Bit of Analysis: HH Saganami Island series

[VhenRa]

Keeping a missile in the tubes... hmm. Well, that is 3% increase right there. 40 Tubes, 1200 normal magazine space. It would be a 5% increase for a Roland with it's 12 tubes and 240 missiles.

[Batman]

In how much detail do we know the missile loading systems on Honorverse ships? Since they can maintain rapid fire for as long as their stores hold out we're obviously not looking at a 'several shots preloaded ' system but maybe they can increase their missile load by not only having missiles in the tubes, but having the feeding queues full too.

[Terralthra]

Well, we know they can changing the firing feed in a missile tube on the fly, as demonstrated in both OTB and HotQ.

[Batman]

They can tell a standard warhead not to bother with the lasing rods on the fly (and even that takes noticeable time). I don't think that involved physically switching out actual missiles (at least in HotQ, what's OTB?)

[Terralthra]

They can tell a standard warhead not to bother with the lasing rods on the fly (and even that takes noticeable time). I don't think that involved physically switching out actual missiles (at least in HotQ, what's OTB?)

In On Basilisk Station (sorry, typoed the acronym), the bosun took a team to shift laser heads from one (damaged) missile tube to another (working), commed up to the bridge to tell them which numbers in the loading queue were laser heads. The tac officer shifted loading priorities and fired those missiles next. Passage in question:

"Bridge, Missile Two." The voice on the intercom was harsh with exhaustion. "We've got two laser heads shifted. They're numbers five and six on your feed queue. I'm working on shifting number three now."

"Missile Two, this is the Captain. Where's the bosun?" Honor asked quickly.

"On her way to sickbay, Skipper. This is Harkness. I guess I'm in charge now."

"Understood. Get that third missile shifted as quickly as possible, PO."

"We're on it, Ma'am."

Even as Honor spoke, Cardones's hands flashed across his console, reprioritizing his loading schedule. Fifteen seconds later, a fresh laser warhead went scorching out of his single remaining tube.

Cardones moved the missiles from five and six in the queue to "right the hell now."

What do you mean by "that takes noticeable time"? The delay in firing during Second Yeltsin was to time the launch with Saladin's defensive EW cycle, not to change the missiles' warhead programming. The passage is quite clear: Cardones (again) "changes his loading queues", "updated penetration profiles" (programming them to home on the EW pattern he picked out), pauses fire to time it with a chrono he's watching that's synced up with Saladin's EW pattern, then fires 25 seconds or so after the pause in fire. There's absolutely no indication that they "turn off the lasing rods on laser heads." Everything there says "Cardones snuck old-fashioned nukes through modern EW."

[Ahriman238]

My first thought also was that it might be an administrative thing, a separation between 'nominal' loadout and full loadout. What I can't figure is why anyone would do that.

"So much for the demise of the Freedom Alliance," Baroness Medusa said bitterly.

Yep.

"The bottom line, I think, Milady, is still that the Kornatians do need the technical support Tonkovic has been requesting. I think it's probable they also need advice and a small, fast response strike force they can use as a precision instrument against identified targets. I know Ms. Tonkovic hasn't asked for those, but I think her planet needs both of them far more than they need us to simply dump modern weapons on their own security forces. And if we decide to intervene in support of the local government at all, the political equation still calls for us to make the strongest possible statement about the quality of the assistance we're prepared to offer our friends in the area. And for that, Hexapuma, especially with Mr. Van Dort on board, is still our biggest counter. Besides, Warlock isn't in Spindle any longer."

The Provisional Governor nodded. Warlock was on her way to Tillerman, at the far end of Rear Admiral Khumalo's southern patrol line. It would take almost three weeks just to get word to Captain Anders to take his ship to Split, and another twenty-six days for him to actually do it.

Oh, hey, it's the Star Knight Warlock, Pavel Young's ship from the first book. They're going to pull Terekhov and Van Dort from Montana and send them to Kornati. Travel time to Tillerman which makes me think. Manticore has by now had several years of experience fighting a war over interstellar distances with weeks or months for reports to reach home and orders to reach the front, but I don't think they've tried governing with this sort of communications delay. Not sure if it makes an appreciable difference, but I'm also not sure politicians have gotten used to this as the Admiralty has, which might make things just a touch more complicated in Talbott and Silesia.

"Who is still available here in Spindle?" she asked after a moment.

"I'd have to screen Captain Shoupe to be certain, but I believe that aside from Hercules, there's only a destroyer or two and the service squadron ships.

Well they can't send a collier/munitions/repair ship, and a destroyer will carry no Marines. An SD is probably the wrong sort of message to send. Yeah, get that dispatch boat and send the Kitty over.

The blue and white image of the planet about which Hexapuma had just settled into orbit floated before them in the conference table's holo display. The service ships Khumalo had stationed there to support his "Southern Patrol"—Captain Lewis Sedgewick's HMS Ericsson and Commander Mira Badmachin's HMS Volcano—were bright dots of reflected sunlight in their somewhat higher permanent parking orbits, hanging above the image of the planet like tiny stars.

Apparently Khumalo parked a supply and a repair ship at Montana to service patrolling cruisers.

"I've already contacted President Suttles and Chief Marshal Bannister. I can't say Bannister seemed delighted to see me on his com, but we have a bit of a personal history that probably explains his initial reaction. Once I explained to him why we were here, he got rather more enthusiastic. Not hopeful, but willing, at least, to give it a try. And, as I'd hoped, Westman's been to some pains to establish a communications link to the system government. If Westman will agree to meet with me at all, Suttles and Bannister think they can probably arrange the details within the next two or three days."

There's communication between Westman and the government, or at least a way for them to communicate besides broadcasting their message and plastering it on every headline and street corner.

"Personal integrity is the single most important ingredient in the Montana honor code, Aivars." His voice was very level, as if he were making a special effort to keep it that way. "Nothing's more central to their notion of honorable conduct, and both Westman and Bannister are honorable men. If Bannister sympathized with the MIM deeply enough to aid Westman's operations, he would've resigned his office and joined Westman openly." He smiled crookedly. "Not the most effective possible approach, I suppose, but Machiavelli wouldn't have been able to give his book away on Montana." His smile vanished. "I think that's one reason they resented Ineka Vaandrager's negotiating techniques so deeply."

The Montanan honor code.

"Sir," the Marine began, "with all due respect for Mr. Van Dort, and accepting that everything he's just said about the Montanans is completely accurate, it's still my responsibility to see to it that—"

"I know what you're going to say, Major." Terekhov's voice was just a bit crisper. "But we're here to help negotiate a peaceful settlement, or at least a cease-fire. And we're not going to manage that if we offend local leaders or suggest we believe they'll act dishonorably. More to the point, perhaps, everything we've seen from Mr. Westman suggests that he does take his personal integrity seriously. Under the circumstances, if he promises a safe conduct, I'm not going to a meeting with him surrounded by battle-armored Marines bristling with plasma rifles and tribarrels. Nor am I going to insist that he come here."

So Terekhov orders no Marine bodyguards, trusting in Westman's pledge of safe passage.

"No doubt," Dame Estelle agreed, noting once again that Nordbrandt had obviously hit a deeper nerve with the economic side of her terrorist platform than any of the Cluster's oligarchs really wanted to admit. Even now, Tonkovic seemed constitutionally incapable of admitting that the discontent which had fueled Nordbrandt's original recruiting drive clearly stemmed from a much broader spectrum of issues than the annexation plebiscite alone.

Nordbrandt tapped into a sense of economic discontent and class warfare to bolster the ranks, which the Kornati oligarchs seem determined to ignore.

"No doubt," Dame Estelle agreed, noting once again that Nordbrandt had obviously hit a deeper nerve with the economic side of her terrorist platform than any of the Cluster's oligarchs really wanted to admit. Even now, Tonkovic seemed constitutionally incapable of admitting that the discontent which had fueled Nordbrandt's original recruiting drive clearly stemmed from a much broader spectrum of issues than the annexation plebiscite alone.

-snip-

"I'm not engaging in 'acrimonious political debate,' Madam President. I'm pointing out a fundamental inconsistency in your position. One which, I hope you'll forgive my mentioning, I've pointed out to you several times before. I don't for a moment believe you intend to deliberately sabotage the annexation effort. And I'm quite certain you believe your reading of the politics of the Convention here and of the annexation campaign, both here and in the Star Kingdom, is accurate. However, as Her Majesty's personal representative in the Cluster, I would be remiss in my duties if I didn't suggest to you that it is somewhat unreasonable to insist on one hand that we demonstrate our support for you against domestic terrorists while insisting on the other that we must grant you an extraordinarily broad special status and admit you to the Star Kingdom, as full citizens, without requiring you to abide by the same laws under which we require all the rest of our citizens to live."

Well it's not like Tonkovic is the first or even the millionth politician to try and have her cake and eat it too.

"We have now reached the point of straining over fine linguistic points of implication and inference," Tonkovic said harshly. "I repeat, am I to understand that my official request for the Star Kingdom's assistance in dealing with the so-called Freedom Alliance of Kornati is conditional upon my immediate acceptance in the name of the Split System of the Alquezar draft proposal for the Constitution?"

Baroness Medusa allowed the hard, brittle silence to linger between them for several seconds. Then she smiled, ever so slightly.

"No, Madam President. We aren't quite at that point yet. However, if you request the Star Kingdom's assistance, we will render that assistance in whatever we believe to be the most effective manner. Our representatives will deal directly with the representatives of your planetary government actually present on Kornati, on a face-to-face basis. And you had best understand that just as you retain the right to change your mind about seeking annexation, we retain the right to inform the Constitutional Convention that we will not extend membership in the Star Kingdom to any or all of the star systems represented here, collectively or as individuals."

She looked directly into Tonkovic's eyes.

"My Queen and her Government would very much prefer to avoid taking that drastic step. It is for that reason we've waited so patiently for so long for an internal resolution of the long delay in the reporting out of a draft Constitution. Yet our patience, as I've attempted to impress upon you before, isn't unlimited. We will not allow this delay to stretch out indefinitely. I am now officially informing you, and will be sending a formal note to the same effect to all other delegations here on Flax within the next two hours, that we require the acceptance of a draft Constitution by this Convention within a period of no more than one hundred and fifty standard days. If I, as the Queen's representative in Talbott, haven't received a draft Constitution within that time, the Star Kingdom of Manticore will either withdraw the offer of membership to all systems in the Talbott Cluster or else present to the Constitutional Convention a list of specific star systems whose inclusion in the Star Kingdom will no longer be acceptable in Her Majesty's eyes. I would suggest to you that it wouldn't be wise of you to find your own system on that list."

Dame Matsuko threatens to exclude individual planets from the annexation, if they're so incapable of compromise. Also makes the jump from telling Tonkovic there's a hard outside deadline to telling her what it is.

The silence that followed was harder—and colder—than ever. Hatred burned in Aleksandra Tonkovic's eyes. Hatred, Dame Estelle thought, all the stronger because Tonkovic was so unaccustomed to finding herself in the weaker position in any political confrontation. She was used to the political warfare of a single star system, to holding the whip—either as head of state itself or at the very least as one of the movers and shakers of the controlling political establishment. She wasn't accustomed to dealing with other star systems and their leaders as equals. And she was even less accustomed to the sour-tasting realization that she and her entire star system might be regarded as an insignificant, bothersome, backward, easily dispensed with distraction by someone like the Star Kingdom of Manticore.

Whatever the outcome of the annexation debate, Dame Estelle Matsuko knew she personally had just made an implacable, lifelong enemy. Which was fine with her. She believed firmly that the best measure of anyone's character was the enemies they made.

I suspect lots of leaders in the CLP are used to being top dog and worried about how their status may change after annexation. Hence the demands for strict local autonomy.


Skipping a lot of the first meeting between Westman, Terekhov and Van Dort, because most of it's things we've heard before. Yes, the RTU screwed over Montana in negotiations, but they were only interested in building the economies of member worlds to survive OFS. No, the fact that the RTU and Van Dort organized the annexation vote doesn't make it another way to screw people over, they found a way to save themselves and all the Cluster.

"I don't believe I said anything about compromises, Mr. Westman." Westman's eyebrows rose, and Van Dort smiled again, thinly, this time. "Assuming your own government remains committed to seeking annexation, and assuming the Constitutional Convention drafts a Constitution which is mutually acceptable to our citizens and Manticore, Montana will become a member of the Star Kingdom."

Westman's eyes flashed, but Van Dort met his fiery gaze steadily.

"That isn't meant to sound gratuitously confrontational," the Rembrandter said. "However, the fact is that, like any guerrilla movement, yours can only succeed if a significant percentage of the Montanan population decides to support it. Without that, your movement is ultimately doomed, and the question simply becomes how much damage you do to your own star system and, indirectly, to the Star Kingdom at large before it's ultimately suppressed."

Truth, unless he finds some support Westman can't seriously stop the annexation.

"What Baroness Medusa is trying to tell you, Sir," the Captain said calmly, "is that the amount of damage is immaterial. The Star Kingdom isn't interested in annexing Montana because of the wealth you don't have. Obviously, in the long term, we believe Montana, like all the Cluster's star systems, will become more prosperous and represent a net economic gain for the Star Kingdom as a whole. But, to be perfectly honest, the Lynx Terminus represents the only powerful selfish reason for us to be involved in this region, and there are many countervailing reasons why we shouldn't be here. At the possible expense of belaboring a point, the entire question of annexation only arose after the citizens of the Cluster requested it. The Star Kingdom's commitment to the annexation of Montana is a moral one, not an economic one. Damage can be repaired. Destroyed facilities can be rebuilt. The legal and moral obligations of a government to protect its citizens—both in their persons and property and in their right to live under the government of their choice—aren't negotiable."

Terekhov on Manticore's position here.

"It's those legal and moral obligations I'm fighting for," the Montanan said, his voice quiet. "I don't believe the government has the legal right to discard our own Constitution. This star system was settled by a bunch of fools who'd fallen in love with an over-romanticized fantasy about a time and place, Captain. They didn't have a clue about how accurate or inaccurate their fantasy was, and it didn't matter. They set up a government and a Constitution predicated on principles of independence, orneriness, the freedom of the individual, and the individual's responsibility to look after himself and stand up for what he believes in. I don't say they built the perfect government. Hell, I don't even say the system we had before this annexation plebiscite came along was what they actually had in mind in the first place! But it was my government. It was a government of my friends and my neighbors, and of people I didn't much care for, but it didn't involve any foreign queens, or any baronesses, or any kingdoms and parliaments. I won't stand by and see my planet sold out to someone else, no matter how good a price some of the folks who live here think they're getting. I won't give up the laws and customs my ancestors built, brick by brick, on this planet, not on Rembrandt, and not on Manticore."

I really do sympathize with the guy here.

"You remind me of someone," he said quietly, his eyes on her face. "You remind me of her a lot. Did Mr. Van Dort ever mention Suzanne Bannister to you?"

"Suzanne Bannister?" Helen repeated, trying to keep her eyes from widening at the surname. She shook her head. "No, he hasn't."

"Ah." Westman seemed to consider that for a moment, then nodded. "I wondered," he said, and inhaled deeply.

"Economic warfare isn't the only thing that lies between Rembrandt and Montana, Ms. Zilwicki," he said softly, then he nodded to her again, politely, and walked briskly away.

They adjourn for a bit, Westman promises to talk with his people and think over the possibility for a temporary cease-fire. Then as they leave he hits Helen Zilwicki with this.

Now she lay sprawled across one comfortable chair, staring at the huge storm system dominating the planet's eastern hemisphere. One of the things spacers missed was the feel and smell of weather, and for someone from Gryphon, where it was always lively (to say the very least), the sense of deprivation sometimes hit hard.

Ships keep a day/night cycle, but people do miss the variety of weather sometimes.

"Is this the only place on board where you sketch?" she asked several minutes later, into the quiet, companionable sound of soft pencil lead kissing sharp-toothed paper.

"Pretty much," he said, eyes on the pad and his gracefully moving pencil. He paused and glanced up at her with an off-center smile. "It's kind of a private thing for me. I started doing it as much for a sort of therapy as anything else. Now—" He shrugged. "I guess it's kind of like Leo's poetry."

"Leo writes poetry?" Helen felt both eyebrows rise, and he shook his head with a chuckle.

"You didn't know?"

"No, I certainly didn't!" She looked at him suspiciously. "You're not just pulling my leg to see if it'll come off in your hand, are you?"

"Me? Never!" He chuckled again. "Besides, I understand you're a very dangerous person. Wouldn't be very safe to try pulling your leg, now would it?"

"So how come you know about his poetry and I don't?"

"Far be it from me to suggest that you can sometimes be a bit unobservant," he said, his pencil moving across the paper again. "On the other hand, I sometimes have to wonder where all of your father's sneaky, all-seeing, spymaster genes went, because you sure didn't get any of them!"

Helen and Paulo bonding. He tells her to ask Van Dort about the troubling name-drop.

"Who was she, Sir?" she asked quietly.

"My wife," he said, very, very softly.

-snip-

"I see why he told you to ask. You look so much like her. You could be her again, or at least her daughter. That's why I almost refused Captain Terekhov's offer to assign you as my aide. It was too much like how I met her, in many ways."

-snip-

"I may well have been the first person in the Talbott Cluster to receive prolong. My father was merchant-owner of two freighters when I was born. My mother and I lived aboard, with him, until I was almost sixteen and he sent me off to Old Earth to college. He had a freight concession from one of the Solly shipping lines, and he made regular runs deeper into the League. Prolong wasn't available here, but he took me along on those trips into the Old League and had the therapies started when I was about fourteen.

-snip-

"Well, I imagine there are enough first-gen recipients in the Star Kingdom for you to realize that first-generation prolong's effects aren't very evident until you're well into your biological thirties." She nodded again, and he grimaced. "Given the fact that prolong wasn't generally available here, the handful of us who'd gotten it the way I did tended not to mention it. It creates a certain resentment when your contemporaries discover you're going to live three or even four times as long as they are. So the fact that I'd received the prolong therapies wasn't general knowledge, and most people simply assumed I naturally looked younger than my age.

-snip-

"I should have realized she looked young for her age. I should've trusted her enough to tell her I'd received prolong. But I'd kept quiet about it for so long it was a reflex to keep on saying nothing. So I did keep quiet. I was here long enough for both of us to realize how deeply we were attracted to one another. And I came back, for a long visit, three months later. I was here almost five T-months that time, and when I left, we were married."

He closed his eyes, his face wrung with pain.

"That was when I told her I was a prolong recipient and that, as a surprise honeymoon gift, I'd arranged a trip to Beowulf itself for her to receive the same therapies. And that was when I found out she was too old. That she was her father's daughter by his first wife, and that she was over twenty years older than Trevor."

He was silent again for what seemed like minutes. Then he inhaled deeply and opened his eyes.

