The Shadow of Cincinnatus

by Nuttall, Christopher

  “And she won’t be allowed to stay in her apartment,” Rawson continued. “She will have to go back to Earth.”

  The anger broke. Men and women shouted questions, then snapped at one another, fueled by the alcohol. Lucy sat there, stunned. To lose her life was bad enough, but to die for nothing? To see her children go back to Earth? She knew, all too well, what would happen to anyone unlucky enough to grow up on humanity’s homeworld. The smug faces of the interns, too dim to comprehend the forces they used to build the stardrives, drove it home. And to think the interns were the lucky ones! Whatever the media might say, Lucy knew from bitter experience that the average citizen on Earth was lucky to live more than fifty years. Life was cheap on Earth.

  “It’s bad enough that we have to work more and more hours,” she said. They’d all worked longer and longer hours as the war raged on. “But what will happen to our children when we go?”

  The anger grew stronger. She was far from the only one to have kids – or the only one to remain in her job, purely because it provided the funds to look after her children. And yet, what would happen to her kids when she died? The apartment and boarding school weren’t the best on the moon – she didn’t earn enough to move her family to a higher level – but it was infinitely preferable to life on Earth. The thought of her daughter being taken by one of the gangs and sold as a whore was sickening. And to think that was one of the better options for life on Earth!

  She felt rage welling up within her – rage, and a sense she could go no further. That none of them could go any further. That there was no point in working herself until she collapsed and died on the job, if a simple accident didn’t kill her, if her children wouldn’t be protected. Once, she’d loved the job. Now, she hated it with every fibre of her being.

  “No more,” she said. “We can’t go on like this!”

  There was a loud roar of agreement.

  “Then we strike,” John Rawson said. “We have to make a stand now!”

  “But strikes are illegal,” Gayle Henderson pointed out. “We could be arrested and exiled and...”

  “And what difference would it make?” Rawson thundered. “We’re practically in jail already!”

  Lucy shouted her agreement with the rest of the workers. She’d once heard, during the mandatory classes on workers’ rights, that the Socialist Faction had guaranteed their rights so there was no need for any independent unions or anything else that might protect them from exploitation. Why, the speaker had said, such independent unions might not have the clout to save their members from a fate worse than death – being sacked. But it hadn’t taken her long to realize that the political faction that claimed to represent her did nothing for her, or for anyone else. It was designed to keep them under control.

  And it worked as long as we were relatively happy, she thought. But now we’re pissed.

  She took another glass and drank it, then stood up. “Strike,” she called. “Let us be heard!”

  “Not just us,” Rawson said. He jabbed a finger at men he knew to have friends in other factory complexes. “Get them all to go on strike!”

  “Shouldn’t we sort out our demands first?” Gayle asked. “They have to know what to give us.”

  “Good point,” Rawson said. “What do we want?”

  * * *

  It was early morning before Gayle Henderson managed to break free of the mob and make her way back to her bunk in the worker barracks. They weren’t comfortable – although they were heavenly compared to some of the places she’d lived in the past – but they did help keep the workers under control. Or they had, she acknowledged, as she reached for her terminal and brought up a game screen. Right now, everyone was so angry that they weren’t thinking through their actions, something not helped by the copious amount of alcohol they’d drunk.

  Idiots, Gayle thought, as she opened the game. No one would think twice about her owning a terminal, or playing games when she wasn’t on duty. But it was also a way to get a message out without using one of the public systems. The factory’s managers didn’t know she was there and she wasn’t about to let them know. She had to warn her superiors before the strike got out of control.

  She wasn’t blind to the need for change. The workers did have a point – and more, besides. Gayle had enough experience to know just how dangerous the workplace had become, over the past two years. Cutting safety procedures and adding more working hours hadn’t gone well together. And cost-cutting had been just plain spiteful. But she knew the needs of the war against aliens came first. The strike couldn’t be allowed to get out of hand.

  Quietly, she tapped in her message. The security forces would be alerted. And then...

  Let us hope it is settled quickly, Gayle thought. Or it could become really bad.

  * * *

  Lucy had taken two painkillers, but her head still throbbed unpleasantly as she followed Rawson and two other workers – elected representatives – to the manager’s office. She’d barely met the man, but she’d heard that he was more interested in meeting the monthly quota for producing new stardrives than helping his staff. But he was an improvement on some of the other managers, she’d been told by the visitors from other factory complexes. One of them was so dim he’d honestly believed his factory was producing weapons, rather than navigational systems.

  Rawson tapped on the hatch, which opened. Manager Pimlico looked up, surprised. He was short and stout, compared to any of his workers, wearing a pair of glasses balanced on his nose. It was fashionable, Lucy suspected – correcting eyesight was not a difficult medical procedure – but she had no idea why anyone would find it attractive.

  “I wasn’t informed you were coming,” Pimlico said, softly. “Why are you here?”

  “We are presenting our demands,” Rawson said. He produced a sheet of paper from his jacket and laid it on the desk with a flourish. “We’re going on strike until these quotas are met...”

