Chapter 11: Prometheus Plus Slinger equals Ozymandias

(in Low-Planet Orbit above the planet Dromes VI)

Tomas Kendrick stared sightlessly at the control pad, as he waited for the numbers to count down. Once the numbers hit 0, the universe would change. Hopefully for the better, he thought, for his own soul’s sake at least. But he privately held his doubts. If he could back out at this, the very last moment, there was not a single iota of doubt in his mind he would do so and gratefully at that. But there was no chance of that. The other people on the ship would be sure of it. They didn’t hold his moral qualms and would view his sudden outbreak of conscience as moral cowardice. The lack of the ability to follow one’s beliefs to its rational conclusion. To take the steps needed to bring the universe one step closer to the end of a corrupt and unjust system. That would be just as deadly in the moment as being part of that hated system. He had no doubt that should he fail to perform and try to stop others from doing what needed to be done, then his death would surely follow, and with no benefit. Someone else would push the button, he was sure. And then 250,000 people below would still die. A quarter of a million souls were currently marked for death, going unknowingly through their daily lives, not knowing that the blade of the executioner was about to be brought down upon them. Tomas didn’t know if he pitied them, or envied them. To not know that they were about to die, for a grand political statement. The opening salvo of an uprising that would go lengths to fix the corrupt system that locked mankind in archaic chains of a past neo-feudal age. And as Tomas watched those numbers count down unendingly, he thought of what had led him to this moment. Of all the friends he had made and lost along the way. And how he survived the unsurvivable, only to face the unimaginable.

Tomas was the fourth son of a Merchant House sub-clan that looked after their parent House’s mercantile interests in the Arhimed system. He knew he had come from a good life, from a good background. Compared to the rabble on some worlds, they had it much easier. His education had been subsidized, and he knew that after his graduation, there was a well paying job managing some House factorum, watching the next generation of rabble toil for their betters. And if he was loyal and successful, there was always ways to move up in rank. Even in a post-age extension society, there was generally enough retirements and turnover to slowly open up positions above them. Over the space of decades, one could move up from Manager-Factorum, Third Class, to Second Class, or even First Class. Tomas’s father had spent nearly eighty years in the system, never once failing to meet his target goals, and there was rumors that he would have been promoted to Regional Manager-Factorum in a decade or two.

Tomas considered this was the slowest death possible. He instinctively knew that it wasn’t the role that he should play in the turning of the Universe. He was bright, but not too bright. Athletic, but not an athletic superstar. He was likeable, but not super-charismatic. In short, he was destined to be another easily replaceable cog in an uncaring, unyielding system that did not yield to any one person. Instead, it treated the men and women in it as easily interchangeable parts, meant to be used until worn out, and then replaced and the next person would take over and just continue on the cycle endlessly. But there was nothing he could do about it.Or so he had thought, until he had met Marta at Ahrimed System Regional Business Learning Center.

Marta hadn’t been a student there. Oh no, she was originally a hanger on, who seemingly was nothing more than the useless arm candy of another posh snob from the Merchant House nobility. But she was nothing of the short. She had the fire of a revolutionary. She saw the gaping holes in the system, and rather then look past them, like most others did, challenged them. To most people, a starving peasant toiling in the fields, bereft of Noble assistance, was an eyesore, something to be ignored, something to pretend didn’t exist ... something to pity. But Marta believed that more good came from one city full of “useless peasants” than a universe of scheming nobles. She was sure of that. Because every day, the peasants and the downtrodden showed that they were better people then the soulless scum that claimed to be their betters. The way that they did small kindnesses to each other, endlessly. Small kindnesses were all they could afford, of course, but that’s because the largess needed for big kindness came with too many strings, too many hidden hooks.

