A Rising Thunder

Chapter Twenty-Four

“What the hell was he thinking?!” Elizabeth Winton snarled.

The Empress of Manticore stood glaring at the monstrous casualty list, brown eyes smoking like twin furnaces as the names of dead and damaged Solarian starships crawled endlessly up the conference room’s display wall.

“You had him dead to rights. He knew he you did! How could even a Solly be so stupid?!”

“I don’t know,” Honor said drearily. She stood beside her monarch, and her own eyes were dark and haunted, not fiery. Anger hovered in their depths, as well, but it was a cold, bitter anger overlaid by equally bitter regret…and guilt.

Nimitz made a soft sound from his perch on a char beside the conference table, then straightened up and raised both true-hands as she looked at him.

he signed sharply.

“Nimitz is right.” Elizabeth’s voice was softer, gentler, and Honor returned her gaze to the Empress. “You did do everything you could, Honor.”

“Everything except not back him into a corner,” Honor replied.

“Don’t you dare second-guess yourself over this!” Eloise Pritchart said sharply. “Yes, you and Earl White Haven pushed for an ops plan which would force them to surrender. I supported you in that, though, and so did Tom and Elizabeth and Protector Benjamin. And the reason we did, is that the two of you were right. And, as you yourself said, anyone crazy enough to open fire in the tactical situation you’d created was going to open fire no matter what happened!”

Honor looked at the Havenite President for a second or two, then nodded. Pritchart was probably right about that, but that didn’t make Honor feel any better over two hundred and ninety-six destroyed Solarian superdreadnoughts…and 1.2 million dead Solarians.

Why? she asked herself yet again. Why did he do it? Because I humiliated him in the way I demanded his surrender? Was hereally so stupid, so…vain, that he was willing to get himself and all of those other men and women killed rather than swallow his pride and back down in front of a bunch of “neobarbs”?

She didn’t know, and she never would, for there had been no survivors from SLNS Philip Oppenheimer. And of the four hundred and twenty-seven superdreadnoughts Massimo Filareta had led into the Manticore Binary System, only sixty had managed to surrender undamaged. Two hundred and ninety-six — including Oppenheimer—had been destroyed (most of them outright, although some had merely been turned into hopelessly shattered and broken hulks), and another seventy-one might have been repairable, assuming anyone was interested in returning such obsolete, outmoded deathtraps to service.

Well, you wanted them to understand there was a price to war, Honor, she thought bitterly. Maybe when they add this to what happened to Crandall, they’ll finally start to get the message. It would be nice if something good came out of it, anyway.

Her pain was almost worse because Grand Fleet’s casualties had been so light. She’d learned long ago that every death took its own tiny bite out of her soul, yet she’d also learned the lesson she’d wanted the Sollies to learn. Wars cost. They cost starships, and they cost billions of dollars, and they cost lives. No matter how well you planned, how hard you trained, they cost lives, and she’d been incredibly fortunate to escape with “just” two thousand dead, most in her screening LACs, and minor, readily repairable damage to eleven of her own superdreadnoughts.

That was still two thousand dead men and women too many, though. And what hurt worst of all was that she’d been so certain Filareta was going to recognize the hopelessness of his situation. His expression, his body language, his obviously bitter appreciation of the tactical situation…all of them had convinced her he would accept surrender on honorable terms rather than see so many of his spacers killed.

“It must have been a panic reaction,” Thomas Theisman said slowly, reaching up to the treecat on his shoulder as Springs From Above’s muzzle pressed against the side of his neck. “I didn’t see it coming either, Honor, but that has to have been what it was.”

“I think Admiral Theisman’s right,” High Admiral Judah Yanakov said. He stood beside Admiral Alfedo Yu, technically Honor’s second-in-command of the Protector’s Own but for all practical purposes its actual CO. “It wasn’t even coordinated fire!”

“Was it a panic reaction, though?” Admiral Yu asked softly.

Everyone turned to look at him, and he smiled faintly at Theisman. Once upon a time, Alfredo Yu had been Thomas Theisman’s commanding officer, mentor, and friend. In fact, he’d transmitted his interest in the history the Legislaturalists and the Committee of Public Safety had both, each for its own reasons, done their very best to erase or rewrite, to a very junior Liueutenant Theisman. And it was his own study of that history which had helped lead a much more senior Citizen Admiral Theisman into his ultimate opposition to Rob S. Pierre and Oscar Saint-Just. Of course, that had been twenty T-years ago. A lot had changed in the intervening decades, but the Havenite-turned-Grayson still recognized the look in his old student’s eyes.

