E p h i a l t e s S h o r t I I I
Son of New York
by
G a v i n E P a r k e r
Son of New York
Version 1.0.0
Published 2016 by parcom entertainment
Copyright © 2016 by Gavin E Parker
This book is copyright under the Berne convention.
No reproduction without permission.
All rights reserved.
The right of Gavin E Parker to be identified as the author of this
work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and
78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
www.ephialtestrilogy.com
[email protected]
Contents
Introduction to The Ephialtes Shorts Series
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
A Note from the Author
Introduction to The Ephialtes Shorts Series
The Ephialtes Trilogy is a sequence of three novels. Set in the twenty-third century, they chart the fallout and unintended consequences when a human colony on Mars secedes from the mother country on Earth. At the time of this writing only the first book, Ephialtes, has been written and published.
Alongside the main novel trilogy are The Ephialtes Shorts. The shorts are individual stories that take place in the Ephialtes Universe. They complement the novel trilogy but are not essential to it. Appreciation of the shorts, however, is likely to be greatly enhanced by familiarity with Ephialtes.
Gavin E Parker
October 2016
Ephialtes Short III: Son of New York
One
The architecture of the north-east United States and Nations mainland was radically altered by the events of the Third World War. Few buildings from before the late twenty-first century survived. In the period after the war a new style developed based on modern easy to manufacture lightweight building materials. So much of what had gone before had been destroyed there was no point in trying to recreate it. The country was trying to look forward to a brighter future and that was reflected in the way they built.
The Fourth World War, over a hundred and fifty years later, was a different beast entirely. The mainland of the USAN was never at risk. All the fighting was a long, long way away, even though those who were fighting it were mostly stationed at home.
The Third World War had reshaped not only the USAN but the entire world. Its influence cast a huge shadow over the next century and beyond. All the wealth, progress and development that characterised most of the twenty-first century had been unexpectedly sacrificed on the altar of the God of War. The decades of improvement in health, life expectancy, productivity and wealth leading up to it had seemed to promise that war itself had finally been conquered. When it came the collapse was so fast and unexpected that there was no time to seek out alternative remedies. From the initial tremors in the global economy to the first shots being fired was a matter of mere weeks.
The twentieth century had had its global conflicts but they had been in a pre-digital age. Information and widely available technologies were as crucial to the third global conflagration as guns and steel had been to the earlier ones. Famines, floods and epidemics were unleashed by lines of code on a world conditioned by a hundred and forty years of peace and low-grade conflicts to consider harmony and cooperation as natural states. International violence, like hunger and poverty, seemed to have been defeated, making the shock of war even crueler.
The buildings of New York tended to appear light and filled with air, delicate but strong. Elmhurst College was typical of post-war (now inter-war) architecture. Adam Wilson was no student of architecture but he appreciated fine buildings. On his short train journey to the college he would often find himself looking at the skyline as it drifted past his carriage, admiring some buildings and less impressed by others.
He was in the second year of an engineering course and hoped one day he might find a job with Helios Matériel Corporation, who were a big employer in the area. Unlike some of his peers he didn’t find the idea of Helios distasteful. In fact he approved of the military, believing that the USAN’s military strength underpinned its freedoms. It wasn’t a popular view amongst the young, so Adam was generally careful how vocal he was about it. But in recent months the unrest in the country had been getting deeper and broader. He was finding it more difficult to bite his tongue as debates seem to flare up more readily and become more heated. At first, when people began protesting he thought nothing of it. There was always a type of person who liked to protest. Usually they were middle-class, insulated and well off protesting on behalf of people they would generally cross the street to avoid. At the beginning, it seemed like that. Over time, the gripes of the protesters could be seen to be more and more legitimate.
The trade sanctions against them were starting to bite. The Martian boycott on deuterium exports to the USAN meant that power was being rationed. The knock-on effect was felt in everything from home heating to employment to the general economy. Restrictions on the amount of power available necessarily limited the amount of economic activity that could take place, leading to rising unemployment. Food shortages were just beginning. At this point it was luxury foods which were becoming increasingly hard to come by but the implication was truly alarming to a population used to almost unlimited energy and nutrition.
Although Adam didn’t approve of the protests he understood them. The people were scared and wanted their voices to be heard. He felt that he had read enough books and followed enough streams to comprehend the situation at a deeper level than most. As far as he was concerned these minor privations were a necessary price for Cortes’ ongoing policy regarding the Martian situation and the Asian Bloc. Sure, it was understandable that people might get antsy when their lights went off at ten o’clock in the evening and their favourite burger joint would be all sold out by midday. But it was a small price to pay for national security.
