House of Steel: The Honorverse Companion (2 page)

With all due respect to Lieutenant Winton’s persuasively and eloquently argued position, it is neither reasonable nor appropriate for a single star system of ultimately limited resources to divert its focus from the provision of the best-tailored and most operationally potent force it can
practically
provide in order to pursue hypothetical technological “equalizers” to be employed against a theoretical adversary fleet which does not even currently exist.

(
ED
: Captain Janacek is currently attached to the Admiralty, serving as Second Space Lord Havinghurst’s deputy chief of staff for Intelligence.)

—From “On the Event Horizon: Letters from the Deck Plates,”

Proceedings of the Royal Manticoran Navy Institute,

Issue number 3676, 13/10/294 AL

“
AND THAT’S ABOUT IT
, Sir.” Lieutenant Roger Winton flicked off his memo board and looked across the briefing room table at his commanding officer. “Better than I really expected it to be, but the delay on those missile pallets is . . . irritating.” He grimaced. “‘As soon as practicable’ isn’t what a good, industrious XO likes to tell his captain when we’re pushing a deployment deadline.”

“No, I suppose not,” Commander Pablo Wyeth, HMS
Wolverine
’s commanding officer said judiciously. He tipped back in his chair, regarding his executive officer sternly, then smiled. “On the other hand, if that’s the worst thing that happens to us, we’ll be luckier than we deserve. And while I realize it’s likely to undermine my slave-driving captain’s reputation, I can’t see how I can reasonably construe it as your fault, Roger.”

“As always, I am awed by your restraint, Sir.”

“I’m sure you are.”

The treecat on the back of Lieutenant Winton’s chair tilted his head, ears twitching in amusement, and Wyeth shook his head, and found himself—again—wondering just why his exec had decided to pursue a naval career. Part of it was obvious enough. Lieutenant Winton had the talent, drive, and innate ability to succeed at anything he’d cared to turn his hand to, and his love for the Queen’s Navy was obvious. Yet he had to find it immensely frustrating, as well. Promotion was glacially slow, and likely to get more so as the prolong therapies began extending officers’ careers. There was more cronyism than Wyeth liked to think about, as well, although it was nowhere near as much a problem in the Royal Manticoran Navy as in some navies. (The Solarian League Navy came forcibly to mind, as a matter of fact.) And the RMN had its cliques, its little mutual-protection clubs, too many of them built on birth and privilege, which had to be especially frustrating for Winton.

Thirteen T-years out of the Island, and he’s still only a lieutenant,
Wyeth thought.
Of course,
I
was four T-years older than he is now before I made lieutenant, but not all officers are created equal, whatever the Island likes to pretend. I can think of at least a dozen of his classmates who’re senior to him by now, and not one of them is as flat out good at his job as Roger is
.

And that, he reflected, was particularly ironic given the fact that cronyism, patronage, and raw nepotism accounted for most of those accelerated promotions . . . and that it was only the lieutenant’s own fierce refusal to play those games which prevented him from being senior to
all
of them.

Once upon a time, I would’ve thought being Heir to the Crown would have to work in someone’s favor
, the commander mused.
But that was before I met Roger. I know some of the “upper crust” think this is some sort of silly hobby on his part—or that his refusal to trade on the family name is some kind of perverse hairshirt he’s chosen to wear—but that only confirms their idiocy. The Navy’s
important
to him, and at least he by God knows he’s
earned
every promotion
that came his way
.
It’d take someone with big brass ones to blackball Crown Prince Roger Winton when his name comes before a promotion board
,
however it got there, but I’m inclined to think it would probably take a pronounced lack of IQ to go ahead and promote him just because of whose son he is
.
He’s
going to be King himself one day not so far down the road, and Wintons have long memories. Somehow I don’t think the career of any brown-noser who “helped” his career along
in hopes of some kind of payback down the road is likely to prosper when that happens
.

Oddly, that thought gave Commander Wyeth a certain profound sense of satisfaction.

On the other hand, there was no point pretending Lieutenant Winton was just any old lieutenant . . . even if he
had
insisted his fellow officers address him as if he were.

“I read Captain Janacek’s response to your letter to the
Proceedings
,” Wyeth said after a moment, his tone carefully casual.

“So did I, Sir.”

Winton’s calm reply would have fooled most people, but Wyeth could watch his treecat, and Monroe’s ears flattened instantly at the mention of Janacek’s name. The captain was less than five years older than Roger Winton, but his family was deeply involved in politics, one of the movers and shakers of the Conservative Association, and they’d pulled strings mercilessly to speed along his promotions.

