by David Weber
Of course, it wasn't as if she hadn't had more than her fair share of experience with partisan press coverage, both in the Star Kingdom and on Grayson, and she handled it with a degree of outward calm Maxwell was privately certain was mostly mask. He'd come to know her well enough over the past few T-years to recognize that for all her ability to project serenity and calm, her temper was probably at least as dangerous as that of the Queen herself. It seemed to be more difficult to make her lose it, but he would have been very hesitant to suggest that anything at all was beyond her once she did . . . as the ghosts of Pavel Young and Denver Summervale could have attested.
In a way, it was even worse for her than for either of the Alexander brothers, Maxwell reflected. At least High Ridge and his cronies regarded them as representing only a single dangerous opponent, whereas it was no secret at all that Lady Harrington's contributions to debates in the Lords represented the views of Protector Benjamin, as well as those of Elizabeth III.
Neither of whom gave a thimble of spit in a blast furnace for Baron High Ridge and his ministerial colleagues.
The attorney started to say something, then changed his mind. He could hardly tell her anything she didn't already know. And even if he could have, it really wasn't his place to offer her unsolicited political advice or confidences, whatever rumors he might have been picking up.
Besides, he reflected, there's a better way to do it . . . assuming I decide I have any business sticking my oar into her private life, that is. I won't have to tell her a thing; I'll just have to have a word with Miranda or Mac. Let them figure out how to bring it up with her.
* * *
"Lord Alexander and Earl White Haven have arrived, Your Grace."
"Thank you, Mac. Ask them to come straight in, would you please?"
"Of course, Your Grace."
Honor put her reader on hold, freezing it on the third page of Midshipwoman Zilwicki's analysis of the Battle of Cape St. Vincent, and looked up with a smile. James MacGuiness, the only steward in the entire Royal Manticoran Navy who wasn't actually in the Navy, smiled back at her, and then bent his head in an almost-bow before he withdrew from her study. She watched him go fondly, fully aware of how critical to the smooth functioning of her life he'd become over the past twenty T-years.
She glanced across at Nimitz, draped in splendid isolation across the double perch he normally shared with his mate. It was Thursday, and Samantha was absent, accompanying Miranda and Farragut to the Andreas Venizelos Academy, the orphanage and private school Honor had endowed for the children of war dead, Manticoran and Grayson alike. AVA had campuses in both the Star Kingdom and Yeltsin, and Miranda, as Honor's chief of staff, deputized for her regularly, since the press of other duties consumed more and more of her own time. The kids idolized Nimitz, Samantha, Farragut, and treecats in general, and all 'cats loved to spend time with children, whether they had four limbs or six. It was a treat all of the 'cats looked forward to, and Nimitz often went with the others even when Honor couldn't. But not when something like today's meeting was on his person's schedule.
She looked past the 'cat and caught a glimpse of LaFollet, outside the study door standing his post even here, before it closed behind MacGuiness. Then she pushed herself up out of her chair and crossed to stand in the enlarged bay window that overhung her mansion's landscaped grounds like a sort of hanging turret. The window's outer, floor-to-ceiling crystoplast wall looked out over the bright blue beauty of Jason Bay, and she allowed herself a moment to enjoy the view afresh, then turned back to face the door once more and twitched her Grayson-style gown and vest straight.
Over the years, she'd become completely accustomed to the traditional Grayson garments. She still considered them thoroughly useless for anything except looking ornamental, but she'd been forced to admit that looking ornamental wasn't necessarily a bad thing. And there was another reason to wear them almost constantly here in the Star Kingdom, when she wasn't in uniform, at least. They helped remind everyone, including herself, of who else she was . . . and of how much the Star Kingdom and the entire Manticoran Alliance owed the people of her adoptive planet.
Yet another point that ass High Ridge seems able to effortlessly ignore . . . or worse, she thought bitterly, then brushed the familiar surge of anger aside. This wasn't the time for her to be storing up still more mental reasons to go for the Prime Minister's throat.
