Showdown, Part 2
New Port Elric had one skyscraper, and they blew it up.
Well, *they* didn't do it, per se. The mob of enraged locals busy dragging Fleet men into the street and doing absolutely unspeakable things to them accomplished that. It's surprising what amateur artillerists can do in this day and age with only a few simple tools.
Provisioner-General Common was busy doing relevant things, like securing the Fleet's supply of nuclear weapons. When the glimmering silver tower the Adamas immigrants had erected to satisfy the Commodores' ever growing hubris exploded, Kia merely shrugged. It was basic economic theory to keep your government center far away from your vibrant financial center anyways, or so she'd read in some old Dathic philosophical treatises.
"We'll move the capital out to the mountains," she had said. "Keep it small enough and weak enough that it can't do anything more than protect the people." Her men cheered, but inwardly she grimaced. The Fleet behaved like a bunch of plutocratic fascists, but they were effective at the projects they set out to accomplish. Like Torpor. A weak and resource-starved government was exactly what the Standards wanted, in theory, but their neighbors had no such ideologies. And she doubted she could govern for very long with the force of her personality alone. She wasn't some genius/economic theorist/rugged guardian of society like Elric Standard was made out to be. But letting the Standards do whatever the hell they wanted would get them all killed in the end.
For the seventh time that day, she wondered what the hell she was doing.
In retrospect, the peace had lasted only as long as the Commodores had kept the armored vehicles in town. Armored posses were always the ones that shook down the towns for whatever they had that was worth selling, and that had gotten old a long, long time ago. Kia's broadcasts of insurrection were more than enough to get the population going after the Commodores' Army shipped out of system, with the Commodores' small posse of retainers holding only a few blocks around the capital building itself. After the structure went critical, Kia overflew it, surveying the damage.
"You know," she said, "some sort of, uh...park would look nice there."
"Park?" said Lieutenant Routine, a promising lad Lewiston had sent her.
"You know, like...nature."
"I'm not sure I follow."
"Never mind, look it up on your own time. Strafe!"
A couple guys in charcoal-grey Fleet uniforms were scurrying out of the wreckage, and muzzle flashes were distinctly visible from a light machine gun. The explosive rounds cracked the windshield and created some turbulence, but Routine activated the flechette cannon almost immediately and their torsos were a bloody mist before they could do any serious damage.
"Watch it, kid," she said guardedly.
"Sorry General, y'had me thinking about parks and natures. Unnatural stuff," he muttered.
The dogfight above the city was winding down; most of the Commodores' light vetos that had been left were meant for transport, not heavy combat. One whirled crazily, having lost an engine, mercifully hitting a sheer mountain wall outside of city limits. Radioing the relevant mopping-up orders to her main lieutenants, Kia decided to land the veto at what passed for the center of town, a huge marble statue of Elric Standard, holding a carbine in one hand and a datapad in the other. The three-story brick houses of the most powerful and well-connected clans rose on all sides of the cobbled (at private expense) square. Much of this planet might have been starving, Kia realized, but for those at the top, Fleet cronyism had been very profitable indeed.
The Provisioner-General, while generally the figure of decorum, had already played the hero enough for today, so she directed her men to loot one of the nearby Commodores' houses for some decent alcohol while she sat on Elric's foot. It took a while for the city's private networks to spread the news that the Peacemaker was at Redstone Square, so she got slightly tipsy and hollered at various clansmen and women she recognized while she waited for a crowd to gather. The tipsiness was important, though. She needed to have absolutely no fear for her first public address as...whatever the hell she was.
The broadcast, when it finally went live, first across local, and then planetary, and then interstellar networks, had something of a party atmosphere. The camera was slightly shaky as it occasionally panned around to take in the fireworks or the bonfires or incoming Fleet straggler ships being gunned down as they responded to false transmissions set up by Kia's codebreakers.
It showed Kia Common, with Felix Lewiston (still in his old Dathic uniform) and a bunch of mostly young-looking men and women, some young enough to be kids. Despite not being that old herself, Kia (when reviewing the broadcast later) realized that she looked older and sterner than she saw herself in her mind's eye. Not too different from that b*tch Rani Habitual who'd ordered the Sack of Torpor.
The cheering and celebratory gunfire (blanks, she prayed) took a while to die down after the Provisioner-General stood up on Elric's foot.
"Alright!" she said. "Alright. If anyone goes and starts calling me Commodore, they're gonna get shot in the head."
Laughter, some of it out of relief.
"I'm a Provisioner-General, and this is a provisional government. And unless you all want me to stay and clean up this mess, you can consider my reign of terror over." And she stepped down from the ad hoc podium.
It took about five minutes of concerted roaring of Kia's name before she got back on the foot to wave the crowd silent.
"You're all happy now, but the weeks will pass, and we'll do something stupid to piss you off. The only thing that I can promise you is that you'll disagree with me, and probably hate me in time. But I'll earn your respect if I can. I won't abuse you, I won't steal from you, and if I have to, I'll damn well die protecting you."
"We can protect ourselves just fine!" somebody yells from the crowd. Laughter.
Kia looked thoughtful. "Well, you can, that's true. But we've got to strike a balance somewhere. The old man up there," she gestured to Elric Standard, "he wanted freedom, not chaos. The most powerful weapon of freedom," she quoted, "is when free men fight for the same cause."
Some more cheering, another veto explodes and crashes and a profanity-laced song about the Commodores gets belted out for half a verse. Kia really wants to let loose and join in, but doesn't.
"We're a new people," she said. "We're not built around the idea of a planet, or a race, and we're not built around that man up there."
Silence.
"He wasn't a god, and he didn't want us to worship him. He wanted us to worship ourselves, and each other. We followed his words into exile, but we've got to build our own promised land."
"And," she continued without a pause, "we've gotta work together. Respect your damn communities, or you'll die alone in a ditch. Self-reliance only takes you so far."
"Alright, grandma," someone shouts derisively.
"Yeah, well, it's past my bedtime anyhow." Kia breaks a beer bottle on Commodore Elric's foot. "Let's christen ourselves a new society, alright? To freedom!"
"TO FREEDOM!"
.
