by Adam Roberts
It was into this harmless band that the Alsists infiltrated themselves; going so far as to purchase licences, to hawk their goods all morning, and then to rubberneck their way about the sights of the city in the afternoon, as if they were real one-day traders. I find it hard to imagine myself into their heads, their duplicity, their knowledge that the innocents they wandered amongst would, soon after their departure, be lying wounded, bleeding, dead.
They planted about a dozen devices in public buildings; the courtroom, Parliament, the major concert hall. The first explosion happened in the late evening, giving the cowards time to slink out of the city under the cover of our own laws and to rejoin their planes out east. They were doubtless airborne under the confusion as more explosions burst amongst us and our attention was diverted.
How well I remember the brutal chaos of that night. By fortune, or God’s Grace, there was no concert in the hall although most nights saw some recital or other. But in the event the only person killed was a janitor, an Eleupolisian as it happens, who kept the venue clean and slept under the stage (he was killed, I seem to remember, by a slab of stone being forced down by the explosion and squashing him). But the enormity of the sound is something difficult to convey using only words. It woke me, and I was asleep half a mile from the building. I was shelled from my sleep like a pea from a pod, and within minutes I was fully dressed and talking with under-Captains and civilian ministers by screen whilst my valet was getting the car ready to take me over town.
To begin with, it was not clear exactly what had happened. Flames were leaping from the roof of the concert hall, sucking up our precious oxygen, burning in exotic colours in the chlorine and oxygen. People had been drawn from their beds, or from their work (half the population had settled into routines of working in the dark hours to avoid the higher levels of radiation, especially if their work involved being outdoors). My imperial car and its troop worked through the crowd to confront the rubble of the entrance hall, the ghastly snake-flames, the black clouds of smoke blotting out the starlight and lit only by their own flames from below; a hellish scene.
There was no doubt, of course, as to who had perpetrated this atrocity, although it is worth noting that the Alsists did not claim responsibility. Indeed, although no historian doubts their guilt, I believe that they never have. It is not their way, of course, to admit that actions have consequences, or that the manly thing is to take responsibility. Perhaps they deny it still. And, of course, the particular villain, the person who actually trespassed and planted the bomb, has never been caught or even identified. Although we can gain some small satisfaction from knowing that, given the high level of Alsist casualties, particularly in the early portion of the war, these criminals almost certainly were killed. Some day I too will go to greet my Maker, and then I shall ask him to grant me the whole sight, to see how His justice was enacted.
Emergency services in those last few pre-war days were in the same state of unpreparedness they had been ever since foundation day. What else? We had not needed them before. And so it was a minor division of army soldiers who were drafted in to put out the fire and to start to set the rubble to rights. But no sooner had I stepped out of the imperial car to address an impromptu speech to the hastily assembled Visualcast cameras, than there was another sound: a mighty smack noise followed by a deep bass rumble that hung on the air for a very long time. This was the second device exploding outside the secondary barracks, knocking in the outer wall and murdering nearly a dozen people.
After that they came with a sickening rapidity. The courthouse bomb did little more than break the triple windows and allow a deal of mess from outside in over the floor (there was a minor case being prosecuted in the cheaper court-hours, and a lawyer was killed; it was lucky there was no more damage). The Parliament bomb did more structural damage; most of the windows were smashed, and one of the two towers was so badly cracked that it had to be demolished. Another bomb pulled out a hole in a main clean-water tank, and weeks of precious desalination was wasted. Another broke walls in a dormitory where only half the sleepers inside were fitted with nasal filters; many choked to death, and even some of those with the filters panicked and mouth-breathed to their deaths.
By now, everybody in Senaar was awake, and the streets thronged. I had fallen back on my private dwelling (I reasoned that no public building was safe – although my under-Captains were adamant that my home be thoroughly checked by military experts in bombmaking before I was even allowed out of the car), and from there I made a series of Visualcasts to calm the population. Despite my anger at the atrocity, I was fiercely proud of my people also. The army never lacked for willing volunteer helpers; volunteers, mark you! People happy to work without any form of recompense, to clear away rubble, to pull people out of the damage. The hospitals introduced a standardised billing system as a mark of respect, even though hospital profits were severely limited as a result.
By the morning, the will of the Senaarians had crystallised. Justice. This assault upon our city, this rape of our prize buildings (erections that symbolised the civic purpose and pride of our nation) had to be answered. I called a dawn meeting of all higher officers, and the meeting stretched throughout the day. In the corner we had several netscreens relaying the shock of Senaarian netprogrammes and news-keepers; but also the alarm that these attacks spread throughout the whole of our world. Galilean nations, broadly speaking, were as thoroughly outraged by the Alsist terrorism as were we; our alliances in the South could be depended upon, because they were built on sturdy foundations. But responses to the news from the North were less sure. Newscasts reported the atrocities, of course, but wove webs of uncertainty about the facts, and gave the impression that all this was remote from Perse concerns. When we contacted diplomatic officers in these northern states – and I spoke personally to the Agent for Convento – we were met with the blank wall of suspicion that the success of Senaar had built up. They said many things, mostly to do with the unproved nature of Als’s guilt in these crimes; but the truth of the matter was that the Northern states were fearful of Senaarian imperium, and would do anything to try and break our increasing power. It is hard, I know, for us to comprehend the fear that our success, our closeness to the Will of God, sets in the hearts of less successful, less devout nations. A bitter lesson to learn in the ways of politics. But this was the point: Convento and Smith were less interested in the rights and wrongs of the matter (and which wrong could be more clearly elaborated than terrorist atrocity against the innocent?), and more interested in political manoeuvrings.
