NonSequtur
a body
Kill Honor? Do you think the Alignment's revenge so incomplete?
her genetic origins and the source of emily's treatment haven't been made public yet
Mission of Honor: Retold
- Thread starter General Battuta
- Start date
- Location
- The Underdark
You realize that about a quarter of her homeworld shares that set of genes?
NonSequtur
a body
I feel pretty safe assuming that if the chapter in which we get the best look into the eugenicist conspiracy that has so far been very effective at causing problems ends with a dramatic statement like this,
It means something related to her origins is going to cause a big problem, in a hypothetical sequel if not this work. I couldn't say what, other than it being presumably genetic because, well, that's what the eugenicist conspiracy would focus on.
Yes, but it is mentioned in Uncompromising Honor that the Harrington family specifically is an Alignment sleeper line that got lost a few centuries back.
It is sort of a gruesome idea, because it seems to imply that Honor's exceptional traits are in fact genetically determined, and if the Alignment had its way the whole galaxy could be full of Honors Harrington. Well, maybe that's too cynical a read - Honor's upbringing and cultural background also get a lot of positive attention from the narrative - but it's still a reading that lurks suspiciously in the corner.
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As a note, I'd love to see some of these applied. Indeed I kind of wonder if the Solarians might try some of them on the Manticorians, given that the Manticorians aren't set up to stop them in the same way that the Solarians are.
The Manticore-Solarian war books were very bad judging by @Ralson's review of A Rising Thunder, but this fanfic is excellent. @General Battuta, this fanfic you have written is excellent work!
This fanfic reminds me of the movie Fail Safe, which I think is a very good movie (I wrote a little review of it on my Tumblr).
This fanfic reminds me of the movie Fail Safe, which I think is a very good movie (I wrote a little review of it on my Tumblr).
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- Location
- London, England
I'll be honest the thing that amuses me most about the planning going on at the moment is that Manticore still thinks it can win a pitched battle against the entire SLN Battle Fleet. And sure, with what they know of their relative capabilities that seems like a reasonable deduction, but Spindle was already a surprisingly bloody and hard-fought battle for them because the SLN had a bunch of surprises up their collective sleeve. You'd think they'd at least consider the possibility that there might be more.
Hell, look at their response to the idea that Filerata might go to Grayson. They instantly assume he'll act like a frontier fleet conqueror and try to subjugate the place by force of arms, and be obliterated by the Grayson defences over it, despite the fact that he has been legitimately invited and the Graysons have asked him to provide aid, because that's what SLN divisions do in their eyes and they genuinely don't seem to realise that Filerata actually takes the Eridani Edict deathly serious.
...in fact, that's the Manticoran's biggest flaw here. They're up against a massive stellar polity that has already demonstrated multiple unknown capabilities, they just got gutpunched by a stealth attack using technology and methods they had no reason to think was physically possible, and they believe the whole affair is being masterminded by a sinister conspiracy behind the scenes... but they still think they know what the playbook is. The idea that any of their assumptions might be wrong just doesn't seem to come up even once in that entire cabinet meeting.
Hell, look at their response to the idea that Filerata might go to Grayson. They instantly assume he'll act like a frontier fleet conqueror and try to subjugate the place by force of arms, and be obliterated by the Grayson defences over it, despite the fact that he has been legitimately invited and the Graysons have asked him to provide aid, because that's what SLN divisions do in their eyes and they genuinely don't seem to realise that Filerata actually takes the Eridani Edict deathly serious.
...in fact, that's the Manticoran's biggest flaw here. They're up against a massive stellar polity that has already demonstrated multiple unknown capabilities, they just got gutpunched by a stealth attack using technology and methods they had no reason to think was physically possible, and they believe the whole affair is being masterminded by a sinister conspiracy behind the scenes... but they still think they know what the playbook is. The idea that any of their assumptions might be wrong just doesn't seem to come up even once in that entire cabinet meeting.
Septentrion
DRM Mapping Project
- Location
- Scotland
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I would absolutely love it if Thomas actually won a battle of Manticore, this time against the slavers.
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- Location
- The Hague
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Whew, I caught up in time.
Hey General Battuta, huge fan of the other stuff you do, feeling a bit faint that you're actually on my forum. Writing fanfiction! And what a fanfiction.
I'm not a huge Honor Harrington fan but being on Spacebattles.com in the mid-2000s meant that you pick up on it, like a lot of Baen books. But I didn't exactly read very far, so I'm not really familiar with the later novels ... except A Rising Thunder, mostly due to following along with Ralson's thread. So while I don't actually know where and how this version of the story differs from the original in its details, I feel as though I can tell when it does. Mainly whenever the story is positively electric with tension.
With Spindle in particular I genuinely felt like the Solarians could win. Maybe if that Aegis error hadn't happened. When they shrugged off a big Manticore alpha strike, when they used Uller to pull an Mk. 23 style surprise with grasers, it really felt like maybe Crandall would pull it off. Maybe Gold Peak would fold. Even though so much of the battle still amounted to descriptions of the technology involved, that distinct sense that Manticore could lose meant that I was engaged throughout. The whole story works something like this. Everyone is trying to make decisions based on extremely incomplete information, and the consequences of making the wrong decision are, as demonstrated by the battle at Spindle and especially Oyster Bay, are just unbelievably awful. It makes all those conference scenes, where you see all these characters slowly tumbling towards apocalyptic confrontation, feel like I'm reading a horror book.
I think this is particularly true of the Manticore scenes, because they aren't getting covered for by the author. Their pride and wrath and self-righteousness draws them back to war. They want justice for the dead, no matter how many more people have to die for it. It's terrifying to see in motion. Good stuff.
Hey General Battuta, huge fan of the other stuff you do, feeling a bit faint that you're actually on my forum. Writing fanfiction! And what a fanfiction.
I'm not a huge Honor Harrington fan but being on Spacebattles.com in the mid-2000s meant that you pick up on it, like a lot of Baen books. But I didn't exactly read very far, so I'm not really familiar with the later novels ... except A Rising Thunder, mostly due to following along with Ralson's thread. So while I don't actually know where and how this version of the story differs from the original in its details, I feel as though I can tell when it does. Mainly whenever the story is positively electric with tension.
With Spindle in particular I genuinely felt like the Solarians could win. Maybe if that Aegis error hadn't happened. When they shrugged off a big Manticore alpha strike, when they used Uller to pull an Mk. 23 style surprise with grasers, it really felt like maybe Crandall would pull it off. Maybe Gold Peak would fold. Even though so much of the battle still amounted to descriptions of the technology involved, that distinct sense that Manticore could lose meant that I was engaged throughout. The whole story works something like this. Everyone is trying to make decisions based on extremely incomplete information, and the consequences of making the wrong decision are, as demonstrated by the battle at Spindle and especially Oyster Bay, are just unbelievably awful. It makes all those conference scenes, where you see all these characters slowly tumbling towards apocalyptic confrontation, feel like I'm reading a horror book.
I think this is particularly true of the Manticore scenes, because they aren't getting covered for by the author. Their pride and wrath and self-righteousness draws them back to war. They want justice for the dead, no matter how many more people have to die for it. It's terrifying to see in motion. Good stuff.
thank you ford for reminding me of this epochal sentence
- Location
- The Hague
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Superb use of language with perfect timing.
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To be honest I feel like even more than the AEGIS crash, what cost them the battle was not leaving a covering force on the limit. They had massive numerical superiority, so they really should have left a squadron to sit in system and make sure the Manticorians didn't try anything clever.
Which is good, because if it was just about technology you might as well just throw automated battle systems at one another.
One of the main differences is that, at the moment, GB's retelling of the events of Mission of Honor comes in at about 160k words. He is hitting every relevant plot beat that Weber did, adds a couple new ones, and infuses the antagonists with some desperately needed character -- and he is still about 50k words below the original. Think about that. An entire novella's worth of text that Weber wrote that wasn't necessary.
Much more than the technology, I like the doctrinal and experience differences. The SLN's been a traditional doctrine driven, peacetime force driven by politics for literally centuries. They are far more political than even the On Basilisk Station era RMN or Havenite navies were, way, way back at the start of the series. Remember back then?
Note that this shows through in this fic by the types of technology the sollies are using, particular the Uller drones. Fleets need big walls to fight at energy range! Closing to energy range is hard. So, obviously, you can make your ships faster - not likely - or you can make energy range bigger!
Guess what they did? Using the stealth tech advantage they've had for decades or centuries.
Once the war went hot, both sides started changing drastically - the 80% compensator limit was tossed out the airlock, the 'concentrate your wall' got tossed out, and by the time of the Battle of Manticore, both sides had split their forces and were executing precise microjumps and layered strategies to trap and counter-trap each other.
Extremely high risk strategies! Ridiculously risky! They could easily jump an entire fleet into the wrong place! Lose a ship, even an SDN from wedge interpenetration! Stupid neobarbs don't actually understand good tactics!
So, I really like that the Sollies didn't leave covering forces - because that's not their doctrine, and they haven't been in real battle against a peer that can FORCE them to change their doctrine by killing those who use it poorly, without accounting for other factors.
The Sollies are, after all, even a more political navy than the RMN was when it gave Lord Young command of a ship. Deviate from doctrine and you'll certainly be investigated by the political backers of the existing doctrine and tech, even if you win. Lose, and you'll be court-martialled - if you'd only followed the doctrine, you would have won!!!
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Honestly, the thing that surprises me the most about this post is that the Weber version of Mission of Honor only clocked in at 210k words.
I thought I remembered all of the latter (say, post-Hell) Honorverse books as gigantic GRRM-esque doorstopping bricks of 400k words or so
guess they only feel that long
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It's a little bizarre how fast the series went off the rails. Like, I was rereading even some of the late era books and while they're not good, they're not the absolute atrocities that the books would come post like, book 11.
The next update has been delayed entirely by my desire to wrap up everything in Chapter 25 (and an epilogue) because it's a pretty number. Or...I could retroactively split 23 and 24 into halves, creating 23, 24, 25, and 26, then post what I have as 27...
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just write whatever number of chapters you need & call them all chapter 25, imo
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Rereading some of the earlier stuff, it occurs to me that one other thing that the Solarians might do in this is actually poke the Andermani into trying to exploit the situation with Manticore's losses again. That whole plot line was kind of interesting but it never really went anywhere because the books crashed.
Chapter Twenty-Five
The last chapter, before a very long epilogue (containing the scenes you want that aren't in this chapter!)
Chapter Twenty-Five
"Ladies and gentlemen, let's close up and do this," Fleet Admiral Winston Kingsford called. "Admiral Nation, it's your meeting."
The long table of Battle Fleet officers adjusted their seats and came to attention. There was no more lingering conversation by the coffee no more furtive exchanges of text messages. Despite centuries of inertia, despite the agonizingly long round-trip communications loop to the 'front', Battle Fleet had shaken off its concrete anklets and started to pull itself together. Even Frontier Fleet's elusive Engracia Alonso y Yáñez had dispatched Admiral Ng to attend. And as Admiral Holy Evangeline Nation approached the lectern, there was only anticipatory silence.
Daud al-Fanudahi leaned over to Irene Teague to murmur something sarcastic. But nothing came. Irene looked at him quizzically. He was so shocked to have no complaints that he could only shrug. "I wonder where Thimàr is? He's been gone for weeks."
"I think he's visiting contractors, tracking down our FTL comm prototypes," she whispered back. "Now be quiet."
"Admirals. Captains." Admiral Nation set her personal link down on the lectern, and the wall immediately opened onto a sharp red MANTICORE THREAT GROUP title, backed by an armored knight with upraised shield. "On behalf of Strategy and Planning, I'm here to present the latest iteration of War Plan Indica. This is an instantiation of Case Haymaker tailored for the defeat of the Star Empire of Manticore.
"Manticore is a major Verge power whose strategic center of gravity is the Manticore Wormhole Junction. This is a junction of unprecedented range, with seven termini linking Manticore to the Andermani, to the Haven quadrant, and, most critically, to our own Core via a connection to Beowulf. Commerce passing through the Junction provides Manticore with a constant revenue stream, but this direct access also poses serious military risks to Manticore. Therefore, the wormhole junction is heavily fortified, and no conventional attack through the Junction could survive.
"Ordinarily, Case Haymaker would dictate a direct assault across the Manticore hyper limit by a wall of battle. However, Manticore's advanced missile technology presents a serious threat to any main fleet engagement. The use of independent system defense pods means they can deliver a strike of essentially arbitrary size at a favorable cost ratio. Although we've developed numerous stopgap countermeasures to enhance our capital ships' survivability, we cannot risk another major defeat. Therefore, our strategy is to constrict Manticore's perimeter and raid their industry through the aggressive use of light forces while we close the technological gap. In order to succeed, we must avoid matching strength with strength. Instead, we must find areas where we possess a comparative advantage. To achieve this, we've turned to the HyperBattle concept proposed by Admiral Isotalo."
A wave of her hand and a nod of her dapper bearded head moved to the next slide. A schematic of the layers of hyperspace, mortared over normal space like a pyramid, filled the wall. "It is well understood that hyperspace restricts the engagement range of modern warships. The nature of hyperspace contracts distances, and the intense virtual-particle flux effectively serves as 'ambient jamming', which degrades long range missile attacks. This gives us a comparative advantage—or at least reduces our disadvantage. Therefore, we should seek battle in hyperspace whenever possible.
"In order to protect their 'interior lines,' Manticore will focus its deployments on the protection of the wormhole network. We expect they will actively attempt to seize wormholes throughout League space. No wormhole terminus, anywhere, exists within the hyper limit of a star. This means that a battle over a wormhole terminus will have at least two layers: the fight for control of the terminus in real space, and the fight for control of the surrounding hyperspace. Whoever controls the hyperspace layer will be able to descend upon a realspace enemy within energy range, granting an advantage to the numerically superior opponent—which will, of course, be us."
There was soft, rueful laughter.
"The exception, however, lies in the resonance zone that stretches between a wormhole terminus and the nearest star. This zone has unpredictable and occasionally deadly effects on hyper transitions. A smart Manticoran commander will take advantage of this zone to deny us hyperspace access to his realspace coordinates. Therefore, we will need both a realspace and a hyperspace threat to achieve victory. Our current doctrine is to use towed missile pods and Uller drones as our primary realspace pressure, and capital ships as our hyperspace 'hammer.'
