Bit of Analysis: Honor Harrington III

[Ahriman238]

Now the battles for Maastricht (Isn't that the Dutch city where the EU treaty was signed?) and Thetis, both Peep worlds seized by the Alliance.

He had less carrier support than some of the other attack forces set up by Operation Thunderbolt, but he shouldn't need it, either. Maastricht, according to NavInt, was picketed by a single reinforced division of pre-pod superdreadnoughts, supported by one CLAC and a battlecruiser squadron. Given the draw-down in Manticoran naval units, that was a fairly hefty picket for a single system which was far less important to the Manticoran Alliance than it was to the Republic of Haven. And by the standards of the earlier war years, it should have been able to give an excellent account of itself even against a task group as large as Kirkegard's.

But those standards no longer obtained . . . as Kirkegard was about to teach the Manties.

Admiral Kirkegard hitting Maastricht which is apparently held with a single carrier, half a squadron of SDs, and 8 BCs.

"It doesn't look good," he conceded quietly, leaning towards Stevens to keep their conversation as private as possible on the destroyer's relatively small bridge. "But at least we've got LACs and they don't."

"I know," Stevens said, still apologetically. "But Incubus' group is at least two squadrons understrength."

"That bad?" Jeffers knew he hadn't quite managed to keep the surprise out of his voice and went on quickly. "I mean, I knew they were short a few LACs, but two whole squadrons?"

"At least, Skipper," Stevens told him. "A buddy of mine is Incubus' assistant logistics officer. He says Captain Fulbright has been pestering the Admiralty for a couple of months, trying to get his group back up to strength. But—"

But the Janacek Admiralty has better uses for LACs then putting them on the frontier.

"You're right," Stevens agreed, but his eyes drifted back to the display and the oncoming icons of eight superdreadnoughts. Assuming what the sensor platforms were seeing was what was really there, Rear Admiral Sir Ronald Maitland's short superdreadnought division was outnumbered by almost three-to-one. "I just wish we had an SD(P) or two to even things up."

Make that 3 Manty SDs to 8 Haven.

According to ONI's analysts, his missiles had an enormous range advantage over anything the Peeps could have produced. Stevens tended to take those reports with a grain of salt, and it was evident to him that Sir Ronald did, too. ONI had assured them that the maximum powered range the Peeps might have managed to get their missiles up to was on the order of seven or eight million kilometers. Sir Ronald had added a twenty-five percent "fudge factor" to the spooks' estimate just to be on the safe side, which brought their theoretical max range up to somewhere around twelve million klicks. That was well within the effective range of the RMN's multi-drive capital missiles which, in theory, had a maximum range at burnout more than five times that great. Of course, that could hardly be considered "effective" range, since not even Manticoran fire control was going to be able to hit a powered, evading target at that distance.

But Rear Admiral Maitland wasn't going to try to accomplish anything that preposterous. He intended to allow the range to drop to thirteen million kilometers, then start pumping missiles out of the pods on tow behind all of his capital ships and cruisers. Given his range advantage, he'd elected to tow maximum loads, which reduced his acceleration to a crawl but would allow him to throw at least a half-dozen heavy salvos from outside any range at which the enemy could reply. Accuracy wouldn't be anything to write home about, but at least some of them would get through. And if he timed things properly, they would come in in conjunction with his LACs. The combined attack would put a considerable strain on the Peeps' defensive systems, which should increase the effectiveness of LACs and missiles alike.

Roland Maitland is a man with a plan for saving Maastricht. It's a good plan, making the best use of his resources, holding fire until he has to for best accuracy and timing the missiles to arrive just ahead of the LACs. The only problem is it hinges on the idea that Haven missiles outrange ONI's most pessimistic guesses by 25%, i.e. no Havenite MDMs.

"God, I almost feel sorry for them," Janina Auderska said so quietly no one but her admiral could possibly hear.

"Don't," Kirkegard said, his eyes glued to the display showing the storm front of his missiles as they scorched towards the Manticoran system picket. The chief of staff glanced at him, surprised by the almost savage edge of harshness in the admiral's usually pleasant voice, and Kirkegard glanced sideways at her.

"This is exactly what they did to us in their damned 'Operation Buttercup,' " he reminded her coldly. "Exactly. I read an interview with their Admiral White Haven. NavInt clipped it from one of their newsfaxes. He said he felt almost guilty—that it was too much 'like pushing baby chicks into a pond.' " Kirkegard gave a harsh crow caw of a chuckle. "He was right, too. Well, now it's our turn. Let's see how they like it."

Naval Intellgience has passed around Manty media interviews with WHite Haven about Buttercup. No surprise, really, and I can understand Kirkegard's sense of retribution.

"And at this range, not even Manty targeting systems are going to be able to score a very high percentage of hits. Neither are ours, of course, but—" his smile was thin and hungry "—we can fire heavy follow-on salvos . . . and they can't."

Yeah, this is going to be ugly.

"Tracking reports that their missile ECM is much better than it's supposed to be, Sir," Maitland's chief of staff said very quietly into his ear. Sir Ronald looked at him, and he grimaced unhappily. "They're estimating that our point defense is going to be at least twenty-five percent less effective than we'd projected. At least."

Maitland grunted and turned his gaze back to the master plot while his brain raced. It was obvious from the weight of fire coming at him that the Peep superdreadnoughts on that plot were a pod design. But the situation wasn't completely hopeless, he told himself. Everything the LACs' sensors had reported so far indicated that the Peeps' EW capabilities, while substantially better than anticipated—as CIC's new estimate of their missile ECM confirmed—were still far below Manticoran standards. That would give Maitland an enormous advantage in a long-range missile duel like this. Or it would have, if he'd been able to shoot back at all.

Vast improvement in Haven ECM, still not up to Manty standards, but a lot more of their birds are getting through than before, and less of Manticore's. Manticoran tech still has a definite edge in a long-range missile duel, provided they have the means to fight at long range.

At least the launchers aboard two of the three older ships he did have had been refitted to handle multi-drive missiles. Which meant that once his pods were exhausted, he wouldn't be completely unable to return fire. It only meant that he could respond with less than twenty percent of the Peeps' weight of fire until he somehow managed to close to within six million klicks of them.

Which none of his starships could possibly survive long enough to do.

A number of older SDs have been retrofitted with the enormous launchers for off-bore MDMs, the real capital ship sized ones. Problem being they can't come close to matching the throw weight of podnoughts, but at least they can shoot back which Peep ships had an awful hard time with during Buttercup. Manty single-drive missile ranges of 6 million klicks, less than a tenth MDM range.

"Are those new acceleration figures for their superdreadnoughts confirmed?" he asked his ops officer.

"Yes, Sir," the commander confirmed unhappily. "They're still lower than ours, but the difference is almost thirty percent less than ONI's estimates."

Haven has closed most of the EW gap and most of the compensator gap, but there's still a margin of Manty superiority.

"Just in case Rontved doesn't make it out, though, detach one of the tin cans. We need to be certain someone gets home with a warning."

Ordering the evacuation, and detaching two destroyers to spread the alarm in case none of the unarmed ships makes it out.

It hadn't been entirely one-sided—only almost.

Maitland's single pod-spawned wave of missiles had hammered one Peep superdreadnought into an air-bleeding wreck and damaged two more of them. His internal launchers had concentrated on one of the two wounded SD(P)s and inflicted substantially more damage on her, and one Peep battlecruiser had been destroyed outright, while another seemed to be in little better condition.

But that was it. The LACs had done their best, and their efforts had helped to account for the one destroyed battlecruiser and inflicted damage on most of her consorts. But the Peeps aboard those starships were no longer confused and panicked by the mere sight of an impossible "super LAC." They'd had time to think and analyze, and they recognized the weaknesses of such small, relatively fragile attackers. The LAC crews had bored in with all the guts and gallantry in the universe, and they'd actually managed to inflict at least a little damage in the process. But these superdreadnoughts' sidewalls were intact, the vulnerable throats of their wedges were protected by bow walls almost as good as the RMN's own, their point defense and energy gunners were waiting, and the massive armor protecting their flanks was fully capable of withstanding the pounding of even a Shrike-B's graser long enough for their defensive fire to kill the LAC.

Incubus' group had gotten in one good firing pass on the ships of the wall. After that, the survivors had been swatted almost negligently when they tried for a second one.

Maitland gets on SD kill, one BC and damaged 2 SDs and multiple BCs. His command is essentially wiped out.

It was obvious that the Peeps still hadn't quite equalized the gap between Manticoran hardware and their own. Their ECM was still nowhere near as good. Their missile pods seemed to carry fewer birds per pod, which suggested that they'd had to accept a more massive design. That meant lighter broadsides from the same tonnage of capital ships and a bigger squeeze on magazine space. And that might prove significant in the long run, for although their seeker systems seemed to have been improved almost as much as their missiles' range had, they still weren't quite up to Manticoran standards, either. Given the RMN's remaining edge in electronic warfare, long-range missile accuracy was going to favor Manticore by a probably substantial edge, but it wasn't going to be spectacular even for the RMN. So the number of missiles an SD(P) could carry was about to become extremely important.

Previously, the Peeps responded to their missile's lack of sophistication by building bigger pods with more missiles, but MDM sizes seem to have inspired them to cut down on birds per pod.

"No telling," Chong replied. He watched the blue-and-white beauty of the planet on the visual display for several moments, then squared his shoulders and turned away. Another display attracted his eyes. The one that listed his task force's losses.

Only a single ship's name glowed in the blood-red color that indicated a total loss, and his lips curved in a smile of grim satisfaction. No one liked to lose any ship, or the people who crewed that ship. But after the savage losses the old People's Navy had taken at the hands of the Manties again and again, a single heavy cruiser and seventy LACs actually destroyed was a paltry price to pay for an entire star system. Not to mention the fact that the Manties had lost over two hundred of their own LACs, four heavy cruisers, and a pair of superdreadnoughts, as well.

Admiral Chog and the glanced over battle for Thetis, at least the losses. Manticore loses 2 SD, 4 CA, and over 200 LACs. Haven lost 1 CA and 70 LACs, and took the system easily.

[Highlord Laan]

I actually think that had the war dragged on, Haven would have eventually been victorious. After they got hold of Manty tech from Erewhon, combined with their own innovations and a shipbuilding capability that massively outstripped Manticores, they'd have pulled it off even with the technological tricks that the Manties pull out later on (Apollo). The tech edge Manticore had isn't as extreme anymore, and the qualitative deficiency that once plagued the Havenite Navy no longer exists.

Haven's economy is larger, it's population greater, and it's capacity to replace losses much faster and on a larger scale. Even without the technological windfall from Erewhon they could have done it. It would have been grueling and bloody, but Haven almost certainly could have ground Manticore down by sheer weight.

[Esquire]

I'm not so sure. If nothing else, Haven's morale probably couldn't stand a whole new round of Buttercup-level curbstomps thanks to Apollo. Without it, though, I expect you're right.

[Ahriman238]

Continuing with Thunderbolt, the 'what-number-are-we-up-to-th Trevor's Star' and Grendelsbane.

MacDonnell smiled. A native born Grayson, himself, he was sometimes bemused in many ways by the Manticoran officers who had taken service with the GSN. The Earl of White Haven was scarcely in that category, of course, although he'd fought enough battles side-by-side with Grayson units to make him one of their own by adoption, at least. But what bemused MacDonnell the most was that the Manticorans seemed so outspoken in their criticism of the High Ridge Government. Of course, they were talking about their prime minister, not their monarch, but it was difficult for MacDonnell to conceive of a serving Grayson officer expressing himself so frankly—and contemptuously—about the Protector's Chancellor.

Not that any of his fellow Grayson citizens disagreed where High Ridge was concerned. It was just that Graysons as a group were more . . . deferential than most Manticorans. It confused MacDonnell sometimes. The crux of the Star Kingdom's entire current political dilemma lay in the aristocracy's control of who formed the executive branch of their government. That same condition, in an even more virulent form, had afflicted Grayson before the Mayhew Restoration had returned the authority which had eroded away from several generations of protectors. But the profound deference which the steaders of Grayson had always extended to their steadholders seemed oddly lacking in Manticorans where their own nobility was concerned.

The fact that Steadholders have a very real and immediate power over their Steaders Manty aristos daren't dream of probably factors into it. I believe slandering a Steadholder is still a high crime in many Steadings.

It was appropriate that he and White Haven should be standing on that ship's bridge at this particular moment, he thought. The "Benjie," as the Navy affectionately referred to Benjamin the Great, had been White Haven's flagship from the day she commissioned until the conclusion of Operation Buttercup. But although the ship was still less than eight T-years old, Benjie belonged to a class of only three ships. Her design had been superseded by the Harrington-class SD(P)s, and MacDonnell knew that some of those in the Office of Shipbuilding wanted to designate his flagship for disposal. He hated the very thought of sending her to the breakers for reclamation, although he had to admit that there was a certain cold-blooded logic to it. Grayson was straining every sinew to build and maintain the fleet it had. It couldn't afford to retain ships, however new, or however beloved, whose design had been rendered obsolescent.

Personally, MacDonnell hoped Shipbuilding would adopt one of the alternate proposals, instead, and refit the Benjie's shipboard launchers to handle the latest generation of multi-drive missiles. But that was someone else's decision. For right now, Benjamin the Great was exactly where she needed to be. Designed from the keel out as a fleet command ship, she had arguably the finest flag deck and fleet information center of any ship in commission anywhere.

Benjie, from day one the flagship of Eighth Fleet on what is probably her last ride.

The Trevor's Star terminus of the Manticoran Wormhole Junction lay much closer to the system primary than the Junction itself lay to Manticore-A. Still, there was the better part of three light-hours between it and Trevor's Star itself. Even with the powerful forts which had been built to cover it, the sheer distance between the system's inhabited planet and the terminus had created an almost insuperable difficulty for Admiral Theodosia Kuzak.

Trevor's Star wormhole three light-hours from the sun, Manticore's is further out still. Can it be a Junction with only one wormhole?

In theory, the forts could deal with most attacks on the terminus itself. Actually, calling them "forts" was something of a misnomer. To most people, the term "fort" implied a fixed fortification, something ponderous and immobile. But while the terminus forts were certainly ponderous, they were not—quite—immobile. Instead, they might be better thought of as enormous sublight superdreadnoughts. Ships so huge that their low acceleration made them totally unsuited to mobile operations, but which remained capable of at least minimal combat maneuvers . . . and which could generate the impeller wedges which were the first line of defense for any warship.

But for all their massive size, thick armor, and potent weaponry, they—like Benjamin the Great—were an obsolescent design. Their rate of fire in a missile engagement was only a fraction of that which a Harrington-class ship could produce. If they had time to deploy missile pods before a battle, they could throw stupendous salvos as long as the pods lasted, of course. But that was another way of saying they could fire for as long as no one could get warheads close enough to take out their pods with proximity kills.

When only the Manticoran Alliance had possessed SD(P)s, no one had worried particularly about pod vulnerability. First, because no other navy in space could produce the weight of fire an SD(P) was capable of, and, second, because no other navy in space could match the range of the Alliance's multi-drive missiles. Which meant that the forts' pods would be able to wreak havoc on any attacker before that attacker could possibly get close enough to kill their remaining pods. But the navy Thomas Theisman had built did have SD(P)s. And it was just possible that those SD(P)s had multi-drive missiles of their own.

Forts for the Trevor's Star wormhole, still smaller and less manpower intensive than the old Manticoran Junction Forts, but still obsolete in an age of MDM podnoughts.

"Third Fleet has almost a hundred ships of the wall in its order of battle, including forty-eight of our SD(P)s, Niall, and two SD(P)s are down for local refit. We have exactly two—count them; two—more squadrons of them with Home Fleet. We have another squadron of them assigned to Sidemore Station. We have a fourth squadron assigned to Grendelsbane. And we have, at the moment, four more of them in various stages of overhaul and working up back home but not assigned to Home Fleet. That's it, even with the dribs and drabs Janacek has managed to add to his order of battle. If Theisman could take out Third Fleet, he'd destroy around a third of our pre-pod wall and two-thirds of our total modern wall. That makes Theodosia's ships his true objective, and if he can pin them against the star, force her to defend San Martin, he has an opportunity to destroy them.

Nobody could ever accuse White Haven of being slow on the uptake. Deployment of Manty SD(P)s. 48 at Trevor's Star (which has a hundred wallers all told, almost a third the pre-war wall of battle) 16 at Manticore itself with Home Fleet, 6 with Honor at Sidemore, and 4 down for repair/maintenance.

"If he pulled that off, he could deal with anything we had left with relative ease. To be perfectly honest, the only remaining counterweight the Alliance would have would be your own fleet, and Grayson would find itself facing much the same quandary the Manticore System faces. How much of your home fleet can you afford to commit to offensive operations?"

"To be honest?" MacDonnell shook his head. "We've probably actually exceeded that limit by what we've deployed here. Not that I think it was a mistake to send us," he added hastily. "I think Lady Harrington and Mr. Paxton are correct in arguing that the Peeps are unlikely to make Grayson one of their priority objectives. That could change, of course, especially once word gets back to them that a sizable portion of our Navy is reinforcing here at Trevor's Star. But at the moment, they almost have to be assuming the GSN is still concentrated at Yeltsin, and they aren't going to want to provoke us until after they've dealt with your SD(P)s."

The Grayson Navy is looking a little thin, having deployed a fleet to back up Kuzak and the Protector's Own to reinforce Honor.

"And if we can win that jackass Janacek just another four or five months, the ships he's finally resumed construction on will begin to come into commission in something like genuinely useful numbers. Especially the ones in the Grendelsbane shadow yards. They were further along in construction when they were suspended, and the first of them will be ready for acceptance trials in just a couple of weeks."

Four to five more months for the suspended/resumed construction SD(P)s and CLACs to be coming out the yards in useful numbers. A couple of weeks for the first ones out of Grendelsbane. I sure hope nothing bad happens at Grendelsbane.

Admiral of the Red Allen Higgins was a man of only middling height, with a round, almost chubby face that was usually a faithful mirror of his affable nature. At the moment, that face was the color of old oatmeal and the eyes were haunted.

He stared down at the pitiless display and felt like a fly in the path of Juggernaut as the Peep attack force rumbled down upon him. Thirty-two superdreadnoughts, an unknown number of them SD(P)s. There were also at least some CLACs in that oncoming freight train of destruction. There had to be, because the four hundred-strong LAC strike he'd sent out to meet them had been ripped apart by an even stronger LAC counterattack.

And to oppose it, once his LACs had been effectively destroyed, he'd had seven SD(P)s, sixteen pre-pod SDs, four CLACs with less than thirty LACs between them, and nineteen battlecruisers and cruisers. He'd thought he might still be able to accomplish something, given his outnumbered SD(P)s' range advantage. But he'd been wrong. As the Peeps had just demonstrated by destroying all seven of them from a range in excess of forty million kilometers.

His remaining twenty capital ships were hopelessly outclassed. The incredible missile storm which had wiped away his SD(P)s was proof enough of that. Thank God that at least he'd held them back when he sent in the SD(P)s! Thousands of RMN personnel were still alive because of that simple decision on his part. A decision he'd tossed off almost casually at the time.

Oh look, something bad happened at Grendelsbane. 32 Haven capital ships of unknown type vs. 7 SD(P) 16 SD, 4 CLAC, 19 screening heavies and BCs. Well the LAC screen and podnoughts are gone, what's the play, Admiral?

"Fuck the Admiralty!" Higgins snarled. "If they want to court-martial me, so much the better. I'd love to have an opportunity to discuss their excuse for a naval policy in front of a formal court! But right now what matters is saving everyone and everything we can . . . and we can't save the yards."

The chief of staff swallowed hard, but he couldn't disagree.

"We don't have time to set scuttling charges," Higgins went on in a harsh, flat voice. "Get every work crew back to the main facility. I want all secure data wiped now. Once you've done that, set the charges and blow the entire computer core, as well. I don't want the bastards getting squat from our records. We've got about a ninety-minute window to evacuate anyone we're going to get out, and we wouldn't have the personnel lift to take more than twenty percent of the total base personnel even if we had time to embark them all. Grab the priority list and find everyone on it that you can. We're not going to be able to get all of them to a pickup point in time, but I want to pull out every tech with critical knowledge that we can."

Evac. Good plan.

And then his mouth tightened and pain flickered in those empty eyes as the first small, intolerably bright sun flashed behind his ships. Then another. Another, and another, and yet another as a tidal wave of flame marched through the huge, sprawling naval base Manticore had spent almost two decades building up from literally nothing.

Those silent pinpricks looked tiny and harmless from this range, but Higgins' mind's eyes saw them perfectly, knew their reality. It watched the forest fire of old-fashioned nukes—his own missiles' warheads, not even the enemy's—consuming fabrication centers, orbital smelters, reclamation yards, stores stations, orbital magazines, the huge hydrogen farm, sensor platforms and relays, and System Control's ultra-modern command station. And the ships. The handful of ships in the repair yards. The ones who'd had the misfortune to choose this particular moment to be immobilized in yard hands because they required some minor repair, or to be undergoing refit. And worse—far worse—the magnificent new ships. Twenty-seven more Medusa-class SD(P)s, nineteen CLACs, and no less than forty-six of the new Invictus-class superdreadnoughts. Ninety-two capital ships—almost six hundred and seventy million tons of new construction. Not just a fleet, but an entire navy's worth of the most modern designs in space, helpless as they lay beside fitting-out stations or half-finished, cocooned in their building slips and dispersed yards. The fifty-three additional lighter types being built alongside them hardly mattered, but Higgins could no more spare them from the fiery sword of fusion than he could the superdreadnoughts.

The fireballs marched, hobnailed with fire, ripping the heart out of Grendelsbane Station. A tidal wave of flame and fury carrying disaster on its crest. And behind that wave were the personnel platforms and the yard personnel he hadn't been able to withdraw. Over forty thousand of them—the entire workforce for a complex the size Grendelsbane once had been, just as lost to the Star Kingdom as the ships they had come here to work upon.

In one catastrophic act of self-inflicted devastation, Allen Higgins had just destroyed more tonnage and far more fighting power than the Royal Manticoran Navy had ever lost in the entire four T-centuries of its previous existence, and the fact that he'd had no choice was no consolation at all.

Wit no time to set charges, Higgins has his ships fire on the shipyards with nukes, wiping out the new construction and attendant infrastructure, like a hydrogen farm, presumably collectors for refueling ships. 73 podnoughts and 19 carriers, a couple of them mere weeks from completion are simply gone. Well, they would have done a lot to equalize the power imbalance with Haven, which makes them priority targets, and I can't blame Higgins for not letting the ships and their technical secrets be captured by the enemy.

Of course, the first time I read this it reminded me most of a scene from a different SF series, Heir to the Empire.

"Perimeter Security has bogeys, Admiral!"

-snip-

"Locus and vector?" MacDonnell asked.

"They made translation right on the hyper limit for a least-time course to San Martin," Commander David Clairdon, his chief of staff, amplified quickly.

-snip-

"CIC makes it over eighty of the wall, Sir," Tatnall announced a moment later, as if he couldn't quite believe the numbers himself. "Uh, they say that's a minimal estimate," he added.

Giscard arrives at Trevor's Star.

"Even with the drones and the LACs, we were still dead lucky to pick them up, Sir. They're coming in heavily stealthed. But they're also pushing hard. One or two impeller signatures burned through the stealth, and once the drones got a sniff, the recon LACs knew where to look. The numbers are still tentative, but CIC is estimating it as between twenty and fifty ships of the wall. Possibly with carrier support."

Giscard spots the Graysons.

