Flag In Exile hh-5

by David Weber

  "Something like that. But..." Honor paused, then frowned. "I'm sure you have better sources than I do, but Gregory Paxton and I have been keeping an eye on things as well as we can from off-planet, and I've been in regular contact with Howard and Colonel Hill. And from our perspective, it looks like Lord Burdette may not be the only problem."

  "Oh?" Benjamin crossed his own legs, inviting her to continue with his eyes, and she sighed.

  "It seems to us that there's more than one strand working out down here, Sir. Lord Burdette and the demonstrators in Harrington are one thread, the loud, public one, you might say, but there's something else going on, as well. Something a lot, well, quieter."

  "You mean Mueller, Michaelson, and company?" Benjamin asked.

  "Yes, Sir." Honor couldn't quite hide her relief at the Protector's response. He smiled, but it was more of a grimace, really, and she went on carefully. "I don't want to sound paranoid, but to me, they actually seem more dangerous than someone like Marchant or Burdette. They're so much less strident people may actually listen to them. And once people start listening to 'moderate' condemnations, the door's open for the extremists to begin sounding rational to them, as well."

  "I see your point," Catherine said. She looked at her husband and frowned. "Didn't you discuss this with Prestwick last week?"

  "I did, indeed," Benjamin confirmed. "And at the moment, neither we nor Planetary Security see any immediate cause for concern."

  "Immediate cause?" his wife repeated, and he smiled sourly.

  "You and Lady Harrington have nasty, suspicious minds, Cat," he said, "and you both pay too much attention to qualifiers. Yes, I said 'immediate,' as in 'things may change.'"

  "How big a factor do you think the Sacristy's decision to defrock Marchant may be?" Honor asked. He cocked an eyebrow at her, and she shrugged. "Greg and I have been trying to get a read on that, but we don't have enough input. All the same, I'm uneasy about the ammunition it offers the reactionaries, and the last poll I was... worrying."

  "The decision to discipline Marchant was Reverend Hank's to make," Benjamin said after a moment. "He discussed it with me, since the Protectorship is technically the executive arm of the Church, but his decision to go forward with it was made only after a formal request from the majority of the Sacristy to do so. I suspect he had something to do with that majority's decision to petition him in the first place, but I make it a rule never to interfere in the Church's internal affairs. Given the amount of fire I've drawn over purely secular matters, the last thing I need is to look as if I'm strong-arming the Church into anything!"

  He paused until Honor nodded her understanding, then went on.

  "Having said that, I agree with his reasoning. Not only was Marchant's behavior unforgivable in any churchman, but it was also a deliberate act of defiance which the Sacristy simply could not overlook. He had to be slapped down, hard, before any core of clerical conservatives congealed behind him. I'm aware, as I'm sure you are, Honor, given that you have Paxton working on this, that there's been a sort of passive resistance from some churchmen, but now they have to restrict themselves to actions which don't openly support the error for which Marchant was disciplined or face the same consequences. I think that had to be established, and now that it has, Reverend Hanks is concentrating on starving the fire of fuel, on the one hand, and encouraging the more progressive clergy to speak out on behalf of reason on the other."

  Honor nodded, but she also found her right hand playing with the Harrington Key. She grimaced and made herself let go of it.

  "And the opinion polls, Sir? It seems to me, and to Greg, that the Marchant decision's been a factor in the numbers. Most of the people who admit to second thoughts about my, ah, suitability as a steadholder indicate that their doubts hinge on my 'infidel' status."

  "No doubt," Benjamin acknowledged. "But your own people aren't worried by it, and, frankly, what citizens of other steadings think about you is largely irrelevant. Reverend Hanks and I both anticipated that there'd be a negative initial effect on public opinion, but we've got time for it to smooth out again, and the fact that you've never hidden your own religious convictions should help. That's the sort of personal integrity Graysons appreciate, once they fully consider it." He shook his head. "Under the circumstances, I think the Reverends action was a wise one, and, as I say, at least it's told the reactionaries there's a line the Sacristy won't tolerate their crossing."

