Whoever had designed Minotaur had taken extraordinary pains to enhance crew efficiency. Even after five months on board, Smith was still a bit awed by the degree of automation she incorporated. Traditionally, warships had embarked crews which were enormously larger than any merchant ship of equivalent tonnage would have boasted. That was largely because merchant ships tended to be nothing more than huge, hollow spaces into which to stuff cargo, whereas warships were packed full of weapons, ammunition, defensive and offensive electronic warfare systems, sidewall generators, back up fusion plants, bigger Warshawski sails, more powerful beta nodes, and scores of other things merchantmen simply didn't carry and hence had no reason to provide crews for. But it was also true that merchies relied far more heavily than warships on automated and remote systems to reduce manpower requirements still further.
Men-of-war could have done the same thing, but they didn't. Or, at least, they hadn't. The official reason was that large crews provided redundancy. After all, if the fancy automation took a hit that fried it, you needed old-fashioned people with toolkits to fix it. And people were still the ultimate self-programming remotes. If a weapon mount or a critical support system was cut off from the central control net by battle damage, or if the central computers themselves crashed, a warship had the human resources to take over and run things in local control anyway.
That was the official reasoning. Personally, Smith had always suspected that tradition had as much to do with it. Warships always had had enormous crews for their tonnage; ergo they always would have enormous crews, and that was simply The Way It Was. Even in the Royal Manticoran Navy, he'd long since discovered, the military mind liked things to stay nice and predictable.
Increasing automation on Manticoran warships can drastically reduce crew sizes, this capability has been around for a very long time but they've never been this hard up on manpower.
But the Star Kingdom could no longer afford to hang onto tradition for tradition's sake. Smith hadn't seen the figures—first-class engineering petty officers weren't generally invited in by BuPers to study classified manpower numbers—but he didn't have to see them to know the Navy was increasingly strapped for crews. It was also common knowledge that the Navy and Marines between them now had something like twenty million people in uniform, and the Royal Army's appetite for manpower had turned increasingly voracious as the Navy picked off Peep planets and the Army had to provide garrisons. Altogether, there were probably close to thirty million Manticorans in uniform now, and that was the next best thing to one percent of the Star Kingdom's total population.
One percent didn't sound like a lot . . . until you subtracted it from the most productive portions of your economy just as you geared up to fight an interstellar war on a scale the galaxy hadn't seen in at least four hundred years. Then it became a very big thing indeed, and BuShips, under pressure from BuPers to do something—anything—to reduce manpower demands, had finally caved in on the automation front. Even with all the personnel for her LAC squadrons on board, Minotaur carried a total company of under two thousand, which was less than most battlecruisers a seventh her size. Of course, she didn't mount the normal broadside weapons of a ship of the wall, but Smith figured that even a conventional warship's company could be cut by at least sixty percent if the same standards of automation and remotes were applied to her design. And that could have major consequences for the Navy's front line strength.
Some of the manpower and economic issues, 30 million Manties, or 1% of the population, now in uniform. That makes the total population about three billion. That tallies well with Honor Among Enemies (3.3 billion) though I'll note the Navie's numbers have doubled in less than two years.
I'm a little fuzzy on the preferred balance of men vs. machines for jobs, in the very first book we saw the engineer's mostly programming robots to build and fix things.
Smith supposed it was inevitable—human beings, being human beings—that the new concept would have its critics, and some of the criticisms were no doubt valid. He did tend to get just a bit pissed off with the ones who caterwauled about what a heavy reliance the new design placed on the ship's computers, though. Of course it put a heavy demand on them . . . and anyone but an idiot knew that had always been the case. Human beings could do many of the things their electronic minions normally took care of for them, but they could do very few of those things as well—or in anything like the same amount of time—as their computers could. And there were any number of things people couldn't do without computers. Like navigate a starship. Or run a fusion plant. Or any one of a zillion other absolutely essential, extremely complex, time-critical jobs that always needed doing aboard a warship. It probably made sense to minimize total dependency on the computers and AI loops as much as possible, but it simply couldn't be entirely eliminated. And as long as he had an intact electronics shop, with one machine shop to support it, and power, and life support, Scooter Smith could damned well build any replacement computer his ship might need. All of which meant he wished the whiners and nitpickers would get the hell out of his way so he could get on with enjoying all the marvelous new features the change in design philosophy had brought with it.
