Bit of Analysis: HH Saganami Island series

[Ahriman238]

The repairs to Warlock are just to scrape together enough alpha nodes and support capability to get her through the junction, so she can be scrapped at Hephaestus. We know, because we see her along with Hexapuma during the fleet honors when they arrive at the junction on the Manticoran end.

You're right, I'm thinking too far ahead, in terms of "time for these ships to finish repairs at Manticore and return" when it's really the earlier phase of "getting both ships ready to limp home."

Okay, now I'm just at a loss. The Mesans are so plugged into the Solly R&D and tech-companies they've been able to string many discoveries in unrelated or casually related fields together to produce things like the streak drive. If anyone in or known to the League has FTL comm, Mesa shouldn't be far behind. Yet we know the Peeps original FTL comms were Solly-built based on data the Peeps provided, and that was years ago.

Solarian space is big, it could be as simple as the Peep's picked a megafirm the Alignment had no hooks in or the information is being restricted to so top secret that any FTL installs are black box affairs that melt themselves down if you try and open them. It's quite possible to build something that is designed to be used, operated but not maintained only swapped out.

I suppose it's possible, but I'd see Mesa buying them up for use even if they couldn't dissect and reverse-engineer them.

Also note the Peep's are also still pretty far behind Manticore. Transmission rates are still in the twitter size not Manticore audio/video.

Oh, I'd expect any Solly FTL comm to be really basic, it just bothers me that they (or at least, elements of 'them') had one six or seven years ago but there's no evidence of one now.

Reginald Houseman, and what's new with him. Seems he resigned from public office and was never convicted of any wrongdoing in the witch-hunts following the HRG's collapse.

Also, confirmation that allying with the High Ridge Government was disastrous for the Liberals, which is no surprise because it created a large "leave in disgust" faction within the party, followed by an internecine struggle between the old party machine (New Kiev's, inherited from her father) and the disgusted people (led by Montaigne, perhaps among others).

Right, Word of Weber has it the Liberals are split between Cathy Montagine's far larger New Liberals and a small group of the old guard, concentrated in the Lords, who still live in denial. The Progressives are flailing without a leader and may well be absorbed by either or both Liberal parties. The Conservative Association was so stained by association with the HRG that it's effectively disbanded but will in time reform under a new name.

Message time from Manticore to Mesa, via the Manty and Mesan wormholes. 12 LY/day for their upgraded 'streak' hyperdrive.

In other words, just short of 4400c, which is a sharp increase over typical warship speeds (~2000-2500c) or maximum courier boat speeds (~3500c)

Yes, it's quite impressive. Occasionally I idly wonder what Buttercup would have looked like if the Manties had strike craft and streak drive.

Okay, now I'm just at a loss. The Mesans are so plugged into the Solly R&D and tech-companies they've been able to string many discoveries in unrelated or casually related fields together to produce things like the streak drive. If anyone in or known to the League has FTL comm, Mesa shouldn't be far behind. Yet we know the Peeps original FTL comms were Solly-built based on data the Peeps provided, and that was years ago.

...Uh, are you sure about that? Because the Solarian companies show no sign of having deployed this hardware themselves.

I'm quite sure that the Peeps, much as Saint-Just was reluctant, outsourced development of their own FTL comm to Solarian corporations and they delivered. That's why it bothers me that no Solly is using it, and the Mesans seem largely in the dark in the sense that they know it exists and have a crude idea how it works but aren't that close to developing it themselves.

Also, the Mesans have been doing things that no one else even thinks are practical. So it's not just that they're plugged into Solarian military R&D, though that explains some projects like their Cataphract extended range missile. But the mind control nanites? The streak and spider drives? Those aren't remotely related to any technology the League has even heard of.

Much like Manticore, the Alignment has had a 'black' research program running for decades if not centuries, pursuing fundamentally new and exotic technological concepts. They haven't accomplished all the same things Manticore has, they have a different palette of secret weapons, but they clearly have advances that must be credited to them alone, not to cobbling together projects that somebody else thought of.

One of Manticore's great advantages is they have a vast merchant marine of reservists who wander the galaxy and report any interesting news, like a ship accelerating faster than it should be or an announced new discovery. Mesa is very similar in that they keep very up to date on every possible field they might someday find military applications for. Hence it seems odd that Mesa would not have heard of a Solly FTL comm, which was all I meant.

However, I will take up that the streak drive explicitly would not have been possible without half a dozen separate breakthroughs in theoretical physics, all of them public. It's just that Mesa was the only group to come up with a model for the higher-band hyper walls that tied them all together and had the werewithal to engineer a workable, brute force, solution. Likewise, when speculating about the lone gunman nanites Kevin Usher said there's been speculation on the possibilities in the Solarian medical literature for a while now.

I'm not saying the Mesan Alignment's R&D is just mooching off the League's. I'm saying they obviously keep a very close eye on what the League is doing and where and how far they may be able to take it.

[Simon_Jester]

I suppose it's possible, but I'd see Mesa buying them up for use even if they couldn't dissect and reverse-engineer them.

It's not clear that the hardware was physically shipped back to the League, from what I remember.

As I recall it, the FTL comm was developed in Haven, with an uncertain amount of Solarian help, from descriptions of the system's capabilities. Although even in that case it should be beginning to spread- maybe the Havenites somehow managed to compartmentalize their use of Solarian experts to the point where none of the Solarians in question knew what they were working on?

Also note the Peep's are also still pretty far behind Manticore. Transmission rates are still in the twitter size not Manticore audio/video.

Oh, I'd expect any Solly FTL comm to be really basic, it just bothers me that they (or at least, elements of 'them') had one six or seven years ago but there's no evidence of one now.

Again, I'm not sure they actually did have such a thing.

Message time from Manticore to Mesa, via the Manty and Mesan wormholes. 12 LY/day for their upgraded 'streak' hyperdrive.

In other words, just short of 4400c, which is a sharp increase over typical warship speeds (~2000-2500c) or maximum courier boat speeds (~3500c)

Yes, it's quite impressive. Occasionally I idly wonder what Buttercup would have looked like if the Manties had strike craft and streak drive.

Er... strike craft?

Anyway, streak drive, uh, probably not very different. While physical travel time was a factor in Buttercup, the bigger factor seems to have been logistics. Unless the Manticorans managed to increase their actual production of munitions, they can't resupply Eighth Fleet much faster than they already did, even if the individual ships are much faster (which, for merchantmen doing supply runs, is not a given).

On the other hand, it might well be that Eighth Fleet would manage to punch out Lovat before Operation Hassan and the cease-fire, at least- in which case Giscard and Tourville are probably dead, leaving Theisman as the only competent senior officer in the Republic, and making it hellaciously difficult for him to bring the Havenite Civil War under control.

I'm quite sure that the Peeps, much as Saint-Just was reluctant, outsourced development of their own FTL comm to Solarian corporations and they delivered. That's why it bothers me that no Solly is using it, and the Mesans seem largely in the dark in the sense that they know it exists and have a crude idea how it works but aren't that close to developing it themselves.

I get that, I'm just not sure the text supports it.

One of Manticore's great advantages is they have a vast merchant marine of reservists who wander the galaxy and report any interesting news, like a ship accelerating faster than it should be or an announced new discovery. Mesa is very similar in that they keep very up to date on every possible field they might someday find military applications for.

That is true, but they also have major secret research programs that have paid off with technology that is drastically in advance of anything anyone else has ever heard of. Some of that technology may itself be inspired by or based on developments from somebody else, but that doesn't mean they aren't doing some very impressive work in-house.

[This is equally true of Manticore and Mesa alike]

Hence it seems odd that Mesa would not have heard of a Solly FTL comm, which was all I meant.

If a Solarian FTL comm exists, then you're right.

I'm not saying the Mesan Alignment's R&D is just mooching off the League's. I'm saying they obviously keep a very close eye on what the League is doing and where and how far they may be able to take it.

Understood. My point is, simply, that there is ample precedent for Manticore or Mesa inventing things nobody else is even close to building, and that they struggle even to figure out how to duplicate without working examples dropped into their laps.

Presumably many Solarian worlds (or Manticore, or hell even Haven) could duplicate the mind control nanites or the streak drive and spider drive given the blueprints. Likewise for the high-bandwidth FTL comms, or the high density fusion plants. But they don't have the blueprints, and they in many cases lack the technical knowhow it'd take to even develop the precursors to those systems.

[Terralthra]

I do not recall the Solarian League ever getting working FTL. I do recall explicit mentions that the reason that the R&D companies that broke the scientific embargo that the SKM forced on the SLN did so because the deal was "we slip you technology, you let us look at their stuff, because we hear they have FTL, and we want that." I don't recall ever seeing a mention that the R&D types got enough of a look at the FTL system to recreate it.

[Ahriman238]

Bardasano belonged to one of Mesa's "young lodges," which explained the tattoos and the elaborate body piercings. The young lodges represented a "new generation" of the Mesan corporate hierarchy, one which had embraced a deliberately flamboyant lifestyle, flaunting its wealth and power under the nose of a virtuously disapproving galaxy. Very few members of any of the lodges had been admitted to the full truth of Mesa's plans, for several reasons. The largest one was that the wealth, sense of privilege, and arrogance which underlay their flamboyance had been deliberately encouraged as one more sign of Manpower and its fellow outlaw corporations' excesses and general degeneracy. It had been more necessary than ever to distract attention from the Alignment's activities now that the culminating moment was so rapidly approaching, and the "young lodges" had done that quite well. Of course, their members' lifestyles had also made them rather more vulnerable to the activities of the Audubon Ballroom's assassins. That was unfortunate, but all the genotypes in question had been conserved elsewhere, and it had been well worth the price tag in terms of misdirection. And if it also convinced the rest of the galaxy that Mesa at large was increasingly dominated by hedonistic sybarites and useless drones, so much the better.

The young lodges, who go for tattoos and piercings and shameless hedonism as part of the corrupt Mesan elite, are just one more of the Alignment's diversions.

The Bardasano genotype had been notable for at least half a dozen generations for its intelligence and ruthless determination. There'd been a few unfortunate and unintended traits, as well, unhappily, and at one point there'd been serious consideration of simply culling the line's last several iterations and starting over again from a significantly earlier point. The positive traits had been so strong, however, that a remedial program had been instituted, instead, and Isabel was the current example of how successful it had been. It had been necessary to eliminate two of her immediate predecessors when their inherent ruthlessness had made them just a bit too ambitious for anyone else's good, but intelligent ambition, properly tempered, was always a useful thing, as Bardasano herself demonstrated. And if there was still a slight tendency towards sexual disorders and mildly sociopathic behaviors, neither of those posed any serious handicap, especially for someone whose area of expertise was covert operations. Of course, they'd have to be dealt with in the next generation or two if the Bardasano line was going to earn back permanent alpha status within the Alignment, which Isabel understood.

It seems the greek letter designators aren't origin of the germ line or specialization, but desirability. Also says a lot about Mesas' priorities that they consider sociopathy a minor problem.

"What I'm thinking is that with only a very little encouragement, New Tuscany would probably make an even better cat's-paw than Monica did last time around. Frontier Fleet's already dispatched a reinforcing detachment to Meyers, which is probably enough to start bolstering Verrochio's nerve all by itself. And I just happen to know that the senior officer of that detachment doesn't much care for 'neobarbs.' In fact, he doesn't care for Manties. Something to do with getting his fingers rather severely burned in an incident with a Manticoran freighter when he was a much more junior officer. Franklin's contacts in the League meant we could get him assigned without ever having to approach him directly, so he doesn't know a thing about our involvement in this. Given his background, though, I'm sure he's already quite upset about the Manties' wild allegations about the complicity of major League business interests—and, of course, those nasty Mesans—in what happened in Monica. If he were properly approached by Hongbo and Verocchio, I'm fairly confident he'd be amenable to doing something about it, especially if the League's assistance was officially requested by someone with legitimate interests in the area. Like, oh, New Tuscany, perhaps. And one of Verrochio's outstanding characteristics has always been his temper. If Hongbo pumps a little hydrogen into the fire, instead of trying to put it out, Verrochio is going to be just itching for an opportunity to get even with Manticore for his current humiliation. And if he just happened to be aware—or to become aware—of the fact that our good friend Admiral Crandall is in his vicinity with an entire Battle Fleet task force of superdreadnoughts, it might stiffen his irate spine quite remarkably."

The new plan, and the League's deployment of forces.

"Militarily," he said bluntly, "Haven is screwed if—and please do note the qualifier, Gregor—whatever Duchess Harrington used at Lovat can be gotten into general deployment. I'm guessing that it has to be some further development of the grav-pulse telemetry we're already using in Ghost Rider. Exactly how Admiral Hemphill's shop did it, and what sort of hardware is involved, is more than I could guess at this point. I'm a spook, not a tactical officer, and I'm actually probably better informed about Peep hardware than I am about ours. Something about knowing your enemy. But it's clear enough even from the preliminary reports that whatever Duchess Harrington did enormously increased her MDMs' long-range accuracy, and that's always been the biggest problem where they're concerned."

Medusa and her staff discussing Lovat, having never heard of Apollo before. The constant touching base is nice in one way, it lets us clearly place events in relation to each other. But by this point I'm getting pretty tired of how much of each book is dedicated to people reacting to or discussing the events of other books.

"First, the sheer scale and . . . audacity of what they had in mind strikes me as being just a bit over the top even for one of the Mesa-based outfits. Second, look at the expense involved. I'm sure they'd have managed to recoup most of their investment one way or another if it had worked, but they invested literally hundreds of billions trying to bring this thing off. That's a pretty stiff risk exposure even for someone like Manpower or Technodyne. And, third, if I'd been Manpower, and if all I really wanted to do was to prevent the annexation of the Talbott Cluster, I could have found an approach that would have been a lot less expensive and risky . . . and probably at least as effective."

"Really?"

"Sure." O'Shaughnessy shook his head. "This was a case of using an awfully big, awfully expensive sledgehammer when a tack hammer would have done the job. Not only that, but they had the tack hammer they needed all along! Look at their return on Nordbrandt, alone. And if Terekhov and Van Dort hadn't literally stumbled across the Manpower connection—I'm not trying to downplay anything they accomplished, but they really did stumble across it, you know—then Westman would probably still be shooting at us in Montana, too. Investing a few hundred million in political action committees and funding and supplying other lunatics with guns and bombs would have let them keep the entire Cluster at the boil pretty much indefinitely, unless we wanted to resort to some sort of authoritarian repression. And it would have done that while simultaneously limiting Manpower's exposure, risk, and expense. They might not have been able to prevent the Constitutional Convention from voting out an acceptable constitution, although I'm not even sure of that. But even if the constitution had been voted out, they could probably have counted on keeping the political unrest going at a level which would have forced us to stay home and tend to our knitting instead of causing them problems in their own backyard. So why go for this sort of grandstanding operation? Why invest so much more money and risk the kind of beating they're taking in the Solly public opinion polls now that it's blown up in their faces?"

It's like they're not really a sinister corporation at all! Oh wait, we had that revelation a while ago in another book.

. "Frankly, I didn't know anything about it before Monica, but it would appear Admiral Crandall has selected McIntosh as the site for her latest fleet exercises." He shrugged. "I know it's a bit unusual for Battle Fleet to venture this far out into the Verge, but apparently Crandall wanted to exercise the Fleet Train, as well as the battle squadrons. According to my information, it's been over ninety T-years since Battle Fleet has deployed more than a single squadron all the way out to the frontier, and there's been some question as to whether or not it still has the logistics capacity to support its own operations outside the Old League's established system of bases."

"So am I supposed to infer that Admiral Crandall is exercising in greater strength than 'a single squadron,' then?" Hongbo asked slowly.

"As a matter of fact, I believe she has somewhere around a hundred of the wall," Ottweiler said in an offhand sort of way, and Hongbo sat suddenly back, deep in his chair.

Josef Byng will have three squadrons of BCs, but just in case there are a hundred capital ships conducting "exercises" no more than three or four weeks flight from New Tuscany.

"Our time window for this is too narrow for 'gradually,' " Ottweiler said. "Even though Crandall's set up for a lengthy deployment as part of her logistics test, she can't stay on station here forever. We've got to get this rolling while she's still around to back our play if it comes to that. That's what restricts our time frame so tightly, and I'm sure the commissioner is going to want to know she's around if he might need her. In any case, my instructions to get this all moving ASAP are about as firm as they get. So if you think you need a little more leverage with him, remind him of this. My superiors have records of all of their past transactions with him. And unlike him, they aren't citizens of the League and aren't subject to its laws."

Hongbo stiffened, and not just because of the icy chill which had invaded Ottweiler's voice. His eyes met the Mesan's, and their unspoken message was abundantly clear. If they had records of their transactions with Verrochio, then they just as certainly had records of their transactions with him. And if they were prepared to feed Verrochio to the wolves if he failed to follow instructions, then they were equally prepared to feed him to the same hungry fangs.

Working with Manpower isn't that much fun. Especially once they get incriminating evidence on you, because it costs them nothing to distribute it far and wide.

All of that was bad enough, but there was worse, because the Audubon Ballroom had made it abundantly clear over the years that bureaucrats and administrators who conspired and collaborated with Manpower when they were supposed to be working diligently to suppress the genetic slave trade were not among the Ballroom's favorite people. In fact, they'd made a point of coming up with especially inventive ways of demonstrating that fact. Ways that were usually punctuated with showers of body parts.

I'm hurt, Jeremy's so much more creative than mere fraggings. Besides, he's reformed now, remember?

Aldona Anisimovna had never expected to be back in the Talbott Cluster this quickly, and for more than one reason.

I'll say. For one, the Manties and Talbotters know her name, face, and connection to supplying both terrorists and Monica now, and she and Bardasano both have a special place on "most wanted" lists throughout the Quadrant.

It was amazing how completely her galaxy had shifted with Albrecht's explanation of what was really going on. A part of her was absolutely stunned that the entire Mesan Strategy Council and all of its deep laid plans and machinations had really been only a part—and not the largest part—of the real strategy she'd served, albeit unknowingly, for so many decades. Another part of her was more than a little irked to discover just how much of what she'd thought she knew, even in an operational sense, had been less than complete or even deliberately falsified. Like the "fact" that the Congo Wormhole hadn't been properly surveyed before those Audubon Ballroom fanatics took the system away from Mesa, for example, or who'd really been in charge of "her" operation in Monica. Discovering that someone else could manage her puppet strings as well as she'd always prided herself on managing others' strings hadn't been especially reassuring. But her irritation over lack of complete information and need-to-know compartmentalization of knowledge was as nothing compared to the sheer shock of what was really happening. Aldona Anisimovna was a hardy soul, yet she was both awed and more than a little terrified by the grand, sweeping scope of the Mesan Alignment's true objectives and resources.

Thoughts of someone just moved closer to the center of the 'onion.'

"I'm afraid some of your bodyguard's implants have flashed several alarms on our security scans. I'm sorry, but security regulations prohibit allowing someone with unidentified implanted hardware into the President's presence."

"I see." Anisimovna considered him for a moment, then turned to Taliadoros.

"I'm afraid you're going to have to wait here for me, Kyrillos," she said.

"Ma'am, under the regulations, I'm not supposed—" he began, exactly as if they hadn't already rehearsed this moment.

"I realize it's against the rules," her own tone mingled patience with just a touch of brusqueness, "but at the moment, we're guests on someone else's planet. It's only polite of us to abide by their rules and customs."

