Bit of Analysis: HH Saganami Island series

[Simon_Jester]

"Given the fact that a Solarian-registry vessel was apprehended in the very act of supplying illegal weapons to terrorists on his planet, President Suttles has every right to be concerned. Since.. Kalokainos Shipping and the Jessyk Combine are known to have coordinated... the discovery that Marianne belonged to Jessyk amply justifies his decision that Copenhagen merits investigation, as well... he clearly had no choice but to remove Copenhagen's crew for interrogation."

The legal fig leaf protecting Suttles and Montana from any splashback on this.

This would SO not work except that Montana is pretty well protected from direct OFS response by Manticore...

Terekhov is going to rally every ship he can reach in time to depart before Khumalo or anyone else could recall him, thus shielding the Star Kingdom by giving them plausible deniability and himself as a ready-made renegade scapegoat. He really is playing craps with his career...

To be fair, he also intends to act with a reasonable degree of caution and professionalism, insofar as that is consistent with upholding the interests and honor of the Star Kingdom.

So he's staking his career, but cautiously- taking what is known as a "calculated risk" and relying on his own instincts to warn him if he's about to screw up too badly. This was not an uncommon move back in the days when communications were slow and uncertain and messages could get lost en route to their intended recipient.

The heavy cruiser Warlock had been at Dresden when Ericsson arrived with Captain Terekhov's orders for any Navy ships in the system to join him in Montana. Captain Anders was junior to Captain Terekhov. As such, he'd had no choice but to obey, whatever he might think about his orders, and he and the destroyer Javelin had arrived in Montana two days before. Helen didn't know exactly what the Skipper had told Anders and Lieutenant Commander Jeffers, Javelin's CO, he had in mind. He might not have told them anything yet, she thought. But everybody aboard the Nasty Kitty had a pretty good idea by now, and she suspected the inter-ship grapevine must have carried at least a few hints to Anders and Jeffers.

Then, this morning, more ships had come in, this time from Talbott. Volcano had returned with Commander Eleanor Hope's Vigilant, another Star Knight-class cruiser, and the light cruiser Gallant, a sister of the Skipper's old Defiant, in tow, accompanied by two more destroyers—Rondeau and Aria, both old Chanson-class ships.

It was turning into a fairly respectable little squadron, she reflected. True, most of its ships verged on obsolescent, by Manticoran standards, but those standards were a bit high by anyone else's measure.

Of course, it was also, in many ways, a stolen squadron. All those ships were part of Rear Admiral Khumalo's "Southern Patrol," one of the mainstays of his anti-piracy strategy. Technically, the Skipper was within his rights to call them in, and communications delays over interstellar distances required that officers exercise their initiative. The more senior an officer became, the more initiative she was expected to demonstrate, but countermanding a superior officer's orders, and especially those of a station commander, wasn't something to undertake lightly. An officer who did so had damned well better be able to demonstrate that her actions had been justified.

Terekhov's scratch squadron, a few heavy cruisers, a couple of light ones, three destroyers and a collier/munitions ship.

I suspect Javelin is a [http://honorverse.wikia.com/wiki/Javelin_class]Javelin-class[/url] destroyer, a type built around 1880 PD- after the laser head but before most of the really neat stuff in the RMN arsenal rolled out. The Chansons are from before that, at a time when the laser head was more of an ominous rumble on the horizon than a tactical reality.

In terms of basic design vintage and the sophistication and competence that went into them at the time, I doubt any of these would have been ton for ton superior to SLN battlecruiser designs.

The Star Knight-class cruiser Warlock was genuinely innovative by 1900 PD standards and might be ton-for-ton superior to a SLN battlecruiser in raw performance potential, but I doubt that one armed with 1904 PD hardware could, say, successfully re-enact Second Yeltsin against a Solarian battlecruiser in place of a Havenite Sultan-class.

It's hard to pin down the light cruiser classes because of RMN naming conventions.

Anyway, the takeaway is that if these RMN light ships can handle SLN battlecruisers, it's going to be to a large extent because of the massive advances in EW equipment they've had since the war began, which may actually owe more to their accumulated combat experience than they do to advances in technology as such.

[VhenRa]

That and the pods they are towing. HMS Volcano's equipment load includes pods for them to use, early 1st War style. Put em on tow.

[Terralthra]

The Star Knight-class cruiser Warlock was genuinely innovative by 1900 PD standards and might be ton-for-ton superior to a SLN battlecruiser in raw performance potential, but I doubt that one armed with 1904 PD hardware could, say, successfully re-enact Second Yeltsin against a Solarian battlecruiser in place of a Havenite Sultan-class.

Actually, they probably could...if the Solly BC still had the only semi-competent Masadan crew. Saladin could almost certainly have walked over Fearless and Troubadour if Yu had been in command.

[Simon_Jester]

My point is that a Solarian Nevada-class, even if crewed by the same barely-trained Masadans who fought Second Yeltsin 'historically' would probably have been able to win Second Yeltsin due to superior electronic warfare, fire control, and computer systems as compared to the Havenite Sultan-class.

SLN equipment was substantially superior to prewar Peep hardware, to the extent that Haven couldn't even begin making meaningful upgrades to their (badly outclassed) electronic warfare capability until they started importing Solarian hardware.

Now, if you give our hypothetical Star Knight and Chanson-class ships who know they're about to cross swords with a Solarian battlecruiser, oh... half dozen or so tractored missile pods so they can open the engagement with a suitably nasty "Sunday punch," and then equip them with Manticoran electronics from circa 1913 PD or 1920 PD, that's another matter entirely. Even without MDMs.

[VhenRa]

Of course. These ones are Indefatigable-class. Not Nevada. Given how long it takes for Sollies to replace stuff, the base design is probably a contemporary of the Homer-class. Or even Redoubtable.

[Ahriman238]

HMS Ericsson erupted over the hyper wall into the Spindle system in a starbust of blue transit energy twenty-seven days after leaving Dresden.

She sent her identity and notice that she carried dispatches to HMS Hercules via grav-pulse as soon as she made translation, and a trickle of consternation flowed uphill as the news of her arrival wended its way towards the superdreadnought's flag deck. Ericsson was a depot ship. She wasn't a dispatch boat, and she was supposed to be permanently stationed in Montana, supporting the Southern Patrol.

27 days from Dresden to Spindle, with military-grade FTL. Dresden being Ericsson's last stop before SPindle, so this wasn't an indirect flight.

She scanned the brief message again. Whatever dispatch Ericsson was carrying, it was obviously important, since she'd listed it as Priority Alpha-Three. That called for it to be delivered via secure recording medium rather than transmitted.

Alpha Three means a message is so security sensitive, it can't even be transmitted. Instead a recording device must be hand-delivered to the recipient.

"Excuse me," Gregor O'Shaughnessy said, "but I came in on this late. What makes Captain Terekhov think the Monicans are up to something in the first place?"

"That's . . . a little involved," Commander Chandler said. Khumalo's intelligence officer glanced at the rear admiral considerably more nervously than Shoupe had. "He's included a summary of all the evidence which forms the basis of his analysis, and he's copied his intelligence files for you and the Provisional Governor, so you can check both the evidence and his conclusions for yourself. The short version's that he and Van Dort have an informant who claims the Jessyk Combine delivered a large number of shipyard technicians, well versed in naval applications, to Monica. Apparently, according to this same source, Jessyk's sending in a flock of freighters configured as minelayers, as well. At Jessyk's cost, not Monica's. And the same ship that delivered the technicians saw what looked like two very large repair or depot ships in Monica, at Eroica Station, its main naval yard, when it dropped off the techs. And it was also the ship used to run arms to Nordbrandt and Westman."

The evidence Terekhov got off of Marianne's survivors, who don't know about the Solly battlecruisers, but know enough to say that something here is real rotten.

"Maybe so, but it's still ridiculous," Khumalo said. "Let's say they've tripled the Monican Navy's combat power." He barked a harsh laugh. "Hell, let's say they've increased it by a factor of ten! So what? We could still wipe them out in an afternoon with a single division of SD(P)s or a squadron of CLACs!"

"Possibly. All right, probably," O'Shaughnessy amended at the rear admiral's exasperated look. "But it's entirely possible that whoever put this thing together doesn't really care what happens to the Monicans. All they may care about is creating a pretext—an armed clash in the Cluster—that gives the Monicans an initial victory or two. Are you going to argue that an upgraded Monican Navy couldn't defeat your presently deployed forces? Especially if it caught them dispersed, by surprise, and engaged them in separate, isolated actions with its own forces concentrated for each attack?"

Khumalo glared again, but this time he was forced, grudgingly, to shake his head.

"Well suppose the Monicans did just that, and then called in Frontier Security, claiming we'd started it and asking for Solarian peacekeeping forces. What do you think would happen then?"

Good times?

"I don't know what I think," Khumalo said after a few heartbeats of silence. "But if he is right, we're going to need more firepower than I have right now. Loretta," he turned to his chief of staff, "draft a message to the Admiralty, highest priority. Attach copies of Terekhov's dispatches—all his dispatches—and request immediate reinforcement of the Lynx Terminus. Further inform them that I'll be ordering the remainder of my present forces to concentrate to cover the southern edge of the Cluster and that I'm moving on Monica personally with every ship available here in Spindle as soon as possible. Inform them," he looked across at the Provisional Governor, meeting her eyes levelly, "that although I remain uncertain of Captain Terekhov's conclusions, I endorse his actions and intend to support him to the best of my ability. I want that off by dispatch boat to Lynx and Manticore as quickly as humanly possible."

Khumalo makes a decision, and endorses Terekhov's actions while begging home for reinforcements and making best time to monica with every ship he can gather on short notice.

The freighter's acting captain glanced at the small com screen which showed the view from the optical pickup mounted on Lieutenant MacIntyre's skinsuit helmet. The engineering officer's personnel management skills impressed FitzGerald even less here in Copenhagen than in Hexapuma. The smaller ship's company only magnified her ability to irritate and annoy the experienced ratings and noncoms under her command, and FitzGerald was beginning to question whether or not his and the Captain's original theory about the reason for that was accurate. Lack of self-confidence was one thing, but some people—and FitzGerald was starting to think MacIntyre might be one of them—simply had too much little-tin-god in them to ever make good officers. She was actually a superior technician, and it had shown as she and her skinsuited work party prepped the recon drone in Copenhagen's cavernous cargo hold, however—

"Just hold it a minute, Danziger!" he heard the lieutenant snap suddenly. "I'll tell you when I'm ready to kick it loose, damn it! Don't you people ever pay attention to what you're doing?"

Lt. MacIntyre, the token unlikable officer aboard the Kitty, or at the moment, Copenhagen. It seems skinsuit helmet cams feeding to a bridge screen in relatively common, at least on EVA.

"At least a third of the freighters in space leave their com watch on auto-record, Jeff," he explained, "and Sollies are even worse about that than most. Generally, there's an alarm set to alert the fellow who's supposed to be keeping an eye on communications that a particular incoming message is important. More often than not, though, the computers aboard a ship like this are too stupid to make that kind of evaluation reliably, so the system simply records anything that comes in and otherwise ignores it until a message has been repeated at least once. At that point, it figures someone really wants to talk to somebody and sounds an alarm to get the com officer's attention. That's why we often have to hail merchantships two or three times."

Kobe nodded, obviously filing away another one of those practical bits of knowledge that places like the Island so often forgot to pass along. FitzGerald nodded back and turned his command chair to glance at the midshipman.

Some things you can only learn on the job, like exactly why merchantmen almost never answer the first hail. Which seems to be because that's how the answering machine decides a message is important enough to pass on to a human crew member right away, that or if it's somehow marked priority.

"Anything interesting showing up, Aikawa?"

"Sir, if someone were obliging enough to set off a ten- or twenty-megaton nuke at a range of ninety or a hundred klicks, this ship's passive sensors might actually be able to pick it up."

FitzGerald snorted, and Aikawa smiled.

"Actually, Sir," he said more seriously, "I am picking up a few impeller signatures now. Not very many, though, and I can't tell you much more than that someone's moving under power out there. If I had to guess, I'd say four or five of them are LACs, but there's at least a couple acting like bigger warships. Maybe destroyers or light cruisers."

Sensors on Copenhagen, one of those freighters that has probably never left a relatively secure area of space, and so has crap sensors.

"Are any of them in a position to pick up our drone?" he asked after a moment.

"I doubt anything in the system has the sensors to spot our bird at anything over five kiloklicks, Sir. And these fellows are so far off the drone's programmed track they couldn't pick it up even with Manticoran sensors that knew exactly where to look."

"I'm glad to hear it," FitzGerald said. "But don't get too confident about the quality of the other side's sensors. If somebody really has been upgrading their naval capabilities, they could have a lot more sensor reach and sensitivity than ONI's estimated."

Not getting cocky, estimated range at which second or third tier sensor tech can detect a Manty recon platform.

It was a very stealthy array, the hardest to spot, lowest-signature drone the Royal Manticoran Navy was capable of building, which was very hard to spot, indeed. It was equipped with extraordinarily capable active sensors, but those were locked down—as, indeed, they almost always were when the drone or its brethren were deployed. There was very little point in being undetectable if one intended to flounder around shouting at the top of one's lungs. The drone's creators had no intention of allowing their offspring to do anything so gauche, and so they had also equipped it with exquisitely sensitive passive sensors, which produced no telltale emissions to give away the drone's position.

Recon platforms have excellent active, as well as the standard passive, sensors/

It sped onward, under the paltry acceleration (for one such as itself) of a mere 2,000 KPS2. Because of the profile on which it had been launched, and the need to avoid the fusion-fired furnace of the system's G3 primary, which lay almost directly between it and its intermediate destination, it would find itself forced to travel two light-hours in order to cover a straight-line distance of only a little over forty light-minutes.

A very slow accel, even for a recon platform.

The drone didn't care. At such a low rate of acceleration, it had a powered endurance of nearly three T-days, and if it couldn't begin to match the massive acceleration rates of ship-to-ship missiles, unlike those missiles, its far lower-powered impeller wedge could be turned on and off at will, extending its endurance almost indefinitely. Besides, the far weaker strength of its wedge, combined with the stealth technology so lovingly built into it, was what made it so difficult to detect in the first place. Let the glamour-hungry attack missiles go slashing across space at eighty or ninety thousand KPS2, shouting out their presence for all the galaxy to see! They were, at best, kamikazes anyway, doomed to Achilles-like lives of brief, shining martial glory. The recon drone was an Odysseus—clever, wily, and circumspect.

3 days of drone endurance at that accel rate, and it can kill it's drive whenever it wants.

Thanks to the manner in which Hexapuma had taken possession of Copenhagen, all the freighter's computers had been intact and undamaged. True, the secure portions of their databases had been protected by multiple levels of security fences and protocols, but most commercial cybernetics—even Solarian cybernetics—simply weren't up to the standards demanded by governments and military forces. There were exceptions, of course. Without De Chabrol's assistance, for example, it would have been effectively impossible for Hexapuma's technicians to break into Marianne's secure systems. A proper team of ONI specialists could have managed it, in time, but it wasn't something to be lightly undertaken under field conditions.

