House of Steel: The Honorverse Companion (54 page)

Grayson society as a whole had by now acquired its highly consensual nature as a survival imperative, and Grayson remained a thoroughly theocratic state, but the Church enshrined a deep respect for individual belief, even when it conflicted with official doctrine, as a necessary and direct consequence of the Doctrine of the Test. Despite this, Grayson society had largely rejected the Faithful’s beliefs, and social pressure had prevented their membership from spreading broadly. As their doctrine diverged further and further from the mainstream, the Faithful found themselves increasingly marginalized, regarded as shrill extremists when they were regarded at all.

This attitude began to change, though, as the degree of discipline necessary to ensure survival decreased. The extremists, no longer seen as a direct threat to necessary conformity, were less thoroughly ostracized, and a certain percentage of the Grayson population began to regard the Faithful and their leaders with at least grudging admiration. A mainstream Church clergyman of the period famously wrote, “I reject their beliefs, yet I have no choice but to respect someone who meets his Test by living his life one hundred percent in accordance with his beliefs, however unpopular they may be.”

By the colony’s three-hundredth birthday, this toleration had expanded to the point at which the Church of the Faithful first openly converted steadholders. Some personal journals of generally accepted provenance imply that, if not the steadholders themselves, members of the converting steadholders’ families (and quite probably Eustace Bancroft at the time of the space program vote) had been secret members of the Faithful for at least a full generation prior to their open conversion.

Ironically, religious toleration was one of the areas where the Faithful diverged from mainstream norms, and as soon as those few steadholders publicly converted, they implemented a policy of enforcing their interpretation of doctrine in their steadings, with very little toleration for those adherents of the mainstream Church. Given the autocratic power and autonomy of the Keys, those steadholders were able to alter conditions in their own steadings very quickly, which attracted the immigration of more Faithful from other steadings (and prompted the emigration from their steadings of adherents of the mainstream Church). Many of the other steadholders were secretly relieved to see their own Faithful go, but although they were a clear minority planetwide, there were large absolute numbers of them, and the populations of the Faithful steadings grew rapidly. The Faithful steadholders became individually more powerful, as a consequence . . . and they also became increasingly insistent on exporting their own doctrine. The emergence of a distinct, aggressively proselytizing, increasingly powerful and militant “Faction of the Faithful” began to alienate the mainstream once again, and by the 1320s, the mainstream Church hierarchy was threatened with a steadily growing schism.

By the end of the thirteenth century PD, Grayson had reestablished a substantial space presence, with private industry providing the lion’s share of deep-space industry and the increasing exploitation of the asteroid belt. The habitats orbiting Grayson remained extremely primitive by present-day standards, heavily dependent upon support from the planetary surface in many critical areas, particularly food and other life-support elements. Space industry was providing benefits which clearly outweighed the support costs, however, and ambitious plans were afoot to construct orbital farms to produce not simply sufficient food to support the extra-atmospheric population, but also significant quantities of foodstuffs free of the omnipresent heavy-metals contamination which had such destructive effects for Grayson’s
planetary
citizens. The increase in private contractors and employees had inevitably resulted in the need for both search-and-rescue capabilities and law enforcement powers, and in 1286 PD, the Five Keys created the Grayson Space Guard (GSG).

Civil War, the Time of Dying

1337–1351 PD

In 1337 PD, the Faithful launched a coup d’état against the Conclave of Steadholders, triggering the Grayson Civil War. Steadholder Jeremiah Bancroft, an avowed member of the Faithful and one of the Five Keys, had petitioned for a special meeting of the Conclave of Steadholders, ostensibly to address some of the more contentious issues dividing the Faithful from the Moderates. Protector John Mayhew II, with the support of Reverend Elkanah Timmons, called the special Conclave and the steadholders attended with their heirs. Steadholder Bancroft never arrived, but troops of the Faithful massacred fifty-three of fifty-six steadholders and their heirs. The other two survivors, Steadholder Oswald and Steadholder Simonds, were also members of the Faithful. Reverend Timmons was “accidentally killed” in the crossfire, the first patriarch of the Church of Humanity Unchained to die by violence.