  "I only wish there hadn't been any need for a line in the first place," Honor worried. "I don't like the thought of serving as the focus for all this craziness." She shook her head, irritated by her own choice of words. "What I mean, Sir, is that I regret providing a focus for it."

  "Honor," Benjamin said quietly, "what I regret is having put you in a position where idiots determined to freeze my planet somewhere in the dark ages can attack you for being better than they are."

  "I didn't mean..." Honor began with a blush, but he interrupted her gently.

  "I understand exactly what you meant. And you're it; you have become the focus of the reactionaries. When I first shanghaied you as a steadholder, I told you we needed you as an example and a challenge, and I was right. But what I didn't warn you about, because I hadn't fully considered it myself, was that as an example of what women can and should aspire to, you'd also become the target of every idiot who insists women can't be such things. I regret that. At the same time, honesty compels me to admit that even if I had considered it, I wouldn't have let it stop me from drafting you... and knowing, as I now do, that your own sense of duty wouldn't have let you turn me down would only have made me feel guilty. It wouldn't have stopped me, because we do need you, and I have a responsibility as Protector of Grayson to see to it that we have you." Honor's blush darkened, and he shook his head at her. "But the fact is that if they didn't have you, the reactionaries would only find some other rallying point. People determined to stand in the path of progress can always find some emotional hook to hang their opposition on. You happen to be the hook for this particular bunch of idiots because they see you as the most dangerous person on Grayson, and, from their perspective, they're absolutely right. You are."

  "I am?" Honor asked in surprise.

  "You are," Benjamin repeated. "You're a hero to our people, even the ones who have doubts about the social reforms, which gives you a dangerous 'constituency' far beyond the bounds of your own steading. The number who have doubts about you may be growing just now, but the majority still sees you as both a woman and an officer who saved our world from our hereditary enemies, which undercuts our society's notions that women are weaker and must be protected. You've done an outstanding job as a steadholder, which presents an intolerable challenge to conservative steadholders who believe no woman could ever do their job. And you're an 'infidel' who not only respects and protects the Church in your steading but who's actually studied our Faith so well you can trade citations with a bigot like Marchant and pin his ears back. When you add all of that together, there's not a reactionary on the planet who doesn't see you, you personally, Honor Harrington, as the direct personification of every challenge to his position and pet bigotries, and it's all my fault for dragging you into it."

  Honor sat silent, gazing deep into his eyes, then looked at Catherine, who nodded wryly in agreement.

  "Sir... Benjamin, I don't want to provide that kind of focus," she repeated finally. He started to speak, but she raised a hand. "Not because I don't want people to hate me. Because I don't want to be the fulcrum they use to attack your reforms."

  "If you weren't here, they'd just find another rallying point," Benjamin said again. "You happen to be the key as things stand, and, as it happens, you're a very good key from my perspective. Despite any slippage in the polls, you'd have to screw up in some truly spectacular fashion before you became a negative factor, and you're not the sort of person who screws up." He grinned. "Frankly, having the lunatics trying to use you as the 'fulcrum,' as you put it, is a vast relief to me. If y
ou're going to be so damned big-hearted that you don't blame me for putting you in the middle of such a mess, then for the Tester's sake, don't blame yourself for being there!"

  "But..." Honor began, then stopped herself with another crooked smile. "All right, I'll shut up and be good. But you are keeping an eye on things?"

  "Do you keep an eye on enemy force appreciations, Admiral Harrington?" Benjamin asked. She nodded with a wry grin of understanding, and he nodded back. "So do I. The sneaky bastards may surprise me from time to time, but not because I'm not paying attention, I assure you. Fair?"

  "Fair, Sir," Honor said.

  "Good! Because..." the Protector grinned and cocked an ear as a sudden ruckus headed their way from the nursery "...I think the holy terrors are returning to base, and if we can catch them, it's just about time for dinner!"

