Flag In Exile

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Armsman Yard clicked to attention outside Honors quarters at her approach, and she wondered if the procession looked as silly as it felt. Andrew LaFollet led the way, Jared Sutton and Abraham Jackson, the latter still in surplice and cassock, followed her, and Jamie Candless brought up the rear like an escorting destroyer. It still seemed awfully complicated to her, and she remembered the first time she'd dined with Benjamin Mayhew and his family. Her mouth quirked at the memory of how grateful she'd been that she didn't have to put up with twenty-four-hour security oversight. God, she'd decided long ago, had a strange sense of humor.

Candless and LaFollet peeled off as she and her two staff officers continued into the cabin. The dining cabin hatch was open, and MacGuiness had just finished setting the table.

"Ready for us, Mac?" she asked while Sutton and Jackson followed her across the carpet.

"Whenever you are, Milady," MacGuiness assured her, and pulled Nimitz's highchair back from the table. The cat leapt from her shoulder to the chair, and Honor grinned at her steward.

"I'm sure Commander Jackson needs to, ah, slip into something a bit more comfortable, first," she said. The chaplain chuckled, then peeled off his surplice, and MacGuiness shook his head reprovingly at Honor as he draped the spotless white garment carefully over his forearm.

"That's all, Mac," Jackson said with a smile of his own, and ran a hand down his black cassock to smooth away a wrinkle. "I'm quite comfortable now, My Lady," he told Honor cheerfully. "After all, I wore this uniform for over five T-years before I ever tried on the Navy's."

"In that case, let's be seated, gentlemen," she invited. She took her own place, with Nimitz to her right and Sutton to her left while Jackson faced her from the table's far end, and watched MacGuiness pour the wine. The Gryphon vintage, a blush chablis from Wishbone, Gryphon's small, southern continent, was a bit sweet for Honor. She preferred a good, tart rose' or rich burgundy, but the Star Kingdom's softer wines had proven popular with Grayson palates, and it made an acceptable aperitif.

The steward finished pouring and withdrew, and Honor watched her guests sample their wine. She'd made a point of inviting Jackson to lunch after each Sunday's services, and Sutton joined her for virtually every meal as part of his ongoing professional education. He was far more confident and comfortable with his duties than he had been, but the social skills which went with a flag lieutenant's role still needed a little polishing. Besides, he was a member of her official "family," and she liked him.

She took a sip from her own glass, then looked at Jackson.

"If you don't mind an infidel's opinion, I particularly liked today’s hymns, Abraham. Especially the one after the second lesson."

"I never mind compliments, My Lady," the chaplain replied, "and I'm rather fond of that one myself."

"It didn't sound much like the other Grayson hymns I've heard, though," Honor observed.

"That's because it's much older than most of our sacred music, My Lady. I believe the original version was written back in the nineteenth century, ah, the third century Ante Diaspora, that is, on Old Earth by a man named Whiting. Of course, that predated space travel. In fact, it predated manned aircraft, and it's been revised and updated several times since. Still, I think the original feeling comes through, and you're right: it is beautiful. And appropriate to naval service, I think."

"I agree. But, then, I usually like your taste in music. I only wish I had a singing voice that didn't sound like a GQ alarm." Jackson's raised glass acknowledged both the compliment and her wry commentary on her own voice, and she smiled back, but then her expression turned thoughtful.

"You know," she said slowly, "it still feels... odd to me to hold official church services on a warship." Jackson quirked an eyebrow, and she shook her head quickly. "Not wrong, Abraham, just odd. Manticoran warships do have services, and any captain always tries to adjust her duty schedules around them, but they're purely voluntary, and the people who conduct them usually have other duties, as well. The RMN doesn't have a Chaplain's Corps, you know."

"Well, fair's fair, My Lady," Jackson said after a moment. "A Grayson would find the notion that any Navy could survive without chaplains equally odd. Of course, we've made some concessions, and rightfully so, I think, since we started 'borrowing' so many Manticoran personnel. Attendance at service used to be compulsory, not optional, which would hardly be suitable now. Besides, even when everyone in uniform belonged to the Church, I always felt conscripting worshipers probably wasn't exactly what God had in mind."

Sutton started to speak, then closed his mouth and shifted in his chair, and Honor glanced at him.

"Yes, Jared?" she invited. The flag lieutenant hesitated a moment longer, he was still uncomfortable about injecting himself into a conversation between his seniors, then made a small grimace.

"I was just thinking, My Lady, that it's a pity certain other people don't feel the way Brother Jackson does about 'conscripting worshipers.'" He looked down the table at the chaplain. There was a hint of apology in his eyes, but also a lot of anger. Jared Sutton had developed a strong, personal loyalty to his admiral, and he didn't like Edmond Marchant a bit.

"If you're referring to Lord Burdette, you don't have to worry about my feelings, Jared." Jackson shook his head wryly, but the bitterness poisoning his usually cheerful expression belied his light tone. "I don't have a clue where that situation's going to end, but I know Reverend Hanks well enough to suspect he's not taking Burdette's activities very kindly. Bad enough for the man to remove the Sacristy's choice from the pulpit by force without ordering his steaders to attend services conducted by that sorry bas..." The chaplain broke off and flushed. The noun anger had almost betrayed him into using was hardly suitable for a clergyman, and especially not in Honor's presence. "I mean, by Marchant," he finished instead.

