This was already the third day of Hungary's closed-door congressional session. As the Emperor had promised, water and bread were available in unlimited quantities, but no one was allowed to attempt to leave the voting hall to go home, rest, or use the toilet. Whenever a member of Congress could no longer resist the drowsiness and fell asleep, soldiers in black ballistic armor would wheel over a "giant metal sheet."
That was how Azazel, deputy to the marshal of the Legal Department, described it. He did not know what a gong was, but he knew that whenever the thing was struck, the entire Parliament Building could hear it—let alone the members of Congress at close range. As he had told Victoria Hand, it was loud enough to wake the dead from their graves. Under such grueling conditions, the Emperor's bills were passed one after another. Only after the most solemn and civilized venue in the grandest building of the Hungarian Province had become a reeking land of savagery did the Regent who had come to take over finally feel satisfied and arrange rooms for the legislators to wash up and rest.
They still could not leave the Parliament Building.
The Emperor could not tolerate the legislators' inefficiency, nor could he tolerate how their backers had devoured state assets after the upheaval in Eastern Europe, transforming themselves into oligarchs who controlled the political scene. These legislators had long since arranged escape routes for themselves through the revolving door between government and business. Every resource had to be used to save the Human Race from extinction. Seizing assets meant for the resistance effort was no different from courting death. Now, that escape route had been completely cut off, because the legislators themselves had passed the Emperor's nationalization bill. The energy companies within