at Palter. They’d known each other since Roman had commanded Midway, where Palter had been his tactical officer. Thankfully, Palter had been available when Roman had been assigned to Fifth Fleet. A month in command hadn’t given him the time to get to know most of his officers, particularly as Fifth Fleet was still assembling. The Federation Navy might have expanded rapidly during the war, but it was still badly overstretched. Roman was surprised that so many starships had been assigned to the Rim.
But Admiral – Emperor – Drake fought here before the war, Roman thought. He felt a duty to do something about the chaos along the Rim.
He took a breath. “Order the fleet to advance,” Roman said. “And prepare to spring our surprise.”

“The cargo is secure, sir.”
Captain Roger Loewi nodded, impatiently. Hogshead had been orbiting Hobson’s Choice for weeks, burning precious fuel, while her agents on the surface had been rounding up the cargo and lifting it to orbit. The crew had been growing increasingly unhappy, after discovering that they would neither be allowed to go down to the surface or play their games with the cargo. He’d had to face down two threats of mutiny and one crewman had actually managed to desert, although he was no loss. Somehow, slavers rarely attracted the best crews.
The cargo, he thought, sourly. One hundred and fifty women, all young, all healthy enough to bear children for a hidden colony thousands of light years from Earth. The crew was already sniffing round the hold and, if it weren’t for the armed mercenaries guarding the hatches, he would have feared for their safety. For some absurd reason, the colonists wanted virgins. God knew it was hard enough to find virgins on Hobson’s Choice, let alone girls who had been captured by pirates and traded to slavers on the planet below. He cursed himself under his breath, then dismissed the thought. If he didn’t think of the slaves as cargo, he would go mad. 
It was a living. Hogshead was too old and slow to carry legitimate cargo, even if there hadn’t been a hundred warrants out for her arrest on the more civilized worlds of the Federation. And wasn’t that ironic? Loewi knew for a fact that some of the slaves he’d shipped, properly modified, had been sold to high-ranking Federation officers, who would probably dispose of them before returning to Earth. Who gave a shit about the morality of shipping kidnapped women and children when the alternative was poverty and certain death? Or indenture...
He turned back to the console. “Take us out of here,” he ordered. “Now.”
“Gotcha, dad,” the helmsman said. His son worked the console with a practiced ease. “I hear some of them are...”
An alarm sounded. Red lights appeared on the cramped display.
Loewi’s mouth dropped open. For a long moment, his brain refused to accept what he was seeing. There were a hundred and fifty starships decloaking around the planet, spearheaded by five entire superdreadnaught squadrons. It had to be a trick of some kind, his brain yammered at him, an illusion created by ECM drones designed to fool far more advanced sensors than Hogshead’s outdated sensor suite. But the images had a terrifying solidity that drove all doubts out of his head.
“Dad, I’m picking up a message,” his son said.
“...Is the Federation Navy,” a voice boomed. “Hobson’s Choice is now under military control. Cut your drives and prepare to be boarded. Any resistance will result in the destruction of your vessels. There will be no further warning.”
Loewi thought fast. The idea of outrunning any of the military ships was thoroughly absurd. They could be given forty-eight hours to run and the military would still catch up with them before they crossed the Phase Limit. Not that they’d be given the time, he saw, as new icons flared to life on the display. Hundreds of starfighters were launching from carriers, each one more than capable of blowing Hogshead into vapor. They were caught like rats in a trap.
His son looked up at him. “Dad?”
“Cut the drives,” Loewi ordered. He knew he was dead. Slaver Captains could be shot without the formality of a trial – and if the bribes no longer protected Hobson’s Choice, there was no point in hoping they would protect him. But at least his children and crew would survive. They’d be on a penal planet, but they would be alive. “Cut the drives and tell them we surrender, then lock down the ship. The mercs might have other ideas.”
* * *
“I think we surprised them, sir,” Palter said.
Roman nodded. There had been seventy starships orbiting Hobson’s Choice when the fleet had decloaked and a third of them had started to try to flee. The others had dropped their drives as per instructions, although there was no way to know if they’d meant to surrender or if they simply hadn’t been able to power up their drives in time to escape. Not, he knew, that it really mattered. The fleeing ships didn’t have a hope of escaping his fleet and making it out into deep space.
“Good,” he said. “Dispatch the Marines. We’ll go with Plan Theta.”
He forced himself to sit back and watch as his fleet’s smaller units moved in to tackle the fleeing ships. A couple cut their drives as soon as the destroyers entered firing range, the remainder kept trying to run until the destroyers opened fire. Roman watched, as dispassionately as he could, as five of the fleeing ships exploded, one by one. They were either pirates or smugglers, he knew, both occupations that earned participants the death penalty. But it was still one hell of a waste.
“The Marines are entering the atmosphere now,” Palter informed him. “There’s no trace of any resistance.”
Roman wasn’t surprised. To all intents and purposes, Hobson’s Choice was an utterly undefended world. There was no government, let alone a military; there was certainly no one willing to fight and die in the defense of a wretched hive of scum and villainy. By the time someone managed to take control, if anyone did, the Marines would already be occupying the major settlements. Resistance would be utterly futile.
More reports came in as smaller parties of marines boarded the surrendered starships. Most of them were smugglers – few pirates would lurk in orbit when they could be back out in space, hunting for their next prizes – but three of them were slavers. Two of the slavers were empty, having returned to Hobson’s Choice for more slaves, while the third was crammed to bursting with young female slaves. They’d been kidnapped, according to the Marines, or sold into slavery by their families. And if the fleet had waited another hour or two before launching the invasion, they would never have had a hope of freedom.
“Move them to the hospital ships,” Roman ordered. How could anyone sell their children into slavery? He’d grown up on an asteroid and no one had ever threatened him with anything worse than being sent to bed without his supper. But the Rim of explored space was rarely civilized. A family might decide it was better to sell one child, no matter how horrific it was, than lose everyone. “And then transfer their former captors to the brig.”
He looked down at the display as more reports came in from the planet’s surface. A handful of locals, no doubt expecting the death penalty as soon as they were identified, had tried to put up a fight. The Marines hadn’t bothered to try to talk them down, knowing it would be futile. Instead, they’d simply called up heavy firepower from a hovertank and blown the enemy building into flaming debris. The bodies would be found and identified later.
“All the ships have been secured,” Palter reported. The display flickered and updated as the Marines took control of the captured ships, showing their status. “Should I dispatch prize crews?”
“See to it,” Roman said. It galled him, but Fifth Fleet’s logistics were appallingly weak. The Grand Senate had been willing to build thousands of new warships for the Federation Navy, but they’d been reluctant to pay for new freighters. It was a piece of short-sightedness that, he suspected, would come back to haunt them. Fifth Fleet was far too dependent on a small handful of bulk freighters for his comfort. “And prepare them for transit to Athena.”
The hours ticked by, slowly. Roman felt growing impatience, even though he knew the invasion was proceeding with astonishing speed. Hitting a more normal colony world, even one without defenses, would take much longer. Hobson’s Choice comprised only a handful of minor settlements, after all. They could literally round up everyone on the planet, load them into prison ships, and drop them off at the nearest penal world.
It was nearly nine hours before Elf contacted him, privately. “Roman,” she said, once the link was secure. “The planet is under control.”
“Good,” Roman said. “Any problems?”
“None,” Elf said. She sounded perturbed. “But there’s an odd shortage of captives.”
Roman frowned. A planet was a large place – and someone with the proper training or equipment could remain undiscovered for quite some time, if they tried. And finding them would require more time than he had.
“Did they have a chance to go to ground?”
“I’m not sure, but I don’t think so,” Elf said. “They only had around twenty minutes of warning before we came down and landed around the settlements. We’re interrogating some of the captives now, but it sounds as though a large number of people have been gone for quite some time.”
“Someone’s been recruiting,” Roman said, slowly.
“It looks that way,” Elf agreed. “The missing people are all mercenaries or starship pilots, as far as we can tell. And we know we didn’t capture many mercenaries when we occupied Admiral Justinian’s territory.”
Roman considered it. “What about our agents?”
“No sign of them,” Elf said. “They weren’t planning to stay on Hobson’s Choice indefinitely, though.”
“True,” Roman agreed. The last time he’d visited Hobson’s Choice, he’d helped to insert a number of agents from ONI. And no one had heard from the agents since. “Have the prisoners moved to the ships, then earmarked for interrogation,” he said. If someone was recruiting...pirates? Smugglers? Or Outsiders? “If we offer someone a chance to escape a hellworld, they might talk.”
“I’ll see to it,” Elf said. Her chuckle echoed down the link. “Easiest invasion I’ve ever seen, Roman. I didn’t lose a single Marine.”
“We could do with an easy victory,” Roman agreed. The Federation Navy had fought hard in the war, but it had also been badly demoralized. Between the certain knowledge that some senior officers had turned on the Federation, and the Grand Senate’s relentless attempts to control the Navy as thoroughly as possible, there were too many officers frightened to do anything without orders – in triplicate. “Good work, Marine.”
He took a breath. “Detach a handful of Marines to sweep the surface,” he ordered. There was no point in keeping the entire fleet in the backwater system, but they could leave a few surprises behind. “I’ll assign a destroyer squadron to the high orbitals. If we’re lucky, we should snag a few strays before word gets out and rogues start avoiding the planet.”
“Aye, sir,” Elf said.
“And then we’ll set course for Athena,” Roman concluded. He felt a thrill of anticipation at the thought of seeing the Rim. “And see just what’s waiting for us there.”
He closed the link, then settled back in his chair. All things considered, it had been a cakewalk, almost laughably easy. Thousands of captives had been liberated, hundreds of pirates, slavers and smugglers would face justice and Hobson’s Choice would no longer be a thorn in the Federation’s side. And the fleet’s morale would improve as news of the victory sank in.
Emperor Marius would be pleased.

Chapter Two

Drake, Marius. Commanding Officer of the Grand Fleet. Betrayed by the Grand Senate after his victory over Admiral Justinian. Rebelled against their authority and made himself Emperor of Earth.
-The Federation Navy in Retrospect, 4199

Earth, 4098
“I’m not interested in excuses,” Marius snarled. “I want to know what happened and why.”
General Theodore Ricardo looked unhappy. “We had a riot. On Earth.”
“I can see that,” Marius snapped. There were times when he thoroughly understood why the Grand Senate had shot so many military officers in the years following the First Battle of Earth. One month of being emperor had convinced him that no one in their right mind would actually want the job. “Why was this one allowed to happen?”
The general hesitated. He was a short balding man, with an air of nervousness that reminded Marius that Ricardo had no real experience on the front lines. The Grand Senate had left him in command of Earth’s security forces, apparently believing he posed no real threat to their supremacy. Marius suspected they might have had a point. General Ricardo lacked the ability to take a shit without permission from his superiors, written in triplicate and countersigned by every Grand Senator on Earth. Leaving him in command might have been a mistake.
“The protests swelled beyond our ability to handle them,” Ricardo said, finally. “We were rushing troops to the area when it turned into an outright riot. At that point, we lost control of large parts of Atlanta and had to hold back the troops, then advance when we had mustered sufficient manpower. By that point, a considerable amount of damage had been done to the city.”
Marius sighed, sitting back in his chair and glowering around the office. It had once belonged to the Federation President and, despite having all of the luxury torn out of it, was still too distracting for his comfort. The president had been a powerless figurehead for nearly a century, ever since the Imperialistic Faction had collapsed following the Blue Star War, but he’d still lived in luxury. And so had the Grand Senate. No wonder they’d been so badly disconnected from their people.
He shook his head, then looked at the display. Troops patrolled the streets of Atlanta and a dozen major cities, while hundreds of rioters – too greedy or too slow to escape capture – were marched off to hastily-erected detention centers. They hadn’t expected any form of violent response, he knew. The Grand Senate’s policy towards riots among the underclass had been to allow them to burn out in their own time. But then, most of the riots during that period had been staged. This one had been real. 
“It makes no sense,” he muttered. “They want to return to having their wants and needs provided rather than stand up for themselves?”
“It was inevitable,” Professor Kratman said. The professor – who had become Marius’s Minister of State – seemed unemotional, but Marius could hear an undercurrent of anger in his tone. “The Grand Senate took care of their needs in exchange for their votes. Over the years, it became a formality. And now you’ve removed their access to the social security network.”
Marius gave him a sharp look. “Was it a mistake?”
“No,” Kratman said. “The Federation spent far too much money every year just taking care of the population of Earth. But they grew used to sucking at the Federation’s teat and now...well, they don’t know what to do without it. And then there’s the birth control measures...”
“There’s no choice,” Marius said. “Earth’s population is already too high.”
He looked down at his hands. On Mars, where he’d been born, it was rare for a family to have more than two or three children, keeping the population relatively stable. The planet simply couldn’t afford unrestricted population growth. But on Earth, with food, drink and clothing provided by the government, the population seemed to spend most of its time turning out new children, who would grow to adulthood and start turning out new children of their own. Earth’s crime and infant mortality rate was the highest in the known galaxy, yet the population had continued to expand. It was utterly unsustainable.
His solution had been simple enough. The government-provided foodstuffs would be laced with contraceptives. Anyone who ate the food would be unable to have children without medical intervention, at least for a year after swallowing the drug. The idea had been to limit population growth as much as possible, while simultaneously encouraging emigration from Earth to the outer worlds. But the population of Earth had been babied so much that relatively few wanted to leave the comfort of humanity’s homeworld.
And when there are no real comforts, Marius thought, that becomes truly pathetic.
“But we are short of manpower to handle the riots,” General Ricardo said. “We should consider making concessions...”
Marius looked up at him, angrily. “Would you suggest we give in to pressure? To threats of violence? To riots that only make life worse for the rioters?”
He sighed. What sort of idiots thought that destroying shops, houses and infrastructure would encourage investment in their areas? Or that it would improve their lives?
“I would suggest that we are moving too fast,” Ricardo said. “We should consider slowing down.”
“But that would be seen as a sign of weakness,” Kratman pointed out, sharply. “We cannot afford to suggest that we would surrender, if pushed hard enough.”
Marius tapped the table, sharply. “No, we can’t,” he said. “The reforms will continue, General, until the time has come when they will no longer be needed.”
“Yes, sir,” Ricardo said. “And the prisoners?”
“Exile,” Marius said, shortly. There was no point in organizing trials. “They can do something useful on a colony world.”
He rubbed his temple, feeling a pounding headache building up under his skull. If he’d known just how much stress being emperor would cause him, he might have seriously considered going into exile after the Grand Senate had tried to kill him. Or, perhaps, seizing some of the more productive sectors for himself and leaving the Grand Senate to administer the Core Worlds themselves. But the Grand Senate, for all its honeyed words, had never given a damn about the population. Marius, for all of his harshness, was trying to help.
But no one likes to have medicine forced down their throats, he reminded himself.
“That raises another problem,” Ricardo said. “We need more transport.”
“The shipyards are turning out more freighters,” Marius said. “They will come.”
“But slowly,” Lawrence Tully said. The Comptroller of Earth sighed. “We have to move carefully to avoid destroying the remains of the economy.”
“We need them now,” Ricardo snapped. “And not just for transporting prisoners...”
“The problem,” Tully snapped back, “is that the entire economy is hanging on a knife-edge. A single false move could completely destroy it, shattering the entire Federation.”
Marius gritted his teeth. The headache was growing worse.
“We have to sort out who owns what,” Tully continued, as if he hadn’t said the same thing over and over again, at every meeting they’d held. “And we have to sort out the legal basis...”
“Enough,” Marius said. If the meeting went on, he’d do something he’d later regret. Or, worse, that he wouldn’t regret. “General, have the prisoners moved to a detention camp and hold them there until they can be transported to a colony world. Keep the troops on the ground and make it clear that any attempt to raise a second riot will result in harsh repression and exile. Find the leaders, if you can, and have them arrested too.”
“That will be difficult,” Ricardo said. “The old leaders are gone.”
Marius sighed. The Grand Senate had once controlled the protest movements on Earth, something that had puzzled him until he’d realized just how effective it was at keeping the lower classes from developing effective ways to make their voices heard. Everything from trade unions to outright anarchist groups had been controlled by the Grand Senate, a web of patronage that had given them staggering levels of control over Earth. But that network was gone now, leaving a new generation free to take its place. God alone knew how it would develop in future.
“Do your best,” he said. He raised his voice. “Dismissed.”
Professor Kratman hesitated at the door, then left when Marius glowered at him. The others left even quicker, as if they were glad to be out of his presence. Marius watched them go, then sat back in his chair and tried to think. There were too many problems on Earth for any of them to be solved quickly, no matter what he did. And then there were the persistent problems caused by the Grand Senate’s mismanagement of the rest of the Federation. A good third of the settled worlds were restless, only held back from trying to declare independence by the certain knowledge that it would draw a harsh response from the Grand Senate. But the Grand Senate was gone.
Life was much simpler on the command deck of a superdreadnaught, he told himself. Even when he’d been trying to keep the political commissioners from interfering in military operations, it had been so much simpler than trying to reform Earth, let alone the remainder of the Core Worlds. I knew what I was doing there.
He rose to his feet, guided by an impulse he didn’t fully understand, and walked through a sealed hatch that led down into the lower levels of the President’s House. It was a larger building than most people realized, although it had been decades since the government had been based out of it. Now some of the old offices had been reactivated, but others had been left alone. Marius had no intention of surrounding himself with a small army of bureaucratic sycophants, not when such inhuman creatures had played a large role in the Grand Senate’s decline and fall. But his plans to reform the bureaucracy had floundered on the cold hard fact that he needed the bureaucracy to make his reforms effective.
I should have had Tully shot, he thought, as he passed a trio of armed guards. But he was too effective at his job.
The secure door hissed open, revealing a detention facility. Quite why there was a detention facility in the basement of the President’s House was beyond him, even though he’d spent an hour digging through the archives last month in search of the answer. Maybe he didn’t want to know the answer. At least one of the Federation’s early presidents had been forced to endure a nasty separation from his wife before leaving office. He pressed his finger against another scanner, then opened the hatch. Inside, there was a line of detention cells. Nine out of ten were empty.
He walked to the occupied one and keyed a switch. The forcefield turned transparent, revealing a young man sitting on the bench, looking down at the solid metal floor. He’d once been relatively handsome, Marius recalled, and cut a swath through his superdreadnaught’s female crew. Now, dressed in an orange prison uniform, he looked tired and worn, perhaps even on the verge of madness. Marius might have kept him alive, but he hadn’t bothered to provide any form of mental simulation. After what the man had done, Marius had decided, he was damned if he was doing anything to make imprisonment any easier to bear.
“Hello, Blake,” he said.
Blake Raistlin turned to look at him. His dark skin was pallid and his eyes were sunken, as if he were too tired to sleep. Marius hadn’t looked like that since the dreaded final exams at the Academy, back before the Blue Star War. But Blake Raistlin had far more to bear than just the risk of failure, after years of hard work. His failure had cost his family everything, including their lives. Marius had shot some of them personally.
“Admiral,” Raistlin said. His voice was almost a whisper. “How nice of you to visit.”
Marius studied him for a long cold moment. “You’re still a prisoner,” he said. “How does it feel?”
“I stopped caring,” Raistlin said. “And you’re a prisoner too.”