"There are myths from Old Earth, from almost every culture and civilization there ever was, of immortal beings—elves, gods and goddesses, nymphs, demigods—who fall in love with mortals. They all end badly, one way or another. Mine was no exception. She forgave me for not telling her, of course. That made it almost worse. I'm not saying we didn't love each other very much, and that we didn't take a tremendous joy in one another, but the entire time, we knew I was going to lose her. I think she felt worst about the thought that she'd be 'deserting' me. Leaving me behind. We had two daughters, Phillipia and Mechelina. They'd received prolong at the earliest possible age, of course, and I think it made Suzanne feel better when she reflected on the fact that we'd have each other when she was gone.

Yeah, I imagine it would be hard to hold a relationship together where one party ages and the other does not.

"Her brother, Trevor, was old enough by then that he'd already begun his career in the Marshals Service, and he didn't think much of the idea. He never really understood, I think, that Suzanne and I were trying to build some sort of bastion here in the Cluster that might be able to resist Frontier Security. He'd never forgiven me, anyway, for marrying his sister without warning her I was going to outlive her by a century or two, and now I'd seduced her into helping me loot the economies of other planets, other star systems. He and his best friend, Stephen Westman—young, intemperate hotheads, the pair of them, even for Montanans—were both convinced I was a ruthless, self-centered bastard who didn't give much of a rat's ass—to use Westman's charming turn of phrase—for anyone else as long as I got what I wanted. Suzanne was . . . irritated with them for their attitude, and she did have a temper. Words were exchanged, and feelings were badly hurt on both sides. But Suzanne and I were certain that, eventually, they'd come to understand what we were doing, and why."

In fairness, Bernadus, that looks pretty bad, especially from a kid's perspective.

"I'd originally been scheduled to go open a round of negotiations with New Tuscany, but she decided to go, instead. She said she could handle the assignment at least as well as I could've, and by going, she could free me up to stay home and deal with some other problems which had arisen. So I took the shuttle up with her and the girls, kissed them, watched them board the Anneloes and set out for New Tuscany.

"I never saw any of them again."

Helen's jaw tightened—in pain, not really in surprise.

"We never found out what happened," Van Dort said softly. "The ship simply . . . vanished. It could've been almost anything. The most logical explanation was pirates, although she was armed, and there hadn't been much pirate activity in the Cluster for two or three years. But we never found out, never knew. They were just . . . gone.

"I didn't take it well. I'd spent so long worrying about her shorter life expectancy, thinking about how I was going to lose her, about how I should have told her before I ever married her, of how incredibly lucky I'd been that she loved me anyway. But it never occurred to me in my worst nightmares that the last thing I'd ever see of her was her and our daughters smiling, waving goodbye. That they'd just be . . . erased out of my life, like some deleted computer file.

"I refused to deal with it, refused to come to grips with it, because if I'd done that, I would have had to admit it'd happened. Instead, I buried myself in my work. I dedicated myself to making the Trade Union the success Suzanne and I had dreamed it could be. And anything that got in the way of that success was my enemy.

"Trevor blamed me for her death for years. I don't think he does anymore, but he was younger then. He seemed to feel I'd sent her to New Tuscany, because it wasn't important enough for me to waste my own time on. It was my fault, as he saw it, that she was ever on that ship in the first place. And the way I refused to face my own loss, to admit it or let the rest of the universe see my wounds, convinced him I was just as cold, callous, and scheming as he'd ever suspected.

"And as if I were determined to confirm the validity of his opinions, I brought Ineka Vaandrager on board. I justified it then on the grounds that time was getting short, that Frontier Security was beginning to look more hungrily in our direction, and it was. That's the worst of it; I can still justify everything I did on that basis and know it was true. But I can never run away from the suspicion that I would've turned to Ineka anyway. That I just didn't care. I'm sure Westman's bone-deep resentment and distrust of the RTU stems from that period, the five or ten T-years after Suzanne's death. And that's why I understand why Montanans might not be particularly fond of me.

Another decent use of a story with no real villains, just people getting along as best they can, making mistakes and enemies along the way.

The dispatch boat from Spindle began uploading its message queue well before it reached Montana planetary orbit. Lieutenant Hansen McGraw, the com officer of the watch, watched the message headers scroll up on his display. Most were protected by multilevel encryption, and he waited patiently while the computers sorted through the traffic. Half a dozen of the larger message files, he noted, were personal-only for Captain Terekhov and Bernardus Van Dort. One of them, however, carried a lower security classification and a higher priority rating. He downloaded that one to a message board, and handed it to Senior Chief Harris.

Marching orders, and as long as they're on the way stuff the dispatch boat full of reports and other information.

"Who has the standby pinnace?"

While in orbit, the Kitty keeps at least one pinnace with the drives warm on a ready five status. Whether they need a ride to/from the surface in a hurry or to rescue an EVA gone "dutchman."

"Yes, I did, Hansen. Please make a general signal to all work and shore parties to return on board."

"Yes, Sir. Should I indicate immediate priority?"

"No," FitzGerald said after a brief consideration. "Instruct them to return directly, but to expedite any extended tasks."

Packing it in again, they never seem to get to stay anywhere as long as they'd planned.

Hexapuma had been in Montana for just under eleven T-days, and it had been nine days since the Captain and Van Dort's first meeting with Westman. Aikawa didn't know how well that effort had been going. He knew Van Dort had met with Westman a second time, but he couldn't pick up a single hint about what they might have discussed.

We've skipped over ten days and another meeting with Westman.

Ragnhild sat back in the pilot's seat and considered her projected trip. As always, the exact location of Captain -Terekhov—-"Hexapuma Alpha"—was monitored whenever he was off the ship. As such, she knew that he, Bernardus Van Dort, and Helen Zilwicki were currently in a restaurant rejoicing in the name of The Rare Sirloin. It was supposed to be one of the better restaurants in Brewster, the Montana capital. Ragnhild didn't know about that personally, of course. Unlike some midshipwomen, she thought, she hadn't been invited to eat there no less than three times in the last week.

The captain's whereabouts when off-ship are carefully monitored.

"So far, at any rate. But what's impressed me even more than her unpleasant propensity for surviving is her sheer malevolence. You do realize that by now she's killed something over thirty-six hundred people, most of them civilians, in her bombing attacks alone?"

"Which doesn't even count the wounded. Or the cops—or the frigging firemen!" Terekhov snarled, and Van Dort looked up quickly.

Even that mild an obscenity was unusual from Terekhov.

Terekhov pretty much never swears, part of the reason he's more of a Picard sort of captain. Oh, and by now we have over 3600 dead from Nordbrandt's bombings.

"Economically, Montana's beef and leatherwork command decent prices even in other systems here in the Cluster, and they also ship it Shell-ward. They have some extractive industries in their asteroid belt, also for export, and they don't import all that much. By and large their industry's domestically self-sufficient for the consumer market, although their heavy industry's more limited. They import heavy machine tools, and all their spacecraft are built out-system, for example. And their self-sufficiency stems in part from the fact that they're willing to settle for technology that's adequate to their needs but hardly cutting edge.

"Montana isn't a wealthy planet by any stretch, but it maintains a marginally favorable trade balance and there isn't actually any widespread poverty. That's an unusual accomplishment in the Verge, and whether Westman and his people want to admit it or not, the RTU's shipping strength is one reason they're able to pull it off.

Montana is unusual for a Verge/Cluster planet, in that it maintains a favorable balance of trade and is pretty-much self-sufficient while exporting enough to see to their needs.

"The other way Montana differs from Kornati is that it's much easier, relatively speaking, for someone who works his posterior off and enjoys at least a little luck to move from the lowest income brackets to a position of comparative affluence. These people make an absolute fetish out of rugged individualism, and there's still a lot of unclaimed land and free range. Their entire legal code and society are set up to encourage individual enterprise to use those opportunities, and their wealthier citizens look aggressively for investment opportunities.

And you can make it without family connections, even if there are some "big ranchers."

"Kornati's a much more typical Verge planet. They don't have an attractive export commodity, like Montana's beef. There's not enough wealth in the system to attract imports from outside the Cluster, and although their domestic industry's growing steadily, the rate of increase is low. Since they have nothing to export, but still have to import critical commodities—like off-world computers, trained engineers, and machine tools—if they want to build up their local infrastructure, their balance of trade's . . . unfavorable, to say the very least. That exacerbates the biggest economic problem Kornati faces: lack of investment capital. Since they can't attract it from outside, what they really need is to find some way to pry loose enough domestic investment to at least prime the pump the way other systems have managed.

"The Dresden System, for example, was even poorer than Split thirty T-years ago. By now, Dresden's on the brink of catching up with Split, and even without the possibility of the annexation, Dresden's gross system product would probably pass Split's within the next ten T-years. It's not that Dresden's wealthier than Split—in fact, the system's actually quite a bit poorer. It's just that the Dresdeners've managed to begin a self-sustaining domestic expansion by encouraging entrepreneurship and taking advantage of every opportunity—including energetic cooperation with the RTU—that falls their way. The oligarchs on Kornati, by and large, are more interested in sitting on what they have than in risking their wealth in the sorts of enterprises which might bolster the economy as a whole. They aren't quite a kleptocracy, and that's about the best I can say for them."

Surprise! The wealth does not "trickle down."

"The truth is that while the situation on Kornati isn't actually anywhere near so bad as Nordbrandt's agit-prop paints it, it isn't good. In fact, it's pretty damned bad. You saw the slum areas in Thimble while you were in Spindle?" Terekhov nodded, and Van Dort waved a hand. "Well, the housing in Thimble's slums is two or three notches above the quality of housing available in Karlovac's. And the social support payments on Kornati have only about sixty percent of the buying power of equivalent safety net stipends on Flax. Starvation isn't much of a problem, because the government does heavily subsidize food for those receiving social support, but it's no damned picnic to be poor there."

"I gathered that from the briefing papers," Terekhov said, indicating the chip folio-littered desk, "and I didn't understand it. According to other parts of the package, the Kornatians are fiercely devoted to individual civil rights. How does a nation with that sort of attitude justify not providing an adequate safety net for its people? I realize there's a difference between having the right to have the government leave you alone and depending on the government to take care of you, but it still strikes me as reflecting contradictory attitudes."

"Because it does, in a way," Van Dort agreed. "As you say, their civil rights tradition is that the citizen has the right to be free of undue government interference, not to be taken care of by the government. When that tradition first evolved, about a hundred and fifty T-years ago, the economy was far less stratified than it is now, the middle class was much larger, relatively speaking, and the electorate in general was far more involved in politics.

"But over the last seventy or eighty T-years, that's changed. The economy's stagnated, compared to other systems in the area, even as the population's increased steeply. The poor and the very poor—the underclass, if you will—has grown enormously relative to the total population, and the middle class has been severely pinched. And there's a growing attitude on the part of some Kornatian political leaders that the civil rights of voting citizens are important, but that those of citizens who don't vote are more . . . negotiable. Especially when the citizens involved pose a threat to public safety and stability."

Why, David Weber, is that an argument in favor of a social safety net? The general mess that is Kornati, and why Bordbrandt was able to find malcontents so easily.

"Aleksandra Tonkovic's the leader of the Democratic Centralist Party. Despite its rather liberal-sounding name, the DCP is, in my humble opinion, anything but 'centralist,' and it certainly doesn't believe in anything a Rembrandter or a Montanan would call 'democracy.' Essentially, its platform is dedicated to maintaining the current social and political order on Kornati. It's an oligarchical party, dominated by the Tonkovic family and perhaps a dozen of its closest allies, who tend to regard the planet as their personal property.

"The Social Moderate Party is the DCP's closest political ally. For all intents and purposes, their platforms are identical these days, although when the SMP was first formed, it actually was considerably to the 'left' of the Centralists. The generation of DCP leadership before Tonkovic successfully co-opted the SMP, but the appearance of a compromise platform, evolved after annual conferences between their 'independent' party leaderships, was too valuable to give up through an official merger.

The Democratic Centrists and Social Moderates are actually the conservative end of the Kornatian political pool.

"Vuk Rajkovic, on the other hand, is the leader of the Reconciliation Party. In a lot of ways, the RP is more of an umbrella organization than a properly organized political party. Several minor parties merged under Rajkovic's leadership, and they, in turn, reached out to other splinter groups. One of them, by the way, was Nordbrandt's National Redemption Party. Which, I imagine, didn't do Rajkovic's political base a bit of good when she decided to begin blowing people up.

"The biggest difference between the Reconciliation Party and Tonkovic and her allies is that Rajkovic genuinely believes the Kornatian upper classes—of which he is most decidedly a prominent member—must voluntarily share political power with the middle and lower classes and work aggressively to open the door to economic opportunity for those same groups. I'm not prepared to say how much of this position's based on altruism and how much is based on a coldly rational analysis of the current state of the Split System. There've certainly been occasions on which he's couched his arguments in the most cold-blooded, self-interested terms possible. But when he's done that, he's usually been talking to his fellow oligarchs, and speaking as someone who's occasionally attempted to locate a few drops of altruism in Rembrandter oligarchs, I suspect he's discovered that self interest is the only argument that particular audience understands.

"The most significant thing about the last presidential election was that the Reconciliation Party launched an aggressive voter registration campaign among the working class districts of Kornati's major cities. I don't think Tonkovic and her allies believed that effort could have any practical effect on the outcome of the campaign, but they found out differently. Tonkovic only won because two other candidates withdrew and threw their support to her. Even so, she managed to outpoll Rajkovic by a majority of barely six percent on Election Day, and that was with eleven percent of the total vote split between eight additional candidates."

Van Dort paused, smiling nastily, and chuckled.

"That must've come pretty close to scaring Aleksandra right out of her knickers," he said with relish. "Especially because, under the Kornatian Constitution, the vice presidency goes to the presidential candidate who pulled the second-highest total of votes. Which means—"

"Which means the fellow she had to leave in charge on Kornati when she went scampering off to Spindle is her worst political enemy," Terekhov finished for him, and it was his turn to chuckle. Then he shook his head. "Lord! What idiot thought up that system? I can't conceive of anything better designed to cripple the executive branch!"

"I expect that's exactly what the drafters of the original Constitution had in mind. Not that it's meant a lot over the past several decades, since, until the Reconciliation Party came along, there wasn't really any significant difference between the platforms of any of the presidential candidates who stood much chance of winning either office.

And the reform-minded Reconciliation Party, the exception to the puppet show of distinct parties that have the same overall agenda (hey, that sounds familiar...) and the runner-up in presidential elections becomes the vice president, which is how it used to work in the American system. Rajkovic doesn't quite have a majority in Parliament (45%) and he's stuck with Tonkovic's hand-picked Cabinet. Still, a man could do a lot of damage while his President was playing chicken in Spindle.

"It isn't a good situation, but it isn't quite as bad as a bare recitation of the political alliances and maneuverings involved might suggest. For instance, a surprisingly high percentage of their civil service is both honest and reasonably efficient, despite the oligrachic political system. As far as I can tell, the Kornatian National Police are also reasonably honest and efficient, and Colonel Basaricek does her level best to keep her people out of politics and out of the hip pockets of the local elite. In fact, she's apparently been working on reinforcing a more traditional view of the entire citizenry's civil rights among her personnel over the last five or ten T-years. Enough so that she's drawn some noticeable political flak from people who value domestic tranquility over the rights of troublemakers.

Unlike a lot of oligarchies, the police and civil service are relatively honest.

"The biggest political problem's the way the electorate's grown increasingly apathetic over the past several decades. There's always been a strong tradition of patronage on Kornati, and these days that translates into clients who vote in accordance with their patrons' desires in return for a degree of security and protection in an economy that isn't doing well. Coupled with the extremely low level of voter registration, that's how a very small percentage of the total population's managed to take control of the legislative process. Which is another huge difference between Split and Dresden . . . and one reason Dresden is overtaking Split economically so rapidly."

That sounds really, really familiar.

"I wondered what Aleksandra had in mind when she supported the original plebiscite so enthusiastically. In my opinion, she was driven far more by fear of being ingested by Frontier Security than by the advantages membership in the Star Kingdom might bring to her planet and its economy. Where the majority of the Convention's delegates, including a majority of the oligarchs, see annexation as an opportunity to improve the lives, health, and life expectancy of their worlds' citizens, Aleksandra doesn't, really.

"I'm not saying the other oligarchs are saints, because they're not. They figure that if the economy improves for everyone, those already at the top of the heap will improve their situations even more. But I do think most of them're able to look at least a short distance past the limits of their own greedy self-interest. I don't really think Aleksandra is. Worse, I don't think she realizes she isn't. She and the people she associates with on Kornati—the people she thinks of as the 'real' Kornatians—are quite well off as things are. The people who aren't 'real' to her don't matter. Don't even exist, except as threats to the ones who are 'real.' So what they want the Star Kingdom to do is to protect them from the League's bureaucratic nightmare and otherwise leave them alone. And I'm afraid Aleksandra, despite having quite a good mind, actually, has been extrapolating from her own experience in Split when she visualizes the Star Kingdom. I'm convinced that when she and her closest associates decided to support the plebiscite, they believed the Star Kingdom's version of representative government was essentially a façade. That they'd be able to continue business as usual even after the annexation went through."

Why Tonkovic is hell-bent on maintaining so much local autonomy. They have a very comfortable systems for the haves on top of the have-nots. She's hoping all the first time voters registered by the RP in the last election will give up when they see they didn't change anything. And she really figures that democracy in general is a sham, and Manticore must be at least as corrupt as they are.

"I think they believe that since the Star Kingdom requires its citizens to pay taxes before they're allowed to vote, they'll be able to control the situation. That the Manticoran system's set up to give the Star Kingdom's upper class control of the electorate while maintaining the fiction that the lower classes have any real political power," Van Dort said, and Terekhov barked a sharp laugh.

"That's because they don't understand how high a percentage of our people do pay taxes. Or maybe they think our tax codes are as complicated and buggered up as theirs are as a way to chisel people out of the franchise."

"Not all of our tax codes are that bad," Van Dort protested.

"Oh, please, Bernardus!" Terekhov shook his head in disgust. "Oh, I'll grant you Rembrandt isn't quite as bad as the others, but I've taken a look at the rat's nest of tax provisions some of you people have out here. I've seen hyper-space astrogation problems that were simpler! No wonder nobody knows what the hell is going on. But the Star Kingdom's personal tax provisions are a lot simpler—I filled out my entire tax return in less than ten minutes, on a single-page e-form, last year, even with the emergency war taxes. And all the Star Kingdom requires to vote is that a citizen pay at least one cent more in taxes than he receives in government transfer payments and subsidies. Once the infusion of investment capital hits your local economies, there're going to be an awful lot of franchised voters. And somehow I don't think they're going to be very fond of Ms. Tonkovic and her friends. In fact, I think they'll probably line solidly up behind Mr. Rajkovic."

Apparently the Manticoran tax form is a single page long and can be filled out in ten minutes. Manticore requires voters to pay more in taxes than they get in benefits, but even one cent more will qualify them to vote. Still not a great system to my way of thinking, but it doesn't sound like one specifically designed to disenfranchise the poor and needy.

