Empire e-1

by Orson Scott Card

  “I only knew him for three days,” he said.

  “He makes an impression,” said Load softly. One by one they each touched his shoulder. And the kind touches were enough to revive him. Calm him. He walked back with them along the path, around the ranger station, ignoring the civilians and rangers who were being watched over by a heavily-armed Benny.

  “Thank you for your cooperation,” said Benny. “I’m happy to tell you that the operation was successful. You can resume your normal activities.” Then he joined them on the walk to their cars.

  Finding the enemy

  They also serve, who only sit and type.

  It was Reuben’s PDA that got Cecily through the first month of widowhood. Recording the shipments and financial transactions, following the trails, searching for patterns, tracking corporate entities, passing along names and leads to FBI and DIA agents: It was a vast spiderweb, with Reuben’s notes like dewdrops that reveal where the otherwise invisible strands must be.

  It was an urgent task. And they were Reuben’s notes. Reuben’s words. It was his trail that she was following. All those days when he traveled on assignments he couldn’t tell her about, all those trips abroad and in America, all those nights when she could see that he was troubled and yet knew he couldn’t talk about it. Now he was telling her.

  Meanwhile, Aunt Margaret brought the children down to Gettysburg and stayed with them. “I’m an old widow myself,” she said. “I know how hard it is. You need the children near, and you also need to lose yourself completely in something that isn’t your family. So here I am and here I’ll stay while you save the world.”

  It wasn’t the world Cecily was saving. It might be America. It might be herself.

  But one thing was certain. It was not going to save Reuben’s reputation. There was no way that he could have helped but see that something wrong was going on. Too much of what he did was within the borders of the United States. Most of the shipments seemed to go from port city to port city, so some illusion could be maintained that these weapons shipments were going overseas. But who would bring weapons from China or Russia to the United States in order to ship them to pro-U.S. partisan groups in Iran or Sudan or Turkmenistan? Reuben had to at least wonder if some or all of these weapons were meant to be used domestically.

  Which was why he kept these notes on the PDA—and why he was so reluctant to give it into anyone else’s hands. Because he knew something dangerous was going on and he was helping with it—yet he believed he was doing it for a President that he admired and trusted, and so he acted the good soldier and did the jobs he was assigned to do.

  Yet if it turned out to be wrong, he would have the paper trail—well, the digital trail—that someone could use to track it all down. Reuben never needed records like this. He had trained his memory like a Jesuit. So he was deliberately creating evidence.

  He knew he was only guessing about the integrity of the people he served. If he guessed wrong, then he was serving traitors, and he could not claim that it had never occurred to him. All he could do was make sure that the full confession was here. The evidence to unravel what he had helped them do.

  If only he had talked to me, she thought again and again.

  And most of the time she answered herself: What did I know? What would I have counseled? Of course, caution, yes—I’m the woman who set aside the political career to raise a family. I choose safety. That’s what I do. But I also loved Reuben. Still love him. And I knew how unhappy he would be, to walk away from something that might have been in service of a cause, a President, he believed in.

  So few seemed to believe in that President, and yet Reuben was sure that he was pursuing the right course. So would she have counseled him to give it up? To denounce it?

  And… could he have given it up? It was clear now that he had been working for and with murderers and traitors. Would they have let him walk away, even she had advised him? No. There was too much danger that he would then denounce them—they would have killed him. And she would have spent the last year or so consoling her children about their father’s apparent suicide. Or traffic accident. Whatever method they used.

  Things happened as they happened. Reuben accepted the hand dealt to him, and bet on it. Bet his life on it.

  Whatever others may think of the choices he made, I know his heart. I know that he would and did sacrifice anything for the cause of freedom, in support of those he believed also fought for it. He took the long view of history. He cared about the world their grandchildren would inherit. He despised those who thought only of themselves, their immediate advantage. Whatever I might have advised him, he would have done what he did. I could not have changed him.

  I wouldn’t have tried.

  So she shed tears over her work, but she kept working.

  Reuben’s jeesh came in and out of the Gettysburg White House, as the media were calling it now. She knew them all by their noms de guerre now: Cole, not Coleman; Load, not Lloyd. Mingo, Benny, Cat, Babe, Arty, Drew. Very young men when they first trained to be soldiers, but now men, seasoned veterans.

  LaMonte knew an asset when he saw one. Eight extraordinarily good soldiers whose loyalty had already been tested. He turned them over to his National Security Adviser, and Averell Torrent used them for missions that required deftness, quickness. Seize this. Destroy that. In twos and threes they went out, sometimes in uniform, sometimes in civilian clothes, sometimes heavily armed in attack choppers, sometimes on domestic flights with no weapons at all.

  They would find the agents of the Progressive Restoration and follow them to where their weapons or funds were stashed. The weapons were to be used to eliminate opponents of the Progressive Restoration in key states, as they had been used in the attempt to kill Cole, or to serve to defend states or cities that came over to the rebel side. The funds were to be used to bribe legislators, governors, mayors, and city councilors who needed a little help making up their mind.

