Bit of Analysis: HH Saganami Island series

[Ahriman238]

And so we come, quite naturally to the second Honor Harrington spin-off series, taking place in the same continuity but having little to do with Honor, for at least the first book, anyways. And while the common element in the titles are shadows (Shadow of Saganami, Storm from the Shadows, and Shadow of Freedom would have been the third book but Weber decided to make it a main-series novel) the published literature lists it as the Saganami Island series, and so it is called.


This series will concern itself with the Talbott Cluster, on the far side of the recently discovered seventh wormhole leading away from Manticore. Talbott is in the Verge, the wide band beyond the official borders of the Solarian League that are littered with protectorates, client states. "trade partners," and a multitude of worlds under de facto occupation by either the League's Office of Frontier Security or this or that Solly megacorporation. Those worlds not in some immediate position of servitude to League interests are being eyed hungrily by OFS.

So when the wormhole is discovered, a hastily organized plebiscite is overwhelmingly in favor of joining Manticore over waiting for the League to absent-mindedly devour them. Of the 16 inhabited systems of the Talbott Cluster only one, New Tuscany, elects not to join the now Star Empire. Of course, just because a vast majority wish to join Manticore doesn't mean everyone is enthused with the idea of bending a knee to a distant monarch. It also doesn't help that the vote was organized by the Rembrandt Trade Union. The RTU is a joint stock company and treaty of free trade between the four wealthiest systems in Talbott. It was created specifically to build a counterweight to the sort of economic forces the League can bring to bear on hardscrabble colony worlds, but is still distrusted and resented in several corners of the Cluster.

Most of the Talbott Cluster operates on a similar technology level to Grayson and Masada when first encountered by Manticore. That means primitive death-traps for space ships, industrial tools generations behind the wealthy League or the Star Empire, and only a handful of the richest people can arrange prolong for their heirs. It's clear Manticore can do a lot more for these people than shelter them from OFS. At the same time, resistance to the idea of Manticoran rule is hardening, and threated Solly interests are looking for an exploit to snap up the Cluster from an impudent neobarb kingdom.

Into this delicate situation we drop Her Majesty's Cruiser Nasty Kitty... er, HMS Hexapuma, one of the sparkling new Saganami-C cruisers, one of the first to go through the wormhole to show the flag at Talbott and help with whatever issues crop up. Her captain is Aivars Terekhov a slightly traumatized veteran of the Haven War and former POW. But this isn't his story so much as it is that of the midshipmen fresh from the Academy on Saganami Island who undergo their first cruise on the Kitty. I know I complained of the attempted 'lower decks' subplot in Honor Among Enemies, but mostly that was the bullying and the distraction from the far more interesting A-plot. Here, there is no distinction, the young men and women grow into proper officers against the backdrop of Talbott and the conflict and deep uncertainty of it's present circumstances. And I love it. I love having a good old fashioned sci-fi adventure like the series hadn't seen since the third book. One ship on a mission, no fears over the greater war. I hadn't noticed how much I'd missed that, until it was suddenly returned to me with this book. So strap in, this one will be a ride.

His head snapped around towards the visual display just as Defiant's sister ship took another complete missile broadside from the nearest Peep battlecruiser. The heavy laser heads detonated virtually simultaneously less than five thousand kilometers off Valiant's port bow. The deadly bomb-pumped lasers slashed out, stabbing through her fluctuating sidewall like white-hot needles through soft butter. Light armor shattered, impeller nodes flashed and exploded like prespace flashbulbs, atmosphere belched outward, and then the entire forward third of her hull shattered. It didn't explode, it simply . . . shattered. The brutally mutilated hull began to tumble madly, and then her fusion bottle failed and she did explode.

"Handley and Plasma Stream are crossing the Alpha wall, Sir!" Franklin shouted from Communications, and he knew he ought to feel something. Triumph, perhaps. But the fact that two ships of his convoy had escaped was cold and bitter ashes on his tongue. The other merchies hadn't, Valiant and Resolute had already died, and now it was Defiant's turn.

Point defense stopped one, final missile—then the other six detonated.

The rather questionable decision to open the book and introduce our captain through a nightmare/flashback to the battle leading to his captivity. He was commanding a convoy escort, bringing supplies to Eighth Fleet during Buttercup when he got pounced by Peeps who'd learned that fighting White Haven head on was suicide, but also that he used up fantastic numbers of missiles in each fight.

By their names, I believe these three escorts to be light cruisers. Terekhov does get some extra coolness as the captain of Defiant.

Also, 17 of 23 missiles stopped by point-defense in a hyperspace engagement. Not bad.

"Point defense fire plan Horatius!" he snapped, and what was left of his Tactical Department started throwing canisters of counter-missiles out of the bow tubes. The canisters were seldom used, especially by a ship as small as a light cruiser, but this was exactly the situation for which they were designed. Defiant had lost over half her counter-missile tubes. The canisters used standard missile tubes to put additional clusters of defensive birds into space, and despite her vicious damage, the ship still had three-quarters of her counter-missile uplinks, which gave her control channels to spare.

You can fire canisters full of counter missiles, like small pods, out a full-sized missile tube in place of standard munitions. It's pretty much purely a desperation move to survive this one salvo, since you aren't firing back, but it lets you survive even without a lot of counter missile tubes, for a little while.

Bomb-pumped lasers lashed at her, but they wasted themselves on her impenetrable impeller wedge, for her hairpin turn had taken their onboard computers by surprise, and the surviving laser heads had no time to maneuver into firing positions.

And well they should have been surprised, a fragment of his brain thought grimly. His bleeding ship was headed directly into the teeth of the overwhelming enemy task force, now, not away, and the heavy spinal grasers of her forward chase armament locked onto a Mars-class heavy cruiser.

They opened fire. The range was long for any energy weapon, even the massive chasers, but the Peep had strayed ahead of her consorts and the more massive battlecruisers as she raced eagerly for the kill, and Defiant's gunnery had always been good. Her target staggered as the deadly blast of energy, dozens of times more powerful than even a ship of the wall's laser heads, sledgehammered into her. It was as if she had run into a rock in space. The chasers went to rapid, continuous fire, sucking every erg Engineering and their own capacitor rings could feed them. Audible warning alarms added their shrillness to the cacophony of damage signals, combat chatter, and beeping priority signals as the grasers overheated catastrophically, but there was no point cutting back, and he knew it.

So did the grasers' on-mount crews. They didn't even try to reduce power. They simply threw everything they had, for as long as they had it, and their target exploded into wreckage, shattering into jagged splinters, life pods, and vac-suited bodies. The tide of destruction swept aft, tearing her apart frame by frame, and then she vanished in a sun-bright fireball . . . two seconds before Chaser Two's abused circuitry exploded.

Terekhov kills a Mars-class CA with chase energy weapons. Chase beams are usually the biggest, most powerful a ship has, since their number is always going to be restricted anyways, and even his dinky cruisers grasers are "dozens of times" more powerful than the biggest, nastiest MDM laser-heads.

There was no time to feel exultation, or even grim satisfaction. The brief respite his desperate maneuver had won ended as the Peeps adjusted. The dead cruiser's squadron mates rolled, presenting their broadsides. They poured out fire in torrents, hurling their hate at their sister's killer. More missiles were shrieking in from every firing bearing, joining the holocaust of the Mars-class ships' fire, and there was no way to avoid them all. No more tricks. No more clever maneuvers.

There was only time to look at the plot, to see the incoming death sentence of his ship and all his people and to curse his own decision to fight. And then—

"Wake up, Aivars!"

The battle, and Terekhov's nightmare, ends. We briefly meet his wife Sinead who is naturally upset that he'll be leaving again.

Admiral of the Red Lady Dame Honor Harrington, Steadholder and Duchess Harrington, sat beside Vice Admiral of the Red Dame Beatrice McDermott, Baroness Alb, and watched silently as the comfortable amphitheater seating of the huge holographic simulator filled up. It was an orderly audience. It was also quite a bit smaller than it would have been a few years earlier. There were fewer non-Manticoran uniforms out there, as well, and the vast majority of the foreign ones which remained were the blue-on-blue of the Grayson Space Navy. Several of the Star Kingdom's smaller allies had cut back sharply on the midshipmen they sent to Saganami Island, and there were no Erewhonese uniforms at all. Dame Honor managed—somehow—to maintain her serene expression as she remembered the tight-faced midshipmen who had withdrawn from their classes in a body when their government denounced its long-standing alliance with the Star Kingdom of Manticore.

Class sizes at the Academy have shrunk a lot with the war over, and less allies have been sending their own officer candidates since the High Ridge Administration started treating them crap. All Erewhon candidates have been pulled since Erewhon went over to the other side.

"Atttten—SHUN!"

Command Sergeant Major Sullivan's harsh voice filled even the vastness of the simulator with a projection the finest opera singer would have been hard-pressed to match, and a perfectly synchronized, thunderous "Bang!" answered as eleven thousand brilliantly polished boots slammed together in instant response. Fifty-five hundred midshipmen and midshipwomen came to attention, eyes front, shoulders square, spines ramrod straight, thumbs on trouser seams, and she looked back at them unblinkingly

Mind, there's still 5,500 people in this graduating class.

They were graduating early. Not as early as some of their predecessors had before Eighth Fleet's decisive offensive under Earl White Haven. But much earlier than their immediate predecessors had, now that Eighth Fleet's triumph had been thrown away like so much garbage. And they were headed not to the deployments of peacetime midshipman cruises, but directly into the cauldron of a new war.

A losing war, Dame Beatrice thought harshly, wondering how many of those youthful faces would die in the next few desperate months. How many of the minds behind those faces truly understood the monumental betrayal which was about to send them straight into the furnace?

We're back to a wartime rush to get the new trained personnel out there, seeing as the war has in fact resumed.

"You are here," she told them, "for one final meeting before you begin your midshipman cruises. This represents a custom, a final sharing of what naval service truly is, and what it can cost, which has been a part of Saganami Island for over two centuries. By tradition, the Commandant of the Academy addresses her students at this time, but there have been exceptions. Admiral Ellen D'Orville was one such exception. And so was Admiral Quentin Saint-James.

"This year is another such exception, for we are honored and privileged to have Admiral Lady Dame Honor Harrington present. She will be on Manticore for only three days before returning to Eighth Fleet to complete its reactivation and take up her command once more. Many of you have had the privilege of studying under her as underclassmen. All of you could not do better than to hold her example before you as you take up your own careers. If any woman in the Queen's uniform today truly understands the tradition which brings us all together this day, it is she."

Honor is giving the graduation address and presentation for Last View.

"In a few days," she said finally into their silence, "you will be reporting for your first true shipboard deployments. It is my hope that your instructors have properly prepared you for that experience. You are our best and brightest, the newest link in a chain of responsibility, duty, and sacrifice which has been forged and hammered on the anvil of five centuries of service. It is a heavy burden to assume, one which can—and will—end for some of you in death."

She paused, listening to the silence, feeling its weight.

"Your instructors have done their best, here at the Island, to prepare you for that burden, that reality. Yet the truth is, Ladies and Gentlemen, that no one can truly prepare you for it. We can teach you, train you, share our institutional experience with you, but no one can be with you in the furnace. The chain of command, your superiors, the men and women under your orders . . . all of them will be there. And yet, in that moment when you truly confront duty and mortality, you will be alone. And that, Ladies and Gentlemen, is a moment no training and no teacher can truly prepare you to face.

"In that moment, you will have only four things to support you. Your training, which we have made as complete, as demanding, and as rigorous as we possibly could. Your courage, which can come only from within. Your loyalty to the men and women with whom you serve. And the tradition of Saganami. Some of you, most of you, will rise to the challenge of that moment. Some will try with all that is within you, and discover that all the training and courage in the universe do not make you immortal. And some, hopefully only a very few, will break."

The sound of a single indrawn breath would have been deafening as every eye looked back at her.

"The task to which you have been called, the burden you have volunteered to bear for your Queen and your Kingdom, for your Protector and your Planet, for whatever people you serve, is the most terrifying, dangerous, and honorable one in the universe. You have chosen, of your own free will, to place yourselves and your lives between the people and star nations you love and their enemies. To fight to defend them; to die to protect them. It is a burden others have taken up before you, and if no one can truly teach you the reality of all it means and costs until you have experienced it for yourself, there remains still much you can learn from those who have gone before. And that, Ladies and Gentlemen, is the reason you are here today, where every senior class of midshipmen has stood on the eve of its midshipman cruise for the last two hundred and forty-three T-years."

Honor's speech, but the reason they're here is to witness the sensor logs and transmissions from Edward Saganami- the founding hero of the RMN- from his last stand.

There was nothing extraordinary about his appearance. He was of somewhat less than average height, with a dark complexion, a strong nose, and dark brown, slightly receding hair, and his dark eyes had a pronounced epicanthic fold. He wore an antique uniform, two T-centuries and more out of date, and the visored cap which the Royal Manticoran Navy had replaced with berets a hundred and seventy T-years before was clasped under his left arm

Edward Saganami, and the older RMN uniform has a cap instead of a beret.

"I beg to report," he continued, "that the forces under my command have engaged the enemy. Although I deeply regret that I must inform you of the loss of HMS Triumph and HMS Defiant in action against the piratical vessels based at Trautman's Star, I must also inform you that we were victorious. We have confirmed the destruction of thirteen hostile cruisers, light cruisers, and destroyers, and all basing infrastructure in the system. In addition, we have captured one destroyer, one light and two heavy cruisers, and two battlecruisers. Several of these units appear to have been of recent Solarian construction, with substantially heavier armaments than most 'pirates' carry. Our own casualties and damage were severe, and I have been forced to detach HMS Victorious, Swiftsure, Mars, and Agamemnon for repairs. I have transferred sufficient of their personnel to the other units of my command to fully crew each of my remaining vessels, and I have instructed Captain Timmerman, Swiftsure's commander, as the detachment's senior officer, to return to the Star Kingdom, escorting our prize ships.

"In light of our casualties, and the reduction in my squadron's strength, it will be necessary to temporarily suspend our offensive operations against the pirate bases we have identified. I regret to inform you that we have captured additional corroborating evidence, including the quality of the enemy's warships, of the involvement of both Manpower, Incorporated, and individuals at the highest level of the Silesian government with the so-called 'pirates' operating here in the Confederacy. Under the circumstances, I do not believe we can rely upon the Confederacy Navy to protect our commerce. Indeed, the collusion of senior members of the government with those attacking our commerce undoubtedly explains the ineffectiveness of Confederacy naval units assigned as convoy escorts.

"Given this new evidence, and my own depleted numbers, I see no option but to disperse my striking force to provide escorts in the areas of greatest risk. I regret the factors which compel me to temporarily abandon offensive action, but I fully intend to resume larger scale operations once I receive the reinforcements currently en route to Silesia.

Saganami met his end during a massive antipiracy mission to Silesia, after his great victory at Trautman's Star and his uncovering of Manpower and government collusion with the pirates he had to break up his forces for convoy escorts. After his death, Queen Adrienne sent the first wallers to depose the current Silesian government.

The warship's bridge was quaint and cramped by modern standards, that of a "battlecruiser" smaller than many modern heavy cruisers, with displays and weapons consoles that were hopelessly out of date. The same almond-eyed officer stood on the command deck, his old-style vac suit far clumsier and bulkier than a modern skinsuit. Battle boards blazed crimson at his ship's Tactical station, and the flow and rush of his bridge personnel's disciplined combat chatter rippled under the surface of his voice when he spoke.

Saganami's flagship, HMS Nike far smaller and less capable than contemporary battlecruisers.

"God damn it to Hell, Eddy!" Hargood exploded. "There are six of the bastards, including two battlecruisers! Just what the fuck do you think you're going to accomplish? Unlike us, you've got the legs to stay away from them, so do it, damn it!"

"There won't be six when we're done," Saganami said grimly, "and every one we destroy, or just cripple badly enough, is one that won't be chasing you or another unit of the convoy. And now, I'm done arguing with you, James. Take your ship, and your people, and get your ass home to that wife and those kids of yours. Saganami, clear."

Like Honor in In Enemy Hands, Saganami's convoy was ambushed by a numerous force, and he chose to sacrifice his command to buy time for the freighters to run, and cut down on the number of pursuers.

A single green icon, tagged with the name "Nike," drove ahead, accelerating hard towards six other icons that glared the fresh-blood color of hostile units. Two of the hostiles were identified as battlecruisers. Another was a heavy cruiser. The other three were "only" destroyers. The range looked absurdly low, but no one had fired yet. The weapons of the day were too crude, too short-legged. But that was about to change, for the range fell steadily as Nike moved to intercept her enemies.

The first missiles launched, roaring out of their tubes, and Prince Harold's sensor imagery was suddenly hashed by jagged strobes of jamming. The icons all but vanished completely in the electronic hash, but only for a moment. Then multiple layers of enhancement smoothed away the interference, replacing it with a glassy clarity. The dearth of data gave away how badly Prince Harold's sensors had been affected, yet what data there was was crystal clear . . . and brutal.

