The Queen Must Die

    I was with the Philippine army at the last assault on Reykjavik.
    Hard to believe it's been long enough that mention the Queen of the North and all you get is a funny look or some spare change. Maybe that's the way it has to be, though: those of us who survived don't like remembering, and those who didn't don't.
    I was there, though, at the beginning, and I was there at the end, bunked down in a troop carrier with a bunch of scared kids on the Forgotten 5th of November. Miserable weather, no time to be fighting on the North Sea, but our army, scraped together from the dregs of dead armies, floating in the decommissioned hulls of dead nations, didn't have much of a choice. All of us just flotsam of the Great War, fighting ghosts.
    Even her. The Queen of the North, she was a quick-thinking opportunist with a bigger band of mercenaries and a smarter bunch of friends (and a lot more luck) than anyone near her: when the Powers that Were destroyed themselves in their war, she grabbed one of the pieces. It made sense. Sense, hell, it was self-preservation, and I helped her do it. But she didn't stop, couldn't, and she wouldn't let go. So I helped stop her, too.
    We had to stabilize things. Everything we'd known was gone, we had to do something, so we did, me and her and the rest of us. But it went too far, and when what was left of civilization washed up in the South to make humanity a going concern again she wouldn't come with us. She too knew we had to stabilize, but her answer to that was for the whole of the North to be hers. Her armies grew fast, war freaks and the rest left above the Line after the planet-buster came down: with them she grabbed every habitable stretch of the northlands, putting down resistance and making it her own. I know she was trying to consolidate first, set herself up as unassailable before scattered humanity could get moving again.
    If we'd taken any longer, she would have made it. That much territory, resources, people; she would have been the power in the Aftermath. The South recovered faster than she'd thought (and I know, I remember guessing the timetable) and when Greenland and Archanglsk and Oslo-Under-Ice radioed for help against her, they were there.
    And when the flames boiled the ice over Rotterdam, I was with them.
    So there I sat, in the briefing room of our new flagship telling the brass how to bring down the Queen I put in place. So there I lay, in the hold of our patched up troop carrier, surrounded by ice and fear and kids half my age waiting for the final assault to come.
    She didn't know, I think, that I was on that boat, with the army that felled her, but it didn't matter whose guns did the shooting. It was me that told them where to fire. It was me at the beginning, and it was me at the end. I think we both knew that's how it had to be. I started it, after all. I had to finish it.

• Posted at Saturday, December 13, 2008 03:29 PM
• In Short Fiction Category | Permalink