Читать книгу The Complete Inheritance Trilogy: Star Strike, Galactic Corps, Semper Human - Ian Douglas, Matthew Taylor - Страница 36

It was, Alexander thought, a less than auspicious start to his mission to Earth. He’d expected the Commonwealth Senate to debate his plan for combating the Xul threat. That much went without saying. He’d not expected that the Marine Corps itself would be within the Senate’s sights, that they would actually be debating whether or not to bring the Corps’ eleven-hundred-year history to a close.

After reviewing the data transmitted back from Puller 659, he’d routed the full text back to Earth, to USMC-HQ, to the Military Intelligence Agency, and, as required by regulations, to the Senate Military Oversight Committee. The reaction of that last was uncharacteristically swift; he’d been ordered to return to Earth Ring in person, to face a full Senate meeting and to present his recommendations.

To that end, he’d taken the somewhat unusual step of pulling Skybase out of its paraspace anchorage and returning it to the Sol System. The Quantum Sea, existing outside of the normal boundaries of four-dimensional space/time, did not relate to space/time with a point-to-point correspondence. If you had a well-plotted set of special coordinates, it was possible to use paraspace as a means to bypass enormous distances in 4D space.

Dropping into Sol space had enabled him to get back to Earth Ring much more quickly than an FTL shuttle. He was wondering, however, if the trip had been worth it. He’d delivered his recommendation—a carefully parsed blueprint for action by the 1st Marine Interstellar Expeditionary Force—1MIEF—minutes ago.

And already the vultures were descending like harpies, scenting blood and eager for a meal.

Madam Marie Devereaux drew herself up to her full 150 centimeters, chin held high, defiant. She was standing at her seat in the Commonwealth Senate, an enclosed box high up within one of the ascending ranks of Senatorial platforms, but her repeater holo image stood at the chamber’s center, towering over the Senate Chamber pit, matching each move, each dramatic pose, each gesture and expression. Alexander wondered if the holo was projecting the woman’s personal e-filters to achieve that seeming perfection of face and form, or if what he was seeing reflected reality.

Not that reality had that much to do with this charade. He grimaced. Devereaux was putting on the show of her life. She appeared to be relishing this moment.

“Ladies and gentlemen of the Senate,” she declaimed. “We’ve heard the arguments in favor of striking at the Xul, heard them endlessly in round upon round of discussion within these sacred halls, both in open debate and in closed committee. Is anyone else here as tired as I am, as sick to death as I am, I wonder, of hearing yet more excuses for this collection of odd bits and pieces of military technology and tradition and self-serving alarmist brinksmanship that calls itself the U.S. Marine Corps?”

A chorus of boos and shouted catcalls sounded from the surrounding rings of seats … but Alexander heard cheers and applause as well. It was impossible at this point in the proceedings to calculate whether the Senate was going to go along with his recommendation … or side with the newly constituted Peace Party.

What he’d not anticipated, though, was that this session was going to become a referendum on the very survival of the Corps.

“The Marines,” Devereaux continued, “may once have had a place in history, a role to play within the disparate collection of military services that once served the United States of America.” The huge, holographically projected face smiled down beatifically at the watching senators. “They were very good, I understand, at scrambling up into the rigging of ancient warships, back in the Age of Sail, and shooting enemy officers on other ships. Some centuries later, they served as a kind of police force on American wet-navy vessels, and as ceremonial guards at American embassies in other countries. I suspect they were chosen because of how pretty their red, white, and blue dress uniforms were. …”

Chuckles and isolated bits of laughter rose from several quarters, and Alexander scowled. Damn the woman. Playing politics with the Corps at a deadly time like this. …

“Many of us love and admire the Marines, admire them for their sense of duty, their sense of tradition going back over eleven hundred years, now. But even as we admire them, we must admit to ourselves that these Marines have never really fitted in with their brothers-at-arms in the other services … the Army, the Air Force, even with the Navy, though historically they draw their strongest support from them. The Marines, admittedly, have served us well in the past, but we see from this incident just brought to our attention that the U.S. Marines are … extremist in their views. And this is not a time, Senators, for extremists.

“You see, the Marines, as we have seen repeatedly in the past, are not … not team players, as the old expression puts it. They take a disproportionate share of scarce resources and financing for their own service needs—for training, for supply, for transport, for administration—and give nothing back.