Giscard nodded in understanding. The recon LACs were heavily modified Cimeterres, with greatly reduced magazine space in order to free up the volume for the most capable LAC-sized sensor suite Shannon Foraker and her techies had been able to build. Their main function, however, if the truth be known, was to serve as drone tenders. Foraker and her wizards still hadn't figured out how to fit a grav pulse transmitter with any sort of bandwidth into something as small as a drone. But they could put a LAC in range for the drone to hit it with a whisker laser, and a LAC could carry an FTL com. They still couldn't real-time the raw drone data to Sovereign of Space, but they could get enough summarized information through to give Giscard a far better picture of what was happening than any previous Havenite fleet commander could have hoped for.

Recon LACs, to my knowledge never honored with a class name. Smaller missile magazines in exchange for upgraded sensors, and the ability to serve as an FTL relay for recon drones, since Haven unlike Manticore still can't shoehorn an FTL comm into a recon platform. I suspect it carries it's own platforms, I'd certainly want a recon ship to have that ability, but it's pure peculation on my part.

No. If there really was a second force out there, then it had been deliberately placed there ahead of time. Only that didn't make a lot of sense, either . . . unless he assumed that they'd somehow guessed what was coming. Which should have been impossible. On the other hand, he couldn't even begin to count the number of "top secret" plans which had somehow been compromised in the long history of military operations.

But even if it were a force from their Home Fleet, how bad could that be? They didn't have enough SD(P)s in Home Fleet to significantly affect the odds here, and rushing in pre-pod SDs would be suicidal. But they'd know that, too. So where—?

"I wonder," he murmured, and turned back to Gozzi. "We need to nail this down, Marius. Send the LACs in closer."

"Sir, if they get any closer and this is what it looks like, they're going to be awfully vulnerable," the chief of staff reminded him quietly.

"I realize that," Giscard acknowledged. "And I don't like it a whole lot more than you do. But we have to know. This is the largest single task force of Operation Thunderbolt. If the Manties have somehow figured out what we're up to, this would be the one place they'd try hardest to set a trap for us. Don't forget what they did to Admiral Parnell at Yeltsin's Star at the beginning of the war. And whether they deliberately set it up as a trap or not, we can't afford to get ourselves enveloped by a superior force. If we take heavy losses here, we could be in serious trouble until Admiral Tourville gets back from Silesia. Or, at least, until Admiral Foraker and Bolthole can make up our losses. If we have to risk some LACs, or even deliberately sacrifice them, to ensure that doesn't happen, then I'm afraid we'll simply have to do it."

Giscard sends the LACs in for a closer sweep, into nearly certain death for the good of his task force.

He'd hoped that the Peeps wouldn't spot them until it was too late. Although it had become evident that there were actually at least a hundred capital ships in the Havenite task force, he remained confident that his task force and Third Fleet, with almost a hundred SD(P)s and fifty pre-pod SDs between them, could take them. The small, fast impeller signatures which proved that the Peeps did have CLACs, after all, had caused him to raise his estimate of the losses he and Kuzak would probably suffer, but that hadn't affected his fundamental confidence. Not with the hundreds of planet-based LACs the Janacek Admiralty had deployed to back up Third Fleet as relations with the Republic worsened steadily. He knew they could take them . . . and that White Haven shared his confidence.

Hundreds of LACs independent of carriers on San Martin, Hemphill got her dream of defensive LAC swarms. Giscard outnumbered.

"Contact Ararat," he told Clairdon. "Tell Captain Davis that I want him to . . . discourage those LACs."

The chief of staff looked at him for a moment, then nodded, and MacDonnell turned back to his plot. Ararat was one of the Covington-class CLACs. Somewhat larger than the RMN's carriers, the Covingtons carried twenty-five percent more LACs, and unlike the RMN, the GSN had developed the Katana-class LAC, specifically designed for the "dogfighting" role. The Graysons had begun from the assumption that eventually someone else was going to produce their own LACs and carriers for them. When that time came, the GSN intended to be ready . . . especially since the RMN's "space superiority LAC" project had been one of the casualties of the Janacek cuts.

GSN Covington-class CLACs, less of a monster than the Haven Aviaries but carries more LACs than the Manticoran carrier. My math gives me 140, 25% more than the 112 of a Minotaur carrier, the published figure from the companions says 124.

Also, the Katana-class LAC, Grayson's signature design, I suspect developed over the inter-war period. Essentially a Ferret that trades in all missile capacity for extra countermissile launchers and deeper magazines. It was made to carry and launch the new Mk. 32 'Viper' countermissiles, which are pricy but double as anti-LAC missiles, so Katanas are excellent LAC-killers and so far the best at contributing to fleet missile defense nets to whittle down huge missile swarms. The Manties had a project to develop a similar craft, but the Janacek Admiralty killed it for budget reasons.

Javier Giscard's scouting LACs realized they were doomed the instant Ararat launched. There were only fifteen of the recon platforms, each of them only lightly armed, and there were over a hundred and twenty LACs coming at them. Worse, their own vectors were almost directly towards the enemy vessels.

There was no way they could possibly escape, and so they pressed on, accelerating directly towards the Graysons in an effort to at least get close enough to see the enemy clearly before they died.

120 LACs scrambled, as far as that argument goes. Giscard's recon LACs don't try to run, just to get useful information before they die, and they do.

"Yes, Sir. But our recon crews were quite definite. They're bigger than Manty carriers."

"Graysons, then," Giscard murmured.

"That would certainly be my guess, Sir," Gozzi agreed, and Giscard snorted softly.

The confirmation of the presence of the GSN in strength put an entirely different complexion on the tactical situation. The sheer numbers coming up behind him would have been bad enough under any circumstances. The fact that they were Graysons made it even worse. Not just because of the profound respect with which the Republican Navy had learned to regard the GSN, but because of what their presence implied.

-snip-

If the Committee of Public Safety had still been in power, the decision ultimately wouldn't have been his. It would have belonged to his people's commissioner, and if he'd dared to argue about it he would have found himself shot for his temerity. But the Republic had no commissioners, and he drew a deep breath and committed himself to the decision no admiral of the People's Navy would ever have dared to make.

"Go to evasion Tango-Baker-Three-One," he told Gozzi.

"Are you sure about this, Sir?" Gozzi asked in a painstakingly neutral tone.

"I am, Marius," Giscard replied with a small smile. "Trevor's Star was a primary objective, I know. And I know why Admiral Theisman wanted Third Fleet destroyed. But if they've managed to assemble this much firepower here, then they have to be buck naked on all of Thunderbolt's other objectives. That means we've kicked their ass everywhere else. I realize that we've got a chance here to carry through and cripple or destroy three-quarters of the combined Manty–Grayson SD(P) force. But we've got too many pre-pod ships of our own, and we'd be risking over half of our own SD(P)s. Not to mention the fact that there's too good chance of their catching us between them instead of us catching them separated." He shook his head. "No. There's always tomorrow, and if we've gotten out as lightly as I think we have elsewhere, the comparative loss figures are going to hit Manticoran public morale right in the belly. I don't want to give them a victory here to offset that effect. Nor do I want them to think that they hurt us badly enough we can't continue to take the war to them."

Giscard chooses retreat, the attack on Trevor's star is beaten off with hardly a shot fired, the only casualties his recon LACs.

"The Prime Minister is here to see Her Majesty," she announced, and High Ridge's jaw muscles clenched. Usually, he rather enjoyed the formalities, the time-polished procedures and protocols which underscored the dignity and gravity of the office he held and the Star Kingdom he served. Today, each of them was a fresh grain of salt rubbed into the wound which brought him here, and he wished they could just get on with it. It wasn't as if his secretary hadn't scheduled the appointment before he ever came, or as if sophisticated security systems hadn't identified him and kept him under direct observation from the instant he entered Mount Royal Palace's grounds.

Get used to it, Janvier.

The baron came to a halt before her desk, standing there—like, he thought from a lava field of resentment, an errant schoolboy and not the Prime Minister of Manticore—and she regarded him as coldly as her treecat did.

"Your Majesty," he managed to get out in very nearly normal tones. "Thank you for agreeing to see me so promptly."

"I could hardly refuse to see my own Prime Minister," she replied. The words could have been courteous, even pleasant. Delivered with the tonelessness of a computer they were something else entirely.

"Your secretary indicated that the matter had some urgency," she continued in that same chill voice which pretended that she didn't know precisely what had brought him here.

"I'm afraid it does, Your Majesty," he agreed, wishing passionately that the unwritten portion of the Star Kingdom's Constitution didn't require the formality of a face-to-face meeting between a prime minister and the monarch at a time like this. Unfortunately, there was no way to avoid it, although he'd toyed—briefly, at least—with the thought that since this was technically only a violation of a truce and not a formal declaration of war he might have evaded it.

"I regret," he told her, "that it is my unhappy duty to inform you that your realm is at war, Your Majesty."

"It is?" she asked, and he heard his own teeth grinding together at the proof that she intended to spare him no smallest fraction of his humiliation. She knew precisely what had happened at Trevor's Star, but . . .

"Yes, unfortunately," he replied, forced by her question to formally explain the circumstances. "Although we've received no notification that the Republic of Haven intended to resume active military operations, their Navy violated Manticoran space this morning at Trevor's Star. Their task force was engaged by our own forces and driven off after suffering relatively light casualties. Our own forces suffered no damage, but the Republic's action in violating the Trevor's Star territorial limit can only be construed as an act of war."

Tradition mandates a face-to-face meeting with the monarch over matters like this. Which doesn't stop High Ridge from trying to weasel out. I thought you liked all the pomp and pageantry.

"Did I understand you to say, My Lord, that our own forces drove the intruders off?"

The emphasis on the possessive pronoun was subtle but unmistakable, and High Ridge's eyes flickered with rage. But, again, still trapped by the prison of formality and constitutional precedent, he had no choice but to reply.

"Yes, Your Majesty. Although, to be more precise, they were driven off as a result of the joint action of our forces and those of the Protectorate of Grayson."

You should really be on bended knee thanking the Graysons for riding to your rescue after you treated them so poorly for years.

"And how do my ministers recommend that we proceed in this moment of crisis, My Lord?"

"Under the circumstances, Your Majesty, I see no option but to formally denounce our own truce with the Republic of Haven and resume unrestricted military operations against it."

"And are my military forces in a fit state to pursue that policy in the wake of this attack, My Lord?"

"They are, Your Majesty," he replied a bit more sharply, despite everything he could do to control his tone, as her question flicked him unerringly on the raw. He saw her satisfaction—not in any flicker of an expression on her own face, but in the treecat's ears and body language—and fought to reimpose the armor of his formality. "Despite the Republic's incursion into our space, we suffered no losses," he amplified. "Effectively, the military position remains unchanged by this incident."

"And is it the opinion of my Admiralty that this incident was an isolated one?"

"Probably not, Your Majesty," High Ridge admitted. "The Office of Naval Intelligence's estimate of the enemy's current order of battle strongly suggests, however, that the forces which violated the Trevor's Star limit constituted virtually the entirety of their modern naval units. That clearly implies that any other operations they may have carried out, or attempted to carry out, must have been on a much smaller scale."

The possibility of a larger modern Haven navy than was publicly announced still eludes High Ridge, even with the reveal that they have carriers.

"I see," the Queen repeated. "Very well, My Lord. I will be guided by the views of my Prime Minister and my First Lord of Admiralty in this matter. Are there other measures which you wish to propose?"

"Yes, there are, Your Majesty," he replied formally. "In particular, it's necessary that we inform our treaty partners of the state of affairs and notify them that we intend to formally reinvoke the mutual defense clauses of our alliance." He managed to get that out without even gagging, despite the gall and bile of suggesting any such thing.

Manticore can't fight a war alone, it's your own fault for neglecting and dismissing your allies that you have to crawl to them now.

"In addition, Your Majesty," he continued, "given the significance and extreme gravity of the Republic's actions, and the fact that the entire Star Kingdom is now forced, however unwillingly, to take up arms once again, it is my considered opinion as your Prime Minister that your Government must represent the broadest possible spectrum of your subjects. An expression of unity at this critical moment must give our allies encouragement and our enemies pause. With your sovereign consent, I believe that it would be in the Star Kingdom's best interests to form a government of all parties, working together to guide your subjects in this moment of crisis."

"I see," the Queen said yet again.

"In time of war, such a suggestion often has merit," she continued after a brief pause, her eyes deadly as her sentence reminded him of another meeting in this same office four years before. "Yet in this instance, I think it may be . . . premature." High Ridge's eyes widened, and the merest hint of a smile touched her lips. "While I am, of course, deeply gratified by your willingness to reach out to your political opponents in what you've so correctly described as a moment of crisis, I feel that it would be most unfair to burden you with possible partisan disputes within your Cabinet at a moment when you must be free to concentrate on critical decisions. In addition, it would be unjust to create a situation in which you did not feel completely free to continue to make those decisions for which you, as Prime Minister, must bear ultimate responsibility."

He stared at her, unable to believe what she'd just said. The Constitution required him to inform her and obtain her formal consent to any proposal to form a new government, but no monarch in the entire history of the Star Kingdom had ever refused that consent once it was sought. It was unheard of—preposterous! But as he gazed into Elizabeth Winton's unflinching, flint-hard eyes, he knew it was happening anyway.

She gazed back at him, her face carved from mahogany steel, and he recognized her refusal to countersign his bid for political survival. There would be no "coalition government," no inclusion of the Centrists and Crown Loyalists to broaden his basis of support . . . or share in the guilt by association if additional reports of disaster rolled in. Nor would she even permit him to extend in her name the invitation William Alexander would almost certainly have refused, thus giving High Ridge at least the threadbare cover of being able to accuse the Centrists of refusing to support the Crown at this moment of need.

She had limited him to just two options: to continue without the cover of a joint government with the Opposition, or to resign. And if he resigned, it would be no more and no less than a formal admission of full responsibility on his part.

High Ridge tries to form a new coalition government, bring in the Centrists and the Crown Loyalists so the blame can be distributed more fairly, or at the very least so he can blame the hyper-partisanship and uncooperativeness of the Centrists for the lack of effective action. Alas, the Queen's rubberstamp approval of the forming of a government is, for the first time ever, withheld.

[Ahriman238]

"The truth is, though," Tourville went on more seriously, "that she's very probably the best—or, at the very least, one of the two or three best—tacticians the Manty navy has. Nobody on our side has ever come close to taking her in an even fight. Just between the two of us, I think from some of the things Admiral Theisman has said that he probably could have beaten her at Yeltsin's Star after Operation Stalking Horse fell apart. But even if he'd destroyed her entire force, it still would have been a strategic victory for her. She hasn't had a chance yet to show what she can do in 'a real fleet engagement,' and, frankly, that's one reason I feel a little nervous about this whole thing. I don't want to be the one who lets her notch up her first win on that scale. As to why the newsies 'fixate' on her, I guess it has to do with her way of always beating the odds. The fact that she looks damned good doesn't hurt any, of course. But the truth is, I think even the newsies sense something about her. Something you have to meet her in person to really understand . . . as much as anyone can."

Tourville's opinion of Harrington.

The unknown units were headed in-system on a course which would bring them to a zero-zero intercept with Marsh in just over six hours, assuming that they made turnover in three. And there were quite a few of them. In fact, it looked very much as if her "official" order of battle would have been outnumbered by at least fifty percent.

"We're getting light-speed emissions signatures now, Your Grace," George Reynolds reported. Honor turned towards them, and the intelligence officer looked up to meet her gaze. "They're not Andies," he said quietly. "We don't recognize some of them, but we've positively IDed at least eight Havenite battlecruisers."

-snip-

"CIC is trying to break them down by type, Your Grace," the ops officer said. "It's a bit difficult without better intelligence on whatever new types they've been building, especially since, as George just said, we don't recognize some of them at all. At the moment though, it looks as though they've brought along fifty or sixty superdreadnoughts, with twenty or thirty battlecruisers in support."

Tourville arrives at Sidemore.

The defending Manticoran task force was headed to meet him. The range remained too long for real-time reports from light-speed sensors, but impeller signatures were FTL, and they blazed clear and strong in the plot, confirming what the first wave of recon drones had already reported. Thirty-one Manty superdreadnoughts, eleven dreadnoughts, four LAC carriers, and sixteen battlecruisers, covered by two destroyer flotillas and at least three cruiser squadrons accelerated steadily on almost a direct reciprocal of his own course. A cloud of LACs spread out to cover the axis of their advance and its flanks. It was much more difficult to get a drive count on units that small, but NavInt had reported that somewhere around four hundred and fifty LACs had been permanently based on Sidemore. It looked like Harrington had brought all of them with her, since CIC estimated her main combatants were accompanied by somewhere around eight hundred of them. Taking NavInt's highest figure and combining it with the six CLACs she was supposed to have gave her a maximum LAC strength of right on a thousand. She might have left a couple of hundred of them to cover the inner system against the possibility that the main attack was actually a feint to pull her out of position around Marsh, especially if she believed the Republican Navy still lacked any CLACs of its own

Honor's forces, the ones she brought from Manticore, anyways racing out to meet the enemy devoid of apparent subtlety, which makes Tourville just a trifle nervous.

"Do you think she'll actually let us into range because she doesn't want to fire the first shot, Sir?"

"I doubt very much that she's going to be that obliging," Tourville said dryly. "We are in violation of the territorial space of a Manticoran ally at the moment, you know. That means she's in a very strong position under interstellar law if she decides to shoot some dumb son-of-a-bitch who's too much of an idiot to even reply to her communications attempts!"

He flashed his teeth in a white smile under his bristling mustache, and DeLaney heard someone chuckle.

"On the other hand, if NavInt is right and the Manties still haven't confirmed that we have MDMs of our own, she may let us get in a lot closer before she gets around to opening fire. She knows we have SD(P)s, but she also knows by now that at least some of the SDs we brought with us are pre-pod designs. On top of that, she has to suspect from our acceleration rates that our older ships are towing heavy pod loads. She, on the other hand, isn't, even though NavInt says that she has only six SD(P)s of her own. She may have some pods tractored inside her other superdreadnoughts' wedges, but she can't have as many of them there as we're towing. Combined with how openly she's coming to meet us, that suggests to me that she still believes she has a decisive range advantage. That she can open fire at a range of her own choosing, from outside our effective reach, and hold it there."

"Do you think she knows about the new compensators, Sir?"

"I wouldn't be a bit surprised if she's figured out that we've improved our performance, whatever her ONI reports might be telling her," Tourville said. "She's certainly smart enough to realize that we must have made overcoming their acceleration advantage a very high priority. Unfortunately, for all their improvements, our compensators still aren't anywhere near as efficient as theirs are . . . and she's smart enough she's probably figured that out, too. So if she thinks she has the range advantage, she'll expect to be able to prevent us from closing with her."

All of which is true, but there's a key detail Tourville can be forgiven for not knowing.

"It's still not anything I'd call satisfactory, Your Grace," Jaruwalski responded promptly in a slightly sour tone. "Whatever else they may have managed, they've improved their ECM significantly. It's still not as good as ours is—or, for that matter, quite as good as what we've seen out of the Andies over the last few months. But it's a lot better than it was during Operation Buttercup. I'd estimate that we should expect at least a fifty or sixty percent degradation in accuracy at this range. Possibly a little bit more."

50-60% less hits at 3 light-minutes, or 54 million klicks, against decent EW.

Honor knew that Mercedes still thought that her own insistence that they operate on the assumption that the Republic's new SD(P)s' missiles could match the full range of their own MDMs was unduly pessimistic. On the other hand, Honor would far rather find out that she had, in fact, been overly pessimistic than suddenly find herself under fire at a range which she had assumed would give her ships immunity from attack.

Honor's a bit of a pessimist, also a realist.

Twelve more minutes passed. Second Fleet's base velocity rose to just over 28,530 KPS and Task Force 34's velocity reached 19,600 KPS. The range continued to fall, gnawed away by a closing velocity of almost sixteen percent of light-speed. It dropped from fifty-three million kilometers to barely thirty-seven and a half million, and then HMS Werewolf transmitted a brief FTL message to HMS Borderer. The destroyer, almost ten full light-minutes outside the system hyper limit received the transmission, acknowledged receipt, and translated up into hyper . . . where it sent a second transmission.

Twenty-six seconds later, the Protector's Own, Grayson Space Navy, made its alpha translation out of hyper, directly behind Second Fleet, and began accelerating furiously in-system in its wake.

Honor's Plan Suraigo. The Protector's Own were hiding in hyper, maneuvering behind the attackers and awaiting only Honor's signal that the enemy was committed and couldn't escape action, relayed through the Borderer to pop out in flanking position.

"We have hard IDs on the new bogeys' types," Marston said flatly. "CIC makes it twelve Medusa-class SD(P)s, six Covington-class CLACs, and six battlecruisers. CIC isn't positive, but it thinks the battlecruisers are probably Courvoisier-class ships."

"Covingtons? Courvoisiers?" DeLaney shook her head. "Those are Grayson types!" She turned to face Tourville. "What are Graysons doing out here in the middle of Silesia?" she demanded almost plaintively.

Tourville stared back at her for perhaps four seconds, then muttered a short, pungent obscenity.

"It's the Protector's Own," he said flatly. "Damn! NavInt told us they were off on some long-ranged deployment training mission. Why didn't it even occur to us that that sneaky bastard Benjamin might have sent them here?"

"But why here?" DeLaney protested.

"I don't know," Tourville replied, but his mind continued to race even as he spoke, and he grimaced. "Best guess? Benjamin and Harrington discussed it before she ever came out here. Damn! I'll guarantee you that's what happened. She knew High Ridge wasn't going to give her what she needed to do her job, so she borrowed it from her other navy without even telling anyone she was doing it!"

At this time, the Proctector's Own, formed from Honor's Elysian Space Navy, has a dozen podnoughts, 6 carriers and 6 BC(P)s.

Even on his new course, his units were going to continue to slide into the arms of Harrington's Manticoran units. His new vector would start generating lateral separation quickly, and it was the fastest possible course back to the system's hyper limit. But it wouldn't kill velocity quickly enough to prevent the range between him and the Manties from closing by at least another thirty light-seconds. And by the time he could kill an appreciable fraction of his closing velocity, the Graysons would be on a direct course for the point at which he would hit the hyper limit out-bound. If he could maintain his present acceleration, they wouldn't—quite—catch him from their much lower base velocity, but they'd sure as hell overrun any cripples who fell behind. And the entire time he was trying to run away, they were going to be pounding him with a hurricane of missile fire precisely to produce as many cripples as they possible could. Not to mention LAC strikes.

Operation Bug Out may save some this time, but Second Fleet remains pretty screwed.

"It looks like at least eight of their 'superdreadnoughts' are actually CLACs, Your Grace," she said. "That makes them a hell of a lot bigger than anything we have, and it looks like each of their groups is at least a third again the size of a Covington's. CIC estimates that they have right on two thousand of them."

"Then they're screwed," Rafe Cardones said confidently from Honor's com screen. "Two thousand gives them less than two hundred more than we have," he went on, lumping the Manticoran and Grayson LAC groups together. "I can't believe they could possibly have managed to improve their tech enough to keep us from tearing them apart when we're that close to parity with them numerically."

"You're probably right," Honor replied. "But let's not get overconfident. ONI never even guessed they had CLACs, so we don't have any meter stick at all for evaluating their LAC effectiveness."

Still a pessimist, 2,000 LACs in 8 carriers gives us 250 per carrier.

Multidrive missiles howled out across the endless light-seconds of emptiness. No fleets in history had ever engaged one another at such a preposterous range. More than two full light-minutes lay between TF 34 and Second Fleet, and it would take almost seven minutes for even Manticore's missiles to cross that stupendous gulf of vacuum. Second Fleet's missiles, with their marginally lower accelerations, would take even longer to reach TF 34. But the Protector's Own was closer than that. The flight time for Alfredo Yu's missiles was little more than three minutes

Crazy ranges, of course that gives you 7 minutes to knock down the incoming salvos.

