by Kali Altsoba
“How will you persuade our people to follow you on this low road to Tartarus?”
“I won’t have to. They’ll do the pushing. They will demand ever greater evil from us.”
“I confess, I fear you may be right. I once thought our people loved peace, but now they call for unholy vengeance and are filled with white-hot hates that I fought against all my life.”
“They’re afraid, prime minister. And hurt and angry.”
“Afraid enough, angry enough to do as you say? To do anything?”
“Yes, after a time. At first from fear, later from something more. They’ll do it for hate. And that is when I shall finally trust them, because I’ll be certain what they want and what they are prepared to do.”
“Then we’ll not be the same people we are now. If our people do as you and Georges say they must, if you pursue this awful war beyond defense of our invaded homeworlds to punish and overthrow the eastern empires, I fear that we shall come to mirror our enemies by the end.”
“We mirror them already.”
“You admit it? That we’ll meet the enemy in war and find that he is us?”
“Yes, but we shall stand with his dead piled in mounds around our feet.”
“And then?”
“Then we have to live knowing what we’ve done. Then, childhood will be over and we may live in peace.”
“I dread the day our good people do as you say, and say to you to let them do it.” Robert Hoare falls silent. LeClerc leaves him be, lost in despoliation of a lifetime of optimism and hope.
‘Georges is right. The PM is a good and deeply troubled man whom these foul times have crushed. I wouldn’t trade places with him for all the power and treasure in Orion.’
Robert Hoare dies three weeks later. Georges Briand says in an oration delivered standing beside the casket: “Whatever else history records about these times it will say that Robert Hoare was a man of sincerity who followed his moral lights and strove always to save our great Union and keep it at peace. It was his hope and ours to save the Thousand Worlds from the awful war in which we now engage. Yes, those are right who say he failed in that effort. So, too, did we all.”
Less charitable is the leader of the Old Believers, his last flocks harried and hounded by scions of the Black Faith arriving on Kaigun warships in the outer systems. He thinks the dead man was too self-righteous by more than half. So he sneers blasphemy to his congregations: “I was invited to attend Robert Hoare’s funeral, but I shall wait and greet him at his resurrection.”
Briand hears of the remark and cancels an All-Faiths and Unity dinner, though it would be politic to go. He tells his private secretary: “Let the cad eat his words, along with his god.”
Defiance
Briand knows he has one chance to define himself and his policy, after which opponents will finish the job in ways not of his choosing or correcting. He first reshuffles the War Cabinet, appointing War Hawks to all the important ministries. Admiral Gaétan Maçon moves upstairs in the Hornet’s Nest, replacing him as Minister of Defense. Joint Chiefs he gives to Juan Castro, plucked from his classroom and the disaster on Glarus and jumped in rank to lieutenant-general.
General LeClerc he keeps as Director of Armaments, but adds Minister without Portfolio to his titles to give him the authority to roam over the whole confederal bureaucracy, intervening in any issue and any time Briand and Maçon want things speeded up or a logjam broken. He tells him: “You’ll be my self-guiding missile, Gaspard. I’ll launch and reload you often.”
He dictates an order to bring General Lian Sòng back to Kars to serve as Army Chief, but LeClerc and others in the ACU and at MoD persuade him that she’ll do more good holding the trench line on Amasia, where she’s an inspiration to millions of troops. He asks, she agrees.
***
Briand knows he must address the nation and its allies. He’ll speak from the grandest stage in Orion, the Great Lower House of the Lok Sabha. That venerated chamber has governed hundreds of worlds with fairness and justice for nearly 1,500 years. Or as much justice as can be reasonably expected in human affairs. It’s the perfect place. The very idea of self-governing, free peoples is under assault in Orion, and the Lok Sabha is the historic amphitheater of democracy.
What will he say? What can he say?
