She tapped a command into her terminal, and a star chart blinked into existence above the conference table. The rough sphere of the Silesian Confederacy glowed amber, its nearest edge a hundred and thirty-five light-years to galactic northwest of Manticore. The slightly larger sphere of the Anderman Empire glowed green, a bit further away from Manticore and below and to the southwest of Silesia but connected to the Star Kingdom by the thin, crimson line that indicated a branch of the Manticore Wormhole Junction. One scarlet edge of the enormous, bloated sphere of the People's Republic was just visible a hundred and twenty light-years northeast of Manticore and a hundred and twenty-seven light-years from Silesia at its closest approach, and the golden icon of the Basilisk System terminus of the Wormhole Junction glowed squarely between Haven and the Confederacy. One look at that chart was enough to make all the advantages—and dangers—of the Star Kingdom's astrographic position painfully clear, Honor thought, studying it for a moment, then cleared her throat.
Some interstellar distances; 125 LY from Manticore to Silesian border. 120 light-years between Manticore and the Haven border (pre-war or after Hamish moved in?) and 127 from Haven to Silesia.
All of them knew the Anderman Empire had cast covetous eyes on the Silesian Confederacy for over seventy years. It was hard to blame the Empire, really. The chronic weakness of the Silesian government and the chaotic conditions it spawned were bad for business. They also tended to be more than a little hard on Silesian citizens, who found themselves in the way of one armed faction or another with dreary regularity, and the Andermani had been faced with several incidents along their northern frontier. Some of those incidents had been ugly, and one or two had resulted in punitive expeditions by the Imperial Andermani Navy. But the IAN had always walked carefully in Silesia, and that was the RMN's fault.
More than one Manticoran prime minister had looked as longingly at Silesia as his or her imperial counterparts. Economically, Silesia was second only to the Empire itself as a market for the Star Kingdom, and chaos there could have painful repercussions on the Landing Stock Exchange. That was an important consideration for Her Majesty's Government, and so—though only, Honor was prepared to admit, in a lesser way—was the continual loss of life in Silesia. Eventually, unless there was a major change in the Confederacy's central government's ability to govern, something was going to have to be done, and Honor suspected Duke Cromarty would have preferred to take care of the problem years ago. That, unfortunately, would have involved one of those "aggressive, imperialist adventures" which all the current Opposition parties decried for one reason or another. So instead of cleaning up the snakes' nest once and for all, the RMN had spent over a century policing the Silesian trade lanes and letting the Confederacy's citizens slaughter one another to their homicidal hearts' content.
Silesia is an important market and a territorial ambition to Manticore and the Andermani alike. Well, it would be a territorial ambition for Manticore if they could overcome their schizophrenic politics.
That same fleet presence was all that had deterred the last five Andermani Emperors from grabbing off large chunks of Silesian territory. At first, the deterrence had stemmed solely from the fact that the RMN was a third again the size of the IAN, but since the Peeps had turned expansionist, the Empire had discovered an additional reason to exercise restraint. The Emperor must be tempted to try a little smash and grab while Manticore was distracted, but he couldn't be certain what would happen if he did. The Star Kingdom might let it pass, under the circumstances, but he could also find himself in a shooting war with the RMN, and he didn't want that. For sixty years, the Star Kingdom had been the roadblock between his own empire and Peep conquistadors, and he wasn't about to weaken that barricade now that the shooting had started.
Or that, at least, was the Foreign Ministry's analysis, Honor reminded herself. The Office of Naval Intelligence shared it, and she tended to agree herself.
Why the Andies aren't taking advantage of Manticore's distraction (what with the giant empire trying to eat them) to plant the flag in Silesia.
"It seems to me that the biggest concern is going to be getting them into space soon enough without doing it too soon," she went on. "We'll need to get some idea of how fast we can manage a crash launch, and I'm going to try to get us enough time to practice it against some of our own warships. That should give us a meterstick for how easy our parasites are to detect and whether or not we can conceal them by deploying them on the far side of our own impeller wedges. After that, we need to take a good look at tying them into our main fire control, and, given our own lack of proper sidewalls or armor, our point defense net.
Figuring out how fast they can scramble the LAC parasites, networking with the LACs, seems there the
Trojans at least have point defense.
