A Rising Thunder

by David Weber

“Come on, out with it!” Jacques commanded. “Let’s get it all out in the open and get rid of it before you have to go back over and do some more of that matron of honor stuff.”

  Honor glared at him for a moment, then shrugged.

  “You may actually have a point, although I find it hard to believe I hear myself saying that.”

  “I always have a point,” her uncle replied with dignity. “It is, alas, simply my fate to be surrounded by people unable to fully appreciate the needle sharpness and rapier quickness of my intellect. Now trot it out!”

  Honor made a face at him, then sighed.

  “All right. I was just watching Chairman Benton-Ramirez, looking at how cheerful and unconcerned he seems, and thinking about the vote on Reid’s motion.”

  The others looked at her. Simultaneity was a slippery concept when applied to interstellar distances, but the vote on Tyrone Reid’s motion to investigate Beowulf’s “treason” against the Solarian League would be occurring on far-off Old Earth in less than twenty-four hours.

  “There’s not much point worrying about it,” her uncle said after a second or two. “We all know how the vote’s going to come out, after all. And Felicia has her instructions for what to do when it does.” He twitched his shoulders. “And it’s not as if there’s much question about how the electorate’s going to respond in the end. Every single opinion poll and electronic town meeting we’ve held underscores that, Honor. And you’ve seen the editorials and the public postings!”

  “I know. Remember, I am half-Beowulfan, Uncle Jacques. But it’s just such a big step, and I’m worried about how the Mandarins are going to react.”

  “There’s not a lot they can do about it,” Jacques pointed out.

  “The problem is whether or not they realize that,” Honor countered, “and their track record to date doesn’t exactly inspire me with confidence in their judgment. I keep reminding myself that they’re not really stupid. Blind, arrogant, bigoted, and so far out of touch with us uppity ‘neobarbs’ that they act stupidly, but within the limits of their worldview, they truly aren’t idiots. And that means they have to be able to see the writing on the wall when their nose gets rubbed in it hard enough, doesn’t it?”

  “Probably.” Jacques nodded. “You’d think so, at any rate, wouldn’t you?”

  “And that’s what worries me,” Honor said frankly. “It’s obvious to me—to us—where Beowulf’s actions are going to lead. I think we have to assume it’s going to be obvious to them, too. And if it is, based on their actions to date, I think we have to assume they’ll try to do something about it before that happens.”

  “I don’t think there’s a great deal they can do about it, in the short term, at least,” her uncle replied.

  “Maybe not, but I’d feel a lot better if we had a couple of dozen Invictus-class wallers in Beowulf orbit.”

  “I’m not sure I disagree with you,” Jacques said slowly, “but that was a political decision, and I can see their point. It’s one thing for us to call on Manticoran assistance to prevent Tsang from forcibly seizing control of the Beowulf Terminus. And I don’t think anyone on Beowulf has any problem with the notion that your navy is going to make damned sure it hangs on to the terminus and deploys however many ships it has to to do it. But if we start putting Manty ships-of-the-wall in orbit around the planet, it’s going to look coercive as hell. Beowulfers who have reservations about our joining the Alliance—and there are some of those, after all—are likely to feel threatened, and that’s not what we want in the run-up to the vote. For that matter, if we had Manty wallers orbiting Beowulf, it could only make Reid and Neng’s job in the Assembly even easier. A lot easier to convict us of treason under those circumstances, don’t you think?”

  “But as you just pointed out, we already know how that vote’s going to come out in the end, anyway,” Honor shot back.

  “I said I wasn’t sure I disagreed with you.” Benton-Ramirez y Chou shook his head. “But there’s another consideration to it as well. Felicia’s going to drop her little nuke in the Assembly as soon as the votes are tallied on Reid’s motion, and we can’t afford to let the Mandarins or their mouthpieces cast doubt on the legitimacy of her actions or of the vote. If there’s anything but Beowulfan warships in orbit around the planet, you know they’re going to claim that whatever the Board of Directors says or however the electorate votes, it was all coerced by the threat of Manticoran warheads.”