“They do nothing that the Army could not do just as well. Once, perhaps, the argument could be made that the Marines served a vital role as a ready amphibious landing force. In the days of wet navies, they could land on any beach, anywhere in the world, creating a beachhead through which regular Army forces could arrive and deploy.

“But the day of amphibious landings is long, long past, Senators. Marines have for centuries deployed through suborbital transports or orbit-to-surface landing craft, not wet-navy boats. Their very name—Marines—reflects a bygone age when ‘marine soldiers’ could be deployed on Navy ships to carry out missions on Earth’s seas. Why, I wonder, deploy them into space? Because the Navy builds and operates the majority of our military spacecraft? Is that reason enough to keep them … like aging pets? Marines, I submit, are anachronisms, a piece of our past as anachronistic as armored knights on horseback.

“But more than being military anachronisms, I submit, Senators, that Marines are political anachronisms. Ask any Marine. Ask General Alexander, up there in the visitor’s gallery, who brought this affair to our attention. Their first loyalties are not to Humankind, nor to our Commonwealth, but to an outmoded political concept called America, and to the Marine Corps itself.

“And that, Senators, that makes them, to my way of thinking, just a little dangerous.”

Again, that smattering of applause. Alexander closed his eyes, trying to feel the emotion in the room. How many supported Devereaux? How many supported the lame duck administration?

How many simply hadn’t yet made up their minds?

“Senators,” Devereaux went on, “the Marines like to present themselves as being the guardians of our liberty. But when their heavily armed mobile base appears off our Ring docking ports, when Marines in their pretty uniforms and with their steely expressions suddenly walk the corridors of our orbital habitats … how safe, how free can we actually feel?”

Alexander’s fist closed. He nearly stood, nearly shouted protest, but forced himself to remain in his seat. Damn it,

He’d ordered Skybase to transit out of paraspace and dock at Earth Ring. It was unusual, but it was the fastest means of getting here. Strictly speaking, Skybase was not a space craft, but a deep space habitat, similar to the colony facilities in use in the Asteroid Belt and the mining settlements out in the Oort Cloud. It had no motive power of its own, other than station-keeping thrusters, and it required a small fleet of tractor tugs to move it around in normal space. The bulky structure was designed to dock periodically at major port facilities—those large enough to receive it—for resupply and maintenance.

As for Marines entering the Ring, well, hell, of course he’d permitted liberty for the base personnel. The men and women under his command were people, not robots. Skybase had been deployed in paraspace for fifteen months—five longer than usual, and it was about time the crew had a chance to go shoreside for a little downtime.

But Devereaux’s tirade was continuing, unfolding like a thunderstorm. “I submit that the Marines, far from being guardians of our liberty, represent a clear and present danger to our cherished way of life. For centuries now, the Marines have not even been a part of our world culture, not in the way that Army soldiers or Air Force High Guardsmen are. They don’t, they can’t fit in. They live for their precious Corps, maintain their own self-contained culture, their own laws, their own religion, even … and rarely mingle with civilians. Indeed, I suspect many of our Marine friends consider mere civilians to be somehow inferior to them.

“The Army is much more connected to our culture, our society, than are the Marines. Marines are extremists in all of their views, and anytime you have extremists, you run the risk of a total disconnection with society.

“And that, my friends, is dangerous. A danger greater than Theocratic fundamentalism, a danger more sinister than this so-called Xul threat! How are we to maintain our freedom with these trained killers in our midst?”

Gods above and gods below. Did the creature just like the sound of her own voice, or did she really mean even half of the crap spewing from that ugly hole in her face?

Furious now, Alexander opened an inner window, calling up a bio on Marie Devereaux. She’d been born, he saw, in Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu, which was located in the province of Quebec. The old sovereign nation of Quebec had finally joined the old North American Federation in the twenty-fifth century, but never had been wholly comfortable with that union. Quebec had never accepted statehood, as had several of her Canadian sister-provinces. After a plebiscite, however, the 2740 Act of Common Union had granted all of North America full and equal representation in the Commonwealth Senate, which was how she’d ended up as a senator. She’d also been an officer in the last war with the Chinese Hegemony, rising to the rank of general in the Commonwealth Army, which explained how she’d wangled a slot as a representative on the Military Advisory Council.

There was nothing, though, to suggest why she had such a hair up her ass about the Marine Corps.

