The Barbarian Bride (The Decline and Fall of the Galactic Empire Book 3)

by Christopher Nuttall

  Ginny paled. “I think I knew too much,” she said, after a moment. “He allowed me to tend to him while he was unwell, My Lady.”

  “That should have been my job,” Tiffany said, without heat. She met the other woman’s eyes. “I want you to tell me, as soon as possible, if he suffers another attack.”

  “If I can get free,” Ginny said. “It was hard enough to make time to come see you now.”

  Tiffany lifted her eyebrows. “What does he have you doing?”

  “Reviewing operational plans,” Ginny said, frankly. “He believes, reading between the lines, that the decisive battle will be fought in the Tara Sector. He’s been looking at ways to ensure a preponderance of force that will ensure his victory.”

  “I see,” Tiffany said.

  “It won’t be enough, My Lady,” Ginny added. “And I’ve tried to tell him so, but he won’t listen.”

  Tiffany looked up, sharply. “It won’t be enough?”

  “No,” Ginny said. “My Lady... how much do you know about the logistics of interstellar war?”

  “Almost nothing,” Tiffany said, not entirely truthfully. She had picked up quite a bit, just by watching Marius, but she knew she was no expert. “What do you mean?”

  “Space is vast,” Ginny said, flatly. “The Federation alone is unimaginably huge, My Lady, and the galaxy far larger.”

  She placed her cup on the table and pointed to it. “If you imagine the cup as the Federation,” she said, “and the table as the rest of the galaxy, you start to get some idea of the scales involved.”

  “I think I see,” Tiffany said.

  “We blunted the Outsiders at Boston,” Ginny said. “If they’d had more ships, they would have sent them. They gain nothing from making a half-assed attempt at taking the system, even if—” she hesitated, noticeably “—the Emperor is starting to give vent to paranoid fantasies. ONI’s best guess — and it is a guess — is that the Outsiders cannot reinforce Fifth Fleet by more than two or three battle squadrons.

  “But even if Fifth Fleet had remained loyal, we wouldn’t know where to target next,” she continued. “The Outsider shipyards were not located at Nova Athena. Finding them would have taken months, perhaps years, during which time the Outsiders would have hastily rebuilt their fleet and incorporated all the lessons of the last two years of war. Now, even if we smash Fifth Fleet to rubble at no cost to ourselves, which is not going to happen, we’d still have the same problem of locating the enemy shipyards.”

  “And rebuilding our own ships,” Tiffany said.

  “Correct,” Ginny said. “My Lady, we could win the coming battle and lose this war.”

  “I think we need to help Marius, then,” Tiffany said, stiffly. “If I can find a pill, we can have it analyzed and then decide how best to proceed.”

  “Understood,” Ginny said. She swallowed. “I’ll do my best to help, My Lady.”

  “Call me Tiffany,” Tiffany said. “I think we’re too far gone to care about formalities, not now.”

  “Yes, My... Tiffany,” Ginny said. She leaned forward, nervously. “But what are we going to do if we can’t help him?”

  “I wish I knew,” Tiffany said. She loved Marius, really she did. The last thing she wanted to do was betray him. “Let us hope it doesn’t come to that.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  In the end, the Brotherhood had created a monster that eventually destroyed it.

  —A True History of the Brotherhood, by the Sole Surviving Brother, 4200

  Earth, 4101

  “The prisoner is secure, sir,” the marine said. “Do you require an escort?”

  “No,” Marius said, absently. Old memories rose up around him as he contemplated the detention block. “Once the door opens, shut down all monitors and recorders until I emerge.”

  The marine blinked. “Sir, standing orders...”

  “Are overridden,” Marius said. “You have new orders now.”

  He stepped through the hatch, feeling a tingle run over his skin as he walked through the protective forcefields. Inside, a naked dark-skinned woman lay on a table, her hands and feet shackled to the cold metal and a pair of tubes attached between her legs. Thin wires, barely visible, ran down from the overhead processor and into her skull; another restraint was wrapped around her neck, keeping her almost completely immobile. Marius studied her dispassionately, even though he knew he would once have been horrified to watch someone — anyone — being prepped for a full interrogation. But now... anything he had to do to save the Federation was justified.

