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

by Christopher Nuttall

  “I’ll have to tell the master,” Bat said, when she'd explained – briefly – what had happened. “Will these ... victims get better?”

  Belinda had no idea. Food poisoning could be lethal – and the victims would never get the right level of medical care they needed to survive. If Earth’s system had had problems coping with the wounded from the student riot, it would collapse completely under the new influx. It was hard to imagine even a fraction of the ill getting any treatment at all.

  “Perhaps,” she said. If she’d said no, Bat might well have just shoved all of the ill out of the lair, even the men. “Make sure they get water and uncontaminated food.”

  “I will,” Bat promised. “And you will have the best room while we try and negotiate passage through other territories. Where precisely do you want to go?”

  “The Inner City,” Belinda said. “And I want to leave as soon as possible.”

  “You will,” Bat assured her. “I do, however, have to barter for your safe passage first. Until then, you may sleep here.”

  Belinda scowled. She didn't want to spend any time in the lair, but it was quite likely that he was right. Bat was a very minor gang leader in the grand scheme of things – and even a major one would not control enough territory to let them walk directly to the Arena.

  “I should warn you,” she said, as he beckoned for them to follow him, “that I am a very light sleeper.” It was true – and it had been true even before she’d been augmented. “Don’t allow anyone to come into our room without knocking.”

  She said nothing else until they reached the room and the door was firmly closed. If it was the best room, she would have hated to see the worst. A tiny bathroom, a faint smell of rotting food ... at least it wasn't the worst place she’d had to sleep. She checked around and found no surveillance devices, but a handful of peepholes that could be used to spy on the inhabitants. Once she’d pointed them out to Roland, she blocked them up and pointed to the bed.

  “Get some sleep,” she ordered. She could go on for several days if necessary, even though she would eventually start losing her edge. They’d been warned never to depend upon the drugs if it could be avoided. “We might need to leave at any time.”

  “Awful place,” Roland muttered, quietly.

  “I’ve seen worse,” Belinda said, briskly. “And believe me; it’s going to get a hell of a lot worse than all of them.”

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  The first anyone knew of the risk was when people started to die. Given the random distribution of the bars, the deaths were likewise random; some families would lose one or two members, while others would be either completely wiped out or untouched. At first, there was panic – and then, when it became clear that the media was lying about the whole crisis, panic turned to rage.

  -Professor Leo Caesius, The End of Empire

  “Help me!”

  Amethyst saw the woman as they came out of the stairwell. She was screaming and battering at doors, tears streaming down her face as she demanded help. Richard gave her an oddly contemptuous look as he saw her, but she started to plead with them as soon as they came into view. Amethyst hesitated, then allowed herself to step inside the woman’s apartment. Richard, shaking his head in some irritation, followed her.

  “My children,” the women pleaded. She seemed half out of her mind with grief and terror. “Please save my babies.”

  The two children lay on the bed, both pale and shivering despite the warm air. Their clothes were badly stained with vomit; Amethyst recoiled at the stench as they drew near. She had never been a doctor and knew nothing about medicine – and few on Earth would help someone, for fear of being blamed for any failure – and she knew that there was nothing she could do. She still felt bitter helplessness as she realised that the two boys – the youngest couldn't have been more than four – were going to die.

  “They’ve eaten something bad,” Richard said. He sounded impatient. “Give them plenty to drink and make sure it keeps going through their system. If anything can help them, that will.”

  Amethyst blinked at him. “Can’t she take them to a medical centre?”

  “I have a feeling that the medical centre is a little overwhelmed,” Richard said. “And besides, she just isn't very important.”

  The poor woman’s children weren’t the only ones affected by the bad food – or whatever it was. As they made their way down the corridors, they saw several other dead or seriously ill people, their families fretting over what to do with them. Death stalked the CityBlock, striking at random; some families only had one person affected, others lost all but one member. Amethyst didn’t have the slightest idea what could do anything like that.

  Richard seemed to have become interested in the puzzle, even as they were still making their way down to the very lowest levels. “I think it was the ration bars,” he remarked to a young man who’d just lost his partner. “They smell funny, don't you think?”

  “The ration bars?” Amethyst repeated. The man seemed oddly familiar, but she couldn’t remember where she’d seen him. “What happened to them?”

  “If something went wrong at the algae plant, no one would notice until it was far too late,” Richard pointed out, mildly. “And then the poisoned bars would be impossible to separate from the safe bars. The only thing they could do would be to round up every bar and destroy it – and that would be impossible.”

  The man stared at them. “Why didn't they tell us?”

  Richard snorted. “They didn't want you to know?”

  Amethyst gave him a sharp look at the callous expression on his face. Richard honestly didn't care about the victims, even though he seemed to have regarded the whole issue as an interesting puzzle to solve. So many deaths – if they’d seen at least nineteen, there had to be many more that they hadn’t seen – didn't seem to affect him at all.

  “My partner is dead,” the man said. “I don’t want to live anymore.”

  “Then go eat one of the ration bars,” Richard said, dryly.

  “No,” the man said. A new – and ugly – determination had entered his eyes. “I will warn everyone else about the dangers.”

