Rebel (18 page)

Kris Longknife had persuaded Vicky to give Sevastopol an Imperial City Charter. Mannie had used it to blend the people, the money, and industry, along with the elected officials, into something that Vicky was finding worth having. Metzburg and Brunswick appeared to have had no such need to balance anything. Admittedly, its people of wealth were scared that the Empress intended to gut and roast them for dinner. Still, Vicky had no idea how these new planets would fare once she helped them get on their feet.

Vicky weighed what she had seen on the new planets and what she knew of on St. Petersburg. Would fear be enough to motivate everyone to balance their interests with everyone else they shared this planet with? Would the hope of their future hold them together once stepmama was no longer out to rip them to shreds?

If they couldn’t, this rebellion might just be the first of many to come.

I need some quiet time to think. This rebellion thing is nowhere as easy as some people thought when they offered me an old flag to wave.

However, Vicky’s contemplation came to a roaring halt as her limo did the same. Vicky couldn’t remember ever having been stuck in traffic before, at least not in Greenfeld space. Traffic jams were something for Longknife folk to get stuck in.

Vicky glanced around. Traffic was stopped on her side of the street, and almost none was coming down the other side.

“Driver,” Vicky said with an annoyed half wave, “pull over and let’s jump to the head of this line.”

The agent riding shotgun next to the driver spoke on his commlink, then shook his head. “The traffic supervisors don’t recommend that, Your Grace. Some gathering of old ladies has gotten out of hand, and the biddies are blocking the road. He suggests you go around.”

Vicky scowled. “Old ladies are blocking the road?”

“Something like that,” the security agent agreed.

“How often does that happen around here?” the commander asked.

The agent looked pained. “I don’t think it ever has.”

“Let’s get out of here, or we will be late,” Vicky said. Several long-term trade agreements had been settled and they wanted her there to sign them, along with the locals and the trade delegates from St. Petersburg. It would not do to keep important people waiting.

The cars ahead and behind Vicky’s limo completed a simultaneous U-turn and gunned down the opposite side of the street just as several others drivers got the same idea. They flinched out of the way of Vicky’s cavalcade.

Despite the delay, Vicky was right on time.

However, the meeting had taken a decided turn from its agenda.

Captain Torrago was beside the man at the head of the table, and there were major thunderclouds hanging over them.

CHAPTER 26

“Y
OUR
Grace, I’m so glad you are here. Maybe you can make this young woman understand that when her betters give her an order, it is to be obeyed.”

“Yes, Your Grace,” Inez bit out. “Would you please tell this . . . man . . .” seemed to replace some other preferred word, “that Rangers do not shoot down unarmed women and children in the street.”

“They are troublemakers. Rabble-rousers,” the man corrected.

“They never would have done this if we still had State Security,” one older man at midtable grumbled. “People knew their place.”

“And what might that place be?” Vicky asked breezily as she made her way as unthreateningly as possible to the head of the table.

I wondered what this rebellion was all about. I suspect I’m about to discover that rebellion is many things to many people. No need to spook these folks any sooner than I have to. No doubt they’re sure they have all the answers.

If I’ve learned anything, it’s that no one does, not even little old me.

Once Vicky was at the head of the table, she stepped between the Ranger captain and the spokesman for the powers that be on Brunswick.

“What seems to be happening that’s got you all upset?” she asked, keeping it as open-ended as possible.

“We have a rebellion,” the chief citizen of Brunswick said evenly, all unction and oil to
his
Grand Duchess.

“I know,” Vicky said, offhandedly. “I seem to have been on the receiving end of its first shots.” She smiled her most encouraging Grand Duchess smile.

“Not
our
rebellion,
their
rebellion,” the grump at midtable growled.

“Ah,” Vicky said, making to appear enlightened. “So it all centers on the pronoun, does it.”

“Don’t be silly, girl,” snapped the grouch. “Jansik, set her straight.”

