Gweon nodded silently, still trying to grapple with the death toll.
“Why did they do it?” he asked. “Surely the system government didn’t refuse to surrender!”
“I don’t know why they did it.” There was something just a bit odd about her tone, and he wondered what she knew—or suspected—that she wasn’t sharing with him. “It doesn’t really matter why it happened,” she continued. “What matters is what Alpha Prime wants us—you—to do about it when you get called in as an analyst. There are a couple of points they want to make sure get hammered home, especially in light of what you’ve already told them about the Alliance’s missile production rates.” She showed her teeth briefly. “Nobody told me, but reading between the lines, I think somebody in Alpha Prime wants a little payback.”
Mount Royal Palace
City of Landing
Manticore Binary System
Star Empire of Manticore
Colonel Ellen Shemais seemed a bit in two minds.
The head of Empress Elizabeth’s personal protective detail approved of anything likely to help her keep the empress alive. That was a given. On the other hand…
Honor Alexander-Harrington hid a smile as she and Anton Zilwicki and Damien Harahap followed Colonel Shemais into the conference room in the Mount Royal Palace subbasement. Several of the guards drawn from the Queen’s Own and scattered obtrusively about the palace had done double takes as she and her companions passed them and they noticed the harnesses both Nimitz and the treecat who had been named Clean Killer now sported. Humans in general tended to forget treecats had been tool-users even before they met humanity, although their tools had been distinctly Neolithic. But aside from the simple carry nets they wove “in the wild,” treecats didn’t worry much about the sorts of reasons humans had pockets, especially if they’d adopted a human. After all, humans had pockets, which meant a wise providence had obviously provided them to carry anything that needed carrying.
That was the reason the guards’ attention had first been drawn to the ’cats’ harnesses. It was only after they’d looked—then looked away and looked back again—that they realized those harnesses weren’t just for the benefit of the carry pouches both of them now had strapped securely against their chests between their shoulders and mid-pelvises. No, they were also there to support the shoulder holsters both treecats now wore, as well.
Which explained Colonel Shemais’s…mixed emotions. It had taken her long enough to grow accustomed to the notion of admitting Honor’s armed human retainers to the empress’s presence. Getting used to the notion of armed treecats—especially one who’d bonded with a former agent of the Mesan Alignment—would take a bit longer.
Unfortunately for the colonel’s peace of mind, the empress’s instructions in the matter had been quite clear.
Honor followed Shemais across to the waiting chair at the conference table, trailed by the two intelligence operatives. They waited until she was seated and Nimitz had climbed onto the perch arranged beside her chair. Then they took their own seats, and Harahap’s companion took the perch next to his.
“I’m sorry we’re a little late,” Honor said, carefully not noticing the expressions on several faces which belonged to people who had never heard of Sergeant Todd or treecat-sized pulsers. “We hit a delay at the shuttle pad.”
* * *
Fire Watch, who had been known as Clean Killer until a hand of days ago, looked around alertly. The mind-glows around him were all unusually focused and powerful. Clearly these were two-leg elders, and he was not certain he liked the taste of some of the mind-glows directed towards his person.
Thought Chaser told him with a mind-chuckle from the perch beside Crafty Mind.
Fire Watch replied.
Thought Chaser said.
Thought Chaser took time to shape the mouth noises as carefully as possible. It was not easy to do that in a mind-voice, but it was not—quite—impossible, either. And he was right, Fire Watch decided. The poor two-legs had to have so many names for things, and the People had just had to learn to cope with it. Still, he remained uncertain why the name he and the People had bestowed upon Plays with Fire was so amusing to the two-legs. For that matter, he did not truly understand why the name Plays with Fire had bestowed upon him struck of the two-legs as hilarious. He was proud of it! Bonding with a two-leg was almost—almost—like bonding with one’s mate for life, and so there was great meaning in the two-leg’s choice when he bestowed a mouth-noise name he could actually speak out loud. That was why the People who had bonded accepted those names just as they accepted the names other People bestowed upon them at different stages in their lives. But he truly did not understand what amused them so about his two-leg name. Laughs Brightly had done his best to explain it, but Fire Watch was unsure about his own understanding of the other scout’s explanation. The fact that Laughs Brightly had lost his mind-voice and was able to communicate only through finger-talk made him no more confident about his own comprehension.