“No, it’s not a trick question, Tom,” he said with a crooked smile. “I mean it. Was it a panic reaction?”

“It had to be, Alfredo,” Yanakov said. “That was a classic gone-to-hell desperation launch. They couldn’t possibly have targeted that much fire.”

“Oh, I agree,” Yu replied. “They just flushed the pods at us, threw everything they had right at Lady Harrington’s command in hopes the missiles’ onboard seekers would find something to kill, even without any direction, and that the sheer mass of fire would saturate her defenses. I’ve planned last-ditch, desperation attacks like that of my own.”

“Exactly,” Honor said slowly, her eyes intent as she tasted the emotions behind Yu’s handsome, bony face. Some thought was working its way out in his brain. She could feel it, even though she had no idea what it was. She wasn’t even certain he knew what it was, yet. But she knew Alfredo Yu well, and she respected his instincts.

“We’ve all put together that kind of fire plan,” she continued, waving her right hand in a gesture which took in the assembled flag officers. “Even when you don’t expect to need it, you put it together, just in case. But, Alfredo, you don’t use it when someone’s offering to let you surrender your ships and your people alive. You just don’t.”

“No, you don’t,” Hamish Alexander-Harrington said softly. “But I think that’s Alfredo’s point, Honor.”

White Haven was gazing very thoughtfully at Yu, and Samantha cocked her head to one side, considering Yu even more intently than her person.

“It is,” Yu said after a moment. “My point, I mean. Look, when you set something like that up, you know it’s only going to be used when the tactical situation’s gone totally straight to hell, right?”

Honor nodded, almond eyes intent, and he shrugged.

“So you set it up so you can get the shot off with zero lost time,” he continued. “I don’t know for sure about the Solly Navy, but I do know that when we set up something like that in the GSN or the Protector’s Own, we usually tie it to a single macro, or at the most a very short, easily remembered keycode on the ops officer’s panel. That’s the way the People’s Navy did it, too.”

“And the Republican Navy still does it the same way,” Theisman said.

“Of course it does.” Yu nodded. “You don’t want something that’s going to go off by accident — not unless you’re criminally insane, anyway! — but you do want something that can get that shot off no matter what else is happening with the shortest possible delay between the order to fire and the actual launch. And what does that suggest?”

“Are you saying,” Benton-Ramirez y Chou asked in a very careful tone, “that you think we’re looking at another example of McBryde’s damned nanotech, Admiral?”

“That’s ridiculous,” Pritchart said, yet her voice was far more thoughtful than denying, and Yu looked at her.

“Why, Madam President? If you assume they could get to Filareta’s ops officer at all, why not set up something like this? Especially if there was some way for the people who programmed him to know or to guess how he’d go about setting up a gone-to-hell fire plan? Maybe they had access to recordings of simulations where he’d set up plans like that. For that matter, maybe they had someone else inside Filareta’s staff passing them that kind of information, probably with no idea at all what the Alignment meant to do with it. I can think of at least three ways, right off hand, a Peep flag officer back in the bad old days could’ve gotten that information about any operations or tactical officer in the People’s Navy anytime he’d wanted to, and the SLN’s at least as badly riddled by patronage and ‘favor buying’ as the Legislaturalists ever were. And if Filareta’s tac officer did have a pattern, did have a standard way of setting up for that kind of plan…”

His voice trailed off, and silence enveloped the conference room as the people in it looked at one another.

“Tester, you may be right,” Yanakov said softly into that silence at last. “It could be, anyway.”

“I think he is right,” White Haven said grimly. “Think about it. If they’d gone with a standard fire plan, they had the fire control channels to’ve fired at least three targeted salvos out of those missile pods. There’d have been time to feed actual target coordinates to their birds, and those salvos would have been in final acquisition by the time anything we fired could’ve reached their ships. Sure, we’d have stopped a lot of them — most of them — before they inflicted any damage, but their chances of actually getting through with at least some hits would have been a lot higher than they could do simply trying to saturate our defenses without even assigning targets!”

“And look at the delay between that first launch and the first follow-on salvo from their broadside tubes,” Lester Tourville said, eyes distant. “It was a good — what? Ten seconds? Something like that?”

