Chapter 6

What’s this with humans and conferences! Yak, yak, yak!

Another meeting—this one public. It was public for a purpose. Because it was public and because of the sensibilities of those invited to attend the meeting in person, the Qua would be “decently attired” in a manner that would offend none of our guests.

I was wearing my Confederacy Navy uniform complete with more ribbons and medals than I deserve. One of those was for destroying a Sa’arm scout ship triad—the Sa’arm seem to do things in threes. That’s another story for another time—and I was by no means the first. We needed a few prisoners, you see...

“I call this meeting to order in the name of my mother, Lilith,” Debra announced. “Sergeant at Arms, call the roll.”

Ricardo Corleone was my personal AI in corporeal form—it was an experiment because we humans are semi-evolved primates that relate better to physical beings than to voices in the sky.

The roll included:

Debra, assistant governor of Arc Dios (when it was in colony mode)

Mary Popov, Captain, Confederacy Navy, captain of Arc Dios (when it was in starship mode) and also as the operations officer

Georgia (no other name, no rank given), DECO representative and intelligence section

Tess, Confederacy Civil Service and functioning as the personnel and training officer of Arc Dios

Marc Shepard, Confederacy Fleet Auxiliary, Ensign, functioning as the supply officer of Arc Dios

Colonel Johnny Dorman, Confederacy Marines, had been replaced by Major Tony Williams as the CENTCOM representative and the counter-intelligence/internal security officer of the Arc Dios.

And then there was me, Lieutenant Thomas Edwin Lawrence, Confederacy Navy, with the formal title of Battle Captain of the Arc Dios.

Missing were the usual non-human companion. Call them service animals if you want. Having a cobra draped around me or a wild jaguar on my lap did focus me on remaining calm—remaining civil. Some creatures, such as the bear Big Momma and my gray stallion Blitzkrieg, were unsuited to the babysitting mission. Big Momma would have immediately savaged Colonel Dorman for his hostility. Blitzkrieg liked to play, play, play—they call it “horsing around” and Dorman would have been injured or worse. That would have required me to kill Big Momma or Blitzkrieg.

Three people running the Selena Medical Complex and Refugee Complex were Selena, Michael, and Diane. Selena was the AI of the colony. Michael was retiring from CEO and President of the Disney Company to be a governor of that small section—I thought that he was a good choice since there would be as many as a billion temporary residents—though for the moment I lied and said that there was room for 250,000,000 temporary residents. In the near future Michael was going to be assigned an AI assistant instead of relying on a general AI because he’d have something like a quarter of Earth’s population under his control until they could be resettled—if loss projections were accurate, Earth would lose half its human population with the first Sa’arm invasion. Diane was the director of the Selena Medical Complex.

There were people from 24 nations and empires including two representatives from behind the Steel Veil. Though Islam had made itself unwelcome in the Confederacy, there was need to liaise with them and promote a common defense of Earth—and because General Mubarak was my father-in-law, I was that liaison as a colonel in the Earth Defense Force. He was accompanied by an important man—for reference, I’ll call him Ibriham even though that’s not one of his names. China and India were treated with suspicion by the Confederacy and for good reason. Africa was imploding for a large number of reasons ranging from systemic poverty, corrupt governments, through interference by Islam, China, India and Europe—and probably the USA and little Cuba—and there were a few representatives from those guilty nations. I insisted that there be at least two but no more than five. South America was more stable but still not united. Well, North America wasn’t united, either.

Remember that in World War Two the “Allies” were not one big happy family. China fought a civil war while fighting Japan and didn’t get the support she needed despite fighting since at least 1935. Russia (the USSR) had been Nazi Germany’s ally and had fought Japan in 1939 to a standstill—was a bitter enemy of England (and a personal enemy of Churchill) and invaded almost as many nations as Hitler did during the years 1939 to 1941, was invaded June 22, 1941 by Germany, and helped its bitter enemy Britain invade Iran in 1941 while in desperate struggle against the German hordes. Britain conducted political warfare in the United States and interfered in American elections—the exact degree of interference included blackmail and may have included assassination. It wasn’t cricket, old boy, to assassinate Nazis, but those uppity colonials needed to be put in their place, don’t you know? Italy “stabbed France in the back” in 1940 by invading France—and getting repulsed—and in 1943 Italy became a co-belligerent. I’m only touching on the events of this GOOD war. The point is that we humans have earned the distrust of the Confederacy.

I don’t trust us, either!

After roll call, the Chair (Debra) presented a briefing on the enemy we called MMD. Their symbol was the Roman numerals for 250,000,000—recognize that number?