Uncompromising Honor - eARC

by David Weber

  “Malachai, you’re the Permanent Undersecretary of information! You know, better than anyone else in this room, how easy it is to strip something out of its context and turn it into a soundbite that says exactly the opposite of what whoever said it actually meant. And that’s just what some bastard in Hypatia’s done with your and Nathan’s little conversational…faux pas.”

  Abruzzi had opened his mouth to respond. Now he shut it again, his expression thunderous, because Kolokoltsov was right. The Ministry of Information spent far more of its resources on “shaping the narrative”—what an earlier and more honest age might have called “producing propaganda”—than it ever did on straight news releases.

  “How the hell did anybody get their hands on it in the first place?” MacArtney demanded, glaring at Abruzzi with a certain self-righteousness. He wasn’t the one who’d just proclaimed the inviolability of their communications channels, after all.

  “If I knew that, whoever’s responsible for it would be roasting on a slow spit,” Kolokoltsov replied grimly. “All I know is that the latest courier boat from Hypatia came in about three hours ago, and your conversation—shorn of anything that could conceivably suggest it wasn’t a serious policy suggestion, or at least a serious consideration—had been on the boards for two days before it left. In those two days, according to Stephanos, it logged over nine hundred and seventy-two million hits. I’ve done the math, by the way. That works out to forty-nine percent of the total population of the star system, including every babe in arms. And for your information, that’s seventy-five percent of the adult population. To say it isn’t playing well with the voters would be something of an understatement, Nathan.”

  “Oh my God.” Quartermain’s tone couldn’t seem to decide between disgust, anger, and resignation. “So how bad is the damage, Innokentiy?” she sighed.

  “Well it isn’t good.” Kolokoltsov popped a data chip into the terminal in front of him and the header of a report appeared on his colleagues’ displays. “This is Nye’s initial take on it. He’s doing a more deliberate analysis, and the numbers may get a little better, but I doubt it’ll make much difference in the end. And the conclusion he’s reached is that what was going to be a squeaker that would probably go against us is in the process of turning into something just a bit more…emphatic. The word he used was ‘tsunami,’ actually.”

  “All over what couldn’t be more than three or four seconds of a com conversation?” Wodoslawski looked as if she would have liked to be incredulous.

  “Oh, it’s more than three or four seconds.” Kolokoltsov spared MacArtney and Abruzzi a fulminating glare, then looked at Wodoslawski. “It would seem there was quite a bit of ‘frustration venting’ in the conversation, and whoever handed it over to the Hypatian newsies must have edited all the choicer bits together, because the actual soundbite runs almost six minutes. Don’t misunderstand me. I’m not saying this is the only thing driving Hypatian public opinion. There were already a lot of negative factors in the mix, and we all know it. But it looks as if this could be the emotional trigger that turns a vote that already looked dicey into an outright disaster.”

  “Shit.” Omosupe Quartermain seldom used colorful language, but she’d clearly decided to make an exception, and Kolokoltsov didn’t blame her.

  With less than a third of Beowulf System’s population, and perhaps a fifth of its gross system product, Hypatia was on the small size for what was technically a Core System of the League. For that matter, as a full member system, Hypatia’s contribution to the Solarian League’s federal budget was limited, aside from the relatively modest duties levied on its interstellar shipping. It was a useful bit of cash flow, but there were probably a dozen Protectorate systems which contributed at least as much. So from that perspective, Hypatia’s potential defection was unlikely to make an already grim situation much worse.

  But Hypatia, like Beowulf, had been a founding member of the Solarian League when the League Constitution was proclaimed right here in Old Chicago seven hundred fifty-seven T-years ago last month. Not only that, the system was only forty-four light-years—less than six days, for a dispatch boat—from Beowulf and the Beowulf Terminus of the Manticoran Wormhole Junction. If Hypatia opted to secede and, even more disastrously, to throw in its lot with its longtime neighbors, trading partners, and friends, it would expand the “Grand Alliance’s” bridgehead at the very heart of the Solarian League dangerously. Worse, a successful secession—another successful secession, since Beowulf’s was a foregone conclusion as soon as the Beowulfers got around to holding their own vote—would go a disastrously long way toward validating the right to secede in the court of public opinion.

