House of Steel: The Honorverse Companion (12 page)

Especially cases like
this
one, assuming Roger had summarized the details with his customary accuracy.

Under the Star Kingdom’s campaign laws, there were no limits on anyone’s individual or corporate political contributions. There was, however, an ironclad obligation for the
sources
of all contributions to be matters of public record. The Star Kingdom’s constitution didn’t care where a candidate got his money, but it cared quite strongly whether or not voters
knew
where that money had come from, in what amounts, and how it was actually spent, and the disclosure requirement was incumbent upon the giver and the receiver alike.

“After consultation with Fitzgibbons, however, Allen and I hit on a more fitting punishment for the crime. Just between you and me, I can’t really complain too loudly about the vote-buying. Oh, I’m pissed off as hell that Treadwell was paying Summercross specifically to throw juicy contracts its way, but at least they were helping inspire him to vote in favor of our armament program. It needs to be whacked, if only to discourage such shenanigans in the future, but I don’t see any reason to turn it into a full blown auto-da-fé at this point, so Treadwell’s going to get a quiet plea bargain that means it’ll be subsisting on a somewhat leaner profit margin for the next several years. Just long enough to pay back its illegal contributions at a modest little, oh, four hundred percent interest or so.” The King smiled thinly. “As for the Conservatives, let’s just say our good friend Summercross and his friends are going to lend Allen their full-blooded and energetic support in the next Estimates debate when he pushes for a ten percent increase in the Navy’s R and D budget. A lot of that’ll go into the open projects, but Admiral Rodriguez is going to funnel a goodly chunk of it to Gram. And Admiral Styler and Dame Lynette will be increasing the personnel—military and civilian—assigned to your shop, as well.”

Jonas nodded slowly. Sir Franklyn Dodson, Baron Styler, had replaced First Space Lord White Haven upon his retirement. Admiral Dame Lynette Tillman had succeeded William Spruance at the Bureau of Personnel as Fifth Space Lord, following Spruance’s long-delayed retirement. And Admiral George Rodriguez had replaced Dame Carrie Lomax as Fourth Space Lord. Adcock missed both White Haven and Spruance, but not as much as he missed Lomax, whose unexpected death had taken all of them by surprise. None of the current space lords were political virgins, though, and he had to suppress a smile as he pictured Styler’s glee, especially. He and Summercross were cousins who thoroughly detested one another, and no one in the King’s uniform could feel anything but satisfaction if someone stepped on North Hollow! Still . . .

“I’d imagine this isn’t going to make Summercross any more cheerful,” he said.

“I’ve come to the conclusion that
nothing
’s likely to make him ‘any more cheerful,’” Roger replied. “And, frankly, I don’t really give a damn. In fact, my one real regret is that I didn’t have this in my pocket when we were negotiating over Basilisk. I could’ve avoided half the crap he and the Liberals demanded to cover their asses with their bases.” He shrugged. “I can live with Summercross’ resentment. Mom always said you can tell more about someone from his enemies than his friends, after all.”

“You’re the King around here, not me. Thank God!” Jonas said fervently, and Roger chuckled. Then he frowned.

“Of course,” he said, “that leaves us with another minor problem. I think it’s time to move you to the List, Jonas.”

“No,” Jonas said firmly. Roger looked at him, and he shrugged. “I want to stay hands-on at
Weyland
, Roger. If you make me a senior-grade captain, seniority’s going to push me up into flag rank, especially at the rate we’re expanding, and then they’ll pull me away from Gram. Besides, I’m your brother-in-law. If I suddenly make List after ‘languishing’ all these years as a captain JG, people are going to figure it’s because of who my sister married. The last thing we need is for the Opposition to ‘out’ Gram because they started digging for dirt about me because of my promotion!”

