Let's Read Fitzpatrick's War (The Only Steampunk with Rights)

[DragonCobolt]

That sounds super grim.

Now I have an urge to have write some sort SI in this world or at least a short hop in a multicross.

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SI? What's that? I've some how written, like, almost a million words on this forum and still don't know what half the words mean.

 

[Acolyte]

SI? What's that? I've some how written, like, almost a million words on this forum and still don't know what half the words mean.

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Self insert. Well i don't actually mean a self insert i guess because i don't write about myself but more of a character from our world shorthand.

I actually do have a story about a world traveling anti fascist so maybe i can do it.

 

[DragonCobolt]

We resume eight months later - and the bodies still aren't fully buried. Part of the reason is there are so many, and part of this is because in 2422, the number of the dead keep going up. Famine, cholera, malaria all stalk the lands and the Yukon killing everyone and blowing up every piece of infrastructure they could didn't fucking help.

Yukon troops start slinking home (well, they're rotated back home since that's how armies work, but I like to think of them slinking home ins hame), but those left behind to continue their jobs with cholera vaccinations and as much bug repellant as they can. Mosquitos and flies swarm around the rivers and they're all rightly miserable.

Then, out of the blue, the Turks compound their disbanded army with signing the Four Points. This causes a bunch of restive states to break away from the Turks (cause, no shit), but then, to everyone's shock, those rebel states also sign the Four Points. Everyone starts calling Bruce "Bruce of Little Faith" for how often he said strategic bombardment doesn't win wars. The collapse and capitulation of two thirds of the world's superpowers has the consequence of cutting off guns and supplies to African states supported by the Chinese or the Turks, meaning that the right wing christofascist maniacs that the Yukons have been arming in Africa start running rampant over the continent.

Disturbing photographs of highly armed African boys of ten or younger became a staple of Yukon newspapers during the war years. Our journalists entered the ports of Monrovia and Lagos City to take the lurid pictures of which both the readers back home and the children themselves did not seem to tire, despite the Archbishop of the United Yukon Church deemed journalists immoral. (No Yukon was so rash as to denounce the arming of little boys and the resulting slaughters as immoral, for that would be tantamount to denouncing the Consul. I was no better than the rest of my countryman, I knew Fitz was doing something horrible and I dared not confess to my brother's officers.)

Our man in southern Africa, the bloodthirsty Joseph Jones, was appointed "President" of the beleaguered region; he promptly killed his rival leaders and stole the land and gold of anyone in Africa who had any of either. The Yukon newspapers called Jones our "gift to Africa" and I suppose...he was.

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TOPICAL! ...still...for some godforsaken reason. You can practically hear Judson's angry fingers as he pounded this into a word processor. Do you get it! Imperialism and it's consequences are on our heads!

Also, as a note, Von Buren says that while Jones was a mass murderer and a theif, he did bring order to the region. He notes that Gerald, the official historian, recounts that Jones had "good manners" and "a pleasing nature." St. Mathews University (Von Buren's much vaunted alma mater) even gave him an honorary doctorate in 2425.

But, yes, the African states also sign the Four Points.

The staff at the slowly dwindling base have a dinner conversation, discussing: What exactly is forcing this? They suggest maybe poison gas...maybe incendiaries...then a General Horowitz says: "Maybe he's dropping mosquitos, like the Chinese did?" And everyone is revolted at the idea, most loudly a General Santeen - who declares the Consul would never!

Lord Stein finds that hilarious.

"Don't you find it humorous, gentlemen," said Stein. "That General Santeen there believes that a man who killed his own father would hesitate to kill those he has never met?"

No one there was going to respond to that.

"You bearded old warriors are a curious lot," Stein went on. "You have each of you been in the service for, what? Three decades at least, and you've just polished off twenty million Chinese and yet still the thought that the Consul is perhaps killing a few million more offends you?"

General Montrose, Santeen, Early and Horowitz jumped to their feet. Santeen had drawn his pistol and I believe he would have shot Stein if hood had not jumped infront of Lord. "Sit down, my friends, sit down," said the Marshal... your men are not responsible for what happened here-"

"No, they were in India by chance and, as fate would have it, twenty milloin Chinese soldiers happened to come here to commit suicide," sneered Stein.

"When set against the dead civilians here in India and the rest of the world, the twenty million are less than you imagine, sir," said Hood..

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The Generals are horrified as Hood explains that he is the one at fault - he knew the Consul was not a good man, and he followed his orders anyway. Stein, clearly a bit drunk and reveling in a mean streak a mile wide, finds this funniest of them all: "These darlings here knew what they were about. Did a bang up job of it too. Since when did any Yukon need to rationalize why he kills the enemies of the Confederacy? Why, our sweet Bobby here is as innocent a man as you'll find in the army, and he was so hot to have at the Chinese that he was ready to throw away his life on that stinking hill with Van Fleet..."

And with a sudden lurch, Bruce puts it all together - what we've already known or guessed.

The locusts were dropped on the farmland of every nation that stood in Fitz's way. THen, once they capitulated, sterile locusts are released to breed with the swarms and kill them off in a generation or two - which, combined with Yukon made insecticides, can stem the tide. Not that it does any fucking good at this point. When Horowitz puts his hands over his face, bemoaning the murder of tens of millions of civilians, Stein sticks the knife in and puts the figure closer to hundreds of millions, maybe more.

Furious, Hood demands that Stein get him proof. Since this would get Stein back to the capital and out of their hair, everyone - Stein included - agrees.

A fortnight later, they get the letter that confirms it: As Stein Writes

"Between the Yangtze and the Pearle rivers, there is fish to eat and not much else. Unless, comilitome, the Chinese are eating one another."

...thanks Stein, you dick.

And the pendulum back home begins to swing. Unknown individuals break the news (Bruce thinks it might have been either Buck or Hood) and the news starts screaming about the locust infestations, the twenty million dead in India, the famines, everything. But whether it was Buck or Hood or someone else who broke the news, Buck does do one thing to continue his best egg status: He sends a journalist from the biggest newspaper to interview Bruce about being made a Second Knight of the Field for his actions on Van Fleet hill. Overnight, Bruce becomes an even bigger hero in the eyes of the Confederacy...and thus, the chances that Fitzpatrick could make either him or Charlotte vanish overnight reduces considerably.

Thanks Buck!

Fitzpatrick cracks down on the news - going so far as to arrange the suicide of one of his main critics (a Reverend in the United Yukon Church who declares that "twenty million souls would damn anyone to hell") - but the newspapers and the rumors continue printing stories that make the Four Points war seem as horrible as it is, including horrifying photographs of bodies stacked as high as hills.

Von Buren, from the lofty height of a century and a half later, dismisses all of this as a fabrication.

That...sounded absolutely insane when I was a kid.

Now, I've seen how people memory hole shit from THREE YEARS AGO I guarantee you that if there is an America in 2124, the COVID pandemic will be a tiny, tiny blip, and the protests to the Iraq War (some of the largest protests in human history) will be irrelevant. Because, at the end of the day, like the people pushing back against Fitzpatrick in the Confederacy, they don't do the fucking job! Fitzpatrick will remain in power. For now.

Though, to once more draw a line between this and the Domination of Draka, I do really like the texture here that while the Yukon are a horrifying society that absolutely will do monstrous things - they cloak themselves in better ideals to conceal their crimes. Stein may be a jerk, but he's also a hundred percent fucking right when he points out that the moral outrage of the "Old Soldiers" is a fucking farce: The Consul's just as murderous as they are. He's just a bit more efficient about it, more indiscriminate, but he's in the same vector.