"I know that, Ma'am, but—"

"This discussion is finished, Kyrillos," she said firmly, then smiled. "I'll take full responsibility, but this time good manners trump the regulations. Anyway, I'm sure the President's security team is up to the task of protecting me, right along with him, if it comes to that. And I really don't expect anyone to try to assassinate me in the middle of a meeting with him, anyway."

A staged scene, but apparently Anismovna's bodyguard has extensive cybernetics, enough to make New Tuscany presidential security nervous. Said bodyguard is later called 'enhanced.' Cyborg weaponry? More to Mesan transhumanism than just genetics? Who knows.

"Frankly, Mr. President, we have no interest in seeing the Manties expanding their control and influence into this region of space," she replied with an air of total candor. "I'm sure all of you are very well aware of the long-standing hostility between the business community of Mesa and the Star Kingdom of Manticore. And as Manticore has demonstrated quite often in the past—and very recently, in Monica—the 'Star Kingdom' has never been shy about resorting to the use of naked force in the pursuit of its policy objectives. It seems very evident to us in the Mesa System that the establishment of a Manticoran bridgehead here in Talbott will almost inevitably lead to further harassment of Mesa and, quite possibly, to actual Manticoran military operations against Mesa in the not-too-distant future. That, to be completely honest, was the reason for our initial contacts with President Tyler.

"Unfortunately, as all of you are also aware, the Constitutional Convention in Spindle has ratified this new constitution, turning virtually the entire Cluster into another lobe of the Star Kingdom. Which means, of course, that what we hoped to prevent as a measure of self-defense by means of our support for President Tyler has become an established fact."

Anisimovna surprises her hosts by owning up immediately to her involvement in Monica, then offers this somewhat slanted view of events.

Frankly, she'd been flabbergasted—initially, at least—to learn that New Tuscany had, in fact, declined to ratify the new constitution. In their place, she would have been falling all over herself to get under the Manticoran security umbrella and share in the flood tide of commerce and investment which was likely to be coming the Cluster's way. Except, of course, for that other little problem they had. She'd already concluded, just in the short trip from the spaceport to this meeting, that Bardasano's analysis of the New Tuscan oligarchs and their motivations had been right on the money. In fact, the lid was screwed down even more tightly here on New Tuscany than she'd expected from Bardasano's briefings. Uniformed security forces had been a high-visibility part of the ground car drive from the shuttle pad, and she'd noticed an extraordinarily high number of extraordinarily obvious (for a planet with New Tuscany's tech base) security cameras on light standards and at intersections. No doubt there were other, far less obtrusive measures in place to monitor the situation without giving away their presence, but clearly the New Tuscan security forces wanted to do more than simply keep a close eye on things. They also wanted to make any potential troublemakers abundantly aware of the point that they were keeping that eye on things.

Police state. Whee. I suppose it makes sense, oligarchs keeping the proles down, and they seem to understand that Manticore wouldn't stand for their security measures. So which to lose out on, the iron fist maintaining their power, or the economic incentives everyone else was getting as part of the annexation?

Looked at from that perspective, she supposed the New Tuscan decision to opt out of the constitutional process when Manticore and their fellow Talbott delegates declined to give them the domestic security carte blanche they'd insisted upon actually made a degree of sense. The last thing any properly exploitative oligarchs could afford was for their social inferiors to get uppity notions, after all. Unfortunately for New Tuscany, the mere example of what was about to happen in the rest of the Cluster was virtually certain to contaminate their star system with those very notions. Their only real hope had been to siphon off enough of the increasing commerce and Manticoran investment to provide an at least modest but real improvement in the general New Tuscan standard of living. Frankly, the chance of their ever having been able to control the situation through any combination of carrot and stick had never been realistic, in Anisimovna's opinion, but it appeared to be the only one they'd been able to come up with.

Not surprisingly, since the only other approach would have been to recognize when they were beaten and try to make the best terms they could with the people they've been systematically pissing on—and pissing off—for the last two or three generations, she thought. Somehow, I don't think they would have enjoyed the only terms they could get.

And there's that.

"The objective," she said aloud, looking him straight in the eye, "was for Tyler to secure control of the Lynx Terminus of the Manticoran Wormhole Junction. Commissioner Verrochio, of the Office of Frontier Security, was prepared to support his actions—completely impartially, of course—while the League arranged for a new plebiscite, under OFS supervision, to determine the validity of the original plebiscite returns in favor of seeking annexation by Manticore. I'm afraid the commissioner anticipated discovering widespread fraud in the Manticoran plebiscite." She shook her head sadly. "If that had turned out to be the case, then obviously Frontier Security would have had no choice but to set those flawed results aside in favor of the results of its own plebiscite. Which would undoubtedly have led to the endorsement of a Cluster-wide government under the leadership and protection of the Monican Navy and recognized by the Solarian League as the legitimate government of the Cluster."

-snip-

"What sort of 'minor changes'?" Vézien asked.

"Instead of striking directly for the Lynx Terminus and using its disputed possession—plus, of course, the brutal repression of patriotic resistance groups spontaneously arising in reaction to the corrupt plebiscite—as the opening wedge for inviting Frontier Security to intervene to prevent additional bloodshed, we intend to demonstrate Manticoran vengefulness and arrogant imperialism to the galaxy at large," Anisimovna replied. "In particular, we're well aware of the fashion in which Baroness Medusa and Prime Minister Alquezar are already attempting to freeze New Tuscany out of the Cluster's new economic order. Alas, we have reason to believe this is only the first step in Manticore's attempt to punish New Tuscany for its principled stand against that bogus Constitutional Convention from which you withdrew your delegates. Worse, we feel confident, is still to come."

"What sort of 'worse'?" Huppé asked, her dark eyes narrow.

"Harassment of your shipping, violations of your territory, that sort of thing," Anisimovna replied with a sigh. "Indeed, I wouldn't be at all surprised to discover that they've already been harassing your merchant shipping, trying to squeeze you out of the Cluster's markets."

Their objective then, and they offer to make sure OFS recognizes New Tuscany as the legitimate government of the Quadrant. Plus the plan now, instead of direct military action, create a series of incidents and sit back while OFS does the dirty work.

At maximum military power with zero safety margin on her inertial compensator, Artemis' maximum acceleration was better than 6.5 KPS2, which was a third again what any prewar ship of her tonnage could have turned out. Even at the eighty percent of maximum power which was the RMN's normal top acceleration, she could produce 5.3 KPS2, which was still the next best thing to half a kilometer per second better than the old-style compensators could have produced running flat out. Given the present . . . delicate state of affairs with the Solarian League, the Admiralty had decided it might be wiser not to flaunt all of the Navy's current capabilities where Solly warships might see them. According to ONI's best current appreciations, the Solarians remained unaware of many of those capabilities. Some people—including Michelle—took that appreciation with a certain grain of salt, although she had to admit it wasn't as preposterous as it might have been if they'd been talking about any other navy in space.

Accel for a Nike-class BC, or if you prefer 674 and 536 Gs.

It was obvious to anyone who'd ever had to deal with the Solarian League Navy that the SLN suffered from an extraordinarily severe case of professional myopia. The League's navy was divided into two primary components: Battle Fleet and Frontier Fleet. Of the two, Battle Fleet was the bigger and the more prestigious, but Frontier Fleet actually did the lion's share of the SLN's real work. Given the League's enormous size, population, and industrial power, it was scarcely surprising that the SLN was far and away the biggest fleet in human history. Unfortunately for the League, the SLN knew it was the biggest, most powerful, most advanced fleet in human history . . . and at least one—and possibly two—of those well known facts were no longer true.

Battle Fleet vs. Frontier Fleet and their rivalry. Though both are pretty condescending to outsiders.

The League's towering sense of superiority where any "neobarb" star nation was concerned, while scarcely one of its more endearing qualities, didn't normally constitute a direct threat to the League's security. When it's navy shared that same sense of superiority (and burnished it with the institutional arrogance of a service which had existed literally for centuries and never known defeat), that wasn't exactly the case, however. Despite the fact that several of the League's member planets had sent observers from their locally raised and maintained system-defense forces to both Manticore and Haven, the SLN itself, so far as Michelle was aware, never had. There was, after all, no reason for it to concern itself with what a couple of minor, neo-barbarian polities on the backside of beyond might be up to. Even assuming that Manticore and Haven hadn't been too busy killing each other (no doubt with the equivalent of clubs and flint hand-axes), both of them together couldn't possibly have built a fleet large enough to threaten the League, and the thought that two such insignificant so-called star nations could have appreciably improved upon the technology of the incomparable Solarian League Navy was ludicrous.

No one at ONI doubted for a moment that the SDF observers had offered their reports to the SLN. The majority opinion, however, was that the SLN's institutional blinkers were so solidly in place that those reports had been quietly filed and ignored . . . assuming they hadn't simply been tossed. The SDFs were only local defense forces, after all—the backup, second-string militia to the SLN's professional, first-string team. They were obviously going to be more parochial in their viewpoints, and, without the SLN's sound basis of training and vast experience, they were also likely to be unduly alarmist. Not to mention the fact that without the solid core of institutional and professional competence of the regular navy, their "observers" were far more prone to misunderstand—or even be deliberately misled by—what the neobarbs in question made sure they actually saw. Even if Solly naval intelligence was willing to grant their complete sincerity, the analytical methods already in place, relying upon tested and proven techniques, were bound to be more reliable than reports from what were little more than reservist observers who'd probably been steered to what the locals wanted them to see in the first place.

It's true, even right now diligent Solly officers are putting together the pieces from the Battle of Monica, only to be dismissed. If 10 ships, only 3 of them heavy cruisers could defeat 7 Solly BCs, then it's because those ships were flown by third-rate neobarb amateurs. To say nothing of the ridiculous stories of that same force weathering an enormous missile salvo and surviving as a fighting force. Or the outlandish tales from the observers sent to witness the Haven Wars.

And you know what, even after the third and fourth times the SLN get seriously spanked they will still refuse point-blank to believe they're out-teched or outmatched.

Whether or not there was more R&D going on than anyone was mentioning, ONI's sources within the Solly navy all seemed pretty much in agreement that the vast majority of Solarian naval officers put very little credence in the obviously wildly exaggerated claims about Manticoran and Havenite military technology. Based on evidence from the Battle of Monica, the Sollies (or one of their major defense suppliers, at any rate) were at least experimenting with newer-generation missile pods, which was something they'd previously disdained, and their missiles' drives had proven surprisingly powerful and with greater endurance than anyone had really expected. But none of the missiles they'd fired—or, rather, supplied to Monica—had been MDMs, their pods hadn't had the new-generation grav-drivers which were so much a part of Manticore's designs, and there'd been no reports of increases in basic Solarian warship acceleration rates, which were incredibly low and inefficient compared to those of the Manticoran Alliance or even the Republic of Haven. After stirring all of that together and pondering it carefully, the Office of Naval Intelligence had come to the conclusion that at least some improvements could be anticipated out of the SLN, possibly as the result of privately sponsored in-house research and development by people like Technodyne, but that significant improvements were unlikely, at least in the short term.

The Sollies aren't completely where Manticore was 20 years ago, they've got bigger missiles, more drive endurance and likely better ECM. Pretty sure the pods are still just Technodyne though.

Bearing that in mind, the Admiralty had instructed all of its captains not to exceed seventy percent of maximum military power in the presence of Solarian warships. The use of Ghost Rider and FTL coms was also to be minimized. And no MDM live-fire exercises were to be conducted in Solarian space.

Restrictions on showing off. Amusingly, Byng later disregards reports of Manty acceleration rates, and thus any sort of technical advance, specifically because of this.

"CIC makes these eight their new Nevada-class, Ma'am," Dominica Adenauer said, highlighting the icons in question. "The other nine battlecruisers are Indefatigables. The IDs on the destroyers are a lot more tentative than that. CIC thinks they're all Rampart-class, but they can't guarantee it." She grimaced. "Frontier Fleet's modified and refitted so many of the Ramparts that no two of their emission signatures really match one another."

The much-maligned Ramparts, and Henke pops out of hyper at Monica to see two of Byng's three BC squadrons just chilling in orbit.

Lecter nodded again. The accepted interstellar convention was that the fleet in possession of a star system or a planet initiated contact with any newcomers. If contact wasn't initiated, if no challenge was offered, it indicated the fleet in possession wasn't planning on shooting at anyone who got too close. Besides, as Michelle had just pointed out, the Union of Monica was not a member system of the Solarian League, which made any Solarian units in Monican space at least as much visitors as the First Division. No doubt everyone understood perfectly well that Monica's sovereignty—such as it was, and what there was of it—currently existed only on sufferance, but there were still appearances to maintain. Which meant that unless the Sollies had, in fact, occupied the star system, any contact—or challenges—should be coming from Monican traffic control, not from the Sollies.

Or, for that matter, from Manticore.

The rules on who calls who.

Adenauer's expression was sober, and Michelle didn't blame her. Readiness Two was also known as "General Quarters." It meant that all of a ship's engineering and life-support systems were fully manned, of course, but it also meant her combat information center and tactical department were fully manned, as well. That her passive sensors were fully manned; that her active sensors were at immediate readiness; that her point defense laser clusters were active and enabled under computer control; that her counter-missile launchers had rounds in the tubes and backup rounds in the loading arms; that her passive defensive systems and EW were on-line, ready for instant activation; that her offensive missile tubes were prepped and loaded; and that the human backup crews for half her energy weapons were sealed into their armored capsules with the atmosphere in the surrounding spaces evacuated to protect them against the effects of blast. The other half of her energy weapons would be brought up and manned on a rotating basis to allow crew rest for the on-mount personnel, and twenty-five percent of her watch personnel from all other departments would be allowed rotating rest breaks, in order to allow her to remain at Readiness Two for extended periods.

In short, except for bringing up her wedge and sidewalls and running out her energy weapons, Artemis and every one of Michelle's other battlecruisers would be ready to respond almost instantly to any Solarian act of aggression.

Ready Two. Less like Yellow Alert and more like being as prepared for a fight as they can maintain a while, and without being obviously prepared for trouble.

"I've just been looking at ONI's records, Ma'am," she said. "I punched in Admiral Byng's name, and it looks like I got a direct hit."

"Really?"

Both of Michelle's eyes rose in surprise. The Office of Naval Intelligence did its best to keep track of the senior personnel of other navies, but its records on the SLN were sparser than on, say, the Republic of Haven or the Andermani Empire. Despite the Manticoran merchant marine's deep penetration of the League's carrying trade, the Solarian Navy had been assigned a far lower priority than more local—and pressing—threats over the past half-century or so. And the fact that the SLN was so damned big didn't help. The same absolute number of officers represented a far smaller percentage of the total Solly officer corps, all of which helped to explain why it was actually unusual to find any given Solarian officer in the database.

Unless he's pretty high up the food chain, or has come to their attention before. Guess.

"I think so, at any rate," Lecter replied. "It's always possible they have more than one Admiral Josef Byng, I suppose."

"Given the size of their damned navy?" Michelle snorted. "I'd say the odds were pretty good, actually."

Point. As was pointed out before the entire officer corps of the assembled fleets of the Haven Sector are dwarfed by the SLN.

In many ways, Josef Byng was a typical product of the SLN, according to the ONI file. He came from a family which had been providing senior officers to the League Navy for the better part of seven hundred T-years; he'd graduated from the naval academy on Old Terra; and he'd gone directly into Battle Fleet, which was far more prestigious than Frontier Fleet. He was a second-generation prolong recipient who was just over a T-century old, and he'd been an admiral for the last thirty-two T-years. Unlike the Royal Manticoran Navy, the SLN had not developed the habit of routinely rotating senior officers in and out of fleet command to keep them current both operationally and administratively, and it looked as if Byng (or his family) had possessed sufficient pull to keep him in what were at least technically space-going commands for virtually his entire flag career.

That didn't mean as much in Battle Fleet as it might have in other navies, given the huge percentage of Battle Fleet's wall which spent virtually all of its time in what the SLN euphemistically referred to as "Ready Reserve Status." It was quite possible for an admiral to spend several T-years in command of a squadron of superdreadnoughts, accruing the seniority—and drawing the pay—which went with that assignment, while the superdreadnoughts in question simply went right on floating around in their mothballed parking orbits without a single soul on board.

So they have commanders drawing active-duty pay for 'conning' mothballed ships. Also, it seems patronage and family connections mostly decide assignments in the SLN.

What was much more interesting to Michelle at the moment, however, was the fact that fifty-nine T-years ago, a young, up-and-coming Captain Josef Byng had been officially reprimanded—and moved back two hundred names on the seniority list—for harassing Manticoran shipping interests.

200 names? Ouch.

Captain Byng had clearly been one of those Solly officers who regarded neobarbs—like Manticorans—as two or three steps below chimpanzees on the evolutionary tree. It also appeared that his wealthy and aristocratic family (although, of course, Old Terra didn't have an aristocracy . . . officially) was deeply involved in interstellar commerce.

It was common enough in Manticore for families involved in the Star Kingdom's vast shipping industry to provide officers for the Navy, as well, and Michelle was perfectly well aware that more than one of those officers had used and abused her authority in her family's interest. When the RMN became aware of those instances of abuse, however, it usually took action. On those rare occasions—which no longer occurred with anything like the frequency they once had—when the officer involved had proved too well connected for the JAG to deal with the situation, she'd normally been eased out of any command which might give her the opportunity to repeat the offense.

That, unfortunately, was not the case in the Solarian League, where cronyism and the abuse of power were both common and accepted. Especially in the Shell and the Verge, officers with "comfortable" relationships with the local OFS structure routinely used their positions to feather their own nests or promote their own interests. Captain Byng had obviously seen no reason why he shouldn't do the same thing, but his harassment had been far more blatant than most. He'd gone so far as to impound three Manticoran freighters on trumped up smuggling charges, and the crew of one of them had spent almost two T-years in prison without ever even being given the opportunity to face a judge.

Abuse of power. Apparently the Manties sent their trade and legal folks to talk to Byng first, and after he chased them off they came back with recorders and the Manty ambassador gave the tape to his superiors, and suggested the possibility of punitive Junction fees if their people can just be seized like that. Ultimately, the merchantmen were released, the League paid out damages, Byng had to submit a written apology for exceeding his authority and got bumped down in seniority.

It would appear from his subsequent record that he held everyone but himself responsible for that outcome, however. It had undoubtedly delayed his promotion to flag rank by several T-years, and it seemed evident that he blamed Manticore for his misfortunes.

On the one hand, yes it did delay his flag rank. On the other, it was a slap on the wrist for blatant abuse of his position and what do a few years matter to a man whose passed his hundredth birthday without getting grey hairs?

Battle Fleet and Frontier Fleet were not fond of one another. Battle Fleet, despite the fact that none of its capital ships had fired a shot in anger in over two T-centuries, received the lion's share of the SLN's funding and was by far the more prestigious of the two organizations. Its officer corps was populated almost exclusively with officers whose family backgrounds were similar to Byng's, making it virtually a closed caste. Whereas the RMN had a surprisingly high percentage of "mustangs"—officers who had risen from the enlisted ranks to obtain commissions—there were none at all of them in Battle Fleet. That helped contribute to an incredible (by Manticoran standards) narrowness of focus and interest on the part of the vast majority of Battle Fleet officers. Who not only tended to look down particularly long and snobbish noses at all non-Solarian navies—and even the planetary defense forces of major Solarian planets—but even looked down upon their Frontier Fleet counterparts as little more than jumped up policeman, customs agents and neobarb-bashers who obviously hadn't been able to make the cut for service in a real navy.

