by David Weber
Kolokoltsov’s molars ground together. The Shingaine Convention had been sponsored by the Solarian League seventy T-years ago expressly as a means to pressure the then-Star Kingdom of Manticore. The Star Kingdom had already been beginning its preparations for its decades-long war against the People’s Republic of Haven, and it had demonstrated that it was only too prepared to use its control of the Manticoran Wormhole Junction as a lever to pressure the League’s foreign policy in its own favor if it decided that was necessary. The League wasn’t used to dancing to anyone else’s piping—it was supposed to provide the dance music in its relations with other star nations—so it had convened a meeting of “independent star nations” in the Shingaine System which had obediently produced the Shingaine Convention. The Solarian League had immediately recognized it as the basis of its “open door” policy, with the clear implication that it would enforce its interpretation of interstellar law by force if necessary.
But as Carmichael had pointed out, the Star Empire had never signed it and so, technically, wasn’t bound by its provisions. Nor had Manticore ever shown any particular desire to kowtow to Solarian pressure on the matter. For that matter, as Carmichael had implied, the League would be on shaky ground if it did insist on enforcing those provisions, since the Office of Frontier Security had excluded independent Verge star systems from warp termini it controlled on several occasions over the last half-T-century or so as a means to pressure them into accepting OFS “protection.”
“Whether or not the Star Empire considers itself bound by the terms of the Shingaine Convention,” Kolokoltsov said coldly, “this high-handed, unilateral, hostile action is not going to pass unremarked in the League. However you may care to dress it up, it does constitute an act of economic warfare, as your government is perfectly well aware, Mr. Ambassador!”
“I suppose it could be described that way,” Carmichael conceded judiciously. “On the other hand, it’s far less destructive than a salvo of laser heads, Mr. Permanent Senior Undersecretary. My government has attempted from the very beginning to resolve the tensions between the Star Empire and the League without further bloodshed. Your government has steadfastly refused to meet us halfway. Or even a third of the way. Allow me to point out to you that however much damage your economy may suffer from the Star Empire’s reasonable and prudent acts to defuse further incidents, it will suffer far less than it would in an all-out war against the Royal Manticoran Navy. You may not believe me, but my government is trying to prevent that all-out war. We’ve tried diplomacy. We’ve tried the exchange of notes. We’ve offered joint investigations. We’ve provided you with detailed sensor records of the incidents which have occurred. None of that appears to have moved the Solarian League in any way.”
He looked levelly across the desk at Kolokoltsov, and his eyes could have frozen helium.
“The Star Empire of Manticore cannot dictate the Solarian League’s foreign policy to it, Mr. Permanent Senior Undersecretary, nor will it attempt to. But it will pursue its own foreign policy, and if we cannot get you to listen to reason one way, we will seek another.”
APRIL 1922 POST DIASPORA
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“Everything we’ve ever seen out of the Manties suggests their first reaction to any threat, especially to their home system, is going to be to kill it.”
—Assistant Director of Defense Justyná Miternowski-Zhyang,
Beowulf Planetary Board of Directors
Chapter Six
______________________________
“Permanent Senior Undersecretary Kolokoltsov is here for his fifteen hundred, Mr. President.”
“Ah! Excellent—excellent!” President Yeou Kun Chol, ostensibly the most powerful man in the entire Solarian League, beamed as Innokentiy Arsenovich Kolokoltsov (who arguably was the most powerful man in the entire League) followed Shania Lewis into his huge office. The president’s desk was bigger than most people’s beds, and he had to physically walk around it to get close enough to Kolokoltsov to offer his hand.
“Thank you, Shania,” the president said to his personal secretary. “I think that will be all—unless there’s anything you need, of course, Innokentiy?”
“No. No, thank you, Mr. President. I’m fine.”
“Good. Good!” The president beamed some more and nodded to Lewis, who smiled politely, bestowed a slight bow on Kolokoltsov, and disappeared. “Sit, Innokentiy. Please,” Yeou continued as the expensive, inlaid door closed silently behind her.
“Thank you, Mr. President.”
