Bit of Analysis: Honor Harrington II

[VhenRa]

That wouldn't make them frigate-class cruisers though, they'd just be cruisers named after frigates, with the class name being 'insert frigate name they chose for the class naming ship'. Or, they're doing what Terralthra said, they seriously decided to name the lead ship of the class 'PNS Frigate' and the ships are completely ordinary cruisers with a patently silly class name, or the ships are completely ordinary cruisers but are designated as frigates for some bureaucratic/political reason or other (it's not like this hasn't happened in the real world, see the US Navy's eventual CGNs).

Would work if you used non-US naming conventions. For example. The Weapon-class Destroyers of the Royal Navy. First ship commissioned was HMS Broadsword and then had Battleaxe, Musket, Pike, Sword, Spear, Rifle. To use an example.

Edit: Ninja'ed

Mind you, supplemental materials call the City-class the Bastogne-class. So it could be a case of reporting names.

[Batman]

Wouldn't that make them Warship-class class cruisers rather than Frigate class?

[Simon_Jester]

They aren't exactly frigates, they're "frigate-class light cruisers" - or at least, Bacchante was. Which is odd, considering a frigate is generally smaller than a DD. Maybe they're extra-light cruisers, but not built along a destroyer's design philosophy?

Again, my theory is that the Frigate-class CLs are in fact ships named after former frigates of the People's Navy or the prior Republic of Haven Navy. Since those frigates have all been decommissioned, their names are up for grabs, but may still reflect an honorable service record.

Anyway, both Bacchante and Sabine describe members of ancient groups: Bacchante is a follower of Bacchus, Sabines were a tribe of people who lived in the region of Rome before it was founded. Seahorse doesn't seem to fit in with that, unless it's referencing the mythological seahorses, in which case the theme is "non-God ancient/semi-mythical stuff". Or it's just not in the naming theme. I mean, the Reliant-class BCs are named after characters of myth like the Homers were (Ishtar, Lysander, Amphitrite), attributes of a warrior like the Redoubtables (Dauntless, Indomitable, Truculent), or...random shit (Nike, Victory, Royalist). Not all things have a consistent theme.

The RMN doesn't follow a coherent naming scheme for battlecruisers, we know that- but they do for certain other ship classes. So it's worth at least trying to figure out if such a scheme exists for a given class in the PN, especially since they are so consistent with many other ship classes we know of.

[Crazedwraith]

For the RMN, I have a feeling they do try to go for naming schemes but they're also hampered by customs like the list of honour. If you're naming all your new reliant class battlecruisers after virtues or whatever and then the existing Nike gets blown the hell up. You have to have one in commission so the next reliant you lie down has to be call Nike, whether it fits the pattern or not.

[Ahriman238]

Since taking command of Farnese, Honor had made a point of dining regularly with as many of her officers as possible. It was one of the best ways she knew to become acquainted with them in a short period, and just as she had hoped, they had begun gelling in her memory as individuals. But only ten days had elapsed since Gonsalves' departure with the Longstops. That wasn't a lot of time. In fact, it remained a terrifying distance short of the respite she'd hoped and planned for, and she and her people were still feeling their ways into their working relationships.

Honor still prefers working suppers to form relationships with her junior officers. Timeline note, this is ten days after the troop transports left.

Every InSec and SS ship ever to visit Cerberus had translated into n-space at loci and on headings very close to least-time courses to Hell, allowing for h-space astrogation discrepancies . . . and so had the only two regular Navy units—Count Tilly and Heathrow's courier boat—ever to visit Cerberus. But they'd all done so from above the plane of the ecliptic. That was unusual. Most skippers tried to make transit in or very close to the system ecliptic because the hyper limit tended to be a little "softer" in that plane. It made for a slightly gentler transit, reduced wear on a ship's alpha nodes by a small but measurable degree, and allowed a little more margin for error in the transiting ship's hyper log position. So if every skipper made a high transit approaching Cerberus-B, she'd realized, there must be a specific reason for it.

Hyper-limit is “softer at the system elliptic, making for noticeably smoother transitions, less wear on the drives and just a bit more margin of error in the time you have to come out. Hence why most ships aim for the elliptic unless they have a good operational reason not to.

Honor had always assumed that the Manticoran Navy held the galactic record for the sheer mass of its paperwork, but she'd been wrong, for the Peep arrival patterns went back to a bureaucratic decree that was over seventy T-years old, and as foolish today as it had been when it was originally promulgated.

The very first InSec system CO had taken it upon herself to instigate the procedure as a "security measure," and no one had ever bothered to countermand her orders. As nearly as Honor could figure out, the high transit had been designed as an additional means of identification. Because it represented an atypical approach pattern, Camp Charon's tracking officers would be able to recognize friends even before they transmitted their IDs in-system. Given how much sensor reach and tracking time Charon had, the maneuver was among the more pointless ones Honor had ever come across. The planetary garrison had ample time to identify anything that came calling long before it reached their engagement envelope, and over the years, the high approach had probably cost hundreds of millions of dollars in gradual, unnecessary wear on the alpha nodes of the ships that had executed it.

Nice to know that happens to the enemy too, however many traditions of the decadent Old Order get swept away by the glorious will of the People. On the other hand, I suppose it would start alarm bells ringing that much sooner if a ship actually came out where most ships would. Tresca could be roused from his bed just in time to wait six hours for something to happen.

But it had never even been questioned. Indeed, by now, she suspected, no one had the least idea why the measure had been instituted in the first place. It was simply a tradition, like the equally irrational RMN tradition that light cruisers and destroyers could approach one of the Star Kingdom's orbital shipyards from any bearing, but heavy cruisers and capital ships always approached from behind, overtaking the yard in orbit. No doubt there had once been a reason (of some sort, at least) for that; today, neither Honor nor anyone else in the Navy knew what it had been. It was simply the way things were done.

Docking difficulties with the orbital yards? Sensible precaution with the bigger ships, made redundant now by drive technology?

But if the reason for the SS's traditional approach to Hell really didn't matter at the moment, the fact that it had offered Honor the chance to lay the equivalent of a deep space ambush certainly did, and she'd grabbed it. There was always the chance that someone would break the pattern, but if they followed it, she could make a much more precise prediction than usual of where they would drop into normal-space . . . and of the course they would pursue after they did.

Heh. Security precaution backfire, which I’m sure happens a lot when your security apparatus is seized from the inside.

Manticoran missiles and seekers had improved steadily since the war began, and the Peeps' front-line weapons had followed suit, although their improvements had been less dramatic. But Cerberus was a rear-area system whose primary defense had been that no one had the least idea how to find it. Its missiles were the same ones it had been given before the war began, with standard prewar drive options and a maximum acceleration of eighty-five thousand gravities. But by dialing the birds' acceleration down to half that, endurance could be tripled from sixty seconds to a hundred and eighty . . and range from rest at burnout upped from one million five hundred thousand kilometers to approximately six million seven hundred and fifty thousand. The lower acceleration made them easier to intercept in the early stages of flight, but velocity at burnout was actually fifty percent greater. Just as importantly, it also allowed them to execute terminal attack maneuvers at much greater ranges, and Charon Control had enough launchers to fire salvos sufficiently massive to swamp anyone's point defense.

But ships which stopped outside that range from Charon would be the next best thing to immune to missile attack. Oh, the defenders might get lucky and pop a laser head or two through their defensive fire. But once the missiles' drives went down, they would be dead meat for the attackers' laser clusters, and the orbital launchers, which lacked the powerful grav drivers built into a warship's missile tubes, could impart a maximum final velocity of only a little over seventy-six thousand KPS. That was much too slow to give modern point defense fire control any real problems against a target which would no longer be protected by its own wedge or able to execute evasive maneuvers as it closed. Even worse, the attackers (unlike the orbital launchers) were mobile. They could dodge, roll ship to interpose their wedges, and otherwise make it almost impossible for birds which could no longer maneuver to register on them.

Hey, Hades’ moon-missiles have the same flight characteristics as the old Fearless in OBS. 85,000 Gs for one minute, or half that for three minutes. By this point Manticore has added 7,000 Gs and thirty seconds to the max accel profile, not sure how that translates into shooting for range.

Also, the lack of grav drivers leads to a serious short-changing in final velocity, but no number are provided except for those without the drivers.

"Inform Commander Caslet that the squadron will execute Operation Nelson. He will pass the word to the other ships by whisker, then lay in a course for Point Trafalgar and prepare ship for acceleration. Is that understood?"

Now Honor is just being mean, and perhaps a little pretentious.

"My own guess is that we're looking at an AI," the citizen general went on after a moment. Yearman cocked his head, his expression painfully neutral, and Chernock laughed again, this time almost naturally. "I know it's better than we could probably produce, although some of the work at Public Information's special effects department might surprise you, Citizen Admiral!" Like the imagery of that pain in the ass Harrington's execution, he didn't add. "But there are quite a few recently captured Manty POWs down there, and their cyberneticists have always been better than ours. One of them, or several working together, could have put together something much more sophisticated than we could."

Chernock has figured out Tresca-chatbot’s word choice is a bit off, besides they’ve had Chernock’s chief of staff, who is well-known to the real Tresca, doing the talking and Tresca-chatbot hasn’t once asked to speak to his old friend.

Okay, so it’s not strictly speaking a chatbot. Instead it parrots the replies the operators at Charon Control ad-lib, substituting word-choice from a list assembled from security footage files and adding in his mannerisms. But it’s not perfect and the odd decidedly not-Tresca word leaks through.

Honor Harrington sat in her command chair and listened to the damage and injury reports coming in from all over her ship. She'd known there would be some, no matter how carefully and thoroughly they'd secured for acceleration. Modern warships simply weren't designed for this kind of maneuver. They didn't have proper acceleration couches at every station, and the people who crewed them weren't used to thinking in terms of locking down every piece of gear against a five-gravity acceleration.

Geez, shut down the inertial compensators and suddenly five Gs is such a huge deal. People shouldn't start passing out for another G or so.

Most of her captains had thought she was out of her mind when she first proposed using reaction thrusters to generate an intercept vector. It simply wasn't done. The maximum acceleration a ship like Farnese could attain on her auxiliary thrusters, even if she ran them up to maximum emergency power, was on the order of only about a hundred and fifty gravities, which was less than a third of what her impeller wedge could impart. Worse, those thrusters were fuel hogs, drinking up days' worth of reactor mass in minutes. And to add insult to injury, without a wedge, there was no inertial compensator. Warships had much more powerful internal grav plates than shuttles or other small craft, but without the sump of a grav wave for their compensators to work with, the best they could do was reduce the apparent force of a hundred and fifty gravities by a factor of about thirty.

But Honor had insisted it would work, and her subordinates' skepticism had begun to change as she walked them through the numbers. By her calculations, they could sustain a full-powered burn on their main thrusters for thirty-five minutes and still retain sufficient hydrogen in their bunkers to run the battlecruisers' fusion plants at full power for twelve hours and the heavy cruisers' for almost eight. Those were the minimum reserve levels she was wiling to contemplate, and they represented the strongest argument against Operation Nelson. Thanks to the huge StateSec tank farm orbiting Hell, they would be able to completely refill the bunkers of every ship afterward, and twelve hours would be more than sufficient to decide any engagement they could possibly hope to win, but none of her ships would have the reactor mass to run for it if the battle fell apart on them.