It lasted over forty minutes, that battle, despite the horrendous odds. Forty minutes in which there was not a sound, not a whisper, in all that vast auditorium while fifty-five hundred midshipmen's eyes watched that display. Watched that single, defiant green bead of light drive straight into more than four times its own firepower. Watched it concentrate its fire with a cold precision which had already discounted its own survival. It opened fire not on the opposing battlecruisers, but on the escorting destroyers. It hammered them with the thermonuclear thunder of old-fashioned contact warheads. And as the range closed, it clawed at them with the coherent light of broadside lasers.

Not a single member of the audience misunderstood what they were seeing. Commodore Saganami wasn't fighting to live. He was fighting to destroy or cripple as many pirate vessels as he could. It didn't matter to a slow, unarmed merchantman whether the pirate that overhauled it was a destroyer or a superdreadnought. Any pirate could destroy any merchantman, and there were as many pirates as there were ships in Saganami's convoy. Each ship he killed was one merchantship which would live . . . and he could kill destroyers more easily than he could battlecruisers.

Nike bored in, corkscrewing around her base vector and rolling ship madly to interpose her impeller wedge against incoming fire, snapping back upright to send an entire broadside of lasers blasting through the fragile sidewall of a destroyer. Her target reeled aside, belching atmosphere, trailing debris. Its wedge fluctuated, then died, and Nike dispatched it to whatever hell awaited its crew with a single missile even as she writhed around to savage one of its consorts.

The green icon twisted and wove, spiraling through its enemies, closing to a range which was suicidal even for the cruder, shorter-ranged weapons of her own day. There was an elegance to Nike's maneuvers, a cleanness. She drove headlong towards her own destruction, yet she danced. She embraced her own immolation, and the hand which guided her shaped her course with a master's touch.

Yet elegance was not armor, nor grace immortality. Another ship would have died far sooner than she, would have been raked by enemy fire, would have stumbled into the path of a killing salvo. But not even she could avoid all of the hurricane of destruction her enemies hurled to meet her, and damage codes flashed beside her icon as hit after hit slammed home.

A second destroyer blew up. Then the third staggered aside, her forward impeller ring a broken, shattered ruin, and Nike turned upon the heavy cruiser. Her missiles ripped into it, damaging its impellers, laming it so that even a lumbering merchantship could outpace it.

Her icon was haloed in a scarlet shroud that indicated escaping atmosphere. Her acceleration dropped steadily as alpha and beta nodes were blown out of her impeller rings. The weight of her fire dwindled as lasers and missile tubes—and the men and women who crewed them—were shattered one by one. Dame Honor and Nimitz had seen the horrors of battle, seen friends torn apart, splendid ships shattered and broken. Unlike Dame Beatrice's watching midshipmen, they knew what it must have been like aboard Nike's bridge, in the ship's passages, in the armored pods where her weapons crews fought and cursed . . . and died. But those watching midshipmen knew they lacked Dame Honor's experience, knew they were witnessing something beyond their experience and comprehension. And that that same something might someday come for them, as it had come for Edward Saganami and the crew of HMS Nike so many years before.

The brutally wounded battlecruiser rolled up at point-blank range, barely eight thousand kilometers from her target, and fired every surviving weapon in her port broadside into one of the enemy battlecruisers. The pirate heaved sideways as transfer energy shattered armor and blasted deep, deep into her hull. She coasted onward for a few moments, and then vanished in a titanic explosion.

But Nike paid for that victory. As she rolled to take the shot, the second, undamaged pirate battlecruiser finally found a firing bearing of her own. One that was no longer obstructed by Nike's skillfully interposed wedge. Her energy weapons lashed out, as powerful as Nike's own. Saganami's ship was more heavily armored than any cruiser or destroyer, but she wasn't a battleship or a dreadnought. She was only a battlecruiser. Her armor splintered, atmosphere gushed from her ruptured hull, and her forward impeller ring flashed and died.

She staggered, trying to twist back away from her opponent, and the heavy cruiser she had already lamed sent a full salvo of missiles into her. Point defense stopped some, but four exploded against her wavering sidewall, and more damage codes flashed as some of their fury overpowered the straining generators and blasted into her side. And then the hostile battlecruiser fired again. The green icon lurched, circled with the flashing red band of critical damage, and a window opened in the tactical display.

Saganami's Last Stand, outnumbered 6 to 1 with two of those ships a technical match for his, he still manages to cripple or kill five.

And the reason, of course, for showing this is to both try and instill on the midshipmen a sense of their own mortality, and that they are part of a grand tradition of self-sacrifice. Even as far back as the third book, RMN officers were suicidally protective of merchantmen, as Theisman said then "it's the Saganami influence."

"We're done, James," Saganami said. His voice was hoarse, harsh with pain and the exhaustion of blood loss, yet his expression was almost calm. "Tell the Queen. Tell her what my people did. And tell her I'm sor—"

Final transmission HMS Nike. Cut to a shot of Saganami's posthumous medal.

And then the lights came up once more, and Lady Dame Honor Harrington, Commanding Officer of the newly reactivated Eighth Fleet, Manticoran Alliance, looked out over the Royal Manticoran Naval Academy's four hundred and eleventh senior class. They looked back at her, and she inhaled deeply.

"Ladies and Gentlemen," she said, her soprano voice ringing out clear and strong, "the tradition lives!"

Sixty more seconds passed in ringing silence, and then—

"Dismissed, Ladies and Gentlemen," she said very quietly.

411th graduating class, finished with their Last View.

[Crazedwraith]

Are the counter missile cannister implied to be recent things? I wonder when Weber thought them up. It just seems to be like they'd be the perfect thing for MacKeon to have used in 'In Enemy Hands' or any one really trying to cope with missile pod swarm with a little warning. Firing broadside guns, each hurling multiple counter missiles at once seems like a decent counter.

[Ahriman238]

Are the counter missile cannister implied to be recent things? I wonder when Weber thought them up. It just seems to be like they'd be the perfect thing for MacKeon to have used in 'In Enemy Hands' or any one really trying to cope with missile pod swarm with a little warning. Firing broadside guns, each hurling multiple counter missiles at once seems like a decent counter.

What you see is what we've got "seldom used, especially by a ship as small as a light cruiser." Presumably in most circumstances it's more productive to get the other guy to stop shooting at you than to thicken your missile defenses a bit. On the other, huge MDM missile swarms would seem to change that equation.

[Mr Bean]

Forget that think about Podnaughts, since you can stack pods and hang them on tractors as needed and since you flush most of your ammo and long ranges why NOT have a few counter-missile pods which you can dump out pre-engagement to tractor behind thirty seconds before the first missiles hit so you can blank space in counter missiles for the first two or three salvos. After all the ranges of post missile swarm means you can fire your entire combat load before your first missiles arrive at top firing rates.

[Batman]

Don't forget that Honorverse missiles are pretty stupid. The canisters make sense if you have more datalinks than operational launchers, but throwing out missiles that are the next best thing to blind, especially at the cost of reducing your broadside firepower, may simply not be worth it.
And while I'm not certain I 'do' think this is the first time they're mentioned in the novels at least.

[Nephtys]

It seems the logical conclusion of the idea (put out forward counter missile platforms) was best realized by the missile defense role of LACs, since they do have the dispersal ability to be out there well ahead of the defending ship's missile engagement range, while being capable enough to actually hit their targets. Blind canister launches seem a desperation move for the RMN and Haven, while the Solarians seem to have developed a (useless) technology to improve the effectiveness of these defense missiles (that Aegis thing that does jack shit vs MDMs)

[Simon_Jester]

And so we come, quite naturally to the second Honor Harrington spin-off series, taking place in the same continuity but having little to do with Honor, for at least the first book, anyways. And while the common element in the titles are shadows (Shadow of Saganami, Storm from the Shadows, and Shadow of Freedom would have been the third book but Weber decided to make it a main-series novel) the published literature lists it as the Saganami Island series, and so it is called.

In effect, though, Shadow of Freedom is the third book regardless of how it's marketed, because the book contains very little of Honor actually doing anything aside from occasionally sitting in a conference room and commenting on developments. Terekhov, Henke, and the same gang who figured prominently in the earlier two Shadow novels figure much more prominently.

Also, 17 of 23 missiles stopped by point-defense in a hyperspace engagement. Not bad.

That's from a single ship; hard to say what class. For a CL that's extremely impressive, though it might well be a CL fitted with the Ghost Rider electronic warfare suite, in which case most of those missiles were blinded or diverted by jamming, not shot down by missile defense. It'd have to be; even with Ghost Rider's ECM advances, the most modern class of RMN light cruiser then available had only five countermissile tubes and four laser clusters on the broadside.

For a Star Knight it's... probably a bit below par, for a Saganami-A it'd be a disappointment.

Honor's speech, but the reason they're here is to witness the sensor logs and transmissions from Edward Saganami- the founding hero of the RMN- from his last stand.

"Founding hero" might be a little much, but one of the earliest great figures of the 'modern' RMN tradition. They have a history before Saganami, but it was during his era that Manticore began evolving into the state it was still recognizable as around 1900-1905 PD: a single-system polity whose control of the Junction and widespread mercantile interests gave it a far-ranging naval presence in the Haven Sector.

Go back before that and the RMN was pretty much a pure system defense force.

Saganami met his end during a massive antipiracy mission to Silesia, after his great victory at Trautman's Star and his uncovering of Manpower and government collusion with the pirates he had to break up his forces for convoy escorts. After his death, Queen Adrienne sent the first wallers to depose the current Silesian government.

Yeah, the Manticore/Thorson-class battleships referenced in the earlier part of House of Steel, which I quoted here.

So yes, those ships hung around for 200 years... wow.

Are the counter missile cannister implied to be recent things? I wonder when Weber thought them up. It just seems to be like they'd be the perfect thing for MacKeon to have used in 'In Enemy Hands' or any one really trying to cope with missile pod swarm with a little warning. Firing broadside guns, each hurling multiple counter missiles at once seems like a decent counter.

Several issues:

1) Light starships do not have very deep magazines and can shoot themselves dry fairly easily if they fight a prolonged battle, or if they have to fight multiple battles without a chance to reload. Each countermissile canister represents a missile that cannot be fired at the enemy, and for Manticoran light combatants, the missiles are the main armament of the ship.

2) It may not be easy to unload a missile tube and reload with countermissile canisters. Certainly possible but not something that can be done instantly, seeing as how the individual missiles are the size of an ICBM. So if your ship doesn't happen to have the canisters in the ready magazine in a place where they can be quickly transferred into the tubes, you might not get them loaded in time to respond to a sudden surprise pod salvo.

3) There was literally no point in having countermissile canisters at all until the missile pod was invented, because most ships had ample missile defense to deal with the heaviest salvo a peer competitor could throw. The main applications of countermissile canisters are to blunt the effects of a single pod salvo, or to allow a smaller ship to survive a bit longer within missile range of a larger one. Since doctrinally, small ships aren't supposed to fight big ones at all, the only application that matters is blunting pod salvoes.

4) Since Haven would predictably not have their own missile pods for at least a few years after Manticore, it is likely that development of pod technology for countermissiles was a lower priority than developing offensive missile pods in the first place. In which case the countermissile canisters would probably not be developed until the time of Honor Among Enemies or In Enemy Hands... And even then, the canisters would mostly be deployed on a limited scale until it was realized that Haven had missile pods and they needed a way to counter the threat.

Forget that think about Podnaughts, since you can stack pods and hang them on tractors as needed and since you flush most of your ammo and long ranges why NOT have a few counter-missile pods which you can dump out pre-engagement to tractor behind thirty seconds before the first missiles hit so you can blank space in counter missiles for the first two or three salvos. After all the ranges of post missile swarm means you can fire your entire combat load before your first missiles arrive at top firing rates.

And that probably ties into the other argument I did not make above: control links.

Missiles are very fast, evasive, time-critical targets; there is no way to have effective missile defense without coordination and control from 'groundside' (or in this case, shipside). Just dumping a zillion countermissiles into space and saying "Go get 'em, tiger!" is not a reliable way of shooting down enemy missiles unless you use a vastly disproportionate number of the things.

You might well need to launch ten countermissile canisters just to get a high enough kill probability to shoot down ten enemy missiles... in which case you're fighting a battle of attrition, because you lost the ability to fire one missile at the enemy, in exchange for shooting down one of the enemy's own missiles.

If you're Manticore, your missiles are better than the enemy, and at anything like a "one kill per canister" exchange rate, it makes more sense to skip the canisters and bring a bigger load of offensive missiles. Because one of your missiles is worth more to you than one of theirs is to them. If you're Haven or the SLN, then the exchange rate of 1:1 is in your favor because of numerical superiority; firing a broadside of 20 countermissile canisters to stop an enemy broadside of 20 missiles is to your advantage. But because of the Manticoran offensive missile edge, uncontrolled countermissiles will be even LESS effective at shooting down their missiles than at anyone else, so you're back to square one.

Moreover, if we start talking about podlayer combat, bear in mind that a 'fully modern' pod combatant has NO broadside offensive weapons. Practically the entire ship's broadside can be covered in countermissiles and other missile defense/tracking systems. That gives you a huge increase in the number of countermissiles you can fire by conventional means and makes the countermissile pod less helpful.

It seems the logical conclusion of the idea (put out forward counter missile platforms) was best realized by the missile defense role of LACs, since they do have the dispersal ability to be out there well ahead of the defending ship's missile engagement range, while being capable enough to actually hit their targets. Blind canister launches seem a desperation move for the RMN and Haven, while the Solarians seem to have developed a (useless) technology to improve the effectiveness of these defense missiles (that Aegis thing that does jack shit vs MDMs)

Aegis would probably work rather well against 1910-era Manticoran technology, assuming the League remembered to install enough fire control.

Ghost Rider MDMs are an overmatch for the Aegis system... because Aegis wasn't designed to counter the threat. A Ghost Rider missile will typically have a closing velocity three times higher than the single-drive missiles the League designed Aegis to counter, and because of onboard fusion bottles its ECM will be able to do things that the League literally never imagined could be done by a missile-sized platform.

So Aegis is a good idea within the paradigm of 'linear evolution' that we see up to Honor Among Enemies. It just doesn't take into account the revolution in military affairs that we see with the rise of the MDM and the miniaturized fusion reactor starting in Echoes of Honor.

[Ahriman238]

She snapped down her locker's lid, set the combination, and brought the built-in counter-grav on-line. The locker rose smoothly, floating at the end of its tether, and she settled her beret perfectly on her head, turned, and marched out of her dormitory room forever.

Footlocker with it's own antigrav. Nice. Also Helen Zilwicki will be one of the main protagonists.

A small, dark-haired, dark-eyed midshipman bounced through the crowd headed for the Alpha-Three Shuttle Concourse like a billiard ball with wicked side spin. Helen had never understood how Midshipman Kagiyama got away with that. Of course, he was over ten centimeters shorter than she was, and wiry. Helen's physique might favor her dead mother's side of the family more than it favored her massively built father, but she was still a considerably more . . . substantial proposition than Aikawa.

Meet Aikawa Kagiyama, one of Helen's two best friends and thus another main character. He's a bit of an imp.

"I know exactly who's assigned to Intransigent. And until this morning, that was my ship. What I don't know is who's assigned to your ship."

"Well, I'm not entirely sure, myself," Helen admitted. "I do know Ragnhild is, though. She's ticketed for the same shuttle to Hephaestus as I am—well, both of us, now, I guess."

"Really? Outstanding!" Aikawa beamed. "I wonder what possessed them to put all three of the Three Musketeers on the same ship?"

"An oversight, I'm sure," Helen said dryly. "Of course, from the way you're talking, they didn't have all three of us assigned to Hexapuma initially, now did they?"

Ragnhild Pavletic, the third member of their trio.

"A point. Definitely a point. So Ragnhild is the only other one you know about?"

"No, Leopold Stottmeister caught the morning shuttle up because he was going to have lunch with his parents at Dempsey's before he reported aboard. I know about him and Ragnhild for certain. But there may be one or two more."

"Stottmeister . . ." Aikawa frowned. "The soccer jock?"

"Yeah. I had a couple of classes with him, and he's a pretty sharp cookie. In the Engineering track, though."

"Oh." Aikawa looked up at her and their eyes met with the same expression. Both of them were in the Tactical track, traditionally the surest way to starship command. There was nothing wrong with someone who was more interested in hardware than maneuvers, of course. And God knew someone had to keep the works wound up and running. But neither of them could quite understand why someone would deliberately choose to be a glorified mechanic.

Leo Stottmeister, another middy, albeit bucking to be an engineer rather than sitting in the captain's chair.

"I think there's one more, though. I didn't recognize the name—Rizzo or d'Arezzo." She shrugged. "Something like that."

