First Citizen (48 page)

We went down the rows of Stompers and Turtles, checking off the crew chiefs for cracked fan sets, leaky gaskets, or battle computers that punched up FFFF instead of 0000. I switched on one of the Stompers and ran her turbines up to red, listening for synch and watching for smoke. She coughed blue at 9,750 rpm: three days assigned in the rotor shop, packing bearings.

Then I took the whole troop, tech specs as well as grunts, out on a little field march. Ten miles through the hills, double time with full packs. On the final leg, I stepped aside and counted off the last hundred grunts—and gave them extra drill.

Every one of those lads and lasses knew that Colonel Birdshit had finally come to California.

The next morning, I rolled up to the house in a Turtle with Lieutenants Wong and Gervaise. We met with Gran and Major Sanders in the map room or control center or whatever Mandy kept that big room for. I had brought along a field cyber with projection rig. Its disks were crammed full of demographic stats, situation reports, political vectors, troop concentrations and capabilities, elint summaries—about 900 gigs’ worth of data on the whole country. I set it up to display on a white wall and began briefing Corbin and the others.

“The political options are largely unchanged from this spring,” I began. “The West is mostly ours, adhering to the nucleus of the TENMAC. The East belongs to itself, or to anyone—except anyone named ‘Corbin’—who can claim to hold Congress.”

I brought up a simple two-color map on the wall, green for us, red for them.

“Now, it is never quite that simple. First, in our own West, allegiance is a sometime thing. Utah, with its Deseret tradition, is talking about a ‘closed community.’ It would work, too, except their citizens hold the deed on too much ground outside the State, and they are afraid they might lose it.”

“They will,” Corbin said.

“Nevada wants concessions. What they are, and in return for what, nobody is saying yet. Just ‘concessions.’ And the Ore-Wash Axis wants a laundry list of environmental miracles out of you, ending with ‘stop the rain’ and ‘bring back the price of timber.’ ”

I shaded the map while talking, with patches of blue and yellow.

“The Farm Belt wants to see how you stand on farm issues, particularly whether the next government is going to continue meddling in the market. I gave their military envoys assurances, when asked, that I could not think why you would want to do that, but they just hum and haw and suck on their mints. Maybe they want a freer money market, or maybe—who knows?—a war with Canada over exports.”

“Not this year,” Corbin agreed.

“Finally, there is Rupert the First, by the Grace of God, King of Montana and All the Lands to the Ocean.
Which
ocean, he does not say. Probably both. He is trying to run the country by fiat from Helena. Although he has fanatical supporters in Wyoming and the Dakotas, for the rest of the country his transmissions are just so many free-floating photons.”

“Is he insane?” Barney Wong asked.

“Possibly. No matter. We still have to whup him, and he has an army about thirty thousand strong.”

“Shit,” Gervaise said.

“What about the East?” Corbin asked quietly.

I slid the colors up on the wall.

“The Midatlantic was strong for Pollock and to them you are still ‘the enemy.’ That creates a vacuum now being filled with lightweights. Money moguls, mostly. All the real military people chose up sides and came to our war long ago.

“Outside of the Middle States, however, there is no psychological dominant—unless you count aggravated fatigue and the desire to be left alone. New England is still allied with us, but mostly to annoy their southern neighbors. The Ohio Valley and the Rust Bowl want markets. That means they are beginning to realize they need the West, and not just on a contraband basis.”

“We’ll trade,” Corbin affirmed.

“Of course.” Next I brought up an orange-and-yellow patchwork on the map.

“The Deep South would like to sign a nonaggression pact with you and go their own way. But that turns out to be about eight ways, because they cannot even agree on Standard Time. And Florida, of course, is fast becoming a Caribbean Island.”

“Bet Georgia loves that,” Pet Gervaise chuckled.

“They
are
talking about a ditch,” I nodded. “Big one—dug with atomics.”

“And finally, that leaves us with Old Mexico. …”

Their three heads craned forward and studied the map. They were silent for a couple of minutes, with only their eyeballs moving.

“Lost them?” Barney Wong asked at last.