“True,” Marius agreed. Being emperor was like being in prison. He was all-powerful...but, at the same time, he was limited. And he couldn’t go anywhere without a cordon of heavily-armed guards. “But you’re the one in the cell.”
Raistlin shrugged, expressively. “Why have you kept me alive?”
Marius felt a sudden surge of blind hatred. He’d trusted Raistlin, he’d depended on the young man...and, when the orders had arrived, Raistlin had tried to kill him. And Tobias, his friend, had died saving his life. He should be alive now, Marius knew, perhaps serving as an advisor or even as co-emperor. Instead, he was dead and buried and nothing would ever be the same again.
“Because I can,” Marius said. “And because we might need a show trial to distract the masses.”
Raistlin laughed. “Being emperor not all it was meant to be?”
“Your people left behind one hell of a mess,” Marius said. “Didn’t they give a damn about the population of Earth?”
“Of course not,” Raistlin said. His voice lightened, slightly. “They were only raised to give a damn about their families.”
He paused, dramatically. “Why are you here, Admiral?”
Marius looked through the forcefield, considering his answer. In truth, he wasn’t sure himself why he’d come. Raistlin could be left to rot away, eating tasteless prison food and drinking water, until the day his mind finally gave out. Or he could be put on trial. Or he could simply be taken out back and have a bullet put through the back of his skull. Marius had killed the senior Grand Senators personally. It would be no challenge to kill Raistlin himself.
But that wouldn’t make the young man suffer, he knew.
He’d been betrayed. A military organization couldn’t survive without trust – and trust was one thing that had been in short supply, after the mutinies and rebels and the imposition of a small army of political commissioners. Raistlin had been trusted, even though Marius had known of his family connections. There had seemed no grounds upon which to reject the talented young man. But, as soon as the orders came, Raistlin had tried to kill his commanding officer. The betrayal could not be allowed to go unpunished.
And you want to make him suffer, he thought. Shooting is far too good for him.
“Because I can,” Marius said. He paused. “Would you like to know what happened to the rest of your classmates? The ones who served the Federation Navy over their families?”
Raistlin started to giggle. There was more than a hint of insanity in the sound.
“Admiral,” he said, “what do you think you’ve built?”
Marius stared at him, more disturbed than he would have cared to admit. “What do you mean?”
“Riding a tiger is perfectly safe,” Raistlin said. He giggled again, then caught himself. “It’s when you try to get off that you start having problems. My family rode a tiger for far too long and could never muster the courage to try to get off. Each little compromise, each one a good idea at the time, built up into an overwhelming structure we could never free ourselves from.
“And here you are, Emperor,” he added. “How long will it be until you become everything you accused us of being?”
“You’re the last of the Grand Senatorial families,” Marius snarled. It was a lie, but close enough to the truth. The lower-level aristocrats had been exiled to a distant world where they would be left alone. It hadn’t occurred to him until much later that they might be happy to have left Earth for more reasons than merely being allowed to keep their lives. “And when you’re gone, you will be nothing.”
Raistlin rose to his feet and walked up to the forcefield, which spat and crackled at him as he stopped. “Look at yourself,” he mocked. “What happened to the proud commanding officer who stood unmoved on the bridge as his ship plunged into battle?”
“He found himself having to clean up a mess that should really have been solved hundreds of years ago,” Marius said, gathering his temper. “What happened to the young lieutenant who had the entire universe ahead of him?”
“He did his job,” Raistlin said. “He followed orders.”
He smirked at Marius’s scowl. “Tell me, Admiral,” he said. “When you were born, on Mars, the planet of war, were you ever exposed to any culture?”
Marius frowned, puzzled. Mars wasn’t a barbaric backwater any longer. Hell, it hadn’t been anything of the sort since the First Interstellar War. These days, it was as civilized as Earth, perhaps more so. The population hadn’t forgotten just how thin the line between life and death could be, even now.
“There’s a song,” Raistlin said. “From an opera. Many a king on a first-class throne, if he wants to call his crown his own, must manage somehow to get through, more dirty work that ever I do.”
Marius gave him a dry look. “I’m no stranger to dirty work,” he said.
“But are you prepared, Admiral, for the dirty work you’ll have to do as emperor?” Raistlin asked. “You’re not the person I knew and respected any longer. The job is changing you beyond recognition. What will you be in ten years, Emperor? Will you really give up the job?”
“Yes,” Marius said.
He took a moment to gather himself. “You will be put on trial, eventually,” he stated, flatly. “And then you will join your family in death.”
“See?” Raistlin said. “You’re not the person you used to be.”
“Neither are you,” Marius said.
He hit the switch, darkening the forcefield, then turned and walked away from the cell. It was hard to say which of them had gotten the better of the encounter, even though Raistlin was in a cell and Marius...was in a prison of his own making. He shook his head as he strode past the Marines, too distracted to acknowledge their salutes. No, he knew which of them had come out ahead. Raistlin was right, in so many ways.
But he’s still the one in a cell, he reminded himself, as he made his way back to his quarters, where his wife was waiting for him. And he will die soon.

Chapter Three

D’Artagnan, Lady Tiffany Eleanor Diana Katherine. Wife of Admiral, later Emperor, Marius Drake. Forced into marriage with him, she rapidly formed a bond with her husband that survived the attempt on his life and remained with him as he took on the position of Emperor...
-The Federation Navy in Retrospect, 4199