Both sides' starships had extra missile pods on tow, and both sides flushed them all in the initial salvo. Second Fleet had seventy-eight capital ships: forty-six superdreadnoughts, eight CLACs, and twenty-four battlecruisers, but its planned margin of superiority had been more than erased by the presence of Alfredo Yu's command. TF 34 and the Protector's Own between them had a hundred and six capital ships: forty-three superdreadnoughts, ten CLACs, eleven dreadnoughts, and forty-two battlecruisers. Still, eleven of Honor's ships of the wall were only dreadnoughts and forty-four percent of her other "capital ships" were mere battlecruisers, and although the Allies' weapon systems remained superior to those of the Republic, the margin of superiority was thinner than it had ever been before.

Tourville's Second Fleet strength 43 SD (podnoughts an unknown percentage) 8 CLAC, 11 DN, 42 BC.

The Havenite missile pods contained fewer missiles because those missiles had to be thirty percent larger than Manticoran missiles to approximate the same performance. But since she'd had no choice but to build enormous missiles because of the mass requirements of their drive elements and power plants, anyway, Shannon Foraker had been able to give them larger payloads than their Manticoran counterparts, as well. She'd used some of that volume to increase the destructive power of their warheads, but most of it had gone into additional sensor capability. The result was a weapon with eighty-eight percent as much range, very nearly eighty percent as much accuracy, and greater hitting power than anything Manticore had.

Havenite MDMs are 30% bigger than Manty ones, or more than half again the size of pre-MDM capital ship missiles. Haven MDMs have a lot more firepower to compensate for their limited range and accuracy compared to Manticore.

But that accuracy still had to get through Manticore's superior ECM, and decoys and jammers went to work on both sides as the deadly tides of destruction swept down upon them. False targets offered themselves, singing to targeting systems, beckoning and seducing them away from the actual starships they sought to destroy. Jammers howled, threshing space with active interference to blind sensitive seeking systems, and as the range fell still further, counter missiles went screaming out to meet the incoming fire with kamikaze devotion.

The Manticoran systems were far more effective, especially with the remote Ghost Rider platforms to spread the EW envelope wider and deeper. Despite the increases in accuracy Foraker had managed to engineer into the Republic's MDMs, the Allies' targeting systems were at least fifty percent more effective simply because of the difference in the two sides' electronic warfare capabilities.

Manticore's still winning the EW game, getting half again as many hits.

Active defenses engaged the weapons which slashed their way through the screen of electronic protection. The latest generation Manticoran counter missiles had increased their effective intercept range to just over two million kilometers, although the probability of a kill in excess of one and a half million was low. Shannon Foraker's best efforts, even with reverse-engineered Solarian technology, had a maximum intercept range of little more than one and a half million. That meant Honor's missile defenses had sufficient depth for two counter missile launches to engage each incoming missile before the attacking birds could reach effective laserhead range. Foraker could get off only a single launch at each incoming wave of Allied missiles, but she'd compensated by increasing the number of launchers by more than thirty percent. Her missiles were individually less effective, but there were many more of them per launch, and Second Fleet threw up a wall of them in the path of the incoming warheads.

Counter missile ranges, 2 million effective for Manticore, meaning likely to score hits. 1.5 million maximum for Haven. With the head of steam an MDM builds, that means one salvo of CMs for Haven, two for Manticore. However, the new Haven Navy mounts 30% more CM launchers to compensate. It's the wave of the future, every ship now has to be able to survive being targeted with hundreds of missiles.

Both the Manticoran and the Grayson fire had concentrated mercilessly upon his own SD(P)s and CLACs. Quite a few missiles—like the ones targeting Majestic—had lost track and gone after other victims, yet it was obvious that they amounted to little more than errant shots which had initially been intended for the newer types. He wondered, at first, how the Manties could have targeted them so accurately, picked them out of his formation so unerringly, when the Allies had no emissions signatures or targeting profiles on file for them. But then he realized how absurdly easy it actually was. They hadn't picked the new ships out; they'd simply chosen not to fire at the ships they could positively identify as pre-pod designs. By process of elimination, that concentrated their fire on the newer, more dangerous designs.

Bingo! Targeting the unknowns first, since they know older ships are so much grist for the mill when they get around to them.

Honor watched the return Havenite fire rip into her own formation. Her wall of battle was too far from its enemies for shipboard sensors to resolve what was happening to Second Fleet in any detail, but the Ghost Rider sensor platforms she'd had deployed were another matter entirely. Not even Manticore had yet been able to find a way for the platforms to send targeting information directly to MDMs, and even an MDM was too small for BuWeaps to cram in an FTL receiver which would have allowed real-time targeting telemetry to be relayed through the ships who'd launched them. But she could at least evaluate what happened when those missiles reached their targets, and her eyes narrowed in respectful surprise at the sheer toughness of that multilayered, tightly coordinated defensive envelope.

It was obvious that the Republic recognized the technical inferiority of its defensive systems. But Shannon Foraker's touch was equally obvious in the way in which those individually inferior systems had been carefully coordinated. The same approach would have been redundantly wasteful of capabilities given Manticoran system efficiencies. Given Republican hardware, it represented a brilliant adaptation of existing capabilities. An answer in mass to the individual superiority of Allied weapons.

And it worked.

That may be subject to change. For now, no direct target data from recon platforms to missiles, but they give her great intel on the effect her fire is having. And again we see Haven making the best use of comparably limited hardware.

Like Tourville, Honor had chosen her flagship for the effectiveness of its command systems more than its ship-to-ship offensive power. And even more than Second Fleet's commander, she found that flagship virtually ignored by the incoming Republican missiles. It made sense, she supposed, although she hadn't really considered it when she made her choice. After all, a carrier which had already launched its LACs automatically had a lower priority than superdreadnoughts which were busy launching missiles of their own or providing fire control to pods laid by another SD(P).

Command ships chosen for the ability to command effectively, so both flagships accidentally wind up having very low targeting priority to the other side.

Despite the incredible range, despite the MDMs' long flight times, the Manties' deadly concentration on his SD(P)s had crippled his offensive firepower in the first two salvos . . . and, for all intents and purposes, destroyed it completely in less than thirty minutes. Only one of his long-range missile ships, Battle Squadron 21's flagship, RHNS Hero, remained in action. Two of her sisters had been totally destroyed, four had been abandoned, with scuttling charges set, three more would have to be abandoned very quickly if their nodes could not be brought back online, and if she herself was still in action, she was also heavily damaged. Her fire control had been gutted by the same missile salvo which had destroyed her flag bridge . . . and killed Rear Admiral Zrubek instantly. She was effectively blind and deaf, yet she continued to roll pods at her maximum possible rate, turning them over to her older sisters' fire control. It let Second Fleet continue to spit defiance at the Manties, but Hero was the only ship he had which could still deploy pods at all, and she had only a finite number of them.

Nor had the SD(P)s been his only fatalities. Five more superdreadnoughts had been destroyed or so badly damaged that he'd had no option but to leave them behind while his survivors continued to run. At least one more had taken critical impeller damage; like the lamed SD(P)s, he'd be forced to leave her behind when he made translation into hyper if she couldn't get the missing alpha node back. One of his CLACs had also been destroyed, and two more were little more than air-bleeding wrecks, which meant that at least seven hundred of his two thousand LACs were going to have to be written off, whatever happened to the rest of his fleet.

Tourville's casualties.

At least some of Harrington's ships had been sufficiently battered to fall astern in the chase, he thought grimly. Some of them, judging from the recon drone's' reports, had taken serious damage. Two of her battlecruisers had been completely destroyed, as had at least three destroyers or light cruisers. CIC wasn't certain which at this range—especially when they hadn't been targeted in the first place. But MDMs were proving as indiscriminate in their targeting at long-range as Shannon had predicted. Most of them went after their programmed victims; a significant percentage wound up going after whatever targets they could see at the ends of their runs.

Honor's casualties, though really both sides have done wonders for improving survivability against supermassive missile swarms.

"Our magazines are down to twenty percent," Alistair McKeon told Honor from her com screen. His face was grim, and Honor knew from the sidebars in her plot that Troubadour had taken serious damage and heavy casualties. But McKeon's flagship was still in action, still rolling pods, and whatever had happened to Honor's command, what had happened to the Havenites was worse.

"The older SDs are in better shape on a percentage basis," he went on, "but they can't pump the kinds of broadsides the SD(P)s can. We've got maybe another fifteen minutes. After that, we'll be down to salvos too light to penetrate that damned defense of theirs from this range."

Running low, a serious problem in the new missile combat environment.

Honor nodded—not in agreement, but in acknowledgment of unpalatable reality. She'd sprung her trap perfectly and savaged the Havenites brutally. Her own losses were painful, but only a fraction of what she'd done to them, and she knew it. But even so, almost half of the enemy fleet was going to escape. They'd held together with too much discipline, and their missile defense doctrine had proven too hard a nut to crack without more MDM firepower then she had. And even if her LACs had been able to intercept, she knew what would happen if she committed them against the close-in defenses which had so badly blunted her missile attack.

-snip-

"We'll continue the pursuit." Her soprano was calm, giving no more hint of her intense frustration than it did of the pain of her own losses. "Alistair, I want you to reprioritize our missile fire. We're not going to be able to hammer our way through those defenses by saturating them, so I want you to slow your rate of fire and pick your targets carefully. Use delayed activation launches to thicken your broadsides while the pods last and try to concentrate on SDs with undamaged impellers. If we can slow some more of them down, our older ships of the wall can take them out as we overhaul, or else we can commit Alice's LACs to deal with them as we go by."

"Yes, Ma'am," McKeon acknowledged.

"Alice, I know you're frustrated by not getting your LACs into this yet," Honor went on, "but at least half a dozen of those Havenite ships are going to be too slow and too beat up to get away from you. When you're free to commit to go in after them, I want you to be sure to offer them the chance to surrender first. They're a long way from home and badly hurt, and I don't want to kill anyone who wants to give up."

Tourville gets half his ships out, give or take. Pretty impressive considering the trap he wound up in.

Queen Elizabeth had wanted to welcome Honor home in the manner in which she insisted Honor deserved to be welcomed, but Honor had managed to avoid that ordeal, at least. It was already obvious to her that there would be other ordeals, just as public and just as exhausting, which she would not be able to avoid. She'd seen the HD of the cheering crowds, celebrating wildly in the capital's streets when news of the Second Battle of Sidemore was announced, and she dreaded what would happen when those same crowds learned "the Salamander" was home. But in this instance, her monarch—well, one of her monarchs, she supposed—had agreed to relent, and so there was no huge honor guard, no crowd of newsies, to observe her arrival once again upon the soil of her birth-kingdom's capital planet.

As the one Manticoran commander to pull something good out of Thunderbolt, Honor is more a hero than ever.

And as she looked into his eyes over the Queen of Manticore's shoulder, she saw the echo of that same reaching out. Not with the same sharpness or acuity as her own empathy. Not even with any conscious recognition of what it was he felt. It was . . . blinder than that, and she suddenly realized it must be what treecats saw when they looked at their mind-blind people. A sense of a presence that was asleep. Unaware yet immensely powerful and somehow linked to them. Yet not totally unaware. He had no idea what he was feeling, yet he felt it anyway, and a part of him knew he did. She tasted that confused, groping sensitivity in the sudden flare of his mind-glow, and saw Samantha stop signing to Nimitz and turn to stare in wonder at her person.

Honor had never felt anything quite like it. In some ways, it was like her link to Nimitz, but weaker, without the strength anchored by a treecat's full-blown empathic sense. And yet, it was also far stronger, for its other end was not a treecat, but another human mind. One that matched her own. That . . . fitted on levels that hers and Nimitz's would never be able to fully share. There was no "telepathy," no sharing of thoughts. Yet she felt him there, in the back of her brain as he had already been in her heart. The other part of her. The welcoming fire ready to warm her on the coldest night.

Honor.... forms a weird psychic connection with White Haven. Huh.

"—so as soon as word came in about Grendelsbane, High Ridge had no choice but to resign," Elizabeth said grimly.

The end to the HRG. High Ridge resigns and retires to seclusion on his lavish estate. Word of Weber is they're still trying to figure if they can prosecute him and what with. The Conservative Association formally disbands but will reform in a few years under a new name, one untainted by public association with High Ridge's corruption and North Hollow's blackmail.

"Is it true about Janacek?" she asked quietly, and it was White Haven's turn to nod.

"According to the Landing Police, there's no question but that it was suicide," he confirmed.

"Not that very many people were prepared to accept that in the immediate aftermath," his brother added with a harsh snort. "He knew where an awful lot of the bodies were buried, and quite a few people found it suspiciously . . . convenient that he should decide to blow his own brains out."

When the news came in about Grendelsbane and just how much he'd screwed over his country, Janacek wrapped his lips around a pulser and pulled the trigger.

"Descroix?" Honor asked.

"We're not sure," Elizabeth admitted. "She tendered her resignation along with High Ridge, of course. And then, a couple of days later, she headed out to Beowulf on one of the day excursion ships . . . and didn't come back. From the looks of things, there was no foul play involved, unless it was her own. I think she planned on not coming back, although at this point no one has the least idea where she may have headed. All we know for sure it is that she transferred about twenty million dollars through a numbered DNA account on Beowulf to another account in the Stotterman System." The Queen grimaced. "You know what the Stotterman banking laws are like. It's going to take us at least ten or twelve T-years to get access to their records."

Elaine Descroix disappeared with 20 million dollars in embezzled public funds, took a ride to the Solarian League (they run day-trip shuttles to Beowulf) and never came back.

"And New Kiev?" Honor asked, and blinked in surprise as Elizabeth laughed out loud.

"Countess New Kiev," the Queen said after a moment, "has . . . retired from politics. It might be more appropriate to say that she was fired, actually. Your friend Cathy Montaigne led something of a coup d'état within the Liberal Party leadership."

"She did?" Honor couldn't keep the delight out of her response, even though she hadn't been aware that Elizabeth even suspected that she herself had been in contact with Montaigne and Anton Zilwicki.

"She certainly did," William Alexander replied with a grin. "Actually, the Liberal Party as we've known it doesn't really exist anymore. Things are still in the process of working their way out, but when the dust settles, it looks like there are going to be two separate political parties, each calling themselves the Liberal somethings. One is going to be a substantial majority of the old Liberal Party, centered in the Commons behind Montaigne's leadership. The other's going to be a rump of diehard ideologists who refuse to admit how completely they were used by High Ridge. They're probably going to be concentrated in the Lords . . . since the only way someone that out of touch with reality could possibly survive as a political figure is by inheriting his seat."

The Liberal Party is split between the majority who like Cathy Montaigne as their new leader and a blinkered group of Lords. New Kiev also withdraws from politics in disgrace.

"North Hollow is also lying conspicuously low just now," White Haven put in, and Shemais chuckled nastily. Honor cocked an eyebrow at her, and the colonel smiled.

"One of the more interesting consequences of the destruction of the 'North Hollow Files'—I mean, one of the consequences of the ridiculous assertion that something which never existed, like the so-called 'North Hollow Files,' had been theoretically destroyed—is that quite a few people seem to want to discuss certain concerns with Earl North Hollow. It's almost as if he'd had some sort of hold over them and now that it's gone, well . . ." She shrugged, and Honor found it very difficult not to smile as she tasted the colonel's vengeful delight. A delight, she admitted, which she shared to the full.

Does this mean we've finally heard the last of the Youngs? *happydance*

, "Willie's Prime Minister, of course. And we've brought back Baroness Mourncreek—except that I've decided to create a new peerage for her and make her a countess—as Chancellor of the Exchequer. We've brought in Abraham Spencer to run the Ministry of Trade for us, and I've convinced Dame Estelle Matsuko to take over the Home Office. Given the state High Ridge and that idiot Descroix managed to let the entire Manticoran Alliance get into—it's confirmed, by the way, that Erewhon has definitely signed a mutual defense treaty with the Peeps—Willie and I figured we needed someone the smaller members of the Alliance would trust as Foreign Secretary, so we asked Sir Anthony Langtry to take over there."

Erewhon is confirmed gone over to Haven.

Hamish's brother Willie, the Exchequer (Treasurer) under Cromarty is the new Centrist PM. Dame Matsuko is going to be Home Secretary (what about the Medusans and the NPA?) and Anthony Langtry, the senior diplomat to the original treaty-signing with Grayson after Courvosier died will be handling diplomacy from here on out. Looks like the Centrists are back with a vengeance, though I believe Matsuko is a Liberal.

"I knew I'd need someone particularly reliable to dig out the unholy mess Janacek and those idiots Houseman and Jurgensen left in their wake. So I turned to the one person I knew Willie and I could absolutely rely on." She nodded at Hamish. "Allow me to introduce you to First Lord of Admiralty White Haven."

Honor's head whipped around in astonishment, and White Haven smiled crookedly. It was a very ambivalent smile, and it matched the taste of his emotions perfectly.

"Actually," Elizabeth said much more seriously, "it was a hard call to make. God knows that taking Hamish out of a fleet command position at a time like this wasn't anything that I wanted to do. But it would be impossible to exaggerate the gravity of the wreckage Janacek left behind." She shook her head, her eyes now completely grim. "That son-of-a-bitch is damned lucky he committed suicide before I got my hands on him. I could probably have made a case for treason out of the way he mishandled his responsibilities and duties. ONI was the worst, and at the very least Jurgensen is going to be dismissed the service as unfit to wear the Queen's uniform. There may well be criminal charges, as well, once the full story comes out, although I hope we can avoid witch hunts for the 'guilty men.' I fully intend to see those responsible for the unmitigated disaster of our present position punished, one way or another, but Justin—and Willie, not to mention Aunt Caitrin—have lectured me very firmly on the absolute necessity of administering justice evenhandedly and fairly. No star chambers, and no twisting of the law. Anything I can nail them for legitimately, yes, damned straight I will. But if I can't, then the bastards walk."

And Hamish is the new First Lord, civilian overseer to the Navy. So he gets, among other things, to fix ONI and figure out how to fight a war with hardly any ships that can stand up to Haven's.

"And working on the same principle that it's vital to restore confidence in the Admiralty," White Haven put in, "I've brought Tom Caparelli back as First Space Lord as well as bringing Pat Givens back in as Second Space Lord. And," his wry grin became absolutely astringent, "Sonja Hemphill to run BuWeaps."

Honor was hard put not to goggle at his last sentence, and he chuckled.

"I expect there to be the occasional, um . . . clash of personalities," he acknowledged. "But I think it's time Sonja and I put our silly feuds behind us. As you pointed out to me once, the mere fact that she's the one who had an idea doesn't automatically mean it's a bad one. And one thing we're going to need badly in the immediate future is as many good ideas as we can get."

The new/old Spacelords/General Staff. Now that Adcock is dead, Hemphill will be running R&D.

"I will go as far as acknowledging that Theisman, as an individual, may be an honest and an upright human being. I will certainly acknowledge his personal courage, and his dedication to his own star nation. But the fact remains that the so-called 'Republic of Haven' has cold-bloodedly, systematically lied with a cynical audacity that not even Oscar Saint-Just could have matched. From Pritchart and Giancola on down—including your friend Theisman—without a single voice raised in dissent, their entire government has presented the same distorted, deceitful face to the entire galaxy. They've lied, Honor. Lied to their own people, to our people, and to the Solarian League. God knows that I could sympathize with anyone who was as systematically used and abused as the Peeps were by High Ridge and Descroix! I don't blame them for being angry and wanting revenge. But this 'diplomatic correspondence' they've published—!"

Elizabeth made herself stop and draw another deep breath.

"We have the originals of their correspondence in our own files, Honor. I can show you exactly where they made deletions and alterations—not just in their own notes, but in ours. It's too consistent, too all pervasive, to have been anything but a deliberate plot. Something they spent literally months putting into place to justify the attack they launched against us. They're busy telling the rest of the galaxy that we forced them to do this. That they had no intention of using this new navy they've built up in some sort of war of revenge until we left them no choice. But not even High Ridge did the things they say he did. They invented the entire crisis out of whole cloth. And what that tells me is that Peeps . . . don't . . . change."

This.... is going to be a problem.

Damn it, everyone here is acting reasonably as far they can know, the other side is a pack of vile liars. But good people are warring and dying for no good reason and neither side is likely to call a stop to it soon.

"As for how bad the situation is, High Ridge and Janacek between them, with more than a little help from Reginald Houseman, managed to do even more damage than we'd guessed. Of course, what happened when the Peeps hit us made it far worse, but if they hadn't set us up for the blow, our backs wouldn't be so firmly against the wall.

"Basically, we've lost in excess of twenty-six hundred LACs, seventy cruisers and light cruisers, forty-one battlecruisers, and sixty-one superdreadnoughts." Honor inhaled sharply as he listed the figures. "None of which includes all of the ships which were currently under construction at Grendelsbane, or the construction personnel we lost there and in half a dozen minor repair facilities scattered around what were occupied Peep star systems. And we've lost," he finished in a granite voice, "every single system we'd taken away from them—with the sole exception of Trevor's Star—since the war started. We're back where we were strategically on Day One, aside from controlling all of the Junction termini, and proportionately, we're much weaker now compared to the Peep navy than we were before the Battle of Hancock."

Ring around the rosy and we're right back where we started again. Except that space combat is deadlier than ever.

"Erewhon didn't have the full Ghost Rider tech package, or the beta-squared nodes, or the LAC fission plants, but they had just about everything else . . . including the newest compensator version and the latest grav-pulse transmitters. When Foraker gets her hands on that and starts reverse-engineering it, we're going to be in an even worse mess than we are now.

Haven will be getting the latest compensators and FTL comms shortly from Erewhon, but they won't get all of Ghost Rider, nor a lot of the things that went into making Manty LACs so fierce.

"Maybe even worse than that, though, Pat has been engaged in a massive reevaluation of ONI's files, cross-indexed with information Greg Paxton has made available, and she's come up with some possible ballpark figures for what the Peeps may still have in reserve. I'm inclined to think that she's probably overestimating their capabilities, which would be a natural enough reaction to how badly we were surprised by what they hit us with. On the other hand, I've seen her basic analysis, and it certainly doesn't seem to me that she's being alarmist in the way she approaches it. So it may be that she's right. But if she is, then the Peeps have a minimum of another three hundred of the wall currently under construction. A minimum, Honor. That's at a time when Grayson has just under a hundred SD(P)s, and we're all the way up to seventy-three. Since we seem to have observed damned close to two hundred of them in action exclusive of the ones they sent to Sidemore, we're looking at what might conservatively be called an unfavorable balance of forces."

Manticore is outnumbered over 2 to 1 in modern ships, having gotten up to 73 SD(P)s in new construction, and Haven has another 300 in construction.

[Ahriman238]

"First of all, what you managed to accomplish at Sidemore seems to have had a profound impact on their thinking. Obviously, they don't know exactly what happened yet—it's going to take their commander on the spot a lot longer to get home, since he can't use the Junction. But they know they got reamed, if only from news reports of what we've already announced. Willie and I have discussed it with Elizabeth, and we're going to go ahead and announce their loss figures officially tomorrow morning, as well. I doubt that we're going to really astonish anyone, after the rumors have already been flying for so long. But when we confirm that you managed to destroy well over half of their attack force and damage most of the rest of it, I think it will give them even more pause. Not to mention what it's already done for our own civilian—hell, not just civilian!—for our civilian and military morale. What you pulled off out there is the only really bright spot in this entire disaster."

Honor then brings up Trevor's Star, and Hamish points out that Giscard ran without cutting first.

"Given the increases in their technical capabilities, especially now that Erewhon is on their side of the line, the morale ascendancy we established before the cease-fire is even more vitally important. Frankly, they've just demonstrated that we don't have a right to that ascendancy any longer, but they may not realize it. For that matter, our people may not realize it . . . if we're lucky. The fact that you defeated them so decisively in the one place where effectively equal forces stood and fought is what we want them to remember. It's what we want our own people to remember, too, but it's even more important where the Peeps are concerned.

