By Dawn's Early Light

by Jason Fuesting

  "Did you know the first nuclear technology tests were accomplished a bit over five hundred years ago? By their calendar, the 1930s? They barely suspected what atoms were less than thirty years before that, but thirty years later they were splitting them. And then what? Fear. Radiation is horrible! Of course it is, cretins, but it's everywhere, what are you going to do, outlaw life? Of course they will. They did, more or less. Tried to anyway. Idiots."

  At the confluence of tears and lashing out, Turing's rant ground to a sputtering halt.

  "Okay?" Eric asked. "That doesn’t make any sense. Why would they do that?"

  Turing sighed before continuing in a much quieter tone, "Half of us are too stupid to see reason and lash out like idiot children. At least a quarter are merely masquerading as adults for their own benefit. It's like it isn't that we can't learn, but most choose not to. They choose not to and haven't for hundreds of years. None of this has changed, Eric. Not in five hundred years. From the merest glimmer of understanding to splitting the atom in fifty years. About a decade later, weaponized fusion. And then what? It's too dangerous. Cowards and simpletons. That's why it took you another century to make practical fusion. Too dangerous. And yet those cowards rule us now. They won, Eric. Welcome to the Protectorate. There's no place for 'man' in humanity, only children to be coddled and kept in line while their masters live stolen lives."

  Turing picked up the bottle of Irish whiskey next to him and twisted at the top several times before he realized the cap was already off. He shook his head and took a slug straight from the bottle. "History's a wreck, Eric. Our ancestors made it so, but have we managed any better? No? How could they have been such fools? How could we be such fools?"

  “Okay, what’s this about, Turing? What did you find in that file that’s gotten you riled up enough to drink?”

  “The key. It’s lies. All of it. Fucking lies. Everything I grew up believing was right in the world. All of it. All of it, Eric,” Turing growled and then pounded his hand on the desk. “All. Of. It. How can one champion the truth if everything you know is built on lies? How can you be any better than the liars?”

  “I got that much, Turing. Care to expand instead of repeating yourself?”

  Turing sputtered and then looked mortified. He coughed into his hand a few times.

  “The file was filled with more old journals, photos. Stuff that my forebearers refused to delete as ordered but couldn’t talk about. I found out how this all started, Eric, the files go back to before the Protectorate was even an idea.”

  “Now that is interesting. Go on.”

  “It took me a bit to put it all together. The Protectorate claims to be the only source of good left in this galaxy, but it’s simply not true. Sure, we do some good, but our system of government, it’s built on lies. Do you know what the Protectorate’s official stance on the Confederacy is?”

  “Not a clue.”

  “They’re planets the Protectorate couldn’t afford to keep. The people too unproductive, too unruly to keep in line. We had no choice but to let the heathens go or they would have dragged us down. The average citizen thinks the Confederacy is populated with backwards, lazy cretins languishing under their own lack of work ethic. The Accorded territories? Same story, but we’re told they’re better off than the Confederacy, more like us and less like them. You pirates are all savages, scourges of the stars living like jackals off the corpses and refuse of your betters.”

  “Well, that’s mildly insulting.”

  Turing finally managed a rakish grin.

  “Eric, the Accorded territories exist because the Protectorate’s last push to take back the Confederacy failed. They spent themselves into oblivion and couldn’t prosecute the war any further. They lost billions of lives along with countless ships and dozens of exterminated planets. They ended up suing for peace. That was just over a hundred years ago.”

  “Okay, I didn’t know that.”

  “No, but your average Confed citizen probably does. Here, only the Inner Party knows. Our government operates with extensive information controls, Eric. Why?”

  Eric shrugged and said, “I’m too tired to play intellectual games right now, Turing.”

  “Because the system would implode the moment people found out they’d been conned, that the entire thing is rigged. I suspected as much when I was younger. My family fell from favor before I was let in on the secret. Now? I have proof. So much proof. All the dirty little secrets.”

  “The hundred years or so before the Accords, war would sweep across the stars every twenty or thirty years. Protectorate or the Confeds, someone would get impatient and fleets would sail.” Turing snorted. “Sorry, I find it funny we still use the term even though a surface naval engagement hasn’t been fought in over three hundred years.”

  Eric nodded. “I can see the humor.”

  “So, the Protectorate of two hundred years ago was twice the size it is now in number of planets, Eric. The Confederacy three times as many. Populations even larger. Can you imagine? We controlled sixty eight systems to the Confederacy’s sixty. And over two hundred years we bombed out seventy four planets. Seventy four. That’s not counting moons or orbitals. Think of all those lives snuffed out, gone. Those systems? Where do you think the Reach came from? It’s a graveyard, all of it.”

  Contemplating the scale of the destruction turned Eric’s stomach. He found himself dropping into one of the chairs in front of Turing’s desk. Turing poured himself a drink and then paused. The man pushed the crystal tumbler of amber fire towards Eric and pulled another tumbler from a drawer.

  “Now you start to see it,” Turing said, filling the second tumbler. “But I’m not done, this is just the barest outline. That’s not why I started drinking. Concerning, yes, but not something to yank the carpet out from under you.”