  “Strikes are banned by law,” Pimlico objected. “You should know better than to risk being noticed, not now.”

  “The current conditions are intolerable,” Lucy said, quietly. She regretted it a moment later, as Pimlico’s eyes locked on her face. His gaze was distant, rather than threatening, but there was something about it that chilled her to the bone. “Being arrested doesn’t seem so bad compared to having to go on working here.”

  Pimlico’s face didn’t change as he picked up the paper and read it, quickly. “A return to normal working hours. Wages adjusted to keep pace with inflation. An end to quotas. An end to the apprenticeship system. Guaranteed pensions and housing for the families of workers killed on the job. An end to effective imprisonment...?”

  He quirked his eyebrows at Rawson, who explained.

  “We used to be able to go to parts of the moon for day trips,” he said. “It allowed us to stretch our legs and get out and about, making the rest of our time here bearable.”

  He waved a hand to indicate the grey walls. Everything was grey in the factory, apart from the workers themselves. The sheer monotony alone probably contributed to the growing accident rate. It was sheer luck that Gary King had been the first to die.

  Pimlico’s face darkened, but he didn’t rise to the bait. Instead, he read on.

  “The right to form your own union, the right to make representation to the government...”

  He shook his head. “Don’t you know there’s a war on?”

  “Yes, we do,” Rawson said.

  He took a breath. Only someone who knew him very well – and Lucy did – would have been able to see just how carefully he was controlling his temper.

  “We understand that there’s a war on,” he said. “The news channels have spent hours telling us how horrific our fate will be, if the aliens win the war. We understand! But we also understand that we simply cannot go on like this!”

  “If nothing else,” Lucy added, quietly, “there will be a far more serious accident soon that might well shut down the plant completely.�
��

  Pimlico pinned her with his gaze. “Is that a threat?”

  “It’s a prediction,” Lucy said, sharply. She drew herself up to her full height and met his gaze. “Right now, sir, we are tired and worn. And tired and worn people make mistakes, mistakes they would never make if they had enough sleep to function properly. Gary King made a mistake and it killed him. It could easily have been a great deal worse. We found, afterwards, that several safety measures had not been reset. If Gary had been a little less lucky, we would have had power surges throughout the entire plant.”

  “The insurance doesn’t cover death by carelessness,” Pimlico pointed out.

  Lucy felt her temper snap. “DON’T YOU GET IT?” She yelled at him. “GARY DIED BECAUSE HE WAS FUCKING TIRED AND IN NO STATE TO CROSS EVERY T AND DOT EVERY I!”

  “Then take more care,” Pimlico said. “Our policy is not to pay out if the worker is responsible for his own death.”

  Lucy clenched her fists. The policy didn’t cover death by carelessness, true, but how could Gary have been anything else, given how tired he’d been at the time? She knew, all too well, that it could easily have been her who had made the fatal mistake, her husband mourning her death, her children sent back to Earth to grow up in the ghetto...

  Rawson growled, deep in his throat. “Are you rejecting our demands?”

  “I am,” Pimlico said. “And I must inform you, furthermore, that if this highly illegal action is not stopped at once...”

  “Strike,” Rawson said. “We are off the job. And we will remain off the job until our demands are met. Not agreed too, sir, but met. We will accept nothing less than your full compliance with our demands.”

  Pimlico opened his mouth, as though he was about to say something, but Rawson didn’t give him the chance. He turned and strode out of the room, followed by Lucy and the others. The door hissed closed behind them, cutting off whatever Pimlico might have been trying to say.

  “Well,” Rawson said, as they made their way back to the common room. “That went better than I expected.”

  Lucy laughed. “Now what?”

  “Now we start spreading the word,” Rawson said. He smirked. “It will take them several hours to decide what to do about us, probably more. By then, we need to present them with a major problem. One factory alone won’t be a big headache, not for them. Several hundred factories, on the other hand...”

  He allowed his voice to trail off, suggestively.

  “And we kick out the interns,” Lucy added. “They might be on the wrong side.”

  She shrugged. “And even if they’re not, they can’t help us,” she added. “They’re too used to doing what they’re told.”

  * * *

  Alone in his office, Giles Pimlico rubbed the side of his head. Headaches had been part of his life since he’d been promoted to fill the gap in management – the previous manager had vanished a week after Emperor Marius took control, for no reason Giles had been able to determine – and they showed no sign of going away. And, now he was caught in a bind, it was worse than ever before.

  He had to fill his quota. That had been made clear to him when he’d been promoted. There was a quota and he had to fill it, or else. Success would mean further promotion – and there were new slots for an experienced manager opening all the time – while failure would mean, at best, a permanent career freeze. At worst...well, he’d heard rumors about what happened to those who failed Emperor Marius. He didn’t really believe the emperor could kill a man merely by wishing him dead, but there was no shortage of soldiers or assassins who would quite happily kill a middle-ranked manager for the emperor, just to make a point.