"Yes, well, that's getting a bit afield from my observation." Honor moved the subject firmly away from Burdette and Grayson's religious... well, crisis probably wasn't the right word yet, but it was moving in the right direction, and Jackson accepted the shift.

"You were saying something about official and unofficial worship services, My Lady?" he asked politely.

"I was saying Manticoran ships don't have official chaplains. Of course, we've got so many religions and denominations that providing a chaplain for each of them would be the next best thing to impossible even if we tried." She smiled suddenly. "On the first SD I ever served in, the captain was a Roman Catholic, Second Reformation, I think; not the Old Earth denomination, the exec was an Orthodox Jew, the astrogator was a Buddhist, and the com officer was a Scientologist Agnostic. If I remember correctly, the tac officer, my direct superior, was a Mithran, and Chief O'Brien, my tracking yeoman, was a Shinto priest. All of that, mind you, just on the command deck! We had another six thousand odd people in the ship's company, and God only knows how many different religions they represented."

"Merciful Tester!" Jackson murmured in a voice that was only half humorous. "How do any of you manage to keep things straight?"

"Well, Manticore was settled by a bunch of secularists," Honor pointed out. "I hope you won't take this wrongly, but I sometimes think that what Grayson actually has is a church which spawned a state as a sort of accidental appendage. I realize things have changed, especially since the Civil War, but the very notion of a church-dominated state would have been anathema to the Manticoran colonists. They'd had too much historical experience with state churches back home."

Jackson cocked his head as he listened to her, then nodded with an air of thoughtful comprehension, but Sutton looked puzzled.

"Excuse me, My Lady, but I don't quite understand," he said.

"What the Steadholder means, Jared, is..." Jackson began, then broke off with a grimace. "Excuse me, My Lady. I believe you were making a point." His grimace became a grin. "Sometimes I tend to backslide into confirmation class mode."

"No, really?" Honor teased gently. The chaplain bent his head in a gesture of surrender, and she turned to Sutton. "Both the people who settled Grayson and the people who settled Manticore came mainly from Old Earth's western hemisphere, Jared, but they had very different reasons for leaving the Sol System.

"The Manticoran colonists primarily wanted to get away from a grossly overcrowded planet. They felt crowded and hemmed in and they were looking for both living space and economic opportunity elsewhere, but very few of them signed on because they felt like a persecuted minority.

"Grayson's colonists, on the other hand, were classic religious émigrés who did regard themselves as a persecuted minority. So whereas the Manticorans came from the entire spectrum of Old Earth's religious backgrounds, your ancestors came from a single one. That was, in fact, what set them apart from the entire civilization they were fleeing, which made it inevitable that they should develop a single state church and a theocratic state here."

"I see that, My Lady, but what did you mean about the Manties' 'historical experience with state churches'?"

"Two-thirds of Manticore’s colonists were from Europe, and Europe had a history of sectarian violence and religious conflict that went back to, oh, the sixth century Ante Diaspora, at least. Whole nations had spent centuries trying to kill each other over religious differences, like your own Civil War. The colonists didn't want anything like that happening to them, so they adopted the traditions of those of their numbers who came from North America, where separation between church and state had been part of the fundamental law. In the Star Kingdom, the state is legally prohibited from interfering in religious matters, and vice versa."

Sutton blinked. The notion of an explicit split between church and state seemed so alien that he looked at Jackson as if seeking confirmation that such a thing was even possible.

"Lady Harrington's quite correct," the chaplain told him gently. "And given the wide religious diversity in the Star Kingdom, its founders were very wise to set things up that way." He smiled sadly. "Anyone who studies history eventually comes up against the same cruel irony, Jared. Man has probably spent more time killing his fellows 'in God's name' than for any other single reason. Look at our own Civil War, or those lunatics on Masada." He sighed. "I know He loves us, but we must be a terrible disappointment to Him from time to time."

The primary supports were all in, and Adam Gerrick stood on the scaffolding which crowned what would become the dome's number one access annex and watched huge, glittering panes of crystoplast rising delicately into place. Although the crystoplast was barely three millimeters thick and far lighter than an equal volume of glass, the smallest panel was over six meters on a side, and while Grayson’s gravity was less than that of Lady Harrington's home world, it was seventeen percent higher than Old Earth's. Only four years before, the men maneuvering them into place would have relied upon grunting, snorting cranes and brute force; now they used counter-grav to nudge the shimmering, near-invisible panes into position with cautious ease, and Gerrick felt a thrill of pride he hadn't yet learned to take for granted.

