“Been brooding about it, has she?”
“Only sometimes,” Emily replied in the judicious tone of someone trying to be scrupulously fair. “Not more than every other time I see her.”
“Then consider her kicked,” Lessem promised.
“Oh, thank you both so much.” Honor rolled her eyes while Hamish and her father chuckled. “And you two aren’t helping this, you know,” she told the male component of the conversation severely.
“Not my responsibility to help when Captain Lessem and Emily are doing such a splendid job,” Hamish informed her. “Not that either of them’s likely to tell you anything I haven’t.”
“Acknowledged.” Honor nodded. “And I’ll try.”
“Good.” Lessem reached out to squeeze her upper arm gently. “That’s good, Honor.”
“I see Mistress Thorn’s minions are about ready to serve,” Hamish observed, looking back towards the ballroom. “Will you join us, Captain?”
“I’d be honored, My Lord.”
“On social occasions, it’s ‘Hamish,’ Captain.”
“Only if it’s also Sara Kate, My Lord is Mesa ,” Lessem replied a bit pointedly.
“Then would you join us . . . Sara Kate?”
“Thank you . . . Hamish.”
He smiled and offered her his arm while Honor took Emily’s hand and the four of them headed for the head table. Alfred looked around until he located Allison. As usual, she was at the center of a cluster of admirers — most of them male — and he headed across to rescue her and escort her to the same table.
She smiled happily as he swooped down upon her, ruthlessly exploiting his position as both husband and guest of honor, since the evening was the official announcement of his return to duty, and she tucked her hand into his elbow and squeezed gratefully as he led her away.
“I don’t know what you were thinking to leave me exposed that way.” Her tone was teasing, but there was an edge of seriousness to it. “My God, Alfred! You didn’t tell me we were inviting George Brockman!” She shuddered. “That man doesn’t have the faintest concept of what ‘monogamy’ means.”
“And if I’d thought for a moment that you weren’t perfectly capable of cutting him off at the knees — or at any other appropriate point on his anatomy —I’d have been there in an instant,” her husband assured her, and looked down at her with a faint twinkle. “Tell me with a straight face that you didn’t enjoy doing exactly that when — as I’m sure happened — he gave you the chance?”
“You may be able to throw me heartlessly to the wolves, but you can’t make me lie!” She lifted her nose with an audible sniff, then smiled wickedly. “I’m pretty sure the bleeding will stop in another hour or so.”
“Good for you!” Alfred laughed. “And while we’re talking about social lapses, were you aware Honor and Sara Kate Lessem — and Jacques, now that I think about it — all know one another?”
“Of course I was.” She looked up at him again with a devilish smile. “Dear me. Did I forget to mention that to you?”
“Out of consideration for your delicate condition, I will defer the proper response to that.”
“Oh, no, you won’t!” she told him pertly. “I’ve already had the peach preserves sent to our room.”
“You’re incorrigible,” he said, smothering a laugh.
“I don’t know why you and Honor keep saying that. I’m the most encouragable person I know!”
* * * * * * * * * *
“It’s good to see him laughing again,” Emily Alexander-Harrington said quietly as her mother and father-in-law headed towards the table.
“Agreed,” Honor said, equally quietly. “And I think —“
She paused for a moment, then shook her head.
“You think what?” Emily pressed.
“Oh, it was just a passing thought.” Honor shook her head again, her expression sobering. “We’re all having a few of those at the moment, I think.”
“Yes, we are,” Emily agreed, but she gazed at Honor speculatively, and Honor made herself look back with tranquil eyes as she tasted the curiosity in Emily’s mind-glow. She also didn’t mention what had spawned that “passing thought.”
“Tell me, have you given any more thought to a brother or sister for Katherine and Raoul?” she asked instead.
“I have.” Emily nodded, although the question seemed to have sharpened the focus of that speculation Honor had tasted. “In fact, I have an appointment to discuss it with Dr. Illescue at Briarwood tomorrow afternoon, before I go back to White Haven.”
