A Rising Thunder

by David Weber

  Haven offered enormous business opportunities for the Star Empire. It wasn’t going to come remotely close to replacing everything Lacoön had shut down, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t going to help a lot. And with Beowulf’s open alignment with Manticore, its economy had become part of the Grand Alliance’s dynamo as well. Beowulfers had always been heavily invested in the Old Star Kingdom; now they were actually lining up to buy Manticoran war bonds.

  Nor was that all Beowulf was doing. Dozens of Beowulfan repair and service ships had already streamed through the Junction, and the nuclei of new space stations were already taking shape—two each, this time, around Manticore and Sphinx. They were going to be different this time, too; built to a carefully thought-out plan that allowed for systematic expansion rather than simply growing as need required. And with powerful self-defense capability as well. There really was truth to the old saw about the burned hand teaching best, Elizabeth reflected grimly.

  The tectonic shift represented by the Grand Alliance’s unexpected formation had hugely reduced even the most optimistic Manticoran estimates of how long it was going to take to rebuild the Old Star Kingdom’s industrial muscle. Which wasn’t to say it was going to happen overnight, even now. The process was still going to take T-years, and everyone knew it.

  That was why Beowulf was already establishing its first MDM production lines. It had no pod-laying superdreadnoughts of its own, but its basic technological capabilities required far less tweaking than Haven’s would to begin producing the mini-fusion plants and the miniaturized gravitic components required to build something like the Mark 23-E. So for the foreseeable future, Beowulf would be the primary missile supplier for the Grand Alliance. For that matter, if things worked out the way the planners were anticipating, in the next several T-months Beowulf would begin building Keyhole-Two platforms to be installed in purpose-built Havenite SD(P)s constructed in Bolthole and sailed to Manticore for final installation of the Beowulf-built components.

  Just thinking about it could make Elizabeth’s head swim, but Honor and Hamish promised her it would work. As long as Beowulf remained intact, at least, and the two hundred pod-laying superdreadnoughts stationed there to protect the system suggested it would.

  “Well, anyway,” Pritchard said, “it looks like this is actually going to work. I have to admit, there’ve been times when I wasn’t as confident of that as I hope I looked.”

  “Eloise, you and I have to be the two stubbornest, most bloody-minded females in the galaxy,” Elizabeth pointed out. “If the two of us can agree on anything, it’s going to happen.”

  “I’m not going to argue with you,” Pritchard said with a smile. “But on that note, I’ll let you get back to your family and that wedding. It’s probably more fun than this anyway.”

  “It is, in a lot of ways,” Elizabeth admitted. “And the notion of having the President of the Republic of Haven present as an invited guest isn’t something I’d’ve given a lot of thought to until the last month or so.”

  “I guess not.” Pritchart chuckled and started to press the button to terminate the connection, then paused. “Oh! While I’m thinking about it. One other point Leslie raised in her message was to ask where we were on the possibility of getting treecats assigned to critical personnel in Nouveau Paris. She knows that’s really up to the ’cats, and she’s not trying to push anybody into leaning on them, but it seems the security services back home are taking the possibility of nanotech assassinations very seriously.”

  “I’ll discuss it with Dr. Arif and Sorrow Singer tomorrow morning, early,” Elizabeth assured her. “From my last conversation with them, I’d say we’ll probably be able to send at least a couple of dozen home with you after the wedding. Maybe more, for that matter.”

  “Thank you,” Pritchard said with a warm smile. “And on that note, go back to your family, Elizabeth. I’ll talk to you later. Clear.”

  JULY 1922 POST DIASPORA

  ______________________________

  “You are so going to get all of us killed.”

  —Lieutenant Colonel Natsuko Okiku,

  Solarian Gendarmerie

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  ______________________________

  Sir Lyman Carmichael, who’d never expected to replace the assassinated James Webster as Manticore’s ambassador to the Solarian League, stood at a fifth-story window and looked down at a scene out of a bad historical holo drama. His perch in one of the Beowulf Assembly delegation’s offices gave him a remarkably good view of it, too.