  And that could not be allowed.

  “Perhaps you can see now why I didn’t screen you about this,” Kolokoltsov observed. “In fact, I know it’s going to be an incredible pain, but in addition to assuming anything we say on our nice, secure com system is likely to be overheard and watching our tongues accordingly, I think any sensitive information will need to be couriered back and forth between us, at least for the next few days. For that matter, it’d probably be smart of us to handle really sensitive information that way for the foreseeable future.”

  “That’d make it almost impossible to coordinate properly,” Wodoslawski objected.

  “No, it won’t.” Kolokoltsov shook his head. “It’ll make it difficult, granted, but all of us—except you—have our offices here in George Benton. I don’t know how they got to Nathan and Malachai’s com conversation, but this conference room is only a lift shaft away from our private offices, and it’s shielded against every form of eavesdropping known to man. For that matter, so are our offices. I’ve already found you twenty-four thousand square meters of floor space here in the tower, and if you need it, we can free up twice that much in seventy-two hours. I know moving your entire staff over would be a pain in the arse, but I don’t really see an option if we’re going to keep you in the loop.”

  “You’re serious, aren’t you?”

  “Dead serious,” he said flatly. “Look, maybe this is an exercise in paranoia on my part, but we’re about to get handed our heads in Hypatia, people. We can’t—we just can’t—go on with this kind of crap hitting us in the face every other week. I’ve talked to my tech people, and they say that if we’re all here in the tower, they can run secure, shielded, hardwired com lines that could only be tapped with direct physical access to the cables. I know it sounds like Dark Ages technology, but if it’ll work, I don’t really give a damn how ‘antiquated’ it is. And if all the cable involved is here in the same tower, it’ll be a lot easier for us to make sure nobody’s getting that physical access to it.”

  Wodoslawski sat back, shaking her head, and Kolokoltsov couldn’t blame her. In truth, he wasn’t certain himself how much of his proposal was rational and how much was the product of his own increasing desperation. The worst thing about it, he thought, was that he proposed to turn Benton Tower into a fortress, and people living inside fortresses developed fortress mentalities. If he and his colleagues retreated into a bunker, even one as splendidly equipped as this one, it might encourage them to retreat into a deeper and deeper disconnect with the galaxy about them, as well.

  But where’s the option? he asked himself. Whether we like it or not, somebody hacked our coms, and none of our techs have found any fingerprints pointing at who it might’ve been or how the hell they did it. And I don’t have to explain all the implications to the others. They know as well as I do that if someone can hack our coms, God only knows what else they can break into! And really, the only one who’d be physically moving would be Agatá. The rest of us’re already in George Bentoon! For that matter, most of the ministries have been here since the day it was built, so it’s not even like the rest of the League will realize we’re forting up in the first place!

  No, they wouldn’t. George Benton Tower was indelibly associated in the public’s mind with the might and majesty of the League’s Federal G
overnment. Moving the other ministries out of George Benton would have generated far more speculation than moving Treasury into it. But he and his colleagues would know, and so would their most senior and trusted subordinates. And from there, the awareness would seep downward with the inevitability of a winter freeze in Tarko-Sale, his hometown in ancient Siberia.

  He looked around the shielded, guarded conference room and wondered how often his fellows reflected upon the name of the two-kilometer tall tower which housed the Solarian League’s heart and brain. Thought about the fact that it had been named for one of the dozen or so most famous human beings in history, the man most responsible, in many ways, for the League’s creation. The co-leader of the medical teams—the teams from Beowulf—which had preserved human life on Old Earth itself after the Final War. The man who’d seen the need for a coordinating authority that could span hundreds of light-years, recognized its necessity in the wake of the catastrophic damage he’d done so much to repair, and spent the last thirty-five T-years of his life bringing that authority into existence.

