Interview with an Imperial clerical employee, published in the Shautler Province underground bulletin, The Objective Informer, Issue 4.
X: . . ..Yes, I'd say that characterizes the general situation rather well.
OI: How did it start? We've heard all kinds of rumors of course, but you were on the inside, so to speak.
X: Let's say I was on the outer edge of the inside. My familiarity with it began with a rumor. Supposedly word had leaked from the Imperial Security Bureau—the ISB of all things! And to be more specific, from the Department of Armed Forces. The entire fleet, every ship, was said to have been sunk in a droid harbor, and the report supposedly sent on a wireless taken ashore from the flagship before she sank.
Actually it was almost more than hearsay, in that I have a friend who swore he saw the message himself before it was taken down. You see, ISB headquarters has one of the new teletypes that print out messages as they come in through the ether. Supposedly someone smuggled the printed message out of the wireless center—on ISB paper—and posted it on an employee bulletin board, from which it soon disappeared. One story has it that it eventually was given to the underground in Larvis Royal.
Still, it could have been a rumor, a simple lie. I didn't see the teletype myself, so I can't vouch for it. In fact, at the time I really didn't believe my friend; the story was just too hard to accept.
OI: But it's what started the disorders?
X: Not directly, but ultimately yes. Initial credence was low. I mean . . . Every ship? Come now! But it didn't end there. It was the first in a supposed series of leaks, although that was the only message said to have been smuggled out in the original. Others were said to have been seen in the original by an army intelligence officer who had no chance to steal them. He's said to have memorized them as best he could and to have written them down later at home. Supposedly the someone was a Major Blenum, who'd then delivered the messages to the underground and gone into hiding.
These other messages, rumored or actual, carried the story further. One had it that most of the munitions for the expeditionary force had gone down with the fleet. Then supposedly men had dived down to the sunken ships—the harbor is shallow—gotten the hatches open, and set grapples onto powder barrels and shell and ammunition cases. The idea being to salvage all that they could. They'd made a fair start on the task when thousands of wild droids supposedly breached the army's defense lines around the droid capital by night and rampaged through the city setting fires.
So the story went. They set fire to the wharf and the entire waterfront—and the munitions stacked there blew sky high, destroying the salvage boats as well. The next to last message in this supposed series said that the army had driven the droids from the city, but that there still was fighting in the outskirts. The last said that a reinforced droid army had fought its way back into the city, that the imperial army was critically low on munitions, and that some units had mutinied in order to surrender.
Of course, anyone with a little basic understanding and a good imagination could have written those. And it would seem to me—there may be something I am missing here—if seems to me that they could also have been wirelessed in not from the army across the ocean, but by some underground operation a mile away.
OI: But the population of the capital was reading or hearing about all this?
X: I don't know how many people actually read about it. In the underground reports, that is. Clearly though, enough people read about it to spread the stories widely, give them broad currency. I don't know what the stories may have been like after they'd been passed along orally enough times, but they could hardly have been much worse than I heard. Or than I read.
Naturally, the government tried ignoring the leaked reports, rumors, or what have you, for a week or more. But when it got to be the talk of the streets, they commented to the extent of denying it all. The whole thing was a hoax, they said, and this denial was in the paper and on the public boards. Their version was that the fleet was standing off the droid coast, monitoring the progress of the military campaign ashore by wireless. And that it all was going nicely, thank you. There'd been no messages of the type rumored, and there was no Major Blenum in the ISB.
Most people were predisposed to believe the government version, on me simple basis that the underground chronically spreads lies. As some underground organizations do, routinely, at least on the Island of the Emperor. Of course, so does the government. I think we all knew that. But it was more comfortable to believe the government than the underground.
Up to a point. The government's statement went beyond that point, because most people knew there was a Major Blenum in military intelligence, or there very recently had been, at any rate. He'd been publicly decorated less than a year earlier, by the emperor himself, for inventing the teletype; it had been played up very big in the paper. So the government reply gave these reports, or rumors—these stories—a certain odor of veracity, you see.