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Citizen Vice Admiral Esther McQueen hadn't been told Operation Stalking Horses full purpose, but she knew how hard-pressed the Navy was before Trevor's Star. That suggested Stalking Horse was very important, given the strength of her own task force. Not, she corrected herself sourly without looking up from her display, that Task Force Thirty was truly "hers." She was grateful that the Committee of Public Safety had removed the Legislaturalist officer corps from her path, but that didn't mean she liked having one of its lap dogs sitting on her own flag bridge to "oversee" her operations.

  She slid that thought back into a well-hidden mental cupboard before she turned from her plot and looked across at Citizen Commissioner Fontein with a candor that was careful to conceal its resentment One of these days, she promised herself. One of these days...

  Fontein smiled at her with his habitual air of slight befuddlement over all things naval, and the satisfaction it woke in her eyes irritated him. He no more enjoyed being thought a fool, especially by someone who hid it so poorly, than the next man. On the other hand, he'd worked hard to convince McQueen he was only one more ignorant Prole who'd risen to his level of incompetence, and he had no intention of revealing how well he actually understood her command's routine operations ... or how much more thoroughly than she he understood her mission and its implications.

  State Security had selected Erasmus Fontein carefully for McQueen's commissioner, though Secretary Saint-Just had disliked letting him go. Fontein was a wizened little man who looked like someone's harmless uncle, but appearances were deceiving. Most of the citizen commissioners (and, of course, one had to call them all "Citizen" today, Fontein thought dourly; "Prole" was, after all, a plutocratic, elitist denigration) came from the ranks of those who'd most hated the Legislaturalists before the Harris Assassination. In some cases their hatred had been a reasoned thing stemming from the inequities of the old order, but people were people. Most of the Committee's official spies had hated the old regime not on the basis of reason, but solely because they'd been losers under it. Too many of them took a fierce satisfaction in cracking the whip now that it was in their hands, despite the fact that the officers they were charged with overseeing were no more the old regime's minions than they were. An officer was an officer, and if they couldn't avenge themselves on the ones they believed had injured them, then they would assuage their hatred by sneering at the ones they could.

  To a certain extent, that attitude was fine with StateSec and the Committee, neither of whom trusted the military, anyway. The animosity between the Navy's officers and the citizen commissioners both warned those officers that anything which even looked like treason would be fatal and insured that they and the commissioners were unlikely to join forces against the new regime.

  Unfortunately, there were officers, like Esther McQueen, whose leashes required particularly deft handlers. Her political masters had no doubt where her loyalty lay; they knew it lay solely with herself, but she was also, by almost any measure, the best flag officer they had left. They needed her skills, yet the very intelligence which made her so useful meant a clumsy watchdog would be no match for her... and that she would maneuver carefully against any commissioner whose capabilities she had cause to respect.

  Which was the reason for Fontein's assignment. His harmless facade concealed a computer's dispassionately amoral mercilessness, and unlike most of the citizen commissioners, he'd done well under the old regime. Indeed, he'd been a major in Saint-Just's old Office of Internal Security, where he'd specialized in keeping an eye on the military. But he'd hungered to do still better, and Major Fontein, whose familiarity with naval operations had been invaluable when Saint-Just and Pierre structured the Harris Assassination so as to implicate the Navy, had been promoted to brigadier when the SS succeeded InSec.

  Saint-Just would much preferred to have used a man of his talents to head one of the planetary SS surveillance forces, but the combination of his competence and finely honed paranoia with an in-depth military background McQueen had no idea he possessed made him uniquely valuable as her watchdog.

  "So the operation is on schedule, Citizen Admiral?" he asked now in his most undangerous voice, and McQueen nodded.

  "It is, Citizen Commissioner. We'll hit the Minette alpha wall almost exactly on time."

  "Excellent, Citizen Admiral. I'm sure the Committee will be pleased."

  "I'm glad you think so, Citizen Commissioner," McQueen replied, and returned her attention to her plot as fifty-five ships of the People's Navy, headed by the sixteen superdreadnoughts of Battle Squadrons Seven and Twelve, hurtled through hyper space at an apparent n-space velocity of just over thirteen hundred times light-speed.

