A Learning Experience

Chapter Eleven

Washington DC, USA

“Let me see if I have this straight,” the President said. “We have a high-tech militia in Montana that has declared itself a foreign power and has the technology to back it up?”

Jürgen swallowed as the President’s gaze moved over and fixed on him. He’d never been to the White House before, certainly not as a participant in a very high-level meeting. His boss wouldn’t have gone to the White House under normal circumstances. That would have been the responsibility of the DHS Director and his subordinates, not low-level analysts.

“That appears to be the only explanation that fits the facts, Mr. President,” he said.

The President nodded, very slowly, then moved his gaze to Dorsey. “There are times when I wish,” he said, “that I could just order someone hung. Might I ask what you were thinking when you encouraged DHS to launch a million-dollar raid on very scant evidence?”

Dorsey looked, if anything, even worse than Jürgen felt. “I… I believed that we had a serious problem that needed to be resolved,” he said. “I…”

“And now we have a far more serious problem,” the President said, cutting him off. “General?”

Lieutenant General Alvin Houseman, Director of the USAF Foreign Technology Division, frowned. “We picked up the blast on satellites all over the area,” he said. “Our analysts worked the data and believe it was an immensely powerful directed energy weapon, fired from somewhere in low orbit. We don’t have a clue what actually fired the weapon.”

“A high-tech militia,” the President said, softly. “What sort of militia could put an orbital weapons platform into orbit without being noticed?”

Jürgen winced, inwardly. Getting something up into orbit without being noticed was pretty much impossible. American satellites monitored every inch of the planet, watching for the tell-tale heat signature that marked a rocket launch. No rogue state could hope to put something in orbit without it being detected and marked for destruction if necessary. And yet, there was no disputing the physical evidence. Somehow, Steve Stuart and his men had put an orbital weapons platform in position to fire on American soil.

“I don’t know, Mr. President,” the General confessed. “The weapons system is years ahead of our best work, literally.”

The same, Jürgen knew, could be said about the dongles… and whatever they’d deployed to bring down the helicopters. And the weapons they’d used. Technology that was out of this world… the thought caught at his mind, holding him still. What if the technology was literally out of this world? What if it was alien technology? But he knew that he would be committed to a mental hospital if he said that out loud.

“So we seem to have a major problem,” the President observed. He looked over at the fourth man in the room. “Colonel? What can you tell us about Mr. Stuart?”

Jürgen turned to look at Colonel Craig Henderson. He was a short black man, with hair cropped close to his skull, wearing a Marine uniform. From what Jürgen had heard, he’d been at Camp Pendleton when he’d been urgently summoned to Washington. It must have been alarming, Jürgen knew. What sort of offence called for a chewing out from the President personally, rather than his senior officers. But he’d been briefed and hadn’t said a word since.

The Colonel cleared his throat. “Steve…”

He swallowed, then started again. “I knew Steve when we were both going through Basic Training,” he said. “He is tough, determined and often very blunt. His family has a long tradition of military service and the honour code that goes with it. When he was sent out to war, he did as well as anyone and better than most. He might have been as fearful on the battlefield as I was, during my first engagement, but he sucked it up and kept going. By the time he was promoted, he looked certain to be a lifer in the Corps.”

There was a pause. “And then came Afghanistan.

“It’s hard to explain to a civilian, but I will do my best. The military code, Mr. President, can be summed up as you fighting for your buddies, rather than your country. You have to be able to rely, completely, on your buddies… and, in a modern army, that can be far more than just your platoon. On deployment, you have to rely on air support, intelligence officers and the logistics officers in the rear to keep going. And you also have to trust that your political leaders won’t simply abandon you when it becomes embarrassing.

“Steve and his men were caught in a Taliban ambush, Mr. President,” Henderson said. “They needed fire support to get out of it, so Steve called for help. Instead of immediate assistance, they were told that the ROE prevented either long-range guns or air support from engaging the enemy. Steve was practically begging for assistance that wouldn’t, not couldn’t, come. In the end, he managed to lead his men out of the trap, leaving four bodies behind. We never recovered one of them. Steve retired soon afterwards and went back to the ranch.”

The President leaned forward. “So… what’s your impression of him now?”

“I have no idea where he got his hands on advanced technology,” Henderson said. “And I have no idea if it is really him calling the shots. But if it is, I think we may be in some trouble. You would have someone with a good reason — several good reasons — to resent the federal government allied with technology that could do real damage. Steve’s attitude, the attitude of his whole family, is that of someone who wants to be left alone. You didn’t leave them alone.”

Dorsey was spurred to respond. “They were flouting laws,” he snapped. “And…”

“And you sent more helicopters than we often had in Afghanistan to storm their ranch,” Henderson snapped back. “Tell me something, sir. What would you have said if Steve and his family had been accidentally killed by your people?”

