The Coalition Man

by Alec Saracen

  THE

  COALITION

  MAN

  Alec Saracen

  Table of Contents

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  a note from the author

  acknowledgments

  1

  With mounting dismay, Zhai watched his side win the war.

  The recording, ripped straight from the exterior cameras of one of the Coalition carriers at the rear of the fleet, left little room for doubt. Spherical attack craft had tumbled out into the swirling purple fog of the Void like spilled marbles, the distorting bubbles of their V-shields flickering into life as soon as they were clear of their mother carriers. Squadrons had rapidly formed up, cutting through the mist into compact battle formations. And, far away, the rival force of the Free Planetary Alliance approached. Though obscured by clouded distance, it was obviously larger than the Coalition fleet.

  Zhai wasn't a military man, but he understood the basics. Each craft's combat capabilities were determined by its individual V-able crew members. Some of those little metal balls might be slightly tougher or faster or deadlier than others, but most were effectively identical. Barring some feat of Coalition tactical brilliance or spectacular Alliance incompetence, it was a foregone conclusion. The only hope for the outnumbered Coalition fleet was to disengage, pile back into the carriers and fold out of the Void and back into realspace. Run, or die.

  But they stood firm, allowing the larger FPA fleet to creep through the Void’s swirling violet mist, squadrons feathering into predatory wings, bearing down menacingly on the stationary Coalition formation. The camera feed had been retouched to eliminate some of the distortion that came from filming through the carrier's V-shield, though the picture still wobbled and shimmered as if seen through the inner wall of a soap bubble. Hazy enemies descended, unable to believe their luck. Maybe the long-feared war wasn't so bad, if the Coalition was this incompetent. They drew closer, and closer.

  And with deadly, silken grace, the impossible trap sprung.

  “Twins,” Zhai heard Harod Nouridh-Salter mutter on the other side of the office as the smartpaper on the wall erupted into light. Suddenly the Void was full of missiles racing away from carriers, archaic chemical exhausts flaring blue-white. Maybe a hundred carriers, and maybe fifteen missiles each.

  Gael Yoqué, sat to Zhai’s right, came to the same realisation. “Fuck me, look at that,” she murmured. “One for every single Alliance ship.”

  Even now, the oncoming FPA fleet wasn’t budging. They knew what Zhai knew: that a V-shield could deflect practically anything that wasn't V-fire, and nobody was in range for that yet. The only way even a nuclear missile could possibly breach a shield was with a miraculous direct hit. Any complex electronics not hidden behind a V-shield malfunctioned catastrophically in the Void, rendering any missiles dumb point-and-shoot specimens – darts thrown at houseflies.

  Everyone knew that. Why would the Alliance doubt it? You couldn't launch targeted missiles in the Void unless you had V-able personnel physically on board to guide them, and wasting V-able pilots on suicide missiles would be madness. As far as the Alliance knew, the Coalition had dropped an inferior force into hostile space, panicked, and blown all their realspace missiles while sitting motionless. Any alarm bells were drowned out by the crowing of Alliance commanders, already imagining medal ceremonies.

  So when the missiles' trajectories exploded into a wild maze of intricately plotted manoeuvres, shimmies, corkscrews, dives, and spirals, all the Alliance could do was watch in horror as thousands of deadeye nuclear missiles bore down on their fleet.

  Harod drew in a sharp breath.

  “Impossible,” Gael said flatly.

  She was right. It was impossible. And it was happening anyway.

  The Alliance formation disintegrated. Panicked ships took evasive action, some colliding and bouncing apart with their V-shields flickering under stress. Pale stabs of V-fire, bright little threads on screen, speared out from a handful of ships trying to shoot down incoming missiles. Two pulled off that miracle shot, igniting a pair of titanic white spheres of lethal energy and drawing gasps from the group watching from the safety of Zhai's office. They were nothing compared to what came next.

