House of Steel: The Honorverse Companion (6 page)

“Deal . . . Sir,” he said with a smile of his own, and dropped the reader on Jonas’ desk.

July 1852 PD

“
—SO I’M AFRAID I CAN’T
quite agree with you there, My Lord,” Roger Winton said politely, looking across the palatial conference table at Jackson Denham, the Baron of Seawell and the Star Kingdom’s Chancellor of the Exchequer.

“Indeed, Your Highness?” Seawell arched his eyebrows, then let his eyes flick very briefly—so briefly it was
almost
unnoticeable—towards the head of the table before he focused intently on Roger’s expression. “I’m afraid I don’t follow your logic. Perhaps you could explain it a bit more clearly?”

Roger made himself smile calmly, despite a frission of anger. He kept his own eyes on Seawell, without so much as a glance in his mother’s direction.

“I’m not questioning your current figures, My Lord,” he said. “My problem is with the basis for some of your projected
future
numbers. Specifically, the ones you’re showing for trade in the Haven Quadrant. I think the underlying assumptions are far too optimistic given what we’ve seen out of the People’s Republic’s current economy.”

“Those assumptions are based on quite a few decades worth of computer time, Your Highness, Seawell pointed out. “And the analysis they support is the product of some highly experienced analysts.”

You
have
heard of “Garbage In-Garbage out,”
haven’t you?
Roger didn’t quite ask out loud.
And those “highly experienced analysts” of yours know exactly what you
wanted
to hear out of them. Don’t you think that might have helped them . . . shave their analyses just a bit? Besides, we wouldn’t want them to entertain a fresh thought and strain their brains, now would we?

“I understand that, My Lord, but I’d also like to point out that everything coming out of our human intelligence sources in the People’s Republic suggests Haven is in the process of adopting highly protectionist economic policies, and I don’t see any mention of that in this analysis.” He tapped the display in front of him, still smiling pleasantly. “Instead, it assumes current trend lines will continue, rather than dip sharply, and I think that’s highly unlikely. According to Dame Alice’s
current
figures, for example, our carrying trade to the People’s Republic has fallen by almost nine percent over just the last three quarters. Would you care to comment on that, Dame Alice?”

He looked at the pleasant faced, silver haired woman sitting two seats down from Seawell. Dame Alice Bryson was the Star Kingdom’s Minister of Trade, and she and Seawell didn’t exactly see eye to eye on quite a few topics these days. At sixty-nine, she was only five T-years younger than he was, but she often seemed half his age when it came to mental flexibility, in Roger’s opinion. Of course, that might be because she was a Centrist while Seawell was a card-carrying member of the Conservative Association.

“I think the figures speak for themselves, Your Highness,” she said now, never even glancing in the Queen’s direction. Instead, she turned her head to smile at Seawell. “His Highness is quite correct about the People’s Republic’s protectionist tendencies, I’m afraid, Jackson. Their government is steadily nationalizing the independent shipping houses of each of their new member systems. As they shut down the independents, they’re also freezing out everyone else’s carriers . . . including ours. It may not show up as much in your projections because our shipping lines are taking up the slack in Silesia and the League and at the moment the People’s Republic’s still buying plenty of Manticoran
goods
, so the trade balance is still a long way from tanking. They’re simply sending their own ships to collect them—and to deliver what little we’re buying from them. But everything we’re hearing at Trade suggests they probably won’t be doing that much longer.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Seawell said testily. “It’s going to cost them at least twenty percent more, possibly even more than that, to try to produce locally what they’ve been buying from us! And unless they want to cut their defense budgets, where are they going to get the investment capital to build the production facilities in the first place?”

“I’m afraid you’re missing my point, My Lord,” Roger said. Seawell looked back at him, and Roger shrugged. “At the moment, and increasingly, Havenite policies are being driven by ideology, not rational analysis. I don’t say the Legislaturalists really buy into the ideology they’re selling to everyone else in the PRH, but they have to at least
act
as if they do. And some of them probably do believe everything they’re saying. What matters from our perspective is less the
why
than the
what
of what they’re doing, however, and the problem is that they’re buying more and more deeply into the notion of a command economy. And what their economic analysts are seeing at this moment isn’t the opportunities of selling to an external market, but the opportunities of exploiting an
internal
market for Haven’s benefit even at the expense of the economies of the People’s Republic’s other member systems.

“They see the star systems they control as a closed internal market, one they can lock other producers out of with protectionist measures to create a situation in which market demand can be satisfied only out of their domestic industry. Protectionism is supposed to create a situation in which market pressures will support the development of the industry their top-down system hasn’t generated, and they don’t
care
if that drives their subjects’ standard of living down by driving prices
up
. And they intend to concentrate all of that new industry in the Haven System and their older daughter colonies. I believe they used to call that sort of thinking ‘mercantilism’ back on Old Earth.”

The crown prince shook his head, his expression grim.

