The Empire's Corps: Book 03 - When The Bough Breaks

by Christopher Nuttall

  “They plan to deploy our fighting men to Albion, where they will loot, rape and murder their way through the population,” the man bellowed. Loudspeakers picked up his words and rebroadcast them over the throng, drowning out the chatter from thousands of throats. “Not content with laying waste to Han, they intend to do the same to Albion. Do we want to tolerate it?”

  “NO,” the crowd roared back.

  Amethyst couldn't disagree. She had never met a single soldier in her life – it wasn't a respectable career for someone from Imperial City – but she had watched the news reports from Han, particularly the ones that they’d been warned not to watch without permission from their parents. The reports had been gruesome; by the time the fighting had ended, millions of people were dead, wounded or displaced from their homes. Wouldn't it have been simpler to simply let them go? It would certainly have been cheaper.

  “They tell us that this is for the good of the Empire,” the speaker bellowed. “But it is really for the good of the interstellar corporations! Who else benefited from Han? Who will benefit when Albion is ground into the dirt, its men killed, its women raped, it’s children rendered homeless? Who benefits? The corporations!”

  This time, the shouting was even louder. Many of the students had read the illicit pamphlets passed around by some of their tutors and student body organisers, all lambasting the planned deployment to Albion. Amethyst couldn’t disagree with their conclusions either. Albion merely wanted to exist without having to pay back impossible levels of debt to interstellar corporations. The deployment was intended to force them to pay. But Han had been hammered into the ground, leaving it even more incapable of paying its debts. Who had really benefited from the war? Even the corporations hadn't really gained anything, beyond displaying their willingness to send in the troops if their victims refused to pay.

  “That guy is definitely interested in me,” Jacqueline muttered, as the protesters finally started to march. “Look! They’re coming over to us?”

  Amethyst primped her hair quickly as the two boys joined them. Up close, they were definitely hunky, although the shorter one had the telltale signs of cosmetic surgery. It was commonplace in Imperial University, paid for out of university funds to boost student self-esteem; there were very few students who hadn't taken advantage of it.

  “Hey,” the unenhanced boy said. “Didn't you used to be Mandy’s friends?”

  Amethyst blinked in surprise. She hadn't expected them to ask about Mandy. The unenhanced boy might have been one of her boyfriends ... but if he was, surely he would have been given her call-code. But Mandy was gone.

  “Yeah,” Jacqueline said. “Who are you?”

  “Very rude boys,” the enhanced boy said. He chuckled and, after a moment, the others joined in. “I’m Tom. This is Richard.”

  “Pleased to meet you,” Amethyst said, holding Richard’s hand just long enough to convey interest. “How do you know Mandy?”

  “Now, that’s a long story,” Richard said. “How much of it do you want to hear?”

  The press of the crowd forced them to start walking, following the rest of the protesters towards the Imperial Palace and the Grand Senate. Someone at the front started a chant and the protesters took it up, bellowing their horror at the thought of more fighting towards the politicians in the government buildings. Outside the protest lines, crowds were forming to watch as they marched by.

  “All of it,” Amethyst said. She had to shout to be heard over the racket of the crowd. “What happened?”

  “I used to study under her father,” Richard said. “And then he was given the sack.”

  “That isn't a very long story,” Amethyst objected. “What else is there?”

  “Think about it,” Richard urged her. “How many professors do you know who have been given the sack without a public reason?”

  Amethyst blinked in surprise. She’d been a student at the university for three years – she was midway through her final term – and several professors had been fired, but always for reasons that had been publically admitted. At least three professors had been sacked for demanding sexual favours from their students and one more had been sacked for embezzling money from university funds ... yet none of them had tenure before they left. And they’d all deserved to go. Everyone had agreed on that, even the students who had earned better grades on their knees rather than at their computer terminals.

  So why had Professor Caesius been fired?

  Amethyst had never attended any of his lectures, but she had met him when she’d visited Mandy’s apartment and he’d seemed a nice guy, if somewhat henpecked by his wife and elder daughter. She couldn't recall any of the students complaining about him, apart from the standard complaints that they were actually expected to turn in essays on time – and most students could obtain an extension if they actually filed the request before hitting the deadline. But if he had done something wrong, why hadn't it been discussed?

  “I know the answer to that,” Richard told her. He reached into his pocket and produced a strip of paper, displaying the name of a nightclub near the university, only a few kilometres from the apartment she shared with Jacqueline and four others. Beneath the name, there was a time and a date. “If you come tonight, you will hear all about it.”

  “Oh,” Amethyst said, looking down at the strip of paper. It looked like a standard advertisement for a nightclub, apart from the absence of any special offers for students. She knew the club, but she’d never been there. Still, it was in a safe part of Imperial City. “I suppose we could come.”

