Bit of Analysis: Honor Harrington II

[Batman]

Well they produce silk so presumably they're like silkworms only newer?

I like how McQueen realized that militarily, Honor wasn't actually that big a catch (as already pointed out she essentially sat out the important part of the war so far, and will in fact to its very end), it's her psychological impact that makes her hero/patron saint/boogeywoman (depending what side you're on) and executing her (leave alone publicly) a Really Bad Idea (TM). Bad Gal or no she should've gotten to do a 'Toldytoldytoldya' dance when that monstrously backfired on the PRH two books later.
McQueen also seems to be the only one on the Committee who realizes Ransom is stark raving mad, even if she's not quite suicidal enough to openly say so.

Idle speculation time-what if McQueen's coup had succeeded and it had been her in charge of the PRH by the time Buttercup happened and the PRHN had just been turned into practice targets?

[Ahriman238]

Honestly, McQueen's move would be pretty much the same as Oscar's. Sue for peace when it becomes clear they can't win. Buy some months or years of negotiations during which she can purge the opposition and cement her position as military dictator.

[Batman]

St. Just managed to sue for peace because he terminated most of the high-ranking Manticoran government officials, and they were replaced with High Ridge and his cronies. McQueen couldn't count on that (in fact even St Just couldn't) Yes, she likely would settle for peace, but the eventual outcome would be a lot more like like Pritchart's Haven (only with a lot more dictatorship, and I'm not sure about that).

[Terralthra]

Yeah, it's highly unlikely that McQueen would go for Operation Hassan, in my opinion. She'd go for a coup against her own repressive government, but not against civilian leadership of an enemy. Without Hassan and the SKM's domestic political fallout, no way does Cromarty (and Elizabeth) accept a cease-fire in place. They'd demand a surrender.

[Simon_Jester]

A San Martino in a StateSec uniform. It takes all kinds I guess.

The historical SS was able to recruit from most of the occupied countries in Europe, at least a trickle's worth, so there are certainly precedents.

Modifications to Tepes, more marines, more brig space and more small craft in exchange for less weaponry. An extra two bays needed to upgrade a BC (which already has two, or at least Nike did) to an SD's smallcraft complement, which we know from earlier books includes six pinnaces and an unknown number (greater than two) of cutters.

Oh, and first mention of assault shuttles which are impeller smallcraft rather like pinnaces, only half again the size (and a normal pinnace is the size of a jumbo jet and holds 80) with extra armor and weapons. More designed for a ground-attack role than carrying out boarding actions at speed.

This is sensible; honestly a StateSec warship is more likely to be called to drop troops or board things than it is to fight.

Idle speculation time-what if McQueen's coup had succeeded and it had been her in charge of the PRH by the time Buttercup happened and the PRHN had just been turned into practice targets?

Well, I don't think she could have actually done much about that. Her offensive operations were already falling afoul of the first fruits of the hardware that went into Buttercup (Second Basilisk, Second Hancock), so she couldn't have done much more to throw the RMN off balance by striking their rear areas. And the physical inferiority of her ships was just too much to handle.

Had McQueen's coup succeeded, moreover, Hassan would probably not have happened, because if nothing else the coup would have resulted in Saint-Just dying along with most of his senior staff, and nobody would have been around to even tell McQueen that the groundwork had been laid for the assassination.

At the same time, what kind of peace could Cromarty have imposed?

On the other hand, McQueen would also have been rather well placed to at least keep herself in power after a surrender to Manticore, since in the wake of a coup, she can totally divorce herself from the atrocities committed by StateSec and Ransom. She'd have the support of the historical Havenite officer cadre who formed the core of the Republic of Haven's military (Theisman, Tourville, and Giscard). There would probably be fewer splinter rebels, and she might well still have Bolthole and the core means to ensure that Haven could rebuild a functional military. It'd just take longer in light of all the disarmament demands and such that the RMN would impose on Haven.

[And yes, Bolthole would probably survive any Manticoran attempt to disarm Haven. Manticore didn't even know it existed and even vaguely competent security efforts on Haven's part would allow that state of affairs to continue. As long as any polity recognizable as "Haven" exists, it will have Bolthole to fall back on.]

[DarkArk]

So I've been working my way through the HH series, and am just in the middle of At All Costs at the moment. I've found it to be an enjoyable read, and honestly I've found Echoes of Honor to At All Costs to be better than the books in the middle. Also been reading the thread off and on for a couple of months, but now deciding to jump in since you're fairly far behind where I am now.

I'm not sure McQueen could have survived an Operation Buttercup that was allowed to march all the way to Haven. She certainly couldn't have stopped it in time, given what she had to work with. I haven't finished the series, so I'm not sure what terms Manticore does end up using, but I got the impression that Elizabeth wouldn't tolerate Haven having much of anything in the way of military power once she had them at her mercy. So after Haven's home fleet gets smashed to pieces by White Haven, and she has to sign an incredibly embarrassing treaty, I see her getting stuck with the check. Further she's not likely to have Theisman and co. to back her up either. McQueen's coup failing was ultimately probably quite good for Haven as a whole, barring a Secretary of State who screwed with his diplomatic correspondence.

Some of my own thoughts about the series:

I've long thought that Theisman, Tourville, and Giscard only survived to become as successful as they did because of their relationships with their People's commissioners, and the fact that they didn't get rabidly faithful ones to Statesec either. Undoubtedly just as skilled or better admirals were lost to either execution or dying in a battle they weren't going to win because they were forced to fight anyway. McQueen is the exception to this, but then she positioned herself well as the best admiral Haven had at the time.

I've thought that Honor's fame within Haven might actually be because she's always had mostly independent commands. She's constantly out there foiling Haven's plots, not sitting there as a CA squadron's CO in a major fleet. 4th Yeltsin undoubtedly did wonders for her reputation with the other side. Further she had fought a lot before the war even started. Yes she hasn't done a ton with regards to major fleet movements, but she's constantly out there screwing up Haven's best laid plans and getting her name in the news.

The books themselves: I think the series might have been better if there had been one or two more books before Honor got command of Fearless I. I certainly think it was a mistake to take Honor out of the major action right when the war got started. Field of Dishonor wasn't bad per se, but there should have been POV chapters from people fighting on the front lines.

For the fact that dueling is legal, it sure seems to have disastrous political consequences for anyone trying to use it. It makes me wonder why it stays around at all.

Honor's parents might just be the best characters in the whole series.

[Simon_Jester]

I'm not sure McQueen could have survived an Operation Buttercup that was allowed to march all the way to Haven. She certainly couldn't have stopped it in time, given what she had to work with. I haven't finished the series, so I'm not sure what terms Manticore does end up using, but I got the impression that Elizabeth wouldn't tolerate Haven having much of anything in the way of military power once she had them at her mercy. So after Haven's home fleet gets smashed to pieces by White Haven, and she has to sign an incredibly embarrassing treaty, I see her getting stuck with the check. Further she's not likely to have Theisman and co. to back her up either. McQueen's coup failing was ultimately probably quite good for Haven as a whole, barring a Secretary of State who screwed with his diplomatic correspondence.

Hm. Maybe. Why do you think that McQueen wouldn't have Theisman et. al. backing her?

Also, if McQueen had won and been forced to sign a humiliating treaty, Havenite space would probably have been stripped down to the 'core' planets- Haven itself, and the ones annexed at the very beginning of the Havenite expansion. It might well take long years for Haven to rebuild a military... but they'd still have Bolthole. The resulting scenario might look something like Germany rebounding for World War Two in some ways, hopefully without McQueen turning out as nasty as Hitler.

Some of my own thoughts about the series:

I've long thought that Theisman, Tourville, and Giscard only survived to become as successful as they did because of their relationships with their People's commissioners, and the fact that they didn't get rabidly faithful ones to Statesec either. Undoubtedly just as skilled or better admirals were lost to either execution or dying in a battle they weren't going to win because they were forced to fight anyway. McQueen is the exception to this, but then she positioned herself well as the best admiral Haven had at the time.

That seems likely.

I've thought that Honor's fame within Haven might actually be because she's always had mostly independent commands. She's constantly out there foiling Haven's plots, not sitting there as a CA squadron's CO in a major fleet. 4th Yeltsin undoubtedly did wonders for her reputation with the other side. Further she had fought a lot before the war even started. Yes she hasn't done a ton with regards to major fleet movements, but she's constantly out there screwing up Haven's best laid plans and getting her name in the news.

Honestly I doubt Honor's name would even show up in state-controlled news organs in the PRH regarding the events of Book Two, because Haven was specifically trying to work through a deniable proxy. In Book One she's officially just a mass murderer and no one not cleared to know about the Basilisk operation should know differently.

The books themselves: I think the series might have been better if there had been one or two more books before Honor got command of Fearless I.

Agreed. Weber tried to fill in the gaps with prequel novellas in later anthologies, but it's just not the same. By comparison, Horatio Hornblower got two books full of content dealing with his adventures before he even got close to ship command. Although those were published later on chronologically too, come to think of it.

I certainly think it was a mistake to take Honor out of the major action right when the war got started. Field of Dishonor wasn't bad per se, but there should have been POV chapters from people fighting on the front lines.

Agreed. I suspect Weber may have realized this mistake himself and tried to fix it in Echoes of Honor when a similar situation arose- Honor being engaged in her own private little war on the side while the main theaters of operation were far away and only tangentially related to what she was doing.

For the fact that dueling is legal, it sure seems to have disastrous political consequences for anyone trying to use it. It makes me wonder why it stays around at all.

The disastrous consequences seem to have more to do with how Honor made use of dueling. She violated the decorum of the most powerful single political institution in the Star Kingdom in pursuit of a vendetta against one of its own members.

The mere fact that she shot Summervale and North Hollow, she could probably have gotten away with. But the way she went about it made her persona non grata in the eyes of a lot of important Manticoran politicians, and probably alienated even some people who approved of her.

Or were you thinking of someone else?

[DarkArk]

Why do you think that McQueen wouldn't have Theisman et. al. backing her?

Because they would have been either dead or captured after getting blown away by Buttercup.