But a run-of-the-mill, honest freighter like Copenhagen neither needed nor could afford the same degree of security, and Amal Nagchaudhuri and Guthrie Bagwell had hacked into the ship's computer net with absurd ease. Which meant Lieutenant Kobe had access to Kalokainos Shipping's basic house encryption and authentication codes. With those in hand, he and Nagchaudhuri had crafted a totally legitimate message in the company's encryption format. The message content was just as totally bogus, of course, but there wouldn't be any way for anyone to realize that until it ultimately reached its final destination—which happened to be the office of one Heinrich Kalokainos on Old Earth herself.

When old Heinrich finally opened and read that message, he was likely to be just a little bit irritated, FitzGerald reflected. But the fact that its addressee was Kalokainos Shipping's CEO and largest single stockholder ought to discourage any officious underling from fiddling around with it in the meantime. And that message was Copenhagen's ostensible reason for being here.

The excuse for stopping by Monica without entering orbit or unloading any goods is passing on a "CEO's-eyes-only" message with all the proper encryption and authentication marks, that is really just gibberish.

The fact that Kalokainos didn't maintain an office of its own on Monica might have been a problem, but there was a gentleman's agreement among the shipping agents of the dozen or so most powerful Solarian shipping lines to act as one another's representatives when circumstances required. Although Copenhagen's message didn't carry any sort of emergency priority (aside from its intended recipient), FitzGerald didn't doubt the Captain was right—the Jessyk Combine agent on Monica would normally accept it and forward it Solward. The only question in the commander's mind was whether or not the Jessyk agent would be feeling equally helpful in light of whatever deviltry Jessyk was up to here.

The major Solly shipping cartels pass on each others' mail.

HMS Hercules departed Flax orbit exactly eight hours and thirty-six minutes after Rear Admiral Khumalo's meeting with the Provisional Government.

Took Khumalo less than nine hours to scramble everything local and prepare his sedentary flagship for departure.

Saunders stood beside the captain's chair on her command deck, hands folded behind her, and watched the master plot as Hercules, the light cruisers Devastation and Inspired, and the destroyers Victorious, Ironside, and Domino accelerated steadily away from Flax. Ericsson, her sister ship White, and the ammunition ships Petard and Holocaust followed in the warships' wakes, and Khumalo had commandeered five additional dispatch boats. It was, at best, a lopsided and ill-balanced "squadron," although Hercules certainly looked impressive as its flagship. Unless, of course, one knew all of the old ship's manifold weaknesses as well as Saunders did.

But she's still a damned superdreadnought, Khumalo's flag captain told herself. And we're still the Queen's Navy. And I will be damned if Augustus Khumalo hasn't actually remembered that.

Khumalo's scratch squadron, 1 SD, 2 CL, 3 DD, 4 logistics ships (2 depot, 2 munitions) and five more dispatch boats.

"I don't have any idea, Dick," she told him frankly. "But I did have the chance to look over Terekhov's projected ops schedule. If everything's going the way he projected, his kidnapped Solly freighter got to Monica about sixteen hours ago. Terekhov'll be arriving at his rendezvous—this 'Point Midway' of his—in about another seventy-two hours, and the freighter will meet him there about a week later. Call it ten standard days from now. And if he decides on the basis of its report to move directly on Monica, he can be there in another six days or so. We, on the other hand, can't reach Monica for twenty-five days. So, if he goes ahead, whatever he does is going to be over, one way or the other, at least one full T-week before we can possibly get there."

Time frame for Terekhov's operation, 25 days straight-line flight from Spindle to Monica.

The Squadron (everyone was calling it that now . . . except the Captain) floated in the absolute darkness of interstellar space, over six light-years from the nearest star. Starships seldom visited that abyss of emptiness, for there was nothing there to attract them. But it made a convenient rendezvous, so isolated and lost in the enormity of the universe that even God would have been hard-pressed to find them.

Many of Hexapuma's people had found the visual displays . . . disturbing over the last week or so. The emptiness here was so perfect, the darkness so Stygian, that it could get to even the most hardened spacer. Commander Lewis, for example, made a point of avoiding any of the displays, and Helen had noticed Senior Chief Wanderman watching her every once in a while. There was something going on there, she thought. Something more than the uneasiness some of the ship's company seemed to feel. Whatever it was, Lewis wasn't letting it affect her performance of her duty, but Helen had the peculiar impression that Hexapuma's Engineer would welcome even the prospect of taking on an entire system navy if it only got her away from this lonely spot which the rest of existence had forgotten.

Sometimes even experienced naval personnel get a little sweaty thinking just how much nothing is outside the hull.

"Please challenge Copenhagen."

"Aye, aye, Sir," the com officer of the watch replied, and Terekhov nodded and settled back in his command chair to wait.

Helen was confident Kaplan had identified the incoming ship correctly. And she felt equally certain Commander FitzGerald was still in command of her. But it was typical of the Captain to make absolutely certain. It was interesting. He took infinite pains, taking nothing for granted, and if she'd seen only that side of him, she'd have written him down as a slave to The Book. One of those fussy martinets who never stuck their necks out, never took a chance.

But that wasn't how the Captain's mind worked. He took such care over the details, whenever he could, because he knew he couldn't always do that. So that when the time came for the risks which must be run, he could be confident of his ship's readiness . . . and his own. Know he'd done everything he possibly could to disaster-proof his position by perfecting his weapon before the screaming chaos of battle struck.

Terekhov's thoroughness and careful attention to detail, whenever he has the luxury of time to tend to the details.

"Copenhagen's recon drone executed its mission profile to the letter, Ladies and Gentlemen. Its passive sensors swept the volume through which it passed for active impeller wedges and examined the area of Eroica Station very carefully. Its data indicates that the Monica System Navy has been what might be called 'substantially reinforced.' In fact, the drone positively identified eleven Indefatigable-class battlecruisers at Eroica Station."

Something very like an audible gasp ran around the table, but he continued speaking calmly.

"So far as the drone was able to determine, all of them are either currently in yard hands or awaiting yard space. I believe they're being refitted in order to disguise their origins as much as possible. Which suggests to me, in turn, that they've been clandestinely provided to Monica. And I can think of only one reason for anyone to do that: to attack the Star Kingdom's interests in the Cluster."

So they found the battlecruisers, or rather the ones at the yard.

"Captain Terekhov, with all due respect, I see no reason to automatically assume these ships were 'clandestinely provided' to President Tyler's navy. ONI reported months ago that the Indefatigables were being retired and replaced by the new Nevada-class ships." She shrugged. "We all know about Tyler's cozy relationship with Frontier Security. If the Sollies are disposing of the Indefatigables, why shouldn't they sell—or even outright give—some of them to somebody who's been their proxy for the last thirty or forty T-years? And if that's the case, or even if there is something 'clandestine' about the way Monica acquired them, it doesn't necessarily follow that they're intended to attack our interests."

Fair point, but then why so many that the present Monican Navy would have to expand to man them all? Captain Anders (HMS Warlock) retorts that if they were openly provided they wouldn't be refitting them to disguise their origins, and who else in the local sector has enough firepower to justify a third the strength they now have?

"Again, with all due respect, Captain," Hope said just a bit impatiently, "even if you're correct about who the ships might be used against, Monica wouldn't necessarily intend to use them offensively. In fact, it would be stupid of them to even contemplate attacking us, battlecruisers or no battlecruisers. But it's entirely possible that they could be sufficiently concerned by our presence in the Cluster to feel the need for a force able to deter any designs we might have on Monica."

"I think you're reaching, Eleanor," Commander Hewlett said, and Hope looked at her angrily. Hewlett looked at Terekhov, and he nodded permission for her to continue.

"There's no way those battlecruisers would deter us if we really wanted Monica," Gallant's CO said. "A couple of pod SDs could turn all of them into scrap in a half-hour. Besides, Monica's not the kind of star nation that worries about what other people are likely to do to it; it's the kind of star nation that spends all its time trying to think of things to do to other people."

Why the BCs can't be there to protect Monica from the grasping Star Empire of Manticore.

"I think Captain Terekhov already answered that question, Eleanor," Hewlett said in a rather pointed tone. "If they think they can convince the League to intervene on their behalf, they can damned well use those ships to create a situation to justify asking for that intervention."

"Or," Hope said stubbornly, "they could be thinking their new battlecruisers might let them stand off a Manticoran attack long enough for the League to intervene on their behalf. In which case," she kept her eyes on Hewlett's face, but Terekhov knew who she was truly speaking to, "actually attacking their system might be the worst thing we could do. If they're ready to invite the Sollies in to defend them, and if the Sollies have already agreed to do that, then the last thing we want to do is to go right ahead and provide them their pretext."

"Under other circumstances, Commander Hope," Terekhov said coolly, "I might be inclined to accept your analysis. Unfortunately, we also know Monica's been involved, as a staging point, at the very least, in a concerted effort by an outside power to provide weapons and funds to terrorists in the Cluster. That, Commander, is indeed an offensive act. Arguably, in fact, an act of war, although the situation's somewhat clouded by the fact that the systems in which they've been aiding and abetting terrorists aren't yet actually Manticoran territory. Based on that fact, I'm disinclined to assume Frontier Security's long-term proxies are forting up in their home system because they anticipate the momentary arrival of Manticoran conquistadors."

I know I'm supposed to disagree with Hope's reflexive ass-covering, but I feel like she has a point. Certainly I'd worry in Terekhov's shoes that attacking Monica might give OFS just the foot in the door they need.

"Because I believe that to be the case, I intend to advance to Monica. There, I will require the Monican government to cease all work upon their new battlecruisers until such time as they demonstrate to our satisfaction that those vessels pose no threat to the security of the Star Kingdom or to our friends in the region. Should they refuse, or should they employ military forces against us, I intend to attack Eroica Station and to destroy all of the battlecruisers being refitted there."

-snip-

"Sir," Hope said almost desperately, "what you're talking about is an act of war. An act of war carried out in time of peace against a sovereign star nation without the direction or approval of our own command authority. Sir, it could be legally construed as an act of piracy committed in the Star Kingdom's name! I can't think of a single thing we could do that would damage our interstellar credibility worse in the eyes of the Solarian public."

"The Solarian public, unfortunately, Commander," Terekhov said, "is in the habit of thinking what the spinmasters who work for Frontier Security and the other Solly bureaucracies tell it to think. And there's no time for us to seek the approval of the Admiralty or the Prime Minister. These ships are being refitted now. We have no way of knowing how far advanced the refit process is, how soon some or all of them will become combat-ready. If we delay even a single day longer than we absolutely must, we potentially give the Monicans and their allies in Mesa the time they need to put their plan into operation. Or, at the very least, to kill and wound more of our people when we finally do move to neutralize the threat."

-snip-

"And if it turns out they never were any threat to the Star Kingdom, and that you—and the officers following your orders—have committed an unauthorized act of war with the very real prospect of bringing the Solarian League in against us, Sir?" Hope challenged.

"I don't believe it will. If it does, however, Her Majesty will be able to say with perfect honesty that she never authorized our actions. That we grossly exceeded our authority, and that she disavows everything we've done. In which case, the fact that you'll be following my own formal, written orders to you will absolve you of any blame."

"Sir, with all due respect, your orders cannot absolve any of us of responsibility for knowingly assisting you in committing an illegal act of war, That, at any rate, will undoubtedly be the verdict of the court-martial which convicts any officer who obeys your order of having committed piracy and murder."

The tension in the briefing room could have been carved with a knife. The other officers sat silent, watching the confrontation between Terekhov and Hope, and he leaned forward in his chair, holding her eyes.

"It's entirely possible that you're correct, Commander," he said in a cold, precise voice. "There comes a time in every officer's life, however, when he must confront not simply the possibility of defeat, not even of his own death, but his responsibility to the uniform he wears. To the Crown, and to the oath he swore when he put that uniform on. It's our duty to protect the Star Kingdom of Manticore and its allies and friends from all enemies. That, Commander Hope, is the bottom line of the oath you swore. The oath Edward Saganami swore. We're at the end of a very long, very tenuous chain of communication. It's our responsibility to exercise our initiative and judgment in the face of this threat. And it's also our duty to provide the Queen with the means of disavowing our actions—and us, if necessary—in order to avoid open warfare with the Solarian League."

"Sir, the fact that you feel it's our responsibility to commit professional suicide in order to deal with a threat which may not even exist doesn't necessarily make it true," Hope said flatly. "And I—and my ship—will not participate in this patently illegal action."

Again, I feel a lot more sympathy for Hope than I feel I'm supposed to, the chain of evidence linking Monica to the supplying of Westman and Nordbrandt is mighty tenuous to be invading sovereign nations over.

"Captain Terekhov," she replied harshly, "I don't think you have a choice. You command a single ship. Admittedly, the most powerful single ship present, but only a single unit. And I question, Sir, whether or not your personnel will fire into another Manticoran vessel simply because it declines to join you in an illegal act."

"I wouldn't question that if I were you, Commander." Ansten FitzGerald's voice was colder than ice, and Hope's eyes darted to his face. "This ship and her people will engage whoever the Captain tells us to," the executive officer continued in that same, frozen voice. "Especially a mutinous vessel whose gutless, ass-covering excuse for a captain is refusing the lawful orders of her superior."

"Ansten, that's enough," Terekhov said quietly.

"With all due respect, Captain Terekhov," Ito Anders said, "it isn't. Commander Hope's chosen to suggest she and her vessel would resist your orders with deadly force. She's also observed that you command only a single ship. That is an incorrect statement." He looked directly at Hope, his dark eyes frozen. "If you were so foolish as to attempt to carry through on that threat, Commander, and if—as I very much doubt—your people were willing to obey your orders, you would discover that Hexapuma wouldn't be the only ship you would face."

"You can't seriously be considering cooperating with this!" Hope protested.

"Yes I can," Anders said calmly. He even smiled ever so slightly. "My ship is older even than yours, Commander. And, to be honest, she's always had something of a reputation to live down. She hasn't been fortunate in her commanding officers. I'm not going to add to that reputation. In fact, I'm going to clean it up properly at last. And if I have to begin by blowing your worthless ass out of space, I will."

Hope stared at him, then looked around the other faces around the table, and her mouth tightened as she realized she was alone.

"Skipper," another voice said then, and her head whipped around as Lieutenant Commander Diamond spoke for the first time.

"Skipper," her XO said sadly, "they're right. You're wrong. And our people won't follow you on this one."

Attempted mutiny.

"This is neither a debating society nor a democratic organization, Commander Hope, and this particular discussion is over. Since you seem to feel unable to carry out my orders, you are hereby relieved from command of Vigilant. Lieutenant Commander Diamond will replace you in command, effective immediately."