  Mercifully, the camera couldn’t cope with the light of thousands of simultaneous nuclear detonations. The entire FPA fleet vanished into a hazy white glow which lingered for too long,

  a spectre burnt into the Void itself. The silence of the recording only made it worse. In the darkness of his office, transfixed by nuclear fire, Zhai heard Dom Balphe softly cursing in Volmais. For once, not one of the Chetic or Qienchuan curses Zhai knew seemed adequate.

  Slowly, gloatingly, the fireball faded. Scattered handfuls of ships survived, saved by luck or exceptional pilot skill. Every single one of their carriers was gone, leaving their children floating dazedly in the Void.

  And now the Coalition fleet sprang to life, the smaller craft proving they were more than decoys. Zhai watched a few of the Alliance survivors react quickly enough to zip away into the Void and find cover in the roiling clouds, pursued by Coalition hunter-killers. The rest wilted under a barrage of V-fire, their precious bubbles bursting and the ships flashing to match-head wisps of flame. One unlucky Coalition craft disintegrated under desperate return fire.

  “One,” Zhai said aloud. “They only got one.”

  As if the recording had read his mind, a graphic popped up on the screen, formatted almost like a sports scoreboard:

  COALITION LOSSES: 0 CARRIERS, 1 FIGHTER

  ALLIANCE LOSSES: 144 CARRIERS, >1500 FIGHTERS

  Elimia Cossingley, perched on the edge of Zhai's desk, sniffed. “Absolute lack of class.”

  “We've got more to worry about than class,” Gael said blackly.

  Zhai tapped his watch to freeze the recording and bring the lights back up. His office was cramped at the best of times – he and Sam each had a desk, his assistant's a barricade between his own and the door – and with six people crammed in, it was claustrophobic.

  “Well,” Harod said, with the look of a man mentally drafting his resignation letter. “That's it, isn't it? We're screwed.”

  Dom, leaning on the back of Gael's chair, shook his head. “I can't believe they had the votes for this. A working majority in the First Circle is one thing, but this? War? Who voted for this?”

  “People who knew they wouldn't lose,” Harod said. He gestured at the scoreboard. “Look at that. I don't know how we did it, but we did it. The Devvies and Revvies both knew it was a foregone conclusion.”

  “And it didn't leak at all. Imagine the organisation, the discipline...” Elimia said, with more than a hint of admiration in her brushed-steel Armenaiakon tones. “How did they pull it off without us knowing? How did they keep them all quiet?”

  Gael's dark eyes glinted mirthlessly. As short as Zhai and half his weight, she occupied her armchair with the laconic command of an ancient colonial power; an ageing panther in repose. “We've been fucked, boys and girls. Ankles over ears.”

  “There's about ninety Developist hardliners and thirty-odd Revanchists in the First Circle,” Harod said, with unchallenged authority. The C
oalition’s governing Circles were his arena. Nobody on the Consolidationist side knew their ins and outs better than Harod, who had spent thirty years on the brutal front lines of internal Coalition politicking. They'd aged him badly, smearing permanent purple bags under his eyes and scoring wrinkles deep into his olive skin. “With one-twenty-nine names on our list, that leaves about forty-five in the middle. Approach them in secret, tell them you could guarantee victory in the war… you'd only need thirty. Your average crossbencher knows a winner when he sees one. Thirty would be easy. If it were us, Zhai and I could get that in an afternoon. Right? Zhai?”

  Zhai hadn't been paying attention to his colleagues. The grisly scoreboard held his attention. The Developist-Revanchist alliance hadn’t needed to release the recording, but they'd done it anyway, plastering it all over the Coalition's internal channels. An hour after it had gone live, it was the one and only topic of conversation on Megereth Station. Right now, endless political dissections of the battle and its ramifications were being hashed and rehashed in a hundred of offices, contingencies outlined and devils advocated, approaches made and reconsidered and infinitesimally recalculated, futures sketched in bold strokes and pasts brushed under rugs. It seemed perversely honest to Zhai that the Devvie/Revvie leadership had reduced thousands of deaths to a scoreboard. That was all anyone cared about, after all. Scoring points.

  “Zhai?” Harod said again, and Zhai's patience grew thin.

