GWOT VII - Hammer Time
Nov. 26th, 2020 01:22 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
drewkittyGWOT VII - Hammer Time
OK, so I can browbeat an Ambassador. That's nice. But I had a much tougher audience to play to, and it was getting painfully difficult to find a way to even get in front of them.
I'd figured out that the police arrangements in the city - whatever they had been prior to the Firecracker - fell into three categories.
Constables or courtesy officers. Sometimes armed, usually not, technically with powers of arrest, often with a head on their shoulders, but used in situations that called for individual officers to work on their own. Very polite people.
Street police. Always armed, sometimes heavily, and used for duties ranging from traffic control to serving warrants. But never, ever alone. Always in numbers, sometimes great numbers.
People's Police. I only knew their title due to overzealous translation. Undercover officers. Constantly following our diplomatic personnel, and assholes like me, anywhere we tried to go. I'd literally seen a constable piss himself when confronted by one. They could walk up to a pack of street police, say a couple words, and the latter would magically disappear, leaving a hole in the air where their armor and guns used to be.
A particular People's Police officer had attached himself to my case. I called him George. His tenacity reminded me of the George who had worked for me at Site so long ago and so far away. He never slept. The surveillance team for the embassy had taken over the apartments on the 2nd floor facing from the north - we'd found out the hard way, when we'd tried to rent just one - and he slept there. Any time I even looked like I might be sticking my head out, here came George. Sometimes alone, often with company, always with a radio earpiece in his right ear.
George didn't play. It was his job to be in eyeshot and preferably earshot whenever I did anything that might bring me into contact with normal Chinese people. Including street police and constables.
Except that first time when he almost cleared leather on me when I fired a blank into the air, I'd never seen a hint that he carried a gun. He obtained the instant, abject cooperation of all Chinese with a whispered word or two. A sentence - in any of five language - sufficed when dealing witih expats. Only in California personnel had he yet met his match, and it puzzled him deeply.
That made it clear. George had to be my contact to the next level. I couldn't get past him, so it would have to be him.
So I invited him to lunch.
Curtly: "I don't eat with Americans."
I saw red. This was my personal policy, and also my national policy. Millions of lives dependent on these temper tantrums.
"I am NOT a fucking American!"
"What are you then?" he asked calmly, and quietly.
"California officer," I said, just as I had in Iowa when committing various acts and crimes. The difference in the eyes of the beholder, and in some cases the victim.
"California is part of America?" he asked again. Still patient.
"No. Not anymore. Let's discuss it. Over lunch. You pick the place."
He turned on his heel and left.
That was odd.
Because for the next hour or so, as I again explored the six block radius around the Embassy within which the constables knew who we were, I didn't see him. His backup, yes, but not him.
He was almost certainly getting instructions.
###
He appeared beside me in the street, with another man in tow. "Mr. Zhou," he introduced, and disappeared.
Mr. Zhou had the most lively eyes I'd yet seen in country. They moved fast, missed nothing. He was dressed in a middle-quality business suit, the kind that would allow him to go into the widest range of places without drawing notice. He had only one tell that I could detect - a single pair of handcuffs in an open leather holster of a type I recognized.
Police detective.
If this was my opening, I had to take it.
"Lunch?" I offered.
"Dinner," he countered. "I will pick you up at six. Be prompt. And alone."
###
The pair of SDF "logistics clerks" watching over my luggage were not best pleased at their duty being extended. I couldn't drag a submachine gun and my token everywhere I went, after all, and now that the Embassy was nominally secure, they stayed in my luggage where they belonged. I hadn't told them about the shock charge wired to the combination lock, but I felt sure they knew. No one but me had the code, an interesting problem in bomb disposal if I didn't come back.
The Embassy Station Chief was less pleased, at the thought of my head of valuable secrets wandering off God Knows Where. I left him with the details, so that someone could protest my kidnap, torture, interrogation and murder.
The Ambassador would have said no, except that I didn't tell her and she had no authority to do so.
###
I wore a very nice middle-range business suit, a handgun in a shoulder holster (it would very much break character not to, even though it would be just useless weight), and a little plastic insert between the molars of two of my back teeth. If bit down on hard... I hoped never to find out.
I brought a burner phone with GPS and GLONASS breadcrumbing and recording. Again, in character. It also had a really crappy but entirely onboard translation program. I also had several thousand dollars in local currency and Euros. Just in case.
