Bit of Analysis: Honor Harrington III

[Ahriman238]

Yeah. I'm not saying I approve of him committing suicide, but it proves that he had a sense of shame- that he felt responsible for the strength and success of the fleet, and that realizing he had failed this responsibility hit him in a big way.

Contrast to how High Ridge himself acted.

Killing himself does not restore his honor, erase his screw-ups or redeem him in any way, shape or form. There's a bullshit line of thought I've never been able to wrap my mind around. But it does reveal a bit of his character, that he really cares for the people who died and the Kingdom poised to fall for his idiocy and petty politics.

Mostly though, it takes what would be a vindicating triumph as he withdrew in disgrace and his hated rival did his job far better than he, and makes it a tragedy. Janacek was an idiot sure, also petty, arrogant, hateful and far too married to a system of patronage and nepotism. But he wasn't the sort of monster whose death I could celebrate.

The more I think about it the more I wonder if upgrading traditional SDs to fire MDMs even makes sense. You have to rip out the old launchers (and possibly a good portion of their energy weaponry), the feed queues, the magazines, and replace them with MDM-compatible ones, you'd have to upgrade the control links, not to mention rearrange the rest of the ship around the new and improved armament. I'm somewhat dubious this is doable faster or more cheaply than just laying down an SD(P).

Maybe, maybe not. We do know Manticoran ships are built with extra room for upgrades. I had a thought though, an MDM-converted SD could really be something like a poor man's podnought. Assuming thirty launchers to a side and off-bore capability it could throw around salvos of missiles, well not really as fast as a podnought rolling patterns of pods; 20 seconds for the broadsides, 12 to kick pods out the backdoor. And obviously it couldn't stack massive pod salvos the way an SD(P) can. So I guess we're back to "It can shoot back and contribute, even meaningfully, to a fleet MDM engagement while presumably being cheaper than building from scratch."

[Simon_Jester]

Being able to design a broadside ship to fire off-bore really does make up most of the gap in volume of fire between broadside and podlayer designs...

The more I think about it the more I wonder if upgrading traditional SDs to fire MDMs even makes sense. You have to rip out the old launchers (and possibly a good portion of their energy weaponry), the feed queues, the magazines, and replace them with MDM-compatible ones, you'd have to upgrade the control links, not to mention rearrange the rest of the ship around the new and improved armament. I'm somewhat dubious this is doable faster or more cheaply than just laying down an SD(P).

This is almost certainly true; it only makes sense in the context of having a lot of pre-existing pre-podlayer hulls, and an admiralty that is more willing to refit than to build new ships.

Also, a strategic environment in which fighting enemy pre-podlayers is a realistic threat... which is where the RMN thought they were prior to about 1918 PD. If you don't upgrade your own pre-podlayers to fire MDMs, then you are far more likely to lose them in combat if they should run into enemy pre-podlayers.

I'm a bit surprised they let a flag officer serve as a chief of staff in any case. Isn't that properly a commander's slot?

To a full admiral? I dunno, but it's at least sort of logical for a chief of staff to outrank the individual captains for an admiral operating on that level.

Honor's reputation among the other Alliance members. How much of that is based on her history and how much her being the hero of the hour I don't know. I'm actually curious how the Andies are feeling about her, now that they're all nominally on the same side.

Her actions in Silesia (on at least three tours of duty) have probably earned their very sincere respect, but at the same time, yeah, she's not their idol.

The Queen gives Honor a white beret, which only a starship captain gets to wear (and it does seem odd to me that flag officers would elect to go back to basic black).

I can sort of get the idea, especially in a navy whose traditions come heavily out of independent commerce protection cruises.

You know, Honor's doing really well for an upper-middle class background. At some point, how about a story where she loses much of her accumulated goodies?

I think the main reason for not doing this is that she's been semi-retired into an 'admiral emeritus;' she spends her time sitting around attending meetings. Other people do the interesting stuff.

This is probably also part of why Weber originally planned to kill her off; she really has reached the logical endpoint of her own character development.

The Andies actually only got as far as dual-drive missiles, didn't manage like Manticore to fit a fusion plant onto a missile (thus giving tons of raw power for EW tricks, and I'll bet endurance) and have the least number of missiles-per-pod (unspecified) of anyone in the MDM pod-layers game. Awkward.

Also an indicator of what, say, the Solarian League might be able to do without really stretching themselves, without having to develop any fundamentally new technologies other than the "this is how to shoehorn more than one drive node array into a missile."

Keyhole is a remote platform that provides fire-control telemetry. The major thing being it can follow a few thousand klicks behind and "above" or "below" its mothership thus circumventing a major issue. Namely, every time a ship fires a broadside or counter missiles, it blinds itself for a minute or so, unable to see past the missile wedges until they get some distance. This means they lose lock on whatever they were tracking, target or inbound missiles and have to reacquire before they can start feeding directions to the missiles. With a Keyhole platform, all tracks become continuous, giving them that much longer to crunch numbers. It's such a perfect example of Ghost Rider's original concept, delegating complex functions to remote platforms that I'd be shocked if it weren't part of the original Ghost Rider's fruits. Yet no mention until now.

The great size and complexity of the Keyhole platforms may have made it impractical to deploy them until some time in the interwar era, whereas other, cruder drone types (that could fly off hulls not specifically designed to accomodate them) could start service immediately.

Manticore has one BC(L) and 6 BC(P)s with another 6 in the pipeline. Both are ready for rapid production as needed. Toscarelli earns himself major points, but goes a step beyond with the 3rd gen podnought, the Medusa-B. Like the Saganami variants, it has only a passing resemblance to a Medusa/Harrington. By drastically reducing beam weapons and using automation for the smallest ever capital ship crew (just over a thousand) Toscarelli designed an SD(P) to carry 2,000 pods and still keep internal launchers for MDMs with magazines fit for two hours of intense combat. By all means, devote at least a little shipbuilding capacity to that. It'll be worth the extra 6-10 months.

Well... sort of?

[Ahriman238]

Now he gazed at the pair of CLACs—RHNS Skylark, the flagship, and her sister Peregrine—his own squadron was escorting, then checked the time display ticking down in the corner of the plot. The combined force would translate out of hyper in another twenty-seven minutes, right on the hyper limit of the Zanzibar System's G4 primary.

Haven can't lose, they've got the Skylark of Space. Think I can see a naming theme in Haven carriers. Also, hello again Oliver Diamoto.

Zanzibar is another question mark. We know they're a caliphate, speak Arabic and has Arabic names, and are named after a region of east Africa (which was a major source of slaves during the... Almoravid? dynasty) and that's pretty much it. Beyond their having a terrorist group, the Zanzibar Liberation Front, the Legislaturist Peeps were funding and sheltering and had recognized before the war and a baby shipyard that was wrecked during Icarus.

Prince Stephen and the other four units of the understrength Thirty-First Battle Squadron weren't precisely cutting-edge. Although the oldest of Padgorny's ships was less than eight T-years old, none of them were pod-layers. All five were surrounded by shoals of missile pods, waiting to tractor themselves to their hulls upon command, but they weren't really optimized for pod-based combat. They simply lacked the sophistication of the fire control built into ships of the wall which had been intended from the outset for the new operational environment. Prince Stephen could "tow" as many as five or six hundred of the new pods, whose internal tractors glued them limpet-like to a ship's hull, but loading up with that many would seriously compromise her combat ability by blocking sensor and firing arcs. Worse, the maximum number of missiles she could actually simultaneously control effectively at range was no more than a hundred. One of the Invictus-class SD(P)s could control two or three times that many birds, even without the new Keyhole platforms, and she had to assume Peep pod-layers would also have several times the missile telemetry channels her ships had.

An SD can carry 500-600 flatback pods, if they don't mind covering every antenna, radar array and weapon. But pre-pod designs can only control 100 or so missiles at a time, not sure I buy that, even the old Fearless would put out three or four salvos before the first one landed, so only 2-3x their broadside in control links doesn't make a lot of sense to me. An Invictus can apparently do two or three times better, I'll look back but I think a lot of previous missile spam doesn't make sense in that light. For that matter, I feel pretty confident Wayfarer managed at least one 300 bird salvo.

Keyhole is 'new' here, and naturally one benefit to Keyhole is it can provide extra fire-control links.

Oh, and the RMN has contributed five pre-pod SDs to defend Zanzibar.

"LAC separation!" a voice announced. "We have LAC separation on Bogeys Alpha and Bravo! Estimate five hundred-plus inbound at six-eight-zero gravities!"

Haven LACs now pulling 680 Gs of accel/decal.

"Should I inform System Defense that we're executing Hildebrandt?"

"Yes, of course you should." Padgorny grimaced. "I should have thought of it myself. In fact, before you pass the orders, contact System Defense. Inform them that I intend to put Hildebrandt into operation unless otherwise instructed."

"Yes, Ma'am."

Padgorny gave the expressionless operations officer a quick smile. The diplomatic management of allies had never been one of her own strong suits, and managing those allies had become both more important and much more difficult in the wake of the High Ridge Government's disastrous foreign policy. Stepping on the Zanzibaran System Navy's sensibilities by ignoring it in its own star system would have been less than brilliant. Especially after the system's industry and economy had been so brutally shattered by the Peeps "Operation Icarus" barely eight T-years ago. And extra especially, in the wake of the High Ridge Government's incredibly incompetent foreign policy, when the Treaty of Alliance specifically assigned command authority to the ZSN. Existing doctrine and previous discussions with the Zanzibarans made it obvious which system defense plan was called for, but that wasn't really the point . . . diplomatically speaking.

Including the Zanzibar space navy since it's, you know, sort of their system and all.

Zanzibar was a G4, with a hyper limit of just over twenty light-minutes. The planet of the same name orbited its primary at just under eight light-minutes, which put it 12.3 light-minutes inside the limit, and most of the system's manufacturing and commercial infrastructure (rebuilt with the very latest technology and the aid of massive Manticoran loans and subsidies after Icarus) orbited the planet. The intruders were already inside both of the system's asteroid belts, and even if they hadn't been, Zanzibar's extraction industry was less centralized than most. There were very few belter nodes for them to hit, which meant any truly worthwhile targets had to be deep in-system.

Zanzibaran hyper-limit, 12.3 light-minutes from the planet at closest approach (which Diamoto is making) and 20 from the sun. Little asteroid mining, but their infrastructure has been rebuilt since Icarus with Manticore picking up a good portion of the tab.

Al-Bakr wore the ZSN's visored cap, maroon tunic, and black trousers, with the doubled crescent moons of his rank glittering on his collar points. Like most Zanzibarans, he was dark-haired and eyed. He was also of medium height, with a lean, hawkish face and a neatly trimmed beard and mustache streaked with white around his lips.

Zanzibaran Space Navy uniform.

"I understand you're opposed to the activation of Hildebrandt, Admiral?" Padgorny said as pleasantly as possible.

"I am," al-Bakr replied levelly. "I believe it's possible this attack represents a feint, intended to draw your units out of position and clear the way for a direct attack on the planet and its orbital installations."

"Sir," Padgorny said, after a brief pause, "we've detected no indications of any force waiting to exploit any diversion the LACs might manage to create. I feel confident your surveillance arrays would have detected any such force upon its arrival."

"They may have taken a page from Admiral Harrington's Sidemore tactics," al-Bakr countered. "They could very well have an entire task force waiting in hyper. If you activate Hildebrandt and move away from the planet, they could send a messenger into hyper to bring those reinforcements in at any point around the hyper-limit sphere of their choice."

The ZSN rejects the plan to chase them out using minimal force and not showing most of their defenses (stealthy LAC bases and pods lurking in the outer-system dark).

"I'm afraid I can't do that," al-Bakr said flatly. "I realize you continue to have a great deal of faith in the superiority of our—and, particularly, your Star Kingdom's—technology over that of Haven. However, I—and my Caliph—are no longer in a position to place complete trust in that superiority, especially in light of the price the Caliphate has already paid. I believe it's probable Haven already knows from its own recon drones or other intelligence sources that we've been deploying LAC tenders and pods in the outer system. Which is one reason I believe this is a feint."

Padgorny tried hard not to goggle at him. If the Caliph and his military advisers thought anything of the sort, why the hell hadn't they said so sooner than this? From the hardening of his expression, she realized she hadn't fully succeeded in controlling her own.

"At any rate, Admiral Padgorny," his voice was flatter than before, "I am not prepared to further debate my decision as the commander of this star system's defenses. You will not execute Hildebrandt and uncover the inner-system. And you will use the outer-system defenses to deal with this attack. Is that understood?"

So we're going all in. Yay. Padgorny puts her dissent on the official record before sending the orders.

"There ought to be," Diamato said. "Look at it. The LACs are going to run right over those extraction ships. And it's going to take some sort of miracle for that merchantman to slip away. They've got to know we're here—for that matter, the fact that the extraction ships are scattering the way they are proves they know. So, where's the response? There ought to at least be a flock of Manty LACs coming out to meet us by now!"

"You think they're up to something sneaky, Sir?"

"I think there's a pretty good chance of it, yes," Diamato replied. "Manties can screw up just like anyone else, but counting on them to do that isn't exactly the smartest thing you can do."

Diamoto's neither a dummy nor complacent.

"Broughton is targeting their CLACs with the delta platforms, Ma'am," Thackeray reported, and Padgorny nodded in acknowledgment. She hadn't specifically dictated targets, but she'd known Broughton would have to use at least some of the pods. His own LACs were much too far astern of the Peeps to overhaul them, after all. And he was right to go after the CLACs, as well. If they had to do this, then they might as well do it as effectively as possible. If he could pick off the CLACs, or even just hammer them badly enough to force them to withdraw into hyper, all the LACs the Peeps had committed to their probe would be doomed, whatever else happened. And killing a couple of the Peeps' superdreadnought-sized LAC carriers would be worthwhile in its own right.

"He's using the gamma platforms on the LACs," Hartnett observed. The chief of staff snorted. "I know it's the only way he can engage them short of the freighters, but his target solutions on them are going to be lousy at this range!"

The outer defenses scramble LACs and launch missiles at both the Haven LACs and their carriers.

"Range is approximately five-one million klicks," Lieutenant Rothschild, his tactical officer reported in a hard-edged voice. "At constant acceleration on our part, actual flight distance will be five-seven-point-five million klicks. Flight time approximately eight-point-four minutes."

"Acknowledged," Schneider replied.

"We have LACs lighting off as well," Rothschild continued. "Estimate approximately fourteen hundred MDMs targeted on us. Looks like somewhere between four and five hundred of their LACs accelerating to come in behind them."

1400 missiles inbound with eight minutes to do nothing but watch them come in, isn't 'modern' combat fun? 4-500 LACs too.

The LAC formation altered abruptly, each tiny vessel accelerating on its own, carefully preplanned vector change. Zizka was new—a variant of the "Triple Ripple" the Fleet had employed so successfully against the Manties' LACs. It was wasteful, in some ways, but with that many Manty MDMs coming towards them, they needed the best defense they could get.

Zizka, the Triple Ripple as missile defense. Same idea, burn out the seekers with hard rads.

Sherman quivered as a second wave of counter-missiles erupted from her tubes. The Republican Navy had refitted its battlecruisers heavily, doubling their original number of counter-missile tubes at the expense of a sizable percentage of their energy armament. More energy weapons tonnage and volume had gone into additional telemetry links, and Sherman and her consorts were tossing canisters of counter-missiles out of their standard missile tubes, as well.

The RHN approach to keeping battlecruisers current. Double the counter-missile tubes by taking out beam weapons, and add fire-control links. Also, note that CM canisters are being used here to give the counter missiles more range as well as increased numbers. Of course, the BCs have nothing but missile-defense to contribute when the MDMs start flying.

The heavily stealthed reconnaissance platforms which had been observing the Peeps since their arrival were close enough to see the individual counter-missiles being launched, and Broughton had never seen so many CMs from so few launch platforms.

"They've got to be cutting their own control links to the first wave," Lieutenant Commander Witcinski said quietly. Broughton looked at him, and the LAC tender Marigold's captain grimaced. "They can't have clear transmission paths to them, Sir. Not with that many impeller wedges between them and the birds."

"They could be relaying through deployed platforms," Broughton countered, in the interest of considering all alternatives, not because he really disagreed with Witcinski.

"Then their platforms would have to be a lot more capable than anything they're supposed to be able to build, Sir," Witcinski returned, and Broughton nodded.

"Can't argue there, Sigismund," he conceded. "On the other hand, this looks like a straight evolution of the same basic missile defense doctrine they apparently employed at Sidemore. They're throwing everything they can at the birds, and it looks to me like they must have refitted heavily with additional counter-missile tubes and control links. It's the only way that few ships could produce that volume of defensive fire."

"I suppose it makes sense, especially if they can't deploy their version of the MDM aboard something as small as a battlecruiser," Witcinski said.

"And it's going to play hell with our calculations of the necessary salvo density for effective system defense," Broughton agreed.

The Manty defender's opinions of this missile defense trick. I'm starting to think the problem with Aegis was mostly being too little too late. And Simon was right, Shannon Foraker can do a lot with the concept.

The first wave intercept killed only twenty of the incoming MDMs. The second wave of counter-missiles did better—over a hundred and fifty of the Manticoran missiles disappeared—but that left over twelve hundred, and he wasn't going to have time for more than another two or three CM launches. Only, if he took those launches, there wouldn't be time for Zizka, and in the face of that massive missile storm . . .

They get a lot more launches off, presumably because the LACs are running directly away from the missiles. Though Manty EW does a to get missiles through. And now we get to see Zizka unleashed...

The lead wave of his missiles was almost into position when the MDMs abruptly changed heading. Schneider's jaw muscles clenched painfully as the attack missiles' vectors changed. Half of them were "climbing" sharply, while the other half "dove" equally sharply, and he swallowed a venomous oath as he realized what they were doing.

So one of their pickets who saw the Ripple did get home, he thought. And the bastards decided to do something about it. Worse, they figured out the possibilities for missile defense and did something about them, too.

The maneuver had to be the result of a preprogrammed attack profile. There was far too little time for whoever had fired them to change profiles that quickly on the fly. But whoever had done the preprogramming had timed it well. The change in attitude interposed the floors and roofs of the MDMs' impeller wedges between them and the Cimeterres' missiles just as the powerful, dirty warheads of the Republican missiles began to detonate. The solid wall of blast fronts and EMP which was supposed to blind and burn out the Manticoran missiles' seekers wasted itself against sensors which couldn't even see it.

All three Zizka waves detonated, and the flood of attack missiles which had parted around the Triple Ripple's roadblock altered heading once more. Their noses swung back towards their targets, and there wasn't time for another counter-missile launch.

... and Zizka denied. Didn't take the RMN long to adapt to that particular trick, they've even programmed missiles to avoid it. On the other hand, half the missiles don't manage to reacquire lock, and of those that do they mostly gang up on the closest third or so of the LAC swarm.

"It's an almost thirty percent kill of their entire formation," he pointed out, and she made a face.

"Sure it is, Skip," she agreed. "But it's less than a ten percent kill ratio for the launch as a whole. Against targets we're supposed to be killing with a single hit each."

Kills from the missiles, and the continuing disappointment of MDM hit ratios at max range.

Everard Broughton had fired eight hundred and thirty missiles at Diamato's squadron and the CLACs he was escorting. Counter-missiles killed two hundred and eleven of them. The close-in energy weapons killed another two hundred and six. Of the remaining four hundred and thirteen, fifty-one were EW platforms, and another hundred and six were defeated by Republican ECM and simply lost lock and wandered off course until they self-destructed at the end of their run.

But that meant that two hundred and fifty-six reached attack range and detonated.

The long range had aided the Republic's defenses by giving them longer tracking time and a deeper engagement envelope. The capability of Manticoran EW had gone a long way towards offsetting that, but nothing the Manticorans could do could magically erase the fire control problems inherent in targeting a maneuvering starship at a range of almost three light-minutes. Every one of the attack missiles had been initially targeted upon one of the CLACs, but a third even of those which reached attack range had lost their original targets and took whatever they could find in replacement.

