by Kali Altsoba
“Not to blame your profession alone, Georges, for we’re all guilty, not least for electing you, but there’s far too much ‘vanity of vanities’ mixed into our politics, top to bottom. It keeps the acid boiling in the pot.”
“That’s why tyranny and empire are the natural states of governance to which we always return after the illusion of democracy fails. Sometimes we make the turn in peace and later call it error. Always we make it in time of war, and say that it’s right and necessary. And so it is.”
“Careful not to say that outside this room, Georges. Fatal for a politician in this cherished Union. Still, my old friend Juan Castro, over at Kars Academy, agrees with you wholeheartedly.”
“What is it you said he tells the cadets, that our Union is ‘an empire that’s disguised as a republic and pretending to be a democracy?’ What does that make me, one of its ministers? Only a junior one, not allowed into inner cabinet meetings, but a minister of this state all the same.”
“Or me. I’m one of its most senior generals.”
“Well, let’s not let our good people off the hook. During my first decade as a politician my party was defeated time and again. At one meeting a rep from Vilnu said, ‘Our people have voted against our party four times in a row. What’s wrong with them?’ I told him that we had to accept the verdict. That our people had spoken their minds, the mindless bâtards.”
“Like I said, I’m not a politician. What’s your point?”
“They still like the PM.”
“Seriously, Georges. We must maintain the old forms for now. Yet how much longer can we afford to wait on the PM? Those of us with eyes to see. War is coming. We have to act.”
***
Briand once quipped through clouds of laughter and yellow pipe smoke that billowed with the rich soils and odors of the hot fields where his extra fine tobacco grows, that Robert Hoare is like an ancient library. “Dry yet somehow also moldy and musty, with thin skin, papery and crinkled and out-of-date.” The remark inevitably found its way back to the PM, who never forgot or forgave it.
It took Pyotr’s invasion of Krevo for the prime minister to finally cave to rising public and political pressure and appoint Briand to inner cabinet as his Minister of Defense. If politics makes strange bedfellows a war scare pulls down the sheets. There’s no hiding nakedness in war.
LeClerc was offworld on one of his many production inspection tours, the duty he hates most about his new job, when he heard from Juan Castro over a secure military neb that Briand was promoted. ‘At last, a man of action and perception in the cabinet. I hope it’s not too late.’
Hoare has never liked or trusted Briand. Not just because the younger man is a rival for leadership of the now ruling party. Not only because he’s a minister who forced his way into the inner cabinet and whose judgment can’t be relied on during a building interstellar crisis with the Imperium. Their dispute is more profound, truly philosophical and almost certainly unbridgeable.
Arguing for a grand renewal of the Peace of Orion in the wake of the invasion of Krevo, Hoare pontificated to his restless and divided cabinet: “An ancient novelist said one thing was stronger than invasion by all the armies in his world, ‘an idea whose time has come.’ I say the great idea of our time is a renewed Peace of Orion, achieved by reason and calm negotiations.”
Briand couldn’t stop himself. He retorted before the whole cabinet: “Fine words, Prime Minister, but your idea is too late arriving and it looks to be getting off the train unarmed in the middle of a knife fight already underway. Worlds are burning, and we, the government of the greatest star nation in all the history of Orion, do nothing but talk and talk and talk.”
Hoare never forgot or forgave that one, either. The “Peace Faction” in cabinet made sure that Briand and his allies inside the government were labelled “War Hawks” on the backbenches and over all the GovNebs. They and the PM sincerely think the War Hawks are the enemies of peace, more than Pyotr. Knives are out inside the cabinet as well as along the Grün frontiers.
***
A month later LeClerc arrives at one of six concentric MoD towers sited in Lowestoft-on-Stamos, come from orange Kars to blue Caspia to consult the head of the Joint Security Council, his old friend Admiral Gaétan Maçon. He’s another member of the growing War Hawks group secretly organizing inside the military. Legally, they’re a conspiracy. Morally, they’re vital.
Maçon has sea-blue eyes. Tropical blue, like a lagoon warm and bright with coral and teeming with life. But also patrolled by reef sharks. He’s so good at bureaucratic strong-arming and silent coercion that he’s known inside Briand’s inner circle as the “Blue Hammer.”
He was the senior cadet of the two, graduating from the Joint Services Academy a year earlier than LeClerc. After three years core military training on Kars he finished Naval Graduate School on Baku. He still likes to tease LeClerc for being his junior by a year, and for going to the Army War College on Argos and not the Navy’s better-regarded graduate school on Baku.
LeClerc has no time for the old jokes, not even with such a good friend. He gets right down to business, asking the question he’s come to ask as soon as he breeches the doorway.
“Why can’t the PM see the gravity of the threat from the Imperium?”
“Good to see you, too, Junior, even if you do storm in here like one of Juan Castro’s premature artillery candidates, all load-and-shoot and no foreplay.”
