Bit of Analysis: Honor Harrington III

[VhenRa]

Those PD mounts might be individually more powerful though. Like faster cycling and longer ranged counter-missiles and PD laser mounts with more lasers. (Remember, SDs have more lasers in each PD mount then Battlecruisers, same for BCs vs Destroyers)

[Simon_Jester]

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?

That HAS to be an error. The 'tech bible' (which is much more recent than The Short Victorious War, but not much more recent than At All Costs) lists the Reliants, of which Nike (BC-462) was one of the lead ships.

It lists them as having nine countermissile launchers per broadside as of construction. A late-war refit more or less doubled the number of countermissile launchers... but here Weber is screwing up and comparing the total of 32 countermissile tubes on a Flight IV Reliant to the single broadside of thirty tubes on a Nike.

Now, I suspect that the Nikes are inferior in the missile defense department to the Agamemnons. Which can't be helped- there isn't room on the broadsides. The Agamemnons have clean, open broadsides with no missile armament and (this is important) no broadside magazines for big bulky antiship missiles. So they can pack an enormous number of countermissiles into the outer hull, between the pod-container core and the outer skin of the ship. It can use the whole broadside for that purpose.

A Nike, which has to cram in 25 missile tubes per broadside and their magazines, can probably only devote, oh... half its broadside, let's say, to missile defense.

And half the broadside area of a 2.5 million ton Nike is less than ALL the broadside area of a 1.75 million ton Agamemnon.

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.

!

Harrington fought some fairly kickass cruiser actions from 1900 to 1904 and got the RMN's best battlecruiser in 1905.

Oversteegen fought some fairly kickass cruiser actions from 1915 to 1919 and got the RMN's best battlecruiser in 1920.

Seems fair to me.

Cutworm II, hitting Chantilly, Des Moines (yes!)

???

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?

[Side note, this is Mueller Junior]

And yes, good question- then again, Mueller Junior is a younger man who may not have fully thought this through. The most likely explanation is that he is in fact attempting to insist on the traditional prerogatives of the Keys to have buy-in on the legitimization of heirs, with a side-order of creating a problem for Benjamin, especially if he takes the indelicate brute force approach of legitimizing the child without Honor being married.

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.

This scene always cracks me up. Particularly the image of the Reverend reading the list off in a dry monotone and hitting "reportedly thirty-six illegitimate sons..."

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.

Battlecruisers in the Honorverse are more equivalent to frigate in the Age of Sail than to the battlecruisers as imagined by Jackie Fisher. Too weak to stand in the line of battle, but fast enough to outrun it.

The catch, though, is that in the age of the multi-drive missile, just showing up in the enemy's star system can put you in range of their capital ships by defaults. Both sides have taken to massing missile pods in their outer systems so they can fire on literally any target almost as soon as it crosses the hyper limit. And if there happen to be capital ships in a given system, being unable to come within tens of millions of kilometers of them means you can't really attack any key targets unless they are very, very isolated.

It's just plain not safe to zip through a star system relying on your superior agility to avoid coming in missile range of enemy heavy forces.

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

Sorry. I should know better than to believe in Weber.

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.

To be fair to the Graysons there, they had literally no reason to know anything whatsoever about swords when they landed on Grayson. So basically everything they know about swords they learned from TV on old Earth or something. Is it any wonder they wound up duplicating the katana, which while not really the best sword design is at least fairly well adapted to a tactical environment where the people you're fighting don't wear armor?

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.

They actually didn't- antimissile firepower per ton has remained more or less constant (one countermissile launcher on the broadside per hundred thousand tons of battlecruiser) from the Flight I Reliant to Nike.

On the other hand, Nike does mount fewer countermissiles per ton than a Flight IV Reliant... but half again as many countermissiles total.

And that's comparing them to a Flight IV Reliant, which is a post-MDM upgrade to a ship that cannot fire MDMs and is therefore incapable of being upgraded to anything more than a glorified escort role, so it might as well have nigh-impenetrable missile defenses on a tonnage basis. Which is basically the same strategic calculation the Havenites made on their battlecruisers. And, in a lesser form, what the SLN is doing with Aegis.

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.

Yeah. Basically, they can no longer count on staying out of range of anticapital missiles... so they need to build a ship that can survive at least occasional hits from those missiles.

[DrStrangelove]

[That HAS to be an error.

It is. The sentence originally included "in each broadside" which made the main battery too large and got deleted in editing. Pearls of weber confirms the Nikes have 32CM tubes in each broadside and explains the goof

[Ahriman238]

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.

!

Harrington fought some fairly kickass cruiser actions from 1900 to 1904 and got the RMN's best battlecruiser in 1905.

Oversteegen fought some fairly kickass cruiser actions from 1915 to 1919 and got the RMN's best battlecruiser in 1920.

Seems fair to me.

It's all fair, though I think the timelines are getting snarled (He gets called a commodore at one point early in ToF) I just find his phonetically-rendered accent really irritating. Which is funny, cause I was fine with Hagrid and the moles of Redwall.

Cutworm II, hitting Chantilly, Des Moines (yes!)

???

