Bit of Analysis: HH Crown of Slaves

[Simon_Jester]

Probably one of the short-story collections, or maybe a short story he wrote for an entirely different anthology that isn't canonically "Honorverse" as such.

[Batman]

If it happened in one of the novels I sure as hell don't remember it and I've read all of them at least twice, including rereading them in order as these threads unfolded.

[Ahriman238]

Great to find a forum with some good HH-verse discussion.

Got a little question I've been pummeling my brain over for the last few months, I think this is the best-fitting of the various HH threads to ask it in. At some time after the Zilwicki family and Cathy Montaigne returned from Earth after the Manpower Incident, there have been a few mentions of the attack on Cathy's townhouse. Did this actually happen "on camera" or is it just in those brief mentions?

I was sure I'd read — a long time ago — a moderately detailed account of what happened, but I've skimmed over all the books and story collections (I don't have all of them) in the right time period with no luck. Am I misremembering, or did I skim right over the chapter every time without noticing, or what?

I've seen a few secondhand accounts since I started, no real story. If a short story it's not in the first four anthologies.

[Ahriman238]

McBryde gazed at him for a moment, thinking about how long they'd known one another. Their careers had brought them together and separated them again often enough over the years, and Lathorous had spent considerably longer in the field as a "shooter" than McBryde had. Unlike the McBryde genome, the Lathorous genome was a beta-line, but even without the sort of nonbiological implants some of the military and/or security-oriented beta and gamma lines often received, Lathorous was a decidedly lethal presence. McBryde was reasonably certain his old friend had been assigned to the Gamma Center specifically to provide the additional, relatively recent field experience he himself lacked.

And, despite their friendship, Lathorous was undoubtedly the most dangerous person in the entire Gamma Center where McBryde's own increasingly ambivalent feelings towards the Alignment in general—and the rapid approach of Prometheus, in particular—were concerned.

So it seems a lot of Mesan security and military types go for cybernetic augmentation of one kind or another. Frustratingly vague, but I have high hopes we'll see this guy's range of tricks. And then Victor Cachat will blow his head off with a fletchette gun.

"I think it's about damned time . . . and pretty damned silly," Lathorous replied with a sour chuckle. "Mind you, I'm sure I don't know everything about the full damage Zilwicki and Cachat have managed to do to Manpower—and us—over the years, but I know enough to think eliminating them would be a very good idea. That much I'm entirely in favor of. My only real problem with it, from an operational perspective, is that I'm pretty sure what really happened was that they finally did something that pissed Albrecht off. I mean, really pissed him off." He shook his head. "Putting out what amounts to a 'shoot-on-sight' order to everyone isn't exactly a calm, reasoned response. I mean, how likely is it that anybody here at the Center is going to stumble across them in our daily routine?"

Pretty likely, since that's just where they're going. It seems the Alignment has decided to issue 'shoot on sight' orders for Victor and Anton. That makes things more interesting.

"I see Lajos is bitching again," he said.

"Hard to blame him, really."

Lathorous' words were reasonable enough, even sympathetic, but his tone was anything else. He and Lajos Irvine had never gotten along particularly well, and McBryde suspected that at least part of it was Lathorous' yearning to be back in the field. He knew he wasn't going to get there anytime soon, and the fact that Irvine seemed to be agitating for the type of assignment Lathorous wasn't going to get only increased the irritation quotient.

"Actually, I agree with you," McBryde said out loud. "I'm probably as tired of his whining as anyone, but, let's face it, spending your time pretending to be—no, scratch that, actually being—a slave has got to be just about the least appealing assignment Security has."

Lajos is another security type I feel we'll be seeing together, inserted among the slave population to keep an eye on things. So Mesa does that.

"They check out all right, E.D. But talk about motherfuckers! It seems as if everybody on that piece of crap is closely related. The one married couple—I kid you not—are uncle and niece."

E.D. Trimm shook her head, but made no wisecrack of her own. Unlike Blomqvist, who was newly hired, she'd been employed by the SG for almost four decades. Most of which time, she'd spent in orbit working on ship inspection. Since she'd married another resident of the huge space station eighteen years earlier, she rarely returned to the planet any longer, even on vacations.

Blomqvist thought a freighter crew made up of closely related individuals, especially when marriage was involved, was a subject of derision and wonder. He'd learn, soon enough. A high percentage of the crews of such freighters—"gypsies," they were called, usually small in size and with no regular runs of any kind—were comprised of people related to each other. There were whole clans and tribes out there, working the fringes of the interstellar freight trade. Some of them were so large they even held periodic conclaves; where, among other things, marriages were contracted. There were some powerful incentives to keeping their businesses tightly held, after all.

Family-held 'gypsy' freighters are fairly common, and Mesan Security does DNA testing on all visitors.

She straightened up. "Just take my word for it. Everyone's better off leaving the ragtag and bobtail seccy trade to the gypsies. Easier for everybody, especially us. The only important thing—check this for me too, if you would—is how long the Hali Sowle is requesting orbit space."

Blomqvist pulled up yet another screen. "Anywhere up to sixteen T-days, it looks like."

Trimm frowned. That was a little unusual. Not unheard of, by any means, but still out of the ordinary. Most gypsies wanted to be in and out of Mesan orbit as fast as possible. Not because the Mesan trade gave them any moral qualms, but simply because they weren't making money unless they were hauling freight somewhere.

"What reason do they give?" she asked.

"They say they're waiting for a shipment of jewelry coming from Ghatotkacha. That's a planet . . ." He squinted at the screen, trying to find the data.

"It's the second planet of Epsilon Virgo, over in Gupta Sector," said Trimm. The request for such a long orbital stay made sense, now. Gupta Sector was rather isolated and the only easy access to the big markets of the League was through the Visigoth Junction. Given the notorious fussiness of Visigoth's customs service, any freighter captain with half a brain who needed to spend idle time in orbit waiting for a shipment to arrive would choose to do so at the Mesan end of the terminus.

An oddity is how long their ride is hanging out.

"Send them a message, Gansükh. I want to see the financial details of their contract of carriage. Certified data only, mind you. We're not taking their word for it."

From the frown on his face, it was obvious that Blomqvist didn't understand why she wanted that information.

"For your continuing education, young man. The financial section of their contract of carriage should tell us who's paying for their lost time in orbit. The shipper of origin? Or it could even be the jewelers themselves. Or the final customer, or their broker. Or . . ."

His face cleared. "I get it. Or maybe they're eating the cost themselves. In which case . . ."

"In which case," E.D. said grimly, "we're sending a pinnace over there with orders to fire if they don't allow a squad of armored cops aboard to search that vessel stem to stern. There's no way a legitimate gypsy would agree to swallow the cost of spending that much time in orbit, twiddling their thumbs."

Ah, don't you hate it when the bad guys have competent, suspicious security?

"And how long do we stay?"

"Until the freighter from Gupta brings us the goods. If they time it right, they'll arrive two or three days before our deadline here in orbit runs out. It'll take less than a day for customs to check everything. Then we're on our way to Palmetto, just as our—completely legitimate—papers say we are. A quick swap of the jewels on Palmetto for a cargo of sutler goods, and we're back again. That shouldn't take more than two weeks. By then, we'll have established our bona fides with Mesan customs, and we should be able to get permission to stay in orbit for up to thirty T-days."

"And what if Anton and Victor need to make an escape during one of the stretches while we're gone?"

"Then they're shit out of luck. There's simply no way we can stay in orbit indefinitely, given our cover story. Not anywhere that has a functioning planetary government, much less Mesa. They're on the paranoid side here, and for damn good reason, as generally hated as they are." She shrugged. "But if those two characters are as good as they think they are—which is probably true—then they'll have enough sense to time whatever they might be doing that's likely to set off any alarms for one of the stretches we're in orbit. Of course, it's always possible they'll get caught by surprise by something unexpected. But that's the risk they run, in that business. Either way, I made sure we're covered in the contract. We get paid, no matter what happens."

The extraction plan, and there really is an inbound cargo.

Besides, the BSC would be footing most of the bill anyway. They'd agreed to pay the Butry clan an annual stipend for the use of the station. The stipend was more than enough to pay for the expense of providing every one of its members still young enough with prolong treatments—and with plenty left over to send them away for a regular education. The contribution of the Ballroom—technically, the Torch military and if you accepted that at face value you were a moron—was mostly going to be muscle. They'd be the ones who staffed the station, maintained the pretense it was still a slaver entrepot while actually using it as a combination stellar safe house and way station for covert operations—and treat themselves to shooting down the stray slaver ship that showed up from time to time.

It was over. Regardless of what happened to Ganny and the few members of her clan on the Hali Sowle, she'd finally managed to save the clan itself.

In case you were sitting on the edge of the seat, wondering at the fate of the amusement park and the Butry family.

She went to her own work station and spent a minute or so keying in some instructions, before hitting the send button. The Hali Sowle's legitimacy, heretofore provisional and temporary, was now established in the data banks of the Mesan System Guard. The next time they came through, if they ever did, the routine would go much more quickly.

She hadn't bothered to check the details of the data on Blomqvist's screen. There was no reason to waste the time. Faking that seal and logo was effectively impossible for anyone except maybe a handful of governments in the galaxy. It was certainly beyond the capability of a gypsy freighter.

* * *

It was not, however, beyond the capability of the government of Erewhon—or any of its major families, even using their own private resources. Jeremy X had been quite right. The great families of Erewhon were still the galaxy's premier money-launderers.

