The End of All Things: The Third Instalment (9 page)

“How do you mean?”

“I mean that there were ten Colonial Union planets that were supposed to announce their independence from the CU simultaneously, and that Khartoum was one of them.
But Khartoum jumped the gun, announced early, and then lured the
Tubingen
into a trap.”

“Why would they do that?”

“That’s what we need to find out,” Wilson said.
“What he tells us is going to make a difference in how the Colonial Union as a whole deals with these rebellious planets.”

“Do you think he’ll talk?”
Powell asked.

“By the time we get done with him, getting him to talk won’t be the problem.
It’ll be getting him to shut up.
Now, are you ready for the formal debriefing?”

“Actually, I would like to see my soldiers first,” I said.

“All right,” Wilson said.

* * *

I found Lambert waist high in a stack of dead bodies near the back of the mess cooler.
Salcido I found two stacks over, closer to the floor.
They did not bear close observation.

“Lambert was right, you know,” Powell said.
She was with me in the cooler.
Wilson had walked us to the cooler, opened it, and then waited outside.
The cooler had been cleared of shelves and the contents they usually stored; the latter were either restocked in a different cooler or being fed to the survivors of the
Tubingen,
who were in the mess itself, unhappily crowded together.

At least they weren’t crowded together in here.

“What was he right about?”
I asked.

“Root causes,” Powell said.

“You of all people,” I said, almost smiling.

“I didn’t ever say he was wrong.
I said ‘who cares.’”

“But now you do care.”

“I care more than I used to.
What are we doing here, Lieutenant?
We’re running around putting out fires.
And fine, we’re the fire brigade.
Our job is putting out the fires.
Not worrying about how they got started, just putting them out.
But at some point even the fire brigade has to start asking who is starting all these fires, and why it’s being left to us to continually put them out.”

“Lambert would be laughing his head off to hear you say that.”

“If he were here to laugh his head off, I wouldn’t be saying it.
He’d be saying it.
Again.”
Powell motioned to where Salcido was.
“And Sau would be geeking out over some point of trivia.
And I would be sniping at both of them, and you would be playing referee.
And we would all be one happy family again, instead of the two of us looking at the two of them in a meat locker.”

“You’ve lost friends before,” I said.

“Of course I have,” Powell said.
“And so have you.
It doesn’t make it any easier when it happens.”

We were silent for a moment.

“I have a speech running through my head,” I finally said, to Powell.

“One you were going to make?”
Powell asked.

“No.
One someone else made, that I’ve been thinking a lot about the last few weeks, when we’ve been running around putting out fires.”

“Which one is it?”

“It’s the Gettysburg Address.
Abraham Lincoln.
You remember it?”

Powell smirked.
“I lived in America and taught in a junior high.
I remember it.”

“It’s something like three hundred words long, and it wasn’t even well received when Lincoln gave it.
The part I’m thinking about is where he says ‘Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.’”

Powell nodded.
“You think we’re in a civil war right now.”

“I don’t know what we’re in right now,” I said.
“It doesn’t feel like a real war.
It’s too strung out.
Too diffuse.
It’s not battlefield after battlefield.
It’s skirmish after skirmish.”

“Let me clear it up for you,” Powell said.
“It’s a civil war.
We lost the Earth.
The Colonial Union only has so long before it has to turn to all the colonies to support it with the things it used to get for free from the Earth.
The colonies are asking if what they get from the Colonial Union is worth the cost, and worth the cost of having the Colonial Union keep running things.
Sounds like the answer for at least some of them is no.
And it seems like now they think the arm the Colonial Union was using to shield them is now up against their throat.
So they’re trying to get out before the whole thing falls down around them.”

“They’re not doing a good job of it,” I said.

“They don’t have to do a good job of it for it to be a civil war.
And they’re
not
doing a good job of it so far.”
Powell motioned around her.
“But it looks like they’re learning.
And it looks like they’re getting allies with this Equilibrium group.”

“I don’t think Equilibrium, whoever they are, are doing this out of the goodness of their own heart.”

“You’re not wrong about that, but it doesn’t matter from the point of view of this being a civil war.
If they don’t think the Colonial Union has their interests at heart, then it’s a case of ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend.’”

“That’s not a very smart strategy.”

“Smart has nothing to do with this.
We could go around and around like this for hours, Lieutenant.”

“What do you think?”
I said.

“About what?”

