NOVA VIRCONIUM
COMMAND CENTRAL
HELLAS PLANITIA, MARS
DOMINATION OF THE DRAKA
FEBRUARY 3, 1998
0600 HOURS
"Thank you, Ursula." Beauregard Rohm watched the serf's hips work under her skirt as she walked back out of his office, then tore his gaze away and sighed regretfully as he took a sip of his Yirgacheffee Kaffa. He gave a small noise of pleasure in the back of his throat as he let the coffee roll over his tongue. It was a relatively rare blend, but an old friend from school had inherited his family's plantation in the Ethiopian highlands and sent him some bags from time to time.
He set the porcelain cup down and started to reach for the first data-plaque when someone appeared at his doorway. Rohm raised an eyebrow as he took in the black dress uniform of a merarch, then nodded to him.
The merarch approached the desk and brought his right fist to his chest. "Service to the State."
"Glory to the Race."
The formalities out of the way, the merarch produced a sheet of paper and held it out. "Sir, this wire just came in from Archona. Priority one."
The commandant-governor's eyebrows rose slightly as he took the offered sheet, and nodded to the officer. "Very good. Carry on." The merarch saluted and walked out.
Rohm unfolded the paper and quickly scanned through it. Sat still for a long moment, then read through it again. A soft whisper, "Wotan." He reached for the communicator.
"Staff conference, immediate," he said. "Force Condition Seven."
CHATEAU RETOUR PLANTATION
LOIRE DISTRICT
TOURAINE PROVINCE
FEBRUARY 3, 1998
"Vite, vite, keep movin'!" The serf foreman reached out to stop a field-hand family; one of the children was cradling a puppy. "No livestock in the shelter, drop it." The small boy began to cry in bewildered terror.
The bossboys were as ignorant as the rest of the serfs, but they had caught the master's nervousness. Karl von Shrakenberg whistled sharply to catch the man's attention and jerked his head; the foreman's rubber hose fell, and the line began moving again as he waved the serf boy through with his pet.
Makes no nevermind, the master of Chateau Retour thought, watching the long column disappearing into the hillside. He swallowed to moisten a dry throat, and suppressed a shiver as he rolled his shoulders within his silk jacket to relieve a tension building between his shoulder blades. It was a relatively cool winter day in the generally mild Loire Valley. The shelter was burrowed under that hill, quite deep; begun in the late '40s after the excavation and removal of the last one that had been irradiated after an incident involving a Yankee agent infiltrating the naming feast of he and his twin sister Alexandra in 1947. The entrance was disguised as a warehouse, but beyond the broad door and the facade was a long concrete ramp. The elevators were freight-type, and the thousand-odd serfs would be in their emergency quarters in another hour or so. Armorplate doors, and thousands of feet of rock-
It should be enough, if we have an hour, he thought. Nothing but the coded messages over the official net, but you could tell... I always grudged the money and effort. Full shelter for all the serfs, sustainable if crowded; fuel cells, air filters, water recyclers, and food enough for three years on strait rations.
He had had just enough time to put most of the farming equipment under wraps; the sealed warehouses held seed grain. There was even room for basic breeding stock, on the upper level.
The last of the field hands passed through, and the overseer looked up from the comp screen by the door. "That's the last of them," she called. Rumbling sounded within, as thick metal sighed home into slots.
Silence fell, eerie and complete. Nothing but the cool wind through the trees, and the tinkle of water from one of the village fountains. He stood in his stirrups and looked around; in the distance was the Great House, an old chateau built in a checkerboard of white stone and red brick, with black Angers-slate roofs; four towers, and a big pool-reservoir behind it with landscaped banks. He was near the Quarters to the east, the cottage roofs almost lost among the trees. Around the manor grounds were blocks of orchard, apple and apricot and peach; dairy pasture down by the river, wheat and corn farther north, and long low slopes of vineyard. Remembering the sign that hung in chains between the front gateposts:
CHATEAU RETOUR PLANTATION
EST. 1945
KARL AND ELIZABETH VON SHRAKENBERG, LANDHOLDERS
Commonplace and infinitely dear. Yesterday his only worry had been the falling price of wheat and the vintage.