The plan, a stealthy ambush approach sans wedges. On thrusters they can manage 150 Gs of accel, though even 35 minutes drains their reactor mass like nobody’s business reducing ships with months of fuel endurance to just hours in the tanks. Grav plates cut down 150 Gs to just 5 experienced by crews. Oh yes, and that’s still about 50% faster than a ship using a wedge but stealth systems with far less chance of being spotted early.

Oh, and Hades has a vast orbital array of hydrogen tanks for refueling visiting ships.

On the scale to which God built star systems, active sensors had a limited range at the best of times. Officially, most navies normally monitored a million-kilometer bubble with their search radar. In fact, most sensor techs—even in the RMN—didn't bother with active sensors at all at ranges much above a half-million kilometers. There was no real point, since getting a useful return off anything much smaller than a superdreadnought was exceedingly difficult at greater ranges. Worse, virtually all warships incorporated stealth materials into their basic hull matrices. That made them far smaller radar targets than, say, some big, fat merchantman when their drives were down . . . and when their drives were up, there was no reason to look for them on active, anyway, since passive sensors—and especially gravitic sensors—had enormously greater range and resolution. Of course, they couldn't pick up anything that wasn't emitting, but that was seldom a problem. After all, any ship coming in under power would have to have its wedge up, wouldn't it?

Stealth systems could do quite a bit to make an impeller signature harder to spot, but they were even more effective against other sensors, and so, again, gravitics became the most logical first line of defense. They might not be perfect, but they were the best system available, and captains and sensor techs alike had a pronounced tendency to rely solely upon them.

As I said a long, long time ago, Honorverse ships have three main sensor systems, gravitics for range, then radar, then lidar for close-range fire control and point defense. Officially radar has a range of a million klicks, effectively half of that because starship hulls and armor are laced with stealth materials to try and muddy the waters at beam ranges, even if there’s effectively no chance of a ship getting that close to the enemy without being inside a giant see-you-halfway-across-the-system impeller wedge.

Assuming her initial estimate of the Peeps' intentions had been accurate (and their flight profile so far suggested that it had been), she would cut across their base course some three minutes before they slowed to zero relative to Hell. She would be somewhere between six hundred and nine hundred thousand kilometers from them at the moment their courses intersected . . . and their bows would be towards her.

The two transports—and that was the only thing those two big, slow ships could be—had dropped back to ride a million and a half kilometers behind the main task group, ready to hand but safely screened against any unpleasant surprises. A single warship—probably a heavy cruiser, and most likely one of the older Sword-class ships, from her impeller signature—had been detached as a close escort for them, but Honor wasn't worried about that. If her maneuver worked, she should be in a position to send enough firepower after them to swat the escort without much difficulty, and all three of those ships were much too far inside the hyper limit for the transports to possibly escape before her cruisers ran them down.

Flight profiles at intercept, Honor hitting them just before they would have stopped just outside range of the missiles from Hades. And if her attack disrupts and distracts them enough for some ballistic missiles to slip through, well wouldn’t that be a pity?

"I just realized something," he said, "and I certainly hope it's a good omen."

"What?" she asked again, a bit more testily, and he gave her an odd smile.

"It's exactly two years and one day since you were captured, Ma'am," he said quietly, and both of Honor's eyebrows flew up. He couldn't be right! Could he? She gawked at him for a moment, then darted a look at the time/date display. He was right!

Timeline, finally synching us up.

In fact, the intercept she was about to achieve would be a far better one than she'd dared hope for. With only minimal steering burns to adjust her own trajectory, her ships would split the interval between the two Peep forces almost exactly in half: seven hundred and seventy k-klicks from the lead force, and seven hundred and thirty from the trailer. She smiled at the thought, but then her smile faded as she raised her head and looked around her bridge once more.

Honor coming up behind the leading force, before the trailing troop transports. She didn’t really plan it that way, but as long as it’s possible she’d be a fool not to make the most of the opportunity.

The problem was that skinsuits, whether Peep or Allied, were essentially custom built for their intended wearers. They were permanently assigned equipment, and modifying one to fit someone else was a daunting task even for a fully equipped maintenance and service depot. But Hell didn't have an M&S depot for skinsuits, because it had never needed one. Her available techs had done the best they could, but they'd been able to fit no more than thirty-five percent of her crewmen; the remainder wore only their uniforms. If one of the Peep ships took a hit and lost pressure in a compartment, the people in it who survived the initial hit would survive the pressure loss; if one of her ships took a hit and lost pressure, two-thirds of the people in the compartment would die . . . messily.

And frantically though Alistair McKeon, Andrew LaFollet, and Horace Harkness had searched, they had not turned up a single Peep skinsuit designed for a one-armed woman a hundred and eighty-eight centimeters tall.

This is exactly why you need stores to cover every possible contingency, I’m deeply disappointed n the so-called “paranoid” designers of this prison.

Unlike her ships, the Peeps' impeller wedges made them glaring beacons of gravitic energy. Honor's active sensors were off-line—instantly ready, but locked down tight to prevent any betraying emission—but Tactical had run a constantly updated firing plot on passive for over half an hour. The Peeps were dialed in to a fare-thee-well, she thought grimly, and she was about to accomplish something no Manticoran officer had ever managed to pull off. She was about to pass directly between two components of a superior enemy force in a position to rake both of them . . . and do it from within effective energy range.

So proud of your making naval history, Honor. Again we see that passive sensors used over a great deal of time can still generate pretty good firing solutions.

"Bogies, Ma'am!" DesCours' fingers flew across his console as he brought the powerful emitters of his electronically-steered fire control radar to bear on the suspect blips. It had a much narrower field of view than his search radar, but it was also much more powerful, and his face went white as more points of light blinked to life on his display. "Three—no, ten of them! Bearing three-five-niner by oh-oh-five, range . . . seven hundred and thirty thousand klicks!"

Raw disbelief twisted his voice as the range numbers blinked up at him, and for just one instant, Jayne Preston's mind froze. Less than a million kilometers? Preposterous! But then the bearing registered, as well, and panic harsh as poison exploded deep inside her. They were in front of her. Whatever the hell they were, they were directly ahead of her! That meant there was no sidewall, and with no sidewall to interdict them, the effective range of modern, grav-lens energy weapons was—! "Helm! Hard skew turn p—"

Detection. Too late.

Has been mentioned before that the restriction of beams to a few hundred thousand klicks is because they simply can't penetrate sidewalls at higher ranges. Remove the sidewalls from the equation and the range climbs to most of a million klicks. Hey point-seven-five million klicks is less than a mill, right?

The main Peep force lay fifty degrees off the starboard bow for most of her units as they crossed its course, but Farnese was inverted relative to the others. The Peeps lay off her port bow, and all down her left side, heavy graser and laser mounts fired with lethal accuracy. Her impellers and sidewalls came up in the same instant, but Honor hardly noticed. Short as the range was by the normal standards of space combat, it was still over two and a half light-seconds. The massive beams lashed out across the kilometers, and they were light-speed weapons. Despite the range, despite the nerve-racking wait for the people who had fired them, the ships they had been fired at never saw them coming. They were already on the way before Jayne Preston even opened her mouth to order a course change . . . and they arrived before she finished giving it.

The range was long, but it had never as much as crossed Paul Yearman's mind that he might actually face mobile units, as well as the fixed defenses. And even if he had, surely they would have been picked up before they could get into energy range! He'd detached Rapier to watch his back, but the decision had been strictly pro forma, taken out of reflex professionalism rather than any genuine sense of danger. And because he'd seen no sign of hostile mobile units, the ships of his command had held an absolutely unswerving course for over six hours . . . and Honor's fire control teams had plotted their positions with excruciating precision. Ninety-three percent of her energy weapons scored direct hits, and there were no sidewalls to deflect them as they slashed straight down the wide-open throats of the Peeps' wedges.

Ouch. Only 93% accuracy. Honor? Oh well, it will do.

The battlecruisers Ivan IV, Subutai, and Yavuz lurched madly as grasers and lasers crashed into their bows. Ivan IV's entire forward impeller ring went down, all of her forward chase armament was destroyed, and the ship staggered bodily sideways as hull plating shattered and the demonic beams ripped straight down her long axis. They could not possibly have come in from a more deadly bearing, and damage alarms shrieked as compartments blew open to space and electronics spiked madly. Molycircs exploded like prespace firecrackers, massive bus bars and superconductor capacitors blew apart like ball lightning, trapped within the hollow confines of a warship, and almost half her crew was killed or wounded in the space of less than four seconds.

But Ivan IV was the lucky one; her forward fusion plants went into emergency shutdown in time. Subutai's and Yavuz's didn't, and the two of them vanished into blinding balls of plasma with every man and woman of their crews.

Nor did they die alone. Their sisters Boyar and Cassander went with them; the heavy cruisers Morrigan, Yama, and Excalibur blew up almost as spectacularly as Subutai; and every surviving ship was savagely damaged. The battlecruisers Modred, Pappenheim, Tammerlane, Roxana, and Cheetah lived through the initial carnage, but like Ivan IV, they were crippled and lamed, and the cruiser Broadsword was at least as badly hurt. Durandel, the only other heavy cruiser of the main force, reeled out of formation, her forward half smashed like a rotten stick while life pods erupted from her hull, and chaos reigned as the crews of maimed and broken ships fought their damage and rescue parties charged into gutted compartments in frantic search for wounded and trapped survivors. Yet chaotic as the shouts and confusion over the internal com systems were, the intership circuits were even worse, for one of ENS Huan-Ti's grasers had scored a direct hit on Tammerlane's flag bridge.

Citizen Rear Admiral Yearman was dead. Citizen General Chernock had died with him, and neither of them had ever even known their task group was under attack. The grasers' light-speed death had claimed both too quickly, and with their deaths, command devolved upon Citizen Captain Isler, in Modred. But the StateSec officer had no idea at all what to do. In fairness, it was unlikely any officer— even a modern day Edward Saganami—would have been able to react effectively to such a devastating surprise. But Isler was no Saganami, and the sharp, high note of panic in his voice as he gabbled incoherent orders over the command net finished any hint of cohesiveness in his shattered force. It came apart at the seams, each surviving captain realizing that his or her only chance of survival lay in independent action.

A few missiles got off, and Pappenheim actually managed to turn and fire her entire surviving starboard broadside at Wallenstein, but it was a pitifully inadequate response to what Honor's ships had done to them. Wallenstein's sidewall shrugged Pappenheim's energy fire aside with contemptuous ease, and despite the short range, point defense crews picked off the handful of Peep missiles which actually launched.

And then Honor's entire squadron fired a second time, and there was no more incoming fire. Five of the enemy hulks remained sufficiently intact that someone might technically describe them as ships; all the rest were spreading patterns of wreckage, dotted here and there with the transponder signals of life pods or a handful of people in skinsuits.

So ends the Battle of Cerberus. Bit of an anticlimax, but if anyone had actually effectively returned fire, Honor’s people would be dead and they all knew that going in.

"Well done, people—all of you. Thank you. You did us proud. Now do us even prouder by rescuing every survivor out there, People's Navy or State Security. I—"

She looked up without closing the circuit as Warner Caslet unlocked his shock frame and climbed out of his own chair. He turned to face her and came to attention, and her eyebrows rose as his hand snapped up in a parade ground salute. She started to say something, but then she saw other people standing, turning away from their consoles, looking at her. The storm of their exultation raged at her as, for the first time, they fully realized what their victory—and the capture of the transports—might mean, and she felt the entire universe hold its breath for just an instant.