"The fact that they refused to engage at roughly equal odds at Trevor's Star is also going to loom in their thinking, I hope, of course. But that refusal takes on an entirely new light in the wake of what happened at Sidemore. Now it could be seen not simply as prudence—which, between you and me, is precisely what it actually was—so much as cowardice. Or, at least, an admission of their continued inability to meet us on equal terms."

Why the politicians are pushing so much Honor's Glorious Victory at Sidemore.

"At any rate, it looks very much as if the Andermani Navy is about to come in on our side."

Honor stared at him in disbelief.

"Hamish, we were shooting at each other less than two months ago!" she protested.

"And your point is?" he asked, and chortled at her expression. Then he sobered. "Honor, 'real politik' is the guiding deity of the Anderman Dynasty. What Gustav Anderman is seeing right this minute is that the Peeps are unpredictable, that they attempted to use him, and that they're lying to the entire galaxy. Oh, and that they once again have the biggest Navy this side of the Solarian League." He shrugged. "On that basis, they're obviously a much greater danger to him than we are. Remember, the Andermani never really thought of us as a threat to their own security. What they resented was our interference in their efforts to secure what they regarded as their 'natural frontiers' in Silesia. Everybody, on the other hand, regarded the old People's Republic as a threat. And now that the new Republic has demonstrated that it has the same leopard spots as the old one, the Andermani see it in very much the same light.

Of course, the Andies also didn't get involved the last time around, but it so happens that Manticore has an offer for them.

"The Conservative Association and the Liberal Party are effectively nonexistent at the moment. You haven't been to the Lords recently, so you can't begin to appreciate just how completely the entire Parliament is supporting Willie's new government right now. To give you some idea, the Lords have already agreed to take up a bill to transfer the power of the purse to the Commons over a five-T-year transition period. Unless something very drastic happens, it will be passed on third reading next week."

The big Centrist plank that drove everybody else to ally against them? Passed to thunderous applause. But that's to illustrate the change in politics that lets them do this:

"But as far as the Andermani are concerned, the Lords' support for domestic finance reform is beside the point. What's going to bring the Empire in on our side is the fact that all of that ideological resistance to anything smacking of 'imperialism' went down the toilet along with High Ridge and New Kiev. Something like it would probably have materialized again soon enough, except for the fact that it's not going to have the chance to. Because later this week, Willie is going to propose to a joint session of Parliament that the Star Kingdom and the Andermani Empire finally bring an end to the incessant bloodletting and atrocities in Silesia."

They're going to draw a line down the middle of Silesia, Manticore shall annex half and the Andermani can police their half. Because arbitrarily redrawing maps with zero input from the people effected has always worked so well in the past.

"And if the Confederacy government objects to being partitioned between two foreign powers?" Honor demanded.

"You've been to Silesia more than most of our officers," White Haven said. "Do you really think the average Silly wouldn't actively prefer to be a Manticoran subject?"

Honor started to reply quickly, then stopped. He had a point. All the average Silesian really wanted was safety, order, and a government that actually considered her wishes and well-being rather than seeing her as one more potential source of graft and corruption.

That said, perhaps you shouldn't start by making their choices for them.

"Whatever the average Silly wants, the Confed government may not see things quite the same way," she pointed out.

"The Confed government consists of a bunch of corrupt, self-seeking, moneygrubbing grifters, thieves, and conmen whose concerns begin and end with their own bank accounts," White Haven said flatly. "For God's sake, Honor! You know perfectly well that the government of the Silesian Confederacy is probably the only bunch of crooks who could actually make High Ridge and Descroix look good by comparison."

Despite her grave reservations, Honor's lips quivered in appreciation of White Haven's comparison.

"Willie and Sir Anthony are already in the process of coming up with what's going to amount to a massive bribe," he went on with an expression of distaste. "Together with Gustav, they're going to buy the existing government off. Most of its members will do very well out of the deal. But the hook they don't know about is that we're going to be serious about requiring them to obey the law afterward. We may pay them off now and effectively amnesty them for past crimes, but we'll come down on them like the Hammer of God the first time they try to go back to business as usual under new management." He shrugged. "I'm not too sure how I feel about the methodology, but the final outcome is going to be that we get an ally we desperately need, a problem which has been a source of tension between us and the Empire for the last sixty or seventy T-years gets resolved once and for all, and—maybe most important of all—we finally bring an end to a situation which has been costing literally hundreds of thousands of lives every single year in Silesia."

They're going to buy the Confederacy from the existing government, huge lump sum and amnesty for past crimes, but they expect to net a lot of people just by actually watching out for future ones.

"And along the way, we become the Star Empire of Manticore," Honor replied with a troubled expression.

"I don't see that we have any choice," White Haven said. "And what with Trevor's Star and the Talbott Cluster, we're already moving in that direction."

"I suppose so," Honor said pensively. "I guess maybe what worries me the most about it is that it could be seen as validating the Republic's charges that we were already expansionist. That that's the reason High Ridge never had any intention of negotiating with them in good faith for the return of the occupied systems."

Yeah, there are going to be PR problems, but the truth is that Manticore has grown drastically even if they're not looking to add any new dominions to the Star Empire.

"On the other hand, Samantha did have several interesting pithy observations on the thickheadedness of humans in general."

"What sort of observations?" Honor asked.

"Largely on the inevitable differences between a race of empathic telepaths and a race which is 'mind-blind,' " Emily replied in a voice which was suddenly considerably more serious. "In fact," she went on quietly, "one of her most telling comments, I thought, was that by treecat standards, it's insane for two people not to admit what they feel for one another."

-snip-

"I've given it quite a lot of thought, you know," she said, "and I've come to the conclusion, my dears, that treecats are really most remarkably sane individuals. I suspect that if you spent some time talking with them, or possibly even with each other, you might come to the same conclusion."

She smiled at them again, and then her life support chair moved silently back from the table.

"You might want to think about that," she told them as her chair floated towards the door. "But for now, I'm going to bed."

Emily gives her tacit blessing to Honor and Hamish's relationship. Or tells them to get over themselves and get busy, I'm still not entirely positive. But thus closes the book.


Now the next book, At All Costs, is something of a ride. Honor is named commander of the new Eighth Fleet and sent to undertake a series of daring deep-strike raids on Haven to wreck their industry and infrastructure and force them to parcel off more and more of their modern ships from the front, and buy time for Manticore's new construction and R&D projects to come online and save their bacon.

[Batman]

The Trevor's Star terminus of the Manticoran Wormhole Junction lay much closer to the system primary than the Junction itself lay to Manticore-A. Still, there was the better part of three light-hours between it and Trevor's Star itself. Even with the powerful forts which had been built to cover it, the sheer distance between the system's inhabited planet and the terminus had created an almost insuperable difficulty for Admiral Theodosia Kuzak.

Trevor's Star wormhole three light-hours from the sun, Manticore's is further out still. Can it be a Junction with only one wormhole?

Reread. the Junction comment is with regards to the Manticore Wormhole Junction, not the Trevor's Star terminus (which is labelled exactly that).

[Terralthra]

"Descroix?" Honor asked.

"We're not sure," Elizabeth admitted. "She tendered her resignation along with High Ridge, of course. And then, a couple of days later, she headed out to Beowulf on one of the day excursion ships . . . and didn't come back. From the looks of things, there was no foul play involved, unless it was her own. I think she planned on not coming back, although at this point no one has the least idea where she may have headed. All we know for sure it is that she transferred about twenty million dollars through a numbered DNA account on Beowulf to another account in the Stotterman System." The Queen grimaced. "You know what the Stotterman banking laws are like. It's going to take us at least ten or twelve T-years to get access to their records."

Elaine Descroix disappeared with 20 million dollars in embezzled public funds, took a ride to the Solarian League (they run day-trip shuttles to Beowulf) and never came back.

Never came back, because as we find out in the side story, she was working for Spoiler

the Mesans

all along, and as soon as she became a liability, they eliminated her.

Hamish's brother Willie, the Exchequer (Treasurer) under Cromarty is the new Centrist PM. Dame Matsuko is going to be Home Secretary (what about the Medusans and the NPA?) and Anthony Langtry, the senior diplomat to the original treaty-signing with Grayson after Courvosier died will be handling diplomacy from here on out. Looks like the Centrists are back with a vengeance, though I believe Matsuko is a Liberal.

She also goes to become Governor-General of the Talbott Cluster when they're annexed, which seems like it'd be a bit of a demotion from Home Secretary to me.

"I will go as far as acknowledging that Theisman, as an individual, may be an honest and an upright human being. I will certainly acknowledge his personal courage, and his dedication to his own star nation. But the fact remains that the so-called 'Republic of Haven' has cold-bloodedly, systematically lied with a cynical audacity that not even Oscar Saint-Just could have matched. From Pritchart and Giancola on down—including your friend Theisman—without a single voice raised in dissent, their entire government has presented the same distorted, deceitful face to the entire galaxy. They've lied, Honor. Lied to their own people, to our people, and to the Solarian League. God knows that I could sympathize with anyone who was as systematically used and abused as the Peeps were by High Ridge and Descroix! I don't blame them for being angry and wanting revenge. But this 'diplomatic correspondence' they've published—!"

Elizabeth made herself stop and draw another deep breath.

"We have the originals of their correspondence in our own files, Honor. I can show you exactly where they made deletions and alterations—not just in their own notes, but in ours. It's too consistent, too all pervasive, to have been anything but a deliberate plot. Something they spent literally months putting into place to justify the attack they launched against us. They're busy telling the rest of the galaxy that we forced them to do this. That they had no intention of using this new navy they've built up in some sort of war of revenge until we left them no choice. But not even High Ridge did the things they say he did. They invented the entire crisis out of whole cloth. And what that tells me is that Peeps . . . don't . . . change."

This.... is going to be a problem.

Damn it, everyone here is acting reasonably as far they can know, the other side is a pack of vile liars. But good people are warring and dying for no good reason and neither side is likely to call a stop to it soon.

There's more than one reason the book is called War of Honor.

[Ahriman238]

Okay, I was looking for this most of the morning. Weber posted online a chart, like the SVW one, showing the relative fleet strengths as of the war's resumption in 1920.

Legend: active service (reserve)

GSN- Grayson Space Navy. IAN- Imperial Andermani Navy. MA- Manticoran Alliance total ships. RHN- Republic of Haven Navy. RMN- Royal Manticoran Navy.

Classes are familiar; superdreadnought SD, dreadnought DN, carrier CLAC, battleship BB, battlecruiser BC, heavy cruiser CA, light cruiser CL, destroyer DD.

(P) for podlayer, this class has a large rear pay stuffed with missile pods it can kick out the back. (L) for large, these ships are oversized with serious missile defense upgrades and MDM capability.



Class____Grayson_______Andermani______Manticoran_______Alliance_________Haven_________Class


SD_______GSN- 30(60)___IAN- 193(30)___RMN-125(100)____MA-348(190)_____RHN-216(103)___SD

SD(P)_____GSN-115______IAN-42________RMN-75_________MA-232__________RHN-318_______SD(P)

CLAC______GSN-24_______IAN-6________RMN-42_________MA-72___________RHN-48________CLAC

DN________GSN-0________IAN-18(70)___RMN-6___________MA-24(70)_______RHN-47________DN

BC___ ___GSN-32(28)_____IAN-98(12)____RMN-75(125)_____MA-205(165)_____RHN-98(17)_____BC

BC(P)_____GSN-40________IAN-11_______RMN-6__________MA-57___________RHN-0_________BC(P)

BC(L)_____GSN-0_________IAN-0________RMN-1__________MA-1____________RHN-0_________BC(L)

CA_______GSN-60________IAN-80(20)____RMN-115(30)____MA-255(50)_______RHN-80(40)_____CA

CA(L)_____GSN-0_________IAN-0________RMN-3__________MA-0____________RHN-0_________CA(L)

CL_______GSN-40________IAN-80(20)____RMN-217(60)____MA-337(80)_______RHN-110(30)____CL

DD_______GSN-20_______IAN-120(20)____RMN-206(212)___MA-346(232)_____RHN-66(130)____DD


Again parentheses () are reserve/mothball ships.

So adding the Andermani does a lot to keep the Alliance competitive. Some of the figures can be misleading, like the alliance has a lot more carriers but the Haven CLACs carry a lot more LACs. Also note there's exactly one BC(L) the prototype HMS Nike, while the CA(L) designation applies to the Saganami-C cruisers. A couple seem just odd like Grayson having only 20 destroyers and no dreadnoughts. Of the reserve hourglass where everyone has SD reserves and most navies have screen reserves but ships in between are rarer. And in these troubled times no one has recent ships in reserve.

None of this reflects ships in construction, naturally.

[VhenRa]

Most of the Grayson SD reserves are actually Manty SDs the HRG retired... and Grayson bought them and stashed them away.

And Grayson DDs are intended for a slightly different role then everyone elses and Grayson never built any Dreadnoughts. GSN is basically intended to do one thing, fight a to the teeth war. Not the convoy escort, picketing, whatever everyone elses has stacked on.

[Crazedwraith]

Also, does that chart imply that only Grayson, the Andermani and Manticore contribute ships to the alliance? No-one else in it has anything? not even destroyers or light cruisers?

[Terralthra]

Also, does that chart imply that only Grayson, the Andermani and Manticore contribute ships to the alliance? No-one else in it has anything? not even destroyers or light cruisers?

If I recall correctly, by midway through At All Costs, Manticore was encouraging the other Alliance partners to distance themselves from the Alliance and be left out of the war. The realization that strategic depth didn't really do much against the growing deep strike tactics both sides were using meant the RMN was picketing a bunch of systems that didn't particularly contribute to the Alliance navy beyond light units. Erewhon only made ships up to BC size, and Zanzibar less than that.

[Ahriman238]

Also, does that chart imply that only Grayson, the Andermani and Manticore contribute ships to the alliance? No-one else in it has anything? not even destroyers or light cruisers?

Most of the member worlds like Alizon and Zanzibar aren't that much better off than Grayson started out, without a huge corps of dedicated spacers. So a few destroyers and light cruisers for a navy, which mostly stay home, since the idea was they would get protection from Manticore in exchange for providing forward bases. Grayson and Erewhon were pretty much the only members of the original alliance that weren't a net drain on hulls.

Zanzibar actually got a serious shipyard up and running to give them BC and capital ships, just in time for Icarus to blast those yards into dust. And they did provide some screen for Eighth Fleet, the only way to since Manticore was so late and short with ships up until they started the new model podnoughts and CLACs.

So in general the other Alliance members will have something like a small system defense force but will contribute meaningfully to the war effort. In terms of ships, anyway, economic support may make a difference though to be honest Manticore's economy dwarfs the combined eight of the other alliance members.

[Simon_Jester]

A couple seem just odd like Grayson having only 20 destroyers and no dreadnoughts.

Grayson deliberately built up a force capable of fighting fleet battles and, frankly, not a lot else. Their screening forces are very minimalist, and they didn't see much need for masses of destroyer-weight combatant, probably because they seldom expect to fight anything a destroyer is "enough ship" to kill. Whereas Manticore spends a lot of time fighting pirates and third-rate crud-navies, so destroyers are "enough ship" for many of their missions.

And they have no dreadnoughts because they only actually designed like four classes of capital ships, during a war when it was clear that ship tonnage was trending upwards. The reason people build dreadnoughts (post-1850 PD) is that they want something almost as survivable as a 'real' capital ship of maximum possible tonnage... but they want to save money by making it 10-20% smaller than the maximum possible.

Grayson never had an incentive to save money that way.

Of the reserve hourglass where everyone has SD reserves and most navies have screen reserves but ships in between are rarer. And in these troubled times no one has recent ships in reserve.

The older capital ships went into reserve because of the staggering expense of maintaining them. The older screening ships went into reserve because steady serial production of new screen combatants is still ongoing during the interwar period: Janacek didn't actually stop building destroyers and cruisers, he just slowed construction to a trickle.

Also, the only reason those older ships stayed in service during the war was because they could go beat up pirates while more modern ships screened the battlefleet. With the war over, the battlefleet's screen can be detached to replace the antipiracy patrols, while the ships that used to be patrolling go into mothballs. Therefore, mothballing the older light ships made a fair amount of sense- again, saves on manpower, and allows you to ensure that the ships you do keep operational are as powerful and capable as possible.

I actually think that had the war dragged on, Haven would have eventually been victorious. After they got hold of Manty tech from Erewhon, combined with their own innovations and a shipbuilding capability that massively outstripped Manticores, they'd have pulled it off even with the technological tricks that the Manties pull out later on (Apollo). The tech edge Manticore had isn't as extreme anymore, and the qualitative deficiency that once plagued the Havenite Navy no longer exists.

I'm not so sure. If nothing else, Haven's morale probably couldn't stand a whole new round of Buttercup-level curbstomps thanks to Apollo. Without it, though, I expect you're right.

Yes. Apollo represents a breakthrough in combat performance comparable to the advantage gained by Ghost Rider and the MDM in the first place, because it makes even extreme-range missile combat far, far more lethal than it used to be.

Arguably, by itself the MDM was an incomplete weapon system- powerful but unreliable. Apollo's 64-fold upgrade in fire control capability makes it a complete system, and a vastly more dangerous one.

And since so far as we know, Haven had no means of countering Apollo on short notice... yeah.

Now, if it hadn't been for Apollo the situation would have been different. Haven was approaching the level of numerical superiority needed to just go straight for Manticore and punch them out of the war; we saw that at the Battle of Manticore. Granted, RMN building levels were speeding up too, but I think Haven was on the way to winning.

---

But the Janacek Admiralty has better uses for LACs then putting them on the frontier.

To be fair, their current defensive strategy requires them to produce thousands upon thousands of LACs. And unlike the capital ships, there's no such thing as a partly-built LAC that can be 'mothballed' and finished later; once you shut down a LAC production line, there's going to be a considerable delay starting it up again.

So I can see the logic in shorting the carrier LAC wings in order to make sure that systems like Tequila have their full complements. If Maitland is missing a few LAC squadrons it makes only a few-percent difference in his overall combat potential; if a system defense force like Tequila's is missing a few LAC squadrons it's more like ten percent of his combat potential.

Roland Maitland is a man with a plan for saving Maastricht. It's a good plan, making the best use of his resources, holding fire until he has to for best accuracy and timing the missiles to arrive just ahead of the LACs. The only problem is it hinges on the idea that Haven missiles outrange ONI's most pessimistic guesses by 25%, i.e. no Havenite MDMs.

Right. It seems like once people put in the effort, it's possible to crank up extreme missile ranges on a single drive to about... ten, twelve, maybe fifteen million kilometers but that is really pushing it.

A number of older SDs have been retrofitted with the enormous launchers for off-bore MDMs, the real capital ship sized ones...

I was honestly surprised to read that; I could have sworn that the RMN hadn't refitted any of the pre-podlayer capital ships to fire MDMs from onboard tubes at all.

Problem being they can't come close to matching the throw weight of podnoughts, but at least they can shoot back which Peep ships had an awful hard time with during Buttercup. Manty single-drive missile ranges of 6 million klicks, less than a tenth MDM range.

Well... more like an eighth, but yeah.

Also, that's the bog-standard single-drive missiles from before the range increases began; an extreme-range single drive variant should be able to better that. But with MDMs available, Manticore might not have bothered to develop and deploy an extended range single drive capital missile.

Also, a typical pre-pod SD should be able to manage something like 1/2 or 1/3 the sustained rate of fire of a podlayer. A fully upgraded non-podlayer capital ship would still be a serious threat... the problem is that the cost of upgrading them to use the latest EW systems and to fire the new missiles is so high that it makes more sense to build a whole new ship that can lay pods.

Maitland gets on SD kill, one BC and damaged 2 SDs and multiple BCs. His command is essentially wiped out.

Yeah... at that rate Manticore would lose the war pretty fast.

Of course, that's what you get when you can concentrate eight capital ships against four, with broadly comparable technical capability that the enemy doesn't even know you have.

Previously, the Peeps responded to their missile's lack of sophistication by building bigger pods with more missiles, but MDM sizes seem to have inspired them to cut down on birds per pod.

A pod designed to be towed behind a normal ship can be about as big as you want. A pod designed to be launched from an SD(P) has to be big enough to fit through the back door, along with 3-5 of its fellows. Since Haven can't build a practical SD(P) hull much bigger than the ones Manticore has, it can't make its SD(P)-launched pods much bigger than Manticore's are... which means accepting fewer, bigger missiles per pod if that's the only way to make sure the SD(P) force gets a three-stage missile.

Admiral Chog and the glanced over battle for Thetis, at least the losses. Manticore loses 2 SD, 4 CA, and over 200 LACs. Haven lost 1 CA and 70 LACs, and took the system easily.

Jesus. How'd that happen?
Haven's economy is larger, it's population greater, and it's capacity to replace losses much faster and on a larger scale. Even without the technological windfall from Erewhon they could have done it. It would have been grueling and bloody, but Haven almost certainly could have ground Manticore down by sheer weight.[/quote]

Continuing with Thunderbolt, the 'what-number-are-we-up-to-th Trevor's Star...'

Fourth, by my count, if you look at the system's whole history. The Manticoran war with Trevor's Star in the 17th/18th century PD, Haven's conquest of the system around 1870 PD, White Haven's capture of the system from McQueen around 1910 PD, and now this.

Nobody could ever accuse White Haven of being slow on the uptake. Deployment of Manty SD(P)s. 48 at Trevor's Star (which has a hundred wallers all told, almost a third the pre-war wall of battle) 16 at Manticore itself with Home Fleet, 6 with Honor at Sidemore, and 4 down for repair/maintenance.

Ahem. These are the new, courtesy-of-High-Ridge six-ship squadrons. That's 50 (two down for maintenance) at Trevor's Star, twelve at Manticore, six at Sidemore and six at Grendlesbane. Plus four in drydock. Total of 78 SD(P)s. Which is how punching out fifty of them becomes 'two thirds' of the modern wall of battle.

Of course, the first time I read this it reminded me most of a scene from a different SF series, Heir to the Empire.

Hm? Which scene?

"CIC makes it over eighty of the wall, Sir," Tatnall announced a moment later, as if he couldn't quite believe the numbers himself. "Uh, they say that's a minimal estimate," he added.

So yeah. Giscard has... consulting the Honorverse wiki, roughly 100 of the wall, an indefinite number of them SD(P)s, and an unknown number of carriers. Assuming that Giscard got the typical ratio of modern to pre-podlayer capital ships, he probably has, oh... at least fifty but more likely 60-70 SD(P)s.

Kuzak had 46 SD(P)s, 51 pre-podlayers, and an indefinite number of carriers.

McDonnell and White Haven had forty SD(P)s and eight or more carriers.

Hard to blame Giscard for NOT pressing the attack. All told, he's outnumbered badly in capital ships, and most likely outnumbered in SD(P)s in particular.

On the other hand, in hindsight it would probably have been smarter to keep Tourville at home and send him to Trevor's Star. Counting each pre-podlayer SD as worth one third of an SD(P), which is probably generous...

Honor's RMN task force has six SD(P)s and 24 SDs, not counting the Protector's Own. That's equivalent to fourteen of the wall, unexpectedly reinforced by another twelve in the form of the Protector's Own. By contrast, Tourville brought 12 SD(P)s and 34 SDs, roughly equivalent to twenty-three of the wall. At the point of contact, he had in effect a numerical superiority of 23:14, roughly 8:5, over the force he expected to fight.

Thing is, 8:5 odds really aren't that great for an offensive, especially when you have a technological disadvantage. The very successful offensives at Maastricht and Thetis and Grendelsbane seem to have been prosecuted at more like 2:1 or better odds, when we discount the gross inferiority of the pre-podlayer designs.