  Frigging idiots, he thought disgustedly. Only Sollies. Nobody else in the entire galaxy would’ve swallowed that line of crap Abruzzi’s passing out! But Sollies? Hook, line, and sinker.

  He shook his head. In a reasonable universe, one might have thought continual exposure to lies would instill at least a partial immunity. Looking down at the sea of angry, shouting humanity clogging the plaza outside the Beowulf residence seemed to demonstrate it didn’t. In fact, he was beginning to think continual exposure actually weakened the ability to recognize the truth on those rare occasions when it finally came along.

  You’re being cynical again. And unfair, he admitted unwillingly. But not too unfair. It’s not like these morons hadn’t heard both sides of the story—or been exposed to them, anyway—before they decided to go out and demonstrate their stupidity.

  For the moment, Carmichael was relatively safe in a personal sense, here with the Beowulf delegation. That shouldn’t have been a significant consideration, but it was in this case. Under interstellar law as accepted by most star nations, his person was legally sacrosanct, no matter what happened to the relations between his star nation and another. Even in time of war, he was supposed to be returned safely to his government’s jurisdiction, just as any ambassadors to the Star Empire were to be repatriated under similar circumstances.

  The Solarian League, however, had never gotten around to ratifying that particular interstellar convention. That hadn’t mattered in the past, since no one had been crazy enough to challenge the League, which meant Old Chicago had never been forced to deal with the problem. It left Carmichael in something of a gray area under the current circumstances, however, and he wasn’t at all sure how Kolokoltsov and his cronies might choose to interpret the law in his own case. That was why he’d moved into the Beowulf residence, which enjoyed extraterritorial status under the Constitution. Assuming anyone was paying attention to the Constitution. On the other hand, if things kept building the way they were, Beowulf wasn’t going to be enjoying any sort of legal status within the Solarian League very much longer.

  He couldn’t hear the individual chants or shouts through the background surf of crowd noise, not from the fifth floor through a hermetically sealed window. But he knew what they were screaming. And even if he hadn’t known, he could read the placards and holo banners.

  MANTICORAN MURDERERS!

  BUTCHERS!

  HARRINGTON + TREACHERY = MURDER!

  REMEMBER FLEET ADMIRAL FILARETA!

  ASSASSINS, NOT ADMIRALS!

  THIEVES, LIARS, AND MURDERERS!

  And there was equal time for Beowulf, of course.

  TRAITORS!

  MANTICORAN PIMPS!

  WHOSE KNIFE IS IN ADMIRAL FILARETA’S BACK?

  WHERE’S YOUR THIRTY PIECES OF SILVER?

  BEOWULF HELPED MURDER ELEVENTH FLEET!

  WHERE WAS ADMIRAL TSANG WHEN ELEVENTH FLEET NEEDED HER?

  Carmichael sighed and turned away from the window, only to discover someone had been standing behind him.

  “Madam Delegate,” he said with a slight bow.

  “Mr. Ambassador.” Felicia Hadley, Beowulf’s senior delegate to the Solarian League Assembly, returned his bow. She was a slender woman with black hair, brown eyes, and a golden complexion. She was at least several T-years older than Carmichael, but the freckles dusted across the bridge of her nose made her look much younger, somehow.

  “I was just watching the show,” he said.<
br />
  “I know. I was watching you watch it.” She smiled slightly. “Impressive, isn’t it?”

  “Not as impressive as the fact that Old Chicago’s highly efficient police force seems somehow totally unable to break up this completely unauthorized and spontaneous demonstration.” Carmichael’s tone was poison-dry, and this time Hadley actually chuckled.

  “The same thought had occurred to me,” she admitted. “Actually, I’ve been wondering whether or not I should add that to my daily indictment on the Assembly floor. It wouldn’t change anything, of course, but it might make me feel a little better.”