Rescuing the survivors, it finally sinks in that every single person is getting out of this prison.

[Ahriman238]

And time for the epilogue.

There had been no more runaway Peep triumphs like the series of attacks with which Esther McQueen had announced the change in the military management of the PRH, for the Allies had not allowed themselves to become that overconfident a second time. But the momentum which had been with the Alliance for so long had disappeared. It hadn't gone entirely to the Peep side of the board, but it was clearly McQueen and Bukato who were pushing the operational pace now. And unlike Citizen Secretary Kline, McQueen understood she had the ships to lose if spending them bought her victories.

It took six years, but McQueen finally broke the RMN's forward momentum and made them worry about security throughout the Alliance.

The Barnett System still burned the spiteful red of the PRH, and Thomas Theisman had not sat still. When no attack had come from Eighth Fleet—which had been busy protecting what was left of Basilisk Station until a proper replacement could be scraped up from somewhere—Theisman had nipped out from Barnett to retake Seabring in an audacious raid. He'd hit that system and the Barnes System both, and then gotten his striking force back to Barnett before Theodosia Kuzak learned of its activities and reacted to its absence. It was unlikely she could have gotten permission to uncover Trevor's Star to move on Barnett anyway, given the shock which had temporarily paralyzed the Alliance's command structure and political leadership, but Theisman had been so quick that she couldn't have hit him even if she'd had permission.

Theisman took back two systems while the Alliance was occupied with politicians playing Chicken Little.

He suspected that Queen Elizabeth and Protector Benjamin were as determined as he himself was that the initiative had to be regained, and he had complete faith in Sir Thomas Caparelli's fighting spirit. Lack of courage had never been one of the things he'd held against the burly First Space Lord. But even though Elizabeth and Benjamin were, by any measure, the two most important heads of state in the Alliance, they weren't the only ones, and their smaller allies saw what had happened to Zanzibar and Alizon—and Basilisk—and were terrified that the same would happen to them. Nor had the Star Kingdom or the Protectorate of Grayson maintained as unified a front as their rulers must have desired.

The Manticoran Opposition had been as stunned as anyone else for the first few weeks. But then, as the true scope of the disaster became clear, that had changed. Their leaders had stormed into the public eye, plastering the 'faxes and domestic news services with condemnations of the Cromarty Government's "lax and inefficient," "inexcusably overconfident," and "culpably negligent" conduct of the war. Never mind that the Opposition had done its level best in the decades leading up to that self-same war to ensure that the Star Kingdom would never have had the Navy to survive its opening weeks. Or that it had paralyzed the Star Kingdom's government and delayed military operations for months following the Harris Assassination, and so allowed the Committee of Public Safety to get its feet under it. Nothing in the universe had a shorter half-life than a politician's memory for inconvenient facts, and people like Countess New Kiev, Baron High Ridge, Lady Descroix, and their tame military analysts like Reginald Houseman and Jeremiah Crichton had even shorter memories than most. They sensed an opening, an opportunity to blacken Cromarty and his advisers in the eyes of the electorate, and they'd seized it with both hands.

The political fire on Grayson had come from another source . . . and been leveled upon a different target. A group of dissident stead-holders had coalesced under the leadership of Steadholder Meuller, denouncing not the war as such, but rather the fashion in which Grayson's "so-called allies unfairly—and unwisely—dominate the decision-making process." They knew better than to expect the Grayson people to shrink from the dangers of war, but they had hit a responsive nerve in at least some of their people. Centuries of isolation could not be totally forgotten in a few years, and there were those on Grayson who believed Meuller was right when he implied that their world would be better off if it were to go its own way rather than marrying its military power and policy to someone—like the Star Kingdom—who had obviously miscalculated so hideously.

Political situation with Grayson, Manticore and throughout the Alliance. Every two-bit system screaming for protection, and the political vultures making hay out of the "ineptitude" of the establishment in not being constantly prepared for surprise attacks with overwhelming force.

And listening to all that drivel were the voters of the Star Kingdom and the steaders of Grayson. Men and women who had steeled themselves for the perils of war before the shooting began, but who had become increasingly confident as the actual fighting went on. Few of them had been happy about the war's cost, or about the lives which were being lost, or about rising taxes, reduced civilian services, or any of the hundreds of other petty and not so petty inconveniences they'd been forced to endure. But they had been confident in their navies, sure the ultimate victory would be theirs.

Now they were confident no longer. Esther McQueen had accomplished that much, at least, and the repercussions had been severe. Now all too many voters demanded that the Navy hold all it had taken, as a glacis against additional Peep attacks. They had gotten out of the habit of thinking in the stark terms of victory or slavery, and with the loss of that habit, they had also lost the one of accepting that risks had to be run. That an outnumbered Navy had to take chances to seize and control the initiative. Indeed, they no longer even thought of themselves as outnumbered, for how could an overmatched fleet have accomplished all theirs had? That was why the shock of McQueen's offensives had cut so deep . . . and why the critics vociferously demanded that "the incumbent incompetents be replaced by new, better informed leaders who will let our incomparable Navy safeguard our star systems and our worlds!"

Which came down in the end to calling the Navy home to "stand shoulder to shoulder" in defense of the inner perimeter . . . which was the worst possible thing they could do.

Some of the hardships, pretty minor really, the war has inflicted on the civilian sector. The polticial will is more and more to turtle up, as opposed to attacking and regaining the initiative.

Nor was the military front hopeless. Despite heavy losses, Alice Truman, Minotaur, and the carrier's LAC wing had proved the new LAC concept brilliantly at Hancock, and ONI's best estimate was that the Peeps still hadn't figured out exactly what had hit them, though they must obviously have some suspicions. In the meantime, the new construction programs were going full blast. Within another few months, the first of an entire wave of LAC-carriers would be joining the Fleet, and the new Medusa-class—

No, he corrected himself. Not the Medusa-class. For the first time in its history, the Royal Manticoran Navy had followed the lead of a foreign fleet, and the Medusa-class missile pod superdreadnoughts—the wisdom of whose construction no one doubted any longer—had been redesignated as the Harrington-class.

Carriers and podnoughts are in the pipeline, when they finally reach the front things will change, drastically.

"Admiral, System Surveillance picked up a cluster of unidentified hyper footprints about twelve minutes ago," the Grayson lieutenant said.

"And?" White Haven prompted when he paused once more.

"Sir, they made transit quite close to one of the FTL platforms and were identified almost immediately as Peeps."

"Peeps?" White Haven sat suddenly straighter in his chair, and Robards nodded.

"Yes, Sir." He glanced down at something White Haven presumed was a memo pad display, cleared his throat once more, and read aloud. "Tracking made it five battlecruisers, four heavy cruisers, a light cruiser, and two of their Roughneck-class assault transports."

"What?" White Haven blinked. He couldn't possibly have heard right. That was a decent enough squadron for something like a commerce raid, or possibly even a strike at some lightly picketed rear system, but twelve ships, without even one of the wall among them, wouldn't stand a snowflake's chance in hell against the firepower stationed here at Trevor's Star. And what in the name of sanity would a pair of transports be doing here? They'd be dead meat for any decent warship—even one of the old-fashioned, pre-Shrike LACs—if they moved inside the hyper limit.

Radamacher's Roughnecks!

Nah, though the thought of Yuri Radamacher leading a gung-ho commando team is pretty funny. Yes, Trevor's Star has spotted the Elysians.

"Trevor System Command, this is Admiral Honor Harrington." Her voice sounded calm and absolutely professional—or would have, to someone who didn't know her. But White Haven saw the emotion burning in her good eye, heard it hovering in the slurred soprano. "I'm sure no one in the Alliance expected to see me again, but I assure you that the rumors of my recent death have been exaggerated. I am accompanied by approximately one hundred and six thousand liberated inmates of the prison planet Hades, and I expect the arrival of another quarter million or so within the next eleven days—our transports have military hyper generators and we made a faster passage than they will. I regret any confusion or alarm we may have caused by turning up in Peep ships, but they were the only ones we could . . . appropriate for the voyage."

The right side of her mouth smiled from the display, but her voice went husky and wavered for a moment, and she stopped to clear her throat. White Haven reached out, his fingers trembling, and touched her face on the com as gently as he might have touched a terrified bird, yet the terror was his, and he knew it.

"We will remain where we are, with our drives, sidewall, weapons, and active sensors down until you've had time to check us out and establish our bona fides," she went on after a moment, struggling to maintain her professional tone, "but I'd appreciate it if you could expedite. We were forced to pack these ships to the deckheads to get all our people aboard, and our life support could be in better shape. We—"

She broke off, blinking hard, and Hamish Alexander's heart was an impossible weight in his chest—heavy as a neutron star and yet soaring and thundering with emotions so powerful they terrified him—as he stared at her face. He was afraid to so much as breathe lest the oxygen wake him and destroy this impossible dream, and he realized he was weeping only when his display shimmered. And then she spoke again, and this time everyone heard the catch in her breath, the proud tears she refused to shed hanging in her soft voice.

"We're home, System Command," she said. "It took us a while, but we're home."

And that should put a nice capstone on Honor's legend. Two years after her capture and broadcasted execution she reappears, having lead the single largest jailbreak in human history, almost half a million prisoners, from the most secret and secure prison ever conceived, while missing an eye and an arm. In the process she carried out a daring ambush that by conventional wisdom should not have been possible. Oh, and she returned Parnell and hard evidence of some of the Committee for Public Safety's dirtier laundry.

End book Eight.

[VhenRa]

Now comes book 9... after that... aren't we looking at the big splitting of events. With the Spook Duo, Lynx Terminus Action and main war books?

[Ahriman238]

Now comes book 9... after that... aren't we looking at the big splitting of events. With the Spook Duo, Lynx Terminus Action and main war books?

Yep.

Yet what bothered her most was that she could never return what they had given her. They thought she was the one who'd achieved so much, but they were wrong. They were the ones who'd done it by doing all and more than all she'd asked of them. They'd come from the military forces of dozens of star nations, emerging from what the Peeps had contemptuously believed was the dustbin of history to hand their tormentors what might well prove the worst defeat in the history of the People's Republic. Not in tonnage destroyed, or star systems conquered, but in something far more precious because it was intangible, for they had delivered a potential deathblow to the terror of omnipotence which was so much a part of State Security's repressive arsenal.

Also, proof positive that everything said by PubIn for years has been a lie, that the Committee ascended to power by assassinating the old government and blaming the military...

The personnel shuttles outside the boat bay were but the first wave of craft which would transport her people from the packed-sardine environment of their battlecruiser to the mountainous surface of San Martin. The planet's heavy gravity scarcely qualified it as a vacation resort, but at least it had plenty of room. And after twenty-four T-days crammed into Farnese's overcrowded berthing spaces, a little thing like weighing twice one's proper weight would be a minor price for the glorious luxury of room in which to stretch without putting a thumb into someone else's eye.

24 days flight for the ENS, so the transports they sent off first should be six days behind.

Why in Christ's name can the woman never bring a ship back intact? What the hell is it that makes her—

Hamish (Earl White Haven) has sort of a point there.

