For the Inmost Sea of All the Earth is Shaken With His Ships

“A state which embraces the ideal of Communism is not declaring that it has achieved Communism within its borders. That is impossible on two counts: that Communism is a stateless status quo, and that there is no actualizing that status quo short of World Communism. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the People’s Republics of Gran Colombia are socialist states, stopgaps dividing the work of beckoning in World Communism between the Old World and the New. It is unfortunate that no leader of the USSR since Comrade Stalin has appreciated the gravity of this responsibility.”

–Vicente Alvarez Molina, General Secretary of the Communist Party of Gran Colombia, in a speech denouncing the policies of his Soviet counterpart Mikhail Gorbachev, 1989

El Castillo de Cromwell was the only restaurant in the Candelaria district, perhaps in all of Bogotá, that served the British classics– cottage pies, Cornish pasties, spotted dick, the comfort food of those rainy little isles that had caused the world so much trouble. Minister of State Intelligence Javier Fernandez Bautista, seated at table in front of the rustic eatery, scooped a slice of banger smothered in mash between his jowls, while his eyes tracked the Politburo limousine coming down the street from Plaza Bolivar.

The Politburo meetings were held in the former cathedral on the square and almost always finished before noon, but the real business of the state took place in restaurants like this one, all over La Candelaria from lunch until well past any ordinary dinnertime. Where and when precisely was decided by the seniormost member in these informal side-meetings, and few other Party men had a taste for the greasy, savory cuisine of Marx’s final resting place. But few had been longer or firmer in their seats than Fernandez, so most of the greatest men in South America had been made to suffer this eccentricity of his.

The younger Politburo man stepped out, heavyset bodyguard in tow, and joined Fernandez at table. He looked around with a rodent’s nervous gaze.

“You don’t need those in the Candelaria, you know.” He nodded at the squirrely man’s bodyguard. “No one gets past the perimeter but Party members in exceptional standing and rich tourists, both of whom are vetted closer than the shave on a samurai’s head. The Japanese ones, at least, I understand the Californians have set that custom aside.”

“I take you at your word, as I do in all things, Comrade Minister.” The young– meaning, in the context of his station, only half-gray in the hair– Rear Admiral Sancho Castro Lopez had a voice every bit as shaky as his fingers. He conspicuously failed to dismiss the bodyguard, who stood just right to block the sunlight and just wrong to shield them from a cold Andean breeze. Fernandez sighed. This was what the Party got for wanting young, fresh-faced technocrats, instead of leaving it to the old boys.

“Then take my word in this: it will be a source of great embarrassment if Project Windmill is not combat-ready in the next… ten weeks, twelve if you’re lucky.”

“How great an embarrassment?”

“The sort that will cost your seat to mend, and maybe your life, fool.”

Admiral Castro steadied himself on the table, scraping it against the pavers. A waiter approaching it stopped suddenly.

“He'll have the pork and apple pasty,” Fernandez told the serving man, “and a pint of Carlsberg.”

Castro breathed deeply. “The current schedule has us ready on the twenty-seventh of May– twenty weeks. Why has the timeline been accelerated so?”

“The negotiations with the Californians. A golden opportunity is coming to throw down the gauntlet over the Mexico City issue– to invoke the Treaty of Budapest.”

“We're actually using it for single combat? I see the appeal of the Duelists as an alternative to heavy tanks in some environments, but… there’s a reason we're calling our model the Don Quixote. The whole treaty is proof positive that Japan and Austria-Hungary, for all their technological breakthroughs, are still culturally stuck in the Dark Ages.”

“It's not foolishness if we win… or if we get what we want out of playing along, for a time. But, for whatever reason we might want to, we cannot deploy a Duelist we do not have.”

“In theory, our current prototype of the Don Quixote should be more or less combat-ready as it is, but not all of its weapon systems are fully integrated, and there’s a whole slew of tests we still need to–”

As he spoke, Fernandez fetched a file folder from his briefcase, and he cut Admiral Castro off by slapping it on the table.

Castro picked up the folder and read the first page. “What is this?”

“This is how you need to focus your efforts, with what time you have left. Blueprints for California’s Duelist. Incomplete, but they should give you some guidance for what the Don Quixote will be pitted against first. They named theirs the Don Juan de Austria, can you believe it?” He quoted in English,

In that enormous silence, tiny and unafraid,

Comes up along a winding road the noise of the Crusade.

Strong gongs groaning as the guns boom far,

Don John of Austria is going to the war.

“Hopeless romantics, the lot of them.”

The waiter set a steaming pasty in front of Castro, but the admiral’s eyes did not rise from his reading. “How did you get this?”

“Now now, Comrade Admiral, leave intelligence work to the Party’s intelligence man. Just as I leave how to apply it to you, as our engineering man.”

“But… why are we challenging California to a Duel? Mexico City is big, sure, but it will be a long time before we can de-feudalize so many people. Is it worth potentially losing access to Japanese-Pacific markets, or the international loss of face if we can’t win?”

Fernandez sneered. “The international community only tolerates us at all because they need our manufacturing capabilities. The trade in consumer electronics alone kept them from trying to muscle us off the Security Council as soon as they phased petroleum out of most of their vehicles. As far as the Mexicans go, we can make them useful in a short timespan. Making them ideological Communists will follow, soon enough. You think Duelists are more useful as part of a combined arms strategy than as a replacement to conventional war? There’s all the labor you’ll need to mass-produce the things.”

“And they’ll willingly build weapons for us?”

“No, but the Ministry of the Interior will iron out that detail. You really must learn to focus on your own area of expertise, and trust the Party apparatus to provide the rest.”

Castro set the file down, and picked at the pasty.

“Something bothering you, comrade?”

“They aren’t serfs under the feudalists. Even the capitalists don’t practice slavery anymore.”

“My good man, this phase, like all on the path to World Communism, will be transient. There are two fundamental truths, two first principles, you must accept to understand the vision of Marx. The first is that the end always justifies the means. They will be held in bondage for their own good, and for the good of their children, so we can end the systems that allow feudal lords and bourgeois plutocrats to rob them day after day, to no end at all but their own greed. And the second… look around you, Sancho. What do you see?”

“A cozy little restaurant, on a cozy little street, in a city seized from the Spanish colonizers by their victims of European and native blood acting as one, set like a gem on the crown of the Andes. A workers’ paradise.”

“And how do you think we built ourselves a paradise? How do we maintain it? The second lesson, Comrade Admiral, is that all of human existence is a zero-sum game. Marxism is a response to rich men getting rich by feeding on the poor. We strive to free men from that, yes, but the heart of our nation must be united in that purpose. A man is ideological, cunning, visionary, but a mob? A city? A people? Short-sighted. The cycle of stimulus-reward must be maintained, to keep them going past the initial effort to throw off the yoke. The core of Gran Colombia expands its borders– ideologically, to bring the world into full Communism, but practically? To eat better, to live more comfortably, to keep the luxuries on which they have become dependent. And why should they not be rewarded, even if it must come out of the hides of those who worked against us before being brought into the fold?” He grinned like a wolf with mashed potatoes between its fangs, and quoted, once more in English, “Some animals are more equal than others.”