  Some of their small victories were kept secret; others, though, Averell Torrent went before the cameras to announce. Cessy soon realized that publicity depended on whether any rebels were killed who were not under arms. Take down a mech or blow up a hovercycle, and Torrent would go on the news, calmly and reassuringly telling the American people that an attempt had been made to assassinate a loyal American official, but the violent Progressive Revolution and its terrifying weapons had been stopped in their tracks.

  But if the dead bodies were not men in body armor or ensconced in the new machines, then the event had no national significance. It was a matter for local law enforcement. If anyone noticed that the victims had been sympathetic toward the rebels’ cause, the killing was assumed to be the work of local right-wing vigilantes.

  The result was that LaMonte’s administration retained its image of being infinitely patient, taking action only to protect American lives from the depredations of the rebels. And people got used to seeing Averell Torrent as the calm, reassuring voice of moderation, reluctantly taking action when forced to by the enemies of peace and freedom, but otherwise merely asking Americans to trust in the democratic process and not throw in their lot with the violence of the Progressive Restoration.

  Meanwhile, the members of Reuben’s jeesh would stop in and see her whenever they passed through Gettysburg. They all regarded it as part of their work, to help her decode the Farsi that Reuben had used for his notes. Words and phrases that were repeated, she would learn, but many phrases weren’t in the dictionary, or at least not with the meaning he was using. Much of his Farsi was really the private language he and his comrades had developed—there was English slang in the Farsi, sometimes translated and sometimes transliterated, as there was also Arabic and Spanish and whatever other languages they happened to know.

  It was all translated within a week, more or less. Then they helped her study the maps. She had threads that traced all the shipments, and as she learned whatever the FBI and DIA could find out for her about those shipments, she began to build u
p a clearer picture.

  Meanwhile, she met with others in Gettysburg who were trying to figure out the Progressive Restoration movement—the rebels, as they called them now in the office. How much money would this all take? Who has that kind of money and can spend it without detection? Is the source of this foreign or domestic? They had to keep in mind the possibility that the Chinese were at the root of this. Or Al Qaeda. Even Russia. The joke inside Gettysburg was that it was really the French behind everything. They’d been secretly running the world since Napoleon, following an extraordinarily deceptive master plan that would eventually lead to conquering the world.

  Jokes aside, it became clear to Cecily and those who agreed with her that a conspiracy like this had to be very tightly held or it would have been detected long before. Even true believers in a cause can be careless, but nobody had been. Nothing leaked. How?

  The organization that Cecily imagined bringing this off consisted of only a handful of people, who then hired or encouraged others to do what they needed, but without telling them anything about what it was for.

  But there were some points where they had to let larger numbers in on what they were doing. Somehow they had to recruit the soldiers who would run these machines, and the pattern was emerging: They must have recruited among groups of veterans who had turned against the war, the military, or the President. She had to assume it was the left-wing version of the way right-wing militias recruited. Find who’s pissed off. Then find the ones who are angry enough to train to kill for the cause.

  The bodies of those killed at Great Falls and at the Holland Tunnel established the profile, and now the investigators were tracking down others who had dropped out of sight in the past year or so.

  Another place where they had to let outsiders in on the secret was weapons development. This wasn’t something you did as a hobby. They had to recruit from among the experts—American experts, since nothing about the designs suggested European or Japanese concepts.

  So the FBI worked on assembling a list of disgusted or disaffected researchers who had dropped out of sight over the years and could now be assumed to be working for the rebels. There were also some former automobile and aviation designers, computer engineers and hotshot programmers whose political views were far to the left and whose rage had seemed, to many of their coworkers, disproportionate. Some of them were found, having made perfectly innocent career changes. Others were not found at all. They went on the list.

  The weapons themselves were still intimidating, but no longer baffling. With several mechs to study from the battle at the Holland Tunnel, the DOD experts had found nothing that couldn’t be built using existing design theory. Excellent, creative engineers built these weapons, but not necessarily geniuses. Their work could be duplicated and countered.

  Except for the EMP gun. The DOD people still had not duplicated the technology that kept the directed pulse coherent over such a long range. It was a serious problem that the rebels had an air defense system that kept military aircraft from overflying New York City any lower than satellite level. The DOD was working on systems that would momentarily shut down all electronics while the EMP blew through. But planes that depended on electronics to stay aloft were almost as damaged by the shutdown as by the EMP itself.

  The U.S. was used to having air supremacy. Over loyal territory they still did. But that territory was shrinking, bit by bit.

  Because in the absence of a firm military response, Americans who viewed the Progressive Restoration as heroes began to believe that they might just bring this thing off. Some worried that the leaders of the Progressive Restoration had not come forward—but the New York City Council insisted that they were now leading the movement to “restore Constitutional government” and the Progressive Restoration was obeying their orders. It put democratically elected officials at the apparent head of the movement, and for many people who sympathized with their views, that was enough.