Roger regarded him thoughtfully. He didn’t really buy into any of Jonas’ arguments entirely, although the one about “outing” Gram was probably the most pointed. If Jonas was promoted, his name would appear on the official “Navy Promotion Selection Register (Captains, Senior Grade),” and it
would
be just like one of the Opposition’s staffers to keep an eye on the Register and start digging if Jonas appeared there. At which point he really might start finding out about things Roger had gone to great lengths to keep very, very “black.” And Jonas was right about how hard they’d worked to keep him under cover and in the background despite their close family relationship. “Captain Adcock” was widely regarded as the queen consort’s well-intentioned but uninspired brother—“They don’t like to talk about it, but the truth is he’s probably just a bit dim, you know, given how junior his rank is at
his
age, darling”—which angered Angelique but actually amused Jonas. He’d even managed to avoid the courtesy titles Parliament had bestowed upon Angelique’s younger brothers, which only added to the perception (outside certain carefully chosen circles, at least) that he was simply spinning out the last few years of an uninspired, pre-prolong naval career, probably on his sister’s coattails.

But the real reason he doesn’t want on the List is that he’s afraid flag rank might make him a suitable candidate for Fourth Space Lord,
Roger thought.
He doesn’t want to give up Gram and get stuck with the Bureau of Weapons, instead. Sooner or later, he’s going to
have
to move over there, though. We’re going to reach the point where someone needs to turn the research into real weapons, and I want him in charge of that. But we’re probably still at least ten T-years from that, so there’s still some time . . . even without prolong.

He felt a familiar pang of regret as he looked at Adcock’s snow white hair and lined face and remembered that his friend was barely twelve T-years older than he was.

“All right,” he said after a moment. “I’ll let you off this time. But Gram’s going to get a lot bigger over the next couple of T-years, Jonas. If things work out the way I expect, you’re going to have at least a handful of captains—some of them probably senior-grade, themselves—turning up over there, and you need the seniority to handle that. So instead of getting you onto the Captains’ List the way I ought to, I’m going to have Styler and Tillman list Gram as carrying acting commodore’s rank for whoever’s in command. That’ll give you the seniority you need and keep you off the Captains List, and as black as Gram is, no one’s going to be seeing anything about your
acting
rank in the open press. And”—he raised an index finger when Jonas opened his mouth—“if you argue with me about it, I
will
have you put on the List.”

Jonas closed his mouth again, and Roger smiled.

“Better,” he said. “And while we’re on the subject of personnel, what’s this I hear about Sonja?”

“She’s just being Sonja,” Adcock sighed. “Tactless, brilliant, opinionated, tactless, irritating, energetic, tactless, bouncy, confident, tactless, over enthusiastic, overly focused—did I mention tactless?”

Roger laughed and shook his head.

“Tactless I can stand, but your latest memo said something about polarizing?”

His tone had become more serious and his eyebrows rose, and Adcock sighed again, more deeply.

“I’m afraid that’s true,” he said. “It’s not that I think she’s wrong, you understand. In fact, I’m positive she’s
right
most of the time, at least theoretically. The problem is that where she sees glittering possibilities, a lot of my other people see harebrained notions produced by someone without any real tactical experience of her own. No one’s done it explicitly yet, but sometime soon someone’s going to bust her chops on exactly that issue, at which point things are going to get . . . lively. And even if we weren’t having that problem in-house, eventually we’ll have to come out into the open with at least some of our notional hardware. We’ll have to sell whatever we come up with to a lot of thick-skinned dinosaurs, most of whom have backgrounds as ‘shooters’ themselves, and they’re going to feel exactly the same way about it. For that matter,
I
feel that way sometimes. The woman really is brilliant, Roger, but she needs a bigger dose of . . . reality? Experience? I don’t know the exact word, but something to . . . temper that enthusiasm of hers.”

“I agree, and I’ve been thinking about it.” Roger took another pull on his cigar, then waved it once more. “She’s going to hate it, and you can blame it on me or Rodriguez to take the heat off you, but we’re going to put her back into shipboard command. I know she’ll feel like a square peg in a round hole, at least at first, but you’re right—she needs that experience for her own perspective, and she needs her ticket punched if she’s going to have credibility with those dinosaurs of yours.”

“You’re right, she
won’t
like it,” Jonas said. “But you’re also right that she needs it.” He grinned. “And it’ll do her good to have to put on her big girl panties and get out there in the trenches with the rest of us mere mortals!”