The Mayhew armsmen died to the man, fighting with Protector John at their head, but by their sacrifice, they saved John’s son Benjamin, who escaped to claim the Protectorship as Benjamin IV. The seventeen-year-old Protector, who was to become known in the fullness of time as Benjamin the Great, fled to Mackenzie Steading and rallied the shattered remnants of the other Steadholders’ Guards to him. Fighting was extraordinarily bitter and bloody, and the brutal measures the Faithful employed in an effort to suppress resistance in areas occupied by their troops was a key element in Benjamin’s success in rallying and leading the military opposition. Damage to the planetary infrastructure, including its farmlands, was extreme, and almost forty percent of the total planetary population died.

One of the Faithful’s first moves was to immediately terminate all support for the despised space industry and to demolish its ground-based component, throwing the fragile deep-space community back on its own limited resources. At the same time, the GSG promptly declared its support for Benjamin IV as the legitimate Protector and head of government, although there was little it could do at that time to assist him, given the need to divert every scrap of orbital and deep-space capability to simple survival, especially after the Faithful destroyed two of the three primary orbital habitats with surface-to-space missile strikes. The GSG was able to create an antimissile defense for the remaining habitat, but only at the expenditure of even more manpower and resources from a critically limited supply of each.

War is usually an impetus to research and development, and the bitterness of the fighting and the total incompatibility of the religious beliefs on either side led to the Faithful’s creation and planned use of a doomsday weapon. Although the practicality of the threat, designed to crack the planet with a succession of powerful warheads, was questionable, there was no doubt that they would almost certainly wreak still more destruction on Grayson’s remaining population centers. They might well also destroy sufficient of the farmland which had been slowly and painfully decontaminated over the past four centuries to threaten all remaining human life on Grayson through mass starvation. Faced with that threat, Steadholder Bancroft’s senior wife, Barbara, defected. Warned by her of the Faithful’s plans, Benjamin’s forces found and defused the first of the doomsday weapons. The Faithful, however, continued building and secreted the weapons around the planet.

Some of Benjamin’s advisers had seriously questioned his decision to “waste” desperately needed resources on off-world projects when they were fighting for their very lives on the planetary surface. In their opinion, it would have been far wiser to withdraw the remaining human presence from space to the planetary surface rather than expend effort, money, and supplies on sustaining it. In the event, they discovered how wise Benjamin had been to reject their arguments when the GSG, given the vitally needed transfusion of resources and support he was able to provide, designed and built a kinetic bombardment capability. Available in 1349 PD, the ability to call in impossible-to-intercept, highly accurate, high-kiloton range kinetic strikes provided the critical edge Benjamin’s still badly outnumbered but passionately loyal, skillfully led, and grimly determined army required to take the war to the Faithful. Another two years of bloody combat (and yet more damage to the farms and protected habitats necessary for survival) were required for the final defeat of the Faithful, but virtually every analysis of the Civil War has agreed that the GSG provided the margin which led to Benjamin the Great’s ultimate victory.

Although the surface infrastructure on Grayson suffered terribly through the Civil War, the remaining spaceborne habitat was largely untouched after the initial missile strikes, as were the ships used to transport goods to and from this platform. The relatively minor nature of the damage to remainder of Grayson’s distributed spaceborne infrastructure was to prove critical to ending the Civil War.

An impasse had been reached: the Faithful no longer had the ability to conquer the planet, but they could destroy its habitability once and for all. Benjamin, with the assistance of Reverend Baruch Gonzalez, Reverend Timmons’ successor, ultimately brokered a deal with the Faithful under which Grayson’s Moderates built short-range starships to transport the Faithful to an exile on Masada in the Endicott System in exchange for the locations of the hidden weapons.

