The Experiment Continued (BT)

If Charlie Woods' first meeting with the Coordinator of the Combine was nervy, the meeting between Alexander Cushing and the Capellan Chancellor on Sian was very nearly murderous. Whereas the Draconians had been cautiously hospitable, with their superior attitudes well-concealed, and maintained at least a façade of impartiality, the Capellans immediately began to take the ambassadorial party for a ride.

Instead of proceeding directly to the Celestial Palace as Cushing had expected, they spent at least three hours being shown various sites around the city. That night, they were taken to a hotel that had been assigned to them, which turned out to be completely empty. When asked for clarification from the State Department, Cushing replied that, "Aside from the staff, there was no one in the hotel, so far as I could ascertain."

The party was utterly isolated by the Maskirovka from any contact with the locals on the planet. This wasn't the Ministry of Security's true name, it was only an appellation grafted on by others, but they wore it proudly. The ambassador and his party swiftly learned that they were not tourists, they were on a tour. And the guides had all acted like people who'd had the script patiently explained to them by someone with a red-hot branding iron.

Perhaps they had.

At any rate, the Capellan interlocutors took them all over Sian, in an obvious attempt to impress the peripheral barbarians with the strength of the greatest nation in the Inner Sphere. The factories were hardly as large as some in the big American manufacturing centers, and the monuments to past Liao Chancellors made Cushing's eyes sore. It took a whole week of the party being patronized rigid by their guides before the Chancellor, or the Celestial Wisdom as people in the Confederation called him, condescended to meet with the American envoy.

The Celestial Palace was the size of the Weiyang Palace on Earth, destroyed many centuries before McKenna's Coup. They wandered through endless galleries of jade and gold, being shown the endless gifts sent to past Wisdoms by various dignitaries, leaders and monarchs around the Inner Sphere. Through all of this, Alexander Cushing walked as though in a dream. It was as though he had been transported back in time a millennia and more to the dark days of the socialist empires that had lain across the heart of Eurasia.

As they followed the guides, Cushing cursed Elias Liao in the privacy of his own mind for what he and his descendants had done. Suddenly he was brought up short by one of the security agents. And there, striding down the hall towards them, that could be no one but Maximillian Liao himself, the old wolf of the Confederation. This was the man who had had his own father assassinated, and brought the Confederation back from the brink of defeat through the sheer force of his will. From what Cushing had been able to learn, Maximillian Liao was possessed of a demonic personality, a granite will, uncanny instincts, a cold ruthlessness, a remarkable intellect, a soaring imagination and an amazing capacity to size up people and situations.

Two men in black and green stood to either side of him, and three people with a marked resemblance to the Chancellor followed behind. The elder two were women, but the youngest was still only a boy.

"Who are they?" Cushing asked his chief of station, acting temporarily as a secretary, "Relatives? Or clones?"

"Relatives. They're his children, Candace, Romano and Tormano."

Cushing couldn't stop a wince. "I was afraid of that."

As the dossiers had it, Romano Liao was even more unstable than her father.

Maximillian deigned to favor the ambassador and his wife with an elegant nod. To be looked down on by sovereign pride was of course a great honor in the Inner Sphere, but Alexander was too sophisticated, too civilized, too down-to-earth to do more than return the nod as one man would for another.

"Barbarian," said Romano, the middle child, "Why do you not abase yourself before the Celestial Wisdom?"

Cushing was taken aback. He'd expected hauteur on the part of his hosts, but this outright rudeness surprised him.

The Chancellor's voice was gently correcting, though he did not turn to face her. "Romano, curb your temper with our guests. They are come from the Periphery, and know not our ways."

"I think I can see your ways well enough," was Cushing's rebuttal.

Maximillian's smile was delighted, with just a hint of irony. It was clear he'd noticed the sarcasm, but was in a good enough mood to let it lie between them.

"Indeed. You must be eager to get down to brass tacks, as I believe the expression to be?"

"The thought has crossed my mind."

"Then perhaps you would join me for tea?"

The ambassador nodded, graciously, and the two of them went to one of the palace's innumerable pavilions to speak in as private a fashion as Capellan security measures would permit.

"So, what impels the united States to end her isolation?" Maximillian asked Cushing, who had just finished a brief recital of America's history after the Terran Alliance's fall.

Cushing chose his words carefully. "My government is of the opinion that peace is soon to be had by all."

