Bit of Analysis: HH Saganami Island series

[Batman]

Um-No. The Mk16 is shown to have a single fusion warhead, with six lasing rods.

[Batman]

Correction: The Mk 16 diagrams in 'Storm from the Shadows' DO designate the lasing rods as 'laser heads' but still show only a single warhead.

[SpottedKitty]

Correction: The Mk 16 diagrams in 'Storm from the Shadows' DO designate the lasing rods as 'laser heads' but still show only a single warhead.

Ah, I thought you were using "MIRV" to refer to the multiple laser heads — that's pretty much the equivalent of RL missiles that toss more than one warhead. AFAIR no Honorverse missile used by any navy has ever had more than one warhead.

[Crazedwraith]

The closest they get is the counter missile cannister, I think.

[Simon_Jester]

Apologies if this has come up before, but this is the first time I remember noticing this:

"One hundred and forty-seven missiles, each of which carried six individual laser heads designed to blast through superdreadnought armor."

So does this mean that at least capital scale missiles are MIRVed, or did Weber just confuse lasing rod and laser head and the editors, as usual, didn't notice?

Overwhelmingly more likely that the editors didn't notice in the wall of text and that he meant "rods."

There's a cutaway drawing in one of the recent-ish books that shows a system breakdown of the RMN's latest shiny toy, the Mk. 16 — a big chunk of the missile's length just behind the warhead in the nose is a payload bay for the six ejectable laser heads, each containing a thread-thin lasing rod. I suppose you could call it a MIRV design, although usually all the laser heads are locked on to the same target as the missile instead of being independently targettable.

No, it is not a MIRV design.

Strictly, it is not a MIRV because it has no reentry vehicles (the 'RV' in MIRV). The lasing rods may or may not be independently targetable (the 'I' in RV)

More practically, there is no physical warhead of which there are multiples. There is one warhead, and a cluster of submunitions that channel that warhead's energy in a certain direction.

[Batman]

Multiple Independent Rod Variant

But yes, I was referring to the multiple warhead nature of MIRVs, because 'laser head' so far usually (I'm inclined to say exclusively) referred to the 'entire' warhead assembly, not the individual lasing rods.

[Simon_Jester]

Well, given how laser head tipped missiles work it'd be folly to put multiple nuclear warheads on one, so yeah, still going with typo.

[Ahriman238]

"You know, I'd really like to meet this Anisimovna one day," Michelle Henke said as she accepted a fresh cup of steaming black coffee from Chris Billingsley. She gave the steward a quick smile of thanks, and he continued around the table to her two guests with his coffee pot, refilling and topping off, then withdrew from the day cabin.

"I don't imagine you're alone in that, Ma'am," Aivars Terekhov said grimly. "I know I'd like an hour or two alone with her."

And I hope you get it, Terkhov. Really, the entire Talbott Quadrant knows about Asnisimovna and her involvement with Monica, which just makes Vezien seem dumber for signing on with her in the first place.

"Do you really think Baroness Medusa and Prime Minister Alquezar are going to sign off on your agreement with Vézien, Bernardus?"

"I think yes . . . probably." Van Dort smiled tightly. "I didn't really promise him all that much, you know. Basically just that the Royal Navy isn't going to come and dismantle his star system's entire orbital infrastructure as a reprisal."

"That and that New Tuscany wouldn't really be excluded from all Quadrant markets," Terekhov said in a chidingly correcting tone. Van Dort raised an eyebrow at him, and Terekhov snorted again. "That's a hell of a lot more than I would have given him, Bernardus! And, frankly, after what they tried to pull this time, I'm not sure it's a justifiable security risk, either."

-snip-

"As far as security risks go," she said after a moment, "they aren't going to risk pissing us off a second time anytime soon, Aivars, I don't think those issues are going to be a deal breaker, but I think the lack of reprisals could be. For that matter, I'm inclined to think it should be."

"Which is why we specifically left open the question of the amount of the reparations to be assessed," Van Dort pointed out. "Both sides know it's coming and that the price tag's going to be stiff, and if you'll notice, I specifically didn't rule out the possibility of reprisals against the New Tuscan industrial establishment if we can't come to a meeting of minds on that particular topic."

And what happens to New Tuscany now, they slapped Monica with a binding nonaggression pact, and though it's not specifically mentioned, I imagine this goes for New Tuscany too. For the moment there are no reprisals and they will discuss reparations.

After the destruction of Jean Bart, Rear Admiral Evelyn Sigbee, commanding the 112th Battlecruiser Squadron, had seen reason very quickly indeed. The fact that Michelle had made it clear she knew which ship was Sigbee's flagship might well have contributed to that, but it was obvious the woman was also considerably smarter—or at least willing to actually use whatever intelligence she had—than Byng had been. Michelle wondered how much of that was because she was Frontier Fleet, not Battle Fleet.

There'd been no survivors from Jean Bart, and the other ships of the Solarian task group had returned very promptly to their parking orbit around New Tuscany. Sigbee had been a little stickier about meekly transporting her personnel down to the planetary surface and handing her ships over to Michelle's boarding parties with their computers intact, but Michelle had held her battlecruisers and heavy cruisers well outside the Solarians' effective missile range while she sent just the destroyers in to be sure Sigbee was complying with her instructions. As she'd hoped, the memory of what had just happened to Jean Bart—and her obvious willingness to repeat the demonstration—had carried the day.

The actual surrender of the Solly BC squadrons. They do pass on Rear Admiral Sigbee's report promptly, but it gets dismissed anyway.

And once those boarding parties were aboard, it had quickly become evident that the Sollies' computer security was far inferior to that of Manticore. On the other hand, it was also inferior to some of the civilian-market Solarian software the navy computer techs had seen, so that didn't necessarily prove anything about the tech base available to the SLN; only about the tech base of which it had actually availed itself.

Once through the fences and into the data banks, it hadn't taken very long to determine that the Sollies own tactical recordings clearly demonstrated that Commodore Chatterjee's ships hadn't had a thing to do with the destruction of the New Tuscan space station. How much good that was going to do after more recent events in the star system was debatable, but Michelle's technicians had made complete copies of the original files.

It seems private companies in the League are more willing to shell out for good computer security than the SLN is. Solly sensor records of the massacre get added to the report heading for home, along with any other interesting data they had.

For that matter, they had some of the actual computers in which those files had been stored, since she'd also chosen to take the battlecruisers Resourceful and Impudent home with her. Resourceful was one of the Indefatigable class, like the ships captured in Monica, and she felt certain BuShips and BuWeaps would want to compare her electronics and weapons loadouts with that of the ships Technodyne had provided to President Tyler. Impudent, despite the letter with which her name began, was one of the new Nevada-class ships. As such, she represented the very latest in deployed SLN technology, and Michelle knew how eagerly the engineers and analysts back home would greet her arrival.

She's also sending home two BCs of different classes to be dissected by Manticoran R&D.

Aside from those two units, she'd left the rest of Byng's ships in New Tuscany with Sigbee. She'd seen no reason to try to take any more of them with her, for several reasons, including the fact that the newer Manticoran designs didn't provide a lot of redundant personnel to make up passage crews for prize vessels. Besides that, she'd quickly come to the conclusion that there was no particular point in trying to refit them for Manticoran use. They were clearly inferior do anything presently in Alliance service, and the expense and effort to bring such manpower-intensive designs up to something like current standards could be far more profitably applied to other ends.

She'd considered scuttling them, and under accepted interstellar law, she would have been entirely within her rights to do so. In the end, though, she'd decided that actually scuttling them might be a case of pouring unnecessary salt into a wound. Nothing she could do was going to make the SLN happy with her, but sailing off into the sunset with every one of their ships, or blowing them up in orbit, was only likely to piss them off even worse. Not that she was any too sure that what she'd ended up doing would make them any happier. Eighty percent of their ships and ninety-five percent of their personnel were still there, and both ships and people were pretty much physically intact, but before leaving, Michelle's boarding parties had deliberately triggered those ships' internal security charges . . . which had reduced all of the surviving battlecruisers' central computer nets to so much slagged molecular circuitry, as inert and useless as a solid block of granite. No one would be reprogramming those computers; it was going to take physical replacement if the Sollies ever wanted one of those ships to get underway under her own power again. That wouldn't necessarily take them permanently out of service, but it would take months to get a suitably equipped repair fleet all the way out to New Tuscany. In fact, it might actually be cheaper and faster in the long run to send out a fleet of tugs and tow them back to a Solarian shipyard.

Seems to be a running theme of including a precaution to physically destroy your computers being used by your enemies.

Which, she added silently, is the reason I also handed complete copies of the depositions Vézien, Dusserre, Cardot, and Pélisard gave us over to Sigbee for her to pass on to their ONI. I doubt it's likely to make them any less pissed off with us, but I don't have any problem at all with getting the League simultaneously pissed off enough at Manpower to finally do something about it!

The League is also being notified as to Mesa's (or Manpower's as far as the Manties and New Tuscans know) involvement in this mess.

That office offered enough square meters for a basketball game, Carmichael thought more than a tad sourly . . . and with very little exaggeration. Which, given that property values in the city of Old Chicago, the capital of the Solarian League, were almost certainly the highest in the explored galaxy, made the office's size an even more ostentatious statement of its inhabitant's status.

Of course, he reflected, status and power aren't always exactly the same thing, are they? Especially here in the League.

This dichotomy in the League between prestigious elected officials and civil servants who wield actual power is commented on a lot. Usually with a repeat or variation on this exact sentence.

And that, despite any occasional whimsical fantasies Carmichael might entertain, was the true reason someone like a Josef Byng could rise to flag rank, or someone like a Lorcan Verrochio could become a commissioner in something like the Office of Frontier Security. When no "unqualified buffoon" could be given effective power by the electorate, neither could anyone else. And when those who exercised true power were unaccountable to voters, they could not be removed from power, either. The consequences of that were unbridled empire building, corruption, and lack of accountability, all of them as inevitable as sunrise, and bureaucrat himself or not, Sir Lyman Carmichael knew which type of system he preferred.

Pretty much the problem with the Solarian system, elected officials have no power, so the civil service wields power, but the civil service is not accountable to the people, or to anyone but themselves.

The authors of the Solarian League's Constitution had represented literally scores of already inhabited, thoroughly settled star systems. Some of those star systems had been colonized a thousand years before the League's creation. All of them had seen the advantages of regulating interstellar trade, of creating a single interstellar currency, of crafting effective regulatory agencies to keep an eye on interstellar finance and investment, of combining their efforts to extradite interstellar criminals, suppress piracy, and enforce things like the Eridani Edict and the Deneb Accords. But they'd also had an entire millennium of self-government, an entire millennium of developing their own planetwide and systemwide senses of identity. Their primary loyalties had been to their own worlds, their own governments, not to some new galaxy-wide super government, and none of them had been willing to surrender their hard-earned sovereignty and individual identities to anyone—not even to the mother-world of all humanity—just to create a more effective regulatory climate. And so they had carefully crafted a constitution designed to deprive the League's central government of any coercive power. They had eviscerated the federal government's political power by granting every single full member of the League veto power; any star system had the legal power to kill any legislative act of which it disapproved, which had turned the League Assembly into nothing more than a debating society. And the same constitution had prohibited the League from imposing any direct taxation upon its citizens.