"We will also be patrolling the grav waves which serve as highways for hyperspace traffic in areas not served by wormholes. Grav waves prevent the use of any impeller drive, including missiles. This forces ships to engage at close range with energy weapons, generally nose or stern-on. This is obviously a huge leveler for us, especially as Manticore's primary superdreadnought classes, the Invictus and Medusa, have major structural weaknesses in their stern. But we anticipate that the initial phase of this war will be fought mostly by small squadrons of light units rather than our capital forces, and that, I'm afraid, falls within the domain of tactics rather than strategy.
"The final element of our HyperBattle strategy is the investment of planetary systems for long-duration sieges. A G2 star like the Sun has a hyper radius that's too large to picket entirely…at least in real space. But in hyperspace, that limit's reduced to a circumference of only 71 light seconds, which we can picket—and fairly heavily, at that. If it becomes necessary, we can control access to the hyperspace alpha band around Manticore or one of its allies. And while that won't prevent them from traveling to their wormhole junction in real space, and it won't certainly prevent them from moving further out past our pickets before entering hyperspace, it will allow us to tie down a huge amount of their forces in their home system.
"All of these tactics combine to support a strategy of strategic investiture and commerce raiding while we bring Battle Fleet's wall up to technological parity. That wall is currently in the middle of a major redeployment. At the moment, Admiral Isotalo is on the way to take command of Eleventh Fleet in Tasmania, which will put five hundred ships of the wall within three weeks of Manticore. Admiral Tseng is overseeing the deptloyment of an additional six hundred superdreadnoughts, plus full screening elements, to join Eleventh Fleet within three months—"
Daud couldn't hold it in any more. He liked some of what he was hearing, and he was glad the SLN's sclerotic bureaucracy had managed to turn a critical eye on itself and produce this step towards a real strategy. But he'd been corrupted by too many years as the staff naysayer and malcontent. He couldn't play with the team. So his question just burst up out of him.
"This is all great," he said, "but what about Manpower? Aren't we all pretty certain that if we didn't hit Manticore, then they must've done it? Isn't everyone muttering that they had Rajampet killed? Are we even going to war with Manticore any more?"
An ominous silence descended as Fleet Admiral Kingsford turned, with all the deliberation of a pulser turret, to bear on him.
"That," he said, "is up to our civilian leadership. Our task is to provide military options if it comes to war. Or, I should say, more war, since Manticore has already declared on us."
"But shouldn't we be considering the ramifications of carrying out an attack that we've been manipulated into, an attack on an Eridani Edict victim—"
"Captain!" Kingsford snapped. "Civilian leadership! Shut the fuck up!"
"Locking fuck up in the shut position, sir," Daud muttered. Kingsford was obviously playing hard on the military's subordination to the civilian leadership…which might be a very important part of averting war. And an equally important part of rebuilding trust in the Navy after Rajani's gambit.
But Daud couldn't help but think that all the military options in the universe would continue to fail so long as they were on Manpower's script.
How the damn hell did a fringe corporation whose very reputation bordered on obscenity get that kind of sway? Were they really providing enough of Earth's elite with customized fuck-puppets to get their tentacles as far up as Rajani? That might appeal to the cretins who rolled conspiracy theories back and forth like dungballs on the planetary nets, but Daud didn't believe that a vast conspiracy of slave-fuckers could actually exist on such a scale. People talked. People had decency, damn it. It wasn't the Common Era any more! You just couldn't own a slave in modern society. Maybe you could go on some all-expenses-paid vacation to a slave planet, but why? Why? There were plenty of planets full of triple-A sex industries ready to arrange whatever you wanted, from your run of the mill orgies to a completely asexual summit on modern phenomenology.
People had decency. And it was up to decent people to do something, wasn't it? So if Kingsford wasn't going to act, and the civilian leadership was tangled up in courts and treaties, well…
Daud began to jot notes. They had nothing to do with the briefing Admiral Nation was giving.
"Picanha." He sawed gently til he had a good cut off the roast. "Brazil's favorite cut, from the branded part of the rump. You see…about one centimeter of white fat, on the outside? Proof that the cow was well fed. Impale the cut on a sword, then cook it with rock salt, never sea salt, and rub it with pepper after the heat. A little olive oil and a little garlic won't go amiss. And there you have…the finest meat on planet Earth."
He plated the cut and passed it across his dining table to Omosupe Quatermain. "Oh good," she said. "I'm your favorite."
He cut again. "Not so fast, now. The anticipation is the second-best part."
"Until the moment I am chewing on this steak, I am still anticipating. Quiveringly,"
"And you will continue to do so until I've said grace. For you, Nathan, I cooked tube steak." Nathan McArtney was a vegetarian, and while there were probably planets where tube-grown beef didn't taste as good as the field-farmed original, Earth was not one of them. Innokentiy finished serving the others, then took his own seat at the head of the table. "Anyone need anything? Drink? Agatá, water for the whiskey?"
"Don't threaten me, Mr. Permanent Undersecretary."
"Good woman." His Hyde Park apartment was narrow and sparsely furnished, but he had excellent light and rent control. Instead of smart walls and hangings, he'd decorated with images of legislation and orders whose form he found particularly…concordant? He wasn't sure exactly what to call the quality, except that it spoke to him of well-organized thought. Now he bowed his head and spoke the words his father had passed down, unchanged through generations of Kolokoltsovs, all the way back to the long-ago ancestral homeland of the New South Brooklyn Hetmanate. "Lord have mercy, Lord have mercy, Lord have mercy. Let's eat!"
"Succinct," Malachai Abruzzi said, over the red bulb of a glass of Balleto Teresa 1901. "Maybe a little generic, though. You could use some flair on the third repetition, you know, like mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa—"
"Mal, don't you dare dissect our host's traditional family grace. Aren't your educational earworms designed to decay in four to six months?" Omosupe Quatermain tested the sharpness of her own steak knife and nodded in approval. "I see you keep your blades keen in this house."
"Sharpen twice, cut once. Or something to that effect?" Nathan McCartney frowned at his plate. "If only we could sharpen up our intervention battalions—"
"No business here, Nathan," Agatà reproached him.
"That's easy for us to say, having our nice dinner in this nice apartment. But I've got people out there who've been taken hostage, entire delegations detained, probably tortured. I mean, Shivaji's in open revolt! And Boniface again, as if we didn't kill enough—"
"Stop," Innokentiy said, softly.
They all froze: Agatà, Omosupe, Nathan, dark-suited Malachai, each caught in the midst of indulging an appetite.
"I don't like it when things depart from the plan," Innokentiy told them. The tablecloth was a sensible brown. He should feel safe and comfortable here. "The plan for this dinner was to fill ourselves with satisfaction and contentment in each others' company. But things haven't gone according to plan, have they? It's been quite a few months. Back in January I told all of you that I pitied Manticore. I told you that in fifty years I saw no future for the Star Empire of Manticore; in its place I foresaw a new member of the Solarian League, protected by a Navy that had triumphed by moral authority and the strength of deterrence. I saw people all around the Verge secure in the knowledge that breakaway states could not thrive. And I said—I said, God help us, I foresee a galaxy that has never known the cataclysmic devastation that visited Epsilon Eridani.
"Well, Manticore is now further from our influence than ever before. Our Navy's potency is in question. Manticore's leaked our contingency files and the entire Verge is in chaos. And, worst of all, VEDA tells me that if we don't bring the perpetrators of the Manticore Strike in ourselves, there's serious risk of Beowulf touching off a secession crisis. We're taking steps on every front, but Manticore's too impatient to wait for the Hague to sort out Manpower's legal status and reach some kind of extradition arrangement. They've already shaved about half a percent off our collective GSP just by pulling their freighters, and we've only seen the start of that economic impact. I think it's safe to say that nothing went as I predicted. In five months, we've escalated from a state of steady. gradual expansion to an interstellar crisis.
"That tells me something in and of itself. The League is an enormously stable system. It always has been. Our system is full of negative feedback loops, devices to stabilize and slow down any unexpected excursion from the steady state. This is why our legislature is neutered. This is why our bureaucrats must struggle for every advantage. The very traits Manticore mocks are the reason for our longevity…and the reason that President Yeou hasn't been able to get his pet 'Yeou Transtellar pays no tariffs' project off the ground."
Agatà smiled a little.
"What it tells me," Innokentiy said, "is that our enemy—our real enemy—knows how to target the mechanisms that keep us stable. They're hitting us on every front, trying to push the League into an extreme state, a terra ignota where something could break. They know that any strategy with a single thrust, a single point of failure, could be identified and neutralized. Steer an aircar for the ground and all the pilot has to do is regain control and pull up. But put that aircar into an unrecoverable flight regime—avionics crashed, stalled airfoil, plates iced up—and the best pilot in the galaxy couldn't save it. Whoever these enemies are, they are very cunning and very sophisticated. And they have the initiative. They are trying to fly us out of our recoverable regime.
"I believe that the best thing we can do right now is nothing. The inertia of size and history is in our favor. But we have two bleeding wounds which make patience dangerous. The failure of our navy against Manticore, and our failure to prevent an Eridani attack that many blame on us. Our enemies are not going to allow us to wait for those wounds to heal.
"So what I want to ask you is this. Next time our enemy strikes, and pushes us closer to war with Manticore, we need a policy in place. We need our people on the ground ready to react. So I propose the following strategy. We will not go to war with Manticore unless two conditions are met. First, we are assured of military success. And second, victory will enhance, not disturb, the prestige of the League's sacred principles. Unless combat is a chance to fight valiantly for the Eridani Edict and the safety of innocent civilians, I want all our admirals and commissioners to swallow their pride and accept a strategy of patient nonconfrontation. Nathan, that especially means your people. Are we agreed?"
He looked at them, and one by one, they nodded.
"Unconditional aid to Grayson," Agata said.
"No punitive seizures of Manticoran freight or shipping," Omosupe murmured.
"I'll have Information & Education take a more… placating stance," Malachai said.
Nathan MacArtney opened his mouth, paused, and shook his head. "Innokentiy, you're talking about completing the process of humiliation that started at New Tuscany. My people are already out there on the Verge, taking casualties, dying, because every pirate and petty tyrant sees the Manticore affair as their big chance to sneak something past us. And you want us to just lie down and take it? I don't know. Once we've lost the respect and, frankly, the fear of the Verge populations, we're never going to get it back. And that means an end to the strategy of expansion we've pursued since the 1300s. The League may never grow any bigger than we are now. In terms of tangible losses, that's as terrible a defeat as Manticore could hope to deliver us short of strikes on multiple Core worlds."
"We'll clean up Frontier Security's image and ease back into expansionism. Frankly, paring back the initial exploitation stage could get our new members to a profitable state decades earlier." Innokentiy began to cut his picanha. "That's why Foreign Minister Orta e Diadoro is first on the list."
"What list?"
"Something I brought for dessert." His knife bared pink interior flesh, and his stomach rumbled. "Names for the first round of spring cleaning. Since we don't know who may be compromised, we'll just get rid of everyone who could do real damage. A safeguard against any further Manpower interference. I'd like us all to sign these lists, just for future solidarity. No one's going to be beheaded in public, or come to any permanent physical harm. But we are going to be toppling a lot of apple—"
His link buzzed.
"I thought you had that on silent," MacArtney protested. "I thought none of us were recording—"
"I had it off, Nathan. It woke up for security alert." Very calmly, Innokentiy checked the link's screen. If it was the kind of situation where a few seconds would make a difference, he had already screwed up so badly as to deserve whatever was coming.
The link said: VEDALERT DOMSECFAIL//SOCONTEXTVIOL202//AIRCAR PRK 4 BLKS//SWATCALLOUT-2MIN?//SAFEROOM?
Immediately he texted back: SWATNO—TAIL—DRY CLEANING?—NO ILLNESS
"Innokentiy?" Agatà asked. "What's going on?"
"Someone's just popped up on the local social surveillance, and my house security has failed. Fortunately, I have backup arrangements. I've told my people to keep an eye on the interloper and to watch for any countersurveillance procedures on his part." He pushed his chair back and stood. "Please follow me. I think we'd better get to my safe room, just in case."
"Christ." Omosupe dropped her fork. "Someone's coming after us? Us? We're the undersecretaries!"
"Not necessarily. There's an unusual aircar parked four blocks away. Just something that the computer flagged as out of the ordinary for this section of Hyde Park…but combined with the security failure, better safe than sorry."
They stood in a clatter of toppling chairs and dropped cutlery. Agatà spat gristle on the plate. They went together, quickly, to the hidden grav chute beside the fridge. Innokentiy reached for the catch, and hesitated.
"What are you waiting for?" Nathan hissed. "People know I work for Minister Diadoro! They could be here to kill me!"
"Yes. They could. Fortunately, you'll be deep underground." Innokentiy pressed the button. "Everyone inside, please. The shaft will drop you straight down to an old shelter left over from the Final War. It's extremely comfortable, and if at any time you can't stand the confinement, there's an aircar ready to take you out under Lake Michigan. I'll be along shortly."
"Wait a minute," Agatà protested. "Along shortly? You're not coming? You can't be serious!"
"I'll be fine. And if I'm not, you know what to do. Go. Now!"
One by one they dropped into the shaft. Nathan was first, breathing hard. Malachai shot his cuffs and stepped in gracefully. Omosupe checked her link for green lights on her family monitor as she went. Agatà looked back at him and mouthed "be careful".
The chute re-sealed automatically. Innokentiy went back to his seat, tucked his napkin into his collar, and began to eat.
His link printed: VEDALERT 11111//SOCONTEXTVIOL 202#INDIV APPROACHING YOUR LOC CODE TWO // DRYCLEANING //ILLNESS?
He typed NO ILLNESS
VEDALERT 11111 his link insisted. 202#INDIV ARMED CODE TWO//ILLNESS?
NO ILLNESS STAND BY
No need to arrest the man. At worst, he was a crazed gunman here to kill Innokentiy. That would be a serious setback, and personally quite undesirable. But at best he was here to make a contact; or he was a floater for a foreign intelligence service, and he could be traced, even turned.
He took another bite. Delicious. He'd really gotten the roast just right on this one. It was a shame dinner would be cold before the others could get back to the table.