  The man whose distant descendent headed the Beowulf System government which was about to stab the Solarian League in the heart. Of course, he must have lirterally billions of “distant descendents” after the next best thing to eight hundred years, and it was only logical for them to be concentrated in Beowulf and its closest galactic neighbors. Yet it was bitterly ironic that even as Chyang Benton-Ramirez prepared to oversee the referendum which would supply the dagger, yet another of those descendents commanded the “Grand Fleet” which might well drive it home.

  It was, perhaps, fortunate so few Solarians were sufficiently aware of their own history to ask why that man’s descendents had chosen to destroy all he’d built.

  “All right,” Wodoslawski said at last. “My analysts and accountants need more space than we’ve got over at De Soto Tower, anyway. We’ve been looking at possible solutions for the last couple of years, really, in a desultory sort of way. For that matter, we’ve already considered moving into George Benton, and it looks like I can free up everything they need back in De Soto by moving my administrative personnel over here. That should at least keep it from looking like some kind of…panic reaction.”

  “And how long is it going to take to install these ‘hardwired’ coms of yours?” MacArtney demanded. For someone whose loose lips had contributed so much to the need for those selfsame coms, he sounded remarkably belligerent, Kolokoltsov thought.

  “They’re already running lines to all the offices here in the tower,” he replied. “It’d be faster to just reprogram the wall molycircs, but a lot less secure, so they’re running actual cable through the air ducts and service shafts. According to my security chief and the building executive, they should complete the installation within another eight days or so. After that, we can probably go back to electronic conferencing for everything but the most sensitive data.”

  “‘Probably,’” Abruzzi repeated sourly, then shrugged. “All right. I think you may be jumping at shadows—or, at least, closing the barn door after the cow’s left—but I also didn’t think a frigging joke with Nathan would turn Hypatia into a damned disaster, either! So I’m not going to tell you you don’t have a point, Innokentiy!”

  Kolokoltsov nodded and turned his gaze on MacArtney.

  “All right. All right!” The permanent senior undersecretary of the interior raised both hands. “If everyone else’s ready to go along with this, who am I to argue? And,” he added grudgingly, “Malachai’s right. If something he and I tossed off in a casual conversation can have the kind of effect your analyst’s describing, it’s probably time we all got paranoid as hell!”

  Not the most gracious assent in history, Kolokoltsov reflected, but he’d take it. Now if only he could figure out some way to toss MacArtney off the troika before he did something even more regrettable. Unfortunately, every single one of them knew where too many bodies were buried for the others to safely feed him—or her—to the wolves.

  “In the meantime, though, and while we’re here,” MacArtney continued, “what the hell are we going to do about Hypatia?” He looked around the table, his expression grim. “It’s bad enough we’re about to lose Beowulf, but at least where Beowulf’s concerned we’ve built the case that they must’ve decided years ago to throw in with the Manties’ imperialist ambitions. We haven’t done that in Hypatia’s case.”

  Personally, Kolokoltsov had distinct reservations about how well they’d “built the case” for Beowulf’s “long-planned treachery” against the League. God knew they’d given it their best shot, and the establishment newsies had embraced the narrative. But while the public opinion metrics (here in Sol, at least; trying to keep up with current public opinion in star systems hundreds of light-years distant was about as impossible as a task came) were favorable to the government’s actions so far, there was no guarantee they’d stay that way. And Beowulf had a tremendous amount of well-earned prestige within the League. Given time, that prestige was only too likely to reassert itself in the public’s mind, and that could be…unfortunate. Despite which, MacArtney had a point about Hypatia.