"You can't do that!" she shouted.

"I just did," he said icily. "And I will tolerate no further disrespect. You have two choices, Commander, neither of which any longer includes command of Vigilant. You may, if you so choose, disassociate yourself from the Squadron's—" he allowed himself at last to use the term others had already been using "—future actions and return to Spindle aboard the dispatch boat I intend to send there before proceeding to Monica. Failing that, you will remain aboard Hexapuma under quarters arrest until such time as we return to Spindle to account for our actions to our superiors."

He looked into her eyes, and something inside her flinched away from his blue battle steel gaze.

"Which is it going to be, Commander?"

And farewell to Captain Eleanor Hope. Not the best beginning to this sort of thing.

The Crown dispatch boat from Lynx came out of the central terminus of the Manticore Wormhole Junction in a blue lightning flash of transit energy. It seemed small and insignificant, lost amid the stupendous, lumbering freighters and passenger ships, but its imperiously strident transponder had priority over them all. Astro Control juggled arrival and departure queues, clearing a path for it, and it streaked towards Home Fleet's flagship under almost eight hundred gravities of acceleration.

800 Gs accel/decel for a courier.

"What sort of raw meat do you people feed your cruiser captains, Hamish?" Queen Elizabeth III of Manticore inquired acidly.

Only the finest Mayacows and Kodiak Max, but they can cook them a little.

"I'm beginning to think we may've been a bit unfair in our opinion of Khumalo, Thomas," White Haven said. "He's no genius, and he's never going to be a brilliant combat commander, but it sounds to me as if he's been working his butt off. I question some of his deployment decisions, but all he's got to work with is what was left over after we wrung out the bar rag. And whatever faults he may have, he obviously understands when it's time to back a subordinate's hunch."

"Should I understand from that that you think Terekhov knows what the hell he's doing?" Grantville asked, and his brother cocked his head to one side for a moment, then nodded slowly.

"Yes," he said judiciously, "I think I do. At any rate, I'm not prepared to second-guess him from here. He's the man on the spot, and whether he's right or wrong, he's demonstrated the moral courage to make the hard call."

White Haven and Caparelli's opinions of both Terekhov and Khumalo.

"Hamish is right, Your Majesty," Langtry said. "And I have to say this, too. There are huge holes in what Terekhov's put together, but just on the basis of what he's already been able to prove, this stinks to high heaven. I pulled the intelligence bio on Lorcan Verrochio, the Frontier Security Commissioner in the region. We don't have as much detail as I'd like, but there's no question that he's inside Mesa's pocket. There were even suggestions in that heap of data Anton Zilwicki dropped on us a few years back that he's directly involved in payoffs to protect the slave trade. If Jessyk is involved, you can be absolutely certain they're operating with Verrochio's knowledge and consent."

"Wonderful," Grantville sighed. "So we probably are looking at direct Solarian involvement."

"Yes and no, Willie," White Haven said. "From what Tony's saying, OFS is involved. That's not the same thing as the League's being involved. It's not even the same as having all of Frontier Security involved. Verrochio has his own little satrapy down on the Cluster's southern frontier. Whether or not he can count on support from his fellow OFS satraps or the SLN's an open question, and it probably depends on how deeply—and publicly—into the cookie jar he has his fingers."

Lorcan Verrochio, and the kind of support he may or may not have. Also not the last time an OFS sector commissioner is referred to as a satrap.

."

"What's the Admiralty's serious estimation of how likely we are to see a response from the Solarian Navy to an attack on Monica, Ham?" Grantville asked.

"In the short term, that may well depend on how willing we are to reinforce Lynx and the Cluster. Khumalo's present strength is so low the local SLN forces assigned to support OFS could probably take him without heavy losses. If we reinforce with a squadron or two of modern capital ships, though, we can ensure that Commissioner Verrochio would have to ask for substantial reinforcements to have any hope of taking us out. And, as I say, at that point it comes down to how much Verrochio himself is willing to risk and how likely anyone else is to want to jump into this with him. If we make it obvious that it's going to cost far more than the League can expect to make back off of the Cluster, the odds of his getting any support ought to go down sharply."

"That's true, My Lord," Caparelli said. "On the other hand, I'm not comfortable about the notion of diverting sufficient strength to Talbott to be a realistic deterrent. Not when we're still stretched so tight at the front. We've finally gotten Eighth Fleet reinforced to a level that will let Duchess Harrington shift from a purely defensive stance to a limited offensive one. I'd hate for this to turn into a diversion that would push her entirely back onto the defensive."

-snip-

"Nonetheless," he went on, "I think we're going to have to divert at least some strength to Talbott. Suppose we sent a couple of battlecruiser squadrons and a single CLAC squadron to the Cluster proper and moved two SD(P) squadrons and another squadron of CLACs from Home Fleet to the Lynx Terminus?"

"Play a shell game with them through the Junction?" Caparelli said thoughtfully.

"Yes." White Haven grimaced. "I don't really like it. Theoretically, it's elegant enough, I suppose, but if we find ourselves forced to move the Home Fleet detachment further into the Cluster, we lose the ability to recall it quickly in an emergency. And if push came to shove, we could find ourselves in a situation where we'd have to recall the detachment regardless of the exposure for Lynx or the Cluster because of a possible threat to the home system."

The kind of reinforcements the Admiralty is willing to shake loose, though the bulk of their forces would be kept in Lynx ready to redeploy to defend Manticore on short notice.

"The Lynx Terminus forts will come on-line starting in another few months," Caparelli pointed out. "Once they can take responsibility for protecting the terminus itself, we could withdraw the heavy squadrons and probably make up the combat differential for the Cluster itself with additional cruisers and battlecruisers. And if the annexation does go through—" he glanced at Grantville and the Queen and got matched nods of confidence "—we can begin deploying LAC groups to each of our new systems. That should give us some local defense in depth and free up our hyper-capable units to act as a roving fire brigade."

The plan to defend both Lynx itself and the cluster in the mid-term.

"My first reaction would be to ask Estelle to take this over, now that the draft Constitution's been voted out," Langtry said much more seriously. "Unfortunately, she's still back in Spindle." He frowned, thinking hard. "I think we might hand it to Amandine Corvisart. What do you think, Willie?"

"I think it's an excellent idea," Grantville replied. Dame Amandine Corvisart was a second-generation Manticoran whose family had fled the People's Republic of Haven sixty-five T-years earlier. "She's tough-minded as a bulldog, but she understands the need to control situations instead of exacerbating them."

"And she'd be ready to actively enlist Van Dort in any negotiations," Langtry said with a nod.

The person they're sending in to manage the investigating of Terekhov's claims. Also, seems a draft constitution for Talbott has been voted out and now the Manticoran Parliament will vote on it.

"I can slice one battlecruiser squadron and a CLAC division off Home Fleet with orders for Monica within two hours, Your Majesty. I think I'll ask Admiral Yanakov if I can swap out a division of his BC(P)s for one of our Redoubtable divisions. It'll take a little longer to move the heavy squadrons, but I should be able to have them on their way within, say, six hours. I'll send the support elements through over the next day or two."

Time to reinforce Talbott, they're concerned enough to borrow some Grayson BC(P)s.

Despite the efficiency of the electronic conference, Terekhov would much have preferred for those holographic ghosts to be physically present.

Terekhov is another officer who prefers face-to-face meetings over conference video calls.

. "Let me emphasize one more time that while I'm prepared to use force, if necessary, I regard that as a last-resort option. I intend to demand that the Monican Navy stand down all its units. And, specifically, that they evacuate all personnel from Eroica Station, leaving all starships in place, pending the arrival of competent Manticoran authority to deal with the situation on a diplomatic basis. I'd like to believe President Tyler's too good a poker player to ride a busted flush down in flames. Failing that, I'd like him to be conniving enough to figure we'll probably be withdrawn from Monica quickly, possibly after a show of force to drive home the point that we're keeping an eye on him. In that case, presumably, he'd get to keep his new toys, and that prospect would have to be attractive to him. The bottom line is that I don't want to kill anyone we don't have to kill, and I'm not interested in destroying starships simply to be destroying them. If we can control the situation without firing a single shot, I'll be delighted."

He let them digest what he'd said, then flicked his right hand.

"Having said that, however, we must be prepared for the possibility that Tyler will opt not to comply with my demand. Perhaps even more to the point, we need to be aware that a government like his, by its very nature, is likely to try to stall. If nothing else, to keep us talking while he brings up his entire navy to confront us. I think he would anticipate that confronting us in that way would cause us to blink and at least hesitate. If we're—I'm—right in my suspicions, there's also the very real threat that still other forces are already in motion, and that if he can stall long enough, still more Solarian, or at least OFS units, will turn up to support his own forces.

"So, eager as I am for a diplomatic solution, I have no intention of allowing this to turn into a long, drawn out standoff. I intend to crowd the senior officer at Eroica Station hard. If at all possible, I want to push him into accepting the stand-down order immediately, on his own authority, then push hard to secure physical control of Eroica as quickly as possible—hopefully before Tyler is able to order him to stall. If there is League involvement in this, I don't intend to give Tyler time to send off to his OFS friends and whistle up an SLN task force to invite us to leave. If he doesn't immediately show clear signs of agreeing to my demands, we will destroy his battlecruisers . . . and any other units they send in to oppose us. Which is a very good reason to deny them the time to send those other units in. If nothing else, it will be that many fewer people for us to have to kill."

The plan, such as it is.

"Here's what Copenhagen's recon drone was able to find for us. I've highlighted the Indefatigables in red. As you can see, most of them are clustered fairly tightly around the main naval space station, on the far side of the complex from the civilian elements. These two over here," two of the red icons flashed where they nuzzled up against a pair of amber light codes actually in among the civilian platforms, "are being serviced by the repair ships indicated in amber. There are also six cruisers and destroyers, all older ships, in the same area—or, they were in the area when the drone dropped by. Frankly, aside from the 'stakes raising' potential the Captain's already referred to, the Monicans' present naval units don't pose a significant threat to us unless we screw up by the numbers. In addition to the ships, however, there are also remotely deployed missile launchers on these asteroids here, highlighted in yellow, and the naval space station itself mounts thirty-two tubes. We don't know how modern their ordnance is, but the launchers the drone actually saw are big enough to fire current-generation Solarian capital missiles. Under normal circumstances, someone like Monica would only have the export version, with the downgraded seekers and EW systems, but given the Indefatigables' presence, that may not be the case here. We don't know that, but we need to keep in mind that they could be extremely bad medicine if we stray into their effective range."

Defenses of the Monica system and Eroica Station. The station itself has 32 missile tubes and is supported y asteroid launchers. In addition to the foreign BCs and the Monican Navy includes 6 light ships, all terribly dated. As in, Grayson/Masada at the start of the series dated.

"At the same time as you begin decelerating, however, you'll also begin deploying missile pods. We're reverting to older tactics, and we'll go in with heavy loads on tow. Eroica Station may have Solly capital missiles for its tubes, but there's no way they have anything that can match the powered range of our pods or Hexapuma's Mark 16s.

"Once the pods are distributed, we'll continue towards Eroica Station. We'll make turnover to decelerate to rest relative to the Station at approximately eight million kilometers, which should put us a million and a half klicks outside their best range. That will enable us to keep them under our guns while we negotiate. We'll also deploy a shell of sensor remotes to cover our flanks. Frankly, it would be suicidal for the remainder of the Monican Navy to try to engage us, even if it had a chance of sneaking through our sensor coverage, but we don't intend to take any chances.

The approach.

"Even the most accurate bombardment with laser heads is going to inflict collateral damage," she said, looking up from the system plot to meet their combined gazes squarely. "At eight million klicks, our fire control should give us good accuracy, and we'll do our level best to restrict our fire to the battlecruisers. Our objective is to neutralize those ships, Ladies and Gentlemen, not to kill Monicans and not to wreck Eroica Station. We aren't even interested in destroying their defensive missile launchers or their point defense stations, if we can take out the battlecruisers without engaging those installations. Nonetheless, if it comes down to it and we're required to open fire, we are going to inflict serious damage to at least the military component of the Station, and we are going to kill Monican personnel. We'll do our best to avoid that, but we aren't going to take the Squadron into a range at which we suffer avoidable ship losses or casualties just to hold down Monican casualties."

They need to close to 8 million klicks to be reasonably sure they hit only the ships in their berths, and even so collateral damage is likely.

[Batman]

Boy, Weber really stinks at keeping his KPS2 and gees straight.
1. The 'measly' 2000KPS2 for the drone is more than twice what the attack missiles can do.
2. If attack missiles really could go 'slashing across space at eighty or ninety thousand KPS2' they'd reach lightspeed in under four seconds

[Simon_Jester]

Of course. These ones are Indefatigable-class. Not Nevada. Given how long it takes for Sollies to replace stuff, the base design is probably a contemporary of the Homer-class. Or even Redoubtable.

I got mixed up about the class names.

That said, these battlecruisers are by all appearances Frontier Fleet ships, and Frontier Fleet replaces its units fairly often. There are good reasons for that other than just technology changing: if a ship is being continuously used, it will get old and start to break down.

In real life, warships can survive peacetime operations for four, five, or even more decades. An extreme example for the Industrial Age, USS Michigan, remained in service on the Great Lakes for nearly eighty years! This owed a lot relatively low-stress service in a corrosion-free freshwater lake. And yet wartime service tends to take lifetime off a hull very quickly. Ships are operated to the utmost limit of their equipment performance during war, maintenance is often delayed or deferred resulting in wear and tear on machinery, and even relatively minor battle damage can cause long-lasting consequences for a ship's performance.

As an example, many British warships during WWII took bomb and torpedo hits but were taken back into action. The catch is that these ships were often slightly twisted or warped in ways that made it impossible to operate one of the engines, or to launch planes from a carrier properly, or had a gun turret put permanently out of action. They were still worth fighting with on the principle of "any ship is better than no ship," since Britain lacked the resources to replace them in a timely fashion. But as soon as peace was declared, most of the ships in the prewar Royal Navy were surveyed and had to be scrapped because they just couldn't perform adequately due to lingering scars, hard overuse of their equipment, and so on.

A lot of nations in the Honorverse have or had 100 or even 200-year old capital ships in 1850 PD (or 1900, or 1920), but that was mostly because the ships were never being used in combat. Since Frontier Fleet operates most of its ships on a regular basis, and does probably have to take them into combat where they do occasionally get shot at... I don't think they can afford to just not order any new ships for decades at a time the way Battle Fleet probably can. So they would have an incentive to be ordering relatively new battlecruiser classes.

Khumalo makes a decision, and endorses Terekhov's actions while begging home for reinforcements and making best time to monica with every ship he can gather on short notice.

See, this sort of thing is why I feel like Khumalo's chronically underestimated. He's got guts, decisiveness, and the willing to take a calculated risk that may involve putting his command in danger in order to accomplish his mission.