Hood has recognized this - and he takes it...badly.

[Hood] could not accept what had happened in northeastern India. The fairy-tale land I had encountered five years earlier had been blasted and burned into a listless black jumble of grit that made my boots dirty every time I left my tent. Scavengers, the healthier ones, sifted through the black, swirling mess, picking burned seeds from the depleted topsoil to have something to feed their families. The unhealthy scavengers - and in time everyone in the region seemed to fall into this category - lay on the wasted ground that had once held their homes and let the windblown ashes drift over them. Hood each day went into those dismal wastes beyond our encampment on errands of mercy; he carried ration kits and had a squad following him carrying armfuls of the same kits of starving Indians they would find there. The food they brought these lost souls was pitifully inadequate.

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Hood tries to grow food - using his own soldiers and the chinese surviving prisoners as labor force. He lies on the reports, claiming thousands of casualties are still alive so that the headquarters keeps sending him extra food and rations for them. He begs for more food, more seeds, more something - and gets not much. He starts drinking. A lot.

Bruce is caught between wanting to help him...and feeling intense guilt for even being near him, as Hood reminds him viscerally of all what he's done. He goes to try and comfort Hood once, and Hood goes, "Have you written your wife? Go do so right now. There is a cloud over me now, but it will pass. No evil lasts forever."

Bruce, almost crying, tells him that he's the finest soldier he's ever known.

"Go and write your wife, Bobby."

Bruce says he will always be loyal to Hood. Hood, amused, says that's what he said to Fitz, once. Hood reflects, sadly, that Fitz sees Hood and Bruce as being a window into the Yukon soul - the only honest commoners he knows. Then he asks Bruce what he and Fitz talked about, when they saw eachother last.

Bruce, ashamed, tells him that he was akin to King David. God's beloved.

Hood's quiet for a long beat.

"For two honest commoners, we're none to honest in his presence, Bobby."

The rainy season comes and Hood, having no choice (as he's being recalled soon), gives the Chinese survivors as many ration packs as he can, fresh food and clothes, then lets them go. He gets six messages a day from Cumberland and the Consul, demanding that he execute them all. Hood just ignores them because, currently, he's the Yukon's most famous general and a war hero so many times over that the Consul can't do shit to him. The Yukon may be horrified by the casualty counts...but they're still impressed by that K/D ratio, huh?

How...American of them.

During this time, Bruce gets nine letters from his darling Charlotte. She would have written even more, but she has been trying to keep on the DL. They contain news of her every doing, and a bazillion million photographs of their daughter: Mary Margaret Bruce. She asks that Bruce not tell her anything of the war - she knows it would break her heart. Their letters are kept secure from Fitzpatrick's spies by being sent under their liege lord's seal - Prim-Jones is a real mensch, gotta say.

Then, finally, something good happens for General Hood. After General Daddy Montrose takes his leave to head back home and the army shrinks even further...Martha Hood (likely sent by his friend Daddy) and their son arrives and Hood starts to come back out from under his deep dark shadow. With that, the last of the Sixth Army picks up their bags and leaves.

I like to think the Santals reclaimed the entire region in the hills after we were gone. Given the damage we had done, it is more likely that for many decades the land there belonged more to the elements than any race of men. I know the natives still living there today have never forgiven us. Nor should they. I only pray enough of them have returned to their ancestral homes to keep their world and their unique history to come again. If that History includes the reason for the natives' undying hatred for the Yukons, that is no less than we deserve.

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The zeppelin, though, is not taking Bruce and Hood to North America. Instead, it sails out to Samarkand, an ancient and incredibly interesting city - ruled by Greeks, Mongols, Persians, Arabs and Turks, it is where Fitzpatrick has decided he shall complete his Alexanderification by creating a capital of the world, ruled by the Yukon. Surrounded by salt flats created by overirrigation and climate change, modern Samarkand is basically a tiny little village that the Yukon have dropped onto like...well, not quite like a bomb because at least now they're building stuff instead of setting it on fire.

And where you find Fitzpatrick, you find his House Karls. And wouldn't you know it!

There's Zimmerman. Who is now a Colonel. Because, like, of course he is.

Hood is not impressed. He calls Zimmerman's uniform a "Halloween" costume: Black tunic, black pants, and a black kepi cap with a death's head skull on it.

(imagine this, but more evil)
​

Zimmerman fills them in that this is gonna be the world capital and it will be called...Neapolis.

Hood and Bruce, filled with low level dread, watch as a fleet of zeppelins arrive, bearing with them Valette, Shelley, the Newsoms, O'Brian, Stein, Lady Joan and her maid, all the DeShay cousins, and a bunch of other rich and spoiled hangers on. Bruce compares their fancy attire to the surrounding desolation as "If the Cherryville set stepped into an unfinished portion of Hell."

Von Buren notes that CHerryville is then and now recognized as the most fashionable suburb of Centralia City. It also happens to be the home of his Alma Matre and doesn't that just square that circle, huh?

Then out comes Fitz.

He's wearing the horns of Amon-Horus, in imitation of Alexander the Great.

Hood, his face purpling, splutters to Bruce that this is beyond the pale - he bows only to God, not to some...some...Emperor! Pularski, who has come as well, begs them both to please, just...just go with it. They stand in furious silence as the whole gang sets up with Fitz on a Throne Like Chair and all the nobles gathered about in a grand pavilion. There, Fitz gives some pretty words, thanking Bruce and Hood for their service. Vallate finds this very amusing and laughs behind his hand at Bruce and Hood (who are looking very unfashionable in their normal uniforms.)

"Silence!" Shouted Fitz. "You bunch of dandies put together aren't worth a fingernail on either of those two men! You silly, ungrateful pack of conspirators! Oh you think I don't know?" He said and rose to pace back and forth across the platform, looking several individual Lords and Ladies in the eyes and shaming them into silence. "I know what you noble slugs would like to do to me. Yes, I have had my men watching you...that's why I brought you here to this empty corner of the world. You may scheme all you damn well please, my friends! You may plan and plan, build your empires in the air, but if you want to stay above this sandy soil you will sit on your noble backsides and you will damn well remain loyal! Cowards! Plotters! Cowardly plotters! If you drank from one cup, I would poison it! I would do it! You aren't worth to breathe the same air as these men! You aren't worth of Neapolis!"

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There is a bit in the Noah Gervais excellent video essay on Wolfenstein: The New Colossus, where he says: "If the fascists were to ever win, first there would be parades, and then there would be boredom, and then there would be pain." Fascism is a snake that eats its own tail.

And Fitzpatrick has decided, like with his goal of being Alexander the Great, that he's gonna do this Any% Speedrun Glitchless.

Bruce and Hood quietly leave to eat ration bars in their tent.

On their way out, O'Brian, almost terrified, corners them and tries to get them to talk to Fitz, to get him to "reconsider" something. Pularski gently takes him aside and tells Hood and Bruce to...keep their distance. Nervously, Hood and Buck leave.