Kolokoltsov obeyed the invitation, taking the comfortable biofeedback armchair facing the desk, and watched Yeou walk back around to his own throne-like chair. The president settled himself behind his desk once again, and the permanent senior undersecretary crooked a mental eyebrow.
Yeou Kun Chol, in Innokentiy Kolokoltsov’s considered opinion, was pretty much an idiot. He’d attained his immensely prestigious (and utterly powerless) position because he knew when to smile for the cameras and because the true power brokers of the Solarian League knew he was a nonentity, the sort of person who would have been ineffectual even if his august office had retained a shadow of true power. There were other factors, of course. Including the fact that however ineffectual he might be, his family was immensely wealthy and wielded quite a lot of power behind the League’s façade of representative government. Letting him play with the pretty bauble of the presidency kept them happy and him from interfering with anything truly important (like the family business), which had paid off quite a few quiet debts. And to give the man his due, Yeou was sufficiently aware of reality to realize his office’s powers were far more ceremonial and symbolic than genuine.
That was one reason it was unheard of for the president to actually invite a permanent senior undersecretary to an audience. He didn’t send “invitations” to them; they told him when they needed to see him for the sake of official appearances. And at any other meeting Kolokoltsov could think of, the president would have joined him, taking another of the palatial armchairs arranged in front of his desk to allow comfortably intimate conversations. He most definitely would not have reseated himself behind the desk, and Kolokoltsov wondered exactly where the unusual attempt to assert some sort of formality—possibly even authority, if the thought hadn’t been too absurd for even Yeou to entertain—was headed.
“Thank you for coming so promptly, Innokentiy,” Yeou said after a moment.
“You’re welcome, of course, Mr. President.” Kolokoltsov smiled. There was no point being impolite now that he was here. As long as Yeou didn’t start meddling in things that were none of his affair, at least. “My time is yours, and your secretary indicated there was some urgency to your summons.”
“Well, actually, there is some urgency to it, Innokentiy.” The president tipped back in his chair, elbows on its armrests, and frowned ever so minutely at the permanent senior undersecretary for foreign affairs. “I just wanted to discuss with you—get your feeling about, as it were—this business with the Manties.”
“I beg your pardon, Mr. President?” Kolokoltsov couldn’t quite keep a trace of surprise out of his tone. “Ah, exactly which aspect of it, Sir?”
Kolokoltsov was aware that in most star nations a head of state would already have been thoroughly briefed about his nation’s relationship with another star nation against whom it was very nearly in a state of war. Even for Kolokoltsov it was more an intellectual awareness than anything else, though. Yeou had received memos and reports from the permanent senior undersecretaries who were the League’s true policymakers, but no one had ever so much as considered presenting him with any sort of genuine briefing. For that matter, even under the dead letter of the Constitution, the office of the president had been almost entirely symbolic. Had anyone been paying any attention to the Constitution, Prime Minister Shona Gyulay would have been the actual head of government, and any briefings would have gone to her, not to Yeou.
“I’ve read the repor
ts, of course,” Yeou told him now. “And I appreciate your efforts—both yours and your civilian colleagues’, and Admiral Rajampet’s—to clarify the … unfortunate events which have led to our current situation.” The president’s expression sobered. “Naturally, I can’t pretend I’m happy thinking about all the people who have already lost their lives and where this all may be headed ultimately. But I must say I find myself particularly concerned at this moment about the Manticorans’ decision to recall all of their merchant vessels.” He shook his head, his expression even more sober. “It’s a bad business all around, Innokentiy, but I’m worried about the immediate consequences for our economy. So I was hoping you could sort of bring me up to date on exactly what’s been happening on that front.”
* * *
“Yeou asked you about that?”
Agatá Wodoslawski’s gray eyes widened, then narrowed speculatively as Kolokoltsov nodded. The attractive, red-haired permanent senior undersecretary of the treasury’s holo image sat directly across the virtual conference table from him. Actually, of course, she was seated behind her own desk in her own office, and now she sat back in her chair, shaking her head with the air of a woman who wondered what preposterous absurdity was going to happen next.