"I doubt she's truly realized just how wrong her original analysis of the Star Kingdom's political structure really was even now, but she has begun to realize that it was wrong. Unfortunately, from her perspective, she's now committed to supporting the annexation. Worse, she's probably realized that even if she could opt out on behalf of the Split System, despite the plebiscite vote—which would be political suicide for her personally, at a bare minimum—Split would simply find itself encysted within the Star Kingdom once the rest of the Cluster joined it. The odds of her being able to maintain her neat little closed system under those circumstances would be minute. So instead, she's fighting for a Constitution which will not simply leave the existing economic structures and control mechanisms in place in Split, but actually give them the imprimatur of an official constitutional guarantee backed by the Crown. That's the 'local autonomy' she keeps harping on—the right of individual star systems to determine who holds the franchise within their own political structures."

Tonkovic's position now. I'm sure Elizabeth and Grantville won't have any problem pledging the support of their Constitution and crown to more-or-less the same system as the People's Republic of Haven, save the massive public relief. And if you buy that, I've some prime Floridian real-estate to sell you.

[Simon_Jester]

So Terekhov orders no Marine bodyguards, trusting in Westman's pledge of safe passage.

A very Picard thing to do (I've been watching TNG lately). It also occurs to me that Westman has so far taken pains not to kill anyone with his attacks. It would be most atypical for him to start with a kidnapping, especially a kidnapping that would occur in the open at a known meeting location where someone surely could send troops to swoop in on him and retake any hostages he captures.

Yeah, I imagine it would be hard to hold a relationship together where one party ages and the other does not.

Don't I remember you, back towards the start of the Harrington analysis threads, commenting on how Weber never makes a point of how prolong would impact society at large?



Anyway, this is, yes, a prime example. This would probably be an incredibly common thing were it not for the fact that most of the developed societies in the Honorverse seem to have adopted prolong en masse more or less all at the same time. As far as I can tell Manticore even has universal health care because it sure seems like every Manticoran citizen born after 1810 PD or so has prolong.

But in the Verge there are probably hosts of stories like Bernardus van Dort's. And, more cynically, cases of prolong-beneficiary aristocrats who cynically work their way through a stream of mayfly lovers who don't have prolong.

Another decent use of a story with no real villains, just people getting along as best they can, making mistakes and enemies along the way.

Yeah. Weber can do that with personal drama, and with military affairs. It's only when things get political that he has to write vile disgusting ignoble moronic hacks into the story.

"The other way Montana differs from Kornati is that it's much easier, relatively speaking, for someone who works his posterior off and enjoys at least a little luck to move from the lowest income brackets to a position of comparative affluence. These people make an absolute fetish out of rugged individualism, and there's still a lot of unclaimed land and free range. Their entire legal code and society are set up to encourage individual enterprise to use those opportunities, and their wealthier citizens look aggressively for investment opportunities.

And you can make it without family connections, even if there are some "big ranchers."

"Kornati's a much more typical Verge planet. They don't have an attractive export commodity, like Montana's beef. There's not enough wealth in the system to attract imports from outside the Cluster, and although their domestic industry's growing steadily, the rate of increase is low. Since they have nothing to export, but still have to import critical commodities—like off-world computers, trained engineers, and machine tools—if they want to build up their local infrastructure, their balance of trade's . . . unfavorable, to say the very least. That exacerbates the biggest economic problem Kornati faces: lack of investment capital. Since they can't attract it from outside, what they really need is to find some way to pry loose enough domestic investment to at least prime the pump the way other systems have managed.

"The Dresden System, for example, was even poorer than Split thirty T-years ago. By now, Dresden's on the brink of catching up with Split, and even without the possibility of the annexation, Dresden's gross system product would probably pass Split's within the next ten T-years. It's not that Dresden's wealthier than Split—in fact, the system's actually quite a bit poorer. It's just that the Dresdeners've managed to begin a self-sustaining domestic expansion by encouraging entrepreneurship and taking advantage of every opportunity—including energetic cooperation with the RTU—that falls their way. The oligarchs on Kornati, by and large, are more interested in sitting on what they have than in risking their wealth in the sorts of enterprises which might bolster the economy as a whole. They aren't quite a kleptocracy, and that's about the best I can say for them."

Surprise! The wealth does not "trickle down."

It is interesting to reflect here that we're presented with a conflict between rugged individualism and entrepreneurship on the one hand (which results in growth) and concentrating all the money in the hands of a small class of elite, powerful oligarchs (which doesn't). Real world experience supports this to a considerable extent, but to contrast the idea with the political ideology and conduct of our own society raises interesting questions.

Why, David Weber, is that an argument in favor of a social safety net? The general mess that is Kornati, and why Bordbrandt was able to find malcontents so easily.

Son of a bitch... you're right!

Apparently the Manticoran tax form is a single page long and can be filled out in ten minutes. Manticore requires voters to pay more in taxes than they get in benefits, but even one cent more will qualify them to vote. Still not a great system to my way of thinking, but it doesn't sound like one specifically designed to disenfranchise the poor and needy.

Well, it kind of is.

Realistically, the way the Manticoran government manages to function involves major transfer payments of money collected by the Junction fees and taxes on the merchant marine and financial sector... which would presumably tend to be transferred to the public as public aid of various sorts.

It might not disenfranchise all the poor and needy, but it will sure hit the biggest blocs: the unemployed, the students receiving government aid, and so on. This may help to explain how idiotic factions stay in office in the Commons as well as the Lords, and how the Liberal Party was able to function prior to the fall of the High Ridge government despite showing little sign of being connected to the wishes of the Manty in the street.

Also, I suspect the Manticoran tax form is a single page long because their absolute tax rates are low precisely because they don't really have to think about where money will come from within their own economy. They have such a big stream of cash flowing out of the magical Negative Space Wedgie in their backyard that they can afford to impose a 3% flat tax on personal income or whatever and call it a day.

[eyl]

Also, I suspect the Manticoran tax form is a single page long because their absolute tax rates are low precisely because they don't really have to think about where money will come from within their own economy. They have such a big stream of cash flowing out of the magical Negative Space Wedgie in their backyard that they can afford to impose a 3% flat tax on personal income or whatever and call it a day.

It's also quite possible that a lot of what you have to fill in today gets done automatically and sent in the background.

Besides, it also depends if there's only a single type of tax form or not. In Israel, for example, your tax form - if you're an employee rather than self-employed and don't have multiple jobs or something - is one and a half pages long, with half a page eing personal information (name, address etc), and the rest being several groups of checkboxes; you can fill out the entire thing in a couple of minutes.

[VhenRa]

Also, I suspect the Manticoran tax form is a single page long because their absolute tax rates are low precisely because they don't really have to think about where money will come from within their own economy. They have such a big stream of cash flowing out of the magical Negative Space Wedgie in their backyard that they can afford to impose a 3% flat tax on personal income or whatever and call it a day.

It's also quite possible that a lot of what you have to fill in today gets done automatically and sent in the background.

Besides, it also depends if there's only a single type of tax form or not. In Israel, for example, your tax form - if you're an employee rather than self-employed and don't have multiple jobs or something - is one and a half pages long, with half a page eing personal information (name, address etc), and the rest being several groups of checkboxes; you can fill out the entire thing in a couple of minutes.

Yeah, a good chunk of the world's tax forms are much simpler then America as I understand, with piles of them having things occurring automatically in the background.

[Mr Bean]

Also on the tax forms.
It's the future so maybe finally they decide that it may be time to create individualize tax forms automatically with space tax software. Something as simple as it auto fills in your name, date, birth ect. Your equivalent of a W2 that lists everything but autocompletes the end tax data. Something tells me Manticore is not big on property taxes so most of the taxes would be income or activity based. Maybe instead of a highly specific calculated property tax it's a flat per home tax.

Note this is also the taxes of a Navy Captain in her Majesty service. I don't think Terekhov has 4 dependants, ten properties and an unknown number of treecats on his forms. Note Honor still has an accountant now that I think on it.

Also is Nimitz a tax dodger?

[Ahriman238]

But there was obviously only one group on Kornati who could possibly require the better part of four thousand tons of small arms, unpowered body armor, encrypted communicators, -stealthed counter-grav surveillance sats and drones, and military-grade explosives. And given the local authorities' ugly attitude, Duan Binyan didn't even want to think about what would happen to anyone caught running modern weapons into the hands of the "Freedom Alliance of Kornati."

Of course, he thought glumly, they can't kill us any deader than the frigging Manties would if they caught us with a special consignment. They've made that clear enough.

Smuggling off-world weaponry and tech to the FAK on the less-than-good Jessyk Combine ship Marianne. 4000 tons of munitions, modern armor, sensors and comm tech, and their own spy-sats.

Even without a special consignment aboard, Marianne had obviously been designed as a slaver, and she carried all of the necessary equipment. Which meant, under the Manticorans' "equipment clause" interpretation of the Cherwell Convention, she was a slaver, and her crew was guilty of slaving, even if there were no slaves physically present. And since the Manties seemed determined to move into the area, their nasty habit of executing slavers gave Duan Binyan a rather burning desire to be certain there were none about.

Marianne has the ejection bays, so if she's searched by a Mantie or Haven ship, the crew is toast.

Fortunately, Marianne's sensor suite was good enough for Egervary to be sure there weren't. In fact, her sensors were far more capable than any legitimate merchantship—especially one that looked as decrepit as she did—ever carried. Nor was that the only unusual thing about her. The four-million-ton freighter might look like a tramp whose owners routinely skimped on maintenance, but she had a military-grade hyper generator and particle screening. Her acceleration was no greater than that of other merchantmen her size, but she could reach the Epsilon Bands and sustain a velocity of .7 c once she got there, which gave her a maximum apparent velocity of over 1,442 c, thirty-two percent faster than a "typical" merchie. He would have liked to have military-grade impellers and a military-grade compensator, as well, but those would have been almost impossible to disguise and would have cut massively into her cargo capacity. And if he couldn't have those, at least her designers had provided her with eyes and ears as good as most military vessels boasted, which was at least equally important to a ship which had to operate covertly.

Upgraded FTL and sensors. Relatively early on, Weber told us that freighters usually spare no expense on the sensors because lacking military grade drives, the only way to avoid trouble is to see it coming from quite a ways off. The sensor operators are less consistent in quality than naval ratings, but that happens. But then we have him repeatedly mentioning the sensors of ships like Marianne and Pirate's Bane like it's something unusual.

She was also armed, although no one in his right mind—and certainly not Duan Binyan—would ever confuse her with a warship. She didn't make any effort to pretend she wasn't armed, although her official papers significantly understated the power of the two lasers she mounted in each broadside and her engineering log always showed that at least one of them was down for lack of spare parts. The Verge could be a dangerous place, and probably ten or fifteen percent of the merchies which plied it were armed, after a fashion, at least. The "inoperable" broadside mount was simply part of Marianne's down-at-the-heels masquerade, and half her point defense clusters and counter-missiles tubes were concealed behind jettisonable plating, again in keeping with her pretense of parsimonious owners.

10-15% of ships in the Verge, a relatively dangerous area of space, are armed. If you call two lasers to a broadside armed.

Agnes Nordbrandt sat in the passenger seat of the battered freight copter as it whirred noisily through the night. Counter-grav air lorries would have been more efficient, and they were common enough on Kornati these days that she probably could have rented one or two without arousing suspicion. But helicopters were cheaper, and so ubiquitous no one could possibly stop all of them for random searches.

Apparently helicopters are a lot more common on Kornati than counter-grav craft.

The problem was the helicopter's maximum cargo capacity of only twenty-five tons. She had five more, similar helicopters, although two of them couldn't be used long, since they'd been stolen for this operation. Still, even with all six of them, she could transport only a hundred and fifty tons in a single flight. Which meant it would require twenty-six round trips by all six to move her arriving bounty of destruction.

Lift capacity of a Kornati freight chopper.

Twenty-three minutes later, he lifted up over the edge of the gorge, crossed a ridgeline, slid down the further side to an altitude of thirty meters, traveled another twelve kilometers, and then set neatly down in an overgrown, bone-dry wheat field. The farm to which the wheat field belonged had been abandoned when its owner had the misfortune to be walking across the Mall on the day of the Nemanja bombing.

Nordbrandt wasn't immune to the harsh irony which made this particular landing site available. She hadn't had anything in particular against the farm's owner. He'd simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time and become a martyr to Kornatian independence. And now his death was making a second contribution, she thought, as she swung down through the passenger door into the tall wheat.

I'm not sure if it's more sickening that she doesn't even try and justify the guy's death, or if it would be if she did. Later we'll hear it's about an hour by air to each of the stockpiles she's stashing the stuff at, and maybe an hour to ninety minutes for loading and unloading, making this a lengthy process to hide from the authorities.

She stood quietly, watching as five of the freight copters headed out. By then, the cargo shuttle was completely empty. The additional pallets were moved into the concealment of a convenient barn, and the shuttle closed its hatches, fired up its turbines, and disappeared the way it had come. Nordbrandt gave the landing site one more look, noting the trampled tracks in the wheat field, then climbed up into the sixth and final helicopter. It would drop her off where other secure transportation was waiting to return her to her tenement safe-house before it returned for its second load.

"Make sure you set the timers before you lift out with your final load," she told the pilot, raising her voice over the clatter of the rotors.

Barn to house the goods until they can ship them out, smart. Burning down the transfer site, just why?

"I don't expect miracles, Captain," Rajkovic reassured him. "I'm afraid some members of my Cabinet and Parliament probably do. And I know those idiots who report the news do. But I recognize that you have a single ship, with limited manpower, and no more idea where to find these lunatics than we have. I suppose what I'm really hoping for is two things. First, I'd be absolutely delighted if you were able to break the FAK wide open in a single brilliantly conceived and executed operation, after all. Second, failing that—which, frankly, seems likely to me—I'd be extremely gratified by even one or two relatively minor successes. If it's possible for us to score a few victories, even small ones, with your assistance, then the notion that the entire resources of the Star Kingdom stand ready to assist us further should be a major morale enhancer for all of our people."

"I see." Terekhov gazed at the face on his com. Obviously Rajkovic wanted him to know he was only too well aware that Hexapuma was unlikely to slay the FAK dragon with a single stroke of the sword. And, the captain conceded, the expectations attached to the Vice President's second hope were both pragmatic and realistic.

Apparently the local media and possibly much of the political establishment have been pinning their hopes on Hexapuma arriving, finding all FAK members through their magic Manticoran sensors that respond to impure thoughts, and taking them out with precision orbital strikes and/or dropping space marines. Rajjovic, at least, seems to understand that this isn't going to happen. The problem with guerrillas and terrorists is if they're smart they vanish after each strike and make the conventional firepower you have somewhat academic.

"I want to know just what orbital assets the Kornatians have. I expect they'll be perfectly willing to brief us on their capabilities, but sometimes there's a discrepancy between what people tell you they can do and the capabilities of the hardware they actually have in place. Put out some arrays to give us a look at the far side of the planet. Then run a detailed analysis of every ship and satellite out there. I'd like you and Lieutenant Hearns to be prepared to give me a full-dress brief on your findings right after breakfast tomorrow."

Terekhov has a suspicious mind, and a thorough attention to detail whenever he has the time, which essentially means whenever he isn't in a pitched firefight. This is commented on multiple times in the book.

She'd arranged for the second load of weapons to be landed that very night. Things had gone so well the first time that she'd decided to go ahead and run in a full shuttle load—over a thousand tons—in a single flight. Since she had enough from the first load tucked away in her twelve separate caches to meet her immediate operational needs in and around the capital, she'd decided to risk landing that large a chunk of the total consignment at Charlie One, the carefully hidden base training camp also known as "Camp Freedom."

Charlie One had been located with security in mind, which meant it was incredibly inconveniently placed to support operations in or around Karlovac. Or any of Kornati's other major cities. Or even moderately large towns, for that matter. But its very isolation should mean it would be reasonably safe to hold the majority of the new weapons and equipment there for at least a short time—long enough, certainly, to carefully disperse it all to secondary hidden locations.

A dozen weapons caches around the capital, so a quarter of their load goes to the training facility at "Camp Freedom."

"So why don't we just leave? Let them go ahead and roll up the locals! It's no skin off our ass if they do."

"Oh, yes, it is. Nordbrandt's contact for this shipment's the Jessyk agent here on Kornati. If we pull out, and Nordbrandt's people get nailed, there's no way they won't tell the authorities exactly who was supposed to deliver their weapons . . . and didn't. And if it's escaped your attention, our agent doesn't have diplomatic immunity. The locals will bust him in a heartbeat, and when they do, they'll hand him over to the Manties. And the one thing we can't afford is for the Manties to start wondering why the Jessyk Combine—a Mesan transstellar corporation—is shipping weapons to terrorists in the Talbott Cluster. Believe me," he looked into her eyes, "there's more going on here than just a weapons drop to a bunch of lunatics. If you and I do anything that compromises the rest of Bardasano's operation, we'll be lucky if we manage to kill ourselves before her wet work teams catch up with us."

-snip-

"So we go ahead with the drop as planned?"

"Only the next scheduled phase. Between what we already have down and the next load, they'll have almost a third of the entire consignment. That's a hell of a lot more than they had before, and we'll explain that the arrival of this Manty cruiser means we have to haul ass. I'm pretty sure Nordbrandt will understand. And even if she doesn't, even if we wind up ratted out, Bardasano won't blame us for it. Or, she probably won't, at least. She came up through covert ops herself, and they say she's got enough experience to recognize what field ops realistically can and can't do when Murphy turns up. If we manage to make that much of our drop and get away clean, I think she'll agree it was the best we could do under the circumstances."

The crew of the not-so-good ship Marianne are less than pleased to be sharing an orbit with a Manty cruiser, so they're bailing after one more weapons drop, letting them get 75% of Nordbrandts guns and gear down.

Ragnhild Pavletic and her pinnace were parked prominently on one of the central pads of the Karlovac spaceport. The dorsal turret's heavy pulse cannon were manned, and the entire pad was ringed by two full squads of battle-armored Marines, complete with heavy weapons. And as an additional touch, two full-spectrum battlefield sensor drones floated overhead on their counter-grav. One was high enough to be immune to virtually any man-portable weapon Kornati might possess; the second was much lower, deliberately exposed to possible hostile fire in order to make sure everyone could see it and know it was there.

A third squad of armored Marines had added themselves to the security perimeter of the Presidential Mansion, and a third sensor drone was deployed above the mansion's grounds.

This time Terekhov brings a lot of security. But then, I gather making an impression was sort of the point, and it'd be just awkward if he were assassinated now.Also, sensor drones for the Marines.

"With all due respect, Mr. Secretary, the Vice President has a point," she told her own civilian superior. "The fact that so many people feel disenfranchised is another factor, of course, but the perception that the system's fundamentally unfair, in some ways, is a huge part of what made it possible for Nordbrandt to get this far."

-snip-

"I think a lot of people have failed to realize," Basaricek said, turning to face Van Dort directly, "that long before the plebiscite, the core of Nordbrandt's Nationalist Redemption Party was composed of extraordinarily angry people. People who, rightly or wrongly, believed they had legitimate grievances against the system. Most of those people, in my opinion, would've done better to look a little closer to home for the causes of their failures and their problems. But if that was true for a lot of them, some of them had definite justification for feeling the government, or the courts, or the Social Support Administration had failed them. I know, because my people tend to find themselves in the middle when someone who's just plain desperate tries to take matters into her own hands."