MacGuiness returned a very few moments later with Hamish and William Alexander.
"Earl White Haven and Lord Alexander, Your Grace," Honor's steward and majordomo murmured, and withdrew, closing the polished wooden doors quietly behind him.
"Hamish. Willie."
Honor crossed the room to them, holding out her hand in welcome, and it no longer seemed odd to her to greet them so informally. Every once in a while she experienced a sudden sense of unreality when she heard herself addressing her Queen or Benjamin Mayhew by their given names, but even those moments were becoming fewer and further between. In an odd sort of way, she remained fully aware of who she was and where she'd come from even as she found herself moving more and more naturally at the very pinnacle of political power in two separate star nations. She seldom thought consciously about it, but when the realization crossed her awareness, she recognized the way in which her belated admission to the innermost councils of her two nations shaped her perspective.
She was an outsider who'd been elevated to the status of one of the most powerful of all insiders. Because of that, she saw things through different eyes, from what she knew her allies sometimes regarded as an almost ingenuous viewpoint. The degree of sophisticated, vicious, endlessly polite (outwardly, at least) political infighting they took so much for granted, even when they deplored it, was alien to her both by nature and by experience. In some ways, her Grayson and Manticoran friends understood one another far better than she understood either of them, yet she'd come to realize that her very sense of detachment from the partisan bloodletting about her was a sort of armor. Her adversaries and allies alike regarded her as deplorably unsophisticated and direct, unwilling—or unable—to "play the game" by the rules they all understood so well. And that made her an unknown, unpredictable quantity, especially for her opponents. They knew all about the subtle shadings of position, of advantage and opportunity, which guided their own decisions and tactical maneuvers, but they found the simplicity and directness of her positions curiously baffling. It was as if they couldn't quite believe she was exactly who she said she was, that she truly believed exactly the things she said she did, because they were so unlike that themselves. So they persisted in regarding her with nervous wariness, perpetually waiting for the instant in which she finally revealed her "true" nature.
That could be a useful thing where enemies were concerned, but it had its downside, as well. Even her closest allies—particularly the aristocratic ones, she reflected, tasting the emotions of her guests—sometimes failed to realize there was nothing to reveal. They might have come to recognize that intellectually, but the Star Kingdom's peers were too much a part of the world to which they'd been born to be able to truly divorce themselves from it, even if they'd wanted to. They didn't, of course, and why should they? It was their world, and Honor was honest enough to admit that it had at least as many positive aspects as negative ones. But even the best of them—even a man like Hamish Alexander, who'd spent seven or eight decades as a Queen's officer—could never quite free themselves from the dance whose measures they'd trod since childhood.
She brushed the thought aside as she shook hands with each of the Alexanders in turn, and then waved them towards their customary chairs with a smile. It was a warm, welcoming smile, and she was no longer aware of how much warmer it became when her eyes met White Haven's.
William Alexander, on the other hand, certainly was aware of it. He'd been aware of the habitual warmth with which she greeted his brother for quite some time, actually, although he hadn't realized he was. Just as he hadn't noticed all the private, intim
ate little conversations, or the way Hamish inevitably seemed to find some reason to remain behind for some last-minute private discussion of the details with her after one of their three-cornered strategy sessions. Now he uneasily watched her smile, and his uneasiness grew as Hamish returned it.
"Thank you for inviting us over, Honor," White Haven said, holding onto her hand for perhaps a heartbeat longer than simple courtesy required.
"As if I haven't been inviting both of you over before each of High Ridge's little soirees for years now," Honor replied with a snort.
"Yes, you have," White Haven agreed. "But I wouldn't want you to think we were starting to take you for granted, Your Grace," he added with a lurking smile.
"Hardly," Honor said dryly. "The three of us have made ourselves sufficiently unpopular with the Government for me to doubt that any of us is likely to take either of the other two 'for granted.' "
"Not unless we want to prove the validity of that fellow from Old Earth," William put in. "You know, what's his name. Hancock? Arnold?" He shook his head. "One of those ancient American guys." He looked at his brother. "You're the historian of the family, Hamish. Who am I thinking of?"