“I will, Wallace, if you give me a chance.” The man at the head of the table turned his bright and winning smile on Vicky. “We have a problem with hooligans and troublemakers blocking traffic, destroying private property, and causing mischief. I asked the young woman you suggested be the chief of our defense forces to deploy her troops to support our small force of traffic supervisors. She refused. Would you please tell her to comply with my order?”

Vicky turned to Inez and raised a questioning eyebrow.
No doubt there was more to this story than one side.

“He ordered me to machine-gun the protestors,” the Ranger snapped.

“That’s what State Security would have done,” Wallace said, getting his oar in the troubled waters.

“Please, Wallace, let the Grand Duchess handle this,” said Jansik.

“Okay, okay, I’m just saying,” said Wallace as he waved away the head of the table.

“Your Grace,” Jansik said.

“Captain?” Vicky said.

“Ma’am, I’ve recruited some of my best trainees from those projects. I’ve had two weeks to train them. Many of them have just begun the weapons phase of their training, and
this man wants me to order them to shoot down their mothers and grandmothers, their kid brothers and girlfriends!”

That got Vicky’s attention. “Who are these people in the street?”

“No one,” Jansik assured her back.

Vicky ignored him and kept her attention on Inez. Here was a woman she’d trusted with her life.

“Your Grace, the protestors are the women from the projects. That’s where the workers live. The folks that still have jobs. The place is a mess. No running water. Little heat, and these guys raised the rent last month while cutting their husbands’ pay for the third time this year. Vicky, the women are protesting because they can’t take it anymore.”

Vicky listened to Inez with two sets of ears.

One, her father the Emperor’s ear, heard what Jansik expected her to hear. Hooligans were making trouble and needed to be taught a lesson. State Security should machine-gun them down. That would teach the likes of such people to accept what they got from their betters.

But Vicky had another set of ears now. Those listened as Mannie would. Here were real human beings, who built with their own two hands everything the people in this room needed. They were the people, like Inez, who would protect them from the likes of stepmommy dearest.

People who had just defended them from stepmom’s invasion fleet.

Vicky closed her eyes.
How could they miss the Ranger’s warning? If she issued those kids guns to shoot their mothers down, they’d be just as likely to turn those weapons on the officers ordering the murder of their family. On the likes of the people in this room.

Fools!

Vicky turned to Jansik. “I don’t think you’ve thought this through.”

“Thought what through?”

Vicky let her eyes rove the room. The grouch was scowling at her, as were many of those around the table. There looked to be a few who might have put two and two together, but they were few and far between.

Vicky was tempted to just turn on her heels, grab Inez and her company of Rangers, and knock the dust of this place from her shoes.

It was tempting.

Then again, St. Petersburg needed Brunswick as a trading partner. Besides, if Vicky withdrew the fleet, the blackhearted Empress would be down on this bunch with her redcoats in two shakes. They’d be dead, and the lot of the workers would be no better.

“Not long ago, I led a Fleet Marine Force and a task force out to bring food to a planet,” Vicky said, slowly. “We had to fight our way through a self-proclaimed duke and his gun-toting henchmen to get starvation rations to people dying of hunger. Inez here fought to make that happen. She’s a good warrior,” Vicky said, nodding at the captain.

Inez met the praise with a hint of a smile.

“Who has the guns on Brunswick?” Vicky asked. “Who got their hands on the guns left behind by the slaughter of State Security?”

Vicky eyed grumpy, then Jansik.

“I thought the guns were removed by the Navy when they took those thugs away,” Jansik said.

“Who checked the inventory?” Vicky asked. “We’ve found a lot of them still locked up in that planet’s armory. That duke fellow blew open the gun vault, and, before long, he had his hands on everything.”

“Aren’t the traffic safety officers using State Security Headquarters now?” someone around the table asked.

That drew shrugs.

“If they’re there,” Vicky said, “and you start shooting, whose hands will the guns end up in?”

