A Charter for the Commonwealth

by Richard F. Weyand

  “Why would I not seek such an end, knowing the current situation is not stable on the medium term, and knowing it is the best way to minimize the violence of the transition?”

  “But you’re privileged within the current system. Why would you wish to change it?” Kusunoki asked.

  Westlake turned to Ansen. “Professor Ansen?”

  Ansen had been staring off into the distance, eyes unfocused. Now he stirred. He turned to Kusunoki.

  “Revolutions most often arise out of the upper classes. Sure, they have to be supported and carried out by the lower classes if they’re going to succeed, but the instigation comes from within the upper classes, especially from among wealthy professionals. Russia. France. The United States of America. China. Vietnam. Very common.”

  “Indeed, Professor Ansen. That is what stood out to me as well, in my studies. And if not me, then who? As a little further explication, Suzette and I have enjoyed our time here, and we have fallen very much in love with Jablonka and its people. You both made the personal decision to be here – you, Professor Ansen, when you returned from Oxford, and you, Professor Kusunoki, when you out-migrated from Earth – so you must be able to relate to that.

  “A caution, however. The Westlake family’s charter on Jablonka expires in ten years. Which family will succeed us here I cannot predict. For the next ten years, however, you have carte blanche – in your writings, in your organizational activities, in your preparations. After that, I will no longer be able to shield you and your friends.

  “As for my public statements and actions, I will, of course, be very much opposed to your goals and your activities. Make no mistake. I will not abandon my duty. I will oppose you. But I will not oversee a regime of oppression and violence in what we all know is a losing battle against historical forces.

  “My opposition will take place in the sphere of ideas, without the use of police or military forces. Until Earth itself responds, of course, at which point it is out of my control. But I will respond with editorials and public statements. You will be forced in the court of public opinion to defend your ideas and your actions.”

  “Which will only make them more popular, of course,” Ansen said.

  “Of course,” Westlake replied. “Responding to my criticism will also force you to publicly work through your ideas. I will keep you honest, Professor Ansen.”

  “Good luck with that, Excellency,” Kusunoki said, and Ansen and Westlake both chuckled.

  “I can also affect to a certain degree the actions of other planetary governors. Urge them to wage a war of ideas rather than of police suppression. I can reasonably argue that police suppression will aggravate rather than solve the problem, and recommend that, as long as it remains in the realm of ideas, it is a useful safety valve. I will be helped in convincing them of that if your side refrains from violence against the current regime until the break actually occurs. Most of them will heed me, which will make your task easier. A few will not, which will also make your task easier.”

  “As examples of the problem,” Ansen said.

  “Of course. And as rallying cries. You need a few of those, but not too many. Widespread police suppression won’t avert the sociological inevitability of the breakup –” Westlake nodded to Kusunoki “– but it will make it harder to steer outcomes and to limit the violence.”

  Ansen and Kusunoki nodded.

  “There is one more person you need to talk to. Georgy Orlov.”

  “The mining magnate?” Ansen asked.

  “Yes. He has asteroid mining rights on many of the larger colony planets. He’s here on Jablonka. Georgy and I went to school together, and he is of like mind on what is coming, and what needs to be done. If you are going to be able to fend off Earth, he has the closest thing there is to a navy. He will be in touch with you.

  “As for us, my dear Professors, we have never met. This meeting never happened. We will likely not meet again.”

  Ansen pulled Westlake’s handwritten invitation out of his jacket pocket and set it on the coffee table.

  “There is no record of any meeting having occurred, Excellency.”

  Westlake nodded. “You have ten years. Good luck.”

  The driver returned them to their home in Jezgra in the large unmarked ground car. He handed Kusunoki out of the car first, and then Ansen. Once Ansen was out of the car, the driver reached into the driver’s compartment and retrieved a plain grocer’s bag, and handed it to Ansen.

  “With his Excellency’s compliments. For your private stock, sir.”

  There was a slight emphasis on the word ‘private.’

  “Ah. Thank you.”

  “Yes, sir. Good day, sir.”

  And with that the driver got back into the car and drove off.

  Once in the house, Ansen looked into the bag to find a bottle of that wonderful bourbon and an entire box of the Earth-import cigars. There was also a large tin of a rare Earth-import Japanese tea.

  Now What?

  Ansen and Kusunoki were sitting in the comfy armchairs in their living room, the front room with the big picture window looking out onto their street in the faculty district of the university. Life outside went on as normal, for as much as life inside had changed.

  “I must say, His Excellency the Planetary Governor has excellent taste in gifts,” Ansen said, and drew on his Earth-import cigar.

  “It pays to have friends in high places,” Kusunoki said, before taking a sip of the excellent tea that had been a gift from Mr. Westlake.

  “Not friends. Well-behaved enemies, more like. We are structural antagonists, adversaries by virtue of our positions. We have no choice but to oppose each other. It’s too bad, in a way. In another life, we might have been friends in fact.”

  “Point taken. So what do we do now? It’s one thing to speculate and write academic articles, another thing entirely to actually make it happen.”