  Amethyst sucked in her breath, suddenly remembering where she’d seen the man before. Dillon-Dillon was a newsreader, someone who read out the news – the officially-cleared news, according to the Professor’s book – for billions of viewers. If he chose to tell everyone that the ration bars were poisoned and the Grand Senate had refused to do anything about it ... there would be trouble. But would he even be allowed to finish telling the world before they took him off the air?

  “Good luck,” she said, quietly.

  Richard caught her arm and pulled her out of the apartment and further down the corridor, towards the sound of raised voices and cries of fear. They turned the corner and saw a pair of young men threatening several older men with makeshift weapons, angrily demanding food and drink. One of them was eying a girl with naked lust in his eye, clearly contemplating rape as well as theft and murder.

  “Give us all of your bars,” one of the young men ordered. His victims were clearly terrified. “Now!”

  Amethyst found her gun in her hand before she quite realised what she was doing. She wasn't a very good shot with the pistol, but she shot the first thug through the head before he even realised that she was there. The second one gaped at her, dropped his weapon and fled; Richard sighed, produced a weapon of his own and shot the retreating thug in the leg. He crashed to the ground and lay still.

  Their victims stared at the gun in Amethyst’s hand, then fled.

  “Sheep,” Richard said. He sounded amused. “One sight of a gun and their legs turn to jelly.”

  “They were being robbed,” Amethyst protested. “And that one wanted to hurt the girls ...”

  Richard started to laugh, unkindly. “Did you really think that civilisation would endure indefinitely?”

  His voice grew colder. “Civilisation is a thin veneer painted over the beast at
the heart of the human soul,” he said. “When civilisation is damaged, that veneer grows ever thinner – until it finally breaks and the beast emerges. The forces of law and order have been weakened for so long that there truly is very little of the veneer left, even here. Right now, it’s every man for himself.

  “If civilisation collapses, it will be the rule of the strong. How many men would rape if they thought they could get away with it? Plenty of men find themselves touched by the impulse – what happens if civilisation is so decayed that they give it free rein? Or steal, taking from those who have, but cannot defend what they have? In the future, all that will matter is brute strength. The strong will rule, taking whatever they want; the weak will obey or die. And then the strong will age and be replaced by someone else ... it took thousands of years to build up civilisation. How long will it take to do it again?”

  Amethyst stared at him. “But humanity doesn’t behave like that ...”

  Richard’s laugh became a snicker. “You students,” he said, making the world a curse. “You suck in the crap your tutors feed you, all the brilliant little intellectual theories that make you feel so clever when you finally understand them – and so superior to those who don’t – and you never realise that the real world simply doesn't work that way. Civilisation is an endless struggle to maintain the balance between the permissible and the forbidden – and yet none of you really understand that.

  “Do you know why the Undercity fell so badly? People like you, acting from the best possible motives, forbade the forces of law and order from dealing with problems before they became serious. People who did bad things could not be arrested or punished because theists claimed that it wasn't really their fault that they were bad. Teachers in schools were not allowed to enforce discipline, or even to grade properly. The students could learn nothing and still pass. And you had the bright idea of distributing free food to the poor, without realising that it would just boost the number of hungry mouths. Look around you when we go into the Undercity. It is the end result of millions of ignorant fools like yourself.

  “You were protected and cosseted within a secure bubble maintained by people you despised, never seeing what they actually did to protect you. Instead, you turned on them, demanding endless cuts to the military and law enforcement – and never realising that you were setting yourself up for the chop. Right now, Earth is already unstable – and it will get worse as news of the poisoned bars spreads. There will be an uprising – and the military force left on the planet will be unable to stop it from spreading. And you and your fellow students will find yourself in deep shit. The living will truly envy the dead.”

  He snickered, again. “Look upon your works, ye insignificant and ignorant, and despair.”

  Amethyst was still staring at him in horror as they found the hatch that led down into the Undercity and headed further downwards. What was he?

  ***

  The Empire had a law that guaranteed freedom of speech. Dillon had read about it while he’d been in Imperial University – and about the endless series of regulations that were intended to ensure that media outlets never actually offended anyone. It was difficult, almost impossible, to do anything without violating one of the regulations, which was at least partly why Truth News pre-recorded everything and then ran it past the lawyers first, before putting it out on the datanet. The only exception to that rule was news pieces handed down from the Grand Senate’s press team. They could be read out on the air without any interruption.

  He’d wanted to be a great reporter when he’d been a student, but it hadn't taken him long to realise that the media was firmly under control. Hell, his first mentor freely admitted that he’d only taken Dillon on because she thought that he was attractive, not because of any qualifications he might have obtained from Imperial University. In fact, true investigative reporters no longer existed, not really. Someone could come to Truth News with a story that the Grand Senate would find embarrassing, but it would never see the light of day. The successful reporters were the ones who did as they were told.

  It was easy to be cynical, particularly when one had been chosen for his looks. Dillon’s job was to read the news; his appearance, apparently, appealed to a certain kind of demographic. His partner, Amber, appealed to another; she wore a very tight shirt, a very short skirt and no panties, allowing her to flash the audience from time to time. The news itself might have been bland and uninformative, but no one cared. They didn't tune in to listen when Amber was on the air.