Thought Chaser continued with a mind-laugh,
* * *
“Excuse me, Your Grace, but are those pulsers?” Sir Tyler Abercrombie asked carefully.
“Why, yes, Sir Tyler.” Honor smiled at him. “They are.”
“But—” the Home Secretary began.
“Sir Tyler.”
The voice which interrupted him belonged to Elizabeth Winton, and he closed his mouth quickly as he turned his head to look at her.
“Duchess Harrington’s kept me and Palace Security fully informed on this matter,” the Empress of Manticore said pleasantly. “Both Nimitz and Fire Watch have demonstrated their proficiency with their weapons, and both the Duchess and Mister Zilwicki have assured me that they’ve also demonstrated full awareness of those weapons’ potential dangers. And that they’ve demonstrated the safety of their weapon-handling skills to the satisfaction of the commanding officer of Imperator’s Marine detachment.” She shrugged. “And, finally, both Colonel Shemais and I were fully informed that both Nimitz and Fire Watch would be armed for today’s meeting. In fact, it’s very likely other treecats will be acquiring similar weapons in the near future.”
Abercrombie looked decidedly uncertain about the advisability of the Queen’s proposal. The slender, dappled treecat stretched across the back of his chair instead of the perch which had been provided for her, on the other hand, did not. Her ears pricked sharply and she looked at Fire Watch. Harahap’s companion gave her a human-style nod, and she buzzed a pleased purr. It seemed apparent that she did not share Abercrombie’s reservations.
“To be fair, Sir Tyler, I can understand why you might be a little concerned by this turn of events,” Honor said. “On the other hand, I might point out that treecats are always armed. That’s one of the reasons they’re so effective in the protective role they’ve agreed to assume for humans who might be targeted for assassination.”
Abercrombie’s stiff body language relaxed a bit
at that reminder, and he reached up to rub Stone Climber’s ears.
“The difference is that now they have what you might call a ‘ranged capability,’” Honor continued, “and it’s not unreasonable for people to worry about how well they understand that and about their ability to respect the threat zone. I assure you, I would never have signed off on giving Nimitz a pulser if I hadn’t been fully convinced on both those points. And I’ll also admit it took a while to get everything resolved to my satisfaction. But don’t forget that Samantha is a memory singer. Once Nimitz was able to get the basic concepts across to her—and once I’d worked with her enough to be certain she really had them—she passed them to Fire Watch in a single memory song. And she can do the same for any other ’cat.” She shrugged. “So it’s really just a case of whether or not we can trust treecats won’t resort to lethal force in circumstances where it’s not justified, and after three or four hundred T-years, I think they’ve demonstrated pretty conclusively that we can.”
She shrugged again, and silence lingered around the table. Several of the expressions which had been uncertain had smoothed into thoughtfulness, instead, and after a second or two, Abercrombie nodded.
“A valid point, Your Grace,” he acknowledged. “Several of them, in fact. I think the notion will take some getting used to, but definitely a valid point.”
Someone chuckled, and Elizabeth smiled. But then the empress shook her head.
“I’m sure it will,” she said. “On the other hand, it would appear some other things that are going to take getting used to, as well. Like the situation in Mesa.”
Any temptation towards humor vanished abruptly, and Elizabeth’s nostrils flared. Then she nodded to Pat Givens.
“Admiral, why don’t you get us started?”
