Snippet – The Prince’s War

I just had this running through my head.

Prologue

From: An Unbiased History of the Imperial Royal Family.  Professor Leo Caesius.  Avalon.  206PE.

It is extremely difficult to trace the history of the Imperial Royal Family – as it became known – past the final stages of the disintegration and the early days of the Unification Wars.  Part of this, of course, is an inevitable result of the wars and their attendant devastation; a great many records were lost and/or deliberately destroyed during the fighting.  Certain factions, particularly during the opening stages of the conflict, believed that it would be better to erase the past so the human race could stride forward into a brave new future, and therefore set out to capture or destroy as many records as possible.  Others simply ignored the danger of historical erasure, and revisionism, until it was too late. 

But a far more significant problem was caused by the newborn Imperial Household’s determination to legitimatise its position.  There were no shortage of academics willing to take thirty pieces of silver – or, more practically, lands and titles – in exchange for creating largely or entirely fictional genealogies for their patrons to use as propaganda.  The results were quite remarkable.  The First Emperor was hailed as the direct descendent of such figures as Alexander the Great, Augustus Caesar, Elizabeth Tudor and many others, ranging from Jesus Christ to George Washington and Joe Buckley.  Links were drawn between him and nearly every figure of consequence, to a truly absurd degree.  He was not only the sole heir to every kingdom on Old Earth, but also lands that simply never existed, including little known fictional kingdoms such as Gondar, Narnia and Wakanda.

This had two unfortunate – and entirely predictable – effects on academic enquiry.  An unwary student, more intent on getting a good grade rather than actually think about the material in front of him, might not notice the inconsistencies and frank impossibilities, such as a marriage between Queen Elizabeth Tudor of England (1533-1603, PSE) and Shaka Zulu (1787-1828, PSE), a marriage that would have been unlikely even if the two hadn’t lived and died nearly two hundred years apart.  A more perceptive student, on the other hand, might realise there were just too many discrepancies to be accidental and come to the conclusion that the whole field was irredeemably damaged beyond repair.  Such students would either leave of their own accord or, if they alienated their academic supervisors, would be pushed out or simply sidelined.  The Imperial University’s administrators knew very well there were fields of enquiry that could not be touched, not without angering their patrons.  What was the life of one student compared to the whole university?

Perversely, the truth is better than the fairy tale.  The First Emperor – whose name was largely stricken from the records, to be replaced by a decidedly impersonal title – was a high-ranking military officer during the early years of the disintegration.  Realising the endless wars were futile – his autobiography makes no mention of the burning ambition that was a mark of his career – he convinced a number of his fellows to mount a coup, seized control of the government and then embarked upon a series of increasingly sophisticated military campaigns to bring the rest of the settled worlds under his control.  He was more than just a naval officer, it must be noted; his skill at convincing former opponents to join him, or at the very least not to oppose him, was quite remarkable.  When he took the title of Emperor, he rewarded his followers by making them Grand Senators.  They in turn rewrote history to make it appear they had always been part of the rightful ruling class.

Whatever else can be said about the First Emperor, he did his work well.  By the time his son succeeded to the Imperial Throne, the empire was on a solid footing and could easily survive a handful of weak or clumsy rulers.  There was enough of a balance of power, the ruling class felt, to ensure both a degree of stability and a certain amount of social mobility.  It should have endured forever.

It did not.  It took years – centuries – for decay to start to take hold, but it did.  A trio of weak emperors allowed the Grand Senate to take more and more power for itself, then – worse – failed to play the different factions within the senate to right the balance of power.  Social mobility slowed to a crawl, the successive emperors losing much of their influence as they were increasingly dominated by the aristocracy.  Many of them lost themselves in mindless hedonism, whiling away the hours with wine, women, song and pleasures forbidden even to the aristocracy.  The handful who tried to reclaim their birthright were swiftly slapped down by the new rulers of empire.  Emperor Darren II was assassinated – it was blamed on terrorists, but the act was clearly ordered by the aristocracy – and Empress Lyudmila was held prisoner by her unwanted husband, then murdered when she produced a heir. 

By the time the Empire entered its final days, the Imperial Throne was occupied – to all intents and purposes – by Prince Roland, known to the public as the Childe Roland.  He was officially declared a great moral and spiritual leader, but the reality was somewhat different.  Prince Roland – the Grand Senate hadn’t been able to decide on when he should be formally crowned – was, by the time he entered his teenage years, a useless layabout.  The only good thing that could be said about him, it should be noted, was that he’d not fallen as far into depravity as some of his ancestors.  It was generally believed that it was just a matter of time.

The Commandant of the Terran Marine Corps, in a desperate bid to turn the situation around, made use of the Corps’s long-held power to appoint bodyguards to the Imperial Household and assigned Specialist Belinda Lawson to take care of the prince and, hopefully, make a man out of him.  She was rather more successful than one might expect, knocking some sense into the nearly-adult prince, but it was already too late.  Earth collapsed into chaos and it was all Belinda could do, along with the prince, to escape.  The Empire died and, as far as anyone outside the Corps knew, Prince Roland died with it.  In reality, he was transferred to a Marine Corps starship.

This was, as far as the Corps was concerned, an awkward position.   Roland was the legal ruler of the known galaxy.  However, practically speaking, he ruled nothing.  The Empire was dead and gone.  The Corps could not recover even the Core Worlds, already blighted by civil war, let alone the rest of the settled worlds.  Roland was an Emperor without an Empire; an unfinished young man who might be an asset but might equally become a burden.  And that left the Corps with a serious problem.

What – exactly – were they going to do with Prince Roland?