I'm also not a fan of the city of Des Moines, being as parochial as the next American.

And yes, good question- then again, Mueller Junior is a younger man who may not have fully thought this through. The most likely explanation is that he is in fact attempting to insist on the traditional prerogatives of the Keys to have buy-in on the legitimization of heirs, with a side-order of creating a problem for Benjamin, especially if he takes the indelicate brute force approach of legitimizing the child without Honor being married.

If anyone's earned, or is ever likely to get, a free pass on legitimizing their chosen heir, it's Honor. Steadholder with no other male heir (and no children, but a sister who may inherit)? check. Proof that the child is, in fact, her blood? Irrefutable. Greatest living military hero, savior of their entire world twice over? Check. And while Graysons can absolutely be stubborn and provincial, I think the man on the street has long since gotten that Honor grew up in a very different society.

To be fair to the Graysons there, they had literally no reason to know anything whatsoever about swords when they landed on Grayson. So basically everything they know about swords they learned from TV on old Earth or something. Is it any wonder they wound up duplicating the katana, which while not really the best sword design is at least fairly well adapted to a tactical environment where the people you're fighting don't wear armor?

Isn't a katana pretty much a way of wringing something useful out of the crap steel Japan used to use? I seem to recall hearing it took weeks of training just to get good enough to swing the sword and have it not shatter or snap.

It is. The sentence originally included "in each broadside" which made the main battery too large and got deleted in editing. Pearls of weber confirms the Nikes have 32CM tubes in each broadside and explains the goof

Makes more sense to me. Thanks, Dr. Strangelove! Good luck with the AHS.

[Simon_Jester]

To be fair to the Graysons there, they had literally no reason to know anything whatsoever about swords when they landed on Grayson. So basically everything they know about swords they learned from TV on old Earth or something. Is it any wonder they wound up duplicating the katana, which while not really the best sword design is at least fairly well adapted to a tactical environment where the people you're fighting don't wear armor?

Isn't a katana pretty much a way of wringing something useful out of the crap steel Japan used to use? I seem to recall hearing it took weeks of training just to get good enough to swing the sword and have it not shatter or snap.

Yes- but the early Grayson settlers may have literally not known that much about swordsmithing and picked a suboptimal design out of ignorance. I don't remember if they actually did have a massively elaborate forging technique as the Japanese did.

But even if they did make katana-shaped swords out of whatever steel was available in historic Grayson culture, they'd be... adequate, probably. Katanas become inviable if your enemies have metal armor, but that just means they stop being the weapons armies fight with and become the weapons of single combat and dueling culture. Which is exactly what happened in Japan- armies fought with bows, halberds, and other such weapons, and the sword became rather secondary.

Which is pretty much what happened everywhere anyway...

[VhenRa]

To be fair to the Graysons there, they had literally no reason to know anything whatsoever about swords when they landed on Grayson. So basically everything they know about swords they learned from TV on old Earth or something. Is it any wonder they wound up duplicating the katana, which while not really the best sword design is at least fairly well adapted to a tactical environment where the people you're fighting don't wear armor?

Isn't a katana pretty much a way of wringing something useful out of the crap steel Japan used to use? I seem to recall hearing it took weeks of training just to get good enough to swing the sword and have it not shatter or snap.

Yes- but the early Grayson settlers may have literally not known that much about swordsmithing and picked a suboptimal design out of ignorance. I don't remember if they actually did have a massively elaborate forging technique as the Japanese did.

But even if they did make katana-shaped swords out of whatever steel was available in historic Grayson culture, they'd be... adequate, probably. Katanas become inviable if your enemies have metal armor, but that just means they stop being the weapons armies fight with and become the weapons of single combat and dueling culture. Which is exactly what happened in Japan- armies fought with bows, halberds, and other such weapons, and the sword became rather secondary.

Which is pretty much what happened everywhere anyway...

Thought it was Bows, Spears and especially by the 1500s... Matchlocks. From what I understand, the Japanese actually had superior usage of early firearms then Europe for a short time.

[Simon_Jester]

Well, the muskets show up at the very end of Japan's pre-Tokugawa period. I was thinking purely in terms of musclepowered weapons, things that existed a few centuries earlier than that.

Point is, metal armor effectively makes all swords more or less obsolete as the primary weapon of a fighting soldier, especially armor made out of plates with decent coverage and thickness. You see armies equipped mainly with swords in environments where the typical enemy is:

1) Going to come within arm's reach, and
2) Not wearing much metallic armor, because
2a) They can't afford it, or
2b) The climate or lifestyle doesn't permit it

Otherwise, the sword becomes a backup weapon for killing lightly armored enemy troops, or evolves into a stylized dueling weapon. If condition (1) fails the default weapon becomes the bow or the musket; if (2) fails the default weapon usually becomes a polearm (for the foot soldier) or a lance (for the cavalryman), because those weapons have the momentum and striking power to penetrate a lot more armor plate.