The resulting scenario might look something like Germany rebounding for World War Two in some ways, hopefully without McQueen turning out as nasty as Hitler.

That's more or less what I was thinking of, but with McQueen more in the role of the Weimar Republic, and getting deposed.

Also had forgotten about Bolthole, which assuming against some random fluke would have allowed Haven to rebuild relatively quickly in secret. You know, it almost makes me wish the series had gone this way.

Honestly I doubt Honor's name would even show up in state-controlled news organs in the PRH regarding the events of Book Two

I was under the impression that Mantie and Sollie news did make its way into Haven, just slower. Also I was more talking in terms of her reputation among Havenite command, rather than the man in the street, who certainly would have access to all of her operational history.

I suspect Weber may have realized this mistake himself and tried to fix it in Echoes of Honor when a similar situation arose

Which made Echoes of Honor a great read after the relatively lackluster Honor Among Enemies and In Enemy Hands.

Or were you thinking of someone else?

I was thinking of that. But it jumped into my mind again when the newsies broke Honor going to the fertility clinic, and her advisors warned her against challenging him to a duel because it would hurt her reputation massively. It seemed like the perfect use of a challenge.

Also I was annoyed that there were no consequences to North Hollow breaking decorum and trying to kill her early. Combined with her losing command over something that was totally legal. I guess the Lords really do have that kind of pull. Further White Haven seemed to go off on how going through with the duel would be what would cost her her command, not just issuing her challenge in the Lords which was already in the past.

[Simon_Jester]

Why do you think that McQueen wouldn't have Theisman et. al. backing her?

Because they would have been either dead or captured after getting blown away by Buttercup.

If she had taken supreme command she probably wouldn't be running the fleet from her own personal superdreadnought any more than Theisman did after the coup. Unless Eighth Fleet simply starts randomly bombarding Haven flat, she'd have a fair chance of surviving to sign the instrument of surrender.

The resulting scenario might look something like Germany rebounding for World War Two in some ways, hopefully without McQueen turning out as nasty as Hitler.

That's more or less what I was thinking of, but with McQueen more in the role of the Weimar Republic, and getting deposed.

I don't know, she seems rough enough to be able to handle most potential threats as long as there is any residual fleet at all left to Haven. For that matter even if there is no hyper-capable fleet.

Or were you thinking of someone else?

I was thinking of that. But it jumped into my mind again when the newsies broke Honor going to the fertility clinic, and her advisors warned her against challenging him to a duel because it would hurt her reputation massively. It seemed like the perfect use of a challenge.

It's one of the problems with combining the idea of a modern society and its media with dueling- you have to have a custom against challenging reporters and columnists to duels. And Weber, unfortunately, wanted a recognizably 'modern' society with paparazzi more than he wanted the Georgian-era English feel of a dueling culture... so when the two were mutually exclusive the hated reporters won.

[Batman]

Why do you think that McQueen wouldn't have Theisman et. al. backing her?

Because they would have been either dead or captured after getting blown away by Buttercup.

If she had taken supreme command she probably wouldn't be running the fleet from her own personal superdreadnought any more than Theisman did after the coup. Unless Eighth Fleet simply starts randomly bombarding Haven flat, she'd have a fair chance of surviving to sign the instrument of surrender.

Simon-he's talking about Theisman et al either dying or being captured during Buttercup, not McQueen herself.

It's one of the problems with combining the idea of a modern society and its media with dueling- you have to have a custom against challenging reporters and columnists to duels. And Weber, unfortunately, wanted a recognizably 'modern' society with paparazzi more than he wanted the Georgian-era English feel of a dueling culture... so when the two were mutually exclusive the hated reporters won.

Or Weber could have done the sensible thing and left dueling to the nobles who are too hidebound to give it up while the reporters (and pretty much everybody else) go 'Um, yeah, no thanks. I'm not risking getting killed over calling your fat ugly stupid sister fat ugly and stupid' with little if no consequences other than legal ones.

[DarkArk]

Simon-he's talking about Theisman et al either dying or being captured during Buttercup, not McQueen herself.

Precisely. McQueen herself is going to live, all of the rest of her named competent officers most likely are not.

I don't know, she seems rough enough to be able to handle most potential threats as long as there is any residual fleet at all left to Haven.

Given how volatile Haven has been before this, I'm going to remain skeptical. I'll give you that she has most of the navy in her pocket, but I don't think that's going to count for much when it's mostly all been destroyed.

As for the dueling, in the end I think it was a relatively stupid addition that the series could have done without.

[Simon_Jester]

Simon-he's talking about Theisman et al either dying or being captured during Buttercup, not McQueen herself.

[Slaps forehead]

OH. Right. Good point; sorry. Now, "captured" wouldn't be such a big deal, because the Havenite POWs would be repatriated after the war. But "killed" is extremely likely, so yeah.

Or Weber could have done the sensible thing and left dueling to the nobles who are too hidebound to give it up while the reporters (and pretty much everybody else) go 'Um, yeah, no thanks. I'm not risking getting killed over calling your fat ugly stupid sister fat ugly and stupid' with little if no consequences other than legal ones.

The main issue is that if dueling is something people routinely have a right to refuse, the institution just plain evaporates because nearly everyone will refuse, including most of the nobility. In most parts of the Western world this happened within, oh, about fifty years or so of the time that it became socially acceptable to not fight a duel.

Basically, the social consequences of not dueling have to be serious enough that you would be willing to risk death to avoid them. Otherwise, people will just stop bothering with it and the custom becomes viewed as backwards and absurd.

Meanwhile, even for the active duelists themselves, there is very little point in bothering with all the risk and sweat associated with duels, if you can't use it to compel respectful behavior from your peers (and inferiors). That was the fundamental reason for duels: the idea of "honor" as that which compelled people to show respect and discretion in dealing with you. If reporters are free to slander your good name willy-nilly, then "honor" simply isn't the kind of shield that you'd need it to be for dueling to persist. Not worth the trouble.

As I've noted elsewhere, if you want a better example of a dueling-aristocrat culture that hangs together in a more logically consistent way, look at Drake's Lieutenant Leary series.

[Ahriman238]

State Security had seen no reason to bring along their prisoners' baggage, and, like everyone else, Scotty had only the uniform he'd been wearing when they'd first been dragged in to face Cordelia Ransom. Modern synthetic fabrics were tough and durable, but even so, there was a limit to how much wear one set of garments could absorb. Their guards had offered bright orange jumpsuits to replace them, but without success, for every one of their prisoners knew the offer hadn't been made out of kindness. Those jump suits would have separated them from what and who they were, reduced them from naval officers to so many hopeless, indistinguishable captives. Their uniforms might be becoming worn and tattered, and they might have to take turns washing them out by hand in the compartment's single lavatory, but none of his people had fallen for the offer.

The Manticoran's keeping of their increasingly ragged uniforms over prison jumpsuits. Honorverse fabrics are alluded to being tougher than contemporary clothes, but are definitely showing wear after six weeks of continuous use.

Even State Security had rules. Its personnel might ignore or violate them, but the official procedures existed, and—on paper, at least—they looked almost reasonable. But Timmons and his detail of two-legged animals understood how twisting those procedures without—quite—technically violating them only allowed even more scope to humiliate and debase anyone unfortunate enough to fall into their power. The letter of the regulations said strip searches and cavity searches of prisoners could be carried out only by security personnel of the same sex, and Timmons insisted that his thugs abide by that. But the regs also stipulated that a minimum of two guards must be present any time a priority prisoner was subjected to searches . . . and that second guard was always male.

Efforts to humiliate Honor by having a male guard watch her strip-and-body cavity search.

Their precious regulations proscribed any sort of cybernetic prostheses or bioenhancement for prisoners, and one of their techs had disabled her artificial eye . . . and the synthetic nerves in the left side of her face. It had been a gratuitous insult, a gloating deprivation which served no useful purpose. Certainly there had been no possible way in which her eye or facial nerves could be considered a "security risk"! But that hadn't prevented them from doing it, and the relative crudity of their tech base had prevented them from simply shutting her implants down. With neither the access codes nor the technology to derive them, they'd taken a brute force approach and simply burned them out, blinding her left eye and reducing half her face to dead, numb immobility. Honor suspected the damage was irreparable and that complete replacement would be required . . . or would have been, if she'd been going to live long enough to receive it.

Nor had their petty cruelties stopped there. They'd shaved her head under the guise of "hygiene," cutting away the braids she'd spent so many years growing. But there, at least, their efforts to dehumanize her had hit a pothole that actually amused her, for they seemed unaware that she'd cut her own hair almost that short for the better part of thirty years for the sake of convenience. Whatever they might have hoped, the loss of her braids was scarcely likely to cause her resistance to crumble.

Apparently 'bioenhancement' is a legitimate thing in the honorverse. Also, Peeps, or maybe just StateSec, don't seem to have the technical know-how to properly and safely disable Manticoran cybernetics. After that, a haircut truly is a minor thing.

Yet for all that her spirit remained unbroken, she also knew, mirror or no, that her confinement was gradually grinding her away. Timmons seemed unaware of her enhanced metabolism or its need for fuel. She didn't know if that was true or if he simply wanted her to beg for the additional food she required, and it didn't really matter. She'd long since decided she would die before asking him for anything.

The living side of her face had grown gaunt, and her muscle tone was slowly rotting under the impact of poor diet and lack of exercise. She knew Cordelia Ransom had wanted her in good shape for the cameras when they hanged her, and she took a certain grim, perverse satisfaction in knowing what Ransom would actually get. Yet inside, where she guarded the walls of her spirit's fortress, she knew she was growing dangerously detached. She had no clear idea how long she'd been in this cell where the light and the temperature never changed, where there was nothing to read or do, where no distraction was ever offered except for her meals and the mocking humiliation of the guards. No doubt they were drawing close to their destination and her execution, yet somehow that hardly seemed to matter. She hadn't spoken a word to her captors in the entire time she'd been here—however long that had been—and she sometimes thought, in the drifting stillness of her thoughts when she was alone, that perhaps she had forgotten how to speak.