Maximillian smirked and said, "Ah, so you have recognized that the Confederation is soon to win this war?"

The sarcasm was laid on so heavily that Cushing mirrored the Chancellor's expression.

"Actually we don't think you're going to win this war. You haven't been trying to win any more than the others, you've just been going through the motions of raids and counter-raids with the occasional capture of a planet, slowly sapping each others' strength. No one has really been trying to win the war since it was declared. My own personal opinion is that we will soon see a return to the status quo of the prewar period."

Maximillian's stare was long and calculating as he murmured, "My word, but you Americans are tactless. I'm amazed you've survived as long as you have."

"Where I come from, it's considered a crime to kill a man for what he says."

The Chancellor's laugh was a gunshot in the silence of the teahouse, "And I suppose the rivers are flowing with milk and honey too? I can put up with a ration of drivel, but it mustn't be pure babble from the padded cell. Mister Cushing, I'm not going to listen to one more word of this!"

"Is it so impossible to believe there's a country where human decency isn't just paid lip service?!"

"As a matter of fact it is. Now why don't you go back to whatever hole you crawled out of, and mind your own business?"

"Why should we, it's not as if anyone here does!"

Both Cushing and Maximillian were standing face-to-face, chest-to-chest, and scowling at each other with such ferocity that the MASK agents shadowing them wondered if the two would come to blows. Finally, the Chancellor raised his head to stare down at the ambassador imperiously.

"Let us suppose for a moment that I believe you. Why should I consent to the united States establishing an embassy on Sian?"

"Other than common diplomatic courtesy?" Cushing asked, coldly. "This would be a first step to normalizing relations between our countries. Trade could be regularly established as a result, and if the Confederation plays her cards shrewdly, she could be exporting products to the whole of the Inner Sphere and the Periphery beyond."

"May I take that to mean you intend to help the Confederation reestablish the Star League?" he asked, as if he did not already know the answer.

"To hell with the Star League. We spent centuries resisting its inroads, the last thing we want is to see it return. And it's not as if you would have any more legitimacy than the Camerons did when they created it in the first place."

"My family claims the First Lordship, you know," Maximillian said, mildly.

Cushing rolled his eyes, "There is no more First Lordship, and there is no more Star League. It died with the Camerons, and without the Camerons, it's never coming back."

The Chancellor rubbed his chin and sat back down, "Elaborate."

Cushing took this as an opportunity to sit down himself as he began to speak, "Let's be honest with each other sir, the Star League was imposed by the Camerons, who forged it with naked force, and held it together with naked aggression. In many ways it was a macrocosm of the Terran Hegemony, in that it was an artificial state born of no popular force nor even of an idea except that of conquest, and held together by the absolute power of the ruler, by a narrow-minded bureaucracy which did his bidding and by history's largest army.

"Besides which, it was possible to create it in the first place thanks to the unique circumstances at the time."

Liao seemed interested with the man's words. He at least found it amusing. "So, by your logic, one should either attempt to engineer circumstances to achieve the same conditions as Ian Cameron found when he reached out to my ancestor four centuries ago, or simply take circumstances as they are and move accordingly."

"And I don't know who has the resources and the pull to change the 'Spheres so much that such a thing could be achieved."

Maximillian steepled his fingers and said, "An interesting conundrum, no?" in tones as cold as lightning.

"Then I take it you have no issue with the opening of an embassy?"

The two rose and bowed, each man a model of stiff politeness, and Maximillian Liao said, "Sir, you are an honored guest at the Court of the Celestial Wisdom. I give you my word that so long as you are on this planet, no harm shall come to you."

Cushing was sensible enough to notice the wording. Just as Maximillian knew he would.

XxX

Apart from that first somewhat ugly meeting, the American embassy was established in the Outer City without much in the way of fuss. And as the weeks wore on, the conversation between the two statesmen had begun to grow in Maximillian's mind. He wanted that power over the Sphere that the Star League had possessed.

He sought to build a future in which the Capellan Chancellor spoke, and all Humanity took heed of his words. But how could he change the circumstances so as to engineer the rise of the Confederation to supremacy? Was there some power out there with enough money and pull to decide the fate of nations? And if there were, could he convince them to work with him?

It would be an alliance of convenience of course; both sides would enter into the partnership intending to betray the other once their usefulness was at an end. But he'd always been good at that sort of game.