Colin slapped him, hard. Percival cried out, his pale cheek burning red where Colin had hit him, yet somehow he remained upright. Colin stared down at him, fighting the desire to hurt Percival, to tear him apart or shoot him or… there were too many possibilities.
And yet, if he killed Percival in cold blood, what would it mean for the future?
“You’re wrong,” Colin said, holding his voice steady through a colossal act of will. “You are the one tightening your grip so hard that eventually there will be a rebellion that will tear the Empire apart. What makes you special? Only the fact that one of your very distant ancestors did something important, many years ago, long before you were born. You cannot keep stamping down on the human race forever.”
Percival looked up at him. Colin wondered absently if the man was in shock. No one had dared to lift a hand to him in the past, yet now he’d been slapped twice in the same day and found himself stripped of all status. It would have been a dizzying fall. No one deserved it more, yet Colin felt a flicker of sympathy and hated himself for the thought. How could he feel any sympathy for his nemesis at all?
“Answer me one other question,” Colin said. “Answer me… and I will know if you lie. Why did you betray me?”
There was a long pause. “Because you’re nothing,” Percival said. He’d clearly decided to tell the truth, even though it might mean a bullet in the head. His voice became mocking, tearing away at whatever remained of Colin’s self-control. “You were someone with ideas above your station. I fed those ideas as long as I needed you, then I discarded you when you were no longer required and replaced you with someone who was so much more useful. You were never important to me, Walker; I never thought about you after I’d discarded you. You were just a tool.”
His mouth lolled open. “And you thought that it was personal,” he added. “What are you to me? I didn’t care enough for it to be personal. You were nothing.”
Colin lifted the pistol and pointed it at Percival’s forehead. “You want to know something else?” Percival added. “You come in here and condemn me for doing what I had to do to maintain the Empire. You are just as guilty as I am. You helped plan missions that slaughtered rebels and crushed entire planets. You are responsible for many of the acts you whine about now. Your hands are as bloody as mine and consider; without you, would I have become the Sector Commander?”
A red mist seemed to descend across Colin’s mind. It took everything he had not to fire the pistol and kill the Admiral in cold blood. Slowly, he fought for calm. Percival deserved something more… appropriate than a mere bullet in the head.
“You may be right,” Colin said, returning the pistol to his holster. “I may be partly complicit in your crimes. I’ll tell you this, though; I will redeem myself and the service I swore to serve until the end of my days. And in the end, few will remember you. You will just be a figure of fun for historians to chuckle over.”
He stood up and walked to the hatch, turning before he left the cell. “I haven’t quite decided what to do with you,” he added, “but I will tell you this. There is a strong feeling that we should just send you back to the Empire. They’re going to be desperate to find someone to blame for this little… crisis. Perhaps we should give them someone, eh?”
Colin walked out and the hatch hissed closed behind him, cutting off Percival’s parting shot — if he shouted anything. Percival might well believe him. The Empire would want someone to blame and, if Percival was the sole survivor from the higher ranks, it would be him. Their method of execution would be far more imaginative and painful than anything Colin could hand out for him.
He ignored the presence of the Marine and paused long enough to recover his temper, running through breathing exercises he had learned at the Academy. Percival had managed to get under his skin, all the more so because everything he had said had the unmistakable ring of truth. Colin had believed — had chosen to believe — that Percival had it in for him personally, yet Percival’s own words countered that. Colin… had just been there when Percival had wanted a tool. Colin’s own ambition had blinded him about his true place in Percival’s scheme of things.
Eventually, he walked down to the second brig and looked down at the monitors. Stacy Roosevelt was lying on the bunk, staring up at nothing. She had actually tried to hide when the Marines landed to arrest her, but the staff at the resort — for high ranking offices and managers only, of course — had betrayed her at once. She hadn’t been any better than Percival at making friends and winning allies. Stacy was wearing only what she had on when she’d been arrested; a bikini top and a pair of shorts. The impression was that of a young and innocent girl with disturbingly old eyes.
Colin felt his vindictive streak boiling up within him and he walked on, pushing Stacy to the back of his mind. The third brig held someone he didn’t know personally, Spencer O’Conner. The older man — even with regeneration treatments, he was clearly aging and his file claimed that he was over a hundred and thirty years old — was the Roosevelt Family’s manager, the grown-up sent to watch Stacy and the planets the Family had seeded over the years. Colin had been intrigued the moment he’d seen the file, because the choice of O’Conner was odd. He wasn’t a direct family member, so he couldn’t be trusted completely… so why was he out in Sector 117?
O’Conner looked up as Colin opened the hatch and stepped into the brig. He moved with a delicacy that suggested that his body’s coordination was wearing out, no matter how healthy he looked. His white hair seemed to shine in the light; his blue eyes were alarmingly perceptive. Someone who had lived so long, Colin knew, would have developed remarkable skills for reading a person, or a situation. Again, he wondered why O’Conner had been sent out to serve the Roosevelt Family. It didn’t quite add up.
“The famous Commander Walker,” O’Conner said. His voice was far more accented than Percival’s duller tones. “I trust you will understand if I don’t get up?”
He rattled his chains to illustrate his point. “Of course,” Colin said, as he took the interrogator’s chair. O’Conner seemed to exude charm, which might explain why he’d been given the job — whatever the job had truly been. “I trust that you will understand if I get right to the point? What were you building for the Roosevelt Family in this sector?”
O’Conner didn’t try to mislead him. “I’m afraid I cannot discuss that, Commander,” he said. “It isn’t a matter I can answer now.”
Colin frowned, peering at him over his fingertips. “Do you have an implanted mental block, or are you just being loyal to the Family?”
“The latter,” O’Conner said. “Sadly, mental blocks are not as helpful as they would seem to suggest, not when the subject needs to talk openly. I hate to insult your intelligence, Commander, but I’m afraid there is no way you can get me to talk.”
Colin snorted. “I hate to insult your intelligence, but I’m sure that you know there are plenty of ways that information can be extracted from an unwilling donor,” he reminded him, dryly. “I assume that you have an implant providing some protection from torture? How long do you think it would protect you once the Geeks take it apart?”
O’Conner smiled, drolly. “What makes you think I know anything?”