-snip-

"Even before the NRP's more moderate members started falling away because of her opposition to the annexation," Basaricek continued, "she'd been recruiting an inner cadre from that bitter, alienated hard core of her most fervent supporters. As the moderates bailed out on her, she came to effectively rely exclusively on the hardliners. There never were very many of them as a percentage of the total population, but even a tiny percentage of a planetary population is a large absolute number. Probably only a minority of even her closest supporters were prepared to cross the line into illegal actions, but that was still enough to let her organize FAK cells in most of our major urban areas."

This isn't just opposition to the annexation, these are economically desperate people who see no end to their struggles, see the deck is hopelessly stacked in favor of the rich and powerful. And this is how Nordbrandt was able to organize them, because she was already separating out the hardcore for the day they'd have to fight against OFS, or the powers that be at home, whichever.

"Mr. Vice President, Baroness Medusa and I have discussed the general situation in the Cluster and, specifically, here in Split. Captain Terekhov and I have further discussed it, in light of the dispatches we received from the Provisional Governor when she ordered us here from Montana. It seems to us that historical experience demonstrates that the successful suppression of this sort of movement must always include a two-pronged approach.

"On the one hand, obviously, the military threat must be contained and neutralized. That's usually fairly straightforward, if not necessarily simple. Colonel Basaricek's just finished explaining a large part of the reason why it's not simple. Nonetheless, it isn't impossible, either, and Baroness Medusa's prepared to offer assistance in the effort. She's dispatching the chartered transport Joanna from Spindle, with two full-strength companies of Royal Manticoran Marines on board. One company is drawn from the battalion assigned to her personal command on Flax. The other is drawn from rear Admiral Khumalo's flagship, the Hercules. They'll be accompanied by their integral heavy weapons platoons, two assault shuttles, and three Fleet pinnaces, and they'll take over in the purely military support role when they arrive. That, unfortunately, will probably not be for another week or two, at the soonest. They will, however, remain on assignment to you until such time as the military situation is under control."

Aside from the Kitty, Dame Matsuko is sending another two companies of Marines with heavy weapons and spacelift to support the government.

"But in addition to neutralizing the military threat, remedial action must be taken to repair the abuses which helped create the threat in the first place. You can't eliminate resistance by simply shooting resisters, not unless you're prepared to embrace a policy of outright terror yourselves. Your tradition of vigilance where civil rights are concerned suggests to me that you probably aren't prepared to do that. Besides, it would be ultimately futile, unless you're willing to accept a permanent police state. Any time you arrest or kill someone who's perceived as striking out against genuine injustice, you simply create another martyr, which only provides recruits to the other side. It doesn't necessarily mean the terrorists are right; it simply means you're generating a supply of people who think the terrorists are right. So to cut off their support at its base, you must make it evident you're prepared to address the issues which spawned the resistance movement in the first place. Do it from a position of strength, by all means, and don't allow yourselves to be driven into making huge, unjustified concessions. But those issues must be addressed, and some sort of consensus about them must be reached, if you're to have any hope of finally and completely eliminating the threat."

The Kornatians looked at one another. Basaricek had no expression at all. Kanjer looked frankly mutinous, and General Suka looked as if he'd just bitten into something spoiled. Vice President Rajkovic looked thoughtful, and he leaned back, resting his right forearm on the conference table, and gazed at Van Dort speculatively.

And the need to actually fix the broken system that spawned so much unrest.

"And just why are you telling us this?" Kanjer demanded suspiciously.

"For two reasons, Mr. Secretary," Van Dort said. "First, it's -necessary to launch a propaganda counteroffensive. Yes, a huge majority of the franchised population voted in favor of annexation. But the franchise is so limited here, because of the nonregistration of eligible voters, that the vote in favor was actually a minority of the total pool of potential voters. Nordbrandt knows that. She's played upon it in her propaganda. And it's not enough for the government to respond by simply reciting the vote totals over and over again. You have to come out swinging, in a way which convinces the majority of those who didn't vote that annexation is a good thing. That it will have positive consequences for them in their own lives. At the moment, Nordbrandt's arguing that it will benefit only the 'moneyed interests' and 'oligarchs,' and only at the expense of everyone else. You need to not only dispute her claims, but effectively debunk them."

Yes, that would be very helpful, Mr. Van Dort.

"And second," he said quietly, "to be completely honest, President Tonkovic's position at the Constitutional Convention isn't helpful."

Suka's already dark complexion turned an alarming shade of red. He quivered with visible outrage, and Kanjer sat bolt upright in his chair, his expression furious, but Van Dort faced him calmly.

"Mr. Secretary, before you say anything, has President Tonkovic informed your government that she's been informed by Baroness Medusa that a hard time limit for the approval of a Constitution exists? That if a draft Constitution hasn't been approved within the next one hundred and twenty-two standard days, the Star Kingdom of Manticore will either withdraw the offer of annexation completely, or else provide a list of specific individual star systems whose admission to the Star Kingdom will be rejected?"

Kanjer had started to open his mouth. Now he froze, eyes widening, and darted a look at Rajkovic. But the Vice President seemed as startled as the Justice Secretary himself.

Actually, she didn't. At all. Too concerned about busybodies at home trying to direct her chicken strategy. Of course, the President of Kornati is constitutionally required to inform their Parliament of major diplomatic developments. Which is another reason for Van Dort to bring it up.

Abigail Hearns looked up from her own console in CIC at the rating's quiet comment. She and Aikawa Kagiyama had just been reexamining—playing with, really—the sensor data on Kornati's orbital space activity Captain Terekhov had asked Naomi Kaplan to run down when Hexapuma first arrived in Split. It wasn't exactly exciting, but it was good practice, and there hadn't been a lot else for Aikawa to do during the current watch.

Johnson was studying his own display, and Abigail frowned. The sensor tech was responsible for monitoring the orbital sensor arrays Hexapuma had deployed around Kornati. Even a planet as poor and technically backward as Kornati had an enormous amount of aerial traffic, and trying to monitor it was a stiff challenge, even with Hexapuma's sophisticated ability to collect and analyze the data. For the Kornatians themselves, it was more of a matter of brute manpower and making do, given their limited and relatively primitive computer capability. Air traffic control worked fairly well, but it really relied upon the fact that most of the pilots involved wanted to obey the traffic controllers, and the Kornatian ground radar stations weren't all that terribly difficult to evade.

But what was impossible for the Kornatians, was simply difficult for Hexapuma's CIC. Sensors and computer programs designed to handle hundreds, even thousands, of individual targets moving on every conceivable vector in spherical volumes measured in light-hours, were quite capable of searching for patterns that shouldn't be there—and flaws in patterns that should be there—in something as small and confined as a single planet's airspace.

The ongoing training of the midshipmen, and the Kitty can track air traffic a lot better than the locals. Which is how they spot the number of flights that all end at this one spot in the middle of nowhere.

"Trust me, Ma'am—I didn't spot it by eyeball, either. Assuming there's really anything to it, that is. I was running standard analysis packages, and the computer spotted this."

He tapped one of the macros he'd set up, and the same timespread replayed itself. But this time the computers were -obviously filtering out the bulk of the traffic. In fact, there were less than a dozen contacts, and Abigail felt both eyebrows -rising.

"Run that again."

"Yes, Ma'am," he said, and she straightened up, folding her own arms and cocking her head as she watched. There was no time association she could see between the contacts Johnson's data manipulation had pulled out. The first appeared at 17:43 hours local. The others were scattered out at apparently random intervals between then and 24:05 local. But what they did have in common was that regardless of when they crossed into the quadrant, they each terminated at exactly the same spot.

-snip-

"I'd set the system filters to show me any location where more than five flight paths terminated, and this was the only one that turned up, aside from a couple of small towns scattered around the area." He shrugged. "I've been trying to think of some reason for them to do that. So far, I haven't been able to come up with one. I mean, I guess they could all be going on a fishing trip together, and it just happened to take them six and a half hours to get together. But if it was me, I think I'd try to schedule my arrivals a little closer together than that. Besides, this is yesterday's take, and I've already done a search of today's. We still don't have a single departure from that location, so whoever they are, they're still there, right?"

See? And so statistics and histograms betray Camp Freedom to the fierce alien overlords.

"That, Skipper, is from one of Tadislaw's stealthed battlefield recon drones. They don't begin to have the raw computational power we do, and they sure as hell don't have our range, but they're specifically designed for taking close, unobtrusive looks. So when I decided I wanted more detail on the area, I got hold of Lieutenant Mann, and he and Sergeant Crites went out to the main airport in Karlovac to inspect the aircraft there. And somehow one of their drones accidentally got itself tractored to the skin of one of the regularly scheduled transports that cross through the area. And it fell off again right about . . . here."

A bright, irregular line appeared on the map, which obediently zoomed in still closer on the roughly wedge-shaped area it contained, and Terekhov's eyes narrowed.

"This, Skipper," Kaplan said, her tone and manner now completely serious as she leaned forward, using a stylus as a pointer, "is the thermal signature of a carefully hidden access—one big enough for an air car or even one of the Kornatians' big freight helicopters, if you fold the rotors—to a large underground structure of some sort. And this," the stylus moved to the side, "is a ventilation system designed to disguise the waste heat. And this over here," the stylus moved again, "is what looks like a pretty well camouflaged observation post, placed high enough on this hill to command most of this entire end of the river valley all of this is tucked away in. And this right here," her voice sharpened and her eyes narrowed, "is a pattern of earth and leaves that were turned over fairly recently—probably within the last seventy to eighty hours—that happens to be big enough to cover the marks the landing skids of a good sized shuttle or a really big -counter-grav air lorry might have left. If that's what it is, it can't have been there for more than seventy-seven hours, unless whatever left them had better stealth capacity than anything of ours does, because that's how long ago we put Johnson's array up and tasked it to watch this area."

"And we couldn't pick any of this up with our own array?"

"Whoever put this in, did an excellent job," Kaplan said. "My best estimate is that the Defense Force's recon satellites wouldn't have seen this at all using their optical or heat sensors. There are power sources down there, but they're also extremely well shielded—so well that even Tadislaw's drone can't isolate point sources reliably. You can do that with enough dirt or cerama-crete. I don't think anything the KDF has could spot this without going active with radar mapping. We couldn't spot it from up here, using purely passive systems, partly because of the sheer depth of atmosphere, partly because of the dense tree cover and how good a job they did of hiding it when they put it in, and partly because for all the computational power we've got, our arrays simply aren't designed for detailed tactical work in this type of environment. The Marines' equipment is, and that's why Tadislaw's drone could spot what we couldn't."

How to camouflage a base against modern sensor tech and ships/spy-sats. Marine sensor drones unobtrusively deployed via regular scheduled aircraft.

Most of the Manticorans Jezic had seen—which wasn't all that many, really, he admitted—were taller than average Kornatians. That probably had something to do with the fact that they got better diets and medical care from childhood, he reflected. But the battle armor added at least another fifteen centimeters to their height, and the armor's arms and legs swelled smoothly with artificial "muscles." Most of the armored Marines were liberally festooned with weaponry and other equipment, but another twenty-odd Marines in armored skinsuits were still checking out their personal gear. That much, at least, was reassuringly familiar, even though the weapons and equipment were far more advanced than anything with which he'd ever trained.

Is everyone in the galactic "First World" i.e. Havenites, Manties, Andies and Sollies that much taller than everyone else? I mean, they talk about some worlds so primitive they've reverted to a late 20th/early 21st Century techbase, but that should still allow for adequate diet and healthcare, and worlds like Grayson and Kornati are significantly more advanced than we are today.

"What we're planning to do, in simplest terms, Captain," Kaczmarczyk said, "is to drop Lieutenant Kelso and her armored people on individual counter-grav. We'll toss them out in a high-altitude/low-opening drop from several kilometers out. They'll freefall towards the installation, using skydiving techniques and their armor's thrusters, and pop their counter-grav at the minimum safe altitude. That ought to put them on the ground, right on top of the the bad guys before they have any idea we're coming.

"Her first objective will be to secure or destroy this structure here." He indicated the stubby, camouflaged tower on top of the hill. "We can't tell whether this tower—it looks like more of a tall bunker, really—is just an observation post, or if it mounts heavy weapons. Since we can't tell for certain, we'll go ahead and be sure it's neutralized, just to be on the safe side.

We will still do HALO jumps in the future, because they're cool?

"While one of First Squad's fire teams takes care of that, her second squad will set up over here, covering the one apparent vehicle ramp we've identified. They'll be dropping in heavy-assault configuration, with maximum firepower and minimum endurance. Hopefully, the entire operation will be over very quickly, but we're bringing in backup power units for their armor and weapons in the event that it turns into some kind of siege operation and they have to stay on site for more than a couple of hours. With the plasma cannon, heavy tribarrels, and grenade launchers they'll be bringing in, I don't think anything's likely to get out of the ramp and away from us.

"First Squad's second fire team will set up right here." Kaczmarczyk indicated the ventilation system which had been identified. "Its primary mission will be to serve as Lieutenant Kelso's tactical reserve until the rest of us get onto the ground. However, it will also be equipped with Suppressant Three." Jezic looked at him, and he shook his head as if mildly irritated with himself. "Sorry, Captain. That's our current sleepy gas. If the fire team can get onto its objective before the bad guys realize what's going on and switch off their ventilators, it may be able to put the majority of the opposition to sleep, which would really make the rest of the job a lot easier."

Wait, wait, wait. Manticore has anesthezine?!? Or something similar? A sleeping gas without serious side-effects or dosage by weight concerns that can be easily deployed against large numbers of people? Do you have any idea how many times over the course of the series this would have been insanely useful?

"Now," Kaczmarczyk said, turning back to Jezic and continuing before the Kornatian could thank him for the implied generosity, "once Lieutenant Kelso's on the ground and has the site basically secured, we'll bring in the rest of First Platoon and Lieutenant Hedge's Second Squad. They'll be in regular Marine skinnies, which're probably as good as any of your local body armor, but not anywhere near as tough as battle armor. They'll spread out to take over the perimeter, and Second Squad, as soon as it's been relieved from that duty, will execute the break-in into the underground installations. The pinnaces will lift back off as soon as everyone's on the ground. They'll provide air cover and ground support, if needed, and, along with the recon drones we'll be deploying, they'll keep an eye out for escapees. We haven't been able to spot them so far, but the people who managed to put in something this well concealed are damned sure going to have bolt holes to let them scurry out the back door if someone kicks in the front door."

Air cover and the follow-up will secure the perimeter so the armor-jockeys can scour the tunnels.

"I do have one question, Captain," Kaczmarczyk said after a moment, his expression much more serious. "The one thing I know I don't have a good feel for is exactly how fanatical these people are. Or maybe what I mean is how suicidal they might be."

"That's a hard one, Captain. We know they're fanatical enough to blow up department stores full of civilians. And which," Jezic added grimly, "they knew contained two child day-care centers. But, to be perfectly honest, we haven't managed to corner enough of them to know how likely they are to blow themselves up for the glory of the Movement." His mouth twisted bitterly. "If this place is as important as its isolation and concealment indicate, I'd think that they'd be more likely to do something like that here than if we'd only cornered a strike team out in the open somewhere. I'd have to say the possibility exists, but I can't begin to tell you how likely it actually is."

"I was afraid that was what you're going to say," Kaczmarczyk said unhappily. "That's one reason I'm really hoping we can get the Suppressant Three in there before they shut down their air system. Not even battle armor will protect someone from a big enough explosion."

There's a small problem.

He flung out his armored arms and legs, simultaneously triggering his suit's built-in thrusters, stabilizing himself in midair. This section of Kornati was virtually unpopulated, an endless forest of virgin, indigenous hardwoods and evergreens, which undoubtedly explained why the bad guys had chosen it for their installation. It also meant there were no artificial light sources below him. He gazed down into a vast, black void—the bottom of the greedy well of gravity into which he'd cast himself—and he could see nothing.

Until he brought his low-light systems on-line, that was.

Armor thrusters and light-amp.

He checked his altitude. It was down to little more than a thousand meters, and the crosshair began to blink—slowly, at first, then more and more rapidly. Another audio tone sounded—this one sharp and insistent, not soft—and he popped his counter-grav.

It wasn't like a standard counter-grav belt or harness. There wasn't room for one of those, or not for one with the power he needed tonight, at any rate. Instead, the backpack harness strapped between his armored shoulder blades popped open. A tether deployed from it, and an instant later, the extraordinarily powerful counter-grav generator at the tether's far end snapped to full power, with no gradual windup.

Kaczmarczyk grunted again, this time explosively, as his airspeed checked abruptly. He swung on the end of the tether, outside the actual field of the generator, and the treetops flashing past below him slowed. They reached up for his boots, but he was coming down far more gradually now, and he checked his HUD one more time.

Grav-chute, an overpowered counter-grav unit that ejects and remains attached by a strap for truly rapid decel.

Even with the best computer support available, there was bound to be at least some scatter in a HALO drop from that far out. For the most part, the error was less than twenty meters, but Private 1/c Franz Taluqdar, of First Squad, was just a bit farther off than that. In fact, Private Taluqdar found himself coming down almost directly in front of the ridgeline tower which was his objective.

Taluqdar didn't know what, if anything, that bunker was armed with. If it was armed and the weaponry was of local manufacture, the odds were pretty good that his armor would protect him from it. But "pretty good" were two words Taluqdar didn't much care for, especially not in reference to sharp pointy things and his own personal hide. He therefore decided that landing in the potential field of fire of the possible bunker's hypothetical weapons was contraindicated and proceeded to do something which would certainly have cost him his PFC stripe in a training exercise.

He jettisoned his counter-grav while he was still ten meters off the ground and hit his suit thrusters.

Battle armor thrusters, unlike the jump gear which allowed an armored Marine to cover ground at an amazing rate in long, low leaps, had a strictly limited endurance. They were intended for extra-atmospheric maneuvers, not for the bottom of a gravity well, and it was expected that their users would avoid full-power emergency burns even there.

Private Taluqdar had other ideas, which, taken all together, violated about fifteen safety regulations.

His trajectory altered abruptly, first dropping in the instant he cut his tether, and then angling sharply upward as his thrusters flared. He reached the apogee of his flight path, swept his body—and his thrusters—through a neat arc, and shifted abruptly to an equally sharp angle of descent. It was all instinct, training, and eyeball estimates, but it worked. Instead of landing in front of the tower, he touched neatly down atop it.

And promptly crashed straight through its camouflaged canopy as inertia and the mass of his armor had their way.

Oops. A bit more on those suit thrusters.

Captain Kaczmarczyk hit the release button to deploy his own speaker unit just before he smashed through the tree canopy and hit the ground. The self-contained unit arced away from him, ping-ponging off branches and spinning sideways before stabilizing into a hover fifteen meters in the air. He hit the ground hard, his armor—freshly smeared with the Kornatian ecosystem's version of chlorophyl—absorbing most of the shock, and tucked and rolled. He came back upright, pulse rifle ready, and heard his own thunderous, recorded voice bellowing from his speaker unit.

