Bit of Analysis: Honor Harrington

[Simon_Jester]

OK, you guys have a point. Let's try to disentangle our arguments:

1) I maintain that multi-salvo pods are impractical, simply because a pod with N salvoes stacked and ready to fire offers very little advantage compared to N pods with one salvo each, and some serious disadvantages.

2) I maintain that miniaturizing the mass drivers on the broadside launchers of conventional ships would actually not do that much to enhance their missile firepower, because the main constraint on broadside missile capacity is providing the volume required to store magazines capable of feeding your launchers. If you don't drastically increase the internal volume dedicated to missile storage, then having more broadside launchers just means you shoot your bolt much earlier in the battle. Under pre-1905 PD missile doctrine this is bad. By 1907-8 there's enough combat experience with missile pods to prove that this might be desirable, but by then the RMN is already working on its SD(P) design concept and won't gain much of anything from implementing the new idea.

[Note that the RMN continues producing more or less identical clones of its last prewar SD design, the Gryphon-class, literally right up until SD(P) production begins. While the later Gryphons may be a bit different than the original ones, there is no major modification in their basic design parameters, because the need for efficient wartime serial production trumps the need for any minor incremental changes in design]

[Batman]

Not to mention that a 2x10 pod offers no advantage over a 1x20 one and halves salvo density (unless the pods can refire faster than their onboard launchers at which point one has to ask why they're not []using[/i] that technology in their onboard launchers-for which there are actually valid reasons). If the limiting factor on how many pods you can tow is your tractors (as Donkey seems to imply) mass doesn't figure into it, if mass does figure into it I fail to see how a double salvo 10 round pod is going to mass all that less than a single salvo 20 round one and I'll just not comment on the effect a dozen or two missile pods have on the acceleration of a starship that could go zero to c in an instant if it weren't for the side effects that'd have on the crew.

[Simon_Jester]

My impression is that pods tractored inside the impeller wedge have no effect on acceleration, but that the precision and capacity of the tractors allows only a limited number of pods to be towed this way. Tractoring outside the wedge is more versatile, but the pods thus towed are more exposed, and there may be some kind of interference 'drag' effect caused by interactions between the tractor beams and the wedge itself.

It's not just a question of the physical mass of the pods and F=ma in action, in other words; it has at least something to do with the wonkiness of how induced gravitational fields operate in the Honorverse.

[Nephtys]

I was under the impression somewhere in the books is that partly why they can cram grav-drivers into pods, is that they're explicitly designed to burn out after one shot, making them cheaper and smaller. I think it was in that dump where pods were first introduced in Short Victorious War?

Presumably some two or three salvo pod design would be less practical if it's grav-drivers were substantially more expensive or bulky compared to just having more disposable one-shots.

[Ahriman238]

Just a half-size update.

As he'd told President Harris months ago, he didn't really want to take Manticore on at all. Unlike Haven's other victims, the Star Kingdom had had both the time and the leadership to prepare. Despite the confused pacifism of some of its politicians, its people were generally united behind their stiff-necked, almost obsessively determined queen, its wealth had let it amass a frightening amount of firepower, and the sheer breadth of its alliance system faced the People's Navy with a whole new dimension of threat. Unlike Haven's past, single-system conquests, there was no quick, clean way to take the Alliance out, short of a direct thrust to its heart, and driving clear to Manticore without protecting the Fleet's flanks and rear invited catastrophe.

Amos Parnell's opinion of Manticore and the factors that will let it stand a chance against Haven.

"But how in hell could they have pulled it off?" Parnell rubbed his chin and frowned at the bland "UNKNOWN" glowing beside the names of four of the PN's best battlecruisers. "He should have been able to avoid anything he couldn't fight. Could they have known when and where he was coming in?"

"The possibility can't be completely ruled out, Sir, but even Admiral Pierre didn't know his objective until he opened his sealed orders. And the Poicters side of the operation went off without a hitch. Commodore Yuranovich nailed a Star Knight-class cruiser right where he expected to find her. As you can see," Perot pointed at the information displayed below the names of the ships committed to the Poicters raid, "he took more damage than we'd hoped—I'm afraid Barbarossa and Sinjar are going to be in yard hands for some time—but there was no sign they'd suspected anything. Since both halves of the mission were covered by exactly the same security, our best guess is that they didn't know Pierre was coming, either."

Haven reaction to the loss of Pierre's squadron, sealed orders for operational security.

"Any response from Manticore over the Star Knight?"

"Not in so many words, but they've closed the Junction to our shipping, ejected all our diplomatic courier boats from Alliance space without any formal explanation, and begun shadowing and harassing our convoys moving through Alliance territory. There was an incident in Casca, but we're not sure who started it. Casca may be officially nonaligned, but they've always leaned a bit towards Manticore, and some of my analysts think our Phase One operations may have pushed the Cascans themselves into pressing the panic button and asking for Manticoran protection. Our local CO exchanged long-range fire with a Manty cruiser squadron, then hauled ass." Perot shrugged again. "Hard to blame him, Sir. He didn't have anything heavier than a destroyer, and they would've eaten him for lunch if he'd stood and fought."

Parnell's nod was calmer than he felt. The situation was heating up, and Manticore was starting to push back, but they weren't lodging any formal diplomatic protests. That could be good or bad. It might mean they knew exactly what was happening and chose to keep silent in order to keep him in the dark about their response till they had it in position. But it could just as well indicate they didn't know what was going on . . . or just how much crap was about to fall on top of them. If they'd simply decided the incidents and provocations might be the start of some larger operation, they could be holding their protests until they figured out what that operation was.

In either case, they'd obviously decided protests would serve no purpose, and the way their forces were pushing back across the board, not just in a few local instances, certainly argued that new orders had gone out to their station commanders. And his fragmentary reports on their ship movements suggested they were also repositioning their units to support whatever those orders were. Now if they'd just do enough of that. . . .

Trying to second guess the other guy. They were right before, Haven is trying to lure Manticore into strategic dispersal.

On the face of it, the possibility of locating and attacking someone else's commerce in hyper shouldn't even exist. Maximum reliable scanner range is barely twenty light-minutes, hyper-space is vast, and even knowing a convoy's planned arrival and departure times shouldn't help much.

But appearances can be deceiving. To be sure, hyperspace is vast, yet virtually all its traffic moves down the highways of its grav waves, drawing both its power and absurdly high acceleration from its Warshawski sails. There are only so many efficient grav wave connections from one star system to another, and the optimum points of interchange are known to most navies. So are the points which must be avoided because of high levels of grav turbulence. If a raider knows a given ship's schedule, he doesn't really need its route. He can work through the same astro tables as his target's skipper and project its probable course closely enough to intercept it.

For those not blessed with such foreknowledge, there are still ways. Merchant skippers, for example, vastly prefer to ride a grav wave clear through their final hyper translation. Power costs are lower, and riding the wave through the hyper wall reduces both the structural and physiological stresses. Which means raiders often lurk at points where inbound grav waves intersect a star's hyper limit, waiting for prey to amble up to them.

And, if all else fails, there is always the blind chance method. Ships are at their most vulnerable at and shortly after they translate back into normal space. Their base velocities are low, their sensor systems are still sorting out the sudden influx of n-space information, and for at least ten minutes or so, while their hyper generators recycle, they can't even dodge back into hyper and run away if something comes at them. A translation right on the system ecliptic is the norm, if not the inviolable rule, so a patient raider might put his ship into a solar orbit right on the hyper limit, run his power (and emissions) down to minimum levels, and simply wait until some fat and unwary freighter translates within his interception envelope. With no emissions to betray it, something as tiny as a warship is extremely difficult to spot, and many an unfortunate merchant skipper's first intimation of trouble has been the arrival of the leading missile salvo.

Just a little primer on exactly how to arrange an interception in hyper.

The maximum safe velocity in hyper for any merchantman was barely .5 c. That translated to an effective normal-space velocity of many hundreds of times light-speed, but all that mattered were relative speeds, and their better particle and radiation shielding let Reichman's ships attain a velocity twenty percent greater than that. Which meant that she was currently overtaking the convoy at just under thirty thousand KPS and that the trailing destroyer ought to see them just . . . about . . . now.

Merchie speed of .5 c in hyper, warships get .6 c.

Captain Helen Zilwicki's face was stone as she listened to MacAllister's analysis of the threat thirteen and a half light-minutes behind her tiny squadron. Six of them to her five, and all of them bigger and far more heavily armed. Even the technical edge her ships might have exploited in normal space would hardly matter here, for it paid its biggest dividends in missile engagements, and missiles were useless within a grav wave. No impeller drive could function there; the wave's powerful gravitational forces would burn it out instantly. Which meant any missile vaporized the second its drive kicked in—and that none of her ships had the protection of their own impeller wedges . . . or sidewalls.

She didn't even consider the possibility of breaking free of the wave. It would have restored her sidewalls and let her use her missiles, but her charges were four light-hours into the wave. They'd need eight hours to get clear, and they didn't have eight hours.

Battle in hyper (well, hyper grav waves, specifically) and a bit on the size of a grav wave, at least 4 light-hours across.

Thomas Theisman's jaw clenched as the drive sources came back toward him in attack formation. He folded his hands tightly behind his back and made himself look at Commodore Reichman without expression. She'd been so sure the Manty commander would order the entire convoy, escorts and merchantmen alike, to scatter. After all, she'd pointed out, the grav wave would strip them of the long-range missile advantage, which might have given them the chance to achieve anything worthwhile. That was the whole reason for intercepting here rather than between waves, as Theisman had suggested. No commander would throw his ships away for nothing when scattering meant at least four of his ten ships would survive.

Thomas Theisman had known better, but Annette Reichman had never fought Manticorans before. And because Theisman had lost when he fought them, she'd ignored his warnings with barely veiled patronization.

This guy's back. Seems no one believes him about Manticoran hardware or tactics. Poor fools.

"Commodore, if you fight a conventional closing engagement with your chase armaments, they're going to turn to open their broadsides and give us everything they've got at optimum range."

"Nonsense! That would be suicide!" Reichman snapped. "We'll tear them apart if they come out from behind their sails!"

"Ma'am," he spoke softly, as if to a child, "we out-mass those ships seven to one, and they have to close to energy range. They know what that means as well as we do. So they'll do the only thing they can. They'll open their broadsides to bring every beam they can to bear, and they'll go for our forward alpha nodes. If they take out even one, our own foresail will go down, and this deep into a grav wave—"

He didn't have to complete the sentence. With no forward sail to balance her after sail, it was impossible for any starship to maneuver in a grav wave. They would be trapped on the same vector, at the same velocity. They couldn't even drop out of hyper, because they couldn't control their translation attitude until and unless they could make repairs, and even the tiniest patch of turbulence would tear them apart. Which meant the loss of a single sail would cost Reichman at least two ships, because any ship which lost a sail would have to be towed clear of the wave on a consort's tractors.

"But—" She stopped and swallowed again. "What do you recommend, Captain?" she asked after a moment.

"That we do the same thing. We'll get hurt, probably lose a few ships, but it'll actually reduce our sails' exposure and give us far heavier broadsides and a better chance to take them out before they gut our sails."

Effects of a loss of sail, the sacrificial tradition of Saganami is strong with this one.

Commodore Banton had commanded the squadron's second and third divisions and their screen while Sarnow commanded the first and fourth, but that was only for the record. In fact, Sarnow had informed Honor five minutes into the exercise that both he and Captain Rubenstein, Division 54's senior officer, had just become casualties and that she was in command.

