by Moshe Ben-Or
Expenditures, on the scale he is requesting, require approval from the supreme civilian authority of the Delta Triangulae League. The Council of Four shall now speak.
They are coming in unhurriedly, with the bailiff’s announcements, the way they always do, in the exact same order in which the national representatives’ signatures appear on the Treaty. That order had been purely random, slighting no one. Now tradition is set in stone, sacrosanct in everything, from diplomatic protocol to the printing of nutritional content information on fast food labels.
“His Righteousness, Admor Avraham Yoseph Yitzhok ben Fruma Malka, the Kunovsker Rebbe.”
A slight, fragile-looking, massively-bearded man with enormous silver peyot, stooped and withered by age. Made even slighter by the black bekishe that hangs upon his withered frame as if upon a stick. The wide shtreimel crowning his head gives him something of the appearance of a wise old Mushroom King from some children’s fairy tale.
Leaning heavily onto a cane despite the low gravity as he limps slowly into the chamber, shaking hand habitually reaching for a tiny book of psalms as he sinks into his chair.
Keeper of a twelve-hundred-year-old lineage and an ancient kabbalistic teaching, going all the way back to a tiny clutch of mystical-minded physicists meeting intermittently amid the utilitarian starkness of a First System War Judean settlement, between the sixteen-hour shifts of Project Noah.
At a hundred and ninety-four, the oldest member of the Council.
Immediately behind him, his grandson, Yitzhok, solicitous as always, sliding out the chair and pouring water for his grandfather. Arranging notepads and bits of smart paper with the quick efficiency of long practice. A vigorous, robust man of eighty, not a wrinkle on his face. The designated successor.
Hidden among the entourage, a surprise. Moshe Rabinovich of Hidekkel, a son of the Kunovsker Rebbe’s greatest rival. Just as vigorous as Yitzhok, though a bit older. His mien is a poker-faced mask.
The Rebbe’s fragility is deceiving; not an act, but a natural disguise made more perfect by practice, like a crouching tiger’s stripes or a stalking snow leopard’s spots. He has looked this way for a good ninety years, pacing just ahead of the Grim Reaper courtesy of the medical renaissance that began in earnest in the 3680s. Behind the bristle of snowy beard and the shield of high-capacity net glasses, brown eyes are alert and quick, windows to a razor-sharp mind.
This man is the closest thing to an absolute dictator among them, thinks Reginald Freeman. The Kunovsker Rebbe rules Haven by fiat, in the name of God. There is a Council of Torah Sages, but it is his plaything. There is an Assembly of Avot, but he dominates it by guile, and sheer force of will. Not even the Spartan king wields as much personal power.
Why, then, is the last surviving son of the Hidekkeler Rebbe here? Has the old man finally lost some measure of his iron grip? Or is there another explanation? Did, amid the devastation of ruined Kiryas Yoel, the present Hidekkeler finally accept the loss of the power that his family had held since Haven’s founding, only to cede to this man’s father, two centuries ago? Did he, perhaps, send a messenger to Kiryas Moshe, bearing words of reconciliation and peace? The Hidekkeler’s son has a virginal daughter, just barely into her teens. Yitzhok Krasnovitsky is recently widowed, and without male offspring.
Regardless of such possibilities, thinks Duke Freeman, the main thing is that this man is surely with him. This war’s fury has expended itself, foremost, upon his people. Heavy is the burden they have borne. Upon the surface of Bretogne, every fourth lies dead. Upon the surface of Haven – every seventh. Upon the surface of Hadassah, uninvaded but pummeled from orbit to the very edge of terraforming reversal, the dead number every tenth. There is no Havenite family, noble or common, into whose home this war has not come, among whose members none was wounded, among whose count none are missed. Even and foremost, among the Chief Rabbi’s dearest and closest. On November Seventeenth, 3771, Rav Yitzhok Krasnovitsky had two wives, and seven sons.
Zin holdouts yet survive upon the surface of Haven, starving and freezing as they huddle in their foxholes, amid the endlessly falling polar snow. A tiny Zin contingent still battles amid the merciless deserts of Bretogne’s Hot Side, clinging desperately to the edge of the Boiling Zone, calling vainly for help that cannot come, as orbital fires and airstrikes pummel it into oblivion.