“So he’s finally woken up to the fact that something’s going on with the Manties, has he?” Malachai Abruzzi’s holo image said sarcastically. The dark-haired, dark-eyed permanent senior undersecretary of information was a short, stocky man with powerful hands, one of which he now waved dismissively. “I’m dazzled by the force of his intellect.”
“‘Dazzled’ may not be exactly the right word for it,” Permanent Senior Undersecretary of Commerce Omosupe Quartermain said, “but when you’ve been looking into a completely dark closet long enough, even a candle can seem blinding. And let’s face it, our beloved President is a very dark closet indeed,” she added, and Kolokoltsov smiled sourly.
Between them, she, Abruzzi, Wodoslawski and Kolokoltsov represented four of what certain newsies—headed by that never-to-be-sufficiently-damned muckraker Audrey O’Hanrahan—had begun to call “the Five Mandarins.” O’Hanrahan had been forced to explain the term’s origin to her readership initially, but once she had, it caught on quickly. Abruzzi’s publicity flaks were doing what they could to discourage its use, but it continued to spread with insidious inevitability. By now, even some of the tamer members of the Legislative Assembly were using it in news conferences and speeches.
It wasn’t going to do them a lot of damage here on ancient, weary, cynical Old Terra. Old Terrans understood how the game was played, and they were far past the stage of expecting that ever to change. Besides, all politicians—and bureaucrats—were the same, really, weren’t they? And that being the case, better to stay with the mandarins you knew rather than stir up all the turmoil of trying to change a system which had worked for seven T-centuries.
But there were other planets, other star systems, whose wells of cynicism weren’t quite so deep. There were even places where people still believed the delegates they elected to the League Assembly were supposed to govern the League. Once O’Hanrahan’s damned clever turn of phrase reached those star systems and they figured out what “mandarin” meant, the reprcussions might be much more severe than here on the League’s capital planet.
“I can’t fault your observation, Omosupe,” Wodoslawski said, “but why do I have the feeling this particular glimmer didn’t come from the force of his intellect at all?”
“Because unlike him, you have a measurable IQ,” Kolokoltsov replied. “Although, to be honest, it did take me several minutes to realize I was basically talking to his family’s ventriloquist’s dummy.”
“Ah!” Wodoslawski said. “The light dawns.”
“Exactly.” Kolokoltsov nodded. “Yeou Transstellar has a lot invested in President Yeou.” And in all of us, as well, he carefully did not add out loud. “I’m inclined to think this is at least mostly a case of Kun Sang reminding us of that investment.”
Quartermain and Abruzzi grimaced in understanding. Yeou Kun Sang was the president’s younger brother. He also happened to be on Old Terra at the moment (officially on a “personal family visit” to his older brother which just happened to have been announced as soon as word of the New Tuscany incidents hit his homeworld’s faxes) and the president and CEO of Yeou Transstellar Shipping. Yeou Transstellar was one of the Solarian League’s dozen largest interstellar shippers, and, like most of those shippers, it actually owned very few freighters. Its business model—like its competitors’—relied on leasing cargo space from people who did own freighters … which meant that whether the great commercial dynasties of the Solarian League liked Manticore or not, they did a great deal of business with it.
“I’m surprised Kun Sang didn’t go directly to you, Omosupe,” Abruzzi said after a moment.
“So was I, at first,” Quartermain agreed. “But now that I think about it, Kun Sang’s always been inclined to stay out of the day-to-day details of managing the clan’s business with Commerce or Interior. And the Yeou family’s really old money, you know. They’ve been one of the first families of Sebastopol for the better part of a thousand years, and they like to pretend all that sordid business of trade is beneath them.”
“Yeah. Sure it is.” Abruzzi rolled his eyes.
“Well, part of the pretense is that everyone knows it’s only a pretense,” Quartermain pointed out. “And the fact that Kun Sang started out as a mere planetary manager and worked his way to the top tends to make it a bit more threadbare in the Yeous’ case. Still, now that he’s at the top, he’s more or less required by tradition to work through the interface of professional managers. The ‘hired hands’ that do all of those sordid, business-related things the aristocratic family doesn’t sully its own digits dealing with, especially where politics are concerned.”
