The crimson icon on Ferrero's plot made absolutely no response to her youthful com officer's warning. It simply continued to flee at its maximum acceleration, which was fairly stupid, the captain reflected. Admittedly, it represented a much smaller starship, which, with equally efficient inertial compensators, ought to have enjoyed an acceleration advantage of at least thirty or forty gravities over a ship of Jessica Epps' tonnage. Unhappily for whoever commanded that icon, however, it didn't enjoy equal efficiency, because Jessica Epps mounted the very latest version of the Royal Manticoran Navy's improved compensator. The suspect vessel's actual advantage, even at the eighty percent settings which represented the RMN's normal maximum power load, was barely twenty-one gravities, less than a quarter of a KPS². If Ferrero had chosen to go to maximum military power and run the risk of compensator failure, the advantage would have lain firmly in Jessica Epps's favor.
The latest generation of compensators are so efficient, 80% power is within shouting distance of max accel for significantly smaller ships.
It appeared, however, that prudence was in somewhat short supply aboard the fleeing vessel. Either that, or its crew was on the list of convicted pirates for whom no trials—beyond the necessary establishment of their identities—would be in order, anyway. This was Silesia, after all, and Silesian governors had a bad habit of "losing" condemned pirates whom the Star Kingdom had turned over to them rather than keeping said pirates safely locked up or executing them. That was the reason the RMN had authorized its skippers to summarily execute such "escapees" if they were captured by Manticoran ships a second time. Given that interstellar law mandated the death sentence for piracy, that authorization was completely legal, and Ferrero strongly suspected that the crew in front of her knew its names were on her list somewhere.
I wonder if Honor started that little tradition or if it was already in place, since we saw her do it over her XO's objections in HAE.
"We'll give him a single warning shot," she said flatly. "Just like the rules of engagement require. After all, I suppose it's remotely possible that his com is down and no one in his entire crew knows how to fix it. But if he decides not to stop even after that hint, I want a full missile broadside right up the kilt of his wedge. No demonstration nukes, either; we'll go with laser heads."
Standard Manty ROE require a warning shot when chasing strange ships that won't talk to you, just in case the unidentified ships are having comm difficulties, a missile is the universal greeting. Apparently (later in the chapter, not quoting) this is part of numerous interstellar treaties and accords.
It didn't look like it was going to be very difficult. The ship they were pursuing massed no more than fifty thousand tons, little more than twelve percent of an Edward Saganami-class cruiser like Jessica Epps, and no hyper-capable warship could mount very much offense or defense on that limited a displacement. Of course, she wouldn't have needed a lot of armament to deal with the completely unarmed and defenseless merchies upon which she preyed, and he felt a grim satisfaction at the way the tables had been turned in this instance.
Why, she's no more than a frigate, not even twice the size of an LAC. Hardly an appetizer to a heavy cruiser.
Let's talk about the
Saganami cruisers. The original
Edward Saganami cruiser was the going to be the latest, most modern, most formidable cruiser-weight ship there was. It was on the drawing board when the shooting actually started, and took forever to get out of design and prototyping, just because they'd get close and then have to tack on the latest EW upgrades or the newest compensator, which meant shuffling systems around looking for a bit more space.... you get the idea. Add the automation that the class was largely a testbed for, all the new systems and soon a significant portion of BuShips worked on the Saganami project in some form. The first flight had some teething problems and they continued to come up with add-ons pretty much until the day Buttercup launched, by which time they'd actually just about used up the space left for refits and upgrades, with the last being a bow wall, and gotten the second flight out to join Eighth Fleet's screen. Still, it seemed worth the wait.
