by John Barnes
“You spent a day at home but you didn’t relax.” Her chiding is gentle but she means it.
“Oddly enough, I thought I had relaxed. You’re not going to make me do it over again, are you, boss?”
“Shouldn’t be necessary. All right, here’s what we’ll be doing with Rivera—”
It’s a single sheet of paper. On it there are four numbered sentences. Harris Diem reads it, reads it again, looks up and says “May I keep this?”
“For what?” she asks.
“For my memoirs.” He reaches into his briefcase, brings out a document holder, and slides it in, smoothing it flat. “I would put this somewhere between the Gettysburg Address and Roosevelt’s Day of Infamy speech. Maybe a bit more significant than the Day of Infamy.”
“It might be a long time before your memoirs can be published,” she says.
“Once I’m dead, I can afford to be patient.”
She grunts and nods; whatever she was about to say next is lost forever, because the secretary announces that the Sec-Gen is on the line.
The pleasantries are short but seem more sincere than usual, at least to Harris Diem. At last, Rivera says, “Ms. President, I think we may as well do this quickly as slowly. Historians may like us better if we deliberate more, but I for one always favored getting into cold water by diving in headfirst.”
“Agreed,” Hardshaw says, “and it may be the last thing we agree on. Have you drafted your proposal?”
“I have, as we discussed. Let’s transmit, read, and discuss.”
Hardshaw pushes a button. The four sentences that Harris Diem is holding the original copy of appear on the Sec-Gen’s screen; four sentences from him appear on President Hardshaw’s screen, and she and Diem lean forward to read.
In less than a minute, both are looking up toward each other hopefully, and with just a trace of a smile. Diem is shaking his head. “I suppose it was inevitable. What needs to be done is so clear—unless, of course, we want Klieg, Hassan, and the Siberians to hold the levers of power in the post-Clem world—that it’s no surprise at all that three of the four points are identical between you. Did you both agree there would be four points?”
“No,” Rivera said, “but those are obvious as well. Ms. President, can we then agree that Colonel Tynan is to proceed with the expedition to the Kuiper Belt immediately for the purposes discussed, that he is to accept no further orders for recall or modification but may at his judgment modify the plan in accord with the original goals—I like your phrasing better than mine—and that he will receive his orders to do so from both you and me and send an acknowledge to both of us?”
“That’s it,” she says. “It’s not a legal document in any sense of the word, so precision doesn’t matter. Now about the point of the dispute: what would you say if I said we’re going to hand ourselves in? We’ll announce that taking over all that Japanese and French stuff on the moon was an act of deliberate aggression and offer reparations, but we’ll concede they’d be justified in declaring war.”
Rivera grins. “Then I would say—you and I are both old lawyers, Ms. President—that I will see you in court. The Secretary-General has seized all property in space for the duration of the emergency—and unlike your American Constitution, the UN Second Covenant lets me declare the emergency retroactively and seize property without compensation—and thus Colonel Tynan, acting under my orders, has behaved in an entirely legal fashion. Will you at least recognize the jurisdiction of the World Court?”
“Hell yes. I might argue the case myself.”
Rivera’s eyes widen, and he says, “Ms. President, I beg you—don’t do that.”
It’s not often that Brittany Lynn Hardshaw looks confused or discomfited. “And why not? If your decision stands, then all I am is a UN provincial administrator anyway; I might as well use all that time on my hands productively.”
Rivera shakes his head, and that’s when Diem sees the twinkle in his eye. “The difficulty, Ms. President, is that if you insist on arguing the United States’ case, I shall be unable to resist the temptation to match wits with you in court on a case of such magnitude—and the world cannot afford to have both of us tied up doing that.” He smiles more widely. “Besides, the irony is too appealing. You win on your sovereignty case if you are convicted of illegal seizure of Japanese and French property. You will be in court trying to prove you’re a pirate; the UN will be there trying to prove you’re innocent.”
