Conquistadors!, page 29
She kept her face impassive as she walked around the protestors and made her way further into Official Washington. There were more police and soldiers on the streets, the latter looking as if they’d rather be out west, but no one tried to block her way. She wondered, idly, if there was a tacit agreement between the protestors and some of the politicians – they were allowed to shout themselves hoarse, as long as they didn’t interfere with government work – but it hardly mattered. She didn’t have to understand the enemy society to find its weaknesses and make use of them. She just had to be careful and keep her head down until the Captain-General took the city.
There were more guards outside the office, including a young man who was more interested in her breasts than whatever danger she might represent to his employer. Catherine identified herself – she’d hacked the system again, just to make sure she was cleared to enter without delay – and stepped through the security screening without fear. The guards would have done better to search her personally, rather than relying on their tech. There were items on her person that would have raised eyebrows, if they’d spotted them. The minibrain in her pocket alone was a dead giveaway. She would have preferred to leave it behind, but she needed it.
Her lips twisted as the Senator’s PA showed her up the stairs. Catherine wondered if the young woman was aware of the Senator’s ... tastes, although there was no way to know. Her computer system had been astonishingly clean, suggesting she was considerably smarter than her boss. Not that that had ever been in doubt, Catherine reflected. A man with tastes so degenerate they’d shock a degenerate – or even a primal – should know better than to put himself in a position where he could be blackmailed. But Senator Thaddeus Remington had done just that.
Catherine felt no sympathy. He deserved everything he got – and worse.
The minibrain scanned the office as she was shown inside, the Senator standing to shake her hand as if she were a lobbyist, rather than a blackmailer. He showed no visible reaction to her arrival, but ... she doubted he would willingly show anything in front of his PA. The young woman might have been deeply corrupted by the degenerates, or at the very least forced to decide if she wanted to destroy her career by blowing the whistle on her boss, yet it would be foolish to rely on it. No one knew how they’d react if they discovered such an awful secret until it happened, and then it was too late. What was the right thing to do?
It would never happen in the Protectorate, Catherine told herself, as the minibrain reported no active surveillance systems. It automatically hacked the computer terminal and the senator’s smartphone, deactivating the microphones. The less evidence, the better. A man like Remington would never be allowed to hold office, unless it was as a trusty in a work camp.
The Senator swallowed hard, the moment the PA left the room and closed the door behind her. Catherine didn’t give him time to say a word.
“What have you found out for me?”
“They tried to nuke the invader base,” Remington said. “It didn’t work.”
“So I’ve heard,” Catherine lied. Her superiors hadn’t told her. “What is your government planning to do next?”
Remington swallowed, again. “Congress has been debating new conscription bills and ... and other measures to handle the crisis,” he said, stammering slightly. “The banks have been effectively frozen, in hopes of keeping the entire system from collapsing, but people are starving on the streets. Some are pushing for more extensive declarations of martial law.”
“How nice,” Catherine said, coldly. It was a shame she couldn’t force him to impede the enemy’s desperate attempts to cope with the crisis, but people would start asking questions if Remington opposed rational measures too openly. He’d be useless to her if his cover was blown, or if he were simply voted out of office. “And military measures ...?”
“I’m not part of any committees,” Remington protested. “I ...”
“I’m afraid that’s not good enough,” Catherine said. She kept her tone even. “I need you to get close to the ones who make the real decisions.”
“But ...” Remington stared at her. “I can’t get too close ...”
“Of course you can,” Catherine said. “You wouldn’t be in your post if you didn’t have contacts.”
“Contacts who have interests of their own,” Remington said. “Look, I’m doing my best ...”
Catherine saw the thought behind his eyes – the idea he could go to the FBI, admit she’d turned him into a spy, and let them use him to feed her false information – and moved swiftly and ruthlessly to crush it.
“We have footage of you engaging in immoral acts with young children,” she stated, bluntly. “The evidence is impossible to deny. Do you really believe you could keep your life, let alone your career, if the recordings were blasted across the entire world?”
Remington paled. His friends and allies would ditch him the moment the footage appeared in their inboxes. The FBI would arrest him ... he’d be lucky, very lucky, if he didn’t spend the rest of his life in prison. His wife and children would leave him, taking what they could of his fortune ... Catherine wondered, mischievously, just how much of his wealth he’d be allowed to keep. A full audit would reveal just how deeply corrupt he’d been, over the years, and just how corrupt he still was. The bribes weren’t even well hidden. Anyone who looked at the records would have no trouble working out the pattern.
“Your only hope is to work with me,” she said, “and take up a position in the post-war government.”
Her lips twisted, briefly. Remington would be used as long as he was useful – and not one moment beyond. Perhaps she’d be allowed to execute him personally. If not ... the work camps always had room for more inmates, although she doubted shipping Remington to the nearest camp would be worth the trouble. He didn’t take good care of himself. His medical records suggested he was dangerously overweight.
He just has to last until we no longer need him, she thought. And then we can discard him.
