First Secretary Heuypzlagger was wittering. Saluus was confident that he looked like he was hanging on the First Secretary’s every word, and that his short-term memory would snick him back in should he need to return his full attention to proceedings if and when anything else of genuine import stumbled into view. But in the meantime, having already gleaned as much as he felt he was likely to regarding the real state of things from the body language and general demeanour of his fellow meeters, he felt free to let his mind wander.
He glanced at Colonel Somjomion, who was the only woman at this meeting. She didn’t tend to say very much so you didn’t get too many opportunities to look straight at her. Not especially attractive (though he was, he’d been telling himself recently, starting to appreciate women rather than girls, and see past the more obvious sexual characteristics). There was, certainly, something especially exciting about the idea of undressing a woman in uniform, but he’d long since been there and done that and had the screenage to prove it. He thought of his latest lover instead.
Saluus thought of her last night, this morning, he thought of her the night they’d first met, first slept together. He quickly got an almost painfully hard erection. They’d sculpted him to have control over that at the Finishing Clinic as well, but he usually just let things rise and fall of their own accord down there, unless either the presence or the absence was going to be socially embarrassing. Anyway, he’d long since accepted that maybe it was a way of getting back at dear old dad, for forcing all this amendment stuff on him in the first place, however useful it had proved.
He still hated meetings.
Saluus supposed things had gone reasonably well for him in this one so far, considering. He’d had to agree to a full inquiry into the gas-capabling of the ships they’d modified as part of the general investigation into what had gone wrong, but — even allowing for the implied insult and the waste of time, just when they didn’t need it — that wasn’t too terrible. He’d managed to deflect most of the criticism by getting the Navarchy, the Guard and the Shrievalty Ocula representatives to compete for who was least to blame for the whole botched-raid thing.
That had worked well. Divide and conquer. That wasn’t difficult in the current system. In fact it was set up for it. He remembered asking his father about this back when Saluus was still being tutored at home. Why the confusion of agencies? Why the plethora (he’d just discovered the word, enjoyed using it) of military and security and other organisations within the Mercatoria? Just look at warships: there were the Guard — they had warships, the Navarchy Military — they had warships, the Ambient Squadrons — they had warships, the Summed Fleet — obviously they had warships, and then there were the Engineers, the Propylaea, the Omnocracy, the Cessorian Lustrals, the Shrievalty, the Shrievalty Ocula and even the Administrata. They all had their own ships, and each even had a few warships as well, for important escort duties. Why so many? Why divide your forces? The same went for security. Everybody seemed to have their own security service too. Wasn’t this wasteful?
“Oh, definitely,” his father had said. “But there’s opportunity in waste. And what some call waste others would call redundancy. But do you really want to know what it’s all about?”
Of course he did.
“Divide and conquer. Even amongst your own. Competition. Also even amongst your own. In fact, especially amongst your own. Keep them all at each other’s throats, keep them all watching each other, keep them all wondering what the other lot might be up to. Make them compete for your attention and approval. Yes, it’s wasteful, looked at one way, but it’s wise, looked at another. This is how the Culmina keep everything under control, young man. This is how they rule us. And it appears to work, don’t you think? Hmm?”
Saluus hadn’t been sure at the time. The sheer wastefulness of it all distressed him. He was older and wiser now and more used to the way that things really worked being more important than the way they appeared to (unless you were talking about public perception, of course, when it was the other way round).
But they really were facing a mortal and imminent threat here. Was it right to encourage division and enmity between people who and organisations which all needed to pull together if they were to defeat the threat they were faced with?
Oh, but fuck it. There would always be competition. Armed services were designed to protect turf, to engage with, to prevail against. Of course they’d compete with each other.
And, if that supposedly fucking enormous and ultimately powerful Mercatoria fleet wasn’t rushing towards them even now, would not some of the people in Ulubis — maybe quite a lot of the people in Ulubis — be contemplating not resisting the Beyonder-Starveling invasion at all? Might they not, instead, be thinking about how they could come to an accommodation with those threatening invasion?
Despite all the propaganda they’d been subject to, secret polls and secret police reports indicated that a lot of ordinary people felt they might not be any worse off under the Beyonder\ Starveling forces. Some people in power would feel the same way, especially if they were being told to sacrifice property and wealth and even risk their own lives in what might turn out to be a lost cause.
Even some of those round this impressively large round table in this impressively large and cool and subtly lit boardroom-resembling-meeting-chamber might have been tempted to think about ways to cope with the threatened invasion that didn’t involve resistance to the last ship and soldier, if it hadn’t been for the oncoming Mercatoria Fleet.
Saluus supposed they had to assume that the fleet really was on the way. There were other possibilities, and he’d thought them all through — and talked them all through with his own advisers and experts — but ultimately they had to be dismissed. Whether the Dweller List existed or not, everybody appeared to be acting as though it did, and that was all that mattered. It was a bit like money: all about trust, about faith. The value lay in what people believed, not in anything intrinsic.
Never mind. After covering the latest intelligence and his own. shocking remissness in not making the refitted ships invulnerable to alien hyper-weapons, the meeting was finally getting round to something useful.
Back to grisly reality.
“The main thing,” Fleet Admiral Brimiaice told them (the quaup commander was keen on Main Things and In The Ends), “is that the Dwellers don’t seem to want to continue hostilities.”
After their initial, furious take-no-prisoners attack and no-quarter polishing-off of those who’d got away, the Dwellers had just as suddenly gone back to their usual show of Shucks-us? ineptitude, claiming it had all been a terrible mistake and could they help with the Third Fury rebuild?
“And thank fuck for that!” Guard-General Thovin said. “If they did, we’d have absolutely no chance. Facing the Beyonder-Starveling lot and the Dwellers as well! Holy shit! No chance. No chance at all!” Thovin was a dumpy barrel of a man, dark and powerful-looking. His voice was suitably gruff.
“Instead, only almost no chance,” Shrievalty Colonel Somjomion said with a thin smile.
“We have every chance, madam!” Fleet Admiral Brimiaice thundered, banging the table with one tubular armling. His splendidly uniformed and decorated body, like a well-tailored airship the size of a small hippo, rose in the air. “We need no defeatist talk here, of all places!”
“We have seventy fewer ships than we had,” the Shrievalty colonel reminded them, without drama.
“We still have the will,” Brimiaice said. “That’s the important point. And we have plenty of ships. And more being built all the time.” He looked at Saluus, who nodded and tried not to let his contempt show.