Colin lifted an eyebrow. “I’m intrigued,” he said, “but verbal fencing doesn’t interest me nearly as much as the physical kind. What do you both have to tell me?”
Kathy took a breath. “Tiberius is planning to have you killed and intends to have Jason do his dirty work,” she said, and started to outline the entire story. Colin listened, keeping his face blank through sheer force of will, as she explained that Jason Cordova had been born a Cicero and that, long ago, he’d spared an entire planet of Dathi from destruction. “I think that he intends to mount a coup.”
“I doubt that there’s any doubt about that,” Colin said absently, his mind racing as he grappled with the new information. He hadn’t thought much about Cordova’s loyalties since the Fall of Earth, deciding that if he was an Imperial Intelligence plant, he’d never been activated in time to save the Empire from the rebellion. His very inaction — and loyal service as part of the Shadow Fleet — had spoken in his favour. He hadn’t considered the possibility of a deeper game… and one played by one of the handful of Family Members he had come to trust. Everything Tiberius had done, since the Fall of Earth, took on new and sinister meaning. “I wonder…”
He focused in on Cordova, seeing, for the first time, the quiet desperation that hid behind the act. The Captain who’d led his ship to the Rim rather than commit genocide, always aware that he was vulnerable, and every man’s hand would be turned against him if the truth leaked out, dependent upon a Family he hated to conceal the truth. He’d been pompous, and pushy, and sometimes plainly crazy, just to hide his real self from the universe. He’d led his crew on a long voyage of the damned. There were legends of starships that had lost their flicker drives in interstellar space and forced to crawl slower-than-light to the nearest world, but Cordova’s ship had been lost forever. They had had no hope of returning home until the Empire was overthrown.
“You spared the Dathi,” he said, carefully. Colin had wondered, privately, if the Dathi threat had been manufactured. There might have been a war thousands of years ago, but no one had seen a living Dathi since then, not as far as he had known. The Empire had had every incentive to manufacture a threat — after all, they couldn’t prove that the race had been exterminated, and they had been spacefarers — and Colin had suspected that it was a manufactured threat. “What happened to them?”
“I looked it up after I returned to Earth,” Cordova said, vaguely. There was something bitter and broken in his voice, a sense that there would never be any safety for him, or Kathy. “The world was destroyed, having first been catalogued as a human world, and then several asteroids were dropped on the wrecked world. There won’t be any trace of them left there now.”
Colin nodded. The Empire might have revealed the truth… if Cordova had obeyed orders and destroyed them from the start. Public Information would have had a field day, proclaiming Cordova the man who’d saved the Empire, never mind the fact that a non-technological planet was utterly harmless to anyone in the Empire. Instead, he’d left them with a poisoned chalice and a nightmarish blow to the very heart of their power. If the population had realised that one of the Thousand Families was prepared to spare the Dathi…
He directed his thoughts back to more immediate problems. “Personally, I don’t think that you did the wrong thing,” he said, addressing Cordova. It would have been hypocritical to accuse him of wrongdoing, after Colin had been working to free the other races held in bondage by the human race, but it was also the truth. A planet of aliens — any aliens — who were no threat to anyone but themselves didn’t deserve to be scorched. Hell, Gaul hadn’t deserved the attempted scorching either. “Politically, we won’t be able to make a big thing of it, but as far as I’m concerned you did the right thing.”
He leaned forward. “And what, exactly, did Tiberius make you do?”
“He sent two of his people to Harmony to meet with me,” Cordova said. He seemed to be regaining his confidence, perhaps realising that Colin wasn’t going to drop a hammer on him and ruin his life. Just telling someone — anyone — had to be a huge relief. “They made contact with me and gave me a piece of artwork to remind me of what I’d done — or rather, refused to do — and told me to wait for orders. I don’t think that they knew the truth. Anyone who has survived as the Cicero wouldn’t have shared that kind of information with just anyone, even his closest allies. They asked me, from time to time, for information, but nothing too significant.”
“Holding you in reserve,” Colin said, thoughtfully. It made a certain kind of sense. No one in their right mind would just throw an asset like Cordova away. “They must have been worried about you simply cutting your losses and vanishing.”
“It wasn’t just me,” Cordova said, flatly. “It was the crew of my ship. They were all involved in my decision and would have suffered for it. I couldn’t get them all to hide, even out on the Rim.”
“They’ll have a pardon,” Colin said, and meant it.
“Pardoned for what?” Kathy asked, sharply. She leaned forward, as if she could change reality by sheer force of will. “If they weren’t guilty of anything, how could they be pardoned?”
Colin shrugged. “It might be important to explain that they haven’t done anything wrong,” he said, putting the matter to one side for the moment. The blunt truth was that the vast majority of the population would consider that they had done something wrong in not exterminating the entire planet and committing genocide. “Jason, Kathy, what do they want you to do now?”
“They want me to kill you,” Cordova said, carefully. “They offered to allow me back into the Family if I killed you, perhaps with other rewards as well…”
“Charming,” Colin said. Surprisingly, he felt almost happy. He had a real enemy to fight, even though he was slightly disappointed in Tiberius. The Cicero had been a valuable ally, or so he had thought. Combat on the ground, in the shadows, wasn’t his forte, but now he knew about the threat. “And do you want to kill me?”
They exchanged glances. “No,” Cordova said, finally. He stroked his beard thoughtfully. It was nearly a minute before he spoke again. “I want my crew pardoned, or officially forgiven, and nothing else.”
“I want this conspiracy defeated,” Kathy said, flatly. “They can’t turn the clock back, no matter how they try.” Her voice hardened. “Colin, this is a clear breach of the truce that ended the war, the agreement that preserved something of their power in exchange for them not bringing the Empire down around our heads. We can go after them openly now.”
She reached over and took Cordova’s hand. “They can’t turn the clock back,” she repeated. “We were having problems keeping the Empire stable despite everything, because of all their workers who wanted to be treated better, and who wanted power and promotion for themselves. We couldn’t keep trying to square the circle forever, but now we don’t have to try. They’re a clear and present threat and can be removed, simply and quickly.”
“Perhaps not,” Colin said, grimly. She was right, in a sense; it would be easy to go after Tiberius and the remainder of the Cicero Family, but would it end there? Who else was involved in the conspiracy? Tiberius had kept an open house, as far as the remainder of the Thousand Families were concerned, even including some of the MPs. How many of them had been subverted and brought under his thumb? He might even have Household Troops under his control, despite the agreement to remove them all from Earth. How far did his influence really spread? “How many others do you know about as being directly involved?”