Glory Main by Henry V. O'Neil Page B

wanted to radiate all the Hab planets between us and the Sims?”
    The story at the time of the coup was that the president had ordered the Human Defense Force to render a large number of Hab planets unlivable, creating a kind of astral firebreak that would divert the Sims from the human-­occupied planets. It was hard to know what was true and what wasn’t because the plan’s alleged authors were all dead, but they’d reputedly dubbed it the “Head ’em Off” plan. His father and the new Emergency Senate had ridiculed it as the “Head in the Sand Plan” just before presenting their own “Head On” strategy to the public. Head On had committed all of mankind to battling the Sims for every Hab planet, no matter where they were found, until the Sim home world could be located and destroyed.
    â€œHe didn’t tell me anything. Like I said, I was ten.” Mortas had given that response so many times over the years that it came out as a reflex, even in his dream. The sad truth was that he’d gotten the same explanation as the rest of humanity, right from his father’s mouth, and that he distrusted the man so completely that he’d automatically dismissed the explanation. For a time, he’d believed he and his sister Ayliss were the only ­people outside the Emergency Senate who even suspected the story was a lie.
    â€œAnd you never asked? Never wondered about those dirty rumors? You know, the ones about a whole bunch of generals and colonels dying in combat right around the time the president was getting the chop, even though half of them weren’t anywhere near the war zones?”
    â€œDid you say rumor? There’s a rumor about your sister too, Dassa. Should I believe that as well?”
    â€œI don’t have a sister. And I’m not going to get one, not now anyway. My dad was an aide to one of those generals, but he was on leave when the Purge happened. Somehow they missed him, but they remembered him a year ago.”
    The dream shifted from reality at this point. In reality Mortas had jumped up, fearing the boy meant to attack him in some twisted act of revenge. He’d whipped Dassa soundly, beating him straight into the old rug before throwing him down the stairs. Emile Dassa had disappeared from the school infirmary that very night, and Mortas had never summoned the courage to ask what had happened to him. But here, in the dream, he stayed in his chair and kept on talking with the other boy, saying things he’d never said in real life.
    â€œThey killed those generals and colonels because they were going to carry out the president’s orders and wreck a hundred habitable worlds. Which means your dad was working for a fool. Any idiot could see that plan wasn’t going to hold off the Sims.”
    â€œStill don’t get it, do you? There never was a ‘Head ’em Off’ plan. There was just a bunch of really frightened politicians who knew what we were actually up against out there, who were going to tell everyone that the Sims aren’t the real enemy. That they’re a front, just a great big clever smokescreen. That we don’t stand a chance against whatever’s backing them. And that would have ended the war.”
    Emile dissolved into a blonde-­haired, blue-­eyed woman in the uniform of the Veterans Auxiliary, the organization that handled everything from rehabilitation to retirement for the Forcemembers returned from the war. Mortas’s sleeping mind wondered how his sister Ayliss could be at the prep school of his teen years when she’d only recently joined the Auxiliary, but her character picked up the thread where Emile had left off.
    â€œSome ­people see the war as a struggle for survival, but some others see it as a struggle for power. And I don’t mean power over the Sims. I mean power over humanity. That’s why Father and his friends killed the president and his cabinet