He may be bad at politics, and may not be a tactical genius, but in my book he shows every sign of being a good, solid fighting admiral.

Some things you can only learn on the job, like exactly why merchantmen almost never answer the first hail. Which seems to be because that's how the answering machine decides a message is important enough to pass on to a human crew member right away, that or if it's somehow marked priority.

I've always been a little suspicious of the premise that in the Honorverse it makes sense for freighters to be so lean-manned. IF the crews are cut down to a bare minimum, it makes sense that they don't routinely have a human being manning the communications console, which is why they rely heavily on an answering machine.

But is it really that expensive to hire an extra 3-5 crewmen to keep an eye on communications, compared to the overall cost of the ship, its fusion reactors, its antigravity-powered engines, and its hyperdrive?

Took Khumalo less than nine hours to scramble everything local and prepare his sedentary flagship for departure.

Not bad; this suggests a high state of readiness for the ships. Not sure Khumalo can take credit for this because he is heir to an overall RMN tradition of lively readiness for action, but it still reflects well on the overall quality and competence of the Talbott Station forces.

"There's no way those battlecruisers would deter us if we really wanted Monica," Gallant's CO said. "A couple of pod SDs could turn all of them into scrap in a half-hour. Besides, Monica's not the kind of star nation that worries about what other people are likely to do to it; it's the kind of star nation that spends all its time trying to think of things to do to other people."

Why the BCs can't be there to protect Monica from the grasping Star Empire of Manticore.

I don't buy that last sentence, though. Or more accurately, it's the kind of comment that people who don't... really understand international affairs make. Realistically, all countries worry about their ability to defend themselves, and no country is so moronic that it fails to think about its own liabilities and vulnerabilities.

Nations have populations of millions or billions; invariably they can find someone smart enough to think clearly.

Again, I feel a lot more sympathy for Hope than I feel I'm supposed to, the chain of evidence linking Monica to the supplying of Westman and Nordbrandt is mighty tenuous to be invading sovereign nations over.

Also mighty tenuous to be risking war with, specifically, the Solarian League. I mean, that is or should be enough to give anyone pause: do I really want my nation to risk getting into a war with those guys? The answer might be "yes," but that would almost have to be the result of a careful, calculated, considered decision about which intelligent people could reasonably disagree on the "this is crazy" side.

[VhenRa]

Of course. These ones are Indefatigable-class. Not Nevada. Given how long it takes for Sollies to replace stuff, the base design is probably a contemporary of the Homer-class. Or even Redoubtable.

I got mixed up about the class names.

That said, these battlecruisers are by all appearances Frontier Fleet ships, and Frontier Fleet replaces its units fairly often. There are good reasons for that other than just technology changing: if a ship is being continuously used, it will get old and start to break down.

In real life, warships can survive peacetime operations for four, five, or even more decades. An extreme example for the Industrial Age, USS Michigan, remained in service on the Great Lakes for nearly eighty years! This owed a lot relatively low-stress service in a corrosion-free freshwater lake. And yet wartime service tends to take lifetime off a hull very quickly. Ships are operated to the utmost limit of their equipment performance during war, maintenance is often delayed or deferred resulting in wear and tear on machinery, and even relatively minor battle damage can cause long-lasting consequences for a ship's performance.

As an example, many British warships during WWII took bomb and torpedo hits but were taken back into action. The catch is that these ships were often slightly twisted or warped in ways that made it impossible to operate one of the engines, or to launch planes from a carrier properly, or had a gun turret put permanently out of action. They were still worth fighting with on the principle of "any ship is better than no ship," since Britain lacked the resources to replace them in a timely fashion. But as soon as peace was declared, most of the ships in the prewar Royal Navy were surveyed and had to be scrapped because they just couldn't perform adequately due to lingering scars, hard overuse of their equipment, and so on.

A lot of nations in the Honorverse have or had 100 or even 200-year old capital ships in 1850 PD (or 1900, or 1920), but that was mostly because the ships were never being used in combat. Since Frontier Fleet operates most of its ships on a regular basis, and does probably have to take them into combat where they do occasionally get shot at... I don't think they can afford to just not order any new ships for decades at a time the way Battle Fleet probably can. So they would have an incentive to be ordering relatively new battlecruiser classes.

Its stated there was five construction flights (at least) of the Indefatigable-class. (Flight V had a new missile launcher, with higher rate of fire). I get the feeling they just ordered more of them... and Battle Fleet seems to be the ones replacing theirs with Nevadas, with Frontier Fleet seeming to be behind on the replacements.

[Simon_Jester]

Uh... what stated that?

[Batman]

Honorverse wiki entry on the Indefatigables. Indefatigable class Of course, there are no source citations , but I 'do' seem to recall the launcher thingy from the printed material.

[VhenRa]

Uh... what stated that?

Honorverse wiki entry on the Indefatigables. Indefatigable class Of course, there are no source citations , but I 'do' seem to recall the launcher thingy from the printed material.

Its Shadow of Freedom. Battle of Saltash. 4 Indefatigable (SLNSs Vanquisher, Inexorable, Paladin and Success) vs 5 Mantie Roland CLs -cough- DDs. (With the newer 50 Megaton tipped Mark 16s, not the older 15 Megaton models they used at Monica. Stated to be about as deadly, with other upgrades, as pre-war DN/SD missiles). Two of the Indefatigables were stated to be Block Vs with the SL-13 launcher (35 second cycle time) and not the SL-11-b (45 second cycle time)

[Simon_Jester]

Honestly I think it's time to say "screw it" and reclassify the Rolands as CGs. "Cruiser" describes their tonnage in a way more in line with Honorverse conventions. And the fact that they are a ruthlessly optimized MDM combatant with effectively no capability to do much of anything else means that calling them guided missile cruisers is frankly more accurate than classifying them as being somehow comparable to any other kind of destroyer or cruiser in existence.

That said, I really really feel skeptical of those missile launcher cycle times, if only because RMN and Havenite launchers were firing a hell of a lot faster than that throughout the series. Their sustained rate of fire may not have been better (apparently, the buildup-era capital ships were designed with 120 missile magazines for each tube, allowing one missile per tube per minute for two hours)... but they could damn sure sling missiles out the tubes faster than that.

[VhenRa]

Its probably another case of obsolescent hardware. The same scene described the launchers on the Rolands as having 18 second cycle times.

[Simon_Jester]

Thing is, launching missiles quickly is mostly just a matter of physically grabbing them and tossing them out the side of the ship, then grabbing the next one from the magazine for further tossing. The only tricky bit is the mass driver that provides the missile with its initial velocity... but as far as we can tell that technology is NOT new (i.e. 1870 PD to 1920).

So designing a fast-firing broadside missile launcher is a straightforward exercise in capacitor power storage (for the mass driver launching the missiles) and mechanical engineering (for the systems that handle the missiles). Neither of those technologies have changed much, and Manticore has no particular unique advantage in those areas. If they did, then in 1905 PD they'd have been able to achieve a drastically better rate of fire from broadside launchers than the Havenites.

So there's no obvious reason why a SLN battlecruiser with 'obsolete' launchers dating to some time last century should have a markedly inferior rate of fire compared to an RMN battlecruiser of the immediate prewar era. Or, for that matter, a modern system designed to handle two-stage MDMs that are about as big as a prewar battlecruiser-weight missile.



Nor does it make much sense for the Solarian fleet to have deliberately accepted missile launchers whose rate of fire is roughly 2/3 to half of what could be done with the available technology.

Because that's one area where a second-tier power could probably afford to outdo them. No 'neobarb' kingdom has much hope of designing EW equipment superior to even the economy version of what the League's electronics industry can turn out. But they might well be able to produce a missile launcher that physically throws missiles out the ship faster than a deliberately el-cheapo Solarian launcher can.

In which case they'd risk facing an opponent whose cruisers and battlecruisers can shoot twice as fast as them- which is a serious disadvantage that would have been viewed as a problem even by 1800 or 1850 PD-era designers.

In short, this is not an area where it makes sense for Solarian "obsolete" hardware to be markedly inferior to, say, 1905 PD Manticoran or Havenite hardware. And correct me if I'm wrong but they could shoot a lot faster than one round per 45 seconds.

[VhenRa]

Thing is, launching missiles quickly is mostly just a matter of physically grabbing them and tossing them out the side of the ship, then grabbing the next one from the magazine for further tossing. The only tricky bit is the mass driver that provides the missile with its initial velocity... but as far as we can tell that technology is NOT new (i.e. 1870 PD to 1920).

So designing a fast-firing broadside missile launcher is a straightforward exercise in capacitor power storage (for the mass driver launching the missiles) and mechanical engineering (for the systems that handle the missiles). Neither of those technologies have changed much, and Manticore has no particular unique advantage in those areas. If they did, then in 1905 PD they'd have been able to achieve a drastically better rate of fire from broadside launchers than the Havenites.

So there's no obvious reason why a SLN battlecruiser with 'obsolete' launchers dating to some time last century should have a markedly inferior rate of fire compared to an RMN battlecruiser of the immediate prewar era. Or, for that matter, a modern system designed to handle two-stage MDMs that are about as big as a prewar battlecruiser-weight missile.



Nor does it make much sense for the Solarian fleet to have deliberately accepted missile launchers whose rate of fire is roughly 2/3 to half of what could be done with the available technology.

Because that's one area where a second-tier power could probably afford to outdo them. No 'neobarb' kingdom has much hope of designing EW equipment superior to even the economy version of what the League's electronics industry can turn out. But they might well be able to produce a missile launcher that physically throws missiles out the ship faster than a deliberately el-cheapo Solarian launcher can.

In which case they'd risk facing an opponent whose cruisers and battlecruisers can shoot twice as fast as them- which is a serious disadvantage that would have been viewed as a problem even by 1800 or 1850 PD-era designers.

In short, this is not an area where it makes sense for Solarian "obsolete" hardware to be markedly inferior to, say, 1905 PD Manticoran or Havenite hardware. And correct me if I'm wrong but they could shoot a lot faster than one round per 45 seconds.

You're missing a step. Charging the capacitors on the missile. Thats not done until its in the tubes, prior to launching from memory.

[Terralthra]

That's still not something the RMN tech base should be substantially better at than anyone else. Marginally, maybe, but not tens of seconds, and Haven certainly shouldn't be better either (which they were, even at the beginning of the war when their tech base was worse than the SLN). With lighting off the fusion plants on their newer missiles, maybe faster, sure, but charging capacitors?

[VhenRa]

That's still not something the RMN tech base should be substantially better at than anyone else. Marginally, maybe, but not tens of seconds, and Haven certainly shouldn't be better either (which they were, even at the beginning of the war when their tech base was worse than the SLN). With lighting off the fusion plants on their newer missiles, maybe faster, sure, but charging capacitors?

They had to invent an entire new generation of capacitors from memory.

[Terralthra]

Yes, for the MDMs and LACs. But that's late-series. Go back to OBS or HotQ: Fearless, Sirius, and Saladin all have firing cycles in the 15-25 second range, faster than the 35-45 seconds like the SLN do in this book, 15 years later.

[Darth Nostril]

Except these missiles have wedges so you've got to allow time to achieve safe clearance before you throw the next one out.
And it's not just how quickly you can throw missiles out of the launcher, it's also how quickly can your targeting systems cycle.

[Simon_Jester]

You're missing a step. Charging the capacitors on the missile. Thats not done until its in the tubes, prior to launching from memory.

Well, it would be logical to design a launcher with a 'ready magazine' capacity to charge capacitors on the handful of missiles in the magazine that are about to be fired within the next couple of minutes, but that's a detail.

Thing is, charging the capacitors from a shipboard reactor is a straightforward challenge in electrical engineering- and, again, this is not an area where we've seen rapid advances over the course of the series. Or at least there is no positive evidence of such advances.

And there is a lack of the negative advances we'd expect.

Because if "the latest" technology (Manticore's) allows drastically better chargers to charge up and prepare a capacitor-fed missile, as compared to "adequate/aging" technology (the League's) or "crude" technology (prewar Haven's)... Well. In that case you'd expect Manticore to have had much higher rates of fire on broadside missile launchers compared to Haven in 1905 PD. I recall no evidence of this being the case.

Except these missiles have wedges so you've got to allow time to achieve safe clearance before you throw the next one out.

Yes, but that constraint applies to everyone, so it represents a more or less universal lower limit on how fast you can "reload" to fire the next broadside. You could imagine an engineer saying "sure, we COULD design a launcher that would lob one missile every five seconds, but the wedge interference would be a killer."

Although honestly, the ship's onboard mass drivers are supposedly fast enough to make a noticeable difference in the terminal velocity and time of flight of impeller drive missiles... which strongly suggests that they can achieve a muzzle velocity of at least a hundreds of kilometers per second. In which case getting the missiles far enough downrange to get safe clearance between their impeller wedges should only take a few seconds.

And it's not just how quickly you can throw missiles out of the launcher, it's also how quickly can your targeting systems cycle.

Right, but SLN naval electronics are at least comparable to Manticoran prewar hardware. Maybe not quite as good, but pretty good. Certainly they're better than anything Haven had before the war.

So an Indefatigable should be in pretty much all respects advanced and sophisticated enough to be superior, ton-for-ton, compared to a Havenite prewar ship like the Sultan-class. Certainly it shouldn't be grossly inferior in any key respect like "can only manage half the volume of fire for its missiles."

It might be meat on the table against MDMs, Ghost Rider-level fusion-powered EW drones, super-LACs, and gravitic-based FTL fire control systems... but the Indefatigable should at least be a respectable and dangerous combatant on the scale of what existed circa 1905 PD.

[Batman]

What has the cycle time of your targeting systems got to do with the refire rate of your missile tubes? The real world licked the problem of you having way more missiles underway than you have target designators 30 years ago. You just tell the missile 'you go thataway until further notice' and switch to the next one. I fail to see why the targeting systems should have any effect on their ability to get missiles underway as rapidly as possible.
My personal interpretation is Weber used those 45 seconds to show that yep, the SLN is that hopelessly obsolete compared to the Manties (as if the MDMs wouldn't already make that painfully obvious) without bothering to check the cycle times he used at the beginning of the series.
In-universe, I got nothing.

[Ahriman238]

"Don't get me wrong, Isidor, but if he screws up and lets your people pick him up, that's a pretty bad sign. The Manties' sensors are a lot better than anything you've got—quite a bit better than anything we've got, for that matter, despite the opinions of several of our own senior R and D people that ours are the best in the universe, if our field reps' reports are accurate. We haven't been able to get any of those idiots in the SLN's R and D departments to pay any attention to us, of course. They're all locked into the 'Not Invented Here' automatic rejection reflex. Well," he added with a charming little-boy grin, "that and an equally automatic suspicion that we're only telling them all those tall tales about Manty capabilities to scare them into funneling more money into our R and D programs. Which there might be just a teeny-tiny bit of truth to.

