Moderator: NecronLord
Hear, hear. To both parts - Ahriman, these threads are great, and Simon, you're definitely not alone.Simon_Jester wrote:Yeah, I'm glad you have them, because it gives us a chance to really talk about these settings in detail and try to understand them. Also for me to reassure myself that I'm not the only one who actually reads these things and is on the whole glad he did so.
And I was having fun back. Seriously, that's frustrating, but far from the stupidest thing I've said on this board. It's probably the stupidest thing this year, though, so I guess there's that. But the year is young. Heck, the last Honor thread I messed up the Protector's family right below the quote describing their relationships.Terralthra wrote:I like your analysis threads. I was just having a bit of fun.
Most of my analysis threads are pretty different from each other. In my more pretentious moments I like to make out like it's a deliberate stylistic choice to treat each universe as it's own thing. To tell the truth, it's informed a lot by circumstances surrounding each series, and some by getting easily bored and tinkering with basic format things. For instance, with stuff from the Baen free library I can copy-paste arbitrarily large blocks of text and comment on every little detail, but for the Animorphs thread I went largely by memory, thumbing through the books to check my recollections and essentially just summarized the books with whatever bits interested me.Batman wrote:Personally I welcome the excuse to revisit the Honorverse so I can keep up with the discussion, and I actually think this is the first time the Honorverse as a whole is under scrutiny rather than select aspects of the technology used therein. Personally, I like having a place where I can air my thoughts and complaints about a universe I still enjoy to a not inconsiderable extent, even if they turn out to be so much baseless garbage.
Can't speak for any of the other analysis threads on account of knowing jack all about the universes involved but if they're like this one, the percentage of people who do enjoying them I expect to be pretty damn high.
Grayson has learned a lot about the value of electronic warfare, and devote even more internal space on each ship class to it than Manticore. Plus, on the refitted SDs they ripped out the vast Haven ECM and EW systems and doubled up on Manticoran equivalents.Peep EW systems were inferior to those of the RMN. Getting comparable performance out of them required much more massive installations, and the Grayson Navy hadn't been able to resist the temptation of all that available volume when they refitted their prize vessels. They'd gutted their new SDs' original EW sections and then filled the same space with Manticoran systems, which meant Terrible boasted almost the same electronic warfare capabilities as a sixteen-million-ton orbital fortress, and that was just fine with Honor. If someone was going to be shooting at her flagship, she wanted all the nasty tricks she could get to play on that someone's fire control.
Still, she had been a bit surprised to learn that Grayson's new-build warships were also more heavily equipped with EW systems than their Manticoran counterparts. Not by as great a margin as the SDs, perhaps, but they carried considerably more capable suites on a class-for-class basis, though the GSN hadn't yet learned to use the potential of its systems to full effect.
I wouldn't say it lasts long, or is consistent, enough or to be called a pattern, but both SVW and FIE have Honor try out a sneaky thing she does near the end in a wargame early on. Nice way of setting it up, and it makes perfect sense. In SVW it was a detached flight of EW drones, here it's having her superdreadnoughts impersonate battlecruisers. It doesn't work this time, but only because the opposition was cautious enough to slip a recon drone in to confirm things.The discovery of all that capability had inspired Honor, and her formation for the exercise had looked like a standard deployment, with her SDs in tight and her escorts covering its flanks while a squadron of battlecruisers screened its line of advance. Only the "battlecruisers" had actually been superdreadnoughts, using their EW to mask the true power of their emissions, and the "superdreadnoughts" had actually been battlecruisers using their EW to augment their emissions. It should have been impossible for Henries to detect at anything over four million klicks, which should have let Honor flush her towed missile pods and get in the first, devastating broadsides from her SDs before his own ships of the wall even realized where the fire was coming from.
Unfortunately, Sir Alfred's wiliness had taken most of the punch out of her surprise, and that was her own fault. She'd deliberately come in on a completely predictable course to help him see what she wanted him to. But that had also given him the opportunity to deploy recon drones from beyond the range at which her own sensors could detect their drives. He'd accelerated them up to speed, then shut down their impellers and let them coast straight down her nice, predictable line of approach to such close range that no EW could fool them, and the RDs' lack of power, coupled with their built-in stealth features, had caused her people to miss them even when one physically penetrated her formation.
Yeah, Sir Alfred Henries is taking an SD squadron forward from Manticore (maybe the new construction mentioned earlier?) to reinforce White Haven at the front. But he was time for five days of wargames against the GSN, which they do for training, even with a war on. I take this as circumstantial evidence for the new construction theory, if they're a newer unit and still working up, getting used to working together.In a total of four exercises, BatRon One had won one hands down, two had been draws, and Henries had won the last one by a narrow, if respectable, margin. No doubt he was pleased by yesterday's outcome, but she knew he hadn't expected things to be quite so hard. Oh, he'd been polite, but there'd been a certain confidence, almost an arrogance, about him at the initial conferences.
She snorted in memory, and Nimitz bleeked a laugh on her shoulder. She was becoming more Grayson than Manticoran, she thought wryly, and wondered whether the Graysons had thought she was arrogant when they first met? She knew Henries hadn't meant anything by it. He probably hadn't even realized he had what Honor's mother had always called "an attitude." The RMN had a tradition of victory, after all, and it had done very well so far in this war. Its officers expected to be better than anyone they met, and it had showed.
Haven seizes Minette and Casca as part of their Operation Stalking Horse (i.e. plan "draw ships away from Grayson") with 30 wallers between the two. This is seven percent of the Haven wall of battle, or roughly 1/14th hmm. Carry the point-two-eight-five, I get 428 (.5!) capital ships. Appreciably close to the pre-war figure of 460, on the other hand Haven's lost 70, captured or destroyed, since the war began. Honor may be using the pre-war figures, or just not care too much about accuracy on this one point."If it is a raid, Sir Alfred," Honor said quietly. Henries looked at her, and she shrugged. "You're right. They've sent a good seven percent of their total surviving wall a hundred-plus light-years behind the front and used it to take two systems that aren't especially vital to us. That seems like an awfully stupid diversion when they have to be aware of what will happen to them if Admiral White Haven breaks through to Trevor's Star." Henries' grunt of agreement held an interrogative note, as if asking what her point was, and she shrugged again. "I don't object to the enemy doing stupid things, Sir Alfred, but when it's something this stupid, I have to wonder if there's something behind it that we just haven't seen yet."
The importance of Trevor's Star, as long as Haven holds it they have the option of attacking the Manticore system directly. It'd be a suicide mission with the orbital forts, but one with a more favorable exchange rate in tonnage and lives than the war has held so far. In short, it's a game of attrition that Haven could eventually win by running out of bodies slower, where the tech advantage would mean less. Though sending multiple waves of suicide missions isn't really Rob Pierre's style. If Manticore claims the system, they can ship supplies closer to the frontline in months less time with absolute security. I mentioned this before.Honor and Henries nodded. The Peeps had to realize Trevor's Star was the true target of Earl White Haven's campaign, for the Republic's possession of the system constituted a direct threat to the Manticore Binary System. Trevor's Star was over two hundred light-years from Manticore. It would take a superdreadnought over a month to make the hyper-space voyage between them, but Trevor's Star also contained one terminus of the Manticore Worm Hole Junction, and a battle fleet could make the same trip effectively instantaneously via the Junction.
Relieving that threat was one of Manticore's primary strategic goals, but the Star Kingdom had more than one motive. If White Haven could take the system, its Junction terminus would become a direct link to Manticore for the Alliance. Developed into a forward base inside the Republic, Trevor's Star would represent a secure bridgehead, a springboard for future offensives. Transit times between the Star Kingdom's shipyards and home-system fleet bases would become negligible. There wouldn't even be any need to detach convoy escorts to protect the long, vulnerable logistical chain between Manticore and a base like Thetis; unescorted merchantmen could pop through to Trevor's Star with total impunity, whenever they chose.
Stalking Horse is going well, they're sending out GSN BatRon Two with Henries' squadron to hook up with other local forces and retake Casca. The whole plan was based on the idea of provoking more-or-less these deployments, based on the forces the Peeps know are there, forcing them in these specific circumstances to react in a highly predictable way and empty Grayson of wallers. Of course, the Peeps don't know about Henries."I realize your orders are to report to Admiral White Haven, Sir Alfred, but I'm countermanding them. Battle Squadron Two will combine with your command and depart within three hours for Casca. At the same time, I'll send dispatches to Admiral Koga and Admiral Truman, instructing them to join us there at their best speed. If the Peeps haven't already pinched the system out from Candor, you and I should have enough strength to discourage them from making the attempt. Once the other divisions join us, we'll move in and throw them out of Candor, then advance on Minette. With any luck, we can coordinate with Admiral Hemphill to take that system back, as well, and do it without diverting a single ship from Thetis."
There's not a huge force sitting around Masada, but they apparently have some orbital fortresses capable of a degree of support for the ground-pounders. It would take very little to remove that and start an uprising/bloodbath of the Masadan fanatics. Which is half of Operation Dagger.Honor nodded. The Endicott picket had nothing heavier than a battlecruiser, and, if Endicott was less strategically important than Yeltsin's Star, Masada also lacked Grayson's heavy orbital fortifications. More to the point, perhaps, even the briefest of raids could have catastrophic consequences if the Peeps only realized it. If they managed just to drive out the pickets and pick off the relatively weak orbital bases the Star Kingdom had placed in Masada orbit, General Marcel's ground forces would be hopelessly inadequate to police the planet. The Peeps wouldn't have to get involved in ground combat at all; all they'd have to do would be isolate the planet from outside relief, then sit back and watch the fanatics dirt-side swamp Marcel's people. The resultant massacre of the "infidel occupiers" and the government of moderates Marcel had managed to put in place would force Manticore to mount a punitive expedition and, all too probably, produce a long, bloody, ugly guerrilla war before control could be reasserted.
The effect of that on the Star Kingdom's domestic opinion could be catastrophic to public support for the war and the Cromarty Government, and that didn't even count the price in blood and suffering, Masadan as well as Manticoran, it would entail.
Meet Shannon Foraker, tac witch and eventual counterpart to Horrible Hemphill. She can figure out what your ships are, hiding in the system periphery, just from your radar emissions and some spurious wedge data. In this case, they're watching the inbound at Casca, looking for evidence that Grayson has been drained."Yep," Foraker replied cheerfully, but then her smile faded. "Problem is, Skip, that these're the only two I'm sure about. I've got the computers trying to run a correlation between impeller strength and acceleration, but we know the Manties are refitting across the board with the new inertial compensator. We're still guessing how much that improves their efficiency, and these birds are taking it mighty easy, so I don't have max power signatures to work with, but it may give us something on their masses." She shrugged. "Our SDs are smaller than theirs are. If I can get an idea—"
Shannon IDs five of theirs by mass (she can't tell absolutely how big they are, but can estimate in relation to each other and since it's pretty much certain there's at least one SD, the biggest ship gives her a baseline) and radar as theirs. They know Grayson got 11 SDs in at least repairable condition last year, but not how badly they were damaged or how fast Grayson could get them back in service. Confidence is reasonably high that the GSN has been stripped to the bone, because they aren't sure about Henries (though it looks like they picked p some extra ships) and they underestimate GLORIOUS KERBAL GRAYSONS!!"Well, whatever they are, they came in on a heading from Yeltsin, as you say. For that matter, Intelligence only gives about a sixty percent chance that even the Manticorans could have gotten all eleven prizes back into service this quickly. The Graysons are probably a bit slower than that, so it's possible we're looking at two divisions of Manty SDs, not one, and they're more likely to have been moving a half-squadron independently than they are to move a single division."
Caslet nodded thoughtfully. That was a possibility he hadn't considered, and it made sense.
"At any rate," Jourdain went on, "if at least five of them are Grayson ships, it seems likely they brought everything Yeltsin could spare." The citizen commissioner sounded a bit as if he were trying to convince himself of that, Caslet noted, and said nothing. A brief silence stretched out between them once more, and then Jourdain nodded sharply to himself.
"All right," he said. "If we've gotten all the information we can from this range, then I suppose that's the best we can do, Citizen Commander. Let's pull out for the rendezvous."
Just a bit that I remember sticking out the first time I read it, Grayson saved the Navy Hymn."If you don't mind an infidel's opinion, I particularly liked today's hymns, Abraham. Especially the one after the second lesson."
"I never mind compliments, My Lady," the chaplain replied, "and I'm rather fond of that one myself."
"It didn't sound much like the other Grayson hymns I've heard, though," Honor observed.
"That's because it's much older than most of our sacred music, My Lady. I believe the original version was written back in the nineteenth century—ah, the third century Ante Diaspora, that is—on Old Earth by a man named Whiting. Of course, that predated space travel. In fact, it predated manned aircraft, and it's been revised and updated several times since. Still, I think the original feeling comes through, and you're right: it is beautiful. And appropriate to naval service, I think."
Grayson has done away with compulsory services since filling out the ranks with so many Manticoran loaners, while the RMN has too many religions to consider a Chaplain's Corps. Similar, but different."You know," she said slowly, "it still feels . . . odd to me to hold official church services on a warship." Jackson quirked an eyebrow, and she shook her head quickly. "Not wrong, Abraham, just odd. Manticoran warships do have services, and any captain always tries to adjust her duty schedules around them, but they're purely voluntary, and the people who conduct them usually have other duties, as well. The RMN doesn't have a Chaplain's Corps, you know."
"Well, fair's fair, My Lady," Jackson said after a moment. "A Grayson would find the notion that any Navy could survive without chaplains equally odd. Of course, we've made some concessions—and rightfully so, I think—since we started 'borrowing' so many Manticoran personnel. Attendance at service used to be compulsory, not optional, which would hardly be suitable now. Besides, even when everyone in uniform belonged to the Church, I always felt conscripting worshipers probably wasn't exactly what God had in mind."
