the Star League (as the shorter summaries suggest) but to rule it.
In all the retellings of the horrible things Amaris did to Terra
and the Hegemony during the Star League Civil War, though,
two issues are rarely addressed. First, Amaris did not start out as
a brutal dictator of the Hegemony. Though Amaris or his toadies
committed crimes against humanity throughout his reign, the
worst atrocities committed in Amaris’s name happened in the last
few years of the Star League Civil War. Second, in all the rushing to
denounce Amaris, few ever answer the question: what did Terrans
and the Hegemony think of Amaris?
Before you answer that using words like “hated,” “feared,”
“despised,” and so on, think a moment: Stefan Amaris declared
himself First Lord (well, Emperor) of the Star League and Director-
General of the Hegemony in January of 2767. He accomplished
this by personally executing Richard Cameron and “sneaking”
the Rim Worlds Republic military into the Terran Hegemony.
But by 2769, the Republic had become the SLDF’s staging base.
Republican taxes and factories supported Kerensky’s crusade
against Amaris. This left Amaris without support from his home
base for ten years, including almost seven years of total war
(2772-2779) against the largest military in human space. Even
with all the Hegemony’s forti cations and SDS network, simply
relying on his original Rim Worlds troops and mercenaries to ght
the giant SLDF was not feasible, not over seven years of warfare
that would eventually kill 100 million Hegemony citizens and
render homeless ten times that number. And many of Amaris’s
most loyal units had family and land in the SLDF-subjugated
Republic—they were not going to stand and defend a foreign
land for most of a decade against a foe that had a gun to the
heads of their families. So, again the question: what did Terrans
and the Terran Hegemony think of Amaris?
Well, a great many of the highest Hegemony nobles and civil
servants were rather in favor of him; quite a few eagerly supported
him. About a third of the population liked him; another third
tolerated him. The remainder voted against him in the Director-
General con rmation vote, but few were so opposed to Amaris
that they raised arms against him.
Why? How is it possible that Amaris the Cameron toady, Amaris
the Periphery liberator, Amaris the Periphery betrayer, Amaris the
Usurper, Amaris the sycophant, Amaris the drunken fop, Amaris the
butcher, could be voted into power in the Hegemony and earn the
Hegemony’s collaboration for twelve years, including seven years
of dogged civil war against the SLDF?
Stefan Amaris presented different, carefully crafted
appearances to different people, as noted in a multitude of
prior works. They were generally self-deprecatory appearances
that led to him being underestimated, and he generally only
revealed otherwise to a select few—the leaders of the Periphery,
for example, when he began providing them BattleMechs. He
presented another one to the leaders of the Terran Hegemony:
a mediator between the Hegemony’s leaders and a distant,
incompetent Richard Cameron. To them, Amaris was intelligent
and sensible, a man who pretended to be a fool to befriend the
real fool—Richard Cameron, who was endangering the Star
League and the Hegemony’s public by enraging the Houses (such
as with Executive Order 156, disarming the Houses) and inciting
the Periphery (via the Taxation Edict and the kind). Likewise,
the Hegemony public had a favorable impression of Amaris for
many reasons