  Hypatia hadn’t been on their radar when they first began looking at other star systems which might follow Beowulf’s lead. It should have been, but the Hypatians had adopted a calm wait-and-see attitude which—he admitted it—he and his colleagues had misread as fundamental acceptance of the League’s indissoluble nature. Unfortunately, that had changed when the Manties leaked news of Operation Raging Justice to the media long before Massimo Filareta ever reached Manticore. Hypatia’s relations with Beowulf were closer than its relations with Manticore, but Hypatians had been marrying both Beowulfers and Manticorans for centuries. They hadn’t reacted well to the dispatch of hundreds of superdreadnoughts to attack Manticore—and several million of their relatives—without so much as a formal declaration of war. And once the possibility of secession had been mentioned, they’d moved forward far more quickly than anyone could have imagined, aided by a system constitution which made it easy to call snap referendums to approve—or disapprove—proposed government policies. Kolokoltsov doubted the Hypatian Constitution’s drafters had ever envisioned that provision being used for something like this, but their handiwork had let System President Adam Vangelis and his Attorney General, Thanos Boyagis, put the machinery into motion with astonishing speed.

  Hypatia would actually vote over a T-month before Beowulf, and there was little question that the outcome of the referendum would impact the Beowulf vote.

  It’s not going to change it, though, he reflected. There’s not a doubt in the universe which way Beowulf’s going to vote, and there hasn’t been from the beginning. What Hypatia will do, unfortunately, is to increase the margin in favor of secession, and probably by a lot. And it’ll also mean Hypatia will be the example all the hotheads in those Verge Systems cite when they start calling for their star systems to secede. Unless we can figure out a way to…defuse that particular threat, that is.

  He looked around the table again, thinking about the policy options Stephanos Nye had outlined in the conclusions section of his report. He’d provided half a dozen possible scenarios, but it was clear which one he favored, and Kolokoltsov wondered if the others would be as appalled by it as he was?

  And whether or not they’d find themselves endorsing it anyway.

  HMS Clas Fleming

  Prime Terminus

  Prime-Ajay Hyper Bridge

  “The really surprising difference is how much less…call it ‘cosmopolitan,’ I guess, than Manticorans they tend to be,” Sara Kate Lessem said from the display. “I have to say that’s not something I would’ve expected, and it took me a while to figure it out. But it finally came to me.” She shook her head. “They’re Solarians, and Solarians automatically know everything they need to know about the neobarbs inhabiting the outer dark beyond the League’s borders. So why bother to look for more data, far less open their minds to new opinions? And, to be fair,
even some of them who’ve spent their entire careers in the Navy haven’t seen anywhere near as many foreign star systems as our Navy personnel, much less our merchant spacers! For that matter, we see a lot more visitors from other star systems right here in Manticore than most Solarians ever see. So I suppose I can understand—in a way—that they never get exposed to anyone from outside their ‘bubble.’ But that doesn’t make it one bit less scary. If the people in the Solarian Navy are…unsophisticated enough, let’s say, to never even question the nonsense the Mandarins are spewing, how’s the Solarian woman-in-the-street supposed to realize it’s all lies?”

  Now that, Commodore Sir Martin Lessem reflected, pausing the letter for just a moment to refill his coffee cup, is an excellent summation of the problem, sweetheart. He smiled. I always knew you were a sharp one, despite the fact that you decided to marry me! Too bad I don’t have any better clue about the answer to your question than anyone else seems to have at the moment.

  He sipped coffee, gazing wistfully at his wife’s frozen image. At the moment, he and Cruiser Squadron 912 were 387.7 light-years (and forty-five days’ hyper-travel) from the Manticore System, and it was going to be a while before he got the chance to hold her again. Fortunately, letters were another matter—for the moment, at least. Despite the Prime System’s distance from Manticore, it was “only” twenty-nine days’ hyper-travel from Beowulf. As interstellar travel times went, that wasn’t especially bad. It wasn’t anything he’d call good, but he’d had to put up with far worse.

  Of course, that hadn’t been in the middle of a war against the largest star nation in human history. That put rather a different slant on things…and had quite a lot to do with how CruRon 912 came to be floating in interstellar dimness just over seven light-hours from the Prime System’s G0 primary.