Bit of Analysis: Honor Harrington III

[Batman]

It would be for long-time fans of the series too.

[Mr Bean]

The worst part was building up the Solarian VS Manticore fight. I expected a curbstomp I expected scenes of frantic Solarians trying to put ships back together trying trick after trick but getting shut down by Manticore fleets even better when you throw in the arrival of Haven forces instead...

The entire thing is over and done with not one thousand the reaction that other things got. I mean imagine the possibility of watching the battle from a Solarian news network ship allowed to sit on the sidelines of battle and watch. Hell maybe Earth sends some talking heads out there to watch the fight thanks to some backroom moves on Manticore's part. Or the viewpoint of an average Solarian sailor who's spent forty years about his superdreadnaught doing patrol clear across the Galaxy from the Haven sector now having to dig friends of twenty years out of the wreckage of what was his ship.

It would have turned what was boring into something amazing if we got to see the entire fight maybe a hundred plus pages worth thanks to it's scope from various POV's only to end the thing with a two page summary from Honor reviewing her after action report on how boring and basic it was.

[Laguna]

The mainline Honor novels are becoming a major problem that way- too many scenes that essentially reduce to details of Groups A, B, C, D, and E all reacting to the same event in parallel as they find out what happened. Although in Mission of Honor I can sort of see it, because it's Weber writing an end to the Manticore-Haven Wars. Which is certainly not something that'd realistically happen without a lot of deliberation and uncertainty from both sides.

The problem is that it's just... not good writing to create a situation where you basically have one plot event, then 200 pages of reaction in which no further plot events occur. Then do it again and again until you've sold another mass-market tome.

It became extremely clear with Mission of Honor that Weber has basically stopped writing the books as standalone novels... but the problem is that instead of writing elaborately plotted novel-length stories that flow into one another, he basically just took one novel and puffed it full of filler text until it was too long to be released as one novel. The process by which the confrontation with Byng escalated into a full Solarian invasion of Manticore really should have been compressed to about half its length and paired off with a good-sized chunk of what became A Rising Thunder.

Then the rest of A Rising Thunder and Shadow of Freedom could have been combined into one novel likewise, and the result would be a lot more appealing for people not already long-time fans of the series.

Oh yeah, all of the current post-At All Costs books, aside from the Zilwicki-Cachat ones, could easily have been edited down into two books, maybe even ONE well-constructed, if long, book. Hell, taking away the endless staff meetings and copy-and-pasted chapters alone leaves pkenty of room for an actual plot.

I really enjoyed The Shadow Of Saganami, it was like a more complex (and longer) version of On Basilisk Station, with a single cruiser against strong foes plotting nefarious schemes. I really wanted to see more like that in a post-SL breakup period, with Abigail Hearns and Helen Zilwicki commanding their own ships. But no, we instead get a glacial-like month-by-month account of the SEM-SL-Mesa interactions, told mostly through 2 million staff meetings. Even the big battle of Second Manticore is "fought" via a simulation; all we get of the actual battle is the lead-up to the start of shooting, and while there is a surprise in that, it still feels like a huge letdown and cheat.

[Simon_Jester]

That's a very good point; I hadn't thought about it because it was in the next book.

It's like... has Weber forgotten how to write a dramatic space battle?

The Battle of Spindle was at least sort of entertaining because of the runup, and the hilarious image of the Manticoran diplomat sitting there with his feet propped up reading a book in the eighteen minute time-lag imposed by Crandall's decision to negotiate from clear out at the hyper limit. It had human interest.

Second Manticore... really didn't have much human interest attached.

[Laguna]

Weber excels at the small-scale ship vs. ship actions, and I think that is one reason he went with the Napoleonic War/Age Of Sail analog for the Honor Harrington stories; those early battles (Fearless Vs Sirius, Fearless vs Thunder Of God) strongly reminded me of the US-British ship battles in the War Of 1812.

With these big fleet engagements, he seems to have fallen back on his wargamer roots, as they read like a board/paper'n'pencil game being played: X number of ships fire X number of missiles, then dice rolls/stat table lookups decide X number of missiles lost to various defenses, with X number surviving to attack and then X number of ships hit/damaged/destroyed. A big yawn-fest.

[Simon_Jester]

Yeah.

It's like, when the entire battle is decided by a missile barrage I get that you want to convey a meaningful sense of how many missiles were shot down short of the target, but the detailed counts are just silly. Meanwhile, not nearly enough attention is going into the human aftermath in some cases.

With First Manticore that's not so bad because the battle is the dramatic climax of the entire novel. With Spindle there's a fair amount of human interest before and after it, at least from a couple of viewpoints, and some nice scenes resolving questions like "what the hell are we going to do with all these prisoners." It's not (QUITE) just wargaming.

But Second Manticore... yeah.

[White Haven]

A lot of that could be helped by switching command decks a bit sooner. One the Titanosalvo is launched, after all, the real drama is on the receiving end.

[Batman]

There 'was' no command deck for them to switch to at Second Manticore. The very sequence of events that triggered Second Manticore made sure that Filareta's command deck was gone, and I don't see how switching to some obviously doomed (and likely previously unmentioned) ship's bridge would have added any drama.

[Mr Bean]

There 'was' no command deck for them to switch to at Second Manticore. The very sequence of events that triggered Second Manticore made sure that Filareta's command deck was gone, and I don't see how switching to some obviously doomed (and likely previously unmentioned) ship's bridge would have added any drama.

Which is why it should have been previously mentioned. We should have had time building up a destroyer captain or some solarian NCO. We got this in the previous fight in Storm where we met the luckless junior office shanghaied for alarmist reports.

[Simon_Jester]

Rereading a bit, the drama leading up to Second Manticore was actually somewhat more interesting, with Filareta getting systematically played by Harrington, Theisman, et al., any of whom make him look like a complete amateur when it comes to large battles.* They've been fighting major fleet actions for years, so they can predict exactly the kind of thing Filareta's most likely to do, and position their own forces to surround and outmaneuver him before he even shows up.

He even gets a moment or three to realize this before the shit hits the fan.

Now, in addition to this you could have a few "my God it's a slaughter" scenes from the Solarian viewpoint (journalist ships watching the battle, people aboard an SLN destroyer that wasn't even targeted, the captain of Filareta's flagship, et cetera).

I'd have to reread that whole part of the book to be sure whether that would improve things.
________________________

*Honor has, what... seven fleet engagements under her belt with one or more capital ship squadrons and a combined strength of thirty-plus units to keep track of, plus innumerable realistic training simulations, for instance. White Haven probably has about the same if not more, with at least three that are described in detail and on screen, plus others. Tourville about the same as Honor, Theisman... probably less, actually, because the only major fleet command he ever held was the Barnett fleet in the middle phase of the first war.

By contrast, Filareta has never fought a fleet battle and probably never even had a realistic simulation of one. I am here defining a 'fleet' battle as something significantly larger scale than a 'squadron' battle. Thus, for instance, First Hancock was a squadron-level action for the RMN.

[Nephtys]

You could have done the last half of the series in so many better, decent ways. It's basically been 4 books of nothing happening but secret space C-Span. We don't need to know everything about Mesa, or actual players in the Solarian political scene.

Just have 'news reports of increased Solarian arrogance', and have a few shadowy councilmeetings where Dietwiller and some unknown Mesan council have agreed on an undetermined plot. Do Oyster Bay and make it a quarter of a book of people doing things. Have it be like, an hour of carnage and have it be an action piece where characters try to reduce the damage somehow, and heroically fail.

Then for the Sol-Manty curbstomps, have the battles play out from perspectives of some Sol spacer characters or something instead of more 'let's posture on video conference'. Have them try very clever tricks and fail, in a perverse inversion of the early harrington series, where Honor gets out of death rides due to guts and wits. Instead, have Glory Gallington, SLN, try to save her people with cleverness only to get killed, further villianizing Mesan manipulation without spelling out every letter of their space nazi manifesto.

There's so many more interesting ways to write these books...

[Simon_Jester]

You could have done the last half of the series in so many better, decent ways. It's basically been 4 books of nothing happening but secret space C-Span. We don't need to know everything about Mesa, or actual players in the Solarian political scene.

Who, me personally? Why thanks...

Anyway, I agree that there's a lot we don't need to know. The main problem Weber faces is that he's in effect introducing a whole new antagonist onto the scene in mid-series. He has to give the reader some idea of what they're dealing with, at least let them see enough of the lower-level tendrils of the Evil Conspiracy that they can reasonably infer what it is.

Then again he does NOT have to spend two pages detailing the appearance and background of the dozen or so planetary leaders who are part of the Evil Conspiracy's public face. Things like that are very much unnecessary. In general, Mission of Honor could, yes, have stood a LOT of trimming. Ideally it should have been trimmed enough that Second Manticore would have fit into the same book, and Shadow of Freedom would have tied in neatly as the follow-on, incorporating whatever scraps of A Rising Thunder it needed to.

Just have 'news reports of increased Solarian arrogance', and have a few shadowy councilmeetings where Dietwiller and some unknown Mesan council have agreed on an undetermined plot. Do Oyster Bay and make it a quarter of a book of people doing things. Have it be like, an hour of carnage and have it be an action piece where characters try to reduce the damage somehow, and heroically fail.

There were actually one or two scenes of 'damage reduction,' but yeah.

Then for the Sol-Manty curbstomps, have the battles play out from perspectives of some Sol spacer characters or something instead of more 'let's posture on video conference'.

Yeah; that got old after Crandall at Spindle. Crandall's posturing was hilariously over-the-top, while the Manticoran reaction was hilariously under the top, and that really should have been it. The next book started with yet another SLN officer trying to bluster Manticoran ships in a different context and it just wasn't the same. By the time Filareta shows up in person, well... he gives his spiel and it's just... more of the same that's already expected. At least he doesn't get mad and cuss anyone out, he just (in effect) reads out his orders and says "this is what I've been ordered to do, I'm going to do it, maybe you can stop me but there will be another and another until we win this."

Have them try very clever tricks and fail, in a perverse inversion of the early harrington series, where Honor gets out of death rides due to guts and wits. Instead, have Glory Gallington, SLN, try to save her people with cleverness only to get killed, further villianizing Mesan manipulation without spelling out every letter of their space nazi manifesto.

Could be good. Sort of like what happened to Hall at Second Hancock.

[Simon_Jester]

Ghetto Edit:

I actually just decided to up and do some of the analysis for A Rising Thunder myself, so Ahriman, don't even worry about Chapter One now. I won't post it until after you get to the part where Elizabeth authorizes the Laocoön strategy, though. After that, well... it might be out of publication order, but the first three or four chapters of A Rising Thunder could very easily fit right into the later part of Mission of Honor with no difficulty.

[Ahriman238]

Admiral Karl-Heinz Thimár commanded the Solarian League Navy's Office of Naval Intelligence, and Admiral Cheng Hai-shwun commanded the Office of Operational Analysis. OpAn was the biggest of ONI's divisions, which made Cheng Thimár's senior deputy . . . and also the person who should have seen this coming.

Just a little who's who, since we're still playing catch-up trying to learn who the major players in the League are. Karl-Heinz Thimar is a cousin to the Thimar who tried futilely to warn his navy about Manticore's tech advantage.

"And while they're working on that, you and I are going to sit down and look at our deployment posture. I know the entire Manty navy's a fart in a wind storm compared to Battle Fleet, but I don't want us suffering any avoidable casualties because of overconfidence. Kolokoltsov has a point, damn him, about the difference in missile ranges. We're going to need a hammer they won't be able to stop when we go after their home system."

How uncommonly prudent.

"The point is," he continued, "that it's going to come to shooting in the end, no matter what sort of 'negotiations' anyone may try to set up. And when it does, the strategy's actually going to be pretty damned simple, since they've only got one really important star system. They don't have any choice, strategically. If we go after Manticore itself, they have to stand and fight. No matter how long-ranged their missiles may be, they can't just cut and run, so I want to be sure we've got enough counter-missiles and point defense to stand up to their missile fire while we drive straight for their planets. It may not be pretty, but it'll work."