Over the next few days, they keep their heads down and mutter quietly to one another about how much this shit sucks. The only high point is getting to go to a lecture dropped by Fitzpatrick's old mentor. No, not Dr. Murrey! The other mentor that was foreshadowed ages ago: Joseph Freedom Flag! He gives a rambling monomyth style lecture full of woo and Jordan Peterson style weird leaps in lobster logic. Most of the people watching just kind of quietly make fun of him for pronouncing Buddha as "Boo-Dah" and snicker at him. Hood manages to ensnare him in a very basic flaw in his own thinking by pointing out that different cultures are, in fact, different and do not perfectly map everything one to one in an easily digestible way and Flag flounders.

As someone who really hates the monomyth and really REALLY hates Jordan Peterson and similar self help lecturers, I am deeply amused by this and clap whenever I read it.

Later that day, Bruce hears Hood ripping Fitzpatrick a new one through the thin walls of the growing palace. He tells him everything he thinks of him, and then storms out. Bruce asks Hood if he's afraid, and Hood goes, "Nah, all he can do is kill me...and then who would he have to look up too?"

And, hey, it actually works! Hood gets assigned leadership in the army back in North America. As he prepares to go with his family, he gives Bruce advice: Be careful, trust no one, you are among vipers.

Speaking of vipers...the next scene is Bruce in his chambers on the first day of the new year (it's now 2423, I believe) when Stein bustles in and exclaims: "I got him!"

Turns out Stein, over the years, has finally managed to nail O'Brian on his peculation and swindling, and he's overjoyed with it. Bruce, trying to stave off disaster, reminds Stein of when they were all friends. Stein points out that he has a much clearer memory of being stuck in India for years while O'Brian was back in the states sleeping with the prettiest daughters of the gentry and getting all the perks, while Stein was forced to hang out with bearded, sexless commoners while also being slandered as a thief and an incompetent, JUST because he stole stuff incompetently. He remembers that very clearly, oh yes!

Bruce hopes that Fitz will look at the evidence Stein has collected and dismiss it as petty bullshit. But before he learns if that is the case, he is called to Fitzpatrick's chambers. There, Fitzpatrick confirms he's gone full villain: He insults Charlotte.

"I forgive you for losing your head over the cunning bitch, Bobby," he said. "My mother pushed her upon you. You are ignorant about women and the evil they can do. My mother can do more than most. Believe me. Ah, lady Susan."

Into Fitz'a compartment came a tall, flaxen-haired young woman in a neo-Roman gown. Her tousled hair came to her waist and her eyes were pale as aquamarine crystal. In face and form, she was a fawn with skin as fine as porcelain; in sum, a creature from a dream, the image of unmatched beauty. I rose and gave her my chair.

"Robert, this is Lady Susan Mitchum," said Fitz. "She has position, family, money. She is a virgin, something I know is important to a green lad like yourself. You know there is no deceit in me, Bobby, so I'll give it to you neat: Marry her and I will make you a Major General, commander of all my engineers, chief planner for the universal railroad I intend to build. In addition, I'll grand you an annuity of a hundred thousand pounds."

"The lady is very beautiful," I said, my voice wavering, "but I have a wife."

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Fitz...does not take this well. He rants about how the whole world hates him, how he wants to build a better one, but first he has to destroy what is there. About how he needs Bruce's complete and utter loyalty, that any loyalty to anyone else is not good enough. He strikes him in the face, and he screams at him, losing his composure completely.

Throughout the whole thing, all Bruce will say is: "I cannot, I have a wife, my lord."

We stan a wifeguy in this house!

Pularski escorts Bruce out of the compound, but he tells him to not take it too badly - Fitz will lose his cool and flip out sometimes, then swing back around to being more moderate. Then...both of them notice House Karls and nobles all gathered around something. Curiously, they approach...and see the gallows. Hanging from it is Lord O'Brian, the second of the Basileus to die. Hanging around his neck is a plaque saying: I Am a Thief. This is What happens to Thieves.

Bruce and Pularksi go to their tent and pray for O'Brian's soul. Bruce, in terror, is called to Fitz's compound. Thinking how he might escape with his life, Bruce is somewhat surprised to find Fitzpatrick all happy and cheery, almost manic. "Forget the unpleasantness yesterday!" he says, and Bruce goes, "What unpleasantness?" meaning he's not sure WHICH horrible thing Fitz is referring too, and Fitz misunderstands him to mean that he was "forgetting" it. Delighted, Fitz gives Bruce his marching orders: Head to the Andermans to begin construction on the UNIVERSAL RAILROAD and the first part of Lord Fitzpatrick's new world order. Even better, his wife can go there! And Fitz is like, "oh don't worry about Lady Susan, that was just a test, ha ha!"

Bruce, still...kinda...fucking nervous, goes, "...s-sure, my lord. Okay."

He gets on a zeppline and breaths a sigh of relief.

He's survived his first visit to Neapolis.


FOOTNOTE TIME!

FOOTNOTE 11: Von Buren refers to the House Karls as a "inexplicable small misstep." Yeah, that's...one way of putting it.

FOOTNOTE 12: The death's head is meant as a "joke." Much like how twitter user 1488HaHa is just "a joke."

FOOTNOTE 14: the justification for Fitzpatrick dressed as an emperor, having a "throne-like-chair" and forcing people to kneel before him is, of course, to appease the NATIVES, who are too easily confused by the idea of an elected official.

FOOTNOTE 21: According to the official histories, O'Brian was either killed by native bandits or committed suicide. his death is relegated to, get this...a footnote in Gerard's official history. Like, come on, you can't even pick one or the other!?

COMING UP NEXT: The return of Charlotte and the Extremely Practical, 100% Doable Massive Engineering Project that Totally Will Work

 

[WestOrEast]

FOOTNOTE 14: the justification for Fitzpatrick dressed as an emperor, having a "throne-like-chair" and forcing people to kneel before him is, of course, to appease the NATIVES, who are too easily confused by the idea of an elected official.

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The natives that didn't even seem to be present?

 

[DragonCobolt]

The natives that didn't even seem to be present?

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There are like five of them. Later, there are more natives that are attracted by a chance to make some money on the outskirts of Neopolis! But yeah, it's not a very convincing lie - hence why they don't even settle on one or the other and stick it into a footnote.

Poor O'Brian…

 

[bookwyrm]

I like to think, in light of Fitz going for the full Alexander including all the bits of adopting Persian customs and forcing the old Macedonian magnates to kowtow to him as a Persian Great King, all of the "historians" like professor Van Buren are just increasingly nervously trying to squeeze Fitz back into the constitutional framework of the Confederacy and all of the unspoken customs and manners of good noble society and such that held it together, despite everyone clearly knowing What Went Down.


In the same way that for the longest time proud chroniclers of the British monarchy had to carefully dance around Henry the VIII being a huge dick and had to pretend he was led to Anglicanism by god and that all of the Bad Stuff was the fault of corrupt ministers and those evil queens and that the big constitutional question of what if another Henry comes along was mostly resolved by the answer of "don't worry, it just won't" until well, the English Civil War.

 

[Kadmus]

Gone from 'elected head of government' to 'pathetic but terrifying screaming manbaby cosplayer' in no time flat, has Fitz. It's hardly surprising, given how many people he's killed and how shitty he seems to be at actually playing politics with the powerful people in his court, but it's still... well, pathetic, like I said.

 

[DragonCobolt]

Gone from 'elected head of government' to 'pathetic but terrifying screaming manbaby cosplayer' in no time flat, has Fitz. It's hardly surprising, given how many people he's killed and how shitty he seems to be at actually playing politics with the powerful people in his court, but it's still... well, pathetic, like I said.