Then a man wearing the uniform and insignia of a captain in military intelligence stood up on the rim of a fountain in Emperors' Park at noon, when a lot of people were sitting about eating their lunches, and he began to shout that the rumors were true. That he personally had seen two of the teletypes. And then . . . then a policeman went up to him and cut him down with his saber where he stood.
It was a shocking thing to see, and scores or hundreds of people saw it. Including myself. It proved nothing, of course, but that one act probably quadrupled the percentage of people who believed the stories. And several people who'd seen it, including the friend I was eating with, claimed they knew the man personally, that he really was a captain in military intelligence, a Captain Margrin, or Margrun.
And of course, the subject matter was one of strong public concern. A great number of people, including, I'm sure, many here on Shautler, had relatives and friends in the expeditionary force. And beyond that, a lot of merchant seamen had been impressed to sail the fleet. Taxes had been raised sharply, as you very well know, taxes that already were quite severe.
So now there began to be impromptu gatherings in the streets, people listening to speakers against the chancellor and even, I'm told, against the emperor! Nothing all that big, you understand, but it seemed quite shocking that such things could happen right in the capital city, and the police were kept busy hurrying about breaking them up. And breaking heads in the bargain. Many people though, perhaps most, said good enough for them, that such lawlessness should be crushed in the bud.
OI: So what caused things to escalate into large-scale rioting?
X: When the police began cracking down on small public gatherings, the "trouble makers," as many people called them, turned to slinging rocks through government windows at night and ambushing policemen on patrol, that sort of thing. And after several policemen were killed, in a single night at that, martial law was proclaimed. Some people were accused and arrested, and a mass execution was held on a platform in Government Square. Your readers know about that, of course.
But it didn't work quite the way it was intended. Some of the crowd began shouting "down with the chancellor! Down with the chancellor!", and it spread. Mounted police rode in to break it up. But the day was chilly and rainy, and some people had come prepared with jointed javelins concealed in their raincapes and began spearing the police kaabors and the policemen themselves. So the police pulled out their repeating pistols and began to shoot, some perhaps into the air but some into the crowd. I know that's true because I was working extra-time and watched it all from my office window. The crowd panicked then, and a considerable number were trampled to death.
Next, of course, a curfew was invoked, and a Public Urgent Bulletin was distributed by the Postal Bureau that all businesses and government offices would be closed the next day. Except Security offices; that went without saying. And the curfew would be in force twenty five hours a day until otherwise officially indicated!
OI: An around the clock curfew!
X: That's right. But it didn't really happen that way, because "otherwise indicated" came the next morning, when the palace bells began to toll. And when Government Square had all the people it could hold, which is about three hundred thousand, the emperor spoke from a balcony. He said the chancellor had been set down, that the emperor himself would operate the government, and that there'd be an investigation.
There was a shot then, and the emperor fell. That started a genuine stampede, and apparently a lot of people were killed. Afterward it was rumored that the emperor was dead. Then the vice chancellor called the army in to clear the streets of all gatherings, and keep them clear. And a roundup was undertaken of everyone suspected of hostility to the government.
At least hundreds were arrested—thousands seems far likelier—taken from their homes and put into compounds. Afterward a dusk to dawn curfew was invoked, and nobody worked much. The waggoners stopped carting anything but food into the capital, and not much of that. There were ships set fire to in Larvis Harbor. Buildings were burned, whole neighborhoods. People seemed actually to have gone quite mad. And because I was known to my neighbors as an employee in the————Bureau, it seemed well to take my vacation time and remove myself and my family from Larvis Royal. That's what it's come to.
Before going down to the carriage I'd hired, I looked out my living room window—I have an upper floor apartment—and saw the university burning. Guns were banging somewhere not too far off. And as for the last departmental rumor I'd heard—probably true, considering the source—Kelthos Province was in full revolt, some imperial police units there had been massacred, and the provincial constabulary was in mutiny and besieging the Kaitmar Military Compound.
I don't know how all this will end, but I fear it can never get back to the way it was.
Unless perhaps the fleet comes sailing back into Larvis Harbor. I most earnestly hope it does. But even if that happens . . . I don't know. I'm afraid that things may have gone too far.