"Yes, Sir," Kingsford said yet again, and he knew his superior was right. After all, that concept lay at the bottom of virtually all of Battle Fleet's strategic doctrine.

Not a terribly elegant fleet doctrine.

Winston Kingsford hadn't commanded a fleet in space in decades, but he had plenty of experience in the tortuous, byzantine maneuvers of the Solarian League's bureaucracy. And he was well aware of how much Rajampet resented his own exclusion from the cozy little civilian fivesome which actually ran the League. Minister of Defense Taketomo's real power was no greater than that of any of the other cabinet ministers who theoretically governed the League, but Defense was—or damned well ought to be, anyway—at least as important as Commerce or Education and Information. It had a big enough budget to be, at any rate, and it was critical enough to the League's prosperous stability. Yet Rajampet had been denied his place at the head table, and it irritated the hell out of him.

So apparently there is some friction over the Fleet's not getting a seat at the Mandarins' table.

It never even crossed his mind that in most star nations what he suspected Rajampet of would have constituted treason, or a reasonable facsimile thereof. For that matter, under the letter of the Solarian League Constitution, it did constitute treason—or, at the very least, "high crimes and misdemeanors" which carried the same penalty. But the Constitution had been a dead letter virtually from the day the original ink dried, and what someone else in some other star nation, far, far away, would have called "treason" was simply the way things were done here in the Solarian League. And, after all, somebody had to get them done, one way or another.

What Kingsford suspects is that Rajampet might be pushing a war just to enhance Defense's standing and get him that seat at the table, but I'm more interested in the notion that the upper ranks are so jaded even high treason for personal ambition is "just the way things are done."

"Some of them are upset about the delay, but she says e-mails and com calls alike are both running something like eight-to-one in support of it, and the opinion poll numbers show about the same percentages." Honor shrugged again. "Manticorans have learned a bit about when and how information has to be . . . handled carefully, let's say, in the interest of operational security. You've got a pretty hefty positive balance with most of your subjects on that issue, actually. And I think just about everyone understands that, especially in this case, we have to be wary about inflaming public opinion. And not just here in the Star Kingdom, either."

The Manticoran public overall doesn't mind that they were kept in the dark for two months about events in New Tuscany. Or at least they trust their Queen and the Alexander Government enough to allow them some latitude.

"If they'd been going to be reasonable, they never would've taken better than three weeks just to respond to our first note. Especially when their entire response amounted to telling us they'd 'look into our allegations' and get back to us. Frankly, I'm astounded they managed to leave out the word 'ridiculous' in front of 'allegations'." The queen shook her head. "That's not a very promising start . . . and it is very typically Solly. They're never going to admit their man was in the wrong, no matter how he got there, if there's any way they can possibly avoid it. And do you really think they're going to want to admit that a multi-stellar that isn't even based in a League star system—and is involved up to its eyebrows in a trade the League's officially outlawed—is able to manipulate entire squadrons of their battlecruisers and ships-of-the-wall?" She shook her head again, more emphatically. "I'm afraid a lot of them would rather go out and pin back the uppity neobarbs' ears, no matter how many people get killed along the way, than open any windows into corners of the League's power structure that are that filled with dirty little secrets."

Another reason for the League to go to war, even if Manticore's publicly fingering Manpower gives them a diplomatic out. The first note from the Sollies arrived, and promised to get back to them after investigating their claims.

Tourville glowered some more, but there was genuine humor in his mind glow. Not that there had been the first time he'd realized the news reports about the treecats' recently confirmed telempathic abilities were accurate.

Honor hadn't blamed him—or any of the other POWs who'd reacted the same way—a bit. The thought of being interrogated by a professional, experienced analyst who knew how to put together even the smallest of clues you might unknowingly let slip was bad enough. When that professional was assisted by someone who could read your very thoughts, it went from bad to terrifying in record time. Of course, treecats couldn't really read any human's actual thoughts—the mental . . . frequencies, for want of a better word, were apparently too different. There'd been no way for any of the captured Havenites to know that, however, and every one of them had assumed the worst, initially, at least.

And, in fact, it was bad enough from their perspective as it was. Nimitz and his fellow treecats might not have been able to read the prisoners' thoughts, but they'd been able to tell from their emotions whenever they were lying or attempting to mislead. And they'd been able to tell when those emotions spiked as the interrogation approached something a POW most desperately wanted to conceal.

It hadn't taken very long for most of the captured personnel to figure out that even though a treecat could guide an interrogator's questioning, it couldn't magically pluck the desired information out of someone else's mind. That didn't keep the 'cats from providing a devastating advantage, but it did mean that as long as they simply refused to answer, as was their guaranteed right under the Deneb Accords, the furry little lie detectors couldn't dig specific, factual information out of them.

That wasn't enough to keep at least some of them from bitterly resenting the 'cats' presence, and a significant handful of those POWs had developed a positive hatred for them, as if their ability to sense someone's emotions was a form of personal violation. The vast majority, however, were more rational about it, and several—including Tourville, who'd had the opportunity to interact with Nimitz years before, when Honor had been his prisoner—were far too fascinated to resent them. Of course, in Tourville's case, the fact that he'd done his dead level best to see to it that Nimitz's person had been decently and honorably treated during her captivity had guaranteed that Nimitz liked him. And, as Honor had observed many times over the five decades they'd spent together, only the most well armored of curmudgeons could resist Nimitz when the 'cat set out to be charming and adorable.

Apparently as of the Battle of Manticore and processing their prisoners after, Manticore is now using treecats to enhance interrogation. However, it seems another thing the Deneb Accords extend to is a POW's right to not answer questions. Which isn't really surprising.

Expecting Lester Tourville to cooperate over something like that would be rather like a Sphinxian woodbuck's expecting to negotiate a successful compromise with a hungry hexapuma, however, and that was one piece of data which hadn't been anywhere in any of the computers aboard his surrendered ships. It once had been, no doubt—they'd confirmed that at least half his surrendered ships had actually been built there—but it had been very carefully (and thoroughly) deleted since.

As ships leave Bolthole, the location of the secret shipyards is carefully deleted.

"When you demanded my surrender," he said, gazing intensely into her eyes, "was it a bluff?"

"In what sense?" She tilted her head to one side.

"In two senses, I suppose."

"Whether or not I would have fired if you hadn't surrendered?"

"That's one of them," he admitted.

"All right. In that sense, I wasn't bluffing at all," she said levelly. "If you hadn't surrendered, and accepted my terms in full, I would have opened fire on Second Fleet from beyond any range at which you could have effectively replied, and I would have gone right on firing until whoever was left in command surrendered or every single one of your ships was destroyed."

-snip-

"The other 'bluff' I've been wondering about is whether or not you really could have done it from that range?"

Honor swung her chair from side to side in a small, thoughtful arc while she considered his question. Theoretically, what he was asking edged into territory covered by the Official Secrets Act. On the other hand, it wasn't as if he was going to be e-mailing the information to the Octagon. Besides . . . .

"No," she said after no more than two or three heartbeats. "I couldn't have. Not from that range."

Eh, she was coming into the fight pretty fresh and with Apollo. If she couldn't have annihilated his command from that far out she sure could have pounded it.

"You wanted my databases intact," he said. "We both know that. But I know what else you were going to say, as well."

"You do?" she asked when he paused.

"Yep. You were going to say you did it to save lives, but you were afraid I might not believe you, weren't you?"

"I wouldn't say I thought you wouldn't believe me," she replied thoughtfully. "I guess the real reason was that I was afraid it would sound . . . self-serving. Or like some sort of self-justification, at least."

And at least one reason for that warning shot and demand for Tourville's immediate surrender in the last book, she didn't want to kill any more people than she had to even (hell, especially) on that bloody day. And with that Tourville agrees to answer any non-classified questions she has about Prichart and Theisman and the rest of the Republic's leadership.

Outside the palace dome, clearly visible through its transparency from the bookcase-lined office's window, crowds of children cheerfully threw snowballs at one another, erected snowmen, or skittered over the steep, cobbled streets of the Old Town on sleds. Others shrieked in delight as they rode an assortment of carnival rides on the palace grounds themselves, and vendors of hot popcorn, hot chocolate and tea, and enough cotton candy and other items of questionable dietary value to provide sugar rushes for the next several days could be seen nefariously plying their trade on every corner.

What couldn't be clearly seen from Matthews' present seat were the breath masks those children wore, or the fact that their gloves and mittens would have served the safety requirements of hazardous materials workers quite handily. Grayson's high concentrations of heavy metals made even the planet's snow potentially toxic, but that was something Graysons were used to. Grayson kids took the need to protect themselves against their environment as much for granted as children on other, less unfriendly planets took the need to watch out for traffic crossing busy streets.

Winter fun on Grayson.

In fact, it was a planetary holiday—the Protector's Birthday. The next best thing to a thousand T-years worth of Grayson children had celebrated that same holiday, although for the last thirty T-years or so, they'd been a bit shortchanged compared to most of their predecessors, since Benjamin IX had been born on December the twenty-first. The schools traditionally shut down for Christmas vacation on December the eighteenth, so the kids didn't get an extra day away from classwork the way they might have if Benjamin had been thoughtful enough to be born in, say, March or October. That little scheduling faux pas on his part (or, more fairly perhaps, on his mother's) was part of the reason Benjamin had always insisted on throwing a special party for all the children of the planetary capital and any of their friends who could get there to join them. At the moment, by Matthews' estimate, the school-aged population of the city of Austen had probably risen by at least forty or fifty percent.

The Protector's Birthday is a planet-wide holiday on Grayson, and since the kids are on school-break anyways, Benjamin Mayhew holds a massive party for all Austen's kiddies.

"When did Forchein decide to sign on with Mueller and Friends, Your Grace?"

"That's hard to say, really." Benjamin tipped his swiveled armchair back and swung it gently from side to side. "To be fair to him—not that I particularly want to be, you understand—I doubt he was really much inclined in that direction until High Ridge tried to screw over every other member of the Alliance."

-snip-

Given that balance, and how much Manticoran and Grayson blood had been shed side by side in the Alliance's battles, Matthews was prepared to forgive the Star Kingdom for High Ridge's existence. Not all Graysons were, however. Even many of those who remained fierce supporters of Lady Harrington separated her in their own minds from the Star Kingdom. She was one of theirs—a Grayson in her own right, by adoption and shed blood—which insulated her from their anger at the High Ridge Government's stupidity, avarice, and arrogance. And the fact that she and High Ridge had been bitter political enemies only made that insulation easier for them.

"I'm serious, Wesley." Benjamin waved one hand, as if for emphasis. "Oh, Forchein's always been a social and religious conservative—not as reactionary as some, thank God, but bad enough—but I'm pretty sure it was the combination of High Ridge's foreign policy and Haven's resumption of open hostilities that tipped his support. And, unfortunately, he's not the only one that's true of."

The Loyal Opposition to the Alliance in Grayson has grown, another thing to thank High Ridge for.

He shook his head. "Some of them wouldn't have supported us sticking with Manticore against Haven this time around if the Protector's Own hadn't already been involved at Sidemore. Their position is that High Ridge had already violated Manticore's treaty obligations to us by conducting independent negotiations with Haven, which amounted to a unilateral abrogation of the Alliance. And while we do have a mutual defense treaty outside the formal framework of the overall Alliance, one whose terms obligate us to come to one another's support in the event of any attack by an outside party, the Star Kingdom's critics have pointed out that the Republic of Haven did not, in fact, attack Grayson in Operation Thunderbolt despite our involvement in defending Manticoran territory. The implication being that since High Ridge chose to violate Manticore's solemn treaty obligations to us—along with every other party to the Alliance—there's no reason we should feel legally or morally bound to honor our treaty obligations to them if doing so isn't in the Protectorate's best interests.