When one of his subordinates brought the news to Walter Imbesi that everything had cleared for the Hali Sowle in the Mesa System, he simply nodded and went back to his business. The only reason he'd asked to be notified at all was because of the political sensitivity of the project. In purely financial terms, measured against the fortune of his family, it all amounted to chicken feed.

Still, even chicken feed was not to be sneered at. The Imbesis would very likely turn a small profit. The jewels were perfectly legitimate and there was a market for them, after all. Even the sutler trade on the reverse leg shouldn't do worse than break even.

And Imbesi managed to fake everything they'd need and turn a modest profit at the same time. The reputation for speed, quality and discretion of the Erewhoni in criminal matters remains secure.

"For the moment, yes, both sides are pretty much at a standstill. Theisman's lost his major striking force, but at least he's got a lot of new construction currently working up to give him coverage in his rear areas, for whatever good it's going to do against the Manties' new fire control. Manticore and the Alliance, on the other hand, still have Eighth Fleet, but they don't have anything else left to cover Manticore if they cut Harrington loose for additional offensive operations. They don't have as many new-build wallers already working up as Haven does, but they've got quite a few, and they've got a bunch of new construction getting ready to come out of the yards. After the Battle of Manticore, they may be a little short of experienced personnel for crews, but they're going to have a lot of hulls available shortly. Not as many as Haven has, even now, but a lot . . . and I think we have to assume all of their new wallers are going to have their new fire control. So while neither side has anything it can use to go after the other one right now, in another few months, Manticore is going to be in a position to reach right down Haven's throat and rip its lungs out."

-snip-

"Basically, we're currently in a strategic vacuum. Nobody's got a lot of firepower to spare or to throw around, but as Edie says, once Manticore's new construction starts really coming forward, that's going to change. All of those 'minor distractions' the Manties are facing in Talbott are going to have a braking effect on their deployment postures, of course, but even so, I give Haven another six T-months—nine at the outside—before Harrington is sent off to turn the entire Haven System into one huge scrapyard. And unless Pritchart and Theisman are prepared to surrender, I think that's exactly what's going to happen. I sure as hell don't see them coming up with some kind of silver bullet in time to save them, anyway."

Someone actually discussing the near future after the Battle of Manticore, in this case Rozsak and his people.

"In our immediate area, I've got a feeling Erewhon is going to be very carefully staying close to home until the situation between Manticore and Haven finally works itself out. I'm certain the Erewhonese were as taken by surprise by the direct attack on Manticore—and, for that matter, by whatever new toy Admiral Hemphill's come up with—as we were. I think they probably view the fact that Elizabeth was prepared to ask them to provide security for Torch when it looked like the summit was going to meet as a provisionally good sign. At the same time, though, they have to know Manticore generally is still pretty pissed off with them. I think they're going to want to make it as evident as they can that, despite any mutual defense treaties with the Republic, they're about as neutral as anyone can get and still be breathing where the current unpleasantness is concerned. Preliminary indications are that they're basically forting up at home, aside from routine commerce protection missions, and I'll be surprised if that changes.

And where Erewhon sits right now. I wonder if there's a pithy Erewhoni saying about betting on the wrong horse?

"How much of the new stuff would we have to trot out if we wanted to defend Torch?"

"That depends on the exact force level Manpower would be able to commit against us." Rozsak shrugged. "I'm not trying to waffle; it's just that we don't know, at this point, exactly what kind of resources are involved from the other side. Before the Battle of Monica, I would have felt fairly confident we wouldn't be facing anything except the ex-StateSec ships we know they've recruited and probably another double handful or so of other pirates or mercs. Nothing bigger and nastier than two or three backgrounders, in other words, and mostly getting pretty long in the tooth, as well. As things stand now, I'm not prepared to rule out the possibility that they've got a few more Solarian Navy—or ex-SLN, at least—warships to make available to them. Against the level of opposition I'd have anticipated before Monica, I think we could probably do a pretty good job without bringing everything we have to the party. Against what we may actually be looking at, we'd probably need just about all of our new units."

"But, Governor," Watanapongse put in diffidently, "we need to bear in mind where we'd be using them. If we intervene to defend Torch, there's no way the Torches would be telling anyone anything about how we intervened if we asked them not to. And assuming this really would be a Manpower operation, the other side wouldn't have any powerful motive that we can see to make Old Chicago privy to whatever information might get back to it with the survivors."

"So you're saying you think letting the cat out of the bag in Torch would constitute an acceptable risk, Commander?" Barregos said.

"What he's saying, and I happen to agree with him, is that risking letting the cat out of the bag in Torch is a more acceptable risk than depriving ourselves of the firepower we might need to win in Torch," Rozsak said, and Barregos nodded.

But the Maya Sector Sollies are genuinely committed to defending Torch, which is really, really nice.

"What's the guy's name?"

"Daniel McRae. What he claims, anyway. He also claims to be another StateSec on the run. I couldn't tell you if that's true either, but he does have a Nouveau Paris accent. That's hard to fake."

For once, Victor's indisguisable accent helps him out.

"Did you send him to Cybille and her people?"

"Yeah. They spent hours with him. Cybille says his story checks out down the line and he's okay." Triêu made a face. "Well . . . 'okay' is not exactly the right word. She's says McRae's probably a psychopath. Most of those really hardcore StateSec guys were. But this one's pretty tightly wrapped, she figures. The fact that he was that close to Saint-Just means he can't just be a screwball. Whatever else he was, Saint-Just was thoroughly practical. He wouldn't have tolerated anyone around him who was so crazy he couldn't keep the lid on."

You have no idea. Instead of playing a legend or some kind of cover, it looks like this will be Victor Cachat, acting as Victor Cachat.

Jurgen Dusek nodded. Over the past few years, he'd become a lot more familiar with the history and inside practices of the former People's Republic of Haven's security forces than you'd expect anyone on Mesa would be. More familiar than he wanted to be, for that matter. But the business of brokering between StateSec mercenaries and the people who'd been hiring so many of them had turned out to be a more profitable line of business than anything else he was engaged in.

Damn risky, though. Not because he was dealing with ex-StateSec toughs and thugs—Jurgen had been handling people like that since he was fourteen—but because of the people on the other end. Those still-very-murky individuals or organizations whose exact identity Dusek didn't know and didn't want to know. "Still-very-murky" suited him just fine. If everything worked out well, they'd stay nice and murky.

But that was the problem. There was always the danger, dealing with "murky people" on Mesa, that you'd eventually discover you'd climbed into bed with Manpower. Or, even worse, the really murky people whom Dusek sensed were lurking somewhere within Manpower, or behind it.

Interesting that people on Mesa outside the onion seem to know there's more going on behind Manpower than is generally known, and are too smart to ask questions or talk about it.

It wasn't that he had any moral objection to the idea of being tied to Manpower. Either today or at some point in his life, Jurgen Dusek had been a knee-breaker, a contract killer, a pimp, a drug dealer, a counterfeiter (of welfare chits, not money; nobody in their right mind tried to pass fake money on Mesa), a brothel-keeper—several brothels, in fact—a gambling overlord, a smuggler—the list went on and on. His capacity for accepting and taking advantage of immoral business opportunities was well-nigh infinite.

Yeah, but aligning with Manpower puts you against the Ballroom, I get it. Now just why is "nobody in their right mind" running a counterfeiting operation on Mesa?

"She's sure he was part of Saint-Just's inner circle?"

"Absolutely and positively certain. She says McRae knows far too many things—details, specifics, not generalities—than anybody possibly could without having been right in the middle of things. In fact, she figures he probably knows more than she ever did, when it comes to field work. Cybille stresses that McRae would have been a very junior member of that inner circle. He wasn't any sort of high level StateSec official, or even mid-level like she was. But she says she recognizes the type. Saint-Just had the habit of cultivating young protégés for field work. People whose dedication and ruthlessness were . . . well, 'extreme' is the word she used. Coming from Cybille . . ."

Dusek grinned humorlessly. Cybille DuChamps had her own reputation for, ah, extreme behavior. For her to call anyone else a "psychopath" was pretty rich. It was literally worth your life to become her lover—and you didn't even get to enjoy the status for more than three or four months.

Now there's a scary thought, a cadre of people like Victor Cachat only totally dedicated to Saint-Just's revolution.

"Is he asking for anything right now? Money? Women? A place to stay?"

"He seems well enough set up." Chuanli smiled. "The only thing he says he wants—he's willing to pay for it, too—is a gun. And unless he's got the sex drive of a rabbit, I doubt he needs a woman. He's got a big blonde with him who's better looking than most of the girls we could provide him with."

"What's her story?"

"Scrag, believe it or not."

Jurgen's eyes widened. For a StateSec man to be coupled with a Scrag girlfriend was highly unusual. Offhand, in fact, Dusek couldn't think of a single case he knew of.

"How'd he manage that?"

"They were both on Terra during the Manpower Incident. Among the few who got out alive and intact. I guess they got hooked up there and they've stayed together ever since."

Oh yeah, things are going really smoothly for a change, makes me wonder when the other shoe will drop.

Dusek was silent for a minute or so, as he weighed the risks and benefits of providing the McRae fellow with a gun. On the pro side, the risk was minimal and selling McRae a gun would serve for a while to keep him on an informal payroll without actually having to pay him anything. On the con side, there was a risk, however small—and there was always the chance that McRae was just a nut case.

But, even if that were true, it just meant there'd be another killing in a district which already had the worst murder rate in the city. (The worst official murder rate. The actual murder rate was a lot worse.) Easy enough to handle.