“I don’t think I’d be too quick to use that last sentence when you explain the situation to her,” Roger said dryly.

“Oh, I’m
far
too wise to do
that
!” Jonas reassured him. “But it really will do her maturity quotient some good.”

“I think it will, too,” Roger agreed. Then he glanced at his chrono, set his cigar regretfully aside, and stood. “In the meantime, and speaking of maturity quotients, I believe you and I have a date with your favorite niece. I’ve noticed that she’s not exceptionally patient at moments like this. Can’t imagine where she gets it from.”

“Neither can I,” Jonas agreed straightfaced, climbing out of his own chair as Monroe thumped down from his perch. “But, considering her
mother’s
‘maturity quotient,’ and speaking as one of your loyal and admiring subjects, Your Majesty, I’d earnestly recommend using a
lot
of that new nanotech air freshener of yours. And while you’re at it, you better squirt me and Monroe, too, or she’s going to wonder what trash incinerator we got downwind of!”

February 1877 PD

“—so while no one can possibly fault His Majesty’s willpower, moral courage, and determination to do the right thing, I think it
is
legitimate to ask whether or not his commitment to confronting the People’s Republic militarily is the best option available to us.” Joseph Dunleavy looked into the pickup, his expression suitably serious and just a touch troubled. “Obviously, when a star nation has been expanding its borders by force of arms, as well as voluntary annexations, for so long, it’s necessary, as one Old Earth politician expressed it over two thousand T-years ago, to ‘Speak softly, but carry a big stick.’ My concern, and that of those who approach these things from the same perspective as I do, is that His Majesty is giving too much emphasis to the stick and not enough to speaking softly.”

“‘Speaking softly’ hasn’t done any of the rest of the Peeps’ victims a single bit of good, as far as I’m aware.”

Hillary Palin’s crisp Sphinixan accent was a sharp contract to Dunleavy’s cultured, uppercrust Landing accent. She sat across the table from him on the deliberately old-fashioned, face-to-face set of the recently created yet already incredibly popular syndicated Into the Fire. That set was designed to bring guests into direct physical proximity rather than through a safely insulated electronic format (which helped generate more than a few of the fireworks for which the program was already famous), and her expression was far more scornful than his had been.

“I’ll agree with you that a big stick is necessary to get the Peeps’ attention,” she went on, “but I’m pretty sure the two of us differ on whether the best negotiating ploy is to simply keep it handy or break their kneecaps with it.”

Dunleavy rolled his eyes. A onetime professor of political science at Landing University, he’d been associated with any number of liberal-leaning think tanks for over forty T-years and served as one of Sir Orwell Lebrun’s senior foreign policy advisers for the last decade or so. Palin, on the other hand, had exactly zero academic credentials in the social sciences. Instead, she’d been trained as a nano and materials engineer and founded an industrial application firm specializing in the development of advanced composites and (according to unconfirmed reports) radically advanced anti-energy weapon armors. No one had ever been able to prove the reports were true—the RMN was fiendishly good at protecting its technology, after all—but Palin, Holder, and Mitchell, Ltd., had sold its patents to the Navy for upwards of seven billion dollars almost twenty-five T-years ago, when she first stood for election to the House of Commons as the Liberal Party’s candidate for the Borough of South Thule on Sphinx. She’d won that election quite handily, but she’d never had a great deal of patience with ivory tower theorists who’d never won election to anything in their entire lives and refused to acknowledge inconvenient truths that clashed with their own preconceptions. That was quite enough to explain why she and Dunleavy had thoroughly detested one another from the moment they first met, and the fact that she’d shifted her membership from the Liberals to the Centrists eleven T-years ago over the Basilisk annexation—and won reelection quite handily two more times since, despite the change in party affiliation—only made her even more irritating to him.

Besides, if those rumors about the nature of her patents were true, he thought now, she had a vested interest—all that Navy money in her accounts—in supporting the knuckle-draggers who thought warheads were the answer to any problem whenever they demanded yet another superdreadnought.

