Europa Strike(94)
Lieutenant Commander John Reynolds, the ship’s communications officer, had gallantly vacated the compartment so she could have her conversation in private. She was glad of that. At the moment, she didn’t know if she was on the verge of tears or profanity, and neither fit her concept of professional behavior in an officer.
Carmen’s face, displayed on the fabric screen unrolled in the air above Kaitlin’s arm, frowned unhappily. “I wish I had better news, Kaitlin, but I don’t. I’m doing my best to delay the vote, but it’s going to happen, probably by the middle of next week.”
“But—but don’t they understand? We have almost a hundred people out there, under constant attack by the Chinese! We can’t just fucking write them off!”
“Things were a whole lot simpler when there were essentially just two parties,” Carmen replied. “The Democrats and the Republicans are still the two biggest—together they take up seventy-one out of a hundred twelve Senate seats. But now we have the Libertarians with nineteen seats, and the Greens with twelve. Globalists control six seats. The rest are independents.
“So everyone has an agenda, right? The Libs, Greens, and Globies all are against the war. I swear it’s the first time in eight years I’ve seen them align themselves on the same side of any issue! They’re all pushing for different things, of course. The Globalists just want us to be one big, happy global community, even if it means surrendering outright to every tin-plated dictator who gets delusions of grandeur. The Greens mistrust big industry of any sort, don’t like space technology, and figure we should leave alien contact out of the picture entirely until we clean up the planet first. Besides, most of them still buy into the Geneva Report, and figure we have to unite the planet before we all die. And the Libertarians just don’t think there’s anything out there worth fighting over.
“So we have a solid block of thirty-seven votes aligned against sending a relief expedition, because it will inflame the Chinese, because it could lead to a shooting war here on Earth. In a simple majority vote like this one, well…the opposition only needs to line up twelve more votes. At least four of the independents will automatically go with the antirelief measure, just because they came in on p-and-j platforms.”
“‘P and j?’”
“Peace and joy. Love yourself, love your neighbor, and the whole world will be a better place.”
“So you’re saying the vote is going to pass. We’re not sending help to Europa?”
Carmen shook her head. “Dear, they need eleven more votes to kill the relief measure. The Democrats are already pretty solidly aligned against relief to begin with. We just came out of a nasty war…we don’t dare risk the utter destruction of humanity over such a faraway issue…ta-da, ta-da, ta-da. And some Republicans I know will side with them just to show their hearts are in the right place. I’m guessing we’ll see the measure passed, oh, eighty to thirty or so, with a couple of abstentions.”
“That’s over two to one!” Kaitlin said, profoundly shocked. “I simply can’t believe the Senate would have that little regard for our people—for people they decided to send out there in the first place!”
Carmen closed her eyes. She looked unbearably tired. “Kaitlin, you know as well as I do that politics always screws up the human equation. Politics deals with the expedient. The practical. Maybe once, a long time ago, government involved rational men making rational decisions, but anymore it has more to do with who’s made the largest campaign contribution or owes who what favor. It’s not that politicians don’t care about people, especially the men and women in the armed forces. If I were a cynical bitch, I’d point out that those military men and women vote. But it’s more than that. We do care. But the system has gotten so damned big and out of control, no individual politician has that much of a say anymore. In a way, that’s good. Checks and balances. No one politician can become a demagogue anymore, or a tyrant.
“But when it comes to supporting our military personnel, it always seems again and again that the practical necessities of politics outweigh duty. Honor. What’s right.”
“I thought,” Kaitlin said carefully, “that contact with the Singer was deemed ‘of vital scientific and national importance.’”
“It was. It is. What does that have to do with politics?” She sighed. “Kaitlin, this is privileged information, you understand.”
“Of course.”
“There’s a small group of senators right now—I think Sam Kellerman’s putting it together—who’re floating the idea of approaching the Chinese and offering to establish a joint mission to Europa. Everything shared. Everything open. The idea is that if the Singer is an alien intelligence, and if it cares, we’ll be approaching it as a united world. As humankind, not as CWS or PRC or American. You understand?”