I offered to shake Mr. Zhou's hand, and he gave me a fractional bow instead, and gestured me to precede him into the stretch limo.
I boarded. Mr. Zhou got in the front right seat, and the limo moved out into traffic.
Another man was waiting for me.
He made Mr. Zhou look like a dullard. He was dressed in an extremely expensive business suit and carried a gem-encrusted mobile phone. I could see this because of the way he held it, comparing something on the screen to my face. He pocketed it, but did not extend a hand.
"Echo 18," he introduced me. He did not introduce himself.
"Same," I agreed.
The limo rolled smoothly down the road, and the tint of the windows deprived me of the opportunity to see where we were going.
I needed all my attention for this man anyway.
"I would say Welcome to China, but you're not. The enemy of my enemy is not my friend. The victim of my enemy is not my friend either.
"When we destroy America, why should we not destroy California as well?"
Shit. Here. Now. The pitch.
"Is Taiwan part of China?"
"Excuse me?"
"California is as much a part of America as Taiwan is a part of China. A historical relationship. Damaged. Badly. By war and death."
"Go on."
"California is alive because we threatened to destroy America. We had that power. We now have the power to destroy the world. Likely you know this."
The implied threat. Not as subtle as I hoped to be, but I could take no chances. The survival of California depended on it.
He nodded. I had gotten the formality out of the way.
"We want to avoid this. We don't want a war. But no one ever prevented a war by looking weak, or hoping it would go away. China has every right to her revenge. But is that revenge worth losing China over?"
"Why does California plant colonies all over the world?"
"Insurance. For when America and China destroy each other, and we are caught in the middle. We want some part of California to survive. Maybe not physically, maybe we cannot save our twenty million people. But we will save what we can."
There was another reason. But that reason lay close to the heart of the Box I kept. I asked a question instead.
"If China doesn't want us here, why were we permitted to open an embassy?"
"We thought you were here to represent the Americans."
Oh shit. Scenario 4B.
"We can't. And won't. But we are worth talking to, in our own right."
"Prove it."
"There's been enough death," I parried. Damn it, this would have to happen when I didn't have secure comms!
He stopped and looked at me.
"You have weapons of mass destruction? It is not a bluff?"
"Yes and yes."
"We are across an ocean from you."
"So was America."
His face darkened and he clenched his teeth. With an effort of will, he unclenched them slightly.
"We thought it was the old story. Would America trade Taipei for Los Angeles?"
"America traded San Francisco for an excuse to murder a hundred cities."
"So California not worth much to them."
"Never was. American power has always been lopsided, the balance well east of the Mississippi River. East Coast lords and West Coast upstarts. Flyover country in the middle."
"Now California is the flyover country. Missile flyover. Why does your Air Force cooperate with American air defense?"
"Why does your air defense cooperate with UK space reconnaissance? Mutual advantage. But such arrangements can stop in an instant."
"What would it take, for China to dictate the moment?"
There was his pitch. Would California betray America?
Of course we already had.
There was the second order implication. Would we sit idly by and watch our brothers and sisters to the east get vaporized?
My instructions from the Governor had been crystal clear.
"Nothing is off the table, if there are assurances that California will survive. The problem is fallout, intercontinental and trans-Pacific."
We'd done our homework. Even without deliberate targeting, a full nuclear exchange would kill California just as certainly. It might take a year or two longer, a year of famine and starvation and desperation and radiation counts. But the outcome would be the same. A land so devastated that even Death was dead, unrotting corpses amid unharvested fields.
"We have a basis for discussion. Contact your government. I assume your Ambassador is window decoration?"
"No," I stated bluntly. "She is here to establish an Embassy and open diplomatic relations with the highest levels of your government."
"Then who and what are you?"
"As close as you will ever get to talking to a member of our Strategic Defense Force."
With those words, I committed treason, and made myself liable to a bullet in the neck. I hoped I would get a chance to explain before some local SDF officer took emergency action.
It was true. That was what made it treason.
"The right hand, a woman and a pleasing face. The left hand, a mass murderer and, what is your term, genocider."
"Genocidaire, from French. From Rwanda."
"And also China, and California. Tell me, how did you feel when we struck your Midwest?"
Another test.
"Not my Midwest. I was afraid for my people, I had ordered them into shelter. I had only a few thousand lives I was responsible for. Not like this."
"Did we have the right?"