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One must imagine that judson has a relatively low opinion of the Bush administration, lol

EDIT: And, to be honest, it's more like "elected" member of government

 

[LordInsane]

Fitz is trying to play at being Alexander the Great... and appropriately that ends up meaning he also echoes some of Alexander III of Macedon's more incompetent tendencies, not just the mythologized "Alexander the Great".

 

[Coyote Niff]

...so, in the Starship Troopers novel, it opens with Johnny Rico dropping on a Skinny planet. Within the opening, you are given a series of powerful images that have blazed themselves into the brains of military SF nerds for, oh, almost a hundred years now. Gleaming power armor, grainy green huds, shoulder mounted tac-nukes, that grenade that goes "I AM A GRENADE I WILL EXPLODE IN TEN SECONDS" for intimidation factor. The shock and awe combat sequences. But later on, the war switches to the Bugs: Teeming masses of inhuman creatures, breeding in such vast numbers that they always outnumber you.

The movie would remove their guns, but neither the book or the movie shied away from what they're supposed to be.

Collectivist.

Hive Mind.

Chinese.

The book doesn't even fucking beat around it, it basically says the Bugs are the apotheosis of "Red China"

This element of military sci-fi has been satirized (Helldivers), deconstructed (The Forever War), subverted (The Confederation series), but, also, tragically, played...extremely straight. I still remember once walking through a bookstore and picking up a book.

This book.

​

I didn't buy it, and being about...I dunno, fourteen, fifteen, I genuinely did not understand how absolutely fucking insane this is as a concept. I've googled what Polseen are like. Another nightmare warrior race, unthinking and vast in numbers. Another conscience free murder-target. Orcs again.

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I'm a thirty-second post! I'm a thirty-second post! Twenty-nine! Twenty-Eight!

Yeah, the original Starship Troopers has quite a bit to answer for-it's simultaneously above, behind, and of its time; a multi-racial, democratic, proto-feminist, semi-socialist, unified Earth...where only trigger-pullers and door-kickers can vote. What Heinlein was probably going for was "people who fight for a country or otherwise serve its people understand the gravity of politics and how to best serve the common interest." What we got, because of his own unexamined biases as a fervent anti-communist Pacific War vet (read: guy slathered in casual, virulent anti-Asian racism in a traumatizing combat environment for up to 7 years if you include the Occupation) is a book that basically acts as a defense of bizarre species-wide soft fascism.

On twitter, a while ago, some dumbass troll account posted an asinine "here's how Russia and China can team up to conquer America" by invading through Alaska. Rather than, like, ignoring them or blocking them, this instead created dozens upon dozens of NATO and globe-emoji weirdoes to rant about how the American military would absolutely kick their asses, which led to counter ranting, which led to people spinning up stories about how they'd just hit the Three Gorges Dam, and nu-huh, that's rated to survive a nuclear strike.

In the days running up to the war in Ukraine, a lot of people were confident it wouldn't happen - from both sides of the political spectrum, simply on the ground it would be so incredibly foolish and pointless and destructive. But once it did start, oh, there were so many people eager to bring out the kill counts.

Tanks destroyed. Bridges wrecked. Convoys smashed. Ships sunk.

Just wargames.

Just noble lords, sitting at breakfast. With a saltshaker representing Britain, and a fork indicating ten thousand miles of range for strategic bombers, blithely listing cities to burn.

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God, the response of the civilian public to the war in Ukraine is truly brain-breaking. It's great that people are genuinely invested in the Ukrainian fight for freedom, but they're so...blithe??...about the horrible grinder of death that Russia is feeding its soldiers into. Rusted AKs, airsoft and paintball strike plates made out plastic and cardboard, Babushka's preserved Mosin-Nagant, and MT-LBs with WWII-era naval autocannons strapped to the top may seem funny, might provide that "you have horses!" or Warhammer "Ork" energy of cobbled-together war machines? But then some 20 year old conscripted college kid from Omsk or Gorky or Krasnoyarsk who couldn't get a taxi across to the Kazakh border when his classmates did gets torn apart by a Paveway or a LAW in the back of some deathtrap because the "APC" he's riding in is only rated for small arms because it's made of aircraft aluminum. His family gets a zinc box back, probably the same one they got in the Afghan war in the 80s with his dad or grandad in it. This has already happened to hundreds of thousands of men.

And the Ukrainians? They're trapped in the Cold War nightmare of defense in depth, pounded daily with heavy-bore artillery designed by some long-dead Stalinist engineer in 1952 to shatter the Fulda Gap and pump in waves of Red Army Iron. Daily, their civilians are murdered in terror strikes from ad-hoc cruise missiles and air-scattered mines. All they can do is hold, and hold, and hold, and hope the rest of the free world doesn't turn off the tap they need. It's the same nightmare their grandparents faced in 1941, but this time it's coming from "inside the house"-from a country that used to be their ally. There are millions of Russian speakers inside Ukraine's occupied territory whose lives have been overturned by a despot claiming to be "saving" them from their own country. I can't imagine what kind of crimes are being perpetrated behind Russian lines.

And people just make memes about it! Modern war is an insane display of competent, computerized violence, fundamentally irrational. It is a terrible thing, and we have grown too fond of it.

Ok, rant over.

Remember when Bruce said there are rumors that the Timmermen have anti-orbital weapons to shoot down other people trying to get into space? And Dr. Murrey looked...faintly amused?

My theory is that...like, look at the Chinese. They're not stupid. They have managed to, without electricity, run a society that keeps a billion people alive and maintains a force that's ALMOST a peer to the Yukon. if it weren't for the Blinking Stars, I think this war would go very, very, very differently. Hell, without the Storm Machines, I think the Chinese are prepped to build nukes and go, "Okay, this stops or else we turn Cumberland into a glowing crater."

Maybe one of the reasons why the Timmermen are so happy to let Fitz do this is because the Chinese got a launch that almost made it into space.

They only need to trigger a Kessler Cascade once and the Yukon are fucked.

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I think this is an excellent example of "show don't tell" writing; Judson puts all the pieces on the table and lets us slot them together in our own time. Very Doyleist.

So, the Timmermen direct the Yukon airforce to bomb the Chinese back into the stone age.

The Chinese do try and bomb back. The Florins are coming - and so, Watchcharm Davis leads his brave, suicidally macho Yukon pilots into the sky and they start hacking Chinese planes apart. A steampunk airplane is even more of a suicidally firey death trap than real airplanes since their internals are made up entirely of fuel lines and fuel tanks. The Yukon attack strategy is to come at the boxes of FLorins in two formations of thirty. All sixty planes drop missiles that spread incendiaries everywhere to hack the planes to bits, then fly in close and start using their MGs and their cannons to rip them apart.

Despite this, a few Florins do get above the fortifications in India and drop a few bombs.

There are guncam footage reels that Bruce, Hood and Daddy Montrose watch.

"How do they ever miss?" Daddy asks, sounding horrified, sickened as he watches the fast, deadly Yukon planes hacking down Florin after Florin.

"No mercy," is all Hood says.

Click to shrink...

The ghosts of the 5th and 20th USAAF were hopefully riding with those Chinese pilots. This whole passage is an ode to the suicidal bravery of combat-box precision bombing, and Judson is exceedingly brave and thoughtful for placing the tools of classical "American heroes"-the WWII bomber crews- in the hands of, as @DragonCobolt says, one of Western milfic and sci-fi's oldest "rogue's gallery" villains.

