Gramm, as Minister of Economic Warfare, served on something called the War Cabinet. Under the chairmanship of a Grand Conclave member called the Plenipotentiary for Total War, this subcommittee was dedicated to the prosecution of the Xeelee war in all its aspects. Now Gramm had been appointed head of the interagency committee which had been given the responsibility of overseeing Nilis’s Project Prime Radiant.
“But most of the great agencies have representatives on our oversight committee,” Nilis said cynically, “as they do on most initiatives that might affect their interests. Around this table there are ambassadors from the Army and Navy, the Guardians, the Ministry of Psychological Warfare who do their best to outguess the Xeelee, with no notable success, and some of the specialist guilds like the Communicators and Engineers and Navigators, and the Surveyors of Revenues, and the Auditor General’s Office. Even the Benefactors are here!—though I don’t see what our greenships have to do with their free hospitals and dole handouts. And of course, there are representatives of the many arms of the Commission for Historical Truth. Gramm, as chair of the committee, has a lot of sway. But any decision is a collective one.”
Darc grunted. “It’s amazing the Coalition doesn’t collapse under its own bureaucracy. And look at all those black robes.” Glancing around the table, Pirius saw that the few martial uniforms, like Darc’s, were far outnumbered by the glum robes of Commissaries; they seemed to swarm through the big room, a black-clothed plague. Darc said, “We are at war. But we seem to divert an awful lot of our energies to policing our own ideological drift.”
Nilis said sternly, “This is politics, Commander.”
“Hmmph. Give me combat any day!”
Minister Gramm hammered at the tabletop with a gavel—a wooden hammer on a wooden table, a remarkably archaic gesture. The susurrus of conversation around the table died. Without preliminaries, Gramm called on Nilis to make his opening remarks.
Nilis lumbered to his feet, a smile fixed on his lined face. His voice was forceful. But Pirius could see the beads of sweat on his neck.
Formally speaking, this was just another stage in the decision-making process: the mandate actually to go to war with this new weapon would not be given today. All this committee was being asked to approve was to release a further tranche of funding—granted a much bigger tranche, as Nilis was asking to establish a new Navy squadron equipped with his new technology at the center of the Galaxy. But still, Pirius knew it was the most important decision point in the project’s uncertain progress so far.
The Commissary quickly sketched the objectives of Project Prime Radiant. He set out his familiar argument that striking at the Prime Radiant, a target “logically upstream” of the many secondary targets in the Core, would if not finish the war, then at least shorten it. He described the problems to be overcome if that ultimate target was to be hit, and set out his three proposals for doing so: the use of gravastar shielding to defeat the Xeelee’s ability to see the strike force coming before it even set off; the revolutionary CTC processors to outmaneuver the Xeelee’s last line of defenses; and the black-hole cannon to strike at Chandra itself. All this was illustrated with Virtual displays, technical summaries, maps of the war zone, and bits of imagery from the Project’s work so far.
Pirius thought he spoke well, uncharacteristically avoiding excessively technical language. And Nilis included plenty of spectacular action images, such as shots of Pirius Blue’s jaunt to Chandra, the captive Xeelee ship being baffled by the grav shield, and finally yielding to the black hole cannonade. For armchair generals, he always said, there was nothing so impressive as a bit of footage of actual hardware.
He drew it together in a simple graphic summary—more sophisticated than Pirius’s old asterisk diagram, but not much. Then he sat down, visibly trembling, and mopped his brow. “Now for the hard part,” he whispered.
Gramm said there would be a recess before detailed questioning began. But he opened the floor for first reactions.
A Commissary raised a finger. With a head like a skull, and paper-thin flesh stretched tight over angular bones, he was one of the oldest people Pirius had ever seen—aside from Luru Parz, of course—older than anyone was
supposed
to get, according to the Doctrines. He seemed to be so prominent in this company he didn’t need to introduce himself.
Pirius was shocked when the very first question was directed at him, not Nilis.
