Honor Harrington 06.2
(1998)
AUTHOR'S NOTE: readers may be amused to learn that both the climax of this story and the archeological methods described therein are closely modeled on real events which took place in the Eastern Mediterranean in 1795.
The Committee of Public Safety of the People's Republic of Haven rarely met in full session. There were security reasons, for one thing; for another, since the purge of the Parnassian faction, the rivalries had gotten too savage. Two dozen men and women sat stiffly along the long table the new regime had inherited from the old Legislaturalist government. The room had a restrained elegance of dark wood and creamy panelling that spoke of that older era, as well. Say what you liked about the Hereditary Presidency and its elitist flunkies, they'd had good taste. Much good it had done them when the jaws of his trap closed on them.
Well, at least we're not shooting at each other, Chairman Robert Stanton Pierre thought wearily. Yet. There were times when he wondered who was worse, the profiteers who swarmed over the State like flies, or Cordelia Ransom and her grim incorruptibles.
Out at Trevor's Star the navies of the People's Republic and the Star Kingdom of Manticore were shooting at each other. Men and women were dying by the thousands to buy the Committee more time. By God, he was sick of these cretins wasting it!
"Citizens," the Chairman of the Committee of Public Safety said coldly.
That brought silence. He gave a wintry nod. Those rivalries were not helping the war effort of the People's Republic, but they were making it less likely that enough of the other Committee members would combine against him ... and he knew with a leaden certainty that none of his possible replacements would do as well. His eyes slid of their own volition to the head of State Security. Saint-Just's face was calm as always, his appearance so utterly unremarkable that the only thing noticeable about it was its own extreme inconspicuousness. Oscar could do it. But State Security had inspired too much hatred along with the fear, not least among the People's Navy. Nobody would accept the head executioner of the purges as head of state. More, the first move of any new head of the Committee would be to purge Security, which meant that Security had no choice but to keep supporting him.
And Oscar knows better. We've been in this together too long. The paranoia was getting to him. Oscar Saint-Just was as reliable a friend as he had on the Committee.
I hope, he thought. When you're riding the tiger, you can't dismount. He had no choice but to bring himself and Haven through and out the other side of the crisis. Cordelia Ransom smiled back at him and nodded. And I need her too. Ransom was the one who'd built up the Committee's propaganda machine, who'd lashed the Dolists out of their apathy. She'd overseen the public carnival of blood as they fed the Legislaturalists and their families to the People's Courts, and then convinced the masses that the Star Kingdom of Manticore was their deadly enemy.
It was blind, it was stupid—it was beyond stupidity, it was self-contradictory—and it tied his hands completely. His power was unassailable, but only as long as he took the great billion-headed beast in the direction it wanted to go. And she has helped me mobilize the Dolists. The vast parasitic horde that had dragged the old regime down with their incessant demands for more and more of the BLS—Basic Living Supplement—were thronging into the People's Navy and Marines, into the shipyards and war-factories. Giving up their bread and circuses. Begging, demanding to work, willing to really learn, which was something the People's Republic hadn't been able to get them to do in what passed for an educational system in generations. The sheer power of it was exhilarating and terrifying all at once; it was the only force he could imagine destroying the huge mass of social inertia that had been dragging down his nation all his life. If only they could win the war ...
Then they could relax, then he could do something positive with the power he'd bought at the cost of so much of his self and the capacity to sleep without hauntings. Yet if he hesitated for an instant, it would all come down on him. Ransom's True Believers were waiting, and behind them factions whose fanaticism was so grotesque it chilled even the golden-haired Cordelia. LaBoeuf and his Conspiracy of Equals, for instance, the Levelers.
We've woken the Beast, he thought. Well enough, as long as we can ride it. But what if it begins to think as well?
"We're here," he went on bluntly, "to consider a major change in our overall policy. As you know, we've reinvigorated our armed forces with a policy of meritocratic egalitarianism."
Meaning we killed everyone we thought wasn't reliable and everyone who showed any sign of incompetence.
"But we've reached a point of diminishing returns with the ... austere policy instituted immediately after the Coup."
Meaning we've got a young, energetic, competent, utterly terrified officer corps. And the latter is beginning to outweigh the benefits of the former.
The departed Legislaturalist scions who'd run the Navy before hadn't been any loss. It was time for the Committee and its political officers to remember that the new breed owed everything to the new regime. For that matter, the professionals and conscripts who'd provided the rank-and-file of the old regime's navy were being diluted by the tidal wave of revolutionary volunteers pouring out of accelerated training courses.
