A Rising Thunder

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Sir Lyman Carmichael, who’d never expected to replace the assassinated James Webster as Manticore’s ambassador to the Solarian League, stood at a fifth-story window and looked down at a scene out of a bad historical holo drama. His perch in one of the Beowulf Assembly delegation’s offices gave him a remarkably good view of it, too.

Frigging idiots, he thought disgustedly. Only Sollies. Nobody else in the entire galaxy would’ve swallowed that line of crap Abruzzi’s passing out! But Sollies? Hook, line, and sinker.

He shook his head. In a reasonable universe, one might have thought continual exposure to lies would instill at least a partial immunity. Looking down at the sea of angry, shouting humanity clogging the plaza outside the Beowulf residence seemed to demonstrate it didn’t. In fact, he was beginning to think continual exposure actually weakened the ability to recognize the truth on those rare occasions when it finally came along.

You’re being cynical again. And unfair, he admitted unwillingly. But not too unfair. It’s not like these morons hadn’t heard both sides of the story — or been exposed to them, anyway — before they decided to go out and demonstrate their stupidity.

For the moment, Carmichael was relatively safe in a personal sense, here with the Beowulf delegation. That shouldn’t have been a significant consideration, but it was in this case. Under interstellar law as accepted by most star nations, his person was legally sacrosanct, no matter what happened to the relations between his star nation and another. Even in time of war, he was supposed to be returned safely to his government’s jurisdiction, just as any ambassadors to the Star Empire were to be repatriated under similar circumstances.

The Solarian League, however, had never gotten around to ratifying that particular interstellar convention. That hadn’t mattered in the past, since no one had been crazy enough to challenge the League, which meant Old Chicago had never been forced to deal with the problem. It left Carmichael in something of a gray area under the current circumstances, however, and he wasn’t at all sure how Kolokoltsov and his cronies might choose to interpret the law in his own case. That was why he’d moved into the Beowulf residence, which enjoyed extraterritorial status under the Constitution. Assuming anyone was paying attention to the Constitution. On the other hand, if things kept building the way they were, Beowulf wasn’t going to be enjoying any sort of legal status within the Solarian League very much longer.

He couldn’t hear the individual chants or shouts through the background surf of crowd noise, not from the fifth floor through a hermetically sealed window. But he knew what they were screaming. And even if he hadn’t known, he could read the placards and holo banners.

MANTICORAN MURDERERS!

BUTCHERS!

HARRINGTON + TREACHERY = MURDER!

REMEMBER FLEET ADMIRAL FILARETA!

ASSASSINS, NOT ADMIRALS!

THIEVES, LIARS, AND MURDERERS!

And there was equal time for Beowulf, of course.

TRAITORS!

MANTICORAN PIMPS!

WHO’S KNIFE IS IN ADMIRAL FILARETA’S BACK?

WHERE’S YOUR THIRTY PIECES OF SILVER?

BEOWULF HELPED MURDER ELEVENTH FLEET!

WHERE WAS ADMIRAL TSANG WHEN ELEVENTH FLEET NEEDED HER?

Carmichael sighed and turned away from the window only to discover someone had been standing behind him.

“Madam Delegate,” he said with a slight bow.

“Mr. Ambassador.” Felicia Hadley, Beowulf’s senior delegate to the Solarian League Assembly, returned his bow. She was a slender woman, with black hair, brown eyes, and a golden complexion. She was at least several T-years older than Carmichael, but the freckles dusted across the bridge of her nose made her look much younger, somehow.

“I was just watching the show,” he said.

“I know. I was watching you watch it.” She smiled slightly. “Impressive, isn’t it?”

“Not as impressive as the fact that Old Chicago’s highly efficient police force seems somehow totally unable to break up this completely un-authorized and spontaneous demonstration.” Carmichael’s tone was poison dry, and this time Hadley actually chuckled.

“The same thought had occurred to me,” she admitted. “Actually, I’ve been wondering whether or not I should add that to my daily indictment on the Assembly floor. It wouldn’t change anything, of course, but it might make me feel a little better.”