Contrary to what StateSec seems to think, you need a lot of computer support and computer sciences to make a half-decent spacer. For that matter, Manty engineers usually have the tools and expertise to build replacement computers from scratch.
In Minotaur's case, those features meant, among other things, that better than eighty percent of the routine hull maintenance on the carrier's LACs could be performed by cybernetic henchmen without ever requiring a suited human presence.
How much load (80%) of routine maintenance the remotes can handle without human crew needing to suit up and tend to the LACs themselves.
But whatever happened to "Silver Spanner," Smith was delighted with the new remotes. They were almost as impressive as the support a shipyard might have boasted, and he was devoutly grateful to have them. But the designers had gone still further in simplifying his task by designing the LAC bays with outsized bow access tubes. Instead of the standard buffers and docking arms which held a small craft in its boat bay, the LACs' mooring tractors drew them bow-first into a full length docking cradle. In the process, they aligned the little ships' sharp noses with "personnel tubes" fifteen meters across that fitted down over their bows. Since that was where all of the LACs' armament—defensive and offensive alike—was mounted, it let Smith work on things like the jammed laser cluster without suiting up. And additional service tubes to the launchers meant missile reloads could be transported directly from Minotaur's main missile stowage, into the LACs' rotary magazines.
LACs park in their tiny individual hangars nose (and guns) in. Which makes maintenance and reloading far, far easier than it otherwise would be, but strikes me as rather unsafe.
"I wouldn't know about snakes, Sir," Takahashi replied. "We don't have them on Manticore, you know."
"They do on Sphinx," Stackowitz informed him. "Of course, they've got legs on Sphinx, and I don't think Old Earth snakes do. Then again, Sphinx always has been noted for the . . . um, peculiarities of its flora and fauna."
Manticore lacks snakes, but Sphinx has them. With legs, which would seem to violate conventional taxonomy.
It was a bit confusing to have two Navy captains aboard the same ship, both in command slots, even if one of them was a junior-grade and the other a senior-grade. And it could have led to dangerous confusion as to exactly whom one was speaking to or of in an emergency, which explained why Harmon was almost always referred to as the "COLAC," the brand-new acronym someone had coined for "Commanding Officer, LACs." Harmon had resisted it at first, on the grounds that it sounded too much like "colic," but it had stuck. It still sounded odd, but it was beginning to seem less so, and it certainly made it perfectly clear who you were talking about. (Ernest Takahashi's innocent suggestion that if the Captain objected to "Commanding Officer, LACs," they might try "Commanding Officer, Wing" instead had been rejected with astonishing speed. Even more astonishingly, the lieutenant had survived making it.)
The new title was also only a tiny part of all the adjustments and new departures Minotaur and her company had been forced to deal with. For the first time in modern naval history—the first time in almost two thousand years, in fact—the "main battery" of a unit which had to be considered a capital ship did not operate directly from that ship in action . . . and the ship's captain didn't control it. Gearman couldn't imagine a better choice for Minotaur's CO than Alice Truman. She had the flexibility and the confidence, not to mention the experience, to grasp the changes in the RMN's traditional command arrangements which the introduction of the LAC-carrier implied, and he wasn't sure how many other captains could have said the same thing. But the fact was that once Minotaur's LACs were launched, Jackie Harmon—a mere captain (JG)—had under her command twice as many energy weapons and six and a half times as many missile tubes as the skipper of a Reliant-class battlecruiser. Not only that, but Minotaur's only real function after launching her brood was to get the hell out of the way while Harmon and her squadron COs got on with business.
Aside from a senior captain commanding the ship,
Minnie has a junior-grade captain who flies with the LACs and commands them when they can't get instructions from the carrier. This position, what would be the CAG (commander, air group) on a contemporary carrier is the COLAC which she is perpetually referred to prevent confusion with the actual-factual captain of the ship.