Thinking about this grim, grueling shit is exhausting, so I'm going to take a break before offering my takes on the land war.

EDIT: there's an SB thread that goes deep on the heinous shit that is Wacht Am Rhine: all I'll supply are the parts which drive me particularly batty: nuclear-powered super Tigers, genetically rejuvenated SS officers as the Vanguard of a "New Germany" and an SS foreign division (think the rat bastards in the Charlemagne division at Berlin) MADE UP OF JEWISH REFUGEES FROM A GLASSED ISRAEL!

It's a truly insane book. I lost all my remaining respect for Baen and John Ringo for letting it be published.

 

[DragonCobolt]

EDIT: there's an SB thread that goes deep on the heinous shit that is Wacht Am Rhine: all I'll supply are the parts which drive me particularly batty: nuclear-powered super Tigers, genetically rejuvenated SS officers as the Vanguard of a "New Germany" and an SS foreign division (think the rat bastards in the Charlemagne division at Berlin) MADE UP OF JEWISH REFUGEES FROM A GLASSED ISRAEL!

Click to shrink...

That's...fucking whack, holy shit...

Though, a dumb part of me would kind of like a story like, "what would it take to make a Nazi into a good person?" - that's the basic premise of After the Downfall by Harry Turtledove, which I like for being high fantasy sex schlock, but even he didn't use a member of the SS.

 

[bookwyrm]

From what I remember from being a dipshit 13-14 year old who only saw mil Sci Fi and classic paperback shlock, it was like 10000% worse by using a specific historical figure as the protagonist, one with revisionist hagiography putting words into their mouth to insulate them from Hitler like the even sorrier knockoff of the lame "Clean Wehrmacht" myth of Prussian officers, that we are told just had what little redemption and character growth needed to happen off-page with a now dead Jewish wife, the SS man being like a super Cold War merc later in life and "redeeming" himself by being down with Zionist militias in the Nakba, after killing Vietnamese people for France and etc... etc...


Not to make Fitzpatrick's War be about a completely different work for the next three pages, but there's like fractals of wrongness within wrongness of how fucked up and awful the Watch on the Rhine is as a grand act of fascist masturbatory fantasies.

 

[Coyote Niff]

That's...fucking whack, holy shit...

Though, a dumb part of me would kind of like a story like, "what would it take to make a Nazi into a good person?" - that's the basic premise of After the Downfall by Harry Turtledove, which I like for being high fantasy sex schlock, but even he didn't use a member of the SS.

Click to shrink...

Oh it gets worse-the main character is

Spoiler: Spoilers for an Insane Book and also CW for what I can only call anti-Semitism?

the main character is a classical Good German who fell in love with, converted to, and married a Jewish woman WHILE being a Nazi, THEN AN SS MEMBER (the book justifies this by making him Waffen and therefore somehow not culpable for the Holocaust By Bullets) AND THEN WAS TOO LATE TO SAVE HER FROM THE CAMPS!!! HE DIES IN A GLORIOUS FINAL STAND RECITING THE SHEMA AFTER INIGO MONTOYA-ING THE GUY WHO KILLED HIS WIFE INSIDE A FUCKING TANK THE SIZE OF A TRACTOR-TRAILER!!!

 

[DragonCobolt]

There's something where it's so offensive it kinda breaks my ability to register it and it just loops around to being completely nonplussed.

 

[Kuja]

WotR is handily explained once you know it was cowritten by a "I can't be a Nazi, I don't literally wear an armband" tier guy. It's just straight up Nazi fiction.

 

[Kadmus]

Isn't Kratman the one who put Athene (yes, the literal poster on this forum) into one of his books just so he could kill her (because she wrote some scathing reviews of his other books)?

 

[ScottishMongol]

Isn't Kratman the one who put Athene (yes, the literal poster on this forum) into one of his books just so he could kill her (because she wrote some scathing reviews of his other books)?

Click to shrink...

As a transgender tank, no less

 

[Kuja]

Isn't Kratman the one who put Athene (yes, the literal poster on this forum) into one of his books just so he could kill her (because she wrote some scathing reviews of his other books)?

Click to shrink...

Several times IIRC. Genuine top tier "I'm not owned I'm not owned" behavior.

 

[DragonCobolt]

Your lets reader must admit, to his ETERNAL shame, the bit where Fitzpatrick War directly makes fun of Drakkan massive engineering projects is actually next chapter. Sorry! This chapter sees Bruce arriving at his new assignment: Arrive at the Andaman islands - which are described as being a gorgeous jungle that has returned to wild nature without humanity, whose ancient masonry and buildings have crumbled away since the Storm Times - and admire the natural beauty...for about 0.5 seconds, then tore down a third of it to replace it with runways.

French, our surviving batman, is quite excited to hear that the Yukon engineers coming to help rebuild the place are from Iceland and Scandinavia and is rather crushed when rather than a bunch of Svens and Knutes and Erikssons, he instead gets a bunch of Johns, Smiths and Harrises: Turns out that the Icelandic region has been recolonized by the Yukon post Storm Times.

Lacking for nothing, Bruce throws himself into building this airport and fueling port for the Yukon navy (which will continue to maintain the Yukon naval domination into the modern day, as noted by Von Buren), and then one day...

A lieutenant I had never met before came into the draftroom on the February 11 and told me my wife was at the zeppelin landing. I ran the whole two miles to that patch of tarmac on the high ground overlooking the island's eastward approaches. From two hundred yards away I saw her standing in her white organdy dress and wide yellow straw hat. I could see the redheaded child in her arms and could tell her mother was whispering some happy nonsense while she watched me run towards them. Charlotte's old suitcases were stacked up behind her in the shade. I was out of breath when I got to her, a circumstance that was all for the good, since I could think of nothing I could say to her. Seconds slipped by. I could only look at her, bouncing the child in her arms. For as long as I stared at that happy picture I could feel the world remained unbroken and the war had never happened.

"You'd better not cry, or you'll get me going, Bobby."

"Awfully good looking little girl," i told her.

"The words just pour out of you, don't they?" she laughed and handed Mary to me.

"You didn't marry a poet."

I took our child in one arm and held Charlotte to me with the other. I kissed Charlotte's mouth and her eyes and the palms of her hands.

Click to shrink...

Professor Von Buren notes that the quasipornographic section describing Bruce kissing his wife's palms (a symbol of sexual submission) rather than forcing her to kiss his hands was removed in the 2541 edition. He's left it in so we can know what kind of man Bruce was.

Bruce and his wife retire to their very tiny tent and, while Bruce is full of love for her and his daughter, and he loves spending time with both of them, when it comes to the nighttime and their even tinier cot, he finds himself unable to provide his husbandly duties - and man, that...is not fun, if you're deeply in love with someone and trying to please them. Charlotte, of course, is very kind and slowly helps him speak about the war.

I confessed to her I had broken both my promises to her. I had been careless with my life and had taken the lives of other men. For nearly two hours I spoke as we watched the stars in the clear sky above us.

"You were ordered to the hill," she said after I had finished. "The men you killed were striving to kill you. That was not a mortal sin, provided you confessed and have asked God for His forgiveness."

"There were hundreds of them," I said. "In the dark, I couldn't tell how many."

"You saved thousands more in that horrible ditch. Before the fighting you saved the Rabari."

"God doesn't keep a ledger sheet to add up the saved against the killed," I said.