“That’s precisely the sort of attitude which can be guaranteed to preclude the possibility of any rational resolution of the tensions which have been mounting between the People’s Republic and the Star Kingdom over the last twenty T-years, Hillary,” he more than half snapped now.

“Ah? Since His Majesty’s coronation, you mean?” Palin shot back in dulcet tones, and Dunleavy’s expression darkened.

Manticoran politicians always had to be careful about how they criticized the royal family. The Star Kingdom had a lively tradition of freedom of speech and even livelier political debate, and as the head of government as well as head of state, the monarch was expected to take his or her lumps along with everyone else. But there were limits to how those lumps could be administered. The sort of character assassination by innuendo and the politics of personal destruction which tended to rear their ugly heads from time to time in Parliamentary contests could not be applied to the reigning king or queen. Not unless the person foolish enough to make the attempt was prepared to kiss his own political career goodbye, at any rate. The Manticoran voting public was sufficiently cynical—or pragmatic, perhaps—to recognize the often sordid realities of political ambition, careerism, and what was still known as “spin doctoring,” and it put up with a great deal in the political arena, but there were some things it was
not
prepared to tolerate.

Which, in Joseph Dunleavy’s opinion, was completely irrational and gave people like Hillary Palin a grossly unfair advantage when it came to the reasoned debate of public policy issues. All she had to do was tar him by implication with attacking Roger III personally, and his argument was cut off at the knees so far as anyone but the Party’s fully committed base was concerned. And that, Dunleavy thought, was as unfortunate as it was unfair, given the fact that King Roger was clearly . . . significantly less than rational where the People’s Republic of Haven was concerned.

“His Majesty’s ascension to the Throne is scarcely the only thing that’s happened in the last twenty T-years, Hillary,” he said after a moment. “I believe his policy and his attitudes have clearly played a role in creating the . . . dynamic we face today, but they’re hardly the
only
factors involved. And I trust you’ll do me the courtesy of remembering that I’ve never argued the People’s Republic isn’t expansionist—or, for that matter, that its foreign policy isn’t being driven by its own militaristic clique. Obviously a star nation of that size and that power, with the military establishment virtually dictating to its civilian leadership, is a very,
very
serious threat to the interstellar community in general. I am not now and never have been one of those idealistic but unfortunately misguided souls who favor some sort of unilateral disarmament on our part as the best way to defuse the tension between Nouveau Paris and Landing. In the face of a major star nation with a powerful fleet and a clear commitment to using that fleet in the furtherance of its expansionist policies, discarding that ‘big stick’ I spoke of a moment ago would be the height of foolishness.”

“Then, forgive me, Mr. Dunleavy,” Patrick DuCain, one of
Into the Fire
’s cohosts, said, “but what exactly are the policy points on which you differ with Prime Minister Cromarty and Foreign Secretary Nageswar?”

Dunleavy showed his teeth for a moment. DuCain was the program’s conservative voice, whereas Minerva Prince, his cohost, provided its liberal viewpoint. Another thing that made their broadcasts so popular, however, was that neither DuCain nor Prince were ideologues. Both were actually registered independents, eschewing party labels (although Dunleavy suspected they both probably
voted
Centrist, though he was less certain in Prince’s case), and while DuCain was substantially more hardline on foreign policy issues, he was actually closer to the Liberals on many social issues than Prince. Of course, Prince made up for her foreign policy rationality by being somewhere to the right of Adam Smith on matters of fiscal policy, he thought resentfully.

And both of them had elevated their gift for choosing guests with . . . lively differences of opinion—and injecting plenty of blood into the political water when they did—to a fine art. That was yet another reason for their program’s high viewership.

“The Prime Minister and the Foreign Secretary are, as I’m fully aware, intelligent, patriotic, and experienced servants of the Star Kingdom,” he said, wishing with all his heart that he dared to speak the truth. They weren’t servants of the
Star Kingdom
; they were servants of Roger Winton and his dangerously militant foreign policy. Could none of them see the holocaust—the millions of dead—which
had
to result from a headlong clash with the People’s Republic?