Her expression was almost whimsical, and Carmichael shook his head.

“Forgive me, Madam Delegate, but I don’t see how you’ve stood it so long. At best, the Assembly’s turned into some sort of zoo where tourists come to see the exotic animals. Or maybe the term I really want is the endangered species!”

“Not the most tactful of descriptions, perhaps, but to the point,” she said judiciously. Then she shrugged, and her expression turned more serious. “Actually, it’s not a bad description at all, but, you know, I honestly believed — once, at least — that I might be achieving something worthwhile. Even if it was only to be the voice of the past, a reminder of what the League was once supposed to be. Now”—she stepped past Carmichael to look out his window—“all of that seems as foolish as it was pointless.”

Carmichael looked at her back, conscious of a stab of regret for his own words. Not because they hadn’t been accurate, but because…

“You fought the good fight, Madam Delegate,” he said quietly. “There’s something to be said for that. At least you didn’t simply throw up your hands and acquiesce. It may be cold comfort at the moment, looking out that window, but one day history’s going to get it right. And one of the nice things about prolong is that we may actually live long enough to see you — and Beowulf — justified.”

“And without prolong, there’s no way either of us would make it that long!” she replied tartly, looking over her shoulder at him. “I think your Duchess Harrington is right. This is going to be the end of the League, at least as anyone’s ever known it. But something this big, with this much inertia behind it, doesn’t go down clean and it doesn’t go down easily. It’s going to be a long time before anyone’s in a position to be taking any dispassionate historical looks back, Ambassador Carmichael.”

“I’m afraid you’re right about that.”

He stepped up beside her, looking back out the window himself at the screaming mob. They were beginning to throw things at the residence’s ground-floor walls and windows. The security fields were stopping the tide of rocks, eggs, over-ripe vegetables, and occasional old-fashioned molotov cocktails, but the symbolic acts of vandalism seemed to please the crowd. Not as much as the little knots of people who were burning the Manticoran and Beowulf planetary flags and dismembering — or igniting — effigies dressed in what they fondly believed were Manticoran and Beowulfan naval uniforms, though. As Carmichael watched, one flashily dressed, wildly tattooed flag-burner — he looked like one of the millions of longterm unemployed who collected their stipends from the planetary government every month — held onto a burning Manticoran flag just a moment too long. It was impossible to hear his howls, but the way he started leaping about and waving his hand frantically said volumes, the ambassador thought with a certain satisfaction.

“Frankly,” Hadley said, “what astonishes me, even though I ought to know better after all this time, is that anyone would take Education and Information’s word for anything.” She grimaced. “Like I say, I ought to know better. In fact, I do know better. But it still seems so incredibly brainless. It’s like they want to be lied to because it’s so familiar, or because it keeps them in their comfort zone by absolving them of the need to actually think about things. Apparently nobody on Old Terra ever heard that cliché about ‘Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.’”

“Well I don’t know if E&I’s reflected on just how badly this is going to bite them on the butt out in the Verge and the Shell,” Carmichael replied. “Sure, it’s tailor-made for the Core Worlds. These people are so sheltered and divorced from what’s going on out on the frontiers that it’s no surprise, really, that they’re liable to actually believe this nonsense. And I realize Kolokoltsov’s and Abruzzi’s immediate concern is how the Core Worlds are going to react. But they’re making a huge mistake if they think the Core Worlds are all that matters, and I think they really do. I think they genuinely believe that as long as they can jolly the oldest, most ‘respectable’ worlds into going along with them, they’ll be able — eventually, at least — to restore the ‘old order’ outside the Core. That ‘the little people’ outside the Core are going to accept their more sophisticated intellectual superiors’ guidance once more, they way they ought to, once all this unpleasantness blows over.” His lips twisted and his eyes were bitter. “Even that OFS and its corporate cronies will be able to go back to administering their little empires out in the Verge. And they’re wrong about that.”

“That’s my reading, too,” Hadley said, her expression troubled. “Especially with Mesa stirring the pot the way it is. Absent some probably impossible change at the center, the League’s going to start shedding Verge systems pretty damned quickly, and it won’t be long until the Shell follows suit.”

