The summoned waiter appeared at Ramirez's elbow, and the colonel smiled at his companions.
"The same again for everyone?" His voice was deep, but its curiously liquid consonants gave it an almost musical lilt. San Martin was one of the worlds whose ethno-preservationist colonists had managed to hang onto their native language, and Ramirez had never lost his accent.
Murmurs of agreement met his question, but Alistair McKeon shook his head with a smile.
"No more beer for Mr. Tremaine," he announced. Lieutenant (Senior Grade) Scotty Tremaine made an indignant sound, and McKeon chuckled. "We adults have to look after the infants among us. Besides, he's going on watch soon."
"With all due respect, Sir, that's a load of, um, unfounded prejudice. We younger, fitter types have the metabolism to handle alcohol without impairing our faculties. Unlike," the sandy-haired lieutenant added, "some oldI mean, certain distinguished senior officers."
"You, young man, spend entirely too much time with people like Senior Chief Harkness." McKeon's tone was austere, but his eyes twinkled, and Tankersley swallowed a laugh. He'd come to know the people around this table well and liked them all, not just Ramirez, but he'd been more than a little surprised by McKeon's and Tremaine's off-duty informality.
Most captains he'd known never socialized with their juniors, much less joked with them, but McKeon managed it without ever undermining his authority or suggesting that he played favorites. Paul wasn't certain how the captain managed that, and he was fairly sure he couldn't have done it himself, but Tremaine's own personality probably had something to do with it.
"Not guilty, Sir," the lieutenant said now. "I'm just reminding you of scientifically demonstrated facts."
"Of course you are." McKeon smiled again, then shrugged. "All right. One more beer for Mr. Tremaine. After that, he's on sodas."
His voice held a slight but unmistakable undertone of command, and Tremaine accepted it with a nod and a smile of his own. The waiter tapped their orders into his pad and departed, and Hibson drained the last swallow from her current stein and sighed.
"I have to say I'm glad things are finally settling down dirt-side," she said, picking up the thread of their earlier conversation, "but I can't help wishing Burgundy had pulled it off."
"Amen to that," Ramirez rumbled with an uncharacteristic frown, and McKeon nodded, but Tankersley shook his head.
"I don't think I do, Susan," he disagreed. The others looked at him in surprise, and he shrugged. "I don't give a good goddamn what happens to Pavel Young, as long as it's unpleasant, but refusing to admit him to the Lords would only have made the situation still worse."
"I hate to admit it, but you're probably right," McKeon said after a moment. He shook his head. "Who would have believed that little shit would actually support the declaration? I hate agreeing with him on anything, and I don't believe for a minute that he's really changed, but the son-of-a-bitch has been useful. And I imagine refusing to seat him would have made things worse for the Captain in the long run, too, now that you mention it."
Paul nodded seriously, but the corners of his mouth tried to smile. All of his companions knew he was Honor's lover, and all of them were unabashed partisans of hers, as well, but they allevery one of them, including McKeon, who commanded his own shipreferred to her only as "the Captain" or "the Skipper."
"I think you're right, too, Sir," Scotty Tremaine said with unwonted seriousness, "but I'm still not clear on exactly what happened or what it was all about. I mean, Young did inherit an earldom. Doesn't that automatically make him a member of the House of Lords?"
"Yes and no, Scotty." Paul gazed down into his empty glass, turning it slowly on the table before him, then looked up and relinquished the empty as the waiter returned. He took a sip of his fresh beer and pursed his lips.
"Youngor North Hollow, nowis, indeed, a peer of the realm," he continued. "Unless he'd been attainted for treasonwhich he would have been, had he been convicted of cowardice in the face of the enemyhe's legally his father's heir. But the Constitution gives the Lords the right to refuse to seat someone, peer or no, as unfit for membership. It hasn't been done in something like a hundred T-years, but the right to exclude is still there, and not even the Queen can override it if a two-thirds majority of the Lords chooses to exercise it. That's what Burgundy was after when he introduced his motion to consider North Hollow's 'demonstrated lack of character.'"
Tremaine nodded, and Tomas Ramirez used his own stein to hide his grimace of distaste. He was a loyal subject of Queen Elizabeth, but he'd never quite accepted the notion of birth as an automatic guarantor of privilege. San Martin had enjoyed, if that was the word, its own hereditary elites before its conquest by the Peeps, but an explicit aristocracy had never been part of them.
He was willing, if pressed, to admit that Manticore's nobility had done well by the Star Kingdom over the centuries. And, certainly, any political system had its own built-in faults. After all, it was designed to govern humans, and humanity could be counted upon to screw anything up periodically. But ever since he'd become aware of the hatred between Pavel Young and the Captain, and especially since he'd learned how it had all started, he'd been even more skeptical than ever about this notion of inherited political power. Like McKeon, he had no faith in Young's apparent conversion, either. The bastard was up to something. The thought that he might get away with whatever he was after was nauseating, and the way some of the other Lords were still trying to prevent effective operations against the Peeps hadn't done a thing to change Ramirez's mind about the institution itself, either.
Of course, the Captain herself was a noble now, he reminded himself, and there were others who'd earned their titles the hard wayor proven they deserved them, however they'd gotten them. People like the Dukes of Cromarty and New Texas, or Earl White Haven and Baroness Morncreek. And there were others who at least recognized their responsibilities and did their best to meet them, like the Duke of Burgundy and the five other peers who'd joined his motion to exclude North Hollow. But the combination of stupidity and self-interest which was making it so hard for Cromarty to obtain his declarationand so easy for Young to play statesmansickened the colonel.
"and the Government couldn't support Burgundy," Tankersley was going on to Tremaine. "I'm pretty sure they would have loved to do just that, at least until North Hollow started pushing support for the declaration. But with the Opposition ready to scream partisan politics, supporting Burgundy and the other nonaligned peers would have"
Ramirez tuned it out and looked around the bar. He couldn't disagree with Tankersley, but that didn't mean he had to like it. And hearing someone who loved the Captain being forced to explain why the Government had no choice but to support the admission to the highest legislative body in the Kingdom of a piece of garbage who hated her did bad things to his digestion.
His eyes swept the patrons about him, and a tiny flaw in his surroundings caught at his attention. He couldn't put his finger on exactly what it was, but something drew his gaze back to a fair-haired civilian standing with one elbow on the bar nursing a frosted glass. The colonel's eyes narrowed, something like a ghost of elusive memory plucking at the corner of his mind, but he couldn't quite lay hands on it and pin it down. Perhaps it was nothing at all. Or, more likely, it was simply the way the man was standing. There was an almost theatrical gracefulness to his pose, and he was gazing more or less towards Ramirez's table as he, too, surveyed the crowd. Their eyes met for just a moment, the strangers bland and incurious; then he turned back to the bartender to order a refill, and the colonel shrugged and returned his attention to his companions.