Automatically, he returned the pistol to its holster, refusing to look away from what he had wrought. He’d executed twelve people in cold blood. In the end, the men and women who had ruled half the galaxy had died by his hand, yet he didn’t feel anything but cold satisfaction.
The innocent dead had been avenged.
Shaking his head, he walked out the compartment and sealed the hatch behind him.
“Clear up the mess and dump the bodies in the incinerator,” he ordered the warden, who had enough sense not to ask the questions that were clearly running through his mind. Cuffs or no cuffs, enough unwilling colonists had managed to kill their fellows while in the holding pens to make disposing of their bodies a regular occurrence. “Once that’s done, forget everything that happened today.”
Not waiting for an acknowledgement, he strode away, back to the shuttle that had brought him to the prison. His mind was elsewhere, considering the future. For humanity to survive the coming storm from beyond the Rim, hard decisions would have to be made about the future. He had never wanted power, certainly not on this scale, but he wouldn’t shrink from using it. Humanity would be safe, whatever the cost.
Once he was back in the shuttle and heading back to orbit, he keyed his communicator. “Tiffany, contact my Cabinet and inform them that we will be meeting in one hour,” he told her. “We have a lot of work to do.”
Afterword
There is a line I remember from a science fiction book I read (unfortunately, I have forgotten which one) that ran “if the Empire knew what sort of lessons could be learned by studying history, they’d ban it.” It may be a coincidence, but I never had a proper history class at school. What little I did have was boring.
Anyone who knew anything about young men—boys—would have known that they would be interested in wars and great heroes of the past. It goes without saying that most of the history lessons I received did not cover areas of history I considered to be interesting. We spent six months studying Lancashire Cotton Weaving—boring—and relatively little time studying World War One. I probably don’t need to add that the version of World War One we learned about was the stereotypical one, where conscripted infantry were made to stand up and walk very slowly towards the enemy, where they would be mown down by machine guns, while their officers remained behind and enjoyed themselves.
And that doesn’t include the political bias that was woven into the material. In my later years, one of my teachers was a Scottish Nationalist who painted a very unpleasant picture of Margaret Thatcher. Another refused to acknowledge that Britain had ever had an empire. A lecturer on the American Civil War called it “The War of Northern Aggression.” In short, what little formal history I was taught was unsatisfying.
I was lucky enough to be able to read from a young age and that gave me access to a vast selection of history books and sources that my teachers pretended didn’t exist, or didn’t matter. I read stories of wars, of men who built empires and men who broke them, of entire areas of history that my teachers had declared verboten. In my youthful imagination, I saw myself flying with the RAF in 1940, invading France with Eisenhower and Monty in 1944; waging war beside Clive and watching as Caesar crossed the Rubicon. As I grew older, I delved deeper into the underlying reasons behind wars and their outcomes, for even dull economics could be made interesting.
I do not claim to be a historian. I have certainly had no formal training in researching history. But then, I have never felt the lack.
Those who do not learn from history, as the saying goes, are condemned to repeat it. This lesson, echoing down the ages, still applies today. Let us consider, for example, the events that led up to the insurgency in Iraq. The Coalition merrily assumed that the Shia—who had suffered horribly under Saddam—would rise up in support of the invasion. This was, as a cursory look at the history of the region would have shown, a naive assumption. In 1991, the Shia rebelled against Saddam, under the impression that the West would come to their aid. The West did nothing to stop the slaughter. It was easy to predict, even without hindsight, that the Shia wouldn’t risk rebelling again. Why should they trust the Coalition to protect them?
I cannot claim, either, to be a specialist in any given area of history. My interests have always been wide-ranging and, if I cannot give you precise details on the Court of the Sun King, I can tell you why the French Empire never matched the British Empire. (Think economics and relative power projection capabilities.) However, in studying different societies and how they interact (internally and externally) I have come to two conclusions about human societies.
-First, any system of government is affected by entropy. It can and it will decay. There will be a massive growth in governmental responsibilities, bureaucracy and quite probably a separation of the rulers (the political class, however defined) from the ruled. If you imagine the government as a human body, imagine its arteries slowly being jammed with fat.
-Second, the entropy process can be slowed or even reversed through two agents; the active participation of the ruled in ruling and the presence of a hostile competitor. If the government is accountable to the population, the political class is pushed into remaining honest or risk losing power. If there is a nearby enemy eyeing the state with covetous eyes, the state is forced into competition, which keeps it honest.
Let us consider, for a moment, Imperial China. At the risk of generalising, the Chinese Government decayed to the point where the entire country stagnated. The Chinese system simply could not adapt when new and very unwelcome people made their appearance in China. The Chinese rapidly found themselves helpless before the modern technology of Britain, France, Russia and even Japan. Had China’s government been flexible enough to realise that change—and reform—were desperately needed (even as late as 1900), the history of China would have been very different. Instead, China endured a long period of misery and now groans under Communist rule.
A second example might be Imperial Japan. The Japanese adapted fairly well when they were confronted by hostile nations; they managed to remain independent and mastered modern technology. Their political system, however, remained insulated from the population (and reality) and the Japanese deliberately started a war with a far stronger nation. The result was Japan’s burning in 1945 and a long period of occupation.
A third example might be the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the USSR. The average member of the USSR’s government (effectively Russia’s government, with the other nations as satellite states) had very little connection to the general population and, therefore, was capable of inflicting untold misery on them without either knowing or caring what was going on. The forced collectivization of Soviet agriculture stole the incentive for actual production from the farmers, so the USSR was never able to feed itself; the absence of incentives for actual work from industrial workers crippled the Russian industry, the ever-present supervision of the KGB destroyed political discourse and the crushing weight of Marxist doctrine prevented a rational attempt to cope with Russia’s colossal problems. The USSR literally rotted away from within and left behind a traumatised continent.
A fourth example might be Saddam’s Iraq. At one time, Iraq appeared to be on the route to dominant power in the Middle East. Unfortunately, all of the power rested in Saddam’s hands (a typical problem in dictatorships) and disagreeing with Saddam rarely led to a long life. Saddam’s failure to understand that invading Kuwait would bring Iraq into conflict with the West meant that war was inevitable; his failure to abandon Kuwait before the Coalition attacked meant that Iraq was going to be hammered; his refusal to abandon his WMD programs meant that there would never be peace; his failure to learn the lessons of Gulf War One meant that Gulf War Two was a quick defeat for Iraq. Iraq’s core problem was that Saddam was insulated from both reality and his own population. He didn’t care about their suffering, although it did allow him to cynically blame it on America.