Bit of Analysis: Honor Harrington

[GMG2Dave]

Well, as someone with a bit of real world Naval experience (just a touch over 14 years) I can honestly say that Suchon's conduct is neither outside the realm of plausibility, or even unknown in the US Navy. For the most part, 90% of the officers &/or enlisted I have served with have been decent sorts, but yes, there are those who are simply incapable/unwilling to do more than the absolute bare minimum needed to "get by". Give them a job to do, they will half-ass it, turn your back for a second, they are poof gone, and if you don't constantly ride them, they are about as productive as a rock. Given the limited number of personnel on a Navy ship, they are a constant source of friction. Make one of them a Department Head (like, say, a ships Chief Medical Officer) and it is a real PITA to deal with. Like, for instance, a certain Weapons Officer I had the unfortunate experience of serving under, who did not know his job, had no desire to learn his job, and blamed everything that he ever did wrong on his subordinates.

I would also like to point out that I do not know of a single commanding officer I have ever served under who would not have jerked her up by the short and curlies for plopping her backside down in his presence without even so much as a "by your leave". Ain't gonna happen. It is blatantly disrespectful of her to do so, and at the very least, Honor should have told her to get up off her ass, and stand at attention while addressing her Captain.

It is also important to note the DW himself explains that at this time in the series, the RMN is very much a peacetime Navy, and that there are a lot of officers (and enlisted) who are just coasting, and trusting in sheer longevity to ensure that they make Grade. Unfortunately this leads to people who are, shall we say, promoted above their level of competence? Hell, look at Santino for the perfect example of sheer incompetence ending up as a senior Admiral, and the total FUBAR that turned into. And as far as Honor booting her lazy backside off her ship? She had every reason to believe she was heading into a fight, and who would you rather have taking care of your injured crew in that scenario? A lazy, incompetent 10%, or Montoya?

[Simon_Jester]

With reference to that, it probably doesn't help that the RMN is a rapidly expanding peacetime navy in the middle of a large buildup. They don't have enough spare manpower to be able to say "fire the 20% of our crews and officers that score the lowest three-year averages on their performance rubrics."

Meanwhile, it's frighteningly likely for incompetents to end up actively concentrated in places like Home Fleet during peacetime, because those are the places where you have the largest staff propping up an incompetent*. And because those are the places least likely to see combat.** And Fearless was assigned to Home Fleet prior to the events of the novel, no?

*Which means fewer chances for someone like Suchon to become conspicuously useless, since she's not the senior medical officer on station and can do things like shuffle patients off onto dedicated hospitals.
**Which means fewer risks; Weber probes this with the Battle Fleet/Frontier Fleet divide in the Solarian League. While I have criticisms of the way he portrays the League, the idea that such a divide between the seldom called-upon heavy hitters of the fleet, and the often called-upon light units which patrol the borders, is realistic.

[Ahriman238]

"Coming up on the three hundred-klick mark, Franny," her pilot murmured, and Malcolm nodded. They'd flown a standard sweep pattern since leaving the Delta, and that had slowed their rate of advance to little more than seventy-five kilometers per hour. It made her feel as if they were barely poking along, especially in light of the urgency Isvarian had stressed in his briefing, but at least they were nearing the limit of their best estimate of how far the dead nomad could have come.

Son of a gun, that stinged-out Stilty really did make it 300 klicks before dying. Air car sweep at low speeds.

And they were firing. Puffs of smoke sprouted from the moss like toadstools, merging into an incredible carpet of gray-white fog. The skimmer bucked as hundreds of eighteen-millimeter projectiles slammed into its belly, and someone screamed behind Malcolm.

Small-arms fire with flintlocks can still bring down an aircar.

The skimmer wasn't armored. Its composites were tough and elastic, but they weren't armor, and more bullets punched through its thin skin. She heard Truman cursing in a high, incredulous falsetto, but his pulser turret was already in action, each barrel spitting fifteen-millimeter explosive darts cased in ceramic frag jackets at a cyclical rate of over a thousand rounds per minute. His fire cut across the ground like a lash of flame, shredding moss and Medusan with equal abandon, yet he could fire in only one direction at a time, and still more armed natives were erupting out of other holes in the ground.

But the aircar has a turret, 15 mm pulser darts, frag explosive. Not quite sure why a pulse dart needs to explode, it should be able to turn a human body into a fine mist all on it's own.

She cut the circuit and flipped up a clear plastic shield on the side of her terminal. Only the captain's cabin terminal had that shield, and she jammed her thumb down on the big, red button it had covered.

Wait, wait. So the only GQ alarm is in the captain's quarters, or her's is the only comm station, specifically, that also has a GQ alarm?

The ululating scream of Fearless's battle stations alarm wailed through the light cruiser's hull. Crewmen rolled out of their bunks, dropped cups of coffee, jumped up from mess tables, threw down playing cards and book readers, and bolted for their stations. That shrill, electric sound was brutal, designed to get inside a person's bones and snarl there, and only a dead man could have ignored it.

Fearless' General Quarters. Lacks the charm of a 100 beats a minute gong.

She cut the circuit and whirled to her own locker. She jerked it open and yanked out her vac suit and shed her kimono in one flowing movement, then sat on the edge of the bed and shoved her feet into the suit. The Navy's skin suits were little more cumbersome than pre-space scuba suits, unlike the hard suits of meteor miners and construction workers, and Honor was glad of it as she made the plumbing connections with painful haste and hauled the suit up over skin still wet from the shower. She thrust her arms into the sleeves, then sealed it and grabbed her helmet and gauntlets from the locker even as her eyes checked the suit telltales and found them all green.

Skin suits, or Mechanical Counter Pressure Suits, are fitted and skintight, except for the bubble helmet, to keep the human body in one piece in the absence of air pressure. Really neat, still problematic for areas that aren't easily covered with pressure. Anyway, with the call to battlestations everyone puts on their fitted spacesuit, that doesn't really restrict mobility much, so they can survive a hull breech. Just one of the touches I really liked about this series. Atomic Rocket had a good, but very brief article on the concept.

Supposedly armored against small arms (pulser?) fire and flying shards of metal, but that part seems to fail whenever convenient to the plot. One downside is that every suit has to be custom fitted to one person, so there aren't any interchangeable or generic pressure suits.

Nimitz had hurtled from his perch at the first shrill of the alarm. He'd been through this same drill as often as she, and he scurried across the cabin to the boxlike affair she'd had clamped to the bulkhead below her sailplane plaque immediately after coming aboard. That box wasn't Fleet issue, and it had cost Honor a small fortune, for it was a custom-built life support module, sized to Nimitz's stature and fitted with the same search and rescue beacon as a Fleet vac suit. It was good for a hundred hours on its internal life support, and the door slammed automatically behind him as he fled into it. He couldn't open it from the inside, but unless something scored a direct hit on it, he could survive even if battle damage opened the cabin to space.

Nimitz's armored, life-support equipped showbox for sitting out fights in.

"All stations manned, Captain," the exec said crisply. "Impeller wedge coming up—we should have movement capability in another ten minutes. Sirius has been underway for six-point-eight minutes . . . at four hundred and ten gees."

He paused, and Honor's jaw clenched. That was low for most warships, but impossibly fast for a freighter, and it confirmed Santos's deduction. Only military impellers could have produced that kind of acceleration for a ship Sirius's size . . . and only a military grade inertial compensator could allow her crew to survive it.

Which we already knew they had?

"We picked up a transmission from the general area where our patrol went down just after we lost contact with Lieutenant Malcolm," Matsuko said quickly. "It was scrambled but not encrypted, and we just broke the scramble. The transmitter didn't identify himself, and he used a code name for his recipient, but we detected a transmission to the freighter from the Haven Consulate immediately afterward, so I think we know who it was intended for."

"What did it say?" Honor demanded. Dame Estelle didn't answer in words; she simply played the message off, and Honor's eyes went cold and flat as a male voice gasped over her com.

"Odysseus! It's Odysseus now, damn it! The frigging Shaman's lost his goddamned mind! They're boiling up out of the caves, and I can't hold them! The hopped-up bastards are kicking off right fucking now!"

Interesting. Clearly the Havenites lost control of the timing of their own operation, and the native uprising kicked off early. There's a lesson in there about riling up a mob, then trying to hold them back for just the right time.

I'm more interested in their timing. Last we saw, they'd agreed to give Young two months to get back and reassert the status quo. In two chapters, it's revealed they put the task force on alert for 6 days.

"'Mr. Venizelos, you will commandeer the first available Junction carrier to relay the following message to Fleet HQ. Message begins: Authentication code Lima-Mike-Echo-Niner-Seven-One. Case Zulu. I say again, Zulu, Zulu, Zulu. Message ends.'" She heard McKeon suck air between his teeth at her shoulder. "That is all, Mr. Webster," she said softly. "You may transmit at will." Webster said absolutely nothing for an instant, but when he replied, his voice was unnaturally steady.

"Aye, aye, Captain. Transmitting Case Zulu." There was another brief pause, then, "Case Zulu transmitted, Ma'am."

"Thank you." Honor wanted to lean back and draw a deep breath, but there was no time. The message she'd just ordered Webster to send and Venizelos to relay to Manticore was never sent in drills, not even in the most intense or realistic Fleet maneuvers. Case Zulu had one meaning, and one only: "Invasion Imminent."

Case Zulu, code for invasion imminent: no drill. Presumably some hefty professional consequences for calling in a false report. Also, messages are recorded, then sent.

"Come to three-five-seven by one-seven-one, Chief Killian. On my command, I want three hundred gravities acceleration on that heading for ten seconds. Then come directly to two-seven-four by zero-niner-three true and go to maximum military power."

-snip-

Honor's hands tightened on her chair's arms, but she didn't even blink as her eighty-eight-thousand-ton command screamed down into the very heart of Medusa's orbital traffic. She'd laid in that vector by eye, without the careful calculations and double-checking The Book required, but there was no time for that, and her mind was still in that odd overdrive. She knew it was correct, with an absolute certainty that admitted no doubt, and Fearless rode the invisible rail she'd nailed down in space as her speed mounted by almost three kilometers per second with every second that passed.

The Havenite courier boat loomed directly ahead of her on Honor's visual display, impeller nodes beginning to glow as they started to come up, but they weren't on line yet. Vapor spewed from the boat's emergency maneuvering thrusters as her skipper tried frantically to avoid Fearless's mad charge, yet those thrusters were far too weak to move the boat more than a few meters in the time they had, and the light cruiser stooped upon the eggshell courier like a vengeful falcon.

Breath hissed as her officers tensed for the inevitable, suicidal impact, but Honor's face was carved stone as the edge of Fearless's drive field slashed past the courier at less than two kilometers, far inside its drive safety perimeter. Vaporized alloy burst from the smaller vessel's stern as the cruiser's vastly more powerful impeller wedge blew her after nodes to incandescent gas; then Fearless was past, and the starscape slewed crazily in the visual display as she shot up and away from the planet in a mad skew turn and went instantly to full emergency power, accelerating at five hundred and twenty gravities.

"My God!" someone gasped as Fearless streaked past an orbiting four-million-ton freighter at a bare ten kilometers' separation. Honor didn't even turn her head. Her eyes were already reaching out for the scarlet light dot of the fleeing Sirius.

First series use of wedge-on-wedge interaction. Fearless is fine, the courier boat is crippled, perhaps because the wedge was still forming? Normally the weaker wedge would implode, assuming they both didn't. Fearless' wedge is more than 2 km from the ship, less than 10. Fearless max accel is 520 Gs.

Also, Honor is still terrible at math and piloting a hsip in the abstract, but was able to eyeball the ramming and immediate turn to follow Sirius manuver.

"They're trying a coup de main to seize the planet," Honor said flatly. "Sirius's master is 'fleeing in panic' from the native insurrection. In the course of his flight, he'll 'just happen' to encounter a Peep squadron or task force in the area on 'routine maneuvers.' Naturally, he'll spill out his story to the Havenite commander, who, horrified and overcome with a sense of urgency and the need to save off-worlder lives, will immediately proceed to Medusa with his entire force to put down the native uprising." She stared into McKeon's eyes and saw the dawning understanding.

"And once he's done that," she finished very softly, "he'll proclaim Haven's possession of the entire system on the grounds that Manticore has demonstrated its total inability to maintain order and public safety on the planet's surface."

The evil scheme explained.

"Look. If they pop out of hyper right at the hyper limit on a reciprocal of Sirius's present course, they'll be barely twelve light-minutes out from Medusa. If they translate downward at the maximum safe velocity, they can be into planetary orbit in under three and a half hours, even at superdreadnought acceleration rates. They'll also be just over eleven-point-three light-hours from the terminus, so they can reach it in twenty-eight hours and forty-five minutes. If we didn't know they were coming until they dropped out of hyper, they'd have plenty of time to be set up right on the terminus when Home Fleet tried to make transit through it."

McKeon paled. "That would be an act of war," he protested.

"So is that." Honor jabbed a thumb in the general direction of Medusa. "But what's happening dirt-side would only be an act of war if we knew who'd done it, and they've done their level best to convince us it was Manticoran criminals who supplied the guns and drugs. By the same token, their interdiction of the terminus would only turn into an act of war if we tried to transit and they fired on us. If I'm right about their plan, they can't have their entire fleet waiting around out here. For that matter, if they did have their entire fleet out here and they were really ready to fight, they wouldn't need any pretexts. They'd just come crashing in and sit on the terminus, and that would be that. But if they've only got a battle squadron or two, then, yes, we could kick them out of the system even if they were waiting for us. Our losses would be brutal, but theirs would be virtually one hundred percent, and they have to know that."

"Then what in God's name do they think they're doing?"

"I think they're running a bluff," Honor said quietly. "They hope we won't push it and risk engaging them if they're in a position to hurt us badly enough—that we'll stop to negotiate and discover public opinion back home won't stand for heavy casualties to take back a system the anti-annexationists don't want anyway. But if it is a bluff, that's another reason to use a relatively small force. They can always disavow the actions of their commander on the spot, claim he was carried away by understandable concern for off-worlders in the wake of the Medusa Massacre but that he exceeded his authority. That leaves them a way to back out and save face, especially if no one knows they caused the massacres. But think about it, Alistair. Events on Medusa are really just a side show. A pretext. They're not after the planet; they're after control of a second Junction terminus. Even if there's only one chance in fifty that they could pull it off, wouldn't the potential prize be worth the risk from their viewpoint?"

Further details.

"But I may be wrong about the size of their force or how willing they'll be to fight," Honor said. "After all, their fleet's bigger than ours. They can stand the loss of a couple of battle squadrons as the opening round in a war, especially if they can inflict a favorable rate of exchange in return. And it's going to be a horse race to get anything here from Manticore in time to stop them, even with our Code Zulu. Our message will take thirteen and a half hours to reach Fleet HQ, but Sirius can be into hyper in two hours and fifty minutes—call it three. Let's say they reach their rendezvous three hours after that. Assuming a Fleet acceleration of four-twenty gees, that means their units could be back here in as little as twelve hours and on the warp point in forty-one, which leaves HQ just twenty-seven and a half hours from receipt of our Code Zulu to cover the terminus. Assuming Admiral Webster reacts instantly and dispatches Home Fleet from Manticore orbit with no delay at all, that'll take them—" She punched more numbers into her maneuvering plot, but McKeon was already ahead of her.

"Call it thirty-four hours for superdreadnoughts, or thirty-point-five if they don't send anything heavier than a battlecruiser," he muttered, jaws clenched, and Honor nodded.

Time to scramble Home Fleet through the Junction. Remember it takes most of a day to get around the system, and that's not ocunting time to get everyone in their ships and on the way.

"We're still in Manticoran space, and what's happening on Medusa certainly constitutes an 'emergency situation.' Under the circumstances, I have the authority to order any ship to heave to for examination."