Frontier Fleet, for its part, regarded Battle Fleet officers as overbred, under-brained drones whose obsolescent capital ships—as outmoded and useless as they were themselves—soaked up enormous amounts of funding Frontier Fleet desperately needed. Personally, Michelle would have been even more incensed by the fact that so much of the funding officially spent on those same capital ships actually disappeared into the pockets of various Battle Fleet officers and their friends and families, but she supposed it would have been unrealistic to expect Frontier Fleet to feel the same way. After all, graft and "family interest" were as deeply ingrained a part of Frontier Fleet's institutional culture as they were for Battle Fleet. And to be fair, Frontier Fleet was also dominated by its hereditary officer caste, which resented the hell out of the juicier opportunities for peculation which came the way of its Battle Fleet counterpart. Still, its commissioned ranks contained a significantly higher percentage of "outsiders," and even a relatively tiny handful of mustangs of its own.

Bearing all of that in mind, no Battle Fleet admiral would have been happy to find herself assigned to command a mere Frontier Fleet task force. And no Frontier Fleet task force would have been happy to find her assigned to command it, either. Under any circumstances Michelle could think of, a Battle Fleet officer of Byng's seniority would have to regard a command like this as a demotion, probably even a professional insult, and he damned well ought to have had the family connections to avoid it.

If, of course, he'd wanted to avoid it.

More on the Battle Fleet/Frontier Fleet conflict. Which why it's such a joy to have a Battle Fleet Admiral commanding a Frontier task force. Because the most obvious explanation is that he volunteered to put the Manty neobarbs in their place.

[Simon_Jester]

It seems the greek letter designators aren't origin of the germ line or specialization, but desirability. Also says a lot about Mesas' priorities that they consider sociopathy a minor problem.

At least, in the context of certain roles. In other roles they consider the ability to keep up a normal family life to be quite important.

I think what it comes down to is that they're trying to specialize humanity... which means that a trait that would be highly undesirable in general (but not actually an impairment of fitness for that purpose) is totally acceptable... for a certain purpose.

Medusa and her staff discussing Lovat, having never heard of Apollo before. The constant touching base is nice in one way, it lets us clearly place events in relation to each other. But by this point I'm getting pretty tired of how much of each book is dedicated to people reacting to or discussing the events of other books.

[shrugs]

Get used to it. It's not SO bad in the most recent books, Shadow of Freedom and Cauldron of Ghosts, but it's still an issue.

It's true, even right now diligent Solly officers are putting together the pieces from the Battle of Monica, only to be dismissed. If 10 ships, only 3 of them heavy cruisers could defeat 7 Solly BCs, then it's because those ships were flown by third-rate neobarb amateurs. To say nothing of the ridiculous stories of that same force weathering an enormous missile salvo and surviving as a fighting force.

To be fair, the Monicans were probably third-rate, and there were three of the Inflexibles.

The League officials may be imagining a scenario sort of like the one where Thunder of God went up against Fearless with almost totally untrained, uneducated yokels operating key systems and a hamhanded captain who made multiple potentially fatal mistakes, including the final one that was fatal.

Especially if panicking Monicans say "HOLY SHIT THE MANTIES DROPPED TEN CRUISERS ON US!"

A similar screwup would explain the failure of that missile spam to meaningfully affect the Manticoran fleet- panicked and fired too soon without bothering to identify which blips on the radar were RMN ships and which were targets.

Or the outlandish tales from the observers sent to witness the Haven Wars.

And you know what, even after the third and fourth times the SLN get seriously spanked they will still refuse point-blank to believe they're out-teched or outmatched.

Eh, debateable. We still haven't really seen the Solarian reaction to Second Manticore as far as I can recall.

The Sollies aren't completely where Manticore was 20 years ago, they've got bigger missiles, more drive endurance and likely better ECM. Pretty sure the pods are still just Technodyne though.

True, although after Monica, the other League multistellars are probably methodically buying up the defunct Technodyne assets and production capability.

Restrictions on showing off. Amusingly, Byng later disregards reports of Manty acceleration rates, and thus any sort of technical advance, specifically because of this.

Well, this kind of shit can actually work in real life- concealing a capability in peacetime so you get to pull off a "Holy cow what was that!?" moment in wartime. Manticore has considerable experience doing it.

So they have commanders drawing active-duty pay for 'conning' mothballed ships. Also, it seems patronage and family connections mostly decide assignments in the SLN.

To be fair, the League is rich and it is worthwhile to ensure that their officers are adequately paid to keep up readiness, rather than having to screw around and take on part-time jobs or whatever. Suppose the League ever does need those mothballed ships. Say, to battle the ravening hordes from Andromeda, or a sudden invasion fleet from Legend of Galactic Heroes or whatever. You really want to minimize the time needed to break them out of storage, which means having solidly trained, dedicated officers in a position to take command of the ships and begin working up the crews promptly.

And paying the officers of a ship while it's in reserve is a pittance compared to paying the thousands of crewmen and ongoing maintenance effort needed to keep the ship running for all that time.

So I can see how Battle Fleet justifies this to itself.

Also, frankly, the whole 'their officers are aristos' thing rings a little false coming from Manticore, where many of the senior officers are second, third, or fourth generation officers. And where it'd probably be even more exaggerated except that Manticore's navy was freaking tiny a century ago, while the SLN is about the same size now as it was then.

200 names? Ouch.

Though given the size of the League Navy, as we've noted... that isn't necessarily more than a year or two on their Captain's List.

On the one hand, yes it did delay his flag rank. On the other, it was a slap on the wrist for blatant abuse of his position and what do a few years matter to a man whose passed his hundredth birthday without getting grey hairs?

Just how many opportunities is that to walk past an admiral in a corridor and grit your teeth because fuck it YOU should have his rank, not be his junior because some clowns from Space Dubai got your promotion delayed? How many chances to meet a friend you went to school with who's been promoted over your head because they gained seniority over you because of the fiasco?

The effect of five years of humiliation on the human psyche isn't going to change much just because people live longer.

[SpottedKitty]

And you know what, even after the third and fourth times the SLN get seriously spanked they will still refuse point-blank to believe they're out-teched or outmatched.

Eh, debateable. We still haven't really seen the Solarian reaction to Second Manticore as far as I can recall.

We've seen hints of it, though, in that briefing in the aftermath of the Mandarins' not-so-tame-after-all Admiral getting that phone call. Although remember who was involved in that briefing...

(Events right at the end of A Rising Thunder, I haven't read the two that come after it yet.)

[VhenRa]

Calderon of Ghosts and Shadow of Freedom don't really touch upon the main plot around Manticore/Beowulf/Sol. Calderon of Ghosts slightly touches on Beowulf... only in that they are aiding the covert mission to Mesa and Shadow of Freedom is out in Talbott. Oh and it also touches on how Erewhon and Maya Sector seem to be working really close together.

[Ahriman238]

And now a while of checking in with the bag guys.

He didn't quite curl his lip as he considered the flag bridge's old-fashioned instrumentation and cramped size. He understood that Frontier Fleet had a lower priority for the Fleet 2000 upgrades, after all, so he'd also known from the beginning that it was unrealistic to expect better, but he didn't exactly attempt to conceal his feelings, either. There was no need, since all of his staff officers had come over with him from Battle Fleet.

The Fleet 2000 upgrade redid the bridges to be spacious, shiny, futuristic and JJ Abrams-y. And did little else.

His eyes moved to the scarlet icons of the Manticoran ships, and this time his lip did curl ever so slightly as he considered CIC's data bars. Of course, it was a Frontier Fleet combat information center with a Frontier Fleet tactical crew, so one had to take its analyses with a grain of salt. Still, at this piddling little range, it was unlikely that even Frontier Fleet could get its sums wrong. Which meant the "battlecruisers" on his plot really did mass well over two million tons apiece.

Just like them and their so-called "navy," he thought contemptuously. No wonder the doomsayers have been whining and moaning about how "dangerous" Manty warships are all of a sudden. Hell, if we built "battlecruisers" twice the size of anyone else's, we could probably stick a lot of firepower into them, too! Sure, I'll bet they can take a lot of damage, too, but ONI's right. The real reason they're building them that damned big is the fact that they realize they couldn't go toe-to-toe with a real first-line navy without the tonnage advantage. And the biggest frigging "battlecruisers" in the galaxy won't help them if they ever come face to face with Battle Fleet!

What Byng, and I suspect a number of SLN officers, think of the tonnage creep.

Before deploying to command Task Group 3021, Byng had dutifully read through all of the intelligence appreciations. Not surprisingly, those from Frontier Fleet's analysts had been much more alarmist than anyone else's. Frontier Fleet had always had a tendency to jump at shadows, in large part because viewing with alarm was one way to try to twist the accountants' arms into diverting additional funding to it. Then too, one had to consider the quality of the officers making those reports.

That's.... actually a fair point. Frontier Fleet probably owes a lot of their money to their ability to play up external threats and crises they simply must get involved in.

Still, even Frontier Fleet's reports had sounded almost rational and reasonable compared to the ludicrous claims being made by some of the system-defense forces. God only knew why any of them had bothered to send observers to watch two batches of neobarbs five hundred light-years from nowhere in particular butchering each other with muzzle-loading cannon and cutlasses in the first place. Perhaps that was part of the explanation for the wild exaggerations some of those observers had included in their reports? Not even an SDF admiral was going to send a competent officer that far out to the back of beyond. No, he was going to send someone whose services could be easily dispensed with . . . and who wouldn't be missed for the weeks or months he'd spend in transit.

It takes impressive willful ignorance to have read the reports from Solly observers of the Haven Wars and completely dismiss them.

Oh, there was no doubt the Manties and their Havenite dance partners had managed to fall into at least some innovations as they stumbled about the dance floor with one another. For example, they obviously had improved their compensator performance to at least some extent, although clearly not to the level some of those "observers" were claiming. And even though it irritated him to admit it, fair was fair; that improvement in their compensators had sparked Solarian R&D efforts in the same direction. Given the difference between the basic capabilities of their respective scientific communities, however, there was no doubt that the Manties' advantage—never as great as those exaggerated reports had asserted—had already been pared away. He only had to look at the acceleration rate of those outsized "battlecruisers" to know that!

Apparently they have been working on compensators, albeit probably by refining their existing hardware rather than going with a radically new design like Grayson. To the point where they can match (or Byng assumes they can, probably not the same) 70% of a Manty ships' accel.

"I'm Admiral Josef Byng, Solarian League Navy," the white-uniformed man on her display said. "To whom do I have the pleasure of speaking?"

Michelle managed to keep her jaw from tightening. She'd never thought much of SLN officers' efficiency, but she rather suspected that Byng's subordinates had at least bothered to inform him of the identity of his caller. And she'd asked for him by name and rank, which made his self-introduction a deliberate and patronizing insult.

Well at least Henke is far more diplomatic and restrained than Honor used to be so surely this won't throw her off her stride or lure her into exchanging barbs.

"Vice Admiral Gold Peak," she replied. "Royal Manticoran Navy," she added helpfully, just in case he hadn't recognized the uniform, and had the satisfaction of seeing his lips tighten ever so slightly.

"What can I do for you today . . . Admiral Gold Peak?" he inquired after a moment.

"I only screened to extend my respects. It's not often we see a full Frontier Fleet admiral this far out in the sticks."

From the look in Byng's eyes, he appreciated being called a Frontier Fleet officer even less than Michelle had expected him to. That was nice.

"I'm sure all of us regret what happened after Captain Terekhov attempted to ascertain exactly what President Tyler's intentions were. According to our own investigations, those battlecruisers provided to him for his projected attack on the Lynx Terminus were supplied by Technodyne. Have your people been able to turn up anything more about that, Admiral?"

"No." Byng showed his teeth in something a professional diplomat might have described as a smile. "No, we haven't. In fact, according to the briefings I received when I was dispatched, we still haven't managed to confirm where they came from."

"Aside from the fact that they obviously came from the SLN. Originally, I mean." Michelle smiled, adding the carefully timed qualifier as Byng appeared to swell visibly. "Obviously, once ships are listed for disposal and handed over to private hands for scrapping, the Navy's responsibility for them is pretty much at an end. And the paper trail can easily become . . . obscured, as we all know. Especially if some criminal—and civilian, of course—type is doing his best to make it obscure."

"No doubt. My own experience in those areas is somewhat limited, however. I'm sure our own investigation will be looking very carefully at the recordkeeping of our various suppliers. No doubt Technodyne will be included in that process."

Oh yeah, this is going well.

"I'm sure it will be," she said instead. "In the meantime, however, may I assume you're also here in something of the role of observer of the Talbott Quadrant's integration into the Star Empire?"

"Star Empire?" Byng repeated, raising his eyebrows in polite surprise. "Is that what you've decided to call it?" He gave her a small, almost apologetic wave of his hand. "I'm afraid I hadn't heard that before I was deployed."

His tone made his own opinion of the delusions of grandeur involved in calling something the size of Manticore's new star nation an "empire," and Michelle smiled sweetly at him.

"Well, we had to call it something, Admiral. And given the political arrangements the Talbotters came up with at their constitutional convention, the term sounded logical. Of course, it's early days yet, isn't it?"

"Yes, it is." Byng smiled back at her, but his smile was considerably colder than hers had been. "I'm sure it's going to be interesting to see how . . . successfully your experiment works out."

"So far, it seems to be going quite well," Michelle said.

"So far," he agreed, with another of those smiles. "In answer to your question, however, yes. I have been instructed to observe events out here in the Talbott area. I'm sure you're aware the public back home was deeply interested in events out here. Especially after that unfortunate business on Kornati began to make it into the newsfaxes." He shook his head sadly. "Personally, I'm confident the entire affair was grossly exaggerated—newsies do need to sell subscriptions, after all. Still, the Foreign Ministry does feel a certain responsibility to get a firsthand impression of events there, as well as throughout the Cluster. I'm sure you can understand why that would be the case."

"Oh, believe me," Michelle assured him with deadly affability, "I can understand exactly why that would be the case, Admiral Byng. And, speaking for Her Majesty and Her Majesty's government, I'm sure all of the Star Empire's new member systems will be prepared to extend every possible courtesy to you."

So Byng is partly here, officially anyway, to observe the annexation. And Henke has offered him the hospitality of any Talbott world.

"And, while you're here, Admiral, if there's any way Her Majesty's Navy can assist you—for example, if you would care to set up joint anti-piracy or anti-slavery patrols—I'm sure Admiral Khumalo would be as delighted as I would to coordinate our operations with you."

"That's very kind of you." Byng smiled again. "Of course, unlike your new Star Empire, the League has no direct territorial interests in this region. Aside from the security of our own allies in the area, that is. And, of course, the security—and territorial integrity—of those star systems which have been taken under the protection of the Office of Frontier Security. I believe we can see to those obligations out of our own resources. At least, it's difficult for me to conceive of a threat to those interests which we couldn't deal with out of our own resources."

"No doubt." Michelle smiled back at him.

Eh, he doesn't take the olive branch, but I get the feeling it was largely a pro forma offering anyway.

"Well, in that case, Admiral Byng, I won't keep you any longer. We won't be in Monica for very long. This was just in the nature of making certain our new allies here were secure, so I imagine we'll be on our way to Tillerman shortly. I need to pay a courtesy call on President Tyler first, however. Governor General Medusa has instructed me to inform him that the Star Empire is prepared to extend government-guaranteed loans to any of its citizens who might be interested in investing here." Her smile turned sweeter. "I believe Baroness Medusa—and Her Majesty—believe it's the least we can do to help Monica recover from the consequences of that unfortunate event."

"That's remarkably generous of your Star Empire," Byng said.

"As I said, I'm sure everyone regrets what happened here, Admiral Byng. And Manticore's experience has been that extending a helping hand to ex-enemies and treating them as equals is one of the better ways to see to it that there's no repetition of all that unpleasantness."

Manticore's 'in victory, magnamity' policy includes a generous shot in the arm to the Monican economy. Makes me even more curious how the Masadan occupation is going.

"Take a seat, Matt," Commander Ursula Zeiss invited, pointing at one of the chairs in front of her desk as Lieutenant Maitland Askew stepped through her shipboard office door.

The tactical officer and ATO for Byng's flagship, SLNS Jean Bart. Here to talk about the threat assessment Askew put together on Manticore and how furious Byng's chief of staff was after stealing and reading it, and where Askew's career goes from here.

There was remarkably little love lost between Battle Fleet and Frontier Fleet at the best of times, and Askew wasn't immune to that institutional lack of mutual admiration. All the same, Admiral Byng and his staff seemed to have taken the traditional rivalry between the two services to an all-time high. There'd been virtually no social interaction between them and Captain Mizawa's officers, despite the lengthy voyage involved in just getting to the Madras Sector. Obviously, they'd had better things to do with their time. And they'd made it abundantly—one might almost have said painfully—clear that the sole function of the none-too-bright ship's company of SLNS Jean Bart was to chauffeur them around the galaxy while they got on with the business of sorting out everything Frontier Security and the local Frontier Fleet detachment had managed to screw up beyond all repair here in the Madras Sector. Probably because none of them knew how to seal their flies after taking a leak.

Yeah, service rivalries are all well and good if they don't get out of hand. This is quite a ways past merely "out of hand." At least it seems to be unusually excessive in this case.

"Should I take it that she complained about my conclusions to the Captain, Ma'am?" he asked after a moment.

"She objected to your conclusions, your assumptions, your estimates, and your sources," Zeiss said almost dispassionately. "She characterized you as alarmist, credulous, ignorant, incompetent, and 'obviously not to be trusted with any significant independent analysis.' That last phrase is a direct quote, by the way. And she informed the Captain that if this represented the caliber of his officers' work and capabilities, the entire task force was obviously in deep and desperate trouble."

"- and so the man returned to the cave, to tell his brothers and sisters of the wonderful world outside. But they would not listen, and scoffed at the idea there could be more to the world than the shadow-plays on the walls. And so they killed the man and returned to their customary entertainments."

Clearly it is not a good idea to speak truth to power in the SLN.

Askew swallowed. Naval service had run in his family for the last eight generations, but all of those generations had been spent in Frontier Fleet. That wouldn't cut a lot of ice with a Battle Fleet captain—or admiral—and he couldn't even begin to call upon the level of patronage and family alliances someone like Aberu could. If Byng or his staff decided an example had to be made of Maitland Askew, the destruction of his own naval career would become a virtual certainty.

More patronage and nepotism, in both Fleets.

Askew hadn't given much thought to the Royal Manticoran Navy himself before Jean Bart had been posted to the Madras Sector in the wake of the attack on the Republic of Monica. He knew the RMN was a lot bigger than most of the neobarb fleets floating around out in the Verge and beyond. It could hardly be otherwise, given the size of the Manticoran merchant marine, the need to protect it, and the fact that Manticore and the People's Republic of Haven had been at war with one another for the last twenty-odd T-years. That much he'd been prepared to admit, in a sort of offhand, casually incurious way, but his own assignments had kept him clear on the other side of the Solarian League's vast volume. He'd had rather more pressing concerns in his own area of operations. So even if he'd been vaguely aware of the Manty navy's sheer size, that awareness hadn't inspired him to think about it with any particular urgency. And if he'd thought about the ridiculous rumors about new "super weapons" coming out of the so-called Havenite Wars at all, it had mostly been to dismiss them as the sort of wildly exaggerated propaganda claims to be expected out of such a backward and distant corner of the explored galaxy. He certainly would have agreed that it was ludicrous to suggest that a single neobarb star system, be it ever so deeply involved in interstellar commerce, could have put together an R&D effort that could manage to outpace that of the Solarian League Navy!

