To end in fire, p.1
To End in Fire, page 1
part #4 of Crown of Slaves Series
Contents
February 1923 Post Diaspora
March 1923 Post Diaspora
April 1923 Post Diaspora
May 1923 Post Diaspora
June 1923 Post Diaspora
July 1923 Post Diaspora
August 1923 Post Diaspora
September 1923 Post Diaspora
October 1923 Post Diaspora
November 1923 Post Diaspora
December 1923 Post Diaspora
January 1924 Post Diaspora
February 1924 Post Diaspora
March 1924 Post Diaspora
April 1924 Post Diaspora
May 1924 Post Diaspora
June 1924 Post Diaspora
July 1924 Post Diaspora
TO END IN FIRE
DAVID WEBER
& ERIC FLINT
To End in Fire
David Weber
THE CROWN OF SLAVES SAGA CONTINUES. ADVENTURE AND INTRIGUE IN HONOR HARRINGTON’S STAR KINGDOM FROM NEW YORK TIMES BEST-SELLING AUTHORS DAVID WEBER AND ERIC FLINT.
The Solarian League lies in defeat, crushed by the Grand Alliance of Manticore, Haven, and Grayson.
Obedient to the Alliance's surrender demands, the League is writing a new Constitution, to prevent the reemergence of out-of-control bureaucrats, like the "Mandarins" who led it to disaster. Frontier Security has been disbanded, the outer worlds have regained control of their own economic destinies, and multiple star systems will soon secede from the League entirely.
Yet the League is—and will remain—the largest, most economically powerful human star nation in existence, and despite the overwhelming evidence that their unelected political leaders were the driving force behind the war, many League citizens deeply resent the fashion in which their star nation—the Solarian League—has been humbled. And those who most resent the Grand Alliance continue to blame Manticore for the nuclear bombardment of the planet Mesa after its surrender. They refuse to accept that the League—and the members of the Grand Alliance—could have been manipulated by a deeply hidden interstellar conspiracy called the Mesan Alignment. The Alignment is only an invention of the Grand Alliance, no more than a mask, a cover, for its own horrific Eridani Violations.
Those Solarians will never accept the "war guilt" of the League, because they know the Grand Alliance was just as bad. Because they deeply resent the way in which the Grand Alliance pretends to be the innocent "good guys." And in the fullness of time, those Solarians will seek vengeance upon their enemies.
Not all Solarians feel that way, but even some of those who accept that there was an interstellar conspiracy cherish doubts about its origins. But it is still out there, and now defeated Solarians and agents of the victorious Alliance must join forces to find it. Even if they don't believe in it, it believes in them.
They must find it and identify it, to prove to revanchist Solarians that there was a conspiracy.
And they must find it and destroy it to end its evil once and for all.
