So why didn’t he? What kept him sitting there in dead silence when he could see her hiding those hideous deeds away in a box labelled COLLATERAL DAMAGE?
The same thing that had made him resign his commission instead of denouncing Fry and standing against her. He had too much respect for the frameworks of authority, was too afraid of the harm that comes when they’re shaken. Sometimes they needed to be shaken. Sometimes they needed to be dismantled and rebuilt from the ground up. He had never seen himself as the one best qualified to do that; never quite found enough sand to draw a line in.
Still, he felt himself reaching a limit. He wasn’t sure how much longer he could convince himself that doing nothing was the lesser evil.
And Fry knew him well enough to see that change coming. Probably she was aware of it even before he was. Certainly she timed her intervention perfectly.
“I have a new mission for you,” she said, handing him the papers. “Top priority. It will take you away from Beacon for a while, which might be the best thing for all of us.”
Carlisle reached out his hand.
He took the papers. Abdicated yet again.
There is a knock on the cockpit’s open door. With no regret, the colonel abandons the contentious past for the unfathomable present.
It’s Lieutenant McQueen. “Poker game, sir,” he says. “The men were wondering whether you’d join us for once.”
Carlisle hesitates. In all his previous postings, he spent as much time with the soldiers in his command as he could. He is fully cognisant of the importance of knowing his troops and being known by them. The emperor held it as a maxim, Mulholland asserts, not to trust his weight to any bridge he had not personally tested and assayed.
But the look on McQueen’s face irks him. The lieutenant barely troubles to hide his contempt, which he will bring with him into the game. Every hand will become an index of the greater, unspoken antagonism between them. Their mutual dislike will curdle the atmosphere and sap the morale of the other soldiers, which is already ebbing steadily.
They stare at each other for a cold second, each acknowledging the unspoken agenda. And why is it still unspoken after all these months of enforced proximity? Carlisle has no idea. He was sure when they left Beacon that there would be a flare-up, a rebellious act or word that would discharge the lightning. But here they are, seven months later, with the storm still building.
“I think not, lieutenant,” Carlisle says evenly. “Thank you for the invitation, but I believe you’ll be better able to relax without a senior officer present.”
“Yes, sir,” McQueen says blandly. “Of course, sir. Enjoy your book.”
Which he wasn’t managing to do even before the lieutenant’s intrusion. He tries again, but still can’t find the right mood of scholarly detachment. It melts in the universal solvent of recent memories. With a sigh, he sets Mulholland aside.
The rear-view mirror gives him a view along the flank of the vehicle. He can see the mid-section airlock and the Greaves boy sitting in it, writing furiously with a stub of pencil so short it doesn’t show between his pursed fingers.
Is he still a boy, at age fifteen? Dr. Khan argues that he is some kind of savant, but Carlisle can only ever see Greaves as the wide-eyed, silent child who made the arduous journey from London to Beacon wearing a single unchanging expression of shell-shocked wonder and dismay. Clutching a toy or doll of some kind. Not hugging it to his chest or trailing it along behind him the way Christopher Robin dragged Pooh Bear, but holding it clenched in both hands like a talisman that he could raise, at need, against the world.
Probably as efficacious as anything else, the colonel thinks.
11
Lieutenant McQueen returns to the game.
“Just the five of us,” he says. “His majesty is wanking off over his war porn again.”
“The four of us,” Sixsmith amends. “Phillips is on sentry.” Sixsmith doesn’t like it when McQueen criticises the colonel, and tends to try to shut him down. She’s one of those—and there are a fair number—who think Carlisle is a hero because he got eleven thousand people out of a city that used to have a population of eight and a half million. Apparently 99.9 per cent attrition counts as success.
And apparently it absolves that abject bastard of everything he did before the evacuation. It’s like the burn runs never happened. It’s like he didn’t preside over the biggest peacetime massacre in British military history and lead decent, serving soldiers into a bloodletting that would stain their souls for ever.
This is what McQueen thinks, about himself, his job and the colonel:
Britain had an army once that prized and rewarded blind obedience. Sometimes that led to monumental screw-ups like the Charge of the Light Brigade, but more often than not it worked. It worked because of the context: a world where people fought against other people, century after century, in the same theatres and with the same rules of engagement.
That was what it was like when McQueen himself enlisted—and he went along with it without much thought. Did well out of it, all things considered. Tours of duty in Syria and then in Lebanon got him commended four times and fast-tracked for promotion.
Then the context changed, overnight. But some people didn’t manage to change with it. Most of the people at the Main Table in Beacon are just the same old arseholes playing by the same old rules. Throwing down the ace of clubs as though it still means something when the game has switched to Russian roulette.
Why does McQueen hate the colonel? Because the colonel had the chance to turn it around. He was one of the highest-ranking officers to survive the global clusterfuck that happened when the hungry plague first broke out, and one of the most respected. He could have taken charge, and people would have rallied behind him. McQueen would have, just for one.
And instead he kept on obeying orders, even when the orders plainly made no sense. Fire-bomb the south of England! When there were people down there barricaded in their houses waiting for help to come. When there were civilian aircraft on the ground that could have been reclaimed and put into use. When your own damn troops were going to need that infrastructure if they were ever going to take one step outside the fences and the ditches and the minefields you had them hiding behind.
Yeah, McQueen thinks, actually his metaphor doesn’t hold. Russian roulette is exactly what the authorities in Beacon were playing. Only they cheated by putting a bullet in every chamber. And then they gave the gun to Colonel Isaac Carlisle to fire.