“Exactly,” Kolokoltsov agreed. “Which I think is part of the point he’s making, assuming I’m reading the situation accurately. He still keeping his thumbs out of the soup, but at the same time he’s letting us know—indirectly, at least—that he’s sufficiently concerned to be on the brink of coming into the open.”
“Which, for a family that’s spent so much time operating in the Sebastopol mode, indicates a lot of concern,” Quartermain said soberly.
“Exactly,” Kolokoltsov repeated. “I’m pretty sure Kun Chol was reading from a prepared script, and what it all came down to was finding out how much worse we expect this to get and how long we expect it to last.”
“If we had the answer to either of those questions—” Abruzzi began, then cut himself off, shaking his head grimly.
“I notice neither Rajampet nor Nathan has joined our little tête-à-tête,” Quartermain observed.
“No, they haven’t, have they?” Kolokoltsov showed his teeth for a moment.
Nathan MacArtney, the permanent senior undersecretary of the interior, was the fifth “Mandarin,” and Fleet Admiral Rajampet Kaushal Rajani was the Solarian League’s chief of naval operations.
“Is there a reason they haven’t?” Wodoslawski asked.
“Nathan’s out of the office at the moment,” Kolokoltsov replied. “He’s on his way out to Elysium—family business, I think—and I don’t really trust the security of his communications equipment until he gets there. Besides, he’s already out beyond Mars orbit. The light-speed delay would be almost a minute and a half.” The permanent senior undersecretary of state shrugged. “I’ll see to it that he gets a complete transcript, of course.”
“Of course.” Quartermain nodded. “And Rajampet?”
“And I think we all already know what Rajampet’s contribution would be.” Kolokoltsov’s colleagues all grimaced at that one, and he shrugged. “Under the circumstances, I thought we could just take his excuses and posturing as a given and get on with business.”
Quartermain nodded again, more slowly this time. The permanent senior undersecretary of commerce was a striking woman, with gunmet
al-gray hair and blue eyes that contrasted sharply with her very dark, almost black skin, but at the moment those blue eyes were narrowed in speculation. She had no doubt Nathan MacArtney was exactly where Kolokoltsov had said he was, but she wasn’t exactly blind to the fact that as much as MacArtney personally despised Fleet Admiral Rajampet Kaushal Rajani, he was also the closest thing to an ally Rajampet had among the civilian permanent senior undersecretaries who actually ruled the Solarian League. That was inevitable, really, given the fact that the Office of Frontier Security belonged to the Interior Ministry, which meant MacArtney’s personal empire was even more directly threatened than most by the specter of a successful “neobarb” star nation’s resistance to OFS’s plans. Not to mention the fact that Frontier Security’s entire position depended on the perceived omnipotence of the Solarian League Navy.
“So what, exactly, is the point of this meeting, Innokentiy?” Wodoslawski asked.
“I realize there’s not a lot we can do about the Manties’ shipping movements,” Kolokoltsov replied just a bit obliquely. “At the same time, I feel pretty confident that while Yeou Kun Sang may have been one of the first to ask those questions of his, he’s damned well not going to be the last. Under the circumstances, I think we ought to be thinking about how we want to respond—not just in private, Malachai, but publicly, with the newsies—when those other people start asking. And I’d appreciate it if you and Omosupe could give us a better feel for how bad this is really going to be, Agatá.”
“Exactly what do you think we’ve been trying to do? Especially since your little tête-à-tête with that son-of-a-bitch Carmichael?” Wodoslawski demanded tartly, and he shrugged.
“I know you’ve been warning us we were headed for trouble,” Kolokoltsov said in a slightly apologetic tone. “And I may not’ve been paying as much attention as I should have. I’ve known it would be bad, but I haven’t really tried to conceptualize the numbers for myself, because it’s not my area of competence and I know it. I know they’re huge, but I’ve been a lot more focused on finding ways to prevent it from ever happening than on trying to really grasp numbers that big. I’m trying now, though, so could you go ahead and give it another try, please? What I’m looking for isn’t the reams of numbers and detailed alternate contingency estimates and analyses in all of those reports of yours but more of a broad overview. Something even an economic ignoramus can grasp. In those terms, just how bad is this really likely to get?”