Those cold, alien eyes tracked across the room, again, a room still as death.
“Should you choose that course, you will immediately be presented with a bill for remuneration of expenditures made on Jefferson’s behalf by personnel and mechanical units of the Concordiat. Failure to pay these charges is grounds for immediate confiscation of sufficient raw materials to equal the value of expenditures to date. To give you an idea of the size of Jefferson’s current indebtedness, the cost of one Hellbore salvo alone would require roughly a week’s worth of the gross planetary products — finished goods and raw mineral resources — from every factory and mine still in production on Jefferson. The battle for Madison, alone, would require remuneration in excess of the entire planetary economic output for the past six months. When Klameth Canyon’s costs are factored into the equation, the bill due — payable immediately, by the way, on pain of confiscation by the nearest Concordiat heavy cruiser capable of taking on raw materials — will literally bankrupt what is left of Jefferson’s economy and send this world plunging down a road you do not want to travel.”
An outraged roar of protest from the Joint Chamber floor erupted, thick with shock and open hatred. Colonel Khrustinov — Kafari couldn’t bring herself to think of him as Simon, as he stood there in icy silence — waited out the tumult while the Speaker leaped to his feet, banging his gavel and shouting for order. When the uproar finally died down, again, Simon spoke as though the outburst had been nothing but the whining of an insignificant insect around his ears.
“That is the least deadly of the choices facing you. The communique I received this morning from Sector Command was blunt and specific. Jefferson’s government has twelve hours, beginning,” he glanced at his wrist chrono, “with your official notification by the Brigade’s designated representative, to comply with the treaty obligations deemed most urgent by Sector Command, or to present remuneration in full for Concordiat and Brigade expenditures to date on Jefferson’s behalf. You have been duly notified as of now.
“Compliance will be deemed initiated with a vote to expend funds for the immediate construction and launch of military-grade surveillance satellites and with the passage of legislation creating troop levies for each Assembly district on Jefferson. Compliance will not be deemed fully met until satellites are in place, troop levies have been shipped, and urgently needed war materiel has been mined, refined, and loaded onto Concordiat-registered freighters. This clause will require the replacement of Jefferson’s commercial space station.”
Another howl of outrage erupted from the floor. The Speaker had to bang the gavel for nearly two full minutes, shouting for order. Again, Kafari’s husband waited in utter silence, his face chiseled from white marble, then he went on with the relentless recitation.
“Given the extensive damage to this planet’s agricultural sector, war materiel required to fulfill treaty obligations will not consist of Terran foodstuffs, but what is left of the planetary fishing fleet will be expected to ship, within the next four calendar months, a minimum of ten thousand tons of native fish, processed for Terran consumption, to support the mines on Mali. The mines have been expanded three-fold under emergency-construction domes, as the refined ores produced there are critical to the defense of this entire Sector.
“These obligations have been in place since the day I arrived on Jefferson with Unit SOL-0045. Each voting member of this assembly has known since that day exactly what Jefferson’s commitments are. Sector Command’s precise requirements were presented to you five months and seventeen days ago. Since this Assembly has failed to so much as vote on a single subclause during those five months and seventeen days, Sector Command has declared Jefferson out of compliance with its treaty obligations.
“I have spent months requesting action from this Assembly. I have been stonewalled and fobbed off with one excuse after another. On the other side of the Silurian Void, the Deng and the Melconians are butchering entire worlds, while you sit securely in your homes with enough food to stave off starvation, roofs over the heads of every man, woman, and child on this planet, and sufficient resources to rebuild anything you decide to rebuild.”
His face went even colder and more alien. “And just to give you a little more perspective, let me give you a little history lesson…”
Kafari sat in numb shock while Simon’s voice, as harsh and mechanical as his Bolo’s, painted scene after horrifying scene of the hell he had witnessed on Etaine. She sat there in the midst of her family, cold and scared, tears on her face and tremors in all her limbs as he described the methodical slaughter, the towns incinerated with their occupants trapped in them, the cities reduced to smoking rubble, bits and pieces that had once been human blown literally into orbit. The faceless millions who had died, an incomprehensible number the mind could not fathom in its entirety, became brutally, staggeringly real, suffering and dying right in front of them. He spoke like a computer, inhuman, a man whose soul had blackened to ashes on a world whose sun Kafari couldn’t even see at night.
She heard shocked weeping, realized Aunt Minau was sobbing. “Oh, that poor man, honey, that man you married is hurting down to the bottoms of his feet…”
I should have been there, Kafari realized with a sickening lurch in her gut. How could I have let him go into that room alone? She found herself hating the men and women in the Joint Chamber, the ones who had stalled spending bills in committees, who had tied up military allocations in technicalities and thinly disguised legal ploys designed to avoid payment altogether, hated them for putting the man she loved through the hell he was reliving in front of them.
The silence when he stopped speaking was so sudden, so brutal, Kafari could hear the clatter of her own heartbeat knocking against her eardrums. Simon stood like a statue, pale and cold and silent, a man with nothing human left anywhere inside him. Then a slight shudder of breath lifted his ribcage, lifted the bloody crimson uniform he wore like a shield and set the ribbons of valor trembling on his chest, and the stone statue vanished in a single blink of his ravaged eyes. In its place stood a man, once again, an officer of the Dinochrome Brigade, a very real and threatening presence that no one who had witnessed the last ten minutes would ever underestimate again.
“That,” he said softly, “is the choice you face. Whether you build or burn is entirely up to you. Mr. President,” he said in a voice filled with abrupt, deep respect, “I yield the podium to you.”
Abraham Lendan rose to his feet, utterly ashen, hands visibly shaking.
“Thank you, Colonel,” he said in a ragged voice, “for making our choices clear.”
Jefferson’s president didn’t even try to make another speech. Whatever he or anyone else in that room might have planned to say had been seared into silence. “I would suggest,” the president said in a voice hollow with horror, “that we poll the delegation.”