by David Weber
His expression was grave, his tone measured.
“In the course of the past year and a half, our home has suffered enormous damage and almost unimaginable loss of life as a consequence of the unprovoked attack of the Shongair Empire. I scarcely need to list all of the crimes and atrocities the Shongairi inflicted upon us in the name of conquest. Nor, for that matter, is there sufficient time to complete that terrible catalog of barbarisms tonight. What many of you watching and listening to me may not yet realize, however, is that their final decision, when they concluded that they would never be able to compel us to truly submit, was to utterly exterminate the entire human race.”
He paused, letting that settle in, then resumed.
“Our surviving militaries and untold numbers of our private citizens fought valiantly against the invaders, spending their life’s blood in our defense, yet our defeat—and destruction—was both certain and inevitable. Until, that was, allies of Governor Judson Howell of the state of North Carolina, in the United States of America, successfully boarded our enemies’ starships and captured them in hand-to-hand combat. Most of those allies have now departed for the Shongair home systems in those same dreadnoughts to teach our foes—our would-be murderers—that humans are not to be attacked with impunity. Before their departure, however, they also captured the highly capable industrial base the Shongairi had brought to our star system to support their invasion, and they left that capacity in the charge of Governor Howell, to be used for the benefit of all humanity. Millions of you listening to me have been directly touched by Governor Howell’s rescue efforts, enabled by that technology. More millions of you will be in the months to come, and I can tell you now that ever more advanced technology will become available to our entire world in the next few years.
“It will become available to our world because it must become available to all of us. Partly because simple decency dictates that it must not become the prize of any one nation, any one group. But, even more importantly, we must all have access to it so that we may use it in one united effort, because the stars are not yet done with us and—to borrow the words of a famous political philosopher of the United States—if we do not hang together, then, assuredly, we will all hang separately. And it is in token of the need for that unity that we appear before you today. It is my pleasure to present to you Governor—and now President—Judson Howell, of the United States of America, and Prime Minister Jeremiah Agamabichie, of Canada. President Howell has been chosen as our spokesman, but he speaks for all three of us.”
He paused once more, gazing into the cameras, then stepped back from the podium with a courteous bow to Howell.
“President Howell,” he said.
“Thank you, President Garçāo,” Howell said, stepping up to the podium. “And thank you, Prime Minister Agamabichie.”
He nodded to both his companions, then squared his shoulders as he, too, looked into the cameras.
“As President Garçāo’s said—and as all of us know from bitter personal experience—our world has been mauled and mangled by an alien species whose technology far surpassed our own. We’ve learned a great deal about the Shongairi since their defeat, however, and we intend to share that information with the entire human race as rapidly as we can. I expect that most of you listening to me will be astounded by just how ‘rapid’ that process will be, yet even so, it won’t happen overnight. So for now, I will simply summarize by saying that the Shongair Empire is only one member of a vast, multi-species political unit styling itself, as nearly as any earthly language can translate the term, ‘the Galactic Hegemony.’ The Hegemony is enormous, not simply in terms of the volume of our galaxy it controls and the number of star systems it has colonized and conquered, but also in terms of its sheer antiquity. It has been in existence longer than Homo sapiens has walked the face of our planet, my friends, and it prizes stability—the status quo—above all things.
“It was because of the value it sets upon stability that the Hegemony’s ruling body agreed to permit the Shongairi to conquer us. It felt we were too bloodthirsty and savage—too likely to destabilize their comfortable societies—to be allowed to attain an interstellar level of technology of our own. I rather doubt the Shongairi’s defeat will change the Hegemony’s opinion in that regard. Even more dangerously from our perspective, however, it’s become evident from our study of the captured history of the Hegemony and its member races, that while they found our … pugnacity ample reason to throw us to the Shongairi like a scrap of bloody meat, they had no grasp—then—of our sheer inventiveness. We have advanced our own technology, however primitive it might currently be by Hegemony standards, far more rapidly than any of the Hegemony’s member races ever advanced theirs, my friends, and their survey crews had no clue of how our fascination with the new and the better, with ways in which the status quo can be improved upon, empowers and drives us in that regard. The same drive which compelled an almost hairless biped, with neither fangs nor claws, to master an entire planet drives us still. It is our greatest strength … and it is also our greatest danger, because the day must ultimately come in which the Hegemony’s masters do understand that. And when they do appreciate those qualities within us, there is no shadow of a doubt that they will find them far more disturbing than they found our perceived bloodthirstiness. They will view us as a mortal threat to the stability, the technological stasis, they hold so dear, and they will take steps to complete the extermination the Shongairi were prevented from carrying out. I tell you this in all sincerity, and the captured records, database, and technology we will make available to all of you will tell you precisely the same thing when you peruse them. For all intents and purposes, our planet is under sentence of death, for the crime of being human, and that sentence will be carried out as soon as the Hegemony realizes how we endanger its … peace of mind.”
He paused, and the utter stillness of the studio was like an echo of the stillness spread across an entire world as those words sank into the minds and marrow of every man and woman listening to him.