"Paulo d'Arezzo? Little guy, only four or five centimeters taller'n I am?"

"Don't know. Far as I know, I've never even met him."

"I think I have, once," Aikawa said as the two of them turned down another hallway and the crowd got even denser, packing tighter together as the corridor narrowed. "If he's who I think he is, he's an electronics weenie. Pretty good one, too." Helen looked a question at him, and shrugged. "I only met him in passing, but Jeff Timberlake worked a tactical problem in the final sims last term with d'Arezzo as his EW officer. Jeff said he was a damned good EWO."

Their fifth, Paulo d'Arezzo. Grayson started the trend of having a dedicated officer to manage ECM and EW, where before the XO or ATO (assistant tactical officer) would handle those duties in the copious free time all such officers have in combat. Manticore caught on around the time they were first building a joint Eigth Fleet, when Honor was captured.

"Bashanova?" Helen grimaced, as much in irritation at herself for repeating Aikawa like some witless parrot as anything else, but she wasn't sure she cared for the implications of that name. Kenneth Bashanova wasn't exactly beloved by either her or Aikawa. Or, for that matter, by at least ninety-nine percent of the people unfortunate enough to know him. Not that he cared particularly. The fourth son of an earl and the grandson of a duke had no need to concern himself with all of the little people clustered about his ankles.

If Aikawa's last-minute reassignment to HMS Hexapuma had saved her from making her midshipwoman's cruise trapped aboard the same ship as Kenneth Bashanova, she was devoutly grateful. He was poisonous enough with anyone, but his sort of aristocrat despised Gryphon Highlanders—like Helen—as much as Highlanders despised them, and he'd gone out of his way to step on her . . . once.

But whatever she thought of him, and however grateful she might be for his departure, Bashanova wasn't the sort of person who was involved in random last-minute changes. If he'd been reassigned to another ship, it was because someone had pulled strings to make that happen. Which might explain why the midshipman assignments to Hexapuma had been "incomplete" last night. And it also posed an interesting question. Had he been shifted to Intransigent because of some special opportunity waiting for anyone fortunate enough to make her snotty cruise aboard her? Or had he been shifted to get him away from Hexapuma?

One in every crowd. Or not, in this case. Still it's a fair question to ask before joining the ship's company.

"Don't you have any 'informed sources'?"

"Hey, I'm the one who knew who else was assigned aboard her, smartass! And just because the 'faxes broke the story about my old man, don't go around thinking I'm some kind of spook. One spy per family's enough, thank you. Although, come to think of it, Lars is showing some signs of interest. Berry and I certainly never did, though!"

"Then how come she wound up up to her . . . eyebrows in all that business on Erewhon and Congo?" he demanded.

"Torch, not Congo," she corrected. "Congo's the system name; the planet is Torch. And I still haven't figured out how all that worked. But I'll tell you this much—it wasn't because Berry was playing spy!" Her snort of disdain was little short of magnificent. "Berry's the sanest person in the entire Star Kingdom. Well, was, anyway. No way was she playing Junior Spook with Daddy—as if he'd've let her, even if she'd wanted to! I'm sure one of them will get around to explaining that whole business to me one of these days, but I already know that much."

Actually, she knew a good bit more, but a lot of what she knew was most definitely not for public distribution.

At least she's learned to keep her mouth shut. Must be hard to be the daughter of Manticore's most famous spy, and suddenly the sister to a foreign monarch.

"All right, I'll come clean. It just happens, Helen, that Hexapuma's newly assigned skipper is one Captain Aivars Terekhov. The Hyacinth Terekhov."

Helen's eyes widened. She didn't need Aikawa to tell her who Aivars Terekhov was. Everyone knew his record, just as everyone knew about the Manticore Cross he'd won for the Battle of Hyacinth.

Hyacinth was the battle from that nightmare sequence above. Seems Terekhov has joined the hallowed ranks of the last war's heroes.

HMSS Hephaestus was always crowded, especially now. With the abrupt, disastrous resumption of the war with Haven, the largest single shipyard the Navy owned was running at well over a hundred percent of its designed capacity. The destruction of the Grendelsbane satellite yards—and all the partially built warships in them—only made Hephaestus' frenetic pace even more frenzied.

Some of the logistics strain of the sudden resumption of the war.

At least she knew why he'd done it, if not how, and she felt a fresh spurt of affectionate irritation at the thought. As a mere daughter, she'd had no standing in the succession to Owens Steading when she initially left home to become the first Grayson midshipwoman ever to attend Saganami Island. As such, she'd managed to make the trip without the personal armsman which Grayson law required accompany any steadholder's heir or potential heir.

But that had been before the Conclave of Steadholders awakened to the full implications of Benjamin Mayhew's alterations to Grayson's laws of inheritance. Daughters were no longer precluded from inheriting steadholderships, so the Conclave had determined that they should no longer be excused from the consequences of standing in the succession.

Lt. Abigail Hearns will be on this cruise as assistant tactical officer and OCTO (officer candidate training officer) meaning she gets to ride heard over our young midshipmen. Since women can now inherit a Steading she needed an armsman as a Steadholder's heir and her father managed to finesse a San Martino/Manty Marine Sergeant, Mateo Gutirrez, from her own adventure for the job.

"Thank you, Ma'am," he said to Ragnhild. "You've been expected. I'm afraid the Executive Officer is out of the ship just now, though, Ma'am. I believe Commander Lewis, the Chief Engineer, is the senior officer on board."

"Thank you, Corporal," Ragnhild replied. He hadn't had to add the information that Lewis was the Engineer, and some Marines, she knew, wouldn't have. The function of a snotty cruise was at least in part to throw midshipmen into the deep end, and declining to provide helpful hints about who was who aboard their new ship was one of countless small ways of adding to that testing process.

Oh hey, it is Ginger Lewis, who Honor jumped to officer on her first cruise aboard Wayfarer. The chief engineer now, well, it's been a decade since HAE and presumably engineering track has less of a problem with a glut of senior officers than tactical/command slowing up advancement.

They swam the tube in single file, each taking care to leave sufficient clearance for his or her next ahead's towed locker. Fortunately, they'd all done well in null-grav training, and there were no embarrassing gaffes as, one-by-one, they swung themselves into Hexapuma's midships boat bay's one standard gravity.

Still got the zero-gee jetway connecting ship and station, which still leads to a boat bay. I guess it's the most logical place for an airlock.

"Yes, Lieutenant." Jankovich's pronounced Gryphon accent was like a breath of home to Helen, straight from the Highlands of her childhood. And there was something else she recognized in it—an edge of deep-seated dislike. There was nothing especially overt about it, but Highlanders were remarkably bad at hiding their true feelings . . . from other Highlanders. The rest of the Star Kingdom found everyone from Gryphon rough-edged enough that they seldom picked up on the subtle signs that were unmistakable to fellow Gryphons.

"Escort these snotties to their quarters," the lieutenant said briskly, obviously unaware of the subliminal vibrations Helen was receiving from the environmental tech.

Outsiders are frequently oblivious to the emotions of Gryphons, so the boat bay officer, Lt. Macintyre doesn't realize she's not making friends.

The midshipmen managed not to crane their necks and gawk as Jankovich led them to the Midshipmen's Berthing Compartment. That was its official name on the ship's inboard schematic, but, like all such compartments aboard all vessels of the Royal Manticoran Navy, it rejoiced in the colloquial nickname "Snotty Row." Hexapuma was a new ship, about to embark on her very first commission. As such, and as befitted a cruiser of her tonnage (especially one with her manpower-reducing automation), her Snotty Row was considerably larger and more comfortable than anything which might have been found aboard older, smaller, more cramped vessels.

Which was not, by any stretch of the imagination, the same thing as "palatial." Each middy would have his or her own privacy-screened sleeping compartment, but those consisted of very little more than their individual, and none too large, bunks. Each bunk boasted a mounting bracket to which the bunk's occupant could affix his or her locker. There was a cramped "sitting room" area against the forward bulkhead, and a large commons table with a tough, nonskid surface. The table also contained a pop-up com unit and at least three computer terminals. The bulkheads were painted a surprisingly pleasant deep, pastel blue, and at least the compartment—like the entire ship—still had that "new air car" smell and feel.

Snotty Row. Very submarine feel with their personal space being a bunk with a pull-down privacy screen.

The nameplate on his chest said "d'Arezzo, Paulo," and he was a good six centimeters shorter than she was, with fair hair and gray eyes. But what struck her most immediately about him was how incredibly handsome he was.

All sorts of internal alarms went off as she observed that classic, perfect profile, the high, thoughtful brow, the strong chin—with cleft, no less!—and firmly chiseled lips. If Central Casting had sent out for an actor to play a youthful Preston of the Spaceways, d'Arezzo was exactly who they would have gotten back. Especially with those narrow hips and broad shoulders to go with all the rest of the package.

Helen's experience with people who approached d'Arezzo's level of physical beauty (she didn't think she'd ever met anyone who actually surpassed it) had been less than happy. The kind of biosculpt it took to produce those looks was expensive, and the people who were willing to fork over the cash for it were either very spoiled, very rich, or both. Not exactly the sort of people a Gryphon Highlander was likely to find congenial.

He'd been sitting at one end of the table, reading from a book viewer, when the newcomers arrived. Another bad sign, she thought. He hadn't even bothered to try to strike up a conversation with Leo, who was one of the easiest going, friendliest people she'd ever met. At least he'd looked up when they entered the compartment, but there was a cool reserve behind those gray eyes. He made absolutely no effort to enter the conversation until Ragnhild and Aikawa had exchanged handclasps with Leo. Then those manly lips curved in a polite, distant smile.

"D'Arezzo, Paulo d'Arezzo," he introduced himself, and extended his hand to Helen, who happened to be closest.

"Helen Zilwicki," she replied, shaking it with as much enthusiasm as she could muster. Something flickered in the backs of his eyes, and she hid a mental grimace. Her accent was too pronounced to disguise even if she'd been inclined to try, and it seemed to have affected him very much as his too-beautiful face had affected her.

I'm assuming nobody reading an analysis thread will be bothered by spoilers? That being the case let me skip right to the chase. Helen assumes Paulo is another snobby aristo sneering quietly down his nose at her because you need a lot of cash to biosculpt a perfect face and form like his. Little could be further from the truth, he's a genetically engineered slave, a C-line prostitute model, liberated by the RMN and so grateful he took the liberating captain's surname as his own and embarked to become an RMN officer. Something Helen should be able to understand, but she needs a lesson in prejudice so her assumption of his attitude will color everything until she's almost hissing at him. It's a major running subplot.

And another reference to the mysterious Preston of the Spaceways.

"I hope you know what we're doing," Ragnhild said dryly. "Because I know I don't have a clue how to find the bridge from here."

"Oh, I feel confident we could find it even from a cold start, if we had to," he replied. "As it happens, however . . ."

He slid his book viewer out into the center of the table, and Ragnhild bent over it. Then she chuckled suddenly and turned the viewer so the others could see it. It was a schematic of Hexapuma, and Helen felt her own mouth twitch in an unwilling smile. She still didn't care too much for the way d'Arezzo had buried himself in the viewer, ignoring everyone else, but at least what he'd been perusing so intently made more sense than the novel she'd assumed he was reading.

Like Helen assuming he's brushing them off when he's frantically studying how to find his way around the ship.

An impressive collection, Helen thought. And one which almost certainly helped explain Lewis' commission. The RMN had always had a higher percentage of "mustangs"—officers who'd been promoted from the enlisted ranks—than most navies, but it appeared Ginger Lewis was something out of the ordinary even for the Star Kingdom.

Mention again of Manticore's high percentage of 'mustangs' commissioned from the ranks instead of going through the Academy.

"The first is one all of you've already had made to you over and over again. But that's because it's an important one. This cruise, here aboard Hexapuma, is your true final exam. Every one of you will officially graduate from the Academy, regardless of the outcome of your cruise, on the basis of your academic record, barring the unlikely event of your committing some court-martial offense in the course of it. But," she let her green eyes sweep their faces, and there was no longer any smile in them, "if you screw up badly enough aboard Hexapuma, you will not receive a commission in Her Majesty's Navy. If you screw up less than totally, you might receive a commission, but it wouldn't be a line commission, and you would never hold command of any Queen's ship. Remember that, Ladies and Gentlemen. This is pass-fail, and it isn't a game. Not a test you can retake or make up. I know all of you are intelligent, motivated, and well educated. I expect you to do well. And I strongly recommend to you that you expect—and demand—the same superior performance out of yourselves.

The whole point of a snotty cruise, test them every which way you can in duty aboard an actual ship before extending a commission. In the actual Napoleonic Navy, a midshipman could go years, or an entire lifetime without ever making lieutenant. Here it's one deployment, probably for a year or two, judging from how long Honor's ships are normally out and about.

"The third point I want to make is that although you hold temporary warrants as Queen's officers for this deployment, and although your positions in Hexapuma's chain of command are very real, you have not yet even attained what a civilian might call 'an entry-level position.' In fact, Ladies and Gentlemen, a midshipwoman is what you might think of as the larval stage of an officer. Be aware of that. You face the difficult task of projecting authority over men and women much older than you are, with many T-years more experience than you possess. You must have confidence in yourself before you can expect those men and women to have confidence in you. And be assured that they will recognize any effort to bullshit them, just as they'll recognize petty tyrants in the making when they encounter them. But your self-confidence can't stop with the ability to make them obey you. It must extend to the point of being willing and able to learn from them without sacrificing your authority.

Position of a snotty. Not enlisted but not a true officer, at once bottom of the ranks yet commanding as though midway between officer and enlisted.

"This, Ladies and Gentlemen," Commander Lewis informed them, "is Senior Chief Petty Officer Wanderman. Senior Chief Wanderman is going to take you on a little tour. Before you set out, however, I believe you might find it advisable to return to your quarters long enough to change out of those nice uniforms into something you can get a little grease on. The Senior Chief believes in, ah, a hands-on approach. Don't you, Senior Chief?"

She smiled at the tough-looking, impassive petty officer, and there might have been the tiniest flicker of shared amusement in his brown eyes, though one would have had to look very close to find it.

"As the Commander says, Ma'am," he said. Then he looked at the midshipmen. "It's now thirteen-twenty-five hours, Sirs and Ma'ams," he told them. "If it would be convenient for you, I thought we might begin the tour at thirteen-forty-five."

It was really quite remarkable, Helen reflected. Until that moment, she hadn't realized a noncommissioned officer's polite "request" could also be a direct decree from God.

And Wanderman, formerly a lowly tech on Wayfarer, now a very senior tech on the Kitty.

And kids, you don't know the half of it...

[Ahriman238]

Now to meet the senior officers for this little pleasure cruise.

"Ah. The yard dogs are still arguing about the Engineering spares?" Captain Aivars Aleksovitch Terekhov leaned back in his chair, arctic blue eyes faintly amused.

"Yes, Sir." FitzGerald shrugged. "According to Bennington, we're twenty percent over establishment in almost every category."

"Shocking," Terekhov murmured. He quirked an eyebrow at his Chief Engineer. "Do you have any idea how this sad state of affairs could have come about, Commander Lewis?"

"Why, no, Sir," Ginger Lewis said. She shook her head, guileless green eyes wide.

"Lieutenant Duncan?" Terekhov looked at the short, attractive officer at the foot of the table. Lieutenant Andrea Duncan was the most junior officer present, and she looked more than a bit uneasy. Although she was Hexapuma's logistics officer, she wasn't a natural scrounger. She took her responsibilities seriously, but unlike Lewis, she appeared to be . . . uncomfortable whenever it came to going outside officially approved channels. And the fact that Terekhov had been aboard as Hexapuma's CO for less than three weeks didn't exactly make her feel any more at ease with him.

Fitzgerald, the XO, you've already met Lewis and Lt. Duncan is the logistics officer. Who really needs to learn the art of the midnight requisition.

"I can live with that, as long as we don't really end up with our departure delayed," Terekhov said, then moved his right hand in a little throwing away gesture. FitzGerald hadn't known Terekhov long, but he'd already learned to recognize the mannerism. That hand-flick was the captain's way of shifting from one mental focus to another, and the XO wondered if he'd always had it, or if it was one he'd developed since the hand was regenerated.

At the very least Terekhov had to regrow a hand after Hyacinth.

"It'll be close, Sir," Lewis replied, meeting his eyes squarely. "To be honest, I don't think the yard dogs have time to get everything done, so I've had them concentrating on Beta Thirty. That much, they should have done with at least a couple of days to spare. Most of the rest of our problems are relatively minor, actually. My people can take care of them underway out of our onboard resources. That was one reason I, ah, acquired so many spares." She shrugged. "Bottom line, Sir, this is a new ship. We passed our trials, and aside from that one beta node, everything on our list is really nothing more than squeaky hinges and parts that need wearing in."