What finally decided Dusek was the need to cross-check McRae yet again. If DuChamps' assessment was accurate—and Jurgen had little doubt that it was—then Daniel McRae had indeed been a legitimate (using the word loosely) member of Saint-Just's inner circle. But that didn't necessarily mean that he was up to snuff, personally. Every inner circle had its flakes. So far as Dusek knew, Saint-Just's sexual preferences had been a complete unknown. Maybe this guy McRae had just been his catamite.

Testing him by giving him a gun?

"A Kettridge Model A-3."

That was an awfully small gun. Easy to hide and deadly enough, if you were a good shot. But most people wanted something quite a bit more powerful, especially mercs.

So, again, there was a possible problem. Maybe the guy was a real gunman. On the other hand, McRae could just be putting up a show and didn't want a man-sized gun that might tire him out, having to lug it around all the time.

"Okay, let him have it. But I want this guy tested, Chuanli. Tested hard. If I broker him to Luff as a top Saint-Just inner circle field op—what lowly crooks like you and me would call an enforcer—then I have to be sure I'm not passing on a creampuff. I don't want to lose Luff as a customer."

Triêu took a little time to ponder the problem. "He's got some rooms not far from the Rhodesian. I'll tell him some people who might want to hire him frequent the place, and he'd be smart to hang out there in the evening. Then I'll tell Jozef to have those three new guys of his show up and hit on the blonde. We'll see what happens."

Victor's preferred firearm, concealability is a higher priority to him than raw firepower. And the 'test' is apparently to try and set up a fight and see what happens.

"You have any problem with the idea?" asked the owner of the restaurant.

Anton Zilwicki smiled. "You mean the degrading status of being a waiter in a greasy spoon joint?"

Steph Turner gave him a thin smile. "You hand a customer a greasy spoon and you're out the door. I don't care how many hosannas Saburo and his people pile on you. The last thing I need is to give the local authorities a reason to inspect the place. The one thing they do take half-seriously are health and sanitation regulations."

Anton's cover, having had his Ballroom contacts smuggle him in and set him up in a diner. Apparently the owner owes her life to Saburo X, who let on that helping Anton in just this would square things.

But that was all in the future. Right now, Anton was just wondering how Victor was managing things. He'd have arrived on Mesa a couple of days sooner than Anton. Maybe as much as three or four days. Either way, though, Cachat would still be getting himself situated. Anton figured he had a few days to get into the rhythm of being a waiter again, before Victor tracked him down.

He smiled, as he started to unpack. "Hell, who knows? Maybe he hasn't even killed anybody yet."

I wouldn't bet on that, particularly with this test they set up for him.

[Ahriman238]

Neither of them had been speaking very loudly to begin with, since they were seated in the governor's box in Corterrael Coliseum on Vorva, the single moon of the planet Smoking Frog. The coliseum's enormous expanse opened before and below them, packed to old-fashioned standing room only as the annual System Festival got underway, and the clowns, acrobats, and jugglers of the Lebowski Circus were taking full advantage of Vorva's low natural gravity. It was one of the "Fabulous Lebowskis' " boasts that they used neither counter-grav nor even safety nets, and the spectacular quadruple somersault Aletha Lebowski had just executed between trapezes had the entire crowd on its feet.

Low-gravity acrobatics are probably really cool.

The Marksman class was unique among Solarian Navy light cruisers in that it had a flag bridge. Of course, the fact that Marksman and her sisters belonged to the Solarian League Navy was something of a technicality, Rozsak supposed. As was the fact that, at 286,750 tons, she was bigger than the majority of the League's heavy cruisers.

She was, in fact, the first of the Maya Sector's "emergency program" to emerge from the newly expanded Carlucci Industrial Group yards in Erewhon, and she and the seven sisters currently in formation about her represented the largest warships in the Maya Sector Frontier Fleet Detachment the SLN had seen fit to place under Rear Admiral Rozsak's command.

A single squadron of the Marksmans are ready, and yes they've had serious tonnage creep, well more of a jump given their circumstances.

Which didn't make them the largest ships under his command, of course. And didn't mean the SLN knew they were actually "his," either. In point of fact, his nominal superiors back on Old Earth were under the odd impression that they were Erewhonese units the SLN was merely helping to man because the Republic of Erewhon found itself "temporarily" short of trained manpower. That sort of assistance was part of the Office of Frontier Security's standard operating procedure for gaining influence with independent star nations, so no one back on Old Earth had turned a hair when Rozsak reported that he was applying the tactic in Erewhon's case. It helped that Erewhon had applied the Royal Manticoran Navy's new standards of automation to its own new construction without bothering to mention that fact to the galaxy at large. The fact that an entire ship's company for one of the Marksmans was actually considerably smaller than the complement of one of the SLN's far smaller Morrigan-class light cruisers made it far easier to convince The Powers That Were back on Old Earth that all Rozsak's people were doing was to "help fill in the holes" in otherwise Erewhonese crews.

How they're selling the ruse back home. Oh, and OFS routinely loans out SLN personnel to Verge navies.

Which was fortunate, in Luiz Rozsak's considered opinion, since it had caused so many people to completely overlook the incisive, sharply honed intelligence lurking behind that stolid, unimaginative-looking exterior. In point of fact, he knew the exterior in question had been developed specifically to hide what was going on behind it . . . including its owner's simmering hatred for what Frontier Security had done to Geronimo, his parents' homeworld. The fact that Kamstra had managed to attain officer's rank in the SLN despite having been born on what had become a Frontier Security protectorate planet six T-years before his own birth made him almost unique. The fact that he'd made it as high as captain (which was a recent promotion) had been made possible only by certain strategically placed patrons, prominent among whom were one Oravil Barregos and one Luiz Rozsak, and they would never have managed to pull it off if anyone in the Solarian League Navy's flag ranks had suspected for one moment how Dirk-Steven Kamstra had come to regard OFS and all its works.

The uniqueness of having a high-ranking officer from such a recent acquisition of OFS.

Like the Marksmans, the Warrior-class destroyers were something entirely new in (theoretically) Solarian service—twenty thousand tons larger and far more lethal than the SLN's standard Rampart-class. Unlike the Marksmans, they were also official units of the SLN, although no one outside the Maya Sector or the Republic of Erewhon realized just how big and powerful they actually were. Commander J.T. Cullingford, Commander Melanie Stensrud, and Commander Anne Warwick completed the ship commanders present, although none of them commanded what were technically warships (as far as anyone outside the Maya Sector or Erewhon knew, at any rate). What they did command was something considerably more dangerous—the first three of the Masquerade-class "freighters" delivered by CIG.

The new destroyers and (pretty sure I mentioned it before but just in case) the Mayans plan to have the freighters, refit as pod-layers even if they lack military drives or armor, accompany the cruisers which have extra fire-control links specifically to let them handle large pod salvos. Almost surprising that Manticore or Haven hasn't tried something like this as an emergency or system-defense measure.

"We've shared our intelligence about what seems to be headed Torch's way with both the Torches and the Erewhonese. Jiri's impression—and mine—is that both of them consider the intel reliable, even though we protected one of our better sources from them. Given the fact that Thandi Palane only has a handful of frigates and McAvoy's under orders to stay home, though, there isn't a whole lot either of them can do with it. Under the circumstances—including the fact that we're the ones with the treaty with Torch—Governor Barregos has directed us to deal with it. That's where you people come in.

For once people are actually talking to each other, sharing information and comparing notes. Alright, it's unfair of me to blame the Manties and Havenites for not doing so, particularly where Prichart tried.

Most of his subordinates nodded soberly at that. The War Harvest-class represented the largest destroyer design in current SLN inventory. The fact that the Maya Sector had been assigned a full flotilla of them (although Destroyer Flotilla 3029, the flotilla in question, was one ship short of the eighteen it should theoretically have had) was an emblem of the Sector's economic importance. The three elderly Morrigan-class light cruisers which had been assigned to lead the flotilla's three squadrons, on the other hand, were an emblem of Frontier Security's . . . ambiguous feelings where Oravil Barregos was concerned. Although they'd been refitted with first-line electronics, they were very little larger than the destroyers they'd been assigned to work with—less than half the size of the Marksmans, in fact.

Apparently a destroyer flotilla, at least a Solly one, is 18 ships. Which seems along with three tiny and elderly cruisers to be the sum total of the forces originally assigned to Maya.

The transitional ship types which had been produced for the Maya Sector in the Carlucci yards were experimental, in one sense, but used proven technological components, in another. The new Warrior-class destroyers were almost ten percent larger even than the War Harvest-class, yet they had twenty-five percent fewer missile tubes and forty percent fewer energy weapons in each broadside than the much smaller Rampart-class. That lesser throw weight had been emphasized in the various reports being sent back to Old Chicago, since it had helped to assuage any possible fears over the combat power of the ships Barregos was building for himself out in Maya. What hadn't been emphasized was that the energy weapons in question were all grasers (not the Ramparts' much lighter—and less powerful—lasers); that the ships carried almost twice the anti-missile defenses of a standard SLN destroyer, that they carried substantially more missiles per tube; and that the missiles in question were the same ones carried by the Royal Manticoran Navy's light units at the close of the First Havenite War. Nor had anyone mentioned the improvements in inertial compensator improvement which gave a Warrior a thirty percent acceleration advantage over Rozsak's War Harvest-class destroyers. It was probably as well for the blood pressure of various senior SLN officers that they were blissfully unaware of just how enormous an increase in combat power all of that represented.