That was all the warning she'd gotten, but it was obvious she'd been thinking ahead, for her own orders had come without any hesitation at all. She'd used the FTL sensor platforms to locate Banton's ships, split her own force into two two-ship divisions, accelerated to intercept velocity, then killed her drives and gone to the electronic and gravitic equivalent of "silent running." But she hadn't stopped there, for she'd known Banton's Achilles had the same ability to spot and track her. And since Honor knew the commodore had plotted her base course before she closed down her emissions, she'd launched electronic warfare drones, programmed to mimic her battlecruisers' drives, on a course designed with malice aforethought to draw Banton into a position of her choice.

The commodore had taken the bait—partly, perhaps, because she didn't expect anyone to use up EW drones (at eight million dollars a pop) in an exercise—and altered course to intercept them. By the time she realized what was really going on, Honor had brought both her own divisions slashing in on purely ballistic courses, wedges and sidewalls down to the very last instant and still operating separately in blatant disregard of conventional tactical wisdom. She'd hit Banton's surprised formation from widely divergent bearings, and her unorthodox approach had used Banton's more traditional formation against her, pounding her lead ships with fire from two directions, confusing her point defense, and using her own lead division to block the return fire of her rearmost ships for almost two full minutes. And, just to make it even better, she'd had Commander Chandler reprogram their screen's antimissile decoys so that the heavy cruisers suddenly looked like battlecruisers.

The decoys had come on-line at the worst possible moment for Banton's tac officer. With no running plot on Honor's "invisible" ships until their drives suddenly came back up, he'd had to sort out who was who before he engaged, and the decoys had confused him just long enough for Nike, Agamemnon, Onslaught, and Invincible to "kill" Banton's flagship and "cripple" her division mate Cassandra with no damage of their own. Defiant and intolerant had done their best after that—indeed, Captain Trinh's stellar performance had gone far to redeem his earlier problems—but they'd never had a chance. The final score had shown the complete destruction of Banton's force, moderate damage to Agamernnon and Invincible, and a mere two laser hits on Nike. Onslaught had escaped completely unscathed and even recovered all but two of the EW drones Honor had used. The drones would require overhaul before they could be reused, but their recovery had saved the Navy something like forty-eight million dollars, and Henke suspected Rubenstein's crew was going to do even more gloating than her own people.

Honor strutting her stuff in a wargame, including going doggo in motion, sending EW drones along her projected path and using them to decoy the enemy ships into position for a kill. The maneuver inspires some of the Battle of Hancock.

"Hi, Honor. Sorry to disturb you, but I thought you'd better know." Her eyebrows knitted in a frown as his grim expression registered. "We just got an arrival signal from a heavy cruiser," his recorded voice continued, then paused. "It's Warlock, Honor," he said, and she went rigid in her chair.

Paul looked out of the screen as if he could see her reaction, and there was compassion in his eyes—and warning—as his image nodded.

"Young's still in command," he said softly, "and he's still senior to you. Watch yourself, okay?"

Dun Dun DUNNN! Alright, I included this just to point out that he's in this story too. In fact, we'll get a look in his head soon and it is not a pretty place.

The bridge was silent as the com officer brought his communication lasers up from standby. Any sort of emission was extremely dangerous under the circumstances, but the relay's position had been plotted with painstaking care. The people who'd planned Operation Argus had known the perimeters of all Manticoran star systems were guarded by sensor platforms whose reach and sensitivity the People's Republic couldn't match, but no surveillance net could cover everything. Their deployment patterns and plans had taken that into consideration, and—so far, at least—they'd been right on the money.

Ogilve snorted at his own choice of cliché, for Argus had cost billions. The heavily stealthed sensor platforms had been inserted from over two light-months out, coasting in out of the silence of interstellar space with all power locked down to absolute minimum. They'd slid through the Manties' sensors like any other bits of space debris, and the tiny trickle of power which had braked them and aligned them in their final, carefully chosen positions had been so small as to be utterly indetectable at anything over a few thousand kilometers.

In point of fact, getting the platforms in had been the easy part. Laymen tended to forget just how huge—and empty—any given star system was. Even the largest starship was less than a mote on such a scale; as long as it radiated no betraying energy signature to attract attention it might as well be invisible, and the sensor arrays were tinier still and equipped with the best stealth systems Haven could produce. Or, Ogilve amended, in this case buy clandestinely from the Solarian League. The biggest risk came from the low-powered, hair-thin lasers that tied them to the central storage relays, but even there the risk had been reduced to absolute minimum. The platforms communicated only via ultra high-speed burst transmissions. Even if someone strayed into their path, it would require an enormous stroke of bad luck for him to realize he'd heard something, and the platforms' programming restricted them from sending if their sensors picked up anything in a position to intercept their messages.

No, there was very little chance of the Manties tumbling to the tiny robotic spies—it was the mailmen who collected their data who had to sweat. Because small as it might be, a starship was larger than any sensor array, and harvesting that information meant a ship had to radiate, however stealthily.

Oglive, another character we'll hear from later. And the big reveal of the Argus Net. Yes, Haven has emplaced advanced spy satellites up and down the Frontier, and been monitoring Mantie ship movements for months. The RMN never even suspected there was a reason they weren't being actively scouted.

This time he did snarl, but he rammed his self-control back into place and banished the expression even while his nerves tingled and spasmed with hatred. Honor Harrington. Lady Harrington. The commonborn slut who'd ruined his career—and now the task group flag captain.

His teeth ground together as he remembered. He hadn't thought much of her the first time he saw her at Saganami Island. She'd been a full form behind him, which should have put her beneath his notice even if she'd been more than some dirt-grubber from Sphinx. And she'd been plain-faced and unsophisticated with her almost shaven hair and beak of a nose, as well. Hardly worth a second look, and certainly not up to his usual standards. But there'd been something about the way she moved, something in the grace of her carriage, which had piqued his interest.

He'd watched her after that. She'd been the pet of the Academy, of course, her and her damned treecat. Oh, she'd pretended she didn't know how the instructors made her their favorite or how everyone fawned over her filthy little beast, but he'd seen it. Even Chief MacDougal, that lout of a phys ed instructor, had doted on her, and Mr. Midshipman Lord Young's interest had grown until he finally made it known.

And the baseborn bitch had turned him down. She'd snubbed him—snubbed him!—in front of his friends. She'd tried to make it seem she didn't know what she was doing, but she had, and when he'd started to put her in her place with a few well-chosen words, that bastard MacDougal had appeared out of nowhere and put him on report for "harassing" her!

No one had turned him down, not since his father's yacht pilot when he was sixteen T-years old, and he'd fixed her ass the next time he caught her alone. Yes, and his father had seen to it she kept her mouth shut about it, too. It should have been the same with Harrington, but it hadn't. Oh, no, not with Harrington.

A low, harsh, hating sound quivered deep in his throat as he remembered his humiliation. He'd planned it so carefully. He'd spent days timing her schedule, until he learned about those private late-night exercise sessions of hers. She liked to turn the grav plates up, and she could have the gym to herself that late, and he'd smiled as he realized he could catch her alone in the showers. He'd even taken the precaution of slipping cotanine into the celery one of her friends kept feeding to her damned treecat. He hadn't got enough into it to kill the little monster, damn it, but it had made him so sleepy she'd left him in her dorm room.

It had been perfect. He'd caught her actually in the shower, naked, and seen the shock and shame in her eyes. He'd savored her panic as he stalked her through the spray, watching her back away while her hands tried ridiculously to cover herself, already tasting his revenge . . . but then something changed. The panic in her eyes had turned into something else when he reached for her to throw her up against the shower wall, and her slippery-wet skin had twisted out of his grasp.

He'd been surprised by her strength as she broke his grip. That was his first thought. And then he'd whooped in anguish as the heel of her right hand slammed into his belly. He'd doubled up, retching with hurt, and her knee had driven up into his crotch like a battering ram.

He'd screamed. Sweat beaded his forehead as he remembered the shame of that moment, the searing agony in his groin and, behind it, the sick, terrible humiliation of defeat. But just stopping him hadn't been enough for the bitch. Her savage, unfair blow had surprised and paralyzed him, and she'd followed through with brutal efficiency.

An elbow had smashed his lips to paste. The edge of a chopping hand had broken his nose. Another crushing blow snapped his collarbone, and her knee ripped up again—this time into his face—as he went down. She'd snapped off two incisors at the gum-line, broken six of his ribs, and left him sobbing in bloody-mouthed agony and terror under the pounding shower as she snatched up her clothing and fled.

Wow, Captain Lord Young needs roughly all the therapy. Or someone to slap the stupid out of him because, again, he tried to rape someone much bigger and stronger than himself, whose really into martial arts and contact sports, which he wasn't.

I do sort of like the idea that both of them are traumatized by that night, so much so they each have minor freak-outs just thinking about the other.

Hoskins Tower was just over four hundred stories tall and a kilometer in diameter—a huge, hollow hexagon of steel and ceramacrete, dotted with air traffic access points and thrusting up from the greenery so far below. There'd been a time when Nouveau Paris' towers, each a small city in its own right, were its pride, but Hoskins Tower's supposedly near-indestructible ceramacrete was already beginning to crack and scale after barely thirty years. Seen close at hand, the tower's skin was leprous with slap-dash patches and repairs, and though it wasn't evident from the outside, Pierre knew its upper twenty-three floors had been closed off and abandoned over five T-years ago because of massive plumbing failures. Hoskins was still on the waiting list for repair crews who, probably, would get around to its pipes someday. Assuming, of course, that the bureaucrats didn't end up diverting them to some more urgent "emergency" (like repairs to President Harris' swimming pool) . . . or that the repair crews didn't decide life would be easier on the Dole and simply quit.

Pierre didn't like Hoskins Tower. It reminded him of too many things from his own past, and the fact that even a Dolist Manager with his clout hadn't been able to get its plumbing fixed infuriated him. But this was "his" district of the capital. He controlled the votes of the people who lived in Hoskins, and it was to him they looked for their share of the welfare system's spoils. That made him a very important man to them—and gave him a security screen here that even Palmer-Levy couldn't match . . . or breach.

Pierre's lips curled back from his teeth as approach control inserted him into the tower's hollow top and his air car began drifting down the patchily lit bore. Despite the physical youth prolong conferred, he was ninety-one T-years old, and he remembered other days. Days when he'd fought his way off the Dole, before the rot had set so deep. There'd been a time when Hoskins Tower's plumbing would have been fixed within days—when the discovery that the bureaucrats in charge of its construction had used substandard materials and evaded building codes throughout the massive structure in order to pocket enormous profits would have led to indictments and prison time. Now, no one even cared.

Hoskins Tower as symbolic of the Republic. A 400 meter hexagonal tower, some of the counter-grav construction perhaps, and the corruption and issues that both plagued the construction and made it impossible to fix.

"Each of us has his or her own reasons for being here. I warn you all now that not all of your fellows are motivated by altruism or principle—quite frankly, those qualities make poor revolutionaries." One or two people flinched at his choice of noun, and he smiled frostily. "To succeed at something like this requires an intense personal commitment. Principle is all very well, but something more is needed, and I've selected you because each of you has that something more. Whether it's personal outrage, anger over something done to you or yours, or simple ambition matters far less than that you have the strength of your motivation and the wit to make it effective. I believe all of you do."

He leaned back, hands still on the table, and let silence linger for a moment. When he spoke again, his voice was cold and harsh.

