Bit of Analysis: Honor Harrington III

[VhenRa]

Or just sail the completed vessels to uninhabited systems with skeleton crews and transfer their crews over.

[Simon_Jester]

Well, at least during the interwar period, Haven was working up its secret SD(P)/CLAC fleet at Bolthole. So they must have been bringing the actual crews of the warships to Bolthole; you can't work up a ship until it has more or less its full complement aboard.

[Terralthra]

That's a factor too.

On the other hand, it's not hard to openly recruit Navy personnel, train them on the obsolete SDs and other starships left over from the first round of the war (Capital Fleet and Twelfth Fleet were both totally intact at war's end), and then pack them in a handful of relatively fast personnel transports. Fly them to Bolthole without telling them where they're going, hop into their new-built ships, and set sail.

No different from any other naval operation; the time you spend out of touch with the outside galaxy is at most several months, which has to be pretty normal for the Honorverse given just how long a long-range naval cruise can travel.

As long as nobody's allowed to take photographs of starscapes or anything dumb like that, it should work out just fine.

Sure, that's possible...assuming the rest of Haven is doing fine. If 8th Fleet demolishes everything else, Bolthole can't exactly go on clandestine recruitment drives.

[Simon_Jester]

This is true.

Then again, unless the Manticorans start outright genocidal mass destruction of civilian populations, the same educated population-base that went to school under the Committee and which provided the manpower base for the Thunderbolt-era Republican Navy is still there.

So they can start recruiting again, probably among a very pissed off Havenite populace. And since the Manticorans can't realistically occupy all of Havenite space, they'd have a hard time stopping it.

Granted, of course, that it would take a hell of a long time to rebuild anything. But my basic point is, as long as Bolthole remains in existence, a sufficiently determined and still-organized Haven would retain the ability to recover within, oh, a decade or so. To prevent this you'd basically have to destroy all centralized government in Havenite space, not just the industrial infrastructure.

[Batman]

But that's it-a still organized Haven would no longer exist, at least for the foreseeable future. If Manticore feels forced to destroy Haven's industrial base they'd dismantle the government too, for the same reason-to make sure Haven will not be a threat if not ever again, then at least for as long as possible. Bolthole cannot possibly stand on its own for any length of time and with the rest of the Republic fallen, it would have to.
Manticore managed to thrive as a single system polity mostly thanks to the Magic Space Anomaly and for virtually all of the first war because it wasn't, it had allies. Oh, and a couple hundred years to build up the necessary infrastructure. How long has Bolthole existed?

[VhenRa]

By this point? Depends on when you put the start point. Getting close to 15 years IIRC.

[Mr Bean]

By this point? Depends on when you put the start point. Getting close to 15 years IIRC.

Yes it's two administrations old at this point. A secret build point for the ships to take Manticore back in 1900 PD.

[Simon_Jester]

Well, dismantling governments is tricky. Or rather, making them stay dismantled is tricky.

And yes this is doable. My point is, it's not easy or simple, and it's certainly not as easy as "send in battlecruiser raid to every populated Havenite system and deliver an infrastructure-busting attack." Which, all things considered, makes Manticore's attempt to make peace with Haven before trying to tangle seriously with the League a wise choice.

It's not that it's impossible to 'break up' a polity that is many times larger than yours, given total tactical superiority. It's that it's hard and requires ongoing effort to make sure that, say, the various system governments you break them up into don't secretly form a pact to go back to the abandoned location of the Bolthole shipyards and build a secret fleet ten years down the road. Or something.

Doing this to the Solarians, by contrast, would be totally impossible for a polity as small as Manticore- and it is precisely that point which Honor and others make in one of the many many strategy-session meetings.

[Kingmaker]

And one of the big limits on Bolthole almost has to be the workforce, because people who are there can't leave in any significant numbers... but at the same time, their communication with family and friends would have to be rather sharply curtailed. Granted, Haven has a very large population and can no doubt find a few million shipyard workers out of its hundreds of billions of people who are willing to work under those conditions. But finding more on demand is going to be difficult.

This occurred to me, but on the other hand, for sufficiently large operation it probably becomes less of an issue. Assignment to Bolthole might be a one-way ticket for the duration of the war, but it's got to be pretty fucking massive - on top of yard workers, you've got researchers, workers from non-hull production (missiles, drones, components, etc...), and for everyone directly involved in Bolthole's operation, there are probably several people working in some supporting capacity, military and civilian. So it's not like you're being assigned to Deep Space Listening Post #4587, with three other people and fourteen episodes of Friends on VHS for company over the next five years. Depending on how much the RHN incentivizes it, Bolthole might be viewed as a pretty nice assignment.

[Simon_Jester]

Well, part of the thing during the interwar period was that Haven had to at least try to keep Manticore from realizing what was going on. Sure, the High Ridge Government's intelligence analysis was trash, but that doesn't mean you can get sloppy.

So you face a similar problem to the one the Mesan Alignment now has with Houdini: how do you evacuate/remove a large number of select people from your own planets without anyone knowing where they went, and ideally without even knowing if they went? The People's Republic was totalitarian enough that it could probably pull this off to a fair extent, but the interwar Republic less so.

Now, the issue is "can you get people's families to relocate to Bolthole?" If not, then even if the assignment is pretty sweet a lot of Havenites won't want to go.

[VhenRa]

Take advantage of the instability and have their freighters "destroyed by ex-State Security pirates."?

[Dominus Atheos]

Well, part of the thing during the interwar period was that Haven had to at least try to keep Manticore from realizing what was going on. Sure, the High Ridge Government's intelligence analysis was trash, but that doesn't mean you can get sloppy.

So you face a similar problem to the one the Mesan Alignment now has with Houdini: how do you evacuate/remove a large number of select people from your own planets without anyone knowing where they went, and ideally without even knowing if they went? The People's Republic was totalitarian enough that it could probably pull this off to a fair extent, but the interwar Republic less so.

Now, the issue is "can you get people's families to relocate to Bolthole?" If not, then even if the assignment is pretty sweet a lot of Havenites won't want to go.

I don't think most starship crewmen or military members in general would end up assigned to their home system. Although I'm not sure how much planetside leave-time those crew members would get anyway, even in peacetime.

[Simon_Jester]

Take advantage of the instability and have their freighters "destroyed by ex-State Security pirates."?

You can do that with modest numbers of workers, but not with the entire millions-strong construction force and their families.

Because at that point, if you publicly announce that so many freighters have been destroyed, you will totally paralyze commerce, no more freighters will sail, and you won't be able to use that cover story anymore.

I don't think most starship crewmen or military members in general would end up assigned to their home system. Although I'm not sure how much planetside leave-time those crew members would get anyway, even in peacetime.

Most fleets seem to be assigned to semi-permanent bases most of the time. If life in the US military is any guide, then the norm in peacetime would be for civilian families to move into housing on a civilian station or planet in the same system as the fleet's base of operations.

For Manticore this usually means Manticore itself; thanks to the Junction, most of the RMN is based directly out of Manticore during peacetime. It's only in the immediate runup to the war that forces start getting sent in large numbers to faraway stations.

For Haven, things are probably different- and I suspect that quite a few Havenite spacers' dependent families moved to major naval bases like Trevor's Star or Barnett in the peacetime era.

On the other hand, interwar Haven wasn't really 'peacetime' conditions due to the civil war. So it may well be that naval personnel just plain never got leave to see their families, any more than they would have during the wars themselves.

But that isn't the same thing as imposing the same conditions on millions of construction workers.

[Batman]

What exactly are the conditions at Bolthole? I don't remember reading all that much about how exactly that system is laid out. I'd venture even a worker population measured in millions would put up with it if, say, Bolthole 2B is Risa writ large and they get a salary that dwarfs anything they could make elsewhere (and that compared to the total population and expenditures of something the size of the Republic, that's definitely feasible).

[Ahriman238]

And this next bit is largely reactions to the Green Pines nuking on Mesa (and the accusation that Manticore was responsible) how that effects the negotiations in Nouveau Paris, and a check-in with Tenth Fleet.

She shuddered internally. Intellectually, she knew, the distinction between nuclear weapons and other, equally destructive attacks was not only logically flawed but downright silly. And it wasn't as if nukes hadn't been used against plenty of other civilian targets over the last couple of millennia. For that matter, Honor Alexander-Harrington, her own cousin Michelle, and other naval officers just like them routinely detonated multi-megaton nuclear devices in combat. But emotionally, Green Pines still represented a tremendous escalation, the crossing of a line the Ballroom, for all its ferocity, had always avoided in the past.

Which is what's going to make the new Mesan line so damnably effective with Sollies who already distrust or despise the Ballroom . . . or don't like the Star Empire very much.

The residual horror about nukes, and just when the Sollies are looking for things to blame Manticore for too.

Judging from Admiral Luis Roszak's losses (and according to Elizabeth's classified Office of Naval Intelligence reports, those losses had been far higher than Roszak or Barregos had publicly admitted) those mercenaries must have been substantially reinforced. They'd certainly turned up with several times the firepower anyone at ONI had anticipated they might possess.

I wonder whether that assumption on our part comes under the heading of reasonable, complacent, or downright stupid? she thought. After Monica, we damned well ought to've realized Manpower—or Mesa, or whoever's really orchestrating things—had more military resources than we'd ever thought before. On the other hand, I don't suppose the analysts ought to be too severely faulted for not expecting them to provide presumably traceable ex-Solly battlecruisers to StateSec lunatics who'd been recruited in the first place as disposable—and deniable—cat's-paws. Worse, Pat Givens' people at ONI have a pretty solid count on how many StateSec starships actually ran for it after the coup. Admiral Caparelli based his threat assessment on the numbers we knew about, or we'd never have expected Roszak and Torch to deal with it on their own. We're all just damned lucky they managed to pull it off, after all.

I'm guessing if Manty intelligence has a really good count on Peep ships that fled after the Theisman coup, and they never anticipated anything like the Battle of Torch, the remaining StateSec pirates must be pretty small time and not a major threat.

But whatever might or might not transpire in the Maya Sector, and despite any threat assessment errors which might have come home to roost for Admiral Roszak and his people, the fact remained that Mesa had neatly factored its own failed attack on Torch into its new propaganda offensive.

After all, its mouthpieces had pointed out, the Kingdom of Torch had declared war on the Mesa System, and a huge chunk of the Kingdom of Torch's military and government leadership had long-standing personal ties to the Audubon ballroom. Obviously, Torch had figured out the Mesan attack was coming well in advance, since it had formally requested Roszak's assistance under the provisions of its treaty with the Solarian League. (It hadn't, but no one outside the immediate vicinity knew that . . . or was likely to believe it.) So the Mesan argument that Torch had orchestrated the Green Pines attack through the direct Ballroom links it had officially severed as an act of government-sponsored terrorism in retaliation for a legitimate attack by conventional military forces on a belligerent star nation had a dangerous, dangerous plausibility. Especially for anyone who was already inclined to distrust an outlaw regime midwifed in blood and massacre by that same "terrorist" organization.