"And—surprise, surprise!—the way the Manticorans' expansion into the Talbott Sector's brought them into direct collision with the Solarian League has only made the people who are pissed off with Manticore even less happy. And to be honest, I can't really blame anyone for being nervous about finding themselves on the wrong end of the confrontation with the League, especially after the way High Ridge squandered so much of the Star Kingdom's investment in loyalty.

"Of course, none of our vessels have actually been involved in operations anywhere near Talbott, but we do have personnel serving on Manticoran warships which have been. For that matter, over thirty of our people were killed when that idiot Byng blew up the destroyers they were serving in. Which gives the people who worry about what may happen between the League and the Manticorans—and, by extension, with us—two legitimate pieces of ammunition. The Sollies may view the participation of our personnel, even aboard someone else's ships, in military operations against the League as meaning we've already decided to back Manticore, and I don't think it would be totally unfair to argue that the people we've already lost were lost in someone else's fight. Mind you, I think it should be obvious to anyone with any sort of realistic appreciation for how Frontier Security and the League operate that standing up to the Sollies should be every independent 'neobarb' star system's fight. Not everyone's going to agree with me about that, unfortunately, and those who don't will be airing their concerns shortly.

Put it that way, I actually feel surprisingly sympathetic to the Graysons who want to quietly duck out of the Alliance.

"Whatever High Ridge and Janacek might have done, ever since Willie Alexander took over as Prime Minister, especially with Hamish as his First Lord of Admiralty, our channels of communication have been completely opened again. Our R&D people are working directly with theirs, and they've provided us with everything we needed to put Apollo into production here at Yeltsin's Star. For that matter, they've delivered over eight thousand of the system-defense variant Apollo pods. And they've also handed our intelligence people complete copies of the computer files Countess Gold Peak captured from Byng at New Tuscany, along with specimens of Solly missiles, energy weapons, software systems—the works. For that matter, if we want it, they're more than willing to let us have one of the actual battlecruisers the Countess brought back from New Tuscany so we can examine it personally. So far, we haven't taken them up on that. Our people in Admiral Hemphill's shop are already seeing everything, and, frankly, the Manties are probably better at that sort of thing than we are here at home, anyway.

"Based on what we've seen out of the Havenites, I'm confident we could successfully defend this star system against everything the Republic has left. And based on our evaluation of the captured Solarian material, my best estimate is that while the Sollies probably could take us in the end, they'd need upwards of a thousand ships-of-the-wall to do it. And that's a worst-case estimate, Your Grace. I suspect a more realistic estimate would push their force requirements upward significantly." He shook his head. "Given all their other commitments, the amount of their wall of battle that's tucked away in mothballs, and the fact that they'd pretty much have to go through Manticore before they got to us at all, I'm not worried about any known short-term threat."

A short time ago, about two years? The GSN was the baddest Navy in known space, since the Manties had stopped building carriers and podnoughts and Haven was still working on theirs. They probably haven't reclaimed the title even after Manticore, since Haven has so many podnoughts they couldn't commit, but they remain a force to be reckoned with.

Grayson has received 8,000 system-defense Apollo pods. Does that mean they finished the planned four-drive MDMs they wanted for them? Unknown. But the fact that Grayson has everything they need to start producing Apollo missiles may be important soon.

Estimated force, given detailed examination of Solly hardware, that they'd need to take Grayson is 1000+ wallers. Of course, in the long term nobody can stop the League if they're willing to pay the astonishing cost in human life it will take to crack any given nut.

Carus chuckled. The four destroyers of the Royal Manticoran Navy's Destroyer Division 265.2, known as "the Silver Cepheids," had been sitting a light-month from Manticore-A for two weeks, doing absolutely nothing. Well, that wasn't exactly fair. They'd been sitting here maintaining a scrupulous sensor watch looking for absolutely nothing, and he was hardly surprised by Landry's reaction.

Even with the near certainty that the detected hyper-footprint was a ghost, the Book still says they spend two weeks canvasing the area.

Commodore Karol Østby leaned back in the comfortable chair, eyes closed, letting the music flow over him. Old Terran opera had been his favorite form of relaxation for as long as he could remember. He'd even learned French, German, and Italian so he could listen to them in their original languages. Of course, he'd always had a pronounced knack for languages; it was part of the Østby genome, after all.

Easy pick-up of language is something Mesa can select for.

So all we have to do now is wait, he told himself, listening to the music, listening to the voices. One more T-month until we put the guidance platforms in place.

That was going to be a little risky, he admitted in the privacy of his own thoughts, but only a little. The guidance platforms were even stealthier than his ships. Someone would have to almost literally collide with one of them to spot them, and they'd be positioned well above the system ecliptic, where there was no traffic to do the colliding. He would have been happier if the platforms had been a little smaller—he admitted that to himself, as well—but delivering targeting information to that many individual missiles in a time window as short as the Oyster Bay ops plan demanded required a prodigious amount of bandwidth. And, despite everything, it was highly likely the Manties were going to hear something when they started transmitting all that data.

Mesa, like Manticore is now using remote platforms to relay targeting data, though where Keyhole is covered by crazy good EW and actual laser clusters, Mesa's version is just super-stealthy up til the moment of transmission.

If Cheng had so far failed to grasp the nature of the sausage machine into which the SLN was about to poke its fingers, Admiral Martinos Polydorou, the commanding officer of Systems Development was in active denial. The SysDev CO had been one of the masterminds behind the "Fleet 2000" initiative, and he was even more convinced of the inevitability of Solarian technological superiority than the majority of his fellow officers.

In theory, it was SysDev's responsibility to continually push the parameters, to search constantly for improved technologies and applications. Of course, in theory, it was also OpAn's responsibility to analyze and interpret operational data which might identify potential threats. Given that al-Fanudahi's career had been stalled for decades mostly because he'd tried to do exactly that, it probably wasn't surprising Polydorou's subordinates were unlikely to disagree with him. After all, Teague was one of the very few OpAn analysts who'd come to share al-Fanudahi's concerns . . . and he'd specifically instructed her to keep her mouth shut about that minor fact.

Martinos Polydorou commands the SLN's R&D efforts, but he's no Shannon Foraker or Horrible Hemphill. In fact, he has his head a lot further up his behind in smug self-assurance than your average Solly admiral (of which there are a few million.)

"But it's only a matter of time before they find out you've been right all along," she argued.

"Maybe. And when that happens, do you think they're going to like having been proved wrong? What usually happens to someone like me—someone who's insisted on telling them the sky is falling—is that if it turns out he was right, his superiors are even more strongly motivated to punish him. The last thing they want is to ask the advice of someone who's told them they were idiots after the universe demonstrates they really were idiots. That's why it's important you stay clear of this. When the crap finally hits the fan, you'll be the one who had access to all of my notes and my reports, who's in the best position to be their 'expert witness' on that basis, but who hasn't been pissing them off for as long as they can remember."

The Solly command structure isn't really set up to reward that single voice of reason.

For centuries, the theta bands had represented an inviolable ceiling for hyper-capable ships. Everyone had known it was theoretically possible to go even higher, attain a still higher apparent normal-space velocity, yet no one had ever managed to design a ship which could crack the iota wall and survive. Incredible amounts of research had been invested in efforts to do just that, especially in the earlier days of hyper travel, but with a uniform lack of success. In the last few centuries, efforts to beat the iota barrier had waned, until the goal had been pretty much abandoned as one of those theoretically possible but practically unobtainable concepts.

But the Mesan Alignment hadn't abandoned it, and finally, after the better part of a hundred T-years of dogged research, they'd found the answer. It was, in many ways, a brute force approach, and it wouldn't have been possible even now without relatively recent advances (whose potential no one else seemed to have noticed) in related fields. And even with those other advances, it had almost doubled the size of conventional hyper generators. But it worked. Indeed, they'd broken not simply the iota wall, but the kappa wall, as well. Which meant the voyage from New Tuscany to Mesa, which would have taken anyone else the next best thing to forty-five T-days, had taken Anisimovna less than thirty-one.

Speed of the streak drive, which wasn't as simple as building a bigger hyper generator and required them to string together multiple breakthroughs publicly made in disparate fields.

"At any rate," Collin said, resuming the narrator's role, "we officially completed our investigation about a week ago, and since neither Zilwicki nor Cachat are around to dispute our version of events, we've announced Zilwicki was responsible for all three explosions. And that the nukes represented a deliberate terror attack launched by the Ballroom and the 'Kingdom of Torch.' The fact that Torch's declared war on us made that easier, and our PR types—both here and in the League—are pounding away at how it proves any Torch claims to have disavowed terror are bullshit. Once a terrorist, always a terrorist, and this attack killed thousands of seccies and slaves, as well."

He showed another flash of teeth.

"Actually, it only got a few hundred of them, but no one off Mesa knows that. And enough seccies disappeared when the regular security agencies came down on them after Zilwicki and Cachat's little friends confessed that no one in the seccy or slave communities who does know better is going to say a word. That's not going to help the Ballroom's cause any even with other slaves. And as far as anyone else is concerned, the whole operation was a deliberate attack on a civilian target with weapons of mass destruction—multiple weapons of mass destruction . We're going to hammer them in the Sollie faxes, and having a known agent of Manticore involved in it gives us another club to use on the Manties, as well."

So this is Mesa's public take on the Green Pines nukings. They were all the work of those vile Ballroom terrorists from the rogue state 'Torch' and their sinister Manty mastermind, Anton Zilwicki. Really, Mesa is totally the victim here. WOn't someone rain in those awful Manties and Torches? Cachat gets left out, because even Sollies would have to wonder how two spies from warring nations collaborated on something like this. Also because Anton is a public figure while Victor is only known in intelligence circles.

"Unfortunately, you're exactly right," Albrecht agreed. "They did roll over on us, and the Manties have broadcast that fact to the galaxy at large. On the other hand"—he shrugged—"it was a given from the outset that they were going to find out in the end. No one could have done a better job of burying his tracks than you did, so don't worry about it. Besides," he grinned nastily, "our people on Old Terra were primed and waiting to heap scorn on the 'fantastic allegations' and 'wild accusations' coming out of Manticore. Obviously the Manties are trying to come up with some story—any story!—to justify their unprovoked attack on Admiral Byng."

"And people are really going to buy that?" Anisimovna couldn't help sounding a bit dubious, and Detweiller gave a crack of laughter.

"You'd be astonished how many Sollies will buy into that, at least long enough to meet our needs. They're accustomed to accepting nonsense about what goes on in the Verge—OFS has been feeding it to them forever, and their newsies are used to swinging the spoon! Their media's been so thoroughly coopted that at least half their reporters automatically follow the party line. It's almost like some kind of involuntary reflex. And even if John Q. Solly doesn't swallow it this time for some reason, it probably won't matter as long as we just generate enough background noise to give the people making the important decisions the cover and official justification they need."

Really, Manticore knows all about, and has publicly announced, Anisimovna's involvement in New Tuscany on behalf of Manpower. Pity the Solly leadership doesn't care and they're not going to beat out the Solly/Mesan spin-doctoring on their own homeground to win over the general public.

[Simon_Jester]

"The point is," he continued, "that it's going to come to shooting in the end, no matter what sort of 'negotiations' anyone may try to set up. And when it does, the strategy's actually going to be pretty damned simple, since they've only got one really important star system. They don't have any choice, strategically. If we go after Manticore itself, they have to stand and fight. No matter how long-ranged their missiles may be, they can't just cut and run, so I want to be sure we've got enough counter-missiles and point defense to stand up to their missile fire while we drive straight for their planets. It may not be pretty, but it'll work."

"Yes, Sir," Kingsford said yet again, and he knew his superior was right. After all, that concept lay at the bottom of virtually all of Battle Fleet's strategic doctrine.