"Attention! Attention! This is Captain Kaczmarczyk, Royal Manticoran Marines! Surrender and come out without weapons and with your hands on top of your heads! Repeat, surrender and come out without weapons and with your hands on your heads immediately! You are under arrest for suspected illegal terrorist activities, and resistance or noncompliance will be met with deadly force! Repeat, you are under arrest! Surrender immediately, or face the consequences!"

Detachable/deployable speakers. Kaczmarczyk promised to call on the FAK to surrender before charging in guns blazing, but if anyone takes a shot, it's an all-military op.

Private Taluqdar caught a scrap of the captain's surrender demand as his armor smashed through the camouflage-patterned thermal canopy covering the open top of the tower.

The single Kornatian who had been standing there, half-asleep in the middle of his long, boring watch, had just started to jerk fully upright in reaction to the thundering voice, when two meters of night-black armor came crashing down on the log platform behind him. His surprise was as complete as surprise could possibly be, and he whipped around, instinctively clawing for the weapon holstered at his hip.

It was exactly the wrong reaction.

Taluqdar knew he was supposed to call upon any "suspects" to surrender before blowing them away. But Franz Taluqdar was also a combat veteran, and there was something about the weapon behind the sentry. Something his experience recognized even if his brain didn't have time to put it altogether. Something that changed the entire threat parameter of the operation.

Something that activated his combat reflexes, instead of the demand to surrender.

The lookout he startled has a plasma gun, he goes down, Taluqdar gives the warning (Pandora!) that off-world weapons are in play and we go straight to the military part.

Second Squad was in assault configuration. Its regular plasma rifles had been replaced with heavier weapons, which were normally crew-served. Its riflemen had traded in their usual pulse rifles for heavy tribarrels fed from five thousand-round, backpack tanks of alternating HE and armor-piercing ammunition.

Now Second Squad went to Case Zulu, and the plasma rifles fired. The camouflaged door to the underground vehicle ramp was only earth-covered logs, less than a half-meter thick. It simply vanished, and a tornado of tribarrel fire ripped through the opening. Grenades followed, and the squad's first section went in behind them, charging into the inferno of exploding fuel tanks and blazing vehicles, tribarrels ready.

First Squad's second fire team looked for a way to dump the sleeping gas into the ventilation system, but there were no intakes. All they had was the exhaust from the system, and they moved swiftly to their alternate assigned role under Case Zulu, deploying rapidly outward to take over the perimeter while Second Squad broke in through the vehicle entrance. Even as they did, Sergeant Cassidy's team went up the ridge in the long, flying leaps of their jump gear, and more breaching charges thundered as they blew their way in through the sides of the tower/bunker and followed Private Taluqdar down into the bowels of the installation beneath.

The storming of the base.

"We don't know. And we may not find out. We only have five prisoners, and three of them are critically wounded. Doctor Orban's doing what he can, but he's pretty sure we're going to lose at least one of them."

"And your own losses?" Van Dort asked, his voice softer.

"Two dead, one wounded," Terekhov said harshly. "Either some of these people were suicidal, or else they didn't know what the hell they were doing! Using plasma grenades in an underground tunnel?" He shook his head viciously. "Sure, they killed two of my Marines, but the same grenades killed at least fifteen of their people—possibly more!"

The aftermath, captured: five FAK members and a thousand tons of Solly munitions. Lost: 2 Marines, with a third wounded.

"You're missing my point. They had it buried in a hole in the ground. Why? If they had this kind of equipment, why weren't they using it? They could've blasted their way right through anything the Kornatian police could put in their way. Hell, for that matter, they could've blasted their way through anything Suka's System Defense Force could have thrown at them, unless the SDF was prepared to resort to saturation airstrikes! Nordbrandt could have invaded the Nemanja Building and taken the entire Parliament hostage on the very first day of her offensive, instead of just bombing it with civilian explosives. So why didn't she?"

Van Dort blinked, then frowned.

"I don't know," he admitted slowly. "Unless they didn't have them then." He inhaled deeply, still thinking. "Maybe you said it yourself. You said they were either suicidal or didn't know what they were doing. Maybe they just hadn't had the weapons long enough."

Good to see them thinking things through, but by this point it admittedly has gotten a bit old seeing the characters work their way to information we, the readers, knew long ago.

"I called this meeting, and asked the question that I did, primarily as a matter of courtesy. In my judgment, the destruction of so much of Nordbrandt's organization, and the capture and destruction of so many off-world weapons, should have a calming effect on public opinion. I believe there won't be a better time for me to grasp the nettle and bring this information to Parliament's attention without provoking widespread public outrage and protests. I'll do so in as noninflammatory a fashion as I possibly can, but all of you know as well as I do that, however public opinion reacts, Parliament won't take it well. And Parliament may, at its own discretion, summon any elected official—including the President—to answer before its members for the proper discharge of his or her duties."

"And you'll just happen to suggest that they ought to do so in this case, eh?" Kanjer demanded with an ugly expression.

"I'll suggest nothing of the sort," Rajkovic replied coldly. "If that were what I wanted to suggest, however, it would be unnecessary, and you know it as well as I do."

"I know you're planning on staging what amounts to a coup d'etat!" Kanjer retorted angrily.

"Oh, bullshit, Mavro!" Majoli snapped. "You can't accuse Vuk of staging a coup when all he's doing is what the Constitution flatly requires him to do! Or do you suggest he should violate the Constitution in order to protect someone else who's already doing the same thing?"

Rujkovic is legally obligated to announce Tonkovic's withholding of crucial information to Parliament, whereupon Parliament will probably exercise their right to recall Tonkovic and question her.

"Well, Sir," Orban said slowly, "normally, under the Beowulf Code, what a patient says under heavy medication is privileged doctor-patient information."

Terekhov felt his muscles freeze. The Star Kingdom subscribed firmly to the bioethics of the Beowulf Code. Most physicians would have been prepared to face prison themselves rather than violate it.

"I believe, Doctor," he said slowly, "that your responsibilities as a Queen's officer supersede that particular privilege under certain circumstances."

Under the Beowulf Code, anything a patient says under the influence of heavy pain meds is confidential, doctor-client privileged. Naval doctors can break the code under a few, carefully and narrowly defined, circumstances. In this case, one of the patients keeps taking the doctors and nurses for his superior and reports the shipment from Firebrand has been secured.

"Whether he is or not, the recorder is," Terekhov said harshly. "I played it back myself. And then I had Guthrie Bagwell digitally enhance it. That's the name he keeps saying. And he's telling this 'Drazen' that he—our wounded terrorist—personally took delivery of 'Firebrand's guns.' I don't think there can be any reasonable doubt. This 'Firebrand' character is how Nordbrandt got her hands on at least—at least, Bernardus—a thousand tons of modern weapons. Do you think it's just a coincidence that your friend Westman's been having some sort of contact with someone using the same name?"

No, not a coincidence. So what's the plan Captain?

"But how could a single arms dealer make contact in such a relatively short period with two such totally different people? Neither of whom were on some directory of would-be freedom fighters or terrorists before they went underground, and that wasn't all that long ago. So how did he find both of them so promptly?" Van Dort objected. "Especially when the two people in question live on planets over a light-century apart?"

"That, Bernardus, may be the one ray of sunlight in this entire thing," Terekhov said grimly. "I've been worried—for that matter, the Office of Naval Intelligence and Gregor O'Shaughnessy have been worried—that certain . . . outside interests might be interested in destabilizing the Cluster to prevent the annexation from succeeding. It might just be that this 'Firebrand' is the front man for somebody trying to do just that."

"By feeding weapons to local terrorists, or possible terrorists," Van Dort said.

"Absolutely. And, if that's the case, and if your estimate of Mr. Westman is accurate, we may finally have caught a break."

Van Dort looked up at him, trying to understand how the probable confirmation that the Solarian League was actively -working against the annexation effort could possibly be construed as "a break," and Terekhov smiled slowly. It wasn't an excessively pleasant smile.

"We're going back to Montana, Bernardus. I'll leave one platoon of Marines, with battle armor, one pinnace, and orbital sensor arrays, to support the Kornatians until Baroness Medusa's reinforcements get here. But you and I, and the Kitty, are returning immediately to Montana. Where we're going to confront Mr. Westman with the media coverage, and the government reports, and our own records, of what Agnes Nordbrandt's been doing here in Split. We're going to ask him if he really wants to be associated with a murderous bitch like her, and then, when he denies he ever could be, we're going to hit him squarely between the eyes with the fact that he's been buying guns from the same supplier she has and see how he likes that."

Back to Montana to ask Westman to deal straight with them and rub his nose in all the things Nordbrandt's done? Not a terrible plan.

[Ahriman238]

Yeah, I imagine it would be hard to hold a relationship together where one party ages and the other does not.

Don't I remember you, back towards the start of the Harrington analysis threads, commenting on how Weber never makes a point of how prolong would impact society at large?



Anyway, this is, yes, a prime example. This would probably be an incredibly common thing were it not for the fact that most of the developed societies in the Honorverse seem to have adopted prolong en masse more or less all at the same time. As far as I can tell Manticore even has universal health care because it sure seems like every Manticoran citizen born after 1810 PD or so has prolong.

But in the Verge there are probably hosts of stories like Bernardus van Dort's. And, more cynically, cases of prolong-beneficiary aristocrats who cynically work their way through a stream of mayfly lovers who don't have prolong.

Weber once explained it online like this: individual prolong treatments are reasonably expensive, he wouldn't say how much, think like a car, but pay for themselves in a long and productive life. The medical infastructure for prolong therapy is so massively expensive there's very little difference in cost to society between setting up a prolong industry for a few tens of thousands of the richest people and setting up one for the mass life-extension of everybody. So pretty much everyone who adopts prolong capability as a society just issues it to everyone expecting to make up the costs with a long-lived, productive workforce. Now, out in the Verge you have individuals scurrying to Solly worlds to get prolong, if not for themselves than for their heirs, at massive out of pocket expenses.

Apparently the Manticoran tax form is a single page long and can be filled out in ten minutes. Manticore requires voters to pay more in taxes than they get in benefits, but even one cent more will qualify them to vote. Still not a great system to my way of thinking, but it doesn't sound like one specifically designed to disenfranchise the poor and needy.

Well, it kind of is.

Realistically, the way the Manticoran government manages to function involves major transfer payments of money collected by the Junction fees and taxes on the merchant marine and financial sector... which would presumably tend to be transferred to the public as public aid of various sorts.

It might not disenfranchise all the poor and needy, but it will sure hit the biggest blocs: the unemployed, the students receiving government aid, and so on. This may help to explain how idiotic factions stay in office in the Commons as well as the Lords, and how the Liberal Party was able to function prior to the fall of the High Ridge government despite showing little sign of being connected to the wishes of the Manty in the street.

You're right, somehow when I read it I saw a volunteerism that didn't actually exist in the text. Sort of "you can opt out of taxes or take additional benefits but lose the ability to participate in politics." Which sounds like a libertarian wet-dream but would probably lead pretty quickly to a more broken political system than any Weber has yet imagined, if taxes became optional.

[Mr Bean]

FYI why Burn the farm Ahrim238?
Remove DNA traces. Remember even casual contact unless your wearing a full on bunny suit your going to leave traces everywhere our technology can find. But Manticore? You have to remove any known meeting area to prevent people from being tracked back and apprehended.

[Simon_Jester]

Will probably be doing lots of response to your most recent quotepost soon, but...

Weber once explained it online like this: individual prolong treatments are reasonably expensive, he wouldn't say how much, think like a car, but pay for themselves in a long and productive life. The medical infastructure for prolong therapy is so massively expensive there's very little difference in cost to society between setting up a prolong industry for a few tens of thousands of the richest people and setting up one for the mass life-extension of everybody. So pretty much everyone who adopts prolong capability as a society just issues it to everyone expecting to make up the costs with a long-lived, productive workforce. Now, out in the Verge you have individuals scurrying to Solly worlds to get prolong, if not for themselves than for their heirs, at massive out of pocket expenses.

Yes. On the other hand, the marginal cost of providing a lot of medical treatments gets cheap when you do it in bulk, and yet we still have people in our society who don't get it for lack of health insurance or lack of ability to secure a loan.

I mean, if prolong is expensive up front and you live on a planet that lacks universal health insurance... what are you going to do, take out a loan from a bank that your child will have to repay out of their future income to cover it? That's not out of line with what we already have in real life with student loans, except maybe for being a better investment for the bank. And yet we have real problems in real life with people not getting approved for those loans.

I think this is a can of worms Weber prefers not to open because it touches on things that are present political issues- like student debt and universal health care.

Apparently the Manticoran tax form is a single page long and can be filled out in ten minutes. Manticore requires voters to pay more in taxes than they get in benefits, but even one cent more will qualify them to vote. Still not a great system to my way of thinking, but it doesn't sound like one specifically designed to disenfranchise the poor and needy.

Well, it kind of is.

Realistically, the way the Manticoran government manages to function involves major transfer payments of money collected by the Junction fees and taxes on the merchant marine and financial sector... which would presumably tend to be transferred to the public as public aid of various sorts.

It might not disenfranchise all the poor and needy, but it will sure hit the biggest blocs: the unemployed, the students receiving government aid, and so on. This may help to explain how idiotic factions stay in office in the Commons as well as the Lords, and how the Liberal Party was able to function prior to the fall of the High Ridge government despite showing little sign of being connected to the wishes of the Manty in the street.

You're right, somehow when I read it I saw a volunteerism that didn't actually exist in the text. Sort of "you can opt out of taxes or take additional benefits but lose the ability to participate in politics." Which sounds like a libertarian wet-dream but would probably lead pretty quickly to a more broken political system than any Weber has yet imagined, if taxes became optional.

Well, it gets moderately broken just by strategic use of welfare subsidies.

I mean, think about one of the implications: as a government official, you can disenfranchise people by giving them money. How perverse an incentive structure does that create for politicians. Inconvenient minority? Give 'em a subsidy! Now they can't vote against you, unless maybe they forgo the free money.

In a society where money is easy to come by thanks to the Junction, that has a lot of potential for abuse.

You can also disenfranchise people by cutting their taxes- same idea, and given how opposed Manticoran society is to income taxes that has interesting effects too.

[WARNING: the following is a death-of-the-author criticism that Weber himself would never endorse I'm sure]

No wonder the House of Commons was damn near impotent in 1900 PD. Given how many chunks of the electorate would realistically have been snipped out by giving them subsidies and/or tax cuts until they lost the right to vote, they probably only represent a small minority of the population.

[Simon_Jester]

Upgraded FTL and sensors. Relatively early on, Weber told us that freighters usually spare no expense on the sensors because lacking military grade drives, the only way to avoid trouble is to see it coming from quite a ways off. The sensor operators are less consistent in quality than naval ratings, but that happens. But then we have him repeatedly mentioning the sensors of ships like Marianne and Pirate's Bane like it's something unusual.

Freighters that routinely operate in pirate-infested space have good sensors. Freighters that normally stooge around secure space probably have pretty low-quality sensors. They rarely even need to look for anything that doesn't have its own navigational beacon.

10-15% of ships in the Verge, a relatively dangerous area of space, are armed. If you call two lasers to a broadside armed.

It deters anyone from flying into beam range unless they think they can survive a hit from the lasers... and you can't board a ship unless you come into beam range. So it deters pirates from trying to rendezvous and board, unless said pirates are willing to either shoot up the ship they want to capture, or credibly threaten to blow it away with a missile.

Also, being an armed ship means YOU can threaten OTHERS, if you decide to indulge in a little creative piracy yourself.

"Make sure you set the timers before you lift out with your final load," she told the pilot, raising her voice over the clatter of the rotors.

Barn to house the goods until they can ship them out, smart. Burning down the transfer site, just why?[/quote]Like Bean said, a fire will help conceal the evidence of who was there and what they did, though it's not perfect because it doesn't hide vehicle tracks or anything.

Actually, she didn't. At all. Too concerned about busybodies at home trying to direct her chicken strategy. Of course, the President of Kornati is constitutionally required to inform their Parliament of major diplomatic developments. Which is another reason for Van Dort to bring it up.

Nice end run on Van Dort's part; I knew there was a good reason for Nasty Kitty to bring him along...

See? And so statistics and histograms betray Camp Freedom to the fierce alien overlords.

We also see explicit indication of something Weber's said in infodump posts privately. Hexapuma's computer systems are doing a lot to analyze and filter the mass of air traffic control data on their own; human operators would never spot the subtle patterns the computers detect. On the other hand, the human operators are the ones with the judgment to figure out what those patterns mean, and to recommend that the computer look for particular kinds of patterns that are likely to be significant.

Is everyone in the galactic "First World" i.e. Havenites, Manties, Andies and Sollies that much taller than everyone else? I mean, they talk about some worlds so primitive they've reverted to a late 20th/early 21st Century techbase, but that should still allow for adequate diet and healthcare, and worlds like Grayson and Kornati are significantly more advanced than we are today.

That is true.

On Grayson, the heavy metal exposure and lingering genetic issues might explain people being short. On Kornati, not so much since there's no indication of the place being any kind of death world. So no, it doesn't make a lot of sense. Manticorans could be even taller than modern First Worlders due to generations of corrective therapy for genetic defects, but that would be reflected in description of character heights, I'm pretty sure.

We will still do HALO jumps in the future, because they're cool?

They have a major advantage in that they let you insert the troops from high altitude (avoiding any short range air defense weapons on the ground shooting them all down), but don't give the enemy an excessive amount of time to react to the airborne unit dropping on their heads.

Wait, wait, wait. Manticore has anesthezine?!? Or something similar? A sleeping gas without serious side-effects or dosage by weight concerns that can be easily deployed against large numbers of people? Do you have any idea how many times over the course of the series this would have been insanely useful?

Uh... hm. Dunno. It's not exactly helpful in ship-to-ship warfare. Ground combat only, essentially. So...

In On Basilisk Station it'd only help if they have sleeping gas that works on Stilties, which is not a given. It could maybe have helped in the capture of Blackbird Base back in Honor of the Queen, but there all the Masadan personnel would have had some kind of independent breathing apparatus because it's an installation on an airless moon so it might not have accomplished much. Books Three through Seven feature basically no situation where it would be particularly helpful as far as I can remember. Book Eight... well, if there were any on hand it'd have been a valuable asset to StateSec on Hades, but there's not much evidence for or against it being used in situations where they see fit.

Book Nine... Ten... nothing comes to mind. So nope, I got nothing.

[CaptainChewbacca]

Yeah, most of the boarding actions are against armored troops.

[Ahriman238]

She'd hoped his onetime association with Nordbrandt might cripple him politically when the FAK began its atrocities. Not that she'd ever wanted the attacks themselves, of course. But it would have been so fitting to see his career ended by the bloodthirsty terrorism of the very elements he'd argued for so long needed to be given greater access to power. Surely the unprovoked mayhem wreaked by the ignorant, childish, brutishly vicious rabble of that "dispossessed" and "unfairly excluded" underclass he was so fond of championing, should have destroyed his credibility.

