Empire of the Fallen, page 5
He straightened up, his throat rumbling with half-voiced thoughts. ‘Now, I’m a fighting man. I’ll do all the fighting you need me to do. Same goes for everyone else here. But I am also the supreme ranking general in the United Nations. You have here a circle of informed advisors of the highest calibre who only have the interests of the UN at heart. Don’t cut us out and we can help you. But don’t make enemies of your own people, as well as the rest of Tier Three.’
Silence seized the room. Constance actually had to employ her IHD to stop herself from flushing with rage. She looked at Foster, that weather-beaten face like a craggy mountainside, that ostentatious handlebar and goatee combination, his greying hair, his squinty eyes. All she wanted to do in that moment was thump him and break that big, bulbous nose of his. His speech did nothing but confirm to her why she had been right to excise them from the peace process in the first place. They didn’t have a clue. Couldn’t they see that it didn’t matter? The fucking Perseus ore belt? The quorl scratching at the adult’s table? The zhahassi complaining about their idiotic leader? None of it mattered! They needed armies and ships, not delicate sensibilities!
‘General,’ she said with a smile that remained limited to the strict parameters of her mouth. ‘Thank you for your candour, and I’m sorry that you feel this way. You are probably right. I have not been open with you. I have been speaking to SPECWAR a lot recently, and the feudal lords.’
She stopped. Everyone leaned forward slightly, expecting her to continue. She didn’t.
‘For God’s sake, Andrea!’ Foster exploded. ‘You are—’
‘No, you listen to me, General!’ Constance snapped, silencing him like a snapped hawser through the neck. ‘The Kaygryn Empire is coming. I am speaking to the provar and I am speaking to mission specialists. I am formulating a plan which is still in its infancy. It is designed to save this galaxy from annihilation. When the time comes, I will share what I need to with you all. From there, you can arrange the fleets’—she looked at Ellisburg—‘and the armies’—she glared at Foster—‘as you see fit. That is your job. Now let me do mine. You have already doubted me once. Do not make that mistake again. Do you understand?’
No-one moved. No-one spoke.
‘I need soldiers now,’ she warned. Now it was her turn to point the finger. ‘Not talkers. I’ll do the talking. You do the fighting. And I expect each and every one of you to support me one hundred per cent; otherwise, I shall find a new ensemble of Joint Chiefs.’ She turned to leave, then stopped herself and whirled back around. ‘And as for UNIS, and EFFECT’—she jabbed a finger at Kessler, whom she’d always hated, and Tavistock, whom she didn’t actually mind—‘sort out the leaks in your goddamn organisations. I am sick to the back teeth of learning about classified mission intelligence on United fucking Information. Do I make myself clear?’
This time she didn’t wait for a response. Judging from their faces—cowed, aghast, hardened, whatever—they weren’t going to say anything anyway. In five paces she was at the door, and she yanked it open so hard it slammed into the wall.
‘Amateurs,’ she hissed under her breath, and disappeared into the warren of corridors.
The afternoon sitting of the Assembly promised to be a difficult few hours for Constance. Since the formation of the Coalition seven months before, the Assembly had become less about the representatives of the many constituent worlds, orbitats and protectorates of the United Nations, and more about cramming as much Tier Three representation into its unsuitably small main chamber as possible. This arrangement, of hundreds of booths being given over to alien legations, looked set to continue as the Coalition itself continued. No-one had voted for its disbandment in the wake of the Ascendancy War. No-one trusted the provar. It was the height of irony that the Ascendant Feudality, the secular, legislative body of the Ascendancy that currently controlled the vast majority of the Ascendancy, was now applying to join.
Her hands shook as she went through her notes again in a small, private caucus room tucked away in the building’s maze of hallways. Rankin had tried to brief her and had earned his own dismissal as a consequence. She had even avoided talking to Bill Pitt and the other EFFECT operatives fundamental to her plans. They could be irritatingly moral in their own ways, and would likely counsel her to take a conciliatory approach.
The fact of the matter was, the UN needed the provar more than it needed the rest of Tier Three combined. Even after half a year of destructive warfare, their combined fleets and armies—now battle-hardened—still outgunned and outclassed their peers by several orders of magnitude. In four weeks of peace, human and provari factories and robotic assembly lines, free from the threat of orbital destruction and with an open tap of Ascendancy-brand EXM, had begun churning out instruments of defence and death at a new and unprecedented pace. No-one else, not even the zhahassi who had proved their martial salt a hundred times over in the war, had the skill, expertise and infrastructure to manufacture the apparatus of war on such an enormous scale.
Unfortunately, it was also the provar who were in the greatest peril. Their entire society, the ancient archenemy of the Kaygryn Empire, would soon be subjected to focussed, systematic destruction—of that, the Feudal Lords were utterly confident. And if that were truly to be the case, then drastic action was required. Old political enmities between the two empires couldn’t get in the way of their survival. Constance would take the devil they knew any day of the week. It was just a shame she was going to have to take an appalling amount of flak to do what needed to be done; the whole of Tier Three, including her own people, would be out for her blood when she revealed her strategy. She was confident that history would adjudge her the most prescient and noble president the United Nations had ever seen, but in the short term, there was nothing but—
‘A world of pain,’ she muttered to herself. Then she saved and dismissed the notes from her IHD, straightened out her blazer, performed an arpeggio or two, then exited the room.