Askew had found it extremely difficult to wrap his mind around the possibility that his initial estimate of the situation might have been seriously defective, but Captain Mizawa had asked him to keep an open mind when he undertook his appreciation of the Manticoran threat's severity. He'd done his dead level best to do exactly that, and the more he'd looked, the more . . . concerned Maitland Askew had become.

The actual hard data available to him was painfully limited. There'd never been much of it to begin with, and he'd decided at the outset that if he was going to come at his task with the "open mind" Captain Mizawa wanted, he'd have to start out by discarding the ONI reports which flatly dismissed the possibility of any threatening Manticoran breakthroughs. That left him gathering data on his own, and since they'd already been in hyper-space, on their way to their new duty station, there'd been precious little of that around until they reached the Meyers System, the Madras Sector's administrative center, and he was able to quietly talk things over with some of the officers of the Frontier Fleet detachment on permanent assignment to Commissioner Verrochio's office.

Commodore Thurgood, the senior officer in Meyers prior to Admiral Byng's arrival, had been more than willing to share all of the information, analysis, and speculation available to him. At first, Askew had been strongly inclined to dismiss Thurgood as an alarmist, but he'd dug into the commodore's documentation, anyway. And, as he'd dug, he'd begun to feel more than a little alarmed himself.

Which mostly means data from Monica, including the size of pod salvo thrown at Terekhov's ships and that the scratch squadron overcame a trio of BCs.

Second, although he wasn't supposed to have been, Thurgood had been briefed on the missile pods Technodyne had made available to Monica. As a consequence, he'd been aware that the missiles in those pods had possessed a substantially higher rate of acceleration and drive endurance—and therefore a substantially greater effective range—than the standard missiles of the Solarian League Navy.

The SLN in general can't match the accel or drive endurance of the missile pods Technodyne gave to Monica.

Fourth, although there was no hard sensor data to explain exactly how they'd done it, it had been made abundantly clear—both during the engagement against Horster's three battlecruisers and afterward—that the Manticorans had managed to emplace what amounted to a system-wide surveillance system without being caught at it. And while Thurgood readily admitted that the supporting evidence and logic were much more speculative, the speed of the Manties' reaction to both Horster's attack and Admiral Bourmont's later maneuvers suggested that they might very well be capable of FTL communication with their recon platforms, after all.

So all of this data is lying around, it's just dismissed because it challenges the idea of Solly supremacy in the sciences?

Askew had been taken aback by Thurgood's attitude. His original response had been strongly skeptical, but rather than simply reject the commodore's concerns, he'd painstakingly retraced Thurgood's logic, searching for the flaws he suspected had to be there. Unfortunately, he hadn't found them. In fact, as he'd dutifully searched for them, he'd come more and more firmly to the belief that Thurgood had a point. In fact, it looked as if he had several points.

And that was what he'd reported to Mizawa, Zeiss, and Commander Bourget, Jean Bart's executive officer. He'd been a bit cautious about the way he'd reported it, of course. He was an SLN officer, after all, well versed in the ways of equivocation and careful word choices, and his own initial reaction to Thurgood had suggested how his superiors would probably respond to any wild-eyed, panicky warnings about Manticoran super weapons. Besides, even though the analysis had been requested only for Captain Mizawa's internal use, there'd always been the possibility that it might—as, indeed, appeared to be the case—have come into someone else's possession. If that happened, some other superior officer might prove rather less understanding than Captain Mizawa if young Lieutenant Askew came across as too alarmist.

The careful word games learned by even very junior officers in the SLN.

"For the moment," Zeiss continued, "he wants you to lie as low as possible. Just go about your duties, and he and I—and the Exec—will keep you as far away from Flag Bridge and the Admiral's staff as we can. Bearing in mind that we don't know exactly how your report came into Captain Aberu's hands, it would probably be a good idea for you to keep your mouth shut about its contents, as well."

Probably a good working plan.

"And may I ask how the Captain reacted to my analysis?"

Zeiss rocked back in her chair, regarding him narrowly for several heartbeats, then shrugged.

"Captain Mizawa—like Commander Bourget and myself—is inclined to take your more alarming hypotheses with a sizable grain of salt. I think the Captain was as impressed as I was by the caliber of your work, but as you yourself point out, the supporting data is really pretty damned thin on the ground, Matt. You and Commodore Thurgood may very well be onto something, but I think we're all inclined to reserve judgment for the moment. I will say that your appreciation of the potential threat is likely to make all three of us approach the situation much more cautiously than we might have otherwise. It's just that until we've acquired some of that missing hard data we can't afford to get overly timid in our relations with the Manties." She gave him another of those hard, level looks, then added, "Or with anyone else."

"Yes, Ma'am. I understand."

Askew didn't try to keep his own worry—and not just for the possible implications for his naval career—out of his own voice, but he understood, all right.

"I thought you would, Matt," Zeiss said quietly. "I thought you would."

Hell of a way to run a railroad. Not that the caution of the Captain, XO and tac officer of the flagship mean much of anything when the Admiral and his staff have their heads so far up their posteriors.

"This is a recorded interview with Captain Tanguy Carmouche, commander of the New Tuscany-registry freighter Antelope, concerning certain events which occurred in the San Miguel System. I am Anne-Louise Brulé, conducting this interview for the Foreign Ministry, the Ministry of Trade, and the Treasury. This record is being made on July 7, 1921 Post Diaspora, on the planet of New Tuscany."

Grist for the propaganda mill, by the way there is no Antelope and "Carmouche" is a New Tuscan Public Information Ministry of Information actor. They do thoughtfully amend their records to add the good ship Antelope in several decades ago.

"But these people didn't waste any respect on anyone aboard Antelope. They were rude, insulting, and what I have to think was deliberately antagonistic. They didn't make requests; they demanded whatever it was they wanted. They insisted on bringing aboard all kinds of scanners and detection equipmet, too, and they went through every cargo space with a fine tooth comb. Took hours, given the size of our holds, but they insisted. Just like they insisted on checking every bill of lading individually against its cargo container—didn't matter whether or not the container's port-of-origin customs seals were intact, either. They even made us open a whole stack of containers so they could physically eyeball the contents! And they made it pretty clear that if we didn't do exactly what they wanted, they'd refuse us entry for the planet and prohibit any orbital cargo transshipment."

Carmouche leaned forward in his chair, his face and body language both more animated in an evident combination of anger and increasing confidence under Brulé's encouraging, gravely sympathetic expression.

"Well, I managed to put up with their 'customs inspection' without popping a blood vessel or slugging anyone, but it wasn't easy. We got them back off the ship—finally—and we got our clearances from them, but that was when we found out we were going to have to submit to a medical examination before we were allowed to take on or discharge cargo. We weren't discharging cargo, anyway, and they damned well knew it. And I've never been asked for a medical certification to take on cargo! At a port of entry, sure. Anyone wants to keep a close eye on anyone who might be bringing in some kind of contagion. But when there's not going to be any contact between any of my people or the planetary environment—for that matter, not even between any of my people and an orbital warehouse, for God's sake, since the cargo was coming aboard in San Miguel shuttles!—it didn't make any sense at all. For that matter, they'd checked our current medical records as part of their customs inspection!

"I didn't understand it then, but it started making sense later, when I realized it didn't have anything to do with medical precautions. Not really. No matter what we did, there was always another hoop waiting for us to jump through before we were going to be allowed to load our cargo. After the medical examination, they insisted on checking our engineering logs to make sure we weren't going to suffer some sort of catastrophic impeller casualty in heavily traveled volumes of the star system. And after that, they decided they had to inspect our enviro plant's waste recycling and disposal systems, since they didn't want us littering in their precious star system!"

He shook his head angrily.

"The only thing I could come up with, since every one of those 'inspections' of theirs was completely bogus, as far as I could tell, was that it was a systematic effort to make it very clear that Antelope wasn't welcome in San Miguel. The RTU's always been protective of its own interests, but I was under the impression from everything everyone was saying before the Constitutional Convention that the Manties supported free trade. Well, maybe they do, and maybe they don't, but I can tell you this—if they do think free trade is a good idea, they obviously don't think it's a good idea for everyone! And after I figured out what was going on, I asked around. There were a couple of other ships in orbit, but we were the only one from New Tuscany. And by the oddest coincidence, we were also the only one being subjected to all those 'inspections.' Which suggested to me that maybe what this was all about was the fact that we hadn't ratified their 'constitution,' and this was an example of payback. I don't know about that for sure, of course, but as soon as I got back to New Tuscany, I spoke to the Ministry of Trade about it, and I don't mind telling you I was just a bit hot when I did. Apparently, I'm not the only New Tuscan skipper this has happened to, either. Or that was my impression, anyway, when they asked me to make an official statement for the record."

My heart bleeds for your imaginary trials.

Of course, while there'd been no particular effort to hide the fact that Anne-Louise Brulé worked for the Ministry of Information, no one had bothered to mention the fact that 'Captain Carmouche' was actually being portrayed by one Oliver Ratté, who was also employed by the Ministry of Information. Unlike Brulé, whoever, who was a recognizable anchor from the New Tuscan news broadcasts, Ratté was effectively anonymous. Although he'd appeared in innumerable propaganda efforts, he'd never appeared under his own face. Instead, his job had been to provide the body language, voice, and facial expressions the computers transformed into someone else entirely.

It was still the best and simplest way to produce high-quality CGI, especially for someone whose tech base might not have all of the latest bells and whistles. In fact, New Tuscany's computer technology was probably at least a couple of centuries behind that of the Solarian League in general. They'd demonstrated over the years just how much could be accomplished by substituting technique and practice for technology, however, and this time around, Ratté was appearing under his own face. There would be absolutely no computer chicanery with this little masterpiece, and the same held true for all the others the New Tuscans were working up. After all, it would never do for any of the Manties' contacts in the League to demonstrate that sort of fancy tricks by analyzing the recording.

CGI-tricks and how they differ between nations based on technology. Also confirmation this has all been staged, just in case you doubted me.

"He said he was going to formally complain about our 'harassment,' Sir," Monahan repeated now.

-snip-

"About the harassing you obviously hadn't done, Rachel. Is that what he was implying?"

"Yes, Sir."

"Had you done anything that could have gotten him pissed off enough at you to fabricate some sort of complaint in an effort to make trouble for you?"

"Sir, I can't think of a single thing," she said, shaking her head. "I did everything exactly by The Book, the way I've done it every time before. But it was like . . . I don't know, exactly, Sir, but it was like he was waiting for me to do something he could complain about. And if I wasn't going to do it, then he was ready to claim I had, anyway! I've never seen anything like it, Sir."

She was obviously even more confused than she was worried, and Denton made another mental check mark of approval for her end-of-deployment evaluation. Despite her evident concern that he might wonder if she was trying to cover her posterior, she'd reported the entire episode to the XO as soon as she'd come back aboard ship. And the XO had been sufficiently perplexed—and concerned—to pass her report along to Denton before she'd even left his office. Which was the reason Monahan was now sitting in Denton's day cabin repeating her account of the customs inspection.

"So you went aboard, asked for his papers, checked them, and did a quick walk-through, right?"

"Yes, Sir."

"And he was giving you grief from the very beginning?"

"Yes, Sir. From the minute I cleared the personnel tube. It was like he was on some kind of hair trigger, ready to bite my head off over anything, no matter how polite my people and I were. Skipper, I think I could have complimented him on the color of the bulkheads and he would have managed to turn it into some sort of mortal insult!"

And real customs inspections, carefully filmed where the crews try and provoke the inspectors. Naturally the provocations will later be edited out.

"It was more like he was talking about me than to me," she said, sounding as if she were picking her words carefully, trying to find the ones to explain whatever it was she was groping towards. "Like . . . like somebody in one of the Academy's training holos, almost."

"Like he knew it was being recorded," Denton said slowly. "Is that what it felt like?"

"Maybe, Sir." Monahan looked more worried than ever. "And it wasn't just me he was complaining about, either."

"Meaning?" Denton tried to keep any note of tension out of his voice, but it was hard, given the mental alarm bells trying to ring somewhere deep down inside him.

"Meaning that he didn't say just 'you' when he was complaining about what a hard time I'd been giving him. He said that, but he also said things like 'you people,' too. Like there were dozens of me, all trying to give him and his friends trouble."

Playing to the cameras too much gives away at least some of the game.

"Agreed. I don't want to make a big thing out of this and worry her any more than she already is, especially not before she gets her formal report together for me. But, that said, I want you to have a word with the rest of her boarding party, especially Chief Fitzhugh. And have a quiet word with any of the other JOs who've been running the customs inspections. See if any of them may have heard some of the same kind of remarks and just not been as willing as Rachel to bring them to our attention. And if they have heard anything like that, I want details of time, place, and content."

"Yes, Sir."

Koslov sounded rather grimmer than he had a moment ago, Denton noticed.

"One other thing," the CO continued. "I want every party that goes aboard anybody's merchant shipping wired for sound and vision. I don't especially want you to mention it to anyone aboard ship, either, because I don't want anyone obviously playing to the camera from our side. So find someplace to put a parasite cam. I don't want to give away any image quality unless we have to, but I'm less worried about picture than I am about sound."

I rather like Lt. Comander Denton. He responds well to a potential crisis and like his junior officer passes this up the chain of command with hardly any fear they'll think he's trying to cover himself against some screw-up he or one of his officers made.

[Simon_Jester]

The Fleet 2000 upgrade redid the bridges to be spacious, shiny, futuristic and JJ Abrams-y. And did little else.

Although if the Baen cover art is to be believed, the 'holographic everything' atmosphere of J. J. Abrams has been a feature of Honorverse command bridges for years. Honestly, I like the old '90s illustrations better, with maybe an exception for Flag in Exile.

That said, you're right about the decorations. At the same time, though, Fleet 2000 also includes meaningful upgrades to the ships' electronic warfare capability, missile defense, and (allegedly) electronics upgradeability.

In the context of the pre-1912 threat environment, Fleet 2000 actually makes Solarian warships significantly more dangerous. Which would matter more if it were feasible to retrofit pre-MDM ships to fire MDMs, which it prrrobably isn't. Hmph.

What Byng, and I suspect a number of SLN officers, think of the tonnage creep.

Hard to blame them, seeing as how they're not actually wrong. League ships are presumably designed the way they are to allow easy massive production using yard infrastructure that's been in place for a long time. As a result they are, yes, smaller than the ships of someone who's been custom-building a whole new shipyard every ten years for the last half century specifically to build bigger, nastier ships.

And a significant fraction of the increase in killing power for the new ships comes from sheer size- we saw this in the Mars class, which was about twice as dangerous as a prewar Havenite heavy cruiser in large part because it was literally twice as big.

Of course, the advances in missile defense, drones, and multiple drive missile combat range have acted as huge force multipliers. But on a fundamental level there's still a strong relationship between mass and ship power, and Manticore's been milking that for all it's worth.

That's.... actually a fair point. Frontier Fleet probably owes a lot of their money to their ability to play up external threats and crises they simply must get involved in.

On the other hand, there are external threats for Frontier Fleet to deal with, people who would otherwise raid Solarian shipping and fringe worlds, and whose warships could actually hope to kill a Frontier Fleet battlecruiser or cruiser.

It takes impressive willful ignorance to have read the reports from Solly observers of the Haven Wars and completely dismiss them.

Although:

1) Byng has every reason to think that it is physically impossible for the Manticorans to do what the observers claim they are doing. It's like if a military observer reported that a bunch of foreigners have learned to fly by flapping their arms. You don't go out to design a strategy to combat the flying-man threat. You ask if he's been smoking funny cigarettes.

2) The real stupidity here is that despite Manticore being one Junction transit away from the League's core territory, and despite control of the Junction being a major strategic asset that would have huge consequences for the League's economy, the League's core government and political structure seem to have basically decided to not give a shit about the war. This is sort of like having the US decide to totally ignore a war between Colombia and Panama over control of the Panama Canal.

3) The image of Haven and Manticore fighting with "muzzle-loading cannon and cutlasses" is hilarious.

Apparently they have been working on compensators, albeit probably by refining their existing hardware rather than going with a radically new design like Grayson. To the point where they can match (or Byng assumes they can, probably not the same) 70% of a Manty ships' accel.

Also, Byng may be dismissing reports by assuming that a Manticoran ship in those reports may be redlining its compensator when in fact it's running at 80% of capacity.

Which, as I pointed out during your interview with Byng's intelligence officer, McMuttonchops ( ), is actually a much more reasonable conclusion than:

"A bunch of literal neobarbarians, whose leaders actually have legal duels with swords and spears and whatnot... AND who had to reinvent the inertial compensator, IN A CAVE, WITH A BOX OF SCRAPS, while suffering from heavy metal poisoning, have somehow figured out a wonderful genius way to redesign compensators nobody else thought of before."

"I only screened to extend my respects. It's not often we see a full Frontier Fleet admiral this far out in the sticks."

From the look in Byng's eyes, he appreciated being called a Frontier Fleet officer even less than Michelle had expected him to. That was nice.

Well, yes, that was a barb. Although to be fair it's a barb she can deliver without any sign of actually wanting to piss Byng off. Byng just showed total ignorance of Gold Peak's identity, so it stands to reason that Gold Peak would be as ignorant of Byng's.

Second, although he wasn't supposed to have been, Thurgood had been briefed on the missile pods Technodyne had made available to Monica. As a consequence, he'd been aware that the missiles in those pods had possessed a substantially higher rate of acceleration and drive endurance—and therefore a substantially greater effective range—than the standard missiles of the Solarian League Navy.

The SLN in general can't match the accel or drive endurance of the missile pods Technodyne gave to Monica.

Well, the SLN is still buying missiles of designs and under contracts that were finalized ten, twenty, or thirty years ago. In many cases, said missiles may actually be drawn from stockpiles older than some of the people firing them. The Technodyne missiles given to Monica were literally the latest thing off the assembly line.

So all of this data is lying around, it's just dismissed because it challenges the idea of Solly supremacy in the sciences?

I think the real problem is, at this point, one of scale. The people who've actually seen the new hardware in action are few in number and low in rank. And the League does NOT have a healthy, functional system for allowing new information to flow up the chain of command from junior officers to seniors.

[Ahriman238]

Medusa and her staff discussing Lovat, having never heard of Apollo before. The constant touching base is nice in one way, it lets us clearly place events in relation to each other. But by this point I'm getting pretty tired of how much of each book is dedicated to people reacting to or discussing the events of other books.

[shrugs]

Get used to it. It's not SO bad in the most recent books, Shadow of Freedom and Cauldron of Ghosts, but it's still an issue.

In all honesty, I think I'm going to skip including these from here on out unless their reaction scenes either a.) reveal something about the characters or b.) meaningfully advance the plot of the book they're in.

The Sollies aren't completely where Manticore was 20 years ago, they've got bigger missiles, more drive endurance and likely better ECM. Pretty sure the pods are still just Technodyne though.

True, although after Monica, the other League multistellars are probably methodically buying up the defunct Technodyne assets and production capability.

The impression I got from the end of SoS was that Technodyne is one of those League transtellar corporations that's "too big to fail."

So they have commanders drawing active-duty pay for 'conning' mothballed ships. Also, it seems patronage and family connections mostly decide assignments in the SLN.

To be fair, the League is rich and it is worthwhile to ensure that their officers are adequately paid to keep up readiness, rather than having to screw around and take on part-time jobs or whatever. Suppose the League ever does need those mothballed ships. Say, to battle the ravening hordes from Andromeda, or a sudden invasion fleet from Legend of Galactic Heroes or whatever. You really want to minimize the time needed to break them out of storage, which means having solidly trained, dedicated officers in a position to take command of the ships and begin working up the crews promptly.