Then Maçon sees the worried look in LeClerc’s eye and shifts to meet the moment, readjusting to seriousness as LeClerc sits down. The room smells of mockleather and fresh polish, of the personal style and professional orderliness of a lifetime devoted to duty and navy discipline.
“I don’t understand it myself, Gaspard. The PM is, we’ve all of us been, too long dupes of a deep delusion. All of us.”
“Damn it to hell, Gaétan! It’s clear as an arctic sky! Arrogant Pyotr and his swarms of locusts mean to take more than a few frontier worlds, more than the United Planets. I’m certain of it. I’ve seen the Core Secret reports on the Rikugun build-up, as have you.”
“You’re mixing metaphors, Junior. Mais oui, d’accord, cher ami. I concur. The Rikugun has too many combat divisions mobilized for a peacetime army, or even for their nasty little war against Krevo. I’ve told the PM often enough what you and I believe to be true, that Pyotr is girding for a much bigger war. He won’t stop at this small invasion. He’s already gobbled seven systems. That’s practice, a testing ground of his tactics and weapons for use against us.”
“Has CIS explained this to the PM?” LeClerc asks, referencing the Calmar Intelligence Service. It’s located in the same six-tower MoD complex in sprawling Lowestoft-on-Stamos.
“I know he’s more inclined to listen to civilian analysts nested here at MoD than to any one of us in uniform. He doesn’t like uniforms, does he? Can’t you push CIS to feed him the right info? Let’s march down there right now, together, and kick some lazy intel assess!”
“I’ve tried. There are lots of good people there, by the bye. Some junior analysts are so scared by what’s crossing their holos they’ve risked careers, even prison, to bring me Ops Secret field reports. One in deep cover on Kestino went straight to Georges, the day he made minister.”
“So that’s where Briand got the secret statistics he revealed inside the Lok Sabha, to pressure and embarrass his own Party into passing preparedness legislation. Damn clever!”
Briand’s revelation of highly classified material on the Grün build-up to the Lok Sabha, under immunity cover of his seat in that Great House, finally awoke public perception of the Imperium’s new military capabilities and caused grave doubts about Pyotr’s intentions. It also first raised public doubt about the honesty and competence of the Hoare government.
“He single-handedly increased the military budget by 40%.”
“Not enough, but it’s a start.”
“A good one. We’d be in a hopeless place without it.”
“Good for that field agent, too, whoever he is.”
“He’s a she. Though you didn’t hear that from me. Or where she is.”
“A woman? On Kestino? Well why not? She’s got more cojones than most of our men. All those stats about armaments production and Grün age cohort call-ups! Scared a lot of folks.”
“Quite right, too.”
“The PM could no longer pretend it was all routine replacement, as he had, resting on the Tennō’s personal assurances. Routine! Mon dieu! That man has two feet in the same clog!”
“Of course, Gaspard, we’ve never discussed the source of the leak. Did we, old friend?”
“Never.” LeClerc taps the side of his nose with his index finger, twice.
“You’ve seen some Core Secret reports. They’re appalling, but I’ve seen worse. Good agents get us the info. Some have died for it. And still there’s a bottleneck at the top of CIS.”
“A bottleneck? You mean too many peacetime security protocols?”
“No. Not our protocols, our personnel. Specifically, that little CIS shit Sanjay Pradip. He’s dumb as a broom but so careful, and here so long, he’s now Head of Political Intelligence. He’s sitting on the hard stuff, keeping it back even from the wider cabinet and the government.”
“Why can’t Briand move him out, now that he’s in charge at MoD?”
“Pradip has the ear of the PM. Their mating has given us a mulish policy of moral and intellectual sterility. Stubborn, stupid, utterly unmovable.”
“Merde! I’m getting swollen by all this!”
“You know how entrenched these pissant civilians are. The signature feature of our permanent governing classes is to believe in the brilliance of all experts like themselves, and to hold in contempt real expertise and the public. That’s why little men like Pradip can’t abide their bosses, the politicians, or the people. It’s an ancient vice, this conceit of the technocrats.”
”I know it too well, Gaétan.” LeClerc harrumphs. “It has a military analogue.”
“Indeed.”
“What if Briand stood for election as Party Leader, against Robert Hoare? Why, surely in this crisis he’d win the vote of every thinking person in his Party and across the wider Union!”
“I’m sure he would, Junior. It still wouldn’t be enough. He needs to win a majority.”
LeClerc snorts in dark amusement. Contempt for the political class and for the judgment of the average Union voter is an old brick in the foundation of their shared views and friendship.
“Forget the politicians! It’s like pissing in a violin! Tell me Gaétan, how bad are things?”
“The Imperium is rearming, rapidly and massively. Beyond anything we anticipated. It looks like they’ve been at it full bore and in secret for ten years at least. Possibly twice as long, since just after the Dowager Empress Mary Oetkert died and her son Pyotr took full control.”
“Good gods! Ten years? Twenty?”
“We had early reports, but you know how it is. We filed them away and forgot them. We ignored new ones. We wanted to disbelieve the bad news. Wanted to believe in the Long Peace and all that rubbish. I confess, I’m as guilty as the PM. I should’ve known, done much more.”