But what had come as the greatest surprise to him were the differences the change in power plants made. He'd known what they were going to be—intellectually, at least—but that had been very different from the practical experience, and he sometimes found himself wondering just how many other things that everyone "knew" were true were nothing of the sort. In a very real sense, the best thing Grayson had done for the Star Kingdom was to force people in places like the Bureau of Ships to reconsider some of those "known facts" in a new light, he reflected, and wondered how long it would be before BuShips did decide to start building fission plants into at least their smaller starships.
Fission plants again, and the treaty with Grayson (at least in one tech's opinion) has paid for itself just in the re-examination of shipbuilding assumptions.
They were smaller, lighter, and actually easier to operate than a fusion plant would have been, and the increase in endurance was incredible. In his previous stint in LACs, he'd been even more paranoid about reactor mass levels than most warship engineers because he'd had so little margin to play with. Now he didn't even have to consider that, and the sheer, wanton luxury of it was downright seductive. Not that there weren't a few drawbacks—including the procedure for emergency shutdown in case of battle damage. If a fusion plant's mag bottle held long enough for the hydrogen flow to be shut off, that was basically that. In a fission plant, however, you were stuck with a reactor core that was its own fuel . . . and which would do Bad Things if the coolant failed. But the Grayson tech reps seemed confident where their fail-safes were concerned. Which wasn't to say that every engineer from the Star Kingdom would agree with them. After all, their entire tech base was so much cruder, accepted so many trade-offs . . .
Fission again. The technical parts are a bit outside my expertise but I'll weigh in if only to point out that LACs in a system defense role are expected to patrol the hyper-limit and the outer system, hence why they mentioned having fuel storage for three weeks of operation even in a conventional design.
"We get to play with Ghost Rider?" Stackowitz' eyes positively glowed at that, and Harmon nodded.
"Yep. The logistics pipeline just delivered an entire new set of decoy heads with brand-new signal amplifiers—the ones you were telling me about last month, in fact. We've got to share them with Hancock Base, but there're more than enough of them to go around."
"Oh boy," Stackowitz murmured almost prayerfully, and then gave McGyver a grin that eclipsed the COLAC's. "I told you they were going to make a difference, Bruce. Now I'll show you. I'll bet you five bucks they cut Minotaur's tracking capability against us by thirty-five percent—and that's with CIC knowing what we're doing!"
New Ghost Rider decoy missiles, perhaps the Dragon's Teeth? And their estimated increase in effectiveness even in a ship that knows all about them.
Amber light strings began to blink above the waiting docking buffers, a sure sign the pinnace was on final with the pilot looking for that visual cue, but White Haven didn't even notice. Or perhaps he did, for the blinking lights took him back to that hideous day fifty years before when the supersonic med flight with its strident, eye-shattering emergency lights had delivered his wife's broken and mangled body to the Landing General trauma center. He'd been there to greet the flight, summoned from his office at Admiralty House, but he hadn't been there to prevent the air car accident, now had he? Of course not. He'd had his "duty" and his "responsibilities," and they were both prolong recipients, so they'd had centuries yet to make up for all the time those inescapable concepts had stolen from them.
But he'd been there to see her carried in—to recognize the damage and cringe in horror, for unlike himself, Emily was one of the minority of humanity for whom the regeneration therapies simply did not work. Like Honor, a corner of his brain thought now. Just like Honor—another point in common. And because they didn't work for her, he'd been terrified.
She'd lived. None of the doctors had really expected her to, even with all of modern medicine's miracles, but they hadn't known her like White Haven knew her. Didn't have the least concept of the dauntless willpower and courage deep within her. But they did know their profession, and they'd been right about one thing. She might have fooled them by living, and again by doing it with her mind unimpaired, yet they'd told him she would never leave her life-support chair again, and for fifty years, she hadn't.
White Haven's tragic backstory with his wife Emily, a famous actress who has since become a motivational speaker and disabilities advocate.
There had been a handful of other women over the last forty-odd years. He and Emily were both from aristocratic families and Manticore, the most cosmopolitan of the Star Kingdom's planets, with mores and concepts quite different from those of frontier Gryphon or straitlaced Sphinx. The Star Kingdom had its licensed professional courtesans, but ninety percent of them were to be found on the capital planet, and White Haven had availed himself of their services upon occasion. Emily knew that, just as she knew that all of them had been women he liked and respected but did not love. Not as he loved her.