Then comes the peace, and the budget fights. The Janacek Admiralty was not interested in designing new starships, which is expensive. So Manty R&D (and probably Sonja Hemphill) came up with the idea of telling the Admiralty that they weren't
really designing a new ship, they were modifying the Saganami design to incorporate the latest advances and tweaking systems to create a comprehensive whole instead of a lot of tacked-on modifications, a block upgrade. That just happened to add 35,0000 tons, several grasers, and a radically different hull-shape. Oh, and one little thing. They redid the missile launchers to fire larger 'extended time' missiles that had better range than most people's but weren't MDMs by any stretch of the imagination, and had the ability to fire off-bore like an LAC. Yep, a 180-degree firing arc, letting them fire broadsides at targets directly in front of and behind the ship. Though, they only have fire-control links to handle 18 missile salvoes to the fore or aft. They dubbed this monster a Saganami-B, while the original was naturally Saganami-A. Oversteegen's
Gauntlet is one.
But wait, there's more. Around this time they're rolling out the first half-dozen of the Saganami-C class, with almost no resemblance to its predecessors beyond incorporating advances they've already made. The Saganami-Cs are the size of pre-war BCs, almost a hundred thousand tons larger than the As. The fire-control problem is dealt with, letting it unleash 40 bird salvos on anyone dumb enough to cross it. The missile launchers were also redesigned to fire MDMs, smaller cruiser-scale ones, with only two drives. The bow wall now can activate in stages, a partial mode that leaves a vulnerable seam around the edges but still lets one maneuver and accelerate and full protection with the usual cost to control. Between that and the off-bore capability, they lost the chaser missiles to add heavy grasers. Oh, and they have the latest (what are up to now, 8th gen?) Grayson-style compensators, meaning when they go all out they actually accelerate faster than LACs and even Honor's yacht from the last book.
But yeah, they're all one class. Just some tweaks here and there.
. Captains of warships of sovereign star nations didn't necessarily have to waste fulsome military punctilio on one another, but there were certain standards of courtesy. This message was little more than a curt dismissal, an instruction to get out of Hellbarde's way which did not even respond to Ferrero by name. Addressed to a warship of a navy which had so recently ratified its claim as the most powerful one within several hundred light-years, it amounted to a studied insult. Moreover, under established interstellar naval protocols, the fact that Jessica Epps was already clearly in pursuit and overhauling before Hellbarde entered the chase gave her priority in claiming the prize. As Ferrero had just observed, this was her bird, not Hellbarde's.
Protocol of chasing pirates and addressing foreign warships. Kapitan der Sterne (Star Captain, I think) Gortz proceeds to blow up the pirate anyway. How rude.
"CIC's just completed an analysis of the Andy missiles, Ma'am," Harris told her. "They were pulling ninety-one thousand gees. And they detonated over fifty thousand klicks from the target." Her eyes widened in surprise, and he nodded. "Not only that, but CIC estimates that they scored at least eighty-five percent of possible hits."
Ferrero understood immediately why CIC had passed its analysis on to Harris . . . and why Shawn had passed it on to her so quickly in turn. Those figures represented an increase of over seven percent in what ONI listed as the maximum acceleration for an Andermani shipkiller missile, and fifty thousand kilometers represented an increase of well over sixty percent in any standoff attack range the RMN had ever previously observed out of an Andy laser head, as well.
And eighty-five percent of possible is damned impressive targeting for a laser head at any range, she thought.
Andy accuracy, missile stand-off range and accel. All greater than Manticore believed they could pull off, and no guarentees there wasn't more held in reserve. And the Andies are having no problem showing Manticore that they can play in the big leagues too.
The uniform wasn't. Mercedes Brigham was a rear admiral in the Grayson Space Navy, but she was also one of the GSN's many "loaners" from the RMN, and she wore the Royal Navy's uniform this afternoon. In Manticoran service, her rank was that of a commodore, and Honor had been a little concerned over how she might feel at the notion of accepting a demotion to serve on someone else's staff. She'd known Mercedes well enough for long enough to feel fairly confident the older woman would genuinely wish for the assignment. But she'd also known her well enough to be afraid she would accept the job out of a sense of obligation and friendship whether it was really one she wanted or not.
Just how much of the Grayson Admiralty is composed of Manticoran flag officers and captains?
