Bit of Analysis: HH Saganami Island series

White Haven · Post by **White Haven** » 2014-07-02 11:13pm

Well, snarkiness aside, the focus on Sword of Damocles postings from your own back yard ties in quite well with the idea of cutting the little fish free of the Alliance because of the decreasing worth of strategic depth. Basically it guarantees that anyone trying a decapitation strike has to live with the fact that the first they'll know of failure is Manticoran warships dropping STL in the Haven system, before even a dispatch boat could arrive home. And, of course, crazy teleport-reinforcement shenanigans.
Spoiler

Ahriman238 · Post by **Ahriman238** » 2014-07-04 01:47pm

Like the crypto software he'd purchased for his people's communicators, the holo generator which produced the illusion of solid stone was of Solarian manufacture. It galled Westman to use Solly technology, given the fact that the Solarian League and the never-to-be-sufficiently-damned Office of Frontier Security had been The Enemy much longer than the Manties. But he was a practical man, and he wasn't about to handicap himself or his followers by using anything but the best hardware available.

Solly tech used by the Montana Independence Movement (MIM).

You never knew what you were going to find on a planet in the Verge. Some of them were little better than prespace Old Earth, while others were even further advanced than Grayson had been before it signed on to the Manticoran Alliance. Montana fell somewhere between the two extremes. It was too dirt-poor to afford a really solid tech base, but it had made innovative use of what it could afford. Its navigation satellites were a case in point. They were at least a couple of centuries out of date by Manticoran standards, but they did the job just fine. And they also pulled double duty as weather satellites, air traffic control radar arrays, law enforcement surveillance platforms, and traffic control points for any freighters which called here.

Montana's tech level and creativity with what they have, like their network of weather/air-control/spy/GPS satellites.

And there's no reason why the place has to be so poor, he thought as he tagged the GPS coordinates to the electronic map in his memo board. The beef they raise here would command top prices back home, and with the Lynx Terminus, they can ship it fresh direct to Beowulf or even Old Earth. He shook his head, thinking of the astronomical prices Montanan beef or nearbuffalo could bring on the mother world. And there are dozens of other opportunities for anyone with just a little bit of startup capital.

Which, after all, was the reason Johansen was here. The Alexander Government had made it clear that Her Majesty had no intention of allowing her new subjects in Talbott to be turfed out of the development of their own star systems by sharp Manticoran operators. The government had announced it would carry out its own surveys of the Cluster, in conjunction with local governments, to confirm all existing titles of ownership. Those titles would be fully protected, and to ensure local participation in any development projects, the Chancellor of the Exchequer had announced that, for its first ten T-years of operation, any new startup endeavor in the Cluster would enjoy a reduction in taxation equal to the percentage of ownership held by citizens of the Cluster. After ten T-years, the tax break would reduce by five percent per T-year for another ten T-years, then terminate completely in the twenty-first T-year. Given where the Star Kingdom's wartime tax rates stood, that provision alone was guaranteed to ensure the massive representation of local interests.

Future room for growth. Manticore is conducting it's own surveys to ensure every claim of land is recognized and protected. Tax breaks on new companies, proportional to their ownership by locals.

"Well, you see, Les, that's the problem," Westman said. "It's not so much I want to tell them they don't have the right to decide for themselves. It's just that I don't figure they've got the right to decide for me. This planet, and this star system, have a Constitution. And, you know, I just finished rereading it last night, and there's not a single word in it about anybody having the legal right—or power—to sell off our sovereignty."

"Nobody's violating the Constitution," Haven said stiffly. "That's why the annexation vote was handled the way it was. You know as well as I do that the Constitution does provide for constitutional conventions with the right to amend the Constitution any way they choose, and that's exactly what the annexation vote was. A convention, called exactly the way the Constitution required, exercising the powers the Constitution granted to its delegates."

"'Amend' isn't the same thing as 'throw in the trash,'" Westman retorted. It was obvious he felt strongly, Johansen decided, but he was still calm and collected. However deeply his emotions might be engaged, he wasn't allowing that to drive him into a rage.

Debate between Steve Westman and the surveyors.

"Good." Westman beamed at him, but then the Montanan's smile faded. "At the same time," he continued, his voice flatter, "if it comes to it, it's possible a whole lot of people're going to get hurt before this is over. I want you to tell your superiors that. This one is a free—well, almost free—warning. I'm not going to be issuing very many more of them. So tell your superiors that, too."

"I'll tell them exactly what you've said," Johansen assured him when he paused expectantly once more.

"Good," Westman repeated. "And now, Mr. Johansen, if you and all your men—and you, too, Alvin—would be so good as to strip to your skivvies."

Westman has the surveyors strip to their undies and sends them walking home. Very mild as far as terrorist acts go, but he gives them a warning, this time no one got hurt, next time will be different.

That was what fueled Henri Krietzmann's hatred of those attempting to derail the Constitutional Convention. It was what had driven him to educate himself, to claw his way out of the slums of the city of Oldenburg and into the rough and tumble of Dresden politics. The fire in his belly was his blinding hatred of the Solarian League, and of the Office of Frontier Security's pious platitudes about "uplifting the unfortunately retrograde" planets of the Verge. If OFS, or any of the Solly lobbying groups who claimed to be so concerned about the worlds it engulfed, had really cared, they could have brought modern medicine to Dresden over a century ago. For a fraction of what Frontier Security spent on its public relations budget in the Sol System alone, they could have provided Dresden with the sort of education system which would have permitted it to build up its own industrial and medical base.

Krietzmann of Dresden, whose family died of various causes easily treatable with modern medicine.

Over the last twenty T-years, largely as a result of the efforts of men and women like Henri Krietzmann, that had begun to change. They had scratched and clawed their own way up out of the most abject poverty imaginable to an economy that was merely poor, no longer destitute. One which was finally beginning to provide something approaching decent health care—or something much closer to it—to its citizens. One whose school systems had managed, at ruinous expense, to import off-world teachers. One which had seen the possibilities for its own development when the Trade Union came calling and, instead of resisting "exploitation" by Rembrandt and its allies, had actually looked for ways to use it for its own advantage.

It had been a hard, bloody fight, and it had instilled a fiercely combative, fiercely independent spirit in the citizens of Dresden, matched with boundless contempt for the parasitic oligarchs of star systems like Split.

Dresden.

"The best solution would be to drive the Convention through to a conclusion before they have the opportunity to really get their feet under them," Krietzmann said, and both his guests nodded in agreement. "That's why I'm so pissed off at Tonkovic," the Convention President continued. "She knows perfectly well that she's not going to get anywhere close to everything she's asking for, but she's perfectly content to string out the negotiating process as long as possible. The longer she can tie us up, the more concessions she can expect to extort out of us as her price for finally bringing a draft Constitution to a vote."

Politics of the constitutional convention. Johan Alquezar and Krietzmann head the Constitutional Union Party, while Aleksandra Tonkovic is president of Kornati and leader of the rival Constitutional Liberal Party. The CUP wants to get the amendment over with, and accept the full body of Manticoran law, privileges and immunities etc. The CLP agenda is to preserve local autonomy by letting each system keep it's existing body of law, or at minimum a mess of special exemption zones, grandfathered codes, etc. Tonkovic coming from a heavily oligarchic 'democracy' this makes sense. The CLP is happy to delay the signing of the amended constitution pretty much indefinitely if it gets them more concessions. Surely nothing could happen to upset the existing balance of political power or convince Manticore to pack up it's toys and go home? Including frustration at a convention that drags on for months and years and never goes anywhere? The CUP is worried that things will come unglued if these negotiations drag on long enough, they're just giving OFS time to do something clever and nasty.

Van Dort frowned down into his wineglass. He'd tried to stand as far in the background as he could once the Convention actually convened. There'd been no way he could do that during the annexation vote campaign, but he was well aware that his very visibility had helped to produce what resistance to the vote there'd been. The Rembrandt Trade Union consisted of the systems of Rembrandt, San Miguel, Redoubt, and Prairie, and the RTU had made plenty of enemies in the Cluster. In Van Dort's opinion, much of that enmity had resulted from envy, but he was honest enough to recognize that many of the Cluster's other worlds had more than a little justification for feeling that the RTU had used its economic clout to extort unfair concessions.

The RTU worlds and the resentment the organization has stirred up.

Khumalo's flagship was HMS Hercules, an old Samothrace-class superdreadnought. Her impressive size was reflected in the spaciousness of her flag officer's quarters, but she was sadly obsolete. How she'd managed to avoid the breaker's yard this long was more than Terekhov would have been prepared to say, although if he'd had to guess, he would have bet she'd spent most of her lengthy career as a flagship assigned to minor fleet stations like this one. Certainly the fact that she was the only ship of the wall assigned to Talbott Station, and that she had to be almost as old as Terekhov himself was, said volumes about the force levels the Admiralty was prepared to assign to Talbott.

Aren't the Samothraces like, 80-100 years old now? Gives us a ballpark for Terekhov's age.

"Obviously, your arrival is more than welcome, Captain," the Rear Admiral continued, "as is your news from home. I've already reviewed the dispatches the Admiralty sent out aboard Hexapuma. It sounds as if the situation at the front is stabilizing, at least."

"To some extent, Sir," Terekhov agreed. "Of course, I don't believe anyone's really too surprised. We took it on the chin in the opening engagements, but the Havenites got badly chewed up in Silesia themselves. And it doesn't look as if they had quite as many of the pod designs in commission when they pulled the trigger as ONI's worst-case estimates assumed. I doubt they expected the Andies to come in on our side, either, or that the Andies had developed pod designs of their own. So they've probably had some serious strategic rethinking to do. And the fact that they know they're up against Earl White Haven at the Admiralty, and that Admiral Caparelli is back as First Space Lord, with Duchess Harrington in command of the new Eighth Fleet, may be playing a small part in their thinking, too."

-snip-

"More likely," Khumalo continued, "the Peeps are delaying further active operations while they digest the technological windfall they acquired when the damned Erewhonese turned their coats!"

Situation on the front, reasons Theisman may have for not doing more major follow-up operations. Naturally, Shannon Foraker is going to do some really nasty things with Alliance tech.

"But the truth is," Khumalo continued, "that in this instance, our low position on the current Admiralty's priority list means we genuinely don't have sufficient strength to be everywhere we need to be. It's the next best thing to two hundred and fifty light-years from Lynx to the Scarlet System, and the entire Cluster represents five and a half million cubic light-years—it's flattened quite a bit, not a true spherical volume, or it would be even bigger. That's almost nine times the volume of the entire Silesian Confederacy, but Admiral Sarnow has twelve times as many ships as we do, even though he's in a position to call on the Andermani for additional support in an emergency. And, I might add, he doesn't have a junction terminus to worry about."

The Talbott Cluster is actually a lot bigger, geographically, than Silesia, for all it only has a handful of populated worlds and the smallest fraction of Silesia's population or industry. Which has also been a big issue in developing anything like a cluster-wide government or cultural identity, when the nearest world is over two week's flight away.

"System President Lababibi has invited me to a political banquet in Thimble tomorrow evening, Captain," he said, as if in afterthought as he walked them to his cabin hatch. "Most of the Constitutional Convention's senior delegates will be there, and Baroness Medusa will also be attending. She's suggested that I bring some of my senior staffers and captains along with me, and I feel it's important for the Navy to make a good showing at these affairs, especially given our responsibilities and the force levels we have to work with. I trust you and some of your own officers will be able to attend?"

That probably took a lot, since Khumalo suspects (correctly) that Terekhov has been sent to Talbott at least partially to inject some better diplomacy into the navy there.

"Our primary tasks, as laid down in his general instructions, are first to maintain peace on and between the Cluster's planets. Second, he's charged with assisting the Spindle System government and Baroness Medusa's available Marines—which amount to only a single understrength battalion—in maintaining the security of the Constitutional Convention here on Flax. Our third priority is to suppress piracy and, of course, genetic slaving throughout the Cluster and to discourage . . . adventurism by any outside elements."

He paused for a moment, his eyes sweeping around the table, and there was no need for him to elaborate on just which "outside elements" Khumalo's general instructions might refer to.

"Fourth," he continued, "we're to assist local authorities in the suppression of any extralegal resistance to the annexation. Apparently the people who lost the vote are becoming increasingly vocal, and there are indications at least a few of them are about to step beyond mere verbal expressions of displeasure.

"Fifth, we already know our local charts are seriously inaccurate. The Admiral's assigned a high priority to updating our astrogation databases, both by collecting information from local pilots and merchant skippers and by conducting regular survey activities of our own.

"And, sixth and finally, we're to 'show the flag,' not simply inside the Cluster, but along its outer fringes, as well. Piracy here in the Cluster has never been as serious as in, say, Silesia, but there's always been some. The Admiral desires his ships to make their presence known along the arcs Nuncio-Celebrant-Pequod-Scarlet and Lynx-Montana-Tillerman, where he's set up standing patrol lines. On the one hand, we should serve as an advertisement of the advantages of membership in the Star Kingdom, and on the other, remind any larcenously inclined souls from outside it that Her Majesty would take their little pranks amiss."

Priorities, including suppressing the separatist movements and patrol routes.

Unlike most other navies—including both the SLN and the Star Kingdom's own Grayson ally—Manticoran Marines were also integrated into damage control parties and assigned to man broadside weapons aboard the ships in which they served. Aboard Hexapuma, for example, Kaczmarczyk's personnel crewed half a dozen of the ship's grasers. RMN ships had been able to carry so many Marines because they weren't displacing naval ratings; they were performing the same functions as naval ratings.

But that practice required additional cross-training of the Marines. It took time to produce people who could proficiently perform the multiple tasks assigned to them, and it wasn't cheap. Which was one of the reasons even the RMN had been forced to rethink things a bit.

Unlike most other navies—including both the SLN and the Star Kingdom's own Grayson ally—Manticoran Marines were also integrated into damage control parties and assigned to man broadside weapons aboard the ships in which they served. Aboard Hexapuma, for example, Kaczmarczyk's personnel crewed half a dozen of the ship's grasers. RMN ships had been able to carry so many Marines because they weren't displacing naval ratings; they were performing the same functions as naval ratings.

But that practice required additional cross-training of the Marines. It took time to produce people who could proficiently perform the multiple tasks assigned to them, and it wasn't cheap. Which was one of the reasons even the RMN had been forced to rethink things a bit.

Auxiliary roles of Manticoran Marines. The RMN sticks crewmen to control the guns in local if bridge command is ever severed. Mind, all this training takes a lot of time.

All of which explained why, instead of the four hundred and fifty-four men and women, in three companies, commanded by a major, assigned to a heavy cruiser under the "old" establishment, Captain Kaczmarczyk (who received the "courtesy promotion" to major aboard ship—since a warship could afford no confusion over who one meant when one said "Captain") had barely a hundred and forty in his single company. Even at that, they represented almost half of Hexapuma's total complement of three hundred and fifty-five.

Why there's one company of Marines aboard the Kitty instead of three. Namely, occupying Manticore's various conquests in the war has drained a ton of manpower, and with automation they're moving to smaller crews and doing nasty things with the space and life support savings, with marine groups shrinking accordingly.

"Hyacinth was supposed to be in our possession," Khumalo said, walking slowly back over to his desk and sitting behind it. "In fact, it was when Terekhov's convoy was dispatched there. It was supposed to be turned into one of Eighth Fleet's forward supply depots, but the picket force covering it was hit by a Peep counterattack. The picket didn't have any of the new ship types, and the Peeps were in overwhelming strength. The picket commander had no choice but to withdraw, and when Terekhov arrived, he sailed straight into an ambush."

The rear admiral paused for a moment, one hand toying with a richly ornamented dagger he used as a paperweight.

"The Peeps called on him to surrender, you know," he went on after a few seconds. "He refused. He didn't have any of the pod technology, but he did have all of the new electronics, including the latest generations of ECM and the FTL com, and the freighters in his convoy were loaded with all the latest technology, including spare parts and MDMs intended to reammunition Eighth Fleet. He couldn't let that fall into enemy hands, so he tried to fight his way out, at least get the merchantmen back out across the hyper limit.

"He did get two of them out. But he lost six, and his entire division of light cruisers, and three-quarters of his personnel. Most of the merchie crewmen survived, after they set their scuttling charges and took to the boats. But his own people were massacred."

Details on Hyacinth. I think Terekhov's superiors are more fixated on that fight than he is.

"Madam Governor," Lababibi said, "Stephen Westman—all those Montanans, even the women!—have far too much testosterone in their systems. They still believe all that First Landing frontiersman nonsense. Or claim they do, anyway. But I assure you, the vote there was almost as one-sided as here on Flax. Lunatics like Westman are only a tiny minority, even on Montana, and there's no way—"

An outsider's perspective on Montana, specifically Samiha Lababidi, president of the Spindle system.

But, then, all these systems are crushingly poor, she thought. Devastated economies in the midst of everything they need to be prosperous . . . except for that first boost up. All except Rembrandt and its trading partners, perhaps. But even the Trade Union's members are poverty stricken compared to Manticore, Sphinx, or Gryphon.

She'd known that, intellectually, before she ever arrived here. But knowing and understanding were very different. And one thing that bothered her deeply was the vast gulf between the haves and have-nots in Talbott. Even the wealthiest Talbotter was scarcely even well-off compared to someone like Klaus Hauptman or Duchess Harrington. But on many of these worlds there was no middle class. Or, rather, what middle class they had was only a thin layer, without the numbers or strength to fuel the growth of a self-sustaining economy. And that was less because of the huge size of the lower classes than because of the vast over-concentration of wealth and property in the hands of a tiny, closed wealthy class. In terms of real buying power, and the ability to command the necessities of life, the gap between someone like Samiha Lababibi and someone from Thimble's slums was literally astronomical. And although the Lababibi family fortune might have constituted little more than pocket change for Klaus Hauptman, it, along with those of a handful of other families, represented a tremendous portion of the total available wealth of the Spindle System . . . and starved the economy as a whole of desperately needed investment capital.

What money exists in the Cluster is pretty concentrated. Also, a city called Thimble on a planet named Flax orbiting the star Spindle? Really?

And as for economic power, so for politics. Samiha Lababibi looked perfectly at home in this sumptuous ballroom because she was. Because hers was one of three or four families who passed the presidential mansion back and forth at election time, like some private possession. Medusa came from a star nation with an overt, official aristocracy; Lababibi came from a "democracy" in which the ranks of the governing class were far more closed and restricted than anything the Star Kingdom of Manticore had ever dreamed of.

Yet the Lababibis weren't pure parasites. Samiha was actually a flaming liberal, by Spindle standards. She was genuinely committed to her own understanding of the good of all of her star system's citizens, although Medusa suspected she spent more time emoting over the poor then she did actually thinking about them.

Spindle politics.

She wore the elegantly tailored trousers and jacket of formal Manticoran court dress, and the crowd of Spindalians and off-planet diplomats stepped aside to let her pass. It didn't look as if they even realized they were doing it; it was simply an inevitable law of nature.

Again, Manticoran formal/court dress is pretty much like a tux with a ruffled shirt, even for the women.

"Tell me, Captain Terekhov. What's your impression of the Cluster?"

"In all honesty, President Lababibi, I haven't been here long enough to form any first-hand impressions," Terekhov said easily.

Terekhov showing off his evasion skills.

"Mr. Alquezar," he said with a slight chuckle, "if I haven't had an opportunity to form a first-hand opinion of the Cluster as a whole, what makes you think I've had the chance to form any meaningful opinion of the local political equation? And even if I had, I rather doubt, first, that any opinion of mine could be particularly reliable, on the basis of so little information, or, second, that it would be my place as a serving military officer to offer my interpretation to two of the leading political figures of the region. Presumptuous, if nothing else, I should think."

"Exactly so, Captain," Khumalo said heartily, moving close enough to graft himself onto the small conversational knot. "Naval officers in the Star Kingdom are executors of political policy, Mr. Alquezar. We're not supposed to involve ourselves in the formulation of that policy."

He'd at least used the verb "supposed," Alquezar noted, exchanging a brief, almost commiserating glance with Tonkovic.

Khumalo moves to shut up Terekhov, which is funny since he was doing so well.

"Agreed, Admiral," another voice said, and a flicker of something suspiciously like panic danced across Khumalo's face as Henri Krietzmann blended out of the crowd. "On the other hand," the Convention's president observed, "this is scarcely your normal political situation, now is it?"

"Ah, no. No, it isn't," Khumalo said after a moment. He darted an imploring look at Medusa, but the Provisional Governor only returned it blandly. She obviously had no intention of rescuing him. If he'd wanted to quash the conversation between Terekhov, Lababibi, Alquezar, and Tonkovic before the captain could say something the rear admiral didn't want said, he'd failed. Now he found himself standing there with the four most powerful political leaders of the entire Convention, and he looked as if he would have preferred standing in a cage full of hexapumas . . . with a raw steak in his hand.

"I think we can all agree with that, Henri." There was a distinct chill in Tonkovic's voice, and Krietzmann gave her a thin smile.

"I would certainly hope so. Although," he observed, "it's sometimes difficult to believe we do."

"Meaning what?" she demanded, a spark of anger dancing in her green eyes.

"Meaning that the Convention is an exercise in living politics, Aleksandra," Lababibi said before Krietzmann could respond.

"Which is always messy," Medusa agreed, and smiled impartially at the disputants. "Admiral Khumalo and I could tell you tales about politics back home in Manticore, couldn't we, Admiral?"

"Yes." If Khumalo was grateful for the Provisional Governor's intervention—or, at least, for the form that intervention had taken—it wasn't apparent in his expression. "Yes, Baroness, I suppose we could."

Khumalo is really not nearly as good at this sort of thing as Terekhov.

"Assuming a draft ever is approved," Krietzmann said. He accompanied the remark with a smile, but his distinctive, saw-edged, lower-class Dresden accent was more pronounced than it had been.

"Of course it will be," she said impatiently. "Everyone at the Convention agrees we must have a Constitution, Henri," her voice had taken on a lecturing tone, the patience of a teacher explaining things to a slow student. She was probably completely unaware of it, but Krietzmann's mouth tightened dangerously. "All we're seeing is a lively, healthy debate over the exact terms of that Constitution."

"Excuse me, Aleksandra," Alquezar said, "but what we're seeing is a debate over what we expect the Star Kingdom to put up with. We asked to join them. As such, are we going to agree to abide by the Star Kingdom's existing domestic law and accept that it extends to every system, every planet, of the Cluster? Or are we going to demand that the Star Kingdom accept a hodgepodge of special system-by-system exemptions and privileges? Do we expect the Star Kingdom to be a healthy, well-integrated political unit in which every citizen, whatever his planet of birth or present residence, knows precisely what his legal rights, privileges, and obligations are? Or do we expect the Star Kingdom to be a ramshackle, shambling disaster like the Solarian League, where every system has local autonomy, every planet has veto power over any proposed legislation, the central government has no real control over its own house, and all actual authority lies in the hands of bureaucratic monsters like Frontier Security?"

He'd never raised his voice, but ripples of stillness spread out from the confrontation, and Tonkovic's eyes blazed with green fury.

"The people of the Talbott Cluster are the citizens of their own planets and their own star systems," she said in a cold, flinty voice. "We have our own histories, our own traditions, our own systems of belief and political structures. We've offered to join the Star Kingdom, to surrender our long-held sovereignties to a distant government which isn't presently ours, and in whose creation neither we nor any of our ancestors had any part. I believe it's not merely reasonable, but our overriding responsibility, as the representatives of our native planets, to ensure that our own unique identities don't simply disappear. And to ensure that the political rights we've managed to cling to aren't simply thrown away in the name of some vast, uniform code of laws which has never been any part of our own tradition."

CUP vs. CLP politics. I admit, for once in a David Weber book I can see both sides of the argument without working for it. Even though Weber himself clearly favors one rule for all Talbott.