  “I hate to say it, but I think they’ve got a point, Honor,” Hamish pointed out, and even Emily nodded in agreement.

  “I didn’t say they didn’t have a point, Hamish,” Honor said a bit tartly. “What I said is that I question whether or not it’s a good enough point to park all of our modern wallers far enough out that some Solly idiot could decide they’re too far from the inner system to intervene if something … untoward happens.”

  “Which is why we’re we’re taking the belt-and-suspenders approach and working on Mycroft,” Hamish pointed out, and Honor was forced to nod in acknowledgment. Sneaky of him to use Mycroft, since she was the one who’d first suggested the concept to Sonja Hemphill.

  One of the problems the Alliance was bound to face if the situation continued to deteriorate was the need to free up capital ships for mobile operations rather than tying them down in static defenses. Honor, as the unwilling beta tester for Shannon Foraker’s Moriarity system, had developed a profound respect for the effectiveness of massed MDM pods in the system-defense role. Michelle Henke’s success at Spindle had reconfirmed that respect even before Filareta’s spectacular demise. Which was why Honor had devoted quite a bit of thought to ways in which Moriarity’s system-wide network of dispersed sensor and fire-control stations could be updated to take advantage of the Mark 23 and the Mark 23-E. The answer Hemphill had come up with was Mycroft, named for a character out of the same pre-space detective fiction which had given Foraker Moriarity in the first place.

  Essentially, Mycroft was simply a couple of dozen Keyhole-Two platforms parked at various points in a star system. It was a little more complicated than that, since the platforms were designed to operate on beamed power from their motherships, so it was necessary to provide each platform with its own power plant. And it was also necessary to provide the raw fire control and the rest of the supporting hardware and software which was normally parked aboard the platform’s deploying ship-of-the-wall. Those were relatively straightforward problems in engineering, however, especially with an entire planet to work with, and tech crews were working at breakneck pace even as Honor stood with her uncle and her spouses to meet them.

  Mycroft’s advantages over Moriarity would be profound. Unlimited by Moriarity’s lightspeed control links, Mycroft would be able to take full advantage of the Mark 23-E and the FTL reconnaissance platforms which were also being thickly seeded throughout the system’s volume. And unlike Moriarity—which had been unarmed and defenseless when Honor used Hemphill’s Baldur to take it out—Keyhole-Two platforms were simply crammed with active antimissile defenses. No doubt they could be taken out, but it would be a difficult task, and enough of them were being deployed as part of Mycroft to ensure survivability through sheer redundancy.

  “I agree that once Mycroft’s up and running, especially, anybody who goes after Beowulf is going to get bloodied in a hurry,” she said now. “I guess my main concerns are that, like the terminus picket, Mycroft isn’t a visible deterrent, especially since we’re keeping it so completely under wraps till it’s actually up and running, and, secondly, that it isn’t up and running yet and won’t be for at least another couple of months. Maybe longer.” She shook her head. “It’s that window that worries me,” she said soberly. “In the Mandarins’ place, I’d make it a point to assume that we had to be aware of Beowulf’s vulnerability and be doing something about it, but I’m not at all sure they will.”

  “Well,” Benton-Ramirez y Chou said with a shrug that was just a bit more philosophical than his mind-glow tasted, “I guess
there’s one way to find out.”

  “And that’s what I’m afraid of, Uncle Jacques,” she said. “That’s what I’m afraid of.”

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  ______________________________

  Felicia Hadley sat once more in the Beowulf delegation’s box in the Chamber of Stars.

  Her head was erect, her shoulders squared, and anyone looking at her could have been excused for not recognizing the mixture of anger, weariness, frustration, grief, and … emptiness behind those outwardly tranquil eyes. After all, she couldn’t sort out all those feelings herself, so why should she have expected anyone else to understand the way she felt?

