Employees! So pesky and demanding. “Please, may I spend Christmas Eve with my family?” “Please don’t choke me, I’m only the messenger.” “Please don’t choose me to be the test-subject for your latest ACME protagonist killer.” Small wonder that some bosses quietly eliminate the workers once they are no longer useful, preferably before they cash their paycheck. After all, what could possibly go wrong?
In Glen Cook’s 1979 A Shadow of All Night Falling, grand wizard Varthlokkur waited for centuries for the birth of Nepanthe, the woman who fate had decreed would be his one great love. His long wait finished, he aims to collect his trophy. Her brothers stand in his way, so he hires three skilled mercenaries to remove the brothers. Varthlokkur kidnaps the now defenseless Nepanthe, retreats to his seemingly impregnable fortress, and then declines to pay the mercenaries. Cue an alliance of three furious warriors and Nepanthe’s surviving brothers….
David Drake’s mercenary troupe, Hammer’s Slammers (commanded by Friesland’s Colonel Alois Hammer), was formed to suppress an uprising on Friesland’s colony-world Melpomone. The foreign mercenaries were offered settlement on wealthy Friesland in exchange for their services, as well as a chunk of cash. But after the mercenaries crushed the rebellion, Friesland’s government decided that it wasn’t such a great idea to settle battle-hardened mercenaries in their midst. Nor did it seem like a good idea to let the mercenaries sell their skills to other employers, since said employers could well be Friesland’s enemies. Best idea: kill off the now-superfluous soldiers. Friesland expects that their own Colonel Hammer will acquiesce. They are wrong. Hammer sides with his soldiers. Forewarned, the Slammers obliterate their would-be assassins and become the very destabilizing force that Friesland had feared.
In Joe Abercrombie’s 2009’s Best Served Cold, mercenary captain Monzcarro “Monza” Murcatto has very nearly delivered the city-states of Styria into the hands of her ambitious employer, Duke Orso. Her very competence threatens Orso…or so he thinks. The Duke has Monza and her beloved brother Benna murdered and their corpses thrown from the battlements of his fortress. Oops: Turns out Monza wasn’t dead. Monza survives. Now the Duke, and the six assassins who killed Benna, face an angry, lethally competent warrior fixated on revenge.
In Yoon Ha Lee’s 2016 Ninefox Gambit, heretics commandeer the strategic Fortress of Scattered Needles. The fortress may have been vulnerable to subversion, but it has heretofore withstood all attempts to conquer it by force. Nevertheless, the Hexarchate is determined to retake it. The obvious candidate to recover the facility is military genius Shuos Jedao. Jedao is dead (alas) but can be reanimated to serve. This is a risky move; the general is brilliant but also unreliable, perhaps even insane. He once massacred his own troops, for reasons he would never explain. The Hexarchate comes up with a cunning plan: resurrect Jedao, permit him to live for as long as it takes him to regain the fortress, then kill him. If only it were that simple….
In JY Neon Yang’s 2019 The Ascent to Godhood, the courtesan Lady Han provides for her old age by relieving her patrons of the occasional minor treasure. Assistant Minister Chong takes offense and plans a dire fate for Lady Han. This is the impetus Lady Han needs to ally with the current Protector’s middle daughter, Hekate. Soon Chong is history and Hekate is on her way to becoming Protector. Lady Han becomes Hekate’s most valuable ally.
One might think Chong’s example would underscore the need to keep Lady Han happy, but Hekate is too confident of her hold over the former courtesan to imagine that any mistreatment could alienate Lady Han. It just goes to show that even evil overlords have their blind spots.
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No doubt you have your own favourite tales of downsizing gone awry. Feel free to mention them in comments.
In the words of Wikipedia editor TexasAndroid, prolific book reviewer and perennial Darwin Award nominee James Davis Nicoll is of “questionable notability.” His work has appeared in Publishers Weekly and Romantic Times as well as on his own websites, James Nicoll Reviews and Young People Read Old SFF (where he is assisted by editor Karen Lofstrom and web person Adrienne L. Travis). He is currently a finalist for the 2020 Best Fan Writer Hugo Award and is surprisingly flammable.
The classic is the story of Xenophon and the Ten Thousand.
There is of course Thingol deciding not to pay the dwarven smiths he hired and all that entails…
Oxymandias (Adrian Veidt) is another example.