  “Okay, so what was, Turing? Not trying to be an ass, but asking the same question over and over again gets tedious.”

  “Oh, right then. Sorry. What’s worse than finding out how heavily edited our histories are? Finding out the motives, the real motives behind why the Inner Party did what they did. It’s not just that it was all lies. Anyone should assume the moment a politician’s mouth starts moving that he’s lying. No, you see, the war against the Confederacy? That was all a distraction.”

  Eric’s whiskey caught in his throat. He beat on his chest as the drink tried to burn its way out.

  Eric’s eyebrows narrowed and he asked, “From what?”

  Turing snorted.

  “A distraction for the common people. The Inner Party came up with propaganda to rile them up against the Confederacy.”

  “To distract them from what?”

  “Earth.”

  Eric sat there, blinking.

  “I’m not following.”

  “You were right, Eric. I was wrong. Earth is dangerous. I-I guess it’d make more sense if I started at the beginning. Context tends to help. The Protectorate of today isn’t the original incarnation. Today, we are the Protectorate of Man, the last bastion of civilization amidst the stars bravely fighting against the dying of the light as it were. Before the wars, before the second round of pogroms, mass exterminations, and executions, we had the People’s Protectorate of Mankind, breaker of chains, savior of the enslaved, liberator and champion of the oppressed. That’s what they claimed anyway. Neither version was better in terms of exterminations. The modern one though? Better focused, I suppose. The People’s Protectorate of Mankind became today’s Protectorate of Man, not slowly over the course of decades, but in the space of a few short years. And it all started with a single event.”

  Following Turing’s lead Eric poured more whiskey down his throat.

  “Before that day, the Protectorate controlled all of space, but keep in mind I say controlled in the loosest sense. What’s known as the Confederacy was considered a semi-autonomous territory of sorts then. Systems that were being brought under our wing after being lost to the darkness for so long, if you would. With
force when necessary, I’ll add. Now, know this, Earth had been under embargo for almost a century when the current Protectorate rose to power.” Turing coughed. “I’ll get to that in a bit, but Earth was embargoed. The Protectorate fleet swept the system regularly, much like here. Nothing space faring was permitted, landings and communications were closely monitored. And then the fleet monitoring Sol and four populated planets ceased to be such. Populated, in the case of the planets, that is. Multiple fusion devices evaporated major population centers, orbitals vanished in similar flashes of light. The State Security Bureau interrupted the group who’d tried to make Unity planet number five. It seems Earth had sent a message.”

  Horrified, Eric knocked back what remained in his tumbler and poured himself another as Turing chuckled darkly.

  “Still, no one but the Inner Party heard that message. The average citizen heard that extremists in the Confederacy conducted the attack and that meant war. Behind closed doors, the Protectorate conceded Sol to the new masters of Earth and agreed to a treaty forbidding us from the system in exchange for no further attacks.”

  “But why? That’s stupid. They could have just glassed the planet.”

  “I know. They probably should have, but from what my forebears wrote, the Bureau of State Security couldn’t be sure they’d caught them all. The Inner Party wouldn’t risk losing more than they already had. And what’s sick is that no one outside the Inner Party knew. It was easier for the Party to blame the innocent than it was to own up to their failure. Easier to blame the people of the Confederacy to distract from what really happened. Billions died for their arrogance. Worse yet, the war of false retribution nearly turned into a civil war, and by the end of it, after the denunciations and chaos settled, only a quarter of the Inner Party remained. Billions more were purged, we lost more citizens by our own hands than we did to the Confederacy.

  “Today’s tradition of being unusually efficient fools must have started then. In all that, they did manage to get around to purging the citizenry of the Earth-based death cult behind the attacks from our systems. Under the cover of night, of course. Well, insomuch as one can do that while murdering twelve billion people. Can’t have the average citizen questioning things, can we?”

  Stupefied, Eric sputtered and asked, “Twelve billion?”

  “Twelve billion. When the dust had settled from the first war, they sent a fleet back to Earth. It was never heard from again. Another planet vanished, another four billion lives. They never tried it again.”

  “Wait, I thought you said they purged those cultists?” Eric asked.

  “I did,” Turing replied dryly.

  “But how did that planet get bombed?”

  “Nobody knows.”

  “Oh. Well shit.”

  “It’s possible my interpretation of the timelines might be incorrect, some of the writing is fragmented quite badly. Not every file is original, some are recovery attempts from corrupted files.”

  “That’s sick, Turing,” Eric said and Turing chuckled. “What?”

  “That’s not the worst of it. What’s truly sick is that none of this had to happen,” Turing said.

  “Well, of course not.”

  “No, I don’t think you follow. Don’t take this like I’m telling you that humanity consisted of only the purest angels before the People’s Protectorate came to be, because it wasn’t. Far from it, in fact. However, for the people who came to be Inner Party, they had to destroy the old order to build a new one to their liking.

  “Before the old Protectorate, all these planets were Earth colonies. Earth didn’t have a unified government, it had many different nations with almost as many outlooks on life. An unheard of diversity in thought by our standards, though I suppose it wasn’t much different than how the Confederacy operates today. In the Protectorate today though, there is only the party line. Things weren’t quite so different in some of the countries then. Some were run nigh identically as we are, but in effect you had dozens, hundreds of party lines globally. Only a handful of them mattered though.