"But my point is, that if you people can pick him up, then it's for damned sure the Manties could."

One reason for the League's reflex rejection of stories of what Manticore and Haven are doing with advanced military hardware. And apparently Manty sensor tech (or more likely their doctrine of using tons of sensor remotes) has outstripped Solly tech.

"Sorry, Sir," Lieutenant Commander Wright said. "I undershot a bit."

"Stop fishing for compliments, Toby," Terekhov said, never looking away from the astrogation plot. "Five hundred k-klicks off on a thirty-eight light-year jump? Sounds like a bull's-eye to me."

Gotta allow for some margin of error on FTL jumps.

"Commander Badmachin reports Volcano is rolling pods, Sir," Amal Nagchaudhuri announced.

"I have them on lidar, Sir," Abigail Hearns confirmed from Tactical. "Warlock's picking up her allotment now."

No messing around, everyone goes in towing as many pods as they can.

Her pulse, she knew, was quicker than usual, yet in almost too many ways, this felt like just another training sim. Which, she supposed, was the point of spending so much time in simulators in the first place.

Bingo, but Helen, you already knew this.

The first remote sensor arrays launched, spreading out in a vast, hollow sphere around the Squadron. At the same time, she saw the electronic warfare platforms spreading out around the individual ships and settling into a closer, tighter defensive formation than the arrays.

A corner of her mind couldn't help thinking the Skipper was being a little paranoid. The Monicans couldn't possibly have known they were coming, and even the best Solarian missiles had a maximum powered attack envelope of no more than 6.5 million kilometers from rest, even at half-power settings. Not to mention the fact that while Manticoran electronics were the best any navy had ever deployed, the Monicans' basic surveillance systems were obsolescent League crap at least forty T-years out of date. There was no way any threat this system could mount could get through her sensor shell to attack range without plenty of warning.

But only a corner of her mind thought that. The rest of it recognized yet another example of the Skipper's infinite attention to detail. He would dot every "i" and cross every "t" ahead of time, when he had the leisure to be sure it was done right. Who was it, back on Old Earth, who'd said to ask him for anything but time? She rather thought it had been Napoleon. Of course, despite all his strategic genius on land, Napoleon hadn't known how to pour piss out of a boot where navies were concerned, but that particular bit of advice translated quite well across the centuries for any officer.

6.5 million klick from range for "even the best" Solarian missiles. Deploying a full shell of recon platforms anyway, because Terekhov doesn't take stupid chances or risk his command through carelessness.

She thought about Lieutenant Commander Diamond. How did he feel right now? From all she could discover, he'd been with Commander Hope for at least two T-years. Now she'd been hustled off aboard the dispatch boat, returned to Spindle ignominiously with the Captain's dispatches, like so much unwanted freight. If this operation turned into the disaster she'd evidently predicted, she'd probably emerge as the only CO of the Squadron with an intact reputation. But if it succeeded, she'd be known throughout the Navy as the commander of a Queen's ship who'd refused, for whatever reason, to face the enemy when ordered to do so. And whichever way it came out, Diamond would have to live with the fact that he'd elected to succeed her in command rather than follow her into exile.

Yeah, it probably won't be fun to be Eleanor Hope after this.

The latest wrinkle BuWeaps had come up with was to incorporate a small tractor beam into each individual pod. Although their design was maximized for deployment from the new hollow-core SD(P)s and even newer BC(P)s, there were still plenty of old-style ships or smaller vessels—like the ones of Captain Terekhov's small squadron—which could only deploy pods on tow. One limiting factor for those ships had always been the way the number of tractor beams they mounted restricted the numbers of pods they could deploy. By mounting tractors on the pods themselves, that particular problem was overcome, and Captain Terekhov was using that advantage to the maximum. By the time he got done his ships would do well to manage 350 g, but they'd have a devastating long-range punch. Even the destroyers would have ten pods tagging along. Each of the three light cruisers would have fifteen, Warlock and Vigilant would have twenty-three each, and Hexapuma would have no less than forty. Altogether, it added up to a hundred and seventy-one pods for a total of 1,710 missiles. Capital missiles of the Royal Manticoran Navy—the longest ranged, most deadly missiles in space.

The flatback pods, or perhaps a transitional version since they aren't carrying these flush against the hull. Now instead of towing one pod for every tractor beam, each ship can tow as many pods as they have fire control links to fire. Which is a lot, particularly for the newer ships. Heck each destroyer can handle more pods than a BC could when they first started using them (which was 5-7).

"They might," the Solly repeated, "but if they were going to do that, they wouldn't have to come in on us at all. If our reports about how they're pulling off their range increases are correct, they've actually built multiple drive systems into a single missile body."

"What?" Hegedusic looked at him in astonishment, and Levakonic chuckled harshly.

"I know. They have to've developed an entire new generation of superdense fusion bottles, or something of the sort, to pull that off. We know they're fiendishly good at engineering components down, but there are practical limits. Their initial long-range missiles were apparently a lot bigger than their current-generation birds, so they probably went with improved capacitors on those. Hell, you've seen our latest-generation birds, and you know how big they are. Well, they still have single-drive systems that just happen to last a little longer before burnout; all the rest of the volume's for the juice they need to take advantage of their drive endurance.

"If our reports from Haven are right, the Peeps are still using stored energy for their birds. It's hurting them in areas like magazine capacity, compared to the Manties, and apparently they only managed that much because they were able to reverse engineer the Manties' late-generation capacitors.

Mini-fusion plant vs capacitator fed MDMs. Apparently Haven has captured and manged to reverse engineer some Manty hardware from the last war, before Erewhon crossed the line.

"Of course," his smile was vinegar-tart, "all we have since Pierre and Saint-Just got bumped off are rumors and third-party reports. Their new management doesn't seem to like us very much. Which is partly our fault, of course." He grimaced. "They didn't have many samples of the Manties' current hardware after the cease-fire, and we weren't particularly interested in helping them out with their own development programs once the reports on Manty hardware started drying up. They, ah, seem to have long memories out there, and once Erewhon went over to their side with actual working examples of Manty technology, their R and D people pretty much told us to take a hike. So our latest first-hand reports are five T-years out of date, and it's possible all of this is inaccurate as hell.

Apparently Technodyne was heavily involved in the tech-transfers to the Peeps during the war, in exchange for reports on Manticoran innovations like FTL comm. When they'd used up all useful information, they stopped being so helpful, and so have been shut out since Haven got a new source of technical information from Erewhon.

"But could anybody really build a fusion plant that small?"

"It's theoretically possible. With a powerful enough grav field to do the pinching, it could be done. But the initial power would have to come from a source external to the missile, which would probably mean some tricky modification of the launchers, as well. Anyway," he shook his head, brushing away the speculation, "the point I was going to make is that they have an effectively unlimited powered attack range. They could fire the damned things from five or six light-hours out, accelerate the bastards up to speed, and then program the second stage drive not to kick in until the birds entered attack range of their targets. If they didn't punch the max velocity too high, they wouldn't suffer significant -particle-erosion degradation of their onboard sensor systems during even a very long ballistic flight component."

Engineering of MDM power sources, and the realities of MDM combat. Negating the all-important issue of fire control.

"—Terekhov, Royal Manticoran Navy. I require you to immediately cease all work on all starships currently undergoing refit, and to evacuate all personnel from the military components of Eroica Station. I have no desire to fire on you or your personnel. My sole concern at this time is to ensure that none of those units enter the service of the Republic of Monica until such time as my government receives satisfactory assurances about the purposes for which you intend to employ them. If, however, my instructions to stand down and evacuate are not obeyed, I will fire upon you and destroy those ships. I hereby formally advise you that I am capable of carrying out that bombardment from beyond the effective range of any of Eroica Station's own weapons. You cannot prevent me from destroying those vessels at my convenience, and so I urge you most earnestly to begin evacuation immediately. You have one hour to comply. Terekhov, clear."

Laying down the law.

"What you're demanding is impossible, Captain," he said harshly. "Even if I were inclined to be dictated to, which I am not, I couldn't possibly contact my government and receive authorization in the time limit you've imposed. Minimum message turnaround between here and the system government is over eighty-three minutes. I assure you messages will be sent immediately, relaying your insulting and arrogant demand and requesting instructions, but I cannot hear back from my government in less than an hour and twenty minutes. Hegedusic, clear."

"I understand your communication problems, Admiral," Terekhov said after the inevitable delay. "Nonetheless, my time limit stands. It isn't negotiable. Terekhov, clear."

"I don't have the authority to give such orders, Captain! I would be . . . strongly disinclined to do so in any case, but as the situation stands, I couldn't even if I wanted to. Hegedusic, clear."

"Admiral, you're a naval officer. As such, you know there are times to observe the legal niceties, and times that isn't possible. This is one of the latter. You may not have the legal authority to evacuate your post, but you do have the de facto authority. And you also have the responsibility to preserve the lives of your personnel in a situation in which you literally cannot fight back. I urge you to consider whether your moral responsibility lies in slavish obedience to the law, or in ensuring your people don't die pointlessly. Terekhov, clear."

"If we're going to speak about moral responsibilities, Captain, what about your responsibility not to slaughter people who, by your own statement, can't even threaten your own command, simply because their oaths to their own government require them to remain at their posts until legally relieved by competent authority? Hegedusic, clear."

"You have a point, Admiral," Terekhov conceded. "However, my own duty leaves me no alternative. And honesty compels me to add that neither I nor any other Manticoran officer have conspired with genetic slavers, pirates, terrorists, and mass murderers to commit acts of war on the sovereign territories of at least two independent star nations. Your government has done precisely that. My responsibility to see to it that those unprovoked and murderous assaults end now overrides any responsibility I may have towards your personnel. And I would further add, Sir, that I'm already holding my fire when you're well within my effective range specifically in order to avoid any unnecessary loss of life. That is the only concession I am prepared or able to make. So, I repeat, I require your immediate stand-down and evacuation. You now have fifty-one minutes to comply. Terekhov, clear and out."

Debate, not so constructive in this case.

"Sir, we just picked up a transmission. I . . . think it's from Commodore Horster."

"You think?" Hegedusic frowned, and the lieutenant gave him a helpless look.

"Sir, there's no header and no ID code. Just one word transmitted in clear."

"Well?" Hegedusic demanded when the young man paused.

"Sir, it just says 'Coming.'"

The three completely refit BCs were sneaking into the system under stealth as part of a wargame. This is Janko Horster's way of coordinating with home.

"At least in the direction of having a fighting chance," Levakonic agreed a bit more cautiously.

"But we could shift them even further if we could keep this Captain Terekhov coming in fat, dumb, and happy."

Hegedusic thought a moment longer, then turned back to the communications section.

"Send a message to the Manties. Tell them I've decided to evacuate the Station, but that it's going to take some time. Tell them I estimate a minimum of two and a half to three hours, even using every available vessel from the civilian platforms."

"Yes, Sir."

Hegedusic turned to another staffer.

"Get down to flight ops. Tell them I want a steady stream of lighters and shuttles moving between the Alpha platforms and the Beta platforms. I don't need anybody aboard them but the flight crews; I just need small craft in motion where the Manties can see it."

Stalling.

"Captain," Helen announced, astonished that her own voice sounded so calm, "we have a possible impeller signature, very weak, inbound at three-point-two light-minutes. Apparent closing velocity four-one-five-seven-two kilometers per second."

-snip-

"Captain, Alpha-Seven has a second possible contact in close company with Bogey-One," Helen announced. She hesitated a moment, then cleared her throat. "Sir, the array's at less than eleven light-seconds from whatever this is."

"Your point, Ms. Zilwicki?"

"Sir, these arrays don't pick up ghosts at that short a range. If they're seeing something that close to them, it's really there. And if they can't see it clearly, it's because whatever it is is doing its damnedest to imitate a hole in space."

"She's right, Skipper," Naomi Kaplan said from AuxCon. She'd been studying the frustratingly inconclusive data herself. "And if that's what we've got here, Sir," she continued grimly, "whoever it is has got much better EW than any Monican unit ever had."

Terekhov's paranoia pays off, they detect the inbound Monican BCs,

"We can't leave the battlecruisers in the yard behind us. I want to hold the pods—we may need them against these newcomers. Do you have a good firing solution on the Station?"

"Yes, Sir," she said steadily.

"Very well," he said. "Execute Fire Plan Sierra, broadside launchers only."

Terekhov fires on Eroica Station (the military/civilian shipyards doing the refits) with the KItty's MDMs.

The missile pods provided by Technodyne were very stealthy platforms. In fact, they had even smaller sensor signatures than the RMN's pods did. In virtually every other respect, however, they were inferior to Manticore's weapons. Their single-drive missiles had lower accelerations, less sensitive seekers, poorer EW, and much, much shorter powered attack ranges. But inferior as they might have been in all of those categories, they were far better than anything the SLN had ever had before. They were better than ONI's worst-case estimates. And they were already inside the attack range their improved drives made possible.

To reach their targets with enough time left on their drives for the necessary terminal attack maneuvers, the missiles would have to restrict themselves to half-power, "only" 43,000 gravities and a terminal velocity of "only" .32 c. They were big—larger even than a standard capital missile, more like something a ground-based system would have fired—and the designers had been able to squeeze only eight of them into each out-sized pod. But Hegedusic and Levakonic had deployed one hundred and twenty of those pods. Deployed them amid the concealing clutter of Eroica Station's platforms and in the protective radar shadows of handy asteroids.

Technodyne's cutting edge Solly-tech missile pods. Only 8 birds to a pod, I see they added 500 Gs to missile accel and their pods are stealthy and difficult targets. Good. Not really competitive with Haven Sector navies in other ways though. And while I respect the pods are pretty much their only real chance of striking back, missile massacre is not a game you want to play with the Manties. Especially not when they brought half again as many pods as you did.

She'd never really expected Fire Plan Omega to be required. It was the "use-them-or-lose-them" option common to any naval force employing towed pods. Their vulnerability to proximity "soft kills" meant they had to be gotten off before that hurricane of incoming fire arrived, but no one had really expected the Monicans would be able to range on them. Yet the Captain had insisted on planning for even that unlikely eventuality. There was a different, less precise targeting sequence to meet it, one which spared only the two battlecruisers in among the civilians, and Abigail Hearns ignored the missiles screaming in to kill her. She had less than three minutes to completely revise her firing plan and get her birds off before they were destroyed. And so she shut the incoming fire out of her mind, trusting her survival and her ship's to a midshipwoman on her snotty cruise while she called up Fire Plan Omega's targeting hierarchy, handed it to the computers, allocated her pods, and fired.

They keep an emergency fire plan ready, so if they have to flush the pods in a hurry, they can do so. In this case, that means targeting all the BCs they came to destroy but the two they absolutely can't hit at this range without massive civilian casualties.