"Don't presume you know God's mind, my darling. Hell is full to the brim with wise men who thought they could. We only know you are not beyond his Grace, you have but to accept it from Him."

Click to shrink...

I'm not religious, but I appreciate what religion can do, when wielded by the best of us. If you're sure you can never be better, why try and do good? There's no ledger, there's no way to "balance" a life out in a way that will somehow add things up. Redemption isn't gained or lost by hitting specific numbers, because if you ever deserved redemption you wouldn't need it. Whether Bruce can ever "make up" for what he's done is not really the question: Can he do better tomorrow than he has done before? That's the hope, the promise, that Charlotte's particular take on Catholicism offers.

...also, this is really funny when in the context of inane twitter conversations about cartoon show characters, I've had people yell at me that Catra was "too evil" to ever be redeemed, and Bruce here's directly responsible for the deaths of hundreds of millions of actual people. The real moral of the story is...don't argue with people on twitter.

Still, Bruce is not quite consoled by Charlotte telling him that what happened in Asia was inevitable - "You sound like Hood, he was always born to be a Calvinist..." and she's like, "No, it wasn't God's plan. It was the Timmermen's."

Which we already figured out thanks to our gigantic brains, and Bruce has suspected. But Charlotte lays it out for the cheap seats: The Timmermen could have stopped this at any time, and Dr. Murrey basically groomed Fitzpatrick for this specific role, then helped him play it out. Bruce points out that seems against the motives of the Timmermen and Dr. Murrey - he was pretty vocally against a global imperial civilization. Charlotte says that Dr. Murrey once taught her that there were three phases of History: A pioneering and heroic era, a golden age of empire and cultural supremacy, and finally, a time of decline and decay.

She says that Dr. Murrey claims to have a way to keep the Yukon in the first stage...forever.

Which is hogwash, they are and have been a practical Empire for the past 400 years, the Timmermen are just dressing up their genocidal ambitions in bunk and hokum. However, it is VERY important for the metaphorical subtext of the novel, which we will come back to later. Put a pin in it!

Still, she does mention that the Yukons back home, the civilians, are getting sick of the Four Points. They see it as a horrible war that they hate, and are all becoming quite isolationist in their attitudes while the Lords continue to play at being world-conquering Emperors abroad.

"When I am with you, I do the best I can," I said. "When I am with Fitz, I still want to please him."

"Then we had better not be apart ever again," she said and kissed my neck.

"You are married to a coward," I said.

"Hardly. A coward wouldn't have saved the Chinese prisoners. A coward would have taken the slut the Consul picked for you."

"Lady Susan is an unfortunate girl Fitz controls," I said. "You shouldn't call her names."

"Don't defend her to me, sir, "Charlotte said, displaying some of her old fire. "She knew you were a married man. Was she pretty?"

"Very," I said. "Almost half as pretty as you."

Click to shrink...

They're so cute~ And Charlotte lays out her plans for her expansive family, and when Bruce mentions the third-child taxes, she already lays out her plans on who will "legally" adopt them (though they will be raised in their household) including one Uncle French and Bruce is like, "...you're going to adult adopt French too?" and she's like, "oh he's old and needs a place to stay, we can be nice for him." Because, you know, she's just the best.

French promotes Charlotte from her prior position as living saint to the Queen of Heaven and takes to his retirement quite happily, lounging in a hammock, drinking sweet tea, and reading an unending string of pulp novels. God. Big mood. Meanwhile, Charlotte helps Bruce to get to know his daughter, who at first finds Bruce a bit intimidating, but quickly grows to know him and love him too. Charlotte and Bruce enjoy the beach when he's not at work designing the base, and during the evening, he'll dance with her in private. But...that's the entirety of their social calender.

The rest of the base are full of people who weren't in India during the war, and have spent months getting horrified at the casualty counts and the rumors of locusts. They are professional and appreciate his engineering skill, but then one day, a drunk officer named Tyler confronts Bruce, asking him how many millions he killed in India, and how many millions more will the locusts kill? Does, he ask, the Consul have a soul. The General in charge of the base hurries him away and apologizes profusely to Bruce, but Bruce is like, "I'm not a Consul spy. I am not going to report any of this."

Despite that, someone carves the image of a locust into a tree near Bruce's tent. Afterwards, French stays on guard with a rifle. Just in case.

And then on July 2nd, 2423, the first ships arrive from the West Africa Autonomous Zone. The Yukon are all like: "What's that?"

That turns out to be a one of SEVERAL swaths of land ceded to Lord Newsom, the husband of Lady Chelsea (sister to Fitzpatrick by marriage) which is worked by African slave labor and produces a bunch of cheap food, textiles, and other things that a bunch of small Yukon businesses make. Similar zones are opening around the world - and they're all flooding the Yukon market with cheap goods and resources somehow thanks to the vagaries of capitalism and the stock market, make a bunch of rich people super rich while causing the economy to drop out for everyone else. The first fatality of this was the Western Australia Company, mentioned wayyyyyyy back in chapter eleven.

Remember how the Australians were going to turn their land into a breadbasket for the world? Well, that economic future drops out and then massive swarms of mosquitos bearing the new super-malaria arrive, a double whammy of economic and ecological shocks that cause the entire project to fold, immediately.

Meanwhile, families and clans throughout the Confederacy had all bet big on new land and new gear to sell stuff abroad with the trade lanes opening up. Except, oops, the once-enemy powers that are now supposedly the Confederacy's trade partners are now broke as shit and have no money for anything but sending it desperately to Fitzpatrick and the Confederate government. As the shocks turn into the Summer Panic, Lord Prim-Jones, who has been an absolute mensch for Bruce and his family, finds all his lands and possessions repossessed by the banks. ANd who owns the banks?

Why!

It's the same Newsoms, Masons, Valettes, Fitzpatrick's and DeShays that we've been following throughout this entire book - though mostly just their ambitious sons and fuckups.

As these economic woes are hitting, the newspapers are reporting on them with a ferocious attitude that they didn't really give to the Four Point's War (what a shocker) and Fitz doesn't seem interested in a crackdown - he's too focused on building Neapolis. Fortunately for him, either through accident or design, he's lucked into still seeming like less of a total bellend than the rest of his peers. While the Newsoms and Masons and Valettes are all eating pheasant and building luxury villas in the desert and throwing bacchanalias, Fitz mostly eats normal food and wears his old Blue Jacket uniform (having abandoned the imperial regalia once the initial shine wore off, it seems.) This means the newspapers are all like, "With friends like these, why does our brave Consul go abroad to seek enemies?"

The consequence of these economic shocks are that society goes conservative. Hard. Romanesque attire is outta here, replaced with classic Yukon clothes. The religious explosion that Fitz created with his edicts gets socially reversed (even if not legally), as people start rejoining the United Yukon Church and looking down their noses at people who don't. Bruce and Charlotte shift to praying in private, and as he says, he does not regret the situation.

"Let the rest of the Yukon hate us, so long as they leave us alone," is all he says on it - for he has Charlotte and Mary...and, soon, another child as Charlotte is now very pregnant, and just in time for the base they were working on to be finished and Bruce is shuffled to the island of Socotra to help them finish their base (which is behind schedule.)

The base commander thinks that Bruce is there to arrest him for being behind schedule, but Bruce once more has to assure him that he's not the Consul's puppet, he's actually an engineer. It turns out that the reason why the base is so far behind is that Lord Newsom has been peculating funds off it, since the neighboring Autonomous Zone is his pet project. Bruce writes to Fitz for more time and he gets it. He reflects bitterly that Lord Newsom, who did the same crime as his friend O'Brian, got a slap on the wrist, while O'Brian was hung without trial.

