The Coalition Man

by Alec Saracen

  “–of casualties,” Chang was saying, “but early estimates suggest at least one hundred thousand.”

  “Twins,” Sam said faintly.

  Chang's voice caught in his throat as he spoke, though whether it was genuine or ruthlessly, cynically calculated, Zhai couldn’t say. “One hundred thousand Torian men, women, and children have been murdered. We do not know by whom. We do not know why. All we know is this: they will pay. This monstrosity will not go unpunished. Today, under the shadow of death, Tor stands defiant, united against those who would destroy us.”

  Chang paused for several seconds, either composing himself or pretending to. “We have already begun the largest humanitarian relief effort since the Evacuation. We emphasise that there is no danger from fallout after an antimatter annihilation. There is no need to evacuate Landing. I repeat, those still in Landing are in no immediate danger. Help is coming. We will rebuild. We will recover. We are Tor, united, independent, and free, and nobody will take that from us. Thank you.”

  Too much rhetoric, not enough concrete action, was Zhai's gut reaction as the new Torian presidential seal flashed up. Even the minimal detail Chang had given had seemed out of place, as if he had been forced to include it by advisers.

  “He waited all night for that?” Harod said. “That was a 'ninety people died in a train crash' speech, not a 'my planet was just fucking nuked' speech.”

  “Not nuked,” Fleischer reminded him. “Antimatter.” She stared off into the distance, a thoughtful frown on her face, as if trying to recall something that was just beyond her.

  “If there's a mushroom cloud, it's a nuke,” Harod said, “or at least it might as well be, optics-wise. If Chang thinks him saying there's no fallout will make people believe it, he's dead wrong. They'll believe he's trying to kill them all with radiation poisoning.”

  “Sounds like Roshi Comet talk,” Zhai said. “What's he saying?”

  The silence that met his question told him everything. Wordlessly, Harod flicked onto Roshi's feed. It was blank. Whenever Roshi was off the air, his channel ran repeats of his earlier coverage. It was never completely dark.

  “Could it be the government?” Zhai asked, without much hope. “Maybe they've taken him down, and he just hasn't gone back up yet.”

  “Never takes him more than half an hour,” Tetaine said. “He's been offline ever since the attack. He's dead.”

  “Ten suns says TruthTeller's audience share just grew a few points,” Harod said darkly.

  “Right,” Zhai said, after a moment of silence. “No time to worry about that. Sam, can you see well enough to use your watch?”

  Sam, who was bone-pale and had clearly been crying, gave a shaky thumbs-up over his shoulder. “I can work, boss.”

  “Good. Here's what we need. One, the next data runner going to Coalition space will be carrying a full list of emergency medical supplies that we can provide. Bypass Megereth Station.” Over Harod’s protesting noises, he carried on: “Go straight to Bayard, they'll have plenty in reserve. Promise them future payment. Emphasise their moral duty.”

  “The syndicates wouldn't know a moral duty if it kicked them in the face,” Harod said.

  “Then we promise to pay them above market rate.”

  Fleischer, sitting on the arm of the sofa, blanched. “Boss, our finances aren’t–”

  Zhai cut her off with a guillotine gesture. “Do I look like I give a damn, Juna? Bayard will provide aid, and the Coalition will pay for it. Hell, tell them they can discount everything they send from their first Coalition Subsidy. These are direct orders, and I take full responsibility. If the Circles come down on me for doing the right thing, then fuck them. Liaise with anyone in the government who'll listen to you, and if nobody will, then find whoever's left in ResTore and ask them what they need. If there's nobody left, work it out yourself.”

  Sam's fingers were already flying. “Got it.”

  Zhai took a deep breath. “Two. I want to talk to Violet Hactaur. I’ve messaged her already, and I'm sure she's busy, but don't let up. Keep bothering her until she talks to me. Three. I want to talk to Chang.”

  Sam made a doubtful noise in the bacdk of his throat. “That one's a long shot, boss.”

