Echoes Of Honor hh-8

by David Weber

  Yet whatever one Hamish Alexander might think, Cromarty and William must truly be feeling the pressure to even contemplate unbottling that particular genie. Once the government had established tight centralized control of the economy for any reason, dismantling those controls later would be a Herculean task. There were always bureaucratic empire-builders who would fight to the death to maintain their own petty patches of power, and any government could always find places to spend all the money it could get its hands on. But even more to the point, the Liberals and their allies would be able—quite legitimately, in many ways—to argue that if the Star Kingdom had been willing to accept such control to fight a war, then surely it should be willing to accept less draconian peacetime measures in the fight against poverty and deprivation. Unless, that was, the fiscal conservatives wished to argue that it was somehow less moral or worthy to provide its citizens with what they needed when they weren’t killing other people?

  "We see some other alternatives—and some bright spots on the horizon," William said, breaking into his thoughts. "Don’t think it’s all doom and gloom from the home front. For one thing, people like the Graysons are taking up a lot more slack than we’d anticipated when the war began. And did you know that Zanzibar and Alizon are about to bring their own shipyards on-line?"

  "Zanzibar is?" White Haven’s eyebrows rose, and his brother nodded.

  "Yep. It’s sort of a junior version of the Graysons’ Blackbird Yard, another joint venture with the Hauptman Cartel. It’ll be limited to cruiser and maybe battlecruiser-range construction, at least for the first couple of years, but it’ll be top of the line, and the same thing for Alizon. And the Graysons themselves are just phenomenal. Maybe it’s because they’ve already had so many battles fought in their space, or maybe it’s simply because their standard of living was so much lower than ours was before the war started, but these people are digging deep, Hamish... and their civilian economy is still expanding like a house on fire at the same time. I suppose part of the difference is that their civilian sector is still so far short of market saturation, whereas ours—" He shrugged. "And it’s not helping a bit that we’re still unable to provide the kind of security for our merchant shipping in Silesia that we’d like. Our trade with the Confederation is down by almost twenty-eight percent."

  "Are the Andermani picking up what we’ve lost?" White Haven asked.

  "It looks more like it’s the Sollies," William said with another shrug. "We’re seeing more and more market penetration by them out this way... which may help explain why certain elements in the League are willing to export military technology to the Peeps."

  "Wonderful." White Haven massaged his temples wearily, then looked back at Caparelli and dragged the conversation back to his original concern. "But the operative point for Eighth Fleet is that it looks like another couple of months before I’ll see my other battle squadrons, right?"

  "Yes," Caparelli said. "We had to make a choice between you and keeping Trevor’s Star up to strength, and, frankly, what happened at Adler is still having repercussions. We’re managing to ride them out so far, but the sheer scope of our defeat there has everyone—and especially the smaller members of the Alliance—running more than a little scared. I’m doing my level best to gather back the ships we were forced to disperse in even more penny-packet pickets for political reasons, but Trevor’s Star is another matter. If I were the Peeps, that system—and the Junction terminus there—would be absolutely my number one targeting priority, and I have to assume they’re at least as smart as I am."

  "Um." White Haven considered that, then nodded slowly. If he were Esther McQueen and he had the strength for it, he’d retake Trevor’s Star in a heartbeat. Of course, he wasn’t Esther McQueen, and so far as he knew, she didn’t have the strength to retake the system, but he understood why Caparelli was determined to make sure she didn’t get the chance. Not that understanding made the implications for his own command area any better.

  "All right," he said finally. "I understand what’s happening, and I can see why we’re where we are on the priorities list. But I hope you and the rest of the Admiralty understand, Sir Thomas, when I say that I’m not trying to set up any sort of preexisting excuses for future failure by saying that I have very deep concerns over our ability to execute our original mission if those ships are delayed for as long as you’re suggesting is likely. At the rate they seem to be reinforcing Barnett, what should have given us a very comfortable margin of superiority is likely to provide little more than parity when we actually move. And everything I’ve seen out of Citizen Admiral Theisman suggests that giving him parity is not the way to go about winning a battle."

  "I understand, My Lord." Caparelli sighed. "And all we can ask you to do is the best that you can do. I assure you that everyone at the Admiralty understands that, and no one regrets the delay in your buildup more than I do. I’ll see what I can do to expedite matters on my return."

  "At least the construction rates are still climbing," William observed in the tone of someone looking hard for a silver lining. "And manning requirements should be dropping, if the reports the Exchequer’s been getting from BuShips and BuPers hold up."

  "That’s true enough," Caparelli agreed, "and if Project Anzio—" He cut himself off, then grinned at White Haven. "Let’s just say that we’ve got the possibility for some real force multiplication, My Lord. If the bastards will only give me another four months or so, I think we’ll be ready to resume the offensive."

  "Remember what Napoleon said about time," White Haven cautioned, and the First Space Lord nodded.

  "Point taken, My Lord. But no one’s fought a war on this scale in at least three hundred T-years, and even then the distance scale was much lower. We’re sort of making up the rules for strategic deployments as we go, and so are the Peeps. For that matter, we know what our problems are, but let’s not make the mistake of assuming the bad guys don’t have problems of their own to offset ours."

