The End of All Things (31 page)

I turned to Okada. “Your thoughts, Mr. Prime Minister?”

“It’s the Colonial Union that instigated this rebellion, not the government of Khartoum,” Okada began.

“Oh, that is
it,
” Powell interrupted, and stood up. “Time for you to breathe some vacuum, motherfucker.” Okada visibly shrunk away from Powell.

I held up a hand. Powell stopped advancing on Okada. “New plan,” I said. I pointed to Okada. “You don’t say another single word until after we dock with the
Chandler
”—I glanced back to Powell—“and you don’t toss him into space.”

Okada said nothing more, even after we had landed and some of the
Chandler
’s crew took him away.

“He seems quiet,” the
Chandler
crew member who approached me said, nodding over to Okada. Unlike all the others, he was green, which meant he was CDF.

“He was sufficiently motivated,” I said.

“It appears so,” he said. “Now, then. Do you remember me, Lieutenant Lee?”

“I do, Lieutenant Wilson,” I said. I motioned to Powell. “This is my sergeant, Ilse Powell.”

“Sergeant,” Wilson said, and turned his attention back to me. “I’m glad you remember me. I’m supposed to debrief you and catch you up with things.”

“What we’d really like to do is get back to the
Tubingen,
” I said.

“Well,” Wilson said. “About that.”

“What is it?”

“Maybe we should find someplace to sit down and chat.”

“Maybe you should just tell me right now because otherwise I might punch you, Wilson.”

He smiled. “You definitely haven’t changed. All right, here it is: The
Tubingen
survived the attack on her, but ‘survive’ is a relative term. She’s essentially dead in orbit. She might have been entirely destroyed but we managed to get here in time and help her fight off the ships attacking her.”

“And how did you do that?” I asked. “Arrive in the nick of time.”

“We had a hunch,” Wilson said, “and that’s all I can say about that right now, here, out in the open in a shuttle bay.”

“Hmmmm.”

“My point is that if you really want to head back to the
Tubingen
you may after we’re done debriefing. But you won’t be staying there. At best you’ll have time to collect any personal belongings that weren’t destroyed in the battle before the
John Henry
and other ships arrive to take you and all the other survivors of the
Tubingen
back to Phoenix Station for reassignment. You might as well stay here. We can have your effects brought to you.”

“How many people died in the attack on the
Tubingen
?” Powell asked.

“Two hundred fifteen dead, another several dozen injured. That’s not counting your platoon. Sorry about that. We’ve retrieved them, by the way.”

“Where are they?” I asked.

“They’re in one of the mess coolers at the moment.”

“I’d like to see them.”

“I don’t recommend that. It’s not very dignified. How they are being stored, I mean.”

“I don’t care.”

“I’ll have it arranged, then.”

“I also want to know about the two Rraey I sent back.”

“They’re in our brig, and receiving medical attention, inasmuch as we can give it to them,” Wilson said. “Their injuries were substantial but thankfully not terribly complicated. Mostly broken bones, which we could set and tend. Which one of you did that, by the way?”

“That would be me,” Powell said.

“You’re fun,” Wilson said.

“You should see me on the second date.”

Wilson smiled at this and turned his attention back to me. “We received your instruction that they were not to be further harmed. That was not a problem because we had no intention of doing so. You do understand we will need to question them.”

“You can question them without harming them,” I said.

“Yes we can,” Wilson said. “I just want you to be clear that the questioning is likely to be aggressive, even if it’s not physical. Particularly of Commander Tvann, who is interesting to us for other reasons than just his involvement here.”

“Who’s going to do the questioning?”

“Well, here it’s going to be me.”

“Commander Tvann doesn’t seem very forthcoming.”

“Don’t worry, I think I can get him to talk without breaking anything else in his body. I’ve worked with Rraey before. Trust me.”

“All right. Thank you,” I said. I nodded in the direction of where Okada went. “What’s going to happen with him?”

“Him, I’m not going to make too many promises about,” Wilson said. “He’s managed to perform a neat little trick. Not only has he betrayed the Colonial Union, he’s also betrayed his own rebellion.”

