Against The Empire

[Lord_Of_Change 9]

Against The Empire: The Story of a Civil War

Terra, 2787

The great square was always a natural home for crowds. It stood between three massive skyscrapers, each on a a separate side of the square. The north side was a boulevard that went straight to the gates of the Imperial Palace. On the two skyscrapers on the square's east and west sides, there hung massive black banners, black to represent the interstellar void, with the National Eagle on them in gold, two-headed, each holding an image of Terra in its claws. On the south side, there was an immense screen on which the latest victories and defeats of humanity's armies in their ceaseless, tireless crusade against the enemy were displayed. When it was a victory the speakers and screen broadcast, the mood was one of excitement. When it was a defeat, the atmosphere was solemn and mournful.

A most unusual crowd had gathered in the square on this bleak December day, as the sky faded to the colour of twilight the evening before Christmas, that ancient festival, its origins long forgotten, of gift-giving in the midst of the bleak and cold winter. They were a group of protesters, thousands-strong, many holding placards on which angry slogans were written in red. They shouted the motto of the Democrats - 'Liberty or death! Liberty or death!'

Police Lieutenant Charles Hayworth looked angry. He had a paltry 150 policemen, armed with the standard riot weapons, with which to halt the mob, and Police HQ was not in a particularly generous mood. He had only one option - to call in elements of the Stormguard, the Party's paramilitary wing, to disperse the rabble using lethal methods as necessary. Eight minutes later, seventy-five men arrived, covered in thick power armour, carrying heavy plasma rifles, marching out of thickly-armoured APCs whose tracks tore up the pavement.

The Stormguard leader made the front part of his helmet transparent, so that his face could be seen. He was young (evidently the result of deaging treatments), his hair black and his eyes venom-green. On his face there was a sneer of arrogance and cold command, and then his voice, modulated by his helmet to be distinctly mechanical, rung out.

'What do you want us to do?' he asked, each word like a sentence in itself.

'Just...' Hayworth replied. 'Just disperse the mob, by all means necessary.'

'That we shall,' the Stormguard leader replied.

The APCs' machine-guns fired into the crowd, mowing down those at the front and covering the Stormguard advance. They were on stun right now, but that could change in future. Then, a single shot from an outdated slugthrower (most likely an old hunting rifle) fired. The Stormguard raised his left hand, the energy-field projected from it stopping the bullet dead in its tracks. Nobody had been hurt. But that single shot gave the Stormguard the right to use lethal force.

What followed was carnage. The Stormguard massacred all in their path. stray shots hitting bystanders. Occasionally, the mob trapped and cornered a lone Stormguard, but the Stormguard would inevitably hack his way through back to the main body with his sabre. Finally, after five minutes, it was over. The survivors were hauled into trucks that had arrived during the fighting, due to be taken to Stormguard Headquarters and 'interrogation'.

A nine-year old boy walked to the body of his father, mortally wounded by a stray shot.

He stayed there for up to an hour, then ran back to home as snow began to fall amidst the shed blood and the bodies of the dead.

The father's story was over. But the boy's had barely to begin.

===

Twenty-Nine Years Later

Admiral Karl Adlerssohn looked back to that bleak 24th of December and shivered. The day of his father's death. His mother had had to sell his sisters into slavery to some wealthy noble (something the Empire technically frowned upon but also something its magistrates were lax on enforcing against) to pay for his entry into the Imperial Orphanage system. The Orphanage had decided, upon him reaching the age of 16 and thus being legally an adult according to the laws of the Empire, to induct him into the Imperial Navy College. He could only thank God it hadn't been the Stormguard - at least the Navy saw no need to rebuild you mentally from the ground up.

God, how he hated the Empire. He could barely conscience 'sterilising' rebel or alien worlds, which was half of what the Navy did. But he knew that to raise his fleet up in rebellion against the Empire was suicidal. At best he could raid the fringe of Imperial control like pirates did - at worst his fleet would be obliterated. But still...

He decided on his course of action. The Empire had to fall, and it was his moral duty to resist it. That was all.

But just because you had to fight a superior foe, didn't mean you couldn't be cunning.