The Coalition Man

by Alec Saracen

  The corner of Zhai’s mouth twitched. “No. We aren’t. So to even things up, let's talk about the Coalition.”

  “Surely we should split it up, boss,” Zhai’s quiet assistant said. Ceq glanced at him in surprise. He was so easy to forget, to dismiss as just part of the background. “Us on one side, Peck on the other?”

  “Yes, I suppose we should.” Zhai paused, drumming his fingers on the back of a chair. “Well. Our alibi: we were also working with Thier, as you know. Ceq, Sam, and myself were all blinded by the flash. We have no interest in making Tor more likely to join the Coalition, or in propping up Chang's government. And – fuck it. We’re working with the Hactaurs as well. They’re planning a coup.”

  “I know,” Grey Hawk said.

  Zhai chuckled. “Why am I not surprised?”

  “You’re not working with Chang, Cadmer hates the Coalition, Sarma-Phung is too close to Chang to risk contacting her, and you’re too smart to bet it all on Thier. We’re not stupid, Ambassador,” Grey Hawk said bluntly, ignoring the stab of pain that was the word ‘we’. Losing comrades makes me wish I had never known them, an agonised Yustrid had written after the fall of Ghurio, a passage Grey Hawk had never fully understood until now. “And that’s why we don’t believe you would bomb Landing. You wouldn’t go that far.”

  She knew Zhai was not completely unprincipled, no matter what he'd done on Naro. He wouldn't go as far as Landing. Somewhere underneath all the calculation, underneath all the cynicism and manipulation and lies, was a level below which he would not sink.

  Zhai nodded, slowly. “Thank you,” he said. “That means a lot, coming from a Liberator. More than you know.”

  Grey Hawk said nothing. Her eyes found Zhai's, and stayed there for several seconds.

  Was there something different there, concealed by his half-blindness? Zhai, ageing, grey and weary, put Grey Hawk in mind of a decaying office building in the dark, with only scattershot windows still aglow – but now she wondered whether somewhere on some dusty, forgotten floor, a long-dormant light had switched back on.

  “Well,” Nouridh-Salter said, “that's all very nice, but we've got work to do.” He gestured at the chart with a jerk of his head. “Peck.”

  “The one who tried to kill you?” Grey Hawk said.

  Zhai let out a black little chuckle. “That's the one.” His expression abruptly turned more serious as the he turned the possibility over in his mind. “Peck,” he muttered to himself. He turned to Nouridh-Salter with a glimmer of anxiety in his eyes. “Do you think–”

  “I think she'd stop short of nothing,” Nouridh-Salter said flatly.

  “Evidence first,” Grey Hawk said. Both of them looked at her with grave expressions. She stepped forward and glanced at Sam, who quickly turned his eyes back to his watch. “She wants Chang in power.”

  “She does,” Zhai said, “and she wants Tor in the Coalition. She'd have happily taken a piece out of the army and the air force, too.”

  “And she's invisible to everyone but us,” Nouridh-Salter said. “Because we've supported Torian independence, nobody would ever suspect the Coalition – but we're not the only Coalition on Tor.”

  “The budget's there too,” Zhai said, “and the technology. And the restraint, too. No sense ruining a major city on a future member world.”

  “And,” Nouridh-Salter finished, “we have no idea what she's been up to since the assassination attempt.”

  Grey Hawk nodded. “Motive, means, and opportunity.”

  Silence reigned. Zhai and Nouridh-Salter exchanged a long, significant look.

  “It could be her,” Zhai said at last. “I don't want to believe it. But it could be her.”

  “The Devvies are dangerous,” Nouridh-Salter murmured. “Radical. They started the war, after all.”

  Zhai's fingers resumed drumming their anxious tattoo on the chair. “This isn't what the Coalition stands for.”

  “This is exactly what the Coalition stands for,” Grey Hawk said. Zhai looked at her with a flash of anger, and Grey Hawk held his gaze steadily. “The greater good, yes? That's what the Coalition has always pursued. At any cost.”

  “Nothing's worth this cost,” Zhai said. His anger was gone already. He knew she was right.

