Debt of War (The Embers of War) Read online

  “And if we deploy it too late, it could be useless,” Peter snapped. He leaned back in his chair, calming himself. He’d hoped to have months, if not years, to settle into his role. His father had promised as much, a promise he’d been unable to keep. Peter felt a surge of red-hot hatred for the king. He’d stolen Peter’s father from him and his family and . . . he’d tricked Peter’s sister into treason. “I . . .”

  He gritted his teeth. “We have a council meeting in thirty minutes,” he said. “I’d like you to sit in. We may need your expertise.”

  “It would be my pleasure,” William said. If he was telling the truth, Peter would have been astonished. Peter hated those meetings and he was a duke, with all the wealth and power the title implied. “However, I do have to return to my post . . .”

  “Unless the king attacks in the next few hours, you can leave everything in the hands of your staff,” Peter pointed out. “Or don’t you think they can handle it?”

  “I have every faith in them,” William assured him. “But I am always nervous when I leave them alone for too long. I don’t have time to deal with political games.”

  “Tough,” Peter said. “Politics taint everyone who reaches high rank, you included. Sorry.”

  He smiled at Sir William’s downcast expression. The man had never made any secret of his disdain for politics. It was almost a shame he hadn’t stayed with Kat when the Theocratic War had come to an end. He could have done much for her instead of wasting his time on Asher Dales. William had never taken the king at face value. If he’d talked Kat out of following him . . .

  There’s no point in woolgathering, he told himself as he tapped his terminal and ordered a quick snack. No one would notice if he ate during the meeting, thanks to the wonder of holographic filters, but it was a bad habit. He had to remain focused. He had no doubt his inexperience was already working against him. We have to deal with things as they are, not as we wish them to be.

  He keyed the display, bringing up a starchart. A cluster of stars glowed red, a mocking reminder of just how many worlds had sided with the king. Their decision would cost them . . . it would, if they had anything with which to pay. A shortage of postwar investment was hardly a death sentence, yet . . . it wasn’t as if they had anything worth taking. The effort involved in snatching what few resources they had would be more than the reward.

  They think they don’t have anywhere to go, he mused. And the hell of it is that they might be right.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  TYRE

  William knew, without false modesty, that he was lucky as hell to be in a position of power on Tyre. He was, after all, a colonial, with no family or connections worthy of the name. Indeed, the only person he did have any ties to, Kat Falcone, was firmly on the other side. But he wasn’t blind to the simple fact that that did give him some advantages. He couldn’t build a power base of his own, not without sacrificing his independence. The House of Lords and the inner council could use him without fearing he’d turn against them.

  And that would be a bad idea, he mused, listening to the inner council debate with half an ear. The king is mad.

  He sighed inwardly. He’d never really liked or trusted the king. He smiled too much. No, it was a little more serious than that. The king had always come across as a junior officer, dangerously promoted out of his competence zone. Too much rank, too little actual experience . . . Yes, William could believe the king had worked hard to trigger a war at the time and place of his choosing. In hindsight, his maneuverings had worked out very well for him. And yet, he’d been very lucky. William knew he’d probably be among the Theocratic POWs worked to death—if his ship hadn’t been simply blown out of space—had Kat not devised a plan to save the fleet. No wonder the king had worked so hard to get her on his side.

  She doesn’t know, William told himself again and again. She doesn’t know what he did.

  He turned the thought over and over as the debate raged on, trying to determine a way to make use of the truth. He hadn’t lied to Duke Peter. The truth was too easy to discredit, particularly when it was just a little too good. And yet, there had to be some way to use what they’d learned against Hadrian. How many of his supporters would stick with him when they learned the king had murdered a duke? How many would allow themselves to be dragged through the mud? None, if they knew. And if they believed what they’d been told . . .

  “If the reports are accurate,” Duchess Zangaria said, “the king has been receiving missions from a dozen different powers. They may start forwarding help.”