Or possibly …

Okay, that might explain it. Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu was located south of the St. Lawrence—in a part of Quebec once and briefly known as occupied Quebec.

That reflected a bit of history dating all the way back to the First UN War, back in the twenty-first century. Quebec had invaded the then-United States as part of a much larger UN offensive involving Mexico, France, and Japan; the U.S. Army had handily knocked back the invaders, then swept in and occupied everything north to the St. Lawrence, from Lake St. Francis to New Brunswick.

That had been the army. But, he noted, elements of the U.S. Marine Corps had assisted with the occupation in the late 2050s.

Damn it! That was ancient history! He knew the PanEuros and the Islamics tended to hold grudges that lasted for thousands of years, but he hadn’t thought that that kind of narrow-minded Dark Ages thinking extended to the Québecois! Besides, the Marines had been a small, almost incidental part of a much larger and complicated history. Why single them out for this … this persecution?

He read further.

Clearly, Marie Devereaux was ambitious. She’d been President Rodriguez’s principal political rival for five years, now, and in the general elections three days ago, the wholesale defection of her Peace Party from its sixty-year alliance with the Liberty Party to the more conservative Constitutionals had won the election for the Constitutionals. Rodriguez, a staunch conservative, would be out in two months; Sherrilyn Simmons, the new president elect, was a liberal but a hard-line fiscal conservative … and an anti-militarist.

That must be it. Devereaux supported Simmons. More, she was positioning herself to be noticed by the new administration. If she were seen as a champion of cutting back the military—principally by eliminating or severely restricting the Marine Corps—she was all but assured of a strong position within the new government. Hell, she might even be angling for a shot at the presidency herself, eight years down the road.

The hell of it was, the election results of the other day were being widely interpreted by the news media as a rejection of the hardliner conservative stance against the Islamic Theocracy. That was scarcely a surprise; lots of people, Alexander included, had some doubts about the nature and the necessity of the current war.

But the media loved the word “mandate,” and the election was being presented as a mandate to end the ill-starred war with the Theocracy … and, what was more, to draw down on the military in order to banish any future risk of interstellar war—whether it be with the Theocrats, or with the Xul.

Disarming in the face of a clear and imminent danger. From Alexander’s perspective, that was sheer lunacy … but he’d seen it before, and knew enough history to know that the same thing had happened time after time after time throughout history, going back long before there’d been a Marine Corps.

The problem was that sooner or later, Humankind would face an enemy that didn’t give a damn if humans were unarmed or not, and which would be strong enough and technologically advanced enough to send humanity the way of the dinosaurs.

An enemy, for instance, like the Xul.

Devereaux, he realized, was still speaking, but it sounded like she was on the point of wrapping things up. “Senators, this proposal placed before us this morning by Lieutenant General Alexander and his staff should be, must be rejected. We cannot act preemptively against the Xul. When they come, if they come, we must trust to the gentle art of diplomacy to convince them that we are no threat to them, that we and they can share this vast Galaxy without threat or dominance of one over the other.

“Furthermore, I submit that the Marines themselves should be allowed to retire, to fade away into the mists of history … and to cease once and for all in their meddling and in their interference in the modern affairs and political ministrations of a united Humankind! It is, in my humble opinion, Marine belligerence, their martial spirit and outlook, their tendency to look at anything strange or unknown as a military foe that threatens the peace more than any presumed threat by an ancient and distant alien empire!”

Devereaux sat down, and a moment later the high-vaulted Senate chamber filled with a roar of applause. There were jeers and boos as well, but it sounded to Alexander’s ear as though the senator from Quebec had successfully swung the majority to her way of thinking.

He thought-clicked a request to speak.

It took several moments for the noise to die away. A number of the senators in the boxes nearer to the visitor’s gallery, he could see, were looking up at him expectantly. Maybe they were just waiting to see if he would react to Devereaux’s tirade with a tirade of his own. Politics could be boring, and maybe this sort of infighting was the only entertainment they could expect this day.

He considered a tirade, a broadside in return, but dismissed the idea. That would be fighting on ground of her choosing.

But he had to respond. …

“General Alexander,” Ronald Chien, the Senate president said. “You have a reply or a rebuttal?”

