In Fire Forged: Worlds of Honor V-ARC (24 page)

One thing she was positive of: if he’d only been younger, begun his career when she’d begun her own, he would never have ended up stalled as a mere lieutenant. The Royal Manticoran Navy’s worst flaw, in her opinion, had always been its susceptibility to cronyism thanks to the tradition of patronage. Junior officers with powerful patrons advanced rapidly, and when there were only so many slots to go around, that meant junior officers
without
powerful patrons got passed over for promotion in order to make room for the ones who did have them. The fact that the Star Kingdom of Manticore’s navy had always been decidedly on the small side, especially for a star nation with such a huge merchant marine, compounded the problem. And the introduction of first-generation prolong to the Star Kingdom seventy T-years ago had only made that situation still worse, given how long naval careers were now likely to last.

But things were changing these days. The naval buildup King Roger had begun in response to the threat of the People’s Republic of Haven’s imperialism continued to accelerate under Queen Elizabeth, which made far more slots available than ever before. And another welcome side effect of the Navy’s rapid growth was that the officers who opposed the patronage system—and, to be fair, there’d always been more than a few of those—were beginning to pry its fingers loose from the Service’s windpipe.

Not that they’ve managed to pull it off completely,
she reminded herself grimly, remembering certain influential enemies of her own.
But people like Admiral Courvoisier have made enough progress that if Al were just starting out today, there’s no way someone as good as he is would’ve gotten stuck as a lieutenant
.

There were times when she wondered (and worried about) what was going to become of O’Neal. His many years of experience, combined with his relatively low rank, made him an ideal fit as
Hawkwing
’s sailing master, but that position was being phased out by the Navy. It was taking longer aboard smaller starships—largely, Honor had concluded, because someone in the Admiralty recognized what a valuable learning resource veteran officers like O’Neal provided the inexperienced commanders of ships like destroyers. Yet it was happening even there, and it wouldn’t be so very much longer before there were no more sailing masters at all, so what was going to become of him once the transition was complete?
 

Of course, she was probably worrying too much—her mother had certainly twitted her for that often enough! Sixty-one wasn’t even middle age for a prolong recipient, even a first-generation one like O’Neal. A lot of people were still coming to grips with the way prolong permitted multiple careers, but with O’Neal’s skill set, he’d be invaluable to any merchant shipping line. And if he didn’t want to move over to merchant service, he’d have plenty of time to go back to school and learn an entirely new profession, if he chose to.

In the meantime,
she reminded herself once again,
why don’t you just go on concentrating on how lucky you and Taylor are to have Al around. I don’t know about Taylor, but I know
I’ve
learned an awful lot from him!

“You heard?” she said, and both of them nodded in confirmation.

“Al,” she continued to the sailing master, “I think this is going to be your job. I want you to pick yourself a set of watch-standers and an engineering crew ASAP.”

“Mahalia’s going to raise hell if I pick the ones I really want, Ma’am,” O’Neal pointed out with a moustache-shadowed smile.

“I’ll deal with Mahalia,” Honor told him with a lurking smile of her own, then jabbed an index finger under his nose. “But that’s not a hunting license for you to go down into Engineering and deliberately pick people you know are going to piss her off, understood?”

“Aye, aye, Ma’am!” O’Neal’s smile turned into the sort of grin any urchin might have envied, and Nimitz bleeked the equivalent of a chuckle from his place on Honor’s shoulder as the sailing master’s gray eyes laughed at her.

“I mean it, Al!” she said warningly, despite the telempathic treecat’s obvious amusement at whatever he was sensing from O’Neal. In fact, given Nimitz’s sense of humor, that amusement only made her even warier.

“I know you do, Ma’am. And I’ll be good—promise.”

Honor regarded him with a trace of lingering suspicion. Lieutenant Mahalia Rosenberg,
Hawkwing
’s engineering officer, was dark-haired, dark-eyed, and strong-nosed, with a thin, studious face. She was about Honor’s own age, and also, like Honor, from the planet Sphinx. In point of fact, she was from the city of Yawata Crossing, not that far from Honor’s birthplace in the Copper Wall Mountains, although she was one of the minority of the city’s citizens who weren’t even remotely related to the Harrington clan.

