Read Online Conquerors' Pride by Timothy Zahn - Free Book Online

and for all within the Commonwealth and among the nonhuman worlds," Maxwell was intoning. "For the past decade the policies of the Northern Coordinate Union have been treated with thinly veiled contempt by more and more member states of the Commonwealth. Particularly those policies involving the organization and philosophy of the Peacekeeper forces that protect them. It's high time we demonstrated to the critics that their taxes and young people have not been simply disappearing into some soft, bloated military bureaucracy. The Peacekeepers are hard and lean and ready to fight. It's time they proved it."

He picked up his plate and stepped down from the podium to a ripple of applause from the rest of the chamber. "He's sure ready to go," Aric murmured.

"He's not the worst, either," his father said. "There's a small but vocal faction that's convinced on philosophical grounds that a strong common enemy is exactly what the Commonwealth has been missing lately. Something to pull humanity together, get us all going in the same direction again."

"Under NorCoord leadership, of course."

The elder Cavanagh shrugged. "Some of them genuinely believe that would be better for all of humanity. I'm not sure all of them do."

"Has anyone brought up CIRCE yet?"

"Not yet," the other said grimly. "But it can only be a matter of time."

Aric studied his father's profile. The taut cheeks, the haunted eyes. The memories. "You don't want it reassembled, do you?"

The other sighed. "You see CIRCE as history," he said, gesturing toward the Parliament floor. "Most of the people down there do, too. Even those my age who lived through the events saw CIRCE more as facts and numbers in a news report than anything else. But I was there. I saw what it did."

Aric frowned. "I didn't know you were at Celadon."

"I wasn't at the battle, no," his father shook his head. "But I was with the cleanup crew that went aboard one of the Pawolian warships afterward."

Wandering around a ghost ship... "Pretty bad, huh?"

"In its own quiet way it was the most terrifying thing I've ever witnessed," the elder Cavanagh said. "You had to see those ships, Aric, to really appreciate what CIRCE had done to them. The Pawoles knew we were experimenting with ion-beam weapons, and they'd built some awesome ion protection into those five ships. They had multiple layers of superdense metal shielding, high-power dipole field generators, even a liquid-envelope radiation reflector. None of it did a bit of good. Twenty-five thousand Pawoles died in that one shot, radiation-burned right where they stood. A shot, remember, that went straight through the cloud of fighters arrayed between the two lines without even singeing them. That was the eeriest part of all."

Aric shrugged slightly. It was hard to get too worked up over nonhumans who'd died before he'd even been born. Especially when it was the Pawoles who'd picked the fight in the first place. "It ended the war," he pointed out.

"Oh, it ended the war, all right," his father said heavily. "And we were all terrified out of our minds that it would end everything. You know as well as I do that no technology ever remains exclusive property for very long-not nuclear weapons, not the Chabrier stardrive, not anything. If CIRCE's secret had leaked out..." He shook his head. "We've been lucky, Aric. Weapons like CIRCE almost always lead in one of two directions: a balance of power where everyone has it, or abuses of power by the exclusive owner. In this case we've had neither."

"Perhaps," Aric murmured noncommittally. It was true enough that CIRCE hadn't been used since the Pawolian war, but not everyone would agree that just because a weapon wasn't fired meant it wasn't being abused. The NorCoord Union had slowly been becoming a secondary voice in Commonwealth politics when the Pawolian war and CIRCE came along. It was hardly a secondary voice now.

A historical fact that was surely not lost on those Parlimins down there. "So how long do