  “I know. Try anyway.” Zhai exhaled and looked around at his staff. “Four. For the immediate future, the sole mission of this embassy is to do everything possible for the survivors in Landing. You're all experts. I want you to turn that expertise to that end. There are lives to be saved, and we can save them. This is no time for politics.”

  Harod laughed aloud, incredulous. “Who are you and what have you done with Zhai?”

  Zhai ignored him. “Is that clear? For the moment, we are a humanitarian organisation.”

  “You may be ambassador plenipotentiary,” Harod said, “but you don't have the authority to make that call until we hear from Sekkanen.”

  “Fuck authority,” Zhai said bluntly. “I don't need it.”

  Harod's smile was uncharacteristically nervous. He glanced at Umbiba, who looked on impassively. “You – do, though.”

  “Anyone who prefers to stand by for orders while people die is welcome to do so,” Zhai said to the room at large. “I'm sure your rigid adherence to procedure will be well regarded at home.”

  To that, nobody said a word, though Zhai dimly glimpsed Ceq glancing his way with something approaching approval.

  Over the course of the morning, more information filtered out of Landing, none of it good. More footage of the blast emerged. TruthTeller went offline at least twice an hour, popping up almost immediately on backup channels that survived government censorship until more backups had been procured, never offline for more than a few minutes at a time. Every time they returned, they began with video of the explosion, as if to remind their audience that it hadn't just been some waking nightmare.

  Semi-live coverage of Landing showed raging fires engulfing huge stretches of the city. The bomb hadn’t been powerful enough to spark the same catastrophic firestorms that had burned Zudel to ashes, but as Zhai looked on the furious orange blazes and the towers of smoke pouring into the sky, he could see little difference. Flame was flame. Death was death.

  Specialist VTOLs buzzed over the city, jetting to and from the nearby lake and dropping full loads of water over the fires. They made little headway. Against those flames, ten-thousand-litre deluges of water looked like a fine spray of mist.

  It was the footage coming out of the hospitals that was the worst. Several major hospitals were in ruins or simply gone, forcing the ocean of casualties out into the less damaged districts, clogging the roads further. Every hospital, every doctor's office, every private surgery and every back-street clinic was overflowing. Burn victims packed the corridors in the video, some of their injuries beyond belief, and the chorus of human misery chilled Zhai's blood.

  He saw people with their faces broiled to raw red masks. Children on makeshift stretchers, savage burns gaping across their bodies, their eyes blank and staring. The silent ones were worse than the wailing ones. Broken bones. Untreated gashes, trickling blood onto filthy hospital floors. The surviving doctors and medics, many of them injured themselves, wading through the casualties with brittle detachment, somehow still working despite the crushing weight of horror on their shoulders.

  No matter what he saw, there was always something worse. A boy of four or five wandering naked through the streets, caked head to toe in dust, blood pouring from an arterial gouge in his neck. A man writhing under a massive slab of concrete that had crushed his legs. A hand attached to a broken wrist sticking out of an unmoveable mound of rubble, still desperately signalling for help. The shambling wreckage of person who, impossibly, was still be alive and trying to drag a body to safety, their skin blackened and charred like grilled meat. Hundreds of silent ghosts in the streets, made into grey shadows by the all-consuming dust. A woman whose jaw was horribly caved in on one side, sitting motionless on a doorstep. A teenage girl with skin peeling fro
m her back in long bloody strips as she shuffled numbly towards the mobbed hospital.

  Small pictures, Zhai thought. They turned his stomach, but he couldn’t look away, even as Sam retched weakly into a bowl in the corner. He had to make himself see it. He wouldn’t let himself reduce this to numbers, abstractions, one big sanitised tragedy – a big picture. It was a tapestry of a million sufferings, just as any major disaster or crime was.

  Just as Naro had been.

  The one thing missing from TruthTeller's coverage was speculation about the bombing’s perpetrators. Zhai suspected that they would never make accusations without overwhelming evidence. But just as he was about to remark to Harod that TruthTeller's reporting was far too safe and impersonal, that suddenly changed.