Like Hamish Alexander, but with even less excuse, Truman had found herself a victim of the Janacek purges. Honor's contacts within the current Admiralty were much less extensive than they'd been when Baroness Mourncreek was First Lord, but there were rumors that Alice had stepped on someone's rather senior toes when she'd been captain of HMS Minotaur. That, coupled with the fact that the Trumans had served in the Royal Navy for almost as many generations as the Alexanders had, and that they were equally fervent members of the anti-Janacek faction, had consigned Alice to half-pay and cost her confirmation of her promotion to vice admiral.
Even Sir Edward Janacek and Jeanette Draskovic had found that one just a bit difficult to rationalize away, given the fact that Rear Admiral Truman, temporarily "frocked" to the acting rank of vice admiral, had commanded Eighth Fleet's CLACs throughout the campaign which had driven the People's Republic to its knees. Not that they'd allowed that to stand in their way, and Alice's obvious and none too private disagreement with current Admiralty policies had made it easier for them to justify it—or her lack of employment, at least—on the basis of irreconcilable policy differences. Which, as Honor had fully recognized, was yet another reason for Draskovic's pettiness over the slate of officers she'd requested.
Lol, what? They really beached their carrier guru because of the tiff she had with a stodgy old admiral who passionately hated the LAC/carrier concept and consistently cheated to try and spike the program, before being proved drastically wrong? The one in which she was scrupulously careful to maintain the moral high-ground while giving the idiot enough rope to hang himself with? Are they really this dumb?
His voice was calm, but his eyes were intent, and as Honor gazed at him, she was struck by the weariness and worry hiding behind his composed exterior. And by his age, she realized abruptly. He was forty-seven T-years old, thirteen years younger than she, yet he looked older than Hamish, and she felt a sudden pang, almost a premonition of loss.
She'd felt the same thing last night, sitting at the supper table with her parents, Faith and James, and the Clinkscales when she'd realized how much frailer Lord Howard Clinkscales had become over the past few years. Now she saw the same process, if on a lesser scale, as she gazed at the Protector. Like so many of her pre-prolong Grayson friends, age was inexorably creeping up on him, and it shocked and dismayed her to realize he was already into middle age. It was a vigorous, energetic middle age, yet his dark hair was going silver and there were too many lines on his face.
That awkward disconnect between those who will live three hundred years and those who will not.
"We're not seeing any of the raw data anymore. Officially, ONI is concerned about maintaining security, and to be perfectly honest, that concern—which started the day Admiral Jurgensen arrived on the scene—has struck a lot of our intel people as fairly insulting."
Benjamin's tone was light, but Honor could taste the anger behind it and knew his intelligence people weren't the only ones who'd found the shutdown of information flow insulting.
"To the best of our knowledge," he continued, "and Admiral Jurgensen hasn't provided any evidence that our knowledge is incomplete, we've never had a breach of security where shared intelligence material was concerned. The same can't be said for ONI, where the evidence is very strong that in at least two cases information we provided them somehow ended up in Peep hands. And while Jurgensen hasn't quite come out and said so, he's made it clear enough that his real concern is the 'Peep turncoats' in our service."
The Peeps cracked Manty ONI a couple times during the war, but never Grayson. Which gives Manticore very little grounds to lecture Grayson on security. On the one hand, clearly some intelligence is being shared with Grayson by ONI. On the other hand, they don't get raw data anymore, just the sanitized summaries and conclusions.
She knew Alfredo Yu and Warner Caslet far too well to doubt for a moment that both of them had been overjoyed by the changes taking place in the Republic of Haven under Eloise Pritchart and Thomas Theisman. Both of them had known Theisman well. Indeed, in many ways, Yu had been as much Theisman's mentor and exemplar as Raoul Courvosier had been for Honor, and both he and Caslet had felt the heart-yearning to return to their homeland to share in its rebirth.
But she also knew they were the honorable men she'd just called them. They'd given their allegiance to Grayson and to the Manticoran Alliance. Indeed, Yu had been a Grayson citizen for over three T-years. The decision of whether or not to remain loyal to Grayson, even if that risked pitting them someday against the Republic once more, had not come easy for either of them, yet there'd never really been any question of how they would choose.