Terekhov gazed at her for a moment, and she looked back steadily. More than one engineer would have sounded far less confident than Lewis. They would have insisted it was Hephaestus' job to repair every problem their own departments' surveys had identified instead of cheerfully accepting responsibility for them themselves. Especially given the way their commanding officers were liable to react if it turned out they couldn't deal with them themselves, after all.

State of the ship, and the self-confidence of Ginger Lewis.

FitzGerald waited to see how Terekhov would respond. Captain Sarcula had been assigned to command Hexapuma while she was still only a gleam in BuShips' eye. He'd supervised her construction from the keel plate out, and begun the assembly of a handpicked command team, starting with one Ansten FitzGerald and Commander Lewis. But Sarcula's assignment had been overtaken by events. His orders to assume command of the battlecruiser Braveheart, following her skipper's death in action, had been totally unexpected, and Terekhov's abrupt assignment to Hexapuma, for all intents and purposes straight out of Bassingford Medical Center, must have come as just as much of a surprise to him as Sarcula's sudden transfer had come to FitzGerald.

Fun fact, the original captain, Sarcula, was tapped to command a battlecruiser that lost it's skipper in Thunderbolt. So they had a new guy dumped on them and instead of the front lines, they're going to Talbott, largely because Personnel wants to ease Terekhov back into the saddle.

"Very well," was all he said, and the right hand flicked again. His head moved, as well, as he turned his attention to Lieutenant Commander Tobias Wright, Hexapuma's Astrogator. Wright was the youngest of Terekhov's senior officers, and the most reserved.

Wright, the astrogator, has all his star charts in order.

"Not yet, Sir." Nagchaudhuri was very tall—over a hundred and ninety-three centimeters—with dark black hair and brown eyes that stood out in sharp contrast to a complexion that approached albinism. That complexion was a legacy of the planet Sandor, from which his parents had immigrated before he'd learned to walk.

"We've received some of them, Captain," he continued, "but we won't be receiving the full crypto download until forty-four hours before we depart. I'm also still waiting for the Trade Union's secure merchant codes, but I've been assured that we should have them within the next day or two. Other than that, we're ready to go."

Amal Nagchaudhuri, comms. Also fervently patriotic and disappointed to be assigned to a sideshow.

"Yes, Sir." Lieutenant Commander Naomi Kaplan was the physical opposite of Amal Nagchaudhuri. She was forty centimeters shorter, and where he was so pale-skinned he'd had a permanent nanotech sun blocker installed, her complexion was almost as dark as Queen Elizabeth's own. Which only made her blond hair, so light it was almost—but not quite—platinum, stand out even more vividly. Her eyes were as dark as Nagchaudhuri's, but they were also far more intense. She reminded FitzGerald forcibly of their ship's hexapuma namesake—territorial, naturally aggressive, perpetually poised for mayhem, and very, very sharp-clawed.

Kaplan, tactical.

Guthrie Bagwell was a solidly built man, thirty centimeters taller than the tactical officer, but almost painfully nondescript. His features were eminently forgettable, his hair was an unremarkable brown, and his brain was quite possibly the sharpest of any of Hexapuma's officers. As the heavy cruiser's electronics warfare officer, he was one of Kaplan's subordinates, but ever since the new hardware developed as part of Project Ghost Rider had reached the deployment stage, EW had become a specialist's job once again. Bagwell, for all of his undisputed brilliance in his own esoteric area, completely lacked the broad-based tactical background which Lieutenant Grigsby had been supposed to bring to Hexapuma as her junior tactical officer.

"The entire Navy is chronically short of EW officers," Terekhov said. FitzGerald, watching him closely and listening to his calm, reasonable tone wondered how much of what he was saying was his own opinion and how much was the rationale BuPers had used when it denied Kaplan's request.

"The units being committed to active operations against Haven have a higher priority for electronics warfare specialists than units being assigned to . . . other duties," Terekhov continued. "And, to be perfectly honest—and with no desire to inflate any egos—the fact is that Lieutenant Bagwell has absolutely top-notch efficiency reports. He's substantially better, both in terms of ability and training, than anyone most ships could reasonably hope to have assigned to them. In part because of that, BuPers feels Hexapuma is adequately covered, and that the scarce supply of qualified EW officers shouldn't be further depleted providing such a paragon with backup which will probably never be needed for this deployment, anyway."

No proper ATO, they'll have to rely on Ms. Hearns or JEWO (junior EW officer). The Navy, it seems, is especially hard up on good EW specialists.

"Something amuses you, Commander?" Terekhov's tone might have been cutting. Instead, it expressed only mild interest, and the com officer shook his head with just a hint of apology.

"Sorry, Sir. I was just thinking. Lieutenant Hearns is also Miss Owens."

"Yes, she is," Terekhov agreed. "I believe I just observed that she was a steadholder's daughter myself."

"I know you did, Sir. But what I was thinking is that that makes her the equivalent of a princess of the blood. Which might make her even more qualified as our OCTO." Terekhov crooked an eyebrow, and Nagchaudhuri chuckled again. "Well, Sir, one of our midshipwomen is Helen Zilwicki. Anton Zilwicki's daughter. Which means, after that business in Congo, that she's a princess of the blood, too. After a manner of speaking, of course. In fact, if I understand what I've read about the Torch Constitution properly, I think she's probably the legal heir apparent if something should happen to Queen Berry."

Ok, first pray that nothing happens to Berry before she produces an heir. Second they're going to keep Hearns as ATO and OCTO despite Commander Kaplan's reservations about her experience.

Sir Lucien had been back in his old job for less than three months, and Admiral Draskovic, his immediate predecessor, had left a monumental mess in her wake. Not as bad as the disaster which had been left at BuShips or over at the Office of Naval Intelligence, perhaps, but bad enough. Especially in the face of a war which was going so badly at the moment.

Sir Lucian Cortez, Manticore's BuPers wizard in the last war, back where he belongs and figuring out which officers got beached that they really need back.

Aivars Terekhov had left active RMN service for almost thirty T-years to pursue a diplomatic career. He'd done well during his twenty-eight T-years with the Foreign Office, but he'd maintained his reserve commission. Promotions had been much slower in the reserve than among active-duty regulars, and he'd advanced only to the rank of lieutenant commander before—like many reservists—reporting for active duty after the Battle of Hancock. Also, as with a lot of "retreads," Cortez's own BuPers had spent longer than it should have recognizing his raw ability and steering him into the promotions and more demanding duties it had deserved.

The other reason to send Terekhov to Talbott. After his naval career stalled inpeacetime, he spent almost thirty years as a professional diplomat before coming back into uniform when the war started, so he pretty much has more interstellar diplomacy chops than any other starship captain available.

"You know Admiral Khumalo's going to need experienced, smart captains, Sir," Shaw continued. "And I can't think of anyone we could send him who could match Terekhov's diplomatic experience. He could be invaluable to Baroness Medusa and the Admiral, especially with his demonstrated ability to think outside the box. And, speaking frankly, you know as well as I do how few officers with that ability Admiral Khumalo has."

"And how poor he is at it himself," Cortez said with another grimace. Shaw didn't say anything in response. However true Cortez's assessment might be, it wasn't a captain's place to pass judgment on a rear admiral of the green.

"Actually, what I'd really prefer would be to recall Khumalo," Cortez continued. "Unfortunately, that's a political decision as much as a military one. Besides, who would we send out to replace him? To be brutally honest, Talbott doesn't exactly have the same priority as the front. Or as Silesia, for that matter."

Dame Matsuko is in Talbott, along with Admiral Khumalo as senior officer. Khumalo, how to say it nicely? Doesn't have nearly Terekhov's diplomatic experience, nor his brains.

"Too many fires," he muttered, mostly to himself. "Too many fires, and not enough people to piss on all of them."

He sat that way for several seconds, then let his chair come back upright.

"Maybe you're right, Terence," he sighed. "We've got to prioritize somehow, and Earl White Haven's been as clear about that as anyone could ask. First, the front and our main combat formations. Second, the integration of our share of Silesia into the Star Kingdom. Third, commerce protection. And Talbott comes fourth. Not because it's unimportant, but because it's less important—or at least less vital—than the others . . . and so much less likely to turn around and bite us on the ass. At least everyone there got to vote on their future!"

The Admiralty's priorities, being as caught out and desperately short of ships and personnel as they are. I'm sure the locals in Talbott would love to hear their new government is in a massive war right now and they've been demoted to fourth priority.

The sleek, double-ended spindle of an Edward Saganami-class heavy cruiser floated to her mooring tractors in the crystalline vacuum, physically connected to the gallery observation deck by personnel tubes while parties of hard-suited yard dogs and their remotes swarmed over her after impeller ring. Technically, Hexapuma was a Saganami-C, an "improved" version of the original Edward Saganami design. Once upon a time, she would have been considered an entirely different class, but BuShips' nomenclature had become a bit more flexible under the previous Admiralty administration. By calling the design a Saganami, rather than admitting that it was an improved, completely new class, they'd actually gotten funding to continue its construction—albeit in very small numbers—as part of the Janacek Admiralty's concentration on building up the Navy's lighter combatants.

The ruse to let them build the B and Cs in the first place. They're not a distinct class they're a tweak to the existing one. Even so, they only built a handful and only because 'Building the Peace' meant building lighter ships again so the Navy could refocus on pirate hunting.

At 483,000 tons, Hexapuma was sixty-one percent larger than the Star Knight-class ships which had been the Navy's newest, latest—and largest—heavy cruisers before what people were beginning to call the First Havenite War. Yet despite the increase in tonnage, and a vast increase in firepower, her ship's company was tiny compared to a Star Knight's. In fact, the way the decreased manpower and life support requirements had freed up mass was as much the reason for her increased combat power as the improvements in weapons technology.

Another 17,000 tons, I believe, and she'd qualify as a small battlecruiser. And yes, though the Nasty Kitty is stuffed full of Ghost Rider and MDMs, a major contribution to her deadliness is that she's so much bigger with such a smaller crew that she has a lot of space for weapons, defenses and ancillaries.

Unlike the original Saganami design, Hexapuma was uncompromisingly optimized for missile combat. Although she actually mounted only forty tubes, fewer than the intermediate Saganami-Bs, she still had half again the missile broadside of a Star Knight. And the tubes she did mount were bigger than a Saganami-B's, capable of handling larger and more powerful missiles, while her magazine space had been substantially increased over the preceding class. Her energy weapons were fewer in number—she mounted only eight in each broadside, plus her chase armament—but, taking a page from the pattern the Graysons had set, they were individually more powerful than most navies' battlecruisers mounted. She could hit fewer targets at energy range, but the hits she landed would be devastating. And the Saganami-Cs had been the first cruiser class to receive the new, improved two-phase bow wall generators.

In short, given her choice of engagement ranges, Hexapuma could have engaged and destroyed any prewar battlecruiser—-Manticoran, as well as Peep.

20 missile tubes to a side, but with off-bore launchers each tube has a 180 degree firing arc, so they can empty both broadsides at targets before or behind her. And unlike a Saganami-B she's packing MDMs, albeit only two-stage, but they're big, nasty, long-legged and she's got deep magazines. 8 grasers to a side, but big, bigger than a lot of BC grasers. Just as tough on defense, lots of counter missiles and PD clusters as is increasingly the fashion, Ghost Rider EW and a two-stage bow wall. They can shield all of the ship's front and lose maneuvering and accel/decel, or shield most of the front end and lose not one whit. Add in the latest compensators for a frightful acceleration for a CA and, well....

Let's just say there's a reason she's the Nasty Kitty.

Five men and three women sat in the luxurious conference room. Their clothing was perfectly suited to their surroundings, expensive and tailored in the latest Solarian styles, and their jewelry—understated, for the most part—was equally expensive. They were elegantly groomed, with the sort of sleek self-assurance that came with knowing they were masters of the worlds about them.

Oh hey, it's the Ominous Solarian Council.

"The problem, Lorcan," one of the other men at the table said, "is that it's beginning to look as if there's not a great deal we can do. Openly, at least."

"That's ridiculous!" the commissioner snapped. "We're the Office of Frontier Security, and they're a jumped-up, Johnny-come-lately, neobarb 'kingdom' with delusions of grandeur! Hell, Old Sol alone has three or four times the population of their entire fucking 'star kingdom.' It's like a toenail threatening the entire rest of the body!"

This is largely why I think neobarb in the Solarian League mostly means 'someone outside the Solarian League.'

"It's not like that on two counts. The first is that the Manticorans aren't just any old 'neobarbs' as far as the League is concerned. Their home system is barely a week away from the Sol System itself, via the Beowulf terminus of their damned junction. And it's been settled for centuries—longer than some of the systems in the Old League itself. Certainly longer than several of the Shell systems! They get along fine with Beowulf and manage to stay on fairly good terms with Sol, unlike most neobarb kingdoms. They got hammered by the media during their first war with Haven, and most of the other systems of the League think of them as being isolated out on their little fringe of the explored galaxy, but they have remarkably good contacts on Old Earth. Which, of course, is the capital of the entire League. And they've had those contacts for over three T-centuries now, ever since the Manticore Junction was discovered and explored."

She shrugged, her voice and manner as calm as her expression, and paused, as if daring anyone to dispute what she'd just said. No one did, and she smiled ever so slightly.

"The second reason it's not like a toenail threatening the rest of the body is that, truthfully, the Manticorans haven't threatened anyone who's a citizen of the League," she pointed out. "And the way their ambassador is presenting matters to the Executive Council back on Old Earth, all they're doing here is accepting the results of a freely organized—self-organized—vote by the citizens of the Talbott Cluster. The results of the plebiscite were overwhelming, you know. Almost eighty percent in favor of requesting annexation by the Star Kingdom."

A brief history of Solly-Manty relations, the perception of the Kingdom in the League. Also 300 years they've been using the Junction.

80% supported annexation by Manticore in Talbott.

"And who cares about that, Aldona?" a very young, hazel-eyed man asked scornfully. "Plebiscites!" He snorted. "How many of them have we bought over the centuries?"

"Which, in many ways, is exactly what makes the current -situation so . . . problematical, Mr. Kalokainos," the dark-haired woman seated beside Anisimovna pointed out. Her eyes were as cold as Anisimovna's, but their irises were a peculiar metallic silver, and her artfully skimpy (although hideously expensive) outfit of Telluridian worm-silk revealed some truly extravagant tattoos and body piercings. "You might say that it's a case of being hoist by our own petard." She grimaced. "I always did wonder where that particular cliche came from, but it's apt enough in this case. We've told the precious voters about so many of our plebiscites, that they're preconditioned to accept anybody's plebiscite as justification for annexation. And those close connections with Old Earth which Ms. Anisimovna just pointed out the Manties have include 'connections' with some of the best lobbyist firms on the planet. They know how to make the Manty plebiscite look very good, especially with those sorts of raw numbers."

Don't you just hate it when you outsmart yourself?

"Excuse me, Vice-Commissioner Hongbo," Kalokainos said, "but the last thing I think we need to do is to lend this naked territorial grab any semblance of credibility. We ought to be taking a clear public stance. Denounce this so-called plebiscite for a fraud and a travesty, proclaim Frontier Security's overriding responsibility to protect the true right of self-determination of Talbott's citizens, and whistle up an SLN task force to kick the frigging Manties back where they belong!"

Aldona Anisimovna managed not to roll her eyes in exasperation, but it was difficult, even for someone with her decades of experience in double-speak. Kalokainos actually managed to sound as if he meant his own rhetoric. Not that there was any chance he really did. Although, unfortunately, he probably did mean the last little bit.

"Perhaps, Volkhart, you aren't fully aware of just what the Manticoran Navy is capable of these days?" He gave her an angry glance, but she met it with the same icy self-control she'd shown Verrochio. "I assure you that we are," she added.

"It really doesn't matter what they're capable of," Kalokainos shot back. "They're pipsqueaks. Oh," he waved one hand irritably, "I'll grant that they're pipsqueaks with long, sharp teeth. But they wouldn't stand the chance of a snowflake in hell against the League Navy. We'd plow them under like pygmies, however good their tech may be, if only by throwing sheer numbers at them. And they're smart enough to know it, too. They wouldn't dare go toe-to-toe with us—especially not now that they're actively at war with the Peeps again!"

How sure of that are you? At least some Sollies seem familiar enough with Buttercup.

"Of course they could hurt us economically if they were stupid enough," he said. "But if they did, even those idiots on the Executive Council would agree to full-scale military operations against them!"

Which, Anisimovna thought coldly, is precisely what you and your cronies would just love to see, isn't it, Volkhart?

That's not very nice.

"As a matter of fact, I do," Ottweiler replied coolly. Several of the others looked at him speculatively, and he hid a smile. Aside from Verrochio and Hongbo—and, of course, Brigadier General Francisca Yucel—he was the only person in the room who legally represented a star nation. It might be only a single-system polity, but the Mesa System had far more clout than any single system normally wielded.

And there's a Mesan in the room making policy decisions. Boo! Hiss!

