by David Weber
The fact that Leonard Shumate, the Earl of Thompson, was Prime Minister instead of Cromarty was a demonstration of that unhappy truth. Roger had nothing against Thompson. In fact, he liked the earl a great deal, and Thompson was a Crown Loyalist. As such, his support for the House of Winton could be taken as a given. But everyone knew that, and putting together a majority in the House of Lords—essential for any prime minister—had required some unhappy horsetrading. That was how Jackson Denham had ended up as Chancellor of the Exchequer, traditionally the second most powerful seat in the Cabinet, and how Alfredo Maxwell, a Liberal, had ended up as Home Secretary while a Centrist like Dame Alice had been forced to settle for Trade.
But at least we got White Haven as First Space Lord. That’s something, he told himself.
In fact, it was quite a lot. Murdoch Alexander, the twelfth Earl of White Haven, wasn’t exactly a Centrist; he was too stubbornly independent to embrace any party label, and peers didn’t require party support to defend their seats. He wasn’t what Roger would have called a flexible man, either, but he was about as easy to deflect as Juggernaut, and he had a brain that worked. He hadn’t been in the First Space Lord’s chair long enough to have thoroughly cleaned house, but he was working on it, and his appreciation of the Star Kingdom’s strategic realities was far better than Admiral Truman’s had been.
Or it’s closer to mine, at least. Of course, that’s the dictionary definition of “better,” isn’t it?
That thought brought him a much-needed chuckle, and he grinned at his mother.
“We’re getting them trimmed down and shaped up, Mom. All we need is a bigger, sharper machete.”
“And two or three years to work on them,” his mother agreed. “I just hope the Havenites give us the time for it, Roger.”
“It’s going to be a while yet,” Roger told her, and she looked at him. She let him see the worry in her eyes, and he smiled gently. She’d been worrying about it too long, he thought. And she was afraid she was going to run out of time—that she was going to run out of time—before she accomplished everything her responsibilities to her kingdom and her people required of her.
“We’ve got at least another twenty or thirty T-years, I think,” he continued. “That’s part of the problem, actually. The people who want to pretend the sky isn’t falling can do exactly what Janacek and Truman have been doing for the last ten or twelve T-years and point out that there’s no immediate threat. The problem is they keep acting as if we’ve got some kind of unlimited savings account of time. That if the threat isn’t ‘immediate’ right this moment we’ll always have time to prepare before it becomes ‘immediate.’” He shook his head, then shrugged. “The good news is that we’re starting to get the people we need in place to do something about it. Like Admiral White Haven and Admiral Lomax.”
“That’s what Abner said last week,” Samantha admitted. “And he also complimented me on my choice of White Haven for First Space Lord. He thinks the earl is going to work out very well. Of course, I smiled and accepted his praise with becoming humility without ever pointing out that you were the one who’d recommended him.”
“Thank God!” Roger grimaced. “Even hinting to anyone that a lowly commander is ‘recommending’ flag officers for appointment as space lords would be the kiss of death for any Navy career I might still hope to cling to! I’m sure quite a lot of people have figured out you’re going to ask me for advice on questions like that, but the longer we can keep even a whisper of it from becoming official knowledge, the better I’ll like it!”
“I suppose I can understand that,” she said with a crooked smile, opening her arms to invite Magnus into her lap. The treecat hopped down and curled into a silken oval, purring loudly as she stroked him while she gazed at her son.
“I’m afraid your career—your Navy career, at least—is on borrowed time, though, Roger,” she said softly, and he froze in his chair, looking at her. Her smile reappeared, but this time it was gentle, almost compassionate. “I don’t seem to be wearing quite as well as I could wish. I’m afraid you may find yourself sitting in my chair sooner than you’d like, love. I wish it weren’t so, but—”
She shrugged, and Roger drew a deep, deep breath.
“You’re not going anywhere for a while,” he told her. “I don’t care what anyone else says; I say you’re not going anywhere for a while. I’ll step up the time earmarked for Cabinet meetings and even—God help us—sessions of Parliament to take more of the weight off your shoulders, but you’ve still got too much to teach me to go traipsing off and leave me stuck with the job!”