  The two weeks of scheduled debate on Tyrone Reid’s motion had been the ugliest Hadley could remember ever having seen. That was hardly a surprise, given the position Kolokoltsov and the rest of the Mandarins faced. They’d pulled out all the stops to focus the League’s fear and anxiety on someone else in order to save themselves, and they knew all the tricks of the game. The attacks had been carefully orchestrated, aimed from every imaginable quarter and endlessly repeated by flocks of coopted newsies and media talking heads, to give them maximum credibility with the public. There were a few reporters, like Audrey O’Hanrahan, who genuinely seemed to be trying to cover both sides of the debate, just as there were some Assembly delegates who’d tried to get the truth out. But those delegates, like the newsies trying to do their jobs, were drowned in the tide of attackers. There were simply too many members of the Assembly—and too many in the media—who owed the Mandarins too many favors (and about whom Malachai Abruzzi’s operatives knew too many secrets) for there to be any other outcome.

  Two things had surprised her, however. One was the degree of genuine hatred some of her fellow delegates had spewed out in their attacks on Beowulf. Reid’s allies had placed their darts carefully, wrapping their fiery denunciations around a core of cold calculation, but others had joined the assault on their own, lashing out in an almost incoherent fury that didn’t care what the law might say, wasn’t concerned with why Beowulf might have done what it had done. No, that fury fed only on panic-stricken reports of the Manticorans’ superior weaponry and fear that Beowulf’s “treason” had somehow freed that weaponry to ravage the entire Solarian League. Of course, no one had bothered to explain how Beowulf’s permitting Imogene Tsang’s fleet to be massacred would have averted that threat, now, had they?

  Well, be fair, Felicia, she told herself. It’s not all fear of what the Manties’ weapons can do, now, is it? Some of those people have started getting messengers from transstellars based in their home systems. A glimmer of what withdrawing all those Manticoran merchantmen and shutting down the hyper bridges really means is starting to sink in, and they don’t like that a bit. They want the hide of anyone associated with the people getting ready to inflict that much hurt on their corporate sponsors.

  No doubt they did, yet what had surprised her even more than the fury coming at her home system from so many quarters was the fact that some of the other delegations had actually spoken in Beowulf’s behalf. Not that Beowulf’s actions met with complete approbation even from them, because they didn’t. But at least some of the League’s elected representatives truly did seem more concerned about getting at the truth, or even considering the legal and constitutional implications of Bewoulf’s acts, than with simply scapegoating someone else.

  Of course, there weren’t very many of them.

  Oh, be fair, she scolded herself again, rather more seriously. Standing up to this kind of hysteria at all requires more guts than anyone running for the Assembly ever expected to need! You always recognized it was really only a rubber stamp for people like the Mandarins, didn’t you? Sure, you wanted to change that, but you knew damned well deep inside that you weren’t going to. Nobody was.

  And now nobody’s ever going to have the chance to.

  She gave herself a mental shake as that last thought ran through her mind. They weren’t going to break the Mandarins’ grip today, no. She knew that. But there was still hope for the future, wasn’t there? Didn’t there have to be? Look at what had happened in the Republic of Haven. They’d recovered their constitution, and it looked like they were making that stand up, too. Of course, the Republic was a lot smaller than the League, and its corruption had been given nowhere near as long to sink into the blood and the bone of their political processes. Yet people like Eloise Pritchart and Thomas Theisman had pulled it off, and that meant it truly was possible for the League as well.

  And it looks like the League’s going to get just as badly hammered militarily as the People’s Republic ever did, she reminded herself glumly. The question’s whether or not it’ll learn enough along the way to—

  The shimmering reverberation of a deep-toned musical chime echoed over the Chamber of Stars’ vastness, interrupting her thoughts.

  The Assembly was in session.

  * * *

  The usual pointless opening ceremonies seemed even more meaningless than usual today. They’d never actually been more than the hollow forms of a representative body which had long since lost any meaningful political power. Lip service to a dream which even Hadley had to acknowledge had never been more than a dream, really. Yet that pretense that the Assembly’s delegates actually represented the will of the Solarian electorate grated especially painfully on her nerves this morning.

