Starfist: Firestorm (15 page)

“Hell or high water, sir, we’ll be there.”

Cazombi looked steadily at Sturgeon for a long moment, nodded, and walked off, leaving the Marine standing there, a quizzical expression on his face. He wondered what was bothering Cazombi that he had to reassure himself of Sturgeon’s “support.” Sturgeon shook his head. There was no time for second thoughts or worries, no time to think of momma and the kids. No, now it was “hi-diddle-diddle, straight up the middle,” just where Brigadier Ted Sturgeon liked to be.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Jane Beresford Posterus, “J. B.” to her intimate associates, did not smoke or drink or carry on with loose company, and was always in bed by ten o’clock each night of the week. She had obeyed those rules all her long life, until she went into politics, and even then the only rule she violated was the last.

Posterus discovered very soon after being elected to the presidency of the Mylex Union that the most important events in military and political life always seem to take place late at night or early in the morning, and that the two endeavors usually went hand in hand. And now here she was once again, sitting in council with her cabinet, the old general droning on and on about the “impetus of war,” her eyelids heavy with sleep, fighting to keep her head from drooping. It wasn’t just that she had aged. Yes, she’d turn eighty this November, but she was still vigorous and alert. It was that she hadn’t slept in twenty-four hours and it had been a long day.

“Goddammit, General, it’s good money after bad! Good money after bad!” Cecil Hicks, Minister of the Exchequer, shouted, slamming his palm on the tabletop with a wet
smaaack
.

J. B. started at the sound. “Madam President,” General Gonsalves Henricus, Chairman of the Mylex Joint Chiefs, implored, ignoring Minister Hicks’s fierce scowl, “My only point is, we simply
cannot
withdraw our forces unilaterally from Ravenette without undermining General Lyons’s army, and if we cut and run now, the sacrifice of our men’s lives will have been in vain.”

“J. B., how can these people be so stupid?” Hicks interjected, referring to those in her government who demanded Mylex’s troops remain on Ravenette in the war against the Confederation. “They all know that General Lyons initially refused command of the Coalition Army because”—he glared at the other ministers—“we cannot possibly defeat the Confederation in this war! We cannot afford the expense of this war, in treasure and in lives! And we are going to lose. That is a fact!” He again slammed his palm on the tabletop. “The Confederation commander on Ravenette, this General Billie, is a military genius! He’s staved off General Lyons’s forces while building up his own and when he takes the initiative, which he will, he will, he’s going to overwhelm our army and end this war!”

“Billie’s an idiot!” General Henricus shouted, slamming his own palm on the table. “Cecil, I know military idiots, and this Billie is one of them.”

“Yes, you surely do.” Hicks smirked.

General Henricus, face turning red, made to rise from his chair at that remark, but he was restrained by the Mylex Minister of Justice Carla Rappenthal, who placed a gentle hand on his shoulder. “Madam President, has anyone at this point considered what would happen to
us
if we do lose this war?” She smiled at the other ministers as she spoke softly. The question was rhetorical. “We’ll be branded as traitors, J. B., and our fate will be certain and grim when the Confederation gets done with us.”

“Carla, that’s ridiculous!” Hicks shot back. “What are they going to do, take the governing bodies of
twelve
member worlds and put them all in jail? Besides, that won’t happen to
us
, I guarantee you, if we withdraw from this enterprise and do it now. There are precedents: the Italian King and his entourage, the Finns in the Second World War when they withdrew from the Axis alignment, and so on.”

Rappenthal smiled, “Cecil, we went along with the Ordinance of Secession, signed on like all the others. ‘Caught with the crows, suffer with the crows.’”