  “Emperor,” General Thorne said. “She’s been quite uncooperative.”

  Marius nodded, looking down at Commodore Arunika as she glared at him. He’d met her after the Battle of Earth, when she’d warned him that Admiral Justinian might well be stronger and better-prepared than the Grand Senate assumed. And then she’d become his intelligence officer, leveraging her Brotherhood connections to serve him. And now she was a prisoner, one of the few members of the Brotherhood to be captured alive. The others had either been killed while trying to escape or committed suicide when they discovered that escape was impossible.

  “I’m not surprised,” he said. “She was always stubborn.”

  Arunika twisted her head. “Rot in hell,” she whispered, hoarsely. “Rot...”

  Marius ignored her. “Can you defeat the suicide programming?”

  General Thorne nodded to a technician, who looked doubtful. “It may be possible, sir,” he said, “but we will not have a chance to correct any mistakes.”

  “They do prepare their people for the prospect of capture,” General Thorne added. “But I think we rounded up most of the known Brothers.”

  Marius nodded, curtly. The Brotherhood had survived, he suspected, because its existence had suited the Grand Senate, but they’d always been careful. Like pirates, terrorists, and intelligence operatives, the Brotherhood had conditioned its senior members — the ones who knew more than just the members of their own cell — to make it impossible for them to talk, no matter what methods of interrogation were used. ONI tried, every time a conditioned pirate was captured, to break the conditioning, but it rarely worked. The pirate normally ended up dead on an operating table.

  “We still haven’t managed to track down Grand Senator Rupert McGillivray,” General Thorne admitted. “He may well be the closest thing the Brotherhood had to a leader.”

  “His mansion was destroyed,” Marius reminded him. Grand Senator Rupert McGillivray had been the last of the Imperialist Faction, their sole surviving representative in the Grand Senate. In hindsight, the Brotherhood might well have played a role in how he’d held on to power. “Are you sure he isn’t dead?”

  He kept an eye on Arunika, wondering if she would react to the question, but her face barely changed.

  “I’ve had teams sifting through the rubble for the past two weeks,” General Thorne said, walking around the table. “They have found no trace of his body. A man as paranoid as McGillivray would be sure to have a way out, even as the troops were storming his home.”

  “Dead in his house,” Arunika said. Her voice was raspy, as if she’d screamed herself hoarse when the wires had been inserted into her skull. “He wouldn’t allow himself to be captured.”

  “Ah, but we can’t be sure you’re telling the truth,” General Thorne said. There was a nasty glint in his eye as he looked down at the prone woman. “Allow us to de-condition you and...”

  Marius cut him off. “You served me well, I thought,” he said. “Serve me one final time and you will be allowed to retire, perhaps to Paradise.”

  Arunika laughed, harshly. “Is it so much a paradise, now?”

  Marius shrugged. He’d sent the remaining members of the aristocracy there, after he’d taken Earth and shot their leadership personally. They’d been Tiffany’s relatives, after all, and they were harmless, without the money and patronage networks that had allowed them to rule the Federation. But would they survive without the hor
des of servants who’d kept the terraformed planet in good shape? Marius neither knew nor cared. They had a better chance for survival than most of their victims.

  “If we start drilling into your head,” he told her, “you may not survive, even if we do break the conditioning.”

  “Fuck you,” Arunika said.

  “Erudite as ever,” General Thorne murmured. “Emperor?”

  “You won’t win,” Arunika said. She struggled to sit up, but the restraints kept her firmly pinned to the table. “And we will recover.”

  “We will see,” Marius said. Her defiance was pointless. The Brotherhood’s power had been decisively broken. “General, you’re with me.”

  “We’ve prepped a new way of accessing her memories,” General Thorne informed him, as they stepped through the door and walked to the elevator. “It’s impossible to be sure, of course, but we think we have a fairly good chance of downloading her brain before the conditioning kills her. Even if it doesn’t work completely, sir, we may get something.”