How the timing of Green Pines is convenient for Mesa, from a propaganda standpoint. And naturally, the StateSec forces at Torch would never dream of violating interstellar law with mass orbital strikes, unlike those nasty Ballroom terrorists.

"Would it make this any simpler for you, Cathy," she asked almost whimsically, "if you just went ahead and said 'Anton and Agent Cachat' instead of being so diplomatic?"

It was Montaigne's eyes' turn to narrow, and the queen chuckled, albeit a bit sourly.

"I assure you, I've read the reports on just exactly how Torch came into being with a certain closeness. And I've had direct reports from Ruth, too, you know. She's done her best to be . . . tactful, let's say, but it's been obvious Agent Cachat's still something of a fixture on Torch. And, for that matter, that he and Captain Zilwicki have formed some sort of at least semi-permanent partnership."

Apparently the Manty intelligence apparatus is well-aware of Victor Cachat, at least after he pretty much threw together Torch out of odds and ends. Even the bloody Queen of Manticore knows who he is.

"Unfortunately, nothing you've just told me really helps, does it? As you say, we can't prove Captain Zilwicki—and, by implication, Torch and the Star Empire—weren't involved. In fact, going public with the fact that he was on Mesa at all would be the worst thing we could possibly do at this point. But I'm afraid that's going to make things rough on you, Cathy."

"I know." Montaigne grimaced. "You're going to have to take the position that the Star Empire wasn't involved, and along the way, you're going to have to point out that even assuming Anton was involved, he's no longer an ONI agent. Ever since he took up with that notorious incendiary and public shill for terrorism Montaigne, he's been establishing his own links to the abolitionist movement and, yes, probably to those Ballroom terrorists. Under those circumstances, clearly neither you, personally, nor the Star Empire is in any position to comment one way or the other on what he may have been responsible for since going rogue that way."

The Manticoran official line about Green Pines.

"But it's going to make problems for your Liberals, too," Elizabeth pointed out. "If—when—this turns as ugly as I think it's going to do, Willie and I are both going to find ourselves forced to hold you at arms length . . . at best. And that doesn't even consider the fact that at least someone inside the party's going to see this as an opportunity to boot you out of the leader's position."

"If that happens, it happens." Montaigne's tone was philosophical; the flinty light in her eyes suggested that anyone who wanted a fight was going to get one. In fact, Elizabeth thought, the other woman was probably looking forward to it as a distraction from her personal fears.

Not really worried about Cathy losing her New Liberals.

"Don't worry! I wasn't setting you up for a sucker punch by telling you what a wonderful, fearless person you are, Cathy." She shook her head. "No. What I was thinking about is that this news is going to hit the Haven System in about a week and a half, and I shudder to think about the impact it's going to have on Duchess Harrington's negotiations with the Pritchart Administration. I'm sure it's going to have repercussions with all of our allies, of course, and thank God we at least consulted with them—unlike a certain ex-prime minister—before we opened negotiations this time around, but I'm more concerned about Haven's reaction. So what I would deeply appreciate your doing would be writing up what you've just told me, or as much of it as you feel you could share with Duchess Harrington, at least, for me to send her as deep background."

Just to be sure, Grayson and the Andermani know of Honor's negotiations and if they aren't cheering in the streets, they didn't object. Mind, small as Honor's party is, you'd think there'd be room for each major Alliance partner to send a rep.

"I remembered readin' your report from Monica," he said. "You might say I had a proprietary interest in your actin' tac officer's performance. I was impressed by th' way you used your Ghost Rider platforms t' reduce th' telemetry lag for your Mark 16s. Didn't seem t' me there was any reason I couldn't do th' same thing with Mark 23s." He shrugged. "It's not as good as Apollo, but it's a lot better than nothin'."

Back on Spindle, Oversteegen just got pasted in a sim where the op force had Apollo, but he did manage three SD kills despite it, and got 15% of his forces out of the ambush. He did use Ghost Rider as an improvised missile control platform, even if it only cut the telemetry lag a little bit.

"You're right about that," Michelle agreed. "And, by the way, the dispatch boat which arrived this morning had several interesting items aboard. The latest newsfaxes from home—and from Old Terra—among other things." She made a face, and Oversteegen snorted harshly. "In addition to that inspiring reading and viewing material, however, there were two additional items which I think you'll all find interesting."

One or two people sat up straighter, and she saw several sets of eyes narrow in speculation.

"The first is that we should be receiving an entire battle squadron of Apollo-capable Invictuses in about three weeks." The reaction of almost explosive relief which swept around the table was all she could have asked for. "There was a bit of a glitch in the deployment order, and their ammunition ships will be here a week or so before they are."

Michelle's Tenth Fleet is getting their upgrade to a force of the wall with 8 podnoughts, all Apollo-capable. And before they arrive (and more importantly, before Crandall) will be several munitions ships loaded down with Apollo pods.

Scotty Tremaine had been one of Honor Alexander-Harrington's protégés ever since her deployment to Basilisk Station aboard the old light cruiser Fearless. Michelle wondered if he'd been as surprised as she was when she discovered that the Admiralty, in its infinite wisdom, hadn't merely transferred him from the LAC community (where he'd not only made a considerable name for himself but actually survived the Battle of Manticore) but chosen to give a new-minted captain of the list such a plum assignment. Once she'd had time to think about it, however, she'd realized exactly why they'd done it. Even in a navy expanding as rapidly as the RMN, a flag officer had to have at least some experience in command of conventional starships, and aside from a brief stint in the "Elysian Space Navy" during the escape from Cerberus (where, admittedly, he'd performed extremely well), Scotty didn't have any. Obviously, Lucien Cortez had decided to rectify that situation, even if giving him a division of Saganami-Cs had to have stepped on the toes of quite a few captains—or even commodores—with considerably more seniority.

Oh hey, Scotty made it out of Manticore alright, and got sent to Talbott, commanding his own squadron of Saganamis, from his own ship, HMS Alistair McKeon.

And Spindle gets the misfortune to hear almost simultaneously about Green Pines and that yes, there is a huge Solly fleet on it's way.

Michelle nodded in glum agreement and looked back at Lieutenant Commander Denton's strength estimate. Seventy-one superdreadnoughts, sixteen battlecruisers, twelve heavy cruisers, twenty-three light cruisers, and eighteen destroyers. A total of a hundred and forty warships, accompanied by at least twenty-nine supply and support ships. Upwards of half a billion tons of combat ships, deployed all the way forward to a podunk Frontier Security sector on the backside of nowhere. Until this very moment, she realized, even as she'd dutifully made plans to deal with the possible threat of Solarian ships-of-the-wall, she hadn't truly believed a corporation like Manpower could possibly have the capacity to get that sort of combat power moved around like checkers on a board.

Crandall's force for the coming battle. 71 SD, 16 BC, 12 CA, 23 CL, 18 DD, plus 29 ammo/supply ships.

She drew a deep breath and ran her mind over her own order of battle. Fourteen Nike-class battlecruisers, eight Saganami-C-class heavy cruisers, four Hydra-class CLACs, five Roland-class destroyers, and a handful of obsolescent starships like Denton's Reprise and Victoria Saunders' Hercules. Of course, she also had right on four hundred LACs, but they'd have to go deep into the Sollies' weapons envelope to engage. So what it really came down to was her twenty-seven hyper-capable warships—the Hydras had no business at all in ship-to-ship combat—against Crandall's hundred and forty. She was outnumbered by better than five-to-one in hulls, and despite the fact that Manticoran ship types were bigger and more powerful on a class-for-class basis, the tonnage differential was almost thirteen-to-one. Of course, if she counted the LACs, she had another twelve million or so tons, but even that only brought it down to around ten-to-one. And as far as anyone in Meyers knew, she had only the ships she'd taken to New Tuscany, without Oversteegen's eight Nikes.

Tenth Fleet at the moment; 1 SD, 4 CLAC, 14 BC, 8 CA, 5 DD and an unknown number of older light cruisers and destroyers. Plus the carriers' LAC complements.

It wasn't as if the SLN's "contingency planning" had come as a surprise, although she suspected the League would be most unhappy if the Star Empire chose to publicize some of its jucier details. There was "Case Fabius," for example, which authorized Frontier Security commissioners to arrange Frontier Fleet "peacekeeping operations" which "accidentally" destroyed any locally owned orbital infrastructure within any protectorate star system whose local authorities proved unable to "maintain order"—meaning they'd been unable to induce the owners in question to sell to the transstellars OFS had decided would control their economies henceforth. Or "Case Buccaneer," which actually authorized Frontier Security to use Frontier Fleet units—suitably disguised, of course—as "pirates," complete with vanished merchant ships whose crews were never seen again, to provoke crises in targeted Verge systems in order to justify OFS intervention "to preserve order and public safety."

The Solarian contingency plans from Byng's files.

All that was sufficiently interesting reading, but she knew what Terekhov was referring to. Byng's files had also confirmed something ONI had suspected for a long time. In the almost inconceivable event that some neobarb star nation, or possibly some rogue OFS sector governor, attacked the Solarian League (or chose to forcibly resist OFS aggression, although that wasn't specifically spelled out, of course), the SLN had evolved a simple, straightforward strategy. Frontier Fleet, which possessed nothing heavier than a battlecruiser, would screen the frontiers and attempt to slow down any invaders or commerce raiders, while Battle Fleet assembled an overwhelmingly powerful force and headed directly towards the home system of the troublemaker . . . which it would then proceed to reduce to wreckage and transform into yet another OFS protectorate.

And the plan for any outside enemy that Frontier Fleet can't casually annihilate. Frontier Fleet focuses on containment (good luck with that) while Battle Fleet throws together a decapitation strike at the enemy homeworld. Battle Fleet is something like the Russian Steamroller, they can overcome any foe in time, even if only by having more ships than the other side has shipkilling weapons, but it takes them a looong time to get these massive fleets concentrated and organized.

Though, thinking of Frontier Fleet containing commerce raiders, I wonder if Manticore might not be forced to those tactics they've always despised in others to survive? The Solly internal trade must be massive, and it'd give something for even those aged light units to do between massive Solly fleets getting massacred.

"Inform the Admiral that I intend to get Reprise on her way within thirty minutes of her arrival in Thimble planetary orbit." Even Terekhov looked a little startled at that, and she bared her teeth. "If Crandall thinks Reprise got a good look at her task force, and if she is inclined to launch an attack, she's going to move as quickly as she can. We have to assume she could be here literally within hours, and if she's decided to head directly for the Lynx Terminus instead, it'll take her only one more T-day to get there than it would to get here.