Probably never even gave it a second thought, either. Hard to blame them, some ways. Promotion’s slow enough and plum command slots are thin enough on the ground to make just about anyone figure he’d better use whatever edge he can if he wants to get command of a major combatant before he’s too old and senile to remember what to do with it when he’s got it!

It was an ignoble thought, and Wyeth knew it. Worse, he’d found himself thinking it more often as more and more of the officer corps became prolong recipients. The therapies had reached the Star Kingdom barely fifteen T-years earlier, and Wyeth had been too old to receive them. In fact, Roger himself had been close to the upper age limit when the treatments became available. But Pablo Wyeth was already fifty-two T-years old; the chance that he would make flag rank before his age-mandated retirement was virtually nil, whereas an arrogant prick like Janacek—just young enough to sneak in under the wire for prolong—would probably make it within the next five or six T-years . . . and then have something like a century in which to enjoy it.

Calmly, Pablo,
he told himself.
Remember your blood pressure, you antiquated old fart!

The self-reminder made him snort mentally, and he saw Monroe’s ears flick back upright as the telempathic ’cat picked up on his own amusement.

“I thought the good Captain went out of his way to be gracious while he was stomping all over your suggestion with both feet,” the commander observed out loud.

“With all due respect for Captain Janacek’s seniority, I’ve never been especially impressed by the scintillating brilliance of his intellect,” Winton replied. “He
was
careful about exactly how he phrased himself, though, wasn’t he?”

“Yes, he was,” Wyeth agreed with a grin. Then his expression sobered slightly. “On the other hand, you realize he never would’ve written that if he didn’t know quite a few other officers—especially
senior
ones—agree with him. I know you don’t really like me to mention this, Roger, but it takes a fair amount of chutzpah to publicly sign your name to something likely to piss off your future monarch. I don’t see Janacek doing that if he didn’t figure there’d be more than enough senior officers around to back his view of things.”

And if he didn’t have a pretty shrewd idea of just how much you hate the family interest game,
Wyeth added mentally.
You’re right about his lack of brilliance, whatever he and his cronies think, but he’s not
really
outright stupid, however he acts sometimes. He’s got to know you’re not going to use
your
“family interest” to step on him the way he probably deserves, or he never would’ve opened his mouth
.

“I know there are. That’s the problem.” Winton reached up, and Monroe flowed down from the chair back to curl in his lap, his buzzing purr loud as the lieutenant stroked his fluffy coat. “We’ve been thinking in one direction for so long that two-thirds of our senior officers are so invested in it they don’t even realize they’re not looking at what’s really happening.”

“Oh?” Wyeth cocked his head, raising one eyebrow.

“It doesn’t take a genius to realize how juicy a target the Junction is,” Winton said. “Hell, Sir! All it
really
takes is a working memory! There was a reason I mentioned Axelrod of Old Terra in my letter.”

Wyeth nodded, yet he couldn’t help wondering if there was more than simple historical memory involved in his executive officer’s position. Unlike quite a few of their fellow officers, whose attention was focused almost exclusively on the Navy’s commerce-protection duties, particularly in the face of the worsening situation in the Silesian Confederacy and the Andermani Empire’s increasing interest in fishing in those troubled waters, Wyeth tried to keep an eye on the broader picture. He wasn’t especially happy about what seemed to be happening in the Haven Quadrant these days, mainly because of the People’s Republic’s naval buildup, despite what most of the pundits believed had to be a rapidly disintegrating fiscal position. Still, there were possible explanations for that buildup that were relatively innocuous. It wasn’t the way
he’d
go about creating jobs and pumping money back into the economy, but he wouldn’t have done
most
things the way the People’s Republic’s political leaders had done them for the last, oh, two T-centuries or so. And whatever they might be thinking, nothing he’d seen so far suggested that Haven might be considering reprising Axelrod’s attempt on the Manticoran Wormhole Junction. For that matter, even if it was, and much as it pained Pablo Wyeth to contemplate agreeing even conditionally with Edward Janacek, the Junction fortresses and the new
Royal Wintons
and
Samothraces
—assuming the idiots in Parliament actually did go ahead and built the rest of the originally requested SDs—should be able to handle the People’s Republic’s battleships if it came to it.