The "turncoats." Grayson is their home now, it's that simple.
"As I say," he continued, "our primary concern is that what we're getting from the ONI reports doesn't match what we're getting from our own sources. We realize Manticore has spent decades, or even longer, setting up its intelligence-gathering nets, whereas we're still very new to the game, but we also know exactly where our information is coming from. We don't have any way to know that where Jurgensen's synopses are concerned, and he won't tell us. The end result is that knowing our data's pedigree automatically makes it seem more reliable to us. And, frankly, the fact that so much of what we seem to be getting from ONI these days is pure fluff only aggravates that."
In this case, I trust Grayson's intelligence network better too.
"First, Silesia. Everything in the official ONI reports suggests that Emperor Gustav is still in the process of deciding what policy to pursue towards the Confederacy. At the same time, until the last month or so, ONI showed absolutely no concern about possible increases in the Andermani's naval tech base. But according to our sources in the diplomatic community, both in the Confederacy and on New Potsdam, the Emperor made his mind up months ago. Possibly as long as a full T-year ago. We can't positively confirm that, of course, but the aggressive moves they've been making and the generally more confrontational attitude of their naval forces in and around Marsh all seem to us to confirm that thesis.
"Greg's conclusion, and mine, is that the Empire has decided this is the time to push in Silesia. The Andermani haven't issued any formal demands or ultimatums to the Silesians, and they certainly haven't sent any formal communiques on the subject to Lady Descroix, but we think that's because they're still testing the waters and getting themselves positioned. Once they're satisfied the Star Kingdom won't push back—or isn't in a position to do any pushing—they'll make their demands clear enough. And they'll be prepared to use military force to support them.
Both group's ideas on what the Andies think they're doing in Silesia.
"Which brings us to our second concern about Silesia, which is the fact that we believe ONI is seriously underestimating the extent to which the Andermani have improved their naval capabilities. Our hard and fast observational data is pretty thin, but there's enough to convince us that we're looking at a major increase in their compensator efficiency, that they've made substantial improvements in the range and targeting capability of their missiles, and that they've been experimenting with their own LACs. We don't think their LAC technology, in particular, is anywhere near our own—not yet—but we can't rule out the possibility that they've been putting the LACs they do have onto carriers. The thing that makes this particularly disturbing is that we know they're fully aware of what Eighth Fleet did to the Peeps, and one thing the IAN isn't is stupid. They wouldn't be picking a fight with someone they know just kicked the Peeps' butts if they didn't think their own hardware was good enough to even the balance. And unlike us, they have a pretty good idea of exactly what kind of hardware they'd have to go up against, because their observers have seen ours in action."
Really, even clouds of mostly old-school LACs would make a half decent counter to Manticore's LAC swarms. Really, I'd assume anyone with a brain who paid attention was trying to duplicate Eighth Fleet's technologies. No one likes the idea of their own navy being reduced to target practice at the whim of some foreigners.
"I think I know where you're going with this one," Honor interrupted, "and if I'm right, I agree with you completely. You're about to say that Jurgensen's view is that the fighting has constituted a steady drain on their experienced personnel. That it's left them weaker."
"That's exactly what I was going to say," he agreed.
"Well, only an idiot—or a political admiral, if there's a difference—could think anything of the sort," Honor said roundly. "Of course they've lost some people and some ships along the way. But a lot more of their officers and crews have survived, and they've spent the last few T-years picking up experience. During the war, we managed to keep their officer corps trimmed back, for the most part, although Giscard and Tourville were turning that around before Operation Buttercup. Now, though . . ." She shrugged. "I don't know any way to quantify what it's done for them, but I'm absolutely convinced that it's improved their combat worthiness by an uncomfortably large factor, not reduced it the way Jurgensen argues that it has."
ONI's reports to Parliament have stressed the losses Theisman's been taking dealing with warlords and breakaway states, missing that he's building a new corps of officers, skilled combat veterans who fear nothing and have never faced inevitability in the form of a cloud of Manty missiles.