[Ultonius]

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 do find it a little odd that in a society which was explicitly founded on pretty fundamentalist 'Christian values', albeit not exactly those of mainstream Christianity, such a relatively high number of steadholders (that we know of!) had extramarital sexual relationships. Even if the steadholders themselves were able to justify their infidelity to themselves on whatever grounds ('I'm the steadholder so I deserve it', 'it's their fault for tempting me', or even 'my wives can't give me sons'), you would think that the fathers/male relatives of their mistresses would have some objections to their supposedly godly rulers 'ruining' their daughters/sisters and by extension disgracing their families. The only thing I can think of is that early in Grayson's history, when survival was at a premium, the alliances between clans, such as the one Honor establishes between the Harringtons and the Clinkscales clan, gave some informal equivalent of 'droit de seigneur'/'ius primae noctis', where steaders tacitly allowed their steadholder to have his way with their women in return for his protection.

[Simon_Jester]

The 1:3 male:female ratio may also have something to do with it; even assuming they adopted polygyny early on, there'd still be quite a few unattached women in the society. Steadholders who wanted to establish a de facto harem would be in a good position to do so.

[Nephtys]

Considering that only 300 years after landfall on Grayson, they were able to build tanks, logistics chains for intercontinental warfare, nukes, giant cryogenic sleeper colony ships, and doomsday devices, I'd imagine the period where swords were actually used for fighting people to have been exceptionally short or non-existant.

It's more likely that much of the symbol was just that. Forced symbolism, to use possibly religious imagery to make the notion of swords a powerful cultural image, but not one that actually had a great practical basis to be so.

[Simon_Jester]

True.

I mean, we went from fighting with swords seriously up to nuclear war in about three hundred years... but we also had a heavily populated planet where industrial development and physical construction were a lot easier than on Grayson.

[Darth Nostril]

It's Glorious Kerbal Graysons, they're allowed to have any silly anachronisms they want.

[Batman]

We also started from that 'swords are actually dangerous in war' tech base. Grayson did not, they started from an 'interstellar travel is possible, albeit only with sleeper ships' tech base, so even if they regressed to early 20th century tech levels I doubt swords were part of their military gear much.

[Mr Bean]

We also started from that 'swords are actually dangerous in war' tech base. Grayson did not, they started from an 'interstellar travel is possible, albeit only with sleeper ships' tech base, so even if they regressed to early 20th century tech levels I doubt swords were part of their military gear much.

Did they bring large scale fabrication and manufacturing tools with them? They regressed earlier than 20th century tech levels if the first cities on Grayson were built with horses in mind.

[Simon_Jester]

I think what happened is that they regressed clear back to a sort of hybrid medieval/technological environment, although I can't imagine how they kept horses alive in that heavy metal environment. However, because they never really lost their basic knowledge of the technology that existed on Earth before they left in the 25th century AD, the first few centuries were a period of building infrastructure and 'redeveloping' technology that they knew they were "supposed" to have, and they recovered relatively quickly.

[Ahriman238]

It's that time again. Cutworm II.

"I don't think there's much we can do about it right now. If they get clumsy and we get a solid read on them, I'd love to nail them. I'm not going to try holding my breath until we do, though, and I don't want to give away anything we don't have to. So tell Ivan to activate Smoke and Mirrors. I want everything we've got brought to immediate readiness, but no one moves, and we shut down the Mirror Box platforms right now. And I want all of our stealth-capable units except the destroyers into stealth now. They stay there until I tell them differently."

The defenders, at least have clearly put some thought into what to do if attacked this time. Then again, at the high operational tempo Honor is keeping they've only had a couple of weeks to hear about the first attack and brace themselves however they're able. But it's okay, these are just the scouts.

"Whatever it is—and between you and me, Sir, it's got to be a stealthed Manty recon platform—it's moving like a bat out of hell. I wish to hell I knew how they got these kinds of acceleration levels and endurance numbers on their platforms!"

"NavInt says they've probably put micro fusion plants on them."

Sullivan blinked.

"Fusion plants? On something this small?"

Yeah kid, on something that small.

"At least thirteen footprints," Ericsson said grimly. "It may be fourteen. We're working to refine the numbers."

13-14 ships hitting Chantilly, I believe this is Alice Truman's attack force.

"Perimeter Tracking makes it four superdreadnoughts, four battle-cruisers, and seven heavy and light cruisers," Bressand repeated. "It's possible one or more of the superdreadnoughts could be a carrier, but so far the emissions signatures are consistent with Invictus and Medusa-class SD(P)s. If I had to guess, I'd guess we're up against the same force that hit Hera."

While Honor hits Augusta. Ah Haven, in every book you have new systems to lose, or just have their industry dismantled in a series of daring raids.

"I've got some orders around here somewhere that say something about my being the Augusta System's naval commander. If memory serves, they also say something about defending my station against attack."

"I know they do." Poykkonen's tone told Bressand his feeble attempt at humor had failed. "But that doesn't change the fact that you've got one old-style superdreadnought, six battlecruisers, and a couple of hundred LACs. That's not enough to stop her, and you know it."

Defenders of Augusta, 1 SD, 6 BC, "couple hundred" LACs. Lots of pods, both system defense and for each of his ships, but yeah, they're going down hard.