Reconstruction, The Time of Healing and The Rise of the Sword

1351–1397 PD

The Grayson Civil War officially ended in 1351 PD, although the Faithful did not leave Grayson for the Endicott System until 1362, when the starships necessary for the trip had been constructed. Including the Faithful who departed for Masada, Grayson had lost almost fifty-three percent of its pre-Civil War population in just twenty-eight years and damage to the planetary infrastructure, while not total, had been catastrophic. Worse still, in some ways, the capacity diverted to building the starships required for the Faithful’s exile had severely hampered early reconstruction efforts. Fortunately, the Graysons had lost none of the hardworking pragmatism that comes from living on a planet that is trying to kill you even in the good times. The same traditional goal-oriented R&D which had allowed Grayson to produce the capability to exile the Faithful to Masada was turned to the reclamation of the Moderates’ home.

The political results of the Civil War proved far more lasting than the mere physical effects. The old order, defined by a relatively weak Protector serving as first among equals in a small group of leading steadholders, was completely turned on its head. One of the Five Keys and two other steadholders had turned traitor, the loyal Keys had been gunned down to a man, and Protector Benjamin (already beginning to be called “the Great”) had rallied the leaderless steadings in defeating the enemy. Under Reverend Gonzalez, the Church had strongly supported Benjamin yet deliberately distanced itself from direct control of Grayson politics as a response to the religious fanaticism which had sparked the Civil War. Gonzalez continued to support Benjamin after the war, which, combined with his own achievements, gave him the opportunity to set up the new political system in whatever manner he chose, and that is exactly what he did.

The keys which steadholders wore around their necks were symbols of their power, and as “first among equals,” the Protector had shared that symbol. Benjamin’s new Constitution, however, promulgated in 1357 PD, formalized the political supremacy of the Protectorship, giving Benjamin and his heirs the
de jure
power that he had acquired
de facto
during the Civil War. Accordingly, the Protector’s symbol became the Sword, rather than the Key, underscoring that supremacy and how it had been won. The steadings of the three treasonous steadholders were combined as the Sword Steading, the Protector’s personal demesne, further cementing Mayhew dominance in the post-Civil War era. The original Mayhew Steading became the steading of the Protector’s heir, thus effectively combining four of the larger steadings of Grayson in the direct Mayhew line.

Nor was that change the only dilution of steadholder power. The Constitution also created a second parliamentary house, the Conclave of Steaders. From the perspective of the exhausted steadholders, the common steaders had earned representation in a chamber of their own because of the way in which they had continued the fight even after their steadholders had been murdered or killed in battle. From the perspective of Benjamin IV (a shrewd politician, as well as a military leader of genius), the natural enemies and competitors for the Sword’s authority were most likely to be found in the Keys, whereas a lower house would be inclined to ally itself with the Sword to protect its own prerogatives.

The cultural rebuilding of this era was made possible largely by the fact that the Faithful who wanted to leave the planet had done so. The lack of a defeated and disaffected former foe and the immediate needs of rebuilding, coupled with a general war-weariness, permitted a rapid and uncommon degree of religious reconciliation and healing. Madame Barbara Bancroft’s remarriage to Protector Benjamin IV also helped
Graysons
of a more conservative religious perspective view themselves in full communion with the Church and sharing in the Protection of the Sword.

Even the setbacks were used to good effect. When an assassin murdered Madame Barbara Mayhew, members of the crowd tore the killer apart, and Protector Benjamin, with the full support of the Grayson steaders, used the opportunity to root out any remaining pockets of extremist groups unwilling to live at peace with their neighbors.

By the time of Benjamin the Great’s death in 1397 PD, Grayson had largely completed the rebuilding process.

Maturation, The Time of the Protectors

1397–1703 PD

The nearly three centuries following the rule of Protector Benjamin the Great were a golden age for Grayson. The number of steadings continued to increase. The population continued to expand. The rate of growth was high for Grayson, considering the hostile environment. A sense of planetwide unity grew, particularly as the planetary data-net expanded and grew in complexity and capability.