Giscard, on the other hand, had... about eighty of the wall (using the 3 SDs equals one SD(P) comparison), while Kuzak had 46+17 is 63. So his numerical advantage is roughly 4:3, which is actually not good at all. Even given the force Giscard expected to run into at Trevor's Star, his force was about the minimum that could possibly have been sent there with a real hope of victory, and the most likely outcome would still be an indecisive, attritional battle. Of course, such a battle of attrition would arguably be to Haven's advantage, but still...

Basically, my conclusion is that it would have been a lot smarter to keep Tourville closer to home, bringing Giscard's effective strength up to about 100 of the (modern) wall, which would give him a much more decisive edge over Kuzak's Third Fleet.

If Thunderbolt had gone according to plan (i.e. if the Graysons stayed home), sure, Honor would have gotten away clean and her six modern ships would be untouched... but on the other hand, there would be a much better chance of bagging the forty-plus modern ships at Trevor's Star, with fewer Havenite losses in the process.

If Thunderbolt had NOT gone according to plan, as actually happened in the novel... well, Tourville wouldn't have wound up sticking his hand in a meat-grinder. Either his ships would have been totally unharmed when Giscard decided "uh, yeah, let's not do this," or at least Second Fleet would have known what it was getting into and been able to fight a battle at roughly equal odds at Trevor's Star.

AN interesting "alternate Thunderbolt" would have been if Theisman and friends had concentrated ruthlessly on wiping out the RMN's modern wall of battle, rather than parceling out penny-packet forces to recapture the many occupied star systems. Sending eight SD(P)s to go beat up on Maitland's three pre-podlayers is arguably a big waste of their time when they're needed at Trevor's Star.

It's hard to estimate exactly how many SD(P)s Haven committed to Thunderbolt, but if they had ALL been sent to Grendelsbane (to wipe out as much as possible of the new modern RMN construction) and Trevor's Star (there to fight a battle if at all possible, as long as the exchange rate is likely to be reasonable), while largely ignoring the occupied systems in the opening round of the war... things might have gone very differently, even given the intervention of the Graysons.

Then the second phase of Thunderbolt would involve taking stock of how many remaining modern ships Haven had and using them to snap up occupied star systems more or less at will, with the RMN's own modern wall of battle having been effectively neutered by losing all but eighteen of their SD(P)s.

Even if Giscard had been beaten, the war would have taken a very, very different tenor.

If the Committee of Public Safety had still been in power, the decision ultimately wouldn't have been his. It would have belonged to his people's commissioner, and if he'd dared to argue about it he would have found himself shot for his temerity. But the Republic had no commissioners, and he drew a deep breath and committed himself to the decision no admiral of the People's Navy would ever have dared to make.

Of course, if the Committee were still in charge, the decision would have been Pritchart's, and it's not like she's going to order her boyfriend shot for declining battle at unfavorable odds.

Tradition mandates a face-to-face meeting with the monarch over matters like this. Which doesn't stop High Ridge from trying to weasel out. I thought you liked all the pomp and pageantry.

He likes it when he gets to be the center of attention and people are paying him, or at least his buddies, homage. When it requires him to keep a stiff upper lip while admitting to a humiliating total failure on his part, not so much...

Honor knew that Mercedes still thought that her own insistence that they operate on the assumption that the Republic's new SD(P)s' missiles could match the full range of their own MDMs was unduly pessimistic. On the other hand, Honor would far rather find out that she had, in fact, been overly pessimistic than suddenly find herself under fire at a range which she had assumed would give her ships immunity from attack.

Honor's a bit of a pessimist, also a realist.

To be fair, if she's expecting the first Havenite missile salvo, and running a continuously updated tracking plot so that she can launch her own salvo whenever she wants, it doesn't really cost her very much to let the Havenites shoot first at a range of their choosing.

What's disastrous is NOT being prepared to open fire when the enemy opens fire, because you were expecting to have many more minutes for the enemy to get closer to you before you launch.

Honor's Plan Suraigo. The Protector's Own were hiding in hyper, maneuvering behind the attackers and awaiting only Honor's signal that the enemy was committed and couldn't escape action, relayed through the Borderer to pop out in flanking position.

"Surigao," I think, a reference to the Battle of Surigao Straits, a 1944 naval battle between the US and Japan.

Crazy ranges, of course that gives you 7 minutes to knock down the incoming salvos.

In theory yes... except that countermissiles are still just about as short-ranged as they were before the war. Not quite as bad but still sharply shorter-ranged than even a single drive missile. Therefore you spend a lot of time watching the incoming and trying to brace for it, while the missile ECM becomes even more important because you do NOT want the enemy having five minutes to size up your missiles and lock onto them with missile defense before they even get within firing range.

Tourville's Second Fleet strength 43 SD (podnoughts an unknown percentage) 8 CLAC, 11 DN, 42 BC.

Twelve of them are SD(P)s. Also, again with the idiotic counting of battlecruisers as capital ships. I can see the logic of it with a BC(P) or BC(L) (a la the newest Nike), because those are at least fit to handle a pre-podlayer dreadnought in combat. But purely conventional battlecruisers with single drive missiles and (in the RMN's case) strictly limited missile defense capability... no. They are NOT capital ships, no number of them can ever really substitute for having a capital ship.

Counter missile ranges, 2 million effective for Manticore, meaning likely to score hits. 1.5 million maximum for Haven.

Note that a big part of the limiting factor on countermissile range is that their drives burn out insanely quickly. You know how you have to cut the endurance by a factor of three to double the acceleration? Countermissiles take it even farther out onto the bleeding edge, and I'd expect that their drive endurance is something like 40-50 seconds. In which case, yeah, they just physically can't get more than 1.5 to two million kilometers from the ship before running out of gas. And a countermissile is useless if it goes ballistic.

Bingo! Targeting the unknowns first, since they know older ships are so much grist for the mill when they get around to them.

Assuming the Havenites haven't also refitted their older SDs to fire MDMs... but even then, Honor has like eighteen SD(P)s, so she can handle Second Fleet's pre-podlayer force.

That may be subject to change. For now, no direct target data from recon platforms to missiles, but they give her great intel on the effect her fire is having.

The missiles are fast-moving targets and recon platforms probably lack the means to track them and beam communications signals to (thousands of) missiles. Whereas Honor's ships are maintaining constant communication with both the missiles and the ships.

Honor's casualties, though really both sides have done wonders for improving survivability against supermassive missile swarms.

One note; I didn't get much sense for what the LACs were doing in this battle, or a lot of subsequent battles...

When the news came in about Grendelsbane and just how much he'd screwed over his country, Janacek wrapped his lips around a pulser and pulled the trigger.

My own feeling is that Janacek at least meets an essential floor of minimum worthiness. He's a bad admiral, he makes a tremendous number of bad decisions with disastrous cumulative effects. But at every step he was sincerely trying to do the things he thought sensible, and at no time did he do anything he thought would seriously compromise his nation's ability to defend itself.

He was wrong, and stupid, and should probably never have made post-captain let alone First Lord of the Admiralty. But to me he earns at least a smidgen of respect, not least for having a sense of actual shame he proves unable to live with when he realizes how badly he's screwed up.

"Actually," Elizabeth said much more seriously, "it was a hard call to make. God knows that taking Hamish out of a fleet command position at a time like this wasn't anything that I wanted to do. But it would be impossible to exaggerate the gravity of the wreckage Janacek left behind." She shook her head, her eyes now completely grim. "That son-of-a-bitch is damned lucky he committed suicide before I got my hands on him. I could probably have made a case for treason out of the way he mishandled his responsibilities and duties...

And see, I disagree with this. He screwed up, but we spend enough time inside his head to know that he actually believes his stupidity will work.

Jurgensen knew perfectly well that he was lying to his bosses when he was specifically charged with finding them accurate information. Janacek at least wasn't actively trying to undermine his own job description.

This.... is going to be a problem.

Damn it, everyone here is acting reasonably as far they can know, the other side is a pack of vile liars. But good people are warring and dying for no good reason and neither side is likely to call a stop to it soon.

I don't think it'd be stoppable at all if it weren't for the fact that there's now telepaths who can talk to people in the Honorverse.

Ring around the rosy and we're right back where we started again. Except that space combat is deadlier than ever.

On the bright side, holding Trevor's Star is a huge advantage, and most of the ships Haven blew up were older types. The real damage was done at Grendelsbane, because what really counts is production and deployment of modern capital ships.

They're going to draw a line down the middle of Silesia, Manticore shall annex half and the Andermani can police their half. Because arbitrarily redrawing maps with zero input from the people effected has always worked so well in the past.

Yyeaah.

Of course, part of the reason this is an issue is that Silesia has not had a meaningful interstellar government in at least 300 years, and what they do have just actively promotes piracy and corruption. So imposing external federal government might not work out so badly as long as that government governs lightly and respects local autonomy. It might not even be noticeable.

"And if the Confederacy government objects to being partitioned between two foreign powers?" Honor demanded.

"You've been to Silesia more than most of our officers," White Haven said. "Do you really think the average Silly wouldn't actively prefer to be a Manticoran subject?"

Honor started to reply quickly, then stopped. He had a point. All the average Silesian really wanted was safety, order, and a government that actually considered her wishes and well-being rather than seeing her as one more potential source of graft and corruption.

That said, perhaps you shouldn't start by making their choices for them.

Yeah, note that it's Manticorans saying the Silesians will be happy under benevolent Manticoran rule, not Silesians. They may be influenced/flattered by the outcome of the vote taken in the Talbott Cluster, though.

She [Dame Matsuko] also goes to become Governor-General of the Talbott Cluster when they're annexed, which seems like it'd be a bit of a demotion from Home Secretary to me.

Yeah, but it's a highly responsible position, and involves directly administering the government of most of the Star Empire's new possessions.

[Ahriman238]

On to At All Costs, Book 11 of the series. Year 1920 PD in-universe.

One reason everyone knows this book is, quite simply, Honor was supposed to die at the end, and did in the original draft. Weber wanted to pick up the story with Honor's child (also in this book) some twenty-odd years later dealing with the Mesans and the Solarian League, but he couldn't do it. It's obvious when she was supposed to die, and when he changed it he left all the references to her age, to death, to children and especially this book, David and the Phoenix.

The big Aviary-class CLACs and their escorting battlecruisers crossed the Alpha wall into normal-space just outside the hyper limit. There were only three of the superdreadnought-sized vessels, but their LAC bays spat out almost six hundred light attack craft, and if the Republic of Haven's Cimeterre-class LACs were shorter-legged, more lightly armed, and nowhere near so capable as the Star Kingdom of Manticore's Shrikes and Ferrets, they were more than adequate for their current assignment.

They accelerated in-system, building vectors towards the industrial infrastructure of the Alizon System, and discovered an unanticipated bit of good fortune. A pair of lumbering freighters, both squawking Manticoran IDs and bumbling along on the same general flight plan, found themselves squarely in the path of the incoming storm and already within extreme missile range.

Haven hitting Alizon with 3 carriers, BC escort and presumed screen. Now we have just under 200 LACs to a carrier.

"Manticoran freighters, this is Captain Javits of the Republican Navy," a harsh, Haven-accented voice said over the civilian guard frequency. "You are instructed to kill your impellers and abandon ship immediately. Under the terms of applicable interstellar law, I formally inform you that we do not have the capacity to board and search your vessels or to take them as prizes. Therefore, I will open fire upon them and destroy them in twenty standard minutes from . . . now. Get your people off immediately. Javits, clear."

One of the two freighters killed her impellers immediately. The other skipper was more stubborn. He continued to accelerate, as if he thought he might somehow still save his ship, but he wasn't an idiot, either. It took him all of five minutes to realize—or, at least, to accept—that he had no chance, and his impellers, too, went abruptly cold.

Shuttles spilled from the two merchant ships, scuttling away from them at their maximum acceleration as if they expected the Havenite LACs to open fire upon them. But the Republic hewed scrupulously to the requirements of interstellar law. Its warships meticulously waited out the time limit Javits had stipulated, then, precisely on the tick, launched a single pair of missiles at each drifting freighter.

The law regarding enemy freighters you can't board or take as a prize. Haven is very careful to stick to the letter of the law and give the crews time to evacuate.

The Cimeterres sped onward, ignoring the dissipating balls of plasma which had once been somewhere in the vicinity of eight million tons of merchant shipping. Their destruction, after all, was a mere sideshow. Ahead of the Havenite units, a half-dozen destroyers and a division of RMN Star Knight-class CAs accelerated to meet them. The range was still too long for the Cimeterres to actually see the defenders, but the remote reconnaissance platforms spreading out ahead of the LACs were another matter, and Captain Bertrand Javits grimaced as he took note of the drones' relayed report of the defenders' acceleration rates.

-snip-

"All Wolverines, this is Wolverine One. From their acceleration rate, it looks like they've got to be towing pods. And from the fact that there's so few of them, I have to assume Intelligence is right about their defensive stance. So instead of walking obligingly into the inner system, we're shifting to Sierra Three. We'll change course at Point Victor-Able on my command in another forty-five minutes. Review your Sierra Three targeting queues and stand by for a defensive missile engagement. Wolverine One, clear."

The defenders, half a squadron of Star Knights and 6 tin cans covering a "surprise" in-system. Pod-heavy.

"Looks like we've got four main nets of platforms on this side of the primary, Skipper," his XO said finally. "Two of them spread to cover the ecliptic, and one high and one low. Gives them pretty fair coverage of the entire sphere of the limit, but they're obviously concentrating on the ecliptic."

Large nets of pods and fire-control systems. Much cheaper than large pickets, hopefully nearly as good a deterrent.

The missiles streaked outward at well over forty thousand gravities. Even at that stupendous rate of acceleration, it would take them the next best thing to nine minutes to reach his ships, and his missile defense crews began to track the incoming threat. It was hard—Manty ECM had always been hellishly good, and it had gotten even better since the last war—but Admiral Foraker's teams at Bolthole had compensated for that as much as they could. The Cimeterres' point defense and EW weren't in the same league as Manty LACs' systems, but they were much better than any previous Havenite LAC had ever possessed, and the extreme range worked in their favor.

At least three-quarters of the total Manticoran launch simply lost lock and wandered off course. The recon platforms reported the sudden spiteful flashes as the lost missiles detonated early, before they could become a threat to navigation here in the system. But the rest of the pursuing missiles continued to charge after his units.

"Approximately nine hundred still inbound," Lieutenant Cook announced in a voice which struck Javits as entirely too calm. "Allocating outer zone counter-missiles."

MDMs moving at what was pretty much standard missile accel at the start of the series, thus presumably going for drive endurance. And the problem with MDMs firing at the edge oftheir range, as 75% of their salvo simply gets lost. To compensate, there are 900 missiles in the remaining quarter. Damn MDM missile combat must be expensive, I'm thinking these things are a lot more than the million dollars a pop missiles were at the start of the series.

Admiral Foraker's staff, and especially Captain Clapp, her resident LAC tactical genius, had worked long and hard to develop improved missile defense doctrine for the Cimeterres, especially because of their small size and the technological imbalance between their capabilities and those of their opponents. They'd come up with a variant on the "layered defense" Admiral Foraker had devised for the wall of battle, a doctrine which relied less on sophistication than on sheer numbers and recognized that counter-missiles were far less expensive than LACs full of trained Navy personnel.

Now Javits watched the first waves of counter-missiles sweeping towards the incoming Manticoran fire. EW platforms seeded throughout the MDMs came on-line, using huge bursts of jamming in efforts to blind the counter-missiles' seekers. Other platforms produced entire shoals of false images, saturating the LACs' tracking systems with threats. But that had been accepted when the missile defense doctrine was evolved, and in some ways, the very inferiority of Havenite technology worked for Javits at this moment. His counter-missiles' onboard seekers were almost too simpleminded to be properly confused. They could "see" only the very strongest of targeting sources at the best of times, and they had been launched in such huge numbers that they could afford to waste much of their effort killing harmless decoys.

A second, almost equally heavy wave of counter-missiles followed the first one. Again, a Manticoran fleet wouldn't have fired the salvos that closely together. They would have waited, lest the second wave's impeller wedges interrupt their telemetry control links to the first wave's CMs. But Javits' crews knew that at this range, the relatively less capable onboard fire control systems of their LACs had nowhere near the reach and sensitivity of their Manticoran counterparts, anyway. Which didn't even consider the effectiveness of the Manty missiles' penetration aids and EW. Since they could barely see the damned things in the first place, they were giving up far less in terms of enhanced accuracy than a Manticoran formation would have sacrificed, and the larger number of counter-missiles they were putting into space more than compensated for any target discrimination they lost.

The Cimeterres' own EW did what it could, as well. The first-wave counter-missiles took out over three hundred of the Manticoran missiles. The second wave killed another two hundred. Perhaps another hundred fell prey to the LACs' electronic warfare systems, lost lock, and went wandering harmlessly astray. Another fifty or sixty lost lock initially, but managed to reacquire their targets or to find new ones, yet their need to quest for fresh victims delayed them, kicked them slightly behind the rest of the stream to make them easier point defense targets.

The third and final wave of counter-missiles killed over a hundred more of the incoming missiles, but over two hundred, in what were now effectively two slightly staggered salvos, burst through the inner counter-missile zone and charged down upon Javits' LACs.

600 Havenite LACs, through superior missile defense doctrine and careful cooperation destroy 600 incoming MDMs, and sucker a further hundred off-course.

More explosions speckled space as Cimeterres' fusion bottles failed. Almost three dozen of Javits' LACs were destroyed outright. Another four survived long enough for their remaining crewpeople to abandon ship.

And really, for taking two hundred missiles, that's pretty light, mostly because LACs can do a really good snap-roll to interpose the wedge.

He switched channels again, back to the civilian guard frequency.

"Alizon System Central, this is Captain Javits. I will be bringing your Tregarth Alpha facilities into my extreme missile range in twenty-seven minutes from . . . now. My vector will make it impossible for me to match velocity with the facilities or send across boarding parties, and I hereby inform you that I will open fire on them, and on any extraction vessels within my missile envelope, in twenty-nine minutes."

Destroying asteroid mining at Alizon.

"Our best estimate from the recon platforms' data is that Captain Javits' raid destroyed about eight percent—probably a little less—of Alizon's total resource extraction capability, Madam President," Rear Admiral Victor Lewis, Director of Operational Research replied. Thanks to venerable traditions of uncertain origin, Naval Intelligence reported to Op Research, which, in turn, reported to Vice Admiral Linda Trenis' Bureau of Planning.

Discussing the Alizon raid, looks like they destroyed almost 8% of Alizon's bustling mining industry.

"And was that an acceptable return in light of our own losses?" the President asked.

"Yes," another voice said, and the President looked at the stocky, brown-haired admiral at the head of the table who'd spoken. Admiral Thomas Theisman, Secretary of War and Chief of Naval Operations, looked back at her steadily. "We lost about a third of the people we'd have lost aboard a single old-style cruiser, Madam President," he continued, speaking very formally in the presence of their subordinates. "In return, we confirmed NavInt's estimate of the system-defense doctrine the Manties appear to be adopting and acquired additional information on their fire control systems and current pod deployment patterns; destroyed eight million tons of hyper-capable merchant shipping, better than five times the combined tonnage of all the LACs Javits lost; and put a small but significant dent into the productivity of Alizon. More to the point, we hit one of the Manticoran Alliance's member's home system for what everyone will recognize as negligible losses, and this isn't the first time Alizon's been hit. That has to have an effect on the entire Alliance's morale, and it's almost certain to increase the pressure on the White Haven Admiralty to detach additional picket forces to cover the Star Kingdom's allies against similar attacks."

Theisman, at least, feels like it was worth the sacrifices made.

"'Confident' is a slippery word. You know I was never happy about going back to war against the Manties." He raised one hand in a placating gesture. "I understand your logic, and I can't disagree with it. Besides, you're the President. But I have to admit that I never liked the idea. And that Thunderbolt's success has exceeded my own expectations. So far, at least."

"Even after what happened—or didn't happen—at Trevor's Star?"

"Javier made the right decision on the basis of everything we knew," Theisman said firmly. "None of us fully appreciated just how tough Shannon's 'layered defense' was going to be against long-range Manticoran missile fire. If we'd been able to project probable losses during the approach phase as accurately then as we could now, then, yes, he should have gone ahead and pressed the attack. But he didn't know that at the time any more than the rest of us did."

In hindsight, it seems likely that Giscard's forces at Trevor's Star could have engaged and maybe carried the day, at least achieving their objective. But hindsight is overrated, as the man on the spot he made the call and Theisman's not going to second guess him.

"Manpower's going to be a problem for about the next seven months. After that, the training programs Linda and Shannon have in place should be producing most of the personnel we need. And a few months after that, we'll begin steadily mothballing the old-style wallers to crew the new construction as it comes out of the yards. We're still going to be stretched to come up with the officers we need—especially flag officers with experience—but we were able to build up a solid base between the Saint-Just cease-fire and Thunderbolt. I think we'll be all right on that side, too.

"As far as the industrial side goes, I realize the economic strain of our present building plans is going to be heavy. Rachel Hanriot's made that clear enough on behalf of Treasury, but I didn't need her to tell me, and I deeply regret having to impose it. Especially given the high price we've all paid to start turning the economy around. But we don't have a lot of choice, unless we end up successfully negotiating a peace settlement."

Finally how in war everyone is scrambling because they don't have enough warm bodies, enough experienced officers, enough hulls, enough time. Haven no less than Manticore, for all they're starting with a pretty good edge in numbers.

"I don't know where we are on that," she admitted, manifestly unhappily. "I'd have thought even Elizabeth Winton would be willing to sit down and talk after you, Javier, and the rest of the Navy finished kicking her navy's ass so thoroughly! So far, though, nothing. I'm becoming more and more convinced that Arnold's been right about the Manties' new taste for imperialism from the very beginning . . . damn him."

Well that's one lesson you might take from this.

"But in this case, yes, I do believe we can defeat the Star Kingdom and its allies if we have to. I really need to take you out to Bolthole to actually see what we're doing there, and discuss everything Shannon Foraker is up to. The short version, though, is that we hurt the Manties badly in Thunderbolt. Not just in the ships we destroyed, but in the unfinished construction Admiral Griffith took out at Grendels-bane. We gutted their entire second-generation podnought building program, Eloise. They're basically having to lay down new vessels from scratch, and while their building rates are still faster than ours are, even at Bolthole, they aren't fast enough to offset the jump we've gotten in ships already under construction and nearing completion. Our technology still isn't as good as theirs is, but the tech information Erewhon handed over, and the sensor data we recorded during Thunderbolt—plus the captured hardware we've been able to take apart and examine—is helping a lot in that regard, as well."

They're equalizing the tech-edge and they are way, way ahead of Manticore in building more modern ships.

Pritchart nodded. The Republic's treaty with the Republic of Erewhon was one of mutual defense, and her administration had very carefully informed Erewhon—and the Manticorans—that since Haven had elected to resume open hostilities without being physically attacked by Manticore, she had no intention of attempting to invoke the military terms of the treaty.

Erewhon has give over technology, but Haven has made it clear they aren't actually expected to take up arms against Manticore, not when Haven started the shooting this time around.

"In addition, we captured examples of a lot of their hardware. Their security protocols worked damned effectively on most of their classified mollycircs, and quite a bit of what we did get we can't really use yet. Shannon says it's a case of basic differences in the capabilities of our infrastructure. For all intents and purposes, we've got to build the tools, to build the tools, to build the tools we need to reproduce a lot of Manticore's cutting edge technology. But we've still picked up a lot, and, frankly, our starting point was so far behind theirs that our relative capabilities are climbing more rapidly than theirs are.