Emily isn't exactly up to conjugal visits from her husband, but has proven remarkably tolerant of his tolerant of his affairs, easily forgiving the first secret one and not bothering with the others. He keeps these discreet, mostly to not twist the knife or make a public scandal.
"I've been trying to assemble Eighth Fleet for the better part of a T-year now," White Haven said flatly. "The process was supposed to be complete over nine standard months ago, and I still haven't received the strength my original orders specified. More to the point, perhaps, I have received the units I was promised by Grayson, Erewhon, and the other Allied navies. What I haven't seen have been the Manticoran units I was promised. I'm still better than two complete battle squadrons—seventeen ships of the wall—short on the RMN side, and nothing I've seen in my dispatches from the Star Kingdom suggests that those ships are going to turn up tomorrow. Should I assume that one reason Allen Summervale sent the second ranking member of his Government and the Admiralty's senior serving officer out here was to explain to myself—and possibly the Protector—just why that is?"
-snip-
"I know what you're going to say, My Lord, but Lord Alexander is right. We simply don't have them. Or, rather, we have too many other commitments and we ran our maintenance cycles too far into the red in the push to get as deep into Peep territory as we are now."
"I see." White Haven sat back, drumming his fingers on the desk in narrow-eyed thought. As a fleet commander, he lacked access to the comprehensive, Navy-wide kind of data Caparelli saw regularly, but the availability numbers must be even worse than he'd thought.
"How bad is it?" he asked after a moment.
"Not good," Caparelli admitted. "As the officer who took Trevor's Star, you must have been aware of how we were deferring regular overhauls on the ships under your command to let you maintain the numbers to capture the system."
He paused, and White Haven nodded. Almost twenty percent of the ships he'd taken into the final engagement had been long overdue for regular maintenance refits . . . and it had shown in their readiness states.
"It hasn't gotten any better," the First Space Lord told him. "In fact, for your private information, we've had no choice but to pull in just over a quarter of our total ships of the wall."
"A quarter?" Despite himself, White Haven's surprise showed, and Caparelli nodded grimly. That was seventy-five percent higher than the fifteen percent of Fleet strength which was supposed to be down for refit at any given time.
"A quarter," Caparelli confirmed. "And if we could, I'd have made it thirty percent. We worked the Fleet too hard to get to where we are now, My Lord. We've got to take the battle fleet in hand—and not just for routine repairs, either. We've been refitting the new systems and weapons and compensators on an ad hoc basis since the war started, but over half our wall of battle units are at least two years behind the technology curve. That's seriously hurting our ability to make full use of the new hardware, especially the compensators, since our squadrons are no longer homogenous. It doesn't do us a lot of good to have three ships in a squadron capable of accelerating at five hundred and eighty gravities if the other five can only pull five-ten! We've got to get all the current upgrades into a higher percentage of the total wall."
-snip-
"But the operative point for Eighth Fleet is that it looks like another couple of months before I'll see my other battle squadrons, right?"
"Yes," Caparelli said. "We had to make a choice between you and keeping Trevor's Star up to strength, and, frankly, what happened at Adler is still having repercussions. We're managing to ride them out so far, but the sheer scope of our defeat there has everyone—and especially the smaller members of the Alliance—running more than a little scared. I'm doing my level best to gather back the ships we were forced to disperse in even more penny-packet pickets for political reasons, but Trevor's Star is another matter. If I were the Peeps, that system—and the Junction terminus there—would be absolutely my number one targeting priority, and I have to assume they're at least as smart as I am."
Everyone has really chipped in to get Eighth Fleet assembled on time. Everyone except Manticore, because of ongoing logistics issues. In fact, they're planning to pull a quarter of their wallers back for emergency overhaul, and they'd pull in a lot more if they thought they could spare the ships.
"We're building up our fleet strength as quickly as we can, Ham," William told him, then grimaced. "Of course, that's not as quickly as I'd like. We're beginning to stress the economy pretty hard. I've even got permanent secretaries and undersecretaries in my department talking about a progressive income tax."
"You what?" That brought White Haven upright in his chair once more, and his eyes widened when his brother nodded. "But that's unconstitutional!"
