“It’s something like three hundred words long, and it wasn’t even well received when Lincoln gave it. The part I’m thinking about is where he says ‘Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.’”
Powell nodded. “You think we’re in a civil war right now.”
“I don’t know what we’re in right now,” I said. “It doesn’t feel like a real war. It’s too strung out. Too diffuse. It’s not battlefield after battlefield. It’s skirmish after skirmish.”
“Let me clear it up for you,” Powell said. “It’s a civil war. We lost the Earth. The Colonial Union only has so long before it has to turn to all the colonies to support it with the things it used to get for free from the Earth. The colonies are asking if what they get from the Colonial Union is worth the cost, and worth the cost of having the Colonial Union keep running things. Sounds like the answer for at least some of them is no. And it seems like now they think the arm the Colonial Union was using to shield them is now up against their throat. So they’re trying to get out before the whole thing falls down around them.”
“They’re not doing a good job of it,” I said.
“They don’t have to do a good job of it for it to be a civil war. And they’re not doing a good job of it so far.” Powell motioned around her. “But it looks like they’re learning. And it looks like they’re getting allies with this Equilibrium group.”
“I don’t think Equilibrium, whoever they are, are doing this out of the goodness of their own heart.”
“You’re not wrong about that, but it doesn’t matter from the point of view of this being a civil war. If they don’t think the Colonial Union has their interests at heart, then it’s a case of ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend.’”
“That’s not a very smart strategy.”
“Smart has nothing to do with this. We could go around and around like this for hours, Lieutenant.”
“What do you think?” I said.
“About what?”
“About the Colonial Union,” I said. “About it controlling these planets. About how it responds to things like this.” I waved my hand around the room. “About all of this.”
Powell looked vaguely surprised. “The Colonial Union’s a fascistic shit show, boss. I knew that much from the first day I set foot on one of their boats to get away from Earth. Are you kidding? They control trade. They control communications. They don’t let the colonies protect themselves and they don’t let them do anything that doesn’t go through the Colonial Union itself. And let’s not forget everything they’ve done to Earth. They’ve been doing it for centuries. Shit, Lieutenant. I’m not surprised we have a civil war on our hands right now. I’m surprised it didn’t happen sooner.”
“And yet here we are,” I said. “You and me, in their uniform.”
“We didn’t want to die old,” Powell said. “I was seventy-five and I spent most of my whole life in Florida and I had bone cancer and never did the things I wanted to do and it was eating me up. You think I’m an asshole now, you should have seen me just before I left Earth. You would have pushed me off a building just on principle, and you wouldn’t have been wrong to do it.”
“Well, all right,” I said. “We didn’t know coming out here what we’d be getting ourselves into.”
“No, we didn’t.”
“But now you do know,” I said. “And if you knew then what you knew now, would you still do it?”
“Yes,” Powell said. “I still don’t want to die old.”
“But you just said the Colonial Union is a fascistic shit show.”
“It is, and right now it’s the only way we survive,” Powell said. “Look around. Look at the planets we’ve been on. Look at all the species out there we’ve had to fight. Do you really think any of these planets and the people on them won’t get carved up the first minute the Colonial Union disappears? They’ve never fought before. Not on the scale they would need to. They have no military infrastructure on the scale they’d have to have. And they would have no time to ramp any of that up. The Colonial Union is a monster, but the colonies are fucking baby deer in a forest full of predators.”
“Then how does any of that change?”
“Got me, boss, I just work here. What I do know is that it is going to change. It has to change because we don’t have the Earth anymore. The mechanics of the Colonial Union, what it was founded on, just don’t work anymore. It changes or we all die. And I’m doing my part to keep it together until then. The alternative is grim.”
“I suppose it might be,” I said.
“What about you? Would you do it again, Lieutenant?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I didn’t want to die old, you’re right.” I reached out and touched Lambert’s cold arm. “But there are worse ways to go.”
“He went mid-pontification,” Powell said. “I’m pretty sure that’s how he would have wanted to go.”