“The time has passed when we can afford to fight with one another,” he resumed, his voice quiet, his brown eyes dark. “As President Garçāo just said, if we cannot work together—if we cannot find a way to rise above those things which separate us and to embrace the survival imperative which must unite us—we, our children, our grandchildren, and our entire species will cease to exist.
“Even if we can unite, we are but a single planet in a single star system. In the wake of the horrendous casualties our world has suffered, the entire human race is no more than two billion strong. We’ve been reduced to the population of the 1920s, and there are literally thousands of other worlds beyond our skies, claimed by the Hegemony, which will decree our destruction the instant it learns the Shongairi have failed. The odds against us are, quite literally, astronomical.
“The good news is that it takes many years—often centuries—for starships to voyage between the stars. It will be at least a hundred years before the Hegemony can learn what happened here, and even longer before they could send fresh forces against us. We believe we should have a minimum of between one hundred and fifty and two hundred and fifty years before that can happen, and we possess now the entire knowledge base of the Hegemony. We are in a position to advance our own civilization’s technological capabilities by thousands of years in a single generation, and—” he smiled for the first time; it was a remarkably thin, cold smile “—we are far more inventive than they. We must use those years to build upon that platform, the technology of which they are currently capable, so that when the time comes for us to meet them once again, the technological imbalance will favor our species, and not theirs. In short, we must become so dangerous that the cowardly, risk-averse species which comprise the ‘Galactic Hegemony’ will be too frightened to attack us again. And so dangerous that if they do attack us, in the end, they will find the outcome no more to their liking than the Shongairi have.
“That’s what we
must do, but we cannot do it as a separate, divided people. We can do it only when we speak and act as one. Yet the one thing of which I am totally certain is that human beings cannot be driven into that unity. The very characteristics which make us what we are, make us something the Hegemony fears, mean we cannot be regimented into one people against our will without our individualism driving us to rebel against our fetters. It’s true that we must become one, but it’s equally true that we must speak as a harmony—as a grand chorus of all our voices, joined as one but recognizing that we are many, with each of us finding our own note within that chorus.
“And that is why President Garçāo and Prime Minister Agamabichie and I are speaking to you tonight. My own nation, the United States of America, still has much rebuilding to do, but the member states of our Republic have reconstituted our Congress and a special election has confirmed my Presidency. President Garçāo and Prime Minister Agamabichie were the legitimate, legal successors to their own heads of state when those were murdered by the Shongairi. Now the three of us have joined together to announce the creation of the Continental Union of the Americas, which will consist—for the moment—of the former Brazil, the former Canada … and the former United States of America.
“I say ‘the former,’” he continued calmly and steadily, “but neither Brazil nor Canada nor the United States of America have ceased to exist. We remain what we have always been, proud of our histories, mindful of our pasts, true to our own institutions. The Continental Union will consist of sovereign states, each with local autonomy within its own borders so long as its domestic laws enshrine the human rights provisions of the Union Constitution. But they will be sovereign states within the framework of a federal republic, subject to the federal laws and provisions of a supranational government and judiciary to whom their citizens shall jointly elect representatives and senators. This isn’t a trade association, not a union of independent states, but a nation which will enact laws, regulate our commerce, provide for a common military defense, and administer the scientific and technological cornucopia which has come into our possession in such a way as to guarantee equal access to it for all of our citizens.
“President Garçāo, Prime Minister Agamabichie, and I have initialed the draft of our new Constitution in the names of our own countries. The provisions of the Constitution—all of them—will be available on the Internet beginning at nine o’clock tomorrow morning, Brazilian time. We invite all of you to read it for yourselves so that you can understand precisely what we’ve undertaken in the names of our nations. Three months from tonight, referendums will be held simultaneously in the United States, in Canada, and in Brazil. It is our hope that those referendums will ratify this Constitution and bring the Continental Union of the Americas into formal existence.
“We have been in contact with President Izquierdo of Peru and President Montalván in Argentina, and we’ve invited them—as we intend to invite every other state of the Americas, as they, too, rise from the ashes—to join us in this endeavor to create a new Republic which, in time, will become truly representative of every citizen of North, Central, and South America—a nation which will reach from Antarctica to the Arctic Circle. And in token of that, we have created a flag for our new nation which partakes of none of our individual nations’ flags.”
He nodded, and the color guard snapped from Parade Rest to Present Arms as the single standardbearer un-cased the flag which had been furled so tightly about the staff in his hands. He turned to display it, and its image filled the viewers’ screens as the cameras zoomed in. Its field was blood red, with a space-black canton adorned by a single, mini-spired golden star. The field was dominated by the western hemisphere of Earth—not a stylistic representation, but the planet itself, as seen from space, in brown, blue, and the white of ice caps. The areas of Canada, the United States, and Brazil had been superimposed upon that globe in green with each nation’s borders outlined in a gleaming thread of gold.
