by David Weber
Caitrin’s tone was far more acid than it had been, and her mother’s expression turned reproving. Not that she expected it to do much good. Sir Casper O’Grady, Earl of Mortenson, was not one of Caitrin Winton’s favorite people.
“Oh, don’t worry, Mom,” her daughter said now. “I promise to be polite—or moderately civil, at least—to him in public. But he keeps harping on that!”
“Yes, he does,” Samantha agreed, holding her daughter’s eyes. “Of course, he’s over seventy, isn’t he? And his attitudes were formed before prolong came along, too, weren’t they?”
Caitrin’s expression sobered. She looked back at her mother for a heartbeat or two, then nodded.
“Point taken, Mom,” she said much more quietly.
Roger sipped coffee, taking his time, letting the moment subside a bit before he lowered his cup again. Queen Samantha would be seventy in another T-year, herself . . . and she’d been far too old for prolong when it reached the Star Kingdom. It was as awkward as it was painful for any child to adjust to the thought that his parents had no more than ninety or a hundred years of life while he himself might well live twice or even three times that long. And it was awkward for the parents, too. Their attitudes and expectations had been shaped by the life expectancies they’d faced growing up. It was hard for many of them to stand back, realize how different their children’s perspectives had to be, and it was even worse in Mortenson’s case. He was a natural worrier, and Roger couldn’t remember the last time—or the first—he’d ever heard the Prime Minister crack a joke, but that might not be such a bad thing in a chief minister. Even if it was a pain in the ass to have Mortenson looking over his shoulder and pressing tactfully (or that was how the Prime Minister probably would have put it; Roger had rather a different perspective on it) now that he was forty-one T-years old—or would be tomorrow, at any rate—for him to “find a nice girl,” put aside his youthful enthusiasms like the Navy, and settle down to his real career in politics.
And while he was about it, produce an heir.
“I suppose I can’t really blame him,” Roger said now, setting his cup back on its saucer. “Hard to remember that, sometimes, but I do try, Mom. But I’m not really planning on becoming King for another—oh, thirty years or so, either—if it’s all right with you. And I’m not really interested in giving up the Navy just yet. Especially now.”
The atmosphere in the pleasant, sunlit dining room seemed to darken. Samantha sat back in her chair at the head of the table, and her treecat companion abandoned his own meal to flow down into her lap and croon to her softly.
“I’m doing all I can, Roger,” she said quietly.
“I know that, Mom.” Roger shook his head quickly. “And I know it might help in some ways to have me available to trot out for debates. But I’m not as good a horse trader yet as you are, and I think—at the moment, at least—that I can do more good arguing the case from inside the Service.” He made a face, then took a piece of bacon from his plate and offered it to Monroe, seated in his own treecat-sized highchair beside him. “If we’re really going to make the kinds of changes you and I both agree we’ve got to make, someone’s got to . . . convince the Navy’s senior officers it’s a good idea.”
“Have you tried a sledgehammer?” his sister asked more than a little bitterly. “It’s been six T-years since that first letter of yours in the Proceedings, Rog, and I haven’t noticed any radical realignments, have you?”
“At least some of them are starting to listen, Katie,” he replied, and watched her quick, involuntary smile as he used the nickname only he had ever applied to her. “I admit it’s an uphill fight, but since the Peeps finally started coming out into the open, a few of my seniors—and quite a few more of my contemporaries—are starting to actually think about it.” He smiled mirthlessly. “In some ways, the timing on Janacek’s response to that much-maligned letter of mine is working in our favor.”
Caitrin laughed. It was a harsh sound, but there was at least some genuine humor in it, her mother thought. And Roger had a point. In fact, he had a much better point than she might have preferred.