“Of course, Your Majesty.” Givens didn’t seem delighted by the command, but she’d known it was coming. The only other person she could have handed it off to was Hamish Alexander-Harrington, and he was in Beowulf at a conference. So she squared her shoulders and indicated the tall, redhaired and green-eyed man sitting beside her.
“For those of you who don’t know him—which would include most of you—this is Charles O’Daley. Officially, he works for Sir Anthony.” She tilted her head at Sir Anthony Langtry, the Star Empire’s Foreign Secretary. “In fact, he’s with Special Intelligence and he’s holding down the Director’s desk until Sir Barton gets back from Nouveau Paris.”
Heads nodded. Sir Barton Salgado was the Director of Special Intelligence, Givens’s civilian counterpart. At the moment, he was either in Nouveau Paris, where he’d gone to confer with Kevin Usher and Wilhelm Trajan, or else on his way home. If he’d had any hint of what would be coming from the Mesa System he would have delayed that trip, Honor thought somberly.
“Charlie and I have been comparing notes,” Givens went on, “and I’m afraid neither of us have come up with any brilliant insights. Certainly not about anything that’s actually happening in Mesa, at any rate.” Her expression was bleak. “We’ve looked very carefully at Countess Gold Peak’s follow-on dispatches, and assuming they’re as accurate as her reports have always been in the past, we’re looking at pretty close to an unmitigated disaster.”
“‘Unmitigated’ may be just a little too strong an adjective,” Honor said. Givens looked at her, raising her eyebrows in surprise, and Honor shrugged. “We can get to that in a minute, Pat. I apologize for interrupting.”
“No apology’s necessary, Your Grace. And I would be absolutely delighted to find that there really could be something mitigating about what’s happened there. In the meantime, though, Charlie’s analysts and mine are in general agreement that this represents a goldplated gift to the Mandarins. We haven’t had time to hear how they’re actually going to spin it, but the truth is, they don’t have to do a lot of spinning in this case. Our ships were in planetary orbit and there were scores of nuclear explosions. At the very least, we let somebody get past us to set them off. At worst—and this is what most of the galaxy’s likely to conclude—we were either responsible for or at least complicit in them.” The Second Space Lord shook her head. “After Hypatia, we were seen as the champions who’d prevented an Eridani Edict violation, at least by anyone with an open mind. Now, though, those same open-minded people really won’t have any choice but to wonder whether or not we were even telling the truth then, given what we’ve apparently done in Mesa. Frankly, if we were in their place, we’d wonder the same thing.”
Heads nodded again, and this time those nods were as grim as Givens’s expression.
“Our analysts all concur that the Mandarins will use this to further their narrative of Manticore and Haven as the imperialist successors of the People’s Republic writ large. They’re going to argue that even if we aren’t red-fanged conquistadors, we’re obviously unhinged. The fact that we’ve found a ‘Mesan Alignment’ that has absolutely nothing in common with the interstellar conspiracy we’ve been talking about will only underscore that. We’re about to be painted as the people who nuked a star system and killed upwards of seven million people, according to Countess Gold Peak’s current numbers, as vengeance against an imaginary enemy we invented in our own paranoid fantasies. And that’s the most favorable interpretation they’re going to put on it.”
“So it’s your sense the Mandarins’ version of this will give them the moral high ground?” Bruce Wijenberg’s blue eyes were anxious.
“I can’t really answer that, Mister Wijenberg,” Givens said.
“I’d say it’s unlikely t’ give them the high ground outside the Core, Sir.” O’Daley, Honor noticed, possessed a drawl just as irritating as Michael Oversteegan’s. Fortunately, from the taste of his mind-glow, he appeared to possess an equally sharp brain. Now Wijenberg looked at him, and he grimaced.
“They say the devil’s beyond blackenin’,” he continued, “and where the League is concerned, that’s certainly true outside the Core. Very few Fringers’re prepared t’ believe a single word that comes out of Old Chicago, unless they’re Fringers whose bread’s bein’ buttered by OFS. Frankly, even they don’t believe what the Mandarins say, but that doesn’t keep them from goin’ along with it for obvious reasons.