Earth, 4098
Marius had never considered himself a marrying man, even though it was an unspoken rule in the Federation Navy that admirals should marry, if only to have a hostess when assigned to command remote bases and fleet deployments. Indeed, he’d assumed he would never be promoted beyond vice admiral after his deployment to the Rim and never really considered looking for a wife. And yet, one had been provided for him by the Grand Senate. It still surprised him, years later, that he’d actually fallen in love with her.
And, perhaps, that she’d become the confidante Tobias had been, before his death.
Lady Tiffany was beautiful, with long red hair and a pale heart-shaped face. She’d once been considered one of the prettiest girls in high society, although she had also been considered largely unmarriageable for reasons that defied Marius’s understanding. However it had happened, he was glad she’d come to him, even though her family had intended to use the marriage to control him. He needed at least one person in his life he could trust completely.
She lay on the bed, looking up at him with a thin smile playing over her lips. Marius grinned back at her, grateful that they’d managed to find enough time to make love. He’d never understood how some of the Grand Senators had managed to keep harems, not when he’d found himself working from five in the morning till very late at night. But then, there had been hundreds of Grand Senators and only one emperor. There were too many pieces of paperwork only he, it seemed, could sign.
“I went to see Raistlin today,” he said, and outlined their conversation. “Do you think he’s right?”
“I think you shouldn’t talk to him,” Tiffany said, practically. “What do you gain from exchanging words with a murderer?”
“I...I don’t know,” Marius confessed. He rubbed the side of his head, feeling the last remnants of the headache fading away. “It’s like something I have to do.”
“It’s a bad habit,” Tiffany said. “Have him shot, or send him into exile, or do something, but don’t torment yourself like this. Raistlin will always have the edge on you when it comes to a verbal duel.”
“He’s cracking up,” Marius said.
“And he’s trying to make you crack up,” Tiffany said. “Raistlin was raised in a Grand Senatorial family. Manipulation of your emotions will have been hammered into his head along with his mother’s milk. He will be very aware of every crack in your emotional armor and how to open it up for best results. You should not try to talk to him.”
She sat upright, then poked him in the chest. “You need to get rid of him and concentrate on the future,” she said, firmly. “And there’s no shortage of work to do.”
“Tell me about it,” Marius groaned.
Tiffany crossed her arms under her bare breasts. “Let’s see,” she said. “There’s the economic recovery program, the training program, the colonization program...”
“I didn’t mean that literally,” Marius snapped. He regretted it instantly. “I’m sorry...”
“You need to find more people you can trust,” Tiffany said, ignoring his apology. “There’s too much for one person to do.”
“But I have a shortage of trustworthy people,” Marius muttered. “Where do I get more?”
He sighed, bitterly. Raistlin’s betrayal had hurt more than he cared to admit, but it wasn’t the only problem. Many of the people he’d picked for his ministers had been people he knew and trusted, but not everyone who fell into that category were able to handle the work of pushing the Federation into reform. Commodore Garibaldi and his generation might be superb fleet commanders – the deaths of so many high-ranking officers had left plenty of room for rapid promotion – but they lacked organizational experience. He couldn’t call one of them back and put him in command of economic recovery.
And then there was the problem that untangling the mess the Grand Senate had made of the economy would take centuries, if they were lucky. Marius had thought the fleet command for the ill-fated Operation Retribution had been tangled, but the economy was far – far – worse. Figuring out who actually owned what – and which properties no longer had an owner – would take longer than he had. He’d promised himself ten years as emperor, no more. But the task was already looking to take longer than his entire lifespan.
“You’ll need to start looking among the managers,” Tiffany said. She gave him a mischievous smile. “Did you really think that we aristocrats did all the work ourselves?”
Marius eyed her, suspiciously. “I wondered how you managed to work while hosting endless parties,” he said.
Tiffany made a face. “I never went to parties,” she said. She cleared her throat, loudly. “I believe that most of the High Families had their own crop of managers. They would be loyal to their patrons, of course, but they also have a great deal of practical experience. And, now that their patrons are gone, most of them will be looking for something else to do. You could round them up and put them to work.”
“I see,” Marius said. “Are they trustworthy?”
“They’ll be loyal to their own families, now,” Tiffany said. “You could make sure their families remain safe and they’ll be loyal.”
Or keep them as hostages, Marius thought. Once, it would have revolted him to even consider such measures. Now, it struck him as something necessary. Raistlin was right, in a way. He definitely wasn’t the person he’d been. 
He looked up at his wife. “Do you want the task of finding them?”
“Not if I can avoid it,” Tiffany said. She sighed. “But do I assume correctly that I don’t have a choice?”
“I’d prefer to leave it in your hands,” Marius confirmed. “I don’t know how far I trust Tully.”
“You can trust him to put his own interests first,” Tiffany told him. “But you can also trust him not to think outside the box.”
Marius stroked his head. “And then we have the problem of sorting out the rules and regulations,” he added. “I’ve got a meeting this evening to discuss it...boring, boring, boring...”
“But necessary,” Tiffany said, firmly. “The Grand Senate screwed up the rules and regulations to ensure they remained on top. Undoing those will be the first step forward towards true economic recovery.”
Marius cursed under his breath. He’d never really thought of the Federation as flimsy, not since the Inheritance Wars had ensured that no planet thought it could declare independence and leave the Federation. Even Admiral Justinian and the other warlords hadn’t managed to crack the towering edifice. But it was rotten to the core, he knew now, and only sheer luck had kept it intact for so long. If he failed to handle the economic question as delicately as possible, the Federation would collapse into rubble. And then a whole new series of wars would begin.
“Fine,” he said, as he rose to his feet. He would have liked to spend the rest of the day in bed with her, but there was far too much to do. They’d had more time together on his flagship! “I’ll expect you to sit in on the meeting. And the professor.”
“Understood,” Tiffany said. She stood as he walked towards the shower. “Do you want company in there?”
* * *
Marius was still smiling as he walked into yet another meeting room, this one decorated in blue and green wallpaper. Judging from the handful of portraits on the walls, showing earlier presidents of the Federation, it was meant to reassure rather than intimidate. It made a change from the office he was starting to think of as his throne room.
“Be seated,” he said, as he sat down at the head of the table. He’d chosen to shun formality almost as soon as he’d made himself emperor. “What do you have for me?”
“We tried to review all of the rules and regulations that were considered to be in force prior to the Second Battle of Earth,” Larimore Hammond said. The portly man had been a legal expert at the Luna Academy before Professor Kratman had recommended him for the task of rewriting the Federation’s regulations. “Most of them are starkly contradictory and all of them are impossible to follow, without baksheesh. The only purpose they serve is enriching the bureaucrats and keeping the Grand Senate in control of the economy.”
Marius sighed. It was a dirty little secret on Earth – and the rest of the Core Worlds – that almost anything could be authorized, if the bribe was large enough. Even in the military, a handful of bribes to the right person could get anything done. Admiral Justinian, the post-battle analysis had indicated, had bribed heavily to get his operatives into position to do some real damage on Earth. Indeed, if Marius’s flight hadn’t been delayed by a few minutes, Admiral Justinian might well have won the war in one fell swoop. But even that disaster hadn’t convinced the Grand Senate to do something about bribery.
But they didn’t have a choice, he thought, bitterly. They needed the bribes to keep the system running.
“The codes cannot be revised in anything resembling a satisfactory manner,” Hammond continued, firmly. “There are just too many pieces of junk attached to the laws for us to fix them all. Instead, I would like to remove or cancel as many regulations as possible, with our role being restricted to ensuring fair play. This would encourage entrepreneurs to start up new businesses as quickly as possible, eventually absorbing or replacing the old Grand Senate-owned businesses. In the long run, our economy would become a great deal stronger.”
“However, it would also weaken Earth relative to the Core Worlds and the outer colonies,” Tully put in. The Comptroller of Earth didn’t sound happy. His thin lips looked even thinner than usual. “It would have unfortunate long-term effects for the balance of power.”
“I don’t see why,” Marius said, although he had a pretty good idea. “Earth has plenty of industries already.”
“It’s a problem caused by the educational facilities,” Kratman said. “The Grand Senate made some reforms, true, but not enough to take advantage of any economic boom. Earth’s population would be left behind.”
“Which would give them incentive to learn to work harder,” Hammond snapped. “The Grand Senate was strangling the life out of the economy before the coup. Now, we have an unbalanced system that is on the verge of collapse.”
“But it will also make it harder for Earth to recover,” Tully snapped back. “This solution will cause other problems for us in the long run.”
“As opposed to short-term problems,” Hammond thundered. “I...”
Marius slapped the table and they fell silent.
“I think we have to admit,” Marius said into the silence, “that there are going to be problems – that there is going to be pain – no matter what we do. Is that correct?”
No one disagreed.
“Then we have to strike now, before events slide completely out of control,” Marius continued. “We will strike down most of the rules and regulations, leaving the ground as clear as we can for an economic revival.”
“But it will cause problems,” Tully said. “What if there’s an ecological disaster?”
“The regulations as they exist are too strict to allow any form of activity,” Hammond pointed out. “And when someone slips someone else a bribe, we get the ecological disaster anyway.”
His eyes narrowed. “Or are you facing pressure from your subordinates?”
Tully’s face darkened. “I...”
“Enough,” Marius said, quietly. “Our purpose is to reform the Federation, to allow it to have a chance to breathe, to eventually pass control back to the population. We are not here to assist any special interests.”
He sighed, inwardly. The bureaucracy was the largest single employer in the Federation, with literally billions of workers. It didn’t take much imagination to realize that cutting rules and regulations would mean less work for the bureaucrats, making it impossible for them to justify their employment. The Grand Senate might not have intended to encourage the bureaucracy to grow to unsustainable levels, but it had succeeded beyond belief. It could take years, even decades, to get permission to open a business, if there wasn’t a large enough bribe.
But no one used that as the excuse, did they? It was all about protecting the workers from exploitation, or protecting the environment of countless worlds, or even about protecting the owners from themselves. A hundred thousand excuses, each one so calm and reasonable and nonsensical. And each one a mocking nail in the Federation’s coffin, because they were useless. Marius knew, all too well, that a bribe in the right place could ensure that anything – absolutely anything – was overlooked.
He tapped his forehead, absently. The headache was back.
“See to cutting the regulations down to the bare minimum,” he ordered. He turned to look at Tully. “I trust you have ordered the freeze on recruitment?”
“It’s proving hard, very hard,” Tully said. “We have a contractual obligation to complete the hiring process for bureaucrats who were applying at the time of the coup.”
“There are to be no new bureaucrats hired beyond this point,” Marius said. He felt a sudden surge of hatred and had to remind himself, sharply, that he couldn’t shoot everyone who annoyed him. “We will also be looking for ways to retrain them to do something useful.”
“Keeping the Federation in order is useful,” Tully protested. “I really think that we shouldn’t move too quickly...”
“But we have to move now,” Marius said. “Or would you sooner watch as Earth collapses into chaos?”
He moved on before Tully could say a word. “See to it, please,” he ordered. “Now.”
“Yes, sir,” Hammond said. “I’ll have the revised code on your desk within the week.”
Marius watched as Hammond and Tully left, then looked up at Kratman. “What the hell was I thinking?”
“Better to reign in hell than to be dead and buried,” Kratman misquoted. “And besides, you have managed to make some improvements already.”
“Not enough,” Marius said. “Tell me something. Did you ever consider, when you were on the Matterhorn, that it wasn’t worth it?”
“Never,” Kratman said. “But that was before the real corruption started to set in.”
Marius nodded. The Blue Star War had weakened the Imperialist Faction in Federation politics to the point where it became completely ineffectual. It wouldn’t have been so bad if the remaining two factions, for their separate reasons, hadn’t worked together to weaken the Federation Navy and bureaucracy. And then Admiral Justinian had tried to overthrow them in one blow. There were days when Marius wondered if the Federation would have done any better if Justinian had succeeded. Someone more interested in power for its own sake might have been better at keeping his subordinates in line.
“I also remember being drenched with work when I reported for duty,” Kratman added, dryly. “Don’t you?”
“I suppose,” Marius said. 
He smiled at the memory. Midshipman Drake had bitched about the amount of work he had to do, until he’d been promoted. Lieutenant Drake had been sure he was the hardest-worked officer on the ship, until he’d become the XO. Commander Drake had cursed his youthful self even as he worked himself to the bone...and then he’d been promoted again. There had been no respite as a Captain, Commodore or Vice Admiral. The splendid cabin and the right to have a staff of his own had come with more paperwork than any one man could do in a lifetime, as well as the risks of commanding a fleet in battle. 
“There are too many vested interests for any such change to go unimpeded,” Kratman said, after a moment. “We may want to look at selling off shipyards and production nodes to their former managers. Give them a stake in the new order, something to keep them loyal – and productive.”
Marius sighed. The Grand Senate, to its credit, had started mass production of everything from missiles to superdreadnaughts and fleet carriers. It wasn’t something he wanted to slow down, not when there were countless problems along the Rim that needed handling as quickly and efficiently as possible. The warlords might be gone, but the pirates remained...and there was still a giant question mark over the Outsiders. What were they doing? They had to know the Federation’s war with its rogue military officers had finally come to an end.
“We will see,” he said. He considered, briefly, just taking Tiffany and a starship and heading for somewhere nicely isolated. His sense of duty wouldn’t allow it. “How are the new students coming along?”
“Slowly,” Kratman said. “The educational base isn’t there. But we’re working on them.”
Marius gritted his teeth. It was absurd that the Federation, with billions of young men and women within the Sol System alone, couldn’t produce enough manpower to crew the Federation Navy, but there was no avoiding the problem. Earth’s educational system simply didn’t produce enough men and women who could read, let alone handle a computer, drive an aircar or anything else useful. It would take generations to produce more than a handful of people each year who didn’t have to do things by rote.
And we might not be able to trust manpower from the outer worlds, he added, in the privacy of his own mind.
“The sooner we start mass exoduses from Earth, the better,” Marius said, finally. “But will it be enough?”
“Not for a decade,” Kratman said. “Moving millions of people will take years, even with the contraception drugs. But the sooner we begin, the sooner it will be done.”
“If it ever is,” Marius said. He shook his head. “I must have been out of my mind.”
“It’s a dirty job, but someone has to do it,” Kratman said. “You’re doing fine.”

Chapter Four

Chang Li. Former elected Senator from Nova Athena. Sole non-Grand Senate linked Senator in the Federation Senate, thus effectively powerless. Departed Earth following the Grand Senate’s imposition of emergency laws and effective state of martial law. Leader of the Outsider Federation...
-The Federation Navy in Retrospect, 4199

Sanctuary, 4098
Very few human eyes – and none from the Federation – had set eyes on the Sanctuary System. It was over a hundred light years from the official edge of explored space, a cold planet circling a cold star. There was nothing to attract the attention of the Federation Survey Service, which concentrated on stars that might have given birth to life-bearing worlds and tended to overlook red giants or white dwarves. Even if a survey ship passed through the system, Chang Li had been assured, there would be little to see. The laboring cadres were hidden deep under the planet’s poisonous atmosphere.
She ran her hand through her long dark hair, then sucked in her breath as the shuttlecraft dropped through the atmosphere. Sanctuary was very far from the ideal human world, something that would further disqualify it as a target of interest for the Survey Service. The thought that life might have arisen on its surface wouldn’t occur to any of them, she hoped, even though Sanctuary had an intelligent race of its own. But then, even if the Survey Service had noticed, it was unlikely they’d care. The planet was completely useless to human settlers.
The shuttle bounced as it passed through the clouds, then broke through and headed towards the base. Li eyed the surface through the shuttle’s sensors, feeling her flesh crawl as she saw the creatures moving far below her. The Insects – their real name was utterly unpronounceable to human mouths – looked like giant beetles. Merely looking at them reminded her of the insect phobia shared by so many humans, yet they were an intelligent race in their own right. And, given that they shared a hive mind of sorts, a unique one. There was no other hive mind known to exist in Federation space.
A handful of large buildings – resembling anthills as much as anything else – had been built around the landing pad. She studied them doubtfully for a long moment, then dismissed her worries about concealment. If the Survey Service started sending probes into Sanctuary’s atmosphere, they’d discover the Insects in short order, sealing their fate. The Federation would rapidly send forces to convince the Insects to bow down to humanity – or die. There would be no alternative. The Federation had a long memory – and besides, beating down aliens served as its reason for existence. A new alien threat would help to unite it and, just incidentally, keep the Grand Senate in power. 
But the Grand Senate is gone, she thought. And what does that mean for us?
Another shudder ran through the shuttle as it dropped down and landed neatly in front of one of the giant buildings. Li reached for her mask, pulled it on over her face and walked towards the airlock. Normally, on any alien homeworld, there would be plenty of places suitable for humans, but not here. The Insects had offered to build the human shuttlecraft an airtight walkway, but Li had declined. They were allies, not slaves, even if they could breathe human air without problems.
Outside, the chill caught at her despite the heating elements in her suit. She walked across the pad, into the nearest building and through another airlock. Inside, the atmosphere was human-norm, thankfully. She wasn’t the only visitor who needed an earth-like atmosphere to live. The entire Outsider Federation leadership had come to attend the meeting. 
And if the Federation knew we were consorting with not one, but two alien races, our deaths would be assured, she thought, as she took her seat. But they’d have to work hard to decide just what they were actually going to shoot us for.
“Honorable Chang Li,” High Lord Slant said. He looked more human than the Insect representative, but nowhere near human enough to fool even a casual sweep. The Marsha resembled green gorillas, although their furry skins were covered by human-designed uniforms. “Welcome.”
“I thank you,” Li said. The Marsha had been expanding into space when the Outsiders had discovered them and made common cause. She didn’t want to think about what would have happened if they’d been discovered by the Federation first. As a starfaring race, they would have been rapidly and cheaply crushed by the Federation Navy. “And I thank all of you.”
There was a long pause. “I called this meeting because there have been developments in the Federation,” she said. “The Justinian War is over...and Admiral Drake has made himself Emperor of the Federation. We must ask ourselves, now, if we still wish to proceed with our plans.”
She waited for the council to review the documents she’d uploaded into the room’s processor, thinking hard. Years ago, she’d come to the conclusion that there was no real hope of salvaging anything from the Federation. The Grand Senate held power too strongly for anyone to take it from them legally – and if anyone threatened to get too close to supreme power, they would simply change the rules. Her election had been the last gasp of the colonies, she knew. It had taken years of careful planning to ensure her victory over two candidates backed and funded by the Grand Senate...and yet her victory had turned to ashes as soon as she’d reached Earth. There had been no hope of changing anything.
“Nothing has changed,” High Lord Slant proclaimed. “This is the same Admiral who worried us, years ago. We could not expect him to leave us alone.”
Li nodded, remembering the first time she’d set eyes on Admiral Drake. He’d been addressing the Grand Senate, begging – pleading, almost – for reinforcements to be sent to the Rim. Drake had even figured out that someone was organizing the Outsiders, the web of semi-legal colonies out beyond the Rim, as well as suspecting the existence of two unknown alien races. He was entirely correct, Li knew, and only the Grand Senate’s interest in maintaining its own domains rather than expansion had prevented him from carrying out survey missions of his own. There was no reason to expect him not to launch the missions himself, once he was in a secure position on Earth.
“The Federation has also been weakened,” General Charlie Stuart said. The short dark-haired commander of the Outsider Strike Fleet looked, as ever, reassuringly competent. “If we’d been in a position to strike three years ago...”
“But we weren’t,” Li said, a little sharper than she’d intended. If they’d known Admiral Justinian was planning to make a bid for power, they might have tried to take advantage of it for themselves. “There’s no point in crying over wasted opportunities.”
“There’s also the problem that the Federation possesses a vastly greater industrial infrastructure,” Director Wilma Ripley pointed out. “Given time, they will out-produce us by a staggering margin.”
“Then we move now,” Stuart said. He tapped the table, then brought up a chart comparing the Outsider industrial plant with that of the Federation. The Outsiders had a more modern plant with better management, but there were few other advantages. “The longer we delay, the harder it will be to win.”
Li winced, inwardly. Forty years of planning, forty years of building up a fleet that could challenge the Federation Navy, forty years...all of which might have been wasted, thanks to Admiral Justinian. The Federation Navy had been top-heavy, with poor training and worse morale, prior to the Battle of Earth. It wasn’t anything of the sort now and, if a number of senior officers had been killed, hundreds of talented newcomers had risen up to take their places.
“There is no alternative,” Slant said. The humans could make their peace with the Federation – or at least go into exile. The Marsha could only look forward to endless servitude, if the Federation didn’t decide they were too dangerous to be allowed to exist. “Your reports make it clear that the Federation is planning a new wave of expansion. This will carry them inevitably towards our space. At that point, we will have no choice, but to fight.”
“Striking now gives us the greatest chance of outright victory,” Stuart agreed. “A long war would be disastrous for both of us.”
“But our industry is not ready,” the Insect chirped. It had no name, merely a number. “If our first blow misfired, we would be unable to keep the fleet operational.”
Li hesitated, trying to parse out her own thoughts. Caution came naturally to her after a decade on Earth, where the grim awareness that a single slipup would mean her death had kept her mind focused on security. The risks of striking now were immense, she knew; they were, in many ways, unable to match the Federation. And yet, the Federation would never be weaker. A series of hammer blows might topple the structure, allowing them to win by default. Even if they lost the battles, their homeworlds and colonies would remain undiscovered. There would be time to rebuild and try again.
She looked down at the table, thinking hard. There were millions of potential rebels within the Federation, from large insurgent movements on various worlds to rebel groups and discontented citizens on others. Even Earth had its discontents, although the Grand Senate had squashed or co-opted most of those. The Outsiders had been making contact with dozens of groups, offering weapons and support in exchange for a coordinated uprising. It was risky – even with the Federation fighting a civil war, they were still keeping an eye on potential threats – but there was no alternative. The more forces they could keep tied down, the better.
But she also knew just how harshly the Federation would respond. It had happened before, after smaller uprisings. Leaders were executed, entire societies were purged or transported or simply buried under crushing piles of debt...and hopes of independence, even of some limited autonomy, firmly crushed. Did she really want that on her conscience? 
She shook her head, but she knew it was futile. The Marsha had to go to war, if only to fight for the independence they would lose when the Federation discovered them. And there were too many rebels and insurgents who would fight anyway, once the Federation started tightening its grip. She could do nothing to stop it. All she could do was muster the strength of the Outsider Federation and pray that it would be enough to win the war.
“It seems we have no choice,” she said. Victory was the only acceptable outcome. “How quickly can we launch the offensive?”
“We can move our ships to jump-off positions within a month,” Stuart said. “But I would prefer to take two months, so we can insert commandos and undercover agents into various fleet bases and other targets. That would give us the greatest chance of capturing as many Federation military installations intact as possible.”
“Adding to our fighting power,” Li said. She’d watched as the military officers argued their way through the planning stages. “But will it be enough?”
The memory bothered her more than she wanted to admit. There was no escaping the fact that the Federation was staggeringly huge. It would take months, even using the Asimov Point network, to move from the Rim to Earth, giving the Federation time to organize its defenses and mount counterattacks. The Outsiders would have the advantage of cohesion and concentration, while the Federation Navy was scattered, but that wouldn’t last. And if the Federation managed to parry the blows, it would stand a very good chance of winning the war itself.
“There’s no way to avoid going through their bases on the Rim,” Stuart said, earnestly. “They would go after our supply lines, given half a chance. We need to take them out before they realize they’re at war.”
“They will be struck before they realize the blow is on the way,” Slant assured them, loudly. The Marsha were a warlike race, one that looked for the next challenge and embraced it eagerly. “And that will be the end.”
Li nodded, although she still had her doubts.
They spent the next hour studying the final version of the operational plan. Li watched as Stuart went through every detail, answering questions with a patience she suspected he didn’t feel. He’d been involved in the Outsider Federation from the day it had started to take shape, even doing most of the legwork behind assembling the Outsider Navy. She couldn’t blame him for wanting to put it to the test, even though it would risk everything. There were only so many simulations they could run, he’d once told her, before they started to lose their edge.
Slant held his tongue until the end, when he started asking questions about assault and occupation troops for Federation worlds. Li had to watch as Stuart explained, carefully, that most of the troops would be human. The Federation was largely xenophobic and, if the locals saw alien troops on the ground, there would be trouble. Memories of the First Interstellar War had yet to fade, even though no one alive remembered humanity’s traumatic first encounter with an alien race.
“My people will demand the honor of fighting for glory,” Slant said, crossly. It was hard to read the emotions on his face, but the way his fist was twitching was quite indicative. He was annoyed. “We cannot be sidelined.”
“There will be assaults on worlds without local populations,” Stuart said, sharply. “Your people can assault them, if they wish.”
“There is no glory if there are no witnesses,” Slant said.
Li concealed her exasperation as the argument raged on. The Marsha didn’t have an aristocratic society, not in the sense that the Grand Senate had been composed of aristocrats. As far as she understood it, the Marsha won glory, which translated into breeding and bragging rights. The more successful a person was, starting from nothing, the more honor and power they amassed. Instead of ensuring that their children had the best start in life, their parents actually disadvantaged them. How else could they gain honor? The system made little sense to her, but she had a feeling that human affairs were equally mystifying to the Marsha.
“Glory is immaterial,” the Insect said. “All that matters is victory.”
“Glory will decide who leads us,” Slant said. There was no point in shouting at the Insects. They didn’t have emotions, as humans understood the term. “The next generation must have its leaders.”
Li held up a hand. “We cannot run the risk of fighting an insurgency in our rear,” she said, carefully. “Correcting the opinions many humans have of aliens will take years – and responsible behaviour on our part.”
“Human thoughts and feelings are not our concern,” Slant said. 
“They will be if they make the difference between peaceful surrender and hopeless resistance,” Stuart said. “We have no choice but to humor them. Allowing them to grow into the realization that most xenophobic feelings are based on nothing more than propaganda will take years.”
On that note, the meeting ended.
* * *
“So tell me,” Li said, when she and Stuart were alone. “What are the odds?”
“Fifty-fifty, I would say,” Stuart said. “We will have the advantage of surprise, some new technology of our own and a very experienced and motivated set of crews. They will have superior numbers and superior industry, if they manage to get it back up to speed. It will not be an easy task. Their tax base is shot to hell, for a start.”
He paused. “Do you still want to make a peace offer? It might be harder to get them to listen after we’ve started the war.”
Li nodded. “It might bring the war to an end,” she said. “If we give them a way out...”
She would have preferred to make the offer ahead of the war, but she knew it would give the Federation time to prepare. A hammer blow that shattered the Federation’s control over the Rim would shock it, she hoped, enough to convince the emperor to talk peace. The Grand Senate certainly would have considered surrender...
...But would Admiral Drake?
She recalled their one meeting and scowled. Drake hadn’t struck her as someone who gave up easily, even after being recalled to Earth to explain his failure. Other admirals might have begged for mercy, or even promised to do more with less, but not Drake. He’d told the Grand Senate, to their faces, that he needed more ships to produce results. And then he’d taken command of the defenses of Earth, saved the planet from a bolt from the blue, and then...
“Emperor Marius Drake will not give up easily,” she said. He’d had plenty of opportunities to set up as a warlord in his own right – and, despite herself, she was sure he hadn’t intended to become emperor. “We will need to ensure the situation is hopeless before he surrenders.”
“Then we will have to fight hard,” Stuart said. “Two months to get everything in order...”
He shook his head. “It will be chancy, Li,” he warned. “But we have no other choice.”
“Of course not,” Li agreed. “If the Federation ever found out about us, we would be dead. And not just us. Everyone would be dead.”
She sat down and stared at the display. It had been years since some of her ancestors had fled the Inheritance Wars. Longer, since they had first left Earth in search of a new home, one where they could live in their own manner. But the Federation had refused to let them go, and their first attempt to make themselves independent had misfired badly. This time, the Federation was weakened and they would never have a better chance at success. 
But if it went wrong...
Then we die, she told herself. But what else can we do?