"I thought O'Brian either needed to have lived a better life, or married a worse woman," is what Bruce has to say on the topic.

With the base finished in tearing speed, Bruce and an even more pregnant Charlotte are invited back to Neapolis for another meeting with Fitz...

Fitz sent a doctor on the airship to take care of Charlotte, by then eight and a half months large with child. He had also dispatched a valet to dress me for the grand occasion, whatever it was to be, and a maid apiece for Charlotte and little Mary. The closet in our cabin suite contained a new wardrobe for each of us; I had three new tailored gray uniforms, and Charlotte and Mary had dozens of new stain gowns. My valet looked at French in his now threadbare homemade linen suit and lifted an eloquent eyebrow, then declared the old man a lost cause. Mary was four years old and full of irrepressible energy, a none too surprising development when one considered who her mother was; she wriggled like a sack of angry snakes while the maid bathed her and stuffed her into a blue velvet dress that had a white lace collar. The maid had the good sense to show Mary how she looked in a full length image, and our daughter at once fell in love with the image. My strong-willed carrottop let the maid curl her hair, and was the sweetest girl child an adult could wish to tend to as the maid put each of the twenty four gowns on her to check for fit. The other maid bathed Charlotte in rose water and fed her orange sherbet while she manicured my wife's nails. The steam pump air conditioner in our cabin ran at full blast during the entire trip.

"This is most sinful," Charlotte said to me as she ate another bowl of sherbet before bedtime. "My next confession won't be a total waste of time."

Click to shrink...

I included this passage because my summary does skip a lot of the tiny character bits between Bruce and his family and...they're a very important part of the story. Not just because they remind us that these are real people in a terrible society, but...well...put a pin in it.

God, I have so many pins. I do swear that they're all getting wrapped up in the final chapter, and it's a doozy!

They arrive at Nepolis to find it completely transformed: There's multiple zeppelin ports to bring in the constant stream of supply. Fitz has, in the least shocking move ever, RECREATED THE HAGIA SOPHIA FOR HIS OWN PALACE, oh my god that's gauche, that's so fucking gauche. The city is surrounded by tents full of Uzbeki tribesmen who have come for work and are hired for various odd jobs and bodyguarding, while a slowly growing number of refugees from the disintegrating Turkish Empire come for protection and what goods they can beg off the Yukon elite upper crust. When Bruce and his family disembark, Pularski and Lady Joan meet them: Mary is immediately fascinated of and terrified of the huge scarred assassin/bodyguard and hides behind Charlotte, while Lady Joan (being the only nice DeShay) takes them in as if they were her family.

...or, considering how awful the rest of the DeShays are, as if they were anyone but.

Bruce notes that Lady Joan, as wife to the Consul and daughter of the richest people in the Confederacy, could have rebuffed Charlotte (a former saloon keeper's daughter) without loss of face of prestige. Instead, she and Charlotte became fast friends. Buck Pularksi, meanwhile...

[Buck and Lady Joan] never flirted openly; they did not have that species of a friendship. There was a definite tenderness the two of them shared. The essence of that mutual feeling was strongest whenever they were together in the garden. To look upon them sitting among hte bright flowers and blossoming orange trees made me feel as if I were an intruder there. Her feelings for the broken man were a mixture of pity for the creature he was and gratitude for the protection and human contact he gave her. Buck loved her without the reservations a more worldly man would have acquired at his age. My heart ached to see him having three o'clock tea with her and Charlotte.

Click to shrink...

Charlotte returns from one (1) such tea session and is like, "So, does Fitz...know that his wife is in love with his bodyguard? Also, when is she going to take the estrogen?"

Bruce thinks that Fitz...doesn't really care about women or pleasure. He cares about power. And Charlotte says that if that was the case, why marry Lady Joan, the best of the Shays (they've dropped the "De" from their name to sound more properly Yukon)? She thinks that Fitz...wants to be better, somewhere in his twisty brain, and he picked a wife that might someday call him to that betterness. Bruce is like, "hum that's too complicated for my simple brain" and Charlotte is like, "That's true, aren't you glad i taught you so much~"

Bruce mentions he's heard rumors.

"Rumormongering is a sin!" Charlotte exclaims. "HOwever, please tell me immediately."

upon hearing about Lady Joan and Fitz's difficulties, she's like, "Oh, well, all men are strange. you're strange, but i enjoy it."

Bruce's like, "You know I'm going to be glad when you have a baby and your hormone levels are normal..." and she's like, "Bah!" in an exaggerated way, it's very cute, they're SO CUTE. They also dance together again, much to Von Buren's horror. Then...there's an odd bit where Fitz finally actually visits Bruce. Except he does it at, like, three in the morning, and it's just to ask him how the airbase and naval fueling station was when he left. Bruce, groggily, is like, "Uh...f-fine?" and Fitz's is like, "Very good, thank you!"

...okay, wait, I know what Fitz reminds me of right now: Obsession with Alexander the Great, weird hours, manic episodes, terrible mother, wait, wait, wait, HE'S-

(I always knew he was a smeghead...)
​

And just like Rimmer, when given near unlimited power, he's...building a fucking Hagia Sophia to live in while getting everyone killed. Which, by the way, his "Great House" Is decorated with a gigantic mosaic done in the style of an Egyptian painting, with Fitz being a titanic figure surrounded by increasingly tiny figures representing his fellows - Bruce will be about as high as Fitzpatrick's boot. There's also a floor map showing all the Yukon bases with circles indicating their range, demonstrating Yukon air superiority to the delegates.

Yes, delegates! The Turks have been waiting around for weeks, and the Chinese have been slowly picking their way from their Empire to here ON FOOT because I DUNNO, SOMEONJE BLEW UP EVERY BRIDGE, ROAD, RAILWAY AND PORT IN THEIR ENTIRE FUCKING COUNRY, then dismantled their AIRFORCE. Fitz is such a dick, man.

When the Chinese do arrive, they're 120 tired, starved, beaten men in normal clothes. They had left with 300.

Fitz has them bathed, fed, and then dressed in sumptuous silk robes like...well, like they're Chinese from the 1800s. I'm pretty sure that the People's Ambassador, elected as best as possible by the Peking Commune is looking at these robes and the moasic and thinking: oh my god, I am at the mercy of a backwards tin pot dictator, this is so much worse than I thought it was going to be. Like, I didn't quite process how insane this would be from their perspective until I was older and realized how...like...they're still communists. They hate this shit!

...at least they got a nice meal I suppose.

The day of the surrender ceremony comes. Bruce, in his best uniform, and with his family in their best clothing, arrives for his designated place in the affair. He notices Hood up by Fitz. "He looks sick," he says.

"No, he's drunk. Sorry, honey, but...you haven't been around as many alcoholics as me," his wife says.

"My friends," Fitz began and his words echoed off the curved surfaces of the dome like a clacker hitting the sides of a bell, "and those who say they wish to be our friends, we have gathered here to forgive past transgressions and to lay the foundation of the new world government that shall rule us all..."

He paused to all the four translators to speak. The first translated Fitz'w rods into Mandarin, the second into Turkish, the third into Arabic, and the fourth into Russian, the language of Panslavia. Those in the crowd unable to understand English or any of the four languages - and there were many from Southern Africa and Latin America who could not - had to wait in uncomprehending fear through the entire ceremony.