Ahriman238 · Post by **Ahriman238** » 2014-07-07 10:56pm

That might account for the chill formality she was displaying, if whatever was going on was one of Yucel's brain children. But so might the fact that, like any Frontier Security officer with a brain, Eichbauer knew who OFS really worked for. It wasn't often a mere major had the opportunity to work directly under the eye of one of the movers and shakers of Mesa. It could be either a definite career-enhancing opportunity, or the slippery lip of oblivion, depending upon outcomes, and an effective display of professionalism could help determine which.

Just so we're clear who OFS works for here.

"The big problem, Damien," Eichbauer said a touch more briskly, as if to reassert control of what was clearly an operational briefing, "is that the Manties have managed to claim some sort of moral mandate on the basis of this supposed free vote in favor of annexation. It's untrue, of course, but their representatives on Old Earth have managed to talk fast enough to fool a lot of people into believing otherwise. Some of those people have access to significant political influence, and they've chosen to endorse the Manticoran version of events, which officially ties OFS' hands. But that doesn't mean we're blind to our responsibilities. So when Ms. Anisimovna and her colleagues approached us, we saw an opportunity to kill several birds with a single stone."

Harahap nodded. In some star nations, he knew, the sort of thing Eichbauer had just said would have constituted something very close to treason. In others, it would simply have led to an instant demand for her resignation. In the Solarian League, it was merely the way things were. The bureaucracies had been eluding civilian control for so long, in the name of keeping the system running, that the evasion of civilian oversight was as routine as brushing one's teeth. And as openly accepted among those who did the evading.

How it is in the League, there's really effectively no control over their own agencies, certainly not by elected officials.

Roberto Tyler, the duly elected President of the Republic of Monica (just as his father and grandfather had been), stood gazing out his office window at the city of Estelle. The G3 system primary burned down out of a cloud-spotted blue sky on the city's white and pastel ceramacrete towers. Its older, original buildings were much closer to the ground. Built out of native materials and old-fashioned concrete, they looked insignificant and toylike in the shadows of the looming towers which had become the norm since the planet finally reacquired counter-grav technology in the early years of his father's presidency. It was unfortunate, he reflected, that even today the construction of those towers was in the hands of out-system technicians, not Monica's own citizens. But there wasn't much choice about it, given the ongoing limitations of the Monican educational system.

Monica's general tech-level, or rather how recently they've returned to being a 'proper' star-faring civilization able to make gravity it's bitch.

Despite the amount of business Monica and Monican -interests—including quite a few of the Tyler family's enterprises—did with Mesa, he personally knew very few Mesans. Nor was he particularly familiar with the internal dynamics of Mesan society. But Alfonso Higgins was another matter. According to him, Bardasano's spectacular tattoos, and the dramatically cut garments which displayed a degree of body piercing that made Tyler want to wince, marked her as a member of one of the Mesan "young lodges." There were at least a dozen "lodges," all in bitter competition with one another for dominance, and all at odds with the older Mesan tradition of inconspicuousness. Secure in the wealth and power of their corporate hierarchy, they deliberately flaunted who and what they were, rather than attempting to blend into the "respectable" Solly business community. Given the track record of the Audubon Ballroom, Tyler doubted that he would have been quite so eager to mark himself out as a target. Perhaps Bardasano simply had an unreasonable degree of faith in her personal security arrangements.

First sign we've seen that Mesa isn't monolithic, there is a counter-culture (almost certainly not in the inner layers of the onion) that want to flaunt who they are. Whether that means simply Mesan or GE'd supermen I'm less sure of.

The Cluster had never been particularly important to Monica (or anywhere else) before the Manties' discovery of their damned terminus. Even the label "Talbott Cluster" was thoroughly inaccurate; the body of stars it defined was neither a cluster nor centered on the Talbott System. It was only a convenient label Solarian astrographers had hung on it because the wretchedly poor Talbott System had been the site of Frontier Security's first observation post in the area. OFS had abandoned Talbott long since in favor of the much more valuable Meyers System once Meyers became an official League protectorate, but the name had stuck.

Solly mapmakers seem to do that, the same way Haven, Manticore, Silesia, Erewhon, The Andermani and Asgard are all part of the Haven Sector/Quadrant (seems to be used interchangeably).

"Let me suggest a possible scenario," she said. "What would happen to your economy, and to your military power, if, instead of Manticore, Monica controlled the Lynx Terminus?"

Now there's a pipe dream, after everything Manticore went through to control all the termini.

"The Sigma Draconis Terminus lies outside the territorial limit of the star system. Nonetheless, the Manticorans were forced to make certain concessions to Sigma Draconis and the Beowulf planetary government. The Sigma Draconis Terminus, for example, isn't fortified, and Sigma Draconis—not Manticore—is responsible for its security. In return for the protection afforded to the terminus by the Sigma Draconis System Defense Force, Beowulf receives a percentage of the use fees on that terminus. In addition, all Beowulf-registry freighters pay the same transit fees through all termini of the junction as Manticoran-registry ships. It would be more accurate to say, I think, that Manticore shares sovereignty over the terminus with Beowulf. And even that much is true only because Beowulf chose to accept the arrangement."

The relationship between Manticore and Beowulf, vis-à-vis their end of a wormhole.

"We—meaning my own business colleagues, not the League or Mr. Hongbo's Frontier Security—are prepared to provide your navy with a rather powerful reinforcement. At the moment, if my figures are correct, your fleet consists of five heavy cruisers, eight light cruisers, nineteen destroyers, and -several dozen LACs. Which comes to just over four million tons. Is that substantially correct?"

"Yes, it is. I'm sure Admiral Bourmont could give you more complete figures, but four million tons will do, " he said, still watching her intently, and refraining from pointing out that almost a half million tons of that consisted solely of sadly obsolete light attack craft. Or that the cruisers fell far short of cutting-edge technology themselves.

"Very well," she said. "We're prepared to supply you with fourteen Solarian Indefatigable-class battlecruisers, each of approximately eight hundred and fifty thousand tons. That comes to twelve million tons, or a three hundred percent increase in your navy's tonnage."

Roberto Tyler felt as if someone had just kicked him in the belly. His ears couldn't have heard what he thought they just had. But if she meant it. . . .

"While the Indefatigables are being replaced in Solarian service by the Nevada-class ships, Mr. President," Levakonic said, speaking up for the first time, "they served primarily with the frontier fleet elements. As I'm sure you're aware, that means they were kept much more rigorously updated with refits than is traditionally the case for Solarian ships of the wall or battlecruisers attached to the Central Reserve. These vessels represent very nearly the latest word in SLN weaponry and EW capabilities. Ms. Anisimovna has pointed out that they would effectively quadruple your existing tonnage. In terms of actual effective combat strength, your navy's capabilities would increase by a factor of well over a hundred."

Monican Navy, before and after Mesa gives them 14 Solly BCs. Frontier (OFS) fleet is kept considerably more up-to-date than the main navy, even if they lack wallers.

"That's why we'd have to insist that all of them be comprehensively refitted in your own yard here in Monica. We'd need more than just a simple change of transponder codes. We could reshape their emissions signatures significantly by changing out sidewall generators and the main active sensor arrays, but there are several other, smaller changes we'd want to make, as well. In combination, they should be more than enough to adequately disguise the ships' origins. It wouldn't stand up in the face of a physical boarding and examination, but that shouldn't really be a factor."

Disguising the BCs.

"I'm sure you're right, at least about the bit about their having a special interest in us. That's why I'm confident their Admiralty must already have drawn up contingency plans for the unlikely event that we were foolish enough to get frisky and step on their toes."

"Of course. But," Anisimovna's gray eyes flashed with what certainly seemed to be genuine enthusiasm, "those plans are based on the ship strength they know you possess. If you were to suddenly appear before the terminus with no less than fourteen big, powerful, modern battlecruisers, they would have to realize there'd been some sort of sudden, radical change in the balance of military power in the Cluster. They won't know where you got those ships, or who you got them from. Nor will they know how many other ships you may have acquired. The possibility that you got them directly from the League, or at least with the League's official knowledge and approval, will have to cross their minds. And the fact that they're already at war with the Republic of Haven, which has them stretched extremely tightly, will be another factor in their thinking.

The first part of the plan. Not really sold.

"After you've accepted the surrender of the Manty terminus picket, or blown it out of space, as the case may be," she said calmly, "a dozen or so Monican freighters will begin emplacing mines. Actually, courtesy of Mr. Levakonic, they'll be something new, something Technodyne developed out of the reverse flow of information from the previous Havenite regime."

Tyler looked at Levakonic, and the Technodyne rep smiled.

"We call them 'missile pods,' Mr. President," he said. "They have a great deal more standoff range than any conventional mine, and enough of them will blow any ship ever built out of space."

The Monican president doesn't know what missile pods are, but I promise the Manties do, and setting them up will not amuse White Haven. In fact, it's much morel likely to convince him to take the threat seriously and deal with it decisively.

"And how long are these missile pods good for? What's their endurance?"

"No more than two or three weeks," Levakonic admitted. "A month, at most. After that, they have to be taken off-line for service and maintenance."

"But they'd be your hole card against an immediate, ill-conceived response from Manticore," Anisimovna said quickly.

Endurance of pods, at least the Mesan versions. Then again, I doubt Haven or Manticore is building the things particularly for endurance.

"Because, Mr. President," Anisimovna said, "you will have contacted the Office of Frontier Security through its offices in the Meyers System before you dispatch your naval units to the Lynx Terminus. You'll explain to OFS that you can no longer sit by and watch the deteriorating situation in the Cluster. Obviously, the citizens of the Cluster's star systems are violently opposed to their annexation by the Star Kingdom of Manticore. You, as the head of state of the most powerful local star nation, with your legitimate interests—humanitarian, as well as those related to your own security—have seen no option but to intervene. And, as the first step in ending the bloodshed and restoring domestic tranquility and local self-government, you have seized control of the Lynx Terminus in order to avoid further destabilization by outside interests."

Which is where the terrorists come in. This sounds uncomfortably close to what the Peeps tried at Basilisk Station, way back when. After an impartial Solly review of the plebiscite throws it out and enacts a new one under League supervision and poll-monitoring, where the people of Talbott will vote to request OFS security while a new constitution is drafted to unite the Cluster under Monica.

"I just finished helping Commander Wright download all available astro material from Hercules on Nuncio, Celebrant, Pequod, and New Tuscany. And I've got to tell you guys, it isn't all that great."

"Nuncio, eh?" Helen scratched an eyebrow and frowned. "So we're catching the Northern Patrol."

Whereabouts of the Nasty Kitty.

"And I'm guessing we're going to spend a lot of our time doing survey work." The others looked at him, and he shrugged. "Hercules' astrogation department has been doing its best to update the various charts, but they really suck. We know about where to find the stars themselves, but we know damn-all about the system astrography, and even some of the grav wave data looks suspect."

And what they'll be largely doing on this patrol. Filling in the holes and crossing the dragons off their local maps.

She looked up, and for one, fleeting moment her expression of casual boredom disappeared into a flare of savage satisfaction as a brilliant light flashed from the fifth floor. She watched the fifth-floor installment of the verandalike balcony which circled the Nemanja Building at each level disintegrate, fly outward, and then go spinning towards the ground in broken bits and pieces that tumbled with dreamlike slowness. A plume of dust and smoke jetted upward from the gaping wound in the parliament building's flank, and dust trails hung in midair, comet tails traced by the plummeting rubble.

The explosion's rumbling thunder reached her eighteen seconds after the flash, and she saw other people in the park looking up, crying out, pointing and shouting questions at one another. Birds—native Kornatian species, and Terran imports alike—erupted from the park's greenery, shrieking in terrified protest, and playing children froze, turning to stare uncomprehendingly at the towering jet of smoke.

And then, hard on the heels of the first explosion, the rumble of other explosions came washing over the capital. Not one more, or two, but ten. Ten more explosions, ten more charges of commercial blasting compound many times as powerful as the ancient chemical explosives of prespace days. They ripped through government office buildings, shopping malls, banks, and the Split Stock Exchange. Fire and smoke and the demonic howl of emergency sirens—and the screams and shrieks of the wounded and dying—followed close behind the explosions, and Agnes Nordbrandt bared her teeth, shivering in a strange ecstasy of mingled horror and triumph. She watched the dust and smoke billowing above the city of her birth, like funeral palls across the cloudless blue dome of the sky. She saw other people leaving the park, running towards the explosions, and she wondered whether they were going to gawk at the disaster or out of some instinct to help. Not that it mattered.

She sat on the bench, waiting, while ten more minutes ticked into eternity . . . and then the second wave of explosions shook the city.

On Kornati, Nordbrandt's FAK bombs the government building, the primary bank and stock exchange, and multiple secondary government offices, shopping malls and public transit centers. The attack kills at least five hundred people, and wounding twice as many. She also adopts the old IRA trick of setting two bombs, one to go off a bit later, to kill cops and emergency workers and people who try to help.

The bomb on the fifth floor of the Nemanja Building had been bad enough. It had killed eleven of Parliament's deputies and at least twenty members of their staffs. But the second bomb, the one planted on the third floor, directly under the first one . . .

He shook his head, feeling nausea swirl underneath the shock. The vicious calculation of that second bomb touched his horror with a sun-hot lick of hatred. That one had only gotten one more deputy—old Nicola Martinovic, who'd plunged back into the smoke and flames like the old warhorse he was. He'd carried two people out and gone back for a third just as the fresh fireball and the flying cloud of shrapnel which had once been stone walls, plaster, framed diplomas, and portraits of husbands and wives and children came screaming out of the rubble.

But Nicola hadn't been alone. The Nemanja Security Force had been there, the cops diving in, tearing at the flaming wreckage with bare hands. And the first of the Capital Fire Department rescue teams, flinging themselves into the flames and the leaning, groaning structural members, ready to fall. They'd been there, too. And the second explosion had slaughtered them, as well, as it spilled the entire western third of the building into the streets below.

Thus.

They got out of his way when they finally realized who he was, and he found himself in the front row, staring up at the display with the rest of them. Staring at a face he knew well, someone who had once been a close political ally . . . and an even closer friend.

"—responsibility in the name of the Freedom Alliance of Kornati. We regret that we have been driven to this extremity, but we will not turn aside from the road we have chosen. The collaborationist regime of President Tonkovic and her sycophants will not be allowed to sign away the sovereignty of our home world. The indecently wealthy traitors whose corruption and greed have inflicted so much poverty, so much suffering, upon so many Kornatians, will profit no further from their crimes. Their plan to sell our planet to the highest bidder to protect their own obscene fortunes will not succeed. And the off-worlders who seek to steal our souls along with our rightful wealth, our liberties, and our rights as freeborn citizens of the sovereign Planet of Kornati, will find only death on our soil. The Freedom Alliance is the avenging sword of the betrayed people of the Split System, and it will not be sheathed while a single traitor clings to power on our world! Let those who love freedom rally to us—and let those who worship slavery fear us!"

Nordbrandt publicly claims responsibility for the bombings.

Unlike Dresden, where hardscrabble -poverty was the great unifying condition, New Tuscany had its own exorbitantly wealthy (by Verge standards) upperclass, like Spindle and at least half of the Cluster's other systems. Yvernau was probably almost as rich as Samiha Lababibi. As such, the delegation chief faced both enormous opportunity and great risk once the annexation went through, and he wanted all the safeguards he could get. A few of the other New Tuscan delegates, without his vast personal fortune to protect, were growing impatient with him. Unfortunately, the delegation, like the New Tuscan government itself, was overwhelmingly dominated by the local oligarchs. It was highly unlikely any of the others would openly break with Yvernau. In fact, they were under binding instructions to follow his directives, which had put New Tuscany firmly into Aleksandra Tonkovic's political pocket.

I'd forgotten New Tuscany even took part in the convention.

"Look, Aleksandra. All of us, including you, have been saying for months now that some degree of backlash was inevitable. And we've all been admitting there's at least a lunatic fringe—like Westman—that was likely to take things into its own hands. But I don't think anyone, including me or Henri, ever expected something like this. We should've at least allowed for the possibility, though, and there's going to be a lot of recriminations—and self-recrimination—while we cope with the reality. Some of it's going to hurt, and a lot of it's going to be ugly. But here in this room, the four of us—especially!—have to be able to talk to each other as frankly as we possibly can."

-snip-

"My point is that I'm not going to let myself be panicked into doing exactly what Nordbrandt wants me to do. I was sent to this Convention by the voters of Kornati with a specific mandate. A mandate supported by a clear majority of those same voters. I'm not going to permit this madwoman and her insane followers to manipulate me into violating that mandate. I can think of nothing which would be more likely to produce exactly the sort of polarization she's looking for. And to be brutally cold-blooded and honest about it, what's happened doesn't change a thing vis-à-vis the political realities of this annexation proposal. Not unless we permit it to, and I refuse to do that."

The convention hears of the attacks on Kornati. And Tonkovic budges not one inch.

"All I'm trying to say, Sir," he continued, "is that classic terrorist strategy—and let's not fool ourselves, this was clearly a terroristic act—is to create the maximum possible polarization. They want the authorities to appear oppressive, to appear to overreact. To clamp down hard enough to convince the undecided that the terrorists were right all along about the fundamental oppressiveness of the state."

Truth.

Simon_Jester · Post by **Simon_Jester** » 2014-07-08 01:15pm

Ahriman238 wrote:Tonkovic coming from a heavily oligarchic 'democracy' this makes sense. The CLP is happy to delay the signing of the amended constitution pretty much indefinitely if it gets them more concessions. Surely nothing could happen to upset the existing balance of political power or convince Manticore to pack up it's toys and go home? Including frustration at a convention that drags on for months and years and never goes anywhere? The CUP is worried that things will come unglued if these negotiations drag on long enough, they're just giving OFS time to do something clever and nasty.

Or, for that matter, convincing the Manticorans that yes, they should "pack up their toys and go home." Which, as an American citizen of the last several years I am painfully conscious of: just how stupid and frustrating it can be to deal with a power bloc that exercises unlimited power to stall negotiations, with no regard for the consequences.

Aren't the Samothraces like, 80-100 years old now? Gives us a ballpark for Terekhov's age.

More like seventy; I'm pretty sure Hercules was completed some time after 1850 PD. But not long after. As a practical matter, they're still adequate to fight most pre-pod ships of the wall of comparable tonnage.

"More likely," Khumalo continued, "the Peeps are delaying further active operations while they digest the technological windfall they acquired when the damned Erewhonese turned their coats!"
Situation on the front, reasons Theisman may have for not doing more major follow-up operations. Naturally, Shannon Foraker is going to do some really nasty things with Alliance tech.

And people say Khumalo's a dummy. Hah!

Priorities, including suppressing the separatist movements and patrol routes.

Although that's an awful lot of priorities for such a small number of ships- but then, they are all things that have to be done, and some of them (like suppressing piracy, keeping the peace, and 'showing the flag' with patrol missions) overlap.

Details on Hyacinth. I think Terekhov's superiors are more fixated on that fight than he is.

Well, he still has flashbacks and gets irrational about Mars-class cruisers...

Then again, yes, I think his superiors are very concerned about the battle. On the one hand, it proved Terekhov to be everything an RMN officer should be, prepared to fight gallantly and die heroically, taking a ferocious toll on the enemy in the process. On the other, it clearly left scars in his head, which raises the question of whether he'd react sanely in a new bad situation...

Khumalo is really not nearly as good at this sort of thing as Terekhov.

Yes. To be fair, it's not exactly his normal job description. My honest opinion of Khumalo is that he's no dummy, but, yes, he's operating a bit out of his depth in a place like this. He'd get the job done in a broadly satisfactory fashion, assuming no enemy got really clever in screwing up the Talbot Cluster... but someone else could do it better.

CUP vs. CLP politics. I admit, for once in a David Weber book I can see both sides of the argument without working for it. Even though Weber himself clearly favors one rule for all Talbott.

Well, the main problem is that the CLP consists largely of unsympathetic aristocratic jackasses. About the only really respectable person we see protrayed in the Cluster who wants to preserve local autonomy hard enough to oppose the CUP and Manticore is Westman.

Ahriman238 wrote:Just so we're clear who OFS works for here.

Well, they don't only work for Mesa, but they work for Mesa. And a lot of other corporate interests only marginally less shady.

How it is in the League, there's really effectively no control over their own agencies, certainly not by elected officials.

The flip side of this being, given how the League legislature works, if the bureaucracy weren't evading civilian oversight left and right, the entire government would seize up and die.

Having a republic really only works with a legislature that is decisive. The League, nominally a republic, lacks a decisive legislature, and therefore cannot function as a republic. So it evolved into a bureaucratic-oligarchic state instead, because that was the only thing that was vaguely functional.

First sign we've seen that Mesa isn't monolithic, there is a counter-culture (almost certainly not in the inner layers of the onion) that want to flaunt who they are. Whether that means simply Mesan or GE'd supermen I'm less sure of.

Or both.

I doubt there's anything in the rules on Mesa that says you can't make your kid a genetically modified superman just because you aren't a member of the Mesan Alignment's "onion." There are probably plenty of genetically enhanced people on Mesa who have nothing to do with the Alignment.

The first part of the plan. Not really sold.

It's a bad plan, but it's probably easy enough to convince someone from OFS (or Monica, which makes a career of kissing up to OFS) that it'd work. It's exactly the kind of thing they do all the time to everyone they want, after all.

Also note that for the underlying Mesans' purposes it makes very little difference if Monica does secure control of the Terminus with such a small force as two battlecruiser squadrons. What matters is provoking a conflict between Manticore and the League.

"And how long are these missile pods good for? What's their endurance?"

"No more than two or three weeks," Levakonic admitted. "A month, at most. After that, they have to be taken off-line for service and maintenance."

"But they'd be your hole card against an immediate, ill-conceived response from Manticore," Anisimovna said quickly.
Endurance of pods, at least the Mesan versions. Then again, I doubt Haven or Manticore is building the things particularly for endurance.

Also Technodyne's version, which suggests that just about any old Solly could build them.

Also, the endurance is an issue for using them in the system defense role, which we know both Manticore and Haven do.

Post by **Mr Bean** » 2014-07-08 01:47pm

I wonder how much of the pods station keeping issues is propellent and various widgets and how much is leaving a chunk of metal in space free to be churned up by space over the weeks. I imagine since these things are design to be as stealthy as possible and don't have on board power plants that month time limit is a combination of how long the batteries will last and average time till space impacts have removed the stealthy material enough not to be stealthy.

Ahriman238 · Post by **Ahriman238** » 2014-07-08 10:40pm

Simon_Jester wrote:
Ahriman238 wrote:Tonkovic coming from a heavily oligarchic 'democracy' this makes sense. The CLP is happy to delay the signing of the amended constitution pretty much indefinitely if it gets them more concessions. Surely nothing could happen to upset the existing balance of political power or convince Manticore to pack up it's toys and go home? Including frustration at a convention that drags on for months and years and never goes anywhere? The CUP is worried that things will come unglued if these negotiations drag on long enough, they're just giving OFS time to do something clever and nasty.
Or, for that matter, convincing the Manticorans that yes, they should "pack up their toys and go home." Which, as an American citizen of the last several years I am painfully conscious of: just how stupid and frustrating it can be to deal with a power bloc that exercises unlimited power to stall negotiations, with no regard for the consequences.

Or rather, are determined to play chicken in the absolute certainty that the other side is going to blink and offer them rich concessions at the eleventh hour. Tonkovic goes just a bit further in believing that nothing bad will happen even if no one blinks.

Khumalo is really not nearly as good at this sort of thing as Terekhov.
Yes. To be fair, it's not exactly his normal job description. My honest opinion of Khumalo is that he's no dummy, but, yes, he's operating a bit out of his depth in a place like this. He'd get the job done in a broadly satisfactory fashion, assuming no enemy got really clever in screwing up the Talbot Cluster... but someone else could do it better.