"Not exactly," William said. "The Constitution specifies that any permanent income tax must be flat-rated, but it does make provision for temporary adjustments to the rate."
" 'Temporary'!" White Haven snorted.
"Temporary," William repeated firmly. "Any progressive taxes have to be enacted with a specific time limit, and they automatically terminate at the time of the first general election after enactment. And they can only be passed with a two-thirds super-majority of both houses in the first place."
The first, tiniest whiff of Centrist domestic politics. A progressive income tax being one that takes away a larger percentage of your income the more you make, aka taxing the rich more. Apparently the Manticoran Constitution flatly forbids such taxes, as a permanent measure anyways, and provides mechanisms so it would be absurdly difficult to pass and end in short order as a default. Presumably more of the original colonists/aristos enshrining their own wealth and power.
"You always were a fiscal conservative, Hamish. And I won't say you're wrong. Hell, I'm a fiscal conservative! But we've already quadrupled the transit fees on the Junction and levied special duties on our own merchant shipping, as well—not to mention increasing import duties to a two-hundred-and-fifty-year high. So far, we've managed not to have to rob Peter to pay Paul—or at least not to resort to armed robbery with violence in the process. But without something like a progressive tax, we won't be able to keep that up much longer. We've already had to restrict cost of living increases in government pensions and assistance programs . . . and I'll let you imagine for yourself how Marisa Turner and her bunch reacted to that."
Marisa Turner being Countess New Kiev, leader of the Liberal Party. Some of the measures taken so far to pay for the war involve raising fees on ships passing through the Junction, raising import duties and nixing increases to pensions and welfare, even to keep up with cost of living increases. But to date, no major new taxes.
"We're doing everything we can at the Admiralty to hold budgets down, and from a purely military perspective, there's lots of slack yet in our industrial capability. The problem Lord Alexander and Duke Cromarty are facing is how we can use that capability without crippling the civilian sector, and even there, we still have quite a lot of slack in fact. The problem is that politics is a game of perceptions, and the truth is that we are reaching the point of imposing some real sacrifices on our civilians."
White Haven blinked. The Thomas Caparelli he'd known for three-quarters of a century wouldn't have made that remark, because he wouldn't have understood the fine distinctions it implied. But it seemed his tenure as First Space Lord was stretching his mind in ways White Haven hadn't anticipated.
"Sir Thomas is right," William said before the Earl could follow that thought completely down. "Oh, we're not even close to talking about rationing yet, but we've got a real inflation problem for the first time in a hundred and sixty years, and that's only going to get worse as more and more of our total capacity gets shifted into direct support of the war at the same time as wartime wages put more money into the hands of our consumers. Again, this is for your private information, but I've been in closed-door negotiations with the heads of the major cartels to discuss centralized planning for the economy."
And an inflation problem, c'est le guerre. Still, just as people at home are already starting to turn off the war's popularity they're finally hitting the point of needing to ask everyone to dig deep and help pay for the thing.
"I see," White Haven said slowly, and rubbed his lower lip in thought. The Liberals and Progressives had always wanted more government interference in the Star Kingdom's economy, and Cromarty's Centrists had always fought that idea tooth and nail, especially since the People's Republic had begun its slide into fiscal ruin. The Centrists' view had been that a free market encouraged to run itself was the most productive economy available. Too much government tampering with it would be the case of killing the proverbial goose that laid the golden eggs, whereas the very productivity of an unregulated economy meant that even with lower tax rates, it would ultimately produce more total tax revenues in absolute terms. The Liberals and Progressives, on the other hand, had argued that unregulated capitalism was fundamentally unfair in its allocation of wealth and that it was government's proper function to regulate it and to formulate tax policies to influence the distribution of affluence in ways which would produce a more equitable balance. Intellectually, White Haven supposed both sides had their legitimate arguments. He knew which viewpoint he supported, of course, but he had to admit that his own heritage of wealth and power might have a little something to do with that.