The Minister of Public Information, Gabs Stukas, decided to join in. “Ma’am, there is the matter of, of, public opinion?” He spoke hesitantly, glancing furtively at the Minister of the Exchequer, whom everyone in the room feared except J. B. herself and General Henricus, and maybe Rappenthal. “Our last opinion poll shows thirty-six percent of our people think the secession movement was a bad thing—”

“Yes, they think that now, with the embargoes and their men all off at war,” General Henricus said, interrupting, “but they were all for it to begin with. Go back and check your polls the day after the news of the massacre at Fort Seymour went public! You want to use the Second World War as a precedent, Cecil? All right, take the Austrians. The biggest hoax ever pulled on the world was them convincing everyone that Hitler was a German! Goddamned public opinion is as fickle as a whore in church. Oh, excuse me, madam”—he nodded toward J. B.—“just an old soldier’s phrase.” He grimaced and cleared his throat nervously.

“This is a democracy, General,” Stukas said, “and thirty-six percent of the population is a significant voter bloc. Frankly, the longer this war drags on, the higher the percentage of people opposed to it will rise.”

“Gabs is right,” Hicks interjected, “and there is an election coming up. You—we—cannot afford to alienate our constituency.”

“I want to go back to the Fort Seymour thing,” General Henricus said. “Cecil, I remember just after it happened, you were all for secession yourself. You made a public statement that the treasury was writing a blank check, as you called it, to finance an expedition to Ravenette in support of General Lyons. Now you want to issue a stop payment on that check, is that what you’re telling us?”

“Indeed, I am,” Hicks replied calmly. “You see, General, unlike your hard-charging military men who spend money like water to support even the most futile operation, I know when an investment has gone bad, and when that happens, the prudent financier cuts his losses and gets out of the market.” Hicks folded his hands and smirked like the cat who has eaten the canary.

Infuriated at the remark, General Henricus did rise out of his chair, shouting, “Investment? Cut losses? Get out of the market? We’re talking about the lives of our soldiers here, Hicks, not one of your goddamned penny-pinching budget-busting exercises! We’re talking about the independence, the freedom of our people! We’ve had enough of second-class citizenship in this Confederation and we’re going to—”

“Oh, relax, General.” Hicks gestured for Henricus to sit back down. “You sound just like that bourbon-guzzling backwoodsman, Preston Summers! I’ve had enough of his rhetoric. We Mylexans have never had much in common with the rubes on these other worlds and you know it.” He turned to President Posterus. “We have to face up to facts, J. B. We rushed into this thing without thinking it through, but now we are thinking it over and our conclusion must be that it is time to get out.”

“We lost thousands of lives already and you just want to toss them away like that?” General Henricus shouted.

“And we’ll lose thousands more if we stay involved. For the ones who’ve already been killed, well, build them a monument in the capital and put all their names on it—”

“You goddamned coward!” General Henricus lunged across the table at Hicks and almost succeeded in grabbing him, but Hicks reared back at the last second and the other ministers were able to restrain the general.

“Dear friends,” President Posterus said and sighed, “the hour is late, we all grow weary. I’m going to adjourn this meeting now. Let’s gather again in the morning—oh, it already is morning! This afternoon, then, and at that time continue our deliberations calmly and in a professional manner.” She nodded at General Henricus who sat breathing heavily in his chair. “So that’s it,” Posterus announced, “I’m hitting the sack, as they say.”

Chloe Mayham lifted the bullhorn to her lips and shouted,
“Madam President, troops out now!”
The slogan was echoed by the hundreds of protesters gathered behind her holding placards and signs urging the government to withdraw its troops from Ravenette and quit the Coalition.

Mayham’s son had been one of the first to fall in the assault on Fort Seymour. By all accounts he’d been a first-class infantryman and had died heroically. An officer had even come to her modest home and presented her with the medals her son had won. Later she threw them in the trash.