I can't really fault his professionalism once the ball starts rolling, but I also can't quite shut out Raoul Courvosier's voice exclaiming "No captain can afford to be a virgin where politics are concerned.

CUP vs. CLP politics. I admit, for once in a David Weber book I can see both sides of the argument without working for it. Even though Weber himself clearly favors one rule for all Talbott.
Well, the main problem is that the CLP consists largely of unsympathetic aristocratic jackasses. About the only really respectable person we see protrayed in the Cluster who wants to preserve local autonomy hard enough to oppose the CUP and Manticore is Westman.

This is so, but in this argument for once, neither side is portrayed as intrinsically and morally correct. Plus, it's easy to see people agreeing with the CLP position even without being oligarchs afraid the sky will fall when wealth starts flowing and not all of it into their hands.

First sign we've seen that Mesa isn't monolithic, there is a counter-culture (almost certainly not in the inner layers of the onion) that want to flaunt who they are. Whether that means simply Mesan or GE'd supermen I'm less sure of.
Or both.

I doubt there's anything in the rules on Mesa that says you can't make your kid a genetically modified superman just because you aren't a member of the Mesan Alignment's "onion." There are probably plenty of genetically enhanced people on Mesa who have nothing to do with the Alignment.

Yes, though I'm pretty confident those more fully in the know would desperately avoid anything like flaunting.

"And how long are these missile pods good for? What's their endurance?"

"No more than two or three weeks," Levakonic admitted. "A month, at most. After that, they have to be taken off-line for service and maintenance."

"But they'd be your hole card against an immediate, ill-conceived response from Manticore," Anisimovna said quickly.
Endurance of pods, at least the Mesan versions. Then again, I doubt Haven or Manticore is building the things particularly for endurance.
Also Technodyne's version, which suggests that just about any old Solly could build them.

Also, the endurance is an issue for using them in the system defense role, which we know both Manticore and Haven do.

That's true.

Sure any Solly corporation could. Remember, missile pods are not a new technology, they were used for decades and retired less than a century ago. The only innovation was the miniaturized mass-drivers that made them competitive again. Haven was able to brute force a pod mass driver after five or six years, and if they've been paying attention (or kept abreast by Mesa) Technodyne has had fifteen years to figure out the mass-driver problem and suddenly missile pods are a going concern again.

VhenRa · Post by **VhenRa** » 2014-07-09 12:14am

And this is proven true in the other books. The Solarian attack on Manticore has pods (With the Cataphract Missiles, which we will be getting to in the 2nd Crown of Slaves book)

Simon_Jester · Post by **Simon_Jester** » 2014-07-09 09:25am

Ahriman238 wrote:
Simon_Jester wrote:Or, for that matter, convincing the Manticorans that yes, they should "pack up their toys and go home." Which, as an American citizen of the last several years I am painfully conscious of: just how stupid and frustrating it can be to deal with a power bloc that exercises unlimited power to stall negotiations, with no regard for the consequences.
Or rather, are determined to play chicken in the absolute certainty that the other side is going to blink and offer them rich concessions at the eleventh hour. Tonkovic goes just a bit further in believing that nothing bad will happen even if no one blinks.

Eh, I'm not sure there's much difference. Either way, the potential consequences are being ignored in favor of the huge (imagined) payoff to whoever's being obstructionist.

I can't really fault his professionalism once the ball starts rolling, but I also can't quite shut out Raoul Courvosier's voice exclaiming "No captain can afford to be a virgin where politics are concerned.

Yes, but there's a difference between being not-a-virgin and being Don Juan. Courvosier was also speaking in what was (at the time) still a peacetime navy whose dominant tradition was that of the long commerce-patrolling strategy pursued for centuries in places like Silesia. The typical prewar RMN's captains on independent station commands probably spent a lot more time waging politics than they did firing missile barrages.

Khumalo achieved his present rank in a fighting service that needed fighting officers. So while he shouldn't be too stupid or ignorant to understand the political implications of his own actions, he may well lack some of the breadth of political experience we'd expect from an admiral whose entire career spanned the time prior to the outbreak of the war.

This is so, but in this argument for once, neither side is portrayed as intrinsically and morally correct. Plus, it's easy to see people agreeing with the CLP position even without being oligarchs afraid the sky will fall when wealth starts flowing and not all of it into their hands.

True.

Ahriman238 · Post by **Ahriman238** » 2014-07-12 04:37pm

Nuncio was a poverty-stricken star system, even for the Verge. Which was particularly ironic, given the system's potential, Aivars Terekhov thought as Hexapuma decelerated smoothly towards her parking orbit and he listened to the soothing routine of his bridge.

The G0/K2 binary system boasted two remarkably Earth-like planets, thoroughly suitable for human occupation with only a little development. Basilica, the habitable world of the G0 primary component, orbited its star at a distance of twelve light-minutes, and boasted a planetary environment any resort world might have envied. With a planetary mass ninety-seven percent of Old Earth's, a hydrosphere of eighty percent, rugged mountains, gorgeous volcanic atolls, sandy beaches, endless rolling plains, and an axial inclination of less than three degrees, Basilica was as close to climatically idyllic as any home for humans outside man's original star system could hope to be. Unfortunately, the planet's successful colonization had called for a degree of subtle genetic manipulation of the terrestrial plants and food species to be introduced there. Had Nuncio been colonized today, or even as recently as the last couple of T-centuries, it would have been a snap. Even at the time the system actually was settled, making the necessary alterations would have been relatively straightforward for a good Solarian genetic lab.

Unfortunately, the colonists' analysts had missed the data in the initial planetary survey which should have told them before they set out that the changes were needed. By the time they realized what they actually faced, all of the "good Solarian genetic labs" and their capabilities had been light-centuries behind them . . . which explained why it was Pontifex, the habitable planet of the secondary component which had actually been settled.

Nuncio, one of, if not the, poorest systems in the Talbott Cluster. Like Grayson, it was settled by religious colonists looking to get away from evil secularism and dependence on technology, and like the colonists of Grayson, they found their new home a bit less suited to colonization than they'd thought, and settled the second planet of the system. The religious angle probably explain the Catholic/Latin names; Nuncio-messenger or church diplomat, Basilica- cathedral, Pontifex- priest.

Unfortunately for those first Nuncians, they had encountered a trap almost as deadly, although in quite a different way, as the one which had met Austin Grayson's followers, and they'd been operating on a considerably tighter budget when they organized their exodus. They hadn't shared the Church of Humanity Unchained's prejudice against technology, but they hadn't been able to afford as much of it as other, more successful colonizing expeditions, and what they'd managed to bring with them hadn't been up to managing the required genetic modifications. That simple fact had almost wiped them out when their crops failed and sixty-five percent of their food animals died within one generation. Somehow, they'd managed to retain enough space flight capability (barely) to transfer about half of their surviving population—and what remained of its food supplies—to Pontifex, a much colder, dryer world, six light-minutes from its cool primary and with far more extreme seasonal changes, but without Basilica's subtle genetic trap.

None of the people left behind on Basilica had survived, and over half of those they'd managed to transfer had died during their first winter on Pontifex. The half which survived—less than sixteen percent of their original expedition—had fought desperately to cling to the technology they still had, but it had been a long, bitter struggle, and the dreadful death toll of the colony's first few years had killed too many trained technicians, too many teachers. They'd regressed to an early steam-powered level before they managed to arrest the agonizing slide downward, and there they'd stayed for generations. Now, six centuries after mankind first landed on Pontifex, and two centuries after the Nuncians had been rediscovered by the rest of humanity, the planetary population was barely three hundred and fifty million, and its technological capabilities and educational system were far inferior to the ones Grayson had attained before joining the Manticoran Alliance.

After the massive die off on Basilica, followed by most of the colonists on Pontifex dying, the survivors became forcefully, almost aggressively athetistic, and do not fondly recall "the founding twits." Still, lots of room for growth here, Manticoran technology can make Basilica super-habitable. Of course, there's not exactly a ton of surplus population anywhere in the Star Empire to move in.

Ragnhild Pavletic decided that there were times when catching the Captain's eye had its drawbacks. Like now. No doubt it was immensely flattering to be chosen for semipermanent assignment as her CO's personal pilot. It was a great honor for a mere middy to be picked over petty officer pilots who might have as much as fifty T-years worth of experience, or even more, and she knew it. The fact that Ragnhild had stood first in her class for flight training every term for her entire time on the Island had more than a little to do with it, and she knew that, too. She'd set the new standard for virtually every record except the time/distance glider record set by Duchess Harrington over forty T-years ago. That one seemed destined to stand for quite a while longer, although Ragnhild took considerable quiet pride in the fact that she'd broken two of the Duchess' other records.

Ragnhild is a suberb small-craft pilot, in fact she broke at least two of Honor's Academy records. Incidentally, Honor seems to have set most of the Academy's flight records.

That was all bad enough, but the fact that Pontifex didn't possess even first-generation prolong made it far worse, because Ragnhild Pavletic was cute. It was the curse of her life. She wasn't beautiful, not pretty or handsome, but cute. She was petite, delicately built, with honey-blond hair, blue eyes, a snub nose, and even—God help her—freckles. Her hair was so naturally curly she had to keep it cut into a short-cropped mop less than five centimeters long if she was going to have any hope of managing it, and she, unfortunately, was a third-generation prolong recipient. Worse yet, she'd received the initial treatment even earlier than most, with the result that it had started slowing the physical maturation process proportionately sooner. Which meant that at a chronological age of twenty-one T-years, she looked like a pre-prolong thirteen-year-old. A flat-chested thirteen-year-old.

And the Captain was taking her down to meet the president of an entire planet full of pre-prolong people who were going to think she was exactly as old as she looked. To them.

I'm actually surprised after over a century of prolong that the younger generation even thinks in terms of their age and appearance vs. pre-prolong. It's simply normal now for 21 year olds to look biologically 13. Which raises a couple of questions vis-à-vis people who are totally at the age of consent but look and biologically are prepubescent. I mean, everyone from Honor to the Queen have complained about a torturously stretched adolescence and years spent trying to get people to take them seriously as an adult, but Honor would have looked really young at the Academy when Young tried to rape her, and during her disastrous post-rape relationship. Hopefully their brain development isn't noticeably slowed by prolong, I'd hate to think they had middies with a 13-14 year-olds impulse control in the service. For that matter, how much of growing up is physical brain development vs. life experience?

Ragnhild stood behind the Captain, listening unobtrusively to the conversation, and wondered if Wexler was deliberately drawing attention to Pontifex's primitive technology. It happened, sometimes. Or that was what her instructors at the Academy had told her, anyway. Sometimes the inhabitants of planets whose societies or technology bases had been hammered especially hard took a sort of aggressive, in-your-face reverse pride in their neobarbarian status.

Eh?

"I've viewed the download you were kind enough to make available to us on your ship's capabilities," the commodore continued. He shook his head. "I realize Hexapuma is 'only' a heavy cruiser, but she seems like a superdreadnought to us, Captain. My 'Space Force' consists of exactly eleven light attack craft, and the biggest of them masses all of eighteen thousand tons. So the entire Nuncio fleet masses about a third as much as your single ship."

Ragnhild instructed her expression to remain one of simple polite interest, but Karlberg's statement stunned her. Intellectually, she'd known from the outset that none of the poverty-stricken governments in the Cluster had the economic and industrial capacity to build anything like an effective naval force. But that was pathetic. Less than a single LAC squadron to defend—or even effectively patrol—an entire star system? She wanted to glance at Paulo, to see how he'd reacted to it, but she knew better than to allow her attention to wander.

The Nuncio SDF, heck their entire navy consists of 11 outdated LACs.

"I know," Karlberg agreed, nodding briskly. "And we've already seen some signs of those economic implications of yours, Captain. Not that much so far, but we've had three freighters stop over here in Nuncio in just the last month and a half. That may not sound like much to someone from Manticore, and one of them only stopped on spec, to see if there was any reason the owners should make us a semi-regular stopover in the future. But that still represents a huge jump in local traffic for us, and I expect it to continue to increase. Unfortunately, it looks like there are some liabilities coming along with the good news."

"What sort of liabilities, Sir?" FitzGerald asked.

"We're in the outermost tier of the systems of our so-called 'Cluster,' Commander," Karlberg said. "We're more exposed than other systems—like Rembrandt and San Miguel—which are basically pretty much slap in the middle. I suspect we're also going to attract less of the new investment everyone is visualizing, unless the President's hopes of luring investors into sinking capital into developing the resort potential of Basilica bear fruit, of course. But even so, we're undoubtedly looking at a major increase in our prosperity and in the amount of merchant traffic in the area. Which is what concerns me most at the moment."

"Why, Commodore?" Terekhov asked, watching Karlberg intently.

"Because it's going to make us more of a target, especially given how exposed we are, and I don't have the available assets to encourage the ill-intentioned to stay the hell out of my star system," Karlberg said bluntly. "Especially not if they have modern vessels available."

Local geography, traffic to Nuncio and, oh yes, there seem to be some former Peep vessels that have been snooping around the system. That explains why the President wanted to dine with Terekhov.

"This e-mail just came in." Santiago pointed at his old-fashioned display. "The system says it comes from an address that doesn't exist."

"What?" Dekker bent over his subordinate's shoulder, peering at the screen.

"It used to exist," Santiago continued, "but this provider shut down over two T-years ago."

"That's ridiculous," Dekker said. "Somebody must be playing games with his mail origination."

"That's why I think you should take a look at it, Boss," Santiago said. He reached out and tapped the message subject header, and Dekker's eyes narrowed.

"Re: Reasons to evacuate . . . right now," it said.

-snip-

The three of them stood behind a police cordon and a hastily erected wall of sandbags, gazing resignedly at the Rembrandt Trade Union's Montana office from a range of two kilometers. The building sat in a corner of the Brewster City Spaceport, backed up against the warehouse-surrounded trio of combined personnel and heavy-lift freight shuttle pads which customarily serviced RTU traffic on Montana. At the moment, they weren't servicing anything, and the office building itself had been evacuated within fifteen minutes of the e-mail's receipt

Bomb threat to the RTU office on Montana. Followed by bomb.

"He probably thinks it's funny," Haven said. Johansen looked at him, and the Montanan shrugged. "The RTU more or less extorted this particular landing concession out of the planetary government 'bout twenty T-years ago," he said. "Matter of fact, today's the anniversary of the formal signing of the lease agreement."

"We didn't 'extort' anything out of anyone." Dekker's tone was stiff and a bit repressive.

"Didn't use guns or knives," Haven conceded. "And I don't recall anyone being outright threatened with dismemberment. But as I do recall, Hieronymus, Ineka Vaandrager—she wasn't Chairwoman then, Oscar; just the head of their Contract Negotiation Department—made it pretty clear that either we gave you folks the concession, or the RTU put its southern terminal on Tillerman. And slapped a fifteen-percent surcharge onto all Union shipments in or out of Montana, just to smack our wrists for being so ornery and disagreeable about it all." He squinted up at the taller, fair-haired Rembrandter. "'Scuse me if I seem a mite prejudiced, but that sounds kinda like extortion to me."

Maybe a little, at the very least it's strong-arming.

So if he's in the mood to be sending messages, this has to be just about the best exclamation point he could've come up with. 'Specially since the RTU managed to 'negotiate' that exclusive contract with Manticore to transport all the Star Kingdom's official freight, mail, and personnel here in the Cluster."

Johansen started to object that the RTU was the only local entity with the ability to meet all the Star Kingdom's shipping requirements. Despite what anyone else might think, that was the only reason it had been able to secure that exclusive contract, and the contract itself was only interim, until it was possible to invite other bidders to compete. But he kept his mouth closed, instead. Les Haven already knew all of that . . . whether he believed it or not, which was more than Johansen was prepared to say. And whatever Haven thought, now that Johansen had spent some time in the Cluster himself, he could well understand how anyone already suspicious of outside interference in the Cluster's affairs or angry over the Trade Union's economic muscle might easily conclude that the contract was a sweetheart deal from Manticore to repay the RTU for serving as the Star Kingdom's front man.

The RTU got a sweetheart deal as sole carriers of official freight and mail for the Star Empire's government in Talbott.

Not that understanding was any particular comfort as he looked at the shuttle pads and warehouses which contained, among other things, something in excess of fifty million Manticoran dollars worth of survey equipment, air cars, computers, communications systems, field desks, and camping equipment.

"I know how much of our stuff you have warehoused, Hieronymus," he said, after a moment. "How much else is in storage or on the pads?"

"Something in excess of one-point-three billion Rembrandt stellars," Dekker replied, quickly enough to show where his own unhappy thoughts had been. "On the order of five hundred million of your Manticoran dollars. Not to mention, of course, all of the base equipment and—"

Manticoran and RTU losses in the explosion. At least he was nice enough to let all the people evacuate.

He shifted uncomfortably in the saddle. The Montanans' ancestors had scarcely been unique in importing horses and other draft animals as part of their original colonizing expedition. If nothing else, animal transport provided an always useful and sometimes vital fallback. Machines could break, technology could fail or be lost. But horses, donkeys, and oxen—or camels, depending on local climatic conditions—could survive, and reproduce, almost anywhere mankind himself could manage to cling to life.

But the Montanans had taken the whole business rather farther than most. It was part of their romanticized lifestyle. And, Harahap grudgingly conceded, there were times and places where the stupid, four-footed, sharp-spined, stubborn creatures had their uses.

On the other hand, your machinery doesn't need that much feed.

Still, the Montana Marshals Service, the local planetary police force, had an impressive record of successes. It wasn't especially huge, but its personnel were smart, well trained, and—unusually for police, in Harahap's experience—accustomed to thinking outside the box. It was only a matter of time before the Manties provided them with the technological upgrades to let them begin using their existing capability to good effect, so Westman's insistence on developing the proper mindset and techniques to evade the eventual spy satellites probably did make sense. Especially given how hot the hunt for him and his associates had turned in the four days since they'd pulled off their little bombing attack.

MIM (Montana Independence Movement) is already looking ahead to technology Manticore is likely to provide for security and how to evade it. Like using horses instead of air cars to get around.

From his present height, Harahap could see for what had to be at least a hundred kilometers across the gorge of the New Missouri River, and despite his aching buttocks and thighs and the grim reality of the errand which brought him here, he felt more than a touch of outright awe. The New Missouri was the second-longest river on Montana, and over the eons, it had carved a path through the New Sapphire Mountains that dwarfed anything Harahap had ever seen. Westman's representative had informed him proudly that the New Missouri Gorge was almost twice the size of something called the Grand Canyon back on Old Earth, and it was certainly more than enough to make Damien Harahap feel small and ephemeral.

Local landmark. Also the best way to ensure some untrustworthy contact actually comes alone.

"I approve of your caution. But if I were working for Vaandrager or Van Dort, the pulse cannon–armed air cars would already be sweeping down upon us."

"And crashing in the Gorge," Westman said with a smile. Harahap cocked an eyebrow at him, and the Montanan shrugged. "I invested quite a bit of money in the necessary tools before I went underground, Firebrand. Including some rather nice Solly shoulder-fired surface-to-air missiles. They may be a mite out of date, and I don't have many of them, but they work just fine, and I expect they should deal with anything short of a modern assault shuttle. I sort of figured this would be a good place to trot some of them out."

The MIM has Solly-made SAMs.

It was late at night by Hexapuma's internal clocks, and the Fourth Watch had the duty, which meant the assistant tactical officer ought by rights to be the officer of the watch. Normally, neither the captain nor the executive officer aboard a Manticoran warship stood a regularly scheduled watch, since, in theory, they were always on call. The communications officer, astrogator, tactical officer, and assistant tactical officer usually took the regularly scheduled watches, with Tactical getting the additional slot because of the Manticoran tradition that made Tactical the fast track to command. The theory was that if tactical officers were going to be promoted to command responsibilities faster than others, they needed the additional early experience.

Manticoran watch schedules. Normally neither the captain nor the XO takes a formal watch, but Hearns is still a little young to be given the keys to the ship, so Fitzgerald takes Fourth Watch but usually sits in an out-of-the-way corner of the bridge catching up on paperwork and letting Hearns do her thing.

Two of the trio of icons on the display strobed with the bright, quick amber-red-amber flash that CIC used to indicate questionable data, but it certainly looked like a pair of stealthily moving impeller wedges, creeping in above the system ecliptic. Much more interesting, however, in some ways, was the third icon—the one burning the steady red which indicated assurance on CIC's part. That one obviously belonged to a merchantman, although what a merchantship would be doing that far above the ecliptic—and that far outside the system hyper limit—was an interesting question. Especially since it seemed to be following in the strobing icons' wake.

He checked the range and bearing data, and his lips pursed in a silent whistle. They were even farther out than he'd thought. Nuncio-B's hyper limit lay 16.72 light-minutes from the star. At the moment, Hexapuma, in her parking orbit around Pontifex, was about ten light-minutes from the star, but the ship or ships Lieutenant Hearns was tracking were at least forty-five light-minutes out. There was absolutely no legitimate reason for any ship to be stooging around that far from any of the system's inhabited real estate.

Found the bad guys. Nuncio's hyper-limit.

"I wasn't aware we'd deployed our remote platforms that far out," he said conversationally.

"We haven't, really, Sir," she replied. He looked up to raise an eyebrow, and she colored slightly but met his gaze levelly. "All the remote arrays are operating inside the zones Captain Terekhov and Commander Kaplan specified," she said. "I just moved them to the outer edge of their assigned areas."

"I see." He tipped his chair back, resting his left elbow on the arm rest and his chin in his left palm while the fingers of his right hand drummed lightly on the other chair arm. "You're aware, Lieutenant," he continued after a moment, "that if you push the platforms that far out on a spherical front you virtually eliminate their lateral overlap?"

"Yes, Sir," she said crisply. "I thought about that, and if the Exec would look at the main plot?"

He glanced at the display. At the moment, it was configured in astrogation mode, and a complex pattern of vectors appeared on it. He studied them for a few moments, then snorted in understanding.

"Very clever, Lieutenant," he conceded in a neutral tone, watching the pattern evolve. She'd sent the remote platforms dancing through a carefully choreographed waltz that swept them back and forth across their zones. There were moments when they moved apart, widening the gap between them and weakening the coverage, but they always moved back towards one another again.

"What's the timing?" he asked.

"It's set up so that a ship would have to be traveling at at least point-five cee to cross the zone without being in detection range of at least two platforms for at least fifteen minutes, Sir. It seemed unlikely to me that anyone would try to sneak into the inner system at that high a velocity."

Abby's program to get the most reach out of the recon platforms.

"Status change, Sir!" she announced, and FitzGerald's eyes went to his repeater plot, then narrowed. The blinking icons had changed abruptly. They continued to blink, but they were fainter now, connected to a single steadily burning red crosshair. A slowly spreading, shaded cone of the same color radiated from the crosshair, its inmost edge moving in-system with the strobing icons.

"Either they've just killed their wedges, or their stealth just got a lot better, Sir. And that far out, I don't think it's likely they just brought that much more EW on-line."

Yeah, they're coasting in on ballistic to take a better look at Nuncio.

It would be simple enough to steer the remotes into positions from which they could observe Bogey One and Bogey Two's predicted tracks closely enough to defeat the level of stealth they'd so far demonstrated, at any rate. The trick would be to do it using light-speed control links. It was unlikely the bogeys had picked up the arrays' FTL grav pulses yet, given how far away from the arrays they still were and how weak those pulses were, but Hexapuma's transmissions to them would be far more easily detected. So the data Hexapuma had was going to get older, but would still be enormously better than anything the bogeys had. Or that they would believe Nuncio could have, which meant . . .

Going to use light-speed comm to order around the platforms, rather than risk clueing in the intruders that someone in Nuncio has FTL comm.

