The Last Stand - Brad Ferguson [0]
IT WAS A BRIGHT, BEAUTIFUL MORNING, the sun blazing hot and white in a cloudless green sky. His hands clasped behind him, Kerajem zan Trikotta stood at the east window of his elaborately appointed office atop Government Tower. The seven members of the Council of Ministers sat silently in comfortable chairs around the room, each alone with his thoughts.
The ministers had been there all the previous day and through the night. They had talked endlessly of peace and war, of good and evil, of life and death. They had argued with each other until their voices had gone, along with their patience. The room air was stale with the sweat of their effort.
Now it was midmorning of the next day, and time was nearly up. The First Among Equals had a decision to make, and so Kerajem was being left to himself for the few moments left.
Kerajem looked down forty-one flights to the busy streets below. It seemed that everyone in the world must be outdoors today, enjoying the suddenly fine weather. Kerajem knew that most of the people down there were government bureaucrats who should have been at their desks on this workday. He smiled slightly. If the smaller wheels who drove the massive machinery of government wanted to take an hour or so off to enjoy the sunshine, then why not? It had been a long, hard winter, and this was the first truly pleasant day the capital had seen in months.
The facts were what they were, and they would not change. That had not stopped several of the ministers from arguing, bargaining for time, hoping against hope that things would work out nevertheless, and that a way out of the crisis would be found.
Kerajem looked up toward the eastern horizon. It was so clear today that he could see all the way to the mountains, which were still white with snow and ice. The mountains were the foothills of the great Kajja Kojja, the range that divided the eastern coast of this continent from the interior plains.
Kerajem knew those mountains well. He had been born among them, in one of the old mining towns. It had been a hard life back then. Kerajem had been drafted to work in the mines at the age of six, as the laws had then required. Children of both sexes were sent into the mines because, being small, they could scramble and wiggle and force themselves into dark, narrow places where grown men could not go. It had been highly dangerous work that provided only the most meager reward to the children’s families.
“You came from there, too, Rikkadar,” Kerajem said over his shoulder. “The mountains. You remember how it was.”
“Yes, First,” the finance minister replied from his chair. He was the only other man in the room above the age of sixty, and he was the only one there who Kerajem thought of as a friend. “That was a long time ago.”
“Not very. A mere matter of decades.” Still facing the mountains, Kerajem looked at his hands. He could not remember a time when he had possessed all ten of his fingers. He might be who he was now, but the mines always found him again whenever he tried to hold a cup or sign his name.
It had been Kerajem’s generation which, when it had come to maturity and power, had at last eased the relentless preparations for war instituted and maintained for millennia by their forefathers. Kerajem himself had helped to form the more liberal policies of modern times when he was younger. There had been great opposition, mostly by the old, the self-interested, and the superstitious, but reform had finally come. As a result, living conditions for the people were generally much better than they had been when Kerajem was a boy.
Social reform had finally come in the conviction that the old stories of doom and destruction had been merely the exaggerated stuff of hoary legend, tales of horror believed only by the stupid, the gullible, and the obsessed. However, the world had discovered the terrible truth just thirty-three years before, when the first signals from space had been detected and the first probes intercepted. Those who would destroy the world were real, and they were coming. Now they were almost