They're getting there, even if they need to build a lot of infrastructure to let them build the things they'll need to build latest-gen Manty hardware. They have a map, a plan. They also can't yet crack security on captured computers.

"The upshot is that Shannon's already working out new doctrine and some new pieces of hardware, especially in the LAC programs and our system-defense control systems, based on the combination of our information from Erewhon, examination of captured and wrecked Manticoran hardware, and analysis of operations to date. At the beginning of Thunderbolt, we'd estimated that one of our pod superdreadnoughts probably had about forty percent as much combat power as a Manticoran or Grayson SD(P). That estimate looks like it was fairly accurate at the time, but I believe we're steadily moving the ratio in our favor."

Ok, say as of a Thunderbolt a Haven podnought is worth 40% of a Manty one. That would explain a lot of the numerical disparity in the forces jumping occupied systems. Also goes on to show that Giscard absolutely did the right thing given what he knew at the time.

"As I say, we'd estimated pre-Thunderbolt that each of their modern wallers was about twice as combat-effective as one of ours. On the basis of changes we've already made in doctrine and tactics, and allowing for how much more capable our missile defenses turned out to be, we've upped that estimate to set one of their SD(P)s as equal to about one and a half of our podnoughts. On the basis of the current rate of change in our basic capabilities, within another eight months or a year, the ratio should drop from its original two-to-one to about one-point-three-to-one. Given the difference in the numbers of ships of the wall we can anticipate commissioning over the next T-year and a half or so, and especially bearing in mind how much more strategic depth we have, that equates to a solid military superiority on our part."

The margin now and the projected margin in a year.

"But the bottom line, Eloise, is that they simply can't match or overcome our building edge over the next two T-years or so. Even then, the sheer numbers of hulls we can lay down and man—assuming the economy holds—should be great enough to allow us to more than maintain parity in newly commissioned units. But for those two years, at a bare minimum, they simply won't have the platforms to mount whatever new weapons or defenses they introduce. And one thing both we and the Manties learned the last time around is that strategic hesitation is deadly."

-snip-

"If we can't achieve our war objectives and an acceptable peace before our advantage in combat power erodes out from under us, then it's time for us to use that advantage while we still have it and force them to admit defeat. Even if that requires us to dictate peace terms in Mount Royal Palace on Manticore itself."

No dummy, Theisman knows Manticore will be looking for a new weapon to pull out their hats, but it doesn't matter. They're winning the shipbuilding game easily and if they can just end this in the next year or two, Manticore won't have time or the opportunity to save itself with wunderwaffen.

"In that case," Honor said, and crossed to the old-fashioned bookcase between the two window seats on the nursery's eastern wall. Nimitz shifted his weight for balance on her shoulder as she leaned forward slightly, running a fingertip across the spines of the archaic books to the one she wanted, and took it from the shelf. That book was at least twice her own age, a gift from her to the Mayhew children, as the copy of it on her own shelf at home had been a gift from her Uncle Jacques when she was a child. Of course, the story itself was far older even than that. She had two electronic copies of it as well—including one with the original Raysor illustrations—but there was something especially right about having it in printed form, and somehow it just kept turning up periodically in the small, specialty press houses that catered to people like her uncle and his SCA friends.

She crossed to the reclining armchair, as old-fashioned and anachronistic as the printed book in her hands itself, and Nimitz leapt lightly from her shoulder to the top of the padded chair back. He sank his claws into the upholstery, arranging himself comfortably, as Honor settled into the chair which had sat in the Mayhew nursery—reupholstered and even rebuilt at need—for almost seven hundred T-years.

Honor reading a bedtime story (David the Phoenix) to Mayhew's children. With anachronistic hardcopy book. By now Honor would be... 61?

"Honor," Benjamin said gently, "Howard is ninety-two years old, and he's touched a lot of lives in that much time—-including mine. If everyone who 'ought to be there' really were there, there'd be no room for the patients. And he's been in the coma for almost three days now. If you were there, and if he knew you were there, he'd read you the riot act for neglecting everything else you ought to be doing."

Speaking of age, Howard Clinkscales is in a coma, slowly dying.

She stopped and shook her head with a slight grimace, and he nodded understandingly. But he didn't really understand, not completely, she thought. Despite the changes which had come to Grayson, his own thought processes and attitudes had been evolved in a pre-prolong society. To him, Howard Clinkscales was old; for Honor, Howard should have been less than middle-aged. Her own mother, who looked considerably younger than Katherine Mayhew, or even Elaine, and who'd carried Faith and James to term naturally, was twelve T-years years older than Howard. And if he was the first of her Grayson friends she was losing to old age so preposterously young, he wouldn't be the last. Gregory Paxton's health was failing steadily, as well. And even Benjamin and his wives showed the signs of premature aging she'd come to dread.

One problem with having prolong, and having friends who don't. By her standards and physically, Honor isn't middle-aged yet, to us, she's nearing retirement age.

"She's not the only one who thinks so," she said, when Honor looked at her. "Most of the nannies have told me what a wonderful mother you'd make, if you weren't so busy off blowing up starships and planets and things."

"Me?" Honor blinked at her in surprise, and Katherine shook her head.

"You, Lady Harrington. In fact," she went on a bit more intently, "there's been some, um, discussion of your responsibility in that direction. Faith is a perfectly satisfactory heir for the moment, you understand, but no one in the Conclave of Steadholders really expects her to remain your heir."

I'm not going to quote every such bit of foreshadowing (I already glanced over three just this chapter) suffice to say, it's everywhere and it's not subtle. But here is a fair point, Honor's been a Steadholder 16 years and done nothing to secure herself an heir.

Rachel had reached up to caress Hipper's ears again, and her expression was intent. Understandably, since she would be entering the Royal Manticoran Navy's Saganami Island academy in less than a month. Honor had delivered the traditional "Last View" address to the senior class two weeks before; the other forms' abbreviated wartime summer leaves would be up in ten days, and Rachel would be returning to Manticore aboard the Paul Tankersley to report to the newest class of snotties. Jeanette looked curious and sober, but she'd never been the navy-mad tomboy Rachel had.

Placing this very well in relation to Shadow of Saganami. Racehl Mayhew will be heading to the Academy next, Protector's daughter with a treecat, won't that be fun?

"Things have been so crazy ever since I got back from Sidemore that it seems the Admiralty's strategic thinking changes on an almost daily basis. The numbers ONI is coming up with keep getting worse, not better, and they keep whittling away at what was supposed to be Eighth Fleet's order of battle." She shrugged with an alum-tart smile. "I suppose it's almost a tradition now that building up anything called 'Eighth Fleet' won't go smoothly."

"And you say we have some stupid traditions," Benjamin snorted.

"Well, it's not as if anyone wants it to be that way, Benjamin. But after the hammering we took in the opening phase, nobody's about to uncover Manticore, Grayson, or Trevor's Star. So anything Eighth Fleet gets is going to be what's left over after our minimum security requirements for those systems have been met. Which isn't going to be a lot. Not right at first, anyway. And to be totally fair, Eighth Fleet doesn't really exist yet. I'm Commanding Officer (Designate), Eighth Fleet. My staff and fleet HQ haven't even been formally activated yet."

Strategic situation, Eighth Fleet is till a bit from reactivating.

"It's starting to look very much as if Admiral Givens' initial estimates may actually have been low."

"Low?" Benjamin frowned at her.

"I know. I think everyone—myself included—felt she was being too pessimistic in her original assumptions. It just didn't seem possible that the Republic could really have built a fleet the size of the one she was projecting. But that was because we all insisted on thinking in terms of ships built since Theisman overthrew Saint-Just."

"Well, of course we did. They couldn't possibly have had the technology to build the new types any sooner than that. Certainly not before Hamish hit them with Buttercup."

Honor's expression didn't flicker as Benjamin used the current First Lord of Admiralty's given name, but she was careful not to use it herself.

"No, they couldn't have," she agreed. "And that's the reason Earl White Haven, for one, was convinced Admiral Givens' estimates were too high. Unfortunately, he's had to change his mind in the last couple of weeks. I don't have the details yet, but according to his last letter, she's dug up some data that went back to before Jurgensen took over from her at ONI. Some anomalies her own analysts had turned up and been unable to explain at the time. Apparently, they suggest that the Peeps might have been stockpiling components even before Saint-Just was killed."

"Stockpiling? For that long?" Benjamin looked skeptical, and she shrugged.

The building situation may be worse for Manticore than they'd feared. Much worse.

"If Admiral Givens is right, then we're looking at a serious numerical disadvantage," Honor said soberly. "And one which is going to get a lot worse before it gets better. The question, of course," she smiled without a trace of humor, "is whether or not the numbers are bad enough to offset our quality. And at the moment, considering the command team they've managed to put together, that's a very pointed question, indeed."

Yep. Not like when the last war started, the Committee was focused on purging internal dissent, every officer was a bumbler who needed permission from a Commissioner to use the lav. No, this is a Navy with Theisman, Giscard and Tourville in charge.

[VhenRa]

This is why these two books are sadly quite tragic. Its two groups of protagonists going to war with each other... for reasons that make perfect sense from their perspective.

[Ahriman238]

Roland Maitland is a man with a plan for saving Maastricht. It's a good plan, making the best use of his resources, holding fire until he has to for best accuracy and timing the missiles to arrive just ahead of the LACs. The only problem is it hinges on the idea that Haven missiles outrange ONI's most pessimistic guesses by 25%, i.e. no Havenite MDMs.

Right. It seems like once people put in the effort, it's possible to crank up extreme missile ranges on a single drive to about... ten, twelve, maybe fifteen million kilometers but that is really pushing it.

Seems about that much, yes.

A number of older SDs have been retrofitted with the enormous launchers for off-bore MDMs, the real capital ship sized ones...

I was honestly surprised to read that; I could have sworn that the RMN hadn't refitted any of the pre-podlayer capital ships to fire MDMs from onboard tubes at all.

I believe the logic is similar to that for the BC(P)s, sure they're not going to take on a podnought one on one, but bring two or three friends and maybe they can. In the meantime, they can contribute, meaningfully to a missile fight and if they come across a non-MDM SD, well they have a very serious edge.

My question is closer to how they did it. MDMs are big bastards, their specialized launch tubes, likewise. How did they free up the space? It seems the simplest for the launchers would be to accept less of them, but if they have smaller broadsides and magazines they're at a disadvantage....

Also, a typical pre-pod SD should be able to manage something like 1/2 or 1/3 the sustained rate of fire of a podlayer. A fully upgraded non-podlayer capital ship would still be a serious threat... the problem is that the cost of upgrading them to use the latest EW systems and to fire the new missiles is so high that it makes more sense to build a whole new ship that can lay pods.

There's that too, at least they don't have to try and retrofit them with podnought numbers of fire-control links, Though, you know what the great equalizer will likely be? Flatback pods.

Maitland gets on SD kill, one BC and damaged 2 SDs and multiple BCs. His command is essentially wiped out.

Yeah... at that rate Manticore would lose the war pretty fast.

Of course, that's what you get when you can concentrate eight capital ships against four, with broadly comparable technical capability that the enemy doesn't even know you have.

That's also pretty much infinitely better than Haven made out at any point in the First War, except when they first unveiled the pods in IEH. Even Icarus did a number on Industry but didn't have exchange rates like this.

Previously, the Peeps responded to their missile's lack of sophistication by building bigger pods with more missiles, but MDM sizes seem to have inspired them to cut down on birds per pod.

A pod designed to be towed behind a normal ship can be about as big as you want. A pod designed to be launched from an SD(P) has to be big enough to fit through the back door, along with 3-5 of its fellows. Since Haven can't build a practical SD(P) hull much bigger than the ones Manticore has, it can't make its SD(P)-launched pods much bigger than Manticore's are... which means accepting fewer, bigger missiles per pod if that's the only way to make sure the SD(P) force gets a three-stage missile.

Pretty much my understanding of it.

Admiral Chog and the glanced over battle for Thetis, at least the losses. Manticore loses 2 SD, 4 CA, and over 200 LACs. Haven lost 1 CA and 70 LACs, and took the system easily.

Jesus. How'd that happen?

Unknown, Thetis literally consists of the commander speculating how Maastricht is going an hour before they come out of hyper, and them wondering how Maastricht went after the battle ended with these loss figured tossed out. I'm guess all the LAC casualties are owed to the Triple Ripple, the rest could be non-MDM ships hopelessly outmatched.

Of course, the first time I read this it reminded me most of a scene from a different SF series, Heir to the Empire.

Hm? Which scene?

Han and Lando choosing to destroy the New Republic's construction at Sluis Van, rather than let Thrawn have it. Smaller scale (I think it might've been forty ships?) but similar idea.

Hard to blame Giscard for NOT pressing the attack. All told, he's outnumbered badly in capital ships, and most likely outnumbered in SD(P)s in particular.

This book analyzes his decision more. Short version, Foraker's missile defense doctrine is more effective than they'd thought, and had Giscard known it was combat-tested he likely would have engaged, even won. On the other hand, we're told they were operating on the assumption that each Haven SD(P) was worth a bit less than half a Manty/Grayson one, because of EW short-fallings and their smaller salvoes.

Basically, my conclusion is that it would have been a lot smarter to keep Tourville closer to home, bringing Giscard's effective strength up to about 100 of the (modern) wall, which would give him a much more decisive edge over Kuzak's Third Fleet.

If Thunderbolt had gone according to plan (i.e. if the Graysons stayed home), sure, Honor would have gotten away clean and her six modern ships would be untouched... but on the other hand, there would be a much better chance of bagging the forty-plus modern ships at Trevor's Star, with fewer Havenite losses in the process.

If Thunderbolt had NOT gone according to plan, as actually happened in the novel... well, Tourville wouldn't have wound up sticking his hand in a meat-grinder. Either his ships would have been totally unharmed when Giscard decided "uh, yeah, let's not do this," or at least Second Fleet would have known what it was getting into and been able to fight a battle at roughly equal odds at Trevor's Star.

AN interesting "alternate Thunderbolt" would have been if Theisman and friends had concentrated ruthlessly on wiping out the RMN's modern wall of battle, rather than parceling out penny-packet forces to recapture the many occupied star systems. Sending eight SD(P)s to go beat up on Maitland's three pre-podlayers is arguably a big waste of their time when they're needed at Trevor's Star.

It's hard to estimate exactly how many SD(P)s Haven committed to Thunderbolt, but if they had ALL been sent to Grendelsbane (to wipe out as much as possible of the new modern RMN construction) and Trevor's Star (there to fight a battle if at all possible, as long as the exchange rate is likely to be reasonable), while largely ignoring the occupied systems in the opening round of the war... things might have gone very differently, even given the intervention of the Graysons.

Then the second phase of Thunderbolt would involve taking stock of how many remaining modern ships Haven had and using them to snap up occupied star systems more or less at will, with the RMN's own modern wall of battle having been effectively neutered by losing all but eighteen of their SD(P)s.

Even if Giscard had been beaten, the war would have taken a very, very different tenor.

Agreed. On the other hand, they have very little to complain about in how the operation went down. They only really lost at Sidemore, and Tourville got half his ships out. Giscard didn't engage, but everywhere else was a crushing victory. They regained most of their territory set up their immediate supremacy in modern hull count, off-set only by an alliance with the Andermani Haven couldn't have reasonably foreseen.

Tourville's Second Fleet strength 43 SD (podnoughts an unknown percentage) 8 CLAC, 11 DN, 42 BC.

Twelve of them are SD(P)s. Also, again with the idiotic counting of battlecruisers as capital ships. I can see the logic of it with a BC(P) or BC(L) (a la the newest Nike), because those are at least fit to handle a pre-podlayer dreadnought in combat. But purely conventional battlecruisers with single drive missiles and (in the RMN's case) strictly limited missile defense capability... no. They are NOT capital ships, no number of them can ever really substitute for having a capital ship.

Maybe, but perhaps the idea is they still count as a relevant factor in capital fights, unlike screen? If I had just the one ship, I'd hate to see those forty-odd BCs coming at me hell for leather.

Counter missile ranges, 2 million effective for Manticore, meaning likely to score hits. 1.5 million maximum for Haven.

Note that a big part of the limiting factor on countermissile range is that their drives burn out insanely quickly. You know how you have to cut the endurance by a factor of three to double the acceleration? Countermissiles take it even farther out onto the bleeding edge, and I'd expect that their drive endurance is something like 40-50 seconds. In which case, yeah, they just physically can't get more than 1.5 to two million kilometers from the ship before running out of gas. And a countermissile is useless if it goes ballistic.

Right, they have to be ultra-fast to intercept before missiles reach detonation range, which is thousands of miles, remember. Even Manticore's range edge with CMs just gives them time for two salvoes to throw at MDMs.

That may be subject to change. For now, no direct target data from recon platforms to missiles, but they give her great intel on the effect her fire is having.

The missiles are fast-moving targets and recon platforms probably lack the means to track them and beam communications signals to (thousands of) missiles. Whereas Honor's ships are maintaining constant communication with both the missiles and the ships.

What I want to know is where's Keyhole? I seem to recall they introduce Keyhole II in this book and I've been keeping an eye out for it since IEH, but so far, nothing.

Honor's casualties, though really both sides have done wonders for improving survivability against supermassive missile swarms.

One note; I didn't get much sense for what the LACs were doing in this battle, or a lot of subsequent battles...

Honor held the LACs to repel LAC attack, believing they wouldn't survive a charge against prepared ships with MDMs. She does use them after a bit to pull down the wounded stragglers limping towards the hyper-limit but fallen out of mutual support range. From this point on, LACs do more fleet missile defense than anything.

When the news came in about Grendelsbane and just how much he'd screwed over his country, Janacek wrapped his lips around a pulser and pulled the trigger.

My own feeling is that Janacek at least meets an essential floor of minimum worthiness. He's a bad admiral, he makes a tremendous number of bad decisions with disastrous cumulative effects. But at every step he was sincerely trying to do the things he thought sensible, and at no time did he do anything he thought would seriously compromise his nation's ability to defend itself.

He was wrong, and stupid, and should probably never have made post-captain let alone First Lord of the Admiralty. But to me he earns at least a smidgen of respect, not least for having a sense of actual shame he proves unable to live with when he realizes how badly he's screwed up.

His sacking or resignation I could cheer over. His suicide.... not so much. Still think he was an idiot of the first order and petty besides but he did do his duty as he saw it.

Ring around the rosy and we're right back where we started again. Except that space combat is deadlier than ever.

On the bright side, holding Trevor's Star is a huge advantage, and most of the ships Haven blew up were older types. The real damage was done at Grendelsbane, because what really counts is production and deployment of modern capital ships.

Correction, it's where pretty much all the in-construction podnoughts were, Janacek having let the ones at Hephaestus finish years ago.

[Simon_Jester]

The big Aviary-class CLACs and their escorting battlecruisers crossed the Alpha wall into normal-space just outside the hyper limit. There were only three of the superdreadnought-sized vessels, but their LAC bays spat out almost six hundred light attack craft, and if the Republic of Haven's Cimeterre-class LACs were shorter-legged, more lightly armed, and nowhere near so capable as the Star Kingdom of Manticore's Shrikes and Ferrets, they were more than adequate for their current assignment...

Haven hitting Alizon with 3 carriers, BC escort and presumed screen. Now we have just under 200 LACs to a carrier.

Yes. Come to think of it, these may be carriers with LAC wings that have already suffered attrition, or LACs may have been peeled off to support other operations. Nothing in the rules says they have to operate at full strength all the time...

MDMs moving at what was pretty much standard missile accel at the start of the series, thus presumably going for drive endurance.

About 45000g is typical 'low' acceleration for standard missiles too; it's just that for standard missiles, the 'low' acceleration version is almost always used. At 'high' acceleration of ~90000g, the missiles are so short-legged that it's hard to ensure you don't end up in beam weapon range if you get that close.

Ok, say as of a Thunderbolt a Haven podnought is worth 40% of a Manty one. That would explain a lot of the numerical disparity in the forces jumping occupied systems. Also goes on to show that Giscard absolutely did the right thing given what he knew at the time.

I also think that's a little unfair; looking at what happened at Grendelsbane, for instance, when an RHN force with an unknown (but probably less than 30) number of SD(P)s engaged seven RMN SD(P)s and annihilated them.

Me, I'd say the ratio is more like 50 to 60% to achieve equality, although if the Havenites want to win reliably and not just achieve attritional losses, outnumbering the enemy 2.5 to 1 in SD(P)s at the point of contact would be a good rule of thumb. It always takes more numbers to win offensive battles reliably.

"As I say, we'd estimated pre-Thunderbolt that each of their modern wallers was about twice as combat-effective as one of ours. On the basis of changes we've already made in doctrine and tactics, and allowing for how much more capable our missile defenses turned out to be, we've upped that estimate to set one of their SD(P)s as equal to about one and a half of our podnoughts.

...Aaaand Theisman agrees with me.

I swear I didn't read this part before making the estimate above.

Honor reading a bedtime story (David the Phoenix) to Mayhew's children. With anachronistic hardcopy book. By now Honor would be... 61?

Thereabouts.

I'm not going to quote every such bit of foreshadowing (I already glanced over three just this chapter) suffice to say, it's everywhere and it's not subtle. But here is a fair point, Honor's been a Steadholder 16 years and done nothing to secure herself an heir.

Plus, it's more of an issue now than ever before. Remember, Honor had only been a Steadholder for about three or four years when she (more or less) left Grayson to rejoin the RMN around 1908 PD. By the time she came back in Ashes of Victory, and recuperated from her injuries, the war was over... and she was now in no danger of dying any time soon.

Now and only now, she's been in charge for a long time and there's another round of shooting war on.

---

My question is closer to how they did it [refit pre-podlayer SDs to fire MDMs]. MDMs are big bastards, their specialized launch tubes, likewise. How did they free up the space? It seems the simplest for the launchers would be to accept less of them, but if they have smaller broadsides and magazines they're at a disadvantage....

They're only at a disadvantage within single-drive missile range, and nothing is going to get within single-drive missile range. If you have to rip out whole missile decks and replace them it's still worth it, as long as you have the available yard space to complete the refits.

Agreed. On the other hand, they have very little to complain about in how the operation went down. They only really lost at Sidemore, and Tourville got half his ships out. Giscard didn't engage, but everywhere else was a crushing victory. They regained most of their territory set up their immediate supremacy in modern hull count, off-set only by an alliance with the Andermani Haven couldn't have reasonably foreseen.

Well, my point is that at the moment, Thunderbolt was a major victory but not a decisive one- the RMN's current modern battleline is still up to 90% of its prewar strength, higher than 90% if you count the Alliance as a whole, even if there's a huge dent in their ongoing construction programs. They lost a lot of ground... but as we've discussed, strategic depth is less and less valuable anyway.

So while Thunderbolt was definitely a major win, it wasn't decisive. If they'd gotten Trevor's Star and Grendelsbane, that would have been decisive. The RMN would have effectively no way of fighting back.

Maybe, but perhaps the idea is they still count as a relevant factor in capital fights, unlike screen? If I had just the one ship, I'd hate to see those forty-odd BCs coming at me hell for leather.

Well sort of, but realistically you'd need a whole squadron of battlecruisers to counter one pre-podlayer SD, let alone a podlayer. So bringing forty battlecruisers is like having along, oh, one or two extra modern capital ships.

Especially since there is no way Havenite battlecruisers are firing MDMs, so they can't contribute to long range missile exchanges. The only thing they do is thicken the fleet missile defense, and mobs of LACs or light cruisers with a fraction of the tonnage would do that more effectively.

What I want to know is where's Keyhole? I seem to recall they introduce Keyhole II in this book and I've been keeping an eye out for it since IEH, but so far, nothing.

Well, we'd only see Keyhole on Honor's ships at Second Marsh. I'm not entirely surprised he didn't mention it.