Yet whatever one Hamish Alexander might think, Cromarty and William must truly be feeling the pressure to even contemplate unbottling that particular genie. Once the government had established tight centralized control of the economy for any reason, dismantling those controls later would be a Herculean task. There were always bureaucratic empire-builders who would fight to the death to maintain their own petty patches of power, and any government could always find places to spend all the money it could get its hands on. But even more to the point, the Liberals and their allies would be able—quite legitimately, in many ways—to argue that if the Star Kingdom had been willing to accept such control to fight a war, then surely it should be willing to accept less draconian peacetime measures in the fight against poverty and deprivation. Unless, that was, the fiscal conservatives wished to argue that it was somehow less moral or worthy to provide its citizens with what they needed when they weren't killing other people?
So the Centrists are also against a centralized or government-managed economy, probably one of the common points that helped them hold an alliance with the Conservatives when the war began.
"We see some other alternatives—and some bright spots on the horizon," William said, breaking into his thoughts. "Don't think it's all doom and gloom from the home front. For one thing, people like the Graysons are taking up a lot more slack than we'd anticipated when the war began. And did you know that Zanzibar and Alizon are about to bring their own shipyards on-line?"
"Zanzibar is?" White Haven's eyebrows rose, and his brother nodded.
"Yep. It's sort of a junior version of the Graysons' Blackbird Yard, another joint venture with the Hauptman Cartel. It'll be limited to cruiser and maybe battlecruiser-range construction, at least for the first couple of years, but it'll be top of the line, and the same thing for Alizon. And the Graysons themselves are just phenomenal. Maybe it's because they've already had so many battles fought in their space, or maybe it's simply because their standard of living was so much lower than ours was before the war started, but these people are digging deep, Hamish . . . and their civilian economy is still expanding like a house on fire at the same time. I suppose part of the difference is that their civilian sector is still so far short of market saturation, whereas ours—" He shrugged. "And it's not helping a bit that we're still unable to provide the kind of security for our merchant shipping in Silesia that we'd like. Our trade with the Confederation is down by almost twenty-eight percent."
More on that later, but essentially yes. The Graysons are familiar with long-grinding wars, it's a little unusual for them to think of war as less than a generational thing. And their technology and standard of living are flourishing, so it's a lot easier for them to accept that their standard of living would climb even higher if it wasn't for the war, because they're still better off then they were a decade ago.
Alizon and Zanzibar have started shipbuilding too, just cruisers and BCs for the foreseeable future, but they're all top-shelf with the latest EW and compensators.
"Are the Andermani picking up what we've lost?" White Haven asked.
"It looks more like it's the Sollies," William said with another shrug. "We're seeing more and more market penetration by them out this way . . . which may help explain why certain elements in the League are willing to export military technology to the Peeps."
The Sollies are doing a roaring trade with Silesia, as Manty shipping is down from war needs and residual skittishness. At least Manticore gets to hit them for wormhole fees.
"Well," William leaned back and crossed his legs, "they both agree she must have been dead for some time before the announcement. That 'killed by enemy action while touring the front on Committee business' is pure crap. We know exactly when and where we've knocked out Peep battlecruisers, and none of the dates we have match the one they've given. It's a little more sophisticated than those 'air car accidents' the Peeps' have always favored to explain away disappearances, especially when they've got some reason to want to obscure the exact time they disappeared someone, but it's still a crock, and we know it. As for when she really died, as far as any of our analysts can determine, she hasn't been seen in public in months, and with that as a starting point, we've taken a very close look at the more recent HD imagery of her, as well. At least some of it was faked—and faked very well, I might add—but the earliest example we've been able to positively identify is only a couple of T-months old. She may have been dead longer than that, but we can't be positive."
The death of Cordeila Ransom. Both military and civilian intelligence agencies agree she was dead for some time before the announcement was made, and probably by the rest of the triumvirate, but they can't agree on why. The military spooks think she made a power play again Pierre and St. Just and lost, the civilians think she made such a stink about McQueen's elevation the others decided to simply liquidate her.
Funnily enough, killed by escaping Manty prisoners doesn't even make the top twenty.
Oh, and the official cover story is that the forces of the decadent Manticoran elitists cowardly ambushed and destroyed
Tepes while the brave Committeewoman Ransom was touring the frontlines. Honor her memory, comrades, and make the capitalist pigs pay in blood for every AU of Haven Space! Great for domestic consumption, but not really going to fly with the Manties.