"They're here, Ma'am," Commander Alan McGwire said. "Perimeter Tracking makes it at least six of the wall—some of them might be carriers, of course—ten cruisers, and at least three destroyers."

Third prong (McKeon) strikes at Fordyce.

"In which case I might as well simply shoot them myself." Carmouche turned away from the plot at last. "For Christ's sake, Diego has less than a hundred and fifty Cimeterres! If I commit him against these people, they'll blow him out of space before he even gets into his missile range of them. And just what the hell does he imagine he'd accomplish against superdreadnoughts even if he got into range in the first place?"

Carmouche in Fordyce gives the order to evacuate all orbital stations, recalls the LACs and has the hyper-capable ships burn rubber for the hyper-limit. Bit of an anti-climax, but then Honor was working on older data planning the attack, data from before they stripped the Fordyce picket to 7 heavy cruisers, 100 LACs and roughly 200 pods.

Contact Admiral Corsini. I want only the Katanas deployed, strictly in the missile defense role. We'll take Intransigent and Elizabeth in, covered by Gottmeyer's cruisers and the Katanas. Corsini is to retain Atchison's cruiser division and the destroyers as a screen for the carriers and stay outside the hyper limit. If any unpleasant strangers appear, she's to immediately withdraw and return directly to Trevor's Star."

"We could probably sweep up the pieces faster with a couple of LAC groups, Sir," Orndorff pointed out in a diplomatic tone, and McKeon nodded.

"Yes, we could. On the other hand, a couple of SD(P)s can wipe out every significant platform out there in less than fifteen minutes if we have to. I'm not going to send in the LACs while holding the wallers out of missile range, and if I'm going to take the division in anyway, there's no point exposing Shrikes and Ferrets to potential lucky hits from the pods. If it takes us a little longer to do the job this way, so be it."

Looks like 2 SD(P)s and 4 carriers in McKeon's group. His plan for taking out the infrastructure even with the pods.

Captain Arakel Hovanian, acting commodore of the 93rd Destroyer Squadron, Republican Navy, glared at the master plot showing the icons of four CLACs, four battlecruisers, and seven destroyers and light cruisers sweeping inward from the hyper limit of the Des Moines System.

Fourth prong. Des Moines order of battle.

Manticore: 4 CLAC, 4 BCs (P?) 7 escorts, light cruisers and tin cans.

Haven: 3 DD, 26 LAC, and an unspecified "thin" shield of system-defense pods. Note that half his squadron is down, so DDs seem to operate in groups of six.

"We've confirmed it," Bressand's ops officer said. "Assuming they haven't decided to try to spoof our identification for some reason, two of those ships are definitely a pair of the Invictuses that hit Hera. I'm guessing one of them is the Manties' Eighth Fleet's flagship."

"Which means we probably are about to play host to 'the Salamander' herself," Guyard observed. "There's an honor—you should pardon the pun—I could have done without."

"You and me both," Bressand said, remembering his conversation with Poykkonen. "Not that it's going to take any tactical genius to kick the crap out of us with this kind of force imbalance."

"Maybe not, Sir," Krenckel said. "On the other hand, there's a sort of backhanded compliment in getting pounded by the other side's best."

"Did I ever mention that you're a very strange man, Ludwig?" Guyard asked.

Back to Augusta a moment, where they've ID'd Honor.

"Why, Admiral Henke! I hadn't realized you had such a broad streak of paranoia."

"It comes from associating with people like you and Her Grace," Henke said dryly. Then she continued more seriously. "As Honor keeps pointing out, the Peeps aren't stupid. And this time around, they don't have political masters insisting they act as if they were. They haven't had time to reinforce heavily, but Chantilly is a jucier target than Gaston was. It should have been more heavily defended to begin with, and they sure as hell had more hyper-capable units in-system than the three destroyers our arrays have picked up. Which suggests to my naturally suspicious mind that as soon as they realized we'd inserted those arrays, they went to full-court stealth on their main combatants."

Chantilly is getting interesting. Mike and Alice are still paired.

"To be perfectly honest, I'm less concerned about their warships than I am about their predeployed pods," Henke said. "They didn't have a huge number of them in Gaston, but that's the most cost-effective area-denial system they've got. And we found out in Gaston that they're a lot harder to spot than we thought they'd be. It's pretty obvious—assuming we're right about where their starships are—that whoever's in command here's a pretty cool customer. Sneaky, too. I don't like to think about what someone like that could do with a big enough stack of system defense pods if she put her mind to it."

And there's that.

Winston Bradshaw and his two Saganami-class cruisers—HMS Edward Saganami and HMS Quentin Saint-James—closed up on Truman's carriers, while Henke herself, with Ajax, Agamemnon, and the light cruisers Amun, Anhur, and Bastet followed in Oversteegen's wake. She didn't want the interval between her own ships and Oversteegen's division to get too great, but she wanted at least a few more seconds to react to any traps or ambushes Oversteegen might trip. And she wanted to be sure she kept her ships and the four squadrons of Katanas providing her close cover between Oversteegen and the two hundred-plus Peep LACs shadowing the Manticoran ships.