Lack of exercise and stimulation don't do good things for Honor. Plus, as mentioned before, Shannon Foraker knew all about Honor's dietary requirements, but her present jailer does not. So what he thinks is a just-above-starvation diet is, in fact, 20% short what it would take to actually not starve her. And Honor is too prideful to beg for food or explain the situation, for now anyways, eventually hunger can force you to do just about anything, on the other hand they're almost to Hades and her execution so she could theoretically die soon with her dignity intact.

"C'mere, cell bait," he whispered, and the hand on her shoulder pulled her closer while his free hand reached for her breasts.

But it never touched them. As he reached forward, Honor's left hand shot up like a striking viper, and he hissed in sudden pain as her fingers locked on his wrist like a vise. He tried to jerk free, but her hand might have been a steel clamp. Her passivity had lulled him into forgetting her heavy-grav origins, just as it had convinced him she would always be passive, and sudden fear—darker, uglier, and far stronger for its total unexpectedness—flickered in his eyes as she tightened her grip still further and the right side of her mouth curved in a parody of a smile.

-snip-

"You're right," Honor told her softly. "I do have friends 'topside,' and you can make me play your sick little games by threatening them. But not this one. Not even for them. And in case you've forgotten, Ransom wants me 'undamaged,' remember? So play your other games, Peep, but tell the rest of the garbage there are limits." Bergren started to heave to his knees, clutching his wrist, but Honor's right foot shot out, and its bare sole crashed into his mouth. He slammed into the corner, groaning and half-conscious, and the other guard shuddered—afraid, and hating Honor all the more for her fear.

Yeah, Honor nearly got raped once and was traumatized for decades over it, and she's a highly skilled martial artist, so this attempt was naturally what made her lash out. And win, which is unusual for prisoners assaulting their guards.


Sorry for the brief update, but the next chapter is so loaded with tidbits it'd almost be easier to quote the whole thing. Probably less interesting though.

[Ahriman238]

As I've noted elsewhere, if you want a better example of a dueling-aristocrat culture that hangs together in a more logically consistent way, look at Drake's Lieutenant Leary series.

Someday, I really need to look into these books.

[Esquire]

The first few are free on the Baen ebook site, if you've got a few hours to spare.

[DarkArk]

Certainly there had been no possible way in which her eye or facial nerves could be considered a "security risk"!

I wonder how true this actually is, considering what her artificial arm holds later in the series. In any case I'd say the spirit of the rule is probably not quite as cruel as it is made out to be here.

[Simon_Jester]

Lack of exercise and stimulation don't do good things for Honor. Plus, as mentioned before, Shannon Foraker knew all about Honor's dietary requirements, but her present jailer does not. So what he thinks is a just-above-starvation diet is, in fact, 20% short what it would take to actually not starve her. And Honor is too prideful to beg for food or explain the situation, for now anyways, eventually hunger can force you to do just about anything, on the other hand they're almost to Hades and her execution so she could theoretically die soon with her dignity intact.

There are cases of people starving themselves to death; it does happen once in a while.

Certainly there had been no possible way in which her eye or facial nerves could be considered a "security risk"!

I wonder how true this actually is, considering what her artificial arm holds later in the series. In any case I'd say the spirit of the rule is probably not quite as cruel as it is made out to be here.

Nerves by themselves can't be a security risk. But how do you know they're just nerves? How do you know they're not, say, a radio antenna, unless you perform exploratory surgery?

Another possibility is that cybernetic prosthetics could be suicide or assassination devices- I just got done reading Dune, so that hollow tooth full of nerve gas springs immediately to mind.

[Ahriman238]

Sorry for the short update. Dumped this last night, had to start from scratch. Here's the first third, anyways.

A prize like Horace Harkness didn't drop into Public Information's lap every day, and the fact that he was a missile tech familiar with the FTL transmitters mounted in the Manties' recon drones made him even more valuable as a source of technical data R&D would make good use of. But the larger implications of propaganda broadcasts and technological information were beyond Johnson and Candleman's mental horizons. They had their own reasons to be happy Harkness had decided to defect, and those reasons had nothing at all to do with his value to the PRH in general.

Horace's technical skills are being analyzed, even as he's making half-a-dozen recordings for Ransom a day.

Technically, both his watchdogs were high school graduates, and Johnson actually had two years of college on his résumé. Unfortunately—or fortunately, depending upon one's perspective—they'd both been Dolists, and their schooling had been provided courtesy of the PRH's educational system. It had been theoretically possible to acquire a worthwhile education from that source, but doing so had required an individual to use the resources available to educate himself, because after so many decades of debasing the concept of achievement in the name of "democratization" and "student validation," no one in the teaching establishment had had a clue as to how to truly educate someone else.

The problem was that genuinely self-motivated people are rare. Without someone else to explain it to them, most young people don't understand why learning is important in the first place. There are always exceptions to that broad generalization, but the majority of human beings learn from experience, not precept, and until someone experiences the consequences of being uneducated, he seldom feels a driving need to correct the situation. Creating a desire to learn in someone who hasn't already been caught in the gears requires an entire support structure, a society in which one's elders make it clear that one is expected to acquire knowledge and training in its use. And that sort of society was precisely what the prewar Dolists had lacked, for the Basic Living Stipend had been handed over like clockwork however unproductive they might have been. Besides, what had there been for a Dolist to use an education on?

Perhaps even worse, the prewar Legislaturalists had gone to some lengths to make the answer to that last question "nothing," for knowledge was a dangerous thing. They hadn't wanted the Dolists educated or involved in making the system work. They might have been an almost intolerable, parasitic drag on a moribund economy, but as long as the BLS had sufficed to support their accustomed lifestyles, they'd felt no particular urge to demand the right to participate in the making of political decisions. That, after all, had been the original bargain between their ancestors and those of the Legislaturalists. In return for being "taken care of," the citizens of the PRH had surrendered all decision-making to the people who ran the machine, and until the machine collapsed, no one had felt any need to fix the host of things wrong with it.

Can't believe I'd ever say this, but preach it, Weber.

This sounds eerily like my daily grind, particularly for a book written almost a decade before "failure is not an option."

People who could barely handle basic math or, like Candleman, suffered from what anything but the Peep Office of Education would have called functional illiteracy, were of strictly limited utility to a modern war machine, because maintaining or servicing any equipment more complex than a pulse rifle required at least some familiarity with the basic principles of electronics, cybernetics, gravity theory, and any of scores of other disciplines. Anyone could be trained to operate modern hardware—simply surviving in a technological society required at least a surface competence—but for people like Johnson and Candleman, that competence was like the math ability conferred by learning to make change in a shopping mall. They had no more comprehension of what went on behind the input keys and the displays than someone from preindustrial Terra would have had.

Some of the skills you need or need to be able to learn to function as a true spacer, against which list Horace's minders fall very short.

That was the main reason the majority of maintenance duties in the People's Navy were assigned either to officers or to senior noncoms. If the prewar PN had wanted competent technicians, it had been forced to train them itself, and it simply hadn't had most of its conscripts long enough to overcome the disabilities with which they arrived. Its only real choice had been to train them first as operators and only secondly as true technicians, and that took time. Years of it, in most cases, which meant it was only really practical to train the people who formed its long-term, professional core.

The People's Marines had faced the same problems, though on a somewhat lesser scale. Battle armor and support weapons weren't something one wanted in the hands of technical ignoramuses, and the days when the dregs of an uneducated society could be turned into first-line soldiers without massive remedial training had gone out with the bolt-action rifle, but the Marines had always been a long-service outfit, with a lower percentage of conscripts. Coupled with their (relatively) simpler equipment, they'd been able to impose a more uniform level of training which came far closer to matching the tactical competence of their Manticoran counterparts, although maintenance remained a chronic problem even for them.

Simon called it, a large number of officers and senior noncoms who are de facto technicians, because nobody else stays around long enough to get the skills hammered into them. Though the Marines are apparently better off, having more volunteers and simpler kit.

But the heavy losses the People's Navy and Marines had suffered in the opening stages of the war—not to mention the officer purges which had followed the Harris Assassinations and the casualties suffered in things like the Leveller Uprising—had cut dangerously deep into the military's trained manpower. The Committee of Public Safety had acted to recall veterans who had completed their terms of service, which had almost covered the initial shortfalls, but the only real solution had to be the education and training of the required replacements to a modern standard . . . preferably before they got to boot camp. There were enough realists in the PRH to recognize that, and whatever her other shortcomings, Cordelia Ransom had managed to sell it to the Mob, as well. In a sort of insanely twisted logic, the need to fight a war started to preserve a parasitic life style had led to a situation in which the parasites in question were actually willing, even eager, to abandon their parasite status, repair their schools, and learn how to provide the support their military required. It was a pity the thought of making the same repairs hadn't occurred to anyone when it might actually have averted the war in the first place.

Reform is happening, and there was a mass veteran recall to cover for the losses in the early stages of the war, and from the revolutionary purges.

In the meantime, however, people with real educations remained in critically short supply, and they were needed not just for the military, but also to operate the Republic's civilian and industrial infrastructure. Balancing personnel allocations between the combat arms and the people who made the weapons with which the combat arms fought remained an enormous problem for the PRH. The situation was improving—and far more quickly than the more complacent Allied leaders would have believed possible—but for the foreseeable future, manpower supplies would remain tight.

But there was at least one area in which people with minimal educations could be readily employed by the State, and that brought Harkness back to Johnson and Candleman. There was nothing fundamentally wrong with the mind either of them had been issued; it was simply that no one had ever bothered to acquaint those minds with their own potentials. They were ignorant, not stupid, and State Security didn't need hyper physicists. For that matter, even with ships like Tepes in its inventory, StateSec didn't need an enormous number of missile and gravitics techs, and those could be poached from the Navy with a suitable use of the security forces' absolute priority.

What StateSec did need, however, were shock troops and enforcers who could be relied upon to take orders and break the heads of any enemies of the People at whom they might be aimed. Seventy-five or eighty percent of its personnel fell into that category, and it didn't take a lot of education to squeeze a pulser trigger or club a dissenter. By the standards of their peers, Johnson and Candleman were of above average ability . . . and neither of them would have been allowed to serve aboard any ship to which Harkness had ever been assigned anyway.