She stood. “I’ll see you again shortly,” she said. “I hope you’ll have better news for me next time.”
Remington sank back into his chair as she turned and left, nodding politely to the PA as she passed. Remington wasn’t her only contact, but ... in some ways, he was the most useful. He could betray her, perhaps even get her killed or captured ... only if he were willing to go down himself. The others might be able to get away with it if they betrayed her. Her lips thinned in disgust. The idea of relying on Remington was disgusting. The man was a coward, a slave to base instincts ... he should have killed himself long ago. But instead he’d gone into politics.
Now he has to find out what his government is doing, she told herself. And then we can decide what to do next.
***
“The strike failed?”
Felix felt as if he’d been punched in the gut. It had felt wrong, completely wrong, to take part in the nuclear release authorisation process, supplying codes to the USAF to unlock a handful of the most advanced nuclear warheads in the world. It had been his idea and yet he’d felt as if he were crossing the line, his voice threatening to fail as he mumbled the codes. The President hadn’t been in any better shape as he’d issued his own authorisation. It had been bad enough to make Felix wonder if the codes would be rejected, on the grounds the President and the Vice President sounded as though they were being held at gunpoint.
“Yes, sir,” Grey said. “All five missiles were intercepted as they raced towards their targets, and taken down so quickly they had no time to detonate their warheads.”
Felix swore. He’d braced himself for the enemy base having force shields ... or simply being tough enough to survive a nuclear-tipped bunker buster. He hadn’t thought the missiles would simply be shot down before it was too late ... how? The enemy sensors were good ... were they that good? The hypersonics should have remained undetected, moving ahead of any warning, until it was far too late. And yet ...
“How?”
“They may have intercepted our authorisation messages,” Grey said. “Or they may simply have better sensors than we knew. Combined with their lasers ...”
Felix swore, again. The enemy had drones orbiting high overhead, if the techs were to be believed. If they also carried laser weapons, they could spot a hypersonic missile and shoot it down well before it reached its target. If ...
The President sagged. “We thought ...”
His voice trailed off. He’d made a decision that would earn him nothing but odium, even though it had been the right decision. And yet it had failed ... it had failed so quickly the enemy might not even know they’d been in danger of being nuked. Felix hoped they didn’t. If they knew, they might retaliate ...
“Are we beaten?” The question hung in the air. “Is it over?”
“No, Mr. President,” Grey said. “We learn more with each encounter. Our countermeasures are already advancing, and ...”
“Leave me,” the President ordered. “Please.”
Felix exchanged glances with Grey, then did as he was told. The President looked worse than ever. His legacy was in tatters ... he would go down in history as the worst leader the US had ever had, worse than James Buchanan or Andrew Johnson. He’d tried to nuke his country – he’d had to destroy Texas in order to save it – and he’d failed. History would forgive much, but not failure. Felix wondered, numbly, who’d be writing the history books. Americans? Or the Protectorate? Perhaps it was all over ...
No, he told himself. It isn’t over until the fat lady sings.
“Go back to the Pentagon,” he told Grey. “We’ll speak later.”
“Yes, sir,” Grey said.
Felix watched him go, then headed back to his office. He had calls to make and General Grey could not be involved, not now and perhaps not ever. And he dared not let the wrong people find out until it was too late ...
And if this fails, his thoughts reminded him, it will be the end of you as well as your country.
Chapter Thirty: Moscow, Russia, Timeline F (OTL)
“So, Yuri,” President Gorbanov said. “What do you make of it?”
Foreign Minister Yuri Romanov – his name was a constant source of hilarity amongst his peers – said nothing for a long moment, trying to gauge the President’s mood. He lacked the immense power his predecessor had built up over the years – said predecessor had committed suicide by shooting himself in the back several times – but that didn’t mean he couldn’t terminate Yuri’s career if he displeased him. The frozen conflict to the west might not have been a complete disaster, and Russia had been able to regain most of what she’d lost as the world realised their sanctions had been largely ineffective, yet it had been unsurprisingly difficult to rebuild the country’s reputation. A quick blitzkrieg would have made Russia look unbeatable. A grinding invasion that had ended in a truly unsatisfactory manner – no matter what state-owned media claimed – was a very different beast. It would be decades, at best, before the country’s military reputation recovered.
The President looked jovial, but it was never easy to be sure. Russia was caught between the West’s scorn and China’s demands from the east, demands that would make Russia a client state if the Chinese weren’t handled very carefully. They had shared interests – they both wanted the American hyperpower weakened, for very similar reasons – but they also had long-standing disputes that couldn’t be papered over forever. The Chinese had alienated most of their neighbours too, including the Indians ... Yuri had hoped, as the post-war world came into focus, that India would draw closer to the Russians and Chinese and away from the overbearing Americans. That wasn’t going to happen now, and ...
... And yet, everything had changed in a heartbeat.