She looked at the tiny icons of the LACs on her plot, and once again, she was tempted to roll pods. The small vessels were well within her powered missile envelope, but far enough out accuracy would be even lower than usual against LACs, and Agamemnons weren't wallers. They had to watch their ammunition consumption carefully.

Another Anhur? What class of Manty cruisers is named for Egyptian gods? Mike's command includes not just all Manticore's BC(P)s but Oversttegen's Nike and a pair of Saganamis almost certainly older A or B models.

Personally, I'm betting she did it as soon as her sensors picked up Greyhound and Whippet's hyper footprints. And I'm also betting she'd already decided what she was going to do with her pods if it came to it. So what she's probably been doing is quietly using some of that near-planet 'merchant traffic' Sturgis reported to pick up and drop off previously deployed pods. If she did, I think we need to rethink our recon doctrine."

"Go ahead and park one or two in close and just let them sit?"

"Yes, Ma'am."

Henke didn't mention that she'd already suggested that modification only to have the Powers That Were at Admiralty House shoot it down. They were concerned that a stationary platform would be more readily tracked down, especially since it would be inside most of the system's defenders' surveillance platforms, which would give them a far better chance of detecting the array's directional transmissions and triangulating on their source. Having the arrays localized and destroyed would have been bad enough, but the present generation of recon drones had all the Ghost Rider bells and whistles, including the very latest grav-pulse coms and several other goodies Erewhon had never had to turn over to Haven in the first place. The possibility that one of them might be disabled without being destroyed, while slight, did exist, and Admiralty House strongly objected to the notion of handing the Star Kingdom's latest and best hardware to the other side for examination.

Smoke and Mirrors, the Havenites at Chantilly moved around their pods, probably giving a hefty initial punch to the force quietly sneaking up on the Manties. The arguments for and against leaving a recon platform to sit in orbit and monitor for this sort of sneakiness.

"Normally, I'd tend to agree with Ivan," Ericsson said after a moment. "But I don't like this." He indicated the steadily accelerating icons of the enemy LACs once more. "They've been careful to keep them between our known LAC concentrations and the rest of their ships. To me, that suggests they're probably Katanas in the escort role. But now they're sending them in along with their probe, and I'm wondering if they've evolved something like our LAC fleet missile-defense doctrine. If they have, then the people we're going to have the improved firing solutions on are also going to've significantly improved their defenses by the time we finally fire."

"On the other hand, Ma'am," deCastro pointed out, "the closer they get to us, the further they are from their main body. And if they are a sizable chunk of the Manties' Katana force, mousetrapping them now might be the best thing we could do. Especially since they also seem to've completely missed Mirror Box."

Yes, Manticore is already using LACs for missile defense.

She stood beside Commander Ericsson, gazing into the master plot of RHNS Cyrus, her battlecruiser flagship, at the icons of the oncoming warships. Even a few years before, she knew, the Manties would already have localized her own ships, opened fire, and almost certainly destroyed them by now. But one of the Manty drones had passed within less than ten light-seconds of her flagship and simply continued on its way, which made it obvious the improvements in the Republic's stealth systems were giving the enemy's sensors a hard time. The fact that none of her starships had their wedges up and that all of them had gone to total emissions control undoubtedly helped, but even so, she felt the tension prickling sharper in her palms. Cyrus and her consorts were barely one light-minute from Vespasien, and the Manties were clearly looking for them hard.

Vespasien is the inhabited planet of the Chantilly system, by the by. Improvements to Haven stealth technology. So now they trigger the decoy.

The new emission signatures Gohr had picked up were just over two light-minutes inside Vespasien's orbit. Assuming the ships responsible for the signatures had pods of multi-drive missiles, that would put his ships inside their effective range, but far enough out for Havenite accuracy to be very, very poor.

"Move the platforms closer, Betty," he said, after a moment. "And don't forget t' watch the other approaches, as well."

"Yes, Sir."

Oversteegen being laconic under pressure, and not necessarily taken in by the EW drones (towed by recon LACs) imitating a stealthed cruiser squadron.

"Launch another shell," he said. "I want t' sweep this area again."

He tapped a command into his armrest alphanumeric pad, highlighting the indicated volume of space on Gohr's larger plot.

"Sir, I can recall the Beta platforms to cover that volume," she pointed out.

"I'm certain you could," he agreed pleasantly. "Unfortunately, that would require at least twenty minutes, and I want it swept now."

Suspicious too, this time it saves his command.

"Missile launch!" Betty Gohr barked suddenly. "Multiple missile launches!"

Oversteegen looked up sharply as the deadly, blood-red icons appeared on the master plot.

"Range at launch eight-five-point-two light-seconds," Gohr said flatly. "Time to attack range six-point-one-three minutes!"

-snip-

"Estimate nineteen hundred incoming," Lieutenant Commander Gohr announced.

Six minutes to deal with almost two thousand in-bound. Fun.

Her six heavily refitted Warlord-class battlecruisers and three Trojan-class destroyers were the only hyper-capable combatants she had, but she also had almost six hundred Cimeterres and almost a thousand system-defense missile pods to back them up. And she also had two hundred and forty standard MDM pods to go with it.