“We all should’ve done more, Gaétan.” There’s profound regret in Maçon’s deep blue eyes and in LeClerc’s plain brown ones. Both men fear that their own failure means the coming war could be lost already, before it starts.
“Well, gods help us, we’ll pay for our willful blindness soon enough. For it’s all beyond concealing now. They hit critical mass this year. Grün garrison worlds are bursting with troops and heavy weps, their space ports and elevator wharves hum with transports and warships. Their whole economy is bent to military production. The Imperium is no longer a normal state with an army, it’s an army with an empire attached. A giant barracks bulging for war. Aggressive war.”
“We’re not so weak ourselves, Gaétan, even given their secret build-up.”
“No, but the Imperium is ahead in all categories of land-to-air-to-orbit assault and even training, and it’s gaining combat experience in the Krevan War. Our main advantage is still the Fleet. Yet even the Kaigun is challenging the NCU, especially in production of phantoms.”
“Why worry about little ships like phantoms? You’re the navy man not me, Gaétan, but I was always told that capital ships, our battleships especially, are the most important.”
“We’ll see. There are some theorists on Kars who think a new naval war won’t be at all like the last one, that the long age of capital warships is over. That war fleets must get smaller and more stealthy to control or deny access to the major space lanes. Don’t look at me like that! You know how I feel about theory, a gram of action’s worth a ton of theory. A neutron ton.”
“I had enough theory thrust down me at the Academy to last more than a lifetime, and even more in each and every holo-briefing I ever sat through.”
“And since then, too, Gaspard.”
“Peacetime military are just like the professors, full of unproven theories and puffed with their own authority. And both are in little or no danger of being challenged by anyone listening.”
“War changes everything, Gaétan, except theories. Analysts both military and civilian will cling to their favorite bad ideas long after this war is fought and over, facts be damned.”
“NCU is locked-in by the brilliant strategic theories of our Kars School, the same superior minds who’ve been misdirecting ship design and procurement policies for decades.”
“How many farting sideways theorists will be on perfectly conceived ships with you when the shooting war starts?” LeClerc emits a bitter grunt.
“Merde! What can I say? Theorists!”
It’s a recurring theme in their conversations, many times repeated, as comfortable and familiar to both as an old robe worn while drinking hot tea in a steaming Barda flower garden.
“Still, I worry that Kaigun admirals came to the same conclusion as our Kars theorists. They’re openly building big battlewagons for deterrence and old-fashioned stand-off fights, as are we. But their new ship production, which they hid from us for years, is a host of phantoms.”
“To what end? I thought phantoms were no more than in-and-out commerce raiders?”
“That was their traditional role. But our analysts think the Kaigun means to use them in swarming ‘fleet reduction actions,’ to attrit or cripple our capital ships before they engage with theirs. After that, they’ll turn the phantoms loose on our merchant marine, hiding out at every LP and system choke point.”
“So, they get two-for-one strategically, and a lot more bang for the production credit.”
“Exactly. We haven’t even seen full war fleet concentration by the Kaigun in the Krevan War. The United Planets are a little power with a little navy. They didn’t have enough big ships to offer a fleet-to-fleet battle. And the few big ones they had are all blown up or away by now.”
“What about other classes, the smaller ones, but bigger than phantoms?”
“And you say you’re not a navy man? We’re still OK in attack boats, frigates, destroyers, and light and medium cruisers. And we can build out that element of the Fleet pretty fast. The lag time from laying down keels to breaking space in heavy cruisers and battleships is two USY, more than triple what we need for light cruisers. Quintuple that of fast destroyers. We have some pretty revolutionary ideas for rapid production of ice-carriers carved out of reinforced comets, but that’s still at concept stage. Overall, production’s lagging in all capital warship classes.”
“I didn’t know it was that bad with the Navy.”
“It’d be worse if not for the work Georges is doing at MoD and in the Lok Sabra. What about the ACU? Gaspard, are you boys in the Union Army doing any better?”
“I won’t sugarcoat it. Analysis of initial ground combat reports shared by KRA intel are deeply worrisome. They confirm that on Genève, Brno, Lwów, and attacks on the ice-moons of Aral the locusts use
d dynamic breakthrough tactics that were new and damned effective.”
“How effective?”
“Enough that they put most of our current planetside defenses at risk.”
“Sacre bleu! You can adjust doctrine, non? Become more dynamic, too, now that the ACU has these Krevan after-action reports and knows what’s coming?”
“It’s not as easy as that. All our divisions have trained in the old doctrine, the old tactics. It would be like telling a southpaw puncher, right before his championship no-gravity match, to forget all his training and magnetic-footwork ‘cause in this fight he can hit only with his right.”
“It’s the same with us in NCU. You can’t expect to change established naval tactics and doctrine and our training overnight, let alone ship design, capabilities and production lag times. We’re just going to have to fight with whatever we have when this war starts. I mean, if it starts.”