"Of course they can't exert the same sort of leverage we can. They've chosen to stay well away from -involvement in the League's political and bureaucratic structures, whereas we're intimately involved in both. And wealthy as they may be, they can't begin to match the resources which we, cumulatively, routinely devote to nurturing our relationships with the League's political leadership, media outlets, and civil service. They literally can't afford to, whereas we can't afford not to remain deeply and directly involved in our own economic and political system. All I said is that they have at least as much physical access as we do. We can't shut that access off, and we can't predict what they'll do with it—not with certainty. All of which implies that we have to do something to pull their political teeth before we make any open move to discredit the validity of their plebiscite.

Yeah, I bet Mesa's invested a lot in the corrupt Solly government.

"Let's assume for the moment the votes actually were counted honestly," Ottweiler said. In fact, as everyone in the conference room knew, the count had been honest. "Even so, it wasn't unanimous. Saying eighty percent of the registered voters voted in favor of seeking annexation is just another way of saying twenty percent of them voted against it, now isn't it?"

Heads nodded, and he shrugged.

"Well, I'd be extremely surprised if somewhere in that twenty percent there aren't quite a few radical loonies prepared to resist annexation. Possibly even by force."

So arm the anti-Manticorans, then use their existence as your crack to get in?

"And," his smile turned into something any shark might have envied, "if media reports of the Talbott fighting were properly framed by journalists attuned to the grim realities of the freedom fighters' struggle to reclaim their stolen independence, it could, ah, offset much of the advantage the Beowulf Terminus' proximity to Sol gives the Manties. Talking heads may be impressive, but the League's public is sophisticated enough—one might almost say cynical enough—to know official representatives spin the truth to suit their own ends. And body bags, burning buildings, and bombing attacks, all absolutely genuine and captured on HD for the evening news, are more impressive than any talking head ever seen. If the Talbott freedom fighters figure out how to get that message out, the League's citizenry might well begin to recognize the difference between our own scrupulously fair and painstakingly honest plebiscites and the crooked, put-up affair the Manticorans have attempted to get away with."

"You know, I rather like that," Izrok Levakonic mused. The small, wiry man had a darkly sardonic face, and his smile held an edge of true whimsy. "It sounds so . . . noble of us."

They're good at spin, I give them this.

"And what if the Manties stomp all over these 'freedom fighters' of yours?" Kalokainos demanded. Of all of those around the table, only his expression might have been called sour.

"That would be . . . difficult," Yucel said. "Not impossible, mind you, Mr. Kalokainos. But difficult. They'd have to have both the political will and the physical means to do so. I'm not sure they would have the will in the first place, since they'd discover fairly quickly that they couldn't do the job without a certain amount of bloodshed. My impression is that Manties are more tough-minded than your typical Solly, but they don't have much experience with the inevitable unpleasant consequences of imperial expansion. The Andermani would probably be prepared to handle whatever had to be handled; I'm not sure Manties would be.

"Even if they were, though, they'd need the means, and given all their other current military commitments, I'd have to question whether or not they could free up the ships and troops to deal quickly and effectively with this sort of resistance."

Yeah, Masada would like to talk with you about that.

[Ahriman238]

"Which doesn't magically overcome the point you yourself made a few minutes ago about the Manties' military advantages," Kalokainos argued. "We may be able to create—I beg your pardon, discover—a situation which would let us justify military intervention in public relations terms. But getting the actual firepower to do it with, or convincing the Manties to back down, is another matter entirely."

Anisimovna quirked a sardonic eyebrow at him, and he flushed.

"I stand by my original analysis," he said defensively. "I still think it would be insane of the Manties to take on the League Navy. But certain other people at this conference have gone to some lengths to argue we can't count on their agreeing with me about that. So I'm simply pointing out that if we can't count on it, we still need to find a way to neutralize the possibility, however remote it might be."

With a technology edge that's next best thing to unstoppable with your present hardware, a week's flight from your capitol? Think carefully.

"I think Valery's proposals would radically shift the parameters of the situation," Anisimovna replied in a reasonable voice. "And I think Brigadier Yucel's suggestion that the Star Kingdom's citizens might lack the stomach for what effective suppression of this sort of resistance would entail also has merit. But even if both of them are wrong and Manticore is prepared to deploy the warships and Marines required to crush the resistance and to forcibly resist any effort by Frontier Security to . . . stabilize the situation, what do we lose? How are we any worse off then, than we are right now? After all, there's no law of nature which would force us to push matters to an actual military confrontation if we chose not to."

Kalokainos started to say something, then paused, and Anisimovna could almost see the light click on behind his eyes.

Well, about time! she thought.

"I see," he said, instead of whatever he'd been about to say. "I hadn't fully considered the fact that the decision as to how far we want to push is completely in our own hands."

Arnold Giancola would like a quick word about how hard it is to run up to the brink of war without tripping over that final step.

Anisimovna nodded, then sipped thoughtfully while she watched Bardasano making selections from the tray. Although it was well known that Manpower and the Mesa-based Jessyk Combine worked closely together, most of the galaxy was unaware that Jessyk was actually wholly owned (through suitable cutouts and blinds) by Manpower. Partly as a result of how carefully the connections between the two interstellar giants were concealed, Anisimovna was less sensitively attuned to Jessyk's operations. Although she was a full member of the Manpower Board of Directors and Isabel was only a cadet, nonvoting member of Jessyk's Board, the younger woman had a much better grasp of the realities of interstellar shipping. And, Anisimovna admitted, of how those realities impacted on the problems—and opportunities—both Manpower and Jessyk confronted.

"So he and his father actually believe they can get the Manties involved in a shooting war with the League." She shook her head. "That seems a bit ambitious, even in our circles."

So half the people shaping League policy in this corner of the galaxy are Mesans. And one of the non-Mesans wants to start a shooting war so the League can conquer Manticore and enact their usual policy on internal League wormholes, i.e. no fees and no restrictions.

"I wouldn't exactly be heartbroken if the Manties suffered a mischief." Anisimovna's tone's mildness fooled no one. "God knows they've been a big enough pain in the ass for as long as I can remember, even leaving aside our recent little misfortunes in Tiberian and Congo. But it's not as if the damned Peeps aren't just as a big a pain."

"For that matter, it was even more Haven than the Manties who engineered the Congo fuck-up," Bardasano said sourly, her smile of a moment before disappearing. The loss of the Congo Wormhole Junction before it could even be adequately surveyed had been almost as upsetting to the Jessyk Combine as the loss of Verdant Vista's slave-breeding facilities and pharmaceutical industry had been to Manpower.

"Agreed," Anisimovna said. "Which," she continued, fixing Ottweiler with her sharp gray eyes, "is why any solution to our present problems in Talbott which leaves Haven intact is second-best, in our view. We want both Manticore and Haven out of our lives for good. And we don't want any solution that takes out one of them but leaves the other. At least at the moment they're both too busy shooting at each other for either of them to turn their undivided attention to us."

Mesa's interests in all this. Also, Congo had significant slave-breeding facilities? I wonder if the Torches will feel like growing people, obviously they'd have very different ideas on what rights should be afforded those who came from a tube. Probably not though, most of them can reproduce the good old fashioned way.

"Of course," Ottweiler acknowledged. "At the same time, though, I'm sure all of us feel just a little anxious at the possibility that Manticore's maintaining a naval presence in Talbott. The Cluster is only a couple of light-centuries from Mesa—almost five hundred light-years closer than the Manticore home system."

"I doubt any of us are unaware of that, Valery," Anisimovna agreed dryly. "No one's arguing that we don't need to chop the Manticorans back down to size and get them the hell out of Talbott. I'm just not prepared to back any plan to provoke a full-scale war between Manticore and the League. Not at this point, at any rate."

That Talbott is in Mesa's backyard is just another reason to meddle.

"I think I see where all of this is going," he said. "But even assuming Tyler's willing to play ball and Hongbo's prepared to give him—or, rather, get Verrochio to give him—the guarantees he'd want, the Monicans don't begin to have the firepower to confront Manticore."

"That's one reason why I have a private meeting with Izrok Levakonic scheduled for tomorrow," Anisimovna told him. "I think I can probably convince TIY to provide a small force augmentation for our friend Tyler."

"Even after what happened at Tiberian?" This time there was a trace of surprise, possibly even skepticism, in Ottweiler's voice.

"Trust me," Bardasano said before Anisimovna could respond. "Technodyne's Directors would sell their own mothers to Aldona for a crack at direct access to frontline Manty military hardware. In a lot of ways, I imagine Izrok would really be happier throwing in with Volkhart. They could steal a lot more tech if they actually took over the Manticore System's shipyards, after all. But I don't think they're very likely to get into a pissing contest with us. And they're too deep into the 'legitimate business community' of the League to act openly on their own." She shook her head. "No, they need someone to front for them. An 'outlaw' bunch like us . . . or like Tyler. So if we ask them, and especially if we're prepared to ante up the cash, they'll come through for the Monicans."

Arming their catspaws, the Monicans.


******

That's from a single ship; hard to say what class. For a CL that's extremely impressive, though it might well be a CL fitted with the Ghost Rider electronic warfare suite, in which case most of those missiles were blinded or diverted by jamming, not shot down by missile defense. It'd have to be; even with Ghost Rider's ECM advances, the most modern class of RMN light cruiser then available had only five countermissile tubes and four laser clusters on the broadside.

For a Star Knight it's... probably a bit below par, for a Saganami-A it'd be a disappointment.

Actually, only two get suckered off by a decoy, the rest are counter missiles and 3 lost to PD lasers. They explplicity had run out of Ghost Rider decoys and drones by this part of the battle. Then again, depending on range you used to be able to count on two or three salvoes of counter missiles, occasionally more from max range. With MDMs, by the time they hit CM range they're going so fast you have one, if a Manty two, shot to stop them.

[Simon_Jester]

I'm assuming nobody reading an analysis thread will be bothered by spoilers? That being the case let me skip right to the chase. Helen assumes Paulo is another snobby aristo sneering quietly down his nose at her because you need a lot of cash to biosculpt a perfect face and form like his. Little could be further from the truth, he's a genetically engineered slave, a C-line prostitute model, liberated by the RMN and so grateful he took the liberating captain's surname as his own and embarked to become an RMN officer.

He is, it turns out, the natural-born child of two other C-lines, rescued when he was very young.

Something Helen should be able to understand, but she needs a lesson in prejudice so her assumption of his attitude will color everything until she's almost hissing at him. It's a major running subplot.

If her experience doesn't include males genetically modified for attractiveness by Manpower, and does include aristocrats with oh-so-perfect plastic surgeons... it's kind of inevitable.

The whole point of a snotty cruise, test them every which way you can in duty aboard an actual ship before extending a commission. In the actual Napoleonic Navy, a midshipman could go years, or an entire lifetime without ever making lieutenant. Here it's one deployment, probably for a year or two, judging from how long Honor's ships are normally out and about.

That's more like how modern navies do it in real life.

The Napoleonic-era Royal Navy's personnel structure was very limited by a few external factors:

1) The model of naval officer training was 'apprenticeship,' so midshipmen received minimal shoreside training and had to do a lot of learning on the job before they could hope to qualify for a position as a lieutenant. Someone who never got the hang of, say, navigation could be trying to qualify for a lifetime. Here, the RMN uses its academy to train midshipmen; by the time they graduate they are almost ready to be promoted to ensign... assuming they're fit for command and can handle themselves in the field.

2) The Royal Navy had a competitive examination system in part because of the way their seniority system worked; all the really desirable commands in the Napoleonic era were held by a list of captains and admirals held firmly in place by seniority. There was very little opportunity to get promoted "up and out" of the rank of lieutenant, so the rate of turnover among the lieutenants was low, so it was hard for a midshipman to become one.

I'm assuming nobody reading an analysis thread will be bothered by spoilers? That being the case let me skip right to the chase. Helen assumes Paulo is another snobby aristo sneering quietly down his nose at her because you need a lot of cash to biosculpt a perfect face and form like his. Little could be further from the truth, he's a genetically engineered slave, a C-line prostitute model, liberated by the RMN and so grateful he took the liberating captain's surname as his own and embarked to become an RMN officer.

He is, it turns out, the natural-born child of two other C-lines, rescued when he was very young.

Something Helen should be able to understand, but she needs a lesson in prejudice so her assumption of his attitude will color everything until she's almost hissing at him. It's a major running subplot.

If her experience doesn't include males genetically modified for attractiveness by Manpower, and does include aristocrats with oh-so-perfect plastic surgeons... it's kind of inevitable.

No proper ATO, they'll have to rely on Ms. Hearns or JEWO (junior EW officer). The Navy, it seems, is especially hard up on good EW specialists.

True EW specialization is new, so there's a shortage of people trained from the ground up for the position. Plus, the increasing complexity and refinement of electronic warfare in the last 10-20 years in the Honorverse means that even the old-school EW wizards (cut from the same cloth as, say, Rafe Cardones) are stretched thinner than they used to be.

The other reason to send Terekhov to Talbott. After his naval career stalled inpeacetime, he spent almost thirty years as a professional diplomat before coming back into uniform when the war started, so he pretty much has more interstellar diplomacy chops than any other starship captain available.

This is another consequence of prolong: an increasing number of people who have spent twenty or thirty years pursuing not one, but multiple careers, and are thus highly skilled in each.

"Actually, what I'd really prefer would be to recall Khumalo," Cortez continued. "Unfortunately, that's a political decision as much as a military one. Besides, who would we send out to replace him? To be brutally honest, Talbott doesn't exactly have the same priority as the front. Or as Silesia, for that matter."

Dame Matsuko is in Talbott, along with Admiral Khumalo as senior officer. Khumalo, how to say it nicely? Doesn't have nearly Terekhov's diplomatic experience, nor his brains.

That said, he's not a complete screwup. For a Janacek appointee he's actually not bad, although that isn't really saying very much.

As a side-note, Khumalo's flagship Samothrace is literally the oldest superdreadnought in the Royal Manticoran Navy at this point, being somewhere between sixty and eighty years old.

The Admiralty's priorities, being as caught out and desperately short of ships and personnel as they are. I'm sure the locals in Talbott would love to hear their new government is in a massive war right now and they've been demoted to fourth priority.

To be fair, there is very little direct military threat to the region, at least to the best of their knowledge.

This is largely why I think neobarb in the Solarian League mostly means 'someone outside the Solarian League.'

Ayup.

How sure of that are you? At least some Sollies seem familiar enough with Buttercup.

I suspect the typical 'informed' Solarian at this point looks at Manticore and assumes their naval hardware is roughly as good as top-of-the-line SLN equipment, which combined with their published fleet numbers is enough to make them respectable... just not a match for the sheer numbers of the League.

Kalokainos, who's head of a shipping line and knows well how effective both SLN and RMN units are against similar targets like pirates, would probably fall into this category. For that matter, talking about the ships he's most likely to encounter he's not really even wrong; most of the antipiracy patrols are still being done by ships designed and built in the late 19th or very early 20th century PD, which don't have any of the superweapons Manticore's been working on.

If Kalokainos's reference point for 'a Manticoran warship' is, say, a Star Knight rather than a Saganami-C, then he's actually right that the League could roll over the Manticoran fleet without too much trouble. As discussed, prior to 1910 PD or so, they'd have done exactly that.

[Terralthra]

I think Khumalo gets a bit of a bad rap from the officers at the beginning. He's got a reputation for being a by-the-book officer, without much in the way of tactical or strategic wizardry, and not being all that bright, but in my opinion, he shows a decent political mind, he thinks things through before taking precipitous action - without hesitating when action is called for - and most importantly, unlike a wide variety of incompetent or semi-competent strawristocrats, he listens to officers who are better strategic or tactical thinkers than he is. He also has his heart in the right place as a Queen's officer. He's a Conservative and a Janacek appointee, but he never shies away from doing what the Grantville government orders and the Queen's honor demands, unlike several other notable Conservative officers.

[VhenRa]

I think Khumalo gets a bit of a bad rap from the officers at the beginning. He's got a reputation for being a by-the-book officer, without much in the way of tactical or strategic wizardry, and not being all that bright, but in my opinion, he shows a decent political mind, he thinks things through before taking precipitous action - without hesitating when action is called for - and most importantly, unlike a wide variety of incompetent or semi-competent strawristocrats, he listens to officers who are better strategic or tactical thinkers than he is. He also has his heart in the right place as a Queen's officer. He's a Conservative and a Janacek appointee, but he never shies away from doing what the Grantville government orders and the Queen's honor demands, unlike several other notable Conservative officers.

Hear hear. He is out of his depth, sure. But he rises to the occasion near the end of the book and shows he is one of those quietly competent officers every military needs.

[Ahriman238]

Are the counter missile cannister implied to be recent things? I wonder when Weber thought them up. It just seems to be like they'd be the perfect thing for MacKeon to have used in 'In Enemy Hands' or any one really trying to cope with missile pod swarm with a little warning. Firing broadside guns, each hurling multiple counter missiles at once seems like a decent counter.

