Chapter 23: Forge a Dagger

Project Arab Dagger was a proposal to pierce the "Steel Veil" between Earth Defense Force and the Caliphate. DECO and Central Command bought in on the project, too. With everybody on board, what could go wrong?

Everything!

The first thing to go wrong was being summoned to a conference on one of the new capital warships. Don't ask me which one. I didn't get to see more than a transporter room, some corridors, and the conference room. Didn't even get to use the bathroom! The good thing was that the meeting was short. Oh, yes, there was some conditioning to avoid discussing the meeting.

Meetings, meetings, meetings. I'd rather be on stable duty grooming Blitzkrieg. My preferences are of no importance to the impersonal universe. Back in Conference Room Four there was a meeting including Tess, Lilith, Georgia, Mary and the good Colonel Dorman. It was a mission briefing on training a number of Earth personnel who were NOT part of the Earth Defense Force. The artificial intelligence running the station, Ramses, introduced an artificial intelligence new to me: Ricardo Coreleone. The training site was Ares Station, hidden somewhere on Mars to isolate the trainees. A chain of linked and boosted transporter pads permitted me to step from classroom to my home in an instant. Travel from Mars to Earth was only a step, too.

Dorman wasn't to interact with the trainees. As far as Colonel Dorman knew, Arab Dagger was happening at the mobile academy. The deception was important.

"What did the committee say about your paranoid fantasy?" Colonel Dorman sneered. "Did they shoot you down?"

"I can't discuss it, sir," I was referring to my conditioning. Security measures – a combination of Confederacy techniques that ensured my silence.

<LIEUTENANT LAWRENCE WILL NOT DISCUSS THE CONSIPIRACY.> Ramses announced.

"But I can," Georgia said. "Tom discovered that some people welcome the Sa'arm coming to Earth because the Sa'arm will kill off the human race. It isn't really a conspiracy so much as a loose association of humans who believe that there are too many humans. They've been working behind the scenes to reduce human population levels for over two centuries."

"Not very successfully, either," Mary commented. "The goal seems to have been keeping Earth's human population to five hundred million. About 1750, the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, an estimated 750 million humans lived on Earth. We reached a population of one billion around the year 1800 and the conspirators decided that one billion was too many. These conspirators tried to remedy the epidemic of too many humans but their efforts failed. In two hundred years we humans expanded from one billion to over seven billion."

The funny thing about 'classified information' is that the TOP SECRET label will persist long past the need for keeping facts hidden from the world. An example is the secret accords between European 'neutral' nations and the warring Allied powers over the return of Allied fliers that survived destruction of their aircraft over Nazi-occupied Europe. Not just the fly-boys, either; many spies crossed 'neutral' territory both into and out of the occupied zones. Diplomatic secrets are kept for centuries. I was prohibited from discussing something that everybody already knew about. Oh, well. The only people I was allowed to discuss the subject with were artificial intelligences. Period.

"Eugenics wasn't a conspiracy," Tess stated. "It was mass delusion shared by all educated people. I don't want to believe that my church had anything to do with the Eugenics movement but the way Tom explained how such involvement would work made sense. Controlling the supply of drugs killed millions. Banning pesticides killed millions. Denying birth control measures also promoted the spread of sexually-transmitted diseases. Labor regulations. They were all sold as protecting life but Franz Kafka wrote the laws."

I said nothing. I wasn't permitted to comment.

"Congratulations, Colonel Lawrence," Georgia announced. "You are now a colonel in Earth Defense Forces."

"Don't let that go to your head, punk!" Colonel Dorman exercised his tactful manners. "You are still a lieutenant in the Confederacy Navy. Not even a real fighting man, a Space Marine!"

"You are outnumbered, Johnny," Lilith said. "There are three naval colonels and one of them is the captain of this ship. I am a civilian official. Tess is Civil Service. Do you want to bring in the AI's? They all like Tom. Notice that there are no non-human critters in here right now. Tom has a new friend, an albino speckled cobra. She loves him. Anybody treating Tom in an unfriendly manner is going to be bit. Cobra venom, nasty stuff."

"Are you threatening me?" Johnny Dorman squeaked.

"What will you do about me threatening you?" Lilith was a small woman and Colonel Dorman was a standard Marine rebuild, two meters and more than a hundred kilograms. "Central Command is planning a regiment-sized landing on a Sa'arm-held world. They could use a regimental commander to lead the boots on the ground."