Uncompromising Honor - eARC

by David Weber

  “What was it that old pre-space philosopher said?” MacArtney said with a harsh chuckle. “Something about it’s better to be feared than to be loved?”

  “I believe the actual quotation is ‘It is better to be feared than loved, if you cannot be both,’ Sir.” Kingsford stressed the conjunction. Slightly. “The philosopher in question was a gentleman named Niccolo Machiavelli,” he added as MacArtney’s eyebrows rose in surprise.

  And the only reason I signed off on Buccaneer in the first place is that you and Frontier Security have damned well made sure we can’t “be both” in the Verge, the admiral added with silent, bitter venom. I only hope to hell we aren’t busy making sure the Manties can.

  “At the moment, I’m afraid, we’ll have to settle for being feared,” Kolokoltsov said, as if he’d read the admiral’s mind. “And, that being the case, where are we on Phase Two?”

  “We’re into the prep stage, Sir,” Kingsford replied. “To be honest, the decision to divert additional battlecruisers and cruisers to…peacekeeping duties in the Protectorates is cutting into our readiness.”

  “You have how many battlecruisers?” MacArtney asked, bristling instantly. “Something over four thousand, I believe?”

  “Five T-months ago, Battle Fleet and Frontier Fleet between them had four thousand four hundred and twelve in active commission and four hundred and sixty undergoing routine overhaul,” Kingsford replied in a precise tone. “At that time—as Admiral Rajampet had mentioned upon occasion, I think—we were at least twenty percent understrength for our peacetime missions in the Verge and Fringe. Specifically, Mister MacArtney, in the Protectorates. Since that time, we’ve lost in excess of four hundred of those ships—and their crews—and given the obsolescence of our superdreadnoughts, virtually the entire burden of fighting this war is falling on that class of ships. We have an additional hundred and eighty or so in the Reserve and we’re mobilizing them as rapidly as possible, but they won’t even compensate for the ships we’ve lost since the shooting started.” He held MacArtney’s eyes coolly. “Under the circumstances, diverting those additional ships to the Protectorates has cut significantly into our readiness posture.”

  “Excuse me, Admiral, but the entire reason we have a Navy, is to—” MacArtney began hotly.

  “That’s enough, Nathan!” Kolokoltsov’s sharp tone drew an indignant look from the permanent senior undersecretary of the interior.

  “Nobody’s arguing that we can afford to let the Protectorates go,” Kolokoltsov said impatiently. “That’s the reason we’re fighting this thing in the first place instead of just taking our ball and going home. But the Admiral needs to be able to tell us the truth, whether we want to hear it or not, and it’s not his responsibility to justify how we got into this mess in the first place. It’s ours.”

  MacArtney locked eyes with him for a moment, then inhaled sharply and looked back at Kingsford.

  “Innokentiy’s right, Admiral.” It sounded grudging, but he didn’t flinch. “We don’t need to take out our frustration on you for a situation that was none of your making.”

  It wasn’t exactly an apology, Kingsford reflected, but it would do until something better came along.

  “I can certainly understand your frustration, Sir,” he said out loud. “Trust me, we have quite a bit of that over at the Admiralty right now, too.”

  “I can imagine.” For a change, MacArtney’s smile looked completely genuine.

  “Given what you’ve just said about force availability, how badly is Phase Two likely to be delayed?” Kolokoltsov asked, turning his attention back to the admiral.

  “That’s difficult to say, Sir.” Kingsford shrugged. “Our force posture is changing daily, of course. We’d demobilized most of the remaining superdreadnoughts and redistributed their crews to the battlecruisers and lighter units comoing out of the Reserve—and to serve as cadre for the new-build battlecruisers as quickly as we can get them built. I’ve ordered that process reversed—enough, at least, to fully crew a hundred and fifty or so SDs. Deploying wallers for routine system security duties is wasteful, to say the least, especially from a manpower perspective, but one of them ought to be impressive as hell out in the Protectorates, and using them to ride herd on our more restive systems will let us recall the battlecruisers we’ve already deployed. Since they now constitute our primary striking force, I’ve got to be able to concentrate them closer to hand. It would help, to be honest, if I could stand down the planning and prep for Operation Fabius.”