When her son, Taffyd, had volunteered for the reserve she had been upset, but at that time there’d been no war on the horizon and the extra money had come in handy paying for his education. Chloe came from a libertarian background and she believed the less government the better, especially when government proposed sending its citizens off to get killed. When Taffyd’s infantry unit was mobilized for shipment to Ravenette, Chloe threw a fit. Since her divorce she had grown ever closer to and more dependent on her only child, and the thought that he might be hurt drove her to distraction, but he was of age and firmly set on going with his unit. His death had energized her, and she had changed almost overnight from a clinging vine to an avenging fury. From somewhere she had dredged up an ancient antiwar protest song which became her anthem at rallies:

I didn’t raise my boy to be a soldier,

I brought him up to be my pride and joy,

Who dares to put a musket on his shoulder,

To shoot some other mother’s darling boy?

Let nations arbitrate their future troubles,

It’s time to lay the sword and gun away,

There’d be no war today

If mothers all would say,

I didn’t raise my boy to be a soldier.

Since then she had taken her antiwar protest from her small hometown of Centreville, three thousand kilometers from New Columbia, the capital of the Mylex Union, right up to the gates of the presidential palace. Along the way the ranks had swelled to thousands of Mylexans opposed to secession and the war, and Chloe’s activism had propelled her into the virtual leadership of the movement. More to the point, perhaps, now members of Posterus’s own political party were publicly urging the president to withdraw their troops. It was not yet a significant majority, not enough to pass the vote of impeachment which many of the antiwar protestors wanted, but it was enough, she hoped, to convince President Posterus to reconsider her government’s war policy.

At the rallies Chloe maintained her composure so well that her opponents labeled her heartless, an ice maiden, and speculated that her activism was only a stepping-stone to a career in politics. Others wondered just how devastated she’d been at her son’s death. A media advisor she hired to orchestrate her appearances, once her movement caught on and people began to donate money, advised her to practice controlling her emotions. “If you go before the public as a grieving mother, people will say, ‘Sure, no wonder she’s upset, but we can’t have grieving mothers running our war policy.’ So keep your cool, show anger if you want, but keep the tears to a minimum.” With effort, she followed this advice but at night, when alone, she thought about never hearing Taffyd’s voice again or seeing his smile, and she could no longer hold her hurt inside her and collapsed.

“No More Of Our Children Must Die!”
Mayham shouted, and that too was also taken up by a chorus of her supporters.

A cordon of riot police blocked the gates to the presidential palace, and other police units separated Mayham’s antiwar group from the prowar demonstrators gathered about a block away. The prowar group was larger than Mayham’s. Some held signs that said,
TRAITOR MAYHAM
and
SUPPORT OUR TROOPS
! Many in that crowd had also lost sons and daughters on Ravenette.

The Mylexan media outlets were concentrating on Mayham’s group, hoping for a clash with the police or with the prowar demonstrators. Chloe Mayham was good for news: attractive, articulate, dedicated as only someone motivated by a great personal loss can be. Her former husband lived quietly, far away, and refused interviews. His opinion on the war and his former wife’s activism against it remained unknown. The only comment he had ever made in public was to a reporter: “Leave me the fuck alone!”

Officer Calvin Riggs of the Capitol Police stood shoulder to shoulder with his fellow officers forming the cordon in front of the palace gates. The Capitol Police were responsible for the security of the Presidential Palace grounds and other government buildings in New Columbia. Officer Riggs had been on the force twenty years. His son, Calvin Jr., was a soldier in the Mylexan contingent on Ravenette. Like many fathers whose offspring go off to war, he suffered from the dilemma of intense pride in his child’s courage and service to his country and the mind-numbing fear that he would become a casualty of war.

Officer Riggs remembered with silent pain the day he’d taken his own son to the reserve center where the boy’s infantry outfit was mustering for shipment to Ravenette. They’d exchanged formal, awkward, good-byes. Neither man had ever shown much emotion toward the other; they simply were not used to public displays of affection. That did not mean their feelings for each other did not run deep. Riggs fought hard to act nonchalant and positive, as Calvin Jr., upbeat and anxious to be off, tried to show he harbored no thoughts of death, and was itching to prove himself in war.