“Oh, good!” Honor beamed at her, bending over her chair to envelop her in a gentle hug. “I’m thinking about doing the same thing. Maybe this time we can time it even closer!”
“There’s only a month or so between the two we have, dear,” Emily pointed out drily. “What? You want to synchronise the deliveries to the same minute?”
“Well, if neither one of us is going to be in a position to do it the old fashioned way, we might as well take advantage of the opportunities we do have. Besides —” she straightened with a devilish smile “— twins do is Mesa run in Mom’s family, you know!”
Emily laughed, and Honor’s smile turned more gentle. But then she straightened and looked at Hamish across Emily’s head. She swivelled her eyes to one side, to where Sandra Thurston, Emily’s nurse and constant companion, stood chatting with James MacGuiness while he kept an eagle eye on the evening’s festivities. Her gaze came back to Hamish, and he shrugged ever so slightly, letting an edge of worry show in his own blue eyes.
Her mouth tightened as she put that together with the undertone she’d tasted in Emily’s mind-glow, but then she drew a deep breath. She wasn’t going to borrow any trouble, she told herself firmly. Not tonight. And not when all three of them had so much to be grateful for, including —
“You’re right about how good it is to see Daddy laughing again,” she said, looking back down at Emily and squeezing her good hand gently, then looked at Captain Lessem. “I think it’s going to be good for him to get back to work, too.”
“Well, I can tell you the entire staff’s damned glad we’ve gotten him back to work,” Lessem said frankly. “Lord knows we need him as a surgeon, but we need him even more on the administrative side.” She shook her head. “I wasn’t joking about how many patients we’re going to have, Honor. It’s bad already, and if those idiots in Old Chicago don’t get their heads out of —” She paused, then grimaced. “Out of the sand, it’s going to get a lot worse.”
“I know. And we’re trying to hold it to a minimum,” Honor said, easing Nimitz off her shoulder to join Samantha in the double highchair between her and Hamish. “And speaking of trying to keep things to minimums, where’s Martin right now?”
“I suppose, given your august connections I can tell you,” Lessem said, smiling crookedly at Hamish. “At the moment, he’s got a task group with Vice Admiral Correia. I don’t know exactly where they were headed, but I know it’s part of Lacoön Two.”
“If he’s with Correia, he’s probably in Ajay or Prime about now,” Hamish said.
“And just between you and me, I’m a lot happier with the thought of his facing off with Sollies instead of Havenites,” the captain observed.
“So am I, for now, at least,” Honor. “I just wish we had a clue about some way to convince the Mandarins to at least pretend they have a single functional brain amongst them.”
“I seem to sense just a little acerbity?” Lessem teased.
“Just a bit, perhaps,” Honor admitted.
“Tell me, Doctor — Sara Kate, I mean,” Emily said. “Honor mentioned something about ‘ancient’ ballroom dancing. How did you ever get involved with that?”
“Blame it on my misspent youth,” Lessem replied with a chuckle. “That and the fact that my mother knew Honor’s Uncle Jacques when they were college students. He got her involved with the Society for Creative Anachronisms, and she’s a physical therapist, too. Dance is sort of a natural connection for therapists. Or it can be, anyway.”
“Fascinating.” Emily shook her head. “I’ve had quite a bit of experience with therapists myself, over the years, but for fairly obvious reasons, no one ever suggested dance to me. I can see its applicability, though, now that you’ve mentioned it.”
“Oh, I do it much more for pleasure than professionally,” Lessem said. “I even got Martin to take it up, and he’s remarkably good at it. To be honest, I’m looking for a new challenge for him.”
“You are, are you?” Honor smiled. “Well, in that case, you’ve come to the right place.”
“I have?” Lessem’s eyebrows arched, and Honor’s smile grew broader.
“Oh, yes. Tell me, are you familiar with the phrase ‘dosey doe’?”
George Benton Tower
City of Old Chicago
Old Earth
Sol System
“Sorry I’m late,” Permanent Senior Undersecretary for Foreign Affairs Innokentiy Kolokoltsov told his colleagues as he stepped through the conference room’s doors and they slid silently shut behind him. “I was ready to walk out of my office when one of my analysts — Stephanos Nye, I think I’ve mentioned him to you before — asked for an urgent appointment.”