The door to Unit 15D clicked and swung open. A preposterously ugly man in a grey windbreaker and a knit cap stepped inside. With his hands shoved into his pockets, his elbows stuck out so far that he almost looked like a diamond, or perhaps a large caution sign. His face was weathered granite. And in his eyes there was a remote, cosmically inevitable wrath which shook Innokentiy almost as badly as the pulser aimed his way through the fabric of the windbreaker.
"Don't move," the man said, unnecessarily. "If you've got people waiting, I'll shoot you first."
"I don't know who you think I am," he told the ugly man, "but I assure you that shooting me will make absolutely no difference to anything you could possibly care about."
"I know," the man said. His accent was false, and impossible to place. "If I wanted you dead, I would've destroyed this entire building."
"I'm very glad you didn't. There are several hundred people in this building. Sit, please. You want to ask me questions, and maybe I can give you answers. I'll cut you a—"
The man's voice vented brimstone from some inner furnace. "I don't want anything from you, Kolokoltsov. I know who you are, and I know what you do. I know who was sitting at this table ten minutes ago." The ugly man nodded to the refrigerator. "I know about the Final War shelter down there, the escape shaft to Lake Michigan, and your own personal decision to keep no weapons in your house. Privilege of a powerful man, to know he's safe in his home."
"You clearly know a great deal, Mister…?"
The ugly man's eyes had finished their swift inventory of the room. He padded towards the HD projector. Static snapped under his soft-soled shoes. "You don't have a family. You don't know what it's like to worry about your children. I had a daughter, you know. Here, with me. On Old Terra. Her mother died fighting the Peeps. She was kidnapped, right here in Chicago, as part of a—" His voice stumbled, a sound like a boulder shifting. "A conspiracy. It doesn't matter. The point is, they took her, and I was so afraid. Fear like no other fear. Something…evolutionary, you know? She was fourteen. I had to help her. I was scared and all that scared turned into angry."
The man wasn't looking at Innokentiy, but the pulser tracked him through the fabric of the windbreaker. "But she wasn't scared. Not my Helen. I think she even enjoyed it. She tunneled out of her cell, got into the Chicago sewers, killed three men who attacked her, and rescued two children they'd been keeping prisoner. Berry and Lars. I adopted them. I love those kids. But Helen—she was all I had left of her mother, understand?"
Innokentiy's link buzzed. He glanced down at it, and his blood cracked to red frost.
VEDALERT 111111 ID 202#INDIV ZILWICKI, ANTON MANTICORE ONI//LAST KNOWN SIGHTING PLANET MESA//POSSIBLY COMPROMISED
He was Manticoran intelligence. He'd been on Mesa. And if the Mesans had turned him, he might not even know it. He might not realize that he was about to assassinate the Permanent Undersecretary of Foreign Affairs and frame Manticore for the act. Mesa wouldn't be that foolish, would they? They wouldn't think Manticore could be framed for such pure idiocy—?
"Mister Zilwicki," Innokentiy said, as calmly as he could, "are you aware that you may be carrying nanites designed by Manpower, Incorporated to influence your choices—"
His picanha roast shuddered on its skewer and burst apart. Zilwicki's pulser was set to a low subsonic velocity, each dart just a loud serpentine hiss. If he fired it on full auto, there would be no merciful, flesh-shredding detonation of transferred kinetic energy. No instant death. Innokentiy would feel every slow, heavy hit. He might even survive long enough to bleed out on his own dinner table.
"And you people killed her." Zilwicki's huge shoulders corded and did not relax. He held onto the weapon like it was his only anchor against a storm surge. "She went into the Navy. She was at Spindle. And you people killed her. She should've lived four hundred years. Imagine what kind of woman could've come from a girl that strong and good. Imagine what she could've done in four centuries. She would've been worth a thousand of you, Kolokoltsov. A million. Fourteen years old and she fought her way out of the Chicago sewers with two orphans in tow. But Chicago got its revenge, eh? You got your revenge."
"What happened at Spindle was a tragedy for everyone," Kolokoltsov began. "No one in my government even knew that Crandall intended to—"
"It was a tragedy for Helen Zilwicki!" the man roared. He turned at the hip to shoot out the HD projector and the camera behind it. Shattered plastic and glittering molycircs spilled across the carpet. "For my daughter! You sit here in your plush offices, tweaking rates and statistics, unaccountable, unelected, uncontrolled, doing your goddamn best to keep everything the same as it's always been. And when people die, you talk about the cost to everyone! But you don't speak for everyone, Kolokoltsov. Not for me. Not for my people. So you don't get to pass the responsibility on to 'everyone'. You made the choices. You have the power, you take the fucking responsibility!"
What else was there to say? "Everything I do, I do for the League."
"I know." Zilwicki's voice fell to a soft, ursine growl. "That's why I'm not going to shoot you, Kolokoltsov. You're just a janitor. You clean this thing's tubes, you feed it and rub its ears, but in the end, you're just another parasite. I'm going to bring the whole rotten beast down on your ears. I'm going to end everything you love. And when the entire Diaspora knows that you're Manpower's patsy, and they string you up for your crimes, the last thing you'll see in life is my dead hand hauling your noose. And the first thing you'll see in death will be my daughter, waiting there to drag you down to your place. A seat in the endless office tower where you'll work the rest of eternity."
"Mister Zilwicki," Innokentiy Kolokoltsov said, in a voice he was astounded to find was perfectly steady, "there is nothing after death. There is only life. And the only reason you are alive—the only reason your daughter was ever born—is the existence of the Solarian League. Without us, your planet would have been extinguished hundreds of years ago. I am sorry for what happened to your daughter. But no amount of grief or rage will ever make one life matter more than two, or two more than ten, or thousands more than billions. People are going to die in the course of human events. That cannot stop those events from being well-governed. I do what I do because it must be done."
Anton Zilwicki's awful smile expanded into the void of his face. "So what are you doing about the eight million dead in Manticore? The same thing bureaucrats always do when they've killed a few million people? Cover it up. Call it necessary."
"Mr. Zilwicki, the only thing the bureaucracy wasn't prepared for in this situation was your government's willingness to destroy the very Navy that's supposed to protect you. A duty that Sandra Crandall was pursuing on the day of aforementioned tragedy. And ,ay I remind you that your daughter died after her own commander refused the very same terms she offered to Josef Byng? Perhaps Admiral Gold Peak is the one you should be visiting—"
Zilwicki came towards him. Innokentiy reached for the steak knife. It was all the excuse Zilwicki needed.
By the time the Chicago SWAT team arrived, Zilwicki's car had been found empty. The sweat-vapor trail that vanished into a jacked manhole on 56th and Drexel turned out to be a counterfeit. And the traces of a personal degausser and echo mask on the Metra led only to a vacuuming unit with an aftermarket add-on.
Innokentiy Kolokoltsov held a cold pack to the welt where the pulser butt had struck his head and wished, fiercely, that some of the blood on his table belonged not him, or to a delicious cow, but to Anton Zilwicki.
Not for revenge, but so VEDA could tell him, with as much certainty as they could provide, whether Zilwicki was under Mesan control…or whether the Manticoran had genuinely gone insane.
The Alignment strove for betterment and perfection, a state of unfettered human triumph released from the shackles of the baseline body. Yet the very values which the Alignment sought to release from the chains of reactionary paleogenetic conservatism were the product of chaos. His love for Evelina, his lust for the tall body arched in shadow above him, was the result of a complex evolutionary process which spiraled far beyond natural selection into the messier realms of founder effect, drift, mutation, non-random mating, culture-gene coevolution, and even the heresies of group selection. The spasms of his ejaculation would be merely painful without a flood of spinal reward that had motivated his ancestors to get their rocks off; the flood of prolactin, dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin and norepinephrine to which he was so particularly vulnerable was a cocktail mixed by aeons of his forefathers' evolutionary failure to fail. The very love that had kept him and Evangeline together through generation after clonal generation was a natural product, not an engineered one. Even his slight tendency towards religiosity was an evolutionary exaptation—not so much a trait in and of itself as a knock-on effect of other positive traits.
In the end, was he so different from the normals, or from the beasts produced in the Final War? Was he any more than a kind of intellectual Scrag—overcome not by bestial wartime appetites but by an extreme hypertrophy of idealism and thought
(He saw, in that moment of their shared climax, not two people twined together, but two braids of causes, culture and gene and culture-gene coevolution and history and accident and force, two trees with their roots planted in physics from the dawn of time and game theory that predated any existence: and he could not say if the trees were growing together, or strangling each other, or trying joyously to make a new thing, or trying desperately to lift their spawn up above the chaos long enough for it to last a little longer.)
Whatever made him capable of dreaming of more had come from the cauldron of less.
And when he came home from work to his wife's arms, he was not just climbing to the highest and most complete joy of his life, but also descending into the primordial past of the species he would drag into the future. Paradox.
And what about the Alignment's grand strategy? What about Operation Prometheus? The overthrow of the Solarian League. The seizure of corporeal power in the new Renaissance Factor. The transfer of the central human authority from weary Old Terra to the worlds of that new Factor. And—gradually, so gradually—the end of genetic slavery, and the beginning of a softened attitude towards progressive genetic engineering.
It was the realization of the Alignment's highest ideals. But it would be achieved by a plunge back into the decidedly unidealistic world of power and profit. And mass death.
He groaned, a nameless singular feeling, total bliss, aching sadness that this joy was already fading. Evelina shuddered, ground against him, fell forward on her elbows. At least there would be no accidents here. Evelina's body was incapable of ovulating without her own conscious consent. He wondered if there would be any orgasms in the future. Would they be needed? Or would they have to be stamped out, like a drug addiction, an uncouth reward for an unsafe behavior?
"I love you," he whispered.
His wife lay her tangled, sweat-soaked hair against his chest. "I love you," she told his heart, and kissed him right above it.
"It's time to go."
"I know."
"I don't want to leave our house."
She kissed him softly on the throat. "Me neither."
Genesis was listed as a private yacht, and if she happened to boast the size, speed, and armament of a battlecruiser, well, that was a fine little synecdoche of the Mesan Alignment's public and private faces. She had made the passage from Mesa by streak drive, almost twice as fast as any other ship could have managed. Now she decelerated into the light of the F6 yellow-white dwarf star that was named Darius only on the Alignment's own charts.
Some of that light was reflected. Reflected from the gleaming metal of Darius Prime, the exquisitely beautiful starburst of an orbital platform that circled Plato, Darius' third and most habitable planet. The night side below sparkled with beads and scatterings of light, and over the terminator, the star of one of the other orbiting platforms burnt like a steady beacon. Beyond, the moons Galton and Rhetra cast softer light.
Delicate lattices cocooned the ships taking form in the yards around Darius Prime, the infant first flight of the Leonard Detweiler-class stealth superdreadnought. There was no sign of the already-completed Sharks used in the Oyster Bay attacks. If there had been a sign, the Sharks would have been a cataclysmic failure. They were nearby, operating at invisible standby. With one exception, they had not been deployed anywhere outside Darius since Oyster Bay, and that was because the Alignment literally could not afford to lose the stealth ships—or, more specifically, the people aboard them. The crews aboard those ships right now were the seed corn for the future of the MAN(D)
Albrecht thought about all the children who'd died in Oyster Bay. He knew it was foolish, but he accepted his grief for them. If he had no qualms he'd be lost.
"We'll be docking with the station in about thirty-five minutes, sir," Genesis' captain told him.
"Thank you," Detweiler replied. "A very smooth journey. Please let Miss Anisimovna know she'll be accompanying me on the shuttle to Galton." L
ike every member of Genesis' crew, Captain Hayden Milne knew Albrecht only as 'the passenger.' The Detweilers had no public presence, and would not for decades, maybe centuries to come. But the people Albrecht had come here to meet, the crown jewels of the Alignment's strategy, would be out in the public eye…perhaps more than anyone else in existence, soon enough. They were, after all, going to lead the downfall of the Solarian League.
"So far, so good, Heinrich," he said.
"As you say, sir," his bodyguard Heinrich Stabolis agreed.
"You know, Heinrich, you don't say a lot, do you?"
"I suppose not, sir."
"But you're always there. If I haven't mentioned it lately, I appreciate it."
"I'm just glad we got you out of Mesa in time, sir."
"In time for what, Heinrich?" he asked, innocently.
"For whatever made it necessary for you to leave, sir."
Yes. A time of dying. More children on his conscience. But at least none of his children.
For all the years which had been invested in Darius, it was still no Manticore. It had no intrinsic value except for its isolation and secrecy. The system was an economic black hole, a funnel into which the Alignment poured money and from which it extracted stealth warships. It might be the Alignment's 'capital', but it would never be an open part of the Renaissance Factor.
The leaders of the worlds that would be sat before Albrecht Detweiler now. The circle of chairs rested below a slowly wheeling sky, the stars of the universe as seen from Darius, projected in true-scale 3D by the dome of the Galton Observatory. The base on Plato's first moon was as close as the these men and women would be allowed to come to Plato, as much for their safety as for the safety of the work there. The less they knew about this place, the fewer mistakes they could make.
Not that any of these heads of state were capable of spilling secrets by loose tongue, any more than they were capable of vertigo at the sight of the stars whirling overhead.
There were twelve of them, counting Albrecht himself, and they were beautiful. People trusted the beautiful, people admired them. There were seven women and four men; for reasons of genetic security, matrilineal descent had been the safest way for the Alignment's sleepers to make their way down the centuries to this moment. Recognition codes and enciphered information lurked in their mitochondrial DNA, hidden even from the genome scans routinely performed by security organizations.
"The League is in disarray," he told the other eleven. "Our leak of the OFS files has already triggered rebellions in Loomis, Kumang, Okada, al-Bakiya, Meroa, Carina, Zunker, Syl-tang, Genovese, and Boniface. And while those are simply Verge protectorates, it's only the start. Every actor in the picture is converging on the narrative we anticipated. Manpower attempted to use the League to force Manticore out of Talbott, and when that failed, Manpower overplayed its hand and hit Manticore and Grayson directly.
"The League is caught between the need to punish Manpower, and to reassert its prestige and power in the confrontation with Manticore. Now the situation's spiraled out of control, and the consequent instability is resonating through the whole sociopolitical structure. The League's feedback is so slow that each of their attempts at de-escalation only arrives in time to reinforce the magnitude of the next crisis.