It was hard for a lot of people, even now, to accept what had happened to the Republic of Haven. Partly, she supposed, that was because it hadn’t happened overnight. In fact, it had been an agonizingly slow process, one drawn out for the better part of two T-centuries, long enough for it to turn into an accepted part of the backdrop of interstellar politics. And it had all been internal to the Republic, after all. If Havenite citizens wanted to reorder their political and economic systems, that was up to them and really wasn’t anyone else’s business. Unfortunately, the process—and its consequences—were no longer a purely internal matter. That minor change in the interstellar dynamic was (or should have been, anyway) becoming increasingly evident to anyone. Even her best analysts were still split over how and why it had happened, yet the consequences were clear enough for those who had eyes and were willing to use them. Unhappily, however, quite a few people weren’t willing to do that, and too many of those people wielded political power in the Star Kingdom.
In her more charitable moments—which were becoming steadily fewer and farther between—she actually sympathized with those who failed to see the danger. Haven a threat to interstellar peace? Clearly the entire notion was ridiculous! Why, for almost three T-centuries, the Republic of Haven had been the bright, shining light, the example every system in and out of the Haven Quadrant wanted to emulate. A vibrant, participatory democracy, a steadily burgeoning economy serving the most rapidly expanding cluster of colonies in the galaxy, and a growing, energetic star nation whose future seemed to hold no limits. That was how everyone, including the Star Kingdom of Manticore, had seen it for ten or twelve generations.
And then, somehow, it had all gone wrong.
The critical moment, she thought, hugging Magnus’ warm, comforting silkiness, had been the Havenite “Economic Bill of Rights” in 1680, with its declaration that all of the Republic’s citizens had an “unalienable right” to a relative standard of living to be defined and adjusted as inflation required by statute by the Havenite legislature. It had sounded like such a good idea. Who could possibly argue with it? Yet there’d been a subtext to it, an agreement struck between corrupt politicians, self-serving bureaucrats, an entrenched civil service, and the professional political operatives who controlled the “Dolist” voting blocs. One that gave those politicians a permanent grip on power, patronage, and office—and on all the wealth, graft, and special privileges that came with them—in return for giving the new class of “Dolist managers” the power to distribute that legally defined standard of living. What should have been—what had been sold to the Republic as—an exercise in political fairness had become a license to steal and to corrupt as the sprawling machinery of governmental bureaucracy turned into a machine that churned out money and personal license for the powerful and the politically connected.
The insidious rot of that corrupt bargain had overwhelmed Haven’s growing, energetic future and turned it into something ugly and dark and stagnant as an economic burden the Republic’s economy might have been able to bear under other circumstances turned into a fiscal black hole. Effective oversight of spending had become a bad joke as civil service posts became lucrative licenses to swill at the public trough, handed out to cronies and sycophants by lifetime officeholders in return for kickbacks and favorable, mutually back-scratching interpretations of an ever swelling mountain of regulations and rules. More and more of the ever-swelling government’s largess had been siphoned into fewer and fewer pockets through one bogus swindle after another even as that legally mandated standard of living required ever increasing expenditures, and deficit spending had become a way of life, gobbling up Haven’s legendary productivity as the Republic plunged steadily deeper and deeper into debt.
Perhaps the slide could have been arrested, the rot could have been cleaned away, but that would have required an open commitment to reform, a
willingness to admit it wasn’t working. Unfortunately, those who’d come to depend on the existing system as the only game in town wouldn’t have liked that very much, and no one could predict where that sort of reaction might lead. And worse even than that, admitting it wasn’t working would inevitably have led to a public look into the reasons it wasn’t, and too many powerful people and families had had far too much to lose to let anything like that happen.
Which meant they’d had to find another solution to their problem.
The galaxy at large knew very little about the top-secret meeting between the leaders of the Legislaturalists, the Republic’s de facto hereditary political rulers, and the handful of most powerful Dolist managers at Nouveau Paris’ Plaza Falls Hotel in 1791. Even Samantha knew far less about it than she wished she did, and it had taken years for Manticoran intelligence to piece together what she did know. There’d been a time when she’d wanted desperately to believe her gloomier analysts’ fears had been paranoid fantasies, but everything which had happened since, especially in the last fifteen or twenty T-years, convinced her otherwise. In fact, she was coming to fear that even their gloomiest predictions had fallen short of the reality.