Slowly, he stood up, and now an immense image of him towered over the assembly. He tried not to look at it. The scowl, the craggy eyebrows, the jut of the chin all conspired to make him look angry, even darkly sinister, and that made him self-conscious.

“Ladies and gentlemen of the Senate,” he began, keeping his voice low, “I am not, of course, a member of this body. I am a guest and, I suppose, a kind of expert witness, whom you have kindly invited to come here and share my views on the Argo incident, and on the necessity of adopting War Plan 102–08.” A babble of voices, protests, and catcalls rose, and he shouted through the noise. “Yes, necessity! Because if we duck back into our shells and ignore the crisis before us, I promise you that we will cease to exist as a species, that you, me, and every man, woman, and child in this system, on the world beneath us, and among the stars around us, will be hunted down and exterminated!

“But before I get to that, I feel that I must comment, briefly, on some of the things Madam Devereaux has said. You see … as it happens, I agree with her, in two important ways, at least.”

At that moment, the Senate chamber became deathly silent. Currently, there were within the Commonwealth government 494 senators, two representing each state, district, major orbital colony, and world within the Commonwealth, and even some major corporate entities as well. Each of those senators had his or her own oval seating box, and each was accompanied by his or her own entourage of secretaries and personal assistants. Several thousand people were watching Alexander at that moment in complete and utter silence.

And a far vaster audience, he knew, was present virtually, watching through their personal links from home.

“Madam Devereaux has said that she believes Marines to be ‘a little dangerous.’ I really must take exception to that. Marines are not a little dangerous. We are very dangerous. We are trained to kill, and we are very, very good at what we do.

“She has also called us extremists, pointed out that we are not a part of the overall culture of Humankind, and suggested that our extremism is more of a threat than are the Xul.

“Extremists? Maybe so. We are extreme in our pride. We are extreme—I would say we are insufferable—in our devotion to our Brotherhood, to one another, and to what we stand for. We are extremists in that way, in the depth of our devotion, to our Corps, to our traditions, and to the memory of those Marines who’ve gone before, to the blood shed by all of the Marines who have served in the past eleven hundred years.

“And we are extremists when it comes to our devotion to duty, to service, to country, to you senators, and to the people and the government you represent.

“Marines are different from the men and women of the other branches of service. I admit that. I am proud of that. And that distinction is an important one.

“In the Army, you have riflemen … and you have supply clerks, and you have cooks, and you have electronics specialists and sims technicians and cartographers and comm personnel and pilots and drivers and military police and all the rest. What is it, now … four, maybe five hundred distinct military specialties?

“In the Marines, though, it’s different. We have specialization skills, yes … but in the Marines every man and woman is a rifleman first. I don’t care if a Marine is unloading cargo pallets at a spaceport, or flying an A-410 Kestrel, or programming combat sims at Skybase, or sneaking drones through a Stargate into a Xul base at the Galactic Core. I don’t care if that Marine is a general officer, or fresh out of boot camp. He or she is a Marine combat rifleman first.

“I daresay General Lisa Devi, the General of the Army, would not call herself a soldier. The General of the Aerospace Force would not call himself an aerospaceman. The Chief of Naval operations does not call himself a sailor. General McCulloch, the Commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps, however, is damned proud to call himself a Marine. As I am proud to call myself a Marine.

“Does that make us extremists? Maybe … but if it does, I submit, ladies and gentlemen of the Senate, that the Commonwealth needs that kind of extremism. That kind of dedication. That sense of purpose and that devotion to duty!

“In five more days, ladies and gentlemen, the Marine Corps will have its birthday, celebrating eleven hundred and three years of service, first to the United States of America, then to the Commonwealth of Terra. Eleven hundred years.

“It’s true, you know, that the Marines have their own culture. I admit that. In fact, I’m damned proud of that. We call a floor a deck, a door a hatch, a hat a cover, our living spaces quarters, a bed a rack. We have our own brand of humor, jokes only Marines can appreciate or even understand. Marines have had their own culture ever since they lived crowded together on the stinking lower decks of wind-driven wet-navy sailing ships, ever since seven of them led an army of revolutionaries across the Sahara Desert to Derna, ever since they charged time after time after bloody time the German machine-gun nests in Belleau Wood. It’s a part of being a member of this fraternity, this brotherhood of heroes.