Apparently Spindle is at least fairly close to Lynx. I'm surprised because Talbott systems are generally so spread out. Perhaps that was even why it was chosen for the site of the Convention, and eventually the Quadrant government.

Warning sent to home, Mike outlines the things she wants to accomplish in defending Spindle.

"First, I want her to underestimate our actual combat power as badly as possible. I realize she's almost certainly already doing that, but let's encourage the tendency in every way we can.

That's going to be stupidly easy. Crandall is so armored from reality by her arrogance and contempt, I suspect she could find Eighth Fleet and the Protector's Own in full force defending Spindle, and she'd still sneer at the thought of neobarb 'toy boats' offering any threat to her command.

"Second, I'd like to push her, to . . . keep her as much off-balance mentally as possible. In a lot of ways, the madder she is, the less likely she is to be thinking very clearly, and that's probably about the best we can hope for. She's not going to head for Spindle in strength unless she's already got blood in her eye, which means it's unlikely—hell, the next best thing to it impossible!—that she's planning on presenting any sort of terms or demands Baroness Medusa and Prime Minister Alquezar are remotely likely to accept. So if push is going to come to shove anyway, I'd just as soon have her making angry decisions instead of good ones."

Again, not going to be that hard. Just have someone treat her as though she weren't the center of the universe.

"Third," she continued after a moment, "and although I realize it's going to sound a little strange after what I just said about pushing her, I'd be just as happy to stall for as long as possible. If Baroness Medusa can get her to burn a day or two in 'negotiations' before anyone actually pulls a trigger, so much the better."

"Is that really very likely, Ma'am?" Commander Culpepper asked dubiously. "Especially if she's underestimating the odds and we've managed to piss her off on top of it?

"If I may, Ma'am?" Terekhov said. Michelle nodded, and Terekhov looked at Oversteegen's chief of staff. "What it comes down to, Marty," he said, "is how much Crandall thinks she can get for nothing. If the Baroness can convince her there's even a possibility she might surrender the system without firing a shot, she's likely to be willing to spend at least a little while talking before she starts shooting. And I'm pretty sure that with a little thought, we ought to be able to. . . irritate her significantly, let's say, while simultaneously reminding her that sooner or later she's going to have to justify her actions to her military and civilian superiors. However belligerent she may be feeling, and however angry she may be, she's got to know it'll look a lot better in the 'faxes if she can report she's 'controlled the situation' without any more fighting."

"And she's more likely t' feel that way if she does decide she's got a crushin' tactical superiority," Oversteegen added. "She's already goin' t' be assumin' exactly that, whatever we do, so there's no point tryin' t' convince her she should just turn around and go home while she's still in one piece. Which suggests th' Admiral here has a point. No matter how pissed off she is, there's probably a damned good chance we can keep her talkin' long enough t' convince her superiors—or th' newsies, at least—that she tried real hard t' talk us into surrenderin' like nice, timid little neobarbs before she had no choice but t' blow us all t' kingdom come."

"That's what I hope, but Marty's got a point that it could also work the other way," Michelle pointed out. "If she feels confident she can punch right through anything in front of her, that may actually make her more impatient. Especially if she was already feeling the need to inflict a little punishment as revenge for what happened to Jean Bart even before we started pushing back at her."

I'm betting on the latter, personally. And not just because Crandall being reasonable would strip this book of all starships going KFB. Crandall is just generally not a terribly rational or easygoing person, in fact she's vicious and high-strung enough to pass for a Masadan, if not for having the wrong reproductive equipment for a Masadan officer.

"And that fourth thing would be what, Milady?" he asked.

"The instant any Solly warship crosses the Spindle hyper limit inbound," Michelle Henke said flatly, "the gloves come off. There won't be any preliminary surrender demands this time, and despite whatever Admiral Crandall may be thinking, we're not going to be thinking in terms of a fighting retreat, either. I think it's about time we find out just how accurate our assumptions about Battle Fleet's combat capability really are."

Oh yes, line in the sand, hurrah for that.

"A lot of things could happen in the galaxy, Sir Barnabas," she told him. "A lot of things I never would have expected. But one thing that isn't going to happen—that couldn't happen—would be for Anton Zilwicki to deliberately nuke a park full of kids in some sort of demented terrorist attack. Trust me. I know the man. Nimitz knows the man." She reached up to caress the treecat's ears gently. "And that man is utterly incapable of doing something like that."

Honor defending Anton, not to Haven but to her own delegation.

"Voitto's right about people like Younger and McGwire. I've been quietly developing some additional information sources since we got here, and the more I find out about Younger, the more revolting he turns out to be. I'm still not sure exactly how the internal dynamics of the New Conservatives lay out, but I'm coming to the conclusion he's a much more important player than we'd assumed before we left Manticore. If there's anyone on Pritchart's side of the table who's likely to try to use something like this, it's Younger."

"But how can he use it, Carissa?" Kew asked. "I realize the media's going to have a field day, whatever we do. And God knows there's enough 'anti-Manty' sentiment here in the Republic already for these allegations to generate even more public unhappiness with the fact that their government's negotiating with us at all. But having said all of that, it's the only game in town. The bottom line is that Pritchart and her people have to be even more determined than we are to keep us from blowing up their capital star system!"

"Really?" Honor turned her head, looking over her shoulder at him. "In that case, why don't we already have an agreement?" she asked reasonably. "Carissa's exactly right about Younger, and I wouldn't be too sure McGwire doesn't fall into the same category. But everything about Younger's mind glow"—she reached up to Nimitz again, suggesting (not entirely accurately) where her certainty about the Havenite's emotions came from—"suggests that he really doesn't care what happens to the rest of the universe, as long as he gets what he wants. Or, to put it another way, he's absolutely convinced he's going to be able to make things come out the way he wants them to, and he's prepared to do whatever it takes to accomplish that." She grimaced. "His and McGwire's obstructionism isn't just about getting the best terms they possibly can for the Republic. They're looking to cut their own domestic deals, improve their own positions here in Nouveau Paris, and Younger would blow up the negotiations in a heartbeat if he believed it would further his own political ambitions."

Younger's a big-wig in the NC party, and surprise, surprise, the two designated bad guys have been dragging their heels, trying to stretch out the negotiations. Has that ever worked out well for anyone in this series?

"In that case, Madam President, I think you should probably sit down with Director Trajan and ask him where Special Officer Cachat is right now."

Despite decades of political and clandestine experience, Pritchart stiffened visibly, and Honor tasted the spike of surprise tinged with apprehension (and what tasted for all the world like a hint of exasperation) which went through the president.

All this distress from his ultimate boss, it's not like Cachat's a lunatic or anything, and his plans have a way of working out most satisfactorily in the end.

"Actually, I was trying to avoid telling him," LePic admitted, and smiled even more sourly. "The truth is that it tracks entirely too well with what Alexander-Harrington's had to say. Our last report from him is over six T-months old."

"What?" Montrose sat abruptly upright. "One of your station chiefs has been missing for six months, and you don't have a clue where he's gone?"

"I know it sounds ridiculous," LePic said more than a little defensively. "In fact, I asked Wilhelm very much that same question this afternoon. He says he hadn't mentioned it to me because he couldn't have told me anything very much, since he didn't know very much. I'm inclined to believe that's the truth, mostly. Actually, though, I think a lot of the reason he kept his mouth shut was that he was hoping Cachat would turn back up again before anyone asked where he was." The attorney general shrugged. "In a lot of ways, I can't fault Wilhelm's thinking. After all, he's the FIS's director. Cachat reports to him, not me, and as a general rule, I don't even try to keep up with Wilhelm's operations unless they develop specific, important intelligence that's brought to my attention. And as Wilhelm pointed out, it's not as if this were the first time Cachat's just dropped off the radar, and he's always produced results when it's happened in the past."

So, were they going to send someone else to Torch to look into Cachat's disappearance eventually? How about Sharon Justice, isn't she his 2IC or whatever the intelligence version of that is?

"Justice. She was one of the StateSec officers involved in that business at La Martine, wasn't she?" Pritchart said thoughtfully.

"She was," LePic agreed.

"Which means she's going to feel a powerful sense of personal loyalty to Cachat," Pritchart pointed out.

"She does." LePic nodded.

I'm.... a little surprised by that, to be honest. I know she never hated Victor the way Yuri did, but neither did I think she was one of his great fans. Honestly, I suspect that a lot of the people involved in La Martine have fond thoughts about Cachat from a safe distance, and would have a heart attack if he turned up on their doorstep.

"You're telling us," Montreau said, speaking with the careful precision of someone determined to make certain they really had heard correctly, "that one of FIS's station chiefs really went, with a known Manticoran intelligence operative, to a star system the Manties have declared a closed military reservation, for a personal conversation with the commanding officer of their Eighth Fleet before the Battle of Lovat? And then went off on a completely unauthorized operation to Mesa? Which apparently ran right into the middle of whatever really happened at Green Pines?"

Well, yes. But it just sounds crazy when you say it like that. Anyways, Honor's bona fides established on this issue, Prichart decides to take her warning seriously that this better not be used to string out talks further, as these events just might accelerate their deadline for producing a workable agreement. And so Prichart unveils her plan to control the more foolish delegates on her side of the table.

"Actually," Pritchart said with a chilling smile, "I don't plan to say a word to them about it."

"No?" There was no disguising the anxiety in Denis LePic's voice . . . nor any indication that the attorney general had tried very hard to disguise it.

"It's called 'plausible deniability,' Denis," she replied with that same shark-like smile. "I'd love to simply march all of them in at pulser point to sign on the dotted line, but I'm afraid if I tried that, Younger, at least, would call my bluff. So I can't just shut him up every time he starts throwing up those roadblocks of his. That's part of the political process, unfortunately, and we don't need to be setting any iron-fist precedents for repressing political opponents. Despite that, however, I think I can bring myself to compromise my sense of political moral responsibility far enough to keep him from using this roadblock, at least."

"How?" This time the question came from Theisman.

"By using our lunatic who hasn't gone missing." Pritchart chuckled coldly. "Everyone knows Kevin Usher is a total loose cannon. I'm pretty sure that if he called Younger and McGwire, let's say, in for confidential in-depth briefings and was very careful to speak to both of them off the record, with no embarrassing recordings, and no inconvenient witnesses to misconstrue anything he might say, he could convince them it would be . . . unwise to use these unfortunate and obviously groundless allegations out of Mesa for partisan political advantage."

"Threaten them with, ah, direct action, you mean?" Unlike LePic, Theisman seemed to have no particular qualms with the notion, and Pritchart's smile turned almost seraphic.

"Oh, no, Tom!" She shook her head and clucked her tongue reprovingly. "Kevin never threatens. He only predicts probable outcomes from time to time." The humor disappeared from her smile as the shark surfaced once more. "He doesn't do it all that often, but when he does," the president of the Republic of Haven finished, "he's never wrong."

