A Call to Vengeance (Manticore Ascendant Book 3)

by David Weber

  Massingill took a deep breath. Time to get her mind back into this particular game. “Inform Lieutenant Bastonge,” she ordered. “He may want to move out while the Red Hands have their attention split. Especially since letting them see what’s left of their hyperdrive might help them make up their minds.”

  “Yes, Ma’am.”

  “And warn the boarding parties to be careful,” she added unnecessarily. “The pirates could still decide to be stupid today.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Prime Minister Burgundy and Chancellor of the Exchequer Breakwater were waiting when Elizabeth arrived in the Palace conference room. The two men, standing on opposite sides of the long table, turned in unison as the door opened, bowing at the Sovereign’s approach.

  “Your Majesty,” Burgundy greeted her for both of them.

  “Your Grace; My Lord,” Elizabeth greeted them in return, wondering uneasily what was going on. After the last chaotic two T-months, at least she no longer felt as if she’d fallen into a drug-induced dream—or nightmare—whenever someone called her Majesty.

  The job that went with the title, though, was a different matter entirely, and she especially hated walking into a situation cold. All Burgundy had said in this case was that Breakwater wanted to talk about some matters that were about to be brought before the Lords and to give her advance notice.

  That alone wasn’t particularly worrisome. Breakwater was one of several Cabinet ministers who liked to get the Queen’s input or approval on a given piece of legislation before bringing it into the public eye. Elizabeth had wondered about that until Burgundy suggested that it was all part of the process of getting a feel for Manticore’s new queen. The same ministers had done the same to Edward when he ascended the Throne, he told her, and assured her the private audience requests would eventually fade away.

  What concerned her was the fact that Burgundy had insisted on accompanying the Chancellor on this one. That automatically raised it above the usual testing-the-water meetings that she’d become used to.

  Elizabeth had always known that politics was a complex and arcane profession. She’d just never realized how deeply nuanced it was.

  Getting thrown headfirst into the deep end of the pool hadn’t helped, either. Edward had been careful to keep Richard up to speed on matters of state, and in the brief time that Sophie had been Crown Princess he’d started the same process with her.

  No one had ever thought Elizabeth might need those briefings, including Elizabeth herself. That, among many other things, would have to change.

  But she had a few months under her belt now, and was finally starting to get the hang of this. Hopefully, whatever Breakwater was about to pitch would be something she already knew how to handle.

  “We appreciate your seeing us on such short notice,” Burgundy continued as Elizabeth seated herself at the head of the table. Once she was settled, he also sat down, taking the seat one chair down the table to her right, where he would be close enough for easy conversation but not so close that he was encroaching on her personal space. Breakwater, probably following the same logic, took the seat opposite him. “As I mentioned earlier, Earl Breakwater has two matters he wished to bring to your attention.”

  “Understood.” Elizabeth focused on Breakwater. “Go ahead, My Lord.”

  “Thank you, Your Majesty,” Breakwater said gravely. “Let me be brief. Regarding the first matter, I wanted you to know that some of the Lords will be proposing a resolution tomorrow calling for the official censure of Commodore Rudolph Heissman for his failure to properly protect Crown Prince Richard during the Battle of Manticore.”

  Elizabeth flashed a glance at Burgundy. The prime minister’s jaw was set, his face wooden.

  “That’s very interesting, My Lord,” she said to Breakwater. “Particularly since the Navy has already cleared him of any wrongdoing in that matter.”

  “The Navy naturally has their own agenda,” Breakwater said. “And yes, I’ve heard their argument that there was no time for Prince Richard’s ship to decelerate and escape before the attackers arrived.” He lifted a finger. “But there was time to order the same split-tail maneuver that Heissman eventually ordered for all of his remaining ships. If Hercules had done that as soon as Heissman knew the size of Tamerlane’s force, it would have been well out of missile range by the time the force arrived.”

  “And it would have cost Heissman the use of one of his ships for that battle,” Burgundy pointed out.