The Crown of Slaves Honorverse Series:
Crown of Slaves
Torch of Freedom
Cauldron of Ghosts
BAEN BOOKS by DAVID WEBER
HONOR HARRINGTON
On Basilisk Station • The Honor of the Queen • The Short Victorious War • Field of Dishonor • Flag in Exile • Honor Among Enemies • In Enemy Hands • Echoes of Honor • Ashes of Victory • War of Honor • Crown of Slaves (with Eric Flint) • The Shadow of Saganami • At All Costs • Storm from the Shadows • Torch of Freedom (with Eric Flint) • Mission of Honor • A Rising Thunder • Shadow of Freedom • Cauldron of Ghosts (with Eric Flint) • Shadow of Victory • Uncompromising Honor
EDITED BY DAVID WEBER
More than Honor • Worlds of Honor • Changer of Worlds • The Service of the Sword • In Fire Forged • Beginnings
MANTICORE ASCENDANT
A Call to Duty (with Timothy Zahn) • A Call to Arms (with Timothy Zahn & Tom Pope) • A Call to Vengeance (with Timothy Zahn & Tom Pope) • A Call to Insurrection (with Timothy Zahn & Tom Pope) *forthcoming
THE STAR KINGDOM
A Beautiful Friendship • Fire Season (with Jane Lindskold) • Treecat Wars (with Jane Lindskold)
House of Steel: The Honorverse Companion (with BuNine)
BAEN BOOKS by ERIC FLINT
THE RING OF FIRE SERIES
1632 • 1633 (with David Weber) • 1634: The Baltic War (with David Weber) • 1634: The Galileo Affair (with Andrew Dennis) • 1634: The Bavarian Crisis (with Virginia DeMarce) • 1635: The Ram Rebellion (with Virginia DeMarce et al.) • 1635: The Cannon Law (with Andrew Dennis) • 1635: The Dreeson Incident (with Virginia DeMarce) • 1635: The Eastern Front • 1636: The Papal Stakes (with Charles E. Gannon) • 1636: The Saxon Uprising • 1636: The Kremlin Games (with Gorg Huff & Paula Goodlett) • 1636: The Devil’s Opera (with David Carrico) • 1636: Commander Cantrell in the West Indies (with Charles E. Gannon) • 1636: The Viennese Waltz (with Gorg Huff & Paula Goodlett) • 1636: The Cardinal Virtues (with Walter Hunt) • 1635: A Parcel of Rogues (with Andrew Dennis) • 1636: The Ottoman Onslaught • 1636: Mission to the Mughals (with Griffin Barber) • 1636: The Vatican Sanction (with Charles E. Gannon) • 1637: The Volga Rules (with Gorg Huff & Paula Goodlett) • 1637: The Polish Maelstrom • 1636: The China Venture (with Iver P. Cooper) • 1636: The Atlantic Encounter (with Walter H. Hunt) • 1637: No Peace Beyond the Line (with Charles E. Gannon) • 1637: The Peacock Throne (with Griffin Barber) • 1637: The Coast of Chaos (forthcoming)
EDITED BY ERIC FLINT:
Grantville Gazette I–IX • Ring of Fire I–IV
To End in Fire
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.
Copyright © 2021 by Words of Weber, Inc. & Eric Flint
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.
A Baen Books Original
Baen Publishing Enterprises
P.O. Box 1403
Riverdale, NY 10471
www.baen.com
ISBN: 978-1-9821-2564-6
eISBN: 978-1-62579-841-1
Cover art by David Mattingly
First printing, October 2021
Distributed by Simon & Schuster
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Electronic version by Baen Books
www.baen.com
For my son, Michael Rice-Weber, USMC.
Your mom and I could not be prouder of you.
—DW
To Rick, Karen and Kevin.
—EF
February 1923 Post Diaspora
“You know, I believe that’s the first time I ever heard the words ‘Ballroom’ and ‘watchdogs’ used together.”
—Anton Zilwicki
City of Mendel
Mesa System
Catherine Montaigne was appalled.
Her personal shuttle had been designed as the luxury tender of a luxury yacht owned by one the galaxy’s more…idiosyncratic billionaires. The term “no expense spared” was most often used to indicate only that something was very expensive. In the Harriet Tubman’s case, however, it was literally true, and her shuttle was an almost equally expensive vessel. Indeed, ton-for-ton, it was actually more expensive. It was much larger than most “shuttles”—a bit larger than a naval pinnace, actually—and boasted quite a lot of features lesser vessels did not. Unlike a standard shuttle’s rows of seats, its passengers sat in luxury armchairs scattered around a tastefully decorated “salon” with smart wall bulkheads. At the moment, those bulkheads were configured to display a panorama of snowy mountains and a magnificent waterfall. The viewscreen at the forward end of the compartment and the “portholes” spaced along that panorama displayed a much uglier view, however.
For all that she’d led a rather adventurous life, Montaigne had seldom seen destruction on this scale. Well, she had toured the ruins of Yawata Crossing after the Yawata Strike had virtually destroyed the entire city. That had been worse, but it had also been…different. The tsunami which destroyed that city might have been spawned by de-orbiting wreckage as the result of an attack, but the tsunami itself had been a force of nature.