"Manpower, as an asset, has been expended. In the near future, we'll be burning Manpower and the Mesa system as part of our 'final flourish.' After that, the next step is up to the eleven of you. I am formally activating the Factor's constitutional agreements. Are you ready?"
In a sense, this moment was more critical than any point of Operation Oyster Bay. He considered them one at a time.
Aatukka Hurskainen, Elected Johtaja of the Republic of Mannerheim and mastermind behind the Asgard uprisings of the past ten years, sat directly to Albrecht's right. She was a mighty presence, nearly two meters tall, her frost-white hair gathered into a wrist-thick braid, her powerful shoulders and veined arms rippling with power. Her manicure was perfect. She had upgraded the Mannerheim System Defense Force into the premier navy of the Factor's component forces.
"I am prepared," she said.
Second-Chancellor Abider Qvortrup, head of government of the Matorgada Second Chance Republic, nodded his silvered head amiably. His warmth and amiability concealed a heart of untarnished charity and goodness. Matorgada was one of Diaspora space's premiere charitable investors, swooping in to rescue corporations and governments all across the Verge. Abider even owned a significant portion of Manticore's war debt, although given the chain of banks and NGOs involved, it was unlikely Manticore knew it.
"Let's go," he said.
Clint Cincinattus Antananarivo, King Clinton III of the Kingdom of New Madagascar, had the intensely vulpine face of a bred hunter. Madagascar was a protected biosphere, one of the lushest alien ecosystems ever discovered—not just on New Madagascar itself, but on planets and moons throughout the system. It was also the Alignment's primary link to Sharpton, the most aggressively transhumanist world in Diaspora space, and thus an important enemy.
He nodded now. "Madagascar is ready."
Board Chairman Joan Torrence, head of state of the Cooperative Worker's World of Pandemonium, raised two fingers to signal assent. The same insane katabatic winds which had given Pandemonium its name had also propelled the snapping line which had nearly split her face in two. She had eschewed regeneration and reconstructive surgery in favor of 'human kintsugi,' using machinery and cosmetics to create a new face that accentuated and beautified the trauma. She was a very small person, a product of the Torrence line's optimization for extreme endurance and survivability.
Caïssa Chatarunga, president of the Line System, was the youngest person in the room. Despite her family's history in strategy and games, she was actually a masterful guitar player, a shreddist of the true high metal. Her brown south Indian skin, golden hair, dark eyes, and fine hands made her a League-wide heartthrob. But here she carried herself with the age and dignity of her line, and her soft "I am ready" was as sober as anyone's.
Nikodema Kakadelis, Chief Counsel of the Free Democratic Republic of Thrace and a high-ranking bishop in the Shark Church, still moved with the nimble ferocity of her upbringing as a sailor and occasional skirmisher on Thrace's island-scattered seas. She clasped hands with her neighbor, Rebecca Monticelli, Top Guy of Comstock and a high-risk grav ski champion. They raised their joined fists in affirmation.
Vin Stone, raven-haired veteran of the Directorate of New Orkney's System Defense Force and current president of its ruling post-war coalition, waited for his own neighbor Bob Tarantino to quit fidgeting and put up his own hand. Tarantino was a fast-talking jittery bastard, and an absolutely brilliant rhetorician. That gift had made him Master Trader of the trinary Bengal-Bombay-Calcutta system, and now he joined Vin in a wholehearted "Let's go!"
"Fuck it," Tanya Ha of the Visigoth Sacred Tribes said. She identified as a woman almost purely for convenience; her line was androgen-insensitive intersex, not out of a particular effort on the part of the Long Range Planning Board but because the trait had not been found to be deleterious. As the Chieftan of the migratory post-industrial peoples of Visigoth, she was the most able and trustworthy negotiator Albrecht had ever met. "I'm in."
Last of all was the Marquess Imani Aureal IV of the Marquisate of Denver, a hazel-eyed and haunting woman who'd received the largest share (nearly half a percent) of the 'Most Beautiful Person Alive' vote in every year of the past sixty. She was a primary architect of the Renaissance Factor's legal compact, as well as the 'slow sieve' structure of social change which would inevitably concentrate power with these twelve principals. She gave a regal "We are prepared," and then laughed at herself.
"Excellent." There'd been no question of it, really, but it was important to Albrecht that everyone have a chance to speak their doubts. One of the major traits selected for in Alignment alpha lines was a near-total immunity to social conformity.
"Now, we've gone to astronomical—literally astronomical!—lengths to be sure none of you have connections to the planet Mesa or any of its registered transtellars. So when you announce that you have collectively and regretfully decided to pool your military and political influence as a 'mutual security association', a way to guarantee the Eridani Edict protections the League Navy has failed to uphold—when you offer membership to all those willing to join—you are also going to make it absolutely clear that you have drawn your inspiration directly from the Six Pillars of the existing Renaissance Association.
"Those are, of course, the reform of the Solarian League government into a genuine bicameral federal structure, major anti-trust legislation to break apart transtellars, the end of permanent bureaucratic sinecures, the provision of full citizenship to the populations of Verge protectorate worlds, the abolition of the Office of Frontier Security….and, of course, the complete eradication of genetic slavery.
"We've done centuries of work to concentrate all the fear and hatred of gene modification upon the slave trade. Now it's time to cast all that into the fire. We've already begun the process of removing and effacing all the Alignment's presence on Mesa; in fact, we've been using the Audobon Ballroom and other terrorist groups to drive up the rate of violent crimes and accident deaths over the past fifty years just so we can make these disappearances seem statistically normal.
"Your star nations are all members in good standing of the Solarian League. You won't be renouncing that membership. What you will be doing is offering yourselves as the guarantors of stability and safety the League should be. And if, in the long run, you'll be the door by which we restore control of the corporeal human condition to rational human authority…then it'll only be because people trust the Factor to look after their best interests."
He grinned at his carefully seeded heads of state. "Quite frankly, I wouldn't be surprised if Manticore and Beowulf were the first to throw their support behind us. Anti-slavery, pro-democracy League reformers? We're a dream come true."
Not really a surprise. There had been plenty of time, during the long days of negotiation in Beowulf, for the Solarians to specially outfit one of their battlecruisers as a spy. And while Honor was confident that Sindurala wouldn't discover anything critical, she still found the tacit breach of faith…troubling.
Not because she expected respect or deference from the League. But because the sensors were a sign that the League was watching, learning, angling for a military advantage…and they were not afraid to let Manticore know. These were not the signals of a complacent power that expected peace.
"What do you think, Rafe?" she murmured. "Are we doing the right thing?"
Sindurala's Warshawski sails bled transit energy as the lingering kinetic transfer of the wormhole became radiation. The light came through the display on HMS Imperator's flag bridge in pale echo of its true grandeur, and Rafael Cardones, Honor's flag captain, did not blink into the glare.
"Turning Crandall over?" He shook his head. "As far as I'm concerned, mam, she's a war criminal and she belongs in our brig. I understand the political case for releasing her. We granted her prisoner of war status, and POW exchanges are going to be vital if there's any further…unpleasantness. Hell, while we were at Haven, God knows I spent long enough wondering how I'd live with myself if we went through with Dido. But at least we were going to give them a chance to evacuate! The chance she didn't give anyone around Spindle. Or anyone on—"
He shook his head and fell silent. Grief for Scotty burnt in his brain. Nimitz crooned softly.
Sindurala's wedge came up, and she began to accelerate, very slowly, away from the Beowulf terminus, towards the locus where the negotiators had agreed that Imperator would conduct the handover. Elizabeth had given Honor her orders in person, fuming like hot plastic the whole time. "Willy convinced me," she'd said. "An act of good faith. A way to show the League we're willing to compromise. But I truly believe she should've stood before the Queen's justice, Honor. And I'm going to have to explain to the people of Spindle why we let her get away."
Now Honor felt the enormous, lonely weight of Rafael Cardones' own regrets. With Scotty, Alistair, and Andreas dead, he and Mercedes Brigham were among the last of Honor's original HMS Fearless officers still alive and fighting. Stromboli was still out there, as were Sam Weber and Fritz Montoya. Ariella Blanding had died at Grendelsbane. Arlene Wolversham was serving in Silesia. Illona Rierson had taken an early retirement, and Lois Suchon was in private practice. And Rafe knew as well as Honor did that the reasons she'd stayed closest to Scotty, Alistair, Andreas, Mercedes, Fritz, and he was also the same reason so many of that group were dead. They were the ones drawn, again and again, to the place of greatest danger, where they could do the most good.
"Rafe," she murmured. "Before we send the drone pinnace over to Sindurala, I'd like to ask Horace up to the bridge."
A spark of surprise caught in Rafe's mind-glow, and almost immediately darkened into worry for Harkness. "Maybe that's a good idea."
Harkness had come aboard as Navy liason to the Marine detail keeping an eye on their guests. Honor had personally welcomed Crandall's flag staff aboard. When she'd saluted Crandall the woman's mind had flashed with such absolute disdain and contempt that Nimitz snarled aloud. "Harrington," she'd said. "You're the one who gets to try out the new missiles first, eh?"
Honor had decided against any attempts at dining with the Solarian officers.
A few minutes later, the flag bridge doors opened to admit a uniformed Chief Warrant Officer Horace Harkness. Physically, he smiled. Emotionally, the glare of guilt, fury, and sorrow off him was a supernova.
And at the sight of Honor, there was even a sparkle of relief.
"Horace. Everything ready for the transfer?"
"Yes mam. It's all set. No Solarians come aboard our ship, none of us go aboard theirs, no crew face any risk at any point. We walk Crandall's shitbirds—pardon me, mam—to the pinnace, the pinnace flies on autopilot to whatever point the Solarians select, they steer it into their bay under their own full control, and then it returns to a safe distance where we can check it over for anything….well," he coughed into his fist, "out of place, mam."
The fear and worry in his mind-glow was like a spark under her tongue. She smiled anyway. "Very nice work. We can't be too careful, knowing what we do about the nanotech. You're one of our best intrusion experts. If anyone can spot something wrong with that pinnace, it's you."
"Well, thank you, mam." He accepted her firm handshake with a rueful grin. Inside, he was screaming. "Flag bridge. Very high company for a simple NCO."
"Given that I wouldn't be standing on this flag bridge without you, Chief Harkness, I think you own a piece of it. In fact, I should probably introduce you to my son someday soon."
He flushed. His mind-glow flooded with warmth and gratitude, and then, just moments later, a backwash of bitter regret and self-hatred. Nimitz growled softly in Honor's ear. It was obvious by now that her suspicions were correct, and her heart wept for him. He'd decided to take fate into his own hands, knowing it would destroy him.
But she gestured for Harkness to stand beside her, and waited as he and Rafe exchanged murmurs. It was eerie to watch their mind-glows shade towards the same color of yearning and loss. Like two pendulums falling into time. Put people together and they would find their common ground, even if it hurt. That was the hope she'd trusted at Haven.
"Long way from slinging drones around Basilisk, isn't it?" Rafe said.
"Aye, it is," Harkness murmured. "Too long a way for some of us."
Minutes passed. Sindulara turned over and decelerated, just as gently, into her parking slot.
Harkness shifted his weight. "I should probably get below, mam. I'd like to be there when they load Crandall onto the pinnace. Just to see her one last time before…"
His voice faltered. His mind was full of death.
"Why do we do this?" Honor asked him.
"Mam? Pardon me?"
She made room for Rafe to join them. "You two were with me on Fearless, twenty years ago. We almost died together. Because I thought we were the only ship between Sirius and the invasion of Basilisk. I did it because it was my duty to Queen and nation. Haven't we done our duty ever since? Haven't we protected this kingdom with our lives, over and over, at cost?
"But here we are, after all that. Eight million dead in a Manpower strike. The League on the verge of war with us because we had the temerity to not die quietly. I promised…"
She did not have to fake the hitch.
"I promised Alistair, after he died, that I'd guard what he left behind. I promised him that the fire he'd given his life to protect wouldn't go out. He should've had so much life ahead of him…we should've been together, all of us, at Fearless' hundred-year reunion. But everything's just burning hotter and hotter, isn't it? The fire's not going out. It's out of control. Do any of us know what our lives will look like in one year, let alone a hundred?"
"Not I, mam," Rafe murmured. "Though I hope I'll be exactly where I'm standing right now, mam."
Harkness was silent, and full of sorrow.
"Why do we still do this?" Honor cupped her arms for Nimitz to swarm down and curl against her chest. "If we don't see a future we can understand. If nothing we've done could prevent his tragedy, and maybe more tragedies to come. Why don't we just…"
She felt the astonishment and horror dawning in the two men. They had never conceived of her as someone who could give up. But she didn't conceive of herself that way either. At least, not someone who could give up in the sense of surrender. Instead, the part of her she feared was the part willing to give up all constraint. All morality. All mercy.
"Why don't we just kill them all?" she said, baldly. "Haven. The Solarians. Manpower. All of them. Why do we go to such lengths to obey the rules, to spare the innocent and separate the guilty, when they're willing to trample on us—to murder us by the millions, in our beds, in our cars, at our birthday parties?
"Wouldn't it be easier to just…finish it? We swore an oath to put Manticore before all other loyalties. Aren't we obliged?"
There was a part of her, she knew, which believed every word she was saying.
"I suppose, mam," Rafe said, with a softness which told her he understood perfectly, "that if we did so, we'd no longer be people worthy of loyalty. Or, if you'll forgive me, people with any honor."
"Yes. That's what I tell myself." She hugged Nimitz close and smiled at him. On her other side, Horace Harkness' mind-glow shaded like a cooling star into deep, pure grief. "I know I've certainly pushed that line. I went after Pavel Young, gun to gun, and shot him dead. It wasn't justice. It was revenge. If Alistair and Horace's good wife hadn't been willing to push that line with me, I wouldn't even have had the pretext of evidence to support my challenge. But God, did I want it. I would've done anything to see him across from me on that field. And I did think, at the time, that I might die after I'd killed Pavel. Just…let myself go."
She turned to Horace. Nimitz's wide eyes looked up at him, twin to her own cool gaze.
