Saving the Royal Federation

Cleaning up the debris

The night was ending. In the bits of the sky, sun was starting to rise. The chaos of the attack almost ended. Huge amount of soldiers were dislocated inside and outside of the palace’s territory. Soldiers were still running around, looking for specific people, checking lists to know who exactly survived.

Jack was sitting in a large meeting room of King Brandon. Any left survivors of the Ruling Circle started to gather, many still in their dusty clothes, some came in their robes as they were sleeping when the attack occurred. Most of them were still in shock, eyes red from the filthy air, lips pale from having to breathe dust in.

It was already counted, that only half of the Ruling Circle survived. They will need to get new Ministers fast. King Brandon entered the room. Everyone stood up and bowed. He looked even more tired than usual. He went to his seating area, which was a little higher than the other chairs and sat down. Then he calmly started speaking:

“Thank you all for gathering during this awful night. We all are very much distressed due to news of Crown Prince Alfred’s death. Despite this sad fact, there are things that must be done. As you can see, most of the Ministers did not survive, which means we need new candidates.“

“Your Royal Highness“ Jack stood up and started speaking “I have thought about new candidates to fill up most of the positions in the...”

“It is one thing to be disrespectful to me in a private meeting and another on the night of my sons death” King Brandon interrupted “I already have the names of the Ministers. Let us meet them now.”

Jack sat down, frustrated. King Brandon continued to introduce name by name, who will be next Corporate Minister, Minister of Corporate Finance, Minister of Royal Relations and so on. Jack started to get bored until he heard King Brandon say:

“Next. Minister of Arms Control Princess Dr. Maeve Gregory”.

Jack looked to her coming in with awe and stood up again:

“Your Royal Highness, I would like to express concern about this position. Please let me recommend someone for this role.”

Maeve ignored his remark and sat down into an empty seat smiling.

“I am sure that Princess Dr. Gregory is the right choice” King Brandon said and added “Now lets look up our casualties and next moves after this battle.”

Jack was furious. He clenched his fists and sat down. War Ministry and Ministry of Arms Control worked in close partnership, most of the time War Ministry had to get permission in using new technologies for battles or move the Phantom Spaceships to another planet.

Jack knew, that he did not have any political power. He was just a marionette. A tool to try stop the war. It was going on way too long, for them to hope to win the war. All everyone wanted was for it to end. The problem was, that during the long years, no one had succeeded to contact Clementine to start the peace negotiations. No one saw them, no one knew how they looked.

“My personal advisors have prepared the information about the casualties of this night. My advisor Prince Timothy will continue.” King Brandon showed to Prince Timothy by hand that he can start, who was standing in the corner of the meeting room. Timothy walked near the table and started to go through numbers:

“Number of civilians dead: 268. Number of Royals dead: 37. Buildings destroyed: 5. According to Security Department, it is still unknown how Clementine got past the atmospheric security system.”

“Pffft” Jack frowned. Everyone looked to Jack for a second and then back to Prince Timothy, who continued:

“It is still under investigation. Looking to the War Zone data, it has been over 9 months that we saw Clementine ships and had a battle with them. This was a success of a newly used strategy to try to ignore the Clementine territory and evacuate the planets where they attack most. It was the most successful of all strategies used so far.”

“The most successful strategy?!” Jack shouted angrily while standing up, he started walking around the fully seated table and pointing with fingers to his pad “Look at the statistics below: 13 civilian planets lost! Where do you think all the 29 billion people went? Do you think all of them had enough money to evacuate? Did all of them have citizenship to get evacuated? All of those people were evacuated mostly to the poorest planets of our Federation and had to start over. Just because we used this “NEW” strategy. It is not a strategy it is a defeat and today’s attack just shows how close they actually are to destroying our Federation.” Jack looked King Brandon in the eyes. The King relaxed on his seat and nodded his head for Jack to continue. Jack pointed to the pad he was holding “LOOK at the war technology statistics. We had 32 Phantom Spaceships 10 yeas ago. Now we have 6! 3 of them are orbiting this planet. This is ridiculous!”

“We have less Phantom Spaceships because our economy is down. We cannot afford to build new ones right now. Most of them were lost during warfare. This strategy seemed like the best option available 5 years ago.” The Minister of Royal Economy argued.

“However, it does not seem to work” Jack continued “Economy is still falling, because of evacuating so many planets with crucial resources for us, we are in recession.” Jack looked around the room. The faces of the Ruling Council. They all seemed very tired. Tired of the war. “I would like to say simply: Evading policy sucks. The more we ignore Clementine behavior, the more hungry it gets. We need to attack the Clementine directly to the core. Show them to back off.”

“This is all very inspiring” Princess Maeve started to interrupt, her hands calmly resting on the table “However, all the attacks need funding. As you already saw and said, we are less than capable economically to continue this battle. Also we do not know where the core of Clementine is. All we know are the blurred lines of where their territory is.”

Jack looked her in the eyes and could feel his blood boiling. There was a little pause, then King Brandon started speaking:

“What would be your next steps, General Sera?”

“We need to find the core. Invest into spying on them. We need to find out who they are.” Jack replied.

“As you should know, we tried, General” King continued “All of the ships were gone without any trace. We did not get any information back after they got into the Clementine territory or anywhere close to it.”

“Would this be different if we could investigate the Clementine ship?” Jack smirked “Because my fleet commander Keira informed me before this meeting, that they successfully retrieved the fallen ship and it is still fully functioning.”

Everyone in the room gasped.

“We must form a scientist group in order to investigate!” Princess Maeve stood up excited. Jack looked at her smiling, when suddenly the doors burst open and Selena walked in. She went near King Brandon and whispered something in his ear. Everyone went silent, then the King shouted out happily:

“We found Princess Adriana, she is alive and well!”