The Chief Rabbi of Haven was the first to call for holy war. His marshals were the first to formally prohibit the taking of Zin prisoners. It is vital to this man that the enemy whom he is now determined to exterminate to the very last kitten be kept busy, that any incipient movement back down the gradient toward his devastated nation be promptly detected and rapidly parried, that the focus of the Fleet’s operations remain upon Paradise, and nowhere else.
The Torah Republic must have time, above all other things.
Haven’s space-based infrastructure, all but completely obliterated by alien invaders, must be rebuilt. The Republic’s badly mauled industrial base must be restored to proper function. Hundreds of millions of skilled workers, mobilized for combat on an emergency basis, must be reintegrated back into the workforce. Industrial capacities, hastily optimized to supply ground forces, must be redirected back toward naval production. Interrupted naval crew training programs must be reestablished.
The Torah Republic’s supreme leader will argue for the General Staff proposal, because it buys him the time he needs, at costs he is willing to live with.
“Her Excellency, Preferred Shareholder, Madame Theresa Inès Thibodeaux, Chief Executive Officer of the Serpent Swarm Corporation.”
A shockingly young, light-haired woman. Barely thirty-three, the youngest member of the council by far. Floating calmly inside her zero-gee bubble as it rolls into the conference room upon its near-silent caterpillar tracks. The wealthiest person in most any room she enters, at least as far as private assets are concerned. The youngest chief executive in the history of the Corporation. A financial prodigy and a bonafide genius, born almost penniless and already a billionairess at twelve.
Utterly atypical for a belter magnate. Just a touch of makeup. Barely any jewelry. Hair cut tastefully, but almost mannishly short. Her robes are the simple rifle green she was born to, with naught but a bit of subdued, reddish-brown piping and an elegant, subtle pattern in gold to indicate how far she has come. None of your flamboyant clashing colors here. A reminder, perhaps, of where she’d started. A public reminder, to herself. Remember, caesar, thou art mortal!
The entourage is a pack of dour, colorless aides, led by a cadaverous old woman whose face looks like it might crack in the exceedingly unlikely event that she were ever to attempt a smile. The mobile command post of some strange, mechanized army, come to invade the room. Extended-capacity net glasses for everyone. Whole batteries of holographic emitters and privacy-screened displays. Massive processor and data storage modules all over the place. Were this part of Delta Triangulae Station not kept at precisely one third of a standard gee as compromise between majority and minority, they would have come floating in behind their leader in a whisper of spinning propellers. The bubbles are custom-built to dock their flying platforms, with reinforced chassis to handle the extra load.
They probably have enough computing power between them, thinks the admiral, to crunch a General Solution for a long jump. Quite possibly the data for it, too. Information-management skills to organize it at a snap of their CEO’s fingers, without doubt.
Theresa Thibodeaux is nicknamed “the Calculator,” by both friend and foe. A pejorative, initially. One she has defiantly embraced, and made into a badge of honor.
The Board trembles at this woman’s word. But her meteoric rise has left a trail of blood and corpses in its wake. Figurative, mostly. Unlike Haven’s shadowy struggles, Serpent Swarm corporate politics are rarely a lethal full-contact sport. But a few did take the Spirit Pill, or theatrically blow their own brains out, for lack of better choice or out of sheer humiliation. One even jumped out an airlock. Some say, that one
was pushed.
Should Theresa Thibodeaux ever stumble, aggrieved blue-bloods will pounce, the Shareholders’ Committee will desert her, and the Board of Directors she has terrorized for years will turn on its mistress like a pack of hyenas. Therefore, she must not stumble. A calculator requires data. Woe be to the aide who fails to instantly and thoroughly meet the need, whatever the subject might be.
This woman’s people, too, have suffered greatly, thinks Admiral Freeman. Fully half the population of the Normann Belt was murdered by the Zin. In sum, that is every seventh Shareholder or Employee, some five hundred and sixty-five million, in all. For many of the rest, the Spirit Pill had loomed large, as sole alternative to fates far worse. No one but Theresa Thibodeaux knows, or will ever know, how close she came to signing the fateful Order.
