A Rising Thunder-ARC (53 page)

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
not
from
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.