Chapter Five

Barany, Governor Richardson. Governor of Athena, Sector Capital. Long-standing client of the Warren Family (Grand Senate). Known for being intensely corrupt. Threatened with recall just prior to the Justinian War. 
-The Federation Navy in Retrospect, 4199

Athena, 4098
There was always a sense of...something...when one passed through an Asimov Point. It was never easy to describe. Roman had tended to think of it as a kind of anticipation, mixed with fear. Anything, anything at all, could be on the other side of the disruption in space-time that linked two star systems together. And these days, after the Justinian War, it was impossible to be entirely certain of what was on the far side. Even friendly space could turn out to be anything but.
He braced himself as Valiant slid through the Asimov Point and materialized in another star system, fifty light years from her departure point. The display flickered, then rapidly started to update, revealing three heavy battlestations protecting the Asimov Point, backed up by a handful of outdated cruisers and destroyers. Athena had been largely uninvolved in the Justinian War and the defenses had never been built up, unlike Earth and a hundred other worlds that happened to be on the front line. Roman had no doubt of his ability to take the system, if necessary. And, no matter how loyal Governor Barany claimed to be, Roman suspected he would be reluctant to cooperate fully. He’d certainly refused to co-operate with Admiral Drake!
“You will have full authority to assess the situation,” Emperor Marius had said, before Roman had boarded the shuttle for Valiant. It was the last time they’d seen one another, sharing a drink as they discussed the future. “Barany may just be a fool – if so, you can retire him with full honors. If not, remove him from power and send him home.”
“Transit complete,” Palter reported, interrupting Roman’s thoughts. “Moving to assembly point now.”
Roman nodded. Fifth Fleet was coming through the Asimov Point in a tight stream of starships, much to the horror of local traffic control. It had been a risk – one mistiming and two starships would collide or find themselves sharing the same space when they materialized – but he’d seen no choice. Quite apart from showing off, it allowed him to muster as much firepower as possible within the system at terrifying speed. If the defenders had wanted to put up a fight, outdated or no, they would have given him a bloody nose. It was the last thing he wanted.
“I don’t think anyone would actually fight for him,” Emperor Marius had said. “Justinian, whatever else could be said about him, had enough charisma to convince his subordinates to go along with him. Barany has none of that, Roman. But he will be desperate if he fears the worst.”
And he might well, Roman thought. By now, he has to know that Admiral Drake is the new Emperor – and Drake complained prominently about him to the Grand Senate. It might be time for him to take his winnings and run before we reach his world.
He forced himself to watch patiently as Fifth Fleet slowly assembled and shook itself down into formation. The drills had helped, he knew, although there was still a hint of imprecision about the fleet’s movements. If they’d still been in the pre-war era, heads would have rolled. A starship out of position by a handful of metres would be considered a major disaster. Now...now it was better to be able to fight than to look good. It would be a long time before the lessons of the war faded away.
“Formation complete,” Palter reported. “Local traffic control is requesting permission to switch back to civilian operations. They’re claiming to have lost millions in credits over the last thirty minutes.”
“Tell them to switch back,” Roman said, not bothering to dispute their claims. The military had transit priority, even in peacetime. Besides, using the Asimov Points was so much quicker than making the crossing between stars without them. “And then dispatch the observers to the battlestations.”
“Aye, sir,” Palter said.
Roman smiled, then glanced at the stream of reports from his ships. There were no major problems, although a couple of ships had barely avoided collisions as they emerged from the Asimov Point. A freak twist in the local gravity field had almost killed four hundred officers and crew, along with destroying two cruisers. Roman muttered a silent prayer of thanks under his breath, then tapped a command into the datanet. The fleet shook itself out and started to glide towards Athena. Governor Barany was waiting for them there.
“Local traffic is surprisingly high,” Commodore Sonia Yu said, from her console at the other side of the CIC. The middle-aged woman looked over at Roman, thoughtfully. “There’s more freighters in the system than we were led to expect.”
“And that means...what?” Roman asked. Athena was a major junction point, with five Asimov Points and a number of colonies within two weeks of FTL travel. “A sign of trouble?”
“Governor Barany’s staff didn’t declare anything like this level of traffic when they reported back to the Grand Senate last year,” Yu said. “He may be skimming taxes from the unreported ships, sir, or he may be up to something more sinister. It isn’t a good sign.”
“No,” Roman agreed. He frowned as more icons popped into existence on the datanet. Athena had only been settled a hundred years ago, the oldest colony world in the sector. It shouldn’t have had so much activity, not according to the standard development profiles. “Can you give me a complete breakdown?”
He watched as the analysts went to work. Athena should have had a handful of asteroid colonies, a single cloudscoop and maybe a pair of colonies on the other rocky worlds within the system. Sector Capital or not, there just wasn’t the funding available for more rapid development. The outdated fortifications protecting the planet itself had been the single largest investment from the Federation. And yet...
The asteroid belt was brimming with activity, there were no less than four cloudscoops operating in orbit around the gas giant and hundreds of freighters were making their way in and out of the system. It was an incredible leap forward, all the more remarkable because none of it had happened prior to 4092, when the Justinian War had begun. Six years of effective abandonment had led to this? Roman couldn’t help wondering just what Governor Barany had done to make so much spring up out of nowhere – and it if could be duplicated elsewhere.
“We will enter orbit in five hours,” Palter reported. “The governor will have plenty of warning of our approach.”
“We’re not trying to hide,” Roman said. What would the governor do? It was hard to argue with success – and it was clear the governor had been very successful. But he had to know that Emperor Marius had a grudge, not without reason. “Just keep a sharp eye on the planetary defenses.”
The hours ticked by slowly. Roman watched grimly as more and more activity came into detection range, suggesting that Athena had jumped two whole development stages within six years. There was a small shipyard in orbit and two more floating in separate orbits around the sun, both civilian-grade but very impressive. The only thing missing was an updated defense grid. There had been no attempt to improve the battlestations protecting the planet from attack.
And that makes no sense, Roman thought, coldly. If you ruled this system, wouldn’t you want to make sure that nothing bad happened to it?
A thought struck him and he tapped his console, bringing up the system display. It was impossible to be sure, but it looked very much as though there was no fear. The freighters made their way in and out of the system without fear of attack, even though there was little hope of support arriving from Athena in time to make a difference, if they ran into trouble. And that made no sense. Everyone knew that pirates and rebels plagued the Rim, looting, raping and killing their way across stage-one and stage-two colonies. Hell, Roman himself had lost his parents to a pirate attack. It made no sense at all.
He keyed his console, linking into the Marine Command Net. “Elf, I’d like you to look at the data,” he said. “Tell me what you think.”
There was a pause. Roman used it to watch the display, wondering just how many rules and regulations had been flouted. But...Athena had been effectively out of contact with the Grand Senate for six years. What had Governor Barany managed to do without the Grand Senate peeking over his shoulder? And was it really right to punish him for actually taking his system and turning it into a success?
But if he’s made deals with pirates, Roman thought, it isn’t something we could allow to go unpunished.
“Picking up a signal from the planet,” Palter said. “Governor Barany sends his regards and invites you to call on him as soon as the fleet enters orbit.”
Roman considered it, briefly. He could hardly avoid paying a call on the governor, even if what he suspected was true. And besides, it would give him a chance to take the measure of the governor in person. Emperor Marius had given him considerable latitude, after all. But he had a feeling, if the old reports were entirely accurate, that the governor was up to his receding hairline in pirate activity. He’d taken advantage of six years of near-independence to build up a protection racket that was blighting the entire sector.
Roman’s earpiece buzzed. “I don’t like this,” Elf said. “It looks, very much, like the governor has made a deal with someone.”
“I know,” Roman said. “You have the plans for Operation Swap. Start tailoring them to the current situation.”
“Aye, sir,” Elf said.
Slowly, Athena herself came into view on the display. She looked like Earth had once been, according to the history books; a blue-green orb hanging against the blackness of interstellar space. But she was surrounded by five heavy – and outdated – battlestations, as well as countless orbital facilities and transhipment nodes. There were far more than the system should be able to support, Roman calculated mentally. The Gross Planetary Product had to be significantly higher than the Grand Senate had been led to believe. 
“Link us into System Command,” he ordered. “I want us to have complete access to their systems – everything from short-range active sensors to long-range probes and listening platforms. Get the data filtered through to the intelligence analysts and tell them I want a complete breakdown of the system. Specifically, I want to know just what the fuck is going on.”
“Aye, sir,” Palter said.
Elf’s face appeared in the display. “Operation Swap has been updated,” she said. “The Marines are on standby, ready for immediate deployment.”
“We need evidence, first,” Roman said. The emperor might not object if they simply arrested the governor, but if there was to be a trial there had to be evidence. It was just possible that Governor Barany had pulled off a miracle. “Something to prove that the governor is a dirty bastard.”
“We already have proof,” Elf said. “The system has far more industrial production nodes than it should. Where is the excess production going?”
Roman frowned as the analysis popped up in front of him. Athena might have jumped a pair of development stages, but her industries weren’t large enough to absorb such a high level of production. Roman could understand wanting to build up a stockpile of spare parts – such a stockpile might have saved the Federation Navy from considerable embarrassment during the early years of the war – but there didn’t seem to be any such stockpile. And then, sooner or later, the industries would be unable to support themselves, if they were unable to sell their products. No matter how he looked at it, he couldn’t escape the impression that he was seeing evidence of heavy corruption right in front of him.
He gritted his teeth. It was absurd! By any reasonable standard, the governor had done an excellent job of ensuring the system remained loyal to the Federation – and survived the economic shockwaves. There were no shortage of horror stories about colonies that had collapsed, while the Grand Senate’s attention was elsewhere. Worlds cut off from supply lines, or raided by pirates, or simply forgotten in the chaos caused by the war. But if the governor had been making deals with someone, he had to be stopped. There was no alternative.
“We’ll call upon the governor tonight,” he said, after a moment’s thought. By then, they should have the proof they needed. “And...”
“Admiral,” Palter interrupted. “I think you should see this.”
Roman swung around as a new icon popped up in the display. “What the hell is that?”
“A starship of unknown design,” Palter said. A stream of data ran past the icon as the sensors started to probe the mystery ship. “I think she’s alien, sir.”
Roman blinked in surprise. Aliens were not allowed starships, full stop. The traumas of the First Interstellar War were still too raw for humanity to ever consider letting its guard down or ever accepting aliens as equals. The policy wasn’t something he approved of, not completely, but it couldn’t be helped. Allowing an alien starship anywhere near a human world was a clear breach of the law. 
And she has to come from the Beyond, Roman thought, sharply. The governor didn’t report her presence to his superiors.
“Query System Command,” he ordered, sharply. “I want a full explanation for her presence.”
The answer came quickly. “Apparently, she was salvaged a month ago,” Palter said. “They don’t know where she came from, sir.”
“Really,” Roman said. Any contact with a new spacefaring race had to be reported to the Grand Senate at once, whatever the situation. It was laid down in Federation Law. “Have a team prepared to board her, once we’ve dealt with the governor.”
“Aye, sir,” Palter said.
Roman forced himself to stand as the fleet entered high orbit. It felt wrong to leave the CIC when they were so close to the planetary defenses, no matter how confident his mentor had been that no one would put their lives on the line for Governor Barany. The fleet couldn’t keep its shields up without alarming the governor, which meant that the planetary defenses, no matter how outdated, could do real damage before the fleet returned fire. It was a risk, but one he had to take. There was no other way to arrest the governor without risking everything.
“Keep a sharp eye on the defenses,” he ordered. “And be ready to snap the shields up without waiting for orders, if necessary.”
He strode out of the CIC and down into his cabin, where he donned his dress uniform. So much had been revised since the Justinian War, but dress uniforms had been unaccountably overlooked. The blue and grey uniform that marked him as a commodore – with a very slight service record, marked in gold pips – was hellishly uncomfortable. He’d been told, back at the Academy, that it helped keep the cadets alert, but they’d privately suspected that someone with powerful connections had blackmailed the Federation Navy into accepting their creations. It was the only explanation that made sense.
Shame we don’t have time to change it, he thought, as he checked his appearance in the mirror. His brown hair seemed thinner these days, even though he was only twenty-nine and alarmingly young for his rank. The dress uniform made him look older, thankfully. If it wasn’t so uncomfortable, he might almost have been pleased. But changing the design was a very low priority at the moment. 
His communicator bleeped. “Platoon A is assembled and ready to provide escort,” Elf said. “They’ve all been briefed.”
“Good,” Roman said. It was almost a shame he couldn’t walk into the meeting with Elf by his side, but she had to command the platoon. Besides, it would draw their relationship into the open air, even though he was morbidly convinced everyone already knew anyway. It wasn’t in breach of regulations. “I’m on my way.”
The Marines, wearing dress uniforms he knew for a fact to be actually comfortable, met him at the shuttlebay. They didn’t look armed and armored, but Elf had once shown him just how many weapons could be concealed within a dress uniform – or any kind of uniform, for that matter. Watching her remove a whole series of knives, guns and other surprises had been both exciting and terrifying. He’d wondered, once, why prisoners were always stripped naked when they were taken into custody. He knew now.
“Sir,” Elf said. On duty, her face showed no trace of any emotions. Like him, she had been promoted rapidly, perhaps too rapidly. But the Marines wouldn’t have tolerated her if she’d been dangerously incompetent. “Platoon A is ready to depart. Company Two and Three, as well as WARCAT One, are also ready and waiting in shuttlebay two.”
“Thank you,” Roman said. It would probably require an entire team of investigators to uncover all of Governor Barany’s misdeeds, but a WARCAT team could make a start on it and, hopefully, uncover enough evidence to send the governor through the airlock and into hard vacuum. “They can follow us once we’ve secured the governor.”
He smiled, inwardly, as they tramped into the shuttle. He’d never hear the end of it afterwards, once they were alone together. What sort of captain, let alone a commodore, would leave his command deck and put his life on the line, just to snare a corrupt governor? But it was the only way to do it without the governor fleeing for his life...and besides, compared to some of the other stunts he’d done, it wasn’t genuinely reckless. The Marines would protect him if the shit hit the fan.
The shuttle rocked, then lifted off the deck and flew out into open space.

