The Hall darkened. The holodisplay showed the recording from the bridge of the Isandhlwana, and then the recordings from the bridge of the Anaximander. Each time, FEU ships appeared out of the warp gate, opened fire with torpedoes, took defensive xraser fire from the SLPSDF, and retreated back through the warp gate, seemingly little the worse for wear. The display records rolled through to completion. That was that, Sandra thought. Now her two superiors would gossip with their peers, raid the buffet, compare notes with local experts, and she would wait until they were ready to fly back to Rutland.
Chapter 3
"For centuries, total isolation worked most splendidly for my great-great-grandfather's Japanese homeland, as it did for the Kingdom of Korea across the sea from us. It brought our homelands peace, prosperity, and civic excellence. Isolationism failed for our ancestral homelands only when they allowed themselves to fall behind the march of progress. Well, we Americans are smarter than they were. We also have the most excellent invention of Professor Pondey Pontefract, the continental electronic thermalization screen that thermalizes electronic and optical signals attempting to pass our borders. More important, we have the historical lesson from my forefathers and my Vice President's forefathers to serve as examples of what we should not do. It is therefore my great privilege and honor to sign into law this wise and noble legislation, which guarantees the eternal safety of our glorious Republic."
...Sean Ishimoto, President of the United States
Remarks to Vice President Kimberly Kim while signing the
Total Extermination of Foreign Intercourse Act,
July 4, 2052
THE MEYER RESIDENCE
ABRAHAM, LINCOLN, ALPHA CENTAURI
April 19, 2174, 5:15 AM Lincoln Standard Time (LST)
State Senator Alphonse Humbert Meyer stood in his dressing room, arms outstretched, waiting as house servots pulled the last drapes of his cape into place. It was a thoroughly indecent hour of the morning, a solid three hours before he usually rose, but the emergency allowed no alternative. As it was, he had received the emergency message hours earlier, ascertained when his Committee could possibly meet, and set his awaking as late as practicable.
Servots had washed his back, completed his manicure, shaved his skin to silken smoothness, and cut every one of his greying hairs to precisely the stylist's computed length. The dressing servot had hoisted him into trousers and jacket, trimmed every ruffle and puff on the sleeves, tied his shoes, ensured his spectacles were clean, and properly polished the inset diamonds in the silver frames. There was no substitute for each morning's attendance to one's dress by a houseful of servots. There were on the other hand modern substitutes for eyeglasses, but 'Forgive me while I switch to my reading glasses' had more than once paralyzed the Committee while he gathered his thoughts.
His fellow Senators, even those from closer to Abraham than his native New Cairo, made do with simple gowns and dress capes, perhaps amplified by a few tasteful pieces of jewelry. He had his insignia--only on occasion did he think of it as his slave-chain-of-office. He reached to his dresser, briefly reverenced the metalwork, and lowered it about his head. Massive square gold links fell heavily atop his cape. The silver seal lay squarely upon his chest. Servots fussily tweaked his cape again. Chair of the Committee, I am, he thought to himself, Chair of the Joint Committee on War. And, ex officio, that other job relating to the Public Armed Forces of Lincoln, or at least those Public Armed Forces that the eleven states of Lincoln assign to the Joint Committee.
His skull tingled. Micronites were faithfully adjusting his brain chemistry, bringing him completely awake despite the hour. They were decidedly more effective than a cup of tea, a fluid that upset his stomach but never gave him the sharpness that came from a sound sleep. So long as he did not depend upon them too often, micronites were as good as nine hours in a soft bed.
Where was the rest of his committee? One he knew for near certain. Helene Braithewaite-Duclos was undoubtedly across town in her mansion, waiting patiently while servots wove gold wire sprinkled with cemented topazes into her honey-blonde hair. For all that the two of them could never see eye to eye on any political question, her Constitutional Restoration Movement being congenitally unable to agree with his Movimiento Moderate Central, they certainly spent enough time in fruitful discussions of household appliances and home renovations. Mutual agreement with respective spouses that the time had come to redo bath- and dressing rooms had led to extensive shared research, and his clear knowledge that in her understanding of dress servots as in all else she lagged behind him. Perhaps he should credit Helene with a better knowledge of odorvots. Most of his colleagues appeared in a cloud of two or three carefully complimentary perfumes and scents, some of which they compounded themselves. He preferred to taste his food, and proudly wore his lapel pin, the enameled boar marking him a Grand Porker of the Prestigious Interstellar Gourmand Society.