  “Indeed, indeed,” Ansen said. “Well, we need some sort of founding document, a constitution or charter, for the new colonial government. We need a way to defeat any Earth forces that come calling. We need to get public opinion on our side. And we need to do all those things across multiple colony planets.”

  “A tall order.”

  “Yes, but, like every large task, it is made up of many small steps. The first thing to do, then – and the hardest to do properly – is to draw up a list of those small steps.”

  “One of those steps, surely, is to get more people involved,” Kusunoki said.

  “And in multiple areas.”

  “Which areas?”

  “The areas of the other steps, of course,” Ansen said. “We need more people writing pieces to move public opinion, on multiple planets. We need people working on a charter, designing a government. We need spacers – current spacers, retired spacers – to man ships.”

  “You need ships first!”

  “Actually, no. I think we need spacers first, to steal the ships.”

  “Steal the ships?” Kusunoki asked.

  “Of course. Otherwise we have to build them. We can steal them faster than we can build them.”

  “What ships are you going to steal?”

  “All of them,” Ansen said. “Warships, freighters, passenger liners, anything, everything.”

  “How do you steal a ship?”

  “Easy. When they arrive at a planet, they rotate their crews for planet leave. When the shuttles go back up, they go back up with our pilots, and our people as passengers, and they take over the ship.”

  Ansen took another drag on the cigar, and stared at the ceiling.

  “Thinking about it, there’s probably an even easier way,” he continued. “When they arrive at a planet, they need restocking. Food, in particular, as well as water for reaction mass for the engines. So when they get here, you simply don’t restock them. Without water, they can’t go anywhere else, and without food, they’re going to have to surrender sooner or later. They don’t carry much extra.”

  “
Won’t Earth notice their ships are disappearing?” Kusunoki asked.

  “Eventually. It’s a one- to two-month crossing from one planet to another even at .8 gravity through hyperspace. Most ships go out for six months or a year at a time, making multiple stops. It will be months before Earth even notices, more months before a pattern becomes apparent. And what will their reaction be?”

  “Send out more ships to see what’s going on.”

  “Exactly. But once they get here, they’re stuck in flypaper as well. And it will be more months before Earth realizes those ships aren’t coming back, either,” Ansen said.

  “Can’t they shoot at us?”

  “Yes, but it takes a considerable effort to do much damage to a planet. Kinetic bombardment is probably the most effective. But they would have to be armed for that, and Earth doesn’t really have any large warships. There’s been no need. And there’s a pesky problem with bombing the planet.”

  “Which is?” Kusunoki asked.

  “You’ve just destroyed the only supplies available. Now you’re never getting home.”

  “There must be a way around that. How would you fight a space war?”

  “No one knows,” Ansen said. “It’s never been done. All the colonies are Earth colonies so we’re all one big happy family. The Earth has no real navy, because there’s been no one to fight with. All they have are a few armed frigates to enforce the commerce regulations, and those are mostly in the colonies, so we’ll capture many of those. They’re no more prepared for this than we are.

  “But if you’re going to fight a war, you have to bring your supplies with you so you’re not dependent on being locally supplied. Their ships don’t do that now. They’re calling on a friendly port, after all.”

  “I never thought of a spaceship as being so helpless. It seems, well, wrong somehow,” Kusunoki said.

  “Spaceships are very dependent on infrastructure, and if you can’t depend on the infrastructure already in the system, you have to bring it with you. They haven’t thought that through yet. But they will.”

  “But they have no warships anyway.”

  “We have to figure they’ll jury-rig some sort of offensive capability, just as we will,” Ansen said.

  “So we end up with warships and navies and such. That’s kind of sad, actually.”

  “As soon as you have two political entities rather than one, you have the potential for war. You of all people know that.”

  “Yes, I know it. It doesn’t mean I like it,” Kusunoki said.

  “Actually, the police forces on planet are probably the bigger issue. Mr. Westlake has said he won’t use them here, but that won’t apply across all the colonies.”

  “Which could get ugly.”

  “Perhaps,” Ansen said. “Most of the police forces are recruited locally, though, and moving large additional forces from Earth will not be possible.”

  “Because we control the ships, through control of their refuel and resupply.”

  “Exactly. Once they get here, they’re captured.”

  “So, we come to the one big question, Mr. Revolutionary. How do we win?” Kusunoki asked.

  “The Earth’s major families run the colonies as a profit center. Many of the colonies would be quite wealthy without Earth’s constant draining of resources, through import and export taxes, income taxes, sales taxes, and restrictive commerce regulations. To win, all we need to do is cost them money. If we turn their profit center into a loss center, and they see costs mounting into the future, they’ll want to be done with us. There should be a lot of small ways we can disrupt their profits. Throw sand in the gears. I’ll have to do some research into how all that actually works behind the scenes.”

  “Which means a major round of parties and dalliances.”

  “Very likely.”

  “As long as I know where your heart is, Love.”

  Ansen took her hand from the arm of her chair, lifted it to his lips, and kissed it softly.

  “You locked it away years ago, my dear.”