  “I've been trying to ignore the obvious,” TruthTeller said, over a long live shot of Landing, the tops of the evacuation towers obscured by the smoke blanketing the city and their bases wreathed in fire. “However, it is now beyond doubt that Roshi Comet is dead.” The synthetic voice was still perfectly neutral, but the pause before the next sentence carried tangible emotional weight. “He and I never saw eye to eye, as I'm sure both our audiences are aware. He was rash, prone to throwing his support to radical groups which pose a threat to Tor's future, and I would be the first to argue that his sensationalist reporting did more harm than good. But he was a good man, if a misguided one, and he never wanted anything but the best for Tor. He was brave beyond words. No matter what you think of his reporting, he dedicated his life to bringing the truth to light, and he was broadcasting right up until the very end. He gave his life for Tor, and we were lucky to have him. We were lucky to have him.”

  There was a long, long pause. On the screen, a wall of heat shimmered above the fires of Landing.

  “Also believed dead,” TruthTeller said eventually, “is ResTore leader Grigori Thier, who sources report is unreachable. Thier's location after his dramatic escape from government custody was unknown, but believed to be somewhere in central Landing, the area – hold on.”

  On the screen, something was moving. Zhai squinted closer to see the evacuation tower on the corner of the grid closest to the point of detonation start to crumble in on itself. It was a chilling sight. Millions of tons of concrete and steel seemed to slide smoothly down into the ground, like the vast building was somehow being sheathed in a titanic scabbard. A tidal wave of dust rose up around it, rolling out in all directions, and still the tower fell, all its enormous height vanishing inwards and downwards, liquefying and spreading over the city. Zhai watched, transfixed, as the last shreds of the tower disappeared into dust.

  “The blast must have weakened the foundations,” Harod murmured.

  Zhai shook his head slowly. “How did it last that long?”

  “Low People engineering, I guess. Nothing else stood up to that blast. Twins, look at that dust!”

  It was still rising, rolling inexorably up to meet the pall of smoke above. The other towers were reduced to vague shapes in a thick grey fog, and soon they disappeared completely, shrouded by their sibling's disintegration. The fires turned into dim red glows at the heart of an impenetrable cloud. It looked almost like the Void.

  “It doesn't seem real,” Zhai said at last. “How could anyone do this? Who looks at the world and thinks this is the way to achieve – anything?”

  Harod, slumped on the sofa, raised a listless hand. “I don't know.”

  “It's madness.”

  “It's a mad world. It's a mad fucking world.”

  “Someone made that call,” Zhai said. “Nobody's claimed responsibility, right?”

  “No-one yet.”

  “So whoever did it doesn't want us to know they did it.”

  Harod nodded. “Makes sense.”

  “So this was political. Done for a reason. Someone made the call to blow up a major city full of innocent people, and it was political. How do you make that decision? How do you look at the world and balance the scales and weigh it all up and decide yes, a hundred thousand people need to die?”

  “It's a mad world,” Harod repeated.

  “It's our world. We live in it.”

  “It's a mad fucking world.”

  Zhai slammed a hand down on the coffee table. “Stop fucking saying that.”

  Harod glanced back at him, looking wounded. “What am I supposed to say?”

  “I don't know,” Zhai snapped. “Something else. Or nothing, if you can manage it.”

  Ceq, who had been sitting quietly on a chair on the other side of the room, suddenly stood up, looking at the embassy entrance. Zhai followed her gaze, and a second later there came a loud pounding on the front door.

  Zhai and Harod looked at each other. The room went quiet, TruthTeller's voice the only sound.

  “Are we expecting anyone, Sam?” Zhai asked.

  His assistant was still deathly pale, but at least he had nothing left to throw up. “No. Everyone's inside.”

  The pounding came again, louder and more irregular.

  “Captain,” Zhai said, looking to Umbiba, who had just entered the room. “Answer that, will you?”

  “As you say, Ambassador,” Umbiba said, drawing his pistol and entering a few quick commands into his watch. He sidled up to the door, triggered the electronic locks, slid back the bolts, and paused for a moment with his hand on the handle. Three of his androids, following his instructions, stood ready with guns drawn.