Case Romeo activated the squadron-wide layered defense system Naomi Kaplan had set up on the voyage from Point Midway. Hexapuma and Aegis, with their superior sensor suites, faster-firing counter-missile tubes, and additional control links, were responsible for the outer counter-missile zone. Warlock, Valiant, and Gallant had the intermediate zone, and Audacious and the destroyers had the close-in counter-missile zone.

First time I've ever heard of dividing the counter missile kill zone into three, with different ships having responsibility for each zone, but it makes a degree of sense, especially considering the newer ships will have better sensors and sheer range on their counter missiles. Apparently improved rate of fire is part of the recent improvements too, which may combine with the greater range to explain why Manticore can usually get off more salvos of CMs against a given hostile salvo.

Hexapuma and Aegis, with their own counter-missiles and enough from the other ships to fill all their redundant control links, destroyed two hundred and nineteen missiles in the outer zone, ripping them apart with precisely directed counter-missile kamikazes.

Seven hundred and forty-one missiles, each fit to blast through a superdreadnought's sidewalls and armor, broke through the outer zone and screamed into the squadron's teeth. Hexapuma and Aegis continued firing, joined by Warlock, Valiant, and Gallant as the older ships' less acute sensors locked onto the incoming tide of death. Holes appeared, ripped through the solid-looking tide of incoming warheads, and another two hundred and forty-eight of them died.

But there were still almost four hundred left, and they came howling into the inner counter-missile zone. All the Manticoran ships could see them now, but there was no time for follow-up shots on missiles which evaded the first counter-missiles targeted upon them. The maelstrom of swarming targets and outgoing counter-missiles, the sensor-blinding interference of hundreds of missile impeller wedges, and the jamming, sensor-twisting strobes of the Solarian-built missiles' sophisticated ECM created a whirling confusion no human brain could have sorted out. It was all in the hands of the computers, and Hexapuma quivered with the saw-edged vibration of counter-missile tubes in constant, maximum-rate fire.

Two hundred more missiles perished, and "only" two hundred and ninety-three kept coming.

They hit the the perimeter of the final defensive zone, too close for counter-missiles to acquire and intercept in time. Tethered decoys called to them, seducing them away from their assigned targets. Huge bursts of jamming tried to blind them. Laser clusters swiveled and spat, cycling bolts of coherent light in lethal streams, their prediction programs pitted against the best evasion patterns the Solarian League's premier naval shipbuilder could provide. The inner zone was a holocaust of shattering missiles and wreckage, and a hundred and ninety-six more were torn apart in the second and a half it took them to cross it.

It was a phenomenal performance. Ninety percent of that lethal tide was stopped short of attack range. Ninety percent, by only ten warships, none heavier than a heavy cruiser.

But ninety-seven got through.

Missile defense of the squadron, 200 missiles or so stopped at each CM zone, and nearly that many by laser clusters, but with a launch of 960 missiles, just over 10% get through.

Hexapuma heaved madly as bomb-pumped lasers designed to shatter the armor of superdreadnoughts slammed into her. Sidewalls did their best, clawing at the beams, bending them. Armor resisted briefly, but the savage bars of X-ray lasers smashed through it. Impeller nodes blew, superconductor capacitors exploded, hull plating shattered. Graser One, Three, and Seven were wiped away as if they had never existed, and despite Hexapuma's manpower-reducing automation, nineteen men and women died with their weapons. Missile tubes were wrecked, ripped and twisted. Frame members shattered. Three sidewall generators went down, and a quarter of her starboard counter-missile tubes and almost half her point defense clusters went with them. Gravitic Array One and Lidar One disintegrated, and a power surge blew into the superconductor ring for Spinal Five, the starboard graser in her after chase armament, like a tornado. The ring exploded, deep inside the ship, like a bomb, and the blast blew back into Auxiliary Control.

Ansten FitzGerald, Naomi Kaplan, and eleven other men and women were caught in the path of the explosion. FitzGerald and Kaplan both survived; most of the others were less fortunate.

-snip-

Javelin, Rondeau, and Gallant were gone. Audacious was -savagely damaged and lamed, with less than a quarter of her weapons left. Vigilant was little more than a hulk, and Warlock was severely damaged. Hexapuma's more modern point defense—and an inordinate share of pure luck—had let her escape with far less damage than her older sisters, but all things were relative. Her maximum acceleration, even without pods, was no better than four hundred gravities. She was down to thirty-five tubes, and a quarter of her broadside grasers—sixty percent of her starboard energy broadside—and one of her after chasers were gone. Thirty-seven of her people were confirmed dead, with at least another seventeen wounded . . . including Surgeon Commander Orban. His sick berth attendants were doing their best, but none of them were fully trained physicians.

Damage to Hexapuma and the squadron. 3 ships dead, 2 crippled and at least 2 more severely damaged.

Isidor Hegedusic felt a moment of incredible triumph as the missile pods fired.

That tsunami of destruction surpassed anything he'd ever dreamed of commanding, and only ten cruisers and destroyers stood in its path. Whatever happened to Eroica Station, those ships were doomed.

Yet even as he thought that, before the first counter-missile had intercepted the first missile, the Manticoran pods fired. He'd sent nine hundred and sixty missiles to crush the Manties; Abigail Hearns sent seventeen hundred back into his teeth, and his defenses were nowhere near as good.

Like I said. Not a game you want to play with the Manties.

He drew a deep breath and turned his attention to Eroica Station and felt a stab of vengeful satisfaction. Those damned missile pods had savaged his squadron, killed his people, but their own fire had shattered the military components of the Station. The close-in drones made it obvious that at least eight of the nine battlecruisers in the military yard had been wrecked beyond any hope of repair even by a Solarian shipyard, far less Monica's facilities. The other one might be repairable, but it would take a fully equipped shipyard months, possibly T-years, to do the job. The two on the civilian side of the installation were still intact, but there wasn't much he could do about that, even using laser heads instead of conventional nukes, without killing hundreds of civilians. He didn't want to do that, and he wouldn't . . . if he had any choice at all. And at least Eroica Station itself had been thoroughly neutralized as a threat.

Which, unfortunately, wasn't true of the oncoming battlecruisers.

Damage to Eroica Station. Whatever else happens, most of those Solly BCs aren't going to be able to threaten the Star Kingdom. It's pretty doubtful the firepower they have left is going to be able to make a serious play for the Lynx wormhole, especially with Home Fleet reinforcing it.

"What's your maximum acceleration, Lieutenant Gainsworthy?"

"I don't know for sure, Sir. It can't be much over a hundred gravs. We've lost the entire after ring, and the forward ring's badly damaged."

"That's what I was afraid of." Terekhov drew a deep breath and squared his shoulders. "You're going to have to abandon, Lieutenant."

"No!" Gainsworthy protested instantly. "We can save her! We can get her home!"

"No, you can't, Lieutenant," Terekhov said, gently but implacably. "Even if she could be repaired, which is doubtful, she can't stay with the rest of the Squadron. Those bogeys will run right over her. So get your people off and set the scuttling charges, Lieutenant Gainsworthy. That's an order."

"But, Sir, we—!" A tear carved a white streak down one dirty cheek, and Terekhov shook his head.

"I'm sorry, son," he said, cutting the lieutenant off quietly. "I know it hurts to lose her—I've done it. But however much you love her, she's only a ship, Lieutenant." A lie, his brain shouted. You know that's a lie! "She's only alloy and electronics. It's her people that matter. Now get them off."

Abandoning Vigilant as unable to stick with the squadron while they engage those BCs.

"They've increased their deceleration to four hundred gravities," he told the civilian. "That's an increase of fifty gees over what they were holding it down to on the way in—probably because of their frigging pods—but it's a hell of a lot less than they ought to be capable of. So obviously they have impeller damage. But they've also got a ship out there somewhere that survived the shooting only to have its signature go off the display just a couple of minutes ago. So either its impeller damage was even worse than theirs, and its nodes just packed it in, or they're abandoning her. But they wouldn't be doing that this quickly unless they were afraid someone was in position to engage them."

Horster figures they (the Monican BCs) have been made.

"They're dead meat," he said flatly. The civilian stopped nodding and looked at him with undisguised anxiety, and the commodore barked a laugh. "They don't have any of those damned pods left," he said, "and they never had anything bigger than a heavy cruiser to begin with, according to Admiral Hegedusic's tac analysis. At least a hundred of our missiles got into attack range before they detonated, too. They've been hammered—hammered hard—and they're going to be up against modern battlecruisers. Battlecruisers that can shoot back this time."

The civilian still looked dubious, and Horster could almost hear the thoughts running through the other man's brain. Yes, he had modern battlecruisers to kill them with, but Horster's crews had been aboard their ships for less than three weeks. Their people were still learning how to use their systems, how to master the capabilities, but it wasn't quite as bad as it could have been. Their engineering and astrogation departments had been forced to wait until they could actually get aboard the new ships, but the tactical crews had managed to spend over two months in the simulators Levakonic had brought with him. That might not be the same as hands-on training, but it was one hell of a lot better than nothing.

And they were battlecruisers, with all the armor and sheer toughness that implied.

And apparently a BC crewed by chimpanzees is a credible threat to a heavy cruiser, at least so one might think from Honor of the Queen. Of course, the Kitty isn't exactly your average CA, if Honor had something like it at Second Yeltsin....

"Skipper," Lieutenant Bagwell said from the electronic warfare station, "until they go active with their sensor suites, we're not going to get any more off of them. From the quality of their stealth technology, though, they've got to be Solly designs."

"Another thing, Sir," Abigail said. "Whoever these people are, they were obviously already on a ballistic course for Eroica Station when we turned up, or we'd have picked up their drives. I suppose it's possible they had their impellers up and their stealth system simply hid it from us, but I don't think so. I think they'd already cut their drives. Which suggests some sort of fleet maneuver."

"And?" Terekhov prompted in an encouraging tone when she paused, although he was fairly certain he knew where she was headed.

"Well, Sir, I suppose it's possible an SLN commander might want to exercise his crews, but it doesn't seem likely he'd have pulled out all the stops that way against typical Verge sensor technology. I think it's more likely these are more of the same—additional ships being turned over to the Monicans, but already through the refit process and working up new crews."

"That's speculative, Skipper," Bagwell said, "but I think it's good speculation."

Not leaping to conclusions, but coming to the correct idea about who and what those three BCs are.

The only advantage he still had was the reach of Hexapuma's internal launchers, and the geometry of the looming engagement did much to neutralize even that. The range was down to 30.9 million kilometers, and with the battlecruisers' overtake advantage of 38,985 KPS, Hexapuma's maximum powered envelope at launch was increased to almost thirty-seven million kilometers. Assuming the battlecruisers' shipboard missile performance approximated ONI's estimates, their range would be under fifteen million kilometers, despite their overtake, but at present velocities and accelerations, they would enter that range of him within another 6.3 minutes and enter energy range eleven minutes after that. Warlock would also have a slight range advantage over the Monican battlecruisers, but it wasn't great enough to change the tactical equation significantly. Her tubes were simply too small; she couldn't handle even the Mark 14 missiles the Saganami-Bs had been designed to fire, much less a Saganami-C's Mark 16s, so her advantage would be little more than three million kilometers—barely seventy-five seconds at the Monicans' rate of closure.

The range was still very long, especially against current Solarian ECM and missile defenses . . . and he didn't have all that many missiles with which to penetrate them. Each of his Mark 16 missiles came in at over ninety-four tons, and Hexapuma's total designed loadout of attack missiles was 1,200. Fortunately, they'd squeezed in an extra hundred and twenty birds . . . but Abigail had expended most of them in Fire Plan Omega, and fifteen more had been in the feed queues of the five destroyed launchers. Without the redundant manpower Hexapuma didn't have, there was no way to manually reclaim those missiles, so his ship was down to an effective total of only 1,155. The cycle time on his launchers at maximum-rate fire was one round every eighteen seconds, twice the time an older ship, like Warlock, would have required. Partly because the missiles were simply larger, but even more because of the need to light up the Mark 16's onboard reactor before launch. Still, in theory, each launcher could fire fifty-four times before anyone else on either side was in range to do the same . . . except for the fact that he had only thirty-three rounds per tube.

Yet he had very little time to think about it. Flight time was going to be over three and a half minutes.

"Guns," he said to his youthful acting tactical officer, "your target is the lead bogey. I want double broadsides at twenty-five-second intervals. You can have four tubes in each salvo for Dazzlers and Dragon's Teeth. Five salvos on Bogey One, then shift to Bogey Two."

Terekhov acts. More fun with both magazine space and rate of fire. A Saganami-C normally carries 1200 missiles, or 30 per tube. It seems he really did get an extra 10%, no idea where he stuck them.

Rate of fire gets pretty inconsistent over the course of the series, but stay to a general area of 10-20 seconds. The first hard numbers we got were HotQ, where the Star Knight-class Fearless II could fire a salvo every 11 seconds, but didn't lest they expend their magazines too quickly. Meanwhile Saladin/Thunder of God could fire a broadside every 15 seconds. Later in FiE, Honor's Superdreadnoughts had 20 seconds between missiles while her screen (explicitly mentioned as having the same model of missile launcher as Fearless II) could fire every 17 seconds. Here and now, Kitty can fire every 18 seconds, but at least half the reason for that is engaging the fusion plant for the MDMs, while Warlock of the same class as Fearless II can fire missiles in half that time. Taken literally, 9 seconds, but I'll allow for some inaccuracy on the grounds that a second or two isn't that much time. We also see again a problem with having tiny crews when it comes to damage control.

"Ms. Zilwicki, lock the Alpha-Seven array directly to Lieutenant Bagwell." He turned his chair to face the EWO. "These people's defenses are going to be good—very good. We need to hammer them, and to do that we need data on their EW capabilities—fast. The rest of the Squadron will have over ten minutes to engage after they enter their effective powered envelope, but for them to use that time, we need to feed them everything we can pry loose about these people's defensive systems, and our missile range advantage is the only crowbar we have. We need to make them show us their best, people."

Not just a tactic of desperation, Terekhov wants to press the enemy hard enough to see all their EW tricks with his nearby recon platforms so by the time they enter missile range of the rest of the squadron they'll have a very good idea how to get the most out of each salvo. And he's spacing out the salvos just enough to let him keep a couple of salvos in reserve when that happens.

The arrow-shaped icons of thirty-five missiles streaked towards his trio of ships, accelerating steadily at 46,000 gravities. Twenty-five seconds later, a second salvo followed. Then a third. A fourth.

Apparently a Mk 16 MDM does 46,000 Gs in long-distance mode.

The Manties had begun firing much sooner than he'd anticipated. For just an instant, he wondered if that meant they were planning on sending them in ballistic. But that would have been a stupid waste of precious ammunition, and they were firing their birds with low-power drive settings. That suggested that they must have the reach to engage under power even at this range, -presumably with plenty of time on their clocks for terminal attack maneuvers. Still, there were less than forty in each salvo. They had to be coming from a single ship, so perhaps the Manties actually had at least one battlecruiser of their own out there. Either way, there weren't enough birds to saturate his division's defenses, so—

His eyes narrowed still further as the lead salvo abruptly vanished from the plot. One instant it was there; the next all thirty-plus missiles just disappeared. Five seconds later, they reappeared, but not as the steady, blood-red light codes they'd been before. Now they strobed rapidly, almost flickering, and he jabbed an angry glance at the tech rep.

