Starcorp 1: Escape from Sol

“Congratulations Prime Minister,” an enthusiastic young aid greeted as Eckhart approached.

Eckhart strode by him quickly while flashing a smile and a nod his way. The past hour had conditioned him to the practice of keeping his responses to a minimum. Predictions from the press that he would win his bid for re-election were coming in for the past three hours. His opponent conceded to his inevitable defeat, via a phone call, nearly one hour earlier. Despite this, Eckhart had been delaying a public announcement of his win until that point in the counting of the votes that equated it as a mathematical certainty. This report came in just a few minutes before. In response to this latest affirmation Eckhart set off for the hotel banquet room to make his victory speech.

One year earlier Eckhart’s chance of winning re-election was deemed improbable by nearly all the political pundits giving attention to the race. They expected his base to provide him with a respectable showing, but none thought this would be large enough to overcome the antipathy the masses felt towards his administration. The course he had steered for the state did little to improve the economic fortunes of its inhabitants. This slow deterioration of the people’s conditions was a stark contrast to the fate of peoples in states on friendly terms with the starcorps. Despite the prejudice that the majority felt towards the Spacers, a large majority of the Alberta Alliance’s populace was not prepared to suffer for this conviction. This situation was, for a long time, a major thorn in Eckhart’s re-election plans. The severity of this thorn prick began to diminish a year earlier with the introduction of the United Front Pact.

Eckhart authored the United Front Pact and Peter Carr, his Minister of State, was tasked with the job of marketing it to all the heads of states about the Earth. The basic provision of the Pact was that all the states would share in the profits and the hardships that came with their dealings with the starcorps. It required that no state accept or solicit gifts, resources, and services from the starcorps that create a disparity between them and a member state of the pact. The passage of this pact had the promise of overcoming the unevenness of assistance that the states were getting from the starcorps. It was a workaround for the absence of investment treaties between the states of Earth.

Without some form of agreement between the states of Earth, they found it impossible to form up into any kind of confederacy. There was the promise in the United Front Pact that this could change. Earthers found common ground in it. Its popularity transcended all territorial disputes, along with the myriad of social, ethnic and religious discords between the states. Every politician on the Earth had to take a position regarding it. For the voters of the Alberta Alliance, this proposal represented a course change in their future without the sacrifice of their rancor towards the starcorps. For Eckhart, it was the saving grace of his administration.

The race for re-election was close but, in the end, Eckhart prevailed with a slightly definitive margin. With the popularity of the United Front Pact and his re-election, Eckhart had hope that he would be able to fulfill his unspoken crusade, the subjugation of the starcorps. He saw in this pact an avenue for uniting the states of Earth. He believed that he could parlay an agreement on this into future agreements of greater significance. For Eckhart, this was a new and exciting development in his political career. Now that he had won another term as the Prime Minister of the Alberta Alliance he was eager to dispense with the campaign machinery and move forward with this plan.

Eckhart, his campaign manager, and three members of his support staff hurried down to the hotel banquet hall to finalize the election process. Eckhart was eager to make his speech and leave. The others were simply trying to keep pace with him. In short order, Eckhart completed this task. Little more than twenty minutes behind that he was out the door and in transit for his office. An hour past this he was there conferring with five of his ministers and three members of his office staff.

“What have you heard?” Eckhart commanded of Carr to report a second after he had entered the office.

“It’s too early to tell, Prime Minister,” Carr reported as he approached the empty chair in front of the desk.

Peter Carr knew without asking that Eckhart was anxious to know how his re-election was affecting their drive to recruit states behind the United Front Pact. The hope was that an election win for Eckhart would translate into an avalanche of states promising their support for the pact. Eckhart, more so than all others, was deeply invested in this prospect. He was not prepared to wait for any appreciable period for a final tally of calls from other heads of states that were declaring their fealty to the cause. He wanted to hear the numbers as they were coming in.

“You’ve made calls, haven’t you?” Eckhart questioned back with authority.

“A few,” Carr responded with a nod as he sat in the chair. “They’re still crunching numbers.”

“What numbers?” Eckhart challenged with a hint of hysterics. “I won. They should be climbing over each other to get on board with this.”

“There are a lot of heads of states out there that don’t have the base that you have, Prime Minister,” Carr softly stressed. “They’re going to want to weigh the risks.”

Eckhart did not care for this answer, but he understood it. He knew a win by a large margin would have pulled in a dozen heads of states within the first hour after the election. The implication that their support for this pact would bolster their chances for re-election would have been too irresistible to pass up. This not being the case, and the fact that pledges of support were slow to come in, Eckhart knew that the heads of other states were calculating the downside of being too closely aligned with him.