“Thirteen,” Theisman said. “You’re right, Les.”

“Pat hasn’t had time for any prisoner interviews yet,” Sir Thomas Caparelli said thoughtfully, lips pursed. “I wonder if anyone’s going to be able to explain that delay to us? It does almost sound like there was a hole of some kind in the order queue, doesn’t it?”

“Possibly,” White Haven agreed. “But that doesn’t change the fact that Filareta could have used the time Honor gave him to set up a sequenced, targeted, controlled launch, and he didn’t. Why not?”

“Because that would have required a series of actions?” Yu murmured, then nodded slowly. “They’d have to select the pods to be enabled. Then they’d have to choose the targets, feed the coordinates, enable at least the first salvo’s telemetry links, update their electronic warfare plan. It would have taken more than one man, and it would have taken a complex series of commands and keystrokes. Whereas—”

“Whereas this way, if you’re right, all they needed was for some poor damned soul to punch one button and they could count on me to kill over a million people for them,” Honor grated harshly.

More than one of the humans present winced. Her husband reached out to lay one hand on her forearm, and she looked at him with bitter eyes.

“You didn’t have any choice,” he told her. “Not with fifty thousand missiles coming at your command.”

“I could have just taken the fire,” Honor replied flatly. “Look at how few people we lost anyway! I could’ve waited to be sure—”

“Oh, stop it!” Thomas Theisman snapped, and Honor’s head snapped around in surprise at the genuine anger in his voice.

“No, you could not have ‘just taken the fire’!” the Republic’s Secretary of War told her sharply. “And if you had done something that stupid, you’d deserve to be broken for it!”

“But—”

“Don’t you ‘but’ me! You didn’t know — you couldn’t know — if they’d come up with some kind of fire control fix we’d never heard of before. You had no right, not one shred of a moral justification, to risk the lives of personnel under your command just because somebody on the other side had done something suicidal! Your responsibility is to your people, not theirs! It’s your job to neutralize an enemy before he kills them, and you’d damned well better do it if you’re going to be worthy of the uniform you wear!”

His brown eyes blazed, and she tasted the white-hot fury, the total sincerity, behind them.

“That’s your responsibility, Admiral Harrington, and you lived up to it! You reacted to the threat you knew about, the one you saw, and I was right there on that flag bridge with you. It took those missiles three minutes to reach us, and you had a Hermes buoy sitting right off his flagship’s bow. There was plenty of time for him to get on the com and tell you the launch was a mistake, if he hadn’t meant to launch it! Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t believe he did that, now did he? Not only that, but thirteen-second lag or not, the rest of his damned fleet was firing full broadsides at you on its heels! I understand that realizing you gave the order to kill that many people has to make you sick to your stomach. It makes me want to puke, and I didn’t have to give it. But the only ones responsible for what happened to Filareta and the people under his command are whoever arranged to get him sent here and — assuming there’s any basis to all this speculation in the first place — whoever got to his tac officer. Not you; not me—them!”

She looked around the conference room and saw the agreement in every other face. More than that, she tasted the agreement, and her brain knew they were right. Maybe someday she’d be able to accept that as easily as they did. But even if that day came, she would never be free of the soul-deep regret, she felt at this moment.

Silence lingered for several moments, then Pritchart cleared her throat.

“How do you think the League is going to react to all this?” she asked the group at large.

“Poorly?” Tourville suggested with a sour smile.

“Oh, I think you can take that for granted,” White Haven agreed. “And I don’t think it’s going to be a very good idea for us to suggest Mesa somehow manipulated Filareta into firing.” He rolled his eyes. “Even if anyone in Old Chicago was willing to entertain any evidence which might support our ‘ridiculous conspiracy theory paranoia’ in the first place, we don’t have any evidence. We’d play straight into Abruzzi’s hands if we handed him that kind of propaganda hook.”

“And there are plenty of Sollies ready to go along with him,” Elizabeth agreed sourly, then gave herself a shake and drew a deep breath. “Not that I suppose I can blame them, really, given the official party line, Solly newsies’ well known impartial reporting, and how ridiculous the whole notion still seems to me sometimes!”

