The Empire's occupying forces discovered that after they had executed the local bigwigs of the Commonwealth by firing squad, the cost of occupation had visibly decreased.
This probably created a peculiar kind of path dependence, and at last they expanded the firing squads to cover the bureaucracy.
And so, in the brief span of October alone—just one week on Earth—more than a hundred senior civil servants were executed. More than ten times as many were arrested and imprisoned, pending deportation to the helot mines to dig coal.
Every one of them had been a respectable gentleman. Even the magnates whose wealth rivaled that of nations, and the politicians of great renown, had been men you could talk and laugh with as equals.
Legally speaking, they had broken no laws. They had not embezzled funds, and of course they had never dared to resist the new rulers. They had merely paid lip service to the orders from above and turned up their noses at the tasks assigned to them, just as they always had.
The respectable senior bureaucrats could hardly understand it. They protested that the bureaucracy had operated this way even under the Empire, before the Commonwealth was founded. And wasn't this how every system of governance in the universe worked?
They had done nothing wrong. If anything was at fault, it was the ways of society.
Even if they had been in the wrong, they shouldn't have received such severe punishment.
As a leader, if you don't first establish the laws, wouldn't this be punishing people without teaching them? It was no way for a wise ruler to act!
That sounded almost reasonable.
What a respectable, eloquent bunch of elites they were!
But none of that changed the fact that their corpses were now dangling from the sea-crossing bridge