Chapter Six

The Federation is divided up into sectors for ease of administration (and also for rigging elections in the Grand Senate’s favor). Each of these sectors generally consists of twenty to thirty star systems, with a Governor based at the Sector Capital, which tends to be the star system of greatest tactical/strategic importance. This generally implies the presence of a considerable number of Asimov Points.
-The Federation Navy in Retrospect, 4199

Athena, 4098
The original planners had shown a remarkable – and largely unprecedented – level of imagination when they’d named the planet’s capital city, Roman decided, as the shuttle dropped down towards the governor’s palace. Athena City might have sounded unimaginative in the extreme, but when nine out of ten capital cities were named something along the lines of ‘Landing City’ or ‘First Landing,’ it was definitely an improvement. It was intended, eventually, that the settlers would rename the city they’d founded, but it rarely happened in practice. The bureaucrats objected to having to redo all the paperwork.
Roman had never really liked planetary surfaces. He’d grown up in an asteroid habitat, after all, where the environment could be precisely controlled, without any of the irritating little problems that planet-dwellers faced like tornadoes or unanticipated rainfall. Indeed, he’d been astonished to discover just how vulnerable some planetary settlements were, even without pirates, raiders and terrorists. A single bad harvest could ruin the entire settlement and, if they were unlucky, plunge them all into debt. It made so much more sense, he thought, to move the entire human race into space. Anyone masochistic enough to want to live on a planetary surface deserved everything they got.
But he had to admit, as he stared down at the city, that the planet’s settlers had done well for themselves. The endless rows of prefabricated buildings that made up the early settlement had been dismantled, apart from one that sat in the middle of a park and was clearly intended to show the planet’s children how far the settlement had come. Instead, there were towering buildings of glass and concrete, far more than he would have expected from such a young colony world. And the people thronged the streets without any sense of care or fear for the future. There was an optimism pervading the city, he thought, that reminded him of the early days at the Academy. It almost felt attractive.
He turned his attention to the governor’s palace and groaned, inwardly. The building was massive, far larger than necessary...and a shining testament to the governor’s vanity. It was mean to serve as an administrative center as well as his personal residence, but it was too large even for that. Roman shook his head in disbelief as the shuttle landed atop the rear landing pad, wondering just how many credits the governor had wasted on the palace. It wasn’t as if the governor was going to stay there indefinitely.
Unless he thinks he is, Roman thought. Did he think the war would go on forever?
The shuttle touched down with a bump, the hatch springing open a moment later. Elf motioned for him to stay in his seat as the Marines moved out, then signalled for him to follow them out onto the tarmac. The world smelled faintly of flowers, something that surprised him until he saw the gardens surrounding the palace. Governor Barany liked flowers, Roman saw. It wasn’t something he’d expected from Emperor Marius’s description of the man.
“Commodore Garibaldi,” a young woman said. “Welcome to Government House.”
Roman studied her for a long moment. She was tall, wearing a long dress that hinted at her curves rather than revealing them. Long blonde hair hung down to her rear, framing a thin face and highlighting blue eyes and perfect lips. Her skin was so perfect, Roman decided, that it was obvious someone had paid for her cosmetic surgery. It was just too perfect to be real.
“Thank you,” Roman said, reminding himself firmly that Elf stood right next to him. “Please escort us to the governor.”
The girl looked doubtful. “All of you? We have refreshments and company for your friends...”
“All of us,” Roman said, firmly. “Please.”
The girl bowed, then led them through the door. Roman had to fight to keep his face impassive as he took in the Governor’s House. He’d heard tales of the luxury enjoyed by the rich, powerful and well-connected, but he’d never really seen it before. Giant statues lay everywhere, each one carefully named and dated. Roman had to check his implants to identify a couple of them, all ancestors of the current governor immortalized in gold and silver. It was clear that Governor Barany intended to place his stamp quite firmly on the palace, ensuring his successors knew just who to thank. But Roman found it more than a little gaudy – and completely tasteless.
He kept his thoughts to himself as they entered a long corridor, lined with portraits of strange, almost inhuman people. The governor’s artist had a really strange imagination, he concluded, as he saw a topless girl with snakes for hair and a tail where her legs should be. It sent shivers down his spine, although he wasn’t sure why. Beyond her, the portrait of a naked girl with pointy ears and fairy wings was almost normal. Someone could have themselves altered to look like her, if they wanted. He just couldn’t understand why anyone would bother.
You could have anything you wanted, if you had the resources of the governor, his thoughts mocked him. How long would it be before you developed a taste for the strange – and the forbidden?
“Your Excellency,” the girl said. “Commodore Garibaldi and guests.”
Roman stepped past her and into the governor’s office. Somewhat to his surprise, the office was plain and remarkably businesslike. The walls were bare, save for a large map of the planet’s surface and another showing the star system itself. But it was the governor himself who dominated the room. He was taller than Roman had expected, and quite remarkably fat, even though there were no shortage of treatments one could use to slim down. It was a message, Roman suspected, even though he wasn’t sure he could read it. Perhaps the governor was hinting at his enormous appetites.
“You’re young,” the governor said. His voice was jovial, yet there was a hard edge that reminded Roman of some of the tutors at the Academy. “How are you in command of an entire fleet of warships? What connections do you have?”
Roman felt an odd flicker of irritation at the man’s tone. If he’d been promoted so quickly in peacetime, there would have been resentment from his peers and he would have had to work hard to prove he could handle it. If, of course, he hadn’t been summarily demoted after the Promotions Board reviewed his case. Even the highest level of connections had their limits. But now, in wartime, he’d moved up quickly, like so many others. He was far from unique.
“A great many people died,” he said, recalling the hellish hours on Enterprise. He’d been...what? Tenth in the chain of command? And if there hadn’t been a minor error on the ship’s blueprints he would have died too, leaving Enterprise at Admiral Justinian’s mercy. “And I was lucky.”
“You must have been very lucky to be assigned a whole fleet,” Governor Barany said. He waved a hand towards one of the chairs. “Please. Be seated.”
Roman ignored the gesture. “There are a number of questions I need answered, governor,” he said. “Starting with the existence of a starship of alien design in orbit, one that was not reported to Earth.”
“It was hard to say who it should be reported to,” Governor Barany said. “The Federation was in turmoil.”
“You should have reported it to the Federation Navy,” Roman snapped. “And you have also not reported your own economic successes here. Why not?”
The governor shrugged. “Because the Grand Senate would come and strangle the life out of it,” he said. “They always react badly to success that doesn’t take place under their mandate.”
“The Grand Senate is gone,” Roman said. He met the governor’s eyes. “I have orders from Emperor Marius to relieve you of your position, pending a full investigation into your conduct. You are under arrest.”
He nodded to the Marines, who stepped forward and grabbed hold of the governor. The governor opened his mouth, then squawked loudly as cold hands started to search him thoroughly, removing a pair of data terminals and a device Roman didn’t recognize. He watched, as dispassionately as he could, as the governor was pushed down into a chair, then cuffed. The governor didn’t seem to be carrying any weapons.
“I suggest you tell your people not to offer any resistance,” Roman said. Without the governor, the planetary defenses would likely be too confused to do anything, if they wanted to fight for their former leader. And if they didn’t, nothing the governor did would make any difference. “The Marines are on their way.”
The governor stared at him. “This is...this is intolerable! I make this world a success and you come to take it from me!”
“You will be investigated,” Roman said. “Should you be found innocent, you will be released.”
Elf glanced at him. “The shuttles are inbound,” she said. “ETA; five minutes.”
Roman nodded, feeling his entire body tense. If the locals planned any resistance, the shit would hit the fan just about...now. But nothing happened. He let out a breath as the Marine companies landed, then swarmed out to take control of the palace. None of the governor’s servants raised a hand to defend him. Relieved, Roman ordered the next wave of Marines to land and start taking over the planetary defenses, then followed Elf and her platoon as they marched the governor back to his shuttle. To all intents and purposes, they’d taken over the entire planet in a bloodless strike.
But now we have to sort out just what the governor was doing, he mused. And see just how much of it was treasonous.
* * *
Camille had been lucky. The moment she’d seen the shuttles, she’d known the game was up. She’d ducked into the tunnels as the Marines landed, then put as much distance as she could between herself and the palace before popping up in the governor’s safe house. It wouldn’t remain secret forever, not when the tunnels were discovered, but it hardly mattered. By the time they found the house, she would be long gone.
She changed her clothes, switching from the dress the governor had designed himself to a simple pair of trousers and a shirt, then hurried out onto the streets of Athena. None of the population seemed to have realized that there had been a shift in the balance of power, although they would – and soon. Far too many of them had worried over what would happen when the Grand Senate turned its attention back to Athena and discovered that the planet’s GPP was now staggeringly high. It wouldn’t be long before the governor was replaced by a horde of aristocratic locusts from Earth, each intent on draining as much as they could from the local economy. And then...
There would be revolution, she knew. And the locals would have help.
The apartment block was completely unremarkable in every way, identical to the dozens of others scattered around the city. She let herself in through the front door, made her way up to her apartment and closed the door firmly behind her. The tradecraft she’d pushed aside for years to avoid looking suspicious came to the fore and she checked around, making sure that the room was completely untouched. As soon as she was certain, she dug into a pile of datachips and removed one marked SELF-AWARENESS LESSONS, YEAR ONE. It was such a boring subject, she’d been told, that no one would look at it willingly. She took the chip, inserted it into her terminal, then entered the password. Moments later, she was looking at an advanced and thoroughly illegal compression and encryption program.
She sucked in a breath, feeling her heart starting to race as she keyed in her message. Mere possession of an illicit encryption program would guarantee a lifetime in jail, if she wasn’t exiled to a colony world. The Grand Senate insisted that all such programs have back doors engineered into them, just to make sure that Federation Intelligence could decrypt the program, if necessary. And they’d discouraged anyone from trying to produce more advanced programs. But her program not only had no back door, it was actually more advanced and capable than any military-grade system available to the Federation. The mere presence of such a program would alarm the Federation, if they found out about it.
Carefully, she finished typing her message and hit the encrypt key. Twenty seconds later, the message was firmly zipped up and almost completely undetectable, unless one knew to look for it and had the right equipment. She smiled as she deactivated the chip and returned it to the hiding place, buried under dozens of equally boring chips, then activated the camera on the terminal. A red light flashed on, indicating she was being recorded.
“Oh, Jim, you hunk of burning love,” she said, as she removed her shirt and exposed her breasts. The lines were tacky, but no one would pay any attention to them while she was topless and playing with herself. “If you were here just now, do you know what I would do to you?”
She smiled as she finished the recording, then added the compressed file to the video stream. No one would think anything of a girlfriend sending her boyfriend erotic messages; the security officers might enjoy themselves watching her performance, but they would be too distracted to look for anything else. Or so she hoped. Sex had been used to hide misdeeds – other misdeeds – for countless years. And besides, the governor had played a large role in dulling the security forces on Athena. He’d certainly had more than enough reason to make sure they were harmless, as well as incompetent.
Clicking a switch, she sent the message to the upload node, then headed for the shower. It wouldn’t be long before someone worked out that she was supposed to be working at the palace, then called to ask her some pointed questions. She didn’t want to be discovered naked, not after the rumors about the Grand Senate’s latest set of enforcers. The last thing anyone wanted was to draw their attention to Athena.
But she had a feeling, she knew as she stepped into the shower, that it was already too late.
* * *
Mike Higgins had wanted to be an engineer from a very early age. He had been mocked by his extended family, which had served in the Federation Navy since there had been a Federation Navy, but he’d always been more fascinated with machines than people. Machines were predicable and understandable, even the ones built by aliens. Indeed, he’d always considered it a shame that there were so few examples of genuine alien technology in the Federation. It was often more interesting than purely human tech.
The alien ship was remarkable, he decided, as his team followed him through the airlock and into the craft. And yet, judging from some of the opened panels, she had been abandoned in a hurry. He peered into one of the panels, then frowned, recognizing some of the circuits. Reaching for his handheld sensor, he swept the panel and felt his frown grow deeper as he examined the results. It was impossible to be sure, but it looked like aliens had captured some Federation technology, then reverse-engineered the systems and put it into production. There were enough oddities about the alien craft to confirm that human minds hadn’t built it.
“Curious,” he mused. It was a shame he couldn’t spend hours exploring the craft, but he wouldn’t have the time. The entire craft would have to be disassembled, piece by piece, and for that it would need to be moved to a shipyard. He seriously considered putting in a request for a transfer, even though he knew it might reflect badly on his career. But alien technology was more interesting than even the latest FTL drives from Earth. “Very curious.”
He paused, then looked around the cabin. It was clear to his gaze that the aliens were humanoid – and, perhaps, not that different from humans. The consoles were in the right positions for humans, rather than one of the child-sized races humanity had effectively enslaved, while the lighting was quite close to human-norm. Indeed, the whole ship smacked of human-alien collaboration. What the hell was it doing here?
“I’m going to try to get a live feed from the ship’s data recorders,” he said, keying his radio. The Federation insisted on working recorders into every hull, but the aliens might have different ideas. “I want to see where this ship has been.”
It only took a few minutes to connect the ship to one of his datacores, not entirely to his surprise. Whoever had designed the ship had wanted it to interact with human technology. It suggested that they weren’t dealing with a self-spacefaring race, but one that had managed to get a leg-up from human renegades. Might the Outsiders have given the aliens human technology? And what else might they have built?
The datacore bleeped an alert, then deactivated itself. Mike scowled, and then checked the readings. It was clear, now, that the ship’s databases had been completely wiped. Even the most thorough sweep of the datacores would reveal nothing. The ship had been abandoned because it was useless, without its computers. But why hadn’t they sought to replace the datacores or simply scuttle her? It was a question he knew he wouldn’t be able to answer.
But he knew his duty. “Captain, this ship is a combination of human and alien tech,” he reported. “I think that spells trouble.” 