Yay Democracy! No, wait. That's the other thing.

[VhenRa]

That would be 6 Invictius. Remember, Manty Battle Squadrons are 6 now.

[Simon_Jester]

What exactly are the conditions at Bolthole? I don't remember reading all that much about how exactly that system is laid out. I'd venture even a worker population measured in millions would put up with it if, say, Bolthole 2B is Risa writ large and they get a salary that dwarfs anything they could make elsewhere (and that compared to the total population and expenditures of something the size of the Republic, that's definitely feasible).

If Bolthole were a paradise world it'd already have been settled prior to the construction of Bolthole. In which case making it 'disappear' off the Manticorans' radar would be exponentially harder.

Aaaaand... oooh, Spindle preparations!

I'm guessing if Manty intelligence has a really good count on Peep ships that fled after the Theisman coup, and they never anticipated anything like the Battle of Torch, the remaining StateSec pirates must be pretty small time and not a major threat.

Well, suppose they know there ARE that many StateSec pirates out there (remember, it's been about seven years since the fall of the Committee of Public Safety). They would still expect most of those pirates to operate as pirates, not to suddenly form up into a full-sized naval flotilla and attack a civilian target which has nothing in particular to attract pirates.

That would have required some paymaster to organize them into a single cohesive whole... which the Alignment took some pains to make sure nobody knew it was doing.

Apparently the Manty intelligence apparatus is well-aware of Victor Cachat, at least after he pretty much threw together Torch out of odds and ends. Even the bloody Queen of Manticore knows who he is.

Especially the Queen. Remember, Ruth Winton is her niece, a very sharp, clever young woman. And Ruth was directly, personally, heavily involved in the operation to retake Torch, including being party to Victor's strategy sessions.

Even if the Manticoran intelligence services knew literally nothing about Cachat's involvement in the whole affair, Elizabeth III could have gotten precise, detailed information by the simple expedient of inviting her niece over for tea.

Just to be sure, Grayson and the Andermani know of Honor's negotiations and if they aren't cheering in the streets, they didn't object. Mind, small as Honor's party is, you'd think there'd be room for each major Alliance partner to send a rep.

Honor IS a representative from the point of view of Grayson; she is higher-ranking and at least as thoroughly tied to the Steadholder as anyone he could reasonably spare to send there.

The Andermani are probably like "You want to stop the war with Haven? Uh... okay. Sure, fine." There's no disadvantage for the Andermani in the war being negotiated to a close from a position of Alliance strength.

Back on Spindle, Oversteegen just got pasted in a sim where the op force had Apollo, but he did manage three SD kills despite it, and got 15% of his forces out of the ambush. He did use Ghost Rider as an improvised missile control platform, even if it only cut the telemetry lag a little bit.

The big advantage of Ghost Rider platforms, as we see in the actions against the Sollies, is that it allows you to get up very close to the enemy and collect detailed information on their deployment, electronic warfare, and so on. This reduces the need for the missiles to downlink telemetry to the launching warships, because they don't need to say "okay, this is what we see, now what do we do, boss?"

Though, thinking of Frontier Fleet containing commerce raiders, I wonder if Manticore might not be forced to those tactics they've always despised in others to survive? The Solly internal trade must be massive, and it'd give something for even those aged light units to do between massive Solly fleets getting massacred.

Well, the main problem is that the older light RMN units can't reliably outfight Solarian warships on the scale that they might encounter in the commerce raiding operations. Frontier Fleet probably has more battlecruisers than the RMN has destroyers. Heck, it probably has more battlecruisers in service right now than the RMN has ever had destroyers, and we know that Manticore had built at least 1000 destroyers during its history even before King Roger's buildup kicked into high gear.

And a pre-MDM, pre-Roland Manticoran destroyer would almost certainly not be able to kill a Solarian battlecruiser, unless it got lucky with a salvo of missile pods. Its tube-launched missiles would be a fairly minimal threat and would enjoy only a little range advantage- no range advantage if Frontier Fleet starts fielding something like the extended range "stage and a half" Cataphract missile the Alignment worked out.

"First, I want her to underestimate our actual combat power as badly as possible. I realize she's almost certainly already doing that, but let's encourage the tendency in every way we can.

That's going to be stupidly easy. Crandall is so armored from reality by her arrogance and contempt, I suspect she could find Eighth Fleet and the Protector's Own in full force defending Spindle, and she'd still sneer at the thought of neobarb 'toy boats' offering any threat to her command.

...Actually, I don't think she's that dumb. If she saw RMN superdreadnoughts she'd at least expect her own command to lose some ships. Her main mistake is that she thinks "Manticore has fourteen two-million-ton 'battlecruisers.'" and weighs that in terms of her own experience.

It'd be no surprise that fourteen light battleships with modern or semimodern weapons could handily defeat Byng's sixteen battlecruisers. Remember how confident Thurston was at Fourth Yeltsin when he thought he faced similar odds in his favor.

But she hears "fourteen light battleships" and expects, say, broadside missile fire to the tune of 20-25 tubes per broadside per ship, which is correct in fact.

She figures that corresponds to a combined throw weight of about 350 missiles per salvo. Which is correct except for Manticoran off-bore and stacked-salvo capability, which are radically new and possibly still classified information within the RMN itself.

She figures those 350 missiles will be equipped with electronics roughly as good as her own, figuring that there is no way that Manticore could have EW systems that are qualitatively superior to what the League can do with an R&D infrastructure that probably outnumbers the Star Kingdom's entire population. This is incorrect but hardly unreasonable; it'd be like a US general assuming in the absence of detailed intel that, say, Russian EW equipment was 'about as good' as his own, or maybe a little worse.

Now, 350 missiles with roughly modern Solarian EW (i.e. something like what Manticore had circa 1900-1905 PD) would not have a chance of penetrating the combined defensive fire of seventy of the wall. That would be five missiles for each of her ships to engage, and each ship has literally dozens of antimissile defense mounts to blaze away at them.

So even if the Manticorans have figured out some way to fire missiles from far beyond her own effective range, she's got seventy ships to engage incoming broadside salvoes of 350 missiles each. And even if that fails, even if somehow the Manticorans pull miracles out of their ass and make their missiles immune to interception... getting hit by five missiles from a battlecruiser or battleship would almost certainly fail to stop a superdreadnought. Even getting hit repeatedly, every 15-30 seconds, by such salvoes over and over for a period of several minutes probably wouldn't stop it.

So you can imagine Crandall making calculations that would be objectively correct if she were fighting, say, a force of light battleships armed with the same equipment as a bunch of 1904 PD-era Manticoran Reliant-class battlecruisers. Just by doing that correctly, Crandall can prepare her forces for a disastrous mauling the likes of which the galaxy hasn't seen since White Haven decided to park Eighth Fleet at Tequila to take a rest break.

Granted, she IS an angry, bitter, obnoxious ass... but she shows no sign of being truly stupid in the flaming-stupidity sense.

Younger's a big-wig in the NC party, and surprise, surprise, the two designated bad guys have been dragging their heels, trying to stretch out the negotiations. Has that ever worked out well for anyone in this series?

Weber basically totally ignores diplomatic negotiations, except at times when the strategic situation of the story mandates that they take place. So no, because whenever negotiations occur in a Weber book at all, they are vitally necessary to the well-being of the state.

All this distress from his ultimate boss, it's not like Cachat's a lunatic or anything, and his plans have a way of working out most satisfactorily in the end.

It's mostly that Cachat does "holy shit you must be kidding" stuff. If you're an experienced operator (like Pritchart is), who's accustomed to working in an environment where one slip could mean death for you and for close friends or loved ones (like Prichart is)...

You're just waiting for the day when Cachat finally gets it wrong and causes a catastrophic explosive mess with epic, untold levels of fallout. The results of which might look a lot like, oh, Green Pines.

I'm.... a little surprised by that, to be honest. I know she never hated Victor the way Yuri did, but neither did I think she was one of his great fans. Honestly, I suspect that a lot of the people involved in La Martine have fond thoughts about Cachat from a safe distance, and would have a heart attack if he turned up on their doorstep.

Justice may have worked with Cachat during the Havenite Civil War and gotten over her fits of nervousness?

Yay Democracy! No, wait. That's the other thing.

Frankly, the guys they're intimidating are the equivalent of the Russian oligarchs. They're not really the product of democracy. They're the product of a rapid transition from state-owned property under an oppressive dictatorship, over to private property with the dictatorship and state oppression apparatus removed.

Moreover, this is a matter of survival for the state.

[SpottedKitty]

This reduces the need for the missiles to downlink telemetry to the launching warships, because they don't need to say "okay, this is what we see, now what do we do, boss?"

For quite a while now, I've had this mental image of the typical AI used in an RMN missile lurching forward en masse muttering "What are we going to do now? What are we going to do now?" when they lose the uplink to their launch platform.

This would make perfect sense if Navy R&D has an AI programmer named Milligan.

(Well, we've had Jordin Kare and Mitch Clapp appear, why not Mike Ford's Plan C.)

[Simon_Jester]

I have literally no idea what this is a referece to...

[SpottedKitty]

I have literally no idea what this is a referece to...

Sorry, it's from Spike Milligan's old, incredibly bizarre "Q" series of comedy sketch shows, which apparently left a pretty deep impression on me since I don't think they were ever repeated since I caught the last couple of series on TV in the early 80s. At the end of each show, all the actors would come on camera and shuffle/lurch aimlessly about, muttering "what are we going to do now?". Sometimes the mental image comes back and whaps me upside the back of the head at the weirdest moments.

Well, I suppose it was funny in context, and besides the idea of Spike Milligan playing a demented AI researcher tickles my funny bone just right.

[Ahriman238]

"Anyone who looks at what Mike did at New Tuscany with an open, unprejudiced mind is going to realize just how outclassed he and his ships were. Unfortunately, if she moved out immedately after Reprise spotted her at in Meyers, she won't have had time to hear anything about Second New Tuscany. And even if she waited long enough to hear from the dispatch boat that got away from Mike, she'd have to be able to make the leap from what happened to a single battlecruiser to what could happen to an entire fleet of superdreadnoughts. As Her Majesty has just pointed out, it's not unlikely anyone Manpower's recruited for this command is going to be all that interested in looking at the data. And even if she is, I suspect she's still too likely to figure her superdreadnoughts are a hell of a lot tougher than any battlecruiser ever built."

Not a ton of open minds in the SLN. Though Crandall didn't leave until she heard about the Second New Tuscany Incident.

"Do you agree with Mike's assessment about their probable targeting priorities, Sir Thomas?" Elizabeth asked, her fingers caressing Ariel's ears.