All of that made nice, logical, reassuring sense. Unfortunately, whatever his own attitude towards his birth, Lieutenant Winton was also Crown Prince Roger of Manticore, only a single heartbeat away from the crown. As such, he received regular in-depth intelligence briefings unavailable to any other junior officer. Or to the commanding officers of any of Queen Samantha’s destroyers, if it came to that.

And he’s not about to let a single classified word slip, either, is he?
Wyeth reminded himself.
He wasn’t even willing to suggest obliquely in his letter that he might know something Janofsky doesn’t. He’s going to make one hell of a King one day
.

“Well, you’re young,” he said out loud. “You’ll have time to wear them down.”

“I hope so, Sir.” His executive officer sounded grimmer than usual, Wyeth thought. “At the moment, though, I’m feeling like a character out of an Old Earth fairy tale.”

“Really?” The commander chuckled. Ancient fairy tales and fables happened to be a hobby of his, and Winton knew it. “Let me see . . . If we asked Captain Janacek, I’m sure he’d be able to come up with quite a few. Like the little boy who cried ‘Wolf!’ for example. Or did you have Chicken Little in mind?”

“Actually, Sir, I was thinking of the Three Little Pigs. Especially the last one.”

“So you’re trying to convince the rest of the Navy that it’s time to build a house out of bricks instead of straw—is that it?”

“Mostly, Sir.” Winton nodded, looking down at his hands as they stroked the purring cream-and-gray treecat in his lap. “Mostly.” He looked up, brown eyes dark and very level. “Except that if
I’d
been the third Little Pig, I’d have held out for something even better. I think
steel
would’ve worked very nicely, actually.”

August 1850 PD

“
SIR CASPER WAS TALKING
about you just yesterday, Roger dear,” Samantha Winton, Queen Samantha II of the Star Kingdom of Manticore, said as she looked across the breakfast table at her son.

“I’ll just
bet
he was,” her daughter Caitrin said, rolling her eyes, and the treecat perched in the highchair beside Samantha made a soft sound that echoed his person’s mingled amusement and exasperation.

“Don’t encourage her, Magnus,” the Queen told him, and spared him a brief, quelling glance before she turned her gaze upon her younger offspring.

Almost twelve T-years younger than her brother, Caitrin looked absurdly young to someone her mother’s age, thanks in no small part to how youthful she’d been when prolong reached the Star Kingdom. She and Roger both had the Winton look—the dark complexion, the brown eyes, the strong chin—but neither of them were quite as dark as Samantha, who looked remarkably like a throwback to the days of King Roger I. Yet as similar as her children were to one another physically, there was an enormous difference in their personalities, the Queen reflected. Roger was the serious, thoughtful worrier—the sort who was constantly looking to the future, trying to anticipate oncoming storms and shape his course to deal with them. Caitrin wasn’t really the mental gadabout she often liked to portray, but there was no denying that she was far more inclined to take things as they came rather than rushing to meet them.

And she was far, far more . . . irreverent about the venerable traditions and responsibilities of the House of Winton. She took them seriously, but she refused to
admit
she did. Of course she wasn’t even thirty T-years old yet; there was time for her to grow properly stodgy, Samantha supposed.

Not that
Roger
showed any signs of stodginess, but he’d always been a serious little boy, and he’d grown into a serious man. One his mother rather liked, as a matter of fact. She often wondered how much of that would have happened anyway and how much was due to the fact that he’d known all his life he’d one day be king? She’d tried to keep that from overshadowing his childhood, just as her parents had tried to prevent the same thing in her own case.

And, like them, she’d failed.

“And what, may I ask,” Roger said now, delivering a quelling glance of his own to his unrepentant sister, “did your estimable Prime Minister have to say about your scapegrace eldest offspring, Mother? No, let me guess. He took the opportunity upon the occasion of my birthday to once more point out that it’s time I began producing an heir to the throne. Annnnnd”—he drew the word out, considering his mother through slitted eyes—“he also took the opportunity to suggest it’s time I stopped playing and settled down to a serious career in politics.”

“I see you know how Sir Casper’s mind works,” Samantha said dryly.

“You mean he knows which ruts the mind in question—such as it is and what there is of it—stays stuck in.”

Caitrin’s tone was far more acid than it had been, and her mother’s expression turned reproving. Not that she expected it to do much good. Sir Casper O’Grady, Earl of Mortenson, was
not
one of Caitrin Winton’s favorite people.