Chapter Seven

Stuart, Charlie. Descendent of the famous Gregory Stuart, who fled Athens after the end of the Inheritance Wars. Played a crucial role in building up the Outsider Navy for fleet operations in the wake of the Justinian War...
-The Federation Navy in Retrospect, 4199

Base One, 4098
“The report is confirmed?”
“Yes, sir,” Lieutenant Juneau said. Her pale face looked worried. “The Federation Navy moved to Athena in force – and arrested the governor.”
General Charlie Stuart looked down at the report, thoughtfully. Governor Barany had been a useful idiot, rather than a conspirator, if only because no one with any sense would trust him any further than strictly necessary. His obsession with making money and his willingness to take bribes from all and sundry had made him useful, his complete lack of concern over what happened to products from his system after they left his jurisdiction had made him an idiot. 
But, for all of his flaws, he had been predictable.
“Our people have been alerted, I assume?” Stuart asked. “They know to take cover?”
“The cells didn’t have any contact with the governor,” Juneau said. “He didn’t know they existed. And the handful of sources within the governor’s office have already burned their bridges. They should be safe.”
“Let us hope so,” Charlie said. 
He shook his head. The timing was suspicious as hell. Did the Federation have an agent or two within the Outsider Federation? Someone who had alerted the new emperor to the threat growing beyond his borders? Or was it a genuine coincidence? Everyone knew that Admiral Drake had wanted to reinforce the borders and hunt down the Outsiders long before the Justinian War had diverted the Federation’s attention. It wasn’t beyond belief that the bastard had decided to settle scores with Governor Barany and reinforce the borders, now that the warlords had been defeated. He certainly would want to do it.
Juneau passed him a second report. “This is everything we were able to find on Commodore Garibaldi,” she explained. “The intelligence staff warns that there simply isn’t very much, as he’s one of the new officers. He didn’t even exist ten years ago.”
“He would have been a child,” Charlie grunted. The Federation had once kept promotion glacially slow, ensuring that their admirals turned rusty before leaving the slots open for younger men. Now, advancement was determined by merit rather than connections. “I doubt he has that much experience.”
“Admiral Drake does, sir,” Juneau reminded him. “And he isn’t the only one with a pre-war combat record.”
Charlie nodded, then skimmed through the report. Born on an asteroid habitat. Parents killed by raiders when he was a teen. Joined the Federation Navy. Graduated in the wake of the attack on Earth with a First. Assigned to Enterprise. Briefly assumed command of Enterprise. Assigned to another starship, apparently – by then – the protégée of Admiral Drake. Wounded in the final battle of the Justinian War. And then...? Nothing.
“This is just the bare bones,” he said. “Can’t they find something more useful?”
“No, sir,” Juneau said. “I don’t think Commodore Garibaldi has had time to rack up anything like Admiral Stevenson’s list of sins.”
“I suppose not,” Charlie said. Any sane navy would have fired Admiral Stevenson decades ago. He was too old and set in his ways to change – and he had a habit of preying on young officers, male and female alike. Chances were that Admiral Drake would dispose of him when reminded that Stevenson was still alive. “He’s only twenty-nine.”
“Yes, sir,” Juneau said. “But he has built up quite a bit of experience.”
“Not in fleet operations,” Charlie said. “But you’re right. We should be careful.”
He sighed. Taking out Athena was necessary, if only to secure control of the Asimov Points and use them to funnel his warships deeper into Federation Space. Governor Barany had cooperated, unknowingly, by not funding additional defenses for his planet, no doubt afraid of the Grand Senate’s reaction. But the arrival of an entire battle fleet was bad news. Charlie had no doubt that he could secure local superiority, yet it would be costly. And yet, if Commodore Garibaldi managed to retreat, he could harass the Outsiders until reinforcements arrived from the Core. The war might stalemate and eventually be lost.
“Pass the word to the cells,” he said. The planetary militia hadn’t been a major factor in his planning, if only because it was undermanned, ill-equipped and pervaded with pro-independence sympathies. But the Fleet Marines would be a very different issue. “They’re to prepare, as best as possible, for strikes rather than outright takeovers. We don’t want to get bogged down.”
He looked up at the display, towards where the First Strike Fleet was slowly assembling into formation. He’d planned for two to three more weeks of exercises before they moved – now, the exercises would have to be repeated, with the newcomers included in the enemy ranks. And then he’d have to try to destroy Fifth Fleet, rather than let it get away from the planet and escape into deep space. It was going to be costly.
“And have stealth ships moved to the system,” he added. “I want them to shadow the fleet at all times.”
Juneau gave him a surprised look. “Stealth ships might still be detected, sir,” she said. “And we have a stream of freighters going in and out of the system...”
“We need precise data,” Charlie said. “And besides, once Federation Intelligence starts going through the records, they’ll shut down most of the shipping lanes. We would be deprived of intelligence when we needed it the most.”
He gave her a nod, then turned to his console. There was, as always, paperwork to do. They were rebels and they still had to do paperwork. It made him wonder what it would be like if they won, when they won. Would they still have to do paperwork then?
Less of it, he told himself, firmly. And no government servants telling us what to do.
* * *
It had been nearly three years since Uzi and his team of deep-cover agents had set food on Hobson’s Choice, posing as a group of mercenaries in need of a job. They’d been snapped up almost as soon as they showed – and verified – their credentials, which proclaimed them to be a band of mercenaries with extensive combat experience. He had thought, at the time, that they would be taken into service with Admiral Justinian and his rebels, where they would have a chance to undermine the bastards from within. Instead, they’d found themselves on a ship heading out past the Rim.
He clicked his cyborg implants unhappily as he surveyed the scene before him. They’d considered, seriously, simply taking over the transport and returning home. Only curiosity had stayed their hand...and they’d discovered, when they reached their destination, the most well-organized rebellion in Federation history. Even the Inheritance Wars, as long and bloody as they’d been, hadn’t been as well-organized as the Outsiders. Uzi had almost had a heart attack when he’d discovered that the Outsiders had superdreadnaughts!
But it was the aliens who had really shocked him. Two different alien races, both working with humans as equals...it was unbelievable. Didn’t the Outsiders understand the dangers of treating aliens as anything like equal to humans? But it seemed not, even though one of the alien races was dangerously aggressive and the other was utterly inhuman. The Outsiders were treating them as equals, even arming them with human weapons designed for their use...
He wanted to curse out loud, to scream and shout at them. Aliens could not be trusted! But there was no point. It would have blown his cover for nothing. All he could do was watch, wait, compile his reports and hope there would be a chance to get them back to the Federation. But so far it had proven futile. The Outsiders might not have any qualms about sharing technology with aliens – and some of it was definitely military-grade technology – but they had been quite successful at preventing any of the mercenaries from making contact with anyone else. He’d been told that anyone who wanted to resign would be shipped to an isolated world, where they would be held until the war was won.
And it might well be won, he thought, as he started to walk back towards the training simulation. The Outsiders had a cause. Worse, they had a unified command system and a network of bases and shipyards that allowed them to pose a significant challenge to the Federation. Worst of all, the Federation was still recovering from the last war. This could bring down the entire Federation and I can do nothing!
He gritted his teeth as a line of Insects marched past, limbs twitching in uneasy unison. They weren’t human...in his view, insects that large simply shouldn’t exist. It was hard to resist the temptation to activate his weapons implants and start blasting away, chopping through them before they had a chance to resist. But would they resist when they had a hive mind? It was impossible to understand them in human terms. They seemed to be both individuals and something greater. And they were armed to the teeth.
You’ve seen worse, he told himself. And you’ve done worse.
It wasn’t reassuring. His career had forced him to train insurgents to commit atrocities, fire on Federation Navy starships, even commit atrocities himself to ensure that his trainees believed that he was on their side. He still had nightmares, sometimes, about the girls he’d burned to death, just to make his credentials very clear. But this was too much. He was assisting aliens in plotting the overthrow of the Federation. The Outsiders might believe that aliens could be trusted, but he knew better. They had their own plans and schemes and none of them included humans, once the war was over.
He stepped into the training ground, pasting a cold smile on his face. It was frustrating as hell to admit, in the privacy of his own mind, that the Outsider recruits would have done well at Boot Camp. They didn’t have the problems shared by many insurgents, even the simple inability to rape, pillage and burn in the right order; hell, compared to some of the men he’d trained, they were angels. But his last trainees had served a purpose and these...these could not be allowed to live. He could kill them, easily. It would end the threat they posed to the Federation. And yet it would blow his cover for nothing.
“Attention,” he bellowed.
The recruits – no, they were soldiers now – lined up in front of him. They’d passed the first stages of training surprisingly well once he’d convinced them to obey orders. The Outsiders prized an independence of mind the Federation preferred not to tolerate. It helped that they had more self-discipline than many Earth-born children. But they’d still needed to be pushed into learning the skills they needed to stay alive.
And where, he asked himself, are we going? Where will those skills be put to use?
“Take your suits,” he ordered, without bothering with preamble. They’d learned well enough to be given some consideration. “And prepare to enter the simulator.”
He’d asked the higher-ups for details of where the Outsiders planned to attack, in the hopes the answer would be revealing. But they’d only noted that the fleet would be hitting a well-developed planet, including Asimov Point fortifications. That only narrowed the list of potential targets down to several hundred, Uzi knew. The only thing that kept Earth off the list was the certain knowledge that it would take years to get the fleet into position to attack Earth without being detected. Admiral Justinian, God damn the man, had taught the Federation Navy to watch its rear.
The soldiers donned their suits, one by one, then lumbered forward into the training simulator. Uzi monitored their progress as the simulation sprang to life, displaying an average planetary capital, complete with a pair of PDCs in position to engage the soldiers as they fell out of orbit. There were a hundred and one ways he could make the simulation unwinnable, or simply immensely costly, but he held his hand. It would only give them skills they could use in battle, when the shit really hit the fan.
But where were they going?
He was still mulling over the problem when the simulation came to an end. The soldiers had done well, taking the capital city in exchange for losing a mere forty of their armoured troopers. They looked pleased with themselves, Uzi noted; he didn’t bother to tell them that he’d slanted the odds in their favor. There would be time enough for harder lessons when they actually hit an inhabited world.
“Very good,” he said, dismissing them. “Catch some sleep. We will debrief properly in five hours.”
He watched them go, then stopped as a green figure stepped into the room. Up close, the alien was just human enough to be disconcerting. It was possible, just possible, to imagine a human actually making love...he pushed the thought aside, angrily. What sort of perverted little fucker would want to make love to an alien? The Federation had plenty of girls who would do anything, even for a smelly antisocial basement dweller. There was no need to consider fucking an alien...
“Your men are brave,” Ground Lord Ma said. “But they are not determined to win.”
“They are winners,” Uzi said. He’d seen enough of how the Marsha fought to know that the Federation would always have the advantage. Honor in war was all very well, but killing the enemy was much more important. Besides, it wasn’t as if they could win alone, without human help. “And they completed the simulation.”
“Simulations are not real,” Ma informed him.
Uzi fought down the temptation to roll his eyes. The Marsha might not understand the gesture, but there was no point in taking chances. They’d probably studied humanity extensively, the sort of study no human would undertake for fear of being accused of having alien sympathies. It could destroy a career if word got out to the wrong person. Besides, what did one really need to know about aliens? They were determined to destroy humanity and that was all. There was no need to know anything else.
“They are the closest we can get to reality, without actually going to war,” he said, instead of making sarcastic remarks. Rumor had it that the Marsha used live weapons in their drills. So did the Federation, but no one was actually trying to kill trainees. “It helps them learn from their mistakes.”
“But there is no glory in it,” Ma insisted. “They do not win if they face...holograms.”
Uzi shrugged. “Some of them were killed in the simulation,” he said. “They will survive –of course – and the next time they won’t make the same mistake.”
“But they will face no true punishment for failure,” Ma said.
“They will be laughed at by their comrades,” Uzi said, dryly. From what he’d heard, the Marsha made Flagellants look calm and reasonable. A training session didn’t give anyone any real lessons until they were bruised and bloody – or dead. He could understand the value of shooting harmless but painful bullets at trainees, but not outright killing them. They would never have a chance to recover from their mistakes. “And they will have to buy the beer.”
He sighed inwardly as the Ground Lord marched off. On their own, the Marsha would just run up to humanity’s guns and get blasted. They would never have a chance to recover from their mistakes. But allied with the idealistic Outsiders and the cold dispassionate Insects, they would make formidable enemies. And their alliance might prove fatal to the Federation.
It had been part of his work, he mused as he walked back to his cabin, to infiltrate rebel groups and incite them into uprising, so they could be slaughtered by the Federation. And he knew, because of it, just how strongly the Federation was hated along the Rim...or even in the older colonies. The Federation needed time to breathe, time to rethink itself, time even to reform to allow the people some say in their own future. But the Grand Senate hadn’t offered anything of the sort. And why not? It would have proven fatal.
It should work if we try to undermine the bastards, he thought. But the Outsiders were far from stupid. Divide and conquer tactics might not work, at least not as well as they had in the past. They knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, just how badly the Federation would react to them, once they launched their invasion. They’d have to hang together or hang separately. And the aliens would know it too. Exterminating humanity would have to come after the war was over and done with. Until then, they would work together.
He paused outside his cabin, then stepped inside. It was tiny, but he’d had to make do with smaller sleeping spaces in the past. He sat down on the bed, then glanced at his terminal. The first message warned that the fleet would be moving to its target in two to three weeks, something that would be informative if he had the slightest idea of where they actually were, relative to the Federation. As it was, he had no idea which worlds were being considered likely targets. 
There was a tap on the hatch. He keyed a switch, opening it to reveal Cleo Pearlman. She was young, idealistic and very easy to seduce, much to his amusement. But she also had enough regard for security to keep her mouth shut, at least when it came to operational details. It would have been admirable if it hadn’t been so frustrating.
“I heard we’re moving,” she said. The only benefit of living among the Outsiders was that they didn’t pay any attention to intimate affairs. There was no penalty for sleeping with any of them, male or female. “Are you ready?”
“Getting there,” Uzi grunted. “But there’s still a lot of work to do.”