See what I mean? Considering the Graysons started as religious pilgrims, I'd say it's fair to consider their society a church that felt the need to grow a government and learned after getting burned badly to keep it's mitts off of government, as opposed to Manticore which, in the American tradition had separation of church and state from the word go."I was saying Manticoran ships don't have official chaplains. Of course, we've got so many religions and denominations that providing a chaplain for each of them would be the next best thing to impossible even if we tried." She smiled suddenly. "On the first SD I ever served in, the captain was a Roman Catholic—Second Reformation, I think; not the Old Earth denomination—the exec was an Orthodox Jew, the astrogator was a Buddhist, and the com officer was a Scientologist Agnostic. If I remember correctly, the tac officer—my direct superior—was a Mithran, and Chief O'Brien, my tracking yeoman, was a Shinto priest. All of that, mind you, just on the command deck! We had another six thousand odd people in the ship's company, and God only knows how many different religions they represented."
"Merciful Tester!" Jackson murmured in a voice that was only half humorous. "How do any of you manage to keep things straight?"
"Well, Manticore was settled by a bunch of secularists," Honor pointed out. "I hope you won't take this wrongly, but I sometimes think that what Grayson actually has is a church which spawned a state as a sort of accidental appendage. I realize things have changed, especially since the Civil War, but the very notion of a church-dominated state would have been anathema to the Manticoran colonists. They'd had too much historical experience with state churches back home."
Again, it's been centuries since the Sacristy tried to involve itself in secular government in any meaningful way, why is this so shocking? Granted, each Protector and Steadholder still swears to uphold and defend the church, and I suppose Reverend Hanks does regularly attend Conclave and Council meetings."Two-thirds of Manticore's colonists were from Europe, and Europe had a history of sectarian violence and religious conflict that went back to, oh, the sixth century Ante Diaspora, at least. Whole nations had spent centuries trying to kill each other over religious differences—like your own Civil War. The colonists didn't want anything like that happening to them, so they adopted the traditions of those of their numbers who came from North America, where separation between church and state had been part of the fundamental law. In the Star Kingdom, the state is legally prohibited from interfering in religious matters, and vice versa."
Sutton blinked. The notion of an explicit split between church and state seemed so alien that he looked at Jackson as if seeking confirmation that such a thing was even possible.
Lot of trivia here, Grayson has 1.17 Gs, not that I expect it to ever come up again. Cool to see counter-grav used in construction, oh and crystoplast sheets 3 mm thick can withstand everything the environment can throw at it, and whatever stresses of the dome they may be subject to while weighing less than a similar mass of glass.The primary supports were all in, and Adam Gerrick stood on the scaffolding which crowned what would become the dome's number one access annex and watched huge, glittering panes of crystoplast rising delicately into place. Although the crystoplast was barely three millimeters thick and far lighter than an equal volume of glass, the smallest panel was over six meters on a side, and while Grayson's gravity was less than that of Lady Harrington's home world, it was seventeen percent higher than Old Earth's. Only four years before, the men maneuvering them into place would have relied upon grunting, snorting cranes and brute force; now they used counter-grav to nudge the shimmering, near-invisible panes into position with cautious ease, and Gerrick felt a thrill of pride he hadn't yet learned to take for granted.
When he says children learn from a young age to take adults seriously when they say things are dangerous, he means it.Gerrick smiled at the familiar thought and looked down as the high, clear sound of a child's voice cut through the work site's noise. A group of kids—students-to-be in the middle school—had asked permission to watch the completion of the main dome, and their teachers, after checking with the site supervisors, had organized a field trip. Needless to say, the Sky Domes' staff had impressed them with the dangers the construction equipment represented, and Grayson children learned early to take adults' warnings to heart. They were well back under the completed eastern wall, and they were staying there, but that didn't mute their avid interest. He could see their excitement even from here as they watched the panels drifting upward on their counter-grav like some sort of impossibly beautiful seed pods and chattered to one another, and he smiled. He'd talked to some of those youngsters himself this morning, and two or three had looked like they had the making of good engineers.
Say whatever you want about Weber's skills as a writer, this scene is really intense. The sabotage we saw before comes to fruition, and a school-dome collapses, killing fifty workers and thirty schoolchildren.It started almost gently, as the most terrible accidents so often do. The first movement was tiny, so slight he thought he'd imagined it, but he hadn't. One of the primary load-bearing supports—a solid shaft of alloy orders of magnitude stronger than titanium set in a hole bored fourteen meters into solid bedrock and sealed with over a hundred tons of ceramacrete—swayed like a young tree in a breeze. But that support was no sapling. It was a vital component of the dome's integrity, and even as Gerrick stared at it in disbelief it was turning, twisting in its socket as if it had been tamped into place with so much sand and not sealed into the densest, hardest mineral building material known to man. It couldn't happen. It wasn't just unlikely, it was impossible, and Gerrick knew it, for he was the man who'd designed it . . . but it was also happening.
His eyes whipped unerringly to the supports which shared that shaft's component of the dome's weight. An untrained eye wouldn't even have known which ones to look at; to Gerrick, it was as obvious as if he'd spent hours pouring over the schematics that very morning, and his heart leapt into his throat with horror as he saw one of them shifting as well!
He stared at it for one terrible, endless instant, his engineer's mind leaping ahead to the disaster to come. It was only a moment, no more than four seconds—possibly five; certainly not more than six—yet that moment of stunned inactivity would haunt Adam Gerrick. It didn't make any difference. He knew that—didn't think it, but knew it. Too much mass was in motion. The inevitable chain of events was beyond the control of any man, and nothing he did or didn't do could make the slightest difference, yet Gerrick would never forgive himself for that moment of stasis.
A soft, almost inaudible groan came from the moving supports, and a pane of crystoplast popped free. The glittering panel dropped, no longer drifting and lovely in its counter-grav supports but slashing downward like a gleaming guillotine, and Adam Gerrick began to run.
He flung himself down the scaffolding, screaming a warning, running straight towards the collapsing horror of his dream. It was madness—a race which could end only in his own death if he won it—but he didn't think about that. He thought only of the children, standing in what was supposed to be the safest part of the entire site . . . directly under those creaking, groaning, treacherously shifting supports.
Perhaps, he told himself later, if he'd reacted faster, if he'd started running sooner, if he'd screamed a louder warning, perhaps it would have made a difference. The engineer in him, the part of his brain and soul which manipulated numbers and load factors and vectors of force knew better, but Gerrick had two children of his own, and the father in him would never, ever, forgive himself for not having made it make a difference.
He saw one of the kids turn and look at him. It was a girl, no more than eleven, and Adam Gerrick saw her smile, unaware of what was happening. He saw her wave at him, happy and excited by all the activity . . . and then he saw eighty thousand metric tons of alloy and crystoplast and plunging horror come crashing down and blot that smile away forever.
Capital F Family men, coming from a tradition of a staggeringly painful infant mortality rate Graysons are extremely protective of their young. Their tradition is you sacrifice anything you can afford to lose for the sake of the next generation, hence that desperate rush to space, with so many deaths."Your Grace," Prestwick said heavily, "the Mueller inspectors have sent ceramacrete samples to the Sword laboratories here in Austin. I've seen the preliminary reports. The final product did not meet code standards."
Benjamin stared at him, trying to understand, but the scale of such a crime was too vast to comprehend. To use substandard materials for a school's dome was unthinkable. No Grayson would put children at risk! Their entire society—their whole way of life—was built on protecting their children!
Even the bad guys are shocked and horrified at what their scheming has done. Only takes them about a minute to justify it though."Dear Tester, what have we done?" William Fitzclarence whispered. He, too, sat staring at an HD, and Samuel Mueller and Edmond Marchant sat on either side of him. "Children," Lord Burdette groaned. "We've killed children!"
"No, My Lord," Marchant said. Burdette looked at him, blue eyes dark with horror, and the defrocked priest shook his head, his own eyes dark with purpose, not shock. "We killed no one, My Lord," he said in a soft, persuasive voice. "It was God's will that the innocent perish, not ours."
"God's will?" Burdette repeated numbly, and Marchant nodded.
-snip-
"I know, My Lord, yet it was God's will. We had no way to know children would be present, but He did. Would He have allowed the dome to collapse when it did if it wasn't part of His plan? Terrible as their deaths were, their souls are with Him now—innocent of sin, untouched by the world's temptations—and their deaths have multiplied the effect of our plan a thousand fold. Our entire world now sees the consequences of embracing Manticore and the Protector's 'reforms,' and nothing, My Lord, nothing, could have driven that lesson home as this has. Those children are the Lord's martyrs, fallen in His service as surely as any martyr ever perished for his Faith."
"He's right, William," Mueller said quietly. Burdette turned to his fellow Steadholder, and Mueller raised one hand. "My inspectors have already found the substandard ceramacrete. I'll wait a day or so before announcing it—long enough for us to check and recheck the analyses, so that no one can possibly question our conclusions—but the proof is there. The proof, William. There's no way that harlot or the Protector can weasel their way around it. We didn't pick the moment it would collapse; God did that, and in doing so he made our original plan enormously more successful than we'd ever dared hope."
"Maybe . . . maybe you're right," Burdette said slowly. The horror had faded in his eyes, replaced by the supporting self-righteousness of his faith . . . and a cold light of calculation. "It's her fault," he murmured, "not ours. She's the one who drove us to this."
Honor's company had everything triple-checked, and updated records on-site making it impossible to skim off the top without a massive conspiracy, leading Adam the engineer to suspect sabotage. And he'll prove it with math. "There was a duplicate key to the wardroom, I proved it using geometric logic" Bonus points to whoever gets the reference, no cheating now."Records no one will believe." Howard Clinkscales' voice was harsh as he spoke at last, and every eye turned to him. "We may know they're accurate, but who's going to take our word? If Adam saw substandard materials, then there are substandard materials on the site. We don't know how they got there, but we can't dispute their existence, and our Steadholder is Sky Domes' majority stockholder. If we make our records public, all we'll do is destroy any last vestige of trust in her. Burdette and his supporters will scream that we doctored them—that her inspectors signed off on their falsification because she told them to—and we can't prove that didn't happen. Not with physical proof of wrongdoing sitting right there in Mueller."
He looked around the table, and his heart felt old and frozen as he saw the understanding on the engineers' faces. But Adam Gerrick shook his head, and there was no surrender in his eyes.
"You're wrong, Lord Clinkscales," he said flatly. The regent blinked at him, unaccustomed to being contradicted in such a hard, certain voice. "You're not an engineer, Sir. No doubt you're right about what will happen if we turn Fred's records over to the press, but we can prove what happened."
"How?" Clinkscales's desire to believe showed in his voice, but there was little hope behind it.
"Because we—" Gerrick waved at the men around the table "—are engineers. The best damned engineers on this damned planet, and we know our records are accurate. More than that, we have a complete visual record of everything that happened at that site, including the collapse itself. And on top of that, we've got not just the plans and the final specs that went into them, we've got all the original calculations, from the first rough site survey through every step of the process."
"And?"
"And that means we have all the pieces, My Lord. If Fred's right about the quality of the materials we shipped to that site, then someone, somewhere, made that dome collapse, and we've got the data we need to figure out how the bastard did it."
"Made it collapse?" Clinkscales stared at the younger man. "Adam, I know you don't want to believe it was our fault—dear God, I don't want to believe it!—but if it wasn't a simple case of materials theft, what else could it be? Surely you're not suggesting someone wanted it to collapse!"
"When you eliminate all the impossible factors, whatever's left must be the truth. And I am telling you, My Lord, that if that dome was built with the materials we specified and if the plans we provided were followed, then the collapse I saw this morning could not happen."
"Adam," Clinkscales said with a cold, frightening smile, "you're an engineer. I used to be a policeman, and, I like to think, a pretty good one. If there's a who and a why, I'll find them." He turned his gaze on another man, at the far end of the table. "Chet, I want the personnel records on that work crew. While you start your analysis of what happened, I'm going to be looking at every single human being who had a hand in the construction. If this was deliberate, then somewhere, somebody left a fingerprint. When you people can tell me what they did and how they did it, I'll know where to look for the person or persons behind it. And when I find them, Adam," he said with an even more terrifying smile, "I promise you'll have that front row seat you wanted."
Although it may not be as surprising as it sounds at first. After all, the BCs they're designing would doubtless be based on their old designs, in which everything would've taken up more space than the RMN-inspired tech they'd use now. If you miniaturize everything, there are limits to what sorts of things you really need more of. Once you have enough missiles to suit operational requirements, enough reaction mass bunkered for typical deployment length, crew cubage mght be expanded a bit, and so on, but it seems like as far as EW goes, you can devote as much space to it as you want (within reason) before hitting diminishing returns like one would with extra ammo or fuel.Ahriman238 wrote:Grayson has learned a lot about the value of electronic warfare, and devote even more internal space on each ship class to it than Manticore. Plus, on the refitted SDs they ripped out the vast Haven ECM and EW systems and doubled up on Manticoran equivalents.Peep EW systems were inferior to those of the RMN. Getting comparable performance out of them required much more massive installations, and the Grayson Navy hadn't been able to resist the temptation of all that available volume when they refitted their prize vessels. They'd gutted their new SDs' original EW sections and then filled the same space with Manticoran systems, which meant Terrible boasted almost the same electronic warfare capabilities as a sixteen-million-ton orbital fortress, and that was just fine with Honor. If someone was going to be shooting at her flagship, she wanted all the nasty tricks she could get to play on that someone's fire control.
Still, she had been a bit surprised to learn that Grayson's new-build warships were also more heavily equipped with EW systems than their Manticoran counterparts. Not by as great a margin as the SDs, perhaps, but they carried considerably more capable suites on a class-for-class basis, though the GSN hadn't yet learned to use the potential of its systems to full effect.
Notably, she does the same thing when she's in charge of the ACS (and when Truman is in charge of Anzio) - putting her own battle-tested tricks into sims they run their students/subordinates through.Ahriman238 wrote:I wouldn't say it lasts long, or is consistent, enough or to be called a pattern, but both SVW and FIE have Honor try out a sneaky thing she does near the end in a wargame early on. Nice way of setting it up, and it makes perfect sense. In SVW it was a detached flight of EW drones, here it's having her superdreadnoughts impersonate battlecruisers. It doesn't work this time, but only because the opposition was cautious enough to slip a recon drone in to confirm things.
