Debt of War (The Embers of War)

by Christopher G. Nuttall

  Kat frowned. “Do you really think you can keep this setup a secret until the time is right?”

  “Yes,” the king said. “Only my most trusted advisers know the truth.”

  “Really.” Kat wasn’t so sure. Caledonia was infested with spies. She would be astonished if there weren’t at least a million spies on the surface, ranging from long-term sources to information brokers and opportunists keen to make their fortunes before the war came to an end. Someone would be monitoring the palace, the embassies, and everywhere else that had even the tiniest shred of importance. And someone else would be tying it together into a single picture. “I doubt the House of Lords will remain in the dark forever.”

  “As long as they remain in the dark long enough,” the king said. “And who would believe them?”

  “Too many people,” Kat said. “They don’t have a reputation for outright lying. Not yet.”

  She leaned back into her chair, feeling grimly unsure of herself. The House of Lords could certainly claim the king was allying himself with foreign powers . . . and discover, later, that they had been telling the truth all along. So far, they’d been remarkably restrained. That would change, she was sure, as attitudes hardened on both sides and all hope of a relatively peaceful return to sanity faded away. Or when it finally dawned on them that they didn’t need to lie to do immense damage to the king’s reputation. All they had to do was tell the truth about everything that had happened on Tarleton. The king’s man had tried to arrest the colonial government. The Colonial Alliance wouldn’t be pleased when it learned that Justiciar Montfort had acted under Hadrian’s orders.

  If a somewhat loose interpretation of his orders, Kat thought sourly. She wasn’t blind to the simple truth that Justiciar Montfort’s defense was quite reasonable and would have been sufficient, if there hadn’t been so much outrage at him. If they decide the king knew what was going to happen, or gave the order, they could do anything in response.

  “We have to win the war,” the king said. “Whatever . . . questionable . . . decisions we have to make will be handled then, once the war is over. Or put aside forever, if the war is lost.”

  “Yes, Your Majesty,” Kat said. “I understand.”

  “Very good.” The king poured himself yet another glass. “I have a meeting with my inner council in twenty minutes. Do you have a plan to win the war?”

  Kat’s eyes narrowed. She hadn’t been invited to the meeting, even though she’d been one of the king’s strongest supporters. An oversight or . . . or what? The king might have chosen to exclude her to please the idiots who suspected her of treason, or . . . or chosen to exclude her because she disagreed with him openly. Or . . . Was she overthinking the problem? She was a military officer, not a political leader. She’d never tried to hide that she found nonmilitary matters boring when she’d first been invited to the privy council. The king had gone along with it.

  And being hundreds of light-years away didn’t help either, she reflected. She’d been so far from Tyre that she couldn’t even attend via hologram. Nor did she have the time to read the highly classified transcripts that had been forwarded to her. No time to do more than read the summaries and cast meaningless votes.

  She put her concerns aside. “Your Majesty, we need to continue to wear them down, in hopes of creating an opening we can use to win the war in a single blow.”

  “Quite,” the king said. “And how do you intend to achieve this?”

  “I don’t know, not yet.” Kat scowled. “If we deploy our entire fleet in hopes of making the diversionary operations convincing, we run the risk of giving them a clear shot at Caledonia.”

  Or of making the House of Lords too unsure of themselves to deploy their fleet away from Tyre, she added, silently. The trick is to offer them a shot at victory without actually giving them a shot at victory.

  She watched the king stand and start to pace, a mannerism they had in common. He knew as well as she did that they couldn’t hope to win a long, drawn-out war, no matter what assistance they received from Marseilles. The House of Lords was bringing the reserve fleet online, training up new officers and crewmen, and building newer and better weapons. It would be just a matter of time until her brother and her best friend—her former best friend—felt strong enough to hit Caledonia without leaving Tyre exposed. And that would be the end. The king couldn’t keep his cause alive once his capital had been captured and his fleet scattered beyond hope of resupply. He’d have to throw himself on the House of Lords’ collective mercy, a trait Kat knew to be in very short supply.