The other leading minority members were less predictable. Thomas Fuller--his persona name, Meyer reminded himself, that being the Democratic-Republican Party's custom--routinely wore the classic black suit, black sash, and black ribbon tie his Antietam constituents expected of their elected public officials. Fuller was probably already on his way to the Capitol.
Elspeth Mina Thorne, the sole Liberty Tree Senator on the Committee, would likely be entrusting her newborn daughter to her co-parents. Elspeth's short-cropped black hair needed even less work than Meyer's curly locks. She always wore white, lapel and cape unornamented except for the tree from which her Party drew its name. She never complained about early meetings--or perhaps she never thought them early because she had not yet gone to bed for the night. Liberty Tree's few Senators made a fetish of deep and thoughtful solutions to serious challenges. Meyer viewed his personal political success as stemming in fair part from listening carefully to Liberty Tree's representatives, ignoring their Neoplatonist religious undertones, and taking very seriously any discussion of unintended consequences.
A servot presented him with his citrus juice. The sweet bite of the oranges, even if the hour of day was truly horrid, brought him to crisp awareness. The schedule display showed that he had time to walk to the Capitol, all four long blocks though nippy early-spring air. Yesterday's escorts had been from the Women's Popular Army. Today his escort would be MinuteGirls. The exercise, the most he usually got, would do him good, not to mention showing his MinuteGirl guards that their services were properly appreciated by the Joint Senate. The guards were private citizens, volunteering to accompany him, paying for their body armor, uniforms, and heavy weapons out of their own pockets. Once upon a time, government officials had had government employee guards. Those officials, and their guards, or at least the survivors, had been deported at the end of the Incursion War. He never reminded the MinuteGirls of the ambiguity: MinuteGirls were The Shields of the Republic. Were they there today to protect him from a highly unlikely assassin, or to protect the Republic from him? It had been a fair number of decades since a Senator had been shot dead by his own bodyguards, as was their sworn duty. Historians were still debating that deed's justifications, but the precedent was universally respected. Meyer was personally convinced that Senator McQueen had lived considerably too long. On the other hand, a dozen years ago MinuteGirl guards had saved his Committee's Chair from assassination. Two MinuteGirls had died in the exchange. The origins of that assassination were also extensively debated, but seemed no closer to solution.
* * * *
Meyer's MinuteGirls awaited him at the front gate, brightly perky, as cheery as though it were a decent quarter-of-nine in the morning rather than the last hours before the dawn. His hundred yard stroll down the ceremonial front walk of his modest city home had brushed the last cobwebs from his eyes. The four women were in dress uniform, deep turquoise blue with gold trim, scarlet phoenix shawls spread over broad shoulders. Each carried a Thayer M-31 battle rifle. Hanging from shoulder clips were Vixen II antitank rockets, antipersonnel mines, and other leth
al bits and pieces of equipment. Meyer allowed that the women were not quite as stocky as they appeared, but the thirty pounds of unseen body armor under the fitted-for-armor dress uniforms did have an effect on one's figure. He attained the same well-padded effect by more natural processes. His stockiness was more reliable; it persisted while he was wearing his birthday suit. How could they be so awake? Of course, they might be drawn from a third of the way around the world, from Vicksburg or the islands and canals of remote Edo, so for them it might actually be the 9 A.M. for which he subconsciously longed.
They set off in silence, the women taking up a loose diamond formation with him at the center. He told himself that the occasional dark blur in the distance, sidewalk pinlights being obscured, might be a cat but more likely was a Girl Guide in ultracamo scouting a half-block ahead. Girl Guides were very good at remaining unseen, but the lighting environment this close to the Capitol made complete concealment impossible.