  “It will take them time to supply anything,” Grand Admiral Victor Rudbek said. The grand admiral shot William a sharp look, daring him to say anything that might be taken as contradiction. The navy’s uniformed head wasn’t William’s biggest fan. “The king needs help and supplies now.”

  “Indeed,” Duke Peter said. Kat’s brother made a show of looking at William. “Sir William?”

  “Outside powers are unlikely to risk aiding the king too much unless he seems the clear victor,” William said. Interstellar politics seemed to have a great deal in common with the schoolyard. “Whatever help they give will be very limited, and deniable. I don’t think they’ll be giving him superdreadnoughts.”

  “Unless they think they can split the Commonwealth in two permanently,” Duke Tolliver grumbled. “Our ability to retaliate will be very limited.”

  “We are bringing the remainder of the fleet back online,” Grand Admiral Rudbek said. “They may have been building up their forces since the war, but they don’t have our advanced weapons or our experience.”

  “And both of those gaps can be closed,” Duke Tolliver warned. “The king could be promising them anything, if he wins the war. He might even sell out the border stars.”

  “That won’t go down well with his allies,” Duke Peter pointed out. “They’d turn on him in an instant.”

  “Unless they see it as the only way to win,” Duchess Turin said. “I swear, the king will do anything to keep his power.”

  “And if he does put himself in debt to outsiders, he will weaken his power,” Duchess Zangaria countered. “If he surrenders the border stars . . . he’ll move the border a great deal closer to Tyre.”

  “It isn’t as if those stars are worth much now,” Tolliver said. “They could be retaken at any moment.”

  “They’d move Marseilles closer to the rim,” Duchess Zangaria said. “Giving them reasonably clear access to the Jorlem Sector and the worlds beyond . . .”

  Which means less than you might think, William thought as the debate raged on. If those worlds cannot be defended, or cannot defend themselves, they’ll be utterly irrelevant to any future war.

  “The point remains, we need to win quickly,” Duke Peter said. “Grand Admiral?”

  Grand Admiral Rudbek scowled. “Your Grace, we do in theory have enough superdreadnoughts to punch through Caledonia’s defenses and land an assault force,” he said, his tone heavy. “However, we would be drawn into a long planet-wide campaign to take down the PDCs while they might be causing trouble elsewhere. Someone as . . . determined as Kat Falcone might even take the risk of letting us attack Caledonia, while she swoops in here and takes Tyre off our hands. It could shorten the war.”

  Duchess Zangaria snorted. “Are you saying we could not hold out here, even without the fleet? Planetary Defense . . .”

  “The king’s fleet would be in a position to do immense damage to our industrial base, even as it landed troops,” Grand Admiral Rudbek said. “We’d have to come to terms with him pretty quickly, and those terms would not be in our favor. He’d win the war in a single blow.”

  “Assuming the timing worked out,” William said quietly.

  “Really?” Duchess Zangaria sounded disbelieving. “Are you sure we couldn’t beat him on the ground?”

  She looked at William, inviting him to answer. They wouldn’t want to hear the truth, but . . .

  “There haven’t been many attempts to la
nd troops and take a planet by force since the Breakdown,” he said. “The only real large-scale landing force was on Ahura Mazda, which ended the Theocratic War. The planet was poorly defended, the population was sick of war and being lied to by its leaders, and yet both sides, along with civilians, suffered huge casualties. We don’t really know how many of their people were killed. And Ahura Mazda was not a particularly well-defended world.”

  “The Theocracy landed troops too,” Duchess Zangaria pointed out.

  “The Theocracy never invaded a heavily defended world,” William countered. “Cadiz and New Southport were the most heavily defended planets to be attacked during the early stages of the war, and both had flimsy defenses compared to Caledonia or Tyre itself. If they land here, Your Grace, they will inflict immense damage even if they’re eventually kicked back into orbit. And even if they lose, they may win the war simply by destroying our will to resist.”