“You could’ve screened to let us know you’d be delayed.” There was an unpleasant edge in Nathan MacArtney’s reply. Then again, they’d expected him almost an hour earlier.
“It’s not like we don’t all have plenty of ‘urgent appointments’ of our own we could be using our time on instead of sitting twiddling our thumbs,” MacArtney added.
Kolokoltsov frowned at him, his eyes cold. Of all the people in this room, MacArtney, as Permanent Senior Undersecretary of the Interior, bore the most direct responsibility for the unholy mess they faced. Kolokoltsov was prepared to admit he’d contributed his own fair share to the making of that mess, but none of the others could rival the string of disasters MacArtney and his ally, the late, unlamented Fleet Admiral Rajampet, had brewed up before Rajampet’s overdue suicide.
“I decided it wasn’t a very good idea to discuss highly sensitive matters over the com, Nathan,” he said after a moment. “We’ve got enough alligators biting us on the arse without letting anything . . . unfortunate get leaked.”
“Oh, don’t be ridiculous, Innokentiy!” Malachai Abruzzi, the Permanent Senior Undersecretary of Information, shook his head. “Our coms are the most secure in the entire galaxy!”
“Really?” Kolokoltsov crossed to the table, settled into the chair at its head, and turned it to face the others. “You’re confident of that, are you?”
“Of course I am!”
“Then perhaps you’d care to explain how the conversation you and Nathan had last month about how to handle the Hypatian situation happened to hit the public boards in Hypatia last week?”
The silence in the deeply buried, heavily shielded conference room was as total as it was sudden, and he looked around his colleagues’ faces.
“What conversation was that?” Omosupe Quartermain asked after a long, still moment. MacArtney, in particular, had been on the Permanent Senior Undersecretary of Commerce’s personal shit list ever since the situation in the Fringe began deteriorating, since she and her colleague Agatha Wodoslawski, the Permanent Senior Undersecretary of the Treasury, were the ones trying desperately — and unsuccessfully — to cope with the catastrophic fiscal consequences.
“The one in which they considered how much simpler things would get if we dropped an intervention battalion or two into Hypatia to ‘encourage’ President Vangelis to call off the referendum. Something about shooting every tenth senator until they got it right, I believe.” Kolokoltsov’s voice was even colder than his eyes, and Wodoslawski joined him and Quartermain in glowering at Abruzzi and MacArtney.
“Oh, come on, Innokentiy!” Abruzzi protested. “That was never a serious policy suggestion!” He shook his head, expression disgusted. “For God’s sake, there are over two billion people on Hypatia, and another million-point-two in the Alexandria Belt! Someone really thinks a couple of intervention battalions are going to turn something like that around?! Give me a break!”
“Of course I don’t think that. That doesn’t mean someone else might not. And let’s be honest here, it wouldn’t be all that different from quite a few interventions OFS has pulled off out in the Protectorates, now would it? Did it ever occur to either of you that with feelings running as high as they are — and enough people on the other side primed to jump on any opening we give them — finding out that two of the ‘Mandarins’ are even talking about what would amount to a coup against a legally elected system president would play right into the hysteria mongers’ hands?”
“First, we were on a secure government com. Who the hell was going to hear about it?” Abruzzi demanded. “And, secondly, it should’ve been totally clear from the context of our entire conversation that we were venting our frustration, not recommending some kind of serious policy!”
“Malachai, you’re the Permanent Undersecretary of information! You know, better than anyone else in this room, how easy it is to strip something out of its context and turn it into a soundbite that says exactly the opposite of what whoever said it actually meant. And that’s just what some bastard in Hypatia’s done with your and Nathan’s little conversational . . . faux pas.”
Abruzzi had opened his mouth to respond. Now he shut it again, his expression thunderous, because Kolokoltsov was right. The Ministry of Information spent far more of its resources on “shaping the narrative” — what an earlier and more honest age might have called “producing propaganda” — than it ever did on straight news releases.