"Judging from we've seen of their contingency planning from the databases she captured at New Tuscany, I'd say yes, Your Majesty." The first space lord grimaced. "If it weren't for the wormhole, I'd be positive they were going to jump straight at Spindle. Given the importance of the Lynx Terminus, though, it's pretty much a coin toss. I don't see them splitting up and going after individual star systems in the Quadrant until after they've nailed Tenth Fleet. Not assuming Crandall knows what happened at New Tuscany, at any rate. But the idea of seizing the terminus, holding it to keep us from reinforcing while simultaneously forcing Admiral Gold Peak to come to them if she wants to reopen her line of communications, would have to appeal to a Solly strategist."

"I wish it would," White Haven muttered, and Caparelli barked a laugh of harsh agreement.

For Spindle, as it happens. The problem with hitting Lynx is that Manticore's Home Fleet is just a few hours away. Well, that's not the only problem....

"Hamish is right about that, Your Majesty," he said. "We've got all but one of the forts fully online now. And we've got Apollo system-defense birds deployed in depth to cover them. In fact, we were planning on recalling Jessup Blaine from Lynx to refit his pod-layers with Keyhole-Two and Apollo."

"So you and Hamish are both confident the Lynx Terminus could hold off seventy-one superdreadnoughts if it had to?"

"Your Majesty, at the risk of sounding immodest, the only real question would be how long it took us to blow all seventy-one of them out of space. Those forts were designed to hold that terminus without any outside support against the attack of two hundred and fifty of our own pre-Apollo podnoughts. Now that they have Apollo, their defensive capability's been multiplied many times. We still aren't sure by exactly how much, but it's got to be at least a factor of four."

Apparently the new forts, the largely automated ones controlling huge masses of pods, all on the other side of the wormholes than Manticore were supposed to be able to stand off 250 podnoughts without help. Quite a ways from the old forts that were expected to take 2 to 1 casualties in lives and tonnage from a mass-limit battleship transit. And that's before they got fixed up with Apollo pods and Keyhole II.

I think Lynx is pretty safe for the time being. Hey, didn't we have something like two squadrons of wallers sitting on the terminus?

"Then Admiral Blaine could—" Elizabeth began.

"Admiral Blaine already has, Your Majesty," Caparelli interrupted. "I sent his new orders before I started over to the Palace. If he hasn't already departed for Spindle, he'll be underway within the hour. And even though he doesn't have Apollo, his command would still eat those Solly superdreadnoughts for lunch. And there's one other bit of good news to go with that one—Admiral Gold Peak's Apollo ammunition ships are almost forty-eight hours ahead of the last schedule update she's received."

Okay, so Tenth Fleet is well on it's way to being a real fleet, not just few BC squadrons and screen.

"From what I've seen of the tech readouts from their battlecruisers' databases," Caparelli replied for the earl after a moment, "and assuming the count on Crandall's SDs is accurate and Admiral Gold Peak fights as smart as she's always fought before, I'd say her chances range from about even to fairly good. There's no way she could survive in energy range of that many superdreadnoughts—I don't care what class they are—but I very seriously doubt that any Solarian superdreadnought's going to survive to close to energy range. Their missile armaments are light, even by our pre-pod standards, and from our examination of the battlecruisers' counter-missiles and those 'Halo' decoy platforms of theirs, they still don't have a clue what the new missile threat environment really is. For that matter, assuming the stats we've pulled out of the computers are really accurate—which, to be honest, in some instances I find a little difficult to believe—at least two thirds of their reserve fleet's still equipped with autocannon point defense, not lasers."

"You're joking," Langtry said, his expression eloquent of disbelief.

The SLN is just waking, very slowly, to the idea that missiles can hurt. Which leads to odd things like 66% of their mothballed reserve still use rotary slugthrowers for point defense, which is just laughable inadequate against a missile doing a decent chunk of lightspeed, that detonates 12,000 miles away.

Actually the SLN has this thing going on where their very best ships are the newest and the oldest. Because they have a program to refit the mothball reserve ships and keep them current, one that starts from the oldest ships and works it's way up. It seems to roughly keep pace with new construction, though I suspect at some point you're going to run out of space for bells and whistles no one had contemplated 200 years ago. Still, it seems like it's going to take a very long time to get the reserve fleet into action.

"As I say, it's hard to believe, but that's what the data says. In fact, it looks to Pat's analysts as if they've only just recently really started to become aware of the increased missile threat. From the reports we've had from Second Congo, at least someone in the League's been experimenting with extended-range shipkillers, but whatever Mesa may've told Luft and his lunatics, there's no evidence the one doing the experimenting is the SLN. They're upgrading their current-generation anti-ship missiles, but only marginally, and according to our captured data from Byng, the improvements are to seekers and EW capabilities, not range.

"Defensively, there's some information in the data about something called 'Aegis,' which is supposed to be a major advance in missile defense. As nearly as we can tell, though, what it really amounts to is ripping out a couple of broadside energy mounts, replacing them with additional counter missile fire control and telemetry links, and then using main missile tubes to launch additional canisters of counter-missiles. It's going to thicken their counter-missile fire, but only at the expense of taking several shipkiller missiles out of an already light broadside. And to make things worse from their perspective, their counter-missiles themselves aren't as good as ours; the fire control software we've been looking at was several generations out of date, by our standards, at the start of the last war with Haven; and even on the ships where they've converted the autocannon to laser clusters, they don't appear to have increased the number of point defense stations appreciably."

So Manticore knows now about Halo and Aegis and in this, at least, the SLN is still playing catch-up to Manticore and Haven, even circa 1900-1905 PD when the series or the war started. The huge gnashing wheels of bureaucracy and the competing flag officer fiefs are just now adjusting to the idea that missiles might cause significant damage, and it's kind of a big leap from there to "missiles are the primary shipkillers."

It seems they are working on better EW and seekers for their missiles, at least.

You know, eight or nine years ago, Solarian EW, stealth etc. was at least competitive with Haven Quadrant powers, somewhere between Haven and Manticore. In fact, it was largely the injection of Solarian hardware that kept Haven competitive for the few years before Buttercup, not to mention that stealthy slow-missile that almost killed the Queen and Protector. Perhaps the problem is that Manticore is so used to Solarian EW wielded by smart, battle-experienced officers that it's made them jaded about the basic hardware. Or perhaps the problem is that was pre-Ghost Rider, during a time when the RMN had a new generation of electronics every year, sometimes twice a year and eight years is a vary long time on a wartime R&D cycle.

"Well, Pat's own analysts have all confirmed that the data she's using in her reports carries what appear to be genuine New Tuscan Navy security and ID codes," Caparelli said. "It may've been doctored—in fact, we know what parts of it were, and we're trying to figure out how to demonstrate that fact—but it certainly looks like the official record of what happened. And to be fair to O'Hanrahan, she's never claimed that she's been able to confirm the accuracy of the data on the chips—only that all of her 'informed sources' agree it came directly from the New Tuscans and that it's been certified by the New Tuscan Navy . . . unlike the data we've supplied."

"Which only makes it worse, in a lot of ways," Langtry observed. "She's not the one beating the drums, just the one who handed them the drumsticks. In fact, in the last 'faxes I've seen from Old Terra, she's actually protesting—pretty vehemently—that other newsies and talking heads are reading a lot more into her story than she ever meant for them to."

-snip-

"With all due respect, your Majesty," Langtry said, "we have exactly the same kind of evidence and substantiation where our prewar diplomatic correspondence with Haven is concerned. In fact, I have to wonder if our little disagreement with the Peeps isn't what suggested this particular ploy to Manpower. Or to Mesa, for that matter." The foreign secretary grimaced. "It's almost like some kind of 'perfect storm,' isn't it? First Mesa drops Green Pines on us, and then O'Hanrahan, of all people, gives us the follow-up punch with this cock-and-bull story from New Tuscany."

The story with the 'true footage' of the New Tuscany incident. O'Harahan had all sorts of experts look over the data, then said she couldn't prove it's authenticity when she announced it. All in all, Manticore's PR credit on Earth is dropping like a rock.

"And even if the truth is staring them right in the eye, people like Abruzzi and Quartermain and Kolokoltsov are capable of projecting perfect candor while they look the other way," Grantville added. "They'll swear the version that suits their purposes is the truth, despite any evidence to the contrary, and figure that when the smoke clears and it turns out they were wrong, they'll get away with it by saying 'oops'. After all, it was an honest mistake, wasn't it?"

He grinned savagely, and his tone was viciously scarcastic as he went on.

"I can hear them now. 'We're so sorry that our very best efforts to sort out the facts went awry, but in the meantime we just happen to have conquered a small, insignificant star nation called Manticore. It's all very unfortunate, but there it is, and you can't pour the spilled milk back into the glass, you know. So we'll just have to set up an interim government under the auspices of Frontier Security—only until the Manties get back on their feet and can elect a properly democratic government on the best Solarian pattern, so that misunderstandings like this don't arise in the future, of course. We'd never dream of interfering with their right of self-determination beyond that! Cross our hearts!'"

Yeah, that seems pretty much how they operate.

Fleet Admiral Sandra Crandall had never been a good woman to disappoint. She was a big woman, with a hard, determined face and what one thankfully anonymous subordinate had once described as the disposition of a grizzly bear with hemorrhoids trying to pass pinecones. In fact, Commander Hago Shavarshyan thought, that had been a gross libel against grizzly bears.

In case anyone thinks I'm being unfair to Sandra Crandall, this is Weber's description of her, not even accounting for how she was practically foaming at the mouth at Spindle.

Those thoughts floated through the back of Shavarshyan's brain as he stood behind the briefing officer's podium while Crandall and the other members of her staff settled down around the long briefing room table aboard SLNS Joseph Buckley.

Found the Buckley.

What?

It's a Baen thing. I think it started in the Posleen War series with Pvt. "Lefty" Buckley, an ACS trooper who blew his own arm off on his first deployment to Diess. He got better, but that and the whole "buried alive" thing made him swear off power armor until he died in a fairly stupid manner, at the hands of a Posleen normal that blew himself up to kill Buckley through his cover. Because the universe wasn't done kicking him, his brain-scans were used to build an AI that was comically pessimistic about everything. Think Marvin the Paranoid Android. And ever since, Baen authors have been sneaking references to him in as an in-joke. This one even has a whole tragic backstory of a brilliant but eccentric hyper-physicist who got himself spectacularly blown up (on a ship called Dahak ) trying to prove that you can use an impeller wedge in a grav wave. And ever since, there's been a "curse" where only one of the many Solarian warships named for the guy have vanished or been destroyed. Wouldn't be my first choice for a flagship.

"But you stand by this nonsense about the Manties' missile ranges?" Vice Admiral Pépé Bautista, Crandall's chief of staff, asked skeptically. Bautista's manner was more often than not caustic even with his fellow Battle Fleet officers, if they were junior to him. He clearly saw no reason to restrain his natural abrasiveness where a mere Frontier Fleet commander was concerned.