“I would have demanded a full investigation,” Dorsey said, weakly.

“And would that investigation,” Henderson demanded, “actually have ensured that someone was punished?”

He took a breath. “Over the last five decades, there have been a whole string of incidents where people have been harassed, arrested, injured or even killed by federal law enforcement agencies, often on very flimsy grounds,” he added. “And how many of those feds have been punished for it?”

The President slapped the table. “Enough,” he said. His gaze moved to Dorsey, then to the DHS Director. “I shall expect your resignations… no, you’re both fired. And if you leak, I’ll personally see to it that you spend the rest of your lives in jail.”

He looked back at Henderson. “Mr. Stuart has offered to speak with us,” he said. “Do you feel we should talk?”

“Talk, yes,” Henderson said. “But I would advise against trying to threaten him.”

“Then we won’t,” the President said. He looked over at his National Security Advisor. “You were at the meeting where the raid was ordered, weren’t you?”

The man paled, but nodded.

“Then consider yourself on probation,” the President said. There was a pleasant tone to his voice that in no way masked the ice underneath. “And if this turns into a political disaster, I’ll want your head on a platter too.”

He paused. “And what, so far, has leaked out?”

Houseman was the only one to speak. “So far, nothing apart from rumours,” he said. “Several bloggers in the town posted notes about naked federal troopers, but most of them seem to believe that it was a practical joke rather than anything more serious. We’re pushing that forward online, helping to bury the truth under a mountain of bullshit. However, there may well be international trouble. The Russians may believe that we were testing an advanced weapon and demand answers.”

The President winced. “Then we make the call and talk to Mr. Stuart sooner, if possible,” he said, firmly. “I’ll go, personally, even if the Secret Service objects. We need to know just what we’re dealing with before we make any long-term plans.”

Jürgen nodded in agreement. Clearly, the President had more steel in him than he’d suspected. And balls too, if he was going to meet Mr. Stuart in person. Jürgen would have liked to be a fly on the wall at that meeting.

Kevin smiled to himself as he listened to the President. Dorsey had no idea that he and his men had carried nanotech bugs with them back to the White House, or that one of those bugs — now hidden on the ceiling — was monitoring the conversation in the White House. And yet, despite his amusement, Kevin was terrified. The sheer potential of the technology was staggering and horrific. Given enough time, the entire world could be monitored endlessly by computers. There would no longer be any privacy at all.

He looked up as Steve entered, the hatch hissing closed behind him.

“We need to talk,” Kevin said, before his older brother could say a word. “Sit.”

Steve sat, his face twisting. Kevin didn’t give him any time to muster a response.

“Tell me,” he said. “Just what were you thinking when you humiliated them so badly?”

Steve’s eyes flashed. “I was thinking they deserved a little humiliation!”

“And you might be right,” Kevin conceded. “But you just committed something that is arguably an act of war. You can hardly declare the ranch to be the embassy of a foreign power and then expect them to recognise it when they have never even heard of us!”

He went on before Steve could say a word. “You have just terrified everyone in Washington,” he snapped. “Scared people do stupid things! We need them to stay out of the way, at the very least, not work to find ways to impede our plans for the defence of Earth! And what will happen to our small community if it does come down to a shooting war? Do you expect everyone to go along with it?

“Yes, you terrorised a bunch of DHS cowboys and rightly so, but what happens when they send Marines or Army Rangers or SEALS? How many of our friends will side against their country? Or would we have a mutiny on our hands at the worst possible moment?”

Steve glared at him. It was the look, Kevin remembered, that reminded him strongly of their father, before the old man had passed away. The look that said, quite clearly, that his children were crossing the line and heading towards disaster. But the old man had never had the sort of power that sat, now, at Steve’s fingertips.

“This isn’t a game,” Kevin said, lowering his voice. “Military service didn’t prepare you for being the leader of a new nation. Not everything is a nail that needs to be hit with a hammer.”

“It worked for George Washington,” Steve objected.

“Washington didn’t build a new nation completely from scratch,” Kevin countered. He’d read history, all history. Steve had focused on its military aspects. “There was Congress and the State Governments and quite a bit of infrastructure — and he still fucked up the slavery issue. Here… you have to build everything from scratch. You’re out of your depth.”

He took a breath. “I understand the urge to just hit back at the feds,” he added. There had been endless talk — so far, just talk — about greeting federal agents with loaded weapons, but Steve had made it real. No matter the justification for the raid, Steve’s actions were likely to have unpleasant repercussions. “But we handled the whole affair very badly. Right now, we have to look like Washington’s worst nightmare. A group of irrational thugs with advanced technology and a bad attitude.”

Steve looked down at the deck, then back up at Kevin. “You would have preferred to abandon the ranch?”