  “Let me know if you succeed,” Marius said. “And McGillivray?”

  “If he’s still alive, he’s gone into deep cover,” General Thorne said. “We’re probing through his finances now, but they’re a complete mess. He may well have obtained some accommodation on Earth and kept it completely off the books. My teams will dig him up eventually, sir...”

  “If he’s still alive,” Marius repeated. McGillivray was an old man, but he’d never struck Marius as someone who would simply commit suicide. “There’s no way to be sure.”

  “No, sir,” General Thorne said. “The self-destruct in his mansion might have been configured to wipe out DNA traces.”

  Marius cursed under his breath. It was hard to see how McGillivray could cause problems — even if he were still alive, he was cut off from his fortune and most of his supporters — but there was no way to know for sure. A few precautions would ensure that McGillivray would still have access to hard cash and unregistered bank accounts. The thought nagged at his mind, mocking him. He’d been tormented by the Grand Senate for much of his adult life, even though he’d been one of their most capable servants, and even now, after the Grand Senate was gone, one of its members was still tormenting him.

  He glanced at General Thorne, rather darkly. Thorne was unlikeable, a man with no conscience or morals; he’d switched sides very quickly when the Grand Senate had fallen, hoping to escape certain death in a purge of the former patronage networks. And yet, he was useful... Thorne, at least, would have no qualms about exterminating the Outsiders, root and branch, for daring to oppose the Federation.

  “Then keep searching for McGillivray,” Marius ordered, although he knew it might be nothing more than a wild goose chase. Dead, McGillivray would be more of a headache than he’d been when he was alive. They’d never know for sure he was dead. “Leave no stone unturned.”

  “Yes, sir,” General Thorne said.

  Marius nodded. It was nice to have someone ready to do as they were told, without backtalk or pointless quibbling. And Thorne was definitely useful...

  “We have located a number of other potential Brothers,” Thorne added. “However, we would have to check their brains for conditioning before we knew for sure.”

  “See to it,” Marius said, absently. The elevator door opened. “I’ll see you at the briefing tonight.”

  “Yes, sir,” General Thorne said.

  Marius rubbed his forehead as the elevator door closed behind him. Useful or not, he didn’t dare show weakness in front of General Thorne, even though he doubted the man would be able to overthrow him and survive. Marius didn’t dare show weakness in front of anyone; he’d dragged Commander Lewis to Earth, without asking what she wanted, just to make sure she couldn’t talk out of turn. And she, too, was useful...

  It was hard, so hard, to do nothing. He’d made a career out of going where the fire was hottest and taking command, but now... now all he could do was wait, read reports, and make plans, moving starships around the display and hoping — praying — that their movements in real life were as smooth. It was frustrating, yet he was starting to think he understood the Grand Senate’s habit of micromanaging everything, even though it had been irritating at best and actively dangerous at worst. They’d been forced to wait at home, knowing battles could have been fought and won — or lost — months before they heard anything.

  He stepped past the guard and entered his office. The latest set of reports were already blinking up on the main display, as he’d ordered. He needed to know what was going on, even if it meant spending hours each day digesting the reports, rather than allowing his subordinates to handle them. He’d been betrayed too many times – by Roman Garibaldi, Commodore Arunika — to take his subordinates loyalty for granted. And yet, without being with the fleet himself, all he could do was assign commissioners, watchdogs, and spies in the desperate hope he could stop another mutiny.

  Home Fleet shouldn’t mutiny, he thought as he sat down. They’re the most important military force in the Federation.

  He keyed a switch, calling up a starchart. It was dominated by icons, each one representing a starship, an orbital fortress, or an industrial node, but the information was already badly out of date. Roman Garibaldi wouldn’t let the grass grow under his feet, Marius knew; he’d trained the younger man. By now, Garibaldi would have reached Ruthven, if he wasn’t already crossing the gulf of space between Ruthven and Marble. But then, Marius had picked the CO of Ruthven personally. He was sure she would have taken a bite out of the enemy fleet before being forced to surrender, if she didn’t fight to the last...

