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

by Christopher Nuttall

  “Granted,” he said, finally.

  Millicent hit the arming key and the weapons slid out of their storage blisters, too late. Orbit Station Seven and its twins had been denied missiles, leaving them with energy weapons alone – and it was too little, too late. The weapons started to fire, just as the freighter closed in ... she closed her eyes as the freighter rammed the station and a colossal impact shook the entire structure.

  The gravity field vanished a moment later. Millicent opened her eyes, just in time to see the power surge – causing several consoles to explode – and then fail. The lighting went out, followed rapidly by the remaining consoles, even though they were supposed to have their own independent power sources. She could hear an unholy sound echoing throughout the entire station, a hint of tearing metal ... moments later, she heard the faint sound of escaping air. System Control was located well above the docking bay, but the entire structure had been decaying for years. God alone knew how many of the safety precautions had failed under the impact. The emergency lighting should have come on at once, but it seemed to have failed completely.

  There was a snapping sound in the darkness, followed by a pulse of light as one of her co-workers found a flashlight and shone it around. Millicent saw several bodies drifting through the air, although she couldn't tell if they were injured or merely unable to catch hold of something to pull themselves back to the ground. One of them was definitely dead, she realised as she saw blood spewing out of a nasty wound in her chest. She had to swallow hard to keep from throwing up. Tiny globules of blood flowing through the air were bad enough, but vomit would be worse. Still, she couldn't help feeling queasy. It had been years since she’d done anything in zero-g.

  Another dull explosion echoed through the structure and she shivered. At least the freighter hadn't been loaded with explosive or they would have been vaporised when it hit – or so she thought. No one had ever rammed an orbital station with a freighter before. Maybe the emergency procedures had worked better than she thought. But she could still hear the sound of escaping air ... two more flashlights appeared as her co-workers found the emergency lockers and passed them out, although several of the flashlights didn't seem to work. They’d grown lax with their emergency supplies too.

  We should have kept our fucking shipsuits on, she thought, too late. There was no point in wasting time on what might have been, if they’d bothered to take safety precautions seriously. And maybe kept a closer eye on what the hell was going on outside.

  She cleared her throat. No one had taken charge – they hadn't been trained to take command, at least until they were formally promoted – but someone had to do it. And she had the makings of a plan. “We need to get out of here,” she said. She could hear other sounds echoing through the structure now, suggesting that the entire station was slowly ripping itself apart. “If we stay here, we will suffocate.”

  “But they’ll know where to find us here,” one of the other workers said. She was young; it was common knowledge on the station that the only reason she’d been promoted was that she’d put out for the last supervisor, who’d since abandoned her to carry out a job she was ill-prepared to handle. Her co-workers ignored her where possible, knowing that she was looking for another sugar daddy to take care of her. “They’ll be looking for us, right?”

  “In theory,” Millicent snapped. In practice ... she wasn't so sure. The SAR teams would be on their way, she was sure, but they’d have no idea what they were getting into. For all she knew, it might look as through the station had been completely depressurised from the outside. “What happens if we’re falling towards Earth?”

  She saw their expressions in the gloom and smiled, grimly. Orbit Station Seven was massive, even if most of its mass was storage bays for goods awaiting shipment to the orbital towers and down to Earth. If it happened to fall out of orbit, it was large enough to survive a fall through the atmosphere and strike the planet’s surface. The results would be devastating wherever the station fell. She knew what the planet’s defences would do if it looked like the station was going to fall; they’d blow the station to atoms to prevent a greater catastrophe. And even if the entire crew was still alive, their deaths would be nothing compared to the billions on Earth who would be at risk if the station fell.

  “We’re going to have to get up to the upper shuttlebay,” she said, now that she had their complete attention. The freighter had struck the lower half of the station; logically, the upper levels shouldn't have suffered so much damage. “That’s probably our best bet to get out. If necessary, we put on spacesuits and turn into Dutchmen. They’ll be able to pick us up from the outside.”

  She felt the air moving as soon as they got out of the command centre, suggesting that the internal airlocks had failed completely. Maybe she'd been wrong, she thought, feeling curiously light-headed as she led the way towards the internal transit tubes. The hull breach might be closer to the command centre than she had assumed. Or maybe something else had broken under the force of the impact ... she pushed the thought aside as the rush of air grew stronger. How long would it take the entire station to become completely depressurised?

  One of the emergency lockers was dead ahead. Millicent breathed a sigh of relief as she realised that it was still sealed and pulled herself towards it, silently grateful that the designers hadn't insisted on using electronic locks. Instead, she opened it with her hands and started to pass out oxygen masks. It was starting to become hard to breathe, she realised, as she pressed the mask against her face. She had no idea how long she could survive in vacuum, but if she had a mask she might just have a chance to be rescued before it was too late ...

