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When six of the most important people in the country are all looking at the same television screen with varying levels of distress, it is never a good idea to slam a door. Yet, that was exactly the thing that Will Straw had just done. The Foreign Secretary had jumped a full foot in the air and was now giving the unfortunate Chief of Staff a look of furious contempt.

“Hardly the time to piss about,” Mandelson hissed, “you’re not even really supposed to be down h-“

The Prime Minister – who had been the only person in the room not to have had a minor attack of apoplexy at the bang – silenced him with a dismissive gesture. Her gaze had not deviated from the screen in front of her, which was showing increasingly erratic, static-filled overview, of several rapidly moving dots flying towards Novaya Gorizont.

“Can we get better feed from other installations?” she asked Admiral West.

The Chief of the Defence Staff shook his head as Straw took a seat at the far end of the table. It was already approaching midnight, which meant that the sun would be rising over the Chinese coast. Straw avoided West’s good eye, the other one having been a victim of that last, bloody, retreat of attrition through the Hindu Kush.

“Sadly not, Prime Minister,” the Admiral replied, “TARANIS-V was seriously damaged during the Kokoro Incident last month. Three of the eyes still work, but they cannot be manipulated so they’re now permanently pointing earthward towards the key Siberian Technocracy military bases.”

“Fucking Abramovich,” Mandelson swore, “we’d have been able to have diplomatically isolated Xi’ian years ago if he hadn’t had embarked on that bloody Gekko programme.”

“They were always going to get around it Peter,” the Home Secretary said. “It was not the fault of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in that respect.”

Mandelson furrowed his brow; he hadn’t said that it had been.

“Has Berlin activated the Sternenzelt yet?” she continued.

Lord West consulted his ePaper.

“Yes,” he said, “the Chancellery activated the military capabilities of the installation – the so-called Siebengestirn – after an emergency meeting of Franco-German Bureau in Aachen yesterday evening. The ‘Personal Force’ clause was invoked as a means of bypassing the Vienna Convention.”

The Home Secretary jotted down some notes and turned to the person at the head of the table.

“In that case, I suppose that the only wise course of action is for us to do likewise with Polaris – we cannot afford a Mein Kraft gap to develop.”

The other occupants of the room turned towards the Prime Minister, who nodded.

“Thank-you Tamsin,” she said, “and yes – I entirely agree. Baruch HaShem for the Ozzies allowing us to keep Blue Streak so close to Cairns – without it we’d have absolutely no military influence within the region whatsoever.”

South-east Asian was a quagmire – of course – it always had been, ever since the assassination of Sukarno had strangled the fledgling Indonesia in its cradle. For decades, it had been in the best interests of the Commonwealth and the other Western Power Blocks to keep the region destabilised; a Franco-German backed coup in the Syndicalist Republic of Java here, a regicide by an MI7 agent in Yogyakarta there. Straw had even done his Doctoral thesis on the MacArthur administration’s foreign policy during the Maluku Intervention back in ’53.

For decades, it has been masterful realpolitik. Now, it was widely seen as folly.

It was the Defence Secretary’s turn to speak. He was a tall man - a fact that became all the more apparent has he drew himself out of his seat and paced over to the screen at the front of the room. With curt bob, he changed the feed from the high-earth orbital cameras to another one – this time facing towards the Sea of Japan.

“This is from the Sulis Aerie,” Hoyle said, “Which the Japanese Exospheric Self-Defence Forces have allowed us to place is Geostationary Orbit above Hokkaido.”

He paused as the door opened again, this time quietly.

“See how it’s done, young William,” Mandelson sneered as the Chancellor took his seat and threw a languid leg over the armrest.

“I thought that you and Hilary were still in Washington,” the Foreign Secretary spluttered.

Hodges made to speak before being interrupted by the Prime Minister.

“I invited Jackson back as soon as it became clear that President Paul was not going to be roused from his stupor,” she said, “it seemed a fool’s errand to try and convince him of any other course of action.”

