House of Steel: The Honorverse Companion (10 page)

“We
could
burn a lot of goodwill,” Roger acknowledged, “but only if the Opposition’s stupid enough to pick a fight over the treaty negotiations, and I don’t think even Summercross is that dumb. If he is, someone like North Hollow or High Ridge will sit on him in this instance, I think.”

Nageswar looked faintly dubious and glanced at Cromarty.

“I think His Majesty has a point, Rachel,” the Prime Minister said. “Mind you, I’d rather not push it so far we find out whether or not he does, but even the Conservatives would realize they’d have trouble convincing anyone else to agree with them.”

The foreign secretary looked at him for a moment longer, then sat back. She still didn’t seem convinced, but Roger agreed with Cromarty.

The Junction Treaty had been negotiated by Queen Elizabeth II’s government shortly after the initial discovery of the Junction and its first three known termini, associated with Beowulf, San Martin, and Hennesy. There were times Roger wished his great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandmother had been just a little more ruthless when that treaty was signed, but he supposed he really couldn’t complain about how well it had served the Star Kingdom’s interests for the last three hundred T-years.

The problem was that Manticore had ceded shared sovereignty over the termini to Beowulf, San Martin, and Hennesy. There’d been no legal requirement for Elizabeth to do that. While any star system was free to claim sovreignty over anything within a six light-hour radius of its primary, claims to anything more than twelve light-minutes from the primary were conditional. In order to establish sovereignty, the system’s claim was subject to challenge under international law unless it could demonstrate its ability to maintain “a real and persistent police power” over it. All known warp termini lay well outside the twelve-minute limit (some, like the Junction itself, lay outside the six-hour limit, but they were rare), which meant they belonged to whoever could maintain that “real and persistent” police power. Essentially, whoever had the military wherewithal to hold it got to keep it, and if that whoever happened not to be the local star system, that was simply too bad.

The Beowulf System, as a member of the Solarian League, would probably have been in a position to produce that wherewithal. Neither Trevor’s Star nor Hennesy, which had only recently been colonized at the time, would have, yet Elizabeth’s government had opted to grant all three star systems an identical share of the Junction revenues, the same discounted transit fees, and the same shared sovereignty over the terminus. Roger had always suspected that Manticore’s own experience with Axelrod had played a part in her decision, although there’d never been any formal mention of that in the negotiations. And given the smallness of the Royal Manticoran Navy at that time, it had undoubtedly made lots of sense not to go around heaping additional missions on it. Now, when the Star Kingdom’s economic power absolutely depended upon the Junction, and when Roger’s ability to prepare his kingdom against the Havenite threat absolutely depended upon that economic power, it didn’t. His mother had quietly amended the RMN’s strategic mission requirements to include providing for the Junction’s secondary termini even before general commerce protection as long ago as 1850, but no one had gone out of the way to underscore that to the rest of the galaxy at the time, given the state of the Star Kingdom’s wall of battle. For that matter, Roger had no desire to pick fights over the issue with anyone even now, yet times had changed (and not for the better) over the last seventeen years. Now he needed the authority—the recognized authority, domestically as well as abroad—to act unilaterally, in whatever fashion seemed necessary, to ensure the Junction’s security, and that included ensuring the security of those secondary termini of it, as well.

Beowulf and Hennesy had recognized that, and both of them had specifically recognized Manticore’s
undivided
sovereignty over their associated termini. Roger had sweetened the deal by increasing their percentage of transit fees and adding a secret clause which amounted to a mutual defense treaty, but in return he had the right to deploy Manticoran warships to protect either of those termini by force if he felt it was necessary. He doubted very much that it ever
was
going to be necessary in Beowulf’s case, but Hennesy was another matter. That system had already required Manticoran assistance once, in the Ingeborg incident which had cost the RMN the life of Admiral Ellen D’Orville in 1710 PD, after all. But whether either of them ever actually needed Manticoran assistance to defend their termini, the precedent was important to establish, since he fully intended to extend it to Basilisk and any of those other as-yet-undiscovered termini the math predicted. And as Nageswar had just pointed out, the Republic of Gregor wasn’t going to make much of a stink when he “requested” the same terms from it. It had far too many internal domestic problems to court a confrontation with a major trading partner. And the Matapan System, thank God, had neither habitable planets nor inhabitants, so there’d never been any question over who
that
terminus belonged to, lock, stock, and barrel.