I shrugged. I'd met survivors of that retaliatory attack, some crippled, some horribly burned. Some whole in body and broken in mind.
"Yes. But there is a point where it needs to stop. The Americans need to stop. Russia needs to not start. China may have the right, but the right to choose is the right not to choose as well."
"America plans another pre-emptive attack. We have proof of this. We are barely hanging on now, with great pain. We will not survive a second sneak attack.
"The only reason we have not attacked already is that we are buying time.
"Just like California. But your measly twenty million lives are nothing against our six hundred million."
"There is your error, sir," I retorted. "'Lives do not add in integers, they add in infinities.'" I did not credit the quote to Lois McMaster Bujold, I did not wish to cloud the issue.
"Explain."
"Our wars so far have killed millions. They have scarred the soul of humanity, they have damaged the planet. A hundred years from now, children will get cancer and die before they grow up from eating a contaminated fish. Yet food is scarce enough that we cannot give up the sea. So many people who will not get the chance to be what they could have been, what they should have been. Nations too. We could be exploring space peacefully, we could be developing technologies and caring for each other. Instead, we are like men with guns in a crowded room - watching the man in the corner with the rifle get drunker and drunker. He has already used it once. What is to keep him from using it again?"
"America."
"America," I confirmed. "First user of nuclear weapons, first to start a nuclear war. We have to get the rifle away from him somehow."
"California is America's enemy?"
"As long as America threatens to destroy the world, everyone is America's enemy. Some just don't know it yet."
"And China? What of our rifle? And our volley?"
"Notice that the American invasion force backed off."
"Too many problems at home to continue foreign adventurism. Can California make those problems worse? As you did in Iowa?"
My brain hurt as I struggled to see that particular perspective on the Expeditionary Force. We'd tied down divisions of American troops, all right, but that wasn't what we had come there to do.
Or was it? I'd been sent to stop genocide, but I'd certainly created a mess doing it. Had the Commanding General, Expeditionary Forces been ready to step in at any moment, using _RCS Panoptes_ to see that things were going well, and that as long as I did what he wanted, he wouldn't apply either the brakes or the cattle prod?
"Yes," I said, committing some hundreds of Bear Force troops to die, killing thousands of Americans along the way, and encouraging tens of thousands to kill each other in pointless petty squabbles. Their only meaning, a distraction, like giving the man with the rifle jock itch.
"So perhaps the Muslims are right, perhaps the enemy of my enemy can be my friend."
"And perhaps they are right another way. If you save the life of one man, you save the life of the entire world."
It was his turn for his brain to hurt.
"California wants ... peace?"
"Enough to kill for it, in job lots. Sudden non-cooperation with NORAD, and a destabilization campaign within America. Not enough. Not enough to disarm America. We must break Trident."
Trident. Named for a god's weapon. Killer of cities. Still fully operational.
But Trident had two weaknesses we had identified.
A ballistic missile submarine must go to missile depth to fire.
A ballistic missile submarine could not stay on patrol forever. She had to go back for overhaul and supplies.
"How? Trident is unkillable, unstoppable. Even if we had ballistic missile defense which we do not anymore."
I fractionally shook my head.
He caught it.
This was too sensitive a subject to discuss outside a truly secure room.
"Enough of business. Dinner. I have picked the restaurant. I have notified your security detail, so that they can be nearby."
###
The food was ass.
I'd grown up on California Chinese food. Not the Americanized dreck, but the good stuff.
This was Cantonese. And my host delighted in getting me to take bites of utter swill, and THEN telling me what I had just eaten.
I ate shit with a grin. And tolerated the burning as if it were a pepper spray exercise.
It was only at the very end that I was able to get my revenge.
"There was a charming young lady in the hotel room when I first checked in. I have not seen her again. Is she quite all right?"
He'd had a briefing pack all right. He didn't try to pretend that he didn't know who I was talking about.
"Yes. She's fine."
My brief descent into business tolerated, he went back to discussing the menu, and my social obligation to try most of it.
###
Fat, bloated and feeling utterly disgusted with myself, our hosts and my species, approximately in that order, I slunk out of the hired taxi for the gates.
The courtesy constable on duty was clearly uncomfortable in her newly issued tightly fitting uniform. The buttons were about to give their all to try to keep her bosom contained, and fail.
She saluted crisply as I passed her, a look of relief on her face when I waved a hand weakly in reply.
Busted. So to speak. But not quite out of the game yet.
Well, that was one life I'd tried to save tonight.