  He yanked it open, and someone fell into the room, as if they'd been leaning against the door. Umbiba managed to catch them and pull them inside, and Zhai jumped to his feet, wondering if he'd really seen what he thought he had. He pushed his way past an android and looked down. Even damaged, his eyes hadn't deceived him.

  She was barely conscious, her skin badly burned, raw machinery showing through like bedrock under torn-up turf – but Grey Hawk was alive.

  26

  The drugs demolished the superstructure of the pain but the foundations remained, jutting up from the mud of her mind. She could feel the taut redness of her burned skin, flash-broiled by the wave of fire that had swept away Thier's headquarters like matchwood. It was real skin, the only human flesh she had left, and only a constant drip of painkillers from her artificial glands had kept her functional on the ride back to Macard.

  They had laid her down on a bed, as if it made a difference to a Liberator, in a darkened room. She was dimly aware of cooling gel packs on her face, doing their best to soothe her burns, but according to the data streams from her medical monitors, their best wasn't enough.

  Her hair was gone, singed to nothing, and it would never grow naturally again from the salted earth of her scalp. Liberators' heads were left as close to their original state as possible, theoretically to ease the transition, but right now Grey Hawk wished they'd stripped it all out – flesh, hair, skull and all. How much easier life would be as a brain controlling a perfect, painless body. The neural implants and displacers in her head were the first technological step towards replacing even the brain, capable of maintaining cognitive function even after significant cranial trauma, and some lucky Grade Eleven or Twelve or Thirteen in the future would be beyond suffering, beyond biological failure. Beyond human weakness.

  But she wasn't.

  And nor was Red Wolf, or Blue Bull, or Blue Wasp. They were dead. Blue Wasp and Red Wolf's bodies had been intact enough to still broadcast their data back to Grey Hawk, and their vital signs were long gone. Blue Bull had disappeared completely from her data.

  Somewhere between Landing and Macard, she had remotely activated the self-destruct function of Blue Wasp and Red Wolf's bodies to prevent them from falling into the wrong hands. Drugged to the gills, barely conscious in the back of her stolen car, she couldn't even remember making that awful decision. The logs remembered, recording with sickening impartiality the moment she had destroyed the last remains of her comrades.

  “Liberators don't retire,” Blue Wasp whispered, at the back of her memory. “We die.
”

  Save for a surviving handful of deep-cover intelligence operatives, she was on her own now, and they could do nothing for her without breaking cover. Somehow, Ambassador Zhai had become her only ally on the planet, and now here she was, in his castle. In his power, even – if he'd wanted her dead, she would be dead.

  She sat up with a groan. Her head was a congealed lump of pain, and she immediately dialled up the drugs. Slowly, the fog began to lift.

  The room, barely more than a cupboard, was bare apart from the bed. Grey Hawk swung her legs over the edge, running through an array of diagnostics and checks. She was largely intact, though flying debris had damaged her left arm and shoulder. It had been partially repaired by her beleaguered maintenance systems. The only lasting damage was to her head.

  No irradiation, she realised belatedly. It hadn’t been nuclear. Antimatter? Her summarisation algorithms pulled terabytes of data out of the air and condensed it: the bomb had been antimatter, and less destructive than she'd feared. But a small antimatter bomb was still an antimatter bomb, and a dull horror yawned within her as she read further and the full implications loomed.

  Tens of thousands, dead. Thier, dead. Her squad, dead.

  God help her, they were dead.

  She stood up, swaying slightly on her feet.

  In that instant, as crippling sorrow began to grip her, Grey Hawk made a decision. She would not grieve for her fallen squadmates until she left Tor. Personal emotion would compromise her. She would finish the job, and only then, only when she was back on Plenty, with Val Yustrid's streets under her feet and its skyscrapers over her head, with a crisp wind on her face and achingly clear air in her nose, then she would allow herself the luxury of personal emotions. Not before. The stakes had risen precipitously. There was work to be done, and it too important to let herself wallow in misery.