Empire's End: Episode 4: The Real Sin Read online

  “I owe you?” she roared.

  “Yes! If I’m going to be a fugitive, if I’m going to be tried and executed if we’re caught, I at least deserve to know why. Quit dodging the question, Kitekh. Tell me what the fuck happened between you and Senator Mol. Tell me why Brody targeted your ship for his assholery.”

  Kitekh snarled and leaned towards him – as though she would spring for his throat. JaQuan squared his shoulders and refused to budge. After a moment, Kitekh sighed, defeated.

  “Very well,” she said. “But it’s a long story.”

  “We’re not going anywhere until Lanaliel finishes the work on the hyperdrive,” JaQuan said. “There’s time.”

  She nodded. Her gaze drifted into the past. A strange mixture of fury and melancholy seized her face.

  “My father was an Imperial Senator,” she said. “He’d been serving for a long time, one of the foremost representatives from our world, Grakur. He was a giant among the Graur and well- respected throughout the Empire.

  “I was a captain in the Grakur Defense Force. As you know, each of the Three Races maintains a certain amount of autonomy despite yielding to Imperial law. As a conqueror race, we never fully gave away our military. The Graur boast a sizeable independent space fleet.”

  JaQuan crossed the bridge and sat at his station as she spoke. Cooressa had turned in her seat to listen as well.

  “I served with distinction. I could have joined the Imperial Fleet and gotten a command immediately. Or I could have entered service to our government and eventually risen to Elder. Just as everyone in the Empire knew my father’s name, everyone on Grakur knew mine. Our family was drenched in honor and accomplishment.

  “But then Idrib Mol introduced a bill in the Senate that would have compelled weekly temple attendance and prescribed a number of other restrictive rules designed to force all citizens to follow the dictates of the holy texts to the letter. It was oppressive and stupid. But prior to his election to the Senate, Mol was a consecrated Keeper of the Faith. He left the service of the Kwin Flaal to pursue politics. There are rumors that the Hierophant herself asked him to do so, but they’ve never been corroborated.

  “Regardless, Mol hit the Senate chamber with a fanatical fury. He was constantly insisting on the ideological and religious purity of Imperial law and attempting to push the government in a more conservative direction. Not long after the Emperor delayed a decision on humanity’s status as the Fourth Race, Mol adopted a strongly antihuman position. He cited any obscure minutiae he could find in the sacred texts to claim that, not only is humanity not the Fourth Race, there is no Fourth Race at all.”

  “Yeah, I’m familiar with his hate speech,” JaQuan said.

  He cursed silently. He was continually disappointed in how Imperial culture was no different than the America he’d left behind on Earth.

  “Anyway, he proposed a bill aimed at imposing strict religious law, and my father opposed it,” Kitekh continued. “He rightly claimed that forced worship gives no glory to God. Faith must be chosen if it is to have any value. He also argued that a theocratic police state was oppression that was not in line with Imperial values.

  “As you might imagine, Mol didn’t appreciate my father’s opposition. The senator has only marginally more respect for Graur than he has for humans. And he’s a zealot.

  “He claimed that Imperial law is already based on the dictates of scripture, which is true. And he used his status as a former Keeper as leverage to convince others he had a truer understanding of the divine will and how it should be expressed in the law.

  “The fight over the bill was savage. My father worked tirelessly to garner enough allies to defeat it. Eventually, he triumphed. Idrib Mol’s initiative died on the Senate floor.

  “And he did not forgive my father for that insult.”

  JaQuan frowned. Among the things he hated about the Empire were its politics. Everything was taken personally. Every defeat and accomplishment was part of a large scorecard that everyone kept. If someone took you down over a cause you championed, it was a loss of status and pride. Revenge was the number-one game in so-called polite society. And no dirty trick was deemed too low, so long as it succeeded.

  “Several months later, Senator Mol engineered a scandal involving my father,” Kitekh went on. “He was accused of having an affair with an Elohiman colleague. This woman was married. The Elohim do not tolerate marital infidelity. When two people choose to wed, it is considered a sacred covenant, ordained by God himself. For her to cheat on her husband was unforgivable.

