Uncompromising Honor - eARC
Page 92
“Fourth, that constitution will guarantee the right of any present member of the Solarian League to leave the League. It will dissolve the Protectorates. It will return ownership of all property of any sort whatsoever it or any private Solarian entity may control in any star system of the Protectorates to the government and citizens of that star system. It will disband the Office of Frontier Security. And it will create a process and an established procedure by which any present or future member system of the Solarian League may legally secede upon the vote of three quarters or more of its population. And it would be wise of that constitution to take cognizance of the fact that the Alliance will stand sponsor to those secession votes and support their outcomes.”
She paused once again and squared her shoulders.
“I have communicated the Alliance’s terms and conditions publicly, so that there can be no misunderstanding. So that no one like Malachai Abruzzi can distort them, lie about them. And I also inform you today that the Alliance will see to it that those demands and conditions are met.
“We will not put armed forces on Old Earth. We will not invade any of the League’s member worlds. We will not send our personnel to take the Mandarins into custody. We will not threaten the life of anyone on any League planet.
“We have taken no civilian lives here in the Sol System. We will continue to avoid the infliction of mass casualties. But if these terms are not accepted, if the motion to assemble a constitutional convention has not cleared the Assembly, within one month, I will divide Grand Fleet into four taskforces, and those taskforces will proceed to the next four wealthiest star systems in the Solarian League. When they reach their destinations, they will do to those star systems what I have done today to yours. And at the end of another month, if these terms still have not been accepted, they will move to the next four wealthiest star systems. And the next four. They will continue doing so until our conditions are accepted…or there are no more industrialized systems in the Solarian League.”
She let the threat lie before them, cold and stinking of danger, and then she inhaled deeply.
“Those are the Alliance’s terms. The choice to accept or reject them is yours. I advise you to choose wisely.
“Harrington, clear.”
George Benton Tower
City of Old Chicago
Sol System
Solarian League
“—and the Assembly will never give in!” Nathan MacArtney insisted hotly. “Roll over and play dead for an ‘alliance’ of neobarbs who just totally destroyed Sol’s economy?! Who’ve threatened to treat Navy ships as pirates and massacre their personnel?! The delegates will never agree to that!”
“Nathan’s right.” Malachai Abruzzi’s voice was harsh, his eyes glittering. “We need to fight on. We’re closing the technological gap, and they know it. That’s the real reason they were desperate enough to try this ‘Operation Nemesis’ shit! They know damned well that we didn’t kill all those civilians in Beowulf—if anyone killed them; I’m not at all sure they were killed in the first place!—but they’re using it as an excuse, and sooner or later, everyone in the League will realize that’s all the hell this is. If they’re stupid enough to threaten the industrial capacity of every Solarian star system, they’ll create so much hatred, so much resentment, public opinion will demand we burn their systems to the ground and sow the ruins with salt! We’ll turn them into bad memories, and—”
Innokentiy Kolokoltsov tuned them out. He sat at the head of the conference table, and for the first time in his long life, he genuinely had no idea what to do next. Agatá Wodoslawski wasn’t present, and he wondered where she was. Perhaps she believed she could find a bolthole somewhere, a way to evade the fate Harrington had decreed for them. A place to hide.
God knew they could all use one.
But there’s not one. Not one that’s deep enough, anyway, he thought. And especially not since Harrington laid it all out on the public boards that way. There’s no one in the entire star system who doesn’t know precisely what the “Alliance’s” conditions are. Or who they blame for all of this.
Was it remotely possible, he wondered, that the Manties had been right all along about the existence of the “Mesan Alignment”…or something like the “Alignment,” at least? Could it be that they’d actually been telling the truth—as they understood it, at least—in all those diplomatic notes, all those protests he’d so blithely disregarded?
He didn’t know the answers to those questions, and if he didn’t, then how could the man in the street, or even an Assembly delegate, know them?
The answer to that question, at least, was childishly simple: they couldn’t, and it didn’t matter a single, solitary damn.
They couldn’t know whether or not the Manties were telling the truth, no. But they did know whose heads the Manties had chosen to demand. They did know who the Manties blamed.