Electronics Technician First-Class Aubrey Wanderman was almost as young as prolong made him look. He was brown-haired and slim, with the wiry, half-finished look of his youth, and he'd dropped out of Mannheim University's physics program half-way through his freshman form to enlist. His engineer father had opposed the decision, but he'd been unable to change Aubrey's mind. And though James Wanderman still bemoaned his son's "excessive burst of patriotic fervor," Aubrey knew he'd developed a hidden pride in him. And, he thought sardonically, not even his father could complain about the schooling the Navy had subjected him to. Any major university would grant him a minimum of three years' credit for the intensive courses, and the fact that he'd completed them with a 3.93 rating explained the first-class stripe on his sleeve.
Meet Aubrey Wanderman, an electronics/grav tech which is apparently very nearly equivalent to a four-year degree.
But gratifying as his rate was, he'd taken the better part of two years to earn it. He knew a modern navy needed trained personnel, not unskilled cannon fodder, yet acquiring that training seemed to have taken forever, and he'd felt vaguely guilty as combat reports from Nightingale and Trevor's Star filtered back to Manticore. He'd been looking forward to shipboard duty—not without fear, for he didn't consider himself a particularly brave person, but with a sort of frightened eagerness—and he'd actually been slated for assignment to a ship of the wall. He knew he had, for Chief Garner had let him have a peek at the initial paperwork.
2 years to push through an enlisted technician, not bad. And, of course, starship duties require something more than unskilled labor to run.
He warned himself not to get too excited. After all, Lady Harrington had been all but forcibly banished after her scandalous duels. It was entirely possible she was being shuffled off to exactly the sort of oblivion Aubrey had assumed this assignment must be, but he couldn't believe it. The woman the newsies had dubbed "the Salamander" from her habit of always being where the fire was hottest was too good a combat commander for that. And it hadn't exactly been the Navy's idea to put her on half-pay to begin with. If the Fleet had her back again, surely they'd want to make the best use they could of her!
First mention I could find of Honor's nickname from the mid/late series "Salamander Harrington" or just "the Salamander." Supposedly because she's always where the fire's hottest. Which doesn't really work for me. her exploits, particularly before there was a war, are certainly headline-catching, but Hancock was neither the first or largest battle of the opening phase, being after the various skirmishes and a sideshow compared to Third Yeltsin. Then she's essentially sat out the last three years of the war, except the one major battle that came to her doorstep.
The bay assignments had been made on an alphabetical basis, and Aubrey had been the lone overflow from the rest of his draft. He was used to finding himself at the end of any Navy list of names, but aside from himself, the bay was empty at the moment, and he missed his fellow students as he peered around the compartment. He towed his locker across to check the bulkhead chart, and his eyes brightened. There were still two bottom bunks left, and he shoved his ID chip into the slot and painted one of them for his own use. He heard feet behind him as a small knot of uniforms entered the bay, and he plucked his chip free and stepped back to clear the chart for the newcomers. He towed his locker across to his freshly assigned bunk, shoved it into the space under it, and sat on the bunk, grateful to get off his weary feet.
Apparently you can use your Navy ID to register your bunk on a central chart. I wonder if this is used for general computer security.
"You hear who's in command of this shit squadron?" someone asked, and Aubrey glanced at the men clustered around the chart, surprised by the surly tone of the question.
"Yeah," someone else said with profound disgust. "Harrington."
"Oh, Christ!" the first voice groaned. "We're all gonna die," it went on with a sort of morbid satisfaction. "You seen the kinds'a casualty lists she comes up with?"
"Yep," the second voice agreed. "They're gonna dump us right in the crapper, and she's gonna win another medal by flushing our asses down it."
Once again, I feel like Weber wants me to get offended on Honor's behalf, but I feel like there's a point here. Honor's gone on several death rides and I'm sure she can seem like an uncaring glory hound to lower decks personnel that have never met her. I'd certainly be nervous about such a commander.
Aubrey looked up in astonishment, and the speaker glared at him. The hulking, dark-haired man was much older than Aubrey, with a tough face and scarred knuckles. There were five golden hash marks on his cuff, each indicating three Manticoran years—almost five T-years—of service, but he was only a second-class power tech. That meant Aubrey was actually senior to him, yet he felt anything but senior as cold brown eyes sneered at him.