Not a terribly elegant fleet doctrine.

Well, the core of it is basically what Haven tried at First Manticore: "screw all this whittling away at the periphery, let's go for the throat!"

The main problem is that the Solarians have no real concept of just how well protected that throat is. And their institutional training experience (especially in Battle Fleet) seems to consist largely of exercises that are meant to avoid embarrassment for the participants.

How many times have we seen Honor embarrass some junior in a simulated training exercise where she pulls a surprise on them? Or, occasionally, vice versa? Few if any of these Battle Fleet officers have the experience of being utterly schooled by a deception scheme they couldn't foresee in advance... and likewise they have little or no experience devising such schemes.

By contrast, Haven got its basic institutional combat experience by beating up on actual armed enemies who were often willing to fight back. Even if they were weaklings, they still had weapons capable of doing actual damage, and weren't paralyzed by Haven's reputation the way a cobra paralyzes a rabbit... unlike most of the targets the OFS and Frontier Fleet knock over.

So Haven's evolved a doctrine that uses at least basic deception tactics in order to minimize the harm that can be caused by local system-defense forces armed with a squadron or two of battlecruisers, or maybe a few battleships. It's not on the same scale as a major fleet action, but it's at least good practice- plus, of course, all the extensive experience they got developing such tactics against Manticore.

Manticore's naval tradition includes some trickery- For instance, they once won a war against San Martin by heroically duping them into flying over to the wormhole terminus to guard against an attack via the Junction, then cunningly sneaking up and pointing laser cannons at the planet before the San Martin Navy could come back to do anything about it.

But the League just plain doesn't have this. They always have overwhelming force, against opponents that are normally afraid to even try to fight them. And training to sneak around and surprise people and outmaneuver them would result in a lot of bad blood and unnecessary stress in peacetime simulations, right?

Which is why unlike Haven, their "go for the throat" attack has no operational finesse...

What Kingsford suspects is that Rajampet might be pushing a war just to enhance Defense's standing and get him that seat at the table, but I'm more interested in the notion that the upper ranks are so jaded even high treason for personal ambition is "just the way things are done."

Partly this. Partly also that the League has no meaningful concept of 'treason' in the first place; it's impossible to betray the universe to an outside party.

The closest they'll have to 'treason' would be some very junior flunky who gets cranky and decides to defect to a random Verge star system with some kind of technology or equipment that makes them rich. Which is a whole different order of (non-threatening) problem than what we classically think of as 'treason,' a betrayal of and active weakening of the state against a serious, threatening enemy.

Eh, she was coming into the fight pretty fresh and with Apollo. If she couldn't have annihilated his command from that far out she sure could have pounded it.

She surely could- but not from that range, due to a lack of bandwidth; she was relaying the FTL communication signals to the Apollo control missiles via the Hermes buoys, and those can apparently only handle so many missiles.

Put it that way, I actually feel surprisingly sympathetic to the Graysons who want to quietly duck out of the Alliance.

Yes. While they owe Manticore for essentially saving their planet from Masada, they can reasonably argue that that debt has been paid, given the Grayson roles in Buttercup, in blunting the effectiveness of the Thunderbolt attack, and in the casualties they took at First Manticore. Manticore might very well not still be in the war if it weren't for Grayson, and might well have been conquered by Haven.

Certainly, Grayson never signed onto the Alliance expecting to end up crossing swords with the Solarian League.

Estimated force, given detailed examination of Solly hardware, that they'd need to take Grayson is 1000+ wallers. Of course, in the long term nobody can stop the League if they're willing to pay the astonishing cost in human life it will take to crack any given nut.

Although given the very real political divisions and cracks within the League, it's reasonable to wonder which will break first- the nut, or the nutcracker.

Carus chuckled. The four destroyers of the Royal Manticoran Navy's Destroyer Division 265.2, known as "the Silver Cepheids," had been sitting a light-month from Manticore-A for two weeks, doing absolutely nothing. Well, that wasn't exactly fair. They'd been sitting here maintaining a scrupulous sensor watch looking for absolutely nothing, and he was hardly surprised by Landry's reaction.

Even with the near certainty that the detected hyper-footprint was a ghost, the Book still says they spend two weeks canvasing the area.

I'm not sure whether they're canvassing the area looking for a specific thing, or whether they're canvassing the area because they're the on-duty patrol squadron responsible for flitting around all over the deep space around Manticore.

[Ahriman238]

A really brief update, because I don't want to break up this next section.

She was still a bit surprised she'd survived the sabotaged software of her EVA propulsion pack, and she knew she hadn't emerged from the experience unscarred. Even now, all these years later, she hated going EVA—which, unfortunately, came the way of the engineering department even more than anyone else.

Ginger Lewis, who had someone try and murder her by messing with her thruster pack, still has lingering fear of going EVA. Hard to blame her, but still sad.

"Would it happen," Faraday continued, "that tucked away somewhere in your subordinate officers' files, between their voluminous correspondence, their instruction manuals, their schedules, their research notes, their ham sandwiches, and their entertainment chips, they actually possess a copy of this station's emergency evacuation plan?"

He looked back and forth between Yaeger and Rear Admiral Warren Trammell, her counterpart on the fabrication and industrial end of Weyland's operations. Trammell didn't look much happier than Yaeger felt, but neither was foolish enough to answer his question, and Faraday smiled thinly.

"I only ask, you understand," he continued almost affably, "because our recent exercise would seem to indicate that eitherthat they don't have a copy of the plan, or else none of them can read. And I hate to think Her Majesty's Navy is entrusting its most important and secure research programs to a bunch of illiterates."

I do like Faraday's style for a chewing out. For context, he recently took over as CO of Weyland (the station where all the RMN's super-secret military R&D happens) and just saw how unprepared the station is for emergencies when he tried to run an evacuation drill.

"Well, Sir, I only wanted to observe that this was the first emergency evacuation simulation Weyland's conducted in the last two T-years. Under the circumstances, it's probably not really all that surprising people were a little . . . rusty."

Time since the last drill, and if previous experience with Rafe, McKeon and Truman holds true, they've probably cycled more than a few people through the station in that time.

As Howell had just pointed out, emergency evacuation exercises had not been a priority of Rear Admiral Colombo, Faraday's immediate predecessor. For that matter, they hadn't been a high priority for the station commander before that, either. On the other hand, that CO had been a Janacek appointee, and nothing had been very high on his priority list. By contrast, Colombo possessed enormous energy and drive, which helped explain why Admiral Hemphill had just recalled him to the capital planet as her second-in-command at BuWeaps. But, Yaeger admitted, Colombo had been a tech weenie, like her. She didn't think he'd ever held starship command, and he'd been involved in the R&D side for over thirty T-years. He'd been conscientious about the administrative details of his assignment, but his real interest had been down in the labs or over in the fabrication units where prototype pieces of hardware were produced.

Previous Weyland commanders.

"I fully realize I've been aboard for less than one T-week," Faraday continued. "And I realize my credentials on the R&D side are substantially weaker even than Admiral Trammell's. But there's a reason we have an emergency evacuation plan. In fact, there's an even better reason for us to have one than for Hephaestus or Vulcan to have one. The same reason, in a lot of ways, that we back all of our data up down on the planetary surface every twelve hours. There is one tiny difference between our data backups and the evac plan, however." He smiled again, a bit less thinly than before. "It would be just a bit more difficult to reconstitute the researchers than their research if both of them got blown to bits."

Every twelve hours the station's computers back up to a secure ground storage site to preserve their research in the event of a catastrophe.

"We all know the new system-defense pods have been deployed to protect Weyland," the vice admiral went on after a moment. "For that matter, we all know the Peeps got hammered so hard it's not really likely they're going to be poking their noses back into Manticoran space anytime soon. But nobody thought it was very likely they'd do it in the first place, either. So however much it may inconvenience our personnel, I'm afraid I'm going to have to insist we get this little procedural bump smoothed out. I'd appreciate it if you'd make your people aware that I'm not exactly satisfied with their performance in this little simulation. I assure you, I'll be making that point to them myself, as well."

And the station is covered by Apollo pods.

"What you are not going to tell them, however, is that I have something just a little more drastic in mind for them. Simulations are all well and good, and I'm perfectly prepared to use them as training tools. After all, that's what they're intended for. But as I'm sure you're both aware, it's always been the Navy's policy to conduct live-fire exercises, as well as simulations. Which is what we're going to do, too."

Yaeger managed to keep her dismay from showing, although she was fairly certain Faraday knew exactly what she was feeling. Still, she couldn't help a sinking sensation in the pit of her stomach as she thought about the gaping holes the chaos of an actual physical evacuation of the station was going to tear in her R&D schedules.

"I fully realize," Faraday continued as if he'd been a Sphinxian treecat reading her mind, "that an actual evacuation will have significant repercussions on the station's operations. Because I am, this isn't something I'm approaching lightly. It's not something I want to do—it's only something we have to do. And because we not only need to test our actual performance but convince some of your 'focused' people this is something to take seriously, not just something designed to interrupt their work schedules, we're not going to tell them it's coming. We'll go ahead and run the additional simulations. I'm sure they'll expect nothing less out of their new, pissed-off, pain-in-the-ass CO, and they'll bitch and moan about it with all the creativity of really smart people. I don't care about that, as long as they keep it to themselves and don't force me to take note of it. But, hopefully, when we hit them with the actual emergency order—when it's not a simple simulation—they'll at least have improved enough for us to get everyone off the station without someone getting killed because he forgot to secure his damned helmet."

So a surprise live-fire drill, as in "climb into your escape pods and instead of hearing the end-simulation tone, they launch."

It had never occurred to the tall, almost albino-pale commander that he might find himself the executive officer of one of the Royal Manticoran Navy's most powerful heavy cruisers. He was a communications specialist, and posts like that usually went to officers who'd come up through the tactical track, although that tradition had been rather eroded over the past couple of decades by the Navy's insatiable appetite for experienced personnel. On the other hand, very few XOs had inherited their positions under circumstances quite like his, which had quite a bit to do with his current weariness.

Back on the Kitty, now-Captain Fitzgerald has named Nagachaudi, the comms officer his XO, despite such officers normally coming from a tactical background.

FitzGerald's eyes darkened at that thought. Of course they'd expected that! After all, none of them were psychic, so none of them had realized the Battle of Manticore was going to come roaring out of nowhere only five days after their return. Hexapuma's damages had kept her on the sidelines, a helpless observer, and as incredibly frustrating as that had been at the time, it was probably also the only reason Fitzgerald, Nagchaudhuri, and the cruiser's entire complement were still alive. That cataclysmic encounter had wreaked havoc on a scale no one had ever truly envisioned. It had also twisted the Navy's neat, methodical schedules into pretzels . . . and the horrendous personnel losses had quite a bit to do with how Nagchaudhuri had ended up confirmed as Hexapuma's executive officer, too.

The Nasty Kitty was present for the Battle of Manticore, but sidelined due to her extensive battle damage. Some of the fallout, it's very hard all of a sudden to find a vacant repair slip.

"Well," he said, shaking off the somberness memories of the battle always produced, "I've got some good news for once. Rear Admiral Truman says she's finally got a space for us in R&R."

"She does?" Nagchaudhuri straightened, expression brightening. Rear Admiral Margaret Truman, a first cousin of the rather more famous Admiral Alice Truman, was the commanding officer of Her Majesty's Space Station Hephaestus, and HMSS Hephaestus happened to be home to the Repair and Refit command to which Hexapuma's repair had been assigned.

But it looks like they're getting in now anyways. Of course it would be now.

"I hope he's enjoying himself," Nagchaudhuri said more seriously. "He's a good kid. He works hard, and he really came through at Monica."

"They were all good kids," FitzGerald agreed. "And I'll admit, I worry about him a little. It's not natural for the XO to have to order an ensign to take leave. Especially not someone with his record from the Island!"