What had happened to the city of Mendel had not. And Mendel was far larger than Yawata Crossing had ever been.
That size actually gave the destruction passing beneath her luxury shuttle even more impact, in a way, because so much of the city was untouched. It provided a stark visual contrast between what Mendel had been and what its devastated sections had become. Of course, she reminded herself, the true devastation was concentrated on the seccy side of town, so that part of it probably hadn’t mattered very much to the city authorities. Or to the previous city authorities, at least. But there’d been more than enough additional damage to go around.
The broken stub of a residential tower directly in front of the shuttle looked as if it had been hammered by a small asteroid. The once massive ceramacrete structure was a rim of rubble around a deep, ugly crater, and a vast swath of the city had been blanketed in a deep layer of the finely divided dust, like lung-tearing snow, vomited skyward from its destruction. Much larger and more dangerous debris had showered outward from the kinetic weapon strike which had wreaked that destruction, as well. More than enough
Gutted industrial areas were interspersed with the green belts. It had been the seccy side of town, after all, which made it the logical home for the industry first-class citizens objected to finding in their own backyards. Most of that damage, she knew, had been inflicted by direct combat, which probably explained why most of the ravaged structures were still recognizable. As structures, at least.
For a moment, her mind fluttered away from the chaos and the human agony and suffering that must have accompanied it. What would be the term for an expert on methods of destruction? Demolitionist? No, that would be the person who did the destroying.
She shook her head slightly, as if to shed those useless questions.
She knew the city bore other, lesser—but no less obscene—wounds left by the “small” nuclear detonations and fuel-air bombs attributed to Ballroom terrorist attacks. Those were beyond her view, even from the shuttle’s two thousand-meter altitude, but whatever else they might be, they hadn’t been Ballroom attacks. If anyone in the galaxy was in a position to know that, she was. That was another problem she’d need to address, but not yet. Not now.
At her command, the shuttle and its sting ship escorts were passing over the city slowly, but from their meager altitude, the terrain below them was still passing fairly quickly.
She waved a hand at the shattered tower which had drawn her eye.
“Is that…?”
“Yes, that’s Hancock.” Saburo X, sitting next to her, nodded. “Bachue the Nose ran that district, and we’re sure she’s the one who gave the order to drop most of an entire floor onto the Misties below. Killed somewhere around two thousand of the bastards.”
“Misties” was the nickname for the troops of the Mesan Internal Security directorate, whose official acronym was MISD. They were the most hated and feared of Mesa’s enforcement agencies.
Had been feared, rather. They weren’t any longer. But they were still hated.
“And that,” Saburo pointed toward another huge tower, “is Neue Rostock, Jurgen Dusek’s district. I’m told—” He paused as the shuttle passed over the ceramacrete structure and it disappeared from view through the viewports, then shrugged and continued. “I’m told—”
“Sandra,” Cathy said, “full vision, please.”
One might have expected such a palatial saloon to be carpeted. It was not, however, for reasons which became apparent as the deck, bulkheads, and overhead all vanished. Only the passengers’ comfortable seats remained visible…floating unsupported two thousand meters above the cityscape.
Two thousand meters of crystal clear, completely empty, thin air above the cityscape.
Saburo tensed a bit in his seat. Behind her, Jeremy X uttered a quickly stifled little hiss.
Cathy’s stepdaughter Berry had a more pronounced reaction.
“Mom!”
Cathy glanced at her. The young woman’s thin face was paler than usual. Her eyes were wide, and her hands were locked with clawlike power on her seat’s armrests.
“For Pete’s sake,” Cathy said. “It’s just the smart walls! Well, and the smart deck, I guess. But still—”
“Mom!”
“Oh, pfui.” Cathy gave Neue Rostock Tower a quick glance. It was now—appeared to be, rather—passing directly below her. “Sandra, restore the sissy floor.”
