The airlock opened. Kat stepped through, wearing a basic uniform. William relaxed, slightly. He’d half expected her to wear her dress uniform. That would have been embarrassing, if only because Asher Dales had no dress uniform. The planetary defense force hadn’t grown large enough to allow inexperienced sadists to claim positions of power. And whoever had designed the Royal Navy’s dress uniform was very definitely a sadist.
He studied Kat for a long moment as she saluted the flag. Dear God . . . what had happened to her? Her face looked the same, but there was a . . . beaten air around her that worried him more than he cared to admit. He knew that she’d taken Pat Davidson’s death badly, yet . . . He winced, inwardly. Kat had lost her father and fiancé in the same month. No wonder she was depressed. And leaving the command deck probably hadn’t helped. She’d been a great commanding officer.
“Welcome aboard,” he said, saluting. “It’s good to see you again.”
“Likewise,” Kat said. She sounded tired. “You didn’t change the dedication plaque?”
William glanced at the plaque, which still read HMS DANDELION. “It didn’t seem as important as getting the ships into space and into service,” he said as he invited Kat to follow him to his office. Tanya fell in behind them. “Besides, Asher Dales hasn’t agreed on a formal ship prefix, let alone anything else. I imagine the ships will be renamed at some point in the future.”
“Probably,” Kat agreed. “You did a good job.”
“With the ships or with the battle?” William grinned at her. “We tried.”
Kat smiled back, tiredly. “Both, I suppose,” she said. “But the battle in particular.”
“It would have gone the other way if they’d come in firing,” William said. He’d done everything in his power to make that clear to the planetary government, although he wasn’t sure they’d believed him. Victory was better than defeat, of course, but it had a nasty habit of going to one’s head. “They might have been able to inflict serious damage on the planet even if we had destroyed them.”
“They didn’t, thankfully,” Kat said. Her expression darkened. “Judd will need years to recover.”
William said nothing as they stepped into his cabin. The reports had been vague and outdated, but the planet had clearly taken a beating. Years of work had been smashed back to bedrock. It was quite possible that the locals wouldn’t have the grit and determination to rebuild, even after the enemy force was destroyed. He’d been on planets that had lost the will to live. They were not pleasant places to visit. He hated to imagine what it might be like to live there.
“Please, take a seat,” he said, waving towards the sofa. It was yet another unessential item he hadn’t bothered to have replaced. Kat, at least, wouldn’t be upset that he hadn’t covered the frame in gold and replaced the navy-issue cushions with silk. “Would you care for a glass of the local vintage?”
“Just a glass,” Kat said. She sat on the sofa and crossed her legs. “What did you pull out of the wreckage?”
“Very little, so far,” William said. He poured three glasses of wine and passed them around, then took a chair himself. Tanya remained standing, her face utterly impassive. “The datacores were quite badly damaged by the engagement. We haven’t even started to untangle them, if indeed it’s possible. Your experts might be able to do a better job.”
And Asher Dales won’t be blamed if they fail to pull anything from the datacores, he added silently. Kat would understand that, sometimes, it simply wasn’t possible to recover data, but her political masters might not be quite so understanding. Better to let someone else take the blame.
He studied Kat, feeling oddly uneasy. She still looked young—if she’d been born on Hebrides, he would have said she was in her midtwenties—but the way she held herself suggested she was an old woman trapped in a young woman’s form. And yet, she wasn’t that old. Kat was in her late thirties. She still had years ahead of her. But she’d lost too much over the last year. She deserved much better.
“We did examine the bodies,” he said, putting the thought aside for later consideration. “Of the fifty-one corpses pulled from the wreck, forty-five of them were almost certainly from Ahura Mazda. They had the usual lack of genetic enhancements, as far as anyone can tell; the remainder appear to have come from somewhere else. We just don’t know where.”
Kat’s lips thinned. “Converts or traitors?”
“Or merely pirates out for a good time,” William said. He didn’t think that any pirates would willingly join the Theocrats, but he’d been wrong before. “It’s also possible that they were conscripts. The Theocrats presumably need people to help keep their ships running.”
“We know they took people from Judd,” Kat agreed. “And they’d take people from here too, if they had the chance.”
William nodded. “I’ve ordered my people to carry weapons at all times,” he said. “But I don’t know how it will work out.”
“At least they’ll have a chance to resist capture,” Kat said.
Or kill themselves before they can be captured, William told himself grimly. No one wants to fall into enemy hands.
Kat cleared her throat. “Do you remember when we were sent out to raid enemy territory?”
“Yes,” William said. The irony wasn’t lost on him. “And now they’re doing the same thing to you.”
Kat looked pained. “You’re not the first person to say that,” she said. “The Commonwealth was able to deal with raiders, William, because most of the stage-two and upwards systems were defended. Here . . . Asher Dales is one of the few systems that managed to raise any kind of defense force. The others are effectively defenseless. I’ve parceled out most of my ships in hopes of catching the raiders in the act, but . . . the odds of actually succeeding are quite low.”