Missile defense, they actually achieve more with the canisters than the LACs did with three salvos of CMs. Of course, proper ships should be more capable, they've got the computer support for it.

One of them reached her inertial compensator. It failed, and the two hundred-plus gravities of acceleration from her still-active after impeller ring killed every man and woman aboard her in the fleeting seconds before it broke her back. The white-hot flare of her failing fusion bottles simply punctuated her destruction.

The light cruiser Phantom went with her, victim of at least three MDMs intended for her betters, and Peregrine was severely damaged. All of Diamato's battlecruisers took at least some damage of their own, but Peregrine was far more badly hit.

"She's down two alphas and five betas out of her after ring, Sir," Zucker reported. "Half her starboard bays are out of action, and she's lost at least thirty percent of her missile defense. Her starboard sidewall's down to about forty percent, and Captain Joubert reports very heavy casualties."

Skylark is dead, Peregrine heavily damaged yet strangely still hyper-capable. Diamoto orders her to pull out and leave the LACs, because in the final equation the carrier is less expendable than it's entire complement.

Even with her LACs away, there had been over three thousand men and women aboard that ship, and not one of them had survived. That was a bitter price, excessive or not. And it did not include the sixty-five hundred Republican naval personnel aboard the task group's LACs. Too many of them were already dead, more of them were going to die, and Oliver Diamato had just ordered the only ship which could have recovered their LACs out of the system.

3,000 crew aboard a Haven CLAC even with all her LACs out.

Even with her LACs away, there had been over three thousand men and women aboard that ship, and not one of them had survived. That was a bitter price, excessive or not. And it did not include the sixty-five hundred Republican naval personnel aboard the task group's LACs. Too many of them were already dead, more of them were going to die, and Oliver Diamato had just ordered the only ship which could have recovered their LACs out of the system.

He watched the impeller signatures of Schneider's LACs breaking down into three and four-squadron formations, scattering on individual evasion courses. This, too, had been planned for, however little anyone had actually expected the plan to be needed. Under Zulu-Three, Schneider's units would make for half a dozen widely separated rendezvous beyond the hyper limit, where Diamato's battlecruisers would recover as many of their crewmen as possible.

It was going to be tight, and difficult. The odds were that Schneider's escape courses would take his LACs into the reach of still more of the deployed system defense pods. It was possible none of his ships would survive to reach a rendezvous, or that the Manties would manage to deduce the rendezvous locations and get something into position to interdict them. Or that the faster, more capable Manty LACs would intercept the Cimeterres short of the limit.

But Oliver Diamato was grimly determined that anyone who did reach one of the rendezvous points would find someone waiting there to take him home.

Zulu Three, LACs scatter and go to multiple points outside the hyper-limit where they will RV with the screen units to unload the crews. Everyone RVs with the surviving carrier in two days so they can all head home. And with that we end Third Zanzibar.

[Terralthra]

Worth noting that a simple perpendicular course change in the incoming MDM missile swarm should be, by the geometry of the engagement, a losing proposition. The MDMs at their terminal velocity have a huge vector toward where the incoming force targeted their triple ripple to go off, and until Apollo, the defending ships have a lot better chance of adjusting their outgoing track to blanket the area (and adjusting their missile track midflight) than the attacking ships have to adjust their missiles' evasive maneuvres to dodge the ripple.

Also, there's references way back in the series (HotQ, I think?) of ships' tac officers cutting the control links to their missile salvoes once the outgoing birds' seekers have a lock. Seems reasonable that unless you have ridiculous advances in seekers, tac officers will have to handhold their missiles to get their seekers into lock range of the target, thus necessitating more and more control channels as the range gets longer and longer.

[Ahriman238]

"I'm sorry about Werewolf," she said in a quieter tone.

"I won't pretend I'm not going to miss her, Your Grace," Captain Rafe Cardones replied. "But a brand new Invictus-class superdreadnought is nothing to sneeze at when you haven't been on the list any longer than I have. And another stint as your flag captain isn't going to hurt my résumé any."

They took Werewolf from Rafe, but he still gets to be Honor's flag captain with her new podnought flagship.

"The bottom line is that Eighth Fleet is something of a paper hexapuma at the moment. The Admiralty doesn't have the ships to make it anything but a shadow of what it was under Admiral White Haven. Your battle squadron, Alistair—all six ships worth of it—will constitute our entire 'wall of battle' for at least the immediate future."

"Excuse me?" McKeon blinked. "Our entire wall?"

"That's what I said," Honor replied grimly. "Not only that, but any additional wallers we receive for the next few months will almost certainly be old-style, pre-pod ships from the Reserve."

Having been upgraded from a task force commander to a full Fleet, it should come as no surprise that Honor has less capital ships than Janacek let her take to Sidemore. After all, she's only commanding the sole force going on the offensive, what would she do with podnoughts if she had them?

"It's a little better than that, Mercedes," Honor said. "For example, we'll have two full squadrons of CLACs under Alice Truman. That's over a quarter of the total we have in commission, including—" she smiled at Cardones "—Werewolf. And they're giving us all of the Manticoran pod-battlecruisers. We'll have first call on additional Agamemnons as they commission, as well. And we should be seeing the majority of the Saganami-Cs, as well."

"Excuse me, Your Grace," Jaruwalski said slowly, "but that sounds like a peculiar force mix, if you'll pardon my saying so. My impression from the media reports, at least, was that Eighth Fleet was being reactivated as our primary offensive command, just as it was during Operation Buttercup. But you're talking about primarily light units, aren't you?"

Well, the carriers make up for some of it. As for getting all the Agamemnon BC(P)s and most of the Saganami-Cs, well cruisers have to be useful to a raiding force, right?

"The truth is that the deployment cupboard is bare, people. We're scraping the bottom of the barrel just to maintain the fleets we've got to have to cover our critical core systems. We simply can't reduce them any further, even with all of the system-defense pods and other fortifications we can put into position. But bad as the situation is, it's going to get worse before it gets better. We'll get to the exact figures ONI is projecting shortly, but what matters for our purposes right this minute is that the Havenites' wall of battle is already bigger than ours is, and it's going to grow faster than ours is for at least the next two T-years.

"Which means that, if they're prepared to take the losses, they probably have—or shortly will have—the combat power they need to hammer Manticore or Grayson."

The previous war raged for nearly a decade. This time though, both Manticore and Haven have independently come to the conclusion they need to wrap things up within two years. Manticore is afraid of Haven catastrophically outbuilding them, Haven doesn't want to give Manticore time to design, test and deploy further wunderwaffen.

"Exactly." Honor nodded. "The idea is for us to wreak a fair amount of havoc in the Republic's rear areas. They can't have built up and maintained a fleet the size of their present navy without having weakened themselves somewhere. For example, ONI's best estimate, from all the intelligence sources we still have in the Republic, is that one thing they did was to scrap all the old battleships the Old Regime was using for rear-area defense. Even if they hadn't needed the manpower anywhere else, those ships would have been sitting ducks for MDMs and LACs, so it would make a lot of sense to retire them. But it's unlikely they've been able to replace them out of new construction, either. It's more probable they're relying on light units and, possibly, LACs of their own for normal security. Undoubtedly, they also hope the damage they did to us in their opening operation knocked back our offensive capability badly enough we won't be in any position to take advantage of the weakness of their secondary systems' defenses. Our job is to convince them they're wrong."

"And they gave you Eighth Fleet, and played up its role as our 'primary offensive force,' to help convince them of that," McKeon said. Honor looked at him, and he shrugged. "It's not that hard to figure out, Honor. If the Admiralty gave you the assignment after Sidemore, then clearly it regards Eighth Fleet as a critical command which it will reinforce as rapidly as possible. Which means the Peeps are going to have to assume that whatever we do to them with raids will only grow steadily in intensity and weight. Right?"

"Something along those lines," she said. "And, as much as possible, they'll be right. It's just that the degree to which anyone can reinforce us is going to be limited."

The mission brief. Maybe they should make Eighth a joint force again, invite Grayson and the Andermani to contribute a few ships? They could double her podnoughts with hardly any effort.

"So, that's the bottom line, people. We'll have essentially a free hand in selecting our objectives and timing our operations. We'll base out of Trevor's Star, so we can also serve as a ready reinforcement to Admiral Kuzak's Third Fleet. And we'll do everything we can to convince the media—and the Republic—we have a lot more tonnage and firepower than we actually do."

Bluffing, and Eighth Fleet will once more be based out of Trevor's Star.

"Hamish, there's not really anything substantively new in any of Pritchart's so-called proposals. She's still flatly denying her government falsified our diplomatic exchanges. She's still asserting that she attacked us because of High Ridge's refusal to negotiate in good faith, and that our publication of our 'forged' diplomatic traffic indicates that the leopard—that's us, Hamish, in case you hadn't noticed—hasn't changed its spots just because of his fall from power. And she's insisting the plebiscites to be held on the previously occupied Havenite planets be conducted under her exclusive supervision. Where's anything new in any of that?"

"What's 'new' is that she's proposed a cessation of hostilities while we negotiate on the basis of her most recent round of proposals," White Haven said sharply. "Trust me. We need that cessation a lot worse than they do right now!"

Prichart's follow-up offers for renewed talks, which the Queen has shot down. Manticore has published their copies of the diplomatic correspondence and both sides are calling each other liars over it. Also, the skipped over her offer for third-party observers to the plebiscites' organization.

"Hamish, it's not going to happen," Langtry said, shaking his head. "It's not going to happen for a lot of reasons. Because we can't trust them after they've already lied so comprehensively. Because even the reports from Admiral Givens admit that at this moment we can't be certain a cease-fire would help us militarily more than it would help them. Because the fact that they're offering it in the first place suggests it would help them militarily, at least in their opinion, more than it would help us. Because we're not going to allow them to rehabilitate themselves diplomatically and take back any of the moral high ground in interstellar public opinion. And, frankly, because the Queen hates their guts with a pure, burning passion. If you want her to sit down and talk with these people, after everything that's happened, then you've got to be able to demonstrate that it will provide us with a significant advantage without improving the Peeps' position simultaneously. And the truth is, Hamish, that you can't demonstrate that."

And that's that. In the grimdark future of the Fourth Millennium, there is only war.

"Your Grace, I checked the results three times," Frazier said. "Trust me. You are pregnant."

Whoops.

The Navy provided a perfectly adequate implant good for one T-year, renewable with each annual physical, as part of its basic medical care, but anyone who wanted to pay for her own implant could do so, as long as it met the minimum one-year requirement of the Service and was kept current. Without that implant, she was restricted to dirt-side duty, safely away from the risk of accidental radiation exposures. Given her own career plans, Honor had opted for a ten-year implant. It could have been deactivated at any time, in the unlikely event her plans had changed, and it was simply one less detail to bother about.

"I'm not positive yet, Your Grace," Frazier continued, "but I think I may have figured out what happened. To the implant, I mean."

-snip-

"Apparently what happened was that when the Peeps announced your 'execution,' the Navy removed your files from the medical center's active database. After all, you were dead. So, when you turned up alive again, they had to reactivate your records. And I'm guessing there was some glitch, because according to your file, your implant was renewed after your return from Cerberus."

"After my return?" Honor shook her head vigorously. "Certainly not!"

"Oh, I'm well aware of that, Your Grace," Frazier said. "In fact, this is at least partly my fault. I didn't do a complete enough review of your records, or I might have realized the date indicated for your implant renewal was flatly impossible."

"But how could someone have screwed it up?" Honor demanded. Her brain, she realized, was not functioning especially well at the moment.

"My best guess?" Frazier said. "It looks to me as if when your records were reactivated all entries specific to Navy-monitored requirements—like the requirement that your contraceptive implant be current—were somehow reset to the date they were reactivated. Which means that so far as I knew from my records, which were based on Bassingford's, your implant should have been good for another three and a half T-years. Which, obviously, it wasn't."

Naval contraception, and the clerical error that let it run over.

Allison Chou Harrington was a Beowulfer by birth. More than that, she was a daughter of one of the great medical "dynasties" of Beowulf. For her, the termination of a pregnancy was unthinkable, except under the most unusual possible circumstances. Something out of the barbaric era before medicine had made so many alternatives available.

Beowulf doesn't allow abortions, though Manticore does.

"Even so, there's no medical reason you have to rush things," he argued gently. "You've already ruled out simply terminating the pregnancy. Obviously, that means tubing or a surrogacy. And if you're going to have the child tubed, you're talking about a routine out-patient procedure. Your mother's a geneticist, not an OB, but she could perform the procedure in a half-hour."

Surrogacy and 'tubing' or uterine replicators. Remove fetus and transplant in an artificial womb. This is one of those odd little technologies that pops up here and there in sci-fi (and in the weirdest places), because it removes many of the risks and downsides to pregnancy and allows quicker reproduction with women getting back into the breeding population much faster.

"First, Honor's—our—giving up this child is not an option," Emily continued. "Second, Honor's carrying the child to term naturally is also not an option. Third, the potential political consequences of our acknowledging the pregnancy at this particular point in time would be . . . difficult. Both here, in the Star Kingdom, and on Grayson. Fourth," she looked back and forth between her husband and Honor, "however we resolve the problems, I want and intend to be involved in raising this child. So, with option number one already settled, what about the second one?"

"Under normal circumstances," Honor said, "and bearing in mind that Mother is from Beowulf, the solution would be simple. She'd become my surrogate, but I'm afraid that won't work here."

"Why not?" Emily asked, cocking her head. Honor looked at her, and Emily flipped her hand in the gesture she used for a shrug. "It just seems like such a good idea from so many perspectives, I'm wondering if we're thinking about the same difficulties."

"It would be a wonderful idea," Honor agreed, just a trifle sadly. "Mother's always had easy pregnancies, and the twins are just old enough now that she's started missing having a toddler around. And I can't think of anyone who would be a better surrogate. But legally, this child will replace Faith in the Harrington succession, and eventually I'm going to have to acknowledge that publicly, which presents all sorts of problems in using Mother as my surrogate. If she's visibly pregnant, the assumption on Grayson will be—unless we tell them to the contrary—that Father is the father."

Constraints, the easy surrogate is out.

"Don't you have an obligation as Steadholder Harrington to inform the Conclave of the birth of any heir to the Steading?" Hamish asked, frowning intently.

"Not precisely."

-snip-

"My obligation, legally, is to inform the Sword and the Church," she said. "Technically, it could be argued that I'm not under any obligation to inform anyone at all until such time as a child is actually born. Trust me," she smiled a bit bleakly, "I've done some research this afternoon. But, while the law specifies that the birth of an heir has to be reported to, and acknowledged by, the Protector and the Church, the practice has always been that they're to be informed when the pregnancy is confirmed. So, the two people on Grayson I have to tell about this, legally speaking, are Benjamin and Reverend Sullivan. I'm sure Benjamin would respect my confidence, and the Reverend's vows would require him to treat it as privileged information, like something revealed under the seal of the confessional, at least until the child is actually born."

Requirements to inform the Grayson government of an inbound heir. You can tell Grayson is getting to Hamish, corrupting him in a hundred subtle ways. Soon he will eat waffles and watch baseball games.

"We could always consider placing the embryo in cryo until the 'political climate' has changed," Hamish said slowly.

That's.... an option I guess? We know they have cyro because a lot of early colony ships used it.

"We're not talking about what's legal or illegal," Emily replied. "We're talking about public perceptions, and on a planet which, if you'll forgive me, is still coming to grips with the implications of modern technology. Specifically, of modern medical technology."

"That's true enough," Honor acknowledged. "My parents and I are working on that, but sometimes it seems to me that at least half the people on Grayson still consider what we can do black magic." She shook her head. "And in some ways, it actually got worse when Mother came up with the nanites for the stillbirth defect."

"I heard about that," Emily said, "but I've never understood why any woman would be opposed to it. A way to eliminate all those spontaneous abortions and stillbirths?" It was her turn to shake her head. "Of course, no one's ever explained to me exactly how it works, either," she admitted.

"It's not an ideal solution," Honor said. "She's still working on a way to actually repair the defect in a way she's certain won't introduce additional problems of its own. In the meantime, the nanites she came up with are more of a brute force approach. They're engineered to invade the ovaries and identify the ova which carry an X-chromosome with the defect. Once they've identified an ovum with one of the damaged chromosomes, they destroy it. Since all of a woman's ova are already formed, Mother can eliminate any woman's damaged chromosomes completely with a single treatment. But there's a lot of resistance to using it. Some of it's from the more conservative elements of the population, who think that she's mucking about with God's plan—and a lot of whom are afraid that altering the ratio of male births to female births will bring chaos to their existing society. Another chunk of resistance, I think, comes from women who are afraid that all of their ova are affected, and that the nanites would render them completely sterile. And others just seem to find the entire concept creepy, or distasteful. But I think a lot of it comes from the point you've already raised, Emily—from the people who really do think of it as if it were black magic. They don't actually understand any of the new medical technology, really, and some of them are at least as frightened by it as grateful that it's become available."

Honor's mother has come up with nanites programmed to destroy any ova bearing the defect that causes so many male stillbirths on Grayson. But there's significant resistance, some religious, a lot based on simple appeals to fear, to using them.

"So what I think we're really saying here," Emily said after a moment, looking back and forth between Honor and Hamish once more, "is that our only real option is to have the child tubed under conditions of medical confidentiality and hope that by the time she—or he—is born, the political and military situation will have changed enough for the fact of her birth to generate somewhat less of a firestorm."

"I'm afraid so," Honor replied.

"Well, in that case," Emily said with a whimsical smile of her own, "I think Hamish and I had better spend the next few months learning how to be salamanders, too."

The final verdict.

His own frown mingled affection, respect, and exasperation as he looked through the armorplast at his Steadholder. Hawke looked as well, and Mattingly felt the younger man twitch in something very like shock as the Steadholder calmly removed the very tip of her left index finger.

"Haven't seen this one before?" Mattingly asked.

"I've seen it before," Hawke replied. "Just not very often. And it . . . bothers me. You know, I keep forgetting her arm's artificial."

"Yeah, and her father's a seriously paranoid individual, Tester bless him!" Mattingly said. "Although," they watched with half their attention as the Steadholder flexed her left hand and the truncated index finger locked into a rigidly extended position, "that particular hideout weapon of hers is something of a case in point for what I was saying earlier. She didn't even tell me or the Colonel about it until after we were sent to Marsh."

Honor practices with her... let's call it a 'handgun.' And apparently none of her armsmen knew at first that she had a pulser in there.

The realization surprised her, yet it was true. Her mind kept returning to that tiny embryo, floating now in the replication tube. Such a minute bit of tissue . . . and yet, how enormous that unborn child loomed in her own heart. She felt hollow, as if she had been emptied of something unutterably precious. Intellectually, she knew her child was far safer where she—or he—was, yet her emotions were something else. A part of her felt as if she'd abandoned her baby, left it in a coldly sterile, antiseptic storage box, like some bit of inconvenient luggage.

Procedure done.

[Simon_Jester]

An SD can carry 500-600 flatback pods, if they don't mind covering every antenna, radar array and weapon. But pre-pod designs can only control 100 or so missiles at a time, not sure I buy that, even the old Fearless would put out three or four salvos before the first one landed, so only 2-3x their broadside in control links doesn't make a lot of sense to me. An Invictus can apparently do two or three times better, I'll look back but I think a lot of previous missile spam doesn't make sense in that light.

Typical "heavy pod loads" were limited to roughly three times the ship's broadside: an SD would carry 10-15 pods in comparison to 30-40 broadside launchers.

Also, there's references in the tech bible to the idea that doctrinally, SDs carry 120 missiles per tube in the magazines, expecting one launch per minute of sustained fire. Since the maximum drive endurance of a missile is between one and three minutes, it's actually reasonable to limit a ship's control capability to, oh... 3-5 times the number of broadside tubes. Granted, in theory a ship could have as many as nine broadside salvoes in space simultaneously... but realistically, if you're firing one salvo per twenty seconds, you cut your own control links with wedge interference so often that you hit diminishing returns. Especially if you're also firing countermissiles at a comparable rate because the enemy's doing the same thing.