"You know Haven doesn't accept that interpretation of interstellar law, Ma'am." McKeon's voice was low, and Honor nodded. For centuries, Haven had championed the legal claim that the right of examination meant no more than the right to interrogate a ship by signal unless it intended to touch or had, since its last inspection, in fact touched the territory of the star system in which the examination was demanded. Since turning expansionist, the Republic had changed its position (within its own sphere) to the one most of the rest of the galaxy accepted: that the right of examination meant the right to physically stop and search a suspect ship within the examiner's territorial space regardless of its past or intended movements. But Haven had not accepted that interpretation in other star nations' territory. In time, they would have no choice but to do so, since the double standard they claimed was so irritating to the rest of the galaxy (including the Solarian League, which had all sorts of ways to retaliate short of war), but they hadn't yet, and that meant Sirius's master might very well assert Haven's old, traditional interpretation and refuse to stop when called upon to do so.

Haven's interstellar law. Haven ships have to submit to physical inspection in their space, but not in anyone else's. The solarian League may pressure them, but I seem to recall they're equally piqued by Manticore's tolls for using the Junction.

Other Marines, bulky in unpowered body armor, were paired off with each battle-armored trooper, running check lists on external monitors, and a background chatter of crisp commands and metallic equipment sounds filled the big troop compartment.

So not just skinsuits and power armor, there is such a thing as unpowered body armor.

He made his way to a gaping hole in the skimmer's side, his armor's audio sensors picking up the sputter and pop of arcing circuits but not a single sound of life from the interior, and drew a deep breath. Then he thrust his armored torso through and looked upon obscenity.

Power armor hearing enhancement.

"Falcon Leader, Falcon-Three-Three. Be advised we see no Stilty rifles on site. It appears they stripped their dead before leaving."

"Understand no rifles on site, Falcon-Three-Three. Maybe they've got more bodies than guns. Any sign they took the NPA's weapons, as well?"

"Negative, Falcon Leader. They . . . spent enough time here to do it, but I've seen several pulse rifles and sidearms. Looks like they might not have understood how to use them."

Or maybe their hands are imcompatible with trigger guards. We know they don't have shoulders, which is why the rifles have chest stocks. Or maybe a pulser really is massively more complex than a firearm, but I doubt it.

He turned to the visual display at Sergeant Major Jenkins's right knee. It showed a birds-eye view of the valley, relayed from one of the two pinnaces invisible on station high above him, and his skin crawled as the ground itself seemed to flow towards his positions. The Stilties were coming at him in a mob more than two kilometers wide and three deep, flowing through the moss like a vast, ragged tide. There must be at least ten thousand of them out there, and that was far more than he'd allowed even his worst-case estimates to assume. Even with the NPA reinforcements, his people were outnumbered thirty or forty to one, and thank God they'd caught them in the open instead of in among the enclaves!

Video feed from a hovering pinnace to the grunts on the ground. Tame for the 21st Century, not so sure aobut when the book was published.

He wasn't worried about his battle-armored people, but the rest of his troops were in standard body armor, and the NPA company Major Isvarian had brought in to flesh out his people were even more lightly protected. He had no doubt his weapons could turn that valley into a slaughterhouse, yet even with air support that many enemies might manage to break at least some of their number out of the zone. It seemed preposterous in the face of modern weaponry. Every manual he'd ever read, every lecture he'd ever heard, said ill-armed aborigines could never break through that much state-of-the-art firepower. But the manuals and lectures had never contemplated facing a horde like this precisely because modern killing power made such a concentrated body of troops suicidal. That meant he didn't have any real way to estimate how much fire the Medusans—especially if they were all on mekoha—could absorb without breaking, and he'd have only a single section of armored scouts on each flank to intercept them.

Yeah, they're really too dumb, or more likely too hopped up on drugs, to come in out of the steel rain.

"Falcon Leader to all Falcons. Engage!" a voice snapped, and Kilgore's pulse rifle swung up into position without conscious thought. His thumb snapped the selector to full-auto, not the normal semi-automatic, and his little finger pressed the stud that selected the explosive magazine.

Pulsers have a full auto, multiple magazines for special rounds, and again explosive shots. You'd think firing a souped up railgun into a crowd would be deadly enough, probably more deadly unless the round is only set to explode after it stops moving. OK, maybe there's a case for pulsers being too complex to just pick up and fire if they have so many switches and options.

Kilgore's pulse rifle surged back, its recoil almost imperceptible through his armor as its small, powerful grav coil spat a stream of four-millimeter darts down-range. The explosions of the darts weren't the clean, white flashes of practice on the range; they were red and steaming as Medusan bodies blew apart in geysers of blood. He swept his fire across the shrieking natives, emptying a full hundred-round extended magazine into them in less than twenty seconds, and his was only one of almost three hundred modern rifles flaying that screaming thong.

4 mm projectiles, that sounds dreadfully familiar. Oh well, Weber isn't Ringo and pulsers are the picture of retraint and practicality next to grav-guns.

Pulsers do have a recoil, albeit a slight one. 100 rounds to a magazine and a 5 rounds a second on full-auto.

It was incredible. Kilgore slapped a fresh magazine into his rifle and emptied it. Slammed in a third and opened up again, ears cringing from the savage discord of shrieks and explosions bellowing over his audio pickups, and he couldn't believe it. The Stilties were charging so fast, their mob formation so thick, that he couldn't kill them fast enough to stop them!

Even with the drugs, a mob that can soak up almost a thousand rounds from exploding, railgun like projectiles and still advance is seriously impressive.

He abandoned his cover, feeling crude bullets skip and whine off his armor like hail as the Medusans saw him at last, and his people hit their jump gear, vaulting higher up the steep slopes.

Jump gear for Marines. No further details, and I can't recall ever hearing of them again, just like all the engineering robots. Maybe an early element dropped later, maybe just never relevant again.

But then the scouts were clear, and the pinnaces screamed down, lasers and autopulsers raving. They swept along the sides of the valley, cluster bombs and napalm erupting beneath them, lasers and guns plowing a ten-meter wide swath of absolute destruction through the howling Medusans, and then they swept back to do it all over again. And again.

And again and again and again . . . until the dead lay five and six deep and there was no living thing in all the blasted nightmare of that valley of death.

Air strike. Pinnaces have nose lasers as previously mentioned and pulsers. Cluster bombs and napalm are new, can't imagine there's a lot of demand for them.

Anyways, multiple airstrikes > mob with flintlocks. The native insurgency the Sirius is fleeing in panic from lasts roughly two hours and kills less than a dozen off-worlders. The Medusans have lost multiple tribes, but on the plus side everyone who didn't participate in the attack now has new grazing land available.

"Solid shot only," he murmured over his com. "Try not to tear things up too badly if you have to shoot—they're gonna want evidence—but don't take any stupid chances."

Because the non-exploding rounds are so not destructive to their surroundings?

Acknowledgments came back to him, and his own little finger squeezed, switching over to the non-explosive rounds in the secondary magazine.

Confirmation of multiple magazines.

The non-explosive darts screamed across the cavern at two thousand meters per second, and Tadeuz O'Brian was qualified Expert Marksman with the pulse rifle. Body armor slowed them, but it couldn't possibly stop them at such a short range, and they struck precisely where he'd intended—a centimeter below Colonel Bryan Westerfeldt's navel.

Pulser muzzle velocity 2000 m/s. Like I said, not a grav-gun but still energetic.

Pity we don't know the mass of a pulser dart, or it's composition, density or length. Just 4 mm across. Just for laughs, I tried the old grav-gun round figures (which were DU) and came up with 3.82 MJ.

Commander Honor Harrington sat in her command chair and watched her displays as HMS Fearless tore through space under maximum emergency power. The cruiser accelerated at a steady five hundred and twenty gravities—more than five kilometers per second per second—in pursuit of the freighter Sirius; Honor's face was still and cold, a mask against her own anxiety, while her mind churned behind her eyes.

520 gravs, just confirmation, and nice of Weber to spell out 5 KPS squared and save me figuring it.

Sirius was, indeed, headed for the Tellerman wave, and the Tellerman was one of the "Roaring Deeps," the most powerful grav waves ever charted. More than that, it headed almost directly towards the People's Republic of Haven. If there truly was a Peep battle squadron out here, the Tellerman would take Sirius to meet it at two and a half or three thousand times the speed of light.

Back in the early days of hyper flight, spacers would have avoided something like the Tellerman like death itself, for death was precisely what it would have meant for any starship that encountered it, but that had changed.

The original hyper drive had been a mankiller, yet it had taken people a while to realize precisely why that was. Some of the dangers had been easy enough to recognize and avoid, but others had been far more difficult to identify and account for—mainly because people who encountered them never came back to describe their experience.

Gravity wave. Is this really the best time for an infodump, during the climax of the story?

It had been discovered early on that translating into the alpha band, the lowest of the hyper bands, at a velocity greater than thirty percent that of light was suicide, yet people had continued to kill themselves for centuries in efforts to translate at speeds higher than that. Not because they were suicidal, but because such a low velocity had severely limited the usefulness of hyper travel.

The translation into or out of any given band of hyper-space was a complex energy transfer that cost the translating vessel most of its original velocity—as much as ninety-two percent of it, in the case of the alpha band. The energy loss dropped slightly with each "higher" hyper band, but its presence remained a constant, and for over five standard centuries, all hyper ships had relied on reaction drives.

There were limits to the amount of reaction mass a ship could carry, and hydrogen catcher fields didn't work in the extreme conditions of hyper-space. That had effectively limited ships to the very lowest (and "slowest") hyper bands, since no one could carry enough reaction mass to recover velocity after multiple translations. It also explained why more stubborn inventors had persisted in their costly efforts to translate at higher velocities in order to maintain as much starting velocity in hyper-space as possible. It had taken over two hundred years for the .3 c limitation to be fully accepted, and even today, some hyper physicists continued to search for a way around it.

0.3 c limit on translation, and you lose 92% of your speed just getting in. Seems hyperdrive was invented during the days of chemical rockets and hydrogen burners, but it was a long time before they oculd make practical use of it.

Even after one had resolved the problems of safe translation speeds, however, there was the question of navigation. Hyper-space wasn't like normal-space. The laws of relativistic physics applied at any given point in hyper, but as a hypothetical observer looked outward, his instruments showed a rapidly increasing distortion. Maximum observation range was barely twenty light-minutes under ideal conditions; beyond that, the gravity-warped chaos of hyper and its highly charged particles and extreme background radiation made instruments utterly unreliable. Which, of course, meant that astrogation fixes were impossible, and a ship that couldn't see where it was going seldom came home again.

The answer to that one had been the hyper log, the interstellar equivalent of the ancient inertial guidance systems developed on Old Earth long before the Diaspora. Early-generation hyper logs hadn't been all that accurate, but they'd at least given astrogators a rough notion of where they were. That had been far better than anything that had come before, yet even with the hyper log, so many ships never returned that only survey vessels used hyper-space. Survey crews had been small, fantastically well-paid, and probably just a bit crazy, but they'd kept hyper travel in use until, eventually, one or two of them encountered what had killed so many other starships and survived to tell about it.

You can "see and use sensors in hyper, but only to a distance of twenty light minutes before everything erm, I think redshifts, but it might be blueshift, to the point of uselessness.

So you navigate hyper not by observing the universe, but measuring the distance and direction from the point you entered hyper, recorded in your hyper log. Presumably if you get lost you can shift back to normal space to get a fresh fix.

Hyper space itself was best considered as a compressed dimension which corresponded on a point-by-point basis to normal-space but placed those points in much closer congruity and so "shortened" the distance between them. In fact, there were multiple "bands," or associated but discrete dimensions, of hyper space. The "higher" the band, the shorter the distance between points in normal-space, the greater the apparent velocity of ships traveling through it . . . and the higher the cumulative energy cost to enter it.

Imagine the universe as a tiered pyramid (like the food pyramid!) each level is smaller than the one below it but a large number of points match up one-on-one. So you hop up a tier or two, go a certain distance and drop back down and you've traveled a much shorter distance than you would have in a straight line.

What they hadn't quite grasped was that hyper space, formed by the combined gravitational distortion of an entire universe's mass, was itself crossed and crisscrossed by permanent waves or currents of focused gravity. They were widely separated, of course, but they also might be dozens of light-years wide and deep, and they were deadly to any ship which collided with one. The gravitational shear they exerted on a starship's hull would rip the hapless vessel apart long before any evasive action could even be contemplated, unless the ship happened to impact at precisely the right angle on exactly the right vector, and its bridge crew had both the reflexes and the reaction mass to wrench clear in time.

As time passed, the survey ships that survived had mapped out reasonably safe routes through the more heavily traveled regions of hyper-space. They couldn't be entirely relied upon, for the grav waves shifted position from time to time, and sticking to the safe lanes between waves often required vector changes reaction-drive ships simply could not make. That meant hyper voyages had tended to be both indirect and lengthy, but the survival rate had gone up. And as it climbed, and as physicists went out to probe the grav waves they now knew existed with ever more sophisticated instruments, observational data increased and ever more refined theories of gravity were proposed.

It had taken just over five hundred years, but finally, in 1246 P.D., the scientists had learned enough for the planet Beowulf to perfect the impeller drive, which used what were for all intents and purposes "tame" grav waves in normal-space. Yet useful as the impeller was in normal-space, it was extraordinarily dangerous in hyper. If it encountered one of the enormously more powerful naturally occurring grav waves, it could vaporize an entire starship, much as Honor herself had blown the Havenite courier boat's impeller nodes with Fearless's impeller wedge.

More on grav waves, invention of impeller drive. Impeller wedge-on-grav wave is bad mojo for the wedge.

More than thirty years had passed before Dr. Adrienne Warshawski of Old Earth found a way around that danger. It was Warshawski who finally perfected a gravity detector which could give as much as five light-seconds' warning before a grav wave was encountered. That had been a priceless boon, permitting impeller drive to be used with far greater safety between grav waves, and even today all grav detectors were called "Warshawskis" in her honor, yet she hadn't stopped there. In the course of her research, she had penetrated far deeper into the entire grav wave phenomenon than anyone before her, and she had suddenly realized that there was a way to use the grav wave itself. An impeller drive modified so that it projected not an inclined stress band above and below a ship but two slightly curved plates at right angles to its hull could use those plates as giant, immaterial "sails" to trap the focused radiation hurtling along a grav wave. More than that, the interface between a Warshawski sail and a grav wave produced an eddy of preposterously high energy levels which could be siphoned off to power a starship. Once a ship had "set sail" down a grav wave, it could actually shut down its onboard power plants entirely.

And so the grav wave, once the promise of near certain death, had become the secret to faster, cheaper, and safer hyper voyages. Captains who had avoided them like the plague now actively sought them out, cruising between them on impeller drive where necessary, and the network of surveyed grav waves had grown apace.

Hyperspace sailing for faster travel that doesn't expend any energy. Not sure if any of his hyperspace speed numbers are for normal travel or with grav waves.

Improved Warshawskis had tended to offset the first difficulty by extending their detection range and warning ships of turbulence. With enough warning time, a ship could usually trim its sails to ride through turbulence by adjusting their density and "grab factor," though failure to trim in time remained deadly, which was why Sirius's claim of tuner flutter had been so serious. A captain still had to see it coming, but the latest generation detectors could detect a grav wave at as much as eight light-minutes and spot turbulence within a wave at up to half that range. The problem of acceleration tolerance, on the other hand, had remained insoluble for over a standard century, until Dr. Shigematsu Radhakrishnan, probably the greatest hyper physicist after Warshawski herself, devised the inertial compensator.

Waves sometimes double back creating turbulence and storms, but these can be detected with scanners also named for Dr. Warshawski.

Radhakrishnan had also been the first to hypothesize the existence of wormhole junctions, but the compensator had been his greatest gift to mankind's diaspora. The compensator turned the grav wave (natural or artificial) associated with a vessel into a sump into which it could dump its inertia. Within the safety limits of its compensator, any accelerating or decelerating starship was in a condition of internal free-fall unless it generated its own gravity, but the compensator's efficiency depended on two factors: the area enclosed in its field and the strength of the grav wave serving as its sump. Thus a smaller ship, with a smaller compensator field area, could sustain a higher acceleration from a given wave strength, and the naturally-occurring and vastly more powerful grav waves of hyper-space allowed for far higher accelerations under Warshawski sail than could possibly be achieved under impeller drive in normal-space.

