by Adam Yoshida
“Well then,” said Admiral Layton, “then let’s hit them again.”
XII Corps Headquarters, Brossard, Quebec
“Please prepare an official message for the President,” said General Jackson simply as he strode into the headquarters that they’d taken from the fleeing FNASA forces.
“Go ahead sir,” said an aide.
“Montreal is ours. Happy Halloween, followed by an exclamation mark,” said the General.
The White House, Washington, DC
No one, not even the worst vandals amidst the Federation’s gallery of scoundrels, had wanted to take responsibility for harming this building, one both famous and even sacred in a way to the people of the United States. The FNASA had been prepared to fight elsewhere in Washington and there had been no shortage of will to kill on either side throughout the war, but this and some of the other most precious places that belonged to all of the American people had been left alone.
“Thank God,” said the Acting President as his helicopter approached the South Lawn, “if something had happened to this place I don’t know what I would have done.”
The White House had been recovered from the enemy without a fight. Indeed, General Mackenzie reported to Rickover that the people guarding it had been eager to turn it over to the control of his forces and insisted that their true loyalty had always been to the United States and never to the Federation or the Democratic Union or even to Kevin Bryan before that.
“For whatever that’s worth, Mr. President,” the General had added with a wink, “there are a lot of people who are going to swear that they were always loyal now.”
Rickover walked slowly through the White House. He had been in this place many times before, but always as a guest. This was the first time that he had set foot here in his year and a half as the Acting President of the United States.
He saved the Oval Office for last. The furniture had been actually taken out of the place over the last several months, an act rich with symbolic meaning given the Federation’s attempt to supersede the United States. Indeed, officially under the Federation’s rule, the White House had been slated for conversion into a museum.
Thankfully, the people who had been assigned to create the new museum had been very through and were now eager to cooperate. They had tracked down the Resolute desk and the other minimum fixtures needed to make the office look like a place where a President could work.
By the time that Rickover entered the Oval Office the cameras were already set him. He wrinkled his nose slightly at that. He would really have rather preferred to take a few moments in this place just for himself. But the address needed to happen on time if people on the East Coast were going to watch it live without being required to stay up for half the night.
The Acting President sat carefully in the chair that had been placed behind the desk as a makeup artist approached him and applied a few final touches. He reached up and straightened his tie before turning to the TelePrompTer.
“Good evening, my fellow Americans. Tonight I am addressing you for the first time from the Oval Office. Tonight Washington is free once again and in the hands of our Army. Tonight Great Britain has declared its independence from the enemy coalition and its forces are fighting alongside ours once again. Tonight New York City has thrown off the shackles of secessionist regime and proclaimed its eternal loyalty to the United States. Tonight our forces in the north have won a famous victory and sent the main body of the enemy’s army off on a hazardous and ignominious retreat. Tonight, in other words, the war that our nation has been cursed with in these recent years is finally coming to an end.”
“It is far too soon for us to know what history will say of us, but it is never too early to talk about our hopes for what it will say. I hope that it will say that our generation, whatever its myriad faults, was a generation that loved America and was willing to pay the cost to preserve it for all Americans. I hope that the Americans of a millennium hence - for I believe that there will still be a United States one thousand years from now - will say of us that we were willing to learn from error, to preserve in the face of adversity, and that we never stopped believing in liberty.”
“We took up arms because we believed in the freedom of all Americans and the Constitution that has preserved our liberties. We believed that those who opposed us rejected the fundamentally libertarian aims of our Constitution and instead had come to believe so deeply in their own communitarian ideals that they were prepared to use totalitarian means to impose them upon us. These people - these deeply misguided people - believed that true freedom lay in the total embrace of the religion of state control. They believed that their ideals and the utopia that they aimed to create justified any level of deception and trickery in order to attempt to make it a reality. They believed that it was ok to destroy the liberties of the people in the name of their higher ideals.”
“Because these ideals - a belief in individual freedom and a belief that individual freedom ought to be considered of lesser value than such things as certain people believed to be in the public interest - could not be reconciled by means of intellectual debate, they had to be settled in another way. Just as our first Civil War was about one form of slavery, so has been our second. In the First Civil War we brought an end to the despicable and wrong idea that people could be enslaved simply because of their race. In the Second Civil War, I hope, that we have brought to an end the evil and immoral idea that some of the people should be slaves of the others on account of their own talents, ambitions, and abilities.”
“The victories that we have won are not final. The resistance of the enemy continues and it may be prolonged. We will endure more losses before the final battle is won. Yet, there should be no mistake: the days of the forces that attempted to divide and destroy our country are coming to an end. We do not know the hour of their defeat, but we know that they will be defeated.”