He hadn’t believed the original reports. Americans were fond of prattling nonsense, from crashed alien spacecraft to believing themselves the good guys in any given situation, even when they were self-evidently on the wrong side. The EMP had been a nuclear accident, if he was any judge, and the stories about an invading force from somewhere else just absurd. Yuri knew, better than most, just how many terrorist groups were trying to steal or build nuclear weapons, and how many had come alarmingly close to success. Even the first satellite images, as orbital spies had been redirected to sweep over Texas, had baffled him. It wasn’t until he’d heard confirmation from multiple sources that he’d started to believe, and even then he hadn’t been sure how much to believe. The Americans were notorious liars, but in this case they could easily have been lied to.
“The first reports appear to have been true,” he said, shaking his head in disbelief. “The invaders have occupied most of Texas, and appear intent on occupying the remainder of the United States.”
“It seems incredible,” General Boris Vladimir said. He was the third member of their little troika, one of the few officers to emerge from the Ukraine War with a greatly enhanced reputation. Very few people pointed out that a great many officers hadn’t come out of the war at all, and they rarely got the chance to say it twice. “The Americans are losing?”
“The Americans have always been overrated,” President Gorbanov said. “They lose every war, eventually.”
Vladimir wasn’t convinced. “They’re fighting for their own homes now,” he cautioned. “I don’t think we can count them out just yet.”
President Gorbanov smiled. “How much of their country have they lost?”
“How much did we lose, when the Great Patriotic War broke out?” Vladimir nodded to the map, hanging from the wall. “They were at the gates of Moscow before they were driven back, then Stalingrad. We still won.”
“The Americans are weak,” President Gorbanov said. “We dug in, when the fascists attacked, and held the lines until they broke. The Americans had a far more favourable position, and yet they lost.”
He looked at Yuri. “And what do you make of their offer?”
Yuri said nothing for a long moment. The invaders – they called themselves the Protectorate, according to their message – had made open contact with Moscow, using some of the most advanced encryption codes the Federal Guard Service had been able to devise. The fact the invaders had done that was disastrous, not least because it was a clear warning the invaders could decrypt anything the Russian Government sent over the airwaves. They’d followed up with a list of American intelligence assets within the Russian Federation, both as a gesture of goodwill and another warning. The FSB had had a collective heart attack when the truth sank in. If the invaders were willing to display their capabilities so openly ...
“They’re offering to trade clean energy, military and political support, and a handful of other possibilities in exchange for our military and political support,” Yuri said, finally. “On paper, it is a very good offer indeed.”
He studied the map thoughtfully. Russia was a powerful country, no doubt about it, but the Ukraine War had exposed so many weaknesses it was difficult to convince the rest of the world to take Russia seriously. Not being defeated in the field wasn’t anything like as stunning as a swift victory, nor was it intimidating enough to deter their neighbours from arming to the teeth. Poland was well on her way to becoming a military superpower – she was already far more powerful than Germany – and the rest of the former Warsaw Pact nations weren’t far behind. Russia had hoped they could convince their neighbours that resistance was futile. The Ukraine War had convinced them it wasn’t anything of the sort.
“We could use their support, when it comes to securing our position,” Yuri added, after a moment. “We also need their production tech, if we can get them to set up factories here.”
He gritted his teeth. Russia had always lagged behind the West, when it came to developing advanced technology. They’d had some successes, but putting them into mass production had been impossible even before the sanctions had really started to bite. The Communists had undermined education and technological development so badly, and then the democrats had ruined what little was left, that Russia would need decades to catch up even if sanctions magically went away. His lips quirked. In a way, they had. NATO might talk a big game, but without the US it was little more than a talking shop. The Germans were so frightened of their own military that they’d lost sight of just how dangerous the world could be if you couldn’t defend yourself.
“The downside, of course, is that we know very little about these people,” he continued. “We have no independent confirmation of their story. Our sources in Washington know very little more, as far as we can tell, and we have almost no assets within the occupied zone. We don’t know what they really want, or how many of them there really are, or even if they can keep the promises they’ve offered us. Or if they will keep their word, afterwards.”
“They have been kicking the Americans in the ass,” Vladimir pointed out.
“Yes, they have,” Yuri agreed, “although none of their gains are all that permanent. Not yet.”
He looked from the President to the General and back again. “We could also easily discover that allying with them means becoming dependent on them,” he added. “They might knock out the Americans and everyone else, then start telling us what to do.”
“If they invade our country, we will defeat them,” Vladimir said, firmly. “We will resist, as we have always done. The size of our country will work for us, and eventually we shall triumph.”
Yuri winced inwardly. The General was reciting orthodox military doctrine, a pattern that had worked for Russia twice before, but he feared simply wasn't applicable to the situation they faced now. He disliked the Americans – they had a Pollyannaish view of the universe that was shaped by the oceans protecting them from problems the rest of the world couldn’t afford to ignore – and yet he had to admit they were immensely powerful. The United States was hardly a small country, either. The invaders could have overrun Britain relatively quickly, given how fast they’d moved since their arrival, but the sheer size of America worked against them. The map showed much of Texas under their control. The reality might be very different.
