He read further.
Clearly, Marie Devereaux was ambitious. She’d been President Rodriguez’s principal political rival for five years, now, and in the general elections three days ago, the wholesale defection of her Peace Party from its sixty-year alliance with the Liberty Party to the more conservative Constitutionals had won the election for the Constitutionals. Rodriguez, a staunch conservative, would be out in two months; Sherrilyn Simmons, the new president elect, was a liberal but a hard-line fiscal conservative … and an anti-militarist.
That must be it. Devereaux supported Simmons. More, she was positioning herself to be noticed by the new administration. If she were seen as a champion of cutting back the military—principally by eliminating or severely restricting the Marine Corps—she was all but assured of a strong position within the new government. Hell, she might even be angling for a shot at the presidency herself, eight years down the road.
The hell of it was, the election results of the other day were being widely interpreted by the news media as a rejection of the hardliner conservative stance against the Islamic Theocracy. That was scarcely a surprise; lots of people, Alexander included, had some doubts about the nature and the necessity of the current war.
But the media loved the word “mandate,” and the election was being presented as a mandate to end the ill-starred war with the Theocracy … and, what was more, to draw down on the military in order to banish any future risk of interstellar war—whether it be with the Theocrats, or with the Xul.
Disarming in the face of a clear and imminent danger. From Alexander’s perspective, that was sheer lunacy … but he’d seen it before, and knew enough history to know that the same thing had happened time after time after time throughout history, going back long before there’d been a Marine Corps.
The problem was that sooner or later, Humankind would face an enemy that didn’t give a damn if humans were unarmed or not, and which would be strong enough and technologically advanced enough to send humanity the way of the dinosaurs.
An enemy, for instance, like the Xul.
Devereaux, he realized, was still speaking, but it sounded like she was on the point of wrapping things up. “Senators, this proposal placed before us this morning by Lieutenant General Alexander and his staff should be, must be rejected. We cannot act preemptively against the Xul. When they come, if they come, we must trust to the gentle art of diplomacy to convince them that we are no threat to them, that we and they can share this vast Galaxy without threat or dominance of one over the other.
“Furthermore, I submit that the Marines themselves should be allowed to retire, to fade away into the mists of history … and to cease once and for all in their meddling and in their interference in the modern affairs and political ministrations of a united Humankind! It is, in my humble opinion, Marine belligerence, their martial spirit and outlook, their tendency to look at anything strange or unknown as a military foe that threatens the peace more than any presumed threat by an ancient and distant alien empire!”
Devereaux sat down, and a moment later the high-vaulted Senate chamber filled with a roar of applause. There were jeers and boos as well, but it sounded to Alexander’s ear as though the senator from Quebec had successfully swung the majority to her way of thinking.
He thought-clicked a request to speak.
It took several moments for the noise to die away. A number of the senators in the boxes nearer to the visitor’s gallery, he could see, were looking up at him expectantly. Maybe they were just waiting to see if he would react to Devereaux’s tirade with a tirade of his own. Politics could be boring, and maybe this sort of infighting was the only entertainment they could expect this day.
He considered a tirade, a broadside in return, but dismissed the idea. That would be fighting on ground of her choosing.
But he had to respond. …
“General Alexander,” Ronald Chien, the Senate president said. “You have a reply or a rebuttal?”
Slowly, he stood up, and now an immense image of him towered over the assembly. He tried not to look at it. The scowl, the craggy eyebrows, the jut of the chin all conspired to make him look angry, even darkly sinister, and that made him self-conscious.
“Ladies and gentlemen of the Senate,” he began, keeping his voice low, “I am not, of course, a member of this body. I am a guest and, I suppose, a kind of expert witness, whom you have kindly invited to come here and share my views on the Argo incident, and on the necessity of adopting War Plan 102–08.” A babble of voices, protests, and catcalls rose, and he shouted through the noise. “Yes, necessity! Because if we duck back into our shells and ignore the crisis before us, I promise you that we will cease to exist as a species, that you, me, and every man, woman, and child in this system, on the world beneath us, and among the stars around us, will be hunted down and exterminated!
“But before I get to that, I feel that I must comment, briefly, on some of the things Madam Devereaux has said. You see … as it happens, I agree with her, in two important ways, at least.”
At that moment, the Senate chamber became deathly silent. Currently, there were within the Commonwealth government 494 senators, two representing each state, district, major orbital colony, and world within the Commonwealth, and even some major corporate entities as well. Each of those senators had his or her own oval seating box, and each was accompanied by his or her own entourage of secretaries and personal assistants. Several thousand people were watching Alexander at that moment in complete and utter silence.
And a far vaster audience, he knew, was present virtually, watching through their personal links from home.
“Madam Devereaux has said that she believes Marines to be ‘a little dangerous.’ I really must take exception to that. Marines are not a little dangerous. We are very dangerous. We are trained to kill, and we are very, very good at what we do.
“She has also called us extremists, pointed out that we are not a part of the overall culture of Humankind, and suggested that our extremism is more of a threat than are the Xul.
“Extremists? Maybe so. We are extreme in our pride. We are extreme—I would say we are insufferable—in our devotion to our Brotherhood, to one another, and to what we stand for. We are extremists in that way, in the depth of our devotion, to our Corps, to our traditions, and to the memory of those Marines who’ve gone before, to the blood shed by all of the Marines who have served in the past eleven hundred years.
“And we are extremists when it comes to our devotion to duty, to service, to country, to you senators, and to the people and the government you represent.
“Marines are different from the men and women of the other branches of service. I admit that. I am proud of that. And that distinction is an important one.
“In the Army, you have riflemen … and you have supply clerks, and you have cooks, and you have electronics specialists and sims technicians and cartographers and comm personnel and pilots and drivers and military police and all the rest. What is it, now … four, maybe five hundred distinct military specialties?
“In the Marines, though, it’s different. We have specialization skills, yes … but in the Marines every man and woman is a rifleman first. I don’t care if a Marine is unloading cargo pallets at a spaceport, or flying an A-410 Kestrel, or programming combat sims at Skybase, or sneaking drones through a Stargate into a Xul base at the Galactic Core. I don’t care if that Marine is a general officer, or fresh out of boot camp. He or she is a Marine combat rifleman first.
“I daresay General Lisa Devi, the General of the Army, would not call herself a soldier. The General of the Aerospace Force would not call himself an aerospaceman. The Chief of Naval operations does not call himself a sailor. General McCulloch, the Commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps, however, is damned proud to