"That freighter's going to be a stone bitch, Sir," the tac officer said after a moment. "Right off the top of my head, I don't see any way to retake her. Even if we let the shooters have free run of the inner system, she'd probably see us coming and slip away across the hyper wall before we ever got close enough to retake her."

That's a minor problem.

Unless the ship was sitting there with both its impeller nodes and its hyper generator carrying full loads—not a good idea for civilian-grade components—it was going to take a minimum of half an hour, by any realistic estimate, for the crew to fire up and make their escape. If Bogey Three's impeller nodes were hot, she could get under way in normal-space in as little as fifteen minutes, but it would take a good forty-five minutes to bring her nodes up if they weren't at standby. And bringing her hyper generator on-line in a cold start would require an absolute minimum of thirty minutes. Actually, the time requirement would more probably be forty or fifty minutes, given that they were talking about a merchant crew. And if they weren't, the understrength engineering crew the pirates had probably put on board would be hard-pressed to get the job done even that rapidly.

With the sensor suite a typical merchie carried, it was improbable to the point of impossibility that the prize ship—and Kaplan had no more doubt than the Captain or FitzGerald of what the lurking freighter was—could pick up Hexapuma, coming in under stealth, before she got well into the powered envelope of her multi-drive missiles. If she didn't, she couldn't possibly escape into hyper in the interval between the time Hexapuma fired and the time the attack birds arrived on target. And no merchie in the galaxy was going to survive a full missile broadside from an Edward Saganami-C-class cruiser.

Unfortunately, blowing her out of space wasn't exactly the best way to rescue any merchant spacers who might still be on board her.

Start up times for freighter drives. Hexapuma can get into missile range sneakily enough, but probably not beam range which they'd probably need to do to convince the pirates they could be destroyed faster than they can flee into hyper.

"Think about it, Ansten. We've got two warships here. So far, we don't know much about them, except that their stealth capabilities and EW were good enough to keep our sensor array from getting a hard read. Admittedly, we're only using passives, they're coming in under emcon, and the range is very long, but there's no way a typical pirate has that kind of capability. Especially not the sort who'd normally operate out here in the Verge. And while word of the Lynx Terminus must have spread pretty much through the League by now, along with the news that shipping is going to be picking up in the vicinity, we're quite a long way from Lynx at the moment. So just what's sufficiently important about a system as poverty stricken as Nuncio to attract pirates with relatively modern vessels?"

FitzGerald frowned. He'd been focused on the tactical aspects of the situation, and the Captain's question hadn't even occurred to him. It took him a few more seconds to work through the logic chain which Terekhov had obviously already considered, but Bagwell got there first. He looked at Terekhov, tilting his head to the side.

"Sir," he said slowly, "are you suggesting they weren't 'attracted' at all? That they were sent?"

"I think it's possible." Terekhov tilted his chair back and sipped coffee, gazing up at the holo display as if it were a seer's crystal ball. "I can't assess how probable it is, Guthrie, but I find those ships' presence here . . . disturbing. Not the fact that raiders are operating in the area." The right hand moved again. "Weakness always invites predators, even when the hunting isn't all that good. But I am disturbed by their evident capability. And if I were an outside power intent on destabilizing the area to hinder or prevent the annexation, I'd certainly consider subsidizing an increased level of pirate activity."

No dummy, that Captain Terekhov.

"First," he said, "we have to deal with Bogey One and Bogey Two. As you say, Ansten, that's going to require getting them close enough to Hexapuma for us to work on them. If I were in their place, I wouldn't come inside the system hyper limit at all. If these ships are as modern and capable as their stealth capabilities seem to suggest, they probably have the sensor reach to get a good read on any active impeller signatures from at least twelve or thirteen light-minutes. So they could stop that far from Pontifex, which would leave them at least two light-minutes outside the limit, and easily spot any of Commodore Karlberg's LACs which happened to be under way. They probably wouldn't be able to pick up anything in a parking orbit with its impellers down, but if they're really modern units and they're prepared to expend the assets, they could punch recon drones past the planet. And they could feel fairly confident that nothing Nuncio has could intercept their drones even if they managed to detect them in time to try.

Not good. 12-13 light-minutes detection of active wedges unless hidden by really good stealth.

"The only other possibility is to entice them into coming to us. Which suggests that it's time we consider a Trojan Horse approach."

"Use our EW systems to convince them we're a freighter, Sir?" Bagwell asked.

"Exactly," Terekhov agreed.

It's a classic for a reason. If you don't lure them in somehow it's too easy for a starship to break off action.

"We're going to have to get Commander Lewis involved in this, but taking some of the beta nodes out of the wedge and playing a few games with the frequency and power levels on the ones we leave in should let us produce an impeller wedge that's going to be pretty hard for anyone to tell apart from the wedge of, say, a three- or four-million-ton merchie. And if Commander Lewis is as good as I think she is, she ought to be able to induce an apparent frequency flutter into the alpha nodes, especially if she lets the betas carry the real load."

"You think these people's shipboard sensors would be able to pick up a flutter from far enough out to make that work, Guthrie?" Kaplan asked. The electronics warfare officer looked at her com image, and she shrugged. "If they can't see it with their shipboard arrays, then I think they'd be likely to go ahead and pop off one of those recon drones the Skipper was talking about a minute ago. That might pick up the flutter, all right, but it would also probably get close enough for a look at us using plain old-fashioned opticals. In which case, they'd recognize what we really are in a heartbeat."

Impersonating a merchie, optics on recon drones.

"Skipper, you told us one of our jobs out here was anti-piracy work, and Paulo and I figured that sooner or later we'd have to deal with a problem pretty much like the one we're looking at here. So we started playing around with simulations. If Commander Lewis—and you, of course, Sir—are willing to put a little extra wear on the ship's alpha nodes, I think we can generate a pretty convincing normal-space flare. The sort of flare a failing beta node might produce. Nice and bright, and clearly visible to any modern warship at at least ten or twelve light-minutes. And just to put a cherry on top, we could simulate successive flares. The sort of thing you might see if an entire impeller ring that was in pretty shaky shape was overstressed so badly its nodes began failing in succession."

This, on the other hand, should be a spectacularly showy engineering failure, enough to be easily visible with no reason to send a recon drone to double-check.

"That's one of the things I was already thinking about," Terekhov said before the tac officer could reply. "Since it shouldn't be that difficult for us to track these people with our own arrays, it ought to be possible for us to coach a Nuncian LAC onto a course which will bring it close enough to the bogeys for it to have detected them. At which point, the LAC skipper would quite reasonably broadcast an omnidirectional general warning that stealthed ships were entering the inner system."

They'll arrange for an LAC to 'stumble' over the intruders and warn them, at such a range and angle it will be impossible for them to engage.

Abigail Hearns sat in the copilot's seat on the flight deck of the pinnace tractored to the hull of the Nuncian Space Force light attack craft. Although NNS Wolverine—named for a Pontifex species which bore remarkably little resemblance to the far smaller Terran predator of the same name—dwarfed the pinnace, she was tiny compared to any true starship. In fact, at barely fifteen thousand tons, she was less than five percent the size of Hexapuma, yet she was one of the more powerful units of Nuncio's fleet.

Pinnace tractored to the LAC, piggy-backing out to go take care of the captured freighter.

Five other LACs sat with her, all that could reach her present position before she'd stopped in space, holding position on minimal power, and let her homeworld move away from her. They were packed to the limits of their life-support capacity with two companies of Nuncio Army troops who, Commodore Karlberg had assured Captain Terekhov, were fully qualified for boarding actions and vacuum work. She hoped Karlberg was right, although if everything went well, it probably wouldn't matter one way or the other.

The real teeth of the boarding force lay in the platoon of Captain Kaczmarczyk's Marines distributed—along with Abigail Hearns, Mateo Gutierrez, Midshipman Aikawa Kagiyama, and Midshipwoman Ragnhild Pavletic—between the two pinnaces under her command.

Six pinnaces carrying a company of Manty Marines and two companies of Nuncian army. Abby also got a brevet to senior-grade lieutenant.

Captain Magnus Einarsson was obviously one of the Nuncians who had trouble remembering that prolong meant the Manticorans with whom he was interacting were uniformly older than they appeared to Nuncian eyes. When he looked at Abigail, he saw a teenager, probably somewhere on the lower side of sixteen, and not a young woman almost ten T-years older than that. Worse, Nuncio was an uncompromisingly patriarchal culture. The bitter centuries of bare subsistence and miserable medical care had created a society which was forced to stoically endure a horrendous child mortality rate. For most of their planetary history, Nuncian women had been too busy bearing children—and dying of childbirth fever, as often as not, until the local medical establishment finally rediscovered the germ theory of disease—to do much of anything else. Only in the last two or three generations had the system's slowly climbing technology level made it possible to change that. And, human societies being human societies, cultural changes of that magnitude didn't happen overnight.

Nuncian feelings towards female children in uniform (from their perspective) are not that positive.

"Skipper, according to CIC, this is a Mars-class heavy cruiser."

"A Peep?"

There was something in the Captain's voice. A sharper edge, or a pause. A fleeting break, perhaps. Something. But Kaplan couldn't quite put her finger on it, whatever it was. And if she'd actually heard it at all, it had disappeared by his next sentence.

"CIC is confident of that?" he asked.

"Reasonably, Sir. They're still calling it tentative, but I think that's just ingrained caution. There is one weird thing about it, though, Skipper. The sensor array crossed astern of Bogey One, right through her stealth field's keyhole, and got a read on her emissions. That's how we were able to ID her. But according to CIC's analysis of the neutrino data, this ship appears to have the old Goshawk-Three fusion plants."

"Goshawk-Three?"

"Yes, Sir. And according to ONI, their yards upgraded to the Goshawk-Four at the construction stage with the third flight for the class, and they've systematically updated the surviving older members of the class—there aren't many of them left—since the armistice. There were some serious design flaws in the Goshawk-Three, and the Four not only corrected those but boosted output by over fifteen percent, so they've made a real effort to upgrade across the fleet. According to ONI, they shouldn't have any of the old Threes left."

Apparently they can identify a fusion plant by close-range neutrino emissions.

His experiences at Hyacinth had left him with a fiery, burning need to know all there was to know about the ships which had slaughtered his division and his convoy. He'd haunted ONI, trading ruthlessly on his "war hero" status, until he'd learned the names of the task force commander and each of his squadron COs. He'd learned the enemy order of battle, which ships his people had destroyed, which they'd damaged. And in the process, he'd learned even more about the enemy's hardware than he'd known before the battle. Including the reason the Goshawk-Three had been retired with such indecent haste when the follow-on generation of fusion plants had become available.

The Goshawk-Three, like the heavy cruisers and battlecruisers in which it had originally been mounted, had been a typical product of the prewar Peep tech base: big, powerful, and crude. Unable to match the sophistication of the Star Kingdom, the People's Republic had relied on hardware designed for brute strength and far shorter intervals between overhauls, but the Goshawk-Three had been unusually crude, even for the Peeps. It had represented a transitional phase between their prewar hardware and the more sophisticated designs they'd managed to produce later, courtesy of Solarian tech transfers. It had been substantially more efficient than its predecessors, producing almost twice the output for a bare ten percent increase in size. But it had reduced the redundancy of its failsafes to save mass . . . and ended up with what turned out to be an extremely dangerous glitch in the containment bottle. At least two ships had suffered catastrophic containment failure in parking orbit under standby power levels. No one, the Peeps included, knew how many other ships had been killed by the combination of the same design fault and combat damage, but the number had undoubtedly been far higher than that.

That certainly explains the "indecent haste" involved in swapping out the things. Apparently the inclusion of Solly hardware let the Peeps double their fusion output.

But even as he tried to think of one, another thought was running somewhere deep, deep in the secret hollow of his mind.

A Mars-class. Another Mars-class. And no light cruiser to kill it with, this time.

Oh no, not this time.

Ease up there, Cap'n Ahab.

At the moment, Wolverine, her consorts, and the two piggybacking pinnaces, were over thirty-three light-minutes from Pontifex and a bit over two and a half light-minutes from Bogey Three. From the cockpit, Nuncio-B was little more than an especially brilliant star to the naked eye, and the planet wasn't visible at all. The pinnace's onboard sensors were much better than that, of course. In fact, they were as good as anything the far larger Nuncian LACs carried. Which didn't mean either the pinnaces or the LACs could see much of anything smaller than a star or a planet—well, perhaps a moon—at this range. Nor could they see much about a powered-down freighter at a hundred and fifty-one light-seconds.

Fortunately, Captain Terekhov had taken steps to provide Abigail with sharper, clearer eyes. One of Hexapuma's sensor drones was tractored to Wolverine's spine beside the pinnace. With the LAC's impeller wedge down, the drone's exquisitely sensitive passive sensors had the sort of reach most navies' all-up starships could only envy. Abigail still couldn't make out any details about the volume of space around the planet, but she had a perfect lock on the freighter, and the array was close enough to pick up even the minute emissions from things like hyper generators at standby.

Pinnace sensors, and a recon drone can apparently pick up a hyper generator on standby at two light minutes.

The storage capacity of computers wasn't unlimited, but when Hexapuma's databases had been updated for her current deployment, they'd been loaded (among other deployment-specific information) with the specs and design schematics for the most common Solarian merchantship classes, since she was far more likely to be meeting Sollies than Manticoran vessels here in the Verge. She, in turn, had downloaded that information to her pinnaces, which would be conducting any examinations or searches of suspect merchantmen she might encounter. Now data scrolled across Abigail's display, cross-referenced to the full spectrum of Bogey Three's emissions.

Manty ships load detailed information on every ship type they're likely to encounter. I doubt data-storage is a huge issue if they still have room for decent-sized game libraries.

The Dromedary class had been designed almost a hundred and fifty T-years ago, she noted, and aside from occasional updates in its electronics, it was virtually unchanged today. That was an eloquent testimonial to its suitability for the sort of general utility required of a smallish (relatively speaking) freighter working around the fringes of the League's merchant marine. It might be a bit much to call the Dromedaries "tramps," but it wouldn't be far off the mark, either.

Abigail watched the data come up and rubbed the tip of her nose thoughtfully. Normal complement was forty-two—large for a Manticoran ship of her tonnage, but manpower was at less of a premium in the League, and their merchant designs tended to use less comprehensive automation. Maximum theoretical acceleration for the class was two hundred and ten gravities, but that was with a zero safety margin on their compensators, and no sane merchant skipper was going to operate his ship at those levels. The standard ships of the class were designed for a hardwired five percent compensator safety margin, limiting them to a maximum of two hundred gees, although it was possible this ship's legitimate owners—or the pirates who'd captured it—might have removed the safety interlocks to give them a bit more acceleration.

4 M-ton Solly freighter has a crew over forty, apparently more than a Manty ship would have. 200 Gs max accel, maybe 210 if you override all the hardwired safeties.

That was good. Without the alpha nodes, her maximum acceleration would be reduced by well over thirty percent—call it a hundred and thirty gravities, barely a quarter of what a Nuncian LAC could turn out, and only about twenty percent of what the newest generation of Manticoran pinnaces could produce.

Roughly 650 Gs for a pinnace.

Manticoran civilian designers had a tendency to sacrifice some cargo-handling flexibility by moving things like fusion plants and hyper generators closer to the center of a ship, rather than leaving them exposed, but Solarian designers were less concerned, by and large, about such design features. A smaller percentage of the Solly merchant marine worked in high-risk environments like Silesia or deep into the Verge, and the Solarian philosophy was that any merchantship which found itself under fire should surrender and stop pretending it was a warship before it got hurt.

Differences in design philosophy.

But the instant any of them began decelerating, even a half-blind freighter with civilian-grade sensors was bound to spot them, and they would still be far out of energy weapon range. The small lasers mounted by Hexapuma's pinnaces, without the more powerful gravitic lensing of their mothership's main battery weapons, would do well to inflict damage at any range over eighty thousand kilometers. The Nuncian LACs' lasers, although bigger, with more brute power, had far poorer fire control. They had the range to hit the freighter from a half million kilometers, but they'd have no effective control of where they hit it, and the sheer power of their weapons made any hit far more likely to inflict damage which might prove lethal instead of merely crippling.

So they'd have to overfly the freighter, disable her hyper generator in passing with the pinnaces' lasers, and then decelerate and come back. The fact that the Dromedaries were a spinal design would help—Abigail had been afraid they'd have to penetrate deeply into their target's hull to reach her generator, and Captain Terekhov had been forced to face the same possibility. That was the real reason Wolverine and the other LACs were along, because in the end, Terekhov was willing to risk destroying the freighter if that was the only way to stop it, and the Nuncian weapons were powerful enough to blast through to a deeply buried target.

The plan is for a quick fly-by shooting to disable FTL, than decal and circle back. 80,000 K range for pinnace lasers against a target with no sidewall.

Even in a best-case scenario, there was going to be bitter criticism of the Captain's plan from some quarters, because it didn't include any attempt to demand Bogey Three's surrender. Under the strict letter of interstellar law, a warship was always obligated to demand compliance with its instructions before firing into a merchantship, and a naval officer ignored that obligation at her peril. In this instance, however, there was no point making the effort. No doubt Bogey Three would happily have promised to stay exactly where it was if Abigal demanded that it do so. And it would have obeyed faithfully . . . just long enough for Abigail's velocity to take her safely out of weapons range.

No. In this case, the only real options were to cripple the -target without warning, so that it couldn't hyper out whenever it wanted to, or else not even to attempt to retake it. The Captain had accepted that unflinchingly, and the fact that Abigail agreed with him a hundred percent didn't make her any happier about knowing that even under the best possible outcome, she was about to kill people.

Itty-bitty flexing of interstellar law here, but it's for a very good cause.

But worse, in many ways, was the possibility that she might never have the chance to kill them. The Captain had made it clear that, badly as he wanted Bogey Three taken, and despite the grave risks he was prepared to run to accomplish that, taking out the armed vessels took precedence over retaking the freighter. So Abigail and Einarsson were specifically prohibited from firing on the Dromedary at all unless Terekhov was confident of engaging the armed vessels before any light-speed warning from the freighter could reach them.

Or if they're spotted, naturally. Just adding one more layer of complication to this plan.

Ahriman238 · Post by **Ahriman238** » 2014-07-12 05:11pm

And now for something completely different, we interrupt the imminent battle to check in with Bernadus Van Dort on Rembrandt.

In short, a depressingly typical winter's day on sunny Rembrandt, Bernardus Van Dort thought sardonically as he stood, gazing out the familiar window, hands clasped behind him. Only a batch of loopy, Renaissance Revivalists like my esteemed over-educated, under-brained ancestors could pick a planet like this for their new home. Bunch of artistically obsessed nincompoops, the lot of them.

The dreary scene was a far cry from the springtime warmth of Thimble. Then again, Rembrandt wasn't as nice a planet, in lots of ways, as Flax. He wondered sometimes if his homeworld's miserable climate helped explain the alacrity with which Rembrandters had abandoned the Founders' cultural pretensions. He didn't know about that, but he was quite certain it explained the emergence of the merchant marine—rare, for any system in the Verge—which had allowed Rembrandt to become a mercantile power.

A matter of anything that gets us off-world has to be a good idea, that's what it was. He smiled at the thought. I know I always luxuriated shamelessly on visits to planets which actually see the sun between summer and late spring.

Climate of Rembrandt, and the particular focus of it's early colonists. I doubt this is a global problem, even Weber can't seem to quite shake the temptation to treat planets like cities, but I'm prepared to accept the climate is generally uncomfortable.

"I'm a bit concerned about some things I've been hearing." He came to the point with characteristic brevity. "Specifically, about new negotiations with Scarlet. I was under the impression we already had quite a favorable agreement in place with them—we certainly did when I left for the Convention—so I fail to understand why it's necessary to 'renegotiate' at this point. And I've heard about certain threats of retaliation in which our representatives seem to have indulged when President Standley proved . . . unreceptive to our 'requests.'"

"Did you come all the way home from Spindle over something that routine?" she asked, and shook her head in amused exasperation.

"It's scarcely 'routine,'" he said, his own expression anything but amused. "And, as I say, I fail to see any pressing reason for new trade negotiations at a time when we ought to be concentrating on . . . other matters, shall we say? I thought we were in agreement about that, Ineka."

Van Dort is here to see Ineka Vaandrager, his second-in-command whose been using the opportunity of "the boss is away playing statesman" to use more of the strong-arm business tactics that have made the RTU so popular on Montana.

"You're not Chairman of the Board any longer. I am," she gritted. Then she made her jaws relax, but her hard eyes never wavered as she went on in a flat, biting tone as flexible as hammered steel. "And as Chairwoman, I don't intend to let a group of insane, bloodthirsty malcontents dictate our trade policies! You can go back to Spindle and kowtow to them if you want—we have no intention of following suit."

"You know," he said in a far more conversational tone, leaning back and crossing his legs, "I never realized, back when I first tapped you for Negotiations, just how blunt an instrument you actually are. It may surprise you to discover this, Ineka, but not all problems are nails you can pound flat or boulders you can smash by simply reaching for a bigger hammer. I suppose it's my own fault for not recognizing your limitations at the time, but I thought we needed someone like you. I was in a hurry, more worried about results than any hostility we might generate, and there were . . . other things on my mind."

His eyes darkened briefly in memory of old, unhealed pain, but he shook it aside, and his eyes narrowed with hard, focused purpose.

"Truth to tell, I still believe we did need those results—then. But I've come to suspect I was wrong to think a hammer was the best way to get them. Especially a hammer as fundamentally stupid as you are."

Vaandrager's face darkened as his tone flayed her sense of self-importance. She opened her mouth to snap back, but he continued.

"That, however, is an error I intend to correct."

So this is how we finally meet the infamous Bernardus Van Dort, about whom much has been discussed. Fixing one of his old mistakes, the petty shark he let climb to the top of his company, accepting responsibility at the same time that he acknowledges that the annexation is more important than the financial bottom-line.

"I have a responsibility to our stockholders and to everyone else who depends on the umbrella of the Union. It's always been our policy to press for progressively reduced import and export duties for our shipping and industries, because we depend on the removal of trade barriers for our goods and shipping, and you know it. I'm not going to abdicate that responsibility just because some mass murderers on a planet so poor it doesn't have a pot to piss in don't like us. And, I remind you, when you were Chairman, your own policies were rather more . . . aggressive than the ones you seem to be attempting to insist upon now."

Again with acknowledging Van Dort's past, and long-standing RTU policy.

"Business is business," she said flatly, "and politics are politics. Don't expect me—or our investors—to confuse them, or to abandon core policies and sacrifice hard-won gains for some quixotic quest of yours. There was a time when you understood that."

"There was a time when my options and tools were more circumscribed . . . as you ought to understand perfectly well. Or were you absent the day your corporate mentor explained exactly what it was the Trade Union was intended to accomplish?"

"Please!" She rolled her eyes. "Do you really think anyone else ever believed that pious, moralistic 'mission statement'? Propaganda's all very well, and it obviously has its place, but don't make the mistake of believing anyone else ever took it seriously."

"I don't really care about 'anyone else.' I took it seriously when I drafted it. And I still do."

She started to laugh, then stopped as she finally recognized the true depth of the incandescent rage hidden behind the cold self-control in his icy blue eyes. The scornful amusement drained out of her expression, and he watched it go with grim satisfaction.

"You really don't want to cross swords with me, Ineka," he told her softly. "I created the Trade Union. It was my idea. I found the initial capital—most of it out of my own family's pockets. I talked a gaggle of other independent shipowners into associating themselves with me, and I sold the notion to old President Verstappen and Parliament. I talked San Miguel, Redoubt, and Prairie into joining as equal partners. And yes, I wrote our mission statement. And whatever you may think, I didn't do all of that just to put money in your credit accounts or cater to your own over-inflated ego."

"I—" she began hotly, but his voice rolled right over hers, still soft, but inexorable as Juggernaut.

