A Rising Thunder

Chapter Thirty-Four

Felicia Hadley sat once more in the Beowulf delegation’s box in the Chamber of Stars.

Her head was erect, her shoulders squared, and anyone looking at her could have been excused for not recognizing the mixture of anger, weariness, frustration, grief, and…emptiness behind those outwardly tranquil eyes. After all, she couldn’t sort out all those feelings herself, so why should she have expected anyone else to understand the way she felt?

The two weeks of scheduled debate on Tyrone Reid’s motion had been the ugliest Hadley could remember ever having seen. That was hardly a surprise, given the position Kolokoltsov and the rest of the Mandarins faced. They’d pulled out all the stops to focus the League’s fear and anxiety on someone else in order to save themselves, and they knew all the tricks of the game. The attacks had been carefully orchestrated, aimed from every imaginable quarter and endlessly repeated by flocks of coopted newsies and media talking heads, to give them maximum credibility with the public. There were a few reporters, like Audrey O’Hanrahan, who genuinely seemed to be trying to cover both sides of the debate, just as there were some Assembly delegates who’d tried to get the truth out. But those delegates, like the newsies trying to do their jobs, were drowned in the tide of attackers. There were simply too many members of the Assembly — and too many in the media — who owed the Mandarins too many favors (and about whom Malachai Abruzzi’s operatives knew too many secrets) for there to be any other outcome.

Two things had surprised her, however. One was the degree of genuine hatred some of her fellow delegates had spewed out in their attacks on Beowulf. Reid’s allies had placed their darts carefully, wrapping their fiery denunciations around a core of cold calculation, but others had joined the assault on their own, lashing out in an almost incoherent fury that didn’t care what the law might say, wasn’t concerned with why Beowulf might have done what it had done. No, that fury fed only on panic stricken reports of the Manticorans’ superior weaponry and fear that Beowulf’s “treason” had somehow freed that weaponry to ravage the entire Solarian League. Of course, no one had bothered to explain how Beowulf’s permitting Imogene Tsang’s fleet to be massacred would have averted that threat, now had they?

Well, be fair, Felicia, she told herself. It’s not all fear of what the Manties’ weapons can do, now is it? Some of those people have started getting messengers from transstellars based in their home systems. A glimmer of what withdrawing all those Manticoran merchantmen and shutting down the hyper bridges really means is starting to sink in, and they don’t like that a bit. They want the hide of anyone associated with the people getting ready to inflict that much hurt on their corporate sponsors.

No doubt they did, yet what had surprised her even more than the fury coming at her home system from so many quarters was the fact that some of the other delegations had actually spoken in Beowulf’s behalf. Not that Beowulf’s actions met with complete approbation even from them, because they didn’t. But at least some of the League’s elected representatives truly did seem more concerned about getting at the truth, or even considering the legal and constitutional implications of Bewoulf’s acts, than with simply scapegoating someone else.

Of course, there weren’t very many of them.

Oh, be fair, she scolded herself again, rather more seriously. Standing up to this kind of hysteria at all requires more guts than anyone running for the Assembly ever expected to need! You always recognized it was really only a rubber stamp for people like the Mandarins, didn’t you? Sure, you wanted to change that, but you knew damned well deep inside that you weren’t going to. Nobody was.

And now nobody’s ever going to have the chance to.

She gave herself a mental shake as that last thought ran through her mind. They weren’t going to break the Mandarins’ grip today, no. She knew that. But there was still hope for the future, wasn’t there? Didn’t there have to be? Look at what had happened in the Republic of Haven. They’d recovered their Constitution, and it looked like they were making that stand up, too. Of course, the Republic was a lot smaller than the League, and its corruption had been given nowhere near as long to sink into the blood and the bone of their political processes. Yet people like Eloise Pritchart and Thomas Theisman had pulled it off, and that meant it truly was possible for the League as well.

And it looks like the League’s going to get just as badly hammered militarily as the People’s Republic ever did, she reminded herself glumly. The question’s whether or not it’ll learn enough along the way to—

The shimmering reverberation of a deep-toned musical chime echoed over the Chamber of Stars’ vastness, interrupting her thoughts.

The Assembly was in session.

* * *

The usual pointless opening ceremonies seemed even more meaningless than usual today. They’d never actually been more than the hollow forms of a representative body which had long since lost any meaningful political power. Lipservice to a dream which even Hadley had to acknowledge had never been more than a dream, really. Yet that pretense that the Assembly’s delegates actually represented the will of the Solarian electorate grated especially painfully on her nerves this morning.

She was scarcely surprised when Speaker Neng moved through those ceremonies more briskly than usual, though. After all, the Speaker had a job to do for the people she really represented, and after so many days of vicious debate it was time to get to it.

The last empty formality was completed, Speaker Neng pronounced the presence of a legal quorum, and then her gavel cracked.

“The Assembly will come to order,” she announced crisply. She waited a heartbeat, then continued, “The Honorable Delegate from Old Terra has the floor.”