‘President Paul’, Straw rolled his eyes about that, amazed at how effortlessly he was able to drop the inverted commas at either end of the term. A political gadfly, no one was actually clear about how exactly that had happened. An innovative campaign aside (those commercials of him straddling an automated fission missile to draw attention to wasteful Octagon spending had been a masterstroke) to have not only won – but to have won a landslide had been nothing short of astonishing. The fact that South Carolina had entered the Republican column had capped off what had already been an unprecedented run of good fortune for the isolationist wing of Congress.

“As the Prime Minister said,” Hodges replied, “there seemed to be little use of us remaining there given the current international situation, although it didn’t stop Hilary going via Nova Scotia to address the Positive Money convention.”

The Prime Minister looked put out at the final point. Perhaps the reshuffle should have gone ahead.

“Can we continue?” Hoyle said, somewhat testily, “We really don’t have much time before…”

A siren blared outside the conference room, but was quickly silenced.

“Apologies, Lindsey” the Prime Minister said, “if you would be so kind as to continue your appraisal.”

The Defence Secretary rapidly ran through the intelligence reports; United Technocracy forces amassing near the border with the Khanate, rumours of a Palace Coup in Samarkand, SOLUR anti-missile installations being readied in Karafuto.

“In short,” he concluded some ten minutes later, “even excluding the acceleration of the crisis brought about by the Xīn-Ming, it was clear that something would be about to give.”

The Chancellor had had enough.

“To whit, the final thing ‘to give’ being us just sitting here and waiting for the bloody Reform Party, or even worse – the fucking National Liberals – to call for a vote of no confidence in us.”

“That’s a bit strong, Jackson,” Mandelson said, “it’s not like we’d be sat here, twiddling our thumbs. The Commonwealth Expeditionary Forces have been at maximum readiness since that ghastly Le Pen chap and – oh – what’s his name, that Hungarian General – tried to storm the Élysée back in July. It had the potential to greatly destabilise the Strasbourg Pact and I made it quite clear that we would have had no option but to intervene to protect the peace in Europe.”

“All that to save the bloody Coal and Steel Community,” Hodges snorted, “it would have hardly been enough to…”

“With respect, Chancellor,” Admiral West said – as coldly as he felt he could get away with, “the alternative would have been to have had a revanchist xenophobe in control of the European Cosmos Programme, and I think it was quite clear that the President could not have countenanced that as an option. He is Commander-in-Chief and would have had the option to overrule the MoD by petitioning the Star Chamber.”

“And if he had done so then we’d have had riots on the streets!”

The Prime Minister slammed her palms on the table.

“We are dithering,” she yelled, “Jackson, your fears are noted but dismissed. Action is required now, but they must remain very much focused on the general security of the Commonwealth and our allies.

“But the settlements on Lu-” the Home Secretary insisted.

“Can wait.”

The clamour in the room came to a pause as the Prime Minister spoke.

“The past century has been most tumultuous,” she said, “I hardly need to tell you of this concept international strategists are calling ‘The Long Great War’ – Hobsbawm called it ‘Social Osmosis’ if I remember correctly, but the basic principles of it remain the same regardless of whether you subscribe to Classic Relations Theory or Neo-Weltpolitik. Class struggle always accelerates after conflict, not before. Attlee’s government tried to fight against, but they were still done in by the energy crisis of ’47 that began the British Revolution, my great-uncle’s best efforts notwithstanding.”

Luciana Berger surveyed the room.

“Just imagine, she said, shot by a gamekeeper at Wentworth Woodhouse for having the ‘audacity’ to get the Earls Fitzwilliam to mine the coal on their own estate.”

To her side, the Prime Minister’s Special Adviser, a twenty-something man with a shock of blond hair, dropped his pen whilst jotting down the minutes of the meeting.

“Result. Catastrophe. A half-million deaths in a single winter. What did people expect was going to happen? The reaction was – as we all know – the end of Democratic Fabianism as a concept.”

She paused as the feed behind her showed the first atomic missiles detonating upon the surface of the Sea of Tranquillity.
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