All is Fair Ch. 03

Until today.

The Imperial Marine Corps were among the most honorable and dedicated group of warriors ever to grace the long and lamentable history of human soldiery. There was a reason why the Emperor hadn't ordered them to slaughter civilians in the name of corporate profit and the maintenance of the so-called civil order; they would have told him where to go and how vigorously to fuck himself when he got there! He had been forced to rely on the 'men' of the colonial militias, barely more than bloodthirsty criminals in uniform. But, of course, that was the problem. And because the tyrant at the head of the Imperium couldn't rely on his best soldiers to carry out his orders without question, they were a liability. The news of the massacres - and there had been several after the incident - hadn't been kept quiet to keep the general population in line. No, it had been to protect the Emperor's illusion of honor so that the Imperial Marines and the men and women serving within its ranks wouldn't find out the sort of man they were being asked to kill and die for.

The Emperor was a monster in every conceivable meaning of the word, but he wasn't a stupid one. He knew that the Marines were sworn to protect the Imperium from any threats, even if that threat was coming from the top of the metaphorical food chain. The order to fire on civilians would have grossly offended the Marine's sense of honor, and they would have rebelled themselves before giving that up in the name of keeping one man in power. And as soon as he lost control of the Marines, he would lose the Navy, and as soon as he lost the Navy, he would lose his grip on power... and there was nothing more important to a monster than his grip on what made him powerful.

So what had the monster done? He had given the Marines a cause to rally behind: the loss of an entire one of their Divisions, an enemy so dangerous that they had become an existential threat to the Imperium and its people, one that needed to be destroyed. Neatly distracting them from the horrors being committed by the man they were sworn to. The men and women being buried today were rebels without ever knowing it; almost fifteen thousand of them had been sacrificed - slaughtered - just to sate that bastard's need to maintain power, and Crow had been the one to pull the trigger.

And he fucking hated himself for it.

He had spent all of the previous morning listening to the frantic, terrified, downright heroic last stands of the corpses in front of him. He had heard the pain and the panic and the shock of the pilots who made it back to the carriers only to be gunned down by people they thought had been their own. He had been put in an impossible position; he knew that! There was no way he could have chosen any other path, but he had forced himself to listen to those death screams, those pleas for support, the shock and the horror of seeing that final moment approaching in countless comms bursts that would go nowhere. He had made himself listen to them all, because someone had to honor the sacrifice these warriors made, and it sure as shit would never be the Imperium.

Rebels, one and all. The most courageous, most professional, most honorable fighting force that could be conceived of. Shining beacons of the humanity within the inhumanity of war. Each of them had given the last full measure of their devotion to a cause that they had believed in wholeheartedly, a cause that had callously betrayed them, a cause that never really existed in the first place. Each of them would almost certainly have joined him, standing and fighting by his side if they knew half the shit that he knew.

And he had been forced to kill them.

For a moment, he was reminded of an ancient earth poem by a man named Thomas Hardy. "Had he and I but met by some old ancient inn, We might sit down to wet right many a nipperkin. But arranged as infantry, and staring face to face, I shot at him as he at me and killed him in his place." The men he was burying could have been - should have been - friends; they should have brothers, comrades in arms and in cause. United in purpose, they would have brought an end to an institution responsible for the most human suffering since the Nazis. But instead, he was watching shovels full of sod and dirt being tossed atop men and women of singular and unquestionable valor.

Cornelius Crow: A name with no history and only the vaguest sense of a future, but a name with a cause. A name with a mission. The man behind the name, the life behind the man, they were ghosts. They were irrelevant. All that mattered was the cause, and lying before him was close to fifteen thousand more reasons - on top of the hundreds of thousands of others that came before - to see the cause through to the end.

Or die trying.

Only then could the name be allowed to die and the man behind it re-emerge.