  “She claimed my father did not seduce her, he blackmailed her. He forced her to have sex with him, to conduct the affair, or he would destroy her career in the Senate. She apologized to her husband, claiming she had been trying to do the right thing to serve their people and the Empire.

  “Father denied the charges. Not only did he not blackmail her, he said, the affair of which he was accused did not occur.

  “But she maintained resolutely that he had violated her marriage. And shortly thereafter, ‘evidence’ turned up that she was telling the truth. The blackmail documents were ‘discovered’ in my father’s office.

  “The Senate rebuked him. A large contingent began agitating to have him expelled. Father fought them. He called for a full investigation, citing several inconsistencies in the alleged documents that proved they were inauthentic.

  “But his own reputation was his undoing. Because he was famed throughout the galaxy, he carried the honor of the Graur on his shoulders. The Tribal Council on Grakur feared he would not be vindicated. The loss of honor for our entire people could not be endured. They recalled Father from the Senate and condemned him to restore the honor of the entire race at the expense of an innocent Graur.

  “But it wasn’t enough to simply punish him or replace him in the Senate. According to our laws, a Graur who brings dishonor on the race, stains their entire family with the crime. To prevent further dishonor and war, the entire line is sentenced to slavery, usually off-world in a remote colony, where insurrection is impossible. Thus, because Father was sacrificed to save the reputation of all Graur, the rest of us were destroyed as well. To prevent justice from being delivered on his entire clan, Father committed ritual suicide. We were all spared enslavement as a result.

  “But I was stripped of my commission in the Grakur Defense Force. While I remained free, the humiliation my father had brought to our people was too much. No one would obey my orders. I was unceremoniously turned out after a brilliant career.

  “Naturally, I swore revenge. It is the Graur way. To restore my father’s reputation, I would have to defeat the person who destroyed it.

  “I gathered the few friends I had, and we seized this ship from its Elohiman crew. We spared Lanaliel, because he was Mandran and we needed a chief engineer. My original intention was to declare war on the Elohim, captaining a pirate ship that attacked their commercial interests. I would hurt them until I could get the chance to kill Idrib Mol himself, for I knew it was he who engineered my father’s fall.

  “But Lanaliel convinced me otherwise. He suggested I could execute my plan, but that I would become the target of the Space Rangers and maybe the Imperial Star Force before long. This modified freighter would be no match for better-armed vessels, and I would be killed long before I could get to Senator Mol.

  “At his suggestion, I became a merchant. I get rich shipping Elohiman goods, which Lanaliel says is a better revenge. It is the Elohim who pay me to conduct their business. In that way, I have conquered their machinations against my family.

  “Personally, I think that’s philosophical schrisch. Lanaliel, like most Mandra, thinks too esoterically. But it allows me to survive until the chance for real revenge presents itself.”

  She fell silent. JaQuan contemplated her story. It disturbed him profoundly.

  “So your father got Emmett Tilled,” he said.

  Kitekh cocked her head, startled out of her reverie by JaQuan’s question
.

  “I don’t understand,” she said. “What has tilling soil to do with my father?”

  “And how does one Emmett till?” Cooressa added.

  JaQuan snorted despite the subject.

  “Emmett Till was a person,” he said. “In my country on Earth, in our mid-Twentieth Century, there was a lot of racial prejudice. People with dark skin like mine originally came from a continent called Africa. People with white skin, like Brody’s, had come to Africa in the Seventeenth Century. They had greater technology, and they enslaved African peoples, shipping them overseas to what would become my country, America, where they were sold to plantation owners. The slaves were forced to work the plantations, any children they had were considered slaves too, and the white workers and owners raped the women and beat or killed slaves for the slightest infraction.