"For the record, ladies and gentlemen, I won't pretend I felt noble or altruistic when I began my contacts with the CRP and CRU. Quite the contrary, in fact. I was looking to protect my own power base, and why shouldn't I have? I've spent sixty years securing my present position in the Quorum. It was only natural for me to look to my flanks, and I did.

"But that wasn't my entire motive. Anyone with eyes can see the PRH is in trouble. Our economy might as well not exist, our productivity's fallen steadily for over two T-centuries—we exist only as a parasite, drawing our sustenance from the star systems our 'government' conquers to fill the treasury. Yet the bigger we become, the more ramshackle we grow. The Legislaturalists are riddled by factions, each protecting its own little piece of turf, and the Navy is equally politicized. Our so-called 'leaders' are fighting over the choicest cuts of the pie while the Republic's infrastructure rots out from under them—like this very tower around us—and no one seems to care. Or, at least, no one seems to know how to stop it."

He fell silent, letting them listen to his words, then resumed in a quieter but somehow sharper voice.

"I'm older than most of you. I remember times when the government was accountable, at least to the People's Quorum. Now it isn't. I'm considered a power within the Quorum, and I tell you that it's become nothing more than a rubber stamp. We do what we're told, when we're told. In return, we get our own piece of the pie, and because we do, we let the Legislaturalists make plans and formulate policies shaped by their interests, not ours. Plans which are leading the entire Republic straight into disaster."

"Disaster, Mr. Pierre?"

He looked up at the question. It came from a petite, golden-haired woman in the first row of chairs. She wore the gaudy clothing of a Dolist, but there was something subtly less baroque than usual about its cut, and her face bore none of the exaggerated face paint currently in vogue.

"Disaster, Ms. Ransom," Pierre repeated quietly. "Look around you. As long as the government keeps the BLS ahead of inflation, people are happy, but look at the underlying structure. Buildings crumble, the utilities are less and less reliable, our education system is a shambles, gang violence is a daily fact of life in the Prole towers—and still the money goes to the BLS, public entertainments . . . and Internal Security. It goes into keeping us all fat and happy and the Legislaturalists in power, not into reinvestment and repair.

"But even aside from the civilian economy, look at the military. The Navy sucks up an enormous percentage of our total budget, and the admirals are just as corrupt and self-seeking as our political lords and masters. Worse, they're incompetent."

I'm not reading anything I disagree with, the revolution started really well (arguably all of them start out that way) Shame how it all turned out.

"Are you suggesting that the solution is to dismantle the entire system?" she asked, and he snorted.

"We can't," he said, and sensed a wave of relaxation in his audience. "No one can. This system took over two centuries to evolve. Even if we wanted to, we couldn't possibly disassemble it overnight. The BLS is a fact of life; it must remain one for the foreseeable future. The need to loot other planets—and let's be honest; that's precisely what we do—to keep something in the treasury will be with us for decades, whatever changes we initiate in our economy. If we try pulling out too many bricks too quickly, the whole structure will come crashing down on us. This planet can't even feed itself without outside food sources! What do you think would happen if we suddenly found ourselves without the foreign exchange to buy that food?"

Silence answered him, and he nodded grimly.

"Exactly. Those of us who want radical reform had better understand right now that accomplishing it is going to be a long and difficult task. And those of us who are less interested in reform and more in power—and there are people like that in this room right now," he added with a thin smile, "had better understand that without at least some reform, there won't be anything to hold power in within another ten years. Reformers need power to act; power-seekers need reform to survive. Remember that, all of you. The time to fight over policy decisions will come after the Legislaturalists are toppled, not before. Is that understood?"

Pierre isn't going to end the BLS or wars of expansion, at least not right away. He does get some points for realizing and admitting that up front.

"Very well." He pinched the bridge of his nose, then went on speaking past his raised hand. "No doubt you're all wondering why I called you together to say these things to you now. Well," he lowered his hand, and his eyes were hard, "there's a reason. All of you have heard reports about incidents between us and the Manties, right?" Heads nodded once more, and he snorted bitterly. "Of course you have. Public Information is playing them for all they're worth, drumming up a sense of crisis to keep people quiet. But what Information isn't telling you is that the Manties aren't responsible for them. We're deliberately orchestrating those incidents as the preliminary to an all-out attack on the Manticoran Alliance."

Someone gasped aloud, and Pierre nodded again.

"That's right, they're finally going to do it—after letting the Manties get stronger and stronger, dig in deeper and deeper. This isn't going to be like any of our other 'wars.' The Manties are too tough for that, and frankly, our own admirals are too gutless and incompetent." Pain wrenched at his expression, but he smoothed it back out and leaned over the table.

"The idiots in the Octagon have put together a 'campaign' and sold it to the cabinet. I don't have all the details, but even if it were the best plan ever written, I wouldn't trust our Navy to execute it. Not against someone as good as the Manties. And I do know that they've already had several disasters in the early phases—disasters they're concealing even from the Quorum."

He gazed grimly at his audience, and his voice was more than harsh when he resumed. It was ugly with hate, and his eyes blazed.

"Among those disasters was one that concerned me personally. My son and half his squadron were destroyed—annihilated—carrying out one of their 'minor provocations.' They were thrown away, wasted for no return at all, and the bastards refuse even to acknowledge that anything happened to them! If I didn't have my own sources in the military—"

Add a personal stake.

"All right, it's time to commit ourselves. War with Manticore is coming. There's no way we could stop it even if we wanted to, but if the Navy continues to screw up, it's going to turn into a disaster. And disasters, ladies and gentlemen, are a revolution's opportunities. But if we're going to take advantage of them, we have to mobilize and plan now. Among you, and with the addition of my military and security contacts, you represent all the elements we need for success—if you all commit yourself to work with me from this moment on and mean it."

He reached into his jacket and extracted a sheet of paper. He unfolded it and looked at them with cold, challenging eyes.

"This is an oath to do just that, ladies and gentlemen." He held it up, letting them see the few neatly printed lines—and the two signatures beneath them—and bared his teeth.

"Wallace and I have already signed it," he said quietly. "If InSec gets hold of this, he and I are dead men, but it proves our commitment. Now it's time for you to prove yours." He laid the sheet of paper on the table and uncapped a stylus. "Once you sign this, there's no backing out. I have every reason to keep it safely concealed, and I assure you I will. But if one of us betrays the others—if one of us even screws up and accidentally leads InSec to us—it will be found. But by the same token, each of us will know we all know that. That we are committed to see it through to the end."

He laid the stylus on the document and leaned back, watching them silently. Sweat beaded more than one pale face, and the silence stretched out intolerably, but then a chair scraped on the bare floor.

Cordelia Ransom was the first to walk to the table and sign.

Defy everyone present to put up or shut up. Not bad.

"Absolutely. Honor, I was his exec for damned near two T-years. You get to know someone in that long, and Pavel Young is a toad. He enjoys all the perquisites of his rank, but he'd never in a million years risk his career like you risked yours in Basilisk. And if he'd been in Yeltsin, he would've set a new hyper speed record pulling out. In short, my sweet, he's got the moral—and physical—courage of a beetle, and you beat the hell out of him when you were only nineteen T-years old. Believe me, his worst nightmare is finding himself in arm's reach of you for a repeat performance!"

Honor realized her mouth was hanging open and snapped it shut, and he laughed again at her expression. She stared into his eyes, trying to see how much of what he'd just said he really meant and how much was intended only to comfort her, and her expression slowly eased as she realized it was all true. He might be wrong, but he wasn't just saying it to make her feel better.

She snuggled back down against him, grappling with a vision of Pavel Young she'd never before entertained, and Paul left her to it. She studied the hideous memory of that night in the showers from a different perspective, and this time she saw the fear—the terror—under his hatred as she took him down. And she remembered other things, as well. Remembered Pavel Young avoiding contact sports, the way he backed down on the rare occasions when one of his social equals challenged his petty cruelties. . . .

Honor finally realizes how scared Young is of her.

"Hold it, Jack," Banton cut in. "The Admiral may be onto something. Even if they do spot us, at optimum missile range we'd have two or three minutes to bring our impellers up. If we hold them at maximum readiness, we can get them up in ninety seconds. Sidewalls, too—and we'd still get our launch off."

90 seconds to start up idling starship impellers and sidewalls.

Young leaned back, considering the staff officer from under lowered lids. Houseman. One of the Waldsheim Housemans from New Bavaria, no doubt—he had the look. Young curled a mental lip in contempt. The Housemans were notorious for their extreme Liberal politics, always whining about "the little man" and "social responsibility". Which, Young had noticed, didn't prevent any of them from enjoying every advantage their own lofty birth and wealth provided. It only gave them a smug sense of complacency when they looked down their noses at other people who did the same things without mouthing pious platitudes to proclaim their own worthiness.

-snip-
Young bared his teeth again. It wasn't quite the thing to encourage an officer to criticize one of his superiors, but Houseman wasn't just any officer. He was chief of staff to a commodore Harrington would have to deal with on a regular basis, and Van Slyke would have to be superhuman not to be influenced by his chief of staff's opinion of the flag captain.

"Actually, you may have a point, Commander," he said, settling in for a long—and profitable—conversation. "I remember back at Saganami Island she had a tendency to push people. Always within the letter of the regs, of course, but I always thought . . ."

One the one hand, it's quite reasonable for Honor's two enemies in the squadron to meet. It even brings Houseman II back into the story. On the other hand, this collaboration will be important approximately never, brought up never and change exactly bupkiss of what happens.

"I think they're trying for too fine a degree of coordination." Givens waved at the display. "They've been turning the pressure up for weeks now. At first it was just 'mystery' raiders we couldn't positively ID, and when we knew they were Peeps, there was no combat. Then they started actively harassing our patrols. Now they're pouncing on convoys and system pickets with hunt-and-kill tactics. But every time they do something to up the ante, it starts at one point, then ripples out north and south."

"Indicating what?"

"Indicating that each increase in pressure is the result of a specific authorization from some central command node. Look at the timing, Sir." She reached into the holo, running her fingers up and down the frontier. "If you assume each fresh escalation was authorized from someplace fifty or sixty light-years inside the Peep border—like Barnett, for example—the delay in the incidents to either side of the first incident in the new pattern is just about right for the difference in the flight times to those points from Barnett."

She withdrew her hand and frowned at the display, worrying her lower lip between her teeth.

"So they're coordinating from a central node," Caparelli agreed. "But we figured that all along, Pat. In fact, we're doing the same thing. So how does that constitute 'too cute for their own good'?"

"We're not doing the same thing, Sir. We're channeling information and authorizing general deployments, but we're trusting local COs to use their own judgments because of the com lag. It looks to me like the Peeps are authorizing each successive wave of activity from Barnett, which implies a two-way command and control link, not just information flow. They're waiting until they hear back, then sending out orders to begin the next stage, then waiting for fresh reports before authorizing the next step. They're playing brontosaurus—that's why this whole thing seems to be building up so ponderously."

Central control, allowing them to carefully time and pull off a great triumph.

"The Graysons have spent the last year fortifying their system with our assistance, Your Grace. We're still a long, long way from completing our plans, but as you can see, we've made considerable progress and Grayson itself is well covered by orbital forts. They're small, by our standards, because they're left over from the Grayson-Masada cold war, but there are a lot of them, and they've been heavily refitted and rearmed. In addition, the Grayson Navy itself must now be considered equivalent to at least a heavy task group of our own Navy—a truly enormous accomplishment for a seventeen-month effort from their beginning tech base—and Admiral D'Orville's Second Fleet is an extremely powerful formation. All in all, Sir, this system has turned into an excellent place for an attacker to break his teeth."