“How the hell did anybody get their hands on it in the first place?” MacArtney demanded, glaring at Abruzzi with a certain self-righteousness. He is Ms. wasn’t the one who’d just proclaimed the inviolability of their communications channels, after all.
“If I knew that, whoever’s responsible for it would be roasting on a slow spit,” Kolokoltsov replied grimly. “All I know is that the latest courier boat from Hypatia came in about three hours ago, and your conversation — shorn of anything that could conceivably suggest it wasn’t a serious policy suggestion, or at least a serious consideration — had been on the boards for two days before it left. In those two days, according to Stephanos, it logged over nine hundred and seventy-two million hits. I’ve done the math, by the way. That works out to forty-nine percent of the total population of the star system, including every babe in arms. And for your information, that’s seventy-five percent of the adult population. To say it isn’t playing well with the voters would be something of an understatement, Nathan.”
“Oh my God.” Quartermain’s tone couldn’t seem to decide between disgust, anger, and resignation. “So how bad is the damage, Innokentiy?” she sighed.
“Well it isn’t good.” Kolokoltsov popped a data chip into the terminal in front of him and the header of a report appeared on his colleagues’ displays. “This is Nye’s initial take on it. He’s doing a more deliberate analysis, and the numbers may get a little better, but I doubt it’ll make much difference in the end. And the conclusion he’s reached is that what was going to be a squeaker that would probably go against us is in the process of turning into something just a bit more . . . emphatic. The word he used was ‘tsunami,’ actually.”
“All over what couldn’t be more than three or four seconds of a com conversation?” Wodoslawski looked as if she would have liked to be incredulous.
“Oh, it’s more than three or four seconds.” Kolokoltsov spared MacArtney and Abruzzi a fulminating glare, then looked at Wodoslawski. “It would seem there was quite a bit of ‘frustration venting’ in the conversation, and whoever handed it over to the Hypatian newsies must have edited all the choicer bits together, because the actual soundbite runs almost six minutes. Don’t misunderstand me. I’m not saying this is the only thing driving Hypatian public opinion. There were already a lot of negative factors in the mix, and we all know it. But it looks as if this could be the emotional trigger that turns a vote that already looked dicey into an outright disaster."
“Shit.” Omosupe Quartermain seldom used colorful language, but she’d clearly decided to make an exception, and Kolokoltsov didn’t blame her.
With less than a third of Beowulf System’s population, and perhaps a fifth of its gross system product, Hypatia was on the small size for what was technically a Core System of the League. For that matter, as a full member system, Hypatia’s contribution to the Solarian League’s federal budget was limited, aside from the relatively modest duties levied on its interstellar shipping. It was a useful bit of cash flow, but there were probably a dozen Protectorate systems which contributed at least as much. So from that perspective, Hypatia’s potential defection was unlikely to make an already grim situation much worse.
But Hypatia, like Beowulf, had been a founding member of the Solarian League when the League Constitution was proclaimed right here in Old Chicago seven hundred fifty-seven T-years ago last month. Not only that, the system was only forty-four light-years — less than six days, for a dispatch boat — from Beowulf and the Beowulf Terminus of the Manticoran Wormhole Junction. If Hypatia opted to secede and, even more disastrously, to throw in its lot with its longtime neighbors, trading partners, and friends, it would expand the “Grand Alliance’s” bridgehead at the very heart of the Solarian League dangerously. Worse, a successful secession — another successful secession, since Beowulf’s was a foregone conclusion as soon as the Beowulfers got around to holding their own vote — would go a disastrously long way toward validating the right to secede in the court of public opinion.
And that could not be allowed.
“Perhaps you can see now why I didn’t screen you about this,” Kolokoltsov observed. “In fact, I know it’s going to be an incredible pain, but in addition to assuming anything we say on our nice, secure com system is likely to be overheard and watching our tongues accordingly, I think any sensitive information will need to be couriered back and forth between us, at least for the next few days. For that matter, it’d probably be smart of us to handle really sensitive information that way for the foreseeable future.”