“How do you mean?”

“I mean that there were ten Colonial Union planets that were supposed to announce their independence from the CU simultaneously, and that Khartoum was one of them. But Khartoum jumped the gun, announced early, and then lured the
Tubingen
into a trap.”

“Why would they do that?”

“That’s what we need to find out,” Wilson said. “What he tells us is going to make a difference in how the Colonial Union as a whole deals with these rebellious planets.”

“Do you think he’ll talk?” Powell asked.

“By the time we get done with him, getting him to talk won’t be the problem. It’ll be getting him to shut up. Now, are you ready for the formal debriefing?”

“Actually, I would like to see my soldiers first,” I said.

“All right,” Wilson said.

*   *   *

I found Lambert waist high in a stack of dead bodies near the back of the mess cooler. Salcido I found two stacks over, closer to the floor. They did not bear close observation.

“Lambert was right, you know,” Powell said. She was with me in the cooler. Wilson had walked us to the cooler, opened it, and then waited outside. The cooler had been cleared of shelves and the contents they usually stored; the latter were either restocked in a different cooler or being fed to the survivors of the
Tubingen,
who were in the mess itself, unhappily crowded together.

At least they weren’t crowded together in here.

“What was he right about?” I asked.

“Root causes,” Powell said.

“You of all people,” I said, almost smiling.

“I didn’t ever say he was wrong. I said ‘who cares.’”

“But now you do care.”

“I care more than I used to. What are we doing here, Lieutenant? We’re running around putting out fires. And fine, we’re the fire brigade. Our job is putting out the fires. Not worrying about how they got started, just putting them out. But at some point even the fire brigade has to start asking who is starting all these fires, and why it’s being left to us to continually put them out.”

“Lambert would be laughing his head off to hear you say that.”

“If he were here to laugh his head off, I wouldn’t be saying it. He’d be saying it. Again.” Powell motioned to where Salcido was. “And Sau would be geeking out over some point of trivia. And I would be sniping at both of them, and you would be playing referee. And we would all be one happy family again, instead of the two of us looking at the two of them in a meat locker.”

“You’ve lost friends before,” I said.

“Of course I have,” Powell said. “And so have you. It doesn’t make it any easier when it happens.”

We were silent for a moment.

“I have a speech running through my head,” I finally said, to Powell.

“One you were going to make?” Powell asked.

“No. One someone else made, that I’ve been thinking a lot about the last few weeks, when we’ve been running around putting out fires.”

“Which one is it?”

“It’s the Gettysburg Address. Abraham Lincoln. You remember it?”

Powell smirked. “I lived in America and taught in a junior high. I remember it.”

“It’s something like three hundred words long, and it wasn’t even well received when Lincoln gave it. The part I’m thinking about is where he says ‘Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.’”

Powell nodded. “You think we’re in a civil war right now.”

“I don’t know what we’re in right now,” I said. “It doesn’t feel like a real war. It’s too strung out. Too diffuse. It’s not battlefield after battlefield. It’s skirmish after skirmish.”

“Let me clear it up for you,” Powell said. “It’s a civil war. We lost the Earth. The Colonial Union only has so long before it has to turn to all the colonies to support it with the things it used to get for free from the Earth. The colonies are asking if what they get from the Colonial Union is worth the cost, and worth the cost of having the Colonial Union keep running things. Sounds like the answer for at least some of them is no. And it seems like now they think the arm the Colonial Union was using to shield them is now up against their throat. So they’re trying to get out before the whole thing falls down around them.”

“They’re not doing a good job of it,” I said.

“They don’t have to do a good job of it for it to be a civil war. And they’re
not
doing a good job of it so far.” Powell motioned around her. “But it looks like they’re learning. And it looks like they’re getting allies with this Equilibrium group.”

“I don’t think Equilibrium, whoever they are, are doing this out of the goodness of their own heart.”

“You’re not wrong about that, but it doesn’t matter from the point of view of this being a civil war. If they don’t think the Colonial Union has their interests at heart, then it’s a case of ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend.’”

“That’s not a very smart strategy.”

