A Rising Thunder

stood there, his expression grave, his eyes artistically troubled, and then drew a deep breath.

“Madam Speaker, I call for the vote.”

Neng reappeared on the display.

“Honorable Delegates, the vote has been called on motion AD-1002-07-02-22, to impanel a special commission to investigate the alleged treason of the system government of Beowulf in aiding and abetting an enemy of the Solarian League. All debate having been completed, the Chair now calls the vote.”

Her image stood there, hovering in the air, while votes were cast throughout the enormous chamber. It didn’t take long.

She looked down, considering the numbers, then raised her head once more.

“The vote is eight thousand seven hundred and twelve in favor, two thousand nine hundred and three opposed. The motion is carried.”

A roar went up, and Hadley’s jaw clenched. Not in surprise, but in anger. The only surprise was that almost a quarter of the Assembly had voted against the motion. That was a dangerous sign for the Mandarins, given the massive effort they’d mounted to pass the motion in the first place. It suggested all sorts of unpleasant things, yet that was for the future. For now…

She punched her attention key and sat back, arms folded, while she waited. The roar of approval continued for several seconds before it finally trickled off slowly into something approaching quiet. Then Neng looked back down at her panel, and her gavel cracked again.

“The Assembly will return to order!” Her tone was sharp, chiding, and the delegates who were still out of their seats, still celebrating their victory, looked up at her in surprise. Then they — slowly — obeyed the command, and she waited another few moments before she looked in Hadley’s direction.

“The Chair recognizes the Honorable Delegate from Beowulf,” she announced.

Hadley didn’t bother to stand as her image replaced the Speaker’s. She simply sat there, looking out of the display as a silence settled over the thousands of delegates. She could feel all those other eyes, almost taste the burning curiosity behind them. How would defeated Beowulf respond? What could she possibly say in the wake of this totally unprecedented public humiliation…and scapegoating? She let them wonder for several endless seconds, and when she spoke, her voice was cold and hard.

“I have served as Beowulf’s representative to this Assembly for almost forty T-years. In that time, I’ve tried without success to find some trace, some fragment, of the power and the responsibility and the high standards of personal conduct envisioned for it by the drafters of our Constitution. There’s no question of what the drafters intended, what they expected from this Assembly. The words are there for anyone to read and understand. The expectations are clear. Yet instead of finding those things, I’ve become intimately familiar with the ‘business as usual’ mentality of this Chamber. Like all of you, I’ve also become aware of where the true power in the formulation of federal law, regulations, and policy lies. Even if I hadn’t, even if I continued to cherish the slightest illusion that the elected representatives of the League’s citizens had one shred of authority at the federal level, this vote has just demonstrated the true owners of power in the Solarian League once again. It is nothing more nor less than a rubberstamped approval of the unelected bureaucrats who illegally wield power far beyond anything the Constitution ever granted them. A rubberstamp dutifully affixed to their effort to silence all internal opposition to the disastrous policy — and war — to which they’ve committed the League. Beowulf’s reward for attempting to prevent that war — or to at least cut it short before it consumes still more millions of lives and trillions upon trillions of credits — is to be investigated for ‘treason’ because it asserted the autonomy guaranteed to every member star system of the League. The same autonomy the home star system of every delegate who just voted in favor of this motion takes for granted every single day.”

She paused, brown eyes hard with contempt and disdain. The Chamber of Stars was deathly still, its quiet broken only by a handful of voices shouting denials of her assertions.

“We expected nothing else from a morally, ethically, and legally bankrupt institution,” she continued finally, her voice colder than ever. “However, there is another right which the Constitution guarantees to every member star system, and Beowulf chooses to exercise that right today. If we cannot oppose the ‘Mandarins’’ criminal and disastrous policies from inside the system, we will no longer attempt to. Instead, as the leader of Beowulf’s delegation, acting on the instructions of my star system’s legally elected government, I hereby announce that Beowulf will hold a system-wide plebiscite to T-months from today to determine whether or not the Beowulf system shall withdraw from the Solarian League.”

The lonely voices shouting insults and denials vanished suddenly into a deep, singing silence, and she smiled grimly.

“That vote will be fairly, legally, and publicly taken, but speaking personally, I have no doubt whatsoever what its outcome will be. And, again speaking personally, I caution all of you to have no illusions upon that head. You’ve passed your motion, and you’re welcome to investigate anything you choose to investigate, but Beowulf will no longer be party to the bloodsoaked policies of a corrupt and venal oligarchy prepared to murder entire star nations rather than admit even the possibility of wrongdoing on its part. We reserve the right to disassociate ourselves from criminal enterprises and murder on an interstellar scale, and to take whatever actions the citizens of our star system believe are required of it in the crisis which Permanent Senior Undersecretary Kolokoltsov and his fellow ‘Mandarins’ have created. For those of you who have chosen to vote in favor of this motion, we wish you joy of your actions…but I don’t think you’ll find it.”

She hit the key that cleared her image from the display, and the Chamber of Stars went berserk.

Chapter Thirty-Five

“So are you still so blase about who easily Reid’s motion is going to ‘neutralize’ Beowulf, Innokentiy?” Nathan MacArtney’s voice was rather caustic, Innokentiy Kolokoltsov thought.

“I was never ‘blase’ about it, Nathan,” the permanent senior undersecretary for foreign affairs replied. “And I never said it would neutralize them. I said I expected it to shift the focus of the debate from us to Beowulf and put a muzzle on Hadley, and I think that’s exactly what’s happening. I’ll admit I never expected even Beowulfers to go this far, and sure as hell not to go this far this quickly, but it does look like were going to take Beowulf out of play in the Chamber of Stars, doesn’t it? I believe it’s called looking for a silver lining.” He smiled thinly. “Since we can’t do anything to stop it, we might as well try to find a bright side to look on once it’s done.”

Hadley’s bombshell announcement had completely blindsided him. He admitted it. He’d envisioned quite a few possible outcomes of Reid’s motion, but never that Beowulf would simply walk away from its seven centuries of membership in the League. No one had ever done that, and most people had assumed that, like so much more of the original Constitution, the right of secession had withered and was no longer applicable.

Beowulf’s government obviously didn’t see it that way, and while the system’s secession had not yet become a fact, there seemed to be very little chance of the plebiscite failing. Benton-Ramirez and his fellow directors undoubtedly had better access to polling data on Beowulfan public opinion than anyone on Old Earth did, but what the Mandarins did have access to made grim reading. At least eighty-two percent of the system population supported the Board of Directors’ decision to accept Manticoran assistance to prevent Imogene Tsang’s transit of the Beowulf Terminus against Beowulf’s wishes. An only slightly lower percentage — seventy-five to seventy-eight percent, depending on whose poll one chose — firmly believed it had prevented thousands of additional Solarian deaths. And somewhere around eighty-five percent favored an outright military alliance with the Star Empire against the boogie man of this “Mesan Alignment” figment of the Manties’ imagination. It was only a very short step from an alliance against Mesa to one against anyone perceived as serving the “Mesan Alignment’s” purposes, and while Kolokoltsov hadn’t seen any specific data on the question of outright secession from the Solarian League, against that sort of public opinion background, he was sickly certain Hadley was right about the final vote on the question.

Worse, there seemed to be very little the federal government could do to stop it from happening. Not with