The new destroyers used by Maya and Erewhon. Still not really in the Manticoran's league, but not bad at all, and certainly able to engage their Solly counterparts one-on-one with a good expectation of victory.

The Marksman-class would have come as an even more unpleasant surprise, had anyone in the Sol System had the least idea of their actual specifications. In many ways, what the Marksman really represented was a slightly downsized prewar RMN Star Knight-class heavy cruiser with updated electronics, energy weapons, and missiles and a substantially downsized crew. Her compensator gave her an acceleration rate which, while inferior to a Warrior's, was still twenty-eight percent better than a War Harvest's, and she carried the Mark-17-E, the Erewhon-built version of the Manticoran Mark-14 missile then-Captain Michael Oversteegen had used to such good effect at the Battle of Refuge three T-years earlier. They weren't multidrive missiles; in fact, Manticore had abandoned further development on them when the Mark 16 dual-drive missile proved a practical concept for cruiser-sized tubes. But they were substantially longer ranged than anything in the Solarian inventory, and in the latest Erewhonese version, they mounted heavier laser heads (although with fewer lasing rods) than were carried by any Solarian combatant short of the wall of battle. They were also, unfortunately, much too large to be fired out of the Warriors' missile tubes, far less by any of the older, Solarian-built units under Rozsak's command, and the Marksmans carried only thirty of them for each of the six tubes in each broadside.

Had any SLN observer taken a good look at one of Rozsak's "light cruisers," he might have observed two interesting external peculiarities. First, their weapons seemed a bit asymmetrically arranged. Although they showed the very respectable (especially for a light cruiser) broadside armament of six missile tubes, five grasers, twelve counter missile tubes, and eight point defense stations, there was a peculiar gap in the middle of each broadside—one just about large enough to have accommodated two additional missile tubes. Second, they seemed to have an awful lot of additional planar arrays stuck in some odd-looking places.

Marksman class, in most respects a smaller, more advanced and capable Star Knight, for all it has less missile tubes to a broadside to accommodate the extra fire-control links.

The peculiar plethora of arrays dotting her flanks provided the telemetry links for all that fire control, which gave them—despite the fact that they mounted only six tubes each—enough capability to simultaneously control sixty missiles in each broadside firing arc.

Ultimately, all of that massively redundant fire control would be removed and replaced with the missile tubes of the original "official" design. At the moment, however, they were half the key to Rozsak's entire strategy for covering the gap until the Maya Sector began to take delivery of a substantial force of Erewhon-built ships-of-the-wall of its very own.

Fire-control capabilities, and the extra links were always designed as modular so once they get real podnoughts they can just rip them out and replace them with another two missile tubes.

Based loosely on the Silesian-designed Starhauler "modular" merchant ship, the Masquerade massed a shade over two million tons. The original Starhauler design had featured a downsized standard, configurable internal cargo hull, surrounded by an outer shell of "container" spaces. The idea had been to produce a vessel which could transport individually loaded cargo modules which could be dropped off in transit without taking time for routine offloading procedures. On paper, it had offered many advantages although, in practice, it had proven less successful.

What Carlucci had done in designing the Masquerade as a similar "modular merchant ship" for the Maya Sector was to eliminate the internal cargo hold entirely. Instead, each ship had sixteen pod bays arranged along each side, and each bay had its own power and life-support connections, since part of the idea was that the ship could also be fitted with passenger-carrying pods or climate-controlled or refrigerated pods. That potential power demand also explained why a merchant ship had not one, but two fusion plants.

-snip-

Each of the Masquerade's pod bays just happened to be deep enough to mount three of the Erewhonese Space Navy's standard missile pods stacked end-to-end. It was considerably wider than a single missile pod, however, and CIG had been considerate enough to design a mounting for multiple pods. The initial design accommodated six pods in three rows of two pods each, but an improved design mounting only four pods each in a true "ring" arrangement was just entering production.

The original six-pod configuration offered a greater throw weight per "ring," but the pods it contained were stripped down, with very lightweight grav-drivers. They weren't quite intended as single-shot weapons, but they would require extensive refurbishing before they could be used a second time. The currently available pods also contained the Mark-17-E, not full-scale multi-drive missiles.

The four-pod version's component pods, on the other hand, were far more robust. They'd be reloadable and reusable without requiring enough additional maintenance to amount to something just short of actual rebuilding, and they'd have the independent endurance to be deployed for up to a week at a time. Even more significantly, their individually larger pods would be loaded with the Mark-19, the ESN's most recent MDM variant.

Given the fact that there were sixteen pod bays in each of a Masquerade's broadsides, each arsenal ship carried up to ninety-six pods, which, with the six-pod ring, gave her a total of five hundred and seventy-six pods. That was more firepower than was carried by the vast majority of pod superdreadnoughts three times her size. Unfortunately, those missiles were all she carried. She was a merchant design, with zero armor, no integral point defense capability, no core hull, no life support redundancy, no military-grade lifepods, no integral firecontrol even for her own pods, and no integral electronic warfare capability. If a genuine warship—even a dinky little pre-Manticore LAC—ever got into weapons range of her, she (and her crew) would disappear quickly from the cosmos. Which was why she wasn't supposed to get into weapons range of anyone else. Instead, she was supposed to lie safely out of range of an opponent with no multidrive missiles, launching salvo after salvo of pods which would then be taken under control by the Marksmans, with all of those redundant telemetry links.

Masquerades now with Erewhon MDMs, and the Mayans must have a close relationship with Erewhon to be getting those.

Eventually, her class would also be provided with specially designed "combat pods" which would contain things like counter-missile tubes, point defense stations, sidewall generators, additional life support, fire control, electronic warfare systems, and the like. Unfortunately, all the "combat pods" in the galaxy would never turn her into a proper warship which could hope to survive even minimal damage. Even more unfortunately at the moment, none of those specially designed combat pods were yet available for the only three Masquerades of which Maya had so far taken delivery.

Modular warship, it's a neat concept anyways.

[Mr Bean]

No comment on the fact that Mesa remains committed to heath and welfare inspections of restaurants despite said restaurants being run by second class citizens who are all but untouchables in the Mesa caste system?

I love those little Weber touches of world building. The idea of a space Rapture where all the questionable companies set up headquarters to avoid league taxes and they have entire hundred story ghetto towers in ghetto sectors yet even the Resturants on the wrong side of the tracks get regular heath and welfare inspections from inspectors you can't bribe. That kind of world building that if you think about it for a minute hints at a bit of folklore or some interesting story behind it. Kind of like the Eridani Edict it's mentioned and it's taken as gospel that no one violates that Edict because Eridani was such a bad bit of history. That what happened there was so terrible and the consequences so horrific that it got a constitutional convention called and a new amendment added.

[VhenRa]

Actually, some of those businesses run by the Seccies... are actually officially run by true free citizens who get a cut of the profits to maintain such a ruse. This comes up in Cauldron of Ghosts.

[Simon_Jester]

So it seems a lot of Mesan security and military types go for cybernetic augmentation of one kind or another. Frustratingly vague, but I have high hopes we'll see this guy's range of tricks. And then Victor Cachat will blow his head off with a fletchette gun.

No promises. The ratio of people talking to action in Honorverse novels has been trending upward for twenty years...

Lajos is another security type I feel we'll be seeing together, inserted among the slave population to keep an eye on things. So Mesa does that.

We will see him again. Note that he's a "fake slave" of the same sort that was sent to Torch as an agent. There are NOT many of these, and it seems that they're a product of the Alignment, not so much Manpower directly.

"In which case," E.D. said grimly, "we're sending a pinnace over there with orders to fire if they don't allow a squad of armored cops aboard to search that vessel stem to stern. There's no way a legitimate gypsy would agree to swallow the cost of spending that much time in orbit, twiddling their thumbs."

Ah, don't you hate it when the bad guys have competent, suspicious security?

Fortunately, the good guys' money launderers are even more competent than the bad guys' security!

The extraction plan, and there really is an inbound cargo.

Yes. Also the note that basically all Honorverse planetary governments exercise enough control of their own orbital space that they won't just let people hang around up there indefinitely. Which is, when you think about it, probably necessary in any interstellar SF setting; it's impossible to defend your planet from infiltrators and spies and even covertly placed bombardment weapons if you aren't routinely inspecting and investigating people who slouch around up there.

"Yeah. They spent hours with him. Cybille says his story checks out down the line and he's okay." Triêu made a face. "Well . . . 'okay' is not exactly the right word. She's says McRae's probably a psychopath. Most of those really hardcore StateSec guys were. But this one's pretty tightly wrapped, she figures. The fact that he was that close to Saint-Just means he can't just be a screwball. Whatever else he was, Saint-Just was thoroughly practical. He wouldn't have tolerated anyone around him who was so crazy he couldn't keep the lid on."

You have no idea. Instead of playing a legend or some kind of cover, it looks like this will be Victor Cachat, acting as Victor Cachat.

Basically, yes. Cachat is professional like that; he doesn't fake things when he doesn't have to. He may bullshit you, but he doesn't construct elaborate fraud-personas when he knows it's more trouble than it's worth.

[Also, Saint-Just really didn't tolerate complete lunatics close to his own person. Ransom was an inconvenience he couldn't do anything about, and the real sadists and psychofreaks in StateSec were mostly NOT part of his own inner circle. Sure, he might appoint a psycho to run the prison camp on Hades, but since Hades is comfortably hundreds of light-years away, that has no direct personal consequences for him.]

Interesting that people on Mesa outside the onion seem to know there's more going on behind Manpower than is generally known, and are too smart to ask questions or talk about it.

