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 blasé 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 ‘blasé’ 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 the Royal Manticoran Navy and its allies only a single wormhole transit away. That was bad enough, but according to his agents within the Assembly, it appeared the system delegations of Strathmore, Kenichi, and Galen were strongly inclined to recommend that their own star systems follow Beowulf’s example! He didn’t know if any of them had actually made their recommendations yet, but their system governments certainly seemed angry enough to take the plunge once they did, especially if Beowulf succeeded in its defiance of the entire League, and the thought was terrifying. The average population of the four star systems was over six billion, and the decision of twenty-four billion Solarian citizens to withdraw would be a body blow to the federal government’s authority and prestige.
No, he thought, not to the federal government, but to the federal system. To us, sitting right here. And, damn it, sometimes I think they’d be right! But what other alternative is there? We can’t reform a system that’s been in place for the better part of a thousand T-years on the run. Especially not in the middle of a military and constitutional crisis! The entire League would come apart! Before we can fix the League’s problems — assuming anyone can fix them — we have to hold it together long enough to be fixed.
“Well, personally, I don’t think your silver lining’s especially bright,” MacArtney said sourly. “I’ve been hearing from a lot of people who aren’t any too happy about the invasion highway Beowulf offers if the Manties decide to come after us right here. For that matter, I’m not too crazy about it either!”
“The worst thing the Manties could possibly do — from their perspective, not ours — is to attack the Sol System.” Kolokoltsov barked a laugh. “In fact, I wish they would! It’s the one thing I can think of practically guaranteed to get all the Core Worlds lined up to back us!”
“You really think so?” Agatá Wodoslawski sounded doubtful. “I mean, if they — and the Havenites, too; let’s not forget them — were to take out Old Terra, you don’t think that would terrify the rest of the League into throwing in the towel?”
“Only in the shortest possible term,” Kolokoltsov said positively. “Personally, I think it would convince most of the other Core Worlds that the Manties and their friends are just as expansionist and arrogant as we’ve been telling them they were all along. It would sure as hell knock any notion of distant, plucky little neobarbs defending themselves against Solarian aggression on the head and turn them into cynical imperialists striking at the very heart of the greatest star nation in human history! The most likely thing for the rest of the Core Worlds to do in that case would be to sue for a cease-fire just long enough to figure out how to build matching missiles of their own, then hammer this ‘Grand Alliance’ flat, and the Manties have to know it.”