Planet-System Governance Time That Breaks (Other People's) Heads. (1)
Skipping the boring, tedious parts entirely and cutting straight to the point, the reason for all this was, in a word, the following.
Mr. Ru-Ja-Po and his gang, who gave off the unmistakable vibe of a mustachioed plumber in a green cap—though in the real world they'd qualify as dangerously seditious vermin without any exaggeration whatsoever—would, under normal circumstances, have simply grown fat under the banner of "Well, it IS technically legal, your honor?", quietly devouring the lower-tier workers bit by bit.
They would have gnawed away at the guts of our golden-sun lolicon Heisenberg's administration, seized political power through a thousand small, deniable cuts, and finally made a play for the so-called miracle comeback via the classic inner-circle coup‧‧‧‧‧‧
But there were a few crucial problems here. The first was that the "lower-tier workers" in question were, for all practical purposes, completely subordinate to us.
Which made sense. In any ordinary planetary system, no matter how you spun it, each individual worker was just one frail, isolated human being.
So normally, that People's Party or whatever it was would have roamed around in packs, absorbed the poor souls drifting about alone, swelled their ranks with the harvest—and turned that swelling manpower into the engine of an all-out war against the central government we currently occupied.
And, embarrassing as it is to admit, the fact that Ilena and Heisenberg had poured every last credit from the fleet sale into a circular shell game told the rest of the story: as the single most effective way to suppress the chaos, aside from greasing the palms of each planetary government, the frontier cities across the remaining planets had been expanded on a massive scale.
Countless citizens had been dispatched there as fully franchised colonial settlers, funneled into a pioneering lifestyle that was orders of magnitude safer and more comfortable than anything they'd known before.
Which meant that, on paper, the People's Party had every reason to believe we were expanding the very "troops" they could recruit—using our own money, no less—while simultaneously widening the territory they could operate in.
Alas for the dreamers of that rosy future, the very class they counted on had a very different story going on around here. Why, you ask? Well, there were plenty of trivial little reasons, but if I had to name the biggest one‧‧‧‧‧‧
-Skreeeee-rik!
-Skree-KEK!
-Kwing-kwing~
"‧‧‧‧‧‧."
"R-Red Scourge?!"
"You idiot! It's not a Red Scourge, it's a Black Scourge! Are you trying to scare people to death?!"
That's right.
Infiltrate the colony cities and turn them into their own power base? With tens of thousands of Black Scourges obeying my every order stationed inside those very cities, what exactly did they imagine they could do about it?
Naturally, the moment anyone brainwashed by the Red Scourge tried to stage a strike or throw a tantrum, the person in question was instantly demoted from "assimilated settler" back to "refugee"—and this kept happening, one case after another.
"We have a report!!! Some bastard tried to incite us into going on strike and dealing a blow to the government!!!"
"You reported so diligently, so you've earned yourself a REWARD, haven't you?"
"YES! Thank!!!"
"The following are all citizen reports concerning People's Party activity filed from the newly constructed colony cities to date."
"What the—why are there so many?"
"A well-cultivated reporting culture, backed by the laws and reward payments that support it, tends to resolve most rear-area problems on its own."
"And this is all thanks to your excellent strategic placement and the far-sighted mass-production plan for the Black Scourges, Consul Benya! Haha!"
"Eeehk."
So no, none of this was intentional—but the upshot was that the last remaining faction of unrest within Milano was now being mercilessly ground to paste inside an automated hunting machine running at full tilt.
And even setting aside the whole laborer problem, if the People's Party wanted to do anything to us, they'd inevitably have needed to latch onto some major corporation within the planetary system—or, at the very minimum, a military garrison—to make anything happen.
Which, of course, brings us to the "resistance forces," the very first parasites to clamp onto the People's Party and the kind of scum perfectly positioned to plunge the whole system into chaos.
"Oh right, Adjutant. I haven't heard anything about the resistance lately. What's going on with them?"
"As of now, 85% of all known resistance bases and 97.3% of their personnel have been eliminated or arrested. Effectively speaking, they're as good as extinct."
"‧‧‧‧‧‧Wait, why? They're supposed to be stubborn enough that there's a saying about them resurrecting all over the place like cockroaches."
"From the very beginning, Black Scourge Legions were laid in thick beneath every city like a secret police force, specifically to prevent any internal infiltration. What exactly did you expect them to do about that?"
"Ah."
"Furthermore, just as the People's Party mobs can't run wild, the former refugees, lower-tier workers, and citizens who've come into our fold have zero intention of joining the resistance in the first place."
"‧‧‧‧‧‧Can you summarize that simply?"
"They keep taking losses with no means of recovering them or growing their numbers, so they're being naturally selected out of existence. To put it in historical terms‧‧‧‧‧‧it's much like how the Communist Party simply ceased to exist under Nazi rule."
"Waaah, too many words! Baby no understand."
"My apologies. That was overly complicated of me."
With that, Ilena wrapped up by twisting her explanation into something even more convoluted, briefly transforming me into a blubbering baby in the process‧‧‧‧‧‧
But to summarize: contrary to what the explainer screen would have suggested, the People's Party friends had failed to secure even the bare minimum of force necessary to make themselves useful.
And because of that, they'd also failed to advertise themselves as attractive partners to the corporations, military garrisons, and miscellaneous others I mentioned a moment ago.
Armed struggle was off the table. Even scraping together rations and upkeep for the members they'd somehow gathered was beyond them‧‧‧‧‧‧
Roughly one week after hearing all of that—
"So what's the situation now, Adjutant?"
"Of the 13.5 million confirmed People's Party members, roughly 3 million have returned to their former lives. The rest appear poised to voluntarily disband before long."
"Good."
I swear this isn't a joke—we had done nothing but go about our usual business, and yet here was a report saying they were drifting into natural extinction all on their own.
And so I came, belatedly, to understand why old-timers always say that "progress" requires a solid foundation.
Of course, if any other old-timers had overheard that remark of mine, they'd have been beyond exasperated. As far as they were concerned, building a "solid" foundation just meant being sturdy enough to endure when your enemies came shaking it.
Who on earth, they'd have demanded, builds a foundation that turns around and devours the very people trying to shake it, converting them into nutrients? The reaction alone would have been worth the price of admission‧‧‧‧‧‧
In any case, all of that chatter had taken place strictly between me and Ilena during idle small talk, so nothing ever made it to the gallery.
The old-timers, never imagining for a second that I'd say something like that, sailed past the whole affair without incident—or so they thought, anyway.