earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.'
'Those elegant words, written over six hundred years ago, have not lost their power, or their importance, even in these times when Man is spread throughout the galaxy in seeming harmony. It is with the strength of those words that we formally declare our independence from the Empire of the Unified Earth, and the dissolution of our ties to her Majesty, Empress Eleanora De Marquez. We have been driven to this act by the empire's continual disregard for our needs and by the unjust, externally imposed limitations on our growth as a self sustaining society.'
Sylvia reached across her desk and tapped the slate to pause the video. 'It goes on like that for a while. The smug bastard wrote himself quite the speech, almost like he expects his 'declaration' will have historical significance. The short version is they're tired of working their little fingers to the bone to feed our teeming billions, in exchange for low quality meds and surplus nano-forges. They want us to recognize their independence and renegotiate a more equitable trade deal. If we refuse, they'll stop all harvest loading and divert the courses of the longships en route to Earth, returning them to New Poland.
'They're apparently serious, too. All commands to the New Poland longships via ZPL connection have been shut out. We're currently locked out from our own supply lines, which could only be due to sabotage.' She settled back in her seat. 'So, what do you think?'
Peter looked back down at the slate. The old man in the screen did not look like a mass murderer-but then again, statesmen rarely did. The longships were Earth's lifelines and the sole reasons for the existence of the colonies. Despite all the orbital greenhouses and the immense arcologies and stack-farms covering nearly every inch of land, extending even into the oceans themselves, the belabored old planet could no longer support her one hundred eight billion inhabitants without some form of external support. The colony worlds were their breadbasket, their only defense against a staggering near-genocide from starvation. Any interruption in the decades-long supply chain could result in the death of billions.
'Sounds like you need to start renegotiating,' Peter answered with a shrug.
She stood up, and walked around her chair, coyly tracing her finger along its top. 'And why do you say that, Peter?'
'Because we don't really have another choice. The New Poland colony is thirty-two years away via DMT longship. That's a pretty long lead time for a punitive assault, not to mention that it's essentially a one way trip for the grunts, with no possibility of relief or re-supply. That's a poor mission. Communication with the colony via zero path length wormhole, however, is instantaneous-you can talk to them immediately. Face it, the colonists can starve us out, but we can't touch them.'
Sylvia looked him in the eye. 'But we can't honestly negotiate with them, either. Do you know what would happen if we granted New Poland their independence? Next year, New Wales would want it. The year after that, Morgan's Rock, perhaps. It wouldn't end until every planet was freed and Mother Earth was left as nothing more than a vassal state, bled dry for our tech resources. It's hard to be an empire without imperialism.'
'We could adjust.'
'I highly doubt that. There are almost one hundred eight billion people out there, some trying to eke out a living, but most just content to live off the dole. A lot of them spend their lives only one ration credit away from starvation. How do you think they would handle the government tightening its belt in order to pay our colonies their 'fair share'? They'd revolt! And there's no way around it, either. There's hardly enough work now for those who might want to earn more ration credits, and the population just keeps increasing. We can't ship them to the colonies or kill them off in wars fast enough. No, giving in to New Poland is signing the empire's death certificate.'
He declined comment on whether or not that would be a bad thing. As much as he hated to admit it, she had a point. Even if he despised what the world had become-what he had helped to bring about-and though he respected what the New Polish were trying to achieve, the colonists' threats scared him to death. 'What other choice is there?'
She came from behind her desk and walked behind his chair, to gently grip his shoulders and lean down to whisper in his ear.
He could smell the sourness of her breath.
'Hornets,' she said. 'We crush this little independence movement with the Hornets we've been secreting away in each of the colony systems for over a hundred years.'
He stood up, as much in shock as to free himself from her touch. 'But that's stupid. Why the hell would you bother putting Hornets in systems lightyears away, with no one to control them?'
'The empire wasn't built by fools, Peter. Independence has always been a possibility and prudence demanded it be planned for. History's proven that after a few generations have passed, once a colony's rulers no longer have strong personal ties to the government, they'll start to think they can run things better by themselves. The Ministry of Colonization had a contingency plan for this before they ever sent the first longships of settlers. I usually regard any plans other than my own with disdain, but I have to admit, this particular strategy was a beauty.'
Peter shook his head. 'What good does pre-deploying Hornets accomplish? Combat AIs can't fight effectively on their own, and if you expect me to go in stasis for over thirty years just so I can go there in person and operate your little death dealers, you've got another think coming,'
She sat back onto the edge of her desk. Now that most of her big secret had been revealed, she appeared somewhat deflated. 'It would be easier to show you than to try to explain it. Follow me.' She stood and walked out of her office, apparently expecting Peter to follow.
Nameless functionaries peeked out from their desks as she passed, some visibly quaking in her wake. They left the mundane normality of the ministry offices together and passed through a pair of security checkpoints, as her eyes and her codes proved to be the keys to the kingdom. Things began to look very familiar to Peter after they entered a large space on the other side of an immense, reinforced door.
The weapons of choice for the EUE and Her Majesty, the Empress Eleanora, were the combat AIs. Rippers for ground-combat or Hornets for aerospace and ground attack, the autonomous war machines had proven themselves to be the ultimate force multiplier, but the artificial intelligence driving them was flawed, incapable of creativity, ingenuity, or initiative. Without a human REMO as 'man in the loop,' Hornets and Rippers either underperformed and were overrun . . . or they committed atrocities so vile, they could never be revealed. They instead had to be 'swept' under the rug by very bad, very dangerous people-people like Peter in his former life.
Inside the vast room Sylvia led him to, stood a full Ripper/Hornet control suite, complete with a connection chair for the REMO, and a set of flat panel displays and adjunct controls for the Remote Operator's supervisor. Surrounding it were banks upon banks of identical, stacked equipment enclosures, each fed by heavy duty cables and cooling lines. What their purpose was, and how they related to Hornets and New Poland, he had no idea.
Sylvia walked up to one of the enclosures and patted it fondly. 'You're right, of course. There's no way for you to control the Hornets we hid in the New Poland system over such an impossible distance. And even if we waited the thirty-two years it would take to get you to the colony, there's no way you could coordinate the Hornets across the breadth of an entire solar system. The lightspeed lag would make any sort of meaningful integration impossible. By that sort of logic, you are absolutely correct and there is no way to prosecute an interstellar war.'
'Yet we find ourselves here together, despite that.' Peter waved a hand at the towering bulk of stacked modules. 'What is all this?'
She smiled again, but it was a smile filled with malice. 'Those are ZPL wormhole transceivers, thousands of them. More FTL comms than have ever been grouped together before, and linked in parallel to provide all the bandwidth you would ever need, enough to control an entire battalion of AIs, whether across town or across the galaxy, securely and instantaneously. This is our ace in the hole. This is how we are going to put down this revolt and save our empire.'
Peter suddenly felt weak and sought a chair. He sat down heavily and shook his head. What had at first seemed to be an impossibility, a wild notion that the colonel and the ministry were bandying about for argument's sake, now became a crushing, nightmarish reality. He looked at her. 'You replaced the Hornet's comm circuits with
