The Shadow of Cincinnatus (20 page)

Watch and wait
, he reminded himself. It wouldn’t be the first time he’d done something distasteful – and some of the things he’d had to do had been
incredibly
distasteful – for the greater glory of the Federation.
Watch, wait and take your chance when you see it
.

The next street held a makeshift barricade, completely abandoned. Judging from its position, it had been intended to keep refugees from the inner city out of the suburbs, rather than blocking the Outsiders as they moved into the city from the landing zones. Or maybe the builders had thought they had time to block the other lines of approach too. He shrugged, then ordered his men to tear it down. Once it was gone, they could move on towards the center of the city.

And hopefully without encountering more idiots
, he thought.

* * *

“The city has been largely secured, sir,” General Erskine said. His face on the display screen flickered in and out, a warning that the communications network was far from stable. “There are some minor pockets of resistance – or riots – but we have them sealed off and will deal with them, once everything else is under control.”

“Good,” Charlie said. “And the facilities?”

“Some are intact, but quite a few have been destroyed,” General Erskine reported. “The Federation Navy took out a number of orbital installations too, as they left orbit. They must have assumed they were going to lose the system.”

Charlie cursed under his breath. Athena’s industry would have been a valuable prize. Not all of it had been destroyed – a glance at the report made that clear – but enough had been taken out to make rebuilding it a significant challenge. Luckily, enough had survived to ensure that Athena wouldn’t need help from outside to rebuild. It would just take several years.

And by then the war might well be finished
, he thought, coldly.
Either we win or they win – or we manage to compromise. The industries here might prove immaterial to the outcome.

“And the local assets?” He asked. “Are they in place to take over?”

“For the moment, only in the city itself,” Erskine said. “They took a pounding from the Marines before they scattered, sir. We can start recruiting from other locals, as planned, but that offers other risks.”

“We will just have to live with them,” Charlie said. “Keep a lid on any trouble, General.”

“I will,” Erskine said. “And good luck with the advance.”

His image vanished. Charlie frowned, then turned his attention to the reports from the Asimov Points. Both of the systems leading back towards the Federation had been secured, but it wasn’t clear if they’d managed to get off a warning or not. If they had, the shit would definitely hit the fan. And even if they hadn’t...it wouldn’t be long before
someone
realized that something had gone badly wrong. The Justinian War had taught the Federation to pay attention to vague reports of trouble from the fringe.

And then there was the Federation Navy’s ships...

He sighed. They’d won this battle, but the war itself had only just begun.

It is a curious fact about the Federation that, in all but its final incarnation, it was determined to produce at least an appearance of following the rule of law. This tended to produce no shortage of legalistic foul play to create a veneer of legality, all of which was complete nonsense. The laws could be changed at will by the Grand Senate. Quite why they felt this compulsion, when no one was in any doubt that the Federation cared nothing for the rule of law, has never been satisfactorily explained
.

-The Federation Navy in Retrospect, 4199

Earth, 4098

“It’s been a month,” Marius said, angrily. “A month of endless stalling, all around the same question! Are orders from the Grand Senate
legal
by definition?”

“You may have underestimated that lawyer,” Tiffany agreed. They sat together in his office, looking down at the latest set of reports. She wrapped an arm around his shoulders as she spoke. “How long does it normally take to hold a court martial?”

“A week,” Marius said. “The evidence is presented, the defendant and his defender make speeches...then the jury moves to immediate judgement. It shouldn’t take any longer than a week at most. It’s gathering the evidence that generally takes time.”

He cursed himself under his breath. Deciding to give Blake Raistlin a reasonably fair trial had been a mistake. He was sure of that now. It would have been relatively straightforward to get a board to rubber-stamp an execution, or simply to have him shot along with the others after the Fall of Earth, but he’d had to make a point. And besides, he’d felt personally betrayed by Raistlin. He’d trusted the younger man to do his duty, rather than serving as a spy and assassin for his family. Instead, Raistlin had shot him.

The media was full of accounts of the trial, divided between those who thought Raistlin was innocent and those who wanted him shot out of hand. How was it, Marius asked himself, that the
media
had been the only industry to survive the fall of the Grand Senate and come out reasonably intact? But then, to maintain a facade of impartiality, the media corporations were officially owned by people with no connections to the Grand Senate. They’d simply kept their jobs and started to work without having to have everything approved, in triplicate. And several media corporations
had
been semi-independent in any case.

And they’d been joined by hundreds of others. There were thousands of would-be journalists out there and, now the regulations governing the media had been swept away, they’d started to band together to form new outlets of their own. Marius suspected, from what Professor Kratman had said, that most of them wouldn’t last longer than a year, but for the moment they were creating a barrage of noise. Life had been easier, the PR staff had said, when most of the media did what the Grand Senate said. But then, it had also included hundreds of obnoxious reporters who’d managed to get in the way during the war.

And a few of them got killed by the enemy
, Marius thought, with bitter satisfaction. It was hard to feel sorry for someone who insisted on the finest cabins, the finest food and then bitched whenever they picked up a tiny bruise. And tried to lure female officers into their beds.
Some of them might even have been killed by friendly fire
.

But right now the Trial of Blake Raistlin was devouring the headlines. And so was everything from the scrapping of rules and regulations to the changes in ownership of various industrial concerns. Everyone seemed to have something to say, even though most of them merely repeated what someone else had already said. It was a major headache to keep track of the babble, or what it was doing to public opinion. There were reports from some of the shipyards of labor unrest, caused by fears over the future. And those fears were being spread by the media.

Tiffany leaned forward. “Maybe it’s time to bring the matter to a close,” she said. “Put a limit on the defender’s right to speak.”