Well, Dusek is almost ideally placed to know because he's the sort of man you work through when you want something dangerous and illegal done very well but discreetly. But yeah, if you actually have a conspiracy to TAKE OVER ZE GALAXY MUAHAHAAAAAA! going on on a planet, and it needs to operate on an interstellar scale, someone outside the actual conspiracy will probably have at least a vague idea what's going on.

What makes such a conspiracy possible in the Honorverse, I think, is that interstellar travel and communications are actually pretty slow. People don't travel interstellar distances without a good reason (like a really sweet resort you can afford to spend three weeks at, or business, or cargo shipping, or one-way colonization trips).

As a result, nobody really has that accurate an idea of what's going on on other people's planets. It's at least possible to infiltrate the common citizenry of the planet, but a government conspiracy can be concealed very effectively because you just don't have the proximity or the means to tap their phone lines, insert highly placed spies into their government (usually), and so on.

Yeah, but aligning with Manpower puts you against the Ballroom, I get it. Now just why is "nobody in their right mind" running a counterfeiting operation on Mesa?

Well, cash as we know it seems largely obsolete in the Honorverse as we've seen, so you're actually counterfeiting extremely well-secured electronic chips that say "I am worth a thousand dollars" or whatever. Since Mesa is a corporatist state that relies very heavily on the accuracy of financial transactions, AND on the secure, reliable use of untraceable currency for shady dealings...

Yeah, they're going to be pretty hard on anyone who tries to counterfeit the money they use to transact their business.

Oh yeah, things are going really smoothly for a change, makes me wonder when the other shoe will drop.

It's all Simoes' fault, basically.

[Simon_Jester]

The Marksman class was unique among Solarian Navy light cruisers in that it had a flag bridge. Of course, the fact that Marksman and her sisters belonged to the Solarian League Navy was something of a technicality, Rozsak supposed. As was the fact that, at 286,750 tons, she was bigger than the majority of the League's heavy cruisers...

A single squadron of the Marksmans are ready, and yes they've had serious tonnage creep, well more of a jump given their circumstances.

They're bigger than an RMN light cruiser, that's for sure. Honestly, calling them "light" cruisers or "heavy" cruisers is just farcical and we might as well call them "cruisers."

"Guided missile cruiser?"

The new destroyers and (pretty sure I mentioned it before but just in case) the Mayans plan to have the freighters, refit as pod-layers even if they lack military drives or armor, accompany the cruisers which have extra fire-control links specifically to let them handle large pod salvos. Almost surprising that Manticore or Haven hasn't tried something like this as an emergency or system-defense measure.

Sure they did; it was called Wayfarer.

In general, because there's not much point. For defensive purposes, a slow, poorly armored podlayer isn't really much more helpful than just dropping the pods in open space well ahead of time with a minelayer. It may even be less helpful. Manticore and Haven have three-stage MDMs, so they can plant a small number of pod-minefields that have enough range to cover the whole inner system of a defended target.

Meanwhile, Erewhon and Maya can't count on that, so instead they concentrate on being able to take the pods to the enemy... even if that means accepting far more risk of the pods being destroyed, along with the podlaying ship, before getting to fire them at the enemy.

Apparently a destroyer flotilla, at least a Solly one, is 18 ships. Which seems along with three tiny and elderly cruisers to be the sum total of the forces originally assigned to Maya.

A flotilla is classically a fairly large unit; it translates literally as "little fleet" in the same sense that guerilla translates as "little war." And frankly, destroyers are a very economical way for the SLN to provide for its massive patrolling and general operations needs, while being "enough ship" to handle the (few, weak, irregular) forces in the galaxy dumb enough to tangle with the SLN.

So no surprise there, that seventeen destroyers and three light cruisers serving as destroyer leaders would be their idea of a good SLN patrol force.

The new destroyers used by Maya and Erewhon. Still not really in the Manticoran's league, but not bad at all, and certainly able to engage their Solly counterparts one-on-one with a good expectation of victory.

Probably also competitive with Havenite destroyers and small CLs. Remember that Haven has no analogue to the Mark 16 missile. So their light units basically serve no role except to engage enemy light elements trying to close to single-drive missile range, and thickening the wall's antimissile defenses.

Masquerades now with Erewhon MDMs, and the Mayans must have a close relationship with Erewhon to be getting those.

It's a de facto alliance. Maya needs Erewhon's near-Manticoran technological level; Erewhon needs the sheer economic mass of Maya to build up a respectable fighting force that can provide it with real defensive clout in case the balloon goes up.

Modular warship, it's a neat concept anyways.

Experience indicates that it's a bad idea, but if you just plain don't have the capacity to build a warship designed for fighting from the keel up, with all systems physically interlocking so that it can fight... well, you do what you can with what you have.

[Ahriman238]

"Do you really think there's someone here who'd be interested in hiring us?" Yana's eyes, as she inspected the interior of the bar, were as skeptical as her tone of voice. "Talk about a dive."

"No, I don't. DuChamps wouldn't have spent that much time with me if they were just thinking of pawning me off in a routine transaction."

"Then why are we here?"

"A test, I figure. Dusek wants to see if I really have the credentials."

Took Victor about two seconds to spot the hidden test.

Victor had spent years in districts similar to Neue Rostock. For a spy like himself, they were often good places to go to ground or set up an operation. There were some disadvantages to working with criminals, to be sure. But the one great offsetting advantage was that very few hardened criminals were burdened with anything in the way of idle patriotic impulses. As long as they got paid, they didn't care who you were or why you were doing whatever you were doing—which they didn't want to know, anyway.

Every planet with a large population had districts like this in their major cities. The Neue Rostock was by no means the worst Victor had run across. Two of the slum areas in Nouveau Paris, one of them less than a mile from where he'd been born, were just as rough or worse. And, everywhere, there were certain standard practices. Not quite formal rules, but very close. One of them was that any establishment—certainly one like the Rhodesian Rendezvouz—had to pay off the cops to stay in business. But the pay-offs were done in a proper and orderly manner, from the top down. Freelance policemen were not welcome and usually didn't last long.

The only thing out of the ordinary at all about Mesa was that the police were almost completely indifferent to what happened in the seccy slums. The cops left the maintenance of order in these districts to the bosses who ran them. As long as they got their baksheesh, they simply didn't care what happened there. And, being fair about it, the bosses probably maintained order at least as well as the police would have done, and the cut they took from every business was no worse than taxes would have been.

Neue Rostock, part of that large seedy underbelly the cops never venture in.

"It'll be the three at the table on the south wall," Yana predicted. "The ones who came in a few minutes ago."

Not that Yana's any slouch.

Victor Cachat. Her friend Lara, not long before she died, had made the quip that with Victor on your side, you don't need to make any bargains with the devil.

It was true enough. She saw the men at the table push aside their chairs and come to their feet. All three were large, muscular, and obviously experienced when it came to physical confrontations. They were probably all mercenaries.

She sensed a very slight motion in Victor's right arm and knew that he'd slid the pistol all the way down his sleeve. He'd be holding it there, on his wrist, with just one finger. One quick motion—very well practiced in simulation chambers, Cachat being Cachat—and the gun would be in his hand.

Victor's ready grip, gun up his sleeve held there by one finger so he can quickly and easily drop it into his waiting palm.

"What's your name, sweetheart?" asked one of the three men, when they came up to the table.

The blonde glanced at him, shook her head, and pointed at McRae. "Ask him."

McRae didn't even glance at them. "She's my woman. Leave it at that." His tone of voice was that of a man thoroughly bored.

The man who'd made the initial advance began to bridle. "Listen, shithead, you—"

McRae somehow had the pistol in his hand. He brought it up, still seated, and shot the man in the chest. As he began to crumple, the Havenite rose, smoothly and easily, and shot him in the head. Twice. Then shot the man to his left, then the one to his right. Three shots each. The first center mass, then a double-tap to the head.

It all took maybe three seconds. Only one of his victims even got a hand on a gun, and he didn't succeed in pulling it out of its shoulder holster. When it was over, half the floor of the bar was covered in blood and brains and the other dozen or so patrons—all of them very tough people in their own right—were pale-faced with stunned surprise.

"Which word in 'she's my woman' does anybody in this bar have trouble understanding?" the gunman asked. He still sounded thoroughly bored.

Do you believe he's a field guy from Saint-Just's inner circle yet?

After watching the recording four times, though, Dusek understood what had happened. It wasn't that McRae was some sort of "fast gun." True, he'd figured out a way to get the pistol into his hand without anyone spotting it, and then he'd moved quickly and surely, with not a single wasted motion. But any man well trained, familiar with weapons and in good condition could have done the same.

No, the secret was mental. This guy was one of those very rare people who could kill at the proverbial drop of the hat. He hadn't needed the stages of emotional escalation that even hardened thugs required, as quickly as those stages might pass. With him, everything had been instantaneous. Recognition of threat, calculation that the threat was best handled ruthlessly, start the killing.

And why he's Victor Cachat, because he doesn't hesitate he just gunned the thugs down while they were still in the banter stage that escalates to violence that maybe gets fatal.

Chuanli had been waiting nearby and had been called in by the barkeeps as soon as the fight was over. He could have been there in thirty or forty seconds, but he stretched it out to five minutes. McRae would probably figure out the whole thing had been a setup, but there was no reason to make it obvious. That might even be a little dangerous.

