War Of Honor

"At this particular moment, Ma'am, we're approximately six hundred and twelve light-years from Manticore. And we've been able to identify that G2 star at four light-years as Lynx."

"Lynx?" Zachary's brow wrinkled, then she shrugged. "I can't say the name rings any bells, Rochelle. Should it?"

"Not really, Ma'am. After all, it's a long way from home. But the Lynx System was settled about two hundred T-years ago. It's part of the Talbott Cluster."

"Talbott?" This time Zachary recognized the name, and her eyes narrowed as she considered the implications of that recognition.

The Talbott Cluster was the thoroughly inaccurate name assigned to one of several regions, most of them rather sparsely settled, just beyond the frontiers of the Solarian League. Whatever else the "cluster's" stars were, they were nothing which remotely resembled anything an astrophysicist would have considered a cluster, but that didn't matter to the people who'd needed to come up with a convenient handle for them.

Most such regions were relatively hardscrabble propositions. Many of them contained colonies which had backslid technologically, severely in some cases, since their settlement, and only a few of them contained star systems which anyone from the Star Kingdom would have considered economically well established. And eventually, all of them would inevitably be incorporated into the glacially expanding frontiers of the League. Whether they wanted to be or not.

No one would resort to anything as crude as outright conquest. Sollies didn't do things that way . . . nor did they have to. The Solarian League was the largest, most powerful, wealthiest political entity in human history. On a per capita basis, the Star Kingdom's economy was actually somewhat stronger, but in absolute terms Manticore's entire gross domestic product would disappear with scarcely a ripple into the League's economy. When that sort of economic powerhouse expanded into the vicinity of star systems which could scarcely keep their heads above water, the train of events leading to eventual incorporation extended itself with the inevitability of entropy.

And if it didn't, the League could be counted upon to give the process a swift kick, Zachary reflected sourly.

Josepha Zachary was scarcely alone among the Star Kingdom of Manticore's naval officers in her dislike for the Solarian League. Actually, a lot of people who had been denied the honor and privilege of Solly citizenship disliked the League. It wasn't because the League went around conquering people. Not officially, anyway. It was just that the towering sense of moral superiority which the League seemed to bring to all of its interstellar endeavors could be absolutely relied upon to irritate every non-Solly who ever experienced it. The antipathy was exacerbated for the Royal Manticoran Navy, however, and Zachary was honest enough to admit it. The embargo which the Cromarty Government had managed to secure on weapons sales and technology transfers to the belligerents in the Star Kingdom's war against the Peeps had irritated the hell out of an awful lot of Sollies. Some of them had been none too shy about making their ire known, and some of those who hadn't been were officers in the Solarian League Navy or Customs Service who had expressed their personal irritation by harassing Manticoran merchant ships in Solarian space.

Even without that, however, Zachary knew, she wouldn't have cared for the Sollies. When the Solarian League was created, the local governments of Old Earth's older daughter worlds had already been over a thousand T-years old. Few of those planets had been prepared to surrender their sovereignty to a potentially tyra

That combination had created a situation in which the League effectively had no official foreign policy. Or, rather, what it had was a consensus so mushy that it was hopelessly amorphous. About the only clear and unambiguous foreign policy principle the League maintained was the Eridani Edict's prohibition against the unrestricted use of what were still called "weapons of mass destruction" against inhabited planets. And even that was only because the edict's proponents had used the Solarian Constitution's referendum provisions to do an end run around the Assembly and amend it to incorporate the edict into the League's fundamental law after the horrific casualties of the Eridani Incident.

But if the League had no official foreign policy, that didn't mean it lacked a de facto one. The problem was that the League Assembly as such had virtually nothing to do with that policy's formulation.

While the restrictions on the central government's ability to tax had indeed limited that government's power, the limitation was purely relative. Even a very tiny percentage of the total economic product of something the size of the Solarian League was an inconceivable amount of money. Despite that, however, the League was perpetually strapped for revenue, because the relative ineffectuality of the veto-riddled Assembly had resulted in the transfer of more and more of the practical day-to-day authority for managing the League from the legislature to bureaucratic regulatory agencies. Unlike laws and statutes, bureaucratic regulations didn't require the item-by-item approval of the entire Assembly, which, over the centuries, had led to the gradual evolution of deeply entrenched, monolithic, enormously powerful (and expensive) bureaucratic empires.

For the most part, the Sollies appeared to have no particular problems with that. Those regulatory and service agencies seldom intruded directly into the lives of the citizens as a whole. And however distasteful Zachary might have found their existence, they did perform many useful functions which the veto-hobbled Assembly would never have been able to discharge efficiently. But there was an undeniable downside to their existence, even for League citizens.

For one thing, the ever-growing sprawl of regulatory overreach required larger and larger bureaucracies, which, in turn, absorbed an ever growing percentage of the central government's total income. That, Zachary suspected, was one reason the Solarian League Navy, for all of its numerical strength and its perception of itself as the most powerful and modern fleet in existence, was probably at least fifty T-years out of date compared to the RMN. The Navy's budgets were no more immune to the hemorrhaging effect of such uncontrolled bureaucratic growth than any other aspect of the League government, which left too little funding for aggressive research and development and meant that far too many of the SLN's ships of the wall were growing steadily more obsolete as they moldered away in mothballs.

Had Zachary been a Solly, that alone would have been enough to infuriate her. Unfortunately, the Navy was only one example of the pernicious effect of siphoning more and more of the available resources of government into the clutches of bureaucratic entities subject to only the weakest of legislative oversight. But what Zachary found even more objectionable as someone who was not a Solly was the way in which the League bureaucrats made foreign policy without ever bothering to consult with the League's elected representatives. And probably the worst of the lot in that regard was the Office of Frontier Security.

The OFS had originally been conceived as an agency intended to promote stability along the League's frontiers. It was supposed to do that by offering its services to mediate disputes between settled star systems which were not yet part of the League. In order to provide incentives for quarreling star systems to seek its arbitration, it had been authorized to offer security guarantees, backed by the SLN, and special trade concessions to those systems which sought the League's protection.