“Well spoken,” Billingsworth said. “Madam President, I must agree with General Colby. Operation Spirit of Humankind must go on, whatever the cost in dollars or lives. We lose too much if we let the Ahannu scare us off.”
“This council is not a democracy,” the President said, her voice cold. “There will be no vote. The decision rests entirely with me.”
“Ah, and with Congress, Madam President,” the Secretary of Human Affairs said. “We can’t forget Congress. They’re paying the bill, after all, and have the responsibility to declare war.”
“You needn’t remind me, Tom,” she told him. “And you needn’t worry. Congress will declare war when I ask them to. They’re the ones whipping up all of these anti-An resolutions lately, remember. It’s good political capital for the folks back home.”
“An interesting public relations problem there, Madam President,” Haslett said. “We declare war, but it will be ten years before our strike force reaches the target. Do you think Congress, or the public, will still be interested in fighting this war in 2148? A decade is a long time in politics and in the public’s memory.”
“Frankly, General Haslett,” the President said, “that will be my successor’s problem, not mine.” She chuckled. “I plan to win my second term in ’forty, retire with dignity in ’forty-four, and be safely ensconced as an elder statesperson teaching metapolitical law on the WorldNet by the time our people even get to the Llalande system.”
“But that also means, Madam President, that your successor, or the next Congress, might not want to continue paying for a war that we started. Our troops could find themselves eight light-years from home with no hope of further reinforcements or supply.”
“Then the Joint Chiefs and the Federal Military Command will just have to see to it that we win with the one expeditionary force, won’t they?”
Haslett nodded but felt deep reservations. This unexpected Ahannu god-weapon that could shoot starships from the Ishtaran sky…it was disturbing, even frightening. If the transport Derna was destroyed while the Marines were on the ground, they would have no way home, no matter what provisions Earthside Command made in advance. And Haslett was politician enough to know that the public wasn’t likely to support another expensive mission to Llalande to rescue the first two, no matter how up in arms they were at the moment over the Ahannu’s human slaves.
General Haslett glanced across the table at Colby and wondered what the Marine commandant was thinking.
The Mall
Washington, D.C., Earth
1840 hours ET
Secretary of State David Randolph Billingsworth rarely visited what he thought of as the tourist city. The special government service maglev subway generally whisked him straight from the underlevels of the White House–Executive Building complex to the station less than a block from his suburban Bethesda home, so his only glimpses of downtown Washington were through the odd window or on the big wallscreen in his office. The coded message that had come through on his cerebralink’s priority comm channel had been as explicit as it had been terse, however. He’d checked a robot floater out of the Executive Office motor pool and ridden six blocks to the Fourteenth Street entrance of the Mall Dome, right next to the Smithsonian Museum of American History.
The Dome, actually a long, narrow ellipsoidal geodesic, stretched from the foot of Capitol Hill almost to the base of the Washington Monument, arching high above the historic Washington Mall. The largest freestanding geodesic in the world when it was built in 2069, it was widely praised as a modern wonder of the world…and equally vilified as a monumental eyesore in the City of Monuments.
Billingsworth had no feeling about it one way or another. It was possible for him to get anywhere within the government office warrens by maglev, from the Pentagon to the Capitol Building to Central Intelligence at Langley to the White House, so he never needed to go up on the surface and actually see the thing. But he had to admit it was rather pleasant…a cool escape from the heat and humidity of midsummer D.C., with late afternoon sunlight filtering through the transparencies to the west, from behind the slender dark spike of the Washington Monument.
He took a seat on a park bench next to a riot of forsythia. Tourists strolled or hurried past on the walkway or slid silently along on the glidepath. A naked couple snuggled on a blanket on a hillock nearby. A young woman—a congressional aide, perhaps—jogged past with a determined gait, her head completely enclosed in a sensory overlay helm, wearing nothing else but a sports bra and shoes. Near the Mall entryway, a gaggle of teenagers resplendent in iridescent Ahannu scale tattoos and shaven heads were passing out pro-An vidfliers to any who would take them.