Deathstalker 04 - Deathstalker Honor

viciously over points of dogma and precedence. Owen supposed he shouldn’t have been surprised. He was a historian, after all.
    All the various rebel factions had ever really had in common was a shared enemy. And though they all bandied around words like justice and liberty, they meant very different things to different people.
    And then there was the deal Random had made, in the midst of the most desperate fighting, to depose but not destroy the aristocratic Families. Faced with an increasingly victorious army calling for their collective blood, the great Houses had banded together and offered to step down from power and privilege, in return for being allowed to survive as purely economic forces. That was the carrot. The stick
    was their threat to destroy the economic base of the whole Empire, and crash every civilized world back to barbarism. No one doubted they were quite capable of doing it. And so Random had made the deal, to save the lives of billions, but no one thanked him for it. The man in the street was cheated of his revenge, the rebels accused their beloved hero of selling out his political convictions, and the Families hated him for the loss of their precious nobility. Afterward, Random had to hire a secretary just to deal with all the hate mail and death threats.
    As if the situation wasn’t complicated enough, Blue Block had emerged from the shadows to unite and control the Families and scare the crap out of everyone else. Blue Block had been the Families’ secret weapon, a last-ditch defense to be used against the Empress if she ever seriously threatened the Clans’
    power and status. The youngest sons and daughters of each House were given to Blue Block, trained and conditioned to be loyal to the Families to the death and beyond. Unfortunately, Blue Block turned out to have an agenda of its own. In their hidden schools, faceless and nameless instructors taught the younger sons and daughters, none of whom would have inherited title or wealth anyway, that the Families as a class were far more important than any one House. And that loyalty to Blue Block therefore superceded any loyalty to individual Clans. They taught their charges other things too, some of them unspeakable, but that still remained a secret. For the moment.
    They were the ones who had come up with the deal to put to Jack Random, and now that they had emerged unblinking into the harsh light of public view, they were the ones who enforced it. The Clans saw what they had unknowingly created and were afraid. And so they all bowed down to Blue Block, and kept their rage and plans for bloody revenge to themselves.
    Owen, Hazel, Jack, and Ruby were united in their horror of the Pandora’s box of troubles they’d opened, but couldn’t decide what to do about it. Random rushed from one meeting to another, desperately trying to keep a lid on things. It helped that most people were at least willing to listen to him.
    Everyone respected the legendary Jack Random. Even if they hated his guts. He spent the rest of his time trying to rebuild the very armed forces he’d just finished fighting, in case of attacks by the Empire’s many enemies. The rogue AIs of Shub, the reborn Hadenmen, and any number of potential alien threats were all quite capable of launching an attack upon an Empire distracted by internal divisions.
    Ruby Journey meanwhile took every opportunity to loot anyone weaker than her, including several corporations, and lost no time in setting herself up in the kind of luxury she’d always wanted to become accustomed to. She had no interest in politics. If you couldn’t hit or rob something, Ruby was mostly lost for an alternative. So she stayed out of the ongoing negotiations, and everyone else heaved a great sigh of relief.
    And Owen and Hazel had become bounty hunters, tracking down escaped war criminals. Officially, they were supposed to bring the villains back to face public trial, but privately it had been agreed on all sides it would be better if certain parties were killed while trying to escape. Owen and Hazel had nodded solemnly when this was explained to them, and decided they’d make up their own minds on the subject, as and when necessary. If there was ever to be any hope of stability in the new order Jack was trying to hammer together, the truly evil had to be punished, and seen to be punished. People like Valentine Wolfe, for example, despised right hand of the Empress and butcher of Virimonde. You couldn’t