Very well, then, I resolved. Alone. It seemed to me that both Convento and Smith underestimated the strength of our will, but this was a problem to which we could return later. I breakfasted, and changed into dress uniform, before returning to the meeting of the senior staff. It is important to create the right impression. Indeed, I caught a glimpse of myself in the polished stone of the corridor outside the meeting room: my buttons shone bright as torch-heads, the dark blue of the uniform swam in the gleaming stone mirror of that wall. My soul took a little electric jolt of pride and confidence. And so I went into the war meeting. Perhaps this seems a little vain to you, but believe me. As a man who has devoted his life to the Prince of Peace, it is no small thing to me to commit men to war; men who have families, children, who worship God, and some of whom will surely die. It is essential, vital, that this be done, but the leader who does this is only a man, a man with compassion. At these times we judge the leader by the strength of his will, under God, but everybody is human.
Not (I flatter myself) that anybody in that meeting room realised that I was anything other than simply and clearly resolute. The time was for action, and I was ready for that time.
The meeting was hot-tempered. Most of the people in that room had been awake all night, many of them commanding troops to deal with fire and try to save lives. I myself had slept poorly. The first reaction of warriors is to action, and the mood of the group was that we should coun
terattack Als at once. The reasoning behind this was most eloquently expressed by a young officer called Ets. He reasoned that Als had perpetrated a deliberate act of war against us, and that they would do so again if we did nothing. The best course of action, he said, was an immediate strike at the heart of their power to disable them. This proposal was hurrayed with loud cheers.
I waited for the tumult to settle down, and then spoke. What my braves were ignoring, I said, was the nature of Als. This was not a people who were capable of acting in concert. The bombs planted in our city were certainly the action of individual fanatics, not of a planned military exercise. Of course we must retaliate, but our retaliation must be carefully planned. The point, of course (and it may seem obvious in hindsight, but it requires a good eye to spy this out in advance), is that the larger power structures must be taken into account. Acting against Als now, after so shocking a terrorist outrage, would win approval from the South, and it might be thought only justice by many inhabitants in the northern cities. But any large-scale military assault on a city on the shores of the Perse would also certainly arouse the unease of the other northern states, who might (they would reason) be next to fall to the military strength of our great nation. Perhaps (I spoke loudly to quell an approving clamour that arose at this thought), perhaps this was indeed the Senaarian destiny, the manifest Will of God for this world. But in this, as in all political matters, timing is everything. If we attack Als and we draw in the military responses of Convento and Smith, then we have straight away declared war on the whole of the Perse, and not just on renegade anarchists. If this is what is to be, then so be it and amen: but we must be prepared for this. We must send in a force large enough to deal with all three nations, and not just the one. Conversely, if we could achieve our immediate end (bringing justice to Als) without involving Convento or Smith, then we would have cut by a third the power of the northern basin; any future development in that area would consequently be one third easier.
Viewed in this fashion, it was clear that how we acted now carried tremendous implications for the future. Haste was not wanted.
We discussed the matter all morning, until lunch was brought in, and after lunch we called up projections of netscreen models. The first alternative was, briefly, to attack Als swiftly from the air and then retreat, such that the other nations of the Perse would not fear invasion, but would instead acknowledge that justice had been meted out. This would reduce the northern threat, and leave us unblooded: but it would also surely provoke retaliation from Als, and possibly from other northern states hoping to use the occasion as a pretext, and to reduce the glory of Senaar a little.
A second alternative was a full invasion, pinpointing Als from above with barrage, and then occupying the broken city with a large force of men. The advantage of this was that we could deal once and for all with Als, and also reduce the chances of their retaliation. Perhaps, indeed, we could civilise these people, bring them discipline and order and take them closer to God. But so aggressive an action would be much more likely to draw out Convento and Smith in what they would term a defensive war. Some of my juniors were less worried than others by this possibility. Their reasoning was that war was inevitable anyway, and it would be better to get it out of the way sooner rather than later. It is true that we would be fighting a war far from home, but so long as we maintained a supremacy in the air our supply lines would be easily maintained.
We argued back and forth between these options, and eventually it fell to me to make a decision. Inescapable power of command. My solution to the problem was, I think, elegant: history has acquitted me of the charges sometimes made by the jealous, that in compromising I weakened the force of both alternatives and gained nothing. Indeed, little could be further from the truth. In fact, my command gave us perfect ground, although I will concede that a certain ineffectiveness on the ground watered down my plan. I was easier in myself, knowing that jean-Pierre – who was present throughout the briefing – backed me throughout. His faith in me never wavered.