Even with the acceleration rates the compensator permitted, no manned vessel could maintain a normal-space velocity above eighty percent of light-speed, for the particle and radiation shielding to survive such velocities simply did not exist. The highest safe speed in hyper was still lower, little more than .6 c due to the higher particle charges and densities encountered there, but the closer congruity of points in normal-space meant a ship's apparent velocity could be many times light-speed. Equipped with Warshawski sails, gravity detectors, and the inertial compensator, a modern warship could attain hyper accelerations of up to 5,500 g and sustain apparent velocities of as much as 3,000 c. Merchantmen, on the other hand, unable to sacrifice as much onboard mass to the most powerful possible sails and compensators the designer could squeeze in, remained barred from the highest hyper bands and most powerful grav waves and were lucky to make more than 1,200 c, though some passenger liners might go as high as 1,500.

So the wedge is also where the force of inertial dampening goes, like a sort of heat sink? Huh. Max ship speeds of 0.8 c normal and 0.6 in hyperthese are the same for everyone, the difference is how fast you can accelerate to or brake from those speeds, giving you more options. Warships, with access to higher bands of hyperspace, can do an effective 3,000 c. Civilian ships almost never have the space for the most powerful hyperdrives and ancillary equipment, and so are restricted to lower bands and 1200-1500 c.

And that brought Honor right back to Sirius, for the ship in front of her obviously had a military-grade drive and compensator. Her sheer mass meant her compensator field was larger and thus less efficient than Fearless's, but no freighter should have been able to pull her acceleration. Even a superdreadnought, the only warship class which approached her mass, could only manage about four hundred and twenty gees, and Sirius was burning along at four hundred and ten. That left Fearless an advantage of barely a hundred and ten gees, little more than a kilometer per second squared—and Sirius had a head start of just under fifteen minutes.

Sirius would hit the hyper limit in just under a hundred and seventy-three minutes from the time she left orbit. Honor had been in pursuit now for almost ten minutes. By cutting the safety margin on her own compensator to zero, she could match velocities with the freighter in another forty-six minutes, but it would take her over an hour just to reach effective missile range. Completely overtaking the freighter would require just over another hundred and seven minutes, leaving her less than twenty minutes before Sirius reached the hyper limit. And even if she did overtake completely, forcing the freighter to heave-to would be far from easy. Worse, momentum alone would carry Sirius beyond the hyper limit, even if she braked at max in response to Honor's demand, unless she began her deceleration within the next hour and a half, and Honor had no way of knowing just how far beyond the hyper limit a Havenite battle squadron might be lurking. No normal-space sensor could see across the hyper wall. The entire Havenite Navy might lie less than a light-second beyond the limit, and no one in Basilisk would know a thing about it, so it was entirely possible Sirius needed only to break into hyper at all to accomplish her mission.

420 Gs accel for superdreadnought, 410 for Sirius, contrasted with 520 for Fearless. With their fifteen minute headstart, Honor can just catch them before the hyperlimit.

Yet he had no choice now. Canning had alerted the task force for an execution date only six days away. If the courier boat had still been hyper-capable, she could have been sent to quietly stand the task force down, but the courier couldn't be sent now. Which meant that unless Coglin reached the rendezvous with Sirius, the entire force might well move in anyway. That had to be prevented, and even if it hadn't, he couldn't possibly permit Harrington to board Sirius, for that was the one thing which would absolutely prove that Haven had been behind the Stilty uprising. There was no way to hide what his ship truly was from a naval boarding party.

Like I said, weird they decided to delay the operation, but gave the task force a greenlight. The funny thing is Honor is chasing Coglin to prevent him from bringing the Haven invasion, while he's running to tell them the mission's scrubbed and dropping by Basilisk would be a really stupid idea.

He queried NavInt's files for the readout on Fearless's armament. She was one of the last of the old Courageous-class ships, almost eighty T-years old and small for her rate, by modern standards. But that didn't mean she was senile. The surviving units of her class had been thoroughly overhauled over the years, and they packed a nasty weight of metal for their age and size. They were light on defense, virtually unarmored and with relatively weak radiation shielding (for warships), but they mounted a pair of grasers, two thirty-centimeter lasers, and seven missile tubes in each broadside. They lacked the magazine capacity for a sustained missile engagement, but they could throw surprisingly heavy salvos for their size while their ammo lasted—more than enough to reduce any freighter to glowing vapor. Or it should have been, anyway.

Repeat of Fearless' armament with a little context. Not enough magazine space for her missile broadside, but she could (before the refit) throw a lot of missiles at once while they lasted. Heavy firepower, light armor, sure sounds like a Hemphill special even before she got her hands on it.

"Coming up on fifty-six minutes, Captain. Velocities will match at one-seven-one-zero-six KPS in thirty-two seconds."

"Lieutenant, prepare to record a transmission to Sirius."

"Recording, Ma'am," Webster replied.

"Captain Coglin," Honor said slowly and clearly, "this is Commander Honor Harrington of Her Manticoran Majesty's Starship Fearless. I request and command you to heave to for examination. Please cut your drive and stand by to receive my boarding party. Harrington out."

"On the chip, Ma'am," Webster said. "Prepared to transmit on your command."

Recording messages pre-transmission again. Is it to give them time to take it back or do another take, or do they condense the message into a high-speed databurst? Either way it takes a bit to arrive. I'm just wondering why record first.

Almost seven-point-seven million kilometers separated the two ships as Honor's message raced after Sirius. It took the transmission over twenty-five seconds to cross that gulf of space—twenty-five seconds in which Sirius moved another four hundred and forty-one thousand kilometers. The total transmission time was over twenty-seven seconds, and Johan Coglin's face went hard as stone as his com officer played it for him.

27 seconds signal delay, bit slower than lightspeed transmission.

Her mind shied away from the thought of firing into an unarmed freighter, but if Coglin refused to heave to, she would have no choice, and she castigated herself for using all three pinnaces for the Marines' combat drop. She could have held one of the boarding shuttles for that, fleshed it out with her cutters, if she'd had to, and retained at least one pinnace aboard Fearless. She had the acceleration and the time to overhaul Sirius, and pinnaces were expressly designed, among other things, to put boarding parties aboard ships under way. Her velocity when she overtook the freighter would be barely four thousand KPS greater than her quarry's. Pinnace impeller drives were far weaker than a regular starship's, but if she'd dropped a boatload of Marines or even armed Navy ratings as she overran Sirius, its drive would have sufficed to decelerate for a boarding rendezvous.

Pinnaces meant for high-speed boarding manuvers, because they have the ship's momentum while in the wedge, but can actually brake fast enough not to overshoot a craft they're pursuing, like a cutter would if they tried the same manuver.

The missile belched from Fearless's number two missile tube and sped ahead at an acceleration of 417 KPS2, building on Fearless's own velocity of just over eighteen thousand kilometers per second. It could have accelerated twice as fast, but reducing its acceleration to 42,500 g raised its small impeller's burnout time from one minute to three, which not only gave it three times the maneuvering time but increased its terminal velocity from rest by almost fifty percent.

It raced after Sirius, seeming to crawl, even at its speed, as the freighter continued to accelerate. At three minutes, more than ten million kilometers from launch and with a terminal velocity of just over ninety-three thousand KPS, its impeller drive burned out and it went ballistic, overhauling its target on momentum alone

Pre-MDM missile drives have a 3 minute life of really high (42500 G) aceeleration. This can be doubled, but the drive burns out in 1 minute, and purely ballistic missiles don't engage in terminal manuvers to baffle point-defence.

Another nineteen minutes before even the longest range shot could reasonably hope to hit the freighter. Tension wrapped itself around her nerves as she realized she was committed, but something else poked at the back of her brain. Something about that debris Sirius had jettisoned. If her captain had no intention of halting anyway, why jettison cargo so soon? He had almost a full hour before Fearless could physically overhaul him and board. It just didn't make—

She stiffened in her chair, eyes wide. Dear God, perhaps it did make sense!

"Mr. McKeon." The exec looked up, and Honor beckoned him over to her chair.

"Yes, Ma'am?"

"That debris from Sirius. Could it have been hull plating?"

"Hull plating?" McKeon blinked in surprise. "Well, yes, I suppose it could have been, Skipper. But why?"

"We know that ship has a military grade drive and compensator," Honor said very softly. "Suppose it has something else military grade aboard? Something that was hidden behind false plating?"

Oh sweet merciful Valen! Are you just figuring this out now? I was thirteen the first time I read this and it took me roughly 0.1 seconds to make the leap that the freighter with the carefully concealed military capabilities, might just be armed. In universe, you've known about this for almost two days, and the Peeps have a history of using Q-ships. Feth, you people are idiots.

[Mr Bean]

"Coming up on fifty-six minutes, Captain. Velocities will match at one-seven-one-zero-six KPS in thirty-two seconds."

"Lieutenant, prepare to record a transmission to Sirius."

"Recording, Ma'am," Webster replied.

"Captain Coglin," Honor said slowly and clearly, "this is Commander Honor Harrington of Her Manticoran Majesty's Starship Fearless. I request and command you to heave to for examination. Please cut your drive and stand by to receive my boarding party. Harrington out."

"On the chip, Ma'am," Webster said. "Prepared to transmit on your command."

Recording messages pre-transmission again. Is it to give them time to take it back or do another take, or do they condense the message into a high-speed databurst? Either way it takes a bit to arrive. I'm just wondering why record first.

I know this one! Time lag!
When your over twenty light seconds away from the person your speaking to normal conversation becomes impossible as each of you try's to guess what the other person is going to say on that twenty second delay. Greater delays make it even worse. The counter for this per NASA is to use stop start which is why they are recording everything THEN sending it. If you get a call from a ship a light hour away you get the entire message and all questions in one go. Leaving you free to respond to all questions in one go.

Make sense?

[Batman]

Actually 27 seconds is pretty much spot-on for a lightspeed transmission?
As for the exploding pulser darts, while I can't see how a dinky little 4mm dart is supposed to hold any worthwhile amount of explosives, against unarmoured opponents their small size and high speed actually work against them-the dart will essentially drill a tunnel through the target and go its merry way, taking most of its energy with it to spend on whatever else is in its flight path. Sure, the target'll be dead within the hour from blood loss and/or organ failure, but for the next few minutes, it's still capable of shooting back. Explosive bolt (assuming you somehow manage to cram in enough explosives to matter and a fuse that manages to make it go off while it's actually still in the target)-down the moment it's hit.

And given that modern assault rifle MVs are in the 800-1000 mps range I don't find 2000 mps all that excessive.

[Terralthra]

She cut the circuit and flipped up a clear plastic shield on the side of her terminal. Only the captain's cabin terminal had that shield, and she jammed her thumb down on the big, red button it had covered.

Wait, wait. So the only GQ alarm is in the captain's quarters, or her's is the only comm station, specifically, that also has a GQ alarm?

I think the modifiers are to indicate that of cabin com terminals, only the Captain's has a GQ button.

She cut the circuit and whirled to her own locker. She jerked it open and yanked out her vac suit and shed her kimono in one flowing movement, then sat on the edge of the bed and shoved her feet into the suit. The Navy's skin suits were little more cumbersome than pre-space scuba suits, unlike the hard suits of meteor miners and construction workers, and Honor was glad of it as she made the plumbing connections with painful haste and hauled the suit up over skin still wet from the shower. She thrust her arms into the sleeves, then sealed it and grabbed her helmet and gauntlets from the locker even as her eyes checked the suit telltales and found them all green.

I got really tired of the phrase "painful haste" whenever someone puts on a skinsuit in a hurry. I mean, not that it's inaccurate, but it would be nice if Weber could vary the phrase a bit.

I'm more interested in their timing. Last we saw, they'd agreed to give Young two months to get back and reassert the status quo. In two chapters, it's revealed they put the task force on alert for 6 days.

Presumably there was a month or two time-skip, covered by the time it took to open up Fearless' impeller ring in the yard, the searching the plains, etc.

"'Mr. Venizelos, you will commandeer the first available Junction carrier to relay the following message to Fleet HQ. Message begins: Authentication code Lima-Mike-Echo-Niner-Seven-One. Case Zulu. I say again, Zulu, Zulu, Zulu. Message ends.'" She heard McKeon suck air between his teeth at her shoulder. "That is all, Mr. Webster," she said softly. "You may transmit at will." Webster said absolutely nothing for an instant, but when he replied, his voice was unnaturally steady.

"Aye, aye, Captain. Transmitting Case Zulu." There was another brief pause, then, "Case Zulu transmitted, Ma'am."

"Thank you." Honor wanted to lean back and draw a deep breath, but there was no time. The message she'd just ordered Webster to send and Venizelos to relay to Manticore was never sent in drills, not even in the most intense or realistic Fleet maneuvers. Case Zulu had one meaning, and one only: "Invasion Imminent."

Case Zulu, code for invasion imminent: no drill. Presumably some hefty professional consequences for calling in a false report. Also, messages are recorded, then sent.

Well, in this case, it has to be recorded anyway, since you can't transmit through the Junction. It has to be carried about a ship about to transit.

Kilgore's pulse rifle surged back, its recoil almost imperceptible through his armor as its small, powerful grav coil spat a stream of four-millimeter darts down-range.

Pulsers do have a recoil, albeit a slight one. 100 rounds to a magazine and a 5 rounds a second on full-auto.

Slight recoil...when wearing full power armor. Presumably, more noticeable when not wearing something which augments strength by several hundred percent.

He abandoned his cover, feeling crude bullets skip and whine off his armor like hail as the Medusans saw him at last, and his people hit their jump gear, vaulting higher up the steep slopes.

Jump gear for Marines. No further details, and I can't recall ever hearing of them again, just like all the engineering robots. Maybe an early element dropped later, maybe just never relevant again.

I believe it's mentioned during the boarding action on Blackbird Base in The Honor of the Queen, but only as a sidenote, as the zero-g and close quarters mean that using the power armor's muscles to toss one's self around is more efficient and safe.

You can "see and use sensors in hyper, but only to a distance of twenty light minutes before everything erm, I think redshifts, but it might be blueshift, to the point of uselessness.

It's not doppler shift, per se, but similar in effect. It's neither blue nor red, but...distorted. Waves expanding, propagating, and interacting spherically behave strangely when the spheres' radii vary over distance and "hyper band".

He queried NavInt's files for the readout on Fearless's armament. She was one of the last of the old Courageous-class ships, almost eighty T-years old and small for her rate, by modern standards. But that didn't mean she was senile. The surviving units of her class had been thoroughly overhauled over the years, and they packed a nasty weight of metal for their age and size. They were light on defense, virtually unarmored and with relatively weak radiation shielding (for warships), but they mounted a pair of grasers, two thirty-centimeter lasers, and seven missile tubes in each broadside. They lacked the magazine capacity for a sustained missile engagement, but they could throw surprisingly heavy salvos for their size while their ammo lasted—more than enough to reduce any freighter to glowing vapor. Or it should have been, anyway.

Repeat of Fearless' armament with a little context. Not enough magazine space for her missile broadside, but she could (before the refit) throw a lot of missiles at once while they lasted. Heavy firepower, light armor, sure sounds like a Hemphill special even before she got her hands on it.

It's just as likely to be a loadout intended for detached duty near a resupply base...like commerce patrol. It has enough to blow some two-bit 'pirate' out of space in short order. Maybe even surprise a heavy cruiser with a big broadside and thus win a short engagement, where a conventional magazine capacity would leave it perennially under-gunned and doomed to get the shit blown out of it no matter what engagement envelop exists with a larger ship. What it doesn't have is the magazine space to really stay in the wall of battle as an escort for as long as capital ship engagements tend to last.