The League doesn't tax it's citizens, though planetary governments can do that, instead they fund themselves through duties on trade. The "any one of the 1,782 official member worlds' representatives can kill any piece of legislation" clause to the Solly Constitution. For that matter, to emphasize the voluntary confederacy nature of the League, their Constitution guarantees all member worlds the right to secede without repercussions, something that's never been used before. That last part doesn't apply to Maya Sector which is an OFS "protectorate" and not officially a member world.

The universal right of veto had, indeed, eviscerated the political powers of the League, but that very success had created a dangerous vacuum. For the League simply to survive, far less provide the services which its founders had envisioned, there had to be some central power to manage the necessary bureaucracy. It was really a very simple choice, Carmichael reflected. Either some central power emerged, or the League simply ceased to function. So, since the Solarians had systematically precluded the possibility of running the League by statute, they were forced to turn to bureaucratic regulation, instead.

And it worked. In effect, the bureaucracies became self-directed, and for a while—a century or two—they functioned not simply effectively, but well and even more or less honestly. Unfortunately, the people running those bureaucracies had discovered an interesting omission in the Constitution. Acts of the Assembly could be vetoed by any full member system, which meant there was no probability of a statutory despotism, but there was no provision for the veto or repeal of regulations. That would have required the statutory creation of someone or something with the power to repeal or reform the regulations, and the bureaucrats had cultivated far too many friends and cozy "special relationships" for that ever to happen. And while the federal government could enact no direct taxation measures, there'd been no constitutional prohibition of regulatory fees or indirect taxes—imposed by regulation, not statute—on businesses or interstellar commerce. To be sure, all of the League's federal funds combined represented an absurdly small percentage of the Sollies' Gross Interstellar Product, but given the staggering size of the League's GIP, even a tiny percentage represented a stupendous absolute cash flow.

There'd been actual attempts at political reform, but the bureaucrats who wrote the League's regulations, who managed its appointments and the distribution of its expenditures, had always been able to find someone willing to exercise his veto authority to strangle those efforts in the cradle. And always out of sheer, selfless, disinterested statesmanship, of course.

Where things went wrong. And I do like the note that people have tried to reform the system, it's just that killing reform is stupidly easy. All the conservative bureaucrat needs is one ally on the floor, leverage with a single legislator and that's the end of that.

Still, there were appearances to maintain, here in the kabuki theater that passed for the Solarian League's government. Carmichael knew that, yet he felt an undeniable sensation of regret for what he knew he was about to inflict on this particular Solarian.

Maintaining appearances, we will learn, is essential to Solarian politics.

"Forgive me," Roelas y Valiente said as Carmichael laid the traditional and thoroughly anachronistic briefcase in his lap. "I completely forgot to ask if I could offer you some refreshment, Mr. Ambassador."

"No, thank you, Minister."

Carmichael shook his head with a smile of appreciation for the Foreign Minister's offer. Quite a few of his fellow ministers, Carmichael suspected, would have "forgotten" to make any such offer to a neobarb ambassador, regardless of the wealth and commercial power of the star nation he represented. In Roelas y Valiente's case, however, that forgetfulness had been completely genuine. It was rather refreshing, really, to deal with a senior Solly politician who didn't seem compelled to look for ways to put "neobarbs" in their proper place. Which only lent added point to Carmichael's regret this morning.

Valiente is good people, which is rare in senior Solly officials.

Carmichael opened the briefcase and extracted its contents: a computer-chip folio and a single envelope of thick, cream-yellow parchment bearing the Star Kingdom of Manticore's arms and the archaic wax seal tradition required. He held them both in his hands for a moment, gazing down at them. The envelope was heavier than the folio, even though it contained no more than three sheets of paper, and he found himself wondering why in the galaxy high-level diplomacy continued to insist upon the physical exchange of hardcopy documents. Since the content of those hardcopy documents was always transmitted electronically at the same time, and since no one ever bothered to actually read the paper copies (except, perhaps, at the highest levels when they were initially handed over, and it was deplorably gauche for a foreign minister to just rip a note open and read it in the ambassador's presence, anyway), why were the damned things sent in the first place?

Tradition! Actually, it occurs to me the hardcopy is a harder-to-alter reference point for the e-version, but I doubt that's really a concern since we've only known the two people to monkey around with diplomatic correspondence.

None of the four people in Quartermain's office had ever stood for election in his or her life, yet they represented the true government of the Solarian League, and they knew it. Kolokoltsov was the permanent senior undersecretary for foreign affairs. McCartney was the permanent senior undersecretary of the interior; Quartermain was the permanent senior undersecretary of commerce; and Abruzzi was the permanent senior undersecretary of information. The only missing member of the quintet which dominated the Solarian League's sprawling bureaucracy was Agatá Wodoslawski, the permanent senior undersecretary of the treasury, who was out-system at the moment, representing the League at a conference on Beowulf. No doubt she would have expressed her own disgust as vehemently as her colleagues if she'd been present, and equally no doubt, she was going to be more than moderately pissed off at having missed this meeting, Kolokoltsov reflected.

Meet the Quintet/Mandarins/Group of Five, they're pretty much the Solarian edition of the ominous evil council and between them these senior undersecretaries are the real decision-makers of the League. They're also all over the place as far as names people use, I feel Iron Man 3 was long enough ago that I'm just going to call them the Mandarins.

"So they're not stupid enough to hand us information that's demonstrably falsified," he said with exaggerated patience. "It's easy enough to produce selective data, especially for a PR campaign, and I'm sure they're very well aware of that. But from what Innokentiy's been telling us, they seem to have given us the entire sensor files, from beginning to end, and the complete log of Byng's original communication with the Manties when they arrived in New Tuscany. They wouldn't have done that if they hadn't known our own people's sensor records and com logs were eventually going to confirm the same information. Not when there's any possibility that the information's going to leak to the newsies."

The idea that Manticore fake sensor images of the massacre of Chatterjee's ships is raised, and dismissed.

As far as Kolokoltsov was concerned, the Office of Frontier Security clearly ought to have come under the authority of the Foreign Ministry, since it spent so much time dealing with star systems which weren't officially part of the League just yet. Unfortunately, the Foreign Ministry had lost that particular fight long, long ago, and OFS was officially part of the Interior Ministry. He could see the logic, even if he didn't much care for it, since like the Gendarmerie—which was also part of the Interior Ministry—Frontier Security was effectively an internal security agency of the League.

OFS works for the Interior, not State, which is generally an annoyance to Kolokoltsov, but today it means OFS's very public indiscretions in Talbott are McCartney's problem. So we see that even the Mandarins are not immune to empire-building or petty sniping.

The revelations about Technodyne and its collusion with Mesa had quite a few of her colleagues over at Commerce all hot and bothered. Attorney General Brangwen Ronayne had actually had to indict several people, and that was always messy. After all, one never knew when one of those under indictment was going to turn out to have embarrassing connections to one's self or other members of one's ministry. The folks over at Justice would do what they could, of course, but Ronayne wasn't really the sharpest stylus in the box. There was always the distinct possibility that something might slip past her, or even evade Abruzzi and make its way into the public datanets, with potentially . . . unpleasant consequences even for a permanent senior undersecretary.

Still, those occasional teapot tempests were a fact of life in the League. They were going to happen from time to time, and MacArtney and Quartermain were just going to have to suck it up and get on with business.

And the cover-up machine that is the Solly Justice Dept. still sometimes has to drag out some bodies to placate the general public.

"All right, so the Manties are pissed off. Well, that's probably not all that unreasonable of them, either. But however pissed off they may be, they aren't really going to open fire on a Solarian task force which, as Omosupe's just pointed out, outnumbers them two-to-one. So what they're actually doing is basically running a bluff. Or, more likely, posturing. They may be prepared to 'demand' that Byng stand down and submit to some sort of Manty investigation, but they know damned well they aren't going to get anything remotely like that. So what they're really hoping for is that Byng will settle for effectively flipping them off, then pull out of New Tuscany and let them claim that they 'ran him out of town' for his high-handed actions."

"And the reason they'll do that is exactly what, Malachai?" MacArtney inquired.

"Because they need to do it for domestic consumption." Abruzzi shrugged again. "Trust me, I know how this sort of thing works. They've got three dead destroyers, they've been fighting a war for twenty-odd T-years, and they've just finished getting their asses kicked when the Havenites hit their home star system. They know as well as we do that even if they hadn't taken any losses at all from the 'Battle of Manticore,' they couldn't possibly take on the Solarian League Navy. But they also know their domestic morale has just been shot right in the head . . . and that the loss of three more destroyers—especially if it looks like the opening step in getting the League added to their enemies—is only going to hit it again. So they issue these incredibly unrealistic demands to us here in Chicago, and to Byng at New Tuscany, in order to show their own domestic newsies what big brass balls they've got. And then, when Byng basically ignores them and sails back to Meyers in his own good time, they trumpet that the big, bad Sollies have backed down. They tell their own public that the League's cut and run and that, purely in a spirit of magnanimity, Queen Elizabeth has decided to exercise moderation and settle for a diplomatic conclusion to the entire affair."

He shrugged.

"To be honest, they almost certainly realize that they've got enough economic clout that we'll decide to offer reparations—pay them off out of petty cash so they'll go away and leave us alone—just so we can get on with moving our commerce through their wormhole network. The bottom line is that it's no skin off our noses if we offer reparations as long as we make it clear that it's totally voluntary on our part and that we completely reject their right to press any demands against us. They get a settlement they can wave under their public's nose to prove how resolute they were, and we avoid establishing any actual diplomatic or military precedents that might come home to bite us on the arse later."

This is actually quote a logical surmise of the situation and where it will go. It's also incorrect because Henke at least is serious about getting justice for murdered RMN spacers.

"As a matter of fact," he continued, "this may turn out to be useful to us." Abruzzi and MacArtney both looked a bit puzzled, and this time he let a little of his smile show. "I think our friends in Manticore have been getting just a little too full of themselves," he went on. "They got away with demanding that technology embargo against the Havenites. They've gotten away with raising their Junction fees across the board to help pay for their damned war. They've just finished dividing the Silesian Confederacy right down the middle with the Andermani. And they've just finished annexing the entire Talbott Sector and shooting up the entire Monican Navy, not to mention turning the League into the villain of the piece in Monica and the Talbott Sector. They must feel like they've been on a roll, and I think it may be time for us to remind them that they're actually only a very tiny fish in a really big pond."

How do they know all this about Manticore, but not what they can do in a fight?

Kolokoltsov would literally have found it difficult to remember (impossible, really, without consulting the archives) how many foreign ministers had come and gone during his own tenure. Given the number of political factions and "parties" in the Assembly, it was extraordinarily difficult for any politician to forge a lasting majority at the federal level. The fact that everyone knew that any government could have only the appearance of actual power meant there was really very little reason to form lasting political alliances. It wasn't as if the continuity of political officeholders was going to have any real effect on the League's policies, yet everyone wanted his own shot at holding federal office. Status wasn't necessarily the same thing as power, and a stint as a League cabinet minister was considered a valuable resume entry when one returned to one's home system and ran for an office that really possessed actual power.