"We have to alter—" he began, then looked up in astonishment as a door burst open.
"Sir!" the Committee Security Force officer said. "Sir, we've got an emergency."
Citizen Admiral Esther McQueen didn't particularly like the Committee of Public Safety. Not that it hadn't done her a good turn or two; it had swept the Legislaturalists out of her way, and without a patron she'd never have risen far in the Navy of the People's Republic under the ancien regime. Killing all the Legislaturalist ruling families, and shooting everyone else who didn't give a convincing imitation of loyalty, and anyone who lost a battle to the Manties, had created very rapid promotion for the survivors.
The problem was that most of the Committee, as far as she could see, were pig-ignorant about naval affairs, which was bad enough, and absolutely unwilling to admit that they were ignorant, even to themselves. That was potentially deadly. Not to mention their habit of shooting anyone who lost, anyone related to anyone who lost, anyone who was a friend of anyone who lost, and all their relatives as well. That sort of thing could get alarming, and it certainly didn't encourage a bold, daring command style. The Committee evidently thought you could win victories without taking any risks.
She looked across the waiting room at her Citizen Commissioner—translated, political watchbeast—Erasmus Fontein. He was waiting patiently himself, looking out the hundred-and-fifth floor window over the towerscape of the People's Republic of Haven's capital city. Nouveau Paris had a certain tattered beauty still, even after generations of decay under the Legislaturalists' grotesque economic policies and the strain of the long war with Manticore. From this height all you could see was the grandeur of her towers. Not the empty windows and broken lights, not the curdled rage and suspicion, the terror of the mass arrests and the cold fear of midnight disappearances. Or the worse nightmare of the People's Courts and mob vengeance that outdid even the old gangs. Worst of all were the ones who came back from "Re-Socialization Centers." Very quiet people who talked seldom and worked like machines. Usually they had no teeth.
Well, I'm fairly sure they aren't going to shoot me, at least. They'd gotten her out of that debacle at the front ahead of time, at least. Although you never knew ... and that left the question of why they'd parked her here in this out-of-the-way tower full of bureaucrats. It made her invisible; if there was one thing that Haven was well-equipped with, it was towers full of data-shufflers. Our sensor equipment isn't all that great, the Manties have better inertial compensators, but when it comes to producing bureaucrats, we're cutting edge. Bah, humbug, bullshit.
Fontein had been dropping cryptic hints and half-statements about an "important interview," possibly with the Chairman himself. It was about time to cut to the chase. She opened her mouth to speak. A quiver in the fabric of the huge building beneath her halted the words.
Fontein looked around; he was a mild-faced man, and most of the time he looked like a complete fool, albeit one whose position made him dangerous. Right now his face was liquid with shock, and the intelligence in his eyes startled her.
"What is it?" she said. "Earthquake?"
Another quiver shook the tower, stronger this time. McQueen pushed past the Commissioner and looked out herself. The bright actinic flash made her whip her head aside in reflex and throw up a hand, then blink back tears of pain as afterimages chased themselves across her retinas. Nobody needed to tell a veteran of space combat what that blink of light in the night sky had been. Nuke, she thought. Fairly big one. A warhead burst, not the type that pumped X-ray lasers for ship-to-ship combat.
The thought came from some insanely logical, dispassionate part of her mind. The rest of it was gibbering. Haven itself couldn't be under attack—
"The Manties," she said. "They could have decided to go for broke ... throw everything through at us ..."
Their eyes met in mutual appalled horror. The staff studies of the People's Navy said the risk was far too high for any sane commander to take. But White Haven, the Royal Manticoran Navy commander, had been taking a lot of chances lately.
Their shoulders bumped against each other as they dove for the waiting room's communications terminal. McQueen ruthlessly shouldered the older Havenite aside as her fingers danced on the keys. She ignored the public news channels; they wouldn't know anything, and they wouldn't be allowed to say it if they did know. There was a surreal quality to watching bits and pieces of news about aquaculture, the glories of the New Republic, and happy Dolists taking accelerated learning courses—at least that was more or less true, they were finally getting substantial numbers of the idle Prole bastards to volunteer to do something useful, namely enlist for the war effort. More light blinked in through the window, and static cut through the reports. EMP is getting to the relays. Quite a lot of it, if it was getting past the digital noise filters. She cut through to the Naval emergency channels.
"Uh-oh," she said quietly.
"Uh-oh?" the Commissioner repeated.
