by Steve White
"You fools," he said coldly, and the Assembly recoiled, for no one spoke to them in that flat, bitingly contemptuous tone! Dieter felt their anger and let it feed his own as he leaned into the pickup.
"Can't you see what this means? Are you all so blind you can't recognize reality just because it happens to clash with your comfortable image of yourselves as the last bright hope of humanity? By God, you don't deserve to survive! Think of the date, you idiots! Task Force Seventeen mutinied five months ago! Who knows what's happened since?"
His words shattered the rising anger like a lightning bolt. They'd lived with the reality of the Fringe's slow communications all their lives, had learned to use their faster communications for ruthless advantage, yet until he threw the date in their faces, they hadn't even considered the time element. But now the implications were before them, and their palms were suddenly slick with fear.
"Yes," Dieter sneered. "It takes a long time for courier drones to come that far—and who knows where other drones were sent? We have one from a single unit of the task force. Do you seriously think that was the only drone launched? Do you seriously think other Fleet units haven't heard by now? Sixty percent of the Fleet is Fringer. Sixty percent. Can none of you understand what that means? We don't have the numerical advantage in the civil war you've provoked—they do!"
His words unleashed the ugly, snarling pandemonium of terror. For over a year, he'd hammered away, warning them, pleading with them, and all but a minority had ignored him. They controlled the Fleet. They spoke with their every word backed by the suppressive might of the Federation's military. And now, suddenly, they saw the nightmare at last, and the man who'd warned them, who'd earned their contempt for his weakness, had been right all along.
Dieter's voice thundered above the tumult.
"Yes! Yes flog the Fringe! Ignore their legitimate complaints! Call them barbarians because they're more honest, more desperate than you are! And now see what you've created! God help me, I helped you do it—now I must bear the same guilt as you, and the thought makes me sick."
"But what are we going to do?" someone yelled. "My God, what are we going to do?"
"Do?" Dieter sneered down at him. "What do you think we're going to do? We're going to fight. We're going to fight to save what we can, because we have no choice, because the only alternative is the utter destruction of the Federation—that's what we're going to do. But understand this, all of you! The days of contempt for the Fringe are over. Fight them, yes. But never, never call them 'barbarians' again! Because, ladies and gentlemen, if they really are barbarians, we're doomed."
His words plunged them back into silence. A fearful, lingering silence.
"We're doomed because they have Task Force Seventeen, ladies and gentlemen, and by now they have other ships. By the time we can get our own courier drones to the Fringe, they may have all of Frontier Fleet—perhaps even the Zephrain Fleet base." He felt the sudden whiplash of terror that thought woke in the delegates who knew what it meant, but he hammered the point mercilessly home. "I know what that means, and so should you. Weapons research in the data base of Zephrain Research and Development Station. Research on weapons which may outclass anything this galaxy has ever seen—and it lies in the Fringe, ladies and gentlemen, not in the Innerworlds." He glared at them, and his voice was cold.
"And if they act as what you've called them—if they truly are barbarians and choose to seek vengeance rather than relief—they will not use those ships and weapons in self-defense. Oh, no, ladies and gentlemen! If the Fringers are barbarians, you will find those ships here, striking the Innerworlds, and you will find those weapons turning your precious planets into cinders." He hissed the last word, and its chill ran through his audience like a wind.
"So get down on your knees," he finished. "Get down on your knees and pray you were wrong."
He cut the connection with a contemptuous flick. Silence roared about him, and he was heartsick and frightened, yet he could almost feel Fionna at his shoulder, and knew he had finally paid the first installment on his debt.
A bell chimed.
Dieter looked up and saw what he'd known he would. Simon Taliaferro was pressing for recognition, his shoulders hunched, his face bitter. He had no choice but to respond, and Dieter knew that if his security showed the tiniest chink, he himself was a dead man.
"The Chair," Haley said, "recognizes the Assemblyman from Galloway's World."
