House of Steel: The Honorverse Companion (55 page)

In political terms, the authority of the Sword was wounded by the six-year dynastic war between 1418 and 1424 PD, which was sparked by Thomas II’s assassination of his brother Caleb. Fortunately for the Sword’s fortunes, Caleb’s junior wife Patricia fled to her father, Steadholder Dietmar Yanakov. Unknown to Thomas (who became known to history as “Thomas the Usurper”), his sister-in-law was pregnant, and Yanakov and Steadholder Abner Mackenzie forged an alliance among a coalition of steadholders to depose Thomas and replace him with Caleb’s posthumously born son, Bernard.

Barely twenty years had passed between Benjamin the Great’s death and Thomas’ coup attempt, and the Constitution (itself barely sixty years old) might well have foundered under such stress. Yanakov, Mackenzie, Reverend Ronald O’Day, and their allies among the Keys, however, recognized the potential for fresh civil war if that was allowed to happen. They stood unswervingly behind the infant Protector, and Yanakov and his daughter trained Bernard literally from the cradle up to rule and not simply reign. Under their rigorous, sometimes harsh tutelage, Bernard V emerged as a ruler almost as skilled as his great-grandfather, Benjamin IV, and strongly reasserted the Sword’s authority after Yanakov’s death in 1443 PD.

There were other setbacks as well. Perhaps the most egregious was the decision by three protectors in a row—Bernard VI, Peter, and Benjamin VII—between 1569 and 1655 PD to effectively turn their backs on further development of space. In fairness, all of them were focused on pressing planetary development issues, but many historians argue that their attitudes owed a great deal to how much of the existing space infrastructure had been created primarily to build the Faithful’s exile fleet, which “tainted” it in the eyes of some of Benjamin IV’s descendants. It was fortunate, however, that Protector Adrian (1655–1681 PD) reversed that trend when he did. Without his change in policy, Grayson would have found itself virtually defenseless in the face of the first Masadan attack on Yeltsin’s Star.

While Grayso was focused on domestic affairs, however, the Faithful were rapidly expanding and consolidating on Masada. In one of history’s greater ironies, Masada was a far more hospitable planet than Grayson, and without the checks of a hostile environment, the Masadan population grew rapidly. More ominously, had the Graysons known it, the Faithful’s attitude towards technology had changed radically. While “the Sin of the Machine” remained anathema, the Masadan Church viewed the suppression of the “heretical” Church on Grayson as a holy mission laid upon it by God Himself. The Moderates had been the first to turn their backs on God; therefore, they and the entire planet which had been intended as His perfect world must be conquered and restored to God’s will. All else must be subordinated to that end, and just as God had granted their ancestors the dispensation to use that technology absolutely essential to survival on Fallen Grayson, so He would grant them the dispensation to develop and use whatever of technology was required for the reconquest of Grayson.

However theologically inconsistent that doctrine might have been, it led to a fierce sense of Masadan identity and solidarity and an astounding reversal in the Faithful’s attitude towards research and development. The first Grayson-Masadan War was one of the few interstellar wars fought without gravitic technology, but the fact that it could be fought at all within little more than three hundred years of the Masadans’ exile speaks volumes of their determination and ability to transcend their antitechnology biases.

The initial series of raids were carried out entirely by sublight vessels, as neither combatant had the hyperdrive, the impeller, or the Warshawski sail. The GSG had expanded in step with the growth in industrial capacity and population, and electronic listening posts and remote observatories were established outside the system’s Kuiper belt to monitor (as well as possible) events in Endicott, since no one on Grayson was foolish enough to believe the Faithful did not cherish a burning hatred and desire for vengeance following their defeat. Those monitoring posts had been neglected under Adrian’s predecessors, though, which, coupled with well thought out Masadan measures to conceal the nature of their preparations, might well have proved fatal. Fortunately, however, the signatures of the attack force’s fusion drives and the electromagnetic noise of their passage through the interstellar medium gave sufficient warning—barely—for defensive measures to be taken prior to the first Masadan strike on
Grayson
in 1672 PD. The GSG’s existing cutters would have been thoroughly inadequate to defeat that attack, but Protector Adrian had been given sufficient warning to commission a force of hastily converted ore-carriers and personnel transports to meet it.