“Oh, don’t worry, Mom,” her daughter said now. “I promise to be polite—or moderately civil, at least—to him in public. But he keeps
harping
on that!”

“Yes, he does,” Samantha agreed, holding her daughter’s eyes. “Of course, he’s over seventy, isn’t he? And his attitudes were formed before prolong came along, too, weren’t they?”

Caitrin’s expression sobered. She looked back at her mother for a heartbeat or two, then nodded.

“Point taken, Mom,” she said much more quietly.

Roger sipped coffee, taking his time, letting the moment subside a bit before he lowered his cup again. Queen Samantha would be seventy in another T-year, herself . . . and she’d been far too old for prolong when it reached the Star Kingdom. It was as awkward as it was painful for any child to adjust to the thought that his parents had no more than ninety or a hundred years of life while he himself might well live twice or even three times that long. And it was awkward for the parents, too. Their attitudes and expectations had been shaped by the life expectancies they’d faced growing up. It was hard for many of them to stand back, realize how different their children’s perspectives had to be, and it was even worse in Mortenson’s case. He was a natural worrier, and Roger couldn’t remember the last time—or the first—he’d ever heard the Prime Minister crack a joke, but that might not be such a bad thing in a chief minister. Even if it was a pain in the ass to have Mortenson looking over his shoulder and pressing tactfully (or that was how the Prime Minister probably would have put it; Roger had rather a different perspective on it) now that he was forty-one T-years old—or would be tomorrow, at any rate—for him to “find a nice girl,” put aside his youthful enthusiasms like the Navy, and settle down to his
real
career in politics.

And while he was about it, produce an heir.

“I suppose I can’t really blame him,” Roger said now, setting his cup back on its saucer. “Hard to remember that, sometimes, but I do try, Mom. But I’m not really planning on becoming King for another—oh, thirty years or so, either—if it’s all right with you. And I’m not really interested in giving up the Navy just yet. Especially now.”

The atmosphere in the pleasant, sunlit dining room seemed to darken. Samantha sat back in her chair at the head of the table, and her treecat companion abandoned his own meal to flow down into her lap and croon to her softly.

“I’m doing all I can, Roger,” she said quietly.

“I know that, Mom.” Roger shook his head quickly. “And I know it might help in some ways to have me available to trot out for debates. But I’m not as good a horse trader yet as you are, and I think—at the moment, at least—that I can do more good arguing the case from inside the Service.” He made a face, then took a piece of bacon from his plate and offered it to Monroe, seated in his own treecat-sized highchair beside him. “If we’re really going to make the kinds of changes you and I both agree we’ve got to make, someone’s got to . . . convince the Navy’s senior officers it’s a good idea.”

“Have you tried a sledgehammer?” his sister asked more than a little bitterly. “It’s been six
T-years
since that first letter of yours in the
Proceedings
, Rog, and I haven’t noticed any radical realignments, have you?”

“At least some of them are starting to listen, Katie,” he replied, and watched her quick, involuntary smile as he used the nickname only he had ever applied to her. “I admit it’s an uphill fight, but since the Peeps finally started coming out into the open, a few of my seniors—and quite a few more of my contemporaries—are starting to actually
think
about it.” He smiled mirthlessly. “In some ways, the timing on Janacek’s response to that much-maligned letter of mine is working in our favor.”

Caitrin laughed. It was a harsh sound, but there was at least some genuine humor in it, her mother thought. And Roger had a point. In fact, he had a much better point than she might have preferred.

It was hard for a lot of people, even now, to accept what had happened to the Republic of Haven. Partly, she supposed, that was because it hadn’t happened overnight. In fact, it had been an agonizingly slow process, one drawn out for the better part of two T-centuries, long enough for it to turn into an accepted part of the backdrop of interstellar politics. And it had all been internal to the Republic, after all. If Havenite citizens wanted to reorder their political and economic systems, that was up to them and really wasn’t anyone else’s business. Unfortunately, the process—and its consequences—were no longer a purely internal matter. That minor change in the interstellar dynamic was (or
should
have been, anyway) becoming increasingly evident to anyone. Even her best analysts were still split over how and why it had happened, yet the consequences were clear enough for those who had eyes and were willing to use them. Unhappily, however, quite a few people
weren’t
willing to do that, and too many of those people wielded political power in the Star Kingdom.