“Then you need to expand the local defenses,” William said. “The ships we purchased weren’t the only ones being sold.”
“Against pirates, you might have a point,” Kat said. “I believe the king was pushing for subsidies for self-defense forces. But against a set of superdreadnoughts . . . there’s no way we can afford to give every world the defenses they’d need to stand them off. The cost would be astronomical.”
William frowned. “How long can they even keep those superdreadnoughts operational?”
Kat sighed. “I don’t know,” she said. “Their maintenance routines are shitty. You know that. I believed the ships that escaped the final battle would rapidly degrade without access to shipyards or even spare parts. No pirate or smuggler ring could provide them with what they’d need to keep the ships running. Someone is helping them.”
“But who actually benefits?” William considered the matter, carefully. “Have there been conflicts with the other Great Powers?”
“Nothing of great concern,” Kat said. “There were a handful of minor disagreements. A few people were upset that Britannia refused to dispatch more than a couple of ships to search for Supreme, but nothing anyone would actually go to war over. And if we caught someone supplying the Theocrats, we probably would go to war. It would be an insane risk.”
William had his doubts. Hebrides had been a rough world even before the Theocrats had turned his homeworld into a radioactive hellhole. Its population knew, on a very basic level, that the world around them and the universe outside the planet’s atmosphere were red in tooth and claw. Might made right, in the crudest possible sense. His people couldn’t hide from the realities of life.
But Tyre was different. Tyre had been a comfortable place to live ever since it had been settled. The population enjoyed considerable advantages, from excellent schools to a social network that had banished starvation and want. There might be a social stigma to accepting free food and lodging from the government instead of earning enough to pay one’s own way, but people didn’t starve. And they’d come to believe that that was how the universe worked, even after the war began. They were, in some sense, tired of war.
And very few of them care about
the people out here, he thought. The liberated worlds aren’t part of the Commonwealth. And they were having problems with the Commonwealth even before the war made all problems worse.
“I hope you’re right,” he said. “Do you think we missed a shipyard, somewhere?”
Kat shook her head. “Their record keeping was terrible, but I think we can be reasonably sure they didn’t hide more than a handful of storage depots in deep space. They grabbed everything they could just to throw at us during the final battle.”
“But you can’t be sure,” Tanya said, speaking for the first time. “There could be a working shipyard out there.”
“Our analysts have tried hard to account for every last ebb and flow of their economy,” Kat said. If she noticed the blatant challenge in Tanya’s voice, she didn’t show it. “Impossible to be entirely sure, as you say, but we believe that relatively little war material remains unaccounted for. Certainly not enough to build and maintain a secret fleet of starships.”
She smiled, although it didn’t touch her eyes. “They were lying to themselves. Their people were pressured into increasing their production, so they basically lied and said that yes, production was increasing. They kept wearing out their equipment because they were trying to meet impossible demands. Their economy was overheating even before we started shooting at each other. There’s a good chance it would have collapsed completely in a few years anyway.”
“And yet they went to war,” William said. “They must have been desperate.”
“It makes you wonder just how much else they didn’t know,” Kat said. “If everyone was . . . massaging the data to create favorable facts . . . did they believe that half the Royal Navy simply didn’t exist? Or did they genuinely believe they could win the war in six months?”
“Their plan wasn’t that bad,” William reminded her. “If we hadn’t been at Cadiz, Admiral Morrison’s fleet would have been caught by surprise and wiped out. That would certainly have given them an opportunity to take the war farther into the Commonwealth.”
“They still wouldn’t have been able to take Tyre,” Kat said. “And even challenging the defenses could have cost them the war.” She leaned back. “We’ll see what we can learn from the captured ship,” she said. “And, under the circumstances, I feel justified in transferring a number of replacement missiles to you.”
“That would be very welcome,” William told her.
Kat smiled. “I thought so too.”
She ran her hand through her hair. “We won the war, William,” she said. “And yet, we seem to be losing the peace.”
“They can’t run rampant forever,” William assured her. “Sooner or later, their luck will run out. And then you’ll be there to meet them.”
“I hope so,” Kat said. “But right now . . . it feels like we’re running around trying to put out fires with water pistols.”
Her wristcom bleeped. “Excuse me.”
“Admiral,” a voice said. “We made contact with Ahura Mazda. I . . . I’m afraid there have been two more attacks.”
William felt his heart clench. Two more attacks? No, there had been three attacks, if one counted the attempted raid on Asher Dales. The enemy was getting bolder.
“Understood,” Kat said. She rose. “I’m on my way.”
“I’ll see you planet-side, if you have time to visit,” William said, standing. “If not . . . I’ll understand.”
“I have to stay here anyway, at least until we pull everything we can from the wreck,” Kat said. “If we find something that will lead us to the enemy base . . .”
William nodded in agreement. If they located the enemy base, Kat could take her superdreadnoughts there and smash the Theocratic fleet into rubble. The move wouldn’t solve all their problems, but it would deal with the immediate crisis. And if the only thing they had to worry about, after that, was pirate raiders . . . well, he’d be relieved. He could handle pirates.