The fighting was furious, bloody, and costly. To quote from Andrew Preston’s God’s Warriors: Masada and the Endless Crusade:

“Modern analysts are uniformly shocked by the suicidal obsessiveness of the Masadan raiding parties. The huge ramscoop fusion carriers that made the multi-year journey to ‘cleanse’ their ancestors’ homeworld were fueled by hydrogen isotopes. Their crews, though, were fueled by religious fervor and a searing hatred, worked to a razor’s edge over three centuries of careful preparation by the Elders of the Faithful. By the time the first Masadans returned to Yeltsin’s Star they saw themselves as chosen instruments of God, guaranteed salvation, on a one-way mission to fight the forces of Satan at the gates of Hell itself. They did not even bother to establish a refueling complex for a chance at returning home. They just fought and died, willing to do anything to purge a planet none of them had ever seen, let alone set foot on, of a people with whom none of them had any personal experience.”

The Faithful were defeated, but the cost was heavy and it was evident to all Graysons that Masada would not accept that defeat as final. As a recognition of that fact—and also as a well-earned tribute to its services—the GSG became the Grayson Space Navy on November 1, 1675 PD, becoming an independent, coequal of the Grayson Army, a status it has maintained ever since.

The follow-up attack in 1696 PD assumed the same flavor, with the Graysons enjoying the advantages of years of warning and a defensive position. The Masadans had realized that, since surprise was impossible, a base of operations in the outer Yeltsin System was necessary, but the increasingly capable Grayson Space Navy prevented the establishment of such a base.

Rediscovery and Modern Warfare

1703–1750 PD

In 1793 PD, the Havenite merchant ship
Goliath
contacted both Yeltsin’s Star and the Endicott System, reestablishing contact between the descendants of Austin Grayson’s colonists and the rest of humanity. Although additional contacts with the galactic mainstream were sporadic and infrequent, to say the least, the effects of rediscovery were profound. New technologies, whose possibility had never occurred to any Grayson or Masadan, were revealed, and a period of frenetic R&D ensued, driven by the longstanding hostility between the two star systems. Although neither Grayson nor Masada could obtain more than bits and pieces from their occasional visitors, both were aware of the dire consequences of falling behind their enemies, and both introduced domestically engineered versions of the hyperdrive, impeller drive, and Warshawski sail in remarkably short order. The locally produced iterations of those systems were both crude and outmoded compared to more modern systems, yet in the process of essentially reinventing technologies the rest of the galaxy had enjoyed for centuries, Grayson researchers opened several promising lines of development which had not occurred to anyone else.

More important in the short term, the Rediscovery advanced Masadan and Grayson interstellar warfighting technology drastically in a short period of time. Within less than forty years, the Masadans had developed the ability to attack with no warning and with the massive payloads that Warshawski hyperships made possible. The first attack of what came to be known as the Third Masadan War was launched in 1736 PD, thirty-three years after the Rediscovery. The GSN—by this time, a highly professional military force that had been effectively continuously at war for the better part of a T-century—had developed its first hyper-capable warships primarily for rapid response in system defense rather than to project power beyond its home system and decisively defeated the fresh Masadan attacks. Masada’s much larger system population allowed it to allocate roughly two to three times more resources to its military than the Graysons could afford to allocate to the pre-Alliance Grayson military, however, creating a losing proposition for Grayson. With interstellar distance no longer equalizing the equation, the situation was grim, and the Navy’s strategists soon realized that they would need to destroy Masada’s interstellar capability if Grayson was going to survive

The first true interstellar warships of the GSN were laid down in 1742 PD, and The Fourth Masadan War began seven years later with a GSN strike on the starship construction infrastructure in the Endicott System. The Grayson captains were scrupulously careful to avoid any possibility of an Eridani Edict violation, but their attack completely surprised the Masadans (who had neglected system defense in favor of offensive forces) and wreaked havoc on Endicott’s deep-space infrastructure.

Triumph and the Decline of the Sword

1750–1848 PD

Protector Michael II had made the construction of the GSN’s starships and the destruction of Masada’s war-making capacity his life’s work, and he succeeded. Although the planet itself was too heavily defended to be attacked without committing an Eridani violation, centuries of orbital infrastructure were wiped out during the attack. Unfortunately, Michael died in 1753, before he could drive the war through to a conclusion, and his heir, Robert I, was a very different Protector. Without his father’s aggressive energy, lacking in political insight, and more interested in the fine arts than in matters military, Robert declared victory, recalled the Navy from Endicott, reduced its strength, and turned his attention to domestic concerns.

