Shadow Puppets (26 page)

“And your heavily armed shuttle can deal with that?” asked Peter.

“Easily. The trouble is, this shuttle is not supposed to exist. The IF charter specifically forbids any weaponization of atmospheric craft. It’s designed to go along with colony ships, in case the extermination of the Formics was not complete and we run into resistance. But if such a shuttle enters Earth’s atmosphere and proves its capabilities by shooting down a missile, we could never tell anyone about it without compromising the IF. So we could use this shuttle to get you safely to Earth, but could never tell anyone about the attempt on your life.”

“I could live with that,” said Peter.

“Except that you don’t actually have to get to Earth at this time.”

“No, I don’t.”

“So we can send a different shuttle. Again, one whose existence is not known, but this time it is not illegal. Because it hasn’t been weaponized at all. In fact, while it’s quite expensive compared to, say, a bazooka, it’s very, very cheap compared with a real shuttle. This one’s a dummy. It is carefully designed to match the velocity and radar signature of a real shuttle, but it lacks a few things—like any place to put a human being, or any capability of a soft landing.”

“So you send this one down,” said John Paul, “draw their fire, and then have a propaganda field day.”

“We’ll have IF observers watching for the boost and we’ll be on that launch platform before it can be dismantled, or at least before the perpetrators can get away. Whether it ends up pointing to Achilles or China, either way we can demonstrate that someone on Earth fired at an IF shuttle.”

“Puts them in a very bad position,” said Peter. “Do we announce that I was the target?”

“We can decide that based on their response, and on who is getting
the blame. If it’s China, I think we gain more by making it an attack on the International Fleet. If it’s Achilles, we gain more by making him out to be an assassin.”

“You seem to have been quite free about discussing these things in front of us,” said Theresa. “I suppose now you have to kill us.”

“Just me,” whispered Uphanad.

“Well, I do have to fire you,” said Graff. “And I do have to send you back to Earth, because it just wouldn’t do to have you stay on here. You’d just depress everyone else, slinking around looking guilty and unworthy.”

Graff’s tone was light enough to help keep Uphanad from bursting into tears again.

“I’ve heard,” Graff went on, “that the Indian people need to have loyal men who’ll fight for their freedom. That’s the loyalty that transcends your loyalty to the Ministry of Colonization, and I understand it. So you must go where your loyalty leads you.”

“This is…unbelievable mercy, sir,” said Uphanad.

“It wasn’t my idea,” said Graff. “My plan was to have you tried in secret by the IF and executed. But Peter told me that, if you were guilty and it turned out you were protecting family members in Chinese custody, it would be wrong to punish you for the crime of imperfect loyalty.”

Uphanad turned to look at Peter. “My betrayal might have killed you and your family.”

“But it didn’t,” said Peter.

“I like to think,” said Graff, “that God sometimes shows mercy to us by letting some accident prevent us from actually carrying out our worst plans.”

“I don’t believe that,” said Theresa coldly. “I believe if you point a gun at a man’s head and the bullet was a dud, you’re still a murderer in the eyes of God.”

“Well then,” said Graff, “when we’re all dead, if we find that we still exist in some form or other, we’ll just have to ask God to tell us which of us is right.”

The Chinese thought at first that the incidents in Xinjiang province were the work of the insurgents who had been forming and reforming guerrilla groups for centuries. In the protocol-burdened Chinese army, it was not until late afternoon in Beijing that Han Tzu was finally able to get enough information together to prove this was a major offensive originating outside China.

For the fiftieth time since taking a place in the high command in Beijing, Han Tzu despaired of getting anything done. It was always more important to show respect for one’s superiors’ high status than to tell them the truth and make things happen. Even now, holding in
his hands evidence of a level of training, discipline, coordination, and supply that made it impossible for these incidents in Xinjiang to be the work of local rebels, Han Tzu had to wait hours for his request for a meeting to be processed through all the oh-so-important aides, flunkies, functionaries, and poobahs whose sole duty was to look as important and busy as possible while making sure that as little as possible actually got done.

It was fully dark in Beijing when Han Tzu crossed the square separating the Strategy and Planning section from the Administrative section—another bit of mindlessly bad structure, to separate these two sections by a long walk in the open air. They should have been across a low divider from each other, constantly shouting back and forth. Instead, Strategy and Planning were constantly making plans that Administrative couldn’t carry out, and Administrative was constantly misunderstanding the purpose of plans and fighting against the very ideas that would make them effective.

How did we ever conquer India? thought Han Tzu.