Adam, like many, particularly from the older generations, was a staunch supporter of President Orlando Cortes. He had been eight years old when the war had begun, and fifteen when it finished. He could barely remember a time before the war and through most of his childhood it seemed to him that Cortes was the strong leader the USAN needed at that time.
Having grown up during the war years he didn’t quite feel the same outrage as some at the lack of elections. Cortes was the only president he had ever known, and seemed to him to be a good one or perhaps even a great one. Cortes had suspended elections early in the war as part of his Restrictive War Measures, a series of emergency laws implemented in order to protect the USAN from cyberwarfare and internal treachery.
He had never known elections so it was harder for him than for some of the older people to get worked up about the absence of them, particularly since Cortes had been such an effective leader. He had led the USAN to victory in WWIV and had only been forced to suffer the ignominy of a grudging truce with the Martians due to their underhand tactics and duplicity.
Adam was given pause when, during one of the early protests, police had opened fire on a crowd. The news streams had made it clear that an undesirable element in the crowd had attacked the police first. It seemed to Adam that, on balance, the reaction of the police was justified. There were alternate streams made by anti-government groups and individuals at the protest which presented a different angle on the events but it seemed that what they were trying to say was extremely self-serving. Although he felt uneasy with it Adam remained committed to the government side.
The shootings at the Denver City march
had been divisive but had served as a powerful recruiting tool for the protesters. Cortes’s ratings in the polls, which had been slowly drifting down since their highpoint at the close of the war, took a sudden dive. Though he retained fifty percent approval ratings they were the lowest they had been for seven years.
Marches and other protests had become more common after that. They were bigger and angrier, too. In response, most states and nations of the union - New York was a notable exception - turned to policing them with military units rather than police forces. Each side saw what it thought was the worst in the other. For the protesters the government was becoming ever more oppressive, suppressing freedom of speech by means of the military. For the military, the population was becoming ever more restive, resistant to the rule of law and harder to control for its own safety.
Adam was glad when responsibility for dealing with mass civil disobedience started to shift to the military and looked forward to the day when it would happen in New York. He knew that his father had been torn about policing the protests. He believed that any violence or vandalism should be dealt with swiftly but also felt that the police service was being used as a political weapon, something he was deeply uncomfortable with. The protests needed to be policed, sure, but the police were being asked to close down any protest on the flimsiest of pretexts. It was framed as ‘Zero Tolerance,’ but felt like a handy excuse to silence opposition.
Gregory Wilson was a police officer and as such might soon be out of it. He had become a policeman like his father and grandfather before him, and was dedicated to the service. He sympathised with the protest movement. Having served his community and country for his whole life he understood how people felt short-changed and that, due to the government’s policies, they were losing out not only on the comforts of life but on employment and latterly even food. He understood that, a few troublemakers aside, most of the people involved in the marches were regular Joes who just wanted to get paid for doing an honest day’s work and get on with their lives. The wider issues were irrelevant to them.
The initial waves of unrest had washed over the nation when Adam had his first major bust up over them. He liked, as a rule, to keep his opinions to himself but as he listened to the conversation in the refectory his anger, which he had been able to control at first, grew to a point where he was unable to contain himself anymore.
He was seated at a table in a corner of the college refectory where a debate was raging about Cortes’ presidency. As a debate it was pretty one-sided, with Leon Eyre holding forth about how Cortes was a dictator crazed by his unquenchable thirst for power while his friends occasionally interjected with weak counterarguments or jokes.
“I’m telling you, the guy’s a fascist, like, totally. He loved the war, man. And now he wants a war with his own people. You’ve all seen it on the streams - cops shooting students, soldiers guarding power plants. That’s just the beginning. The guys not even elected, for Chrissakes.”
“Dude, this is ’Merica, man. That sort of shit just doesn’t happen here.”
“That’s just how they want you to think: ‘hey, it’s all okay, this is the good ole USAN. The best nation on Earth. Listen, when was the last time we had an election? Huh?”
“What does it matter? If there’d been elections Cortes would have won them anyway. The guy’s been untouchable for the last ten years.”
“That’s not the point. He should be subject to an election, and anyway he should only serve two terms. However popular he is, or perhaps I should say was, he would still have had to go at the end of his term in ’40. He’s got no right to be president. In fact, he’s not president, according to the original constitution and as far as I’m concerned he’s not my president.”
Adam Wilson was not particularly friendly with Leon Eyre. Some of the people at the edge of his social circle mingled with people on the edge of Eyre’s. They had some classes together and would nod ‘hello’ to each other when passing in corridors but beyond that they were barely acquaintances.
Adam had been left on the table when his friend had to leave early to make it to a lesson. His friend knew one of Leon Eyre’s inner circle and Adam had been easy to persuade they should sit there once he had seen Leon’s girlfriend Alice at the table. She was in some of his classes, though he doubted she had ever noticed him.