"I don't know!" the civilian said, correctly interpreting the look. "It must be some sort of jamming platform. That—" he stabbed an index finger at the flickering icons "—indicates we can see them, but we don't have hard locks. And look—look there! Goddamn it!"

Horster didn't swear out loud, but his teeth ground together as his division's entire initial salvo of counter-missiles lost lock and went stumbling off into ineffectuality.

*********

Terekhov bared his teeth at the tactical plot. Despite the range, the FTL reports from Helen's recon drones gave him a real-time, close-range picture of what was happening. He hadn't given Abigail specific instructions on how to employ the EW platforms seeded into her attack salvos, but he recognized what she'd done. She'd used all of the available slots in the initial double broadside for Dazzlers but locked them down until they detected the launch of the enemy's first counter-missiles. When the powerful jammers did come on-line, the Monican CMs had already established lock and been cut loose from the launching ships' control links. But the counter-missiles' onboard seekers weren't up to the challenge of that sudden, massive pulse of jamming right in their faces.

Dazzlers, and was that a carefully timed drive transition or just the jamming?

The attack salvo jinked and wove, threading through, past, and around the suddenly dazed and clumsy interceptors which were supposed to have stopped it, then drove past the second wave of CMs, which had already locked onto Abigail's next attack wave. Four of the first wave's birds abruptly wavered, losing lock, veering away as the Monicans' own EW lured them astray. Then a fifth followed them. But thirty held lock, and their closing velocity was so great the defenders had no time to vector yet another wave of counter-missiles onto them.

Then Bogey One's forward laser clusters opened fire.

* * *

This time Janko Horster did swear.

Typhoon's shipboard sensors were less affected by the Manties' infernal jammers than the counter-missiles' seekers had been, but it was painfully obvious they hadn't been unaffected. They fired late, and their solutions were poor. An Indefatigable-class battlecruiser's point defense clusters should have been more than equal to a salvo that size, but she stopped only fourteen of them. The other sixteen got through.

Fortunately, three of the leakers must have been EW platforms. But thirteen laser heads detonated in sequence, so rapidly it looked like one, continuous eruption, directly ahead of Typhoon. The bomb-pumped lasers stabbed straight down the throat of her wedge, unobstructed by any sidewall.

Typhoon's forward hammerhead was massively armored against just such an attack, but not even her armor could shrug off that staccato thunder of stabbing X-ray lasers. It stopped a dozen of them, but another half-dozen blasted straight through it. They knocked out two of her chase missile tubes, one of her chase energy mounts, two counter-missile tubes and a laser cluster. And, far worse, one shattered her forward radar array. It blinded her, put out the eye of her forward missile defenses, and a second wave of attacking missiles was only twenty-five seconds behind.

The Monicans aren't nearly as tough on defense, but even after that hit Typhoon (all the BCs were renamed for powerful storms) is still in the fight.

"Excellent!" Terekhov acknowledged, but he knew that had been the most effective single salvo they were going to get in, and now that they knew for certain he'd seen them, the Monicans were no longer trying to hide. Their wedges were up, and they were accelerating directly towards the Squadron at five hundred gravities. That was going to reduce his missile engagement time, he thought grimly, but it was hardly unexpected. And at least if they were going to chase him, it meant exposing the throats of their wedges to his fire.

Now they'll know to be more careful, and they'll have more data on the ECM Manty missiles use. And now it's a chase, with the Monican BCs opening the throttle to close the distance faster, and showing Terekhov their throats.

He watched the plot as Abigail's second double broadside roared into the Monicans' outer defense zone. He saw the instant that its Dazzlers came on-line and the counter-missiles which had been speeding to meet them veered aside. But this time there was time for a follow-on wave of CMs to be vectored onto them. Seventeen of them were intercepted and blotted away, and then the laser clusters began to fire. Another twelve were picked off, but six got through, and Bogey One staggered as more stilettos drilled through her armor.

* * *

Typhoon shuddered as a second wave of X-ray daggers bored through her armor. She should have stopped more of them—all of them—with her lavish anti-missile defenses, but she couldn't see them. Her point defense lasers had become dependent upon relayed tracking reports from Cyclone and Hurricane, and that simply wasn't adequate against targets coming in so fast. -Especially not targets as elusive as Manticoran Mark 16 missiles. Fresh -damage reports inundated her bridge, and her acceleration faltered as four of her beta nodes blew.

Much less effect out of the second salvo. Interesting that the BCs are networked enough to share targeting data for PD clusters, eve if it is less effective.

Terekhov glanced at the time display. Five minutes into the engagement. Abigail's third salvo was rumbling down on Bogey One, and in a little over seventy seconds everyone on both sides would be in range.

There'd been time—barely—for Abigail's control links to update the third salvo in light of Bagwell's observation of the ECM which had greeted the first salvo, and Terekhov's eyes gleamed. The Monicans' counter-missiles had picked off twenty of the incoming missiles, but only two of the fifteen survivors succumbed to the enemy's EW. Five of the remaining thirteen fell to Bogey One's laser clusters, but three EW birds and five laser heads reached attack range.

A nice running tally on each salvo's effectiveness. A minute and change before the BCs enter their own missile range, and they're still working over the one lead ship.

Janko Horster's face went white as Typhoon blew up.

That shouldn't have happened, a small, stunned corner of his brain insisted. Not to a battlecruiser!

"Allah!" the Technodyne rep whispered. His face glistened with sweat now, and his hands shook. "How—?"

"No telling," Horster said harshly. "A freak hit. Somebody in a fusion room who punched the wrong button. Maybe God just got pissed at us! But it's not going to help them much in another sixty seconds!"

Lucky hit and they lost containment on a fusion plant. And the Solly tech rep on Horster's bridge swears by Allah.

Her next two salvos—sixty-two precious laser heads and eight EW platforms—went streaking into nothingness. Their target no longer existed, and there was no time to divert them to Bogey Two; they would continue to the end of their powered run, then detonate harmlessly. But that gave her computers an additional fifty seconds to update the first of Bogey Two's salvos. And she'd taken a different approach with its penetration aides.

Missiles self-destruct after a while of streaking out into space, presumably to avoid ruining someone's day a thousand years down the line. And the next two salvos were already in space and couldn't be diverted to one of the other BCs.

Unlike Typhoon, there was nothing at all wrong with Hurricane's forward sensors. But the salvo of missiles tearing down upon her seemed totally oblivious to her ECM. They ignored her decoys, brushed aside her jamming. It was ridiculous. No one could respond that quickly to a target's electronic warfare systems!

But somehow the Manties were doing it.

It's almost as though they had a front-row seat to our EW, or an observer reporting back to them faster than light, but that'd just be silly.

Hurricane's counter-missiles roared out. The Manties' jamming didn't seem quite so intense this time—either that, or Hurricane's tactical officers were getting a better feel for it. Horster smiled as he watched the CMs tear out to meet the Manticoran missiles.

And then, suddenly, there weren't thirty-five incoming birds; there were more than seventy of them.

"Damn them! Damn them!" the tech rep muttered. "They can't do this shit!"

"What are you talking about?" Horster snarled as the intercepting counter-missiles went berserk trying to maintain lock on their designated targets in the midst of so many abruptly replicated threats.

"They can't have the power to confuse our sensors this way!" the civilian said. "They're inside our shipboard sensor envelope. They aren't dealing with remote arrays, or even smaller shipboard suites—these are battlecruisers, damn it! We should be burning through that clutter like it wasn't even there!"

Eh, mini fusion bottles for the win again.

Horster wasn't certain how many of the real attack missiles Hurricane and Cyclone had managed to kill. Some of them, at least. But an entire cluster of them got through, and it was Hurricane's turn to twitch in agony as the X-ray needles stabbed into her. They seemed to be all over her, ripping at her like demons, yet unlike Typhoon, she shook the hits off without any apparent effect, and Horster grinned like a punch-drunk fighter. That was what it meant to be a battlecruiser fighting heavy cruisers!

"Missile range in twenty seconds, Commodore!"

"Bring the division to starboard. Clear our port broadsides."

"Yes, Sir."

The two surviving battlecruisers swung to starboard, bringing their port broadsides to bear, and Horster kicked himself mentally. He should have done this sooner. He'd been too fixated on pursuing the enemy, accelerating straight after them. He should have let them go ahead and reduce the closure rate in order to bring his broadside sensors and additional point defense to bear. But he'd been confident in the strength of his armor and the effectiveness of his EW . . . until Typhoon blew up, at least.

They'd just begun their turn when the second Manty heavy cruiser opened fire, followed seconds later by every surviving Manticoran ship.

Still outranged, just a bit by the Manties, who all fire as soon as the Monicans begin turning.

Hexapuma and Aegis were the only ships in Terekhov's riven Squadron with the off-bore capacity to fire both broadsides at a single target. The light cruiser had twenty tubes. Warlock had sixteen in her less damaged broadside. Janissary had eight, Aria had six, and the severely mauled Audacious had three. Altogether, it came to eighty-eight launchers. The minimum cycle time for Warlock, Janissary, and Aegis was eight seconds per launcher; for the older Aria and Audacious, it was fourteen seconds. But penetrating the battlecruisers' defensive envelope required massed fire, so the controlling factor was the slowest cycle time of the squadron.

Hexapuma had expended four hundred and sixty-five Mark 16s and sixty of her hundred and thirty EW platforms. She had six hundred and thirty attack missiles left—only eighteen double broadsides, but her consorts had full magazines, and the last thing Aivars Terekhov wanted was to let two undamaged battlecruisers into energy range of his mangled ships. The rest of the Squadron had eleven minutes of concentrated missile fire to do something about that, which was the real reason he'd expended so many missiles while only Hexapuma had the range to engage, but Hexapuma had only another five minutes of fire.

Guthrie Bagwell's analysis of the enemy's electronic warfare capabilities had gone out to the entire Squadron, and if they lacked Hexapuma's reach, even the older destroyers could come close to matching her penetration aids over the range they did have.

Now 8 seconds for missile salvos from the newer ships, 14 for the older ones. Apparently 130 of the Kitty's missiles, just over 10% are EW birds. If they enter beam range, they've had it, so all together now as fast as the slowest ship can fire.

Janko Horster realized he'd made another mistake, one far worse than failing to open his broadsides earlier. Each of his battlecruisers had twenty-nine tubes in her broadside. With Typhoon gone, that gave him fifty-eight—two-thirds as many as the Manties had—with a minimum cycle time of thirty-five seconds. Worse, his tactical crews had no information at all on the Manties' electronic warfare capabilities, while it was quickly and dismally apparent the Manticoran CO had learned a great deal about his EW during the approach.

Not like there was a ton you, Horster, could have done about that. Except maybe find and destroy the recon platform sitting right on top of you. 35 second cycle time for Solly BC missile launchers, an eternity compared to the fire rates of Haven Sector navies.

In the next two hundred and sixteen seconds, Aivars Terekhov's cruisers and destroyers fired nine hundred and ninety attack missiles and one hundred and twenty Dazzlers and Dragon's Teeth. Seven hundred and thirteen missiles and seventy-nine of the electronic warfare birds were in space before the first salvo landed. In the same time period, Cyclone and Hurricane fired three hundred and thirty-six missiles . . . and no dedicated EW platforms at all.

It was a holocaust.

The Manticoran missiles went through the Monicans' electronic defenses like white-hot awls. Counter-missiles managed to kill dozens of them, point defense laser clusters killed dozens more, but for every missile that was stopped, five got through. The battlecruisers' tracking capacity was simply overwhelmed by the Dragon's Teeth's false images of incoming warheads. Their sensors were hashed by blinding bursts of static. They were a third-class navy up against what might well be the premier combat fleet of the explored galaxy, and they were outclassed in every quality but courage.

-snip-

By the time Cyclone and Hurricane reached energy range of the first Manticoran ship, they were little more than hulks, wedges dead, power gone, trailing atmosphere, escape pods, and wreckage.

But they didn't die alone. Outclassed they might have been, with faulty training and poor doctrine, but there was nothing at all wrong with their courage. And however justified Aivars Terekhov's actions might have been, the fury they felt at his attack burned with a clear, white heat. Three hundred of their missiles reached Terekhov's squadron before the blowtorch of his own attack seared them, and the destroyer Janissary and the light cruiser Audacious died with them. Hexapuma, Warlock, Aegis, and Aria survived. Four ships, all that was left of Terekhov's squadron, every one of them severely damaged.

Terekhov takes over 60% casualties at the Battle of Monica, and totally destroys the enemy.

"—and Surgeon Commander Simmons abandoned Vigilant successfully with a pinnace full of wounded before she blew. They'll be aboard directly, Sir," Amal Nagchaudhuri said wearily. With Ansten FitzGerald still unconscious and Naomi Kaplan even more badly injured, and with Ginger Lewis working like a titan to deal with Hexapuma's brutal wounds, Nagchaudhuri was Terekhov's acting executive officer. He looked exhausted, out on his feet, and Terekhov sympathized, for he felt exactly the same.

"Good, Amal," he said crisply, and the com officer wondered where the Captain found his energy. No one could look that clear-eyed and alert after what they'd all been through, but somehow, the Captain managed it. "We'll have to find room for the wounded somewhere," he continued. "But thank God we can get a proper doctor in here!"

The messy aftermath and cleanup. Good that they got a replacement doctor.

"We've lost six beta nodes in the forward ring, and eight betas and two alphas out of the after ring. Our best acceleration's about three hundred gravities, but Ginger's working on that. We're down to two grasers in the port broadside—none at all to starboard, although Ginger thinks she may be able to get one of them back eventually. We've got eight operable tubes to starboard, and eleven to port, but we shot ourselves dry. We're even out of counter-missiles. The after chase armament's pretty much trashed, and I don't think Ginger's going to be able to do anything about that. The forward chasers came through untouched, somehow. And we still have the bow wall. But if it comes to another fight, Skipper, we've got the firepower—maybe—of a destroyer, and we have exactly one starboard sidewall generator."

Damage to the Nasty Kitty.

"We're still working on the numbers, and we've still got people unaccounted for who may be alive in the wreckage. But so far, Skipper, it looks like sixty dead and twenty-eight wounded."

Terekhov's jaw clenched. Eighty-eight might not sound like very much compared to what the Monicans had lost. Or the other ships of his own squadron, for that matter. But Hexapuma's total company, including Marines, was only three hundred and fifty before her earlier casualties and detachments. Nagchaudhuri's numbers—which still weren't complete, he reminded himself—represented thirty percent of the people he'd taken into battle with him.

