The old Guns ‘N Roses song “Civil War” was playing now, just loud enough for Reggie Waite to be aware of it. It brought back memories of the Naval Academy, of his midshipman cruise aboard the old aircraft carrier John F. Kennedy, one of the last conventionally-fueled carriers in the US Fleet. War had been in the air that summer, although everyone had expected it to be a quick dust-up like Grenada back in Reagan’s day, not the long haul the Energy Wars had turned out to be.
It also made him think of his first trip south of the Mason-Dixon Line, of stopping at some little shop and the elderly shopkeeper sharply scolding him, “There was nothing civil about that war.”
Being all of eight years old and under the stern eye of his father, Reggie had held his tongue. But looking back with the perspective of his classes on military history at Annapolis, he now knew that, as such affairs go, the Late Unpleasantness of the 1860’s had actually been quite a civil affair, as compared to the horrors of the Russian Civil Wars — either the 1918 one between the Reds and the Whites, or the Red Resurgeance of the 1980’s — let alone the various uprisings and insurgencies in Africa and other parts of the Third World.
And if the current conflict with the Flannigan Administration was to be termed a civil war, it too was quite low-key. Of course having the two sides be 1.5 light-seconds apart did help keep things from becoming too kinetic, particularly when the dissenters were at the top of the gravity well and the Administration at the bottom.
He was even in contact with his nominal superiors within the space bureaucracy. Take this latest e-mail missive from the NASA Administrator. How often did a separatist leader anywhere else in the world get a sternly-worded letter from the boss, written in a manner that showed the writer clearly expected it to actually mean something?
It might have meant a little more if the new guy in the big chair hadn’t been a political hack whose chief talent seemed to be knowing how to tell Flannigan what he wanted to hear. Reggie had his differences with Aiden McAllister, but at least the man was a veteran astronaut, someone he could respect, not a professional brown-noser.
A brown-noser who was now whining about how Reggie needed to get his IT people back under control, because NASA couldn’t very well have them running around the Internet playing hacker. Reggie fought down the urge to laugh. Given that his wife was head of IT up here, and he himself had a EE degree from Annapolis, he knew perfectly well what was going on, and why. Some things deserved to be yanked out into the sunlight, which was why he’d greenlighted his niece’s idea of a pirate radio station when she’d first presented it to him.
Still, one could not very well appear too blatantly insubordinate to the man who was at least nominally running the agency to which one belonged. Which meant he needed to formulate a reasonably civil reply — and decide whether he wished to argue his case for the incursions, or play the plausible deniability card.