“You’re in your thirties,” Kerri said. “Can you remember being a teenager?”
Haydn shrugged. He’d been a rowdy teenager who hadn’t really knuckled down and worked at anything until he’d joined the marines, where he’d learnt that Drill Instructors were rarely impressed with teenage smartasses. It was humbling, in hindsight, to realise that most of his daringly original teenage rebellions had been nothing of the sort. The DIs had seen it all before, time and time again. Of course they hadn’t been impressed.
He winced at the memory. “I try not to.”
“I don’t blame you,” Kerri said. She made a show of consulting her wristcom. “I have to be back on the bridge in five hours, but until then ...”
She held out a hand. “Coming?”
Chapter Forty
And, alas, far too many people had to die to convince them they were wrong.
- Professor Leo Caesius, The Rise and Fall of Interstellar Capitalism
It was always snowing on Safehouse
Major-General Jeremy Damiani, Commandant of the Terran Marine Corps, stood by the conference room window and peered out over a scene from hell. Safehouse’s atmosphere was poison for an unprotected human, the pools of liquid and ice on the ground deadly ... the flickers of weird lightning in the cloudy purple sky a grim warning the world was very far from safe. It was the last place anyone would look for a marine base, he thought, which was why the Major-Generals had chosen it. But it couldn’t be the only major base any longer ...
He turned to face Major-General Anderson. “We made mistakes.”
“Yes, sir,” Anderson said. His report had been both complete and conclusive. It hadn’t made for comforting reading. “We made a lot of mistakes.”
Jeremy nodded. The marines had underestimated their enemy and overestimated their own potency on the battlefield. It was an understandable mistake, he conceded, but not an excusable one. They should have realised what would happen when they faced an enemy that matched them in equipment and technical skill. Air and space supremacy could no longer be taken for granted. They’d still come out ahead, but it had been costly. Seven hundred marines had died in the fighting. Many of the bodies had never been recovered.
“We didn’t realise what we were facing,” Anderson added. “If we’d known we were picking a fight with a multi-system power before we committed ourselves ...”
“We might not have had a choice,” Jeremy said. It was comforting to believe the corprat system would have collapsed into bloody chaos, with or without the marines, but he knew he couldn’t put his faith in it. There’d been hundreds of governments and systems that had tottered for decades before finally expiring. The people who’d predicted their demise had often been wrong. “We couldn’t let them reshape the galaxy to suit themselves.”
“Yes, sir,” Anderson said. “We can no longer remain in the shadows. We have to start forging a new order.”
“I know.” Jeremy let out a breath. He’d never considered himself a politician, for all that he’d spent most of his career rebuilding societies that had torn themselves apart. “We can’t take the risk of letting someone else do it.”
His eyes wandered to the starchart. There were a disturbing amount of unknowns in what had once been very well explored regions of space. How many other corporations had set up their own boltholes? How many warlords would survive long enough to become a significant threat? And how many defenceless colony worlds would be forcibly integrated into the growing empires, broken and crushed before they had a chance to grow into something interesting. Jeremy knew he had the most complete picture of what was going on in the known universe, yet he also knew it was dangerously out of date. A whole new threat could be growing, even now, on the other side of the Core Worlds. And they’d have to be ready to deal with it.
“We need to establish a new form of interstellar government,” he said. Military rule was rarely effective in the short term and never in the long term. “And we need a figurehead.”
Anderson nodded. “Prince Roland?”
“It’s possible.” Jeremy grimaced. “He’s making his way through Boot Camp. It’s possible he might be suitable, but ...”
He shook his head. It had been common, before Earthfall, to blame the Empire’s problems on the Head of State, but the blunt truth had been that the real cause of the problems had been the overconcentration of power in too few hands. The Grand Senators had been the worst, followed rapidly by the interstellar corporations and the massive ever-growing government bureaucracy. There was no way anyone who’d survived Earthfall would go along with putting so much power right back in the hands of a central government, particularly as the former government had done more damage through ineptitude than malice. They’d need to sort out a balancing act, quickly. They couldn’t lurk in the shadows any longer.
“I’ve asked for a report on the prince’s progress,” he said. “If he’s suitable ... we’ll see if we can use him. If not, we’ll have to think of something else.”
He took his chair. “Right now, that’s a matter for the future,” he said. “We have other matters to discuss.”
Anderson tensed. “Yes, sir.”
“I think you made the right call,” Jeremy said. “There will be people, years from now, who will question your decision, but I think you made the right one. The corprats could not be allowed a chance to get back on their feet and come looking for us. And the liberated planets have been quite grateful to us.”
“Hameau offered to host a new Slaughterhouse,” Anderson said. “I said we’d consider it.”
“We might be better off finding an uninhabited world,” Jeremy said. “They literally killed everything on the Slaughterhouse. Whoever did that ... they didn’t give a shit about civilian casualties.”