And here's another weird thing about the SLN, it's commented on much later, but there are flag officers everywhere. At one point a Solarian admiral is introducing her staff and it's a constant chain of Admirals ending with something like "and this is my Flag Lieutenant, Commodore _____."

"Yes, it is," Crandall agreed, although she manifestly didn't like doing so. "All the same," she continued, "it really doesn't matter in the long run. Assuming Gruner's observations and Sigbee's report were accurate at all, we already knew we were going to be out-ranged by at least some of these people's missiles. On the other hand, I agree with Sigbee—and with you, Commander—that no missile big enough to do that could be fired from missile tubes the size of the ones we've actually observed aboard even those big-assed Manty battlecruisers. So they had to come from pods."

She shrugged. Like the woman herself, it was a ponderous movement, without grace yet imbued with a self-aware sense of power.

"But whether they came from pods or missile tubes, they can't have the fire control links to coordinate enough of them to swamp the task force's point defense, and their accuracy at such extended ranges—assuming they actually have even more range—has to be poor. I know some of them will get through. We'll take damage—hell, we may even lose a ship or two!—but there's no way they're going to stop a solid wall of battle this size by just chucking missiles at it. And I'm not going to let them bluff me into going easy on them because of some kind of imagined 'super weapon' they've got!"

Fascinating, they've concluded MDMs only come from pods (and they're half right, despite starting from a flawed premise, internal capability for full-up MDMs is still a pretty rare thing. DDMs are a different story.) Acknowledge the range, and that pods will thicken salvos, and remain totally convinced that mere missiles could never threaten them.

And the fact that it took this fat-assed task force a solid week to get underway probably helped, the commander thought sourly from behind his expressionless face. Not even Crandall can argue that we're going to have the advantage of surprise when we arrive!

He'd heard about Crandall's tirade in Verrochio's office, complete with its vow to be underway for Spindle within forty-eight hours. Unfortunately, the real life lethargy of Battle Fleet's stimulus-and-response cycle had gotten in her way.

The SLN doesn't really maintain the kind of readiness that Manticore and Haven habitually do.

Task Force 496, Solarian League Navy, lay just outside the twenty-two light-minute hyper limit of the G0 star known as Spindle. The planet of Flax—the capital of both the star system and the Talbott Quadant itself—lay nine light-minutes inside the limit, well beyond the range of any shipboard weapon. Which didn't change the fact that TF 496 was in flagrant violation of the territorial limit recognized by centuries of interstellar law. No government could have expected to actually police every cubic light-second of a sphere twelve light-hours across, yet warships were still legally required to repond to the challenges and requests for identification of any star nation once they crossed its "twelve-hour" limit. They were also legally required to acknowledge and obey any lawful instructions they received from that star nation, even if the star nation in question were some dinky little single-system neobarb in the back of beyond. They were normally granted at least some leeway in exactly how quickly they responded, but they were still supposed to honor their legal obligations in a reasonably timely fashion.

Interesting. We established much earlier that the inner system automatically belongs to the inhabitants, farther out depends on their ability to enforce their claim. But it seems there's a far wider band in which ships are legally obliged to answer challenges and obey any lawful orders from the locals.

Which was precisely the reason Sandra Crandall had waited a carefully considered three-quarters of an hour before deigning to respond to the Manticorans' challenges, Commander Shavarshyan reflected. Not to mention the reason she'd decided to conduct her first contact with them from such an extended range. She could say all she wanted in her official report about remaining far enough out to respect the Spindle hyper limit in order to preclude any avoidable incidents, but the real reason was to make the Manties sweat during the nine-minute transmission lag each way. Conducting any sort of official conversation with that kind of delay built in between exchanges came under the heading of calculated insult—additional calculated insult, given her refusal even to identify herself as legally required—and she hadn't bothered to hide her enjoyment of the thought, at least in her private meetings with her senior staffers.

After all, he thought, it would never do to have these neobarbs thinking we take them seriously, would it? He shook his head mentally. I think she'll take it as a personal failure if she misses a single opportunity to piss one of them off. And if she finds out she has missed one, I'm sure she'll go back and—

So we're opening with a violation of interstellar law, just to set the tone? Making the Manties wait for almost an hour.

His thoughts broke off rather abruptly, and his lips twitched with a sudden and utterly inappropriate desire to grin as a shortish, slender man with thinning gray hair appeared on the master com display. Instead of the cringing, perspiring poor devil Crandall had expected to discover bending anxiously over his com, imploring her to respond to his terrified communications pleas while he waited for the looming Solarian juggernaut to take note of his wretched existence, the man on the display wasn't even looking into his own pickup. Instead, he was angled two-thirds of the way away from his terminal, tipped back in his chair, heels propped on the seat of another chair which had been turned to face him, while he gazed calmly at the book reader in his lap. A book reader which was aligned—not, Shavarshyan suspected, just coincidentally—so that a sharp eyed observer could look over his shoulder and recognize a novel about the psychically gifted detective Garrett Randall by the highly popular Darcy Lord.

The man on the display went right on looking at his book reader, hit the page advance, then twitched as somebody outside the field of his own pickup hissed something in what had to be a carefully audible stage whisper. He glanced over his shoulder at his own display, then straightened, bookmarked his place, turned to face the com, pressed a button to terminate what had obviously been a purely automated repeating challenge, and smiled brightly.

"Well, there you are!" he said cheerfully.

For a moment, Shavarshyan cherished the hope apoplexy might carry Crandall off. Her demise would have to improve the situation.

Mr O'Shaughnussy, relaxing.

"I am Admiral Sandra Crandall, Solarian League Navy," she grated.

"I see." The man on the display nodded politely, eighteen minutes later. "And I'm Gregor O'Shaughnessy, of Governor Medusa's staff. What can I do for you this afternoon, Admiral?"

He asked the question cheerfully enough, but as soon as he had, he nodded equally cheerfully to the pickup, turned back to the other chair, put his feet back up in it, and switched his book reader back on. Which made a sort of sense, if not exactly polite sense, given the two-way lag. After all, he had to do something while he waited. Unfortunately, Crandall didn't seem to feel that way about it. For just a moment she resembled an Old Earth bulldog who couldn't understand why the house cat draped along the sunny window sill was completely unfazed by her own threatening presence on the other side of the crystoplast, and her blood pressure had to be attaining interesting levels as O'Shaughnessy did to her precisely what she'd intended to do to him. Then she gave herself an almost visible mental shake and leaned closer to her own terminal.

Mr. O'Shaunghnussy, positively oozing class in comparison to Crandall.

"I'm here in response to your Navy's unprovoked aggression against the Solarian League," she told O'Shaughnessy icily.

"There must be some mistake, Admiral," he replied in a calm reasonable tone, looking back up from his novel again after the inevitable delay. Which did not, Shavarshayn thought, add to Admiral Crandall's sunny cheerfulness. "There hasn't been any unprovoked aggression against any Solarian citizens of which I'm aware."

"I'm referring, as you know perfectly well, to the deliberate and unprovoked destruction of the battlecruiser Jean Bart, with all hands, in the New Tuscany System two and a half months ago," she half-snapped, then slashed one finger at Chatfield. The com officer cut the visual from her end, and she turned her chair to face Bautista.

Oh yes, surely her attempt to reason with the neobarbs will look wonderful on the official record. Maybe after extensive editing.

"Unless we want to take the remotes in close enough the Manties may pick them up and nail them, we're not going to get really good resolution," Ou-yang replied. "We are picking up a superdreadnought and a squadron—well eight, anyway—of those big heavy cruisers or small battlecruisers or whatever of theirs, but I'm pretty sure that isn't everything they've got."

"Why?" Crandall sounded at least a bit calmer as she focused on Ou-yang's report.

"We've got some fairly persistent 'sensor ghosts,'" the ops officer told her. "They're just a bit too localized and just a shade too strong for me to believe the platforms are manufacturing them. The Manties' EW capabilities are supposed to be quite good, so I'm willing to bet at least some of those 'sensor ghosts' are actually stealthed units."

"Makes sense, Ma'am," Bautista offered. "They probably want to keep us guessing about their actual strength." He snorted harshly. "Maybe they think they can pull off some sort of 'ambush!'"

So with recon platforms and a couple of hours, they can tell that Manty ships under stealth are there, but can't localize them without bringing the recon platforms close enough to be seen and killed.

"Actually, Pépé," Ou-yang Zhing-wei said, "Commander Shavarshyan may have a point." The chief of staff looked at her incredulously, and she shrugged. "Not in the way you're thinking. As you say, they can't want to fight us, but they may have orders to do just that. And I suggest all of us bear in mind that this particular batch of neobarbs has been fighting a war for the better part of twenty T-years."

"And that experience is somehow supposed to make battlecruisers and heavy cruisers capable of taking on superdreadnoughts?" Bautista demanded.

"I didn't say that," Ou-yang replied coolly. "What I'm suggesting is that whether they want to fight us or not, there probably aren't a whole lot of shy and retiring Manty flag officers these days. Hell, look at what this Gold Peak's already done! So if they've got orders to fight, I expect they'll follow them. And in that case, it's entirely possible they'd want us to underestimate their strength. It might not help them a lot, but when the odds are this bad, I'd play for any edge I could find, if I were in their place."

"I see your point, Zhing-wei," Crandall acknowledged, "but—"

"Excuse me, Ma'am," Captain Chatfield said. "Two minutes to the Manties' response."

"Thank you, Darryl." Crandall nodded to him, then looked back at Bautista and Ou-yang. "There may be something to this, Pépé. At any rate, let's not automatically assume there isn't. I want you and Zhing-wei to give me an analysis based on the possibility that all of her sensor ghosts are those big-assed battlecruisers. And another based on the possibility that all of them are superdreadnoughts that managed to get here from Manticore faster than we got here from Meyers. Understood?"

In fairness to Crandall, this is one occasion where her brain engages. Not long enough for her to see what a terrible idea this whole thing is, but at least she's acting more like a naval officer and less like a rabid dog.

"Oh, I'm perfectly well aware of what happened in New Tuscany, of course, Admiral," O'Shaughnessy said with an affable smile. Then his eyes narrowed, and his voice hardened ever so slightly. "I'm just not aware of any unprovoked aggression on the Star Empire's part."

-snip-

"Unless you wish me to move immediately upon your pathetic little planet, I advise you to stop splitting semantic hairs, Mr. O'Shaughnessy," Crandall said, as if underlining Shavarshyan's last thought, and her expression was as ugly as her tone. "You know damned well why I'm here!"

