“I had heard a rumor, but didn’t believe it. You don’t believe it, do you?” she asked him. “I know that Reza is different from anyone I’ve ever known, but he would not have killed Nathan. I just can’t accept–”
A glance and a frown from a nearby councilwoman caught Braddock’s eye.
“Yes, I know,” he said, raising his voice to make sure the eavesdropping councilwoman heard, “it amazes me that President Borge is even going to bother with a tribunal.”
“Tony?” Enya said, confused at his turn of his speech, but stopped when his hand gripped her arm tightly, almost painfully.
Braddock watched out of the corner of his eye as the councilwoman turned back to her conversation, apparently satisfied. Then he guided Enya to the open space beneath a nearby Corsair’s wing. “Enya,” he whispered after they’d moved out of earshot of their neighbors, “you’ve got to be very careful about what you say and who hears you. Since Nathan died, the changes on the Council have been nothing short of terrifying.” He glanced around quickly, and she recognized the look from her time in the resistance: he was making sure the area was secure.
“Almost all the old members of the Council – everyone who supported Nathan and his policies – are gone,” he whispered. “Since he declared martial law after Nathan’s death, Borge has dismissed most of the Senate and Council. He’s installed sympathetic supporters or simply eliminated representation for some worlds in the legislature. Some of them, the most vocal opponents, have died suddenly and inexplicably.” He looked around again. The crowd had grown larger, closer. “The checks and balances system is gone. Even the judiciary has been subverted since Savitch was killed. We’ve got a dictatorship with a rubber-stamp body masquerading as a democracy.”
“And what about you?”
A look of shame crossed his face. “I’ve tried to make a stand for the things I’ve felt are really important, but it’s no use,” he said wearily. “My only hope is to try and gain enough support in an underground movement to restore some kind of order to the government. In public, I have to appear as just another lackey, or I face the same fate as the others. Then none of us will have any hope.”
Enya took his arm. “Don’t be ashamed,” she told him. “Sometimes there is no alternative but to dress like the enemy so you can defeat him.” She, of all people, knew the truth of that. She had worked against Belisle’s corrupt government on Erlang by masquerading many times as a Ranier. Some of the things she had to do…
He managed a grim smile. “That’s what worries me,” he told her. “I don’t want to become the thing I’m trying to destroy.”
“May I have your attention, please!” a voice suddenly boomed over the PA system. Braddock recognized it immediately: Voronin Hack, the Council’s Master-at-Arms and ceremonial mouthpiece. The crowd quieted down immediately. “Ladies and gentlemen,” his smooth baritone voice continued, “honored guests and dignitaries… the President of the Confederated Alliance of Humanity!”
A massive cheer went up as Borge took his place at the podium, the white presidential robe billowing about his ample stomach, his face flushed with supreme confidence. He raised his hands to the crowd, basking in their adulation.
The applause, Braddock noted sadly, was enthusiastic and sincere. There were no guns at people’s backs, no cue cards or faked admiration. With the exception of those on the Council or in the upper circles of the military, few people here knew or understood the implications of the transformation that had occurred in the Confederation government at Borge’s hand. Most of them saw him as the inheritor of Nathan’s tragic legacy, as the man who had pursued a humble life in the unglamorous world of creating and guiding the law, but who now was determined to end the war and bring peace to the galaxy.
After what was to Braddock an interminable interlude of applause, Borge finally gestured for the crowd to be silent. Slowly, unwillingly, they began to comply.
“Fellow citizens of the great Confederation!” he declared as the crowd at last was still. “Fellow humans, hear me:
“For many long years we have suffered and died at the hands of the alien enemy, losing our loved ones, our children to the claws of this insidious infestation that has swept across our galaxy like a plague. Campaign after campaign have we fought, not for glory or bounty, but for our very survival.” His voice deepened, his tempo slowed as he went on, “For nearly a century have we lost world after world, colony after colony invaded, burned, destroyed. Neither man, nor woman, nor child has been spared this agony, this devastation.”
He looked down at the podium, as if in communion with the now-thoughtful members of the audience, as if offering a silent prayer to those who had died in the century-long invasion. “But, my friends, the tide has turned,” he said, looking up, casting his gaze upon the crowd before him. “The aliens have lost their strength, their will to fight,” he told them. “They have run in full retreat from our worlds, fleeing to the sector of space from which they were spawned. We may never know the nature of the divine intervention that has driven them from our homelands, but know you this…” He paused, his brow wrinkling in righteous fury. “They cannot run far enough to escape our vengeance!”
The assemblage broke into a roar of cheering and whistling, voices taking up the challenge that Borge had laid before them.
Borge patiently waited for the tremendous reaction to subside, the shower of voices finally falling into silence within the great cavern of the landing bay.
“And seek vengeance we will, my friends,” he promised them. “That is why we are gathered here this day, why tens of thousands of sailors and Marines, Coastguardsmen, and so many others have gathered in these three great fleets that shall sail as one toward the enemy’s shores, the greatest armed force the galaxy has ever known.” He was interrupted by more cheers and applause.
“As many of you know,” he continued, “the Armada set out without us knowing the exact location of the Kreelan homeworld, only a comparatively vast area of space where we knew the enemy must be hiding.” There were low murmurs in the audience, particularly among the naval personneclass="underline" many of them had thought it was insane to start the operation without knowing exactly where to strike. “My friends, just before taking the podium,” he went on quietly, the thousands before him now utterly silent, “I was informed that one of our brave scoutships has pinpointed the location of the Kreelan homeworld, and has confirmed that their own battle fleet is assembling for a knockout blow against the Confederation.” His fist suddenly hammered on the podium. “But we shall strike first! We shall strike at the enemy’s heart with all our might, and for the first time in a century carry the battle into the enemy’s territory. We shall end this terrible war with a single crushing blow, and we shall lead humanity to victory!”
Despite how much he hated Borge, Braddock found himself swept up in the religious fervor that washed over the audience in the landing bay like a tidal wave, carrying away all doubt, all reservations, all fears of what the immediate future held. Borge’s words were irresistible to men and women who had fought and lost again and again in a war that had begun when their great-great-grandparents were children. Nearly everyone in the bay had lost a friend or relative, a spouse or a child, to the Kreelans. Their thirst for blood ran deep, and they were willing to sacrifice everything for a moment of that soon-to-be finest hour promised by Borge’s words.
Beside him, Enya watched with wide eyes as the normally professional and disciplined Navy and Marine people around her applauded the president’s speech with maniacal intensity.