Twenty T-years ago, possibly as little as ten, she might have been able to convince herself that wasn’t so. But the Havenite “Constitutional Convention” of 1795 had radically rewritten the Republic’s Constitution, ostensibly to fix the government overreach which had produced the crumbling economy but actually to create the People’s Republic. The new constitution had maintained the façade of democracy even while it limited eligibility requirements, office qualifications, and the franchise—officially in order to reduce voter fraud and restrict the political clout of special interest groups—so severely it had become literally impossible to elect a representative who wasn’t a Legislaturalist. It had also just happened to abridge the old Republic’s once robust guarantees of freedom of speech and assembly, although that clause had been very carefully worded. The actual language only authorized the government to punish “hate speech” and language which “attacked another’s dignity on the basis of political, religious, or economic differences.” Of course, the courts had taken a rather broader view of the government’s authority in that regard than the letter of the constitution might have suggested, but it had really only been officially codifying what had gradually become the normal, accepted state of affairs over the previous T-century.
And then, with the new constitution safely in place to rescue the Republic from insolvency and ruin, the first budget passed under it had actually increased the deficits, raising them to a level which could only lead to outright collapse within the next fifty T-years. Everyone had believed that eventually the Legislaturalists would be forced to bite the bullet, to reform their system before it fell apart under them, but the Legislaturalists had had another solution in mind, and the reason for those increased deficits had become clear as the Peoples Navy’s tonnage began to increase steadily.
It hadn’t happened overnight. In fact, they’d managed to hide their increased military spending well enough no one had even noticed for the first ten or fifteen T-years, and once people did start to notice, they’d managed to pass it off as a means to “prime the economic pump” through government funded “jobs production” and “skill training programs.” Oh, there’d been “wild rumors” about huge numbers of Havenite battleships being secretly constructed, but no one had believed them.
Despite everything, Haven was still the golden image. Its economic and fiscal woes had to be only temporary, just until the Republic caught its breath and got its house back in order. It was impossible for it to work any other way, and despite any transitory fiscal dislocations, its laudable commitment to economic fairness remained the model everyone else wanted to emulate.
Several of the other star nations in the Haven Quadrant had done just that, following the Republic into statist economies and guaranteed standards of living. And to be fair, most of those other star nations’ governments had avoided the death spiral of the People’s Republic for the simple reason that they’d been relatively honest governments. They’d managed to provide their own equivalent of the Havenite Basic Living Stipend without completely destroying their economies’ competitiveness and productivity, and they’d managed to pay for their social programs without plunging themselves ever further into debt, but they’d done it only by radically changing their spending goals and policies. Unable to pay for everything without destroying their own economies, they’d cut back even further on military spending, relying for protection against outside aggression on Haven, the traditional guarantor of interstellar peace and order in the Haven Quadrant. In fact, many of them had actually been relieved by the expansion of the Peoples Navy, since its ability to protect them provided such a hefty “peace dividend” for the rest of their national budgets.
Until 1846, that was.
Less than eighteen T-months after Roger’s letter to the Proceedings, the rest of the Haven Quadrant—or as much of it as was willing to face reality, at least—had discovered the real reason for the People’s Republic’s military buildup.
In the last four T-years, the People’s Republic had “annexed” no fewer than eleven independent star systems. Most of them had been Havenite daughter colonies, and the majority of them had “spontaneously sought” inclusion in the new, greater, interstellar People’s Republic of Haven. The thing that amazed Samantha was that there were actually people—quite a lot of them, in fact—who accepted the “spontaneous” nature of those star systems’ eagerness to join the PRH. Obviously even the analysts who’d worried about the Havenite military buildup had missed the Legislaturalists’ accompanying investment in espionage and subversion, although they hadn’t really needed all that much subtlety in many cases. A quiet ultimatum here, a private conversation between the Havenite ambassador and a system president there, an offhand reference to the heavy task forces waiting to sweep in and take control by force of arms if an invitation wasn’t forthcoming in another case, had proved quite effective.