"I'm afraid that since I'm not a mind reader, and since you haven't bothered to respond to any of our earlier communication attempts, I really don't have a clue as to the reasons for this visit," O'Shaughnessy told her coolly eighteen minutes later, looking up from his reader once more. "Perhaps the Foreign Ministry protocolists back in Old Chicago will be able to figure it out for me when they play back the recording of your edifying conversation which will undoubtedly be attached to Her Majesty's next note to Prime Minister Gyulay."

-snip-

"Very well, Mr. O'Shaughnessy," she said with icy precision three or four fulminating seconds later. "In order to avoid any misunderstandings—any additional misunderstandings, I should say—I would like to speak to . . . 'Governor Medusa' personally."

She slashed her finger at Chatfield again, bringing up Joseph Buckley's wallpaper in place of her own image. Then she went a step further, pressing the stud that cut off the Manticorans' video feed as well, and glared at the blank display.

Alright, so I just like this sequence.

"One minute to the Manties' response, Ma'am," he said in an extraordinarily neutral tone.

"Turn it back on," Crandall growled, and the display came back to life.

O'Shaughnessy had been reading his book again until Crandall's demand to speak to Medusa actually reached him nine minutes earlier. Now he looked up.

"I see." He gazed at her for a moment, then nodded. "I'll see if the Governor's available," he said, and his image was replaced by the Star Empire of Manticore's coat of arms.

The silence on Joseph Buckley's flag bridge was intense as this time the Manties turned on their wallpaper.

Well, what did they expect?

He was just making a mental bet with himself that Bautista would be driven to speak before Ou-yang when the Manticoran wallpaper disappeared and a smallish woman with dark, alert, almond-shaped eyes appeared on the master display in its place. He recognized Dame Estelle Matsuko, Baroness Medusa, from his file imagery, and she looked remarkably composed. But there was something about the glitter in those dark eyes . . . .

Not a woman to take lightly, Shavarshyan decided. Particularly not after the exchanges between O'Shaugnessy and Crandall. In fact, her obvious self-control only made her more dangerous. And if anger sparkled in the depth of those eyes, there was no more sign of fear than there'd been in O'Shaughnessy's, as far as he could see. Indeed, she looked much too much like the matador, advancing into the ring only after her picadores had well and truly galled the bull. Which, given that she was clearly not an idiot and had to be aware of the minor fact that she had nine obviously hostile squadrons of ships-of-the-wall deliberately violating her star system's territoriality, made Hago Shavarshyan extremely nervous.

Dame Matsuko, and at least one member of Crandall's staff (the Frontier Fleet Commander she grabbed as her intel officer, highly reluctantly) has the brains he was born with.

"Good afternoon, Admiral Crandall," she said frostily. "What can I do for the Solarian League Navy?"

"You can begin by surrendering the person of the flag officer who murdered Admiral Josef Byng and three thousand other Solarian military personnel," Crandall said flatly. "After that, we can discuss the surrender of every warship involved in that incident, and the matter of reparations to both the Solarian League and to the survivors of our murdered spacers."

We finally get to terms.

"I see," Medusa said finally. "And you think I'm going to submit to your demands because—?"

She cocked her head slightly and raised polite eyebrows.

"Unless you're considerably more foolish than I believe," Crandall's tone made it obvious no one could be more foolish than she believed Medusa was, "the nine squadrons of ships-of-the-wall just outside your hyper limit should suggest at least one reason."

Yet another endless interval dragged past; then Medusa nodded calmly.

"Which means I should assume this enumeration of warships is intended to communicate the threat that you're prepared to commit yet more acts of deliberate aggression against the Star Empire of Manticore?"

"Which means I am prepared to embrace whatever means are necessary to safeguard the sovereignty of the Solarian League, as every Solarian flag officer's standing orders require," Crandall retorted.

It was remarkable, Shavarshyan thought, still studiously pondering the facts and figures on his own display, how an eighteen-minute wait between exchanges undeniably robbed threats of immediacy and power while simultaneously distilling the pure essence of anger behind them.

Oh yes, this is clearly going to make the SLN appear to be the reasonable party when reviewed later.

"First of all, Admiral Crandall," Medusa said calmly after the inevitable delay, "no one's transgressed against the sovereignty of the Solarian League. We've simply taken exception to the massacre of our ships and our personnel and insisted that the man responsible for that massacre answer to the applicable provisions of interstellar law. Interstellar law, I might add, which has been formally recognized and codified by the Solarian League in several solemn treaties.

"Admiral Gold Peak gave Admiral Byng every opportunity to avoid any additional violence, and when he refused to take any of them, she fired on only one of his ships—the one he happened to be aboard at the moment, to be precise—when she could just as easily have fired on all of them. She also ceased fire and extended yet another opportunity to avoid bloodshed—further bloodshed—after Admiral Byng's . . . demise."

Crandall's expression was livid, but Medusa continued in that same tone of deadly calm.

"Secondly," she said, "we happen to be in possession of the file copies from Admiral Sigbee's flagship of both her own and Admiral Byng's standing orders, which I presume must have been at least generally similar to your own. Oddly enough, there's nothing in them about committing blatant acts of war against sovereign star nations. Aside from little things like 'Case Buccaneer,' that is, but we won't go into that particular 'contingency plan' at this point. Unless you insist on discussing Frontier Fleet, OFS, piracy, and 'disappeared' merchant ships officially and on the record, of course."

Her dark eyes glittered, and Shavarshyan inhaled sharply as the Manticoran's steely smile challenged Crandall to press her on that point in an official exchange both sides knew was being recorded.

Oh yes, a conversation with Sandra Crandall is a duel of wits against an unarmed opponent. Ultimately, of course, she has no legal justification for this punitive expedition, while Henke had every right. Not to mention what a huge escalation this is.

"I make this point only to clarify the fact that we're well aware you're acting at the present moment on your own authority," Medusa continued after a moment."Mind you, I'm equally well aware that one of the functions of a flag officer this far from her star nation's capital is to do precisely that in moments of crisis. However, you would do well to consider that in this instance the Star Empire of Manticore has already communicated formally with the Solarian League on Old Terra about both New Tuscan incidents. I am in receipt of copies of the League's official responses to those communiques, should you care to view them. And if you would care to avail yourself of the Lynx Terminus, we would be quite happy to send your own dispatches directly to Old Chicago, should you wish to seek guidance from your superiors before we have another of those . . . misunderstandings, I believe you called them? I suspect those superiors might not be entirely pleased if some avoidable 'misunderstanding' on your own part leads to a further regrettable escalation of the tensions between the Solarian League and the Star Empire."

Dame Matsuko offers a chance to step back from the brink, take a deep breath and think things over. And even a way to save face in doing it.

"I have no intention of sitting here for a solid T-month while you and your 'Star Empire' redeploy your own warships, Madame Governor," the admiral said coldly. "My standing orders require what I believe my standing orders require, and the terms I've already stated are the minimum I'm prepared to accept."

Rejected, naturally.

"And if I should happen to reject your 'minimum terms'?"

Shavarshyan couldn't decide whether the ever so slight curl of Medusa's lip was deliberate or an involuntary response which had escaped her formidable self-control. In either case, the unstated contempt came through quite nicely.

"In that case, Governor," Crandall responded, "I will advance upon the inhabited planet of your star system. I will engage and destroy every military starship in the system. And after I've done that, I'll land Marines on your planet and secure control of it in the name of the Solarian League until an appropriate civilian administration can be set up by the Office of Frontier Security. And, I feel confident, Frontier Security will continue to administer this world—and every other planet of your so-called Talbott Quadrant—until such time as the Solarian League's just requirements for accountability and redress are fully satisfied."

She paused very briefly, her smile thin and cold, as she deliberately raised the stakes. Then she continued in that same, cold voice.

"I'm prepared to to give you the opportunity to comply with my reasonable demands without further loss of life or destruction, but the Solarian League Navy doesn't intend to permit an act of war against the League to pass unanswered. I have no doubt you have indeed been in communication with the League. I also have no doubt of where my own duty lies, however. Because I have no desire to see additional avoidable bloodshed, I will give you precisely three T-days from the moment my ships made their alpha translations to accept my terms. If you do not do so within that time, I will cross the limit and proceed exactly as I've described, and the consequences of that will rest upon your shoulders. In the meantime, I'm uninterested in any further communication of yours, unless it is for the purpose of accepting my terms. Good day, Governor."

She stabbed a button, and the display went blank.

Very diplomatic. Three days until the Battle of Spindle.

Absolutely nothing changed on the flag bridge itself, yet Østby felt an almost tangible release as the order was finally given. Which was about as irrational as responses came, he supposed. The scout ships themselves were extraordinarily stealthy, and the arrays they were about to emplace were equally so. Which meant they were actually entering the moment of maximum danger as they deployed their work parties with the tools and equipment necessary for their task, since those tools and that equipment, while still very hard to detect, were considerably less stealthy. And still, however unreasonable it might be, there was that sense of relief—not relaxation, only relief—as they actually set about it at last.

The Mesan scout ships at Manticore deploy stealthed platforms to relay targeting information, two weeks to Oyster Bay.

[Simon_Jester]

Apparently the new forts, the largely automated ones controlling huge masses of pods, all on the other side of the wormholes than Manticore were supposed to be able to stand off 250 podnoughts without help. Quite a ways from the old forts that were expected to take 2 to 1 casualties in lives and tonnage from a mass-limit battleship transit. And that's before they got fixed up with Apollo pods and Keyhole II.

I think Lynx is pretty safe for the time being. Hey, didn't we have something like two squadrons of wallers sitting on the terminus?

Which are now freed up.

The main advantage for the new forts is that they don't have to sit within beam range of the terminus. They can remotely launch huge barrages of missiles into the terminus exit zone

"Defensively, there's some information in the data about something called 'Aegis,' which is supposed to be a major advance in missile defense. As nearly as we can tell, though, what it really amounts to is ripping out a couple of broadside energy mounts, replacing them with additional counter missile fire control and telemetry links, and then using main missile tubes to launch additional canisters of counter-missiles. It's going to thicken their counter-missile fire, but only at the expense of taking several shipkiller missiles out of an already light broadside. And to make things worse from their perspective, their counter-missiles themselves aren't as good as ours; the fire control software we've been looking at was several generations out of date, by our standards, at the start of the last war with Haven; and even on the ships where they've converted the autocannon to laser clusters, they don't appear to have increased the number of point defense stations appreciably."

So Manticore knows now about Halo and Aegis and in this, at least, the SLN is still playing catch-up to Manticore and Haven, even circa 1900-1905 PD when the series or the war started. The huge gnashing wheels of bureaucracy and the competing flag officer fiefs are just now adjusting to the idea that missiles might cause significant damage, and it's kind of a big leap from there to "missiles are the primary shipkillers."

