The Martian General's Daughter by Theodore Judson

Author:Theodore Judson [Judson, Theodore]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, (¯`'•.¸//(*_*)\\¸.•'´¯)
ISBN: 9781591026433
Google: mOURIQAACAAJ
Amazon: B002IKKLFE
Publisher: Pyr
Published: 2008-04-01T07:00:00+00:00

ix years earlier, Father had saved Selin's military career as well as his future rival's life. Abdul Selin was then military governor of the Great Plains, the vast province composed of fourteen former American states that had Kansas City as its capital. Like every other general or administrator serving under the Concerned One, Selin's survival depended upon keeping the erratic emperor's favor. When the emperor had a change of heart, men in Selin's position often came to a sudden and very bad end for no particular reason.

Cleander, the new chamberlain in Garden City and the unacknowledged leader of the City Guardsmen, was at this time helping himself to the treasury while the Concerned One spent the remainder of the Empire's fortune on his houses, his harem, his spectacles, and on his throng of hanger-ons who clung to the emperor's court as other lowlifes cling to famous athletes and celebrated actors. In this era of good stealings, army payrolls set aside for forces far removed from the capital often magically shrank before they arrived at the offices of the various military paymasters. In a repeat of what had happened in Britain two years earlier, some soldiers served for months with no pay at all. Selin's men in the Great Plains were among the most neglected. To air their grievances to their temperamental commander, these soldiers formed a committee and presented him a petition an educated man among them had rendered into good English. The little African of Turkish descent met with the committee one morning right after breakfast, and that same afternoon put them to death in the so-called old style, which is to say he stripped the men naked and had them clubbed to death with iron bars before the entire mustered army. He ordered the entire army in his province to draw lots and intended to kill every hundredth man among them in a similar fashion. His impudent troopers had the gall to revolt before he could execute his plan.

A common soldier named DeVries, a man possessing the mind and leadership abilities rarely found in men of any station, took control of Selin's rebellious troops and led them west from Kansas City into the lightly populated center of the Great Plains, where many farmers and villagers were sympathetic to the rebels' cause. From hidden bases within that sea of grass and grains, DeVries waged a guerrilla war upon the unprotected towns and villas of the neighboring provinces. He freed thousands of local citizens from the rule of the tax farmers, and many of the rural folk joined the rebels' ranks and let them have the livestock and grain DeVries's men needed to feed themselves. In Garden City the Senate spoke of this rebel leader as a second Robert E. Lee; they and the emperor feared DeVries would cross into Mexico and lay hold of the capital, defended as it was by only a single division of Guardsmen. For months it seemed as if the center stone of the Empire were giving way.

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