The terminal paused at his command. I could send the starfighters along with her, he thought, considering the possibility. It was unlikely in the extreme that Admiral Wilhelm would have anything to match them, although he would probably have arsenal ships by now. That cat was very definitely out of the bag. He shook his head after a moment. The starfighters were still an untested weapon of war.
He rekeyed the terminal. “I want a full report on your current status no later than a day after receipt of this message,” he concluded. “I have a feeling that the shit is about to hit the fan.”
Chapter Nine
Carola had never actually entered the Parliament building before. Indeed, she couldn’t actually remember if she’d ever actually seen it, although she had spent years in the High City, once upon a time. She looked back on those years fondly, but with ultimate power within her grasp — and that of her husband — the memories were more a source of private amusement rather than something to keep her warm in the night. She’d spent four days on Earth, mainly chatting to old friends, and reading between the lines it was easy to see that they were scared. Their universe had turned upside down.
And some of them think that we’re going to be putting them back on top, she thought, remembering Stacy Roosevelt. The silly bitch hadn’t realised, unlike Lady Hohenzollern, that she was effectively in a trap, one of her own making. She had believed that Admiral Wilhelm would continue to serve them, and indeed Carola had encouraged her husband to keep up the pretence, but the truth was that the two aristocrats — and the rest of the reactionaries — would serve them now. They might be useful for their links to the remainder of the Thousand Families, or perhaps they could be used as scapegoats for the attack on the rebel cruisers. There were just so many possibilities.
The interior of Parliament showed the signs of a quick renovation, carried out by the High City’s staff of workers. It looked surprisingly low-key for such an important building, in stark contrast to the Imperial Palace where the Emperors and Empress had held court, or some of the mansions belonging to the Thousand Families, but no one had bothered to give Parliament a building fit for its status. Or, perhaps, they had. No one was used to thinking of Parliament as a real power, not yet. She wondered, with a half smile, how long it would be before the MPs started to factionalise. She would have been surprised if the process wasn’t already underway.
All men want power, she reminded herself, as her guide showed her into the main chamber. Given a chance, they will reach for that power without thinking of the possible consequences… or without caring.
The main chamber was larger than she had expected, although it also looked remarkably cramped. Parliament had originally had only three hundred MPs, representing the various worlds of the then-Empire through a complicated process that no one fully understood and was easy to game by someone unscrupulous. The Fall of Earth and the rise of the Provisional Government had ensured the creation of a new government, obeying new rules… and one of them was that each world would have an MP. Carola could see several flaws with that scheme, starting with the problem that the Empire’s different worlds had populations ranging between hundreds of thousands to the billions, but as an ideal it was understandable. It would also mean that they would have to fit, somehow, three thousand MPs into the chamber… and she doubted that that would be possible. The chamber only held five hundred MPs and it was already packed.
She allowed her gaze to swing over the MPs slowly, knowing that most of them would be studying her and for the same reason, know thy enemy. They were a mixed bunch, curiously dressed in the formal uniform for an MP, with long dark robes and white wigs that hung down their backs. At one time, it might have given them an aura of quiet dignity, but Carola found them vaguely ridiculous. They looked like butlers from one of the more traditionalist Families. The Great God Tradition might demand that they wore their formal outfits to all formal meetings, but she guessed that they were wearing really loose outfits underneath. The thought made her smile openly, even though some of the MPs would probably take that as a challenge.
The briefing packet hadn’t said much about how Parliament actually conducted its business, so she suspected that they were still working that out. Giving each of the MPs a say would take forever, so they would probably decide to go with a single voice vote for each question put before the House. The advantage of a new government, as she’d found back at Cottbus, was that the rules would be still very loose. The odds were that at least some of the MPs would take bribes, if they were offered, whatever the rules said. They probably weren’t getting paid very much for serving their people.
Their chairs were organised in a vast circle, positioned so that they could all see the speaker at one end of the room. Blondel Dupre was speaking, her voice carried through the entire room by a sound-effect field, and Carola studied her with interest. A person — a lady, no less — who had forsaken cosmetic treatments was either someone who didn’t care about their appearance, or knew what they were and had nothing to prove to anyone. Carola respected that. In another world, Blondel and her could have been friends. They had the same attitude to life.
Her guide tapped at her arm. “You’ll be standing there while you address Parliament,” he muttered, pointing to a platform. It was below Blondel’s position, much to Carola’s amusement, for it reflected how the original designers had seen people who spoke before Parliament. They were not coming as equals, but as supplicants, a deep irony to anyone who knew the role Parliament had held before the rebellion. “Do you have your speech prepared?”
“Of course,” Carola said, as if she were irritated. She tapped the side of her forehead with one long finger. “I am always prepared.”
She looked up at the Stranger’s Gallery, high overhead, and saw a handful of familiar faces. Colin Harper looked older than she had expected, in sprit if not in body, while the redheaded woman next to him seemed privately amused by the entire proceeding. A blonde-haired girl, hauntingly beautiful, was studying her; Carola recognised Gwendolyn Cicero with a jerk. That made the younger man sitting next to her Tiberius Cicero, the man that Lady Hohenzollern and Stacy Roosevelt blamed for everything. It was hard to see any ogre in his eyes. They were just that of a young man, worried for the future.
If I had a molecular dispensing field or even a bomb, I could wipe out the heart of the rebellion, she thought, coldly. It would have killed her as well, however, and security had been very tight. They hadn’t exactly strip-searched her — that would have been a deadly insult to an Ambassador — but they’d searched her handbag and run all kinds of sensors over her. If she’d been used to carrying weapons, she would have felt distinctly naked, but she didn’t even know how to fire a gun. It wasn’t a skill that was in demand in high society.
The thought made her smile again. There were some members of high society, as shallow as they were — or had been — that she would miss, but most of them would improve the human race enormously if they died. There were hundreds of men and women, snubbed by their social superiors, who threatened violence, but none ever had carried out their threats. There were times when Carola regretted that, even though she might have been a target herself; they could have cleaned up high society overnight. Now, of course, most of the really snooty ones were hiding in their mansions, trying desperately to prove to themselves that nothing had really changed.