And they knew who they had to hand over to prevent the Manties and their friends from wrecking the Solarian League from one end to the other.
The only good thing was that Harrington had given them a month. Kolokoltsov knew damned well it wasn’t going to take that long for the citizens of the Sol System to decide what they were going to do, but at least they had a little time. Maybe there really was a bolthole they could reach. Maybe—
The conference room door opened abruptly, without warning, and his head snapped up as a Gendarmerie brigadier, accompanied by a Gendarmerie lieutenant colonel and a Marine major walked through it unannounced. He opened his mouth to demand an explanation, then froze as a dozen assault rifle-armed gendarmes and Marines in light body armor followed on their heels.
“What’s the meaning of this?!” MacArtney demand was hot, fierce…and frightened.
“My name is Gaddis,” the brigadier said flatly. “This is Lieutenant Colonel Okiku and Major Tarkovsky. We’re here to place you under arrest.”
“Arrest?!” MacArtney surged to his feet, pounding both fists on the conference table, his face dark with fury. “We’ll have you court-martialed! We’ll have you shot for mutiny! You have no authority, no—!”
“We have all the authority we need,” Gaddis’s cold tone cut across MacArtney’s fiery indignation like a sword. “It comes from Admiral Winston Kingsford and Deputy Attorney General Marie-Claire Rorendaal.” McArtney’s mouth snapped shut, and Gaddis’s eyes glittered. “Attorney General Rorendaal, on the basis of information and evidence laid before her, has authorized your arrest for conspiracy, treason, and mass murder. Given the…uncertain state of the civilian government and its agencies, she’s formally requested that Admiral Kingsford and the Navy oversee that arrest.”
It was suddenly very, very quiet in the conference room, and Gaddis’s smile was a vibro blade.
“Admiral Kingsford, in turn, deputized me. I’m afraid he couldn’t be here himself, much as he would have liked to be, because his pinnace is currently en route to HMS Imperator where, on behalf of the Solarian League, he will formally accept the Grand Alliance’s terms.”
Three men and one woman, who up until that moment had been four of the five most powerful people in the Solarian League, stared at him in stunned silence, too shocked even to think, far less protest. Gaddis looked at them for a moment, then turned to Okiku and Tarkovsky.
“Take them away,” he said.
MARCH 1923 POST DIASPORA
King Michael’s Tower
Mount Royal Palace
City of Landing
Manticore Binary System
Star Empire of Manticore
“So it looks—so far—like things are going about as well as they could,” Prime Minister Grantville said. He sipped whiskey and shook his head.
“I can’t begin to count all the ways this could still go south on us, and I wish to hell we still had Tony to advise us, but I think Carmichael’s settling in as Foreign Secretary. He probably knows the Sollies even better than Tony did, and he’s pretty damn confident it’s going to hold up.”
“That kind of stupid deserves to be culled before it reproduces, Alley,” Jacques Benton-Ramirez y Chou, the newly named Beowulf Director of Defense, said flatly. “Unfortunately, none of the people who currently feel that way are quite stupid enough. They’re not going to poke their heads out of hiding as long as my long, tall niece here is waiting to whack them right off.”
He smiled at Honor with fierce approval. He was still in a gravity float chair, and would be for at least another three or four weeks. His brother-in-law had a pronounced tendency to keep a close eye on him—which, in fact, Commodore Harrington was doing at that very moment—but he was very much a going concern again, and so was Bark Chewer’s Bane. Now the treecat yawned, baring needle-sharp canines in Jacques’s lap, but Honor shook her head as she bounced Katherine very gently on her knee.
“I’m done whacking off heads,” she said, bending over to plant a kiss on the part of the little girl’s hair. Then she turned her head and smiled at Hamish, sitting in the chair beside hers while Nimitz and Samantha stretched across the chair backs, before she looked back at her uncle. “Besides, it sounds like I won’t have to.”
“No, you won’t,” Elizabeth Winton told her with a warm smile. “I think you’ve done just about all of that we’re going to need for a while.”
Honor nodded, making no effort to conceal her relief.