Trevor’s Star was another matter, of course. Already half-surrounded by Havenite conquests or proxies, San Martin wasn’t about to risk pissing off the PRH, despite its traditional friendship with Manticore—or perhaps
because
of that friendship—by signing an agreement which would give the Star Kingdom the unilateral right to forward deploy battle squadrons to the Trevor’s Star Terminus whenever it felt like it. The San Martinos were working hard to build a navy which would hopefully be big enough to at least give the People’s Republic pause, but not even the contacts Baron Big Sky had managed to cultivate in the SMN were optimistic about their ability to do so. And there was no way in the universe San Martin was going to look like it was cozying up to Manticore when that was likely to convince the PRH to go ahead and nip the potential threat of its military in the bud.

“With all due respect, Dame Rachel,” Jacob Wundt said in his calm, quiet voice, “I agree with His Majesty in this instance, as well. I think Summercross, at least, would prefer for the Junction Treaty to remain unaltered. I really don’t think he’s going to complain too much about the Beowulf or Hennesy aspect of it, but he’s going to resent its precedent, especially when we press Gregor to concede the same status to the terminus there. He’s going to see it as the first step down that ‘slippery slope to imperialism’ he’s been whining about for as long as even
I
can remember!”

The Lord Chamberlain grimaced, and Nageswar’s lips twitched. Not that it was really all that humorous. The Conservative Association was opposed to anything that might draw the Star Kingdom into territorial expansion. Its members had nothing at all against Manticore’s burgeoning economic reach, the steady growth of its merchant marine, or its enormously active financial sector, but anything which might entangle the Star Kingdom in interstellar power rivalries was anathema to the Conservatives. Even worse from their perspective, Roger suspected, would be the possibility of actually adding additional voters to the Star Kingdom. The constitutional mechanisms which had been crafted to conserve political power in the House of Lords when the Star Kingdom was created were beginning to wear uncomfortably thin, in their opinion. The last thing they wanted was to open the door to “outsiders and foreigners who don’t understand how our system works” . . . and who might have the effrontery to side with the Commons against them. That was the real reason they’d never raised a stink about Manticoran sovereignty in Matapan; no people meant no voters to screw up their treasured status quo.

“But however
he
feels about Gregor—and even Basilisk—too many of his fellow Conservatives are making too much money out of their business relationships with Beowulf for him to risk alienating the Planetary Directors” Wundt continued, “and he can’t really make much of a stink about Hennesy, given how enthusiastically President O’Flaherty’s embraced the idea. No,” the Lord Chamberlain shook his head, “he’ll reserve any open opposition for Gregor and Basilisk, exactly the way he’s been doing.”

“Jacob’s put his finger on it, Rachel,” Roger said. “Which rather brings us back to my original point, I suppose.”

“And leaves us with the problem of Lebrun,” Cromarty pointed out sourly.

The Conservatives’ opposition to annexing Basilisk reflected their basic isolationism, but despite Summercross’ personal rabidness on that particular issue, it didn’t rally enormous amounts of resistance among their rank-and-file in Basilisk’s case. The
Liberals’
opposition, on the other hand, was ideology and emotion-driven, and Sir Orwell Lebrun’s followers were far more adamantly opposed to “imperialism” because that sort of “jingoistic aggression against weaker star nations” affronted their principles. That was especially true, unfortunately, in the case of the Medusans, who were somewhere in the equivalent of the early Bronze Age. That automatically made them “noble savages” and made it the Star Kingdom’s moral responsibility to ensure their independence and guarantee the security of their natural resources—like the Basilisk terminus—rather than using an iron fist to despoil the native sentients itself.

Never mind the fact that neither Roger nor anyone else on Manticore had the least interest in “despoiling” the Medusans. Never mind the fact that interstellar law granted Manticore prima facie sovereignty over the terminus as its discoverer . . . or that there was no way in the universe the Medusans could have utilized, managed,
or
protected that terminus.

