In the sky a few thousand meters over the fertile plains of Penta Novosibirsk, starships appeared in their dozens, vessels of war whose appearance suggested daggers. Boris Sadulaev, governor of this human colony many dozens of light years from earth, grimaced at the sight from his homestead on the edge of the largest settlement. He’d expected the fleet, although he hadn’t thought they would come his way this quickly. The first of perhaps a hundred small shuttles began to descend toward the surface, blasting off from their parent vessels and circling in the sky until they formed several large groups like swarms of hornets. All at once, the shuttles split, found their different landing zones, and started disgorging troops. Five touched down on Boris’ farm, retrorockets vaporizing swaths of cultivated land.
The invaders were human, but their armorers had gone to great lengths to dehumanize them. Featureless slats of bulletproof metallic-ceramic plate, rich with visual sensors, protected their faces. Not an inch of skin was exposed—they could fight just as well in the vacuum of space as they could here—and their environment suits were, to suit the purpose of intimidating the colonists, black with red and white trim. They hefted vicious, vaguely arcane-looking rifles which they aimed in every direction as their commander, the one who had come to see Boris, emerged from the shuttle. Like the others he could tell neither the commander’s age nor gender nor race. Unlike the others the commander’s uniform was ornate, gold and platinum bands across the helmet, intricate painted designs on the faceplate, a staff in its hand, a cape hanging from its back.
It took him some time to realize the commander was the Satrap herself, not a general, not a subordinate. She stopped before the stoop of Boris’ homestead and spoke, her voice transmitted clearly by the suit.
“Governor Sadulaev, you are in revolt against the Satrapy. Explain yourself.”
“Take off that ridiculous crown and I’ll talk to you.”
“You will start talking. Now. Otherwise I will order my troops to begin annihilating this colony—settlement by settlement, family by family.”
Boris considered his options and quickly found there were none. This was what he expected, more or less—a big punitive expedition, a show of force. If the Satrap had felt like it when she woke up this morning, she could have ordered the extirpation of Penta Novosibirsk, renamed the place, and plopped a different batch of conscripted nobodies on it to carry on the work. But, and this was where Boris’ plan mattered, she wanted to know why an undefended and indefensible colony would even bother with the attempt in the first place. Hence the show of force, not the hail of gunfire.
“All right, all right,” Boris sat on his stoop and withdrew a cigarillo from the tin in his jacket, lit it up with a wood match. All the comforts of home made locally. “The truth of the matter is, we’ve got you by the short hairs.”
“Explain.” The Satrap was not one for preambles, it seemed.
“The Satrapy’s colonial policy is this: of the twenty inhabited worlds of our stellar cluster, eighteen are agricultural subsistence colonies, one is a hard resource subsistence colony, and one—just one, the capital—is what people would call a real colony. An existential venture for the human race, as it were, a new home. Right?”
“That’s how it has to be.”
“So that means you’ve got nineteen planets whose sole purpose is to feed and provide raw materials for one planet. That one planet can’t survive on its own because it’s a city from pole to pole—half a trillion people all vying for space and if they don’t get their bimonthly tribute from the other nineteen worlds they’ll starve and freeze and run out of toilet paper.”
“And only a monster would allow that to happen. You aren’t making a good case for your revolution here.”
“Well,” Boris pulled on the cigarillo deeply, let the smoke hang in his mouth for a moment, then blew it out gently, liquid white vapor turning blue as it floated away, “The issue isn’t that we want half a trillion people to starve. The issue is that those half-trillion people, or rather their fleet, your little police force in the sky here, force us to live stuck in the middle of the twentieth century on earth. Look around you, what do you see? Tractors that run on diesel. Houses with clapboard along the outside. Every pipe in my home here is copper. I haven’t seen a holographic terminal outside of our short-range communicator in town there for three years.
“But that isn’t the half of it, Satrap,” Boris’ words were turning bitter now, “Because we aren’t provided medicine out here. Last month a settlement on the southern continent was damn near wiped out by a virus we figure made its way out here on one of the tribute ships. It was a virus that could have been little more than a sniffle, if we just had access to basic medical supplies. And our food—oh, good god almighty, our food—while you get fat on the finest cuts of pork and steak, we’re not allowed to slaughter our own bloody livestock. We eat potatoes, black bread, and a monthly ration of poultry. What little we can get away with secreting for ourselves we do, but the truth of the matter is most of us are malnourished. The average lifespan on the capital is almost a century. The average lifespan on the colonies never exceeds sixty-five. You do all this, and on the rare occasion you don’t kill us for asking why, your only answer is ever ‘that’s how it has to be.’”
“When you were appointed to this position,” The Satrap growled, “You were made to understand your place in the galaxy. These are the way things must be, for the sake of the survival of our people. Any time a subsistence colony is allowed too much leeway, they break off and the most ambitious of their leaders—men like you, Governor—becomes a tyrant and an enemy.”
“I knew you wouldn’t listen to my complaints. I knew you came here to arrest me and take me back to the capital and throw me down the steps of the Palace, and you’d broadcast the feed to every colony, to show them what happens when they stand up to you.”
“Then why bother at all?”
“You’ve kept us down for a long time,” Boris flicked the butt of his smoke away, “But you did give us those short-range transmitters. You thought we were too inept to utilize them to our benefit, you thought they were too primitive to do us any good. You were wrong. As I’m speaking to you right now, we’ve used it to hijack the long-range transmitter on the fleet capital ship, Sipahi. I’m pleased to say that not only does every colony world know of your intentions, of how you’ve been suppressing us and your shallow justification for it, but so does those half-trillion we’ve been feeding.”
The Satrap laughed a little. “What will that accomplish?”
“On every tribute ship, I’ve smuggled a negotiator. They’ve spread to every colony world and they’ve made arrangements. Now they’ve all come back and they’ve assured me of my alliances. Satrap,” Boris got to his feet, “It gives me great pleasure to say that all the colonies will now do as we did and sabotage the next tribute ship that comes their way. Even if you’ve got a fresh batch of conscripts to replace us here, you won’t be able to exterminate and replace every other colony quickly enough to save the Satrapy.”
For a long time the Satrap weighed her options behind her mask, and found there were none. “What are your demands?”
“Medicine, technology, the ability to eat the food we cultivate. Basic human freedom.”
“Your people will have it.”
“Constant, uninterrupted, uncensored communication with all the other colonies.”
“Your people will have it.”
“Amnesty for myself.”
“I cannot do that.”
“Why in hell not?”
“Governor Sadulaev, you are in revolt. Whether your revolution succeeds or fails, you must pay for your crime. I will grant your other demands and the colonies will not continue to fight, for they’ll have what they want without you.”
“I won’t go with you back to the capital.”
“You won’t have to.”
The Satrap moved quickly. Her staff, sharpened to a spearpoint at its base, went in and out of Boris’ stomach so smoothly it was as though his flesh offered no resistance at all. The iridium-lined hammer head of it came down on his skull and shattered it with the same ease, and Boris fell down the steps of his homestead and poured his blood into the soil of Penta Novosibirsk, for that’s how it has to be.