Carmichael nodded, wondering if Hadley had been as fully briefed as he had on events in the vicinity of the Congo System and the Maya Sector.

He looked back out at the mob.

Aside from the mental myopia of mistaking Old Terra’s public opinion for the entire League’s public opinion, Abruzzi and his minions had actually done a workmanlike job, he reflected. The suggestion that the Grand Alliance had deliberately sucked Filareta into a death trap with false offers of honorable surrender terms just so it could be certain of wiping him out had actually struck a chord in at least a sizable portion of Old Terra’s population. The Mandarins’ pet newsies had come out swinging in support of the official line, and the Solarian Navy’s refusal to uncategorically back that same official line had actually lent it additional credibility. It gave the story an aura of deliberation, of a refusal to rush to judgment which befitted sober minded, thoughtful leaders doing their best to pick their way through a minefield of confusion and other people’s misrepresentation.

As far as Carmichael could tell, at least part of the people who were embracing Abruzzi’s version so enthusiastically had done so because it explained how the invincible Solarian League could have been defeated so completely by a patchwork coalition of neobarbs. What made it even more convincing to them, he suspected, was that it suggested the Grand Alliance was really afraid of the League. That it had resorted to such chicanery and treachery because whatever it might claim, it was actually terrified of facing the SLN in fair, open battle. After all, Spindle had been primarily an ambush engagement, hadn’t it? And now there was Filareta’s massacre in a similar situation. Surely that demonstrated that the League’s defeats were primarily due to neobarb treachery and deceit, not the fundamental rot at Battle Fleet’s core! There was no doubt in his mind that such an analysis was comforting to those frightened of admitting the League was in a position of hopeless inferiority. Not to mention those who simply resented the hell out of the way the Solarian Navy had been slapped aside like a bothersome mosquito.

And then there was the derision Abruzzi and his stable of newsies had heaped upon Manticore and Haven’s assertions of Mesan complicity in the creation of the entire crisis. He’d known that was coming. In fact, everyone back home had known it was coming. Yet they’d had no choice but to make their information public, and at least some of the Solarian newsies — like Audrey O’Hanrahan, for example — weren’t as quick to dismiss it as a combination of Beowulfan paranoia and Manticoran lies. Exactly who was going to be believed in the end was still being fought out, but it didn’t look good for the Grand Alliance. Too many Solarians had bought into the Mesan claims of the Star Empire’s complicity in the Green Pines atrocity. They’d invested too much emotion in that belief, which predisposed them to see the absurd allegations about hidden conspiracies as simply one more cynical Manticoran ploy to turn public opinion against Mesa and provide an excuse for the Star Empire’s own support of terrorists and imperialist expansion.

I purely hate this entire frigging planet, he thought sourly. I know it’s the home world, the mother world. The place we all came from. But I’m notfrom here. I’m from the planet Manticore, and this place, this planet, is the epicenter of the corruption trying to hand the entire human race over to whatever those murderous bastards in Mesa are trying to accomplish. Hadley’s right. The League’s grown so rotten, so accepting of corruption and graft, of shakedowns and empire building, of brutal régimes propped up by Frontier Security and Gendarmerie intervention battalions, that it doesn’t deserve to survive. That the sooner we’re all shut of it, the better.

And that was the fatal flaw in Malachai Abruzzi’s strategy. No matter what he convinced Old Terra of, no matter what line he sold to the oldest, most comfortable of the Core Worlds, the rest of the galaxy knew better. It was far enough from the center to see much more clearly than those too close to the rot, and it was going to refuse to go along with the Office of Frontier Security and its transstellar cronies any longer.

They’re not getting that genie back into the bottle, he thought coldly. No matter what they do.

