Sensing death, and unwilling to die without a struggle, the killer launched itself at the senior Kessentai, claws outstretched and fangs bared. The senior, however, had not reached his position within the clan by being slow and indecisive. Even while the lower God King began his leap, the senior had drawn his boma blade and begun to swing. The blade passed through the thick neck almost as if it were not there. When the body struck it did so in two pieces, dead.
The senior looked at Guanamarioch as if measuring him for the recycling bins. At length, he decided that Guanamarioch had more value as a future leader than as a current meal.
“This is not to be spoken of further,” the senior announced as he turned to leave.
Chapter 8
Diplomats are useful only in fair weather.
As soon as it rains they drown in every drop.
The early morning sun shone brightly off the Potomac, sending scattered rays of light to bathe the Lincoln Memorial and the National Academy of Sciences. Some of that light, and it was perhaps the only brightness to the place, indirectly lit the walls of the Department of State where a meeting, judged by some to be important, was taking place.
The President’s National Security Advisor was not entitled to quite as much deference as a Darhel lordling. Thus, she was received in a second class conference room. It was facing towards the Potomac, true, but the furnishings and wall hangings were not of the best. It would never do for someone in such a quasi-military, politically-appointed position to be made to feel that she was somehow the equal of the senior career bureaucrats of State.
The Secretary of State, who was not a career bureaucrat, fumed. Someone, somewhere in the Byzantine halls of Foggy Bottom, had deliberately set this up to insult NSA and embarrass him.
NSA was there expressly to discuss some of the President’s concerns with regard to what he had called “sabotage” of American policy in places ranging from Diess to Panama. In particular, today NSA was concerned with Panama.
If State showed contempt for NSA, it was as nothing to what NSA felt for State. She’d thought them, in her own words, “lily-white, weak-kneed, overbred, limp-wristed collaborators with the communists,” back during the Cold War. “Our very own fifth column for the Kremlin… pseudo-intellectual moral cowards… poltroons.” And she had said that on a day when she was in a good mood. Her opinion was even lower now, when it wasn’t just America’s freedom on the line, but the survival of humanity itself.
The Secretary of State, himself, on the other hand, she liked and even, to a degree, respected. A well-dressed, distinguished looking Wilsonian Republican with clear, intelligent eyes and a full head of hair going gray at the temples, SecState was simply unable to control the senior career bureaucrats who actually ran the department. NSA thought that perhaps no one could really control them, at least not without shooting a fair number to gain the attention and cooperation of the rest.
Even then, she thought, the shootings would have to be public and every one of the remainder would have to be forced to watch them. The ability of a State Department fool to deny unpleasant reality is deservedly the stuff of legend.
“I’m not a fool, madam,” the secretary said, shaking his distinguished Websterian head slowly. “I know my department is rife with traitors, collaborators and people running their own agenda. What I lack is the ability to do all that much about it. They know the system. Sadly, I don’t. They work together to cover for each other and keep me in the dark. No one’s really been able to control them since at least 1932 or ’33.”
Before the NSA could make an answer, her cell phone rang. Smiling apologetically, she answered it. Her eyes grew suddenly wide as she swallowed nervously. “I understand, Mr. President,” she said, quietly and sadly. “Yes, Mr. President, I’ll tell the secretary.”
NSA looked up to the secretary. “I am informed,” she said, “that the Posleen have crushed the Army’s corps to the south of us. The Posleen have broken through and are coming north. I am supposed to evacuate and the President suggests that you do the same.”
The impeccably and expensively clad Undersecretary of State for Extraterrestrial Affairs looked at his phone and then, nervously, at his watch. 9:26. Shit, they were supposed to be ready to evacuate me by now.
The undersecretary stared nervously southward, across the Potomac to where the scattered remnants of a wrecked Army corps and a ceremonial regiment were fighting to the death to buy a little time. Columns of smoke rose skyward from more places than the diplomat could easily count. In fact, he didn’t even try. What difference did the amount of destruction make? What mattered was where it was heading, and how quickly it might reach him, here at Foggy Bottom, or his family in Bethesda.
Again, the diplomat glared down at the phone. Again he looked at his watch to see that bare minutes had passed. He started to reach for the phone, to contact his Darhel handler, when there came a bright flash from across the Potomac, from the general vicinity of Fort Myer and Henderson Hall. Following the flash a shock wave arose, turned dark by the smoke, dust, lumber and other debris it picked up and flung outward in all directions. The broad river itself bowed downward under the force, the passage of the shock wave plainly visible as a fast moving furrow in the water.
In less time than it takes to tell, the diplomat uttered, “Shit,” and threw himself violently to the floor, damage to his suit be damned. The shock wave dissipated rapidly but, given the amount of GalTech C-9 explosive the Marines had packed into Henderson Hall, it was still enough when it reached the Department of State to shatter the windows, rip loose bricks, and raise the overpressure inside the well-appointed office enough to knock the undersecretary out cold.
Which was a pity from the point of view of the undersecretary and his family, for the phone with his evacuation instructions began to ring mere minutes after he was rendered unconscious.
Because her evacuation instructions didn’t depend on alien star transport, and because she had no family to sweat over, the National Security Advisor was not anxiously awaiting a phone call when the blast struck. Instead, she and a couple of aides awaited transportation by the parking lot abutting Virginia Avenue to the northeast of the State Department Building. The group heard the helicopter coming in down Twenty-Third Street before they saw it. When they did see it…
“My God… I’ve heard of treetop level flying, but automobile antenna level flying? Christ!”
The helicopter had just pulled up to a hover when the blast struck. Though it was in the lee of the storm, being behind the massive State Department Building, shock waves like that tend to flow and fill any space available to be filled. The NSA was knocked down flat on the concrete, scraping her rather delicate and attractive nose. For the helicopter, completely unsheltered from the blast, the pilot’s ability to control was overwhelmed. The chopper pitched onto one side and then slammed, hard, into a stout tree. It began to smolder but before it could burst into flames the four man crew emerged out of the side that was open to the sky and scurried away. Two of them carried one of their number who appeared to be unconscious — plus a rifle each — and one more carried the pintle-mounted door machine gun he had had the presence of mind not to leave behind.