All of that combined to explain why most premierships lasted less than a single T-year before the current prime minister was turned out and replaced by someone else—who, of course, had to dole out cabinet positions all over again. Which was why Kolokoltsov had so much trouble remembering the faces of all the men and women who'd officially headed his ministry over the years. All of them—including Roelas y Valiente—had understood who truly made the League's policy, just as all of them—including Roelas y Valiente—had understood why that was and how the game was played. But Roelas y Valiente resented it more than most of the others had.

Seems Solly politics have a really high turnover rate, and political alliances are generally very short indeed, since no party can effect real change and the game is played for status and counting coup rather than for power or specific policy objectives.

"To be honest," Kingsford continued, "what I'm most concerned about is the potential for setting an unfortunate precedent. I don't think the Navy wants to find itself with pissant neobarb navies thinking they can get into the habit of popping out of the underbrush to make 'demands' on us. If this looks likely to head anywhere in that direction, we may just need to step on it—hard. In that respect, at least, I think Kolokoltsov has an excellent point. And so does Rajani."

And somehow the possibility of admitting culpability in this one specific case becomes a fear of setting a precedent where they must kowtow to every foreign navy.

The Anchor Lounge was reserved solely for Navy captains, although the occasional, particularly audacious Marine colonel might occasionally invade its sacred precincts, and it was a very nice dining room, indeed. Far short of the sybaritic luxury of the flag officers' dining room, of course, but much more magnificent than mere commanders or lieutenants (or Marine majors) were likely ever to see. And, because it was located in the Navy Building, it was much less uncommon to see Battle Fleet and Frontier Fleet officers rubbing elbows here, as it were. Officially, it was even encouraged, since they were all members of the same Navy. Unofficially, it was extraordinarily rare, even here, for officers in the Solarian League Navy's competing branches to actually seek out one another. It simply wasn't done.

Daub and Irene Teague, two officers, Frontier and Battle Fleet respectively belonging to the analysis branch of Solly R&D.

Al-Fanudahi cocked his head, his expression skeptical, and Teague felt the tips of her ears heat. While she was undoubtedly correct that it wasn't her place to make any final judgments on Byng's actions, providing the analysis on which those judgments would be based was supposed to be one of Operational Analysis' primary functions. The fact that its analysis was more likely to be used to whitewash someone than to nail actual cases of obvious incompetence was one of those little secrets polite people didn't talk about in public. On the other hand, failing in its responsibility to report unpalatable truths was hardly OpAn's only fault. They were also supposed to be the office which identified and analyzed potential foreign threats or new developments which might require modifications of the SLN's operational doctrine, and they didn't do very much of that, either. In fact, OpAn did a lot less of either of those things than al-Fanudahi—and Teague—thought it ought to be doing, although Teague (unlike al-Fanudahi) wasn't prepared to make her views in that regard officially explicit.

Analysis mostly helps in that cover-up business, and provides an echo chamber that makes the Janacek Admiralty's ONI look downright professional and objective.

"They provided us with really good sensor resolution, don't you think?" he responded—rather obliquely, she thought.

"So?"

"I mean, it was really good resolution," he pointed out.

Teague sat back in her chair, wondering where he thought he was going with this, and it was his turn to sigh.

"Didn't it occur to you to wonder how they happened to be able to provide us with that kind of data?" he asked.

"No, it didn't." She shrugged. "After all, what diff—"

She broke off abruptly, her eyes widening, and al-Fanudahi nodded. There were very few traces of his earlier humor in his expression now, she noticed.

"I've put their data through the computers half a dozen times," he said, "and it keeps coming out the same way. That's shipboard-quality data. Actually, it's pretty damned good even for first-line shipboard sensors. Better than anything smaller than a battlecruiser—or maybe a heavy cruiser—should have been pulling in. So where did they get it?"

Apparently Manty recon platforms get such good sensor resolution, it's hard for Sollies to believe it didn't come from a ship's sensors.

"But that leads us to another interesting little question. I'm not familiar with any recon platform in our inventory that would have pulled in data this good even if it had been inside energy range, must less missile range. Are you?"

"No," she said unhappily.

"I'm trying to remind myself that we still don't have anything from Byng," al-Fanudahi said. "Maybe he did pick up something and then went ahead and fired anyway, but I find that difficult to believe even of him. And here's another interesting little point to consider. Even if it was a remote platform, there had to be someone out there monitoring its take. I'm inclined to wonder if even Josef Byng—and, by the way, I think you were doing cockroaches a disservice there a minute ago—would be stupid enough to kill three destroyers and their entire crews while he knew he was on camera!"

"Which suggests the Manties do have shipboard stealth capability good enough that he never realized this Chatterjee had deployed at least one trailer on his way in," she said even more unhappily.

Oh my, ships can hide from you. It's not like that's a terrible revelation or that they need even remotely comparable tech for that, space is a big place. I'm surprised there's so much difference in the recon sats when we've previously established the Sollies were pretty much equal to the Manties in stealth and ECM six or seven years ago.

"They can't all be true," she protested quietly. "The rumors, I mean. Manticore's only one tiny little star system, Daud! All right, so it's a rich little star system, and it's got a hell of a lot bigger navy than anybody else its size. But it's still one star system, however many other systems it may be in the process of annexing. Are you seriously suggesting that they've managed somehow to put together a better, more effective R and D establishment than the entire Solarian League?"

"They don't have to have done that," he said flatly. "The League could be ahead of them clear across the board, but that doesn't mean the Navy is. These people have been fighting a war for better than twenty T-years, and they started their military buildup way the hell before that. You think maybe they could have been working really hard on weapons R and D in the process? That maybe, unlike us, they've been looking at real combat reports, instead of analyses of training simulations where the 'secret details' get leaked to all the senior participants before they even begin the exercise? That, unlike us, the people building their weapons and evaluating their combat doctrines might once have heard of a gentleman named Charles Darwin? Compared to someone who's been fighting for his life for two decades, we're soft, Irene—soft, underprepared, and complacent."

Someone has a brain, but they agree to keep quiet for now rather than get sacked and achieve nothing.

[Simon_Jester]

It seems private companies in the League are more willing to shell out for good computer security than the SLN is. Solly sensor records of the massacre get added to the report heading for home, along with any other interesting data they had.

Since the SLN almost never has to worry about its ships being boarded or captured by foreigners with a competent technical establishment, why blow a lot of money on security software that will never be needed?

Aside from those two units, she'd left the rest of Byng's ships in New Tuscany with Sigbee. She'd seen no reason to try to take any more of them with her, for several reasons, including the fact that the newer Manticoran designs didn't provide a lot of redundant personnel to make up passage crews for prize vessels. Besides that, she'd quickly come to the conclusion that there was no particular point in trying to refit them for Manticoran use. They were clearly inferior do anything presently in Alliance service, and the expense and effort to bring such manpower-intensive designs up to something like current standards could be far more profitably applied to other ends.

Honestly, I was under the impression that the RMN is still manning its old Reliant-class prewar battlecruisers, and possibly the Homers and Redoubtables. Of course, those ships have been refitted with modern electronics and upgraded missile defense systems about as thoroughly as the basic hulls allow... but still, a Nevada really should be competitive with a 1905 vintage Manticoran battlecruiser.

Of course, the RMN isn't deliberately building more such battlecruisers; it's just using the ones it has until something better for its needs comes along.

Tradition! Actually, it occurs to me the hardcopy is a harder-to-alter reference point for the e-version, but I doubt that's really a concern since we've only known the two people to monkey around with diplomatic correspondence.

Well, it also has the advantage that if you hand someone a physical piece of paper to read, you know whether they're looking at it, and you can point to relevant bits of it, and so on, in a face to face interaction.

Whereas with an electronic document, you give someone a USB stick or whatever and they have to pull out their personal computing device and open it up and so on. And there is, I suspect, always going to be a certain indefinable sense that it is somehow crass to be reading your email while a foreign diplomat is standing right in front of you discussing important affairs. Even if it's an email he sent you.

This is actually quote a logical surmise of the situation and where it will go. It's also incorrect because Henke at least is serious about getting justice for murdered RMN spacers.

Also because Manticoran domestic morale is rather strong, and because Haven didn't really manage to flatten the RMN as heavily as the Solarians appear to think.

Of course, that's because the Solarian leadership has no concept of how irrelevant it is to blow up all Manticore's old superdreadnoughts when their new ones are about an order of magnitude more dangerous.

How do they know all this about Manticore, but not what they can do in a fight?

It's like the difference between knowing the extent of the USSR on a map, and knowing the exact parameters of Soviet military capabilities (which the US never did). The US tended to overestimate those capabilities rather than underestimate them, but the basic principle remains.

And somehow the possibility of admitting culpability in this one specific case becomes a fear of setting a precedent where they must kowtow to every foreign navy.

Well, again, that's a common issue in nations with a tradition of being large and in charge. They get VERY touchy about maintaining their own unquestionable hegemony.

Thus, you get Roman officials who were willing to do horrible things to foreign polities over relatively small-scale abuses against the dignity of Roman citizens. Or English/British warships routinely demanding that anyone and everyone sailing the English Channel drop their flag in submission to any British warship present. Or, today, the US refusing to meaningfully punish its soldiers for war crimes committed on foreign soil.

There's always a subconscious sense, sometimes well founded, that if you as a hegemon suddenly concede that you don't have total impunity from consequences... you'll suddenly get swarmed. And as I said, sometimes that concern is well founded.

Oh my, ships can hide from you. It's not like that's a terrible revelation or that they need even remotely comparable tech for that, space is a big place. I'm surprised there's so much difference in the recon sats when we've previously established the Sollies were pretty much equal to the Manties in stealth and ECM six or seven years ago.

Well, these guys are reasoning thusly:

1) These sensor readouts are too good to be from a tiny little drone.*
2) Therefore, they came from a ship. A ship with pretty good sensors, even. At pretty close range (as in, single-drive missile range).
3) BUT clearly these sensors were running the whole time and Byng never noticed.
4) Therefore, a Manticoran ship was operating so close to Byng's task force that it was able to view the whole affair from inside single-drive missile range. AND this same ship managed to hide not only before Byng massacred the destroyers, but afterward, and managed to sneak away without Byng ever even realizing it was there.
5) Spoooooky.

This may not be totally unimaginable to the Sollies, but it's probably a surprise- few navies they're accustomed to operating against have the combination of guts, skill, and technical savvy to sneak that effectively.

*Which is false, but justified if you don't know about all the insane things the Manticorans have done with miniaturizing their electronics in the past few decades and kept about as well classified as the Mesans have their genetic superman research...

[Ahriman238]

More exciting talking around conference room tables.

"Well, it would appear that our good friends in Chicago aren't in any tearing hurry after all, wouldn't it?"

-snip-

"They've only had our note for about ten days, Your Majesty," Sir Anthony Langtry pointed out.

He and Grantville sat in comfortable armchairs in Elizabeth's personal office, flanking her deck. They'd both eaten earlier, although each of them had a coffee cup, but the remains of Elizabeth's lunch had just been removed, and she continued to nurse a tankard of beer.

