Throne of Stars

by David Weber

  “And what we’ll have is a civil war,” Julian said. “Adoula’s faction’s in too deep to back out, and they’re not going to go down smiling. They also control a substantial fraction of the Navy and the Corps, and they own the current Empress’ Own. We do this, and Adoula either sits tight on Imperial City, declaring a state of martial law in the Sol System while the various fleets have internal squabbles and duke it out in space. Or, maybe even worse, he runs back to his sector with the baby, your mother being dead, and we end up in a civil war between two pretenders to the Throne.”

  “He’s going to get some portion of the Navy, no matter what we do,” Eleanora argued.

  “Not if we capture the king,” Julian countered.

  “This isn’t a chess game,” Eleanora said mulishly.

  “Wait.” Roger held up his hand. “Jin?”

  The agent raised an eyebrow and then shrugged.

  “I agree with both,” he said simply. “All of it. Civil war and all the rest. Which will mean, of course, the Saints will be busy snapping up as many planetary systems as they can manage. The flip side, which, curiously, neither of them mentioned, is that it means all of us will be relatively safe. Adoula wouldn’t be able to touch us if we were under the Alphanes’ protection. And if they offer it, it will be full force. They’re very serious about such things. You can live a full life, whether Adoula is pushed out or not.”

  “They didn’t mention it because it’s not part of the equation,” Roger said, his face hard. “Sure, it’s tempting. But there are too many lives on the trail for any of us to ever think about turning aside because it’s ‘safer.’ The only question that matters here is where our duty lies? So how do you evaluate that question?”

  “As one with too many imponderables for a definite answer,” Jin replied. “We don’t have enough information to know if the insertion and countercoup plan is even remotely feasible.” He paused and shrugged. “If we find that it’s impossible to checkmate Adoula, and we’re still undetected, we can back out. Go back to the Alphanes—this all assumes their support—and go for Plan B. And if we’re caught, which is highly likely given that the IBI is not stupid, the Alphanes will be authorized to release the entire story. It won’t help us, or your mother, most likely, but it will severely damage Adoula.”

  “No,” Roger said. “One condition we’ll have to have on their help will be that if we fail, we fail.”

  “Why?” Julian asked.

  “Getting Adoula out of power, rescuing Mother—those are both important things,” Roger said. “I’ll even admit I’d like to live through accomplishing them. But what’s the most important part of this mission?”

  He looked around at them, and shook his head as all of them looked back in greater or lesser degrees of confusion.

  “I’m surprised at you,” he said. “Captain Pahner would have been able to answer that in a second.”

  “The safety of the Empire,” Julian said then, nodding his head. “Sorry.”

  “I’ve contemplated not trying to retake the Throne at all,” Roger said, looking at all of them intently. “The only reason I intend to try is because I agree with Mother that Adoula’s long-term policies will be more detrimental to the Empire than another coup or even a minor civil war. Give Adoula enough time, and he’ll break the Constitution for personal power. That’s what we’re fighting to prevent. But the long-term good of the Empire is the preeminent mission. Much, much more important than just making sure there’s a MacClintock on the Throne. If we fail, there will be no one except Adoula who can possibly safeguard the Empire. He won’t do a good job, but that’s better than the Empire breaking up into small pieces, ripe for plucking by the Saints or Raiden-Winterhowe, or whoever else moves into the power vacuum. We’re talking about the good of three-quarters of a trillion lives. A major civil war, with the half-dozen factions that will fall out, would make the Dagger Years look like a pocking picnic. No. If we fail, then we fail, and our deaths will be as unremarked as any in history. It’s not heroic, it’s not pretty, but it is the best thing for the Empire . . . and it will be done. Clear?”

  “Clear,” Julian said, swallowing.

  Roger leaned his elbow on the station chair’s arm and rubbed his forehead furiously, his eyes closed.

  “So we go to the Alphanes, get them to switch out the ship for one that’s less conspicuous—”

  “And a bunch of money,” Julian interjected. “There’s some technology on here I don’t think they have yet.”

