Darkness is a funny thing, when you wake up to find it without expecting it. It’s not there, but it’s all around you. You can’t see through it, but you know there are monsters in there somewhere. All your problems and solutions lie just out of reach and yet there you are, stuck like moist veggies on a poorly-lubricated grill. Your instinct is to get out of it, but how? Which direction is right? Any direction could lead to your doom. You could fall off of a cliff. You could step on a scorpion. You could smash your pinkie toe into the side of the doorjamb and break it in such a way that the doctor says “There’s not really anything I can do, it has to heal on its own” and you end up walking around with a broken toe that never heals right and your friends call you L-Toe any time you wear sandals. Anything could happen in the dark. For anyone who isn’t a cat, it might be the worst place to find yourself unexpectedly. James was not a cat, found himself in just such a situation, and reacted as many might: he sat up with a start.
His head slammed into solid metal and he was once more positioned flat on his back. A funny humming sound rang in his ears, and he stretched his hand out into the pitch in front of him to get a read on the vertical range he had to work with. Not much- has hand stopped short about a foot in front of his face. The metal was cold to the touch. He reached out to either side of him and found he had slightly more room there. That metal was also cold to the touch. Feeling around with his feet and reaching above his head he found that his space in those directions was alarmingly unrestricted. Gradually he regained focus, becoming aware of a gentle swaying that drove him to think harder about his surroundings. He flipped over so that he could, theoretically, look up the tunnel. He saw a light ahead of him, a distant pinpoint in the suffocating void of ill-lumination in which he found himself. The loading belt had probably stopped, he realized, and that was the open flap. Maybe they knew he was there. He hoped not. He hoped that they had stopped for some other reason. Even so, he started crawling toward the distant light, trusting he could think of some decent lie that would explain his presence without compromising his freedom or his mission. As he got closer to the hole of light, the humming in his ears grew louder.
The Empire is a strange beast. It is immense and strong, covering and conquering infinitely unlimited worlds in an ever-expanding rectangular prism. It is also tiny and weak, with an infinitely limited capacity to police those worlds. It has an official army, an official navy, and an official clandestine intelligence service- and they are all both obviously insufficient and pathologically feared. It has no official contracts with any subcontractor whatsoever, and maintains large numbers of private enforcement services, mercenaries, and spy networks on an unbudgeted shadow payroll. It has very little in the way of obvious things, and the things it has can’t be obvious, for obvious reasons.
The one thing that doesn’t apply to, the one thing the Empire has in great, unequivocal quantities, is currency. It has been said that the people who manage the Empire are required to learn one skill, and one skill only: accountancy. The theory is that lacking currency the Empire would crumble, while possessing any other assets would lead to dictatorship. This is the open joke, the one told on street corners by good, law-abiding, clueless citizens with no knowledge of the real game. Behind the terrible and mostly incompetent cloak which the Empire has draped around itself is a small herd of oligarchs, each with a syndicate governing an immense slice of the galaxy over which they have been given functionally omnipotent power to rule as clandestinely as possible. It is across the table from these slimy, secretive shadows where those who know and hate the game sit and peer with undiluted malice as they try to lift the veil.
The Emperor himself is thought by some to be the strongest of these oligarchs. He is thought by others to be the weakest. No one is, or can be, certain but the fact is no matter how strong he may be personally, when united the other Galactic Lords keep in check any power he may wield, statutory or otherwise. In such ways is order maintained through the Empire. The people on the street can only complain about the price of bread, which they in joyful tones do with great enthusiasm.
The humming was growing unbearable. James had never heard that sound before, and he’d been around these belts his entire life. Also, he wondered, why was he swaying if the belt was turned off? It wasn’t much of a sway, but it couldn’t be his bodyweight because the surface he was crawling on didn’t move with him. This movement was entirely independent of him and made him sick now that he thought about it. He became aware of an intense cold radiating downwards onto him from the ceiling. He reached out to test it, the way one does when they’re thinking with their instinct instead of their brain.
Previously it had simply been cold to the touch, but now as he held his hand closer he could feel the skin on his fingertips dying. If there had been enough light, or any light beyond that given by a pinprick at the end of a hungry, hungry hallway, he felt sure there would have been visible frost above him. Why would they be cooling the belt down now, he wondered. They did it occasionally, but usually it was for cold imports. Not much that left the planet had to be refrigerated- anything worth extra refrigeration wouldn’t have been on Malyria in the first place. With the number of worlds available and the sheer volume of cargo that moved through the Empire it was easier and cheaper to find an ice planet and then build habitats for the people, rather than build cold storage spaces on planets too temperate to handle the item in a loosey-goosey fashion. And if something cold had been coming in James definitely would have known about it. That was the interesting stuff, the stuff he could absolutely never get otherwise and for which might relax his anti-ship-thievery rule.
