[b]Addis Ababa[/b]

The War Room of the Imperial Palace was a round theatre-style room, with a gallery of benches lining its walls. In the center of the floor was painted forty by thirty foot map of Africa in a dozen shades of brown. Harsh yellow light poured from the ceiling as Hassan stood on the continent The contours of its coast and details of its topography were painted clearly so that Ethiopia's leaders could understand the theaters of their wars visually. Hassan stood in the center. He was broad man, though old age was beginning to make him flabby. His baggy uniform, a starched olive parade outfit, hid some of that though, With one foot in Nekemte and the other in Awasa, he looked like a giant brooding over a helpless Ethiopia.

Yaqob stood as well, black trimmed robes flowing over him like a dress. He took a place just outside the circumference of the map. In the gallery of benches surrounding them sat three men. One was Taytu's assistant Ita Thabiti, a middle aged man who was bald except for a thin horseshoe of wiry, short cut hair crowning his temple. He sat politely at one end of the room, mostly silent. At the other end was Yaqob's old friend Themba Akanni. He was the Prime Minister of the Ethiopian Empire, but his title had done little more than bury him in parliamentary politics. Akanni had once been the type of man to dress in European fashion and keep his hair short, but he was different now. He wore a thick black suit, golden flowers embroidered on the pockets and intricate intertwining patterns of gold trim climbing up the front, meeting with a tight embellished collar. He had let his hair grow out some, and it was beginning to hint at an afro. The third man, sitting across the room from Akanni, was Chitundu.

"The inspectors we sent to Kivu only confirmed it." Chitundu shouted from the gallery. Chitundu was a rare man in the sense that he had risen to the position of Imperial Adviser for Domestic Affairs despite being from poverty-stricken Katanga. The very same Katanga that had rebelled four years ago, though Chitundu had proven his loyalty by staying with Yaqob's government during that fight. His ink-dark skin and wide features stood out amongst the light skinned East-Africans that made up the inner circle of Ethiopian government. He was an older man now, and he suffered pains that made him sit awkwardly, in poses that made him look slightly insolent.

"Nobody cares about your roads." Ras Hassan groaned. He had been put on edge by news that had arrived an hour earlier. The Spanish had brushed aside their defenses in the Mandeb strait as easily as they would swat at flies. This meant that Ethiopia no longer had a navy, but that was not what troubled Hassan. He had expected them to be more prudent, Yaqob knew. Prudence was something that Hassan could exploit, but it looked like Spain had no interest in giving him that chance.

Yaqob could not help but agree with Hassan about the roads. Chitundu was a bureaucrat through and through. He had become so focused on his own career that he seemed to forget about the apocalypse that was coming for them over the sea. Yaqob's mind was on his family, surely in Persia by now, though he had not heard anything about them since they left. That had been nearly nine hours ago. Only five hours had passed since he gave the speech at the Addis Ababa Press Club that officialized the war. This day had been nothing but new stresses for him, and he was beginning to wonder if it would ever end.

"I agree. The war is more important, Ras." Chitundu continued in his obstinance. "But doesn't that make theft from the government a treason?"

Hassan didn't respond.

"It's a grave treason." Akanni said with the melodramatic flair of a charismatic politician. "To betray your people in times of war? They should die for that." Yaqob felt strange to think this was the same man who had accused Yaqob of being too serious when they lived in exile together in China.

Yaqob did not think that this argument needed his input, in truth. It was something that Chitundu's office could surely handle on its own. But it was his job as Emperor to care about the nation, and his very sense of self kept him from staying silent. In times like this, after all, Yaqob got a strange sort of comfort from the youthful benevolence he had prided himself in when he first ascended to the throne. "Have the inspectors had the chance to assess how much money we lost on this?" he said.

"They say that there is at least seventy kilometers of road left undeveloped." he said. "The Kivu office had been too short handed to oversee the contractors..."

"Nevermind the excuses." Yaqob said politely. He knew how weak his government was beyond the urban centers of Africa. Three quarters of the nation remained beyond their ability to tax, even now when they could use the money. "That was seventy kilometers out of how many?"

"Three hundred." Chitundu replied.

Yaqob grimaced. He saw Ita Thabiti stir uncomfortably in his silent corner, and Akanni's expression twist in something between surprise and anger. "That is nearly one a third of everything we payed them to do." Yaqob said. "Criminal charges are definitely in order."

"That's the problem. That's why I brought it here." Chitundu replied. "We can't find the contractors."

Yaqob blinked. Hassan snickered.

"You cannot find the contractors?" Akanni blurted, "How would they disappear?"

"They gave us false personal information." Chitundu waved. "The Kivu offices lost the photographs they took of these men. We are going off of the memory of the old woman who took the photos and a few men who worked on the stretches of road they actually finished. But, that is not enough." Chitundu paused for a moment, and Yaqob could see that he was building up courage. When he continued, he spoke boldly. "We need the Walinzi on this one."