Instead, he'd emerged from the carnage as a decisive national leader, a figure of reassuring calm and inflexible determination, dealing with the crisis while Tonkovic was in an entirely different star system. Someone who was enough the Mob's own to have credibility with it and simultaneously "respectable" enough to be seen by the oligarchical party leaders as their only real conduit to the underclass which had suddenly assumed such a frightening, bogeyman presence.

Rajkovic's ascension, fueled by actually being there and handling the crisis while Tonkovic plays games in Spindle.

Which was why it was more important than ever to ensure that Kornati retained the law enforcement and economic mechanisms to guarantee another Nordbrandt couldn't succeed where the FAK failed. That was why she'd decided against passing on that insufferable prig Medusa's arrogant and humiliating demand that she surrender the principles she'd come to Spindle to fight for.

Even now, she couldn't believe Medusa was so foolish as to believe she could convince anyone who knew how the game was played that the Alexander Government's warnings about a set deadline were anything but a ploy. A bluff. One more attempt to browbeat her into surrendering Kornati's essential sovereignty. The Star Kingdom of Manticore had invested too much prestige in this annexation. Allowing the annexation to fail and Frontier Security to snap up the Cluster after all would be a devastating blow to its interstellar credibility. If she only stood her ground—if those cowards back on Kornati only let her call Manticore's bluff—Prime Minister Alexander would find some perfectly logical "reason of state" to extend the deadline.

And even if he didn't, how much worse off could they be? If they surrendered their full sovereignty, then everything that mattered about Kornati would be destroyed, possibly within months, certainly within years. Far better to hold their position on the basis of principle. And if the Manticorans carried out their cowardly threat and specifically excluded the Split System from their precious Star Kingdom because Split refused to cave in, she and her government could face the people of Kornati with their heads high. The fault would lie elsewhere, and Kornati would be free to pursue its own destiny. Best of all, the Star Kingdom which had refused to grant them membership as if they were some sort of moral pariahs would protect them from State Security after all by its simple presence.

More of Tonkovic's.... interesting perspective on the Convention and Kornatian politics.

Madam President,

At the command of Parliament, I must request you to return to Kornati by the first available transportation. Your presence before the Special Committee on Annexation and the Standing Committee on Constitutional Law is required.

By command of the Parliament and people of -Kornati,

Vuk Ljudevit Rajkovic
Planetary Vice President

Recall notice.

"One thing I can tell you, though. If he's asking you to bring Ms. Zilwicki along, it damned sure means he's not planning anything . . . untoward."
Terekhov started to ask what he meant, then changed his mind, remembering Van Dort's cryptic comments about his personal history with Bannister. There was something going on here, and if it meant one of his officers—especially one of his -midshipmen—might be being placed in danger, it was his responsibility to find out what that something was. But if Helen would have been endangered by it, Bernardus would have told him. Of that much, he was certain.

"Tell Mr. Westman his word is sufficient bond for me. Mr. Van Dort and I will meet him at any time or place of his choosing. And if he wishes Ms. Zilwicki to be present, I'm sure that can be arranged, also."

Terekhov is both smart enough to easily realize there’s something going on, and trusts Van Dort enough to believe he’d bring it up if it were a serious issue that effected Helen’s safety.

"While we were in Split," the captain continued, watching the Montanan's face carefully, "we located one of Nordbrandt's base camps. One platoon of my Marines raided it. The FAK suffered very close to one hundred percent casualties, over a hundred of them fatal, in an operation which lasted about twenty minutes."

Westman's eyes narrowed, as if he realized Terekhov had deliberately underscored the speed and totality with which a single platoon of Captain Kaczmarczyk's Marines had demolished the Freedom Alliance base.

So nice to play the game with another professional.

"And just who do you think might be prepared to -subsidize . . . someone like Nordbrandt?" he asked.

* * *

Not a muscle in Terekhov's face so much as twitched, but a fierce bolt of exultation ripped through him as Westman asked the question he'd prayed for.
"I'd start," he said calmly, "by considering who—aside from patriots such as yourself, of course—might think the Star Kingdom's presence in the Cluster was a bad thing. And I'd also ask myself who they might prefer to see here instead of the Star Kingdom. If whoever supplied Nordbrandt is also prepared to supply weapons to . . . someone else, on a similar scale, then the supplier must have both extensive resources and extensive contacts with those weapons' source."
He gazed into Westman's eyes, pausing, waiting with the same precision he would have used to time a missile salvo. Then—

"And I'd reflect on the fact that every one of those weapons, every round of ammunition, every bit of equipment, came from somewhere in the Solarian League."

Dawn breaks o’er Marblehead. Westman realizes he’s been used and though there are details to settle, they’ll have no more trouble from him. And a further reminder that Terekhov is an accomplished diplomat.

"Maybe not, but what if they recognize us?" Egervary asked.

He looked more than a little pinched around the nostrils, and Duan remembered that Egervary—only his name hadn't been "Egervary" then—had been a "guest" of the Royal Manticoran Navy once before. Fortunately, he'd been acting as the tactical officer aboard a pirate cruiser in Silesia at the time, rather than serving aboard a slaver. Since he hadn't been in the database of the battlecruiser which had taken his ship and he'd been "only" a pirate, he'd been turned over to the local Silesian system governor rather than simply executed by the Manties. Getting him back from a Silly system governor had been trivially easy for Jessyk, but it seemed to have permanently affected Egervary's nerve where Manticoran warships were concerned.

Probably because he figures he is in their database now, Duan thought sarcastically. But his sarcastic amusement faded quickly. Finding yourself in the Manty Navy's database under the heading of previously arrested pirate or slaver was a virtual guarantee of the death sentence the second time they apprehended you.

So it’s not just Honor who takes a picture and maybe a DNA sample before turning over pirates to the local authorities. Makes sense though, if the locals (pretty much Silesians) can’t or won’t execute or properly imprison a pirate and they fall back on old ways, it’s good to have that information.

"There's not any reason they should recognize us," he said, looking Egervary in the eye. "If they didn't spot us doing anything we shouldn't have been doing in Split, there's no reason for them to have done anything except check our transponder code. Why waste time taking a close look at one more rusty tramp—especially one that heads out of the system within less than nine hours of your own arrival? Right?"

Egervary looked at him for a moment, then gave a jerky nod.

"All right, then." Duan turned to Sandkaran. "Have we contacted Flight Control yet, Iakovos?"

"No," Sandkaran said, shaking his head.

"And we haven't started squawking our transponder code yet, right?" Another headshake. "Good. Let's crank up a new -transponder—the Golden Butterfly, I think. Get it ready, then contact Flight Control and request a parking orbit as Butterfly. Don't put the transponder on-line until they call you back up and whack you on the wrist for not having it up. Be a little crabby when they do, like a typical lazy merchant spacer. Then put the Butterfly code up. By the time we actually make orbit, the Manty should already have been informed by Flight Control that we're coming under our new name."

Changing their name.

Understanding showed in Sandkaran's eyes. Annette actually chuckled, and even Egervary cracked a slight smile. Marianne carried a severely damaged liquid oxygen tank everywhere she went. It was her excuse for stopping at planets where she couldn't produce a legitimate cargo or other reason for being there. The tank was identical to the ones in her life-support plant, and stopping to replace something like that at the earliest possible moment would make sense for any merchantship. Especially for a freighter as dilapidated as Marianne appeared to be, since such a ship would undoubtedly be operating on a thinner safety margin than better maintained vessels.

The broken oxygen tank as a ready-made excuse for turning up somewhere strange “we need semi-emergency repairs.” That’s actually pretty clever.

Aikawa Kagiyama felt bored. Standing a tactical watch was all very well, but it would have been nice if there'd been something a bit more energetic than Montana's anemic traffic to keep an eye on. Even the arrival of a typical tramp for a routine repair call was a welcome diversion . . . which said something significant about just how boring things had been before the weirdly named Golden Butterfly arrived.

For want of anything else to do, he decided to run a tracking exercise on the freighter, which was now less than fifteen minutes from entering orbit. She was moving at barely 1,703 KPS, and only 736,096 kilometers out, and he had an almost perfect sensor angle, right up the kilt of her wedge.

He studied the information on his display. Aside from the fact that her active sensor emissions seemed just a bit more energetic than he would have expected out of a ship like her, the data was thoroughly uninteresting. He almost pulled the sensors off of her, then shrugged. If he was bored, the ratings manning CIC probably were, as well. He might as well give them something to do, too, so he punched in the command for a routine evaluation of the ship.

He wasn't at all prepared for what came back a moment later.

Aikawa is bored enough to run the freighter through CIC.

"Even that wouldn't have mattered if you hadn't had Abigail and me pull in everything we could while we were in Kornati orbit, Skipper," Kaplan pointed out.

Terekhov nodded almost absently, his mind busy.

Whoever that was over there, he doubted very much that the ship's real name was Golden Butterfly. And he was quite certain the other vessel's commander had no idea Hexapuma had gotten a complete emissions map off of her before she left Split. If he'd even suspected that, he would never have been stupid enough to try using a false transponder code.

Because Terekhov had them get good scans of everything in Kornati orbit, both because he’s incredibly thorough when he has the time and as a training exercise for the middies, they recognize the Marianne. Ironically, if they’d kept the name they’d be less suspicious, maybe it’s odd that they stopped at Montana, and that they got there so fast, but a ship changing name at every port is probably up to no good.

"Attention freighter Golden Butterfly!" She heard the Skipper's voice come up on the com as she settled down on course for the freighter. "Golden Butterfly, this is Captain Terekhov of Her Majesty's Starship Hexapuma. You are ordered to stand by for boarding and examination. My boarding party is en route now. You will open your hatches immediately."

And they clear for action right after launching a ‘routine’ pinnace full of Marines and order the freighter to prepare to boarded and searched.

The money was always good for someone willing to serve on one of the Jessyk Combine's "special ships," and the risks weren't really all that great. Despite the best efforts of people like the Star Kingdom of Manticore and the Republic of Haven, no more than five percent of slave ships were ever apprehended. Most were stopped by people like the Solarian League, where, by and large, the worst a crewman had to worry about was a brief incarceration before the Combine or Manpower bribed him out of jail. No more than a handful were stopped by the Star Kingdom or the Republic in any given year. But the crews on that handful were seldom ever heard of again. Manticore and Haven, for all they hated one another, both took genetic slaving seriously, and the penalty under the law of either star nation was death.

But the odds against being one of those handful of ships were so high, and the money was so good, Jessyk could always find someone to take the chance. Someone like Duan Binyan, who suddenly realized all the money in the galaxy was no use at all to a dead man.

Only 5% or so of slavers ever get caught, but most of them get busted in the League or Silesia where oft as not they’re released almost as easily and the money’s good enough to make the risk seem pretty manageable.

"Like what you want's going to make a difference!" Egervary jeered. "We're dead, Binyan. That's what happens when the Manties come on board. Well, if I've got to die, so do they!"

The security officer hovered on the brink of outright madness in his terror, Duan realized. And that terror, as all too often happened, was feeding his rage, fanning it like a furnace.

"No," the captain said flatly, forcing his voice to project a calm he was far from feeling. "We're going to do exactly what they tell us to, Zeno. Exactly."

"You think so?" Egervary's grin was wider and more maniacal than ever, and he whipped back around to his panel.

Duan Binyan had an instant to realize what that grin had meant, and he lunged towards the security officer screaming in protest.

-snip-

The universe punched Helen Zilwicki in the belly. Nothing else could have explained the sudden, hoarse exhalation. The way her heart stopped and her lungs froze as Hawk-Papa-One exploded.

Point defense cluster, an icy voice said in the back of her brain, clear and precise—a stranger's voice, surely not her own.

Shock at the sheer, suicidal stupidity of what they'd just seen gripped every officer on Hexapuma's bridge. Every officer but one.

"Laser clusters only—force neutralization!" Captain Aivars Aleksandrovich Terekhov snapped. "Fire!"

And the pinnace, including Ragnhild Pavletic, gets vaped.

The range was less than four thousand kilometers.

At that range, point defense lasers capable of taking out incoming, wildly evading missiles at ranges of sixty or seventy thousand kilometers were more than enough to deal with any unarmored target not protected by a sidewall or an impeller wedge. It wasn't often that a warship had the opportunity to use its point defense against even hostile small craft, far less another starship, because nobody was insane enough not to surrender when a naval vessel got that close.

PD laser clusters can be used as energy weapons at short range, 60-70 thousand K range against missiles.

The good news for Marianne was that Hexapuma's laser clusters were far less powerful than her broadside energy mounts. One of the heavy cruiser's grasers would have blown entirely through the freighter's civilian hull, and probably broken her back in the process. The laser clusters wouldn't do that, but dozens of them studded each of Hexapuma's flanks, and the Royal Manticoran Navy believed in being prepared. Rare though the opportunity to use the normally defensive weapons offensively might have been, BuWeaps had considered how best to do so when the chance offered itself, and Naomi Kaplan's vengeful finger punched up a stored fire plan. The tactical computer considered the data coming back to it from the active sensors briefly—very briefly—then established its targets, assigned each of them a threat value, assigned them to specific point defense stations, and opened fire.

Stilettos of coherent light stabbed out from Hexapuma. Each of a cluster's eight lasers was capable of cycling at one shot every sixteen seconds. That was one shot every two seconds from every cluster in Hexapuma's starboard broadside and Marianne's hull plating seemed to erupt outward. The strobing laser clusters tracked across her, precisely, carefully, almost literally unable to miss at such an absurdly short range, as Hexapuma savaged the ship which had killed her pinnace. They scourged her with whips of barbed energy, shattering and smashing, wiping away weapons, sensors, impeller nodes.

It took precisely twenty-three seconds from the instant Terekhov gave the command to fire to reduce the ship which had just murdered eighteen of his people to a shattered, broken wreck that would never move under its own power again.

-snip-

There were other screams, here and there throughout her hull. Human screams, not electronic ones, and—for the most part—very brief. Low-powered laser clusters might be, compared to regular broadside weapons, but atmosphere belched out of the holes smashed into her. Some of it came from cargo holds, but most came from the ship's compartments. From impeller rooms which were torn open by laser talons, spilling men and women in coveralls and shirt sleeves into the merciless vacuum. From passageways inboard from targeted laser clusters. From berthing quarters directly inboard from her broadside lasers. From messing compartments inboard from her main broadside sensor array.

There were fifty-seven men and women aboard Marianne before Hexapuma fired. That was an extraordinarily large crew for a merchantship, but then most merchantships never had to worry about cargoes of desperate slaves.

By the time Zeno Egervary's body hit the deck and stopped sliding, there were fourteen still-living men and women aboard the freighter's shredded wreck.

-snip-

"Cease fire!" the terror-distorted voice screamed over the com. "For God's sake, cease fire! We surrender! We surrender!"

PD lasers can be preprogrammed to fire at exposed bits outside a ship's normal hull/armor, like impeller nodes, weapons, point-defense, sensors and comm antennae. In this case, it takes a very short time to permanently wreck the Marianne. 16 seconds between shots, but each cluster has 8 lasers so normally they fire at two second intervals to maintain a steady rate of fire.

"Then understand this, as well. You've just murdered men and women of the armed forces of the Star Kingdom of Manticore. As such you are guilty, at the very least, of piracy, for which the sentence is death. I suggest, Captain, that you spend the next few minutes trying to think of some reason I might consider letting you continue to live."

Aivars Terekhov smiled. It was a terrifying expression.

"Think hard, Captain," he advised almost gently. "Think very hard."

Now here's a way Terekhov is not like Picard, he's very pissed off.

Aikawa was on duty—the Captain was keeping him there, she knew, because he blamed himself. If he hadn't identified the freighter, none of this would have happened. It was foolish to condemn himself for it, but he did, and the Skipper was too wise to let him sit and brood.

The "keep him to busy to think" school of grief management.

"I didn't say I made the wrong decision, based on the information we had, Ansten," Terekhov interrupted. "We're Queen's officers. Queen's officers die in the line of duty. And Queen's officers send other people places where they die. Someone had to take that pinnace across, and as I said at the time, only a lunatic would've tried to stop it. One did." He inhaled deeply. "But it was still their job to go, and my job to send them. I did. No one else in this ship did. I will not have any officer—or midshipman—under my command blaming himself for not possessing the godlike power of clairvoyance to predict what was going to happen."

Terekhov makes it clear that what happened was his responsibility, no one else's, and if he's not going to beat himself up over it than no one else gets to.

"This vessel belonged to the Jessyk Combine," he began. "Given its construction and outfitting, it clearly falls under the equipment clause of the Cherwell Convention. As such, all members of its crew are legally liable to the death sentence, even without reference to what happened to Hawk-Papa-One. They realize this, and the surviving personnel are falling all over themselves trying to provide sufficient information to buy their lives.

The Marianne had one of those bays for rapidly spacing a cargo of slaves, under Manticoran/Haven law their lives were forfeit, hence the freakout and firing on the pinnace.

"Marianne," Van Dort's flat voice reclaimed Westman's attention, "wasn't working for anything called the Central Liberation Committee. To the best of her crew's knowledge, there is no Central Liberation Committee. Marianne was owned and operated by the Jessyk Combine."

Westman felt the sudden shock congealing his features, but there was nothing he could do about it. Jessyk Combine? Impossible!

"The weapons were being delivered to 'resistance groups' in the Cluster on the direct orders of Isabel Bardasano, a cadet member of the Jessyk Board of Directors who specializes in covert operations, 'wet work,' and the transportation of genetic slaves," Van Dort continued implacably. "Marianne was equipped and outfitted as a slaver. She was a slaver, and the survivors of her crew include her commanding officer, who's carried out quite a few 'special operations' for Jessyk over the years. As far as he's aware, this was simply one more."

Westman gets told whose really been providing for his insurrection, and it's worse than they implied at their last meeting.

The only reason any Mesan corporation would have helped him keep the Star Kingdom out of Montana was to hold the door open for Frontier Security. If he succeeded in driving Manticore out, it would only be to let Frontier Security—and Mesa—in instead.

"I—" he began finally, only to stop. He cleared his throat. "I didn't know Mesa was involved," he said. "The fact that it was doesn't necessarily mean Manticore wears a white hat—" his eyes flicked to Terekhov's white beret almost against his will, and he snatched them back under control as he continued "—but that's no excuse for dealing with someone like Mesa."

"Mesa may not be the only one you were dealing with, Steve," Bannister said heavily. "According to the bastards aboard that ship, their next port of call wasn't Mesa—it was Monica."

Well, Terekhov at least wears a nice white hat. Mesa's name gets Westman out of the revolution business, and now Terekhov has heard of Monica.

"Old Bernardus may not be up to Ineka Vaandrager's weight as a pure, dyed-in-the-wool bitch, but he's a pretty persuasive negotiator in his own right. He started by saying Rembrandt'll refuse to press charges for the destruction of its enclave here on Montana. He followed that up by telling the President he already had Baroness Medusa's approval of an amnesty offer for all of you on the part of the Star Kingdom if you'd surrender your weapons and give up all this nonsense. And he suggested to the President that if Rembrandt was prepared to forgive you, and Manticore was prepared to forgive you, it might just be he ought to consider exercising his pardoning power to promise you boys amnesty under Montanan law if you lay down your guns."