Apparently 75-80% of StateSec is made up of knuckle-dragging thugs, and they can shanghai whatever technical experts they need from the Navy. Both Manticore and Haven are suffering near-crippling manpower shortages, the Manticoran Alliance is slowly automating more and more ship functions because they don't have the bodies to operate all their hulls. Haven has plenty of warm bodies, but not nearly enough skilled labor or good officers. Both sides find balancing their needs challenging. Which is pretty much what you expect after years of war.

Harkness had spent enough time in the service to feel confident that anyone StateSec might have assigned to him would have been receptive to the concept of rigging the ship's electronic games library. The combination of boredom, greed, and a very human (if ignoble) desire to put one over on one's fellows had produced the same ambition in virtually every Manticoran ship in which Harkness had ever served, and those factors operated even more strongly aboard Tepes.

In the Honorversem ships carry large libraries of video games and/or tactical sims, to pass the time. Gambling on the games naturally follows, and rigging the games is not far behind.

Not that Harkness had leapt right out to make the offer. The possibility of doing anything which might jeopardize his arrangement with Committeewoman Ransom was unthinkable, and so he'd done exactly what was asked of him. He'd recorded dozens of propaganda broadcasts in which he cheerfully perjured his immortal soul with accounts of all the "war crimes" he'd either observed or helped commit. Other recordings, when they were broadcast, would appeal earnestly to his ex-countrymen to follow his example and defect to their true class allies rather than continuing to serve their plutocratic exploiters. And while he'd been careful to warn Citizen Commander Jewel that he was only a technician with a severely limited understanding of the theory behind the grav pulse generators he'd learned to service, he'd also spent hours discussing the system with her and giving her pointers towards how it worked. By now, he calculated, he'd committed at least thirty different forms of treason—certainly enough to make it impossible (or, at least, fatally inadvisable) for him ever to return home.

Actually, if memory serves, they knight him and give him a warrant. Some of the things Horace has been doing in the month since his defection.

Harkness had been astounded when he realized just how obsolescent they were. Several were actually variants of games he'd first encountered fifty T-years before, at the very beginning of his naval career. He'd always assumed—correctly, as it turned out—that the Peeps' military hardware (and the software that ran it) had to be at least comparable to the RMN's. It was clearly inferior, but if it hadn't been at least within shouting range, the war would have been over years ago. That assumption was the reason it hadn't occurred to him that something which formed the basis for shipboard gambling could be so extremely simple-minded . . . or have such primitive security features. It was a given that any game which could be rigged would be rigged, sooner or later, and those aboard Manticoran ships were regularly inspected by electronics teams from Engineering to be sure they hadn't been. Perhaps more to the point, the people who designed those games (and their security features) knew some very clever, extremely well-trained people would bend all their formidable talents on breaking those security features.

But there weren't all that many well-trained people in the People's Navy . . . and there were even fewer in StateSec. Which meant the games library contained an entire raft of programs with security arrangements which were laughably simple for anyone who'd cut his eyeteeth on Manticoran software.

Manticore takes the security of it's games and sims, or maybe the integrity of the ship's gambling operations, very seriously. They have serious security, and Engineering regularly checks up on them, because Engineering doesn't have enough to deal with. Point being that while the hardware is comparable to Manticore's the software is some generations behind, and the computer security around the games is laughable.

As far as Johnson or Candleman were concerned, the games library was merely that: the games library. It was simply a place somewhere in the mass of computers they didn't really understand where the games were stored, and they knew they had no access to anything else in the system. But Horace Harkness was an artist. His ability to work the RMN personnel system to ensure that he always wound up assigned wherever Scotty Tremaine was assigned had baffled many an observer, but that was because none of them realized he'd actually managed to hack into BuPers' records. He might have reformed considerably since his first tour on Basilisk Station with Tremaine and Lady Harrington, and he'd certainly abandoned the various contraband operations he'd maintained on the side, but a man liked to keep his hand in. . . . And the security fences which had been erected to block a crew of techno-illiterates from access they shouldn't have were laughable barriers for anyone who'd broken the security on the classified records of the Royal Manticoran Navy's Bureau of Personnel.

Which meant that, for the last two weeks, Harkness had prowled the bowels of PNS Tepes' information and control systems almost at will. Aside from tinkering with the gaming software, he'd been careful to make no changes lest he leave footprints which could be tracked back to him, but he'd amassed an enormous amount of knowledge about the ship, its course, its destination, its crew, and its operating procedures. The fact that Johnson and Candleman regarded his hacking activities as nothing short of black magic had helped enormously, for they'd granted him the sort of working privacy which had been the prerogative of wizards throughout history. That meant he hadn't had to figure out a way to carry out his explorations while they looked over his shoulder every second. In fact, they normally left him undisturbed on one side of the compartment, working away on the minicomp they'd been thoughtful enough to provide, while they played old-fashioned poker on the other side. Just to be safe, he'd created his own version of what was still called a "boss program" to instantly shift the display to something innocuous if one of them had decided to get curious, but he'd scarcely ever needed it.

And so for the pretense of joining the Peeps, and a few weeks as Ransom's dancing monkey in front of the cameras, Horace not only got the run of Tepes' computer systems, he got Tweedledee and Tweedledumb to leave him alone while he works and cover for him. And now with a few nested programs, detailed schematics of the ship and a plan, Horace is about ready to begin the jailbreak. Because Horace is just awesome that way.

He took the chip from Candleman and bounced it in his palm for a moment. "You're all right, Harkness," he said after a second. "And you're worth every centicredit of your cut, too."

"Glad you think so," Harkness said with an answering smile. "I like to think I earn my way wherever I am, Corp, and I always look after my friends."

That's not the most obvious ominous/threatening line I've seen fly right over someone's head. That distinction belongs to "the Salvation War" when (IIRC) Gabriel? secures a magically binding oath from compulsive backstabber Michael that after the latest orgy of treachery and blood Gabe will get "what's coming to him." and he walks away all smug. Still, you'd think from someone who apparently betrayed his friends to get here in the first place, saying "I always look after my friends" would set off one kind or alarm bell or another. That's not an intelligence or education-related matter, simple life experience should provide the feeling that something is terribly, profoundly wrong with that last sentence.

[Simon_Jester]

Can't believe I'd ever say this, but preach it, Weber.

This sounds eerily like my daily grind, particularly for a book written almost a decade before "failure is not an option."

Yeah. Although so far we aren't sure the American political system is actively screwing up the public schools so that publicly-educated children become stupid and unable to participate meaningfully in the larger society.

My main point of disagreement with Weber is that he's writing before the 'high-stakes testing' craze, and probably thought at the time that this was actually a good solution to the problem of making sure schools do their jobs effectively. He's thinking of schools that promote students because it would bruise their egos if they failed. In other words, the enemy is political correctness.

He's not considering schools that promote students because they'll get disbanded if their graduation rate isn't steadily increasing year by year, even if said students are wandering the halls setting fire to the ceiling tiles and mocking teachers rather than actually learning anything.

Some of the skills you need or need to be able to learn to function as a true spacer, against which list Horace's minders fall very short.

Yes. As any decent Golden Age SF author could have told you, heroic MANLY SPACEMEN need to be educated, not just heroic and manly. Which is why the slide rule was as indispensable a tool as the ray gun.

Simon called it, a large number of officers and senior noncoms who are de facto technicians, because nobody else stays around long enough to get the skills hammered into them. Though the Marines are apparently better off, having more volunteers and simpler kit.

The Soviet Navy had this issue too. Proportionately more officers than the US Navy, because short-service conscripts don't learn to do things very well. Even given the Soviet school system which was probably a damn sight better than the Havenite one, all else being equal.

So, for example, on one occasion a Red Navy ship visited US ports to show off its shiny technical capabilities. Only later did the US learn that to man this ship they had literally pulled officers off several other ships and made it have an all officer crew, because that was the only way to be sure nobody did anything dumb or sloppy.

Or that's how I remember the account.

Apparently 75-80% of StateSec is made up of knuckle-dragging thugs, and they can shanghai whatever technical experts they need from the Navy.

I'm honestly surprised by this- I think Weber underestimated the likely role of pervasive surveillance in making a futuristic security state run. I suspect that even real organizations like the Gestapo, KGB, and Stasi needed a lot of clerks and analysts to keep track of all their dossiers and so on.

Secret police forces need people educated enough to read critically (so they can find hints of subversion), operate whatever technology they need (StateSec and InSec would probably have spent a lot of time doing the NSA's read-all-the-email schtick), and so on.

Otherwise the thugs are just brutalizing people at random, which is not only unpopular but actively dangerous because it means they're likely to miss the real threats to your regime.

Actually, if memory serves, they knight him and give him a warrant. Some of the things Horace has been doing in the month since his defection.

Of course, the main reason he is thus rewarded is that no one ever finds out just what he did. That might have been too much to swallow for the RMN even knowing full well why he did it and what the plan was.

[God help him if Tepes had stopped in some system on the way to Hades and datadumped the contents of all those interviews and propaganda...]

Still, you'd think from someone who apparently betrayed his friends to get here in the first place, saying "I always look after my friends" would set off one kind or alarm bell or another. That's not an intelligence or education-related matter, simple life experience should provide the feeling that something is terribly, profoundly wrong with that last sentence.

Arguably. On the other hand, it depends on the interactions they've had previously and how buddy-buddy Harkness has been with them. He's pretty good at seeming like this big bluff likeable fellow, so who knows?

[Ahriman238]

Part 1 of the Great Escape.

"Tepes will continue to a parking orbit around Hades, but we're to place ourselves in orbit around Cerberus-B-3, Citizen Admiral," Fraiser replied respectfully, then paused and cleared his throat. "There's a personal attachment from Citizen Committeewoman Ransom," he added. "She says that you, Citizen Commissioner Honeker, Citizen Captain Bogdanovich, and Citizen Commander Foraker should report to her on Hades by pinnace at oh-nine-hundred local tomorrow."

Tourville's Count Tilly is being sent far, far away from the actual planet Hades.

