“Excuse me, Lord Governor? I didn’t hear.”
“Nothing. Nothing.”
A small man dressed all in black jumped down from a traffic signal he had climbed and landed sprawled on the roof. He pounded on the skylight with his fist, yelling something that Aaron couldn’t hear through the soundproofing. Aaron’s hand strayed down to the armrest. He flipped it open, revealing a hidden control panel. His finger hovered over the controls. He turned to Cisco. “Can I push the button?”
The button was connected to one of the car’s defensive options. If pressed, fifty thousand volts of electricity, at very low amperage, would be transmitted through the car’s exterior rails and trim, guaranteed to turn anyone touching them into a twitching heap on the ground.
She sighed. “No, Lord Governor. You must demonstrate tolerance.”
“I don’t feel tolerance. I feel an intense desire to push the button.”
“I wouldn’t advise it. We must keep up appearances.”
“I suppose so.” He reluctantly snapped the armrest back down over the panel.
There was a pause. Cisco studied him. “You were just joking, Lord Governor?”
He grinned slightly. “About the button? I suppose. About the urge? Not at all.” He looked out the window at the angry crowds. “All people have urges, impulses, and it’s no less true of the very powerful. But when most people slip and let one of those impulses loose, perhaps a window gets broken, or a car fender gets bent, or at worst a nose gets broken. At the very, very worst, the body counts can be tallied on the fingers of your hands.
“But when people like me slip, wars start, planets fall in ruin, thousands or millions die. I have to be very careful about those urges, and so when one comes along like that, where death is unlikely, where the victim is certainly deserving, it is very, very tempting.”
Cisco nodded. “But you still resist.”
“Mostly. But just in case, I depend on my people to remind me of my station. Consider that a test. You passed.” He looked around. The crowds had thinned, and they could at least drive freely, without concern about running someone over. “Where are we going, anyway?”
“Nowhere, Lord Governor. We’re simply out so you can be seen.”
He watched a group of children raiding a trash can, and throwing garbage at them. “And this is helping me how, exactly?”
She raised an eyebrow. “I sent you an executive summary. I’d assumed you’d read it.”
“A month ago, I’d have known everything there is to know about this planet; I hired you so I didn’t have to think about such details. I have a war to win. I need to be able to trust you to take care of everything under your purview, and I don’t want to have to oversee everything you do. So tell me what we’re doing here.”
“Poznan is a former member of the Duchy of Liao. Under the Duchy’s control, immigrants of Chinese descent turned the ruling descendants of the original Spanish colonists into an oppressed minority—a fine tradition of hatred that continued for centuries under the rule of the Capellan Confederation. Though this oppression was moderated when The Republic assumed control, it lingers.” She gestured at the windows. “These are members of the Spanish minority, by the way, who are throwing rotten fruit at us.”
“Good to know. And I suppose the people with the ‘LIBERATE US, LIAO!’ signs were Chinese?”
“Exactly, but that was a block ago; the Chinese never cross Xu Avenue west of 110th Street.”
Aaron shook his head. “This is barbaric.”
“I won’t even discuss the other original colonists, who were of Polish descent. They lost a civil war with the Spanish, and still hate them with a seething passion. I’m sure if we drove across town to their neighborhood, they would throw fruit at us, as well.”
“Delightful. I can hardly wait. Let’s go.” He rubbed his chin. “You still haven’t explained how this helps me.”
“The people throwing fruit at you are secretly glad that you’re here listening to them without fighting back, without”—she pointed at the armrest where the button was hidden—“and the people who oppress them are pleased that you’ve seen, up close and personal, what their ‘problem’ is, and aren’t afraid of it. Or at least, they all will be, after you give some speeches I write, and sign off on some statements I’ll fabricate. If we play this right, we can make them all hate each other even more, and love you at least a little bit.” She went back to her writing.
She looked back up at him. “You’ve read the executive summary, haven’t you?”
“I skimmed it. Frankly, there wasn’t much I didn’t already know from my own research, but I found it to be concise and well written.”
“That was another test, wasn’t it?”
“It was.”
“I don’t like secret tests, Lord Governor. If you want to test my competency, you have only to ask.”
Aaron studied her for a minute. “You don’t like me very much, do you, Cisco?”
She glanced up at him. “Is that a job requirement?”
“No. I insist on competence and loyalty. ‘Like’ I can live without.”
“Good, because you’re not liable to get ‘like.’ But I’m not going to pass judgment either.
“I’m a professional liar. I sold my soul to the farm-machinery devil a long time ago. I’ve spent half my life convincing people to mortgage farms that have been in their family for a hundred years, to buy AgroMechs that will only drag them into bankruptcy.
“I make truth seem like lies, and lies look like truth. I run black and white through a blender every day, and make it come out gray.”
“You don’t paint a very flattering portrait of yourself.”
She shrugged. “People pay me to manipulate the truth for them. I’ve got nothing like that left for myself.”
“So what is bothering you, then? Are we going to win this planet to our cause or not? Because”—he gestured at the screaming mob outside—“it doesn’t look good to me.”
She half-smiled. “When you started this, did you think they’d all be easy? Like I said, you were lucky, and you hired me just in time. It’s just”—she paused in her writing—“that if they sign on to your coalition, my polls and surveys show it’s going to aggravate an already bad situation. If Liao doesn’t take this world, they’ll have a civil revolt within a year, and it will likely spiral into a full-blown war.”
“I don’t need them for longer than a year. If we haven’t stemmed the tide of Liao in six months, it won’t matter.”
“I know, which is why I’m just here doing my job. It’s just—” She put down the pad and stared out the window. “What then?”
“Then, when this is done, I will return, and I will give them order. I promise this.”
The crowd ahead of them suddenly surged to the left side of the street, people trampling each other in panic. From behind a building to the right, a Riot-Mech appeared, the little black-and-white machine wading through the crowd, red and blue lights flashing from the bar above its cockpit. Tiny for a ’Mech, it was still a terrifying presence among the mostly unarmed mob, which scattered from it like a school of fish facing a shark. A rotary launcher on the Riot-Mech’s right arm swiveled down and began to pelt the crowd with rubber bullets. Even in the car he could hear the screaming.
“It’s about time,” he said.
Ulysses Paxton kept his cool reserve as he drove the limousine past the two SwordSworn ’Mechs standing guard, and up the ramp into the Tyrannos Rex. s abbreviated vehicle bay. He watched in the rearview cameras as four members of his recently hired security force opened the door, and ushered the Duke into the relative safety of the ship’s living quarters.
His eyes missed nothing, not where it concerned the Lord Governor’s safety, or the performance of his new team. To his satisfaction, as he watched them disappear, he detected not a single flaw in their procedures. Maybe, in six months or so, they’d be as good as the people he’d lost on New Canton.