  “Which may or may not have made a difference,” Breakwater said. “Ultimately, it was Casey’s actions alone that made the difference in that particular action.”

  “There was no way for Heissman to know that would be the case,” Elizabeth pointed out. “His job—and Richard’s—was to put themselves in harm’s way for the sake of the Star Kingdom.”

  “Perhaps,” Breakwater said. “At any rate, Your Majesty, the point is that I wanted you to know about the resolution in advance so that the…reminder…of your nephew’s demise wouldn’t come as a surprise.”

  “I appreciate your concern, My Lord,” Elizabeth said, letting just a hint of sarcasm color her otherwise very proper Official Tone. Breakwater could talk all he wanted about how some of the Lords would be bringing up this matter, as if his own heart was innocent and his hands pure as the drifting snow. But she knew better, and from the expression on Burgundy’s face it was clear that he did, too. Breakwater was a power broker, and an ambitious one, and his fingerprints were all over this.

  As to how she would handle it…well, that was going to take some extra study. “You said there were two matters?”

  “Yes, Your Majesty,” Breakwater said. Out of the corner of her eye, Elizabeth saw Burgundy’s expression go even tighter. “This one’s a little more…delicate, shall we say?”

  “Get on with it,” Burgundy growled, and Breakwater inclined his head.

  “Very well. As you may know, Your Majesty, the Constitution requires the Sovereign to be married to a commoner. At this point, your marital status does not conform—”

  “Excuse me, My Lord,” Elizabeth cut him off, her stomach suddenly tightening. “If you’re suggesting what I think you’re suggesting, you’d best tread very lightly.”

  Breakwater spread his hands.

  “I make no suggestions of my own, Your Majesty,” he protested. “I merely point out what others are already whispering: that their Sovereign is out of compliance with the Constitution. I’m sure you don’t want to add any further uncertainties to an already uncertain time…”

  He continued on. But Elizabeth could no longer hear him. All she could hear was Carmichael’s voice, her eyes filling with his face, her skin tingling with his touch. His smile…his frown…his voice…his laughter…

  “We’re done here,” she said abruptly.

  She had the vague sense that Breakwater was in the middle of a sentence. She didn’t care.

  “You will leave now,” she said, hearing the quavering in her voice and not caring about that either. “Both of you.”

  She was vaguely aware of Burgundy saying the usual farewells, and then of the two of them standing up and passing on either side behind her toward the door.

  She saw none of it. Her head throbbed with a kaleidoscope of her life with Carmichael. The love, the comfort, the tears, the horror of his death.…

  Slowly, the memories ebbed, gradually and reluctantly like a receding tide, back into the recesses of her mind. She’d thought she’d done such a good job of burying those images away in the four and a half T-years since he was snatched so suddenly away from her.

  And yet, all it had taken to bring them flooding back was a single gut-wrenching comment.

  She swore, softly, feelingly. When she’d ascended the Throne, as custom dictated, the entire Cabinet had submitted their resignations. At Burgundy’s suggestion she’d reinstated all of them, with the goal of maintaining as much continuity as possible in the political arena until the shock of Edward’s death h
ad time to settle.

  Breakwater had been among the reinstated group. Now, she was wishing she’d kicked him the hell out.

  Theoretically, it still wasn’t too late to do that. She could call Burgundy back right now and ask him to form a new government without Breakwater.

  In practice, unfortunately, it wouldn’t be that easy. Breakwater had a large following among the Lords, and throwing him out without cause would not sit well with them. They weren’t a majority, as near as she’d been able to calculate, but they might have enough swing to force a no-confidence vote and bring down any government Burgundy tried to form without their leader. With the Star Kingdom’s citizens still twitchy from the events of the past few months, that would probably cause more harm than good.

  Besides which, Breakwater was a good Chancellor. Everyone, supporter and opponent alike, agreed on that. He managed the Star Kingdom’s money in a quiet, efficient, and exemplary way.