Everyone expects the brusque new prime minister to call for courage and renewed hope, to assure them that all their sacrifice and suffering serves a noble cause that will surely triumph. To say that he sees a clear path to turnaround and victory. Instead, he stands before a chamber of 4,000 MPs and stuns them still and silent with his nude verities.
“I’m told that some in this House and in our nation say that I’m a prophet who foretold the calamity that surrounds us. That they seek in me their salvation, in a hour where they need deliverance from the great evil surging toward us from the east. I’ll speak only truth today to the peoples and friends of our Union. I’ll not tell you what you want to hear, only what you need to hear. So I say to all who might look to me as an anchor or an auger: you must stop. I am neither savant nor savior. In the dismal, vital struggle in which our efforts and courage are engaged I offer only to share equally in your toil, in your trials, and in your torments.”
“I do not promise quick victory. There can be no such outcome when vast forces fighting for us and immense forces arrayed against us engage. This fight will not be easy, for we must wage it with fearsome weapons that our darkest genius made, and with new ones it will yet produce. As did our forebears, we shall improve the art of war and forge more terrible means of murder. Our enemies will do the same. Therefore, I can offer one thing only to this nation and this Alliance: war, more war, and more terrible war. We are genius to our own ruin.”
It’s a shocking beginning. Bracing for the expectant Calmar Union and the still neutral republics of the Globular Clusters, and a half-dozen more small Neutrals in the far west where 147 billion free folk who aren’t Alliance listen to every word. Sobering also to a hundred billion Calmari huddling on desperate worlds fighting invaders or already beaten and under occupation.
Multitudes watch and hear him speak. Not all at once, of course. His image and words arrive at hundreds of worlds at bohr-staggered times. Yet everyone who watches feels his words as though he’s in the room with them, wherever that may be. Tens of billions on a hundred occupied worlds risk severe punishment, even death, to listen without seeing him. They risk retribution from cruel Kempeitai or worse, hideous black-robed Shishi. They huddle in family groups, his words barely audible, chancing directional surveillance and arrest or death. Civilians listen while battles rage outside or overhead, hiding in cellars. Soldiers listen, crouching in trenches and gun pits, while waiting to attack into a hollowed asteroid or across an airless moon. Whole fleets and armies listen.
Across the Calmar Union they watch in bars and in public squares, in homes and offices, in hospitals and barracks, onboard troopships leaving to head into battle and big ships packed with wounded just coming back. They tune in implant flakes that project directly to optic and auditory nerves or watch on public screens. Rikugun in occupation garrisons listen, sneering in contempt, laughing and miming Briand’s broad gestures. Even krasnos watch, bewildered as the JarNeb is hacked by tiny holos that arrive on forbidden channels. They're beamed down from swarms of nansats launched by Alliance agents from silver ships that move secretly to all outer LPs, seeding storm-clouded worlds with what may be freedom’s last rain. Briand knows all this as he speaks.
Not everyone takes the moment or Briand so seriously. A local wag sits undisturbed by unfolding events, downing dark beer in one of the safest western systems. He perches on his usual stool in his usual pub, in a dull provincial city on a mid-sized and generally unremarkable world tucked high and safe in the northwest corner of Orion. He laughs and proclaims: “Viarge! Who does this puffed man think he is? Turn him off! There must be mercury ball on tonight!”
Others in the pub stay silent. Most p
eople in most places who listen stay silent. To them it’s a wonder of the hour that a man so burdened as the new prime minister must be can yet be magisterial and earthy all at once. They offer him quiet gratitude. He already has their sympathy.
“When the Krevans were attacked we Calmari did nothing. We thought the choice was war or dishonor. We chose dishonor, and now we have war. We must prepare ourselves and our children to endure this ordeal, a trial-by-combat like no one suffered before this generation. For the free peoples face years of grievous harm and vales of suffering to cross, ill-rewarded labor and unrecognized privation, separation from family and home. For some, partings to last forever. We face years to come of death, mourning and long, dreary winters of the soul.”