And paying the officers of a ship while it's in reserve is a pittance compared to paying the thousands of crewmen and ongoing maintenance effort needed to keep the ship running for all that time.

So I can see how Battle Fleet justifies this to itself.

That's fair.

Also, frankly, the whole 'their officers are aristos' thing rings a little false coming from Manticore, where many of the senior officers are second, third, or fourth generation officers. And where it'd probably be even more exaggerated except that Manticore's navy was freaking tiny a century ago, while the SLN is about the same size now as it was then.

True, but the Manties for all they have an actual aristocracy have strong meritocratic elements too. They do admit new members to their aristocracy, there are plenty of first generation officers, and the highest proportion of any navy in the series of officers who started out as enlisted, something they take pains to explain never happens in the SLN.

The Fleet 2000 upgrade redid the bridges to be spacious, shiny, futuristic and JJ Abrams-y. And did little else.

Although if the Baen cover art is to be believed, the 'holographic everything' atmosphere of J. J. Abrams has been a feature of Honorverse command bridges for years. Honestly, I like the old '90s illustrations better, with maybe an exception for Flag in Exile.

That said, you're right about the decorations. At the same time, though, Fleet 2000 also includes meaningful upgrades to the ships' electronic warfare capability, missile defense, and (allegedly) electronics upgradeability.

I recall it as being largely aesthetic with a few tweaks here and there, like actually adding space for future upgrades like Manticore has been doing for decades.

In the context of the pre-1912 threat environment, Fleet 2000 actually makes Solarian warships significantly more dangerous. Which would matter more if it were feasible to retrofit pre-MDM ships to fire MDMs, which it prrrobably isn't. Hmph.

? The Manties retrofit SDs to fire internal MDMs, and we discussed the debatable worth of that.I don't know if they ever applied that to smaller ships, likely because it simple wasn't worth the time and expense vs. building new ships but possibly because they couldn't retrofit ships that didn't have the sheer space of a superdreadnought.

What Byng, and I suspect a number of SLN officers, think of the tonnage creep.

Hard to blame them, seeing as how they're not actually wrong. League ships are presumably designed the way they are to allow easy massive production using yard infrastructure that's been in place for a long time. As a result they are, yes, smaller than the ships of someone who's been custom-building a whole new shipyard every ten years for the last half century specifically to build bigger, nastier ships.

And a significant fraction of the increase in killing power for the new ships comes from sheer size- we saw this in the Mars class, which was about twice as dangerous as a prewar Havenite heavy cruiser in large part because it was literally twice as big.

Of course, the advances in missile defense, drones, and multiple drive missile combat range have acted as huge force multipliers. But on a fundamental level there's still a strong relationship between mass and ship power, and Manticore's been milking that for all it's worth.

Of course, a smaller ship wouldn't have space for even dual-drive MDMs. And with automation, a lot more of the ships' tonnage is devoted to EW and weaponry than Byng could ever guess.

It takes impressive willful ignorance to have read the reports from Solly observers of the Haven Wars and completely dismiss them.

Although:

1) Byng has every reason to think that it is physically impossible for the Manticorans to do what the observers claim they are doing. It's like if a military observer reported that a bunch of foreigners have learned to fly by flapping their arms. You don't go out to design a strategy to combat the flying-man threat. You ask if he's been smoking funny cigarettes.

Less like people flying by flapping arms and more in the 'this shouldn't be possible without major engineering advances.' Say our observer reports that a wealthy foreign nation has developed hypersonic jet fighters, railgun-armed tanks and a workable anti-ballistic missile defense. In which case I wouldn't believe said observer uncritically, but neither would I dismiss his report out of hand. If I have any reason to question the observer's competence I said someone I trust.

2) The real stupidity here is that despite Manticore being one Junction transit away from the League's core territory, and despite control of the Junction being a major strategic asset that would have huge consequences for the League's economy, the League's core government and political structure seem to have basically decided to not give a shit about the war. This is sort of like having the US decide to totally ignore a war between Colombia and Panama over control of the Panama Canal.

It really is, particularly where the general staff on Earth could send one of their own aides as an observer and have them back within a month.

3) The image of Haven and Manticore fighting with "muzzle-loading cannon and cutlasses" is hilarious.

Agreed.

So all of this data is lying around, it's just dismissed because it challenges the idea of Solly supremacy in the sciences?

I think the real problem is, at this point, one of scale. The people who've actually seen the new hardware in action are few in number and low in rank. And the League does NOT have a healthy, functional system for allowing new information to flow up the chain of command from junior officers to seniors.

Yes, even very junior officers apparently have to be extremely politic, and aware of the business and family connections of every officer senior to them. Which is virtually every officer.

[Ahriman238]

"Not much of a picket, is it?" Michelle Henke commented quietly to Cynthia Lecter, twelve days after her conversation with Josef Byng, as HMS Artemis and the other three ships of the first division of Battlecruiser Squadron 106 decelerated towards a leisurely rendezvous with the ships Augustus Khumalo had detached to keep an eye on the Tillerman System when he returned to Spindle from Monica.

9 days from Monica to Tillerman, as they spent three days there.

On the other hand, even a pair of Nikes might find themselves hard-pressed against all of Byng's battlecruisers at once. Despite the advantages in range and hitting power the Mark 16 and Mark 23 provided for the RMN, enough effective missile defense could go a long way towards blunting that advantage, and no one had any way to assess just how effective SLN missile-defense doctrine might actually be. Michelle strongly doubted that it would be enough to tip the odds in the Sollies' favor, but she couldn't be positive of that before the fact. Worse, even if it turned out after the fact that two Nikes were, indeed, a match for everything Byng had, Byng wouldn't know that ahead of time, either. For that matter, he'd never admit it—probably even to himself—no matter how much evidence anyone presented to him before the shooting started. Michelle had seen enough Manticoran officers who were capable of that sort of self-delusion when it suited their prejudices. Someone like Byng would be able to pull that off effortlessly.

And if he doesn't recognize—or admit—the threat even exists, then the "threat" won't deter him for a moment, will it? she thought bitingly. Aside, of course, from the possibility that taking out our "outnumbered and outgunned" picket would be crossing a line he may have specific orders not to cross.

Yeah. Sure he does. If you're willing to bank on that, girl, don't be accepting any real estate deals that involve bridges or magic beans!

There's no knowing until the shooting starts, but Mike seems to think that two Nikes stand a decent chance against two squadrons of Solly BCs.

It was fascinating to watch Admiral Gold Peak in action, Gervais Archer reflected some time later. Despite her lofty birth, there was an undeniable earthiness about her basic personality, and he'd come to wonder if she might not have developed that trait deliberately. He'd already seen ample evidence of her effortless mastery of the proper rules of etiquette and her ability to project the public persona appropriate to someone who stood only five heartbeats away from the Crown of Manticore. Very few people, watching her operate in that mode, would ever have grounds to suspect how much she clearly loved escaping from it, he thought, but anyone who'd worked with—or for—her for any length of time knew exactly how little she liked playing that particular role. And it wasn't as if she needed to remind anyone in the Navy that the Queen was her cousin. First, because however much she might have wished they didn't, everyone already knew. But second, and more importantly, because she needed no aristocratic airs to underscore her authority. She'd demonstrated her competence too many times, and even if she hadn't, five or ten minutes in her presence would have made that competence painfully clear to anyone, however "casual" or "earthy" she might choose to appear.

Mike Henke in social situations. At least she's a lot better than Honor started out.

"I'll be returning to Spindle by way of Talbott, Scarlet, Marian, Dresden, and Montana—I think this entire area needs a little reassurance, after what happened in Monica and Vice Admiral O'Malley's recall—but Captain Conner is going to be taking over as Tillerman's senior officer. I'm detaching his ship and Captain Ning's Romulus. Unless something changes, I'll be sending up additional destroyers as soon as some of them arrive from Manticore. In the meantime, I'll expect Devastation, Inspired, and Victorious to conduct anti-piracy patrols and generally show the flag in this vicinity while Captain Conner's battlecruisers stay home and mind the store. As soon as we can get some more modern destroyers, and possibly a few heavy cruisers, out here to replace you, I'll withdraw your ships to Spindle for a well deserved rest."

The deployment at Tillerman, for the moment and the plan for the future.

"I'll expect you to make your own local knowledge and advice available to Captain Conner. It's clear to me from your reports that you haven't let any grass grow under your feet, Commander. The time you've spent making contacts with the local system government, emplacing the system surveillance platforms, and deploying missile pods for defensive use has been very well-used—a point I intend to make in my own report when I unreservedly endorse your actions and conduct here in Tillerman. You've done a great deal to make Captain Conner's job easier, and I'm confident that you'll be equally helpful during his settling-in period."

Placing system-defense pods and a decent detection net, a process I assume is ongoing throughout Talbott.

"I'm fully aware that the Admiralty would prefer for us not to advertise all of our capabilities unless we have to. Nonetheless, I'm specifically authorizing you to use any weapon available to you—including the Mark 23s—to their full capabilities in defense of this star system . . . against anyone. If anybody, and I'm specifically including the Solarian League Navy in that 'anybody,' attacks this star system, you are to defend it as if it were the Manticore Home System itself. My formal written orders to you will emphasize those points, and they will further authorize you to use deadly force against anyone—once again, specifically including the Solarian League Navy—who violates the territorial sovereignty of this system."

-snip-

"On the other hand, I also want you to understand this. Defending this star system does not mean throwing away the ships under your command. I expect you to use all of the resources at your disposal, if necessary, to accomplish that mission. If it becomes evident, however, that you aren't going to be able to stop an attack, then I also expect you to pull your ships out. Kick as much hell out of the other side as you can, but get them out intact. Losing them, in addition to losing the system, won't help anyone, no matter how 'gloriously' you all die. Keeping them intact for when we come back to kick the Bad Guys back out of Tillerman on their asses, will. Strive to bear that in mind, please? I had the misfortune to make Elvis Santino's acquaintance too many years ago. The Royal Navy doesn't need another one of him."

And Mike's orders, which I suspect she plans to repeat at every system she hits before Spindle.

"Oh, I'd say that was definitely the case, Madam Governor," Samiha Lababibi replied with a smile. "Joachim is absolutely right about what's going on, except that in this case, I'm fairly sure it's not a 'he' who's doing the pissing and moaning. I've got a pretty good idea exactly who it is, as a matter of fact, and if I'm right, it's a 'she.' It's not really that she got her toes stepped on, either; it's that she was hoping for a little better opportunity to line her own pockets off of the investment credits program." Lababibi shook her head. "I'm afraid a few people are still having a bit of difficulty realizing it isn't going to go on being business as usual. As Joachim says, it's not the last time something like this is going to come up, either. I can think of some people right here in Spindle—and not visitors to my fair home world, either, I'm afraid—who feel exactly the same way and may actually be stupid enough to try to do something similar."

-snip-

"In this case, though," Lababibi continued, blissfully unaware of the governor's thoughts, "I believe I can . . . reason with the culprit. If I point out, speaking as the Quadrant's Treasury Secretary, that the investment credits are being offered solely on a private citizen basis and that both the Alquezar Government and Her Majesty would look with . . . profound displeasure, shall we say, on any effort by local governments to interfere with that, I think she'll get the message."

"Good." Medusa smiled, then sobered slightly. "As I say, this does strike me as an internal matter for the Quadrant, and you're quite right, Samiha. This entire credit program is being offered to private citizens, which means that, aside from the tax credit portion of it, it's not properly a matter for government control or intrusion at all. You might want to deliver your message in a fashion which makes it clear my office and I are being kept in the loop, however. Let me do a little ominous looming in the background, but don't make me any sort of explicit big stick. Let them draw any inferences they want, but not only is it not my place to be interfering in a matter like this unless you or Joachim request it, I want everyone to understand both that I know it isn't and that the Quadrant government is all grown up and able to make its own decisions and do any hammering you people think is required."

People wanting to skim off the investment credits, and still working out the divide between internal Quadrant matters for the Quadrant government, and things Dame Matsuko as Imperial Governor needs to take official notice of. More on both momentarily.

Under the new constitution, Alquezar, as the Quadrant's Prime Minister, was the legal head of government for the Quadrant. That gave him and the rest of the Quadrant an enormous degree of local autonomy . . . and the accountability that went with it. However, the entire Quadrant was responsible for accommodating itself to the policies of the Star Empire of Manticore, represented and enunciated in this case by one Baroness Medusa. While she could not normally overrule specific policy decisions or acts of local legislation, she had complete authority—and the power of the veto—when it came to making certain those decisions and pieces of legislation fitted smoothly into imperial guidelines in those areas where the Empress' authority was paramount. Despite the Quadrant Constitution's neatly delimited articles and sections, actually implementing its provisions remained a work in progress, and that wasn't going to change anytime soon. It was going to take some time for the lot of them to work out exactly how and where the pragmatic limits of specified authority and responsibility fell, but so far things seemed to be headed in the right direction. At least all of the members of the Alquezar Government seemed determined to see to it that they did.

Right, it's still a balancing act.

Empress Elizabeth had decided, long before the Constitutional Convention had finally voted out the provisions of the Quadrant's new constitution, that her newer subjects were not going to be taken to the financial cleaners by her older ones. At the same time, it was clearly imperative—for a lot of reasons—to push investment in the Talbott Cluster as hard and fast as possible. The Quadrant had a lot of people and a lot of star systems, but its seriously backward technology base urgently required updating and expansion, and investment capital was hard to come by locally. So Elizabeth and Prime Minister Grantville had decided that for the first ten T-years of operation, any new startup endeavor in the Quadrant would enjoy a reduction in taxation equal to the percentage of ownership held by citizens of the Quadrant. After ten T-years, the tax break would reduce by five percent per T-year for another ten T-years, then terminate completely in the twenty-first T-year. That gave tremendous incentive for investors from the Old Star Kingdom to seek out local partners, and all government really had to do was to keep track of that percentage of local ownership and administer the tax breaks. It most emphatically did not have any role in creating the partnerships in question.

Some of the local oligarchs appeared unable (or unwilling) to grasp that point. They'd expected to control ownership of the new enterprises much as they had dominated the pre-annexation financial structures of the Talbott Cluster. The smarter of them, on the other hand, had recognized early on that there were going to be enormous changes. They'd realized that they'd better adjust to the realization that elements of their populations who previously had been insignificant blips as far as local financial markets were concerned were about to find themselves highly attractive to Manticoran investment partners.

And the government incentives to promote investment into Talbott's private sector. It will gradually phase out, but for now there's tons of money to be in TQ start-ups. Particularly as Manticoran investors can have local partners sign on for only the discount they bring and come out well ahead, which means you don't need a lot of money, or to be an oligarch, to play the game.

Which brought Medusa back to the situation in Marian. Apparently one of the local oligarchs—and, like Lababibi, Medusa thought she could make a fairly accurate guess as to exactly who the oligarch in question might be—had decided she ought to receive a "commission" for brokering and expediting the formation of partnerships between Manticoran investors and their Talbott colleagues. Words like extortion, graft, and bribery came to mind whenever Medusa thought about it, and she almost hoped the culprit would prove less amenable to sweet reason than Alquezar and Lababibi expected. She couldn't remember exactly who it was back on Old Terra who'd been in favor of shooting a few people "to encourage the others," but in this case, Estelle Matsuko was prepared to pay for the ammunition herself.

Yeah, after five years of HRG they're not putting up with this all over again.

In many ways, Lababibi had thought from the beginning that Van Dort would have made a far better treasury secretary than she herself had, since no one in the entire galaxy had a better feel for the economic realities of the Talbott Cluster. Unfortunately, he was still too polarizing a figure in too many eyes for him to have been handed that particular cabinet post. And, Lababibi admitted, not without a certain degree of reason. She herself trusted him completely, but the RTU had been too unpopular with too many of the Cluster's inhabitants for far too long for Bernardus Van Dort to have been acceptable as the Quadrant's chief treasury official.

Why Van Dort isn't the Exchequer.

"What you may not—yet—fully realize is what that means in terms of interstellar trade, though," Van Dort continued. "I'd have to check with our central records back on Rembrandt to confirm this, but I'd be surprised if Pequod ever saw more than a couple of freighters a T-month prior to the discovery of the Lynx Terminus. And if you glance at a star map, the system is hardly on a direct approach to Lynx. There's going to be a general upsurge in system visits by ships vectoring through the Terminus and looking for cargoes of opportunity, and Pequod will probably see at least some of it. But six ships from a single local star system in less than two T-weeks?" He shook his head. "No way. For that matter, the New Tuscan merchant marine isn't particularly huge. Six hyper-capable freighters represent a hefty percentage of their total merchant fleet, and probably two-thirds of its ships are registered elsewhere for tax purposes. That's what makes it significant that the Admiral mentioned New Tuscany-registered vessels, because there are only a relatively small handful of ships which are both owned and registered in New Tuscany. I can't conceive of any sound business reason that would send that many ships, out of such a limited pool, to a system like Pequod."

Apparently six ships are a large chunk of New Tuscany's merchant marine, and a larger number of New Tuscany-flagged ships as most are registered elsewhere for tax purposes.

"What's the dispatch boat flight time from Pequod to Spindle, Admiral?" she asked.

"Right on seventeen T-days, Madam Secretary."

Flight time for courier/military ships from Spindle to Pequod.

But hey it's time to check in with the actual main characters from the last book and what they've done since it ended, only 29 chapters in.

"The Skipper wants to see you," he continued.

"Wants to see me?" Helen repeated carefully. "As in, 'I'd like to see you around sometime,' or as in 'Get your butt up here right now, Ms. Zilwicki'?"

"The latter," Paulo told her with a smile. "As in 'Mr. d'Arezzo, ask Ms. Zilwicki to come by my day cabin at her earliest convenience.' "

"Crap." Helen sat back on her heels, trying to think of anything she might have done to earn her a last-minute 'counseling interview' with Captain Terekhov. She couldn't come up with anything right off the top of her head, but that wasn't necessarily reassuring; it was the unanticipated reamings that smarted the most, she'd discovered. Of course, it was always possible he just wanted her to stop by because he'd heard a really good joke and wanted to share it with her, but somehow she didn't find that possibility extremely likely.

The joys of being a midshipwoman ensign.

"I realize this is a bit irregular," he said then, "but so is our situation. Abigail, I know you and Helen are both well acquainted with Commander Kaplan. However, you may not be aware—as I wasn't, up until about—" he glanced at the time display on the bulkhead "—fifty-seven minutes ago—that she is also the brand-new commanding officer of HMS Tristram."

Their tactical officer is getting her own ship, by the name a Roland. Isn't it usually the XO who gets a ship after some exceptional action?

"In addition to the ships Vice Admiral Gold Peak already has, an additional squadron of Nikes is in the process of forming. Admiral Oversteegen is its commander (designate), and as soon as all of its units have joined up, it—and he—will be transferred from Eighth Fleet to Tenth Fleet. In addition, however, the Admiralty is already prepared to deploy a full squadron of brand new Saganami-Cs and one of the new Roland-class destroyer squadrons to Talbott. Tristram—" he nodded at Kaplan "—is one of the Rolands. And I, to my considerable surprise, am the newly designated commodore of CruRon 94. Commander FitzGerald will take over Hexapuma, Commander Pope will be acting as my chief of staff, and Captain Carlson will be my flag captain."

Ah, that explains it. Fitzgerald is getting the Kitty because they bumped Terekhov up to commodore and have given him a whole squadron of Saganami-Cs while Kaplan just gets a DD.