The space below their feet and under their seats instantly seemed to be a deck again, although the deck was now a magic carpet suspended in mid-air. The view all around them remained unimpeded.
Saburo whistled softly. “Perhaps a bit of warning next time, Countess.”
“I gave up the title, remember?”
“As you said yourself, pfui. People who make perfectly serviceable shuttles disappear are obviously aristocracy. Sensible commoners like us—” he pointed toward himself with a thumb and Berry with a forefinger “—would do nothing of the sort.”
“Berry is hardly a commoner,” a voice spoke up from the luxurious landing shuttle’s flight deck. It belonged to Cathy’s assistant, Sandra Kaminisky. “She’s a monarch. And, Catherine, I really don’t think it’s proper to call your stepdaughter queen a ‘sissy.’”
“Who asked you?” Cathy demanded.
“You did. When we left Congo you told me to maintain proper protocols.”
Sandra more-or-less ran the Harriet Tubman, as well as serving as a combination social secretary and aide-de-camp. And, in truth, Cathy had told Sandra to keep her from straying too far into her normal habits. This was, after all, officially a royal visit. Queen Berry had brought much of Torch’s government with her, prominent among them, Prime Minister Web Du Havel and the Secretary of War, Jeremy X.
Now that the deck had been restored—more precisely, now that the optical illusion that the deck had vanished had been abnegated—Berry was able to relax a little. She turned her head and looked at her prime minister, whose expression was serene. Undeniably, it was serene.
“You knew she’d do that,” Berry said accusingly, and Du Havel shrugged.
“I had no idea what she’d do. But I’ve known her for decades. Any time Cathy is in close proximity to technology which she doesn’t understand but knows how to use, you’ve got to be on your guard.”
Cathy had ignored the interplay while Neue Rostock Tower reappeared to her left as the shuttle banked. Now that she had a better look at it, she could see just how badly damaged it was. Repair and construction remotes swarmed about it, but even now, the next best thing to three T-months after the fighting, they were still mostly at the “hauling away debris” stage. Actual repair, assuming that would ever happen, lay in some distant future. At least it was still standing, though, unlike Hancock. Its upper stories were basically a heap of rubble, but it was obvious that it had never been hit by the monster that had destroyed Bachue’s tower. Instead, it had been systematically hammered by far more—but far smaller—KEWs. Among other things. Scores of jagged breaches had been blasted through the incredibly tough outer shell of its lacerated ceramacrete flanks by other weapons, as well.
There were more of those holes than she could possibly have counted. A lot more. Neue Rostock hadn’t been destroyed…only blasted into ruin.
“Ruthless bastards,” she muttered.
“Being fair about it,” Saburo said, “they did try to limit the collateral damage as much as they could once they launched their assault on Neue Rostock. That’s why they refused to release even the tactical KEWs to General Drescher for so long. Which was just as well for Dusek and our friends. Drescher was a nasty enough handful even when her superiors insisted she had to send her assault force in on the ground, and when they finally relented enough to let her use the tactical KEWS…” He shook his head. “Just as happy she wasn’t in charge from the beginning. She might’ve hit Hancock with something a lot smaller than the big bastard they actually used…and then the collateral damage wouldn’t have stopped them from doing the same thing to Neue Rostock.”
Cathy had already known that much, from the report Thandi Palane had sent to Torch right after the fighting was ended by the arrival of Admiral Gold Peak’s fleet in the Mesa System.
The Mesan authorities had begun trying to crush the rebelling seccies by using the Office of Public Safety’s regular troops, the so-called “Safeties.” Those barely even qualified as policemen; they were essentially just official thugs. The Safeties had very rapidly gotten chewed to pieces once the crime bosses who ran the seccy districts realized they were in a fight for their lives. At which point the authorities sent in the MISD’s troops. They were, , even more brutal than the Safeties, but they were also better trained and armed.