Now he had a few moments to gather his serious thoughts. Fleet Time was three hours ahead of the clocks of Abraham, so Grand Commodore Kalinin had been able to collect information from his entire flotilla, make a rough integration of what had been seen, and return to Lincoln from the Clarksburg warp point. His pinnace would have had to kill its velocity to cross the system's primary ether screen, requiring him twice to accelerate to 50 miles per second, switch to rapidity drive, and then stop again. Between the acceleration legs, rapidity drive would have carried Kalinin at close to the speed of light. Rapidity drive notwithstanding, an hour or two would still be good time for Kalinin’s voyage back to Lincoln.
Kalinin’s preliminary report was extremely sketchy. Perhaps little was known. Fourteen EU ships had come through the warp point. Ten were familiar EU fleet combatants. The other four were novel types displaying technical innovations. The absence of supply ships raised the possibility that only the vanguard of a larger fleet had been seen, but perhaps supply vessels had been left to the rear until it was certain that it was safe for them to advance.
The EU vessels had swiftly withdrawn. Before then, they had done nothing other than fire short-range missiles in all directions. Apparently those missiles were inert, because most of them had not even been noticed by American ships until the event had ended. Each came to the end of a forty-thousand league run and detonated, a low-yield but extremely expensive antimatter pulse serving to turn them to plasma. Their working parts were now expanding clouds of gas, unavailable for inspection. What had those missiles been doing? They had no detected emissions. If they were passive observers, what had they passively observed? It was all a bit curious. The EU knew where the warp point was located. The torpedoes had spread well beyond its fringes. The EU had carefully mapped a segment of the empty void. They had also had time for a preliminary optical survey, enough to identify the system as the well-mapped planets of Alpha Centauri. The French had first-rate maps of Alpha Centauri, if not the minor detail that it was now part of the United States. They had not, said Kalinin's preliminary report, had long enough to map every settlement in the States of Lincoln.
Fortunately, the original settlers of Lincoln and Markoff were scrupulous about signal discipline. The only detectable signs that Lincoln or Markoff were inhabited would be lighting in a few towns. One could propose running a colony with no external lights or broadcasts--settlements on Harding and Coolidge did--but a peaceful planet with livable outdoors unavoidably produced a night glow. Markoff, cold, wet, foggy, with many small seas alternating with rough coastlines, would be less readily observed. Large American telescopes could detect Lincoln's lights from Sol, but the EU didn't build such instruments. After all, it had hardly seemed likely that the hypernet would lead EU explorers to nearby stars, but that was precisely what it had just done.
One advantage of the hour was that his dear colleagues had had no time to start scheming. There would be plenty of committee debate, but it would begin on familiar ground. Forces. Organization. Budget. Standing Orders. With some luck, his colleagues would stay on topic. There would doubtless be a few digs. Helene and the Constitutional Restorationists would make ritual attacks on the Imminent Danger clause, arguing that Lincoln should instead provide the American Solar Navy with a subsidy for kept ships devoted to Lincoln's defense. The rest of the Committee viewed kept ships as being less credible than the kept women of prior centuries: Ships that painted the ASN ensign on their tail fins, no matter who paid for them, were apt to vanish to Sol in a crisis. His own Party would want to denounce socialist ideas for Planetary Self-Defense Fleet investments in pure science and general technology, ideas that the Constitutional Restorationists just happened to champion.
With any luck at all, Senator Fuller would not rant about Democratic-Republican proposals for high taxes, conscription, and a standing army drawn from Lincoln's male population. It was scarcely a half-century since the State of Antietam had tried acting on those ideas. They might have gotten away with it too, they being a single small state that people could readily leave, if they had not been seized by the idea that Popular Army weaponry should compulsorily be stored in Public Armories rather than private homes--for efficiency's sake. Attempts to disarm the resident MinuteGirls, Woman's Citizen Volunteer Forces, Girl guides, Junior Girl Guides, and Lambda Scouts had gone over poorly. The Armory Event was only a small war. It still cost the Democratic Republicans two-thirds of their voter support across most of the Republic.