  “Escape was nearly impossible, because slavery was an institution in the South, and black people look different than whites. It would be like you and Rorgun. An orange Graur could easily spot a black one. Escaped slaves had to attempt to journey hundreds of miles north to make it to freedom. If they were caught, they were killed and their bodies displayed as a warning to others. Sometimes, even if they made it north, they would be captured and sent back.

  “This went on for about two hundred years until a massive civil war between the North and South ended with the South’s defeat and the emancipation of the slaves.

  “But Southerners were embittered about the whole thing, and they always looked down on blacks as subhuman. There were a lot of abuses. They had laws that forced blacks to use different bathrooms, eat at different lunch counters, drink from different water fountains; some places even made blacks enter through the backdoor instead of the front. They called it ‘separate but equal,’ but it wasn’t equal at all. The white people’s things were nice. The black facilities were dirty, broken, and shabby.

  “Anyway, Emmett Till was a fourteen-year-old kid from the northern city of Chicago. He was visiting family in a small town in Mississippi, which is in the Deep South. A white woman accused him of whistling at her.”

  “Whistling?” Cooressa asked.

  “Like this,” JaQuan said. He pursed his lips and gave a wolf’s whistle. “Men would whistle at women they thought were attractive.

  “A white woman accused Emmett Till of whistling at her. A few days later, her husband and his half-brother abducted Emmett and beat him bloody, disfiguring him. Then they shot him in the head, killing him. They tied his body to a fan with barbed wire and threw him into the river. He was pulled out three days later, so badly mutilated he could only be identified by the ring on his finger.

  “The two men were tried for murder. But it was the Deep South, and an all-white, all-male jury acquitted them, despite overwhelming evidence of their guilt.

  “A few months after the acquittal, both men admitted they had murdered Emmett. They were paid by a magazine to tell the whole story. And because of laws that said you couldn’t be tried twice for the same crime, their public confession didn’t mean shit. They got to go free anyway, and they made money off their crime.

  “And maybe the worst part of the whole thing was that fifty years later, the woman who accused Emmett Till of whistling at her admitted she had made the whole thing up.”

  Kitekh stared at JaQuan, her face a mask of confusion and outrage.

  “But that is a travesty of justice,” Cooressa said.

  “Most definitely,” JaQuan replied, looking at her for the first time. “That’s the way things work.”

  “That is an horrific story, JaQuan,” Kitekh said. “But I am not seeing the parallel.”

  “Emmett Till didn’t commit a crime that was on the books,” JaQuan said. “He didn’t commit a crime at all, as it turned out, but even if he had whistled at her, it wasn’t something you could be tried and punished for. There was no law against whistling at women.

  “The real sin was that a black kid allegedly whistled at a white woman. He broke a social boundary. The woman’s husband wasn’t offended that someone whistled at his wife. He was furious a black man looked on his wife at all. This was all about Emmett Till being black, and the jury agreed. They were not going to send two white men to jail for killing a black teenager, no matter how terrible the crime.

  “Your father’s sin was not having an affair, Kitekh. And it wasn’t having an affair with a married woman. The problem was he was accused of fooling around with an Elohiman.”

  “That is not true,” Cooressa said. “He was accused of blackmail.”

  “Bullshit, Cooressa,” JaQuan said. “I’ve been in the Empire long enough to know that marital infidelity and blackmail are all part of the game. People in Imperial high society are all about counting coup on the other guy. If this wasn’t about race, Kitekh’s father would have been socially rewarded for his move. He’d have been seen as a brilliant tactician – you know, a stereotypical Graur. All you ever hear about them is what great warriors and tactical geniuses they are.

  “But that’s not what happened here. Idrib Mol knew what he was doing. Blackmail wasn’t enough to bring down the Graur who defeated him. He needed something people would find heinous. And that was a Graur having sex with an Elohiman.”

  “You are wrong!” Cooressa all but shouted. “There are no racial divides in the Empire. Everyone is equal.”

  “Yeah, but some are more equal than others,” JaQuan countered.

  “That is an illogical statement,” Cooressa said. “Equality means everyone is treated the same.”