Cordelia Ransom's determination to have Honor Harrington judicially murdered was going to be a disaster for everyone, not just for the people who'd tried to prevent it. The Solarian League would be almost as infuriated as the Manties and their allies, which could have devastating consequences for the movement of technology from the League to the PRH, and altogether too many members of the Republic's own military would be just as sickened and shamed by it as Tourville had predicted.

I don't really remember a ton of League outrage, which doesn't mean it wasn't there, the whole execution is an uglytwisting of interstellar law, and the League is more invested in enforcing those than other star nations.

The entire Cerberus System was a monumental tribute to the institutional paranoia of the PRH's security services, old and new alike. Its coordinates weren't even in Count Tilly's astrogation database, for the very existence of the system, much less its location, had been classified by the Office of Internal Security when the old regime first authorized Camp Charon's construction. Even today—or perhaps especially today—that information was a fanatically guarded secret known only to StateSec, and the fact that no one else had the slightest idea of where to find it was but the first layer of a defense in depth.

You know, until they brought a Navy ship with them right after a public broadcast announcing the existence of the prison planet. But yes, nobody can assault or infiltrate your prison effectively if they haven't the least idea where it is. Well, I suppose you could try and get yourself arrested for high treason, but then you run the risk of them just shooting you, and you probably couldn't sneak any tools or weapons past the guards, so you'd be as helpless as all the other prisoners.

In all his years of naval service, Tourville had seldom seen orbital defenses as massive as those which surrounded Hades—otherwise known as Cerberus–B-2—and its three largish moons. The data on it available to Count Tilly was severely limited, but Citizen Captain Vladovich had given her a fragmentary download when it was assumed she would accompany Tepes all the way in. He'd had to, for the planet-moon system was literally smothered with firepower which would have made short work of any ship which made a single wrong move. Yet even a cursory glance at Vladovich's information had been enough to show that StateSec's chronic distrust had produced a bizarre defensive arrangement whose like neither Tourville nor any member of his staff had ever imagined.

There wasn't a single manned fortress in the entire star system. Shoals of mines—old-fashioned "contact" nukes designed to kill small craft as well as the laser buoys designed to shoot LACs and starships, and both seemingly thick enough to walk across—surrounded the planet and its moons, seeded with more sophisticated and modern energy platforms for good measure, and he suspected there were ground-based missiles on the planet, at least, if not on the moons. Taken all together, Hades must have had the raw combat power of a full squadron of superdreadnoughts . . . but all of those weapons were remote-controlled from Camp Charon. There wasn't even an orbital cargo station. Everything within a good light-minute of the planet was covered by massive amounts of firepower, but no permanent manned orbital presence of any sort had been tolerated, and Tourville wondered why that was.

Hades is further protected by extensive minefields and "laser buoys" and heavier automated energy weapons platforms, no confirmation yet on the moon or ground-based missiles, but it seems nearly certain.

Nor did he understand why they'd bothered with orbital defenses at all. If they weren't going to let the Navy know where the system was and put a picket force into it, then all the mines and remote energy platforms in the galaxy were ultimately useless, for a planet suffered from one enormous tactical disadvantage: it couldn't dodge. An attacker always knew exactly where it was, and that meant a single battlecruiser—probably even a heavy cruiser—could take out every weapon orbiting Hades with old-fashioned nuclear warheads launched on purely ballistic courses from beyond the defenses' own range. A few dozen fifty or sixty-megaton detonations would blow gaping holes in the massive, interlocking shells of mines, and not even modern hardening could have prevented the EMP from at least temporarily crippling the electronics of any spaceborne platform that survived outright destruction. He supposed ground-based missiles on the planet or its moons (if, in fact, there were some) would survive, but any competent defensive planner knew purely orbital systems—even proper fortresses with bubble sidewalls—were ultimately useless against mobile attackers.

The only explanation he could come up with was that whoever had ordered the immense (and wasted) expenditure to put this abortion together hadn't bothered to consult a competent defensive planner. Well, that actually made a sort of sense, didn't it? If you distrusted your own military personnel so much that you refused even to tell them a prison existed, far less where it was, lest they decide to attack it for some unimaginable reason, then you were hardly likely to ask those same people for advice on how to fortify it against themselves, now were you?

Of course, without ships to defend it, all the stationary defenses in the universe are barely better than useless, because the enemy can always get some running room and do a c-fractional strike.

His left hand snapped out, grasping Johnson's chin and yanking it upward, pushing the back of the StateSec man's head harder into his pillow and arching his neck. The corporal's eyes opened, unfocused and confused, but he hadn't even realized he was awake, much less what was happening, when Harkness' right hand came down like an axe. Johnson started to suck in air, but any shout he might have given died in an agonized wheeze as his larynx shattered. He thrashed and jerked, hands pawing at his throat while he fought for breath that wouldn't come, but Harkness had already turned away. Heinrich Johnson was already a dead man; he simply hadn't realized it yet, and Harkness still had Candleman to worry about.

The second StateSec guard made a snorting sound and stirred sleepily. For all their violence, Johnson's death throes weren't very loud, and Candleman never had a chance to realize what the harsh, choking sounds which had penetrated his sleep might portend. He was still moving muzzily towards the boundary of wakefulness when two callused hands locked on his head and twisted explosively. For just an instant, the sickening crunch of vertebrae seemed to completely bury the sounds of Johnson's fading, desperate efforts to breathe, and then those sounds, too, died, and Horace Harkness stood back in the darkness, closed his eyes, and shuddered with sick loathing.

Horace straight up kills his guards, and new buddies, in their sleep and with his bare hands. Chief Harkness is hardcore. Though, even after a month of compliant behavior, who has guards and the person they're watching sleep in the same room?

Both of them were locked, but Horace Harkness had opened quite a few locks which had belonged to someone else over the course of a checkered career, and he had the advantage of having watched their owners open these dozens of times. He input the combinations quickly, and his mouth twitched in a hungry smile as the lockers' internal lights gleamed on his dead watchdogs' weapons.

Arming up.

He used Johnson's password to log on. Had computers cared about such things, Tepes' computer might have been amazed by the quantum leap in the programming skills of Citizen Corporal Heinrich Johnson, SN SS-1002-56722-0531-HV. But computers didn't care, and Harkness flipped quickly through the pathways he'd established while Johnson and Candleman assumed he was simply rigging the outcomes of games for them.

He hadn't dared make any major changes on the main system lest one of the officers or NCOs who were computer literate stumble across his work, but that hadn't prevented him from making all those changes well in advance on the minicomp. Of course, seeing to it his little packages were activated at the proper time and in the proper order was going to be a bit of a problem, but he hoped he'd taken that sufficiently into account. And there was one bit of programming he had been forced to change ahead of time. Now he checked it and grunted in satisfaction; it had activated eighteen minutes and twenty-one seconds earlier, exactly as instructed, and he grinned. There were still a thousand things that could go wrong, but that had been the part that worried him most. Now he had to do the next most dangerous bit, and he flicked a function key.

As far as anyone else aboard PNS Tepes was concerned, nothing at all happened, but Harkness and his minicomp knew better. Throughout the battlecruiser's electronic guts, half a dozen programs changed abruptly, overwritten by the versions of themselves which Harkness had downloaded to his minicomp and altered—in most cases subtly; in others not so subtly—days or even weeks before.

Despite the size of some of the programs and program groups involved, the substitutions flicked into place with a speed which would have been inconceivable to anyone who'd lived in the days of chips and printed circuits, and the breath Harkness hadn't realized he was holding whooshed out as confirmation of his commands' execution blinked on his display. Then he logged off, pulled the minicomp out of its slot, shoved it into his pocket, slung the laundry bag with Johnson's uniform over his shoulder, and walked quickly to the end of the compartment. The ventilation grille would be a tight fit, but that was the least of his worries at the moment.

Final check that all his software he needed for this part are ready, and the jailbreak is on.

"I'm sorry to wake you, Captain," he said quietly, "but I thought you should know. We'll be entering Hades orbit within forty minutes." McKeon stiffened, and Caslet felt the same ripple of tension spread out across the compartment. "Shipboard time isn't quite synchronized with local," he went on, "but it'll be light at Camp Charon in about another two hours, and they'll be taking you down then. I . . . thought you'd like to know."

Just over two and a half hours to pull this off.

Dirtsiders tended to think of starships as solid chunks of alloy wrapped around passages and compartments, but any professional spacer knew better. Like the human body itself, ships were riddled by arteries and capillaries which carried power, light, air, water, and all the other vital ingredients of an artificial world throughout their volumes. And unlike the human body, they were also provided with inspection hatches and crawlways to provide access to components which might require repair or adjustment.

Needless to say, the presence of such subsidiary access ways was a pain in the posterior for naval architects, who had to provide blast doors to seal them, as well as the passages and lifts the dirtsiders knew about, in the event of sudden loss of pressure, but there was no way to do without them. And if a man knew his way around them, and had enough time, he could get virtually anywhere he wanted to without using those passages and lifts.

Jefferies tubes, and assorted other ways of quietly getting around.

"Staging a breakout, Sir," Harkness said matter-of-factly, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

"Where to?" McKeon demanded. Which, Caslet reflected numbly, was an eminently reasonable question, given that they were a hundred and thirty light-years from the nearest Alliance-held real estate.

Hades is 168 LY from Barnett, and 130 from Manticore-held space, which could be the front or maybe Trevor's Star.

"I sort of hacked into their computers. That's why I was worried by the Commander here." He nodded to Caslet. "I've set up a loop in the imagery from the surveillance cameras in this section."

"A loop?" Venizelos repeated.

"Yes, Sir. I commanded the cameras to go to record mode five minutes into the current watch and stay there for twenty minutes. They started playing that back as a live feed for the folks watching the monitors up-ship about sixteen minutes ago. Unless they send somebody down to look, they're gonna go right on seeing what they always see, and according to the Security files, nobody's scheduled to come calling until they send in the goons to collect you and the other officers for transport dirtside. That's what gives us our window—assuming everything goes right. But if I'd caught the Commander's arrival and they saw him come in twice without leaving in the middle, well—"

He shrugged, and Venizelos nodded. But he also turned and gave Caslet a long, thoughtful look, then quirked an eyebrow at McKeon.