Even the wag is quiet now.
“Across Orion, twenty centuries look down on us and wonder. Will the free peoples rise to meet the dread hour? We must ask ourselves, what are we prepared to do? Are we ready to do what is necessary to survive and prevail against enemies such as these? Our enemy in the north is depraved and degenerate to defy imagination and description. He is death incarnate, the Emperor of Death and Nothingness. Our enemy to the south has nursed his hate for decades. He is vile and vicious. He is the Emperor of Vanity who would make a mirror of the glimmering free worlds so that he does not have to look into the reflecting pool of Imperium decay and decline.”
Heads nod in vivid agreement.
Portentous looks are exchanged.
“Know this truth: we face the depravity of our enemies, but worse, we must also face our own. To win, we must pervert production into making the terrible tools of war, into instruments of horror and destruction to kill tens of millions, perhaps billions, of our fellow human beings. For such they are, even though the men and women of the Dual Powers come at us with red murder in their eyes, come at us as embodied rage wearing Brown or Green.”
Uneasy murmurs.
“We must, and we will, scythe down these enemies like overripe summer wheat. Yet, every plasma-rifle our factories churn out, each warship that we launch, the next missile that we shoot, will only reave from those without shelter or hope, from billions who wander already and many billions more who’ll yet wander over Orion’s woeful stars during years of war to come.”
Speaking into a universal quiet, he warns: “Yet we must do these awful things. For the great conflict of our Age is come to us, against all our choosing. We must fight to win, for there’s no prize in war for second place.”
More murmurs, of support and agreement from 4,000 assembled MPs. A beginning of comprehension across the worlds.
“I say to our enemies, we are not the decadent ‘Last Men’ your so-called philosophers say that we are. We aren’t too tired of life to be capable of risk or courage. We do not seek only comfort. We are not barren, without potential for greatness. We aren’t those dead things at all. It is you who are coerced to war by demagogues, your tramping legions that are corrupted by perverse ideology, your false-god leaders who blink out lies and make war from fear of your contentment.”
“Hear, hear!”
“You give ‘em hell, Georges!”
“You called that right!”
“Yes, but what are you going to do?”
He knows the question was picked up by the broadcast and is going out across all Orion. He looks up from his notes, pushes them aside and waits for 4,000 professional talkers to subside back into attentive silence.
He didn’t plan this next moment of waiting, and waiting, or the intense suspense it builds in the great amphitheater and on hundreds of listening worlds. He didn’t plan the moment. But he rises to it. After a minute of waiting, he looks up and says to the stars:
“This Great House asks, what is my policy? I say to our nation and allies, and above all I say to our enemies, my policy is to make war. Only to make war! If I may quote our valiant Krevan allies, my policy and that of my government, the policy henceforth of all the free worlds gathered in the Grand Alliance, will be to make peace no more, forever. Until the defeat of all our enemies. Until the expulsion of their evil from all our worlds. Until victory is ours!”
Thunderous applause rocks the Lok Sabra. The guest delegation from the United Planets is whistling and stamping its feet like they’re sitting in the crowd at an All-Orion Mercury Ball Final. (OK, sure the name’s not quite right. Yeah, I know. No teams from Daura have been in the tourney for half-a-century now. But still! What? Well, really! When was the last time you won? Ha! Thought so. What a snark! My planet is a five-time champion. Yours is a total loser!)
Similar scenes repeat wherever free peoples listen freely. Hope returns to all who huddle. Briand casts aside his notes for good. He speaks spontaneously, with eyes raised and his head turning slowly back-and-forth to take in the whole Assembly and all the Thousand Worlds.