Almost seven-point-seven million kilometers separated the two ships as Honor's message raced after Sirius. It took the transmission over twenty-five seconds to cross that gulf of space—twenty-five seconds in which Sirius moved another four hundred and forty-one thousand kilometers. The total transmission time was over twenty-seven seconds, and Johan Coglin's face went hard as stone as his com officer played it for him.

27 seconds signal delay, bit slower than lightspeed transmission.

Just over 25 seconds travel time. The other two must be transmit/receive/modem time.

[Batman]

She cut the circuit and flipped up a clear plastic shield on the side of her terminal. Only the captain's cabin terminal had that shield, and she jammed her thumb down on the big, red button it had covered.

Wait, wait. So the only GQ alarm is in the captain's quarters, or her's is the only comm station, specifically, that also has a GQ alarm?

I think the modifiers are to indicate that of cabin com terminals, only the Captain's has a GQ button.

Technically this only says the captain's terminal is the only one to have the flip-up shield, meaning it's entirely possible for every comm terminal to have the button, the captain's is merely the only one that can't be pressed by accident.
On a more serious note, I agree. This doesn't say this is the only GQ alarm. It's merely the only GQ alarm in people's quarters and that seems pretty damned sensible to me.

I'm more interested in their timing. Last we saw, they'd agreed to give Young two months to get back and reassert the status quo. In two chapters, it's revealed they put the task force on alert for 6 days.

Presumably there was a month or two time-skip, covered by the time it took to open up Fearless' impeller ring in the yard, the searching the plains, etc.

Err-if they had put 'Fearless' in the yard none of the book would have happened. You're thinking Young's ship, HMS 'Warlock'.

Also, messages are recorded, then sent.

Well, in this case, it has to be recorded anyway, since you can't transmit through the Junction. It has to be carried about a ship about to transit.

Yes, but that's irrelevant to it being recorded before transmission. The receiving ship could record a live transmission just as easily.

[Ahriman238]

Actually 27 seconds is pretty much spot-on for a lightspeed transmission?

I got 25.3 seconds, but it's close enough I'm not really bothered by it.

And given that modern assault rifle MVs are in the 800-1000 mps range I don't find 2000 mps all that excessive.

I quite agree, I sort of vaguely recalled them being much, much faster. But still a ways short og the Posleen War.

I know this one! Time lag!
When your over twenty light seconds away from the person your speaking to normal conversation becomes impossible as each of you try's to guess what the other person is going to say on that twenty second delay. Greater delays make it even worse. The counter for this per NASA is to use stop start which is why they are recording everything THEN sending it. If you get a call from a ship a light hour away you get the entire message and all questions in one go. Leaving you free to respond to all questions in one go.

Make sense?

Makes sense, they have plenty of delayed conversations like that over the course of the series.

I got really tired of the phrase "painful haste" whenever someone puts on a skinsuit in a hurry. I mean, not that it's inaccurate, but it would be nice if Weber could vary the phrase a bit.

Beats "howl of <insert emotion>"

Anyway, is there a non painful way to jam something up your urethra quickly?

[Batman]

Actually 27 seconds is pretty much spot-on for a lightspeed transmission?

I got 25.3 seconds, but it's close enough I'm not really bothered by it.

25.3 seconds for the original 7.7 million km (and I get 25 and two thirds for that). Remember that 'Sirius' isn't sitting still, it's moving. For the original distance plus the distance 'Sirius' would have moved during a lightspeed signal's travel time yes, I'm afraid 27 seconds is right on the money.

[Terralthra]

I'm more interested in their timing. Last we saw, they'd agreed to give Young two months to get back and reassert the status quo. In two chapters, it's revealed they put the task force on alert for 6 days.

Presumably there was a month or two time-skip, covered by the time it took to open up Fearless' impeller ring in the yard, the searching the plains, etc.

Err-if they had put 'Fearless' in the yard none of the book would have happened. You're thinking Young's ship, HMS 'Warlock'.

Technically, it's because they did put Fearless in the yard that the book happened. If she hadn't been refit as Hemphill's testbed, she wouldn't have been exiled to Basilisk Station...

[Batman]

Touche

[Ahriman238]

25.3 seconds for the original 7.7 million km (and I get 25 and two thirds for that). Remember that 'Sirius' isn't sitting still, it's moving. For the original distance plus the distance 'Sirius' would have moved during a lightspeed signal's travel time yes, I'm afraid 27 seconds is right on the money.

(checks figures) You're right, Bats.

Presumably there was a month or two time-skip, covered by the time it took to open up Fearless' Warlock's impeller ring in the yard, the searching the plains, etc.

Good thought, but no.

I'm sorry, I ommited the revised timetable after the destruction of the drug lab, 3 weeks. I own that, but the timeline still doesn't make sense for the task force. This is pretty explicitly 5 days later, or 4 days after Hauptman's visit.

[Batman]

Another thought-how, exactly was the Task Force laying in wait alerted to an execution date a few days hence? 'Sirius' hung around in Medusa orbit all the time, the damned dispatch boat didn't leave period, how did they know they were to show up to save the day 6 days (or whatever it was) down the line? We know Honorverse doesn't have interstellar communications other than couriers.

[Ahriman238]

Another thought-how, exactly was the Task Force laying in wait alerted to an execution date a few days hence? 'Sirius' hung around in Medusa orbit all the time, the damned dispatch boat didn't leave period, how did they know they were to show up to save the day 6 days (or whatever it was) down the line? We know Honorverse doesn't have interstellar communications other than couriers.

That one's easy enough. Haven shipping to and from the planet all but stopped weeks before their go dead (cause that's not remotely suspicious) but normal travel through the Junction, and in and out of the system has been going on all this time. All they'd need is a secure line to one of the freighters not going anywhere near the planet which, now that I think aobut it, might be pretty challenging. The most secure communications we see are whisker lasers, which don't work so well without a very precise idea of where the person you're communicating with is, harder at the ranges and speeds involved, unless the freighter came out of the wormhole and just sat there for an hour or two.

[Batman]

Actually you are right this is easy enough on hindsight, because they don't need a secure channel, they just need a channel period. 'Timmy Turner's dad is quite possibly the stupidest speaking cartoon character in existence' broadcast in the clear wouldn't result in anything but a 'yeah, right, what?' on the part of the Manticorans but would easily serve as a 'go' signal for someone expecting it.

[Ahriman238]

Just two thoughts for the night.

First, when I first read the series, the back of the book had short appendices of useful information, stuff that might or might not have gotten infodumped in the book, like hyperspeed velocities, or the number of hulls/tonnage of various classes for the Manticorans and the Havenites. WHen they introduced the Shrikes and the Minotaur, as well as the podnoughts there were even illustrations. Well, my books were gifts from some years later, and all that's gone. I don't know if Weber posted it all online (I'm sure someone did) but the only thing still there is OBS, a description of the length of a Manticoran day and year. I seem to remember the old one at least had a description of the 2 calenders. But the backs of the book aren't empty, no sir, they all hold the same teaser excerpt from Storm from the Shadows. Look, I read Shadow and Storm, I liked them well enough, but I'd rather have my charts and figures that relate to this story than the same passage from that story ad nauseam.


Second, I'm not sure if this was intentional, a carry-over from adapting Horatio Hornblower or something else entirely: but like C. S. Foster never had his Captain HH participate in major historical battles, or only in a very minor peripheral role that history would have no reason to record (like the Quiberon Expedition) so does Honor sort of sit out most of the first war with Haven. I mean, she was in several dramatic battles that ensure people would hear of her, Basilisk, Grayson, the opening shots fired at Hancock, and her great escape from Hades. But she also spent 3 years beached at Grayson (granted she was an admiral for two of those and fought one major battle) another year captured/on Hades, plus recovery time from her adventures and a few months dicking aorund with pistol duels on Manticore and you realize how many things she simply wasn't there for: San Martin, 2nd Hancock and Basilisk, Zanzibar and Buttercup. I like that, it goes a long way towards making it feel like a broad universe and war that doesn't revolve around Honor Harrington.

[StarSword]

^On the first note, just a thought: Which printing do you have? (Mine's the one with the cover that has Honor bareheaded on the bridge with Nimitz on her shoulder. Been a while since I read it so I don't remember if it has the appendices.)

This is going back a ways in the thread but I only just remembered it:

The room was paneled in light-toned native woods, not the extravagance it would have been on one of the inner-worlds, and there was a fireplace in one corner. It was functional, not merely ornamental, and that, Alexander thought, was an extravagance. The Admiralty Building was over a Manticoran century-and-a-half old and little more than a hundred stories tall, a modest little structure for a counter-gravity civilization, but that fireplace's chimney bored up through thirty-odd stories of air shafts and ventilation ducting. He could only marvel at the stubborn insistence of whoever had designed the building, especially in a climate which required air-conditioning far more often than heating.

Well, that's a touch underwhelming. Not the thirty story chimmney, just that they keep talking about the architecture of a counter-grav civilization but all they show are taller and taller skyscrapers. How gauche, how unimaginative.

Contrast this with Star Risk, Ltd. by Chris Bunch. The eponymous mercenaries operate out of an office building that uses antigravity to produce a crazily shaped building with ledges and balconies sticking out every which way that would disintegrate if the antigrav ever turned off for any significant length of time. Though that in turn brings up a decent argument for why they just build skyscrapers: safety. Skyscrapers even today are designed to pancake in a fairly predictable fashion, minimizing collateral damage should the unthinkable happen. Also, and this may be just me, but I have the impression that the Manticorans care a little more about sustainability than our current society does: skyscrapers take up much less land area than sprawl while providing similar amounts of room for people, so it makes some sense that they'd become the dominant architectural form.

EDIT: Minor tweak to last sentence.

[Simon_Jester]

Wait, wait. So the only GQ alarm is in the captain's quarters, or her's is the only comm station, specifically, that also has a GQ alarm?

Wouldn't be surprised if it was the latter, though the former would be stupid.

Only the captain, or certain senior officers (whoever's in charge on the bridge at a given moment maybe), would have the authority to sound General Quarters, and it would not be a routine action for anyone except the captain or the officer who has the conn/deck/whatever. So controls capable of sounding General Quarters would probably be present:

1) On the bridge.
2) In the captain's quarters and anywhere else she is very likely to be, since she's the one person most likely to sound GQ.
3) Present as emergency devices, like fire alarms at a school- and separated off from controls for any other system, for the same reason the fire alarms at a school are.

Supposedly armored against small arms (pulser?) fire and flying shards of metal, but that part seems to fail whenever convenient to the plot.

Usually it takes very large pieces of metal or large-caliber gunshots to do this, though. The skinsuits aren't actually intended to be armored- Weber later explained that the high-density storage vacuoles for consumables are hard enough to act as (reactive?) armor, but this is just a pleasant side-effect of making them survivable in vacuum.

He paused, and Honor's jaw clenched. That was low for most warships, but impossibly fast for a freighter, and it confirmed Santos's deduction. Only military impellers could have produced that kind of acceleration for a ship Sirius's size . . . and only a military grade inertial compensator could allow her crew to survive it.

Which we already knew they had?

Which Santos had deduced they had, and which deduction is, as noted, now confirmed.

I'm more interested in their timing. Last we saw, they'd agreed to give Young two months to get back and reassert the status quo. In two chapters, it's revealed they put the task force on alert for 6 days.

Could you expand on that?

The evil scheme explained.

In reality, of course, Coglin is actively running to warn the task force AWAY, that the whole scheme has been blown... a tragedy Weber later remarked on, but which was kind of... not satisfactorily communicated in the book, IMO.

Or maybe their hands are imcompatible with trigger guards. We know they don't have shoulders, which is why the rifles have chest stocks. Or maybe a pulser really is massively more complex than a firearm, but I doubt it.

Probably a combination of physical incompatibility and one or two mechanical features the Stilties couldn't figure out while hopped up on their equivalent of cocaine. Like, say, safeties. Or the equivalent of using the slide on a shotgun to chamber the first round.

Video feed from a hovering pinnace to the grunts on the ground. Tame for the 21st Century, not so sure aobut when the book was published.

In, what, '93 or '94? It might have been a bit futuristic but not much, IMO; we were not THAT far from streaming video.

Yeah, they're really too dumb, or more likely too hopped up on drugs, to come in out of the steel rain.

Also, The Book supposedly doesn't even contain estimates for fighting human wave tactics aside from "they shall not pass!" which turns out to be entirely correct.

4 mm projectiles, that sounds dreadfully familiar. Oh well, Weber isn't Ringo and pulsers are the picture of retraint and practicality next to grav-guns.

Whose books do you think Ringo was reading when he was drafting A Hymn Before Battle? In terms of his status relative to Baen, Ringo is sort of an "ascended fan-" he was one of their discussion board posters well before he became a major published author.

Pulsers do have a recoil, albeit a slight one. 100 rounds to a magazine and a 5 rounds a second on full-auto.

Alternatively, he was firing bursts rather than just squeezing the trigger. Even against such a huge mob, you could still miss by pulling the trigger when the gun is pointed at the ground or sky instead of the enemy.

It was incredible. Kilgore slapped a fresh magazine into his rifle and emptied it. Slammed in a third and opened up again, ears cringing from the savage discord of shrieks and explosions bellowing over his audio pickups, and he couldn't believe it. The Stilties were charging so fast, their mob formation so thick, that he couldn't kill them fast enough to stop them!

A big part of it is that the Stilties run two or three times faster than a human being. Still, this really should end in the Stilties getting massacred by power armor playing mobile defense...

Jump gear for Marines. No further details, and I can't recall ever hearing of them again, just like all the engineering robots. Maybe an early element dropped later, maybe just never relevant again.

Little of both, I think.

520 gravs, just confirmation, and nice of Weber to spell out 5 KPS squared and save me figuring it.

For the record:
100g is one KPSPS (kilometer per second per second, or kilometer per second squared), or as close enough as makes no difference.
102g is exactly one KPS if you are David Weber whose understanding of "significant figures" is pretty sketchy.

Gravity wave. Is this really the best time for an infodump, during the climax of the story?

You are quite right. One of the earliest symptoms of Weber Disease... "oh crap, I didn't stop to explain how FTL travel works in my universe! Gotta squeeze that in!"

You can "see and use sensors in hyper, but only to a distance of twenty light minutes before everything erm, I think redshifts, but it might be blueshift, to the point of uselessness.

Another cause might be, for example, magnetic fields deflecting charged particle radiation, a dense particle background absorbing electromagnetic waves, and the sheer amount of random gravitic crap making it hard to spot gravitational signatures.

Hyperspace sailing for faster travel that doesn't expend any energy. Not sure if any of his hyperspace speed numbers are for normal travel or with grav waves.

The only speed figures given are 'practical maximums:' a measurement of how much distance you can cover in Euclidean space if you transit to the appropriate hyperspace level and travel at 0.6 or 0.8c within that level until you reach your destination.

The advantage of grav waves is that by giving you a free acceleration measured in the tens of kilometers per second squared, they let you actually reach those speeds in a matter of a few hours, instead of a few days. Plus they save fuel.

Yet he had no choice now. Canning had alerted the task force for an execution date only six days away. If the courier boat had still been hyper-capable, she could have been sent to quietly stand the task force down, but the courier couldn't be sent now. Which meant that unless Coglin reached the rendezvous with Sirius, the entire force might well move in anyway. That had to be prevented, and even if it hadn't, he couldn't possibly permit Harrington to board Sirius, for that was the one thing which would absolutely prove that Haven had been behind the Stilty uprising. There was no way to hide what his ship truly was from a naval boarding party.

Like I said, weird they decided to delay the operation, but gave the task force a greenlight.

Could you expand on that? I'm a bit confused.

Repeat of Fearless' armament with a little context. Not enough magazine space for her missile broadside, but she could (before the refit) throw a lot of missiles at once while they lasted. Heavy firepower, light armor, sure sounds like a Hemphill special even before she got her hands on it.

Except that the design arguably predates Hemphill, let alone her tenure as a senior officer. It's more like the ship was designed in an age prior to modern missile engagements and the laser head, and that the refits tended to improve her weapons, but couldn't do anything about the raw construction of the hull (i.e., the amount of armor layered on it). So her defenses, designed in an era of weaker weapons, cannot stand up very well to the modern weapons she's been rearmed with.