"Unless I'm very much mistaken," White Haven replied, "the man whose name you're fumbling so ineptly for was Benjamin Franklin. He was the one who advised his fellow rebels that they must all hang together unless they wanted to be hanged separately, although it astonishes me that a historical illiterate like yourself could even dredge up the reference."
"Given the number of years that have flowed under the bridge since your precious Franklin, I think anyone who doesn't have more than a trace of anal retentiveness in his nature is doing remarkably well to remember him at all," William told him. "Of course, I was quite confident that you'd be able to give me chapter and verse on him."
"Before you pursue that thought any further, Willie," Honor warned him, "I should probably mention that I'm fairly familiar with Franklin and his period myself."
"Oh. Well, in that case, of course, my exquisite natural courtesy precludes any further consideration of—Well, you know."
"I do, indeed," Honor told him ominously, and they both chuckled.
A soft knock sounded from the direction of the study door, and then it opened once again to readmit MacGuiness. He wheeled in a cart of refreshments prepared by Mistress Thorne, Honor's Grayson cook, and parked it at the end of her desk. It was no longer necessary for him to ask her guests what they preferred, and he poured a stein of Old Tillman for White Haven before he drew the cork from a bottle of Sphinx burgundy and offered it for Lord Alexander's inspection. Honor and Hamish grinned at one another as William carefully examined the cork and sniffed delicately before nodding his gracious approval of the offering. Then MacGuiness poured a second Old Tillman for Honor. She took it and smiled at him as he withdrew, and then she and Hamish raised their foamy, condensation-dewed steins to one another in a beer-drinkers' salute, pointedly excluding the hopelessly effete wine-snob in their midst.
"I must say, Honor," Hamish said with a sigh of pleasure as he lowered his stein once more, "that I'm much more partial to your taste in refreshments than I ever was to the sorts of things you encounter at most of Willie's political get-togethers."
"That's because you're attending the wrong sorts of get-togethers," Honor suggested with a twinkle. "Far be it from me to suggest that blue-blooded, natural born aristocrats like your honorable brother are a bit isolated from the simpler pleasures of life, but one thing I was always delighted about on Grayson is that even the snobbiest of steadholders isn't ashamed to admit he likes an occasional beer."
"The supposed virtues of a taste for beer are grossly exaggerated by those unfortunate souls blind to the superior virtues of a decent vintage," William informed them both. "I don't mind an occasional beer, myself. It certainly beats water. But why settle for second-best when a superior alternative is available?"
"We didn't," his brother replied. "We were wondering why you did."
"Behave yourselves, children," Honor scolded, feeling briefly more like their nanny than their political colleague, despite the fact that even the younger Alexander was well over twenty T-years older than she. "We have other things to discuss before we settle down to letting you two insult one another properly."
"Aye, aye, Ma'am," White Haven said with a broad grin, and she shook her head fondly at him.
"Actually," William said, his tone suddenly much more serious, "you're quite right, Honor. We do have several things to discuss, including one concern I really wish didn't have to be brought up."
Honor sat back in her chair, eyes narrowing as she tasted his emotions. Despite the customary banter between the brothers, both of them radiated an underlying sense of tension frosted with anger. That much she was accustomed to; it was an inevitable consequence of the political situation they'd come to discuss. But she'd never before sensed anything quite like the level of . . . anxiety she was picking up from William at the moment. There was something new and especially pointed about his emotions, a sense of focused urgency. More than that, he seemed to be trying to suppress whatever it was—or at least to feel a hesitance about admitting its source which surprised her after all of the crises they'd weathered together by now.
"And what would that be?" she asked cautiously.
"Well . . ." William looked at her for a moment, then glanced at his brother and visibly drew a steadying breath.
