House of Steel: The Honorverse Companion (9 page)

I said I’d build my house of steel, Pablo,
he thought, remembering a long-ago day aboard HMS
Wolverine
in Manticore orbit,
and I damned well meant it
.

“All right,” he said again. “Here’s what’s going to happen. Allen, you and I are going to find the cash to increase our shipbuilding budgets by a minimum of twenty-five percent over the next fiscal year. When we present the Estimates to Parliament next year, that will be part of them. And if our good friend Baron Seawell doesn’t believe he can support that, then I will regretfully accept his immediate resignation and find a new Chancellor of the Exchequer. If the Conservative Association doesn’t like that, all they have to do is get behind my budget proposal. And if they want to find out just how prepared I am to get down and dirty over this, you invite them to make a fight over it, instead. They won’t like what happens if they do.”

Duke Cromarty didn’t look very surprised, but neither did he look particularly happy, and Roger smiled thinly before he turned his attention to Castle Rock, Pierce, and White Haven.

“I want our construction schedules revised, starting right now, in accordance with that increase in budget. I want medium and light platform construction cut back hard. We’ve had the better part of two decades of fat years where our commerce protection programs are concerned; now it’s time we build ourselves some wallers. I don’t know if we’ll be able to squeeze out the budget for superdreadnoughts, so I want you to plan a fallback budget—for at least the first couple of fiscal years—to build dreadnoughts, instead, but I don’t want to hear about battleships. They’re too small to be survivable, and I’m not sending our people out to die in fleet engagements because we couldn’t be bothered to build effective warships for them.”

He let his eyes sweep over them for several heartbeats, waiting for their nods, then continued.

“In addition to the new construction, we’re about to start investing heavily in our infrastructure. You’re not going to be able to use the full budget increase Allen and I are going to hammer out of Parliament just on superdreadnoughts and dreadnoughts, because we don’t have enough building slips. So we’re going to fix that, too. I can probably count on the Conservatives and the Progressives to support at least that much, if only because of all of the porkbarrel contracts they’ll think they’re going to steer to their cronies.” He smiled again, even more thinly than before. “They’re perfectly welcome to think that way, as long as the money gets appropriated. Of course, they may be just a little surprised by the degree of personal oversight I intend to exercise on where that money goes afterward. And the King’s Bench will be exercising it right along with me. So will the Judge Advocate General and the Inspector General from your side. And understand me about this: if the Opposition—or anyone else, including anyone in uniform—wants to drag his feet or try to feather his own nest out of this, he
will
be hammered. Nor am I above using the threat of indictments to . . . leverage the support we need in Parliament. I’ll cheerfully send any bastard who tries to embezzle or misappropriate to prison for a long, long time, but I’m less concerned about prison sentences than I am about
stopping
malfeasance and graft and driving this building program through. I want that clearly understood by every investigator and prosecutor assigned to look for criminal activity.”

He tapped the conference table top with his forefinger in slow, measured emphasis, and Monroe’s ears were flattened once more. Silence hovered for a moment, but no one in that conference room thought for a moment that he was done yet.

“The other thing that’s going to happen is that we’re going to take advantage of all the spadework Dame Carrie’s had Captain Adcock doing over at BuWeaps and the CDO. I know a lot of people are skeptical about the feasibility of our financing an independent R and D program on the scale Captain Adcock and I have been talking about.”

He looked directly at White Haven. The First Space Lord had been supportive of Lomax’s under-the-radar efforts, and he’d backed Project Python firmly enough, but he clearly continued to cherish some doubts. Not about the idea of improving existing systems—like his son, he had an acute appreciation of the need to do that—but about the idea that the Star Kingdom, however wealthy it might be on a
per capita
basis, could possibly somehow develop breakthrough war-fighting technologies which had evaded the Solarian League’s R&D efforts.

“I know that skepticism exists,” Roger continued, “but I think it’s misplaced for several reasons. First, our general tech base here in the Star Kingdom is every bit as good as the Solarian League’s. Our relationship with Beowulf gives us a close enough look at current-generation Solly tech for anyone to realize that’s the case, despite our physical separation from the rest of the League.