  “I think that may be out of the question, Admiral.” Kolokoltsov’s expression was troubled. “If making a point about Hypatia was important, it’s likely to be even more important to make one in Beowulf’s case.”

  And just how well did that “point” work out in Hypatia, Mister Permanent Senior Undersecretary? Kingsford thought bitingly.

  “Sir, with all due respect, Fabius would be a death ride.”

  “That’s not the way you seemed to feel a month or two ago, Admiral,” MacArtney pointed out.

  “A month or two ago, Sir, I hadn’t had the opportunity to study the intelligence reports which have come across my desk since. Nor had I had the opportunity to evaluate what happened to Vice Admiral Hajdu. I remind you that there were no fixed defenses in Hypatia and, so far as we know, every missile they fired came out of the internal magazines of cruisers.” Kingsford shook his head. “If Beowulf is covered by superdreadnoughts and pre-deployed heavy missile pods, we’d be lucky to get recon drones close enough to locate targets for even a Parthian launch, much less actually get the birds away.”

  MacArtney looked thunderous, but Kolokoltsov raised a placating hand.

  “No one wants to send the Navy on any ‘death rides,’ Admiral. And, to be honest, I think that for the moment we might want to delay implementation of Phase Two of Buccaneer, as well. What we’ve already accomplished is having a significant effect on Core World public opinion. All of Malachai’s polls agree on that point. And the Manties’ losses are a big part of that.”

  Really, Mister Kolokoltsov? And just what “Manty losses” would those be? Kingsford wondered. The ludicrously inflated Allied losses appearing in the official news releases were particularly galling to the man whose men and women had paid such an exorbitant price in blood for the Manties’ actual losses.

  “Under the circumstances,” Kolokoltsov continued, “I think it might be advisable to…postpone Phase Two.”

  “I won’t pretend a pause wouldn’t be welcome, Sir. It would give us time to build up our stores of the new Cataphracts, and I have a message from Admiral Kindrick about a new weapon system she wants to show me out at Ganymede. The last thing anyone needs to do is to start believing we can come up with a miracle weapon by just snapping our fingers. On the other hand, Technodyne’s R&D people seem to think this one—they call it ‘Hasta’—may represent a significant enhancement of our combat power, and Kindrick concurs. Given how skeptical of Technodyne’s claims she tends to be, that suggests there may really be something to their claims this time around.

  “A hiatus in Buccaneer would give me more time to evaluate whatever it is they’ve come up with and to reorganize our deployments. At the moment, we’re still badly off-balance, and the diversions to reinforce the nodal pickets covering both the Protectorates and our frontier with Talbott are only making that worse. The Manties’ sezure of so many wormholes is playing as much hell with our naval movements as it is with merchant shipping, and what should be routine deployment orders are…a bit more complicated than they used to be.” He grimaced at his own massive understatement. “If I can get all the Phase One units back to base and do a little judicious rearrangement, I can build much more balanced task forces for Phase Two if and when we resume Buccaneer.”

  “I can see a lot of merit to doing all that, Innokentiy,” Wodoslawski said, and Quartermain nodded her head emphatically.

  MacArtney—predictably—looked rebellious, but Abruzzi finally nodded, as well, albeit wit
h less enthusiasm than Quartermain.

  “So can I,” he said. “At the least, it’ll give us the opportunity to massage the message we already have out there. It’ll let me hear back from focus groups in at least the closer Core Systems, too. Boundary, Faraday, Sebastopol, Lunacy—some of the others.” He twitched an unhappy frown. “I hate how fast this whole thing is moving. There’s just not time to do enough opinion sampling to establish real trend lines anywhere except right here in Sol, and this time I’m afraid we need to reach a lot broader audience than usual.”

  Now, that was a refreshing admission, Kingsford thought. For as long as he could remember, no one in the federal government had given much of a damn for public opinion outside the Sol System. In fairness, most of the Core World member systems—the only ones that had counted, when one came down to it—didn’t much care about federal policy. They were insulated against its bureaucratic intrusiveness, so the only opinions that really mattered when it came to formulating those policies were those of the professional governing class and those who made their living from the government, in one way or another.