A billion questions teemed in his brain, put there by the raw impossibility of Honor Harrington's survival, and he knew he was not alone in that. When word of this broke, every newsie in Alliance space—and half of those in Solly space, no doubt, he thought—would descend upon whatever hiding places Honor or any of the people with her might have found. They would ask, plead, bully, bribe, probably even threaten in their efforts to winnow out every detail of their quarry's incredible story. But even though those same questions burned in his own mind, they were secondary, almost immaterial, compared to the simple fact of her survival.

I'm really not sure how closely the Solly press is following the war, their reporters are mentioned numerous times but later on you'd think the Sollies would understand more of what was going on with even the smallest coverage.

"Honor guard, attennnnnn-hut!" he barked, and hands slapped the butts of ex-Peep pulse rifles as the ex-prisoners snapped to parade-ground attention. Honor watched them with a proprietary air and wasn't even tempted to smile. No doubt some people would have found it absurd for men and women packed into their ship like emergency rations in a tin to waste time polishing and perfecting their ceremonial drill, especially when they all knew they would be broken up again once they reached their destination. But it hadn't been absurd to Farnese's ship's company . . . or to Honor Harrington.

Also gave them something to do on a trip longer than three weeks. Good thing we know ships include video games for entertainment.

"He was the senior officer in Camp Inferno—we never would have been able to pull it off without his support—and he thought that given the fact that we were escaping from a planet officially called Hades, we ought to call ourselves the Elysian Space Navy. So we did."

"I see." White Haven rubbed his chin, then grinned at her. "You do realize you've managed to open yet another can of legal worms, don't you?"

"I beg your pardon?" Honor repeated in a rather different tone, and he laughed at her obvious puzzlement.

"Well, you were acting as a Grayson, My Lady . . . and you're a steadholder. If I remember correctly, the Grayson Constitution has a very interesting provision about armed forces commanded by its steadholders."

Somehow, I think Protector Benjamin will forgive her this once. In fact, I already know how. As his champion, Honor is permitted to recruit for the Protector's Own household troops, which will provide a nice home to all the Elysians with no where better to go.

"There've been a few problems back home in the Star Kingdom that I do know about, however," he went on after a moment. "For one thing, your title was passed on to your cousin Devon when you were officially declared dead."

"Devon?" Honor rubbed the tip of her nose, then shrugged. "I never really wanted to be a countess anyway," she said. "Her Majesty insisted on it—I certainly didn't!—so I really can't complain if someone else has the title now. And I suppose Devon is my legal heir, though I hadn't thought much about it." She grinned crookedly. "I suppose I should have considered it long ago, but I'm still not really used to thinking in dynastic terms. Of course," she chuckled wickedly, "neither was Devon! Do you happen to know how he took his sudden elevation?"

"Grumpily, I understand." White Haven shook his head. "Said it was all a bunch of tomfoolery that would only get in the way of his research on his current monograph."

"That's Devon," Honor agreed with something very like a giggle. "He's probably the best historian I know, but getting his nose out of the past has always been all but impossible!"

Honor's comte has passed to her historian cousin, Devon.

The term "lands" was used in the Star Kingdom as a generic label for any income-producing holding associated with a patent of nobility. It was a sloppy term, but, then, both the original colonial charter and the Constitution tended to be a bit sloppy in places, as well. The same term had been used from the very earliest days of the Manticore colony to refer to any income source, whether it was actual lands, mineral or development rights, fishery rights, a chunk of the broadcast spectrum for HD, or any other of a whole host of grants, which had been shared out among the original colonists in proportion to their financial contributions to the colonizing expedition. Probably as much as a third of the Star Kingdom's current hereditary peerage held no actual land on any planetary surface as a direct consequence of its ennoblement. Well, no, that wasn't quite true. Virtually all the hereditary members of the Lords had at least acquired properly titled seats somewhere to support their aristocratic dignity, but the real income which had permitted them to do so often came from very different sources.

Still, it was highly unusual these days for the Crown to dip into the Crown Reserve to create those income sources, if for no other reason than that the Reserve had dwindled over the years since the Star Kingdom's founding. The usual procedure was for the Crown to request the Commons to approve the creation of the required "lands" as a charge on the public purse, not to split them off from the bundle of lands which still belonged personally to Elizabeth III, which was what the Crown Reserve really was. And that was especially true for a hereditary title like her own, since unlike the grants for life titles, its holdings would remain permanently associated with it. So if the Queen had irrevocably alienated part of the fabulously wealthy Unicorn asteroid belt from the Crown in Devon's favor, she'd clearly been serious about her desire for the Harrington title to be properly maintained.

New lands have to be provided to nobility, either from the Crownlands or at public expense. Also, Honor did not previously have land to go with her title, but the Queen attached them before passing the title to Devon, who at least was never barred from Parliament.

"In all honesty, Milady, and all jesting aside, Grayson was thrown into far more disorder by the report of your death than the Star Kingdom was. We have scores of earls and countesses in the Star Kingdom; there are less than ninety steadholders on Grayson. There were all sorts of repercussions there, and that's why I agreed with Admiral Kuzak and Governor Kershaw that you ought to return to Grayson first."

Number of Steadholders < 90.

"The political and diplomatic consequences of your escape are going to be enormous, and Grayson deserves to know the full details first. We'll send a courier boat ahead to both Yeltsin and Manticore, but the dispatches will be classified at the highest level available to us. Not even the courier boats' crews will know what they say, and we're clamping a security blackout on the story here. I can't guarantee it, but I doubt very much that Her Majesty will allow a hint of the information to leak into the system data nets until the Protector's government has had an opportunity to debrief you in person and decide how to deal with it."

For now things are being kept hush-hush while the Manticoran and Grayson governments can digest the news and respond properly. Honor is going on the first ship to Grayson so they begin untangling the mess there, what with a Steadholder and their Number Two Admiral returning from the dead.

The superdreadnought was one of the largest ships Honor had ever seen. Possibly the largest warship, she reflected, her experienced eye estimating its tonnage from the relative size of the huge ship's weapons hatches and impeller nodes, although she supposed she might have seen larger merchant vessels. That was her first thought, but then she noted the odd, distinctive profile of the after hammerhead, and her eye narrowed in sudden recognition.

"That's a Medusa!" she said sharply.

No Honor, no it is not. But it is the lead ship of the class of podnoughts you knew as the Medusa-class.

"Indeed. We haven't used any of them, including the new SDs, en masse yet. We're still ramping up our numbers in the new classes and weapons, because we'd like to commit them in really useful numbers rather than penny-packets that will give the enemy time to adjust and work out countermeasures. At the moment, we hope and believe that the Peep analysts haven't been able to put together a clear picture of their capabilities from the limited use we've been forced to make of them so far. That's one reason we're not sending any of the new types through the Junction except in emergencies; we don't want anyone who might whisper in StateSec's ear getting a good look at them. But within a few more months, Citizen Secretary McQueen and the Committee of Public Safety ought to be getting a very unpleasant surprise."

The plan is to keep the podnoughts and CLACs and MDMs under wraps until they have enough of them to form a fleet and drive hard and fast into the heart of Haven.

"Just one more thing," White Haven said very quietly, pitching his voice too low even for Robards and LaFollet to have heard, and she glanced at him. "This ship, and the others like her in Grayson service, were all built in the Blackbird Yard you arranged the basic funding for, Milady. So, in a very real sense, you're a keel plate owner of all of them. That's one reason we felt she'd be the perfect ship to take you home again."

Honor's funds married to Glorious Kerbal Graysons can do amazing things.

She'd braced herself as best she could, but nothing could really have prepared her. The music, the storm of uniforms, lit by the lightning flashes of gold braid and rank insignia, the presented arms of the Marine honor guard, the whirlwind of emotion and welcome—and, yes, vengefulness as they saw her missing arm and paralyzed face—all of it crashed over her. And with it came something else: a roar of cheering not even Grayson naval discipline could have hoped to stifle. She felt Nimitz quivering in his carrier, shared his almost dazed response to the sensations flooding through him like some polychromatic roll of thunder that went on and on and on, and it was all she could do to carry through the instinct-level protocol for boarding a ship.

Mind the secret empathy guys! Sheesh.

Her thoughts chopped off as she saw the ship's crest on the bulkhead behind the honor guard. The basis of the crest was glaringly obvious. She'd seen the same set of arms every time she looked at her own steadholder's key . . . and if there'd been any question at all of where it had come from, the ship's name blazoned above it would have dispelled it immediately.

She stared at the crest, unable to look away even though she knew her reaction was fully validating the torrent of amusement she felt flooding from the Earl of White Haven. And it was probably as well for the earl's continued existence that she couldn't turn away, she realized later, for if she'd been able to, and if he'd been smirking even a tenth as broadly as she suspected he had, and if he'd been in arm's reach . . .

But she had no time to think about such things just then, for the tumult about her was dying, and Thomas Greentree decided to ignore the strict demands of naval protocol just this once. His hand came down from its salute even before hers did, and it reached out, catching hers in a crushing clasp of welcome before she could say a word.

"Welcome home, My Lady!" he said, and if his voice was husky with emotion, it also echoed in the sudden quiet. "Welcome home. And welcome aboard the Honor Harrington!"

Well, that's a trifle awkward, but at least she's riding home in style.

Austin City was the oldest city on Grayson. While many of its public buildings had been placed under protective domes, the city as a whole had not, and it was winter in Grayson's northern hemisphere. Fresh, heavy snow had fallen overnight, and banks of it lay more than man-high where the landing field's plows had deposited it. Matthews had never been particularly fond of snow, but he was prepared to make exceptions at times. Like this year. The four-thousand-year-old Christian calendar which Grayson stubbornly clung to for official dating was in unusual agreement with the actual planetary seasons, and that had given him extra enjoyment as he listened to his favorite carols. It wasn't often that a Grayson had a chance to see for himself what the ancient songs' enthusiasm for "white Christmases" was all about.

Austin City, and those wonderful rare occasions when the seasons on Grayson more-or-less match those of Earth and the calendar they still use.

Officially known as the 5019th Special Battalion, the Orbit Dogs were the elite battalion (except that the outsized "special" battalion was bigger than a normal regiment) of the Grayson Space Marines. After the Protector's hairbreadth escape from assassination, Palace Security had decided he needed an especially nasty guard dog, and "Sparky" Rice had been their choice.

Technically they're all Army, but whose prepared to argue the point with them?

Honor Harrington stepped out of the lift and started to come to attention, but Benjamin Mayhew reached her in a single stride. His arms went about her in a bear-hug embrace far too powerful for his wiry frame to have produced, and her working eye went wide. It was unheard of for a Grayson man to so much as touch an unmarried Grayson woman, far less to throw his arms around her and try to crush her rib cage! For that matter, no properly reared Grayson male would embrace even one of his own wives so fiercely in public. But then the surprise flowed out of her eye, and her remaining arm went around the Protector, returning his hug, as his emotions swept through her.

Most unorthodox! Harumph!

Grayson social mores.

"The eye's gone again, too, isn't it?" he said after a moment, and she nodded, the live side of her mouth twisting in a wry smile. "That, and the nerve repairs've been shot to hell again . . . And the arm," he said flatly. "Anything else?"

She gazed back at him, all too well aware of just how much a lie his apparent calm was. She'd been afraid of how he might react to her injuries, and especially to how she'd received them. She'd had a sufficient foretaste from Judah Yanakov and Thomas Greentree . . . not to mention every other Grayson officer who'd heard the story.