  “I’ll look for options,” she said calmly. “We may have to gamble.”

  “We can wait until we receive the newer weapons and supplies,” the king said. “Marseilles isn’t the only interstellar power interested in supporting us.”

  “They’re interested in keeping the Commonwealth off-balance,” Kat said, sharply. “They’re not interested—”

  The king rounded on her. “Don’t you think I know that?”

  He calmed himself with an effort. “I apologize,” he said stiffly. “The stress is getting to me.”

  “I quite understand,” Kat said. She did, although she wasn’t inclined to forgive people who shouted at her. At least he’d had the grace to apologize. “Perhaps you shouldn’t be drinking so much.”

  “There’s little else I can do,” the king said. He snorted, humorlessly. “I’m a prisoner of events.”

  “Then we’ll try to find a way to take control,” Kat said. She knew that wouldn’t be easy. The king was rapidly running up against the limits of his power. His fate wouldn’t be decided on Caledonia, or at least Caledonia alone. All their plans might come to nothing if the House of Lords put its own plans into operation. “There are always options.”

  “Yes,” the king said. “And sometimes we need to stake everything on one throw of the dice.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  CALEDONIA

  “Justice for Tarleton,” the voices bellowed. “Justice for Tarleton!”

  Captain Sarah Henderson shivered, despite herself, as the protest march hove into view. It was as spontaneous as any large protest could be on a planet under martial law; she’d heard the local government had only granted permission after it had been pointed out that the march was probably going to go ahead with or without the government’s blessing. The protest was already growing rapidly in size and shouting power. She felt something deeply primal within her, both luring her into the crowd and urging her to run. She’d had two days of shore leave and . . . She shuddered. She hadn’t had the chance to do much of anything for herself before the shit hit the fan.

  She lifted her cup to her lips and took a sip. She’d spent the last few hours exploring the city, trying to get a sense of local feeling. The time hadn’t really been informative. There had been grumbles about shops selling out of imports from Tyre and the rest of the colonies, but nothing that hinted at a change of public opinion. And anger about the problem of Tarleton had been mounting steadily as the king and his closest supporters failed to do anything to quell the unease. She had the grim feeling that it had finally burst into the open.

  The mob advanced, shadowed by a handful of policemen in riot gear. The march was both threatening and remarkably well behaved, shouts echoing off the tall skyscrapers even as the protesters stayed within the road and allowed pedestrians to walk down the street without harassment. Several teenagers handed out paper leaflets, running in and out of the crowd as if they expected to be cited by the policemen if they stood still for more than a few seconds. Sarah took a leaflet from a young girl and scanned it quickly. The paper charged that the king had given the justiciar private orders, which he’d attempted to carry out. Sarah frowned, concerned. Secret orders were not unknown in the navy, but they were of questionable legal value. Justiciar Montfort would probably have had more latitude than anyone outside the establishment would realize. It didn’t absolve him of his crimes, even if it did land the king in hot water.

/>   She gritted her teeth as the shouting grew louder. Her eyes swept the mob, noting people who were clearly spacers along with industrial workers and immigrants who’d moved to Caledonia in the hopes of finding newer and better jobs. The latter would be in some trouble, she suspected, if the protest turned violent. Caledonia had never been as welcoming to immigrants as Tyre—the planetary infrastructure and security forces were less capable of handling potential disruptions—and the locals would demand their immediate deportation if they appeared to be more trouble than they were worth. She frowned as the noise grew worse, trying to ignore the handful of police flyers hanging menacingly in the distance. All along the road, doors closed and heavy shutters slammed shut. Caledonia had seen too much political and social unrest for anyone to believe the mob would disperse peacefully. The leaders might hope for a peaceful resolution, for a simple march to show local feeling, but there would be troublemakers in the crowd yearning for violence. Rumor claimed the House of Lords was funding every loudmouth with a lack of common sense.

