Conference Room
RSS Triumphus
"I won't bother to ask if you read the briefing material we forwarded," Admiral Hale said while Constance weighed her options.
"Quite thoroughly," she replied. With escape impossible in the immediate future, her priorities had to be gathering what information she could, and from there figuring out a way to get it out to anybody who might still be loyal. "Though the context changes now that I know you engineered the uprising."
Admiral Hale sighed. "I suppose that's a logical conclusion. A doomsday device goes off, Terra collapses into chaos, we step into power in the confusion. Nobody's the wiser. Except we didn't do it."
It was ridiculous, but Admiral Hale said it with such conviction... Constance couldn't begin to imagine how he expected her to believe it.
"Do you want to know how many people are in on this conspiracy of ours?" Admiral Hale asked. "Me, the command staff of the Triumphus and Auspicium, and the Metis Commission. That's it. Nobody else. If you walked out of this room and told my crew that I was illegally detaining the Exarch and ordered my arrest, there's a fairly even chance that they'd do it."
"Is that an option?" Constance asked facetiously.
"Not until I say my piece," Admiral Hale said. "You read the briefing material, you know how the uprising started." The Admiral slid a datachip into a port on the edge of the conference table, and a holographic rendering of Terra popped into existence. A handful of pinpricks of light appeared across the planet, centered on a few major cities spread across every continent.
"It took well over a week for us to compile a remotely coherent time-line based on what we could see and intercept from orbit. As near as we can tell, the uprising began with spontaneous riots in these cities, each of which began within ten to fifteen minutes of each other."
This had all been in the briefing material Constance had already read. The initial riots had been launched predominantly by civilians, with only a tiny fraction of military personnel involved. At first, they'd been severe enough to paralyze emergency response in the cities where they'd taken place, but the open fighting wouldn't come until later.
"Within an hour of the rioting starting, the detonation in the Pacific took place." On cue with the admiral's words, a large orange circle appeared in the southern pacific of the holographic globe. Almost immediately, more pinpricks began appearing across the planet.
"Even though there's no way word could have reached anybody yet, the detonation in the Pacific was like flipping a switch. These lights?" Admiral Hale gestured to the map. "These are just the locations we knew about. Even so, they looked small, controllable. Small groups of rioters, mass shooters, the isolated soldier going on a killing spree. Twelve hours into the uprising, we were still confident that order could be restored. We didn't understand it, but we thought we could stop it. The Pacific was being devastated by tsunamis, but we thought we could salvage the rest of the world."
"The briefing you gave me gets sparse here," Constance said. Her packet had barely managed only a few sentences to describe the next twenty nine hours, indicating only that the first mutinies among republic forces had begun.
"It had to," Admiral Hale said. "We could not risk details of what happened next getting out. You have to understand, this could break the Republic, beyond any hope of repair."
Constance waited expectantly.
"We called them mutinies in your briefing, but if you asked us who mutinied against who... I couldn't tell you. Our troops just started turning on each other. Entire platoons and companies started wiping out each other and everybody else they could reach. Entire populations started joining in." Hale's voice was low, haunted. "Those who didn't join the fighting were butchered by those who did..."
His hand shaking, Hale pushed a couple of buttons and the holoimage changed. "You have to understand."
Constance had long been a student of history. She'd made a study of some of the most destructive conflicts imaginable, and the imagery of the worst of those, of the Jewish Holocaust, Elbar, Kentares, Galedon, they were all burned into her brain. Constant reminders of just how terrible man could be.
This was worse.
It was a silent video, low quality, but good enough to paint a clear picture. A ruined city. Soldiers moving through the rubble and...
There were body parts, neatly stacked in piles in a field kitchen, while a cook chopped up some unknown meat and threw it into a stew pot.
There were prisoners, stripped naked and fastened to frames while soldiers took turns raping them.
There were others, being flayed alive with bayonets, their skins left to dry in the sun.
There were children, impaled on spikes inside strange ritual circles drawn in the dirt using their own blood.
And through it all, there was Devlin Stone, walking through the ruins, seeing all this horror, and laughing.
