The Lost Stars: Tarnished Knight

Here and there, brief spasms of violence played out as someone tried to break into a liquor store or other business and was repulsed by quick and brutal use of first nonlethal riot-control agents, then direct gunfire on anyone who resisted. But such incidents stayed few as the great majority of those celebrating showed no sympathy for lawbreakers. Generations of conditioning on the need to obey authority could not be shed in a day, not when authority was on the streets and acting only against those who were clearly breaking laws.

But still, there was a sense, something that Drakon felt even if he couldn’t quantify it, that the situation was balanced on a knife-edge. The mood of the crowds oscillated around a tipping point, giddy, happy, irresponsible, reckless, an ocean of humanity whose waves could shift the wrong way in a heartbeat.

“They’re happy to see the soldiers,” Malin said. “They see our troops as liberators because we slew the snakes. You need to personalize that, General Drakon. You need to be the liberator, the man who freed this star system from the grip of the Syndicate Worlds and the fear of the ISS.”

“They’ve seen him,” Morgan replied. “Everyone saw him when he made that broadcast.”

“It’s too remote, too isolated. He needs to be among the citizens.”

“Where any nut can decide to take a shot at him!”

Drakon let the sound of their debate subside to a buzzing at the back of his head as he considered his options. Malin and Morgan had a good habit of clearly stating their positions and the rationales behind them right up front, as well as a bad habit of then restating the same points in endless back-and-forth argument. “Here’s what we’ll do,” he finally said, putting an instant stop to the debate.

A couple of minutes later, still wearing his combat-battered armor but with the helmet and face shield open, Drakon strode out of his headquarters and out among the crowds. Malin and Morgan both followed a few paces behind, wearing only their black skin suits but carrying unobtrusive and deadly weapons as they watched the crowds around Drakon. As Drakon had expected, all eyes went to him in his armor, paying little attention to those who followed him. In that armor he loomed a bit taller and wider than the citizens, appearing to be a figure literally larger-than-life.

The first mass of citizens he encountered paused in their celebrating, uncertainty in their eyes, as they realized that a CEO was among them. Drakon smiled at them, the same sort of comradely-but-I’m-in-charge smile he would give his soldiers. “It’s a good day!” he called. “This is our star system now, our planet, and we’re going to take care of it!”

The crowd cheered, ripples of reaction running away from Drakon like rings in a pond in which a rock has fallen. He walked slowly but deliberately through the crowd, the omnipresent security cameras picking up his image and sending it everywhere on the planet. Citizens reached out tentative hands to touch his armor, some straining to touch the scars of recent combat against the snakes. Drakon felt the power of the mob as if it were a single vast organism, huge and immensely powerful, and fought down his wave of fear. He had seen armored troops pulled down and overwhelmed by masses of civilians on Alliance planets and had a healthy respect for what an aroused mob could do. But he tried not to show any concern, instead holding that smile and maintaining his steady pace as he called out occasional vague words about order and law and safety.

A younger citizen, just coming to draft age by the look of him, eyes afire with emotion, thrust himself before Drakon, heedless of the weapons that Malin and Morgan immediately trained upon him. “When are the elections? When will we truly choose those who govern us?”

“We’ll get to that,” Drakon replied loudly. “Things have changed.” No one spent a lifetime dealing with and working among the Syndicate Worlds bureaucracy without developing a skill at mouthing meaningless reassurances that promised nothing.

The passionate young man looked uncertain, then he was pushed aside by other citizens and lost in the crowd. But Drakon had a bad feeling that his question would not be so easily disposed of in the days to come.

* * *

ICENI and the others on the bridge of the heavy cruiser watched video from the surface, showing Drakon’s triumphal procession through the streets and the adulation the citizens were heaping upon him. “You’d think that I’d done nothing,” she commented to those around her, keeping her tones partly annoyed and partly amused to hide the concerns those images created. If Drakon becomes the face of the rulers of this star system, he can more easily push me aside. Drakon may have to be dealt with after all.

CHAPTER FIVE