Cry Wolf (The Empire's Corps Book 15) Read online

  Cry Wolf

  (The Empire’s Corps – Book XV)

  Christopher G. Nuttall

  http://www.chrishanger.net

  http://chrishanger.wordpress.com/

  http://www.facebook.com/ChristopherGNuttall

  Cover By Tan Ho Sim

  https://www.artstation.com/alientan

  All Comments Welcome!

  Series Listing

  Book One: The Empire’s Corps

  Book Two: No Worse Enemy

  Book Three: When The Bough Breaks

  Book Four: Semper Fi

  Book Five: The Outcast

  Book Six: To The Shores

  Book Seven: Reality Check

  Book Eight: Retreat Hell

  Book Nine: The Thin Blue Line

  Book Ten: Never Surrender

  Book Eleven: First To Fight

  Book Twelve: They Shall Not Pass

  Book Thirteen: Culture Shock

  Book Fourteen: Wolf’s Bane

  Book Fifteen: Cry Wolf

  Cover Blurb

  They say democracy dies in darkness ...

  Earth has fallen. The Empire is no more. Old certainties are collapsing everywhere. Chaos is spreading across the stars, with war following in its wake ...

  Tarsus, a world too close to Earth for comfort, is far from immune.

  Clarence Esperanza, a reporter on Tarsus, thought he had the story of the century. But, when he took the story to his bosses, he was unceremoniously fired. Cut off from his former friends, abandoned by his wife isolated from the world around him, he thought all he could do was stagger onto the streets and wait to die. But when an old friend offers him a job, with a new news outlet challenging the dominance of the planetary media networks, he finds himself on the front lines of a struggle for control of the planet ...

  ... And fighting for the freedom of an entire world.

  Dear Readers,

  I must apologise for the long delay between this book being announced as a forthcoming project and its appearance. However, as I’m sure you’ll agree, I have a good excuse.

  As you may know, if you follow my blog, my health began to deteriorate in November 2017 and, after a brief period when I thought the problem was behind me, started to collapse again in April 2018. The doctors tried several possible approaches before discovering, thanks to a private MRI/CT scan my wife insisted I take, that I had lymphoma. Chemotherapy was prescribed. This may just have been in time to save my life. I collapsed when I went for the first set of treatments, allowing the doctors to realise that I also had a nasty chest infection.

  I ended up spending three weeks in the hospital, having antibiotics fed into my system and my lung drained of fluid. This was not a pleasant experience and I found myself being moved between the haematology ward and the high-dependency care unit, depending on my exact condition. Eventually, they gave me the first treatment in two sections and - after my health started to improve - allowed me to go home. I was not, however, in a good condition for some time afterwards. The side effects made it hard to eat, at first, and then I caught a cold because my immune system had been badly weakened by the treatments. It was some time before I was able to muster the energy to finish this book.

  Obviously, I hope to regain full health once the treatments have been finished. I have a backlog of story ideas I want to write, including the start of a new The Zero Enigma arc and a couple of completely new universes that need developing. (I spent a lot of time thinking of ideas while lying in that hospital bed.) If you want to pray for me, please do.

  I hope to finish the Invincible trilogy sooner rather than later, too, but I cannot guarantee anything. Please bear with me.

  Thank you.

  Christopher G. Nuttall

  Edinburgh, January 2019

  PS - If you liked this book, please write a review. It’s growing harder to make a living as an indie author these days and every little helps.

  CGN

  Prologue I

  From: The Death Agonies of Empire. Professor Leo Caesius, Avalon University, 46PE.

  As we have seen in previous volumes, the Fall of Earth managed to surprise nearly everyone within the Core Worlds, save for a handful of far-sighted visionaries. Earth had been the centre of human civilisation for centuries, the cradle of the human race and the heart of the Empire itself, for so long that there was a permanence about Earth that seemed ... well, permanent. It was almost impossible to grasp the fact, intellectually as well as emotionally, that Earth was gone. The core of the Empire could not be gone.

  But it was.

  Earth’s significance did not just lie in sentiment alone. Earth was the home of the Grand Senate and, thanks to the presence of hundreds of interstellar corporations, the heart of the Empire’s economy. It is literally impossible to estimate just how many billions of credits passed through the Solar System each day, nor how many trillions had been spent on the system’s vast industrial base. Nor was Earth insignificant in other ways. The naval presence alone - and its support system - cost millions of credits every year. Every element of the Empire’s military might had its HQ on Earth - even the Imperial Marines were formally based on Earth - and no officer could be truly said to be going places unless he’d served a term on the homeworld. And, of course, the endless stream of immigrants to newly-settled colony worlds came, by and large, from Earth.

  And now it was gone.