He kicked at the pigeons scurrying around his feet. They fluttered a few meters away, then came back for more, as if they thought his feet might have shed something edible with each step.

The only reason this government stays in power is that the people of China are pigeons. You can kick them and kick them, and they come back for more. And the worst of them are the bureaucrats. China invented bureaucracy, and with a thousand-year head start on the rest of the world, they’d kept advancing the arts of obfuscation, kingdom-building, and tempests-in-teapots to a level unknown anywhere else. Byzantine bureaucracy was, by comparison, a forthright system.

How did Achilles do it? An outsider, a criminal, a madman—and all of this was well known to the Chinese government—yet he was able to cut through the layers of fawning backstabbers and get straight to the decision-making level. Most people didn’t even know where the decision-making level was, since it was certainly
not
the famous leaders at the top, who were too old to think of anything new and too
frightened of losing their perks or getting caught out in their decades of criminal acts ever to do anything but say, “Do as you think wise,” to their underlings.

It was two levels down that decisions were made, by aides to the top generals. It had taken Han Tzu six months to realize that a meeting with the top man was useless, because he would confer with his aides and follow their recommendations every time. Now he never bothered to meet with anyone else. But to set up such a meeting, of course, required that an elaborate request be made to each general, acknowledging that while the subject of the meeting was so vital it must be held immediately, it was so trivial that each general only needed to send his aide to the meeting in his place.

Han Tzu was never sure whether all this elaborate charade was merely to show proper respect for tradition and form, or whether the generals actually were fooled by all this and made the decision, each time, whether to attend in person or send their aide.

Of course, it was also possible that the general never saw the messages, and the aides made the decision for him. Most likely, though, his memo went to each general with a commentary: “Noble and worthy general would be slighted if not in attendance,” for instance, or “Tedious waste of heroic leader’s time, unworthy aide will be glad to take notes and report if anything important is said.”

Han Tzu had no loyalty to any of these buffoons. Whenever they made decisions on their own, they were hopelessly wrong. The ones that weren’t completely bound by tradition were just as controlled by their own egos.

Yet Han Tzu was completely loyal to China. He had always acted in China’s best interest, and always would.

The trouble was, he often defined “China’s best interest” in a way that might easily get him shot.

Like that message he sent to Bean and Petra, hoping they’d realize the danger to the Hegemon if he really believed Han Tzu had been the source of his information. Sending such a bit of information was
definitely treason, since Achilles’s adventure had been approved at the highest levels and therefore represented official Chinese policy. And yet it would be a disaster for China’s prestige in the world at large if it became known that China had sent an assassin to kill the Hegemon.

Nobody seemed to understand that sort of thing, mostly because they refused to see China as anything other than the center of the universe, around which all other nations orbited. What did it matter if China was regarded as a nation of tyrants and assassins? If someone doesn’t like what China does, then that someone can go home and cry in his beer.

But no nation was invincible, not even China. Han Tzu understood that, even if the others did not.

It didn’t help that the conquest of India had been so easy. Han Tzu had insisted on devising all sorts of contingency plans when things went wrong with the surprise attack on the Indian, Thai, and Vietnamese armies. But Achilles’s campaign of deception had been so successful, and the Thai strategy of defense had been so effective, that the Indians were fully committed, their supplies exhausted, and their morale at rock bottom when the Chinese armies began pouring across the borders, cutting the Indian army to pieces, and swallowing up each piece within days—sometimes within hours.

All the glory went to Achilles, of course, though it had been Han Tzu’s careful planning with his staff of nearly eighty Battle School graduates that put the Chinese armies exactly where they needed to be at exactly the time they needed to be there. No, even though Han Tzu’s team had written up the orders, they had actually been issued by Administrative, and therefore it was Administrative that won the medals, while Strategy and Planning got a single group commendation that had about the same effect on morale as if some lieutenant colonel had come in and said, “Nice try, boys, we know you meant well.”

Well, Achilles was welcome to the glory, because in Han Tzu’s opinion, invading India had been pointless and self-defeating—not to mention evil. China did not have the resources to take on India’s
problems. When Indians governed India, the suffering people could only blame their fellow Indians. But now when things went wrong—which they always did in India—it would all be blamed on the Chinese.

The Chinese administrators who were sent in to govern India stayed surprisingly free of corruption and they worked hard—but the fact is that no nation is governable except by overwhelming force or complete cooperation. And since there was no way conquering Chinese officials would get complete cooperation, and there was no hope of being able to pay for overwhelming force, the only question was when the resistance would become a problem.