He turned in place to survey the entire site. This was one of the smaller jobs, for Lord Mueller had decided he needed a demonstration project before he committed to something the size of a farm or city dome, but he'd certainly picked a gorgeous spot to put it. When the project was finished, it would protect the brand new Winston Mueller Middle School, set atop a bluff overlooking God's Tears, the most beautiful chain of lakes on the continent of Idaho. The school's buildings were in, and once the bluff wore its dome like a gleaming, high-tech crown, work crews would plant Old Terran grass and lay out playing fields, and, Gerrick chuckled, Lady Harrington was donating one of her "swimming pools." The school administrator had expressed his thanks, but the poor man still seemed dreadfully confused by the whole idea.

Small as it was, the project was certainly one of the most satisfying Sky Domes had underway. Especially for him. The entire dome concept had been his, but in the beginning, he'd thought of it primarily as a fascinating challenge to adapt Manticoran technology to Grayson needs, without really considering all its implications. Now that those implications had become a reality, he felt a deep, complex joy, a happiness that mingled the satisfaction of a challenge met with that sense of accomplishment, of knowing he would leave his world a better place than he had found it, which only the most fortunate of engineers got to savor.

And, he admitted with a broad smile, the fact that he was also in the process of becoming one of the wealthiest men in Grayson's history was pretty nice icing for his cake.

He turned back to the east and watched as the first section went into the uppermost tier. The dome looked lopsided and dangerously unbalanced with that single pane leaning so far out over the center of the school, but Gerrick saw with an engineer's eye. He'd personally checked every decimal place of the stress calculations, and he'd designed a safety margin of well over five hundred percent into the support structure.

The paneling teams sealed the pane with an instantly-setting caulking compound and moved quickly to the west side of the dome. Despite the safety factor, they wanted to complete the first full cross section of roof quickly to balance the stress, and Gerrick approved. Engineers believed as firmly in their calculations as they did in God, but they also believed in minimizing exposure to the Demon Murphy.

Gerrick smiled at the familiar thought and looked down as the high, clear sound of a child's voice cut through the work site's noise. A group of kids, students-to-be in the middle school, had asked permission to watch the completion of the main dome, and their teachers, after checking with the site supervisors, had organized a field trip. Needless to say, the Sky Domes staff had impressed them with the dangers the construction equipment represented, and Grayson children learned early to take adults' warnings to heart. They were well back under the completed eastern wall, and they were staying there, but that didn't mute their avid interest. He could see their excitement even from here as they watched the panels drifting upward on their counter-grav like some sort of impossibly beautiful seed pods and chattered to one another, and he smiled. He'd talked to some of those youngsters himself this morning, and two or three had looked like they had the making of good engineers.

He let his eyes sweep proudly back up the glittering wall above the kids... and that meant he saw it all happen.

It started almost gently, as the most terrible accidents so often do. The first movement was tiny, so slight he thought he'd imagined it, but he hadn't. One of the primary load-bearing supports, a solid shaft of alloy orders of magnitude stronger than titanium set in a hole bored fourteen meters into solid bedrock and sealed with over a hundred tons of ceramacrete, swayed like a young tree in a breeze. But that support was no sapling. It was a vital component of the dome's integrity, and even as Gerrick stared at it in disbelief it was turning, twisting in its socket as if it had been tamped into place with so much sand and not sealed into the densest, hardest mineral building material known to man. It couldn't happen. It wasn't just unlikely, it was impossible, and Gerrick knew it, for he was the man who'd designed it ... but it was also happening.

His eyes whipped unerringly to the supports which shared that shaft's component of the dome's weight. An untrained eye wouldn't even have known which ones to look at; to Gerrick, it was as obvious as if he'd spent hours pouring over the schematics that very morning, and his-heart leapt into his throat with horror as he saw one of them shifting as well!

He stared at it for one terrible, endless instant, his engineer's mind leaping ahead to the disaster to come. It was only a moment, no more than four seconds, possibly five; certainly not more than six, yet that moment of stunned inactivity would haunt Adam Gerrick. It didn't make any difference. He knew that, didn't think it, but knew it. Too much mass was in motion. The inevitable chain of events was beyond the control of any man, and nothing he did or didn't do could make the slightest difference, yet Gerrick would never forgive himself for that moment of stasis.

A soft, almost inaudible groan came from the moving supports, and a pane of crystoplast popped free. The glittering panel dropped, no longer drifting and lovely in its counter-grav supports but slashing downward like a gleaming guillotine, and Adam Gerrick began to run.

He flung himself down the scaffolding, screaming a warning, running straight towards the collapsing horror of his dream. It was madness, a race which could end only in his own death if he won it, but he didn't think about that. He thought only of the children, standing in what was supposed to be the safest part of the entire site... directly under those creaking, groaning, treacherously shifting supports.

Perhaps, he told himself later, if he'd reacted faster, if he'd started running sooner, if he'd screamed a louder warning, perhaps it would have made a difference. The engineer in him, the part of his brain and soul which manipulated numbers and load factors and vectors of force knew better, but Gerrick had two children of his own, and the father in him would never, ever, forgive himself for not having made it make a difference.

He saw one of the kids turn and look at him. It was a girl, no more than eleven, and Adam Gerrick saw her smile, unaware of what was happening. He saw her wave at him, happy and excited by all the activity . .. and then he saw eighty thousand metric tons of alloy and crystoplast and plunging horror come crashing down and blot that smile away forever.