  "Fair enough," White Haven agreed. He tipped his chair back again and sipped wine, frowning as he digested what he’d just been told. His brother watched him for several seconds; then he cleared his throat, and White Haven looked up questioningly.

  "You said you had two things you wanted to discuss with us," William reminded him. "Did we already cover the other one, as well?"

  "Hm?" White Haven frowned, but then his expression cleared, and he shook his head. "No. No, we didn’t actually." He brought his chair back upright and set his wineglass back on the desk. "I wanted to get the official Government impression of the consequences of Ransom’s death."

  "Ha! You and me both, brother mine," William replied sourly.

  "I take it from your response that the whole thing smelled as fishy to you people back home as it did to me?"

  "To put it mildly, yes." William glanced at Caparelli, then looked back at his brother. "ONI and Special Intelligence both agree that something about it wasn’t kosher, but of course they don’t agree on what that something was."

  White Haven swallowed a snort of laughter at William’s expression. The Office of Naval Intelligence and its civilian counterpart had a history of disagreeing with one another, and the turf battles when their areas of expertise intersected could be spectacular.

  "Would you care to elaborate on that?" he invited after a moment.

  "Well," William leaned back and crossed his legs, "they both agree she must have been dead for some time before the announcement. That ‘killed by enemy action while touring the front on Committee business’ is pure crap. We know exactly when and where we’ve knocked out Peep battlecruisers, and none of the dates we have match the one they’ve given. It’s a little more sophisticated than those ‘air car accidents’ the Peeps’ have always favored to explain away disappearances, especially when they’ve got some reason to want to obscure the exact time they disappeared someone, but it’s still a crock, and we know it. As for when she really died, as far as any of our analysts can determine, she hasn’t
been seen in public in months, and with that as a starting point, we’ve taken a very close look at the more recent HD imagery of her, as well. At least some of it was faked—and faked very well, I might add—but the earliest example we’ve been able to positively identify is only a couple of T-months old. She may have been dead longer than that, but we can’t be positive."

  "At least we know she was alive recently enough to murder Lady Harrington," Caparelli put in, and the raw, grating anger in his tone snapped White Haven’s eyes to him. The earl gazed at his superior for a handful of silent seconds, then nodded without any expression whatever and looked back to his brother.

  "Should I take it that the disagreement between ONI and SIS is over the reason the Peeps delayed admitting her death?" he asked.

  "You should," William agreed. "SIS thinks she was zapped as part of a personal power struggle between her and Saint-Just or, perhaps, her and the combination of Saint-Just and Pierre. Some of their more... creative analysts have actually raised the possibility that she was the senior inside member of the Leveler conspiracy and Saint-Just found out about it and had her popped. I personally find that a little hard to swallow, but it’s certainly not impossible, especially when you consider the sort of rhetoric she routinely pumped out. But if that was the case, or if it was simply a case of settling a personal rivalry, the Committee may have wanted to keep it quiet until the winners were confident that they’d IDed—and purged—any of her adherents.

  "ONI, on the other hand, is less certain about that. They agree that Ransom was a loose warhead and that deep down inside, at least, Pierre has to be mightily relieved that she’s gone. But they don’t think it was a personal power struggle or that Ransom had anything to do with the Leveler coup attempt. They think it was part of the same process which brought McQueen in as Secretary of War. Everyone knows how bitterly Ransom distrusted the Peep military, and McQueen’s reputation for personal ambition would practically make her a poster girl for Ransom’s paranoia. So the theory is that Pierre and Saint-Just had decided they absolutely needed a professional to run the military—as you suggested earlier, Hamish—and that McQueen’s suppression of the Levelers made her seem an attractive choice... to them. But not to Ransom. So either she tried something from the inside to stop the appointment, or else her ‘friends’ on the Committee figured she might decide to try something and chose to play safe by removing her."

  William paused and shrugged.

  "Either way, the Committee wouldn’t have wanted to let the word leak until what they considered the optimum time, hence the delay in announcing her death. As for its supposed circumstances, that’s clearly an attempt to paper over whatever intramural conflict led to her removal in the first place and simultaneously gain a little propaganda support for the war. ONI and SIS agree on that, as well, especially given Ransom’s continuing popularity with the Mob."

  "I see." White Haven rubbed his chin for a moment, then sighed. "I can’t say I was sorry to hear about her death," he admitted. In fact, I was goddamned delighted after what she did to Honor! "But I rather regret the potential consequences." William cocked his head questioningly, and the earl shrugged. "Remember what I said earlier about divided command structures, Willie. Saint-Just and StateSec were only part of the grit in their military machinery, and, frankly, Ransom was a lot bigger problem for them. Whether they recognized that and killed her to remove an obstruction or whether it was purely fortuitous, the fact remains that it’s going to make it a hell of a lot easier for McQueen to do whatever she was brought in to do. And that isn’t good from our viewpoint."

  He brooded pensively down at his blotter for another long moment, then shook himself and climbed out of his chair with a wry smile.

