Chapter Thirty-Two

“… THE excitement we all feel at this historic moment. The honor of speaking for the entire Star Kingdom, of somehow finding the words to express the pride Her Majesty’s subjects all feel in our incomparable scientific community on an occasion such as this, does not come often to any political leader, and I approach it with mingled pride and anxiety. Pride that it has fallen to me to attempt to speak aloud what all of us feel at this moment, and anxiety for how inadequate I know any words of mine must be. Yet I take courage from the reflection that, in the end, anything I may say will be only the first words spoken. They will be far from the last, and as the citizens of the Star Kingdom add their own, far more worthy thanks to my own, I know that…”

“My God,” T.J. Wix muttered out of the corner of his mouth. “Is he never going to shut up?!”

Jordin Kare and Michel Reynaud, seated to either side of him, managed not to glare repressively at him. They also managed not to grin in appreciative agreement with his plaintive tone… which was considerably more difficult. They sat with him on the raised stage of the press room, behind the lectern and the tall, narrow, stoop-shouldered form of the Prime Minister of Manticore, listening to his apparently interminable speech, and not one of them would have accepted the invitation to this prestigious moment if he’d had any choice in the matter.

Unfortunately, none of them had. And equally unfortunate, Kare reflected, was the fact that the High Ridge Government had found itself in greater need than usual of a public relations windfall at precisely the wrong moment.

I don’t suppose we ought to have expected anything else out of them, he reminded himself. Not that knowing what was coming would have made it any better.

The Prime Minister and his First Lord of Admiralty had suffered a sharp downtick in their popularity and job approval ratings when the HD footage of Secretary of War Theisman’s Nouveau Paris news conference reached the Manticoran public. The public’s reaction hadn’t been as severe as it might have been, but it had been undeniably sharp, and the Centrists and Crown Loyalists had done their best—with some initial success—to capitalize upon it.

Kare had entertained at least a faint hope that the shock of the news might weaken High Ridge’s grip on power, and he supposed it could still have a cumulative effect in that direction. But damaging as the revelation of the Peeps’ new naval capabilities might have been, it was obviously insufficient to do the job by itself.

It was difficult for the astrophysicist to keep his own highly disrespectful thoughts from shadowing his attentive expression as he sat watching the Prime Minister speak into the lenses of the newsies’ HD cameras, but he managed. He didn’t have much choice. Besides, disgusting as he might find High Ridge, he didn’t have a great deal more respect for his fellow citizens, either. In any reasonably run universe, the Manticoran electorate and even—God help them all—the Manticoran peerage ought to have been smart enough to rise up in revolt now that the consequences of the High Ridge-Janacek naval policies had become manifest. In the universe they actually occupied, things hadn’t quite worked out that way.