There might have been a gradual upward trend in control capability per missile tube in the late 19th and early 20th century PD even without pods, simply because you see more ships that are designed to focus on missile combat and therefore more incentive to launch (and control) missiles at close to the maximum possible rate of fire.

For that matter, I feel pretty confident Wayfarer managed at least one 300 bird salvo.

It's not clear whether Wayfarer did control those missiles, or just fired off all 300 of them and counted on Manticoran missile seekers to ensure that 'enough' of them hit the target even though most of them would be largely uncontrolled.

The LAC formation altered abruptly, each tiny vessel accelerating on its own, carefully preplanned vector change. Zizka was new—a variant of the "Triple Ripple" the Fleet had employed so successfully against the Manties' LACs. It was wasteful, in some ways, but with that many Manty MDMs coming towards them, they needed the best defense they could get.

Zizka, the Triple Ripple as missile defense. Same idea, burn out the seekers with hard rads.

Amusingly, Jan Zizka's pioneering tactics using heavily armed wagons in combat against enemy armored knights included "circle the wagons."

Also, note that each LAC is firing off several missiles that, taken together, might actually not weigh much less than one MDM. Although I suspect that the cost of a missile scales more or less linearly with number of drives, not so much with raw weight.

The RHN approach to keeping battlecruisers current. Double the counter-missile tubes by taking out beam weapons, and add fire-control links. Also, note that CM canisters are being used here to give the counter missiles more range as well as increased numbers. Of course, the BCs have nothing but missile-defense to contribute when the MDMs start flying.

RMN battlecruisers are in the same position, except for the podlayer and BC(L) variants that were only just starting to be laid down at this point... Seriously, using 'battlecruisers' as the heavy screening elements for task force missile defense is a good idea in my opinion.

The Manty defender's opinions of this missile defense trick. I'm starting to think the problem with Aegis was mostly being too little too late. And Simon was right, Shannon Foraker can do a lot with the concept.

Very much so; Aegis is basically this, in terms of hardware modification. The latest Solarian battlecruiser class, with Aegis integrated is probably just as capable technologically as the latest Havenite design... the only difference is doctrine that reflects Haven's far greater war experience and adaptability.

They get a lot more launches off, presumably because the LACs are running directly away from the missiles. Though Manty EW does a to get missiles through. And now we get to see Zizka unleashed...

The LACs may also be using that 'rotary launcher' trick for countermissiles. Fleet missile defense is almost certainly a role they're partly designed for along with counter-LAC duty, so being able to spam multiple countermissile launches in rapid succession as an MDM salvo sweeps in at half the speed of light is... desirable.

... and Zizka denied. Didn't take the RMN long to adapt to that particular trick, they've even programmed missiles to avoid it. On the other hand, half the missiles don't manage to reacquire lock, and of those that do they mostly gang up on the closest third or so of the LAC swarm.

Yeah. Honestly, "stop half the missiles from hitting the target" is about as good as something like Zizka ever had a realistic chance of accomplishing, against a dispersed incoming missile salvo.

So anyway, the Manticorans fired about 1400 missiles at 500 LACs and scored hits on roughly 140-160 of them. Hit rate is about 10-12%.

Missile defense, they [Havenites] actually achieve more with the canisters than the LACs did with three salvos of CMs. Of course, proper ships should be more capable, they've got the computer support for it.

Here, the RMN fires 830 missiles at the task force's starships and scores roughly 250 hits (noting that it looks like about 15-20% of the salvo are EW platforms, and not counted in hit calculations, which is typical). Hit rate is about 30%.

So despite the battlecruisers' unexpectedly good missile defense capability, it looks like the Manticorans achieved saturation of the Havenite task force's defenses- enough that roughly half of their missiles at least got into range to engage the enemy, and three eighths or so could have had a firing solution if they'd had warheads.

The capital ships' inability to launch a "triple ripple" barrage may have played a role here; the LACs were able to defeat half the incoming salvo that way, after countermissile fire had thinned it out, which suggests that the hit rate on the LACs would have been more like 20-25% without Zizka.

The light cruiser Phantom went with her, victim of at least three MDMs intended for her betters, and Peregrine was severely damaged. All of Diamato's battlecruisers took at least some damage of their own, but Peregrine was far more badly hit.

Assuming the 'lost lock and reacquired' missiles were distributed randomly across the ten ships of the formation, that's three hits out of... probably eight or nine that targeted Phantom, consistent with overall hit rate. The battlecruisers would experience similar numbers of hits unless they're a lot easier to see, which come to think of it they probably are. Figure ten or so 'random' hits on each ship in the formation as the missiles try to reacquire targets...

And each carrier eats something like 80-100 hits from heavy system defense MDMs apiece, which is enough to ensure a mission-kill on one ship and a catastrophic-kill on the other. This is one of the few benchmarks we have of just exactly how hard it is to kill Honorverse ships with MDM fire. Havenite CLACs are massive targets built to the same scale as the largest missile-ships on either side... but on the other hand, the LAC bays are huge empty spaces that easily take up half their internal volume, probably more; LACs are biiig and this thing has to somehow wrap 250 or so of them around its hull. I actually have trouble visualizing that, although it is just barely possible given that the carrier is about ten times longer, higher, and wider than the LAC. So wrapping five or six 'girdles' of LACs around the hull is probably doable...ish, and each of them COULD include up to forty LACs. Alternatively, you could stack them two deep in 125-130 broadside-on bays, each containing one 'inboard' LAC and one 'outboard' LAC if you are really willing to cut into other broadside systems.

[Basing that on the Series 282 LAC and Gryphon-class SD, which I have figures I can actually look up because I posted them earlier]

Anyway, the point is that I feel it fairly reasonable to estimate that an Aviary would be able to survive at most half and at least a quarter of the pounding of a "properly" armored warship built to the same scale... giving us 200-400 MDM hits to knock out a superdreadnought. Somewhere in the low single digit hundreds, anyway... which is fairly consistent with what we've seen throughout the series.

Regardless of how many missiles get launched, that is roughly the number of hits you need to score to wreck a capital ship with capital-class laser heads.

Skylark is dead, Peregrine heavily damaged yet strangely still hyper-capable. Diamoto orders her to pull out and leave the LACs, because in the final equation the carrier is less expendable than it's entire complement.

That, or Diamato just doesn't like LACs for some inexplicable reason?

Nothing personal against the crews, mind, it's just that he hates LACs. Gee, why might that be?

I kid. Probably.
____________________________

Also, an insane tactic for dodging missile barrages fired from long range at LACs just occurred to me: shut down your impeller wedge. Seriously, LACs are maneuverable enough that there probably isn't a recon drone within radar range of your LAC formation if you're fifty million kilometers from the enemy defenses... and at those ranges you don't show up on anything except gravitics. You're practically invisible.

This probably wouldn't work, actually, for several reasons.

Worth noting that a simple perpendicular course change in the incoming MDM missile swarm should be, by the geometry of the engagement, a losing proposition. The MDMs at their terminal velocity have a huge vector toward where the incoming force targeted their triple ripple to go off, and until Apollo, the defending ships have a lot better chance of adjusting their outgoing track to blanket the area (and adjusting their missile track midflight) than the attacking ships have to adjust their missiles' evasive maneuvres to dodge the ripple.

Well, all you really have to do is make sure your missile is pointing 'up' or 'down' and away from the ripple when the warheads go off. It's a totally viable tactic to "look away" for only a couple of seconds, which even at missile accelerations will impart a lateral delta-V of about 1000 km/s at these ranges. Enough that it can be corrected for by turning again and pointing the wedge in the opposite direction for a few more seconds, as long as you get something like 10 seconds' advance notice that the ripple is coming for you.

Which, at MDM terminal attack velocities... is a few million kilometers. O_o

Having been upgraded from a task force commander to a full Fleet, it should come as no surprise that Honor has less capital ships than Janacek let her take to Sidemore. After all, she's only commanding the sole force going on the offensive, what would she do with podnoughts if she had them?

Anyway, think about the strategic situation. Haven only lost about twenty of the wall during Operation Thunderbolt, tops; Manticore lost at least six or seven. Both sides have essentially the same force levels they did before the war, except that the Alliance has the Andermani ships... which, coincidentally, aren't fit to fight a proper MDM battle without further modification.

And the correlation of forces in Thunderbolt was... pretty unfavorable; the RMN was unable to stop Havenite task forces anywhere except at Sidemore and Trevor's Star. They must hold Trevor's Star and Grayson or they've practically lost the war already, and they must hold the Manticore Binary System or they do lose the war.

Doing so during Thunderbolt required basically every ship the RMN and GSN had, and Haven is no less powerful now than it was then. So doing so still requires basically every ship the RMN and GSN has. About the only place they can actually take ships away from, ships that are no longer required to defend vital systems, is Sidemore.

The Sidemore fleet is their last reserve force, the only group of ships that were not committed to a vital objective. So that's six RMN SD(P)s, plus the Protector's Own... and since Benjamin left Grayson virtually uncovered during Thunderbolt, he's probably going to have to recall the Protector's Own to defend his own homeworld.

Which leaves Honor with, yeah, pretty much the same wall of battle she had last book.

Despite that, she's a bit stronger. The SD(P)s she does have are better ones than the Medusas from last book. And she now has multiple BC(P)s and the sole BC(L), all of which are capable of contributing meaningfully in a major fleet action... Even if it takes three BC(P)s to punch as hard as two SD(P)s, and even if the BC(P)s have only a tiny fraction the survivability as individual platforms. Plus, as noted, way more carriers.

So the new Eighth Fleet would probably wipe the floor with the old Task Force 34, not counting Grayson reinforcements.

And as noted, what we see is that her force mix is dominated by battlecruisers, cruisers, and LACs... which are, coincidentally, the units the RMN doctrinally favors for raids. Wonder why?

The previous war raged for nearly a decade. This time though, both Manticore and Haven have independently come to the conclusion they need to wrap things up within two years. Manticore is afraid of Haven catastrophically outbuilding them, Haven doesn't want to give Manticore time to design, test and deploy further wunderwaffen.

Well, Manticore would probably love it if the Havenites decided to 'take five' for three years or so... because that gives them time to get their next wave of construction into commission and resume building SD(P)s at a wartime rate of dozens a year. In other words, to reach full war mobilization.

Haven is already at full war mobilization, and in fact is just hitting their stride... which means striding all over the Manticoran Alliance just as soon as they recover their balance from that last massive haymaker they swung.

The mission brief. Maybe they should make Eighth a joint force again, invite Grayson and the Andermani to contribute a few ships? They could double her podnoughts with hardly any effort.

Andermani SD(P)s haven't got the missile range to fight alongside Manticoran SD(P)s until the refits come through, and even then will be 'second-line' ships. Much better to use an Andermani SD(P) to free up a Manticoran ship to fight on the front lines by using it to garrison a system that might be attacked, if you ask me.

Grayson, well, they've pretty much hit an upper bound on the ships they can possibly man and maintain, and I suspect they can't commit more ships than they did during Thunderbolt. Most of which are either helping to secure Trevor's Star, or were sent to Sidemore and will now have to be recalled... because now Haven knows Grayson is still willing to send ships to support the Alliance. They didn't know that during Thunderbolt, or they would have attacked Grayson too; now that they do there is a very strong temptation for Theisman to see if his fourth time tangling with Graysons is a charm.

[He always survived the experience before, which is more than most can say, no?]

If Giscard shows up with the same fleet that declined battle at Trevor's Star, throwing, say, 50-80 of the wall on Grayson, can they stop him? Good question, and the GSN will take considerable pains to make sure the answer is as close to 'yes' as possible.

So no, I don't think Grayson will have a lot of ships to spare now.

Prichart's follow-up offers for renewed talks, which the Queen has shot down. Manticore has published their copies of the diplomatic correspondence and both sides are calling each other liars over it. Also, the skipped over her offer for third-party observers to the plebiscites' organization.

Also confirms my theory that a renewed cease-fire would be to Manticore's advantage right now. WOO!

[does happy I-was-right dance]

And that's that. In the grimdark future of the Fourth Millennium, there is only war.

Unless the psyker witchcraft kicks in. Thaaat'd help.

Naval contraception, and the clerical error that let it run over.

Well gee Honor, just because your protection lasts a decade doesn't mean you get to forget about it!

Allison Chou Harrington was a Beowulfer by birth. More than that, she was a daughter of one of the great medical "dynasties" of Beowulf. For her, the termination of a pregnancy was unthinkable, except under the most unusual possible circumstances. Something out of the barbaric era before medicine had made so many alternatives available.

Beowulf doesn't allow abortions, though Manticore does.

Beowulf also has pretty strict social pressures favoring advance family planning as I recall; conspicuously large families are frowned on. People who have kids too fast are criticized, and we've just seen how trivially easy it is to postpone having children for years or decades with Honorverse medical technology.

Of course, they've had prolong long enough that basically everyone on the planet who isn't dead has centuries of life and fertility to look forward to, they invented prolong!

Hm. I wonder what the options are like for male birth control.

"Even so, there's no medical reason you have to rush things," he argued gently. "You've already ruled out simply terminating the pregnancy. Obviously, that means tubing or a surrogacy. And if you're going to have the child tubed, you're talking about a routine out-patient procedure. Your mother's a geneticist, not an OB, but she could perform the procedure in a half-hour."

Surrogacy and 'tubing' or uterine replicators. Remove fetus and transplant in an artificial womb. This is one of those odd little technologies that pops up here and there in sci-fi (and in the weirdest places), because it removes many of the risks and downsides to pregnancy...

True that.

and allows quicker reproduction with women getting back into the breeding population much faster.

Which is not usually one of the reasons listed.

Seriously, artificial wombs are one of those technologies we'd almost certainly develop if we could, but it turns out precisely replicating the very complex system required to support a developing fetus is hard, and screwing it up means mutant flipper-babies, so it's probably not going to happen for a long time in real life.

Honor's mother has come up with nanites programmed to destroy any ova bearing the defect that causes so many male stillbirths on Grayson. But there's significant resistance, some religious, a lot based on simple appeals to fear, to using them.

Hard to blame people. The male-female birth ratio on Grayson is 1:3, so two thirds of all males conceived must have the defect...

How many women are there who'd flinch if you told them you were going to inject them with nanobots that would seek out and kill 50-70% of their remaining ova? I'm guessing "most."

[VhenRa]

If I recall correctly, those Manticore BC(P)s don't fire Mark 23s out of their missile pods. Instead loading 14 Mark 16 DDMs into each pod instead of 10 Mark 23s. Giving them a throw weight of 56 Mark 16s vs 40 Mark 23s. (With a SD(P) having a throw-weight of 60 Mark 23s)

[Terralthra]

Yeah, that's going to dramatically lower the fertility for women on Grayson. There's three ways it can go, biologically. Two involve the woman's body not speeding up the development of the remaining ova in the ovaries. In that case, the woman's body can continue to menstruate monthly, even with effectively no corpus luteum that mensis (unlikely, considering that the corpus luteum is what causes the hormonal changes of menses) or they can skip the menses with the destroyed ova (more likely, in my opinion). Third, the woman's body will realize that those ova are defunct and the ovaries will adjust development to favor the still-valid ones, in which case the fecund age range to go from ~40 years (figure 12 years old through 50 years old or so) to...14 years. In that case, women will start having their menopause around 25-30 years old. Alternatively, if they have this procedure done around 25, they'd have menopause around 32-35. Jesus. Goodbye huge Grayson families. She could try to force the first or second (least ugly, imo) outcomes, by making the ovary still undergo folliculogenesis with no ovum to release, I guess.

This does make me think of something else that never occurred to me to think about before: how does prolong interaction with menstruation? If it doesn't affect menses, that means women like Honor and Allison should already be menopausal, having passed all their childbearing years. Since they're clearly not, that means...what, that during the prolonged "extended peak" period of maturity, they'd have their usual 40ish years of fertility extended to 200 or so, meaning 2, maybe 3 periods per year? That's...interesting. And means women are way less likely to get accidentally pregnant, since the egg only lasts 1-2 days in the fallopian tube before disintegrating, if it isn't fertilized. 4-6 fertile days a year, plus the 3-7 days sperm can be viable in the uterus, means a max of what, 2, possibly 3 fertile weeks out of 52? As opposed to 12 in RL humans.

[Simon_Jester]

Possibilities:

1) Somehow, prolong induces the ovaries to produce new eggs after menarche. Don't know how plausible this is.

2) Prolong may have no effect on ovulation, but other, separate contraceptive technology may exist that outright stops the menstrual/ovulation cycle, so that a woman can press "pause" on her "40ish years of fertility" and have those forty years at whatever point in her life she chooses. This technology would be pretty useless without prolong (would a woman of normal life expectancy really want the option of having kids when she's eighty?)

3) Prolong actually does reduce the frequency of ovulation, and actually does reduce fertility rather sharply, as you discuss.

4) Prolong could make it de facto necessary to have medical intervention (i.e. medication that induces ovulation) for a prolong recipient to have a child. Obviously that is not consistent with Honor's version of prolong, because she has an unplanned pregnancy on her hands. This would tie into (2), and the medical intervention in question might be the installation of a 'pause' button. On the other hand, to ensure that women can have children without specific medical intervention the 'pause' device might be designed to turn off automatically... ah-ha. This might be how Honor's "contraceptive implant" was supposed to work; it didn't act the way 20th century contraceptives do, but literally put her fertility on hold for the specified span of time.

[Then again, Honor's implant might be a perfectly normal version of the Norplant-type devices we already have; Occam's Razor may apply]

5) Somehow, prolong reduces the rate of follicular attrition in childhood if you catch it early enough; the average girl is born with enough ova to last them for millenia, but 99.9% or so of them don't make it to menarche. This would almost have to be a feature unique to 'third generation' prolong, because that's the only one that does have to be applied before puberty. But it wouldn't apply to 'first' and 'second' generation prolong...

[Terralthra]

1) would imply huge amounts of genetic modification. Baseline women are borne with every ovum they're ever going to have.

2) Sure, that sounds possible, but would eliminate the accidental pregnancy possibility, de facto. Honor would have to be a complete idiot.

3) Seems likely to me, based on the complete lack of mention of medical intervention to let Allison bear Faith and James. I'm actually guessing it never gets mentioned because Weber is a dude and didn't really think through the implications of prolong on women's biology, but that's meta-explanation, not in-universe.

4) This could work, except Honor would, again, have to be a complete fucking idiot. If we accept the timeline as written, then Honor started being fertile again while she was on Hades. If her contraceptive implant stopped working during that time, she'd start menstruating, when she did not before. Again, maybe Weber didn't think this through because he's a dude, and didn't think through female biology, but menstruation is the kind of thing a person fucking notices. There's no way Honor (on a jungle planet with limited supplies) didn't notice starting her period again (along with the resultant dehydration, which would be actually dangerous where they parked their shuttles).

5) Possible, but that seems like the most outlandish possibility, compared to what the rest of prolong "does", in effects.

[Crazedwraith]

They can regenerate whole limbs and stuff. Surely ova would be relatively simple to regen?

[Ahriman238]

"Let me get this straight, Kevin," she said very quietly. "You're telling me you think we may have gone back to war against the Manties not because they altered our diplomatic traffic, but because we did?"

"Yes." Usher's always deep voice sounded like a gravel crusher, and he inhaled deeply. "I'm not saying I'm convinced that's what happened, but I'm afraid it may be, Danny."

"Why?" she demanded.

"Partly because of Wilhelm's reports." Usher tipped back in his float chair. "We lost a lot of our best conduits when we took down Saint-Just's organization, but he's still got a few sources in place inside the Manty Foreign Office. Not as highly placed as they were, but high enough to have access to the sorts of insider shop talk permanent assistant undersecretaries get to hear. And according to them, everyone—everyone, from the top down—is convinced we did it."