Something popped in his hand, and he looked down at it. He had been clenching his fists so hard his knuckles had cracked under the pressure. The backs of his knuckles were white, and the indentation in his palm from his own nail was almost deep enough to draw blood.

But try as he might, he couldn't be in this place, with those bodies and those thoughts, and calm himself down. It was one or the other. So to hell with his knuckles, to hell with his palms, and to hell with the pain either would cause him later. Honor demanded he stay to give these soldiers a soldier's respect. Besides, a little pain never hurt anyone.

Pain was something he was uncommonly familiar with; pain of the heart from the things he had seen, things like this. But pain of the body, too. Time had withered and worn his once proud and strong bones, the last seventeen years infinitely more so than the forty years that had preceded it. He had known the pain of loss, the pain of defeat, the pain of broken bones, the pain of laser fire, and the pain of despair. He knew anguish and despondency as well as he knew his own shoe size, and yet he refused to bow to it. He refused to let the weight of his own turmoil bend him to its dark desires; he refused - abjectly and outrightly refused - to give in to the shadows that seemed to always surround him. Strength, he had long ago learned, was not about lifting the heaviest thing or throwing the hardest punch; it was the ability to hold that thing up, to take that punch, and to keep going anyway. To put one foot in front of the other despite all adversity and all the conspiracies of those who would see him fail.

The only weakness a man should ever fear, he told himself, was a weakness of spirit.

So there he remained, long into the lateness of the afternoon. Long after the sun had reached and then passed its zenith overhead, long after the warmth of the day was fought off by the coolness of the evening, and the light started to follow in its retreat. He watched silently, mournfully, and respectfully as one body after another was entrusted to this now most hallowed ground. Thousands upon thousands of times. Each of them a tragedy, each of them a waste, and each of them adding weight to the lodestone forever tethered to his chest. Theirs was a burden he bore with solemn pride; crippling in its weight, devastating in its meaning, yet each imbued with a sad sort of beauty. Theirs was a loss that would be forever remembered, a sacrifice revered as much as it was reviled, and a heroism that would inspire a revolution.

No, the Tyrant at the head of the Imperium snake was not a stupid man, but he was grossly shortsighted. He had taught Crow well that these sorts of crimes only escaped the scales of justice if they were kept away from the light. The colonies who had seen that little girl's face in the moments before her death, those who had heard what had happened to those poor people, had rebelled, almost to a soul. It was only the efforts made to stop the spread of that information that had halted the spread of rebellion. It was a lesson Crow had taken to heart, and he would personally ensure that everyone... everyone... heard what the God king of the Imperium did to his own people. Again, an old, ancient proverb from time immemorial whispered through his mind.

Beware of he who denies you access to knowledge. For in his heart, he already sees himself your Master.

********

Adam. 2

It was strange to think how technology had made life so much different from past generations. There were the obvious ways, of course; the harnessing of the gravimetric properties of singularities had brought almost free, practically limitless power to every city in the imperium. New methods of waste disposal had, over the course of centuries, reversed the calamity of climate change, and obviously, mankind had reached to the stars. But that wasn't what Adam was thinking about at that moment.

Adam was thinking about commuting.

A few hundred years ago, it would take the average citizen an hour to travel sixty or seventy miles. They were confined to the ground in all but the most exceptional cases and were, therefore, extremely limited - globally speaking - in where they were able to work. Their place of employment needed to be within a reasonable distance from home, or more often, home needed to be within a reasonable distance from their place of work. With new technology came new methods of travel, and Adam was marveling at one of those now.

He wasn't an engineer, he had no idea how a lot of these things worked, but he was more than able to see the benefits of them. One such piece of technology was a ship's deflector shields. He understood that they were there to stop a ship from being ripped apart by floating, near-invisible chunks of space rock; that is what they were designed to do, and, as far as he could tell, they did their jobs well. But at some point, some clever son-of-a-bitch had realized that they also worked really well at keeping a smaller ship safe from the heat of atmospheric re-entry.