She'd always known she enjoyed a unique status in her adopted Navy's eyes. That probably would have been enough to wake the bleak, harsh hatred she'd tasted in them as she tried to brush over her imprisonment and starvation and StateSec's degrading efforts to break her. But they were also Grayson men, and despite any changes Benjamin Mayhew might have wrought, Grayson men were programmed on a genetic level to protect women. She suspected that the reports of her death had been enough to push quite a few of them to a point only a step short of berserk rage. Indeed, she knew it had, for she'd felt the echoes of fury still reverberating within Judah Yanakov . . . and Greentree had told her about his order to the Grayson forces at the Battle of the Basilisk Terminus. Yet in some illogical way, the discovery of how she'd actually been treated was even more infuriating to them, now that they knew she was alive, than even the HD imagery of her supposed death had been when they'd believed she was dead.

Capital F Family Men, as Simon said, that and Honor has been the GN's good-luck charm for a long time.

Just wait until she sees the statue.

He glared at her, almost angry at her for trying to brush her mutilation aside. Both of them were perfectly well aware that not even Manticoran medicine could provide true replacements. Oh, modern prostheses could fool other people into never realizing they were artificial, and many of them, like the cybernetic eye the Peeps had burned out aboard Tepes, offered some advantages over the natural parts for which they substituted. But the interface between nerve and machine remained. There was always some loss of function, however good the replacement, and whatever enhancements a replacement might add in partial compensation, it never duplicated the feel, the sensitivity—the aliveness—of the original.

So there's less in the way of cyborg super-soldiers. You could do it, but there are countervailing disadvantages and major sacrifice on the part of the recipients.

"He arranged for a pinnace to bring up its impeller wedge inside a battlecruiser's boat bay," she told him much more soberly.

"Sweet Tester!" Matthews murmured, and her smile went crooked and cold.

"If there were any pieces left at all, they were very, very small ones, Benjamin," she said softly, and his nostrils flared as he inhaled in intense satisfaction.

"Good for you, Senior Chief," he repeated, and Honor felt a tingle of relief as he stepped back from the precipice of his rage. He could do that, now that he knew those actually responsible for what had happened to her were safely dead. It wouldn't make him one bit less implacable where those people's superiors were concerned, but his need to strike out at someone—anyone—had been muted into something he could control.

Again, everyone has a very strong reaction to hearing that one.

"This is Faith Katherine Honor Stephanie Miranda Harrington," she said gently, and giggled at Honor's expression. "I know the name is longer than she is just now, poor darling, but that's your fault, too, you know. At the moment—which is to say until you get busy in the grandchild department—this long-named little bundle is your heir, Lady Harrington. As a matter of fact, right this second she's actually the legal 'Steadholder Harrington,' at least until the Keys get around to discovering that you're back. Which means we were lucky to hold her to just five given names, all things considered. I expect the assumption, up until a few hours ago, was that she would become Honor the Second when she chose her reign name. Fortunately—" Her lips quivered for an instant, and she paused to clear her throat. "Fortunately," she repeated more firmly, "she won't have to make that decision quite as soon as we'd feared she might after all."

Honor's new baby sister, Faith. Also a Puritan-root virtue name.

"And this," Alfred said, having slipped out of his own carrier's straps, "is her slightly younger twin brother, James Andrew Benjamin Harrington. He got off with two less names, you'll note, thus duly exercising his prerogative as a natural-born male citizen of the last true patriarchy in this neck of the galaxy. Although we did, I hope you will also note, manage to butter up the local potentate by hanging his name on the poor kid."

And her brother James.

"It's so much 'work' she insisted on carrying them to term the natural way, despite the fact that her prolong added two and a half months to the process, My Lady,"

Apparently babies develop slower in prolong-equipped bodies.

The exact way in which the telempathic treecats communicated with one another had always been a matter of debate among humans. Some had argued that the 'cats were true telepaths; others that they didn't actually "communicate" in the human sense at all, that they were simply units in a free-flow linkage of pure emotions so deep it effectively substituted for communication.

Since her own link to Nimitz had changed and deepened, Honor had realized that, in many ways, both arguments were correct. She'd never been able to tap directly into Nimitz's "conversations" with other 'cats, but she had been able to sense the very fringes of a deep, intricate meld of interflowing thoughts and emotions when he "spoke" to another of his kind. Since he and Samantha had become mates, Honor had been able to "hear" and study their interwoven communication far more closely and discovered Nimitz and Samantha truly were so tightly connected that, in many ways, they were almost one individual, so much a part of one another that they often had no need to exchange deliberately formulated thoughts. But from observing them together and also with others of their kind, she'd also come to the conclusion that 'cats in general definitely did exchange the sort of complex, reasoned concepts which could only be described as "communication." Yet what she'd never been certain of until this dreadful moment was that they did it over more than one channel. They truly were both empaths and telepaths. She knew that now, for Samantha could still "hear" and taste Nimitz's emotions . . . but that was all she could hear. The rich, full-textured weaving which had bound them together had been battered and mauled, robbed of half its richness and blighted with unnatural silence, and she felt herself weeping for her beloved friends while they grappled with their sudden recognition of loss.

Thanks to that pulser rifle but when he jumped Ransom, Nimitz has lost his telepathic "voice" he can still receive communication, still sense and share his feelings, but the exchange of complex ideas between him and his kind isn't happening. The sudden discovery of this is rather shocking and frightening.

"We've wondered for centuries why the 'cats spinal cords have those clusters of nervous tissue at each pelvis," he told her. "Some have theorized that they might be something like secondary brains. They're certainly large enough, with sufficiently complex structures, and the theory was that they might help explain how something with such a relatively low body mass could have developed sentience in the first place. Others have derided the entire idea, while a third group has argued that even though they may be secondary brains, the physical similarities—and differences—between them indicate that they must do something else, as well. Their structures have been thoroughly analyzed and mapped, but we've never been able to link them to any discernible function. But, then, no one ever had a 'cat expert quite like you available for consultation, Honor. Now I think we know what at least one of those super-ganglia do."

'Cats have multiple secondary "brains" responsible for their empathy and telepathy. At least, we understand that now. Even with thorough neural mapping we needed this Phineas Gage-esque incident to understand what they actually did.

Despite himself, Pierre felt a grin—more of a grimace, really—twitch the corners of his mouth. There were nine people at the table, including himself and Saint-Just. Among them, they represented the core membership of the most powerful group in the entire People's Republic. After better than eight T-years, the Committee of Public Safety still boasted a total membership of twenty-six, almost thirty percent of its original size. Of course, that was only another way of saying that it had been reduced by over seventy percent. And allowing for new appointments to replace those who'd disappeared in various purges, factional power struggles, and other assorted unpleasantnesses (and for the replacement of several of those replacements), the actual loss rate among the Committee's members had been well over two hundred percent. Of the original eighty-seven members, only Pierre himself, Saint-Just, and Angela Downey and Henri DuPres (both of whom were little more than well-cowed place-holders) remained. And of the current crop of twenty-six, only the nine in this room truly mattered.

And six of them are too terrified to breathe without my permission. Mine and Oscar's, at any rate. Which was what we thought we wanted. They're certainly not going to be hatching any plans to overthrow me . . . but I hadn't quite counted on how useless their gutlessness would make them when it hit the fan.

The Committee once had 84 members besides the Triumvirate, now 23 spares and only a couple of survivors from the original group.

Joan Huertes, Interstellar News Service's senior reporter and anchorwoman in the People's Republic of Haven, had commed Boardman directly, seeking his comment on the incredible reports coming out of the Manticoran Alliance. The good news, such as it was, was that Boardman had been smart enough to give her a remarkably composed (sounding, at any rate) "No comment," and then to contact Saint-Just immediately rather than sit around and dither over what the PR disaster might mean for him personally. Judging from his expression, he'd made up for the dithering since, but at least he'd gotten the information into the right hands quickly.

That's good, because people covering up problems they really, really need to kick up the chain of command is sort of a major problem in Haven these days. Obviously they've now heard of the mass escape from Hades.

"On the other hand, that would appear, at the moment, to be one of the brighter spots of the situation," Pierre pointed out. "For right now, at least, your people are still pushing the Manties back, Esther. Are you in a position to keep on doing that?"

"Unless something changes without warning, yes," McQueen said. "But I caution you again, Sir, that my confidence is based on the situation as it now exists and that the situation in question is definitely open to change. In particular, we know from the Operation Icarus after-battle reports that the Manties hit us with something new in both Basilisk and Hancock, and we're still not certain exactly what it was in either case."

"I still believe you're reading too much into those reports." Saint-Just's tone was just a tiny bit too reasonable, and McQueen allowed her green eyes to harden as they met his. "We know they used LACs at Hancock," the StateSec CO went on, "but we've known ever since our commerce raiding operations went sour in Silesia that they had an improved light attack craft design. My understanding is that the analysts have concluded the Hancock LACs were simply more of the same."

The party line, "There are no Manty super-weapons, citizen, Basilisk and Second Hancock were flukes, using the same LACs as the Trojan Q-ships."

"The civilian analysts have concluded that," McQueen replied so frostily several people winced.

McQueen and Saint-Just had clashed over this before, and their differences, however cloaked in outward propriety, had become ever more pointed over the last few months. McQueen wanted to resurrect the old Naval Intelligence Bureau as a Navy-run shop, staffed by Navy officers. Her official reason was that the military needed an in-house intelligence capability run by people who understood operational realities. Saint-Just was equally determined to retain the present arrangement, in which NavInt was merely one more section of State Security's sprawling intelligence apparatus. His official reason was that centralized control insured that all relevant information was available from a single set of data banks and eliminated redundancy and the inefficiency of turf wars. In fact, his real reason was that he suspected that her real reason was a desire to cut his own people out of the loop in order to give herself (and any personal adherents in the upper echelons of the Navy's command structure) a secure channel through which to intrigue against the Committee.

The power struggle between Saint-Just and McQueen over Naval Intelligence. And naturally both of them are right, Esther that Saint-Just's civilian analysts are missing important context to understand the raw data, and Saint-Just that she's undermining him and building her own power-base.

"Because so few units got out, and because those who did had suffered so much damage to their sensor systems," and because you won't let me, "I've still been unable to reconstruct the events at Hancock with any higher degree of certainty and confidence than the official board managed immediately after the operation," she went on. "I've got a lot of theories and hypotheses, but very little hard data."

Sensor records are fragmentary, as are witness accounts of what happened at Second Hancock.

"Then my point stands." Saint-Just shrugged. "We've known for years that they have better LACs than we do, but they're still just LACs, when all's said and done. If it hadn't been for the circumstances under which they were allowed into range, they surely wouldn't have been any real threat."

"They weren't allowed into range, Citizen Secretary," McQueen said very precisely. "They utilized stealth systems far in advance of anything we have—and far more capable than any LAC should mount as onboard systems—to intercept before anyone could have detected them. And once in range, they used energy weapons of unprecedented power. Powerful enough to burn through a battleship's sidewall."