The problem was that although the system-defense pods' out-sized, over-powered birds could actually slightly exceed Manticoran MDMs' acceleration rates, her standard pods' missiles couldn't quite match them, and neither of them were as accurate as Manty missiles. In addition, what had happened in Gaston demonstrated that her LACs simply could not mix it up with Katanas—on Manty terms, at least—and win. So she'd had to get creative if she wanted to do any good.

Chantilly defenders, 6 BC, 3 DD, almost 600 LACs. The ships are still towing standard missile-pods while the system-defense pods have MDMs. The LACs are scattered around, some as decoys, some as the highly visible defenders, but most are waiting quietly to pounce while the Manties are distracted. Mirror Box are LAC bases disguised as normal freight-handling stations (because they're converted ones, I'd bet). Bellefeuille is an interesting adversary.

Dillinger didn't really like to think about just how expensive each of his LACs' "counter-missiles" actually was. The systems built into the Viper for its anti-LAC role meant it cost twice as much as the standard extended-range Mark 31 CM on which it was based. But the Viper retained the Mark 31's basic drive system, and a counter-missile's impeller wedge was what it used to "sweep up" attack missiles. Which meant the Viper was still perfectly capable of being used defensively, and earmarking a percentage of them for missile defense, rather than using magazine space on dedicated Mark 31s which couldn't be used in the anti-shipping role, simplified their ammunition requirements and gave them a potentially useful cushion both offensively and defensively.

Though in this case, most of this set-up was so they'd fire off their missiles and be vulnerable to the Haven LACs. Oh, and order for emergency LAC missile defense is 'Flyswatter,' which Oversteegen orders them to abort when he and Mike each realize there's too few inbound missiles for a proper sucker punch attack with the pods they know to be there.

Of the nineteen hundred missiles which had launched, the LACs had killed seven hundred. The battlecruisers' counter-missiles killed two hundred and sixty, and another hundred and fifty or so simply lost lock and wandered off on their own. Three hundred and twelve more locked onto the Ghost Rider decoys Nike and Hector had deployed, and another sixty looped suddenly back towards the Katanas, only to be ripped apart by the LACs' point defense clusters.

Some impressive missile defense. 260 missiles from Nike and compatriots' own CM launchers, 312 lost to decoys, 150 lose lock on their own while 60 pick up on the LACs. The defenders estimate the LACs go through half their VIper missiles their, so at least 28 birds to an LAC.

Oversteegen watched them come, absolutely motionless in his command chair, narrow eyes very still. Thirty point defense laser clusters studded each of Nike's flanks. They were individually more powerful than any past Manticoran battlecruiser had ever mounted, with fourteen emitters per cluster, each capable of cycling at one shot every sixteen seconds. That came to one shot every 1.2 seconds per cluster, but that was only twenty-five per broadside per second, and these were MDMs. They had traveled over twenty-five million kilometers to reach their targets, their closing speed was almost 173,000 KPS—fifty-eight percent of the speed of light—and they had a standoff attack range of 30,000 kilometers.

The new PD lasers, 30 clusters times 14 emitters to a cluster. 420 lasers, each with one shot every 16 seconds. I wonder what the RoF is for larger energy mounts.

They crossed the inner perimeter of the counter-missile interception zone, losing another hundred and seventeen in the process. Of the three hundred and sixty-one survivors, fifty-eight were electronic warfare platforms, which meant "only" three hundred and three missiles—barely fifteen percent of the original launch—actually attacked.

The space about Nike and Hector was hideous with incandescent eruptions of fury, and bomb-pumped lasers ripped and gouged at their targets. But these battlecruisers had been designed and built to face exactly this sort of attack. Their sidewalls—especially Nike's—were far tougher and more powerful than any previous battlecruisers had mounted, and both of them were equipped with the RMN's bow and stern walls. The fact that they'd been able to keep their wedges turned towards the incoming fire even while they engaged it with their own counter-missiles presented additional targeting problems for the Havenite missiles' onboard systems. Instead of the broadside aspect ships were normally forced to show attack missiles' sensors, all these missiles saw was the wedge itself. But no sensor could penetrate a military-grade impeller wedge, which made it impossible for them to absolutely localize their targets. They could predict the volume in which their target must lay, but not precisely where within that volume to find it.

And that was why Nike and Hector survived. The missiles' sensors could have seen through the battlecruisers' sidewalls, but the sidewalls were turned away from them. Most of them streaked "above" and "below" the Manticoran battlecruisers, fighting for a "look-down" shot, while others crossed the Manticorans' bows or sterns, trying for "up-the-kilt" or "down-the-throat" shots. Tough as Nike's passive defenses were, they were no match for the raw power of the Havenite lasers, but the very speed which made MDMs such difficult targets for short-range point defense fire worked against them now. They simply didn't have time to find their targets and fire in the fleeting fragment of a second they took to cross the Manticoran ships' tracks.

Sidewall upgrades too. Actually they come through completely undamaged, and kept up a steady stream of CMs with their wedge in the way, thanks especially to Keyhole.