"We know what their tax structure is, and we've managed to come up with a ballpark figure for their total economy which we feel is probably within ten or fifteen percent of accurate. And even taking the lower limit we've been able to postulate, the revenues they say they're collecting and spending are low to the tune of several hundred billion Manticoran dollars per year. And if our higher limit is closer to correct, the discrepancy gets much, much worse."
"Several hundred billion?" Honor repeated very carefully. She tried to remember if any of the High Ridge Government's intelligence types had ever expressed any qualms about the announced budgetary figures of the new Republic to any member of Parliament. Right off the top of her head, she couldn't think of a single time they had. For that matter, she admitted, it had never occurred to her to ask them about it or to suggest that anyone run the sort of analysis Benjamin was suggesting Grayson had made.
Which, she reflected, was uncommonly stupid of me.
"At an absolute minimum," Benjamin told her. "We haven't been able to find out where the money's actually going—not with any degree of certainty, at any rate. Part of the problem is that the Republic's so large and constitutes such a huge internal market that virtually all of it could be being plowed back into the domestic economy. More to the point, so much of their economy's been so distressed for so long that it's literally impossible to single out all of the perfectly legitimate places they could be pumping funds back into it. Unfortunately, we don't think that's the case. Or, rather, we're afraid it is the case, but that we wouldn't like the place they're spending all of that money if we could confirm it."
When in doubt, follow the money. Large amounts of Haven's cashflow have been disappearing into a black hole, this makes the Graysons nervous, but not Manticore who know that the Invincible Eighth Fleet is proof against any threat.
"We don't know," Benjamin admitted, "but we have two straws in the wind, as it were. One is the existence of some top-secret project, one that was apparently launched under the Committee as much as several years before the McQueen Coup but which has been continued under Pritchart and Theisman. All we know about it for certain is its codename: 'Bolthole.' That, and the fact that Pierre and Saint-Just funneled huge amounts of money into whatever it is even at the height of the war and despite their worst financial problems. We don't have confirmation that Pritchart and Theisman have continued the same level of funding, but the discrepancy between what their revenues ought to be and what they're reporting certainly seems to suggest that some 'black project' is continuing to siphon off an awful lot of cash.
They have the name of Bolthole, and they can't help but notice that they've lost track of Shannon Foraker, who was definitely on a list of flag officers to watch closely. A link is suspected.
"No. And even if they were, it would make perfect sense for them to be looking for ways to offset our tactical advantages. In fact, they'd be derelict in their duty if they weren't looking for them."
"Absolutely. That's what has me and Greg so worried. Well, that and the fact that so far no one—including our sources—has seen a single improvement in their pre-truce hardware. It's been the better part of four T-years, Honor. Do you really think that much time could have passed without a navy which knows exactly how badly outclassed it was by Eighth Fleet introducing even one new weapon improvement?"
Again, only an idiot or someone prepared to accept Manticoran supremacy wouldn't try to duplicate or counter the technologies of Eighth Fleet. But while ONI takes the lack of evidence of new weapons as proof that Havenites (no longer Peeps) are idiots, Grayson is concerned that whatever their efforts are, they're well-hidden.
"That's the real reason Wesley and I have been continuing to push the naval budget so hard," Benjamin told her. "We're beginning to catch some fairly powerful opposition, especially in the Keys, but we're determined to go right on building up the Fleet as long as we can. The problem is that we estimate we can only keep it up for another two T-years, three at the outside. After that, we'll simply have to cut back on our building programs. We may even have to suspend them entirely."
Even the spunk of Kerbal Graysons can only go so far.
Honor nodded. Altogether too many of the Star Kingdom's politicians shared the Government's ill-concealed opinion that Benjamin's obsession with continuing to build up the Grayson Navy now that the war was 'over' was a reflection of megalomania on his part. After all, no single-planet system like Yeltsin's Star could possibly match the sort of fleet a star nation like the Star Kingdom or the Republic of Haven could build. But Benjamin hadn't seemed to realize that, and the GSN was up to a strength of very nearly a hundred ships of the wall. Not only that, virtually all of them were SD(P)s. And that didn't include the CLACs which had been built or ordered from Manticoran yards to support them. Only the vast increases in onboard automation which had been accepted in the newer designs made it possible for Grayson to man its new construction, even with all of the demobilized Manticoran naval personnel it had managed to attract and even with the scandalous, steadily increasing number of women entering the planetary work force. But she hadn't needed Benjamin to tell her that the financial strain of that continued buildup was ruinous.
