The Coalition Man

by Alec Saracen

  Tor picked the next day to join that number in earnest.

  Chang's announcement of Tor's official independence day and his new title of President of the Independent Republic of Tor – not even 'Interim President' – were received mutedly in Macard. In Landing, they precipitated riots. Zhai and Tetaine sat side by side on the couch, watching live footage roll in from clumsily dispersed rallies and running battles between police and protesters in the street. To Zhai, it felt like watching an unstable vase wobble on a nudged table. Tor was living in that slow-motion moment when the fall was already inevitable but hadn't quite begun.

  Tetaine had a bowl of tortilla chips on his lap and was steadily munching his way through them as he watched, which would have struck Zhai as in bad taste had it been anyone but Tetaine, who snacked like other people breathed.

  Roshi Comet was all over the riots, and was collating all the most outrageous acts of police brutality on his channel. There were the usual beatings, bone-breaking arrests, and mass deployment of various agonising and incapacitating gas canisters. Zhai winced as he saw the black-armoured police break out the soak-and-shock treatment on one knot of rioters: a high-powered hose blasted them with icy water, immediately followed by an incandescent bolt from a long-range stun gun that turned the targets into flailing, smoking marionettes as electricity arced between them. It wasn't quite fatal. That didn't make it a good idea. It looked too brutal on camera. Beatings could be disguised. Lightning guns couldn't.

  A shaky snatch of footage that must have been taken from one of the prefab towers on the edge of the grid showed the scale of the unrest. VTOLs buzzed ineffectually overhead a seething mass of people, mostly concentrated around a few blocks near the towers. A pall of smoke was rising from dozens of fires. Several buildings and hundreds of cars were ablaze.

  Zhai glanced at the window of the embassy. Security in Macard was still tight after the assassination attempt, but the city was utterly tranquil. It seemed to him that the government's obsession with controlling Macard had blinded them to the trouble brewing in Landing. They had built their perfect, shining, bland citadel here and left Landing to slowly come to the boil.

  “I have to go to Landing,” he said, at last.

  Ceq scoffed. “You're not going to Landing.”

  “Nobody will even give me the time of day here,” Zhai said. “Chang is freezing me out, like he thinks I'll just go away if he doesn't let anyone talk to me. Look at this.” He gestured at the chaos unfolding on the screen. “That's a revolution in the making. I need to meet Thier before it's too late. We can still influence this.” And if the Hactaur clan didn’t approve, they could fucking hurry up with their coup. There was a queue forming.

  “If you think I'm going to let you go there-”

  “Ceq. I appreciate your concern. I would also remind you that I pay your wages.”

  “Fuck the wages, boss. I'll work for free this month if you don't go to Landing.”

  Zhai chuckled. “You would, as well. Sorry, Ceq. This is too important.”

  Ceq looked distinctly displeased, but said nothing more. Her eyes spoke volumes. Long, repetitive volumes which read 'You're a fucking idiot, boss, and on your own head be it' over and over.

  “Uh-oh,” Tetaine said through a mouthful of chips. “That's a mistake.”

  “Oh, Twins,” Zhai groaned. Heavy armoured vehicles were rolling into shot now. A few of them were specialist crowd control vehicles, but the majority looked like full-blown battle tanks. Armoured, helmeted troops flanked them as they rumbled down the streets of Landing. “What are they thinking?”

  Tetaine shrugged. “Big guns solve everything?”

  Zhai's watch buzzed. The pattern told him it was an encrypted message from Convivial-sackcloth.

  It read: The whole world is watching.

  Violence breeds violence, Zhai replied after a moment's thought. It was enough to let Violet know he was thinking along similar lines, but not quite a statement of support. Whatever the state of affairs in the Hactaur strategy, the government response to events in Landing would be catastrophically counter-productive. No matter how threatening the unrest looked, by clamping down so heavily they were only undermining Chang's attempts to cast himself as Tor's great emancipator.

  Which, Zhai thought, suddenly chilled, might be the whole idea.