How many thousands I'd killed would remain to be seen.
OK, so I can browbeat an Ambassador. That's nice. But I had a much tougher audience to play to, and it was getting painfully difficult to find a way to even get in front of them.
I'd figured out that the police arrangements in the city - whatever they had been prior to the Firecracker - fell into three categories.
Constables or courtesy officers. Sometimes armed, usually not, technically with powers of arrest, often with a head on their shoulders, but used in situations that called for individual officers to work on their own. Very polite people.
Street police. Always armed, sometimes heavily, and used for duties ranging from traffic control to serving warrants. But never, ever alone. Always in numbers, sometimes great numbers.
People's Police. I only knew their title due to overzealous translation. Undercover officers. Constantly following our diplomatic personnel, and assholes like me, anywhere we tried to go. I'd literally seen a constable piss himself when confronted by one. They could walk up to a pack of street police, say a couple words, and the latter would magically disappear, leaving a hole in the air where their armor and guns used to be.
A particular People's Police officer had attached himself to my case. I called him George. His tenacity reminded me of the George who had worked for me at Site so long ago and so far away. He never slept. The surveillance team for the embassy had taken over the apartments on the 2nd floor facing from the north - we'd found out the hard way, when we'd tried to rent just one - and he slept there. Any time I even looked like I might be sticking my head out, here came George. Sometimes alone, often with company, always with a radio earpiece in his right ear.
George didn't play. It was his job to be in eyeshot and preferably earshot whenever I did anything that might bring me into contact with normal Chinese people. Including street police and constables.
Except that first time when he almost cleared leather on me when I fired a blank into the air, I'd never seen a hint that he carried a gun. He obtained the instant, abject cooperation of all Chinese with a whispered word or two. A sentence - in any of five language - sufficed when dealing witih expats. Only in California personnel had he yet met his match, and it puzzled him deeply.
That made it clear. George had to be my contact to the next level. I couldn't get past him, so it would have to be him.
So I invited him to lunch.
Curtly: "I don't eat with Americans."
I saw red. This was my personal policy, and also my national policy. Millions of lives dependent on these temper tantrums.
"I am NOT a fucking American!"
"What are you then?" he asked calmly, and quietly.
"California officer," I said, just as I had in Iowa when committing various acts and crimes. The difference in the eyes of the beholder, and in some cases the victim.
"California is part of America?" he asked again. Still patient.
"No. Not anymore. Let's discuss it. Over lunch. You pick the place."
He turned on his heel and left.
That was odd.
Because for the next hour or so, as I again explored the six block radius around the Embassy within which the constables knew who we were, I didn't see him. His backup, yes, but not him.
He was almost certainly getting instructions.
###
He appeared beside me in the street, with another man in tow. "Mr. Zhou," he introduced, and disappeared.
Mr. Zhou had the most lively eyes I'd yet seen in country. They moved fast, missed nothing. He was dressed in a middle-quality business suit, the kind that would allow him to go into the widest range of places without drawing notice. He had only one tell that I could detect - a single pair of handcuffs in an open leather holster of a type I recognized.
Police detective.
If this was my opening, I had to take it.
"Lunch?" I offered.
"Dinner," he countered. "I will pick you up at six. Be prompt. And alone."
###
The pair of SDF "logistics clerks" watching over my luggage were not best pleased at their duty being extended. I couldn't drag a submachine gun and my token everywhere I went, after all, and now that the Embassy was nominally secure, they stayed in my luggage where they belonged. I hadn't told them about the shock charge wired to the combination lock, but I felt sure they knew. No one but me had the code, an interesting problem in bomb disposal if I didn't come back.
The Embassy Station Chief was less pleased, at the thought of my head of valuable secrets wandering off God Knows Where. I left him with the details, so that someone could protest my kidnap, torture, interrogation and murder.
The Ambassador would have said no, except that I didn't tell her and she had no authority to do so.
###
I wore a very nice middle-range business suit, a handgun in a shoulder holster (it would very much break character not to, even though it would be just useless weight), and a little plastic insert between the molars of two of my back teeth. If bit down on hard... I hoped never to find out.
I brought a burner phone with GPS and GLONASS breadcrumbing and recording. Again, in character. It also had a really crappy but entirely onboard translation program. I also had several thousand dollars in local currency and Euros. Just in case.
I offered to shake Mr. Zhou's hand, and he gave me a fractional bow instead, and gestured me to precede him into the stretch limo.
