“You’re still determined to leave?”
Kathy Tyler’s voice stopped him as he left the Parliament Chamber and headed back to his office. She was two months pregnant, according to his reports, but she showed no sign of the baby yet. It was unusual, to say the least, for a high-born mother to carry the baby to term in her own womb, but Kathy had decided that it was the least she could do for her dead lover. Jason Cordova’s death in action had almost broken her, but she’d pulled through and helped push the entire economic restructuring package through Parliament. It hadn’t been a perfect success, but in the long run, the Empire would be stronger than ever before.
“They don’t want me looking over their shoulders now,” he said, as she fell into step beside him. It wasn’t entirely true — he could have carried on as President if he had wanted the post — but he had felt that it would be better to leave. Besides, he really didn’t want the position of President, or Emperor. He’d felt forced to consider the latter during the darkest days of the war, but it wasn’t a post he wanted. Look what it had done to Daria and her allies. “Besides, I wrote the term limits in myself, back at the beginning. If I stayed, I’d be exceeding my own rules.”
Kathy smiled bleakly. “I understand,” she said. “Do you already have a ship lined up for the flight?”
Colin hesitated. “The Jason Cordova,” he said, finally. Kathy winced, but said nothing else. Too many people, heroes and villains, had died in the closing hours of the war. “The Geeks designed her as a battlecruiser, so I should be well-protected out there past the Rim. A handful of experienced hands, but mainly a new crew, now that the Academy is churning out qualified officers rather than well-connected arseholes.”
He scowled. It had been Joshua who’d redesigned the Imperial Navy Academy; Joshua, who had led the Empress’s fleet into battle… and, in the end committed suicide, unwilling to go on. Colin would have had no choice, but to execute him if he had lived, but he missed the older man. Unlike so many from the Shadow Fleet and the ranks of the rebellion, he had understood the underlying problems of the Imperial Navy. His program of careful gradual change had to be continued. There was no real choice.
“Good luck, then,” Kathy said. She held out a hand. Colin shook it firmly. “I’ll see you when you return to Earth.”
She walked off, leaving Colin alone with his thoughts. So many had died; David Houston, Arun Prabhu and so many others, heroes and villains, friends and enemies. The Empire’s civil war had reshaped everything, but it might have ended so badly, or it might have pulled the Empire down to barbarism. They had been incredibly lucky.
And now the first-rank worlds are building superdreadnaughts of their own, he thought, grimly. That was going to be a problem for the new government. They’d devolved the Empire’s government as much as possible, but it wasn’t going to be easy to sort out new lines of responsibility and power. No one wanted to be oppressed again, even if they had to bankrupt themselves to produce a new squadron of superdreadnaughts, or consider limiting the Imperial Navy. The growing threat from pirates out along the Rim as the wave of change reached the Rim would force new deployments, but who knew where that would end? Perhaps the Imperial Navy would assign a squadron of ships to each world and allow them to forge links with their bases, or perhaps…
He shook his head. It wasn’t his problem any more.
It was an hour later when he arrived at the detention centre. He might not have had any official status any more, apart from Commanding Officer of the Jason Cordova, but General Neil Frandsen wasn’t going to allow him to remain unprotected. He had assigned an entire platoon of Marines to Colin’s personal guard, despite his objections, and an oversized Company to Colin’s ship. The Marine Corps had come through the civil war and rebellion almost unchanged, although Colin had signed orders to expand their recruiting base before he had left office. They were still the unyielding guardians of honour and, perhaps, the dream that had inspired the Empire.
“Stay here,” he ordered, before stepping into the cell. The single figure looked up from her chair. Carola Wilhelm, he realised, had loved her man. He was dead now, at Joshua’s hands, and she was alone. Their power base had been shattered by the rebellion on Cottbus. Even if she escaped — and she had, briefly, with Gwendolyn’s help before being recaptured — she had nowhere to go. “Hello, Carola.”
Carola’s voice was battered, almost old. “Fuck you.”
“Your husband is dead,” Colin said. “Your lies have been exposed. Most of your allies on Earth have been arrested and either sentenced to exile or a penal world. That just leaves the issue of what to do with you.”
Carola snorted. “And what are you doing here?”
“Tying up loose ends,” Colin said, flatly. “There’s a general amnesty for those who served under your husband, or Daria, provided that they surrender and make a full accounting of their actions while they worked for the enemies. Some of them, the people who betrayed their oaths, have been sentenced to penal colonies, but others are harder to deal with. Your husband might have mutinied, but so did we.”
“You couldn’t prosecute him without calling into question your own actions,” Carola said. She laughed, rather dryly. “You betrayed your oaths as well, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” Colin said. He leaned forward. “You seem to fall into a grey area. You swore no oaths, but you definitely waged war on the Empire. We’re offering you a choice. The remaining members of the Thousand Families, those who don’t want to serve with the new order, have been moved to Paradise Rest, a former pleasure world…”
“I’ve heard of that place,” Carola said, flatly. “They’re going to be bored out of their tiny minds. There’s nothing there, but pleasure systems that won’t work without the staff, right?”
“Something like that,” Colin agreed. There were enough Family Members to create a whole new colony, if they worked together. If not… well, they weren’t his problem. If they all starved to death, or down to a level where they could live off the land, it would be their own fault. “Your choice is simple. You can join them, or you can join the population on one of the penal worlds instead.”
“Some choice,” Carola said, angrily. “A lifetime with the most boring people in existence, including some who would cry for hours if they broke a nail, or life on a hellish world of suffering and death.”
Colin didn’t deny it. Penal worlds were worlds that were on the margin of being habitable, often populated by unpleasant animals or even diseases that could leap the gap into humanity. The Empire dumped its criminals and outcasts on them in the hope that they could tame the world and make it a profitable colony. Most of them died in the first year, but there were always replacements. The Empire was never short of criminals, rebels, or people who merely offended someone in power.
“It’s your choice,” he said. “Whichever one you choose, Carola, there will be no turning back.”
“Paradise Rest,” Carola said. She looked up at him defiantly. “If I go there, I’ll be running the place within the year.”
Colin shrugged. “Good luck, then,” he said. He keyed his communicator as he walked out the door. “Have my shuttle pick me up from here.”