  The waiter materialized at her side. “We’re closing,” he said bluntly. The politeness he’d displayed when she’d entered the café was gone. She had no trouble recognizing his fear. Mobs were terrifying, even if one had enough firepower to crush an army. They had no brain and no fear, at least until the bullets started flying. “Do you want to come inside or leave now?”

  Sarah considered his words, then shrugged. It went against the grain to allow fear to dominate her life, even though she was nervous. The shouting was growing louder, pressing against her eardrums. She wanted to run, to turn and flee for her life. She knew she couldn’t give in to the fear or it would forever overshadow her. She reached into her pocket and produced a handful of royals, the planet’s local currency. Caledonia had never embraced e-currency to the same level as Tyre and the other first-rank worlds. The locals were justifiably suspicious of money they couldn’t hold in their hands.

  “I’ll go.” Sarah paid him, adding a midsized tip. The coins weren’t worth their face value. She was grimly aware that inflation was rising, despite the king’s pleas for calm and the government’s best efforts. It was only a matter of time before the government started to fix prices, blowing the bottom out of the economy. “I’m sure I’ll be back. It was very good coffee.”

  “If we’re still here,” the waiter said. He’d tried to flirt with her when she’d entered, but now . . . he looked too worried to muster even a single tedious quip. He seemed torn between the urge to tell her to run and inviting her to take shelter inside the café. “Good luck.”

  Sarah nodded as she stepped through the tiny gate and onto the street. The mob seemed to be good about not pressing onto the pavement, but that would soon change. She caught sight of a handful of children amid the crowd, grinning as they chanted as if it were just a special day out. Shouldn’t they be in school? She laughed at herself a moment later. She was thinking like a Tyrian, not someone who’d grown up on a piss-poor planet in the middle of nowhere. School? Kids couldn’t go to school when there was work to be done on the farm. But Caledonia had schools, didn’t it? The government had worked hard to catch up with the first-rank worlds.

  She kept moving as a line of policemen marched past her wearing armor that would have been intimidating to uninformed civilians. She shuddered, wondering just how uninformed—and unarmed—the civilians in the mob actually were. They could have all sorts of weapons, from makeshift tools to actual guns and ammunition. Caledonia had no gun laws, a legacy of the days when the police didn’t exist and a horde of religious fanatics might fall out of the skies at any moment. If the mob turned into an insurgency . . .

  “Justice,” the mob howled. “Justice!”

  A man pressed another leaflet into her hand and hurried on before she could get a good look at him. She crumpled the paper and shoved it into her pocket, then resumed her walk towards the road linking the city to the spaceport strip. The mob seemed to swell, as if half the city was on the march. She spotted a stream of spacers, some wearing naval uniforms, flowing out of the spaceport and joining the crowd. They’d be in hot water if they were caught . . . or they would have been a few short months ago. The military wasn’t supposed to get involved in politics, but . . . She snorted. The Royal Navy had been dominated by politics. Pretty much all of her former commanding officers had been selected by their patrons for political reliability rather than demonstrated competence. A number had been killed off during the opening days of the war. The last war. The remainder had stayed at their posts until they’d been reassigned or pushed into resigning.

  You can’t count on the Theocrats for anything, she thought wryly. You can’t even count on them to rid us of incompetent officers.

  The noise rapidly dwindled as she made her way through the spaceport strip. There were guards everywhere, locals and marines, looking wary as they glanced towards the distant gates. A number of shops and entertainment facilities, even brothels, were closing, something she’d thought impossible. The spaceport was normally open every hour of every day, even on planets that observed the Sabbath or their local counterpart. Now . . . She saw spacers hurrying around, their eyes nervous as they took in the lack of crowds. The handful of people who sneaked through the gates, mainly youngsters intent on visiting facilities that were rarely available outside the wire, were gone.

  It felt like the end of the world.

