Captain (The David Birkenhead Series) Read online

  I leaned back in my seat and sighed. "And one more thing."

  This time, he actually winced. The poor bunny must have hundreds of hours worth of work laid out for him by now, all of it marked urgent. "Yes, sir?"

  "First of all, just as soon as you can work it in I want you to hire yourself an assistant. Human, Rabbit… I don't care. In fact, I'd actively prefer a human if you can find one willing to work with us. I think it'd be an important step forward. You're to be my chief of staff from now on, Nestor, not my servant. Let someone else cook the meals and make my bed, at least while we're dirtside. You've done a wonderful job, mind you. But times are changing, and you can't do it all." I sighed. "Don't get me wrong, my friend. I value your dedication and hard work more than you can possibly imagine. But I need your sharp mind and loyalty even more. I want you close at hand to advise me, not chasing off after clean linen."

  There was a long silence. "Sir, I never… I mean.. When I was little…"

  "We were both born slaves," I reminded him. "But we're not anymore, either of us. We've grown, and in more ways than one. Perhaps all of us Rabbits have—I'm still not sure yet. Anyway, it's time that we act our age and accept our true responsibilities." I smiled. "In my case, I suppose that means wearing ridiculous clothes and sitting in the Hall of Nobles all day long for no good reason. In yours, well… It means no more domestic valet work, at least when there are others around to do it for you."

  "I see, sir," he answered slowly. "And… Thank you again. For everything."

  Then, sitting side by side in the back of the air-limo, we slept the sleep of the truly exhausted.

  9

  I'd thought the first day was a blur, but things only got worse from there. The navy wanted to see me in order to ask more questions about Richard's cruise, as well as to have an endless series of publicity pictures taken. The Royal War Museum asked Nestor and I to recreate the wet-cement footprints we'd left on Imperious for posterity—someone, somehow had smuggled out holographs of the originals, and currently the image was the single most downloaded file in Royal space. Uncle Robert wanted me at his side in meeting after meeting, even though I practically never had anything useful to say or more than half-understood the subtleties of the game he was playing. On top of this I had duties of honor to fulfill towards former crewmates. It was an old navy tradition that a spacer's obligations to his former shipmates never really ended, especially when there was something memorable or extra-dangerous about the cruise in question. This was especially true for the commanding officer. Even more, I owed an extra-special obligation to my Rabbits. One of the Zombie Station mob had run up an enormous gambling debt while working at my estate, and found it very natural to turn to me for help. "I still don't understand why I didn't win that last round," the letter he'd dictated to one of his more literate fellows read. "It was a sure bet—even the dealer said so!" I sighed and handed the case over to Marcus's legal department, who in turn subpoenaed the legally-mandated recording of the game in question. In the end the casino either couldn't or chose not to produce it, which negated their claim entirely. It was obvious to everyone that Minky had been cheated, and yet… I still had to block out half a day to sit down with him and explain why what he'd done was so foolish. Even worse I learned in the process that several of my other Rabbits were regular customers at the same establishment, so I had to make time to talk to all of them as well. It wasn't something that could be delegated; while they might possibly have listened to Nestor speaking in my name, I wouldn’t have given very good odds. The explanation wouldn't have had the same impact, coming from him. The simple fact was that there wasn't enough of me to go around— I was wearing far, far too many hats. So in the end I finally had to pick and choose, leaving some obligations begging. Oddly enough, at least for a time it was the navy and Uncle Robert that I found myself shorting the most severely. Perhaps it was because of my lack of any other personal life, and certainly in some ways it was a bit selfish. But somehow I found my personal obligations far more compelling than the political or career-based ones. My old friend Chief Engineer Lancrest, for example, had contracted a fatal illness during my long absence and was barely hanging on. He asked me to come and visit with him one last time before he passed away, and I actually ended up demanding of the navy that my own court marital be rescheduled to allow for it. I got my way, too: the expression on the face of the Court's secretary when the motion was granted was priceless.

  Soon, however, it became evident that I couldn't afford to continue on like that. The real shocker came when what should've been a routine vote in the House of Lords went unexpectedly awry. The matter in question was a routine defense bill okaying the continued funding of three dreadnoughts that were half-complete. The vessels had long been authorized, and during wartime their construction was hardly controversial. The original purchase order had sailed through without opposition. But now that it was time to appropriate money to finish the things, well… Something went terribly wrong, though at first no one could say just what.

  "…purposeless continuation of the conflict," Lord Dunbar was declaring from the rostrum when I arrived, late as usual due to another obligation. "We've lost three worlds already; how many more will go by the wayside if we continue fighting a losing struggle?"

  I looked at Uncle Robert as I sat down; his features were hard, his cheeks were white with anger, and the little green light that indicated he wished to speak on the current motion was lit. It would've been a red light, except that apparently his apportioned debate time was already used up. "Our losses are acceptable. We can make an honorable peace," Dunbar continued, smiling gently. "We should make an honorable peace, this time a lasting one according proper recognition to the true balance of power in the universe. And why do we need more expensive men-of-war to live in peace?"