"But it also happens to belong to a sovereign ally of the Star Kingdom, Admiral." Concern and more than a hint of disapproval tinged Cromarty's voice. "You're suggesting that we deliberately draw the enemy into attacking one of our friends—without consulting them."

"I fully realize the implications of my suggestion, Your Grace, but I'm afraid we've reached a point at which we don't have time for consultations. If Admiral Givens is correct—and I think she is—the Peeps are counting down against a timetable they may have spent years perfecting. We have our own defensive plans, but allowing them to begin a war on their terms, at a time of their choice, against a target of their choice, is extremely dangerous. If at all possible, we need to draw them into a false start or, at least, into attacking a target of our choice. But to do that, Your Grace, we have to get the information we want them to have into their hands in time for them to rethink their operations and send out new orders from their central command node before their scheduled 'X' hour.

"The key to the plan is one of Admiral Givens' communication officers at BuPlan. The Havenite ambassador's gone to great pains to suborn him. He's been working for them for almost two T-years now, but what they don't know—we hope—is that he's actually working for Admiral Givens. To date, his reports have been one hundred percent accurate, but he's reported only information which couldn't hurt us or which we were reasonably certain the Peeps could obtain by other means.

"What we propose is to use him to inform the Peeps, through Ambassador Gowan, that the activity around Talbot Station has concerned us so deeply that we're transferring several of D'Orville's battle squadrons there as reinforcements. We'll be sending replacements to Yeltsin, of course, but not for two or three weeks. At the same time as he passes the information off to Gowan, we'll send the same instructions to Admiral D'Orville through regular channels. As far as anyone will know, it will be an absolutely genuine order . . . but the same courier boat will carry separate orders under a diplomatic cover instructing Admiral D'Orville to disregard the redeployment instructions. If the Peeps have sources in our communications sections that we don't know about, they may pick up the 'official' orders as confirmation of our double agent's report.

"If our present analysis of Peep operations is accurate, they're probably coordinating from their base in the Barnett System. If we can get this false information to Barnett quickly enough, whoever's in command there will have a window to hit Yeltsin before our 'replacements' arrive. Only when he does, he'll find out none of D'Orville's ships ever left."

"I understand that, Sir Thomas, but what if he hits Yeltsin hard enough to take the system despite Admiral D'Orville's strength? Bad enough that we're asking our allies to take the brunt of the first blow, but what if that blow is heavy enough to conquer them despite all we can do?"

Caparelli leaned back in his chair, his face like stone. He was silent for several seconds. When he spoke again, his voice was heavy.

"Your Grace, they're going to attack us. Neither I nor any member of my staff doubts that, and when they do, Yeltsin will be a primary target. It has to be, given the shallowness of our frontier at that point. I realize the risk I'm suggesting we expose the Graysons to, but it's my opinion that drawing the Peeps into attacking us there on our terms is our most effective option. In a best-case scenario, they'll underestimate D'Orville's strength and attack in insufficient force, in which case officers like D'Orville and High Admiral Matthews will hand them their heads. And even if we lose D'Orville's entire fleet and Yeltsin, we'll hurt them very, very badly, and a prompt counterattack from Manticore should retake the system with an overall loss rate which will be heavily in our favor."

Third Yeltsin set up, once they get approval form the Grayson Ambassador and the Protector's son.

"Um." Parnell stared back down at the message board, wanting to believe and fighting his own desires. If only they'd been able to extend the Argus net to Yeltsin! But there hadn't been enough time to set it up—even assuming the seething deep-space activity in Yeltsin hadn't ruled it out. The Graysons seemed intent on smelting down every asteroid in the system for their orbital and planetary projects, and Nav Int had decided they were too likely to stumble over one of the sensor platforms, however heavily stealthed, and blow the entire Argus operation. Which meant he didn't have the same "look" into Yeltsin. Maybe that was his problem. He'd gotten used to more detailed intelligence than he had any right to expect.

The amazing, frantic pace of orbital construction and industry by the mighty Kerbal Graysons!

And yes, it's terrible to get too reliant on a trick. especially an information source.

Barnett was a hundred and forty-six light-years from Yeltsin, a three-week trip for superdreadnoughts, and his window was barely twenty-six days wide.

3 week flight from Barnett to Yeltsin, one more week to Manticore. 40 light-years from Manticore to Grayson sound right?

[Terralthra]

One the one hand, it's quite reasonable for Honor's two enemies in the squadron to meet. It even brings Houseman II back into the story. On the other hand, this collaboration will be important approximately never, brought up never and change exactly bupkiss of what happens.

It is brought up again, but blink and you'll miss it.

Not even the fact that [Young] and Houseman obviously were doing their best to alienate Commodore Van Slyke from her could impair her grim pleasure - though it might have, she conceded honestly, if Van Slyke had been willing to pay them the least attention

[Simon_Jester]

Haven reaction to the loss of Pierre's squadron, sealed orders for operational security.

Also, a Star Knight manages to inflict serious damage on two PN battlecruisers. This suggests that the job Honor did on Thunder of God in the previous novel wasn't entirely a fluke- high missile firepower and superior electronics really does give Manticoran heavy cruisers enough punch to at least land serious, meaningful hits on ships twice their tonnage, even when outnumbered.

Thomas Theisman had known better, but Annette Reichman had never fought Manticorans before. And because Theisman had lost when he fought them, she'd ignored his warnings with barely veiled patronization.

This guy's back. Seems no one believes him about Manticoran hardware or tactics. Poor fools.

Actually, in this case Reichman is arguably making the right call, because missile combat gives RMN ships a disproportionate advantage. Here, Reichman's ships may take a few big nasty hits from the RMN escorts' energy weapons, but they're still going to deliver a lot more punishment than they absorb. And they'll do it without the risk of ending up in a missile duel where they inflict almost no damage on the enemy until they've been mauled by Manticoran missile fire.

Remember my "WHERE IS YOUR MISSILEGOD NOW" line? That was referring to a scenario a lot like this- the idea of deliberately jumping an enemy inside a grav wave where missiles are useless and ships have to fight with conventional beam weapons.

"That we do the same thing. We'll get hurt, probably lose a few ships, but it'll actually reduce our sails' exposure and give us far heavier broadsides and a better chance to take them out before they gut our sails."

Effects of a loss of sail, the sacrificial tradition of Saganami is strong with this one.

To summarize the aftermath, Captain Helen Zilwicki is killed with her entire command protecting the convoy, including a ship carrying her husband and daughter. The Zilwickis show up again about 10-15 years later- Helen Junior as a midshipwoman involved in events in the Talbot Cluster, and Anton Zilwicki as a Manticoran spy heavily involved in the events that lead to Manticore discovering the Mesan Alignment.

Oglive, another character we'll hear from later. And the big reveal of the Argus Net. Yes, Haven has emplaced advanced spy satellites up and down the Frontier, and been monitoring Mantie ship movements for months. The RMN never even suspected there was a reason they weren't being actively scouted.

The RMN later gets revenge by using its destroyers to picket Havenite star systems; the destroyers may not be as 'invisible' as an Argus platform, but they're damnably hard for Havenites to chase down.

Wow, Captain Lord Young needs roughly all the therapy. Or someone to slap the stupid out of him because, again, he tried to rape someone much bigger and stronger than himself, whose really into martial arts and contact sports, which he wasn't.

If Honor's beating couldn't slap the stupid out of him, nothing will.

Hoskins Tower as symbolic of the Republic. A 400 meter hexagonal tower, some of the counter-grav construction perhaps, and the corruption and issues that both plagued the construction and made it impossible to fix.

One of the problems with massive construction like this is that it's very hard to either demolish or repair- good luck fixing pipes that are buried in a meter of 'nigh-indestructible' masonry.

I'm not reading anything I disagree with, the revolution started really well (arguably all of them start out that way) Shame how it all turned out.

The political pressure of the war, and of the more wildly-impractical elements of the revolutionary, screwed things up pretty badly. Basically, Pierre couldn't stop to fix the economy because there was a full blown war on, and he couldn't effectively stop people further out on the political spectrum (i.e. Ransom) from doing things that Pierre himself would have regretted or tried to avoid.

[Ahriman238]

Actually, in this case Reichman is arguably making the right call, because missile combat gives RMN ships a disproportionate advantage. Here, Reichman's ships may take a few big nasty hits from the RMN escorts' energy weapons, but they're still going to deliver a lot more punishment than they absorb. And they'll do it without the risk of ending up in a missile duel where they inflict almost no damage on the enemy until they've been mauled by Manticoran missile fire.

Remember my "WHERE IS YOUR MISSILEGOD NOW" line? That was referring to a scenario a lot like this- the idea of deliberately jumping an enemy inside a grav wave where missiles are useless and ships have to fight with conventional beam weapons.

Oh, jumping the convoy in the grav wave was highly intelligent, Reichman called that the convoy would scatter, Theisman that the outmatched escorts would throw themselves at the attackers. Theisman was also right about them turning to deliver a broadside even though it would kill them, but that time Reichman listened.

To summarize the aftermath, Captain Helen Zilwicki is killed with her entire command protecting the convoy, including a ship carrying her husband and daughter. The Zilwickis show up again about 10-15 years later- Helen Junior as a midshipwoman involved in events in the Talbot Cluster, and Anton Zilwicki as a Manticoran spy heavily involved in the events that lead to Manticore discovering the Mesan Alignment.

Helen with her two outmatched ships manages 3 kills and a sail-disable, forcing one survivor to tow the disabled one to safety, and Oglive decides against pursuit with a single ship. And you forgot Berry who became a queen.

One of the problems with massive construction like this is that it's very hard to either demolish or repair- good luck fixing pipes that are buried in a meter of 'nigh-indestructible' masonry.

They can carve through starship armor, I'm sure they can manage this. Granted, it is a larger, more complicated sort of project, but Pierre was just grumbling to himself that in his childhood it would be a five day job, it's the corruption and idiotic regulations that have kept him from fixing the plumbing for years.

The political pressure of the war, and of the more wildly-impractical elements of the revolutionary, screwed things up pretty badly. Basically, Pierre couldn't stop to fix the economy because there was a full blown war on, and he couldn't effectively stop people further out on the political spectrum (i.e. Ransom) from doing things that Pierre himself would have regretted or tried to avoid.

"There are two major problems a revolutionary must face, assuming, in fact, that his revolution succeeds. First is the question "Now what?" Someone must be in charge, some law must be established, and everyone will have their own idea of how it should go. Either the revolution splinters or compromises are made as everyone realizes they can't have precisely the government they wanted. Second, the revolution must almost immediately fortify against their neighbors, who will see weakness in the exchange of power.

Between these two factors, the revolution is destroyed or transformed. Single slogans are abandoned in a more complicated world, while unit and clear direction are lost."

Not a new story, by any stretch of the imagination.

[Terralthra]

Helen with her two outmatched ships manages 3 kills and a sail-disable, forcing one survivor to tow the disabled one to safety, and Oglive decides against pursuit with a single ship. And you forgot Berry who became a queen.

He didn't forget her, she isn't here. Helen and Anton meet Berry on Old Earth years after this incident.

[Ahriman238]

Helen with her two outmatched ships manages 3 kills and a sail-disable, forcing one survivor to tow the disabled one to safety, and Oglive decides against pursuit with a single ship. And you forgot Berry who became a queen.

He didn't forget her, she isn't here. Helen and Anton meet Berry on Old Earth years after this incident.

That's right. Heh, eventually the Zilwicki family gets sort of big and complicated, even if you don't count Cachat as an honorary member.