The respite won by Michael’s strike on Endicott permitted Grayson to survive Robert’s policies, but many of the Keys recognized that would not be true forever. In the power vacuum created by Robert’s vacillation and disinterest in governing, the Conclave of Steadholders began to chip away at the Sword’s authority and prerogatives. Robert I’s protectorship was short, but when his son, Robert II, replaced him in 1766, he proved no stronger or more politically adroit than his father had been.

The erosion of the Sword’s power continued as a political structure reminiscent of the Time of the Five Keys reemerged. A power bloc of steadholders who eventually came to be called the Great Keys gradually assumed primacy. By the end of the era, the Great Keys controlled the government of Grayson, and over the next century, the
de facto
power of the Protector was reduced to little more than figurehead status.

The Long Crusade and Cold War

1848–1903 PD

The bill for the succession of weak protectors came due in 1848 PD when Masada, having rebuilt its infrastructure—and its navy—launched the Fifth Masadan War, which came to be known as the Long Crusade. The initial attacks took the GSN by surprise and almost succeeded in reaching Grayson’s planetary surface. Defeated at heavy cost, the Masadans withdrew, but only to reorganize and launch a fresh assault four years later. The GSN launched a counterattack, only to encounter powerful Masadan system fortifications and take heavy losses of its own. The fighting continued, see-sawing back and forth, until Masada ultimately
did
get through to Grayson with a series of planetary nuclear strikes in 1868. Casualties were severe, although Grayson’s heavily protected environmental domes held them to a much lower level than Masada apparently expected, and under the Great Keys, a heavily reinforced GSN took the war back to Masada in a series of bitter battles. The Long Crusade guttered down to a state of cold war in 1875, but neither side was so foolish as to believe the longstanding war was at an end, and the interval was marked by occasional skirmishes, Masadan commerce raids, and Grayson reprisal strikes when the raiders became overly blatant. By 1892, however, the rising tensions between the People’s Republic of Haven and the Star Kingdom of Manticore, coupled with Yeltsin’s Star’s and Endicott’s strategic position between the PRH and the Manticoran Alliance, had drawn the two warring star systems into the toils of great power politics.

The Mayhew Restoration

1903 PD–Present

Both Endicott and Yeltsin’s Star are located along a direct hyper-space route between Haven and Manticore, and, as the likelihood of a conflict between the Star Kingdom and the People’s Republic increased, so did the strategic value of the two bitterly hostile star systems. The growing alliance between Grayson and Manticore may prove to be the most important outcome of the last twenty years, given its major contribution to the survival of both star nations at least to date. Many Grayson political analysts, however, would argue that the political implications of the rise of Protector Benjamin IX, the so-called “Mayhew Restoration,” and his domestic policies have even greater significance for the people of Grayson.

Of course, these events are not independent, as the restoration of Benjamin the Great’s Constitution has been closely linked with the alliance with Manticore. The Courvosier Mission, Manticore’s initial attempt to bring Yeltsin’s Star into the Manticoran Alliance, would have ended in unmitigated disaster if not for a Royal Manticoran Navy squadron commanded by then-Captain (subsequently Steadholder) Honor Harrington. Harrington’s desperate and costly defense of Grayson against the so-called “Maccabeus Campaign” launched by Masada with Havenite support, created the political climate in which Protector Benjamin Mayhew IX could reassert the Sword’s ascendancy and restore the Constitution. In public statements, Protector Benjamin has acknowledged that the absolute power of the Protectorship may need to be reduced in the fullness of time. His actions, however, imply no intention of giving up any of his authority in the near future. Opinion polls of steaders in the last several years show powerful majority support for his continued power and policies, despite periodic complaints from individual steadholders in the Conclave. While it seems likely his heirs may face a gradual transition to a genuine limited monarchy, most Manticoran constitutional scholars and Grayson historians agree that too precipitous a transition could prove disastrous because of the nature of the Protectorship itself. Every steadholder is recognized as a sovereign head of state and absolute ruler, limited only by the citizens’ rights clauses of the Constitution and the fealty he owes to the Protector. Until and unless the power of the individual steadholders can be reduced, any attempt to limit the
Sword’s
powers is all too likely to result in a return to something very like the Time of the Great Keys.