Invisible Sun (Empire Games, #3)

by Charles Stross

The cantonment was overrun by uniformed soldiers: both regular Army and members of the Commonwealth Guard, the gendarmerie created by the Radical Party to be its military wing, during the revolution that overthrew the Emperor seventeen years earlier. The Commonwealth Guard was the mailed fist of the Deep State, the state-within-a-state that the Party presided over. It existed to preserve the revolutionary framework of Democracy from counter-revolutionary threats, both internal and external. (Democracy was a new and supposedly fragile ideology in time line three, which had missed out on the revolutions of the eighteenth century, never mind the nineteenth and twentieth.) The Guard had started out fighting street battles with monarchist mobs, then faced down the heavily armed blackshirts of the Internal Security Directorate during the immediate post-revolutionary chaos. Eighteen years later the Commonwealth Guard had become a sprawling paramilitary bureaucracy with its own armored divisions, air support, and assault landing ships. Not unlike Hitler’s SS and the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, it saw itself as an elite force loyal to Party over Nation.