[Batman]

Let's see-Anton, Helen, Berry and Anton's ladyfriend (whose name escapes me at the moment). Even if we include Cachat that doesn't seem all that sprawling to me?
Of course I might be missing a lot of people from the anthologies but as far as I can tell, for the main series, that's about it.

[Simon_Jester]

Oh, jumping the convoy in the grav wave was highly intelligent, Reichman called that the convoy would scatter, Theisman that the outmatched escorts would throw themselves at the attackers. Theisman was also right about them turning to deliver a broadside even though it would kill them, but that time Reichman listened.

Well, the interesting point here is that Reichman is not actually stupid and makes a good tactical decision which results in the PN potting several Manticoran warships, but misread the RMN doctrine for convoy escort as being a bit less "BANZAI" than it really was.

I wouldn't be surprised if Havenite and maybe even Sollie doctrine here would be to write off (some of) the merchantmen by scattering and trying to engage one or two of the enemy raiders on more favorable terms. You can make a case for warships being less expendable than merchantmen, and over the long haul in a war of attrition the RMN could lose a lot of light warships this way if they make a habit out of this.

The RMN doctrine of routinely sacrificing convoy escorts makes more sense in the context of their long tradition of 'peacetime' commerce protection against various random raiders and privateers, who are few enough in number that Manticore can win a war of attrition.

If a planetary 'privateer' force with its own cruisers know that an RMN destroyer will cheerfully die fighting, that may deter the raiding cruisers from attacking a Manticoran convoy even if they expect to win that fight. After all, it really isn't worth putting one of their CAs in the hospital to put that destroyer in the morgue.

But against a larger, better equipped opponent that calculation changes. Haven is probably quite happy to accept the outcome of brutal, damaging fights between PN and RMN warships, if that's what it takes to attrite the RMN commerce protection force and reduce their ability to run merchantmen in areas threatened by Haven.

Helen with her two outmatched ships manages 3 kills and a sail-disable, forcing one survivor to tow the disabled one to safety, and Oglive decides against pursuit with a single ship. And you forgot Berry who became a queen.

What are the ship classes here? Do we have names, weight categories? Who's doing what?

One of the problems with massive construction like this is that it's very hard to either demolish or repair- good luck fixing pipes that are buried in a meter of 'nigh-indestructible' masonry.

They can carve through starship armor, I'm sure they can manage this. Granted, it is a larger, more complicated sort of project, but Pierre was just grumbling to himself that in his childhood it would be a five day job, it's the corruption and idiotic regulations that have kept him from fixing the plumbing for years.

Yes; behind the scenes though I'd point out that this is an issue. You can't just call in Bob the Plumber with his pickup truck to fix something like this; it might well take heavy machinery and dedicated equipment, and trained personnel to do it properly without causing further damage to the structure of the building.

Thus, the ability to build and maintain such large, heavily built structures is even more strongly tied to the health and strength of Haven's technical infrastructure than one might think at first glance. It's not just that all random tasks are impossible because of Haven being too fucked to accomplish anything. It's that important, complicated, challenging tasks are beyond the social, political, and industrial capital of a society which is steadily sliding from "First World" down to "Third World" standards of governance, organization, and education. So big awesome buildings that Old Haven could build can no longer be maintained by New Haven because of this decline.

"There are two major problems a revolutionary must face, assuming, in fact, that his revolution succeeds. First is the question "Now what?" Someone must be in charge, some law must be established, and everyone will have their own idea of how it should go. Either the revolution splinters or compromises are made as everyone realizes they can't have precisely the government they wanted. Second, the revolution must almost immediately fortify against their neighbors, who will see weakness in the exchange of power.

Between these two factors, the revolution is destroyed or transformed. Single slogans are abandoned in a more complicated world, while unit and clear direction are lost."

Not a new story, by any stretch of the imagination.

Hm. Who are you quoting? Cool-sounding.

Anyway, if Pierre had pulled his revolution in 1904 before the war broke out, he'd have had a lot more leeway to do it... but then, it was his perception that war was inevitable that made him do it in the first place. Probably his biggest and most tragic blunder was thinking that right as the war started was the time to stage his revolution, because that was exactly the time when the chaos in the PRH's government was going to cause the most damage, and when it would be the hardest to effect change because of the hard-and-fast survival needs imposed by the war.

[andrewgpaul]

Probably his biggest and most tragic blunder was thinking that right as the war started was the time to stage his revolution, because that was exactly the time when the chaos in the PRH's government was going to cause the most damage, and when it would be the hardest to effect change because of the hard-and-fast survival needs imposed by the war.

In another way, though, the war was helping Pierre to make inroads into his aims - the BLS was being held flat or possibly even reduced and the decline in education standards was beginning to be arrested, wasn't it? Mind you, whatever happened, Pierre and his CPS was fucked; without the war, they wouldn't be able to turn round the social issues without massive riots, and with the war, they were losing. And, of course, he demonstrated that a revolution could succeed, which arguably gave McQueen and Theisman ideas.

[Ahriman238]

Well, the interesting point here is that Reichman is not actually stupid and makes a good tactical decision which results in the PN potting several Manticoran warships, but misread the RMN doctrine for convoy escort as being a bit less "BANZAI" than it really was.

I wouldn't be surprised if Havenite and maybe even Sollie doctrine here would be to write off (some of) the merchantmen by scattering and trying to engage one or two of the enemy raiders on more favorable terms. You can make a case for warships being less expendable than merchantmen, and over the long haul in a war of attrition the RMN could lose a lot of light warships this way if they make a habit out of this.

The RMN doctrine of routinely sacrificing convoy escorts makes more sense in the context of their long tradition of 'peacetime' commerce protection against various random raiders and privateers, who are few enough in number that Manticore can win a war of attrition.

If a planetary 'privateer' force with its own cruisers know that an RMN destroyer will cheerfully die fighting, that may deter the raiding cruisers from attacking a Manticoran convoy even if they expect to win that fight. After all, it really isn't worth putting one of their CAs in the hospital to put that destroyer in the morgue.

But against a larger, better equipped opponent that calculation changes. Haven is probably quite happy to accept the outcome of brutal, damaging fights between PN and RMN warships, if that's what it takes to attrite the RMN commerce protection force and reduce their ability to run merchantmen in areas threatened by Haven.

Makes sense.

Helen with her two outmatched ships manages 3 kills and a sail-disable, forcing one survivor to tow the disabled one to safety, and Oglive decides against pursuit with a single ship. And you forgot Berry who became a queen.

What are the ship classes here? Do we have names, weight categories? Who's doing what?

The Manticoran convoy has 5 freighters carrying equipment and personnel to Grayson, escorted by two light cruisers and three destroyers, classes unidentified. The attackers are six heavy cruisers, tentatively identified as Scimitar-class by the Manties. Only one ship from each side is named, the Peep Commodore Ogive's flagship is PNS Sword while the destroyer that first detected them is HMS Hotspur (a Hornblower reference.)

The CAs pounce from a hidden whorl of hyperspace and begin overtaking the convoy, detected at 300 million klicks out with an estimated three hours to intercept (the convoy) by the Hotspur which calls the flag and falls back to try and identify. Upon ID, captain Zilwicki orders the freighters to scatter and the escort to engage the enemy. This is when Theisman tells Oglive that the Manties will turn at the last moment before energy range to present their broadsides which are unshielded while riding a grav wave. Sure it makes their death that tiny bit more certain, but it gives them the best chance of destroying or at least damaging the enemy too much to pursue. Please note that it the Peeps could take out the escort without casualties, they would have one ship each to go after each of the fleeing freighters. Theisman recommends the Peeps do the same turn-to-broadside maneuver to end this quickly and protect their drives.

We don't see the rest of the battle. Just Anton holding his daughter while people on the transport speculate whether that explosion was one of ours or theirs and the final report is given as I said. Total destruction of the escort, but they killed three of the heavies and crippled a fourth.

Yes; behind the scenes though I'd point out that this is an issue. You can't just call in Bob the Plumber with his pickup truck to fix something like this; it might well take heavy machinery and dedicated equipment, and trained personnel to do it properly without causing further damage to the structure of the building.

Thus, the ability to build and maintain such large, heavily built structures is even more strongly tied to the health and strength of Haven's technical infrastructure than one might think at first glance. It's not just that all random tasks are impossible because of Haven being too fucked to accomplish anything. It's that important, complicated, challenging tasks are beyond the social, political, and industrial capital of a society which is steadily sliding from "First World" down to "Third World" standards of governance, organization, and education. So big awesome buildings that Old Haven could build can no longer be maintained by New Haven because of this decline.

Agreed, less Bob the plumber and more Bob, 50 or so of his closest friends with a crane and some chem-catalyst gear.

"There are two major problems a revolutionary must face, assuming, in fact, that his revolution succeeds. First is the question "Now what?" Someone must be in charge, some law must be established, and everyone will have their own idea of how it should go. Either the revolution splinters or compromises are made as everyone realizes they can't have precisely the government they wanted. Second, the revolution must almost immediately fortify against their neighbors, who will see weakness in the exchange of power.

Between these two factors, the revolution is destroyed or transformed. Single slogans are abandoned in a more complicated world, while unit and clear direction are lost."

Not a new story, by any stretch of the imagination.

Hm. Who are you quoting? Cool-sounding.

Leo Ward, my first college history teacher. No reason you'd know him, unless you were reading every history paper ever published, and I'm more paraphrasing him anyways. He's a lot less formal than that in speech and a lot more so in papers.

Anyway, if Pierre had pulled his revolution in 1904 before the war broke out, he'd have had a lot more leeway to do it... but then, it was his perception that war was inevitable that made him do it in the first place. Probably his biggest and most tragic blunder was thinking that right as the war started was the time to stage his revolution, because that was exactly the time when the chaos in the PRH's government was going to cause the most damage, and when it would be the hardest to effect change because of the hard-and-fast survival needs imposed by the war.

The war afforded him both motive and opportunity. And in fairness, Manticore did give him several months to consolidate his power base and purge untrustworthy elements, because it seemed more sportsmanlike, which he did with a will.


Anyways, here's the second half I would have put up, and you know, the third quarter of the book really moves around. We're with Parnell, no the convoy ambush, now the Peep ship making an Argus run, now Caparelli, now Rollins, now Honor, now Parks, etc. I didn't notice it so much reading through, but now it really stands out.

The small, nondescript man in Robert Pierre's office didn't look like an ogre. Oscar Saint-Just was a mild-mannered man who neither raised his voice, drank, nor swore. He had a wife and two lovely children, and he dressed like some low-level bureaucrat.

He was also First Undersecretary for Internal Security, Constance Palmer-Levy's second in command, and his mild voice had sent more people than even he could count into oblivion.

Meet Oscar. Nice man, no bad habits, loves his wife and children, and will order you and all your family killed in the same tone of voice he orders his morning coffee with. Obviously named for Louis Antoine Saint-Just "the Angel of Death" who drafted the 1793 French constitution, and famously served as a commissar to the Army of the Rhine. Historical Saint-Just was likewise famous for never losing his calm, and became a sort of public face for the Reign of Terror to everyone who had to sit through a documentary about the thing.

With later events, I'm afraid I associate Oscar Saint-Just a bit more with Beria than Louis Antoine.

"And Constance?"

"That part of the plan is ready to go right now—thanks, again, to Cordelia." Pierre smiled. "She didn't have to work around anyone to bring it off, either. The CRU's Central Action Committee jumped at the thought of it, crisis or no crisis. I'm afraid Constance hasn't made herself as popular with them as she could have since Frankel's assassination."