True. Honestly, I don't think even the RMN figured this out until 1910 or so, doctrinally; even having launched deadly salvoes of towed pods didn't stop Honor from ruminating during Honor Among Enemies:

Her armament was also arranged differently, the mounts segregated into a single, relatively light graser deck between two very heavy missile decks, and Honor pursed her lips in a silent whistle. Derfflinger was already smaller than an RMN SD, and the magazine capacity for that many tubes had obviously cut deep into mass which might have been used for energy weapons. But while the ship would be far weaker in energy-range combat than one of her Manticoran counterparts, she also carried half again the missile broadside of a Sphinx... She could see several advantages to the armament mix, but Derfflinger would find herself in serious trouble if an enemy managed to close with her.

So even flying a podlayer, albeit a year or two before the MDM became known to the Manticoran military community, Honor's still thinking seriously about the limits of a ship's beam armament as a significant drawback compared to its missile capability.

You know, eight or nine years ago, Solarian EW, stealth etc. was at least competitive with Haven Quadrant powers, somewhere between Haven and Manticore. In fact, it was largely the injection of Solarian hardware that kept Haven competitive for the few years before Buttercup, not to mention that stealthy slow-missile that almost killed the Queen and Protector. Perhaps the problem is that Manticore is so used to Solarian EW wielded by smart, battle-experienced officers that it's made them jaded about the basic hardware. Or perhaps the problem is that was pre-Ghost Rider, during a time when the RMN had a new generation of electronics every year, sometimes twice a year and eight years is a vary long time on a wartime R&D cycle.

Yeah. The Solarian EW systems are marginally inferior to pre-Ghost Rider Manticoran hardware. The problem really comes down to "Sollies don't have Manticore's mini-fusion plants," so they can't build missiles and drones with the powerful EW emitters used by modern Manticoran drones and MDMs.

Nor have they ever designed their own ECCM (counter-countermeasures) to cope with EW capability that powerful. So for example, Havenites using the same basic equipment know about crap like the "Dragon's Teeth" jammer missile and its ability to cunningly impersonate eight totally fictitious missiles. They've programmed the computers to cope with this, to try and spot clusters of missiles that pop out of nowhere with powerful (illusory) impeller signatures, and automatically ignore them. Stuff the Solarians could totally do if only they had a realistic appreciation of the scope of the problem.

The Sollies... haven't. Their EW systems would probably perform rather well against the Manticore of 1905 PD or even 1910 (suffering there from lack of experience)

Found the Buckley.

What?

It's a Baen thing. I think it started in the Posleen War series with Pvt. "Lefty" Buckley, an ACS trooper who blew his own arm off on his first deployment to Diess. He got better, but that and the whole "buried alive" thing made him swear off power armor until he died in a fairly stupid manner, at the hands of a Posleen normal that blew himself up to kill Buckley through his cover. Because the universe wasn't done kicking him, his brain-scans were used to build an AI that was comically pessimistic about everything. Think Marvin the Paranoid Android. And ever since, Baen authors have been sneaking references to him in as an in-joke. This one even has a whole tragic backstory of a brilliant but eccentric hyper-physicist who got himself spectacularly blown up (on a ship called Dahak ) trying to prove that you can use an impeller wedge in a grav wave. And ever since, there's been a "curse" where only one of the many Solarian warships named for the guy have vanished or been destroyed. Wouldn't be my first choice for a flagship.

What was amusing was finding a Baen series that didn't kill Joe Buckley.

Repeatedly.

The authors in fact took phenomenal pains to justify Buckley very narrowly escaping death. Time and again. To where even the in-universe characters noticed what a disaster magnet he was.

And yet he got the girl, survived everything, discovered aliens (or helped to do so), and managed to write the book on how to do acceptable cooking in microgravity.

And here's another weird thing about the SLN, it's commented on much later, but there are flag officers everywhere. At one point a Solarian admiral is introducing her staff and it's a constant chain of Admirals ending with something like "and this is my Flag Lieutenant, Commodore _____."

Well, unlike the RMN they aren't an expanding service, they don't rotate senior officers out of positions or force them to retire, and their basic force structure hasn't changed since before prolong was invented.

If they didn't have this stupid proliferation of flag officers, no one would ever get promoted anymore, because all the positions of any real authority would be filled by prolong-enhanced centenarians who are going to hold those same jobs for the next two hundred years.

Fascinating, they've concluded MDMs only come from pods (and they're half right, despite starting from a flawed premise, internal capability for full-up MDMs is still a pretty rare thing. DDMs are a different story.) Acknowledge the range, and that pods will thicken salvos, and remain totally convinced that mere missiles could never threaten them.

Well, remember, even assuming pod salvoes towed by warships (the prevailing paradigm up to about 1912 PD even in Manticore)...

Each of those RMN 'light battleships' can only tow maybe 10-15 pods or so. Call it 2100 missiles from the pods, plus several hundred more from internal tubes. Three thousand missiles, optimistically, once.

That's still not nearly enough to be a serious threat to the broadside missile defense of seventy of the wall, let alone the armor of seventy of the wall, if you're still thinking in terms of the lethality and defense evasion capability of single drive missiles.

Basically, picture fourteen two million ton capital ships, with DDM-capable pods, in a position similar to what Honor was in during The Short Victorious War. The imbalance of raw tonnage would be about as bad, and one pod-launched salvo from outside the SDs' effective range wouldn't change that.

So the lighter force would get stomped flat, just as Sarnow's command was going to get stomped flat by the Havenite dreadnoughts.

That's the scenario Crandall thinks she's looking at.

Interesting. We established much earlier that the inner system automatically belongs to the inhabitants, farther out depends on their ability to enforce their claim. But it seems there's a far wider band in which ships are legally obliged to answer challenges and obey any lawful orders from the locals.

Probably because ships can easily build up so much speed out there that by the time they get to the inner system, they're travelling too fast to stop and too fast for defenders to react. So if they see someone building up speed to charge their planet, they have a right to challenge them (and position forces to shoot back if it's an enemy).

"I see," Medusa said finally. "And you think I'm going to submit to your demands because—?" She cocked her head slightly and raised polite eyebrows.

"Unless you're considerably more foolish than I believe," Crandall's tone made it obvious no one could be more foolish than she believed Medusa was, "the nine squadrons of ships-of-the-wall just outside your hyper limit should suggest at least one reason."

Yet another endless interval dragged past; then Medusa nodded calmly. "Which means I should assume this enumeration of warships is intended to communicate the threat that you're prepared to commit yet more acts of deliberate aggression against the Star Empire of Manticore?"

"Which means I am prepared to embrace whatever means are necessary to safeguard the sovereignty of the Solarian League, as every Solarian flag officer's standing orders require," Crandall retorted. It was remarkable, Shavarshyan thought, still studiously pondering the facts and figures on his own display, how an eighteen-minute wait between exchanges undeniably robbed threats of immediacy and power while simultaneously distilling the pure essence of anger behind them.

Oh yes, this is clearly going to make the SLN appear to be the reasonable party when reviewed later.

Yeah. Holding your negotiations from out around two or three astronomical units out is just... not a good idea.

[Terralthra]

True. Honestly, I don't think even the RMN figured this out until 1910 or so, doctrinally; even having launched deadly salvoes of towed pods didn't stop Honor from ruminating during Honor Among Enemies:

Her armament was also arranged differently, the mounts segregated into a single, relatively light graser deck between two very heavy missile decks, and Honor pursed her lips in a silent whistle. Derfflinger was already smaller than an RMN SD, and the magazine capacity for that many tubes had obviously cut deep into mass which might have been used for energy weapons. But while the ship would be far weaker in energy-range combat than one of her Manticoran counterparts, she also carried half again the missile broadside of a Sphinx... She could see several advantages to the armament mix, but Derfflinger would find herself in serious trouble if an enemy managed to close with her.

So even flying a podlayer, albeit a year or two before the MDM became known to the Manticoran military community, Honor's still thinking seriously about the limits of a ship's beam armament as a significant drawback compared to its missile capability.

Yeah, but, do also consider the context. She herself was flying a ship which could potentially be hell on wheels from long range with missile salvoes, but in energy range, she'd get eviscerated (and did). Potentially the nature of her own command influenced her thought patterns.

Also, the last major fleet action in which she commanded, 4th Yeltsin, was largely decided by two engagements, both of which were decided by large differences in the relative ability of the forces involved to achieve victory via missiles or beams. Sneaking her SDs into energy range in the first place let her pot two full squadrons of BBs and a squadron of BCs with relatively minor losses, while trying to engage just one squadron of BBs with her wounded half-squadron of SDs would have let her be pounded to death by missiles by a force she could easily have destroyed if she got them into beam range.

[Simon_Jester]

Yeah, but, do also consider the context. She herself was flying a ship which could potentially be hell on wheels from long range with missile salvoes, but in energy range, she'd get eviscerated (and did). Potentially the nature of her own command influenced her thought patterns.

Maaaybe. Then again, her command was also highly vulnerable to missile evisceration; even a few broadsides from the Havenite Sultan were enough to wreck her pod rails.

Also, the last major fleet action in which she commanded, 4th Yeltsin, was largely decided by two engagements, both of which were decided by large differences in the relative ability of the forces involved to achieve victory via missiles or beams. Sneaking her SDs into energy range in the first place let her pot two full squadrons of BBs and a squadron of BCs with relatively minor losses, while trying to engage just one squadron of BBs with her wounded half-squadron of SDs would have let her be pounded to death by missiles by a force she could easily have destroyed if she got them into beam range.

True.

My basic point is that there is considerable evidence to support the theory that "traditional" naval doctrine sees missiles as... call them 'gambling' weapons to be used prior to a decisive beam engagement. Prior to the laser head they have massive destructive force but are highly unlikely to actually hit a target. So you lob them in moderate quantities in hopes of crippling one or two enemy ships with a lucky shot.

Then comes the laser head; doctrinal adaptation to this takes a generation or two. By 1900 PD the consensus among militarily progressive powers is that missiles with laser heads have become co-equal with beams, more or less, except that the reduced penetrating power of a laser head's beam makes it relatively unlikely to just obliterate an enemy starship, the way that either a contact nuclear warhead or a graser salvo could do. So, you get lots and lots of missiles fired, in hopes of inflicting attritional damage on an enemy ship. In theory you can launch so many missiles the enemy ship is totally destroyed, but this hard to do.

So "missiles or beams" becomes a question of two roughly co-equal, but very different, approaches to bringing harm to the enemy. And my basic point is that even in the RMN, the missile school didn't decisively triumph over the beam school until the rise of multiple drive missiles. That was when they made the transition to "missiles are the primary shipkillers" as opposed to "missiles are one of two co-equal kinds of shipkillers."

[VhenRa]

Yeah, in circa 1900 PD fleet doctrine, missiles seemed to be used to soften the enemy up prior to the decisive beam engagement. In the hopes of decreasing the amount of damage you take, because decisive beam engagements from memory seem to be fairly mutually destructive.