"I think you've made a mistake," he said as calmly as he could. "This is my bunk."
"Oh no it isn't, Snotnose," the older man said unpleasantly.
"Check the chart," Aubrey said shortly.
"I don't give a flying fuck what the chart says. Now get your ass off my rack while you can still walk, Snotnose."
Meet Steailman, he'll be every 1980s bully stereotype for this story. 30+ Earth Years in the service, and he's junior to the kid out of the academy, literally on his first posting. Oh, and Manticoran length-of-service insignia.
No one spoke, but Aubrey felt resentment and hatred welling up about him like poison, and his nerves crawled. He'd never imagined anything like this in a modern navy, yet he knew he should have. Any force the size of the RMN had to have its share of thieves and bullies and God alone knew what else, and his heart sank as he realized the other men in this berthing bay were among the worst the Navy had to offer. What in the name of God was he doing here?
They needed some lovable misfits to balance things out. No, seriously, just a reminder that not all Manticorans are knights in shining armor, a great many are, in fact, just assholes.
"Good." She turned as if to leave, then paused. "There's just one more thing," she said calmly. "Wanderman's assigned to this bay because I didn't have anyplace else to put him. You'll find a half-dozen Marines joining you shortly, and I'd advise you to behave yourselves. I'd especially advise you to be very sure that nothing, ah, unfortunate happens to Wanderman. If he should as much as stub his toe, I personally promise you that every single one of you will wish you'd never been born. I don't care what you got away with in your last ship. I don't care what you'd like to get away with in mine. Because, people, what you will get away with is nothing."
6 Marines bunking with the overflow new kid and all the hard cases.
Honor Harrington sat in her command chair, one hand caressing the treecat in her lap, as HMS Wayfarer decelerated towards the central terminus of the Manticore Wormhole Junction at the eighty percent power setting the Navy allowed as its normal maximum. Vulcan had completely stripped the freighter's original bridge and refitted it with what could have passed for a regular warship's command stations, but one look at Lieutenant Kanehama's power settings gave the lie to that illusion, Honor thought dryly, for Wayfarer's "maximum power" was only 153.6 g.
Which by my math makes their military power 184.3 Gs.
Whatever its possible acceleration, the open throat of a ship's wedge meant it had to worry about particle densities and the rare but not unknown micro-meteorite. A warship's particle and anti-radiation fields let her pull a maximum normal-space velocity of .8 light-speed in the conditions which obtained within the average star system (max speeds were twenty-five percent lower in h-space, where particle densities were higher, and somewhat higher in areas of particularly low densities), but merchant designers wouldn't accept the expense and mass penalties of generators that powerful. As a consequence, merchantmen were limited to a maximum n-space velocity of about .7 c and a max h-space velocity of no more than .5 c . . . and Wayfarer was a merchant design.
The need for particle shielding, why hyperspace velocities are slower.
Wayfarer can do 0.7 lightspeed in normal space, 0.5 in hyper.
A ship's maximum acceleration rate depended upon three factors: its impeller strength, its inertial compensator's efficiency, and its mass. Like impellers, military-grade compensators were more powerful than the far cheaper installations merchantmen mounted, and the Caravan-class were the size of many superdreadnoughts. Given equal compensator efficiency, a smaller ship could dump a higher proportion of the inertial forces of its acceleration into the "inertial sump" of its wedge, which explained why lighter warships could run away from heavier ones despite the fact that their maximum velocities were equal. The smaller ship couldn't go any faster, but it could reach maximum speed more quickly, and unless its heavier opponent was able to close the range before it did so, it could never be forced into action. The situation was even worse for Wayfarer than it would have been for a ship of the wall, however, for an SD her size could have pulled over twice her acceleration.
All of which meant that Wayfarer maneuvered like an octogenarian turtle and that bringing an enemy to action would require guile and cunning.
An explanation for why accelerations vary, in particular why the new LACs have the fastest accel in space despite having the smallest imepeller mechanisms.