  “And a bunch of money,” Roger agreed, still rubbing. “Then we take the Basik’s Own, and Patty, and a bunch of atul and basiks and what have you—”

  “And several tons of barleyrice,” Julian said.

  “And we go start a chain of restaurants, or at least a couple,” Roger said.

  “A chain would be better,” Julian pointed out. “But at least one in Imperial City. Maybe near the old river; they were gentrifying that area when we left.”

  “And then we somehow parlay that into taking the Palace, checkmating Home Fleet, and preventing Adoula from killing my mother,” Roger finished, looking up and gesturing with an open palm. “Is that what we have as a plan?”

  “Yes,” Eleanora said in an uncharacteristically small voice, looking down at the tabletop.

  Roger gazed up at the overhead, as if seeking guidance. Then he shrugged, reached back to straighten his ponytail, pulled each hair carefully into place, and looked around the compartment.

  “Okay,” he said. “Let’s go.”

  “Hello, Beach,” Roger said.

  “I cannot believe what your guys did to my ship!” the former Saint officer said angrily. She had soot all over her hands and face and was just withdrawing her head and shoulders from a hole in a portside bulkhead.

  Amanda Beach had never been a Saint true-believer. Far too much of the Saint philosophy, especially as practiced by the current leadership, was, in her opinion, so much bullshit.

  The Caravazan Empire had been a vigorous, growing political unit, shortly after the Dagger Years, when Pierpaelo Cavaza succeeded to its throne. And Pierpaelo, unfortunately, had been a devotee of the Church of Ryback, an organization dedicated to removing “humanocentric” damage from the universe. Its creed called for the return of all humans to the Sol System, and the rebuilding—in original form—of all “damaged” worlds.

  Pierpaelo had recognized this to be an impossibility, but he believed it was possible to reduce the damage humans did, and to prevent them from continuing to seek new frontiers and damaging still more “unspoiled” worlds. He had, therefore, started his “New Program” soon after ascending to the throne. The New Program had called for a sharp curtailment of “unnecessary” resource use via ruthless rationing and restrictions, and a simultaneous aggressively expansionist foreign policy to prevent the “unholy” from further damaging the worlds they held by taking those worlds away from them and transferring them to the hands of more responsible stewards.

  For some peculiar reason, a substantial number of his subjects had felt this was a less than ideal policy initiative. Their disagreement with his platform had led to a short, but unpleasant, civil war. Which Pierpaelo won, proving along the way that his particular form of lunacy didn’t keep him from being just as ruthless as any of his ancestors.

  From that time on, the Saints, as they were called by everyone else in the galaxy, had been a scourge, constantly preaching “universal harmony” and “ecological enlightenment” while attacking any and all of their neighbors at the slightest opportunity.

  Beach, in her rise through the ranks of the Saint Navy, had had more than enough opportunities to see the other side of the Saint philosophy. What it amounted to was: “The little people deserve nothing, but the leaders can live as kings.” The higher-ups in the Saint military and government lived in virtual palaces, while their subjects were regulated in every mundane need or pleasure of life. While extravagant parties went on in the “holy centers,” the people outside tho
se centers had their power turned off promptly at 9 p.m., or whatever local equivalent. While the people subsisted on “minimum necessity” rationing, the powers-that-were had feasts. The people lived in uniform blocks of concrete and steel towers, living their lives day in and day out at the very edge of survival; the leaders lived in mansions and had pleasant little houses for “study and observation” in the wilderness. Always in the most charming possible locations in the wilderness.

  For that matter, she’d long ago decided, the whole philosophy was cockeyed. “Minimum resource use.” All well and good, but who belled the cat? Who decided that this man, who needed a new heart, deserved one or did not? That this child—one too many—had to die? Who decided that this person could or could not have a house?

  The answer was the bureaucracy of the Caravazan Empire. The bureaucracy which insured that its leadership had heart transplants. That its leadership had as many children as they liked, and houses on pristine streams, while everyone else could go suck eggs.