  Dillon had played ball. He’d risen up in the ranks, even if he still couldn't afford to move into a better CityBlock. Now, though, he no longer cared. They could sack him or arrest him and it wouldn’t matter, because his partner was dead. His life had revolved around coming home to Alfred and now Alfred was gone, poisoned by the ration bars. It hadn't taken much sniffing around the news office – the smallest department in the building – to establish that Alfred was far from the only victim. There were thousands dead, maybe many more. How many had not been reported?

  He stuck his head into the monitoring room and smiled to himself. The ration bars had actually made themselves helpful, ironically; the Civil Servant who monitored the transmission hadn’t reported into work. Normally, someone else would have been sent to replace him at once, but this was not a normal day. In the confusion, no one had actually decided to shut down operations. Instead, they were going to broadcast live for the first time in centuries.

  There was no sign of Amber when he walked onto the set. A gofer passed him a datapad containing the news – it had been passed down by the Grand Senate – and muttered a quick explanation. Amber simply hadn't shown up for work at all. Dillon couldn't help wondering if she’d been struck down by the ration bars or caught up in one of the riots that had broken out in several cityblocks. In the end, it didn't matter. At least she would be out of the line of fire.

  He skimmed through the news bulletin, pretending to commit it to memory. The Grand Senate’s Public Relations Division – the Propaganda Division, the media staff called it when they thought they couldn't be overhead – had prepared a statement that was blander than usual, saying very little about the ration bars. Instead, they’d talked about ‘dissidents’ spreading rumours to undermine the Empire and little else. He felt cold anger burning through his chest as he realised just how little they cared about the population. There wasn’t even a suggestion that the newer ration bars should be destroyed.

  “We're live in ten,” the producer called. “Get ready!”

  Thankfully, he didn't have the authority to actually cut the transmission, not when the speech had been written by the Grand Senate’s servants. For once, bureaucratic ineptitude would work in Dillon’s favour. The Producer might not dare cut the transmission even when it became clear that the speech he was reading was not the one he’d been given. Dillon took a breath and settled back in his chair, pasting the Very Serious expression he'd been trained to use on his face. By now, it was second nature.

  “Good day,” he said, as the countdown reached zero. “I’m Dillon-Dillon, speaking for Truth News. A grave crisis has struck our Empire, a crisis caused by the bureaucrats the Grand Senate has allowed to remain in power. The ration bars that feed our people have become contaminated.”

  He’d taken a look at the raw information sent in to Truth News and had a good idea of just how the crisis had actually begun. There were laws to protect whistleblowers, none of which would actually save one under normal circumstances. After all, it was relatively easy to track down the whistleblower and sack them – or worse. Now, however, it might be difficult. For once, the general public would be thoroughly enraged.

  “The Grand Senate demanded a massive increase in algae production to feed the planet,” Dillon continued. “However, the ancient machinery that produces algae was unable to cope with the demand and the bars became contaminated. By now, there are millions of contaminated bars, utterly inseparable from the safe bars, out on the streets. The bureau
crats knew that the bars were contaminated and they sent them out anyway. By now, hundreds of thousands of people are dead or ill and the hospitals are overflowing.”

  He braced himself and went on. “My partner Alfred is dead. Many of my co-workers are dead or missing. How many other vitally important departments have lost some of their best men? How many others ...”

  The light went out. Someone had finally pulled the plug.

  “I’ll have your head for this,” the producer bellowed, as he stormed onto the set. “Do you know what that will cost us in fees?”

  Dillon glared at him, no longer bothering to hide his opinion. The producer had been given his position through nepotism – and he would have been better at it if he hadn't spent so much time luring the female staff into his bed. His only virtue in the eyes of senior management, as far as Dillon could tell, was a slavish adherence to the rules. At least it had worked out in Dillon’s favour for once.

  “It doesn’t matter,” he snapped. “All that matters is that people are dying.”

  “Out,” the producer snapped. “You’re fucking fired!”

  “Thank you,” Dillon said, mischievously. “I can claim the BLA now.”

  ***

  “The ration bars are perfectly safe, I assure you.”

  Lieutenant John Foster, Civil Guard, glared at the bureaucrat. Hardly anyone liked logistics officers at the best of times – and now, after hearing about the contaminated bars, his entire unit was on the verge of mutiny. Privately, part of him wanted to mutiny too.

  “Right,” he said, flatly. Dillon-Dillon hadn't said anything useful, like how to separate out the good ration bars from the bad, but John had a few ideas of his own. “I want you to try the bars before we start serving them to the men.”

  There was a dull rumble of agreement from his troopers. John hadn't spent as much time with them as he should – the NCOs were meant to provide a barrier between the enlisted and the officers – but they’d all had to bed down together while they waited outside Imperial University. It had allowed him to realise that his men had their own thoughts and feelings – and that they were terrified that their food had turned poisonous. The Civil Guard drew their rations from the same production plants as the civilians ... they knew might find themselves becoming the next victims. It was not helping morale.