His sacking or resignation I could cheer over. His suicide.... not so much. Still think he was an idiot of the first order and petty besides but he did do his duty as he saw it.

Yeah. I'm not saying I approve of him committing suicide, but it proves that he had a sense of shame- that he felt responsible for the strength and success of the fleet, and that realizing he had failed this responsibility hit him in a big way.

Contrast to how High Ridge himself acted.

Correction, it's where pretty much all the in-construction podnoughts were, Janacek having let the ones at Hephaestus finish years ago.

Huh. Could have sworn there was another wave of them under construction there at war's start.

[Ahriman238]

And now a Mesan meeting to discuss events in Talbott.

"I realize that for most Sollies, Manticore and Haven might as well be Shangri-La or Never-Neverland. They're off somewhere on the edge of the explored universe, full of belligerent neobarbs so primitive and bigoted they spend all their time killing one another. That, unfortunately, falls somewhat short of the truth, as all of us are rather painfully aware. What some of you may not realize, is that in many ways the situation is getting worse, not better, from our perspective."

He tipped back in his own chair and surveyed his guests. One or two of them looked a bit puzzled, as if they couldn't quite see why the situation was any worse than it had always been. After all, both the Star Kingdom of Manticore and the Republic of Haven had been the openly avowed mortal enemies of Manpower Incorporated and the genetic slave trade literally for centuries. From the viewpoint of Manpower and the Mesa System generally, the last twenty T-years of warfare between the Star Kingdom and the Republic had been excellent news. At least it had distracted both of them, to greater or lesser extent, from their interference in Manpower's affairs.

The reason the Haven War has so profited Manpower and Mesa, and their understanding of the Solly on the street and his knowledge of the Haven Sector.

"For the last seventy T-years, the one thing—the only thing—the Star Kingdom of Manticore and the People's Republic of Haven have agreed on is the suppression of the genetic slave trade. And let's be realistic—historically, their efforts have been much more effective than those of anyone else. We have zero market penetration in either of them, and although we've historically had major penetration in some areas of the Silesian Confederacy and Midgard, the Manties and the Peeps have made life hard on us even there. To be honest, it's really only since the two of them started concentrating on one another that we've been able to regain ground we'd been steadily losing in both of those areas. The Andermani Empire is another sore point, particularly since it happens to lie in such close proximity to the other two, but the Andies have never been as aggressive about attacking our interests outside their own territory.

"While the Manties and the Peeps were actively at war with one another, we managed to expand our influence and markets on the peripheries of their spheres. And their concentration on one another also made it easier for us to acquire a degree of penetration—of influence, not sales—which we'd never had before in both the Star Kingdom and the Republic themselves. Things, in other words, were looking up.

"Then along came the Manties' 'Operation Buttercup,' Pierre's assassination, the so-called 'Manpower Incident' on Old Earth, the cease-fire, and the overthrow of the Saint-Just version of the Committee of Public Safety. In combination, they produced three serious consequences for us."

Manpower's penetration in the region of space we know best. Something the end of the war and the exposure of the Manpower Incident have sharply curtailed. The fact that their wartime efforts on cultivating contacts were focused on State Security really hurt them when the new regime took up, too.

"Fortunately, our best and highest surviving contact in Manticore wasn't in Zilwicki's files and remained in place. She wasn't really what we could consider a reliable asset—she was using us as much as we were using her, and she definitely had her own agenda—but Descroix was willing to do what she could to mitigate Manty operations against us and assist with damage control domestically in the wake of the 'Manpower Incident' in return for our financial support and the intelligence we could provide her. Unfortunately, she was completely unwilling to do the main thing we wanted out of her."

"Which was?" Sandusky prompted, as if he didn't already know the answer to his own question, when she paused.

"Which was to get rid of the damned cease-fire,"

Confirmation that Elaine Descroix was a Mesan agent.

"We wanted Manticore and Haven shooting at each other again. To be frank, at that time, the Strategy Committee was actually more concerned about Haven than Manticore. Manticore has the bigger merchant fleet, and the stronger tradition of arrogating some sort of interstellar police power to itself, even to the extent of locking horns with the League. But the Republic is much larger, and the new régime there clearly has a 'crusading spirit,' whereas the High Ridge régime in Manticore was about as venal—and shortsighted—as we could have asked for. Unfortunately, neither side, each for its own reasons, wanted to resume hostilities. And initially, at least, it looked like something of a toss-up as to whether or not Theisman and Pritchart could make their new Constitution stand up. For at least a few years, they were going to be involved in what amounted to a civil war, even if they managed to win it in the end.

"About two T-years ago, however, it became evident they were going to win, and quite handily. In addition, one of the handful of contacts we'd managed to hang onto in the Republic—your contact, as a matter of fact, Jerome—informed us that the Havenite Navy was secretly in the process of some sort of major rebuilding program. The notion of a Theisman-Pritchart government, firmly in control of a star nation and an economy the size of the Republic, with a resurgent navy under its command, didn't make anyone on the Committee happy. Nor was anyone enthralled with what Montaigne and Zilwicki were up to in the Star Kingdom. You may recall the rather spectacular failure of our attempt to remove Montaigne by direct action. That was primarily the result of Zilwicki's active alliance with the Audubon Ballroom, and then Klaus Hauptman and his daughter climbed onto the bandwagon and began building actual light warships for those butchers."

Haven is much bigger on Mesa's threat assessment.

"That's where Verdant Vista entered the picture. We knew High Ridge had managed to seriously alienate several key allies, including the Republic of Erewhon and, we hoped, Grayson. We didn't have very high expectations where Grayson was concerned, but Erewhon seemed to offer possibilities. In addition, certain of our friends in the League—specifically, Technodyne Industries—really wanted access to the Manties' new technology, and Erewhon had that.

"So the idea was to use Verdant Vista to worry Erewhon. We knew the Cromarty Government had promised the Erewhonese the Star Kingdom's assistance in their efforts to eject us from Congo. But we also knew the High Ridge Government was completely and totally—one might almost say vehemently—disinterested in the project. And we knew this was an area in which we could count on Descroix's support behind the scenes.

"With all that in mind, we abandoned our relatively low profile and started deliberately drawing attention to our presence there. We planted a few stories in the Erewhonese 'faxes about 'atrocities' on Verdant Vista, and we encouraged an upswing in 'piracy' in the area. The cruisers that were destroyed at Tiberian were part of that strategy. The idea was to draw the Erewhonese Navy into committing additional light units to piracy suppression in the vicinity, then to pounce on those units with modern Solarian heavy cruisers and wipe them out. Whether the Erewhonese decided we were directly involved in backing the 'pirates' or not, they were bound to become even more furious with the Star Kingdom when they started suffering losses among their warships as well as their merchant traffic. Given the peculiarities of the Erewhonese honor code, it was likely that if we continued to provoke them long enough, and if the Manties continued to ignore their demands for assistance, the Erewhonese would eventually withdraw from the Manticoran Alliance."

More of Mesa as the shadowy puppetmasters behind everything. In this case they outsmarted themselves, aggravating the Erewhoni to splinter the Manticoran Alliance which they hoped would panic High Ridge into resuming the war. Instead, Cachat throws together an alliance of everyone on the fly to punch out Congo and establish Torch, after Oversteegen managed to kill off their modern Solly cruisers at Tiberian.

Which would be good for us in exactly what way?" Sandusky asked, frowning intently as he followed her explanation.

"Erewhon's abandonment of the Alliance was bound to shake up even the Manticorans. The Manty woman-in-the-street seemed willing enough to go along with High Ridge as long as there was no clearly perceived external threat to the Star Kingdom's security. If, however, the Alliance seemed to be crumbling, still without any formal peace treaty, that was likely to change, hopefully in the direction of greater militancy directed towards the Republic. And, to be honest, although High Ridge's disinterest in suppressing slavery was good for us, we doubted that he'd be able to ignore the issue much longer, given the way the Winton dynasty's always hated us and how hard Montaigne, Zilwicki, Harrington, and people like the Hauptmans were all pushing it. So we were perfectly willing to see his government fall, especially if that contributed to the resumption of hostilities we wanted.

And that part happened anyway, even if the Torch thing backfired spectacularly.

"From another perspective, once Erewhon withdrew from the Alliance, the Erewhonese were going to suddenly start feeling very lonely, especially if their one-time allies and the Republic did start shooting at each other again. Under those circumstances, it seemed likely they'd feel the need to bolster and maintain their own military, which would probably mean going back to the people who'd built all of their ships of the wall before they joined the alliance. Which happens to be our good friends at Technodyne. Which meant Technodyne would be able to get a direct look at the latest and best Manty war-fighting hardware. Whether or not the League's navy would be interested in it, Technodyne and the Mesan Navy certainly were, and getting access to it for ourselves and the system defense contingents of our friends in the region would have been a very good thing. That's why Technodyne was so cooperative about coming up with the Tiberian-based cruisers."

And they were hoping the Erewhoni would just turn over their Manty-grade hardware to the folks who used to build most of their ships, Technodyne Industries which has a long-standing relationship with the Mesans.

"Worse, Ruth Winton was right there on the spot and actually managed to get the Star Kingdom, however marginally, involved in supporting what was effectively a Havenite-planned operation against Congo. That left the two of them standing as joint sponsors of the 'Torch' régime on Verdant Vista—a relationship which seems to be surviving so far despite the fact that they're shooting at each other everywhere else."

Both sides continue to support Torch.

He sat back from his desk for a moment, surveying the people he'd assembled. They looked back, and he knew what they were seeing—the culmination of almost five centuries of steady genetic improvement. Much of the rest of the galaxy remained blissfully unaware that what the Ukrainian maniacs of Old Earth's Final War had failed to achieve with their "Scrags" had, in fact, been achieved on Mesa.

But Mesa had learned more than one lesson from the Slav Supremacists, including the need to be cautious. To build a position of security first, before trumpeting the fact of one's superiority to those who would justifiably see in one the hateful image of their future master.

The Mesan agenda, reign of the ubermensch blah, blah blah.

"Also on the deficit side of the ledger, we still haven't managed to obtain access to first-line Manticoran naval hardware. No matter how everything else works out, eventually we are going to find ourselves in open conflict with Manticore, unless we can somehow arrange for someone else to handle that chore for us. We'll continue to pursue the option of finding someone else to do the deed, and I'm sure we'd all find it extremely satisfying if we could, indeed, find a way to use Haven and Manticore to neutralize each other. I don't believe we can count on that, however, so it behooves us to continue planning for an ultimate direct confrontation. With that in mind, anything we can do to reduce Manticore's military, economic, and industrial power bases is eminently worthwhile. Which obviously includes keeping them from annexing the Cluster and all the industrial potential those planets represent.

"I happen to know the Strategy Committee is already working on a plan to at least destabilize and hopefully permanently derail the Talbott annexation. Personally, I give it no more than a thirty percent chance of succeeding, but I could be being unduly pessimistic. Aldona and Isabel will be our contacts for that particular operation, and I want it clearly understood by everyone in this room—whatever we may say or do for the consumption of others—that while I very much hope for their success, we must all be aware that that success is at best problematical. In other words, there will be no penalties and no retaliation if, through no fault of their own, this plan miscarries."

Mesa needs to be able to deal with the Manty tech-edge, sooner or later even if they've some serious surprises of their own. Dettweiler extends his protection to Anisimovna in the event her clever scheme fails.

"While they deal with that aspect of the problem, Jerome," he continued, turning to Sandusky, "you will be polishing up the final details of our arrangement with Mannerheim. Make it very clear to President Hurskainen that it's almost certainly going to be up to him to provide the military muscle when the time comes for the open move to retake Congo." He grimaced. "We can't afford to postpone that particular necessity very long. We've got some time, but the last thing we need is for an entire planet of Ballroom fanatics to get loose in the galaxy. Especially not a planet which controls that particular wormhole junction."

"What about the indirect approach we've discussed?" Sandusky asked in a businesslike voice.

"We'll keep it in reserve," Detweiler directed. "It has a certain appeal on its own merits, but at the moment, Verdant Vista appears to be the only point over which the Manties and Havenites continue to find themselves sharing any common ground. Any move against this so-called 'monarchy' at this time would certainly be seen as our handiwork, however many cutouts we employed, and I don't want us to do anything which might push them closer together where we're concerned than they already are.

"Nonetheless, Isabel," he turned back to Bardasano, "we do need to keep the thought in mind. This is your particular specialty, and I want a detailed operational plan on my desk and ready for implementation before you and Aldona head out to meet with Verrochio. We'll call it . . . Operation Rat Poison."

Their plan for dealing with Torch, to be covered in the next CoS book, Torch of Freedom.

"His name is Ottweiler, Valery Ottweiler," Detweiler replied.

"I know him," she said, frowning thoughtfully. "And he really is good at this kind of thing. In fact, if it weren't for his genome, I'd say he should be brought fully inside."

They are very, very careful about bringing untermenschen normal people fully into their confidence and plans for the future. Particularly as that future does not look bright for normal people.

"If this technique works as well as it did in our tests, and really is this close to impossible to detect," she continued more seriously, "then it might be time for us to begin making judicious use of it in special cases." She shrugged. "Even if they figure out someone is deliberately triggering the attacks, there's not much they can do about it. Not, at least, without security arrangements which would effectively hamstring their own operations. And I can think of several prominent individuals in both Manticore and Haven whose sudden and possibly spectacular demises could be quite beneficial to us. Especially if we can convince both sides that the other one, not some third party, is responsible."

Discussing using the nanotech control for 'special cases.' The Hofschulte Affair was apparently a test run, not of whether the nanotech would work, but if the nanotech would properly self-destruct and be undetectable forensically.

Honor sat in the Stranger's Aisle to the left of the nave, immediately adjacent to the sanctuary. She, her parents and siblings, James MacGuiness, Nimitz, and Willard Neufsteiler, all of them in Harrington green, shared the Aisle's first pew with the Manticoran and Andermani ambassadors and consuls from each of the other members of the Manticoran Alliance. The two rows of pews behind them were solidly packed with officers in the uniform of the Protector's Own: Alfredo Yu, Warner Caslet, Cynthia Gonsalves, Harriet Benson—Dessouix and her husband Henri, Susan Phillips, and dozens of others who had escaped from the prison planet Hades with Honor. Their uniforms and the diplomats' off-world formal attire, in the styles of more than half a dozen different worlds, stood out sharply, but each of them also wore the dark, violet-black armbands or veils of Grayson-style mourning, as well.

Honor still sits in the Stranger's Aisle, even at Howard Clinkscales' funeral.

For all its rich pageantry and centuries of tradition, the liturgy of the Church of Humanity Unchained was remarkably simple. The funeral mass flowed smoothly, naturally, until, after the lesson and the gospel, it was time for the Memory. Every Grayson funeral had the Memory—the time set aside for every mourner to recall the life of the person they had lost and for any who so chose to share that memory with all the others. No one was ever forced to share a memory, but anyone who wished to was welcome to do so.

-snip-

At most Grayson funerals the Memory took perhaps twenty minutes. At Howard Clinkscales' funeral, it took three hours.

Grayson funerary rites include an open mic time for anyone who wants to share a story about the deceased.

"You know our customs, My Lady," Bethany said. "Howard's body has already been reclaimed for our Garden of Memory. But he made an additional request."

"A request?" Honor repeated when she paused.

"Yes, My Lady." Bethany extended a small wooden box. It was unembellished by any carving or metalwork, but its hand-rubbed finish gleamed brilliantly in the sunlight. "He requested," she continued, "that a portion of his remains be given to you."

Being short on space, Graysons cremate their dead and bury the ashes in Memory Gardens.

"The Clinkscales Clan has served me personally and this Steading with a devotion and a skill far beyond anything I might reasonably have expected. My family and my people are deeply in your debt—in all of your debts—" she raised her eyes to look at Austen and Carson, as well, "and as Howard served me so well, and as Austen has agreed to serve me in his stead, so you've made yourselves family, not simply servants or even merely friends. My sword is your sword. Your battle is mine. Our joys and our sorrows are as one."

-snip-

She looked at Carson again over his aunt's head, tasting his astonishment, and wondered if he'd been aware she even knew the formal phrases by which a Grayson steadholder created a legal familial relationship with another clan. The complex interweaving of clan networks had been integral to the Graysons' survival in their hostile planetary environment, and the creation of what equated to blood relationships between the great houses of the Steadholders and their closest allies and retainers had played a major role in forging those networks. In a sense, what Honor had done subordinated the Clinkscales Clan to the Harrington Clan, but it also bound Honor and her heirs personally to the defense and protection of Howard Clinkscales' descendants forever.

It was not a step to be taken lightly or impulsively, but Honor realized that her decision had been neither of those things. And that she truly ought to have done it much sooner, while Howard was still there to see it done. Well, no doubt he still could, from wherever he was at the moment, she thought fondly. And then her lips twitched as another thought struck her.

Honor doesn't exactly make the Clinkscales her vassals, but something similar.

[Simon_Jester]

And they were hoping the Erewhoni would just turn over their Manty-grade hardware to the folks who used to build most of their ships, Technodyne Industries which has a long-standing relationship with the Mesans.

Which was a reasonable hope, seeing as how Erewhon did have a prior relationship with the League if you go back before the 1900-1905 timeframe, and relied heavily on the League to build their ships at that time.

Mesa needs to be able to deal with the Manty tech-edge, sooner or later even if they've some serious surprises of their own. Dettweiler extends his protection to Anisimovna in the event her clever scheme fails.

Which also gives you a bit of insight into the culture of the Mesan Alignment; personally I've always seen it as a sort of knockoff of Boskone from the Lensman setting in some ways, with leadership being secured by a combination of 'good genes' and merit, where merit is defined as "success at all costs."

They are very, very careful about bringing untermenschen normal people fully into their confidence and plans for the future. Particularly as that future does not look bright for normal people.

Yeah. Genetic experimentation, planned breeding, genetic experimentation on your children, probably sterilization of 'defectives...' not a lot to look forward to there.

Even the... mildly-enhanced-on-average normal population of Mesa aren't in on the Alignment's plans as a rule.

Honor doesn't exactly make the Clinkscales her vassals, but something similar.

Well, given the etiquette of the thing, it really couldn't be a declaration of "you are now my vassals," because that's always a consensual thing in feudal cultures. More like "you are now under my protection."

[eyl]

Being short on space, Graysons cremate their dead and bury the ashes in Memory Gardens.

IIRC, the custom originated not because of a lack of space, but because of a critical need for fertilizer. In one of the earlier books (HofQ, IINM) Matthews comments that family gardens would once grow food, and in more modern time rgow flowers and such.

[Batman]

The more I think about it the more I wonder if upgrading traditional SDs to fire MDMs even makes sense. You have to rip out the old launchers (and possibly a good portion of their energy weaponry), the feed queues, the magazines, and replace them with MDM-compatible ones, you'd have to upgrade the control links, not to mention rearrange the rest of the ship around the new and improved armament. I'm somewhat dubious this is doable faster or more cheaply than just laying down an SD(P).

[Ahriman238]

Mercedes Brigham still wore the commodore's uniform of her Manticoran rank rather than the rear admiral's star she would have been entitled to in Grayson's service. For that matter, she really ought to have traded in the double planets of her commodore's insignia even in the RMN. Honor knew perfectly well that Brigham had quietly made it clear to BuPers that she preferred her position as Honor's chief of staff, and promotion to rear admiral would have made her too senior for the slot.

I'm a bit surprised they let a flag officer serve as a chief of staff in any case. Isn't that properly a commander's slot?

"Nowhere near as bad as what McQueen did in their Operation Icarus," Brigham said quickly. "Not that it was exactly good, you understand. We lost a couple of our own freighters, and they blew the hell out of a respectable chunk of the asteroid extraction platforms and mining boats. But human casualties were very low and they never got close enough to hit the main industrial platforms. None of our people even got scratched, and the Alizonians only lost a half-dozen or so miners." She twitched one shoulder in a half-shrug. "Even that looks like it was an accident. From everything I've seen, they appear to have done their dead level best to play it according to the rules."

Losses from the Alizon raid.

"Did our LACs engage at all?" Honor asked, and Brigham gave her a thin smile.

"By the strangest turn of fate, no, Your Grace. I know what you're thinking, and Alizon Defense Command thought the same thing. This was a probing attack, testing our defenses. If they'd wanted to do serious damage to the system infrastructure, they'd have attacked in much heavier strength. So when Defense Command realized we were up against a raid that probably wasn't even going to try to penetrate the inner defenses, not a serious assault on the system, all our Shrikes and Ferrets and—especially—Katanas stayed covert. So did the outer-system pods, for that matter. ONI gives us ninety percent-plus odds that the Peeps never even saw them."

-snip-

"It's not very likely someone like Theisman isn't going to figure the LACs, at least, were there, anyway," she continued, "but at least he wasn't able to confirm it."

LACs weren't committed to the fight, on the assumption it was a probe.

"Well, they did get the piss blown out of them the last time around, Your Grace," Brigham observed. "And after the way High Ridge and his bunch treated them, we've probably run our store of goodwill pretty close to rock bottom. Do you know Admiral Simon?"

"Not personally." Honor shook her head. "I know he's young for his rank, that he's a Saganami graduate, and that he's got a good reputation with us, as well as his own people. That's about it."

"Actually, that sums him up pretty well, except that I'd add that he's always been one of the stronger supporters of the Alliance. But even the dispatches from him I've seen make some pretty pointed references to how understrength the system defenses would have been against a real attack." She grimaced. "I'm guessing the civilians are going to be even more pointed about it, and I can't blame them. They're going to want some concrete demonstration of our willingness—and ability—to protect them from an Icarus repeat."

"Which is exactly why Theisman did it." Honor sighed. "I liked it so much better when Pierre and Saint-Just didn't trust their navy enough to let it do its job properly."

Admiral Simon, a senior admiral of the Alizon navy. Alizon, like nearly all Manticore's allies, is petitioning for modern ships to be stationed there posthaste, which is naturally the point of probing and raiding them, to disperse Manticore's podnoughts more.

"If you'll pardon me for a moment, My Lady," he said, "I need to speak to the limo driver before he parks the car. With your permission?"

-snip-

"Andrew does more than simply protect me physically, Emily," Honor said. "He also does his best to let me cling to at least the illusion of a little bit of privacy." Her smile was more crooked than the one the artificial nerves in the left side of her face normally produced. "Of course, we both know it's only an illusion, but that doesn't make it any less important to me."

"No, I don't suppose it does," Emily said gently. "We Manticoran aristocrats think we live in fishbowls, but compared to you Grayson steadholders—"

See, LaFollet can be discreet.

"Mostly, though, it's my armsmen themselves who keep me sane. Graysons have had a thousand years to adjust to the peculiarities of their own traditions, and it's amazing how 'invisible' an armsman can make himself. But it's more than that, too. They just . . . become a part of you. I suppose it's like your relationship with Nico or Sandra, or mine with Mac, but with an added dimension. They know everything about me, Emily, and every single one of them will go to his grave without ever betraying a confidence of mine. That's what Grayson armsmen do."

Honor on the traditions of armsmen.

"Oh." Giancola sat back, drumming lightly on his desktop with the fingers of one hand, then shrugged. "I see where you were going now. You may even have a point. On the other hand, it doesn't much matter what I do; Usher's going to think I'm up to something however I act. So I'm basically playing a shell game. I'm leaving my security systems up most of the time, no matter who I'm seeing, which means there's no way for him to tell whose conversations I really want to be certain he can't overhear. I'm sure he understands that; my little charade is to help explain to my staff and everyone else why I keep 'forgetting' to switch the jammers off. It isn't really directed at him at all, except, possibly, in a very secondary sort of way. I do like to spend the occasional minute thinking about how incredibly irritating he must find the entire thing, though."