  Her expression was almost whimsical, and Carmichael shook his head.

  “Forgive me, Madam Delegate, but I don’t see how you’ve stood it so long. At best, the Assembly’s turned into some sort of zoo where tourists come to see the exotic animals. Or maybe the term I really want is the endangered species!”

  “Not the most tactful of descriptions, perhaps, but to the point,” she said judiciously. Then she shrugged, and her expression turned more serious. “Actually, it’s not a bad description at all, but, you know, I honestly believed—once, at least—that I might be achieving something worthwhile. Even if it was only to be the voice of the past, a reminder of what the League was once supposed to be. Now”—she stepped past Carmichael to look out his window—“all of that seems as foolish as it was pointless.”

  Carmichael looked at her back, conscious of a stab of regret for his own words. Not because they hadn’t been accurate, but because …

  “You fought the good fight, Madam Delegate,” he said quietly. “There’s something to be said for that. At least you didn’t simply throw up your hands and acquiesce. It may be cold comfort at the moment, looking out that window, but one day history’s going to get it right. And one of the nice things about prolong is that we may actually live long enough to see you—and Beowulf—justified.”

  “And without prolong, there’s no way either of us would make it that long!” she replied tartly, looking over her shoulder at him. “I think your Duchess Harrington is right. This is going to be the end of the League, at least as anyone’s ever known it. But something this big, with this much inertia behind it, doesn’t go down clean and it doesn’t go down easily. It’s going to be a long time before anyone’s in a position to be taking any dispassionate historical looks back, Ambassador Carmichael.”

  “I’m afraid you’re right about that.”

  He stepped up beside her, looking back out the window himself at the screaming mob. They were beginning to throw things at the residence’s ground-floor walls and windows. The security fields were stopping the tide of rocks, eggs, overripe vegetables, and occasional old-fashioned Molotov cocktails, but the symbolic acts of vandalism seemed to please the crowd. Not as much as the little knots of people who were burning the Manticoran and Beowulf planetary flags and dismembering—or igniting—effigies dressed in what they fondly believed were Manticoran and Beowulfan naval uniforms, though. As Carmichael watched, one flashily dressed, wildly tattooed flag-burner—he looked like one of the millions of long-term unemployed who collected their stipends from the planetary government every month—held on to a burning Manticoran flag just a moment too long. It was impossible to hear his howls, but the way he started leaping about and waving his hand frantically said volumes, the ambassador thought with a certain satisfaction.

  “Frankly,” Hadley said, “what astonishes me, even though I ought to know better after all this time, is that anyone would take Education and Information’s word for anything.” She grimaced. “Like I say, I ought to know better. In fact, I do know better. But it still seems so incredibly brainless. It’s like they want to be lied to because it’s so familiar, or because it keeps them in their comfort zone by absolving them of the need to actually think about things. Apparently nobody on Old Terra ever heard that cliché about ‘Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.’”

  “Well, I don’t know if E&I’s reflected on just how badly this is going to bite them on the butt out in the Verge and the Shell,” Carmichael replied. “Sure, it’s tailor-made for the Core Worlds. These people are so sheltered and divorced from what’s going on out on the frontiers that it’s no surprise, really, that they’re liable to actually believe this nonsense. And I realize Kolokoltsov and Abruzzi’s immediate concern is how the Core Worlds are going to react. But they’re making a huge mistake if they think the Core Worlds are all that matters, and I think they really do. I think they genuinely believe that as long as they can jolly the oldest, most ‘respectable’ worlds into going along with them, they’ll be able—eventually, at least—to restore the ‘old order’ outside the Core. That ‘the little people’ outside the Core are going to accept their more sophisticated intellectual superiors’ guidance once more, they way they ought to, once all this unpleasantness blows over.” His lips twisted and his eyes were bitter. “Even that OFS and its corporate cronies will be able to go back to administering their little empires out in the Verge. And they’re wrong about that.”