"Run one mo' check," he said. "Wouldn't want to leave one of they brats out by mistake." The overseer was taut-nervous herself, but her fingers were steady on the keyboard.
"All of 'em."
"Right." He ran a soothing hand down the neck of his horse as it side-danced with the tension. "Sooo, boy, easy. Now, let's go jump in a hole and pull it in aftah us."
DONOVAN HOUSE
NEW YORK CITY
FEDERAL CAPITAL DISTRICT
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
FEBRUARY 4, 1998
0700 HOURS
"Could it be a drill of some sort?" one of the figures in the screen said.
The Conference Room was nearly empty; just the president, and a few of her chief aides there. The Alliance Chairman was in the center of the holoscreen, with the military chiefs and some of the most crucial administrators. In theory the other Alliance heads of government were coequal, but this was still much more than primus inter pares.
Carmen Hiero forced herself not to sigh in exasperation. "Amigo, they've started closing down factories and evacuating the population to the deep shelters," she said. "Look at the reports; there are abandoned dogs walking through the streets of Alexandria! You think they're doing this – it must be costing them astronomically – for a drill?"
Allsworthy tapped his fingers together and looked to one side, toward his pickup of the ACI – Alliance Central Intelligence – chief. Hiero frowned slightly; she thought the chairman tended to rely on his Intelligence people rather too much. Enough, she thought. Listen.
"Anything congruent? Any reason for it to start now?" the chairman said.
The ACI man, a square-jawed Argentine of Welsh descent, frowned and shook his head. "Nothing we can spot on short notice, Mr. Chairman," he said. "Not even anything out by the mass relay excavation at Charon since that clash last month."
Allsworthy grunted, looked down at his hands. Hiero felt herself touched with sympathy, and a moment's gratitude that the final decision was not hers. The life of the planet lay in those palms. "Recommendations?"
The president hesitated, thoughts running through her head. Finally, the ACI commander spoke up. "Sir, whatever has brought this on, even if we win with the present inadequate level of infection in their infosystems, we're talking hundreds of millions of dead. Everybody, if they use Fenris." That was the Domination's doomsday bomb, their final resort to bring the entire Earth down along with them if they were on the verge of utter defeat. "We have to play for time, try and unroot what this is as we ready our forces."
"We're already at Defcon 4," Hiero said. "We should attack immediately."
"Attack." That was Donati, the OSS chief of staff, more decisive than usual.
She sat silent as she listened to the ensuing debate. This was not a committee, could not be, and she had said what she believed... At last the chairman raised a hand for silence.
"We'll present an ultimatum," he said. "Secretary Ferriera, draft an immediate note to the Domination; their mobilization is an intolerable provocation and threat, and we will consider ourselves in a state of war unless they begin withdrawal by exactly" – his eyes went to a clock – "1000 hours tomorrow. General Mashutomo, all Alliance forces to Defcon 5 and proceed on the assumption that hostilities begin as of the expiration of the ultimatum." He looked around. "Any questions?"
Hiero waited until she was sure there would be none, before she spoke. "No. I disagree with this course of action, but we must have discipline or we are truly lost." A weary smile. "And I very much hope I am wrong and you are right, Senor Chairman."
"Roderigo," she said, as the last of the president's council were leaving. "Wait a moment." When they were alone. "Miguel and the grandchildren are still on Ceres. Send a message, tightbeam, priority; Stay. He will understand."
WESTERN NORTH CAROLINA
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
FEBRUARY 4, 1998
1500 HOURS
"Captain Fischer, what the hell is this place?"
The trooper was nervous. They all were, after the sudden Defcon 5 and the scramble of orders that had sent them barging off into the Nantahala Forest, away from any news of what was going on.