Honor might also be going based on 7% of their wall's mass, rather than ordinals. All the ships sent to Minette and Casca are SDs, which would be a larger proportion of the overall wall's mass than they are of its number.Ahriman238 wrote:Haven seizes Minette and Casca as part of their Operation Stalking Horse (i.e. plan "draw ships away from Grayson") with 30 wallers between the two. This is seven percent of the Haven wall of battle, or roughly 1/14th hmm. Carry the point-two-eight-five, I get 428 (.5!) capital ships. Appreciably close to the pre-war figure of 460, on the other hand Haven's lost 70, captured or destroyed, since the war began. Honor may be using the pre-war figures, or just not care too much about accuracy on this one point.
I wouldn't say they don't know about Henries. They know some Manties might be passing through, and figure they'd either be drafted to retake Casca and Minette, or continue on to their original destination. What they don't figure is that the GSN would recommission all 11 SDs by now, and that's the miscalculation that costs them.Ahriman238 wrote:Stalking Horse is going well, they're sending out GSN BatRon Two with Henries' squadron to hook up with other local forces and retake Casca. The whole plan was based on the idea of provoking more-or-less these deployments, based on the forces the Peeps know are there, forcing them in these specific circumstances to react in a highly predictable way and empty Grayson of wallers. Of course, the Peeps don't know about Henries."I realize your orders are to report to Admiral White Haven, Sir Alfred, but I'm countermanding them. Battle Squadron Two will combine with your command and depart within three hours for Casca. At the same time, I'll send dispatches to Admiral Koga and Admiral Truman, instructing them to join us there at their best speed. If the Peeps haven't already pinched the system out from Candor, you and I should have enough strength to discourage them from making the attempt. Once the other divisions join us, we'll move in and throw them out of Candor, then advance on Minette. With any luck, we can coordinate with Admiral Hemphill to take that system back, as well, and do it without diverting a single ship from Thetis."
I had to go look this up the first time I read it; I like Navy Hymn - it reminds me of Crimson Tide, and that movie reminds me a lot of the Honorverse, since it's also in large part about the burdens of command, incomplete information, and calculated risks with large consequences, like many of the smaller-scale books can be.Ahriman238 wrote:Just a bit that I remember sticking out the first time I read it, Grayson saved the Navy Hymn.
I also like (being the son of a MechEng) that Weber depicts engineers not just as maintenance workers and jury-riggers, but exceptionally intelligent people capable of all sorts of complex mental tasks in their head. Very different from Star Trek and other popular scifi.Ahriman238 wrote:Say whatever you want about Weber's skills as a writer, this scene is really intense. The sabotage we saw before comes to fruition, and a school-dome collapses, killing fifty workers and thirty schoolchildren.
Hm. Hypothesis:Ahriman238 wrote:Grayson has learned a lot about the value of electronic warfare, and devote even more internal space on each ship class to it than Manticore. Plus, on the refitted SDs they ripped out the vast Haven ECM and EW systems and doubled up on Manticoran equivalents.
Note that Henries is also an RMN admiral who's fighting a jumped-up captain whose sole prior experience with fleet command is as Sarnow's flag captain. Even if he respects Honor's basic competence, and even if we remove RMN arrogance from the picture entirely, Henries would probably still expect to be able to outpoint Honor on the basis of superior experience with squadron-level forces.Yeah, Sir Alfred Henries is taking an SD squadron forward from Manticore (maybe the new construction mentioned earlier?) to reinforce White Haven at the front. But he was time for five days of wargames against the GSN, which they do for training, even with a war on. I take this as circumstantial evidence for the new construction theory, if they're a newer unit and still working up, getting used to working together.
Oh, and the darker side to the RMN's "tradition of victory," they can come off as arrogant, even to their close allies and former members.
Haven's shipyards are still in business and they no doubt are making their own capital ships; it's been something like a year since the war started which is easily time to turn out quite a few ships.Haven seizes Minette and Casca as part of their Operation Stalking Horse (i.e. plan "draw ships away from Grayson") with 30 wallers between the two. This is seven percent of the Haven wall of battle, or roughly 1/14th hmm. Carry the point-two-eight-five, I get 428 (.5!) capital ships. Appreciably close to the pre-war figure of 460, on the other hand Haven's lost 70, captured or destroyed, since the war began. Honor may be using the pre-war figures, or just not care too much about accuracy on this one point.
Uh... which Havenite officers? Sollies, yes- but Sollies always assume their enemies are ignorant barbarians, which is pretty much supported by their experience until now anyway. Havenites tend to be a little smarter than that, as far as I can recall. Some of the more political officers are that dumb, but not many we see 'on screen.'Oh, and again we see that when Haven manages to shake loose several ships and launches raids on relatively unimportant backwaters, the RMN and Grayson's first response is to wonder what they're planning, what they know that we don't know, as opposed to simply assuming their enemies are morons like many Haven and almost all Sollie officers would.
The RMN's strategists can't be sure; from what limited information they have there's no way for them to say confidently that Pierre isn't simply a soulless, sadistic butcher.The importance of Trevor's Star, as long as Haven holds it they have the option of attacking the Manticore system directly. It'd be a suicide mission with the orbital forts, but one with a more favorable exchange rate in tonnage and lives than the war has held so far. In short, it's a game of attrition that Haven could eventually win by running out of bodies slower, where the tech advantage would mean less. Though sending multiple waves of suicide missions isn't really Rob Pierre's style.
At 2000c that would indeed be about 36 days in hyperspace. That corresponds to listed speeds for the 'zeta band' of hyperspace, which is probably about as high as anyone's going to take a major fleet except under emergency conditions. The 'eta' and 'theta' bands are accessible to warships and offer further speed increases, but are actively dangerous and thus used only in unusual conditions (i.e. Apollo's speed run from Grayson to Manticore in Honor of the Queen), or by couriers.What interests me is the mention of 200 light-years being over a month's journey for a superdreadnought. I did not think they appreciably slower in hyper than any other ship, is that a sign that they are, a generic example of a warship's capability or something else?
To be fair, the plan would quite probably still have worked if Thurston had known Honor's First Battle Squadron was still in Grayson. He'd still have had her out-tonnaged by a very large margin (I'll sit down and math it out later).Stalking Horse is going well, they're sending out GSN BatRon Two with Henries' squadron to hook up with other local forces and retake Casca. The whole plan was based on the idea of provoking more-or-less these deployments, based on the forces the Peeps know are there, forcing them in these specific circumstances to react in a highly predictable way and empty Grayson of wallers. Of course, the Peeps don't know about Henries.
Don't you just hate an almost perfect plan?
I can't imagine it making that much difference to Manticore's ability to prosecute the war, since in the worst case they can just blockade the planet.There's not a huge force sitting around Masada, but they apparently have some orbital fortresses capable of a degree of support for the ground-pounders. It would take very little to remove that and start an uprising/bloodbath of the Masadan fanatics. Which is half of Operation Dagger.The effect of that on the Star Kingdom's domestic opinion could be catastrophic to public support for the war and the Cromarty Government, and that didn't even count the price in blood and suffering, Masadan as well as Manticoran, it would entail.
Because while the Church on Grayson doesn't routinely interfere actively in government, they've never been asked to explicitly surrender their right to do so, and their role as guardian of the Grayson collective conscience is too important for any Grayson to seriously consider making that request.Again, it's been centuries since the Sacristy tried to involve itself in secular government in any meaningful way, why is this so shocking? Granted, each Protector and Steadholder still swears to uphold and defend the church, and I suppose Reverend Hanks does regularly attend Conclave and Council meetings.
I wish I had the figures on how much glass it'd take to provide the required level of protection. One issue in visualizing those domes- I don't know if they're 'glass' (or whatever) panes set in a framework of structural metal/plastic/whatever, or if they're just lots and lots of 'glass' somehow joined at the edges.Lot of trivia here, Grayson has 1.17 Gs, not that I expect it to ever come up again. Cool to see counter-grav used in construction, oh and crystoplast sheets 3 mm thick can withstand everything the environment can throw at it, and whatever stresses of the dome they may be subject to while weighing less than a similar mass of glass.
Since the alternative is to have your kids die of lead poisoning or having gone out to play in the arsenic-snow too many times, hell yes Graysons would go the extra mile to ensure their children heed safety warnings.When he says children learn from a young age to take adults seriously when they say things are dangerous, he means it.
I feel kind of guilty mentioning this, but...Say whatever you want about Weber's skills as a writer, this scene is really intense. The sabotage we saw before comes to fruition, and a school-dome collapses, killing fifty workers and thirty schoolchildren.
As noted, I think what's happening is that the Manticorans have (or had prewar) specific design requirements for their EW systems that are based on a prewar standard of what's required.Terralthra wrote:Although it may not be as surprising as it sounds at first. After all, the BCs they're designing would doubtless be based on their old designs, in which everything would've taken up more space than the RMN-inspired tech they'd use now. If you miniaturize everything, there are limits to what sorts of things you really need more of. Once you have enough missiles to suit operational requirements, enough reaction mass bunkered for typical deployment length, crew cubage mght be expanded a bit, and so on, but it seems like as far as EW goes, you can devote as much space to it as you want (within reason) before hitting diminishing returns like one would with extra ammo or fuel.
Umm...Thurston, in this very book? He "knows" Grayson has no SDs, so when he sees 25 BCs form a (sloppy) formation against that many battleships, he just assumes they're doing the best they can against overwhelming odds, and too shitty at formations to make a good one.Simon_Jester wrote:Uh... which Havenite officers? Sollies, yes- but Sollies always assume their enemies are ignorant barbarians, which is pretty much supported by their experience until now anyway. Havenites tend to be a little smarter than that, as far as I can recall. Some of the more political officers are that dumb, but not many we see 'on screen.'Ahriman238 wrote:Oh, and again we see that when Haven manages to shake loose several ships and launches raids on relatively unimportant backwaters, the RMN and Grayson's first response is to wonder what they're planning, what they know that we don't know, as opposed to simply assuming their enemies are morons like many Haven and almost all Sollie officers would.
Thurston isn't hoping to make a serious inroad on the RMN's combat ability, he's hoping that the massive bloodshed will make the Manticoran electorate demand peace. Given that the PRH started the war (and needs the war), it isn't exactly to their benefit to stop after their current losses, but it does give them time to try to cope with the tech advantage (like SJ's assassination -> peace treaty ploy in AoV).Simon_Jester wrote:I can't imagine it making that much difference to Manticore's ability to prosecute the war, since in the worst case they can just blockade the planet.Ahriman238 wrote:There's not a huge force sitting around Masada, but they apparently have some orbital fortresses capable of a degree of support for the ground-pounders. It would take very little to remove that and start an uprising/bloodbath of the Masadan fanatics. Which is half of Operation Dagger.The effect of that on the Star Kingdom's domestic opinion could be catastrophic to public support for the war and the Cromarty Government, and that didn't even count the price in blood and suffering, Masadan as well as Manticoran, it would entail.
Also, this reminds me of something I've seen a few times in Napoleonic War books (i.e. C. S. Forester and Patrick O'Brien's works). One of the standard ploys is to force the British officers to thwart a French attempt to trigger an uprising in Ireland- which was chronically discontent during the period, and immediately explains how a relatively small French force could accomplish something to seriously inconvenience the British.
The structural supports are listed as "yet another of Manticore's marvelous alloys." So, metal structure, "crystoplast" panes in between.Simon_Jester wrote:I wish I had the figures on how much glass it'd take to provide the required level of protection. One issue in visualizing those domes- I don't know if they're 'glass' (or whatever) panes set in a framework of structural metal/plastic/whatever, or if they're just lots and lots of 'glass' somehow joined at the edges.Ahriman238 wrote:Lot of trivia here, Grayson has 1.17 Gs, not that I expect it to ever come up again. Cool to see counter-grav used in construction, oh and crystoplast sheets 3 mm thick can withstand everything the environment can throw at it, and whatever stresses of the dome they may be subject to while weighing less than a similar mass of glass.
I'm not so sure it deserves a wow. It's impressive, sure, but consider that there are steel alloys (maraging steels) which have an order of magnitude higher tensile, shear, and compressive strength than your average titanium alloy. Titanium has a better strength-to-weight ratio, but it's not "ultra steel", like steel but better in every way. Steel has a higher ultimate strength in most cases.Simon_Jester wrote:Also, a main structural girder in the dome is supposed to be "orders of magnitude stronger than titanium." This is probably made out of the same general category of stuff they armor starships with, so wow.
Napoleonic War books, nothing. It actually happened, although it ended up being only a minor inconvenience due to an inflexible plan and the incompetence of the French general involved. (One wonders what would've happened if they'd picked Napoleon to command the operation instead of Amable Humbert, but they didn't.)Simon_Jester wrote:Also, this reminds me of something I've seen a few times in Napoleonic War books (i.e. C. S. Forester and Patrick O'Brien's works). One of the standard ploys is to force the British officers to thwart a French attempt to trigger an uprising in Ireland- which was chronically discontent during the period, and immediately explains how a relatively small French force could accomplish something to seriously inconvenience the British.
Terralthra wrote:Umm...Thurston, in this very book? He "knows" Grayson has no SDs, so when he sees 25 BCs form a (sloppy) formation against that many battleships, he just assumes they're doing the best they can against overwhelming odds, and too shitty at formations to make a good one.
I wrote:Havenites tend to be a little smarter than that, as far as I can recall. Some of the more political officers are that dumb, but not many we see 'on screen.'
I wrote:Havenites tend to be a little smarter than that, as far as I can recall. Some of the more political officers are that dumb, but not many we see 'on screen.'
Turnabout is fair play.I wrote:Havenites tend to be a little smarter than that, as far as I can recall. Some of the more political officers are that dumb, but not many we see 'on screen.'
Although, again, Manticore could easily counter by just blockading the planet and letting the natives stew until they have the time and wherewithal to cope. I'm not sure the Manticoran government would actually do that, but I'd be surprised if no one on the Havenite side's thought of it.Thurston isn't hoping to make a serious inroad on the RMN's combat ability, he's hoping that the massive bloodshed will make the Manticoran electorate demand peace. Given that the PRH started the war (and needs the war), it isn't exactly to their benefit to stop after their current losses, but it does give them time to try to cope with the tech advantage (like SJ's assassination -> peace treaty ploy in AoV).