Now that the organics trade with Haven is restored, albeit at far lower than prewar volume, immediate crisis within the Corporation’s remaining habitats has been averted.
“Averted”, on second thought, is poor choice of words. It would be far more accurate to say, muses the admiral, that the crisis has been postponed. Autarkic recycling systems, long neglected in favor of bilateral trade, must be rebuilt and expanded. Additional resources must be extracted using locally available means. New habitation space must be built from scratch. Yet the war presses.
Six out of every ten capital ships in the Fleet have been lost. None are better than the belters of the Serpent Swarm at building things in space. Half their Youth Labor Reserve is trained to operate bot swarms that melt down asteroids, spin fiber and slap steel together out in the vacuum. Victory depends on their building more ships quickly, both for themselves and for their brutalized Havenite allies. But the work of expanding and feeding the shipyards competes directly with the need to expand and further stabilize the Corporation’s overcrowded habitation space. Unlike every other Member, the Corporation must artificially produce everything. Even air.
Like the Chief Rabbi of Haven, this woman desires that the Fleet keep its focus upon Paradise. Like him, she desires time above all things. But the cost of the General Staff special operations proposal is considerable, in human resources if not in materiel.
In the present crisis, conventional salaries do not exist. Capitalism is suspended for the duration. Manpower costs are measured in hours as percentage of available pool. The special operations plan demands a great many such hours, and they must come from those of rare skill, and high qualification. Unlike in high school economics fantasyland, in the real world, skilled workers are not readily interchangeable, nor can the pool of skilled labor be quickly expanded. For many categories of workers, it simply cannot be expanded at all. Not on any relevant timescale. The question, therefore, is one simply of allocation.
Few indeed are as good as the Calculator at resource allocation problems. But what she had decided after the leaders of the General Staff were finished with their briefing, or how she may have been swayed by others in the hours since, are mysteries known only to her.
“His Majesty, King Filip Theodorovich, by the Grace of Heaven Caesar of All Sparta, Commander of the Armies and Protector of the Faith.”
Duke Reginald’s liege lord is a vigorous man in late middle age. They are yearlings, Filip and he, though the years have been kinder to His Majesty than to his boyhood playmate. The wavy black hair and short, curly beard are liberally sprinkled with white now, but the broad-shouldered, muscular frame beneath the resplendent forest green velvet and golden bullion braid of the royal uniform is still as powerful as ever. The olive skin is dry and unflushed, but the beak-like Lenites nose flares its nostrils now and again, a hint of what goes on beneath the calm poker face.
His Majesty has come to a decision, thinks Duke Reginald. One he does not at all like.
In all fairness, muses the admiral, Filip didn’t have a likable decision in this business. The Caesar of All Sparta is no unfettered despot, like the Son of Heaven in his Forbidden Palace or some Baron of Miranda upon the Gothic Throne.
The Kingdom has been spared the worst so far. The Fleet’s great battles have been bloody. Bloodier than any in living memory. Funerals are frequent and numerous. Hospitals are full. Upon the streets of major cities, men sporting regen shells, canes, crutches, wheelchairs, clumsy, freshly-regrown limbs and scars from healing radiation burns are a common sight.
Passerby offer help and hold open doors. Strangers yield seats on the trolley. Taxis give free rides. Restaurants feature special menus, of items recommended by doctors, and dishes that will not unduly discomfit a still-healing digestive tract.
But the dead and maimed are all Naval crew, grown men who went forth for King and Country, well-trained and well-armed, knowing what they’d signed up for.
The gentry fights at the forefront, as it always has. In the best neighborhoods, many a fine townhouse is draped in black bunting. Many a well-bred lady sports a black dress. Many a distinguished gentleman’s gold-buttoned suit has sprouted a black armband. Many a liveried servant wears a black ribbon upon his lapel. At the great castles and fine country manors, the bells toll especially often.
Tragic, of course, would say the common townsman. One feels for their families. But such is the face of war. It always has been.