* * *

Fleet Admiral Rajampet Kaushal Rajani sat in his private penthouse apartment gazing out his three hundredth-floor window at the glittering jewel box of Old Chicago. Other towers rose as high as or even higher than his own, caparisoned in glowing windows and flashing aircraft warning lights, and gemlike bubbles drifted across the heavens as air cars moved sedately in and around them. More of the stupendous structures rose from pylons sunk deep into the bedrock underneath Lake Michigan, and their mirrored reflections gleamed up at them from night-black water swarming with the Christmas tree glow of pleasure boats. The pedestrian slide-walks so far below his window were a steady stream of late-night, moving humanity amid a forest of HD billboards, subliminal advertising messages, chatter, and the frothing ferment of Old Terra’s largest city. If he looked up, he could see the gleaming pearls of orbital freight stations and solar power collection satellites, but the overpowering impression was of the incredible size, power, and wealth of the city that stretched as far as the eye could see and lit high, thin wisps of cloud with its own sleepless glow.

Rajampet loved that view. He loved looking out over it, knowing he was one of the movers and shakers who controlled the destiny of all those antlike people swarming about so far below him. He loved the taste of power — he admitted it — and for almost a hundred T-years, he’d wielded it well. But the panorama from his window was less reassuring tonight, because tomorrow he was going to have to face Kolokoltsov and the others. He didn’t expect to enjoy that session. For that matter, he wasn’t at all sure his position was going to survive it, and without his position, what did he truly have?

Well, he thought dryly, you might think about that 3.6 billion credits in your private account, Rajani. Not a bad paycheck, all things considered. And you can’t pretend you didn’t know you were supping with the devil, although maybe you might have wanted to use a spoon that was a bit longer, now that the fucking Manties’ve finally tumbled to the truth. Or part of the truth, anyway. God knows where the wilder parts of their hallucinations are coming from! Something in the water or the air out there? Talk about paranoia!

He shook his head.

Of course, the fact that you’re paranoid doesn’t necessarily mean you don’t really have enemies…even if they aren’t the three-meter monsters you think they are. Like that nanotech crap. Ha! Why believe in fairy tales like that instead of simpler explanations? Crandall was so deep in Mesa’s pocket shed’ve picked any spot they wanted for her frigging exercise, and they could count on her stupidity to make the rest of it work out the way they wanted. Same thing with Byng, except that they probably didn’t have to promise him a thing except an opportunity to put one in the Manties’ eye. And Filareta—! If that taste of his for sick games with little girls and boys had ever made it to the public eye, he — or his career, at least — would’ve been dead, even in the League. So getting him on board wasn’t all that hard, either. And it didn’t take any “mind-control nanotech” to convince you to help hit the bastards where it hurt, now did it? Even if things are turning out a bit…dicier than you expected.

He snorted in harsh amusement, yet the truth was that he hadn’t counted on the completeness of the defeat waiting for Sandra Crandall and Massimo Filareta. He wasn’t going to shed any tears for either of the admirals involved, and he wasn’t going to pretend about that even with himself. But he hadn’t contemplated the sheer number of other people who were going to get killed. For that matter, he’d genuinely believed the new missiles would go a long way towards leveling the playing field when Filareta reached Manticore. And he’d never thought for a moment Filareta would have been stupid enough to open fire after that bitch Harrington had mousetrapped him so completely.

Never thought Haven would be willing to side with the Manties, either, did you? he asked himself derisively. God, who could’ve seen that one coming?!

He’d asked himself, since the reports of the Second Battle of Manticore had reached Old Terra, why he’d really done it. Oh, the money was the easy answer. And so was his resentment of the way he’d been denied his proper place at the table with Kolokoltsov and the rest of those parasitic civilian leeches. Their very survival had depended on Rajampet’s Navy to do the dirty jobs it took to keep them where they were, yet he couldn’t even count how many times one of those arrogant ‘Mandarins’ had shown his — or her, he thought, thinking of Omosupe Quartermain — condescension for the uniformed men and women who carried the League’s mandate out to the fucking neobarbs on the backside of nowhere.

But most of all, he’s come to realize, it had been his hatred for the Star Empire of Manticore. His resentment of its merchant marine’s reach and power and wealth. Of Manticore’s refusal to bend to the League’s demands, to show the Solarian League Navy the respect and deference it was due. For the sheer arrogance of a ten-for-a-centicredit neobarb so-called star nation — one which had laid claim to only a single star system as little as twenty T-years ago! — which had dared to use the unfair advantage of its damned Junction to actually tell the Solarian League what it could and couldn’t do. In that respect, much as he hated to acknowledge the comparison, he and Josef Byng had actually had at least one thing in common.