Two or three orders of magnitude is legitimately impressive, though.I'm not so sure it deserves a wow. It's impressive, sure, but consider that there are steel alloys (maraging steels) which have an order of magnitude higher tensile, shear, and compressive strength than your average titanium alloy. Titanium has a better strength-to-weight ratio, but it's not "ultra steel", like steel but better in every way. Steel has a higher ultimate strength in most cases.
What I mean is, "yet another attempt to stir up Ireland" is exactly the sort of thing the author can put into a Napoleonic War book without seriously changing the course of events. There's at least one Hornblower novel that does it, I think the one about the blockade of Brest.StarSword wrote:Napoleonic War books, nothing. It actually happened, although it ended up being only a minor inconvenience due to an inflexible plan and the incompetence of the French general involved. (One wonders what would've happened if they'd picked Napoleon to command the operation instead of Amable Humbert, but they didn't.)
Right, it's another case of Grayson's tech jump meaning they aren't part of the traditional doctrine, and so they amend assumptions the Manticorans hadn't realized they made. I wonder if Manticore will be copying this too?Although it may not be as surprising as it sounds at first. After all, the BCs they're designing would doubtless be based on their old designs, in which everything would've taken up more space than the RMN-inspired tech they'd use now. If you miniaturize everything, there are limits to what sorts of things you really need more of. Once you have enough missiles to suit operational requirements, enough reaction mass bunkered for typical deployment length, crew cubage mght be expanded a bit, and so on, but it seems like as far as EW goes, you can devote as much space to it as you want (within reason) before hitting diminishing returns like one would with extra ammo or fuel.
As good an explanation as any. She's close enough that I'm not really bothered by it, and the point that haven is gambling a significant chunk of their fleet on whatever they're trying stands.Honor might also be going based on 7% of their wall's mass, rather than ordinals. All the ships sent to Minette and Casca are SDs, which would be a larger proportion of the overall wall's mass than they are of its number
Right. They discuss the possibility of Manticoran reinforcements and decide that maybe only five of the ships are from Grayson, and maybe they only got that many working yet. And even if they refitted all eleven in record time, the six guarding the hearth are not going to be enough to stop Thurston.I wouldn't say they don't know about Henries. They know some Manties might be passing through, and figure they'd either be drafted to retake Casca and Minette, or continue on to their original destination. What they don't figure is that the GSN would recommission all 11 SDs by now, and that's the miscalculation that costs them.
I like. Haven has a lot more recent experience with large-scale engagements and planetary conquests, and may have simply decided that if missiles are relatively ineffective but the only game unless you can close to beam range, the obvious answer is to double up on missile launchers.Hm. Hypothesis:
The RMN's been enjoying the benefits of miniaturized EW hardware for many years now, and until recently, a lot of their capital ship design doctrine revolved around getting the greatest possible punch out of dreadnought-weight ships. Moreover, their doctrine didn't explicitly emphasize missile combat over beams until quite recently. EW hardware is useful only in a missile duel.
So I suspect that in the ships Honor's spent most of her career on, what's been happening is that increasingly miniaturized EW fits were being used to reduce the space devoted to electronic warfare spaces while keeping overall performance constant or slightly improved. Or at most to keep EW system volume constant and notably improve performance.
The idea of actually dedicating a greater percent of hull volume to EW to really come to terms with the missile threat is probably the sort of thing RMN designers are only willing to contemplate now that war experience has shown that missiles are the dominant arm in naval warfare, and that being able to defend ships against missile attack is if anything more important to their survivability than armor-plate. And certainly more important than hundreds of thousands of tons of antiship laser cannons.
Meanwhile, looking at the balance of missile and beam armaments on the Havenite ships (including definitely prewar designs like the Nouveau Paris-class dreadnought), it's obvious that the PN has been designing their ships to emphasize missile combat and volume of missile fire. Their systems may be inferior on a ton-for-ton basis, but they certainly didn't skimp on the quantity of those systems they were prepared to bring to the fight.
[House of Lies will probably contradict this, but to heck with it.]
Uh... which Havenite officers? Sollies, yes- but Sollies always assume their enemies are ignorant barbarians, which is pretty much supported by their experience until now anyway. Havenites tend to be a little smarter than that, as far as I can recall. Some of the more political officers are that dumb, but not many we see 'on screen.'
Sample bias. The officers who appear in multiple books are the competent ones who don't think like that. I don't know, it doesn't appear all that often, but it never fails to annoy me when it does.Anyway. Thurston is the very model of one of 'the more political officers.' I was thinking in terms of the recurring characters (Theisman, Caslet, Giscard, Tourville, McQueen).
Thurston, by contrast, is an overpromoted hack whose strategic concept is crude (feint here, pounce there), and whose main virtue is that he's the first Havenite staff officer with the balls to propose an offensive battleplan to Pierre. To be fair, it's not a bad battleplan as such. The biggest single problem is that Thurston's the one trying to implement it. If Thurston had taken charge of the diversion at Minette (which he couldn't possibly screw up) while McQueen attacked Grayson (which he could), for instance, things could have gone very differently.
Honor's fear, and Thurston's hope, is that without orbital support the many Manticoran troops on the ground will be massacred, especially with much Haven infantry support and weapons, that Manticore will have to respond to that and reassert order, a long and bloody business that will turn Manticoran popular support away from the war. Like the Tet offensive, the important part is how it will play in the press. Though I suppose for Haven giving Manticore more problems, more fronts to fight on and more manpower-intensive obligations is worthwhile in it's own right.I can't imagine it making that much difference to Manticore's ability to prosecute the war, since in the worst case they can just blockade the planet.
Which happened at Ballinamuck, as StarSword mentioned. Plus the British tried something similar in landing Royalist French ex-pats at Quiberon. But yes, it makes sense in the context of giving the heroes a disaster they must thwart and so miss out on the major historical events. Sort of like how Honor more-or-less misses the first three years of the year serving with the Grayson Navy, takes part in a side mission then gets captured and ensuing drama, escapes and the war ends before she completes her recovery and is able to fight.Also, this reminds me of something I've seen a few times in Napoleonic War books (i.e. C. S. Forester and Patrick O'Brien's works). One of the standard ploys is to force the British officers to thwart a French attempt to trigger an uprising in Ireland- which was chronically discontent during the period, and immediately explains how a relatively small French force could accomplish something to seriously inconvenience the British.
Almost certainly, or their ships would probably have little hope of surviving against Havenite pod salvoes later down the road.Ahriman238 wrote:Right, it's another case of Grayson's tech jump meaning they aren't part of the traditional doctrine, and so they amend assumptions the Manticorans hadn't realized they made. I wonder if Manticore will be copying this too?
Although the ships being sent to Casca and Minette aren't really at so much risk; they can always just pull out in the face of a superior opponent, should one mass to face them. At least, that's how I'd write the battle plan.As good an explanation as any. She's close enough that I'm not really bothered by it, and the point that haven is gambling a significant chunk of their fleet on whatever they're trying stands.
On the other hand, the fact that they appear to deliberately skimp on beam armament in their modern (i.e. late 19th century PD) capital ships means their ships should get brutalized in beam combat- or rather, should get brutalized harder than the other guy's do, all else being equal. So they may actually intend that these ships operate in a missile-dominant doctrine.I like. Haven has a lot more recent experience with large-scale engagements and planetary conquests, and may have simply decided that if missiles are relatively ineffective but the only game unless you can close to beam range, the obvious answer is to double up on missile launchers.
True, true. It's just that very few of those unprofessional idiot Havenite officers are coming to mind- the ones that see the enemy doing something confusing and automatically assume they've screwed up. Thurston, yes, and also some of the SpaceSec 'naval' officers who tangle with Honor in Echoes of Honor. That's about all I can think of.Uh... which Havenite officers? Sollies, yes- but Sollies always assume their enemies are ignorant barbarians, which is pretty much supported by their experience until now anyway. Havenites tend to be a little smarter than that, as far as I can recall. Some of the more political officers are that dumb, but not many we see 'on screen.'Sample bias. The officers who appear in multiple books are the competent ones who don't think like that. I don't know, it doesn't appear all that often, but it never fails to annoy me when it does.Anyway. Thurston is the very model of one of 'the more political officers.' I was thinking in terms of the recurring characters (Theisman, Caslet, Giscard, Tourville, McQueen).
Thurston, by contrast, is an overpromoted hack whose strategic concept is crude (feint here, pounce there), and whose main virtue is that he's the first Havenite staff officer with the balls to propose an offensive battleplan to Pierre. To be fair, it's not a bad battleplan as such. The biggest single problem is that Thurston's the one trying to implement it. If Thurston had taken charge of the diversion at Minette (which he couldn't possibly screw up) while McQueen attacked Grayson (which he could), for instance, things could have gone very differently.
Oh, I get it; the key point is that the Manticorans could in theory just... NOT restore order, this would have serious bad consequences for Masada but would be fairly localized. Now, given the way Manticoran media and politics work this might not be an option... but I bet it's exactly what Pierre would do if he were dictator of Manticore rather than dictator of Haven, faced with the same strategic imperative and the same tools to meet them.Honor's fear, and Thurston's hope, is that without orbital support the many Manticoran troops on the ground will be massacred, especially with much Haven infantry support and weapons, that Manticore will have to respond to that and reassert order, a long and bloody business that will turn Manticoran popular support away from the war. Like the Tet offensive, the important part is how it will play in the press. Though I suppose for Haven giving Manticore more problems, more fronts to fight on and more manpower-intensive obligations is worthwhile in it's own right.I can't imagine it making that much difference to Manticore's ability to prosecute the war, since in the worst case they can just blockade the planet.
When you said "some of the more political officers", I assume you meant the political officers, rather than the "promoted-for-political-reasons" officers. =]Simon_Jester wrote:No, really, that wasn't a stupid oversight or anything, I'm just being screwy...
Anyway. Thurston is the very model of one of 'the more political officers.' I was thinking in terms of the recurring characters (Theisman, Caslet, Giscard, Tourville, McQueen).
I'd forgotten some of the details, but I do think he's included in my thesis.
It's a late series thing and the instances sort of blur together in my brain, which is why I haven't commented much on them, I'm sure I'll get to them. I think there was a brief one after the Battle of Manticore, when Honor launches a warning broadside to show off Apollo and explain that the fight is over now.simon wrote:True, true. It's just that very few of those unprofessional idiot Havenite officers are coming to mind- the ones that see the enemy doing something confusing and automatically assume they've screwed up. Thurston, yes, and also some of the SpaceSec 'naval' officers who tangle with Honor in Echoes of Honor. That's about all I can think of.
Ah Adam, that's a lot of redundancies and records, which is a good thing when something goes wrong, it takes them maybe three or four hours to piece together exactly what happened. Also bonus points for rendering reasonably complex engineering in a layman's terms."Do you remember how we'd designed the holes to give the maximum volume for the ceramacrete footings while simultaneously locking the base of each support into a natural load-bearing matrix?" Gerrick asked, and she nodded. "Well, with the supports socketed into the crosscuts and a hundred-plus tons of ceramacrete poured into each footing on top of that, each support in the alpha ring should have been the next best thing to indestructible."
Honor nodded. Had the ceramacrete been properly fused, it would have formed the equivalent of a plug of solid igneous rock stronger and harder than obsidian. Coupled with the socketing effect of the crosscuts, the support members should have been like extrusions of the planet's very bones.
"All right, My Lady, what actually happened is this. When the man on the power bore drilled his holes, they looked close to specs, but the portion that was supposed to 'neck down' actually had a diameter equal to the support's width, which meant the beams didn't engage in the crosscuts and knocked out that part of the design's stress redundancy. We've only managed to check two of the holes, since the Mueller inspectors won't let us on-site, but we had good visual records on those two. The people who shot the chips were holo-vid techs, not engineers, so they never noticed the proportions were off, and none of our technical people viewed the chips prior to the accident. But we've viewed them now, and we've been able to scale the holes from the HD chips. It's a computer reconstruction, but it'll stand up in any court, and the holes themselves are still there and available for physical examination to confirm it."
Honor nodded once more, and Gerrick rubbed his eyebrow in a gesture of tired triumph before he continued.
"In addition to the diameter shift, the bottoms of each of the holes we've checked were also off profile, My Lady. They were cut on a slight angle, so that only the edge of each support actually had any bearing surface. Again, with good ceramacrete, that wouldn't have mattered, since the pour would have come in under the unsupported portion of each upright before it was fused. With bad ceramacrete, it became an important factor in what happened."
"Didn't we check the profiles?"
"Yes and no, My Lady," Gerrick said with a grimace. "The specs were locked into the bores' software. For them to be off required the bore operator to deliberately alter them, and we run diagnostics and self-check programs on all our equipment between shifts to catch any accidental modifications. That meant whoever altered them also had to reset them before he went off shift, which he did. That deprived us of any warning from that end . . . and, just incidentally, proves that what happened wasn't an accident.
"But we had a second built-in check, My Lady. The crews who set the supports also had the proper profiles in their software. If the holes were off, they should have caught them—would have caught them, if they hadn't been deliberately covering for whoever drilled them in the first place. That's how we know there were at least two parties.
They sabotaged the hole and the footing, and in the process have instituted new sampling rules for Grayson. And even with all that effort, two of the doctored holes wound up perfectly secure because of on0site supervisors. At this point I'm starting to have trouble crediting that Honor wasn't somehow expecting materials theft or sabotage, with all these redundancies and preventative measures."As nearly as we can piece it together at this point, the crews who put the supports into the bad holes knew which ones were off. They put in their beams, then poured the ceramacrete, but they only fused the top half meter or so of it. Two of the bad holes had good ceramacrete, so we're assuming one of our supervisors happened by during those pours and that the saboteurs were afraid to hold back on the fusing process in his presence because they figured he'd spot it. As far as the others are concerned, though, our inspectors—and the Mueller Steading inspectors, for that matter—only drill twenty-centimeter cores for our quality control samples. That's the standard for Sword and steading inspectors, My Lady, partly because it's so hard to drill through ceramacrete in the first place. Given what's happened here, however, I've already recommended to the Protector that the requirement be changed to a full-depth sampling technique.