His eyes hardened. He was used to atrocity, but he’d never seen a whole world effectively destroyed before. The attackers had drenched the planet in radioactive particles ... he felt sick at the thought. There wouldn’t have been any survivors, if the planet hadn’t been evacuated before the hammer fell. People in bunkers might have survived, but getting out and off-world would have been tricky. Jeremy was relieved they wouldn’t have to try.
Anderson made a face. “We still don’t know who did it, then?”
“No.” Jeremy had hoped it had been the corprats. It would have given him some closure and allowed them to start work on a new training world. Instead ... they were still guessing. He found it hard to imagine anyone, even religious fanatics, being willing to obliterate an entire world. “We don’t know.”
He stood. “We’ll find them,” he said. “And then we’ll make them regret they ever heard of us.”
“Yes, sir,” Anderson said.
“We’ll hold a formal debrief tomorrow,” Jeremy said. “Dismissed.”
Anderson stood, saluted and headed for the hatch. Jeremy turned aside to stare out of the window again. The reports really hadn’t made comforting reading, although they would have been a great deal worse if the marines had actually lost. As it was ... it had been a close-run thing. Their mistakes had nearly taken them down completely. He let out a breath as he studied the poisonous snowfall. There was no way they could return to the shadows now.
He frowned, his reflection frowning back. The Empire had been too large, too concentrated. And yet, there’d been no choice. The fractured states before the Unification Wars had been too scattered for effective governance. The Empire had brought order, at a price. But it had failed to balance government with freedom, and the bill had finally come due.
The problem was all too clear. Too many worlds would refuse to submit themselves, once again, to a central authority. They’d demand some very stringent safeguards to protect themselves before they’d even consider it. Others would expect handouts, to be assisted by their wealthier neighbours ... something that would make the neighbours reluctant to offer their assistance to anyone. And still others had nursed grudges they had no intention of putting down ... it still shock
ed him, even now, just how many people had died in the last few months. The precise number would never be known, but ... it was impossible to grasp - to truly grasp - how many people had died. It was nothing more than a statistic.
Every one of those figures represents a living breathing human wiped from existence, he thought, sharply. And if we don’t find a way to put the brakes on, the number will just keep getting higher.
And yet, as he stared over the poisonous landscape, he knew there might be no way to stop the chaos before it was too late.
We won the battle, he thought. But can we win the war?
The End
The Empire’s Corps Will Return In:
The Prince’s Way
Coming Soon
Afterword
Fools that we were! We thought that all this wealth and prosperity were sent us by Providence, and could not stop coming. In our blindness we did not see that we were merely a big workshop, making up the things which came from all parts of the world; and that if other nations stopped sending us raw goods to work up, we could not produce them ourselves. True, we had in those days an advantage in our cheap coal and iron; and had we taken care not to waste the fuel, it might have lasted us longer.
[SNIP]
And yet, if ever a nation had a plain warning, we had.
- The Battle of Dorking, George Chesney
It’s getting harder to find things to write about for these afterwords ...
(Of course, some people aren’t going to consider it a bad thing.)
I went through several different ideas, when I was thinking about it. The last three years have been crazy, with the world feeling as if the elites are determined to play ‘dog in the manger’ until their universe finally crashes down around them and the rest of the population quite willing to throw the baby out with the bathwater ... a problem that, in places as diverse as Cambodia, China and France, led to utter disaster. Sane people would have taken a breath, calmed down and concentrated on learning from their experiences. We don’t seem to be led by sane people. And, really, by the time this book is published a lot of what I want to say will be out of date.
So ... I’m going to focus on something else.
Imagine ... a pair of battleships steaming through the waves, heading towards the enemy landing sites. Kings of the seas, their crews quietly confident of victory as they approach their targets. And then the sun is blotted out by wave after wave of dive bombers falling towards the ships. The guns rise and open fire, but the bombers keep coming. The ships take hit after hit, until they are ablaze and sinking. There are only a handful of survivors, all stunned by the sheer scale of the disaster. Two battleships have been lost ... and so has an empire.
This happened in 1942. The British Government made a series of catastrophic misjudgements as it became increasingly aware there was going to be war with Japan. They sent two battleships, the Prince of Wales and Repulse, in the hopes their mere presence would deter the Japanese. This was folly, all the more so as the Royal Navy itself had used aircraft to cripple or sink German and Italian battleships. If relatively primitive aircraft could do so much, what could the more modern Japanese aircraft do? And even if one chose to assume the Japanese aircraft would not be much more effective than their British counterparts, the Japanese Navy would be deploying ten battleships to the British two. The Royal Navy might outnumber the Japanese - leaving the issue of quality out for the moment - but the British couldn’t concentrate their fleet in eastern waters. There was no way to avoid the simple fact that the British Government made a terrible mistake.