She walked to the Assembly Chamber as a condemned approaches the gallows. Thanks to her IHD, she was artificially calm and collected, but the trepidation was there, a burning kernel of nerves wrapped in a nutshell of false cool. No amount of glanding or IHD programs would rid her of it. In some ways it was good, in that it provided focus, but in most, without IHD intervention, it simply made her feel sick.
Already she could hear the roar of the Chamber in session, like a hypersled crowd waiting for the green light. It permeated the building’s foundations and drenched the air like nervous sweat. A room full of diplomats she could face down. A room full of generals she could chastise. But a gargantuan, multi-tiered hall filled with many thousands of people and aliens was a new kind of terror. She had faced it a fortnight before with her address to the Coalition on the Kaygryn Empire. She had pulled through it on a cocktail of stimulants and bravado, but the experience had been unsettling. The speech was short, and she had taken no questions. It had been all she could do not to turn and run away from the podium. How Aurelius—or any president in their long line of presidents—had done it so routinely was beyond her.
This address, though, would be even worse. At least with the news of the Kaygryn Empire, there was nothing she could do. They had hated the situation, the fact of the Empire’s existence, but they hadn’t hated her.
Now she would be giving them several good reasons to.
She stepped through into the small anteroom which preceded the raised podium beyond. The roar of conversation was deafening now. She calmed herself unsuccessfully with some breathing exercises, before stepping through the second door.
It was like a diva stepping on to the stage in an opera house. The clamour quickly reached fever pitch. There were some roars of approval, mostly from Federal Socialists and worlds controlled by Federal Socialist governors, but there were more cries of anger and derision. Alien hoots and whistles accompanied the booing, too, so that the whole thing sounded like a demented rainforest.
The Assembly Chamber was actually not unlike an opera house. The podium she stood on, fortunately shielded behind a vast mahogany lectern, looked out across five horseshoe-shaped tiers rising high above, each filled with hundreds of boxes. There was no property in a box; holographic flags on the front of each one changed depending on who was in occupation. At the same time, holo banners ran around the tiers with political and economic updates like the whole hall was an enormous stock exchange, and huge holos hung in the air ready to focus on whoever was speaking.
Her voice would be amplified, of course, across the Chamber, and there would be running translation available from a bank of human, alien and VI translators in a box up to her right, but she wasn’t sure, even with this small army of assistance, if she would be able to surmount the wall of noise.
She stood firm, gripping the sides of the lectern, trying not to focus on a given area in case she saw the anger there and faltered.
‘Friends and allies,’ she began, and that was met with even louder jeers. She opened her mouth to speak again, but was cut off by huge, rolling peaks of sound. Thousands of people and aliens were screaming and gesticulating at her and at each other. Her instapoll ratings, a red/green icon that represented her approval on a second-by-second basis, was seventy-seven per cent red and holding.
She felt her choler rise. She gripped the lectern even harder, her palms sweating. After several further attempts to talk, she lost her temper.
‘Oh, shut up!’ she snapped, thumping the lectern. It echoed around the chamber like a gunshot, like someone had tripped all of the audio dampers at once. It was unprecedented. The assembled Representatives lapsed to shocked silence. Out of the corner of her eye, Constance could see on one of the massive holos the words ‘shut up’ in Terran ten metres high along with five alien translations.
She swallowed back her anger. Somewhere in the back of her mind, she realised that this outburst was going to do the rounds on United Information for weeks. Their pressbots, little irritating camera drones, flitted about the Chamber like a cloud of starlings.
‘You have come here to listen to me, so listen to me!’ she said. The Chamber was silent. It was almost as unsettling as the noise. It was so un-presidential, so unstatesmanlike, to shout.
‘I have told you about the Kaygryn Empire. I have addressed this Chamber on the matter already. What I will now tell you is what I intend to do about it. You all voted me to helm this Coalition through the last war. That war is now over. We now face a new war, and unless we all act together, with the Ascendancy, we will all face annihilation.’
The noise level was starting to creep up again. She held up a hand for silence, but didn’t get it.
‘I understand that many of you have suffered in these last months. Many of you will have personally suffered. Many of you will have lost friends, many more of you family. I am so sorry to each of you, and to the people you each represent. But we are not beyond reproach. We dropped bombs on undefended provari cities too.’ The jeering had reached about half the volume of what it had been under peak clamour. Why can they not see that we are all as bad as each other?
‘What I will propose now, and push through with executive orders—’ a vast collective groan cut through the Chamber. Constance’s use of executive orders, both to extend her own presidency and then to push through all the measures she felt necessary, had been a sore point among the assembled races. She saw it as necessary to govern a weary, squabbling post-war population; they saw it as a dictatorship in all but name. But she dared not test her authority by giving anyone a choice in the matter. ‘What I will propose now, many of you will not like—’
‘You can say that again!’ someone shouted from a nearby box. Raucous laughter followed. The Chamber, as it often did, was devolving into a circus.