“Not quite. The psychometry says the various States need a northern affiliation more than ever. And opinion about the General is pretty evenly divided—even inside some heads. For one thing, he is the G.V. military officer who ran the State of Yucatan fairly and progressively. For another, he is the babykiller who incinerated three cities in Coahuila. Now, that does not count entirely against us. Call it the Whipped Dog Syndrome—”

Corbin made a face at that.

“—but just our having the guts to actually
use
The Bomb impresses a lot of people. Even on this side of the river. We have been riding that wave for four years.”

“What does Mexico
want?”
Corbin asked.

I studied the map myself. This one did not have a single color or code. The key was not clear. What does any people want, who once ruled a subcontinent from pyramids of stone, whose land is more bitter than dust and richer than the Pharaohs’ Egypt, who have gotten the boot from every European who ever landed there?

What does a woman want, when she has been raped so often, it is the only love she knows?

“Respect,” I said at last. “That man who can show his understanding for Mexico’s heritage and potential, can rule her.”

“Then we’ll do film clips and docudramas,” Gran said immediately. “Check our Merida archives—we must have a couple of thousand hours of children and me speaking Spanish. And our road system, the new docks at Progresso … Narration in the vernacular only.” He was giving orders to Pet Gervaise as if she were part of his video crew, not a fire team leader. And she was nodding away and pretending to take notes. After that thought had run out, Corbin looked up at me.

“What else, Billy?”

“Nothing else, except to come up with a plan. Our strength is on the map.” I keyed up the symbols for various military units: black circles ours, black squares others. “You only have to move them where you want them and decide who gets hit first.”

“Rupert?” Wong ventured.

“Eventually, but not the first,” I said. “Save him for mop-up.”

“What about the politics in Congress?” Corbin asked.

“Ah!” Missed that dimension. I quickly overlaid the map on the wall with an orange-and-black checkerboard, which clumped up in some areas.

“Here are the party standings as of 2018, the last valid election after the start of the war. And here they are today.” I keyed again, and the checkerboard faded. “Nothing, since the Boot Heel Election of ’20 was disputed and no candidate took his or her seat in Congress. No one has a seat now, and the last session adjourned
sine die.
Primaries were spotty this spring, and no one is sure what will happen.”

“So, Corbin concluded, “the man who called for new elections now would be picking up points for leadership.”

“Something like that,” I agreed.

“And to do that, I’d have to be somewhere in or near Baltimore. Which is closed to us.” He studied the map, its puddles and swatches of color. The East Coast around the capital was uniformly hostile.

“What about my authority as a member of the last Special Executive?” he asked.

“Good question. And was it invalidated by your breaking the G.V. charter and bringing troops into the country?”

“It’s going to be a question of what people
want
to believe,” Corbin said quietly, almost to himself. “Like most things. But they don’t know what the stakes are—and don’t have a reason to care. Our task, then, is to create a venue, an arena in which they are forced to choose and believe. Just as we did in Houston.”

“A victory march?” Pet asked. “Like Napoleon returning from Elba? Slow enough to let people rally to him, but too fast for the opposition to organize itself. Something like that?”

“And when the East encloses Baltimore in a ring of steel?” Corbin countered.

“I didn’t say we wouldn’t take weapons,” she purred.

“I don’t like leaving Rupert behind us,” Barney Wong said. “Feels like a pincers.”

“I think we can take care of him later,” I said. “From Baltimore.”

Corbin looked from one of us to another, then turned to my major, Sanders. He had sat through all these discussions without speaking, following them only with his eyes.

“What do you think, Carl?”

Sanders considered his words for five seconds. “I think they will lay roses at your feet, General.”

“Then let’s do it.”

The conference turned operational. We discussed troop strengths and how to move them so they would build our “standing wave” of support. We weighed our army along the Mississippi and how it would play into the eastward roll. We gave thought to the western desert, the great barren patch in Nevada and Utah that we would have to cross. We counted satellite uplinks and plotted transmissions that would show the victory march to its best advantage.