Kevin Usher has a suspicious mind.

"There are other factors—straws in the wind, you might say. One is how well I know the players on our side."

"Boss, I hate Giancola's guts myself. And I wouldn't be too surprised at anything he did. But much as I might like him as the baddie for this one, I think you're reaching. First of all, he's smart. He has to know that sooner or later whoever wins this war's going to get her hands on the other side's diplomatic archives. Second, however much I may despise and distrust him, I don't see even him as deliberately starting a war just to serve his own personal political ambitions. Especially not when there's no way to be sure we're going to win the damned thing. And, third, how the hell could he have pulled it off without someone else at State realizing he'd altered the original notes?"

"I never said he was stupid," Usher said mildly. "And taking your first and second points together, I also never said he deliberately set out to start a war. If my more paranoid suspicions are on track, what he wanted was to create a crisis he could then successfully 'resolve' as a demonstration of his own competence and tough-mindedness to strengthen his hand when he runs for the presidency a few years down the road. If he'd managed to pull off what I think he was after, there wouldn't have been a war, and neither side would have access to the other's archives. At the very least, it would probably have been decades before anyone had a chance to compare originals."

You're there, Kevin, you're there! Now get out there and prove it.

"Maybe so, but there's still the question of how he could have pulled it off." Abrioux shook her head. "Somehow he'd have had to alter at least the Manty originals after they were received and logged in. And given what the Manties have published as their version of our correspondence, he would have had to alter that from the version the President and the rest of the Cabinet had seen before it was sent, as well."

"Altering the outgoing correspondence wouldn't have been difficult," Usher responded. "He has personal, direct access to the traffic. He's the Secretary of State, after all! And he also has access to the State Department's internal recordkeeping, chip-shredding, and security systems. And, yes," he waved one hand, cutting off her interruption, "I know he still should have stubbed his toe after the Manties published their version of the documents. After all, our 'Special Envoy' also had access to the documents actually delivered to Manticore. He must know whether or not what they've published matches the notes he actually delivered. And Mr. Grosclaude hasn't said a word to indicate they did. Which means that either the documents they're publishing are, indeed, false, or . . ."

"Or else Grosclaude was in on it, too." Abrioux's dark eyes narrowed thoughtfully, and Usher nodded.

Technique for arranging the substitution.

"Even if I manage to establish that," she went on after a moment, "the mere fact he had access to the key wouldn't prove he actually did anything with it."

"It might. Or, at least, it would be highly suggestive. Enough so for me to feel confident about showing probable cause."

"How?"

"Because the only key the original diplomatic note I saw carried was the one we've managed to compromise," Usher said grimly. "It's not unheard of for a note, even a high-level one, not to carry the Foreign Secretary's personal key, but it is unusual. So suppose we're able to establish that Giancola had, in his possession, the general key. And suppose we go back and examine all of the disputed correspondence and we find that none of the Manty originals carried Descroix's personal key?"

"Probable cause out the ying-yang," Abrioux said softly.

"Bingo." Usher raised his coffee cup in ironic salute, took a sip, and then smiled thinly at her.

Yes!

Brigham sat beside Honor, next to the hatch, and Honor nodded in silent agreement with her chief of staff as she studied the ponderous mountain of battle steel drifting against the stars, glittering with the brilliant pinpricks of its own riding lights. HMS Imperator was a far cry from Honor's last flagship. The better part of two megatons larger, massively armored, without the hatch-studded flanks of a CLAC. One of the new Invictus-class ships, Imperator was one of the dozen or so most powerful warships in existence. Unfortunately, her class was also far smaller than originally projected, thanks to all the incomplete Invictuses which had been destroyed in their building slips in Grendelsbane.

Honor's new flagship and Rafe's new command, the Invictus-class Imperator. There is now a tall figure dressed in black that paces impatiently on the bridge of an Imperator. Exactly like Darth Vader.

The other five units of her squadron—two more Invictus-class ships, and three of the older but still formidable Medusa-class SD(P)s—orbited San Martin in company with the fleet flagship. Just beyond Imperator, she saw HMS Intransigent, Alistair McKeon's squadron flagship, and she smiled fondly at the sight. If anyone deserved a flag, it was certainly Alistair, she thought. And she couldn't think of anyone she would rather have watching her back.

How many I-quality names can there be? McKeon will command Honor's short squadron of podnoughts.

Her pinnace decelerated to a halt relative to Imperator, then rolled on its gyros as the superdreadnought's boat bay tractors locked on. They drew the small craft steadily in, then deposited it with scarcely a tremor in the docking arms. The boarding tube ran out to mate with the hatch collar, and the service umbilicals extended themselves and locked into the proper receptacles aboard the pinnace as Honor gazed through the transparent armorplast of the boat bay gallery at the waiting side party.

"Good seal," the flight engineer informed the flight deck crew, studying her panel.

"Crack the hatch," the pilot replied, and the hatch slid open.

Just don't remember seeing a full pinnace docking sequence in the series before.

The Royal Manticoran Navy's tradition that the most senior officer boarded last and disembarked first was ironclad . . . for most people, at least, she thought with a slight grimace. As usual, things weren't quite that simple for Steadholder Harrington, but she'd won at least one concession from LaFollet. She got to swim the tube first, then her armsmen broke into the traditional disembarkment queue.

Boarding and exiting shuttle rules, as modified for Honor's armsmen.

"Have we met, Commander?" Honor asked.

"Uh, no, Your Grace," she said hastily. She seemed to hesitate, then smiled tautly. "You did meet my father once, though. The same time Glenn did."

Honor frowned, then her eyes widened.

"Yes, Your Grace," Neukirch said more naturally. "Father stayed in the Star Kingdom after Casimir."

Rafe's astrogator is the daughter of a slave Honor and the crew of Hawkwing rescued decades ago.

"I've often considered visiting Masada myself. Colonel LaFollet here—" she gestured at her senior armsman "—doesn't seem to feel that would be the smartest decision I ever made, however."

"On balance," Lorenzetti replied, deliberately using her own choice of phrase, "I'd have to agree with him, Your Grace. Things have improved a lot just in the time since I was first stationed there, but there's still a nasty underground ticking away. And, with all due respect, you're probably one of the three or four people they'd most like to assassinate. The real fanatics would pull out all the stops if they knew you were coming."

Just a snippet of the situation on Masada, now under foreign occupation, what, fifteen, maybe sixteen years? At the very least, they've unlikely to threaten Grayson again in the foreseeable future.

It was as near to a hand-picked command team as anyone was likely to be able to come under the current circumstances. Alice Truman, Alistair McKeon, and Michelle Henke—commanding her carriers, her "wall of battle" (such as it was, and what there was of it), and her most powerful battlecruiser squadron, respectively—were all known quantities. Vice Admiral Samuel Miklós commanded the second of Eighth Fleet's two CLAC squadrons—Truman herself commanded the other, as well as the entire carrier force—and Rear Admiral Matsuzawa Hirotaka commanded Honor's second battlecruiser squadron. Rear Admiral Winston Bradshaw and Commodore Charise Fanaafi commanded her two heavy cruiser squadrons, and Commodore Mary Lou Moreau commanded her attached flotilla of light cruisers, while Captain Josephus Hastings was present as her senior destroyer captain.

She knew Matsuzawa and Moreau personally, although not well; Miklós, Bradshaw, Fanaafi, and Hastings were complete newcomers to her command team, but all of them had excellent records. Perhaps even more importantly, given the nature of their mission, all of them had already demonstrated flexibility, adaptiveness, and the ability to display intelligent initiative.

Michelle Henke will be commanding Her majesty's Eighty-First Battlecruiser Squadron, ie. all of Manticore's present BC(P)s. She's got the carrier goddess along with the greatest concentration of carriers in the RMN right now. It's a start.

"Commodore Brigham, Captain Jaruwalski, and I have given considerable thought to the most appropriate initial targets for our attention. This isn't simply a military operation. Or, rather, it's a military operation with a political dimension of which we must be well aware. Specifically, we want the Havenites to divert forces to provide rear security against our raids. That means balancing vulnerability of target against economic and industrial value, but it also requires us to think about which target systems are most likely to generate political pressure to divert enemy strike forces to defensive employment.

"I'm confident we can find such targets, but accomplishing our objective is almost certainly going to require us to operate widely dispersed attack forces, at least in our initial operations. That means we're going to be relying very heavily on the judgment and ability of our junior flag officers—more heavily than we'd originally anticipated. I know the quality of my squadron commanders, but I'm less familiar with your divisional commanders, and, unfortunately, the pressure to begin operations is going to sharply restrict the time we have to get to know one another through exercises. Which means, of course, that I'm going to be relying heavily on all of you to provide the insight about your subordinates which I won't have time to develop for myself."

Picking their targets, and dispersing the Fleet.

"Look at the record, Mike. Of our graduating class, thirty percent have attained at least junior flag rank; another forty percent are captains, over half of them senior-grade; and fifteen percent are dead or medically retired. Are you seriously going to tell me that if you were another officer, evaluating your record and your performance, you wouldn't rate your command ability as being in the top thirty percent of our classmates? You do remember some of the idiots who graduated at the same time we did, don't you?"

Henke's lips twitched at the acid tone in which Honor delivered her last sentence, but she also shook her head.

"I'm not saying I'm not qualified to be a commodore, or even a rear admiral. What bothers me is that I just got command of the one and only squadron of pod-laying battlecruisers in the entire Royal Navy. If you aren't aware of how cutthroat competition for this slot was, I certainly am."

Henke is uncomfortable with the idea that she got a prized slot through nepotism, or whatever the friendship-based version of that is. Honor actually manages to deal with this maturely and reassure her that Lucian Cortez himself suggested her for the slot when Honor asked if Henke were available.

"Oh, officially I'm here for Doctor Arif. She's drafted me for her commission, as a representative of the medical profession who's as close to an expert on treecats as she can find. I kicked and screamed about how busy I am on Grayson, but it didn't do me much good. And, actually, it's fascinating watching Samantha and the other memory singers working with her to demonstrate their value. At the very least, it's going to revolutionize psychotherapy here in the Star Kingdom, and I think the implications for law enforcement may be at least equally significant. But for the official record, I'm here to talk to you—and Hamish, when he gets home this evening—about your experiences with Samantha for a paper I'm putting together. I'm supposed to present it to the commission next Wednesday."

Treecats' empathic abilities would doubtlessly be priceless in psychotherapy, law enforcement, diplomacy....

Emily's eyebrows rose. One of the things about artificial gestation which the medical profession had learned the hard way was the necessity of providing the developing fetus with the physical and aural stimulation the child would have received in its mother's womb. Heartbeat, random environmental sounds, movement, and—most importantly of all, in many ways—the sound of its mother's voice.

"Honor and I have made selections from several of her letters to me and to her father," Allison continued. "She's also found time to record several hours of poetry and a few of her favorite childhood stories. And she insisted that my voice, and her father's, should also be included. Just as she very, very much wants her child to hear the voices of its father . . . and both its mothers."

D'aaw. Recording sounds for the fetus to hear.

"You know what Honor's been through in terms of physical injury. Nothing that's happened to her was as severe as what happened to you, but it was more than enough to make her worry about passing her inability to regenerate on to her children. Fortunately for her, her mother happens—if I may be pardoned for blowing my own horn—to be one of the Star Kingdom's leading geneticists. I made identifying the gene group which prevents her from regenerating a personal project, and I found it years ago. The problem child is a dominant, unfortunately, but it's not associated with the locked sequences of the Meyerdahl modifications—if it were, Alfred wouldn't regenerate either, and he does—so it's not automatically selected for at fertilization. Once I'd determined that, I also determined that she carries it only on the chromosome she received from her father, and I've done a scan on her child. As a result of which, I was able to reassure her that she hasn't passed it along to him."

"Him?" Despite her own whiplashing emotions, Emily fastened on the personal pronoun.

"Oh, crap!" Allison shook her head, her expression suddenly disgusted. "Forget you heard that," she commanded. "Honor doesn't want to know yet. Which, if you'll pardon my saying so, is fairly silly. I always wanted to know as soon as possible."

It's a boy! And Allison Harrington has isolated the genetic sequence that keeps some people from regenerating.

"Because my full family name is Benton-Ramirez y Chou," Allison said, and Emily's eyes widened.

Of all the medical "dynasties" of Beowulf, acknowledged throughout explored space as the preeminent queen of the life-sciences, the Benton-Ramirez and Chou families stood at the very pinnacle. They were Beowulf, with a multigenerational commitment to the field of genetic medicine which stretched back to well before Old Earth's Final War. George Benton and Sebastiana Ramirez y Moyano had actually led the Beowulf teams to Old Earth to battle the hideous consequences of the Final War's bioweapons, and Chou Keng-ju had led the bioethics fight against Leonard Detweiler and the other "progressive eugenics" advocates six centuries ago. Among the many jewels in the crown of their families' achievements since was a leading role in the development of the prolong process itself. And—

"Well," she said, mildly, after a moment, "at least I finally understand exactly where Honor's rather . . . volcanic attitude towards the genetic slave trade and Manpower comes from, don't I?"

Allison's lineage, with it's deep roots in Beowulf history and medical science.

Now the autopilot dipped the air car slightly, dropping a bit lower to give him a better view, and he felt a familiar stir of enjoyment as the rocky, tree-crowned cliffs loomed up on either side of his prow.

And at that moment, something very peculiar happened.

Yves Grosclaude felt something almost like a mental tickle. As if someone were running a finger down his spine, except that it was behind his eyes somewhere. He started to frown, but then the frown vanished into another expression entirely.

He'd never noticed the almost microscopic capsule which had somehow found its way into the yogurt he'd enjoyed with his supper two nights ago. He hadn't been looking for anything of the sort, never suspected anything like it was remotely possible.

Nor was it . . . for the Republic's tech base. That capsule's contents had been well beyond the capability of Haven's own scientists, and as the capsule itself disintegrated in his digestive tract, submicroscopic virus-based nanotech had infiltrated his bloodstream. They'd traveled to his brain, seeking very specifically targeted sections of it, and then waited.

For this specific moment.

Yves Grosclaude jerked in his seat as the tiny invaders executed their programmed instructions. They did no physical damage at all; they simply invaded his body's "operating system" and overwrote it with instructions of their own.

He watched helplessly, screaming in the silence of his mind, as his hands switched off the autopilot. They settled on the stick and throttle, and his eyes bulged in silent horror as his right hand wrenched the stick suddenly to the right even as his left rammed the throttle to the wall.

The vehicle was still accelerating when it struck a vertical cliff face head-on at well over eight hundred kilometers per hour.

Grosclaude, former ambassador to Manticore, is murdered with the Mesan 'lone gunman' nanites.

[VhenRa]

And unfortunately... did it in a way it makes it look like the Haven government assassinated him. (Tragic Aircar accident, favourite of the old SS and other internal security agencies of the old People's Republic)

[Simon_Jester]

They can regenerate whole limbs and stuff. Surely ova would be relatively simple to regen?

Twenty percent of the human race, including Honor, has a genetic incompatibility with the regen process.

1) would imply huge amounts of genetic modification. Baseline women are borne with every ovum they're ever going to have.

Agreed. Unless that trait is unusual in humans, it would be hard to modify out. I just threw the idea out there because it's at least conceivable.

2) Sure, that sounds possible, but would eliminate the accidental pregnancy possibility, de facto. Honor would have to be a complete idiot.

Honestly, Honor has to be a complete idiot in any case to not have so much as had a conversation with her GP about her contraceptive implant status. She has to know the thing hasn't been updated since the halcyon days when Haven still thought FTL comms were an unfounded rumor.

3) Seems likely to me, based on the complete lack of mention of medical intervention to let Allison bear Faith and James. I'm actually guessing it never gets mentioned because Weber is a dude and didn't really think through the implications of prolong on women's biology, but that's meta-explanation, not in-universe.

Yes.

4) This could work, except Honor would, again, have to be a complete fucking idiot. If we accept the timeline as written, then Honor started being fertile again while she was on Hades. If her contraceptive implant stopped working during that time, she'd start menstruating, when she did not before. Again, maybe Weber didn't think this through because he's a dude, and didn't think through female biology, but menstruation is the kind of thing a person fucking notices. There's no way Honor (on a jungle planet with limited supplies) didn't notice starting her period again (along with the resultant dehydration, which would be actually dangerous where they parked their shuttles).

Well, the implant didn't necessarily run out on Hades proper, and could easily have run out later, but this is still true; Honor would damn sure notice her menstrual cycle firing up again. I wonder if it's biochemically possible to have the cycle without actually having ovulation, the release of an egg from the ovary. Although conversely, I think a lot of women would be just as glad to shut the symptomatic aspects of the cycle down entirely if they had the chance.

5) Possible, but that seems like the most outlandish possibility, compared to what the rest of prolong "does", in effects.

Yes, but there's no obvious reason it couldn't be done- not so much as part of prolong, but as a supplementary treatment to prolong, or even something that is routinely done for all women and has been for centuries because it prevents menopause.
_________________________________

How many I-quality names can there be? McKeon will command Honor's short squadron of podnoughts.

Illustrious, Irresistible, Invincible, Indomitable, just off the top of my head. I doubt they'll name the whole class that way, though...

It's a boy! And Allison Harrington has isolated the genetic sequence that keeps some people from regenerating.

Or one of them, anyway.

Grosclaude, former ambassador to Manticore, is murdered with the Mesan 'lone gunman' nanites.

Also, what it's like to be hijacked by the stuff. Yech.

[Ahriman238]

"It's about the diplomatic correspondence the Manties altered," he said.

"What about it?"

"Actually, what I ought to have said," Usher replied, "is that it's about the diplomatic correspondence the Manties are alleged to have altered."

For an instant, Pritchart felt only puzzled by his choice of words. Then an icy dagger seemed to run down her spine.

"What do you mean 'alleged'?" she demanded harshly. "I saw the originals. I know they were altered."

"Oh, they certainly were," Usher agreed grimly. "Unfortunately, I've begun to have some serious questions about just who did the altering."

"My God." Pritchart knew her face had gone white. "Please, Kevin. Please don't tell me what it sounds like you're about to tell me."

All things considered, Prichart takes it rather well.

"Exactly." Abrioux nodded back. "The fact that he had an accomplice was, frankly, the one real chink I could see in his armor. I'm sure there has to be other physical evidence, but we're up against the need to show probable cause before we can go looking for it. If I could pull Grosclaude in and sweat him a little, put a little pressure on him, he might give Giancola up. Or, he might at least provide me with something concrete to lend at least some credence to the rather preposterous scenario the Director had come up with. On the other hand, I needed to approach him a bit cautiously, hopefully without Giancola figuring out I was interested in him at all.

"Unfortunately, either I wasn't cautious enough, or else Giancola's had his own plans for Grosclaude all along."

"Meaning what?" Pritchart demanded when she paused with a chagrined expression.

"Meaning Mr. Grosclaude was killed in a single-air car accident four nights ago," Usher said flatly.

"Oh, shit," Pritchart said with soft yet deadly feeling. "An air car accident?"

"I know. I know!" Usher shook his head. "It's like some sort of bad joke, isn't it? After all the inconvenient people StateSec disappeared in mysterious one-air car accidents, this is going to be just peachy keen when we have to go public, isn't it?"

Like VhenRa said, a lot of people inconvenient to the Legislaturists, and then to StateSec died in aircar accidents, so it's rather inconvenient when they try and explain the war was all their fault, or rather, it was the guy who died in an air car accident.

"I've tapped very quietly into the investigation of his death, Madam President," Abrioux replied for Usher. "I've kept my interest in it entirely black, which has required calling in quite a few old markers. But the crash investigation team has been through the wreckage of his air car—which, by the way, was reduced to very small pieces—very, very carefully without finding any indication of any sort of mechanical or electronic sabotage. The black boxes came through more or less intact, and they all agree that for some unknown reason, Grosclaude suddenly disengaged his autopilot, put the throttle right through the gate, and flew straight into a near vertical cliff. He impacted at a speed somewhere around Mach one."