"He goes with us, Andy," the captain said firmly. Caslet blinked, and McKeon smiled grimly at him. "I'm afraid we don't have much choice, Citizen Commander. Much as we all like you, and grateful as we are for all you've done, you are a Peep officer. It'd be your duty to stop us from— Well, from doing whatever the hell Harkness has in mind. And leaving you locked up behind us wouldn't do you any favors, either, now would it?"

Looping the cameras, an old trick but it still works. Oh, and Warner Caslet get shanghaied into the jailbreak.

"I've got the security alarms shut down throughout most of the ship, and I've got the route to the boat bay mapped, but I couldn't set timers on any of my surprises because I couldn't tell how long it'd take us to get ready. That means we'll have to send the activation code once we're in position, and that means someone's gonna have to get my 'puter here into an access slot at the right time. And I couldn't get into the systems that control the brig area, either. That's the highest security area of the ship, and their computers are stand-alones. There's no direct interface between there and the main system, and just getting there physically's going to be a bitch, Captain. We can do it, but if the brig detail gets time to hit an alarm button, it's gonna go off, 'cause I can't get to it to stop it."

Aside from getting everyone maps of the ship and looping cameras, Horace disabled every alarm he could. Now, he needs someone to plug his handheld computer into an access slot and press "OK" to set in motion the active programs they'll need to escape. And Carson Clinkscales, Honor's clumsy flag lieutenant, is the only one who fits one of the StateSec uniform they have.

All personal communications aboard Tepes were recorded as yet one more of StateSec's precautionary measures, and it was remotely possible one of the recording techs would actually be listening in and overhear what McKeon was about to say. But that was a chance they had to take, and he punched in the combination of the com which had once belonged to Citizen Corporal Porter.

StateSec is at least pulling the NSA routine on all personal comm calls on their own ship.

Boat bays aren't normally considered especially dangerous places. True, they offer ample ways for someone to do himself in, but so do a great many areas aboard any starship, and the things that pose dangers to the ship—like the connections for things like hydrogen and emergency rocket propellant to fuel the ship's small craft, or the stores of ammunition and external ordnance kept in nearby magazines—are safeguarded in many ways. Proper training in operation and maintenance is the first defense, and so is physical separation, keeping one danger source as far from any other as the boat bay's servicing requirements permit. And in addition to all human safeguards, computers monitor the danger points continuously.

The safety and security of boat bays, under ordinary circumstances. Carson? Enact extraordinary circumstances.

CIC went first, and the senior tracking officer swore as her holo display went suddenly blank. It was hardly a life-threatening disaster when the ship was safely in orbit around Hades, but it was irritating as hell, and there was no logical reason for it.

Except that there was one. The display had died for the simple reason that there was no longer any input to drive its imagers. For just an instant, the tracking officer felt relieved by the realization that the display's sudden shutdown hadn't been her people's fault, but then her forehead furrowed in fresh—and deeper—consternation. What in heaven's name could cause every sensor system to go down at once?

The program which had shut down Tepes' sensors finished the first part of its task and turned to the second. In the flicker of an eye, far too rapidly for any human operator to realize what was happening, it used CIC's computers as a launching pad to invade the Tactical Department's central processing system, established control . . . and ordered the system to reformat itself.

The tac officer of the watch gaped in disbelief as his panels started going down. It began with Tracking, but from there the failures leapt like wildfire, and display after display blinked and went dead. Radar One, Gravitics One and Two, Lidar Three, Missile Defense, Main Fire Control . . . the nerve center of the ship's ability to fight—or defend herself—died even as he watched. Nor was the damage something which could be quickly fixed. The computers would have to be completely reprogrammed to put them back on-line—a nightmare task in a Navy with so few fully qualified technicians—and it all went so quickly the tac officer barely had time to realize it was happening before it was done.

Other programs capered and danced, exploding through the net like a plundering army. Internal alarms and central communication systems became so much useless junk as the software which ran them was reduced to meaningless gibberish. The ship's helm and drive rooms locked down. "The Morgue," in which every suit of battle armor was stored, suddenly sealed itself . . . and the subprocessers which monitored the ready suits of armor to be sure they were always prepared for instant use sent power surges down the monitoring leads to lobotomize their onboard computers and render them totally useless until teams of technicians spent the hours required to reprogram their software.

And while all that was going on, the computers responsible for monitoring the fueling needs of the ship's small craft received their own orders. Valves opened, and in Boat Bay One a technician who'd happened to be working on a minor glitch in Umbilical Two gaped in horror at what was happening. He leapt for the manual controls, trying to override, but there wasn't time . . . nor would it have mattered. For even if he'd been able to keep the emergency propellant from venting and mixing in Umbilical Two, it wouldn't have stopped precisely the same thing from happening in Umbilical Four.

The binary-based fuel was hypergolic, and even as the service tech screamed and turned to run, he knew it was pointless. The components mixing behind him were too . . . voracious for that, and Tepes bucked like a wounded horse as Boat Bay One blew apart. Twenty-six members of her crew and every small craft in the bay were ripped apart in the explosion, and alarms wailed as the blast blew back into the hull as well. Bulkheads shattered, and another forty-one men and women died as atmosphere belched out of the hideous wound in an almost perfect ring of fire.

Horace's other surprises. Blind the ship, fry the comms and the power armor, and destroy all but one of the boat bays.

"Propellant leak!" it announced. "Multiple propellant leaks! Evacuate the bay immediately. Repeat, evacuate the bay immediately!"

It was neither a computer-generated voice nor a stored message, and as panic swept the bay, no one noticed that they didn't have the least idea just whose voice it was. It came from the intercom speakers, and it spoke with absolute authority. That was all they needed to know, and they stampeded for the lifts as red and amber danger lights began to flash. Tepes lurched yet again as Boat Bay Five blew up, and the fresh concussion lent desperation to their flight. They piled into the lifts, too frantic to escape even to notice the blood-soaked corporal kneeling beside a dead sergeant, and as Carson Clinkscales watched them go, he knew that for the first time in his life, he'd gotten everything exactly right.

And play an evacuation message in the remaining bay, which is a lot more credible after they've felt the explosions elsewhere. Good thing too, the prisoners were rather outnumbered, and Honor's armsmen took half the weapons and ran off to the brig.

Oh, and Carson finally found his confidence, resolving the, can it even be called a subplot if it's gotten all of three sentences' mention? To think, all it took was trying to look casual while walking to the computer slot and emptying a gun into a man's chest at zero range.

[Simon_Jester]

I don't really remember a ton of League outrage, which doesn't mean it wasn't there, the whole execution is an uglytwisting of interstellar law, and the League is more invested in enforcing those than other star nations.

Well, Weber basically proceeds to ignore the Star League entirely for another few books, not counting some low-key involvement in side stories that go into anthologies. So any outrage could easily have gotten missed.

You know, until they brought a Navy ship with them right after a public broadcast announcing the existence of the prison planet. But yes, nobody can assault or infiltrate your prison effectively if they haven't the least idea where it is. Well, I suppose you could try and get yourself arrested for high treason, but then you run the risk of them just shooting you, and you probably couldn't sneak any tools or weapons past the guards, so you'd be as helpless as all the other prisoners.

Yeah; the place is pretty much escape-proof if you enter as an unarmed prisoner.

Of course, without ships to defend it, all the stationary defenses in the universe are barely better than useless, because the enemy can always get some running room and do a c-fractional strike.

I would honestly think that something with an impeller wedge could render itself immune to relativistic impactor attack by rotating its impeller wedge- but while that can protect a point target (like a space station, or Camp Charon), it can't protect the entire volume of space around a whole planet. So yeah, clearing the minefields with nuclear bombardment from extreme range would still work.

Horace straight up kills his guards, and new buddies, in their sleep and with his bare hands. Chief Harkness is hardcore. Though, even after a month of compliant behavior, who has guards and the person they're watching sleep in the same room?

Honestly, StateSec is way too trusting of this defector. In real life defectors are never truly trusted by the security organs, for fear of exactly this kind of thing happening. Or, more plausibly, the defectors just plain spying on their hosts, that happens too.

[White Haven]

If the Star League is getting involved, I demand that General Kerensky make an appearance!

As for the defector-trust bit, I could see it being a factor of just how much 'dear god that's useful' information he may have given the Peeps. I don't disagree with you, though; Harkness's access is the weakest part of this arc.

[Batman]

I shudder to think how BattleTech gear would fare in the Honorverse and anyway who said it would be the BT Star League? The setting now has FTL capable aircars and Gunstars

[Simon_Jester]

If the Star League is getting involved, I demand that General Kerensky make an appearance!

D'OH!

Sorry.

As for the defector-trust bit, I could see it being a factor of just how much 'dear god that's useful' information he may have given the Peeps. I don't disagree with you, though; Harkness's access is the weakest part of this arc.

It's not so much that he was able to hack the ship given access to the computer net; it's pretty explicit that the StateSec warships have a disproportionate number of thugs and fanatics and relatively few people who are good at IT aboard.

It's not even the part where he was able to get access to the net in the first place. That's a screwup, but a (sort of maybe) believable one if you accept Weber's premise that the average StateSec trooper is technologically illiterate, but rather venal.

It's the part where the guards don't have the sense to, y'know, not sleep in the same room as the guy they're theoretically supposed to be guarding. A secret police force really shouldn't screw that part up. You can't be secret police if you don't know how to manage prisoners, including a wide variety of different subtypes of prisoners who may have special privileges (i.e. defectors and stool pigeons).

No amount of illiteracy should stop an effective secret police force from having the mother wit to secure a prisoner.

[Ahriman238]

And those measures were denied him. What he wanted to do was storm into her cell with a neural whip and see how she liked direct stimulation of her pain centers for an hour or two.

Neural whips which stimulate the brain's pain centers directly, presumably with a minimum of obvious physical harm.

The brig passageway opening off the lift formed a dog-leg to the right on its way to the cells. LaFollet didn't know if that was a deliberate security feature, but it certainly had the effect of one.