Recording messages pre-transmission again. Is it to give them time to take it back or do another take, or do they condense the message into a high-speed databurst? Either way it takes a bit to arrive. I'm just wondering why record first.

Probably both of the above AND because it makes sure the message is on file in the ship's computers for future reference, after it's finally sent.

Oh sweet merciful Valen! Are you just figuring this out now? I was thirteen the first time I read this and it took me roughly 0.1 seconds to make the leap that the freighter with the carefully concealed military capabilities, might just be armed. In universe, you've known about this for almost two days, and the Peeps have a history of using Q-ships. Feth, you people are idiots.

Probably. Also, my impression is that Q-ships are actually very rare, rarer than they appear from the frequency with which they show up in the Honorverse. Sort of like in modern times, sure it's physically possible that that superfreighter has a big block of VLS launchers for antiship missiles tucked away under concealed deck plating, and maybe somebody actually considered it... but the odds are utterly overwhelming that nobody really did it in this case.

Even freighters with covert military-grade drives (for ludicrous speed) might be more common than armed freighters, except in weird environments where piracy is a huge concern.

[Ahriman238]

Could you expand on that?

It's probably my overthinking things, and far less of a problem than I thought at first glance. Taken literally it's a minor timeline snarl, the task force would show up three days before the planned date of the native uprising they're supposed to be suppressing. More likely, of course, they've simply been alerted to be ready to go a few days ahead of the planned start date.

Probably a combination of physical incompatibility and one or two mechanical features the Stilties couldn't figure out while hopped up on their equivalent of cocaine. Like, say, safeties. Or the equivalent of using the slide on a shotgun to chamber the first round.

Quite likely, I just hate the condescending idea that the same people who could reverse engineer flintlocks without taking a single working example home would be baffled by what seems to be a straightforward enough firearm.

[Batman]

Like Simon said, they were seriously drugged up (though apparently still coherent enough to collect their own weapons). The guys who reverse-engineered the flintlocks presumably weren't.
Besides, given said flintlocks were their very first brush with firearms, they may simply not have recognized the pulse rifles as such. Would somebody from the 17th century familiar with that eras flintlock rifles, upon stumbling across a FN P-90 or a TAR-21, be able to identify those as guns?

[Ahriman238]

Depends. I'm pretty sure if a 17th Century man overcame someone who was shooting at him with those futuristic guns, he'd grasp the idea pretty quickly.

[Batman]

But would a 17th century man drugged up to his eyeballs? Remember we're not talking about the natives sitting down calmly to analyze what a pulse rifle may be and be able to do, we're talking a drug-fueled mob.

[Ahriman238]

Likely not.

"I'm afraid we don't have much on their merchant raiders, Skipper." The air-conditioned bridge was cool, but Alistair McKeon scrubbed irritably at a drop of sweat on his forehead as he downloaded what he did have to Honor's secondary tactical display.

AC on the bridge, nice to see someone thinking about cooling in space. Not very hard, clearly, but thinking about it all the same.

Smaller than Sirius or not, the Trumball-class Q-ship had been more powerfully armed than most modern heavy cruisers, and she scrolled through the data till she found the notes on its chase armament. Three missile tubes and a pair of spinal mount lasers fore and aft. If Sirius's chasers had simply been scaled up proportionally, her fire would be twice as heavy as anything with which Fearless could reply.

Only Q-ship on their records. Then again, realize most freighters are built on the same scale as SDs and there's a lot of room for weaponry.

At anything above two or three million kilometers, she couldn't turn far enough to completely interpose her sidewalls—not without giving up too much of her acceleration advantage, if she meant to stop the other ship short of the hyper limit—but at least she might deny Sirius straight down-the-throat shots by zig-zagging across her wake. It wasn't much, but it was absolutely all she could do, and her mouth tried to twist bitterly.

The extent of evasive manuvers allowed by a pursuit.

She checked the chronometer again. Sixty-three minutes into the pursuit. She'd come thirty-six and a half million kilometers, and the range was down to seven-point-six million kilometers. Another thirteen-plus minutes until her missiles could reach Sirius before burnout.

36.5 million klicks in just over an hour. Not the magic rapid flight of Trek or Wars, but still really moving, especially from a cold start and still accelerating.

The smartest thing to have done, he acknowledged grudgingly, would have been to obey Harrington's order to heave to. If he'd stopped, let the cruiser come into energy range, and then blown his panels, he could have wiped her out before she even realized what was happening. But he hadn't, and that mistake left him with a much less attractive range of choices.

I admit to being a bit torn here. On the one hand, the villain clearly makes a bad decision solely because if he'd done the smart thing, the series would end right here. On the other hand, it's a very believeable mistake to make, acknowledged as a screw-up in the text, and a moment is taken to acknowledge the inevitable "why didn't Coglin just..."

Fearless was out-gunned by a factor of ten, whether Harrington knew it or not, but RMN cruisers were tougher than the numbers might suggest. If he turned on her, she would not only have the higher base velocity as they closed, but her higher acceleration and lower mass would make her far more maneuverable than Sirius in close combat. The way she'd taken out the courier boat's drive told him Harrington was no shiphandler to take lightly, and if his sidewalls were tougher than hers, her main impeller bands were just as impenetrable as his own. If he got drawn into a close-range dogfight against a more agile opponent, she might just get lucky and score a hit or two in the right place before she died. If she crippled his Warshawski sails, for example, it wouldn't even matter whether or not he could get into hyper.

And here's why Coglin doesn't turn and fight. Though Fearless would doubtlessly be destroyed, it could do serious damage to Sirius first, maybe even damage FTL capability. The risk is still present in a running fight, of course, but he feels it's more manageable.

The only drawback was that she might break off once she realized what she was up against, and if she did, he would have to let her go. He hated that. The instant he opened fire, she'd have proof he was armed. That would be bad. Not only would it give away the fact that Haven had armed some of its Astraclass ships as commerce raiders, but the fact that a Q-ship had been in the system would certainly be persuasive evidence that Haven had played a major role in fomenting the native unrest on Medusa. And if he opened fire before she did, then Haven would be guilty of committing the first overt act of war, as well. On the other hand, her only proof would be her instrument readings, and everyone knew data could be faked up. In effect, it would be Manticore's word against Haven's, and while that might be embarrassing to certain high-ranking jackasses who had planned this entire abortion, it wouldn't necessarily be disastrous to the Republic.

Sensor records are falsifiable, to an extent it's not the end of the world if Fearless lives with records of the "poor unarmed" Sirius firing on them.

The tactical board flashed as his ECM sprang from standby to active, and two fifty-ton decoys snapped out of their broadside bays, popping through specially opened portals in Fearless's sidewalls. Tractors moored them to the cruiser, holding the driveless lures on station to cover her flanks, as passive sensors listened to the incoming missiles, seeking the frequencies of their active homing systems, and jammers responded with white noise in an effort to blind them while fire control systems locked on the small, weaving targets.

The first, largely passive, defenses of a starship. ECM to screw up the enemy missiles sensors and telemetry, and decoys to sucker them off. Fearless' decoys are are impeller drives tractored by the ship but outside the wedge and mimicking it's wedge strength. They're also smaller than the SD missiles from before, but have a lot of endurance compared to missiles. Then again, they have like 1% the accel, like a ship would.

Cardones started to reach for his counter-missile firing key, then paused and glanced over his shoulder at her.

"Not yet, Mr. Cardones," she said quietly. "Let the plot settle. Fire at a half-million kilometers to catch them as their drives go down."

Next phase of missile defense, counter missiles are launched to intercept. Not sure if firing at 0.5 million klicks is a standard or a more situational thing.

"We're jammed, Ma'am. We're too far out on the wrong vector for me to hit any of the buckets in Medusa orbit with a laser, and they're blanketing everything else."

Jamming doesn't effect comm lasers, but being halfway across the system and not LOS to any reciever will do that for you.

Cardones's counter-missiles streaked away at over ninety thousand gravities, charging to meet them, and she watched the incoming weapons' drives burn out. They coasted onward, suddenly sitting targets, unable to maneuver, and the counter-missiles adjusted their own vectors with finicky precision. They carried no warheads; their small but powerful impeller wedges were their weapons, sweeping the space before them, and she watched Sirius's missiles vanish from the display.

Counter missiles have over twice the acceleration of normal missiles, and are implied later to be much smaller. So it makes more and more sense that they'd have a lot less range. No warheads, counter-missiles rely on wedge-on-wedge interaction, or in this case wedge-on-squishy-matter interaction.

But there were two more behind them, and another pair launched as she watched. Cardones tapped keys, bringing his point defense laser clusters on line, and she made herself look calmly and deliberately at her own tactical readouts.

The last ditch defense, laser point defense weapons. In the (now gone) appendix to this book, it was said that a generation or two ago, ships had autocannon in the same role.

Ten more minutes before she could return fire with any realistic hope of a hit, and her forward magazines held less than sixty missiles. She couldn't waste them hoping for a lucky hit as Sirius was doing, and she cursed Lady Sonja Hemphill with cold and silent venom. If Hemphill hadn't butchered her armament, she might have turned long enough to open her broadside and pump a full seven-missile salvo back at Sirius, just to test the limits of her point defense.

State of Fearless' post-refit magazines, with just 60 missiles.

The speed with which Fearless's decoys and ECM had sprung into action certainly answered the question of whether or not Harrington had suspected Sirius was armed! And they were better than NavInt had projected, he noted. Fleet HQ had been unable to provide him with solid data on Manticoran system capabilities, and it seemed their estimates had been low.

A part of the reason Manticore ships are tougher than a simple recitation of armor, mass and weaponry would lead you to believe, Electronic warfare is one area in which they're going to remain superior to Haven too.

"Go to rapid fire on twenty and twenty-one, Jamal," he said.

Honor winced inwardly as the Q-ship ahead of her began to spit paired missiles at fifteen-second intervals.

4 missiles a minute out each tube is rapid-fire. Which makes sense with multi-ton missiles.

Echo-Seven-One was just about the simplest evasion pattern Honor had practiced with Killian, little more than an erratically timed barrel roll along the same vector. It only moved them a few dozen kilometers either side of their base course each time they rolled, but there wasn't a lot else Fearless could do to evade Sirius's fire. Not unless Honor wanted to angle far enough off the base track to interpose a sidewall, and that would give away too much of her acceleration advantage over the Q-ship. Yet it wasn't quite as useless as one might have thought, for she'd included Cardones and McKeon in the same drills. Now Cardones retained control of his active defenses, but McKeon took over the passive systems and began a deliberate jingle-jangle between the flanking decoys. Fearless's rolling progress swept them in a complete circuit about the cruiser, and the exec shifted their power levels in a carefully timed pattern which gave the impression that the ship's heading was veering from side to side, as well. It wasn't, of course, but, hopefully, Sirius's tactical officer would be forced to use up missiles covering the course changes the cruiser might be making because he couldn't be certain she wasn't

The joys of having a well-drilled crew. Also, Mckeon seems to have taken over electronic warfare for the duration of this fight, later in the war they'll get a dedicated tac officer for that.

The Q-ship's missiles were still burning out before they came in, but the engagement time between salvos was too short for Cardones to wait them out. He had to launch sooner, with poorer solutions and lower counter-missile accelerations to give him more time—and range—on their impeller wedges. The laser clusters began to fire as a handful of Sirius's shots got past his counter-missiles, and she looked up at the main visual display as incandescent bursts of brilliance pitted the starfield ahead of her. Unless she missed her guess about the warheads those missiles carried, she had to stop them at least twenty thousand kilometers short of her ship, and they looked frighteningly close.

But none of them were getting closer than a hundred thousand . . . yet.

Or that's a perfectly good reason for waiting, if you want neat little hits. Bit confused, were ranges adjusted in the Great Resizing? I could have sworn laser clusters had a range of 12,000-20,000 klicks, and laser heads detonated at 8,000. Here the point defense lasers are firing at 100,000+ and the missiles only need to get to 20,000 km.

Honor flinched as Cardones finally missed an incoming missile. It darted in to twenty-two thousand kilometers; then it vanished in a brilliant eyeblink, and she bit her lip as her worst fears were confirmed. Sirius was using laser warheads, turning each missile into a remotely targeted cluster of bomb-pumped x-ray lasers.

22,000 km detonation and laser head. These are Excaliber-type missiles, which eject rods that sort of... for lack of a better simple term, channel some of that energy into a laser beam. The end result has only the tiniest percentage of the energy of a nuke, but has scatter and reach for several thousand klicks.

In universe, the events of this book happen on the tail end of a transition from nukes to laser heads. For a while it was a raging debate, the laser heads do very little damage, but the nukes have very little chance of actually hitting. Finally point-defense just reached the point where a missile actually contacting the ship simply wasn't happening, no way, no how. So the nukes go the way of the dinosaur and, IIRC this is the last book with straight-up nukes fired in anger.

The rate of closure was over seventy-seven thousand KPS, which didn't allow for a lot of accuracy from the fire control that could be squeezed into a warhead, especially not fire control dazzled by McKeon's ECM, but one of the beams picked off her port decoy. McKeon deployed another without orders or comment, but there was no need for comments. Fearless carried only three more decoys; when they were gone, her ECM's effectiveness would be more than halved, and she hadn't even gotten into range of her opponent yet.

Apparently local fire control in the missile decides how to eject the rods. Decoys aren't rugged, and Fearless carries only 6 in total.

"Range coming down to twenty-three-point-four light-seconds." Cardones's harsh voice showed the strain of thirteen minutes under fire to which he could not reply, but there was exultation in it, as well.

Fearless makes missile range with her velocity difference to Sirius, 7.015,143.52 km, or just over 7 times the range from a standing start.

"Incoming fire!" Jamal snapped, and Coglin smothered a curse. Damn it, what did it take to hit that frigging ship?! He'd fired over ninety missiles so far; six of them had gotten through Fearless's counter-fire, but the cruiser's ECM was hellishly effective, and not one of them had scored a hit!

After 13 minutes of engagement, Sirius is 0 for 90 with 2 decoy kills. How embarrassing.

A damage alarm screamed, the bridge twitched, and he whipped around to his display in panic, then relaxed convulsively. The laser warhead had savaged Sirius's flank, ripping number four cargo hold open to space like a huge talon, but number four was empty, and Sirius had suffered no casualties. Her capabilities were unimpaired, and he swiveled his cold eyes to the tactical officer.

"Well, Jamal?" he snapped.

"They suckered me, Sir," Jamal admitted. Sweat beaded his forehead, but his fingers were already racing across his panel. "They fired a pair of laser warheads and staggered their launch." He pressed the commit key, locking his new firing orders into the point defense computers, and twisted around to return his captain's look. "The interval was less than half a second, but the lead missile mounted some kind of ECM emitter, Captain. I'm not sure what it was, but it covered the gap between their launch times. The computers thought they were coming in simultaneously, and our fire solution missed the separation, so we nailed the lead bird, but the second one got through. It won't happen again, Sir."

And it takes Fearless no time at all to get a (minor) hit. Possibly first use of "Screamer" missiles, which in place of warheads have ECM suites to mess up point defense's ability to target other incoming missiles.

The tactical display blinked, and Honor inhaled sharply. Sirius was no longer firing salvos of two missiles each; she was firing six at a time.

Sirius has almost as many tubes to the rear as Fearless used to have for a broadside.

The two ships charged onward, and Fearless writhed from side to side under her opponent's steady pounding. Honor felt sweat trickle down her temple and wiped it irritably away, hoping no one had noticed it. She was losing a tiny fraction of her effective acceleration advantage, yet she had no choice; the shallow S-turns she'd added to Killian's wild, erratic rolls weren't much, but she'd lost another decoy. She had only one spare left, now, and the hail of missiles sleeting at her from Sirius was inconceivable. A regular capital ship might have fired more in a single salvo, but no warship—not even a superdreadnought—boasted the magazine capacity to keep up such density for so long! She herself was able to fire little more than one salvo a minute; for every missile she sent after Sirius, the Q-ship sent twelve back into her teeth.