The rest would have been routine. Clean up the place, quietly threaten whatever patrons—probably none—might have an inclination to shoot their mouths off, and then pitch the three corpses into the garbage disintegrator of the restaurant next door. Dusek owned the restaurant as well as the Rhodesian, and he'd provided it with a top-of-the-line disintegrator. And then paid bribes to the police and the sanitation department to have all the recorders and detectors disabled. Nobody except the people involved would ever know what happened to those bodies.

It seems the Mesans, like the Sollies alarm their disintegrators, but they can be disabled.

But that still left the Ballroom as a possibility. Not likely, but it couldn't be ruled out altogether. Dusek had no loyalty to Mesa, but he also wasn't a fool. This planet was his place of business—a very profitable one, too—and keeping that business up and running required him to avoid pissing off the powers-that-were.

A triple killing, when the dead men were thugs themselves and had no important patrons or allies, wouldn't concern the Mesan authorities. Not one that took place in this district. But if there was any Ballroom connection, the official indifference would end abruptly. Twice in his life, Jurgen had seen what happened when Mesa took off the gloves and really went after someone in the seccy districts. "Due process" and "reasonable force" were meaningless noises. They'd think nothing of leveling entire city blocks and butchering everyone in them, just to kill one person they were after.

How Mesan Security handles Ballroom penetration.

The wall was configured to show bird's-eye views from the ceiling-mounted security pickups scattered throughout the facility for which he held primary responsibility. From those views, an uninformed observer would never have guessed that the entire Gamma Center was buried under better than fifty meters of the planet Mesa's dirt and rock. Actually, it was buried under the foundations of one of the commercial-zoned towers which fringed the outskirts of Green Pines, as well. Its original construction had been handily concealed by all the other activity involved in building Green Pines in the first place, and it was far enough out from the residential district that it had no "full-time" neighbors to notice anything peculiar about it. Even better, perhaps, the fact that the tower above it was packed with specialty shops, financial offices, medical service providers, and better than a dozen various government and corporate offices provided ample cover for the comings and goings of the Center's seven hundred-odd scientists, engineers, and administrators and the security people responsible for keeping an eye on them.

The Alignment, however, had learned long ago that a troglodyte existence wasn't conducive to getting the very best out of creative people. That was why the Center's subterranean chambers boasted surprisingly high ceilings and large, airy rooms and offices. Corridors were broader than they had to be, with their smart walls configured to provide remarkably convincing illusions of open forest glades or—on the second floor—sundrenched, white-sugar beaches. The public areas' ceilings were likewise designed to give the impression that people inside them were actually outside, but the individual researchers' work spaces and offices were configured as the interior rooms they were, since quite a few people seemed to find it difficult to concentrate their full attention on the work at hand when they were "outside." On the other hand, the decision of exactly how to configure any team's work area was left up to the team's members, and the majority of them had opted for "windows" looking out on the same scenery their public corridors afforded. Better than half had added large "skylights" whose views of the sky matched the apparent time of day of the corridors which, in turn, were coordinated with the actual time of day outside the Center.

The result was a working environment which avoided the impression of being shut up inside a bunker (despite the fact that it was) and simultaneously kept the researchers' mental and physical clocks adjusted to the rest of Mesa's clocks when they finally got to head home at the end of work each day.

The Gamma Center, and damn me if the Alignment doesn't even have super-secret underground laboratories like James Bond villains.

And as he'd grappled with the emotionally draining task of keeping Herlander Simões functional long enough for him to complete his work, the new set of lenses his empathy with the hyper-physicist had given McBryde kept mercilessly examining what the Alignment had become. Deep at the heart of him, he knew, he was still committed to the Detweiler vision he'd assimilated as a youngster. He still believed the galaxy-wide rejection of the notion of genetically uplifting the entire human race to become all that it could have been was deeply, fundamentally, and tragically wrong. It rejected so much, turned its back on so many possibilities, doomed so many people to be so much less than they might have been. He believed that, with every fiber of his being.

But, he admitted to himself now, letting himself truly face it for the first time, what you don't believe anymore is that we have the right to force those who disagree with us to submit to our vision of their future. That's too much for you now, isn't it, Jack? And it's what the Board did to Francesca—and Herlander—that made it that way.

No, that wasn't entirely fair, he thought. It wasn't just the tragedy of the Simões family. It was a lot of things, including the realization of how many billions of people the Alignment's strategy was inevitably going to kill along the way—the "collateral damage" the Alignment's master strategy was prepared to accept.

And it's the fact that you've finally realized that you, personally, are going to be directly responsible for bringing about those deaths, he thought despairingly.

Jack McBryde, it seems Simoes isn't the only Mesan becoming disgruntled.

It's not about the advantages, about the "nobility" of our purpose—assuming the Board truly remembers what that purpose once was, he thought. Those things still matter, but so does your soul, Jack. So does the moral responsibility. There's right, and there's wrong, and there's the choice between them, and that's part of the human race's heritage, too. And it's about the fact that if we're really right—if Leonard Detweiler was really right—about how the entire species can choose to improve and uplift itself, then why haven't we committed even a fraction of the resources we've committed to building the Alignment to convincing the rest of the galaxy of that? Maybe it wouldn't have been easy, especially after the Final War. And maybe it would have taken generations, centuries, to make any progress. But the Alignment's already invested all of those generations and all of those centuries in our grand and glorious vision . . . and it had abandoned the idea of convincing other people we were right in favor of killing however many of them it took to make them admit we were right almost before Leonard Detweiler's brain function ceased. For that matter, the way we've embraced and used Manpower and genetic slavery has actually contributed to the prejudice against "genies," damn it!

That much is true, secret armies and navies and centuries of genetic research cost a lot more than even a really good PR program.

Jack McBryde looked at that smiling face and saw the mirror of his own people's arrogance. Not the arrogance of which Leonard Detweiler had been accused, not the arrogance of believing a better, healthier, more capable, longer-lived human being was achievable. Not that arrogance, but another deeper, darker arrogance. The arrogance of fanaticism. Of the ability—of the willingness, even the eagerness—to prove to the rest of humanity that Detweiler had been right. To rub the rest of the galaxy's nose in the fact that, as Leonard Detweiler's descendents, they were right, too . . . and that everyone else was still wrong.

That in their own persons they already represented that better, more capable human being, which was proof of their own superiority and their own right to dictate humanity's future to every other poor, benighted, inferior "normal" in the universe. That they'd been right—had the right—to actually expand the genetic slave trade and all of the human misery it entailed not for profit, but simply as a cover, a distracting shield for the high and noble purpose which justified any means to which they might resort.

And to create, evaluate, and "cull" however many little girls had to be thrown away to accomplish that glorious purpose.

Why the Mesan Alignment is evil, which comes as a revelation to McBryde, less so to us.

Captain Gowan Maddock of the Mesan Alignment Navy looked down at the ornate rings of braid around the cuffs of his Mesa System Navy uniform with remarkably scant favor. He'd always thought the MSN's uniform, with its hectares of braid and its tall caps whose visors dripped old-fashioned "scrambled eggs," looked more like something out of a bad operetta than anything any real navy would have tolerated. Of course, no one had ever wanted anyone to take the MSN seriously, had they? It was supposed to be a pretentious Lilliputian force with delusions of grandeur—exactly what the galaxy would have expected out of a star nation whose government was totally dominated by outlaw, profit-driven transstellars.

And, by the oddest turn of fate, that was precisely what the Mesa System Navy actually was. It would never have done to create a force whose professionalism might inadvertently have given itself away, after all.

The ridiculous, braid encrusted MSN uniform, and the divide between the official, gaudy, ineffectual Mesan System Navy as opposed to the secret, advanced and professional Mesan Alignment Navy.

He and Milliken looked conspicuously out of place at that table in their black tunics and charcoal-gray trousers. True, the other uniforms around them sported almost as much braid as theirs did, but those other uniforms' tunics were red, and their trousers were black.

Okay, so StateSec uniforms really were red tunic, black trousers. The MSN uniform is black tunic and dark grey pants.

I wonder, do even they still genuinely believe there's a single chance in hell they'll ever return victoriously to Nouveau Paris and deal with the counterrevolutionary scum whose backstabbing treason brought down the people's paladins of the Committee of Public Safety?

It seemed unlikely to Maddock that anyone could truly be that completely and totally out of touch with reality, but the People's Navy in Exile certainly acted the part. Even the names they'd assigned to the surplus Indefatigable-class battlecruisers Manpower had provided to them reflected that: Leon Trotsky, George Washington, Marquis de Lafayette, Oliver Cromwell, Thomas Paine, Mao Tse-tung, Maximilien Robespierre . . .

The Mesans have provided the PN-in-exile at least 7 Solly battlecruisers, Indys like they gave to Monica. As pretentious as the revolutionary names are, I'm kind of amused how Weber's more conservative friends would like the idea of a George Washington fighting alongside Trotsky and Mao.

The consequences of their degeneration into ten-a-credit brigands had been painfully evident when they gathered here to begin drilling for the Verdant Vista operation, though. They'd never been what Maddock would have considered real naval officers, but they'd become even sloppier and more incompetent than he'd expected. Integrating the mercenaries Manpower had been forced to retain to flesh out their crews—especially when the additional SLN units had been added to the PNE's order of battle—had made things even worse. Given the nature of this particular operation, Manpower had prudently avoided the more respectable mercenary outfits. In fact, the bulk of its new hires were basically common thieves, thugs, and murderers with a thin veneer of technical competence. Beating them into a semblance of efficiency had been a daunting task. It was fortunate Luff and his fellows had acquired so much experience in instilling terror-based discipline, he supposed, but even with the aid of Milliken and the other Manpower "advisers" provided by the "Mesa System Navy," it had taken every single day of the endless months spent orbiting this bleak, planetless red dwarf to get them ready.