The Solarian Assembly was furious, and it wasn’t making much effort to hide that fury, but it was also honoring the terms Winston Kingsford had accepted in the Solarian League’s name. The new Constitutional Convention had been officially seated on the last day of February. Not all of its delegates had arrived yet, and it was still very much at the setting-up stage, but all their intelligence sources suggested that the convention meant business. Despite its resentment of the League’s ignominious defeat, its members seemed to genuinely understand why they were there. More to the point, whether they chose to admit it or not, they knew the task to which they’d been called was centuries overdue. And with the Mandarins’ disastrous example so fresh in their memory, it was unlikely they’d repeat the same mistakes.
Of course, she reflected with the resignation of someone who loved history, that just means they’ll find other mistakes to make. They’re human beings, and the two things humans make are tools…and mistakes. But sometimes we get stuff right, too, and there are some really good models out there if they’re only willing to do the research. I guess we’ll have to see about that.
Actually, she reminded herself, the odds were better for the Sollies than for some other constitution-writers, because they had a pretty demanding editor looking over their shoulders. The Grand Alliance had meant it when she told the Solarian public the Allies didn’t care what form of government the League adopted, but it had also meant it when she told them that whatever form they adopted, elected officeholders would exercise the decision-making power…and be held accountable for those decisions. That and the secession provision were nonnegotiable, from the Allies’ perspective, and the hundred or so ships-of-the-wall still riding Old Earth orbit were a silent, pointed reminder to that effect.
The situation in the Protectorates promised to be more complicated, and probably ugly. In some instances—like Chotěboř, Seraphim, Włocławek, Mobius, and Swallow—the local star systems looked to be adjusting well, with a minimum of bloodshed and civil unrest. In other cases…not so much. There were a lot of scores to pay off out there in the Fringe, especially on the planets whose native oligarchs had been deepest in OFS’s pocket, and OFS wasn’t going out of its way to engineer any soft landings. In fact, some OFS governors and managers were clearly determined to make the entire process as ugly as they possibly could.
And it’s our fault, too, she admitted unflinchingly. We knew a lot of this would happen when we issued the demand. But I honestly don’t see any other way we could have gone. If we hadn’t demanded Frontier Security’s total disbandment, something that big, with so many people in other people’s pockets, would have hung on, claiming it was “winding down as quickly as possible,” for decades. Maybe even longer.
Quite a few Manticoran politicians argued that the Star Empire had a moral responsibility to provide the stability the ex-Protectorates needed. That, as the creator of the power vacuum, the Grand Alliance was the only force capable of filling it. Part of Honor wanted—badly—to endorse that argument. She was a historian, and specifically a military historian, and she knew how poorly it was going to end in some of those star systems. She didn’t want to see that…and, she knew, she wanted to avoid the moral guilt for having allowed it to happen.
But the last thing the galaxy needed was for the Grand Alliance to simply replace Frontier Security. And the last thing the Grand Alliance needed was to turn into Frontier Security. The Office of Frontier Security had started with the best of intentions, and it had taken a while for it to warp and corrode. But it had happened, and Honor Alexander-Harrington had no desire to see her star nation—either of her star nations—start down that dark and twisty road.
Besides, there’s such a thing as independence and maturity. Star nations have to learn to walk, just like anybody else, and they need to learn to stand on their own two feet. We won’t do them any favors by “casting a protective wing” over them if it prevents them from learning both those things.
And it wasn’t like the Grand Alliance was simply going to walk away. It had no intention of intervening to impose outside solutions, but it was prepared to trade with any star system, support any legitimate government, extend economic support and military aid as trading or treaty partner. And it was prepared to whack any hands that got too greedy and grasping where their neighbors’ toys were concerned. No doubt there would be an upsurge in piracy and warlordism, but the Royal Manticoran Navy had cut its eyeteeth in the Silesian Confederacy. Any newly independent star systems who were inclined to emulate their erstwhile OFS masters would discover the RMN and its allies had a short way with freebooters and would-be conquistadors. Speaking of which—
“I had a letter from Tom yesterday,” she said, looking at Elizabeth, who leaned back on an old, worn, sinfully comfortable couch beside Prince Consort Justin while Ariel and Monroe drowsed with the blissful limpness of treecats stuffed with far too much celery.