The smallest of those mammoth forts massed over sixteen million tons; the space between them was thickly seeded with mines; and a quarter of them were always at full general quarters readiness. They changed off every five and a half hours, cycling through their readiness states once per Manticoran day, and the cost in wear and tear on their equipment was sobering.
Unfortunately, it was also necessary . . . at least until Trevor's Star was taken, and that underscored the absolute priority Sixth Fleet's operations held.
Junction Forts again, they've added minefields since the war started, and now a quarter of them are on battle alert at all times.
Those fortresses were individually more powerful than any superdreadnought, but not even Manticore Astro Control's traffic managers could know a ship was about to use the Junction inbound until it actually arrived. That meant a hostile mass transit would always take the forts by surprise, and losses among them would be heavy. The attacker's losses would probably be total, yet the new Peep regime had amply demonstrated its ruthlessness, and no one could afford to ignore the possibility that it might launch what amounted to a suicide attack.
Honor had once participated in a Fleet maneuver built around the assumption that the PN might employ some of the enormous number of battleships it had built for area defense to do just that. Everyone knew BBs were too weak to engage superdreadnoughts or dreadnoughts—as Honor had demonstrated once again in the Fourth Battle of Yeltsin—which was why Manticore had none. The RMN could afford to build and crew only ships that could lie in the wall of battle, but if a navy had them, BBs were ideal for covering rear areas against raiding squadrons of cruisers or battlecruisers. They were also potent tools for keeping restive systems from asserting their independence—a major reason the old regime had built them and a task upon which the new one was currently employing something like two-thirds of them.
But the maneuver's authors had assumed that since battleships were useless in fleet actions, the PN might throw them at the Junction from Trevor's Star for the sole purpose of whittling down the fortresses, instead. The umpires had calculated that the Peeps could have put roughly fifty through the Junction in a single transit. That was little more than thirteen percent of their total battleship strength, which meant—in theory—that they could do the same thing more than once if it worked . . . and for their sacrifice, the "Peep CO" in the war games "destroyed" thirty-one fortresses, or a quarter of the entire Junction Defense Force. In purely material terms, that was a sacrifice of roughly two hundred million tons of shipping and, assuming no survivors from any of their ships, 150,000 men and women in return for destroying four hundred and eighty million tons of fortresses and killing over 270,000 Manticorans. If one simply looked at the numbers and ignored the human cost, that had to be a bargain, especially for a fleet which was larger to begin with, though Honor had never been able to believe any sane navy would accept the catastrophic damage such a suicidal operation would wreak on fleet morale.
Manticore has wargamed a suicide rush through the wormhole with BBs as inflicting roughly 2:1 casulties. Of course, sending more than three or four such attacks would be difficult.
Unfortunately, no one could rely on an enemy's rationality when the risk was the crippling of your capital system's defenses. Especially when, unlike the People's Republic, that system was also the only one you had. The need for the Junction forts had eaten so deeply into the RMN's budget for decades that the Star Kingdom had started the war with a marked inferiority in ships of the wall, and their ongoing cost and manpower demands continued to suck resources away from the front. The ability to stand down even half of the Junction forts would have released the trained personnel to man twenty-four squadrons of SDs and added over fifty percent to the RMN's strength in that class—a thought, given her own experience of BuPers' manning problems, which was more than enough to boggle Honor's mind.
Apparently the 120-odd Junction Forts eat up enough manpower to double Manticore's SD strength (I got 384 SDs worth when I calced it, or 1.99 million souls.)
The helmsman sent Wayfarer creeping forward once more, following sedately behind the two ships still in front of her, and Honor felt herself tense inwardly, ever so slightly. Although it was called a "wormhole" by spacers and the public, astrophysicists decried the misuse of that term. It wasn't totally inappropriate, but in effect the Junction was a crack in the universe where a grav wave even more powerful than one of the "Roaring Deeps" had breached the wall between hyper-space and normal-space. For all intents and purposes, it was a frozen funnel of h-space, and not a calm one, for the grav wave twisting endlessly through it was extremely potent. Impellers couldn't be used for the actual transit, and proper alignment required exquisitely accurate astrogation. One of Honor's Academy instructors had described it as "shooting a tsunami in a kayak," and she'd never encountered a better analogy.