And through much hard work and hardship, they've actually drilled the former Peeps to something like battle-readiness.

He gazed around the silent briefing room, and Maddock could almost hear his audience's thoughts. The PNE's "new" ships were effectively SLN castoffs, and he knew Luff and many of his ship commanders had reservations about them. And rightly so, he reflected, given how weak their missile defenses were. The MAN was equally aware of that weakness, although Maddock hadn't admitted anything of the sort to his ex-StateSec pupils, since neither the Solarian League Navy nor the official Mesan System Navy, had any concept of just how outclassed they truly were. The Alignment had seen to it that all of the new battlecruisers had Aegis, the SLN's most recent (and, in Maddock's considered opinion, hopelessly belated) bid to increase counter-missile salvo density, and it had upgraded all of the PNE ships' electronics to current first-line Solarian standards. It was clear from the StateSec holdouts' reactions that they were impressed but not exactly overawed by the capabilities of their new fire control and EW systems, but it was equally clear they remained less than enthralled by the paucity of point defense clusters and counter-missile tubes. Maddock had been privately amused watching them upgrade the software of the vaunted Solarian League Navy's defensive systems. They'd made that their very first priority, and, amused or not, he had to admit that they'd probably enhanced their vessels' missile defenses' efficiency by somewhere around twenty-five percent.

Even the Peeps aren't terribly impressed by Solly hardware these days. At least they realize how inadequate Solly missile defense is.

They'd still be dogmeat going up against the Manties, and they know it, he reflected. Fortunately, they're only planning on going up against Havenite hardware. We had to come up with a hell of a lot of ships to get them to sign on for this operation, anyway, of course. And the Cataphracts—let's not forget them! But Luff's probably right about what a swath they'd be able to cut through Theisman's light units.

Ah yes, the Cataphract missile. Mesa hasn't yet managed to duplicate MDM technology, but they've managed to shoehorn in a counter missile drive as a second-stage. It's a big improvement over even extended flight missiles, but still a ways short of even dual-drive MDMs. Does make me wonder if the Haven Sector powers couldn't make up something similar for their light units.

"Second," he resumed, his voice as hard as his eyes, "it would be as well to remember that these are not slaves being liberated from the hold of a slave ship somewhere. I'm sure Captain Maddock's and Commander Milliken's superiors are unlikely to be surprised by the fact that, despite our sincere gratitude for their support, we scarcely see eye to eye with them on the general issue of genetic slavery. In this instance, however, we aren't talking about liberating slaves or freeing the victims of someone else's mistreatment. We're talking about dealing with a terrorist organization. If any of your personnel are having trouble remembering that, I recommend you require your ships' companies to view the HD of the ghastly atrocities these people visited upon their prisoners following the 'liberation' of Verdant Vista. Remind them of that brutality and cruelty, and I think you'll find their reservations manageable."

Because I guess StateSec hardcases bad enough they'd be shot by the new sunnier regime are easily shocked by violence and depravity?

"That's why we have no real body of doctrine for its employment. Our current estimates are that the . . . target will be covered by somewhere between a minimum of four and a maximum of ten of the new frigates the Manties have been supplying to the system. Our tech people's analyses suggest that they're probably pretty damned nasty for anything anyone else would call a 'frigate,' but they wouldn't pose any significant threat to your forces even without the Cataphract. It's also possible, however, that the Erewhonese Navy will have detailed a division of light cruisers or even heavy cruisers to back up those frigates. We don't really expect it, but it's clearly possible, given Erewhon's strong support for the . . . earlier incident in the system. If that should be the case, we're going to be confronting at least some Manty-grade hardware, which could make the entire operation substantially more expensive. With Cataphracts in the tubes, however, we anticipate that you should succeed with zero or at least negligible damage."

Haven, Erewhon, and Manticore are all pledged to support and defend Torch, even if it's quite a ways down their priority lists at the moment. And I notice he completely neglects the Mayans.

[Simon_Jester]

The Gamma Center, and damn me if the Alignment doesn't even have super-secret underground laboratories like James Bond villains.

On the other hand, they're good at super-secret underground laboratories. None of this half-assed stuff where people go insane from claustrophobia and start making mistakes a four year old child would spot.

Why the Mesan Alignment is evil, which comes as a revelation to McBryde, less so to us.

Well, even nowadays you can probably find people who think that genetically enhancing humanity is a great idea, that euthanasia of genetically tweaked infants who turn out 'wrong' is merciful, and that some people are just plain too useless to be anything other than servants of the people with enough brains and overall quality to run the world.

I've seen most of that expressed on this very forum.

The problem is that when you take that mindset and put it in the context of a world that opposes being changed... you get the Alignment, or something like it. The 'benevolent, paternalist' faction that starts frothing at the mouth and bloodying its knuckles on someone's face as soon as the rest of the world turns out not to be interested in what they're selling.

The Mesans have provided the PN-in-exile at least 7 Solly battlecruisers, Indys like they gave to Monica. As pretentious as the revolutionary names are, I'm kind of amused how Weber's more conservative friends would like the idea of a George Washington fighting alongside Trotsky and Mao.

Heh. Yes.

To the Peeps it's probably all one, and I doubt they even bother to pay much attention to the difference among many of these individuals. They're all two thousand years buried.

Even the Peeps aren't terribly impressed by Solly hardware these days. At least they realize how inadequate Solly missile defense is.

I still think Aegis's countermissile spam tactic SHOULD work...

More generally though, yeah, the most likely explanation is that while Solarian hardware is competitive with Havenite (since the best Haven has, they in large part got from the League)... their software and doctrine are inadequate because they do not reflect intense combat experience.

So for instance, there might be a lot of needless "tactical officer, this is the main computer, please click the mouse to verify that this missile needs killing" and not a lot of "YOU IDIOT BUCKET OF BOLTS, THAT'S AN INCOMING NUCLEAR MISSILE KILL IT NOW!" Just to pick a cartoonishly simple example; the real examples would probably be more subtle.

Ah yes, the Cataphract missile. Mesa hasn't yet managed to duplicate MDM technology, but they've managed to shoehorn in a counter missile drive as a second-stage. It's a big improvement over even extended flight missiles, but still a ways short of even dual-drive MDMs. Does make me wonder if the Haven Sector powers couldn't make up something similar for their light units.

Yes, but Cataphract accepts a major weakening of the warhead to get the increased range. Do that on a destroyer or CL-weight missile, and you end up with a warhead that you might as well not have bothered firing. Especially if your smallest probable target is a Roland which is probably harder to blow apart than a prewar heavy cruiser, even after you take the active defenses out of the equation.

Another note: to maximize range it would actually work a lot better to use the countermissile drive first and the main engine second, not the other way around which is apparently how Cataphract operates. I ran some representative numbers (135000g for 40 seconds on the countermissile drive, 45000g for 180 seconds for the main engine burn), and it turns out that you can get to around 17.7 million kilometers my way, but only just a shade over 12 million if you use the countermissile drive second.

This is basic equations-of-motion stuff, but explaining would take a bit of a tap-dance. Can put up calculations if anyone wants. What it comes down to is that you want to have the 'high speed' phase of an MDM's flight stretch out as long as possible. So it is better to use a short-endurance, high-acceleration drive first and a slower but longer-lived 'cruising engine' second, not the other way around.

At least that's true if your goal is to maximize actual range, and assuming it's possible from an engineering standpoint to do this. There are other advantages to using the countermissile drive as a second stage drive.

Because I guess StateSec hardcases bad enough they'd be shot by the new sunnier regime are easily shocked by violence and depravity?

No, but they are anti-slavery. Plus, it is generally accepted that unrestrained planetary bombardment is Just Plain Wrong, and even StateSec guys who'd kill you personally as soon as look at you may hesitate to blow your whole continent off the map. Although the reverse is probably true too.

Haven, Erewhon, and Manticore are all pledged to support and defend Torch, even if it's quite a ways down their priority lists at the moment. And I notice he completely neglects the Mayans.

Doubt he even knows they're involved. Their Marines were a source of muscle in the original operation to seize Torch, but it was downplayed heavily.

[Batman]

Well against Manticore/Haven/the Andermani the range difference doesn't really matter, chances are you're a fatality long before you get into launch range anyway, and against everybody else 12 million km means you're still outside missile range (at least as far as Mesa knows) and how far outside missile range you are is moderately irrelevant. In that case, using the countermissile drive last, while costing you significant range, makes your missiles considerably harder targets in the final phase thanks to the higher acceleration.

And is there any particular reason why the drives have to be used 'in sequence'? We're not talking about a multistage rocket where the lower stages are physically in the way. I realize there's a time limit due to capacitors not holding the charge forever once initiated but that holds true regardless of which stage I use first. Can't I just use the countermissile drive 'first' in situations where I'm uncertain about my range advantage?

[Simon_Jester]

I honestly don't know if there's any obstacle stopping you from selecting which drive to fire first.

With respect to the question of who to use it on in other environments... For one, lots of people are working on uprated, longer range single drive missiles, so the Cataphract might actually not outrange them all by a significant margin. And that can matter, as we saw at Monica. Sure, Hexapuma "outranged" the Solarian battlecruisers, but they were still able to tank literally hundreds of those longer-range missiles and close into their own single-drive missile range. Which is even more of a problem when you realize that Cataphract has a lighter warhead than an equivalent single-drive missile.