“About the Colonial Union,” I said.
“About it controlling these planets.
About how it responds to things like this.”
I waved my hand around the room.
“About all of
this.
”

Powell looked vaguely surprised.
“The Colonial Union’s a fascistic shit show, boss.
I knew that much from the first day I set foot on one of their boats to get away from Earth.
Are you kidding?
They control trade.
They control communications.
They don’t let the colonies protect themselves and they don’t let them do anything that doesn’t go through the Colonial Union itself.
And let’s not forget everything they’ve done to Earth.
They’ve been doing it for centuries.
Shit, Lieutenant.
I’m not surprised we have a civil war on our hands right now.
I’m surprised it didn’t happen
sooner.
”

“And yet here we are,” I said.
“You and me, in their uniform.”

“We didn’t want to die old,” Powell said.
“I was seventy-five and I spent most of my whole life in Florida and I had bone cancer and never did the things I wanted to do and it was eating me up.
You think I’m an asshole now, you should have seen me just before I left Earth.
You would have pushed me off a building just on principle, and you wouldn’t have been wrong to do it.”

“Well, all right,” I said.
“We didn’t know coming out here what we’d be getting ourselves into.”

“No, we didn’t.”

“But now you
do
know,” I said.
“And if you knew then what you knew now, would you still do it?”

“Yes,” Powell said.
“I still don’t want to die old.”

“But you just said the Colonial Union is a fascistic shit show.”

“It is, and right now it’s the only way we survive,” Powell said.
“Look around.
Look at the planets we’ve been on.
Look at all the species out there we’ve had to fight.
Do you really think any of these planets and the people on them won’t get carved up the first minute the Colonial Union disappears?
They’ve never fought before.
Not on the scale they would need to.
They have no military infrastructure on the scale they’d have to have.
And they would have no time to ramp any of that up.
The Colonial Union is a monster, but the colonies are fucking baby deer in a forest full of predators.”

“Then how does any of that change?”

“Got me, boss, I just work here.
What I do know is that it
is
going to change.
It has to change because we don’t have the Earth anymore.
The mechanics of the Colonial Union, what it was founded on, just don’t work anymore.
It changes or we all die.
And I’m doing my part to keep it together until then.
The alternative is grim.”

“I suppose it might be,” I said.

“What about you?
Would you do it again, Lieutenant?”

“I don’t know,” I said.
“I didn’t want to die old, you’re right.”
I reached out and touched Lambert’s cold arm.
“But there are worse ways to go.”

“He went mid-pontification,” Powell said.
“I’m pretty sure that’s how he would have wanted to go.”

I laughed at that.
“Fair enough,” I said.
“I think my point is that I get it now.
I get that there are worse things than to have lived a life and have most of it behind you.
I wouldn’t be afraid of that anymore, I think.”

“Maybe.
It’s easy to say that now that you look twenty years old and will live for another sixty even if you left the CDF today.”

“Again, a fair point.”

“This is why I told Lambert to stop going on about it, you know,” Powell said.
“All the thinking about the steps beyond what we were directly doing.
It never makes you happy.
It never solves anything for you, right now.”

I smiled.
“And yet you were the one to bring it up, here, now.”

“Yes, well.”
Powell grimaced.
“Think of it as a tribute.
To our departed friend.
I’ll never do it again.”

I motioned to Salcido.
“And him?”

“Shit, I don’t know,” Powell said.
“Maybe listen to that stupid pizza moon song again.
Or think about what day it is in the mess.
Which is complete bullshit, by the way.
You can get pizza and tacos and hamburgers any day you want.
It’s just which entrée they push out in front.”

“I know,” I said.
“But that wasn’t the point of the conversation, was it.”

“No,” Powell said.
“No, it wasn’t.”

PART FIVE

Why are we even here,
Powell said to me, through her BrainPal.
We and the rest of our platoon on the
Uppsala
were policing a protest on Erie, in the city of Galway.
The protest was entirely peaceful.
All the protesters were doing, all anyone was doings, as far as I could see, was lying down.
Everywhere.
There were at least 100,000 of them.
She was thirty yards away from me, part of a defensive line in front of the Colonial Union offices.

We’re protecting Colonial Union property,
I sent back.

What are they going to do, lay on it?

I seem to remember you recently complaining about people thinking too much about our missions,
I said.

This seems like something the local police can handle.

Indeed,
I said, and pointed at a woman lying about two meters from me, in a police uniform.
There’s the chief of police.
You can talk to her about it.

Even from thirty yards away I could hear Powell’s snort of derision.

The problem with Erie was not that the population had tried to declare its independence, or tried to burn down the Colonial Union local headquarters, or had invited less than entirely altruistic alien species to attack Colonial ships and soldiers.
The problem was that Erie had gone on strike.

Not entirely on strike; the planet was still feeding itself and clothing itself and taking care of its own internal needs.
But it had decided that, for now, it was no longer in the export business.
This presented a problem for the Colonial Union because the Colonial Union bought a substantial amount from Erie, and Erie, as one of the earliest colonies, had one of the most developed export economies in the whole Colonial Union.