"Sure they have, Tony," she agreed, waving her tankard. "And just how long would it have taken us to respond to an official note alleging that we'd killed somebody's spacers with absolutely no provocation? Especially if they'd sent along detailed sensor data of the event . . . and informed us that they were sending a major naval force to find out what the hell happened?"

Then again, we've already covered that the League bureaucracy grinds forward with glacial speed at the best of times, and this is only exacerbated by their determination to not be seen rushing on account of "neobarbs."

The first Manticoran reporters had been briefed by the Foreign Office and the Admiralty after they and their editors had agreed to abide by the government's confidentiality request. Legally, Grantville could have invoked the Defense of the Kingdom Act and slapped them with a formal order to keep silent until he told them differently, but that particular clause of the DKA hadn't been invoked by any prime minister in the last sixty T-years. It hadn't had to be, because the Star Kingdom's press knew it had been official policy over almost all of those T-years to be as open as possible in return for reasonable self-restraint on the 'faxes' part. He had no intention of squandering that tradition of goodwill without a damned good reason.

And, so far, the members of the media here in the Star Kingdom who knew anything about it were clearly living up to their end of the bargain. In the meantime, the first of their correspondents would have reached Spindle yesterday aboard an Admiralty dispatch boat. In another couple of weeks, those correspondents' reports would be coming back through the Junction to their editors, and it would be both pointless and wrong to expect their 'faxes not to publish at that point. So . . .

"You're both right," he acknowledged. "I'd like to hold off for a little longer, though. For two reasons. One is that they may actually have sent us a response that just hasn't gotten here yet. But the other, to be frank, has more to do with whacking them harder when we do turn it loose."

The relationship between the Manticoran government and the press, one of the few relationships the High Ridge administration managed to not ruin. The government is as open and honest as it can be, but expects the press to sit on a story for a few weeks if they ask nicely. Still, the story of New Tuscany is out there, and will be made public after a few weeks.

"What I suggest is that we hold off for another four days. That will just happen to have given the Sollies exactly twice as long as they really needed to acknowledge the receipt of our note, and we make exactly that point in our official news release. We explain that we'd delayed making the news public both to give us time to notify the next of kin of Commodore Chatterjee's personnel and to be sure that the Solarian League government had been given ample time to respond to our concerns. Now that they've had twice as long as needed for that, however, we feel no further point can be served by failing to make the news public."

"And waiting that long makes the point that we had a specific delay interval in mind all along," Langtry mused. "We're not just going ahead and calling in the newsies because were getting nervous about the Sollies' failure to respond."

"Exactly." Grantville nodded with a nasty smile. "Not to mention the fact that, as the real adults of the piece, we gave the petulant, spoiled children of the piece extra time before we blew the whistle on them. But, equally as the real adults of the piece, we are not going to allow the spoiled brats to hunker down forever in the corner with their lips poked out while they sulk."

The suggested delay before going public, and the reasons for it.

"I can't say your report is very cheerful reading, Michelle," Augustus Khumalo said heavily. "On the other hand, I completely endorse all of your actions."

Khumalo still doesn't see much action, but he knows when to back his subordinates.

"I agree that there's nothing particularly cheerful about the situation, Sir," she continued out loud after a moment, shaking off—mostly—her reflections about potential media disasters with her name on them. "In fact, I'm beginning to wonder if it was such a good idea to send Reprise off to Meyers before we knew exactly what was going to happen at New Tuscany. Especially since I didn't manage to keep the Sollies from getting a dispatch boat out."

Denton and the Reprise are being sent to the nearest OFS satrap in Meyers, carrying Dame Matsuko's written reaction to the New Tuscany Incident (the original destruction f Chatterjee's destroyers.)

"Anisimovna told Vézien and the other New Tuscans about Crandall, but no one on the planet ever actually saw her or any of her ships. Given what happened to Giselle, it's pretty evident Anisimovna wouldn't have suffered any qualms of conscience over lying to them about a little thing like fifty or sixty superdreadnoughts. And I'd really like to think that it's one thing to get a Battle Fleet admiral with a pathological hatred for all things Manticoran assigned to a Frontier Fleet command but another thing entirely to get an entire fleet of Battle Fleet ships of the wall maneuvered this far out into the boonies. If Manpower has that kind of reach, if it can really move task groups and battle fleets around like chessmen or checkers, we've obviously been underestimating the hell out of them for a long, long time. And if that's true, who knows what else the bastards are up to?"

Quite a lot, actually. The Manties have intelligence that there's a large force of Solly wallers nearby where they can respond, but they're not sure if they trust the source, namely Vezien and the New Tuscans say that Anisimovna told them so.

Michelle cocked an eyebrow at him, and he chuckled and a bit sourly. "For quite some time, I was convinced I'd been sent out here—and left here—because the Cluster was absolutely the lowest possible priority for the Admiralty. In fact, to be honest, I still cherish rather strong suspicions in that direction."

He smiled more warmly at her, and she hoped she'd managed to conceal her surprise at hearing him say that. The fact that it accorded well with her own view of the situation made it even more remarkable that he'd brought it up. And especially that he'd done it with so little evident bitterness.

"In fairness," he continued, "I'm relatively sure the Janacek Admiralty sent me out here because of my connections with the Conservative Association and the fact that I'm related, although rather more distantly than you are, to the Queen. It put someone they considered 'safe' out here, and my connection to the Dynasty didn't hurt any in terms of local prestige. But they never showed any interest in providing Talbott Station with the ships required to provide any sort of real security in such a large volume of space. It was one of those 'file and forget' sorts of situations.

"Then the new Government came in, and I wondered how long I'd stay here until I got yanked back home. Politics being politics, I really didn't expect to be left out here for long, and it got more than a little unpleasant waiting for the ax to fall. But it became pretty evident that the Grantville Government had assigned a lower priority to Talbott than to Silesia, and, again, I couldn't really argue on any logical basis. So, here I sat in a humdrum, secondary—or even tertiary—assignment out in the back of beyond, with the firm expectation that the most exciting thing likely to happen was the chance to chase down an occasional pirate, while I waited to be relieved and banished to half-pay.

"Obviously," he said dryly, "that's changed."

"I think we might both safely agree that that's an accurate statement, Sir," Michelle said. "And, if you'll forgive me, and since you've been so frank and open with me, I'd like to apologize to you."

He quirked an eyebrow, and she shrugged.

"I'm afraid my evaluation of why you were out here was pretty close to your own, Sir," she admitted. "That's what I want to apologize for, because even if the logic that got you out here in the first place was exactly what you've just described, I believe you've amply demonstrated that it was a damned good thing you were here."

Khumalo's thoughts on why he was sent, and remains, in place at Talbott Station. Pretty much on the nose, though I think Caparelli and White Haven at least have believed in the hidden depths of Khumalo's character ever since he got Terekhov's message about Monica, endorsed his actions and went tearing off with the biggest force he could muster on short notice.

"The dispatch in question informed me that, despite whatever is or isn't going on closer to home, Admiral Oversteegen and his squadron will still be arriving here in Spindle. In fact, I expect him within the next twelve to fifteen T-days."

"Thank God!" Michelle said with quietly intense sincerity.

"I agree. It's taken some time for them to feel comfortable enough back home after the Battle of Manticore to go ahead and release him, and I still don't have an exact projected arrival date, but he's definitely in the pipeline. I understand he'll be bringing another squadron of Saganami-Cs with him, as well, and I'm sure we'll all be relieved to see them."

"Based on the Sollies' performance at New Tuscany, and what my people were able to see of their hardware on the prize ships, I'd say that with Michael and another squadron of the Charlies we ought to be able to handle just about anything below the wall they're likely to throw our way."

"I'm sure you would," Khumalo said even more soberly. "But I'm afraid that's sort of the point, isn't it? I'm not too worried about anything below the wall, either."

Reinforcements, and the Admiralty has been hoarding a lot of ships at Manticore after the big battle.

"Deploy the platforms, Guns," he said.

"Aye, aye, Sir. Deploying the alpha platforms now."

Heather nodded to Jackson, who gave her readouts one last check, then pressed the key. Heather watched red lights flash to green and watched her own panel carefully.

"Alpha patterns have cleared the wedge, Sir," she announced a few moments later. "Stealth is active and deployment appears nominal." She glanced at a time display. "Beta platforms prepped for launch in . . . ten minutes and thirty-one seconds."

One of the advantages of Ghost Rider is that they can launch them out the missile tubes for speedy deployment, but it seems they aren't doing that here if they need over ten minutes to deploy, likely more careful masking of their capabilities.

Despite its status as the administrative center of the Madras Sector, the Meyers System was scarcely a bustling hive of interstellar commerce. In fact, it was a rare day that saw more than two or three hyper translations, and it was scarcely unheard of for days or even weeks to go by with no new arrivals at all.

Traffic had been a bit more brisk since the fiasco in the Monica System, but most of the "special investigators" and representatives of the Inspector General's office had already come and gone. Most of them hadn't even bothered to unpack, as far as Bristow could tell. The fact that they'd come all the way out to Meyers was sufficient proof of their devotion to duty, and there was no point actually investigating anything, since most of them had been informed of their reports' conclusions before they were dispatched in the first place.

Ah, the nearest OFS-administered region of the Verge is called Madras, check. Also, some of the serious investigation of Monica.

O'Shaughnessy crossed to the indicated bridge chair and settled into it, careful to keep his hands well away from the console in front of it or the chair arm keypads. Heather turned her head to smile at him, and he smiled back. The ATO's place was where Commander Denton normally parked him when he visited the bridge, and Heather had gotten to know the analyst rather better than she'd ever expected to.

She'd also locked out the control pads he was so carefully avoiding, though she had no intention of telling him so. First, because she didn't want to risk rubbing in any perceived distrust in his ability to keep his hands out of trouble, and, second, because there was something rather touching—almost endearing—about how cautious he actually was.

Apparently you can lock out control panels from the captain's chair. Handy when you have clueless civilians on the bridge.

The destroyer's closing velocity relative to the system primary had risen to 20,296 KPS, and she'd traveled just under thirty-two million kilometers farther in-system. In that same interval, the Ghost Rider platforms, loping along at the low (for them) acceleration of only five thousand gravities in order to stay stealthy, had already moved three minutes past their turnover time. They were over sixty million kilometers ahead of the destroyer, with their velocity back down to a mere 85,413 KPS, which also meant they were only seventy-three million kilometers from Meyers, and four light-minutes was close enough for their passive instrumentation to begin picking up more detailed information.

A recon platform's low, highly stealthy accel of 5,000 Gs, and about a four light-minute range for massive sensors to detect anything useful.

Reprise had stopped accelerating and started coasting ballistically twenty-six minutes earlier. During that interval, her recon platforms had reached their destinations, spreading out to englobe the planet Meyers at a range of barely fifteen light-seconds. At that distance, there could be no mistake. There really were seventy-one Solarian superdreadnoughts, accompanied by sixteen battlecruisers, twelve heavy cruisers, twenty-three light cruisers, and eighteen destroyers orbiting the planet.

Not to mention three repair ships, what have to be a couple of dozen stores ships, and what looks like a pair of straight ammunition carriers. It would appear New Tuscany isn't the only star system out this way benefitting from Battle Fleet's attention of late, he thought ironically.