  “That's your judgement. Not necessarily theirs.” Grey Hawk could see Zhai's eyes clouding over with calculations and comparisons, and she pressed on. “You know the Coalition better than me, Ambassador. Ask yourself this: based on what you know, would elements within the Developist or Revanchist factions sanction the use of an antimatter bomb against a civilian target if they thought it politically advantageous?”

  Zhai broke eye contact, taking refuge in the blue glare of the projection. “I don't know.”

  “On the balance of probability, then–”

  “I don't know!” Zhai roared. “I do not fucking know, all right?”

  The room was shocked into silence. For a few seconds, the only sound was Zhai's heavy breathing.

  “I don't know,” he repeated, now with a fragile calm. And he didn't, Grey Hawk saw. She could see the battle raging within him, contested between his belief in the Coalition and the evidence that undermined that belief. A flimsy stalemate. Something had to give.

  “Let's move on for now,” Nouridh-Salter said into the silence, delicately breaking the tension with an experienced touch. “Madmen, lone wolves, and mysterious terrorists next, wasn't it?”

  Fleischer bit into her third pastry. “Not possible,” she said, her mouth full. “They'd never be able to store the antimatter – or create it in the first place.”

  Nouridh-Salter shrugged. “For the sake of argument, though. Who would want–”

  Fleischer suddenly made a loud choking sound, and Umbiba leaned over to thump her on the back. She doubled over, wheezing.

  “Something to add?” Zhai said.

  Fleischer coughed twice and held up a hand, desperately trying to speak. “UBM,” she spluttered, after a few seconds.

  Zhai frowned. “UBM?”

  “Unidentified Blue Metal,” Tetaine said.

  The ambassador made an impatient gesture. “We all know what UBM is.”

  “Shut up,” Fleischer said hoarsely, to which Zhai raised an eyebrow.

  With a few commands on her watch, Fleischer wiped away the chart and brought up an incomprehensible jumble of numbers and diagrams, most of which depicted concentric curves interrupted by jagged lines and protrusions. “Look at this.”

  “I'm looking,” Zhai said. “Explain.”

  Fleischer growled in frustration and made an abortive gesture at the chaotic information floating in the air, as if to say isn’t it obvious? She began talking very quickly. “OK, look. On the ship over, in the Void, I kept picking up all these weird readings, right?”

  Zhai nodded. “Right.”

  “Now, I thought it was just Void interference with my instruments, but it was weirdly constant. Strange patterns of electromagnetism, originating somewhere on the ship, but I didn't recognise it.”

  “UBM,” Tetaine said slowly. “Right?”

  “Right!” Fleischer looked up, her face flushed with excitement. “You try to run EM fields in the Void, they fail – it’s the random electrical variance. Only way to stabilise them enough to guarantee they’ll stay up is to run them through UBM. That's what I was picking up all that time, except all the instruments were out of whack in the Void – it didn't look consistent, but it was. The phenomenon was constant, but the measuring devices weren't!”

  “Oh,” Grey Hawk said aloud, as the final piece of the puzzle slotted into place in her mind. “And the EM fields–”

  “Exactly!” Fleischer said.

  Zhai looked from one to the other, exasperated. “Look, break it down for me. You’re telling me we had UBM on board. So what?”

  “Antimatter can only be safely stored within powerful electromagnetic fields,” Grey Hawk said. “If it comes into contact with regular matter, it's instantaneous annihilation
. But if you're in the Void, the disruption would compromise the fields, even with a powerful V-shield.”

  Fleischer nodded. “So the only way to transport antimatter in the Void is by stabilising the EM fields with–”

  “UBM,” Zhai said faintly.

  He knew.

  “Can you confirm it?” Nouridh-Salter demanded. “Can you confirm, 100%, that we had antimatter aboard our ship?”

  “The realspace engines were standard rekenon ion drives, not antimatter,” Tetaine said, “but there'd have been trace UBM built into the essential circuits. That might explain–”

  Fleischer shook her head vigorously. “No. Wouldn’t be enough for the readings I was getting. We’re talking – I don’t know, half a kilo of the stuff.”

  “Can you confirm it?” Nouridh-Salter repeated.