  He met her eyes, evenly. “In many ways, Caledonia will be a harder target. The civilian population is heavily armed. The Caledonians are more used to deprivation than Tyrians. The king wouldn’t have so much at risk . . . not at first, anyway. He could easily slip away from the planet, even if we control the high orbitals. I’d be surprised if he doesn’t have plans to do just that.”

  “So what do we do?” Duke Peter addressed the chamber. “We cannot wait for the remainder of the fleet, and we cannot move now.”

  William frowned as the debate raged back and forth. None of them, even the Grand Admiral, had any real military experience. Duke Peter had been raised as corporate royalty, not a navy brat. They were used to talking about numbers, statements on a balance sheet, not about lives and starship hulls and the intangibles that might make the difference between victory and defeat. William had studied war throughout the ages. He’d also lived it.

  He waited until they asked his opinion, then leaned forward. “There is a good chance the king’s faction is already threatening to split,” he said. The spies claimed as much, although long experience had taught him to be wary of anything the spooks said unless it was independently confirmed. “He’s failed to produce immediate victory. He’s doomed to lose unless he finds a new source of ships and weapons, and anything he does find will come with a heavy price tag. There will be factions who want to fight to the death and factions who will abandon him if offered a chance to back out. Perhaps we should offer them an easy way out.”

  “At the cost of losing our investment in their infrastructure,” Duchess Zangaria snapped. She tapped the table in front of her sharply, the sound faithfully reproduced by the holographic projectors. “Do you know how much it cost?”

  Enough money that the investment can only be explained by resorting to imaginary numbers, William thought wryly. More accurately, enough money to rebuild the entire fleet from scratch.

  He dismissed the thought with a shrug. “Your Grace, the money is lost. I don’t think there’s any way you can force them to pay, not when they literally don’t have the money to repay their debts. All the prewar financial assumptions went out the airlock after Cadiz. I think you’d be better off accepting that you’re not going to get the money back and moving on from there. If you offer to forgive the debts owed by every world that comes back to you, you might get a few takers. You might even offer to let the king go into exile on the other side of the Wall.”

  “Poor bastard,” Duke Tolliver muttered.

  Duke Peter shook his head. “You want to let him get away with murder—multiple murders—and starting a fucking civil war?”

  “It will be harder for him to keep the civil war going if he has a way out,” William said. He understood the duke’s outrage, but ending the war came first. “And his supporters will drift away from him when they realize he could have gotten out but didn’t.”

  “We’ll consider it,” Duke Peter said in a tone that added over my dead body. “We can certainly try debt forgiveness.”

  “And who is going to pay?” Duchess Zangaria scowled. “There’s no such thing as a free lunch, young man! The money has to come from somewhere.”

  “We could always strip the king’s corporation to pay,” Duke Tolliver suggested, nastily. “Let him pay for the lost facilities.”

  “And do immense damage to ourselves in the process?” Duchess Turin looked utterly unwilling to compromise. “We couldn’t afford it. Not now, not ever.”

  “I had my people run projections on the assumption those monies would never be repaid,” Duke Peter said. “It will be painful, I admit, but not disastrous. There’s a good chance we’ll never get the money, regardless of what we do. I don’t think we have much to lose because”—he smiled thinly—“we’ve already lost it.”

  “So you say,” Duchess Turin said. “Can I remind you that your father advocated for making those loans?”

  Duke Peter flinched. William felt a stab of sympathy.

  “My father did not know, at the time, that we’d be fighting a war that would require us to abandon all our careful planning and throw money in all directions,” Duke Peter said, his voice sharp enough to cut stone. “We believed the loans would be long-term, yes, but that they’d be repaid over the next few decades. There was no reason, then, to believe otherwise. In hindsight, those loans were a mistake. My father did not have the advantage of knowing then what we know now.”

  “We’re not blaming your father,” Duchess Zangaria said.

  Good, William thought. He felt a flash of vindictive amusement. Because you sat on those council meetings too, didn’t you?