"He did what?" Pritchart sat up straight and frowned at the senior inspector.

"There's no question, Madam President. And there's also no explanation. That's one reason the Director and I didn't come to you sooner; we kept hoping we'd find something significantly bogus. But the weather was clear, visibility was good, and there was no other traffic on or near his flight path at the time; the crash team's pulled the air traffic satellite records to confirm that. There's no sign anyone tampered with his vehicle in any way, and there's absolutely no indication of any external factor which could have inspired him to do what he did. At the moment, to be perfectly honest, the crash team is leaning towards the theory that it was a suicide."

"Oh, that's just wonderful!" Pritchart snarled, fear and the sudden cold suspicion that she'd gone back to war because of a lie driving her into an uncharacteristically savage fury. "So now we're not even claiming it was an 'accident.' Now we're going to tell the galaxy our suspect fucking committed suicide! That's going to give us a lot more credibility when we try to pin anything on him!"

Yeah. Also, their ability to backtrace these things is impressive, and aircars have black boxes.

"The medical examiner, however, did note that there appeared to be 'unidentifiable organic traces and DNA markers' in one of the blood samples."

"Meaning what?" Pritchart's expression was intent.

"Meaning we don't know what the hell what," Usher replied. "When he says 'unidentifiable,' that's exactly what he means. All the organic elements he's picked up on could be explained away by a simple case of the flu, except that there's no indication of it in any of the other samples. If you really want to wade through his report, I can get you a copy of it, but I doubt it will mean anything more to you than it did to me. The key element, though, seems to be the DNA he turned up. There's been some speculation in Solarian medical literature for a while now about the possibility of viral nanotech."

"Are they insane?" Pritchart demanded incredulously. "Didn't those lunatics learn anything from the Final War?"

"I don't know. It's not my field, by two or three light-years. But apparently the people doing the speculating believe it should be at least theoretically possible to control their viruses and prevent unwanted mutations. After all, we've managed the same sort of thing with nanotech for centuries now."

"Because the damned things don't have DNA and don't reproduce even in medical applications!" Pritchart said snappishly.

"I didn't say I thought it was a good idea, Eloise," Usher said. "I just said there's been some Solly speculation about the possibilities. As far as I'm aware, and I've done some judicious research on the subject since Danny brought me the blood workup results, it's all purely theoretical at the moment. And even if the Sollies can do it, there's no one here in the Republic who could. So assuming these highly ambiguous results—found, I remind you, in only one of the blood samples—mean Grosclaude was murdered using that sort of technology, where the hell did Giancola get access to it?"

Solly speculation into things like the lone gunman nano. Kevin thinks this is what happened to Grosclaude, but good luck proving it.

"If we're going to accuse Arnold Giancola of what I'm almost certain he did, we've got to have proof. Not suspicions, however profound. Not hypotheses, however convincing. Proof. Without that, he and his partisans—and he has a lot of them, as we all know—are going to scream we're simply pulling a StateSec. We're concocting ludicrous charges against a political adversary as a pretext for purging your opposition. Anyone who actually knows you would realize how preposterous that was, but by the time the spin masters on both sides get done with it, no one outside your immediate circle is going to be sure of that. Which means we might just find Giancola and his supporters seeking to topple your administration on the basis that they're the ones protecting the Constitution from abuse and manipulation. And if he can generate enough confusion, drum up enough support, the consequences for everything we've been trying to accomplish could be very, very ugly."

A very valid fear. So get to work on finding proof.

"It's probably even worse than you're thinking," Pritchart said unhappily. "This war's incredibly popular at the moment. I hadn't realized how much public opinion wants to get our own back against the Manties for the way they kicked our ass in the last round. And at the moment, there's absolutely no question in Congress that the Manties manipulated the diplomatic exchanges. Why should there be? I personally certified that there wasn't!

"So what happens if I suddenly go before Congress and announce that we're the guilty parties after all? Suppose I tell the Senate's Foreign Affairs Committee we went back to war—with Congress' enthusiastic support—on the basis of a lie told not by the Manties, but by our own Secretary of State?"

"I have absolutely no idea," Usher admitted frankly. Abrioux shook her head, as well. Unlike Usher, however, her expression was that of someone who was entirely certain she was involved with something way, way above her pay grade.

"The first thing that's going to happen," Pritchart told him with absolute certainty, "is that they're going to refuse to believe it. Even with the sort of proof you've already pointed out we need, it would take time—probably quite a bit of it—to convince a majority of Congress of what really happened. And that assumes a majority of Congress is willing to be open-minded enough to even entertain the possibility. Don't forget how many friends Arnold has over there.

"But even if Congress buys our version of it, we're winning the damned war. At least, that's the way it looks right now, and Congress as a whole is absolutely convinced we are. So even if it turns out the shooting started because one of our own cabinet officers deliberately manipulated, falsified, and forged diplomatic notes, there's going to be a sizable number of senators and representatives who don't care. What they're going to see is that this time it's the Manties on the ropes, and there's no way in hell they're going to be willing for us to drop an e-mail to Elizabeth Winton saying 'Oops. Sorry about the misunderstanding. Let's all make nice now.' Especially not if that means—as it damned well ought to, if Arnold's done what you—we—think he has—that the Republic publicly acknowledges its war guilt. And if we make what we believe happened public knowledge, we've got to acknowledge our guilt if we're ever going to convince the rest of the galaxy we're not still the People's Republic of Haven."

And then there's the political complexities of stopping the war, even if they go public. So the official order is: we can't go public without rock-solid proof, but do whatever you've got to get that proof because if it exists we can't afford not to go public.

"I don't like spreading our forces this thinly," she continued more seriously, looking back at her subordinates as MacGuiness silently withdrew from the dining cabin of Imperator's enormous admiral's quarters. "But we've got to get this op moving. We've been sitting here for over three weeks since we finally activated the command, and we still don't have our entire assigned order of battle. Part of me wants to go right on waiting until we do, so we'd have the strength to hit better-defended targets, but we can't. And given the pressure to move, it's probably as good a distribution as we could hope to come up with."

State of Eighth Fleet and high time they got moving forward, enough ships or not. To further complicate matters, they've breaking into small groups to hit multiple targets.

"I know." Honor sipped cocoa, letting her mind run back over the framework of the operation which had been assigned the randomly generated codename of "Cutworm." It was a silly name, but no sillier than "Operation Buttercup" had been. And unlike some navies—including, apparently, the Havenite fleet, upon occasion—the Royal Manticoran Navy had a pretty good track record for selecting operational designators which didn't give clues as to what those operations were intended to do.

Random word generator for naming Manticoran military operations. So while Haven has always had great classical or martial operation names; Perseus, Stalking Horse, Dagger, Icarus, Scylla and Thunderbolt, Manticore has things like Buttercup and Cutworm. Mind, they kind of reduce the efficacy of this by doing like, four Operation Cutworms before changing it up.

"About that," he agreed. "We could go sooner if Unicorn and Sprite had gotten here on schedule. But—"

Are they just running out of monster names for the carriers? I'm sure they can think of something more threatening sounding than Unicorn and Sprite.

"That's what I was thinking." Truman nodded. "And on that basis, I think we're in pretty good shape. But if you don't mind, Sam, I've got some training scenarios I'd like to upload to your carriers, as well." Miklós looked faintly curious, and she gave him a rather nasty grin. "It would appear our good Captain Tremaine has pretty accurately deduced what we're going to be doing. He and Chief Harkness have put together some simulator packages built around individual LAC groups."

"Scotty and Harkness?" Brigham laughed. "Why do I find that particular combination of authors just a bit ominous, Ma'am?"

"Because you know them?" Honor suggested.

Yep.

"We'll just have to maximize the edges we have," Honor replied. She glanced at Brigham for a moment, then went on. "Mercedes and I haven't mentioned anything about the new targeting systems in our staff sessions, Sir Thomas. We don't like to think about losing people or having them captured, but it can happen, and we decided to restrict that information as tightly as possible. But the last time I spoke to Commander Hennessy, he indicated that Admiral Hemphill's people were planning an all up test over in Gryphon space. Do we have the test results yet?"

"Yes, we do." Caparelli nodded. "I've only seen the preliminary report so far, not the details, but I understand it looked promising. Very promising. No one's talking about deploying it tomorrow, but it's beginning to look like it should be available, at least in small numbers, sometime in the next three to four months."

Just setting up for a later payoff.

"May I also ask how we're coming on the Andermani refits?"

"That's a bit less cheerful," Caparelli replied. "It's not coming along as well as I'd hoped. It's going to take at least a few weeks more than Admiral Hemphill's original projections suggested to get their pod-layers refitted with our old-style MDMs, and the Keyhole modifications to the later ships are going to take even longer. The good news is that we'll probably get a bigger 'python lump' of them delivered in a single shot. Of course," he grimaced, "Silesia's drawing a lot of the Andies' attention just now. Ours, too, for that matter."

The modifications to the Andy ships are taking longer than expected.

"Oh, it's nothing he isn't going to be able to deal with eventually," Caparelli said reassuringly. "But some of the old Silesian administrators obviously didn't really believe us when we told them it wasn't going to go right on being business as usual. And although most of the appointive system governors were simply retired as part of the annexation deal, almost a quarter of the governors were 'freely elected' by their citizens."

"Trust me, Sir Thomas," Honor said dryly, "there was nothing 'free' about an old-style Silesian election. The winning candidate paid cash on the barrel head for every one of those votes."

"I know, I know. But we can't simply go in and depose elected governors, however they got themselves elected in the first place, without excellent justifying cause. Some of them are stupid enough to think that will let them get away with running things the old way, and, unfortunately, several of the stupid variety had their local Confederacy Navy command structure firmly in their pockets under the previous régime. There's been a lot of passive resistance to Admiral Sarnow's instructions to decommission so many of their older units, obsolescent pieces of junk or not. And there's been even more resistance and obstructionism to his policy of completely reshuffling the star systems' command staffs. He's made a couple of salutary examples which seem to be convincing all but the most brain-dead we mean business, but unfortunately, we can't account for almost thirty percent of the Confeds' official ship list."

"Thirty percent, Sir?" Surprise startled the question out of Mercedes Brigham, despite her relative lack of seniority, and Caparelli chuckled with very little humor.

"It's nowhere near as bad as that sounds, Commodore," he reassured her. "At least half—more probably two-thirds—of the ships we can't account for were long gone before we ever came along. Hell, one of the more audacious system governors and his local naval commander were listing an entire squadron of battlecruisers—eight ships, and the next best thing to twenty thousand personnel—as present on active duty when they didn't even exist! The two of them, and maybe a half dozen other officers they needed to maintain the charade, were pocketing the nonexistent crews' salaries, not to mention every penny that was supposedly being spent on ammunition, reactor mass, maintenance, etc."

Big trouble in little Silesia. Passive-aggressiveness, resistance to administrative changes, and a number of ships that have simply gone pirate. Admittedly, I respect the chutzpah of the people who invented a BC squadron to pocket their pay and maintenance expenses.

"And then, of course, there's always Talbott."

"Are the reports about terrorist operations accurate, Sir?" Honor asked quietly.

"I think they've probably been sensationalized a bit by the media, and so far they're highly localized, but, yes. There've been some ugly incidents, especially in the Split System. Admiral Khumalo isn't exactly the sharpest stylus in the box, either, I'm afraid. Not a bad administrator, under most circumstances, but not really the right man to have on the spot when there's blood in the streets. Fortunately, Baroness Medusa is quite the opposite."

Connection to SoS, seem to have gotten a bit ahead of that book.

"Your mother and I had a very interesting discussion when she told me you wanted my voice, as well as Hamish's, for the Briarwood recordings. The fact that you did meant a lot to me. But, in some ways, what your mother had to say meant even more. Hamish and I have an appointment of our own over there next week."

Emily Alexander will also be using a uterine replicator to have a child.

"I was tempted a time or two, I'll admit. It's hard to imagine someone who could have been a bigger snot than Franz Illescue at twenty-five. He comes from one of the best medical families here in the Star Kingdom—his family's been physicians ever since the Plague Years—and he wasn't about to let a mere yeoman from Sphinx forget about it. Especially not a yeoman who was being sent to med school by the Navy. He was one of those people who thought the only reason people joined the Navy was because they couldn't get jobs in the 'real world.' I understand he's mellowed a bit with time, but the two of us were like a leaking hydrogen canister and a spark when we were younger."

"Tell her everything, Alfred," Allison admonished.

"Oh, well, there was one other minor matter," Alfred said. "He'd asked your mother out once or twice before I came along."

Why Honor's doctor was giving her the stink-eye earlier.

"Tim, general signal to all flag officers. They're all invited to supper. We should just about have time for that before we all pull out."

One last working supper. Next time we'll look at Operation Cutworm.

[Darth Nostril]

"About that," he agreed. "We could go sooner if Unicorn and Sprite had gotten here on schedule. But—"

Are they just running out of monster names for the carriers? I'm sure they can think of something more threatening sounding than Unicorn and Sprite.

Ah but think of the humiliation factor for the enemy.
Poring over the data records from the handful of survivors who escaped a Mantie taskforce.

"We our arses kicked by the HMS fucking Unicorn?!?! Those bastards are just taking the fucking piss now!!"

[Batman]

Besides, could've been much worse. They could have called the ship 'HMS Tinkerbell'. Heck now I'm half-hoping that's going to happen to some Solly task force or other in the future. "We got our asses handed to us by a pixie? '

[Ahriman238]

"Whatever they are, they've gone into stealth."

"Damn," Beauchamp muttered. He let his chair swing back and forth in a tight arc for a few seconds, then shook his head. "All right, Chief. How much did we get?"

"Not much, Sir," Torricelli admitted. "We only had them on sensors for about eight minutes, and like Lowell says, that's an awful long way out for any kind of detail. Best I can tell you is they weren't anything really big. Might've been a pair of light cruisers, but it looked more like destroyers, from the little we got."

Honor's scouting Hera with two destroyers, Skirmisher and Ambuscade. Haven sees the hyper-footprint and sees them about eight minutes before they drop to stealth. It's not enough to positively identify their classes. The two destroyers immediately deploy sensor platforms and hang out in system for two days.

The chief of staff wasn't happy about how much wear and tear they'd put on their LAC personnel. The LACs were the only search platforms they had with a chance of running down something as elusive—and fast—as a stealthed Manty destroyer. Unfortunately, they didn't have very many of them, and as the last two days had demonstrated, even their chance was a piss poor one without at least some sort of sensor clue to give them an edge.

LAC sweeps to find the tin cans, but as we've mentioned, a star system is a very big haystack.

"Damn. Who would've expected the bastards here?"

That, Tucker thought, was a very good question. The Hera System was just over sixty light-years from Trevor's Star . . . and barely thirty light-years from the Haven System itself. That was closer to the capital system than the Manties had ever come, even during Operation Buttercup, but Hera was scarcely a major bastion like the Lovat System. It was important, true, but clearly a second-tier system: a significant industrial node, but not vital enough to demand a heavy fleet presence for its security. Especially not when it was only four days from the capital itself, which meant it could be quickly reinforced in the unlikely event that the Manties managed to mount a second Buttercup.

Hera's position on the map, which probably played as much a role as the industry and lack of security in Honor's planning. These raids have political objectives, remember, to inspire Havenite sectors and planets to start bleating for the protection of modern ships the way Manticore's allies are. And being four days' flight from Haven itself just means there's six more days until any possible reinforcements could arrive.

"Excuse me, Sir." Both officers turned to face the office door as the duty communications tech appeared in it. "Sorry to disturb you," the young woman continued, her face tight with worry, "but Perimeter Watch just picked up unidentified hyper footprints."

"How many?" Milligan demanded sharply.

"It looks like at least six ships of the wall, split into two groups, Sir," the com tech said. "They're coming in on converging courses, and Captain Beauchamp estimates they're accompanied by six additional cruiser-range vessels."

Milligan's jaw tightened. Six wallers—even six old-style wallers—would go through his "System Command" like a pulser dart through butter. And if they were coming in separated but on converging courses, they undoubtedly meant to pincer any defensive forces between them. However unnecessary that particular refinement might actually be.

Eighth Fleet arrives at Hera. Part of it anyways.

"Sir," Tucker said very quietly, "if this really is six wallers, we're not going to stop them."

"No," Milligan said bleakly. "But if they're doing what I think they are, we couldn't avoid action with them even if we tried."

Tucker started to open his mouth, then changed his mind and nodded, instead.

"Get with Stiller," Milligan continued. "I want an immediate evacuation of the entire orbital infrastructure. I'll get Shelton to confirm that when I speak to him."

"And our civilian shipping, Sir?"

"Anything that's hyper-capable and can reach the hyper limit before the Manties can bring it into range, runs for it. Get that order out immediately. Anything in their way, tries to evade, but I don't want any more dead heroes than I can help. If a ship's crew is ordered to abandon or, God help us, simply fired on, I want them to take to the boats immediately."

Orders for all the civilians in the firing line.

"How many? What class?" he barked.

"We can't say yet, Sir," the ops officer replied. "Looks like a couple of ships of the wall—might be CLACs, instead—with at least a dozen battlecruisers or cruisers. Probably at least a couple of destroyers, as well. And—" she turned to look Beach straight in the eye, and her voice harshened almost accusingly "—we've got a single destroyer-range impeller signature already in-system and moving to meet them."

Beach's jaw tightened, and anger sparkled in his eyes. But angry as he was at Commander Inchman, he knew even more of his anger was directed at himself. Inchman had tried to convince him that the "sensor ghost" the arrays had picked up two days ago was really there, but Beach had disagreed. Oh, it had looked like a hyper footprint, but almost a full light-hour beyond the system hyper limit? At that range, given the rudimentary state of Gaston's sensor net, it could have been almost anything. And whatever it was, it had vanished within minutes of appearing in the first place.

And at the same time we'll be covering the battle at Gaston, where the local commander dismissed the idea they were being scouted.

"I hope the other groups' timing is as good," Andrea Jaruwalski said from Honor's other side, and Honor glanced at her. "I know it doesn't really matter all that much in the greater scheme of things, Your Grace," the ops officer said with a crooked smile, "but this is opening night, so to speak. I want our audience to appreciate all the trouble we've gone to in order to impress them."

"Oh, I imagine they'll get the message," Honor said with a half-smile of her own. She could taste Jaruwalski's excitement and anticipation, and the information from her scouting destroyers' spy mission strongly suggested that Hera was going to prove a case of severe overkill. No wonder the captain was confident of success.

So was Honor. In fact, she'd suspected from the beginning that they were bringing along more firepower than was going to be required. But Hera was the closest of their targeted systems to Nouveau Paris, and this was the only attack going in without any carrier support at all. So she'd brought along Alistair McKeon's entire squadron . . . in no small part to make the point to Thomas Theisman that the Alliance could—and would—operate even its most modern superdreadnoughts aggressively this deep behind the front line systems. But, unlike Jaruwalski, Honor wasn't really looking forward to what they were about to do.

Or to killing all the men and women who were about to die.

Why Honor took all the podnoughts to Hera.

"It's confirmed, Sir." Captain Beauchamp's expression was grim on the com screen connecting Milligan's flag bridge to the system's planet-side Defense Headquarters. "Bogey Alpha is two superdreadnoughts and three big heavy cruisers—they look like the new Saganami-Cs. Bogey Beta is four SDs and three light cruisers. From the emissions signatures, two of Beta's wallers are Medusa-class SD(P)s. We don't have positive IDs on Beta's other SD, or on either of Alpha's, but all three of them are even bigger than a Medusa."

Aside from the 6 SDs, Honor brought three heavy and three light cruisers. But thin on screen there.

