THE STATE OF SIEGE
In a democratic society, which has long known peace and stability, these powers fall senescent. Flooding rains create a landslide which buries a road and a town. The media fixates on the images of tragedy. The Governor declares the 'State of Emergency', and the town becomes eligible for money from the central government, the deployment of troops, and other measures to recover. Nobody asks where the laws of the State of Emergency came from, what they mean, what they do as a legal mechanism.
They are not some kind of oddly named reference to a request for disaster assistance. They can be used that way, but they are not. They are in fact the tool of the Castellan. They are the ancient principle of Cicero: Inter arma enim silent leges. The tool of the Gendarme. They are the device of the prorogued Parliament. They are the Order-in-Council, the Executive Order. The suspension of Habeas Corpus.
They are the body of soldiers standing at the checkpoint in the middle of the night stopping someone from returning to their house without a document check. They are the tanks in front of Parliament. They are the national curfew. They are the mobilisation order for soldiers when there is no war. They are the warning shot in the air cutting through the silence of a peaceful summer day and the summary detention of groups of people found out on the street. They are the nervous clusters of fresh conscripts, smoking on the street corner with fixed bayonets, not quite sure if they are surrounded by enemies and traitors or friends and countrymen, and so not quite sure of how to act.
They are the LAACDocs. They are the suspension of the Senate. And they are the Oversector Grand Moffs, ruling by reference to the authority of His Imperial Majesty and the Rescript of the throne in response to their actions. The crack of the pistol in the night, and the assembled firing squad. They are the civil war, when the army recaptures rebel territory and begins to arrest collaborators. They are the moment when even the lawyers of a democratic society argue "these amendments of the Bill of Rights, in truth, are all peace provisions of the Constitution and, like all other conventional and legislative laws and enactments, are silent amidst arms, and when the safety of the people becomes the supreme law".
They are the 10-80.
They are the 10-81.
They are the Decreto de Guerra a Muerte. The band playing Deguello, and the flag of 'Death to Traitors' hoisted before the rebels. They are the moment when the glove falls off the fist of civilisation, and the State takes spasmodic, exceptional actions in the hope that the emergency can be quickly ended, and the peace of civil society quickly restored.
Except sometimes the measures do not work. Sometimes the problems remain. Sometimes the solution remains the same. Try it again. Try harder. There are no limits when you are under the State of Siege! If it doesn't work, society itself is doomed...
Minister of the Interior of the Galactic Dominion the Right Honourable Lady Miranda Lawson didn't know what she was going to order under the State of Siege yet. She didn't know how long it was going to last. She didn't know how bad the conspiracy was. She didn't know how great the threat was.
But she sat behind her wonderful rosewood desk with brass fittings at the centre of her office in the old convent of Santo Domingo, and aides continuously brought reports and left again as the holo-projector in front of her updated and a trail of flimsies and padds were deposited and retrieved, the guards ramrod straight in stormtrooper armour outside. Her throat felt dry and half swollen, for no particular apparent reason, and for every reason under the stars.
There had been an attack on the President. On Tanda. On the woman who had saved the galaxy from the Reapers.
And pursuant to Article 10 Section 81 of the Constitution of the Galactic Dominion, she had signed the Emergency Order, her devolved authority in the event of Presidential incapacity, that initiated The State of Siege. A distant crackle of gunfire echoed through the cool mountain night of Cusco, and the sirens of arriving vehicles howled their two-tone notes to the hazy sky.
The Demigoddess Liberator-President of the Dominion might already be laying dead, shattered at the bottom of a canyon. And whether or not she was, no conspiracy this brazen intended to leave the job only half-finished.
They had to be coming for her next. For her, and for the peace of the galaxy.
Her hand clenched on a pen, and she looked to the clone now known as Avital Shepard. "One moment, Director," she said, and turning back to her desk, calmly signed the national military mobilisation orders while flickering light from the fireplace in the old Spanish colonial convent played a game against the steady white light of the desk lamp, a game of shadows and shades that made her think of the game she had just been forced to start. Oh yes; the game had begun, and only the vicious logic of the State of Siege would give it an end.