"The Walinzi are busy." Hassan said firmly. "There is a war, if you have forgot. Why is it that we are spending money on roads in Kivu when we can hardly pay for the oil to keep our war machines in the field?"

"The Kivu Road project was funded with Chinese grant money. It was money they earmarked specifically for infrastructural projects." Chitundu said.

"The Chinese shouldn't be telling us how to spend that money." Hassan grumbled. "How many advisers do they have working with us? How many agents?"

"Some men working out of their embassy here." Yaqob responded. "And some working out of Pemba. Not many though." He saw where Hassan was going with this. It was their oldest problem with the Chinese government. Near infinite resources and they horded every bit.

"They cannot tell us how we should be spending this money because they have no idea what the situation on the ground actually is." Hassan said. "They haven't seen Kivu. They haven't combed through our finances. We should have taken that money and spent it on defense."

"We cannot spend all our money on defense." Yaqob reminded. "Or we would have nothing to defend. But Hassan is right about the rest of this. We cannot send agents hunting after thieves when our coasts are under attack by an enemy invader. The war takes extreme precedence." He did not want to talk about roads anymore. It was time to change the subject. "Speaking of the war. Hassan, where are we with it?"

The room-size map had more than just Hassan on it. Three-foot tall wooden poles stood on rounded stands to represent the military forces and their locations. Multiple ribbons of colored cloth hung limply from their tops and told what those poles stood for. A pole with a green ribbon meant that it belonged to Ethiopia. Blue meant it was an allied force - a force that the Ethiopian commanders had no direct control over, but could trust for support. And red meant the enemy. Additional ribbons signified what sort of unit that pole stood for, so that a green ribbon and a black ribbon meant Ethiopian infantry. A blue ribbon and a purple ribbon meant allied armor. And a red ribbon with a white ribbon meant enemy navy. The coast of east Africa was line with poles hanging the red and white ribbons.

"Rais has taken command of the first Sefari here" he walked into the north of Ethiopia. "He will be joined by most of the sixth Sefari, which is coming down from Sudan and leaving a token force to put up a fight should the Spanish attempt to land support to our north. I have taken personal command of the seventh Sefari..."

"Personal command?" Yaqob interrupted. "Wouldn't it be wiser for you to direct this war from behind the lines? If you die..."

"It would be wiser to do things that way." Hassan agreed tentatively. Something in his voice sounded annoyed, but it was clear he was working to hide it. "But it isn't the way I operate. Your majesty."

Yaqob paused for a moment. "I do not want to hinder you in any way." he said. "Do what you must do to win this war."

Hassan gave Yaqob a lingering glance. "The seventh with be joined by elements of the fourth, though we cannot bring much into the Rift valley to defend the coast. We'll bring some of the fourth into Somalia and keep the rest in Swahililand." he paused for a moment, thinking. "The only infrastructure in the Afar is the roads leading to Addis and Harar, and the city of Djibouti itself. It would take a great effort to defend, but there would be little pay-off. What I want to do is destroy what little comfort there is there, to kill as many Spaniards as we can, and then fall back and let them keep that desert and see how much they like it."

It sounded like a sensible plan. The Afar Triangle was often said to be the hottest place in the world. It was place where water was scarce, coming out of maintenance-heavy wells and lakes that were half salt. Few people lived there, save for tribal salt miners and the citizens of the port city at Djibouti. They were well into the dry season by now, and the temperatures would be climbing toward one hundred and twenty degrees Fahrenheit.

"I like that. Break the infrastructure. Can you poison the wells, perhaps?" as he said that, he felt a lump in his throat, and he immediately regretted himself. What about the innocent people? When water was scarce, the Spanish would take it all and leave the people to die. He wanted to do whatever he could to cause suffering to his enemy. This war with Spain felt like his war, a personal battle with Africa as the battleground. He wanted to hurt them, to kill them, and to see the life melt out of their eyes. He hadn't felt these brutal desires since the Katanga rebellion, and they disturbed him.

Hassan grinned. "This is why I like you, your majesty. You might play the sad-sack from time to time, but when times get cruel, you get cruel right along with them."

Insolence. Yaqob cringed. If Hassan has been anybody else, that wouldn't have been acceptable at all. But this was Hassan, and nobody said anything. His self-imagined role as benevolent monarch was beginning to dissolve, and it made him feel stuck and alone.

"I've shuffled most of the artillery into the highlands." Hassan continued over the background whine of incandescent light. "I will make do with a few light-pieces. The highlands are more valuable, and I would rather make them hurt there."

"Couldn't you use it to stop them off the coast?" Yaqob asked.