“I’ll see you soon,” he said. “And good luck.”
“You too,” Kat said. “You’ve done very well here.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
* * *
TYRE
Father definitely had the right idea, Peter thought as he listened to yet another long-winded Member of Parliament droning on about his constituency’s interests. There’s no reason I couldn’t vote by proxy, or even have each debate summarized for me . . .
He glanced at his datapad, wondering when, if ever, the MP for Hawking Park would get to the point. It felt like he’d been talking for hours, despite the speaker putting a strict time limit on speeches. The man definitely loved the sound of his own voice. Peter rather thought he’d said the same thing over and over again. By the time the MP sat, to a ripple of relieved applause, Peter was nursing a pounding headache.
The speaker stood. “The Honorable MP for Gridley wishes to propose a Private Member’s Bill.”
Peter sat upright, feeling a sudden flicker of excitement. Anyone could propose a PMB, but it wouldn’t be put up for debate unless a handful of other MPs had already agreed to sponsor it. And then . . . the MP was gambling. If his bill didn’t receive a certain level of support from the Houses of Parliament, according to the rules, he’d have to face a vote of confidence from his constituents. The MP for Gridley—an independent MP, according to the man’s file—was taking a huge chance. His constituents might not thank him for failing to represent them properly.
Particularly as an independent will have problems getting the backing to get anything done, Peter thought. Party MPs had much more clout. They may come to regret electing an independent.
“Honorable Speaker, Honorable Members, I will be brief,” the MP for Gridley said. “We have spent the last week dancing around the question of passing the budget bill and arguing—pointlessly, I daresay—over our duty to the liberated worlds. To me, the issue is not up for debate. The liberated worlds are not members of the Commonwealth, we have no treaties with them that we should honor . . . and, as many others have pointed out, what commitments were made were made without Parliament’s consent.”
Dangerous waters, Peter thought, amused. The MP hadn’t mentioned the king, but everyone knew who’d made the commitments. His career will either rise to terrifying heights or come crashing down in flames.
“I say that we have no commitments,” the MP for Gridley said, his voice rising. “And I say that we have no interest in trying to civilize the barbarians. The people of Ahura Mazda do not want to live in a civilized society, and all our efforts to impose a new order on them are doomed to failure. There is literally nothing to be gained by an expensive commitment to the liberated sector. The Royal Navy exists to protect our worlds and our shipping. It does not exist to play galactic policeman!”
He paused, significantly. “I propose the immediate withdrawal of our ships and our bases from the Theocratic Sector. Let the locals handle their own defense, if they are so inclined; let the barbarians wallow in their own barbarism. The Theocracy is gone. In time, they will evolve newer and better ways to live. We should not believe that we have a duty to assist them. Even if we did, they have shown us what they think of our . . . assistance.
“Honorable Speaker, I request that we move to an immediate vote,” he concluded. “Let the matter be decided now, once and for all.”
Peter sucked in his breath. Another gamble, on top of the first? The MP had to be confident of victory. But there was no reason to be confident. Peter’s analysts believed that, at most, only a third of the MPs would support immediate withdrawal. The House of Lords was keeping their cards closer to their chests, as always, but Peter doubted that they’d be keen to support the bill. The corporations had made a number of loans to the liberated worlds.
Loans we couldn’t expect to have repaid if the sector collapses into chaos, Peter thought. They weren’t big loans, not compared to the amount of money that would be needed to rescue Cavendish, but collectively they were quite significant. And chaos on the far side of the Gap might easil
y spread into our territories.
His datapad bleeped, inviting him to cast a vote. Should the proposed bill be put to an immediate vote or not? He smiled, humorlessly. They were voting on whether or not they should be allowed to vote on the bill. No, he corrected himself. That wasn’t quite accurate. They were trying to decide if the bill should be put to the vote now or later, the latter giving anyone who disagreed with the bill time to organize resistance. It made him wonder if there were ties between the bill’s proposer and Israel Harrison. The Leader of the Opposition might have dreamed up the whole scheme to challenge the king without revealing his hand too openly.
Something to consider, he told himself as he voted nay. No one takes such a gamble unless they’re convinced of powerful support.
He allowed himself a sigh of relief as the nays had it, two to one. Too many MPs hadn’t liked the idea of being forced to vote on a bill without debating first, even if it meant more long-winded speeches. Peter checked his datapad once again, noting when the debate had been scheduled. There would be plenty of time to organize resistance . . . if, of course, he wanted to organize resistance. From a practical point of view, withdrawing from the occupied sector would save billions of crowns.
And it would put less pressure on the Royal Navy, Peter thought. It’s something else I’ll have to discuss with Kat.
He took a long breath as the speaker rose, again.
“Honorable Members,” he said. “We have one final issue to discuss. The Royal Wedding Bill.”
Debt of Honor (The Embers of War) Page 21