This, then, was the action I ordered: Als would be attacked from the air, her major buildings pulped, her will destroyed. Simultaneously we would send (unarmed) ambassadors to the other Perse nations to hold them at bay with intensive negotiations. We would vigorously present the attack as just retribution, and we would explain the presence of a (relatively small) group of armed men on the ground in terms of policing the area, and providing humanitarian aid. This way, I reasoned, we would break Als, and be able to place a force of men on the site to keep them down, without seeming to pose a threat to Convento and Smith. If all went according to plan, we would eliminate Als as a military threat, and simultaneously create a base for further military operations, without antagonising the neighbouring states.
The rest of the day (and I won’t labour this narrative with all the tedious details of discussion) were to do with ordnance, numbers, statistics. It is no easy task to organise a large-scale operation, to bring all the hundreds of separate components together (and each individual soldier is a component as well) and achieve the desired consummation. It took us three days.
That afternoon I made another speech for the Visuals; the speech which perhaps you have read in your schoolbooks. I would like (each of us has a little kernel of pride, I think) to claim each of those words as my own, but the truth is that I wrote the speech very rapidly with three or four aides. I even did without help from Preminger. The smell of that room – the salt-polish on the black wooden table (wood that had flown all the way from Earth with us), the close smell of men together – I think that smell will stay with me until my dying day. The words were well chosen, though (or else why would you be studying them in your schoolbooks?): the point of that speech (and perhaps you will forgive me from making comment upon it) is that each of the words I spoke in it was about action, was about bringing all the atoms of state together in a unified effort of will. Strike at Senaar, I said, and you will hurt your hand; because her breast is stony with resolve and God’s justice. Our enemies had sowed the seeds of fire and death, but this was a crop we would not harvest on our own.
After the words had been recorded for netcast and for use on all Visuals at basic fee (jean-Pierre thought I should have charged artists’ rates, so powerful was the effect of my words): after this I toured the city. The speech was injuncted to be broadcast only in the after-Whisper of evening. People, outside now, trying to rebuild wrecked lives, would go indoors for the Whisper, and the audience would be that much larger. Moreover, my words would be followed by news reports of the retaliatory strike against the Alsists. My afternoon tour was partly to allow me to survey the damage at close quarters, but also an opportunity for my people to see me. Rumours had circulated, shortly after the bombs, that I had been wounded, or even killed. Rumour, as many military historians have noted, is a dangerous pathogen, a virus that rattles through the body politic. Visuals, denials of my death might be considered merely politic, but my actual presence in the city was a different matter. A tonic for my people. It was for this reason that, much later, I instituted the anti-rumour legislation, my personal project, paid through the Senate with my own personal votes, because other politicos were too timid to see the wisdom in this legislation. But you, you live amongst a nation shaped by the outlawing of spreading vicious or malicious rumour that might damage the Senaarian polity. You know how much more wholesome our nation is since that day.
But I am getting ahead of myself. On that day, I selected my open car, with only a web of perfectly transparent woven-fibre covering between myself and the world at large (we had been attacked so recently, it would not do to be careless), and drove down the main street, the one that had recently been renamed in my honour. It was late in the afternoon, and the crowds were coming out from their midday-sun rest period. The cheering! It brought tears to my eyes, to think that the spine of Senaar was so strong. Steel, not to be snapped. By the time I reached the central square, word had spread of my progress, and a great mass had gat
hered to wave and cheer me. The canopy did not permit me to say any words, but I was able to stand and to wave at the crowd. The courtesy guard had to hold some of the crowd back (excess of enthusiasm; not what my enemies have sometimes called it. I know it was merely an excess of enthusiasm; I was there, after all).
Afterwards, I toured the concert hall, the barracks, the justice centre. The guards cleared me a space, and I got out of the car to actually go amongst the rubble with some of the military workers, the life-savers. A huge crane had been erected over the mess of broken concrete and some sappers were constructing an industrial-scale Fabricant to take the broken stone and rework it into usable rebuilding slabs. I was so overcome I bear-hugged the under-Lieutenant, a moment captured on several Visuals for later display. I am a large man, and I entirely obscured the little fellow from the camera eye.
I was frankly exhausted by so much gadding about, and I retired to my second home; my official residence was now deemed too liable to attack, and I had moved to a secret second residence. Afterwards, scurrilous news-reporting suggested that I had ordered the family out of this second domicile under pain of imprisonment. But there is no truth in this piece of anti-propaganda. The family were too happy to move from their home. Of course they were. Try to understand the mood that gripped Senaar now. Young boys presented themselves to army offices, eager to serve the nation in war despite their youth. Women organised spontaneous support groups recording net-messages to be sent to single soldiers. There were mass rallies in support of the campaign. People donated some of their votes – entirely free of charge, mark you! – to the military treasury to ensure that certain of the less obvious military legislation be passed without eating into military vote budgets.