  The tanks weren't police equipment. They were military. It was possible Chang had ordered them in, but Zhai wondered if Marshal Cadmer wasn't playing his own political game and trying to further destabilise Chang's government by exacerbating the unrest.

  As he watched petrol bombs explode harmlessly on the tanks, Zhai felt a cold certainty that this was just the beginning. Tor was slipping out of control – anyone's control. Which meant a struggle to gain control. Which meant bloodshed. Chang might have proclaimed the end of Tor's long night, but the sky darkened still.

  The footage switched to a long shot of troops clustered around the armoured treads of a tank, firing indiscriminately into the crowd. For an instant Zhai thought they were shooting to kill, but the sudden tightening of his gut was eased by the realisation that the gunfire was far too muffled and quiet for lethal rounds.

  “Pepper pellets,” Ceq said from behind him. “Nasty. They can blind you for days.”

  People were reeling away from the gunfire, pawing at bloodshot eyes with tears streaming down their faces. Half of them looked like kids, teenagers brutally confronted with the harsh reality of the world.

  Zhai grimaced. When politicians played their games, people got hurt. People died. It wasn't him who had ordered the tanks in, but that did nothing to lessen the gnawing sense of guilt. He was part of the great, grinding system greased by the sweat and blood of the human race, and he couldn't shirk his share of the responsibility.

  Umbiba, leaning against a wall, grunted in displeasure. “They're bringing out all their toys. This isn't strategy.”

  “Not a good look for Chang,” Tetaine observed.

  Zhai shook his head. “He can't tell people he hated the Alliance's oppression one day and order this the next.”

  “None of this is being broadcast in Macard.” Tetaine tapped through a few screens on his watch. “Official line is that there have been a few outbreaks of looting after spontaneous independence celebrations.”

  “Twins. They must know how widespread the illegal network is. They can't seriously think they're successfully keeping Macard in the dark. Chang's smarter than that.”

  Tetaine shrugged. “Either you're wrong, or this isn't on his orders.”

  “Do we know what sparked it off?”

  Tetaine let out a short laugh. “Take a guess.” He tapped at his watch, bringing up a piece of footage Zhai hadn't seen before. One of Landing's biggest public squares was packed with at least eight or nine thousand people. Flags and banners waved above the crowd, several of them emblazoned with the ResTore name and logo. One efficient sign he could make out read 'HANG CHANG'; another 'NO ALLIANCE NO COALITION FREE TOR NOW'. ResTore's emblem was scratched in a bold red on the lower right corner of the footage.

  “They're stepping up their publicity, then,” Zhai said.

  Tetaine nodded. “Hugely.”

  The crowd was already buzzing, but the noise went through the roof when Grigori Thier appeared. The camera, at the other end of the square, panned across the audience and zoomed in. A tall stepladder was Thier's platform, ringed by a couple of dozen protective toughs.

  “My friends!” Thier called, his voice slightly tinny over the makeshift sound system. “My friends, thank you for coming!”

  As opening lines went, it was hardly Trenoit, but the crowd responded with a primal roar. The crowd was a world apart from the one Chang had corralled for his speech in Macard. Even on the screen, the atmosphere was obviously electric.

  Thier still looked every inch the scruffy professor, but now that Zhai had heard his voice, he began to understand how this man could be so popular. His Torian accent was the thickest Zhai had ever
heard, and those first few words had boomed out deep, gruff, and sonorous.

  “I hear that Governor Chang is calling himself President Chang now,” Thier said, to a chorus of boos and shouts of general outrage. “President of Tor! He thinks we will forget about all those years he ruled us like a king. But we remember!”

  As the crowd howled its approval, Zhai nodded to himself. Thier had the greatest gift a demagogue could hope for: authenticity. He spoke without notes and with the manner of a man untrained in rhetoric but blessed with a raw innate talent for it, and his obviously unfiltered voice and mannerisms were so naturally striking that his lack of polish worked in his favour. He was a man born to demagoguery.

  Now, Zhai thought, the question becomes: are you as genuine as you appear, or are you a consummate liar?