  She took a breath ... and recoiled. The air inside the mask’s compressed supply stank. This time, she couldn't help throwing up; she barely managed to pull the mask off before she threw up everything she’d eaten before going on duty. They hadn't changed the masks, she realised in horror, as she saw others having the same problem. The staff had been warned that the masks had to be replaced regularly, something else they'd dismissed as bureaucratic nonsense, but now she knew why. But it was too late.

  Millicent struggled for breath, even risking pushing the mash back against her face, but found nothing. The atmosphere inside the station was almost gone; the masks were useless. She looked back at her co-workers and saw her own horror reflected in their eyes. The safety procedures had failed through lack of maintenance ... and they were all going to die.

  The world went dark around her and Millicent knew no more.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Unsurprisingly, this constant state of unrest granted special prominence to the Imperial Navy. Corruption spread rapidly, with everyone from the leading admirals to junior officers and chiefs being on the take. This trend blurred with Grand Senatorial attempts to expand their patronage networks and divided the Navy into factions, each one unthinkingly hostile to the others. It is quite likely that the Navy would have broken if faced with a serious challenge from an outside force. However, such a force failed to materialise.

  -Professor Leo Caesius, The End of Empire

  “We,” Grand Senator Stephen Onge muttered, “are victims of our own success.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Nothing, Lindy,” Stephen said. Lindy’s family might have served the Onge family for generations, but there were some matters best kept private. After all, who could really be trusted completely? “Do you have a final report?”

  “Orbit Station Seven disintegrated completely nineteen minutes after the impact,” Lindy said. She looked young, barely old enough to be considered an adult, but her mind was sharp even without the benefit of memory implants. And besides, perhaps tended to see a beautiful girl beside the Grand Senator and underestimate both of them. “All five hundred crewmen were killed, either in the impact or the disintegration. Three hundred and twelve bodies have been recovered so far.”

  “Never mind the dead,” Stephen snapped. “What about the physical destruction?”
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  “Everything stored on Orbit Station Seven is gone,” Lindy said, briskly. “That’s upwards of seventy billion credits worth of foodstuffs from the Inner Worlds and forty-two million credits worth of technical equipment for Earth. As yet, we are still computing the exact total of the loss; it is unfortunately possible that insurance will not be able to make up the shortfall for several corporations.

  “Furthermore, thousands of pieces of debris were spewed into orbit by the impact,” she continued. “So far, there have been several secondary impacts – and an alarming amount of material has fallen into Earth’s atmosphere. The Imperial Navy is vaporising anything large enough to prove a threat to the orbital towers or the planet’s surface; orbital defences are sweeping anything that might damage other installations out of space.”

  Stephen nodded, tiredly. Losing Orbit Station Seven was going to hurt – and not just financially. Billions of credits had been tied up in the destroyed foodstuffs and technical supplies, but billions more had been wrapped up in the futures market – and with a missing orbital station, it was going to be harder to bring supplies down to Earth. The economic knock-on effects could be disastrous.

  He activated his implants and reviewed the economic model of the Empire his staffers had prepared, using information that was rarely available to people without the right clearance and the intelligence to ask the right questions. Several medium-sized corporations were going to take a nasty hit in the pocketbook, right up to the point where they might fold over and collapse. Even the bigger interstellar corporations were going to be in trouble, he realised, even the ones that were tied to the Grand Senate. They might be able to convince the Senators to help preserve them, but the Senate might not be able to afford it. And even if they could, it would require more political horse-trading that would eat up time and energy.

  “In addition, nineteen freighters – seven of them independents – were destroyed in the blast,” Lindy informed him. “The remainder belonged to various corporations and will represent another drain on the insurance companies, particularly the corporations based in the Inner Worlds ...”

  Stephen scowled. Albion and most of its sector were already teetering on the brink of declaring independence – and the rest of the Inner Worlds would follow, if they thought they could get away with it. A major crisis on Earth might just prompt them to do just that, particularly if the economic shitstorm took down most of the Empire’s economy. If the Inner World corporations threw their not-inconsiderable power behind the secessionist movements, the Empire would be in big trouble.

  He stood up and paced over to the window, staring down at Earth’s teeming megacities far below. All of the Senatorial families had residences in Imperial City, but only the very richest of families could afford a tower so close to the Imperial Palace. Stephen’s family had been close to the centre of power since the Unification Wars, so tightly enmeshed within the Empire that they had regularly provided wives and mistresses for the Emperors. But now the Empire seemed to be finally winding down to an end.

  Professor Caesius had been right. God alone knew how he’d gotten his hands on restricted data – Stephen had his suspicions about Marine involvement in the whole affair – but he’d drawn the correct conclusions. The Empire’s economy had been warped for generations and the bills were finally coming due, just as large parts of the most productive parts of the system were either grinding to a halt or trying to get out of the system. How could he blame them? But in the end, it didn't matter. Stephen’s duty was to the family he headed, not the Empire as a whole. What did it gain him if he sacrificed his family to save the Empire?