“I’d like to ask our hero ensign what he thinks of this.” The old man’s voice was soft as a whisper. “Would he be willing to fly this
lash-up
into the Xeelee nest?”
Pirius glanced at Nilis and Darc; Nilis shrugged.
Pirius stood. Every face turned to him, the hard expressions of military commanders, the softer curiosity of the swarming black-robed Commissaries. “Sir, I would say—”
“What, what? Speak up!” A ripple of laughter passed around the room.
Pirius cleared his throat. “Sir, this technology is unproven in battle. That’s obviously true. But we are proposing many more proving stages before it is deployed. It will require courage to take such a new weapon into battle. I have no doubt that many will give their lives trying. But try we will.”
Nilis gently patted Pirius’s back.
The old Commissary nodded. “All right, Ensign. One thing we are not short of is the courage of our soldiers. But this melange of ancient and possibly illegal technologies—how can it work? Put it this way. If this was such a bright idea, why didn’t somebody think of it long ago?”
Pirius knew he should consult Nilis before replying. But he had heard such comments many times since becoming involved with Nilis’s project, even from military personnel. He said forcefully, “Sir, what’s behind your question is: if this is a good idea,
why didn’t the Xeelee have it first
?” There was an ominous silence. “I think some people believe that if it didn’t come from the Xeelee it can’t be any good—that Xeelee technology must be better than ours, simply because it is Xeelee. But if we think like that, it’s a recipe for defeat.” The old Commissary’s mouth was round with shock.
What am I saying?
“With due respect, sir,” he gabbled, and sat down hastily.
Gramm was glaring across the table at him. “Commissary Nilis, I suspect your pet soldier has already lost your case for you—or won it. In any case we must go through the motions. Two-hour recess.” He slammed his gavel on the table.
On the way out, Pirius was the target of amused stares. But Nilis, furious, wouldn’t even look at him.
When the committee reconvened, the grilling was ferocious.
The points raised by the military agencies, Pirius thought, were mostly fair. The representatives of the Green Army and the Navy asked detailed technical questions. Nilis was able to field most of these, others he passed to Darc and the ensigns. When a question came his way, Pirius made sure he referred to Nilis and Darc first—not that the Commissary would have given him any choice. Torec answered more than Pirius, and did so well, Pirius thought enviously—calmly, with no visible sign of nerves, and yet with a control and discipline that Pirius himself had so obviously lacked.
Toward the end of this session, though, with the military representatives still dominating the proceedings, the questioning took a direction that puzzled Pirius. Points were raised about how the technologies could be applied on other battlefields than the very center. There was a great deal of maneuvering, too, about how each military force would place representatives in the project.
When the meeting broke again, Nilis snorted. “What a distraction! It’s been a tactic of my opponents all along, to divert my discoveries to lesser targets—to waste this unique possibility.”
Pirius frowned. “But the commanders are just doing their jobs, aren’t they, Commissary? They have to think through the options—”
Commander Darc shook his head. “What is going on in this room is politics, remember. The Navy and the Green Army, to name but two, have been at each other’s throats since they were founded. And the individuals around this table all have their own career strategies, their own rivalries and ambitions. Now they are maneuvering, you see. If our technology is promising, they each want to get hold of it for themselves to further their own careers. If our Core assault does go ahead, and it happens to go well, they will want to take the credit. Conversely, if it goes wrong, as I suspect most of those here believe is likely, they don’t want to be blamed.”
Torec was angry. “Maybe it would be better if we put our effort into fighting the Xeelee rather than each other.”
Darc laughed, not particularly unkindly. “Of course there will be honest doubts, too. I tell you, Commissary, there are many serving officers who don’t like your Project just for the
feel
of it. This fiddling with physics: it’s more like a Ghost project than anything humanity would devise. It has their glistening sheen all over it—
that
might be our biggest obstacle of all.”
In the next session, the many representatives of the Commission for Historical Truth took over, and the lines of questioning drifted away from the military justification of the Project and into realms of philosophy, ideology, and legalism.