"When our enemies first began this war," continued Fitz. "they stood like gods upon their vast empires and beat their chests and said aloud 'We are gods! let us make the world our footstool! We hsall crush the Yukons first! They alone stand in the way of our mad ambitions!"

He paused for translation.

"Laying it on a bit thick," whispered Charlotte.

"Especially since we made war on them," i said.

Fitz was only getting warm. He accused the Chinese of killing his father. He told the story of Sadiya Bridge, a tale that was news to me and the other war veterans. (It seemed the Chinese had attacked a bridge in northern India on April 8th, 2421, two days before we commenced bombing. Charlotte said she remembered something in the papers about the incident.)

Click to shrink...

this goes on for four hours. Bruce and his wife quietly leave, citing her health (she is very preggo) and learn what happened later: The three leaders of the Chinese delegation are kicked and shoved into the center and, wiping tears from their eyes, sign the Four Points. And...god, it's fucking heartbreaking to imagine.

Then...Fitz says it is time for the allies to sign.

The Indian, Panslav (apparently they're Yukon allies? I must have missed that, ooops!) and Philippine delegates are forced at gunpoint towards the treaty. The Indian Delegate (Mr. Puri, who you may recognize from earlier) begs the Consul for some kind of sanity.

"Go weep," Fitz says.

Von Buren, harrumphing, informs us what he ACTUALLY said was "Come, let us build a better world together." (see Gerald page 4987 for proof!)

With the entire world under the Yukon thumb, Fitz throws a party. Bruce, despite his wishes, is required to come. Charlotte manages to beg off, blaming her feet. And there...they watch another movie. And it's not as much fun as the last film Bruce saw - which, remember, was years before at college, with Mason?

We soon discerned that it was a silent color film taken from the belly of an airship. It showed the Yangtze River from the height of about two hundred feet and followed that muddy stream east towards the ocean. First we saw the green mountain vistas from Kuming.

"This is not so bad," i heard Woodenhead Santeen say. "Reports had it that the land was bare."

The trees in the mountains had enough leaves to give the steep slopes a verdant cover. As the elevation dropped the land flanking the river turned yellow, then became a brown shade that was interrupted by patches of gray where the burned cities had been. When the zeppelin's camera reached the heart of Sichuan Province we had to squint to tell the difference between the river and the bare mud flats around it. We saw some red-tiled roofs and empty sunken roads and clumps of dead trees. There were no living, moving people. The locusts had stripped the landscape clean...when the camera moved over a major city, we could see the river had left its banks and had washed away many of the buildings like the sea taking away sand castles from the beach. Not a single sandbag had been placed on the banks to hold back the water. In that part of China, there were no human hands to make barriers. I had helped bring this about, I told myself. There were no words in my vocabulary that could justify this abomination...

Click to shrink...

Hood, watching this...begins to quote from the Book of Joel

"Hear this, you aged men
give ear, all inhabitants of the land:
has such a thing happened in your life
or in the days of your fathers
tell your children of it
and let your children tell their children
and their children another generation
what the cutting locusts have left
the swarming locust has eaten
What the swarming locust left
the hopping locust has eaten
and what the hopping locust left
the destroying locust has eaten"

By the end, he's screaming as the other people at the party try and drag him away. Bruce goes to him, and they stagger out together.

"We're going to hell, Bobby," he says.

"Perhaps, sir." Is all Bruce can say.

FOOTNOTE TIME!

FOOTNOTE 3: The passage about the Timmerman conspiracy is removed from the 2541 edition of the book - Von Buren left it in, to show just how nuts Bruce was. We'll see!

FOOTNOTE 8: Apparently, the House Karls love drinking "Muerte", a liquor distilled from sugarcane and cow blood. Y...Yummy.

FOOTNOTE 12: Amusingly, the guy in charge of the base that Bruce takes over (who begs to not be arrested and executed) is apparently none other than Curtis COurage Sallis, who goes on to write "Yours by Moonlight", "Your Face" and "Whenever I see you Smile", which are still popular in Yukon territories as romantic songs even 150 years later. Ergo, he is best imagined to be played by a young and sexy Frank Sinatra.

FOOTNOTE 13: Sallis also refers to a rumor that Fitz and Lady Chelsea (the future Chrysanthemum Woman) had an illicit love affair. In a RARE instance, Von Buren AND Bruce are in agreement that that never fucking happened.

COMING UP NEXT: The Universal Railroad (for real this time) and the Third Baesilus to Die. (Place your bets as to who down below!)

 

[Kuja]

 

[Kadmus]

God, Fitz absolutely is Rimmer. Petty little jumped-up tyrant who lets the faintest whiff of power go to his head.

Although, you know, Rimmer has (a very few) redeeming qualities, whereas Fitz is just a raging arsehole genocaidaire who's so desperate to kill more people he can't even keep his allies from turning into enemies (which is one of those inevitable outcomes of the whole 'force all the people who you pretended to be on the same side as to sign a unilateral disarmament agreement at gunpoint' thing), and he also can't even tyrant over his own people properly; a competent dictator would be stringing up the nobles by the thousand to secure his position, not pandering to these people who openly despise him and openly work directly against his interests, and who he even knows are plotting to kill him!

 

[ScottishMongol]

upon hearing about Lady Joan and Fitz's difficulties, she's like, "Oh, well, all men are strange. you're strange, but i enjoy it."

Click to shrink...

What do you think she meant by this

 

[DragonCobolt]

What do you think she meant by this

Click to shrink...

Lots to think about!!!

God, Fitz absolutely is Rimmer. Petty little jumped-up tyrant who lets the faintest whiff of power go to his head.

Although, you know, Rimmer has (a very few) redeeming qualities

Click to shrink...

You know I wonder if, going off Book Rimmer, Fitzpatrick would also have been happier if he had been allowed to be a painter. (The passage about how good Rimmer is at painting and contrasted with how bad he is at anything related to the job he has convinced himself he HAS to do is fucking heartbreaking)

 

[RC2020]

Though Fitz is, if nothing else, charismatic. Maybe he has Ace Rimmer's charm and confidence on the outside, with normal Rimmer's neuroses and quirks underneath.

 

[WestOrEast]

The base commander thinks that Bruce is there to arrest him for being behind schedule, but Bruce once more has to assure him that he's not the Consul's puppet, he's actually an engineer. It turns out that the reason why the base is so far behind is that Lord Newsom has been peculating funds off it, since the neighboring Autonomous Zone is his pet project. Bruce writes to Fitz for more time and he gets it. He reflects bitterly that Lord Newsom, who did the same crime as his friend O'Brian, got a slap on the wrist, while O'Brian was hung without trial.

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"I hope so, for your sake, General. The Consul is not as forgiving as I am."

I'm not religious, but I appreciate what religion can do, when wielded by the best of us. If you're sure you can never be better, why try and do good? There's no ledger, there's no way to "balance" a life out in a way that will somehow add things up. Redemption isn't gained or lost by hitting specific numbers, because if you ever deserved redemption you wouldn't need it. Whether Bruce can ever "make up" for what he's done is not really the question: Can he do better tomorrow than he has done before? That's the hope, the promise, that Charlotte's particular take on Catholicism offers.

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I suppose it's my Christian upbringing but I've always thought that the people who deserve forgiveness, mercy and redemption are not the ones who need it.