  It took time, perhaps longer than many people realise, for word to spread. When it did, when it reached the rest of the Core Worlds, people were disbelieving. Earth could not be gone, they told themselves. It took time for understanding to arrive and, when it did, it brought terror in its wake. Love it or hate it, Earth was gone. And it had taken the core of the Empire with it. Planetary governments - and governors - awoke to the fact that they were on their own, corporations realised that vast amounts of money and assets had simply vanished, naval units realised they would never get orders from home - they would never get orders again - and independence movements across what had once been the Empire took heart. Their prospects for gaining their freedom had never been better.

  The chaos was not long in following. A handful of unpopular governors fell, only to be replaced by governors who could no more handle the crisis and calm the chaos than their predecessors. A handful of ambitious naval officers declared themselves warlords, only to discover that ruling a vest-pocket empire was nowhere near as easy as they’d believed. And others, seeking stability, found that there was none to be found in the ruins of empire. It truly seemed like the end of times. It was no surprise that radical religious factions, some old and some new, spread like wildfire. The people wanted hope. It was hard to find as the madness gripped the remnants of a once-great civilisation.

  But, even during the darkest days of the Fall, there were some who were trying to bring back the light ...

  Prologue II

  Tarsus was dying.

  It was not, the man in the dark suit mused, a quick death. There was no fleet of angry starships preparing to scorch the entire planet, no giant asteroid on its way to strike the surface with the force of a million nukes, no dread disease steadily working its way through the population and killing everyone it touched ... no, it was the slow death of economic collapse. The men and women below didn’t realise it, not yet, but the Fall of Earth had done immense harm to Tarsus and the remainder of the sector. They simply couldn’t grasp that things had changed. How could they? There had been economic downturns before - the man in the dark suit owed his position to the previous downturn - but nothing so drastic. The Empire had seemed immortal ...

  ... Until it was gone.

  He stood at the window a
nd peered at the streets below. It was near midnight, but the city was still humming with life. The men and women hurrying up and down the streets didn’t understand the new reality, not yet. They didn’t believe what had happened. Earth was hundreds of light years away. They didn’t understand that Earth was - that Earth had been - the core of an economic system that covered thousands of light years, nor did they realise that its absence meant utter chaos. The man had seen the reports, the ones his political enemies had tried to hush up. No one really knew what would happen when reality finally hit the population. It was so utterly unprecedented.

  And yet, there was a twinge of fear running through the air. People knew that something was wrong, even if they couldn’t put a name to it. The smarter ones were already hoarding food and fuel, something that was technically illegal ... the dumber ones were flocking to the entertainment complexes, trying to forget about the shadow looming over the city. They tried to close their eyes to the steadily-growing signs of decline - businesses closing, banks calling in loans, hundreds of thousands already out of work as the economy contracted - even though it was an exercise in futility. If a rising tide lifted all boats, as the finest economic theorists asserted, what happened when the tide was receding? The man didn’t want to admit it, not even in the privacy of his own head, but he knew the truth. There was nothing to be gained by trying to hide from it. The wealthy and powerful would be the last to fall, perhaps ... but they would fall. It was the end of the world.

  He turned his eyes towards the distant Government House, where the First Speaker and his cronies were trying to find something - anything - that would save their bacon when the population realised just how thoroughly screwed they were. The man admired their determination to blind themselves to inconvenient facts, even as he held them in utter contempt for their failure. They’d built their system on the assumption that nothing would ever change, although everyone knew that change was the only universal constant. They simply didn’t have the determination to do what needed to be done. They were weak when they needed to be strong and strong when they needed to be weak. The man rolled his eyes in disgust. The First Speaker gave the population what they wanted, but not what they needed.

  His eyes sought out the distant spaceport, half-hidden in the darkness. The police and security forces were already rounding up the Forsakers, preparing to deport them to ... the man didn’t know where they were going, let alone when. No one did. All that mattered was getting rid of them. But the man knew it was an exercise in populist pointlessness. The Forsakers might be a drain on society, but deporting them wouldn’t solve anything. They weren’t that big a drain on society. The whole thing was nothing more than a desperate bid to win approval from a population that was about to discover that it had bigger things to worry about than the wretched Forsakers. The government might see a blip in its approval ratings, for a day or two, and then reality would assert itself once again. And Tarsus would continue her slow slide into chaos.

  But chaos brings opportunities, the man thought. Who knows what the future may hold?

  He smiled, coldly. He was a popular man - and his party was a popular party - but they had been deprived of real power. They’d won enough of the popular vote to be included in government, yet the governing coalition had successfully blocked any of their proposed legislation. It was maddening - the man knew his party would share the blame for mistakes that were none of their doing - but it could not be helped. The party structure that had governed Tarsus for over two thousand years was almost impossible to change. And yet, it was based on an economic system that no longer existed. It was dead. It just didn’t know it.

  Not yet, the man told himself. In some ways, the government’s refusal to face up to facts worked in his favour. Let them exchange worthless favours for a few more weeks. Let their promises be exposed as worthless. Let them thoroughly discredit themselves. And then, we can take over and put the world to rights.