  She was scarcely surprised when Speaker Neng moved through those ceremonies more briskly than usual, though. After all, the Speaker had a job to do for the people she really represented, and after so many days of vicious debate it was time to get to it.

  The last empty formality was completed, Speaker Neng pronounced the presence of a legal quorum, and then her gavel cracked.

  “The Assembly will come to order,” she announced crisply. She waited a heartbeat, then continued, “The Honorable Delegate from Old Terra has the floor.”

  Tyrone Reid’s image replaced hers on the huge display. As the originator of the motion, it was his right under the Assembly’s rules to move for the vote now that all time allocated for debate had been expended. He stood there, his expression grave, his eyes artistically troubled, and then drew a deep breath.

  “Madam Speaker, I call for the vote.”

  Neng reappeared on the display.

  “Honorable Delegates, the vote has been called on motion AD-1002-07-02-22, to impanel a special commission to investigate the alleged treason of the system government of Beowulf in aiding and abetting an enemy of the Solarian League. All debate having been completed, the Chair now calls the vote.”

  Her image stood there, hovering in the air, while votes were cast throughout the enormous chamber. It didn’t take long.

  She looked down, considering the numbers, then raised her head once more.

  “The vote is eight thousand seven hundred and twelve in favor, two thousand nine hundred and three opposed. The motion is carried.”

  A roar went up, and Hadley’s jaw clenched. Not in surprise, but in anger. The only surprise was that almost a quarter of the Assembly had voted against the motion. That was a dangerous sign for the Mandarins, given the massive effort they’d mounted to pass the motion in the first place. It suggested all sorts of unpleasant things, yet that was for the future. For now …

  She punched her attention key and sat back, arms folded, while she waited. The roar of approval continued for several seconds before it finally trickled off slowly into something approaching quiet. Then Neng looked back down at her panel, and her gavel cracked again.

  “The Assembly will return to order!” Her tone was sharp, chiding, and the delegates who were still out of their seats, still celebrating their victory, looked up at her in surprise. Then they—slowly—obeyed the command, and she waited another few moments before she looked in Hadley’s direction.

  “The Chair recognizes the Honorable Delegate from Beowulf,” she announced.

  Hadley didn’t bother to stand as her image replaced the Speaker’s
. She simply sat there, looking out of the display as a silence settled over the thousands of delegates. She could feel all those other eyes, almost taste the burning curiosity behind them. How would defeated Beowulf respond? What could she possibly say in the wake of this totally unprecedented public humiliation … and scapegoating? She let them wonder for several endless seconds, and when she spoke, her voice was cold and hard.

  “I have served as Beowulf’s representative to this Assembly for almost forty T-years. In that time, I’ve tried without success to find some trace, some fragment, of the power and the responsibility and the high standards of personal conduct envisioned for it by the drafters of our Constitution. There’s no question of what the drafters intended, what they expected from this Assembly. The words are there for anyone to read and understand. The expectations are clear. Yet instead of finding those things, I’ve become intimately familiar with the ‘business as usual’ mentality of this Chamber. Like all of you, I’ve also become aware of where the true power in the formulation of federal law, regulations, and policy lies. Even if I hadn’t, even if I continued to cherish the slightest illusion that the elected representatives of the League’s citizens had one shred of authority at the federal level, this vote has just demonstrated the true owners of power in the Solarian League once again. It is nothing more nor less than a rubber-stamped approval of the unelected bureaucrats who illegally wield power far beyond anything the Constitution ever granted them. A rubber-stamp dutifully affixed to their effort to silence all internal opposition to the disastrous policy—and war—to which they’ve committed the League. Beowulf’s reward for attempting to prevent that war—or to at least cut it short before it consumes still more millions of lives and trillions upon trillions of credits—is to be investigated for ‘treason’ because it asserted the autonomy guaranteed to every member star system of the League. The same autonomy the home star system of every delegate who just voted in favor of this motion takes for granted every single day.”