In Her Name: The Last War (66 page)

“You have all seen the reports of what happened on Keran,” she went on, her voice dropping lower in pitch. “Millions of people were wiped out, exterminated. The fleet of the
Alliance Fran
ç
aise
was nearly destroyed, and Earth’s fleet severely mauled. Yet our combined forces were almost enough to stop the invasion.
Almost
. We did not believe then. And there will never again be another
almost
. Never again will we give less than our all to defend our people, to defend humanity itself. If the Kreelan Empire has come looking for a fight, we will give it one. And we will emerge victorious!”

The crowd, several million people lining the streets of old New York City on Earth, roared in support. While it would take months for the recording to reach the farthest human settlements, McKenna’s speech would eventually be heard by the twenty billion humans living among the stars.

“Yet the battle fought at Keran showed us the crucial importance of unity. Our fleets and ground forces could not communicate properly. Our weapons and equipment are not standardized. Most important of all, we have had no unified military or political leadership.” She shook her head slowly. “My friends,” she said, “the Kreelans do not care about our differences. They do not care about our history. They do not care about any of our problems, any more than they care about our dreams and aspirations. They have come for one thing, and one thing only: to kill us. If Keran is an example of what they plan for our species, every man, woman, and child of our race is under a threat of death. Unless we unite, unless we can pull together and form a common defense,
we will not survive
.” Drawing herself up to stand even taller, she went on, “In that spirit, and as my first official act as President of the Confederation of Humanity, I extend an open invitation to every world to join the Confederation. There will be commitments necessary for the common defense of human space, but your planetary sovereignty will be respected. The Confederation’s purpose, reflected in its charter, is not to subdue or absorb its member worlds, but to defend and protect them. As president, I offer that protection unconditionally to any world that chooses to join us...”

Roze signaled the young man to stop the playback. He had heard enough. Looking around the room, he saw the answer to his unasked question —
Should we risk joining?
— written on every face. For there was much risk, particularly for the men and women in this room. Officially, there were no Saint Petersburg military forces currently on Riga, as that had been banned under the armistice twenty years ago. But everyone around the table knew that this was a hollow truth. “Military advisers” were garrisoned near vital installations, including the bunker they were meeting in. Worse, Saint Petersburg had rearmed in blatant violation of the armistice treaty, building heavy weapons and expanding their “coast guard” into a potent navy that Roze believed could challenge even the new Confederation. They also had enough interplanetary lift capacity to land a large occupation force on Riga or any number of other worlds quickly. Riga, by contrast, had only a token paramilitary force of policemen who also trained as militia, armed with weapons controlled by Red Army detachments from Saint Petersburg. 

Roze and the others had no illusions about what the “St. Petes” could — and would — do if sufficiently provoked. Riga petitioning to join the Confederation would certainly be provocative. The only question was how strong their response might be.

On the other hand, if Riga’s government did nothing, Roze was sure Riga’s lot would only become worse. Political pressure from Earth and the Alliance to keep Saint Petersburg in line had evaporated years ago, long before the threat from the Kreelan Empire loomed. Saint Petersburg would have a free hand to deal with Riga however they chose. 

“It is our best chance, Valdis,” his interior minister, who also doubled as defense minister, told him. “At worst, we will only accelerate whatever the bastards plan to eventually do with us. At best...” he shrugged.

“At best,” Roze finished for him, “we may at last have true independence.” He looked across the table at his foreign minister. “Send an envoy to Earth with a petition for Riga to join the Confederation.”

As the room filled with discussion of fears and opportunities, Roze silently wondered how long he had before the Saint Petersburg secret police would come for him.

* * *

President Natalie McKenna hated the new presidential complex, particularly her main office. She appreciated that it was new and intended to support the needs of the leader not of a world, but of a union of worlds larger than any other formed in post-Diaspora history. It was huge, over four times the size of the White House that had been the home of the presidents of the old United States, with dozens of rooms and a staff that numbered in the hundreds. Fitted with every conceivable gadget, all the latest and greatest of everything she could imagine and many that she couldn’t, the complex was a marvel of technology and engineering. Everything was so high-tech, in fact, that at first she was afraid of using the vidphones for fear of not being able to figure out how to work them. 