He and Candless had been ready when the rest of the rescue party opened the lift doors manually . . . which was more than could be said for the half-dozen people standing there in their black-and-red dress uniforms. Each had a flechette gun slung over his or her shoulder, and a pulser rode at each right hip, but most of them had been looking away from the lifts, at the officer behind the security console at the bend in the corridor. Their heads started to turn as the doors slid apart, and one of them actually shouted something and clawed frantically at his slung weapon, but he was too late. Andrew LaFollet and James Candless had debts to pay—one to their Steadholder, and a very different one to her enemies—and their eyes were merciless as they squeezed their triggers.

Jailbreak, more of the black and red uniform.

A single flechette, licking through the gap between the console and bulkhead, caught him just as he rounded the bend, and he screamed as it chewed into his thigh. Slower than a pulser dart or not, it was still traveling at three hundred meters per second, and it sliced the back of his leg like a high-velocity axe.

300 m/s (984 ft. per second) speed for flechettes. Remember, flechette launchers are essentially adjustable-spray shotguns firing a mess of projectiles, they're preferred for shipboard combat because the relatively low-velocity rounds are unlikely to puncture bulkheads or break anything important.

"Open com link!" he shouted, and then, before anyone could stop him, rolled out of his cover with the flechette gun on full automatic.

****

Timmons heard the shout and grinned viciously. The bastards knew someone would be coming up their backsides any minute now. All he and his remaining men had to do was hold out, and he suddenly realized how he could do just that. These idiots had to be here to rescue Harrington, so all he had to do was open her cell and drag her out into the middle of the firefight, and—

His thoughts broke off as someone rolled out into the very middle of the passage. His sudden appearance took Timmons totally by surprise, and he gaped at the apparition in shock, unable to believe anyone would deliberately throw himself into what he knew had to be a deathtrap. But that was because he'd never encountered a Grayson armsman whose Steadholder was in danger. Robert Whitman had only one purpose in life, and his very first shot tore Citizen Lieutenant Timmons to bloody rags.

The two men further up the passage poured fire back, but the bare bulkheads and deck offered no cover . . . for anyone. Deadly clouds of flechettes shrieked past one another, intermingling and then separating, all of them set for maximum dispersion, and there was no place to hide.

So passes Robert Whitman, Honor's third armsman on this little pleasure cruise. Also, another advantage to spraying projectiles in small cramped corridors is that you're almost certain to hit, but then the enemy is likely to hit you too.

"We'll need a little over eighty-three minutes to decelerate to rest relative to Hades, Citizen Admiral. If we go for a least-time flight from that point, we can reach the planet in another hundred and seventeen minutes—call it three hours and twenty minutes total—but our relative velocity would be over thirty-six thousand KPS. If we go for a zero-velocity intercept, it'll add almost another hour to the flight profile."

Count Tilly detects the sudden shutdown of Tepes' radar from 3.5 light-minutes out, then gets a call from Hades that Tepes dropped a call midsentence (vanishingly rare) in another moment they'll detect atmosphere and debris from the boat bay explosions. Four hours until Count Tilly can arrive to investigate and render aid. Honeker (Tourville's People's Commisioner) gets points from me for ordering Tourville to move towards Hades and Tepes to render aid on his authority.

Honor staggered, her good eye flaring wide, as Andrew LaFollet shouted her name. Her personal armsman stood in the open doorway, face haggard and his normally immaculate uniform ragged, and he cradled a flechette gun in his arms.

Not possible, her brain told her calmly. This is not possible. It has to be a hallucination.

But it wasn't, and she stumbled forward as he freed one hand from the gun and held it out to her. Her working eye misted, making it hard to see, but his hand was warm and firm as it closed on her too-thin fingers. He squeezed hard, and Honor dragged in a deep, shuddery breath and put her arms around him, hugging him fiercely.

Honor's not really in great shape to be assisting her own escape. A month of solitary confinement and slow starvation from insufficient food will do that to you.

"They're trying the lift again!" Alistair McKeon heard someone shout, and a grenade launcher coughed in rapid fire.

Three grenades sizzled past him and dropped neatly through the doors the first assault attempt had left jammed half open, and there was a moment of silence. Then the screams began a half heartbeat before the grenades exploded in rapid succession. Their effect in the enclosed lift shaft must have been indescribable, but Jasper Mayhew sent two more after them.

Yes, the honorverse has grenade launchers with full-automatic and burst-fire. I believe we've covered this before.

Another of Harkness' programs had locked all the lifts to Boat Bay Four—a fact the Peeps obviously had already discovered. So far, they were restricting themselves to the forward lift only, and since they couldn't use the lift car itself, they'd come down the shaft and tried to blow the doors into the gallery. They'd partially succeeded, and the explosion when they blew the doors had killed Chief Reilly, but the rest of McKeon's people had massacred the entire assault team before it could clear the shaft. The undamaged rear lift remained a threat, but McKeon had decided against blowing it himself. Honor might need it, and Sanko and Halburton made a pretty effective security measure. Anyone who tried to use it to attack the boat bay might get as far as opening the doors; he certainly wouldn't get any further.

Horace locked down the lifts to the escape bay. General situation in the escape bay.

The fact that Tepes was a State Security ship worked in their favor at the moment. Each of the assault shuttles in the boat bay was configured to drop one of StateSec's outsized infantry companies, approximately seventy-five percent bigger than a Royal Manticoran Marine company, at minimum notice. That meant their onboard guns and external ordnance racks were left permanently armed . . . and that the weapons in their small arms racks were kept charged, with ammunition ready to hand. His people had many times more firepower than they could possibly use, all courtesy of StateSec, and they were employing everything they had the manpower to fire with savage satisfaction.

StateSec uses large formations, and they keep loaded/charged weapons lying around in their assault shuttles. This strikes me as a bad idea.

But not all of them could be spared to shoot bad guys. Harkness had moved his precious minicomp from the access slot Clinkscales had used to the cockpit of one of the shuttles and put it into straight terminal mode to wage war against the Peep computer techs who had belatedly realized what was going on. The senior chief had two enormous advantages: he was a better programmer than any of them, and, unlike them, he knew exactly what he'd done in the first place. But he had two matching disadvantages, for there were more of the Peeps and, unlike him, they had physical access to all the ship's systems. After twenty minutes of trying to take control back from him, they'd begun shutting computers down—or ripping them out—and going to manual control.

Fortunately for the escaped prisoners, Harkness had planned his original sabotage carefully. Wherever possible, he'd used the computers to inflict major damage on systems rather than simply locking them down, and Tepes was going to require months of repairs before she could possibly return to service. Her crew, unfortunately, seemed to have grasped that, and they appeared to be perfectly willing to inflict massive additional damage on their own ship if that was the only way to get at their enemies.

Sooner or later, someone had to wake the ship's IT staff.

Geraldine Metcalf took the shuttle up the side of the battlecruiser on reaction thrusters alone. The big assault boat felt logy and clumsy, and a part of her screamed to kick up the wedge and get more acceleration, but that was out of the question. She had a very specific job to do, and any betraying emissions would keep her from doing it.

She settled into position above the ship, passive sensors searching down past its hammerhead bow. If anything came up from Camp Charon, it was almost certain to come in from ahead, and she glanced sideways at Sarah DuChene as her copilot ran her fingers down the weapons panel and green standby lights began to burn an ominous scarlet.

The escaping Manties launch one of their two assault shuttles to maneuver on thrusters, effectively stealthed, and shoot down any relief ships from Hades.

"Message from Camp Charon, Citizen Admiral," Harrison Fraiser announced, and Tourville gestured for him to continue. "Your intention to render aid to Tepes, if required, is approved, but Brigadier Tresca says he has no confirmation that it is required. He's sending up some shuttles to check, and he'll advise us of their findings. In the meantime, we are not to cross the outer mine perimeter without express permission."

So Camp Charon and Count Tilly aren't exactly coordinating.

Their own stolen communicators were getting only gibberish, which probably meant Harkness' efforts to cripple the Peeps' central communications net had worked. But the presence of those people up ahead was proof it hadn't worked completely . . . and that somebody on the other side had figured out at least part of what was going on. If they hadn't guessed what was happening, they wouldn't have known to block the lift shaft between the brig and Boat Bay Four, and if they hadn't had at least some communications ability, they couldn't have gotten these people here to do the blocking. But how much com capability did they have? If it was any more than fragmentary, he'd never get the Steadholder to safety, because there were simply too many people aboard this ship. If their officers could tell them where to go to intercept the escapees . . .

Sometimes things don't go perfectly. Remember, these are still less than thirty prisoners trying to escape a ship of 2,800 souls, if the comms were functioning normally, they would be well and truly screwed.

Scotty Tremaine crawled out of the pinnace's electronics bay and scrubbed sweat out of his eyes. He'd never even imagined doing what he'd just done, and the ease with which he'd accomplished it was more than a little chilling. There were many better small craft flight engineers than he—Horace Harkness, for one—but it hadn't taken a genius to carry out the modifications, and that was scary. Of course, there hadn't been any security features to stop him, since no one in his right mind would have considered that someone might do such an insane thing on purpose.

More on this shortly.

"Here they come . . ." DuChene murmured, and Metcalf nodded. The Peep cargo shuttles were getting so close they'd have to spot the assault shuttle shortly, hiding spot or not. Besides, they were beginning to split up, and she couldn't have that.

She watched for another five seconds, then punched the button.

The range was less than sixty kilometers to the furthest shuttle as her impeller drive missiles kicked free of the racks and brought up their wedges. They couldn't match the eighty or ninety thousand gravities of acceleration all-up shipboard weapons could crank, but they could accelerate at forty thousand gravities. The longest missile flight lasted barely .576 seconds, and that was much too short a time for anyone to get a transmission off or even realize what was happening.

****

"What the—?"

Shannon Foraker jerked upright in her chair, staring at her display, then turned to call for her admiral. But Tourville had seen her jump, and he was already halfway across Flag Deck to her.

"What?" he demanded.

"Those three shuttles from Charon just blew the hell up, Sir," she said quietly.

Assault shuttle missiles. Naturally, despite being too far out to see the missiles, Shannon Foraker works out more-or-less immediately what happened.