“Second, everyone seems to keep forgetting that the League has a strong vested interest in
preventing
significant changes in military technology. It has the biggest navy in existence, and a real technological game changer might make that navy obsolete overnight. When you add that to the corruption and inefficiency generated by all of
their
nepotism and crony capitalism, I strongly question the universal assumption that somehow the SLN’s technology has to be the end-all and be-all of military hardware. We damned well know our
merchant
ships are better than theirs; I intend for our
war
ships to be better, as well.

“And third, speaking of merchies, our merchant fleet is
everywhere
, My Lords, and it’s expanding every year. It’s Crown policy to
push
that expansion as hard as we can, for a lot of reasons, but one of them is its sheer reach. Our skippers and our crews and our shipping agents see
everything
eventually, and it’s time we started taking advantage of that. At least a third and more probably half of all our civilian ship masters are ex-Navy or hold current Reserve commissions. We’ve always had the advantage of feedback, of reports on things that catch the interest of some of those veterans and reservists; now we’re going to systematize that. We’re going to send out orders for them to keep their eyes open, we’re going to give them direction about things we’re particularly interested in, and we’re going to encourage them to look for anything they think we
ought
to be interested in. I know it’s going to generate a huge increase in paperwork for your people at ONI, My Lord,” he told Big Sky, “but I want the finest-meshed net we can produce. If anybody anywhere is doing
anything
where weaponized or potentially weaponizable technology is concerned, I want us to hear about it as soon as humanly possible. The Junction gives us more reach in that respect than anyone else in the galaxy. I want that reach
used
.”

Big Sky nodded soberly, and Roger shifted his attention back to Truman and Jerome Pearce. As Second Lord of Admiralty, Pierce was the Navy’s chief financial officer, and he looked mildly apprehensive, to say the least, as the King’s gaze swiveled in his direction.

“In addition to that, we’re going to take all of the work Captain Adcock and his people have done and put it to work,” Roger said, seeing no need to mention that
he’d
been one of Adcock’s people, since everyone sitting around that table already knew it. “We’re going to stand up a new, completely black command. We’re going to hide it on
Weyland,
we’re going to call it ‘Gram,’ and Captain Adcock will command it.”

White Haven’s eyes narrowed, and Roger nodded. HMSS
Weyland
was the smallest, least capable, and least conveniently located of the Star Kingdom’s three major infrastructure platforms. It also orbited the planet Gryphon, the rather less-than-hospitable habitable planet of Manticore-B, the G2 secondary component of the Manticore Binary System, however. That put it
very
conveniently out of sight of the enormous volume of traffic passing through the Junction, which was associated with Manticore-
A
, better than twelve light-hours away.

And just as
Weyland
was the best place to put it, Adcock was the best man to head it. He certainly had the technical credentials for it, and despite his sister’s marriage to Roger, he’d managed to stay well hidden in the background. He wasn’t exactly totally unknown, but his relatively junior rank and the fact that he hadn’t held a space-going command in close to thirty T-years meant he was almost completely off everyone else’s radar. He wouldn’t even have to drop out of sight, because he’d
been
“out of sight” ever since Lomax set up her own covert think tank.

And if there was one man in the entire galaxy in whom Roger Winton could repose complete and total confidence, that man was Jonas Adcock.

“It’s going to be off the books, My Lords,” he said, looking around the table, his expression grim. “
Nobody
is going to know about it, and we’ll do whatever we have to do to keep it that way. Hopefully, the name’s obscure enough to conceal what we’re doing if it should leak, but we
are
going to be forging a sword, and if Sigurd could kill Fafnir with the original, I intend for us to do the same thing to
our
dragon with its namesake.

“I suspect that eventually a lot of money’s going to flow into it, and I want you to begin socking away cash for it now, Lord Pierce. Every loose dollar you can find gets earmarked for Gram, and I intend to press Parliament for a substantial increase in discretionary covert spending to come up with even more funding. This is going to be completely separate from BuWeaps’ open R and D programs, but any funding we can skim off the open R and D and funnel into Gram, gets skimmed. Understand me on this—if I have to dispose of Crown Lands and fund this out of the Privy Purse, that’s what I’ll do. We’re looking at the short end of a disastrous war of attrition unless we come up with a qualitative equalizer. I don’t know what we’ll find, and for that matter I can’t guarantee we
will
find our own Gram, but I
can
guarantee that if we
don’t
find it, we lose. And, My Lords, the House of Winton does not lose when the security and the freedom of the Star Kingdom of Manticore and its citizens are at stake.”

