Offices of the Supreme Council for the Preservation of the Faith, City of McNair, Commitment Planet
Chief Councillor Polk wearily rubbed his eyes. They felt like someone had poured sand into them.
He’d always wondered why Merrick had aged twice as fast as his peers. Now he knew. The pressure was unrelenting, the workload enormous, the torrent of issues that poured into his secretariat so huge that he felt like he was drowning.
But he was making some progress. It had taken time, but he now had people he was prepared if not to trust at least to let handle much of the day-to-day work he’d been forced to take on in the days after Merrick’s fall from power.
Day-to-day work! One crisis after another was more like it. He ran through the list in his mind.
The Hammer economy was completely stuffed. In truth, it was always stuffed, so maybe he shouldn’t classify it as a crisis; no change there. In any case, his handpicked successor at the Department of Economy and Finance, Tobias de Mel, was pretty competent, so Polk was happy to let him get on with it.
The riots in McNair provoked by his predecessor’s departure and execution were finally over. The city and the rest of the planet were simmering in unhappy silence, which was just fine with Polk. Let them simmer.
The situation on Faith was coming under control. Doc-Sec’s ruthlessness backed by marine firepower was slowly grinding the life out of the heretics, the ground having been cut out from under their feet by a carefully stage-managed upsurge of xenophobic anger and resentment after the Feds’ attacks on Eternity and Hell.
Of the really big issues, that left only what to do about those Kraa-damned and insufferably arrogant Feds.
Polk picked up the latest report from the negotiating team on Old Earth from a paper-cluttered desk. He snorted derisively as he reread the document. Councillor Albrecht thought the Feds might agree to let Brigadier General Digby carry the can for the Mumtaz affair. In return, Albrecht wanted the authority to agree to the Feds’ long-standing demand for a formal public apology before any further discussions took place. Polk snorted again. Stupid bastard. They might as well agree to what the Feds really wanted: referral of their outrageous demand for financial restitution to the interstellar court for determination, because they sure as hell were not going to stop at an apology.
Well, Polk thought as he flicked Albrecht’s report back onto his desk, many things might come to pass, but agreeing to Feds’ demands was never going to be one of them. Not while he was chief councillor.
In any case, he didn’t much care what Albrecht did, thought, or said. Short of complete capitulation by the Feds, whatever Albrecht achieved would not be enough to save him no matter how well he’d done under the circumstances. On his return from Old Earth, Albrecht would be arrested the second he stepped off the down-shuttle; the carefully doctored holovid of him in unwisely close proximity to known agents of the Old Earth Alliance would be more than enough to take him down. If the bastard lived for another week after that, he’d be Kraa-damned lucky, thought Polk with a small shiver of pleasure. He made a note to himself. He must be sure to get holovids of Albrecht’s execution. That would seal the moment. Yes, he’d enjoy that, he thought, as he jotted down a short note to get it arranged.
Flicking on his voicewriter, Polk pushed back in his chair and closed his eyes. His response to Councillor Albrecht was not going to be what the man wanted to hear.
Two minutes later a blunt, short, and dismissive note was on its way to Albrecht. Polk felt good, very good in fact. Telling Albrecht to tell the Feds to fuck off always made him feel that way. Knowing that Albrecht was finished made him feel even better. Of the remaining Merrick appointees to the Council, that left only Khan and al-Hamidi. Unknown to Khan, the case against him being put together by a secret DocSec task force was almost finished. Very compelling it was, too, Polk had been pleased to see when presented with a preliminary draft.
But al-Hamidi wouldn’t be so easy, far from it. Shifting him would be hard.
Unique among Merrick’s appointees to the Council, al-Hamidi was not from Commitment, and winning his support had been one of the keys to Merrick’s success. Al-Hamidi had a deep-rooted power base centered on his home town of Providence Sound. From there, he controlled the huge continent of South Barassia, the center of the Hammer’s substantial defense industry. Needless to say, it was a matter of considerable frustration to Polk that even after years of effort, his supporters, whose control over the rest of the planet Fortitude was total, had been unable to shake al-Hamidi’s grip.
Well, Polk thought, he’d be interested to see how well al-Hamidi coped now that Merrick was gone, along with control of DocSec. History showed that no single individual could stand up against DocSec, and in the end, that was all al-Hamidi was. Just one man, and like all the others, his time would come.
Polk sat for a while, comfortable in the warm glow of self-congratulation. The more he thought about it, the closer he was to securing his domestic power base, so maybe this was the time to start thinking about making the Feds wish that they had left the Mumtaz business alone. Yes, he decided, it was time, despite unanimous agreement at the last Defense Council meeting that the matter was probably best left alone. Fact was, he didn’t give a flying fuck what the Defense Council thought. They would do as they were damned well told.
He reached for the intercom. “Singh!”
“Sir?”
“Contact Fleet Admiral Jorge. See if he’s free for lunch tomorrow.”
“Sir.”
Polk flicked off the intercom.
By all accounts, Jorge was a good man. He was an off-worlder, which meant he probably wasn’t much of a Merrick supporter, though according to DocSec, he had taken scrupulous care throughout a long and competent career to stay well clear of factional politics, so who would know? Much more significantly, Jorge owed his appointment as commander in chief of Hammer Defense Forces to Polk, and Polk had made damn sure he knew it. He had plucked Jorge out of relative obscurity as the flag officer in command of Space Fleet research and development, promoting him two ranks over the heads of those Polk judged to be largely responsible for the Hammer’s spineless and incompetent response to the Feds’ attack.
Most of those men, Polk was happy to remind himself, were now anonymous bodies among the thousands in some DocSec lime pit somewhere.
The purge of Space Fleet in the weeks after the attack on the Hell system had been merciless. Senior officers had been cut down in the hundreds without appeal, the executioner’s bullet reaching deep into the organization to root out anyone even remotely connected to the humiliation dished out by the Feds at Hell’s Moons.
From Polk’s perspective, the daily reports from DocSec summarizing the previous day’s arrests, convictions, and sentences-all but a tiny minority of those arrested going to the firing squad the next day-had been profoundly satisfying. It was very simple. Most if not all of those condemned must have been tacit supporters of Merrick. Otherwise, how could they have flourished during Merrick’s time as chief councillor? Add in their contribution, actual or inferred-it didn’t much matter which-as Fleet’s senior management to the defeat at Hell’s Moons and it was pretty straightforward if you thought about it.
Polk’s enjoyment of the moment was interrupted by the carefully neutral tones of Ramesh Singh, his longtime confidential secretary. “Chief Councillor?”
“Yes, Singh.”
“Fleet Admiral Jorge would be delighted to meet you for lunch tomorrow, sir.”
I bet he would, Polk thought. As if he had any choice in the matter.
“Good. I’m so pleased to hear it,” Polk said sarcastically.
“I’ll arrange lunch for 13:00 at the residence.”
“Yes, that should be fine. What else do I have tomorrow?”
“Photo opportunity at 12:30, sir. Front lawn, weather permitting. Medal ceremony for crew members of the New Dallas. Ten minutes.”
“Ah, good. Will Jorge be there?”
“Not planned to be, sir. It’s a Space Fleet-sponsored affair, so Admiral Kseki will be there, and he’s hosting the lunch afterward.”
“Okay. Fine.” Admiral Kseki. Another one of his recent appointments.
As the intercom clicked off, Polk smiled a grim smile of satisfaction.
If necessary, Jorge would be left in no doubt that any reluctance on his part to commit body and soul to what Polk was beginning to think of as a righteous crusade against the Feds would be a career-, not to say life-threatening move on his part.
But somehow Polk didn’t think it would come to that.