“Obviously, however, I and other members of the Liberal Party don’t see eye-to-eye with them on all matters,” he continued. “Specifically, in terms of foreign policy, we believe the Star Kingdom has a moral responsibility—to itself and to the galaxy at large—to go the extra kilometer in its efforts to avoid what would inevitably be the biggest, bloodiest, and most destructive war in the last millennium of human history. It’s entirely possible, little though any of us like to contemplate such an outcome, that war is inevitable. That the so-called ‘Big Navy’ advocates are correct, and that only the actual
use
of military force will be sufficient in the end to bring a halt to the People’s Republic’s expansion. Given that possibility, one cannot but be grateful for His Majesty’s unflagging efforts to build the military wherewithal which will be so sorely needed on that grim and terrible day.”

Dunleavy’s expression was sober, solemn, and he inhaled deeply.

“Yet, granting all of that, do we not have a responsibility—indeed, given the difference between our open, representative political system and the closed, military-dominated system which has plunged the once bright beacon of the Republic of Haven into darkness, do we not have a
greater
responsibility than Haven—to do all we can to prevent such a hugely destructive, bloody conflict? Whatever we may think of the People’s Republic’s leadership,
we
are an open system which believes in freedom, the worth of the individual, opportunity, the value of hard work and talent, and freedom of choice. As such, we owe the galaxy better than to simply abandon any hope of stopping short of war. It doesn’t matter what the
People’s Republic
does or doesn’t owe to itself or to anyone else; we owe
ourselves
the knowledge that we didn’t simply follow a brutish, militaristic, repressive regime into the maw of warfare without first making every possible effort to avert that outcome.”

“Ms. Palin?” DuCain looked at his other guest. “I have to say that doesn’t sound all that unreasonable. Surely Mr. Dunleavy is correct that every alternative should be considered before we resort to brute force.”

“No one’s advocating resorting to ‘brute force’ if any other alternative presents itself, Patrick.” Palin shook her head, her expression just as sober as Dunleavy’s. “The problem is that the
Peeps
—and I include their civilian leadership in this, as well as the military; Joe’s mistaken if he thinks there’s any actual difference between them—
believe
in the use of ‘brute force.’ And, on the face of it, it’s hard to argue with their view that it’s been working pretty well for them for the last thirty T-years or so. They’ve built an enormous military machine, and that military power and their acceptance that they have no choice but to expand or die—politically and economically speaking, at any rate—has developed a momentum that isn’t going to stop before it runs into something it can’t devour. I’m afraid that by this time the Legislaturalists are completely captive to the so-called ‘Duquesne Plan.’ I would love, more than anyone—including Joe—might be prepared to believe, for him to be right that it’s possible to stop the Peeps short of direct military conflict. Unfortunately, I’m no longer confident anyone can . . . or that it’s even
possible
for them to stop, which is why I shifted my party affiliation to the Centrists. That wasn’t an easy decision for me to make, but I believe I owe my constituents and the Star Kingdom as a whole support for the best available foreign and military policy.”

She looked directly across the table at Dunleavy, and this time there was nothing in her eyes but somber sincerity.

“I don’t say I think the Prime Minister’s policy options are
good
ones, Joe. I only say they’re the best of the
bad
options available to him. Don’t think for a moment that he likes them any better than you do, either. But we live in the same galaxy, and the same tiny part of it, as the Peeps, and Duke Cromarty would be grossly derelict in his responsibilities to the Star Kingdom if he didn’t prepare for the one argument he knows the Peeps will
have
to listen to if and when the time comes.”

“It sounds to me,” Minerva Prince said, “as if the disagreement here is more a matter of degree than kind.” She looked back and forth between Palin and Dunleavy. “Would the two of you agree with that?”

“Not without some significant qualifications, I’m afraid,” Dunleavy said heavily. “I have to agree with Hillary that if worse eventually comes to worst, the existence of the battle fleet Prime Minister Cromarty—and His Majesty—are committed to building is, indeed, an argument the People’s Republic will be forced to ‘listen to.’ As I’ve said from the beginning, the Star Kingdom must have a big stick in reserve if it expects soft speech to accomplish anything.