  “That,” he said, jabbing a finger at the screen, “is the death of a superpower. Right there. That is the Free Planetary Alliance–”he even managed to say 'Free' without irony “–collapsing. Crumbling. Thirty worlds! The single largest state that has ever existed, and it's gone overnight! We killed it!” He paused, feeling the heat of ten eyes on him. “What the hell are we going to do with it? Take it over, bring our borders right up to the Confederation? Just after we've won a galactic war – the galactic war – with virtually zero casualties? Just after we've publicly demonstrated our fleet renders every other V-navy out there obsolete? Might as well save time and declare war now, because if we absorb the Alliance, there's a worse war coming. And if we don't take it over, the entire region will collapse into chaos. Trade will implode. The economy will deflate. Half those worlds will be fighting civil wars by Separation Day.”

  He didn’t remember standing, but Zhai found himself on his feet. He collapsed heavily back into his chair. It was a reinforced model, but it still creaked under his bulk.

  “What a mess,” he said into the silence, rubbing his forehead with a knuckle. “All we can do is limit the damage, and there's not much we can do against a First Circle majority.”

  “They'll press for annexation,” Dom said, with grim certainty. Harod grunted in assent. “Most of those suddenly free worlds will gladly sign up to the Charter. It's – comment dit-on? – a no-brainer. We say, 'sign over all your planetary defence to the most powerful V-navy in the galaxy', they say 'of course, sir, and perhaps a foot massage, oui?'”

  That got a laugh from Gael and nobody else. Volmais humour only ever amused other Volmais speakers.

  “Surely the Developists are more sensible than that,” Elimia said, with the naïveté that would always keep her just short of real power. “The Revanchists are – well – insane, and they'd try to conquer the galaxy if the Devvies let them get out of hand, but the Devvies have some sense left, don't they? Mass annexation will guarantee war with the Confederation in the future. They don’t want that.”

  Appended to that remark was an unspoken yet, which was louder to Zhai than the rest of Elimia's sentence. Maybe she was learning.

  “It doesn't matter what they do,” Harod said gloomily. “There's four months until the end of the senior Circle term. Four months of bloody Devvie-Revvie triumphalism. No matter what names the lottery spits out, whoever’s appointed to the Circles is going to be seduced by that. They've just won a war, after all.”

  The war, Zhai thought. The big one, the one and only. He remembered being young enough to think crushing the FPA would be the greatest victory imaginable, the Coalition’s ultimate vindication. Get back all those lost worlds, topple the tinpot tyrants, finally reverse the old humiliation of the Expansion Wars... but he’d come to realise that the Alliance, the Confederation, and the Coalition were propping up the three-legged table of the galaxy. Wipe one out, and suddenly things were a lot less stable.

  Life after the FPA. Zhai tried to imagine it. It was like imagining a day without an afternoon, where morning slipped straight into evening. Three superpowers had coexisted more or less peacefully for more than a century, and now one of them had been swept away in a heartbeat, an act of macropolitical prestidigitation. Now you see the balance of power, now you don't.

  Before long, the Coalition's new V-missile technology, whatever it was, would be countered. The Void distorted and corrupted lasers, but not badly enough that they were useless. Though they'd never break through a V-shield, they could easily swat down incoming missiles. The missile innovation, whatever it was, would be obsolete as soon as someone fielded a gigantic bank of counter-missile lasers against it, and they'd be back to relying on V-fire. It had been a one-war trick. But right now, the Coalition V-navy was invincible. If Zhai were on the Devvie-Revvie side, he'd be pushing for immediate war against the Confederation. Control the Void, control the galaxy. It was child's play to drop into realspace in a star system, launch missiles at the orbital infrastructure, and slip back into the Void before any return fire could reach you. Right now, the Coalition could reshape the galaxy as it saw fit.