"He has been well behaved since we got back from Monica," Nagchaudhuri acknowledged. "You don't think he's sick, do you?"

"No, I think it's just losing all his accomplices." Fitzgerald shrugged. "With Helen off as the Skipper's new flag lieutenant, and with Paulo assigned to Weyland with Ginger, he's sort of at loose ends when it comes to getting into trouble. For which we can all be grateful."

"That depends. Are we going to get a fresh complement of snotties for him to provide with a suitably horrible example?"

"I doubt it." Fitzgerald shrugged again. "Given the fact that we're going to be sitting in a repair dock for the next several months, I imagine they'll be looking for something a bit more active for snotty cruises. Besides, even if we get a fresh batch, he's an ensign now. I think he'd actually feel constrained to set them a good example."

"He" in this case being Aikawa, the last of the Kitty's former midshipmen, the one who stayed onboard but is now taking his leave time.

[VhenRa]

The entire sequence to do with the Hexapuma... at first when I read Mission of Honor, I hadn't read Shadow of Saganami. Now that I have... its kinda painful to read the Hexapuma parts of Mission of Honor.

[Ahriman238]

"I was under the impression we'd just issued a system-wide Red Alert," she said, her tone noticeably more astringent than the one in which she normally addressed Theisman. "I'm assuming, Admiral, that you had a reason for that?"

"Yes, Madam President, I did." Theisman's expression was peculiar, Thiessen thought. "Approximately"—the Secretary of War glanced to one side—"thirty-one minutes ago, a force of unidentified starships made their alpha translations ten light-minutes outside the system hyper limit. That puts them roughly twenty-two light-minutes from the planet. The gravitic arrays detected them when they reentered normal-space, and our original estimate, based on their hyper footprints, was that we were looking at forty-eight ships-of-the-wall and/or CLACs, escorted by a dozen or so battlecruisers, a half dozen CLACs, and fifteen or twenty destroyers. They appear to have brought along at least a dozen large freighters, as well—most likely ammunition ships."

Which still leaves Eighth Fleet somewhat behind their Buttercup strength in hulls, though with Apollo, Keyhole, and the various new classes Honor's Eighth Fleet is unquestionably far more powerful and dangerous than Hamish's ever was. Particularly with a dozen ancillary freighters loaded down with Apollo pods.

Oh yes, and Eighth Fleet popped into the Haven system. Under the circumstances, I'd forgive people for soiling themselves.

"Under the circumstances, there didn't seem much doubt about who they belonged to or why they were here," he said, "but it's taken us a while to confirm our tentative IDs at this range. And it turns out our initial assessments weren't quite correct."

"I beg your pardon?" Pritchart said when he paused.

"Oh, we were right in at least one respect, Madam President—it is the Manties' Eighth Fleet, and Admiral Harrington is in command. But there's an additional ship, one we hadn't counted on. It's not a warship at all. In fact, it appears to be a private yacht, and it's squawking the transponder code of the GS Paul Tankersley."

"A yacht?" Pritchart repeated in the careful tone someone used when she wasn't entirely certain she wasn't talking to a lunatic.

"Yes, Ma'am. A yacht. A Grayson-registry yacht owned by Steadholder Harrington. According to the message she's transmitted to us from one Captain George Hardy, the Tankersley's skipper, Admiral Harrington is personally aboard her, not her fleet flagship. And, Madam President, Captain Hardy has requested permission for his ship to transport the Admiral to Nouveau Paris with a personal message to you from Queen Elizabeth."

Well that's one way of getting attention.

Only those who knew her very well would have recognized her own anxiety in the slow, metronome-steady twitching of the very end of the tail of the cream and gray treecat draped across her lap.

Captain Spencer Hawke, of the Harrington Steadholder's Guard, Colonel Andrew LaFollet's handpicked successor to command her personal security team, was one of those few people. He knew exactly what that twitching tail indicated, and he found himself in profound agreement with Nimitz. If Hawke had been allowed to do this his way, the Steadholder wouldn't have come within three or four light-minutes of this planet. Failing that, her entire fleet would have been in orbit around it, and she would have been headed to its surface in an armored skinsuit aboard a Royal Manticoran Navy assault shuttle, accompanied not just by her three personal armsmen, but by a full company of battle armored Royal Manticoran Navy Marines.

Preferably as the Manticoran Alliance's military representative for the signing ceremony as she accepted the unconditional surrender of an abjectly defeated Havenite government amid the smoking ruins of the city of Nouveau Paris.

Clearly not everyone is excited by this particular peace overture, though in Spencer's case it's more professional paranoia. He should be grateful that Prichart, like Von Rabenstrange just accepts that Grayson law requiers Honor to have armed bodyguards at all times, no matter how it must give her security people conniptions!

And so she sat still in the comfortable seat, pretending she was unaware of the mesmerized gaze the Havenite flight engineer had turned upon her as he came face to face with the woman even the Havenite newsies called "the Salamander," and hoped she'd been right about Pritchart and her administration.

Really? It's a stupid nickname, but even more so for her enemies to use.

Eloise Pritchart stood on the shuttle landing pad on the roof of what had once again become Péricard Tower following Thomas Theisman's restoration of the Republic.

The massive, hundred and fifty year-old tower had borne several other names during People's Republic of Haven's lifetime, including The People's Tower. Or, for that matter, the bitterly ironic one of "The Tower of Justice" . . . when it had housed the savagely repressive State Security which had supported the rule of Rob Pierre and Oscar Saint-Just. No one truly knew how many people had vanished forever into StateSec's basement interrogation rooms and holding cells. There'd been more than enough, however, and the grisly charges of torture and secret executions which the prosecutors had actually been able to prove had been sufficient to win a hundred and thirty-seven death sentences.

A hundred and thirty-seven death sentences Eloise Pritchart had personally signed, one by one, without a single regret.

Pierre himself had preferred other quarters and moved his personal living space to an entirely different location shortly after the Leveller Uprising. And, given the tower's past associations, a large part of Eloise Pritchart had found herself in rare agreement with the "Citizen Chairman." Yet in the end, and despite some fairly acute personal reservations—not to mention anxiety over possible public misperceptions—she'd decided to return the presidential residence to its traditional pre-Legislaturalist home on the upper floors of Péricard Tower.

Some of her advisers had urged against it, but she'd trusted her instincts more than their timidity. And, by and large, the citizens of the restored Republic had read her message correctly and remembered that Péricard Tower had been named for Michèle Péricard, the first President of the Republic of Haven. The woman whose personal vision and drive had led directly to the founding of the Republic. The woman whose guiding hand had written the constitution Eloise Pritchart, Thomas Theisman, and their allies had dedicated their lives to restoring.

The governmental residence for Haven, renamed after the Revolution, and it seems Rob Pierre moved out after the Levellers and converted it into StateSec headquarters. Prichart reclaimed it, and the name of Haven's visionary first president for it.

It was escorted by three more shuttles—assault shuttles, heavily laden with external ordnance—which went into a watchful counter-grav hover overhead, and even more atmospheric sting ships orbited alertly, closing all air space within fifteen kilometers of the tower to any civilian traffic as the passenger shuttle settled towards the pad with the crisp, professional assurance only to be expected from Thomas Theisman's personal pilot. Lieutenant (JG) Andre Beaupré hadn't been selected as the chief of naval operations' full-time chauffeur at random, so he'd been the logical choice when Theisman decided he needed the very best pilot he could lay hands on to look after their unexpected visitor.

That said, considering most of the galaxy still thinks Haven tried to assassinate Honor a year ago, Prichart personally assured Honor's safety and the Invincible Eighth Fleet it sitting right up there, the Havenites are being pretty paranoid about Honor's security themselves.

Besides, Harrington's got a pulser built into her left hand, for God's sake! Is Sheila planning to make her check her prosthesis at the door? Leave it in the umbrella stand?

Apparently that's a thing that people know about now, probably because of that same assassination attempt. I'm sure that makes Prichart's head of security real happy.

"This is an unexpected meeting, Admiral Alexander-Harrington."

"I'm sure it is, Madam President." Alexander-Harrington's accent was crisp, her soprano surprisingly sweet for a woman of her size and formidable reputation, and Pritchart had the distinct impression that the hand gripping hers was being very careful about the way it did so.

The gripping strength from hell.

"I understand you have a message for me," the president continued out loud. "Given the dramatic fashion in which you've come to deliver it, I'm prepared to assume it's an important one."

"Dramatic, Madam President?"

Despite herself, Pritchart's eyebrows rose as she heard Alexander-Harrington's unmistakable amusement. It wasn't the most diplomatic possible reaction to the admiral's innocent tone, but under the circumstances, Pritchart couldn't reprimand herself for it too seriously. After all, the Manticorans were just as capable of calculating the local time of day here in Nouveau Paris as her own staffers would have been of calculating the local time in the City of Landing.

So Eighth Fleet popped over the hyper-limit around Midnight, Nouveau Paris time. I'm not really sure if that was deliberate or just when they happened to arrive, it's not like after a trip of over a month Honor couldn't hang out in hyper for a few hours. Then again, why bother?

"Well, I have to admit we in the Republic have developed a certain aversion to aristocracies, whether they're acknowledged, like the one in your own Star Kingdom, or simply de facto, like the Legislaturalists here at home. So there'd be at least some . . . mixed emotions, let's say, in using one of your titles of nobility. At the same time, however, we're well aware of your record, for a lot of reasons."

-snip-

"As I say, we're aware of your record. Given the fact that you come from good yeoman stock and earned all of those decadent titles the hard way, we're prepared to use them as a gesture of respect."

Interesting. For the time being, they settle on 'Admiral' as the appropriate form of address.

"Thank you." Pritchart gave her another smile, this one somewhat broader. "To be perfectly honest, I suspect some of my more aggressively egalitarian Cabinet members might be genuinely uncomfortable using one of your other titles."

She's fishing with that one, Honor decided. Most people wouldn't have suspected anything of the sort, given Pritchart's obvious assurance, but Honor had certain unfair advantages. She wants an indication of whether I want to speak to her in private or whether whatever Beth sent me to say is intended for her entire Cabinet.

"If it would make them feel uncomfortable, then of course we can dispense with it," she assured the president, and suppressed an urge to chuckle as she tasted Pritchart's carefully concealed spike of frustration when her probe was effortlessly—and apparently unknowingly—deflected.

Honor's social hacks in action.

"Please, have a seat, Admiral," Pritchart invited, indicating the comfortable armchairs arranged around a largish coffee-table before a huge crystoplast window—one entire wall of the office, actually—that gave a magnificent view of downtown Nouveau Paris.

Honor accepted the invitation, choosing a chair which let her look out at that dramatic vista. She settled into it, lifting Nimitz down from her shoulder to her lap, and despite the tension of the moment and the millions of deaths which had brought her here, she felt an ungrudging admiration for what the people of this planet had accomplished. She knew all about the crumbling infrastructure and ramshackle lack of maintenance this city had suffered under the Legislaturalists. And she knew about the riots which had erupted in its canyon-like streets following the Pierre coup. She knew about the airstrikes Esther McQueen—"Admiral Cluster Bomb"—had called in to suppress the Levelers, and about the hidden nuclear warhead Oscar Saint-Just had detonated under the old Octagon to defeat McQueen's own coup attempt. This city had seen literally millions of its citizens die over the last two T-decades—suffered more civilian fatalities than the number of military personnel who'd died aboard all of the Havenite ships destroyed in the Battle of Manticore combined—yet it had survived. Not simply survived, but risen with restored, phoenix-like beauty from the debris of neglect and the wreckage of combat.