The dead are buried with honor. New men come forward to shoulder the burden in their place. The gentry earns its titles with the sword, as it should, and justifies its place in the grand scheme of things, as ever, by watering the fields of strife with its blood. The common man puts his shoulder to the wheel, setting aside comfort and leisure, accepting rationing as inevitable and taking wartime restrictions in his stride. His sweat flows in rivers in the name of victory, a vital supplement to the noble warrior’s blood. Life goes on.
But the threat to New Helena is acute. The Commons holds the kingdom’s purse strings, and demands action. The example of Haven looms menacingly in the minds of all.
The threat to Tròido is not much less acute than the threat to New Helena. Here, for quite a bit more than a few of the Honorable Masters of the Commons, it is not fellow citizen but own pocket that is threatened.
Duke Aarno Ahonen might not have set out to earn a fortune, when he’d followed a small band of rogue Israelis halfway across Known Space, to fight in defense of a people he did not know, but earn a fortune he did. Many a family among the Commons has expanded greatly upon the crumbs falling from that table in the intervening hundred and ninety-odd years.
When a penniless Ledonian lord and a rogue Israeli colonel had conspired to spark a war that would make the League what it is today, muses Duke Reginald, they probably did not expect things to end up the way they did. But the King of Tròido had guile enough to equal them both. He knew which bonds bind nations the closest. The Lords, too, demand action to protect their investments on the faraway World of Red Skies.
A parliamentary revolt cannot depose King Filip. Unlike every other member of the Council, he cannot lose his title to a vote even in theory, much less in practice.
But should the Honored Gentlemen of the House of Lords make common cause with the Honorable Masters of the House of Commons, they can render King Filip as impotent and the nation as rudderless as they did when they’d rebelled against his father, King Theodore, over the ill-fated intervention on Miranda, some forty years ago. Like back then, they have the sense to wait until the fighting is over. But King Theodore did, in the end, abdicate in the name of the common good.
On the other hand, should King Filip betray his maternal second cousin and leave Duke Freeman’s designated heir to his fate, forfeiting honor and duty as liege lord, violating the spirit, if not the letter, of Article Twelve…
The Lords did not revolt over fat bank accounts alone. And who better than the King’s maternal second cousin, the Duke Freeman Himself, de-facto spiritual leader of the Reformers, to lead such a potential revolt? Who better, to rope in the Conservatives over a matter of tradition and oaths, or to forge an alliance of convenience with power-hungry radical
s among the Commons?
He’d threatened no such thing. They have never discussed the issue in private. Protocol must be maintained, especially in desperate times like these. But honor must be maintained also, and Filip knows exactly what this matter means to his childhood friend…
“His Excellency, Israel Alon, Prime Minister of New Israel.”
“And this is the last of them,” thinks Reginald Freeman as the portly ex-admiral takes his seat.
He’d always looked more like a banker than a military man. His whole family runs to pot bellies and chubby cheeks. But, like with the Kunovsker Rebbe, appearances are deceiving.
This man is a gifted admiral, and an even more gifted politician. At a hundred and twenty-nine, he is the duke’s senior by only seven years. But he was Admiral of the Fleet already when Reginald Freeman still wore a rear admiral’s two broad stripes.
Israel Alon always knew which ass to kiss, and which ass to kick. Were it not for the house-cleaning that had followed the Third Imperial’s disappointing stalemate, he might still be Admiral of the Fleet today. Instead, with thirty-two continuous years in office amid the incessant coalition chaos that is Israeli politics, he is now, by far, New Israel’s longest-serving prime minister.
“What have you decided?” thinks admiral Freeman, drilling his stare into the prime minister’s inscrutably good-natured eyes. “You know that we are not strong enough to both defend Hadassah and simultaneously do something serious around Tienchen. You know that an enduring threat to Paradise’s modular factories will set the Zin on edge and paralyze huge forces as they try to protect their supply line. You know that Buzh Frolov’s insane proposal is workable. We have both the data to prove it and the pilots to fly the ships. You know that setting Paradise aflame will have effects out of all proportion to the size of the forces involved. You know that the real battle we face now is the Battle of the Shipyard, the Battle of the Factory, the Battle of the Mine. You know that we must have time, above all other things.