"Horace," she said, into the man's terror and confusion and grief, "these people hurt your wife. They killed your son. I don't know how that feels, thank God. But I think I can come pretty close. And if I were in your position, I know I would be capable of doing terrible things. And I know how much I would regret them, for all the rest of the days God has allotted to me. So I can only pray that you, or Rafe, or my husband, or my wife, or the Queen herself, would be in a position to stop me."
He could not look at her. The grief broke, and beneath it there was only shame.
"I think we still do this," Honor Harrington said, "out of the hope that, in the end, after it's all over, we can look into our hearts and know that we tried our best. Know that things are a little better than they would've been otherwise, if they'd happened without us. We can't stop the wars. We can't end evil. So all we can do is step up and take our place, because someone's going to do it, and who better than us?
"So I hope you won't do anything in Scotty's name that would make you doubt, in the end, whether you'd done as much good as you could. There are enough people in the universe trying to kill the next Scotty Tremaine or Alistair McKeon or Andrew LaFollett or…" She swallowed. There were too many names. "There are enough people trying to do that already. Without us making things worse."
Silence fell between them. Then, in a voice hoarse with unshed tears, Horace Harkness said, "I've got to get down to the boat boy. Just thought of a check I need to run on the pinnace. Safety measure. Just a…little thing."
"Very good, Chief. Wouldn't want anything to go wrong at such a delicate moment." She laid a hand on his shoulder. "Mind how you go, now. Dismissed."
* * *
The pinnace settled into SLNS Sindulara's boat bay with no one at all at the controls.
Ranks of League Navy personnel waited in full dress uniform to receive the returning heroes of the Battle of Spindle. Astrid Wang, Innokentiy Kolokoltsov's personal assistant and (secretly) the covert manager of so many of the negotiations in Beowulf, fidgeted nervously in a block of Foreign Ministry personnel. She'd never been off Old Terra before, and on this trip she'd discovered that she hated military boat bays. There was just so much space outside.
Inside the pinnace, Pelé Bautista smeared a tear of patriotic gratitude from his cheek. "I knew they'd come back for us," he muttered. Ou-yang Zhing-wei's fingers brushed Hugo Shavarshyan's hand across the aisle between their seats. Sandra Crandall hiccuped and flipped to the next page of the Jayne's Fighting Ships she'd stolen from her stateroom. "Fucking dildo-ass piece of shit," she muttered at the renders of the Gryphon-class superdreadnought on the next page.
In the flight computers of the pinnace, a small block of code did not execute.
A buffer did not overflow. A set of commands did not escape the lockdown placed on the flight systems by the 'near-ship operations' safe mode. No blizzard of false readings forced the proximity lidar and Warshawski mass sensors into a failsafe reboot. And no deadly fang of code reached out to bite into the impeller wedge control systems…and bring the kilometer-long wedge online inside Sindulara.
The wedge did not chop itself into the rubber of space-time, cutting straight through battle steel, superconductor runs, bulkheads, and flesh. Sandra Crandall, Ou-yang Zhing-wei, Hugo Shavarshyan, Barend Haarhuis, Darryl Chatfield, and everyone else aboard the pinnace did not die in the shock front of plasma and radiation that crushed their pinnace like a gumball. Astrid Wang and the ship's company of SLNS Sindulara did not perish along with their battlecruiser, sliced apart by one of those catastrophes that gave boat bay officers night sweats.
Nothing happened. It was an absolute anticlimax.
For once, all had gone right.
And then, on the flag deck of HMS Invictus, an alarm buzzed.
"Repeat!" Rafael Cardones snapped into his headset. His eyes narrowed. "Admiral, we have a destroyer just arrived from Trevor's Star via wormhole. They are reporting a hyper footprint at the Trevor's Star limit. Three hundred Havenite ships of the wall just made a zero-velocity translation. They're holding station. There's one ship accelerating in-system. We have an FTL platform nearby and they got a transponder ID…"
The concentration in those eyes became shock. He turned to Honor with his mouth agape.
"It's Haven One, mam. She's requesting permission to transit to Manticore. She says she has a patient aboard."
Chapter Twenty-Five
"Ladies and gentlemen, let's close up and do this," Fleet Admiral Winston Kingsford called. "Admiral Nation, it's your meeting."
The long table of Battle Fleet officers adjusted their seats and came to attention. There was no more lingering conversation by the coffee no more furtive exchanges of text messages. Despite centuries of inertia, despite the agonizingly long round-trip communications loop to the 'front', Battle Fleet had shaken off its concrete anklets and started to pull itself together. Even Frontier Fleet's elusive Engracia Alonso y Yáñez had dispatched Admiral Ng to attend. And as Admiral Holy Evangeline Nation approached the lectern, there was only anticipatory silence.
Daud al-Fanudahi leaned over to Irene Teague to murmur something sarcastic. But nothing came. Irene looked at him quizzically. He was so shocked to have no complaints that he could only shrug. "I wonder where Thimàr is? He's been gone for weeks."
"I think he's visiting contractors, tracking down our FTL comm prototypes," she whispered back. "Now be quiet."
"Admirals. Captains." Admiral Nation set her personal link down on the lectern, and the wall immediately opened onto a sharp red MANTICORE THREAT GROUP title, backed by an armored knight with upraised shield. "On behalf of Strategy and Planning, I'm here to present the latest iteration of War Plan Indica. This is an instantiation of Case Haymaker tailored for the defeat of the Star Empire of Manticore.
"Manticore is a major Verge power whose strategic center of gravity is the Manticore Wormhole Junction. This is a junction of unprecedented range, with seven termini linking Manticore to the Andermani, to the Haven quadrant, and, most critically, to our own Core via a connection to Beowulf. Commerce passing through the Junction provides Manticore with a constant revenue stream, but this direct access also poses serious military risks to Manticore. Therefore, the wormhole junction is heavily fortified, and no conventional attack through the Junction could survive.
"Ordinarily, Case Haymaker would dictate a direct assault across the Manticore hyper limit by a wall of battle. However, Manticore's advanced missile technology presents a serious threat to any main fleet engagement. The use of independent system defense pods means they can deliver a strike of essentially arbitrary size at a favorable cost ratio. Although we've developed numerous stopgap countermeasures to enhance our capital ships' survivability, we cannot risk another major defeat. Therefore, our strategy is to constrict Manticore's perimeter and raid their industry through the aggressive use of light forces while we close the technological gap. In order to succeed, we must avoid matching strength with strength. Instead, we must find areas where we possess a comparative advantage. To achieve this, we've turned to the HyperBattle concept proposed by Admiral Isotalo."
A wave of her hand and a nod of her dapper bearded head moved to the next slide. A schematic of the layers of hyperspace, mortared over normal space like a pyramid, filled the wall. "It is well understood that hyperspace restricts the engagement range of modern warships. The nature of hyperspace contracts distances, and the intense virtual-particle flux effectively serves as 'ambient jamming', which degrades long range missile attacks. This gives us a comparative advantage—or at least reduces our disadvantage. Therefore, we should seek battle in hyperspace whenever possible.
"In order to protect their 'interior lines,' Manticore will focus its deployments on the protection of the wormhole network. We expect they will actively attempt to seize wormholes throughout League space. No wormhole terminus, anywhere, exists within the hyper limit of a star. This means that a battle over a wormhole terminus will have at least two layers: the fight for control of the terminus in real space, and the fight for control of the surrounding hyperspace. Whoever controls the hyperspace layer will be able to descend upon a realspace enemy within energy range, granting an advantage to the numerically superior opponent—which will, of course, be us."
There was soft, rueful laughter.
"The exception, however, lies in the resonance zone that stretches between a wormhole terminus and the nearest star. This zone has unpredictable and occasionally deadly effects on hyper transitions. A smart Manticoran commander will take advantage of this zone to deny us hyperspace access to his realspace coordinates. Therefore, we will need both a realspace and a hyperspace threat to achieve victory. Our current doctrine is to use towed missile pods and Uller drones as our primary realspace pressure, and capital ships as our hyperspace 'hammer.'
"We will also be patrolling the grav waves which serve as highways for hyperspace traffic in areas not served by wormholes. Grav waves prevent the use of any impeller drive, including missiles. This forces ships to engage at close range with energy weapons, generally nose or stern-on. This is obviously a huge leveler for us, especially as Manticore's primary superdreadnought classes, the Invictus and Medusa, have major structural weaknesses in their stern. But we anticipate that the initial phase of this war will be fought mostly by small squadrons of light units rather than our capital forces, and that, I'm afraid, falls within the domain of tactics rather than strategy.
"The final element of our HyperBattle strategy is the investment of planetary systems for long-duration sieges. A G2 star like the Sun has a hyper radius that's too large to picket entirely…at least in real space. But in hyperspace, that limit's reduced to a circumference of only 71 light seconds, which we can picket—and fairly heavily, at that. If it becomes necessary, we can control access to the hyperspace alpha band around Manticore or one of its allies. And while that won't prevent them from traveling to their wormhole junction in real space, and it won't certainly prevent them from moving further out past our pickets before entering hyperspace, it will allow us to tie down a huge amount of their forces in their home system.
"All of these tactics combine to support a strategy of strategic investiture and commerce raiding while we bring Battle Fleet's wall up to technological parity. That wall is currently in the middle of a major redeployment. At the moment, Admiral Isotalo is on the way to take command of Eleventh Fleet in Tasmania, which will put five hundred ships of the wall within three weeks of Manticore. Admiral Tseng is overseeing the deptloyment of an additional six hundred superdreadnoughts, plus full screening elements, to join Eleventh Fleet within three months—"
Daud couldn't hold it in any more. He liked some of what he was hearing, and he was glad the SLN's sclerotic bureaucracy had managed to turn a critical eye on itself and produce this step towards a real strategy. But he'd been corrupted by too many years as the staff naysayer and malcontent. He couldn't play with the team. So his question just burst up out of him.
"This is all great," he said, "but what about Manpower? Aren't we all pretty certain that if we didn't hit Manticore, then they must've done it? Isn't everyone muttering that they had Rajampet killed? Are we even going to war with Manticore any more?"
An ominous silence descended as Fleet Admiral Kingsford turned, with all the deliberation of a pulser turret, to bear on him.
"That," he said, "is up to our civilian leadership. Our task is to provide military options if it comes to war. Or, I should say, more war, since Manticore has already declared on us."
"But shouldn't we be considering the ramifications of carrying out an attack that we've been manipulated into, an attack on an Eridani Edict victim—"
"Captain!" Kingsford snapped. "Civilian leadership! Shut the fuck up!"
"Locking fuck up in the shut position, sir," Daud muttered. Kingsford was obviously playing hard on the military's subordination to the civilian leadership…which might be a very important part of averting war. And an equally important part of rebuilding trust in the Navy after Rajani's gambit.
But Daud couldn't help but think that all the military options in the universe would continue to fail so long as they were on Manpower's script.
How the damn hell did a fringe corporation whose very reputation bordered on obscenity get that kind of sway? Were they really providing enough of Earth's elite with customized fuck-puppets to get their tentacles as far up as Rajani? That might appeal to the cretins who rolled conspiracy theories back and forth like dungballs on the planetary nets, but Daud didn't believe that a vast conspiracy of slave-fuckers could actually exist on such a scale. People talked. People had decency, damn it. It wasn't the Common Era any more! You just couldn't own a slave in modern society. Maybe you could go on some all-expenses-paid vacation to a slave planet, but why? Why? There were plenty of planets full of triple-A sex industries ready to arrange whatever you wanted, from your run of the mill orgies to a completely asexual summit on modern phenomenology.
People had decency. And it was up to decent people to do something, wasn't it? So if Kingsford wasn't going to act, and the civilian leadership was tangled up in courts and treaties, well…
Daud began to jot notes. They had nothing to do with the briefing Admiral Nation was giving.
* * *
Innokentiy's knife found pink flesh.
"Picanha." He sawed gently til he had a good cut off the roast. "Brazil's favorite cut, from the branded part of the rump. You see…about one centimeter of white fat, on the outside? Proof that the cow was well fed. Impale the cut on a sword, then cook it with rock salt, never sea salt, and rub it with pepper after the heat. A little olive oil and a little garlic won't go amiss. And there you have…the finest meat on planet Earth."
He plated the cut and passed it across his dining table to Omosupe Quatermain. "Oh good," she said. "I'm your favorite."
He cut again. "Not so fast, now. The anticipation is the second-best part."
"Until the moment I am chewing on this steak, I am still anticipating. Quiveringly,"
"And you will continue to do so until I've said grace. For you, Nathan, I cooked tube steak." Nathan McArtney was a vegetarian, and while there were probably planets where tube-grown beef didn't taste as good as the field-farmed original, Earth was not one of them. Innokentiy finished serving the others, then took his own seat at the head of the table. "Anyone need anything? Drink? Agatá, water for the whiskey?"
"Don't threaten me, Mr. Permanent Undersecretary."
"Good woman." His Hyde Park apartment was narrow and sparsely furnished, but he had excellent light and rent control. Instead of smart walls and hangings, he'd decorated with images of legislation and orders whose form he found particularly…concordant? He wasn't sure exactly what to call the quality, except that it spoke to him of well-organized thought. Now he bowed his head and spoke the words his father had passed down, unchanged through generations of Kolokoltsovs, all the way back to the long-ago ancestral homeland of the New South Brooklyn Hetmanate. "Lord have mercy, Lord have mercy, Lord have mercy. Let's eat!"
"Succinct," Malachai Abruzzi said, over the red bulb of a glass of Balleto Teresa 1901. "Maybe a little generic, though. You could use some flair on the third repetition, you know, like mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa—"
"Mal, don't you dare dissect our host's traditional family grace. Aren't your educational earworms designed to decay in four to six months?" Omosupe Quatermain tested the sharpness of her own steak knife and nodded in approval. "I see you keep your blades keen in this house."
"Sharpen twice, cut once. Or something to that effect?" Nathan McCartney frowned at his plate. "If only we could sharpen up our intervention battalions—"
"No business here, Nathan," Agatà reproached him.
"That's easy for us to say, having our nice dinner in this nice apartment. But I've got people out there who've been taken hostage, entire delegations detained, probably tortured. I mean, Shivaji's in open revolt! And Boniface again, as if we didn't kill enough—"
"Stop," Innokentiy said, softly.