It wouldn’t take very much longer for all of Haven’s daughter colonies to be gathered to her bosom, Samantha Winton thought grimly, her mouth tightening despite Magnus’ comforting, buzzing purr. And if there was anyone in the entire galaxy who believed the People’s Republic would stop then, she had some magic beans she wanted to sell them.
“We’re running out of time, Roger,” she told her son quietly. Monroe stopped nibbling on his bacon and looked up, grass-green eyes dark, ears flattening as he, too, sensed Samantha’s emotions. “Our Navy’s bigger and stronger than anything else in the Quadrant, but it’s not big enough to stand off the entire Havenite fleet, and I can’t get those idiots in Parliament to realize it!”
“I know.” Roger nodded, and it was a sign of his mother’s distress, he thought, that she should be telling him, of all people, that. “But that’s why I have to stay where I am. I can’t wrangle politics the way you can. I don’t know how—yet—and I don’t know where enough of the political bodies are buried. Worse, I’m only the Heir. Nobody in the House of Lords has to take me seriously yet any more than those fossilized jackasses in uniform do.”
“Maybe not,” Samantha said. “But however much all of us may think Sir Casper isn’t the sharpest possible stylus in the box, he’s a good man, and he does understand what we’re up against. That’s one of the reasons he’s as worried as he is. And I think he does have a good point, as much as you’re going to hate hearing this, about assignments that deploy you outside the home system.”
Roger stiffened. He’d finally attained lieutenant commander’s rank and command of his first hyper-capable ship. He was reasonably sure, despite his well-known attitude towards nepotism and “family interest,” that who he’d been born helped explain why that first hyper-capable command had been a modern destroyer instead of one of the RMN’s more elderly frigates, but he knew he’d done well in his two deployments to Silesia. Three pirates, one “p
rivateer,” and two slave ships would cause no more harm thanks to Captain Winton and HMS Daimyo.
“I said you weren’t going to want to hear it,” his mother continued, holding his eyes levelly across Magnus’ prick-eared head, “but I’m afraid we don’t have a choice. And part of the reason for that is the fact that you don’t have an heir of your own, aside from Caitrin, of course. And since she hasn’t married anyone yet, either,” the Queen gave her daughter an only half-humorous glare, “Sir Casper’s quite right to be worried about what might happen to the succession if you . . . suffered a mischief in Silesia.”
Roger looked rebellious, and Monroe’s tail twitched, his ears flat, as he tasted his person’s emotions. But the crown prince kept his mouth firmly closed, and Samantha smiled at him, hoping he saw her gratitude.
“You’re right, Mom,” he said finally. “I don’t like it one bit, but I don’t suppose there’s much point my arguing about it, is there?”
“No, there isn’t,” Samantha said. “I’m sorry, but it’s one of those unpleasant consequences of the nice house and all the people so eager to take care of us.” She smiled just a bit crookedly. “And I’m not asking you to resign your commission, or even to go onto half-pay. We just need to find something—something worthwhile, not just make work—you can do here in the home system. And I’m afraid that while you’re doing it, Sir Casper’s going to insist on your being a bit more hands-on in the political arena, as well.”
“Wonderful,” Roger muttered, his tone dark, although it seemed to his mother that his heart wasn’t fully in it.
“I know you don’t want me speaking directly about this to Abner Laidlaw or Sir Frederick,” she went on, “but there’s no point pretending this is really a ‘routine’ personnel decision.”
“No, I suppose there isn’t,” he agreed, trying not to shudder at the thought of his mother talking to Sir Frederick Truman, the Star Kingdom of Manticore’s First Space Lord. The uniformed head of the Royal Manticoran Navy was one of the “fossils” he’d mentioned earlier. Well into his seventies and facing mandatory retirement within the next four T-years, Truman wasn’t fond of people who rocked the boat and threatened his own orderly plans for the expansion of the Navy’s mission in Silesia. He’d be simply delighted to suggest—with infinite respect, of course—that perhaps the simplest solution would be for Crown Prince Roger to leave active duty entirely.