"According to my sources," he said in the voice of a man determined to get through difficult ground and setting up the groundwork for the journey, "we're about to be hit with fresh naval reductions in the new budget. The new estimates are in, and it's pretty clear that the termination of the Emergency Income Tax Act is about to start cutting into their slush funds and pork barrel pretty badly. They don't like that one bit, but they're not stupid enough to try to renew it. Not when they know we'll kill it in the Commons and use the opportunity to both advertise their real spending priorities and simultaneously deprive them of the ability to go on blaming us for all of the Kingdom's fiscal woes. So instead, Janacek is going to recommend cutting our active duty ships of the wall by about twenty percent to free up funds from the other 'wartime taxes.' He's also planning to suspend construction on virtually all the incomplete SD(P)s for the same reason, and High Ridge thinks he's found a way to neutralize you and Hamish when the new cuts are debated in the Lords."
"Fresh reductions?!" Hamish repeated, then muttered something vicious under his breath which Honor was just as happy not to have heard clearly.
"How can they possibly justify cutting the Fleet even further?" she asked William, and she was more than a little surprised that she sounded so calm herself. "We're already down to a lower number of hulls than we had before the war started," she pointed out. "And as they're fond of reminding people, the war still isn't over."
"Not officially, anyway," Hamish growled.
"They plan to justify it exactly the way they've justified all the other reductions," William replied to Honor's question. "By pointing to how much of the naval budget they can save through the increased effectiveness and combat power of the new types. They don't need all those 'obsolescent' older ships getting in the way of the new, lean, efficient Navy Janacek has single-handedly created."
Despite her own total agreement with William's opinion of High Ridge and Sir Edward Janacek, Honor winced at the ferocious sarcasm in his bitter voice. His brother, on the other hand, was too furious to pay it much attention.
"That's the biggest load of bullshit I've heard in months," Hamish grated. "Even for them, it sets some new record!"
"It's a logical progression from everything else they've done, Hamish," Honor observed. Her voice was by far the most serene one in the room, but there was nothing particularly serene about her agate-hard eyes. "Still, I'm a bit surprised at the size of this reduction. They've already cut away every bit of fat and muscle; now they're working on the bones."
"That's a depressingly accurate
analysis," William agreed. "And you're right, this is a direct, straight-line extension of the same justification they've used every step of the way. The new ship types are more powerful, more survivable, and less manpower intensive, and with the demise of the income tax, their budget is suddenly so tight something has to give."
" 'Give,' is it?" Hamish repeated savagely. "I'll give that lying, conniving, pigheaded idiot Janacek something! In fact, I'll—"
"Calm down, Hamish," Honor said, never looking away from William . . . and not even thinking about how casually she'd addressed White Haven. "We already knew they regard the Navy budget as some kind of piggy bank they can keep raiding forever for their precious 'peace dividend.' Losing our tempers and frothing at the mouth while we chew pieces off of them in debate the way they deserve is only going to make us look like we're overreacting. Which will only make them look more reasonable. However stupid their policy may be, we have to stick together and sound calm and rational when we oppose it. That's especially true for the two of us, and you know it."
"You're right," he said, after another brief, fulminating pause. Then he drew a deep breath. "So they're going to reduce our combat power even further, are they?" he said. His brother nodded, and Hamish snorted. "And I suppose Jurgensen and his pet analysts at ONI are going to back Janacek up?"
"Of course they are," William replied, and it was Honor's turn to snort bitterly.
It hadn't surprised anyone when Janacek began his second tenure as First Lord of Admiralty by placing Hamish Alexander on inactive, half-pay status. The Earl of White Haven's war record had been brilliant, but the combined reincarnation of Horatio Nelson, Togo Heimachoro, Raymond Spruance, Gustav Anderman, and Edward Saganami couldn't have been brilliant enough to outweigh the bitter, personal animosity between himself and Sir Edward Janacek.
That much, at least, had been expected, however petty and vindictive it might have been. But Honor suspected that the rest of the Navy had been as surprised and dismayed as she had when Janacek decided Sir Thomas Caparelli and Patricia Givens also "deserved a rest."