  Thier's speech rumbled on, gaining mass and speed like an avalanche. “He thinks he can force us into the Coalition, sacrificing our independence to save his own skin! He thinks we have forgotten all of Coalition's evils! But we remember!”

  He drew out his pauses with perfect precision. The sonorous passion of his voice put Zhai in mind of that most dangerous hybrid, the preacher-politician. Thier's next words only deepened the quasi-religious feeling of the speech.

  “Chang thinks it has been so long that we cannot even remember what independence is like! He thinks we have forgotten how to be free! But though none of us here today have known that freedom, Tor has! It is in the bones of this world, in the rocks and the sky and the sea! Tor remembers!”

  Thier pulled off the clunky metaphor with aplomb, drawing a mighty cheer. Zhai felt a grudging admiration for the way the man could rally a crowd. Thier could have read out his laundry list for an hour to a rapturous reception if he'd wanted to.

  Popularity and charisma could only go so far, of course. If Thier governed Tor once the dust settled, he'd find life rather harder once confronted with the endless compromises and ideal-sapping realities of government. Still, though Thier's Tor would probably be a domestic disaster, it would hardly be bad from the Consolidationist point of view.

  “My friends–” Thier began, then instinctively ducked as a dozen tear gas canisters arced overhead and landed among the crowd, instantly shrouding them in mist. The camera shook and refocused on armoured police trucks rolling out of a side street, disgorging faceless figures in full riot gear.

  “THIS GATHERING IS ILLEGAL. DISPERSE IMMEDIATELY. THIS GATHERING IS ILLEGAL. DISPERSE IMMEDIATELY,” a synthetic voice began repeating over a loudspeaker, almost drowned out by the furious baying of the crowd. Thier, on the edge of shot, opened his mouth again, then thought better of it and scrambled back down his stepladder as the first VTOLs buzzed overhead.

  “That's either very stupid or very clever,” Zhai said. “Stupid if they thought it would actually calm the situation down, but clever if someone wanted to spark a city-wide riot.”

  Tetaine delicately nibbled on the edge of a chip, eyes tilted to the ceiling in thought. “You think they wanted to undermine Chang?”

  “It's a strong possibility. The only problem is, it strengthens Thier's hand more than anyone else's. He needs to watch his back.” Don't we all, he thought, and winced as he shifted position on the couch. Ceq's life-saving tackle on him had left him with an angry purple bruise on his flank where it had met her incoming shoulder, and he hadn't taken any painkillers today. “If Thier knows what he's doing, he'll keep needling away at the government. The harder they clamp down, the better things are for him.”

  “What if doesn't want to put his people in danger?” Ceq said.

  “I'm sure he doesn't,” Zhai said, twisting round to face her. “But right now, the value of one publicly, outrageously murdered protester to his cause is far higher than that of one unmurdered, alive and well protester. That's political mathematics.”

  Disgust curled on Ceq's lip. “Maybe he doesn't think like that.”

  “If he doesn't,” Zhai said, “he's going to have a rude awakening when he tries to run a planet.”

  Ceq shook her head and walked away. “I hate politics,” she said over her shoulder, as if Zhai didn't know.

  Tetaine flipped back to the quasi-live coverage.

  “What the–” he muttered, and dialled up Roshi Comet's commentary. Zhai glanced back at the screen to see one of the government tanks in flames, its rear armour in shreds and smoke billowing from the engines as the crew slithered out of the emergency hatch.

  “–looks like it was fired from one of the evacuation towers,” Roshi was saying excitedly, “but there's no – another!”

  From above, a white flash of a missile smashed into a tank further down the now rapidly reversing column, again scoring a direct hit on the engine. The machine spluttered and ground to a halt, flames erupting from its rear. The crowd roared in triumph even as the accompanying troops, falling back, blasted them with pepper pellets.

  “Anti-tank missiles,” Umbiba said. Zhai started. He hadn't even noticed the captain walk up behind the couch. “High-end, too.”

