“Why haven’t you used troops?” rumbled Politovsky.
“They say they’ve got atomic weapons. If we move in—” He shrugged.
“Oh.” The Governor rubbed his walrus moustache lugubriously and sighed. “Commander Janaczeck.
What news of the Navy?”
Janaczeck stood. A tall, worried-looking man in a naval officer’s dress uniform, he looked even more nervous than the otherwise controlled Von Beck. “There were two survival capsules from the wreck of the Sakhalin; both have now been recovered, and the survivors debriefed. It would appear that the Sakhalin approached one of the larger enemy intruders and demanded that they withdraw from low orbit immediately and yield to customs inspection. The intruder made no response, so Sakhalin fired across her path. What happened next is confused — none of the survivors were bridge officers, and their reports are contradictory — but it appears that there was an impact with some sort of foreign body, which then ate the destroyer.”
“Ate it?”
“Yes, sir.” Janaczeck gulped. “Forbidden technology.”
Politovsky turned pale. “Borman?”
“Yes, sir?” His adjutant sat up attentively.
“Obviously, this situation exceeds our ability to deal with it without extra resources. How much acausal bandwidth does the Post Office have in hand for a televisor conference with the capital?”
“Um, ah, fifty minutes’ worth, sir. The next consignment of entangled qubits between here and New Prague is due to arrive by ramscoop in, ah, eighteen months. If I may make so bold, sir—”
“Speak.”
“Could we retain a minute of bandwidth in stock, for text-only messages? I realize that this is an emergency, but if we drain the current channel we will be out of touch with the capital until the next shipment is available. And, with all due respect to Commander Janaczeck, I’m not sure the Navy will be able to reliably run dispatch boats past the enemy.”
“Do it.” Politovsky sat up, stretching his shoulders. “One minute, mind. The rest available for a televisor conference with His Majesty, at his earliest convenience. You will set up the conference and notify me when it is ready. Oh, and while you’re about it, here.” He leaned forward and scribbled a hasty signature on a letter from his portfolio. “I enact this state of emergency and by the authority vested in me by God and His Imperial Majesty I decree that this constitutes a state of war with — who the devil are we at war with?”
Von Beck cleared his throat. “They seem to call themselves the Festival, sir. Unfortunately, we don’t appear to have any more information about them on file, and requests to the Curator’s Archives drew a blank.”
“Very well.” Borman passed Politovsky a note, and the Governor stood. “Gentlemen, please stand for His Imperial Majesty!”
They stood and, as one man, turned expectantly to face the screen on the far wall of the conference room.
The Gathering Storm
“May I ask what I’m charged with?“ asked Martin.
The sunshine filtering through the skylight high overhead skewered the stuffy office air with bars of silver: Martin watched dust motes dance like stars behind the Citizen’s bullet-shaped head. The only noises in the room were the scratching of his pen on heavy official vellum and the repetitive grinding of gears as his assistant rewound the clockwork drive mechanism on his desktop analytical engine. The room smelled of machine oil and stale fear.
“Am I being charged with anything?” Martin persisted.
The Citizen ignored him and bent his head back to his forms. His young assistant, his regular chore complete, began unloading a paper tape from the engine.
Martin stood up. “If I am not being charged with anything, is there any reason why I should stay?” This time the Citizen Curator glared at him. “Sit,” he snapped.
Martin sat.
Outside the skylight, it was a clear, cold April afternoon; the clocks of St Michael had just finished striking fourteen hundred, and in the Square of the Five Corners, the famous Duchess’s Simulacrum was jerking through its eternal pantomime. The boredom grated on Martin. He found it difficult to adapt to the pace of events in the New Republic; it was doubly infuriating when he was faced with the eternal bureaucracy. He’d been here for four months now, four stinking months on a job which should have taken ten days. He was beginning to wonder if he would live to see Earth again before he died of old age.
In fact, he was so bored with waiting for his work clearance to materialize that this morning’s summons to an office somewhere behind the iron facade of the Basilisk came as a relief, something to break the monotony. It didn’t fill him with the stuttering panic that such an appointment would have kindled in the heart of a subject of the New Republic — what, after all, could the Curator’s Office do to him, an off-world engineering contractor with a cast-iron Admiralty contract? The summons had come on a plate borne by a uniformed courier, and not as a nighttime raid. That fact alone suggested a degree of restraint and, consequently, an approach to adopt, and Martin resolved to play the bemused alien visitor card as hard as he could.
After another minute, the Citizen lowered his pen and looked at Martin. “Please state your name,” he said softly.
Martin crossed his arms. “If you don’t know it already, why am I here?” he asked.
“Please state your name for the record.” The Citizen’s voice was low, clipped, and as controlled as a machine. He spoke the local trade-lingua — a derivative of the nearly universal old English tongue — with a somewhat heavy, Germanic accent.
“Martin Springfield.”
The Citizen made a note. “Now please state your nationality.”
“My what?”
Martin must have looked nonplussed, for the Citizen raised a gray-flecked eyebrow. “Please state your nationality. To what government do you owe allegiance?”
“Government?” Martin rolled his eyes. “I come from Earth. For legislation and insurance, I use Pinkertons, with a backup strategic infringement policy from the New Model Air Force. As far as employment goes, I am incorporated under charter as a personal corporation with bilateral contractual obligations to various organizations, including your own Admiralty. For reasons of nostalgia, I am a registered citizen of the People’s Republic of West Yorkshire, although I haven’t been back there for twenty years. But I wouldn’t say I was answerable to any of those, except my contractual partners — and they’re equally answerable to me.”
“But you are from Earth?” asked the Citizen, his pen poised.
“Yes.”
“Ah. Then you are a subject of the United Nations.” He made a brief note. “Why didn’t you admit this?”
“Because it isn’t true,” said Martin, letting a note of frustration creep into his voice. (But only a note: he had an idea of the Citizen’s powers, and had no intention of provoking him to exercise them.)
“Earth. The supreme political entity on that planet is the United Nations Organization. So it follows that you are a subject of it, no?”
“Not at all.” Martin leaned forward. “At last count, there were more than fifteen thousand governmental organizations on Earth. Of those, only about the top nine hundred have representatives in Geneva, and only seventy have permanent seats on the Security Council. The UN has no authority over any non-governmental organization or over individual citizens, it’s purely an arbitration body. I am a sovereign individual; I’m not owned by any government.”