NationStates Jolt Archive

OOC: Some of you might remember my Gotterdammerung with Derscon and its allies. Here's Undershi begining to recover.

Undershi City, Undershi Province, The Undershi Empire

Abdul Koch, Provisional Government Secretary of Foreign Affairs, coughed into his cream silk handkerchief. The heating had gone out again in the offices the Foreign Affairs Secretariat had taken over. They'd been military offices before the war, there were plenty of them left even after the Dersconi bombing... and he guessed he should be thankful for the fine offices he'd inherited from some officer. But the problems, how the heat kept going out... he sighed, and decided to put on his coat. It was a sad state of affairs, when a senior government official had to wear his coat in his office because the heating was gone...

As he went over to the coat rack to fetch it, he glanced out of his window, appreciating the view... the old Winter Palace was across the square, or rather what was left of it. The NSAA War had left it a smoking ruin, and no one had ever found the effort to do more than clear away some of the larger rubble, what with the seemingly endless series of wars that had followed. The thousand little wars of an Empire in decline... and now the Empire had fallen, he guessed. No more true colonies, at any rate. All of those gone, 'liberated' by Dersconi. No more Empire, then. No Leader either, just the Provisional Government and the Secretariats...

He sighed, and sat down again. So much to worry about... but Undershi was back together, more or less. At least, the parts of Undershi that were Undershi. The norm revolts had been put down, the Northland Revolt crushed by the tanks freed up from the front by the sudden truce that had led to the humiliating terms imposed. There was still trouble in Southland province, though. There had always been trouble in Southland Province. Those Maoist rebels, they didn't know when to give up... but order was restored. At a price, of course. Political liberalization, for the first time ever... the abolition of norm slavery, the granting of civil rights, at least to an extent... freedom of movement, even... but not the vote, not yet at least. And not the chance to carry weapons as anything other than Janissary soldiers of the Empire. So things were kept in order. Mostly. For now.

Abdul Koch sighed, as he sat at his desk. There was still so much that was left to happen, he could tell. He did not look forward to whatever the future would hold. If it was anything like the recent past, there would be nothing to look forward to.

Another Perspective

Matthew Lee warmed his hands at an oil-drum fire fueled by waste paper from the government offices. He felt so very tired, soul-crushing exhaustion... but then, so did many people, these days. He still wore the remains of the uniform he'd been wearing when Undershi had signed the treaty, that damned treaty...

"... and Undershi, having shown itself to be by nature an agressor, shall be allowed to maintain no more than a minimum Self Defense Force, of no more than twenty divisions..."

He could quote that detail from memory. Twenty divisions, for a military that had once numbered its divisions in the hundreds... no new WMDs, not even to replace those used during the ferocious last days of the war... so that there were few enough atom bombs left, perhaps even none if the rumors were true, and little enough in the way of chemical weapons...

There had been... hard times, when the war was just over, and the norms had been rising up. Hard times, difficult times. Harsh times... harsh measures... all the harsh measures he'd ever imagined might be possible. And then some.

Twenty divisions wasn't enough of a military force to keep down the norms, and so... reliance on other methods. The IIS had been disbanded, another result of that damned treaty, but the men and the material and the infastructure was still there... and Yursuf Schmidt, the former head of the IIS, now sat on the Supreme Council of the Provisional Government.

The IIS men and the soldiers who had suddenly found themselves unemployed had found new work, of course. Free Companies, Police Battalions, all sorts of things like that. Keeping the norms in place, so that the True Undershis could keep a hold on power... and they had.

Matthew's thoughts wandered, he checked his sub-machinegun, smilled at its deadly weight and its deadly look and its oh-so-deadly killing power. He'd used it often enough, when the war had ended. Often enough indeed...

Other men were gathering around the oil-drum fire. Matthew let them, without comment. Soon they would 'spontaneously' wander over to the norm quarter, to smash windows and make reprisals. A night of blood ahead... somehow, to the tired, unemployed, hung-over and hungry young ex-soldier, that prospect seemed a fine idea, a dream. To have power over another, to be a True Undershi again, instead of standing in line for work that before the war would have only been considered fit for a norm... his soul rebelled at that thought, told him he was too good for such things. And so he would go out, and be a terror again, and feel like a man and a True Undershi once more.

Someone was passing around a bottle of rot-gut whiskey. That was another sign of the decay of Undershi as a nation - before the war, alcohol had been illegal, now it was openly consumed... Matthew took the bottle when it was offered to him, and drank deeply of it. The burning...

A flashback, to a sneering IIS sergeant lighting a cigar from the still-burning corpse of a norm child, in some god-forsaken town in Northland Province, where they'd cleared guerillas out with flame-throwers...

... but then, back to the present. Ready weapons, shout slogans without meaning, feel the rush of excitment, the thrill of the idea of power and glory returning, even if this was a pathetic shadow of the way things were before the war...

... some man who wore a dirty, lived-in looking, set of IIS blacks was giving a speach, standing on a pile of garbage, unsteady from the drink already, screaming as he foamed at the mouth that it was time for True Undershis to teach the idiot norms a lesson in who it was who was the master and who it was who was the slave... Matthew didn't listen to the words. He was remembering, before the war, how good it had felt to be one of the many, during a military parade, tens of thousands of True Undershis marching in perfect unison, all so alike... all so united, united to face any outside threat.

They'd tried, tried so hard to face Derscon when the war came... done a damn good job, when it came down to it. But it hadn't been enough. All those fine, strong, men and boys all marching to the fray... and so many laying down their lives... all for nothing. All for a defeat. Depression clawed at his soul, as the drunken IIS man screamed and spewed forth raw hatred against all the norms of the world. But Matthew pushed aside depression, and didn't listen to the words. Only the tone, of absolute conviction. Somehow that tone seemed so very attractive.