Description of what a wormhole is and how it works in the context of the Honorverse. Which makes little practical difference, stuff goes in one end and consistently comes out the other, but I can see physicists getting annoyed.
Engineering had more than its share of rough spots, but Tschu had put his best people on the duty roster for the transit, and Wayfarer's impeller wedge dropped to half strength as her forward nodes reconfigured smoothly. They no longer produced their portion of the wedge's total strength; instead, their beta nodes were out of the circuit entirely while their alpha nodes generated the all but invisible, three-hundred-kilometer-wide disk of a Warshawski sail, and Honor watched red numerals dance as her ship continued creeping forward under the power of her after nodes alone and the sail edged deeper into the Junction.
"Stand by for aftersail," she murmured to Tschu, never looking away from her repeaters.
"Standing by," the engineer replied
At this velocity there was a safety margin of almost fifteen seconds either way before the grav wave's interference would blow Wayfarer's after nodes, but a poorly executed transit could produce nausea and violent dizziness in a crew. Besides, no captain wanted to look sloppy, and Honor watched the numbers for the foresail spin upwards with steadily mounting speed until, suddenly, they crossed the threshold. The sail was now drawing enough power to provide movement independent of the wedge, and she nodded sharply.
Most detailed womrhole transition I can recall in the series, they need both hypersails to transit, like in a grav wave, but there's plenty of time to make the transition from wedge to sail.
Oh, and 300 km sail.
The Gregor terminus had its own fortresses, although they were far smaller and less numerous than those in Manticore, and Lieutenant Cousins cleared his throat.
"Gregor Defense Command is challenging, Milady."
"Send our number," Honor replied. Every ship was subject to the same challenge, even though it was largely a formality. Ships could move to or from Manticore via any of the Junction's termini, but it was impossible to move directly from one secondary terminus to another, so any arrival here must have been cleared by Junction Central. But Gregor Defense had its own responsibilities, and Honor approved of how promptly the challenge had come.
Smaller Forts on the far side of the womrhole, you get challenged at both ends. Later we'll see even Basilisk now has wormhole forts.
Whoever these people were, they had excellent electronic warfare systems of their own, and that EW was playing merry hell with Wayfarer's active sensors. They also had at least one heavy missile platform, which was engaging the convoy escorts from beyond Wolcott's active detection envelope. Sensor range was always degraded in hyper-space, and Wolcott needed her gravitics to pick her enemies' impeller signatures out of the background hash of charged particles, jamming, and the EMP of detonating laser heads. But the entire gravitational detection system was down, and he couldn't get it back.
Wayfarer DOES have EW capability.
Eight grasers, each as heavy as any ship of the wall might mount, fired as one, blazing away through the "gun ports" in Wayfarer's sidewall, and a battlecruiser-sized raider vanished in the brilliant flash of a failing fusion bottle.
8 grasers to a broadisde, from earlier comparison to Haven Q-ships they probably mount 16 or more.
"Gravitics up!" Wolcott shouted in sudden triumph. "Enemy missile platforms bear zero-one-niner two-zero-three, range one-point-five million klicks! Designate them Bogies Fourteen and Fifteen! They look like a couple of converted freighters, Ma'am!"
"Got 'em!" Hughes barked back. "Stand by to roll pods!"
"Programming fire control," Wolcott replied. A handful of seconds ticked past, and then. "Solution accepted and locked! Pods ready!"
"Roll them!" Hughes snapped, and six missile pods spilled from Wayfarer's stern. Their sudden appearance took the raiders by surprise, and no one even tried to fire on them before attitude thrusters kicked them to the right bearing and they launched. Sixty missiles, far heavier than anything the raiders had, shrieked towards their targets, and Aubrey rolled up on his knees, panting, to watch their tracks cross the main plot. The laser heads reached attack range and detonated, and scores of x-ray lasers ripped at the missile ships. Their defenses were even weaker than Wayfarer's; they never had a chance, and both of them blew apart under the terrible pounding.
First time (albeit in a sim) we see the pod-laying system in action, and they kill two ships easily with one pod launch.