  About half the men at the table applauded, and a deep, dark chill ran through my soul. What was going on here, anyway?

  Then Lord Wilkes arose, ignoring my uncle's green light. Which he had every right to do, of course, given that the Marcus time-quota was all used up. "I move for a vote, gentlemen. Who among us favors funding Defense Continuing Appropriation 372?"

  Ten hands shot up, Uncle Robert's first of all.

  "And those opposed?" he demanded. Fourteen rose.

  Dunbar smiled wider than ever. "The nays have it, which concludes today's business. Do I hear a motion to adjourn?"

  10

  "Miserable defeatist bastards!" my uncle raged, once ensconced safely in the privacy of his personal office. "Traitors! Weaklings!"

  With my own hands I poured him three fingers worth of his favorite whiskey and placed the glass in front of him. "Calm down," I scolded. "You'll have a stroke. And what good would that do anyone?"

  He frowned, then nodded and drained half the liquor in one swift gulp. "Thank you, David," he said, sitting down at last. "You're right, of course." Then his eyes hardened again. "But still! I can't believe that—"

  "What just happened?" I interrupted him, my voice still deliberately calm and gentle. "I thought we had twelve votes wrapped up?"

  "We used to," he acknowledged, shaking his head. "Or at least I thought we did. But we seem to have lost a couple." Then he sighed and sort of slumped. "This was a test-vote," he explained. "A parliamentary maneuver. When people are switching sides, it's natural that for a period of time they tend to ride the fence. In private they agree with the opposition while in public they still vote the way they always did before. So you can never be sure where they stand, from either side of the equation." He sipped at his whiskey again. "Until of course you force them out into the open. Which is best accomplished by choosing an issue where they have to make a clean break with their past and making sure they understand that if they don't put their money where their mouth is they'll be cut out of all future deals. That's exactly what Lord Dunbar did today—force two side-switchers to openly commit to his leadership." He looked down at his desk. "The good news is that Dunbar was uncertain enough of the outcome that he chose an issue of trivial importance for his test. Those battlewagons won't be completed for another four years, and the current funding is enough to carry on work for several more months. We'd have ended up voting on them again and again regardless, I'm sure—it's just how these things work. He didn't have much to lose, in other words, if things hadn't gone his way." Then he met my eyes again. "The bad news, of course, is that our side lost."

  I sighed and sat down in the special Rabbit-chair that my uncle kindly kept in his office for me, despite the fact that he didn't really have enough room for it. "I see."

  "We're moving the wrong way," my uncle explained, quite unnecessarily. "We need sixteen votes to crown James. Anything less leads to a Regency. And if that happens, the Imperials will eat up this entire kingdom, one little nibble after another."

  ***

  It was to be expected, I suppose, that I'd not be much interested in politics except in the most general sort of way. There were a thousand factors mitigating against it. One was that from my earliest childhood I'd been told over and again that politics was for humans, that it was a waste of time for a Rabbit to so much as read the daily paper. My father had believed this deeply, and he was absolutely correct for his own purposes. Even as a ship's engineer he was in the end a slave who went where he was told to go and did what he was told to do. Politics can never matter to the utterly powerless, at least in a pragmatic way. It is for them to endure, not to have opinions. Though it hurt me in some ways to admit it, Father had been exactly that—powerless, in political terms.

  So I'd been raised by someone with no real interest in the subject, and then, well… Yes, the Marcuses were into politics in a very large way indeed. But I was still a Rabbit despite my adoption, and always would be.
Though they made sure that I understood the basics, politics as a higher art had always been the province of James and Uncle Robert. "You go build your navy career," the unspoken deal had always been between the three of us. "You're especially good at that, and it's important that there be such a well-known, famously-capable Rabbit in the universe. Don’t worry about politics; we'll take care of that end of things." While I'd gotten entangled in a little bit of intra-family feuding regarding land and ship purchases while putting together the fencibles, well… Pretty much every Marcus wanted to be my friend, so they went out of their way to smooth the road for me. Therefore I was still pretty much an innocent when it came to dealing with smoke-filled rooms. Even more, I was happy to be an innocent—as a Rabbit there wasn't any way that I could ever function socially among the truly powerful, so there'd never been any point in wasting much time learning much about the subject.

  Now, however… I felt helpless, and there wasn't anything I hated worse than that. So I decided to do some cramming.

  The battleship vote was held on a Friday afternoon. Instead of spending all Saturday and Sunday giving speeches and inspecting a new destroyer, as planned, I stayed home "sick" in my cabin. It was a lie and I hated lies, but this was clearly a necessary one. My stomach still gave me trouble sometimes after doing almost entirely without hay for so long on Zombie Station, and my doctors had cautioned me to treat each flareup seriously. Normally I just toughed things out and went about my normal business like nothing was wrong, but the flip side was that when I did claim illness no one doubted me for a second.

  "Let's lay things out on paper," I suggested to Nestor as we locked ourselves into my office for the duration. "That's what Professor Lambert always suggested when planning a campaign."