  And, to fill his quota, he’d cut everything he could. Costs had to be saved, somehow; production had to be increased, somehow. Balancing the two had become a nightmare and he had a feeling he’d finally failed. His superiors would be less than pleased with him.

  But that wasn’t the only problem. He had to help train newcomers, who might take some of the pressure off his workers. But the only way to train newcomers was to take them on as interns, who learned on the job. It was frustrating – he understood it was frustrating – but he had no choice. He had to do as he was told...

  ...And so did the workers. Only they weren’t. Part of him almost envied them for deciding to take a stand, even though he knew it was not only futile, but selfish. It wasn’t just his career – and theirs – that was at stake. The war itself was at stake. And, if the rumors were correct, the emperor wouldn’t let them stand in his way. The war had to be won.

  He thought of his wives and family, then reached for the terminal. The only thing he could do now was call his superiors. They would have to decide what to do.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  In making sure that the workers had nowhere to take their complaints, the Socialist Faction ensured that trouble built up and up until it finally exploded. Ironically, their system worked; the Socialist Faction was a dead duck by the time disaster struck.

  -The Federation Navy in Retrospect, 4199

  Sol, 4100

  “So we have another riot on our hands,” Marius said, sharply.

  “No, sir,” General Thorne said. “We have a strike.”

  Marius met his eyes. “Explain.”

  “The workers at the Fredericksburg Stardrive Plant have gone on strike,” General Throne said. “They’re refusing to go back to work until their demands are met. And the strike is already spreading, even though we cut communications as soon as we heard what was happening. We have strikes developing in a dozen other plants on Luna.”

  “I see,” Marius said.

  Professor Kratman leaned forward. “And what do they actually want?”

  General Thorne eyed him suspiciously. “I fail to see why their demands are important.”

  “Answer the question,” Kratman growled. It might have been decades since he’d set foot on a command deck, but he still knew how to command. “What do they want?”

  “Basically, an end to the emergency procedures and protocols,” General Thorne said. He produced a datapad from his belt and passed it to the Professor. “We can’t grant any of them without risking production levels.”

  Marius winced. Production was a long-running battle between the different factions in his cabinet, particularly with the war well underway. The Federation Navy needed everything from new starships to fortresses and other weapons, as well as an endless supply of new recruits and spare parts. And creating new training camps for crewmen had, in its turn, created new problems too. The only force that seemed to be adapting successfully to the new regime was the Marine Corps, which had its own training methods.

  And they don’t need to know so much about what they’re doing, Marius thought. But experienced officers in the Navy do.

  He pushed the thought aside, then looked at Tully. “You have something to say?”

  “We should consider giving them what they want,” Tully said. “The emergency measures were successful in producing some material, but in the long term they risk doing considerable damage to the Federation’s infrastructure.”

  “We cannot give in to blackmail,” General Thorne countered. “And this is blackmail! They will accept our surrender, then make some more demands until they find something we literally cannot give them.”

  “I think you’re overreacting,” Tully said, coolly. “Right now, this is a minor problem. If you overreact, it could become a major problem.”

  Marius felt his head starting to pound, again. There were just too many problems to handle one at a time. If the Outsider War hadn’t begun, there would have been time to rationalize the Federation’s industry, along with its educational system and just about everything else. But the Outsider War demanded their fullest concentration, which meant reforms had to fall by the wayside. They couldn’t surrender. All they could do was hang on desperately and wait for the tide to turn.

  He looked up, towards the holographic starchart in the corner. Hundreds of stars
were marked either red, for enemy territory, or yellow for status unknown. It was clear – and he reminded himself, again, that the map was months out of date – that the Outsiders were moving to surround Boston. It wouldn’t be long before Roman Garibaldi faced a full-scale assault on the system. Only desperate fighting along the borderline had prevented one from taking place already.

  Or they will advance down and try to isolate Boston, he thought. It might just be workable...

  Professor Kratman cleared his throat. “Giving them most of what they want wouldn’t be impossible,” he said. “They might be open to negotiation.”

  “They’re not open to negotiation,” General Thorne snapped back. “They said as much themselves.”

  “That’s a common bargaining tactic,” Kratman countered. “You deliberately ask for more than you actually want, in hopes of getting it – or of allowing yourself to be talked down to what you actually want, allowing your opponent to feel they’ve won the argument.”

  “These people aren’t skilled bargainers,” General Thorne said. He turned to face Marius, keeping his voice under tight control. “They cannot be allowed to spread the word over the solar system, sir.”

  Marius took the list of demands and read it, quickly. Some were reasonable enough, others were impossible to grant without slowing down production considerably. And if that happened, the knock-on effect would be terrifying. It was possible, he supposed, that they could handle the delays, but what would it do to the war?

  “These people have been influenced by Outsider propaganda,” General Thorne continued, angrily. “They have got to be stopped.”

  Kratman cleared his throat, loudly. “Is there any proof of that?”

  “There’s no proof that anyone has been distributing propaganda on Luna,” Tully offered. “They tend to concentrate on the other parts of the Core Worlds. Luna is too close to Earth to be easily subverted.”