Amnesty for Westman and his people once they give up fighting.

"Thank you. There was one minor element about your other-wise comprehensive report which struck me as a little odd, Madam President. I refer to the fact that Baroness Medusa, Queen Elizabeth's Provisional Governor, repeatedly and specifically informed you that your delaying tactics at the Convention were threatening to derail not simply the Convention but the entire annexation effort and that you didn't see fit to report that information to this committee. Could you possibly explain why that was?"

Ranjina's pleasant voice never changed. The smile never left her face. Yet her question hit the hearing room like a hand grenade. Gazi's face turned an alarming shade of puce. Two of the other committee members appeared as dumbfounded—and enraged—as their chairman, and a single heartbeat of silence hovered in the question's wake. Then the stunned silence vanished into a rising turmoil of whispered agitation among the staffers sitting behind the committee members and those sitting behind Tonkovic herself.

For her own part, Tonkovic felt herself staring in sheer, incredulous shock at the woman on the other side of the horseshoe. She couldn't believe Ranjina had possessed the unadulterated gall to make such an outrageous statement in an open committee hearing. It simply wasn't done. One didn't seek to ambush and humiliate the Planetary President! It was obvious from Gazi's reaction that Ranjina had given him no hint of what she intended to say. Clearly the treacherous bitch had realized the chairman would have muzzled her—or, at the very least, warned Tonkovic—if he'd dreamed she was about to launch such a crude, bare-knuckled assault on the dignity of Tonkovic's office.

Tonkovic gets called on her shennanigans, and it is sweet. Public meeting too, so now the voters know that Tonkovic illegally withheld crucial information from Parliament.

"You were informed over four T-months ago by Baroness Medusa that the continued deadlock in the Constitutional Convention—which all reports available to me suggest stemmed primarily from the deliberate efforts of the Constitutional Liberal Party, which you organized in Spindle—was threatening the annexation effort. You were informed by Baroness Medusa three T-months ago that the Star Kingdom of Manticore would no longer consider itself bound to honor its agreement to annex the Talbott Cluster if a draft constitution wasn't voted out of the Convention within a reasonable time. And you were informed two T-months ago that a hard and fast time limit of one hundred fifty standard days existed, after which, in the absence of a draft Constitution, Queen Elizabeth's Government would either withdraw the offer of annexation in its entirety or else submit a list of star systems which the Star Kingdom would exclude from any future annexation, and that the Split System would appear on that list."

The whispered exchanges which had been provoked by Ranjina's initial assault had vanished into a rising tide of consternation as the Vice Chairwoman's ice-cold voice rolled on. Tonkovic's expression was mottled with the ivory-white of shock and the deep crimson of rage. She couldn't believe it. She could not believe that even a Reconciliation Party hack like Ranjina would do something like this! It violated every aspect of the code against washing political dirty laundry in public. Even the most bitter partisan conflicts between the established parties had some rules, some limits. The reaction of the reporters behind her made it all too clear the substance of Ranjina's coldly enumerated accusations had never been made public, and the Planetary President ground her teeth together in mingled humiliation and fury.

I'm just loving this.

Of course, he was considerably senior to her, but Regs only prohibited relationships between officers in the same chain of command. Technically, that included Marines aboard a ship, but it was a technicality that was winked at most of the time. So maybe it wasn't such a bad thing he was a Marine after all. . . .

Rescue from earlier, Ragnhild's last thoughts before death. Apparently some of the winking at fraternization regs includes relationships between naval ratings/officers and marines. Though, chain of command appears to be the only rule regarding fraternization.

The Navy had also concluded that attempting to enforce celibacy on its mixed crews would not only be a Bad Idea but also doomed to fail, and BuPers had adopted a pragmatic policy over five hundred T-years previously. The only relationships which were absolutely banned were those covered by Article 119: those between officers and or noncoms and any of their own subordinates. Aside from that, personnel were free to make whatever arrangements they chose, and all female personnel received five-year contraceptive implants which could be deactivated upon request. In peacetime, such requests were granted automatically; in wartime, they were granted only if personnel were available to replace the woman making the request. More than that, women who chose to become pregnant were immediately pulled from shipboard duty and assigned to one of the space stations or ground bases, where they could be promptly replaced and transferred to duty without radiation hazards if they did become pregnant. It wasn't fair—women's procreation was more limited, though women could also use a decision to have children to avoid shipboard duty—but biology wasn't fair, either, and the practice of tubing children took a lot of the sting out of it. In fact, BuPers both provided free storage for sperm and ova to its personnel and covered seventy-five percent of the cost for tubed offspring in an effort to even the possibilities still further. Despite periodic complaints, the policy was understood—and, in the main, accepted—as the best compromise a military institution could come up with.

The policy also meant a wise captain and executive officer generally kept their noses out of who was sleeping with whom as long as no one violated Article 119.

And even 119 is "the most commonly winked at of the Articles of War."

[Simon_Jester]

More of Tonkovic's.... interesting perspective on the Convention and Kornatian politics.

She's got the aristocrat's ability to perceive no real difference between her "honor" and her privileged position in her native society. Therefore, to her, removal of her privileges would destroy her civilization, because she is unable to conceive of her civilization actually meaning anything without her or someone like her in charge.

[You know, if the Kornatians had been clever enough to actually formalize their oligarchy with actual noble titles the way Manticore had, I bet the two societies would have gotten on like a house on fire and there would have been no trouble with annexation from Kornati...]

Because Terekhov had them get good scans of everything in Kornati orbit, both because he’s incredibly thorough when he has the time and as a training exercise for the middies, they recognize the Marianne. Ironically, if they’d kept the name they’d be less suspicious, maybe it’s odd that they stopped at Montana, and that they got there so fast, but a ship changing name at every port is probably up to no good.

Obviously the crew of the Marianne aren't used to major national navies that keep thorough information on the ships they see and consider patrolling and policing commerce a core mission. If they operate in the Verge most of the time, or in a relatively 'confederate' government like Silesia or even (much of) the League, that's no surprise.

PD laser clusters can be used as energy weapons at short range, 60-70 thousand K range against missiles.

To be fair, a missile is probably less heavily built than even a rickety old starship. Then again, missiles are stupidly evasive targets. We know their straight line acceleration is between, oh, forty and a hundred thousand gravities, but we don't know what their lateral acceleration is.

I'm honestly surprised they can predict the position of the missile to within enough precision to hit the target with a laser, if it has all of 0.2 seconds to sidestep from the time the ship takes the laser shot.

One possibility (if I ever write any serious SF it'll have this) is... let's call it "energy buckshot," where you deliberately fan your beam out to cover a square kilometer or so of space. If you have single digit kiloton-level power output, which seems if anything conservative for Honorverse laser clusters, that means you can create a kilometer-wide zone of conditions roughly as hostile as the inside of a nuclear fireball for anything flying through the cone of light from your laser.

Missiles will probably not survive that, although... sigh, I don't have time to go dig up my calculations from earlier about the amount of particle flux per square meter experienced by objects traveling at relativistic speeds.

PD lasers can be preprogrammed to fire at exposed bits outside a ship's normal hull/armor, like impeller nodes, weapons, point-defense, sensors and comm antennae. In this case, it takes a very short time to permanently wreck the Marianne. 16 seconds between shots, but each cluster has 8 lasers so normally they fire at two second intervals to maintain a steady rate of fire.

This might actually be less useful in normal operation than firing all eight emitters at once, because the missiles are timed to come in in very large vollies. Then again, point defense effectiveness is greatest at shorter ranges, so if the enemy missiles come in slow enough to allow you the engagement time, it might be better to fire sequentially.

[Also, I can't recall if the individual lasers in a cluster are independently trainable or if they're like the barrels on an organ gun. If the former, it explains cases where a ship seems to have shot down more missiles with point defense lasers than it had clusters to do it with... although it also means that overall the hit rate for point defense lasers isn't very impressive]

Now here's a way Terekhov is not like Picard, he's very pissed off.

This is true.

Picard operates in a state of more or less permanent, low to mid-level crankiness which fuels his sanctimonious speeches and intolerance of certain types of failings among his subordinates.

Terekhov saves up his crankiness for special occasions, then gets it all out at once by manticoremissilemassacring someone.

Well, Terekhov at least wears a nice white hat.

I suspect that traditional Montana cinema is basically Western movies, and given how... self-stereotyped the culture is, I suspect they do color-code heroes and villains with white and black hats.

Tonkovic gets called on her shennanigans, and it is sweet. Public meeting too, so now the voters know that Tonkovic illegally withheld crucial information from Parliament.

Also, a commentary on pre-annexation Kornatian politics, which was very blatantly NOT an institution where the ruling elite play hardball against each other. No wonder nothing ever got better.

I'll say one thing for Manticore: even though their Government (in the parliamentary sense) is dominated by the Lords, they do force whoever's speaking for the Government to play hardball and answer difficult questions in an attempt to hold them accountable for their actions.

Tonkovic basically seems to not even perceive the idea that she is accountable for her actions. She's doing what she thinks is right, but she doesn't expect to be punished for violating the rules.

The policy also meant a wise captain and executive officer generally kept their noses out of who was sleeping with whom as long as no one violated Article 119.

And even 119 is "the most commonly winked at of the Articles of War."

The obvious reason to wink at it is that it really only matters if the people involved are unable to fulfill their duties properly. It's like office romances. You'd be stupid to punish everyone who dates a co-worker, but you do need some kind of mechanism in place to deal with situations where someone lets their love life interfere with their professionalism.

[Terralthra]

PD laser clusters can be used as energy weapons at short range, 60-70 thousand K range against missiles.

To be fair, a missile is probably less heavily built than even a rickety old starship. Then again, missiles are stupidly evasive targets. We know their straight line acceleration is between, oh, forty and a hundred thousand gravities, but we don't know what their lateral acceleration is.

I'm honestly surprised they can predict the position of the missile to within enough precision to hit the target with a laser, if it has all of 0.2 seconds to sidestep from the time the ship takes the laser shot.

To my knowledge, we've never seen any indication that anything with a wedge can use it to sidestep at all. The wedge accelerates toward the throat of the wedge, and that's it. It can torque the ship to yaw, pitch, or roll, but side-slipping has never been mentioned in a context that doesn't involve reaction thrusters.

[Simon_Jester]

Yawing or pitching a missile that accelerates at fifty thousand gravities can generate very high instantaneous accelerations on fairly short notice- once your nose is pointing a tenth of a degree out of line with where the target was originally, you are generating about... eighty gravities of acceleration sideways. Since the missile is only a few meters wide, that means that it can maneuver far enough to dodge a point object (such as a bullet) which was aimed directly at it within a matter of about fifty milliseconds. A laser with a wider zone of effect takes longer, but it's still doable. So even a one degree per second of rate of turn would enable evasive dodges on the order of hundreds of meters within a literal eyeblink.

And we have reason to believe that impeller drive missiles must be able to turn pretty fast, quite a bit faster than one degree per second in all probability, because they have to pivot to aim the nose of a laser-head-tipped missile at the target as they reach it, and can do this even when flying past the target and firing perpendicular to their line of flight.

[VhenRa]

Yawing or pitching a missile that accelerates at fifty thousand gravities can generate very high instantaneous accelerations on fairly short notice- once your nose is pointing a tenth of a degree out of line with where the target was originally, you are generating about... eighty gravities of acceleration sideways. Since the missile is only a few meters wide, that means that it can maneuver far enough to dodge a point object (such as a bullet) which was aimed directly at it within a matter of about fifty milliseconds. A laser with a wider zone of effect takes longer, but it's still doable. So even a one degree per second of rate of turn would enable evasive dodges on the order of hundreds of meters within a literal eyeblink.

And we have reason to believe that impeller drive missiles must be able to turn pretty fast, quite a bit faster than one degree per second in all probability, because they have to pivot to aim the nose of a laser-head-tipped missile at the target as they reach it, and can do this even when flying past the target and firing perpendicular to their line of flight.

Point of order, just prior to detonation the drive is killed and the lasing rods (and warhead IIRC) separate from the missile and align via RCS, last I remember.

[Simon_Jester]

Well, an RCS powerful enough to separate the warhead assembly* and aim the missile should also be powerful enough to turn the entire missile at a respectable (if lesser) rate. Again, you don't really need much rate of turn to make the missile extremely effective at sideslipping a few hundred meters at a time, even if you don't outfit the missile with 100+ gravity RCS systems to use on terminal approach.

Which I would because it's one of the best defense penetration aids I can imagine against point defense laser fire. Useless against countermissiles, but for precisely that reason the dodging-RCS system will only have to work for at most a second or two.

*(in my book the lasing rods are part of the warhead, because the missile causes no harm to the enemy without them)

[Ahriman238]

"You told me, once, that you might need me to warn you that what you had in mind was a little risky," the XO reminded him. "Well, the Sollies're going to go ape-shit . . . and that may be the good news!"

The captain and his exec sat in Hexapuma's number two pinnace, and FitzGerald pointed out the viewport at the mountainous bulk of the Kalokainos Shipping-owned freighter Copenhagen.

"I think the admiralty courts call this 'piracy,'" he said.

"Nonsense," Terekhov replied airily. "This is a simple and obvious case of salvage of an abandoned vessel."

"Which you arranged to have 'abandoned' in the first place!"

Terekhov seizes, through the proxy of the Montanan President, a freighter belonging to a company mixed-up in this. His plan is to send Fitzgerald on the Copenhagen with a drone or two to recon the Monica System. As Ansten is pointing out, seizing a Solly freighter like this is not something most people will look favorably on.

"Given the fact that a Solarian-registry vessel was apprehended in the very act of supplying illegal weapons to terrorists on his planet, President Suttles has every right to be concerned. Since there was a second Solarian-registry vessel in orbit at exactly the same time, and since Kalokainos Shipping and the Jessyk Combine are known to have coordinated their interests in several areas of the Verge, the discovery that Marianne belonged to Jessyk amply justifies his decision that Copenhagen merits investigation, as well. And since the entire Montanan navy consists of LACs, without a single hyper-capable unit, he obviously couldn't count on preventing Copenhagen from fleeing the system to avoid investigation if, indeed, her ship's company had been involved in this nefarious plot. So he clearly had no choice but to remove Copenhagen's crew for interrogation."

The legal fig leaf protecting Suttles and Montana from any splashback on this.

Lieutenant MacIntyre would be along as FitzGerald's engineer, with Lieutenant Olivetti as his astrogator and Lieutenant Kobe to handle his communications. That was as many officers as Terekhov could spare, but it was still going to leave FitzGerald shorthanded, since only Olivetti was watch-qualified. MacIntyre and Kobe were both junior-grade lieutenants, capable enough in their specialties, but with limited experience. In fact, MacIntyre had something of a reputation for being sharp-tongued and waspish with enlisted personnel and noncoms. Terekhov suspected that it sprang from her own lack of self-confidence, and he hoped this assignment might help to turn that around. But he'd also decided FitzGerald needed at least a little more support, so he'd attached Aikawa. The midshipman wasn't watch-certified, yet, but he was a levelheaded sort who was actually better at managing enlisted personnel than MacIntyre was. He could take on at least some of the load . . . and getting him out of Hexapuma would also get him out of an environment where every single sight and sound and smell reminded him of Ragnhild's death.

The officers going on this little jaunt, including one of their problem-children lieutenants.

"Thank you for worrying, Ansten," he said quietly, "but the decision's made. I only have three hyper-capable units, aside from Hexapuma herself—and, of course, Copenhagen. I can't spare any of them for a direct flight to Spindle, but Ericsson will continue on to Spindle from Dresden. She'll deliver my complete report to the Admiral and the Provisional Governor."

Terekhov is going to rally every ship he can reach in time to depart before Khumalo or anyone else could recall him, thus shielding the Star Kingdom by giving them plausible deniability and himself as a ready-made renegade scapegoat. He really is playing craps with his career. This means any ship at Dresden, Talbott or Tillerman.

To be sure, Rajkovic ought to have returned the seal of office to her, and with it her formal authority as head of state, as soon as she set foot back on Kornatian soil. He hadn't, and she'd been back for over nine days now. It was infuriating and insulting, but it wasn't—quite—illegal. Technically, a confirming vote of Parliament was required to transfer that authority back and forth, even if he'd handed the seal directly to her. And given the current tone of Parliament, and her continuing appearances before the Special Committee on Annexation and even more acrimonious appearances before Cuijeta Krizanic's Standing Committee on Constitutional Law, she'd decided not to press the matter. Some of the exchanges between her supporters and opponents—not all of them Reconciliationalists, either—were becoming decidedly ugly. However little she'd cared to admit it to herself, she hadn't been certain Parliament would back her if she demanded Rajkovic hand the seal over, and she couldn't afford the loss of political capital if it had declined to do so.

Besides, she hadn't needed the official return of her authority to monitor what was happening inside "his" Cabinet. Mavro Kanjer and Alenka Mestrovic kept her fully informed on anything Rajkovic said at Cabinet meetings, and Kanjer, as Justice Secretary, would certainly have known about any communications taps the Manticoran detachment from Spindle was maintaining.

The Kornatian President's seal of office, and literal political power is transferred with it, hence needing a Parliamentary rubber-stamp vote every time the President and Vice President hand it back and forth.

"This afternoon," he continued, "Krizanic spoke to the other members of the Standing Committee behind closed doors. Afterward, Judita Debevic came to my office."

He paused, and Tonkovic nodded slightly. Debevic was the leader of the Social Moderates and vice chairwoman of the committee.

"Madam President," Zovan said heavily, "she'd come to ask me unofficially if I'd be prepared to serve as your advocate in a formal impeachment debate."

And despite Tonkovic's denials, such a thing is indeed in the works.

"Well, you're not doing it without me."

"Why not?" For the first time there was more than a little exasperation in Terekhov's voice, and Van Dort smiled thinly.

"Partly because I refuse to pretend you pulled the wool over my eyes, as well. I don't intend to look that stupid to the rest of the galaxy. And partly because if both of us go along on this idiot's errand of yours, the Queen will have two loose warheads to blame it on. But mostly?" He held Terekhov's gaze with a fiery, unflinching eye. "Mostly because I started this entire mess when I came up with the brilliant notion of organizing the plebiscite. If you want to come right down to it, Aivars, everything that's happened, including Nordbrandt and Westman and Monica is my fault. So if someone's going to get his idiot self killed, and possibly quite a few other people along with him, I'm going along for the ride."

"Bernardus, that has to be the most arrogant thing I've ever heard anyone say in my entire life. One man, no matter who he is, can't possibly take the entire credit—or blame—for the actions of everyone in an entire cluster the size of Talbott!"