No, she decided, the only thing she liked about the new complex was the view. Built on Governor’s Island, the ten-story complex provided a grand view of modern New York City, including the hallowed ground of what had once been the twin towers of the World Trade Center and the fully restored Statue of Liberty, which had been badly damaged during the wars before the Diaspora. McKenna had arranged her office so that her desk faced toward the window wall that framed the statue in the distance. The sight of Lady Liberty brought her comfort and gave her strength. Today she needed that more than usual.

“How the
hell
could we have let this happen?” she cursed. “I shouldn’t have to find out about a resurgent militant government on Saint Petersburg from a Rigan envoy! We should have known!”

Secretary of State Hamilton Barca, who could easily have been mistaken for a football linebacker who happened to be wearing an expensive suit, frowned. President McKenna only cursed when she was extremely upset. Looking across the coffee table at the woman who had been his friend and boss as they had climbed up the political ladder, he was worried for her. An African-American from the old American state of Georgia, Natalie McKenna had grown up poor, owning nothing more than an unconquerable sense of determination, and eventually rose to the most powerful position on Earth as the president of the Terran Planetary Government. Now, with the formation of the Confederation to rally humanity’s colonies to a common defense against the Kreelan menace, she had become the most powerful individual in the entire human sphere. Such power, however, was an unthinkable burden of responsibility for a single human being, and he knew the strain was slowly killing her. She had lost far too much weight in the months since the battle for Keran, and her skin was now tightly stretched over her cheekbones. Her hair — raven black only two years ago — had turned almost completely gray. Her face was lined from worry, and there were dark rings beneath her eyes from a constant sleep deficit. Those intense brown eyes, however, were as clear and sharp as ever. Right now they were looking out at the Statue of Liberty, for which he was grateful. Had she turned them on him, he was half afraid he would ignite from her anger and be burned to a cinder.

“It’s not Hamilton’s fault, Madam President,” Vladimir Penkovsky, former head of the Terran Intelligence Agency and now the director of the new Confederation Intelligence Service, said quietly. “We have been reporting for several years on the rearming of Saint Petersburg and the quiet return to power of people who still hold the ideologies and policies that led to the war twenty years ago. The armistice left a power vacuum in its wake that was filled by a weak government, and over time that government has been suborned by the survivors of the old guard. There can be no doubt. Our sources have been excellent; the information is very detailed and we believe it to be quite reliable.” 

Penkovsky wished he had intelligence half as good on the other problem areas he faced. Saint Petersburg was a special case: there was a great deal of yearning by many of the ethnic Russians there to have the freedoms that their Terran cousins enjoyed, and many Saint Petersburg citizens had secretly provided information to the TIA.

Like the other major powers of the time before the Diaspora, Russia had been devastated by the wars that had led to a frenzy of interstellar colonization missions as the world teetered on the brink of total annihilation. China, its natural resources guttering out, launched a massive invasion of Russian Siberia to take by force what it needed, with a simultaneous attack against northeastern India to secure that strategic theater. Totally overwhelmed, the Russians fought back the only way they could: they obliterated the invading Chinese armies with nuclear weapons. The Indians, also reeling from China’s attack, followed suit. Once the mushroom clouds had dissipated, half the major cities in India and Russia were burning nuclear pyres. In China, no city with a population over a hundred thousand people was left standing. 

After the war, the Russians who were left banded together politically with the other major survivors of the wars, notably the United States and India, and the resulting unlikely melting pot had, by and large, been extremely successful. It had been a long road back from the brink, but since then Earth’s inheritors had enjoyed a kind of global peace that modern humankind had never before known.

