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And Please Sign In Blood
Janos Marik considers a unusual offer.
by Mike Miller |
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Rain fell across the wasteland known as New Sydney. It must've been a cold rain because the calendar said it was winter, but even with his hand pressed hard against the window the Captain-General couldn't feel the cold outside. The thin, singled-paned window did not let the chill through. It was a Star League era window, a Terran Hegemony window. It did not let chills through. It did not let chills through even after seeing New Sydney die in a nuclear fireball in 2790. Such was 28th Century engineering.
Of course, the window and 100-floor tower it topped were also on the outskirts of New Sydney while the warhead had been centered on the city’s heart. The Captain-General suspected there was a relation between the window's continued performance after 245 years and its location. Still, it had only taken a few days for an engineering platoon with a little weather sealing, some dusting, and a power connection to an idling Orion at the foot of the tower to make the building inhabitable again. That was 28th Century engineering, so superior to 31st Century technological fumbling.
The window seamlessly wrapped around the perimeter of this top floor, a distinctly stationary revolving restaurant. Apparently some 28th Century engineering had not lasted. It was also doubtful that the view probably was that the former patrons had looked at. New Sydney was now a gray city. Winter and nuclear fire had stolen its color. The plants that had over grown it were gray and dead with the cold. The rain leached more color from it and the solid horizon-to-horizon overcast sky stole the last.
The Captain-General knew why New Sydney was the site of these diplomatic talks...this one meeting. It was abandoned. It was near the border. No one would come here, no one would bother him or his foreign counterpart. It was in the Free Worlds League, on the well-populated planet Connaught with a decent garrison. He would feel secure here. An obvious choice for obvious reasons.
Of course, Janos Marik knew the real reason. It was salesmanship. The stumps of scorched skyscrapers that the stationary restaurant forced him to view delivered a powerful message with respect to these diplomatic talks. The message was heavy-handed, even melodramatic: war is hell, etc., etc.
Janos could see the message. A child could have spotted the 'hidden' message. That didn't mean he could ignore it. New Sydney had been nuked because a Capellan Confederation mech regiment and infantry brigade had holed up in it, daring the Free Worlds League invaders to take the planet the Capellans had rightfully stolen first from the defunct Terran Hegemony. The Free Worlds League commander had decided not to engage in costly urban combat and used a 1-megaton nuke instead. A completely rational, tactical judgment call. Commander Whoever needed his troops to conquer the rest of Connaught, not just the city of New Sydney. It was no comfort unit commanders from four other interstellar nations had made similar decisions for decades after New Sydney was destroyed. The carpeting of the lower floors Janos had walked through was still stained with the fluids the refugees of New Sydney had leaked from their atomic burns.
New Sydney, of the Free Worlds League planet Connaught, had been nuked by Janos's own countrymen.
The message was about the price of power and pride. The landscape was not only a heartrending scene for Janos, but also one that triggered additional sympathetic pain. To wit, it made his ass ache with a pain from a very similar lesson to New Sydney. In fact, the stitches had only recently come out.
By responding to a call of nature that a 74-year old body damaged by stroke inflicted on him, Janos had left an important meeting with his sons Duggan and Thomas and nephew Duncan. Janos smiled wryly. By virtue of making an offering to the porcelain god, he had been spared from the bomb his nephew had planted. But the cruel god shattered under him when the bomb detonated and left him to be found in an undignified mess by panicked guards. The smile left his bearded face. Janos had seen his son Duggan's corpse pulled from the rubble and been by Thomas's hospital bed when his youngest child died from bomb-inflicted injuries.
Janos turned away from the window to stare at the window, refusing to look at the only other person in the room. His counterpart sat innocuously in a U-shaped booth that had once, centuries before, been the domain of merely middle-classed asses, the asses of tourists and commoners. And now the fate of trillions was being determined in it. Instead, Janos looked at the simple papers set neatly in the center of the table, the simple papers that would steal his soul.
Item 1 discussed by the papers was enticing alone. Aid against the Andurien rebels, aid worth a mech regiment or more. In cash, in vehicles, in weapons and spare parts, in new mechs...whatever suited the Free Worlds League.