A fresh stream of pods rolled from Wayfarer's after cargo doors. The fleeing raiders were much harder targets than the missile ships, but not hard enough to resist that sort of fire. It took only five more salvos to kill them both, and Hughes sat back with a sigh as the raiders on the far side of the convoy's track also spun away and fled madly.
5 salvos (300 missiles) needed to kill an unknown number of fleeing privateer raiders.
"Uh, well, the array itself was still up, Ma'am. It was only the coupling. But the data from all the arrays runs through Junction Three-Sixty One. It's a preprocessing node, and the blown sector was downstream." He swallowed. "So I, uh, I overrode the main computers to reprogram the data buses and dumped it through Radar Six."
-snip-
"I don't believe I ever saw that particular trick pulled before."
"That's because it shouldn't work," Hughes pointed out. She punched up something on her own terminal and studied it for a moment, then whistled. "There is a cross-link at Three-Sixty-One, but I still don't see how he forced data compatibility. For that matter, he had to convince battle comp to bring three independent buses into it."
She shook her head in disbelief, and all eyes turned to Aubrey, who wished he could sink through the decksole. But the Captain only smiled and cocked an eyebrow at him.
"Where'd you get the software for it?" she asked, and Aubrey shrugged uncomfortably.
"I, uh, sort of made it up as I went along . . . Ma'am," he admitted, and she laughed.
Wanderman first attracts Honor's notice by improvising around the disabled gravitic sensors, by routing the feed through radar and working out a software bridge on the fly.
"Good. And be sure you bring along a copy of Wanderman's improvisation. Let's see if we can't clean it up a bit and store it permanently just in case we need it again."
The RMN never throws away a useful trick.
Honor leaned back in her command chair as Wayfarer and the rest of the convoy decelerated at a steady four hundred gravities, riding grav wave MSY-002-91 toward the beta wall and a return to normal space. That kind of decel would have killed her entire crew under impeller drive, but even the weakest of hyper-space's grav waves were enormously more powerful than anything man could generate, and their "inertial sumps" were proportionately deeper. Not that it was strictly necessary to decelerate. A ship bled over ninety percent of its velocity as it broke each hyper-space wall in a downward translation, which could be a handy tactical maneuver. But crash translations were rough on personnel and systems, and merchant skippers preferred the gentler, safer stress of a low velocity translation. It not only allowed their crews to avoid the violent nausea crash translations induced but also reduced alpha node wear by a measurable percentage, and that made their employers' bookkeepers happy with them, too.
The grav wave lets the freighters of the convoy more than double their usual accel/decel. They also repeat how crash translations work in case you missed it before.
The convoy was coming up on the New Berlin System, capital of the Anderman Empire, roughly forty-nine light-years from Gregor. Left to themselves, Commander Elliot's escorting destroyers could have made the trip in seven days by the universe's clocks (or just over five by their own, given the time dilation effect), but they would have had to move well up into the eta bands to do it. Given the elderly nature of some of her charges, Elliot had held the convoy to the lower delta bands, where their maximum apparent velocity was only a little over 912 c, so the trip had taken almost twenty days objective, or seventeen days subjective. The commander had checked her decision with Honor who, whether anyone else knew it or not, was the convoy's true senior officer, but Honor hadn't even considered overriding her. It might have looked suspicious if Elliot had piled on too much speed. Besides, it had given Honor more time for simulations, like the one in which Jennifer Hughes had pinned Rafe's ears back.
A 49 light-year voyage is 7 days to the tin cans (ot 7 LY/day) but 20 for a convoy.
Some officers might have been ticked off with the electronics tech, but Cardones had been delighted. With Honor's approval, he'd transferred the youngster from his original duty station and, despite his lack of seniority, assigned him as Carolyn Wolcott's permanent gravitics chief as an acting third-class petty officer. Wanderman seemed unable to believe his good fortune, and Honor hadn't needed Nimitz to know the young man had a serious case of hero worship where she herself was concerned. She felt a certain amusement over it, but Wanderman seemed to have it under control, so she hadn't spoken to him about it. After all, she told herself, he'll only be this young and on his first deployment once. There's no point embarrassing him—let him enjoy it.
Wanderman's bit of improv gets him a brevet promotion to PO 3rd.