Now, as she gazed out at the gleaming fireflies of air cars zipping busily past even at this hour—at those stupendous towers, at the lit windows, the fairy-dusting of air traffic warning lights—she saw the resurgence of the entire Republic of Haven. Recognized the stupendous changes that resurgence had made in virtually every aspect of the lives of the men, women, and children of the Republic. And much of that resurgence, that rebirth of hope and pride and purpose, was the work of the platinum-haired woman settling into a facing armchair while their bodyguards, in turn, settled into wary watchfulness around them.

Nouveau Paris in brief.

"May I offer you refreshment, Admiral?"

"No, thank you, Madam President. I'm fine."

"If you're certain," Pritchart said with a slight twinkle. Honor arched one eyebrow, and the president chuckled. "We've amassed rather a complete dossier on you, Admiral. The Meyerdahl first wave, I believe?"

"Fair enough," Honor acknowledged the reference to her genetically enhanced musculature and the demands of the metabolism which supported it. "And I genuinely appreciate the offer, but my steward fed me before he let me off the ship."

"Ah! That would be the formidable Mr. MacGuiness?"

Apparently Haven has a really impressive dossier on Honor by now, and Prichart doesn't mind showing off. Her genie status is apparently part of her medical record, but something that a number of her closest friends didn't know for years and years, but is apparently known to Haven.

"My Queen has sent me as her personal envoy," she said. "I have a formal, recorded message for you from her, as well, but essentially it's simply to inform you that I'm authorized to speak for her as her messenger and her plenipotentiary."

Pritchart never twitched a muscle, but Honor tasted the sudden flare of combined hope and consternation which exploded through the president as she reacted to that last word. Obviously, even now, Pritchart hadn't anticipated that Honor was not simply Elizabeth III's envoy and messenger but her direct, personal representative, empowered to actually negotiate with the Republic of Haven.

Honor has been empowered to make a deal, though there's one or two points there will be no compromise on.

"Her Majesty—and I—fully realize there are enormous areas of disagreement and distrust between the Star Empire and the Republic," Honor continued in that same, measured tone. "I don't propose to get into them tonight. Frankly, I don't see any way we'd be remotely likely to settle of those disputes without long, difficult conversations. Despite that, I believe most of our prewar differences could probably be disposed of by compromises between reasonable people, assuming the issue of our disputed diplomatic correspondence can be resolved.

"As I say, I have no intention or desire to stray into that territory this evening, however. Instead, I want to address something that will very probably pose much more severe difficulties for any serious talks between our two star nations. And that, Madam President, is the number of people who have died since the Republic of Haven resumed hostilities without warning or notification."

She paused, watching Pritchart's expression and tasting the president's emotions. The Havenite hadn't much cared for her last sentence, but that was all right with Honor. Honor Alexander-Harrington had never seen herself as a diplomat, never imagined she might end up chosen for such a mission, yet there was no point trying to dance around this particular issue. And she'd offered Pritchart at least an olive leaf, if not a branch, with the phrase "resumed hostilities."

Two of those points being war guilt and the diplomatic correspondence. Technically, of course, Haven broke the cease-fire but not any treaty or peace agreement, since their grievance in the first place was the High Ridge Government's unwillingness to negotiate in good faith and come to a peace agreement. Manticore will also want reparations, but the precise amounts are open to discussion.

"This struggle between our star nations began eighteen T-years ago—twenty-two T-years, if you count from the People's Republic's attack on the Basilisk Terminus of the Wormhole Junction. And despite the position in which we find ourselves today, even the most rabid Havenite patriot must be aware by now that, despite all of 'Public Information's' propaganda to the contrary, the original conflict between us began as a direct consequence of the People's Republic's aggression, not the Star Empire's.

"But because we saw that aggression coming, our military buildup to resist it began forty T-years before even the attack on Basilisk, so for all intents and purposes, our nations have been at war—or preparing for war—for over sixty T-years. Which means we've been actively fighting one another—or preparing to fight one another—since I was roughly four T-years old. In a very real sense, my Star Empire's been at war, hot or cold, against Havenite aggression, in one form or another, for my entire life, Madame President, and I'm scarcely alone in having that 'life experience' or the attitudes that come with it. After that long, after that much mutual hostility and active bloodletting, either side can easily find any number of justifications for distrusting or hating the other.

A concise history of the Haven Wars, and a major problem. Haven and Manticore have been enemies so long that any sort of trust or peace is going to be difficult. Just look at all the people who reacted to the assassinations as "Well, duh it was Haven. They're Peeps. What did you expect trying to talk with them?" And there's just as many (far more, in absolute terms) Havenites perfectly happy to hate and distrust Manticore on principle.

"The reason I'm telling you this is that you need to understand that while we don't want to fight the League, we're a long way from regarding a war against the Sollies as tantamount to a sentence of death. But we're not prepared to fight the Solarians at the same time someone whose technology is as close to equal to ours as yours is comes at us from behind. So as we see it, we have two options where the Republic is concerned.

"One, and in many ways the less risky of them from our perspective, would be to use that technological superiority I spoke about a few minutes ago to destroy your infrastructure in order to compel your unconditional surrender. In fact, one month ago, I was instructed to do just that, beginning with this very star system."

It was very, very quiet in Eloise Pritchart's office. The emotions of the president's bodyguards were a background of taut anxiety and anger restrained by discipline, yet Honor scarcely noticed that. Her attention—and Nimitz's—were focused unwaveringly upon Pritchart.

"But those instructions were modified, Madam President," she said softly. "Not rescinded, but . . . modified. Her Majesty's been convinced to at least consider the possibility that the Republic of Haven truly isn't the People's Republic any longer. That it was not, in fact, responsible for the assassination of Admiral Webster on Old Earth, or for the attempted assassination of Queen Berry on Torch. To be honest, she remains far from convinced of either of those possibilities, but at least she recognizes them as possibilities. And even if it turns out the Republic was responsible, she's prepared to acknowledge that killing still more millions of your citizens and military personnel, destroying still more trillions of dollars worth of orbital infrastructure, may be a disproportionate response to the Republic's guilt.

"In short, Madam President, the Queen is tired of killing people. So she's authorized me to deliver this message to you: the Star Empire of Manticore is prepared to negotiate a mutually acceptable end to the state of war between it and the Republic of Haven."

So that's the deal, Honor is here to negotiate a lasting peace with Haven, or ensure that Manticore won't have a powerful enemy at their back while they war with the League in a more tangible, nasty way. Which mean no side should be trying to stretch out negotiations for advantage, or playing chicken with Elizabeth's deadlines (though one particularly dim Havenite bottom-feeder tries anyway.)

"Speaking for myself, as an individual, and not for my Star Empire or my Queen, I implore you to accept Her Majesty's proposal. I've killed too many of your people over the last twenty T-years, and your people have killed too many of mine."

She felt Javier Giscard's death between them, just as she felt Alistair McKeon's and Raoul Courvoissier's and Jamie Candless' and so many others, and she finished very, very softly.

"Don't make me kill any more, Madam President. Please."

Well, heartfelt personal appeal done, time for Prichart to talk to her cabinet.

"Dropping in on you literally in the middle of the night was a pretty flamboyant statement in its own right, Madam President," he continued. "The only question in my mind is whether it was all lights and mirrors, or whether Admiral Alexander-Harrington simply wanted to make sure she had your attention."

"Personally, I think it was a case of . . . gratuitous flamboyance, let's say." Rachel Hanriot's tone could have dehumidified an ocean, despite the fact that the Treasury Secretary was one of Pritchart's staunchest allies. "I'm not saying she's not here in a legitimate effort to negotiate, understand. But the entire way she's made her appearance—unannounced, no preliminary diplomacy at all, backed up by her entire fleet, arriving on the literal stroke of midnight in an un-armed civilian yacht and requesting planetary clearance . . . ."

Her voice trailed off, and she shook her head, and Denis LePic snorted in amusement.

"'Gratuitous flamboyance' or not, Rachel," the Attorney General said, "it certainly did get our attention, didn't it? And, frankly, given the way things've gone ever since Arnold got himself killed, I'm in favor of anything that moves us closer to ending the shooting before everything we've managed to accomplish gets blasted back to the stone age. So if Alexander-Harrington wanted to come in here naked, riding on the back of an Old Earth elephant, and twirling flaming batons in each hand, I'd still be delighted to see her!"

"I have to go along with Denis—assuming the offer's sincere and not just window dressing designed to put Manticore into a favorable diplomatic light before they yank the rug out from under us anyway," Sandra Staunton said. The Secretary of Biosciences looked troubled, her eyes worried. She'd been another Giancola supporter, and, like Nesbitt and Barloi, she continued to cherish more than a little suspicion where the Star Empire e was concerned.

Eh, about as well as can be expected. Manticore has made a history of using naval officers for diplomats, but this turn-up-unaanounced-for-a-face-to-face simply isn't done.

Describing the Battle of Manticore as the "worst military defeat" the Republic of Haven or the People's Republic of Haven had ever suffered—in a single engagement, at least—while accurate, was definitely a case of understatement. Nor had Pritchart tried to conceal the scope of the disaster. Some details remained classified, but she'd refused to change her policy of telling the Republic's citizens the truth or abandon the transparency she'd adopted in place of the old Office of Public Information's propaganda, deception, and outright lies. Some of her political allies had argued with her about that—hard—because they'd anticipated a furious reaction born of frustration, fear, and a betrayed sense of desperation. And, to some extent, they'd been right. Indeed, there'd been calls, some of them infuriated, for Pritchart's resignation once the public realized the magnitude of the Navy's losses.

Some of Haven's domestic politics. Prichart remains more popular and trusted than the opposition, but her credibility has taken a serious beating after announcing the losses at Manticore.

"Pardon me for saying this, Madam President," Walter Sanderson, the Secretary of the Interior, said slowly, "but I have the distinct impression you actually like her."

Sanderson sounded as if he felt betrayed by his own suspicion, and Pritchart cocked her head, lips pursed as she considered what he'd said. Then she shrugged.

"I wouldn't go quite that far, Walter. Not yet, anyway. But I'll admit that under other circumstances, I think I would like her. Mind you, I'm not going to let her sell me any air cars without having my own mechanic check them out first, but when you come down to it, one of the first rules of diplomacy is picking effective diplomats. Diplomats who can convince other people to trust them, even like them. It's what they call producing 'good chemistry' at the conference table. I know she's not a diplomat by training, but Manticore has a long tradition of using senior naval officers as ambassadors and negotiators. It's paid off for them surprisingly well over the years, and I'm sure that was part of their thinking in choosing her, but I also think it goes deeper than that."

And why Manticore likes using plain-spoken naval officers for diplomats.

"But she hasn't made any suggestions at all about protocol?" Montreau pressed. It was clear to Pritchart that the Secretary of State was seeking clarification, not objecting, and she shook her head.

"No. She hasn't said a word about protocol, delegation sizes, or anything else. Not yet, anway. Mind you, I don't doubt for a minute that if we came up with a suggestion she didn't like, she wouldn't hesitate to let us know. Somehow, I have the impression she's not exactly timid."

Something like a cross between a snort and a laugh sounded from Thomas Theisman's general direction, and LePic raised one hand to hide a smile.

"I don't think I'd choose just that adjective to describe her, either, Madam President," Montreau said dryly.

You can say that again. But how Haven has to figure out a delegation, a bipartisan one with Prichart's and Giancola's supporters.

"There's got to be someone involved in these negotiations who isn't 'one of us.' I'd prefer for it to be someone who's opposed to us as a matter of principle, assuming we can find anyone like that, but the bottom line is that we've got to include someone from outside the Administration or its supporters, whatever their motives for being there might be. Someone to play the role of watchdog for all those people, especially in Congress, who don't like us, or oppose us, or who simply question our competence after the collapse of the summit talks and what happened at the Battle of Manticore. This can't be the work of a single party, or a single clique—not anything anyone could portray as having been negotiated in a dark little room somewhere—if we expect congressional approval. And, to be honest, I think we have a moral obligation to give our opponents at least some input into negotiating what we hope will be a treaty with enormous implications for every man, woman, and child in the Republic. It's not just our Republic, whatever offices we hold. I don't think we can afford to let ourselves forget that."