  “Uh-huh. Tell me something, Cooressa, how many Imperial Senators are Graur?”

  “I do not know,” she said.

  “I do,” JaQuan said. “Of the one thousand members of the Imperial Senate, only one hundred twelve are Graur, and only three of them represent a non-Graur world or territory. You know how many Graur there are on the Council of Nine? One.”

  “There were two before the calamity,” Cooressa said.

  “That’s still not equal,” JaQuan said.

  “You cannot dictate talent and skill,” Cooressa protested.

  “Can’t you?” JaQuan said. “The Council of Nine is comprised of one representative of each race, one representative from each of the three foundation worlds, and one representative from each of the Three Pillars of Society. It sounds to me like you’ve dictated representation right there.”

  “That is not the same thing,” she said.

  “Isn’t it? The Three Pillars of Imperial Society are Faith, Law, and Community. Graur overwhelmingly choose a law career. Nearly three quarters of law enforcement and military professionals are Graur. Yet the Law Councilor is Elohiman. The Graur were a conqueror race before assimilation into the Empire. They have a larger presence across the Empire than any other species. Yet only eleven percent of the Senate is Graur.

  “You can talk all you want about how everyone is equal, Cooressa. You can make all the excuses you want. But the fact is Graur do not have equal representation in the government, and it isn’t out of lack of interest. The Graur are different from the Elohim and the Mandra, and they are treated like it. Kitekh’s father wasn’t disgraced and recalled because he did something Imperial society considered criminal. He was blacklisted because Idrib Mol accused him of having sex with an Elohiman.”

  Cooressa’s mouth opened and closed several times. Retorts formed and died unspoken on her tongue.

  “How do you know all this?” Kitekh asked.

  “We were forced to learn Imperial history and culture in Acclimation,” JaQuan said. “I paid attention in class.”

  “But the percentages of the Senate,” Kitekh said. “I’m not sure I could have told you more than that the Graur were in a minority.”

  “It’s public information,” JaQuan said. “All you have to do is look.”

  “These facts do not make the Empire racist, JaQuan,” Cooressa said. “There are other, more reasonable explanations.”

  “Yeah, I heard that all the t
ime on Earth,” he replied. “There was always some ‘reasonable explanation’ for why it wasn’t about race. But the thing is, the shit that happened to black people didn’t happen to whites. It was always about race. The whites just didn’t want to admit it, because that would make them bad people.

  “And it’s the same way here, Cooressa. The Elohim are in charge. Society is geared to benefit them, and infractions are less serious for them than for others. But you don’t want to admit it, because then you would have to take responsibility for the harm it causes.”

  Fury gripped Cooressa’s face. For the first time in the three years he’d known her, Cooressa’s temper boiled over. She shot up from her chair and opened her mouth to shout.

  An alarm wailed through the bridge.

  Cooressa’s anger dissipated immediately. She turned to her board and tapped commands.

  “There is a scout-class ship approaching at high speed from the asteroid field,” she said. She tapped a few more commands. “Its weapons are armed.”

  “Oh, shit,” JaQuan said. “Gwen.”

  Gwen had nearly reached the edge of the Belt when her scanners picked up a Lankwin-class freighter. She was tucked behind three medium-sized asteroids just outside the field.

  “Oh, hell yeah,” she said aloud. “I’ve got you now, JaQuan.”

  Gwen cut her engines and drifted to the edge of the asteroid belt. Carefully, she maneuvered her way closer to Cataan’s Claw. The outlaw vessel was running with her shields down. They clearly hadn’t detected Gwen yet.

  Perfect. Gwen’s scout ship was more maneuverable, and probably better armed. But Cataan’s Claw was larger and likely had more guns. Plus, the wily Graur captain had escaped two Imperial battlecruisers back at Daxal. Gwen was not going to underestimate the terrorists.

  Tapping commands into her board, she armed her weapons and activated her deflector screens. There was no reason to believe the ship would simply surrender, not after what happened at The Outpost. She needed the element of surprise and to disable them first.