  She reached the terminal and stepped inside, noting just how few shuttles were prepped and ready for immediate departure. The frantic push to get as many military and former civilian ships online as quickly as possible was putting huge demands on the planetary infrastructure, demands that it couldn’t even begin to meet. She knew things were going to get worse before they got better, if they ever did. The king had no shortage of trained manpower, but he was very short on materials and support infrastructure. The only upside, as far as she could tell, was that the Tyrians appeared to have the opposite problem.

  “Captain,” the dispatcher said, “I can have a shuttle for you in twenty minutes.”

  “There’s no hurry,” Sarah lied. She wanted to get off the planet, back onto her command deck. She’d be happier up there, even though she knew there would be people trying to kill her. At least such potentially deadly dynamics would be nice and understandable. The politics on the surface left her cold. “I’ll wait.”

  She took a chair and dug through her pockets until she found the leaflet. It looked like something that had been run off by hand, rather than mass-produced in a printer. She snorted, wondering if that was deliberate. Caledonia had never fallen that far in the years since she was cut off from Earth. But printed matter did tend to be taken more seriously than electronic text. There was something about it that carried more weight. She smiled at the thought—all of her tactical manuals were electronic—as she unfolded the leaflet. The text warned the reader, all readers, that they’d better not be caught with the document. The results might be disastrous for their employment, their reputation, and even perhaps their freedom.

  Her eyes narrowed as she skimmed the remainder of the leaflet. The writer seemed to believe the king was on the verge of imposing a tyrannical regime across the entire Commonwealth, threatening the freedoms of every last world . . . regardless of which side it had taken when the dispute between the king and his government turned to civil war. The justiciar’s decision to try to arrest the entire government on Tarleton was only the beginning. Soon, the writer warned, the king would move to take control of the entire government. The colonials were already being frozen out.

  Which might be true, Sarah thought. Governor Rogan had said the same, back when they’d held their meeting. The king’s government was torn between his clients, many of whom hoped to return to Tyre if proper terms could be arranged, and the colonials, who knew they wouldn’t have a future unless Tyre was brought to heel. And who knows what will happen then?

  She crumpled the leaflet, then dropped it in the bin as her shuttle was called. The
unknown writer might be right, although it was hard to separate cold hard truth from demented ravings. Princess Drusilla, the king’s wife, might have come from the Theocracy, but blaming her for the crimes of her father, brothers, and everyone else was simply unfair. She’d had no power whatsoever. Besides, by the same logic, the king himself was a traitor. He’d been born and bred on Tyre.

  The House of Lords would probably agree with that logic, she thought. They think he’s a traitor too.

  There was no shortage of irony, Governor Bertram Rogan considered, in establishing the Colonial Alliance headquarters in a skyscraper that had once belonged to the Falcone Corporation. The building was the kind of place where the Colonial Alliance’s representatives had never been welcome, where anyone who dared mention words like “union” or “political rights” was shown the door as quickly as possible. Bertram had always loathed the corporations for their arrogance, but he’d hated the simple truth that they had a reason to be arrogant. They’d sewn up political power on Tyre, and by extension in the Commonwealth, decades before he’d been born. What they said went, and if there was even the faintest chance that a colonial would come out ahead, they’d change the rules to make sure he couldn’t and didn’t.

  Bertram stood at the window, watching the protest march as it strode down the boulevard and past the House of Worlds, where the king’s makeshift government was taking shape. The king had said all the right things as the Commonwealth had lurched towards civil war, but now . . . Bertram had his doubts. The king and his closest supporters were too intent on returning to Tyre, too determined to recover what they’d lost to build something new. Bertram wasn’t blind to the simple fact that they held most of the power, controlling most of the fleet and the ever-growing planetary security forces. The colonials would need to launch a second round of mutinies to get rid of him if they felt they had no other choice. That wouldn’t be easy. The first set of mutinies had been largely unprecedented. Indeed, there had only been one mutiny on a naval vessel before the civil war. But now . . .