  Richard gave her a smile that turned her legs to jelly and then walked off, out of the protest march. Amethyst watched him go and then turned to give her friend the thumbs up as the protestors finally reached the gate to the Grand Senate Hall. A handful of students were already advancing past the line drawn by the Civil Guard, ready to be arrested by prior arrangement. Nothing bad actually happened to them, Amethyst had been told, but it played well in the student papers. She watched a handful of young men and women being cuffed and led off towards a hover-wagon and then relaxed as more speakers appeared in front of the Senate Hall. They were Junior Senators, looking for re-election, ready to speak to the crowd if it would garner them a few more votes. Amethyst didn't bother to wait to hear what they had to say. Instead, she slipped out of the crowd and started to walk back towards the university. She was just in time to see the arrested protestors being released and given a gentle push towards the university.

  “Frauds,” Jacqueline muttered. She looked up at Amethyst. “Are you going to go to the nightclub?”

  “I guess so,” Amethyst said. Richard had been handsome – and he’d piqued her curiosity by talking about Mandy and her father. “Come on. We’ll get something to eat and then go study in the library for a few hours. It isn't that long until seven o’clock.”

  Night was falling over Imperial City as they reached the nightclub. It had apparently been booked by a private party, but Amethyst showed the slip to the guard and he pointed the two girls towards a narrow staircase leading up to a higher floor. When they reached the top, Amethyst was surprised to see a large room filled with sound equipment – and a dozen other students, standing in a line in front of a set of lockers.

  “Hi,” Richard said, coming over to greet them. “If you have any electronic devices at all, take them off and drop them in the lockers. Anything at all – handcoms, locators, computers, recorders ... take them off and put them in the lockers.”

  Amethyst blinked in surprise. “Why?”

  “Security,” Richard said, which explained nothing. “Or you can go, if you don’t want to comply. There isn’t a choice, I’m afraid.”

  Amethyst exchanged a long look with Jacqueline and then obeyed, removing her handcom from her belt and dropping it into the locker. Thankfully, her parents had decided that she was old enough not to have to wear a personal locator bracelet any longer. It had made her feel such a dork when she'd been a first-year student, unable
to go to any of the more risqué nightclubs because she'd known that her parents would be instantly informed of their daughter’s activities. Jacqueline had been much luckier. She’d been legally emancipated from her parents since she’d turned fourteen.

  They finished filling the locker and closed it. Amethyst took the key and pocketed it, feeling oddly naked without the handcom. She didn't have the slightest idea how it worked beyond a few generalities, but she could use it to call her parents – or anyone else – in the solar system, even if there was a time delay if she wanted to call someone on Mars. Without it, she was isolated in a city with millions of residents, completely alone.

  “In here,” Richard called, waving them through a door. “Don’t worry. Everything in the lockers will be safe.”

  Inside, there was more sound equipment – she could feel a faint vibration from the dance hall below through the floor – and a man she didn't recognise, carrying a silver wand in his hand. He waved it over Amethyst’s body before she could object, then motioned for her to pass into the room. Everyone was checked, she realised, before the door was closed and locked. A moment later, Richard touched a button and she heard a faint sound in her inner ear. Judging from the number of people rubbing their ears, she wasn't the only one to hear the maddeningly faint sound.

  “The sound you hear is a modified anti-surveillance system,” Richard said, as he sat down on top of a giant speaker. “It isn't quite perfect, but anyone who tries to spy on our meeting will have some problems listening to us. We can speak freely here.”

  “We can speak freely,” a male student Amethyst didn't recognise said. “Just what the fuck is going on, dick-head?”

  “I’d like to make one other thing clear before we continue,” Richard continued, ignoring the interruption. “You may want to go no further with this after we explain – and we will allow you to leave – but you have to keep your mouths shut. If you decide to tell anyone without our express permission, you will be killed.”

  Amethyst gasped. She wasn't the only one.

  “This is deadly serious,” Richard said. His voice echoed around the silent room. “Our lives are at stake. So is everything else. If you want to leave, you can leave – but if you breathe one word of it to anyone, you will die.”

  He smiled, thinly. “If anyone wants to leave now,” he concluded, “the door is over there.”

  There was a long pause.

  “No one, then,” Richard said. “Good.”

  He stood up and clasped his hands together. “You all knew Professor Caesius or his daughter Mandy,” he said. “You should also know that the Professor was sacked from the University and then exiled from Earth to the Rim. What you will not know is why the Professor was sacked – or, for that matter, why Cindy Jefferson was expelled from the University on grounds of drug abuse and returned to her homeworld.”

  Amethyst gritted her teeth. Drug abuse was technically an offense against university regulations, but if the staff had expelled every student who had experimented with drugs – or become an addict – they wouldn't have had anyone left to teach. Expelling someone for that was almost unheard of. She’d never met Cindy Jefferson – had never even heard of her until the meeting – but she felt a moment of pity for the girl.

  “The question you should really ask,” Richard continued, “is what connects the two departures from the university.”

