TBC40

==Chapter 40 - The Broken Commonwealth==
===Alone with her Thoughts===
Tharkad City 
Tharkad System
Lyran Commonwealth
December 3149
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There's always something else going on.
The hardest part of governing, is knowing who you can trust, who you should trust, and who you can't trust.
The Lyran Commonwealth's dark side, is that it's as much a tyranny as the Draconis Combine, once you scratch through the crafted veneer. With a secret police whose methods are considerably more ruthless in method than many of the worst Capellan Maskirovka atrocities.
Just...done more or less with prussian efficiency.
Archon Trillian Steiner-Davion sat in a pho' shop, eating Vietnamese-style noodle soup for lunch.
Across the remainder of the Lyran Commonwealth, Lohengrin teams were in motion today, and where Lohengrin wasn't operating, Heimdall was.
The move began almost as soon as the ink was dry on her succession, and she'd worked with Sharon Ngo to set up the trap. They'd worked together on wording the exact tone of Sharon's resignation, timing it precisely, to lure their prey into moving openly.
Trillian sipped broth from a baked-ware spoon, and turned the pages of a neighborhood German-language magazine while the strains of the Connaught Royal Pipers played on the shop's muzak.
There wouldn't be time for all the trials, so only a few targets would survive to face charges.
It simply wasn't possible to prosecute so many in a reasonable period of time, especially among the Commonwealth's so-called 'leading' citizens.
Trillian settled for letting one in ten survive to be tried, and it was still going to be hundreds of prosecutions.
Embezzlement, profiteering, fraud, bribery, abuse of office, misuse of resources, black marketeering, theft of public property...
She turned a page.
...theft under color of law, obstruction of justice, racketeering...
She paused and sipped from a small earthenware tea-cup.  
Tonight, the Commonwealth would change, because it has to.  
"...the old ways are failing us, Trillian. I can keep delivering useless, futile so-called 'victories' but if you don't cut the rot out, it's just delaying the inevitable..."
A Ruler must make choices, sometimes choices that rankle.  For centuries, the rot had gone on because the Commonwealth produced with extra to spare, arming both friend and foe, maintaining endless conflicts to power the lifestyles of the rich and decadent, and now?
We can't afford that anymore.
On the whole, it was a tiny sub-fraction, a millionth of a percent.  Most Lyrans wouldn't even notice as teams from Loki's financial crimes bureau served papers on firms as old as the Commonwealth itself, and teams either captured. They didn't notice assassinated the men running the illicit operations that had siphoned the health, and the wealth, of the nation on a truly colossal scale.
She sighed, and took a fork to a baked dumpling, and another sip of tea.
In barracks and academies, even men were about to meet their fates.
She sipped her tea, and turned a page.
Now, to figure out how to get out from under Khan Alaric Ward-Steiner.
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- FINI - The story of the Broken Commonwealth is completed.External Link to Author's Comment of the Story
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