"Certainly they used their stealth systems effectively," Saint-Just conceded, his almost-smile as cold as her own had been. "But, as I already said, we've known for years that they were upgrading their LACs. And as you yourself just pointed out, our sensor data is scarcely what anyone could call reliable. My own analysts—civilians, to be sure, but most of them were consultants with the Office of Construction before the Harris Assassination—are uniformly of the opinion that the throughput figures some people are quoting for the grasers mounted by those LACs are almost certainly based on bad data." McQueen's face tightened, but he waved a hand in a tension-defusing gesture. "No one's arguing that the weapons weren't 'of unprecedented power,' because they clearly were. But you're talking about battleship sidewalls, attacked at absolutely minimal range, not ships of the wall, or even battleships or battlecruisers attacked at realistic ranges. The point my analysts are making is that no one could fit a graser of the power some people seem afraid of into something the size of a LAC. It's simply not technically feasible to build that sort of weapon, plus propulsive machinery, a fusion plant, and the sort of missile power they also displayed, into a hull under fifty thousand tons."

Keep telling yourself that, Oscar. There were Japanese generals who argued that what happened at Hiroshima must have been some sort of hitherto unseen natural disaster too.

"According to our source, who's a civilian employed in their Astographic Service, White Haven brought all or most of his fleet through from Trevor's Star in a very tight transit. I'm not conversant with all the technical terms, but I'm sure the report will make a great deal of sense to you and your analysts when you've had a chance to study it. The important point, however, is that what happened to Darlington was simply that he walked into several dozen superdreadnoughts who weren't supposed to be there and into the fire of a store of missile pods we thought hadn't been delivered."

See, nothing to worry about here, move along.

"I think my analysts are probably on the right general track about Hancock, too," he went on, as if his analysts had already suggested that Eighth Fleet had successfully rushed to the defense of Basilisk, as well. "The LACs in Hancock just happened to be there. No doubt they do represent an upgrade on what we've already seen in Silesia, and Hancock would be a reasonable place for them to work up and evaluate a new design. The logical answer is that they were already engaged in maneuvers of some sort when we turned up and they were able, by good luck for them and bad luck for us, to generate an intercept. Unless we want to stipulate that the Manties' R&D types are magicians in league with the devil, though, the worst-case evaluation of their capabilities is much too pessimistic. Probably there were more of them than any of Kellet's survivors believed and they made up the apparent jump in individual firepower with numbers. As for the missiles Diamato talked about, he's the only tac officer who seems even to have seen them, and none of his tactical data survived Schaumberg's destruction. We have no way to be sure his initial estimates of their performance weren't completely erroneous. It's far more likely there were additional ships back there, ships he never saw because of their stealth systems, and that the apparent performance of the missiles was so extraordinary because what he thought was terminal performance was actually a much earlier point in their launch envelope." He shrugged. "In either case, no one else has seen any signs of super LACs or missiles since, and until we do see some supporting evidence . . ."

In light of all they know and understand of enemy capabilities, it's an entirely reasonable explanation. It is also quite wrong, but such things happen.

"I agree with your basic analysis, Citizen Secretary, but it's been over a year since you launched Icarus, and you've hit them hard a half dozen times since then without seeing any sign of new hardware. Let's say for the sake of argument that they do have a new LAC and a new missile and that the performance of each falls somewhere between what your analysts think we actually saw and what my analysts believe is theoretically possible. In that case, where are those new weapons? Isn't it possible the Manties haven't used more of them because they don't have any more? That we ran into prototypes of a design they still haven't been able to debug sufficiently to put into series production? That being the case, they may still be months from any actual deployment. And the need to defeat them before they do get it into full production lends still more point to the importance of continuing to hit them as hard, frequently, and quickly as possible."

The strongest argument against there being super-LACs and MDMs, why haven't the Manties used them in the half-dozen major battles since?

"Actually, it's a monumental pain in an awful lot of ways," she told her oldest friend, and Captain the Honorable Michelle Henke laughed. "Go ahead, laugh!" Honor told her. "You haven't had to deal with people who name superdreadnoughts after you—and refuse to change the name when it turns out you weren't quite dead yet after all!" She shuddered. "And that's not the worst of it, you know."

"Oh?" Henke cocked her head. "I knew they'd named the Harrington after you, but I hadn't heard anything about their refusing to change the name."

-snip-

"I argued myself blue in the face, you know, but Benjamin says he can't overrule the military, the Office of Shipbuilding says it would confuse their records, Reverend Sullivan insists that the Chaplain's Corps blessed the ship under her original name and that it would offend the religious sensibilities of the Navy to change it now, and Matthews says it would offend the crews' belief that renaming a ship is bad luck. Every one of them is in on it, and they keep playing musical offices. Whenever I try to pin one of them down, he simply refers me—with exquisite courtesy, you understand—to one of the others. And I know they're all laughing in their beers over it!"

The Manticorans just went back to calling the class Medusas but the Graysons won't change the class or the one ship name for any reason.

"By the way," she said in a conversational tone, "there's something I've been meaning to say to you. Have you seen the HD of your funeral on Manticore?"

"I've skimmed it," Honor said uncomfortably. "I can't stand to watch too much of that kind of thing, though. It's like seeing a really bad historical holodrama. You know, one of the 'cast of thousands' things. And that doesn't even consider the crypt at King Michael's! I mean, I realize it was a state funeral, that the Alliance thought the Peeps had murdered me and that that had turned me into some sort of symbol, but still—"

Come on, Honor, how many people can say they watched the footage of their own funeral?

"Ah, then you haven't been to Steadholders' Hall! That explains it."

"Explains what, damn it?!"

"Explains how you could have missed the modest little four-meter bronze statue of me, standing on top of an eight-meter—polished!—obsidian column, in the square at the very foot of the main stairs to the North Portico so that every single soul who ever walks through any of the Hall's public entrances will have to walk right past it at eye level."

-snip-

No, she made herself admit judiciously, calling it a "monstrosity" wasn't really fair. Her own taste had never run to heroic-scale bronzes, but she had to agree, in the intervals when she could stop gnashing her teeth, that the sculptor had actually done an excellent job. The moment he'd chosen to immortalize was the one in which she'd stood on the Conclave Chamber's floor, leaning on the Sword of State while she awaited the return of the servant Steadholder Burdette had sent to fetch the Burdette Sword, and it was obvious he'd studied the file footage of that horrible day with care. He had every detail right, even to the cut on her forehead, except for two things. One was Nimitz, who'd been sitting on her desk in the Chamber while she waited but had somehow been translocated from there to the statue's shoulder. That much, at least, she was willing to grant as legitimate artistic license, for if Nimitz hadn't been on her shoulder, he'd still been with her, and far more intimately than the sculptor could ever have guessed. But the other inaccuracy, the nobility and calm, focused tranquility he'd pasted onto her alloy face . . . That she had a problem with, for her own memories of that day, waiting for the duel to the death with the treasonous Burdette, were only too clear in her own mind.

She realized Henke was still staring at her in stupefaction and cocked her head with a quizzical expression. Several more seconds passed, and then Henke shook herself.

"Four meters tall?" she demanded in hushed tones.

"On top of an eight-meter column," Honor agreed. "It's really very imposing, I suppose . . . and when I saw it, I was ready to cut my own throat. At least then I really would be decently dead!"

"My God!" Henke shook her head, then chuckled wickedly. "I always thought of you as tall myself, but twelve meters may be just a bit much even for you, Honor!"

Or thirteen feet on a 26.6 foot column in Imperial. Honor's bronze statute, right outside Steadholders Hall where all the visitors get to walk past it.

"And they won't take it down?"

"They won't," Honor confirmed grimly. "I told them I'd refuse to use the main entrance ever again if they left it there, and they said they were very sorry to hear it and pointed out that there's always been a private entrance for steadholders. I threatened to refuse to accept my Key back from Faith, and they told me I wasn't permitted to do that under Grayson law. I even threatened to have my armsmen sneak up on it some dark night and blow it to smithereens . . . and they told me it was fully insured and that the sculptor would be more than happy to recast it in case any accident befell it!"

There's some more of that wonderful Grayson stubbornness.

"All he did was create a special 'Protector's Own Squadron' of the Grayson Space Navy, buy in all the captured ships for service as its core elements, and make me its official CO."

"Did you say 'core elements'?" Henke repeated, and Honor nodded. "And precisely what, if I'm not going to regret asking, does that mean?"

"It means Benjamin has decided to offer slots in the GSN to any of the Cerberus escapees who want to take them, and he's established a special unit organization for them. He's calling it a 'squadron,' but if he gets a fraction of the number of volunteers I think he's going to get, it's going to be more like a task force . . . or a bloody fleet in its own right! Anyway, he's planning to swear them all on as his personal vassals, then make me, as his Champion, the permanent CO. He's starting out with the ships we brought back with us, but he'll be adding to them, and he and Matthews are already making gleeful noises about pod superdreadnoughts and proper screening elements."

"My God," Henke murmured. Then she cocked her head. "Does he have the authority to do something like that? I mean, I'd hate to think how Parliament would react back home if Beth even thought about establishing a force like that!"

"Oh, yes," Honor sighed. "The Grayson Constitution gives the Protector the right to do it. He's the only person on Grayson who does have the right to organize full-scale military units out of his personal vassals. It was one of the little points Benjamin the Great wrote into the Constitution to emphasize the Sword's primacy. Of course, he'll place it under the authority of Wesley Matthews, as Chief of Naval Operations, which should soothe any ruffled feathers, but people on Grayson take their personal oaths even more seriously than most Manticorans. If push ever came to shove between the Protector and the regular Navy—God forbid!—it would almost certainly come down on Benjamin's side. And the fact that virtually all the personnel for it, initially, at least, will be foreign-born and that 'That Foreign Woman' will be its CO, at least on paper, has the conservatives in the Keys unable to decide whether to drop dead of apoplexy or scream bloody murder. Except, of course, that they can't possibly afford to raise a stink over it at the moment because of all the whooping and hollering going on over my return. Which is exactly what that stinker Benjamin is counting on."

"Counting on?" Henke wrinkled her nose, and Honor laughed briefly.

"Service in the Grayson Space Navy automatically confers Grayson citizenship after a six-year hitch, Mike. Benjamin rammed that little proviso through right after they joined the Alliance. He was one of the first people on the planet to recognize that the GSN was going to have to recruit from abroad to man its units, and he was determined to give anyone who signed on a stake in the planet they'd be fighting to defend. Of course, once everyone else figured out the same thing, there was a lot of resistance to the notion of offering citizenship to job lots of infidels. But Reverend Hanks signed on in strong support, and it came soon enough after the Maccabean coup attempt and 'the Mayhew Restoration' that no one in the Keys could put together an effective opposition. It doesn't apply to Allied personnel serving on loan from their own navies, even if they hold rank in the GSN, but these won't be Allied personnel. Which means every person he enlists for his 'Protector's Own' will eventually become a Grayson citizen, assuming she survives, and there are almost half a million escapees . . . most of whom have no planet to go home to. I'd be surprised if at least a third of them didn't jump at his offer, and that means he'll be adding something like a hundred and sixty thousand 'infidels' to his population in a single pop."

Protector's Own, and resulting political fits. Service in the GSN for six-years automatically confers Grayson citizenship, bringing Grayson a lot more cosmopolitan technical experts. Which among other things means Alfredo Yu has by now been a card-carrying Grayson for some time.