  To be fair, thinking “inside the Kuiper Belt,” as a Beowulfan newsie—who’d been almost as annoying in his time as Audrey O’Hanrahan was in hers—had labelled it over two T-centuries ago, worked both ways. The people inside it didn’t worry about anyone outside it; too many of the people outside it never gave a single thought to what went on inside it; and he’d been just as submerged in that mentality as any civilian bureaucrat. Well, maybe not quite that deeply, he amended. After all, he and the Navy had been responsible for enforcing federal policy—outside the Core, at least—which meant they’d had to be aware of its real-life consequences. But he’d never given any more thought to protesting that policy than any of those fat-and-happy Core World civilians.

  Until now.

  “So, we’re agreed about temporarily halting Phase Two?” Kolokoltsov looked around the conference room until everyone, including MacArtney, had nodded, then turned back to Kingsford.

  “I think that’s all we really needed to talk about today, Admiral. Thank you for coming and for being your usual clear-spoken self.”

  “It’s what you pay me for, Sir.”

  Kingsford smiled, but he didn’t climb out of his chair yet, and Kolokoltsov arched one eyebrow.

  “If I may, I just wanted clarification on one point, Sir,” the admiral said.

  “Which point would that be Admiral?”

  “Fabius, Sir.” Kingsford shrugged. “It would help my redeployments even more if I could take Fabius off the front burner. It’s using up a lot of staff time over at Strategy and Planning, and trying to build up the reserve for it is tying down over two hundred battlecruisers that aren’t available for use anywhere else. And, as I’ve just explained, barring some totally unforeseen technological development, our ability to execute a Buccaneer-style attack on Beowulf is effectively nonexistent.”

  “No,” Kolokoltsov said firmly, and shook his head when Kingsford opened his mouth again.

  “I understand your point—your points, plural, I should say, Admiral. And I fully accept their validity. But I’m afraid there may be circumstances under which we’d have no choice but to commit to Fabius, despite our probable losses and even if the prospect of success was…dim. I know you don’t want to hear that. For that matter, I don’t want to say it, and I pray we’ll never have to do it, but the possibility does exist. So I’m afraid we need a plan for it, and I’m sure you’ll agree that we also need to continuously update that plan in light of anything we learn about the enemy’s capabilities—or vulnerabilities—and in light of any of those ‘unforeseen technological developments’ you just mentioned. If we have to do this in the end, if we have to send your spacers out on a forlorn hope, they have to at least go with the best, most comprehensive battle plan we can possibly give them.”

  SNS Maya Sector Bureau

  City of Shuttlesport

  Smoking Frog System

  Maya Sector

  “So you want me to believe my ace reporter—the guy who taught me everything I know, I think you’ve been known to suggest upon occasion—doesn’t have a clue what this is all about?” Laura Lochen tipped back in her chair, her heels propped inelegantly on her desk. An enormous Beowulf Manx cat, who rejoiced in the improbable name of Ziggy, lay curled on her blotter, rumbling a purr that threatened seismograhs all over the city of Shuttlesport, and the tumbler in her hand was half-filled with amber liquid. Fifteen minutes ago, it had been completely filled. “Is that what I’m supposed to believe? Tell me it ain’t so!”

  “At the risk of tarnishing my halo,” Christopher Robin replied, reaching for the bottle which had been three quarters full of the same amber liquid, “I have no idea at all. Zip. Nada. Nichts. Zilch. Zero. Rien. Ingenting. Ničego. Not a—”

  “Oh, shut up!” Lochen told him with a laugh. “I swear to God, Chris, you spend more time dredging up obscure languages than anybody else I know. And I also know you only do it to be irritating. At which, may I say, you succeed admirably.”

  “Why, thank you, Boss!” Robin was ninety-seven T-years old, twice Lochen’s age, but she was the Solarian News Services bureau chief here in the Maya Sector, whereas he was simply her senior reporter.

  Which suited him just fine, he thought, pouring more Glenfidich into his glass, then recapping the bottle and setting it back on the desk between Ziggy and Lochen’s left heel. She was young, sharp, and obviously on her way up, whereas the Maya Bureau was way out in the sticks, by SNS’s standards, definitely still in the minor leagues. But that also made Maya an excellent place for future big-league stars to gain experience and seasoning, and that was exactly what Lochen was doing. Personally, he gave her three more years—five, tops—before the home office sent her on to bigger and better things.