So if your range is 'only' twelve million kilometers, you really do need to be concerned about, say, some guy who's been at least trying to improve his single-drive capabilities. Because maybe he can just absorb the fire of your extended range missiles for the first three million kilometers*, then open up with his own significantly heavier single drive missiles that have had their maximum range extended to, oh, nine million kilometers.

With a seventeen million kilometer range, you have much more margin of superiority over any 'slightly upgraded' single drive missile design, and a much wider envelope of "I can shoot at you and you can't shoot back and I can get away before you get into firing range of me." Thus, that range increase might actually matter quite a bit, because even in the Honorverse it's never as simple as "he who brought the longest-ranged weapon, insta-wins."

Longer range is an advantage. But it's only a decisive advantage if it's so long that you can totally destroy the enemy in less time than it takes you to get into their own weapon range... as with a three stage MDM against a single-drive missile during the Buttercup era.

*(Remember, three million kilometers may be only five minutes' flight time- heck, one minute's flight time- at fairly reasonable impeller drive speeds).

[VhenRa]

IIRC, Cataphract-A is a converted DD/CL missile fired out of a CA/BC tube, Cataphract-B is a converted CA/BC missile fired out of a SD tube and Cataphract-C is a converted SD missile fired out of missile pods.

[Simon_Jester]

Right. Which is basically my point. The Cataphract missile warhead is so much lighter than a conventional missile of equivalent "caliber" that you really can't count on actually putting down an enemy warship with them, unless you use stupidly huge numbers of the things. Especially not a battlecruiser or heavier ship.

So imagine you are, say, an Alignment battlecruiser fighting a Nevada-class battlecruiser owned and operated by a League member planet's System Defense Force. Your Cataphracts have a destroyer-weight warhead, which means they are at best marginal against the Nevada's armor belt. Like the situation Helen Zilwicki was describing with Hexapuma having trouble killing a battlecruiser with Mark 16s at Monica, only more so.

Even if you score dozens and dozens of direct hits, you have no guarantee of putting down the target quickly- and if your range advantage over them is only a few million kilometers, you're going to end up getting targeted and shot back at by their harder-hitting missiles.

So if you must restrict yourself to softer-hitting extreme range misisles, you really want a bigger range advantage, so that you have an opportunity to whittle the enemy down more thoroughly before they get dangerously close.

[That said, it occurs to me that if the Alignment has Cataphract, it means they've at least solved the real killer problem of MDM design: making multiple drives that can engage in rapid succession without interference from one drive blowing up the impeller nodes of the next one. The rest is a matter of refinement and detail work, although one that might take them a decade or more in theory]

[VhenRa]

On the other hand, IIRC, the Cataphracts can be fired out of otherwise unaltered missile tubes and the Cataphract-C is loaded into pods so if you make a SD(P) loaded with Cataphract-C pods you have an edge on anyone who doesn't have a proper MDM.

[Terralthra]

Right. Which is basically my point. The Cataphract missile warhead is so much lighter than a conventional missile of equivalent "caliber" that you really can't count on actually putting down an enemy warship with them, unless you use stupidly huge numbers of the things. Especially not a battlecruiser or heavier ship.

So imagine you are, say, an Alignment battlecruiser fighting a Nevada-class battlecruiser owned and operated by a League member planet's System Defense Force. Your Cataphracts have a destroyer-weight warhead, which means they are at best marginal against the Nevada's armor belt. Like the situation Helen Zilwicki was describing with Hexapuma having trouble killing a battlecruiser with Mark 16s at Monica, only more so.

Even if you score dozens and dozens of direct hits, you have no guarantee of putting down the target quickly- and if your range advantage over them is only a few million kilometers, you're going to end up getting targeted and shot back at by their harder-hitting missiles.

So if you must restrict yourself to softer-hitting extreme range misisles, you really want a bigger range advantage, so that you have an opportunity to whittle the enemy down more thoroughly before they get dangerously close.

[That said, it occurs to me that if the Alignment has Cataphract, it means they've at least solved the real killer problem of MDM design: making multiple drives that can engage in rapid succession without interference from one drive blowing up the impeller nodes of the next one. The rest is a matter of refinement and detail work, although one that might take them a decade or more in theory]

Well, I think the key point here, that explains both why they have it in the less optimal order and why they are so much less advanced than the RMN and RHN, is that they haven't actually solved that problem. They don't have multiple nodes operating on the same missile body. They have a regular missile with the standard impeller drive, but instead of the normal warhead on the front, they have the warhead bus loaded with essentially a counter-missile and the biggest warhead they could shove onto a counter-missile body (thus the smaller warhead size). The normal drive reaches its end stage, pops off the bus, and the CM drive lights off on the detached bus. We know inactive impeller-drive vehicles can be enclosed in the hull of an active drive because pinnaces. So, rather than solve the problem (like the RHN and RMN did), they dodged around it, just to get some sort of extended range missile in production quickly.

This explains why they can't have the CM drive first: the nodes on the CM missile/warhead bus are by necessity enclosed inside the warhead compartment of the larger cataphract, and we know that the nodes have to be outside the hull or they'd slag it (cf. Sirius in OBS). This also explains why they are so much larger, specifically length-wise, than single-drive missiles: the hull of a CM is longer than the normal warhead bus of the same size missile, and explains why they are weaker, as well.

It explains everything coherently, in my opinion.

[Simon_Jester]

On the other hand, IIRC, the Cataphracts can be fired out of otherwise unaltered missile tubes and the Cataphract-C is loaded into pods so if you make a SD(P) loaded with Cataphract-C pods you have an edge on anyone who doesn't have a proper MDM.

Sure- but you only get so many pods in a salvo. My basic point is not that Cataphract is useless, it's that to get maximum benefit out of it you really need at least the option of using the extra range advantage you gain by firing the countermissile drive first.

Well, I think the key point here, that explains both why they have it in the less optimal order and why they are so much less advanced than the RMN and RHN, is that they haven't actually solved that problem. They don't have multiple nodes operating on the same missile body. They have a regular missile with the standard impeller drive, but instead of the normal warhead on the front, they have the warhead bus loaded with essentially a counter-missile and the biggest warhead they could shove onto a counter-missile body (thus the smaller warhead size). The normal drive reaches its end stage, pops off the bus, and the CM drive lights off on the detached bus. We know inactive impeller-drive vehicles can be enclosed in the hull of an active drive because pinnaces. So, rather than solve the problem (like the RHN and RMN did), they dodged around it, just to get some sort of extended range missile in production quickly.

This explains why they can't have the CM drive first: the nodes on the CM missile/warhead bus are by necessity enclosed inside the warhead compartment of the larger cataphract, and we know that the nodes have to be outside the hull or they'd slag it (cf. Sirius in OBS). This also explains why they are so much larger, specifically length-wise, than single-drive missiles: the hull of a CM is longer than the normal warhead bus of the same size missile, and explains why they are weaker, as well.

It explains everything coherently, in my opinion.

Hm. You know... that's a very good point. Scratch what I was saying, then.

[PKRudeBoy]

Mesan ships should carry a mix of Cataphracts and standard missiles, and switch once they enter normal missile range. Otherwise, they'll get pounded if an equal combatant gets within range.

[Simon_Jester]

Very much true. The Cataphract's reduced striking power makes it more of a specialty weapon than a general-purpose missile.

[PKRudeBoy]

It strikes me very much as a weapon designed as an extension of the prewar idea of missiles being used to 'feel out' an enemies defenses, because that and pod killing are mainly what you'll be able to do unless facing lighter opponents.

[Simon_Jester]

That actually ties into an interesting speculation: the Mesan Alignment may be weak on doctrine. Unlike Manticore and Haven they have negligible practical combat experience in recent history. While they may have done a lot of exercises, they have to operate quite secretly, and it seems as though most of their navy is dispersed among the various puppet/shadow governments they control.

So when it comes to tactical and strategic sophistication in a stand-up fight, they might well prove... less than impressive.

[Batman]

This explains why they can't have the CM drive first: the nodes on the CM missile/warhead bus are by necessity enclosed inside the warhead compartment of the larger cataphract, and we know that the nodes have to be outside the hull or they'd slag it (cf. Sirius in OBS). This also explains why they are so much larger, specifically length-wise, than single-drive missiles: the hull of a CM is longer than the normal warhead bus of the same size missile, and explains why they are weaker, as well.

Why would they be? Sirius' nodes were partially inside her hull so she could pretend to be a freighter. The Cataphract isn't going to convince anybody it's anything other than a two-stage missile so why not have the nodes out in the open from the word go? It's not like they need to worry about aerodynamic drag so why would they need to be inside the warhead compartment?

[Terralthra]

Basically, because the physics demand a certain shape of the vehicle, and that shape is not scalable within the same basic hull-form. The forward impellers must come to a certain width relative to the maximum beam, and the beam may not increase beyond a certain point, and so on. If I try to superimpose a smaller missile onto the front of a larger missile, that hull-form is busted. Won't work. Enclosing it entirely within the hullform works just fine.

That's my logic, anyway.

[Batman]

Except the Mk16 doesn't have forward impellers, both the stage 1 and 2 impeller rings (single impeller rings) are at the rear of the missile. Apparently the problems that govern ship impeller layout don't (or at least not fully) apply to missiles (given that pinnaces and shuttles don't look like miniature starships that shouldn't come as much of a surprise). Speculatively, this may be because missiles (and impeller-driven parasite craft) don't have alpha nodes and are thus more flexible in their beta node layout.