A chorus of boos and shouted catcalls sounded from the surrounding rings of seats … but Alexander heard cheers and applause as well. It was impossible at this point in the proceedings to calculate whether the Senate was going to go along with his recommendation … or side with the newly constituted Peace Party.
What he’d not anticipated, though, was that this session was going to become a referendum on the very survival of the Corps.
“The Marines,” Devereaux continued, “may once have had a place in history, a role to play within the disparate collection of military services that once served the United States of America.” The huge, holographically projected face smiled down beatifically at the watching senators. “They were very good, I understand, at scrambling up into the rigging of ancient warships, back in the Age of Sail, and shooting enemy officers on other ships. Some centuries later, they served as a kind of police force on American wet-navy vessels, and as ceremonial guards at American embassies in other countries. I suspect they were chosen because of how pretty their red, white, and blue dress uniforms were. …”
Chuckles and isolated bits of laughter rose from several quarters, and Alexander scowled. Damn the woman. Playing politics with the Corps at a deadly time like this. …
“Many of us love and admire the Marines, admire them for their sense of duty, their sense of tradition going back over eleven hundred years, now. But even as we admire them, we must admit to ourselves that these Marines have never really fitted in with their brothers-at-arms in the other services … the Army, the Air Force, even with the Navy, though historically they draw their strongest support from them. The Marines, admittedly, have served us well in the past, but we see from this incident just brought to our attention that the U.S. Marines are … extremist in their views. And this is not a time, Senators, for extremists.
“You see, the Marines, as we have seen repeatedly in the past, are not … not team players, as the old expression puts it. They take a disproportionate share of scarce resources and financing for their own service needs—for training, for supply, for transport, for administration—and give nothing back.
“They do nothing that the Army could not do just as well. Once, perhaps, the argument could be made that the Marines served a vital role as a ready amphibious landing force. In the days of wet navies, they could land on any beach, anywhere in the world, creating a beachhead through which regular Army forces could arrive and deploy.
“But the day of amphibious landings is long, long past, Senators. Marines have for centuries deployed through suborbital transports or orbit-to-surface landing craft, not wet-navy boats. Their very name—Marines—reflects a bygone age when ‘marine soldiers’ could be deployed on Navy ships to carry out missions on Earth’s seas. Why, I wonder, deploy them into space? Because the Navy builds and operates the majority of our military spacecraft? Is that reason enough to keep them … like aging pets? Marines, I submit, are anachronisms, a piece of our past as anachronistic as armored knights on horseback.
“But more than being military anachronisms, I submit, Senators, that Marines are political anachronisms. Ask any Marine. Ask General Alexander, up there in the visitor’s gallery, who brought this affair to our attention. Their first loyalties are not to Humankind, nor to our Commonwealth, but to an outmoded political concept called America, and to the Marine Corps itself.
“And that, Senators, that makes them, to my way of thinking, just a little dangerous.”
Again, that smattering of applause. Alexander closed his eyes, trying to feel the emotion in the room. How many supported Devereaux? How many supported the lame duck administration?
How many simply hadn’t yet made up their minds?
“Senators,” Devereaux went on, “the Marines like to present themselves as being the guardians of our liberty. But when their heavily armed mobile base appears off our Ring docking ports, when Marines in their pretty uniforms and with their steely expressions suddenly walk the corridors of our orbital habitats … how safe, how free can we actually feel?”
Alexander’s fist closed. He nearly stood, nearly shouted protest, but forced himself to remain in his seat. Damn it,
He’d ordered Skybase to transit out of paraspace and dock at Earth Ring. It was unusual, but it was the fastest means of getting here. Strictly speaking, Skybase was not a space craft, but a deep space habitat, similar to the colony facilities in use in the Asteroid Belt and the mining settlements out in the Oort Cloud. It had no motive power of its own, other than station-keeping thrusters, and it required a small fleet of tractor tugs to move it around in normal space. The bulky structure was designed to dock periodically at major port facilities—those large enough to receive it—for resupply and maintenance.
As for Marines entering the Ring, well, hell, of course he’d permitted liberty for the base personnel. The men and women under his command were people, not robots. Skybase had been deployed in paraspace for fifteen months—five longer than usual, and it was about time the crew had a chance to go shoreside for a little downtime.
But Devereaux’s tirade was continuing, unfolding like a thunderstorm. “I submit that the Marines, far from being guardians of our liberty, represent a clear and present danger to our cherished way of life. For centuries now, the Marines have not even been a part of our world culture, not in the way that Army soldiers or Air Force High Guardsmen are. They don’t, they can’t fit in. They live for their precious Corps, maintain their own self-contained culture, their own laws, their own religion, even … and rarely mingle with civilians. Indeed, I suspect many of our Marine friends consider mere civilians to be somehow inferior to them.
“The Army is much more connected to our culture, our society, than are the Marines. Marines are extremists in all of their views, and anytime you have extremists, you run the risk of a total disconnection with society.
“And that, my friends, is dangerous. A danger greater than Theocratic fundamentalism, a danger more sinister than this so-called Xul threat! How are we to maintain our freedom with these trained killers in our midst?”
Gods above and gods below. Did the creature just like the sound of her own voice, or did she really mean even half of the crap spewing from that ugly hole in her face?
Furious now, Alexander opened an inner window, calling up a bio on Marie Devereaux. She’d been born, he saw, in Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu, which was located in the province of Quebec. The old sovereign nation of Quebec had finally joined the old North American Federation in the twenty-fifth century, but never had been wholly comfortable with that union. Quebec had never accepted statehood, as had several of her Canadian sister-provinces. After a plebiscite, however, the 2740 Act of Common Union had granted all of North America full and equal representation in the Commonwealth Senate, which was how she’d ended up as a senator. She’d also been an officer in the last war with the Chinese Hegemony, rising to the rank of general in the Commonwealth Army, which explained how she’d wangled a slot as a representative on the Military Advisory Council.
There was nothing, though, to suggest why she had such a hair up her ass about the Marine Corps.
Or possibly …
Okay, that might explain it. Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu was located south of the St. Lawrence—in a part of Quebec once and briefly known as occupied Quebec.
That reflected a bit of history dating all the way back to the First UN War, back in the twenty-first century. Quebec had invaded the then-United States as part of a much larger UN offensive involving Mexico, France, and Japan; the U.S. Army had handily knocked back the invaders, then swept in and occupied everything north to the St. Lawrence, from Lake St. Francis to New Brunswick.
That had been the army. But, he noted, elements of the U.S. Marine Corps had assisted with the occupation in the late 2050s.
Damn it! That was ancient history! He knew the PanEuros and the Islamics tended to hold grudges that lasted for thousands of years, but he hadn’t