"This is Admiral Honor Harrington, Royal Manticoran Navy," she said levelly. "By this time, you must be aware of the disparity of combat power between your forces and mine. I am here to destroy the industrial infrastructure in this star system, and I will do so, however regretfully. I have no interest in killing anyone when that can be avoided, however. I submit to you that the forces under your command, even assuming—as I do—that they're backed by a substantial number of previously deployed missile pods, can't hope to seriously damage my own units. Your vessels, on the other hand, are little more than targets. Courage alone cannot substitute for tactical inferiority on this scale. You are already inside my powered missile envelope; you won't survive to bring us into your shipboard range. Nor will your LACs survive to reach attack range of us."

She paused for just a moment, then continued in that same level, measured voice.

"It's obvious from your maneuvers to this point that you're prepared to do your duty in defense of this star system, however hopeless you must know that defense to be. I respect that, but I also implore you not to throw away the lives of the men and women under your command. If you continue to close, I will fire on you. If, however, you choose to abandon ship and scuttle at this time, I will not fire upon your small craft or life pods. Nor will I fire upon your LACs if you order them to withdraw and stand down. I'm not asking you to surrender your vessels to me; I'm simply asking you to allow your personnel to live.

"Harrington, clear."

Honor's transmission, as her staff immediately note she doesn't command the defenders to stand down or self-destruct any missile pods, on the basis that total disarmament would be the extra step that would make them reject her offer entirely. To his credit, the local commander accepts the offer because damn his career, he's not throwing away his people's lives to achieve nothing.

As little as five or six T-years earlier, that many missiles, fired at a mere pair of superdreadnoughts, would have been both enormous and deadly. Today, it was different. In an era of pod-laying ships of the wall, missile densities like that had become something defense planners had to take into the routine calculations.

Doctrine and hardware had required major modifications, and the modifying process was an ongoing one. The Mark 31 counter-missiles Honor's ships were firing represented significant improvements even over the Mark 30 counter-missiles her command had used as recently as the Battle of Sidemore, only months before. Their insanely powerful wedges were capable of sustaining accelerations of up to 130,000 gravities for as much as seventy-five seconds, which gave them a powered range from rest of almost 3.6 million kilometers.

Kill numbers at such extreme ranges were problematical, to say the least, and the incoming Havenite missiles were equipped with the very best penetration aids and EW systems Shannon Foraker could build into them. That made them much, much better than anything the People's Navy had possessed during the First Havenite War, but BuShips and BuWeaps hadn't precisely been letting grass grow under their feet, either, Honor thought grimly. Her ships mounted at least three times as many counter-missile launchers as ships of their classes had mounted before the advent of pod-based combat.

1100 inbound MDMs, but these days that's a piddling number. Foraker may have doubled CM launchers on BCs, but Manticore has tripled them on the Invictuses. Also, we get rare counter missile numbers for the latest version, 130,000 Gs for 75 seconds (or 1.25 minutes) giving 3.6 million klick range.

Their telemetry and control links had been increased by an even higher factor, and each of her ships had deployed additional Mark 20 electronics platforms at the ends of dedicated tractor beams. Nicknamed "Keyhole" by the Navy, the Mark 20 wasn't a traditional tethered decoy, or even an additional sensor platform or Ghost Rider EW platform. These platforms were placed much further from the ships which had launched them, and they had only one function—to serve as fire control telemetry relays. They extended well beyond the boundaries of their motherships' impeller wedges, like an old-style wet-navy submarine's periscope, and they gave the tactical crews aboard those ships the ability to look "down" past the blinding interference of their own outgoing counter-missiles' wedges.

To a civilian, that might have sounded like a small thing, but the implications were huge. The Keyhole platforms were massive and expensive, but they allowed a ship to control multiple counter-missiles for each dedicated shipboard fire control "slot." And they also allowed counter-missile launches to be much more tightly spaced, which added significant depth to the antimissile engagement envelope.

Keyhole, which allows them to fire CMs in much tighter salvos without blinding themselves, and control multiple CMs with one 'slot' they'd use for a proper attack bird.

And as a final refinement, the grav-pulse com-equipped reconnaissance arrays deployed in a shell three and a half million kilometers out watched the incoming missiles' EW with eagle eyes, and their FTL data streams provided the missile defense crews aboard Honor's ships a priceless nine-second advantage. Although the missile controllers and their AIs were still limited to light-speed telemetry links, they were able to refine and update targeting solutions with much greater speed and precision than had ever been possible before.

FTL comm platforms give them more time, if just a few seconds of number-crunching, to refine data on their target and the incoming, again this is very much in the spirit of the original Ghost Rider program. Also, the first time I can think of with FTL comm showing serious bandwidth letting them keep track of all of this in nearly real-time.

The first counter-missile launch killed only a hundred and six of the incoming MDMs. The second, intercepting them less than ten seconds later killed another hundred. But the third launch, with almost twenty seconds for its controllers to react, killed three hundred.

* * *

Tom Milligan turned away from the pinnace's tiny display without a word. He returned to his seat, staring out the viewport once again, and his expression was bleak.

One hit, he thought. Surely one frigging hit wasn't too much to ask for!

But the Republic hadn't gotten it. Only forty of Beauchamp's MDMs had broken through the Manties' counter-missiles, and the point defense laser clusters—whose numbers also seemed to have been hugely increased—had blasted those threadbare survivors out of existence well short of attack range.

The magic of FTL comm and Keyhole managed missile defense.

We knew they were improving their antimissile doctrine, but nothing I ever saw suggested that they'd improved it this much! And it's going to play hell with our system defense doctrine.

Yeah, it's going to take serious overkill to hurt these ships.

Honor didn't respond for several seconds. She was gazing into her plot, her eyes picking out the icons of orbital factories, extraction facilities, power satellites, warehouses. By the standards of a wealthy star system like the Manticore home system, or of a major transportation node, like one of the Junction's termini, Hera's orbital and deep-space facilities might seem sparse, but they still represented decades of investment. They were where people worked, what powered over half the star system's economy. They represented literally billions of dollars of investment, and even more earning potential, all in a star nation struggling doggedly to overcome more than a century of ongoing economic disaster.

And she was here to destroy them. All of them.

Hera's orbital industry, interesting that it fuels half the local economy.

"They've got to be battlecruisers," Commander Myron Randall, his chief of staff, replied.

"I know that," Beach said, just a bit impatiently. "But look at the tonnage estimates. According to CIC, these things mass dammed close to two million tons. That's a big dammed battle-cruiser, Myron!"

"The Graysons' Courvoisier IIs mass over a million tons," Randall pointed out.

"Which is still considerably smaller than these are." Beach shook his head. "I'll bet you this is the Manties' version of a pod-laying battlecruiser."

Back to Gaston where they've tentatively identified Henke's BC(P)s.

"Have your people noticed that cluster of blips in Charlie-Two-Seven?" Henke asked, after nodding a welcome to Goodrick.

"You mean the ones just to system north of the refitting platform?" She nodded again, and he shrugged. "We've seen them, but so far we've put them down as just orbital clutter. You know how sloppy a lot of civilian facilities are about disposing of their trash."

"Tell me about it," Henke said sourly. "In this case, though, I don't think that's what it is." Goodrick raised his eyebrows, and she grimaced. "The arrays aren't getting very clear returns off of them. In fact, it looks to us over here as if that could be because we're not supposed to."

"Low-signature platforms?" Truman asked.

"Definitely a possibility," Henke agreed. "Especially if you look at how they're distributed. Captain LaCosta's tactical section agrees with us that they look like what could be missile pods dispersed just widely enough to clear their birds' impeller wedges when they launch."

Stealthy pods, even the Manties largely dismissed them as sensor clutter and space debris, but Henke and her staff are the suspicious sort.

"Since we can't avoid action with them, and since we can't match their engagement range, I want all of our ships moved around to the far side of the planet. We'll keep it between us and them as long as we can."

Randall looked vaguely rebellious. He didn't say anything, but Beach read his thoughts without much difficulty.

"No, it's not particularly glorious. And I doubt it's going to make a lot of difference in the end, for that matter. But if whoever's in command over there is feeling particularly stupid, he may send in his LACs to flush us out of cover. If he does, we might actually manage to pick a few of them off. Even if he doesn't, he'll have to maneuver his MDM-capable units to clear the planet if he wants a shot at us. For that matter, he may decline to fire from extended range at us at all, if we're close enough to the planet."

Sensible tactics.

She had only four of her six battle-cruisers actually under her own command—her third division, HMS Hector and HMS Achilles—had been attached to Samuel Miklós' force for the attack on Tambourin, which left her only Agamemnon, Ajax (her own flagship), and the second division's Priam and Patrocles. They had four of the Edward Saganami-class heavy cruisers in support, including Henke's old ship, the Saganami herself, but none of them were equipped to fire internally launched MDMs. On the other hand, they did have several dozen of the new-style missile pods tractored to their hulls.

Now Agamemnon and Ajax, accompanied by two of the heavy cruisers, began to angle away from Priam, Patrocles, and the other two heavy cruisers. By spreading her forces, she ought to be able to bring the defenders' starships under fire with at least one of them. After all, the opposition commander couldn't keep the planet between her ships and everybody. But it meant Henke would probably be able to engage with only half her total platforms. Worse, it meant her two attack groups were moving steadily out of mutual support range for missile defense.

And Henke orders her ships to split up. Four BC(P)s, four heavy cruisers and the two carriers hanging back near the limits of MDM range. Also, I think I've figured the naming pattern in the Agamemnon-class BC(P) but I think this is the part where I ask the clever reader to pause and see if they can work it out themselves. Oh, and Saganami's have room for "several dozen" flatback pods without getting in the way, presumably on the top and bottom.

"But look at this, Sir," Randall said, indicating the red arrows of projected vectors. "They may be going to try to open clear lines of sight to us, but on their current headings, the range will be less than seven million klicks."

"So they are a little nervous about Eridani violations," Beach observed, and smiled humorlessly. "On the other hand, our ships' best powered envelope from rest is under two million. Not a huge improvement."

Again, launching missiles while traveling at high speeds makes a big difference in how far they'll fly. First mention in a long time of missile range at ret, which used to be just a million klicks.

Beach nodded and frowned thoughtfully down at the plot. "I know doctrine says to kill the CLACs as our first priority in a situation like this one," he said, after a moment, "but they aren't being obliging enough to bring them in closer. If we had more pods, if we could get a better salvo density, it might still make sense to go after them, first. Under the circumstances, though, I think we'll hold our fire as long as we can, then concentrate it all on Alpha. Run your firing solutions accordingly, Sandra."

Beach is smart, sensible, doesn't panic in a crisis and knows when to modify doctrine. He's kind of wasted on a garrison post far from the frontlines.

"Too close," Henke agreed. "Especially for MDMs at this range. We might have a nasty accident, and Duchess Harrington wouldn't like that."

"No, Ma'am, she wouldn't," Stackpole agreed with feeling.

Honor had made it abundantly, one might almost say painfully, clear that she would not be amused by anything which might be remotely construed as a violation of the Eridani Edict's prohibitions, even by accident. And if smacking an inhabited planet, however accidentally, with a ninety-five-ton missile moving at fifty percent of light-speed couldn't be construed as using a "weapon of mass destruction" against it, very few things could be.

Why no one wants to risk firing missiles at a planet. I'm not sure precisely how energetic that event would be, but mostly because after I hit a megaton I figured 'energetic enough to absolutely qualify.'

"Message to Admiral Truman. My compliments, and I would appreciate it if she could order the LACs to go after the pods."

"Yes, Ma'am."

They send the LACs after the pod networks.

"That should help some," Beach agreed, although both of them knew it wouldn't make a great deal of difference. Gaston System Command had three hundred and twenty Cimeterre-class LACs. The Manty attack force had just over two hundred Shrike and Ferret-class LACs, and they knew about the "Triple Ripple" by now. Given the difference in the basic capabilities of the two sides, Beach's LACs were about to face a painful exchange rate.

In theory, Beach could have moved his battlecruisers out to support them, since the Manty LACs would have to enter the reach of his own shorter-ranged shipboard missiles. But that would have required him to come out from behind the planet and expose his ships to MDM fire.

Inspiring Beach to send his LACs out to meet Alice's. 320 Have LACs vs. 200+ Manty ones.

Of course, it didn't take weapons that powerful just to kill another LAC. Anything would kill a LAC . . . assuming it could score a hit in the first place. But the Havenites' sidewalls and EW were both far inferior to their Manticoran counterparts, and none of the Cimeterres at Sidemore had mounted a bow or stern wall at all. Worse, from the Havenites' perspective—though they might not realize it yet—six of Tremaine's squadrons were Grayson Katanas.

Designed specifically as "space superiority" LACs, the Katanas were the Alliance's conceptual equivalent of the Cimeterre itself. Unlike the Cimeterre, however, the Katana incorporated all of the Alliance's tech advantages. It was smaller than its Havenite rival—and also faster, more maneuverable, far better protected, with enormously superior electronic warfare capabilities and the LAC-sized version of the new bow wall "buckler," and equipped with what were for all intents and purposes a trio of superdreadnought point defense laser clusters, in addition to the Grayson-designed Viper anti-LAC missile.

The Viper was about two-thirds the size of a standard LAC missile, but it was quite different. It carried a much smaller warhead, without the multiple lasing rods of a conventional warhead, in order to incorporate significantly better seekers and an enhanced AI. And it also was designed for engagements at much shorter ranges. Engagements in which massive acceleration, agility, and the ability to reach targets quickly were vastly more important than endurance. Which was why the Viper used the same drive systems as the Mark 31 counter-missile.

Grayson Katana-class LAC. Both Katanas and Cimeterres are basically stuffed full of as many missiles as possible, far more than a Ferret. Difference is, Katana's have all this technical sophistication, better sidewalls, two-stage bow wall, better compensators, fission piles etc. And payload, the Viper missile having the same drive and lfight characteristics as the CMs above.

He didn't much care for the odds. The Cimeterre was a pure attrition unit, designed to overpower the individual superiority of its Manty opponents by means of massive numerical superiority. Abercrombie knew Admiral Foraker and her staff were working furiously to improve the Cimeterre's capabilities in the Republic's second-generation light attack craft, but the limitations of their tech base, even with the rumored upgrades from the Erewhonese, meant her teams simply couldn't match the Manties' capabilities.

Current doctrine called for engaging Manty LACs at minimum odds of four-to-one. Even at that level, Republican casualties would probably be heavy in a straight-up fight. It was hard to say for certain, because the only LAC-on-LAC engagements so far had been dominated by the Republic's surprise "Triple Ripple" tactic.

Doctrine says they usually only engage Manty LACs at 4 to 1 odds. Also, Shannon Foraker is hard at work building better LACs, now that they've got serious Alliance hardware.

It was the XO's turn to nod. He and Abercrombie had discussed it often enough, and it seemed the Manties—or Graysons, as the case might be—had come up with the same solution to the Ripple as they had. They weren't going to let their onboard sensors be blinded again; that part had been a no-brainer, once the Manties realized what had been done to them. Nor were they going to expose their decoys and EW platforms any sooner than they must, and it was a given that they'd have spread their remote recon platforms as widely as possible in order to get them outside the Ripple's area of effect.

And now they'd taken Zizka out of the equation, as well, by the simplest expedient of all. They knew Republican missile defense doctrine, especially for LACs, relied more on mass and volume than individual accuracy, so they'd realized it was less the density of a missile salvo than its duration which really mattered. At any sort of extended range, Abercrombie's LACs had no choice but to attempt to saturate the incoming missile patterns rather than attempting to pick off individual threats, the way Manty missile-defense crews would have. So it wasn't really necessary for the Manties to achieve the sort of precise time-on-target concentrations which would have been used to saturate more sophisticated defenses. Or, to put it another way, Abercrombie's defenses were too crude to be significantly degraded by that sort of sophistication.

So the Manties had staggered their launches, spreading them out in time, and seeded their attack birds with their damnably effective EW platforms. Coupled with the impossibly high speed of the attack missiles themselves, those decoys and jammers were going to degrade point defense kill probabilities catastrophically. And by stretching out their launch envelope, by creating what was effectively a missile stream, rather than a single, crushing hammer blow, they'd made it impossible for a single Ripple launch to kill more than a fraction of their total attack. Worse, the LACs who'd launched the Ripple could no more see through it than vessels on the other side could, and Abercrombie couldn't afford to further hamstring his missile defense by providing the enemy with the opportunity to effectively attack "out of the sun."

Alice Truman's answer to the Triple Ripple/Zizka. Doesn't hurt that Viper missiles have such short flight times, even if their powered range is only about half a proper missiles.

Their AIs were better than those of any previous missile remotely close to their size, and those AIs had been carefully optimized to go after small, fast, fragile targets. They were far more capable of independent engagements, with less need for telemetry links to the vessels which had launched them. After all, LAC EW—or, at least, the Havenite version of it—was much less capable than that of a starship. There was less need for fire control officers to correct for the sort of sophisticated razzle-dazzle larger ships could perform, and their shorter powered envelope meant the Vipers' sensors had a much better look at their target when they were launched.

In effect, they were launch-and-forget weapons, which saw to their own midcourse corrections, and the Katanas were free to maneuver, and to employ all of their fire control links for counter-missiles, once they'd gotten the Vipers away.

And against mere LAC ECM, it's possible to have a true "fire and forget" weapon. No need for hand-holding to guide the birds in, though they have that capability should it ever be needed.

Each Katana fired twenty-five Vipers.

The six Dagger squadrons between them put eighteen hundred of them into space over a thirty-second window, and they scorched through the shell of Havenite counter-missiles like white-hot awls.

Some of them were killed.

A few of the counter-missiles—a very few—managed to discriminate between real threats and the false targets of the Dragon's Teeth platforms. Managed to see through the blinding strobes of jamming. Managed to steer themselves and their wedges into the path of the preposterously fleet attackers. But they were the exception. Most of the kills were attained only because even against an attack like this, Shannon Foraker's layered defense was at least partially effective. There were simply so many counter-missiles that blind chance meant some of them had to find and kill Vipers.

Under the circumstances, any kills were an impressive achievement . . . but the counter-missiles managed to actually stop less than three hundred.

At least 25 Vipers to a Katana, I'm betting on quite a few more. Viper missiles with Dazzler and Dragon's Teeth heads. Cimeterres manage to stop 300 out of 1800 missiles.

Some of Abercrombie's Cimeterres had gotten off their own offensive launches, but they'd achieved nothing. At their slower acceleration rate, it had taken them nine seconds longer to reach their targets, and most of the ships which had launched them were already dead by the time they did. Even the handful of Cimeterres which hadn't already been destroyed had had little or no attention to spare for the attack profile updates Republican missiles needed so much more badly than Manty missiles did, anyway. The tactical crews which would normally have provided those updates had been too distracted by the threat they'd faced . . . and too busy dying.

Superior Manty EW, sidewalls, point defense, and maneuverability had done the rest.

Havenite fire is far less effective.

"First, we make sure all of the tactical details on what they just did to Abercrombie get recorded in the secure database dirt-side. The next poor son-of-a-bitch some stupid fucking admiral sends in against Manty LACs needs to at least know what he's getting into. And after that—"

He turned to look at his chief of staff.

"After that, it's our turn."

Beach's continued coolness under fire, preserving a record of what happened.

And that's all here, later we'll hear that Cutworm hit five targets. We only see Hera and Gaston.

[VhenRa]

Isn't this precisely the sort of raiding/independent operations that RMN doctrine was stated to be in the earlier books?

[Simon_Jester]

Yes, which is probably why they reverted to it so quickly when they finally ran into an enemy whose fleet is big enough to stop them from launching decisive "final offensive" pushes a la Buttercup.

I had a number of other things to say, particularly my opinion that HMS Invictus and RHS Sovereign of Space represent a design concept that makes all other ships, including podlayers, at best semi-obsolete overnight. I think that clearing the whole broadside for antimissile defense systems and relying entirely on a long podlaying core greatly increases a ship's survivability and therefore usefulness, compared to the 'compromised' Medusa/Harrington design.

But the computer-gods ate it.

[Ahriman238]

One special event, and the rest are people discussing or wrapping up Cutworm.