It became a problem not long after Achilles left for the Hegemony, when the Indians started piling up stones. Han Tzu had to hand it to them, when it came to truly annoying but symbolically powerful civil disobedience, the Indians were truly the daughters and sons of Gandhi. Even then, the bureaucrats hadn’t listened to Han Tzu’s advice and ended up getting themselves into a steadily worsening cycle of reprisals.

So…it doesn’t matter what the outside world thinks, right? We can do whatever we want because no one else has the power or the will to challenge us, is that the story?

What I have in my hands is the answer to
that
theory.

“What does it mean that they’ve done nothing to acknowledge our offensive?” said Alai.

Bean and Petra sat with him, looking at the holomap that showed every single objective in Xinjiang taken on schedule, as if the Chinese had been handed a script and were doing their part exactly as the Crescent League had asked them to.

“I think things are going very well,” said Petra.

“Ridiculously well,” said Alai.

“Don’t be impatient,” said Bean. “Things move slowly in China.
And they don’t like making public pronouncements about their problems. Maybe they still see this as a group of local insurgents. Maybe they’re waiting to announce what’s going on until they can tell about their devastating counterattack.”

“That’s just it,” said Alai. “Our satintel says they’re doing nothing. Even the nearest garrison troops are still in place.”

“The garrison commanders don’t have the authority to send them into battle,” said Bean. “Besides, they probably don’t even know anything’s wrong. Your forces have the land-based communications grid under control, right?”

“That was a secondary objective. That’s what they’re doing now, just to keep busy.”

Petra began to laugh. “I get it,” she said.

“What’s so funny?” asked Alai.

“The public announcement,” said Petra. “You can’t announce that a Caliph has been named unanimously by all the Muslim nations.”

“We
can
announce it any time,” said Alai, irritated.

“But you’re waiting. Until the Chinese make their announcement that some unknown nation has attacked them. Only when they’ve either admitted their ignorance or committed to some theory that’s completely false do you come out and tell what’s really happening. That the Muslim world is fully united under a Caliph, and that you have taken responsibility for liberating the captive nations from the godless imperialist Chinese.”

“You have to admit the story plays better that way,” said Alai.

“Absolutely,” said Petra. “I’m not laughing because you’re wrong to do it that way, I’m simply laughing at the irony that you are so
successful
and the Chinese so completely unprepared that it’s actually delaying your announcement! But…have patience, dear friend. Somebody in the Chinese high command knows what’s happening, and eventually the rest of them will listen to him and they’ll mobilize their forces and make some kind of announcement.”

“They have to,” said Bean. “Or the Russians will deliberately misunderstand their troop movements.”

“All right,” said Alai. “But unfortunately, all the vids of my announcement were shot during daylight hours. It never crossed our minds that they would take this long to respond.”

“You know what?” said Bean. “No one will mind a bit if the vids are clearly prerecorded. But even better would be for you to go on camera, live, to declare yourself and to announce what your armies are doing in Xinjiang.”

“The danger with doing it live is that I might let something slip, telling them that the Xinjiang invasion is not the main offensive.”

“Alai, you could announce outright that this was not the main offensive, and half the Chinese would think that was disinformation designed to keep their troops in India pinned down along the Pakistani border. In fact, I advise you to do that. Because then you’ll have a reputation as a truthteller. It will make your later lies that much more effective.”

Alai laughed. “You’ve eased my mind.”

“You’re suffering,” said Petra, “from the problem that plagues all the top commanders in this age of rapid communications. In the old days, Alexander and Caesar were right there on the field of battle. They could watch, issue orders, deal with things. They were needed. But you’re stuck here in Damascus because here is where all the communications come together. If you’re needed, you’ll be needed here. So instead of having a thousand things to keep your mind busy, you have all this adrenaline flowing and nowhere for it to go.”

“I recommend pacing,” said Bean.

“Do you play handball?” asked Petra.

“I get the picture,” said Alai. “Thank you. I’ll be patient.”

“And think about my advice,” said Bean. “To go on live and tell the truth. Your people will love you better if they see you as being so bold you can simply tell the enemy what you’re going to do, and they can’t stop you from doing it.”

“Go away now,” said Alai. “You’re repeating yourself.”

Laughing, Bean got up. So did Petra.

“I won’t have time for you after this, you know,” said Alai.

They paused, turned.

“Once it’s announced, once everybody knows, I’ll have to start holding court. Meeting people. Judging disputes. Showing myself to be the true Caliph.”

“Thank you for the time you’ve spent with us till now,” said Petra.

“I hope we never have to oppose each other on the field of battle,” said Bean. “The way we’ve had to oppose Han Tzu in this war.”