After two hours, I looked up and my eye was caught by a flash of material in one of the doorways. It was a sleeve of red silk. I could guess whose it was. After two or three seconds it disappeared.

By noon, we had hammered out the details. We agreed that the five companies camped here should move out as soon as possible, but no later than tomorrow at dawn. I would leave this day to begin arranging the route and our outside troop strengths.

We broke for lunch, which I insisted we all take in the camp. Our aides went out, but Gran hesitated.

“I think I’ll stay here for—” he began.

“For what?” I asked sharply. “To say good-bye? To torture yourself? Or to torture
her?”

Gran turned his head aside, looking toward that door where I had seen the sleeve.

“Your destiny is to rule this country, Gran. You must go to that destiny. And you cannot do that and have her, too. Even if she were willing, she is on the wrong side of the economy. Your alliance would not serve anyone’s interest.”

“I know.” Corbin’s shoulders sagged half an inch, his jaw muscles loosened. With one step, one turn of the heel, he seemed to age ten years. It was a man carrying fifty-two winters of hard fighting whom I led out from the house of the arches on that California hilltop.

The rest of our story is in the history books.

While Napoleon may have taken twenty days to march from Cannes to Paris, it took us twenty months. Half the State of Nevada met our armored column coming out of the passes of the Sierra, and they cheered us as we started into the Carson Sink and the great deserts east of Reno. Nevada, like California, had been Granny’s home.

Utah had not. They blockaded the main road, old I-80, against us at the State line. The Mormon troops and the Desert Pilgrims were backed up by at least three “legions” of Rupert I’s fanatics. They outnumbered the 750 men and women we had in marching order by at least eight to one. Gran could have radioed to his friends at Nellis AFB and had a wing of heavy bombers to cover us in forty minutes. He could have made a strategic strike and reduced Salt Lake City to lath and cinders. But none of those would have done our work of consolidation.

Instead, we rolled my yellow truck, the Nuke Wagon, out in front and fired a brace of our star shells high in the air over them. The Pilgrims ran for it. Our Stompers dove on the roadblock itself, blasting it apart with concussion grenades. Only Rupert’s men held their ground and kept firing. They were only put down with a bullet each to the head. I had never met this King Rupert, who could inspire such loyalty or fear, but I was beginning to get a feeling he would require our special attention.

Passing through Colorado, Corbin sent a special task group under Mike Alcott, backed up by reinforcements moved in from our army along the Mississippi, to the Federal Strategic Forces center at Colorado Springs. Alcott was to reason with the “First Strike Fellahs” and get them to acknowledge Corbin as the only viable alternative to a complete power vacuum on a nationwide scale.

The FSF had been indoctrinated in loyalty, not to the extinct Gordon Pollock or any one man, but to the Constitution of the United States and the country’s duly elected chief executive. Alcott had no other options except to put the center under blockade and try to starve them out. The pushbutton warriors had enough resources with them under the mountain to survive a thermonuclear war, stay sealed in two years, and come out to plant cesium-reducing hybrid corn and rebuild the American way of life. Alcott made the gesture anyway, but privately he told Corbin to start winning elections.

That was not so easy. Our allies in the various western States may have backed us when it was a shooting war against a single Federal force under Pollock. But now that Corbin had won and wanted to put his own name on the whole enchilada, they got skittish. They had second thoughts. They saw the possibilities of running their own little regional empires, on the model of Rupert in Montana. They wanted their quid-pros.

East of Colorado, the victory march broke down into a hopscotch of private consultations, Corbin and his closest aides meeting with the local honcho and his or her bully boys. When talks broke down, there was usually some military maneuvering, which Corbin won because he had always managed to hold the greatest resources at any point in time. He also had some chits out, of course, and he called them in with a vengeance.

When the opposition gave in, it was more through exhaustion than conversion.

Corbin was finally allowed to approach Baltimore, but only on his way to Annapolis to negotiate with the Maryland legislature, and he could come only as a private citizen—no bodyguards, no honor guard, nothing. He told me later about walking across Rotunda Square in the Capitol Complex. The groundskeepers had maintained it perfectly; even the twenty-four fountains were still spraying.