The convoy continued inward, bound for the orbital warehouses and cargo platforms around the capital planet of Potsdam. There were scores of warships out there, including what looked like three full battle squadrons on some sort of maneuvers, and Honor felt a wistful longing. The IAN was smaller than the RMN, but its hardware came closer than most to matching Manticore's, and she wished Duke Cromarty had managed to bring the Andies into the war. After all, if Manticore went down, the Empire had to be next on the Peeps' list, and the support of those well trained warships would have been of immeasurable value.
But the House of Anderman didn't think that way. Or, rather, the current Emperor, Gustav XI, had no intention of coming into the war until there was something in it for him, which seemed to be an Anderman genetic trait. Generations of emperors had extended their borders in slow, steady expansion by the time-honored tradition of fishing in troubled waters, and Gustav XI clearly intended to do the same thing. So far, Manticore had more than held its own, but Gustav obviously hoped the time would come when the Star Kingdom's need for an ally was so pressing it would make concessions in Silesia to buy the services of his navy. Honor found that rather shortsighted, but it would have been unrealistic to expect anything else of an Anderman. And at least once the Empire came in on someone's side it had a record of staying the distance.
The Imperial Andermani Navy has 75% the strength in hulls Manticore does, mostly similar technology, at least Sollie good, and excellent officers and men. However, they remain neutral in the Manticore-Haven war until and unless Manticore gets desperate enough to make them a truly princely offer.
Dozens of warlords had built vest-pocket realms over the last six or seven centuries, but only the Anderman dynasty had made it stick, because whatever its other faults, it seemed to produce extremely competent rulers. Of course, some of them had been a little on the strange side, starting with its founder.
Gustav Anderman had been convinced he was the reincarnation of Frederick the Great of Prussia. In fact, he'd been so convinced that he'd run around in period costume from the Fifth Century Ante Diaspora. No one had laughed—when you were as good a military commander as he'd been you could get away with that sort of thing—but one could hardly call such behavior normal. Then there'd been Gustav VI. His subjects had been willing to put up with him even when he started talking to his prize rose bush, but things had gotten a bit out of hand when he tried to make it chancellor. That had been too much even for the Andermani, and he'd been quietly deposed. Removing him had created problems of its own, since the Imperial Charter specified that the Crown passed through the male line. Gustav VI had been a childless only son, but he'd had half a dozen male cousins, and a nasty dynastic war had been in the making until the oldest of his three sisters put an end to the foolishness by embracing a legal fiction. She'd had herself declared a man by the Imperial Council, taken the crown (and control of the IAN Home Fleet) as "Gustav VII," and invited any of her male relatives who felt so inclined to take his best shot. None had accepted her challenge, and she'd gone on to hold the throne as "His Imperial Majesty, Gustav VII" for another thirty-eight T-years. She'd also turned out to be one of the best rulers the Empire had ever had, which was saying quite a lot.
Gustav Anderman and his eccentricites, and some of those of his descendants.
The Empire was not, Honor thought wryly, your run of the mill monarchy, but despite the occasional quirks in its gallop, the House of Anderman had, by and large, done well by its people. For one thing, its members were wise enough to grant an enormous degree of local autonomy to their various conquests, and they'd shown a positive knack for picking up systems which were already in trouble for one reason or another. Like the Gregor Republic in Gregor-B. The entire system had fallen apart in a particularly messy civil war before the IAN moved in and declared peace, and like so much else about the Empire, that tendency to "rescue" their conquests went back to Gustav I and Potsdam itself.
Before Gustav Anderman and his fleet moved in on it, Potsdam had been named Kuan Yin, after the Chinese goddess of mercy. Which had been one of the more ironic names anyone ever assigned a planet, for the ethnic Chinese who'd settled it had found themselves in a trap as deadly as the one which had almost killed the Graysons' ancestors.