As alluded to by others, the Sollies have something like this, their revolutionary Aegis missile defense system. Aegis-equipped ships sacrifice broadside tubes for extra radar and fire-control links, then devote two of the remaining tubes to throwing canisters of counter missiles. It... doesn't work out so well. In fairness it would have been a great idea twenty years ago when it became clear that ships were trending more towards missile combat, maybe for screening units in fleet engagements whose birds weren't going to accomplish much anyways, but it's simply grossly inadequate for the realities of honorverse missile spam.

[Ahriman238]

The Havenite destroyer was indeed sweeping farther out to port, and another keypadded command projected her new vector. She was obviously trying to skirt Hexapuma's missile envelope in order to get at the convoy beyond while her consorts maneuvered together to hold the Manticoran ship's attention. And she was accelerating at over six hundred gravities. Even with the newest generation of Havenite inertial compensators, that meant she was pulling over ninety percent of theoretical max. Assuming her maintenance people knew their jobs, she could risk cutting her safety margin that way, but it was a fair indication of how much importance the Peep force's commander attached to hitting the convoy.

A sim. Convoy escort. The newest compensators are pretty impressive all around, this destroyer is pulling the same accel as an LAC circa-Buttercup.

Still, she would dearly have loved to be able to put his skills to work handling Hexapuma's electronic warfare suite for this engagement. But Lieutenant Hearns had assigned Aikawa to EW, with Ragnhild (not Leo Stottmeister, of course) at Engineering. Intellectually, Helen understood why the acting OCTO was deliberately rotating their assignments for the simulations, but she didn't like the way it left her feeling subtly off-balance.

Cross-training is good for you.

"Helm, come to zero-four-one by two-seven-five," she said. "Roll ship fifteen degrees to port, and increase acceleration to six KPS squared."

That was considerably higher than the "eighty percent of maximum power" The Book called for under normal circumstances, but it still left an almost ten percent reserve against compensator failure.

Helen goes to 90% max accel, likewise about 600 Gees.

"Aikawa, I want to knock back Bogey Three's sensors—especially for her missile defense," Helen said. "Suggestions?"

"Recommend an immediate salvo of Dazzlers," Aikawa said promptly. "Then fire a second salvo to precede the attack birds by, say, fifteen seconds. That should seriously degrade their -sensor capabilities. Then seed half a dozen Dragon's Teeth into the broadside itself."

"I like it," Helen said with a wicked smile. Dazzlers were powerful jammer warheads which would tear holes in the destroyer's sensors but leave the targeting systems in Hexapuma's missiles unaffected. Unlike the destroyer, they would know exactly what pattern the Dazzlers had been set for, and could be adjusted to "see" through the erratic windows the electronic warfare birds' programming provided. And if the destroyer's battered electronic eyes could see past the jamming at all, the Dragon's Teeth, each loaded with enough false emitters to appear as an entire salvo of attacking missiles, ought to do a pretty fair job of completely swamping their victim's tracking capability.

Attacking ships can see through Dazzler interference, that must take some tricky computer coordination, particularly in big fleet engagements.

"Aye, aye, Ma'am. Accepting EW download now. The birds are receipting. Ready to launch in another . . . twenty-seven seconds."

Helen nodded. It took a little longer to set up for a double broadside, using the off-bore launch capability the RMN had developed, but it would permit her to put almost forty missiles on the destroyer. That would undoubtedly be overkill, assuming Aikawa's EW suggestion worked half as well as she expected it to. Still, it was better to finish the target off—or at least cripple it thoroughly—in a single exchange so she could get back to the rest of the Peep attack force.

Hexapuma was individually bigger and more powerful than any of the attackers, and she'd also taken delivery of the new Mark 16 MDM. Nothing smaller (or older) than a Saganami-C-class ship would ever be able to handle them, but the Saganami-Cs had been designed around the new, larger Mark 9-c tubes. Even with the massive reduction in manpower represented by Hexapuma's smaller crew, BuShips had been able to cram only twenty of them into each broadside, but the Mark 16 carried twin drives. That gave Hexapuma a powered missile envelope from rest of almost thirty million kilometers, which her present opponents couldn't possibly match.

Almost thirty seconds to put together the planned double-broadside, including loading the specified birds. Mk 16 MDMs for the Saganami-C and I believe Nike classes have a 30 million klick range. Less than half a three-drive MDM, but over double the theoretical max of a single-drive missile and 5 times missiles from the start of the series.

The destroyer's bid to stay out of Hexapuma's envelope was going to come up short—way short, like over twelve million kilometers short. In fact, it would have come up a couple of million klicks short even against the Mark 13 missiles of one of the RMN's older heavy cruisers. That was still far enough out to degrade Hexapuma's accuracy—fire control was still trying to catch up with the extended ranges of the new missiles—but not badly enough to keep a forty-missile double broadside from blowing her out of space. Best of all, nothing on the Peeps' side had the range to engage Hexapuma in reply. The Peeps had multi-drive missiles of their own, but they hadn't managed to engineer that capability down into something a heavy cruiser mounted. Their capital ships and battlecruisers could match or exceed anything even Hexapuma's new birds could do, but their cruisers still had barely a quarter of her extended reach.

So Manticore does have extended range single drive missiles. Mk 16 MDMs 4x the best a light Haven combatant can manage. However, the problem is that missiles are still restricted to light-speed comms, so once they get more than a few light seconds away from their mothership the communications lag prevents effective control and hit rates lower drastically. To the point we saw at Alizon in the main books, where 75% of a missile salvo just lost lock and wandered off.

Helen's eyes darted away from the missiles she'd sent roaring towards the enemy destroyer. D'Arezzo was right. The enemy flagship had launched missiles at them, and not just a few birds. There were at least thirty in that incoming salvo, and even as she watched, the "fluctuating" impeller wedge firmed back up. Its acceleration shot upward, peaking at over four hundred and eighty gravities, and it spun on its axis. Nineteen seconds after that, a second massive salvo erupted from it as the spin brought its other broadside to bear.

And the second salvo had been fired with an even higher initial acceleration. It was already overtaking the first launch, and Helen knew exactly what was about to happen.

Suckered, goddamn it! she thought. That's no heavy cruiser—it's a frigging battlecruiser pretending to be a heavy cruiser! Just like it was pretending to be damaged so I'd ignore it while I concentrated on swatting destroyers. And those are MDMs. MDMs launched with enough oomph on their first-stage drives to bring them all in as one, huge, time-on-target salvo.

The wrinkle in this sim, the heavy cruiser she thought she'd crippled in the first exchange turns out to be a BC, with MDMs, and playing possum.

Helen watched her plot and swore as the two Peep broadsides merged . . . and their combined acceleration suddenly leapt upward. That TO over there knew her job, damn it. She had more than enough range to reach her target, so she'd set her birds' first-stage drives to terminate and their second-stage drives to kick in as soon as her separate broadsides had matched base vectors. They would burn out much more rapidly, but the new settings would get them to Hexapuma even more quickly than d'Arezzo—and Helen—had estimated. They'd be coming in faster, as well. And even if she burned out the second stage completely, she'd still have the third. There'd be plenty of time left on their clocks for terminal attack maneuvers.

Fun how MDMs let you coordinate a time-on-target like that.

And the bastards knew exactly what they were doing when they timed it, too, she thought viciously. We have to cut the downlinks to our attack birds to free up the tracking and datalinks to deal with the damned battlecruiser!

The offensive missiles would continue to home on the targeted destroyer, but without guidance from Hexapuma's onboard sensors and computers, the odds of any of them attaining a hard lock went down drastically, especially at such an extended range. Which meant the destroyer was probably going to survive, as well.

We see again issues with limited links, they have to stop hand-holding their outgoing birds to track the incoming missiles and manage their own counter missiles.

D'Arezzo's counter-missiles zipped out, racing to meet the initial attack. There'd be time for only two defensive launches against it, and Helen bit her lip, watching the midshipman's fingers dance and fly. He was hunched slightly forward in his bridge chair with totally focused intensity, and she saw the light codes for his initial counter launch blinking from strobing amber to blood-red as the individual counter-missiles' internal seekers locked onto their designated targets. As each of his birds "saw" its own target, it dropped out of Hexapuma's shipboard control queue, freeing additional tracking capacity and control downlinks for the counter-missiles in his second-tier launch.

CMs drop the link automatically the moment they get a hard lock on the incoming, freeing up capability.

Peep missiles didn't carry as much ECM as Manticoran. Despite all the improvements in their technology since the last war, Haven was still playing catch-up in a lot of areas. But the ECM they did have was much better than it once had been, and d'Arezzo's plot jumped in the electronic equivalent of a gibbering fit as a complex orchestration of countermeasure emitters activated at the last possible moment.

Two-thirds of d'Arezzo's counter-missiles lost lock as the blizzard of jamming lashed at them. Again, it was all a matter of timing. If they'd had more time, the defensive missiles might have been able to adjust and reacquire. If the range at launch had been longer, the attacking missiles would have been forced to bring up their ECM sooner, because they would have been intercepted farther out. That would have given d'Arezzo's onboard systems and more powerful computers a longer look at the emitters' patterns. Would have allowed him to analyze them and refine his counter-missiles' solutions against them while they were still accepting downlinked control data from Hexapuma. Would have allowed him a third-tier launch.

But none of those things were going to happen, and the Havenite missiles broke past the first-tier counter-missiles almost completely unscathed. The second-tier birds did better, taking out fourteen of the attack missiles. But that left sixty-six still -incoming. Some of them had to be dedicated ECM platforms, with no laser heads, and CIC had identified half a dozen of them and designated them to be ignored by defensive fire. There had to be more of them, but there was no time to sort them out; every one of the other missiles had to be considered an attack bird, and Hexapuma's last-ditch point defense lasers began to fire with computer-controlled desperation.

She nailed another thirty-two missiles in the fleeting seconds she had to engage them. Another eleven laser heads wasted their fury on the impenetrable roof or floor of her impeller wedge. Of the fifteen remaining potential attack missiles, seven turned out to be ECM platforms.

Eight weren't.

Haven version of dazzlers, and the desperate missile defense carried out at the last moment against a time-on-target double broadside launched from what seems to be optimum range. They stop 47 out of 62 missiles. Targeting priority is to ignore the EW birds, though that's no surprise.

D'Arezzo sent a double broadside of his own roaring off towards the enemy. It crossed the enemy's second broadside seconds after launch, and the plot was a seething confusion of incoming and outgoing missile wedges cutting holes in Heaxpuma's sensor coverage like old-fashioned gunsmoke, more counter-missiles stabbing into the Peep's massive attack wave, laser clusters firing furiously, and then—

AuxCon heaved madly one last time, and every light went out.

The absolute blackness lingered for the prescribed fifteen seconds. Then the master plot came back up, and two blood-red words floated in the darkness before them like a disembodied curse.

"SIMULATION OVER," they said.

Sim over, man, sim over.

Abigail nodded. D'Arezzo was right to point out his ID errors, but Zilwicki was equally right to bring up CIC's matching mistake. The Combat Information Center's primary responsibility, after all, was to process sensor data, analyze it, plot it, and display the necessary information for the ship's bridge crew. But the -tactical officer had access to the raw data herself, and it was one of her responsibilities to assess—or at least demand a CIC recheck of—any ship ID or damage state which struck her as questionable. And if d'Arezzo had looked carefully enough at the "heavy cruiser's" emissions signature, he probably would have noticed the tiny discrepancies Abigail had carefully built into the Havenite's false image when she tweaked Lieutenant Commander Kaplan's original scenario.

CIC use and the tactical officer.

"I'd like all of you to consider," she said after a moment, instead of calling on Kagiyama, "that you failed to make full use of the sensor capabilities available to you. Yes, at the moment the enemy brought up their impellers, they were already within your shipboard sensor envelope. But they were far enough out, especially given that sensor conditions in hyper are never as good as in n-space, that relying solely on shipboard capabilities gave away sensor reach. If you'd deployed a remote array, you would almost certainly have had sufficient time to get it close enough to the 'heavy cruiser' to burn through its EW before it managed to draw you so badly off balance and out of position."

The lesson here being to use the recon platforms and double-check everything. Surprise is what happens when someone misunderstands what they saw.

"The tin can wasn't going to get outside the Kitty's missle env—"

-snip-

"I gathered you were referring to the ship, Ms. Pavletic. But I'm afraid I still haven't quite caught the name by which you called her," Abigail said pleasantly, eyes holding the honey-blond midshipwoman steadily.

"I called her the Kitty, Ma'am," Ragnhild admitted finally. "That's, ah, sort of our unofficial nickname for her. Just among ourselves, I mean. We haven't used it with anyone else."

"You call a heavy cruiser the 'Kitty,'" Abigail said, repeating the name very carefully.

"Um, actually, Ma'am," Leo Stottmeister said, speaking up manfully in Ragnhild's defense—or at least to draw fire from her, "we call her the Nasty Kitty. It's . . . really meant as a compliment. Sort of a reference to how new and powerful she is, and, well . . ."

His voice trailed off, and Abigail gazed at him as levelly as she had at Pavletic. Several seconds of tense silence stretched out, and then she smiled.

"Most crews end up bestowing nicknames on their ships," she said. "Usually it's a sign of affection. Sometimes it isn't. And some are better than others. A friend of mine once served in a ship—William Hastings, a Grayson heavy cruiser—which ended up called Shivering Billy because of a nasty harmonic she picked up in two of her forward impeller nodes one fine day. Then there's HMS Retaliation, known to her crew as HMS Ration Tin, for reasons no one seems to remember. Or HMS Ad Astra, a perfectly respectable dreadnought which was known as Fat Astor when she was still in commission. Given the alternatives, I suppose 'Nasty Kitty' isn't all that bad." She saw them beginning to relax and smiled sweetly. "Of course," she added, "I'm not the Captain."

Ship nicknames, and why you don't use them in front of the officers.

"Uh, yes, Ma'am," the midshipwoman said. "I was saying that she wasn't going to be able to get outside our missile envelope, whatever she did. Not with Mark 16s in the tubes. If she'd tried to swing wide enough for that, she'd have taken herself out of any position to attack the convoy, and she literally didn't have the time and accel to pull it off whatever she tried to do. So if we'd maintained our course, we could still have engaged her without turning our backs on the Peep flagship."

"Which would also have kept our forward sensors oriented on the 'heavy cruiser,'" Helen added, and Abigail nodded with a slight smile of approval.

"Yes, it would," she agreed. The forward sensors aboard most warships, including Hexapuma, were significantly more capable than their broadside sensors, because they were more likely to be the ones their crews relied upon when pursuing a fleeing enemy. Given the "bow wave" of charged particles which built up on the forward particle shielding of any vessel as it approached relativistic velocities, the sensors designed to see through it had to be more capable. Which meant they would have been more likely than Hexapuma's broadside sensors to see through the enemy's EW.

The superior capability of forward sensors. They shouldn't have chased a ship that wasn't getting away in any case.

"Once the decision to close on and engage Bogey Three had been made," she continued, "there was the question of fire distribution. While ensuring the prompt destruction of your target was appropriate, a full double broadside represented a considerable margin of overkill. Given that, it might have been wiser to throw at least a few more birds at the 'heavy cruiser' at the same time. If nothing else, that would have required her to defend herself, in which case it might have become evident she had a lot more point defense and counter-missile tubes than a heavy cruiser ought to have. In addition, if she really had been the heavy cruiser she was pretending to be, and if you actually had inflicted the damage she was pretending you had, her defenses might have been sufficiently compromised for you to land additional hits with only a portion of your full missile power. That, however, could definitely be argued either way. Concentration of fire's a cardinal principle of successful tactics, and although the destroyer wasn't yet in range to threaten the convoy, she was the closer threat. And, of course, if the 'heavy cruiser' had actually suffered the impeller damage you believed she had—and if she'd been unable to repair it—you'd have had plenty of time to deal with her."

Fire distribution, arguable either way. The important part is that they're learning.

[Simon_Jester]

As alluded to by others, the Sollies have something like this, their revolutionary Aegis missile defense system. Aegis-equipped ships sacrifice broadside tubes for extra radar and fire-control links, then devote two of the remaining tubes to throwing canisters of counter missiles. It... doesn't work out so well. In fairness it would have been a great idea twenty years ago when it became clear that ships were trending more towards missile combat, maybe for screening units in fleet engagements whose birds weren't going to accomplish much anyways, but it's simply grossly inadequate for the realities of honorverse missile spam.

Honestly, I think that either:

1) Weber is short-selling Aegis, or...

2) Aegis would work very well indeed, if only the SLN were to acknowledge the true nature of the multi-drive missile threat. That's their real problem; they don't know what they're getting into.

Shannon Foraker could probably take Aegis and turn it into a wall of nigh-impenetrable missile-proof kabongium in space. The hardware is at least as good or better than anything Haven can produce, after all.