Simply put, as far as his limited knowledge understood, as something traveled through the air, the drag of its mass passing through the air particles created resistance; the bigger that thing was, and the faster it was traveling, the more resistance it would suffer. That resistance translated rather spectacularly into heat. That was why meteors broke up in the earth's atmosphere usually before hitting the surface. Shooting stars were always a dazzling and stunning sight, but essentially, they were those little chunks of those space rocks burning up under the resistance from the air.

Mr - or Mrs - clever son-of-a-bitch, had worked out that a ship's deflector shields not only protected the hull from those space rocks but also from small amounts of energy - the kinetic energy from space rock impacts and from stellar radiation - and that a directed energy weapon broke through those shields by focusing a staggering amount of energy onto a single point on them, overloading the capacitors. Otherwise, the shields seemed to naturally - and quite accidentally - spread that heat, that energy, over the entire surface of the protective bubble and thus eased the load on the capacitors so much that they were able to tolerate the burden. How they made the leap from that to atmospheric re-entry was beyond him, but that is what happened.

Shields were added to even the smallest of stellar shuttles, allowing them to leave and, more importantly, re-enter a planet's atmosphere at will. A few hundred years ago, the heat now being deflected from Adam's shuttle by its shields would have warped and melted the hull and then flash-boiled the hundred or so people inside it in seconds. Now, he was perfectly safe. What this meant, in practical terms, was that most cities on Earth had a shuttle port that could put the equivalent of a busload of people into orbit. Being in orbit meant that shuttles could travel at something close to a hundred thousand miles an hour, which in turn meant that he could get to almost anywhere on the planet in less time than it would have taken his ancestors to travel less than a hundred miles.

Distance, it would seem, was relative.

The downside of this, however, was that everything was allowed to condense. In past generations, a massive bureaucratic entity like the Internal Security Division - or any other government agency, for that matter - would have had offices spread all over the place. A main office in some central, important location, and then satellite offices dotted around everywhere else. That was how it needed to be because getting from one place to another took time, so having people spread out meant they could react to crises easier and - thanks to the need to commute - could spread out and expand their potential labor pool.

New technology had nullified both of those necessities and so, like all other government agencies, not to mention corporate offices and the like, the ISD had all been condensed into a single, massive complex. The Internal Security Division, being a leviathan of the apparatus of the state, had a complex the size of a small city a few dozen miles outside of Caracas in what had once been known as Venezuela.

Adam lived in the Northern regions of Norway. Norway was cold, it was snowy, it was isolated, it was private, and he loved it. Caracas was hot and humid as hell, and the ISD complex was always teeming with people.

People, in Adams's estimations - especially lots of people crowded into small areas - were highly overrated and best avoided.

This was one of the reasons Adam liked to work from home. The most obvious reason was that Jenny, Natasha, and Lucy were there; the warmth they provided him could fight off the most bitter of northern winters, but the biggest reason was that here - in the fiery pits of hell or the closest thing he could imagine to it - he had to be "the boss." It was an act, a persona, that he had perfected over years of service, and he had to act like that to almost everyone.

He was the head of his division and had to be ruthless with the law, uncompromising with security, and utterly without mercy to anyone who violated either. His wife, the love of his life, knew what he did, but he never shared details. They would scare her. One of the biggest fears of his existence was that she or his daughters would learn what he did to keep them fed and clothed with a roof over their heads. Not the job title - that came with no small measure of prestige - but the things he had to do as part of his work. Adam was a realist, and he knew, without any shred of doubt, that he was personally responsible for the torture and murder of thousands of people. He had found information, he had pointed out the culprits, and those people - thanks to the darker elements of the ISD - had simply disappeared.

The boogeyman was real, and he answered to Adam.

