Uncompromising honor, p.31
Uncompromising Honor, page 31
part #19 of Honor Harrington Series
“On the contrary, Mister President. I may be the one giving the order; you—and your government—are the ones who have forced my hand. I’m simply obeying the orders of my legally constituted chain of command. You and your star system are the people who committed treason against the Solarian League, leaving me no option but to execute my contingency orders in the time window available to me.”
“That’s an utterly meaningless and specious attempt to evade the blood guilt for anyone who dies in this star system thirty-six hours from now.” Vangelis’s voice had turned even colder than Hajdu’s. “Believe me in this, Admiral. This war—the war your ‘legally constituted chain of command’ began with an unprovoked attack on a sovereign star nation in time of peace—will end one day, and unless you’re a lot stupider than I think you are, you know as well as I do that the Star Empire of Manticore and the Republic of Haven are way too big a mouthful for your navy to chew. So, when the inevitable day comes that a peace treaty is signed between the Solarian League and the Grand Alliance, be certain that your name, and the demand that you be extradited to an Allied court to face trial for premeditated mass murder, will be part of those terms. Even if, by some unimaginable turn of luck, the current clique running the League should survive in office, don’t think they’ll hesitate for one single instant before throwing you under the air lorry to save their own contemptible arses.”
“My statement is neither meaningless nor specious, Mister President, and I’ve already told you where the ‘blood guilt’ resides in this instance. As for the conclusion of hostilities,” the admiral permitted himself a snort of contempt, “I’ll take my chances on your neobarb friends’ ability to force the Solarian League to do anything it chooses not to do. For the present, however, further discussion is pointless. I will be back in contact in twenty-four hours. I advise you to expedite your efforts in order to save as many lives as possible from the consequences of your star system’s actions. Hajdu, clear.”
The display went dark, and Vangelis turned to the men and women seated around the table in the Proedrikḗ Katoikía’s Situation Room. His gaze circled the table, his eyes fiery, but his desperation was as obvious as his fury.
“My God, Adam.” Kyrene Morris, the System Vice President, was white-faced, her eyes shocked. “My God, he’s really going to…to murder all those people?”
“That’s what he says, and I doubt he would’ve said it for the official record if he didn’t mean it,” Vangelis replied harshly.
“What if we were to renounce the referendum result?” Frederica Saraphis, the Senate Majority Leader sounded a bit hesitant. She raised her right hand, palm uppermost. “I know we don’t have the legal authority to set it aside, but we could certainly delay—even suspend—its execution, under the circumstances!”
As the chairwoman of the Liberal Centrists, with a thirty-seat majority, Saraphis had shepherded the referendum—formally sponsored by the LibCents and all but one of the other major Hypatian political parties—through the Senate. She’d been one of its staunchest supporters, and her expression showed how little she liked making that suggestion.
“We can’t, Freddie,” Makiko Allerton said, her voice flat and hard. She sat beside Saraphis. Her Independent Democrats had been the only major party to oppose secession, and she’d fought her old friends Saraphis and Vangelis tooth and nail the entire way. But now she shook her head, her violet eyes dark and bitter.
“You’re right that we can’t set the referendum aside,” she continued after a moment. “Even suspending its implementation would get us into all sorts of questionable waters, legally speaking.”
Allerton glanced at Attorney General Boyagis, who jerked his head in a single, curt nod, then looked back at Saraphis, and now her expression held an edge of what could almost have been compassion.
“Completely aside from the legal aspects, though, there are the moral ones,” she said. “I opposed secession. I thought that was the right decision. But I lost, and I happen to believe in the legal and political systems of Hypatia. I lost,” she repeated, “…and if this man—this monster—is going to come into my star system and murder hundreds of thousands of my fellow citizens, of my people, and tell me his actions have been approved by the Solarian League, then thank God I did.”
She looked around the table again, her eyes like iron.
“I don’t know about this ‘Mesan Alignment’ the Manticorans and the Havenites are talking about. I don’t know about an awful lot of things, but I just discovered how horribly wrong I’ve been about one thing I thought I did know. I thought I knew the Solarian League was worth saving.”
