The Complete Inheritance Trilogy: Star Strike, Galactic Corps, Semper Human. Ian Douglas

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СКАЧАТЬ style="font-size:15px;">      As for Marines entering the Ring, well, hell, of course he’d permitted liberty for the base personnel. The men and women under his command were people, not robots. Skybase had been deployed in paraspace for fifteen months—five longer than usual, and it was about time the crew had a chance to go shoreside for a little downtime.

      But Devereaux’s tirade was continuing, unfolding like a thunderstorm. “I submit that the Marines, far from being guardians of our liberty, represent a clear and present danger to our cherished way of life. For centuries now, the Marines have not even been a part of our world culture, not in the way that Army soldiers or Air Force High Guardsmen are. They don’t, they can’t fit in. They live for their precious Corps, maintain their own self-contained culture, their own laws, their own religion, even … and rarely mingle with civilians. Indeed, I suspect many of our Marine friends consider mere civilians to be somehow inferior to them.

      “The Army is much more connected to our culture, our society, than are the Marines. Marines are extremists in all of their views, and anytime you have extremists, you run the risk of a total disconnection with society.

      “And that, my friends, is dangerous. A danger greater than Theocratic fundamentalism, a danger more sinister than this so-called Xul threat! How are we to maintain our freedom with these trained killers in our midst?”

      Gods above and gods below. Did the creature just like the sound of her own voice, or did she really mean even half of the crap spewing from that ugly hole in her face?

      Furious now, Alexander opened an inner window, calling up a bio on Marie Devereaux. She’d been born, he saw, in Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu, which was located in the province of Quebec. The old sovereign nation of Quebec had finally joined the old North American Federation in the twenty-fifth century, but never had been wholly comfortable with that union. Quebec had never accepted statehood, as had several of her Canadian sister-provinces. After a plebiscite, however, the 2740 Act of Common Union had granted all of North America full and equal representation in the Commonwealth Senate, which was how she’d ended up as a senator. She’d also been an officer in the last war with the Chinese Hegemony, rising to the rank of general in the Commonwealth Army, which explained how she’d wangled a slot as a representative on the Military Advisory Council.

      There was nothing, though, to suggest why she had such a hair up her ass about the Marine Corps.

      Or possibly …

      Okay, that might explain it. Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu was located south of the St. Lawrence—in a part of Quebec once and briefly known as occupied Quebec.

      That reflected a bit of history dating all the way back to the First UN War, back in the twenty-first century. Quebec had invaded the then-United States as part of a much larger UN offensive involving Mexico, France, and Japan; the U.S. Army had handily knocked back the invaders, then swept in and occupied everything north to the St. Lawrence, from Lake St. Francis to New Brunswick.

      That had been the army. But, he noted, elements of the U.S. Marine Corps had assisted with the occupation in the late 2050s.

      Damn it! That was ancient history! He knew the PanEuros and the Islamics tended to hold grudges that lasted for thousands of years, but he hadn’t thought that that kind of narrow-minded Dark Ages thinking extended to the Québecois! Besides, the Marines had been a small, almost incidental part of a much larger and complicated history. Why single them out for this … this persecution?

      He read further.

      Clearly, Marie Devereaux was ambitious. She’d been President Rodriguez’s principal political rival for five years, now, and in the general elections three days ago, the wholesale defection of her Peace Party from its sixty-year alliance with the Liberty Party to the more conservative Constitutionals had won the election for the Constitutionals. Rodriguez, a staunch conservative, would be out in two months; Sherrilyn Simmons, the new president elect, was a liberal but a hard-line fiscal conservative … and an anti-militarist.

      That must be it. Devereaux supported Simmons. More, she was positioning herself to be noticed by the new administration. If she were seen as a champion of cutting back the military—principally by eliminating or severely restricting the Marine Corps—she was all but assured of a strong position within the new government. Hell, she might even be angling for a shot at the presidency herself, eight years down the road.

      The hell of it was, the election results of the other day were being widely interpreted by the news media as a rejection of the hardliner conservative stance against the Islamic Theocracy. That was scarcely a surprise; lots of people, Alexander included, had some doubts about the nature and the necessity of the current war.

      But the media loved the word “mandate,” and the election was being presented as a mandate to end the ill-starred war with the Theocracy … and, what was more, to draw down on the military in order to banish any future risk of interstellar war—whether it be with the Theocrats, or with the Xul.

      Disarming in the face of a clear and imminent danger. From Alexander’s perspective, that was sheer lunacy … but he’d seen it before, and knew enough history to know that the same thing had happened time after time after time throughout history, going back long before there’d been a Marine Corps.

      The problem was that sooner or later, Humankind would face an enemy that didn’t give a damn if humans were unarmed or not, and which would be strong enough and technologically advanced enough to send humanity the way of the dinosaurs.

      An enemy, for instance, like the Xul.

      Devereaux, he realized, was still speaking, but it sounded like she was on the point of wrapping things up. “Senators, this proposal placed before us this morning by Lieutenant General Alexander and his staff should be, must be rejected. We cannot act preemptively against the Xul. When they come, if they come, we must trust to the gentle art of diplomacy to convince them that we are no threat to them, that we and they can share this vast Galaxy without threat or dominance of one over the other.

      “Furthermore, I submit that the Marines themselves should be allowed to retire, to fade away into the mists of history … and to cease once and for all in their meddling and in their interference in the modern affairs and political ministrations of a united Humankind! It is, in my humble opinion, Marine belligerence, their martial spirit and outlook, their tendency to look at anything strange or unknown as a military foe that threatens the peace more than any presumed threat by an ancient and distant alien empire!”

      Devereaux sat down, and a moment later the high-vaulted Senate chamber filled with a roar of applause. There were jeers and boos as well, but it sounded to Alexander’s ear as though the senator from Quebec had successfully swung the majority to her way of thinking.

      He thought-clicked a request to speak.

      It took several moments for the noise to die away. A number of the senators in the boxes nearer to the visitor’s gallery, he could see, were looking up at him expectantly. Maybe they were just waiting to see if he would react to Devereaux’s tirade with a tirade of his own. Politics could be boring, and maybe this sort of infighting was the only entertainment they could expect this day.

      He considered a tirade, a broadside in return, but dismissed the idea. That would be fighting on ground of her choosing.

      But he had to respond. …

      “General Alexander,” Ronald Chien, the Senate president said. “You have a reply or a rebuttal?”

      Slowly, СКАЧАТЬ