Chapter 1: WestHem

New Pentagon, Military Headquarters
Denver, WestHem
Tuesday, October 4, 2146

“Colonel Whitestone, are you going to accept this assignment?”

Oliver Whitestone, Colonel, WestHem Military Intelligence, looked at the man talking to him. “And which assignment is that, sir? The assignment to slit my throat? Or the assignment to strip off my uniform and march naked down to the ghetto and move in?”

General Wesley Morgan’s lips pressed together tightly. As Adjutant, Chief of Staff, he was the second most powerful military officer in WestHem, the Democratic Alliance of the Western Hemisphere. As adjutant his job was to back up the Chief of Staff and execute the orders General Turner gave him. General Wainwright Turner had been chosen for his job because he was vidstar handsome and utterly reliable at carrying out the orders given to him by the WestHem Executive Council and his corporate sponsors. It didn’t matter if the orders he received were nonsensical or impossible, General Turner was highly proficient at finding somebody to either execute the orders while he took the credit or take the blame when they failed.

General Morgan was often the man who General Turner relied on to get things accomplished. He would never become the Chief of Staff. He was five centimeters too short, fifteen kilos too heavy, and his skin was too dark, courtesy of his grandmother’s dalliance with a Brazilian vidstar fifty years ago. He was also just a touch too independent for the Executive Council or their corporate sponsors to tolerate. He had his own sponsors, primarily from Alexander Industries and Shilling Munitions, but as long as he pushed their products, they didn’t require him to do anything unusual.

Taking the position of Adjutant was Morgan’s crowning achievement in the WestHem military. A successful stint as Adjutant would guarantee his eventual retirement in the Aspen Enclave, the highest possible pension available to the military, and even some shares of Alexander Industries and Shilling Munitions. All he needed to do was hold his nose and determine which category the idiotic orders that Turner gave him fell in. The executable orders he executed; the nonsensical and impossible orders he found an appropriate flunky to take the fall when the shit hit the fan.

“Colonel, I am not planning to put you on InfoGroup lecturing the Executive Council. I need to know what we need to do to prepare for the second invasion, so that it doesn’t become the debacle that the first one became. The reason I have this job is that General Turner got the job when the last Chief of Staff was cashiered after Martian Hammer. You know they are going to demand another invasion, only bigger and better, and if we don’t solve the problems, we’re just going to have a bigger and better disaster.”

Whitestone shook his head. “General, ninety percent of the problems came about because of the orders from the Executive Council and their sponsors. Do you honestly expect that I will explain their screwups and shoot myself in the head at the same time voluntarily?”

“Colonel, please...”

“General, the operations plan for Operation Martian Hammer was a brilliant plan that ultimately failed because of the treason and treachery of Generals Wrath, Browning, and Sega, as well as that of Admirals Jules and Rosewood. The largest problem we had was in the inhumane brutality and unprecedented criminal behavior of the communist Martian terrorists.” Whitestone was simply repeating the official history of Martian Hammer that was being currently taught in all WestHem school systems and being broadcast on WestHem Internet channels.

“Colonel, if I want the party line, I can turn on InfoGroup. What I need is accurate and unbiased information. If you can provide that, fine. If you can’t, I believe you will be a prime candidate to train and lead an armored infantry brigade during the next invasion of Mars. If you are really lucky, I will nominate you to lead the first attacks.”

Whitestone rolled his eyes. “When do you need the information, General?”

“Yesterday, but officially not until after Turner gives me the order for the invasion, which he won’t do until after tomorrow’s Executive Council meeting.”

“Tomorrow? Think that’s cutting it close, General?”

Morgan gave a wry smile at that. “It’s not quite that bad. General Turner will consider the various options available until the next day, at which time he will order me to come up with a new plan. I won’t have to give him the details for three to four days.”

“You want me to come up with an operational plan to win a war against Mars in four days?” Whitestone stared in disbelief. Morgan had a reputation for intelligence and sanity. Neither trait was on display.

The general shook his head. “No, nothing like that. You know and I know that the ultimate plan is going to be a bigger and better version of Martian Hammer. We’ll use the same plans and deployments, only with more ships and more men. This was the brilliant plan developed by the Executive Council and the corporate interests with detailed knowledge of the planet. I need to know what we really need to do. What specifically failed, aside from the treason and treachery you mentioned earlier.”

“Why me?” asked Whitestone.

Morgan answered, “Because you have the unfortunate reputation of preferring honesty and accuracy instead of foolish drivel, and because of that reputation, you will never rise above your current rank. Instead, you will be reduced in rank and forcibly retired when Martian Hammer Two fails, which we both know it will. However, if we succeed, you become a Major General in charge of WestHem Intelligence. You really don’t have much of a choice.”

“General, if I tell you what really went wrong, I’ll be put against a wall, and you’ll be standing next to me.”

“The best I can promise is that nobody from the Council or the corporations will be in the audience when you tell me.”

Whitestone sighed. “Give me a few days.”

Oliver Whitestone left General Morgan’s office and took an autoflyer back to his office at Military Intelligence Headquarters. Once there he did some paperwork and then checked out. A second autoflyer took him back to the condominium complex he and his family lived in near Colorado Springs. He gave it a critical look as the autoflyer was on final approach. Colorado Springs was a nice upper-middle-class neighborhood, not as nice as Aspen, where the Executive Council and their corporate bosses lived, but lightyears better than the ghettos surrounding Columbine and Aurora.

He entered his home and was greeted by his wife Cheryl and their two daughters. The girls, twins aged five, ran up to him giggling and squealing and he dropped down to their level so they could tackle him and knock him to the floor. He tickled them in return, and they ran squealing off to their bedroom. Whitestone looked up at his wife.

“Don’t expect me to pick you up,” she laughed.