Prince of Wales and Repulse were hardly the first battleships lost by the Royal Navy. HMS Hood had been sunk only a year ago. But their sinking represented far more than just a major tactical defeat. The British Empire rested its supremacy on the Royal Navy and the Royal Navy was dependent on battleships. Losing two battleships under such circumstances, circumstances that were predictable even without the advantage of hindsight, discredited the underpinnings of the British Empire itself. It wasn’t the first time the British had lost a battle - the British Imperialists were fond of saying they lost all battles save for the last - but it was the first insurmountable defeat. And so the British Empire, for better or worse, was consigned to the dustbin of history.
This is not an uncommon pattern, throughout the history of empires. The battlefield defeat of Imperial Germany, in 1917-8, spelt the end of the Second Reich. The defeat of China, in the Opium and Arrow Wars, undermined Imperial China beyond repair. The defeat of the Romans at Adrianople undermined the Roman Empire, ensuring the Goths would remain a powerful - and separate - force that would eventually sack Rome and destroy the Roman Empire. It is perhaps unsurprising that so many people who really should have known better tried to deny it, to pretend - with horrific consequences , in Hitler’s case - that nothing had really changed. The shock of the defeat was just too much to handle.
Why did these defeats happen?
It is often said that generals always try to fight the last war. There is some truth in this. Military planners need to know what can happen and they study previous wars in hopes of predicting future wars. This is often misleading. Much of the Royal Navy’s tactics, in the years between Napoleon and the First World War, became impractical as technology advanced. The idea of landing a small army, in the days of motorised infantry, tanks and aircraft, is dangerous, to say the least. The Royal Navy’s battle to land troops on the Falklands meant running risks that would have been alien to Nelson and Drake.
It is also true that militaries, particularly victorious militaries, are dangerously conservative. The British Army of 1918 was the most advanced military in the world. It had mastered the art of using tanks and aircraft, burying the Germans under a tidal wave of men and machines they simply couldn’t match. (The myth the German soldiers were stabbed in the back was never anything more than a myth.) And yet, many of those lessons were simply forgotten as the First World War receded into the past. The British and French chose to ignore the warning signs, chose to pretend that war hadn’t changed. The Germans, who couldn’t ignore the truth, took those lessons and ran with them. The German Army of 1939-40 had its weaknesses, many of them. It was also the most capable force on the planet at the time, to the point it beat the British and French in open battle.
And yet, there are risks in being too innovative. The Germans wasted a considerable amount of their limited resources in trying to develop wonder weapons (and even naval units they couldn’t really use, like battleships and carriers.) The history of military development is littered with boondoggles that absorbed money and returned little. One doesn’t need to look further than Arthur C. Clarke's Superiority to realise that a technologically-advanced military could be defeated by a primitive, but more numerous force (as happened to Custer at Little Big Horn). The trick, as always, is to remain on the cutting edge without sacrificing the keystones of survival and eventual victory.
***
In 2000, the Bush Administration believed the only major threat to the United States - and the global order it had created - was China, a rising power. The reforms to the American military proposed by Donald Rumsfeld, amongst others, were designed to fight and win a war that was assumed to be something akin to the Falklands War, although on a much larger scale. The war would be limited. The Americans would either safeguard Taiwan and put the Chinese back in their box or lose control over the waters surrounding China, in which case China would dominate Taiwan and the surrounding nations. There was no concept the war would turn general, with engagements being fought all over the world, or nuclear.
This was not an unreasonable assumption, at the time. However, it didn’t account for terrorists who could - and did - turn airliners into makeshift cruise missiles. (Not unlike submarines and aircraft, the threat was first discussed in fiction and largely ignored by the militaries.) The United States and its allies found themselves grappling with a new kind of war, facing challenges they were not mentally prepared to handle
. They had to deploy forces to Afghanistan and later Iraq, becoming embroiled in complex issues that were either unprecedented or, in the past, had been handled in ways that were now politically unacceptable. Worse, the terrorists and insurgents who survived their first encounters with American and allied firepower learnt from their experiences. They found ways to minimise American advantages, they found ways to circumvent or outsmart American technology and they found ways to create legal and ethical problems for their American opponents. Worst of all, the terrorists were ever-present. When the allied forces pulled out, the terrorists moved back and undid all their good works.
The problem exists on a much bigger scale. China, Russia and Iran - and other enemy states -have a very good motive to find ways to circumvent American advantages and bring the United States to heel. The Chinese investment in antiship missiles, for example, can only be explained as a bid to deter American carriers from approaching the South China Sea or preparation to sink one if she did. The Russians have been working on building up their deployable technology, claiming that it can match American technology (and, just incidentally, selling it without strings attached). The assumption the United States - and the West in general - will retain its technological edge for the foreseeable future is nothing more than wishful thinking.
The Halls of Montezuma Page 40