Well said, but that's still going to make negotiations a pain and a half, though I think I like Sanderson's take on it best-

Oh, and Congress will have to rubber-stamp any treaty, so having a bipartisan group will short out the cycle where the delegation settles on terms, Congress rejects the terms, the delegation tries to renegotiate the terms, Congress objects again and Honor finally loses her patience and blasts a small moon into rubble to make a point.

"Wonderful." Walter Sanderson shook his head. "I can see this is going to turn into a perfectly delightful exercise in statesmanship. I can hardly think of anything I'd rather do. Except possibly donate one of my testicles to science. Without anesthetic."

Pritchart chuckled. One or two of Sanderson's colleagues found his occasional descents into indelicacy inappropriate in a cabinet secretary. The president, on the other hand, rather treasured them. They had a way of bringing people firmly back to earth.

"Given what you've just said," she told him with a smile, "I think we'll all be just as happy if we keep you personally as far away as possible from the negotiating table, Walter."

Oh, I don't know, we could always see who can be the most direct.

[Simon_Jester]

Which still leaves Eighth Fleet somewhat behind their Buttercup strength in hulls, though with Apollo, Keyhole, and the various new classes Honor's Eighth Fleet is unquestionably far more powerful and dangerous than Hamish's ever was...

Yes. By the Battle of Manticore, Haven had mostly closed the technological gap between their own SD(P)s and the 1914-era Medusa-class ships that made up White Haven's Eighth Fleet.

Apollo is a whole new level of nasty, especially when combined with the... I'm going to call it "Ghost Rider Mark II" electronic warfare and stealth capabilities that represent the RMN's current frontline hardware.

Clearly not everyone is excited by this particular peace overture, though in Spencer's case it's more professional paranoia. He should be grateful that Prichart, like Von Rabenstrange just accepts that Grayson law requiers Honor to have armed bodyguards at all times, no matter how it must give her security people conniptions!

I think the main reason this works is that Verge polities (including the Haven Quadrant ones) are accustomed to the idea that all sorts of leaders are accompanied by armed guards, and that the armed guards of a state representative aren't really a threat to another state representative. It's random crazed assassins that are the problem.

Although von Rabenstrange in War of Honor actually didn't let Honor OR her bodyguards come armed into his presence; they checked their weapons at the door. Including, in Honor's case, the "bang you're dead" finger in her artificial hand.

Meanwhile, Pritchart really doesn't have much of a choice; Haven is the weaker party in what amounts to a surrender negotiation. Besides which, if Honor were planning to decapitate the Havenite government she'd have done it with laser heads.

Besides, Harrington's got a pulser built into her left hand, for God's sake! Is Sheila planning to make her check her prosthesis at the door? Leave it in the umbrella stand?

Apparently that's a thing that people know about now, probably because of that same assassination attempt. I'm sure that makes Prichart's head of security real happy.

Although Pritchart really should think of the same solution Honor herself did in War of Honor: eject the pulser magazine.

So Eighth Fleet popped over the hyper-limit around Midnight, Nouveau Paris time. I'm not really sure if that was deliberate or just when they happened to arrive, it's not like after a trip of over a month Honor couldn't hang out in hyper for a few hours. Then again, why bother?

For maximum "holy shit!" coefficient, why else? The point is to cause the "holy shit!" reaction followed by the "wait, they're here to TALK?" and shock the Havenites out of any impulse to engage in time-wasting.

Manticorans may not expect Pritchart to waste time like that, but she's obviously not the only player in the Havenite government, so this psychological move may be aimed at literally everyone, not just her.

Apparently Haven has a really impressive dossier on Honor by now, and Prichart doesn't mind showing off. Her genie status is apparently part of her medical record, but something that a number of her closest friends didn't know for years and years, but is apparently known to Haven.

Given that the Navy and then StateSec had her in captivity for months, they'd be grossly remiss to NOT have her DNA on file. Granted any medical records from Tepes would have died with the ship. But even as a POW in Navy custody she was surely required to take a medical exam, and it's unthinkable that with Honorverse medical technology they wouldn't do DNA testing as a routine part of medical examinations.

[Ahriman238]

Clearly not everyone is excited by this particular peace overture, though in Spencer's case it's more professional paranoia. He should be grateful that Prichart, like Von Rabenstrange just accepts that Grayson law requiers Honor to have armed bodyguards at all times, no matter how it must give her security people conniptions!

I think the main reason this works is that Verge polities (including the Haven Quadrant ones) are accustomed to the idea that all sorts of leaders are accompanied by armed guards, and that the armed guards of a state representative aren't really a threat to another state representative. It's random crazed assassins that are the problem.

Although von Rabenstrange in War of Honor actually didn't let Honor OR her bodyguards come armed into his presence; they checked their weapons at the door. Including, in Honor's case, the "bang you're dead" finger in her artificial hand.

Meanwhile, Pritchart really doesn't have much of a choice; Haven is the weaker party in what amounts to a surrender negotiation. Besides which, if Honor were planning to decapitate the Havenite government she'd have done it with laser heads.

Well, not with the Eridani Edict or the horrifying potential for collateral damage and civilian casualties, but I take your point. And Honor took a moment to conspicuously disarm herself, since the Andies never even suspected her hand-pulser.

So Eighth Fleet popped over the hyper-limit around Midnight, Nouveau Paris time. I'm not really sure if that was deliberate or just when they happened to arrive, it's not like after a trip of over a month Honor couldn't hang out in hyper for a few hours. Then again, why bother?

For maximum "holy shit!" coefficient, why else? The point is to cause the "holy shit!" reaction followed by the "wait, they're here to TALK?" and shock the Havenites out of any impulse to engage in time-wasting.

Manticorans may not expect Pritchart to waste time like that, but she's obviously not the only player in the Havenite government, so this psychological move may be aimed at literally everyone, not just her.

I'm just not convinced there's anything like a particularly good or bad hour of the day to bring a fleet to a capital system.

Apparently Haven has a really impressive dossier on Honor by now, and Prichart doesn't mind showing off. Her genie status is apparently part of her medical record, but something that a number of her closest friends didn't know for years and years, but is apparently known to Haven.

Given that the Navy and then StateSec had her in captivity for months, they'd be grossly remiss to NOT have her DNA on file. Granted any medical records from Tepes would have died with the ship. But even as a POW in Navy custody she was surely required to take a medical exam, and it's unthinkable that with Honorverse medical technology they wouldn't do DNA testing as a routine part of medical examinations.

Which does bring up another good reason to have gone with Honor Harrington" the Nest Generation. We hear several times that there's still considerable prejudice against the genetically engineered, that the 'genie' label continues to haunt slaves even in sympathetic states like Manticore and Haven, where the slave is acknowledged as a victim. But we never really see it. Honor not only has considerable passing privileges, unlike say Web who is obviously a genie or even Paulo d'Arezzo who is built to the same standards of beauty as those who go for expensive future-plastic surgery but can still betray his origins with a glance at his tongue BUT her position as Manticore's most legendary living naval hero and one of it's five or six most important political figures, a woman of vast wealth and power effectively insulates her from ever experiencing or even witnessing real prejudice. Even if her status became completely public knowledge (and it may already have, just from their account of Hades) who the hell would be stupid enough to make an issue of it to her face? Or express vaguely anti-genie sentiments in her presence? Even if someone were, Honor has more than enough self-assurance (and being genetically engineered is really such a tiny part of her identity) to shrug off any bigot or crazy and return to her life of wealth and very real power.

Now her son would be starting from a lower decks perspective. He might be considered by some to be marginal officer material for his genie status even with a hero mom to live up to. If he ever failed, that would be his genie showing. He could hear his mom called a sell-out and a 'good genie' for succeeding so, or even be in a position to see how Honor's example may have changed things in Manticore, made people revisit old assumptions. It would, at the very least, be a tremendously more entertaining book than the boardroom meetings #544-602.

[Simon_Jester]

Well, not with the Eridani Edict or the horrifying potential for collateral damage and civilian casualties, but I take your point. And Honor took a moment to conspicuously disarm herself, since the Andies never even suspected her hand-pulser.

Strictly true about the laser heads; what I meant is that she has plenty of armed force with which to reduce the Havenite defenses to scrap and demand their surrender, and if she really wanted to have Pritchart killed she could no doubt arrange it in ways far less likely to get her killed by Pritchart's bodyguards.

I'm just not convinced there's anything like a particularly good or bad hour of the day to bring a fleet to a capital system.

It might not be much of an effect, but you take what you can get in terms of psychological warfare.

Which does bring up another good reason to have gone with Honor Harrington" the Nest Generation. We hear several times that there's still considerable prejudice against the genetically engineered, that the 'genie' label continues to haunt slaves even in sympathetic states like Manticore and Haven, where the slave is acknowledged as a victim. But we never really see it.

Agreed.

Honor not only has considerable passing privileges, unlike say Web who is obviously a genie or even Paulo d'Arezzo who is built to the same standards of beauty as those who go for expensive future-plastic surgery but can still betray his origins with a glance at his tongue BUT her position as Manticore's most legendary living naval hero and one of it's five or six most important political figures, a woman of vast wealth and power effectively insulates her from ever experiencing or even witnessing real prejudice.

Hm. Interesting. Hadn't thought about it like that.

Now her son would be starting from a lower decks perspective. He might be considered by some to be marginal officer material for his genie status even with a hero mom to live up to. If he ever failed, that would be his genie showing. He could hear his mom called a sell-out and a 'good genie' for succeeding so, or even be in a position to see how Honor's example may have changed things in Manticore, made people revisit old assumptions. It would, at the very least, be a tremendously more entertaining book than the boardroom meetings #544-602.

Well, I think that the attitude that creates this prejudice is more of distrust and "beware the superman" fear, not "genetic modification makes you incompetent." However, I get your point and it might be interesting.

[Ahriman238]

"What's the current status of Bogey Two, Utako?"

"No change in course or heading, Sir," Lieutenant Commander Utako Shreiber, operations officer of Task Group 2.2, Mesan Alignment Navy, replied. She looked over her shoulder at Commodore Roderick Sung, the task group's CO, who'd just stepped back onto MANS Apparition's tiny flag bridge, and raised one eyebrow very slightly.

Mesans scouting Yeltsin (Grayson) for Oyster Bay in one of their Ghost-class spider-drive scout ships.

Oyster Bay's operational planners had taken advantage of the tendency for local shipping to restrict itself largely to the plane of a star system's ecliptic. Virtually all the real estate in which human beings were interested lay along the ecliptic, after all. Local traffic was seldom concerned with anything much above or below it, and ships arriving out of hyper almost invariably arrived in the same plane, since that generally offered the shortest normal-space flightpath to whatever destination had brought them to the system, as well, not to mention imposing a small but significantly lower amount of wear and tear on their alpha nodes. So even though defensive planners routinely placed surveillance platforms to cover the polar regions, there wasn't usually very much shipping in those areas.

Again, translating at the system ecliptic is a bit easier on the hardware, aside from generally providing a least-time course to wherever you want to go. Which is why polar translations are generally assumed to be military (even moreso than other unidentified translations, anyway.)

In this instance, however, for reasons best known to itself—and, of course, Murphy—the GSN had elected to send an entire squadron of what looked like their version of the Manties' Saganami-C-class heavy cruisers out to play half way to the hyper limit and due north of Yeltsin's Star.

It wouldn't have pissed Sung off so much if they hadn't decided to do it at this particular moment. Well, and in this particular spot. The other five ships of his task group were headed to meet Apparition for their last scheduled rendezvous, and unless Bogey Two changed vector, it was going to pass within less than five light-minutes of the rendezvous point.