  He paused to allow them to wonder. “Cindy Jefferson asked the Professor a set of awkward questions about the Empire,” he said. “He discovered that he couldn't answer them. Instead of referring her to the computer files, he started to conduct his own independent research program, intent on writing a book himself. That book was submitted nine months ago – and both of them were expelled two weeks afterwards.

  “The poor girl – Cindy Jackson - comes from Montana, a very straight-laced planet in the Edo Sector. A charge of drug abuse would be enough to blight her life after returning from Earth in disgrace. Certainly, no one would pay close attention to her – which is what the university staff wanted. Professor Caesius, on the other hand ... he was harder for them to deal with. Eventually, they arranged his exile. The question we must now ask is why. Why did they go to all this trouble?”

  He paced over to a cupboard and opened it, revealing a small stack of loosely-bound books. “The interesting thing about the planetary datanet is that the controllers can erase almost anything from the files,” he said, as he picked up the books. “If you happened to have a copy of a banned book on your private terminal, it would be erased after you hooked it into the datanet. But they can't erase a printed book unless they destroy every copy in existence.”

  Amethyst took the copy he passed her automatically. “This is what destroyed my tutor’s career,” Richard said, flatly. “Cindy Jefferson asked him about the true state of the Empire; Professor Caesius researched it and decided that the situation was far worse than we were led to believe. He wrote this book ... and his career was destroyed. And if any of you are caught with the book, your career as students will be over. At best, you will be expelled; at worst, you will be transported to a new colony world as an indentured colonist – a slave, in all but name.”

  “I ...” Jacqueline coughed and started again. “I’ve only got a few months of study left. I don’t want to be expelled.”

  “I don’t think that Cindy Jefferson wanted to be expelled either,” Richard said, dryly. “But tell me something. What are you going to be when you grow up?”

  Jacqueline scowled at him. “A sociologist,” she said, proudly. “My tutors say that I have real promise ...”

  “I bet they do,” Richard said. He tapped the book. “Have you looked at the employment figures – I mean, have you really looked at them?”

  He pressed on before Jacqueline could answer. “The figures have been carefully massaged,” he said. “The average employment rate for newly-qualified students is roughly five percent – that’s your chance of getting employed in any career. Even shitty jobs like working in bars and nightclubs – or even prostitution – are on the decline. And if you get lucky and you do get a job, you’ll lose eighty percent of what you earn in taxes and paying back your loan.”

  One of the other students interrupted. “And what if we don’t get a job?”

  “You sit in a shitty apartment eating shitty food and trying to die young,” Richard said. “And that’s the lucky outcome.”

  He looked around the room. “Take the books with you and read them,” he said. “Read it all; I’m afraid that there are no summaries, pre-written answers or anything other shortcuts for this book.” There were some nervous chuckles. “There’s a note in the back for how to leave us a message if you’re interested in joining us. If not ... well, no harm done, as long as you keep your mouths shut.”

  Amethyst felt her head spinning as they were gently urged out of the room. She wasn't sure what she’d expected, but it hadn't been what they’d received. Richard had made his speech, given them the book and then ... left them to decide what to do on their own. That wasn't common at Imperial University.

  There was only one thing for it, she decided, as she shoved the book into her bag. She’d have to read it for herself.

  Chapter Seven

  It might have remained stable indefinitely if the first Emperor hadn't made a dangerous mistake. Elections to the Senate were determined by population size: Earth, with a population in the billions, was entitled to elect no less than 100 Senators and 10 Grand Senators. Many of the other long-settled worlds were heavily populated themselves. The newer colony worlds, however, rarely qualified to have a Senator, let alone a Grand Senator. This left them at a major disadvantage in the political arena.

  -Professor Leo Caesius, The End of Empire

  “Remind me,” Colonel Chung Myung-Hee said, as she stepped up behind Jeremy. “Why are we supposed to defend these people again?”

  Jeremy gave her an icy look. Marines – and other military officers and men – couldn't question their
responsibilities. Their duty was to defend the Empire and that included the ignorant young students thronging through the streets below, protesting the military’s planned deployment to Albion. It was clear from their own statements that they knew almost nothing about what was really going on, although their narrative did have the advantage of being simpler than the truth. Blaming everything on evil interstellar corporations seemed to make more sense than the fact that if Albion left the Empire, other protective parts of the interstellar economy would leave as well.

  The irony would have been amusing, if it hadn’t been so sad. He didn't want to send Marines to Albion, but for different reasons. And the negotiations with the Grand Senate had not been productive.

  “They have a right to protest,” he said, finally. But did they, really? All protests had to be cleared in advance with the Civil Guard and a protest that touched on a truly sensitive issue would never be allowed to get off the ground. If the protesters had started raging about the Grand Senate’s political leadership being firmly entrenched, with elections nothing more than a joke, he doubted it would have been long before the Civil Guard was ordered to move in and crush the protestors, exiling them to a newly-settled world as indents. Let them protest thousands of light years from Earth.

  “I’d be more impressed if they actually spent their time in university learning,” Chung said, tartly. “How many of those students down there are failing remedial arithmetic?”