A Rising Thunder

power from their motherships, so it was necessary to provide each platform with its own power plant. And it was also necessary to provide the raw fire control and the rest of the supporting hardware and software which was normally parked aboard the platform’s deploying ship-of-the-wall. Those were relatively straightforward problems in engineering, however, especially with an entire planet to work with, and tech crews were working at breakneck pace even as Honor stood with her uncle and her spouses to meet them.

Mycroft’s advantages over Moriarity would be profound. Unlimited by Moriarty’s lightspeed control links, Mycroft would be able to take full advantage of the Mark 23 E and the FTL reconnaissance platforms which were also being thickly seeded throughout the system’s volume. And unlike Moriarity — which had been unarmed and defenseless when Honor used Hemphill’s Baldur to take it out — Keyhole-Two platforms were simply crammed with active antimissile defenses. No doubt they could be taken out, but it would be a difficult task, and enough of them were being deployed as part of Mycroft to ensure survivability through sheer redundancy.

“I agree that once Mycroft’s up and running, anybody who goes after Beowulf is going to get bloodied in a hurry,” she said now. “I guess my main concerns are that Mycroft isn’t a visible deterrent, especially since we’re keeping it so completely under wraps till it’s actually up and running, and, secondly, that it isn’t up and running yet and won’t be for at least another couple of months. Maybe longer.” She shook her head. “It’s that window that worries me,” she said soberly. “In the Mandarins’ place, I’d make it a point to assume that we had to be aware of Beowulf’s vulnerability and be doing something about it, but I’m not at all sure they will.”

“Well,” Benton-Ramirez y Chou said with a shrug that was just a bit more philosophical than his mind-glow tasted, “I guess there’s one way to find out.”

“And that’s what I’m afraid of, Uncle Jacques,” she said. “That’s what I’m afraid of.”

Chapter Thirty-Four

Felicia Hadley sat once more in the Beowulf delegation’s box in the Chamber of Stars.

Her head was erect, her shoulders squared, and anyone looking at her could have been excused for not recognizing the mixture of anger, weariness, frustration, grief, and…emptiness behind those outwardly tranquil eyes. After all, she couldn’t sort out all those feelings herself, so why should she have expected anyone else to understand the way she felt?

The two weeks of scheduled debate on Tyrone Reid’s motion had been the ugliest Hadley could remember ever having seen. That was hardly a surprise, given the position Kolokoltsov and the rest of the Mandarins faced. They’d pulled out all the stops to focus the League’s fear and anxiety on someone else in order to save themselves, and they knew all the tricks of the game. The attacks had been carefully orchestrated, aimed from every imaginable quarter and endlessly repeated by flocks of coopted newsies and media talking heads, to give them maximum credibility with the public. There were a few reporters, like Audrey O’Hanrahan, who genuinely seemed to be trying to cover both sides of the debate, just as there were some Assembly delegates who’d tried to get the truth out. But those delegates, like the newsies trying to do their jobs, were drowned in the tide of attackers. There were simply too many members of the Assembly — and too many in the media — who owed the Mandarins too many favors (and about whom Malachai Abruzzi’s operatives knew too many secrets) for there to be any other outcome.

Two things had surprised her, however. One was the degree of genuine hatred some of her fellow delegates had spewed out in their attacks on Beowulf. Reid’s allies had placed their darts carefully, wrapping their fiery denunciations around a core of cold calculation, but others had joined the assault on their own, lashing out in an almost incoherent fury that didn’t care what the law might say, wasn’t concerned with why Beowulf might have done what it had done. No, that fury fed only on panic stricken reports of the Manticorans’ superior weaponry and fear that Beowulf’s “treason” had somehow freed that weaponry to ravage the entire Solarian League. Of course, no one had bothered to explain how Beowulf’s permitting Imogene Tsang’s fleet to be massacred would have averted that threat, now had they?

Well, be fair, Felicia, she told herself. It’s not all fear of what the Manties’ weapons can do, now is it? Some of those people have started getting messengers from transstellars based in their home systems. A glimmer of what withdrawing all those Manticoran merchantmen and shutting down the hyper bridges really means is starting to sink in, and they don’t like that a bit. They want the hide of anyone associated with the people getting ready to inflict that much hurt on their corporate sponsors.

No doubt they did, yet what had surprised her even more than the fury coming at her home system from so many quarters was the fact that some of the other delegations had actually spoken in Beowulf’s behalf. Not that Beowulf’s actions met with complete approbation even from them, because they didn’t. But at least some of the League’s elected representatives truly did seem more concerned about getting at the truth, or even considering the legal and constitutional implications of Bewoulf’s acts, than with simply scapegoating someone else.

Of course, there weren’t very many of them.

Oh, be fair, she scolded herself again, rather more seriously. Standing up to this kind of hysteria at all requires more guts than anyone running for the Assembly ever expected to need! You always recognized it was really only a rubber stamp for people like the Mandarins, didn’t you? Sure, you wanted to change that, but you knew damned well deep inside that you weren’t going to. Nobody was.

And now nobody’s ever going to have the chance to.

She gave herself a mental shake as that last thought ran through her mind. They weren’t going to break the Mandarins’ grip today, no. She knew that. But there was still hope for the future, wasn’t there? Didn’t there have to be? Look at what had happened in the Republic of Haven. They’d recovered their Constitution, and it looked like they were making that stand up, too. Of course, the Republic was a lot smaller than the League, and its corruption had been given nowhere near as long to sink into the blood and the bone of their political processes. Yet people like Eloise Pritchart and Thomas Theisman had pulled it off, and that meant it truly was possible for the League as well.

And it looks like the League’s going to get just as badly hammered militarily as the People’s Republic ever did, she reminded herself glumly. The question’s whether or not it’ll learn enough along the way to—

The shimmering reverberation of a deep-toned musical chime echoed over the Chamber of Stars’ vastness, interrupting her thoughts.

The Assembly was in session.

* * *

The usual pointless opening ceremonies seemed even more meaningless than usual today. They’d never actually been more than the hollow forms of a representative body which had long since lost any meaningful political power. Lipservice to a dream which even Hadley had to acknowledge had never been more than a dream, really. Yet that pretense that the Assembly’s delegates actually represented the will of the Solarian electorate grated especially painfully on her nerves this morning.

She was scarcely surprised when Speaker Neng moved through those ceremonies more briskly than usual, though. After all, the Speaker had a job to do for the people she really represented, and after so many days of vicious debate it was time to get to it.

The last empty formality was completed, Speaker Neng pronounced the presence of a legal quorum, and then her gavel cracked.

“The Assembly will come to order,” she announced crisply. She waited a heartbeat, then continued, “The Honorable Delegate from Old Terra has the floor.”

Tyrone Reid’s image replaced hers on the huge display. As the originator of the motion, it was his right under the Assembly’s rules to move for the vote now that all time allocated for debate had been expended. He