They all froze: Agatà, Omosupe, Nathan, dark-suited Malachai, each caught in the midst of indulging an appetite.
"I don't like it when things depart from the plan," Innokentiy told them. The tablecloth was a sensible brown. He should feel safe and comfortable here. "The plan for this dinner was to fill ourselves with satisfaction and contentment in each others' company. But things haven't gone according to plan, have they? It's been quite a few months. Back in January I told all of you that I pitied Manticore. I told you that in fifty years I saw no future for the Star Empire of Manticore; in its place I foresaw a new member of the Solarian League, protected by a Navy that had triumphed by moral authority and the strength of deterrence. I saw people all around the Verge secure in the knowledge that breakaway states could not thrive. And I said—I said, God help us, I foresee a galaxy that has never known the cataclysmic devastation that visited Epsilon Eridani.
"Well, Manticore is now further from our influence than ever before. Our Navy's potency is in question. Manticore's leaked our contingency files and the entire Verge is in chaos. And, worst of all, VEDA tells me that if we don't bring the perpetrators of the Manticore Strike in ourselves, there's serious risk of Beowulf touching off a secession crisis. We're taking steps on every front, but Manticore's too impatient to wait for the Hague to sort out Manpower's legal status and reach some kind of extradition arrangement. They've already shaved about half a percent off our collective GSP just by pulling their freighters, and we've only seen the start of that economic impact. I think it's safe to say that nothing went as I predicted. In five months, we've escalated from a state of steady. gradual expansion to an interstellar crisis.
"That tells me something in and of itself. The League is an enormously stable system. It always has been. Our system is full of negative feedback loops, devices to stabilize and slow down any unexpected excursion from the steady state. This is why our legislature is neutered. This is why our bureaucrats must struggle for every advantage. The very traits Manticore mocks are the reason for our longevity…and the reason that President Yeou hasn't been able to get his pet 'Yeou Transtellar pays no tariffs' project off the ground."
Agatà smiled a little.
"What it tells me," Innokentiy said, "is that our enemy—our real enemy—knows how to target the mechanisms that keep us stable. They're hitting us on every front, trying to push the League into an extreme state, a terra ignota where something could break. They know that any strategy with a single thrust, a single point of failure, could be identified and neutralized. Steer an aircar for the ground and all the pilot has to do is regain control and pull up. But put that aircar into an unrecoverable flight regime—avionics crashed, stalled airfoil, plates iced up—and the best pilot in the galaxy couldn't save it. Whoever these enemies are, they are very cunning and very sophisticated. And they have the initiative. They are trying to fly us out of our recoverable regime.
"I believe that the best thing we can do right now is nothing. The inertia of size and history is in our favor. But we have two bleeding wounds which make patience dangerous. The failure of our navy against Manticore, and our failure to prevent an Eridani attack that many blame on us. Our enemies are not going to allow us to wait for those wounds to heal.
"So what I want to ask you is this. Next time our enemy strikes, and pushes us closer to war with Manticore, we need a policy in place. We need our people on the ground ready to react. So I propose the following strategy. We will not go to war with Manticore unless two conditions are met. First, we are assured of military success. And second, victory will enhance, not disturb, the prestige of the League's sacred principles. Unless combat is a chance to fight valiantly for the Eridani Edict and the safety of innocent civilians, I want all our admirals and commissioners to swallow their pride and accept a strategy of patient nonconfrontation. Nathan, that especially means your people. Are we agreed?"
He looked at them, and one by one, they nodded.
"Unconditional aid to Grayson," Agata said.
"No punitive seizures of Manticoran freight or shipping," Omosupe murmured.
"I'll have Information & Education take a more… placating stance," Malachai said.
Nathan MacArtney opened his mouth, paused, and shook his head. "Innokentiy, you're talking about completing the process of humiliation that started at New Tuscany. My people are already out there on the Verge, taking casualties, dying, because every pirate and petty tyrant sees the Manticore affair as their big chance to sneak something past us. And you want us to just lie down and take it? I don't know. Once we've lost the respect and, frankly, the fear of the Verge populations, we're never going to get it back. And that means an end to the strategy of expansion we've pursued since the 1300s. The League may never grow any bigger than we are now. In terms of tangible losses, that's as terrible a defeat as Manticore could hope to deliver us short of strikes on multiple Core worlds."
"We'll clean up Frontier Security's image and ease back into expansionism. Frankly, paring back the initial exploitation stage could get our new members to a profitable state decades earlier." Innokentiy began to cut his picanha. "That's why Foreign Minister Orta e Diadoro is first on the list."
"What list?"
"Something I brought for dessert." His knife bared pink interior flesh, and his stomach rumbled. "Names for the first round of spring cleaning. Since we don't know who may be compromised, we'll just get rid of everyone who could do real damage. A safeguard against any further Manpower interference. I'd like us all to sign these lists, just for future solidarity. No one's going to be beheaded in public, or come to any permanent physical harm. But we are going to be toppling a lot of apple—"
His link buzzed.
"I thought you had that on silent," MacArtney protested. "I thought none of us were recording—"
"I had it off, Nathan. It woke up for security alert." Very calmly, Innokentiy checked the link's screen. If it was the kind of situation where a few seconds would make a difference, he had already screwed up so badly as to deserve whatever was coming.
The link said: VEDALERT DOMSECFAIL//SOCONTEXTVIOL202//AIRCAR PRK 4 BLKS//SWATCALLOUT-2MIN?//SAFEROOM?
Immediately he texted back: SWATNO—TAIL—DRY CLEANING?—NO ILLNESS
"Innokentiy?" Agatà asked. "What's going on?"
"Someone's just popped up on the local social surveillance, and my house security has failed. Fortunately, I have backup arrangements. I've told my people to keep an eye on the interloper and to watch for any countersurveillance procedures on his part." He pushed his chair back and stood. "Please follow me. I think we'd better get to my safe room, just in case."
"Christ." Omosupe dropped her fork. "Someone's coming after us? Us? We're the undersecretaries!"
"Not necessarily. There's an unusual aircar parked four blocks away. Just something that the computer flagged as out of the ordinary for this section of Hyde Park…but combined with the security failure, better safe than sorry."
They stood in a clatter of toppling chairs and dropped cutlery. Agatà spat gristle on the plate. They went together, quickly, to the hidden grav chute beside the fridge. Innokentiy reached for the catch, and hesitated.
"What are you waiting for?" Nathan hissed. "People know I work for Minister Diadoro! They could be here to kill me!"
"Yes. They could. Fortunately, you'll be deep underground." Innokentiy pressed the button. "Everyone inside, please. The shaft will drop you straight down to an old shelter left over from the Final War. It's extremely comfortable, and if at any time you can't stand the confinement, there's an aircar ready to take you out under Lake Michigan. I'll be along shortly."
"Wait a minute," Agatà protested. "Along shortly? You're not coming? You can't be serious!"
"I'll be fine. And if I'm not, you know what to do. Go. Now!"
One by one they dropped into the shaft. Nathan was first, breathing hard. Malachai shot his cuffs and stepped in gracefully. Omosupe checked her link for green lights on her family monitor as she went. Agatà looked back at him and mouthed "be careful".
The chute re-sealed automatically. Innokentiy went back to his seat, tucked his napkin into his collar, and began to eat.
His link printed: VEDALERT 11111//SOCONTEXTVIOL 202#INDIV APPROACHING YOUR LOC CODE TWO // DRYCLEANING //ILLNESS?
He typed NO ILLNESS
VEDALERT 11111 his link insisted. 202#INDIV ARMED CODE TWO//ILLNESS?
NO ILLNESS STAND BY
No need to arrest the man. At worst, he was a crazed gunman here to kill Innokentiy. That would be a serious setback, and personally quite undesirable. But at best he was here to make a contact; or he was a floater for a foreign intelligence service, and he could be traced, even turned.
He took another bite. Delicious. He'd really gotten the roast just right on this one. It was a shame dinner would be cold before the others could get back to the table.
* * *
When the knock came, it was very firm. "Come in," Innokentiy called. "It's unlocked."
The door to Unit 15D clicked and swung open. A preposterously ugly man in a grey windbreaker and a knit cap stepped inside. With his hands shoved into his pockets, his elbows stuck out so far that he almost looked like a diamond, or perhaps a large caution sign. His face was weathered granite. And in his eyes there was a remote, cosmically inevitable wrath which shook Innokentiy almost as badly as the pulser aimed his way through the fabric of the windbreaker.
"Don't move," the man said, unnecessarily. "If you've got people waiting, I'll shoot you first."
"I don't know who you think I am," he told the ugly man, "but I assure you that shooting me will make absolutely no difference to anything you could possibly care about."
"I know," the man said. His accent was false, and impossible to place. "If I wanted you dead, I would've destroyed this entire building."
"I'm very glad you didn't. There are several hundred people in this building. Sit, please. You want to ask me questions, and maybe I can give you answers. I'll cut you a—"
The man's voice vented brimstone from some inner furnace. "I don't want anything from you, Kolokoltsov. I know who you are, and I know what you do. I know who was sitting at this table ten minutes ago." The ugly man nodded to the refrigerator. "I know about the Final War shelter down there, the escape shaft to Lake Michigan, and your own personal decision to keep no weapons in your house. Privilege of a powerful man, to know he's safe in his home."
"You clearly know a great deal, Mister…?"
The ugly man's eyes had finished their swift inventory of the room. He padded towards the HD projector. Static snapped under his soft-soled shoes. "You don't have a family. You don't know what it's like to worry about your children. I had a daughter, you know. Here, with me. On Old Terra. Her mother died fighting the Peeps. She was kidnapped, right here in Chicago, as part of a—" His voice stumbled, a sound like a boulder shifting. "A conspiracy. It doesn't matter. The point is, they took her, and I was so afraid. Fear like no other fear. Something…evolutionary, you know? She was fourteen. I had to help her. I was scared and all that scared turned into angry."
The man wasn't looking at Innokentiy, but the pulser tracked him through the fabric of the windbreaker. "But she wasn't scared. Not my Helen. I think she even enjoyed it. She tunneled out of her cell, got into the Chicago sewers, killed three men who attacked her, and rescued two children they'd been keeping prisoner. Berry and Lars. I adopted them. I love those kids. But Helen—she was all I had left of her mother, understand?"
Innokentiy's link buzzed. He glanced down at it, and his blood cracked to red frost.
VEDALERT 111111 ID 202#INDIV ZILWICKI, ANTON MANTICORE ONI//LAST KNOWN SIGHTING PLANET MESA//POSSIBLY COMPROMISED
He was Manticoran intelligence. He'd been on Mesa. And if the Mesans had turned him, he might not even know it. He might not realize that he was about to assassinate the Permanent Undersecretary of Foreign Affairs and frame Manticore for the act. Mesa wouldn't be that foolish, would they? They wouldn't think Manticore could be framed for such pure idiocy—?
"Mister Zilwicki," Innokentiy said, as calmly as he could, "are you aware that you may be carrying nanites designed by Manpower, Incorporated to influence your choices—"
His picanha roast shuddered on its skewer and burst apart. Zilwicki's pulser was set to a low subsonic velocity, each dart just a loud serpentine hiss. If he fired it on full auto, there would be no merciful, flesh-shredding detonation of transferred kinetic energy. No instant death. Innokentiy would feel every slow, heavy hit. He might even survive long enough to bleed out on his own dinner table.
"And you people killed her." Zilwicki's huge shoulders corded and did not relax. He held onto the weapon like it was his only anchor against a storm surge. "She went into the Navy. She was at Spindle. And you people killed her. She should've lived four hundred years. Imagine what kind of woman could've come from a girl that strong and good. Imagine what she could've done in four centuries. She would've been worth a thousand of you, Kolokoltsov. A million. Fourteen years old and she fought her way out of the Chicago sewers with two orphans in tow. But Chicago got its revenge, eh? You got your revenge."
"What happened at Spindle was a tragedy for everyone," Kolokoltsov began. "No one in my government even knew that Crandall intended to—"
"It was a tragedy for Helen Zilwicki!" the man roared. He turned at the hip to shoot out the HD projector and the camera behind it. Shattered plastic and glittering molycircs spilled across the carpet. "For my daughter! You sit here in your plush offices, tweaking rates and statistics, unaccountable, unelected, uncontrolled, doing your goddamn best to keep everything the same as it's always been. And when people die, you talk about the cost to everyone! But you don't speak for everyone, Kolokoltsov. Not for me. Not for my people. So you don't get to pass the responsibility on to 'everyone'. You made the choices. You have the power, you take the fucking responsibility!"
What else was there to say? "Everything I do, I do for the League."
"I know." Zilwicki's voice fell to a soft, ursine growl. "That's why I'm not going to shoot you, Kolokoltsov. You're just a janitor. You clean this thing's tubes, you feed it and rub its ears, but in the end, you're just another parasite. I'm going to bring the whole rotten beast down on your ears. I'm going to end everything you love. And when the entire Diaspora knows that you're Manpower's patsy, and they string you up for your crimes, the last thing you'll see in life is my dead hand hauling your noose. And the first thing you'll see in death will be my daughter, waiting there to drag you down to your place. A seat in the endless office tower where you'll work the rest of eternity."
"Mister Zilwicki," Innokentiy Kolokoltsov said, in a voice he was astounded to find was perfectly steady, "there is nothing after death. There is only life. And the only reason you are alive—the only reason your daughter was ever born—is the existence of the Solarian League. Without us, your planet would have been extinguished hundreds of years ago. I am sorry for what happened to your daughter. But no amount of grief or rage will ever make one life matter more than two, or two more than ten, or thousands more than billions. People are going to die in the course of human events. That cannot stop those events from being well-governed. I do what I do because it must be done."
Anton Zilwicki's awful smile expanded into the void of his face. "So what are you doing about the eight million dead in Manticore? The same thing bureaucrats always do when they've killed a few million people? Cover it up. Call it necessary."
"Mr. Zilwicki, the only thing the bureaucracy wasn't prepared for in this situation was your government's willingness to destroy the very Navy that's supposed to protect you. A duty that Sandra Crandall was pursuing on the day of aforementioned tragedy. And ,ay I remind you that your daughter died after her own commander refused the very same terms she offered to Josef Byng? Perhaps Admiral Gold Peak is the one you should be visiting—"
Zilwicki came towards him. Innokentiy reached for the steak knife. It was all the excuse Zilwicki needed.