  And really, up to now he’d mostly behaved himself. There’d been a few critical speeches, most of them centered around the kinks still being worked out in his new MPARS training center. But even the speeches had been reasonably mild in tone, more informative than incendiary. For the past couple of months Elizabeth had almost forgotten that she needed to be on her toes around him.

  All that had now changed. Because just like the Heissman resolution, this suggestion of noncompliance clearly wasn’t coming from others in the Lords. This was being created, nurtured, and driven by Breakwater himself. With a single back-stabbing gut punch, Breakwater had ended whatever truce had existed.

  Mentally, she shook her head. Back-stabbing gut punch. She really needed to work on her metaphors. Even the ones that never saw the light of day.

  Slowly, she got to her feet and turned around. Adler and Penescu, her two bodyguards, stood silently on either side of the doorway, waiting patiently for their Sovereign to either go elsewhere or give them new orders. Despite her own proximity to the throne, she’d never had to deal with the all-pervasive—and highly intrusive—security which surrounded the Queen of Manticore every minute of her life. That was yet another thing she hated about this job.

  They’d heard every word, of course. Distantly, she wondered what they thought about her reaction.

  “Well, that was interesting,” she said. She wasn’t sure whether the Queen should exchange idle conversation with her guards, but she’d started out that way from the beginning and saw no reason to change. “Back to the office.”

  The guards exchanged glances.

  “Your office, Your Majesty?” Penescu asked.

  “Yes,” Elizabeth said, frowning at him. “Why, is there a problem?”

  Another set of glances.

  “Prime Minister Burgundy indicated that he’d wait in the library,” Adler said, her forehead creased slightly. “He said you’d want to see him.”

  Elizabeth pursed her lips. Technically, inviting himself to a conversation with his Queen—as opposed to asking for an audience—was seriously overstepping the privilege of both rank and position.

  But now that Adler mentioned it, she rather wanted to see Burgundy, too. At least for long enough to ask if he’d known in advance about Breakwater’s bombshell.

  “Well, then,” she said. “Let’s not keep him waiting.”

  There were several comfortable chairs and sofas in the Palace library. She found Burgundy seated in the one that faced the wall-mounted Royal Seal.

  Seated across from him, directly under the seal, was former King Michael.

  Elizabeth hadn’t seen much of her father for the past two weeks, though he and Elizabeth’s mother Mary had visited almost daily during the first month after the accident. Occasionally, Edward’s widow Cynthia had joined them as well, as the broken remnants of the family talked and mourned together.

  But Cynthia had now gone back to her own family, and Michael and Mary had sequestered themselves in the Tower—in seclusion, the official notices called it. Part of that, Michael had explained to Elizabeth, was the need for private mourning, while part was to avoid distracting the nation from its new sovereign by allowing images of its former one wandering the Palace to get out.

  Though that might no longer be the problem he thought it was. Michael had aged a great deal since the accident, to the point where a casual observer might fail to recognize him at all, certainly not at first glance.

  But while his face was more lined and his hair had gone thin, his eyes were as bright and alert as ever.

  “I take it there was more, Your Grace?” Elizabeth asked as she walked into the room.

  “Your Majesty,” he said, scrambling to his feet and bowing to her. “I’m sorry—I expected you to be longer…No matter. I just wanted to offer my apologies for the…well, for all of it, I suppose. I’m so sorry.”

  “As well you should be,” Elizabeth said, more harshly than she’d intended. “Did you know about this in advance?”

  “Easy, Elizabeth,” Michael said quietly. “None of this is his fault.”

  Elizabeth grimaced. He was right.

  “I know,” she said. “My apologies, Your Grace.”

  “No apology needed, Your Majesty,” Burgundy assured her. “And to answer your question, no, I didn’t know.” His lip twitched. “At least, not far enough in advance. I did know about his first point, which was why I wished to accompany him in the first place. We were already on our way into the Palace when he told me what his second point was going to be. Which,” he added, his expression darkening even more, “made me even gladder that I’d come along.”

