Free Chronicles of Isambard Smith 05 - End of Empires by Toby Frost Page A

don’t know how to do that, Isambard.’
    Smith glanced back over his shoulder, to give the man behind the counter a reassuring smile, and saw Carveth talking to him. ‘Have you got any popcorn?’ she asked.
    ‘Welcome, friend,’ he replied, gesturing to the entrance on the far side of the hall.
    ‘No, really –’ Carveth protested, but by then Smith was pushing her towards the door.
    Smith took the lead. He was suddenly in a narrow, dark corridor. It smelled of sawdust and old carpet.
    They took seats at the back. A thin man with a goatee beard stood on the stage, haranguing about a dozen people dotted around the hall.
    ‘What good has the Leighton Wakazashi corporation ever done?’ the speaker demanded. ‘Why does our government trust those crooks, whose only solution to any problem at all is to try to get a bunch of man-eating space monsters through quarantine?’ His voice sank low. ‘I don’t know who’s worse. You don’t see Procturan Rippers screwing each other over for a god-damn percentage. Or wearing those suits with shoulder pads. Or shouting into mobile phones! Do you? Don’t believe it when they tell you that greed is good, or that lunch is for wimps! Leighton Wakazashi claims that wealth trickles down onto the poor. Well, something does, and it’s yellow alright, but it sure as hell isn’t gold!’
    Cheering broke out among the listeners. Actually, Smith thought, the fellow had a point. Smith had crossed paths with the corporation’s executives on several occasions, and had been left with a very unsavoury feeling.
    ‘But that’s enough from me,’ the speaker said. ‘Now for some real fire. Friends, I give you our lady of rebellion, the scholar of the barricades, the woman who turns a moment into a movement: Miss Julia Chigley!’
    Onto the stage strode a pale, dark-haired young woman in a boiler suit with a red sash. She stood before the microphone and glared out at the audience for a moment, as if challenging them to throw her out. Then she made a fierce gesture with her fist. ‘Up the people! Up the front!’
    Blimey, thought Smith.
    ‘Brothers and sisters,’ she began, in a surprisingly genteel voice, ‘we are at war. Not just with the Ghasts, not just with the Yull, but with corruption. With insidious forces within the Space Empire that gnaw at its very bowels.’
    Smith glanced to his right. Rhianna was watching with great interest. Carveth had started to fidget and swing her legs. Suruk was nowhere to be seen. That was worrying in itself, but there was no time to find him now.
    ‘I speak of a conspiracy, aimed not only at the loyal citizens of Ravnavar – man, alien and robot alike – but at you. A conspiracy that is alive and well.’ She paused and looked into the audience. Given the bad lighting, they must have seemed like blurs in the darkness, but Smith could not lose the feeling that she was looking at him. It reminded him of the last speech he had sat through from end to end, at Midwich Grammar Sports Day about thirty years before.
    ‘Our demands are incendiary – to those in power, pure dynamite.’ Miss Chigley raised her hand, closing her fingers as she numbered the points. ‘One: free bus passes for our brothers in struggle, the under-fives. Two: the immediate banning of televised talent contests. Three: better tea rations for our boys at the front and the workers who support them. Four: the recognition of moral fibre as a chemical compound. These are our demands, Ravnavar – do you have the strength to meet them?’
    In the moderate uproar that followed, Smith leaned over to Rhianna. ‘It all sounds rather more, well, reasonable than we’d expected, don’t you think?’
    Rhianna opened her hands. ‘Are you sure this is the right place?’
    ‘We are the greatest empire in space,’ Miss Chigley resumed, ‘but not when we forget our moral fibre. Vigilance is all! In our struggle for justice, we must purge our very language of subversive jargon foreign to the