LITMIR.BIZ

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if you resist, gentlemen,” Longuet added, “you will be replaced by officers who see political reason, by Confederation officers without your, ah, conflict of interest.”

      And with a jolt, Gray was back in his office, alone with the monitors and virtual screens at his workstation. He and Steiger, it seemed, had just been summarily dismissed.

      Not good, he thought. Not good at all …

       Executive Office, USNA

       Columbus, District of Columbia

       United States of North America

       1215 hours, EST

      “Ms. Valcourt would like a moment for consultation, Mr. President,” his secretarial AI told him. “She says it is most urgent.”

      Koenig looked up from a report displayed on his desktop—the Confederation robotic freighter Dione was landing at Giordano Bruno Base on the moon with an unusually large shipment of supplies—and sighed. He’d been expecting this. “Very well. Link me in.”

      Julie Valcourt, a Canadian, was Speaker of the North American House, and one of Koenig’s more powerful opponents in the government. A member of the Global Union party, she was an outspoken advocate for the Global Union platform—that the USNA must fully integrate into the Confederation government.

      “Good afternoon, Mr. President,” she said. “I haven’t yet had the opportunity to congratulate you on your victory.”

      “Thank you, Madam Speaker,” Koenig replied. He knew, however, that congratulations were not the primary thought on Valcourt’s mind. The woman never did anything without a frank political motive behind it. “That’s very kind of you.”

      “Not at all. The people, as they say, have spoken.”

      “Well, some of them have.”

      The news downloads were calling Koenig’s election victory a landslide and a popular mandate, but Koenig knew better. The population of North America currently stood at nearly three quarters of a billion people. Of those, perhaps half had bothered to link in and vote, and the only reason that the Freedom party had won was the stark fact that the Global Unionists and the Progressives hadn’t been able to agree on a common anti-Freedomist platform. The Progressives, like Koenig’s own Freedomists, wanted to extend the franchise to AIs; the Unionists feared the loss of human sovereignty and the possibility of second-class status for organic citizens somewhere down the line. But the Progressives felt that the military needed to be run by the Confederation, which of course was where they parted company with the Freedomists.

      As a result the Progressives and the Unionists had knocked each other out of the running … but Koenig remained painfully aware that he’d been re-elected with just 44 percent of the vote. Despite the fireworks displays and enthusiastic mobs in the concourse, less than a quarter of North America’s population had actually voted for him.

      “I thought,” Valcourt continued, “that you should know that the Europeans are going to be trouble.”

      “Tell me something I don’t know.”

      “They approached me yesterday with a question.”

      “Yes?”

      “Is the USNA population going to accept a Confederation take-over of our military?”

      “Military First Right,” Koenig said, nodding. “I know.”

      “You know?”

      “I was informed a few hours ago. Geneva has assumed command of one of our carrier battlegroups.”

      “I … didn’t think they would move this quickly. Have you agreed to this?”

      “Apparently, it doesn’t matter whether we agree or not. The battlegroup commander was simply told how it would be. We need to decide how we’re going to respond, however. We could refuse …”

      “Civil war? A complete break with the Confederation?”

      “It could come to that.” He thought for a moment. “Tell me, Madam Speaker, how did they approach you? In person?”

      “No. It was a direct e-link.”

      “Did you record it?”

      “Apparently, Mr. President, the link was one-view specific.”

      “Ah.”

      E-links allowed data to be downloaded directly into the hardware nanotechnically grown within most people’s brains. Neural connections allowed what amounted to telepathy, mind-to-mind, as well as the downloading of information from the Global Net, direct interfaces with AIs or with machines—anything from a spacecraft to a door. And anything that was downloaded, from a conversation to an encyclopedia reference, could be stored … usually. Private messages could be embedded with code that erased the data as it was being transferred to memory. The recipient retained his or her organic memory of the message—though this was often fuzzy and indistinct, like the fast-evaporating memory of a dream—but there was nothing on record, nothing that could be uploaded to a database as, say, evidence for criminal proceedings.

      “That message could be interpreted as an attempt by a foreign government to manipulate the election,” Koenig said.

      “‘Foreign government’? Sir, this is the Confederation we’re talking about! Earth’s government!”

      “The relationship of the USNA to the Confederation is still … let’s just say it’s still being tested. What I’m saying is that interfering with a nation’s choice of its own government violates the provisions of the Confederation Charter.”

      “We’ve been part of the Confederation for three hundred years! We were one of the founding states of the Pax!”

      “Yes, and the original constitution stated that each nation within the Pax was sovereign, that it would determine its own form of government and that it would retain control of its own military forces. This First Right thing is something new … an abridgement, an erosion of our rights under that charter.”

      “Sometimes, rights must be surrendered for the good of the whole,” Valcourt said. “An individual doesn’t have the right to kill another person, where a national government can wage war and kill millions.”

      Koenig gave a mental shrug. “I know we don’t agree on this, Madam Speaker. Just how did you reply to the question?”

      “About how our citizens would respond to Geneva taking control of our military? I told them to take a look at the celebrations going on outside in the Freedom Concourse,” she said. “It would appear that the citizenry approves of less interference from Geneva, not more.”

      “And their response?”

      “They said that things change, situations change … and that the people can be led. That, after all, is the whole purpose of government.”

      “I would say that government is supposed to express the will of the people, and to secure and protect that people’s rights. ‘Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,’ remember?”

      “I would suggest, Mr. President, that you are a few centuries out of date. Those words were destroyed when the Chinese dropped Wormwood into the Atlantic Ocean.”

      Koenig sighed. Sometimes he did feel out of date. “Shall we agree to disagree, Madam Speaker? Once again?”

      “My apologies, sir. I didn’t intend that to sound impertinent.”

      “Not at all.” He hesitated. “I’m curious, though. What were these … Europeans, you say? What did they want from you? Why did they approach you?”

      “I think they genuinely wanted to know how we Americans would react to the invoking of the Military Rights Act. They approached

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