Forcing a final, lunging push to his crawl he found himself back where he’d started. The hatch that had given way to his current situation was visible, dim but slightly raised in the light from the tunnel’s end, and sealed shut. It hadn’t just closed behind him: someone had to have activated the seal. Whatever was coming in through that flap ahead had to be absolutely frozen. That meant it was about to get very cold, very quickly…and James was nowhere near the exit.
By the way, it’s not that bread is particularly expensive. Or particularly cheap. Bread, like most goods, fluctuates pretty wildly in price based on the economic conditions of whatever planet the buyer happens to be on. Some places don’t even understand bread as a concept, while others understand it but wouldn’t eat it if you held a torch to their gills and threatened them with a salt prong. The point is that they’d complain no matter what, and potentially about bread, because people will always complain about things that never really change all that much.
Taxes are another Galactic scourge to be complained of, no matter which oligarch you live under. Come to think of it, they’re a scourge whether or not you’re aware that there’s an oligarch in charge of you. Most people aren’t, weren’t, and haven’t been. That means the Emperor himself takes a lot of the blame for all the bad things that happen, being obvious, and most people never stop to consider the laughable idea that one person could ever effectively govern the number of worlds the Empire is known to comprise. That doesn’t even consider the ones that it’s rumored to comprise by those in the know, and certainly not the ones which no one even has an inkling it comprises. The vast majority of people though, while aware of some version of the vague scope the Empire encompasses, remain solely concerned with their local obsessions. Since one person could effectively govern a single planet with a middling population, they all assume that the Emperor is directly concerned with the government of their planet and complain accordingly. That means that when bread is taxed, they blame a man in charge of billions of worlds and quadrillions of people…for the price of perhaps half their dinner. It all makes perfect sense to most of them. To some, though, it doesn’t make much sense at all.
The Creed, as they call themselves at their parties, take a bit of a violent objection to the idea that one person might be controlling all of it, or any of it. They set as their goal the revelation of the ruling oligarchy and its eventual deposition. No one in the Creed ever seemed to ask how they discovered this secret cabal existed but, since they claimed evidence of it without spreading their ideas outside their own intellectual confines, it never needed to be questioned with any kind of pointedness. It’s particularly tidy and circular (by design, some might argue) but the upshot is that the Creed has never once complained about the price of bread. Their concerns are rather more galactic. They’ve complained quite a bit more about the rampantly rising cost of spaceship fuel, but not one single time about any food they ate. The thing about spaceship fuel, though, is that it’s exceedingly rare, hard to scan for, and, while it can be mined in temperate zones all over the galaxy, it must be kept frozen solid at all times, once it is found, to prevent explosion. It’s also incredibly high on the Desire Scale for not only the Official Galactic Empirical Navy but all of the mercenary fleets by which the Empire is actually policed. So it’s expensive, and since it’s expensive it remains the true frontline on which the war for the Empire is waged and a secret beyond all imagining at any of the given choke points. Interestingly, most people hadn’t personally refueled a spaceship. So most people had no idea. Some people had never considered a spaceship needed to be refueled. And those people were sometimes stuck on a conveyor belt without any idea of what might be coming their way.
James kept crawling, and also kept freezing. He’d never been this cold in his entire life. He wasn’t sure the planet itself had ever actually been this cold. He could feel his eyes start to water, and then suddenly couldn’t. Worried, he reached up to touch his face and when did so he felt the tears frozen solidly on it. He tried to double his speed but the spatial constraints wouldn’t allow for that and he kept bumping into the painfully cold ceiling. The humming was deafening now, and the swaying had started to pick up a bit. He thought he heard a pattern in the humming that corresponded with the sway, but decided it was probably his mind playing tricks on him. The environment that had created itself around him was a particularly fertile one in which a mind could do so. The opening ahead of him, which had been growing larger, suddenly started to get smaller. Its edges became rounded and fuzzy. He continued crawling, or at least thought he did, but then it occurred to him that his arms didn’t seem to be moving and without them he’d be doing a pretty poor job of crawling. Analyzing the situation further he realized his legs had quit as well, and were now curled beneath him. His whole body had become a useless frozen lump, and the exit was getting smaller and smaller. By the time he realized he was blacking out the exit was so far away that consciousness wouldn’t have done any good anyway. No one could crawl that far.
