The Renegade: Apollo Stone Series Book 3 by P.M. Johnson

Author:P.M. Johnson [Johnson, P.M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-10-17T06:00:00+00:00

Chapter 29

True victory requires more than simply defeating your enemy on the field of battle. You must also defeat his strategy. If you have not defeated his strategy, you have not achieved victory despite a hundred battles won or a thousand foes slain.

- Baku Nestra (The Way of the Blade), Book VII.

Attika sighed and dropped a seventy-five page report onto a stack of a dozen or so similar looking documents and slowly dragged her fingers through her hair, carefully avoiding the plate embedded into the side of her skull. The report was yet another uninspired study prepared by stiff-necked functionaries incapable of creative thought. Clearly, they had not embraced her vision for the future, whether out of contempt or stupidity she was not yet sure. She’d held long discussions with each of the ministry heads and laid out her plans for the newly constituted Federated States of America, but all she had received from them was a laundry list of excuses for missed industrial and food production goals and warnings about the dangers of her “radical” proposals.

She glanced at a one-page summary of the latest economic data. It was dismal. Long on the brink of economic collapse, the nation was finally tipping over the cliff. Leading economic indicators were all down ten percent or more compared to the prior year. Flows of foreign trade were down to a mere trickle, and worst of all, the blight was expected to destroy at least fifty percent of the current year’s harvest. Fifty percent! Were it not for generous donations of corn, wheat, and other food from the League of Free Cities, people would be digging for tubers and boiling bark just to survive. Of course, the League did not provide this food out of the goodness of their hearts. They feared being inundated by refugees flowing west across the Mississippi in search of relief from poverty and famine. And to ensure that did not happen, the League’s relief shipments came with one condition attached; Attika must prevent her people from wandering west. Though somewhat disorganized, the League had a much stronger economy and higher standard of living than their cousins to the east, and they didn’t want to spoil a good thing. Attika complied with the League’s mandate by reinstituting internal checkpoints and beefing up border patrols along the eastern side of the Mississippi River.

As disastrous as the food shortages and rapidly shrinking economy were, the main contributor to the nation’s woes was its currency, or lack thereof. The Guardians had managed a large part of the PRA’s monetary policy through a highly centralized “buy-card” program. Under this system every individual over the age of eighteen was issued a card in which was embedded a data chip containing the individual’s biographic and biometric information. Each month the Ministry of Growth and Prosperity would allocate credits to every card, which people could then use to purchase goods and services. There were seven types of cards, each with its own color and specific credit allotment depending on the needs of the bearer and his or her status in society.

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