“Tonight I call once again upon the leaders of the so-called Federation, wherever and whomever they may be now, to immediately and unconditionally surrender. The military situation, about which I have already spoken, admits no conclusion other than that our forces will soon destroy the remainder of theirs. I have no desire to see any unnecessary effusion of blood. In the name of humanity I ask that they surrender that we might end this war immediately.”
“My fellow Americans: we have lived through the worst of the storm, though its last winds have not blown by yet. This nation has known trials before and it will know them again. Yet, through all of troubles and all of the horrors that we have seen, I have always held onto one belief in my heart: that America is good and that it is the last, best hope of mankind upon this Earth. Together we shall save our country and, in so doing, we will save humanity.”
“God bless you, and God bless the United States of America.”
And, with that, it was all in the hands of the American people.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
The Race
Downtown Los Angeles, South California
The NBC camera crew began their assignment by filming shots of the lines that now extended around the block.
“…a handful of activists,” explained the on-camera reporter, “have called for a general boycott of the voting today here in Los Angeles and across California on the grounds that they do not represent a genuine and fair election due to the fact that millions of residents of California who were granted the vote under the previous Administration have been denied it under the National Emergency Elections Act passed by the Congress in Colorado Springs this summer. Among other things, the NEEA declared the grants of citizenship made by the Bryan Administration after the impeachment proceedings and the disputed outcome of those proceedings to be illegitimate.”
Shots of a group of around thirty protesters who had descended upon the polling stations set up near Pershing Square now filled the screens of the approximately thirty-two people who still watched what was left of the National Broadcasting Corporation’s news broadcast
s. Some of those viewers were stupid enough to be deceived into thinking that the crowd was much larger than it actually was due to the exclusive use of close-up shots by the NBC cameraman.
“And,” said the anchor from Denver, where the portion of the old mainstream media that had survived was now largely based, “that isn’t the only controversy about the election today. There have been calls for a boycott from other sources as well.”
“That’s right, Pedro,” said the reporter, “the Governor-in-exile of California also issued a proclamation calling upon citizens of California to boycott the vote on the grounds that the partition of the state of California into the new states of North and South California is also illegitimate.”
“Though that has been upheld by the Supreme Court,” noted the anchor.
“Yes, well, speaking from Mexico City earlier today, Governor Juarez maintained that he doesn’t recognize the authority of that court as it is presently constituted.”
“But that doesn’t appear to have stopped a lot of people from coming out to vote today,” said the anchor.
“No, it hasn’t. The polls heading into today show that South California is close. In fact, there have been three polls released over the last twenty-four hours and they show three different outcomes. One of them has the race as a dead tie, with the Acting President holding 47% of the vote and Senator Randall holding the same. One other shows Rickover with a 3% lead and the final poll shows Randall ahead by four. Given all of the changes between now and the last election, everyone agrees that the result here in South California will be impossible to predict until almost all of the votes are counted here tonight.”
Tempe, Arizona
“Today we, the American people, have a chance to end this,” Governor Robert Schmidt told the crowd as he returned to his home state as part of the Randall-Schmidt ticket’s last-minute scramble to get out the vote, “today we have a chance to say no to the endless war and imperial projects that have played as much a role in getting us into this mess as the domestic overreach of the last Administration. Let us begin to work to rebuild America one home, one block, one neighborhood, one city, and one state at a time. That is the work that begins today.”
“It was right and just two years ago when we decided that we had had enough of Federal tyranny. Today it is right for us to have peace once again.”
“Don’t be deceived by these reports from the battlefield. Mr. Rickover doesn’t intend to let it end here. He’s going to send our boys into Chicago and beyond. If you vote for the Acting President, our children will be sent off to fight foreign wars when we still have so much work to be done here at home.”
“Remember: today you have the unique responsibility of either voting for war or voting for peace.”
Minneapolis, Minnesota
The Democrat-Farmer Labor Party, though somewhat in disrepute given the number of their leaders who had either been Loyalists or defected to the cause of the Federation, had offered their tacit support to the Randall-Schmidt ticket. In Minneapolis and the other big cities all across the country, that meant using standard Election Day tactics for mobilizing urban voters.
“Here’s $200,” said the fat man who appeared to be sweating through his shirt despite the bitter cold of Minneapolis in November, “that should cover your costs for the rest of the day.”
The unshaven man who took the money took a quick look at it and stopped for a second. $200 was more than the usual handed out by the Democrats on Election Day, but $200 wasn’t what it used to be.
“Tell your friends to come and see me,” said the fat man as he began to walk away, “if any of the rest of them need any held in getting to the polls.
The fat man walked several more feet and stopped for a moment as he was overtaken by a coughing fit. The unshaven one took the money and shoved it into his pockets and began to quickly walk away as he reflected, to the degree it may be said that he was capable of such a process, on the slim differences between life in peace and war.