“I say to the unfree nations of Orion, I say to our enemies, Pyotr and Jahandar, that we shall fight you to the bitterest of bitter ends. We shall battle you in frozen, outer systems and on warm, inner worlds. We shall contest with you on the surface of worlds and above them, in the farthest reaches of system space and across the deeps of the interstellar medium. We shall seek you in the asteroid belts and chase you from around gas giants. We will drive across vast deserts and down mountainsides and over ice. We will find you and destroy your vanity. There will be nowhere you can hide that our fleets and armies will not come to reckon for what you have sent your legions out to do. We shall look for you at every bohr-zone and silent moon. We shall never rest or slumber while we know you reside anywhere in Orion. We will free every stolen world.”
Time’s Arrow finally hits its mark. Briand is this moment and this rare moment is Briand. Time’s fletchings stiffen as the tip cuts into the nova-winds sweeping decency away all over Orion. Among a hundred billion choices made that same minute somewhere in the Thousand Worlds, more are made that bend Fortune back, away from the Autocrat and the Tyrant. Choices by young fighters standing in a trench line on Amasia, by sailors flying down a startled Grün system with the White Sails fleet on a butcher-and-bolt raid, by anyone anywhere who resists Pyotr and Jahandar and their fleets and armies. By ordinary folk who will surge to take up arms, not because they want to or know how but because now they know they must. By students and storekeepers, by poets and peasants, by farmers and mine workers and people with soft, clean hands. By strong sons and daughters, by mothers who refuse to weep any more, by fathers finally proud of the right things. By courageous spies and agents, and prisoners of war in vast Dual Power camps, diplomats and politicians, and hosts of minor bureaucrats who decide to work harder and stay later at their jobs.
“We shall wage war with all the strength, defiance and vigor of our brave youth, the resolve and wisdom of our elders, with terrible means gifted to us by our greatest scientists and engineers. We will defeat the monstrous, dual tyrannies that dare to hurl primeval fire toward us, who seek our ruination so that it matches their own. These ruthless and failing criminal regimes, so unsatisfied with misery they inflict at home they must export their envious evil to us as well.”
“How dare Pyotr proclaim his is the superior civilization, the greater star nation that may seize from others by force alone whatever it wants? By what foul right does unnatural Jahandar send Hermit troops and his criminal terror police to the free systems of Orion? What warrant has either tyrant to murder and maraud, to plunder and destroy what he can neither build himself nor comprehend, a great confederation and coalition such as ours, a unity of free people under law?”
“Never in human history has so stained a shroud of crime and affliction dropped over so many lives, threatening now to descend on hundreds of billions more who yearn only to live free and in peace, undisturbed by these willful men, by evil men, by hollow men. We will not have it!”
The chamber erupts in a cacophony of shouting, rhythmic stamping and sustained applause. Across the free worlds, a sudden thrill of hope is leavened with a yeast of realism. The way will be long. It wi
ll be hard. Yet there is a way. And now a leader to show armed pilgrims the path ahead.
“I speak frankly to all free worlds of Orion’s strong arm and the Clusters who cling to a pale hope that the Autocrat and Tyrant won’t strike at you, that this new Orion War might pass you by. I say that this Union withheld support too long to save the proud and burning worlds of Krevo. That brave, little people fights on from exile, cut off from all its beloved homeworlds. I am proud that Krevans stand strong beside us in a Grand Alliance, first among equals. Krevans are a proud, resilient, resourceful, admirable people. But they are not free. Because we in this Union failed them. Do not make our mistake.”
He lets the confession settle like a shroud over the past.
“I warn all who believe they are too blessed, or too distant, to be affected by what we say and do today. You are wrong. All the free peoples, old Neutrals clutching a fading chance of peace inside Orion, younger nations in the Clusters, you must not repeat our error. If you stay neutral too long your strong voices and brave forces will count as nothing in the end. Long before the tyrants dared to cross our frontiers this was already our fight, as it is also yours. As it is already a fight joined and waged by exiled free nations, by the United Planets of Krevo, the ‘Iron Kingdoms” of the Threes, and Helvetics of the Association of Free Trading Worlds. And of course, joined also by our old friends, Oyo and Jos.”