“I’m sorry, Makiko,” Vangelis said softly. “I know how much saying that had to hurt.”
“So do I,” Saraphis said, reaching across to squeeze Allerton’s hand. “And I agree that Hajdu proves the Mandarins are even more corrupt than we’d thought they were. But think of all the lives we’re talking about! I’m willing to risk the legal consequences of anything that would save that many people, so if suspending the referendum’s execution—even indefinitely—will stop him, I say we have no choice but to do just that.”
“Won’t work, Freddie.” Vangelis sighed. She looked at him, and he shrugged. “I already suggested that to Hajdu.” Some of the others looked shocked, but he only shrugged again, harder. “Of course I did! Frederica’s right. My first responsibility, as a human being and not just to my oath of office, is to save as many lives as I can. The only way I could save anybody today would be to convince Hajdu not to pull the trigger, and I am by God prepared to do anything that might possibly accomplish that! His response was that it’s too late for that.”
“Too late?” Saraphis stared at him. “Too late to save all those lives? That’s what he said?”
“In almost exactly those words,” Vangelis told her. “The conversation was recorded, if you want to view it yourself, but the short version is that by expressing our intent to leave the League and—especially—by even suggesting the possibility of some sort of political union with Beowulf, we’ve demonstrated our fundamental treachery and willingness to trample all over his version of the Constitution. As such, he’s not prepared to delay the execution of his orders even if we promised we’d never secede, regardless of the referendum vote. After all, how could he possibly take the word of a bunch as traitorous as we’ve proved ourselves? No doubt we’d simply change our minds back again as soon as he left the system. Because of that, he has no choice but to carry out ‘Operation Buccaneer’ before he leaves.”
Saraphis sat back in her chair, her face ashen, and this time it was Allerton squeezing her hand comfortingly.
“But why is he so insistent on his time limit?” Mildred Roanoke, the Secretary of Industry asked. “If he’d give us just an additional forty hours—even thirty hours—we could get almost everybody out, even from the Belter habitats!”
“Somebody must’ve told the cowardly bastard we’re expecting Allied warships, Ma’am,” Commodore Franklin Nisyrios, the senior uniformed officer of the Hypatia System Patrol grated. The red-haired commodore’s gray eyes blazed and his lip twisted in contempt. “He may talk a good fight about how he thinks this war is going to end, but even if he believes that crap, he’s a long way from any peace treaty that might save his sorry arse. And right now, he knows damned well what a squadron or so of Allied wallers would do to his task force. So he’s shitting his skinsuit—pardon my language—to get the hell out of here before those wallers turn up!”
“I think Frank’s right,” Vangelis said. “I think someone must’ve told him—or given him enough information that he could extrapolate for himself—when we originally expected Admiral Kotouč to arrive. So he’s going to execute his orders and run for it before then. Obviously he doesn’t know the exact time we expected Kotouč, or he’d probably have given us the extra time we need. But that’s got to be what’s driving him right now.”
“Speaking of Admiral Kotouč—” Bernard Yale, the Minister of Infrastructure began, but Nisyrios interrupted him.
“Forget it, Mr. Yale,” he said. “The Manties are good, and Kotouč’s ships are—well, the only way I can put it is that they’re totally out of the SLN’s class. I had time for a virtual tour of Phantom, and her capabilities…”
He shook his head, gazing off into his memories, his expression almost awed, then pulled his eyes back to focus on Yale’s face again.
“That ship could take any Solarian superdreadnought one-on-one and kick its arse into next week without even working up a sweat,” he said simply. “But Kotouč only has one of her…and Hajdu has ninety-five battlecruisers. Worse, Kotouč told me he doesn’t have any of the missile pods that might help to even the odds. And even if he had them, according to my revenue cutters’ sensors, Hajdu’s deployed several thousand missile pods of his own.”
He shook his head again, this time heavily.