Eckhart was still the most popular politician about the globe among the militantly anti-starcorp population. However, his crossover popularity into the moderate populace had declined significantly over the past three years. This group was indispensable to his ambitions. The starcorps, severely, penalized the Alberta Alliance economically for obstructing the passage of the Thames/BX01 investment treaty. The impact of this stiffened the resolve of the militants and weakened Eckhart’s appeal among the moderates. The decline in Alberta’s economic fortunes did not go unnoticed within the global political community. Eckhart’s weight of influence had all but disappeared. Over the past two years, no one sought his endorsement during their election campaigns. Eckhart desperately wanted to reverse this situation. He knew, without the clout to leverage other heads of states to fall in line behind him, there was no chance of him directing any kind of assault, economic or military, against the starcorps. The United Front Pact was the vehicle he hoped to restore his political clout.

Eckhart suspected that Carr had members of his staff making calls and checking the numbers as they spoke. He would have preferred discussing the positive response he expected to get from the states that they promoted this pact to directly. But he could see that this was not going to be the case at present. In place of this discussion, he turned his attention to an appraisal of his post re-election status.

“And what do your people say?” Eckhart questioned Carr grudgingly.

“Well, there’s no doubt that you’ve regained some clout,” Carr reported with a positive inflection. “I estimate by this time tomorrow we will have half a dozen states firmly committed to this Pact.”

“And after that,” Eckhart challenged glumly.

“The going will likely be slow after that,” Carr reported in a matter of fact manner. “I am sure that there will be dozens of states watching you, Prime Minister. But if we can push this pact through the legislature of—twenty states, most the other states will fall like dominoes.”

Eckhart considered this with a decidedly unoptimistic look. He gave a few seconds of thought to this, and then he pondered out the question that it produced.

“What’s the timeframe that we’re looking at for all of this?”

“To get this pact in full swing, I believe that we’re looking at a minimum of ten years,” Carr casually answered after a second of calculation. “Twenty is a more likely number.”

Eckhart took this in with a pondering frown and silence. The Minister of Defense, George Wilkinson, was not so contemplative and quickly reacted to this report with an intonation of shock in his voice.

“Twenty years! If this pact doesn’t take hold soon, and in a big way, we’ll be out of a job in twenty years.”

Carr ignored the direction that this remark came from. He suspected that Eckhart shared this sentiment and focused his attention on him.

“That might be the case, but this pact is not going anywhere,” Carr expressed excitedly. “We’ve started something here, Prime Minister. This is not going to go away. This is just the beginning. When enough states sign on to this, the starcorps will be forced to deal with us as a block of states and it won’t matter what they do after that. They can castigate us. They can favor us. It doesn’t matter. This pact will become the cornerstone of a new cooperation among the states—the reemergence of trade—interstate commerce. And as this cooperative grows stronger more states will join in to become a part of it. When that happens, we’re looking at industrialization on a global scale. In fifty years’ time, the domination of the starcorps could be a thing of the past.”

Eckhart was not interested in a long-term strategy for displacing the starcorps as the dominant power in the solar system. His aspirations were far more hands on. He wanted to be the captain of the vessel that destroyed the starcorps. He rationalized, within his own mind, that the starcorps owed Earth a debt that needed to be collected. Publicly, he spoke of appropriating the starcorps to service the needs of Earth first. But, silently, in the back of his mind he dreamed of punishing the inhabitants of the starcorps for the crime of being the object of his intense hate.

“Keep me apprised of your progress,” Eckhart fumed after a moment of silence. “I want to know who signs on to the pact and who declines.”

Eckhart knew that there was nothing more that he could do on this subject. Despite his efforts to the contrary, he always suspected that his need for vengeance would never be satiated, and he grudgingly accepted this as the reality. With some mental effort, he pushed away from this subject and devoted the next forty minutes to the business of his administration. At the end of this time, he questioned the group for any new business that needed to be discussed. After a moment of silence, George Wilkinson, the Minister of Defense began to speak on a new subject.

“There is some peculiar talk coming from the starcorps,” Wilkinson reported halfheartedly.

“What kind of talk?” Eckhart questioned with a shrug.

“There’s a rumor going around that there’s a starcorp working on some kind of secret project in the Saturn System.”

Eckhart was not particularly intrigued by this. The starcorps were always expanding and growing their presence in the solar system. Nonetheless, he asked the question that this topic provoked.

“Which starcorp?”

“RG01, it’s new,” Wilkinson reported back casually. “It’s only a few years old. I haven’t been able to get any details on it, which is strange.”

“Why is that?” Carr questioned straightaway.

“Our contacts in other starcorps don’t seem to know anything about RG01,” Wilkinson reported with a slight shake of his head. “And they seem to have their own suspicions about it.”

Eckhart’s attention was roused by this report. And he noted that Carr was equally curious and lost in thought. Eckhart turned his attention to his Secretary of State in reaction to this.

“What are you thinking?”

Carr took a moment to finish his thought before giving Eckhart the answer to his query.

“Saturn is awfully far away for a starcorp. But if I wanted to keep something a secret, that was too large to hide, that’s where I would put it.”

Eckhart and Carr took two seconds to exchange looks of concern. At the end of this time, Eckhart turned his attention to his Minister of Defense and gave him a succinct directive.

“Do whatever you have to, and find out everything you can about RG01.”