Adam was a man whose mere presence in a room put fear in the hearts of the strongest and most powerful men in the Imperium. He was the man who not only watched over them while they slept but peered into the darkest corners of their lives, the deepest pits of humanity, and cast judgment. If you were judged to be law-abiding and sensitive to the security needs of the state, you were safe. If you weren't, there were a legion of men in dark suits at Adam's beck and call, and very unpleasant things would happen to you. The people who disappeared in the dead of night were rarely seen again, and their bodies were never found.

But unlike the police who investigated and judged the general population, Adam judged the officials who governed not only the police but every level of official in the Imperium; he judged the agencies who controlled the officials, and he judged the titans of government who ran the agencies. Fear was a very useful and very effective tactic in his role, and it was one that his persona had cultivated to truly staggering levels of efficiency. Only the people who worked directly with him were allowed to see through the mask; only they saw the man beneath the persona, and that was because they needed to trust him to back them up, not punish them for trivialities.

If they thought something was wrong, they came to him because it was his job to do something about it; they couldn't be afraid of his reaction to their findings. Everyone else, on the other hand, had legitimate reason to be afraid. Fear could potentially keep them alive, and if that fear kept them in line, even if only to avoid the uncompromising gaze of the head of the ISD's investigation branch, so much the better.

With that in mind, he rolled his neck as the shuttle touched down with its inevitable sharp jolt, put that scowl onto his face, stood from his seat, and marched toward the shuttle's hatch. Predictably, not a single other soul moved until he had passed, and nobody... nobody... made eye contact.

It would break Lucy's heart to see him like this.

He was already striding imperiously down the steps of the shuttle before the rest of the passengers were getting to their feet, brushing past a couple of flustered, nervous-looking dock workers and heading toward the main entrance of the complex.

Being recognized was not a problem for him; everyone in the ISD knew who he was by sight alone, and all but the newest or most ignorant knew him by reputation as well. Being recognized by him, on the other hand, was less of a desire by the worker drones; it meant you had done something very, very good or very, very bad. So, the shrinking hulk of a security guard - a man who would probably crush Adam in a physical confrontation - was an ominous sign to everyone around. The security guard in question had been loudly, publicly, and graphically re-educated by Adam a few weeks earlier for allowing him to pass through the scanners without being checked. Anyone could be impersonated, and holographic disguises were not only commonplace, they were getting increasingly more sophisticated, to the point that the ISD mandate was that everyone was checked, from the highest to the lowest. That included him. The security guard - probably as a gesture of respect - allowing him to pass through security unmolested was a huge breach of security, and Adam had not been gentle in reprimanding the man for it.

Fortunately for the security guard, it was a breach that warranted nothing more than a stern talking to and nothing more serious, but the lesson had been necessary, and - by the looks of things - it had been learned.

"Good Morning, Mr. Doncaster," the guard said, trying to hide the nerves in his voice.

"Morning, Tom," Adam nodded, intentionally adding an air of indifference to his own. Adam rarely forgot a name, no matter how much people like Tom hoped he would.

"Do you have any weapons on your person or in your bag, Sir?"

"I do not."

Tom nodded and gestured to a DNA reader. "If you could place your hand on that, please, Sir, and then step into the scanner."

Adam did as he was asked, the green strip of light sliding over the reader and cross-checking his full DNA profile against the one on the ISD's employee database before the whole screen flashed green, then he stepped into the scanner.

A few seconds later, the door on the other side of the scanner opened, and Adam was allowed to proceed into the main building. "Thank you, Sir. Have a nice d..."

Adam was gone before Tom had the chance to finish the sentence. He hated treating people like that; he hated the dismissive, dangerous, self-superior attitude he had to adopt every time he set foot inside this fucking place. He hated the fact that good men like Tom, men he would have happily sat down for a beer with in any other life, had good cause to be genuinely terrified of him. He hated that the simple crime of being good at his job had elevated him to the lofty heights he had achieved and had alienated all the people beneath him who helped him get there. He stood on the shoulders of good people, he knew it, and they knew it, and yet his position damned near forbade any of them from even acknowledging it.