But she would be doing this in light of the extensive combat experience of herself and her peers in numerous major fleet engagements. The problem the League has is that its combat-experienced officers are all trained in small scale actions, while its officers trained in fleet actions have no combat experience and have quite possibly never known anyone who does.

Also, as noted, the SLN designed Aegis to meet the single-drive missile threat, which means it simply is not required to engage missiles coming in faster than, oh... 0.4c or so. Multiple-drive missiles perform sharply better than that at long range where they have a lot of time to reach terminal velocity. Foraker would not have made that mistake, because she knows perfectly well what MDMs can do.

Almost thirty seconds to put together the planned double-broadside, including loading the specified birds. Mk 16 MDMs for the Saganami-C and I believe Nike classes have a 30 million klick range. Less than half a three-drive MDM, but over double the theoretical max of a single-drive missile and 5 times missiles from the start of the series.

Also, the dual-drive missile is long enough ranged that it can hit the ranges most people prefer to fire three-stage missiles, because of the telemetry limitations.

On the other hand, when Apollo shows up, there appears to be no DDM equivalent of the Apollo control missile, so ships firing the Mark 16 are going to be a lot less accurate at long range than capital ships firing Apollo missiles with their FTL fire control telemetry.

Haven version of dazzlers, and the desperate missile defense carried out at the last moment against a time-on-target double broadside launched from what seems to be optimum range. They stop 47 out of 62 missiles. Targeting priority is to ignore the EW birds, though that's no surprise.

Yeah. Unless an EW missile physically rams your sidewall (which should HURT), it's not a threat.

Concentration of fire's a cardinal principle of successful tactics, and although the destroyer wasn't yet in range to threaten the convoy, she was the closer threat. And, of course, if the 'heavy cruiser' had actually suffered the impeller damage you believed she had—and if she'd been unable to repair it—you'd have had plenty of time to deal with her."

Fire distribution, arguable either way. The important part is that they're learning.

Basically, learning to think. This is the crucial thing. There are all sorts of different tactical doctrines that can exist; most of them have exploitable loopholes if the enemy knows you're using them. The key virtue of the officer in a combat service is that they don't get caught up in the mundane task of actually firing on the enemy or whatever. They think about what is going on, which of the several different tactics they can think of are appropriate, and how the enemy might be fooling them.

[Ahriman238]

"Better to feel like an idiot than to get snapped up by the graybacks," one of the men replied. The nickname referred to the Kornatian National Police's charcoal gray tunics.

Kornatian police, Kornati of the Split system being a Talbott planet joining the kingdom.

"Yes, we do," she said flatly. "I didn't spend my life fighting to keep those Frontier Security ljigavci off my world just to turn it over to someone else."

"We obviously agree with you, or we wouldn't be here," Firebrand's companion said. "But to give the Devil his due, there actually is a difference between OFS and the Manties."

"Not to me there isn't." Nordbrandt's voice was even flatter, and her eyes flashed. "Nobody's ever been interested in trading with us, or treating us like equals. And now that the galaxy's found out about the Lynx Terminus and all the money it represents to whoever controls it, you want me to think we suddenly have both the frigging Sollies and oh-so-noble Manticorans lining up to embrace us solely out of the goodness of their hearts?"

-snip-

"I know all about the annexation vote," Nordbrandt replied bitterly. "And how my so-called 'political allies' deserted in droves when Tonkovic and that unmitigated bastard Van Dort started waving around promises of how rich we'd all be as good little Manty helots." She shook her head fiercely. "Those rich bastards figure they'll make out well enough, but the rest of us will just find ourselves screwed over by another layer of money-gouging overlords. So don't tell me about the vote! The fact that a bunch of stupid sheep voluntarily walk into a wolf's lair behind a Judas goat doesn't make the wolf any less of a carnivore."

Meet Agnes Nordbrandt, who resigned from the Kornati Parliament in protest after the annexation vote and has been rallying support for immediate, violent action ever since.

Agnes Nordbrandt had been one of the youngest members of the planetary parliament of Kornati, the sole inhabited world of the Split System, before the discovery of the Lynx Terminus had brought the Star Kingdom of Manticore into contact with Split. She'd won that position as the founder of the Kornatian National Redemption Party, whose extremist nationalist politics had resonated with the large percentage of Kornati's population which feared the eventual arrival of the Office of Frontier Security in Split. But those not unjustified fears couldn't explain her success by themselves. Although she'd been adopted as an infant and raised by a childless couple who'd been among the junior ranks of Kornati's oligarchical elite, she'd also reached out to the disenfranchised, the all-too-large Kornatian underclass who struggled daily to put food on the table and shoes on their children's feet.

Many of her political opponents had sneered at her for that. They'd mocked the National Redemption Party as a mismatched hodgepodge with no coherent platform. As for trying to build a political machine out of the underclass, the very idea was ridiculous! Ninety percent of them hadn't even registered to vote, so what sort of political base could they provide?

But Nordbrandt been a shrewder political animal than they'd recognized. She'd maneuvered with the best of them, building alliances between her NRP and less extreme politicians and political parties, like Vuk Rajkovic's Reconciliation Party. Perhaps the marginalized urban poor who supported her most enthusiastically didn't vote, but there'd been enough middle class voters whose fear of the Sollies had combined with their recognition that economic reform was essential to give her a surprising strength at the ballot box.

Nordbrandt's political background, the NRP are the ultranationalist faction in Kornati politics, so no surprise they'd be upset at the thought of annexation. Also the decided oligarchic tendencies of Kornati politics.

The Manticoran standard of living, despite over a decade of bitter warfare with the People's Republic of Haven, was one of the highest in the explored galaxy. The Star Kingdom might be small, but it was incredibly wealthy, and the extent of its wealth had lost nothing in the telling. Half of Kornati's people seemed to have believed that simply acquiring Manticoran citizenship would somehow make them instantly and incredibly wealthy, as well. Most of them had known better deep down inside, and, to their credit, the Manticorans never made any such promises. But any illusions the Kornatians might have cherished about Manticore hadn't changed the fact that they'd known exactly what to expect from OFS. Faced with the decision, seventy-eight percent of them had decided anything was better than that, and that permanently binding themselves to Manticore was the one way to avoid it.

A lot of people are inspired almost as much by tales of Manticore's wealth and high standards of living (prolong for everyone!) as by fear of OFS.

"I'm glad we understand one another. But my point still stands. What do you have to offer?"

"A real Kornatian," she said bluntly, and smiled at the involuntary flare of surprise—and alarm—in Firebrand's eyes.

"Your accent's quite good, actually," she told him. "Unfortunately for you, linguistics have always been something of a hobby of mine. I suppose it has something to do with a politician's ear. I always found it useful to be able to talk like a 'good old girl' when it came to politicking at the grass-roots level. And, as we say here on Kornati, 'You're not from around here, are you?'"

She's an extremist, to be sure, but she's not stupid. Lucky for Mesa's frontman, she thinks he's from a different Cluster world realizes pragmatically that she needs all the allies and support she can get.

"I'm glad you understand that," Firebrand said gravely. "To begin with, though, it looks as if we're going to be able to secure at least the seed money we need through a little judicious electronic manipulation."

"Oh?" Nordbrandt perked up visibly.

"Oh, yes," Firebrand said with a nasty smile. "I'm obviously not at liberty to give you any details. For that matter, I don't have many details to give, at this point. But come the end of the current fiscal quarter, Bernardus Van Dort is going to discover that the Trade Union is running an unanticipated deficit."

Nordbrandt clapped a hand over her mouth to smother a delighted peal of laughter, and her brown eyes danced devilishly. Firebrand grinned back like a little boy who'd just gotten away with cutting an entire week of school without being caught. He'd thought she'd like the notion of pilfering from the coffers of the powerful, theoretically nonpolitical trade organization which had taken the lead in organizing the annexation plebiscite in the first place.

Embezzling from the RTU to pay for the various insurrection and terrorist movements Mesa hopes to start across the Cluster. At least, that's what they tell Nordbrandt, truth is it's simpler for the Mesans to pay out themselves.

"The woman isn't too tightly wrapped, and you know it. And she's smart. That's a bad combination."

"That depends on what you're trying to accomplish, doesn't it?" Harahap shot back. "I agree she seems a couple of canisters short of a full load. If I wanted to keep Frontier Security off my planet, I'd jump on the opportunity to join Manticore in a heartbeat. So would anyone else whose mind spent its time in the real universe. But I think Nordbrandt genuinely believes she can orchestrate a resistance movement which could not only convince Manticore to go elsewhere, but do the same thing to OFS and probably even overturn Kornati's entire economic system, as well."

"Like I said—a lunatic."

"Not entirely," Harahap disagreed. The other man looked at him incredulously, and he chuckled again. "Oh, she's dreaming if she thinks Frontier Security would lose an instant's sleep over turning her and all her loyal followers into so much dogmeat. OFS has had too much experience swatting people like her. But she could just have a point where Manticore is concerned. And if Major Eichbauer, or her esteemed superiors, are actually contemplating any sort of operation here in Talbott, just who do you think it's going to be directed against?"

There is that.

"Westman's a whole different case. Nordbrandt hates Van Dort and the Trade Union because of the role they played in inviting Manticore in; Westman hates Manticore because inviting it in was Van Dort's idea. He's hated and distrusted the Rembrandt Trade Union ever since it was created. He's spent so long worrying about its mercantile imperialism that he's automatically opposed to anything the RTU thinks is a good idea. But when you come right down to it, he really doesn't know anything more about the Manticorans than Nordbrandt does. At the moment he's seeing them strictly through a prism that's still focused on the way things were before Manticore suddenly acquired a wormhole terminus here. He's more organized and better financed than I think Nordbrandt is, and his family name gives him enormous influence on Montana. But if he gets himself educated about the difference between Manticore and Frontier Security, he's just likely to decide there might be something in this 'Star Kingdom' business for the Montana System, after all."

Their other cultivated contact, Westman on Montana. The Montana colonists wanted to relive their idealized notions of life in the West and freeze all culture and technology there, naturally things have wandered over the generations. Westman has no grudge against Manticore, but he has a deep personal hatred and distrust of Bernadus Van Dort, founder and major shareholder of the Rembrandt Trade Union. Hence the Mesans' fear that he'd turn pro-Manticore if he could only understand who these people are and what they're about.

"It's not that Zilwicki or any of the others are actively riding him, or getting on his case. For one thing, they're all good kids. For another, they all take their responsibility to function as junior officers seriously. They're not going to piss in each other's beers over any minor crap. But Zilwicki's as much of a natural leader as he is a loner, and her attitude affects those of the other snotties. She's not deliberately hammering d'Arezzo, but the fact that she doesn't much care for him is helping to keep him an outsider. So Abigail's been deliberately assigning the two of them to work together in situations which require them to cooperate to solve problems. Sooner or later, that's going to get them past whatever it is Zilwicki's got stuck up that stiff-necked, Highlander nose of hers. Either that, or bring it out into the open where Abigail can deal with it once and for all."

Senior officers have noticed Helen's problems with Paulo, but think Abby can handle it. She's shaping up nicely as both ATO and OCTO.

"Although, from the intelligence summaries I've been reading, the situation in Talbott's a lot less tense than the situation in Silesia right now."

"Admiral Sarnow is 'living in interesting times' in Silesia, all right," FitzGerald agreed. "On the other hand, he's got a lot more ships than Khumalo does, too. But whatever our Lords and Masters' logic, what matters to us is that we're pulling out in three days, not five."

Expedited launch, and Mark Sarnow reappears in the series after a fifteen year absence as the senior officer in Manticoran Silesia. Have fun!

There was no one in the Queen's uniform who had more amply proven his courage and skill than Aivars Aleksovitch Terekhov. Forced into action under disastrous conditions which were none of his fault, he'd fought his ship until she and her entire division were literally hammered into scrap. Until three-quarters of his crew were dead or wounded. Until he himself had been so mangled by the fire that wrecked his bridge that the Peep doctors had been forced to amputate his right arm and leg and regenerate them from scratch.

And after that, he'd survived almost a full T-year as a POW in the Peeps' hands until the general prisoner exchange the High Ridge Government had engineered. And he'd returned to the Star Kingdom as the single officer whose command had been overwhelmed, destroyed to the last ship, however gallant and determined its resistance, at the same time Eighth Fleet, in the full floodtide of victory, had been smashing Peep fleet after Peep fleet.

Terekhov's history, and the XO has noticed the 'slightly traumatized' and 'easing him back into the job' surrounding his captain, and is concerned.

The Manticore System's G0 primary was dim, scarcely visible seven light-hours behind them, and its G2 companion was still farther away and dimmer. Yet the space about Hexapuma was far from empty. A sizable chunk of Home Fleet was deployed out here, ready to dash through the Junction to reinforce Third Fleet at Trevor's Star at need, or to cover the Basilisk System against a repeat of the attack which had devastated it in the previous war. And, of course, to protect the Junction itself.

A decent chunk of Home Fleet is protecting the Junction, and ready to scramble to reinforce Basilisk or Trevor's Star at need.

Once that protection would have been the responsibility of the Junction forts. But the decommissioning of those fortresses had been completed under the Janacek Admiralty as one more cost-saving measure. To be fair, the process had been begun before the High Ridge Government ever assumed office, for with Trevor's Star firmly in Manticoran hands, the danger of a sudden attack through the Junction had virtually disappeared. Perhaps even more important, decommissioning the manpower-intensive fortresses had freed up the enormous numbers of trained spacers to man the new construction which had taken the war so successfully to the People's Republic.

But now Manticore, and the diminished Manticoran Alliance, was once again upon the defensive, and threats to the home system—and to the Junction—need not come through the Junction. Yet there was no question of recommissioning the fortresses. Their technology was obsolete, they'd never been refitted to utilize the new generations of missiles, their EW systems were at least three generations out of date, and BuPers was scrambling as desperately for trained manpower as it ever had before. Which meant Home Fleet had to assume the responsibility, despite the fact that any capital ship deployed to cover the Junction was over nineteen hours—almost twenty-one and a half hours, at the standard eighty percent of maximum acceleration the Navy allowed—from Manticore orbit. No one liked hanging that big a percentage of the Fleet that far from the capital planet, but at least the home system swarmed with LACs. Any Light Attack Craft might be a pygmy compared to a proper ship of the wall, but there were literally thousands of Shrikes and Ferrets deployed to protect the Star Kingdom's planets. They ought to be able to give any attackers pause long enough for Home Fleet to rendezvous and deal with them.

Manticore system security, now that the Forts are decommissioned and Home Fleet divided. At least they've got more LACs than Tequila.

Almost stranger than seeing so many ships of the wall assigned to ride herd on the Junction, was seeing so many of them squawking Andermani transponder codes. For the entire history of the Star Kingdom—for even longer than there'd been a Star -Kingdom—Manticoran home space had been protected by Manticoran ships. But not any longer. Almost half of the superdreadnoughts on Ragnhild's tactical plot belonged to the Star Kingdom's Grayson and Andermani allies, and relieved though Helen was to see them, the fact that the Star Kingdom needed them made her feel . . . uncomfortable.

This surprised me. Shouldn't the allies be doing more to cover the other Alliance members or striking back?

Even in time of war, the Junction's use rate had continued to do nothing but climb. Fifteen years ago, the traffic controllers had handled one transit every three minutes. Now they were up to over a thousand inbound and outbound transits a T-day—one transit every eighty-five seconds along one of the fourteen lanes—and an astonishing amount of that increase moved along the Manticore-Lynx lane.

Thousand Junction transits a day, averaging one every 1.25 minutes.

No observer would have noticed any visible change, but the bridge displays told the tale as Hexapuma's impeller wedge dropped abruptly to half-strength. Her forward nodes were no longer generating their part of the wedge's n-space stress bands. Instead, her beta nodes had shut down, and her alpha nodes had reconfigured to produce a Warshawski sail, a circular disk of focused gravitation that extended for over a hundred and fifty kilometers in every direction.

150 km radius to sails.

This terminus of the Junction was less conveniently placed than most of the others in at least one respect. The closest star, a little over five and a half light-hours from the terminus, was a planetless M8 red dwarf, useless for colonization or for providing the support base a wormhole junction terminus required. Every bit of the necessary infrastructure had to be shipped in, either direct from Manticore or from the Lynx System—sixteen hours of flight for a warship in the Zeta bands, and thirty-two hours for a merchantship in the Delta bands. That wasn't very far, as interstellar voyages went, but it was far enough that it would be difficult for anyone to make a day-trip for a few hours' visit at a planet suited to human life.

Moreover, Lynx was a Verge system, with very limited industrial infrastructure and even less modern technology. There was a distinct limit on anything except raw materials and foodstuffs which it could provide, and its labor force would have to be entirely retrained on modern hardware before it could make any significant contribution to the development and operation of the terminus.

Position and state of the Lynx end of the wormhole.