“The rest of the Fringe and most of the Verge know better than t’ take Old Chicago’s word that water’s wet. At th’ same time, public opinion’s held that Manticore’s word is almost universally good…again, outside the Core. That’s what we’ve almost certainly lost here, at least in the short term. That doesn’t mean everybody outside the Core’s suddenly goin’ t’ take the Mandarins’ word over ours. It does mean there’s goin’ t’ be one hell of a lot more skepticism and suspicion where we’re concerned.”
“And inside the Core?” Baroness Morncreek asked, her voice soft.
“And inside the Core the Mandarins will use this to beat us—and Beowulf—to death,” Elizabeth said harshly before O’Daley or Givens could respond. “They’re going to point at it and scream that we really are barbarians, that we’ve been lying about our reasons for going to war from the beginning, and that with the neo-barbarians at the gate, it’s time for desperate measures.”
“I’m afraid Her Majesty has a point,” Givens said, drawing all eyes back to her. “All of our analyses indicate our basic strategy’s been working. The Mandarins have steadily lost credibility; systems outside the League were steadily tilting our direction, especially after the Sollies unveiled ‘Operation Buccaneer’; and more and more League member systems looked like they’d be heading the same direction Hypatia did. All of that was trending directly towards the strategic goal Duchess Harrington articulated at the very beginning: the internal fracturing of the Solarian League without active military operations against the Core Worlds on our part.
“Now, as word of this spreads, an awful lot of that momentum will be reversed. People who were trending in our direction are likely to start trending the other way. Worse, this will give the Core Worlds a unifying focus they really didn’t
have before. That means it will tend to counteract the centrifugal force which had the League starting to shed member systems. And if the League maintains its territorial integrity, even if we force it to accept terms we can live with by military action, the odds are that we’ll be looking at a rearmed, reequipped, and much more dangerous revanchist enemy within the next few decades.”
“That’s probably true in the long term, Pat,” Honor said. “But while I’ve always been aware of the dangers of Solarian revanchism, I could live with that if it was only a long-term problem. I wouldn’t like it, but life is imperfect and there’ll always be a degree of ‘sufficient unto the day,’ whatever we do. What concerns me more at the moment are the short-term implications.”
“Which ones, Honor?” Baroness Morncreek asked. The chancellor of the exchequer’s dark eyes were narrow, and Honor gave her one of her crooked grins.
“The same one I’m pretty sure you’re worrying about,” she said. “At the moment, the Mandarins have to be on the brink of fiscal collapse. Operation Lacoön and the withdrawal of our merchant marine is only just now starting to really bite the Solarian economy as a whole, but it’s decimated the federal bureaucracy’s revenue stream. Coupled with what’s been happening in the Protectorates, especially since we started actively looking for planets where Operation Janus—” she twitched her head in Damien Harahap’s direction “—had primed local revolts, they couldn’t possibly sustain a war effort without some alternate source of funding. Now—”
She shrugged, and Mourncreek nodded.
“You’re right, that is what I’ve been worrying about,” she acknowledged, then looked at the others around the table. “The single point on which the League member systems have always been united in their resistance to Federal authority, since the day their Constitution was signed, is the constitutional prohibition of direct taxation. That’s even held true so far in this damned war, for a lot of reasons. At the same time, we’ve always known the League’s gross product is literally incalculable. For all intents and purposes, it has no bottom. The way things are now—or the way they’ve been up to now, at any rate—the Mandarins have been forced to operate on credit, and by this point their bond issues are effectively valueless, despite the interest rates at which they’re being offered. So Her Grace is right—under pre-‘Mesan Atrocity’ circumstances, the Mandarins’ position and war effort was unsustainable. And it was staying that way, because absent some existential threat to the League itself—or to their own systems’ citizens—the member systems weren’t going to relax the stringency of the constitution.