His name was Axel Lacroix, and he was twenty-six T-years old. His family had been Dolists for three generations, until the First Manticoran War. He'd been only a child when that war began, but he'd grown to young adulthood against its backdrop. He'd seen his family move off the BLS at last, seen his parents regain their self-respect, despite the oppressive grip of the Committee of Public Safety and State Security. He'd seen the changes beginning in the educational system, seen the even greater changes his younger siblings had faced when they entered school. And he'd seen the restoration of the Constitution and the concepts of personal responsibility . . . and liberty.

He'd been too young to serve in the First War, and he knew his parents really would have preferred for him to remain a civilian. But he owed a debt for all of those changes, and so when the fighting resumed, he'd enlisted in the Republican Marines.

-snip-

The runabout wasn't very new, but personal vehicles of any sort were still relatively rare, especially here in the capital city, where most people relied on mass transit. For Lacroix, though, the slightly battered, jaunty little sports air car had always symbolized his and his family's success in proving they were more than simply one more clan of Dolist drones. Besides—he grinned as he unlocked the door and settled into the front seat—it might be old, but it was still fast, nimble, and downright fun to fly.

A bit of a ground-up perspective on Haven and it's reforms.

"Ten o'clock!"

Giancola's head snapped up at Lauder's sudden shout. The limousine swerved wildly, yanking hard to the right, and the Secretary of State's head whipped around to the left.

He just had time to see the runabout coming.

In what appears to have been a genuine drunk-driving accident, our new pal Axel Lacroix kills Giancola.

"Flying on manual?" LePic repeated. "If his blood-alcohol was so high, why was he on manual?"

"We'll have to wait for the tech teams to complete their examination of the wreckage, but Lacroix was driving an older model runabout. Right off the top of my head, I'd guess the internal sensors weren't working properly. Hell, I suppose it's even possible he deliberately disconnected the safety overrides. It's against the law, of course, but a lot of people used to do it simply because traffic control was so spotty they didn't trust it in an emergency. At any rate, for some reason the overrides which should have locked someone in his condition out of manual control didn't do it."

The autopilot on an air car is supposed to lock down the steering wheel if you're too drunk to drive. I bet traffic control and remote override were great tools in arranging air car "accidents" in previous years, which may be why people don't trust the system and intentionally disable it. That or it really is crap, in keeping with the 'concrete jungle' of Legislaturist Nouveau Paris. Or both.

"Kevin's been conducting a black investigation of Giancola for almost a month now. Denis has known about it from the beginning, but I didn't tell you about it because, frankly, you're an even worse actor than Denis. You already hated Giancola, and I was afraid you'd have a hard time not making him suspicious that something was going on. I'd intended to bring you fully on board as soon as Kevin's team had anything concrete to report."

Theisman gets brought in on the investigation.

"So you see our problem, Tom? And you, Rachel?" Pritchart said. "The only 'evidence' we've actually been able to turn up—illegally—is demonstrably falsified. Apparently, it was intended to implicate Giancola, which would undoubtedly be construed by a lot of people, especially his allies and supporters, as proof he was actually innocent. However, we have the fact that the person who supposedly falsified it was killed in what Kevin and I both consider to be a highly suspicious 'accident.' And now, unfortunately, our only other suspect has just been killed in yet another air car accident. Bearing in mind just how fond of similar 'accidents' both the Legislaturalists and StateSec were, how do you suppose public opinion—or Congress—is going to react if we lay this whole—What did you call it, Kevin? Oh, yes. If we lay this whole 'shit sandwich' out on the public information boards?"

With uproarious applause at how forthright and honest their new government is?

"To put it bluntly," he said, after a moment, "Harrington just gave us an object lesson in how rear area raids ought to be conducted. She hit Gaston, Tambourin, Squalus, Hera, and Hallman, and there's not a damned bit of orbital industry left in any of them."

Targets of Cutworm.

"How much did you lose?" Pritchart asked.

"Two battleships, seven battlecruisers, four old cruisers, three destroyers, and over a thousand LACs," Theisman said flatly.

Ship losses from Cutworm. Well, it could have gone a lot worse for Haven.

Hanriot settled back in her chair and nodded slowly. After two T-years of hard, unremitting labor, her analysts, in conjunction with Nesbitt's Commerce Department, had completed the first really honest, comprehensive survey of the Republic's economic status in better than a century barely six months before the shooting had started back up.

"All these systems were listed in the 'break even' category," the Secretary of War continued. "At best, they were second-tier systems, and Gaston and Hallman, in particular, had been money-losing propositions under the Legislaturalists. That was turning around, but they were still barely contributing to our positive cash flow. The destruction in the star systems is going to have a net negative effect, I'm sure—your analysts will be able to evaluate that better than I'm in any position to do—because the damage to the local civilian infrastructure means we'll be forced to commit federal relief funds and resources on an emergency basis. But none of them were particularly critical. Which is, frankly, the reason they weren't more heavily defended. We can't be strong everywhere, and the systems we've left most weakly covered are the ones we can most readily survive losing."

Economic impact limited, because these were poor systems.

"But what we can afford in cold-blooded economic and industrial terms and what we can afford in terms of public opinion may not be exactly the same thing."

"They almost certainly aren't the same thing, and the Manties clearly understand that," Theisman replied. "Whoever selected their targets did a damned good job. Harrington was able to use relatively limited forces and still attain crushing local superiority. She took virtually no losses of her own, cost us sixteen hyper-capable units in addition to all those LACs, and scored the Manties' first clear-cut offensive victory of the war. And, to be perfectly honest, the fact that they did it under Honor Harrington's command is also going to have an impact. She's something of our own personal bogeyman, after all.

"So, completely exclusive of any physical damage she's done to us," he continued, "this is inevitably going to have an impact in Congress. I've already got the General Staff considering how we're going to respond when the senators and representatives from every system which hasn't been raided yet start demanding we strengthen their covering forces."

And the political impact. You know, at long last after she returned from the dead to give them hell, smacked around Tourville at Marsh, and with White Haven flying a desk, I can finally buy wholeheartedly the idea that Honor is the RHN's bogeyman.

Hanriot interrupted. "Public opinion has been riding a sustained emotional high since Thunderbolt. As far as the woman in the street's concerned, we cleaned the Manties' clock everywhere except at Sidemore, and there's a tremendous feeling of satisfaction, of having rehabilitated ourselves as a major military power. I think it would be impossible to overestimate the degree to which our sense of national pride has rebounded with the restoration of the Constitution, the turnaround in the economy, and now the successful reconquest of the occupied systems, coupled with the enormous losses we've inflicted on the Manties' navy. So far, this has got to have been the most popular war in our history.

"And what's happened now?" She shrugged. "The Manties have punched us back. They've hurt us, and they've demonstrated that they may be able to do it again. But our actual naval losses, however painful they may be, are literally nothing compared to the losses we inflicted on them in Thunderbolt. So what's going to happen, at least in the short term, is that public opinion's going to demand we go out and whack the Manties back, harder, to demonstrate to them that they don't want to piss us off. There's going to be some panic, some shouting about reinforcing to protect our more vulnerable star systems, but mostly, people are going to figure the best way to do that is to finish Manticore off, once and for all."

The likelihood of stopping the war now, it is not high. The average Havenite is very much in support of the war effort.

"Sooner or later we're going to have to get to the bottom of it, and it's going to have to be done publicly," Pritchart said. "There's no other way for an open society which believes in the rule of law to handle it. And if we don't do it now, then when we finally get around to it, all of us—and especially me, as President—are going to be castigated for delaying open disclosure. Our personal reputations, and quite possibly everything we've accomplished, are going to come under attack, and a lot of it's going to be vicious and ugly. And, to be perfectly honest, we'll deserve it."

She looked around the office, her shoulders squared.

"Unfortunately," she said into the silence, "at this moment, I don't see any choice. Kevin, keep looking. Find us something. But until he does," she swept the office once again with her eyes, "I see no option but to keep our suspicions to ourselves and get on with winning my goddamned war."

Mount your horses, draw your swords. Like it or not, it's a proper war now.

And now a more detailed briefing on the effects of Cutworm.

"I think probably our initial evaluation of why they hit the targets they hit was on the money," he said. "All five systems have enough population to give them several representatives in the lower house, plus, of course, their senators. If the object is to create political pressure to disperse our forces, that would obviously have been a factor in their thinking, and my people are confident it was.

"Economically, as I'm sure we're all already aware, the elimination of their industrial bases will have only a minor direct impact on our ability to sustain our war effort. The indirect economic implications are something else, of course, and I expect Secretary Hanriot and Secretary Nesbitt are going to be less than happy dealing with the civilian fallout."

Haven Congress, like the US version, has a lower house based on population numbers alone, every X number give you a rep. The indirect effects include what the government will have to pay to rebuild.

"She not only brought along the firepower she needed to destroy all of our defensive units, she also brought along enough she was able to spread out, take her time, and destroy effectively every single orbital platform in each of the systems she hit. Asteroid extraction centers, foundries, power satellites, communications satellites, navigation satellites, construction platforms, freight platforms, warehouses—all of it, Sir. Gone."

Some of the many things honorverse Star Nations put into orbit.

"And that was part of her 'message,' as you put it?"

"Yes, Sir. It was a statement of the level of 'scorched earth' policy the Manties are prepared to embrace. It was also a statement that they intend to operate as aggressively as possible within the limitations of their force availability. Please note, for example, that they committed both Invictus-class superdreadnoughts and what appears to be their complete current inventory of Agamemnon-class pod battlecruisers. And they weren't particularly shy about showing us just what the Katanas and those frigging awful missiles of theirs could do, either."

Yes, there is that. Glad you noticed.

"There's another message in what they've done, this far, at least, Arnaud," she said.

"I'm certain there are quite a few," the chief of staff said dryly. "Which one did you intend to point out?"

"The casualty figures," she said flatly. "I know we took virtually one hundred percent casualties in our LAC groups in Gaston, Tambourin, Squalus, and Hallman. And our shipboard casualties were almost as bad—not surprisingly, I suppose, when they destroyed every single ship they managed to bring into range. But in Hera, Harrington herself gave Milligan the option of saving his people's lives. And they didn't kill or even injure a single civilian when they took out the infrastructure in that system, or anywhere else."

"That was partly because they had the time, Ma'am," Lewis pointed out. "They had complete control of the star systems, and they could afford to give our civilians time to evacuate."

"Agreed. But Harrington didn't have to let Milligan stand down his forces. And they would have been justified, under accepted interstellar law, in simply giving us 'a reasonable time' to evacuate, which would have been a lot shorter than the time they actually gave us." She shook her head. "No, I think part of it was the Manties' way—or, at least, Harrington's way—of telling us that if we show restraint—whenever we can, at least—they'll do the same."

And that. I'm sure part of it was not wanting to command civilian murders, but I'm sure she's just as happy to put out a message that this doesn't have to be a brutal war at the same time.

"The one drawback to Milligan's acceptance of Harrington's terms, from our perspective over at Operational Research, is that her SD(P)s were never forced to fire. As such, we weren't able to get any sort of feel for how the Invictuses' armaments may vary from their Medusa/Harrington ships. The one thing that does stand out from the visual scans some of our recon platforms got and transmitted down to the planet before Harrington wiped them out is that the reports that the Invictus mounts no broadside missile tubes appears to be accurate. We're not certain why. We've had to make the same decision primarily because our missiles are so damned big, compared to theirs, that we really can't afford the mass penalty for launchers big enough to handle them in ships already designed to deploy pods. All the indications from captured hardware and what we've gotten from Erewhon are that the Manties don't suffer from that particular problem, or not, at least, to anything like the same degree, so there's obviously a different basis for the design philosophy.

Haven podnoughts have no broadside tubes because they had to remove them just to make room for the pods. Manticore did it with the Invictuses to make space for more pods and point defense.

"In the case of Gaston, we got a lot of sensor information on the Grayson Katanas. I'm having all of it sent directly to Admiral Foraker at Bolthole for her teams' consideration, although my initial take on it is that most of it indicates the Katana is built around more of that damned Manticoran miniaturization tech we can't match yet. Certainly, they're very small units, with extremely high acceleration rates. They appear to have all the Shrike's defensive capabilities, and whatever the hell they call that new missile of theirs. On the other hand, they never fired a shot in energy range, so we're not sure what they carry there. Even bearing in mind that we're talking about a Manty-derived design, there can't be a lot of room for the kind of energy armament the Shrike hauls around with it.

"The real bad news seems to be those missiles. They obviously can't have the sort of range our Cimeterres' missiles do, but they're incredibly fast. At the very minimum, we're going to have to completely overhaul our missile defense software to deal with their speed and maneuverability, and their sensor and tracking ability appear to have significantly improved, as well. The fact that the Manties obviously know about the Triple Ripple, and have adapted their tactics to defeat it, further complicates the situation. Frankly, at least until the next-generation LACs start coming out of Bolthole, I don't think our LACs are going to be able to encounter Manty units—or, at least, Katanas—with any realistic hope of victory."

"My initial feeling was that Victor was being unduly pessimistic, Sir," Trenis put in. "Having had a better look at the raw data, though, I no longer think that. My own feeling, at this time, is that we need to restrict the Cimeterres essentially to the anti-missile role. If they have to mix it up with Manty or Grayson LACs, they're really going to need to do it from within our own starships' engagement envelope. They're going to need the support that badly."

Actually, from here on out most everyone's LACs will focus primarily on missile defense, adding more CMs and laser-clusters to the point defense networks. Haven still can't miniaturize hardware the way Manticore can, which is about to be a bigger problem for them.

"Secondly, they don't appear to deploy the same number of pods per salvo as we've seen out of their SD(P)s. Manty pods are damnably hard sensor targets, but it looks like they were only rolling four pods at a time. However—" he looked up and met Marquette's eyes "—the pods they were rolling apparently carried fourteen missiles each."

"Fourteen?"

"That's correct, Sir. So their four-pod salvos were effectively rolling almost as many missiles as their SD(P)s' six-pod salvos."

The Manty BC(P)s, at least, have pods firing 14 of the Mk 16 missile. Sure it's only dual-drive and lacks some of the sheer power of MDMs, but it has good enough range to keep up with where they like to fire MDMs anyway, and this way they get as much salvo density as a podnought.

"Fourteen birds," Marquette muttered, shaking his head. "Jesus. If they do start packing their SD(P)s' pods that full, proportionately, we're going to be in even more trouble in a long-range duel."

"Agreed," Trenis said. "On the other hand, they appear to have concluded that sixty-missile salvos are about the max for their fire control. For the moment, at least."

"Sure," Marquette snorted. "Until they get around to upgrading it!"

This again seems a lot lower than previous experience suggests. Anyways, This book was where I sort of fell off the series, so I don't know if they ever tried deploying the fourteen-missile pods from SD(P)s.

"I'm also aware that I'm asking you to do something which is quite possibly impossible. I don't have any choice but to ask you, however, and you don't have any choice but to figure out how to do it anyway. There has to be some sort of underlying pattern to their target selection. I can't believe someone like Harrington is just reaching into a hat and pulling out names at random. For that matter, the spacing on this cluster of raids demonstrates she isn't. So try to get inside her head. Run it through the computers, kick it around, try to get some sort of feel for what kind of tendencies or inclinations may be pushing her choices."

Trying to anticipate the next strikes of Eighth Fleet.

*ahem* meanwhile, back at Trevor's Star....

"Yes, Ma'am." Mercedes Brigham smiled hugely at Honor. "According to the preliminary reports, we didn't lose anyone on combat ops."

"That's . . . hard to believe," Honor said. She reached up to gently caress Nimitz's ears and shook her head. "Mind you, I'm delighted to hear it. I just didn't expect it."

Make that no casualties on the original Cutworm raid.


Oh, and a Countess Fairburn who never appears before or since this chapter has a source at the medical facility bringing Honor's baby to term, and Emily's too. Fairburn leaks this to the press. Oh dastardly villain! Surely your comeuppance shall be graphic and... right, we never see her again.

"If you'll notice," Honor said, "his claws are much broader at the base than those of a terrestrial cat. When people call them 'scimitar-shaped,' it's literally descriptive, except that the wrong side is edged. And they retract into some fairly specialized, cartilage-lined receptacles, because they're actually more like a terrestrial shark's tooth than anything someone from Old Earth would call a 'claw.' The actual composition of the claw itself is more like stone than it is like horn, cartilage, or bone, and this curved inner section is at least as sharp as most flaked obsidian knives. It's true they aren't very long, but for all intents and purposes, he's got scalpel blades on each finger that are the next best thing to a centimeter and a half in length. That's why a 'cat in a true killing rage looks so much like a berserk buzz saw. Each individual cut isn't that deep, but with all six limbs going at once in repeated slashes, well—"

Honor takes a minute to...teach the First Spacelord, her immediate boss, a lesson treecat physiology.

"We've managed to scare up a few more units for you, as well," Caparelli continued. "Not as many as I'd like, or anywhere near as many as we'd originally scheduled, although some of them will be a bit newer than projected, to compensate. What we have been able to dig up will be waiting for you when you get back to Eighth Fleet. The main problem, as I'm sure you've guessed, is the need to cover Zanzibar and Alizon. Especially Zanzibar, since the Peeps got such a good look at our defensive deployments there. To be honest, your success in Cutworm is actually going to make that particular problem worse. The logic, I'm sure, is going to run something like 'If Harrington can do that to them, then they could do it to us.' And the hell of it, of course, is that they're right. Even if they weren't, the political realities of the Alliance would require us to respond to their concerns."

And they're getting a few new ships.

"It's a lot less complicated being a commoner, you know."

"Cling to your illusions if you must," Emily replied. "Given your rank, little things like your military reputation, and the fact that you're probably one of the dozen wealthiest people in the entire Star Kingdom, I doubt very much that your life could ever be uncomplicated again."

Extent of Honor's wealth. I'm not quite sure when it got that out of hand.

She wasn't at all surprised when it lit with the current day's Landing Tattler. Nor was she surprised that the display was centered on Solomon Hayes' gossip column. It wasn't the first time she'd found herself the object of Hayes' interest, and white-hot anger glowed as she remembered the smear campaign High Ridge and his cronies had used Hayes to open.

Her eyes ran down the text, and her lips tightened. Normally, Hayes touched on several victims in each of his maliciously barbed columns. And he was also normally careful to couch his accusations and veiled insinuations sufficiently obliquely to avoid anything which might be actionable under the Star Kingdom's stringent libel laws.

This time, the entire column was devoted to only a single topic, and there was nothing oblique about it at all.

Isn't implying a scandalous relationship between Honor and Hamish so last year?

"Ha! The instant you challenge him, he'll emigrate to Beowulf!" Hamish growled. "They don't allow duels there."

No duels on Beowulf. Also, this is probably not the most productive conversation they could be having. Well they can't flat-out deny Hamish is the dad if he wants to own up to it later, which he does. Honor's leaving almost right away, so they tell Hamish to 'no comment' from his office and if cornered and asked if he's the dad to have a good laugh.

"And just what did you have it in mind to do about Mr. Hayes?" Honor inquired mildly. "This isn't Grayson, you know, Miranda."

"Oh, I certainly do, My Lady." Miranda's mouth twisted in distaste, and Farragut, her treecat, made a soft hissing sound from the perch beside her chair. "Freedom of the press is a wonderful thing, My Lady. We have it on Grayson, too, you know. But this Hayes person wouldn't care at all for what his brand of 'journalism' would get him back home."

"Sounds like a very free press to me," Honor observed. "Not that I don't think Mr. Hayes would look ever so much better with a couple of broken legs. Unfortunately, if that were a practical solution to the problem, I'd already have taken care of it myself."

Grayson may have a "free" press, but they have no patience for yellow journalism.

"Well," Honor said, "I just happened to run into Stacey Hauptman at lunch yesterday, and somehow or other the conversation turned to journalism. And it seems Stacey has been considering venturing into that area for some time. She told me she thinks she might begin by buying the Landing Tattler—just to get her toes wet, you know. Sort of explore the possibilities. And I think she might also have said something about making it her business to—how did she put it? Oh, yes. Making it her business to 'clean up the professionalism of Manticoran journalism generally.'"