  The door opened behind him. Marius jumped, one hand reaching for the pistol at his belt, before he remembered the only person who could enter his office without passing the marine on guard or being announced. He sighed inwardly — he didn’t have time for his wife — and turned around. Tiffany was wearing a short black dress that showed off her breasts and long bare legs.

  “You need to rest,” Tiffany announced, firmly.

  “I don’t have time,” Marius said. It was hard to keep his eyes off her. “There’s too much to do.”

  Tiffany came forward and looked him in the eyes. “Is there anything, anything at all, that will not wait for a couple of hours?”

  Marius hesitated — and was lost. There wasn’t anything that couldn’t wait, not even the revised deployment plans for the defense of a dozen sectors. They were already checked and rechecked; they didn’t need to be checked a third time before they were sent away to the various sector commanders. And the hunt for Rupert McGillivray would proceed with or without his supervision. He could leave that in General Thorne’s hands.

  “I thought not,” Tiffany said. She stepped up to him, then started to massage his shoulders gently. “You really do need to relax, Marius. You’re far too tense.”

  Marius lifted his head and kissed her on the lips. “There’s too much to do,” he protested, weakly. The frustration kept boiling up at the back of his mind, making it hard to think clearly. He honestly had no idea how the Grand Senators had found time to lead a life of debauchery while ruling the galaxy. “I’m...”

  “Taking the rest of the day off,” Tiffany said. She pulled him to his feet, pressing her body against his. Marius was suddenly very aware of her heartbeat, of her firm breasts touching him, yet his body felt old and weak. “Come with me.”

  She pulled him into the bedroom, her hands unsnapping his uniform buckles and dropping his clothes on the floor. Marius shivered — very slightly — as she pushed him onto the bed, straddled his back and started to massage the tension from his muscles. He had no idea where Tiffany had learned how to soothe his tormented mind, but it seemed to be working even if his body wasn’t responding properly. He yawned before he could stop himself — Tiffany giggled — and gave himself up to her ministrations.

  I can always work late tonight, he reassured himself, as she helped him turn over. She’d removed her dress at some point, le
aving her naked. And no one will care if I miss the nightly briefing...

  * * *

  Tiffany watched her husband as he slept, praying that he hadn’t picked up on her growing concern. Marius hadn’t been normal since he’d returned from Nova Athena, but all her instincts were telling her that something more was wrong. He’d been passionate when they’d first married, even after becoming Emperor; now... he’d been almost lethargic, as if his age was finally catching up with him. Tiffany had had to work hard, once she’d worked the kinks out of his muscles, to prepare him for sex.

  Something was deeply wrong.

  She sat upright carefully, willing herself not to make any noise. Marius had been jumpy too, ever since he’d returned; he’d once practically leapt out of bed when she’d accidentally kicked him at night. There wasn’t any weapon within reach, she thought, but she had no illusions about his strength. Indeed, his near-impotence was all the more worrying when she realized that he was still in good physical shape.

  Because he’s been engineered to remain healthy until the end of his life, she thought, as she stood and padded over to the small pile of clothing. Marius’s jacket lay where she’d placed it, separate from the rest. What the hell is he taking?

  Picking up the jacket, she stepped into the office, activated the sound-barriers and started to rummage through the jacket pockets. There was nothing in the outer pockets, save for a secure datachip, but she found a small bottle of liquid — it smelled like alcohol, although nothing like anything she’d smelled before — and a tiny packet of pills. One glance at the tiny grey pills was enough to tell her they weren’t standard; there were no markings stamped into the medicine, nothing to say what might have gone into the pills. She took one out and sniffed it, but smelled like nothing at all.

  Placing the pill in a tiny packet she’d prepared already and hiding it in her lingerie drawer, she returned to the bedroom, placed the jacket back on the ground and climbed back into bed. Marius hadn’t moved at all, although his breathing seemed normal, certainly more relaxed than it had been for several weeks. Tiffany wondered, absently, just how much of that was due to her ministrations. Her aunts had taught her a great deal about looking after men — no one had expected her to inherit any real power — but she’d often wondered if they were just pulling her leg. God knew only one of the four women had ever actually married.