The final sentence came out with slow, dreadful emphasis, and Monroe sat up on his true-feet, ears flat, baring his white, needle sharp fangs as King Roger III of Manticore looked around the Admiralty House conference room’s silence.

“Are there any questions?” he asked softly.

April 1867 PD

“
YOUR MAJESTY
,” the Duke of Cromarty’s tone was a bit more formal than it was in his private working sessions with King Roger, “the Liberals and the Conservatives will pitch three kinds of fit if you force the issue at this point. You know they will.”

“Then they’ll just have to get over it,” Roger said flatly. “This sh—” He paused, glancing at Dame Rachel Nageswar, the Foreign Secretary. “This
crap
,” he continued after a moment, “has dragged on too long already, Allen. I want it settled. We
need
it settled.”

“I don’t disagree, Your Majesty. I’m just saying that it’s going to be one hell of a fight, one we may not win in the end, and that there are going to be potential costs down the road. As your Prime Minister, it’s my responsibility to point all of that out before I go out and fight like hell to get it done, anyway.”

Cromarty smiled faintly, and Roger snorted and sat back in his chair, feeling Monroe’s familiar, comforting, warmth against the back of his neck. He reached up over his shoulder, opening his hand, and the treecat bumped his head affectionately against it. Then the King looked back at the two-footed people in the Mount Royal Palace conference room.

Cromarty sat across the table in his usual place. Jacob Wundt, Roger’s Lord Chamberlain and one of his closest advisers, as he’d been Queen Samantha’s, sat to the King’s left; Dame Rachel sat to Cromarty’s left; and Dame Elisa Paderweski, Roger’s tough as nails ex-Marine chief of staff, sat to the King’s right. It was a small group, all of its members drawn from Roger’s most trusted inner circle, and every single one of them was looking back at him.

And I don’t blame them,
he thought grumpily.
If I had the choice,
I’d
be looking at someone else, too!

The problem ought to have been an absurdly simple no-brainer, but could the Liberals and the Conservatives see it that way? No, of course they couldn’t!

The math on the Manticoran Wormhole Junction had always insisted it had additional termini which had not yet been discovered. The fact that it was already the biggest junction in known space actually made finding those additional termini more difficult, not less, however, because the ones already discovered masked their undiscovered fellows’ much fainter signatures. Some hyper-physicists had even claimed the math was wrong—that the real reason none of those hypothetical additional termini had never been found was because they simply didn’t exist. Other hyper-physicists pointed out that over seventy T-years had elapsed between the rapid-fire discovery of the Junction’s first three termini in Beowulf, Trevor’s Star, and Hennesy and the discovery of the Gregor Terminus in 1662 . . . and that the Matapan Terminus hadn’t been discovered until 1796, a hundred and thirty T-years after that! Those hyper-physicists had been confident in the existing math and, shortly after Roger had assumed the throne, their confidence had been justified by the discovery of a sixth terminus, associated with the G5 star Basilisk, two hundred and ten light-years from the Manticore Binary System.

At the moment, there wasn’t much human settlement out that direction, but warp bridges had a tendency to change things like that, and Basilisk’s position offered some very interesting possibilities where trade with Silesia and the Andermani was concerned. In fact, those possibilities were already in a fair way to being realized as what the economists had dubbed “the Triangle Route” gathered speed. Ships could now depart Manticore to the Gregor System, move normally through hyper-space from Gregor throughout the Silesian Confederacy or the Andermani Empire, then swing “north” to Basilisk and return directly to Manticore. The savings in time—and thus overhead—loomed large, the reduction in turnaround time meant a ship could make more voyages in a given time window, and the extra reach was opening still more markets.