She nods. “See you in court, then. And I’m guilty as hell.”
“Ms. President—you are not. I take it we have no further business and we should get this underway?”
“Right. My regards to your family—”
“And I’m delighted for this chance to talk with you,” he says. Once again, things have slid into formality, but Diem can’t help feeling that there’s warmth underneath it. The Secretary-General’s office clicks off. There’s a brief flicker of the blue-and-white UN logo, and then the screen goes blank.
As she turns back to him, she says, “I checked it out, of course, over a scrambled channel, and Tynan really is ready to go. Would have looked pretty stupid if he’d had to hang around in Earth orbit for three weeks while everyone sued everyone else. So I guess we send the signal—get it rolling, Harris. Here’s the tape you can transmit up to Tynan.”
Diem accepts it and looks down at the cassette; the thought occurs to him that this object, someday, will probably sit in the Smithsonian, if there is a Smithsonian. “Oh, and Harris?” she adds.
Diem glances up.
“You might be right about significance, but the real parallel is the Great White Fleet. And unlike Teddy Roosevelt, I don’t have to worry about Congress deciding to just strand the colonel out there.”
“You do have to worry about impeachment.”
She stands up, stretches, and he suddenly realizes how old and tired she looks; her eyelids droop a little, her skin is gray, and she stands as if a few muscles were not quite behaving themselves. “Worry? Harris, I’m looking forward to it.”
THREE
SINGULARITY
JULY–SEPTEMBER 2028
CLEM HAS CONTINUED on its way. After the Hawaiian Holocaust, as the news people have dubbed it, most of the language used to denote Clem’s indifference to human affairs has dropped out of the reports. Few people want or need to be reminded that Clem does not care what people might think.
During the week beginning on July 14, the Republic of the Marshall Islands ceases to exist. On Friday the fourteenth, at 10:00 A.M. local time, the giant hurricane’s eye is centered at 166W 7N, about as empty a stretch of the Pacific as one could hope to find, with only the little pricey tourist spot at Palmyra Atoll, long since evacuated, taking the brunt of the storm.
But late that afternoon, at about 3:30 P.M. local time (though there is no one there to observe it as “local”), the several outflow jets that have been carrying off the bulk of the mass sucked up by Clem coalesce to the northeast of the giant hurricane, and it begins to move rapidly to the south and west.
The Marshalls are a battered mess already from Clem’s previous pass, which was at a considerable distance to the south; this time the hurricane is far larger, as big as it was when it tore across Hawaii, and it pounds right through the middle of the two parallel chains of islands that form the Republic.
Warning time has been adequate, but this does not mean everyone has gotten away, only that in theory they have had a chance.
Admiral O’Hara, on the bridge of HMS Abel Tasman, flagship of the UN rescue fleet, has a sick feeling that that theoretical chance was all that mattered to the UN politicians. The Republic of the Marshall Islands has been a festering sore for almost a generation, and from the SecGen’s standpoint Clem couldn’t hit a better place. The international force at O’Hara’s command is completely inadequate for getting people out of the mess, and for that matter even without a hurricane there they would have been inadequate for coping with the approximately twenty-sided civil
war that has turned the one-time island paradise into a vast disaster area.
O’Hara is proud of the job his Australians and Kiwis have been doing, and for that matter he couldn’t ask for better people than the Filipino, Indian, Korean, and Thai units he has, but he knows they have been given an impossible task—and when you give a military force an impossible task, all you are doing is asking them to endure.
They are having plenty to endure. The only island on which they are not being shot at—so far—is Kwajalein, but they have evacuated almost no one from that island. The thousands of squatters in the former American village, a sort of “suburban bubble” built to accommodate the Americans who worked on the missile range, belong to a variety of Christian cults united mostly by their extreme distrust of messages from the outside world. Most of them won’t board, thinking it’s a trick to get them out of the way so the Americans can come back.