  The Developists would never go for that, Zhai thought, though the Revanchists might. The Devvies were too convinced that the FPA was the Coalition's only enemy. In truth, Zhai thought a galaxy united under the Coalition wouldn't be a disaster. He’d always considered the Coalition's willingness to let its member worlds govern themselves – as long as they paid their Subsidy and surrendered their military autonomy – to be its best aspect, especially next to the ruthless totalitarian centralisation of the Alliance, and unlike the bureaucratic Confederation, at least the Coalition didn’t pretend it was a democracy. All things considered, it was the least of three evils. If they were going to start a war that would scramble galactic politics overnight, they could at least finish the job. Better Coalition hegemony than a cold war with the Confederation.

  Three weeks ago, when the slim Devvie-Revvie majority had forced the declaration of war through the Solids’ last legislative redoubts in a marathon thirteen-hour First Circle sitting, Zhai's main fear had been that the war would rattle on indefinitely. The prospect of a crushing victory hadn't even occurred to him – or any Solid – until the first whispers of a secret superweapon had echoed through Megereth Station a week later. By then the Coalition fleet had already obliterated the famous Alliance defence at Bayard. There'd been no recording, only hazy courier reports of a staggering victory which nobody had quite believed at the time – but now, with hard video evidence of the war's total one-sidedness, there was no denying reality. The Free Planetary Alliance was no more.

  The conversation had moved on around Zhai. Dom and Elimia were bickering about something to do with the Fourth Circle, on which they both sat, over Zhai's head. As if the Fourth Circle mattered to anyone but the people on sitting on it, Zhai thought uncharitably. What were they going to do – send a strongly worded advisory brief to Lockley Satterkale's office?

  Abruptly, without a word of goodbye, they both got up and left his office, trailing excited chatter in their wake until the door slid shut.

  “Rude,” Gael remarked, genuinely affronted.

  Zhai smiled wearily. “Oh, let them believe they can make a difference. They're young yet.”

  “Balphe turned forty last month,” Harod said.

  “As I said: young. Remember when we were forty?”

  Harod blew out his cheeks. “Not really. That whole decade’s a bit of a haze, if I’m honest.”

  Gael snorted. “Not surprised
.”

  “And just what are you implying?”

  “Oh, nothing,” Gael said. “Far be it from me to criticise Harod ‘Two-Bottles-At-Breakfast’ Nouridh-Salter, who certainly never turned up to cabinet meetings drunk.”

  “No more than six or seven, at any rate. Twins know you need it to deal with Sekkanen sometimes.”

  “I think she feels the same about you.”

  “I bloody well hope so.”

  Zhai half-listened to his old friends’ banter, knowing their hearts weren’t in it. The enormity of the Alliance’s fall was starting to sink in, but it would be a long time before he could fully absorb it. Perhaps he never would, and would go to his grave wondering how he could possibly have outlived the FPA.

  Then again, he had very nearly outlived the Coalition.

  “It's the scrapheap for us, no denying that,” Gael was saying, settling back into her chair with the air of someone who intended to spend all afternoon there. “No Solid majority in the First Circle for ten years at least, and I don't know if I plan to live that long. Definitely not working that long. I'm already too old for this shitshow.”

  She didn't look it. Blessed with good genes, she had aged better than Zhai or Harod had. It was odd. When they'd been young firebrands together in the First Circle all those years ago, she had looked thirty at twenty, thirty at thirty, and thirty at forty. Even now that the ageing process had remembered her and doubled back to get to work, she looked barely fifty when she was only just the right side of sixty, her dark skin still smooth and her hair still mostly black. Zhai had been grey since his thirty-sixth birthday, and Harod claimed to be a ‘post-follicular thinker’.

  That bald head of his was being sorrowfully shaken now. “Twins, can you imagine those two on the executive committee? The plunge from Sekkanen to Cossingley... it was a golden age and we didn't even know it.”

  “On that, my friend, you’re not wrong,” Gael said.

  Along with the magnitude of the political upheaval, it was slowly sinking in just how finished Zhai's career was. At fifty-nine, he should have been in line for the most prestigious ambassadorial posts in the galaxy. Now, he'd never hold one again. He'd always secretly assumed he'd be ambassador to the URSS one day, occupant of the Rose Office in the magnificent old embassy on High Summer. That long-held dream was gone. The votes weren't there, and they wouldn't be there again until long after his retirement.