Although the Star Kingdom had opted not to reactivate the fortresses around the Junction's central terminus, there were at least a dozen of them under construction at the Lynx Terminus. They wouldn't be as big as the Junction forts, but they were being shipped in in prefabricated chunks, and unlike the Junction forts, they were being built with the latest in weapons, sensors, and EW systems. And they were also being built using the same manpower-reducing automation which was a feature of the most recent Manticoran and Grayson warship designs. When finished, each would mass about ten million tons, significantly larger than any superdreadnought, and with far less internal volume devoted to impeller rooms. Bristling with missile tubes and LAC service bays, they would constitute a most emphatic statement of the Star Kingdom's ownership of the wormhole terminus.

More modern Forts at Lynx, including big bays of LACs.

Purely civilian installations were also under construction at a frantic rate. The mere existence of the terminus, especially in light of all of the other termini of the Manticoran Wormhole Junction, was acting on merchant shipping less like a magnet than a black hole. The Lynx Terminus cut distances—and thus time—between, say, New Tuscany and Sol from over five hundred light-years to less than two hundred and fifty. That was a savings of over twelve T-weeks for a typical freighter, and the interlocking network of the Manticoran Junction and a handful of smaller ones allowed similar time savings around almost three-quarters of the Solarian League's huge perimeter. And, Helen thought grimly, when the annexation was completed, that terminus would also move the Star Kingdom's border far around the Solarian frontier and five hundred light-years closer to places like Mesa.

Location, location, location. With the addition of Lynx, over half of freighters making runs within the League can save some time by taking the Junction.

The forts were under construction, the civilian infrastructure was growing almost literally as she watched, and hordes of merchies were streaming through the terminus . . . and the Royal Manticoran Navy's total presence—aside from Hexapuma, who was only visiting—were two relatively modern destroyers and one elderly light cruiser.

Well, she thought, I suppose Home Fleet is on call at the central terminus, but still . . .

The sight of that grossly understrength picket—almost as weak as the one the first Janacek Admiralty had assigned to Basilisk Station before the First Battle of Basilisk—made her feel even queasier than the wormhole transit had. She knew the Navy couldn't be strong everywhere, but she also knew the Talbott Station task force was far more numerous than anything she saw here. Surely, Rear Admiral Khumalo could have spared something more to watch over the billions of dollars worth of fortresses and service platforms under construction. Not to mention the trillions of dollars worth of merchantships and cargo passing through the terminus itself every single day.

Lynx station picket, a cruiser and two tin cans.

The computers began obediently spewing out information, and she plotted the endpoints of the necessary course, feeling grateful that Hexapuma was already outside the local star's hyper limit. At least she didn't have to crank that into her calculations!

Next she punched in a search order, directing the computer to overlay her rough course with the strongest h-space gravity waves and to isolate the wave patterns which would carry them towards Spindle. She also remembered to allow for velocity loss on downward hyper translations to follow a given grav wave. She'd forgotten to do that once in an Academy astrogation problem and wound up adding over sixty hours to the total voyage time she was calculating.

She felt a small trickle of satisfaction as she realized the same thing would have happened here, if she'd simply asked the computers to plot a course along the most powerful gravity waves, because one strong section of them never rose above the Gamma bands, which would have required at least three downward translations. That would not only have cost them over sixty percent of their base velocity at each downward translation, but Hexapuma's maximum apparent velocity would have been far lower in the lower bands, as well.

Complexities of plotting a course through hyper.

"Helm," Helen said, "come to one-one-niner by zero-four-six at five hundred and eighty gravities, translation gradient of eight-point-six-two to h-band Zeta-one-seven. I'm uploading the waypoints now."

They can slug the spots for course corrections directly from astrogation to the helm. Makes sense, and they've used such waypoints in tactics before, so no real surprise.

Helen listened carefully as the senior master chief repeated her instructions. Under any conceivable normal circumstances, there was no way a petty officer of Clary's seniority was going to get them wrong. Even if she did, she almost certainly would have caught any error when she checked her actual helm settings against the course data Helen had loaded to her computers. But even improbable accidents happened, which was why the Navy insisted orders be repeated back verbally. And just as it was Clary's duty to repeat her orders, it was Helen's duty to be certain they'd been repeated correctly.

Repeating of orders.

Abigail wasn't certain what to make of the dinner itself, either. Terekhov wasn't one of the RMN officers who followed the tradition of dining regularly with his officers. In Abigail's native Grayson Space Navy, every captain was expected to follow that practice, a legacy of Lady Harrington's indelible imprint upon their service, and Abigail had to admit it was the tradition she preferred. But Hexapuma's Junction transit lay over two T-weeks behind them, and this was the first time Captain Terekhov had invited anyone—aside from Commander FitzGerald and Commander Lewis—to dine with him.

Honor's tradition of regular working suppers with her officers has really caught on in the GSN.

All of the toasts had been drunk. Aikawa, as the junior officer present, had gotten through the loyalty toast to the Queen with admirable composure, and the Captain himself had called for the Protector's Toast from Abigail. She'd appreciated that, just as she'd appreciated and admired the fashion in which he'd discharged all of his host's responsibilities, and now she watched him lean towards Lieutenant Commander Kaplan at his left elbow.

Abigail was surprised the first time Oversteegen ate with her that he knew there was a Grayson toast, Terekhov is at least as sensitive as Oversteegen though, so no worries.

"There are no real mysteries here, Ladies and Gentlemen. I'd be surprised if the grapevine version of our orders isn't at least mostly accurate. Basically, the Nasty Kitty has been assigned to Talbott Station, under the command of Rear Admiral Khumalo."

Abigail saw Ragnhild Pavletic and Aikawa Kagiyama go absolutely rigid. Their eyes were suddenly huge, and she rather thought they'd both forgotten to breathe. The Captain seemed totally unaware of their reaction, but Abigail saw the faint twinkle in his eyes and recognized Naomi Kaplan's frantic effort not to erupt into laughter all over again. So that was what he'd been saying to the Tac Officer!

Not that it'll stop him from teasing the midshipmen.

"I understand why some of them—some of you—may feel that way. However, you are wrong if you think our mission here is unimportant to the future of the Star Kingdom. It is very important. Whether we like it or not, the Star Kingdom most of us have known and served all of our lives is changing. It's growing. In the face of the renewed Havenite threat, Queen Elizabeth and Prime Minister Alexander, with the strong concurrence of Parliament, have determined that we have no choice but to expand. In Silesia, that expansion, sanctioned by treaty agreement with the Andermani Empire and approved by the sitting government of Silesia, will ultimately permit us to put an end to the pirate threat which has cost so many Manticoran ships and lives, including that of Commodore Edward Saganami, over the centuries. It will allow us to drastically reduce our anti-piracy efforts in that region, thus allowing us to retain a higher percentage of our ship strength for frontline deployments. And it will also bring an end to the ceaseless cycle of violence which has afflicted the people living on the planets of the Confederacy for far too long.

"Some will disapprove of our annexation of Silesian territory, regardless of the reasons. Undoubtedly, some of those who disapprove will be Silesians who suddenly find themselves living under Manticoran rule. Others will be outsiders—some from the region, and some from outside it—who will resent or fear the expansion of our borders and, ultimately, the strength of our Star Kingdom.

Some of us just think it's weird for you to just barely escape being absorbed into a greater empire, then turn around and start rapidly expanding this way. Looks like the plan to buy off the existing Silly government worked.

"The situation in Talbott is somewhat different. The decision to annex Silesia was made on the basis of military necessity, more than any other factor. The decision to annex Talbott stemmed from the spontaneously expressed will of the citizens of the Cluster. I don't believe anyone ever anticipated that the discovery of the Junction's seventh terminus would result in the admission of a multisystem cluster to the Star Kingdom. And aside from our obvious security concerns for the Lynx Terminus, there's no pressing military need for us to acquire territory here. But when a locally organized plebiscite votes by such a wide majority to request annexation, Her Majesty has no choice but to consider that petition very carefully."

He paused to take a sip of water, then continued.

"Ultimately, the Cluster will undoubtedly become of great economic and military importance to the Star Kingdom. Its population is many times the Star Kingdom's prewar population, and its star systems are for all intents and purposes undeveloped. There will be a huge internal market for our goods and services, not to mention vast opportunities for investment, and the mere existence of the Lynx Terminus can only continue to attract even more shipping both to Talbott and, via the Junction, to Manticore itself.

"Yet all that lies in the future. What concerns us at this moment isn't the potential advantages our Star Kingdom may reap from the annexation, but our responsibility to the people of these star systems and planets, who are in the process of voluntarily making themselves our fellow citizens and Her Majesty's subjects. That is why Admiral Khumalo is here, and the reason Hexapuma was assigned here.

Long-term benefits to Manticore in accepting the plebiscite.

"If there are those who resent and would, if they could, oppose our expansion into Silesia," Terekhov continued, "there are many more who will resent—and who will oppose—our annexation of Talbott. I scarcely need to remind any of you of the existence of the Office of Frontier Security, or of the Mesa System, or of the many Solarian shipping lines which deeply resent our domination of the carrying trade around the periphery of the League. All of those elements will be most unhappy at the mere thought of finding a lobe of the Star Kingdom on the League's very doorstep.

At least you understand the forces arrayed against you.

"At the moment, Admiral Khumalo has made the Spindle System the central base for Talbott Station. Although Spindle may not be . . . ideally placed for the protection of the Lynx Terminus, it is the site of the Talbott Constitutional Convention, where delegates from every system are assembled to hammer out the constitutional provisions which will govern the admission of the Cluster to the Star Kingdom. As such, the security of that system must be assured.

Spindle is home to the constitutional convention, and so to Dame Matsuko and HQ of naval operations in Talbott.

"Well, I wasn't there," Leo Stottmeister said slowly, "but every single word he said about how close we are to the League, and about Mesa, and about the shipping which is already moving through Lynx is absolutely true. And I may never have dealt with Frontier Security myself, but my Uncle Stefan's ship pissed off an OFS paper-shuffler, once. They didn't do anything wrong, but by the time the dust settled, that Solly bastard had condemned and confiscated their entire ship and its cargo. Uncle Stefan always figured the son of a bitch got a cut of the ship's value, but he said the profit was just icing on the cake for him. Their ship's real crime was that they'd snagged a profitable cargo out from under the nose of a Solly shipping line that had a sweetheart deal with Frontier Security."

The tall midshipman shrugged, his face unwontedly serious.

"I know Ragnhild has relatives in the shipping industry, but I don't know about any of the rest of you. I can tell you this, though—Uncle Stefan isn't the only person I've heard talk about how much some of the Solly freight lines hate us. And Frontier Security thinks of us as a bunch of neobarbs with delusions of grandeur. You mix that all up into a single ball of snakes, and God knows what you'll get out of it! Just don't expect it to be good."

OFS corruption and connections to Solly merchant lines that hate the idea of the Manticoran merchant marine.

"Paulo's right," she said, although it irritated her to admit it. "The situations probably wouldn't be at all the same, but that's exactly the way it would seem to an SLN skipper. Because Leo's right about how the Sollies think of us. I've been to Old Earth and seen it myself. In some ways, it's even worse than for the 'neobarbs' who don't have such close contact with Sol." She grimaced. "You know my dad was still in uniform when we were there, right?"

Heads nodded, and her grimace turned even sourer.

"Well, we were at a party one night, and I overheard this woman—I found out later she was a Solly assemblywoman, no less—pointing Daddy out to one of her friends and saying 'Look at that. He looks just like he belongs to a real navy, doesn't he?'"

An incident with Anton when he was attached to the embassy on Earth.

And, of course, her very own wormhole junction.

With termini whose locations none of her people, so far, knew the least thing about, since Manpower either hadn't explored them itself or had managed to destroy the data before it lost Congo.

Destroyed the data, definitely. Helen gives her friends the public consumption version of Crown of Slaves the one without Victor or Jeremy, and a genuine hostage crisis.

"What did you expect a planet inhabited almost exclusively by freed genetic slaves to do?"

"And they're using those frigates your father and mother—I mean, your father and Lady Montaigne—had built for the ASL for their fleet?" d'Arezzo asked, his expression intent.

"As the nucleus for it. At the same time, I understand they're negotiating with both us and the Peeps for heavier ships. Even 'obsolete' Allied designs are as good as anything Mesa or Manpower might have. And everyone on Torch figures it's only a matter of time until Manpower decides it's found a way to regain possession of Congo somehow. So building up a big enough fleet to discourage temptations is pretty high on the priority lists of 'Queen Berry's' senior advisers."

Torch Navy, frigates so far, looking for light units from Haven or Manticore.

"Manpower's going to be pretty unhappy to suddenly find us with secure fleet bases that close to its home system. Which is why I think the Captain has a definite point about just how nasty things could turn. We've always had a tendency back home in the Star Kingdom to think of Manpower and Mesa as two separate entities—sort of like the Star Kingdom and the Hauptman Cartel, or Grayson and Sky Domes. But it doesn't really work that way. Manpower and a handful of other huge companies own Mesa, and Mesa has its own navy. Not too big compared to our Navy, maybe, but nothing to sneeze at, and equipped with modern Solly designs. Plus most of the companies headquartered there have at least some armed ships of their own. With us as distracted by Silesia and the front as we are, they'd almost have to be tempted to use that military capability in an effort to destabilize our annexation of the Cluster."

"And Frontier Security would be just absolutely delighted to help them do it," Leo agreed grimly.

"You know," Aikawa said thoughtfully, "this deployment may not turn out to be quite so boring as I figured it would."

I think you can count on that. Everyone knows Meas is a front for Manpower but secretly Manpower is just a tool for the Mesan Alignment and their agenda.

[Batman]

In all fairness a goodly portion of that rapid expansion wasn't their idea. Both San Martin and the Talbott Cluster asked to be added to the Star Kingdom. It's hardly 'expansionist ambitions' when people plead to be allowed to join.

[Simon_Jester]

A decent chunk of Home Fleet is protecting the Junction, and ready to scramble to reinforce Basilisk or Trevor's Star at need.

About as close as Manticore has to a strategic reserve, I guess- and come to think of it the Junction is a great place to put a reserve.

This surprised me. Shouldn't the allies be doing more to cover the other Alliance members or striking back?

The Andermani ships probably aren't fully up to tangling with the Peeps by themselves (in some ways yes, in others no). Also, I'm not sure there ARE many remaining Alliance members, a number having left or been shoved out by High Ridge.

Letting Haven control the Junction (even briefly, to mine it) could be a disaster, so it's understandable that a lot of forces get parked here.

Some of us just think it's weird for you to just barely escape being absorbed into a greater empire, then turn around and start rapidly expanding this way. Looks like the plan to buy off the existing Silly government worked.

Manticore's been an economic hegemon within its own region for centuries; outright annexing territory that it already de facto polices probably doesn't weird out them as much as it does you.

[White Haven]

Keeping substantial assets in Manticore is most definitely the smart move here. The Junction lets them cheat by maintaining a heavy defense in the Alliance's (what's left of it, at any rate) most critical system (critical, given the new 'holy shit deep striking is a thing' realization) while also dangling that same fleet as a Sword of Damocles over Haven (via Trevor's Star), Silesia (in case Haven gets frisky with fleet-scale commerce raiding again), and the Talbott cluster. As an added bonus to the Andermani contingent, it lets them get home quickly via Silesia if the shit hits the fan there, something they couldn't do if they were deployed away from a Junction terminus, which in turn lets them risk a larger fraction of their fleet on the Alliance in the first place.

[Ahriman238]

Wouldn't Gregor be a lot faster if they were in a hurry to get home?

[White Haven]

Brain fart, but it just makes my point even more well-targeted.

[Ahriman238]

And in fairness, deep-striking has always been 'a thing.' That's why Manticore's biggest, most capable fleet spent the war hanging out in the Manticore system, as Home Fleet is wont to do. The thing is, everyone knows you can drop a fleet on anyone with little warning, so space navies tend to be very defensive-minded, attacking only with the forces leftover after they're feeling pretty secure anywhere they can't afford to lose. Sure, you could throw everything at the enemy capitol, all-or-nothing but, what if it's nothing? Then you lose your whole fleet and in the process really tick the other side off. In short, you lose.

Besides, a home-system deep-strike attack like that would be huge, bigger than all the battles of the last war, a major depopulation event for both sides.

That and, as shown by Tourville at Marsh, there are certain advantages to operating around friendly secure bases full to bursting with fuel, ammo, repair facilities and other supplies. Or rather, there are several pointed disadvantages to being caught out weeks of flight from any of these things.

[White Haven]

True enough. Perhaps I should delay making my point until you finish up with At All Costs. *whistles innocently*

[Ahriman238]

Eh, go ahead, people have been dropping spoilers like crazy in these threads, and I kind of did it myself anyways.

Now, deep-striking might look a lot more attractive with the sheer overkill podnoughts and CLACs can bring to the party.