There are still plenty of peaceful atolls as well, places out of South Pacific or Mutiny on the Bounty, that break your heart to look at. But the first pass of Clem has cut many of them off—though direct satellite broadcasts reach all the islands, some of the outliers still have no antennas up, and there are a few thousand people who never hear the warnings. The Thais are racing from one to another on their hydroplane scout boats, and whistlers from the Indian carrier Brahma have reached others, but they have no way of knowing which atolls still have people or which ones have been illegally settled, and there will just not be time to reach them all. When the great storm surges and the Beaufort 35 + winds hit, many thousands will drown without anyone ever knowing they were there.
But these are just minor heartbreaks. O’Hara is bothered by them only because they are decent sane people, even the cultists in Kwajalein, and he would rather be carrying off loads of peaceful, harmless people to safety than dealing with what most of his forces are confronting.
The barometer has begun to drop already, and though Clem, much shrunken by its southward journey, is still more than a thousand kilometers off, waves are beginning to pound farther and farther up the beaches. O’Hara looks out over the ship with a certain resignation; he wonders if he’d have chosen this career if he’d known where it would end.
He has never heard a shot fired in anger; the Australian Navy has not fought a war in a long time. Even had he been in one, the Tasman is a CROC, a Combined Robotic Operations Cruiser, a ship that travels at the center of a great cloud of intelligent drones of all kinds, on, above, and below the ocean surface; if anything has penetrated far enough to hit the ship, chances are the battle is lost.
But there will be no battles—not against other ships per se. He was near retirement age, anyway….
Somewhere, far out over the horizon, Korean marines are advancing in house-to-house fighting along a miserable stretch of coral sand, twelve kilometers long by two hundred meters wide, the sprawling “suburb” that grew up between Darrit-Uliga-Delap and the airport, currently divided into half a dozen territories by the civil war that has raged in the aftermath of the expulsion of the Americans. The Koreans at least have a clear task—get all the various gunmen cleared out so that unarmed civilians can safely board the buses to the airport. The only thing holding up the Koreans is that their forces are too small—too many troops are being used in other places and can’t be spared.
The Kiwis and Aussies trying to evacuate Ebeye, in Kwajalein Atoll just north of Kwajalein itself, have the truly impossible task. The thousand or so Marshallese who worked at the missile range were supporting 7500 dependents in 1990; by 2010, the same thousand jobs had become the support for 25,000 people, the great majority under twenty years old.
Just before the fighting that led to the American departure broke out, the U.S. had attempted to solve the extremely embarrassing problem of that island slum, with its Fourth World misery jammed up within sight of the Kwajalein’s golf course, shopping malls, and movie theaters, by virtually covering Ebeye with modern high-rise housing.
The revolution that led to the American exodus had been sudden and violent, and in the aftermath of the Flash, the United States no longer had the desire or the will to maintain a base so far from home against armed opposition. Consequently they went home with almost no warning, and the 25,000 inhabitants of the world’s most isolated housing project had nothing left to support them at all. Within weeks the water and power were off more often than not, and gangs that were more or less political and more or less criminal, depending on where the money was, moved in to take over in an incomprehensible cascade of turf and control struggles.
For the last few years, Ebeye has been a perennial subject for XV coverage—stories of cannibalism, of girls bred and raised for prostitution and sold by the dozens to Japanese entrepreneurs, the Thirst Riot when the single desalinating plant broke down, the siege for ransom of one large building by a local criminal syndicate, the ring selling infant tissues for tank-grown transplant materials….
The UN forces are struggling to keep a beachhead safe for evacuation (under constant sniper fire) and to open up safe pathways for people to run through. The inhabitants of Ebeye mostly speak English, and mostly don’t believe anything a white man tells them, but there are still plenty of people escaping to the beach whenever they can—almost all of them women and girls, many of them naked, according to the reports O’Hara is seeing.