“The fact that we can’t blame them for it doesn’t keep their refusal to entertain the truth from being inconvenient as hell,” Pritchart observed even more sourly. “And the fact that Tsang is going to get to Old Terra with what happened in Beowulf well before anybody in Old Chicago finds out what happened out here isn’t going to help one bit. The Mandarins are going to have at least a few days to start drumming up anti-Beowulf sentiment before word of what happened to Filareta lands on them like a nuke, and just imagine what the ’faxes are going to be like then.”

“Not exactly something we didn’t anticipate,” Benton-Ramirez y Chou sighed. “Mind you, we’d all have been happier if Tsang had been bright enough to back down without Admiral Truman having to take a hand.”

“At least she was smart enough not to pull a Crandall or a Filareta,” Honor observed grimly.

“Or else Mesa didn’t have time to get to anyone on her staff,” Tourville muttered.

“They can’t get to everybody, Les,” Theisman said pointed out a bit tartly.

“And they can’t predict every situation,” Yanakov added, nodding his agreement with Theisman’s observation. “Tester knows they seem to do a better job of anticipating and manipulating than I’d like, but there have to be limits somewhere. And, frankly, the last thing we can afford is to actually succumb to — what was it you called it, Hamish? ‘Ridiculous conspiracy theory paranoia’?—and start seeing Alignment machinations behind everything that happens.”

“Either way, Honor has a point,” Benton-Ramirez y Chou observed. “Nobody got killed in Beowulf, and as the President says, they won’t have a clue what happened to Filareta until the first newsies get to the Sol System from Manticore. So they’re going to come out like attack dogs, without any idea of the next bit of news in the pipeline. I’m not sure how that’s going to play with League public opinion, but I’m pretty damned sure that when word of Filareta’s disaster reaches Old Chicago, things are going to go to hell in a handbasket. I wouldn’t be too surprised if some of the real lunatics don’t press for direct military action against Beowulf.”

“Some of them are going to see your actions as real treason, Mr. Director,” Yu pointed out. “They’re not going to worry about constitutional niceties, and they are going to be looking for someone to blame, especially when they find out what happened to Filareta. If there’s any justice in the galaxy, they’ll blame Kolokoltsov and Rajampet, but it’s been my observation that justice is conspicuous by its absence when it comes to politics and entrenched, self-serving regimes.”

“We have had just a little experience of our own with that, haven’t we?” Pritchart said wryly, but she was looking at Theisman, not Yu. “On the other hand, Tom, I remember something you said about Kolokoltsov and Frontier Security.”

“Something I said?” Theisman’s eyebrows arched.

“Yes. It was while we were discussing the implications of the Battle of Spindle and how the Sollies might react. I said something about how little impact Solarian public opinion ever has on the League’s decisions. Do you remember what you said to me?”

“Not exactly, no.”

“I think this is pretty nearly a direct quote, actually,” she told him. “As I recall, you said, ‘The citizens of the People’s Republic didn’t have any real political oversight over its bureaucracies, either. A situation which changed rather abruptly when the Manties’ Eighth Fleet came calling and Saint-Just got distracted dealing with that minor threat.’”

There was silence for a moment, then Benton-Ramirez y Chou nodded.

“That’s becoming a steadily more likely scenario,” he said grimly. “And that’s hard.” He shook his head, his expression sad. “I’ve known the League was rotten at the core for almost my entire life, but it was still the Solarian League. It was still the heir of all Mankind’s greatness, and for all its warts, it was still my star nation. And now this.” He shook his head again. “Now it looks like I ‘m going to be directly party to the actions which bring the whole tottering edifice crashing down. And I can’t be sure we’re not doing exactly what those Mesan bastards want us to be doing.”

“The last thing we can afford to do is allow ourselves to be paralyzed for fear we might be doing what they want, Uncle Jacques,” Honor said quietly, almost gently. “Judah’s right about that. And I know you. For that matter, I know Beowulfers. If it comes down to doing what you think is right or sacrificing your most basic principles to preserve a system as corrupt as the League’s proving it is, I know what you’re going to decide.”

“Always so black-and-white for you Manties,” her uncle teased her gently, and Elizabeth chuckled.

“And you decadent Beowulfers always trying to convince us that you see only shades of gray,” she riposted.

“Well, usually, that’s what it is.” Benton-Ramirez y Chou’s tone was suddenly much more serious. “But sometimes, it isn’t, and my long, tall niece here has a point.” He smiled a little sadly at Honor. “Comfortable or not, when those ‘sometimes’ come along, the only coinage history seems willing to accept is our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.”