“I’ll try to bear that in mind. And while I’m bearing it in mind, Earl Thompson made a rather pointed suggestion to me last week. The same sort Earl Mortenson used to make.”
“You know, I really don’t think of myself primarily in terms of breeding stock,” Roger said.
“Well, to some extent, you should. It comes with the Crown, unfortunately. And the truth is, Roger, that you’ve been able to wait a lot longer than any of the rest of us have because of prolong. But it really is time you were settling down. And”—her eyes sharpened suddenly, impaling him the same way they’d once impaled an adolescent Roger Winton when his “explanations” had started shedding their wheels—“it’s not as if you didn’t have a perfectly lovely young lady in mind, now is it?”
“No,” he admitted after a moment. “No, but . . . it’s not that simple, either, Mom. I mean, I’m delighted that the Constitution requires me to marry a commoner. There were times, when I was younger, it really pissed me off, but not now. Unfortunately, this particular commoner doesn’t want to be queen.”
“She doesn’t want to marry you?” Samantha’s surprise showed in her tone, and she shook her head. “Roger, nobody’s been spying on you—or, at least, not spying on you for me—but I have seen the two of you together. I can’t believe she doesn’t love you!”
“That’s not what I said. I didn’t even say she didn’t want to marry me. The problem is that she doesn’t want to marry the King.”
“Oh.”
Samantha’s hands stilled on Magnus’ coat. The constitutional requirement that the heir to the throne wed outside the aristocracy had produced its share of unhappiness over the centuries. She was convinced it was one of the monarchy’s greatest strengths, yet more than one potential consort had backed away from the thought of becoming prince consort or queen consort and plunging themselves—and their children—into the fishbowl of the Star Kingdom’s politics.
“I think she’ll come around,” Roger said. “I wish I were certain I didn’t think that mainly because of how badly I want it, but you’re right. She does love me, and I love her, and Monroe adores her. Jonas is on my side, too, and that counts. But I’m not going to pressure her on it.” He met his mother’s gaze steadily. “From a cold-blooded political perspective, a marriage that turned out . . . unhappily could blow up in the entire Star Kingdom’s face. But even more importantly, for me at least, is that I don’t want her to be unhappy. I want her to marry me because that’s what she wants to do. And I think it is. It’s not even the political side of it that concerns her, I think. It’s that she’s afraid she doesn’t have the background for it. That she’ll embarrass me somehow. And that unmitigated asshole Bannister sure as hell isn’t helping.”
His expression turned ugly for a moment, and Samantha’s mouth tightened. Godfrey Bannister, the senior social columnist for the Landing Times, had a well-deserved reputation for steeping his columns in acid from time to time. She didn’t really think that was what he’d done this time, but the consequences were just as bad as if he had.
“The Little Beggar Girl.”
That was what he’d dubbed Angelique Adcock.
Samantha was almost certain he’d actually meant it as a compliment. She’d read the column when he’d used it for the first time, and its tone had been admiring, almost celebratory, a reminder that in the Star Kingdom of Manticore the Crown married the Commons in every generatio
n. And that even someone who’d arrived in Manticore as a penniless refugee could find himself or herself elevated to the very highest level of Manticoran society.
But it hadn’t been taken that way. Perhaps it was because he’d used so much carefully distilled vitriol over the decades. Perhaps the sorts of people who read his column had simply become so accustomed to it that they’d read the appellation as a sneering comment on the Angelique’s origins when that wasn’t what he’d intended at all.
“I really think she hadn’t even considered the possibility of my proposing until Bannister opened his mouth and ‘outed’ her,” Roger continued harshly. “That’s probably partly my fault. I was trying to be gradual about it, trying to avoid scaring her off, and I think I waited too long. She’s thinking about it now, though, and what she really wants to do is run away back to Gryphon and hide in those woods of hers! But I’m not going to give up on her, Mom.” His expression firmed. “She’s the one I want, the one I love, and she damned well loves me, too. I’m not letting that get away from me. I know how much you and Dad loved each other, and I want that, as well. And we’ve both had the prolong therapies.” He looked straight into his mother’s eyes. “I’ve found the one I want, and I’m willing to be patient. You and Dad had forty-three T-years, and I know how good they were. But I want more than that, and I can have it, and nobody and nothing is going to take that away from Angelique and me. Nobody.”