"Neither have I," Saint-just said quietly. "I do trust they won't try for a double-header in an excess of enthusiasm?"

"If I thought there was any chance of that, I would've intervened personally." Pierre shook his head. "No, Cordelia's stressing the need to give 'InSec's storm-troopers'—that's you, Oscar—'time to reflect on the People's object lesson'. She's really quite good at agit-prop, you know. Perhaps we can convince her to take Public Information instead of the Treasury."

And here the troubles begin...

He circled the last ventilator head and peered out at the open stretch between him and the edge of the tower. Wind flapped his clothing, and that was another cause for worry. Their primary escape plan called for a counter-grav free-fall leap off the tower roof, and with this much wind to blow them back into the tower as they fell—

Counter-grav base jumping for fun and quick escapes. Just mind those winds.

A five-shot burst of nonexplosive darts tore through the InSec man in a spray of blood. He didn't even have time to scream, and Usher grunted in satisfaction as he glided further out onto the roof, head swiveling from side to side and pulser poised in a two-handed combat grip. Their briefing had insisted there was only the one guard, but Usher had seen too many operations blow up from faulty intelligence to take that for granted.

Nonexploding pulser darts used to quickly and nearly silently kill a security guard.

The air car looked like a luxury civilian limo and boasted the internal fittings to match, but it was fast, heavily armored, and equipped with a sophisticated sensor suite based on the Marines' forward reconnaissance vehicles, and its pilot was a decorated combat veteran. Palmer-Levy smiled at him as she settled into her seat, and he nodded back respectfully, waiting until the hatch closed before bringing up his turbines and counter-grav. The limousine lifted without even a curtsy, and he sent it gliding along the ramp toward the outer access point.

The Head of Internal Security's personal air-limo has military-grade sensors, armor and speed, plus a decorated combat pilot. Nice.

The launching charge lit the tower roof like lightning as it spat the Viper missile from the tube. Its tiny impeller drive kicked in almost instantly, accelerating it at over two thousand gravities even as its sensors picked up the glare of reflected laser light from the air car below and in front of it, and its nose dipped.

Viper anti-air impeller missile. 2,000 Gs of accel (that's what, 19 KPS2?) and they had to paint the limo. Don't know if it exploded or shredded the air-car with gravity planes, because the book focuses on poetically describing the detonation of the car's hydrogen fuel-tanks (fusion powered?)

The original plan had given good promise of success against Hancock. Admiral Coatsworth's arrival from Barnett would increase his own "official" strength by over fifty percent, and the Manties wouldn't even know Coatsworth was coming until he hit Zanzibar in their rear. With Coatsworth behind them and the Seaford task force in front of them, they'd be caught in a vise.

But if Hancock was empty, the entire ops plan went straight out the lock. There was no telling where the Manties were, or in what strength—not, at least, until the other Argus collectors reported in. Still, Hancock was the only Manty repair facility in this sector. If he was going to have to hunt for them anyway, depriving them of anywhere to repair damages would be an invaluable first step.

Don't you hate it when the enemy messes up our plans and schedules? Well, probably not so much when he offers his only repair base on a platter.

"Admiral Chin, I'll want your squadron to probe Hancock as we go in." Chin nodded, but her surprise showed, for her dreadnoughts were less powerful than the other battle squadrons.

"I haven't lost my senses, Admiral," Rollins said dryly. "Your ships are lighter, but they should be more than adequate to deal with battlecruisers, and if we're not going to get anything bigger, I at least want to nail as many of them as possible before they run. Besides, if there is something nasty waiting for us, you can pull a higher acceleration than superdreadnoughts."

In short, he thought, they could get the hell out of it faster than anything else he had, and he saw understanding in Chin's eyes as she nodded.

"And Admiral West's battlecruisers, Sir?" she asked.

"We'll attach them to you, but don't let him get too far ahead of you. His squadron's understrength to start with—I don't want him tangling with Manties at three-to-two odds while you're too far astern to assist."

Still going to be careful and probe first with the faster ships. The ones that are more than heavy and numerous enough to deal with the BCs they expect.

HMS Arrowhead and the two other destroyers from her division were cast in the role of aggressors for this particular exercise, and, at the moment, Arrowhead and Attack were busy pretending to be holes in space and watching the rest of the flotilla look for them. Every system was powered down to a bare trickle while his passive sensors tracked the other nine destroyers and the light cruiser bumbling along astern of them in the role of a "merchantman." Another couple of hours should bring the whole "convoy" within missile range, and, at the moment, every one of those destroyers was looking in exactly the wrong direction. There were going to be some red faces at the exercise debrief, he thought complacently.

The Manticorans in Yorik are playing a little convoy escort wargame. Kind of grim, considering what we just saw happen to a convoy.

"Excuse me, Skipper, but I just picked up something odd. It— There it is again."

"What?" Tribeca spun his chair toward his tactical officer and frowned. "There what is, Becky?"

"I don't know, Sir. It's like . . ." Her voice trailed off and she shook her head, then looked at the com officer. "Hal, sweep zero-eight-zero to one-two-zero. I think it's a com laser."

"On it," the com officer replied, and Tribeca's frown deepened.

The Argus platforms won't transmit if they detect a ship anywhere where they might have the least chance of intercepting the comm-laser or detecting the satellite or receiving ship. But right now, there are highly stealthed, drive-dead destroyers out here in addition to the stealthed cruiser collecting the data. Oops.

"Get ready, then," he said, and looked back at the tac officer. "I want you to take us to battle stations on my command, Becky, but leave fire control and sensors on standby. Whatever this is, it's in range for a com laser. It could also be in energy weapon range, so I don't want any active emissions until the wedge and sidewalls come up. Got it?"

Getting everything ready for battlestation except things that would give off emissions before they warm up the drives.

"Contact!" Alexander's tac officer shouted. "I have an impeller wedge, bearing one-three-six by oh-niner-two!" He slapped keys on his console. "Manty destroyer at eighteen million klicks, Captain!"

"Shit!" Commander Trent slammed a fist into the arm of her command chair. "Battle stations, but do not go active! Confirm!"

"Do not go active, aye." The tac officer confirmed the order even as Yasir Raven's thumb jammed down on the battle stations alarm. Staying in passive meant the cruiser couldn't bring up her impeller wedge or sidewalls, but it was still remotely possible that they hadn't been detected, and—

"Radar pulse!" Tactical snapped through the yowl of the alarm. "They've got us, Ma'am!" He paused, then, "Second drive source detected! Two destroyers at eighteen million klicks!"

Trent bit back another curse. At that range and on that bearing, there was only one reason for a Manty to suddenly light off his drive. Damn the luck! What the hell had they been doing lying doggo in just the right place for her com beam to hit them?!

"Vector change," Tactical announced in a taut voice. "They're coming to an intercept course, Ma'am. Acceleration five-two-oh gravities."

Busted. Later the Peeps will assume Parks knew about Argus all along, because really, what are the odds of all of this happening by chance?

"She's gone active," Tribeca's tac officer reported, her voice almost dreamy with intensity. "Looks like a Conqueror-class light cruiser, Sir. She's altering vector away from us."

"Any chance of engaging her?" There was more hope than expectation in Tribeca's voice, and she shook her head.

"Sorry, Sir, no joy. She's way outside our missile envelope, and she's rolling to bring up her belly bands."

"Damn," the commander murmured. He watched his own display, ignoring the confused questions rattling over the com from Attack's skipper, while the Peep cruiser spun still further away from him. She was piling on the accel, too, and this far out—

The impeller source vanished in the sparkle of a hyper footprint, and he grunted. So much for catching her.

Well, the bad news is the Alexander got away. Now whereever were they receiving a call from?

"We can't be sure till he gets back here with the relay and we tear it apart, but his preliminary description of it certainly suggests the fusion of more than one outfit's tech, and God knows there's enough Havenite trade with the Solarian League."

"But the League's embargoed military technology to both of us," Parks pointed out, and O'Malley nodded. Getting that embargo in place had been one of the Star Kingdom's more effective diplomatic moves, for it certainly favored Manticore's generally superior tech base over Haven's. It had also been hard to achieve, and only Manticore's control of the League's traffic through the Sigma Draconis terminus of the Manticore Worm Hole Junction had given the Foreign Office the clout to bring it off.

"Agreed, Sir, but I'm not suggesting this was an authorized technology transfer. The League's organized on an awful loose, consensual basis, and some of its member planets resent how hard we pushed for the embargo. It's possible one of them, or even a rogue defense contractor or a bribable League Navy officer, would be willing to violate it."

Manticore went through a lot of political capital, burned some bridges and caused a lot of resentment to get a tech embargo through, and the thing still leaks like a sieve. Also, that 'loose, consensual' aspect of League membership will be tested later.

The admiral tipped his chair back and scrubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands, wishing he could believe Hurston was wrong. But he couldn't. If the Peeps had bugged Yorik with their damned invisible sensor platforms, then they'd done it elsewhere, as well.

He clenched his jaw and swore silently. Manticore had gotten too confident of its technical edge, refused to contemplate the possibility that the Peeps, equally aware of the differential, might take steps to redress it. And he himself had been as blind as anyone else.

"This changes everything," he said finally. "Our—my—belief that Admiral Rollins couldn't know we'd pulled out of Hancock no longer applies. Which," he forced himself to make the admission in a level voice, "means Admiral Sarnow was right all along."

He drew a breath and shook himself, then popped his chair upright, lowered his hands, and spoke crisply.

"All right, people. I screwed up, and it's time to try to fix it. Mark," he looked at Hurston, "I want you to tear every one of our contingency plans apart. Crank in the assumption that the Peeps have been watching our deployments all along the frontier for at least the last six months and find any spots in the plan that need adjustment in light of that capability. Zeb," he turned to the intelligence officer, "I want you to take charge of the relay Tribeca's bringing in. Strip it completely. Find out all you can about it—not just how it works, but anything you can tell me about the components and who made the damned thing initially. And see to it that Tribeca knows I intend to commend him strongly for his initiative."

Now there's the worthy commander we've been looking for, owning up to and immediately moving to correct his mistakes.

And on the other side of officers fulfilling expectations...

She grinned at herself, then let her chair swing in a gentle arc, and her grin faded. The last few days had carried their own undertone of strain for her as Pavel Young settled in among the task force's officers. She'd been able to avoid much direct contact with him, but simply knowing he was there cast a pall over her spirits that even Paul and Mike had trouble lifting. At least she hadn't had to put up with him outside the bounds of formal conferences, though, and she was guiltily aware that Sarnow had handled Young's necessary background briefs through his staff channels, not her. Ernie Corell had been stuck with most of them, and while the chief of staff had been careful about her choice of words, her tone whenever she mentioned Young spoke volumes about her own opinion of him.

Honor frowned and rubbed the tip of her nose, wondering (far from the first time) how someone like Young had survived so long in the Queen's service. She'd seen Corell's reaction to him mirrored in too many other officers, many of them male, to believe her own opinion of him was unique.

She sighed and tipped her chair further back. In light of her troubles with him, she'd researched his background more carefully than she cared to admit, and what she'd found appalled her. She'd always known a certain segment of the aristocracy (not all of them conservatives, by a long mark) believed the rules didn't apply to them, that they were above the constraints lesser beings had to accept, but the Young family was outstanding even among the scum element of the nobility. From all reports, Pavel's father, the current Earl of North Hollow, was as bad as Pavel himself . . . and the record suggested his grandfather might actually have been worse! Three entire generations of the same family had gone their self-centered way, as if determined to single-handedly prove the depths to which "nobility" could sink, and somehow they'd gotten away with it.