He didn’t give a single good goddamn whether the Manties actually had any imperial ambitions. He admitted that in the privacy of his own mind, because it didn’t matter. He remembered one of his long dead father’s favorite sayings: ‘When you fuck with the bull, you get the horns.’ Well, it was time the Manties got the goring they deserved, and if he could do well for himself out of the process, so much the better.

Yeah, all well and good, but it’s not going to make tomorrow any more fun, despite the fact that you knew something like this was coming sooner or later, he reflected. But at least you did see it coming, unlike those other cretins. That’s the reason you buried your tracks as well as you did. And—he smiled thinly—if the wheels come off anyway, you’ve got enough little tidbits tucked away to convince your esteemed civilian colleagues they’d better cover your back. Doesn’t matter how good Abruzzi is. If your insurance files ever hit the news channels, they’re all dead meat.

There was actually a part of him that hoped they’d push him into making that very point to them. It would be so…satisfying to see the looks on their faces when they realized he had them all by the short hairs. It would be the equivalent of a nuclear exchange, of course; no way there’d be any bridges back from that kind of confrontation. But he was pretty sure they planned on stuffing him out the airlock as the sacrificial goat anyway, so he might as well get his full credit’s worth out of it first.

Besides—

A ripple of musical notes, the first few bars of the overture from Adonis of Canis Major, his favorite opera, announced a com call on his private, priority combination. He scowled out at the city panorama, then sighed and pushed himself to his feet. He’d never felt any inclination to surround himself with the bevies of personal attendants altogether too many of the Solarian elite seemed to require. They were less efficient than properly programmed electronic servants, they chattered and pestered, they always had their noses in their employers’ affairs, and every one of them was a potential security breach waiting to happen. Besides, he didn’t like being fussed over in the privacy of his own home. There was enough of that in the Service!

He walked across to the living room communications terminal and frowned as he looked at the display. He didn’t recognize the caller’s combination, and there weren’t that many people who had his combination — not on this line, anyway.

He shrugged and pressed the audio-only acceptance key.

“Rajampet,” he announced gruffly.

“Sid?” a voice he’d never heard before said. “Is that you, Sid?”

“No, it isn’t!” Rajampet replied sharply. “Who is this?”

“What?” The other voice sounded confused. “I’m sorry, I was trying to reach Sid Castleman. Isn’t this his combination?”

“No, it isn’t,” Rajampet repeated. “In fact, it’s a secure government combination!”

“Oh, Lord! I’m so sorry!” the other voice said quickly. “I must’ve punched in the wrong combination.”

“I guess you did,” Rajampet agreed a bit nastily.

“Well, sorry,” the other voice repeated. “Clear.”

The connection went dead, and Rajampet snorted as he hit the termination key at his end. But then his eyes opened wide as the hand which had just hit the key went right on moving. It opened the drawer in the com console, the one where he’d kept a loaded pulser for the last fifteen or twenty T-years. It reached into the drawer, and Rajampet’s face erupted in sweat as he watched his own fingers wrap around the pulser’s butt. He fought frantically to stop his hand…without any success at all. He tried to raise his voice, shout the code to activate the penthouse’s security systems…but his jaw refused to move and his vocal cords were still.

His mind raced as the pulser rose, his thoughts gibbering like rats in a trap, and then, to his horror, his jaw did move. It dropped so that his own hand could shove the weapon’s muzzle between his teeth.

God, God! he thought, calling out frantically to the deity he’d never really believed in. Help me! Help me!

There was no answer, and alloy and plastic were cold and hard as his teeth closed on the pulser’s barrel.

They were right. The frigging Manties were right all along, a tiny corner of his brain realized, like a last pocket of rationality in a hurricane of terror. The bastards do have some kind of nan—

His finger squeezed the trigger.