Item 2 was more in the same vein. Spoiler raids to be conducted along the Capellan Confederation's border with the Federated Commonwealth. This would draw away attention from the Confederation-League border, allowing the Free Worlds League to remove units to deal with the Anduriens. The raiding troops would be from the League-Lyran border, freeing that many more League troops to deal with the Anduriens.
Item 3 was economic aid to help the Free Worlds League recover from the Andurien Crisis and the Succession Wars in general, plus improved trade ties that would probably do more than low-interest loans and grants.
Item 4 was a return to antebellum borders, a return of all worlds lost (and a few gained) in the recent blitzkrieg of the Fourth Succession War.
Item 5 was a formal recognition of all Free Worlds gains against the Capellan Confederation since 2787. A minor thing now, but of some diplomatic value over the Capellans if the last items of the treaty were met.
Item 6 required the Free Worlds League to withdraw from the Concord of Kapteyn and declare at least formal neutrality in any upcoming hostilities the other Concord members might find themselves in with the Federated Commonwealth.
Item 7 required Janos Marik and any other contending Free Worlds citizen renounce all claims to the title of First Lord of the Star League.
Item 8 required Janos to recognize and vote for Hanse Davion as First Lord of the Star League.
Item 9 guaranteed peace if the above conditions were met.
The last three items brought it all together. The last three items would take the Free Worlds League out of the Succession Wars and formed a new Star League. That was what the Succession Wars were about, weren't they? Surviving to their end?
No, they were about finding a new First Lord of the Star League! Two and a half centuries of war to find the successor to the Star League throne!
The horrible aspect of the situation was that Janos Marik knew that wasn't him. Realistically, at the most he could get the Capellan Confederation to recognize his claim. The Draconis Combine would laugh at him, to say nothing of the Federated Commonwealth. His own successors were unlikely to do better. On the other hand, he knew he could get the Parliament and public to swallow the treaty. Peace at last, and not from the worst source or in the worst manner.
Janos finally looked at Satan's stand-in for this Faustian deal. Somehow the red hair and handsome looks that had survived aging well - was the bastard actually in his fifties? - were appropriate. There wasn't a look of false sympathy on his face for Janos, or a plastic smile. An expression of understanding for the agony of indecision the Captain-General was presently enduring, perhaps, just a little more than the appropriate polite expression of patience for Janos’ deliberations.
Oh, Hanse Davion was a good salesman.
Hanse Davion didn't need this treaty signed. With the Free Worlds League tied up with the Andurien Crisis (Hell, Davion might give that regiment of aid to the rebels just to prolong the crisis!) and with the Confederation the military equivalent of a quivering vegetable, Hanse Davion was free to smash the Draconis Combine. The Skye Rebellion had slowed the inevitable invasion date, but all of Kanrei Theodore Kurita's reforms and all of Coordinator Takashi Kurita's old school soldiers weren't going to stop the nigh-270 battlemech regiments of the Federated Commonwealth. The Combine would only survive with a miracle and, as Janos knew the saying, God was on the side with the bigger battalions. And then it would be the Free Worlds League's turn. Janos could see that.
The Captain-General could see the Free Worlds League didn't need the treaty signed, either. Defeat of the Andurien Secessionists would happen in a year or two...for a higher cost in blood than without foreign aid. The economy would recover from Andurien Crisis without trillions in loans from Lyran and Federated Suns banks...though more slowly. The Star League would be reformed without Janos's signature on that document...but with the blood of untold regiments of his soldiers, the blood of untold millions of his citizens, and devastation across untold numbers of his worlds.
And yet Janos was certain Hanse Davion would honor a peace treaty, especially if he was First Lord of the Star League. That was what the Succession Wars were about, and these papers would take the Free Worlds out of them. No need to be invaded when you were a little, subservient puppet, right? (Honestly, would signing a peace treaty make the Free Worlds a puppet to the Federated Commonwealth? They would both be part of the Star League and the Free Worlds would have a powerful voice on the High Council.)
Peace for the Free Worlds League. A chance to recover from nearly 250 years of war. That was worth betraying two "allies" who had done nothing for the Free Worlds, wasn't it? That was worth turning his back on nearly two and a half centuries of blood spilled by his countrymen, wasn't it?
Peace for trillions of your citizens was certainly worth selling your soul.
Wasn't it? |
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