House of Steel: The Honorverse Companion (16 page)

“I really do wish he didn’t get so wound up about it,” she said, watching the sting ships through the side window. “He hates it afterward, too, you know. I think he knows he’s being unfair when he gets so mad, and he doesn’t
like
being mad at you, Dad.”

“I know that, honey. And
I
don’t like being mad at
him
, either.” He touched her hair lightly and smiled when she looked back at him. “But, fortunately, Mikey’s a really good kid, whatever rough patch we’re going through right now. And part of it, you know, is the difference between the way boys’ and girls’ heads work.”

“Oh?”

Elizabeth looked at him just a bit suspiciously, and his smile broadened.

“Boys don’t do ‘subtle’ very well, Beth. Especially when those hormones kick in, but it starts earlier than that, really. They know what they know, they’re stubborn as the day is long, and they don’t handle limits very well. They’re geared to solve problems—like disputes with parental authority—by doing things
their
way, with all the finesse of an Old Earth rhino, and they come at you head on. That’s the reason Mikey and I lock horns so much more often than he and your mom do. As Doctor Sugiyama says, Mikey’s a lot more like
me
than he is like your mom, and that makes these little . . . lively moments between us inevitable, I’m afraid.”

And,
he chose not to add out loud,
the way I’m stressing over the situation in Trevor’s Star isn’t helping just at the moment. I try not to let it affect the way I react when he and I don’t see eye-to-eye, but I know it’s leaking over sometimes. In fact, I think it was probably a major contributory factor in our last blow up.

“So, if
boys
don’t do ‘subtle’ very well, is that another way of saying girls
do
?” Elizabeth demanded, pulling him away from that unhappy thought before his smile could fade.

“Well, of course!” He shook his head at her. “Girls tackle problems more consensually than boys do, they’d rather spend their energy doing things they don’t know from the outset is going to get them lectured by their elders, and they figure out early that the males in their lives are only there to get in the way and mess things up, so they start out by practicing on their parents. They smile, they promise to do exactly what their parents tell them to do, and then they go out to do precisely what they were going to do anyway, on the theory that if they’re lucky—and good—their parents will never find out about it. And, the way they see it, they’re actually doing their parents a favor, aren’t they? By keeping them from worrying about the consequences of all those things they promised they wouldn’t do, I mean.”

Elizabeth’s eyes widened, and Ariel bleeked with laughter as he tasted her chagrin.

“I didn’t—I mean,” she said, “
I
—”

“Didn’t realize I’d figured that out?” her father suggested helpfully, and chuckled at her expression. Then his smile faded slightly.

“Beth, I never worried about the venal sins your mom and I knew you were committing, because—like Mikey, but maybe even more so—you were always a good kid. You’re turning into a remarkable young woman, as well, and I knew the whole time you were manipulating and evading your way around me in those venal things you were up to, that you’d never lie to me about anything important.” He rested his hand on her shoulder as the limo settled onto its skids. “I wasn’t worried then, I’m not worried now, and I doubt there’s another father anywhere in the entire Star Kingdom who’s more satisfied—more
delighted
—than I am with the way his daughter’s turned out. I’m sure Mikey’ll turn out just as well—in his own stubborn, male, mule headed, obstinate,
determined
way—as you did. And as for the rest of it, I console myself with an ancient Old Earth proverb.”

“And which proverb would that be?” Elizabeth asked as a lieutenant of the King’s Own began to open her limo door for her.

“The one that says ‘This too shall pass,’” her father told her wryly. “‘This too shall pass.’ Even male adolescence, thank God!”

Jonas Adcock and the other people gathered in the briefing room rose respectfully as King Roger and Crown Princess Elizabeth walked through the door.

They were a striking pair, Adcock thought yet again, his brother-in-law and his niece. Elizabeth was above average height for a woman, but her father had his own father’s height. At a hundred and ninety-four centimeters, Roger was far taller than his daughter, whose slender, not quite delicate frame clearly favored her mother’s side of the family. Her complexion was just a shade lighter than her father’s, as well, but she had the Winton chin and her father’s steady brown eyes. And if her head didn’t top Roger’s shoulder, her spine was just as straight, her head regally raised, despite the weight of the treecat riding on her shoulder.

She’ll make a wonderful queen someday,
he thought,
even if I’ll be long gone before that ever happens. No system of government’s proof against throwing up idiots, incompetents, thieves, or charlatans as head of state, and monarchy’s got more potential for it than some others I could think of. But Manticore’s been lucky as hell in that regard over the centuries. I imagine an awful lot of that’s due to the requirement that the Heir marry a commoner—avoids inbreeding, anyway!—but I think a lot more has to do with that whole Winton concentration on “servant of the people” when they start raising their kids. Wouldn’t be surprised if the
’cats
have more than a little to do with it, too, now that I think about it, but the childhood training . . . that’s the big factor. And Roger and Angel are smart—
smart
—to get Beth involved in Roger’s plans as deeply as possible, as early as possible.

He knew more than a few people, even among Roger’s closer advisers, wouldn’t have agreed with him. People who felt that a young woman—a girl—barely three T-months past her eighteenth birthday was
not
a suitable recipient for the sorts of heavily classified information which routinely came her way. And even many who’d learned not to worry that she was going to start posting classified documents on her personal blog continued to cherish reservations about an eighteen-year-old’s insight, judgment, and ability to truly understand the Star Kingdom’s steadily deteriorating relations with the People’s Republic of Haven.

Jonas thought those people were fools. He was willing to admit
he
might be just a little prejudiced, as well, but still—!