Chapter Eight

Martial Law. The imposition of control by a military force, imposed by authority of the Grand Senate or Federation Emergency Procedures. Military officers replace civilians at all levels, issuing orders; crime and dissent can be harshly punished.
-The Federation Navy in Retrospect, 4199

Athena, 4098
“It looks bad,” Investigator Bonaventura said. “This could be the worst case of corruption since Admiral Stevenson was indicted on several hundred counts of molesting subordinates, gross incompetence and desertion in the face of the enemy.”
Roman looked at the middle-aged woman in surprise. Admiral Stevenson had stayed in his post until Emperor Marius had assumed control of Earth and started to remove officers too loyal to the Grand Senate or too incompetent to be allowed to remain in their posts. Even then, he’d been determined to stay in command of his unit and only the detachment of a squadron of superdreadnaughts had convinced him to surrender his authority. That, and the fact – like Governor Barany – that no one would consider fighting for him. It was a minor miracle that none of his subordinates had considered mutiny before the coup.
“It’s that bad?”
“Yes, sir,” Bonaventura said. “It’s disastrous.”
She stood and activated the wall display. “Governor Barany was taking bribes from just about everyone,” she said. “The local industries, for example, bribed him to cut their taxes down to the bare minimum, which weren’t even paid. This funded their rapid expansion, an expansion that was utterly uneven – and yet they maintained their production rates. We now know that most of their products were purchased by parties without the Federation-mandated end user certificates, including weapons, advanced sensor systems and every other form of starship component. The only things he didn’t seem to sell are full-sized starships.
“It gets worse. He was apparently running a protection racket as well. Starship crews and corporations that paid up were allowed to run unmolested, while ships and crews that refused to pay – or were simply unable to pay – were targeted by pirates, once they were outside the system. I can’t even begin to estimate just how much damage this has done to the sector’s overall economy, commodore. There are quite a few planets in real danger of collapse because they’re not self-sufficient yet. Indeed, the governor was purposely delaying the shipments that would have allowed them to stand on their own two feet.”
“Shit,” Roman said. He’d thought he’d seen bad officers – and he’d seen a great many purged, either by the war or Emperor Marius. Now, he understood why some of his former superiors had been so cynical. “And no one gave a damn?”
“I think his patrons in the Grand Senate were receiving their full share of the proceeds,” Bonaventura said, darkly. “There was certainly no incentive to remove him, despite Admiral – ah, Emperor – Drake’s insistence that Barany was in bed with the pirates.”
She paused, dramatically. “But there may be something even worse,” she warned. “There were recruiting officers operating here, too. Countless spacers and mercenaries have been lured away from the planet and taken...well, we don’t know where they went. But the local intelligence officers should have been tracking their movements and, instead, they dropped the ball. They could have gone anywhere.”
Roman frowned. A year ago, it would have been assumed that Admiral Justinian or one of the other warlords had been recruiting as many mercenaries as he could. He’d always had a shortage of trained and experienced manpower, at least at first, and he’d been willing to pay through the nose for decent officers and men. But Justinian was dead, along with the rest of the treacherous bastards. Who would be recruiting them now?
He looked up at the display, then back at Bonaventura. “There’s enough evidence to indict Barany?”
“Oh, yes,” Bonaventura assured him. “There are at least seven separate counts of High Treason we could indict him for, all of which carry the death penalty.”
“Have him interrogated, thoroughly, then have him sent back to Earth,” Roman said. As tempting as it was to have the governor hurled out the nearest airlock, Emperor Drake would want to deal with him personally. “What about the remains of his administration?”
“We’ve suspended a number of people, but the vast majority may have had no idea of what was going on,” Bonaventura said. “However, it will take years to sort out the guilty from the innocent.”
The Grand Senate would have killed the whole lot of them, Roman thought. Either to make it clear that treachery on such a scale would not be tolerated or to bury all tracks that might have led back to Earth.
He pushed the thought to one side. “Have your people start working their way through the governor’s staff,” he ordered, instead. “The guilty can be shipped back to Earth too.”
“Yes, sir,” Bonaventura said.
Roman swung around to face Higgins, who looked uncomfortable in the briefing compartment. Roman didn’t blame him. Engineers were rarely invited to high-level staff meetings. 
“The alien ship,” he said. “What did you find?”
“There’s little to add to my original report,” Higgins said. He took control of the display and put up an image of the alien vessel. “The ship was designed and built by aliens, but they very definitely used human technology. Advanced and adapted human technology. This was not put together by someone following rote instructions, sir. The builders understood what they were doing.”
Elf leaned forward. “You’re sure it wasn’t built by humans to look alien?”
“Every human ship, even ones designed more for beauty than for practicality, is built in a similar manner,” Higgins said. He seemed more comfortable, now he was talking about something he understood perfectly. “The Federation enforced standardization on every shipyard, even the ones that were sited within the old Colonial Alliance. This ship was not built in a standard human shipyard.
“Besides, there are other odd points,” he continued. “The air mix is odd; humans could live there for extended periods, but there would eventually be health problems. Federation specifications insist that life support units be built to extreme standards; the designers of this ship, whoever they were, didn’t invest so much effort in maintaining the atmosphere. The internal tubes are badly shaped, by our standards. Anyone larger than a ten-year-old kid would have real problems using them, even in zero-gee. No, the ship was built by alien shipwrights. And that leaves us with a problem.”
“I’d say,” Captain Heinz Lancelets said. Valiant’s CO didn’t look pleased. “What the hell was she doing here?”
“I checked the records,” Bonaventura said. “She was, apparently, salvaged in the Rim and brought in to Athens by a local contractor. They were still bickering over the exact salvage fee when we arrived.”
Roman shook his head in disbelief. The Federation Navy had a flat rate it paid for alien technology – and it was far from ungenerous. Any contractor who recovered an entire alien starship would be paid enough to buy a handful of human-built ships for himself, if he wished. And there shouldn’t have been any delay over purchase, either. Once the ship was verified as being alien, it would have been purchased at once.
“The governor may have been stalling,” Elf said.
“Someone certainly was,” Bonaventura agreed. “But there’s no evidence the governor even knew of the ship’s existence. All such matters should have been handled by the local sector officer...”
“Who was never replaced, because of the war,” Roman finished. “And whoever was left behind might have had their own reasons to stall.”
“Yes, sir,” Bonaventura said.
Roman thought, rapidly. There had always been rumors of new alien races lurking beyond the Rim – and the starship’s presence proved that at least one undiscovered alien race definitely existed. And the simple fact that the starship’s existence hadn’t been reported to Earth, as far as they could tell, was worrying too. The aliens might already have managed to subvert the planet’s government. Perhaps they were the ones recruiting human mercenaries for their purposes. Hell, they already knew the aliens had collaborators. The existence of so much human-derived tech proved that beyond a shadow of a doubt.
“This system should be defended,” he said, slowly. He didn’t aim the question at a specific officer, just tossed it out into the air. “But just how heavily defended is it, really?”
It was Elf who answered. “Poorly,” she said. “I had a look at their reports and compared them against our sensor readings. Training and exercise cycles are way down, orbital fortresses are badly undermanned and the sector fleet is spread out over the sector. There was nothing larger than a heavy cruiser in this system until we arrived. The governor was more interested in plowing the sector’s funds into his bank accounts than seeing to his defenses.”
“Corruption has proved a major problem there too,” Bonaventura added. “I have evidence that senior officers within the planetary defenses were involved in selling off pieces of military-grade hardware to civilians. Again, there were no real checks on who was actually buying the hardware.”
Roman groaned. Pirates always lived on the margins, he knew; it was why their ships were in constant danger of falling apart at the seams. And, perhaps, why they were so brutal to their victims. But they wouldn’t have been able to operate at all if they hadn’t been supported by vested interests within the Federation itself. The planet that needed equipment without taxes or awkward questions being asked, the officer who wanted funds and was prepared to trade military hardware for money, the governor who wanted to run a protection racket...it was sickening.
Like above, so below, he thought, bitterly. His parents had been killed by pirates, pirates who might have been armed and trained by corrupt officials within the Federation. It had seemed a random attack...but had it really been anything of the sort? Had someone benefited from the near-complete destruction of Isogloss, with Roman the only survivor? If someone could use a pirate attack as an excuse to seize an entire planet, why not an asteroid-mining field?
But he wasn’t the scared little boy or junior cadet any longer, he told himself. He could look it up in the records, the records that had been seized before the Grand Senate could destroy them. All it would take was a query to Earth. No one would try to stop him finding the truth...
...And he was woolgathering. Angrily, he forced himself to concentrate on the here and now.
“I’m going to declare martial law over the entire system,” he said, firmly. It was within his authority, but he’d hoped never to have to use it. He’d seen too many examples of martial law being abused by Federation authorities. “The formal announcement will be made in” – he glanced at the chronometer – “four hours. By then, I want Marines at every vital location within the system and our people in command of the orbital fortresses.”
“Our crews will be stretched quite thin,” Bonaventura pointed out. “There are over twenty thousand men and women involved in crewing the fortresses alone.”
“The Marines can supervise, if necessary,” Elf said. “And the fortresses are designed to operate on reduced manpower.”
“I wouldn’t count on these fortresses being designed for anything of the sort,” Lancelets said, softly. “The governor wouldn’t have been able to keep so many people on the rolls if the stations could be operated with a skeleton crew.”
Roman nodded. “Once the system is secure, we will start boosting the defenses as quickly as possible. I want to ensure we have a safe port, if necessary. Our plans to start aggressively patrolling within the sector will need to be put on hold, until we have a secure base. I will be contacting Emperor Marius directly, reporting the situation and requesting reinforcements.”
Bonaventura gave him a sharp look. “You expect trouble?”
“Yes,” Roman said, flatly. He nodded towards the image of the alien starship. “There’s at least one starfaring race out there, linked to human collaborators. What do they want?”
“We could learn a great deal from them,” Higgins said. “They had some new approaches to issues...”
Lancelets cut him off with a glower. “Learning from aliens? Are you insane?”
The captain turned to face Roman. “Commodore,” he said, “I move that statement be struck from the record.”
“Do it,” Roman said, after a moment. Even a hint of alien sympathies could destroy a career, no matter the actual context. The mere presence of an alien starship built with human technology would be alarming enough. “We must assume the worst.”
He sighed, inwardly. It hadn’t been that long since he’d taken shore leave on an alien world, where he’d seen just how badly the aliens had been degraded under humanity’s jackboot. They’d rebelled later, he’d heard, and he didn’t blame them. The Federation might be hated and feared along the Rim, where Federation membership brought more oppression and exploitation than benefits, but aliens had the worst of it. They were, at best, nothing more than slaves. It was strikingly rare to encounter an alien away from its homeworld, outside a zoo. 
And who, a nasty little voice at the back of his mind muttered, could blame the new aliens for trying to defend themselves?
“See to your duties,” he said, tartly. The voice had to be ignored, right now. There was too much to do, rebuilding the Federation, to worry about alien rights. Something could be done later, he was sure. “Dismissed!”
Elf waited behind until the other officers had left the compartment. “Young Higgins will be in for some trouble,” she observed. “That was a very intemperate remark.”
“His superiors will not be pleased,” Roman agreed. But Higgins was really too good an engineer to lose. “His career will survive.”
“Chew him out personally,” Elf suggested. “No one else will say a word to him if you chew him out first.”
Roman smiled weakly, remembering his first deployment on Enterprise. There had been a strict pattern for young officers who happened to screw up by the numbers. They’d be chewed out by their immediate superior, then the next-ranking officer, and then all the way up to the XO. But if the XO happened to be the first one to chew the young man out, no one else said a word.
“I’ll see to it,” he said. “What do you make of the whole mess?”
“A mess,” Elf said. “Nothing about this makes sense, Roman. That probably means there’s more than one party involved, perhaps working at cross-purposes.”
“The governor and...the aliens?” Roman asked. “Or insurrectionists? Or...what?”
“We may not find out for a while,” Elf said. She rose to her feet, then paced over to sit next to him. “And you were right. We must be prepared for the worst.”
Roman sighed. His plan had been simple enough; the superdreadnaughts would remain at Athena, while his smaller units would be assigned to convoy protection. They would aggressively chase every contact they detected, ensuring that the pirates knew there was a new game in town. Any pirates they happened to capture would be interrogated, hopefully allowing ONI to track down their bases, which might lead to rogue colonies beyond the Rim. He’d even been planning to send out new survey missions, once he had a feel for the entire sector. They might have stumbled across an entire world of rebels and started the task of bringing them under the Federation’s authority.
But the plan hadn’t survived contact with Governor Barany.
“They bought vast amounts of military gear,” he mused. “Why would they want so much of it?”
It was rare, vanishingly rare, to encounter a pirate ship larger than a light cruiser. The crewing requirements were staggeringly high, beyond the capabilities of any reasonable pirate organization. Besides, the larger the ship, the more complex its operations. Pirate crews were rarely capable of handling such a ship for long, even with automated systems to assist. The pirates seemed to be purchasing material they had no logical use for, save the mere pleasure of ownership. But add in an alien race using human-derived technology and one explanation suggested itself fairly quickly. The aliens, not the humans, wanted the technology. 
He outlined his thoughts and Elf nodded. “It makes sense,” she said. “If they’re trying to build up a fleet of their own, they’d need as many weapons and other pieces of hardware as they could get. And we already know they’re technologically ingenious.”
“Higgins made that clear,” Roman said. Actually, his report had suggested the engineer was more than a little impressed with his alien counterparts. The report might have to be edited carefully before it was sent up the chain to Earth. Federation Navy HQ would be unlikely to take a calm view of it. “We definitely have to prepare for the worst.”
Elf smiled, then rose to her feet and walked out of the compartment. Roman watched her go, then looked down at the reports on his datapad. There had been so much hardware flowing out of the system that he couldn’t help considering it a major threat, if it was gathered together in one place. And Governor Barany hadn’t helped. Even if he’d had no idea that aliens – and human collaborators – were active within his system, the sheer lack of oversight had allowed them to get their work done without interference. That would have to stop...
But cutting off their supply lines will tell them we know what they’re doing, he mused. And they might do something stupid – or dangerous...
He tapped a switch, bringing up a star chart of the Rim. A number of worlds were tagged as having been catalogued, but not officially brought into the Federation; beyond them, there were no tags, apart from a handful of question marks. The Survey Service had been cut to the bone long before the Justinian War. Anything could be out there, anything at all. 
“Record,” he ordered, straightening up. “To Emperor Marius, from Commodore Garibaldi. A dangerous situation has been uncovered...”