Admiral Crandall's Task Force 496. 71 SD, 16, BC, 12 CA, 23 CL, and 18 DD. And a rare instance of a fleet bringing it's own supply and repair ships. And yes, after a short interval this force will be driving straight for Spindle. So what are the odds?

"Don't get me wrong, Mr. O'Shaughnessy. We could hurt them, probably even pretty badly, but no way in the galaxy could we stop them if they're prepared to keep coming. The battlecruisers and the small fry—phfffft!" Denton snapped his fingers. "But those big bastards are something else entirely. We could probably rip hell out of them as long as the Mark 23 pods hold out, but it would take a lot of hits—even with the Mark 23—to kill one of them, and we don't have an unlimited supply of the pods. Worse than that, we don't have any podnoughts. That means we can only carry and deploy pods externally, which makes them a lot more vulnerable and tactically less flexible. They'd be at their most effective in a purely defensive deployment, with lots of shipboard control links to manage them, but to make that work, we'd have to figure out where we needed them far enough in advance to get them—and enough ships to control them in worthwhile salvos—there before the Sollies came calling, and that wouldn't exactly be a trivial challenge.

"It's more likely we'd find ourselves having to face up to them without a powerful pod reserve—especially if we decide we have to insure the security of Spindle and dump most of the pods there. If that happens, we'll have to use mobile units to cover the Quadrant's other systems, and that means nothing heavier than a Nike or a Saganami-C. And that means using primarily whatever we can fire from our internal tubes . . . which sure as hell doesn't mean Mark 23s.

Alright, I admit that sounds bad, even if the new laser heads provide a good chance for a Nike or a Saganami to do real damage from outside an SD's range, they can't kill dozens of SDs with just a cruiser or two.

"Well, with all due respect, Sir, I think it's time we aborted your diplomatic mission. Somehow, I don't think protesting Byng's actions or presenting a note explaining our response is going to do much good. And given what happened the last time some of our destroyers got too close to Solarian battlecruisers, I'd just as soon not get any closer than this to Solarian ships of the wall!"

"Captain, for what it's worth, I concur entirely."

Looks like delivering the note is off in favor of warning home.

"Never did squawk their transponder, Sir," Coker observed.

"No, I noticed that myself, PO," Bristow replied with a touch of irony, and Coker chuckled.

"Suppose they saw something they didn't much care for, Sir?"

"That's exactly what I think," Bristow said slowly, "and that's what bothers me."

"Sir?"

"Just how the hell did they see anything to make them nervous from way the hell and gone out there?" Bristow asked, and the petty officer frowned. It wasn't a particularly happy frown, and Bristow nodded slowly. "That's what I thought, myself. Of course, whether or not we can convince Admiral Crandall of it is something else entirely, isn't it?"

Not every Solly is an idiot, just all the ones making decisions in the field.

"I don't care what their frigging 'warning messages' to Josef said!" Crandall snarled, glaring across the conference table at Lorcan Verrochio as if he were a Manty. "And I don't give a good goddamn what happened to their damned destroyers! The bastards fired on and destroyed a Solarian League Navy battlecruiser with all hands!"

"But only after Admiral Byng had—" Verrochio began.

"I don't give a flying fuck what Byng may or may not have done!" Crandall interrupted furiously, her expression livid. "First, because the only evidence we have is what they've seen fit to provide us, and I don't trust it as far as I can damned well spit. But second, and even more importantly, because it damned well doesn't matter! The Solarian League can't accept something like this—not out of some frigging little pissant navy out beyond the Verge—no matter what kind of provocation they may think they have! If we let them get away with this, God only knows who's going to try something stupid next!"

"But the Manticorans aren't a typical—"

"Don't tell me about their super weapons again, Mr. Commissioner," Crandall snapped. "I'll grant you that they obviously have much longer ranged missiles than we'd appreciated. That may actually make some sense of the preposterous stories we've been hearing about their damned war with the Havenites. But what they could do against a dozen Frontier Fleet battlecruisers won't help them very much against modern, integrated missile defense from nine squadrons of the wall, plus screen. Trust me, they'll need something more than a few fancy tricks with missiles to stop my task force! And I don't intend to stand here with my thumb up my ass while they get themselves organized."

Well she's willing to admit some stories out of the Haven Quadrant may have some grain of truth, so, upgrade? Again with all this pissing and moaning about how any sort of reason or restraint will set a precedent they can't live with.

"Admiral," Verrochio said as forcefully as he could (speaking for the recorders, of course), "I cannot authorize any sort of action or reprisal against the Manticorans without approval from higher authority within the Ministry!" He raised one hand like a stop sign and continued quickly as Crandall seemed to swell visibly. "I'm not saying you aren't totally justified in your feelings. And assuming the information available to us at this time is accurate, I think it's extremely likely Ministry approval would be forthcoming. As you say, allowing something like this to go unchallenged, to set some sort of precedent for other neobarb navies, could be disastrous. But making a decision which would amount to going to war with a multi-system stellar power, especially one so deeply involved in the League's carrying trade, is well beyond the scope of my authority as a Frontier Security governor."

-snip-

"Well," Crandall didn't quite sneer, in response to Verrochio's protest, "you undoubtedly know the limits of your authority better than I do, Sir. However, I know the limits of my authority, and I also recognize my responsibilities. So, with all due respect for your need for Ministry approval, I have no intention of waiting for it."

"What do you mean?" Verrochio asked, his voice taut.

"I mean I'll be underway within forty-eight hours, Mr. Commissioner," Crandall said flatly, "and the Manties won't be happy to see me at all."

Verrochio, knowing exactly what kind of wood chipper Crandall is about to stick her hand in, manages to artfully cover himself for any responsibility in what will damn well turn this into an all-out shooting war. "Yep, it has all Crandall's idea, I had no authority to stop her."

[Ahriman238]

Absolutely nothing seemed to happen for the next two or three minutes, but appearances were deceiving, and Topolev waited patiently, watching his own displays, as Task Force One of the Mesan Alignment Navy translated ever so slowly and gradually back into normal-space.

This maneuver had been tested against the Mesa System's sensor arrays by crews using the early Ghost-class ships even before the first of the Shark-class prototypes had ever been laid down, and Task Force One had practiced it over a hundred times once the mission had been okayed. Despite all that, Topolev still cherished a few reservations about the entire operation. Not about the abilities of his people, or the technical capabilities of his vessels, but about the timing.

Sneaking into a system is really hard, however good your ship's stealth is there's an immense and easily detectable energy burst when leaving hyper, so your only real hope is they have no meaningful detection capability (unlikely, in the case of Manticore and Grayson) or you come out far enough away, weeks or months at sublight, so the signature is barely detectable and more readily explained as a sensor glitch.

And about the fact that we were never supposed to carry this out with the Sharks in the first place, Freddy, he reminded himself. Don't forget that minor point! This was what the Leonard Detweiler class was supposed to be for after the Sharks proved the basic concept. They weren't supposed to carry out the actual mission themselves; they were supposed to serve as training ships for the crews of the ships that would execute the mission.

The Shark-class spider-drive podlayers were the proof-of-concept prototypes and training ships for a serious class of stealthy podnoughts that were supposed to do this a couple of decades down the line. You know. in Raoul Harrington's day.

It was physically impossible for any ship to cross the hyper wall without radiating a hyper footprint, but the strength of that footprint was—to a large extent, at least—a factor of the base velocity the ship in question wanted to carry across the wall. The alpha translation's bleed factor was roughly ninety-two percent, and all of that energy had to go somewhere. There was also an unavoidable gravitic spike or echo along the interface between the alpha bands of hyper-space and normal-space that was effectively independent of a ship's speed. Reducing velocity couldn't do anything about that, but a slow, "gentle" translation along a shallow gradient produced a much weaker spike, as well.

No translation, however slow and gentle, could render a hyper footprint too weak to be detected by the sort of arrays covering the Manticore Binary System. Yet arrays like that, because of their very sensitivity, were notorious for throwing up occasional "false positives," ghost translations that the filters were supposed to strain out before they ever reached a human operator's attention. And the most common ghosts of all normally appeared as a hyper footprint and an echo, which was precisely what Topolev's maneuver was supposed to counterfeit.

So they can't make the footprint vanish, but they can do a pretty convincing impression of a sensor ghost. Ships lose 92% of their velocity on a downward translation, which is already restricted to 0.3 c or less if they don't want their ship torn apart.

Under normal circumstances, there would have been very little point to deceiving the arrays where a simple hyper footprint was concerned, given the fact that those same arrays would almost certainly have picked up the impeller wedge of any ship headed towards the system. Even the best stealth systems were unreliable, at best, against a sensor array which could measure eight or nine thousand kilometers on a side, and Manticore's long-range sensors were even larger—and more sensitive—than that. Closer in, where the gradient of the stellar gravity well provided background interference and there were dozens of other gravity sources to clutter the landscape and turn the master arrays' very sensitivity against them, yes. The really big arrays were all but useless once you got within a light-hour or so of a system primary or a wormhole junction. That was where the shorter-ranged sensors aboard warships and recon platforms took over, and with good reason.

The impressive size of the early- warning arrays, which seem to cover the distant approaches but cannot monitor the nearer, well-traveled areas where a ship would normally jump in near the hyper-limit.

The twenty Shark-class ships, each about midway between an old-fashioned battleship and a dreadnought for size, deactivated the tractors which had held them together. Reaction thrusters flared, pushing them apart, although they didn't seek the same amount of separation most starships their size would have. Then again, they didn't need that much separation.

A few moments later, they were underway at a steady seventy-five gravities. At that absurdly low acceleration rate it would take them a full ninety hours—almost four T-days—to reach the eighty percent of light-speed that represented the maximum safe normal-space velocity permitted by available particle shielding, and it would take them another three T-weeks, by the clocks of the rest of the universe, to reach their destination, although the subjective time would be only seventeen days for them. Another ship of their size could have attained the same velocity in a little more than thirteen hours, but that was all right with Admiral Topolev. The total difference in transit time would still be under six days—less than four, subjective—and unlike the units of his own command, that hypothetical other ship would have been radiating an impeller signature . . . which his ships weren't.

Size (big battleship/pocket dreadnought) and accel of the Sharks, they can actually pull a couple of times that much accel (IIRC, the absolute theoretical emergency maximum is 275 Gs) but they're in no particular hurry, they have a schedule to keep and that schedule has them arriving in three weeks. Also a reminder that in general it takes a capital ship most of a day to reach their max sublight speed.

Given the range on the possible footprint, the datum was over twelve hours old. Footprints, like gravitic pulses, were detectable by the fluctuations they imposed on the alpha wall interface with normal-space, which meant they propagated at roughly sixty-four times the speed of light. For most practical purposes, that equated to real-time, or very near to real-time, but when you started talking about the detection ranges possible to Perimeter Security Command's huge arrays, even that speed left room for considerable delays.