"And the reason we've called the two of you in for this little conversation is that one of the slots I still need to fill is the flag lieutenant's billet, and Tristram needs a good tac officer.

"Helen," he looked directly at her, "you worked out very well as my liaison with Mr. Van Dort. I believe we have an established and efficient working relationship, and you're already very familiar—especially for an officer of your youthfulness—with the political and military realities of the Cluster. I mean, the Quadrant. Normally, the flag lieutenant's slot would be filled by someone rather more senior than you are at the moment, and I'm well aware that what you would really prefer at this point in your career is to move directly into a tactical department slot somewhere. I don't want you to feel pressured, and if you decide you want a tactical assignment, I will unreservedly recommend you for it. At the same time, the opportunity for this sort of experience, this early in your career, doesn't happen along every day. And, unfortunately, given the time constraints involved, I need your decision almost immediately—within the next twelve hours, at the latest. And I, also unfortunately, am about to leave for several hours of conferences at Admiralty House. Since I needed to speak to you personally about this, I had to cram it at you before I leave the ship, as it were.

Staff jobs are usually for more experienced officers being groomed for eventual command, but Helen has been so involved in events in Talbott as Van Dort's assigned gopher that Terekhov wants her for flag lieutenant, despite being, you know, an ensign fresh off her snotty cruise.

"As for you, Abigail," he turned to the lieutenant, "Commander Kaplan has specifically requested you as Tristram's tactical officer."

Helen's brain had been doing its best to imitate a chipmunk in the headlights as she tried to assimilate Captain—No, damn it! she told herself sharply—Commodore Terekhov's offer. Now, despite herself, her head snapped around towards Abigail.

At a hundred and eighty-nine thousand tons, the Roland was bigger than a pre-MDM light cruiser . . . and she was armed with Mark 16s, just like Hexapuma. She and her sisters were the plum assignments of the Navy's destroyer force, and they were offering a Roland's tactical department to a brand new senior-grade lieutenant?

Yes it is, and yes they are.

"Before you turn it down because you think you're too junior for the slot, or because you think it's time you moved back over to the GSN, let me explain a few things to you. First, you arguably have more tactical experience actually using the Mark 16 in combat than anyone else in the entire Navy—in fact, than anyone else in either of your two navies—given how quickly AuxCon—and I—got taken out of action in Monica. While there may be someone else whose overall experience with the Mark 16 matches yours, I can't think of any other officer of your rank who's been responsible for managing an entire squadron's—hell, an entire light task group's—fire in a furball like that one. So, yes, you are junior for the slot. But you've also demonstrated your competence under fire, which a lot of tactical officers senior to you haven't, and you bring with you a lot of very valuable experience with Tristram's primary armament.

"And as far as moving back over to the GSN is concerned, this is the first squadron of Rolands to be formed. For a change, we're actually ahead of Grayson in deploying a new class, and High Admiral Matthews has specifically requested that Grayson personnel be assigned to it to help develop doctrine and accrue experience with the new class and its weapons. I'm thinking you'd be an extremely logical choice for that assignment. You're already fully experienced in how we Manties do things, and, let's face it, you're still the first Grayson-born female officer in the entire GSN. Getting your ticket punched as a full-fledged tactical officer, in command of your own department, is only going to bolster your authority when you finally return full-time to Grayson. And when you do, unless I very much miss my guess, High Admiral Matthews is probably planning to assign you to relatively light units, where your example will be most direct and where you're least likely to get shoved away into some admiral's convenient flagship pigeonhole just because he can't—or doesn't want to—figure out what to do with you. That being the case, adding demonstrated familiarity with the new destroyers and cruisers—and their main weapons systems—to your résumé strikes me as a very good idea."

Reasons for wanting Abigail Hearns to be Kaplan's tac officer. And it seems Grayson is also going to be building Rolands they're just taking longer to get production in. I suspect this is because they've about exhausted their ability to build and crew podnoughts and still have some personnel left over.

"Ma'am, I really appreciate the offer," Abigail said. "And under other circumstances, I'd probably be willing to kill to get it. But if I run off with a prize like this, it's going to be a blatant case of string-pulling!"

"Of course it is!" Kaplan replied, and snorted at her expression. "Abigail, that's what happens with officers who demonstrate superior performance. Oh," she waved one hand in midair, "it happens for other reasons, too, and a lot of those other reasons suck, when you come right down to it. God knows we all know that! And I suppose there probably will be at least a few people who think you got this assignment because of who your father is. I rather doubt anyone who knows Steadholder Owens is going to think he pulled the string in question, but that's not going to keep some people from whining and bitching about the fact that you got it and they didn't. And most of those people who are going to be doing the whining and bitching aren't going to want to consider the possibility that you got it because you were better than they were, which is why—as far as they're concerned—it's obviously going to be a case of nepotism. Well, guess what? That happens, too. Or do you think there weren't plenty of officers who thought Duchess Harrington was being pushed up faster than she deserved, even after Basilisk Station, because of favoritism from people like Admiral Courvosier and Earl White Haven?"

"I'm not Duchess Harrington!" Abigail protested. "I don't have anywhere near her record!"

"And she wasn't 'Duchess Harrington' at the time, either," Kaplan replied. "That's my point. She was given the opportunity to achieve what she achieved because of the ability she'd already demonstrated. I'm offering you this slot for the same reason. There's nothing wrong with pulling strings as long as the result is to put the right officer in the right billet at the right time, and if I didn't think that was what was happening here, I wouldn't have made the offer. You know that."

And the trump card, comparing her to Honor. But it's a valid point, for a while now Honor has been playing the patronage game as a flag officer, rehabilitating officers who didn't get a fair shake and trying to advance the officers she thought really deserved it. Surely someone as observant and close to her at the Academy as Ms. Hearns will have seen that.

Anyways, both young ladies accept.

She hadn't really thought about it when the commodore offered her the flag lieutenant's slot, but there were several very good reasons—two of which had presented themselves strongly to her over the last few days—why that particular position was never offered to someone who wasn't at least a lieutenant.

First, the reason a flag officer needed a personal aide to help keep him, his schedule, and his workload organized was fairly glaringly apparent. And, generally speaking, it took someone with rather more experience than any ensign could have accrued to do all that organizing. Helen had never actually realized—not in any emotional way, at least—just how much time a flag lieutenant spent making certain her flag officer's time was spent as efficiently and productively as possible.

When she'd discovered just how thoroughly she was supposed to be tapped into all of the squadron's departments, even her naturally hardy soul had quailed. The responsibility for learning what went on in the administration and coordination of all those various departments—plus operations and logistics—and their respective duties had come as something of a shock to Helen. And the fact that they still didn't have an operations officer, a staff astrogator, a staff communications officer, or a staff intelligence officer didn't help any, either. At the moment, Commander Lynch was holding down the operations department for Commodore Terekhov, and Lieutenant Commander Barnabé Johansen and Lieutenant Commander Iona Török, Quentin Saint-James' astrogator and com officer, respectively, were filling in as his astrogator and communications officers, but the whole arrangement had an undeniably temporary, makeshift feeling to it.

To be honest, I'd kind of assumed a flag lieutenant was a flag officer's gopher and the chief of staff would handle most of these duties.

But that brought her to the other reason her present assignment was usually reserved for a full lieutenant. A flag lieutenant didn't exist simply because a flag officer needed an aide. She existed because an assignment as a flag lieutenant was a teaching experience, too. Well, in fairness, every naval assignment was a teaching experience—or it damned well ought to be, at any rate. But Manticoran flag lieutenants were far more than just aides and what were still called go-fors, and RMN flag lieutenacies were normally reserved for officers being carefully groomed for bigger and better things. The experience of managing a flag officer's schedule and sitting in on staff discussions and decision making processes other lieutenants never got to see was supposed to give a flag lieutenant a deeper insight into a flag officer's responsibilities. It was supposed to teach someone whose superiors felt she had already demonstrated the potential for eventual flag rank herself how the job was supposed to be done . . . and also how it wasn't supposed to be done.

So far, none of the senior officers she'd found herself working with seemed to resent the fact that she was a mere ensign. She didn't know how long that was going to last, though, and she had a sinking sensation that more than one lieutenant she ran into was going to resent it. Not to mention the fact that she could absolutely guarantee that at some point in her future career some officer to whom she'd just reported was going to have looked in her personnel jacket, examined her Form 210, noted her present assignment, and concluded she was receiving preferential treatment from Commodore Terekhov.

Which, after all, is only the truth, she admitted. It wasn't the first time that thought had crossed her mind, and she tried to banish it with the memory of Commander Kaplan's comments to Abigail. Which, of course, only made her wonder if she was reading too much into them in her own case . . . and if she was headed for what her father had always called a terminal case of infinitely expanding ego.

Well, the learning part certainly makes sense. Have fun with that then, Helen.

"The Mark 16 is a big enough advantage against other cruisers and battlecruisers as it stands, but with the new laser heads, they're actually going to be able to hurt genuine capital ships, as well." She shook her head. "I don't think the Havenites are going to like that one bit."

"No doubt," Lynch agreed. "Although I trust," he continued more dryly, "that what you've just said doesn't mean you think it's going to be a good idea for a heavy cruiser to take on a superdreadnought, even with the new laser heads?"

"No, Sir. Of course not," Helen said quickly.

Ah yes, the new and improved laser heads, now with yield figures for the nuclear component and a complete description and history of laser heads.

There was a reason it had taken so long for the laser head to replace the contact nuclear warhead as the deep-space long-ranged weapon of choice. The basic concept for a laser head was actually quite simple, dating back to pre-Diaspora days on Old Terra. In its most basic terms, a hair-thin, cylindrical rod of some suitable material (the Royal Manticoran Navy used a Hafnium medium) was subjected to the x-ray pulse of a nuclear detonation, causing it to lase in Gamma-rays until the thermal pulse of the detonation's core expansion reached the rod and destroyed it. The problem had always been that the process was inherently extraordinarily inefficient. Under normal conditions, only a few percent of the billions of megajoules released by a megaton-range nuclear warhead would actually end up in any single x-ray laser beam, mostly because—under normal conditions—a nuclear detonation propagated in a sphere, and each rod represented only a ridiculously tiny portion of the total spherical area of the explosion and so could be subjected to only a tiny percentage of the total pulse of any detonation. Which meant the overwhelming majority of the destructive effect was completely lost.

For the first time, a full explanation of how laser heads work, they eject really thin rods before the detonation. These rods channel the radiation into lasers a second before the rest of the blast destroys them.

Given the toughness of warship armor, even two or three T-centuries ago, that was simply too little to have any appreciable effect, especially since the resultant laser still had to blast its way through not just a warship's sidewalls, but also its anti-radiation shielding, just to reach the armor in question. So even though the odds of achieving what was effectively a direct hit with a contact nuke were not exactly good, most navies had opted to go with a weapon which could at least hope to inflict some damage if it actually managed to hit the target. Indeed, pre-laser head missiles had been most destructive when they achieved skin-to-skin contact as purely kinetic projectiles. That, unfortunately, had been all but impossible to achieve, even with the best sidewall penetrators, so the proximity-fused nuclear missile had become primarily a sidewall-killer. Its function was less to inflict actual hull damage than to burn out sidewall generators.

Unfortunately from the missile-firer's perspective, active missile defenses had improved to such a degree that "not exactly good" odds of scoring a direct hit had turned into "not a chance in hell," which was the real reason capital ships had gone to such massive energy batteries. Missiles might still be effective against lighter combatants, but they'd been for all intents and purposes completely ineffective against the active and passive defenses of a capital ship, so the only way to fight a battle out had been to close to the sort of eyeball-to-eyeball range at which shipboard energy mounts could get the job done.

Since warships have armor and sidewalls that's supposed to afford some protection against full starship beam emplacements, which make laser heads look anemic by comparison, they haven't historically been that great a threat. It took a simultaneous revolution in laser heads, along with improvements in point defense that made missiles that actually have to hit or come within a couple klicks of the enemy completely useless, to let the laser head have it's day. Even so in those early years it was a choice between laser heads that might do minor damage or nukes that have hardly any chance of hitting.

A ring of gravity generators, arranged in a collar behind the warhead, had been designed. When the weapon fired, the generators spun up a few milliseconds before the warhead actually detonated, which was just long enough for the layered focal points of a gravitic lens to stabilize and reshape the blast from spherical to Gaussian, directing the radiological and thermal effects forward along the warhead's axis. The result was to capture far more of the blast's total effect and focus it into the area occupied by the lasing rods. By modern standards, the original laser heads had been fairly anemic, despite their vast improvement over anything which had been possible previously, and capital ship designers had responded by further thickening the already massive armor dreadnoughts and superdreadnoughts carried. But the ancient race between armor and the gun had resumed, and by fifty or sixty T-years ago, the laser head had become a genuine danger to even the most stoutly armored vessel.

So they figured out how to make a shaped nuclear charge, can't we already do that? Anyways the backstop the blast with something like a sidewall and channel the detonation into a 30 degree or so cone, concentrating far more energy into the lasing rods.

There were other factors involved in the design of a successful laser head, of course. The length and diameter of a lasing rod determined its beam divergence, with obvious implications for the percentage of energy the laser delivered at any given range. Ship-mounted energy weapons, with their powerful grav lenses, could squeeze beam divergence in a way no laser head possibly could. There was simply no way to design those lenses into something as small as a laser head which, despite many refinements in design, remained essentially a simple, expendable rod which would have been easily recognizable by any pre-Diaspora physicist.

In the current Mark 23 warhead, the laser heads (the assemblies containing the actual lasing rods) were roughly five meters in length and forty centimeters in diameter, which carried the thread-thin lasing rods suspended in a gel-like medium. The laser heads also incorporated the wolter mirrors to amplify the beampath, reaction thrusters, lots of fuel, on-board power, telemetry, and sensors. They were carried in bays on either side of the weapons bus, which ejected them once the missile had steadied down on its final attack bearing. Each of the laser heads mounted its own thrust-vectoring reaction control system, which acquired the target on its own sensors, thrust to align itself with the target's bearing, and quickly maneuvered to a position a hundred and fifty meters ahead of the missile. At which point the gravity lens came up, the warhead detonated, and the target found itself out of luck.

The critical factors were laser head rod dimensions, the yield of the detonation, and—in many ways the most critical of all—the grav lens amplification available. Which was the main reason capital missiles were so much more destructive than the smaller missiles carried aboard cruisers and destroyers. There was still a minimum mass/volume constraint on the grav lens assembly itself, and a bigger missile could simply carry both a more powerful lens and the longer—and therefore more powerful—lasing rods which gave it a longer effective standoff range from its target. That was also the reason it had been such a challenge to squeeze a laser head capable of dealing even with LACs into the new Viper anti-LAC missile. The bay for the single lasing rod was almost two thirds the length of the entire missile body, and finding a place where it could be crammed in had presented all sorts of problems.

Engineering of laser heads, from SD to LAC scale. So a bit more than just hafnium wires. I wonder if they made the base end a bit wider to catch more energy, would that effect the firepower? Enough to be worth further complicating the design?

The general Manticoran technical advantage over the Republic of Haven had made itself felt in laser head design, as well. Manticoran missile gravity generators had always been more powerful on a volume-for-volume basis, and Manticoran sensors and targeting systems had been better, as well. The Star Kingdom had been able to rely upon smaller warheads and greater lens amplification to create laser heads powerful enough for its purposes, especially since it could count on scoring more hits because of its superior fire control and seeking systems. The Republic had been forced to adopt a more brute force approach, using substantially larger warheads and heavier lasing rods, which was one of the factors that explained why Havenite missiles had always been outsized compared to their Manticoran counterparts.

Well, one of a couple of reasons, but their inability to downscale while maintaining firepower is definitely a major factor.

But now, thanks primarily to fallout from the Star Kingdom's ongoing emphasis on improving its grav-pulse FTL communications capability, BuWeaps had completed field testing and begun production of a new generation of substantially more powerful gravity generators for the cruiser-weight Mark 16. In fact, they'd almost doubled the grav lens amplification factor, and while they were at it, they'd increased the yield of the missile warhead, as well, which had actually required at least as much ingenuity as the new amplification generators, given the way warheads scaled. They'd had to shift quite a few of the original Mark 16's components around to find a way to shoehorn all of that in, which had included shifting several weapons bus components aft, but Helen didn't expect anyone to complain about the final result. With its fifteen megaton warhead, the Mark 16 had been capable of dealing with heavy cruiser or battlecruiser armor, although punching through to the interior of a battlecruiser had pushed it almost to the limit. Now, with the new Mod G's forty megaton warhead and improved grav lensing, the Mark 16 had very nearly as much punch as an all-up capital missile from as recently as five or six T-years ago.

Interesting. The old Mk. 16 had a 15 MT warhead, the new Mk. 16G has 40 megatons, and new grav lensing that doubles the effective firepower of the lasers, meaning Rolands and Saganami-Cs have missiles as powerful as proper capital ships (does that mean they were already using 80 MT?) capable of poking holes in even SD armor. There's also an F mod where they upgrade existing Mk 16s to carry the new grav lensing without the total redesign to accommodate the warheads. And naturally the grav-lensing scales quite naturally to double laser head power across the board.

The Mod E-1 was basically the existing Mod E with its original gravity generators replaced by the new, improved model. That was the only change, which had required no adjustments to buses or shifting of internal components, and the new warheads could be fused seamlessly into the existing Mark 16 weapons queues and attack profiles. Of course, with its weaker, original warhead it would remain less effective than the Mod G, since its destructiveness was "only" doubled . . . while the Mod G laser heads' throughput had increased by a factor of over five.

And the difference the new design makes.

"In that case, why don't we start with your evaluation of how the availability of the Mod G—or, for that matter, the E-1—would have affected Commodore Terekhov's choice of tactics?"

Helen frowned thoughtfully, the darkness of memory fading as she concentrated on his question. She considered it carefully for several seconds, then gave her head a little toss.

"I think the main change in his tactics might have been that he'd have gone for early kills."

"Meaning what, exactly?" Lynch's tone was an invitation to explain her thinking, and she leaned slightly forward.

"The thing was, Sir, that I think we all knew the only way we could realistically hope to stop those battlecruisers was with massed missile fire at relatively short range. Oh, we got one of them at extreme range, but that had to have been a Golden BB. No way did we manage to get deep enough to hit anything that should have blown her up that way!"

She shook her head again, her expression grim as she recalled the spectacular destruction of MNS Typhoon and her entire crew. Then she shook herself mentally and refocused on the present.

"Anyway, we knew we sure couldn't afford to let them into energy range of us, and because our laser heads were so much lighter, we knew we were going to have to concentrate a lot of hits, both in terms of location and time, if we were going to get through their armor. The Kitty—I mean, Hexapuma—was the only ship we had that was Mark 16-capable, and that meant we couldn't achieve that kind of concentration outside standard missile range. So what the captain was actually using our long-range fire for was to get the best possible feel for the Monicans' active defenses and EW capabilities. He was using the Mark 16s to force them to defend themselves so we could get a read on their defenses and pass it to the rest of the squadron to maximize our fire's effectiveness once they came into the range of the rest of our ships.

"But if we'd had Mod Gs, instead of the old Mod Es, we would have been able to get through battlecruiser armor even at extreme range and without the kind of concentration we had at the end of the battle. So, in that case, I think he still would have been probing for information, but at the same time—"

How Monica would have gone if they'd had the new laser heads.

[Simon_Jester]

There's no knowing until the shooting starts, but Mike seems to think that two Nikes stand a decent chance against two squadrons of Solly BCs.