Tyrone Reid’s image replaced hers on the huge display. As the originator of the motion, it was his right under the Assembly’s rules to move for the vote now that all time allocated for debate had been expended. He stood there, his expression grave, his eyes artistically troubled, and then drew a deep breath.

“Madam Speaker, I call for the vote.”

Neng reappeared on the display.

“Honorable Delegates, the vote has been called on motion AD-1002-07-02-22, to impanel a special commission to investigate the alleged treason of the system government of Beowulf in aiding and abetting an enemy of the Solarian League. All debate having been completed, the Chair now calls the vote.”

Her image stood there, hovering in the air, while votes were cast throughout the enormous chamber. It didn’t take long.

She looked down, considering the numbers, then raised her head once more.

“The vote is eight thousand seven hundred and twelve in favor, two thousand nine hundred and three opposed. The motion is carried.”

A roar went up, and Hadley’s jaw clenched. Not in surprise, but in anger. The only surprise was that almost a quarter of the Assembly had voted against the motion. That was a dangerous sign for the Mandarins, given the massive effort they’d mounted to pass the motion in the first place. It suggested all sorts of unpleasant things, yet that was for the future. For now…

She punched her attention key and sat back, arms folded, while she waited. The roar of approval continued for several seconds before it finally trickled off slowly into something approaching quiet. Then Neng looked back down at her panel, and her gavel cracked again.

“The Assembly will return to order!” Her tone was sharp, chiding, and the delegates who were still out of their seats, still celebrating their victory, looked up at her in surprise. Then they — slowly — obeyed the command, and she waited another few moments before she looked in Hadley’s direction.

“The Chair recognizes the Honorable Delegate from Beowulf,” she announced.

Hadley didn’t bother to stand as her image replaced the Speaker’s. She simply sat there, looking out of the display as a silence settled over the thousands of delegates. She could feel all those other eyes, almost taste the burning curiosity behind them. How would defeated Beowulf respond? What could she possibly say in the wake of this totally unprecedented public humiliation…and scapegoating? She let them wonder for several endless seconds, and when she spoke, her voice was cold and hard.

“I have served as Beowulf’s representative to this Assembly for almost forty T-years. In that time, I’ve tried without success to find some trace, some fragment, of the power and the responsibility and the high standards of personal conduct envisioned for it by the drafters of our Constitution. There’s no question of what the drafters intended, what they expected from this Assembly. The words are there for anyone to read and understand. The expectations are clear. Yet instead of finding those things, I’ve become intimately familiar with the ‘business as usual’ mentality of this Chamber. Like all of you, I’ve also become aware of where the true power in the formulation of federal law, regulations, and policy lies. Even if I hadn’t, even if I continued to cherish the slightest illusion that the elected representatives of the League’s citizens had one shred of authority at the federal level, this vote has just demonstrated the true owners of power in the Solarian League once again. It is nothing more nor less than a rubberstamped approval of the unelected bureaucrats who illegally wield power far beyond anything the Constitution ever granted them. A rubberstamp dutifully affixed to their effort to silence all internal opposition to the disastrous policy — and war — to which they’ve committed the League. Beowulf’s reward for attempting to prevent that war — or to at least cut it short before it consumes still more millions of lives and trillions upon trillions of credits — is to be investigated for ‘treason’ because it asserted the autonomy guaranteed to every member star system of the League. The same autonomy the home star system of every delegate who just voted in favor of this motion takes for granted every single day.”

She paused, brown eyes hard with contempt and disdain. The Chamber of Stars was deathly still, its quiet broken only by a handful of voices shouting denials of her assertions.

“We expected nothing else from a morally, ethically, and legally bankrupt institution,” she continued finally, her voice colder than ever. “However, there is another right which the Constitution guarantees to every member star system, and Beowulf chooses to exercise that right today. If we cannot oppose the ‘Mandarins’’ criminal and disastrous policies from inside the system, we will no longer attempt to. Instead, as the leader of Beowulf’s delegation, acting on the instructions of my star system’s legally elected government, I hereby announce that Beowulf will hold a system-wide plebiscite to T-months from today to determine whether or not the Beowulf system shall withdraw from the Solarian League.”

The lonely voices shouting insults and denials vanished suddenly into a deep, singing silence, and she smiled grimly.

“That vote will be fairly, legally, and publicly taken, but speaking personally, I have no doubt whatsoever what its outcome will be. And, again speaking personally, I caution all of you to have no illusions upon that head. You’ve passed your motion, and you’re welcome to investigate anything you choose to investigate, but Beowulf will no longer be party to the bloodsoaked policies of a corrupt and venal oligarchy prepared to murder entire star nations rather than admit even the possibility of wrongdoing on its part. We reserve the right to disassociate ourselves from criminal enterprises and murder on an interstellar scale, and to take whatever actions the citizens of our star system believe are required of it in the crisis which Permanent Senior Undersecretary Kolokoltsov and his fellow ‘Mandarins’ have created. For those of you who have chosen to vote in favor of this motion, we wish you joy of your actions…but I don’t think you’ll find it.”

She hit the key that cleared her image from the display, and the Chamber of Stars went berserk.