"What it meant, though, was that a half meter of good ceramacrete gave a valid quality control check for the entire footing—a footing which, in fact, came nowhere close to meeting the stress loading we'd designed into it. In fact, it wouldn't have been enough to handle the loads in a good hole, but they weren't taking any chances."
Planetary security keeps all the fingerprint records, and Honor's company printed all their workers. Oh, and there is apparently at least one semi-breakaway sect of the Church of Humanity Unchained (besides the Faithful/Masadans) the Jerimites."At this point, My Lady, we're still figuring out exactly how they did it. We can't identify the crews who set the supports and poured the ceramacrete from our own work orders, but Security is working with the site visual records, and Lord Clinkscales fully expects to find their faces in our employee database. But we can positively identify the bore operator right now, because we know which bore drilled which holes and who was the assigned operator on each bore."
"And?"
"According to our records, it was a Lawrence Maguire, My Lady," Gerrick said flatly. "He's one of the workers who 'resigned in protest' when the first reports of substandard materials came out, and we don't know where he went after that. We've already checked the address he listed as his residence and discovered that it was a boardinghouse. He rented rooms there only a week before he applied to us for a job, however, and none of the other personal background he gave on his application form checks out."
"Then we don't know who he really was?" Honor tried to keep the disappointment from her voice and knew she'd failed. It was vital that they find the man. If they couldn't identify him, establish a motive for his murderous actions, then her enemies would insist he was a figment of her company's imagination—that there'd been no deliberate saboteurs and that the faulty execution which had caused the disaster were only the "mistakes by poorly trained personnel" they were already being called.
"I didn't say that, My Lady," Gerrick said with a thin smile. "I said our records don't tell us where to look for him, and they don't. But while he falsified his application information, he had to give us his real fingerprints. I guess he figured we'd never put it together and even realize we should be looking for him, but we've got them, and we handed them over to Lord Clinkscales. He ran them against the Harrington database without finding anything, which confirmed our suspicion 'Maguire' was an outsider, but he also transmitted them under a deep security cover to a contact of his in Planetary Security, who ran them through the Sword database. And it just happens, My Lady, that as a teenager, Mr. 'Maguire' was once picked up for participating in a civil disturbance. It was a 'demonstration' against the Jerimites—they're a small, independent-minded group some members of the Church consider heretics—that turned violent, but because of his youth, he got off with a reprimand. He may not even have realized that the steading records on all criminal arrests, even the most petty ones, go into the Sword database and stay there.
Can't clear Honor's name without alerting Burdette that they're on to him."If Lord Clinkscales and Security can identify the workmen who sabotaged the ceramacrete and we can link them to Harding, we'll have convincing proof of a conspiracy, Your Grace. But unless we can demonstrate a link between the conspirators and Lord Burdette, we won't have enough evidence to impeach him before the Keys. At this stage no one can predict whether or not we can ever make that linkage at all, but we do know we can't assemble the evidence which might demonstrate it without a formal investigation."
"And if I authorize a formal investigation," Benjamin sighed, "we'll have to bring in so many people Burdette is bound to get wind of it."
Forty four Steadholders votes needed to begin the process for impeaching one of their own, presumably this represents a majority of the Keys."Bad as all that is, Your Grace, it's only a symptom. The real outrage is aimed directly—and personally—at Lady Harrington, and it's assuming frightening proportions. I've received petitions from thirty-eight steadholders and over ninety members of the Conclave of Steaders for her immediate recall as an admiral and impeachment and formal trial for murder. If only six more steadholders endorse the impeachment petition, we'll have no choice but to implement it. And if that happens—"
Theisman's command, Task Group 14.2, the group blitzing the Endicott picket and delivering Haven troops and arms to assist a Masadan insurgency, consists of a dozen battleships (more than adequate for a picket with nothing bigger than a BC) two troop carriers, and five freighters full of weaponry. If these are, as most freighters seem to be, dreadnought or SD-sized, that's a lot of weaponry. Task Group 14.2 will be sticking with Thurston until it looks like he's doing okay and not running into more than he can handle in Yeltsin and then moving on to Endicott."Well, that was an . . . interesting disaster," Citizen Rear Admiral Theisman observed. His tone was so dry that even Citizen Commissioner LePic grinned, but there was a point to the comment. Task Group 14.2, Theisman's own command of twelve battleships and screening elements, had performed flawlessly in the latest sim. Unfortunately, Citizen Admiral Chernov's TG 14.3 had completely misunderstood its orders. He'd strayed badly out of position on the approach to Masada, and the computers ruled that the Grayson battlecruisers protecting Endicott had managed a successful interception. They'd taken heavy losses from Chernov's escorts, but not heavy enough to keep them from killing both his troop transports and four of his five freighters full of weapons.
Theisman sighed. He wasn't at all happy about arming a planet full of religious fanatics—especially when he knew from personal experience what they were capable of—but if he had to do it, he preferred to do it right. No doubt his fellow task group commander was getting an earful from Thurston and Preznikov at this very moment, but it really hadn't been Chernov's fault. This was a more complex op than even Theisman had fully suspected. Neither he nor Chernov had known, for example, that the entire task force was going to arrive in Yeltsin in a single body before detaching the Endicott attack force . . . for the very simple reason that it hadn't been part of the original plan. Theisman thought it an eminently sensible alteration—he'd never been happy about splitting the task force into two forces and having them go in completely independent of one another—but it would have been nice if he and the other task group COs had been informed of it a bit sooner. As it was, the entire maneuver had come at them almost cold, and it was hardly surprising that Chernov's astrogation had been off.
The form for a secret Conclave meeting, and Mueller's perspective on it.Samuel Mueller frowned down at the archaic sheet of parchment on his blotter. The writ of summons' stilted, old-fashioned legalese was familiar enough—except for the last sentence, which no living steadholder had ever seen. Mayhew had the right to append it under the old Constitution, but that made Mueller no happier to be ordered to keep the session secret "upon peril of the Sword's displeasure." It was like a throwback to the bad old days when the Protector had been able to threaten his steadholders, and the fact that Mayhew truly could threaten them only made it more disagreeable.
Mueller's a bit of a weasel, but smart enough to prepare for every contingency, and place himself to best advantage in any situation. He's like a more oily Xanatos.Neither Burdette nor Marchant had yet realized how deep in his debt they now stood. Nor had it occurred to Burdette that what he might not choose to give Mueller out of gratitude could be secured hereafter by other means. Burdette hadn't even noticed that while there was no evidence linking Mueller to the plot, he had complete details on every phase of their operations. With that in hand, his steading's investigative agencies could always "discover" evidence of the others' involvement later, and any allegations Marchant and Burdette might make about his own complicity would be futile. And that, he thought with another smile, would give him an iron hold on Lord Burdette for the rest of his life.
Nor was that the only, or even the greatest, advantage he'd secured, for he and his steaders were the victims of this atrocity. That not only made him the last person anyone would suspect of involvement, but also positioned him nicely to lead the attack on Harrington—and, indirectly, on Mayhew—as a matter of principle. He could wax as bitter in his rhetoric as he pleased, and it would be put down to perfectly natural outrage rather than to ambition. And if worst came to worst and somehow their plan to brand Harrington with responsibility miscarried, he was also positioned to recoil in shock and adopt the voice of sweet reason in order to "heal the wounds" left by this tragedy. Best of all, any concessions he made to that end would gain him enormous sympathy as a wise and judicious statesman and put that upstart Mayhew publicly in his debt.
Not, of course, that he intended to fail. But it never hurt to cover all possibilities, and one thing he was determined upon. He had no intention of passing his son a hollow authority in his own, God-given steading, and he was only fifty-two. With the new medical advances, he could expect to last well into his nineties, even without prolong, and, he thought with grim humor, that would give him plenty of time to, as the verse from his childhood had put it, "try, try again."
Information clampdown by StateSec, but Honor's beaching is apparently known. And Theisman knows the Graysons will recruit her if possible and is mentally preparing himself to throw down with her again, even as he 'knows' she's probably in Casca.He drew a deep breath and looked around almost surreptitiously as he finally admitted the truth in the privacy of his own thoughts. The last update from Intelligence had included a reference which Thomas Theisman found most unsettling. StateSec had clamped down on the distribution of intelligence since the coup. All of it was now handled solely on a "need to know" basis, and StateSec apparently assumed naval officers had no particular need to know anything. Nonetheless, what had once been NavInt before StateSec ingested it had finally confirmed reports that Honor Harrington had retired to Yeltsin in disgrace after that disastrous duel on Manticore.
Theisman shook his head. How could anyone be stupid enough to beach Harrington over something like that? The most cursory glance at the raw newsfax stories showed Pavel Young had deserved everything he'd gotten, and Thomas Theisman was pleased, in an oddly proprietary way, that Harrington had given it to him. The thought amused him, yet it was true. He regarded Honor Harrington as an enemy, but she was an honorable one, who'd treated him and his people with respect and dignity after their surrender to her in Yeltsin—and that despite the fact that, whatever the official cover story, she'd known the PRH had deliberately attacked and killed Manticoran personnel.
She was also, he thought, one of the best in the business. Even the PN officers who hated her, and they were many, admitted that. She was the sort of officer any navy would kill to enlist, and the RMN had beached her? For shooting a piece of aristocratic scum in a fair—and legal—fight? Incredible.
But however stupid the Manties might've been, Theisman doubted the Graysons shared their opinion. No, if Harrington was in Yeltsin, the GSN had offered her a commission. And given Grayson's need for experienced officers, she'd probably been bumped even higher in rank than he had, as well.
A quick note on Honor's PR situation, which only gets treated in passing. The secret meeting tips Marchant and Burdette to make discreet inquiries and get an idea that there is a more intensive Sword investigation than Mueller's, leading to this piece:And then he realized. Justice was beginning an investigation. That meant they didn't know anything yet, didn't it? If they'd really known what had happened, that heretic Mayhew would already have taken formal steps against Lord Burdette, and he hadn't. Instead, he'd summoned a closed session of the Keys. That must mean he intended to lay the story before the steadholders before Justice had investigated, and that made sense, didn't it? The public's hatred for Harrington was rising to levels higher than Marchant had dared let himself hope for, so it followed that the Protector was desperate to quell the mounting fury before it reached a stage at which not even proof the Mueller dome had been sabotaged could repair public confidence in her.
And once again, the bad guys default to "kill Honor and all our problems will go away.""I know the plan, My Lord, but think. If there is any physical evidence, the plan to convict her of murder will fail. But if she's never brought to trial, if neither she nor Gerrick, the man responsible for the dome's original design, are allowed to present their stories, her innocence will never be fully proven in the people's minds. If Harrington herself, personally, is never exonerated in a court of law, many—possibly most—of Grayson's people will never truly be convinced the collapse was contrived. A kernel of doubt will remain, like God's mustard seed. Even if we don't fully succeed at this time, all we truly need is to assure that we do not fully fail. In His Own good time, God will bring that seed to fruition."
Burdette leaned back, gazing at Marchant with intent, narrow eyes, and the cleric smiled thinly.
"At this moment the only two people who present a genuine threat to God's will are Gerrick and Harrington. They, and they alone, are the focus around which Satan may rally his minions in time to undo God's work. And we, My Lord, know where they are . . . and where they will be in twelve hours' time."
Zero-G tube in a skirt is enough to raise a fit of polite coughing from a Grayson escort. VIP transport pinnace, with a double-wide aisle down the middle, so perhaps they're set up like airplanes after all. Oh, and here a pinnace transports a half-company.Her smile became an urchin's grin at that thought, and then she swung into the pinnace's gravity and adjusted her skirts before she moved forward. The pinnace had started life as a standard RMN Mark Thirty, designed to land a half-company of Marines on a hostile surface and/or give them fire support once they were down. It still retained the capability for the latter mission, but a superdreadnought's small craft capacity was great enough that the GSN had decided to gut the troop compartment of one of each SD's pinnaces and refit it as a VIP transport. The results were downright opulent, with double-wide aisles—something Honor appreciated at the moment. Her key of office's chain had gotten tangled with the ribbon of the Star of Grayson while she swam the tube, and it was a relief to have an aisle wide enough to let her look down while she disentangled them without tripping over things. She completed the task, then slipped into her seat and looked up at the flight engineer.
Manticoran impeller SAM is man-portable.Martin nodded. The weapon was one of the accursed Manticorans' latest designs—there was a certain sweetness in that thought—for a portable, shoulder-fired, surface-to-air missile, and like all such weapons, it used its own impeller wedge rather than a warhead to destroy its target. Of course, the drive which could be crammed into a portable weapon produced a wedge smaller than those of larger vehicle- or aircraft-mounted missiles, which reduced its lethal zone and put a correspondingly greater premium on accuracy. But it also meant the weapon was small enough that its carrying case could—barely—be forced into an outsized civilian carryall. That, unfortunately, was a mixed blessing, since armsmen had no business carrying civilian luggage on duty. Well, if the gate guard pressed the point they could always claim Austin was delivering it for a friend before he checked in.
Most Steadholders have not yet rearmed their armsmen with pulsers due to expense. Honor has, but in this case it just helps this young man get himself killed.The youngster was looking at him now, and then his eyes flipped back to Austin. Not at the carryall this time, but at something else.
At, Martin suddenly realized, Austin's gun belt. His own eyes dropped to the Harrington's sidearm, and his jaw tightened as he saw the sleek, lethal pulser. It was a modern weapon, too expensive for most steadholders to have reequipped their armsmen with . . . and totally unlike the old-fashioned machine pistols he and Austin carried.
This possibility had occurred to none of their planners—it was always the simple damned things that tripped people up—but he didn't take time to think about it. The Harrington had just started to step back, his own mind still grappling with the implications of what his eye had seen but his brain had not yet fully assimilated, when Martin struck.
The SAM hits 10 KPS and has advanced tracking.The small, high-tech kamikaze had lost its target when Troubridge dove for the deck, but its seekers had reacquired lock, and it came slashing in at over ten kilometers per second. Even so, the pilot had almost denied it a hit, and its impeller wedge's leading edge caught the pinnace's rearing nose one bare meter aft of the radome.
