Without warning

The blustering tone nailed it. ‘Oh, General,’ said Kipper. ‘Oh, dear me… We are in trouble, aren’t we? My apologies – I mean it. I came in here all ready to beat you down. But now I see what I need to do is give you an exit plan, right?’

A long, uncomfortable silence greeted that, broken in the end by McCutcheon.

‘Keep talking.’

‘An offer?’ said Kip. ‘Truth be known, I don’t have one. This has sort of caught me by surprise, but if my colleagues agree to let me take this on the fly…’ He glanced sideways at Dave and Marv, who nodded, and at the state government people, who were now more obviously behind him. ‘Look, I guess, if you let the councillors go, and apologise for the inconvenience, I could do my very best to make sure that they don’t make a meal of it. Unless you’ve tortured them or something – you haven’t done that, have you?’

He was joking but Blackstone took genuine umbrage. ‘They’ve been quartered more comfortably than any of my people, I’ll tell you that.’

‘They had Xbox and satellite TV,’ offered McCutcheon.

‘Well then, I’m sure they’ll see the upside of their imprisonment,’ quipped the engineer. ‘Look, being serious, I can understand why you felt the need to take them out of the decision loop, but you just can’t do that. Let them go. Put them back on the Executive Committee…’ He held a hand up to stave off any objections. ‘But in the meantime we’ll set up an Operational Committee, with my heads of department, some guys from the state capital, and whoever you feel the need to have on it, and the OC can do the actual grunt work of ensuring the power stays on and people get fed. Okay? Executive can discuss… I dunno… the meaning of life… but at Operations we’ll actually get stuff done. Like assigning security to food distribution,’ he finished, pointedly.

Blackstone let out a long breath and leaned across to consult in a lowered voice with Major McCutcheon. After a few moments of muttered discussion, he leaned forward and nodded. ‘All right. You square it with the councillors, or it doesn’t happen. Believe me, Admiral Ritchie is going to be a lot less interested in what’s happening here than the Middle East for the next little while.’

‘Well, let’s hope for your sake we don’t have to find out.’

‘Is that all, Mr Kipper?’ asked Blackstone. ‘Can we get on with the meeting now?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘All this 1984 bullshit has to stop, too. Travel permits, monitoring people’s phone calls and shutting down the media. It’s convenient in the short term – God knows I understand that – but it is a road to hell, General. And it has to stop here and now.’

‘Are you crazy?’ replied Blackstone. ‘Even in normal times, during natural disasters, the government reserved the right to temporarily restrict travel, to federalise services, ration supplies and limit communications. You surely can’t be serious about letting people run around as they please? Think how that scene at your food bank the other morning would’ve turned out if just anybody had been allowed to turn up. Some controls are necessary. Especially given that we have a fallout cloud from the Middle East making its way around the world.’

Kipper leaned back and tapped his pen on the table. Some of what Blackstone said made sense, but he couldn’t help but feel they were paving a path to their own doom with good intentions.

‘The fallout, we’ll deal with,’ he said. ‘We have some experience of it now, thanks to the pollutant storms. They were a bit of a left-handed gift that way, I suppose. But I am serious, General – this police-state bullshit won’t stand. It weakens us in the long run. I’m going to suggest that one of the first things the Executive Committee could do – when it’s re-formed with its original, elected members, is look at exactly what restrictions are necessary.’

Blackstone looked like he was going to choke.

‘Or we can take it up the line to Admiral Ritchie,’ Kip suggested helpfully.

‘Goddamn, this is why we need a proper chain of command,’ grumbled Blackstone. ‘These decisions should be no-brainers. Instead, I’ve got a bunch of no-brain pen-pushers telling me how to do my job.’

Kip sensed Marv Basco stirring beside him. His sanitation chief was slow to anger, but he did hold grudges and he wasn’t one for ignoring a personal slight. There was no sense in letting this get out of hand, seeing as how things had gone so much better than they’d expected.

‘Listen, if an elected official tried on this KGB stuff, fine. There’s checks and balances to constrain them, and they can always get ass-whupped at the polls. But you’re not elected, General. You have force. But you have no power. Nobody consented to being ruled by you, and that’s what’s been happening. Rule by decree. It has to end. We have to get back to first principles, now more than ever.’