But there was a kicker in Basilisk’s case. The Basilisk System had an inhabitable planet . . . and that planet, Medusa, was already inhabited. Worse, it was inhabited by an alien species, not colonized by humans, and the aliens in question were decidedly pre-space. That minor fact had created a furor in the ranks of the Manticoran Liberal Party, and it had also spawned a bizarre alliance between the Liberals, the Conservative Association, the Progressive Party, and Sir Sheridan Wallace’s so-called “New Men.” In the Liberals’ case, he was at least tentatively willing to admit that something remotely like principle played a part. The Conservatives and the Progressives, however, wouldn’t have recognized a genuine principle if it jumped out of the underbrush and bit them . . . and the “New Men’s” principle quotient was somewhere south of there.

Well
south.

“I appreciate that it’s going to be a problem,” he said now, meeting Cromarty’s eyes across the table. “I also think we’ve only made it worse by pussyfooting around it up till now, though. And I think it may be time to remind the Star Kingdom in general about some ancient history and Axelrod. You know damned well that things haven’t changed
that
much where human greed is concerned over the last three hundred T-years!”

Cromarty smiled in unhappy agreement. The Axelrod Corporation had been one of the very first Solarian transtellers to recognize the true significance of warp bridges after their discovery in 1447 PD, and its Astro Survey Division had gone back and systematically recrunched the numbers on every surveyed star, looking for the gravitic markers no one had previously known to watch for. Axelrod’s management had been willing to spend the manhours because it had believed those markers might well be buried in the old data if it was reexamined, and that belief had proved well founded. The various termini the search had uncovered within the territory of the Solarian League had, of course, been recognized as the League’s property and duly reported to Old Terra for lucrative finder’s fees, but those outside the League had enjoyed rather a different status in Axelrod’s opinion—especially in cases where the recrunched data suggested the possibility of true junctions, with multiple termini.

Cases like, oh, the Manticore Binary System, for example.

Axelrod’s boldfaced attempt to use its mercenary-manned fleet to seize the Manticoran Wormhole Junction by naked force before the then-Star Kingdom even realized it might exist could well have changed galactic history, and—given the typical Solarian transstellar’s modus operandi—not for the better. Only courage, an officer named Carlton Locatelli, and a lot of luck had prevented the attempt from succeeding, although very few Manticorans seemed to think about that very much today. Not too surprisingly, perhaps. Looking around at the prosperity and the commercial and economic power the Junction had bestowed upon them, it was difficult to remember the sleepy, peaceful, isolated star nation Manticore had once been.

And life would probably be simpler if we still
were
sleepy, peaceful, and isolated,
the Prime Minister reflected.
Unfortunately, we’re not. Roger’s right about
that
.
And he’s also right that what almost happened to us then can still happen to us
now
if the people opposed to his buildup don’t realize our neighborhood isn’t sleepy, peaceful,
or
isolated any longer
.

“Your Majesty,” Nageswar said after a moment, “like Allen, I support your policy. But I’m not sure this is the best time to push.”

She met Roger’s gaze unflinchingly, with the confidence of the lifelong, career diplomat she’d been before rising to her present post in the latest Cabinet reorganization. One of the things he most valued about her, almost more than her indisputable expertise as the Star Kingdom’s chief diplomat, was her willingness to disagree with him when she thought he was wrong, and he sat back with a courteous nod for her to continue.

Nageswar was a Crown Loyalist, part of Roger’s ongoing—and frustratingly gradual—remaking of his Cabinet. Cromarty’s Centrists, unfortunately, still couldn’t command a majority in the House of Lords, even with Crown Loyalist support. That meant sharing out cabinet posts among the major political parties . . . and that Cromarty’s premiership hung in perpetual jeopardy, at least in theory. Officially, with both Conservatives and Liberals in the Cabinet, there
was
no Opposition in Manticore at the present time; in fact, the restiveness of the other parties meant that political analysts routinely spoke of the Conservatives and Liberals as being in opposition even while they sat in a “coalition” Cabinet.

Unfortunately for them, the monarch was head of government in the Star Kingdom, not simply head of state. In theory, Roger didn’t need the Cabinet at all, although God only knew what sort of political crisis he could provoke by deciding to rule by decree! But while he couldn’t compel the House of Lords to support a prime minister not of its choosing, neither could the House of Lords compel him to accept a prime minister not of
his
choosing. That sort of standoff would lead to effective paralysis of government in the Star Kingdom, of course, but the Opposition had realized early on that Roger, unlike his mother, was perfectly prepared to accept that paralysis in the short term if he had to. There was a steeliness behind those calm brown eyes of his that was already reminding some historians of Queen Adrienne, and he had the traditional weapon of the House of Winton—the powerful support of his subjects—tucked away in his hip pocket.

