more hilarity...
"Rumors of our annihilation were...exaggerated." General McEvedy stated. "Yes, we survived. NO, I won't break operational security to tell you where, but as you can see, we are not exactly helpless."
Elizabeth leaned back in her chair, and lit a cigar. here it comes
"And your relationship to Kowloon?"
"Possible future customers." Liz announced, "we just have to finish making arrangements. You gotta know the drill, I need the necessary permits from the Federated Commonwealth for tech transfer and there's a currency stability issue to work out-Their money isn't recognized in the banking system here, and ours isn't recognized on their side." she blew a smoke ring, and then started coughing violently, killing the image she apparently was trying to project and replacing it with a sick girl playing grown-up. "Cough! how..cough did dad...coughcough smoke these things??"
"you're not supposed to actually inhale, Liz." Victor advised.
she crushed it out on her palm, "How in hell do people like these things?? anyway, they're here as business. speaking of which, no, you can't have my citizens." she looked ill, and let the unfinished stogie hit the gym floor. "They might not be human, or entirely human, but they're citizens and I don't condone trading in people like...commodities. People are not objects."
"You have certainly given orders that caused deaths." Nathan observed before the two seniors attending by remote could interrupt, "you have even taken lives yourself."
"Never without good cause." Liz said seriously, "And unlike you, I'm only allowing this because I don't have a choice."
"you would rather just kill, and kill and kill wastefully?" he scoffed theatrically.
"IF I had my preference, Star Captain Nathan Roshak, your clans would pack bag-and-baggage back to where your ancestors left and send a trade legation instead of an invading army, and I wouldn't have to host a diplomatic reception with people that remind me of the Elbar Declaration every time I look at them!" she snarled, then went into another fit of coughing. "Gustavus Adolphus said, 'I will wage no war that is unjust, and I will not end a just war except in victory'."
"Wise position..." Marthe said.
"Okay, want to know what the sick, dying little girl who's your current chew-toy thinks is a just war??" Elizabeth snarled, "I saw Natalie Breen's little speech when she stepped down as Khan of the Steel Vipers, I got the names of the people she was going to hunt down and murder for merely being related to those folks over there." she pointed at the Wolverines, "They've been warned, I have people watching out for them, not because I have any love for the deserters who abandoned us. That shit happened a long time ago, generations are gone, I can't hold you Clanners responsible for an act of barratry, desertion, dereliction of duty and treason. It's not your fault your ancestors chose abandon all of us, chose to go ahead and light humanity and let the rest of us burn. I could no more do that, than hunt down Chivington's descendents for Dinh Diep."
she straightened, "What I can do, is judge you for your people's actions in the now." her eyes burned, "An entire people have to live in hiding for something their ancestors may have done. even the worst tyrants in our shared history stopped at the third generation, this is like, thirty generations later, and you're not only talking about it, you're actively hunting down people with indirect relation to continue your purge, your 'annihilation'...your GENOCIDE." her head snapped up, and her cane fell to the side. "you can't justify it, you people, you venerate Aleksandr Kerensky, and I've hd time to read a copy of your Remembrance, Khan Marthe Pryde, the Clans shit on the memory of Aaron DeChevalier and Aleksandr Kerensky with every breath that this 'annihilation' policy continues, and I have the proof of this."
it was actually shocking to some in the room, and even Victor didn't have a clever quip.
Elizabeth straightened, and walked, not with a limp, but with fire. "Your people, General McEvedy, I don't care what you did, or what they say you did, your people have been wronged. My ancestors fled Southeast Asia to escape the horrors of Pol Pot's Year Zero, and to escape China's oppression of ethnic cultures and to escape the Communist butchers, and my ancestors fled Israel when it was h anded on a platter to the Pan Islamic forces by the Terran Alliance in exchange for cheap germanium and oil. Their relatives that did not, were worked to death in slave camps, and killed wholesale in death camps, while the rest of humanity looked away."
she shuddered. "and my ancestors fled North America, because their faith, native to that place, was deemed a threat to the Global order. most of the ones who remained, were forced to recant, or killed in 'incidents', labeled racist even with non-european blood. This is Kowloon, my people remember. we do not forget...but we can forgive, and if we could not, we would be monstrous indeed for most of the human race would be our enemies if we could not. a 'just war' would see that...atrocity levied against the present generation overturned, for that would be worth the lives that would be spent."
She stared defiantly at Nathan Roshak, "But I can't have nice things." she said, "So I will settle for one thing; The Wolverines have come, they will come again, and I will ****** annihilate, as in destroy, without conscience, any force that comes here to kill them without a just, and present cause. I will practice war to the knife, and not from a boardroom. I will fight you in the wastelands, in the streets, on the seas, in the space between stars to stop it. I will do so because of this."
she reached to her briefcase, and held the document up, "Because of this, I will do this thing. Some burdens do follow from one generation to the next. The last time the 171st took the field, it was violating the orders of the Archon, they waged war in reply to Jinjiro Kurita's attempted genocide at Kentares IV, because they believed in this. They rode to the aid of an enemy state, to stop a genocide, and they almost made it. how could I do less? especially with so many more 'honorable' others refusing even to look or consider?"
"but you don't even want to talk." Nathan said.
"I don't have the choice." Elizabeth countered. "I will not look away at what your people condone. I will not stand aside and pretend it isn't happening, that it will end without someone, somewhere standing up. Your people plan the deliberate murder of strangers who five years ago did not know you even existed, for something that happened two hundred and fifty years ago and more. Your ancestors worked people to death for the actions of some of their government, you sterilized civilians and worked them to death and call yourselves moral, honorable? you have gone so far as to gene-test prisoners to see if there is even a tangential relation to these..'wolverines' and then sentence those strangers to death for the crime of existing. You...you Clanners? you disgust me on a deep and fundamental level...and not for your gaudy fashion sense. My brother was wrong, he was taken in by your advanced medicine, but with what I know now? you could present me the cure, and I would reject it. It is better to die of what is killing me, than to live, knowing that I was or would ever be a part of what you people are doing."
she held up the document for the cameras, then laid it on her desk. "Genocide, is exactly what your people are still doing."