Manticore was single-system until very recently, I'd remind you. And since Manticore stopped building at 64, and Haven's projects are a secret, as far as anyone knows the GSN is the most powerful navy in space, or damned close with a quarter Manticore's pre-war wall of battle, and most of them podnoughts. Certainly in the top five, allowing for Haven and the Andermani. All this in just fifteen years since their crapy piddling navy was annihilated and they had to rebuild from the ground up.
I know I harp on this a lot. But Grayson has clawed it's way into space, spent decades engaged in interstellar war with their nearest neighbors, lost countless men to the void and kept on going, charging like lemmings into space, dying so others could live until they reach this point where they stand as a major power in their own right. This is why they are, and will always be, Glorious Kerbal Graysons.
"Have you shared this information with Jurgensen?" she asked after a moment.
"We've tried to," Benjamin said bitterly. "Unfortunately, he seems to suffer from a bad case of 'not made here' where anything he doesn't want to hear about is concerned."
Who here is surprised? Nobody?
In fact, Benjamin was probably understating the Erewhonese reaction—not least because Erewhon had been forced to live under the shadow of Peep conquest for far longer than Grayson had. The fact that the Erewhonese government had elected to cut its treaty relationship with the Solarian League in order to sign on with the Manticoran Alliance had only exacerbated that anger, too. The perception had been that it had sacrificed a longstanding security arrangement with the most powerful political and economic entity in the history of the human race in order to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Manticore only to be stabbed in the back by its own treaty partners.
Yeah, they're a bit ticked off about that, having watched Haven nervously fr decades, almost signing on with the Solarian League before deciding that Manticore is more invested in this region of space and the people in it, and then HRG.
"As I say, we have no proof of it, but we've been conducting quiet, one-on-one negotiations with several of the Alliance's smaller members." She regarded him intently, and he shrugged with a curious mixture of apology and irritation. "No one's interested in sneaking around behind the Star Kingdom's back, Honor. Not really. But let's face it. Thanks to High Ridge's idiotic foreign policy, the Alliance is in serious disarray at the moment, and we've been doing our best to try to put out the various fires before they get entirely out of hand and bring the entire structure down."
"I see." Honor understood exactly what he meant, and she felt a dull throb of shame at the thought of how hard Benjamin had obviously been working to preserve the vital alliances High Ridge equally obviously never wasted a single night's sleep worrying about.
"At any rate," Benjamin went on after a moment, "some of the things the Erewhonese ambassador's said in those discussions sound a lot more like the sort of temporizing and qualifying that usually go on between states that don't entirely trust one another—or who have something to hide—than the way allies are supposed to speak to each other. I don't think it's his idea, either. I think he's acting on formal instructions from his government, and that makes me wonder just why they're holding not just the Star Kingdom but all of us at arm's length. And one possibility which suggests itself to me is that they might be considering jumping the other way."
Grayson intelligence and the Protector also smell a rat in Erewhon, because of all the running around sticking their fingers in dykes they've had to do to keep the Manticoran Alliance running after Manticore decided on a policy of "screw you all. I got mine."
"My God, but I hope you're wrong!" Honor said fervently after two or three heartbeats. "After Grayson, Erewhon has the largest navy in the Alliance."
"And access to all of our new hardware," Benjamin pointed out grimly. Honor inhaled sharply, and he shrugged. "Their industrial base isn't as good as ours is because it was never as completely modernized and overhauled as ours was. But at the very least, they have examples of everything short of Ghost Rider—and some of that technology, too, I think. And if the Peeps get a chance to reverse engineer that . . ."