A fresh wave of MDMs had abruptly appeared, launched from the same spot as the first salvo. But this one was considerably more massive. The next best thing to six thousand missile icons spangled the display, streaking towards his ships—and also Dillinger's LACs and Michelle Henke's division—and Gohr was right about the LAC launches, as well. The two hundred Task Force 81 had already known about went suddenly to full acceleration, charging towards the Manticorans, but twice that many more were erupting into space, turning towards Dillinger's Katanas and the battlecruisers behind them.

-snip-

No. They were simply going to have to take it, and his expression was bleak as he watched the attack come in. It was unlikely that even this would destroy his ship. The one mistake whoever had planned the attack had made was in his targeting selection. He ought to have directed all of that fire at no more than one or two targets, not spread it among so many. But it was hard to fault him for that, when he probably hadn't realized just how tough the battlecruisers he faced truly were. And if he wasn't going to kill them, that didn't mean he wasn't going to hurt them badly. Which didn't even consider what was going to happen to Dillinger's Katanas after they'd been mousetrapped into expending so many of their missiles against the first wave of MDMs.

For just a moment, behind the armor of his eyes, Michael Oversteegen felt a fleeting glow of admiration for his opponent. Whoever he was, he'd made maximum use of his limited resources, and Task Force 81's lead elements were about to get hammered.

But the moment passed, and Oversteegen straightened in his command chair.

"Defense plan Alpha-Three," he said calmly.

The new BCs are helluva tough, it's the only way to survive. This is where we cut off for Chantilly, and really all of Cutworm II. Suffice to say, the thing was another rousing success.

[VhenRa]

Winston Bradshaw and his two Saganami-class cruisers—HMS Edward Saganami and HMS Quentin Saint-James—closed up on Truman's carriers, while Henke herself, with Ajax, Agamemnon, and the light cruisers Amun, Anhur, and Bastet followed in Oversteegen's wake. She didn't want the interval between her own ships and Oversteegen's division to get too great, but she wanted at least a few more seconds to react to any traps or ambushes Oversteegen might trip. And she wanted to be sure she kept her ships and the four squadrons of Katanas providing her close cover between Oversteegen and the two hundred-plus Peep LACs shadowing the Manticoran ships.

She looked at the tiny icons of the LACs on her plot, and once again, she was tempted to roll pods. The small vessels were well within her powered missile envelope, but far enough out accuracy would be even lower than usual against LACs, and Agamemnons weren't wallers. They had to watch their ammunition consumption carefully.

Another Anhur? What class of Manty cruisers is named for Egyptian gods? Mike's command includes not just all Manticore's BC(P)s but Oversttegen's Nike and a pair of Saganamis almost certainly older A or B models.

My money? Apollo-class CLs, like Alice's HMS Apollo. Might be Avalon-class though (Avalon is the CL counterpart to the Saganami-B and Wolfhound-class DDs, Wolfhounds were the convoy escort/general use DD the HRG authorized. Roland-class is much more optimised for sheer killing and is actually larger then the Avalon CLs)

Her six heavily refitted Warlord-class battlecruisers and three Trojan-class destroyers were the only hyper-capable combatants she had, but she also had almost six hundred Cimeterres and almost a thousand system-defense missile pods to back them up. And she also had two hundred and forty standard MDM pods to go with it.

The problem was that although the system-defense pods' out-sized, over-powered birds could actually slightly exceed Manticoran MDMs' acceleration rates, her standard pods' missiles couldn't quite match them, and neither of them were as accurate as Manty missiles. In addition, what had happened in Gaston demonstrated that her LACs simply could not mix it up with Katanas—on Manty terms, at least—and win. So she'd had to get creative if she wanted to do any good.

Chantilly defenders, 6 BC, 3 DD, almost 600 LACs. The ships are still towing standard missile-pods while the system-defense pods have MDMs. The LACs are scattered around, some as decoys, some as the highly visible defenders, but most are waiting quietly to pounce while the Manties are distracted. Mirror Box are LAC bases disguised as normal freight-handling stations (because they're converted ones, I'd bet). Bellefeuille is an interesting adversary.

Uh? The towed pods ALSO have MDMs, it says right there. Its just system-defense pods have much more capable MDMs then the standard pods, which are supposed to be carried inside SDPs as well. Manticore has their own system-defense pod and attendant MDM, which is a four-drive variant of their standard three-drive MDM. The big different system-defense pods seem to have is, they are not intended for offensive use and are put into place as cargo on freighters, so why stick to a smaller missile when you can essentially go big. The Havenite system defense pods are larger then normal AND fire a much larger MDM, even larger then Havenite's already quite large MDM.

Oversteegen watched them come, absolutely motionless in his command chair, narrow eyes very still. Thirty point defense laser clusters studded each of Nike's flanks. They were individually more powerful than any past Manticoran battlecruiser had ever mounted, with fourteen emitters per cluster, each capable of cycling at one shot every sixteen seconds. That came to one shot every 1.2 seconds per cluster, but that was only twenty-five per broadside per second, and these were MDMs. They had traveled over twenty-five million kilometers to reach their targets, their closing speed was almost 173,000 KPS—fifty-eight percent of the speed of light—and they had a standoff attack range of 30,000 kilometers.