"I did it because it was the only possible option I saw to avoid what Frontier Security's done to every other Verge system that attracted its attention. Because the only way I could think of to protect our citizens from the kind of debt peonage the Solly multistellars impose was to become a fat enough goose, with enough potential golden eggs, to be able to buy better treatment, like the Maya Sector did.

"Oh, I won't try to pretend the possibility of getting even wealthier didn't appeal to me as well, but money's only a tool, Ineka. You've never understood that. You seem to feel some compulsion to just keep piling it up, higher and deeper, as if it had some intrinsic value besides the things you can do with it. But neither of us could possibly spend the money we already have fast enough to keep our net worth from increasing hand over fist, so what's the point in squeezing the last drop of blood out of a turnip just to keep score or count coup?"

Foundation of the RTU. The company has always been Van Dort's tool to bring the Cluster together and resist OFS when they come knocking. Not all of the RTU believes in their official mission statement, but it has always been so.

"Resent it all you like," he told her flatly. "I came home for two reasons. One was to remove myself from the political debate, because some of the delegates were spending more time worrying about the RTU 'puppetmaster' than about drafting a Constitution. But the other was to investigate reports I was getting about your policy directives. I didn't have any idea Nordbrandt was going to murder so many people, but the reports from Kornati only emphasize to me how right I was to be worried about you."

Alright, so he had two motives for coming back home to Rembrandt.

"You aren't going to do anything to lend one gram of additional credence to the arguments of the Cluster's Agnes Nordbrandts and Stephen Westmans. The Union's member systems and shareholders already stand to make a fortune off our existing service contracts with the Star Kingdom. Once the annexation's completed, we'll still enjoy the inside position in the Cluster, because we're already up and running—the only organized local shipping cartel. But all those tariff and tax advantages you've extorted out of other systems, all the trade barriers you've busted, won't matter squat. We'll all belong to the same political unit, and aside from the junction use fees, the Star Kingdom's always pursued a policy of interstellar free trade. Do you think they'll do less for their domestic commerce? That the Queen of Manticore's going to let you keep your sweetheart deals? Or that you'll actually need them?"

He grimaced in disgust. Was she really so smallminded she didn't realize even that much? Couldn't see the huge edge the Union's existing connections and infrastructure would give it in the new, unified Cluster economy? They might no longer dominate it outright, but where was the need to do that when a smaller slice of such a hugely increased pie would be so vast?

Free trade as part of Manticore, less the duties on the Junction.

"If you can't think of it any other way, think about this—the amounts of money you'll be able to pile up in your private accounts if the annexation goes through will dwarf anything you could ever have managed without it. But if enough people start agreeing with Nordbrandt, the annexation won't go through. And if it doesn't, OFS won't hesitate an instant. They'll move in on the Cluster like vultures, and we'll be just wealthy enough to be their priority target, and not wealthy enough to have any voice in the terms of our peonage. So forget about altruism, or the silly concept that human beings have any value that can't be quantified in terms of money, and think about what will happen to you—you personally, Ineka—when the Sollies move in."

She stared at him, her mouth taut with rage, and he suddenly realized that she didn't really believe it.

My God. She actually thinks she can cut a deal with OFS—that she's a big enough fish, got enough clout, to protect her personal position if she offers to throw in with them and bring her local contacts and knowledge with her. And she doesn't give a solitary damn about anyone else. She'd be perfectly happy to play Judas goat if it let her hang onto her own precious, privileged position. Could it be she'd actually prefer OFS? Yes, it could be, in some ways, at least. Because if the annexation goes through and we integrate into the Star Kingdom's economy, she's suddenly going to be a much smaller fish. And one without the power to rattle the cages of planetary presidents. But as an OFS collaborator . . .

He felt physically ill at the thought, but as he looked into those hard, flat hazel eyes, he could no longer deny the truth.

Van Dort's "What have I done" moment regarding his company and it's Chairwoman. Not that he didn't walk into the office completely prepared to shitcan her.

"As you may be aware, the Van Dort family—which is to say, me—controls forty-two percent of the Union's voting shares outright. The Alquezar family controls another twelve percent. There are no proxies involved, Ineka. Unlike you, Joachim and I control our votes directly, and I remind you that according to the bylaws, a special meeting must be convened upon the request of fifty-one percent of the voting stockholders. I'd hoped I might convince you to see reason. I see now that I can't. Fortunately, there are other remedies."

"Now, just a minute, Bernardus," she began. "I know tempers are running high. And you're right about how my ego sometimes gets involved in these things. But there's no need to destabilize the entire Union just because you and I disagree on policy and tactics."

"Spare me, Ineka," he said wearily. "You were my mistake. Now I'm going to fix it. Don't waste your time or mine pretending you and I can come to some sort of meeting of the minds. What's happening in Thimble right now is far more important than anything happening here, and I'm not going to have you standing in the way."

Well, she's out. Now to see if he can save the company reputation after thirty years of using her as their primary negotiator and letting her become chairman after the Convention was called.

CaptainChewbacca · Post by **CaptainChewbacca** » 2014-07-12 07:11pm

I feel like I'm missing out on a lot by only reading the main series books. Would you recommend I check out the Crown of Slaves series or Saganami Island next? I'm on vacation.

Ahriman238 · Post by **Ahriman238** » 2014-07-12 09:05pm

Crown of Slaves has more ties to the overarching plot of shadowy Mesan puppetmasters, but has a serious tone shift. It really is a diplomacy/spy series. Saganami Island is just more fun, at least for the first book, and definitely what I, personally, would recommend.

VhenRa · Post by **VhenRa** » 2014-07-12 10:29pm

Yeah. Crown of Slaves (and it's series) is a combination of Spy, Diplomacy... and Buddy Cop. Lots of intrigue, more personal scale combat. Missiles? What missiles?

Though, to be fair. Saganami Island series is also more loaded on the lower scale stuff.

DarkArk · Post by **DarkArk** » 2014-07-13 03:01am

Yes, you should. I've been re-reading/skimming At All Costs after reading Crown of Slaves and Shadow of Saganami and it explains more about what is going on. It also helps the buildup to certain plotpoints later in the series considerably.

Saganami Island is just more fun, at least for the first book, and definitely what I, personally, would recommend.

Would also have to agree with this. I like the politics/spy stuff of Zilwicki and Cachat, but if the earlier Honor books are what you enjoyed Shadow of Saganami is a return to that form.

The order of reading according to Simon:

Ashes of Victory
War of Honor
Crown of Slaves
Shadow of Saganami
(the latter two books take place during the action of War of Honor, don't have much direct effect on it, and have at least some effect on At All Costs)

At All Costs
Torch of Freedom
Storm from the Shadows
(the latter two books take place during the action of At All Costs but don't have much direct effect on it. They *definitely* affect the action of Mission of Honor)

Mission of Honor
Shadow of Freedom
Cauldron of Ghosts
(the latter two books take place during the action of Mission of Honor but don't have much direct effect on it)

VhenRa · Post by **VhenRa** » 2014-07-13 03:16am

Yeah. Cauldron of Ghosts ends like... a right after Shadow of Freedom. To the point where the final chapter of Shadow of Freedom... is basically the punch line in Cauldron of Ghost's ending. I was right near the end of Cauldron of Ghosts, wondering how in the world will our heroes get out of this pickle they have found themselves in... when I remembered the final part of Shadow of Freedom.

Though, technically.. chunks of Cauldron of Ghosts and Shadow of Freedom take place during "A Rising Thunder", which also starts near the end of Mission of Honor itself. Mission of Honor/A Rising Thunder/Shadow of Freedom/Cauldron of Ghosts is basically a big confused mess timeline wise. And Shadow of Saganami actually starts during At All Costs and ends during At All Costs. With Storm from the Shadows beginning during At All Costs as well.

Hell, the opening few chapters of Storm from the Shadows.. actually start before the end of Shadow of Saganami IIRC.

Simon_Jester · Post by **Simon_Jester** » 2014-07-13 12:15pm

The easy way out is to read the books in order of publication, which basically works because Weber isn't stupid and doesn't want to terminally confuse his readerbase.

Ahriman238 wrote:After the massive die off on Basilica, followed by most of the colonists on Pontifex dying, the survivors became forcefully, almost aggressively athetistic, and do not fondly recall "the founding twits." Still, lots of room for growth here, Manticoran technology can make Basilica super-habitable. Of course, there's not exactly a ton of surplus population anywhere in the Star Empire to move in.

Observe that this sort of thing is exactly why you don't really want to be one of the outermost shell of colonies in human space if you can avoid it, if that means being several months' flying time from anyone who could help you out of a jam. Thus, there is a lot more incentive to settle places closer to support.

I'm actually surprised after over a century of prolong that the younger generation even thinks in terms of their age and appearance vs. pre-prolong...

A young woman who feels as though she's looked like a flat-chested thirteen-year-old for eight years might well be quite frustrated with it by now.

More generally, I can't think of a case where Weber makes a point of it except when he's writing a scene where prolong recipients meet pre-prolong people whose standards are characteristically pre-prolong. I mean, all the midshipmen on Hexapuma are of roughly the same age and grew up in a world where everyone living has prolong (give or take a few beloved grandparents or great-grandparents who'd have made it to 1910-20 PD). They don't remark on each other's appearances as being odd, even though presumably Zilwicki, d'Arezzo, Stottmeister, and Kagiyama all look roughly as youthful as Pavletic does (say, fourteen, fifteen, or sixteen by today's standards).

It's simply normal now for 21 year olds to look biologically 13. Which raises a couple of questions vis-à-vis people who are totally at the age of consent but look and biologically are prepubescent. I mean, everyone from Honor to the Queen have complained about a torturously stretched adolescence and years spent trying to get people to take them seriously as an adult, but Honor would have looked really young at the Academy when Young tried to rape her, and during her disastrous post-rape relationship.

True. On the other hand, it's not like real fourteen and fifteen-year-olds aren't attracted to each other in real life. Putting twenty year old brains in fifteen year old (looking) bodies doesn't mean they'll stop having sexual relationships, given that everybody looks like that and the real fifteen year olds look even younger.

Also, I'm not sure 'post-rape' is an accurate description given that the physical act never occurred and in fact the would-be rapist got his balls kicked up between his ears by the intended victim. But yeah, I take your meaning.

Hopefully their brain development isn't noticeably slowed by prolong, I'd hate to think they had middies with a 13-14 year-olds impulse control in the service. For that matter, how much of growing up is physical brain development vs. life experience?

Honestly, I don't think it would even be possible to educate people with the brains of 13-14 year old children to be naval officers in a professional starfaring service. There are too many abstract concepts to learn. You'd have to find some very exceptional individuals, and those would also be the ones who even as children show the greatest aptitude for responsibility, prudence, and big-picture thinking.

Ragnhild stood behind the Captain, listening unobtrusively to the conversation, and wondered if Wexler was deliberately drawing attention to Pontifex's primitive technology. It happened, sometimes. Or that was what her instructors at the Academy had told her, anyway. Sometimes the inhabitants of planets whose societies or technology bases had been hammered especially hard took a sort of aggressive, in-your-face reverse pride in their neobarbarian status.
Eh?

Think of the justifiable pride the GLORIOUS KERBAL GRAYSONS might feel at their own pre-1905 accomplishments, which they built from essentially nothing, including having to reinvent from scratch some of the most fundamental of modern technologies and doing a damn good job.

Plus, well, the same psychology that causes any impoverished group to find reasons to feel superior to richer, softer-living peoples around it. "Poor but honest," "poor but tough," "my grandpappy could beat up your grandpappy," sort of thing.

"...Ineka Vaandrager—she wasn't Chairwoman then, Oscar; just the head of their Contract Negotiation Department—made it pretty clear that either we gave you folks the concession, or the RTU put its southern terminal on Tillerman. And slapped a fifteen-percent surcharge onto all Union shipments in or out of Montana, just to smack our wrists for being so ornery and disagreeable about it all." He squinted up at the taller, fair-haired Rembrandter. "'Scuse me if I seem a mite prejudiced, but that sounds kinda like extortion to me."
Maybe a little, at the very least it's strong-arming.

Also note that even government employees and other people on Montana have a... dislike for the RTU. Westman may be unique in his willingness to wage a guerilla campaign against them, but he's far from unique in hating them.

Manticoran and RTU losses in the explosion. At least he was nice enough to let all the people evacuate.

Westman is an interesting contrast to, say, Nordbrandt on Kornati, in that he is trying pretty hard not to kill anyone. It speaks well of his character.

[I note with some asperity that the Righteous Space-American Good Ol' Boy anti-unification guerilla is a heroic Robin Hood of the stars, while the Funny-Sounding Foreign-Named 'Extremist' anti-unification guerilla is a mass murderer.)

He shifted uncomfortably in the saddle. The Montanans' ancestors had scarcely been unique in importing horses and other draft animals as part of their original colonizing expedition. If nothing else, animal transport provided an always useful and sometimes vital fallback. Machines could break, technology could fail or be lost. But horses, donkeys, and oxen—or camels, depending on local climatic conditions—could survive, and reproduce, almost anywhere mankind himself could manage to cling to life.
On the other hand, your machinery doesn't need that much feed.

True, but grass is cheap while oil requires refineries.

Also, if the planet's ecology allows, you can literally just turn (the right kind of) horses loose into the wild and they'll breed, creating a tamable population of them forever after. Obviously that raises issues if you're worried about invasive species, but it's at least a possibility.

Any other technology beyond the level of a sharp rock can be lost if people lose the resources to maintain it. The existence of horse herds... not so much.

"I approve of your caution. But if I were working for Vaandrager or Van Dort, the pulse cannon–armed air cars would already be sweeping down upon us."

"And crashing in the Gorge," Westman said with a smile. Harahap cocked an eyebrow at him, and the Montanan shrugged. "I invested quite a bit of money in the necessary tools before I went underground, Firebrand. Including some rather nice Solly shoulder-fired surface-to-air missiles. They may be a mite out of date, and I don't have many of them, but they work just fine, and I expect they should deal with anything short of a modern assault shuttle. I sort of figured this would be a good place to trot some of them out."
The MIM has Solly-made SAMs.

Also, Westman could afford to buy the equivalent of a goodly number of Stinger missile launchers capable of intercepting countergrav flying vehicles out of pocket, even before Firebrand and friends got to him.

It's a classic for a reason. If you don't lure them in somehow it's too easy for a starship to break off action.

At least, assuming you don't have or can't use MDMs to obliterate them from half an astronomical unit away...

They'll arrange for an LAC to 'stumble' over the intruders and warn them, at such a range and angle it will be impossible for them to engage.

It's kind of hard for me to see how that's supposed to work (the 'can't engage' part), but sure.

Nuncian feelings towards female children in uniform (from their perspective) are not that positive.

Also, Nuncio apparently 'forgot' the germ theory of disease. Which I find very difficult to believe... but if that is what happened then it's hard not to justify calling them "neobarbarians."

[Also, being 'two or three' generations from the time when double-digit mortality rates caused by death in childbirth were common would put them somewhere in the early to mid-20th century, I think]

Apparently they can identify a fusion plant by close-range neutrino emissions.

I can't easily calculate the neutrino flux from an Honorverse fusion reactor, but this well be possible IF you have a very good neutrino detector.

That certainly explains the "indecent haste" involved in swapping out the things. Apparently the inclusion of Solly hardware let the Peeps double their fusion output.

It may also help to explain some of the Havenite ship blowups we saw in the first round of the war, especially if the CA/BC-class "Goshawk" reactors weren't the only ones that were being run on dangerous overcharge.

But even as he tried to think of one, another thought was running somewhere deep, deep in the secret hollow of his mind.

A Mars-class. Another Mars-class. And no light cruiser to kill it with, this time.

Oh no, not this time.
Ease up there, Cap'n Ahab.

He'll get it out of his system eventually...

Ahriman238 wrote:Climate of Rembrandt, and the particular focus of it's early colonists. I doubt this is a global problem, even Weber can't seem to quite shake the temptation to treat planets like cities, but I'm prepared to accept the climate is generally uncomfortable.

Also, when the founding population of a colony is measured in the tens or hundreds of thousands, they'll often tend to clump up in one area of the planet... and for at least a few generations afterward they'll still mostly be found in a small region. That makes an impression on people.

Post by **Mr Bean** » 2014-07-13 01:33pm

About prolouge
There is a section in the second book where Admiral Mathews is looking around at all the 2nd and third generation prologs and he mentions they look like teenagers. It's a common trend in that 3rd generation stops the aging process in the mid 30s while 2nd generation stops it in the mid to late twenties but it seems 3rd generation (Which JUST started getting used 1900 PD if the chronology is right) stops the aging process in the late teens, early twenties.

Everything I've read about it says the treatment freezes your age for a hundred to three hundred years and then wears off and you age normally, so if Ragnhild Pavletic got 3rd generation the first day you can legally give it to a child she might be looking at a twenty year adolescences or some other biological craziness.

Ahriman238 · Post by **Ahriman238** » 2014-07-13 01:57pm

Simon_Jester wrote:
I'm actually surprised after over a century of prolong that the younger generation even thinks in terms of their age and appearance vs. pre-prolong...
A young woman who feels as though she's looked like a flat-chested thirteen-year-old for eight years might well be quite frustrated with it by now.

More generally, I can't think of a case where Weber makes a point of it except when he's writing a scene where prolong recipients meet pre-prolong people whose standards are characteristically pre-prolong. I mean, all the midshipmen on Hexapuma are of roughly the same age and grew up in a world where everyone living has prolong (give or take a few beloved grandparents or great-grandparents who'd have made it to 1910-20 PD). They don't remark on each other's appearances as being odd, even though presumably Zilwicki, d'Arezzo, Stottmeister, and Kagiyama all look roughly as youthful as Pavletic does (say, fourteen, fifteen, or sixteen by today's standards).

Yes but everyone else she interacts with should be used to young men and women looking like early teens by now. Then again, some young adults have enough problems with being treated as younger without the appearance adding to it.

I mean, McKeon was a little off-put by how much younger than himself Honor seemed at first, though he admitted she got a later generation of prolong that froze her age much earlier. But other than that, you're correct, they don't remark on it much.

Also, I'm not sure 'post-rape' is an accurate description given that the physical act never occurred and in fact the would-be rapist got his balls kicked up between his ears by the intended victim. But yeah, I take your meaning.

She seemed plenty traumatized all the same.

Hopefully their brain development isn't noticeably slowed by prolong, I'd hate to think they had middies with a 13-14 year-olds impulse control in the service. For that matter, how much of growing up is physical brain development vs. life experience?
Honestly, I don't think it would even be possible to educate people with the brains of 13-14 year old children to be naval officers in a professional starfaring service. There are too many abstract concepts to learn. You'd have to find some very exceptional individuals, and those would also be the ones who even as children show the greatest aptitude for responsibility, prudence, and big-picture thinking.

Exactly.

Ragnhild stood behind the Captain, listening unobtrusively to the conversation, and wondered if Wexler was deliberately drawing attention to Pontifex's primitive technology. It happened, sometimes. Or that was what her instructors at the Academy had told her, anyway. Sometimes the inhabitants of planets whose societies or technology bases had been hammered especially hard took a sort of aggressive, in-your-face reverse pride in their neobarbarian status.
Eh?
Think of the justifiable pride the GLORIOUS KERBAL GRAYSONS might feel at their own pre-1905 accomplishments, which they built from essentially nothing, including having to reinvent from scratch some of the most fundamental of modern technologies and doing a damn good job.

Plus, well, the same psychology that causes any impoverished group to find reasons to feel superior to richer, softer-living peoples around it. "Poor but honest," "poor but tough," "my grandpappy could beat up your grandpappy," sort of thing.

That does make sense.

Manticoran and RTU losses in the explosion. At least he was nice enough to let all the people evacuate.
Westman is an interesting contrast to, say, Nordbrandt on Kornati, in that he is trying pretty hard not to kill anyone. It speaks well of his character.

[I note with some asperity that the Righteous Space-American Good Ol' Boy anti-unification guerilla is a heroic Robin Hood of the stars, while the Funny-Sounding Foreign-Named 'Extremist' anti-unification guerilla is a mass murderer.)

This is made explicit in a later chapter. Paraphrasing here, but something like "One of these people is a mass-murderer whose managed to piss off pretty much every single resident of the Cluster. The other has struck against a polarizing, oft-hated corporation, hasn't killed anybody, and is rapidly gaining folk-hero status. Which of these do you think is a bigger threat to the annexation?"

Also, Westman could afford to buy the equivalent of a goodly number of Stinger missile launchers capable of intercepting countergrav flying vehicles out of pocket, even before Firebrand and friends got to him.

That's to be expected. Westman comes from one of the wealthiest, most respected families on Montana.

It's a classic for a reason. If you don't lure them in somehow it's too easy for a starship to break off action.
At least, assuming you don't have or can't use MDMs to obliterate them from half an astronomical unit away...

Even then, if they don't come in the hyper-limit they could conceivably jump out.

They'll arrange for an LAC to 'stumble' over the intruders and warn them, at such a range and angle it will be impossible for them to engage.
It's kind of hard for me to see how that's supposed to work (the 'can't engage' part), but sure.

The 'discovery' LAC will be behind the Peeps, between them and the hyper-limit, at such a range it would be impractical of them to try and intercept, even if it weren't suicide for a lone LAC to tackle a tin can and a heavy cruiser. Thus, given the choice between trying to pursue the LAC who will be a non-issue unless they go after it, or the fleeing half-crippled freighter, guess which the pirates will choose.

[

quote]Nuncian feelings towards female children in uniform (from their perspective) are not that positive.

Also, Nuncio apparently 'forgot' the germ theory of disease. Which I find very difficult to believe... but if that is what happened then it's hard not to justify calling them "neobarbarians."

[Also, being 'two or three' generations from the time when double-digit mortality rates caused by death in childbirth were common would put them somewhere in the early to mid-20th century, I think][/quote]

They apparently regressed to 'barely there' steam technology and spent a couple centuries there. Mind, germ theory and medicine in general would be sort of a priority to preserve, so I'm not quite sure how they lost it.

That certainly explains the "indecent haste" involved in swapping out the things. Apparently the inclusion of Solly hardware let the Peeps double their fusion output.
It may also help to explain some of the Havenite ship blowups we saw in the first round of the war, especially if the CA/BC-class "Goshawk" reactors weren't the only ones that were being run on dangerous overcharge.

My impression is the Goshawk 3 was always a transitional thing, they wanted to take advantage of the new capabilities of Solly hardware, but had to cut the safeties to shoehorn it in with barely any increase in size. Then realized how dumb this was because ships kept blowing up.

About prolouge
There is a section in the second book where Admiral Mathews is looking around at all the 2nd and third generation prologs and he mentions they look like teenagers. It's a common trend in that 3rd generation stops the aging process in the mid 30s while 2nd generation stops it in the mid to late twenties but it seems 3rd generation (Which JUST started getting used 1900 PD if the chronology is right) stops the aging process in the late teens, early twenties.

Everything I've read about it says the treatment freezes your age for a hundred to three hundred years and then wears off and you age normally, so if Ragnhild Pavletic got 3rd generation the first day you can legally give it to a child she might be looking at a twenty year adolescences or some other biological craziness.

Essentially. Prolong recipients age slowly, 'freeze' for a good long while at one point, then resume aging normally. For first generation prolong, as originally created ninety years ago, this point is in the mid-forties. 2nd gen. prolong is more like the early 30s-late 20s. 3rd gen. like Honor and the kids have, freezes things in the early 20s. Which is why Abigail Hearns, who is 26 T-years old, is still in the middle of puberty, roughly 16.

Mind, we know that stress can still cause grey hairs and crows feet, and there a dozen subtler signs of aging. Hence why even though Honor looks no older than she was the day she took command of the original Fearless, people don't really comment on it anymore or react to her as a woman in her early twenties.