  Fleischer looked down at her watch, then at the projection, then at Nouridh-Salter’s trembling jaw.

  “Yes,” she said, and now her enthusiasm vanished in an instant as she realised the real-world implications of her theorising. “I – I can confirm it.”

  Nouridh-Salter slammed his palm on a table. “It was her! It was that bitch Peck! She smuggled antimatter onto Tor right under our noses, in our own fucking ship, and she destroyed a whole goddamn city with it!”

  Zhai grabbed the chair he'd been standing behind, wrenched it back, and slumped into it as if he could no longer stand. He stared up at the projected screens with hollow eyes.

  “I fucking knew it,” Nouridh-Salter was saying, practically spitting in fury. “The Devvies tried to kill you, and now they've gone one better. I always, always knew that they–”

  “Don't say 'they',” Zhai said, his voice barely a whisper.

  “What?”

  “Don't say 'they', Harod. Don't just pin this on them.”

  Harod gestured in agitation at the screens. “Why not? It was them! We have proof!”

  “It wasn't just them. We're all complicit in this.” He closed his eyes and dropped his head into his hands. “We did this. It was the Coalition. It was us,” he said, into the bleak silence that had settled on the room like a shroud. “It was us.”

  27

  The rain pawed at the window as Zhai sat alone in his office, thinking about the past.

  He tried to remember how he'd felt on Naro. The decades dividing him from Zhai-that-was had been long and eventful. He'd packed an entire career into those years. A life.

  It seemed logical to him that he could find his way back through a continuum of his past selves, each one only slightly different from its predecessor and successor, an evolutionary chain of Zhais comprising the seamless spectrum of his life. Somehow, the boy on Xanang had become the man on Tor, and there had to be an unbroken chain between them, wending through Armenaiakon, Megereth Station, Naro, Star City, Morin, and a score of other worlds, hanging from the thread of his existence like beads on a necklace. There must be a path back.

  But he couldn't find it.

  Zhai wished he had kept a diary. It had always seemed so much trouble at the time, another distraction from the real work, but now it was another regret to add to the pile. Right now, he would have given anything to trace his mind back through the years, to see himself gradually transform. Memories were lies, obscuring the truth with a patina of passing time that distorted, minimised, exaggerated, and confused. The truth of who he had been was gone. Only vague, pale recollections remained.

  It seemed to him that he had once believed very strongly in the Consolidationist ethos. In a sense, he still did. He knew that the Developists and Revanchists would plunge the galaxy into a nightmare war if they kept hold of the reins, and the Solids had always been a voice of caution, a steady hand to stabilise, not change. But to believe in the Consolidationist cause was to believe in the Coalition.

  How easy it would be to blame it all on Peck and radical Devvies and Revvies. That was what Harod was doing, and Zhai couldn't blame him – but nor could he find it within himself to take the same way out. Somewhere deep down, he knew that this was no momentary lapse, no uncharacteristic blip for the Coalition. Grey Hawk had been right, damn her. This was what the Coalition did. This was what the Coalition had always done.

  It had been woven right into the Coalition's cultural fabric ever since the Twins fell at Megereth. A pathological need to make the hard choices nobody else would make, on which was built a cast-iron sense of superiority – an innate belief that the Coalition's role was to decide the fate of the human race. It was the Coalition which had enacted the First and Second Separations, the Coalition which had led the fight against the Red One, the Coalition which had sacrificed a continent of people to save the rest, the Coalition which had scattered the human race across the stars. Even now, converted to a relatively ordinary interstellar state, robbed of what had once made it special, the Coalition's DNA was shot through with the arrogance that made it take drastic action in the name of a nebulous greater good.

  Zhai stared numbly at his hands, which were trembling slightly on the desk. He felt ill. The poison of the Coalition ran through his veins, permeated every capillary and neuron, and his body had finally realised just how toxic it was. His tongue, teller of a thousand Coalition-serving lies, was limp and heavy in his mouth.

  There was a tightening in him, an intense sensation of impending disconnection. He and the Coalition had travelled along parallel rails for decades, rails so close that to his careless eyes they had appeared to be one – but now a fork was looming, and the rails would arc apart. His choice was simple: hop over and abandon his own path for the Coalition's, or stay the course and leave it behind, like an antique rocket shedding its boosters.