“All Kotouč and his people could do would be to die gallantly, Mr. Yale. I don’t doubt they’d do that in a minute…if it could stop Hajdu. But it couldn’t. They might be able to hurt him badly first, but not badly enough to stop him from carrying out his orders in the end, and no military commander could justify throwing away his own people’s lives when the sacrifice couldn’t make any difference in the end.”
“So what do we do?” Vice President Morris said after a moment.
“We go on doing what we’re already doing,” Vangelis replied heavily. “We’ve got every orbit-capable shuttle, cutter, runabout, and garbage scow in the system moving everyone we possibly can in the time Hajdu’s so graciously given us. There’s already been some panic—you just can’t organize an evacuation on this kind of scale without telling people why you’re evacuating them—but so far, it’s manageable. Commodore Nisyrios’s people are providing armed parties for the major habitats’ boat bays to prevent—we hope—things from getting too out of hand, and we’re beginning with the major residential habitats. We should—should, probably—be able to get between eighty and eighty-five percent of the residents down to the planetary surface in thirty-six hours. That’s almost a hundred and nine million people.”
“And it still leaves eighteen-point-seven million people up there,” Morris said.
“And another one-point-two million in the Alexandria Belt,” Roanoke said. “My God. We’re talking about twenty million dead as our best case scenario!”
She looked around the conference room’s frozen-helium silence, and the clatter of a falling pin would have been deafening.
SLNS Camperdown
Hypatia System
“Do you think the Admiral will really keep to his timetable?” Captain Adenauer asked very quietly as he and Commodore Koopman worked to update his best estimate of the number of Hypatians who’d been evacuated to the planetary surface so far.
“What do you think?” Koopman replied after a moment.
The sable-haired operations officer’s eyes were a very dark brown under normal circumstances. Now they could have frozen oxygen as she considered him, and the intelligence officer reminded himself that Daphne Koopman was not a good person to get sideways of. She was smart, she was ambitious, she had lots of family connections, she’d made a habit of discovering the locations of as many buried bodies as possible, and rumor said she kept meticulous lists of those who’d helped her career, those who’d harmed her career, and those who’d simply really, really pissed her off.
“I don’t know what to think,” the captain said after considering his options. “I just know that all of this”—he gestured at the displays full of intelligence data his remotes were pulling him from the system datanet, side-by-side with the results of Koopman’s remote sensors—“says these people really are doing their dead level best to get their people evacuated. I mean, so far almost twenty of their System Patrol people have been killed in accidents because they’re cutting the margins so fine. I’m just wondering if he’s going to take that into consideration.”
“Worried about what might splash onto you if the opposition groups back home get hold of the casualty figures?” Koopman didn’t—quite—sneer, and Adenauer flushed.
“Maybe I am, some,” he acknowledged with a defiant jut of his chin. “Mostly, though? Mostly, Commodore, I don’t want to be a Solarian officer who’s remembered for his part in killing fifteen or twenty million Solarian citizens.”
Koopman started to say something sharp, then stopped herself, and what might have been a certain grudging respect showed in her eyes. It took more than a little courage for a member of a Solarian flag officer’s staff to voice anything which could be taken as a criticism of the flag officer in question. And that was especially true when Admiral Hajdu had to know that, orders or no orders, billions of people who weren’t here and hadn’t had to make the decision were going to bitterly criticize whatever he did. He had a reputation as a ruthless survivor of the Solarian League Navy’s Byzantine bureaucracies and turf wars, and he knew all about burying inconvenient witnesses. That meant the consequences for any officer he suspected of disloyalty, or whose opinions might help fuel the criticism, were likely to be…significant.
“It’s a little late to be developing cold feet, Adenauer,” she said, after a moment.
“I didn’t say I was developing cold feet. On the other hand, that might be one way to put it,” Adenauer admitted. “And it’s not exactly like you or I were asked to volunteer when the orders were handed out. For that matter, I know the Hypatians voted to secede, which, I guess, means they aren’t Solarian citizens anymore. It just…just bothers me, Ma’am.”