That connection of the Winton Dynasty with the Star Kingdom’s commoners had been renewed with his marriage to Queen Consort Angelique, who’d won Manticore’s collective heart by her beauty and obvious love for their King . . . and it had been underscored afresh by the birth of Crown Princess Elizabeth Adrienne Samantha Annette Winton, exactly one T-year ago next month. If the Opposition pushed him to it, if its leaders provoked a government shutdown, there wasn’t much question what would happen in the House of Commons in the next general election. It might take a year or two, but the outcome would be the decimation of the Opposition parties’ representation in the lower house. And while that might not much concern the Conservative Association, which was overwhelmingly a party of the aristocracy, it definitely loomed large in the thinking of Sir Orwell Lebrun’s Liberals and Janice MacMillan’s Progressives.

Roger didn’t much like to contemplate that sort of constitutional crisis, either, although part of him was tempted to go ahead and embrace it, even
provoke
it. At the moment, the People’s Republic of Haven was still the better part of two hundred light years away from the Manticore Binary System. There were moments—and this was one of them—when it seemed to him that taking on the Opposition and breaking it once and for all
now
, however bloody the political infighting, would be preferable to finding himself hamstrung at some more critical moment farther down the road, with the Peeps close at hand and the situation too critical for facing down domestic opposition. But that was the nasty, bloody-minded side of him talking, he told himself. Far better to continue gradually nibbling away at the Opposition parties’ power without risking a constitutional fight he might not, after all, win.

Not that he intended to back away from that fight if it came, he reminded himself grimly.

“We’re just about to wrap up our current negotiations with Beowulf, and everybody in Parliament knows it,” Nageswar reminded him now. “If we add this to the mix, it might throw a spanner into those talks, as well. Or at least into the Lords’ willingness to ratify whatever treaty modification we emerge with.”

“That’s a valid point, Rachel,” Roger acknowledged. Obviously she’d been thinking the same thing he had.

“At the moment, Beowulf’s going to agree to everything we’ve requested,” she continued, “and Hennesy actually welcomes the changes. Gregor’s going to be less enthusiastic, but it’s also not going to have much choice when we get around to the Republic. But it would be a public relations debacle if after getting
Beowulf
to agree, the Lords rejected the treaty, and you know the Conservatives are opposed to it anyway, whatever Summercross may have to say.”

Matthäus Routhier, the Earl of Summercross, was the current leader of the Conservative Association, and a more xenophobic isolationist would have been difficult to imagine. The only good thing about his paranoia, from Roger’s perspective, was that he was at least marginally willing to support a Navy powerful enough to protect his isolationism.

“The Beowulf Planetary Board of Directors is going out of its way to meet our requests,” Nageswar pointed out. “In some respects, they’re courting the risk of a significant backlash from their own voters, and the League government’s not going to be delighted when it hears about it, either. I don’t think the Directors need—or deserve—to be kicked in the teeth because someone decides to mount a domestic resistance to the treaty modifications from
our
side. We could burn a lot of goodwill that way.”

Roger nodded again. Once upon a time, the Beowulf System had enjoyed excellent relations with both the Star Kingdom and the Republic of Haven. The three of them had always been the strongest supporters of the Cherwell Convention to suppress the interstellar genetic slave trade, among other things, and Beowulfers worshiped at the shrine of meritocracy. The original Republic’s emphasis on individual freedoms and opportunities had been a good fit with that Beowulfan attitude, but the PRH was something else entirely. The Technical Conservation Act had been a direct slap in the face, as far as Beowulf was concerned, and Manticore—with whom relations had been even closer, given the Junction’s direct connection to the Beowulf System—had profited by the cooling of the Beowulf-Haven relationship over the last T-century. That was a major part of Beowulf’s willingness to revisit the Junction Treaty of 1590, but there were limits in everything. However willing the Board of Directors might be to work with Manticore, Beowulfers in general were just as capable as anyone of getting pissed off at a star nation which had insulted
their
star nation.