“I think your analysts are missing that because from the perspective of the PRH and its citizens as a whole, it’s very, very bad policy. But from the perspective of the Haven System—which is all the Legislaturalists are actually concerned about at the moment, when all’s said—it makes good
short-term
sense. In essence, they’re looting the economies of the systems they’re conquering—excuse me, peacefully annexing—” his irony was withering “in order to prop up and grow their own domestic economy in Nouveau Paris. In the end, it’s going to wind up costing them far more for manufactured goods and they’re going to take a hammering on lost foreign markets for their own products, but it
will
force the growth of their own heavy industry in the systems which are most important to them. And because it’s an ultimately
ir
rational policy from the perspective of the PRH as a whole, your rational analysts missed it.”

Seawell started to say something, then made himself stop and closed his mouth firmly. He sat that way for several seconds before he nodded grudgingly.

“You may—
may
, I say—have a valid point there, Your Highness. I’ll certainly sit down with my staff and examine all of our models in the light of what you and Dame Alice have just said. Having said that, however,” he continued, rallying gamely, “the fact remains that increasing the Navy budget yet again is going to place a very serious strain on the economy as a whole. Because of that—”

“You did well, Roger. Very well,” Samantha Winton said, sipping her tea. “I was particularly impressed when you didn’t reach across the table and pull his tonsils out through his nose.”

“I thought I concealed my unhappiness rather well, actually, Mom,” he replied, sitting back with a tankard of cold beer while Monroe purred across the back of his chair. “Besides, if I wanted his tonsils, I’d ask Monroe to extract them. His claws are a lot better equipped for that kind of surgery.”

Samantha chuckled, and Monroe reached out to smack Roger gently on top of the head with a true-hand. Roger smiled, but there was a carefully hidden darkness behind that smile as he looked at his mother. She’d aged noticeably over the last couple of years, and something inside him raged at her increasing frailty, the slight bend in her spine that defied everything the doctors could do. It wasn’t right—it wasn’t
fair
!—for her to be visibly fading in front of him when she was barely thirty T-years older than
he
was.

“Don’t go giving Monroe any ideas,” she said sternly after a moment. “’Cats are very direct souls. If you give him the idea that he can go around dissecting cabinet ministers, it’s going to get very messy.”

“Not if he and I make a few salutary examples right up front, surely!” Roger replied. “Just one or two. I’m sure the others would get the idea and begin deferring suitably to my tyrannical whims.”

“I wish,” Samantha said with rather less humor.

She set down her teacup and leaned back in her chair, closing her eyes for a moment, and Roger felt a fresh pang as Magnus looked down at her protectively. The older treecat no longer rode his person’s shoulder the way he had for as long as Roger could remember, and he was constantly at her side, watching over her. Roger could read his concern, his worry, in his body language, and another strand of concern of his own went through him.

Treecats almost never survived their companions’ deaths. That had made their practice of adopting the shorter-lived humans a virtual death sentence for centuries, and the idea of losing Magnus, who’d been a part of his own life from the day he learned to walk, at the same time he lost his mother was almost insupportable.

At least that’s not likely to be a problem for Monroe
. The thought tasted much bleaker than usual at the moment.
That’s one good thing about prolong. Not that it’s going to help Mom or Magnus
.

“I think I’m getting too worn out for this, Roger,” Samantha said without opening her eyes. “I just don’t have the energy to beat up on them the way I used to. It helps—if that isn’t an obscene use of that particular verb—that the Havenites are getting increasingly blatant. People can still argue about how much of a threat they are to
us
, but nobody can simply deny that they pose a threat to
anyone
anymore.”

“I wouldn’t go quite that far, Mom,” he said dryly. “There’s always Lady Helen.”

“Oh, God.” Samantha opened her eyes and looked at him. “I could’ve gone all day without thinking about her. Thank you, Roger. Thank you ever so much.”

Roger snorted and took a long pull at his beer. Lady Helen Bradley was the current leader of the Liberal party in the House of Lords, and her insulation from the electoral process also seemed to insulate her from rationality, in Roger’s opinion. She got to live in her own little echo chamber, where the only people she ever spoke to were those—from all sides of the aisle, he had to acknowledge—who agreed with her, and the electorate couldn’t even punish her at the ballot box, because she never had to stand for office.

The good news (from Roger’s perspective, at least) was that the Conservative Association had never had much representation in the House of Commons to begin with and that the isolation from reality of peers like Bradley was steadily eroding the Liberals’ popular support, which was actively costing them seats in the lower house, as well. Allen Summervale, the Duke of Cromarty, who’d assumed the leadership of the Centrist Party with Earl Mortenson’s resignation last year, was gathering up quite a few of those disaffected Liberals. The
bad
news was that the Star Kingdom’s constitution gave the House of Lords disproportionate power, which meant a sufficient number of nobly born drooling idiots could still hamstring the government’s policy badly.

The fact that Leonard Shumate, the Earl of Thompson, was Prime Minister instead of Cromarty was a demonstration of that unhappy truth. Roger had nothing against Thompson. In fact, he liked the earl a great deal, and Thompson was a Crown Loyalist. As such, his support for the House of Winton could be taken as a given. But everyone knew that, and putting together a majority in the House of Lords—essential for any prime minister—had required some unhappy horsetrading. That was how Jackson Denham had ended up as Chancellor of the Exchequer, traditionally the second most powerful seat in the Cabinet, and how Alfredo Maxwell, a Liberal, had ended up as Home Secretary while a Centrist like Dame Alice had been forced to settle for Trade.