There was this book about a bunch of hackers who create these awesome enhancement mods. The best and most elite of them secretly makes his mod able to control all of theirs. So they have to take him down, somehow, even though his mod has this total stealth mode and he’s totally pwned them and is reading all their emails.
Had a sudden flashback to a book I read as a teenager – Earth Lies Sleeping. MC is a sort of intergalactic James Bond called Simon Rack, who returns to his home planet – a quasi-medieval world – where he visits some righteous vengeance on all the various nobility who gave him a hard time when he was a grubby little urchin. The villain’s voice was like a ‘scorpion dipped in honey’. Plus it had a cool cover. What’s not to like? But I doubt if you’ll find it, and anyway it’s pretty short by today’s standards (a standard 60 – 80 thousand words).
Nepanthe, eh. *web search* I thought it sounded familiar — Nepenthe is “not-sorrow” in ancient Greek and a sorrow-forgetting drug in ancient Greek mythology and literature, and Nepenthes is the genus of tropical pitcher plants named after the drug because Linnaeus deemed them astonishingly wonderful. Despite the spelling difference from Nepanthe, I wonder if there’s a connection.
@1 wiredog
The Ten Thousand weren’t screwed by their employer. Their employer died while trying to take control of the Persian Empire, and the emperor who won that power struggle was understandably hostile to the mercenaries who worked for his rival.
It would be treacherous for an emperor to turn on the people who brought him to power, but only reasonable for an emperor to seek the deaths of the mercenaries who tried to overthrow him.
Evil overlords never read the Evil Overlord’s List.
Schlock Mercenary has a few that come to mind, all working for the United Nations of Sol.
Fleet Admiral Manyara Emm a treacherous, duplicitous and murderous spy chief.
Colonel Krum, another UNS spook of dubious morals and reliability.
And the king weasel of them all, UNS General Levaughn Matsui “Hugo” Xinchub.
#8, let me introduce you to the queen from Tanya Huff’s “A Woman’s Work”. She’s not only read the list, she’s made it her holy scripture.
One of the genre classics is the Dorsai’s Jacques Chretien, although we’re given the facts only as back story — and mostly in a song, at that.
Seems like most of these are about specialists in organized violence. Any stories about people who fire the only IT specialist who understands their legacy systems, and who then goes on to wreak a terrible revenge?
@12- That sounds an awful lot like it would be the plot of a Laundry novel by Charles Stross, but I’ve only read two of those, and it’s not either of them. Of course, in the Laundry series the legacy systems are likely to be the only thing keeping assorted Elder, Old, Deep, and/or Many Angled ones at bay.
There’s always the betrayal of House Atreides by their “boss” the Padasha Emperor in Dune. Talk about a comeuppance in the end!
In the tabletop rpg scene, the standard Shadowrun game scenario was:
a) Mr Johnson hires a bunch of heavily armed and enhanced mercenaries for a simple one-off mission.
b) The mercenaries carry out the mission.
c) Mr. Johnson decides to save money and enhance operational security by killing the mercenaries.
Next week, the new Mr. Johnson does the. Same. Damn. Thing. Thus proving that evil megacorporations have very little in the way of institutional memory or cross-communication.
@15 / Rose Embolism – to be fair, if they keep doing it, it must be effective for resolving the problem with most Shadowrunners…
And where it doesn’t work, usually Mr Johnson doesn’t survive. So the organisation doesn’t learn, because the bosses won’t know the details (I.e. who exactly they hired) for plausible deniability, colleagues won’t know for operational security, and even accounting won’t know because they’ll just be listed as independent contractors on the expenses sheet!
oh, and yes the players will get reputations for not being double-crossed, but then *every* Shadowrunner cultivates that rep, deserved or not. You don’t want to be seen as a victim… :)
@12: I suppose The Shockwave Rider doesn’t count; we learn early that the hero has broken the mold the government tried to squeeze outside-the-box geniuses into rather than being outright betrayed. ISTM that dead-man switches in IT show up here and there, but I can’t cite specific cases.
Right post, wrong place.
This reminds me of an episode of GOTHAM where two gunsels are ready to take out Oscar Cobblepot (aka The Penguin). I mean, you can’t really blame them, because the Penguin is always trying to push above his weight. But at the ultimate moment, Mr. Cobblepot starts shrieking “Cheapskate! Skinflint!” about the boss who hired the hit. The first gunsel then takes out the second one, because Mr. Cobblepot had had the foresight to make alternative financial arrangements with the first guy. (Honestly, it felt like something Miles Vorkosigan might have done…).