"Maybe not." Van Dort's voice dropped, and he looked away at last. "Maybe not. But I've spent my entire adult life trying to keep Frontier Security's claws off of my planet, and I've supped with the Devil to do it. I've connived, and I've pressured people, and I've extorted concessions to squeeze the last stellar out of entire planets. Whether I meant to or not, I've given my obsession my wife and my daughters. Fifteen days ago I gave it Ragnhild Pavletic and your Marines. I fed all of them into the furnace, and the absolute hell of it is that I'd do it all again. So if those Frontier Security bastards—or anyone else—think they're going to come charging in at this point and take over everything I care about, everything I've mortgaged my soul and poured out my life and the lives of the people I love to keep out of the Sollies' clutches, I'm damned well going to be there when they find out they're wrong!"

There was a moment of silence. Then Terekhov cleared his throat.

"All right," he said finally. "You're a bigger idiot than you seem to think I am, but if you're going to be this whiny about it, I suppose you can come along."

And Van Dort's coming along because Terekhov can't trick him off the ship and doesn't want to have the Marines escort him off.

"I'm worried about what this may mean for the CLP, Andrieaux," Lababibi said with a concern that was only partly feigned. "Aleksandra's been the heart and soul of the Liberals from the very beginning. Now that she's been recalled, even her own delegation is beginning to slip away. And I don't think the example has been lost on a couple of the other delegation heads."

"The more fools they for not having secured the full, informed approval of their own governments," Yvernau said scornfully. "Did they think the respectable classes wouldn't understand? Ptahhhh!" He actually spat on the expensive carpet, his features twisted with disdain. "Now look what they've done to themselves! Every one of them, sitting in his expensive office every night, wondering when the hounds baying at his heels will drag him down. And it'll happen to more than a few of them, Samiha. You mark my words! When the implications of Medusa's insolent time limit sink home, the fact that the idiots didn't get clear, unequivocal approval for their positions will give their opponents—and possibly their 'friends,' as well—back home the excuse to make the entire delay their fault. They'll find themselves sacrificed by the gutless wonders who can't wait to scramble onto Alquezar's wagon and fawn all over Medusa, whining 'It wasn't our fault! We didn't know what they were doing!'"

Lababibi frowned ever so slightly. Even that was more expression than she'd intended to show, but the scalding venom of Yvernau's angry contempt surprised her. The New Tuscan had always prided himself on his self-control, his detached amusement at the inept maneuvers of the lesser mortals around him. He'd known he was far superior to any of them, that it was only a matter of biding his time until destiny inevitably handed him the opportunity for which he waited.

Andreiaux Yvernau, the head of the delegation from New Tuscany and now that Tonkovic is going down in flames the de facto leader of the Constitutional Liberal Party, sadly he's just as committed to the game of chicken as Tonkovic was.

Lababibi's problem was, in many ways, the opposite of Aleksandra Tonkovic's. Since the Convention was being held on her own homeworld, every single member of the Spindle System -government—not to mention every semi-literate in the street—knew every detail of what was happening. Well, every public detail, at any rate. There were still some things which were thankfully confidential. God bless smoke-filled rooms and their spiritual descendants!

But more than enough was known to prevent Lababibi from exercising anything remotely resembling the freedom Tonkovic had enjoyed . . . until she was yanked back to Split. Which had its upside, of course. At least no one could drag her home and accuse her of concealing critical information or formulating her own policies. The bad news was that she had no choice but to execute the policies dictated to her, whether she thought they were insane or not.

Samiha Lababibi, president of both the Convention and Spindle would much rather get things over and done with, but her constituents insist on her toeing the CLP party line.

"The basic situation is very simple, Samiha." Yvernau's voice took on the lecturing note Lababibi most detested. "In essence, Medusa's informed all of us that we're under the gun. That we face a time limit, imposed by Manticore, within which we must yield to the Star Kingdom's demand for a complete surrender of our sovereignty. If we decline to lick Queen Elizabeth's hand like proper little lap dogs, then she'll kick us aside and leave us to languish in the outer dark. Where, as the final element of her threat runs, we'll undoubtedly be devoured by Frontier Security."

He paused, and while Lababibi would have disputed the tone and purpose of the Manticorans' statement, he'd certainly summed up the consequences accurately enough in his own, viciously angry way.

"However," he continued, "the truth isn't quite that cut and dried, because Aleksandra had a point. If they carry their threat through, and if Frontier Security does scoop us up, Manticore's prestige and diplomatic reliability will suffer severe damage. Possibly even irreparable damage, given how much dispute there is over the Manties' and Haven's versions of their prewar diplomatic exchanges. They're in a worse position to afford damage to their credibility than anyone else I can possibly think of."

The requirement wasn't to give up all sovereignty, just to come to a damned agreement within that timeframe.

"So you still think, despite the formal communique from Prime Minister Alexander in the Queen's name, that it's really a bluff?" Lababibi managed to keep the incredulity out of her voice somehow.

"More than a bluff, but far short of an irrevocable policy statement. They may be threatening to do it, but it's the last thing they really want to do."

You flaming idiot. Just what, Lababibi thought scathingly, makes you think this Cluster is important enough to Manticore for them to waste time trying to bluff us? About the only thing I can say for you, Andrieaux Yvernau, is that you're not a whole lot stupider than my own political lords and masters.

Oy.

"If that's the case, what do we do about it?" she asked, rounding her eyes and giving him her best "troubled-but-trusting" expression.

"We treat it as a bluff," he said decisively.

"I beg your pardon? Didn't you just say it was more than that?"

"Of course. But if we stand fast, tell them we're prepared to reject their demands even at the risk of their abandoning the entire process, we'll be able to use Medusa's own policy against Alquezar and his so-called 'moderate' cronies. They're already terrified we're going to pull the house down around their ears. I say we convince them that's exactly what we'll do unless they meet us at least half way. And once they're convinced of that, we offer them the compromise platform I've been working on all along. They'll be so scared, so desperate to do anything to save the annexation, that they'll accept the compromise rather than call our bluff and risk losing everything."

Well I suppose Yvernau's an improvement over Tonkovic in that he's willing to compromise and considers the CLP line a foraward bargaining position to fall back from. He just wants to pitch his compromise at the eleventh hour so he can't be talked down from it in any way.

"And if they do decide to 'call our bluff' and count on the portion of the Alexander statement that says Manticore will pick and choose which of the Cluster's systems it will annex and which it will exclude?"

"There are two possibilities, assuming—which I, for one, don't—that these frightened little minds have the fortitude to go eyeball-to-eyeball with us. One is that Manticore's genuinely willing to exclude and abandon our star systems, despite the diplomatic fallout of such an action. The second is that our governments back home will disavow our positions and cave in, making the best deals they can with Alquezar after removing us from our delegations.

"Personally, I don't think the Manticorans have the balls to go through with the exclusion. And, even if they do, I don't see them allowing Frontier Security to snap us up. The Manties couldn't afford to see their new systems here in the Cluster invaded by cysts of the League. So whether it's what they want to do or not, they'll have to include us under the same security umbrella as their possessions here. That's why I'll recommend to my government that even if everyone else signs up like good little peasants, we refuse."

"And if they don't?"

"If they don't, then they disavow my actions," Yvernau said unflinchingly.

Lababibi rather doubted he could really visualize a situation in which his government might actually do that. His personality was too fundamentally arrogant for him to believe on any emotional level that even the universe itself could ultimately fail to do his bidding. And there was probably an element of desperation in his disbelief, as well. His final refuge was to deny the reality of the threat bearing down upon him. Yet whether or not he could fully accept the possibility of his political demise, he was at least intellectually aware of the possibility. And so, in his own way, he was showing considerable political courage. Of a nasty, contemptuous sort, perhaps, but still courage.

Which was quite possibly the single virtue he possessed.

The plan if Manticore decides to annex cooperative systems and exclude the CLP hadliners, and an interesting parallel to Terekhov in that Yvernau is prepared to be disavowed and dropped from politics, however remote he considers the chance, if need be.

"He might actually get those stupid dinosaurs to stand up in front of the glacier with him, you know," the Dresdener pointed out.

"In which case they'll be found a thousand years later with buttercups frozen in their stomachs," Alquezar said scornfully. "That's the best they'll be able to hope for—to stay frozen exactly where they are while the rest of us sign up with Star Kingdom and leave them in our dust. But that's not what's going to happen."

"No?"

"No. I give it ten T-years, twenty-five at the outside, before they get themselves tossed out of office by a new crop of political leaders who'll come begging, hats in hand, to be allowed to join the Star Kingdom on our terms. I don't think any other result's possible, in the long term. Not when they see what membership in the Star Kingdom's going to do for our economies and our citizens."

"I think you may be being overly optimistic," Krietzmann said, his eyes troubled. He raised his left hand, the one with the missing fingers, in an exasperated sort of wave. "Unless we're willing to embargo their economies, they'll still share in any general economic improvement in the Cluster. Not to the same extent, maybe, but I'm afraid they may see enough domestic improvement to keep a lid on things a lot longer than you're predicting."

Anyone who gets frozen out of the annexation will probably still benefit from the nearby presence of the RMN and the increased trade to the region. Maybe enough that it'll take a while for internal pressures to build in favor of signing on.

"That's what I'm trying to tell you," Kanjer said. "It's coming from inside the Party, Aleksandra."

"But . . . but how did Rajkovic get to Mrsic?" Tonkovic asked in bewilderment.

"He didn't, Aleksandra," Kanjer said almost gently. "Alenka and I have been telling you all along that Rajkovic hasn't been in secret communication with Parliament. Hasn't been tapping your communications. Hasn't been using the KNP against you and your supporters. You just haven't been listening."

"But . . ." She stared at him, confused, and he shook his head.

"Vuk Rajkovic's no saint, Aleksandra. He's an experienced politician, and he can be just as sneaky and devious as any of the rest of us. But he didn't have to be this time. He didn't pressure Parliament into recalling you. All he did was pass on the information Medusa put into his possession through Van Dort. Parliament did the rest. And now Parliament is pushing the impeachment movement."

With Tonkovic's own party leading the charge against her, already desperate to disassociate themselves.

"What are you saying? Are you saying the impeachment would succeed?"

"Yes," he said, and there was a certain kindness in the brutally brief reply. She shook her head, dazed, almost bemused, and he reached across the table and took her lax right hand between both of his own.

"I know what you tried to do," he said. "And I believe the majority of the Party does. But it's not a big enough majority. Not with the Reconciliationist bloc in Parliament. If you're impeached, the impeachment will be sustained. Comfortably."

Tonkovic swallowed. This was a nightmare. It couldn't be -happening—not to her.

And that's all she wrote.

"Because if you don't, it's the end of your political career."

"And how much 'political career' does a President who resigns in disgrace have? No Planetary President's ever resigned, and you know it!"

"This is a panic reaction," Kanjer said. "The people who ought to recognize what you're trying to do are too frightened to defend you at the moment. But that doesn't mean they won't eventually realize you were right. That by stampeding into the Manties' arms under Alquezar's terms they've thrown away their best—possibly their only—hope of preserving our way of life and, not to put too fine a point on it, their own positions.

"But when that day comes, they'll still be a political force. Not as strong a force as before they threw away all their advantages, but still a force. And the only force dedicated to protecting what's left of our society. When they finally wake up and recognize what they've done, how bad the situation is, they'll need a leader. One who didn't stampede right along with them.

"You, Aleksandra. They'll need you."

And the future after Tonkovic resigns, somehow I doubt it'll work out quite that way, or that they'll have as much support as they figure.

The heavy cruiser Warlock had been at Dresden when Ericsson arrived with Captain Terekhov's orders for any Navy ships in the system to join him in Montana. Captain Anders was junior to Captain Terekhov. As such, he'd had no choice but to obey, whatever he might think about his orders, and he and the destroyer Javelin had arrived in Montana two days before. Helen didn't know exactly what the Skipper had told Anders and Lieutenant Commander Jeffers, Javelin's CO, he had in mind. He might not have told them anything yet, she thought. But everybody aboard the Nasty Kitty had a pretty good idea by now, and she suspected the inter-ship grapevine must have carried at least a few hints to Anders and Jeffers.

Then, this morning, more ships had come in, this time from Talbott. Volcano had returned with Commander Eleanor Hope's Vigilant, another Star Knight-class cruiser, and the light cruiser Gallant, a sister of the Skipper's old Defiant, in tow, accompanied by two more destroyers—Rondeau and Aria, both old Chanson-class ships.

It was turning into a fairly respectable little squadron, she reflected. True, most of its ships verged on obsolescent, by Manticoran standards, but those standards were a bit high by anyone else's measure.

Of course, it was also, in many ways, a stolen squadron. All those ships were part of Rear Admiral Khumalo's "Southern Patrol," one of the mainstays of his anti-piracy strategy. Technically, the Skipper was within his rights to call them in, and communications delays over interstellar distances required that officers exercise their initiative. The more senior an officer became, the more initiative she was expected to demonstrate, but countermanding a superior officer's orders, and especially those of a station commander, wasn't something to undertake lightly. An officer who did so had damned well better be able to demonstrate that her actions had been justified.

Terekhov's scratch squadron, a few heavy cruisers, a couple of light ones, three destroyers and a collier/munitions ship.

The fact was that, now that she understood where Paulo's good looks had really come from, and even more since she'd gotten over her own silly prejudices and begun to know the person behind those features, she found him . . . attractive. Very attractive, if she was going to be honest, which she very much wished she could avoid. The comfort he'd given her after Ragnhild's death, she'd come to realize, was completely typical of him, despite his aversion to letting people get too close. Of course, Ragnhild had become his friend, as well as Helen's, but not in the same way. He'd known her for less than six T-months; Helen had known her for four T-years. He and Ragnhild had gotten just close enough for him to realize how much her death had hurt Helen, and for it to hurt him enough that he, too, had needed to draw comfort from another.

-snip-

Helen had been what she'd thought of as "romantically involved" before. Several times, in fact. Sometimes it had been fun; other times, sheer frustration had made her want to kill the idiot. Like most Manticoran adolescents, she'd been reasonably well instructed in the basics of human sexuality, and she'd found those lessons valuable in those romantic involvements. That, too, had been fun. On occasion, lots of fun, she admitted cheerfully.

But none of those relationships had begun as whatever was growing between her and Paulo had. She hadn't started out disliking the other person intensely, for one thing. And the other person had never carried Paulo's history and background around with him. Never possessed near godlike handsomeness . . . and despised its source. There was an ingrained, intense suspicion in Paulo. A defensive reaction against the attractiveness designed into his genes to make him a more sellable commercial commodity. He didn't want people to desire him for his appearance, and that jagged, wounded part of him was always only too ready to assume anyone who did desire him was, in fact, drawn to his physical attractiveness.

Had Helen decided to pursue him aggressively, it would have been like trying to embrace an Old Earth porcupine. And, in the end, almost certainly as futile as it would have been painful. So it was possibly a good thing she wasn't certain she wanted to "pursue" him at all. Yet she suspected that he, like her, felt the changes in whatever was growing between them. It was already too intense for Helen to call it mere friendship, but hadn't—quite—toppled over into anything else yet.

Helen's feelings toward and potential relattionship with Paulo d'Arezzo. More of those fun issues created by slavery and it seems Manticore wants their people to understand sex by the time they're old enough to have it.

"It's been obvious for weeks—months—Lababibi despises Yvernau," she said. "He's probably the only person in the entire Convention who didn't know it. And you're right about her instructions. But the motion had already failed before the vote got to her, so she's not even going to have to pay the price of disobeying orders. She's the woman who put them firmly on the winners' side instead of death-locking them to the losers, the way she'd been told do to. And she got to kick Yvernau publicly in a particularly sensitive spot in the process. Talk about having your cake and eating it, too!"

Yvernau's proposed strategy was shot down, by such a huge margin Lababibi changed votes when it was her turn.

"But I'm afraid the New Tuscan oligarchs are even more stubborn and a lot more monolithic than the Kornatians."

"Yes, Milady, they are. My best prediction at the moment is that there's about an eighty percent chance they'll leave Yvernau here, still heading their delegation. I figure there's a seventy percent chance they won't send him any new instructions, either. They'll let him continue standing in front of the air lorry until it runs him down, hoping for the best. After that, though, I don't know what they'll do. That's why I was asking you. It looks to me as if it's too close to call at this point. There's almost an even chance they'll buy into this notion of his that they can do just fine without us, thank you."

"That's my reading of the situation, too," Medusa said. "And he's probably right that we'll find ourselves obliged to prevent anyone else from moving in on them. But for the rest of it—" She shook her head. "Either New Tuscany's going to turn into some sort of police state, or else the current management's going to get bounced out on its collective posterior when the New Tuscan electorate sees what's happening to the rest of the Cluster without their participation."

Likelihood of New Tuscany recalling or issuing new orders to Yvernau is low. Spoiler: New Tuscany winds up the only system in Talbott to not get annexed.

"Given what Terekhov and Van Dort did to Nordbrandt and the FAK, and now the approval of the Alquezar draft Constitution virtually in its entirety, I'd have to say the annexation logjam seems to be breaking up. The one thing I was most worried about—once the Government finally decided to go ahead and impose a hard and fast deadline—was the effect all of the death and destruction on Kornati was going to have on domestic political opinion back home. Tonkovic and Yvernau's delaying tactics never had a hope of standing up to the threat of exclusion, but I had my doubts about whether or not Parliament would approve the annexation, even with the Queen getting behind and pushing hard, if it thought we were going to be looking at a constant, running sore in Split."

"I think you might've been underestimating both Her Majesty's grip on the present Parliament and the electorate's intestinal fortitude," Medusa said. "On the other hand, you might not have been. Either way, I'm glad there's not going to be any more spectacular bloodshed and explosions coming out of the Cluster."

Ah, irony. It seems the Convention is finally coming around with Tonkovic gone, Westman laying down his arms and Nordbrandt deep in hiding. Surely there will be no more explosions or bloodletting.

He turned his attention to the main plot. The green icons of twelve ships gleamed upon it now. In addition to Hexapuma's own, there were two other heavy cruisers—Warlock and Vigilant—and three light cruisers—Gallant and Audacious, both sisters of his dead Defiant, and Aegis, one of the new Avalon-class ships, almost as modern as Hexapuma. That was the core of "his" squadron's combat power, but they were supported by four destroyers—Javelin and Janissary, both relatively modern, and the ancient (though neither of them was really any older than Warlock) Rondeau and Aria. The ten warships were accompanied by the dispatch boat he'd impressed from its assignment to the Montanan government and by HMS Volcano.

He let his attention linger on Volcano's light code for a moment, then laid his forearms precisely along the armrests of his command chair and rotated it to face Lieutenant Commander Wright.

"All right, Tobias," he said, his voice calm, unshadowed by any trace of uncertainty. "Take us out of here."

Final numbers on the scratch squadron, 3 CA, 3 CL, 4 DD, 1 dispatch boat to relay their success or failure, and one supply ship. And they're moving out to meet up with Copenhagen at Point Midway, an arbitrary marker 38 light-years from Monica.

[VhenRa]

Why hello there HMS Warlock. Been awhile since we saw you.

[Batman]

And for another spoiler, she will live to finally shed the Young stain.