“That’s not permissible,” Marius said. The defender could keep raising issues forever, as long as the judges were prepared to allow it. There were so many precedents that Darlington could keep hammering home the same message time and time again, without repeating himself once. “Most court martial hearings concentrate on the facts. They don’t normally need to spend months arguing over precedents.”

“Then ignore the issue,” Tiffany advised. “You don’t need to worry about him any longer, do you?”

Marius shrugged. He didn’t care to look at his own feelings, for the issue had become an obsession. Betrayal was something he’d expected from the Grand Senate, not someone who had been so close to him. And yet, in hindsight, it was blindingly obvious that Raistlin had been placed there to keep an eye on him. He should have anticipated that the younger man would be given other orders too.

“I don’t know,” he said, finally.

He’d always enjoyed working with younger officers, helping to steer their careers into places where they could best serve the Federation and themselves. Everyone wanted to be a captain, but not everyone was
suited
to be a commanding officer, not when the demands of commanding a starship under fire were intense. Steering someone gently away from command track was often a service to them as well as the Federation, even if they didn’t appreciate it at the time. Mentoring younger officers was important – and he’d seen himself as mentoring Raistlin, as well as Garibaldi and the others. And Raistlin had shot him.

“Well, don’t,” Tiffany said. She poked him in the chest. “This has...”

The ground heaved. Marius blinked in shock as the lights flickered on and off, then stood up and pushed Tiffany under the heavy wooden desk. The alarms started seconds later, emergency alerts flashing through the datanet. Marius triggered his implants, searching for the cause of the upheaval, then swore as he realized that four datanodes had been taken out. Someone was mounting an attack on Earth.

He reached for the pistol he kept at his side as the doors crashed open, revealing a handful of armed and armored Marines. Marius forced himself to relax, knowing that the Marines would be on edge – and that if they’d been subverted, there was no hope for anyone. And besides, if they were, there was no point in trying to fight.

“Sir,” the leader said. “There’s been an explosion. We have to get you to the bunker.”

“Take Tiffany too,” Marius ordered, as he was hustled across the office and up to the wall. “She needs to be safe too.”

The wall looked impregnable, but a hidden hatch opened when the Marine tapped it, revealing an antigravity shaft. Marius had no time to object before he was shoved into the shaft and fell into the depths of the earth. The antigravity field caught him before he hit the ground and whisked him into a bunker, where the president was expected to hide if there was ever a major attack on Earth. Given that the
last
president had been on the moon when Admiral Justinian had attacked, it was unlikely the cold gray bunker had ever been used for its intended purpose.

“Sir,” the operator said. She was a thin woman, so pale he couldn’t help wondering if she’d spent all her life below the earth. Her body was shaved so thin that he would have taken her for a child, if she hadn’t been wearing a military uniform. It looked thoroughly unnatural. “We have an emergency situation.”

“I gathered that,” Marius said. It had been six years since Admiral Justinian had attacked Earth. “Give me a status update.”

There was a whooshing sound behind him as Tiffany landed, then picked herself up off the ground. The operator looked as if she were about to object to her presence, then caught Marius’s eye and thought better of it. Instead, she turned back to her console and brought up a system-wide display.

“There was a bomb attack outside the President’s House,” she said, “and a number of smaller attacks scattered over the system. Nothing nuclear or antimatter, thankfully, but most of them were precisely targeted and did considerable damage. There were also attempts to attack the datanet with chaos software, but thanks to the precautions we put in place after the last attack they all failed. As of now, the datanet is secure.”

Marius took a step forward until he was looking down at the display. The attacks had been carefully targeted all right, and collectively they represented a major breach in security. It was beyond him to imagine how
anyone
had managed to carry out so many attacks, unless they’d had inside help. Admiral Justinian had done the same, six years ago. Hadn’t the Grand Senate’s purge been enough to sweep away all the infiltrators?

Evidently not
, he thought.

He took a long breath. “Are there any reports of incoming ships?”

“None,” the operator said. “I checked with both the Gateway and Titan Base. Both of them are at full alert, but neither of them are reporting trouble. The long-range sensors in Luna Orbit have gone active and are currently sweeping the system, yet nothing out of the ordinary has been detected so far. There may be no incoming attack.”

Marius considered it, quickly. Home Fleet consisted of twelve squadrons of superdreadnaughts and over three hundred smaller ships, while both Earth and the Gateway were heavily defended. This time, the defenders had not been caught napping. The damage the attackers had done had been significant, but not fatal. There should be no need for a desperate defense of Earth.

“We will see,” he said. “Keep me informed.”

Reports came rolling in from all over the system. Each one made grim reading; the enemy, whoever they were, had targeted industrial plants as well as shipyards and even asteroid mining stations. One of Jupiter’s massive cloudscoops had been destroyed, while two others had been badly damaged. Marius watched in grim disbelief, wondering how so many terrorists had managed to get through the screening program. Surely, the Grand Senate had closed off all the likely angles of attack.

They subverted a clerk somewhere in the bureaucracy
, he guessed.
That rat bastard cleared them through the security net, perhaps recording that they were given the full security vetting before they were granted clearance to work anywhere. And people pay far too much attention to what’s written in the databases, rather than checking for themselves.

But there are too many people involved,
his thoughts mocked him.
How can they all be checked and vetted and then declared safe
?

It was nearly five hours before he was sure they’d seen the worst of it. No attacking fleet had made its presence known, not entirely to his surprise. Admiral Justinian had attacked a fleet he’d known he’d decapitated – Marius had a suspicion he’d had someone watching the fleet from Earth, reporting on its status – but Home Fleet was intact and searching for any attackers stupid enough to infringe on Earth’s defense limit. And the chaos software attack had failed completely.