Saint Petersburg, on the other hand, had gone the opposite direction. The colonization mission had been led by a small oligarchy of powerful men and women who had been able to muster the resources to finance the mission. Their vision was to create their ideal of “Mother Russia” on a planetary scale, free of the external influences and threats that Terran Russia had suffered. Paranoid, ruthless, and power-hungry, successive generations fell into tyranny in a variety of guises. At last, a form of neo-Communism arose that fostered atrocities that would have made Josef Stalin proud, and eventually led to war with Earth and the
Alliance Fran
ç
aise
. The armistice had ended the ordeal twenty years ago, but old ways often died hard. Sometimes, they didn’t die at all.

“If we had that much intelligence information,” McKenna growled, “then why didn’t we do anything about it. Why the
hell
wasn’t I informed?”

“You were, Madam President,” Barca told her as gently as he could, deciding to dive with Penkovsky into the vat of boiling oil, figuratively speaking. “We got the reports, and plenty of the information showed up in your daily briefings over the last several years. But none of us, least of all me, was going to make more of an issue out of it than was absolutely necessary.”

“My God, Hamilton,” McKenna said, turning to face him, her face a mask of shocked anger, “why didn’t you?” She turned her glare on Penkovsky. “Why didn’t
both
of you?”

“Economics,” Barca answered bluntly. “After the war, Saint Petersburg was an economic disaster. But Korolev, the new bastard in charge, managed to turn things around by exporting strategic minerals and other raw materials that are always in critical demand. Everybody lined up for the peace dividend.”

“Including us,” McKenna said softly, closing her eyes. She had been in the Terran Senate then, and had voted for the trade treaty with Saint Petersburg. It had seemed like such a good idea at the time.

“And the Alliance, as well,” another voice sighed. Laurent Navarre looked down at the polished wood surface of the coffee table. The former ambassador from the
Alliance Fran
ç
aise
to the Terran Planetary Government, he was now McKenna’s vice president. Intelligent, charming, and extremely competent, he was a much-valued addition to McKenna’s leadership team. “As you may recall, our economy, and Earth’s, was in a very bad state in the years after the war. Korolev’s government made such a handsome offer to all of us that it was impossible to refuse.” He shrugged. “Without that agreement and access to their resources, it would have been at least another decade before our economies would have recovered.” 

“We made a deal with the Devil,” McKenna grated.

“It was not the first time, Madam President,” Navarre told her levelly, “and it will not be the last. It is the nature of what we must do sometimes. You know this.”

“Yes, I do,” she said tiredly as she sank down into the wing-back chair at the end of the coffee table, facing the others. Barca and Penkovsky had been part of her cabinet since her first administration in the Terran Planetary Government. The other key member she had brought along was Joshua Sabine, the Defense Minister, who was away with the Chief of Naval Staff, Admiral Phillip Tiernan, to review the new ships coming off the ways in the orbital shipyards. Navarre was a recent addition, having been the Alliance ambassador to Earth prior to the Confederation's founding. “So, it seems we have a bit of a quandary,” she told them. “Saint Petersburg has rearmed in violation of the armistice: so do we go after them, or ignore them and focus on the Kreelans?” She sighed. “I suppose we could count that on the good side of things, in that it potentially gives us more firepower against the Kreelans.” 

Penkovsky snorted, shaking his head. “They would defend their own world, Madam President,” he told her, “but they would never send forces to the aid of another system. I doubt they would even bother to defend Riga. There would be no tears shed by Korolev if Riga shared Keran’s fate.”

McKenna frowned. “Which brings us to the next problem: if we accept Riga into the Confederation, how is Saint Petersburg going to react?”

“Saint Petersburg’s reaction is almost immaterial,” Navarre pointed out, “because we do not really have a choice about accepting Riga. The Confederation charter is explicit: membership is open to every world that is willing to help provide for the common defense of humanity. If Riga is willing to meet the requirements of raising a Territorial Army and provides the designated per capita quota of manpower and resources for combat units and shipbuilding, which their envoy indicated that they can, they must be accepted. The Confederation will then be obligated to help train, arm, and equip them. There are some stipulations to keep out the rogue worlds, but not many: a planet led by anything short of an outright dictatorship can meet the basic political requirements.” He shrugged. “Saint Petersburg could join if they wanted, and we would be obligated to give them the same benefits.”