Sirius has a lot of magazine space. Fearless down to 3 decoys, still keeping 2 active at a time.

Wayfarer could beat up Sirius for it's lunch money, and made a much more convincing freighter to boot. Then again, Wayfarer couldn't have matched Sirius' ability to run.

Fearless lurched. The entire ship bucked like a terrified thing, alarms howled, and Killian's head jerked up.

"Forward impellers down!" he barked.

Dominica Santos's face went white in Central Damage Control as the focused blast of X rays slashed into Fearless's bows. Alarms shrieked at her, screaming like damned souls until Lieutenant Manning stabbed the button that killed them.

"Forward hold open to space. Mooring Tractor One's gone. Heavy casualties in Fusion One," Manning snapped. "Oh, Jesus! We've lost Alpha Two, Ma'am!"

First hit on Fearless, and it does a lot of damage, costing them 2 drive nodes, one tractor beam and a lot of people.

Honor bit her lip so hard she tasted blood, but somehow she kept the sickness from her face. Fearless had just dropped to half power, which was bad enough, but the loss of the alpha node could be disaster. Despite the loss in acceleration, she was continuing to close the range on Sirius, if more slowly, for her velocity was almost fifteen hundred KPS higher than the Q-ship's. But Sirius was now out-accelerating her by almost 1.5 KPS2.

Which is a problem, but I again like that how objects move in space is considered here.

Without the alpha node, Fearless couldn't reconfigure her forward impellers for Warshawski sail. If Sirius broke through into hyper-space and reached the Tellerman, she would run away from Fearless at over ten times the cruiser's maximum acceleration . . . and Honor couldn't follow her into the wave on impellers alone, anyway.

Warshawski sail in a grav wave provides a ton more acceleration than ships can normally manage. How do the inertial dampeners cope?

Johan Coglin flinched involuntarily as yet another of Fearless's missiles punched through Jamal's defenses. It detonated, and the deadly rapiers of its clustered lasers clawed at his ship. One of them hit, punching through the radiation shielding inside the wedge as if it were tissue paper, and a fresh boil of atmosphere gushed from Sirius's side.

"Heavy casualties in after control!" a voice shouted. "We've lost Damage Control Three, Sir!"

Coglin spat a curse and glared at his tactical display. Damn it, what was keeping that fucking ship alive?! He'd hit her at least twice, possibly three times, and she was still back there—lamed, perhaps, out-gunned and out-massed and bleeding air, but there, and she was still hitting him. Her salvos were far smaller than his, yet she was getting almost as many hits in as he was, for her missiles were incredibly hard targets for point defense. The Manticoran Navy's electronic missile penetration-aids were at least as much better than estimated as their defensive ECM was.

Manticore technology is as good on offense as defense. Until the wars, then it's way, way better.

The universe went mad. Stilettos of X-ray radiation stabbed deep into Fearless's lightly-armored hull, breaching compartments, killing her people, clawing and rending at her bulkheads and frame members. And then, a sliver of a second later, the light cruiser smashed into the blast front of the warhead itself.

It was below her as she drove forward, not the direct frontal collision from which nothing could have saved her, but a savage eruption of plasma spumed up beneath her belly through the vacuum of space. Generators howled in protest as the massive shock front of radiation and particles smashed at her shielding like a flail, but they held—barely—and Fearless heaved like a goaded horse as she shot the rapids of destruction.

Lasers and a nuclear blast do considerable damage to Fearless, but not a one-hit kill.

She caught the heat-slagged edge where cutters had slashed away a buckled access panel, jerking her body to a brutal halt, and swallowed vomit as she saw electronicist 2/c Porter clawing at the spearlike hull fragment projecting from the belly of his suit. The wreckage thrust out from the bulkhead behind him, impaling him, and he writhed upon that dreadful spike like a soul in hell while his scream went on and on and on, even as blood and internal organs began to bubble and boil from the wound.

Death by impalement while in a skinsuit.

Honor clutched at her command chair, head snapping savagely back despite her shock frame as Fearless leapt about her.

Shock frame. A starship where the duty stations all have seatbelts.

She made herself look at her battle board. At least a dozen compartments were open to space now, and Lieutenant Webster smashed both fists against his own console.

"Direct hit on the com section, Ma'am," he reported in a voice of raw, dull anguish. He turned to look at her, his face shocked and white, and tears gleamed in his eyes. "It's gone. Dear God, half my people went with it, too."

I guess Webster isn't the only comm guy, there's a section of the ship and multiple people working in communications.

"Missile One. What's the status of Missile One?"

"Gone, Ma'am. We've got a four-meter hole in the starboard bow. The whole compartment's gone—and its crew."

Apparently these are the 4 meter/13 foot wide lasers. I guess if they're blowing 4 meter holes through the ship, there's a lot of reason to be unhappy.

The warhead detonated at fifteen hundred kilometers, and twenty-five separate beams of energy stabbed out from its heart.

Two of them hit Fearless.

One struck almost amidships, ripping inward through half a dozen compartments. Nineteen men and women in its path died instantly as it gutted forward life support, slashed through the forward crew mess, and reduced two of the cruiser's port energy torpedo launchers to wreckage, but it didn't stop there. It sliced deep, just missing the combat information center, and ripped its ghastly way clear to the bridge itself.

Plating shattered, and Honor slammed her helmet shut as air screamed out through the gaping hole. Her suit whuffed tight, protecting her against vacuum, but some of her people were less lucky. Lieutenant Panowski never even had time to scream; the hit blasted huge chunks of bulkhead into splinters, and a flying axe of steel decapitated him in a fountain of gore, then carried on to smash his entire panel to spark-spewing ruin. Two of his yeomen died almost as quickly, and Chief Braun had been out of his chair, unprotected by his shock frame. He flew through the thinning air and slammed into a bulkhead, stunned and unable to move. He died in a flood of aspirated blood before anyone could reach him to close his helmet for him.

Detonation at 1500 klicks, the ranges are all over the place here. Lasers goes through 6 compartments before hitting the bridge, sensibly buried in the middle of the ship. If it wasn't clear before, the bridge chairs have racks holding the helmet so you can reach up, slam it down over your head, secure it and be done.

I don't remember the series being quite this gory.

"Fusion One, Ma'am! The mag bottle's fluctuating and I can't shut down from here—something's cut the circuits!"

Normally the fusion reactor can be shut down from damage control. Sensible. The already took it off the ship circuit, but now can't shut it down due to battle damage.

Honor paled as Manning's frantic message registered. Fearless could move and fight on a single reactor. She only had two for the security of redundancy, and that was also why they were at opposite ends of the hull, but if that mag bottle went down—

There's going to be a kaboom! An earth-shattering-

One fusion reactor is ample for the ship's needs, even in a running firefight, with a second included purely for redundancy's sake.

"Aye, aye, Ma'am." He unlocked his shock frame and dashed for the lift, and Honor ran a quick check of the ECM. She was down to her last two decoys, but the programs McKeon had set up seemed to be working well. She started to key in a modification, then stopped as Cardones spoke without looking away from his console.

Down to 2 drones. Honor takes over ECM, while Mckeon goes to run damage control, freeing up the engineers to stop the fusion reactor from going boom.

"Skipper, we're down to twelve birds for Missile Two, and I'm out of laser heads."

"What about Missile One's magazine?"

"Twenty-three rounds left, including eleven laser heads, but the transfer tube's been breached."

"Engage with standard nukes," she told him, and plugged her suit com into the damage control net.

"Bosun, this is the Captain. Where are you?"

"Just finishing a bulkhead patch at frame forty, Ma'am," MacBride replied instantly.

"Take a work party and get forward. I need you to shift missiles from Missile One to Missile Two and the transfer tube is down. Move the laser heads first."

12 missiles left in their working launcher's magazine, and 23 in the other. Fearless has fired off 25 missiles so far. Also, they still have nukes as I mentioned before, more than half their magazine. Normally, there's an automated transfer process between missile magazines.

The bosun drew a deep breath and glared at the people around her. "You heard the Old Lady!" she barked. "Harkness, Lowell—get me a dozen Mark Nine counter-grav collars. Yountz, I need drag lines. Find me a spool of number two wire and a cutter. Jeffries, you and Mathison get forward and check the tractor grab in Passage Nineteen. I want to know if—"

Counter-grav collars for moving multi-ton missiles.

Johan Coglin peered at his display in disbelief. He'd pounded Fearless for almost thirty minutes, hit her at least half a dozen times, and she was still after him. Not only after him, but already making up the velocity advantage she'd lost while her forward impellers were down! Goddamn it, why couldn't Harrington just leave him the hell alone? All he wanted was to get out of here and tell the task force not to come!

Another missile exploded just short of the ship, and he winced as the huge fireball blossomed astern. They must be out of laser heads. That had been a standard megaton-range warhead, and that could be very, very bad news. The standard nukes weren't stand-off weapons; they had to get in much closer to inflict damage, which gave the laser clusters more time to kill them, but a near-miss from one of those monsters could wreak untold havoc.

There's the irony Simon mentioned earlier.

Megaton nukes are still some bad mojo, even a near-miss can mess up a ship. Then again, near miss means something else when you shoot laser missiles that only need to get within a few thousand klicks.

Sweat beaded his forehead, and he wiped at it irritably. His ship was far more powerful than Harrington's. He'd reduced her cruiser to a wreck—she had to be some kind of wizard just to hold it together, much less go on shooting at him! He longed to turn on her, finish her off, and get the hell away to safety, but all the old arguments against a close-range action remained.

Or did they?

He cocked his head, eyes narrowed as he rubbed his chin in speculation. She was still on his tail, yes, but she was firing only single missiles at a time, even if she was firing at shorter intervals, and the fact that she was using standard nukes was a clear sign her forward magazines were running low. Which didn't make any sense at all. A Courageous-class ship had a seven-tube broadside, for God's sake, and her overtake velocity was over eleven hundred KPS. Why wasn't she veering to bring those tubes to bear? She could zig-zag back and forth across his stern pouring in broadsides as she crossed, and hit him with more missiles than he was firing at her, damn it!

Unless . . . Unless he'd hurt her even worse than he knew? Maybe that was why she was still charging straight up his wake. Could his hits have gone in further aft than he'd thought? Been spread over a wider area and wrecked her broadside armament or fire control? It was a possibility. Perhaps even a probability, given the way her forward fire had dropped. If she hadn't lost most of her broadside firepower, then she damned well ought to be using it instead of lunging doggedly forward through his missiles like a punch-drunk fighter while he pounded her!

Another mistake, but again a highly believeable one. Because Honor isn't using her broadside armament, he assumes it's been damaged. It's not like Coglin would know Fearless was refit with short-range weapons.

"Yes!" Rafael Cardones screamed, and Honor felt her own heart leap as the savage boil of light erupted just off the Q-ship's starboard quarter.

"Heavy damage aft. Fourteen dead in Missile Two-Five. No contact at all with Two-Four or Two-Six. Sir, we've lost a beta node; our acceleration is dropping."

Lieutenant Commander Jamal was white-faced, his voice flat with a strained, unnatural calm, and Coglin stared at him in disbelief. Half their after launchers gone to a single hit? Harrington wasn't a wizard—she was a goddamned demon!

And that's what a dead hit by a megaton nuke does to Honorverse ships.

Sally MacBride bent her own back to the struggle, and the seventy-ton missile floated across the passage. The overhead tractor rails were out, and the passage was open to space. Her vac-suited people grunted and strained, manhandling the ten-meter-long projectile, leaning their weight desperately against it to point it down the shaft to Missile Two's magazine. The counter-grav collars reduced its weight to zero, but they couldn't do anything about momentum and inertia.

MacBride's own feet scrabbled against the deck as she leaned back against the drag wire, hauling the nose around by pure, brute force while Horace Harkness threw himself against it from the other side, and the long, lethal shape began to pivot toward her.

So normally there's a "tractor-rail" either for general moving of heavy objects or as a backup to the missile transfer tubes. Fearless missiles are 70 tons, only a bit lighter than the missiles larger ships used in the beginning. FInally, grav-collars take care of the weight, but not inertia, nor do they stop momentum once the missile starts moving, as we see in a moment when the ship is hit and the missile crushes the bosun against the wall.

"We've lost most of the bottle software—I don't know how it's holding together now," she said rapidly, already ripping off access panels. "And we've lost all the hydrogen feed files. The bastard's running away on us."

Manning nodded silently, jerking off other panels at her side.

"If the plasma hits overload levels with an unstable bottle—" Santos broke off and flung herself on her belly, peering into the guts of the console, and grunted.

"We've got maybe five minutes before this thing blows, and I don't dare screw around with the mag governors."

"Cut the feed?" Manning said tautly.

"All we can do, but I'm going to have to cross-wire the damned thing by hand. I lost my cutter when we took this hit. Get me another, and hunt up four—no, five—alpha-seven jump harnesses. Fast!"

Just amused for lack of technobabble, except for "We've lost most of the software" which doesn't make much sense without a preceding line about how the computers in this section were scrambled by EMP. But everything here makes sense, with my lay knowledge of fusion.

I assume A7 jump harnesses are thruster packs for the skinsuits. Those get mentioned a few more times throughout the series.

"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."

Progress of the bosun, now PO Harkness' detail on shifting those missiles.

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.

15 seconds is consistent with the next shot, can rearrange the firing order of missiles inside the magazine.

Sirius's bridge was a tiny pocket of hell. Smoke billowed, circuit boards popped and sizzled and spat actinic fury, and Johan Coglin retched as the smoke from burning insulation filled his lungs. He heard Jamal's agonized, hacking coughs as he fought to retain tactical control, and someone was screaming in pain.

"We've lost—lost—" Jamal broke off in another tortured spasm of coughing, then slammed his helmet. Coglin followed his example, rasping for breath as his suit scrubbers attacked the sinus-tearing smoke, and Jamal's voice came over his com.

"We've lost another beta node, Sir. And—" Coglin peered through the smoke, watching the tactical officer work on his console. Then Jamal cursed. "Point defense is hurt bad, Captain. I've lost four laser clusters and half my phased radar array."

Coglin swore viciously. With two beta nodes gone, his maximum acceleration was going to be reduced by over nine percent—he'd be lucky to pull three hundred and eighty gees. He still had his alpha nodes, which meant he still had Warshawski capability, but how long was that going to last? Especially with half his last-ditch laser clusters gone?

Damage from that laser head. 2 lost beta nodes= 9+% loss of acceleration.

Coglin nodded to himself, his eyes bitter. With the open front of Fearless's wedge toward him and no sidewalls to interdict, effective laser range was right on a million kilometers, but he'd lost one of his own spinal lasers, and the back of his wedge was as open as the front of the cruiser's. If Fearless got into energy range. . . .

Energy range, hell! His point defense was down to less than half efficiency! If Harrington realized it, turned and hit him with a multiple-missile salvo—

Energy range is over ten times greater if you don't have to worry about penetrating a sidewall.

The emergency jettisoning charges hurled the entire side of Fusion One out into space a microsecond before the ejection charges blew the reactor after it. There had to be a delay, be it ever so tiny, lest a faltering mag bottle be smashed against an intact bulkhead and liberate its plasma inside the ship. But small as that delay was, it was almost too long.

Dominica Santos, Allen Manning, and Angela Earnhardt died instantly. The dying containment field failed completely just as the reactor housing blew through the opening, and the terrible fury of a star's heart erupted back into the compartment as well as out. Fusion One vanished, along with seven hundred square meters of Fearless's outer hull, Missile Two, Laser Three, Point Defense One, Rad Shield One, all of her forward fire control sensors, and her forward port sidewall generators, and forty-two of Fearless's surviving crewmen died with them. A streamer of pure energy gushed out of the dreadful wound, and the light cruiser heaved bodily up to starboard in maddened response.