Giancola has developed a façade as an increasingly absent-minded workaholic who leaves his security screens and anti-bugging gear on all the time so he won't be interrupted, not that he's going to fool Kevin Usher but it's useful chaff, if everyone conversation is treated as if part of some grand conspiracy it makes it harder to figure who is actually a conspirator of his.

"I mean that the central net is still riddled with StateSec backdoors, Mr. Secretary. To really nail them all shut, they'd have to slag the old system down and start from scratch. Oh," Nesbitt shrugged, "they actually did a fairly good job when LePic and Usher set things up over at Justice. I'd guess they probably managed to find and close a good ninety percent of them. But there were so many in place that they never had a prayer of getting all of them. I'm sure they're still looking, and of course not knowing for sure whether or not they've found my little keyholes does tend to make life a bit more exciting. There's always the chance they have found them and they're just sitting there, monitoring, letting me tie the noose around my own neck before they pounce."

StateSec had tons of redundant backdoors into everything important on the central net, the Haven (planet) internet. Most have been found and eliminated, but they were never going to get all of them. Which let Colonel Nesbitt, Giancola's security guy, find Ambassador Groscalude's "in the event of my death or disappearance" letter.

"My God," Nesbitt said, finally startled out of his normal air of amused cynicism, "they actually stole Descroix's encryption key?"

"Not her personal key, no, but her departmental key. Which is another of the reasons I'm fairly confident the Manties would quickly figure out who did what if they got a chance to compare the raw originals. I'm going to be dreadfully embarrassed when I realize no one here in State realized we never saw Descroix's personal key on any of the correspondence. Of course, there was no reason why we should have felt unduly suspicious, since all of it had the official Manticoran Foreign Office codes, but still—"

StateSec managed to get the Foreign Office private keys during the war, having always been more focused on political intel-gathering than military. Funny the things you can find in their files if you go nosing around. Without it, Giancola couldn't have pulled his man-in-the-middle con with the diplomatic mail.

"Forgery?"

"Yes. It's going to have to be carefully done, but I want that file to prove Yves planned on setting me up as the fall guy for his manipulation of the notes. I want it to be good, but I want there to be a provable flaw in it, something a good security type like yourself can spot."

"You're figuring that if the fellow who really did it all also manufactured evidence that you were responsible for it, it will demonstrate that, in fact, you didn't have a thing to do with it," Nesbitt said slowly, gray eyes beginning to gleam.

And that should take care of that, after Nesbitt's hack removes the "in the event of my death" instructions.

"Well," Emily said with a fondly amused smile. "Very well, in fact. Of course, it was only the first day, Honor. You do understand that it's going to take a long time for them to make any real progress, don't you?"

"Of course I do." Honor shook her head, lips twitching as she tasted Emily's response to her own eagerness. "But the entire idea is incredibly exciting to a Sphinxian, especially one who's been adopted. After so many centuries when none of the experts could even agree on how intelligent the 'cats really were—or weren't—seeing them sit down with humans to formally discuss ways treecats can integrate themselves into human society as full partners is— Well," she shook her head again, "it's something there aren't really words to describe."

Samantha, with Emily Alexander as her interpreter, set up a conference to discuss human and treecat societies, and the best ways to integrate them.

The sting ships in Winton blue and silver which had escorted them from White Haven banked gently away to either side as the armored limousine in Harrington Steading livery came in across the sparkling waters of Jason Bay and crossed the threshold into Mount Royal Palace's defensive envelope. Honor suspected that very few citizens of Landing ever really considered the fact that Mount Royal was one of the most heavily defended pieces of dirt on any of the Star Kingdom's three inhabited planets. She was aware of it primarily because of the necessary interfacing between her own armsmen, the Queen's Own, and Palace Security, and even as a serving naval officer, she'd been astonished at the amount of firepower hidden away under the various innocuous-looking weather domes and secondary structures scattered over the immaculate grounds.

Aside from the usual security, Mount Royal is well-equipped to stand off a siege or a massive air assault.

He saluted again, and Honor chuckled mentally, wondering exactly how the Palace Protocol Office had decided to resolve the question of precedence between them. Hamish was senior to her in Manticoran service, but although both of them were fleet admirals in Grayson sevice, she was senior to him in that navy.

Oh what tangled webs we weave when we serve in multiple navies.

"These formal receptions and dinners are important—I know that. And, to be perfectly frank, we need to show you off to the Allied ambassadors, Honor. Given what happened at Sidemore, most of our allies seem to regard you as something of a talisman."

Honor's reputation among the other Alliance members. How much of that is based on her history and how much her being the hero of the hour I don't know. I'm actually curious how the Andies are feeling about her, now that they're all nominally on the same side.

"You needn't look so worried, Honor," the Queen scolded now. "This isn't going to hurt a bit, I promise."

"Of course, Your Majesty," Honor said even more warily, and Elizabeth chuckled. Then she leaned forward, scooped up the white beret on the coffee table, and flipped it across to Honor.

"Here," she said as Honor caught it reflexively. "I think this is yours."

Honor arched her eyebrows, then looked down at the beret in her hands. It looked exactly like the black one tucked under her epaulette, except for its color—the white color, reserved for the commander of a hyper-capable warship of the Royal Manticoran Navy. It was the emblem of a captain of a Queen's ship, a mistress after God, which Admiral Honor Harrington would never be again.

The Queen gives Honor a white beret, which only a starship captain gets to wear (and it does seem odd to me that flag officers would elect to go back to basic black). What's going on here?

"Well, you've already got the Parliamentary Medal of Valor, a knighthood—although, now that I think about it, we're going to be promoting you to knight grand cross this afternoon, I believe—a duchy, a mansion, a baseball team—whatever that is—your own personal starship, a multibillion-dollar business empire, and a steading." Elizabeth shrugged. "With all that, deciding what to give you is getting a bit complicated. So I decided to give you back your white beret."

You know, Honor's doing really well for an upper-middle class background. At some point, how about a story where she loses much of her accumulated goodies?

Honor broke off. HMS Unconquered was the oldest starship still in commission in the Royal Manticoran Navy. She had been commanded at the very beginning of her lengthy career by Edward Saganami when he was a commander, and her last commanding officer on active deployment had been Lieutenant Commander Ellen D'Orville. Unconquered was unique, the only ship to have been commanded by both of the Star Kingdom's greatest naval heroes, which was why she had been rescued from the breakers by the Royal Naval League after a century in reserve.

The League had organized a massive fund-raising project to repair and refurbish the ship, then convinced the Crown to return her to commissioned status as a combination memorial and living museum. Restored to her exact condition when she was Saganami's first cruiser command, she was maintained in permanent orbit around Manticore. Membership in her official "crew," which was maintained at the exact number of officers and ratings which had served under Saganami, was a high honor, reserved as a way of recognizing the achievements of the Navy's best and brightest. None of them actually served aboard her, because the tradition also required that they be personnel on the active duty list, and her captain, by long tradition, was an admiral. Nominated by majority vote by all of the Navy's serving officers, selected by the Queen from the list of elected candidates, Unconquered's captain was the single serving flag officer of the Royal Manticoran Navy who was permitted to wear the white beret of a starship commander.

"I didn't put your name on the list, Honor," Elizabeth said quietly. "Your peers did that. And, while I might have been tempted to jump you to the top of the list if I'd had to, your name was already there."

Honor is named captain to HMS Unconquered, Manticore's most famous starship, the command of their two biggest heroes, and now a floating museum with a fantasy football "crew" of the best officers and ratings in active service, in actual fact scattered here and there around the galaxy. Every active duty officer votes to nominate an admiral to be the captain, the Queen making the final choice. Honor's name has apparently been on the list since she got back from Cerberus, backed by a majority of officers (how they determine place on the list) but it's taken this long for Massengle to retire.

So Honor gets to be the only flag officer with a starship captain's white beret.

Obviously, we're going to have to reinforce Alizon, if only to make our commitment to their defense clear, and that's going to stretch us even thinner, but there's no quick fix for that, Your Majesty. We're reactivating superdreadnoughts from the Reserve as quickly as we can, of course. They may be obsolete compared to the pod-layers, but some waller is better than no waller, and the Republic still has quite a few of the older ships in its own order of battle. But we're not going to be commissioning very many new ships in the foreseeable future. After what they did to Grendelsbane, we have only thirty-five SD(P)s under construction. They should be commissioning within the next six to ten months, but we won't see any more than that until the ships we're laying down right this minute commission. Which means our total available pod-laying wall will consist of no more than a hundred and ten units for at least another two T-years."

Manticore is reactivating (and buying back from Grayson) a number of mothballed SDs. They're target practice for podnoughts, but at least they can help if older ships, which still make up almost half the Haven wall of battle, attack. With Hephaestus having to lay entirely new hulls that won't be rolling out for over a year (closer to two) and Grendelsbane gone, Manticore has only 35 podnoughts in the pipeline, along with 75 in service right now. Good thing they have friends.

"Essentially, Your Grace," Givens said, "the Andies were estimating the number they'd need if push came to shove between us on the basis that at least half our available strength would be required closer to home to keep an eye on Haven. They projected a total build of roughly a hundred and thirty SD(P)s, but they have only forty-two currently in commission. The other ninety are all under construction at various states of completion. Some of them won't be completed for at least another eighteen months."

The Andies are a bit better off, 88 SD(P)s in construction, all of them will be completed within a year-and-a-half. Grayson.... I don't have exact numbers from his conversation, but it was made clear that Grayson is getting close to the limits of their ability economically to build ships and logistically to man them. I don't know how the resumption of the war may have changed things, but I cannot imagine they had more than thirty or so ships in the works when the shooting started up again.

Bottom-line is, it looks like this time Haven is going to win the ship-building game. Handily.

"And even the ones they've completed are going to require fairly substantial refits before we can make best use of them," Hamish put in. Elizabeth cocked her head at him, and he shrugged. "Their multi-drive missiles are considerably cruder than ours. In fact, they're less sophisticated than the ones Haven is currently deploying. They're almost as big as Havenite three-drive missiles, but they incorporate only two drives. Tactically, they're a lot more like the Mark 16s we're deploying aboard the new Saganami-Cs. They've got heavier warheads than the Mark 16, but their range is very similar. And because they're capacitor-fed, without the Mark 16's fusion plant, their EW is less effective. They simply can't match our birds' power budgets. And while their pods are bigger than ours are, they actually carry fewer birds than the Republic's currently do, which means their salvo density is thinner than ours, as well.

The Andies actually only got as far as dual-drive missiles, didn't manage like Manticore to fit a fusion plant onto a missile (thus giving tons of raw power for EW tricks, and I'll bet endurance) and have the least number of missiles-per-pod (unspecified) of anyone in the MDM pod-layers game. Awkward.

"We've put BuWeaps and BuShips on to the problem, and Admiral Hemphill and Vice Admiral Toscarelli have come up with a minimum-modification solution. They can't operate the new fusion-powered MDMs from their pods, but we can load their launcher cells with our own older-style, capacitor-fed three-stage missiles. It won't give them any greater salvo density, and the EW will still be less capable, but it will significantly improve their range. It's going to require some modifications to their pods, which they're going to be making at their end, but that part of the process should be completed within the next sixty days. After that, it's just a case of their building the new pods.

For the moment, they're just giving the Andies the old (read: end of the last war) MDMs that are capacitor fed. It won't magically fix their problems with the EW birds, but they'll be better off and have proper MDM range at least.

"The longer-range fix is to modify their existing SD(P)s to accept the Keyhole platforms and fire our new 'flat-pack' pods with the all-up fusion-powered birds. That's going to take considerably longer, because each ship will have to spend an absolute minimum of ninety days in yard hands to carry out the modifications. Toscarelli's people have just about completed the blueprints for the necessary alterations, and they've been working with the Andies' architects to provide a fix which can be incorporated into the ships still under construction. At best, though, that's going to impose an additional delay on those units' completion."

Three months in the yard to bring the Andies up to Grayson/Manticore standard. Found the Keyhole!

Keyhole is a remote platform that provides fire-control telemetry. The major thing being it can follow a few thousand klicks behind and "above" or "below" its mothership thus circumventing a major issue. Namely, every time a ship fires a broadside or counter missiles, it blinds itself for a minute or so, unable to see past the missile wedges until they get some distance. This means they lose lock on whatever they were tracking, target or inbound missiles and have to reacquire before they can start feeding directions to the missiles. With a Keyhole platform, all tracks become continuous, giving them that much longer to crunch numbers. It's such a perfect example of Ghost Rider's original concept, delegating complex functions to remote platforms that I'd be shocked if it weren't part of the original Ghost Rider's fruits. Yet no mention until now.

"So," Caparelli said, "looking at every pod-laying waller we can scrape up between us, Grayson, and the Andies, and including all of the Andy SD(P)s currently in commission as fully effective units, we have a total of two hundred and thirty-two. Assuming our construction times hold up, and allowing for working up time, we can have a total of just over four hundred within the next eleven to eighteen months. We can add about a hundred and sixty pod-laying battlecruisers to that total, but they can't stand in the wall against proper superdreadnoughts. That's an impressive number, but the Havenites have some pretty impressive numbers of their own."

Alliance SD(P) strength now and in the foreseeable future (232 and 400, respectively) neglecting combat losses. Also, since they all told have just under 60 BC(P)s they have a hundred in production between the three major navies.

"At any rate," Givens went on, "there are serious holes in our information-gathering capabilities. And I have to admit that Pierre and Saint-Just managed to build this entire shipbuilding complex of theirs, wherever it is, on my watch, without my getting so much as a sniff of it. We're looking for it hard, scouting every system we can think of, but so far, we haven't found it. Which is more than mildly irritating, given the resources we're committing to the effort. On the other hand, the way they've spread out their building capacity since Theisman first went public about the Peep pod-layers, Bolthole is becoming steadily less of an absolutely critical node for them.

"But bearing in mind the limits on our intel ability, and counting only the new ships we've actually observed, and making allowances for errors in post-battle reports, we're estimating that they must have a minimum of three hundred pod-layers currently in commission. We know they had at least two hundred old-style superdreadnoughts in service, as well, plus another hundred or so in reserve, but it's the pod-layers that pose the critical threat. If they do have three hundred in service at this time, then they have approximately one and a half times as many as we and the Graysons do. It drops to about one-point-three-to-one in their favor if we include all of the completed Andermani SD(P)s. By our best estimate of the differences between their current hardware and our own, that equates to near parity between the two sides, but they've got much more strategic depth than we do."

"That depth tips the strategic balance significantly in their favor, Your Majesty," Caparelli put in. "They can afford to concentrate their forces for offensive operations to a far greater extent than we can. We can't afford to allow them the opportunity to take out the industrial capacity here in the Star Kingdom or in Grayson, and that means we're forced to maintain sufficient strength in those systems to deter a serious attack. As Pat says, we don't even know where this 'Bolthole' of theirs is, so there's no way we could do the same thing to their infrastructure. We could hurt them badly in several places, if we uncovered enough to go after them, but without at least Bolthole's location, we can't cripple them the way they could cripple us."

Their count is pretty good, unsurprising since I'm pretty sure all the modern ships were committed to Thunderbolt. ONI's sources in Haven have mostly dried up, both because of Jurgensen's neglect and because they always depended to a degree on a pool of disaffected Peeps that simply isn't there anymore.

Also, the reason strategic depth matters, even if starships can circumvent any bases easily enough to deep-strike. The Alliance only has so many shipyards and bases (look how the attack on Grendelsbane took out 75% of their new construction) so each one lost is going to hurt them a lot more than losing a single shipyard will hurt Haven.

"However, after examining the wreckage from Her Grace's victory at Sidemore, we've determined that even though the SD(P)s Haven deployed for the attack were new-build, new-design ships, they used existing, off-the-shelf components wherever possible. Obviously, many of their systems had to be new-construction, but the truth is that probably at least eighty-five percent of the design was based on existing hardware. Exactly what they appear to have been stockpiling. Our numbers for what they squirreled away are nowhere near as precise as I'd like, but allowing for a twenty-five percent overestimate, and assuming the stockpiled items represent only seventy percent of the new ships' total requirements, they could still have an additional four hundred to four hundred and fifty under construction at 'Bolthole' alone. And, of course, there's no way for us to estimate how far along in the construction process those ships might be."

Possible capacity of Bolthole, 400-450 modern capital ships (allowing for a 25% overestimate in their stockpiled materials) Also they've been cost saving by using off-the-shelf standard parts wherever available.

"Obviously, until they announced the existence of their own pod-layers, all their construction was carried out under conditions of maximum secrecy—the entire rationale for Bolthole in the first place. But as soon as Theisman announced they had SD(P)s of their own, they began preparations to lay down additional units in other shipyards. Our estimate is that they're probably looking at longer construction times in the older yards, not to mention the fact that they had to set up all of the long-lead items and get organized before they could begin construction there at all. Nonetheless, we have indications from various sources that they have somewhere in the vicinity of an additional four hundred new units under construction at Nouveau Paris and two or three other of their central systems. That's the bad news. The good news is that although the Pritchart Administration authorized their construction the better part of a T-year ago, they only really hit their stride about four months ago. Which means it's going to take them at least another two and a half T-years to complete any of them. So they're not a factor in the immediate gap between our numbers and theirs."

However, publicly, Haven has 400 ships in the pipeline though all these ships were started in existing yards only after Bolthole and the modern ships' existence was announced. So they're looking at thirty months before any of that construction is a problem and realistically this will probably be over before then anyways.

"But, with all due respect, Admiral Givens," his brother said, "how realistic is your estimate in fiscal terms?"

-snip-

"That, Prime Minister, is outside my own area of expertise," Givens admitted. "The financial analysts attached to ONI believe they can, indeed, complete all or a high percentage of the total projected current program—or, rather, our estimate of what that program is. They're going to have to make some hard decisions about what not to build to pull it off, but they have many times the star systems we do. Despite our much higher per capita income, their absolute budgets are at least as big, or bigger, than our own, and their manpower costs are far lower. It's certainly possible that trying to complete this program would indeed lead to the economic collapse of the Republic. Which, on a long-term basis, could be good or bad from our perspective. My own feeling, however, is that we dare not count on that outcome. Especially not given how much of Havenite strategy under the Legislaturalist régime was based on seizing Manticore and our wormhole junction specifically as a revenue source. The new régime might well be willing to go deeply into debt if it believes that by doing so it can succeed where Harris, Pierre, and Saint-Just failed."

Looks like Haven can pay for all the new ships, at least in the short term. Long term 1200 podnoughts might be beyond them, but if they ever got there they could pretty much declare themselves kings of the universe anyway.

"At any rate, despite the official Janacek position that there was no need to build anything other than LACs and commerce-protection units, Toscarelli and his people managed to get the Saganami-C approved as a 'modification' of the existing Saganami design, rather than as a totally new class which represents as significant a tactical departure for cruisers as the Medusa-class represented for superdreadnoughts. He also managed to get the design for the new Nike-class battlecruisers and Agamemnon-class BC(P)s approved. We only have the lead ship of the Nike-class about to commission, and only six of the Agamemnons, but there are six more Agamemnons already in the pipeline. Almost more importantly, most of the construction kinks have been worked out of both designs, and they can be put into rapid series production quickly. Then there's the new Medusa-B-class SD(P). It was authorized by Chakrabarti solely as a paper study, but Toscarelli took it to the detailed blueprint stage. It's a significant improvement on the Invictus design, but we'd be looking at an additional delay of six to ten months to put a completely new design into production rather than simply building repeat Invictus-class ships."

Manticore has one BC(L) and 6 BC(P)s with another 6 in the pipeline. Both are ready for rapid production as needed. Toscarelli earns himself major points, but goes a step beyond with the 3rd gen podnought, the Medusa-B. Like the Saganami variants, it has only a passing resemblance to a Medusa/Harrington. By drastically reducing beam weapons and using automation for the smallest ever capital ship crew (just over a thousand) Toscarelli designed an SD(P) to carry 2,000 pods and still keep internal launchers for MDMs with magazines fit for two hours of intense combat. By all means, devote at least a little shipbuilding capacity to that. It'll be worth the extra 6-10 months.

[Ahriman238]

And now for the big talk about construction rates, as everyone explains things to Willie Alexander who opens by asking-

"If we're looking at a two-year window of vulnerability," the Prime Minister asked, "why not consider building smaller units? I know we haven't built any dreadnoughts since before the first war, but given that we're talking about pod-laying designs, shouldn't it be possible to build an effective DN(P)? Units that size could be built much more rapidly, couldn't they?"

"Yes, and no, Prime Minister," Caparelli said formally. "Construction time on a dreadnought runs about eighty percent of the construction time on a superdreadnought. In theory, that means we could build one in about eighteen months rather than twenty-three. Unfortunately, we don't have a DN(P) design. We'd have to produce one from scratch, then get it into construction, with all the delays always attendant on the introduction of a completely new class. We'd probably be looking at a minimum of three T-years from the moment we began work to the moment we completed the first unit, which means it would take six months longer to build the first of the smaller ships. Thereafter, we could, indeed, build them faster, but if we're prepared to use dispersed yards and build 'Grayson-style,' we can build as many superdreadnoughts simultaneously as we can fund. So it doesn't seem to us over at Admiralty House that there's any advantage in designing a smaller, less capable unit when it would actually delay our building programs."

23 months to build an SD, only 18 months to build a DN, hence the discussion of the possibility of DN(P)s. Of course, Willie is neglecting the design phase of the process, which is going to take a lot longer than building the things. Manticore is using Grayson style free-range space docks to build at least some SDs, allowing them to build as many as they can pay for at once and hopefully leaving some slips at Hephaestus and Vulcan open to fix all the damaged ships they're getting swamped with.


"But wait!" you say, "The original GNS Honor Harrington was finished in just over a year. Granted it was a special rush job and they stole personnel and materials from other... major... construction jobs. Oh." Yeah, oh.

"There's no way we can speed construction?" Grantville asked. All of the uniformed officers—and his brother—looked at him, and he shrugged. "I'm sorry. I don't mean to question your professional judgment, but the Graysons managed to get their first SD(P) built in under fifteen months."

"Yes, they did," Hamish replied. "But to complete her to their new schedule, which had a little something to do with Honor's supposed execution, they pulled out all the stops. In fact, they diverted major components from older-style SDs to the new designs. The Harrington's fusion plants, for instance—all of them were diverted from two of their Steadholder Denevski-class ships, which delayed their completion by almost eight months. We can't do that here because we don't have the new construction to divert components from. But that's pretty much what ONI is saying the Havenites have been doing with those stockpiled components Admiral Givens was just talking about."

Yeah, they were already crash-finishing all the modern ships they could under Janacek when things started to destablizie. Then all that hard work sent up in nuclear fire at Grendelsbane.

"And while we're talking about things the Janacek Admiralty did right for the wrong reasons," Caparelli put in, "his mania for using LACs as a panacea has at least guaranteed that the LAC assembly line was in full swing when the penny dropped. We foresee no bottlenecks in LAC or missile pod production, including the new system-defense pods and setting up our own lines to produce the Graysons' Vipers. There may be some problems we haven't foreseen with the new munitions BuWeaps has in the pipeline, but production of our existing weapons should be ample for our needs. It's going to take us a while to build up to full speed for the system-defense units, but we can probably build LACs faster than we can train crews for them. They won't help us out a lot against an intact wall of battle, but they'll give us a high degree of scouting and rear area coverage which should at least allow us to economize on hyper-capable pickets."

At least they have vast LAC swarms to sooth their nervous allies' fears, and provide rear area security. They've also still got full production of LACs and missile pods running.

[White Haven]

Tube-fired MDMs on old-style SDs are probably another fruit of the 'for fuck's sake, let us build real ships, we'll just call it a modification' workaround that produced the Saganami-Cs. Less 'this is a good idea' and more 'this is the best we can sneak past that fuckhat Janacek.'