I boarded. Mr. Zhou got in the front right seat, and the limo moved out into traffic.
Another man was waiting for me.
He made Mr. Zhou look like a dullard. He was dressed in an extremely expensive business suit and carried a gem-encrusted mobile phone. I could see this because of the way he held it, comparing something on the screen to my face. He pocketed it, but did not extend a hand.
"Echo 18," he introduced me. He did not introduce himself.
"Same," I agreed.
The limo rolled smoothly down the road, and the tint of the windows deprived me of the opportunity to see where we were going.
I needed all my attention for this man anyway.
"I would say Welcome to China, but you're not. The enemy of my enemy is not my friend. The victim of my enemy is not my friend either.
"When we destroy America, why should we not destroy California as well?"
Shit. Here. Now. The pitch.
"Is Taiwan part of China?"
"Excuse me?"
"California is as much a part of America as Taiwan is a part of China. A historical relationship. Damaged. Badly. By war and death."
"Go on."
"California is alive because we threatened to destroy America. We had that power. We now have the power to destroy the world. Likely you know this."
The implied threat. Not as subtle as I hoped to be, but I could take no chances. The survival of California depended on it.
He nodded. I had gotten the formality out of the way.
"We want to avoid this. We don't want a war. But no one ever prevented a war by looking weak, or hoping it would go away. China has every right to her revenge. But is that revenge worth losing China over?"
"Why does California plant colonies all over the world?"
"Insurance. For when America and China destroy each other, and we are caught in the middle. We want some part of California to survive. Maybe not physically, maybe we cannot save our twenty million people. But we will save what we can."
There was another reason. But that reason lay close to the heart of the Box I kept. I asked a question instead.
"If China doesn't want us here, why were we permitted to open an embassy?"
"We thought you were here to represent the Americans."
Oh shit. Scenario 4B.
"We can't. And won't. But we are worth talking to, in our own right."
"Prove it."
"There's been enough death," I parried. Damn it, this would have to happen when I didn't have secure comms!
He stopped and looked at me.
"You have weapons of mass destruction? It is not a bluff?"
"Yes and yes."
"We are across an ocean from you."
"So was America."
His face darkened and he clenched his teeth. With an effort of will, he unclenched them slightly.
"We thought it was the old story. Would America trade Taipei for Los Angeles?"
"America traded San Francisco for an excuse to murder a hundred cities."
"So California not worth much to them."
"Never was. American power has always been lopsided, the balance well east of the Mississippi River. East Coast lords and West Coast upstarts. Flyover country in the middle."
"Now California is the flyover country. Missile flyover. Why does your Air Force cooperate with American air defense?"
"Why does your air defense cooperate with UK space reconnaissance? Mutual advantage. But such arrangements can stop in an instant."
"What would it take, for China to dictate the moment?"
There was his pitch. Would California betray America?
Of course we already had.
There was the second order implication. Would we sit idly by and watch our brothers and sisters to the east get vaporized?
My instructions from the Governor had been crystal clear.
"Nothing is off the table, if there are assurances that California will survive. The problem is fallout, intercontinental and trans-Pacific."
We'd done our homework. Even without deliberate targeting, a full nuclear exchange would kill California just as certainly. It might take a year or two longer, a year of famine and starvation and desperation and radiation counts. But the outcome would be the same. A land so devastated that even Death was dead, unrotting corpses amid unharvested fields.
"We have a basis for discussion. Contact your government. I assume your Ambassador is window decoration?"
"No," I stated bluntly. "She is here to establish an Embassy and open diplomatic relations with the highest levels of your government."
"Then who and what are you?"
"As close as you will ever get to talking to a member of our Strategic Defense Force."
With those words, I committed treason, and made myself liable to a bullet in the neck. I hoped I would get a chance to explain before some local SDF officer took emergency action.
It was true. That was what made it treason.
"The right hand, a woman and a pleasing face. The left hand, a mass murderer and, what is your term, genocider."
"Genocidaire, from French. From Rwanda."
"And also China, and California. Tell me, how did you feel when we struck your Midwest?"
Another test.
"Not my Midwest. I was afraid for my people, I had ordered them into shelter. I had only a few thousand lives I was responsible for. Not like this."
"Did we have the right?"
I shrugged. I'd met survivors of that retaliatory attack, some crippled, some horribly burned. Some whole in body and broken in mind.