Erewhon has the third largest navy, which we knew. They're pretty much the only ones outside Grayson and Manticore in the Alliance with capital ships of their own, albeit mostly of Solly make. They contributed a couple dreadnought squadrons to Eighth Fleet, and have been buying up older Manty SDs the Admiralty was going to mothball or scrap. Grayson has been doing this last bit too, at salvage prices.
"I'm not going to send a naval detachment to serve under a Manticoran admiral on an RMN naval station, Honor. I'm going to send the Protector's Own on its first major interstellar deployment and training cruise under the direct supervision of its permanent commander, Steadholder Harrington."
"You're out of your mind! Even if that sort of legal fiction was going to do you a bit of good when the Opposition gets hold of this in the Keys, think about the possible consequences. If it does come to a shooting situation with the Andies, then you're going to get Grayson involved in it right alongside the Star Kingdom. And I can tell you that the IAN's always been a much tougher proposition than the Peep Navy ever was!"
The Protector's Own is being sent on an extended deep-space drill near Honor's new command area, just in case.
"Baron High Ridge is an idiot, Honor. You and I both know it, just as we both know he's so obsessed with domestic political maneuvering that he's almost completely oblivious to the potential interstellar disaster we both think he's courting. But the Star Kingdom is still our natural ally, and if the worst happens, Manticore's going to find itself under different management very quickly. If the Star Kingdom goes to war, whether it's with the Andies or the Havenites, we have no realistic choice but to support it, because without the Star Kingdom, Grayson and every other member of the Manticoran Alliance become the natural targets of any aggressor. Which means that I find myself in the unenviable position of being forced to watch High Ridge's and Janacek's backs when they're too stupid to even realize they need watching!"
Irony, the Opposition on Grayson is correct and the alliance with Manticore has really become an anchor around Grayson's neck. They simply have no choice but to follow through though, and they know there is much good in Manticore even if the present government consists of myopic, parochial, and corrupt polticos who display shocking incompetence in all manners not related to dirty domestic dealings. Speaking of...
"Well," Wix said with an air of calm, "I can't be certain of course, but unless I'm sadly mistaken, that last data run from Admiral Haynesworth's people just nailed down the entry vector."
"What?!" Kare was out of his chair and standing at Wix's shoulder, peering down at his display, without any conscious memory of having moved. "That's preposterous! There's no way! We don't even have a definitive locus yet—how the hell could we have an entry vector?"
The one unambiguously good thing to come of the High Ridge administration, the fluff project he created to embezzle from has actually found the seventh wormhole of the Manticoran Junction.
"Certainly not!" Elaine Descroix seconded enthusiastically. "This is the greatest discovery in decades—no, centuries! The Junction's been the biggest single factor in the Star Kingdom's prosperity; if its capacity increases, it will be the biggest boost our economy's had in almost a hundred T-years. And it's an agency we created which found a new terminus to make that possible."
And naturally they're going to milk that for all it's worth. Fits nicely with the 'building the peace' slogan.
"The latest from Admiral Chakrabarti's office is that we're going to have to leave one of our squadrons of Medusas here with Home Fleet. They're going to give us two squadrons of the pre-pod types, instead. And according to my sources, at least two of the non-pod ships are going to be dreadnoughts, not superdreadnoughts."
"Only two squadrons?" Mercedes Brigham demanded, and turned to face Honor. "I know you warned me they were being tight about turning tonnage loose, Your Grace, but that's ridiculous! There's no way two squadrons of pre-pod ships equate to a single squadron of SD(P)s!"
-snip-
If the new force levels held up, the Admiralty would be giving her task force only one squadron of SD(P)s. Admittedly, there would be eighteen older-style superdreadnoughts—or dreadnoughts, if Andrea is right, she corrected herself—to back them, plus the two weak battle squadrons already on station under Admiral Hewitt. And it was also true that six of the new ships ought to be capable of destroying an entire fleet of the older types all by themselves, but it still seemed like a foolhardy move.
Task Force 34, Honor's reinforcements to Sidemore, is getting cut down to size.