  “The major players fell into two major blocs. You had the western nations on one side, the United Kingdom, its client states, and the United States, conveniently a former colony of the UK. On the other, you had the Russian Federation and China, who spent no small effort trying to differentiate between each other, but for all their outward bickering they were close allies.”

  “I won’t bore you with the details, I’ll copy you the files sometime so you can read yourself, but suffice it to say those two groups were the only two that mattered in the big picture. The western states prided themselves on the ideals of liberty, even if they weren’t near as devout as they were earlier in their history. The Eastern states only cared about control. Does this sound familiar?”

  “It sounds like today,” Eric commented. Turing gave a quiet clap.

  “Point for you. The more things change, the more they stay the same.”

  “So the Confederacy today is the successor for the Western states?”

  “Surprisingly, or maybe not as surprisingly, really. Most of the Confederacy’s dominant cultures are descended from those very states or their neighbors. One of them is technically not a descendant if what I’ve read is true. One of the UK royal family happened to be visiting what we now know as the British Systems when the Protectorate struck.”

  “Then the Protectorate came from the Eastern states?

  “In a manner of speaking. Unity was originally called Novaya Moskva.”

  “I hear the caveat in your voice. What gives?”

  “Well, the Eastern states had locked down on their colonies fiercely, mostly on information control at first. Trade restrictions followed as the colonies built themselves up and could compete with their native lands. Now, you have to understand that these Eastern states were separate nations with a shared ideology. Both of these Eastern cultures loved the strong man and were infatuated with the State.

  “The biggest difference between the two ideological bases, the East and the West, revolves around a very simple concept: who owns you?”

  “Well, nobody does.”

  Turing nodded sagely and sipped his drink.

  “Spoken like a Westerner. To the West, the individual was the highest authority and they only answered to whichever deity they worshipped. The State derived its power from the consent of the governed. To the East, the State was the highest authority. The individual lived only to further the interests of the state. No more, no less.”

  Eric wrinkled his nose and drank from his tumbler.

  “Most of the Eastern ideology used the words of a man by the name of Marx as its foundation. For Marx’s followers, everything was oppression, everything was struggle even when it wasn’t. There was literally no other valid interpretation in their eyes. Much like today, if you challenged the party line, you were branded with whatever labels were necessary to shut you up and then disposed of. Would you be surprised that a non-trivial number in the West worshiped the man’s ideas as well? This one of the chief reasons the West had as many issues as it did, that and the Marxists were sadly much better at the propaganda game. Easier and more effective to convince people they were oppressed and someone owed them then to tell a man that his woes were his own making or that the only person who could save him is himself.

  “Either way, you can see how control by the Eastern states chafed the citizens of their colonies, yes?

  Eric nodded.

  “So over the course of time, there came a conspiracy amongst the Eastern colonies. Technically nothing major at first considering they couldn’t do anything about their positions but fume. That and their parent states kept a close eye on them. Or thought they did.”

  “Yeah, I’m not seeing how this turns into the fall of civilization,” Eric prompted.

  Turing gave a dark smile and quietly said, “Enter my forebearers and Turing Interstellar, the largest shipping and industrial conglomerate in the West. Secret channels were formed, promises
made, bribes paid, and one day, as far as a citizen on Earth was concerned, the world ended.”

  Turing shook his head at Eric’s lack of reaction.

  “Turing Interstellar had connections to every major industry that existed. You’d have to in order to achieve market dominance the way they had. They also had a supply of massive old, mothballed ships they’d never gotten around to quite scrapping yet. Under the auspices of a holding company, one of their ventures bought old ships, another refitted them. Some of them were legitimately resold, but a large number of them were converted for a variety of uses. In a company that big, even things as big as starships can fall through the cracks. And they did. Purposefully.

  “The primary refit the conspirators made to these ‘lost’ ships essentially created large drone fireships. A fireship’s only goal in life is to get close to a target, ramming it if possible, and detonate. Ships like that took out most of the main orbitals in Sol. Shipyards, military docks, vessels. A surprising percentage of Earth’s forces were neutralized by an empty hull stripped of everything but the necessary operating components. Financially speaking, it was genius. Hell, from an intelligence standpoint, it was genius. Nobody saw it coming because the number of people involved were kept to a minimum. As for the military side, it must have been a terrible thing to pour fire into an oncoming vessel and it simply kept coming despite the fusillade.

  “Eh, I digress. Eventually they needed people. They needed someone to conduct the negotiations. While the orbitals were burning up on reentry, Earth governments were informed that their signed capitulations were to be submitted within the hour. Four nations objected. Care to guess which four?”

  “That’s fairly obvious.”

  “True. Most of inhabited China disappeared under orbital bombardment ten minutes after the deadline. A bit over two billion people gone in minutes. The early Protectorate had a thing about quantity. The Americans responded with surface to orbit weaponry. Took out a decent number of ships before they were EMPed and the ten most populous cities vaporized. The Russian Federation submitted five minutes later. The United Kingdom, seven.”