At first he found it easy to tune out most of Eyre’s ranting. Plainly, Eyre liked to be the centre of attention and enjoyed the sound of his own voice. He seemed to be one of those people who liked to think their views were controversial and against the grain; that somehow they had insight that the rest of us lack. Adam thought he had Eyre’s card marked and he carried on eating.
It became more difficult to ignore the conversation going on around him the longer it continued. As people half-heartedly took issue with some of Eyre’s points he became more emphatic about them, loving the attention he was getting.
“And don’t get me started on White. What does he ever do? He’s just a pissed up old fart. He pops up on the streams now and then saying reasonable stuff, then Cortes does exactly the opposite. He should be tried for treason, like the rest of them.”
Eyre’s group of friends giggled at the remark.
“That’s right,” said one, “we should haul them all off to the camps.”
“You shouldn’t joke about that,” said Eyre. He shook his head seriously. “That’s coming. That’s coming soon, for people like us. Think about it; if they’re shooting students and protesters already what’s to stop them rounding up ‘troublemakers’ and keeping them in camps? Our country has a history of that sort of thing, and don’t think it couldn’t happen again.”
Adam quietly held to the belief that Cortes had steered the nation through one of the darkest chapters in its history. He had led them through WWIV, achieving a satisfactory (though not unproblematic) victory. He had also taken the right stance against the Martian revolutionaries. Even though it had been expensive and risky, the plan to send the Aloadae to Mars had been the right thing to do. That it had ended in disaster was by the by. Cortes had done the right thing, only to be defeated by Martian trickery and deception.
It was the Martian debacle that had led to their current woes. The rationing of deuterium was choking the nation. The lack of power led directly to a lack of jobs via the shrinking of the economy and had caused the general downturn in their fortunes. It occurred to Adam that had Cortes’ Martian plan succeeded Eyre would have nothing to moan about. The economy would be booming after the long war years and they would not be at the mercy of a handful of Martian renegades. It was easy to kick a man when he was down but what Cortes had tried to do would have prevented all of the things that Eyre was complaining about, apart from his overlong stay in the New White House.
“We should all be worried. We shouldn’t even be having this conversation - who knows who’s listening? Maybe they’ll send some cops to come and shoot us.”
Adam thought that while Eyre would love to think he was important enough to be worth shooting, if a single cop were to stride into the refectory at that moment he would probably shit his pants and start crying.
“What would you do, man, if the cops were after us?”
“I’d fight.”
“Fight?”
“Yeah. It would be our patriotic duty.
“The founding fathers of this great nation always intended for the government to be kept in check by the people. That’s why we have the right to bear arms. It’s the role of the patriot to rein in the excesses of government, so that’s what I’d do if I had to. That’s what I will do, when the hour comes, and you better all believe me it is coming.”
“No, man, none of that’s gonna happen. Cortes is a pussy. He liked to talk tough during the war, and during a war that’s the sort of thing that people want to hear. But he’s a peacetime president now, and people have had enough of him.”
“So what are they going to do about it?” Eyre interjected, “vote him out? Oh no we can
’t, and why not? That’s right, because he took our democracy away when we were all patting him on the back and now the public are getting uppity he’s not just going to give it back to them,” he snapped his fingers, “just like that, because that’s what dictators do - hold on to power at any cost.”
“You’re paranoid, man.”
“We’ll see.”
“He’ll be gone within a year.”
Eyre took a deep breath. “This is how it always starts. ‘He’s not that bad,’ ‘they’ll get rid of him,’ ‘he’ll only be around a few months,’ ‘no one’s going to take him seriously.’ They said that about all of them, all of the dictators. It’s like car crashes and cancer; no one ever thinks it’s going to happen to them. So they keep telling themselves that right up until the point when it’s too late; when the secret policemen are knocking on the door or when a friend or neighbour ‘disappears.’ The price of freedom is constant vigilance, and we’ve already let him go way over the line. I say a true patriot would shoot that son of a bitch dead right now.”
Adam was surprised to find himself suddenly speaking. “You’re full of shit, Eyre,” he said. “If you mean what you say you’re talking treason. You may not like the man, but Cortes has been a good president for us. It makes me sick that people like you sit around talking trash about someone who stuck up for American values. If it wasn’t for Cortes and all the other people like him there’d be no USAN by now. We’d all be in internment camps or worse. The Asian Bloc would have rolled round the world, crushing all democracy and extinguishing the light of freedom wherever they found it. God bless the president, and screw you.”
“Screw me? Screw you, Wilson. What are you, some kind of a stooge for the government? Are you going to be reporting back to your commissar?”
Son of New York (Ephialtes Shorts Book 3) Page 1