A guillotine of gravitic energy slammed through the fuselage like an axe through butter, and the raw kinetic energy of the impact tore the first ten meters of the pinnace apart. Troubridge, his copilot, and his com tech died instantly, and the impact energy completed what the tail strike had begun. The dying pinnace twisted impossibly, snapping all the way up and over, then slammed into the ground like a dolphin arcing backwards into the water. But it was no dolphin, and the spaceport approaches were paved with forty centimeters of ceramacrete that was much, much harder than water.
Survivability of Navy pinnaces. The eject-the-fuel-tanks feature is probably great for crew survivability, but bad for crashing in a crowded area. Then again, crashing in populated areas is going to be bad, and pilots will avoid it if possible, so you may as well try and improve crew survivability.Had it been a civilian shuttle, everyone aboard would have died with the flight deck crew, but the pinnace was a naval craft, intended for high-threat environments. Its armored hull was built of battle steel, and the people who'd designed it had produced the most crash-survivable vehicle their technology could build.
Number two turbine ripped free, rocketed across the field, and slammed into a fuel tanker, and a huge, blue fireball spalled the night. The tanker's driver never even knew he was dead, and his ground-effect vehicle blew sideways into Service Bay Twelve. Two atmospheric passenger buses and eighteen technicians were torn apart in the resultant explosion, and the pinnace slithered onward in a screaming shower of sparks and shredded alloy.
The hydrogen reservoirs went next, but they, too, were designed to be crash-survivable, and jettisoning charges hurled them away from the splintering fuselage before they could explode. They fell like bombs, and, mercifully, three of them landed in empty, open space. The fourth slammed into the main terminal, and the staggering concussion when it blew turned a thousand square meters of exterior wall to shrapnel and sent it shrieking through the civilians in Concourse B. Two crash vehicles narrowly survived the explosion of another of the tanks square in their path, but their crews had no time to waste on their miraculous survival, and they reefed around in hairpin turns to charge after the disintegrating pinnace.
Accidentally assassinating your own religious leader. I do believe that may be an event unprecedented in human history. Well, maybe not, history is vast and complex. Still, I'm sure even the fanatic must be feeling all kinds of stupid. Oh, and Honor's padded vest for Nimitz to ride on her shoulders can stop pulser fire, but not necessarily bullets at close range. I suspect that pulser darts, though much faster than bullets, may have much less mass. At least, that's the first explanation that leapt to my mind.The shout died in a staccato chatter as the Reverend Julius Hanks, First Elder of the Church of Humanity Unchained, flung himself between her and her assassin. Bullets ripped through a frail old body in a spray of blood, and Honor cried out—in horrified grief and useless denial as much as pain—as those same bullets smashed into her chest. She went down, fighting for the breath the impact had hammered out of her, but she wore her formal gown and vest, not her uniform, and it was the vest Andrew LaFollet liked so much—the one designed with Nimitz's claws in mind. The one that could stop even light pulser fire. It wouldn't normally have stopped the machine-pistol's heavy slugs, not from this close, but their passage through Reverend Hanks' body had slowed them, absorbed just enough kinetic energy to keep them from penetrating.
She lay at the bottom of the ditch, drenched in Hanks' blood and pinned by his weight, stunned by the brutal impact of bullets and gasping for breath, and her killer came to the lip of the ditch. He knelt there and extended the pistol at arms' length for the final, careful head shot to end it.
* * *
Martin went to his knees, clinging to his sanity by his fingernails. Alive. She was still alive! How many times must he muster all the courage in him to kill this woman? And how many more innocents must perish before she died?!
The thought of all the blood he'd taken upon his soul, even in the name of God's work, tore at him, and his eyes dropped compassionately to the armsman who'd given his life to save his Steadholder's. A good man, he thought. Another good man, just like that kid at—
Edward Martin's universe came apart in one terrible, incandescent burst of recognition. The light of the fires spilled over the face of the man lying across Harrington's body, and he heard the hideous triumph of Satan's laughter in the roar of the flames, for he knew that face. He knew it, and it was no armsman's.
The pistol fell from his hand, and he stared in utter horror at the man he'd killed. The man whose murder would damn his own soul to Hell for all eternity.
"My God!" he cried in agony. "My God, my God—what have You let me do?"
An order to Jamie Candless, who might otherwise have trouble taking in a man who tried to kill his principal/Steadholder and did kill his equivalent to the Pope in a fit state to be questioned."Alive!" It took all Honor's strength to get the word out, but somehow she did. "We need him alive!"
In the Grayson tradition of freedom for the press, inaccurate and sensationalist reporting leads to reporters getting run out of town by an angry mob, and when armed men tell you to back off, you do so.William Fitzclarence glared at his HD's nonstop news bulletins in bloodshot exhaustion, and hopeless, unanswerable questions stuttered through his brain.
By now, all Grayson knew something terrible had happened at Harrington Space Facility, but no one knew what. The Harrington Guard had clamped a steel cordon no one was getting through about the facility. The first—and only—news crew to try entering HSF airspace had come within millimeters of being shot out of the sky, and freedom of the press or no, none of their colleagues had felt the slightest temptation to try their own luck.
Mueller is more convinced then before that Burdette is a moron for this assassination attempt. Apparently no one has assassinated a Steadholder since the Civil War. Or even made a credible attempt.Mueller leaned back in his chair, rubbing his upper lip, and his mind raced. Aside from Maccabeus, no one had tried to assassinate a steadholder in over four centuries. He had no idea how the shock of that would impact on the anti-Harrington hatred he'd worked so hard to help Burdette and Marchant create, but if she'd survived, it was at least possible the attack would swing opinion in her favor. That was bad enough, but if whoever Burdette had used for it could be identified, traced back to him, then the fool had put Mueller at risk along with himself.
I'm not sure preying on this man's religious terror is the most ethical way of getting a confession out of him. Oh well, what the heck, it's got to be better than giving him to Howard Clinkscales.The cell door opened.
Martin's head jerked up, and his eyes widened—dark with terror and the burden of agonizing doubt—as he recognized the men in the opening. Benjamin IX, Protector of Grayson, and Jeremiah Sullivan, Second Elder of the Sacristy, stood looking at him, and somehow he found the strength to rise. He couldn't raise his gaze to theirs, but at least he could meet them on his feet.
"Edward Julian Martin," Elder Sullivan's voice was cold with doom, "do you know what you've done this night?"
He tried to answer. He truly tried, but the words choked him, and he felt the tears sliding down his face, and all he could do was nod.
"Then you know what you have laid up for yourself in the eyes of God and under the law of Man," Sullivan told him. Martin nodded once more, and the Second Elder stepped closer to him. "Look at me, Edward Martin," he commanded, and, against his will, Martin obeyed. He stared into the dark, bushy-browed eyes set on either side of Sullivan's strong, hooked nose, and what he saw there shriveled his soul within him.
"To my shame," the Second Elder said in that same slow, cold voice, "I cannot forgive you. What you have done tonight—what you tried to do—" The bald head shook slowly, but then the Second Elder inhaled. "Yet it isn't my forgiveness you need, and whatever we who serve Father Church think or feel, we are Father Church's servants, and God's, and God can forgive what Man cannot. Would you make confession of your sins, Edward Martin, to the lords temporal and secular of Grayson, and seek God's mercy upon yourself?"
The prisoner's white, tear-streaked face twisted, and a last, desperate need to believe he'd been right, that it had been God's voice he'd heard, warred with the terrible suspicion that it hadn't. And then he sank slowly to his knees at Sullivan's feet and bent his head.
"Yes." His voice was a tattered, broken thing, but it came out with all the tormented guilt which filled him. "Hear my confession, Second Elder." He whispered the words he'd said to priests so often during his life with a desperate need he'd never before dreamed was possible. "Help . . . help me find God's forgiveness, for I have failed in the Test He sent me, and I am afraid."
"Do you voluntarily make confession to the secular powers of Grayson, releasing me from the seal of your contrition?" Sullivan asked.
"I—" Martin swallowed and reached deep for the strength to repair his sin in whatever pitiful way he could. "I do," he whispered, and the Second Elder reached into the pocket of his cassock. He withdrew the scarlet stole of Father Church and draped it about his neck, and when he spoke again, his voice was no less implacable, yet touched somehow with the compassion of his calling.
"Then begin, Edward Martin, and as you value your immortal soul and your chance of Heaven, may your confession be true and complete so that you may find the omnipotent mercy of the Lord our God."
That would be... found it.Ahriman238 wrote:It's a late series thing and the instances sort of blur together in my brain, which is why I haven't commented much on them, I'm sure I'll get to them. I think there was a brief one after the Battle of Manticore, when Honor launches a warning broadside to show off Apollo and explain that the fight is over now.simon wrote:True, true. It's just that very few of those unprofessional idiot Havenite officers are coming to mind- the ones that see the enemy doing something confusing and automatically assume they've screwed up. Thurston, yes, and also some of the SpaceSec 'naval' officers who tangle with Honor in Echoes of Honor. That's about all I can think of.
The RMN force fires from a range of seventy million kilometers, which is insanely long even for MDM combat. Now, you're right, this initial reaction doesn't look good: the Havenites are thinking it's a bluff, when it's not. On the other hand, "it's a bluff" is probably a more likely explanation than "Manticore has significantly increased missile range AGAIN, even though we saw no sign of this new longer-range missile in the previous battles we fought in this system just a few hours ago, and even though where the hell would Manticore deploy a new secret weapon if not in defense of their own homeworlds?"At all Costs wrote:"What the—?" Andrianna Spiropoulo looked at the tracking report in disbelief. That didn't make any sense at all!
"Ma'am," she said, turning to Admiral Chin, "the Manties have just fired."
"They've what?" Genevieve Chin looked up from a discussion with Nicodème Sabourin.
"They've fired, Ma'am," Spiropoulo repeated. "It doesn't make any sense. They're still at least seven million kilometers out of range!"
"That doesn't make any sense," Chin agreed, walking across to stare at the preposterous missile icons in the master display.
"Maybe they're trying to panic us, Admiral," Sabourin suggested. She looked at him, eyebrows rising in disbelief, and he shrugged. "I know it sounds silly, Ma'am, but I don't have any better suggestion. I mean, we've just hammered two entire Manty fleets into so much scrap metal, and these people are outnumbered by at least three-to-one. Maybe they figure this is the only way to distract us from finishing off the system."
"I suppose it's possible," Chin said slowly, watching the icons come. "But it doesn't seem like a Manty sort of thing to do. On the other hand, I don't see what else they could expect to accomplish."
Six minutes later, the Havenite Fifth Fleet sees Honor's Eighth Fleet make two more weird moves. One is that they cut their missile drives after second stage burnout, reserving the third for terminal attack maneuvers. Immediately they figure out what the purpose of launching from 'out of range' was, and the Havenites grasp the tactic immediately. In theory they could do the same thing themselves."They can't be serious," Spiropoulo said in exasperation as every single impeller signature disappeared simultaneously from her plot, six minues after launch. She glared at the plot with an affronted sense of professionalism, then punched a radical course change into the fleet tactical net.
Fifth Fleet obeyed the order immediately, rolling through a skew turn which would take it over thirty thousand kilometers from its predicted position by the time the Manticoran missiles reached it.
"What is it, Andrianna?" Chin asked, looking up from her com display and a hasty conference with her squadron commanders.
"Ma'am, you aren't going to believe this," Spiropoulo said, "but they're sending their birds in ballistic."
"What?" Chin looked back down at her com. "Excuse me for a moment, please," she told the flag officers on its compartmentalized display. "I think I need to see this for myself."
She climbed out of her command chair and walked over to stand beside Spiropoulo, her eyes seeking out the missile icons. She found them, but they were rapidly strobing flickers, not the steady light of the hard position fixes active impeller drives would have provided.
"They boosted for six minutes at forty-six thousand gravities, Ma'am," Spiropoulo said. "Then they just shut the hell down. I altered course as soon as their impellers went down, which they have to know is going to play hell with whatever accuracy they might have achieved. And that's not the only screwy thing they're up to. Look at this."
The ops officer punched a macro, and Chin frowned as an additional cluster of impeller signatures blinked into existence. For some reason known only to itself and God, the Manty task force ahead of them had just fired another pattern of pods—one pattern of pods, with less than sixty missiles in it. And it hadn't fired them at Chin's ships; the missile vectors made it obvious the Manties had fired at Second Fleet, almost 150,000,000 kilometers away from them, inside the resonance zone.
"Well, at least now we know how they think they can get them to make attack runs once they get them into range," Sabourin said.
"I suppose," Chin said, but her expression was troubled.
!Point. On the other hand, she (and Gerrick) may have just been expecting shoddy, rushed worksmanship from some of their Grayson employees. Said employees are, after all, in a big hurry to get the job done, and are not exactly the best-trained people in the galaxy for the job.They sabotaged the hole and the footing, and in the process have instituted new sampling rules for Grayson. And even with all that effort, two of the doctored holes wound up perfectly secure because of on0site supervisors. At this point I'm starting to have trouble crediting that Honor wasn't somehow expecting materials theft or sabotage, with all these redundancies and preventative measures.
Unlike the assassination attempt in Field of Dishonor, this time they are arguably right, or at least right within the limits of their own (engineering-ignorant) frame of reference- killing her when she's under a cloud of disgrace is probably the best thing they can do to dump on her reputation and negate her effect on Grayson politics.And once again, the bad guys default to "kill Honor and all our problems will go away."
Ten kilometers per second at burnout is actually... almostThe SAM hits 10 KPS and has advanced tracking.
Also, military aerospace craft are probably much more likely to be shot down over someone else's territory than to crash over their own. In which case the collateral damage from the crash isn't a big deal.Survivability of Navy pinnaces. The eject-the-fuel-tanks feature is probably great for crew survivability, but bad for crashing in a crowded area. Then again, crashing in populated areas is going to be bad, and pilots will avoid it if possible, so you may as well try and improve crew survivability.