The hell of it, Kevin knew, was that Steve had a point. They — and Mongo — had grown up on the ranch. They’d run through its fields, climbed the mountains nearby, swum in its lakes, courted their first girlfriends in the haystacks… it was their home. And it was home to generations of Stuarts, ever since they’d first settled in Montana. The thought of federal agents swarming through the ranch, breaking furniture and searching their vast collection of books was appalling. If Kevin had been the one in charge, he didn’t know if he could have coldly abandoned the ranch and set up another base elsewhere.

“I would have sent them away with their dignity intact,” Kevin said. “Look, Steve, what sort of nation do you want to build?”

“A decent one,” Steve growled.

“Then act decently towards other nations,” Kevin said. “Particularly the nation that raised and trained most of our manpower — and the one to which many of us swore an oath.”

“We swore one to protect the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic,” Steve pointed out. “What about the domestic enemies in Washington?”

“We’re leaving them behind,” Kevin said. “Or would you rather wage war on the United States?”

He paused, then pushed on. “Let’s bomb Washington, right now,” he said. “Zap the White House from orbit. Smash the military bases! Blow up the Beltway! Burn Langley to the ground! Oh, and let’s make enemies of the entire American population while we’re at it.”

His voice softened. “I saw this before in Iraq,” he added. “And so did you. Destroying Saddam’s regime was easy; rebuilding a decent Iraq was hard. How many people resisted us because we destroyed their livelihoods, exposed them to their enemies and shattered their grip on power? How many others resisted us because they trusted Iran more than they trusted us? How many people fought because it was the only way we’d left them to make a living…”

Steve slapped his hand on his knee, hard. “Point. Taken.”

“This isn’t a fantasy any longer,” Kevin said. “This is as real as reality gets.”

He waved a hand at the console he’d set up, with the help of his interface. “This technology scares me,” he admitted. “We have spy probes in the White House itself! It wouldn’t be hard to blanket Afghanistan with bugs and track down the terrorist networks, then start obliterating them one by one. Or we could disable Iran’s nuclear program, North Korea’s nuclear missiles… hell, we could cripple China and Russia in an afternoon, without them ever realising what happened to their weapons. But all of those options are destructive.

“Steve, if we’re going to build a new nation, we need something constructive.”

Steve nodded, ruefully. “Very well,” he said. “What do you propose we offer?”

Kevin had to smile. Steve had been right about one thing. Sometimes, you just had to hit the bull between the horns to make it pay attention, even if there was a risk of being gored by an angry bull.

“Most of what Keith suggested,” Kevin said. “We have a handful of small portable fusion reactors, enough to supply the entire country’s requirements. We have superconductors that would allow them to make steps forward in producing laser and other directed energy weapons. We have medical kits and cures for diseases, including some that have proven incurable by current human technology. Hell, we have quite a few other pieces of technology we could offer them.”

“And we could offer assistance in going after the Taliban,” Steve commented. “Do you think they’d like it?”

Kevin shrugged. Afghanistan was a major headache for the government. They couldn’t commit the troop levels necessary to keep the country stabilised, which ensured that any gains made by American and local troops were often reversed when the foreign troops moved onwards to the next region. And yet the government didn’t dare try to pull out completely, having built up Afghanistan as the Good War. Kevin had a private suspicion that Afghanistan would end up just as badly as Somalia, with the added complication of American SF roaming the countryside, wiping out small pools of Taliban wherever they found them.

And besides, the debt for 9/11 might have been paid, but that didn’t justify simply abandoning the country.

“They probably would,” Kevin said. He smiled, then met his brother’s eyes. “We have a week before the scheduled meeting, unless they want to meet earlier. God alone knows what might happen in the meantime. So far, there hasn’t been a leak, but that will change. And maybe we should ask to meet earlier, if we can. The sooner we start mending fences, the better.”

Steve nodded. It was one of their father’s sayings.

“Once they call, set the meeting up as soon as possible,” he ordered. “I’ll speak to Keith and a couple of others, then… then try to make nice with the government.”

He paused. “But we won’t be surrendering our independence,” he added, firmly. He tapped his knee to make the point clear. “That is not on the table.”

“Nor should it be,” Kevin agreed.

Even with the best will in the world — and he had never believed that all government was evil — it was unlikely that the US Government could put together a plan to defend the Earth in time to save it. The Horde would notice they’d lost a starship, sooner or later, and send another one to investigate. By then, they had to be ready to take the starship out — ideally, they had to be able to capture it. A second starship would be very useful. If nothing else, it would allow them to send trade missions to the nearest inhabited star system and pick up alien tech and, more usefully, alien user manuals.

“But we do have to mend fences,” he repeated. “We cannot afford having the US government trying to either impede us or even just refusing to cooperate. The consequences could be disastrous.”