“We could settle for simply claiming the
terminus
,” Nageswar suggested. “I know that would be less than ideal, but it would give us the authority we needed to develop it and—if necessary—defend it without interfering with the Medusans at all.”

“If
we
don’t claim sovereignty over the entire star system, then someone else is going to,” Roger said flatly. “That’s the whole reason we claimed the
Matapan
System as well as the Terminus. It’s not as if we really
needed
an M-4 without a single planet of its own, after all! But we couldn’t leave the system just hanging, either, and that’s what that idiot Lebrun is systematically ignoring. It’s all very well for him to proclaim that the Medusans must be left alone in undisputed possession of their planet and their star system, but even if
I
agreed with him, someone like Gustav Anderman or Hereditary President Harris wouldn’t lose a minute’s sleep over trampling all over a planet full of aborigines. Gustav would claim the system to use as leverage against us in Silesia and as a base to harass us—and anyone using the terminus—in order to get a bigger piece of the trade moving through the Triangle Route. And Harris would claim the system because he’s a Peep who’s damned well figured out we’re going to be the biggest long-term threat to his expansion, and because when—not
if
, as far as he’s concerned—he takes out Trevor’s Star, that would allow him to threaten us militarily through two of the Junction’s termini simultaneously.”

“I agree that’s probably how he’d think about it, Your Majesty,” Paderweski said, “but I hope you’ll forgive an ex-jarhead for pointing out that it would be a really, really stupid thing for them to try.”

“Of course it would, Elisa,” Roger agreed. “That doesn’t mean they
won’t
try it, though. Have any of you noted any particular signs of restraint on the Peeps’ part?”

He looked around, answered only by silence, and snorted.

“That’s what
I
think, too. And the problem is that whether an assault through the Junction worked or not, it would still be an act of war, and we’d still find ourselves fighting the Peoples Navy. At the moment, we’re not in a position to do that, and we can’t afford a situation in which Harris and his admirals screw us all over by starting a war neither side’s really ready for. Besides, there’s still that matter of future precedents to worry about. I want it established right now that if we do manage to locate, survey, and open any additional Junction warp bridges, both ends of them belong to
us
, no matter
what’s
at the other end.”

“All right, Your Majesty,” Cromarty said, “as long as you understand that this could get really ugly.”

“Oh, believe me, I understand that! But I’ve got an ace up my sleeve.”

Roger smiled thinly, and Cromarty experienced a distinct sinking sensation. He’d seen that smile before.

“An ace up your sleeve?” he repeated carefully.

“Oh, yes. She’s called Elizabeth.”

“Your Majesty?” Cromarty blinked at the total non sequitur, and Roger chuckled. But then the King’s expression turned hard.

“You tell Lebrun that if he wants a fight over this, he can have one,” he said coldly. “And you tell Summercross that if he really wants to piss off the House of Winton, he should have at it. We’re close to having the votes we need in the Lords with just your Centrists and Rachel’s Crown Loyalists, and Janice Macmillan and Sheridan Wallace are for sale to the highest bidder. We can outbid Summercross or Lebrun, and just this once, I’m willing to do it if I have to. And if we bring the Progressives—or even just the ‘New Men,’ probably—on board, we’ll have the votes.”

“Assuming they’d stay bought, Your Majesty,” Cromarty said with a grimace of distaste, and Roger nodded.

“Oh, I wouldn’t expect them to stay bought forever, Allen. But I wouldn’t need them to, either—I’d just need them long enough to sign off on my solution to the problem. And, frankly, this time around I’d be willing to buy whatever shiny new toy we had to give Macmillan or Wallace.”

“And just what solution did you have in mind, Your Majesty?” Nageswar asked, her tone even more cautious than Cromarty’s had been.

“I’m willing to throw Lebrun a bone if that’s what it takes,” Roger replied. “So I’m willing to specifically not claim sovereignty over the planet Medusa itself, to recognize the Medusans as the original inhabitants and rightful owners of the star system, precisely as the Ninth Amendment recognizes the treecats on Sphinx, and to set aside, say, five percent of all revenues generated by traffic through the Basilisk Terminus for the benefit of the Medusans. At the same time, however, we’re going to assert sovereignty over the star system as a whole, and directly—
officially
—annex the terminus itself.”