Ahriman238 · Post by **Ahriman238** » 2014-07-13 04:51pm

For the last hour and thirty-four minutes Bogey One and Bogey Two—now identified as a Desforge-class destroyer, one of the Havenites' older classes, but still a powerful unit for her type—had been chasing the terrified Rembrandt freighter Nijmegen (so identified by Hexapuma's transponder code) which had broken from planetary orbit in a foolish, panicky bid to evade them. Only a totally terrified merchant skipper would have fled deeper into Nuncio-B's gravity well, especially starting with a velocity disadvantage of more than eighty-five hundred kilometers per second and a ship whose best possible acceleration was no more than a hundred and seventy KPS2.

The pirate destroyer is a Desforge-class. Not one that rings any bells.

No engineer was ever really happy about deliberately overstressing the systems under his care, but Ginger Lewis had seemed to find an unholy delight in the notion.

"Sucking pirates in where we can kill them, Skipper? And all you want me to do is take a few hours off the components?" The attractive engineering officer's smile had been decidedly predatory. "No sweat. And if these really are Peep commerce raiders, that's just extra icing on the cake! Remind me to tell you sometime about my first deployment. I'm in favor of killing as many of the bastards as we can catch!"

Terekhov had made a mental note to follow up and get the details about that first cruise of hers. But whatever had happened on it, she clearly harbored a pronounced distaste for any pirate, and she'd entered into Bagwell's ploy with a vengeance. She'd even added a few wrinkles of her own, including a brief, simulated total failure of the wedge while the bogeys were still too far out to actually see the ship herself.

It's a long story.

Better yet, the acceleration they were turning out was fifty gravities lower than Hexapuma's standard maximum, and a hundred and ninety-five less than she could turn out if she cut her compensator margin to zero.

The only sour note was that, despite the Mars class's obsolescent power plants, she clearly had at least a late pre-cease-fire compensator. The Mars ships were enormous for heavy cruisers—at 473,000 tons, Bogey One was barely ten thousand tons smaller than Hexapuma—and they paid for that extra mass with sluggish acceleration. Bogey One's observed acceleration already exceeded the max her class had been capable of when they were first laid down, but Peep acceleration rates had been creeping upward even before the High Ridge cease-fire. With the latest pre-cease-fire version, a ship of her size could have pulled a maximum acceleration of six hundred and ten, which would have meant she was currently pulling a bit less than eighty-seven percent of her maximum possible acceleration. If she had the post-cease-fire compensator, her max theoretical acceleration should be about six hundred and thirty gravities, in which case she was pulling a bit under eighty-five percent. The Peeps tended to cut their margins finer than the RMN, accepting the risk of catastrophic compensator failure as the cost of shaving away some of the Alliance's acceleration advantage, so it was possible this ship could have the older compensator.

But Terekhov had to assume he was up against a post-cease-fire compensator, which meant Hexapuma's theoretical maximum acceleration was only ninety-six gravities higher than Bogey One's. Bogey Two, assuming equal generations of compensators, would have a slight acceleration advantage over Hexapuma, but not much of one. Like the Mars-class cruisers, the Desforge-class destroyers were big ships for their types, with correspondingly lower acceleration rates.

I think Weber is starting to get confused by the great mass of numbers he generates. Pre-cease-fire, the fastest accel of anything was the new LACs, at 600 Gs, discounting Honor's custom yacht with the same compensators but far less mass. No way was a Peep heavy cruiser faster than that. I suppose we might save this by arguing 600 was their 80% normal top speed. Still it's obvious that everyone's accel has continued to climb in the background. Except the poor, dumb, infinitely smug Solarian League Navy.

"How far out are the tertiary arrays?"

"They're approximately thirteen light-minutes outside the bogeys, Sir."

"Lieutenant Bagwell."

"Yes, Sir?"

"How likely would you say our bogeys would be to detect a directional grav pulse transmitted directly away from them by one of the stealthed arrays thirteen light-minutes astern of them?"

"That would depend on how good their sensor suites are, and how good the people using them are," Bagwell replied. "BuWeaps' R and D people evaluated and tested as much of their hardware as we could recover from the ships Duchess Harrington knocked out at Sidemore Station. On the basis of their tests, and assuming these people have well-trained, alert sensor crews," he was punching information into his console as he spoke, cross-indexing against the recorded test data, "I'd have to say they'd have somewhere around a . . . one-in-ten chance. That might be a little pessimistic, but I'd rather err on the side of overestimating their chances, rather than underestimating."

"Understood." Terekhov pursed his lips for a few moments, then looked back at his EWO. "On the other hand, you're evaluating their chances on the basis of current first-line equipment, correct?"

Whisker laser to a platform that will use a directional FTL comm (they can do that now). 10% chance of detecting the small amount of backscatter from a grav pulse headed away from them with top-shelf Haven equipment.

"Yes, Sir." Bagwell input additional data, then looked back up at his captain. "Assuming the parameters you've specified, Sir, even a well-trained and alert sensor watch would probably have no more than one chance in about two hundred."

The specified parameters being "assume they have only the hardware they did during Buttercup." Apparently Haven sensor tech has made a great leap forward during the peace. And since their sensors then were Solly hardware...

Terekhov had sent the ship to General Quarters, and FitzGerald, with Helen Zilwicki as his tactical officer and Paulo d'Arezzo as his electronic warfare officer, was in Auxiliary Control. AuxCon was a complete, duplicate command bridge located at the far end of Hexapuma's core hull. If anything unfortunate should happen to Terekhov, Naomi Kaplan, and Guthrie Bagwell, it would be FitzGerald's job to complete the task at hand.

Terekhov frowned as that thought flicked through his brain. In many ways, it made sense to keep his most experienced officers here, where command would be exercised unless catastrophic damage smashed the bridge or managed somehow to cut it off from the rest of the ship. The odds against that happening were high, after all. But it was far from impossible, which was why there was an AuxCon to begin with, so perhaps it might also make sense to consider transferring either Bagwell or Kaplan to FitzGerald's alternate command crew. Because if something did happen to the regular bridge, Hexapuma was probably going to be in such deep shit that FitzGerald would need the very best command team he could get if the ship was going to survive.

The surprisingly difficult question of staffing the main bridge or the auxiliary one with your best people, or dividing them.

The two pinnaces had completed separation from their host LACs even while Aikawa was speaking. Now main reaction thrusters blazed to life, slamming them forward under almost a hundred gravities of acceleration. It wasn't much, compared to impeller drive, but it was an enormously higher acceleration than the thrusters normally generated. Their primary function was for final docking approaches or other circumstances which required the pinnaces to maneuver in close proximity to other spacecraft. A pinnace impeller wedge was minuscule compared to that of a starship, or even a LAC, but it was still lethal to any solid structure it encountered, and contact with a larger, more powerful wedge would burn out the pinnace's nodes as catastrophically as a direct hit from a capital ship graser. Which was why Hawk-Papa-Two and Papa-Three had to be at least ten kilometers clear of any of the LACs—or each other—before the safety interlocks would allow their nodes to come fully on-line.

The planes of a pinnace wedge are only 10 km across, compare with a thousand for a proper starship. They can pull 100 Gs of accel on thrusters alone for emergencies, though with only grav plates for inertial dampening they still feel 15 Gs of that. Which I believe is consistent with HaE.

The Dromedary sat rock steady on the display. It wasn't an actual optical image of the freighter, although it was now less than seventy thousand kilometers away. The pinnace's imaging systems could have showed the freighter easily enough at that range, but the tactical computers had been instructed to -generate a wire-drawing of the ship, instead. The skeletal schematic allowed her a far better grasp of the actual targeting parameters, and the countdown to optimal firing range spun downward in its own window in the corner of the display.

I wonder if all visual representations of distant ships are made as wire-drawings, or at least the tactical displays.

The pinnaces had moved over thirty-eight hundred kilometers closer to Bogey Three in the thirty-nine seconds they'd spent under power, but the range was still just a shade over sixty-four thousand kilometers when the lasers fired. Hexapuma was one of the first ships to receive the new Mark 30 Condor-class pinnaces, and the Condors' sensor suites, EW, and fire control had all been improved in tandem with their upgraded compensators, while the previously standard nose-mounted two-centimeter laser had been upgraded to a five-centimeter weapon, with significantly improved gravitic lensing.

Range at firing, and the new Condor-class pinnace with improved compensators, sensors, EW and energy weapons. Grav-lensing is used to direct energy, in this case to give lasers even tighter focus and more power. There will be a lot more made next book of Manticore's significant improvements in grav-lens technology.

A proper warship's sidewalls would have brushed the best efforts of those weapons contemptuously aside, and if its sidewalls had been down, its armor would have absorbed the hits with little more than superficial damage. But warship armor was a carefully designed, multilayered combination of ablative and kinetic armors—complex metallic-ceramic alloys of almost inconceivable toughness—laid over a hull framed and skinned in battle steel.

Bogey Three was a merchantship. Her hull was unarmored, and formed not out of battle steel, but out of old-fashioned, titanium-based alloys, and when those lasers hit, the results were spectacular.

Despite the misconceptions which civilians, accustomed only to medical and commercial laser applications, somehow still managed to cling to, weapons grade lasers were not fusing weapons. The energy transfer was too sudden, too huge, for that. Plating struck by an incoming laser shattered, and that was precisely what happened to Bogey Three.

What lasers do, and the difference between warship armor and civilian hulls. Honorverse armor is supposed to ablate, I guess. I.e. to shatter in such a way as disperses the maximum amount of energy.

Commercial impeller wedges were unlike military ones. A warship generated a double stress band above and below its hull; a merchant vessel generated only a single band. The difference reflected the fact that it was theoretically possible for an enemy to analyze an impeller wedge sufficiently to adjust for the gravity differential's distorting effect on sensors. If he could do that, then he could "see" through it, which no one thought was a good idea applied to his own navy. Using a double wedge, in which the outer protected the inner from analysis, thwarted any such effort. And, of course, naval designers, by their very nature, worshiped the concept of redundancy as the way to survive battle damage. But merchant designers had other priorities, and civilian-grade impellers were fifty to sixty percent less massive, on a node-for-node basis, than military-grade installations. The military-grade systems were commensurately more expensive, and their design lifetimes were substantially shorter, all of which was highly undesirable from the viewpoint of designing a durable, low-maintenance, low-cost freight-hauling vessel.

But one of the consequences of the difference in design was that whereas a warship, like a pinnace, could generate a functioning impeller wedge with only one impeller ring, a freighter required both. And another consequence was that whereas warship impeller rooms were subdivided into mutiple armored, individually powered and manned compartments, a civilian impeller room was one large, open space, completely unarmored and without the multiply redundant power and control circuits—and -manpower—of a military design.

Which was why Hawk-Papa-Three's shot inflicted such horrific damage.

This difference was also significant when Haven experimented with 'the Crippler' superweapon that could heterodyne and overload a civilian ship's wedge from great distances, but was useless against warships because of the secondary band.

The laser's entry wound itself was no more than a pinprick, a tiny puncture, against the vast dimensions of its target. Any one of the beta nodes in Bogey Three's after impeller ring massed dozens of times more than the attacking pinnace did. But size, as size, meant nothing. The laser blasted straight through the impeller room's thin skin and directly into Beta Twenty-Eight's primary generator. The generator exploded, throwing bits and pieces of its housing into the surrounding jungle of superconductor capacitors and control systems, and a brutal power spike blew back from it to Beta Twenty-Seven and Twenty-Nine. Without the internal armored bulkheads and cofferdams, the separate, parallel control runs, and redundant circuit breakers of military design, there was little to stop the train wreck of induced component failures, and a chain reaction of shorting, arcing superconductor rings raced through the compartment. The trapped lightning bolts crashed back and forth with the ferocity of enraged demons, taking one node after another completely off-line with catastrophic damage, and more frantic alarms screamed on the freighter's bridge.

Unlike the damage to the hyper generator, the effect of Hawk-Papa-Three's fire was immediately evident as the entire after impeller ring went from standby power to complete shutdown in less than two seconds. It had to be actual battle damage—no human's reaction time was fast enough to cut power that quickly. But, again, it was impossible for Abigail's sensors to confirm the extent of the damage in the flashing seconds her pinnaces took to scud past at over 17,600 KPS.

The terrible damage mentioned above.

"Hawk-Papa-Two, this is Einarsson," Abigail's earbug said ninety seconds later. "Do you have a damage estimate, Lieutenant?"

"Not a definitive one, Sir." Part of Abigail wanted to add "of course," to that, but she reminded herself that even her pinnace's sensor capabilities must seem almost magical to the Nuncians. And at least Einarsson had waited until she'd had a chance to examine the available data before he asked the question.

"From what we could see during the firing pass," she continued, "we scored good hits on her after impeller room, at least. The ring's down, and a commercial design doesn't have much ability to come back from that kind of damage without outside assistance. Obviously, there's no way we can be certain that's the case here, but it seems likely.

"It's a lot more difficult to estimate what kind of damage we may have done to her hyper generator. It wasn't on-line to begin with, so we didn't have a standby power load to monitor or see go down. From the observed atmospheric venting, it looks like we definitely got deep enough to get a piece of the generator, and the computers estimate a seventy percent chance it was big enough. But we won't know for certain until we're actually aboard her."

What their sensors can tell from one high-speed pass. As well as what they can't. But it seems pretty unlikely the pirates can patch up FTL capability in the two hours it will take the LACs and pinnaces to return.

"I suppose that analysis could be the result of the fact that I'm a Grayson, not a Manticoran. I've noticed—no offense, -Midshipwoman—that you Manties think of the current government of the Republic, whoever it happens to be at the moment, as the font of all evil in the known universe. Not surprising, I suppose, given your experiences with them over the last, oh, sixty or seventy T-years.

"We Graysons, on the other hand, spent as long as your entire Star Kingdom's existed thinking that way about Masada. We're less fixated on governments and more fixated on ideologies, you might say—religious ones in our own case, of course. And we've seen more than enough evidence of displaced Masadans turning to freelance thuggery and atrocities and popping up in the most peculiar places after being run out of Endicott by the Occupation, like those so-called 'Defiant' fanatics who attacked Princess Ruth and Helen's sister in Erewhon last year. So, with all due respect, even if the Captain does think these are probably official Havenite naval units under officially sanctioned orders, I'm not so sure. And if they aren't," her smile disappeared, and her gray-blue eyes were suddenly very, very cold, "then the Deneb Accords don't come into it at all, do they?"

One place where Graysons in general have a lot more perspective than Manties. Graysons are used to the idea that their long war with a hostile power means nothing to the galaxy at large, so Abigail, unlike the snotties considers these far more likely to be fled remnants of a previous Haven regime than some sort of clandestine mission of the current one. Of course, Terekhov has already come to more-or-less the same conclusion.

Her hands flicked across her panel, entering the proper commands, even though she and the Exec both knew the AuxCon computers had already updated the tac log backups automatically, just as they did every five minutes whenever the ship was at General Quarters. Despite that, The Book called for a manual doublecheck every half-hour. The tactical logs were the detailed record of every sensor datum, every helm change, every order or computer input which affected Hexapuma's tactical stance in any way. On ships like Hexapuma, which boasted an Auxilliary Control position, they were maintained by AuxCon personnel in order to free the primary bridge personnel from that distraction. On ships without an AuxCon, their maintenance was overseen by the tactical officer's senior petty officer. Their purposes were manifold, but especially included analysis by BuWeaps and Operational Research, the Navy commands charged with evaluating and updating tactical doctrine. And, in the event that any court of inquiry was ever called, the logs would form the crucial body of evidence for all concerned. Which was why The Book was just a tad paranoid about making certain those logs were properly backed up.

The tactical log, recording everything the ship sees and does for later analysis. As long as the ship is at battle stations, the computer will update the log every five minutes, but they still insist on a manual update every half-hour.

"Ms. Zilwicki, I have something," Sensor Tech 1/c Marshall said quietly, and Helen turned towards the tracking rating responsible for monitoring the outermost shell of Hexapuma's remote sensor arrays. All of them were reporting only via relayed, light-speed channels to prevent the bogeys from realizing they were out there, so whatever was coming in was at least thirty minutes out of date, but naval personnel got used to skewed information loop timing.

A sensor tech is a rating, allowing them to delegate monitoring the drone shell to him. They've picked up the confirmation of a successful attack run on the freighter namely sensor records of the wedges going live and lasers firing.

"Very good, Ms. Zilwicki," Ansten FitzGerald replied. And it was very good, he reflected, watching the com display which tied him to the bridge. Marshall and Zilwicki had spotted, evaluated, and passed on the data a good ten seconds faster than CIC's highly trained and experienced personnel had managed to get the same information to Naomi Kaplan. And, almost equally as good, Zilwicki had seen to it both that he knew Marshall had brought the information to her attention and that Marshall knew Zilwicki had made certain he did. Of course, one reason they'd been quicker off the mark than CIC was that they hadn't wasted any time double-checking their information before reporting it to him. But it was still excellent work, and he was about to say something more to them when Captain Terekhov spoke over the AuxCon-to-Bridge com link.

CIC double checks all their data, which sometimes means they get it to the main tac officer a little slow. Helen gets credit for letting her subordinates have their fair credit.

Their overtake velocity was down to under sixteen thousand KPS, and the range was down to less than fifty-two light-seconds. Given that Hexapuma's maximum powered missile range from rest was over twenty-nine million kilometers and that the range was less than sixteen million, both those ships were already within her reach . . . and probably doomed, if Aivars Terekhov had been prepared to settle for simple outright destruction. Which, of course, he wasn't.

Mk 16 MDM range from rest is 29 million k.

"Freighter Nijmegen, this is Captain Daumier of the heavy cruiser Anhur. Cut your accel immediately and stand by for rendezvous!"

The voice was harsh, hard-edged, with the flat accent of the slums of Nouveau Paris. There was a chill menace to it, despite the absence of any overt threats, and it was female.

Again with that distinctive accent. Note that Daumier does not identify herself as a Peep, or even as a Citizen Captain.

The Captain hadn't turned a hair as the missile came rumbling down on his command. Helen's fingers had itched, almost quivering with the urge to bring up Hexapuma's missile defenses, but the Captain simply sat there, watching the missile bore in, and smiled thinly.

"Not this one," he'd said calmly to Lieutenant Commander Kaplan. "She's not quite pissed off enough yet to kill a golden goose, and a ship like the real Nijmegen would be worth several times any cargo she could be carrying out here in the Verge. She won't just blow that away when she figures she can have us in energy range—or close enough for pinnaces and boarding shuttles, for God's sake!—in another twenty minutes, and take us intact."

A ship worth several times any cargo it's likely to carry. Well it makes sense economically. Oh, and a warning shot, two actually.

Only a single command sped outward from the button, but that command was the first pebble in a landslide. It activated a cascade of carefully organized secondary commands, and each of those commands, in turn, activated its own cascade, and things began to happen.

HMS Hexapuma's impeller wedge snapped abruptly to full power. Senior Chief Clary's joystick went hard over, and the heavy cruiser snarled around to starboard in a six-hundred-gravity, hundred-and-eighty-degree turn. Her sidewalls snapped into existence; tethered EW drones popped out to port and starboard; her energy weapons ran out, locking their gravity lenses to the edges of the sidewalls' "gun ports"; and radar and lidar lashed the two Havenite ships like savage whips.

It was the worst nightmare of any pirate—a fat, defenseless merchie, transformed with brutal suddenness from terrified prey into one of the most dangerous warships in space at a range where evasion was impossible . . . and survival almost equally unlikely.

It took Hexapuma fourteen seconds to go from standby to full combat readiness. The EW drones' systems were still coming on-line, but Kaplan's fire control computers had been running continuously updated tracks on both targets for hours. The missiles in her tubes' firing queues had been programmed for three broadsides in advance, and the firing solutions had been updated every fifteen seconds from the instant Bogey One and Bogey Two entered her maximum missile range. Now, even as she turned, a double broadside roared from her tubes, oriented itself, and drove headlong for Bogey Two.

At such a short range, they were maximum-power shots, and current-generation Manticoran missile drives at that power setting produced an acceleration of over 900 KPS2. Worse, from the enemy's viewpoint, the bogeys were rushing to meet them at over two thousand KPS. Flight time was under thirty-four seconds, and it took the bogeys' tactical crews precious seconds to realize what had happened. Bogey Two's anti-missile crews got off a single counter-missile. Just one . . . that missed. The Haven-built destroyer's laser clusters managed to intercept three of the incoming laser heads. The others—all the others—ripped through the desperate, inner-boundary defenses and detonated in a single, cataclysmic instant that trapped the doomed vessel at the heart of a hell-born spider's lightning web.

The destroyer's sidewalls didn't even flicker. She simply vanished in the flash of a fusion plant which had taken at least a dozen direct hits.

14 seconds to go to full readiness from standby, presumably most of that is kicking loose and activating decoys and EW drones. Apparently the primary helm control is a joystick. The tin can manages to stop 3 out of 40 in-bound missiles(it's kind of overkill), all with laser clusters. Admittedly they were taken by surprise with just over thirty seconds to realize there were inbound missiles and respond.

Hexapuma settled on her new heading, her bow directly towards Anhur. Not so many years ago it would have been a suicidal position, exposing the wide-open throat of her wedge to any weapon her enemy might fire. But Hexapuma possessed a bow wall even tougher than the conventional sidewalls covering her flanks, and Anhur didn't.

There were ports in Hexapuma's bow wall for the two massive grasers and three lasers she mounted as chase weapons. Like her broadside energy mounts, they were heavier than most battlecruisers had carried at the beginning of the Havenite Wars. In fact, they'd been scaled up even more than her broadside weapons, because they were no longer required to share space with missile tubes now that the RMN's broadside tubes had acquired the ability to fire radically off-bore, and the Manticoran cruiser's fire control had Anhur in a lock of iron. It took Hexapuma another twenty-seven seconds to reverse her heading—twenty-seven seconds in which the missiles which doomed Bogey Two were sent hurtling through space and the bogeys' overtake velocity closed the range between them by 54,362 kilometers.

Then Terekhov's ship settled on her new heading at maximum military power. She decelerated towards Anhur at seven hundred and twenty gravities even as Bogey One continued to decelerate towards her at 531g, and that, too, was something Hexapuma wasn't supposed to be able to do. The single enormous tactical drawback to the new bow wall technology was that an impeller wedge had to be open at both ends to function. When the RMN had introduced the new system, it had accepted that ships with raised bow walls would be unable to accelerate and had been happy to do it, given the fact that, for the first time in history, an impeller-drive ship would be protected against the deadly "down the throat" rake which was every tactician's dream.

But BuShips had felt it could do better, and it had in the Saganami-Cs. Hexapuma's bow wall could be brought up in two stages. The second stage was the original wall that completely sealed the front of her wedge, protected against fire from any angle or weapon, and reduced her acceleration to zero. The first stage wasn't a complete wall, however. It was a much smaller, circular shield, its diameter less than twice the ship's extreme beam. It offered no protection against beams coming in from acute angles, and a laserhead could actually slip right past it before detonating. But against the energy weapons of a single target, Hexapuma could place that defense directly between her hull and the enemy . . . and continue to accelerate at full efficiency.

Where to begin? We have the two-stage bow wall, the full bow wall and a 'buckler' that protects the ship very nicely from direct-fire energy weapons but not so much from laser heads. But with a buckler up she can still accel, decel and maneuver normally. We have 27 seconds to turn the Kitty all the way around, and 720 Gs at max decel.

The sheer stupefaction of the savagely reversed trap paralyzed Anhur's bridge crew, just as Terekhov had intended. Most of their brains gibbered that this could not be happening, and even the parts that worked had no idea what to do about it. A heavy cruiser could not reverse course that quickly. A ship of so much tonnage could not accelerate at that rate. And though they knew RMN heavy cruisers had bow walls, they didn't know a thing about the new technology. Which meant, so far as they could know, that Hexapuma couldn't have hers up. But without it, engaging bow-to-stern, chaser-to-chaser, was suicide for both ships! And yet, that was precisely what the Manticoran maniac roaring down on them was doing.

