The Final Battle by Graham Sharp Paul

He was the one who turned all that into something worth hearing.”
    “He didn’t tell you that your speech was put together by the best psycholinguistics team in human history?” Jaruzelska asked with a half smile.
    “It was?”
    “Oh, yes,” Jaruzelska said with a nod. “Their job was to craft the most persuasive speech ever written. You had to convince everyone that even though you were as guilty as hell, you didn’t hijack those dreadnoughts because you were a lovelorn fool. You did it because your motives were good, because you could see what the rest of us were too slow, too stubborn, too self-interested to see: that it was only a matter of time before the Hammers smashed us into the dust. And guess what? It worked. Right across the Federated Worlds and especially in the military, your approval rating soared. It’s never dropped, and we’re making sure it never will. You are a genuine hero, Michael, and you might as well get used to it.
    “The death sentence was the second step, and we made sure there was plenty of commentary pointing out that execution is a barbaric institution that has no place in a civilized society. We also made sure that everybody knew that your sentence was imposed because that was what the government wanted.”
    “Despite the fact that it was handed down by a court? The judge wouldn’t have been too happy.”
    “Let’s just say that she is a friend of ours,” Jaruzelska said. “We owe her big time.”
    “You didn’t stop there, though, did you?” Michael said. “You spread the idea around that the government pushed for the death penalty only because that was what the Hammers wanted. Am I right?”
    “Ferrero the puppet having her strings pulled by Polk the puppet master,” Jaruzelska said. “You know what? I think we’ll make you a psyops man of you yet,” she added with a smile.
    “I don’t have your sneaky, devious mind, sir. Niccolò Machiavelli would have been proud of you, though. So what came next?”
    “The final step was persuading President Diouf to—”
    “Whoa, hold on, sir! The president is in on this?”
    “No, she’s not. All you need to know is that a mutual friend, a man whose advice and guidance Diouf has relied on for most of her adult life, convinced her that the Federated Worlds would be at grave risk if she did not turn down your request for clemency. The president was told only as much as she needed to understand why she was being asked to do something … so extraordinary. In the end she agreed to go along with us, but only when we convinced her that you would not actually be executed.”
    Relief flooded through Michael; he had not been wrong to trust Diouf.
    “And that was when things got very dirty,” Jaruzelska went on. “When Diouf turned you down, we had to convince the Worlds that you had been unfairly treated. The Hammers helped us there. We have holovid of the dumb bastards trying to bribe Diouf to let your execution go ahead. Twenty million FedMarks they offered her. She refused it, of course, but we slipped a story to the trashpress saying that she had taken the money. To muddy the waters a bit more, we concocted another story that the Hammers were so pissed by Diouf’s refusal that Polk forced Moderator Ferrero to blackmail Diouf into turning down your appeal for clemency.”
    “Diouf’s the closest thing I know to a saint,” Michael said; he looked incredulous. “How do you blackmail a saint?”
    “Easy. You cook up a story, backed by lots of seemingly credible evidence, that Diouf financed a child slavery racket operating out of the Rogue Planets in the ’50s, and then …”
    Michael grimaced; that would have hurt Diouf.
    “… you give it to the trashpress and tell them that Ferrero was using it to blackmail the president. The story was so juicy, so hot, they just couldn’t resist the temptation. They went public with it the day you were executed. The timing could not have been better.”
    “Then what?”
    “The