Chapter 15: A Pawn that Refused to Come off the Board...

Caym Katain, House Master of the House of Katain, grimaced as he perused the interstellar headlines. Too slow, he thought. It’s all moving too slow.

As he settled back into his hover-assisted chair, ignoring the slight dip as the machine adjusted itself to his significant weight, his mind went over the steps that had been successfully taken so far, as well as the fly in the ointment that threatened to bring it all down.

From a young age, Caym had been taught ruthlessness. Most houses would simply designate their oldest progeny as the Heir-apparent, and only remove that status under extraordinary circumstances but House Katain had always taught that prestige, position, and power was not given. It was TAKEN. If you did not take from others, others would take from you. It was one of the truths of the universe. The strong took from the weak. Or put another way, the weak existed to serve the strong.Caym’s first political advisor had thought to mold him in his ways. He taught him that “Nice people do not make history. Nice people write histories that deplore the awful people who actually MAKE history.”

Caym had decided to be an avid learner and to apply his lessons THOROUGHLY. So much so, that instead of letting him retire peacefully as most past-their-prime political operatives would like todo, he made sure that there would be no future students to learn those same lessons. Framing him for the embezzling of nine billion credits from a failing sub-clan was simple. Once he was actually IN prison, it didn’t take more than the tiniest fraction of the nine billion credits (that had actually been siphoned off shortly before his mentor’s arrest into an account that Caym himself controlled), to hire someone to literally stab his mentor in the back. Generous bribes to the guards on duty and a camera technician to make sure that no one actually saw the killing was even less costly. He hoped his mentor appreciated the touch of the classics about the betrayal. He thought about having the assassin whisper the famous line from Julius Caesar after his assassination “Et tu, brute?” into his mentor’s dying ears, but decided it was a little over the top.

Caym’s interest in classic history not only spread through the Terran Empire days, but pre-Terran spaceflight history. One of the first treatises on ancient warfare he had read was a chronicle known as the Romance of the Three Kingdoms. The first lines of the translation had always stuck with him. “The Empire, long divided, must unite. Long United, must divide. Thus it ever has been”. He saw parallels between the three kingdoms era and his own situation. The Kingdom of China, like the Federation, and the Terran Empire before it, had grown too big to govern effectively. This allowed regional power blocs to form, which quickly turned into sinecures that vied for power at the expense of others. With no power able to rival the united nation, the squabbling regions turned for glory and power the only way they could ... by lessening the power of others in their glory. This oppression and corruption caused the people to seek redress from those in power. Once those in power were seen to ignore the plight of the common rabble, the people rose up in revolt. When central authority could not effectively quell the revolt, they had to turn towards the regional warlords to do their work for them. Of course, once the regional warlords saw off the common rabble, they realized that they were truly more powerful then the central authority, and the dynasty quickly faded into dissolution and destruction. The wars raged through China for over a century of Terran years, and the amusing thing to Caym was that none of the great powers that had risen up during the period ended up claiming the Mandate of Heaven of a united China at the end. Instead, a group that had loyally served one of the titular three Kingdoms saw its chance when the ruling family in turn proved unworthy of holding such power, overthrew them in turn.

The lesson he learned, along with the dissolution of the “Two Superpowers” era of history at the beginning of mankind’s space age, is that humanity does not function properly as a contented whole. There must always be an enemy, an OTHER, for mankind to struggle against, to advance. In the Three Kingdoms, the Other was first the common rabble, then the regional warlords, and then the ruling families. In the Superpowers era, one power only diminished when its dominion was unchallenged by others. When the Terran Empire hit the same issue, combined with a series of weak Imperators, the rot set in and even the greatest General, Tobias Hennessey, who was said to have won every battle he had ever participated in, before taking the office as the Last Imperator of the Empire in its death throes, could not fix the issue. Such a time was rising again, and even if it would happen organically, Caym was the type of person to ... give the whole process a kickstart to happen on HIS timeframe, not anyone else’s.

Even before he had fully consolidated his reign over House Katain after his father’s “Tragic Grav-boat accident” (that just happened to also claim the lives of two of Caym’s brothers, such a tragedy) he had researched the likely causes of the Federation’s dissolution. One had to know about what the common plebian considered an infringement on his pursuit of a contented life. After intense studies, he came down to a few key factors that would shape the future of mankind:

First off, of course, was Safety: The common pleb would put up with a lot, if they and theirs were safe from attack. The ongoing “God’s Hammer” (what his group called the Slinger Project) attacks were an obvious threat to everyone’s safety. Not only that, because of the random nature of the attacks, and the method of the attack leaving no clues to the origin of the attackers, billions of Federation citizens and serfs fruitlessly scanned the horizon of their own worlds, wondering if they would be the next to suffer an atrocity. And while even a hundred “God’s Hammer” attacks could not kill a world’s population, the fact that it affected so many, yet left so many untouched increased the paranoia the attacks caused. A pre-Terran spaceflight dictator once said “A single death is a tragedy. A million deaths is just a statistic.” But even a million deaths is still a tragedy on a world with over 250 million on it, was indeed a tragedy. Because so many were left behind, and most of them had at least a theoretical connection to those killed, it caused additional anguish.Combined with the “encouragement” of open piracy in some areas made interstellar travel and trade dicey. Better to stay home and safe rather than risk those ... foreign worlds, with things unfamiliar, after all.

Then there was Identity. People wanted to believe that their origin, no matter how lowly, was better than others, and particularly better then nearby rivals. People did not want to be classified as a whole, in general. They wanted to divide the universe into US and THEM. Who US and THEM were would differ from region to region, and really THEM could be left unsaid, that people would automatically substitute their preferred THEM for a nebulous threat. For the Merchant Houses, Identity was more with the House, then the region of space. You couldn’t be too heavy handed, but if you were subtle enough, over time, (years stretching to generations), people would identify with something local and against something distant and far away. For example, most luxury goods on Katain-controlled worlds was made by a Katain-controlled corporation. Only the base level, shoddily built products of other regions were imported. Sure, you could get a House Tarkan grav-car for a couple thousand less credits then the Katain-created version with minimal feature changes, but the resulting lack of quality from only importing base models would shine through, and the public would automatically look at things made be other regions as “foreign junk” and “not fit for a TRUE connoisseur”. The only things that carried the House Katain brand was reliable, high-quality products for a reason.