  “I see.” The emotional tsunami had faded far enough now for Elizabeth’s rational mind to start operating again. And the first rational question needed to be—“Does he have a case?”

  “I don’t know, Your Majesty,” Burgundy he admitted. “The Constitution states unambiguously that the heir to the throne must marry a commoner. Unfortunately, whether that means you have to marry, or whether it simply means that if the heir marries, he or she must marry a commoner, is somewhat less clear. And the language does specifically refer to the heir to the throne.”

  “Well, I’m not the heir,” Elizabeth said more than a bit bitterly.

  “I know, Your Majesty,” Burgundy replied gently. “The problem is that the peers Breakwater was referring to are construing the language rather more broadly than I believe it was ever meant to be construed. They’re taking the position that the provision is intended to assure that any future monarch has at least one parent from outside the aristocracy. The reason the Constitution requires that the heir must marry a commoner is to bring about that specific end. And, unfortunately, the marriage requirement is combined in the same clause of the Constitution as the requirement that any new monarch must be the heir of the body of the previous monarch unless the monarch dies without issue.”

  “You’re saying that that’s one interpretation of the Constitution?”

  “Yes, Your Majesty.” Burgundy inclined his head slightly. “A countervailing interpretation is that although the heir is required to marry a commoner in order to ensure that, as the Constitution itself says, ‘Crown and Commons are perpetually wed,’ extraordinary circumstances, such as your own, aren’t actually covered. That’s my own opinion of what the drafters intended, as a matter of fact.”

  “The problem is that the Constitution’s still in what you might call its infancy,” Michael added. “Or at least its adolescence.”

  “Exactly,” Burgundy said, nodding. “Your brother, King Edward, was actually the first heir to the Throne to marry anyone since its ratification. Your grandmother and your father were both already married before the Constitution was drafted. The truth is that, as yet, no reigning Monarch has ever married, so that means we’re in what the lawyers like to call ‘a gray area,’ and there are likely to be plenty of people wanting to push constitutional interpretation their way, for a whole range of reasons. We’re already seeing plenty of debate over ‘strict constructionism’ and ‘livin
g document’ reinterpretation to suit points people think weren’t adequately covered or in which circumstances may have changed.”

  Elizabeth looked at her father.

  “My reading is the same,” Michael said, nodding. “We can call in a legal scholar to get something more definitive, but I’m betting we’ll get conflicting views. Of course, neither Davis nor I are constitutional lawyers, but we were both there when it was written. I’m afraid I wasn’t paying as much attention to it as he was, and I should have been, since it was going to have such an impact on our family. My own memory is that Davis is right, but he’s also right that God knows a profitable business has grown up already around interpreting constitutional law. Frankly, I’m strongly in favor of supporting the ‘strict constructionist’ school.”

  “As were your grandmother and your great-grandfather,” Burgundy said. “They were damned insistent that if the Constitutional Convention was going to fundamentally rewrite the way we governed ourselves, then the rules it set forth had to be the rules, not something we decided to change any time they got a little inconvenient.”

  “Exactly,” Michael agreed. “I remember Mom—your grandmother—saying that the very best thing we could do as a family and as future monarchs was to put as much grit into the system as we could because, more than anything else, it was going to be our job to maintain stability. Having said that, though, we probably do need to start looking into current expert opinion on it.”

  “That won’t be necessary,” Elizabeth said. “Because I’m not going to marry again. Not yet. Absolutely not simply because someone else tells me to.”

  “Understood, Eli—” Burgundy glanced at the guards at the door. “Your Majesty,” he corrected himself.

  Elizabeth felt her throat tighten. Even a man old enough to be her grandfather, a man who’d watched her grow up, and who’d held her hand through this whole horrific crisis, now couldn’t bend enough to be her friend instead of her subject.