“Is that such a bad thing? We still have God knows how many distinct cultures on Earth, and we call it diversity and say it’s an important part of being human. And the people living in Earth Ring have their own distinct way of looking at things … as do people in Mars Ring, or in Luna, or out in the Belts or the Jovians or Chiron or Ishtar or anywhere else where humans have gone and made homes for themselves. We Marines are no different. We’ve made a home for ourselves within the family we call the Corps. If we’re proud of that, it’s no worse than being proud of being American, or Japanese, or Lunan.

“How does having a unique culture make us a threat?

“Yes, we have our ‘pretty uniforms,’ as Madam Devereaux said, where each part carries its own tradition, each color its own meaning. Black for space, blue for the ancient oceans of Earth. And red. Let’s not forget the red in that thin red stripe down the trouser legs of our full-dress uniforms. Red for the blood of Marines shed at places like Chapultepec and Belleau Wood, Suribachi and the Chosin Reservoir, Cydonia and Ishtar.

“Blood, I might add, shed for your ancestors, so that they, and you, might be free to hold these deliberations in this chamber today!”

Alexander was startled by a sudden burst of applause from the chamber. He hesitated, looking across the pit, wondering what it was that had inspired this display. He didn’t think of himself as a demagogue, and certainly not as a politician or a speechmaker. He’d been speaking from the heart, from a very angry heart, not so much trying to sway the audience as to simply get them to hear, to understand.

He took a deep breath, calming himself. He did have their attention now, so if he was going to make his point, now was the time to do it.

“You have a choice before you, Senators. You can do nothing, and wait for the Xul to arrive … and they will arrive, I promise you that. Sooner or later, they will be here, just as they were here in 2314, but this time it will be an armada flinging rocks or worse at Mars, not a solitary, arrogant, and cocksure huntership.

“And if that happens, I promise you that the Marines will stand and fight. We will fight, as we have always fought in desperate actions, and we will die protecting you, and your children, and our children, and our worlds. We will stand and we will fight and we will die … because there will be no place else to which we can withdraw if the enemy comes to us with his full, vast, and overwhelmingly advanced technological might.

“Do you understand that? We will die. Earth will die. And on every one of 512 planets scattered across eight hundred light-years, Humanity will die! We know something similar happened half a million years ago, with the destruction of the Builders. It happened to the An. It will happen to us.

“Or … you can adopt the proposal I have placed before you, a plan drawn up by my staff on Skybase and incorporating the best intelligence on Xul basing and deployments that we have. We can go on the offensive, take the war to them in a dozen different star systems. We can hit them and keep hitting them and never be there when they muster a retaliatory force, and we can hurt them enough that they will send their full strength after us, rather than to Sol and Earth. We will lead them deeper and deeper into the sea of stars that is our Galaxy, far away from Earth, and we will continue to fight them while you, here, decide how best to preserve that ‘precious way of life’ invoked by Madam Devereaux.

“That, Senators, is the choice I give you. Stand and fight and die here … within Earth’s own solar system. Or send the Marines, dangerous and extremist as we are, to fight this war out there, in their backyard, not ours.

“And because we are loyal to the Commonwealth and to the rule of civilian law, we will wait and do what you command.

“I only ask that you make up your minds swiftly … because we, all of Humankind, do not have much time left.”

Again, thunderous applause filled the chamber. As Alexander took his seat, he turned his gaze on Devereaux, in her box on the far side of the pit. His link with the local Net allowed him to zoom in on her face from almost 80 meters away. She was watching him, he saw, with a cold look of absolute contempt.

“I don’t think she likes you, General,” Cara whispered in his thoughts.

“No, I don’t think she does.” He shrugged. “Does make me wonder, though.”

“Wonder what, General?”

“Why it always seems that our most vicious enemies aren’t the aliens who want to wipe us off the face of the universe … but our own friends and neighbors.”

“Truthfully, General, I’ve never understood that about humans. If you don’t have enemies, you seem peculiarly adept at creating them. If you don’t mind my saying so.”

“Mind? No. Why would I mind the truth?” He checked his internal time sense. “Looks like they’re going to be debating for a long time to come, Cara. I need food.”

He electronically logged out, then stepped through the doorway at the back of his visitor’s box. He could already tell that it was going to be a long afternoon, one that would probably extend well into the evening.

And the die was cast, as another general had commented three thousand years earlier.

There was nothing else he could do to influence events, however much he might wish it.