“Did you?” Elizabeth asked tranquilly.
“Yes. He said something about ‘making the Alliance permanent.’” She regarded her monarch thoughtfully. “It wouldn’t happen you—and, of course, my esteemed brother-in-law,” she added, looking pointedly at Grantville “—know what he was talking about, would it?”
Elizabeth glanced at Grantville. The prime minister looked back at her for a moment, then shrugged, and the empress returned her gaze to Honor.
“Actually, it would happen I do. I just wasn’t planning on discussing it with you yet. Not until you come back from Grayson, anyway.”
“Oh?” Honor raised an eyebrow, looking rather more intently at her monarch, and her tone might have held just the slightest edge of suspicion.
“It’s fairly straightforward, really,” Elizabeth said. “The problem Eloise and I see is how long the People’s Republic of Haven and the Star Kingdom of Manticore spent being enemies. I think we’re probably past the worst of that, but old memories die hard—especially in a civilization that has prolong—and even those who don’t actively cherish old animosities don’t have a very deep reservoir of what you might call warm and fuzzy memories. Once upon a time the Star Kingdom and the Republic had just that, but that was before the Legislaturalists. We’ve got some new ones we can build on, but there’s a genuine danger zone between where we are now and where we need to be. The fact that a lot of people see the way we cleaned the Solarian League’s clock as proof that we’re the new-model ‘invincible star nation’
isn’t calculated to help me and Elizabeth sleep soundly at night, either.” She grimaced. “You and Hamish are the historians, but I’ve read a little history myself. If there’s anything in the universe more dangerous than complacency, I don’t have a clue what it might be.”
“There isn’t anything—outside political or religious fanaticism, anyway,” Honor said glumly, hugging Katherine against her chest and resting her chin lightly on the crown of her daughter’s head.
“And it’s not made any better by the fact that you brought home everything in the Solarian League Navy’s databanks.” Elizabeth sighed. “Everybody knows you got it, too, so the complacency brigade is sitting around in a blissful haze contemplating the fact that we know exactly what the League was up to and, therefore, what it’s capable of.”
“They do remember Operation Thunderbolt, don’t they, Your Majesty?” Alfred Harrington asked. “I seem to remember that the despised Peeps managed to overcome a fairly severe technological deficit.”
“Honestly, Commodore Harrington, how could you even imagine I’d be be so crass and crude as to point that out to them?”
The irony in Elizabeth’s tone could have turned Jason Bay into a desert, and Alfred shook his head with a snort of disgust.
“Fortunately, what Her Majesty is calling the ‘complacency brigade’ is a distinct minority at the moment,” Grantville said. “And the same is true—at the moment—for the people who don’t see any reason the Republic and the Star Empire need to stay focused and on the same page. What Her Majesty and President Pritchart have been discussing is how we might go about keeping things that way.”
“And you’ve come up with…?” Honor raised both eyebrows at him, and he nodded in Elizabeth’s direction, obviously returning the thread to her.
“We’re not worried at all as long as Eloise is in office,” Elizabeth said. “She and I understand each other, and we intend to stay in very close touch—and Benjamin Mayhew intends to stay in the mix, as well as Oravil Barregos. Unfortunately, she won’t be in office forever. In fact, the Havenite Constitution limits her to no more than three successive terms.” The empress grimaced. “I think that needs to be changed, and I think some of the Constitution’s other term-limit aspects—especially the clause limiting a president’s term to only five T-years—reflects pre-prolong thinking. Now, the Constitution does allow someone to run for the office again after being out of office for at least one term, and I’d say if anyone had a chance of pulling that off, it would be Eloise. Or Tom Theisman, if he wasn’t smart enough to stay as far away from elective office as physically possible! And some members of Congress are pressing to amend the Constitution to remove the three-successive-terms limitation specifically so she can run again. Eloise won’t hear of it, though. For that matter, I think she’d be highly resistant to running for office again—ever—once her three terms are up.”