And Hexapuma was one of the lucky ships.

Casualties.

"Aegis is the closest thing we've got to combat-capable, Sir, and she's down to sixty-two missiles and five grasers. Warlock doesn't have a single operable weapon left, and Aria is almost that bad. Lieutenant Rossi says—"

The squadron's combat readiness. Important in a moment when....

[Ahriman238]

* stupid character limit.

"Sir, Helen's arrays are picking up several Monican warships headed our way. It looks like half a dozen LACs, four destroyers, and a pair of light cruisers. And we've just received a message from an Admiral Bourmont. He demands that we surrender or be destroyed."

-snip-

"Captain Badmachin, I want you to join the rest of the Squadron here at your best speed."

"There, Sir?"

"Yes. You should have time to join us, drop off a couple of hundred more pods, and still return across the hyper limit before any Monican unit is in range to fire on you. Please get underway immediately."

-snip-

"Admiral Bourmont," Terekhov faced the visual pickup, his shoulders square, his expression confident, and his voice was icy. "You've called upon my Squadron to surrender. Unfortunately, I can't do that. I came here to do a job—to neutralize the battlecruisers your star nation has been assembling to attack mine. I have not yet completed that task. Two of your battlecruisers remain undamaged, because I refrained from firing upon them in light of their proximity to the civilian portions of your Eroica Station complex. Should any of your armed vessels continue to approach my own command—and we have all of them under surveillance as I speak—I will have no option but to complete my task before withdrawing into hyper before any of your warships can reach me. I regret to say it, but this will require a bombardment of the battlecruisers in question with contact nuclear warheads, and it will be impossible for me to permit the evacuation of your civilian workforce first."

He heard someone inhale sharply behind him, but his own expression never wavered.

"Should you choose to stand down your warships, and to maintain the present status quo unchanged pending the arrival of the approaching Manticoran relief force, I will be spared that unpleasant necessity. Should you choose not to stand down your warships and maintain the status quo, I will proceed with the bombardment. And under no circumstances will I permit the evacuation of your civilians. The choice is yours, Sir. You have two hours in which to make it and get your decision to me. Terekhov, clear."

Can't say the man lacks nerve. He'd do it too. If you doubt, Van Dort asks if he's bluffing and he explains that he isn't. Fortunately, the Monicans back down.

[Ahriman238]

"Yes, Sir," Terekhov repeated. "Very glad. Ericsson and the other repair ships have done a remarkable job, but she really needs a full-scale shipyard."

O'Malley nodded. In the three T-months since Rear Admiral Khumalo's arrival in Monica, the Talbott Station support ships had patched HMS Hexapuma up enough to at least get her home. Which had been just as remarkable a job as Terekhov had implied. They hadn't had much to work with, after all.

Of Terekhov's impromptu squadron, only Aegis and Hexapuma would ever return to service. Aria and Warlock were simply too old, too obsolescent, to be worth repairing, even if they hadn't been so severely mangled in the Battle of Monica. Warlock, at least, would be returning to the Star Kingdom under Commander George Hibachi's command and her own power in company with Hexapuma, but only because repairing her alpha nodes had cost less than the Navy would be able to reclaim from her hull when she was broken up.

Half the survivors of Monica are to be scrapped, the others will be spending a lot of time in the yard. Heck, it took 3 months to repair the Kitty enough to fly her home for proper repairs. On that note, it's now 3 months later.

Yet the name Warlock would not disappear from the Royal Manticoran Navy. As Ito Anders had once said, HMS Warlock had not been fortunate in her commanding officers or her reputation. But Anders had repaired that fault. It had cost him his life, but his ship had redeemed herself. Like every unit of Terekhov's "Squadron," her name had been added to the List of Honor. Those names would be kept in commission in perpetuity in recognition of what they and their people had accomplished at such dreadful cost.

All the ships of the squadron have joined Fearless and Nike on the Honor List of ship names that will always be kept in commission.

Fifty-one percent of Terekhov's personnel had died in Monica; another twenty-six percent had been wounded. Manticore's total casualties had been far lower than those of the Monican Navy. Probably, O'Malley reflected, even proportionately, but certainly in absolute terms. Which didn't change the fact that sixty percent of his ships had been destroyed outright, that the remaining forty percent had been brutally crippled, and that less than a quarter of their personnel were fit for duty. Yet somehow, with the missile pods from Volcano as their only remaining hole card, Aivars Terekhov's surviving, broken, air-bleeding wrecks had managed to hold an entire star system captive for seven standard days. One entire T-week. All by themselves, with no assurance Augustus Khumalo was really coming. With no way of knowing when a Solarian League task force might come over the alpha wall with blood in its eye.

Apparently the stalemate from the last chapter lasted for a week.

No, O'Malley corrected himself. They had one other card, beside the pods. They had Terekhov.

He looked at the broad-shouldered, bearded captain whose blue eyes looked steadily back from under the band of his white beret. He looked so . . . ordinary in so many ways. A bit taller than average, perhaps. But there were only those unflinching eyes to give the lie to his ordinary appearance. And they were enough, O'Malley decided. Enough to explain why this man was already being compared by some to Honor Harrington or Ellen D'Orville. Perhaps even to Edward Saganami himself.

The RMN sure do like to talk up their military heroes.

Whatever Khumalo might have thought during his long voyage from Spindle to Monica, he had never hesitated or wavered a single millimeter after his arrival. He'd backed Terekhov's actions to the hilt. When Roberto Tyler demanded that he withdraw immediately from Monican territory, Khumalo had flatly refused. Perhaps the evidence of the two remaining Indefatigable-class battlecruisers at Eroica Station helped explain that. Yet O'Malley felt oddly certain that Khumalo would have supported Terekhov's actions anyway. The man would never be a brilliant officer, perhaps, but he'd demonstrated an astonishing depth of moral courage of his own, and his undamaged superdreadnought flagship and her consorts had been more than sufficient to transform the tense stalemate in Monica into a complete Monican surrender. Especially when he endorsed Terekhov's threat to destroy the remaining battlecruisers by bombardment.

There might still be a little hell to pay over that, O'Malley reflected. Under the letter of interstellar law, Terekhov and Khumalo would have been within the legitimate rights of a belligerent had they done precisely what they threatened, but that wasn't the sort of tactic the Royal Manticoran Navy normally embraced. Especially not when the Navy had invaded another sovereign star system without benefit of the minor formality of a declaration of war. Not to mention the fact that destroying the remaining battlecruisers might very well also have destroyed all supporting evidence for Terekhov's interpretation of the Monicans intentions if Tyler had chosen to stonewall.

Khumalo's other moment to shine. Apparently there's noting in the interstellar laws of war to prevent them from hitting stations full of civilians, at least as long as they're also military shipyards, for all that Manticore normally makes a rule of giving the bad guys plenty of time to evacuate.

More importantly, perhaps, Roberto Tyler had believed it. When Dame Amandine finally arrived aboard O'Malley's flagship, over a month after the battle, Tyler had been a broken man, desperate to save what he could from the wreckage. Some of his subordinates, like Admiral Bourmont, had clearly clung to the hope that Frontier Security and the League might yet ride to their rescue. Tyler had cherished no such illusion. Or, at least, no hope that they would do so in time to make any difference to him personally. And so, rather than defy Dame Amandine's demands, he'd capitulated promptly in return for her promise that O'Malley would not complete the destruction of his military forces or forcibly topple his regime.

The bargain had been a simple one. In return for its continued existence, the Republic of Monica had signed a permanent nonaggression pact with the Star Kingdom of Manticore . . . and surrendered to Manticore the two surviving battlecruisers and all documentary evidence of the involvement of Manpower, Technodyne Industries, and the Jessyk Combine in its projected seizure of the Lynx Terminus.

Investigation and permanent nonaggression pact (and what's that worth in terms of interstellar law?). Apparently no one thought to delete/shred the documentary evidence in the week the system was held hostage, that or Tyler intentionally saved the evidence as leverage.

Dame Amandine had proven fiendishly devious, too. She'd actually arranged for her own diplomatic and intelligence teams to be accompanied every step of the way by representatives of the Sollies' own interstellar news services. The League's reporters had observed every bit of evidence as it was handed over by the Monicans, and they'd been allowed to examine it themselves. O'Malley had seen their reportage, and in his opinion, no unbiased observer could possibly doubt the validity of that evidence. Of course, that probably wouldn't make a great deal of difference to Manpower or Jessyk. They were both headquartered in Mesa, not the League. As such, the League had no responsibility for or jurisdiction over their actions, however reprehensible the League might—officially—consider those actions.

Technodyne, though. Technodyne was another matter entirely. Izrok Levakonic hadn't survived the destruction of the military component of Eroica Station, but his body had been positively identified, and his personal computer files had been recovered from the wreckage. Coupled with the evidence Tyler had provided as the price for continued political survival, Technodyne's guilt could not be denied. In the face of such evidence not even the League's bureaucracies could protect the enormous corporation, and it had already collapsed, the value of its stock plummeting, a third of its board of directors already under indictment, and half of those not indicted—yet—turning state's evidence in an effort to save their own skins.

No doubt Technodyne would survive. It was too big, too important to the League—both to its economy and its military—to be allowed to fail completely. So one day it would reemerge, phoenixlike, from the flames of reorganization, but not quickly or soon. And at least some of those responsible for what had happened here would probably actually spend time in prison, which was more than O'Malley had ever believed might happen.

Repercussions for Technodyne at least, every detail of the investigation open to the Solarian League press to keep OFS from sweeping the details under the carpet and charging in to play white knight against a crisis they created, per their particular idiom. It won't work this time.

Dame Amandine had already announced the Star Kingdom's intention of seeking the extradition from Mesa of Aldona Anisimovna and Isabel Bardasano on charges of complicity in murder, terrorism, and illegal weapons trafficking. No one believed for an instant that the extradition request would be granted, but at least Anisimovna and Bardasano would know what was waiting for them if Manticore ever did get its hands on them.

More to the point, their names and faces are now known to the Manticoran military and intelligence organs. Even if this feels like a weird parallel to Haven's trying Honor in abstentia for mass murder, I'm sure they'd get a scrupulously fair trial before being hung.

The one thing which had unfortunately avoided Dame Amandine was positive proof of Frontier Security's involvement. Anisimovna and Bardasano had gotten off Monica aboard their private ship before Khumalo arrived. With his own ships so badly damaged, Terekhov would have been unable to prevent their escape even if he'd known about it in time, and all indications were that certain Gendarmerie officers had disappeared with them. Tyler and Alfonso Higgins, the head of his intelligence services, both claimed the Gendarmes—and, so, by extension, Frontier Security itself—had provided Anisimovna with significant support. But there was no concrete evidence to support that contention, and so Dame Amandine had opted to make no charges against OFS.

But OFS gets away clean, once again.

HMS Hexapuma and HMS Warlock emerged from the central terminus of the Manticoran Wormhole Junction, exactly one T-year from the day Midshipwoman Helen Zilwicki, Midshipman Aikawa Kagiyama, and Midshipwoman Ragnhild Pavletic had reported aboard her. Now Ensign Zilwicki sat beside Lieutenant Senior Grade Abigail Hearns at Tactical. Naomi Kaplan would live, and return to duty, but her injuries had been so severe that she'd been returned to Manticore for treatment months ago. Abigail was undoubtedly too junior for permanent duty as a Saganami-C-class heavy cruiser's tactical officer, but Captain Terekhov had flatly refused to allow anyone to replace her before Hexapuma's return to Manticore.

It's been a full year, and now the middy cruise is over. For the survivors. Let's see, they spent most of it rushing from one destination to another, got in some stellar mapping time, went to a high society party with political movers and shakers at the Convention, passed a wormhole for the first time, fought pirates, violently suppressed terrorism, negotiated with terrorists (well, Helen did) fought a major squadron-level battle, held a foreign nation at gunpoint for a week and spent the last quarter of the year patching up their ship after their adventures. They also lost one of their own in the line of duty. Think they're ready to become naval officers now?

"Message from Invictus, Sir," Amal Nagchaudhuri announced.

"Yes?" Terekhov turned his command chair to face the communications officer. HMS Invictus was the flagship of Home Fleet, no doubt in orbit about the planet of Manticore.

"Message begins," Nagchaudhuri began, and something in his tone made Helen look at him sharply.

"'To Captain Aivars Terekhov and the men and women of HMS Hexapuma and HMS Warlock, from Admiral of the Green Sebastian D'Orville, Commanding Officer, Home Fleet. Well done.' Message ends."

A congrats message. Looks like the flag of Home Fleet has been transferred from King Roger to Invictus, but it makes sense that Home Fleet would get a disproportionate number of Invictuses.

Helen frowned, but before the message had time to sink in, the main tactical display changed abruptly. In one perfectly synchronized moment, forty-two superdreadnoughts, sixteen CLACs, twelve battlecruisers, thirty-six heavy and light cruisers, thirty-two destroyers, and over a thousand LACs, activated their impeller wedges. They appeared on the display like lightning flickering outward from a common center, a stupendous globe thousands of kilometers in diameter, and Hexapuma and Warlock were at its exact center.

Helen recognized that formation. She'd seen it before. Every man and woman in Navy uniform had seen it, once every year, on Coronation Day, when Home Fleet passed in review before the Queen . . . with its flagship in exactly the position Hexapuma and Warlock now held.

Even as she stared at the display, another icon appeared upon it. The crowned, golden icon of HMS Duke of Cromarty, the ship which had replaced the murdered HMS Queen Adrienne as the royal yacht, sitting just beyond the threshold of the Junction. A Junction, Helen sudden realized, which had been cleared of -shipping—all shipping—except for Home Fleet itself.

The vast globe accelerated towards Cromarty, matching its acceleration rate exactly to Hexapuma's, holding formation on the heavy cruiser and her single escort, and the raised wedge of every ship in that huge formation flashed off and then on again in the traditional underway salute to a fleet flagship....

Parade/review spherical formation, the returning Hexapuma gets a greater salute than the old Fearless.

I've mentioned Duke of Cromarty before, it's an Agamemnon-class BC(P) without pods, or any offensive missile armament. But still a BC, far more survivable than the old royal yacht.

Home Fleet strength: 42 SD (an unknown number of them podnoughts) 16 CLAC, 12 BC, 36 cruisers, 32 DD. They have less carriers than Eighth Fleet, but are otherwise superior in numbers in keeping with the defensive mindset of honorverse navies.

"Additional message, Sir," Nagchaudhuri said. He stopped and cleared his throat, then continued, and despite his throat clearing, his voice seemed to waver about the edges.

"Message begins. 'Yours is the honor.'" He looked up from his display, meeting Aivars Terekhov's eyes.

"Message ends, Sir," he said softly.

And so does the book, with Hexapuma's triumphant return home, having singlehandedly saved the annexation movement and secured Talbott and the Star Kingdom from a sinister plot.