Taliaferro appeared on the screen, and his face shocked Dieter. The compelling strength had waned, and the arrogance was mixed with desperation. It struck him suddenly that Taliaferro had actually never considered this possibility. That he, too, had missed the significance of the drone's date. That he'd brushed aside Dieter's warnings about the Fleet simply because his blind, overweening confidence had never considered the chance of failure.
But though Dieter might hate him, Simon Taliaferro had cut his way to power with courage as well as conspiracy, and he gathered his shaken will to respond.
"Ladies and Gentlemen of the Assembly," he began, his formal courtesy somehow pathetic after Dieter's contempt. "My friends. The Assemblyman for New Zurich—" he drew a deep breath. "The Assemblyman for New Zurich may be right. Perhaps we have lost more Fleet units since the . . . mutiny. But it changes nothing. Nothing!" He shouted the last word, and suddenly he seemed to find fresh strength. Dieter recognized the signs. Like himself, Taliaferro was unleashing his anger, letting fury sustain him.
"We are still the Federation, and they are still barbarians! Even if they have every ship in Frontier Fleet, even if they have every dispersed unit of Battle Fleet—even if they have the Zephrain Fleet base itself!—what of it? Before they can injure us, they must come to us, ladies and gentlemen! They must fight their way through Fortress Command. They must deal with the remaining strength of Battle Fleet. They must deal with the Reserve, ladies and gentlemen. Fifty percent of Battle Fleet—fifty percent—is in mothballs! How will they deal with that when we mobilize it? Even if they have Zephrain, surely the base personnel—personnel rigorously screened for loyalty and integrity—destroyed the facilities before they could be taken! And what will they use for shipyards? They have only a few, scattered repair bases and small civilian yards. We hold the Fleet shipyards! We hold the major construction facilities!"
Dieter felt the shaken Assembly take courage from Taliaferro's words. Couldn't they recognize the counsel of despair when they heard it?!
"Let them come against us, ladies and gentlemen! It will prove that I was right—that we were right—when we called them barbarians! Driven to it? Poppycock! This is a coldly calculated act of treason. This is—must be—the end product of a long and careful conspiracy! We have driven them to nothing—but we will drive them. We will drive them to destruction and retribution! Our worlds are safe behind our fortifications, their worlds will lie open to our attack when the Fleet is fully mobilized! Let us teach them the true meaning of war, my friends! Let us cauterize this cancer of conspiracy in the only way they understand—with the flames of war and iron determination!"
It took all Dieter's strength to keep his dismay from his face. He'd shaken Taliaferro, but the Gallowayan was rallying his forces, and without the Outworlds not even a unified bloc of Heart Worlds and the few Corporate World moderates could fight the political steamroller Taliaferro controlled.
"And if it is a long war, what of it?" Taliaferro demanded hotly. "We have fought long wars before and come back to victory. We will do it again! We have the strength to crush these traitors—it is only a matter of mobilizing that strength! My friends! As chief of delegation for Galloway's World, I place the combined building capacity of the Jamieson Archipelago—the greatest concentration of industrial might in the Galaxy—unreservedly at the service of the Terran Federation! Let us see how the rebels like that!"
A roar greeted his words—the desperate roar of a panicked crowd which suddenly sees salvation. Dieter hammered his call button, but Taliaferro ignored him as
he ignored Speaker Haley's urgent, amplified pleas for calm, smiling fiercely out at the shouting, clapping delegates. He'd done it. He'd salvaged victory and his career from the very teeth of disaster.
And in that moment of heady political triumph, the sealed doors flew open and the Sergeant at Arms raced down the aisle, followed by the red cloak of the Lictor General. A shockwave of quiet fanned out from them, and Taliaferro's fierce grin faded as he saw them.
The two men hurled themselves up the steps to Haley's side, and only later did Dieter come to recognize the blind providence—or the brilliance of David Haley—which had left the Speaker's mike open. Every ear in the Chamber of Worlds heard the message the Lictor General gasped into Haley's ear.
"A message from Galloway's World, sir! It-it's terrible! Skywatch HQ is gone! A dozen destroyers blown apart! And the Jamieson Archipelago!"
"What about the Archipelago?" Haley's question was sharp.