By the time the Chicago SWAT team arrived, Zilwicki's car had been found empty. The sweat-vapor trail that vanished into a jacked manhole on 56th and Drexel turned out to be a counterfeit. And the traces of a personal degausser and echo mask on the Metra led only to a vacuuming unit with an aftermarket add-on.
Innokentiy Kolokoltsov held a cold pack to the welt where the pulser butt had struck his head and wished, fiercely, that some of the blood on his table belonged not him, or to a delicious cow, but to Anton Zilwicki.
Not for revenge, but so VEDA could tell him, with as much certainty as they could provide, whether Zilwicki was under Mesan control…or whether the Manticoran had genuinely gone insane.
* * *
Albrecht Detweiler, the mastermind of the Mesan Alignment, direct clonal descendant of Leonard Detweiler of Beowulf and thus inheritor of the practices and principles of the founder of the Deregulated System of Mesa, lay beneath his beloved wife and released the chaotically mangled packets of his genome, the very tyrants that he had vowed to dethrone. It was in these moments of supreme ecstasy that he confronted the central contradiction of his life.
The Alignment strove for betterment and perfection, a state of unfettered human triumph released from the shackles of the baseline body. Yet the very values which the Alignment sought to release from the chains of reactionary paleogenetic conservatism were the product of chaos. His love for Evelina, his lust for the tall body arched in shadow above him, was the result of a complex evolutionary process which spiraled far beyond natural selection into the messier realms of founder effect, drift, mutation, non-random mating, culture-gene coevolution, and even the heresies of group selection. The spasms of his ejaculation would be merely painful without a flood of spinal reward that had motivated his ancestors to get their rocks off; the flood of prolactin, dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin and norepinephrine to which he was so particularly vulnerable was a cocktail mixed by aeons of his forefathers' evolutionary failure to fail. The very love that had kept him and Evangeline together through generation after clonal generation was a natural product, not an engineered one. Even his slight tendency towards religiosity was an evolutionary exaptation—not so much a trait in and of itself as a knock-on effect of other positive traits.
In the end, was he so different from the normals, or from the beasts produced in the Final War? Was he any more than a kind of intellectual Scrag—overcome not by bestial wartime appetites but by an extreme hypertrophy of idealism and thought
(He saw, in that moment of their shared climax, not two people twined together, but two braids of causes, culture and gene and culture-gene coevolution and history and accident and force, two trees with their roots planted in physics from the dawn of time and game theory that predated any existence: and he could not say if the trees were growing together, or strangling each other, or trying joyously to make a new thing, or trying desperately to lift their spawn up above the chaos long enough for it to last a little longer.)
Whatever made him capable of dreaming of more had come from the cauldron of less.
And when he came home from work to his wife's arms, he was not just climbing to the highest and most complete joy of his life, but also descending into the primordial past of the species he would drag into the future. Paradox.
And what about the Alignment's grand strategy? What about Operation Prometheus? The overthrow of the Solarian League. The seizure of corporeal power in the new Renaissance Factor. The transfer of the central human authority from weary Old Terra to the worlds of that new Factor. And—gradually, so gradually—the end of genetic slavery, and the beginning of a softened attitude towards progressive genetic engineering.
It was the realization of the Alignment's highest ideals. But it would be achieved by a plunge back into the decidedly unidealistic world of power and profit. And mass death.
He groaned, a nameless singular feeling, total bliss, aching sadness that this joy was already fading. Evelina shuddered, ground against him, fell forward on her elbows. At least there would be no accidents here. Evelina's body was incapable of ovulating without her own conscious consent. He wondered if there would be any orgasms in the future. Would they be needed? Or would they have to be stamped out, like a drug addiction, an uncouth reward for an unsafe behavior?
"I love you," he whispered.
His wife lay her tangled, sweat-soaked hair against his chest. "I love you," she told his heart, and kissed him right above it.
"It's time to go."
"I know."
"I don't want to leave our house."
She kissed him softly on the throat. "Me neither."
* * *
Genesis was listed as a private yacht, and if she happened to boast the size, speed, and armament of a battlecruiser, well, that was a fine little synecdoche of the Mesan Alignment's public and private faces. She had made the passage from Mesa by streak drive, almost twice as fast as any other ship could have managed. Now she decelerated into the light of the F6 yellow-white dwarf star that was named Darius only on the Alignment's own charts.
Some of that light was reflected. Reflected from the gleaming metal of Darius Prime, the exquisitely beautiful starburst of an orbital platform that circled Plato, Darius' third and most habitable planet. The night side below sparkled with beads and scatterings of light, and over the terminator, the star of one of the other orbiting platforms burnt like a steady beacon. Beyond, the moons Galton and Rhetra cast softer light.
Delicate lattices cocooned the ships taking form in the yards around Darius Prime, the infant first flight of the Leonard Detweiler-class stealth superdreadnought. There was no sign of the already-completed Sharks used in the Oyster Bay attacks. If there had been a sign, the Sharks would have been a cataclysmic failure. They were nearby, operating at invisible standby. With one exception, they had not been deployed anywhere outside Darius since Oyster Bay, and that was because the Alignment literally could not afford to lose the stealth ships—or, more specifically, the people aboard them. The crews aboard those ships right now were the seed corn for the future of the MAN(D)
Albrecht thought about all the children who'd died in Oyster Bay. He knew it was foolish, but he accepted his grief for them. If he had no qualms he'd be lost.
"We'll be docking with the station in about thirty-five minutes, sir," Genesis' captain told him.
"Thank you," Detweiler replied. "A very smooth journey. Please let Miss Anisimovna know she'll be accompanying me on the shuttle to Galton." L
ike every member of Genesis' crew, Captain Hayden Milne knew Albrecht only as 'the passenger.' The Detweilers had no public presence, and would not for decades, maybe centuries to come. But the people Albrecht had come here to meet, the crown jewels of the Alignment's strategy, would be out in the public eye…perhaps more than anyone else in existence, soon enough. They were, after all, going to lead the downfall of the Solarian League.
"So far, so good, Heinrich," he said.
"As you say, sir," his bodyguard Heinrich Stabolis agreed.
"You know, Heinrich, you don't say a lot, do you?"
"I suppose not, sir."
"But you're always there. If I haven't mentioned it lately, I appreciate it."
"I'm just glad we got you out of Mesa in time, sir."
"In time for what, Heinrich?" he asked, innocently.
"For whatever made it necessary for you to leave, sir."
Yes. A time of dying. More children on his conscience. But at least none of his children.
* * *
The Mesan Alignment had established the first colony in Darius almost two centuries ago, but the really exponential growth had begun only in the last seventy years. It had been judged wise to spend at least a century waiting for someone to stumble over the system; if it hadn't happened by then, the risk-of-failure function predicted it would probably not happen at all during the operational timeframe. The population of Darius was 3.9 billion. Two billion of those people were Alignment alpha, beta, or gamma-line enhanced humans. The other one point nine billion were 'slaves,' in the sense that they came from genotypes the Alignment had prototyped through its Manpower, Incorporated asset. But they were fully emancipated, educated in their rights and responsibilities, and rewarded for their loyalty to the genetic caste system with an ideal standard of living. Every one of the lower castes had been borne here in Darius, inoculated from before birth with the ideology of the future human state.
For all the years which had been invested in Darius, it was still no Manticore. It had no intrinsic value except for its isolation and secrecy. The system was an economic black hole, a funnel into which the Alignment poured money and from which it extracted stealth warships. It might be the Alignment's 'capital', but it would never be an open part of the Renaissance Factor.
The leaders of the worlds that would be sat before Albrecht Detweiler now. The circle of chairs rested below a slowly wheeling sky, the stars of the universe as seen from Darius, projected in true-scale 3D by the dome of the Galton Observatory. The base on Plato's first moon was as close as the these men and women would be allowed to come to Plato, as much for their safety as for the safety of the work there. The less they knew about this place, the fewer mistakes they could make.
Not that any of these heads of state were capable of spilling secrets by loose tongue, any more than they were capable of vertigo at the sight of the stars whirling overhead.
There were twelve of them, counting Albrecht himself, and they were beautiful. People trusted the beautiful, people admired them. There were seven women and four men; for reasons of genetic security, matrilineal descent had been the safest way for the Alignment's sleepers to make their way down the centuries to this moment. Recognition codes and enciphered information lurked in their mitochondrial DNA, hidden even from the genome scans routinely performed by security organizations.
"The League is in disarray," he told the other eleven. "Our leak of the OFS files has already triggered rebellions in Loomis, Kumang, Okada, al-Bakiya, Meroa, Carina, Zunker, Syl-tang, Genovese, and Boniface. And while those are simply Verge protectorates, it's only the start. Every actor in the picture is converging on the narrative we anticipated. Manpower attempted to use the League to force Manticore out of Talbott, and when that failed, Manpower overplayed its hand and hit Manticore and Grayson directly.
"The League is caught between the need to punish Manpower, and to reassert its prestige and power in the confrontation with Manticore. Now the situation's spiraled out of control, and the consequent instability is resonating through the whole sociopolitical structure. The League's feedback is so slow that each of their attempts at de-escalation only arrives in time to reinforce the magnitude of the next crisis.
"Manpower, as an asset, has been expended. In the near future, we'll be burning Manpower and the Mesa system as part of our 'final flourish.' After that, the next step is up to the eleven of you. I am formally activating the Factor's constitutional agreements. Are you ready?"
In a sense, this moment was more critical than any point of Operation Oyster Bay. He considered them one at a time.
Aatukka Hurskainen, Elected Johtaja of the Republic of Mannerheim and mastermind behind the Asgard uprisings of the past ten years, sat directly to Albrecht's right. She was a mighty presence, nearly two meters tall, her frost-white hair gathered into a wrist-thick braid, her powerful shoulders and veined arms rippling with power. Her manicure was perfect. She had upgraded the Mannerheim System Defense Force into the premier navy of the Factor's component forces.
"I am prepared," she said.
Second-Chancellor Abider Qvortrup, head of government of the Matorgada Second Chance Republic, nodded his silvered head amiably. His warmth and amiability concealed a heart of untarnished charity and goodness. Matorgada was one of Diaspora space's premiere charitable investors, swooping in to rescue corporations and governments all across the Verge. Abider even owned a significant portion of Manticore's war debt, although given the chain of banks and NGOs involved, it was unlikely Manticore knew it.
"Let's go," he said.
Clint Cincinattus Antananarivo, King Clinton III of the Kingdom of New Madagascar, had the intensely vulpine face of a bred hunter. Madagascar was a protected biosphere, one of the lushest alien ecosystems ever discovered—not just on New Madagascar itself, but on planets and moons throughout the system. It was also the Alignment's primary link to Sharpton, the most aggressively transhumanist world in Diaspora space, and thus an important enemy.
He nodded now. "Madagascar is ready."
Board Chairman Joan Torrence, head of state of the Cooperative Worker's World of Pandemonium, raised two fingers to signal assent. The same insane katabatic winds which had given Pandemonium its name had also propelled the snapping line which had nearly split her face in two. She had eschewed regeneration and reconstructive surgery in favor of 'human kintsugi,' using machinery and cosmetics to create a new face that accentuated and beautified the trauma. She was a very small person, a product of the Torrence line's optimization for extreme endurance and survivability.
Caïssa Chatarunga, president of the Line System, was the youngest person in the room. Despite her family's history in strategy and games, she was actually a masterful guitar player, a shreddist of the true high metal. Her brown south Indian skin, golden hair, dark eyes, and fine hands made her a League-wide heartthrob. But here she carried herself with the age and dignity of her line, and her soft "I am ready" was as sober as anyone's.
Nikodema Kakadelis, Chief Counsel of the Free Democratic Republic of Thrace and a high-ranking bishop in the Shark Church, still moved with the nimble ferocity of her upbringing as a sailor and occasional skirmisher on Thrace's island-scattered seas. She clasped hands with her neighbor, Rebecca Monticelli, Top Guy of Comstock and a high-risk grav ski champion. They raised their joined fists in affirmation.
Vin Stone, raven-haired veteran of the Directorate of New Orkney's System Defense Force and current president of its ruling post-war coalition, waited for his own neighbor Bob Tarantino to quit fidgeting and put up his own hand. Tarantino was a fast-talking jittery bastard, and an absolutely brilliant rhetorician. That gift had made him Master Trader of the trinary Bengal-Bombay-Calcutta system, and now he joined Vin in a wholehearted "Let's go!"
"Fuck it," Tanya Ha of the Visigoth Sacred Tribes said. She identified as a woman almost purely for convenience; her line was androgen-insensitive intersex, not out of a particular effort on the part of the Long Range Planning Board but because the trait had not been found to be deleterious. As the Chieftan of the migratory post-industrial peoples of Visigoth, she was the most able and trustworthy negotiator Albrecht had ever met. "I'm in."
Last of all was the Marquess Imani Aureal IV of the Marquisate of Denver, a hazel-eyed and haunting woman who'd received the largest share (nearly half a percent) of the 'Most Beautiful Person Alive' vote in every year of the past sixty. She was a primary architect of the Renaissance Factor's legal compact, as well as the 'slow sieve' structure of social change which would inevitably concentrate power with these twelve principals. She gave a regal "We are prepared," and then laughed at herself.
"Excellent." There'd been no question of it, really, but it was important to Albrecht that everyone have a chance to speak their doubts. One of the major traits selected for in Alignment alpha lines was a near-total immunity to social conformity.
"Now, we've gone to astronomical—literally astronomical!—lengths to be sure none of you have connections to the planet Mesa or any of its registered transtellars. So when you announce that you have collectively and regretfully decided to pool your military and political influence as a 'mutual security association', a way to guarantee the Eridani Edict protections the League Navy has failed to uphold—when you offer membership to all those willing to join—you are also going to make it absolutely clear that you have drawn your inspiration directly from the Six Pillars of the existing Renaissance Association.
"Those are, of course, the reform of the Solarian League government into a genuine bicameral federal structure, major anti-trust legislation to break apart transtellars, the end of permanent bureaucratic sinecures, the provision of full citizenship to the populations of Verge protectorate worlds, the abolition of the Office of Frontier Security….and, of course, the complete eradication of genetic slavery.