Ejection of fusion two. Note that the ejection doesn't immediately solve everything, there's a delay after jettisoning the hull plate, and there's still a large fusion explosion in close proximity to the ship, doing crippling damage.

Her wedge was weakened and fluttering, but it was still up, and even as he watched someone was bringing her back under command. He stared at the crippled cruiser, and something hot and primitive boiled deep within him. He could run now. But Fearless was still alive. Not only alive, but battered into a bloody, broken wreck. If he left her behind, the Royal Manticoran Navy would have far more than instrument data to prove Sirius had been armed.

He sensed the danger of his own emotions and tried to fight his way through them. What had happened out here was an act of war—there were no two ways to look at that—and Haven had fired the first shot. But no one knew that except Sirius and Fearless, and Fearless was helpless behind him.

And dead men, he thought, told no tales.

He told himself he had to consider all the options, had to evaluate and decide coldly and calmly, and he knew it was a lie. He'd suffered too much at that ship's hands to think calmly.

"Bring us about, Mr. Jamal," he said harshly.

In fairness, it's sort of hard to claim to be a simple freighter with a half-wrecked warship in your wake. Still, he seems to be missing out on the important part, warning the fleet to stand down.

" . . . nothing left at all in the port broadside," Alistair McKeon's hoarse voice reported from Central Damage Control, "and the port sidewall's down clear back to Frame Two Hundred. We've lost an energy torpedo and Number Two Laser out of the starboard broadside, but at least the starboard sidewall is still up."

"And the drive?" Honor demanded.

"Still up, but not for long, Ma'am. The entire port impeller ring's unbalanced forward. I don't think I can hold it another fifteen minutes."

Damage from the fusion two explosion, and it is considerable. No sidewall or armor for most of the port side, the drive a quarter hour from total failure.

Jamal sat stiff and silent at Tactical, poised over his missile defense panel. A small sigh of relief had escaped him as Sirius's turn brought his undamaged forward sensors to bear, but he obviously dreaded what Fearless's broadside might do to him.

Only it wasn't doing a thing, and Coglin felt a bubble of vengeful laughter tearing at the back of his throat. He'd been right! The cruiser's armament must have been gutted—no captain would pass up the opportunity to fire his full broadside down the throat of a wide open impeller wedge!

Or rather, Honor has just one missile left and would rather sucker you in than take a last potshot.

"Give her a broadside at four hundred thousand," Coglin said softly. "Let's see how she likes that."

"Four-zero-zero thous—"

Even as Cardones spoke, Honor whipped Fearless up on her side.

* * *

"Shit!"

Coglin slammed a fist into his chair arm as the limping cruiser spun suddenly. Damn it, didn't Harrington know when it was over?! She was done. All she could do was stretch out the agony, but she didn't seem to know it, and her turn presented her impenetrable belly stress band even as he fired, as if she'd read his mind. He'd more than half expected it, but that didn't make him any happier to see it.

Honor snap-rolls the ship the moment Sirius comesi nto energy range for the coup de grace, showing that invulnerable belly.

Sirius's side flashed with the fury of a Fleet battlecruiser, and Honor had cut her maneuver just a fraction of a second too late. Fearless's belly bands came up in time to intercept the missiles, but two of the lasers got through. The sidewall bent and attenuated them, but not enough, and the cruiser lurched as they ripped deep into her hull and smashed her single, unfired missile tube and two of her energy torpedoes.

Yet she survived . . . and so did her grav lance.

Invulnerable belly band is not a perfect defense.

The sensors she had left couldn't track Sirius clearly through her belly stress band, and her current vector gave the Q-ship four options: retreat and break off the engagement, roll up on her own side relative to Fearless and shoot "down" through the starboard sidewall as she overflew the cruiser, cross her bow, or cross her stern. She might do any of them, but Honor was betting her ship—and her life—that Coglin would cross her bows. It was the classic maneuver, the one any naval officer instinctively sought—and he knew her forward armament had been destroyed.

But if he was going to do that, then he ought to be coming into position . . . just . . . about . . . now!

Can't see out through belly band with sensors.

She slammed the helm over, wrenching her ship still further round to port and rolling to swing the broadside she'd denied Sirius back towards her with blinding speed.

Lieutenant Commander Jamal blinked. It was only for an instant, only the briefest hesitation. There was no logical reason for Fearless to suddenly swing back, and for no more than a heartbeat, he couldn't quite believe she had.

And in that heartbeat, Rafael Cardones targeted his grav lance and fired.

Sirius staggered. Captain Coglin jerked upright in his chair, his eyes wide, face shocked in disbelief as his sidewall went down, and then Fearless's four surviving energy torpedo launchers went to rapid, continuous fire.

The armed merchant raider Sirius disappeared forever in a devastating boil of light and fury.

Sucker!

OK, there's really no way Coglin could have predicted that, but it's still a sweet moment in the book.

[Ahriman238]

And now to wrap it up with a nice bow.

Her hands were clasped behind her, and Nimitz sat very tall and straight on her shoulder. One hand-paw rested lightly atop her beret—the plain, black beret of the RMN undress uniform—and his green eyes were dark mirrors of her emotions as she stared through the thick, armored plastic.

So captains wear the standard black in their undress uniforms?

Judging by the Q-ship's performance and the weaponry she'd revealed, Sirius must have had a crew of at least fifteen hundred, and there had been no survivors. Even now, Honor could close her eyes and resummon that cauldron of light and energy in every hideous detail and feel the same sick revulsion at the work of her own hands and mind . . . and the vaulting exultation and triumph.

Likely crew of Sirius 1500.

I had friends on that Death Star?

But triumph at such cost. She bit her lip again, feeling the pain. One hundred and seven of her crew, more than a third of those aboard at the start of that terrible pursuit and slaughter, had died. Another fifty-eight were wounded, though the medics and base hospital teams would probably return most of them to duty in the next few months.

The cost in blood and pain had been terrible enough, but that had been fifty-nine percent of her total crew, even before detachments, including Dominica Santos and two of her three commissioned assistant engineers. She'd had barely a hundred and twenty uninjured people left for her repair parties, and Fearless had been a shambles. Her forward impeller nodes had failed completely within seconds of Sirius's destruction, and this time there had been no way to repair them. Worse, her after impeller ring had gone for over forty-five minutes, as well—three-quarters of an hour in which she had coasted another ninety-four million kilometers outward while damage reports flooded in to her airless bridge.

Ok, I'm glad they didn't just coast into deep space on their momentum and die, but how is a third the crew aboard, with several detached duty stations, the same as almost 60% of the crew before you started splitting them up?

Oh well, 107 died in the pursuit, from a 300+ man crew.

For a time, Honor had believed her crew would follow Sirius's into death. Most of Fearless's life support was down, three-quarters of her computer support was inoperable, the grav lance had shorted out three of her after beta nodes, the inertial compensator was off line, and seventy percent of her normal engineering and damage control personnel were casualties. Crewmen, many of them wounded, had been trapped in airless compartments all over the ship. Her own quarters had taken a direct hit that left them without pressure for over six hours. Only Nimitz's shielded life-support module had saved him, and her sailplane plaque was heat-warped and twisted, one corner blown completely away.

The damn plaque becomes her good luck charm for the rest of the series. Don't ask.

Also, the grav lance did substantial damage to their own impeller, another good argument against it.

Honor's wounded ship had taken four more hours just to decelerate to rest relative to Basilisk, but her people had used the time well. McKeon and Rierson had continued their repair activities, bringing more and more of the internal control systems back on line, and Lieutenant Montoya (and thank God she'd gotten rid of Suchon!) and his medical parties had labored beyond collapse, dragging the wounded out and laboring over their broken bodies in sickbay. Too many of Montoya's patients had slipped away from him, far more than he would ever find it easy to live with, but it was thanks to him that people like Samuel Webster and Sally MacBride had lived.

And then there had been the long voyage home. The long, slow voyage that had seemed to crawl, for Fearless's communications had been out. There was no way to tell Dame Estelle or the Admiralty what had happened, who had won, or the price her people had paid. Not until Fearless limped brokenly back into Medusa orbit thirteen hours after she'd left it and a white-faced Scotty Tremaine brought his pinnace alongside her air-bleeding wreck.

Ok, so one more brief mention of Suchon. 4 hours to decelerate, suggesting the brakes are a lot slower than the gas for Honorverse ships, which the series seems to bear out. Then again, with this in isolation it'd make more sense to say that;s how badly they were damaged.

The hit to the comm room took out all communications.

Two months during which the entire Home Fleet, summoned by her desperate Case Zulu, had conducted "unscheduled war games" in Basilisk—and greeted the three Havenite battle squadrons who'd arrived on a "routine visit" six days after Captain Papadapolous's Marines and Barney Isvarian's NPA had annihilated the rifle-armed Medusan nomads.

Honor's grief for her own dead would never fade entirely, yet it had been worth every moment of heartbreaking labor, every instant of self-doubt and determination, to witness that. To hear the hidden consternation in the Havenite admiral's voice as he acknowledged Admiral D'Orville's courteous welcome. To watch the faces of the Havenite officers as they endured the remorseless barrage of courtesy visits D'Orville had arranged to make them comfortable—and to drive home the warning that Basilisk was Manticoran territory and would remain so—before they were finally allowed to depart once more with their tails figuratively between their legs.

Resolution to the invasion, 3 Peep battle squadrons to secure the Junction. I wonder if these are anything like the BC squadron Honor was part of in the 3rd book? Just in the sense of being 8 BCs and screening elements.

And then, at last, there had been the voyage home, accompanied by an honor guard of an entire superdreadnought battle squadron while the Manticoran anthem played over every Navy transmitter in the system. Honor had thought her heart would burst when D'Orville's stupendous King Roger flashed her running lights in the formal salute to a fleet flagship as Fearless entered the terminus to transit home, yet under her pride and bittersweet joy had been a fear she dared not admit.

Very cool. Not sure it's actually appropriate for a flagship to do for a non-flagship, but it's no weirder than an SD squadron honor guard for a light cruiser.

Fearless was too old. She was too small, and she'd taken too much. Given too much. Repair would require virtual rebuilding and cost as much as a newer, bigger ship, and so the decision had been made. Within the week, she would be towed out of her slip once more and delivered to the breakers at one of the orbital recovery stations, where she would be stripped, cut into jagged chunks of alloy by workers who could never truly understand all she had been and meant and done, and melted down for reclamation.

She deserved better, Honor thought, blinking on her tears once more, but at least she'd ended as a warrior. Ended in combat and then brought her surviving people home, not died in her sleep after decades in mothballs. And even when she was gone, something of her would remain, for HMS Fearless had been added to the RMN's List of Honor, the list of names kept perpetually in commission by new construction to preserve the battle honors they had earned.

List of Honor, like the real-life British one.

And of course, Fearless II will be a brand new Star Knight heavy cruiser, same as Warlock.

Alistair McKeon looked very different and yet utterly right, somehow, with the three gold cuff bands of a full commander and the white beret of a starship's captain, and the destroyer Troubadour lay waiting for him, already under orders for the new, heavily reinforced Basilisk Station picket. Not a single over-aged light cruiser, but a task force, covering the terminus while construction of its own network of forts got under way.

Resolution for both Mckeon and the future of Basilisk Station. I'm much more interested in the the situation planetside with the Medusans however, which is never addressed. Come one, aliens gave the nomads firearms and raised an army against the other off-worlders. Even with the army slaughtered, and the Peeps arrested, you can't tell me there won't be lasting consequences.

Oh, and with Mckeon gone, Andreas Venizelos is Honor's new XO (he was the tac officer she detached for the Junciton customs patrol) and Rafe Cardones who filled in for Venizelos will be the official tac officer.

Taken all in all, it had ended well, she thought a bit sadly. Too many good people had died to undo the mistakes and greed and stupidity of others, but they'd done it. The Hauptman Cartel had been cleared of knowing collusion in Basilisk, but the Queen's Bench had decided they ought to have known what their employees were doing and slapped them rather firmly on the wrist with several million dollars worth of fines. And the Court of Admiralty had condemned Mondragon as a legitimate prize for smuggling—a decision which had, just incidentally, made Captain Honor Harrington a millionaire. Most importantly of all, Haven's attempt to grab off Medusa and the Junction terminus had galvanized the political situation. Fear that Haven might try again had turned the Conservative rank and file against Janacek's long fight to downgrade Basilisk Station, and the Liberals and Progressives had been driven into full retreat. In fact, the Act of Annexation had been amended in ways that neither Countess New Kiev nor Baron High Ridge had ever imagined in their worst nightmares.

Well, I'm assuming if the articles of annexation are being reworked, Dame Matsuko will have less restrictions on her ability to do her bloody job and control the tech transfer to the natives. Oh, and I'm sure the millions of dollars in fines, and seizure of a multimillion dollar freighter, will endear Honor to the Hauptman Cartel.

Honor allowed herself a rare, gloating smile as she considered Young, and Nimitz echoed it with a purr. His family and political connections had saved him from a court martial or even a court of inquiry, but nothing could save him from the judgment of his peers. There wasn't an officer in uniform who didn't realize exactly what he'd tried to do to Honor, and surprisingly few of them, given his family's power, bothered to hide their opinion of him. Bad enough that he'd used his rank to knife a junior in the back, but it was also Lord Pavel Young who had completely ignored the situation on Medusa itself. It was Lord Pavel Young who had never bothered to board Sirius, never even suspected she was armed, and personally certified the Q-ship's false engineering report and cleared her to remain indefinitely in Medusa orbit. And no one seemed to have the least doubt what the outcome of Haven's plans would have been had Lord Pavel Young remained the senior officer on Basilisk Station.

He and Warlock had been banished to escort duty, poking along through hyper to guard tramp freighters plying back and forth to the Silesian Confederacy. Not even First Lord Janacek or his father had been able to save him from that. He was lucky they'd been able to keep him on active duty at all.

Funnily enough, in later books and short stories, the Silesian anti-piracy patrol is looked at as a fine thing for a peacetime navy, letting the crews see a bit of action.

As for the People's Republic of Haven, Queen Elizabeth's Government and Navy weren't yet strong enough to embrace open war, especially not when the battered Opposition could still point out—accurately—that all evidence linking Haven to the mekoha and rifles on Medusa was circumstantial. It was highly suspicious to find a member of the Havenite Consulate's staff (and a full colonel in the Republic's army, no less), supplying the shaman's army, but he was dead, and the Republic had insisted—and produced the splendidly official documentation to "prove"—that Colonel Westerfeldt had been discharged from his consular position for peculation weeks before the unfortunate incident. No doubt he had been involved even then with the Manticoran criminals who had really supplied the natives. The criminals in question, captured by Papadapolous's Marines, hadn't been able to prove Haven had been their paymaster, nor would they ever be able to prove anything again. The last of them had faced the firing squad over a month ago.

Funny story, there's a short story prequel to the series about the Queen. It seems her father was assassinated by Haven, with help from a treacherous uncle, because they hoped for a pliable girl on the throne. She knew this, could prove it, but held off because Manticroe wasn't ready for the inevitable war. Later, when Honor reaches the status that lets her rub elbows with royalty, we'll see that Her Majesty is not entirely reasonable when the subject of Haven comes up, for good reason.

Still, if she wasn't going to get into a ill-advised war to avenge her father, she's definitely not going to for this. Which doesn't mean she isn't getting some back.

By Crown Proclamation, any Haven-registered ship passing through the Junction, regardless of destination or normal diplomatic immunity, must submit to boarding and search before she would be allowed passage. Moreover, no Havenite warship would be permitted transit under any circumstances. There had been no negotiation on those points; Haven could take it or leave it . . . and add months to every cruise their freighters made.

The Republic had accepted the deliberate, calculated humiliation, for refusal would have driven even their own cargoes into freighters which could use the Junction, with disastrous effects upon their carrying trade. But because there was no proof, Haven had still been able to protest its innocence and scream to galactic public opinion over the Kingdom's "highhanded discrimination" and the lengths to which Manticore had gone to smear its good name.

Like that.