  And she’d poked around the peripheries of enough other societies to see the real black side of Rybak. The Saints had the highest population growth of any human society of the Six Polities, despite a supposedly strictly enforced “one child only” program. Another of what she thought of as the “real” reasons they were so expansionist. They also had the lowest standard of living and—not too surprisingly; it usually went hand-in-hand—the lowest individual productivity. If there was nothing to work towards, there was no reason to put out more work than the bare minimum. If all you saw at the end of a long life was a couple of children who were doomed to slave away their lives, as well, what was the point? For that matter, Caravazan cities were notorious for their pollution problems. Most of them were running at the bare minimum for survival, mainly due to their shitty productivity, and at that level, no one who could do anything about it cared about pollution or the inherent inefficiency of pollution controls.

  She’d visited Old Earth during an assignment in the naval service, and been amazed at the planet. Everyone seemed so rosy. So well fed, so happy—so smugly complacent, really. The streets were remarkably clean, and there were hardly any bums on them. No bums who’d lost hands or arms because of industrial accidents and been left out to die. A chemical spill was major news, and nobody seemed to be working very hard. They just did, beavering away and getting tons of work done in practically no time.

  And Imperial ships! Efficiently designed to the point of insanity. When she’d asked one of their shipbuilders why, he’d simply explained—slowly, in small words, as if to a child or a halfwit—that if they were less efficient than their competitors, if their ships didn’t get the maximum cargo moved for the minimum cost, both in power usage and in on/off loading speeds, then their customers would go to those competitors.

  Lovely rounded bulkheads and control panels, for safety reasons . . . which were considered part of overhead. Control runs that took the shortest possible route with the maximum possible functionality. Engines that were at least ten percent more efficient in energy use than any Saint design. Much less likely to simply blow up when you engaged the tunnel drive or got to max charge on the capacitors, for that matter. And cheap. Comparatively speaking, of course; no tunnel drive ship was anything but expensive.

  Saint ships, on the other hand, were built in government yards by workers who were half drunk, most of the time, on rotgut bootleg, that being the only liquor available. Or stoned on any number of drugs. The ships took three times as long to build, with horrible quality control and lousy efficiency.

  The Emerald Dawn was, in fact, a converted Imperial freighter. And it had been converted by a quiet little Imperial yard that was happy for the work and more than willing to avoid unnecessary questions, given the money it was being paid. If the work had been done in one of the ham-handed Saint yards, the quality loss would have been noticeable.

  In fact, if the Dawn had been a Saint ship, those idiot Mardukans would probably have blown it all the way to kingdom come, instead of only halfway.

  Amanda sometimes wondered how much of it was intentional. The official purpose of the Church of Ryback was to ensure the best possible environmental conditions. But if they actually succeeded in being as “clean” as the Imperials against whom they inveighed so savagely, would people see that level of “contamination” as that great a threat? Would the workers even care about the environment? Could the Church of Ryback sustain itself in conditions where the environment was clean and people went to bed hungry every night?

  Her commander in the Dawn, Fiorello Giovannuci, on the other hand, had been a real, honest, true-believer. Giovannuci wasn’t stupid; he’d seen the hypocrisy of the system, but he ignored it. Humans weren’t perfect, and the “hypocritical” conditions didn’t shake his belief in the core fundamentals of the Church. He’d been in command specifically because he was a true-believer despite his lack of stupidity; no one but a true-believer ever got to be in command of a ship. Certainly not of one that spent as much time poking around doing odd missions as the Dawn. And when the Basik’s Own’s assault was clearly going to succeed, he’d engaged the auto-destruct sequence.

  Unfortunately for his readiness to embrace martyrdom, there’d been a slight flaw in the system. Only true-believers became ship commanders, true, but the CO wasn’t the only person who could shut off the auto-destruct. So when Giovannuci had been . . . removed by the ever-helpful Imperials, Beach had been in nowise unwilling to turn it off.