In the fighting, the MinuteGirls’ vaunted Team Collaboration concept did very poorly. The extremely few observers who understood the MinuteGirls' serious wartime difficulty--failing to identify the OpForce as the Eagle Legion rather than a bunch of overimbibing guys from the local shooting clubs--did not tell the Dark Lady what she seemingly was not noticing. Meyer bit his tongue. The number of nonmembers who knew that there was an Eagle Legion was extremely small. Such people tended to meet with accidents, the sort of accident that would keep his bodyguards busy. It was far better that the MinuteGirls received a wakeup call, even one to a wrong number, than that he risk his neck. MinuteGirl training had since been drastically upgraded.
The Senate would surely debate maintenance. The fleet had long operated on the philosophy 'run it until it breaks', at least for components whose breakage was unlikely to break still other components. Advocates of predictive maintenance proposed that costs could be lowered by fixing things before they broke, particularly when failure modes were well-understood and diagnostically accessible, while failure consequences were expensive. Opponents noted that the cost estimates for maintenance-on-demand charged for crew and ship servot time, but that those expenses were really fixed costs. The crew had to be paid whether they were doing repairs or not. If they were doing emergency repairs, they were getting good training. Now Anaximander had lost its communications in the middle of a combat situation, and it appeared that collateral effects had taken Anaximander's on-board data storage out of the loop for a critical few minutes. Critical observations on the European visitors had been lost. Whenever maintenance was broached, Meyer always gritted his teeth, taking the stance that maintenance was properly a committee decision, and that he would support the majority. The sight of predictive maintenance advocates Elspeth Thorne, Thomas Fuller, and Becky wears-her-MinuteGirl-crossed-swords-on-her-lapel-pin Steinmetz in the same minority was enough to frighten Meyer, but not enough to give the rest of the Committee pause.
JOSE GOMES COMMITTEE CHAMBER
THE CAPITOL
ABRAHAM, LINCOLN, ALPHA CENTAURI
April 19, 2174, 5:59 AM LST
Meyer gave himself a few moments to collect his thoughts. His star witness was waiting when he arrived. They'd only had time to clasp hands and exchange a few camaraderies. His two senior staffers, Jonathan O'Brien and Zoltan Ahmad, had conferred with the Grand Commodore's staffers about presentation technicals. He allowed they all knew that topic better than he did, and should be left to do their jobs. Fellow Senators were still trailing into the Hall. He had had a quorum for the
past seven minutes, but protocol dictated patience. The compdisplay set into his tabletop counted through checklists, confirming that this meeting would be on the legal up and up.
The Jose Gomes Committee Chamber was in the finest mid-22nd century barococco style, every square inch of its travertine walls carved in deep relief, polished, and gilded. The builders had had novel servots that could be trusted to work stone without active human intervention, and were determined to demonstrate their every possible application, no matter how loudly lovers of sparse symbolism and pale flat-polished stone might shudder. It was, of course, the neighboring Jose Indra D'Angelo Hall in which the stone was brilliantly painted and inlaid with precious albeit synthetic gems. The images showed the 575 first settlers at Thanksgiving dinner, every one a near-photographic likeness, as was regularly confirmed by their great-great-grandchildren. The images above them, the founding fathers of the Republic portrayed as a rage of angels showering their beneficences on the feasting settlers, were more symbolic than literal. Meyer remembered tedious complaints from perfectionists about picky historical details. Perhaps Washington, Lincoln, Harding, and Markoff had actually not been active in politics contemporaneously. Whatever.
The Minority Party Leaders took their seats. Thorne and Fuller merited clasped hands. He politely kissed the air over Helene's hand. He could have done the same for Elspeth, but the dear girl might have gone into shock. Unlike some Senators, she was too dignified to inflate herself with false pride. A look around the room showed everything in order. His body-servile scrolled holoarrows across his glasses, illuminating and identifying three members of the audience. Some of his colleagues might do things differently, but it never hurt to be friendly to people who could later inconvenience you. He nodded and smiled at the Governors of Abraham, Gettysburg, and Edo, who had slipped into the rear of the room while he was elsewise occupied. Madame Sugiyama, who must have been visiting Abraham to be here so soon, smiled back.
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