  The camera, still shaking, panned up to the gigantic monolith of the nearest tower block just in time to see another missile fired emerge from a puff of smoke. It followed the streak down until it slammed into one of the tanks caught between the two burning wrecks, making a third direct hit. One of the other tanks decided that enough was enough and angled its smaller rear turrets up to return fire. It shell exploded against the tower, blowing a sizeable hole in the wall and sending a rain of deadly chunks down on the crowds below. Smoke roiled out into the clear blue sky.

  “Some brave patriot has destroyed three of Chang's tanks!” Roshi crowed. “Their fate is unknown, but folks, I take my hat off to whoever had the balls to stand up against this oppressive regime and give them a taste of their own medicine!”

  Slow-motion replays of the missile impacts began running on repeat, accompanied by the famous music from the climactic tank battle in Sons of the Storm.

  “How advanced are those missiles, captain?” Zhai asked.

  Umbiba frowned in thought. “Those tanks are AMA90s – outdated, but tough. That accuracy plus that power means military grade, and expensive military grade at that.”

  “It's Liberation,” Zhai said. “It must be. Nobody else bar the government would have that kind of tech.”

  Tetaine pointed at the screen. “Live rounds being fired,” he said bleakly.

  The crowds were breaking up and fleeing the flaming tank carcasses, leaving more than a few of their number behind. The camera zoomed in on the blood already pooling on the streets.

  Zhai watched in horrified fascination as one or two of the troopers continued firing into the backs of the stampeding mob. One had their gun physically wrestled from them by two of their comrades, desperately trying to stop the slaughter. It was too late.

  A precedent had been set.

  Three hours later, TruthTeller announced that more than a hundred were confirmed dead, with thousands clogging up hospitals across the city. Many more were unaccounted for. Where Roshi was alternately exhilarated at the scale of the resistance and outraged at the brutality with which it was met, TruthTeller's synthetic voice simply reported the facts, though in their word choice and angle of coverage – focusing on the victims, the wounded, the families searching for missing loved ones – Zhai detected a deep sorrow.

  And, as the evening wore on and the casualties mounted, even Roshi Comet grew sombre.

  “Folks,” he said quietly, over footage of limp bodies being rushed away on makeshift stretchers, “tonight, Tor is bleeding. President Chang has shown us his vision for our world, and it stinks. I don't want to join the Coalition, but right now, I'd take them over Chang. Anything is better than this.”

  Zhai had sent a message to Grey Hawk not long after the first attacks on the tanks. He had received no reply. Was she there now, fighting on the streets? If he was right and those tanks had been destroyed by her fellow Liberators – or even Grey Hawk herself – they had blood on their
hands. The violence would have escalated anyway, but Liberation had fired the first lethal shots.

  Had they intended the bloodshed? If they were throwing their weight behind Thier and ResTore, then pushing the government into its disastrous response could only be a good thing for Liberation. Of course, this being Liberation, there was an equal chance that they'd rushed into action without considering the consequences. Idealistic foolishness or cynical brilliance. Same result, in the end.

  Late that evening, as hundreds of fires raged across Landing and the violence faded into sporadic clashes rather than full-blown battles, Zhai finally received a message from Grey Hawk.

  It simply read: Offer still stands.

  Zhai stared at his watch, flexing his thumbs in contemplation. There really was no alternative. It would be dangerous. At least three different groups of people would have very good reasons to kill him, and ample opportunity to chance their arms. But he'd survived one attempt on his life this week already, and it had sparked in him a devil-may-care, just-you-try bravado. If he was going to die, let it be here in the line of duty.

  He would rather suffer a spectacular, definitive end than live to old age and gradually attenuate away to nothing. If the choice was between cowering safely away in his embassy or risking his life and charging in like a political wrecking ball, he knew damn well which option he preferred.

  Very helpful, he replied to Grey Hawk. Let's go to Landing.

  17

  Landing's train stations and airport were in lockdown. Nothing was getting in or out of the city except by road, and even then government checkpoints covered all the major arteries. Zhai refused any route which would provide direct proof that he was in Landing, which left Grey Hawk struggling to work out how to get him in secretly.