"Logic bomb," McQueen said. "Look." She extended the screen and pivoted it. "Hash. Rerouting, cross-connections, garbled text, crossed order-response loops, spontaneous memory core dumps ... Nothing working the way it should."
"Impossi—" Fontein began.
They looked at each other again. Every military service in the human-settled galaxy depended on information systems; every service had unbreakable protection against logic bombs from the outside. Every ship had an emergency response, too; cut all connections to the net to guard against infiltration if the system was compromised.
Which meant someone had done it from the inside, and that they'd effectively cut the Home Fleet into so many isolated units for as long as it took to bring the system back up. Hours, at least, and a good deal could happen in a couple of hours. Any commander would hesitate to act without orders or hard data. Particularly in the People's Navy, where exercising independent initiative without orders tended to get you stood up against the nearest convenient wall.
"Citizen Commissioner," McQueen said slowly. "I think you'd better try the Security Service net. And find out what the hell is happening."
"This is the best I can do, Citizen Admiral," Erasmus Fontein said, fifteen minutes later.
He was acutely conscious of the sweat running down under the collar of his uniform. In a man so precisely controlled, one who'd spent decades perfecting the art of emitting no signal of voice or body except those intended, it was humiliating.
"My clearance is being recognized," he said at last. "But that's triggering some subroutine that shunts my calls—some sort of viral AI parasite living in whatever open memory it can find. Whoever did this is damned clever, it's like having hostile ghosts loose in the machine."
"Can you get anything?"
"I've got a one-way bleed on the Security net. The contacts last about six to twelve seconds, and then the AI kicks me out. Take a look."
McQueen did. The first was a helmet pickup, showing ground level. The Admiral blinked; she'd never seen that many people all at once. Dolists, from their shabby-colorful clothes. They carried signs—Purge the Traitors and Victory to the People, liberally sprinkled with Equality Forever, Equality Now—but what bothered her was the sound they were making. It was nothing like a chant; more like a storm she'd seen once, on another planet. One where long slow waves crashed into a cliff in endless gray ranks, and made the solid rock vibrate beneath her feet. The sound of the crowd was like that, but it was alive. And it hated. The Committee had set out to prod the Dolists out of their apathy into revolutionary fervor, and it had succeeded. Succeeded all too well.
"Fire," she said. "Come on, whoever's in charge, give the order to—"
The helmet camera did a quick glance right and left. A long line of Public Order Police stood there, two deep, armed with riot shields and clubs; a slab-sided vehicle floated behind them, its dorsal turret loaded with soundbombs and stickgel.
"Citizen Admiral, the police can't use deadly force without political authorization. And right now, that detachment can't get authoriz—"
The crowd surged forward, throwing a surf-wave of bottles and rocks before it. McQueen had stood on her bridge without undue difficulty in engagements where tens of thousands died ... and a flagship was not invulnerable to weapons that could turn it into a ball of expanding plasma. The thousands of snarling faces racing towards the pickup still made her draw back in the seat, the way the sudden appearance of a lion might. It spoke to instincts far older than spaceflight—older than fire or chipped flint.
Just before the screen blanked the pickup slammed forward to the ground. She could see boots going by, and the helmet juddered as the crowd stampeded across it. And across, she realized, the body wearing the equipment.
The screen blanked and then jumped. Another helmet pickup, but this time the scene was a little more familiar; a tac display table, but the groundside model. It carried a holo-schematic of the city, but the information markers were mostly amber blinking lights, signifying "no data."
"Citizen Lieutenant," a voice said testily—the voice of the person wearing the helmet.
"Citizen Captain!"
The lieutenant was wearing chameleon fatigues and the torso portion of a set of infantry armor. The branch-of-service flashes on her collar were red-on-black, and only State Security used that waffenfarbe.
Intervention Battalion, McQueen thought. State Security goon squads, but heavily armed.
"Citizen Lieutenant, something is going on, but we're getting no intelligence at all. Take a floater, get out there, and eyeball the situation. Then report directly to me. Understood?"
"Yes, Citizen Captain!"
The lieutenant put on her helmet, face vanishing behind the facemask, and trotted towards a vehicle park on the outer rim of the tower-top. Then a voice screamed: "Incoming! Incoming!"
McQueen saw figures around the tac display table begin to dive for cover, and the pickup went black with a finality that was different from the system switch she'd seen before. A few seconds later, like an echo, a distant drawn-out booooommm came through the window.
"That's enough," she said crisply to the Commissioner. "We're not going to do anything useful here. T...
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