  Crazily, he thought of a gruesome movie that Ceq, relishing Zhai’s discomfort, had told him about at great length, in which a trapped hiker gnawed off his own arm. Trying to cut himself off from the Coalition now would be beyond painful. Just the thought of it sent existential terror lancing through him, made him feel weak at the knees. If the strength to make that choice existed in Zhai, it was buried deep below rich veins of cowardice.

  He tried to remember Naro – the real Naro, not the story he’d written for himself – but found himself in a maze of lies, each of which seemed real and true until he recalled constructing them all those years ago, an endless chain of deceit that folded in on itself, keeping him from the truth of the past. What had he really thought, or felt? He remembered what he’d said, and that had retroactively become what he’d thought. He’d overwritten his own truth with Coalition lies.

  Alone at his desk, Zhai felt suddenly adrift. All the ropes and moorings that had anchored him all those years – Ambassador Zhai of the Coalition – had frayed away, and he hadn’t even noticed. He was still half-blind – though now he could just about see through the blotch of colour at the centre of his vision to the world beyond, if he focused – but in a way, it seemed to him that he could see more clearly than ever.

  The rain was pelting incessantly at the window now. Over Macard, dark clouds convulsed with lightning, teasing an almighty storm to come. Zhai tried to distract himself with the weather forecast. The monsoons were predicted to begin in earnest any day now. It was in the hands of the clouds – sooner or later, they would decide to burst, and Tor would suffer the deluge. One small mercy was that the rain had aided firefighting efforts in Landing, where the firestorms raging across the city were mostly extinguished.

  It had not doused Tor's anger. Zhai flicked through the footage coming from Landing, where furious, drenched protesters marched unchallenged in the streets, their banners accusing Chang of murdering his own people. Even Macard, the bonsai tree of a city so thoroughly pacified by the government, was beginning to wake up. A peaceful sit-in in a park had been broken up by police, and snatches of video showed them slamming demonstrators slammed into the mud and dragging them off to waiting vans, and edgy cops had violently put an end to a march in solidarity with Macard when the first anti-government signs went up. Illicit public message
systems were reaching new heights of activity. Chang was taking the blame in the eyes of his people, no matter how desperately the news tried to spin Landing as the work of pro-Alliance terrorists.

  And Salmi was silent.

  “Come on, Salmi,” Zhai muttered to himself. He checked his watch again, glaring at his unanswered message. “Talk to me.”

  “It’s all gone,” Salmi said.

  Zhai’s heart skipped at least two beats.

  “Twins,” he said faintly, resisting the urge to look foolishly around. “Salmi? Is that you? You damn near gave me a heart attack.”

  “I can’t believe it.” Salmi’s voice was a distant, distracted whisper. Had she been listening to him – hell, the entire embassy – all this time? The thought of the power Chang had allowed her to accumulate terrified Zhai. “I – I can’t believe it.”

  Zhai exhaled. His heart was working overtime to catch up. “I was worried about you. When you went silent–”

  “I’m not in Landing,” Salmi said. “Ambassador, the network there is barely holding together. I’m trying to keep it up to help coordinate the emergency response, but I can’t do it. So much of it just – went dark. Like the sun went out.”

  The bleakness of her voice chilled him.

  “They killed him,” she said softly, her words almost lost in the rain. “They killed them all. My home – it was my home, Ambassador, and it’s just – it’s all–”

  She kept cutting herself off, and from the choppy, hollow sound of her breathing, Zhai knew she was holding back tears.

  And, an instant before his empathy spun up to speed, the calculating snake in him was thinking what do I tell her to keep her on our side?

  He ducked the guilt like a boxer. He was what he was.

  “I’m throwing my support behind the Hactaurs,” he said, swearing to himself that he wouldn’t lie to Salmi. Did she already know? How long had she been listening? Was anything they’d ever said in the embassy private from her? He glanced at his watch again. It gave no clue that Salmi was talking to him, unlike last time. “They’re going to launch a coup. Twins know they won’t be perfect, but anything’s better than Chang, and they’ll keep Tor independent. When it comes–”