His mother looked back at him for several long, silent moments, and then she nodded slowly.
“And I want you to have it, too,” she told him softly. “So you go ahead, take your time, make sure what you have is strong enough to handle the Bannisters and the society backbiters. And when it is, you marry that girl, Roger. You marry her, and you love her, and you have children with her, and you remember me—and your dad—when you do. You do that.”
“I will, Mom,” he told her equally softly. “I will.”
March 1855 PD
“I’M TELLING YOU, ROGER, she’s brilliant. We agree on that, all right?! But she knows she’s brilliant, and she has about as much tact as . . . as—”
Jonas Adcock shook his head, obviously unable to come up with the simile he wanted, then threw up both hands.
“Hell, she doesn’t have any tact! In fact, I don’t think she’s ever even heard the word!”
“Now, now, Jonas!” Roger shook his own head reprovingly. “You know perfectly well she has to have heard the word used at least in passing as much as, oh, two or three times just at the Island!”
“Then she sure as hell wasn’t paying attention,” Adcock growled.
“Should I assume from your obvious despair that she’s . . . stepped on someone’s toes again?”
“I’m astonished young Alexander didn’t wring her neck,” Adcock said bluntly. “Or that the two of them didn’t spend their lunch hour down at the dueling grounds, for that matter!”
“Oh? And what was the source of their . . . mutual discontent this time?”
“The usual,” Adcock sighed. “Mind you, this time it was all Sonja’s own fault. Not that she was prepared to admit it! She ran into him when he dropped by Section Thirteen to discuss the latest ‘burn’ settings on the Mark Ten.”
He paused, raising his eyebrows, and Roger nodded his understanding. Section Thirteen was internal Navy-speak for “Bureau of Weapons, Missile Development Command, Warhead Division,” which happened to be housed in Section 13-065-9 of HMSS Hephaestus, and the Mark Ten was the latest-generation heavy shipkiller warhead of the RMN. Like all such modern weapons, it could be used in “boom” or “burn” mode: as a contact nuke or as a sidewall “burner,” designed to take down that critical defense before warships closed for the decisive energy duel. The Mark Ten was a very advanced warhead—markedly superior to current-generation Solarian warheads, in fact—which had raised the standoff range in sidewall-burning mode to almost eleven thousand kilometers.
“Well, Sonja was over there to see Commander Mavroudis about something completely separate, but she overheard the question and made some remark about how ‘obsolescent dual mode warheads’ are becoming.”
He looked at Roger again, this time expressionlessly, and Roger groaned.
“Tell me she didn’t say anything about Python!” he begged.
“No,” Adcock said judiciously. “Not in so many words, anyway. But she’d said enough to make Alexander curious, and he asked her what she was talking about. At which point she realized she wasn’t supposed to be talking about Python to anyone—Mavroudis was doing everything but send her semaphore messages from behind Alexander’s back to shut up about it—and fell back on simply giving him a smug, Sonja, I-know-something-you-don’t-know look. Which convinced him she didn’t have a clue what she was talking about—that it was just Sonja being Sonja again—and he made a relatively scathing observation about people who happened to be obsessed with shiny toys and what a pity it was they couldn’t spend the same amount of mental effort on weapons, instead.”
“Oh, Lord.”
Roger’s tone was almost mild, his expression that of a man watching two ground cars slide unstoppably towards one another on a sheet of ice, and Adcock chuckled sourly.
Project Python was a top secret effort being pursued by Section Thirteen with very quiet, under-the-radar input from the Concept Development Office’s researchers. Based on the original, failed effort by Abreu and Harmon, a Solarian defense contractor, Python represented an attempt to develop a workable “laser head”: a weapon which would generate bomb-pumped X-ray lasers and punch them straight through sidewalls from far greater standoff ranges than any sidewall burner had yet attained. If it worked, it would enhance the lethality of missile combat enormously and offer the possibility of radically altering accepted tactics. Unfortunately, it was still a completely black program no one was supposed to know a thing about.