Nobles never did things for the right reasons, she argued. It was all calculated. All minimum effort to maximum glory hogging. To hear Marta put it, the only reason why Nobles even lavished a bit of attention on those below them, is because they viewed them as something similar to one’s pet. Like one would show off a prize horse or faithful huntsman’s dog in the past, they would show off their donation to some astrophysicist or artist. It was nothing more than a status symbol. No, Marta concluded, the Nobles did not create. They only consumed. They were the enforcers of a blood-fueled system, a voracious maw that could never be satisfied with what one already had, but always looking for more, and how to get more at the expense of others.

Needless to say, these ideas were GENERALLY as well received at the learning center as the idea of doing one’s finances using only a writing implement and papyrus, like the ancients. The system WORKED for them, and that’s all they cared about. The system was set up to benefit them, and when one thought about it, it was because no one else could handle such a burden. Just think, how would a multi-planetary business, even small ones like the ones in the Ahrimed system fare if some uneducated yob off the production floor somehow was in control of the whole thing. It was a harsh duty, to be sure, but one they were willing to bear for the future of the Federation.

Marta had eventually got five of them under her sway, convinced them that a small sign of protest would help others understand the plight of the downtrodden. Nothing big, just a harmless prank really. Turning off the security system at the Ventok Labs, and then smuggling in a fake bomb that read “There is no future that is not built on the backs and the blood of the common people. Those who claim to be their betters would be wise to remember that.” Marta thought it would be a good touch to get a conversation started about the plight of the common man and woman of the sector, and hopefully a vector of change. Tomas wasn’t sure of that, but Marta was persuasive, so Tomas had gone along with it.

However, when the news that evening led with the story about an explosion in the Ventok Labs that had killed 250, both Merchant House trained and commoner alike, he knew he had been fooled. The shadowy voice that released a statement calling for the tearing down of the Learning Center, and all other symbols of class-based dominance, and vowed that further destruction would be visited upon those who exploited others, while the police and commentators did not speculate on the identity of the terrorist who had released the propaganda video, Tomas didn’t have to speculate. He had heard it many times. All from Marta’s mouth. Tomas was lucky. His survival instincts led to him taking the next interstellar liner out of the system, only to jump ship at its next port of call, and losing himself in the Kamar system underground. His fellow travelers had not been so lucky. Three of them were arrested and sentenced to lives of hard labor in the weeks after the Ventok Massacre, as it became known. The fourth never was arrested, but that was because he died in an attempted holograv bombing attack of the regional stock exchange two months later, when a mis-set timer meant that the bomb went off 5 seconds after he had armed it, instead of five hours. He sometimes wondered if the timer had been mis-set purposefully, to provide another martyr to the cause.

Tomas had drifted through the underground of several sectors afterwards. His participation in the Ventok Massacre had marked him as a man who was loyal to the Cause (what the Cause was, varied from system). It didn’t matter that he had been an unwitting pawn of a charismatic demagogue, what mattered was results. After all, one who was sentenced to life at hard labor in absentia for the deaths of two hundred fifty people could be trusted not to have a moment of weakness and reveal to the ever-powerful Enemy upcoming operations, no matter how many pangs of conscience that he had. Tomas had gotten away from the direct-action wings and found that he had a knack for planning operations, and almost as important, understanding how system authorities would respond to provocations. What would be ignored as a harmless provocation, and what would be met with overwhelming force. Things that would get noticed as small little rebellions in a modern Universe, and things that would inspire a massive over-reaction from police and government. Both were important, in their own way. One allowed the slow eroding of the common man’s view that the system worked, and that attempts to defy or change the system were doomed to failure. The other showed that the power that system authorities granted themselves were too easily abused. Given the right spin, the right target, and the right personaliites, a demonstration for greater taxes on a Merchant House could lead to an evening-news “tsk, tsk” about the irresponsibility of youth these days, while claiming they might have had some valid points, or it might lead into the system-wide crackdown on anything subversive, in which the excesses the authorities inevitably found happening drove future people like Tomas into the Cause’s hands. In his own way, he feared that he was no longer a follower of people like Marta ... to others now, he was their Marta. That bothered him more than he cared to admit. He had tried to explain it away as just doing what he needed to survive in a Universe that was vehemently against him.