In her more charitable moments—which were becoming steadily fewer and farther between—she actually sympathized with those who failed to see the danger.
Haven
a threat to interstellar peace? Clearly the entire notion was ridiculous! Why, for almost three T-centuries, the Republic of Haven had been the bright, shining light, the example every system in and out of the Haven Quadrant wanted to emulate. A vibrant, participatory democracy, a steadily burgeoning economy serving the most rapidly expanding cluster of colonies in the galaxy, and a growing, energetic star nation whose future seemed to hold no limits. That was how
everyone
, including the Star Kingdom of Manticore, had seen it for ten or twelve generations.

And then, somehow, it had all gone wrong.

The critical moment, she thought, hugging Magnus’ warm, comforting silkiness, had been the Havenite “Economic Bill of Rights” in 1680, with its declaration that all of the Republic’s citizens had an “unalienable right” to a relative standard of living to be defined and adjusted as inflation required by statute by the Havenite legislature. It had sounded like such a good idea. Who could possibly argue with it? Yet there’d been a subtext to it, an agreement struck between corrupt politicians, self-serving bureaucrats, an entrenched civil service, and the professional political operatives who controlled the “Dolist” voting blocs. One that gave those politicians a permanent grip on power, patronage, and office—and on all the wealth, graft, and special privileges that came with them—in return for giving the new class of “Dolist managers” the power to distribute that legally defined standard of living. What should have been—what had been sold to the Republic as—an exercise in political fairness had become a license to steal and to corrupt as the sprawling machinery of governmental bureaucracy turned into a machine that churned out money and personal license for the powerful and the politically connected.

The insidious rot of that corrupt bargain had overwhelmed Haven’s growing, energetic future and turned it into something ugly and dark and stagnant as an economic burden the Republic’s economy might have been able to bear under other circumstances turned into a fiscal black hole. Effective oversight of spending had become a bad joke as civil service posts became lucrative licenses to swill at the public trough, handed out to cronies and sycophants by lifetime officeholders in return for kickbacks and favorable, mutually back-scratching interpretations of an ever swelling mountain of regulations and rules. More and more of the ever-swelling government’s largess had been siphoned into fewer and fewer pockets through one bogus swindle after another even as that legally mandated standard of living required ever increasing expenditures, and deficit spending had become a way of life, gobbling up Haven’s legendary productivity as the Republic plunged steadily deeper and deeper into debt.

Perhaps the slide could have been arrested, the rot could have been cleaned away, but that would have required an open commitment to reform, a willingness to admit it wasn’t working. Unfortunately, those who’d come to depend on the existing system as the only game in town wouldn’t have liked that very much, and no one could predict where that sort of reaction might lead. And worse even than that, admitting it wasn’t working would inevitably have led to a public look into the
reasons
it wasn’t, and too many powerful people and families had had far too much to lose to let anything like
that
happen.

Which meant they’d had to find another solution to their problem.

The galaxy at large knew very little about the top-secret meeting between the leaders of the Legislaturalists, the Republic’s
de facto
hereditary political rulers, and the handful of most powerful Dolist managers at Nouveau Paris’ Plaza Falls Hotel in 1791. Even Samantha knew far less about it than she wished she did, and it had taken years for Manticoran intelligence to piece together what she
did
know. There’d been a time when she’d wanted desperately to believe her gloomier analysts’ fears had been paranoid fantasies, but everything which had happened since, especially in the last fifteen or twenty T-years, convinced her otherwise. In fact, she was coming to fear that even their gloomiest predictions had fallen short of the reality.

Twenty T-years ago, possibly as little as ten, she might have been able to convince herself that wasn’t so. But the Havenite “Constitutional Convention” of 1795 had radically rewritten the Republic’s Constitution, ostensibly to fix the government overreach which had produced the crumbling economy but actually to create the
People’s
Republic. The new constitution had maintained the façade of democracy even while it limited eligibility requirements, office qualifications, and the franchise—officially in order to reduce voter fraud and restrict the political clout of special interest groups—so severely it had become literally impossible to elect a representative who wasn’t a Legislaturalist. It had also just happened to abridge the old Republic’s once robust guarantees of freedom of speech and assembly, although that clause had been very carefully worded. The actual language only authorized the government to punish “hate speech” and language which “attacked another’s dignity on the basis of political, religious, or economic differences.” Of course, the courts had taken a rather broader view of the government’s authority in that regard than the letter of the constitution might have suggested, but it had really only been officially codifying what had gradually become the normal, accepted state of affairs over the previous T-century.