"Gone, sir! The yards, the Fleet base, half the Reservation—just . . . gone, sir. It was a nuclear strike. . . ."
The Lictor General's voice trailed off as he realized the microphone at his elbow was live, but no one noticed. Every eye was on Simon Taliaferro as he swayed, his swarthy face pale, his eyes blank, and stumbled silently away.
ATROCITY
The furrows stretched out behind Fedor Kazin's lurching tractor—miles and miles of furrows, hungry for Terran wheat, waiting for spikeweed sprigs. The one to feed Innerworld bellies, he thought sourly, and the other to liven their dreams, and which did they value more, eh?
Yet whatever they paid him, it wouldn't be enough . . . again. Not with the shipping fees those Corporate World vlasti extorted from the Fringe. For thirty years he'd harvested his wheat and spikebalm, and still he was perpetually in debt to the shipping lines.
He glanced up at the clouds. His grandfather had always claimed Novaya Rodina's steppes were almost as beautiful as Old Russia's, but for the color of the sky. Fedor wouldn't know; he'd seen only recordings from the motherworld, and he'd always suspected they touched the things up a little—surely no sky could be that blue!—but he knew his own sky well. He only hoped he finished his plowing before the storm struck.
Thoughts of the weather turned his mind to the storm ripping through the entire Federation. He couldn't believe the tales coming out of Novaya Petrograd! Did those madmen think they were all back in the days of the tsar? That the Federation was run by Rasputin? And who were they, these men who called themselves 'Kadets' once more? Kerensky? Trotsky? Fedor had no more love for the Corporate Worlds than the next man, but the Federation was the Federation! It had risen from the flames of Old Terra's Great Eastern War and reached out to the stars, protecting its people as it placed them on worlds light-years from their birthworld. It was the Federation of Howard Anderson and Ivan Antonov. Four centuries it had stood—what were a hundred years or so of mistakes against that? And Novaya Rodinans were Russians: they knew a thing or two about endurance.
But these crazy Kadets—! Madness! Even if they succeeded, where would his wheat go? There had to be some form of foreign exchange—and who in the Fringe needed foodstuffs? What Fringe farming world could sell Novaya Rodina the manufactured goods she needed?
So Fedor plowed and sowed, for the day would come when the crazy men realized they couldn't succeed. It might be necessary to chastise them a little first, but in the end the Federation would take them back. And when it did, Fedor Kazin would have a crop ready, by God!
He looked up as thunder muttered and the squall line in the east swept closer. He wasn't going to finish today after all: best to stop at the end of this furrow and head home. 'Tasha would have supper waiting.
* * *
Pieter Tsuchevsky looked around the quiet room at his fellow Kadets. So this was how it felt to be a rebel. He'd never really wanted to be one. He doubted any of the others had. But it was inevitable for those who controlled the old government to call their opponents "rebels." He'd known that from the start, just as he'd known where his first public expressions of discontent might lead.
They'd led here—to the men and women who had declared themselves the new Duma of Novaya Rodina and stated their determination to withdraw from the Federation . . . not without fear and trembling. There was something almost holy about the Federation, but a government was only a government, and surely its function must be to make the lives of its people better, not worse. The purpose of an elective assembly couldn't be to murder its own members!
Pieter had never met Fionna MacTaggart, but he'd corresponded with her over the light-years, and even from her recorded messages he'd felt the intelligence and determination which had made her the Fringe's leader. Had she done her job too well? Was murder the fate small minds always reserved for great minds they could not silence? He didn't know, but from the morning the news arrived, he'd known the Federation was doomed. Anything that rotten at its core deserved to die, and die it would.
If only communications were less chaotic! Novaya Rodina had never had a relay system, and courier drones had become notoriously unreliable since the Kontravian Mutiny. No doubt many nav beacons had been shut down or destroyed, but it went further than that. The Corporate Worlds handled a tremendous percentage of the total drone traffic, just as they monopolized the freight lanes. Almost certainly they were tampering with the drones to keep the "rebels" disorganized.
Well, if he were in their position, he would probably do the same. But in the meantime, it left him with the devil of a problem! He cleared his throat, and the eyes around the table returned to his face.