Considering how often sneaky going-ons are foiled or nearly foiled by light ships on exercises in the outer system (especially considering what a huge volume a system is) the GSN and RMN must run a lot of exercises, which is totally in character for them. I wonder if that might not be a thing, such exercises doubling as system patrols, at least in the minds of those officers ranked highly enough to be planning such things.

Oh, and half a dozen MAN scout ships in Yeltsin.

He'd studied every available scrap about the Manties' operations against Haven, and he'd been impressed by their reconnaissance platforms' apparent ability to operate virtually at will without being intercepted by the Havenites. Unfortunately, if Sung's presence was ever noted at all, whether anyone managed to actually intercept him or not, Oyster Bay was probably blown, which meant the Manties' task had been rather easier than his own. He never doubted that he could have evaded the local sensor net well enough to prevent it from pinning down the actual locations of any of his units even if it managed to detect their simple presence. Unfortunately, the object was for the Graysons to never even know he was here in the first place. The Manties' scout forces, by and large, hadn't been particularly concerned about the possibility that the Havenites might realize they were being scouted, since there was nothing they could have done to prevent it and it wasn't exactly as if they didn't already know someone was at war with them. But if the Graysons figured out that someone—anyone—was roaming about their star system before the very last moment, they could probably substantially blunt Oyster Bay's success. They'd still get hurt, probably badly, but Oyster Bay was supposed to be decisive, not just painful.

For that matter, at least once Manticore bluffed Haven by very ostensibly scouting multiple systems. Requiring that no one so much as suspect the scouts exist obviously makes things much harder.

Bearing all of that in mind, the operational planners had ruled out any extensive com transmissions between the widely dispersed units of Sung's task group. Even the most tightly focused transmissions were much more likely to be detected than the scout ships themselves, which was why the ops plan included periodic rendezvous points for the scouts to exchange information at very short range using low powered whisker lasers. Once all their sensor data had been collected, organized, and analyzed, Apparition would know what to tell the guidance platforms. But without those rendezvous, Sung's flagship wouldn't have the data in the first place, and that would be unacceptable.

Why RV at all, to share targeting data to eventually, at the last possible moment, feed the pods for Oyster Bay. Without transmitting even by whisker laser at more than light-second ranges lest a stealthed Grayson ship blunder into the lasers path, like happened to Haven with their Argus array.

Unlike some of the more fiery of the Alignment's zealots, Roderick Sung felt no personal animosity towards any of the normals who were about to discover they were outmoded. However naïve and foolish he might find their faith in the random combination of genes, and however committed he might be to overcoming the obstacles that foolishness created, he didn't blame any of them personally for it. Well, aside from those sanctimonious prigs on Beowulf, of course.

Some Mesans hate all us plebian normals, some don't. There's variety even within the Alignments 'reign of the supermen' agenda.

"Bogey Two's going to pass within two light-minutes of our base course at closest approach," Tsau pointed out, still in that quiet voice.

*"Why are we whispering?"*

*"Dunno. Not like sound travels through space."*

[normal voice] Okay then, first real field test of Mesan stealth technology.

At the moment, Apparition was moving on a purely ballistic course, with every active sensor shut down. And, as Sung had just pointed out, that, coupled with all the manifold stealth features built into the scout ship, ought to make her more than simply invisible. The only real problem with that analysis hung on the single word "ought," since if that assumption turned out to be inaccurate, Apparition would stand precisely zero probability of surviving.

The Ghost-class ships had no offensive armament at all. They were designed to do precisely what Apparition was doing at this moment, and there was no point pretending they'd be able to fight their way out of trouble if the other side managed to find them in the first place. So they'd been equipped with every stealth system the fertile imaginations of Anastasia Chernevsky and the rest of the MAN's R&D establishment had been able to devise, packed into the smallest possible platform, and if that meant sacrificing armament, so be it. Even their anti-missile defenses represented little more than a token gesture, and everyone aboard Apparition was thoroughly aware of that fact.

The spider drive should be invisible to ships from navies that have never encountered it, or at the very most look like a faint and uninteresting gravitic anomaly, but taking no chances they're spending as much time as they can in ballistic. Ghosts are totally unarmed, and with only token missile defenses, basically whatever wouldn't take up much mass.

A huge chunk of Apparition's available tonnage had been eaten up by the Spider's triple "keels," and another sizable chunk had been dedicated to her enormously capable sensor suite. Habitability had also loomed as a major factor in her designers' minds, since the Ghosts were going to be deployed on long-endurance missions, but the architects had accepted some significant compromises even in that regard in favor of knitting the most effective possible cloak of invisibility.

Priorities in Ghost-class design. Stealthy drives, followed by sensors, stealth and long-term habitability as a distant fourth.

Unlike the starships of most navies, the MAN's scouts hadn't settled for simple smart paint. Other ships could control and reconfigure their "paint" at will, transforming their hulls—or portions of those hulls—into whatever they needed at any given moment, from nearly perfectly reflective surfaces to black bodies. The Ghosts' capabilities, however, went much further than that. Instead of the relatively simpleminded nanotech of most ships' "paint," the surface of Apparition's hull was capable of mimicking effectively any portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. Her passive sensors detected any incoming radiation, from infrared through cosmic rays, and her computers mapped the data onto her hull, where her extraordinarily capable nannies reproduced it. In effect, anyone looking at Apparition when her stealth was fully engaged would "see" whatever the sensors exactly opposite his viewpoint "saw," as if the entire ship were a single sheet of crystoplast.

They're using the actual "cloak of invisibility" technology to project whatever images and energy readings are on the other side and would normally be blocked by the ship. meaning they can't be found by looking even for the spot where the stars go momentarily dark.

It wasn't perfect, of course. The system's greatest weakness was that it couldn't give complete coverage. Like any stealth system, it still had to deal with things like waste heat, for example. Current technology could recapture and use an enormous percentage of that heat, but not all of it, and what they couldn't capture still had to go somewhere. And, like other navies' stealth systems, the MAN's dealt with that by radiating that heat away from known enemy sensors. Modern stealth fields could do a lot to minimize even heat signatures, but nothing could completely eliminate them, and stealth fields themselves were detectable at extremely short ranges, so any ship remained vulnerable to detection by a sufficiently sensitive sensor on exactly the right (or wrong) bearing.

Actually thinking about waste heat and stealth, one more thing the Honorverse does differently. I wonder to what use they put the bulk of their heat. Convert it to electricity, perhaps?

In this instance, though, they knew right where the Graysons were. That meant they could adjust for maximum stealthiness against that particular threat bearing, and as part of his training, Sung had personally tried to detect a Ghost with the MAN's very best passive sensors. Even knowing exactly where the ship was, it had been all but impossible to pick her out of the background radiation of space, so he wasn't unduly concerned that Bogey Two would detect Apparition with shipboard systems as long as she remained completely covert. He was less confident that the spider drive would pass unnoticed at such an absurdly short range, however. Chernevsky's people assured him it was exceedingly unlikely—that it had taken them the better part of two T-years to develop their own detectors, even knowing what they were looking for, and that those detectors were still far from anything anyone would ever call reliable—but Sung had no desire to be the one who proved their optimism had been misplaced. Even the Spider had a footprint, after all, even if it wasn't something anyone else would have associated with a drive system. All it would take was for someone to notice an anomalous reading and be conscientious enough—or, for that matter, bored enough—to spend a little time trying to figure out what it was.

And the fact that the Spider's signature flares as it comes up only makes that more likely, he reflected. The odds against anyone spotting it would still be enormous, but even so, they'd be a hell of a lot worse than the chance of anyone aboard Bogey Two noticing us if we just keep quietly coasting along.

Naturally the first thing the Mesans did after coming up with their revolutionary stealth craft was work on detecting said craft, and they still can't do so consistently. As I said, there is a faint reading given by the spider drive, even if it conforms to no commonly known form of drive or communication and is detectable only at short ranges, like the two light-minutes distance they'll be passing a Grayson heavy cruiser at. Even at this range, it's pretty unlikely that they'd spot it, even with the advantage of initial drive flare.

At the same time, he knew exactly why Tsau had asked his question. However difficult a sensor target they might be for Bogey Two's shipboard systems, the rules would change abruptly if the Grayson cruiser decided to deploy her own recon platforms. If she were to do that, and if the platforms got a good, close-range look at the aspect Apparition was keeping turned away from their mothership, the chance of detection went from abysmally low to terrifyingly high in very short order. Which meant what Sung was really doing was betting that the odds of the Grayson's choosing to deploy recon platforms were lower than the odds of her shipboard systems detecting the Spider's activation flare if he maneuvered to avoid her.

The disadvantage to venting heat on the side facing away from another ship is that they might have a remote sensor platform on that side, in which case their inability to see that same heat bloom with their own shipboard sensors makes it all the more suspicious. I wonder if they couldn't build an internal heat sink for short period, close contacts like this. Well, it's probably not a likely enough scenario to plan and design, and set aside the mass for. It's a close call, but Rod Sung chooses to continue on ballistic and hope for the best rather than give a very competent or very bored sensor operator the riddle of a gravitic anomaly to solve.

Was probably the correct call, since by all indications, Grayson had zero suspicion.

[Simon_Jester]

"Bogey Two's going to pass within two light-minutes of our base course at closest approach," Tsau pointed out, still in that quiet voice.

*"Why are we whispering?"*

*"Dunno. Not like sound travels through space."*

[normal voice] Okay then, first real field test of Mesan stealth technology.

Honestly, I think it's a human reaction to the intellectual knowledge that you're trying to hide from someone. Your instinctive ancestral-environment sneaking behaviors may be totally pointless, maybe you might as well be ringing huge gongs and clashing cymbals for the heck of it in the middle of your stealth run. But it feels like you should be quiet, so you do. Very human thing to do.

Actually thinking about waste heat and stealth, one more thing the Honorverse does differently. I wonder to what use they put the bulk of their heat. Convert it to electricity, perhaps?

Presumably, somehow. Probably runs on technobabble or outright bullshittium.

[Ahriman238]

Well, I think that the attitude that creates this prejudice is more of distrust and "beware the superman" fear, not "genetic modification makes you incompetent." However, I get your point and it might be interesting.

Appeals to fear, or a desire to feel superior to someone, can be subtle and still be very effective.

Hell, the simplest, most natural way to consider a genetic superman less effective as a military officer is to suggest that they can't properly bond with, or undervalue their men. What does a superman know of illness, or a thousand daily minor problems? What does he know of the anguish of a poor self-image? Why should he care for the lives of those clearly less capable, less worthy than he?

Remember TNG's "Redemption part 1" (I think) where Data gets to briefly command a starship of his own? His own XO constantly pushed and second-guessed him, to the point of countermanding his orders in battle and feeling he had to remind Data that the human crew aren't machines. Imagine that, but constantly from all sources, above and below in rank.

Or the simple double standard of always being identified with a "superior" group. If he succeeds, he's skating by on his tricked-out genome. When he fails, that's proof that even the smartest lab-jockeys can't come up with a better human than nature can, or at the extremes, the uppity genie getting his. It can be as subtle as him always drawing the hardest jobs or simulations because "he can take it." either as a genie or as Honor's son, being held to an artificially high standard. Or people being determined, for his own good, to keep him from becoming arrogant, again either because of his genetics or his mom.


Weber still can, and I think should, explore some of this with a new character, or even Paulo d'Arezzo as his vehicle. Though even that's different because Paulo is part of a generally accepting naval environment, and has proven himself in battle. He was also genetically engineered as a sex object, so that has little or no bearing on his ambition to be a naval officer. Possibly there might be people who'd argue he should never try and be more than a sex object, but I doubt it. That would feel to close to Mesa's genetic ideology.

[Simon_Jester]

Yeah, you're right. Definitely a missed opportunity at this point, though; the series has grown to the point where introducing the necessary characters would be prohibitively difficult.