“Smart has nothing to do with this. We could go around and around like this for hours, Lieutenant.”

“What do you think?” I said.

“About what?”

“About the Colonial Union,” I said. “About it controlling these planets. About how it responds to things like this.” I waved my hand around the room. “About all of
this
.”

Powell looked vaguely surprised. “The Colonial Union’s a fascistic shit show, boss. I knew that much from the first day I set foot on one of their boats to get away from Earth. Are you kidding? They control trade. They control communications. They don’t let the colonies protect themselves and they don’t let them do anything that doesn’t go through the Colonial Union itself. And let’s not forget everything they’ve done to Earth. They’ve been doing it for centuries. Shit, Lieutenant. I’m not surprised we have a civil war on our hands right now. I’m surprised it didn’t happen
sooner
.”

“And yet here we are,” I said. “You and me, in their uniform.”

“We didn’t want to die old,” Powell said. “I was seventy-five and I spent most of my whole life in Florida and I had bone cancer and never did the things I wanted to do and it was eating me up. You think I’m an asshole now, you should have seen me just before I left Earth. You would have pushed me off a building just on principle, and you wouldn’t have been wrong to do it.”

“Well, all right,” I said. “We didn’t know coming out here what we’d be getting ourselves into.”

“No, we didn’t.”

“But now you
do
know,” I said. “And if you knew then what you knew now, would you still do it?”

“Yes,” Powell said. “I still don’t want to die old.”

“But you just said the Colonial Union is a fascistic shit show.”

“It is, and right now it’s the only way we survive,” Powell said. “Look around. Look at the planets we’ve been on. Look at all the species out there we’ve had to fight. Do you really think any of these planets and the people on them won’t get carved up the first minute the Colonial Union disappears? They’ve never fought before. Not on the scale they would need to. They have no military infrastructure on the scale they’d have to have. And they would have no time to ramp any of that up. The Colonial Union is a monster, but the colonies are fucking baby deer in a forest full of predators.”

“Then how does any of that change?”

“Got me, boss, I just work here. What I do know is that it
is
going to change. It has to change because we don’t have the Earth anymore. The mechanics of the Colonial Union, what it was founded on, just don’t work anymore. It changes or we all die. And I’m doing my part to keep it together until then. The alternative is grim.”

“I suppose it might be,” I said.

“What about you? Would you do it again, Lieutenant?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I didn’t want to die old, you’re right.” I reached out and touched Lambert’s cold arm. “But there are worse ways to go.”

“He went mid-pontification,” Powell said. “I’m pretty sure that’s how he would have wanted to go.”

I laughed at that. “Fair enough,” I said. “I think my point is that I get it now. I get that there are worse things than to have lived a life and have most of it behind you. I wouldn’t be afraid of that anymore, I think.”

“Maybe. It’s easy to say that now that you look twenty years old and will live for another sixty even if you left the CDF today.”

“Again, a fair point.”

“This is why I told Lambert to stop going on about it, you know,” Powell said. “All the thinking about the steps beyond what we were directly doing. It never makes you happy. It never solves anything for you, right now.”

I smiled. “And yet you were the one to bring it up, here, now.”

“Yes, well.” Powell grimaced. “Think of it as a tribute. To our departed friend. I’ll never do it again.”

I motioned to Salcido. “And him?”

“Shit, I don’t know,” Powell said. “Maybe listen to that stupid pizza moon song again. Or think about what day it is in the mess. Which is complete bullshit, by the way. You can get pizza and tacos and hamburgers any day you want. It’s just which entrée they push out in front.”

“I know,” I said. “But that wasn’t the point of the conversation, was it.”

“No,” Powell said. “No, it wasn’t.”

PART FIVE

Why are we even here?
Powell said to me, through her BrainPal. We and the rest of our platoon on the
Uppsala
were policing a protest on Erie, in the city of Galway. The protest was entirely peaceful. All the protesters were doing, all anyone was doing, as far as I could see, was lying down. Everywhere. There were at least 100,000 of them. She was thirty yards away from me, part of a defensive line in front of the Colonial Union offices.