For the most part, Honor approved of Lieutenant Rosenberg. She was good at her job, industrious, intelligent, an excellent chess player, and usually good company. But there was something about Aloysius O’Neal that simply rubbed her the wrong way. Despite the sailing master’s easy-going personality, he and Rosenberg seemed constantly on the brink of some sort of spat. They were like oil and water—or possibly more like flint and steel, given the effortless way they struck sparks off one another.

She gave him one more moderately suspicious look, then transferred her attention to Nairobi.

“In addition to whoever Al thinks he’s going to need to run the ship, we’ll have to leave at least a couple of squads of Everett’s Marines aboard as a security element, Taylor. That’s going to make some holes in your watch lists.”

This time, the executive officer’s nod seemed a tad less cheerful. The Royal Manticoran Marine Corps was larger than similar services in a lot of star nations, but that was partly because its personnel were tasked not simply as the Navy’s ground combat component and boarding force but also as integral members of their ships’ crews. No one was going to mistake a Marine for a trained naval rating, but they served on weapons crews, in damage control parties, and in search and rescue duties aboard ship. Coupled with the naval personnel O’Neal was going to need, sending half of them to another ship was going to cost Nairobi over fifteen percent of his total warm bodies.

“Be thinking about which squads we can give up with the least repercussions for our shipboard organization,” she told him. “And I’m thinking we’re going to want either Everett or KK over there to help Al keep an eye on things. In fact,” her eyes twinkled suddenly, “if we can find a tactful way to do it, it might not be a bad idea to leave
both
of them over there. That way KK could keep an eye on Everett, too.”

“Yes, Ma’am,” Nairobi replied, and despite any problems he might foresee, there was a hint of the twinkle in his own eyes…and less unhappiness in his voice than she’d expected.

“While the two of you work on that, I’ll get Aniella”—Honor twitched her head in the direction of Lieutenant Aniella Matsakis,
Hawkwing
’s astrogator—“started laying out our course to Saginaw.”

Both Nairobi and O’Neal looked at her. The exec did a better job of hiding his reaction (probably because O’Neal didn’t seem to be trying especially hard to conceal
his
), but it was obvious neither had experienced any sudden thrill of delight when they heard her announcement. Which was fair enough; she wasn’t enthralled by it herself. Unfortunately, her orders left her little choice.

As far as Honor was concerned, the Silesian Confederacy was more of a continual, ongoing meltdown into anarchy than anything she would have dignified with the title of “star nation.” The local elites had an absolute stranglehold on political and economic power and they were even more corrupt than most of the closed oligarchies one found all too often in the Verge—that vast, sprawling hodgepodge of independent star systems and tiny star nations spreading out beyond the Solarian League. Technically, the Star Kingdom was part of the Verge itself, although the Manticoran Wormhole Junction gave it a direct connection to the very heart of the League, despite its physical location. But Manticore was also a prosperous, well-educated, and politically stable society where upward mobility was the rule, not the exception, which made it a very different proposition from a typical Verge star nation.
 

The Confederacy differed from most of those other star nations, too, if not in precisely the same ways. Or in anything
like
the same ways, when it came down to it. Silesia was far larger than Manticore, for example, with many times the systems and inhabited planets. It also had a large population, decent education (for the children of the oligarches, at least), a fairly modern (if decidedly second-tier) tech base, and semi-decent healthcare. Given all of those factors, the Confederacy should have been a going concern, but it wasn’t.

Like the even larger People’s Republic of Haven, although for very different reasons, Silesia’s self-inflicted wounds had turned what ought to have been a thriving, well-off star nation into a shambles. Many of its individual planets or star systems were at least reasonably stable (if not particularly prosperous, by Manticoran standards), and the Confederacy as a whole offered an enormously lucrative market to the Star Kingdom, given the fact that local industry was so hugely underdeveloped. But one of the main reasons for that lack of local development was the way the oligarches siphoned every possible dollar out of the Silesian economy through graft, bribery, peculation, and outright theft. They were deeply embedded predators, concentrating a stupendous percentage of the Confederacy’s total wealth in a relative handful of pockets, and that suited them just fine.
They
weren’t suffering, after all.