  Vice Admiral of the Red Ludwig Stanton, Royal Manticoran Navy, suppressed an urge to yawn as he carried his coffee cup over to HMS Majestic's master plot and stood gazing down at the light dots of his command.

  Every unit of Task Force Minette-01 rode comfortably in orbit around Everest, the single habitable planet of the Minette System. It looked dreadfully complacent, even to him, but his dreadnought flagship's combat information center was tied into an FTL sensor net which covered the entire system. Nothing larger than a cutter could penetrate that kind of coverage under power without detection, and the outer shell of platforms was more than a light-hour out from the systems G3 primary. Using manned vessels as pickets would only have dispersed his strength while adding nothing to his surveillance capabilities, so his destroyers and heavy cruisers were tucked in close, able to respond to any threat in company with his half squadron of dreadnoughts.

  It irked Stanton to be this far from the action while Admiral White Haven’s forces skirmished back and forth with the main Peep fleet between Nightingale and the Alliance's advanced base at Thetis. Minette wasn't exactly of vital strategic importance. It served as an advanced picket, helping the enormous Grendelsbane fleet base cover the Alliance's southern flank against the Peep bases in Treadway and Solway, but those systems had been stripped of mobile elements as White Haven's offensive headed for Trevor's Star, and their immobile fixed defenses posed no threat. Stanton agreed that Minette's billion inhabitants had to be protected, the Minetians were charter members of the Alliance, and the Star Kingdom had a responsibility to look out for them, but his four ships of the wall represented a lot of fire-power to waste a hundred and fifty light-years from the real action.

  He sipped more coffee and watched the light dots of impeller-drive freighters plying back and forth between Minette's two asteroid belts and Everest's orbital smelters. Minette's industry was unsophisticated, but the system was an important source of raw materials and heavy industrial products, and there'd been plans, once, to upgrade its defenses by adding a powerful shell of orbital fortresses around Everest itself. Like much else, however, that project had been overtaken by the war. Although it required massive linked defenses to cover the repair and maintenance bases that supported the Fleet in wartime, they were only built during peacetime. Once the fighting actually started, they cost too much, for not even the Star Kingdom could afford to build everything.

  It was remarkable that the prewar arms race hadn't w
recked the Manticoran economy, Stanton mused. Although it had been a boom for the armaments industry and done amazing things for applied research, the monetary cost had been staggering. Only the Star Kingdom's enormously productive industrial base and vast merchant marine, coupled with its control of the Manticore Worm Hole Junction, had given it the wealth to absorb such huge peacetime military budgets without major disruptions.

  It was getting worse now that the war had actually begun. Taxes and toll fees on the Junctions merchant shipping had already been raised twice. No doubt they'd be going up yet again soon, and finding the trained manpower to simultaneously crew the Fleet and merchant marine and sustain the work force might become a problem, but things might have been far worse. No one else in the Peeps' path had possessed the capability to build a war machine that might stand up to them. Only Manticore had been able to do it ... and even then only with the Liberal and Progressive Parties screaming like gelded hexapumas at "diverting" so many tax dollars into "alarmist, unproductive military hardware."

  Well, Stanton thought grimly, only a thin shell of Peep bases still stood between Admiral White Havens "unproductive military hardware" and Trevor's Star, the single nexus of the Manticore Junction controlled by the People's Republic, and on his way there, White Haven had decisively blunted the Peeps' overwhelming prewar advantage in ships of the wall. At the same time, Stanton admitted, the Peeps had yet to lose a truly vital system. White Haven's capture of Sun-Yat and its major shipyards had hurt them (and, ultimately, with proper technical upgrades, would no doubt help Manticore), but Sun-Yat's loss was only a flea bite against the military infrastructure they'd spent fifty years building. Which explained why the Alliance could no longer divert capacity to fortifying its rear areas. It had to concentrate on the ships to take the war to the Peeps. And, as certain elements of BuPlan often pointed out, those same starships would also be the most mobile and flexible means of responding to any counteroffensive the Peeps managed to launch.