  So we did just that, on a wall-sized chart laid out just like the conference table in the Hall of Nobles. We colored each chair based half on their past voting history and half on the battleship-funding bill. Then we added in every other factor we could think of as well as a series of little coded dots around the chairs—the relative strengths of the various Houses, what industries their economies were based on, their geographical extent, how many worlds they'd already lost to the Imperials…

  At first we found nothing surprising. Those Houses with the most to lose in wartime, or with a history of having lost the most worlds, were generally the stalwarts in opposition to the Marcus point of view. It was understandable enough—the Houses whose economies were built on shipping, for example, were bearing far more than their proportional cost of the endless wars. The House of Dunbar represented these perfectly—Lord Dunbar himself had chastised me for widening the conflict via my attacks on the merchies in Richard even as he'd insisted on waving my pennant and basking in my victories. The correct answer to his dilemma in my book was for the other Houses to pool their resources and offer extra aid to vulnerable Houses such as his own—Lord Robert, in fact, had been pushing for years in exactly that direction. But the others wouldn't go along, so one could see why the House of Dunbar might reasonably be less enthusiastic about the war than the rest.

  This sort of thing accounted for three of the fourteen Houses that'd voted against us, but that left eleven others. What was their beef with Marcus? One by one Nestor and I picked out the factors we thought might be the drivers behind their points of view. Five of them were fringe Houses, so small and economically insignificant that they only continued to exist due to their traditional right to cast a vote in the House of Lords. Each of them owed their survival to one or more patron-Houses, who continued to prop them up in exchange for their willingness to vote however they were told to vote. It was an archaic and absurd way to run the kingdom's business, Nestor and I agreed. But I could hardly complain that it was unfair—powerful Marcus had six such vassal-Houses of her own, and Kandoro was well on her way to becoming the seventh. (Indeed, there was much speculation that His Majesty had deliberately sired James's father out of wedlock in anticipation of his own House's final fall from viability, thus further empowering what was clearly someday going to become Kandoro's protector-House.)

  So, what motivated the other six "no" votes? Four of them were due to the same kind of blood-obligations that bound the House of Quenton to Marcus, we decided—there'd been considerable intermarriage. But figuring out the last two was tough going indeed, though we were convinced we were on the right track because these were the same ones whose side-switching had so infuriated Uncle Robert. We added more and more dots and color-codes until the chart became an incomprehensible mishmash except in the immediate vicinity of the famous Empty Seats. These were the chairs formerly held by the breakaway Houses that'd become the Empire. They remained unoccupied in a symbolic appeal for their return. One of the two vote-changing Houses, that of Wilkes, happened to sit right next to one of these empty spaces. It was pure coincidence, and yet…

  I scowled, making my whiskers go all awry. "Nestor," I said slowly. "James and his elder brother are the two leading candidates for the throne."

  "Without question," he agreed. "Especially once His Majesty passes away and the final will and testament is read. Everyone expects him to acknowledge their legitimacy there."

  I nodded. "In fact, their claim is so strong that I can't even name number three. Can you?"

  He titled his head to one side, then wriggled his nose for a moment. "You're right. It's sort of strange, but I can't either."

  I looked at our chart again. "I'll bet you half your glazed carrots at our next fancy dinner with the family that he's either a Wilkes or a Hashimoto."

  Nestor's jaw dropped, then his nose began wriggling too. Hashimoto was the other vote-changing House. "No deal," he replied at last. Then he turned to his keyboard, and in two minutes had the answer. "It's a good thing I didn't bet. You'd have gotten the whole portion."

  I blinked. "But I was only going to bet half!"

  "There's not one but two equally-qualified number-three pretenders," he explained. "So closely matched that no one can really decide which is the stronger. They're His Majesty's second cousins. One is a Hashimoto, and the other a Wilkes."

  11

  I really should've met with Uncle Robert that Monday morning, but one of the few things that even he accepted as having a higher priority than politics was my duty to the navy. Direct orders were nothing to toy with, even when you were considered as successful an officer as I was.

  Ostensibly I was at Navy Headquarters for my court-martial. Mr. Wong was representing me again, and this time it wasn't nearly as big a deal as it'd been before. "If they were to find the officer who left his footprints on Imperious guilty," he explained the first and only time we met on the subject, "the rioting would go on for weeks. They'd have to be insane to find you guilty, David. Either that or damn fools. They wouldn't convict you even if you'd actually done something wrong. Which you haven't, of course."

  This time around there were no criminal charges. The only issue at stake was to determine if the loss of Richard might possibly have been due to negligence, incompetence, or cowardice on my part. Clearly none of those applied, and everyone involved recognized that the court marital was merely a formality. The officers convened for less than an hour, then I was once again most honorably acquitted and urged to wear my Sword in good health. Afterwards, however, I was rather surprised when Admiral Panetta, the Second Space Lord, ambushed me out in the corridor. Nestor and I were attempting a break for home, but he was too quick for us. "Commander!" he greeted me, shaking my hand warmly. He even spared my aide a nod and smile, which was more than most of the high muckety-mucks did. "I'm pleased to hear that you've been formally cleared. Not at all surprised, mind you. But pleased nonetheless."