It took another thirty-one seconds—thirty-one seconds in which the range dropped by another 108,684 kilometers and their closing velocity fell to just over fifteen hundred KPS—for the Mars-class cruiser's captain to reimpose her will on her own ship's maneuvers.

It was obvious when she did. Anhur's bow rose, relative to Hexapuma, which simultaneously dipped her stern, since she was decelerating directly towards the Manticoran ship. Obviously, Daumier—if that was really the other captain's name, Terekhov thought viciously—had elected to stand her ship on her tail, presenting only the roof of her impeller wedge to Hexapuma's bow chasers as they closed. She probably hoped she could get far enough around to present her own broadside, then roll back up to hit Hexapuma from astern with a raking broadside as they crossed over one another.

Unfortunately for her, the range was down to 423,522 -kilometers . . . 50,000 kilometers inside the range at which Hexapuma's chasers could have burned through the bow or stern wall Anhur didn't have.

Energy ranges against very strong walls (an LAC's bow wall is as strong as an SD sidewall) with the enormous beam weapons of a CA(L). Apparently the decel and turn-rate of the Kitty are a nasty surprise.

In their arrogant confidence that they were the hunters, Anhur's crew hadn't even completely cleared for action. Only her missile crews and half a dozen energy mounts were fully closed up, with the crews in skinsuits, and the outer spaces normally evacuated of atmosphere for combat were wide open and fully pressurized. Almost three-quarters of her crew had been in normal working dress, not skinsuits, when Hexapuma turned ferociously upon them, and not one of them had the time to do anything about it. They just had time to realize how hideously vulnerable they were, and then the tsunami struck.

Always clear completely for action.

At that range, unopposed by any sidewall, Hexapuma's energy weapons could have disemboweled a superdreadnought. What they did to a mere heavy cruiser was unspeakable.

Anhur's after hammerhead shattered. Heavy armor, battle steel structural members, impeller nodes, power runs, chase weapons, sensor arrays—all of them blew apart, ripped and torn like tissue paper. The energy weapons' superconductor rings erupted in volcanic secondary explosions as they arced across. The forward impeller rooms were brutally opened to space, more superconductors gave up their stored energy, and still Hexapuma's rage tore deeper and deeper. Through internal armored bulkheads. Through weapons compartments. Through magazines. Through berthing compartments, mess compartments, damage control points, life-support rooms, and boat bays. Her fire ripped a third of the way up the full length of the central spindle before its fury was finally spent. Broadside weapons were taken from the side, unprotected by the ship's heavy side armor as the energy fire came from the one angle the ship's designers had assumed it simply could not. Still more uncontrolled power surges and secondary explosions lashed out, erupting along the flanks of the central vortex of destruction, and her after fusion plant managed to go into emergency shutdown a fraction of an instant before the Goshawk-Three reactor's unstable bottle would have failed.

The stricken cruiser reeled aside, after impeller ring completely down, wedge flickering, sidewalls stripped away from the after half of her hull. In that single firing pass, in the space of less than six seconds, HMS Hexapuma and Captain Aivars Aleksovitch Terekhov killed over thirty-five percent of her ship's company outright and wounded another nineteen percent. Thirty-one percent of Anhur's shipboard weapons had been destroyed. Her maximum possible acceleration had been reduced by over fifty percent. She'd lost forty-seven percent of her sidewalls, all of her after alpha and beta nodes, and her Warshawski sails. Fifty percent of her power generation was gone, her after fire control and sensor arrays had been gutted, and almost two-thirds of her tactical computers had been thrown into uncontrolled shutdown by power spikes and secondary explosions.

No ship in the galaxy could survive that punishment and remain in action, no matter what incentive her crew might have to avoid surrender.

"Enemy cruiser!" The voice screaming in Terekhov's earbug was no longer hard and harsh—it was raw and ugly with sheer, naked terror. "Enemy cruiser, we surrender! We surrender! Cease fire! For God's sake, cease fire!"

The power of the Nasty Kitty's energy chasers, and the battle is ended.

For just an instant, an ugly light blazed in arctic-blue eyes that glowed now with furnace heat. The order to continue firing hovered on the tip of Terekhov's tongue, with the salt-sweet taste of blood and the copper bitterness of his own dead, crying out for vengeance. But then those eyes closed. His jaw clenched, and silence hovered on Hexapuma's command deck while the voice of Anhur's captain screamed for mercy.

-snip-

"Anhur," he said in a voice colder than the space beyond Hexapuma's hull, "this is Captain Aivars Terekhov, commanding Her Majesty's Starship Hexapuma. You will cut your wedge now. You will shut down all active sensors. You will stand by to receive my boarders. You will not resist them in any way, before or after they enter your vessel. And you will not purge your computers. If you deviate from these instructions in any detail whatsoever, I will destroy you. Is that clearly understood?"

And Captain Terekhov passes a personal trial in not pursuing revenge.

Simon_Jester · Post by **Simon_Jester** » 2014-07-14 01:46pm

Ahriman238 wrote:Yes but everyone else she interacts with should be used to young men and women looking like early teens by now.

And everyone else she interacts with, except for people from societies where prolong is rare, IS used to it.

Ragnhild is only bringing it up because:
1) She's on a planet where most of the people around her won't take her seriously because to her, if you look a pre-prolong thirteen you are a pre-prolong thirteen.
2) She's self-conscious about her body, which a lot of people with thirteen-year-old bodies are in real life. Being twenty and having had puberty sort of... 'hang-fire' on you and go on hold for the better part of a decade has got to be frustrating. Especially if for years you've been surrounded by people who at least look thoroughly post-pubescent.

I mean, McKeon was a little off-put by how much younger than himself Honor seemed at first, though he admitted she got a later generation of prolong that froze her age much earlier. But other than that, you're correct, they don't remark on it much.

McKeon was also born in 1852 PD. When he was a child, a lot of people more than about 40-50 years older than himself had not received prolong... and the prolong recipients of his father's generation did not yet look drastically younger than the

There would have been a critical threshold around, oh, 1860-1870 PD in the Star Kingdom where you would see a very sharp divergence between the youngest people not to receive prolong (who are now conspicuously into old age) and the oldest people who did receive it (who remain in eternal middle age at 35-45).

People whose formative attitudes were made before the critical threshold would probably still have more or less normal subconscious expectations about aging. Especially since in their generation of prolong, prolong had no tendency to artificially extend youth. When McKeon looked thirteen he was thirteen, and at that time (1865 PD) all the people who looked twenty were twenty. Likewise all the people who looked thirty were thirty, and the people who looked forty were forty... or maybe fifty, sixty at the oldest.

And at the same time there were probably quite a few people around who looked fifty or sixty and had not received prolong and had a much shorter life expectancy than the first-gen prolong recipients only a decade or two younger than themselves.

So that was the world of Alistair McKeon's teens.

...

By the time McKeon turned forty-eight (in 1900 PD, the time of On Basilisk Station), there were people like Honor (who was forty-one) only slightly younger than him. But these people looked fifteen to twenty years younger than him. As McKeon reflected, Honor looked younger than him by a large enough margin to be his niece, though probably not his daughter; I've always pictured her as a fresh-faced thirty.

Meanwhile, by that same point in Manticoran history, there would be virtually no one between the apparent (prespace) ages of forty and, oh, seventy or eighty.

...

You have a huge number of nigh-immortal first generation prolong recipients born between 1810 and 1855 PD or so, who grew up in a world that was not entirely attuned to the expectations of prolong.

And it wasn't until, oh, 10-20 years before the start of the first novel that they could even begin to see the world around them begin to take the shape of 'the future,' in which the norm is prolonged puberty and centuries of looking like a prespace twenty-five-year-old.

Now it's 1920 PD. Everyone under fifty grew up in the Brave New World (10-15 years of biological adolescence, age caps out at 25). But all those first-generation recipients are still around, grousing about all these young whippersnappers with not a worry line on their face and not a gray hair on their heads... despite the fact that in many cases, said whippersnappers are veterans of a massive interstellar war.

...

So it's actually rather complicated and no wonder people comment on it occasionally.

Also, I'm not sure 'post-rape' is an accurate description given that the physical act never occurred and in fact the would-be rapist got his balls kicked up between his ears by the intended victim. But yeah, I take your meaning.
She seemed plenty traumatized all the same.

Sorry, I was nitpicking and I shouldn't have. She clearly experienced trauma, yes.

Hopefully their brain development isn't noticeably slowed by prolong, I'd hate to think they had middies with a 13-14 year-olds impulse control in the service. For that matter, how much of growing up is physical brain development vs. life experience?
Honestly, I don't think it would even be possible to educate people with the brains of 13-14 year old children to be naval officers in a professional starfaring service. There are too many abstract concepts to learn. You'd have to find some very exceptional individuals, and those would also be the ones who even as children show the greatest aptitude for responsibility, prudence, and big-picture thinking.

Ahriman238 wrote:Exactly.

I've been watching first season TNG lately, so it occurs to me... Honestly, about the best you could do with people whose brains are biologically 13-14 is a ship full of Wesley Crushers. OW.

I'm pretty sure the middies in Shadow of Saganami show a lot more maturity and common sense than Wesley does. Part of that may just be due to better writing, but I think there's supporting evidence in there that the brains of third-generation prolong recipients grow up faster than their bodies do. Their hormones, though... could be anywhere in between.

Also, Westman could afford to buy the equivalent of a goodly number of Stinger missile launchers capable of intercepting countergrav flying vehicles out of pocket, even before Firebrand and friends got to him.
That's to be expected. Westman comes from one of the wealthiest, most respected families on Montana.

Yes, but it gives us a benchmark for what it means to be from one of the wealthiest families on Montana.

It's a classic for a reason. If you don't lure them in somehow it's too easy for a starship to break off action.
At least, assuming you don't have or can't use MDMs to obliterate them from half an astronomical unit away...

Ahriman wrote:Even then, if they don't come in the hyper-limit they could conceivably jump out.

In which case you cannot use MDMs to obliterate them, now can you?

That certainly explains the "indecent haste" involved in swapping out the things. Apparently the inclusion of Solly hardware let the Peeps double their fusion output.
It may also help to explain some of the Havenite ship blowups we saw in the first round of the war, especially if the CA/BC-class "Goshawk" reactors weren't the only ones that were being run on dangerous overcharge.
My impression is the Goshawk 3 was always a transitional thing, they wanted to take advantage of the new capabilities of Solly hardware, but had to cut the safeties to shoehorn it in with barely any increase in size. Then realized how dumb this was because ships kept blowing up.

Thing is, the Goshawk-Four improved power output. My guess is that Goshawk-Three was actually a prewar or early-war design, in which they greatly increased power output in an attempt to match Manticore, but did not (could not) duplicate the safety features that make the Manticoran reactor safe.

Then and only then did Sollie technical assistance make it possible to create a safe reactor functionally similar to Manticore's, with basically the same power output, power density, and reliability.

Mind, we know that stress can still cause grey hairs and crows feet, and there a dozen subtler signs of aging. Hence why even though Honor looks no older than she was the day she took command of the original Fearless, people don't really comment on it anymore or react to her as a woman in her early twenties.

Well, I'm not entirely sure of this. I would think that prolong makes it roughly as likely that you'll develop stress-induced signs of aging as it would be for people of the same biological age with no prolong.

Put a forty year old man under a few years of intense stress and his hair will go gray. Put a twenty-five-year-old man under a few years of intense stress... maybe it will, maybe it won't.

Ahriman238 wrote:
The Dromedary sat rock steady on the display. It wasn't an actual optical image of the freighter, although it was now less than seventy thousand kilometers away. The pinnace's imaging systems could have showed the freighter easily enough at that range, but the tactical computers had been instructed to -generate a wire-drawing of the ship, instead. The skeletal schematic allowed her a far better grasp of the actual targeting parameters, and the countdown to optimal firing range spun downward in its own window in the corner of the display.
I wonder if all visual representations of distant ships are made as wire-drawings, or at least the tactical displays.

A wireframe drawing has a lot of advantages because it lets you visualize the complete structure of a three dimensional object. If all you can see are the surface features, a lot of information is concealed.

There's a reason that CAD software in engineering still uses (or allow you to use) wireframe drawings even though technology has long since advanced to where we can render 3D objects easily.

What lasers do, and the difference between warship armor and civilian hulls. Honorverse armor is supposed to ablate, I guess. I.e. to shatter in such a way as disperses the maximum amount of energy.

They are probably also designed to respond to visible-light wavelengths by reflecting away as much energy as possible- with a laser, you can do that. Even if the material underneath is boiling away, it can still be absorbing and reradiating as efficiently as possible, and every joule that is scattered, reflected, or absorbed and reradiated away is a joule NOT absorbed by the hull... and a shade less damage applied to your hull.

Gamma rays, on the other hand, don't absorb or reflect worth a damn. And clever arrangement of the atoms inside the armor material won't do so much to stop them either; you basically have to pile up as many atoms of heavy elements as possible if you want protection that will absorb them at all.

Which may explain why grasers are always presented as 'heavier' than lasers even though there's no obvious reason this should be so. Graser beams are far more likely to do an efficient job of shattering and blowing through a layer of well-designed armor plating. Even if generating them is less energy-efficient (which seems likely), that can still pay off.

One place where Graysons in general have a lot more perspective than Manties. Graysons are used to the idea that their long war with a hostile power means nothing to the galaxy at large, so Abigail, unlike the snotties considers these far more likely to be fled remnants of a previous Haven regime than some sort of clandestine mission of the current one. Of course, Terekhov has already come to more-or-less the same conclusion.

For lo, it is known: Terekhov Is No Dummy.

"Not this one," he'd said calmly to Lieutenant Commander Kaplan. "She's not quite pissed off enough yet to kill a golden goose, and a ship like the real Nijmegen would be worth several times any cargo she could be carrying out here in the Verge. She won't just blow that away when she figures she can have us in energy range—or close enough for pinnaces and boarding shuttles, for God's sake!—in another twenty minutes, and take us intact."
A ship worth several times any cargo it's likely to carry. Well it makes sense economically. Oh, and a warning shot, two actually.

Also, ballsy decision here. But it could have been ugly if that hadn't been a warning shot, or if Captain Daumier had decided she could probably patch up the damaged ship after hitting it with one or two laser heads and still manage to get most of the same resale value.

14 seconds to go to full readiness from standby, presumably most of that is kicking loose and activating decoys and EW drones. Apparently the primary helm control is a joystick. The tin can manages to stop 3 out of 40 in-bound missiles(it's kind of overkill), all with laser clusters. Admittedly they were taken by surprise with just over thirty seconds to realize there were inbound missiles and respond.

Yeah. Countermissiles require a more detailed lock than point defense lasers, I suspect, because they have to track a target on the way in and predict where it's going to be so that the countermissile will be in the right place. Point defense lasers just need a momentary window in which they have a clear shot, then POW.

Also, I think they've been using joysticks to control ships since the first book.

Ahriman wrote:Energy ranges against very strong walls (an LAC's bow wall is as strong as an SD sidewall) with the enormous beam weapons of a CA(L). Apparently the decel and turn-rate of the Kitty are a nasty surprise.

[Anhur go splat]

...Always clear completely for action.

Also, we note that the professionalism and organization of Anhur's crew have gone pretty far downhill. They don't clear for action, et cetera...

But think. They're StateSec veterans, and they haven't fought a real war in years. No wonder they make rookie mistakes and waste time gaping when they should be fighting.

Ultonius · Post by **Ultonius** » 2014-07-14 05:54pm

Simon_Jester wrote: Which may explain why grasers are always presented as 'heavier' than lasers even though there's no obvious reason this should be so. Graser beams are far more likely to do an efficient job of shattering and blowing through a layer of well-designed armor plating. Even if generating them is less energy-efficient (which seems likely), that can still pay off.

A short-wavelength laser, such as a graser, compared to a longer-wavelength laser that has identical power, shot/pulse duration and lens/mirror diameter, will suffer less diffraction. It therefore should be able to maintain a given beam diameter at a greater distance than the other laser, giving it longer effective range. At a given range, it should be able to maintain a smaller beam diameter, and therefore greater beam intensity, than the other laser, giving it greater penetration, even before you factor in how the material of the target behaves when exposed to the wavelength in question.

Ahriman238 · Post by **Ahriman238** » 2014-07-14 08:39pm

"I understand the Marines will be in charge of securing the prisoners, Sir. But what about their wounded? I'm sure we're going to be running into trapped injured personnel—and, for that matter, probably unhurt crewmembers—once we start clearing wreckage and opening damaged compartments."

"That's why you have sidearms, Mr. d'Arezzo. All of you," the Exec's eyes had bored into theirs, "remember what you're dealing with here. Commander Orban's sickbay attendants will have primary responsibility for stabilizing any wounded personnel and returning them to Hexapuma for treatment. No matter who these people are, or what they've done, we'll see to it that they receive proper medical attention. But don't make the mistake of lowering your guards simply because this ship has surrendered. At the moment, her people are probably too terrified and shocked—and grateful to be alive—to pose any threat, but don't rely on that. It only takes one lunatic holdout with a grenade or a pulse rifle to kill you or an entire work party. And it won't make you, or your parents, feel one bit better to know whoever killed you was shot himself five seconds later. Do you read me on this one, People?"

Good advice for a middie's first boarding party. We'll actually cover two, Helen Zilwicki and Paulo d'Arezzo will be with the parties boarding Anhur, while Raghnild and Kagiyama will be boarding the freighter.

Aivars Terekhov stared at the main bridge display. Its imagery was relayed from Angelique Kelso's helmet pickup as she and her Marines took control of Anhur's single functional boat bay. There were no signs of damage in the immaculate boat bay. Or, at least, not of physical damage to the ship. The white-faced, shocked officer waiting to greet Kelso as she came aboard was another matter.

Helmet camera feed displayed on the main viewscreen of the bridge. I saw this in a TNG episode, once.

Terekhov felt himself coming back on balance, although the sight of the uniforms which had filled any citizen of the People's Republic of Haven with terror had brought something much stronger than distaste back to him. For four months after the Battle of Hyacinth, he and his surviving personnel had been in StateSec custody. Only four months, but it had been more than long enough, and a fresh, hot flicker of hatred pushed the last wisps of surprise out of his mind.

The State Security thugs who'd run the POW camp which had engulfed his pitiful handful of survivors had treated them with the viciousness of despair as Eighth Fleet smashed unstoppably into the People's Republic. They'd taken out their fear and hatred on their prisoners with a casual brutality not even the foreknowledge of inevitable defeat had been able to fully deter. Beatings had been common. Several of his people had been raped. Some had been tortured. At least three who other survivors swore had been captured alive and uninjured simply disappeared. And then, in rapid fire, came word of the cease-fire High Ridge was stupid enough to accept . . . followed eight local days later by news of the Theisman coup against Oscar Saint-Just.

Those eight days had been bad. For those days, StateSec had believed in miracles again—had once again believed its personnel would never be called to account—and some among them had indulged in an even more savage orgy of vengeance upon the hated Manties. Terekhov himself had been protected, at least, by his critical wounds, because the People's Navy had run the local hospital, and the hospital commandant had been a woman of moral courage who refused to allow even StateSec access to her patients. But his people hadn't been, and all the evidence suggested that the two men and one woman who'd vanished had been murdered during that interval . . . probably only after undergoing the sort of vicious torture certain elements of the SS had made their chosen speciality.

I suspect scenes like this were common throughout the Republic between word of the cease-fire and word of the Theisman coup. Certainly it wasn't all like La Martine.

The Peeps had conducted their own investigation afterward, in an effort to determine exactly what had happened, and despite himself, he'd been forced to believe it was a serious attempt. Unfortunately, few StateSec witnesses had been available. Most had been killed when Marines from the local naval picket stormed the SS planetary HQ and POW camps and the howling mobs of local citizens lynched every StateSec trooper, informant, and hanger-on they could catch. The local SS offices had been looted and burned, and most of their records had gone with them. Some of those records had probably been destroyed by StateSec personnel themselves, but the result was the same. Even the most painstaking investigation was unable to establish what had happened. In the end, the military tribunal impaneled on Thomas Theisman's direct authority for the investigation had concluded that all evidence suggested Terekhov's people had been murdered in cold blood by unknown StateSec personnel while in Havenite custody. The captain who'd headed the tribunal had personally apologized to Terekhov, acknowledging the People's Republic's guilt, and he had no doubt that, had the cease-fire ever been transformed into a formal treaty, the new Havenite government would have echoed that acknowledgment and made whatever restitution it could. But the people actually responsible were almost certainly either already dead or had somehow evaded custody.

And the investigation, apologies and probable reparations afterwards, sort of forestalled by the continuing lack of a peace treaty and the final breakdown of negotiations.

And the fact that they were Peep ships after all justifies the Captain's decision to attack without challenging them first, she added to herself. She was surprised by how relieved that made her feel . . . and also to realize that in the Captain's place, she'd probably have done exactly the same thing, Peeps or no Peeps.

They got lucky in this, but if it saved lives it would have been the right call anyways.

All three smiled, and Aikawa Kagiyama, who sat watching them, wished he felt remotely as calm as they appeared. At least some of it had to be an act, he thought. The way warriors throughout the ages had put on relaxed faces to demonstrate their confidence before facing the unknown. Yet there was a tough, resilient professionalism underneath the act. Mann was the youngest of the three, but there was no question of his authority, however light the hand with which he exercised it, and Aikawa thought that was probably what he envied most.

I feel the same way around more experienced teachers sometimes, people who do what I do, only better and they make it look easy.

Never a large person, he felt like a midget in his standard Navy skinsuit beside the towering, armored Marines. The soot-black battle armor's limbs swelled with exoskeletal "muscles," and the pulse rifles most of them carried looked little larger than toys in their gauntleted hands. The two plasma gunners had exchanged their energy weapons for tri-barrels, and he knew the grenadiers carried only standard HE and frag rounds without any plasma grenades. He still felt dwarfed and insignificant armed with nothing more than the pulser holstered at his right hip.

No plasma rifles/grenades on this little excursion, being sort of the opposite to fletchette launchers in terms of minimizing collateral damage. Or not blowing holes into space.

The entire right-hand side of the passage ahead had been ripped as if by a huge, angry talon. It was splintered and broken, half-melted and recongealed in places, for a distance of nine or ten meters. The damage crossed one of the ship's emergency blast doors, and the door's starboard panel had obviously never had a chance to move before whatever titanic blow had torn the passage apart froze it.

And neither had the crewmen who'd been in the passage when that blow hit.

She couldn't even tell how many of them there'd been. The port bulkhead was pitted where fragments of the starboard bulkhead had ricocheted from it, but the marks were hard to see because of the blood patterns splashed across it. It looked as if some lunatic with a spray gun of gore had been interrupted halfway through repainting the passage, using bits of human tissue and scraps of human bone to provide texture to her work. Severed limbs, blasted torsos, fingers, bits of uniform, an intact boot with its owner's foot still in it, a human head canted up against the lower edge of the frozen blast door like a discarded basketball. . . . And, worst of all, the contorted body of a man who'd obviously been badly hit by the explosion but miraculously not killed outright when it shattered both his legs. A man whose rupturing lungs had vomited blood from mouth and nose while his fingers clawed at the deck as the passage depressurized about him.

The middies get to see some of the nasty aftermath of a space-battle up close.

The system primary was no help at all when it came to making out details of the freighter's damage, and Aikawa wished at least one of the pinnaces had remained close enough to lend the assistance of its powerful lights. But Lieutenant Hearns had been adamant about withdrawing both of them to a safe distance.

Probably another reason I wish they were close enough, he thought wryly. I don't like the notion of their needing a safety perimeter.