At the moment, how they'd done it was less important than the fact that they had, and he sighed unhappily as he realized what he had to do. He suspected he would spend a lot of time avoiding mirrors for the next several weeks—or months—but his duty left him no choice.

"Harrison, com Warden Tresca." He looked up and met Honeker's eyes. "Tell him I think the prisoners aboard Tepes are trying to take the ship . . . or destroy it."

Word gets out to Hades.

But like all of them, Mayhew had found time to climb into unpowered body armor from one of the assault shuttles, and he dragged himself back up to his knees and his launcher hurled grenades down the Peeps' throats. Another of McKeon's petty officers went down—dead, he was grimly certain—as a Peep grenade bounced out of the open lift doors and exploded directly behind her, but then Sanko and Halburton got their plasma rifle turned around, and a packet of white hot energy went roaring up the shaft. Anyone who got in its way never had time to realize he was dead, but those on the fringe of its area of effect were less fortunate. Shrieks of agony and secondary explosions as ammunition cooked off rolled from the lift shaft like the voices of the damned, and then Sanko fired a second round and the screams cut off instantly.

Body armor that can at least resist flechettes, first series use of plasma rifles.

"Looks like they finally kicked my butt out, Sir," he said, and bared his teeth in a wolfish grin. "But by the time they did, just about everything but life support got slagged right down to glass. Even if we don't make it, they're gonna be a long time trying to put this bucket of bolts back on-line."

"So they've got complete control of whatever's left?" McKeon asked.

"Just about, Sir. I don't think they can break my lock on that lift—" he pointed to the intact lift doors through which no attack had yet come "—and there's no software left down here in the bay itself. But give 'em another forty, fifty minutes, and they're gonna start getting some sensors and weapons back under manual control. And when they do—"

State of the war between Horace and the IT staff.

He ran quickly, smoothly, head turning in metronome arcs to sweep the passage ahead of him. He carried the heavy flechette gun at his hip, the sling over his shoulder to steady it, and his finger stroked the trigger in elegant, precise bursts as astonished Peeps popped up before him, attracted by the clangor of battle exploding in their very midst. He was a wizard of death, dispatching his sorcery in the lethal patterns of his flechettes, for he was fighting for his Steadholder's life and anyone who crossed his path was doomed.

Andrew LaFollet, in the running battle to get Honor to the last lift that'll take them to the escape bay.

Heavier weapons were snarling back, now, and as Honor hammered the lift button, she heard the distinctive, ear-splitting devastation of a tribarrel slicing bulkheads like a bandsaw.

The doors opened and she leapt through them, stabbing at the panel. Lights flickered on the display, then burned steadily, confirming that Harkness' control of the lift still held, and she turned back towards her friends.

"Come on!" she shouted. "Come on!"

McGinley heard her and wheeled, teeth bared in a huge smile of triumph as she ran for the lift . . . and then she seemed to trip in midair, and her torso exploded as the tribarrel sawed through the bulkhead, and Honor screamed in useless denial.

Tribarrel, sort of a pulser mini-gun, sawing through bulkheads. I'm guessing this is one of the weapons you aren't supposed to use on a ship because of collateral damage to ship systems.

"Come on, Andrew!" she screamed, but he ignored her, and then a grenade skittered around the bend and he hurled away his weapon and flung himself on it. Somehow he reached it before it exploded, and his frantic heave sent it back the way it had come, but not quite soon enough, for the blast picked him up and bounced him off the bulkhead like a rag doll. He slammed to the deck, motionless, and Honor's heart died within her.

She had to go. She knew she had to go. That this was what her armsmen—her friends—had died for. That only her escape would give their deaths meaning, and that it was her duty—her responsibility—to go.

And she couldn't. It was too much, more than she had in her to give, and she dropped her own weapon and hurled herself from the lift. The grenade explosion seemed to have stunned the attackers—any who were still alive—and not a shot was fired as she flung herself down beside Andrew. She was weak and wasted, running on adrenaline and desperation alone, and it didn't matter. She snatched him up as if he were a child and flung him over her shoulders even as she turned back towards the lift.

And that was when the Peeps seemed to snap back awake. Pulser darts whined and shrieked, ricocheting from the bulkheads. More grenades exploded. The tribarrel opened fire once more, flaying the bulkheads, and the entire universe was a seething, screaming tide of metal and hate ripping about her ears.

LaFollet is hurt, and Honor goes back for him. As the lift starts moving, the tribarrel ventilates it and...

The upper third of the lift car had been torn to bits, not so much shattered as sliced by what could only have been a heavy-caliber tribarrel, and bits and pieces of knife-edged alloy—some small as a fingernail paring, others the size of a man's hand—had been spewed out of the lift wall like bullets. He knew they had, for Honor Harrington and Andrew LaFollet lay entangled on the lift floor, and the entire bottom of the car was coated in blood.

Lethridge was already there, lifting LaFollet off his Steadholder and passing the limp armsman to McKeon. The captain took him and passed him out to other, ready hands, but his eyes never left Honor as Lethridge went to his knees in her blood.

It was her arm. Her left arm was shattered just above the elbow, and Lethridge's hands moved with desperate speed as he whipped his own belt around her upper arm, right at the armpit, and yanked the crude tourniquet tight. And then he and McKeon between them picked her horribly limp, blood-soaked body up and ran for the pinnace.

Honor loses her arm to it.

"Impeller signature!" Shannon Foraker barked.

Count Tilly had killed her velocity relative to Hades and started back the way she'd come, but she remained far beyond any range at which she could have intervened in what was happening in Hades orbit. The drone she'd launched was still too far out for good detail resolution, but it was close enough to see the brilliant gravitic beacon of a pinnace streaking for the stars. For that matter, her shipboard sensors easily picked up its impeller wedge, and Foraker clenched her jaw as the small vessel raced for freedom.

"Do they have it from Camp Charon?" Tourville asked urgently.

"They must, Sir," she said grimly, and looked up to meet her admiral's eyes. Then she looked back at her display, already knowing what she would see.

Most of the defenses around Hades were designed to kill starships, not something as small and agile as a shuttle. None of the energy platforms or hunter-killer missiles could target something that tiny—not efficiently—and Camp Charon was in no mood to try. Nor did it need to, for that was why the old-fashioned area-effect mines had been emplaced. And so the ground base waited calmly until the small craft passed almost directly between two hundred-megaton mines, then pressed a button.

200 MT nuclear mines composing the Hades minefield. Four small craft in the escape bay. One assault shuttle to provide overwatch, one to cary the bulk of the prisoners, one to zip off into space on autopilot and die. The fourth? Well, that was Scotty's special job.

The small craft of all impeller-drive navies have at least one thing in common. They may be larger or smaller, armed or unarmed, fast or slow, but every single one of them is fitted with safety features to prevent it from bringing up its drive when any solid object large enough to endanger it—or to be endangered by it—lies within the perimeter of its impeller wedge. And above all, it is impossible to accidentally activate an impeller wedge while still within a boat bay.

But those safeguards, while as near to infallible as they can be made, are designed to prevent accidents, and what happened in PNS Tepes' Boat Bay Four was no accident. The only vessel left in it was the pinnace upon which Scotty Tremaine had labored, and now Horace Harkness' last program brought its systems on-line. But Scotty had made one small alteration: he had physically cut the links between the pinnace's sensors and its autopilot. The flight computers could no longer "see" the boat bay about them. As far as they could tell, they could have been in deepest, darkest interstellar space, and so they felt no concern at all when they were commanded to bring the pinnace's wedge up while it still lay in its docking buffers.


*****


"My God."

Shannon Foraker's hushed whisper seemed to echo and re-echo across Count Tilly's flag deck as PNS Tepes blew apart.

No, Lester Tourville thought shakenly. No, she didn't blow apart; she simply came apart. She . . . disintegrated.

And that, he realized, was precisely the right word. The battlecruiser's fusion plants blew as their mag bottles failed, spewing white-hot fury amid the wreckage, but it didn't really matter. Nothing could have survived that dreadful, wrenching blow from inside her hull. All the fusion plants did was vaporize a few score tons of wreckage and silhouette the rest of it against a star-bright fury, like snowflakes in a ground car's headlights.

He stared in awe at the visual images of the carnage transmitted from their RD to the main view screen, and he knew how it had happened. He'd never actually seen it before, but there was only one thing the Manties could possibly have done to produce that effect, and a corner of his mind wondered distantly how they'd gotten past the fail-safes that were supposed to make it impossible.

Ever wondered what happened when a sheet exerting hundreds of Gs of force contacted matter? Generally matter comes off the loser, and since even a pinnace wedge is a hundred klicks long...

And then he saw Shannon Foraker's right hand come out of her lap and move slowly, almost stealthily, towards her panel. Something about its movement caught at his attention, and he crossed quietly to stand behind her. She heard him and looked up, and her hand moved away from the "ERASE" key even more slowly—and far more reluctantly—than it had come.

Tourville gazed down over her shoulder at the tactical recording she'd been replaying, and his jaw clenched as he saw what she'd seen: two pieces of wreckage, larger than most of the others, and on a vector which had clearly taken them away from the murdered battlecruiser before she exploded. A vector which just happened to look very much like an unpowered reentry course.

He looked at them for another long moment, rubbing his fierce mustache with one finger. Shannon's drone had seen them, but it was highly unlikely Hades' EMP-blinded sensors had picked them up in time, and with the destruction of the "fleeing" pinnace, no one would even think to look for them. He felt a deep flicker of admiration for whoever had thought this one up, but he knew what his duty required of him.

Yes, I know what "duty" requires, he thought, and reached down past Shannon's shoulder to press his own finger firmly on the "ERASE" key. He heard Shannon inhale sharply, saw her head twitch, but she didn't say a word, and he turned away from her panel. He walked across to where Honeker and Bogdanovich stood, both still staring in awe at the visual imagery of the spreading pattern of wreckage relayed by Shannon's drone, and cleared his throat.

Both Shannon Foraker and Lester Tourville see the assault shuttles dropping to Hades when Camp Charon can't. But neither of them is in a sharing mood.