  He smiled. Duke Peter and Duke Jackson Cavendish—who hadn’t been invited—were the only dukes who hadn’t taken part in those discussions, let alone voted for and against the planetary infrastructure project. They could claim innocence, quite rightly. They could blame their fellows, as unfair as it was . . . He chuckled. Duke Peter wasn’t the kind of person to rub their noses in their mistakes. And Duke Jackson Cavendish had other problems. His entire corporation was teetering on the brink of disaster.

  “Then it’s time to admit that the loans will never be repaid,” Duke Peter said. “We can launch a two-prong offensive. One, to discuss how the king manipulated events to start the war and plunge a number of worlds into enemy hands. Two, to offer debt forgiveness and general amnesty to any colonial world that forsakes the king and returns to the Commonwealth. We can agree to let bygones be bygones if they do the same.”

  “And so the guilty get away,” Duchess Turin pointed out. “They won’t be brought to justice.”

  “They can bow out of public life,” Duke Peter added. “People don’t fight to the death, Your Grace, if they think there’s a chance of surviving defeat. Just think how many Theocrats surrendered after they realized we weren’t going to gun them down on the spot! Let them go. It costs us nothing and gains us much.”

  “Not all the time,” Duke Rudbek mused. He’d been silent until now, content to let the younger aristocrats debate. “I’ve studied history. There have been times when the former rulers of defeated states, states that thoroughly deserved their defeat, were able to regain power and convince their people that they’d been on the side of right all along.”

  “How stupid those people must have been,” Duchess Zangaria said. “To believe lies is foolish at the best of times, but to believe liars after their untruths have been exposed is truly absurd.”

  Duke Rudbek chuckled. “What have the Romans ever done for us?”

  William smiled. He got the reference but doubted many of the others did. Kat Falcone was the only aristocrat he’d met who’d been particularly interested in prespace movies . . . The others, as far as he knew, had had little time to develop such tastes. Perhaps Kat had been rebelling against her parents and social class. He wondered, absently, what was Duke Rudbek’s excuse.

  “The scene is a joke,” Duke Rudbek explained. “The Romans have actually done a lot of good things for the locals. But they’re Romans, and thus outsiders and thus untrustworthy by definition. They
represent power without local accountability and could turn nasty at any moment. And so, distrust of the Romans makes perfect sense even though the Romans really have done a lot of wonderful things.”

  “Brought peace,” William muttered.

  “Quite,” Duke Rudbek agreed. “Point is, the former rulers were able to spin a narrative that made them the good guys and the outsiders the bad guys. And it wasn’t as stupid as it sounds.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Duke Peter said. “We can and we will make sure the former rulers go into exile. Or stay out of politics, as a quid pro quo for their survival. And if we reconstruct the governments properly, with sensible economic opportunities for those willing to take advantage of them, they won’t be a problem even if they try to return to power.”

  “I admire your optimism,” Duchess Turin said. She looked at Grand Admiral Rudbek. “Do you have a military plan to keep up the pressure?”

  Grand Admiral Rudbek looked at William, who nodded. “Yes, Your Grace. We intend to continue pressing against their territory, forcing them to either concede entire star systems to us or expend their resources defending them. Either way, we put wear and tear on their equipment that will make it harder for them to continue the war. We’re also looking at ways to hit their industrial base and damage it, but . . . there are concerns of mass casualties if we launch hit-and-run raids. We don’t want to be responsible for a slaughter.”

  “I’d have said we were already well past that point,” Duchess Turin said. “What about launching minor raids on Caledonia itself?”

  “Doable, but ineffective unless we launch a major offensive,” William said. A thought was nagging at the back of his mind. It might be possible . . . He made a mental note for future consideration, then redirected his attention to the councilors. “They’ll see them as little more than harassment, until we really push them.”

  “At least the raids will keep them off-balance,” Duke Peter said. He sounded as if he was looking for an excuse to end the meeting as quickly as possible. “And keep them from searching for weak points in our defenses.”