  Giovannuci himself was no longer a factor in anyone’s equations, except perhaps God’s. He and his senior noncommissioned officer had tried to murder Roger with “one-shots”—specialized, contact-range anti-armor weapons—after surrendering. The sergeant had died then, but only Armand Pahner’s sacrifice of his own life had saved Roger from Giovannuci’s one-shot. Unfortunately for Fiorello Giovannuci, the Dawn’s entire cruise had been an illegal act—piracy, actually, since the Saints and the Empire were officially at peace—and that was a capital offense. Then, too, the accepted rules of war made his attempt to assassinate Roger after surrendering a capital offense, as well. So after a scrupulously honest summary court-martial, Giovannuci had attained the martyrdom he’d sought after all.

  As for Amanda Beach, she had no family in the Caravazan Empire. She’d been raised in a state creche and didn’t even know who her mother was, much less her father. So when the only real choice became dying or burning her bridges with a vengeance, she’d burned them with a certain degree of glee.

  Only to discover what a hash the damned Empies and their scummy allies had made of her ship.

  “Six more centimeters,” she said angrily, rounding on the prince and holding up her thumb and forefinger in emphasis of the distance. “Six. And one of your idiot Mardukans would have blown open a tunnel radius. As it is, the magnets are fried.”

  “But he didn’t blow it open,” Roger noted. “So when are we going to have power?”

  “You want power!? This is a job for a major dockyard, damn it! All I’ve got is the few spaceport techs who were willing to sign on to this venture, some of your ham-handed soldiers, and me! And I’m an astrogator, not an engineer!”

  “So when are we going to have power?” Roger repeated calmly.

  “A week.” She shrugged. “Maybe ten days. Maybe sooner, but I doubt it. We’ll have to reinstall about eighty percent of the control runs, and we’re replacing all the damaged magnets. Well, the worst damaged ones. We’re way too short on spares to replace all of them, so we’re having to repair some of the ones that only got scorched, and I’m not happy about that, to say the least. You understand that if this had been a real freighter that wouldn’t even be possible? Their control run molycircs are installed right into the ship’s basic structure. We’re at least modded to be able to rip ’em out to repair combat damage, but even in our wildest dreams, we never anticipated this much of it.”

  “If it had been a real freighter,” Roger said, somewhat less calmly, “we wouldn�
�t have done this much damage. Or had our butcher’s bill. So, a week. Is there anything we can do to speed that up?”

  “Not unless you can whistle up a team from the New Rotterdam shipyards,” she said tiredly. “We’ve got every trained person working on it, and as many untrained as we can handle. We’ve nearly had some bad accidents as it is. Working with these power levels is no joke. You can’t smell, hear, or see electricity, and every time we activate a run to check integrity, I’m certain we’re going to fry some unthinking schlub, human or Mardukan, who doesn’t know what ‘going hot’ means.”

  “Okay, a week or ten days,” Roger said. “Are you getting any rest?”

  “Rest?” she said, cranking up for a fresh tirade.

  “I’ll take it that that means ‘no.’” Roger quirked one side of his mouth again. “Rest. It’s a simple concept. I want you to work no more than twelve hours per day. Figure out a way to do that, and the same for everyone else involved in the repairs. Over twelve hours a day, continuous, and people start making bad mistakes. Figure it out.”

  “That’s going to push it to the high end on time,” she pointed out.

  “Fine,” Roger replied. “We’ve got a new project we need to work out, anyway, and it’s going to mean loading a lot of . . . specialized stores. Ten days is about right. And if you blow up the ship, we’re going to have to start all over again. As you just noted, you’re an astrogator, not an engineer. I don’t want you making those sorts of mistakes just because you’re too pocking tired to avoid them.”

  “I’ve worked engineering,” she said with a shrug. “I can hum the tune, even if I can’t sing it. And Vincenzo is probably a better engineer than the late chief. At least partly because he’s more than willing to do something that’s not by the Book but works. Since the Book was written by the idiots back on Rybak’s World, it’s generally wrong anyway. We’ll get it done.”