Fischer looked up from his maps; they had walked most of the way from Cheoah, up into the hills. The air was cool here in the high Great Smokies even in summer, chill with winter now. The steep mountain ridges were thick with triple-canopy forest, underbrush at chest height, a second layer twice as tall as a man, then hardwoods and pine trees above them.
"It's an old talc mine," the captain said. They're supposed to be independent-minded, he reminded himself. And they're feeling lost, yanked out of their regular units. Most of the Rangers were helping with the last crates, up from the disused road and through the carefully run-down entrance. The shielding started a little way beyond that, and then the storerooms and armories. "You married? Close relatives?"
"No, sir," the solder answered. He was in his late teens, with a fluffy brown attempt at a mustache. "Not really."
"Nobody here does," Fischer continued. "And in that cave there's everything we'd need for a long, long time."
The soldier swallowed. "Yessir, I get the picture." The officer noted with pleasure that he didn't ask if there were other redoubts like this. I suspect so, the captain thought. But neither of us needs to know. One of the noncoms below called with a quietly menacing displeasure, and the young Ranger saluted and turned to go. That gave him a glimpse of the last contingent, looking unaccustomed to their fatigues and carrying various items of black-boxed electronics.
"Girls?" he squeaked, then remembered himself and saluted again.
"Technicians," Fischer said softly to himself, looking up. "Edited out of the comps, like all the rest of us. Unlikely to be missed. Not on paper either, anywhere."
The last troopers were following up the trail, replacing bent branches and disturbed leaves, spraying pheromone neutralizers. He folded the map and tucked it into a shoulder pouch. It was going to create the biggest administrative hassle of all time, getting this set up again when they'd been stood down.
"I hope," he murmured. "I sincerely hope."
CENTRAL OFFICE, ARCHONAL PALACE
ARCHONA
DOMINATION OF THE DRAKA
FEBRUARY 5, 1998
0500 HOURS
"So." Eric von Shrakenberg looked around the circle of the table. "Is that the consensus?"
Louise Gayner, head of the Militants, snorted and snapped a thumbnail against the crackle finish of her perscomp. The other glanced sidelong at each other; the Supreme General Staff representatives, the Directors of War and Security, the Council members. No teleconferencing, not for this. A dozen human beings, and they were all those who must be consulted in this matter.
Silence. Nods.
The Archon looked down at his fingers. All my life I've wanted to set us free, he thought. Free from a way of life based on death. Now my only chance of it is to inflict more death than the combined totals of every despot and warlord in the whole mad-dog slaughterhouse we call human history. Now it had come down to this, the whole of human history narrowing down to this point. Ten thousand generations, living, rearing their children, working, dreaming, going down to dust, and now... He would say the words, and they would lie like a sword across all time, no matter the outcome. If there were humans at all, a generation hence, they would call this the decisive moment. The time when the Stone Dogs had reached acceptable saturation. The ultimate power, and in his hands.
It would be so easy to blame the fault of the situation devolving down to this moment on the Protheans, leaving their bunker behind on Mars for a humanity bitterly divided in two to find fifty thousand years later. But I'd be deluding myself. The Protracted Struggle, the Domination's policy of aggressive neutrality, the steadfast moralism of the Alliance, the bitterness of the Draka national consciousness made up of those rejected by the rest of Western civilization. I suppose it was inevitable.
He could feel the cold carnivore eyes on him. A leader is someone who manages to keep ahead of the pack, he knew bitterly. There was exactly one practical choice he could make, within the iron framework of the Domination's logic, and the Draka were nothing if not a practical people. Or he could refuse it, and the only difference would be that he would be safely dead in twenty minutes. For a split second's brief temptation he wished he could; it would spare him the consequences at least.
No. At seventh and last, I am a von Shrakenberg, and I have my duty. Besides that, if nothing else it would give Gayner too much pleasure.
"Activate the Stone Dogs," he said; his voice had the blank dispassion of a recording. "Force Condition Eight. Service to the State."
"Glory to the Race," came the reply. There was another brief pause, as if the men and women gathered around the table were caught in the huge inertia of history, the avalanche they were about to unloose. Then they rose and left, one by one.