  Centuries ago, his ancestors had made a deal with the First Emperor. They would provide support for his bid to unify the human race and, in exchange, they would have the opportunity to expand their economic and commercial power. And they’d capitalised on it magnificently. His family controlled over ten percent of the Empire’s entire economy, with trillions of humans working directly or indirectly for them – and it had interests everywhere. There was hardly a colony world that hadn't taken out a long-term loan from his family, or a smaller corporation that wasn't indebted to them ...

  ... But if the Empire’s economy started to collapse, it would take his family with it.

  It had been a simple matter to intermesh the family with the first Grand Senators, and then to create a political class – an aristocracy in all but name – that would control the reins of power. Indeed, Stephen suspected, from reading between the lines of the family’s private records, that it would have happened with or without deliberate intent. Control over both politics and the economy gave the Grand Senate awesome power to offer patronage, placing their own people into vital positions. It would have been very difficult for anyone to break their stranglehold on power. But now the very foundations of their power were weakening and threatening to collapse.

  “Tell me something,” he said, looking over at his personal assistant. “Do you think we made a mistake locking out the talented but unconnected?”

  It shouldn't have been surprising, he knew. The political class had become an aristocracy – and birth had become more important than talent. Why allow someone from the outside to marry their children and join the families when there were so many candidates who brought family connections and patronage opportunities to the marriage? And besides, any outsider would be shunned by the rest of the quality, no matter how talented.

  But that might have been a mistake.

  He silently remembered his own struggle to find roles for some of his relatives, men and women so stupid that he doubted they could count to eleven without taking off their socks. If the geneticists hadn't kept a close eye on the family genetics, he would have wondered if they were suffering the effects of too much inbreeding. But he’d had to find them roles suited to their status ... there had been times when he’d seriously considered holding a cull instead, after looking at some of the disasters they’d caused. The third cousin who had been murdered by a man he’d dragged into his bed had only managed to cause the family some embarrassment. Most of the others had been worse.

  “It isn't my place to say,” Lindy said.

  Stephen scowled as he stared down at the city below. Of course it wasn't her place to say; she was only a bloody personal assistant, someone who could be removed, memory-wiped and dumped among the undercity’s denizens on a whim. She wouldn't risk angering him, even if her family’s entire position hadn't depended on keeping him sweet. How easy it was, he knew, to hear what he wanted to hear – or what people thought he wanted to hear. But that wasn’t the same as being told what he needed to hear.

  “The Grand Senate has called an emergency meeting to discuss the crisis,” Lindy added, a moment later. “Will you be attending?”

  “I suppose I must,” Stephen growled. There was only one Grand Senator per family, thankfully, and no nonsense about elections. The Junior Senators did have to worry about elections, which tended to make them insistent that all the so-called social security provided to Earth’s teeming poor were left untouched. But then, keeping Earth’s population sweet was vitally important. “What will this do to Earth’s food supply?”

  Lindy didn't show any surprise when he changed the subject. “On the face of it, costs for imported foodstuffs will skyrocket over the next four weeks,” she said. “Algae-based foodstuffs will probably not be affected. However, many in the middle classes will find themselves unable to afford imported foods. There may be trouble.”

  Stephen nodded, unsurprised. Algae-based food was healthy, but tended to taste terrible, no matter what flavourings were added. For the poor in the undercity, there was literally nothing else to eat; Earth’s farming industry had long since stopped producing anything, but algae. The middle classes, on the other hand, had been accustomed to putting better meals on the table. That certainty was suddenly under threat.

  “There will be trouble,” he grunted. He turned to face her, admiring – once again – the perfection of
her body, the result of months in the cosmetic body shop. But all he ever did was admire her. Power was so much more rewarding than sex. “You can go and inform Senate Security that I will attend the session, naturally. And send in Bode as you go.”

  He watched Lindy’s swaying hips as she left his office and closed the door behind her, then turned back to the window. Once, Imperial City had been the richest city in the Empire – and the safest. Now ... Stephen knew that a rising tide of anarchy threatened to overwhelm civilisation – and Earth itself. And where would the Grand Senate be then?

  The door opened, revealing Bode. Like Lindy, his family had been trusted retainers for generations, but the tall muscular man’s expertise lay in a very different arena. Bode had served in the Imperial Army’s Special Forces before returning to the family and taking control of their private security force. Lately, however, Stephen had been using him for a different purpose.

  “I heard the news, boss,” Bode said. Unlike Lindy, he was almost always informal. “It’s going to be bad on the surface.”

  Stephen nodded, turning to look at his retainer. Bode had done dirty work for the family before – everything from nerve gassing colonists who had been reluctant to move to hunting down and assassinating several rebel leaderships – and could be trusted, at least to some degree. The psychologists who’d examined him had called Bode a certifiable sociopath, someone who would do anything, no matter how appalling, as long as he got paid. He was a tool, Stephen knew, but one who could easily turn in the hand that held him.