-snip-

"And you were just suggesting the Grayson press might incorporate a few journalistic constraints."

"Even in the Star Kingdom, Miranda, private citizens—as opposed to governmental agencies or public bodies—are permitted to make their displeasure known, so long as they violate no laws or civil rights. Which, I assure you, Stacey has no intention of doing. Or, now that I think about it, any need to do."

Honor's revenge. She seems to be adjusting well to having wealth and power.

She tasted the name in the depths of her mind, and her feelings were mixed as she gazed at the splendid new ship. This Nike's predecessor had been listed for disposal by the Janacek Admiralty in order to free the name for this new class' lead ship. The sudden eruption of renewed hostilities had saved BC-413 from the breakers, but the name had already been reassigned, so 413 had been renamed Hancock Station. If they'd had to rename her, Honor couldn't really fault the choice, but as that Nike's first captain, she would always think of the older ship as the rightful holder of that name.

Honor's BC Nike from the third book survived both the war and the Janacek Admiralty, to be renamed Hancock Station for a battle she participated in. The new Nike, however is BC-762.

The problem being that BCs are supposed to be able to outrun wallers that can kill them, but modern wallers have a hell of a reach to them, leaving the question of what to do with BCs in the modern combat environ. The BC(p)s are one option, though Manticore considers them a transitory class, the new Nike is the other option, a BC(L) that does to the BC what a Saganami-C does for heavy cruisers.

[Ahriman238]

Nike was the result: a 2.5 million-ton "battlecruiser," almost three times the size of Honor's old ship, but with an acceleration rate thirty percent greater. The old Nike had mounted eighteen lasers, sixteen grasers, fifty-two missile tubes, and thirty-two counter-missile tubes and point defense clusters. The new Nike mounted no lasers, thirty-two grasers—eight of them as chase weapons, fifty missile tubes (none of them chasers), and thirty counter-missile tubes and laser clusters. The old Nike had carried a ship's company of over two thousand; the new Nike's complement was only seven hundred and fifty. And the new Nike was armed with the Mark 16 dual-drive missile. With the "off-bore" launch capability the RMN had developed, she could bring both broadsides' missile tubes to bear on the same target, giving her fifty birds per salvo, as opposed to the older ship's twenty-two. And whereas the old Nike's maximum powered missile range from rest had been just over six million kilometers, the new Nike's missiles had a maximum powered endurance of over twenty-nine million.

BC(L), put in big off-bore MDM tubes, even if they're dual-drive missiles. I admit one thing bugs me, they designed this ship to be survivable in the modern battlespace and tripled the mass, so why does it have less in the way of active point defense?

She couldn't fire the all-up, three-stage MDMs the Courvoisiers and Agamemnons could handle, so her tactical flexibility was marginally less, and her warheads were slightly lighter, but an Agamemnon rolling pods at her maximum rate would shoot herself dry in just over fourteen minutes, whereas Nike carried sufficient ammunition for almost forty minutes, and she carried fifty percent more counter-missiles, as well.

Endurance remains a serious issue for podlayers. I believe a Harrington/Medusa can at max rate burn through their pods in about 17 minutes? My calculating (500 pods, kicking 6 out the back every 12 seconds) gives me 16.66 minutes if you feel pedantic. Invictus doubles that, and I'm actually impressed a smaller Agamemnon can even come close to that, and even match salvo density. Even the Large ships are hit by being able to pump both broadsides at a target, while the missiles are greater. Still, a Nike-class can keep them coming from 50 tubes for 40 minutes. None too shabby. Apparently even if it has less CM launchers than an older BC it has considerably larger magazines for counter missiles.

Personally, Honor was convinced that this Nike represented the pattern for true battlecruisers of the future, and she deeply regretted the fact that although the Janacek Admiralty had authorized her construction, they had seen her as a single-ship testbed. The Navy desperately needed as many Nikes as it could get, and what it had was exactly one. Which was all it would have for at least another full T-year.

But at least Honor had the only one of her there was, and—she smiled at her reflection in the armorplast—she'd convinced Admiral Cortez to give her to a captain who was almost as competent as he was . . . irritating.

At least a year to build a massive BC, Honor's feelings on the design. Sigh- and yes, Nike is commanded by Captain Michael Oversteegen.

Ajax's total complement was under six hundred, including Marines, and her designers, faced with all that space, had obviously felt someone as lordly as a flag officer deserved the very best.

I remember when a BC took two thousand people to run.

"Cutworm II is both more ambitious and less ambitious than our first attacks were," she continued after a moment. "It's more ambitious primarily in terms of timing and how deep we're penetrating to hit Chantilly and Des Moines. Since all of our task forces will have different transit times, and since I've decided to once more orchestrate our strikes to hit our targets simultaneously, Admiral Truman and Admiral Miklós will depart immediately after this meeting. Admiral McKeon will depart for Fordyce the day after tomorrow, and Admiral Matsuzawa and I will depart for Augusta four days after that.

"Remember, hitting our assigned objectives—hard—is critically important, but bringing your ships and your people home is equally so. It seems unlikely the Republic will have been able to adjust its defensive stance significantly in the last three weeks. Nonetheless, it isn't impossible, so be alert. We're more likely to see changes in doctrine and tactical approaches than we are to see significant redeployment of covering forces. Eventually, obviously, we hope that's going to change, but simple message transit times are going to preclude their having done it yet. Hopefully," she smiled again, "our modest efforts over the next two weeks will provide additional encouragement for their efforts.

Cutworm II, hitting Chantilly, Des Moines (yes!) Augusta and Fordyce.

"I could hardly say no to a request from such distinguished visitors, Steadholder Mueller," Sullivan said easily. Mueller smiled and stepped aside, and Sullivan extended his ring hand to the next steadholder in line.

Mueller's smile became just a trifle fixed as he watched. It was certainly correct etiquette for visitors, however exalted their rank, to kiss the Reverend's ring of office. But it was customary in cases like this morning's meeting for the Reverend to settle for receiving the courtesy from the senior member of the delegation.

All five of Mueller's fellows kissed the ring in turn, and Sullivan waved a graceful hand at the half-circle of chairs arranged before his desk to await them.

Sullivan making a point. Interesting, AFAIK the ring-kissing thing is a distinctly Catholic tradition shared by few, if any, other churches.

"I'll grant you, My Lord," Sullivan continued imperturbably, "that, traditionally, that's included a notification of the Conclave as a whole. However, the Conclave's responsibility to examine and prove the chain of succession actually begins only after the birth of the heir in question. And, although I realize you weren't aware of it, Lady Harrington informed Protector Benjamin and myself almost two full months ago that she was pregnant. So I assure you all of her constitutional obligations have been faithfully discharged."

"It hasn't simply been traditional to notify the Conclave, Your Grace," Mueller said sharply. "For generations, it's had the force of law. And that notification is supposed to be given well before the actual birth of the child in question!"

"Quite a few erroneous practices had the 'force of law' prior to the reestablishment of the correct provisions of our written Constitution, My Lord." For the first time, there was a very definite iciness in Reverend Sullivan's voice. "Those errors are still in the process of correction. They are, however, being corrected."

Ah, the new Steadholder Mueller wants to attack Honor via her child. Honor has fulfilled the letter of the law by informing her Protector and the Reverend of the imminent birth of her heir.

"Nonetheless, the fact remains that Steadholder Harrington isn't married; that our law, unlike that of the Star Kingdom of Manticore, clearly does recognize the concept of bastardy and regards it as a bar to inheritance; and that we don't even know who the father of this child is."

"No, Lady Harrington isn't married," Sullivan agreed. "And, you're quite correct that Grayson law, as presently written, does recognize bastardy and the disabilities and limitations which normally attach to it. However, it's incorrect to say that we—in the legal sense of Father Church and the Sword—don't know who the father of Lady Harrington's son is."

"You know who the father is?" Mueller demanded.

"Of course I do, as does the Protector," Sullivan said. For that matter, he thought, everyone on the entire planet knows, whether they're prepared to admit it or not.

"Even so," Mueller said after a brief pause, "the child is clearly still a bastard. As such, he must be unacceptable as the heir to a steading."

That's a pretty decent point as I understand the relevant law, what I don't know is what Mueller thinks to accomplish here. To make stress for Honor before the Protector or Reverend legitimizes her child? To piss off Honor enough that they'll need a mop to remove him from the floor?

The Reverend opened a desk drawer and withdrew a fat, old-fashioned hard-copy folder. He laid it on the blotter, opened it, glanced at the top sheet of paper, and then looked back at Mueller.

"It would appear that in 3112, nine hundred and ten T-years ago, Steadholder Berilynko had no legitimate male children, only daughters. The Conclave of Steadholders of that time therefore accepted the eldest of his several illegitimate sons as his heir. In 3120, Steadholder Elway had no legitimate male children, only daughters. The Conclave of Steadholders of that time therefore accepted the eldest of his several illegitimate sons as his heir. In 3140, Steadholder Ames had no legitimate male children, only daughters. The Conclave of Steadholders of that time therefore accepted the eldest of his several illegitimate sons as his heir. In 3142, Steadholder Sutherland had no legitimate male children, only daughters. The Conclave of Steadholders of that time therefore accepted the eldest of his several illegitimate sons as his heir. In 3146, Steadholder Kimbrell had no legitimate male children, only daughters. The Conclave of Steadholders of that time therefore accepted the eldest of his reportedly thirty-six illegitimate sons as his heir. In 3160, Steadholder Denevski had no legitimate male children, only daughters. The Conclave of Steadholders of that time therefore accepted the eldest of his illegitimate sons as his heir. In 3163—"

The Reverend paused, looked up with a hard little smile, and closed the folder once more.

"I trust you'll observe, My Lords, that in a period of less than seventy years from the founding of Grayson, when there were less than twenty-five steadings on the entire planet, no less than six steadholderships had passed through illegitimate—-bastard—-children. Passed, mind you, in instances in which there were clearly recognized, legitimate female children. We have nine hundred and forty-two years of history on this planet. Would you care to estimate how many more times over that millennium steadholderships have passed under similar circumstances?" He tapped the thick folder on his desk. "I can almost guarantee you that whatever total you guess will be too low."

Silence hovered in his office, and his old-fashioned chair creaked as he sat back in it and folded his hands atop the folder.

"So what we seem to have here, My Lords, is that although the stigma of bastardy legally bars one from the line of succession of a steadholdership, we've ignored that bar scores of times in the past. The most recent instance of which, I might point out, came in Howell Steading less than twenty T-years ago. Of course, in all the prior instances of our having ignored the law, the bastards in question were the children of male steadholders. In fact, in the vast majority of the cases, there was no way for anyone to prove those steadholders were actually even the fathers of the children in question. However, in the case of a female steadholder, when the fact that she's the mother of the child in question can be scientifically demonstrated beyond question or doubt, suddenly bastardy becomes an insurmountable bar which can't possibly be set aside or ignored. I'm curious, My Lords. Why is that?"

A concise history of successful bastards on Grayson. I do believe that's checkmate on that argument.

"I said, this child won't be illegitimate," Sullivan repeated coldly. "Surely that should satisfy even you, My Lord."

"You're God's steward on Grayson, Your Grace," Mueller shot back, "but not God Himself. It's been well established, in both Church and civil law, that no Reverend—not even the entire Sacristy in assembly—can make falsehood true simply by saying something is so."

"Indeed I cannot," Sullivan said icily. "Nonetheless, this child will not be illegitimate. You will not be given the opportunity you so obviously desire to use Lady Harrington's child as a weapon against her. Father Church won't permit it. I won't permit it."

Papal infallibility is not a Grayson tradition, and Sullivan is the first to think of the obvious solution to Honor's problem.

[Batman]

Modern BC captains hopefully know modern wallers have that reach, and I don't see how the equation has changed much-wallers have always been able to kill BCs if they could catch them. MDMs merely increased the range the BCs had to stay away from them to ensure they couldn't.
BCs can still fulfill the traditional BC role-kick the snot out of everything smaller than them, be fast enough to run away from anything that could eat them.*

*Granted, didn't work out so well in the real world, but I'd put that down to faulty implementation (and possibly inadequate technology) more than the basic concept not working.

[Simon_Jester]

One special event, and the rest are people discussing or wrapping up Cutworm.

Ship losses from Cutworm. Well, it could have gone a lot worse for Haven.

Not really, since they had no more armed forces in those systems to lose- the real damage was to their industrial capability.

"Unfortunately," she said into the silence, "at this moment, I don't see any choice. Kevin, keep looking. Find us something. But until he does," she swept the office once again with her eyes, "I see no option but to keep our suspicions to ourselves and get on with winning my goddamned war."

Mount your horses, draw your swords. Like it or not, it's a proper war now.

Also, note that Pritchart actually takes responsibility for the war, even now that she knows perfectly well Giancola played a major role in creating the situation that led her to declare it.

Haven podnoughts have no broadside tubes because they had to remove them just to make room for the pods. Manticore did it with the Invictuses to make space for more pods and point defense.

Honestly, I think this is 'the wave of the future' in capital ship design, and that SD(P)s with broadside armament will be seen as transitional designs in the future. The reason is simple: only by the expedient of mounting enormous piles of missile defenses on the broadside can a modern Honorverse capital ship put out enough antimissile fire to defend itself against massed MDM barrages.

Honor takes a minute to...teach the First Spacelord, her immediate boss, a lesson treecat physiology.

To be fair, Hamish acquired a treecat in the past year or two, so he does legitimately need to know these things. I know if I had a treecat I'd be damn sure glad someone told me about the claws and why they seem to be made of pure sharpium.

Grayson may have a "free" press, but they have no patience for yellow journalism.

Yeah, no fair airing powerful people's dirty laundry in public on the planet that just happens to be among the most theocratic in the galaxy and heavily focused on moral and religious rectitude...

Honestly, I think the problem is that Weber zig-zags between making the Graysons an interesting and unique society, and making them the... call it the Baen Reader Fantasy SF Planet, designed to appeal to his core demographic of Republicans who think space is awesome, that regular churchgoing is a must or know lots of people who do, that military budgets should be LARGE, free enterprise leads to 100% employment, and dream of three traditionalist women seeking to nab every husband.

For such a one, Grayson sounds really nice... but that's where gratuitous and inappropriate things like popular hatred of LIBERAL MEDIA come in.

The problem being that BCs are supposed to be able to outrun wallers that can kill them, but modern wallers have a hell of a reach to them, leaving the question of what to do with BCs in the modern combat environ. The BC(p)s are one option, though Manticore considers them a transitory class, the new Nike is the other option, a BC(L) that does to the BC what a Saganami-C does for heavy cruisers.

Hm. Now that I think about it... the BC(L) outmasses a prewar battlecruiser by about 2.5 or 3 to 1.

A Saganami-C compared to a prewar heavy cruiser... more like 1.5 to 1

I think the main difference is that the BC(L) is designed with the expectation that it will be targeted from long range by MDM salvoes. That imposes a certain minimum tonnage and capability level required to make the class viable. Meanwhile the Saganami-C typically does not expect to be primary target for an MDM attack... so the new weapons threats don't change it as much.

[Ahriman238]

One special event, and the rest are people discussing or wrapping up Cutworm.

Ship losses from Cutworm. Well, it could have gone a lot worse for Haven.

Not really, since they had no more armed forces in those systems to lose- the real damage was to their industrial capability.

Sure, which is more or less what I meant. If they'd posted more forces they could have taken significant military losses in addition to the lost industry, which itself was marginal in hindering the war effort, this was very much an attack to regain the initiative and cause political damage to the Prichart Presidency, forcing her and Theisman to explain over and over why this world isn't important enough to station a handful of podnoughts.

Haven podnoughts have no broadside tubes because they had to remove them just to make room for the pods. Manticore did it with the Invictuses to make space for more pods and point defense.

Honestly, I think this is 'the wave of the future' in capital ship design, and that SD(P)s with broadside armament will be seen as transitional designs in the future. The reason is simple: only by the expedient of mounting enormous piles of missile defenses on the broadside can a modern Honorverse capital ship put out enough antimissile fire to defend itself against massed MDM barrages.

Quite likely.

Honor takes a minute to...teach the First Spacelord, her immediate boss, a lesson on treecat physiology.

To be fair, Hamish acquired a treecat in the past year or two, so he does legitimately need to know these things. I know if I had a treecat I'd be damn sure glad someone told me about the claws and why they seem to be made of pure sharpium.

Oh no, Hamish is First Lord of the Admiralty, she's having this conversation with Thomas Caparelli and it totally comes from nowhere.

Grayson may have a "free" press, but they have no patience for yellow journalism.

Yeah, no fair airing powerful people's dirty laundry in public on the planet that just happens to be among the most theocratic in the galaxy and heavily focused on moral and religious rectitude...

Honestly, I think the problem is that Weber zig-zags between making the Graysons an interesting and unique society, and making them the... call it the Baen Reader Fantasy SF Planet, designed to appeal to his core demographic of Republicans who think space is awesome, that regular churchgoing is a must or know lots of people who do, that military budgets should be LARGE, free enterprise leads to 100% employment, and dream of three traditionalist women seeking to nab every husband.

For such a one, Grayson sounds really nice... but that's where gratuitous and inappropriate things like popular hatred of LIBERAL MEDIA come in.

I know. I like the memory stones and gardens. I like the sheer energy they throw into investing into the next generation, literally dying like lemmings to get orbital industry and farming up and to defend it, or building a fleet from almost nothing that stands among the most powerful in the galaxy. I even enjoy the stubborn maintenance of baseball and the handling of their institutional misogyny, how that changes over time but still won't die completely. Then we get to "you could make any sword, but you chose to make katana." and similar things.

In-universe, I believe there are still steadings where badmouthing the steadholder is a crime. We've certainly seen time and again how protective Honor's armsmen are of her, to the point where she banned them from chasing off protestors, so Andy set a volunteer to a bar to rouse a pro-Harrington counter-protest. I suspect a similar dynamic may be at play in their traditions of journalism.

The problem being that BCs are supposed to be able to outrun wallers that can kill them, but modern wallers have a hell of a reach to them, leaving the question of what to do with BCs in the modern combat environ. The BC(p)s are one option, though Manticore considers them a transitory class, the new Nike is the other option, a BC(L) that does to the BC what a Saganami-C does for heavy cruisers.

Hm. Now that I think about it... the BC(L) outmasses a prewar battlecruiser by about 2.5 or 3 to 1.

A Saganami-C compared to a prewar heavy cruiser... more like 1.5 to 1

I think the main difference is that the BC(L) is designed with the expectation that it will be targeted from long range by MDM salvoes. That imposes a certain minimum tonnage and capability level required to make the class viable. Meanwhile the Saganami-C typically does not expect to be primary target for an MDM attack... so the new weapons threats don't change it as much.

I suspect you're right, it continues to annoy me that they stepped down point-defense even slightly, because logically they need to be doing the exact opposite.

Modern BC captains hopefully know modern wallers have that reach, and I don't see how the equation has changed much-wallers have always been able to kill BCs if they could catch them. MDMs merely increased the range the BCs had to stay away from them to ensure they couldn't.
BCs can still fulfill the traditional BC role-kick the snot out of everything smaller than them, be fast enough to run away from anything that could eat them.*

*Granted, didn't work out so well in the real world, but I'd put that down to faulty implementation (and possibly inadequate technology) more than the basic concept not working.

Can they really though, when a waller can reach out and tap them from half an AU away? All you need is one Sidemore trap and there go your BCs. For that matter, they can easily outrange even that, albeit they'd murder their hit-ratios by delaying drive activations. Heck, the biggest limitations seem to be sensor and that missiles outrun control links and come in dumb. The question mark is if the other side is willing to waste massive salvos most of which will miss you.

So no, I can see the idea that without some rethinking and reworking the concept, the BC might find itself on the wrong side of the R&D curve.