Rickover-Chan Headquarters, Colorado Springs, Colorado
If you’ve been around enough elections you can get a feel for how things are going to go as soon as you see the first actual results come in. Of course, you can’t always extrapolate everything from the first numbers - sometimes a lot of primary voters in Dixville Notch decide that they’re going to vote for Ron Paul for some reason - but you can tell a lot. By 9PM on the East Coast, there was a lot of data from a lot of states to play with.
The Acting President was doing pretty well in the South, where the nation’s electoral machinery was functioning more-or-less normally. Georgia, both Carolinas, and Alabama were already in the bag. Texas was still voting, but the exit polls from there looked good. Even the early returns from parts of the West Coast weren’t half-bad. Rickover wouldn’t win everywhere there, but he looked set to win a lot of the newly-created states. East Washington would easily fall into the Republican’s column and South California remained too-close-to-call.
But the news wasn’t all good, not by a long shot. Randall was running away with the big urban centres, many of which had been swelled by displaced people from the Federation who, despite the fact that they’d fled from statism at home, continued to vote for some version of it in the places where they lived now. Northern California would easily go for him. Ditto West Washington, and Oregon. More troubling was the fact that the returns from a lot of the front-line states in the Midwest showed Randall well ahead. He was certain to win both Ohio and Michigan, just to begin.
At 9:42PM the campaign’s chief pollster walked into the office of the campaign manager. The two men locked eyes and the former just shook his head.
The White House, Washington, DC
In the end, it was Florida that put Mitchell Randall over the top.
States with a total of four hundred and forty electoral votes had participated in the Presidential Election, meaning that the winner needed to have two hundred and twenty-one votes. The Randall-Schmidt ticket didn’t win by much, but it was more than enough.
The Exit Polls actually showed that Acting President Rickover had an approval rating of fifty-seven percent. Indeed, some twenty percent of the voters who approved for him voted for his opponent anyways. This fact proved to be of considerable interest to political pundits in the days after the election and a matter of speculation in the days to come.
The most popular explanation of the results was that Rickover had actually been hurt rather than helped by the battles that had occurred during the days before the election. The recapture of New York City and Washington convinced voters that the war was going to end in the complete reunification of the country now no matter who ended up in the White House and the American participation in the Battle of the Celtic Sea - condemned internationally as a massacre of the French Navy - convinced a significant percentage of voters that a re-elected Terrance Rickover would soon send American forces to war in Europe as well.
Indeed, some polling would show that Mitchell Randall was greatly helped by a “gaffe” by his running mate, Arizona Governor Robert Schmidt, who told a crowd in Kansas the day before the election that, “I don’t know what we’re going to do about Chicago and the rest of that, but I do know one thing: Mitch Randall and I aren’t going to get into any fucking European wars.”
Perhaps even more than that, a lot of people just wanted to get on with their lives and forget about the war and all that had come with it.
Acting President Rickover, on the other hand, knew exactly what he was going to do about “Chicago and the rest of that.” The morning after the election he got up and called together the National Security Council in the Situation Room.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “whatever happened to us last night, the reality is that we’re still in control of the government for a little more than two and a half months. I’ve already spoken to the President-elect and wished him well but, given his continued equivocation on the matter of negotiations with what’s left of the Federat
ion, I don’t intend to give him the opportunity to equivocate with the future of America.”
“Mr. Secretary,” he said, turning to face Mark Preston, “what’s the current situation along the front?”
“XII Corps continue to pursue what’s left of the FNASA’s Unified Army Group. Right now they’re both near Kingston, Ontario. The Army of Northern Virginia is cooling its heels around Washington right now.”
“Which could get to Chicago first?” asked the Acting President.
“Assuming that the Unified Army Group doesn’t prove to be capable of greater resistance than we expect - they’ve been heavily damaged by air attacks during their retreat along Highway 7, so much so that the press are referring to it as the “New Highway of Death”, I think that they’re about equidistant.”
“And our forces in the Illinois Theatre of Operations?” asked Rickover.
“Strong, but probably not enough to storm Chicago if the FNASA forces there put up the same kind of fight that they did in Montreal,” answered Preston.
“It seems doubtful that they could,” said Rickover. Preston shrugged.
“Alright,” said Rickover, “we need to move fast - but not so fast that we lose lives unnecessarily. Order both Mackenzie and Jackson to get their armies to Chicago as fast as they can. If they don’t surrender then, then we’ll take everyone in at once.”
Palais Schaumburg, Berlin, Germany
The other European leaders had been looking nervously at the chumminess between the Russian President and the German Chancellor all afternoon. During the morning the leaders, who under the revised union treaty now proposed, would serve as the “Executive Council” of the Democratic Union had disposed of certain pressing business such as announcing a program to jointly rebuild the European navies that had been shattered during the war and formally expelling the United Kingdom from the Union (as unnecessary as that seemed, given the position of the new British government on that particular matter).