Also, "light" pulser fire is probably antipersonnel. Think lower-velocity, frangible slugs designed specifically to NOT rip through human bodies (and brick walls, and steel beams, and 20th century tanks) like they weren't even there.Accidentally assassinating your own religious leader. I do believe that may be an event unprecedented in human history. Well, maybe not, history is vast and complex. Still, I'm sure even the fanatic must be feeling all kinds of stupid. Oh, and Honor's padded vest for Nimitz to ride on her shoulders can stop pulser fire, but not necessarily bullets at close range. I suspect that pulser darts, though much faster than bullets, may have much less mass. At least, that's the first explanation that leapt to my mind.
Remember, what just happened is equivalent to, in the context of the United States... hm.In the Grayson tradition of freedom for the press, inaccurate and sensationalist reporting leads to reporters getting run out of town by an angry mob, and when armed men tell you to back off, you do so.
Now that REALLY surprises me; if nothing else I'd expect the occasional intra-family killing by a jealous male relative.Mueller is more convinced then before that Burdette is a moron for this assassination attempt. Apparently no one has assassinated a Steadholder since the Civil War. Or even made a credible attempt.
This is the sort of thing that explains why Grayson doesn't have a wall between Church and State. From the point of view of Protector Benjamin and Elder Sullivan, the assassin sinned against God and committed a crime against the state at the same time. The crime is an offense against God and the state alike, and the state's interest in punishing this injustice and ferreting out the men responsible is totally compatible with the Church's interest in ensuring that a sinner unburden himself of his crimes and be able to find peace with God.I'm not sure preying on this man's religious terror is the most ethical way of getting a confession out of him. Oh well, what the heck, it's got to be better than giving him to Howard Clinkscales.
I'm sure she knows about Apollo, as Apollo is the main reason they're attacking Manticore in the first place. But she doesn't know what it will let them do in terms of ballistics and terminal control, as nearly every ship that's seen Apollo in use has, well, been blown the shit up. Chin sees Apollo in action earlier in this fight, even, when McKeon's three(?) Apollo-equipped SD(P)s blow up a SD per salvo without even trying hard.Simon_Jester wrote:That would be... found it.Ahriman238 wrote:It's a late series thing and the instances sort of blur together in my brain, which is why I haven't commented much on them, I'm sure I'll get to them. I think there was a brief one after the Battle of Manticore, when Honor launches a warning broadside to show off Apollo and explain that the fight is over now.
(snipped quotes)
Under all previous rules of MDM combat this is the case, and I'm honestly not even sure Chin's been told in detail about Apollo and exactly what it does to the Manticorans' fire control telemetry capability. For that matter, the entire Havenite Navy doesn't know exactly what Apollo can and cannot do, only that it is seriously bad medicine.
Chin herself and her SD(P) (along with a couple others) get away, though. She's in command of a Peep task force at Second Manticore.Simon_Jester wrote:Chin does exactly what she should given all available information, acts appropriately and professionally, and her worst mistake is not figuring out what the new RMN fire control telemetry system lets them do in ten minutes.
Is this perhaps less than brilliant? Yes. Is it stupid or unprofessional? No. Chin pays attention, figures out as much as can readily be deduced from the available data, and takes appropriate steps to protect herself against the visible threat.
And on top of that, in spite of operating in a relative information vacuum, she DOES figure out that this is happening, and that this IS in fact Honor's superweapon fleet firing ze missiles at them... And it takes her, as far as I can tell, a single-digit number of minutes to work this out. By act of Weber, this single digit number is about two too many for her to get her fleet into hyperspace before Eighth Fleet's Apollo salvo blows away her fleet.
Also, Honor is the CEO and Chairman of the Board, and she's military. If anyone would be triple-checking inventories, it'd be someone who was checking inventories of nuclear missiles earlier in her career.Simon_Jester wrote:Point. On the other hand, she (and Gerrick) may have just been expecting shoddy, rushed worksmanship from some of their Grayson employees. Said employees are, after all, in a big hurry to get the job done, and are not exactly the best-trained people in the galaxy for the job.They sabotaged the hole and the footing, and in the process have instituted new sampling rules for Grayson. And even with all that effort, two of the doctored holes wound up perfectly secure because of on0site supervisors. At this point I'm starting to have trouble crediting that Honor wasn't somehow expecting materials theft or sabotage, with all these redundancies and preventative measures.
Since Grayson Sky Domes is liable for any screwups, they would naturally want to be sure their new hires are monitored carefully, especially since a screwup on a project like this can kill hundreds of people.
Also, a lot of redundant cross-checking is already fairly routine in major engineering projects in real life, which is one of the (many) reasons they are complicated, expensive, and take a long time. Engineers have learned that it is much cheaper and better for their reputations to build buildings slowly and triple-check every feature than it is to have a skyscraper collapse on them because somebody forgot to tighten a bolt.
That's consistent with numbers all along. They always say "80-odd" Steadholders.Ahriman238 wrote:Forty four Steadholders votes needed to begin the process for impeaching one of their own, presumably this represents a majority of the Keys.
Also, it's a nice touch to get other major powers' and officers' perspective on the Honor/Pavel thing. Theisman thinks duels are stupid, but Pavel Young dying in a duel doesn't bother him in the slightest, and it certainly wouldn't be worth beaching Harrington over, if he were in charge. A bit odd, because at this point Theisman hasn't completely lost his faith in the revolution, so far as I know. I'd expect to see a bit more vitriol towards aristocracy than is on display here.Ahriman238 wrote:Information clampdown by StateSec, but Honor's beaching is apparently known. And Theisman knows the Graysons will recruit her if possible and is mentally preparing himself to throw down with her again, even as he 'knows' she's probably in Casca.He drew a deep breath and looked around almost surreptitiously as he finally admitted the truth in the privacy of his own thoughts. The last update from Intelligence had included a reference which Thomas Theisman found most unsettling. StateSec had clamped down on the distribution of intelligence since the coup. All of it was now handled solely on a "need to know" basis, and StateSec apparently assumed naval officers had no particular need to know anything. Nonetheless, what had once been NavInt before StateSec ingested it had finally confirmed reports that Honor Harrington had retired to Yeltsin in disgrace after that disastrous duel on Manticore.
Theisman shook his head. How could anyone be stupid enough to beach Harrington over something like that? The most cursory glance at the raw newsfax stories showed Pavel Young had deserved everything he'd gotten, and Thomas Theisman was pleased, in an oddly proprietary way, that Harrington had given it to him. The thought amused him, yet it was true. He regarded Honor Harrington as an enemy, but she was an honorable one, who'd treated him and his people with respect and dignity after their surrender to her in Yeltsin—and that despite the fact that, whatever the official cover story, she'd known the PRH had deliberately attacked and killed Manticoran personnel.
She was also, he thought, one of the best in the business. Even the PN officers who hated her, and they were many, admitted that. She was the sort of officer any navy would kill to enlist, and the RMN had beached her? For shooting a piece of aristocratic scum in a fair—and legal—fight? Incredible.
But however stupid the Manties might've been, Theisman doubted the Graysons shared their opinion. No, if Harrington was in Yeltsin, the GSN had offered her a commission. And given Grayson's need for experienced officers, she'd probably been bumped even higher in rank than he had, as well.
Also, note that the fuel tankers at the spaceport are ground-effect vehicles, which is...an odd choice, to be sure. With cheap AG...yeah, this makes no sense to me. Simon, thoughts?Ahriman238 wrote:Survivability of Navy pinnaces. The eject-the-fuel-tanks feature is probably great for crew survivability, but bad for crashing in a crowded area. Then again, crashing in populated areas is going to be bad, and pilots will avoid it if possible, so you may as well try and improve crew survivability....Number two turbine ripped free, rocketed across the field, and slammed into a fuel tanker, and a huge, blue fireball spalled the night. The tanker's driver never even knew he was dead, and his ground-effect vehicle blew sideways into Service Bay Twelve. Two atmospheric passenger buses and eighteen technicians were torn apart in the resultant explosion, and the pinnace slithered onward in a screaming shower of sparks and shredded alloy.
The hydrogen reservoirs went next, but they, too, were designed to be crash-survivable, and jettisoning charges hurled them away from the splintering fuselage before they could explode. They fell like bombs, and, mercifully, three of them landed in empty, open space. The fourth slammed into the main terminal, and the staggering concussion when it blew turned a thousand square meters of exterior wall to shrapnel and sent it shrieking through the civilians in Concourse B. Two crash vehicles narrowly survived the explosion of another of the tanks square in their path, but their crews had no time to waste on their miraculous survival, and they reefed around in hairpin turns to charge after the disintegrating pinnace.
Counter-grav is pretty new on Grayson, I think (IIRC at some point someone compare's Grayson's architecture with that of a counter-grav civilization; presumably they haven't gotten around to upgrading the spaceport vehicles.Terralthra wrote:Also, note that the fuel tankers at the spaceport are ground-effect vehicles, which is...an odd choice, to be sure. With cheap AG...yeah, this makes no sense to me. Simon, thoughts?
Me too. Best guess is after the virtual extermination of the major Steadholders and their heirs that kicked off the Civil War, killing Steadholders became associated with the Faithful and treason.Now that REALLY surprises me; if nothing else I'd expect the occasional intra-family killing by a jealous male relative.
Minor nitpick, Honor is the founder, majority shareholder and chairman of the board. But Howard Clinkscales is the CEO. Though you point about thorough checks is well-taken. Especially for anyone whose served on a ship with Horace Harkness.Also, Honor is the CEO and Chairman of the Board, and she's military. If anyone would be triple-checking inventories, it'd be someone who was checking inventories of nuclear missiles earlier in her career.
Sure, but we're a non-counter-grav civilization, and I've never heard of anything thinking a GEV would be a good idea for a fuel tanker.eyl wrote:Counter-grav is pretty new on Grayson, I think (IIRC at some point someone compare's Grayson's architecture with that of a counter-grav civilization; presumably they haven't gotten around to upgrading the spaceport vehicles.Terralthra wrote:Also, note that the fuel tankers at the spaceport are ground-effect vehicles, which is...an odd choice, to be sure. With cheap AG...yeah, this makes no sense to me. Simon, thoughts?
Given the male birth rate and life expectancy, the odds of two males in direct line to inherit a steading seem very low.Ahriman238 wrote:Me too. Best guess is after the virtual extermination of the major Steadholders and their heirs that kicked off the Civil War, killing Steadholders became associated with the Faithful and treason.Now that REALLY surprises me; if nothing else I'd expect the occasional intra-family killing by a jealous male relative.
Fair point about her being founder and chairman, but not CEO, but I think the point stands. As majority shareholders, she could always kick Clinkscales out as CEO.Ahriman238 wrote:Minor nitpick, Honor is the founder, majority shareholder and chairman of the board. But Howard Clinkscales is the CEO. Though you point about thorough checks is well-taken. Especially for anyone whose served on a ship with Horace Harkness.Also, Honor is the CEO and Chairman of the Board, and she's military. If anyone would be triple-checking inventories, it'd be someone who was checking inventories of nuclear missiles earlier in her career.
Right.Terralthra wrote:I'm sure she knows about Apollo, as Apollo is the main reason they're attacking Manticore in the first place. But she doesn't know what it will let them do in terms of ballistics and terminal control, as nearly every ship that's seen Apollo in use has, well, been blown the shit up. Chin sees Apollo in action earlier in this fight, even, when McKeon's three(?) Apollo-equipped SD(P)s blow up a SD per salvo without even trying hard.
I don't think Theisman was ever a hardcore populist- he's just a Havenite patriot who loves his country and wants it to do well. He likes the revolution (or at least has some hope for it) because of the chance that it will reform the existing system. That doesn't mean he has any particular ideological hatred of the Manticoran aristocracy, the way that, say, Victor Cachat would.Also, it's a nice touch to get other major powers' and officers' perspective on the Honor/Pavel thing. Theisman thinks duels are stupid, but Pavel Young dying in a duel doesn't bother him in the slightest, and it certainly wouldn't be worth beaching Harrington over, if he were in charge. A bit odd, because at this point Theisman hasn't completely lost his faith in the revolution, so far as I know. I'd expect to see a bit more vitriol towards aristocracy than is on display here.
Got it.Also, note that the fuel tankers at the spaceport are ground-effect vehicles, which is...an odd choice, to be sure. With cheap AG...yeah, this makes no sense to me. Simon, thoughts?
At this point, it's been two days since the attempt on Honor's life.The events in Harrington Steading hung heavy in their minds. Fifty hours had passed since the first stunning reports, and still all they knew were rumors. But what had been ordered as a closed session of the Keys had become something else, and holo-vid cameras rimmed the Spectators' Gallery above them, waiting to carry whatever was to transpire here to every HD in the star system.
Apparently even the Protector gets challenged and naturally announced, except when he comes to deal out justice to someone hiding behind their Key.Benjamin IX walked through those doors and into that silence with a face of stone. For the first time in living memory, the Door Warden neither challenged nor announced the Protector's entrance, and more than one steadholder's mouth went dry as the significance sank home.
There was one time, and only one, when the Protector might ignore the Keys' corporate equality with him in this, their Chamber . . . and that time was when he came to pass judgment upon one of them.
The final death toll for the attack, and the first time Burdette hears that he accidentally assassinated his religious leader."Tuesday night, I could only have told you my investigators believed that to be the case, and we knew even that much only because Adam Gerrick, Sky Domes' chief engineer, had performed a brilliant piece of reconstruction. For that reason, I wished Mr. Gerrick to be present, so that he could, if you so desired, explain his conclusions. I regret to inform you that it will not now be possible for him to do so, however, for Adam Gerrick is dead—dead with ninety-five other men and women in the crash of Lady Harrington's pinnace in Harrington Steading. And like the Mueller dome collapse, that crash was no accident. Adam Gerrick and the others who died with him were murdered. Murdered by the men who used a surface-to-air missile to shoot down that pinnace because Lady Harrington was aboard it. The same men, Steadholders of Grayson, who also murdered Reverend Julius Hanks."
On the hand one Honor has received quick-heal, on the other her injuries are still visible. She got slammed in the right side by a falling luggage rack in the crash, then body-tackled by her armsmen to stop her from rushing back to the wreck, then shot though Hanks and her vest stopped the slug. All in all she amassed a forehead cut, split lip, the bruised cheek, and a broken rib. Possibly other injuries as well.The click of her heels echoed and reechoed in the stillness as she moved down the stone-floored Chamber's length like a tall, slender flame of white and green. The Harrington Key glittered on her breast below the Star of Grayson, and the Star's scarlet ribbon was stained with darker spots whose origin every man in that chamber guessed. The dark line of a deep cut, already responding to quick heal, seamed her forehead, and her right cheek was brutally bruised and discolored.