‘—but it is necessary to ensure our survival. The first of these measures will be a programme of resettlement. I will take as many provari civilians as can be taken from the Ascendancy’s most at-risk worlds and I will relocate them to a selection of our worlds.’
If Constance thought that the Chamber had already reached fever pitch, she was wrong. The sustained uproar which followed was so long and loud that she nearly left the podium altogether.
‘It is necessary—’ She tried on three separate occasions. When it was clear it wasn’t going to work, she committed a second unprecedented breach of protocol: she activated the Chamber’s audio dampers.
The Chamber was subject to a number of conventions, unwritten rules which over centuries had come to govern the conduct of all who debated within it. They were mostly based around respect and the right of all to be heard. Most of the reprehensible tricks of the governments of yesteryear—talking out bills for hours with longwinded speeches, drowning out hated Representatives with loud jeering until they gave up and sat down—had been consigned to history. One of the biggest faux pas to commit though was triggering the audio dampers. For a leader, it was the height of disrespect. For Constance, who was already under pressure for her unilateral actions, it was downright dangerous.
Complete silence engulfed the Chamber. Mouths continued to move; hands continued to wave. But slowly, once everyone realised what had happened, they stopped. Even her staunchest supporters looked uneasy. The rest looked furious. Even the aliens, such as the insectoid quorl, managed to look angry in a way she’d never really been able to discern before.
‘I am sorry to resort to this, but I must speak, and I must speak quickly. These ordinances affect us all. We do not have a great deal of time. I have consulted with my military advisors and this is the best hope we have of securing ourselves.’ She pretended to consult her IHD notes, but really she was just trying to calm herself down. Activating the dampers had torn her already frayed nerves. ‘We will resettle as many Ascendancy civilians on Tier Three worlds away from the old crusade fleet lines and the known navigable entrances—now exits—to the Khāli Barrier. At the same time, I intend to put in place a programme of impressment. Able-bodied men and women from the ages of sixteen to seventy and their alien maturity equivalents who meet the selection criteria will undergo a period of training of not less than six weeks’ VR-adjusted time to become proficient in arms. Existing forces will be dispatched to garrison front-line worlds within the next two weeks.
‘Industry will be turned over to the production of arms under executive order. I will delegate emergency powers to planetary governors to requisition all industrial facilities as they see fit. The manufacture of arms and armour is now an international priority. The provar will share their EXM reserves with us on a pro rata basis depending on martial contribution and population size. Of this I am assured.
‘We are at war, ladies and gentlemen, whether we like it or not. It is my intention to make this galaxy a bitter pill to swallow. I shall make the Kaygryn Empire fight for every centimetre of our land. They will rue the day that they came through the Barrier. They will soon learn that this is our galaxy, no matter what some ancient prophetic nonsense tells them, and it is not theirs for the taking!’
It should have been met with rapturous applause. She should have been lauded as a gifted Churchillian orator, refusing to back down in the face of overwhelming odds. Instead, she left the podium in deafening silence while behind her thousands of people clamoured on mute to be heard.
She let out a frustrated scream in the back of her Bluebird executive jet. Constance the Conciliator. That’s what they called her. At first they’d meant it, too.
The Bluebird took her directly over Arrengate, flanked by a pair of Manticores. She studied their bulbous lethality through the window as they soared through the cold air, grey as the slate sky and bristling with weapons. A few snowflakes drifted past and were sent into mad spirals the moment they encountered the turbulent backwash from the engines.
Where had she gone wrong? Why did she feel like she was the only one who could see the danger they were in? The evidence presented by the provar hadn’t exactly been empirical, but what better explanation was there for the crusade fleets? Or Lyra Staerck’s corroborated testimony from Sophia? Or what every fucking kaygryn in the galaxy was losing their minds over?
No, she had not gone wrong. It was just that no-one else wanted to believe it. Alexander White, the Human Democrat leader desperate for power and who would likely have got it after Aurelius’ term was over if the war hadn’t started, would do anything to turn the population against her. He publicly accused her of scaremongering off the back of some ancient provari fairy tales, and to a population sick to death of war, it was a welcome ridicule. Of course the Kaygryn Empire was nonsense; if a respectable presidential candidate and leader of the second largest political party in the UN said it was all rubbish, then it almost certainly was. Constance was mad, after all. She’d let the stresses of the war affect her mind and now she was jumping at shadows. One only had to look at the kaygryn in this galaxy—pathetic, downtrodden, barely eligible for Tier Three—to know that they would never have the strength and wherewithal to build an intergalactic empire.
The rest of Tier Three seemed all too eager to agree with his rambling idiocy as well, especially when their land and resources were being unilaterally ceded to fund the new Ascendancy war effort. By the time the Bluebird landed, she had whipped herself up into a quiet fury and was close to tearing her own hair out.