Well, they're faster and their missiles have four times the range, so if nothing else they should be able to deliver massed missile barrages and run for it when they run out of ammunition, probably having done a lot of damage in their wake.

And Mike's orders, which I suspect she plans to repeat at every system she hits before Spindle.

Also interesting that Henke is still using Elvis Santino as the poster boy for how NOT to defend a star system, ten years later.

At a hundred and eighty-nine thousand tons, the Roland was bigger than a pre-MDM light cruiser . . . and she was armed with Mark 16s, just like Hexapuma. She and her sisters were the plum assignments of the Navy's destroyer force, and they were offering a Roland's tactical department to a brand new senior-grade lieutenant?

Yes it is, and yes they are.

Given that the Rolands have sixty-man crews, the tactical section can't be more than 10-20 people. In which case it would be if anything grossly excessive to have anyone more senior than a senior lieutenant in charge of it.

To be honest, I'd kind of assumed a flag lieutenant was a flag officer's gopher and the chief of staff would handle most of these duties.

Honestly yes. I think you're right and Weber did this for drama reasons. Then again, the flag lieutenant may not be in charge of the admiral's schedule, but they are essentially their secretary. A high-powered executive may have a dedicated chief of staff who plans things, but his personal secretary still has power over his schedule.

So they figured out how to make a shaped nuclear charge, can't we already do that? Anyways the backstop the blast with something like a sidewall and channel the detonation into a 30 degree or so cone, concentrating far more energy into the lasing rods.

We can certainly shape a nuclear charge into a thirty-degree cone. Channeling it as tightly as Honorverse lasing head 'lasing rods' are supposed to... will not be so easy. Even using current lasing rod technology it would not be easy.

Engineering of laser heads, from SD to LAC scale. So a bit more than just hafnium wires. I wonder if they made the base end a bit wider to catch more energy, would that effect the firepower? Enough to be worth further complicating the design?

And continuing my speculations and thoughts, I am preeetty sure that it's physically impossible to channelize as tightly as Weber has his missiles channelize.

The basic technology, the X-ray laser, is well understood today, and in fact the Reagan administration basically planned to put laser heads (which would work as Weber described, with independent targeting of each lasing rod) on bog-standard chemical rockets and toss them into the path of oncoming Soviet ICBM salvoes. Part of the "Star Wars" program.

The catch is that you cannot keep the beam tight enough to have the kind of effects Weber describes at extreme range. Tens of kilometers yes, hundreds of kilometers probably I dunno, tens of thousands... not so much?

And, for that matter, you cannot use a 'grav lens' located entirely at the emitter head of your laser/graser to ensure that a beam is collimated tightly enough to travel hundreds of thousands of kilometers without spreading. The diffraction limit doesn't work that way.

I think this is one of those cases where Weber just plain smacked into the limits of his own knowledge.

Interesting. The old Mk. 16 had a 15 MT warhead, the new Mk. 16G has 40 megatons, and new grav lensing that doubles the effective firepower of the lasers, meaning Rolands and Saganami-Cs have missiles as powerful as proper capital ships (does that mean they were already using 80 MT?) capable of poking holes in even SD armor.

Doesn't quiiite work that way. The yield in megatons of the nuclear warhead is kind of irrelevant; what matters is the intensity of electromagnetic radiation created by the warhead at the location of the lasing rod.

The obvious way to make this better is to park the lasing rod closer to the warhead: halve the separation and by the inverse square law, the lasing rod absorbs four times more energy from the nuclear explosion, and thus produces a quadruple-strength X-ray laser. But that has limiting factors, among them that the closer the lasing rod is to the launch platform, the more inherent difficulty you have in making sure it's pointed just exactly at the target. It's kind of hard to say "yes, a line drawn through the center of the warhead blast front and down the length of the lasing rod will intersect that 500-meter warship that is twenty-five thousand kilometers away" when the baseline between warhead and lasing rod is only five meters long, for instance.

The more subtle way is to use a nuclear shaped charge. That way, you can focus nuclear blast intensity that would otherwise spread across the whole sky into a relatively narrow cone. I'm not sure what jet angles are realistically achievable- but basically, if you focus the whole nuclear explosion into a 30-degree cone, you've increased the intensity by a factor of, uh... (360/x)^2, which in this case is... twelve times twelve is 144. Halve the jet angle, quadruple the intensity, and therefore quadruple the effectiveness of the lasing rod without compromising your ability to align the rods.

The challenge is that while we DO know how to make nuclear shaped charges today, they exploit the properties of a fission device. Even fusion bombs as we know them are actually mostly using the nuclear fusion stage as a way to boost and get maximum efficiency out of the fission stage. Given that Weber's missiles are pure-fusion devices (why I don't know, they're big enough to carry appropriately-sized nuclear warheads I would think), the shaping methods we use might not work, requiring active gravitic compression.

The effect of the grav lens on an Honorverse missile warhead is NOT to increase warhead power, it's to increase the focus of the warhead power. This is why better grav lenses apply evenly to increase the punch of all theoretically possible warheads: because they aren't a "plus ten megaton" bonus or something. They're a "take all the megatons and put them into fewer square meters" bonus.

Other observation: in a versus crossover, an Honorverse 'sidewall burner' is a formidable weapon in its own right even without the lasing rods. Of course, filling the warhead space with a sack of wet concrete and having the thing just plain ram the target by sheer kinetic energy is too. I honestly think an SD(P) could compete even in ALMIGHTY STAR WARS AS ENVISIONED ON THIS SITE on that basis, at least against medium-weight ships. Getting clocked by the missile itself is waaaaay more dangerous than a mere nuking, let alone the paltry love-tap that is a laser head.

A hypothetical 100-ton MDM, traveling at a fairly typical alleged closing velocity of 0.8c, has a kinetic energy of, hm... relativistic correction... m vee squared... 9.6*10^21 joules. ABOUT 2.2 teratons. Yes, that is teraton, not megaton or gigaton.

This represents the ultimate Honorverse fanboy tactic, which I came up with as a purely intellectual exercise. No tactic more fanboyful is possible, to the best of my knowledge.

It is also, of course, insane, because this is never seriously considered as an offensive tactic in the actual series Weber wrote. Not against enemy ships, anyway, even though it would very plausibly work in my opinion. They must know something I don't.

[Simon_Jester]

Didn't see the response post to my earlier post. Replies:

Also, frankly, the whole 'their officers are aristos' thing rings a little false coming from Manticore, where many of the senior officers are second, third, or fourth generation officers. And where it'd probably be even more exaggerated except that Manticore's navy was freaking tiny a century ago, while the SLN is about the same size now as it was then.

True, but the Manties for all they have an actual aristocracy have strong meritocratic elements too. They do admit new members to their aristocracy, there are plenty of first generation officers, and the highest proportion of any navy in the series of officers who started out as enlisted, something they take pains to explain never happens in the SLN.

Pfft. If the RMN had stayed at a fixed size for the past several generations with no prospect of impending war, no incentive to significantly increase total ship numbers, and no actual change in Manticore's strategic posture, I bet it'd be as much of an aristocratic backwater as the SLN.

That said, you're right about the decorations. At the same time, though, Fleet 2000 also includes meaningful upgrades to the ships' electronic warfare capability, missile defense, and (allegedly) electronics upgradeability.

I recall it as being largely aesthetic with a few tweaks here and there, like actually adding space for future upgrades like Manticore has been doing for decades.

Aegis is part of the Fleet 2000 updates. So is Halo, a system for using EW drones to help protect the ship. And the space-for-updates thing is what I was talking about in terms of upgradeability.

In the context of the pre-1912 threat environment, Fleet 2000 actually makes Solarian warships significantly more dangerous. Which would matter more if it were feasible to retrofit pre-MDM ships to fire MDMs, which it prrrobably isn't. Hmph.

? The Manties retrofit SDs to fire internal MDMs, and we discussed the debatable worth of that.I don't know if they ever applied that to smaller ships, likely because it simple wasn't worth the time and expense vs. building new ships but possibly because they couldn't retrofit ships that didn't have the sheer space of a superdreadnought.

Exactly. I mean, the Saganami-C may be big but it's not bigger than a prewar battlecruiser. If Manticore were in a position to take its swarms of Homers and Reliant-class battlecruisers from the 1900-era and retrofit them to fire dual drive missiles, they'd probably have already started doing so given how hard up they are for fighting hulls.

But instead, it's seen as more cost-effective to build new Saganami-Cs from scratch.

Less like people flying by flapping arms and more in the 'this shouldn't be possible without major engineering advances.' Say our observer reports that a wealthy foreign nation has developed hypersonic jet fighters, railgun-armed tanks and a workable anti-ballistic missile defense. In which case I wouldn't believe said observer uncritically, but neither would I dismiss his report out of hand. If I have any reason to question the observer's competence I said someone I trust.

It depends.

In the frame of reference of officers born and raised in the early 1800s PD, multiple drive missiles ARE impossible unless you know how it's done. Incremental extensions on their missile range might be possible, but that's not the same thing.

FTL comms ARE impossible, likewise. They're a screwball application of a very arcane bit of science, and nobody's even gotten close enough to making one work to advertise that it might work.

Improvements in electronic warfare, workable missile pods, LAC swarms, and stuff like that are obviously possible... but frankly the League has or is working on adequate doctrine to deal with those threats. The real trump cards are the MDM and the FTL comm. The MDM is supposed to be impossible because of interference among the stages' impeller nodes. FTL comm is one of the eternal pipe dreams.

Another point you might want to consider is that many navies across the galaxy probably have bitter experience with frauds and hucksters trying to sell them a superweapon like Zahn's 'Crippler' (a super-grav lance allegedly capable of knocking down whole impeller wedges from a million kilometers away) that turn out not to work in real life. So suspicion regarding claims of weapons that operate far outside what is normally possible might well be the norm, just as a 1700s general would be suspicious if someone told him there was a new infantry firearm that could kill ten men a minute from several hundred yards away.

Is such a thing physically possible? Obviously. Is it more likely under the circumstances that the thing is a fraud or a joke? Very possibly.

2) The real stupidity here is that despite Manticore being one Junction transit away from the League's core territory, and despite control of the Junction being a major strategic asset that would have huge consequences for the League's economy, the League's core government and political structure seem to have basically decided to not give a shit about the war. This is sort of like having the US decide to totally ignore a war between Colombia and Panama over control of the Panama Canal.

It really is, particularly where the general staff on Earth could send one of their own aides as an observer and have them back within a month.

Right. Well, it's not just that, it's that Haven winning the war would have real consequences for the League, as would Manticore winning and turning into an expansionist wanna-be empire on the League's periphery. Whoever wins, Frontier Fleet should at least take an interest. And more of an interest than they would in the random squabbling of fifth-rate systems like Grayson and Masada, too.

It's like, even if the travel time were six months each way, you'd damn sure send out someone to keep an eye on the war, figure out how it was won and why, and generally investigate to make sure Frontier Fleet has an accurate concept of what these touchy, proud, and warlike neobarbs are up to in that remote corner of space.

[VhenRa]

TBH I wouldn't have had Beowulf declining to send observers, I would have had them sending them and sending back false reports of absolutely nothing out of the ordinary, speaking of. I wouldn't be surprised if the eventual Mesan alignment worlds sent SDF observers and did that.

[Simon_Jester]

Actually, for all I know that's exactly what happened. Some bits of the books and supplementary text at least hint that SOME of the Solarian system defense forces (i.e. Beowulf) did in fact send competent observers who remembered to take notes.

[VhenRa]

Actually, for all I know that's exactly what happened. Some bits of the books and supplementary text at least hint that SOME of the Solarian system defense forces (i.e. Beowulf) did in fact send competent observers who remembered to take notes.

Oh, we know they sent SDF observers, many of which reported back accurate (as best as they can) data on how deadly the Manty hardware is and noted it to their governments. But its specifically pointed out Beowulf didn't, from memory. But if I was the Alignment... I would send SDF observers with orders to file false reports to send to the SLN. Reports of things like shorter ranges then Solarian hardware, patently false data, ect ect. Make it so damn conflicting that assuming a sane world, this data is worthless because either the Havenites and Manties are fighting at knife-fighting ranges, they are fighting exactly the same as the League or they are fighting at absurd ranges... and there is just as many people saying each thing.

[Simon_Jester]

Y'know, I'm going to stick in my private canon that the Alignment actually did this, because it makes the stupidity more explicable. It would be consistent with their main objective of creating a situation where the League is outgunned by a militarily superior foe and starting to break up under the strain.

[Ahriman238]

"And just what did New Tuscany's Foreign Minister have to say about her obstreperous merchant spacers?"

"Interestingly enough, she didn't have a thing to say about her spacers. Had quite a bit to say about the conduct of our naval personnel, on the other hand."

-snip-

"I take it Cardot's position is that Commander Denton and his people aren't just loose warheads?" he said after a moment.

"Oh, on the contrary," Medusa said dryly. "She's taken exactly the position that they are loose warheads. In fact, she's taken it so elaborately that no one could possibly miss the fact that she considers it a polite diplomatic fiction she's offering so that we can use it as a political fig leaf. From the tone of her note, it's obvious she intends to give us an out by repudiating and reprimanding Denton, thus proving we would never have authorized, far less instigated, such 'a pervasive pattern of Manticoran harassment of New Tuscan merchant shipping in the peaceful pursuit of legitimate commercial interests.' "

And complaints to the Manties as part of this ongoing escalation of imagined and engineered incidents.

"Essentially, it's a formal protest alleging that Commander Denton—and apparently the entire ship's company of HMS Reprise—has systematically insulted, obstructed, and harassed New Tuscan merchant ships pursuing their lawful business in the Pequod System. She's enumerated all of the incidents Denton had reported to us, and added quite a few more. At least a couple of them occurred—according to her, at least—after Denton's dispatch to Admiral Khumalo, which presumably explains why we hadn't already heard about them. Others, though . . ." She shook her head. "Others, Gregor, have that 'manufactured out of whole cloth' feel to them. I've got the distinct feeling that they didn't really happen at all."

"Fictitious encounters tucked away in the underbrush of genuine ones, you mean?"

"That's exactly what I mean." Medusa's expression was grim. "It looks like they were recording all of our people's official shipboard visits, as well. According to them, they 'just happen' to have imagery available on a handful of inspections. No one was recording them on purpose, you understand. It was just a fortuitous coincidence that the internal systems of the ships in question were switched on at the critical moment. It's obvious they went through those recordings thoroughly before they very carefully picked the material Cardot included with her note, and I don't doubt for a moment that she's taken the remarks of our people even more carefully out of context, but they do have at least some imagery. Which is one reason I find the thought of fictitious incidents so disturbing. I mean, they have to know we'll realize they're lying about those . . . episodes, so who are they creating them to impress in the first place? It has to be a third party, and I think that also explains the imagery they're presenting, as well. You know how any imagery tends to substantiate even the most outrageous accusations for some people."

"Some people in this case being Frontier Security, do you think?"

"That's what I'm afraid of," she admitted. "And I'm even more afraid that they didn't hit on this notion, whatever it is, all on their own."

Cherry picked footage, and at least Dame Matsuko has a pretty good idea what audience they have in mind, and thus where this is going.

"That's a good point, Amandine," Medusa said now. "One that hadn't occurred to me, to be honest, though it should have. The accusations and counteraccusations flying back and forth between Landing and Nouveau Paris are going to resonate with any dispute between us and New Tuscany, aren't they?"

"They will for the Sollies, Milady," Corvisart agreed. "By this time, the diplomatic waters are awfully murky as far as any Solly observer is likely to be concerned. Why should they believe us instead of New Tuscany if we find ourselves involved in yet another diplomatic wrangle? Especially if the New Tuscans have what purports to be recorded imagery that proves their claims? I doubt anyone else is going to be particularly impressed by their 'evidence,' but that doesn't really matter. And look at it from Verrochio's perspective. If he can spin this thing properly, we suddenly become the heavies of the piece . . . which just happens to tie back into the Solly suspicions about our 'imperialist' leanings that Nordbrandt's atrocities were busy fanning. Not only that, but if he can spin things to make it look as if he's riding to the rescue on a white horse in this instance—which, as he'll make very sure the entire galaxy knows, is a totally separate incident with an obviously innocent third-party—then everything that came out of Monica becomes suspect by association."

And there's that, Manticore's word may be more suspect after the arguments over the diplomatic correspondence that started the war again.

"I'm inclined to suggest that we pretty much sit tight until we get that first squadron of Rolands out here, Milady. We still haven't actually seen any of them, of course, and I realize the deployment schedules we've gotten so far are still provisional and subject to revision. But a Roland is bigger than a lot of light cruisers, and I doubt the Admiralty is choosing their skippers by just pulling names out of a hat."

"That's not a bad idea at all, Loretta," Khumalo said approvingly. "She'd be big enough to make the point that we're serious, but she'd still officially be 'only' a destroyer. And as you say, Admiral Cortez is going to be handpicking their COs. I doubt we'll be lucky enough to get another Terekhov out of the deal, but whoever we do get is definitely going to be first-string."

They want a more experienced commander in Pequod, but are afraid sending too senior an officer or large a ship (like a Nike) would be seen as panicky overreaction, even as they do do want to make it clear they're serious. Interesting balancing act.

Vice Admiral Jessup Blaine tried not to feel too bored as he worked his way through the routine reports and paperwork. It was nice to have his own task group to command, and to have two full squadrons of pod-laying ships of the wall at his beck and call, as it were. And it was nice that Quentin O'Malley's battlecruisers had returned to him from Monica.

Two squadrons of podnoughts sitting on the Lynx Terminus, for a few more hours anyway.

"I'm sorry to disturb you, Admiral," she said, speaking so rapidly the words blurred together at the edges. "We just received a priority message from the Admiralty. It's Code Zulu, Sir!"

For just a moment, Blaine felt the breath freeze in his chest. She had to be mistaken, a part of his mind tried to insist. Either that, or he must have misunderstood her. In naval use, Code Zulu had only one meaning: invasion imminent. But no one, not even the Peeps, could be crazy enough to take on the defenses of the Manticoran home system!

"Is there an enemy strength estimate attached, Lieutenant?"

-snip-

"The Admiralty's initial assessment is a minimum of three hundred of the wall, Sir," she said. "Initial course projections indicate they're headed directly for Sphinx on a least-time approach."

Blaine felt as if someone had just slugged him in the belly. Three hundred of the wall? That was . . . that was insane. The one thing Thomas Theisman had persistently refused to do as the Republic of Haven's Secretary of War was to commit the men and women under his command to the sort of death-ride offensives the Committee of Public Safety had once demanded of them.

But maybe it isn't a death ride, Blaine thought around the icy wind blowing through the marrow of his bones. Three hundred wallers . . . probably towing max pod loads . . . and with D'Orville forced to position himself to cover the Junction, as well . . .

Jesus Christ, he realized suddenly, coldly. This could actually work for them! And if it does . . .

Oh look, it's the bloody Battle of Manticore. And just where were your ships during this fun adventure, Admiral? I don't remember seeing them.

"Immediate signal to all squadron and divisional commanders," he heard his voice telling the lieutenant on his display.

"Yes, Sir." The young woman's relief as she found herself doing something comfortingly familiar was obvious. "Live mike, Sir," she said a moment later.

"People," Blaine told his pickup, "they need us back home. Activate Ops Plan Homecoming immediately. I want your impellers up and your ships moving in thirty minutes. Blaine, clear."