"Not likely." Hassan replied. "They have that navy of theirs ready to reply. If I throw everything we have at them in the beginning, we will lose the war in a month. They have the guns, and they have that VX. Concentrating our forces is the last thing we should be doing. They can afford casualties in the beginning, that is what their people will expect. If we are going to see the end of this war, it will be by sapping their will to fight. We need to force them to bleed for every hill. They need enter villages counting the ways they can be killed. They need to second guess every tree, and every rock, and every bend in the road. Their families back at home need to see long lists of dead sons, and wonder why they are fighting. If the war lasts long enough, they will decide it is more useful to see Sotelo as their enemy rather than us. After all, if they can't beat us, they can beat that bastard with an election." Hassan smiled slyly. "Or maybe they will kill him for us."

For a moment, Yaqob felt as if victory was assured. It was a foolish feeling, and he quickly shook it.

"The Third will move out of Katanga to bolster the defenses on the border of Spain. We will keep the second, fifth, and eighth in place in Chad, Chari, and the Congo respectively. If they make no moves on the Ivory Coast... we will take it. Deprive them of some of that oil."

"Why don't we do that now?" Yaqob asked.

Hassan shrugged. "I want to see what they are doing. It would be too easy to blunder there. Besides, the border legions are already conducting raids into Spanish territory. I know they crossed over in on place and dragged a Spanish accountant out of his office in some village and hung him up from a tree by his ankles."

"That's not as violent as I expected..." the border legions were the militia's that the Ethiopian government had armed. They were men weened on stories about the demon white men and the horrors they brought one hundred years ago, and they would have no love for the Spaniards. Yaqob expected them to be a wild card in the war. The raid was not too surprising.

"Not by ropes." Hassan grinned. "With hooks. Through the ankles. Man probably won't walk again."

Hooks. Yaqob imagined the weight of the man would have turned his legs to gore. The horror of that thought caused his chest-scar to throb. This man was just the beginning, Yaqob knew.

Yaqob surveyed the map, committing to memory every detail that he could. It was hard, at first, to take his eyes of the border of the Ivory Coast where that grizzly raid had taken place. He wondered what speck coincided with that village. His eyes drifted to the Suez, where the first miserable battle had been fought. He looked over the Red Sea, red-ribboned poles filling its water all the way to the Mandeb where they had lost their second fight. He followed the borders of his Empire, until they rested on a detail that Hassan had forgot to mention.

"What about Tanganyika?"

Hassan looked down at the single blue-ribboned pole in the south of the map. "I sent word we could use them. They haven't responded."

That was worrisome. Tanganyika was an independent country, but Ethiopia had been critical to the success of the current regime. Yaqob wondered if they were stalling because they thought Ethiopia had already lost, or if it was because of the other threat.

The British invasion of South Africa was an unexpected kink in their plans. At first, it had caused some manner of panic within the government when it seemed that Britain might have allied with Spain. As reports continued to flood in, it slowly became apparent that the British were acting of their own accord.

In some ways, their invasion was more a hindrance to Sotelo than it was for Yaqob. There was no love lost between the Pan-African Ethiopians and South Africa's own experiment in regional hegemony. On the other hand, Sotelo's argument to the world that he was doing no more than curtailing the growth of communism became much less believable when Britain decided to take South Africa. Suddenly it wasn't a single war between neighbors, it was a second European scramble for Africa, and Sotelo was no more that a modern day colonial Imperialist.

"Taytu will be in Dar es Salaam" Yaqob assured. "We'll know their intentions soon." There was little else to say.

When the meeting came to a close, Akanni caught up with the Emperor. Yaqob felt a twinge of nostalgia when he saw the Prime Minister's eyes. Akanni had been his fathers Ambassador to China, and when Sahle cut off ties with the Chinese while he was Emperor it had turned Akanni into Yaqob's only companion in exile. That had only been six years ago, but life had stiffled their friendship.

"Your majesty." Akanni said. "There is a man I would like you to meet. A writer who told me he knows how to win this war."

Yaqob blinked. "A writer? I don't think writers win wars."

"Ahh!" Akanni grinned. "Writers win wars all the time. They write their wars, and then they write their victories. I think more writers have won more wars than generals." Yaqob smiled. That was the wit he knew his old friend for.

"My writer friend was an officer once, too. I know he has seen wars." Akanni continued.

"Do I know this man?" Yaqob asked

"You might" Akanni replied "His name is Zenon Bie Bwana. He is..."

"A Pan-Africanist." Yaqob interrupted. "I read one of his books when we lived in China. He argued that the ancient Berbers were the ancestors of the Mande, and the modern Berbers are just Arabs." Pan-African literature was rife with writers claiming that the classical ancient civilizations had roots in black Africa, though their arguments were always based on suspicious suppositions and hackneyed ethnography. Yaqob was no anthropologist, but he took these theories with a grain of salt.

"He wrote a biography of Hannibal Barca, and he invited me to read it before it is published" Akanni said. "He was telling me that he learned a lot in his research that you might be able to use."

Yaqob thought that he sounded like a crackpot, but he needed the distraction. "I'll invite him to dinner." Yaqob said. "We need all the help we can get, anyway."