Lieutenant Hearns hadn't specified what she was leaving a safe distance against, but it didn't take a hyper-physicist to figure it out. The Dromedary was unarmed, and it sure as hell couldn't hope to ram something as small and agile as a pinnace, even if it had possessed a functioning impeller wedge. But it did have a fusion plant, and that plant was still active, according to the ship's emissions signature. And if someone put his mind to it, he'd had time to get around the safety interlocks if he'd really wanted to.

Searchlights on a pinnace. Leaving a safe distance in case the pirates try and self-destruct the freighter. So the boarding parties are going over EVA.

They'd traveled about fifty meters and passed through one open set of blast doors when they found the first bodies.

"What do you think, Lieutenant?"

Aikawa was struck by how calm Lieutenant Hearns sounded as she stood looking down at the mangled bodies in the enormous puddle of congealing blood. He was glad he had his helmet on, and he tried to not even imagine the stink of blood and ruptured internal organs which must fill the passageway.

"More than one weapon, Ma'am." The Marine went down on one armored knee, his tone almost clinical, and examined one of the bodies closely while McCollum's squad spread out, pulse rifles and tribarrels ready. "What do you think, Sarge? Flechette guns from up-passage?"

The freighter hasn't answered hails, there's been no activity or signs of life, and now it seems the crew were shooting at each other.

It took the better part of three more hours to sweep the ship. Even then, they'd actually examined only a tiny portion of the freighter's interior. A battalion of Marines could have been hidden in the enormous cargo holds, but it became steadily more apparent as they went along that there couldn't be very many—if any—live enemies left aboard. At least one of the freighter's cargo shuttles was missing, and it was possible the survivors of the on-board massacre had escaped in it while the pinnaces were too far away to see them. They could have gotten away with that if they'd launched on thrusters rather than bring up their wedge, and even at a low initial acceleration, they could be anywhere in an enormous volume of space by now. But if any survivors had bailed out that way, there couldn't have been many of them.

Possibilities for a shuttle escape, most of the crew is dead. Even a cursory search of the ship takes almost three hours until they find a locked door, the fusion plant.

The bulkhead com was a simple, bare-bones unit. It could be set for voice-only or for voice with two-way visual, but not for visual only one way. Apparently the delay had been to give the man inside the fusion room time to cover his pickup, because Abigail's end showed only a featureless blur. She stood calmly, facing her own pickup, then stepped back far enough to be sure that it could see her Navy skinsuit.

"Take off your helmet, please," the voice said, and she complied. There was silence, and then the voice said, "We're coming out."

-snip-

"Lieutenant Josh Baranyai," he said quickly. "Third officer of the Emerald Dawn."

Identifying the freighter as the Solly-flagged Emerald Dawn captured a few months ago departing New Tuscany.

"I'll take your word for it," Baranyai said. "I might not have, once, but I will now, for damned sure. Somehow the 'faxes don't seem to've reported the full story on the People's Republic. Nothing I ever saw said anything about homicidal maniacs being put in charge of the asylum!"

"Not all Havenites are maniacs. We aren't too fond of them, of course, but honesty compels me to admit that the present regime genuinely seems to have done everything it can to expose and eradicate the excesses of its predecessors." It came out sounding more stilted than Abigail had intended, but it was nothing less than the truth.

"I can believe that, too, from the way these people carried on," Baranyai said. "Their commander—'Citizen Commodore Clignet,' he called himself—could rant and rave for a half-hour at a time, and at the drop of the hat, about the 'recidivists' and 'class traitors' and 'enemies of the Revolution' and 'betrayers of the People' who'd conspired to overthrow the legitimate government of the People's Republic and murder somebody called Saint-Just."

Abigail nodded again, and Baranyai looked at her helplessly.

"I thought the Havenite head of state was named Pierre," he protested.

"He was. Saint-Just replaced him after he died in a coup attempt."

"If you say so."

Baranyai shook his head, and Abigail found herself smothering a smile at the way the Solly's confusion put the all-consuming importance of the war against Haven and the reasons for it into brutal perspective from a Solarian viewpoint.

Perspective is an important thing, Baranyi is probably ahead of the curve in knowing who was in charge of Haven six years ago.

"Anyway. You blew the crap out of the ship. Citizen Lieutenant Eisenhower, the prize master Clignet had assigned to Emerald Dawn, was one of his inner circle. He started screaming at us to put the hyper generator and the after impellers back on-line. But there was no point trying—they're dockyard jobs, both of them. His own engineering officer told him the same thing. At which point apparently he ordered his people to blow up the ship and themselves with it.

"After, of course, killing off the rest of our people so we couldn't interfere."

He fell silent again, staring off at something only he could see. Then he gave himself a shake and his eyes refocused on Abigail.

"I guess at least a few of his people decided they didn't want to be martyrs to the Revolution, after all. We sure as hell didn't have any weapons, but somebody started shooting. I think Steve Demosthenes—he was our second officer—was in After Impeller when you hit us. I don't know. But I grabbed every one of my people I could get my hands on and dragged them down here. I figured they'd play hell trying to blow up the ship with anything short of the fusion plant, whoever won the shooting match, and there was at least a fair chance whoever had shot us up would follow up with a boarding party sooner or later. Either way, this was the only place I could think of to go, and, at least, as a bridge officer, I knew the security override codes so they couldn't just unlock the hatch from the bridge. And . . . here we are."

What happened aboard the Dawn, I guess some of the crew weren't quite ready for martyrdom.

Two local days had passed since the destruction of Commodore Henri Clignet's "People's First Liberation Squadron" and the recapture of Emerald Dawn.

There'd been enough left of Anhur's impellers to get her under way under a mere fifty gravities' acceleration, and the savagely battered wreck now lay in a parking orbit around Pontifex. Emerald Dawn's helpless hulk had been towed in by a half a dozen LACs and occupied an orbit not far from her erstwhile captor. Baranyai had been able to confirm that one of the freighter's heavy shuttles was missing, but no one had found any trace of it, so far. Eventually, Helen felt sure, it would turn up somewhere. Probably someplace on the surface of Pontifex, abandoned by whoever had used it to get there. Exactly how the Peep escapees thought that they were going to blend into such an isolated local population was more than she could say, but she supposed they figured that making the attempt beat the alternatives.

The situation two days later.

"We sure don't have the space aboard ship for them!"

"No, we don't," Leo agreed. "But I don't think that's all the Captain has in mind." He looked around the table and saw all of them looking back at him. "The Exec told the Commander that the Captain's going to recommend to Admiral Khumalo that Clignet and Daumier and all of their people be handed over to the Peeps, along with all the evidence we've been able to collect about their activities."

"Oh, my!" Helen sat back in her chair, her lips half-parted in a sudden smile. "That's . . . evil," she said admiringly.

Looks like everyone gets repatriated eventually. And I'm sure Haven will love to have these Sons of Revolution back.

Clignet, as part of the megalomania which had driven him to dream—apparently sincerely—of someday restoring the People's Republic in all its malevolent glory, had kept a detailed personal log of his "squadron's" activities. He'd lovingly detailed each prize they'd taken, by name, registry, and cargo. Listed the profits they'd earned by disposing of them, the star systems where they'd been sold, even the names of the brokers through whose hands they'd passed. He'd recorded the other rogue Peep units he'd been in contact with, and the "Liberation Force in Exile" organization which had grown up among them. He'd also meticulously listed the names of those he'd ordered executed for "treason against the People" . . . including at least forty people who'd never been citizens of the People's Republic in the first place. And he'd kept an equally thorough list of his personnel who had most distinguished themselves "for their zeal in the People's service."

More people making detailed recordings of their capital crimes. Apparently the wealth of getting bit by that when the regime in Haven changed taught Captain Daumier and Commodore Clignet nothing at all.

Even now, the exec was more than a little surprised they could have this conversation. He remembered all his earlier doubts about Aivars Terekhov and the scars Hyacinth must have left behind. And, truth to tell, he wasn't convinced yet that he'd been wrong to harbor them. But the action against Anhur and Clignet's psychopaths had gone a long way toward resolving them. And, more importantly, in many ways, it seemed to have resolved a lingering constraint in his relationship with his Captain.

Nothing like getting into a fight, and winning, to bring a crew together.

"But now that it's over, I realize I need you to help me watch myself." His smile disappeared, and he looked at FitzGerald very levelly. "There's only one person aboard any warship with whom its captain can truly let down his guard, and that's his exec. You're the one person aboard the Kitty I can discuss this with—and the one person in a position to tell me if you think I'm stepping over the line without damaging discipline or undermining the chain of command. That's why I'm telling you this. Because I need you to know I want your input in a case like this."

"I—" FitzGerald paused and sipped coffee, deeply touched by his Captain's admission. The relationship he'd just described was the one which ought to exist between every successful captain and his executive officer, yet the degree and level of frankness he'd asked for—and offered—was attained only too rarely. And FitzGerald wondered if he would have had the moral strength and courage to admit to another officer, especially one of his subordinate officers, that he'd ever doubted his own judgment. Not because he was stupid enough to believe they wouldn't realize he had, but because admitting it simply wasn't the way the game was played.

A major milestone in Terekhov and Fitzgerald's personal and professional relationship.

"I'm starting work on my post-battle reports, and I'm looking forward to seeing yours and the rest of our officers. I'm especially curious as to whether or not the rest of you are going to identify the one weakness I've discovered about the new ship types."

"Like the lack of manpower?" FitzGerald asked dryly, and Terekhov chuckled.

"Exactly like the lack of manpower," he agreed. "We were swamped trying to deal with Anhur's casualties and damages. Even with the Nuncians to take up so much of the slack, we didn't begin to have the warm bodies we would've needed if we'd had to board a couple of intact ships. And as for doing that and making critical repairs, especially if we'd already had to detach some of the Marines—!"

"I never thought I'd say reducing the Marine detachments was a mistake, Skipper," FitzGerald said, shaking his head, "but it really is going to be a problem for us on detached operations like this."

"I know. I know." Terekhov sighed. Then he shrugged. "On the other hand, what we need right now more than anything else is a warfighting navy, not a peacekeeping one, and so far, these designs are one hell of a lot more efficient as pure fighting machines. We'll just have to learn to cope with the problems in other operational regimes. And let's be honest—if we'd been conducting regular anti-pirate operations instead of taking on semi-modern heavy cruisers, we wouldn't've felt the strain quite so badly."

One downside to the Saganami-C design with it's sparse crews and tiny Marine detachment, it doesn't have the people to deal with a lot of competing duties or crisis situations. Compare how Honor was able to detach something like a third of her crew in the first book, launched all the Marines and was still good for a fight. There's a bit less flexibility, and a lot less redundancy in these crews.

"Skipper, Clignet's logs virtually admit Manpower's recruited every damned refugee StateSec ship they can get their hands on!"

It's an odd combo, given how virulently anti-slavery the Peeps were, even in the darkest days. But Manpower is taking care of their maintenance for free and buying/fencing their loot in exchange for getting to point them the way of rival corporations and places they want to destabilize some (like Talbott). And naturally prepping them as a reserve to deal with outstanding problems, like Torch.

"Let's face it, Ansten; some of the biggest Solly merchant lines have always been in bed with the more successful pirates. They use them against competitors, and supplying them with information and weapons buys them immunity for ships traveling under their own house transponder codes. Hell, Edward Saganami was killed in action against 'pirates' subsidized by Mesa and the contemporary Silesian government! Not a lot of change there."

And apparently this is a relatively standard business practice in the League.

"Yes, Sir," FitzGerald sighed. "I've already got Tobias running preliminary updates on our charts, and I promised him he can have the snotties when he needs them. I guess we can settle down for the real survey activity tomorrow, or the next day."

"Time estimate to completion?"

"With all of the remote arrays we deployed against Clignet, we've already got a pretty damned good 'eye in the sky.' We're going to have to use the pinnaces to pick some of them up if we want to recover them—which," he added dryly, "I'm assuming, given their price tags, we do?"

"You assume correctly," Terekhov said even more dryly.

"Well, about a quarter of them've exhausted their endurance, so we're going to have to go out and get them. That's the bad news. The good news is that they've given us enough reach that we can probably complete the survey within another nine to ten T-days."

"That is good news. At that rate, we'll be able to pull out for Celebrant almost exactly on schedule, despite playing around with Clignet. Outstanding, Mr. Exec!"

"We strive to please, Skip. Of course," the XO smiled nastily, "doing it's going to require certain snotties to work their butts off. Which may not be such a bad thing, given some of the experiences they have to work their way past," he added more seriously.

"No, not a bad thing at all," Terekhov said. "Of course, I don't see any reason to explain to our long-suffering snotties that we're doing this for their own good. Think of all the generations of oppressed midshipmen who'd feel cheated if this one figured out their heartless, hard-driving, taskmaster superiors actually care what happens to them!"

Another nine or ten days to finish a survey of the Nuncio System, fill in all the celestial bodies, photo the stars for their nav charts and make detailed orbital surveys of both habitable planets. Then on to Celebrant.

She'd discovered the small observation dome early in her second week aboard Hexapuma. It was never used. The optical heads spotted along the cruiser's hull, and especially here between the boat bays, gave multiply overlapping coverage. They allowed the boat bay flight control officer far better visibility from the displays in his command station than any human eye could have provided, even from this marvelously placed perch. But the dome was still here, and, in some emergency, with the normal command station knocked out, someone stationed here might actually do some good. Personally, Helen doubted it, but she didn't really care, either. Whatever the logic of its construction, it gave her a place to sit alone with God's handiwork and think.

It was very quiet in the dome. The hand-thick armorplast blister on the bottom of Hexapuma's central spindle was tougher than thirty or forty centimeters of the best prespace armor imaginable, and the dome boasted its own armored hatch. There were only two comfortable chairs, a communications panel, and the controls required to configure and maneuver the small grav-lens telescope. The quiet whisper of air through the ventilating ducts was the only sound, and the silent presence of the stars was her only companionship whenever she came here to be alone. To think. To work her way through things . . . like the carnage and butchery she'd seen aboard Anhur.

And that made it a very precious treasure aboard a warship, where privacy was always all but impossible.

Apparently the boat bay has a small observation dome with two chairs and an advanced telescope, in the event of catastrophic sensor failure. Not sure how much good it would do, or even that it isn't an excuse to put a window on a spaceship because people like having windows. An inch of armorplast is worth "thirty or forty centimeters of the best prespace armor imaginable." For now it's where Helen Zilwicki goes to think, and where she is dismayed to find Paulo d'Arezzo.

She inhaled sharply as she recognized the sketch. Saw the shattered, broken hammerhead looming against Nuncio-B, surrounded by wreckage and splintered ruin. It was a stark composition, graphite on paper, blackest shadow and pitiless, blazing light, jagged edges, and the cruel beauty of sunlight on sheared battle steel. And somehow the images conveyed not just broken plating and pieces of hull. They conveyed the violence which had created them, the artist's awareness of the pain, death, and blood waiting within that truncated hull. And the promise that the loss of some precious innocence, almost like virginity, waited with those horrors.

The kid can draw, and I guess this is his way of dealing with it.

"No. I'm talking about something that happened years ago, back on Old Earth."

"When the Scrags kidnapped you?"

"You knew about that?" She blinked, and he actually chuckled.

"The story got pretty good coverage in the 'faxes," he pointed out. "Especially with the Manpower connection. And I had reasons of my own for following the stories." Again something flickered deep in his eyes. Then he smiled. "And neither your father nor Lady Montaigne have been particularly . . . inconspicuous since you came home." His expression sobered. "I've always figured the newsies didn't get the whole story, but the part they did get was bloody enough. It must've been pretty bad for a kid—what, fourteen T-years old?"

Seeing this, Helen talks with him about their odd feelings of guilt, and opens up about the time she straight-up killed three guys with her bare hands during the Manpower Incident.

"Look," she said, feeling a returning edge of awkwardness but refusing to let it deter her, "this may not be any of my business. But why is it that you, well . . . keep to yourself so much?"

"I don't," he said, instantly, smile disappearing, and it was her turn to shake her head.

"Oh, yes, you do. And I'm beginning to realize I was even slower than usual not to realize it isn't for the reasons I thought it was."

"I don't know what you're talking about," he said stiffly.

"I'm talking about the fact that it isn't because you think you're so much better than everyone else, after all."

"Because I think what?" He stared at her in such obvious consternation she had to chuckle.

"Well, that was my first thought. And I can be kind of mentally lazy sometimes. Somehow I never managed to get beyond thought number one to number two or number three." She shrugged. "I see somebody who's obviously spent that much money on bio-sculpt, and I automatically assume they have to have a pretty high opinion of themselves."

Here we go.

"No," he said. "It's not biosculpt. It's genetics."

"You're kidding me!" She eyed him skeptically. "People don't come down the chute looking that good without a little help, Mr. d'Arezzo!"

"I didn't say it was natural genetics," he said, his deep, musical voice suddenly so harsh that she sat bolt upright. His eyes met hers, and the cool gray was no longer cool. It was hot, like molten quartz. And then, suddenly, shockingly, he stuck out his tongue at her.

It was a gesture she'd seen before—seen from "terrorists" like Jeremy X and scholars like Web Du Havel. But she'd never seen the genetic bar code of a genetically engineered slave on the tongue of a fellow Naval officer. He showed it to her for perhaps five seconds, then closed his mouth, gray eyes still blazing.

Open mouth, insert foot. I hope you learned something from this experience Ms. Zilwicki.

"I guess you can also understand why I'm not quite so impressed with my 'good looks' as other people are," he said in a low, harsh voice. "Sometimes it goes a lot further than that. When you know a bunch of twisted bastards designed you to look good—to be a nice, attractive piece of meat when they put you on the block or rented you out—having people chase after you just because you look so goddamned good turns your stomach. It's not you they want. Not the you that lives inside you, the one that does things like this." He slapped the sketchpad's satchel. "It's this." He touched his face again. "This . . . packaging."

Many and varied are the traumas of former slaves. Even if Paulo was too young for the routine rape part of his training. Who was it who asked why genetic slavery in particular is a bad thing, and what makes it genetic anyhow?

"Paulo," she said, almost gently, "I've known a lot of ex-slaves, all right? Some of them are like Jeremy or Web. They wear where they came from right out on their sleeves and throw it into the galaxy's teeth. It defines who they are, and they're ready to rip Manpower's throat out with their bare teeth. Others just want to pretend it never happened. And then there's a whole bunch who don't want to pretend it didn't happen but who do want to get on with who they are. They don't want to talk about it. They don't want people to cut them extra slack, make exceptions for them out of some sort of misplaced, third-party guilt. And they don't want pity, or to be defined by those around them in terms of their victimhood. Obviously I haven't bothered to get to know you as well as I should've, or this wouldn't be coming as such a surprise to me. But I do know you well enough to know, especially now, that you're part of that hardheaded, stiff-necked, stubborn bunch that's determined to succeed without whining, without excuses, or special allowances. The kind who're too damned stubborn for their own good and too damned stupid to know it. Sort of like Gryphon Highlanders."

And the many ways of dealing with it.

"I guess maybe we are sort of alike," he said finally. "In a way."

"And who'd've thunk it?" she replied with that same toothy grin.

"It probably wouldn't have hurt to've had this discussion earlier," he added.

"Nope, not a bit," she agreed.

"Still, I suppose it's not too late to start over," he observed.

"Not as long as you don't expect me to stop being my usual stubborn, insufferable, basically shallow self," she said.

"I don't know if all of that self-putdown is entirely fair," he said thoughtfully. "I never really thought of you as stubborn."

"As soon as I get over my unaccustomed feeling of contrition for having misjudged the motivation for that nose-in-the-air, superior attitude of yours, you'll pay for that," she assured him.

"I look forward to it with fear and trembling."

"Smartest thing you've said all day," she told him ominously, and then they both laughed.

Personal problems, definitively dealt with.

Simon_Jester · Post by **Simon_Jester** » 2014-07-15 12:08am

Ultonius wrote:
Simon_Jester wrote:Which may explain why grasers are always presented as 'heavier' than lasers even though there's no obvious reason this should be so. Graser beams are far more likely to do an efficient job of shattering and blowing through a layer of well-designed armor plating. Even if generating them is less energy-efficient (which seems likely), that can still pay off.
A short-wavelength laser, such as a graser, compared to a longer-wavelength laser that has identical power, shot/pulse duration and lens/mirror diameter, will suffer less diffraction. It therefore should be able to maintain a given beam diameter at a greater distance than the other laser, giving it longer effective range. At a given range, it should be able to maintain a smaller beam diameter, and therefore greater beam intensity, than the other laser, giving it greater penetration, even before you factor in how the material of the target behaves when exposed to the wavelength in question.

Honorverse laser weapons have to openly defy the diffraction limit just to work at all at the described combat ranges and given the described aperture sizes.

While you have a legitimate point, my suspicion remains that part of the graser's advantage is how it interacts with the materials of the target hull.

Otherwise, well, gamma rays have wavelengths on the order of tens or hundreds of thousands of times shorter than light and can therefore be collimated down to an intensity billions of times higher, assuming you have a lens actually capable of focusing gamma rays. Gravity lensing should be as good on gamma rays as on laser wavelengths so that's a solved problem.

Ahriman238 wrote:I suspect scenes like this were common throughout the Republic between word of the cease-fire and word of the Theisman coup. Certainly it wasn't all like La Martine.

Thank you Cachat, then...

One downside to the Saganami-C design with it's sparse crews and tiny Marine detachment, it doesn't have the people to deal with a lot of competing duties or crisis situations. Compare how Honor was able to detach something like a third of her crew in the first book, launched all the Marines and was still good for a fight. There's a bit less flexibility, and a lot less redundancy in these crews.

Also note that in a light cruiser of ninety thousand tons, Honor had roughly as many, if not actually more, crew total than Terekhov does on a heavy cruiser of about four hundred thousand tons.

On the one hand, this means that for every Courageous-class light cruiser the Navy had in 1900 PD, it can crew a Saganami-C, which is so much more powerful as a combat unit that it beggars description. On the other hand, this means that if Hexapuma were sent to Basilisk Station to do the same job Honor did...

Despite probably being 5-10 times more expensive, the new heavy cruiser probably wouldn't be able to do a much better job of the routine duties of manning that post.

VhenRa · Post by **VhenRa** » 2014-07-15 12:37am

Simon_Jester wrote:
One downside to the Saganami-C design with it's sparse crews and tiny Marine detachment, it doesn't have the people to deal with a lot of competing duties or crisis situations. Compare how Honor was able to detach something like a third of her crew in the first book, launched all the Marines and was still good for a fight. There's a bit less flexibility, and a lot less redundancy in these crews.
Also note that in a light cruiser of ninety thousand tons, Honor had roughly as many, if not actually more, crew total than Terekhov does on a heavy cruiser of about four hundred thousand tons.

On the one hand, this means that for every Courageous-class light cruiser the Navy had in 1900 PD, it can crew a Saganami-C, which is so much more powerful as a combat unit that it beggars description. On the other hand, this means that if Hexapuma were sent to Basilisk Station to do the same job Honor did...

Despite probably being 5-10 times more expensive, the new heavy cruiser probably wouldn't be able to do a much better job of the routine duties of manning that post.

Doesn't this come up with the Roland-class DDs in another book, what with having absolutely no Marines aboard at all?

Simon_Jester · Post by **Simon_Jester** » 2014-07-15 01:13am

I have no idea. Maybe. It certainly should be an issue.

Honestly, I think this is one respect in which Manticore has gone too far in the right direction- although their manpower crunch is very, very severe and is only going to get worse. While it's probably a good thing that battlecruisers can be operated with a crew of several hundred and superdreadnoughts with, say, 1000-1500... it is not such a smart idea to squeeze a cruiser complement down to three or four hundred.

Not if you're going to expect the cruiser to do the same things it used to do with twice as many people.

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Bit of Analysis: HH Saganami Island series

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