Several frantic people around the table started talking to their commlinks. Vicky waited patiently for them to find out what cow was eating their cabbage, as some of the ex-farmers in the fleet were often wont to say.

“The gun vault opened at a touch, but it’s empty,” a woman near the foot of the table announced. “It looks like it was unlocked a while ago and just closed back up.”

“So, my fine people, who has the monopoly on violence in your city and planet?” Vicky asked. “There is a thing I read
about in one of the books I found on a Navy battleship. Not in the library at the palace, but something the Navy reads. It’s called a social contract. Have any of you heard of such a thing?”

Heads shook around the table.

“You come to a green light,” Vicky said slow, as if talking to particularly difficult preschoolers. “You drive through it, knowing that anyone coming from the other directions will see the red light and not smash into you. It’s the same way with other things. I work for you. I assume that you’ll treat me decently. That part of the contract can be a bit harder if you’ve got the likes of State Security to lean on the worker. The Emperor provided the duress, and you got to stint on the decent-treatment side. Now the machine guns are gone, and you’re caught between a rock and a hard place. My stepmother is providing the rock. She’s only too willing to smash you down and take what she wants from your dead body. The workers can’t help but notice that the guns are gone. They could sure use some decent treatment. Who do you want to bargain with, my mom or those women blocking traffic?”

Vicky settled into Jansik’s chair, leaving the fellow standing at her elbow.

The room’s silence grew long, but that was too much for grumpy. “A Peterwald is telling us to bargain with our workers. I never thought I’d hear that.”

“I bet you never thought a Peterwald would save your sorry ass from another Peterwald, but it happened,” Vicky pointed out. “Face it, folks, you live in very strange times.”

That drew a lot of surprised glances from around the table.

“Any chance we could bargain with the Empress?” grumpy asked no one.

“Have you talked to any of your family who are stuck in her ‘security sphere’?” a young fellow across the table from him said. “The last I heard from my sister, her husband had an offer he couldn’t refuse. That was a year ago, and there hasn’t been a peep out of them since. Not so much as a small text message. Anyone else hearing nothing, too?”

He eyed the room. Suddenly, everyone was busy looking at the table.

“Yeah, like I thought. Folks, we have one and only one choice. We can pull together, all of us, or we can all get pulled
apart. Wallace, I know you won’t like it. You were chummy with General Zin before he got tossed out the window of State Security Headquarters.”

“He jumped,” Wallace insisted.

“Jumped, pushed? He was just a splat on the cobblestones when it was all over. I like this thing the Grand Duchess mentioned. We made our social contract with the Peterwalds and their State Security. They made it easy for us to do pretty much what we wanted to.”

The young man looked around the table. “Now we have no guns to back us up, and the Empress is canceling all previous contracts and offering us stuff we can’t swallow but can’t refuse. So, unless someone has a third option I haven’t heard about, we either make our peace with the folks we share this planet with and give them guns to defend themselves and us with, or we kowtow to the Empress and let her do what she wants to us.”

Now there was discussion around the table. Vicky figured she’d be there for a long time. She looked up at Inez and drew her close with a quick waggle of a finger.

“Ma’am.”

“You want to get back to work?” Vicky whispered.

“Yes, Your Grace.”

“And look into those missing State Security machine pistols. You might also want to put some guards around the protestors to see that no one decides to use those machine guns in crowd control. I think I’ve got this bunch stampeded into a circle, but who knows who is out there and willing to do their unspoken bidding.”

At “stampeded,” the former rancher smiled, but at the thought of stray weapons wrecking what she and her Grand Duchess had worked so hard for this afternoon, Inez nodded and quick-walked from the room, her commlink already to her lips.

CHAPTER 27

T
O
Vicky’s disappointment, she did not find herself standing at several guys’ elbows, smiling prettily to banks of newsies, as contracts were quickly signed. Instead, she sat through another long meeting.