And, she supposed, the fact that Haven had tried her in absentia (legal under what passed for Havenite law when Manticore refused to extradite her), found her guilty, and condemned her to death, had been the frosting on the cake.

For the cold-hearted massacre of the crew of the totally innocent and unarmed freighter Sirius, Commander Honor Harrington is tried in abstentia and senteced to be hung by the neck until dead. Good thing Manticore refuses to extradite her, and Haven has no power to enfore their will at this time. Yep, this is exactly the sort of flavor detail that could never, ever, come back to bite her in the ass years down the line.

But the Kingdom had responded to Haven's claims in unambiguous fashion. Honor smiled and straightened her cuffs, brown eyes glinting as she savored the four gold rings of a Captain of the List. They'd jumped her two full grades, clear past captain (junior grade), and Admiral Cortez had been almost apologetic about the fact that she hadn't been knighted. He'd talked his way around the point for several minutes, concentrating rather unconvincingly on the diplomatic repercussions and the effect on "neutral opinion" should the Crown knight someone Haven's courts had sentenced to death as a mass murderer, but the way he'd said it had carried quite another message. It wasn't Haven or the Solarian League which concerned the Government; it was the Liberals and Conservative Association. They'd taken a beating over Basilisk, but their power hadn't been broken, and in typical politico fashion, they blamed all their trials on Captain Harrington and not their own stupidity and short-sightedness.

Honor doesn't get knighted or enobled, because otherwise what oculd she aim for in the sequel? And once again, Honor makes enemies wherever she goes.

Honor didn't mind. She looked down at the ribbon of the Manticore Cross, the Kingdom's second highest award for valor, gleaming blood-red against her space-black tunic. She had that to signify the Navy's and her Queen's opinion of her, just as she had her new ship, and she'd made list at last.

Not to say she doesn't get rewarded, between a decoration, 2 promotions and making the list.

"Oh, excuse me. You wouldn't know. I'm Andrew Yerensky." He held out his hand, and Honor took it.

"Commodore Yerensky," she said, still wondering why he'd obviously sought her out.

"I wanted to talk to you about your action in Basilisk, Captain," Yerensky explained. "You see, I'm on the Weapons Development Board down at BuShips."

"Oh." Honor nodded. Now she understood; it was about time somebody finally took official notice of the stupidity of Fearless's armament alterations.

"Yes, indeed," Yerensky beamed. "I've read your combat report. Brilliant, Captain! Simply brilliant the way you sucked Sirius in and took her out! In fact, I'm hoping that you'd be willing to address a formal meeting of the board about your action and tactics next week. Admiral Hemphill's our chairman, you know, and she's placed consideration of the demonstrated effectiveness of the grav lance/energy torpedo weapons mix on the agenda."

Honor blinked. Admiral Hemphill? He couldn't possibly mean—!

"We were delighted by the outcome of your action, Captain," Yerensky burbled on. "It was a brilliant vindication of the new armament concept! Just think—your old, undersized little cruiser took on and defeated an eight-million-ton Q-ship with the armament of a battlecruiser! Why, when I think how impossible that would have been with one of the old, traditionally-armed cruisers, I can hardly—"

Honor stared at him in disbelief as he babbled on and on about "new thinking" and "proper weapon systems for modern warships" and "gave you the edge you really needed, didn't they?"—and something hot and primitive boiled deep within her. Her eyes hardened, and Nimitz hunkered down on her shoulder and bared his fangs while her fingers twitched with the physical urge to throttle the pompous twit. His "new thinking" had gotten over half her crew killed or wounded by forcing her to close straight up Sirius's wake, and it wasn't "proper weapons" which had saved what was left of Fearless—it had been Honor's people, their guts and blood and pain, and the definite partiality of Almighty God!

Her nostrils flared, but the commodore didn't even notice. He just went on and on, patting himself on the back so hard she expected him to sprain his shoulder, and the corner of her mouth began to twitch.

Talk to his board members? He wanted her to talk to his board members and tell them what a stroke of genius Fearless's refit had been?! She glared at him, sucking in breath to tell him exactly where he could put his invitation, but then a new thought struck her. She reared back to consider it, and the tick died. Her eyes began to twinkle instead of glare, and she fought back a sudden urge to giggle in his face as he slithered to a halt at last.

"Excuse me, Commodore," she heard herself say, "but let me be sure I've got this straight. You want me to address an official panel of the Weapons Development Board and give them my combat evaluation of Fearless's weapon systems?"

"Precisely, Captain!" Yerensky enthused. "Our more progressive members—the whole Navy, in fact—would be eternally in your debt. The personal testimony of an officer who's proven their efficacy in actual combat would have tremendous weight with the more reactionary, stick-in-the-mud board members, I'm sure, and God knows we need all the help we can get. Why, some of those die-hards actually refuse to admit it was your weapons—and skill, of course—which made your victory possible!"

"Shocking," Honor murmured. She cocked her head, and her glowing brown eyes danced while her firm lips blossomed into an immense smile. "Well, Commodore Yerensky, I don't see how I could possibly turn your request down. It happens that I do have very strong feelings about the new armament—" her smile grew even broader "—and I'd be delighted to share them with Admiral Hemphill and her colleagues."

And end book 1.

Honor's report to the Weapons Development Board is something of a noodle incident, it's mentioned a couple times in the next few books, but never shown. When it is mentioned it's always in the context of "tactless Harrington sure made a lot of enemies that time at the Weapons Development Board." Or oblique references to publicly humiliating Admiral Hemphill. On the other hand, at least one person (Mark Sarnow, if you need a name) seems to think she was never less than polite and professional, and it's hardly her fault if her conclusions did not match some members of the board's.

[Simon_Jester]

AC on the bridge, nice to see someone thinking about cooling in space. Not very hard, clearly, but thinking about it all the same.

Honorverse definitely has magic radiators. Also, note that keeping a space like this air-conditioned to cold temperatures is a common response; it helps keep people alert and their metabolism active.

Only Q-ship on their records. Then again, realize most freighters are built on the same scale as SDs and there's a lot of room for weaponry.

This also implies that Q-ships are... not THAT common, the Havenites may only have a few dozen of them, and Manticoran naval intelligence may not have accurate information on how many of them there are, or how big they are.

Bear in mind that for the Manties themselves, a Q-ship is a commerce protection unit; it would not make sense to equip them more heavily than is needed to deter a typical pirate, and a typical pirate flies a ship no more powerful than pre-refit Fearless. Probably a lot less powerful.

Whereas for the Havenites, a Q-ship is a platform for launching sneak attacks on enemy national navies- which means mounting more and bigger weapons, and actually making the ship rugged enough to shake off a certain amount of fire from something like a destroyer or light cruiser. So the idea that a ship as big as Sirius could have the weapons of an appropriately sized Q-ship would be rather foreign to Honor's experience, unless she has made a very close study of those particular reports from ONI which at least imply that they might exist.

The smartest thing to have done, he acknowledged grudgingly, would have been to obey Harrington's order to heave to. If he'd stopped, h she even realized what was happening. But he hadn't, and that mistake left him with a much less attractive range of choices.

I admit to being a bit torn here. On the one hand, the villain clearly makes a bad decision solely because if he'd done the smart thing, the series would end right here. On the other hand, it's a very believeable mistake to make, acknowledged as a screw-up in the text, and a moment is taken to acknowledge the inevitable "why didn't Coglin just..."

It's worth noting that doing this would be a really GOOD way to create an even more blatant international incident than they already have- a Peep ship blowing a Manticoran cruiser out of the ether because its captain is doing her job in Manticoran space is much more of a provocation than "a Peep ship was physically present in our system."

Which might well be all they'll ever be able to prove, if Coglin had been able to get away unmolested. Of course, Coglin was not able to do that because Honor chased him and shot at him, but that choice was hers to make, and Coglin may have hoped to the last minute to avoid that necessity.

The risk of Sirius taking real damage in a close range beam duel with Fearless is also a factor, no doubt.

The first, largely passive, defenses of a starship. ECM to screw up the enemy missiles sensors and telemetry, and decoys to sucker them off. Fearless' decoys are are impeller drives tractored by the ship but outside the wedge and mimicking it's wedge strength. They're also smaller than the SD missiles from before, but have a lot of endurance compared to missiles. Then again, they have like 1% the accel, like a ship would.

ECM is both active (I kick sand in your missile's eye) and passive (I create a decoy to trick your missile into blowing the crap out of empty space)

"We're jammed, Ma'am. We're too far out on the wrong vector for me to hit any of the buckets in Medusa orbit with a laser, and they're blanketing everything else."

Jamming doesn't effect comm lasers, but being halfway across the system and not LOS to any reciever will do that for you.

It occurs to me that at a time like this, it would be very useful for Honorverse ships to carry a message drone, comparable to a recon drone but more intended to just physically fly from one place to another and send a message at close range. Or to act as a 'message in a bottle' for another starship to check out later.

Then again, Fearless only has so much space for drones, and if it did have such a message drone, Honor would probably have repurposed it to make it part of the sensor net back at the start of the book.

The last ditch defense, laser point defense weapons. In the (now gone) appendix to this book, it was said that a generation or two ago, ships had autocannon in the same role.

The equivalent of a very large pulser would probably be able to shoot down incoming missiles a few kilometers from the ship by putting a literal wall of flak/shrapnel/darts in its path. But given standoff distances of hundreds of kilometers, let alone thousands, the sheer volume that has to be saturated to defend against an attacking missile is so big that gunfire can't possibly do the job.

The best I've ever been able to figure out that would work in this context is guided flak rounds- in effect, you use a gun to supply initial velocity to a small guided missile which homes in on the targets path and blows up in its face.

State of Fearless' post-refit magazines, with just 60 missiles.

The forward magazine probably specifically serves the two forward missile tubes. Other magazines further back would feed the broadside and stern tubes, and no wonder they're reduced. Think about it- those missiles weigh 70 tons; 30 of them is more than two percent of a Courageous's total mass. 30 missiles per tube on the ship would have a combined weight of...

(30 missiles/tube)(70 tons/missile)(2 forward chase + 2 stern chase + 7 starboard broadside + 7 port broadside)

(2100 tons/tube)(18 tubes)

37800 tons.

Jesus.

[Although the ship's mass may be measured with fuel, ammunition, and small craft/drones NOT counted, for all I know. Also, the chase tubes might actually have bigger magazines than the broadside ones; "a stern chase is a long chase," after all, so you might need to fire more salvoes out of them.]

Or that's a perfectly good reason for waiting, if you want neat little hits. Bit confused, were ranges adjusted in the Great Resizing? I could have sworn laser clusters had a range of 12,000-20,000 klicks, and laser heads detonated at 8,000. Here the point defense lasers are firing at 100,000+ and the missiles only need to get to 20,000 km.

Ranges were not adjusted, the maximum standoff range has always been 25000 km. Laser cluster ranges are or should be at least broadly comparable to the range of main battery beam weapons- on the one hand they're smaller, but this matters less than you might think for a laser beam, and the point defense lasers are shooting at MUCH softer targets.

However, at ranges of a light-second or more, I'd expect point defense lasers to flat out miss almost all the time. Because an Honorverse missile can easily sidestep far enough in one second that a tightly collimated laser beam fired at where it was two seconds ago will miss it entirely.

Hell, if it weren't for the generally slow-ass nature of impeller drive craft making turns, I'd bet on the missiles to be able to keep making such evasive maneuvers well into attack range of their target.

In universe, the events of this book happen on the tail end of a transition from nukes to laser heads. For a while it was a raging debate, the laser heads do very little damage, but the nukes have very little chance of actually hitting. Finally point-defense just reached the point where a missile actually contacting the ship simply wasn't happening, no way, no how. So the nukes go the way of the dinosaur and, IIRC this is the last book with straight-up nukes fired in anger.

Nope.

Sirius has a lot of magazine space.

One plausible mission for a ship like Sirius would be to act as a secure ammunition tender for other PRN ships that are engaged in commerce raiding operations, or other actions in hostile territory. This would make it desirable to carry not only enough missiles for Sirius herself to take out an enemy cruiser, but enough to reload the magazines on several smaller ships, possibly several times over.

Another possible mission would be for her to sit on the edge of a star system and lob huge salvos of ballistic missiles onto an unprepared enemy's outer defenses or shipyards. In this case you'd need immense volume of fire to compensate for the inherent inaccuracy of the missiles, even if "coming in ballistic" still lets the laser heads independently lock on and fire into the target should they be lucky enough to get somewhere near it.

Wayfarer could beat up Sirius for it's lunch money, and made a much more convincing freighter to boot. Then again, Wayfarer couldn't have matched Sirius' ability to run.

Actually this is questionable. Wayfarer has much heavier armament, but is so much more vulnerable that she might be destroyed very easily. In a missile duel, Wayfarer's pod armament would let her get off a salvo powerful enough to totally destroy Sirius... but Sirius, firing broadside-on would in turn be able to launch several dozen missiles before being killed, and some of those could cause terrible damage.

Warshawski sail in a grav wave provides a ton more acceleration than ships can normally manage. How do the inertial dampeners cope?

As you quoted earlier, the grav wave gives the inertial compensator a much stronger "sump" than a ship's own impeller wedge ever could.

Lasers and a nuclear blast do considerable damage to Fearless, but not a one-hit kill.

Also, a nuclear blast really isn't that nasty in vacuum, after even a fraction of a second for the hot gas of the warhead's vaporization to disperse. Honestly, Fearless should be able to tank that on her radiation shielding, given that she's rated to fly at 0.8c through normal space, smacking headlong into every bit of interplanetary hydrogen in her path.

Death by impalement while in a skinsuit.

The skinsuit does not keep out "flying alloy spears" of fragments spalling from the ship's own walls. This is a much nastier problem than ordinary bullets, come to think of it.

Apparently these are the 4 meter/13 foot wide lasers. I guess if they're blowing 4 meter holes through the ship, there's a lot of reason to be unhappy.

Exact diameter of a beam is a bit... negotiable; most realistic ways of doing this will create an Airy disc distribution of energy density. Also, the transfer of energy to a single point on the hull of the ship can cause it to vaporize explosively, blowing material out of the way that was never in the direct path of the beam.

Ejection of fusion two. Note that the ejection doesn't immediately solve everything, there's a delay after jettisoning the hull plate, and there's still a large fusion explosion in close proximity to the ship, doing crippling damage.

True. But better than having a kiloton-range event happen inside the ship's armor belt.

In fairness, it's sort of hard to claim to be a simple freighter with a half-wrecked warship in your wake. Still, he seems to be missing out on the important part, warning the fleet to stand down.

If he can polish off Fearless, he can go back and warn the fleet at his leisure. An hour's delay really wouldn't make that much difference, since they were already waiting for a little while after the planned time of the native uprising to move in.

Indeed, if the same events had happened without Honor's very aggressive enforcement of customs and so on... Coglin's best move might have been to nonchalantly sidle out of orbit at a leisurely acceleration to deter suspicion. He'd still have plenty of time to reach the freight rendevous, without having to run like he stole something and attract attention. Say, from Pavel Young's Warlock, which could have ripped the shit out of Sirius in a stern chase, given that she has something like twice Fearless's armament, and probably more than twice her defensive strength.

Invulnerable belly band is not a perfect defense.

More like "do a barrel roll!" is not a perfect defense. Star Fox, this is not.

The sensors she had left couldn't track Sirius clearly through her belly stress band, and her current vector gave the Q-ship four options: retreat and break off the engagement, roll up on her own side relative to Fearless and shoot "down" through the starboard sidewall as she overflew the cruiser, cross her bow, or cross her stern. She might do any of them, but Honor was betting her ship—and her life—that Coglin would cross her bows. It was the classic maneuver, the one any naval officer instinctively sought—and he knew her forward armament had been destroyed.

But if he was going to do that, then he ought to be coming into position . . . just . . . about . . . now!

Can't see out through belly band with sensors.

Well, one CAN do so, but not when one's sensor arrays have been shot to rags and the computers have been shaken, rattled, and rolled by the shock waves from multiple nuclear explosions and the ship getting blasted with lasers.