Like the original Manticoran settlers, Kuan Yin's colonists set out from Old Earth before the Warshawski sail had made hyper-space safe enough for colony vessels. They'd made the centuries-long voyage sublight, in cryo, only to discover that the original survey had missed a minor point about their new home's ecosystem. Specifically, about its microbiology. Kuan Yin's soil was rich in all the necessary minerals and most of the required nutrients for Terrestrial plants, but its local microorganisms had shown a voracious appetite for Terran chlorophyll and ravaged every crop the settlers put in. None of them had bothered the colonists or the Terrestrial animals they'd introduced, but no Terrestrial life form could live on the local vegetation, Terran food crops had been all but impossible to raise, and yields had been spectacularly low. The colonists had managed—somehow—to survive by endless, backbreaking labor in the fields, but some staple crops had been completely wiped out, dietary deficiencies had been terrible, and they'd known that for all their desperate efforts, they were waging an ultimately hopeless war against their own planet's microbiology. Eventually, they were bound to lose enough ground to push them over the precipice into extinction, and there'd been nothing they could do about it. All of which explained why they'd greeted Anderman's "conquest" of their home world almost as a relief expedition.
None of Gustav Anderman's peculiarities had kept him from being a gifted administrator, and he'd possessed an outstanding capacity for conceptualizing problems and their solutions. He'd also had a talent, which most of his reasonably sane descendants appeared to share, for recognizing the talents of other individuals and making best use of them. Over the next twenty T-years he'd brought in modern microbiologists and genetic engineers to turn the situation around by creating Terrestrial strains which laughed at the local bugs. Potsdam would never become a garden planet like Darwin's Joke or Maiden Howe, with food surpluses for export, but at least its people were able to feed themselves and their children.
That made him quite acceptable to the natives of Kuan Yin as their new Emperor. His foibles didn't bother them—they would have been prepared to forgive outright lunacy—and they became very loyal subjects. He'd started out by raising and exporting the one product he fully understood—competent, skillfully led mercenaries—and then gone into the conquistador business on his own. By the time of his death, New Berlin had been the capital of a six-system empire, and the Empire had done nothing but grow, sometimes unspectacularly but always steadily, ever since.
Founding of the Empire, which has a fascinating blend of Chinese and German language, culture and aesthetic. As seen in the Andermani character we see the most of, Herzog Chien-lu Von Rabenstrange.
The Andermani give a great deal of local autonomy to their member worlds, and usually come as liberators, saving planets from external enemies, restoring law and order or providing priceless aid in disasters, asking ony for membership in the Empire.
And somewhere out there is a garden/agri-world named Darwin's Joke. It never gets mentioned again, but I'm fascinated by the place, and dying to know what the joke is.
"Ah, do you suppose you might extend the focus of your pickup, Lady Harrington?" the admiral murmured, and Honor's eyes narrowed. "It can't be very comfortable to sit so still just to keep me from seeing your uniform, My Lady," he added almost apologetically, and she felt her mouth quirk in a wry smile.
-snip-
"Please, My Lady. We do have our own intelligence services, you know. What sort of wicked militarists would we be if we didn't keep track of people crossing our space? I'm afraid some of your people were somewhat loose-lipped about your squadron and its purpose. You might want to bring that to Admiral Givens' attention."
"Oh, I will, Sir. I certainly will," Honor assured him, and he smiled again.
"Actually," he went on, "the reason my cousin asked me to contact you was to assure you that the Andermani Empire has no objection to your presence in our space and that we understand your concerns in Silesia. His Majesty would consider it a personal favor if Admiral Caparelli would inform us before his next Q-ship deployment, however. We can see why you would prefer to conceal your deployment from the Confederacy, but it's a bit rude to keep us in the dark."
-snip-
"I see our security screen's leaked like a sieve where imperial intelligence is concerned, but I would be most grateful if we could avoid giving anything away to anyone else."
"Of course, My Lady. Your convoy is scheduled for a three-day layover. If you'll take a pinnace to Alpha Station, one of my pinnaces will pick you up there for delivery to Derfflinger. I've taken the liberty of pre-clearing you for an approach to the civilian VIP bay at Alpha Seven-Ten, and station security will see to it that the gallery is unoccupied when you dock."
"Thank you again, My Lord. That was very thoughtful." Honor's wry tone acknowledged defeat. Rabenstrange had not only known she was coming, but anticipated her request for anonymity as well. Maybe it's just as well we are at peace with these people, she thought. God help us if the Peeps ever catch us out this way! But at least he was being a gentleman about it.
Busted. Imperial Intelligence is annoyingly omnisicent, I forgot that part.