It seemed like an awfully long way to go for very little return. There'd been no sign of an impeller wedge, which meant no one was out there accelerating towards the star system. If there'd been an actual hyper footprint in the first place—which Epstein frankly doubted was the case—it had to have been some merchantship coming in with appallingly bad astrogation. Whoever it was had popped out of hyper a full light-month short of his intended destination, and then promptly (and sensibly) popped right back into hyper rather than spending the endless weeks which would have been required to reach anyplace worthwhile under impeller drive. And when she did arrive in the star system, or at the Junction, she wasn't going to tell a single solitary soul about her little misadventure. That kind of astrogation error went beyond simply embarrassing to downright humiliating. In fact, if Astro Control had hard evidence of a Manticoran astrogator who'd been that far off, they would undoubtedly call her back in for testing and recertification!

FTL delays relevant at these ranges, and we actually have a range, which puzzles me. A "full" light-month out, I can't see a way for them to cover it in three weeks without using FTL. Ah well, probably an error that got by the editor.

Commander Michael Carus, the commanding officer of HMS Javelin, and the senior officer of the second division of Destroyer Squadron 265, known as the "Silver Cepheids," sighed philosophically as he contemplated his orders.

At least it was something to do, he supposed. And he wasn't surprised they'd gotten the call. The squadron had earned its name from its demonstrated expertise in reconnaissance and scouting, although he'd always wondered if it was really all that appropriate. Cepheids were scarcely among the galaxy's less noticeable stars, after all, and recon missions were supposed to be unobtrusive.

"Here, Linda," he said, handing the message chip to Lieutenant Linda Petersen, Javelin's astrogator. "We're going ghost hunting. Work out a course, please."

Probable sensor ghost or merchie misadventure or not, it gets checked out. By no less than four destroyers to fan out and cover the volume an enemy ship might have covered on reaction thrusters.

If he were going to be honest, Topolev supposed, he wasn't immune to the ops officer's sense of euphoria. In the roughly seventeen hours since their arrival, their velocity had increased to better than forty-five thousand kilometers per second, and they were almost a hundred and thirty-eight million kilometers closer to their destination. Under most circumstances, 7.6 light-minutes wouldn't have seemed like very much of a cushion against military-grade sensors. Especially not against Manticoran military-grade sensors. The Mesan Alignment had plowed quite a few decades—and several trillion credits—into the development of its own stealth technology, however, and the MAN was at least two generations ahead of the Solarian League in that capability. Their analysts' best estimate was that their stealth systems were equal to those of Manticore at a minimum, and probably at least marginally superior, although no one was prepared to assume anything of the sort. But as the Manties' own Harrington had demonstrated at a place called Cerberus, the key element in any passive detection of a moving starship was its impeller signature . . . and Task Force One didn't have an impeller signature.

Mesan stealth is at least equal to, and perhaps better than Manticore's. Certainly they're ahead of the Sollies, whose hardware made a very good showing against Manticore some six or seven years ago in Operation Hassan (the assassination of Cromarty, and attempt on the Queen and Protector.)

The Royal Manticoran Navy was the enemy, and Frederick Topolev was prepared to do whatever it took to defeat that enemy, but neither he nor Collin Detweiler's intelligence services were prepared to underestimate that enemy or permit themselves to hold mere "normals" in contempt. Especially not given the RMN's combat record over the last twenty years. The MAN was almost certainly the galaxy's youngest real navy, and its founders—including one Frederick Topolev—had studied the Manties, and their officer corps, and their battle record with painstaking attention.

In this, at least, the Mesan Alignment has learned a lot from the Scrags. Genetic enhancements mean nothing if they just give you the hubris to imagine your enemies can't possibly outwit or harm you.

They'd learned quite a few valuable lessons of their own in the process, and the admiral knew the crews of those destroyers were firmly convinced they'd been sent out here to investigate a genuine ghost. If anyone had thought anything else, they wouldn't have sent just four destroyers to check it out. But he also knew that, routine or not, the crews of those ships were doing exactly what they were supposed to be doing. He recognized the standard search pattern they were running, knew their sensor crews were monitoring their instruments and their displays intently. If there was anything out there to find, those destroyers would find it.

Except that no one in the entire galaxy knew how to find it. Knew even how to recognize that there was something out there to find. And so, despite the absurdly low range, and despite his own ships' ridiculously low top acceleration rate, Topolev felt just as confident as he looked.

This is true, the Manties will be studiously attentive to duty, but they know for a fact there can't be a wedge out there, because the array would catch it, stealth or no. So they're looking for a ship or ships that probably don't exist and at most could have pulled 15 Gs of accel from their starting point, as opposed to 75. So the volume of space they're searching is much to small, and the MAN ships are already well outside it, under the most impressive stealth Mesa could develop.

"I don't think there's any such thing as 'good timing' for a confrontation with the Solarian League, Your Majesty," he said, speaking rather more formally than was his wont. "On the other hand, as you've just said, it's not exactly as if there were any tremendous surprises here, is it?"

"I can always be surprised by Solly stupidity, Willie," Elizabeth said bitingly. "I shouldn't be, I suppose, but every time I think I've seen the stupidest thing they could possibly do, they find a way to surpass themselves! At least this particular idiot's taken himself out of the gene pool. It's a pity he had to take so many others with him!"

"I agree, Your Majesty," anger of his own rumbled around in Sir Anthony Langtry's voice, "and the fact that those flaming idiots in Chicago still haven't officially responded to our initial note only proves your point."

By now word has reached Manticore of the battle, and the ultimate fate of Joseph Byng, as well as Manpower's involvement in egging the New Tuscans on.

"Personally," Elizabeth said, "I'm less worried about sixty obsolete Solarian superdreadnoughts than I am about the several hundred modern, pod-laying superdreadnoughts the Peeps still have. You're right, Willie. We've discussed the Sollies almost to death. I'm not saying we've figured out what to do with them yet, even if I do feel a little bit better in that regard than I did a month or so ago, but I think we may have let ourselves get overly focused on them. I mean, whatever kind of threat the Solarian League may pose in the long term, it's the Peeps we have to worry about now. So while I'm perfectly willing to admit that the League may be the greater danger in absolute terms, I think we need to focus on removing the threat we can remove as quickly as possible."

-snip-

"I've deliberately kept my hands off of a lot of the operational details," he said. "The last thing Tom Caparelli needs is to think he's got a backseat driver—and one who's a civilian, now—trying to grab the controls away from him, so he and I have both tried very hard to respect one another's spheres of authority. Having said that, though, I think the answer is probably that, yes, we could punch out the Haven System with what we have available right now. If we want to do it before we find ourselves up against the Sollies, though, and considering transit times and everything else, we'd have to use Eighth Fleet, which would mean uncovering the Home System at least temporarily. I don't much care for that thought, but I think enough of the new construction would be available at or almost at combat readiness to cover the gap, and we've made better progress than I really anticipated in getting the system-defense variant of Apollo into service.

A couple of months after the Battle of Manticore, they're ready to get back on the offensive against Haven.

"I know you and I haven't seen eye-to-eye where the Peeps are concerned for a long time now, Honor," she said quietly. "I've tried to pretend we did. I've tried to ignore the fact that we didn't. And when I couldn't do that anymore, I've concluded that your personal acquaintance with people like Theisman and Tourville has affected your judgment. I still think that's possible, as a matter of fact. But—"

She paused, and silence hovered once more for several heartbeats before she spoke again.

"But," she continued, "maybe I'm the one whose judgment has been affected. You know why that might be true—better than anyone else, I suspect. And you're right, we do know things now that we didn't know then. As you say, there's still the problem of how they could have set up something like this so quickly—just the distances involved should have made it impossible. But"—her expression was that of a woman whose stubborn integrity was at odds with deeply held beliefs—"the explanation really could be as simple as their having someone close enough to Pritchart to know what she was thinking ahead of time. I still don't know how they could have known I'd pick Torch for the site of the summit, but if you're right—if it was a case of someone trying to manipulate me because they knew how I'd react to an assassination attempt anywhere—Torch would have been a logical target for Manpower. It could just have been serendipity that it was also the prospective site for the summit."

See, Elizabeth is not unreasonable. Stubborn and hot-tempered sure, but willing to examine her own assumptions. Though she still sees it as her essential responsibility to her subjects to see Haven removed as an enemy as quickly as humanly possible.

"Yes, it is," Honor agreed quietly. "But let's suppose you manage to impose peace on your terms. What are those terms going to be? Remember what we talked about here less than a month ago. Sir Thomas gave you the Admiralty's plan for defeating and occupying the Solarian League. Do you really think we could do the same thing to Haven, as well? Especially if we found ourselves trying to do both of them at once?

"We don't even know where Bolthole is, Elizabeth, so even if we demanded that they scrap their entire existing fleet, we can't take out their biggest and best yard with some sort of long-range strike. And it also means we can't picket it to make sure their fleet stays scrapped. So the Republic of Haven is still going to have a navy—and that navy's still going to be the only other major fleet with podnoughts—when we turn around to face the Sollies. We all know how well that worked out last time around. But let's suppose we do know where Bolthole is—that we demand its location as part of the surrender terms and then go blow the crap out of it. What happens then? If you impose punitive peace terms at knife-point because of the temporary advantage Apollo gives us, you've still got to come up with the hulls and ships to enforce those terms afterward . . . at the same moment when you're fighting for your life against the League.

"Do you really want to trust that we'll somehow be able to build a fleet big enough to handle both of those chores at once? And do you really think Pritchart—or, more likely, some other Havenite administration—wouldn't go right ahead and stab you in the back at the first opportunity? Or even simply offer 'technical assistance' to the Sollies to help them close the gap between their capabilities and ours even faster? And if you impose those terms by blowing the Haven System's infrastructure apart, and by killing thousands more of their naval personnel when they can't even shoot back effectively, I can absolutely guarantee you that any Havenite administration is only going to be licking its chops while it waits for the best possible moment to hit you from behind."

And this. Winning the Haven Wars (discounting HRG-fuckery) was never going to be as simple as blowing stuff up till one side yells "uncle!" Well, maybe for Haven, which absolutely has the population base needed to occupy Manticore, but Manticore can't effectively occupy Haven. They need a way to forge a lasting peace before the Sollies try sending a big fleet straight at Manticore.

"But, having said that, I think we have to position ourselves to fight the SLN, whether we want to or not. And that means reaching some sort of settlement, whether it's diplomatic or military, with the Havenites first. I've never disagreed with you there. But I think that rather than blowing still more of their ships out of space, and rather than destroying still more of their infrastructure, we ought to tell them we think it's time to talk. Hamish is right about the timing if we decide to launch what amounts to a preemptive strike, but remember what Pritchard did when she had the advantage because of what was happening in Talbott. She didn't shoot first, she offered to talk, and I genuinely believe she's telling the truth when she says she didn't set out to derail the summit.

"So I think it's time we show Haven we can forego an advantage in the interests of peace, as well. We defeated them decisively here in Manticore, despite our own losses, and they know it. By now, they know we could destroy the Haven System any time we chose to, as well. So I suggest that we hold Eighth Fleet right here, close to home, in case we do end up needing it in Talbott. Instead of sending me to Nouveau Paris to hold a pistol to their heads and make them sign on the dotted line, send an accredited diplomat, instead. Someone who can tell them that we know we can destroy them, too, and that we're prepared to do it if we have to, but that we don't want to unless we have to. Give them the option and let them have a little time to think, a little time to approach the decision with dignity, Elizabeth, not just because they're lying face down in the dirt with the muzzle of a gun screwed into the backs of their necks. Give them the chance to surrender on some sort of reasonable terms before I have to go out and kill thousands of more people who might not have to die at all."