Hadn’t they been
listening
to her? She clearly remembered one of her mother’s favorite adages, learned from Jonas’ stepmother—“A wise man speaks because he has something to say; a fool speaks because he has to say something.” Elizabeth didn’t open her mouth all that often in the meetings she attended with her father, but whenever she did, what she had to say was worth listening to. There’d even been a time or two when she’d disagreed with Roger, at least in part, and it had been instructive to see how carefully
Roger
listened to her when she did.

Yep, a wonderful queen,
he told himself as her father pulled back her chair and seated her before taking his own place.
I hope she doesn’t get to demonstrate that for decades and decades after I’m gone, but when the time comes, she’ll be ready.

Roger noticed Jonas’ small smile, and he was glad to see it, although he hated how lined his brother-in-law’s face was getting, how thin his snowy hair had turned. It was even more striking at today’s meeting, since Roger’s other brother-in-law, Edward Henke, was also present, looking absurdly—painfully—young beside Jonas. The Earl of Gold Peak was an up-and-coming assistant undersecretary in the Foreign Office, although he was still more than a little junior for this sort of stratospheric session, despite his close relationship to the Crown. He was also, however, one of Foreign Secretary Nageswar’s specialists where San Martin was concerned, and that was rather the point of today’s meeting.

In fact, it would probably be a good idea to get that part of the meeting out of the way now so they could move on to the material Gold Peak and most of the other Foreign Office representatives had no need to know.

“All right,” he said, “at least part of this is going to be brutally short, simple, and to the point. According to all our information,” he nodded in Big Sky’s direction, “the Peeps are going to move on Trevor’s Star within the next six T-months. Possibly even sooner.”

Most of the civilians around the table stiffened as they abruptly realized why this meeting was taking place at Admiralty House instead of Mount Royal Palace, and Roger smiled thinly.

“Yes, you’re absolutely right,” he told those civilians, sparing a slight, additional nod in Gold Peak’s direction. “As soon as we can shove all of you civilians—except you and Abner, Allen—” he smiled a bit more naturally at Prime Minister Cromarty and First Lord Castle Rock “—out the door, the uniformed types and I are going to be looking very closely at all of our military hole cards. But before we get to that, we have to decide what we’re going to tell President Ramirez and his government.”

“At the moment, Your Majesty,” Baron Big Sky said, “I’m not sure there’s much we
can
tell the President.” His expression was unhappy. “I don’t doubt he and his intelligence people are picking up on the same straws in the wind we are—in fact, I know their navy’s intelligence officers are. President Ramirez’s assessment may be somewhat different from ours, but he has to realize what’s building. The problem is that they’re painted into a corner. Not only have they been looking down the barrel of the Peeps’ pulser for damned close to thirty T-years, but they’ve pursued that ‘nonaligned’ policy of theirs for so long that trying to reverse course would be bound to create all sorts of confusion within their own government. And that completely ignores the question of how the Peeps would react!”

“Admiral Big Sky’s correct, I’m afraid, Your Majesty,” Gold Peak put in. He was careful to speak formally, under the circumstances, even if Roger was his brother-in-law. “I hate to say it, but there’s a huge degree of . . . fatalism, I guess I’d have to call it, in the San Martin leadership. They’ve been trying to build up their military, but everyone knows they’ve got the chance of a snowball in hell if—when—the Peeps come after them. I think they’ll probably fight, even knowing they can’t win, but that’s the problem. They’ll hurt the Peeps a lot worse than the Peeps probably think they can, but the San Martinos
know
they can’t win in the end, and they’ve got their heads so far down, leaning so hard into the wind, that they just aren’t open to any other possibilities. In fact, it’s almost as if they’re afraid to
consider
any other possibilities because of how much worse it will hurt when they find out they were right to be pessimistic all along.”

“I’m aware of that, Ed,” Roger replied. “And I think your estimate’s a very good one. For that matter, more than one member of the
Alliance
is going to have serious reservations about what I have in mind. They agree with Ramirez’s advisers: Trevor’s Star is going down, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it. Not when the Peeps outgun the San Martinos as badly as they do, and not when Trevor’s Star is effectively completely surrounded by Peep territory. To be brutally realistic about it, they see no benefit to tying the Alliance to a walking corpse, especially if it’s likely to embroil the entire Alliance in a shooting war with the PRH. We’re a hell of a lot better off than we were a couple of decades ago, but so are the Peeps, and they’re still a hell of a lot bigger than we are. We have seventy-six of the wall;
they
have twice that many. And they’ve got somewhere north of three hundred and fifty battleships for rear area security . . . while we don’t have
any
anymore.”

He paused for a moment, long enough to let all of that sink in, then leaned forward, folding his hands on the table in front of him, looking around the faces of his most trusted advisers, feeling his daughter sitting at his elbow.

“I understand why they feel we can’t risk facing down the Peeps over a single star system that isn’t even a member of the Alliance, but they’re wrong,” he said flatly. “Completely ignoring any moral questions or how long San Martin’s been a Manticoran trading partner, we can’t afford to let the Trevor’s Star Terminus go down without at least trying to save it. And we can’t put defensive forces on it without the San Martinos’ permission. And San Martin isn’t about to give us permission to defend the
terminus
if they believe doing so will move up the Peeps’ schedule for seizing the
star system
. We have to convince them to . . . see the situation differently, and we also need to deliver a shock to Nouveau Paris. They’ve gotten too complacent, too sure of themselves, and that’s part of the problem. We need to make them back off and rethink, really
consider
how serious a threat our own Navy’s become and whether or not they
really
want to risk opening the ball with us. At the very least we need to change the game in a way which can buy us another five, even ten extra T-years before the missile actually does go up.”