"It's only about twenty-nine billion," Honor corrected her testily. "And why shouldn't I be 'casual' about it?" She snorted. "Remember me? Your yeoman roommate from Sphinx? I've got more money than I could possibly spend in the entire rest of my life, even allowing for prolong, Mike! It beats heck out of being poor, but after a certain point, it's only a way to keep score . . . in a game I'm not all that interested in playing. Oh, it's a valuable tool, and it lets me do all sorts of things I never would have been able to do without it, but to be perfectly honest, I think I would have preferred leaving it just the way my will left it. I don't need it, and Willard, Howard, and the Sky Domes board were making perfectly good use of it before I came back."

Honor's personal worth at this point, and her feelings on money in general.

"I also ought to drop by Admiralty House, I suppose," she went on, and Henke hid a smile. Honor might not realize how much she'd changed over the last ten years, but the casual way she'd just referred to Admiralty House, the sanctum sanctorum of the Royal Manticoran Navy, was a dead giveaway to Henke. Honor was only a commodore in the RMN, but she thought and acted like the fleet admiral she was in Grayson service . . . and did it so naturally she wasn't even aware of it. "Among the other things you brought me was a very politely phrased 'request' to make myself available as soon as possible for an ONI debrief. And I'll want to talk to Admiral Cortez about the ways he can make best use of the non-Allied military personnel who came back from Hell with us . . . and don't get scooped up by Benjamin's new project.

Honor's debrief and some of the ways she's changed.

"The only thing I know for certain from the Admiralty is that, assuming I plan on returning to Manticoran service while I'm in the Star Kingdom for medical reasons anyway, they'd like me to consider spending some time at Saganami Island. I'll be on limited duty while they design and build my new arm, so I guess a stint in a classroom might not be a terrible idea. I don't know exactly what they have in mind, but I'd rather keep busy than just sit around." She shuddered. "I remember the last time we went through all this neural implant business. Not having anything to do between bouts of surgery and therapy just about drove me crazy!"

Honor's rehab is going to take over a year, in the meantime the Admiralty will be sticking her in a tactics course at the naval academy on Saganami Island. Just in time to mentor the first female officer of the Grayson Space Navy as she goes through the Island.

"I know you're already familiar with the basic parameters of the design, but they went right on refining it up to the moment they actually laid Eddy down at Hephaestus, and a lot of the features that ended up in the Har—I mean, in the Medusas—were incorporated into her, as well. Not just the automation to reduce crew size, either. We got a lot of the new electronics goodies, including some major fire control updates, the brand new generation of ECM and stealth, and a little surprise for the Peeps the next time they take a down-the-throat shot at us."

Saganami heavy cruiser, modded with the latest fruits of Projects Ghost Rider and Anzio. Ghost Rider stealth and ECM, Anzio's bow walls for starships, and some serious fire control upgrades, presumably for handling many pods.

[VhenRa]

What year are we up to? And yes, House of Steel indicates the 2nd Flight of the Saganami CAs had Bow Walls. And it was standard on the Saganami-Bs and -Cs. With the B and C featuring Stern Walls as well. (B and C should be new classes but were snuck through the procurements department as Saganami because it sounded cheaper to the people paying for them.)

[Ahriman238]

Should be the first days of 1914 right now. Battle of Cerberus has a given date of 10/24/1913. Then 24 days puts their arrival at Trevor's Star at 11/18. Another three weeks to a month to fly to Grayson. She stayed on Grayson long enough for the news to leak, get back to the Peeps, and exchange several terse letters with her monarch with a week's turnaround.

[VhenRa]

Should be the first days of 1914 right now. Battle of Cerberus has a given date of 10/24/1913. Then 24 days puts their arrival at Trevor's Star at 11/18. Another three weeks to a month to fly to Grayson. She stayed on Grayson long enough for the news to leak, get back to the Peeps, and exchange several terse letters with her monarch with a week's turnaround.

Yeah. Saganami-Bs are still 3 years away. Those will be the refit Block II Saganami-As. RMN's first All-Graser vessel in over a hundred years. And around 30% larger then the previous Star Knight-class. Welcome to the beginning of the Tonnage Creep. Where RMN Destroyers become larger then their Light Cruisers... and thats their MODERN Light Cruisers. Its actually getting close to older Heavy Cruisers in mass.

[Simon_Jester]

Hey, Hades’ moon-missiles have the same flight characteristics as the old Fearless in OBS. 85,000 Gs for one minute, or half that for three minutes. By this point Manticore has added 7,000 Gs and thirty seconds to the max accel profile, not sure how that translates into shooting for range.

Where are you getting that "add thirty seconds" from?

If true, then at 42500g for 180 seconds you get a powered range from rest of 6.75 million kilometers (rounding here, since I only have three significant figures to work with). At the improved performance figures you cite... 9.94 million kilometers.

The vast majority of that performance enhancement comes from the "add thirty seconds to the burn time" increasing the acceleration time from 180 to 210 seconds. The missiles are traveling much faster at the end of their run than the beginning, so each extra second you add to the clock adds many thousands of kilometers to the distance they cover.

With the acceleration increase but without the duration increase... 7.30 million kilometers from rest, considerably less impressive.

Geez, shut down the inertial compensators and suddenly five Gs is such a huge deal. People shouldn't start passing out for another G or so.

Anything much over three gravities is brutally punishing. Three to five can be sustained for several minutes, ten is far beyond what anyone can handle more than momentarily. It helps very much if you experience the heavy acceleration perpendicular to the long axis of your body (slamming you into the back of your seat, rather than down into the seat itself). Still, though, it's really pushing it and honestly I think Honor's making a bad call by accepting a sustained high-g burn and its effects on her crew in exchange for that tiny extra sliver of acceleration.

Although... maybe the effect of the grav plates varies cuts back a more or less fixed percentage of the total thrust from the engines, in which case I guess it wouldn't be worth sacrificing, say, 60g of acceleration in exchange for lowering the force experienced by the crew from 5g to 3g.

[snip 'Battle' of Cerberus]

I think it's a bit of a stretch for the Havenite force to have made no allowance for captured mobile units, especially since one possible explanation for the capture of Cerberus would be, say, a trap set by the RMN or some outside actor who had somehow managed to infiltrate Hades and secure Camp Charon, without setting off the orbital defenses... and which might well have ships lurking around to jump anyone who came to investigate.

I'm really not sure how closely the Solly press is following the war, their reporters are mentioned numerous times but later on you'd think the Sollies would understand more of what was going on with even the smallest coverage.

Yes. I mean, you can handwave it as "a lot of the Solly reporters are as ignorant of naval matters as the typical Western journalist is of air combat when covering bombs falling on Baghdad." But you'd still expect some competent military commenters, whose remarks would at least be noticed in the League core worlds, to the effect of "Wow, the RMN really is carving through the Havenites fast now."

'Cats have multiple secondary "brains" responsible for their empathy and telepathy. At least, we understand that now. Even with thorough neural mapping we needed this Phineas Gage-esque incident to understand what they actually did.

It probably doesn't help that no human neurologist would have the faintest idea what a telepathic transmitter antenna looks like... so even if you're staring straight at one you won't recognize it.

The party line, "There are no Manty super-weapons, citizen, Basilisk and Second Hancock were flukes, using the same LACs as the Trojan Q-ships."

To be fair, running into a few hundred of those LACs would have put a pretty serious dent into the Havenite battle force. Not really enough to adequately explain the losses they suffered, but enough to justify them in the eyes of civilian analysts.

"According to our source, who's a civilian employed in their Astographic Service, White Haven brought all or most of his fleet through from Trevor's Star in a very tight transit. I'm not conversant with all the technical terms, but I'm sure the report will make a great deal of sense to you and your analysts when you've had a chance to study it. The important point, however, is that what happened to Darlington was simply that he walked into several dozen superdreadnoughts who weren't supposed to be there and into the fire of a store of missile pods we thought hadn't been delivered."

See, nothing to worry about here, move along.

It's not like that wouldn't have been enough to kick Darlington's ass up between his ears anyway. Especially given the junction forts' ability to control large missile salvoes, which the Havenites probably already knew or could deduce- given the forts' tonnage they might easily have 50-80 missile broadsides.

Come on, Honor, how many people can say they watched the footage of their own funeral?

"...Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated."

Seriously though, creeeepy.

Should be the first days of 1914 right now. Battle of Cerberus has a given date of 10/24/1913. Then 24 days puts their arrival at Trevor's Star at 11/18. Another three weeks to a month to fly to Grayson. She stayed on Grayson long enough for the news to leak, get back to the Peeps, and exchange several terse letters with her monarch with a week's turnaround.

Yeah. Saganami-Bs are still 3 years away. Those will be the refit Block II Saganami-As. RMN's first All-Graser vessel in over a hundred years. And around 30% larger then the previous Star Knight-class. Welcome to the beginning of the Tonnage Creep. Where RMN Destroyers become larger then their Light Cruisers... and thats their MODERN Light Cruisers. Its actually getting close to older Heavy Cruisers in mass.

You sure Capitalize Randomly a lot.

Anyway, yes, tonnage creep. I think it's simply because of the survivability problem; missiles get nastier, and missile combat is emphasized over beams... but missile launchers need magazines that add tonnage, and antimissile defenses add a LOT of tonnage. Lighter platforms become unsurvivable unless, like a LAC, you build them very tiny and explicitly design them to have limited combat endurance.

Also, I like the "destroyer heavier than a CL" thing because it helps convey that maybe, just maybe, the tonnage classes aren't purely arbitrary- that a light cruiser is meant to cruise, and a destroyer is a fleet escort unit first and foremost, and that each is designed to fulfill its own mission regardless of which one is heavier.

I mean, in real life "light" and "heavy" cruisers were basically identical in weight except that one was a 6" gun cruiser designed to Washington Naval Treaty specifications, while the other was an 8" gun cruiser of equal tonnage.

[Kingmaker]

Yes. I mean, you can handwave it as "a lot of the Solly reporters are as ignorant of naval matters as the typical Western journalist is of air combat when covering bombs falling on Baghdad." But you'd still expect some competent military commenters, whose remarks would at least be noticed in the League core worlds, to the effect of "Wow, the RMN really is carving through the Havenites fast now."

Weber's excuse for why Solarian analysts and commanders have their heads so far up their asses is a) they're so far removed as an institution from actual war they've somewhat forgotten how it's done, b) the RMN and RHN are not especially chatty about ongoing military operations (a fair point, arguably), and c) they view the war as a sideshow between two minor powers and thus haven't assigned much in the way of intel gathering to it and don't pay much attention to what they do get.

Institutional rot in the SLN and security on the part of the belligerents can explain some of it, but I'm hard pressed to imagine why they consider it a minor war when it is the only real naval war going on (and is, in fact, pretty much the only such thing in quite some time).

(The real answer is of course that Weber needs an excuse as to why a polity much larger than both Haven and Manticore put together isn't going to pound them flat in a week).

[VhenRa]

You sure Capitalize Randomly a lot.

Anyway, yes, tonnage creep. I think it's simply because of the survivability problem; missiles get nastier, and missile combat is emphasized over beams... but missile launchers need magazines that add tonnage, and antimissile defenses add a LOT of tonnage. Lighter platforms become unsurvivable unless, like a LAC, you build them very tiny and explicitly design them to have limited combat endurance.

Also, I like the "destroyer heavier than a CL" thing because it helps convey that maybe, just maybe, the tonnage classes aren't purely arbitrary- that a light cruiser is meant to cruise, and a destroyer is a fleet escort unit first and foremost, and that each is designed to fulfill its own mission regardless of which one is heavier.