  "Well, I suppose that answers my questions, one way or another. But now, gentlemen, my staff and flag captain are waiting to brief you on Eighth Fleet’s status. I don’t suppose we should keep them waiting any longer than we have to, so if you’ll just accompany me?"

  He stepped around his desk and led the way from his day cabin.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  "And that’s the lead ship of our new SD class," High Admiral Wesley Matthews told his guests, waving with pardonable pride at the immense, virtually completed hull drifting beyond the armorplast view port. "We’ve got nine more just like her building as follow-ons," he added, and William Alexander and Sir Thomas Caparelli nodded with deeply impressed expressions.

  And well they should be impressed, White Haven thought, standing behind his brother and listening to Matthews’ description of the enormous activity going on here in Yeltsin’s Star’s Blackbird Yard.

  Of course, they haven’t seen the specs for the class yet, so they don’t really know how impressed they ought to be, he reminded himself wryly. I wonder how Caparelli will react when he does find out?

  The thought came and went, flickering through his brain almost like an automatic reflex without ever diverting his attention from the scene beyond the view port. He’d been here often over the last several months, yet the sights and energy of the place never failed to fascinate him, for Blackbird Yard was totally unlike the Star Kingdom’s huge space stations.

  For all the relative primitivism of its technology, Grayson had maintained a large-scale space presence for more than half a millennium. Not that it had been anything to boast about in the beginning. They’d had the capability—barely—to exile the losing side of their Civil War to the neighboring system of Endicott, but that was a hop of less than four light-years. Even to accomplish that much had required them to reinvent a cruder form of the Pineau cryogenic process and virtually beggar the war torn planet just to get less than ten thousand "colonists" across the interstellar divide. The strain of it had been almost intolerable for the Civil War’s survivors, and it had probably set Grayson’s efforts to exploit its own star system back by at least fifty years. Yet it had also been the only way to get the defeated Faithful (and their "doomsday bomb") off the planet, and so Benjamin IV and his government had somehow made it all work.

  But that had been six hundred years ago. Since then, and despite ups and downs—and one eighty-year period when the Conclave of Steadholders had been forced to fight bitterly against three Protectors in a row who, with a dogmatism truly worthy of their Neo-Luddite ancestors, had preferred to concentrate on "practical" planet-side solutions to problems and turn their backs on the limitless possibilities of space—the Graysons’ off-planet presence had grown prodigiously. By the time their world joined the Manticoran Alliance, the Grayson deep-space infrastructure, while almost all sublight and vastly more primitive than the Star Kingdom’s, had actually been almost the size of Manticore-A’s, with a far larger work force (almost inevitably, given their manpower-intensive technology base), and they had their own notions about how things should be done.

  "Excuse me, High Admiral," Caparelli asked in a suddenly very intense tone, "but is that—?" He was leaning forward, his nose almost pressed against the armorplast, as he pointed at the all but finished hull, and Matthews nodded.

  "She’s our equivalent of your Medusa —class," he confirmed with the broad smile of a proud father.

  "But how the devil did you get the design into production this quickly? " Caparelli demanded.

  "Well, some of our Office of Shipbuilding people were in the Star Kingdom working on the new compensator and LAC projects when the Medusa was first contemplated," Matthews said. "Your BuShips involved a couple of them—including Protector Benjamin’s brother, Lord Mayhew—in the planning process when they started roughing out the power-to-mass numbers for her impellers and compensator, and they just sort of stayed involved. So we had the plans by the same time your people did, and, well—" He shrugged.

  "But we only finalized the design thirteen T-months ago!" Caparelli protested.

  "Yes, Sir. And we laid this ship down a year ago. She should commission in another two months, and the other nine should all be completed within two or three months of her."

&nb
sp; Caparelli started to say something more, then closed his mouth with a click and gave White Haven a fulminating glance. The Earl only smiled back blandly. He’d passed on the information when it came to his attention the better part of nine T-months ago, but it had been evident from several things Caparelli had said that no one had routed a copy of White Haven’s report to him. Well, that was hardly the Earl’s fault. Besides, the shock of discovering just how far advanced the Grayson Navy really was ought to be good for the First Space Lord, he thought, and returned to his consideration of the differences between Grayson and Manticoran approaches to shipbuilding

  The biggest one, he thought as their pinnace drifted closer to the ship Matthews was still describing, was that Grayson yards were far more decentralized. The Star Kingdom preferred putting its building capacity into nodal concentrations with enormous, centralized, and highly sophisticated support structures, but the Graysons preferred to disperse them. No doubt that owed something to the crudity of their pre-Alliance tech base, he mused. Given how incredibly manpower-intensive Grayson shipbuilding had been (by Manticoran standards, at least), it had actually made sense to spread projects out (as long as one didn’t get carried away about it) so that one’s work force didn’t crowd itself. And one thing any star system had plenty of was room in which to spread things out.

  But even though the Graysons now had access to modern technology, they showed no particular intention to copy the Manticoran model, and as White Haven could certainly attest from personal experience—not to mention discussions with his brother, who ran the Star Kingdom’s Exchequer—there were definite arguments in favor of their approach. For one thing, it was a hell of a lot cheaper, both financially and in terms of start-up time.