“That’d make it almost impossible to coordinate properly,” Wodoslawski objected.
“No, it won’t.” Kolokoltsov shook his head. “It’ll make it difficult, granted, but all of us — except you — have our offices here in George Benton. I don’t know how they got to Nathan and Malachai’s com conversation, but this conference room is only a lift shaft away from our private offices, and it’s shielded against every form of eavesdropping known to man. For that matter, so are our offices. I’ve already found you twenty-four thousand square meters of floor space here in the tower, and if you need it, we can free up twice that much in seventy-two hours. I know moving your entire staff over would be a pain in the arse, but I don’t really see an option if we’re going to keep you in the loop.”
“You’re serious, aren’t you?”
“Dead serious,” he said flatly. “Look, maybe this is an exercise in paranoia on my part, but we’re about to get handed our heads in Hypatia, people. We can’t — we just can’t — go on with this kind of crap hitting us in the face every other week. I’ve talked to my tech people, and they say that if we’re all here in the tower, they can run secure, shielded, hardwired com lines that could only be tapped with direct physical access to the cables. I know it sounds like Dark Ages technology, but if it’ll work, I don’t really give a damn how ‘antiquated’ it is. And if all the cable involved is here in the same tower, it’ll be a lot easier for us to make sure nobody’s getting that physical access to it.”
Wodoslawski sat back, shaking her head, and Kolokoltsov couldn’t blame her. In truth, he wasn’t certain himself how much of his proposal was rational and how much was the product of his own increasing desperation. The worst thing about it, he thought, was that he proposed to turn Benton Tower into a fortress, and people living inside fortresses developed fortress mentalities. If he and his colleagues retreated into a bunker, even one as splendidly equipped as this one, it might encourage them to retreat into a deeper and deeper disconnect with the galaxy about them, as well.
But where’s the option? he asked himself. Whether we like it or not, somebody hacked our coms, and none of our techs have found any fingerprints pointing at who it might’ve been or how the hell they did it. And I don’t have to explain all the implications to the others. They know as well as I do that if someone can hack our coms, God only knows what else they can break into! And really, the only one who’d be physically moving would be Agatá. The rest of us’re already in George Bentoon! For that matter, most of the ministries have been here since the day it was built, so it’s not even like the rest of the League will realize we’re forting up in the first place!
No, they wouldn’t. George Benton Tower was indelibly associated in the public’s mind with the might and majesty of the League’s Federal Government. Moving the other ministries out of George Benton would have generated far more speculation than moving Treasury into it. But he and his colleagues would know, and so would their most senior and trusted subordinates. And from there, the awareness would seep downward with the inevitability of a winter freeze in Tarko-Sale, his hometown in ancient Siberia.
He looked around the shielded, guarded conference room and wondered how often his fellows reflected upon the name of the two-kilometer tall tower which housed the Solarian League’s heart and brain. Thought about the fact that it had been named for one of the dozen or so most famous human beings in history, the man most responsible, in many ways, for the League’s creation. The co-leader of the medical teams — the teams from Beowulf — which had preserved human life on Old Earth itself after the Final War. The man who’d seen the need for a coordinating authority that could span hundreds of light-years, recognized its necessity in the wake of the catastrophic damage he’d done so much to repair, and spent the last thirty-five T-years of his life bringing that authority into existence.
The man whose distant descendent headed the Beowulf System government which was about to stab the Solarian League in the heart. Of course, he must have lirterally billions of “distant descendents” after the next best thing to eight hundred years, and it was only logical for them to be concentrated in Beowulf and its closest galactic neighbors. Yet it was bitterly ironic that even as Chyang Benton-Ramirez prepared to oversee the referendum which would supply the dagger, yet another of those descendents commanded the “Grand Fleet” which might well drive it home.
It was, perhaps, fortunate so few Solarians were sufficiently aware of their own history to ask why that man’s descendents had chosen to destroy all he’d built.
edited to add last nine words that got chopped off somehow in the original post. Had to be a software glitch!
