She smiled thinly. “We rebelled against the Empire, which turned a blind eye to thousands of abuses, even the ones it didn’t cause,” she said. She looked Colin right in the eye. “Are we going to turn a blind eye to this particular abuse?”
Colin scowled. He had to admit that she had a point. Like it or hate it, the Empire had kept a firm lid on thousands of petty human conflicts, often over the strangest things. New Kabul’s civil war had been brought to an end by the mass slaughter of the armies and leaders involved, hundreds of thousands of pirates and wreckers had been mercilessly hunted down… and that was only the beginning. The demise of the Empire had brought all of those crises back into existence and forced them to either act to prevent them, which meant that they would be accused of being imperialistic, or watching helplessly as thousands of innocents were slaughtered. The refugee crisis alone was unbelievable and would have been a lot worse if more starships had been available.
Daria pressed her case. “We know nothing for sure, beyond the fact that Cottbus lured our ships into an ambush and destroyed them once they were past any hope of escape,” she continued. She tapped the table to underline her words. “That is the only thing we know. The details about it being an democratic state, wanting independence from the Empire, are what we’ve been told. It looks like a Jonah Rotten to me.”
There were some chuckles. The original Jonah Rotten had been an Imperial Navy Q-Ship. It had looked like a harmless bulk freighter, operated by an independent shipping firm, until the pirates had slipped into weapons range. The freighter had hit their ship with enough fission beams to cripple it, boarded it and then, once they’d completed their mission, launched the surviving pirates into space. Pirates, who wanted to get home and spend their ill-gotten loot, had given every other bulk freighter a wide berth from then on for a few years. It had been one of the more successful tactics the Imperial Navy had deployed.
“At the very least, we should assume that this isn’t right,” she concluded. “I propose that we move the 2nd Fleet out to Hawthorn anyway, as we planned, accompanied by a team of people who can...investigate their claims. We can send in covert operatives as well, people who can land on their worlds without being noticed; hell, the League has been discussing expanding into that territory. We get in there, we find out what the hell is going on, and if he’s created a military state, we act against it.”
“We could probably sell that to the first-rank worlds,” Goscinny said, finally. He sounded rather reluctant, but accepting. “They might insist on sending along their own representatives…”
Colin smiled. “René, why don’t you go?”
Goscinny nodded. “I think that that would probably be the best choice,” he said. “I’ll be wanting danger money, of course.” Colin laughed. The Empire was barely in the black and money was very tight. Paying danger money might have had a serious effect on the economy. “More seriously, if you’ll give me a day or two, I can assemble a team from the first-rank representatives on Earth, including a handful of MPs.”
“And they might be taken and altered,” Daria warned. “If that happens, they will come back singing Wilhelm’s praises and we’ll be no wiser than we already are.”
“I know,” Goscinny said. He sounded a little nervous, but refused to surrender. “I’ll just have to take the risk.”
Brave man, Colin thought. Imperial Intelligence had had a long history of ‘altering’ people who rebelled against the Empire, using their mental technology to turn them into puppets, or loyal servants of the Empire. Some of them hadn’t even known that they were slaves to the Empire and had believed, truly, that they were still working against it, even as they led rebel bands into traps or worse. They never lasted long — the human mind didn’t like such control and eventually collapsed — but while they lasted, they could be devastating. Trust became impossible when you never knew who could be unknowingly working for the Empire.
“Good,” Colin said. He looked around the room. “We’ll send the 2nd Fleet out to Hawthorn and send some representatives with it. They can investigate the situation and discover just what we’re actually dealing with. Are there any objections?”
There were none.
“I have a proposal,” Grand Admiral Joshua Wachter said. “If we’re sending out Admiral Garland, she should be ordered not to initiate hostilities, but to launch covert surveillance missions into the sector to discover what might actually be going on. A handful of picketing destroyers might be more useful than any agent on the ground.”
Colin scowled. He was an Imperial Navy officer, or at least he’d been an Imperial Navy officer, and every bone in his body was calling out for him to crush the potential threat before it crushed him. He might have become a politician, but he still had problems accepting the give and take of politics, even if there was no choice. Blondel was right. If they acted harshly and quickly, it would destroy their reputation.
“We also need to clarify her status,” Blondel continued. Her firm voice demanded respect. “In hindsight, we had little choice, but to allow her to address Parliament. We need to decide, now, what she is and how we should deal with her.”
She stood up and started to pace. “She’s either a Member of Parliament herself, in which case Cottbus is actually a part of the Empire, or an Ambassador, in which case we have effectively recognised Cottbus’s independence,” she continued. “At the moment, she seems to be both; hell, we’ve treated her as both. We could maintain the fiction that she’s a non-voting MP or something, but…”
“Cicero sent Ambassadors to us during the rebellion,” Colin said, not missing the sharp glance that Joshua sent Tiberius. He evidently hadn’t known that little detail, which was interesting. It was definitely something to think about later. “We do have a certain amount of precedent.”
“Not for something like this,” Daria said firmly. “The two situations are not exactly compatible. We knew, back then, that it was us or them. There was no thought of a compromise, nor could we have worked one out even if we had considered it. This is something different. Cottbus could become an independent stellar nation… and that is something that we cannot allow. It would shatter the Empire.
“There are still sectors governed by the last remains of the old order,” she continued, altering the display to show the nine sectors that probably only had an inkling that something had changed on Earth. “If we allow this precedent to stand, we will have those sectors declaring independence as well… and we won’t have a legal leg to deal with them. How could we invade and liberate them from tyranny when we left one alone because of legal quibbling?”
“That’s the sort of logic that worries the first-rank worlds,” Goscinny said. “The Empire didn’t interfere — often — with our internal customs. The price for our acquiescence to the Empire’s overall rule was internal autonomy. Yes, the Empire did move into our spheres more and more as time went on, but it didn’t interfere with our customs.”
He paused. “Gaul has several customs that most of you will find a little odd,” he said. “They’re not even the strangest, or perhaps the most outrageous, customs, covering everything from sex to religion and everything in-between. What they — we — regard as traditional customs you will find unpleasant, perhaps even repulsive. A threat to them will still be taken very seriously.”
“I seem to recall,” Joshua said, “one of my best officers coming from a world where she would be regarded as having no role, but being barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen. I fail to see why such customs should be tolerated.”