"Yes. But there is a point where it needs to stop. The Americans need to stop. Russia needs to not start. China may have the right, but the right to choose is the right not to choose as well."
"America plans another pre-emptive attack. We have proof of this. We are barely hanging on now, with great pain. We will not survive a second sneak attack.
"The only reason we have not attacked already is that we are buying time.
"Just like California. But your measly twenty million lives are nothing against our six hundred million."
"There is your error, sir," I retorted. "'Lives do not add in integers, they add in infinities.'" I did not credit the quote to Lois McMaster Bujold, I did not wish to cloud the issue.
"Explain."
"Our wars so far have killed millions. They have scarred the soul of humanity, they have damaged the planet. A hundred years from now, children will get cancer and die before they grow up from eating a contaminated fish. Yet food is scarce enough that we cannot give up the sea. So many people who will not get the chance to be what they could have been, what they should have been. Nations too. We could be exploring space peacefully, we could be developing technologies and caring for each other. Instead, we are like men with guns in a crowded room - watching the man in the corner with the rifle get drunker and drunker. He has already used it once. What is to keep him from using it again?"
"America."
"America," I confirmed. "First user of nuclear weapons, first to start a nuclear war. We have to get the rifle away from him somehow."
"California is America's enemy?"
"As long as America threatens to destroy the world, everyone is America's enemy. Some just don't know it yet."
"And China? What of our rifle? And our volley?"
"Notice that the American invasion force backed off."
"Too many problems at home to continue foreign adventurism. Can California make those problems worse? As you did in Iowa?"
My brain hurt as I struggled to see that particular perspective on the Expeditionary Force. We'd tied down divisions of American troops, all right, but that wasn't what we had come there to do.
Or was it? I'd been sent to stop genocide, but I'd certainly created a mess doing it. Had the Commanding General, Expeditionary Forces been ready to step in at any moment, using _RCS Panoptes_ to see that things were going well, and that as long as I did what he wanted, he wouldn't apply either the brakes or the cattle prod?
"Yes," I said, committing some hundreds of Bear Force troops to die, killing thousands of Americans along the way, and encouraging tens of thousands to kill each other in pointless petty squabbles. Their only meaning, a distraction, like giving the man with the rifle jock itch.
"So perhaps the Muslims are right, perhaps the enemy of my enemy can be my friend."
"And perhaps they are right another way. If you save the life of one man, you save the life of the entire world."
It was his turn for his brain to hurt.
"California wants ... peace?"
"Enough to kill for it, in job lots. Sudden non-cooperation with NORAD, and a destabilization campaign within America. Not enough. Not enough to disarm America. We must break Trident."
Trident. Named for a god's weapon. Killer of cities. Still fully operational.
But Trident had two weaknesses we had identified.
A ballistic missile submarine must go to missile depth to fire.
A ballistic missile submarine could not stay on patrol forever. She had to go back for overhaul and supplies.
"How? Trident is unkillable, unstoppable. Even if we had ballistic missile defense which we do not anymore."
I fractionally shook my head.
He caught it.
This was too sensitive a subject to discuss outside a truly secure room.
"Enough of business. Dinner. I have picked the restaurant. I have notified your security detail, so that they can be nearby."
###
The food was ass.
I'd grown up on California Chinese food. Not the Americanized dreck, but the good stuff.
This was Cantonese. And my host delighted in getting me to take bites of utter swill, and THEN telling me what I had just eaten.
I ate shit with a grin. And tolerated the burning as if it were a pepper spray exercise.
It was only at the very end that I was able to get my revenge.
"There was a charming young lady in the hotel room when I first checked in. I have not seen her again. Is she quite all right?"
He'd had a briefing pack all right. He didn't try to pretend that he didn't know who I was talking about.
"Yes. She's fine."
My brief descent into business tolerated, he went back to discussing the menu, and my social obligation to try most of it.
###
Fat, bloated and feeling utterly disgusted with myself, our hosts and my species, approximately in that order, I slunk out of the hired taxi for the gates.
The courtesy constable on duty was clearly uncomfortable in her newly issued tightly fitting uniform. The buttons were about to give their all to try to keep her bosom contained, and fail.
She saluted crisply as I passed her, a look of relief on her face when I waved a hand weakly in reply.
Busted. So to speak. But not quite out of the game yet.
Well, that was one life I'd tried to save tonight.
How many thousands I'd killed would remain to be seen.