I mean, in real life "light" and "heavy" cruisers were basically identical in weight except that one was a 6" gun cruiser designed to Washington Naval Treaty specifications, while the other was an 8" gun cruiser of equal tonnage.

Given the inferior weapons fit of the Avalon-class as compared to the Roland-class and it's description as mainly being sent to Silesia, I suspect the main differences is in capability of independent operations. The Rolands have severe issues with doing anything outside of fighting after all, given they don't have a RMMC detachment and have an anemic crew size. Inferior because the modern DDs have Mk16 DDMs while the CLs have Mk36 extended runtime single drive missiles.

[Simon_Jester]

Weber's excuse for why Solarian analysts and commanders have their heads so far up their asses is a) they're so far removed as an institution from actual war they've somewhat forgotten how it's done, b) the RMN and RHN are not especially chatty about ongoing military operations (a fair point, arguably), and c) they view the war as a sideshow between two minor powers and thus haven't assigned much in the way of intel gathering to it and don't pay much attention to what they do get.

Institutional rot in the SLN and security on the part of the belligerents can explain some of it, but I'm hard pressed to imagine why they consider it a minor war when it is the only real naval war going on (and is, in fact, pretty much the only such thing in quite some time).

(The real answer is of course that Weber needs an excuse as to why a polity much larger than both Haven and Manticore put together isn't going to pound them flat in a week).

It's... barely within the realm of the conceivable that a major polity like the League could be that screwed up, could be that able to ignore basic realities and could laugh off that much crucial information.

But it's damn hard to believe. It's not like it would be that hard to establish as a brute fact that, for example, the RMN has been using missiles with ten times the effective range of old single-drive missiles. There are literally millions of military personnel who survived the war and saw those missiles in action; do you mean to tell me that the SLN's intelligence organs don't have the basic common sense to give a few of those personnel a stipend and ask them to come in and describe their experiences?

If nothing else, Frontier Fleet should be doing a better job than that, because unlike 'Battle Fleet,' their careers do actually depend on knowing what's going on beyond the League's borders. Because a Frontier Fleet officer can get into a lot of trouble if he inadvertently dispatches cruisers to a periphery system and it turns out they recently purchased a battlecruiser flagship without his knowing about it.

Keeping track of what a foreign neighbor is realistically capable of, and how to respond to that threat, would be one of the core purposes of Frontier Fleet's mission.

[Simon_Jester]

Given the inferior weapons fit of the Avalon-class as compared to the Roland-class and it's description as mainly being sent to Silesia, I suspect the main differences is in capability of independent operations. The Rolands have severe issues with doing anything outside of fighting after all, given they don't have a RMMC detachment and have an anemic crew size. Inferior because the modern DDs have Mk16 DDMs while the CLs have Mk36 extended runtime single drive missiles.

Yep. See? The Rolands are straight-up fleet escort units, designed to fight enemy warships, usually in company of other warships rather than a convoy of freighters.

The Avalons, on the other hand, are doing a lot of the same missions that they routinely used to assign to destroyers, but also to light cruisers... they are multirole combatants with long endurance, hence "cruiser." While the dedicated escort platforms are relabeled "destroyers."

[Black Admiral]

I mean, in real life "light" and "heavy" cruisers were basically identical in weight except that one was a 6" gun cruiser designed to Washington Naval Treaty specifications, while the other was an 8" gun cruiser of equal tonnage.

Which would be one reason that, at the time (as far as I understand it) the Royal Navy didn't use light/heavy cruiser, usually referring to its ships as 6-inch or 8-inch (as appropriate) cruisers.

[Simon_Jester]

Yes.

But in a lot of subsequent fiction where space warship classes are arbitrarily transplanted, including the Honorverse, we see major differences between "light" and "heavy" cruisers... tonnage differences of a factor of three or so. Very peculiar.

I'd be happier if Weber had put a bit more imagination into names, or mixed and matched a bit more with clearly delineated doctrinal roles for different designs that are more or less the same tonnage. Or established a bit more nuance in capital ship design than "all else being equal, heavier equals better." Or done more to explain the enormous and seemingly arbitrary gap in tonnage between the biggest "battlecruisers" and the smallest capital ships, a range in which apparently no one even thinks of building a ship until the RMN comes along with their two million ton Nike.

[VhenRa]

Weber's excuse for why Solarian analysts and commanders have their heads so far up their asses is a) they're so far removed as an institution from actual war they've somewhat forgotten how it's done, b) the RMN and RHN are not especially chatty about ongoing military operations (a fair point, arguably), and c) they view the war as a sideshow between two minor powers and thus haven't assigned much in the way of intel gathering to it and don't pay much attention to what they do get.

Institutional rot in the SLN and security on the part of the belligerents can explain some of it, but I'm hard pressed to imagine why they consider it a minor war when it is the only real naval war going on (and is, in fact, pretty much the only such thing in quite some time).

(The real answer is of course that Weber needs an excuse as to why a polity much larger than both Haven and Manticore put together isn't going to pound them flat in a week).

It's... barely within the realm of the conceivable that a major polity like the League could be that screwed up, could be that able to ignore basic realities and could laugh off that much crucial information.

But it's damn hard to believe. It's not like it would be that hard to establish as a brute fact that, for example, the RMN has been using missiles with ten times the effective range of old single-drive missiles. There are literally millions of military personnel who survived the war and saw those missiles in action; do you mean to tell me that the SLN's intelligence organs don't have the basic common sense to give a few of those personnel a stipend and ask them to come in and describe their experiences?

If nothing else, Frontier Fleet should be doing a better job than that, because unlike 'Battle Fleet,' their careers do actually depend on knowing what's going on beyond the League's borders. Because a Frontier Fleet officer can get into a lot of trouble if he inadvertently dispatches cruisers to a periphery system and it turns out they recently purchased a battlecruiser flagship without his knowing about it.

Keeping track of what a foreign neighbor is realistically capable of, and how to respond to that threat, would be one of the core purposes of Frontier Fleet's mission.

From what I recall, Frontier Fleet actually does have more of a clue what is going on. Its just Battle Fleet hates Frontier Fleet about as much as.. hmm. Some British Army regiments hate each other? Something like that.

[Highlord Laan]

Also, I think it's mentioned that a lot of Solly officers and analysts are fully aware of how outmatched the SLN is in all but numbers and are doing everything in their power to set off the alarm bells, but are being ignored and swept under the rug by their infinitely corrupt superiors. Hell, I think it's even mentioned that there's League home defense fleets that can outfight the SLN on a ship-for-ship basis, it's just that the SLN has been the 9000lb gorilla in the room for so long that institutional arrogance has become hardwired.

[White Haven]

As for the news-reporting side, I think at least some of the 'we don't give a fuck' vibe can come down to the time lag. When we, in the modern world, hear about some conflict in the ass end of beyond, we're still hearing about it in something approaching real time. We look at the news and say 'holy shit, this is actually happening right now.' Would we care as much if we knew that everything we were watching from that random back-end-of-nowhere spat was weeks or months out of date? I...really suspect we would not.

And that's as much as we already care about a back-of-beyond scuffle, which ultimately isn't much to begin with if no one is fucking with the inhabitants of first-world nations or committing really, really egregious war crimes. Sometimes not even then.

I would actually love a look into a Sollie community along SDN lines, not a precise analogue or anything, but just a relatively educated, interested, engaged subsection of the populace that's watching all this from inside the League and actually trying to piece together what's really going on. ...And now my mind is drifting through to the equivalent of the North Korea thread in N&P, with people posting Havenite propaganda pieces and sighing at how fucking Manticore is at it again.

[Dominus Atheos]

Although... maybe the effect of the grav plates varies cuts back a more or less fixed percentage of the total thrust from the engines, in which case I guess it wouldn't be worth sacrificing, say, 60g of acceleration in exchange for lowering the force experienced by the crew from 5g to 3g.

Yes, that's what it said:

Warships had much more powerful internal grav plates than shuttles or other small craft, but without the sump of a grav wave for their compensators to work with, the best they could do was reduce the apparent force of a hundred and fifty gravities by a factor of about thirty.

[Simon_Jester]

The fact that it says "by a factor of... thirty" does not prove that just any acceleration would be cut by a factor of exactly thirty. It does, however, imply it.

I mean, when the ship is completely at rest and/or coasting ballistically, the grav plates can still provide a 1g acceleration toward the deck. So zero engine thrust translates to normal gravity.

It's possible that the grav plates are set to automatically correct 97% of a ship's acceleration regardless of what that acceleration actually is... but not certain. It is at least as plausible that grav plates can completely adjust for an acceleration of, say, 10-20 gravities, but start to break down and reach their limits at 100-150 gravities and start becoming much less effective protection.

[Kingmaker]

Or done more to explain the enormous and seemingly arbitrary gap in tonnage between the biggest "battlecruisers" and the smallest capital ships, a range in which apparently no one even thinks of building a ship until the RMN comes along with their two million ton Nike.

Wasn't that gap previously filled by battleships? It's just that nobody builds them anymore because they're too fat for regular cruising operations, too fragile to stand in the wall, and cost and manpower inefficient for local defense. I mean, the implication is that people hardly build dreadnoughts anymore, even at the beginning of the series. I'm guessing the new Nikes are pushing the upper limit of viable cruising ship and are only able to reach that size because of the war's technological advances.

are being ignored and swept under the rug by their infinitely corrupt superiors. Hell, I think it's even mentioned that there's League home defense fleets that can outfight the SLN on a ship-for-ship basis, it's just that the SLN has been the 9000lb gorilla in the room for so long that institutional arrogance has become hardwired.

The thing is, you'd think even a hideously corrupt military leadership accustomed to a position of total dominance would constantly be on the look out for any excuse to increase their funding (especially when League foreign policy is predicated on that dominance). Missile gap, etc...

Would we care as much if we knew that everything we were watching from that random back-end-of-nowhere spat was weeks or months out of date? I...really suspect we would not.

The average man on the street very probably wouldn't give a shit, the Solarian League has multiple intelligence agencies, at least some of which are specifically supposed to keep an eye on external developments. As Simon said, it is barely within the realm of plausibility, but the degree of incompetence in the SLN just seems contrived (especially when responding allows them to extract greater funding from the government).

[Simon_Jester]

Wasn't that gap previously filled by battleships?

Partially- but it's a big gap, and it's kind of hard to believe that there weren't serious explorations in the direction of making ships in that size range viable, even if some of them were rather poorly conceived.

The thing is, you'd think even a hideously corrupt military leadership accustomed to a position of total dominance would constantly be on the look out for any excuse to increase their funding (especially when League foreign policy is predicated on that dominance). Missile gap, etc...

Also they'd be looking for ways to avoid embarrassment- again, Frontier Fleet in particular must have a culture of systematically knowing what it might have to go up against, because their ships are individually small enough that they can actually get killed and defeated if they wind up hitting an opponent tougher than they were prepared to handle.

The average man on the street very probably wouldn't give a shit, the Solarian League has multiple intelligence agencies, at least some of which are specifically supposed to keep an eye on external developments. As Simon said, it is barely within the realm of plausibility, but the degree of incompetence in the SLN just seems contrived (especially when responding allows them to extract greater funding from the government).

On the other hand, part of the problem appears to be a lack of funding for such things; the League has a chronic shortage of funds to actually do anything with because it's not allowed to tax planetary populations, as I recall.