The sinister Office of Doctrinal Responsibility, as the Commission’s ideological police force, had agents throughout the Galaxy, and assigned to every frontline unit: even Arches Base had its political officers, or “Doctrine cops,” as the troops called them. They were widely mocked, but their power was feared. And now the Doctrine cops on this committee dug into the question of the legality of what Nilis had been up to.
It was of course impossible for the Commissary to deny that he had been assisted by a jasoft, or that he had called on a posthuman colony on Mars, or that his gravastar hadn’t been developed by humans at all. But he was able to fend off their probing. It was not him, he pointed out, who had allowed Luru Parz to survive, or let a Coalescence to develop under Mons Olympus, or revived a colony of the long-extinct Silver Ghosts. These developments happened long before he was born, presumably with the full knowledge and even cooperation of the Commission.
“And why did all this happen? Because these divergences are
useful.
They may be non-Doctrinal, but they are valuable resources, and those who allowed such developments, far wiser than I, knew that it is sometimes necessary to compromise the purity of one’s ideology. If we were to lose the war, all our ideology would count for nothing anyhow. I am merely following in the footsteps of my wiser forebears.”
This mixture of flattery and blame-shifting seemed effective, and he deflected them further with a bit of philosophy. Was knowledge morally neutral? If a fact came from a dubious source, was its utility to be overridden by its ethically compromised origin? If so, who was to be the arbiter of what was “clean” science and what was not? . . .
By the time the Doctrine cops gave up, Nilis was sweating again. He had been on shaky ground. After all, it was one of Nilis’s “pragmatically useful resources,” Luru Parz, who, by threatening to expose the existence of other “morally compromised facilities,” had forced this committee to consider Nilis’s requests in the first place.
But now the Office of Cultural Rehabilitation waded in. This department of the Commission was a sister to the ancient Assimilation program, which had been tasked with absorbing the resources of conquered alien races for the benefit of mankind’s projects. Rehabilitation had the mission, still in fact ongoing, of seeking out relics of older waves of human colonization. These pre-Third Expansion pockets of humanity, having been seeded before the establishment of the Coalition, were of course non-Doctrinal by definition. Many had even lapsed into eusociality, becoming Coalescences. But all of them had to be brought into the fold, their populations reeducated. The ultimate goal of Rehabilitation was to ensure that every human in the Galaxy was assigned to the single goal of the great war.
Now, it seemed to Pirius, Rehabilitation officers were expressing concern about Nilis’s Project, not in case it failed, but if it
succeeded.
Would it actually be moral to end this war? The entire human economy of the Galaxy was devoted to the war: if it ever ended, the resulting dislocation would be huge. And without the war’s unifying discipline, how could central control be maintained? There would be riots; there would be starvation; whole worlds would break away from the light of the Coalition and fall into an anarchic darkness.
One dry academic even suggested that a true reading of Hama Druz’s writings showed that that ancient sage had been arguing, not for the conquest of the Galaxy, but for the continual cleansing of unending conflict. The war had to go on, until a perfect killing machine had been forged from imperfect mankind. Of course victory was the ultimate goal, but a victory
too soon
could imperil that great project of the unity of a purified species. . . .
Torec and Pirius were amazed. But since they had come to Sol system, it wasn’t the first time they had heard people actually argue
against
victory.
Pirius thought he could see what was really going on here, beneath the dry academic discussions. These ancient agencies weren’t concerned for the myriad people in their care; they were only concerned about their own survival. If the war went away, he thought with a strange thrill, any justification for the continuance of the Coalition itself, and its Galaxy full of ideological cops, would vanish. And then what?
Perhaps he was growing cynical.
The session overran its allotted time. At last Gramm banged his gavel, and ordered the committee to reconvene in the morning.
While they had talked, the planet had spun on its axis, taking Conurbation 11729 and its busy inhabitants into its shadow.
Nilis’s party was assigned quarters on a residential floor of the huge building. The room given to Torec and Pirius seemed impossibly luxurious. After a while, they stripped blankets off the too-soft beds, making themselves a nest on the floor.