Ashes Of Victory

with its suppliers. While those suppliers had felt that Solarian hardware in Solarian hands would undoubtedly prove far superior to that same hardware in the hands of a Navy whose personnel came from a ramshackle education system like the PRH's, they could not overlook specific items, such as the Manties' development of the first, practical short-range FTL communication system in history, reported by their Havenite customers. They couldn't seem to get the League Navy itself interested in sending competent observers to the front of what the League persisted in regarding as a squabble between minor, third-rate foreign powers, but the combined allure of profitable sales and access to the information the People's Navy could provide from sensor readings and occasional examination of Manty wreckage had proved irresistible.

Yet those arrangements, like everything else, now stood jeopardized by Amos Parnell's escape to the League. If he was believed, and Pierre felt dismally certain he would be, the PRH was about to stop being the 'good guys' in the eyes of Solarian public opinion. It was possible, even probable, that the longstanding acceptance of the Star Kingdom and its 'autocratic' allies as the heavies of the piece would prevent any fundamental, long-term swing of public support in the Manties' favor, but that wasn't the same thing as saying that it wouldn't provoke a swing against the PRH. If Pierre was lucky, it would generate a feeling of 'a pox upon both your houses!' and lead to a general disgust with both sides, and Leonard Boardman and Public Information would certainly do their utmost to bring that about. But even that attitude would intensify public support for the embargo. Which, in turn, would inspire certain League bureaucrats to look more closely at their legal responsibility to enforce it... and to publically slap the wrist of anyone caught violating it. Since one thing they could slap those wrists with was a temporary or even permanent bar against bidding on Navy contracts, the PRH's suppliers were about to become much more skittish about doing business with them.

None of which was going to do anything good for the People's Navy's combat efficiency.

'Well,' the Chairman said finally, 'there's not much we can do about the situation in the League right now. We'll just have to ride it out, I suppose. And Boardman's right in at least one respect. The official communications lag between here and Sol really does work in our favor right now.'

'For what it's worth,' Saint-Just replied. 'But let's not fool ourselves, Rob. We can delay sending official government responses to inquiries from the League by claiming that the Manties' control of the wormholes means we have to send them the long way around, but that's not going to help us when it comes to their newsies' questions. They don't have that problem, and anything we say to them is going to get back to the core worlds almost as quickly as anything the Manties say.'

'Thank you for pointing that out.' Pierre's tone was sour, but there was a slight, weary twinkle in his eye. He wouldn't have shown it to anyone but Saint-Just, and the StateSec CO snorted.

'You're welcome. It's my job to bring you the bad news even more than the good, after all. Which is why I mentioned Parnell in context with McQueen.'

He cocked his head, eying his superior expectantly, and Pierre surrendered to the inevitable.

'Go on,' he said.

'We're not going to be able to completely control the Solly version of events even here in the Republic,' Saint-Just said. 'So far, our existing censorship is containing its open dissemination, and the Solly agencies understand that we will retaliate if they violate the Information Control Act or the Subversive Agitator statutes. But bootleg versions of Solly stories are going to get out. Hell, we've never been able to fully suppress the Manty'faxes dissidents keep smuggling in!'

'I know that,' Pierre said patiently. 'But I think Boardman is right about our ability to at least mitigate the damage. Unconfirmed, `bootleg' reports have always been with us, but they've never been able to offset the full weight of the official information system. Not even people who automatically take anything PubIn says with a grain of salt are immune to the saturation effect over the long term. They may reject our version of specific events, but the background noise still shapes the context in which they view the rest of the universe.'

'I'm not disputing that, although I think Boardman is overconfident about his ability to spin this particular story. But I'm also not worrying about public opinion, Rob. Not in the short term, at least. I'm worrying about how the Navy is going to react once the full extent of Parnell's charges sinks in.'

'Um.' Pierre cocked his chair back and ran one hand's fingers through his hair.

' `Um,' indeed,' Saint-Just said. 'You know how popular Parnell was with the Legislaturalist officer corps. We may have had the better part of ten T-years to build our own cadre of officers, but every single senior member of it started out under the Legislaturalists. They may've been lieutenants and even ensigns, but they started out with Parnell as their CNO. As long as he was safely dead, especially after being executed for his part in the Harris Assassination, he was no threat. In fact, branding him with responsibility actually helped undermine any lingering loyalty to the old regime. After all, if someone they respected that much had been part of the plot, then everything they'd respected about the old system suddenly looked far less certain than it ever had before.

'But now he's back, and alive — which absolutely proves that at least part of what we told them about him was a lie — and he's telling the universe we engineered the Harris Assassination. Which means everything we thought we'd accomplished by making him one of the fall guys is now likely to turn around and bite us right on the ass.'

'Are you seriously suggesting we could be looking at some sort of spontaneous general military revolt?' Pierre asked, and his tone was less incredulous than he could have wished it were.

'No.' Saint-Just shook his head. 'Not a spontaneous one. Whatever else is happening, they're in the military and the Republic is fighting for its life, with dozens of its star systems still occupied by the other side. They may not like us much — in fact, let's be honest and admit that they've never liked the Committee — but that doesn't change the larger picture, and they must realize what the Manties could do to them if the chain of command falls apart or we split into factions that start fighting among themselves. They certainly saw enough of that when we were still securing our own control and the Manties were picking off frontier systems we were too disorganized to reinforce.

'But what is going to happen is that we're about to lose a lot of the legitimacy we've slowly built up in their eyes. We've done our best to promote people who had bones to pick with the old order, of course, and most of those officers won't feel any great nostalgia for the Legislaturalists even if Parnell has come back from the dead. But not all of them are going to fall into that category, and even some of the ones who do are going to remember that at least the Legislaturalists never shot officers in job lots for failure to perform. So if the people who have shot them suddenly turn out to have seized power by having lied to them, they're not going to feel any great loyalty to us, either.'

He paused, eyebrows raised, until Pierre nodded.

'I expect inertia to be on our side,' he went on then. 'We've been the government for ten T-years, and they've seen too much chaos. The Levelers aren't that far in the past, and the natural tendency is going to be to shy away from any course of action which is likely to encourage the Mob's more extreme efforts or provoke new power struggles at the top. But that's why I'm so concerned about McQueen and the degree of loyalty she's managed to evoke by winning battles.'

'We'd have that problem with anyone who won battles, Oscar!'

'Agreed. And I also realize, although you must sometimes think I've forgotten, that we have to have someone who can win battles. I'm fully aware that it would be just as fatal — to you, me, and the Committee, at least — to lose the war as it would be for someone to stage a successful coup against us. But the person who's winning for us right now is Esther McQueen, and she's as ambitious and smart as they come. Worse, she's a member of the government... and one who only came on board well after all the things Parnell is accusing us of had already happened. She's in a position to claim all of the advantages of the incumbent, if you will, without having to shoulder any of the dis advantages. And worst of all, perhaps, she's the one woman in the Navy who's in a position to have a realistic chance of delivering a shot to the brain of the Committee. She's right here, on Haven, with direct access to you, me, and the rest of the Committee. And she's already the civilian head of the Navy. If the officer corps decided to follow her lead, there wouldn't be any factional struggles. Not immediately, at any rate. And you can bet anything you want that she's smart enough to make that point to them.'

'But there's no evidence she's done anything of the sort,' Pierre pointed out.

'No, there isn't. Trust me, if I'd picked up even a whisper of anything like that, you would have been the