  He poured himself a drink, then turned back to the window. A shuttle was taking off from the spaceport, the twinkling lights vanishing in the cloudy skies. A storm was brewing. The man could feel it in his bones. He raised his glass in a silent toast to the future and took a single sip. The wine was worth savouring. He had a handful of bottles, locked away for special occasions, but once they were gone they were gone. There would be no more Rose Picard from Marseilles or scotch from New Aberdeen until someone rebuilt the interstellar economy from scratch. The man doubted he’d live to see it. His projected lifespan was over two hundred years, but rebuilding the Empire would take thousands.

  But I can start the process, he thought. Tarsus wasn’t a bad place to be, if one happened to have ambition. The planet was close enough to Earth to maintain valuable links, both with the homeworld and the other important worlds, yet far enough from the centre of power to be relatively safe. There is opportunity here, for the man who dares to reach out and take it.

  His intercom pinged. “Mr. Secretary, the First Speaker requests your presence at the cabinet meeting tomorrow.”

  The man smiled. “Does he indeed? How nice of him.”

  It was not, he knew, a request. He’d be expected to rubber-stamp a decision made by the First Speaker’s inner circle. There was no point in trying to object, not now. But - in time - he would avenge every humiliation the wretched ruling class had inflicted upon him and his supporters. The rulers had thought their position unchallengeable. They’d certainly sealed up all the normal avenues to power. But the Empire was gone. Who knew how far an ambitious man could go?

  He took another sip of his wine. “Inform the First Speaker that I would be deeply honoured to attend his meeting,” he ordered, dryly. “And tell my wife I will be leaving the house early tomorrow.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The man finished his drink, then took one last look at the streets below. They were still brightly lit ... that was going to change. The man had no illusions about just what would happen when the truth finally slammed home. Tarsus, one of the most stable worlds in the sector, was about to undergo a massive shock. The wildfire sweeping over the once-great Empire would burn the planet to ashes.

  But we will rise from the ashes, he told himself. He silently catalogued his plans and preparations, reassuring himself that he’d covered all the bases. There was a certain element of risk, of course, but he’d minimised it as much as possible. And we will build a better world.

  Chapter One

  It will come as no surprise that the single most distrusted entity within the Empire, from the moment the decline began to Earth’s final collapse into madness, was the media. It is difficult to say for sure, but it seems unlikely that many people believed what they were being told.

  - Professor Leo Caesius. Crying Wolf: The Media and the Fall of the Empire.

  It was a dark and stormy night, Clarence Esperanza narrated to himself, as he surveyed the chain-link fence between him and the dark industrial estate. It was a dark and stormy night, damn it!

  He smiled - white teeth flashing in a dark face - as he looked for an easy way to get over the fence. He’d always enjoyed adding little flourishes to his work, even if half of them were gleefully stolen from ancient writers hardly anyone - and certainly none of his readers - had heard of. It wasn’t theft, not really. It was ... all right, maybe it was a kind of theft, but it was in a good cause. Clarence knew, without false modesty, that he was no writer. He lacked the skill to string words together in a manner that would comfort the powerless and afflict the powerful. Whatever skill he’d had in writing, once upon a time, had been ground out of him by a creative writing course and ten years as a reporter. It was no comfort to know that everyone else had the same problem.

  An aircar flew overhead, heading north towards the spaceport. Clarence glanced up at it, then returned his attention to the fence. The estate had been abandoned two years ago, according to the city files, but someone had taken precautions to make sure that no one could get in or out of the massive complex without going
through the gates. Clarence had expected to find a whole string of holes in the wire - cut by the homeless, looking desperately for somewhere to sleep that wasn’t damp and cold - but there was nothing. Gritting his teeth, he checked his gloves and started to scramble over the fence. It was harder than it looked and he nearly fell twice before he got over the wire and landed on the far side. The sound of his feet hitting the ground was terrifyingly loud in the silent night air. He ducked down, expecting to see a night-watchman heading towards him. The estate was certainly large enough to merit someone on duty at all times.

  And my press pass probably won’t be enough to spare me a night in jail, Clarence thought, as he listened for the sound of approaching footsteps. The watchman might show him the door or he might call the cops. There was no way to know how the cops would react. They wouldn’t risk abusing a journalist, but a night in the cells was hardly abuse. And the editor will give me hell for being caught.

  He smiled at the thought. The tip-off had been vague, but it had come from a trustworthy source. Something was going to happen tonight, in the vast industrial estate. Clarence would have preferred more details, particularly a clear idea of precisely what was going to happen, but his source had gone silent. That wasn’t uncommon, in a world where talking to the media could get a source fired and blacklisted ... he shook his head. The risk of getting caught was high - press pass or no press pass - but it had been a long time since he’d done anything worthy of the great reporters of the distant past. He’d spent the last five years taking official statements and trying, desperately, to put his own spin on bland pap. One might as well add spice to fried mush. No matter how much spice one used, it was still mush.