Even that would probably have been bearable, if they’d been willing to limit their depredations to the economy. Unfortunately, politics, personal power, and money were even more thoroughly intermixed—and far more bare-knuckled—in the Silesian Confederacy than they were most places. Political power was concentrated just as completely (and in the same hands) as economic power, and the kleptocracy which controlled both saw them only as tools its privileged members could use to improve their own positions vis-à-vis one another. Graft, corruption, and kickbacks would have been bad enough, but piracy was a thriving, long-standing tradition in Silesia…mainly because the First Families of Silesia had always been in bed with the aforesaid pirates. They were willing enough to prey on domestic shippers, but they were even happier to pillage the merchant ships of other star nations when they ventured into Silesian space.

And, just to make the mess complete, someone in Silesia was always prepared to do what abused, pauperized, exploited people were always sooner or later driven to do: rebel. Honor doubted there’d been a single year in the last T-century or so in which at least one “independence” movement hadn’t been waging armed rebellion against the Confederacy’s central government. They seldom accomplished much, but that didn’t keep a lot of people from getting killed in the process. And, as Honor had discovered on her own middy cruise, one reason so many people got killed was because the very oligarches they were rebelling against actually found ways to exploit the situation and make money off of it until the situation finally got bad enough the Confederacy Navy was called in to put down the rebels.

Which always seemed to be accomplished with the maximum possible firmness (and bloodshed). Officially, that was to deter future rebellions. If it just happened to wipe out most of the people who could have fingered certain extremely wealthy oligarches as their primary weapons providers, that was pure serendipity, no doubt.

In Honor’s opinion, the best thing the Star Kingdom could have done for the people of Silesia would be to ship in several million free pulsers—or, better yet, several
billion—
and the ammunition for them.

Unfortunately, the Foreign Office hadn’t been interested in Commander Harrington’s deep insights into the nature of Silesia’s internal dynamic before
Hawkwing
had departed on her current deployment. Which meant her orders were to support the Star Kingdom’s official foreign policy towards the Confederacy. And it had been made crystal clear to Commander Harrington that, as part of the Navy’s cheerful and willing support of the foreign policy of Her Majesty’s Government, she was to cooperate with the local authorities. In particular, she was to cooperate with the Honorable Leokadjá Charnowska, Governor of the Saginaw Sector, who was (according to the Foreign Office) a leading spokesperson for Silesian-Manticoran cooperation and happened to be closely related to the Confederacy’s current head of state. Charnowska, Commander Harrington had been informed in no uncertain terms, was a very important—and very large—fish who was making a significant difference in her sector. She was firmly committed to maintaining public order and supporting and protecting interstellar commerce and trade. As such, Commander Harrington was to do all in her power to support the sector governor’s reforms and to encourage and strengthen Charnowska’s pro-Manticore leanings.

Honor intended to do her best to comply with her orders, but she’d been to Silesia before. Because of that, she’d made a point of finding and interviewing as many merchant factors and skippers who’d had firsthand familiarity with Saginaw as she could, and their accounts had painted rather a different picture from the Foreign Office’s rosy assessment.
 

After two and a half T-months on station, everything she’d seen suggested they’d been right. However pro-Manticore Sector Governor Charnowska might be, the Saginaw Sector still seemed to have just as many pirates—and just as much local corruption—as any of the Confederacy’s
other
sectors. None of which filled her with optimism where Charnowska herself was concerned. In the Navy, a ship’s captain was both morally and legally responsible for the performance of her command. Honor was well aware that civilian—and especially political—hierarchies were seldom run on quite such a black-and-white basis. Even granting that, however, she suspected that any disinterested observer would conclude that at least some responsibility for the sector’s condition had to be laid at the feet of Manticore’s good friend, the Sector governor.