The correct form for accusing a steadholder."Your Grace, I come before you for justice." Her soprano voice was a thing of cold steel, the pain in it deeper even than the pain in her eyes. "By my oath to you, I call upon yours to me. As I swore to protect and guard my people, so I now require your aid to that end, for he who has killed and maimed my steaders carries the key of a steadholder, and I may not touch him while he shelters behind its protection."
The entire Chamber held its breath as it recognized the formal appeal to the Protector's Justice, unheard in this Chamber in generations, and then Benjamin spoke.
"By my oath to you, I honor your demand for justice, My Lady. If any man in this Chamber has offended against you or yours, name him, and if you bear proof of his crimes, then steadholder or no, he shall answer for them as the laws of God and Man decree."
-snip-
"I name my enemy William Allen Hillman Fitzclarence, Steadholder Burdette," she said in a voice colder than the heart of space. Her treecat hissed, baring his fangs, and Burdette's knees sagged as every eye in the Chamber turned upon him like the closing jaws of a trap. "I accuse him of murder, of treason, of my own attempted assassination, and of conspiring in the murder of children and of Reverend Julius Hanks. I bring before you the witnessed and sealed confession of Edward Julius Martin of Burdette Steading, freely offered under the law of Church and Sword, that William Fitzclarence personally ordered my death; that William Fitzclarence, Edmond Augustus Marchant, his steader, Samuel Marchant Harding, also his steader, Austin Vincent Taylor, also his steader, and twenty-seven other men in his service, contrived the collapse of the Mueller Middle School dome and the deaths of fifty-two men and thirty children; and that as a direct consequence of William Fitzclarence's orders, the Reverend Julius Hanks, First Elder of the Church of Humanity Unchained, died giving his own life that I might live."
She paused, and Burdette's ragged breathing was the only sound in the vast, hushed Chamber. She let the silence linger while a small cruel part of her—one whose vicious strength shocked her—savored what must be running through his mind, and then she raised her right hand and pointed at him.
"Your Grace, by your oath to me and the proofs I have offered, I claim the life of William Allen Hillman Fitzclarence as forfeit for his crimes, for his cruelty, and for his violation of his sacred oaths to you, to this Conclave, to the People of Grayson, and to God Himself."
"My Lady," Benjamin Mayhew said softly, "by my oath to you, you shall have it."
Burdette becomes the first steadholder in three centuries to challenge his Protcetor's justice and declare trial by combat."I reject your right to condemn me to death in order to silence God's voice of opposition to your corrupt abuse of power! As is my ancient right before God, the law, and this Conclave, I challenge your decree! Let your Champion stand forth and prove the true will of God sword-to-sword, in the ancient way of our fathers, and may God preserve the righteous!"
Exultation filled him as he saw Mayhew's astonishment, and he snarled in triumph, for he'd trapped the bastard in his own snare. If he would assume the ancient powers of the Protector, turn back the clock and exert his despotism, then he must accept the Protector's ancient limitations, as well, and his so-called "Champion" was the bitch on the Conclave floor. The harlot God had brought openly within reach of Burdette's own sword at last.
Honor has slept less three hours in two days, and is apparently hopped-up on stimulants. Burdette is a 'Master Second' in the Grayson rating system of fencing, and has been in the planet-wide quarterfinals thrice.His right hand fisted at his side, and his eyes went bleak and cold. In that moment, he wanted nothing in the universe as much as he wanted William Fitzclarence dead on the Chamber floor. Yet whatever he wanted, he also knew Honor had slept for less than three hours in the fifty since her pinnace went down, that she had four broken ribs quick heal had only begun to repair, and that under her clothing she was covered with brutal bruises. She was running on adrenaline and stim tabs, and he had no idea how she could show so little sign of fatigue or physical pain as she stood proudly erect before the Keys, but he knew she was in no fit state to meet a man with Burdette's sword skill. Even if she'd been fresh and unhurt, she'd first touched even a practice blade barely a year before, while Burdette had advanced to the planetary quarterfinals no less than three times, and the rogue steadholder would never settle for first blood. He meant to kill her, and the odds were overwhelming that he could.
Damascus steel swords. Uh huh. The people who figured what swords looked like by watching old samurai flicks just happened to duplicate Damascus steel (which we still have trouble with, though we can produce superior steel for most applications.)"Your Grace," she said, "I have only one question. Do you wish this man crippled, or dead?"
-snip-
"My Lady," the Protector of Grayson told his Champion, "I do not wish him to leave this Chamber alive."
"As you will it, Your Grace." Honor bowed in formal salute and stepped up to her own desk. She lifted Nimitz from her shoulder, and he sat tall and still, ears flat but quiet, as she took the Grayson Sword of State from its padded brackets. That jeweled yet deadly weapon had been forged six hundred years before for the hand of Benjamin the Great, but it remained as lethal as of old, and its polished blade—marked with the ripple pattern of what Old Terra had called Damascus steel—flashed in her own hand as she stepped back down to face her enemy.
"My Lord," Lady Honor Harrington said coldly, "send for your sword—and may God preserve the righteous."
Which is sort of key to any explanation of how Honor can possibly win this, and a nice callback to the beginning of the book when Honor loses a bout because she went for a killing stroke, accepting a minor hit and forgetting that in sport the first touch wins. There she lost because she treats fencing like real fighting, here Burdette is getting set up to lose because he treats a real fight like a match.Yet for all his confidence, Burdette had forgotten—or perhaps never learned—something Honor knew only too well. He thought it would be like the fencing salle. But they weren't in a salle, and unlike him, she knew where they truly were, for it was a place she'd been before . . . and he hadn't. He'd ordered murder done, but he himself had never killed—just as he'd never before come in reach of an intended victim with a weapon in her hand.
Burdette advanced to face her with the arrogant, confident stride of a conqueror. He paused to execute a brief limbering up exercise, and she watched impassively, wondering if he even began to appreciate the difference between competition fencing and this. Fencing was like a training kata in coup de vitesse. It was designed to perfect the moves, to practice them, not to use them. And in the salle, a touch was only a touch.
And the climatic duel.Burdette finished loosening his muscles, and that confident corner of his mind sneered afresh as the harlot took her stance. She'd adopted a low-guard position, with the blade extended at a slight diagonal, the hilt just above her waist and the tip angled down. She tried to hide it, but she was favoring her right side—perhaps that was the "injury" Mayhew had mentioned? If so, it might well explain her stance, for the low-guard put less strain on the muscles there.
But the low-guard, as his very first swordmaster had taught him, was a position of weakness. It invited attack rather than positioning to attack, and his sword rose into the high-guard as he took his own stance, weight spread evenly, right foot cocked and slightly back, and his hilt just above eye-level so that he could see her clearly while his blade hovered to strike.
* * *
Honor watched him with the eyes of a woman who'd trained in the martial arts for almost forty years, and the hard-learned, poised relaxation of all those years hummed softly within her. She felt her weariness, the pain of broken ribs, the ache in bruised muscles, the stiffness of her left shoulder, but then she commanded her body to ignore those things, and her body obeyed.
There were two terms Master Thomas had taught her in her first week of training. "The dominance" and "the crease," he'd called them. The "dominance" was the clash of wills, the war of personal confidence fought before the first blow was struck to establish who held psychological domination over the other. But the "crease" was something else, a reference to the tiny wrinkling of the forehead when the moment of decision came. Of course, "crease" was only a convenient label for an infinite set of permutations, he'd stressed, for every swordsman announced the commitment to attack in a different way. All fencers were taught to look for the crease, and competition fencers researched opponents exhaustively before a match, for though the signal might be subtle, it was also constant. Every swordsman had one; it was something he simply could not train completely out of himself. But because there were so very many possible creases, Master Thomas had explained while they sat cross-legged in sunlight on the salle floor, most swordmasters emphasized the dominance over the crease, for it was a simpler and a surer thing to defeat your opponent's will than to look for something one might or might not recognize even if one saw it.
But the true master of the sword, he'd said that quiet day, was she who had learned to rely not on her enemy's weakness, but upon her own strength. She who understood that the difference between the salle and what Honor faced today—between fencing, the art, and life or death by the sword—was always in the crease, not the dominance.
Honor knew she'd taken longer to grasp his meaning than someone with her background should have. But once she had, and after she'd studied the library information on Japan, she'd also realized why—on Grayson, as in the ancient islands of the samurai—a formal duel almost always both began and ended with a single stroke.
* * *
An edge of puzzlement flickered in Burdette's mind as she simply stood there. He, too, had been taught about the dominance and the crease, and he'd used both to his advantage in many competitions. But he was certain she had no more idea of what his crease was than he did of hers; surely she didn't think she could somehow deduce it at this late date!
Or perhaps she did. Perhaps she was too new to the sword to have sorted out all the metaphysical claptrap from the practical reality, but William Fitzclarence was too experienced to allow himself to be distracted from the real and practical when he held a live blade.
He held his position, and his upper lip curled as he reached out for the dominance. That was the part of every match he'd always enjoyed most. The invisible thrust and parry, that tension as the stronger will drove the weaker to open itself to attack, and he licked mental chops at the thought of driving the harlot.
But then the curl smoothed from his lip and his eyes widened, for there was no clash. His intense concentration simply disappeared against her, like a sword thrust into bottomless black water which enveloped it without resistance, and a bead of sweat trickled down his cheek. What was wrong with her? He was the master here, she the tyro. She had to feel the pressure, the gnawing tension . . . the fear. Why wasn't she attacking to end it?
* * *
Honor waited, poised and still, centered physically and mentally, her eyes watching every part of his body without focusing on any. She felt his frustration, but it was as distant and unimportant as the ache of her broken ribs. She simply waited—and then, suddenly, she moved.
She never knew, then or later, what William Fitzclarence's "crease" was. She simply knew she'd recognized it. That something deep inside her saw the moment he committed himself, the instant his arms tightened to bring his blade slashing down.
The instant in which he was entirely focused on the attack, and not on defense.
Her body responded to that recognition with the trained reaction speed of someone born and bred at the bottom of a gravity well fifteen percent more powerful than her opponent's. Her blade flashed up in a blinding, backhand arc, and the Sword of State's razor-sharp spine opened Burdette's torso from right hip to left shoulder. Clothing and flesh parted like cobwebs, and she heard the start of his explosive cry as shock and pain froze his blade. But he never completed that scream, for even as it rose in his throat and he began to fold forward over his opened belly, her wrists turned easily, and she slashed back to her left in a flashing continuation of her original movement, backed by all the whip-crack power of her body, and William Fitzclarence's head leapt from his shoulders in a geyser of blood.
The main problem here is that the rules of fencing are a lot like the rules of real fighting- the pointy end goes in the other guy. The one thing that Honor might have going for her is sheer ruthless aggression, from having fought and killed in hand to hand combat before.Ahriman238 wrote:Which is sort of key to any explanation of how Honor can possibly win this, and a nice callback to the beginning of the book when Honor loses a bout because she went for a killing stroke, accepting a minor hit and forgetting that in sport the first touch wins. There she lost because she treats fencing like real fighting, here Burdette is getting set up to lose because he treats a real fight like a match.
Make whatever deduction you like for boasting, but the basic point (elaborated on later) is that there's a difference between someone who enters combat to 'fight' and someone who enters combat to 'survive' and or to 'kill the other guy.' MacYoung goes on to recount cases where HE assumed a fighting stance in a fight, and the other guy switched into 'killer' mode and rolled right over him.Marc 'Animal' MacYoung, take with as much salt as you wish... wrote:I teach knife work internationally. That means that my skill with a blade has taken me - literally - around the world. This extensive traveling has also allowed me to see a very wide spectrum of how knives are used in other cultures. As well as standards of training far beyond just my local area and style. I have also had the opportunity to spar with, and work out with, students from a wide variety of styles and instructors.
Generally I slit their throats within a few moments
This is not to say that I am better than they are. In fact, most of them are much finer martial artists than I am and far more technically talented.
However, their hearts and heads aren't in the right place. Whereas all I do is "flip the switch" and go to town. What do I mean by that? A man named Bob Taylor once said of me "Yeah, there's a lot of people who could kick Animal's ass in the ring. Thing is they'd lose in an alley because he'd run their asses over with a truck."
And you know what? He's right, I would.
That's because surviving isn't about skill, it's about something else. And you can have all the skill in the world and still lose to someone who has "it." The problem is that despite all the claims of so-called knife fighting gurus, they can't teach you how to get "it." Because the willingness to do what you must do in order to survive combat is an internal thing. It must come from you, not from an outside source. So in the end all you have is a lot of fancy dance moves and not what it takes to survive a serious attempt on your life.
Chalk it up to Grayson's particular approach to fencing. For one, they've had to independently reinvent the terms for most of the same things everyone else has a word for. For another, swords seem to have been the weapons of formal duels, not so much the weapons of war insofar as wars were fought.Oh, and the "dominance" and "crease" mentioned here are real things, though that's still the only time I've heard them called that. They're not as much a part of the sport as this passage implies.
My error, actually, I was confusing them with hovercraft.Terralthra wrote:Sure, but we're a non-counter-grav civilization, and I've never heard of anything thinking a GEV would be a good idea for a fuel tanker.eyl wrote:Counter-grav is pretty new on Grayson, I think (IIRC at some point someone compare's Grayson's architecture with that of a counter-grav civilization; presumably they haven't gotten around to upgrading the spaceport vehicles.Terralthra wrote:Also, note that the fuel tankers at the spaceport are ground-effect vehicles, which is...an odd choice, to be sure. With cheap AG...yeah, this makes no sense to me. Simon, thoughts?
As you alluded to, this may be Honor's independent empathic sense starting to manifest itselfAhriman238 wrote:Generally speaking, that's a couple too many "Ifs" to make a really good plan unless you have a lot of experience against this particular opponent. And if you watch for that too intently, you can react just a bit too slow to his first attack and that'll end things real quick, with you as the loser.