"We've done centuries of work to concentrate all the fear and hatred of gene modification upon the slave trade. Now it's time to cast all that into the fire. We've already begun the process of removing and effacing all the Alignment's presence on Mesa; in fact, we've been using the Audobon Ballroom and other terrorist groups to drive up the rate of violent crimes and accident deaths over the past fifty years just so we can make these disappearances seem statistically normal.
"Your star nations are all members in good standing of the Solarian League. You won't be renouncing that membership. What you will be doing is offering yourselves as the guarantors of stability and safety the League should be. And if, in the long run, you'll be the door by which we restore control of the corporeal human condition to rational human authority…then it'll only be because people trust the Factor to look after their best interests."
He grinned at his carefully seeded heads of state. "Quite frankly, I wouldn't be surprised if Manticore and Beowulf were the first to throw their support behind us. Anti-slavery, pro-democracy League reformers? We're a dream come true."
* * *
SLNS Sindurala coalesced from nothingness under the million staring eyes of the Manticore Wormhole Junction's fortresses. The Nevada-class battlecruiser was an ultramodern unit, stuffed to the limits of its Universal Shipboard Bus system with a bristling array of lasers, grasers, missile launchers, point-defense clusters, countermissile tubes, AEGSA arrays, Warshawskis, and more. Within seconds, the fortresses had identified her, checked her codes against her scheduled arrival, and determined that at least half of her systems were facades for ultra-sensitive passive listening equipment.
Not really a surprise. There had been plenty of time, during the long days of negotiation in Beowulf, for the Solarians to specially outfit one of their battlecruisers as a spy. And while Honor was confident that Sindurala wouldn't discover anything critical, she still found the tacit breach of faith…troubling.
Not because she expected respect or deference from the League. But because the sensors were a sign that the League was watching, learning, angling for a military advantage…and they were not afraid to let Manticore know. These were not the signals of a complacent power that expected peace.
"What do you think, Rafe?" she murmured. "Are we doing the right thing?"
Sindurala's Warshawski sails bled transit energy as the lingering kinetic transfer of the wormhole became radiation. The light came through the display on HMS Imperator's flag bridge in pale echo of its true grandeur, and Rafael Cardones, Honor's flag captain, did not blink into the glare.
"Turning Crandall over?" He shook his head. "As far as I'm concerned, mam, she's a war criminal and she belongs in our brig. I understand the political case for releasing her. We granted her prisoner of war status, and POW exchanges are going to be vital if there's any further…unpleasantness. Hell, while we were at Haven, God knows I spent long enough wondering how I'd live with myself if we went through with Dido. But at least we were going to give them a chance to evacuate! The chance she didn't give anyone around Spindle. Or anyone on—"
He shook his head and fell silent. Grief for Scotty burnt in his brain. Nimitz crooned softly.
Sindurala's wedge came up, and she began to accelerate, very slowly, away from the Beowulf terminus, towards the locus where the negotiators had agreed that Imperator would conduct the handover. Elizabeth had given Honor her orders in person, fuming like hot plastic the whole time. "Willy convinced me," she'd said. "An act of good faith. A way to show the League we're willing to compromise. But I truly believe she should've stood before the Queen's justice, Honor. And I'm going to have to explain to the people of Spindle why we let her get away."
Now Honor felt the enormous, lonely weight of Rafael Cardones' own regrets. With Scotty, Alistair, and Andreas dead, he and Mercedes Brigham were among the last of Honor's original HMS Fearless officers still alive and fighting. Stromboli was still out there, as were Sam Weber and Fritz Montoya. Ariella Blanding had died at Grendelsbane. Arlene Wolversham was serving in Silesia. Illona Rierson had taken an early retirement, and Lois Suchon was in private practice. And Rafe knew as well as Honor did that the reasons she'd stayed closest to Scotty, Alistair, Andreas, Mercedes, Fritz, and he was also the same reason so many of that group were dead. They were the ones drawn, again and again, to the place of greatest danger, where they could do the most good.
"Rafe," she murmured. "Before we send the drone pinnace over to Sindurala, I'd like to ask Horace up to the bridge."
A spark of surprise caught in Rafe's mind-glow, and almost immediately darkened into worry for Harkness. "Maybe that's a good idea."
Harkness had come aboard as Navy liason to the Marine detail keeping an eye on their guests. Honor had personally welcomed Crandall's flag staff aboard. When she'd saluted Crandall the woman's mind had flashed with such absolute disdain and contempt that Nimitz snarled aloud. "Harrington," she'd said. "You're the one who gets to try out the new missiles first, eh?"
Honor had decided against any attempts at dining with the Solarian officers.
A few minutes later, the flag bridge doors opened to admit a uniformed Chief Warrant Officer Horace Harkness. Physically, he smiled. Emotionally, the glare of guilt, fury, and sorrow off him was a supernova.
And at the sight of Honor, there was even a sparkle of relief.
"Horace. Everything ready for the transfer?"
"Yes mam. It's all set. No Solarians come aboard our ship, none of us go aboard theirs, no crew face any risk at any point. We walk Crandall's shitbirds—pardon me, mam—to the pinnace, the pinnace flies on autopilot to whatever point the Solarians select, they steer it into their bay under their own full control, and then it returns to a safe distance where we can check it over for anything….well," he coughed into his fist, "out of place, mam."
The fear and worry in his mind-glow was like a spark under her tongue. She smiled anyway. "Very nice work. We can't be too careful, knowing what we do about the nanotech. You're one of our best intrusion experts. If anyone can spot something wrong with that pinnace, it's you."
"Well, thank you, mam." He accepted her firm handshake with a rueful grin. Inside, he was screaming. "Flag bridge. Very high company for a simple NCO."
"Given that I wouldn't be standing on this flag bridge without you, Chief Harkness, I think you own a piece of it. In fact, I should probably introduce you to my son someday soon."
He flushed. His mind-glow flooded with warmth and gratitude, and then, just moments later, a backwash of bitter regret and self-hatred. Nimitz growled softly in Honor's ear. It was obvious by now that her suspicions were correct, and her heart wept for him. He'd decided to take fate into his own hands, knowing it would destroy him.
But she gestured for Harkness to stand beside her, and waited as he and Rafe exchanged murmurs. It was eerie to watch their mind-glows shade towards the same color of yearning and loss. Like two pendulums falling into time. Put people together and they would find their common ground, even if it hurt. That was the hope she'd trusted at Haven.
"Long way from slinging drones around Basilisk, isn't it?" Rafe said.
"Aye, it is," Harkness murmured. "Too long a way for some of us."
Minutes passed. Sindulara turned over and decelerated, just as gently, into her parking slot.
Harkness shifted his weight. "I should probably get below, mam. I'd like to be there when they load Crandall onto the pinnace. Just to see her one last time before…"
His voice faltered. His mind was full of death.
"Why do we do this?" Honor asked him.
"Mam? Pardon me?"
She made room for Rafe to join them. "You two were with me on Fearless, twenty years ago. We almost died together. Because I thought we were the only ship between Sirius and the invasion of Basilisk. I did it because it was my duty to Queen and nation. Haven't we done our duty ever since? Haven't we protected this kingdom with our lives, over and over, at cost?
"But here we are, after all that. Eight million dead in a Manpower strike. The League on the verge of war with us because we had the temerity to not die quietly. I promised…"
She did not have to fake the hitch.
"I promised Alistair, after he died, that I'd guard what he left behind. I promised him that the fire he'd given his life to protect wouldn't go out. He should've had so much life ahead of him…we should've been together, all of us, at Fearless' hundred-year reunion. But everything's just burning hotter and hotter, isn't it? The fire's not going out. It's out of control. Do any of us know what our lives will look like in one year, let alone a hundred?"
"Not I, mam," Rafe murmured. "Though I hope I'll be exactly where I'm standing right now, mam."
Harkness was silent, and full of sorrow.
"Why do we still do this?" Honor cupped her arms for Nimitz to swarm down and curl against her chest. "If we don't see a future we can understand. If nothing we've done could prevent his tragedy, and maybe more tragedies to come. Why don't we just…"
She felt the astonishment and horror dawning in the two men. They had never conceived of her as someone who could give up. But she didn't conceive of herself that way either. At least, not someone who could give up in the sense of surrender. Instead, the part of her she feared was the part willing to give up all constraint. All morality. All mercy.
"Why don't we just kill them all?" she said, baldly. "Haven. The Solarians. Manpower. All of them. Why do we go to such lengths to obey the rules, to spare the innocent and separate the guilty, when they're willing to trample on us—to murder us by the millions, in our beds, in our cars, at our birthday parties?
"Wouldn't it be easier to just…finish it? We swore an oath to put Manticore before all other loyalties. Aren't we obliged?"
There was a part of her, she knew, which believed every word she was saying.
"I suppose, mam," Rafe said, with a softness which told her he understood perfectly, "that if we did so, we'd no longer be people worthy of loyalty. Or, if you'll forgive me, people with any honor."
"Yes. That's what I tell myself." She hugged Nimitz close and smiled at him. On her other side, Horace Harkness' mind-glow shaded like a cooling star into deep, pure grief. "I know I've certainly pushed that line. I went after Pavel Young, gun to gun, and shot him dead. It wasn't justice. It was revenge. If Alistair and Horace's good wife hadn't been willing to push that line with me, I wouldn't even have had the pretext of evidence to support my challenge. But God, did I want it. I would've done anything to see him across from me on that field. And I did think, at the time, that I might die after I'd killed Pavel. Just…let myself go."
She turned to Horace. Nimitz's wide eyes looked up at him, twin to her own cool gaze.
"Horace," she said, into the man's terror and confusion and grief, "these people hurt your wife. They killed your son. I don't know how that feels, thank God. But I think I can come pretty close. And if I were in your position, I know I would be capable of doing terrible things. And I know how much I would regret them, for all the rest of the days God has allotted to me. So I can only pray that you, or Rafe, or my husband, or my wife, or the Queen herself, would be in a position to stop me."
He could not look at her. The grief broke, and beneath it there was only shame.
"I think we still do this," Honor Harrington said, "out of the hope that, in the end, after it's all over, we can look into our hearts and know that we tried our best. Know that things are a little better than they would've been otherwise, if they'd happened without us. We can't stop the wars. We can't end evil. So all we can do is step up and take our place, because someone's going to do it, and who better than us?
"So I hope you won't do anything in Scotty's name that would make you doubt, in the end, whether you'd done as much good as you could.
Silence fell between them. Then, in a voice hoarse with unshed tears, Horace Harkness said, "I've got to get down to the boat boy. Just thought of a check I need to run on the pinnace. Safety measure. Just a…little thing."
"Very good, Chief. Wouldn't want anything to go wrong at such a delicate moment." She laid a hand on his shoulder. "Mind how you go, now. Dismissed."
* * *
Ranks of League Navy personnel waited in full dress uniform to receive the returning heroes of the Battle of Spindle. Astrid Wang, Innokentiy Kolokoltsov's personal assistant and (secretly) the covert manager of so many of the negotiations in Beowulf, fidgeted nervously in a block of Foreign Ministry personnel. She'd never been off Old Terra before, and on this trip she'd discovered that she hated military boat bays. There was just so much space outside.
Inside the pinnace, Pelé Bautista smeared a tear of patriotic gratitude from his cheek. "I knew they'd come back for us," he muttered. Ou-yang Zhing-wei's fingers brushed Hugo Shavarshyan's hand across the aisle between their seats. Sandra Crandall hiccuped and flipped to the next page of the Jayne's Fighting Ships she'd stolen from her stateroom. "Fucking dildo-ass piece of shit," she muttered at the renders of the Gryphon-class superdreadnought on the next page.
In the flight computers of the pinnace, a small block of code did not execute.
A buffer did not overflow. A set of commands did not escape the lockdown placed on the flight systems by the 'near-ship operations' safe mode. No blizzard of false readings forced the proximity lidar and Warshawski mass sensors into a failsafe reboot. And no deadly fang of code reached out to bite into the impeller wedge control systems…and bring the kilometer-long wedge online inside Sindulara.
The wedge did not chop itself into the rubber of space-time, cutting straight through battle steel, superconductor runs, bulkheads, and flesh. Sandra Crandall, Ou-yang Zhing-wei, Hugo Shavarshyan, Barend Haarhuis, Darryl Chatfield, and everyone else aboard the pinnace did not die in the shock front of plasma and radiation that crushed their pinnace like a gumball. Astrid Wang and the ship's company of SLNS Sindulara did not perish along with their battlecruiser, sliced apart by one of those catastrophes that gave boat bay officers night sweats.
Nothing happened. It was an absolute anticlimax.
For once, all had gone right.
And then, on the flag deck of HMS Invictus, an alarm buzzed.
"Repeat!" Rafael Cardones snapped into his headset. His eyes narrowed. "Admiral, we have a destroyer just arrived from Trevor's Star via wormhole. They are reporting a hyper footprint at the Trevor's Star limit. Three hundred Havenite ships of the wall just made a zero-velocity translation. They're holding station. There's one ship accelerating in-system. We have an FTL platform nearby and they got a transponder ID…"
The concentration in those eyes became shock. He turned to Honor with his mouth agape.
"It's Haven One, mam. She's requesting permission to transit to Manticore. She says she has a patient aboard."
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I do like that after an entire book of the bad guys winning, you're seeing the first bits and pieces which might suggest that the plan is eventually going to go to shit.
NonSequtur
a body
'high shreddist of the true metal'
oh god the metalheads made a religion out of it
oh god the metalheads made a religion out of it
On the one hand, the big, reliable systems of the League are known and accounted for in Mesa's plan where a single person of no particular note doing something might not be. On the other hand, there's a reason those big systems are relied upon. Here's hoping Daud is more of a Honor than a Zilwicki type of wrench in the works.
An interesting depiction of the Alignment's priorities and extreme long-term view, that a single transhumanist planet - arguably closer to them philosophically - is instead viewed as an important enemy.
Speaking of Honor as the beneficial sort of chaotic actor, that was a moving (if relatively small scale) example of her defying the seemingly inevitable disaster.
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- Location
- Massholistan
Crandall continues to be one of my favorite characters in this fic