“Give her her due,” Adcock said after a moment. “She obviously realized she should never have opened her mouth about it, and she wasn’t about to breach security, even when Alexander whacked her up aside the head. But that doesn’t mean her temper was any better than usual. She let him have it right back, and they were off to the races in a bloodbath that didn’t have one single thing to do with hardware or weapon systems anymore. One of the little drawbacks of having known each other since they were weaned, I suppose.” He shook his head. “Mavroudis says it took him ten minutes to separate them . . . and it felt like ten hours! He also asked me if I could put her on a leash in the future.”
“Oof!”
Roger grinned. Commander Anders Mavroudis was one of the easiest-going officers in the Queen’s Navy. The fact that he’d made a request like that spoke volumes about how . . . interesting the discussion must have become.
“He commed me while she was still in transit,” Adcock continued, “so I took the opportunity to give her a few quality moments of my own time on her arrival and then sent her off to Sebastian for a refresher review on Security 101, and I’ll just let you guess how well she took that. For a minute there, I thought he was going to invite her out for a little pistol practice this afternoon!”
Adcock grimaced disgustedly. Despite a degree of patriotism which made the most fervent nativeborn Manticorans’ look positively anemic, there were some aspects of the Star Kingdom of which he’d never fully approved. One of those was the persistence of its Code Duello . . . which didn’t mean there weren’t times he could understand how useful people might find it in certain situations.
Roger chuckled, although he had to sympathize with his friend. Lieutenant Commander Sonja Hemphill, the granddaughter of Vice Admiral Robert Hemphill (who’d finally been forced into a long overdue retirement at BuShips), was just as brilliant as Adcock had suggested. And while she wasn’t quite as socially tone deaf as the other captain’s diatribe might suggest, she did have a pronounced gift (which she had obviously inherited from her grandfather) for stepping on toes. It didn’t help that she and Commander Sebastian D’O
rville didn’t like each other very much, and the fact that she obviously thought D’Orville—who happened to be senior to her—was slightly denser than battle steel helped even less.
Lieutenant Commander Hamish Alexander, on the other hand, was just as smart and at least moderately more tactful than Hemphill. How someone with his mindset had ended up on Bethany Havinghurst’s staff over at BuPlan was one of life’s little mysteries, but Roger suspected Admiral White Haven (who happened to be Hamish’s father) had probably had a little something to do with it. And in this instance, little though Roger cared for the patronage game, he was prepared to admit it was a good thing, although he was also prepared to admit that Hamish’s occasional . . . lively disagreements with Edward Janacek probably helped explain his own approval in this instance. Fortunately for all concerned—except, of course, he reminded himself grimly, for the rest of the Star Kingdom—Janacek had become a professional intelligence specialist whereas Alexander remained firmly wedded to the tactical track which had always been the fast path to starship command and senior fleet command in the RMN. The good news was that Janacek was unlikely ever to command a fleet in battle and get a few thousand people killed; the bad news was that he had acquired sufficient seniority to be a serious obstacle to efforts to convince the Admiralty and, especially, Parliament that Manticore needed a true battle fleet.
The friction with Janacek was also driven by the fact that Alexander was advancing almost as rapidly towards Captain of the List and eventually flag rank as Janacek had . . . and doing it on the basis of proven ability in command positions, not just who he happened to know. The two men had never liked one another, and Roger forsaw the development of one of the Navy’s truly legendary personal feuds looming inevitably on the horizon. Given their family and political connections, it was likely to be a particularly messy and vicious one, as well. Especially if Janacek ever made the mistake of getting Alexander’s dander up in a public setting. Given the younger man’s rapid advancement, he was going to overtake Janacek’s rank sometime very soon, at which point Janacek was going to discover just how much interest he’d accrued on the numerous barbed, venomous comments he’d made about Alexander in “private conversations” he knew would be circulated through the officer corps. That sort of tactic was typical of his spiteful, coup-counting nature, especially since he could always claim he’d been misquoted or that the anonymous source who’d passed along the comment had garbled it or gotten it wrong. And since it hadn’t been made in any official setting or on the record, no one in the Navy could take official cognizance of it and call him to account.