Wealth, birth, and political influence, she thought sourly. Power they took so completely for granted that the responsibilities which went with it had no bearing on their lives. Power they abused with a casual lack of concern that sickened her. That it revolted the majority of their peers, as well, did little to protect less eminent persons from them, and sometimes that made her wonder about her entire society. Yet even at her most depressed, a stubborn part of her insisted that the very reason they stood out so disgustingly was because they were the exceptions, not the rule.

She twitched her shoulders and took herself to task. Why Young acted as he did and how he got away with it were less important than the consequences, and one thing had become clear to her. Paul was right; Young was afraid of her. It showed in his eyes, now that she knew to look for it, on the rare occasions when he found himself within her reach, and she was a little ashamed by her intense satisfaction at that discovery. Not even the fact that he and Houseman obviously were doing their best to alienate Commodore Van Slyke from her could impair her grim pleasure—though it might have, she conceded honestly, if Van Slyke had been willing to pay them the least attention.

Honor's musing on the aristocracy, Young's fear of her, and finally the utter failure of Young's attempts to undermine her. I'm thinking Sarnow was right about Van Slyke, he puts up with Houseman because he's good at his job but has no personal connection to the man and less reason to listen to his opinions.

The captain of a Queen's ship had broad power to authorize enlisted and noncom promotions, as long as she stayed within the establishment laid down by BuPers for her command. If a promotion exceeded her establishment, she was required to return the "overly senior" personnel to Admiralty control for reassignment as soon as possible. It was a pain in the posterior, but Honor knew it was also intended to prevent captains from showing too much favoritism.

"His efficiency report is top drawer, Mike," she said at last. "And Lord knows he's done an outstanding job ever since we commissioned. I don't want to lose him, but I don't want to hold him back, either. Besides, we'll still be over establishment whenever he gets his rocker, even if we wait until BuPers acts, and he'll spend another ten months in grade, easy. If we bump him now, at least we can get him the salary and seniority he deserves."

"Agreed. The only problem is that regs are going to require that either he or Senior Chief Fanning be reassigned out of Nike."

"Unless we get the Admiral to sign off on letting us hang onto him 'in the interests of the Service,' " Honor mused. "After all, he's about the best gravitic tech I've ever seen, and we do have the pulse transmitter to worry about. That's been his baby from the outset, so—"

The establishment system where if you promote your people enough times, you have to unload them. Then again, apparently flag officers can override this requirement, no potential for abuse there.

"We're getting fairly decent information now, Sir," the tac officer reported. "At the moment, we're calling it thirty-five capital ships. The count's less positive on their screening elements, but CIC's current projection makes it—" Chandler glanced to the side to doublecheck her display "—roughly seventy destroyers and cruisers. Our best call on the capital ships is twenty-two superdreadnoughts, seven dreadnoughts, and six battlecruisers." Chandler met Sarnow's eyes with a grim expression, and Lieutenant Southman pursed his lips in a silent whistle.

Finally, the major fleet action we've been teased with since the first book, and that is a mighty big hammer compared to Sarnow's eight battlecruisers and cruiser/destroyer support.

"They're moving now, Sir. Looks like they're splitting into two elements and sending the dreadnoughts and battlecruisers in ahead. That could change, but at the moment they're opening a definite gap between them, though both groups are coming in at low acceleration. Their lead element looks like about two KPS squared—call it two-zero-four gees—and the SDs are trailing at about half that."

Breaking into two groups well beyond sensor range (assuming the enemy doesn't have FTL-comm recon platforms, but that would be silly.) Of course, this low accel is going to give Sarnow plenty of time to get his people into position.

"Almost exactly two hours after course merge, Sir." Chandler's instant response indicated she'd already worked the numbers. Sarnow's mouth twitched in a quick smile, and the tac officer went on speaking. "Assuming they maintain their projected vector—and that we aren't detected early, of course—we'll be right on a hundred million klicks from the base when the range hits seven million. That should put them over half a million klicks inside our envelope."

"I see." Sarnow rubbed his mustache again, then nodded. "All right, let's do it. Samuel, inform the minelayers' senior officer that I want his field laid ninety-eight million klicks out. And—" the admiral's green eyes slipped, almost against their will, toward Honor "—further inform him that he is to execute Carry Out as soon as he's done that."

"Aye, aye, Sir." This time Webster's response was audible over the com, and Honor caught Sarnow's gaze and nodded slightly, acknowledging the sense of his orders. Operation Carry Out would remove all the noncombatants the minelayers could cram aboard from the base. It would only be about fifty percent of the total base personnel—and wouldn't include Paul Tankersley—but there was no point pretending they had any other option. Eight battlecruisers couldn't possibly stop the firepower accelerating toward them.

Going forward with the plan, and the Evac plan will be carried out by the minelayers.

[Simon_Jester]

The Manticoran convoy has 5 freighters carrying equipment and personnel to Grayson, escorted by two light cruisers and three destroyers, classes unidentified. The attackers are six heavy cruisers, tentatively identified as Scimitar-class by the Manties. Only one ship from each side is named, the Peep Commodore Ogive's flagship is PNS Sword while the destroyer that first detected them is HMS Hotspur (a Hornblower reference.)

Also a real Royal Navy reference; the RN has had four ships of that name, and one of them served moderately well in World War Two.

We don't see the rest of the battle. Just Anton holding his daughter while people on the transport speculate whether that explosion was one of ours or theirs and the final report is given as I said. Total destruction of the escort, but they killed three of the heavies and crippled a fourth.

And that almost has to be up to the RMN energy weapons all landing on the forward hammerheads of the PN ships, thus knocking out their forward alpha nodes, causing said PN ships to get torn apart and killed by the grav wave. Gotcha. Thank you.

Agreed, less Bob the plumber and more Bob, 50 or so of his closest friends with a crane and some chem-catalyst gear.

Which right there explains why it's so hard to get this kind of thing done in a society which has serious problems with corruption, low worker retention, and poor overall education.

Anyways, here's the second half I would have put up, and you know, the third quarter of the book really moves around. We're with Parnell, no the convoy ambush, now the Peep ship making an Argus run, now Caparelli, now Rollins, now Honor, now Parks, etc. I didn't notice it so much reading through, but now it really stands out.

I personally like it that way, and it's good insofar as it makes the books sound less like they're all about Honor. Although at this point Honor is still a reasonably interesting character.

With later events, I'm afraid I associate Oscar Saint-Just a bit more with Beria than Louis Antoine.

Yes. The real Saint-Just was actually quite different- something of a wild child in his youth, as far as personal habits go. Rather passionate in his personal correspondence and speeches.

Oscar is more in line with the twentieth-century image of the abstemious little clerk who runs a massive tyrannical secret police force; he probably owes more to Heinrich Himmler than any other single man, because like Himmler he is very loyal to his leader. Beria... not so much. I always pictured him as a Himmler clone myself.

"If I thought there was any chance of that, I would've intervened personally." Pierre shook his head. "No, Cordelia's stressing the need to give 'InSec's storm-troopers'—that's you, Oscar—'time to reflect on the People's object lesson'. She's really quite good at agit-prop, you know. Perhaps we can convince her to take Public Information instead of the Treasury."

And here the troubles begin...

On the other hand, she is legitimately good at her job. The problem is that she's a nut- that she starts to believe her own propaganda, so that she enters this death spiral of saying fanatical things to the public, thus becoming more of a fanatic, thus leading on her particular segment of devoted listeners into growing fits of revolutionary madness.

A five-shot burst of nonexplosive darts tore through the InSec man in a spray of blood. He didn't even have time to scream, and Usher grunted in satisfaction as he glided further out onto the roof, head swiveling from side to side and pulser poised in a two-handed combat grip. Their briefing had insisted there was only the one guard, but Usher had seen too many operations blow up from faulty intelligence to take that for granted.

Nonexploding pulser darts used to quickly and nearly silently kill a security guard.

We will see Kevin Usher later, too. This guy's going to go on to have Saint-Just's job, or a large part of it (the foreign intelligence side), after the Theisman coup.

Still going to be careful and probe first with the faster ships. The ones that are more than heavy and numerous enough to deal with the BCs they expect.

Reasonably professional and intelligent. It's a good plan, and it basically works in spite of all the weird gimmicks Sarnow and Harrington can come up with. They get faked out at the last moment, but- if this is the prewar Havenite officer corps in action, it's fair to say that they're pretty good at their jobs.

The establishment system where if you promote your people enough times, you have to unload them. Then again, apparently flag officers can override this requirement, no potential for abuse there.

There are good arguments for unloading promoted officers, especially in a fleet that is rapidly expanding and needs new officers and NCOs to run newly built ships. Every captain would like to keep his most experienced and reliable personnel (the ones who get promoted), but if they do, who's left to man the new ships?

Letting the flag officer override this rule might conceivably lead to abuse, but in practice admirals don't have time to make a separate decision to keep every senior non-com in a whole squadron, so it's unlikely to become a problem on any large scale. Also, you have to have some means by which the senior officer commanding a large force can overrule bureaucratic idiocy that would impair the fighting effectiveness of their command.

"We're getting fairly decent information now, Sir," the tac officer reported. "At the moment, we're calling it thirty-five capital ships. The count's less positive on their screening elements, but CIC's current projection makes it—" Chandler glanced to the side to doublecheck her display "—roughly seventy destroyers and cruisers. Our best call on the capital ships is twenty-two superdreadnoughts, seven dreadnoughts, and six battlecruisers." Chandler met Sarnow's eyes with a grim expression, and Lieutenant Southman pursed his lips in a silent whistle.

Finally, the major fleet action we've been teased with since the first book, and that is a mighty big hammer compared to Sarnow's eight battlecruisers and cruiser/destroyer support.

For that matter, it's a big hammer compared to Parks' entire command.

Interesting that battlecruisers are being classed as "capital ships" when a ship of the wall outmasses them by about 5:1 or even 8:1, while a battlecruiser only outmasses a CA by about a factor of two or three.

[Terralthra]

Quick note, the officer in charge of the PN commerce-raiding squadron is Reichman, not Ogilve. Ogilve is the commander assigned as captain of one of the destroyers taking data dumps from Argus.

And also, the plan works for the PN against Sarnow's BCs because it's a squadron of DNs vs. a squadron of BCs. The books have said all along that the only way to get a decisive battle in the pre-MISSILE-GOD era is to pin the defenders against something they have to defend, with superior combat capacity, and say, "So, whatcha gonna do?" The PN does exactly that, and no matter how many tactics Sarnow has up his sleeve, it's still 8 BCs vs. 7 DNs.

[Simon_Jester]

Well yes, but I mean the overall character of the plan- the PN is striking decisively at Parks' most vulnerable point, taking advantage of the situation created by Parks' mistake. On the other hand, they are also conscious of the possibility of some kind of mistake or trap screwing up their plans, so they prepare for this possibility.

In other words, more or less what Parnell fails to do, with serious consequences, at Third Yeltsin.

[Ahriman238]

Also a real Royal Navy reference; the RN has had four ships of that name, and one of them served moderately well in World War Two.

Indeed. But to me it will always be Hornblower's sloop, just as I think of fictitious captains first when I hear Enterprise.

We don't see the rest of the battle. Just Anton holding his daughter while people on the transport speculate whether that explosion was one of ours or theirs and the final report is given as I said. Total destruction of the escort, but they killed three of the heavies and crippled a fourth.