Chapter Nine

Captain’s Court. A formal venue for military court-martials. Seven active-service Captains sit in judgement over defendants, who may be of any rank. Sometimes referred to as the Admiral’s Bane, as Admirals may be judged by their subordinates.
-The Federation Navy in Retrospect, 4199

Earth, 4098
“Back again, Admiral?”
Marius nodded as he stood in front of the forcefield, clasping his hands behind his back. The captive was lying on his bunk, staring up at the cold grey ceiling, resting his hands on his chest. As Marius had ordered, a barber had been allowed to visit Blake Raistlin, ensuring he looked his best for the hearing. But no one could really look their best in the bright orange jumpsuit he’d been forced to wear. No other clothes were provided for prisoners within the Federation Penal System.
“It must be a special day,” Raistlin said, mockingly. “I had my hair cut. Do you know how hard my mother and the maids had to work to get my hair cut when I was a child?”
“It’s truly sad to see you never grew out of being a brat,” Marius said, although he knew that was unfair. Raistlin’s career had been promising, despite his exalted family connections, before he’d tried to kill Marius Drake. He should have gone into starship command and wound up commanding a cruiser, like so many of the graduates from his class. “I would have thought you’d be glad of the shave.”
“No one here to be impressed,” Raistlin pointed out. He swung his long legs over the side of the bunk and sat upright. “No women to charm, Admiral. Not even a guard intent on having his fun with a helpless prisoner. Not even a shower room to accidentally drop my soap. Why should I bother looking nice?”
“Your trial has finally been scheduled,” Marius said. “It will take place in three hours from now.”
Raistlin lifted one dark eyebrow. “And how will I defend myself in a court you have packed with your supporters?”
“You will receive a fair trial,” Marius said. “It’s no less than you deserve.”
“And did my family,” Raistlin asked, “receive a fair trial?”
“They could never have had one,” Marius said. He didn’t regret shooting the Grand Senators, but he hadn’t been worried about putting them on trial at the time. “You will have every chance to defend yourself.”
Raistlin smirked. “You must be confident I can’t defend myself,” he said. He stood and stalked towards the forcefield, coming to a halt just before it would have thrown him back into the cell. “Or are you merely intent on watching as I die?”
Raistlin paused. “Or do you have another reason to keep me alive, admiral?”
Marius clenched his fists. Tiffany had been right. Raistlin was a skilled manipulator, even when he was on the wrong side of a prison forcefield. His words cut into Marius’s soul, even though Raistlin was nearly sixty years younger than Marius himself. But no amount of words would change the fact that he was a prisoner and about to die.
“Your death will set an example,” Marius said, instead. “You will be tried – fairly. You will be judged – fairly. And you will be executed – fairly.”
“How very fair,” Raistlin observed.
“The universe isn’t fair,” Marius snapped. “How many of your family’s atrocities would have been carried out if the universe were fair?”
Raistlin smiled, but said nothing.
Marius turned as a hatch opened, revealing a short grey-haired man wearing a black suit and tie, rather than a military uniform. “This is Lobe Darlington,” he said. “Your defense lawyer.”
For the first time, he thought he saw an honest emotion on Raistlin’s face. Surprise.
“You actually hired a defense lawyer for me?”
“You will be tried by a Captain’s Court,” Marius said. He took a moment to enjoy the younger man’s astonishment, then stepped back from the forcefield. “You are entitled to a defender, if you wish, or you may defend yourself. The choice is yours.”
“Thank you, Emperor,” Darlington said. He had an irritatingly nasal voice, which had proven surprisingly effective in the past. The Federation’s justice system might be thoroughly corrupt, but a skilled lawyer could sometimes make a real difference. “If you don’t mind, I need to speak with my client.”
“Of course,” Marius said.
“And I further wish to register a complaint about how the guards treated me as I entered the facility,” Darlington continued. “They searched every inch of my body.”
“This is a high-security facility,” Marius said. Normally, a Captain’s Court would be held on the moon, but there was no time for him to leave Earth. “And your paperwork was left untouched.”
Darlington nodded, reluctantly, as he drew an old-style notebook from one of his pockets, followed by a pen. Marius puzzled over it for a moment, then realized that the notebook would be impossible to hack. The Marines at the gates would have insisted on scanning any portable terminal thoroughly, just in case it had been rigged to explode at the right moment. A notebook posed no real threat, beyond paper cuts.
“It is still a breach of my rights,” Darlington said. “I...”
“...Was hired to serve as a defense attorney,” Marius said. “The security requirements are a part of that, I’m afraid.”
He walked towards the door, then stepped through it, resisting the temptation to shout something rude as he left. He’d always hated lawyers, hated the way they could twist the truth into a pretzel or manipulate the jury until someone who was obviously guilty was released on a technicality. God alone knew how many corrupt officials had escaped punishment because they’d been able to pay for a good lawyer. But it was important to ensure that Raistlin had a fair trial. The Federation’s legal system needed to be repaired.
Three hours later, they assembled in the courtroom. It hadn’t been designed to serve as a courtroom and there had been some quick changes to allow for the procedure. A long table held seven Captains, all selected by lot, while two smaller chairs and tables had been put to one side, one for the defendant and one for the prosecutor. Captain Helen Yale saluted Marius as she entered, then sat down at the prosecutor table. Moments later, Raistlin and Darlington were escorted into the room.
“He looks better than I expected,” Tiffany muttered in his ear. “Where did he get that uniform?”
Marius shrugged. Raistlin wore a commander’s uniform instead of the orange jumpsuit. He considered it briefly, then decided that Darlington would have asked for the uniform, or simply brought it with him when he entered the President’s House. Marius hadn’t forbidden him to bring anything, as long as it didn’t set off the security alarms. But it was still an uncomfortable sight.
Captain Warren, the senior Captain, tapped for silence. “Commander Blake Raistlin stands accused of treason, murder of a senior officer, attempted murder of a senior officer and obeying illegal orders,” he stated. There were few of the formalities seen in civilian courts. “Commander Raistlin. How do you plead?”
“Not guilty, sir,” Raistlin said.
“Duly noted,” Warren said. “Captain Yale?”
Helen Yale rose to her feet. “The case before us is simple,” she said. “Commander Raistlin was assigned to the permanent staff of Admiral Marius Drake as his aide. He served in this role until the defeat of Admiral Justinian, whereupon he took a gun into the CIC and opened fire, resulting in the wounding of Admiral Drake and the death of General Vaughn. These facts are beyond dispute.”
She paused, for effect. “Commander Raistlin is an officer in the Federation Navy,” she continued. “He was commissioned as an officer six years ago, just after the Battle of Earth, when he took the second oath. As such, he has a duty to uphold both the traditions of the Federation Navy and the structures that make the Navy work. To betray his senior officer, to call into question the trust the Navy needs to function, is the act of a traitor. Is there any defense he can make that would save him from the consequences of his actions?
“Yes! There is! He will say that he was only following orders! But the orders from the Grand Senate to murder Admiral Drake were not, could not, be legal! Admiral Drake was not a declared rebel, an enemy of the Federation. He was an officer following orders who could be legitimately recalled to Earth. There were no grounds for ordering his subordinates to remove him, let alone assassinate him.
“An officer in the Federation Navy must be capable, above all, of judging the orders he receives and determining their legality. Following an illegal order makes the officer following the order an accomplice, at the very least. It certainly does not constitute an excuse! Blake Raistlin, in choosing to follow the order, stepped well over the line. I have no hesitation in asking the court for the heaviest possible penalty for his crimes.”
Yale sat down. Marius watched her for a long moment, then shifted his gaze to Blake Raistlin. The younger man was sitting there, his dark face impassive, as Darlington rose to speak. There seemed to be nothing readable in his expression, Marius noted, not even a single trace of emotion. But Raistlin was a skilled dissembler. He’d grown up in a world where deceit was as natural as breathing.
Tiffany was right, Marius thought. I should just have had him shot.
“I would not claim to be familiar with the military way of doing things,” Darlington said, into the silence. “Ideally, a JAG officer would serve as Commander Raistlin’s advocate and defender. But I do know, civilian that I am, that the military prides itself on following a chain of command. The Admiral issues an order to the Captain, the Captain issues an order to the Lieutenant and everyone issues orders to the Midshipman. Would that seem an acceptable description of the chain of command?”
Marius felt a flicker of disquiet. Several of the judges had smiled, very briefly.
“The Federation is not – was not – a military dictatorship,” Darlington continued. “The Federation Navy took its orders from the Grand Senate, which set the outlines for military deployments, operations and funding. It was the Grand Senate that approved the rules and regulations set out for governing the Navy, even if the rules were implemented by military officers. The orders that make up the Big Red Book, as I believe it is commonly called, come ultimately from the Grand Senate.”
He paused, his gaze sweeping the judges. “I do not attempt to deny that my client drew a pistol in a...ah, CIC...and opened fire. That, as Captain Yale says, is beyond dispute. The case file I was given included live footage, independently verified, from the CIC’s monitoring suite. There is no point in trying to deny the facts of the case.
“But what can be questioned are the motivations and legalities of the act itself.”
Marius felt his eyes narrowing. They knew the motivations. The Grand Senate had been scared of him, scared he would take Admiral Justinian’s place, even though all he’d wanted to do was save the Federation. He hadn’t wanted to overthrow the Grand Senate, he hadn’t wanted to make himself emperor, but they’d given him no choice. It had been fight or die, with the certain knowledge that his subordinates would be purged alongside him. What choice had he had?
Darlington continued, unaware of Marius’s thoughts. “Commander Raistlin received orders from the Grand Senate, from the legal source of all orders,” he said. “Those orders were to assassinate Admiral Drake. This is not in dispute either. Again, evidence has been presented to prove that these orders were issued, beyond all shadow of a doubt. But we must ask ourselves a very simple question. Were these orders actually illegal?”
Marius stared at him, astonished. Beside him, Tiffany put a hand on his arm.
“The Grand Senate is the source of all orders,” Darlington said, hammering the point home. “Could the Grand Senate issue an illegal order? Can one of their orders be illegal by definition?”
I should have had him shot, Marius thought, coldly. He tried to ignore the thought that it was hardly too late. It would be easy to issue the orders and easier still to make sure they were carried out. He’d been careful to staff the President’s House with officers and men loyal to him, or to Tobias Vaughn’s memory. It might have saved us some trouble.
“Picture it, sirs,” Darlington continued. “You are a young officer. The Grand Senate is the source of all authority. Would you be in a hurry to disobey – or question – an order from the Grand Senate?”
He paused, dramatically. “Captain Yale is quite right to note that being given an illegal order does not serve as an excuse,” he said. “But were the orders actually illegal? That is the question we must answer.”
Marius had to bite his lip to keep from saying something, anything. He’d never considered the possibility that someone might question the illegality of the orders, yet in hindsight it was an obvious path to take. If the orders were declared legal, then Raistlin would have to be freed; after all, he’d only been following orders. Even the death of Marius’s best friend could be explained as an accident, rather than deliberate malice. Cold hatred burned through his mind as he forced himself to sit back and listen, rather than trying to sway the judges himself.
Helen Yale rose to speak. “The Grand Senate was the source of all authority,” she said. “I do not believe that was in dispute. However, the fact remains that the Grand Senate had legal avenues to explore, including – at worst – declaring Admiral Drake to be an outlaw. No such judgement was made, sirs.”
There wouldn’t have been, Marius knew. The Brotherhood, for its own inscrutable reasons, had chosen to promote Marius as a hero. There might well have been riots on Earth if the Grand Senate had moved against him openly, which didn’t bode well for Raistlin’s future, whatever happened. They might just have disowned him once Marius was safely dead, assuming he survived the assassination attempt. Marius’s crew would probably have killed him out of hand.
“Nor did Commander Raistlin have any reason to believe that Admiral Drake had been outlawed,” Yale said. “The procedures for declaring someone an outlaw are very clear – and they were not carried out. Indeed, there wasn’t even a note to that effect in the message Commander Raistlin received. There was no reason for anyone to believe that Admiral Drake was anything other than a naval officer in good standing.”
That sounded a convincing argument, Marius thought. But how would Darlington respond to it?
“Except that he received orders, from a legitimate authority, to execute Admiral Drake,” Darlington said. “That would seem sufficient grounds to assume that Admiral Drake had been declared an outlaw.”
“Except that such orders have to be openly propagated to be legal,” Yale snapped. “The procedure for declaring someone an outlaw, as I said, is well understood. There are no grounds for anyone to assume that Admiral Drake was an outlaw, then or ever.”
Captain Warren tapped the table and they both fell silent. “I believe it would be best to hold a recess,” he said. “Both sides will need time to reformulate their defenses, assuming they both wish to continue?”
He looked at Yale, then Darlington. They both nodded.
“Then the court is dismissed,” Warren said. “The prisoner will be escorted back to his cell.”
Marius managed to keep his mouth closed until they returned to his office, where he sat down in his chair and swore like a Marine on his fifth deployment to a warzone.
“That bastard,” he said. “I should have had him shot!”
“Too late now,” Tiffany said. She shrugged, then pulled up a chair and sat down next to him. “It would look very bad if you just had him shot, particularly now. You couldn’t claim it was done in the heat of emotion any longer.”
Marius rubbed his forehead. There were times when he felt he was doomed to always be headachy, now that he was trying to rebuild the Federation. No wonder the Grand Senate had been a load of assholes, if they’d been headachy from birth till death. Or perhaps the staggering luxury was a way of distracting themselves from the realization that they, for all their power, had less control than they cared to admit. Marius knew, all too well, just how long it took to get orders from one side of the Federation to the other. The warlords had enjoyed a kind of limited autonomy long before they’d started to rebel.
“I screwed up, didn’t I?”
“Maybe,” Tiffany said. She’d always been more aware of the legalities of any situation, having been trained by her father. “But if you want to make a point, if you want to prove that trials are actually fair, you have to let the process play out until the end.”
“Yeah,” Marius said. But the hell of it was that the judges would have their doubts. If the Grand Senate could legally do anything, could they actually issue an illegal order? And if the order wasn’t illegal, what grounds did they have for holding Raistlin? “He still killed Tobias, after all.”
He sat back in his chair, then glanced at the terminal. A new set of reports from the industries, warning him of production bottlenecks and work slow-downs in the wake of the collapse of the Grand Senate. The new/old managers had barely been found and sent back to work. God alone knew what would happen when they started trying to compete against newcomers to the field.
It will work out for the best, he told himself, firmly. He had to believe it. And the Federation will be freer than ever.
He sighed. “What’s next on the agenda?”
“A deputation from Castile Sector,” Tiffany said. If she was annoyed at being treated like a secretary, she didn’t show it. “They want to discuss their future, now that Admiral Roper is dead.”
“They supported him,” Marius said. Admiral Roper – another rogue warlord – hadn’t lasted long, but he’d distracted the Grand Senate from concentrating everything against Admiral Justinian. “What should we do with them?”
“You’ll have to decide,” Tiffany said. “And I suggest you decide quickly.”

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