War Of Honor

Those restrictions had made it very difficult for the Cromarty Government to pass the income tax (with a top rate of almost forty percent in the uppermost brackets) and special import duties required to finance the war. The public had accepted the immense financial burden of that tax structure with glum resignation only because Cromarty had successfully made the case for its necessity . . . and because the voters had expected it to lapse as soon as the war ended. Unfortunately for their expectations, the war hadn't ended (not officially, at any rate), and so the taxes remained in effect.

Naturally, High Ridge and his allies deeply (and publicly) regretted the fact that the Havenite refusal to conclude a formal peace required them to maintain the tax burden the Centrists had enacted. But their duty to ensure the Star Kingdom's security would not allow them in good conscience to reduce taxes until they could be positive the military theat had been ended once and for all in a formal treaty. In the meantime, that same tax structure provided an enormous influx of funds they could divert to other programs now that the shooting had stopped. Which was, of course, a simple, unanticipated consequence of the unsettled international situation.

Quite a bit of that largess had gone very quietly to certain political action organizations, union leaders, industrialists, and financiers. Siphoning those funds discreetly into the intended hands had been relatively easy, although it had been necessary to dress up the transfers with justifications like "research grants," "employment conditions studies," "educational subsidies," or "industrial expansion incentives." The new Royal Manticoran Astrophysics Investigation Agency had been one of the most successful of those sorts of ploys. No doubt some practical good would come of it, but its real value was that it had engaged the public imagination. It was the poster child for the "Building the Peace" campaign New Kiev had devised, and with excellent reason. After all, something like three quarters of the Star Kingdom's prosperity rested on its carrying trade and the mammoth through traffic the Manticoran Wormhole Junction serviced. Discovering additional destinations the Junction could serve could only enhance that wealth.

Of course, it was also a hideously expensive undertaking . . . rather more so than its administrators fully realized, High Ridge devoutly hoped. Almost ten full percent of its budget could be neatly skimmed off the top and passed directly to various ship builders and consulting firms without ever being wasted on something useful, and it had become such a popular icon no one dared question its expenditures.

Here and there, a few more odd forty or fifty million-dollar transfers had disappeared completely even without benefit of the RMAIA's cloak of respectability. Most of them had gone through discretionary funds or payments whose recipients could be concealed under a claim of national security endorsed by obliging members of the intelligence community, but very little of that sort of thing had actually been required.

By far the largest expenditures, however, had gone into long-cherished Progressive and Liberal social programs. High Ridge himself regarded them as nothing more than vote-buying boondoggles, and he was certain Descroix shared his view, whatever she might say for public consumption. But New Kiev was another matter. She truly believed that the "poor" of the Star Kingdom were destitute . . . despite the fact that the poorest of them enjoyed an effective income at least four times that of the average citizen of their Grayson allies, and somewhere around seven or eight times that of the average Havenite living in the financially ravaged Republic. She and her fellow Liberals were determined to build a new "fairer and more equitable Star Kingdom" in which the "indecent wealth of the monied classes" would be redistributed by government fiat, since the normal operation of the marketplace seemed incapable of doing so.

If pressed, High Ridge would have admitted that, as a matter of principle, he ought to have found the Liberals far more threatening than he ever could the Centrists. The impassioned rhetoric of New Kiev's more vociferous cohorts carried an ugly echo of the thinking which had led to the collapse of the original Republic of Haven and the creation of the People's Republic, after all. Fortunately, there was very little chance of their ever achieving their proclaimed goals in the Star Kingdom. And in the meantime, by giving both the Exchequer and the Home Office to the Liberals and strongly and publicly supporting New Kiev's domestic programs, he was able to blunt at least the sharper edges of the electorate's traditional view of the Conservative Association as the purely reactionary defender of aristocratic privilege at the expense of all other classes.

That had taken on additional importance following that damned Montaigne woman's hysterical slavery charges and the scandal they'd spawned. For that matter, the reorganization which had given the Liberals such a disproportionate share of ministerial power had been dictated by the same scandal. Support for the Government's handling of the resultant witch hunt had been reasonably solid in the Lords, although it had proven unfortunately necessary to sacrifice a few individuals to the moral outrage of the proles. The Commons had been a different matter, however, and Alexander's efforts to initiate a special inquiry—separate from and in addition to the official Government investigation—had been dangerous. In fact, it had been extremely dangerous, because although there'd been one or two names from the Centrists and a single Crown Loyalist in the files Montaigne and her common-born lover had turned over, there'd been many more Conservatives and Progressives.

And Liberals.

That had been the most dangerous aspect of the entire scandal, given the size of the Liberal Party's representation in the lower house. Not so much because of the convictions Alexander and his cronies might have secured, though those would have been bad enough, as because of the Liberals' internal revulsion at the mere possibility that any of their own could have been involved in something like genetic slave trading. That was the problem with people who insisted on defining themselves in terms of their principles and holier-than-thou morality. When something offended those principles (or at least threatened to draw the public's eye to their public violation), they tended to attack the offenders without any consideration at all of pragmatic strategy. High Ridge himself deplored the very existence of something like genetic slavery, of course, although he frankly doubted it was carried on on anything like the scale that hysterics like Montaigne insisted it was. But much as he deplored it, there were other matters to be considered, and he could scarcely be expected to throw away his one opportunity to prevent the Crown from destroying the fundamental balance of power mandated by the Constitution over a single issue, however much public agitation that issue might generate.

Unfortunately, it was impossible to explain that to a Liberal. Or, at least, to a Liberal member of the House of Commons who thought his constituents or the press might be listening in on the explanation. There'd been a dangerous groundswell of Liberal support for Alexander's demand for a separate inquiry, and High Ridge had managed to defuse it only by shifting things around to give New Kiev the Cabinet's second-ranking position and make Sir Harrison MacIntosh Home Secretary. In his new post, MacIntosh had been the member of the Government responsible for overseeing the investigation, and he had a well established reputation as a jurist. He was also a member of the Commons, not a peer, which had allowed the Liberal MPs to argue that he would never be a party to any "aristocratic coverup." And just as importantly, certain indiscretions in his past, coupled with a personality that was far more pragmatic in private than his public persona might have suggested, had helped provide the Prime Minister with a certain additional leverage even New Kiev wasn't aware existed.