The Armageddon Inheritance

“Gerald, please. Or just ‘Ger,’ if you’re comfortable with it.”

Tsien began a polite refusal, then paused. He had never been comfortable with easy familiarity between serving officers, even among his fellow Asians, yet there was something charming about this American. Not boyish (though he understood Westerners prized that quality for some peculiar reason), but charming. Hatcher’s competence and hard-headed, forthright honesty compelled respect, but this was something else. Charisma? No, that was close, but not quite the proper word. The word was … openness. Or friendship, perhaps.

Friendship. Now was that not a strange thing to feel for a Western general after so many years? And yet… Yes, “and yet,” indeed.

“Very well … Gerald,” he said.

“I know it’s like pulling teeth, Marshal.” Hatcher’s almost gentle smile robbed his words of any offense. “We’ve been too busy thinking of ways to kill each other for too long for it to be any other way, more’s the pity. Do you know, in a weird sort of way, I’m almost grateful to the Achuultani.”

“Grateful?” Tsien cocked his head for a moment, then nodded. “I see. I had not previously thought of it in that light, Comr—Gerald, but it is a relief to face an alien menace rather than the possibility of blowing up our world ourselves.”

“Exactly.” Hatcher extracted a bottle of brandy and two snifters from a desk drawer. He set them on the blotter and poured, then offered one to his guest and raised his own. “May I say, Marshal Tsien, that it is a greater pleasure than I ever anticipated to have you as an ally?”

“You may.” Tsien allowed a smile to cross his own habitually immobile face. It was hardly proper, but there was no getting around it. For all their differences, he and this American were too much alike to be enemies.

“And, as you would say, Gerald, my name is Tao-ling,” he murmured, and crystal sang gently as their glasses touched.

Out of deference to the still unenhanced Terra-born Council members, Horus had the news footage played directly rather than relayed through his neural feed. Not that it made it any better.

The report ended and the Terran tri-vid unit sank back into the wall amid the silence. The thirty men and women in his conference room looked at one another, but he noted that none of them looked directly at him.

“What I want to know, ladies and gentlemen,” he said finally, his voice shattering the hush, “is how that was allowed to happen?”

One or two Councilors flinched, though he hadn’t raised his voice. He hadn’t had to. The screams and thunder of automatic weapons as the armored vehicles moved in had made his point for him.

“It was not ‘allowed,’ ” a voice said finally. “It was inevitable.”

Horus’s cocked head encouraged the speaker to continue, and Sophia Pariani leaned forward to meet his eyes. Her Italian accent was more than usually pronounced, but there was no apology in her expression.

“There is no doubt that the situation was clumsily handled, but there will be more ‘situations,’ Governor, and not merely in Africa. Already the world economy has been disrupted by the changes we have effected; as the further and greater changes which lie ahead become evident, more and more of the common men and women of the world will react as those people did.”

“Sophia’s right, Horus.” This time it was Sarhantha, one of his ten fellow survivors from Nergal’s crew. “We ought to’ve seen it coming. In fact, we did; we just didn’t expect it so soon because we’d forgotten how many people are crammed into this world. Hard and fast as we’re working, only a small minority are actively involved in the defense projects or the military. All the majority see is that their governments have been supplanted, their planet is threatened by a menace they don’t truly comprehend and are none too sure they believe in, and their economies are in the process of catastrophic disruption. This particular riot was touched off by a combination of hunger, inflation, and unemployment—regional factors that pre-date our involvement but have grown only worse since we assumed power—and the realization that even those with skilled trades will soon find their skills obsolete.”

“But there’ll be other factors soon enough.” Councilor Abner Johnson spoke with a sharp New England twang despite his matte-black complexion. “People’re people, Governor. The vested interests are going to object— strenuously—once they get reorganized. Their economic and political power’s about to go belly-up, and some of them’re stupid enough to fight. And don’t forget the religious aspect. We’re sitting on a powder keg in Iran and Syria, but we’ve got our own nuts, and you people represent a pretty unappetizing affront to their comfortable little preconceptions.” He smiled humorlessly.

” ‘Mycos? Birhat?’ You don’t really think God created planets with names like that, do you? If you could at least’ve come from a planet named ‘Eden’ it might’ve helped, but as it is—!” Johnson shrugged. “Once they get organized, we’ll have a real lunatic fringe!”

“Comrade Johnson is correct, Comrade Governor.” Commissar Hsu Yin’s oddly British accent was almost musical after Johnson’s twang. “We may debate the causes of Third World poverty—” she eyed her capitalist fellows calmly “—but it exists. Ignorance and fear will be greatest there, violence more quickly acceptable, yet this is only the beginning. When the First World realizes that it is in precisely the same situation the violence may grow even worse. We may as well prepare for the worst … and whatever we anticipate will most assuredly fall short of what will actually happen.”

“Granted. But this violent suppression—”

“Was the work of the local authorities,” Geb put in. “And before you condemn them, what else could they do? There were almost ten thousand people in that mob, and if a lot of them were unarmed women and children, a lot were neither female, young, nor unarmed. At least they had the sense to call us in as soon as they’d restored order, even if it was under martial law. I’ve diverted a dozen Shirut-class atmospheric conveyers to haul in foodstuffs from North America. That should take the worst edge off the situation, but if the local authorities hadn’t ‘suppressed’ the disturbances, however they did it, simply feeding them wouldn’t even begin to help, and you know it.”

There were mutters of agreement, and Horus noted that the Terra-born were considerably more vehement than the Imperials. Were they right? It was their planet, and Maker knew the disruptions were only beginning. He knew they were sanctioning expediency, but wasn’t that another way to describe pragmatism? And in a situation like the present one…

“All right,” he sighed finally, “I don’t like it, but you may be right.” He turned to Gustav van Gelder, Councilor for Planetary Security. “Gus, I want you and Geb to increase the priority for getting stun guns into the hands of local authorities. And I want more of our enhancement capacity diverted to police personnel. Isis, you and Myko deal with that.”

Doctor Isis Tudor, his own Terra-born daughter and now Councilor for Biosciences, glanced at her ex- mutineer assistant with a sort of resigned desperation. Isis was over eighty; even enhancement could only slow her gradual decay and eliminate aches and pains, but her mind was quick and clear. Now she nodded, and he knew she’d find the capacity … somehow.

“Until we can get local peace-keepers enhanced,” Horus went on, “I’ll have General Hatcher set up mixed-nationality response teams out of his military personnel. I don’t like it—the situation’s going to be bad enough without ‘aliens’ popping up to quell resistance to our ‘tyrannical’ ways—but a dozen troopers in combat armor could have stopped this business with a tenth the casualties, especially if they’d had stun guns.”

Heads nodded, and he suppressed a sigh. Problems, problems! Why hadn’t he made sufficient allowance for what would happen once Imperial technology came to Terra in earnest? Now he felt altogether too much like a warden rather than a governor, but whatever happened, he had to hold things together—by main force, if necessary—until the Achuultani had been stopped. If they could be—

He chopped off that thought automatically and turned to Christine Redhorse, Councilor for Agriculture.

“All right. On to the next problem. Christine, I’d like you to share your report on the wheat harvest with us, and then …”

Most of Horus’s Council had departed, leaving him alone with his defense planners and engineers.