  The Admiral

  It was three days after the meeting with Westlake that Ansen answered the front door about 11:00 in the morning to find a man on their stoop in the work uniform of the Orlov Group, the mining concern that worked Jablonka’s asteroid belt. He held out a card to Ansen without a word. On the blank side was scrawled a note.

  Might I call on

  you to discuss history

  at 2:00 today?

  The front of the business card was printed. Together with the logo of the Orlov Group, it announced:

  Vice Admiral Jarl Sigurdsen (ESN, retired)

  Vice President of Mining Operations

  The Orlov Group

  One Orlov Center

  Jezgra, Jablonka

  Ansen pocketed the card.

  “You may tell the Admiral that 2:00 would be fine.”

  “Very good, sir.”

  He turned and walked back down the walk to his car and drove away.

  Ansen went back in the house and considered the card again. A retired vice admiral of the Earth Space Navy.

  Now that was interesting.

  At precisely 2:00, the doorbell rang. Kusunoki answered it, and showed the admiral into the living room where Ansen sat smoking a locally manufactured cigar. Ansen stood to greet him.

  “Welcome, Admiral. Come in, come in. Have a seat. May I offer you a refreshment of some sort?”

  They shook hands in the middle of the room. The tall, slim, crisply dressed Sigurdsen contrasted with the shorter, bulkier, more casually dressed Ansen.

  “Water would be fine, Professor Ansen.”

  “Very well.”

  Kusunoki left the room to return moments later with a pitcher of ice water and a glass for the admiral.

  “Thank you, Professor.”

  They all settled into the big armchairs in the living room.

  “My wife will be joining us, if you don’t mind, Admiral. She has an interest in matters of history as well,” Ansen said.

  “Of course, Professor Ansen. I hoped she would.”

  Sigurdsen nodded to Kusunoki, and she nodded back.

  “And what may I help you with today, Admiral?”

  Sigurdsen looked around and seemed to hesitate.

  “I will mention that the house is protected against eavesdropping devices by the very best electronic sensors, and no recording of any kind is being made on my part,” Ansen said.

  “Ah.” Sigurdsen sat back. “I wanted to talk to you about matters of war, Professor. Specifically, how wars might be fought in the future, based on insights from the past.”

  “A broad topic, Admiral. Should we narrow it down a bit?”

  “We could. What I know most about is Jablonka, and, of course, Earth, from my time in the Earth Space Navy. We could hypothesize a war between Earth and Jablonka. Purely as a discussion exercise, of course.”

  “Of course,” Ansen said. “First, give me some broad principles of war, Admiral. Let’s see how much the theoretician and the practitioner are on the same page.”

  “I think most basically, Professor, one needs to understand that war is an engineering discipline, and has been for a very long time.”

  “At least since the Roman Republic.”

  “Indeed,” Sigurdsen said. “It is the application of force, in the physics sense, to achieve one’s political goals. Ballistics, chemistry, hydrodynamics and aerodynamics, metallurgy, propulsion, meteorology, mechanics, biology, quantum mechanics – practically every science and technology is a useful skill in the practice of war.”

  “In this we are agreed, Admiral. Another basic principle?”

  “Once begun, war will continue until one side is physically, economically, or emotionally unable or unwilling to continue. The other side, regardless of its own losses, is called the victor.”

  “Again, we are agreed,” Ansen said.

  “I’ll offer one more, Professor. The race does not always go to the fastest, or the figh
t to the strongest, but that’s the way to bet. History is full of famous examples of the underdog pulling out a victory, but those examples are so famous because they are the minority of confrontations. When the underdog has won, it is because they were better prepared or more emotionally invested in the victory, usually both.”

  “Excellent, Admiral, excellent. Having agreed on basic principles, then, let’s move on to specific cases. Were there to be a war between Earth and Jablonka, or, more generally, Earth and its colonies, were Earth to win, how would it do so?”

  “By destroying the colonies’ will to fight,” Sigurdsen said. “Since Earth would want to continue to milk the colonies after winning the war, it would not want to destroy enough population or infrastructure to make it physically or economically impossible to fight. So it would want to dispirit the colonies through a few impressive victories, staged far enough apart to allow the news to spread. To make it readily apparent to all that the Earth will ultimately prevail, and the colonies could short-circuit a lot of suffering and bloodshed if they only gave up the hopeless cause.”

  “And the colonies? Were they to win, how would they do it?”

  “By costing Earth so much money that Earth was not willing to continue the fight.”

  “An economic win, then,” Ansen said.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “What would Earth’s biggest potential mistake be, do you think, in waging such a war?”

  “Giving the colonies a battle cry,” Sigurdsen said.

  “Remember the Alamo, eh?”

  “Exactly. And the colonies’ biggest mistake would be a stand-up battle on equal terms.”

  “Don’t give the Earth the big, demoralizing victories they want. Agreed, agreed.” Ansen relit his cigar and stared at the ceiling. Returning his attention to Sigurdsen, he said, “Let us consider the roster of battle, then, Admiral. Let’s start with the Earth.”