“Well,” Koopman returned her attention to the data on the display between them, “I guess if I’m going to be honest, it bothers me, too, and I’m the one who drew up the ops plan.” She shook her head. “But exactly what he plans on doing when the time limit runs out—?”
She shrugged.
Prásino Phúllo Habitat
Hypatia Planetary Orbit
and
Hypatia System Patrol Shuttle Asteria
Hypatia System
“Come on, Petra!” Kassandra Tsoliao tried to keep the impatience—and fear—out of her voice. “We’ve got to go, Honey!”
“But I can’t find Mikhalis!” five-year-old Petra protested tearfully. “We can’t go without Mikhalis!”
“He’ll be fine, Honey,” Kassandra promised her.
She hated lying to her daughter. It was one of the things she and Sebastianos never did. But today, she didn’t hesitate. Nor did she tell Petra that the reason she couldn’t find the cat was that Kassandra had locked him in his carrier in the storage closet down the passageway from their apartment.
God, she’d hated doing it—hated it! She loved that cat, too, but she’d had no choice. The evacuation orders were harsh, uncompromising, and draconian. No pets—not even a parakeet—on the evacuation boats. No carry-on luggage beyond a single bag small enough to fit into its carrier’s lap. No family treasures, no heirlooms, nothing that wouldn’t fit into that single bag.
But she could never have explained that to Petra, and so she’d rubbed Mikhalis under the chin, kissed him between the ears one last time, and then dashed the tears out of her eyes with both hands as she left him purring comfortably in the familiar confines of his carrier and went back to the daughter she could never have convinced to leave him behind.
Forgive me, Mikey, she thought now. I’m so sorry. But I know you love Petra, too, and I have to get her out of here.
“Are you sure he’ll be all right, Mommy?” Petra pressed, and Kassandra made herself smile.
“Of course I am, Honey. Tell you what, we’ve really got to run, but why don’t you dash out to the kitchen and make sure there’s water in his bowl?”
“Good idea, Mommy!” Petra beamed and scurried toward the kitchen while her mother covered her eyes with the palms of her hands and tried not to cry.
“Prásino Phúllo Control, this is—”
Lieutenant Paulette Kilgore, Hypatia System Patrol, felt her exhausted mind blank completely. She jammed her thumb down on the mute button on her joystick and stared at the display, cursing herself as she realized she hadn’t entered the flight number into her onboard computer when she lifted for the current run. Then she shook herself and twisted around to look over her shoulder at her flight engineer—they were so desperately pressed for people that she didn’t have a copilot—Sergeant John Debnam.
“God, what number are we now, John? Don’t tell me you didn’t write it down either,” she begged.
“One-Seven-Niner-Papa-Papa-Echo-Six,” Debnam replied without looking up from his own panel.
“Thank you, thank you!”
The bearded sergeant only nodded, still without looking up, and Kilgore took her thumb off the mute button.
“Sorry about the com glitch, Prásino Phúllo Control,” she said. “Had to deal with something. This is One-Seven-Niner-Papa-Papa-Echo-Six. Requesting approach to Bay Nineteen Bravo.”
“One-Seven-Niner, Prásino Phúllo Control,” a voice even more exhausted than she felt replied. “Negative Bay Nineteen Bravo. I say again, negative Bay Nineteen Bravo. You are cleared approach Bay Eighteen Bravo. I say again, Eighteen—One-Eight—Bravo. Confirm copy.”
“Control, One-Seven-Niner confirms diversion to Bay Eighteen—I repeat, One-Eight—Bravo.”
“That is correct, One-Seven-Niner. The holding beacon is Niner-Niner-Zero-Alpha. You are…seventh in the approach queue.”
“Niner-Niner-Zero-Alpha and we are number seven,” Kilgore replied.
“Confirm, One-Seven-Niner. Godspeed.”
“Thank you, Prásino Phúllo Control.” Kilgore started to key off the com, then paused. Stacking shuttles seven deep under the current conditions suggested a major snafu of some sort at a time when no one could afford snafus.
“Control, can I ask why we’re being diverted?” she asked.