“We present to you the banner of the Continental Union of the Americas,” Howell said quietly. “It bears not the Stars and Stripes of the United States, nor the Maple Leaf of Canada, nor the Diamond and Southern Cross of Brazil. Its charge is our world, because that is what it has been formed to protect and to preserve against all threats.
“Creating the Continental Union, navigating the immense changes before us, and protecting our world will not to be easy tasks, but they must be achieved. The great Simón Bolívar was not especially fond of my own country.” Howell smiled again, almost impishly. “I believe he said that ‘The United States appears to be destined by Providence to plague America with misery in the name of Liberty,’ and I’m forced to concede that, historically, there’s been a great deal of truth in that. But that wasn’t all he had to say.” The smile disappeared, the eyes went dark and intent once again. “He also said, ‘Do not compare your material forces with those of the enemy. Spirit cannot be compared with matter. You are human beings; they are beasts. You are free; they are slaves. Fight, and you shall win. For God grants victory to perseverance.’ He spoke of human adversaries, and the adversary we face is far more powerful, its forces far more numerous, than anything he confronted. Yet his words remain true. We are human beings, we are free, we will persevere to the bitter end, and we will not be the slaves or victims of powers from beyond the stars who would take that from us, make us less than we are, or simply destroy us for daring to be who we are.”
Those hard brown eyes looked out of tridees and televisions across the width and breadth of his home world, and they might have been forged from iron as the man behind them met the moment for which he had been born.
“It will not be easy,” Judson Fitzsimmons Howell said from behind those eyes, “but Bolívar spoke truly, my friends—my fellow citizens of Earth. And to paraphrase another great revolutionary leader of history, ‘Here we stand. We can do no other.’”
RENAISSANCE
SOL
SYSTEM
YEAR 15 OF THE TERRAN EMPIRE
. I .
SPACE PLATFORM BASTION,
L5 LAGRANGE POINT
The view was spectacular.
It wasn’t actually a viewport, but he’d configured the smart wall to make it look like one, and the tridee made the illusion breathtakingly realistic. From his vantage point, the Moon was an incredibly bright, white nickel and Earth was a gorgeous cloud-banded sapphire the size of a quarter. The starscape receded into infinity—literally—and the space about Bastion was alive with a busy, hectic, seemingly random pattern of sunlight-gilded spacecraft. Looking at it from the outside, the only term that really came to mind was helter-skelter, yet he knew there was a carefully planned pattern buried in the midst of that confusion. The traffic control computers and their human supervisors managed it with the polished, almost offhand precision which came from ten or twelve years of constant—and constantly hectic—practice.
Most of the spacecraft visible through that “viewport” were employed continuing the expansion of Bastion’s already stupendous hull. Not only did the space platform house the federal government of the Planetary Union, it also housed the Terra House, the president’s official residence; the Senate; the House of Representatives; and the steadily growing city for the people who made all of that work. It was also home to the Citadel, the Planetary Union’s equivalent of the long-vanished Pentagon which had once served the United States’ military. Since Bastion had been built for the specific purpose of putting the federal government’s capital outside the borders of any earthly nation, it only made sense to put as many as possible of the federal organs in the same place.
The Citadel controlled a steadily growing military which dwarfed anything the United States of America might ever have contemplated, yet it ran with a fraction of the staff the Pentagon had required. Part of that was the result of an intentionally Spartan manning policy aimed at avoiding the bloat which had afflicted the American military bureaucracy. All military bureaucracies, to be fair, real
ly, he supposed. But that bloat was something the Continental Union of the Americas had been unable to afford, and which the Planetary Union of Earth could afford even less.
At least as big a part of the reason was simply that the cyber support available to the Planetary Union was a staggeringly effective efficiency multiplier. There were still distinct limits on how much a single human brain could carry around and keep track of, but the computers aiding that human brain were something else entirely, replacing bevies of assistant project officers, clerks, accountants, and God only knew what else.
And it didn’t hurt a damned thing that there were no defense contractor lobbyists knocking on office doors or taking senior officers out to five-martini lunches. That was because there were no defense contractors, which had come as quite a shock to the human race in general. On the other hand, it looked like most of humanity would adapt quite handily to the radically new “economy” which had engulfed them. Not all, of course. There were losers as well as winners in any paradigm shift, and this had been one hell of a shift.
None of that impinged directly upon him, however. Not at the moment, anyway. He still had plenty to do, and his headaches remained focused on something that hadn’t changed in the new paradigm: human nature.
He leaned back in his sinfully comfortable chair, reading the latest correspondence from the display projected directly onto his cornea. As was not unusual when some new bit of technology was added to his person, he’d felt a few qualms when they explained that they were going to surgically implant his very own computer monitor to replace the contacts he had been using. Hosea had walked him through it (the way he’d walked him through quite a few things by now) and explained that the procedure was really no more intrusive than a cataract operation. And, oh, by the way, while they were about it they would give him roughly 40/20 vision, the equivalent of a really good built-in compound microscope, lowlight optical capability, plus infrared, all controlled by his personal computer. He could configure the new capabilities to deploy themselves automatically or override the autonomous software whenever he chose.