"So there you have it, comrades," he said slowly. "The Federation has declared martial law and suspended habeas corpus . . . among other rights. And we—you and I, my friends—we are all rebels." He shrugged. "For myself, I realized this must come, but possibly some of you did not. So it is only fair that we reconsider what we have done, I think. We have made our gesture, voiced our protest. Is that all we wish to do? If so, we had best dispatch a courier drone with apologies and renewed protestations of loyalty at once! But if we do not, if we continue as we have begun to follow the lead of the Kontravians, God alone knows where we shall end."
"Pieter," Magda Petrovna stroked her prematurely silvering hair, "you say you knew this would come. Do you think we were all fools, Pieter Petrovich?" She smiled in gentle mockery. "How noble of you to give us a choice! But tell us—what will you do when we all run crying home to babushka Terra?"
A soft laugh ran around the table, and Pieter smiled unwillingly; but he also shook his head.
"This is no laughing matter, Magda. This is life and death. Oh, we hold the cities and universities, but the farmers and ranchers think we're mad. They won't raise a hand if it comes to a fight—and we've little chance of defeating the Federation if they would!"
"Mega shit!" The tart remark could come only from one man, and Pieter's eyes twinkled as he turned to Semyon Jakov, the single megaovis rancher in their Duma. The old man's blue eyes were fiery as he puffed his walrus mustache, looking as fierce as one of his huge, vaguely sheep-like herdbeasts. "No way we could beat the Federation, no," he snapped, "but we won't be fighting the Federation—only an Innerworld rump, and well you know it, Pieter Petrovich Tsuchevsky! And they won't even have the full Navy. Damnation, man, the Kontravians took a task force—a task force—in one snap! D'you honestly think they haven't lost more ships? I wouldn't be surprised to hear they've lost half the Fleet by now, Pieter!"
"True, Semyon, but Novaya Rodina is no Navy base. There were no ships for us to seize; it was pure luck Skywatch supported us. They could've blown our leaky old tubs out of space—and those are still the best ships we can scare up. No, Semyon Illyich, whatever the Kontravians may have taken, we can't fight what the Federation can send here."
"But why send anything?" Tatiana Illushina asked plaintively. "We're not exactly the richest of the Fringe Worlds!"
"No, Tatiana," Magda said gently, "but we are what the Fleet manuals call a 'choke p
oint.'" The others listened carefully. Semyon Jakov had been a Marine for fifteen years, but Magda had reached the rank of captain in Frontier Fleet before resigning in protest.
"A choke point?" Tatiana asked.
"An especially valuable warp nexus," Magda explained. "The way the warp lines lie, some systems control access to several others. The Corporate Worlds are mostly on early choke points of the Federation. That's why they're so powerful; every ship to the Heart Worlds has to go through choke points they control." Tatiana nodded. When it came to the economic implications of the Corporate Worlds' galactic position, every Fringe schoolchild understood.
"Well, the same thing makes choke points militarily important," Magda said "If Novaya Rodina goes over to the Kontravians, we'll block a whole section of the Fringe off from the Federation; they'll have to take this system before they can attack the others. But if we remain loyal to the Federation, the Fleet will have several possible avenues of attack into Fringe space to choose from, you see?"
"But . . . but in that case, they're certain to come here—aren't they?" Tatiana asked very quietly.
"They are," Pieter told her gently, "and soon, I think. They wouldn't have sent this—" he waved the official message form gently "—if they didn't mean to back it up. There's some pretty stiff language in here; if they planned on talking us back into the Federation, they'd've taken a more flexible initial position."
"I agree," Semyon said harshly, "and I say—fuck 'em! Let them come! There's twenty million people on this planet. It'd take half the Corps to hold us down!"
"Except that only eight million or so of them are actively on our side," Pieter begun, but Magda interrupted.
"It doesn't matter anyway, Semyon Illyich," she said with an affectionate smile. "Just because you grunts spend your time crawling around in the mud doesn't mean the Fleet does! They don't care about planets, only warp points and the normal space between them."