  In the first month, the legislatures ofWashington State and Vermont passed resolutions joining themselves to the Progressive Restoration. In Washington the governor vetoed that action and mobilized the National Guard to make sure that no mechs or hovercycles showed up in Washington. The trouble was, he also asked President Nielson to keep U.S. forces from taking any “provocative military action.” In effect, the state had declared itself neutral territory.

  Meanwhile quite a few cities had passed or nearly passed resolutions declaring their recognition of the Progressive Revolution. And there were well-orchestrated movements in other states pressing for their legislatures to jump on the bandwagon.

  There was no shortage of liberals, from moderate to radical, who also condemned the rebellion. This was the wrong way to go about it, they said. Nobody should have died, they said. If the Progressive Revolution has any links to the assassinations of Friday the Thirteenth, they should be tried and punished for the crimes.

  At the same time, many voices that condemned the rebellion also argued strongly against taking military action. Cecily was not surprised to hear them call for negotiations. Having lived for years with a soldier-historian, she knew that negotiations only worked when you had something to offer or when the other side thought they had something to fear from you. It was hard to see what negotiations with rebels would accomplish except to give them time to build more and more support in the rest of the country.

  Cecily could hear Reuben’s voice in her mind, scoffing at all these people. If the states tolerate a takeover of the federal government by force, we’ll never have peace again, he’d say.

  The trouble was he wasn’t here for her to argue with him, to tell him that if this rebellion was suppressed by military action against an American city, there would be no forgiveness for it. He would listen. He would realize that she was right, or at least that her views had to be taken into account.

  Meanwhile, she worked at her investigation. The key was figuring out where all these shipments were controlled from, where the money flowed. When her information was complete, it could be combined with information from the other investigations and maybe they could figure something out.

  She was glad she had her job and not LaMonte’s. Because the country’s split over how to respond to the war showed up in Congress. Party discipline was breaking down on both sides of the aisle. There were Democrats calling for military action against the rebels, and Republicans calling for a wait-and-talk policy. Each side of the debate saw only the worst possible consequences for the other side’s view.

  Which was a recipe for indecision and obstruction in Congress. No one there had declared for the rebels; no one had resigned, not even the Congressmen from New York City. All were calling for the Progressive Restoration to leave New York.

  But that didn’t mean that there weren’t substantial numbers of Congressmen acting to slow down any kind of military action. Part of that was to hold up approval of President Nielson’s appointments.

  They approved George Sarkissian as the new Secretary of State, though with a battle; Averell Torrent sailed through as National Security Adviser. However, there was such virulent opposition to former Secretary of State Donald Porter as the new Vice President—it was called a needlessly provocative action—that the acting Speaker of the House and the majority leader of the Senate refused to push through a vote on his confirmation even though they were of the President’s party.

  And there was no chance of getting a new Secretary of Defense through, regardless of who it was. The Republicans threatened to name one of their most radically right-wing members as Speaker of the House to replace LaMonte Nielson, making him the next in line for the presidency. But this was abandoned when legal experts in the law schools howled that even though it might be technically legal, the effect would be an end run around the Constitutional requirement that the new next-in-line to the presidency be approved by both houses of Congress. “It’s just what you’d expect,” said one of the sound bites, “given the reckless disregard for the Constitution shown by
the Republicans from 2000 on.” Once that became the story, the maneuver became politically impossible and the House continued with an Acting Speaker.

  International reaction was predictable but maddening.The sworn enemies of the United States were quick to recognize the Progressive Restoration, declaring their U.N. ambassadors to be ambassadors to the United States as well, downgrading their ambassadors in Washington to mere consular status. But that sort of thing was expected from those nations, hardly worth noticing.

  It was the wait-and-see reaction from supposed allies in NATO and elsewhere that infuriated LaMonte and Sarkissian. As Sarkiss-ian said in one meeting, “Do our allies really want an armed rebellion controlled by unknown persons to get their fanatical little hands on the nuclear button?”

  The worst was that President Nielsen’s inner council was divided as well. Sarkissian and Porter argued for military action. Torrent argued for them to wait. And so far, at least, LaMonte was deciding things Torrent’s way.

  “You’re right,” LaMonte said to Sarkissian and Porter, more than once. “Our inaction is practically inviting other states to attempt to join with the rebels. But their resolutions have no legal force whatsoever. Passing a resolution doesn’t give them military power. When we decide to take action, we’ll take that action.”

  The longer we wait means the larger the portion of the country that will have to be treated like an occupied enemy when the war is over, they said.

  But always LaMonte would say, “It’s a struggle for hearts and minds. They want us to use military might. In their view, it proves that they’re right about us. So we’ll limit ourselves to very small military actions while we find out who these people really are. When we find out who’s funding all this and who’s giving the orders, then we can treat it as what it is—a police matter. We’ll arrest the perpetrators, seize their military and financial assets, and then welcome everybody back to constitutional government with open arms and no grudges. That can only happen if there’s no invasion, no bloodbath.”