He rolled his eyes and got to his feet. “I can remember the time you used to run to meet me at the door and then knocked me to the floor and joined me.”

“Remember how that worked out? Twins!”

He snorted and got to his feet, after which Cheryl gave him a quick kiss. She was an astonishingly beautiful woman, auburn-haired, blue-eyed, and with a stunning figure. When he first met her, he had been a very junior major and she had been a second lieutenant. She had also been assigned to a position in Public Relations where she could serve as a mistress to the head of Military Appropriations. Her selection as a mistress was not something she could turn down; it was the WestHem way of advancement for professional women, Whitestone had been attracted to her and they had been friendly, but the general involved didn’t like to share his toys. Fortunately, he also liked new toys, so after a year, he tired of her, and she was promoted to first lieutenant and sent back to the PR office. A year later she and the major were married, and she was able to resign her commission.

“Want to work on a few more tonight?” he asked.

“You made general?” she asked. They had talked about a few more children but wanted to wait until he made brigadier. As a member of the military, the population control laws didn’t apply.

“Trust me! Would I lie?”

“Like a rug! How about I put on something naughty, and we practice, instead?”

Whitestone nodded. “It will have to be tonight. Tomorrow I start a new project and will be away for a few days.”

“Anything you can tell me about?”

He smiled and shook his head. “I am planning the ultimate downfall of EastHem and all our other enemies.”

She snorted. “As long as it’s nothing too serious. Try to be home Saturday. The girls have a dance recital.”

“Got it. See what I can do.”

After dinner, he retired to his den and began considering the assignment given to him by General Morgan. In many ways, it was no more voluntary than his wife’s assignment as a mistress to a general. In a wry concession to reality, he realized that both assignments involved getting fucked. He wondered if he should ask Cheryl what the best lube was for bending over and getting fucked up the ass.

He knew how it all started, but there wasn’t much he could do to change it. Morgan knew it as well. Starting in the late Twentieth Century, the consolidation of corporate power began leading to the rise of mega-corporations. Following World War III, the corporations grew even more powerful. Nothing mattered but power and profit. By the end of the Twenty-First Century, the transformation of WestHem society was complete. The corporations competed by sponsoring politicians, bureaucrats, and military officers; the winners got more power and profit while the losers were acquired and shut down.

The system worked great for the corporations, but not so great for anybody else. Militarily it began to break down during the Jupiter War in 2131. EastHem, the European version of WestHem, sent a military force to Jupiter, where WestHem had a military base and a hydrogen fueling facility on the moon of Ganymede. WestHem claimed Jupiter as their property, but EastHem set up a competing operation on the moon of Callisto. The resulting war was ordered and coordinated by the Executive Council and the corporations that ran them, specifically Standard Fuel Supply and Jovian Gases, who lost the lucrative EastHem market when EastHem set up their Callisto operations.

The Jupiter War had been a disaster for the WestHem military. They had lost thirty-one ships and twenty-thousand Marines in three separate attacks on Callisto. That didn’t include the losses when EastHem counterattacked WestHem positions on Mars. There had been almost as many civilian casualties on Mars, which neither WestHem nor the military considered important, but the locals considered otherwise. The war ended with a treaty allowing EastHem to stay on Callisto, but in no way mentioning that WestHem lost the war.

The First Martian War had begun after a traitorous local politician managed to become Governor of Mars. Laura Whiting had been an innocuous politician with the ‘gift of gab’, but once in power she turned out to be a raving communist and converted a significant segment of the population to her radical economic theories. One of those she converted was a man descended from African-Americans named Kevin Jackson, then a captain in the WestHem Marines, roughly the highest a Martian could rise in the Marines. She convinced him to throw in his lot with the Martian Planetary Guard, a ragtag home militia that had been sold as a way to protect Mars in the unlikely case that EastHem attacked and WestHem couldn’t stop them.

Jackson turned out to be a military genius on the order of Washington, Wellington, and Giap. He had played the WestHem military and its corporate overlords like a violin, breaking them to his will and destroying the Marines and Navy with a ragtag collection of odds and sods. Now Whitestone was responsible for figuring out what had gone wrong and how to do it all over again, only this time winning.

Whitestone’s ruminations were interrupted by his wife’s appearance. She was wearing a lacy black top and black high heels, along with some jewelry and a spritz of a banned but very popular EastHem perfume. “Oliver, are you planning to come to bed?”

He looked at her and lewdly licked his lips. “Why don’t you come over here and we can talk about it.”

Cheryl giggled and sat down on his lap. They could go to bed for the next round.

Executive Council Meeting Room B
Denver, WestHem
Saturday, October 8, 2146

It had been three hectic days and three hectic nights for Colonel Whitestone, and it was now the time for the results to be disclosed. He had spent seventy-two hours researching the disaster that was Operation Martian Hammer, punctuated by only a few catnaps and breaks, and was sure he looked like a disaster. He could feel the bags under his eyes and only an emergency dry cleaning had saved his uniform.

He looked around the room quickly as he went to the podium. In addition to General Morgan there was a wide collection of other second level officers, assistant division heads and deputy department managers. He recognized more than a few. The division and department heads were the type that looked good on InfoGroup and the other Internet services; their seconds-in-command were the ones who did the thinking. He plugged a specially prepared thumb drive into the projector and took the remote control. Showtime!

“Thank you, General Morgan. The purpose of this briefing is to discuss the failings of Operation Martian Hammer and the ways it could have been improved. I am not here to discuss any political or commercial ramifications. It is well known that the leadership of both the Marines and the Navy had been compromised and were treasonous in their actions.” When his part in this mess became known, Whitestone hoped that this statement would prove sufficient at his court martial to prevent his execution and limit the damage to his dismissal from the service and imprisonment at the Butte Military Detention Center.