  He’d miss her, when that happened, but he wouldn’t envy her. For himself, Robin found Smoking Frog a pleasant beat, far removed from the Core World cesspools he’d covered as a brash young newsy. He wouldn’t go so far as to say he was in his sunset years, but he had fewer ulcers and slept far better than he had when he’d been considered one of Old Chicago’s top half dozen political reporters. These days, he regarded himself almost more as a coach than a player, somebody who’d made his mark as a starter in the majors and now was content to pass his experience along to the next generation before the fresh line of warriors took up the battle in his place.

  He suspected the home office thought of him that way, too—whenever it happened to think of him at all—given the number of younger, upward-bound newsies like Lochen it kept sending out to Maya. He couldn’t think of any other reason for it to keep cycling people as good as she was through Smoking Frog. For the last several T-decades, the Maya Sector had been about as quiet and orderly as it was possible for a Protectorate sector to be, notable primarily for the dearth of exciting news it generated.

  Up until the recent excitement over Congo and Torch, at any rate, and as far as he could tell, nobody in the home office had been especially interested in the reportage Lochen and her people, including one Christopher Robin, had produced on that.

  Probably killed it because they didn’t want to be accused of giving the Ballroom good press, he thought now. Just like them. Lord knows I hated the contortionist act Editorial insisted on when I was covering Old Chicago. Doesn’t look like it’s gotten any better since, either. Especially with all this crap about the Manties!

  After twenty-three T-years watching the Star Kingdom of Manticore, the People’s Republic of Haven, and Erewhon from uncomfortably close range, Christopher Robin knew what he thought about the allegations of Manty imperialism and warmongering. Unfortunately, Malachai Abruzzi had made the League’s official position on those issues crystal-clear, and SNS wasn’t going to buck Education and Information. The editorial board probably wouldn’t have disputed Abruzzi’s version at the best of times. They certainly weren’t going to do it at a time like this.

 
; But at least I don’t have to add any fuel to Malachai’s bonfire, he reminded himself. He’d known the current permanent senior undersecretary of information back when Abruzzi had been only a particularly ambitious and unscrupulous young aparatchik, and the man hadn’t improved with age. I meant it when I told Laura I don’t know what Barregos is up to. Doesn’t mean I don’t know he’s been up to something for the last few T-years, though. I guess somebody who still thought of himself as a real reporter would’ve dug up all the bodies and dumped them in the middle of the town square just to run up the notches on his pulser while he watched the fireworks. That’s what a good, crusading muckraker does, isn’t it? But with the entire galaxy going up in flames, I will be damned if I pile on. Besides, it’s Barregos.

  He’d been astounded when he realized how much that last fact weighed with him, because he couldn’t remember the last time he’d genuinely admired a Solarian politician. On the federal level, at least; there were probably at least a half-dozen—maybe even a full dozen—honest local politicians in various individual system governments, although he reserved judgment on that. His time covering politics in the League’s capital city had only refined, tempered, and polished his contempt for the career political bureaucrats who ran it, and he’d learned far too much about the Office of Frontier Security along the way. Yet Oravil Barregos, not simply a career bureaucrat but an OFS bureaucrat, had actually earned his admiration and respect. He’d given the people of the Maya Sector good governance—honest governance, for that matter, when the best anyone had a right to expect out of an OFS governor was that he’d be an efficient administrator while he stole everything that wasn’t nailed down.

  Christopher Robin wasn’t about to nominate Barregos for sainthood, and he recognized someone who enjoyed the exercise of power when he saw it. God knew he’d covered enough of them in Old Chicago, and most of them had enjoyed their power because of the perks that came with it. Because of the way the monumentally corrupt system churned out wealth, privilege, and ego-polishing affirmation of their right to power. Yet there truly were some people who enjoyed it simply because that was what they were really good at, because they knew they could do it better than ninety percent of the human race and they needed an avocation that challenged them. And there were even some, although they were the rarest subspecies of all, who enjoyed it because it gave them the chance to serve their communities. To make those communities better places to live, not worse.