Ah, I guess you just weren't mentioned then or came just a bit too late to the party. And I see they have a plan in place for a crash-homecoming, which is good since the ability to do just that is one reason the Admiralty felt it could spare the ships here.

Somehow, of all the problems she'd envisioned facing on the day she returned to her birth world's navy, this one hadn't occurred to her, and it should have. She'd been too focused on Grayson's long-standing prohibition against seeing its wives and daughters serving in the military, worried too much about whether or not Grayson males would be prepared to accept a female Grayson voice of command as well as they had become accustomed to accepting female Manticoran voices from Steadholder Harrington and the other "loaners" from the RMN. She'd braced herself for dealing with subordinates who found it hard to believe any proper Grayson girl could be a "real officer," but she'd never considered how more traditional Grayson males might respond to the almost genetic-level social and religious programming of their birth society.

Abigail Hearns is not having fun serving with her countrymen again. Not because they disdain the idea of a woman officer, but because they'll never forget she's a Steadholder's heir, and keep annoying her with the "My Lady" in place of "Ma'am."

She already labored under the distinction of being the only member of the ship's company who was permanently assigned her own bodyguard, as Grayson law required. Mateo Gutierrez, her towering personal armsman, had fitted himself as neatly into Tristram's small ship's company as he had into Hexapuma's, but everyone knew he was there, and she suspected that some of her Manticoran-born fellows thought his presence was just the sort of pretension to be expected out of Neobarbs. And the sort of special consideration which was bound to give her a vastly inflated sense of her own importance. She didn't need any of the other lieutenants aboard who were senior to her deciding that the Grayson members of the crew accorded her greater respect and obedience than they did anyone else, either. Nor, for that matter, did Abigail like it very much, herself. One of the things she'd loved about her experience in the Royal Manticoran Navy was that as far as most Manties were concerned, she was only Lieutenant Hearns. No one wasted a lot of time kowtowing to her, or looking as desperately eager to please as puppies.

And she's still legally required as an heir to have at least one armsman accompany her at all times.

You've only been aboard ship for six days, Abigail, she reminded herself. It might be just a little bit early yet to be letting your frustration quotient rise so high, don't you think? Besides, at least thirty percent of the ship's company is Grayson.

It's a small crew, sixty-odd people and a full third are Grayson. High Admiral Matthews was serious, it seems, about Grayson transfers getting experience aboard the Rolands. FOr that matter, Abby's tactical section has at least one Lieutenant (JG) and five ratings.

So far, most of her Manticoran personnel seemed to be taking their Grayson crewmates' peculiarities pretty much in stride. The fact that Manticore had its own aristocracy probably helped in that respect, although even now not all Manticorans seemed prepared to take Grayson titles quite seriously. But Abigail had decided at the outset that she couldn't accept one set of responses from Manticorans and another from Graysons. She'd seen enough evidence of what allowing cliques to form aboard a warship could do to its internal cohesiveness. Her department was going to be composed of people who were all members of the same ship's company, not internally divided into "us" and "them," Manticorans and Graysons. At the same time, she didn't want to hammer Pettigrew. For one thing, much as it irritated her, he hadn't really done anything to be hammered for. And, for another thing, reprimanding him for the way he addressed her would only draw attention to the very fault lines she was determined to eradicate in the first place.

Good attitude to have.

"Jesus," Lieutenant Wanda O'Reilly's voice was quiet but harsh as she leaned slightly across the table towards Lieutenant Vincenzo Fonzarelli in Tristram's wardroom. "Who had this frigging brainstorm?"

Fonzarelli, Tristram's chief engineer, took his time sipping from his beer mug while he considered O'Reilly thoughtfully. Like the rest of the destroyer's company, her officers were split between Manticorans and Graysons. Unlike the rest of Tristram's company, they were split just about evenly, and O'Reilly was one of the Manticorans who seemed to have a bit of a problem with that.

And with one of those Graysons in particular, I'd say, Fonzarelli reflected. The idiot.

Meet Ms. O'Reilly, Tristram's com officer and our designated anti-Grayson bigot for this crew. Seems half the officers are Graysons too.

"As a matter of fact," the engineer said mildly, lowering his mug, "I believe the Skipper came up with the notion of making it a squadron-wide, winner-take-all competition. The original idea of having the ships exercise against each other, though, came from Lieutenant Hearns, I think."

"Well, that figures!" O'Reilly snorted.

"And just what exactly does that mean?" Fonzarelli asked, still in that mild tone of voice.

"You know," O'Reilly replied, waving one hand in the air between them and—Fonzarelli noticed—careful to keep her volume down.

"No, I don't," the engineer disagreed.

Background. Abby wanted her tac people to have shooting/tactical problem contest in the sims, and Captain Kaplan liked the idea so much she talked to some people and made it squadron-wide, and now O'Reilly is grumbling because they haven't had more than a few weeks to work up and won't even get to Spindle for over a week.

"Don't much care for Lieutenant Hearns, do you, Wanda?" he asked after a moment.

"What's not to care about?" O'Reilly responded with another of those shrugs. "I hardly even know her!"

"The very thought that had just crossed my own mind," Fonzarelli agreed. "But that wasn't really answering my question. So let me try phrasing it a bit more clearly. What's your problem with Hearns, Wanda?"

The engineer's voice hardened on the final sentence, and O'Reilly glowered at him. Unfortunately for the communications officer, while they were both senior-grade lieutenants, Fonzarelli was almost a full T-year senior to her. That didn't leave much wiggle room in the face of a specific question.

"I don't like her," she finally said, his expression almost defiant. "I don't like her, and I don't think she's really qualified for TO, either."

"I see." Fonzarelli smiled ever so slightly. It was not an extraordinarily pleasant expression. "Let me see if I've got it straight, though. You've known her for less than one week, and you've already decided you don't like her. And on the basis of that same lengthy acquaintance, you've decided she's not qualified as the ship's tactical officer, either. I am awed by the clarity and deliberate speed with which your extraordinary intellect comes to these carefully considered evaluations."

O'Reilly's face flushed more darkly than ever. Given her fair complexion, it was painfully obvious, too, and she knew it. Which only made her even angrier, Fonzarelli supposed.

"Look," the communications officer said rather more sharply, "I never claimed I know her well. You asked me what my problem with her was, and I told you."

"That's true enough," Fonzarelli agreed. "But you also said you don't think she's qualified for her position. That's a pretty serious accusation to be leveling at the ship's senior tactical officer."

"Maybe it is. But this wouldn't be the first time someone's family or connections got him moved up faster than his ability justified, and you know it. Christ, Vincenzo! Don't tell me you've never served with—or under—some idiot whose sole qualification for her position was whose cousin she was!"

Well, at least this particular annoying subplot looks like it's going to get wrapped up quickly. And I get that Hearns is young for her job, but she's been in three battles already so where does the comm officer get off questioning her skills?

"Maybe not," O'Reilly said stubbornly. "And I'll grant you Harrington's got a reputation for not playing the favorites game. But I still say Hearns wouldn't be where she is today if her last name had been Smith."

"Or O'Reilly, maybe?" Fonzarelli asked softly.

"Maybe." O'Reilly's glower was unyielding. "And I'm not going to be the only one who thinks that, either."

"Well, allow me to suggest that you'd better let those others be the ones to badmouth her." Fonzarelli looked her up and down and shook his head. "The last thing any ship needs is some officer undercutting some other officer's authority. I believe you'll find the Regs frown on that sort of behavior. And I also believe you'll probably find the XO's boot so far up your backside you'll be tasting leather for a week or so."

O'Reilly's eyes narrowed, and Fonzarelli shook his head again.

"I don't have any intention of going to Commander Tallman about this, Wanda. And from what I've seen of her, neither will Hearns when it finally comes to her ears. And that will happen if you keep this up, as you and I both know perfectly well. I mean, that's one reason you're sharing it with me instead of discussing it directly with her, isn't it? To be sure the campaign gets nicely underway?"

His lip curled slightly, and O'Reilly's jaw muscles tightened angrily. Not that Fonzarelli seemed to notice her reaction particularly—or care about it if he did—as he continued levelly.

"I'd say Hearns is the kind of person who fights her own battles, and I think she's not going to want to go running to Commander Tallman to make the big, bad Manty lieutenant be nice to her and stop saying all those nasty things. Not that I think you're going to like what happens to you when she decides to handle you all on her own. And however she feels about involving the XO won't make one damned bit of difference, as far as you're concerned, if he hears about it on his own. Trust me on that one. Or don't." The engineer shrugged as O'Reilly almost visibly hunkered down and dug in her heels. "It's no skin off my nose which way you go with this. But I think it's gonna be quite a bit of skin off of another part of your anatomy if you piss off the Skipper and the XO."

I'd say the engineer has a much better idea where this is heading.

"I never had any doubts about her capability, Ma'am," he said. "Obviously, I don't know her as well as you do, but just looking through her personnel jacket, it was pretty clear she's not the kind of person who panics and runs around in circles when the shit hits the fan. And I have to agree with you, however junior she may be, she's got as much or more experience with the Mark 16 than any other officer around. But if I'm going to be honest, I did cherish a few doubts about her age. She's so damned young I expect to hear her uniform squeaking when she walks by. And, let's face it, 'good when the shit hits the fan' doesn't automatically equate to someone who's a good officer all around. I guess a part of me just questioned whether or not anyone her age could possibly have enough experience on the administrative and training side to run an entire tactical department."

"And does that question still bother you?" Kaplan asked.

"No, Ma'am. Not really." Tallman shook his head. "I'll admit, I've been keeping a closer eye on her administrative and personnel management skills than those of anyone else on board. So far, she hasn't dropped a single stitch anywhere on the paperwork side. And my spies tell me she already knows every member of her department by name, along with the world he comes from, his hometown, whether or not he's married—or romantically involved with anyone—and apparently even who his favorite sports teams are."

Speaking of the XO, he seems to have cherished a few doubts about Abby himself, but is getting over them.

"Good. But," she leaned back in her chair, "correct me if I'm wrong, but do I detect the merest hint of resentment on the part of some of her fellow officers?"

"Not on any sort of general scale," Tallman told her. "There are some people who feel their noses have been put out of joint, but to be honest, none of them would have been in the running for the tactical officer's slot even if Abigail had never come along at all. I wouldn't worry about it too much, Ma'am. We've got some cooler heads out there helping to sit on the ones with the problem, and she's turning out to be pretty damned good at doing that sort of thing herself. I think it probably has to do with growing up as a steadholder's daughter. She had to learn the basic people-managing skills early on. And if all else fails, you can always reach for your patented five-dollar special executive officer hammer. Not that I think you're going to need it any time especially soon."

As we've already seen.

"Well, since you've put my mind to rest on that little problem, let's look at the next one on the list," she suggested. "I've been thinking over what Fonzarelli was saying about the forward impeller rooms, and I think he's got a point. Given how cramped the access way is thanks to the chase armament and the launchers, getting everyone to battle stations is going to be a lot bigger pain in the ass than BuShips allowed for. We need to be looking at some revised flow patterns there, I think, if we want to avoid a major bottleneck when we can least afford it. I've been pushing some numbers around on the ship's schematic, and I think if we move the route for Point Defense Two's and Four's crews up one deck, and the crews for PD One and Three down a deck, we ought—"

And they're planning designated routes for everyone to get to their battle stations in a hurry, so there aren't any hallway traffic jams.

Albrecht Detweiler looked out across the ranked seating of the palatial auditorium as he strode towards the lectern, and his expression was sober. The auditorium wasn't really all that large, despite its luxurious furnishings and absolutely state-of-the-art communications and briefing equipment. It was also buried under the next best thing to two hundred meters of solid earth and ceramacrete, making it impervious to any known snooping system, which was not a minor consideration on a day like this. And although its maximum seating capacity was under a thousand, there were no more than eight hundred people in its comfortable seats this afternoon. It was more than big enough for that, and he felt a sense of anticipation humming through his blood as he looked out at those eight hundred.

A secret underground auditorium, for the Mesan Alignment's super-secret pep rallies.

They represented the core leadership of the entire Mesan Alignment. A handful of people were missing, among them his sons Franklin and Gervais. He missed Franklin and Gervais more than most of the others, but their absence wasn't truly critical. Franklin was in charge of the Alignment's political penetration strategies, which meant most of his attention was focused on the Solarian League, and the Sollies were really at most a secondary concern today. Gervais, on the other hand, was effectively the Alignment's foreign secretary, the Alignment's primary contact with its out-system allies, which made his absence of greater significance than Franklin's this afternoon. Still, all of those allies already understood their parts in the overall plan, even if they didn't understand precisely how all of those parts fitted together or to what true end, and everyone had known for decades that when the time finally came to pull the trigger, there might well not be time to brief all of them first.

What sons F And G do for Dettweiler. Specifically manage their various agents and allies respectively.

"What this means," he said flatly, "is that the combined walls of battle of Manticore and Haven have been effectively gutted. At this moment, the Manties' Eighth Fleet is probably the only organization on either side which actually deserves to be called a 'fleet' at all. I would be astonished to discover that they could have suffered fewer than a million and a half human casualties between them, which is bound to have its own impact in the not-too-distant future, but the critical point is that Haven no longer has an effective battle fleet at all, and that Eighth Fleet is going to be anchored to Manticore for the foreseeable future."

He stopped speaking and stepped back from the lectern, and Albrecht took his place there once more.

"Obviously," he said quietly, "there are still a great many things we don't know. But what we do know clearly indicates that, as Benjamin's just said, the combat power of both the Manticoran alliance and the Republic of Haven has been effectively—if temporarily—wiped out."

His smile would have done any Old Earth shark proud.

Well, the Mesans are pleased as punch with how the Battle of Manticore worked out.

"Of course, the Manties are not alone at this time. In addition to the Royal Manticoran Navy itself, the Manticoran Alliance can count on the Grayson Navy and the Andermani. Indications are that the Andermani took significant damage themselves at Manticore, and previous reports have indicated that their general warfighting technology is still lagging behind the rest of the Alliance's. Moreover, the Andermani have always been . . . pragmatic. They signed on to the Alliance to fight Haven; none of our analysts believes they'd be willing to take on the SLN, especially if they'd be doing so effectively single-handedly. Which means that who we really have to worry about are the Manties and the Graysons. Given time, Haven would undoubtedly become a threat once more, as well, but once Manticore and Grayson go down, Haven won't have that time."

That's a fair point given all he knows, there's no good reason for the Andermani to want to get dragged into a shooting war with the League.

"A very few of you are aware that Benjamin has been working for quite some time now on an operation codenamed Oyster Bay. Those of you who know about it, also know we're still far short of all of our projected readiness dates for mounting it. However, Oyster Bay was originally intended to strike Manticore, Grayson, and all of the major Havenite building centers simultaneously. It would be impossible for us to launch an operation on that scale before the Manties' new construction comes out of the yards. But the fact that that new construction is still in the yards, concentrated in a limited volume of space where we can find it and get at it, and without the ability to defend itself, represents an enormous force multiplier for the Oyster Bay resources already available to us. In addition, we don't need to strike the Havenites at this moment. Their wall of battle has been effectively destroyed; their construction rates are still much slower than those of the Manties or the Graysons; and they don't have this new targeting system the Manties have deployed. In other words, we can deal with them later, using more conventional tactics if we have to.

"So, what it comes down to is this. The Manties' new technology is more dangerous than ever, but their combat strength has been cut back to no more than forty to sixty ships of the wall, and they have to be reeling strategically from the losses they've already taken. Despite their new tech, they're vulnerable in a way they've never been before. We have the means already in place in or approaching Talbott to cut off that entire lobe of this new 'Star Empire' of theirs, and get them into the shooting war with the League we've always wanted. And, after discussing our own readiness states with Benjamin and Daniel, I believe we're in a position to launch a modified, downscaled Oyster Bay, targeted on Manticore and Grayson only, within six T-months."

Oyster Bay, a massive sneak attack meant to cripple all shipbuilding capability. Originally it was meant to hit Manticore, Grayson and Haven. As it stands now, they don't have the hsips and with this window of vulnerability they want to go now and hit just Manticore and Grayson. Particularly as they're really afraid of a clear victory in the Haven War, and a vast Apollo-equipped RMN that could bedevil their schemes later.

[VhenRa]

He is actually wrong about Haven IIRC. Didn't the Havenites still have their Capital fleet? And a degree of building that is nuts. Fairly sure Haven has something like 400-500 SDPs under construction at this point... and they have enough ships to commit around 200-300 brand new Wallers to 2nd Manticore a year after 1st Manticore.

[Mr Bean]

He is actually wrong about Haven IIRC. Didn't the Havenites still have their Capital fleet? And a degree of building that is nuts. Fairly sure Haven has something like 400-500 SDPs under construction at this point... and they have enough ships to commit around 200-300 brand new Wallers to 2nd Manticore a year after 1st Manticore.

They are dead wrong as pointed out, by the time of Oyster Bay it's mentioned that Haven already has over 100 SD ready to go not counting their own capital fleet. Simply put Haven has had twenty years to get masses of trained spacers and refine the construction process down to a hard and fast science compared to 1900 Haven which still had issues of Cronyism and armed robber outlook.


Or in other words the 1900 fleet was designed to take Manticore and help them loot the system to keep the Dole going and the citizens pacified. The 1920s fleet is designed to win a war of survival against a foe who can and will destroy them if they fail.

[VhenRa]

And here is the thing... the Havenite economy from memory is still recovering from the People's Republic days. Havenites are building the most capital warships of any power and have been doing so for awhile...

And to make matters worse, the Manties actually managed to get the bulk of their new construction out of the yards before Oyster Bay regardless from memory and were already in the process of starting the next construction cycle. In other words, Mesa jumped the gun badly there, their stated reason of doing it right then was to catch Manty construction late in their current construction cycle for Wallers... they caught them in the next cycle.

[Simon_Jester]

Well, that's still better than letting them sit still and churn out several hundred Apollo-capable capital sihps. Based on what Mesa thought they knew the plan at least made sense, and it more or less worked in that it had the desired effect on Manticoran defensive capability. Just not to the extent that had been anticipated.

And they're planning designated routes for everyone to get to their battle stations in a hurry, so there aren't any hallway traffic jams.

...There are only sixty people on the ship... O_o

That really shouldn't be enough for traffic jams lasting more than a few seconds.

[Terralthra]

How many seconds are you really comfortable delaying 4 point defense stations' readiness?

Plus, it specifies that this is very particular to the chase area of the ship. My guess is that shoving 6 missile launchers in a destroyer's hammerhead cramps the hell out of hall volume.

[Simon_Jester]

[Pictures jam at the door of his classroom at end of third period]

OK, maybe I can see i in that respect.

[Mr Bean]

[Pictures jam at the door of his classroom at end of third period]

OK, maybe I can see i in that respect.

This is also a thing modern fleets do today, practicing getting to your battle station from berthing and sometimes the chow hall. Because of the speed demands you either practice the routes and drill them twenty times a month until the entire crew can do them in their sleep (And real life indicates most people will do the first 50 meters in their sleep) or you risk a cluster fuck as doors designed to let two people squeeze by if they are thin instead get jammed up by five people with twenty behind them.

We have people better able to answer this that myself since CT's don't need to go far (Typically about twenty feet max) to get to our battle stations but from the stories from AO's and DC chiefs that 0400 battlestations drills resulted in gun crews that were 6 guys strong of which two would still be in berth clothing (IE naked or underwear) sometimes after the drill was over they would have to backtrack to find where they dropped their sheets. It's not laziness it's just you drill something enough and you go from asleep to running down a passageway not sure why until you realize that's a GQ alarm.