  “That’s my reading, too,” Hadley said, her expression troubled. “Especially with Mesa stirring the pot the way it is. Absent some probably impossible change at the center, the League’s going to start shedding Verge systems pretty damned quickly, and it won’t be long until the Shell follows suit.”

  Carmichael nodded, wondering if Hadley had been as fully briefed as he had on events in the vicinity of the Congo System and the Maya Sector.

  He looked back out at the mob.

  Aside from the mental myopia of mistaking Old Terra’s public opinion for the entire League’s public opinion, Abruzzi and his minions had actually done a workmanlike job, he reflected. The suggestion that the Grand Alliance had deliberately sucked Filareta into a death trap with false offers of honorable surrender terms just so it could be certain of wiping him out had actually struck a chord in at least a sizable portion of Old Terra’s population. The Mandarins’ pet newsies had come out swinging in support of the official line, and the Solarian Navy’s refusal to uncategorically back that same official line had actually lent it additional credibility. It gave the story an aura of deliberation, of a refusal to rush to judgment which befitted sober-minded, thoughtful leaders doing their best to pick their way through a minefield of confusion and other people’s misrepresentation.

  As far as Carmichael could tell, at least some of the people who were embracing Abruzzi’s version so enthusiastically had done so because it explained how the invincible Solarian League could have been defeated so completely by a patchwork coalition of neobarbs. What made it even more convincing to them, he suspected, was that it suggested the Grand Alliance was really afraid of the League. That it had resorted to such chicanery and treachery because whatever it might claim, it was actually terrified of facing the SLN in fair, open battle. After all, Spindle had been primarily an ambush engagement, hadn’t it? And now there was Filareta’s massacre in a similar situation. Surely that demonstrated that the League’s defeats were primarily due to neobarb treachery and deceit, not the fundamental rot at Battle Fleet’s core! There was no doubt in his mind that such an analysis was comforting to those frightened of admitting the League was in a position of hopeless inferiority. Not to mention those who simply resented the hell out of the way the Solarian Navy had been slapped aside like a bothersome mosquito.

  And then there was the derision Abruzzi and his stable of newsies had heaped upon Manticore and Haven’s assertions of Mesan complicity in the creation of the entire crisis. He’d known that was coming. In fact, everyone back home had known it was coming. Yet they’d had no choice but to make their information public, and at least some of the Solarian newsies—like Audrey O’Hanrahan, for example—weren’t as quick to dismiss it as a combination of Beowulfan paranoia and Manticoran lies. Exactly who was going to be believed in the end was still being fought out, but it didn’t look good for the Grand Alliance. Too many Solarians had bought into the Mesan claims of
the Star Empire’s complicity in the Green Pines atrocity. They’d invested too much emotion in that belief, which predisposed them to see the absurd allegations about hidden conspiracies as simply one more cynical Manticoran ploy to turn public opinion against Mesa and provide an excuse for the Star Empire’s own support of terrorists and imperialist expansion.

  I purely hate this entire frigging planet, he thought sourly. I know it’s the home world, the mother world. The place we all came from. But I’m not from here. I’m from the planet Manticore, and this place, this planet, is the epicenter of the corruption trying to hand the entire human race over to whatever those murderous bastards in Mesa are trying to accomplish. Hadley’s right. The League’s grown so rotten, so accepting of corruption and graft, of shakedowns and empire building, of brutal régimes propped up by Frontier Security and Gendarmerie intervention battalions, that it doesn’t deserve to survive. That the sooner we’re all shut of it, the better.

  And that was the fatal flaw in Malachai Abruzzi’s strategy. No matter what he convinced Old Terra of, no matter what line he sold to the oldest, most comfortable of the Core Worlds, the rest of the galaxy knew better. It was far enough from the center to see much more clearly than those too close to the rot, and it was going to refuse to go along with the Office of Frontier Security and its transstellar cronies any longer.