And so Honor is taking Eighth Fleet where it was always meant to go, straight to the Haven system, with an offer to negotiate a meaningful and reasonable peace. And with the threat of Eighth Fleet going to town unstated but understood by all parties.

He sat once more upon Mako's flag bridge. Beyond the flagship's hull, fourteen more ships of Task Force One kept perfect formation upon her, and the brilliant beacon of Manticore-A blazed before them. They were only one light-week from that star, now, and they had decelerated to only twenty percent of light-speed. This was the point for which they had been headed ever since leaving Mesa four T-months before. Now it was time to do what they'd come here to do.

"Begin deployment," he said, and the enormous hatches opened and the pods began to spill free.

The other units of Task Force One were elsewhere, closing on Manticore-B. They wouldn't be deploying their pods just yet, not until they'd reached their own preselected launch point. Topolev wished that he'd had more ships to commit to that prong of the attack, but the decision to move up Oyster Bay had dictated the available resources, and this prong had to be decisive. Besides, there were fewer targets in the Manticore-B subsystem, anyway.

It'll be enough, he told himself, watching as the pods disappeared steadily behind his decelerating starships, vanishing into the endless dark between the stars. It'll be enough. And in about five weeks, the Manties are going to get a late Christmas present they'll never forget.

Dun Dun Dunnn. And the end. In more ways than one. Because not only was Shadow of Freedom marketed as a main series book, but Mission of Honor is more a direct sequel to this book with things like Crandall's attack on Spindle and Mesa's attack on Manticore, than it is to At All Costs. I imagine that must be confusing to anyone who read only the main series, no matter how many times people in the book fill you in by describing the events in other books.

[Simon_Jester]

One of the advantages of Ghost Rider is that they can launch them out the missile tubes for speedy deployment, but it seems they aren't doing that here if they need over ten minutes to deploy, likely more careful masking of their capabilities.

Admiral Crandall's Task Force 496. 71 SD, 16, BC, 12 CA, 23 CL, and 18 DD. And a rare instance of a fleet bringing it's own supply and repair ships.

The SLN is more likely to do this than anyone else, for the following reasons:

1) Their fleets tend to be huge. 71 of the wall would be among the largest single fleets on either side of the Havenite Wars, but to the SLN it's about three or four percent of their active wall of battle. So they need support, because sheer statistics means that their fleets will have more ships suffering random failures and whatnot.

2) Their fleets rarely actually fight an organized and well equipped enemy, so there is little danger of having the supply ships attacked.

3) The cost of maintaining the kind of dense base network Manticore and Haven use to support their operations in the Havenite Wars throughout Solarian space would be prohibitive, so the fleets have to bring enough of a supply train that they can 'live off the land' at other times.

Well she's willing to admit some stories out of the Haven Quadrant may have some grain of truth, so, upgrade? Again with all this pissing and moaning about how any sort of reason or restraint will set a precedent they can't live with.

Honestly I'm getting the feeling that senior SLN officers tend to have a serious case of 'abusive spouse syndrome' when it comes to everyone else in the galaxy. They "can't accept" the idea of anyone presuming to fight back or answer back to them, because it offends their sense of dominance.

Also, Crandall demonstrates one of the key 'tells' of a Weber Antagonist Who's Gonna Die Soon: she has a pottymouth.

The impressive size of the early- warning arrays, which seem to cover the distant approaches but cannot monitor the nearer, well-traveled areas where a ship would normally jump in near the hyper-limit.

Broadly analogous to real life radar. There are HUGE arrays that can tell you "holy shit, something's coming" from thousands of miles away, but most of them are simply not designed or calibrated to also tell you something's coming from ten miles away.

FTL delays relevant at these ranges, and we actually have a range, which puzzles me. A "full" light-month out, I can't see a way for them to cover it in three weeks without using FTL. Ah well, probably an error that got by the editor.

Yes. We're told that the Sharks will need roughly four days to reach top speed of 0.8c (during which time, if we ignore relativity for anything more complicated than time dilation calculations as Weber always does, they will cover about, oh, 30-40 light-hours. That's one or two light-days. Then they spend about 20 days in flight, covering about sixteen light-days more.

So, yeah, 17-20 light-days of distance from Manticore, not 30.

A couple of months after the Battle of Manticore, they're ready to get back on the offensive against Haven.

Mostly because they're ready to assemble the system defense version of Apollo and put it into the field- which means that if Tourville had attacked a few months later his whole fleet would have gotten slaughtered.

And this. Winning the Haven Wars (discounting HRG-fuckery) was never going to be as simple as blowing stuff up till one side yells "uncle!" Well, maybe for Haven, which absolutely has the population base needed to occupy Manticore, but Manticore can't effectively occupy Haven. They need a way to forge a lasting peace before the Sollies try sending a big fleet straight at Manticore.

To be fair, if not for the Theisman Coup, the "blow stuff up" approach would have worked really well for Manticore. Once they punched out Haven proper and dismantled the Committee of Public Safety or its successor government, the bulk of Haven's satellite states would probably be just as happy to go their own way. Manticoran brute force would have been needed to polish off most of the StateSec remnants and whatnot, but they could basically have dismantled the PRH into its component planet-states and settled for just occupying Haven, and patrolling the rest of Havenite space.

Granted that the volume formerly occupied by the PRH would have degenerated into chaos in all likelihood, but at least the existential threat to Manticore would have been decisively eliminated. Sort of like a smaller-scale version of the strategy Honor envisions for dealing with the League.

But the High Ridge government decided to seek a cease-fire with Saint-Just, the Theisman Coup happened, and enough of the planets the PRH had conquered were willing to give the new Republic of Haven a chance that Theisman was actually able to reconquer the rest. So the PRH's large sphere of influence was reborn as a Republic of Haven that was just as big and considerably more unified as the PRH had ever been.

Now, in the wake of those events, Manticore finds itself utterly unable to permanently dismantle and disarm the Republic of Haven... just as it would be unable to permanently defeat a politically unified and well governed League.

Dun Dun Dunnn. And the end. In more ways than one. Because not only was Shadow of Freedom marketed as a main series book, but Mission of Honor is more a direct sequel to this book with things like Crandall's attack on Spindle and Mesa's attack on Manticore, than it is to At All Costs. I imagine that must be confusing to anyone who read only the main series, no matter how many times people in the book fill you in by describing the events in other books.

To be fair, given that the side series are normally marketed along with the main one, and that there have been LONG gaps in publication in the main series which were filled only by the side series... I doubt there are many people like that.

[Crazedwraith]

I've been reading through the main series novels up to at 'At All Costs'. I have no idea when the side line novels come in and nor do I really want to. I guess I should have though in At All Costs it was increasingly obvious I was missing things. I handled that by skimming past any chapter involving Zilwilki and Montague which worked quite well until Zilwilki and Cachat turned up for a long chat with Honor...

[Simon_Jester]

Is it that you don't like the side novels, or is it something else?

[Crazedwraith]

Partially that I have no idea what the reading order actually is for it. Partially, I've been chugging along with the main series books out almost a sense of inertia. They're not great books, but I want to find out what happens to Honor right?

And partially because from what little I've read in the Torch thread. The style of the books don't really appeal.

But my point is. it's perfect possibly to read through the main series of books and not look at the side series at all. And if you're going to call it a side series. You should be able to do that. If they all interlink to the point they're all required reading. It's not a side series at all.

[Terralthra]

It was physically impossible for any ship to cross the hyper wall without radiating a hyper footprint, but the strength of that footprint was—to a large extent, at least—a factor of the base velocity the ship in question wanted to carry across the wall. The alpha translation's bleed factor was roughly ninety-two percent, and all of that energy had to go somewhere. There was also an unavoidable gravitic spike or echo along the interface between the alpha bands of hyper-space and normal-space that was effectively independent of a ship's speed. Reducing velocity couldn't do anything about that, but a slow, "gentle" translation along a shallow gradient produced a much weaker spike, as well.

No translation, however slow and gentle, could render a hyper footprint too weak to be detected by the sort of arrays covering the Manticore Binary System. Yet arrays like that, because of their very sensitivity, were notorious for throwing up occasional "false positives," ghost translations that the filters were supposed to strain out before they ever reached a human operator's attention. And the most common ghosts of all normally appeared as a hyper footprint and an echo, which was precisely what Topolev's maneuver was supposed to counterfeit.

So they can't make the footprint vanish, but they can do a pretty convincing impression of a sensor ghost. Ships lose 92% of their velocity on a downward translation, which is already restricted to 0.3 c or less if they don't want their ship torn apart.

You can transition downward at greater than 0.3c. You can't transition into hyper above 0.3 c. Downward translations can be taken at anything up to max speed. That's the aforementioned "crash" translation. They're avoided unless necessary because it's harder on equipment (and people). Worth noting that that is a 92% velocity loss per band, and it's up or down that you lose the velocity. That's why hyper was discovered before impellers or the sails, but not used: you had to use a bunch of reaction mass to get outside the hyper limit of a star system, then lose huge amount of the velocity you spent it on, making reaction mass requirements prohibitive.

FTL delays relevant at these ranges, and we actually have a range, which puzzles me. A "full" light-month out, I can't see a way for them to cover it in three weeks without using FTL. Ah well, probably an error that got by the editor.

The discrepancy is that Epstein expects their destination is the Manticore system, while their actual destination is well outside the Manticore system (where they will be dropping the even stealthier torpedo pods).

This is true, the Manties will be studiously attentive to duty, but they know for a fact there can't be a wedge out there, because the array would catch it, stealth or no. So they're looking for a ship or ships that probably don't exist and at most could have pulled 15 Gs of accel from their starting point, as opposed to 75. So the volume of space they're searching is much to small, and the MAN ships are already well outside it, under the most impressive stealth Mesa could develop.

15 gs is absurdly low. Harrington's Elysian Navy task force hit 150 gs by using the gravplates to take ~145 of it. The destroyers sweeping should easily be covering the volume in which the MAN ships lie...the problem is that they're looking for impellers or reaction plumes, neither of which are there.

He sat once more upon Mako's flag bridge. Beyond the flagship's hull, fourteen more ships of Task Force One kept perfect formation upon her, and the brilliant beacon of Manticore-A blazed before them. They were only one light-week from that star, now, and they had decelerated to only twenty percent of light-speed. This was the point for which they had been headed ever since leaving Mesa four T-months before. Now it was time to do what they'd come here to do.

"Begin deployment," he said, and the enormous hatches opened and the pods began to spill free.

The other units of Task Force One were elsewhere, closing on Manticore-B. They wouldn't be deploying their pods just yet, not until they'd reached their own preselected launch point. Topolev wished that he'd had more ships to commit to that prong of the attack, but the decision to move up Oyster Bay had dictated the available resources, and this prong had to be decisive. Besides, there were fewer targets in the Manticore-B subsystem, anyway.

It'll be enough, he told himself, watching as the pods disappeared steadily behind his decelerating starships, vanishing into the endless dark between the stars. It'll be enough. And in about five weeks, the Manties are going to get a late Christmas present they'll never forget.