There were stories on XV, last year, of a “party palace” on Ebeye which offered select Westerners and Asians the opportunity to eat a fine dinner served by slave girls, to rape as many of them as they cared to, and then to see several of them tortured and killed. The secret UN estimate that O’Hara saw as he prepared this expedition estimated a sixty-five percent chance that the story was substantially true.
Yet the UN did not come then. Farming women like cattle was not grounds for any intervention. It must be, O’Hara thinks, all right to kill them retail for fun, but not all right for them to drown wholesale. Perhaps the analogy to cattle is perfect… no one objects to slaughterhouses, but if ten thousand cattle were about to drown—
He breaks off from that train of thought. All the way back to the beginning of his naval career, he was regularly told he had a little too much imagination and sympathy for his job. Maybe so—he’d like to have had a job like that American general, Marshall, who was most known for rebuilding Europe after World War II. Make O’Hara the dictator someplace and maybe the news people wouldn’t like how they were treated, but by god there would be sewers, electricity, decent roads, and jobs, and there wouldn’t be murder, rape, or theft.
And all this is just to avoid thinking, right now, about the paras and marines pinned down on Ebeye, in a job that’s a bizarre combination of Ulster, Sarajevo, and Gallipoli. Every couple of hours another is hit by a sniper, another young body with a hole torn in it, some dying, some crippled for life, some who will merely spend forty years having nightmares, all so that the forces on the ground there can keep making sorties and dashes to the nearer buildings, forcing doorways, opening passages through which the captives can flee.
O’Hara has written a short report that he intends to leak—his career is over after this anyway—revealing that the real population of Ebeye before this was probably about two hundred male rulers, three thousand gunmen and male overseers working for the rulers, and more than twenty thousand female slaves.
His effort to be abstract about it all is failing; he has about five more minutes till he makes the decision that will result in his court-martial, and all he wants to think about is his real reason, the last straw.
Two hours ago a whistler from Brahma disgorged twenty Indian commandos onto the top of one of the big buildings of Ebeye, the first of 100 who were to seize the top floors of the building, silence the array of machine guns up there, and allow the Anzacs to enter and clear the building. The staticopter was hit as it attempted to take off again, and its wreckage effectively blocked others from landing, stranding the Indian force. They nevertheless fought their way down through the bui
lding far enough to take the first machine gun position, and might well have taken the rest—except that the warlord who owned the building quietly evacuated his gunmen, blocking the fire doors open, then suddenly set off charges which drained the water tanks and set the tower on fire. Besides the commandos, several hundred slaves, mostly girls, were burned to death in their still-locked rooms, or plunged to the concrete below, while the Aussie and NZs were pinned down by heavy weapons fire from neighboring buildings—and could not return fire because the enemy shielded themselves behind living, bound slaves.
There is no one left alive in the building, but it continues to blaze like a great torch; there was no way to reach the commandos trapped on the upper floor, and whatever remains of them is somewhere in the mass of orange flame and black smoke that boils against the high, lead-gray nimbus clouds.
No point in delaying further. O’Hara gets the conference call together and gives the order; everything spelled out, so that no matter what may happen later, in any trial, the full responsibility will fall only on him.
Give an adequate military force a purely military task, and it gets done. In half an hour, at the cost of more than two hundred hostage lives, four key towers are in UN hands, the gunmen trapped inside are prisoners, and the UN has the superior position. In one more hour, the island is pacified.
A lot of Australians and New Zealanders will dream, all the rest of their lives, of having to cut women in half with machine gun fire in order to kill the screaming nineteen-year-old boys behind them.
The evacuation is swift and efficient from that point on; the former rulers of the island and their various thugs and assistants are herded to the side—undoubtedly along with an occasional innocent male slave or prisoner, since the forces are sorting out all the men clearly past puberty and putting them into one end of the island. The best guess is that about five percent—maybe 150—of the 3000 men within that perimeter are innocent. O’Hara is not much concerned with such niceties.