And that almost has to be up to the RMN energy weapons all landing on the forward hammerheads of the PN ships, thus knocking out their forward alpha nodes, causing said PN ships to get torn apart and killed by the grav wave. Gotcha. Thank you.

I don't actually think so. Both parties turned and showed broadsides and it was described in detail what a node failure would mean, the ship couldn't drop out of or control itself in hyper and would need to be towed out of the grav wave. I think the outright destructions were the Manties, giving them a 3-5 kill ratio and a mission kill against a far heavier force.

Anyways, here's the second half I would have put up, and you know, the third quarter of the book really moves around. We're with Parnell, no the convoy ambush, now the Peep ship making an Argus run, now Caparelli, now Rollins, now Honor, now Parks, etc. I didn't notice it so much reading through, but now it really stands out.

I personally like it that way, and it's good insofar as it makes the books sound less like they're all about Honor. Although at this point Honor is still a reasonably interesting character.

I didn't terribly mind reading it, and it's not like a ton of interesting things are happening in Hancock anyway, but reviewing it's a pain in the butt. I feel like the quotations are all jumbled and fragmentary without context or continuity.

With later events, I'm afraid I associate Oscar Saint-Just a bit more with Beria than Louis Antoine.

Yes. The real Saint-Just was actually quite different- something of a wild child in his youth, as far as personal habits go. Rather passionate in his personal correspondence and speeches.

Oscar is more in line with the twentieth-century image of the abstemious little clerk who runs a massive tyrannical secret police force; he probably owes more to Heinrich Himmler than any other single man, because like Himmler he is very loyal to his leader. Beria... not so much. I always pictured him as a Himmler clone myself.

Blame Fanatic. There's a part where Cachat mentions that no pure police state has ever lasted, making Yuri think of Beria, and ever since then (especially with the purge-happiness) Saint-Just has always had Beria's face in my mind.

"If I thought there was any chance of that, I would've intervened personally." Pierre shook his head. "No, Cordelia's stressing the need to give 'InSec's storm-troopers'—that's you, Oscar—'time to reflect on the People's object lesson'. She's really quite good at agit-prop, you know. Perhaps we can convince her to take Public Information instead of the Treasury."

And here the troubles begin...

On the other hand, she is legitimately good at her job. The problem is that she's a nut- that she starts to believe her own propaganda, so that she enters this death spiral of saying fanatical things to the public, thus becoming more of a fanatic, thus leading on her particular segment of devoted listeners into growing fits of revolutionary madness.

I just want to put myself out there and say that with the exception of Theisman, whose status is pretty debatable, Cordelia Ransom is the most entertaining damn villain in this series. She's completely nuts, a propaganda woman who believes everything she says, sort of like a less evil feminine Rand Paul. On a purely pragmatic note, putting her in charge of Public Information was a terrible idea, because it fueled her and gave her the power to stand on an equal basis with Oscar and Rob.

A five-shot burst of nonexplosive darts tore through the InSec man in a spray of blood. He didn't even have time to scream, and Usher grunted in satisfaction as he glided further out onto the roof, head swiveling from side to side and pulser poised in a two-handed combat grip. Their briefing had insisted there was only the one guard, but Usher had seen too many operations blow up from faulty intelligence to take that for granted.

Nonexploding pulser darts used to quickly and nearly silently kill a security guard.

We will see Kevin Usher later, too. This guy's going to go on to have Saint-Just's job, or a large part of it (the foreign intelligence side), after the Theisman coup.

Oh no, my friend. They separated StateSec's police and foreign intelligence powers alright, but they didn't make Kevin Usher a spy, no, they made him a cop.

The establishment system where if you promote your people enough times, you have to unload them. Then again, apparently flag officers can override this requirement, no potential for abuse there.

There are good arguments for unloading promoted officers, especially in a fleet that is rapidly expanding and needs new officers and NCOs to run newly built ships. Every captain would like to keep his most experienced and reliable personnel (the ones who get promoted), but if they do, who's left to man the new ships?

Letting the flag officer override this rule might conceivably lead to abuse, but in practice admirals don't have time to make a separate decision to keep every senior non-com in a whole squadron, so it's unlikely to become a problem on any large scale. Also, you have to have some means by which the senior officer commanding a large force can overrule bureaucratic idiocy that would impair the fighting effectiveness of their command.

It makes perfect sense to move senior people where they're needed, and to make shift around people who might have been getting favoritism from their commanders. Heck, it makes sense just to not have ship full of Senior Chiefs and Lt. Commanders tripping over each other. But I wonder how many requests to keep this or that man the admiral, or more likely his staff, deal with on a regular basis. It also gives officers a good reason to sit on a promotion so they can retain their best people, which is why Honor is feeling conflicted about promoting the man in the first place.

Quick note, the officer in charge of the PN commerce-raiding squadron is Reichman, not Ogilve. Ogilve is the commander assigned as captain of one of the destroyers taking data dumps from Argus.

Oh, I knew that. Did I type Oglive? Yes I did, I meant Reichman.

[Simon_Jester]

We don't see the rest of the battle. Just Anton holding his daughter while people on the transport speculate whether that explosion was one of ours or theirs and the final report is given as I said. Total destruction of the escort, but they killed three of the heavies and crippled a fourth.

And that almost has to be up to the RMN energy weapons all landing on the forward hammerheads of the PN ships, thus knocking out their forward alpha nodes, causing said PN ships to get torn apart and killed by the grav wave. Gotcha. Thank you.

I don't actually think so. Both parties turned and showed broadsides and it was described in detail what a node failure would mean, the ship couldn't drop out of or control itself in hyper and would need to be towed out of the grav wave. I think the outright destructions were the Manties, giving them a 3-5 kill ratio and a mission kill against a far heavier force.

Wait, I thought Reichman didn't go with turning broadside-on, and that ships with node failures would risk being destroyed, or at least so immobilized that they'd be sitting ducks.

Alternatively, PN heavy cruisers aren't quite as big and nasty compared to CLs and destroyers as a Star Knight is. If they don't have the sheer defensive toughness of a Star Knight or the later Havenite Mars-class, that would explain a lot.

I didn't terribly mind reading it, and it's not like a ton of interesting things are happening in Hancock anyway, but reviewing it's a pain in the butt. I feel like the quotations are all jumbled and fragmentary without context or continuity.

You could always rearrange them in order.

Oh no, my friend. They separated StateSec's police and foreign intelligence powers alright, but they didn't make Kevin Usher a spy, no, they made him a cop.

Oh right, I got it backwards, it was LePic they put in charge of the spies. I'd forgotten because literally all we ever see Usher do is via Cachat, who operates outside Havenite space in the novels where I've read him. Haven't reread Fanatic in a long time.

It makes perfect sense to move senior people where they're needed, and to make shift around people who might have been getting favoritism from their commanders. Heck, it makes sense just to not have ship full of Senior Chiefs and Lt. Commanders tripping over each other. But I wonder how many requests to keep this or that man the admiral, or more likely his staff, deal with on a regular basis.

Probably a few per ship per month, since it's really only senior NCOs and officers who are worth putting in a special request for.

It also gives officers a good reason to sit on a promotion so they can retain their best people, which is why Honor is feeling conflicted about promoting the man in the first place.

This does happen- but it's a real issue given that any fleet must necessarily have its crews moving around and serving on multiple ships during their careers. There is no easy answer.

[Batman]

I actually found Ransom to be not inconsiderably annoying. That woman was so deluded she made cartoon 'I'm evil because I'm evil! Mwuhahaha!' villains look rational. I found characters like Theisman, Tourville and their likes a lot more interesting, because they pretty much knew they were on the wrong side, but it was the side they'd sworn allegiance to, and they were trying to make the least terrible of it because they couldn't do much about the big picture (as it turned out Theisman was wrong about that but that came later), but they tried to run their little bit of the war as decently as that is possible for a well, war. They were essentially good guys stuck working for the other side.
...Which means they essentially not really villains, so this was pretty irrelevant actually. I'd say 'Oops' bun in this context that could have pretty drastic consequences.

[Simon_Jester]

Ransom was so nuts that she effectively lost the ability to distinguish between right and wrong.

This can make her entertaining for some, but not really a well-written villain.

[Ahriman238]

Well right there's a major flaw of the series. Most of the villains aren't anything too impressive. Coglin, Theisman, Yu, Oglive, and Tourville are all decent, likeable guys doing their job and doing it well, they're too sympathetic to really count. Simonds was a fanatic and in way over his head, not terribly interesting. Rob starts out really sympathetic with his revolution, then hardly appears and when he does he isn't threatening. Saint-Just and Ransom ARE threatening, and ultimately go down like punks.

Who does that leave? Burdette? Lame. That space pirate whose so fascinating I completely forgot his name? Pass. The Quadumvirate who secretly run the Solarian League? Feels just like Armageddon Reef. The shadowy Mesan conspiracy? Maybe, I haven't really been following the series since the Battle of Manticore, have they gotten decent development? Because in Mission/War of Honor it felt pretty damned cheap that there are suddenly these people who are part of an ancient conspiracy directly responsible for every bad thing to ever happen in the series.

That's what the Honorverse desperately wants, an A-list villain. Someone threatening, interesting and compelling, who can challenge the characters (meaning Honor) where they're strongest and doesn't mind hitting where they're most vulnerable. Someone who will stick around for a few books and not be brushed off before one even ends. And someone who can be EVIL and not an effective and strictly honorable opponent Honor would love to share tea with in other circumstances.

I never would have gotten into the Star Wars EU if not for Dark Force Rising, and seeing Thrawn challenge the heroes of the films as even Vader never quite managed. Weber should absolutely NOT do a copy-paste Thrawn, but something in that vein, something new.

[Batman]

Actually I find the Mesan Alliance to be a rather interesting villain. They're definitely villainous, they seem to be halfway competent, they aren't 'evil because I'm evil' over-the-top, and I think they got a good bit of development in the Talbot Quadrant spinoff novels. The most annoying thing about them is they got introduced pretty much out of nowhere with their background being 'Um well they're genetic ubermensch fanatics that believe they should rule the universe and have been scheming to achieve that for centuries, didn't we mention that?'
And I sorta liked the 'WTF? We had absolutely nothing to do with that' twist for the resumption of hostilities between Haven and Manticore.

[Terralthra]

I really don't agree that the series needs "A-list villains". I liked War of Honor, where two sets of mostly-competent officers and mostly-competent politicians go to a war none of them want, but all of them prosecute competently, because of the machinations of a few incompetent or malicious politicians. It seems more believable that way, and I also feel more pathos for the victors and losers of a battle, no matter who is on the winning side, because they aren't cartoonish villains (or unbeatable heroes).

[Nephtys]

The Mesans made me really groan when it was revealed that they were behind EVERYTHING. Most egregiously, that they were behind the slow degredation of the old Haven Republic. That was just... unnecessary.

Suddenly, they're the 'final boss', with their sleek squadrons of Evil Ships, firing new, Evil Missiles. And their ability to somehow maintain security on a multi-generational black op that relies on an entire planet for support? It really doesn't help that the last 3 books didn't advance the plot at all, but to serve as a lot of 'here's some dumb sollies', 'here's some shadowy evildoers' and 'here's honor enjoying married life'.

The only reasonably decent villain in the series I think was Saint-Just. He's the SS man who just likes being an SS man, and doesn't know what the hell to do when his boss is gone. He doesn't really KNOW any better than to be a thug, which is more interesting I think than black-hat villains who just love villainy. I guess the only other vaguely entertaining bad guys were the Masadans?