Dun Dun Dunnn. And the end. In more ways than one. Because not only was Shadow of Freedom marketed as a main series book, but Mission of Honor is more a direct sequel to this book with things like Crandall's attack on Spindle and Mesa's attack on Manticore, than it is to At All Costs. I imagine that must be confusing to anyone who read only the main series, no matter how many times people in the book fill you in by describing the events in other books.

Also, see? They're a light-week away from Manticore-A. They took a little over 25 days to go 21 light-days, going at 0.8c for most of that time. The math more or less checks out.

[Simon_Jester]

Partially that I have no idea what the reading order actually is for it. Partially, I've been chugging along with the main series books out almost a sense of inertia. They're not great books, but I want to find out what happens to Honor right?

Reading the books in the order of publication works. I'd recommend a few slight modifications to that:

Ashes of Victory

Crown of Slaves

War of Honor
Shadow of Saganami

At All Costs
Torch of Freedom
Storm from the Shadows

Mission of Honor

A Rising Thunder
Shadow of Freedom
Cauldron of Ghosts

Each 'cluster' of books I list happens more or less simultaneously and have heavily interleaved plots.

And partially because from what little I've read in the Torch thread. The style of the books don't really appeal.

How so?

But my point is. it's perfect possibly to read through the main series of books and not look at the side series at all. And if you're going to call it a side series. You should be able to do that. If they all interlink to the point they're all required reading. It's not a side series at all.

That's fair. I think the real problem is that Weber alone has been writing the "Shadow" series, so at some point his mental barrier segregating events in those books from the mainline books kind of collapsed. He started putting essential plot details from the mainline setting into the "Shadow" books, because he couldn't write the overall story of the Manticoran-Solarian conflict without incorporating details of what's happening in the Talbot Quadrant.

You could still get away with not reading the Weber/Flint collaboration books, as far as I can tell- it just means that Zilwicki, Cachat, and Torch turn into bit characters rather than major characters in the overall story.

You can transition downward at greater than 0.3c. You can't transition into hyper above 0.3 c. Downward translations can be taken at anything up to max speed. That's the aforementioned "crash" translation.

...Coulda sworn it was the other way around.

This is true, the Manties will be studiously attentive to duty, but they know for a fact there can't be a wedge out there, because the array would catch it, stealth or no. So they're looking for a ship or ships that probably don't exist and at most could have pulled 15 Gs of accel from their starting point, as opposed to 75. So the volume of space they're searching is much to small, and the MAN ships are already well outside it, under the most impressive stealth Mesa could develop.

15 gs is absurdly low. Harrington's Elysian Navy task force hit 150 gs by using the gravplates to take ~145 of it. The destroyers sweeping should easily be covering the volume in which the MAN ships lie...the problem is that they're looking for impellers or reaction plumes, neither of which are there.

It may be that they're banking on the fact that if a ship fires its reaction engines hard enough to accelerate at anywhere near a hundred gravities, that ship will be extremely visible and obvious to the destroyers from much farther away than it would be at lower accelerations.

Alternatively, that 15g figure could be a typo?

Also, see? They're a light-week away from Manticore-A. They took a little over 25 days to go 21 light-days, going at 0.8c for most of that time. The math more or less checks out.

A light-week is not 21 light-days, any more than a week of time is 21 days of time.

[Terralthra]

Also, see? They're a light-week away from Manticore-A. They took a little over 25 days to go 21 light-days, going at 0.8c for most of that time. The math more or less checks out.

A light-week is not 21 light-days, any more than a week of time is 21 days of time.

I'm well aware. They went one light-week short of one light-month. 4 weeks - 1 week = 3 weeks * 7 days = 21 days. We were discussing the discrepancy from 1 light month of distance to 3(+) weeks of travel time at STL.

[Terralthra]

From On Basilisk Station:

It had been discovered early on that translating into (emphasis mine) the alpha band, the lowest of the hyper bands, at a velocity greater than thirty percent that of light was suicide, yet people had continued to kill themselves for centuries in efforts to translate at speeds higher than that. Not because they were suicidal, but because such a low velocity had severely limited the usefulness of hyper travel.

The translation into or out of any given band of hyper-space was a complex energy transfer that cost the translating vessel most of its original velocity - as much as ninety-two percent of it, in the case of the alpha band.

This is during the long hyperspace infodump during Fearless's overhaul of Sirius. Some say it ruins the tension of the chase. I like it because it emphasizes that space is big, and stern chases take a lot of time: there's plenty of time for Honor to ruminate on the history of all of this stuff while sitting there watching velocity numbers climb.

[Simon_Jester]

I just wish it had come in somewhere earlier in the novel- that big a chunk of exposition really doesn't belong in the climax of a novel. Artistically it'd be better to just say "we have to stop him from escaping into hyperspace!" and save it all for the next book. We know what it means when the bad guys get away, after all...

[Ahriman238]

Partially that I have no idea what the reading order actually is for it. Partially, I've been chugging along with the main series books out almost a sense of inertia. They're not great books, but I want to find out what happens to Honor right?

And partially because from what little I've read in the Torch thread. The style of the books don't really appeal.

But my point is. it's perfect possibly to read through the main series of books and not look at the side series at all. And if you're going to call it a side series. You should be able to do that. If they all interlink to the point they're all required reading. It's not a side series at all.

CW, I completely understand. Until revisiting the series for this thread, my interest in the books petered out after AAC, though I read both Saganami Island books and Crown of Slaves. There's a really impressive tone shift over the course of the series, so it gets hard to say where things started getting uninteresting.

I would recommend you read Shadow of Saganami, because to my mind, that's the book that bought fun back into the series. The characters are pretty fleshed out (well, half the officers of the Kitty aren't really) the stakes are very personal and real, as opposed to being the umpteenth raid against a tertiary system, the talking-to-action ratio is better than all the recent mainline books and you really feel for them in battle, as opposed to watching another fleet sail obliviously into a new tactic/technology or watching Manticore roflstomp clueless Sollies.

[Ahriman238]

To be honest, I think it was a mistake not to go with Weber's original plan. Kill Honor off at the battle for Manticore, and let the Solly/Mesan threats created in the side-books come to fruition twenty years or so down the line, for Honor's son to deal with. Along with having a naval legend for a mother whom he never met, it'd be a more interesting story. Most of all, though, Weber has complained that he hasn't had the opportunity to flesh out either Mesa or Beowulf as originally planned. Both were supposed to get attention in Raoul's series, the Beowulf code and the Mesan counter-culture would be explored in detail. Let's face it, even with a book taking place on Mesa, with Victor and Anton living there for months, does anyone feel like we've really gotten to know them as villains? Say as well as we did the Peeps?

Admiral Crandall's Task Force 496. 71 SD, 16, BC, 12 CA, 23 CL, and 18 DD. And a rare instance of a fleet bringing it's own supply and repair ships.

The SLN is more likely to do this than anyone else, for the following reasons:

1) Their fleets tend to be huge. 71 of the wall would be among the largest single fleets on either side of the Havenite Wars, but to the SLN it's about three or four percent of their active wall of battle. So they need support, because sheer statistics means that their fleets will have more ships suffering random failures and whatnot.

2) Their fleets rarely actually fight an organized and well equipped enemy, so there is little danger of having the supply ships attacked.

3) The cost of maintaining the kind of dense base network Manticore and Haven use to support their operations in the Havenite Wars throughout Solarian space would be prohibitive, so the fleets have to bring enough of a supply train that they can 'live off the land' at other times.

Agreed, they're operating a ways out from the usual Solly naval bases, and frankly they can afford the ships even if they lose a few to the enemy.

Well she's willing to admit some stories out of the Haven Quadrant may have some grain of truth, so, upgrade? Again with all this pissing and moaning about how any sort of reason or restraint will set a precedent they can't live with.

Honestly I'm getting the feeling that senior SLN officers tend to have a serious case of 'abusive spouse syndrome' when it comes to everyone else in the galaxy. They "can't accept" the idea of anyone presuming to fight back or answer back to them, because it offends their sense of dominance.[/quote]

Pretty much. I mean the demanding to board the ship seems excessive to us, the closest equivalent I could find was detainment law, which would authorize New Tuscany to board the ships, arrest key crew or simply demand they not try and leave while they investigated.

Also, Crandall demonstrates one of the key 'tells' of a Weber Antagonist Who's Gonna Die Soon: she has a pottymouth.

Yes, she does and yes, she will.

A couple of months after the Battle of Manticore, they're ready to get back on the offensive against Haven.

Mostly because they're ready to assemble the system defense version of Apollo and put it into the field- which means that if Tourville had attacked a few months later his whole fleet would have gotten slaughtered.

Quite, particularly if they got the four-drive missiles going with Apollo. Probably too big for podlayers since they were talking about them in terms of a pure system defense role, but a really nasty surprise nonetheless.

And this. Winning the Haven Wars (discounting HRG-fuckery) was never going to be as simple as blowing stuff up till one side yells "uncle!" Well, maybe for Haven, which absolutely has the population base needed to occupy Manticore, but Manticore can't effectively occupy Haven. They need a way to forge a lasting peace before the Sollies try sending a big fleet straight at Manticore.

To be fair, if not for the Theisman Coup, the "blow stuff up" approach would have worked really well for Manticore. Once they punched out Haven proper and dismantled the Committee of Public Safety or its successor government, the bulk of Haven's satellite states would probably be just as happy to go their own way. Manticoran brute force would have been needed to polish off most of the StateSec remnants and whatnot, but they could basically have dismantled the PRH into its component planet-states and settled for just occupying Haven, and patrolling the rest of Havenite space.

Granted that the volume formerly occupied by the PRH would have degenerated into chaos in all likelihood, but at least the existential threat to Manticore would have been decisively eliminated. Sort of like a smaller-scale version of the strategy Honor envisions for dealing with the League.

But the High Ridge government decided to seek a cease-fire with Saint-Just, the Theisman Coup happened, and enough of the planets the PRH had conquered were willing to give the new Republic of Haven a chance that Theisman was actually able to reconquer the rest. So the PRH's large sphere of influence was reborn as a Republic of Haven that was just as big and considerably more unified as the PRH had ever been.

Point, I suspect a number of Haven Core worlds that were part of the system for decades would stay on, but it could well be manageable as you say. I doubt it would have been simple, and it would definitely take a few years stamping out brushfire, but that's not an option with the resurgent Republic.

[Ahriman238]

Kind of belated, but here's my index.

The Books:

Shadow of Saganami
Storm from the Shadows

Major Events:

Kornati Parliament Bombing
"Battle" of Nuncio (Nasty Kitty vs. Pirates)
Nordbrandt's 'Still Alive' Bombing
Storming of Camp Freedom
Battle of Monica

Terms of the Annexation and Resulting Government

New Laser Heads
New Tuscany Incident
Second New Tuscany Incident

The Commentary:

Humphrey McMuttonchops
Counter Missile Canisters
Strategy in the 2nd Haven War
Smaller Crew Sizes
Wedge Shield Wall


Other Honorverse Threads:


First Thread, books 1-4
Second Thread, books 5-9
Third Thread, book 10 on


Crown of Slaves