The new PD lasers, 30 clusters times 14 emitters to a cluster. 420 lasers, each with one shot every 16 seconds. I wonder what the RoF is for larger energy mounts.

14 Emitters? Wasn't early book PD mounts only 8 emitters per cluster?

[Ahriman238]

"The only 'good' news I've got is a follow up report that Bellefeuille survived after all," Admiral Marquette replied.

The devious Chantilly commander lives to fight another day.

Of the four star systems Harrington had hit this time around, only Chantilly had mounted any effective resistance. Not for want of trying, he reminded himself grimly. Rear Admiral Bressand had done his best in Augusta, but he'd been totally outclassed and outgunned . . . and not as cunning as Jennifer Bellefeuille. Harrington's pod-layers had reduced his hyper-capable combatants to scrap metal in return for minor, if any, damage. And when his LACs had closed with suicidal gallantry, they had discovered that the Manties' counter-missile tubes, at least aboard their newer construction, were perfectly capable of launching the "dogfighting" missiles they'd developed for their damned Katanas.

It had been a massacre, and not one for which he could blame Bressand. A part of him would have liked to, and he could actually make a case for it, if he really tried. After all, Bressand could have exercised his discretion and declined to engage such a massively superior force. But the reason that force had been so superior to his was that his own superiors—headed by one Thomas Theisman—had failed to adequately support him.

Bressand had done his job with what he had, and, like Bellefeuille in Chantilly, he'd obviously hoped to inflict at least attritional damage on the raiders. And that, Theisman reminded himself, was probably a direct consequence of the staff analysis he'd ordered shared with all of his system commanders. Given the numerical advantage the Republic enjoyed—or shortly would enjoy—even an unfavorable exchange rate was ultimately in Haven's favor. He'd ordered that analysis disseminated because it was true, yet it had been much easier to accept its truth before so many thousands of Navy men and women had died in Augusta.

Aftermath of Cutworm II. Theisman has told all his people how much they're looking to outstrip Manticore in construction, and that every loss is going to hurt the Manties more than them. Oh, and bigger ships can fire Vipers out their CM launchers too. Now all we need are canisters of Viper missiles.

"We hurt their LACs pretty badly, relatively speaking," Marquette said. Then he grimaced. "I can't believe I just said that. Bellefeuille took out about seventy of their LACs, including fifty or so of their Katanas, in return for just over five hundred of our own. As exchange rates go, that sucks, but it's the equivalent of about three quarters of one of their LAC groups, and much as I hate to say it, we can replace our personnel and materiel losses more easily than they can."

LAC exchange rate at Chantilly. 50 Katanas and some other LACs that weren't part of Dagger group in exchange for 500 Cimeterres.

"On the starship side, we didn't do as well. Mostly because those damned new battlecruisers of theirs are a hell of a lot tougher than a battlecruiser has any right being. We hammered one of their pod-layers pretty badly—her wedge strength was down, and she was venting a lot of atmosphere by the end. Bellefeuille's other main target—that big-assed 'battlecruiser' that just has to be this new Nike we've been hearing rumors about—got off with what was probably only minor damage."

Marquette shook his head, his expression rueful.

"That's a very tough ship, Tom. And they appear to have armed her with that new, smaller MDM NavInt's also been hearing about. By the way, that's how the staff weenies figure they've managed to cram so many missiles into their battlecruiser pod-layers' pods. They're using pods big enough to fire all-up missiles, but loading them with these smaller ones. It costs them something in total powered envelope, but it also increases their throw weight, and accuracy at extreme range's so poor the heavier fire more than compensates across the effective envelope. And the reports that they're somehow firing both broadsides simultaneously from their more conventionally armed ships—and doing it while they're rolled on their sides relative to their targets, to boot—seem to be confirmed."

Didn't we go over the Mk 16s in BC(P) pods after the last Cutworm? Granted Tom wasn't at that meeting, but you'd think it'd take less than a few weeks for him to hear of it. Haven still doesn't have off-bore missile tubes.

"We've got two options—well, three, I suppose. We could do nothing, which wouldn't exactly sit well with Congress or the public at large. We could immediately launch a general offensive, which might succeed, but probably wouldn't—at least until we've got more of the new construction up to speed and ready for action—and which definitely would entail heavy casualties. Or we dust off the contingency plans for Operation Gobi and hand it to Lester."

Options.

"He's got Second Fleet's core organization just about set up, and he's got a nucleus of experienced units to go with the new ones. He could probably slice off a battle squadron or two for a quick-and-dirty, off-the-cuff job if we told him to."

"No." Theisman shook his head firmly. "If we hand him Gobi—and I think we're going to have to—he gets time to set it up right. I saw too many operations fucked up when the old management decided to improvise and demand miracles. I won't send our people in without adequate time to prepare unless there's absolutely no other alternative."

Spoken like a man sent on no notice to deal with Masadan fanatics in an impossible....oh.

"Basically," Marquette said, sitting obediently, "they tried looking at the problem through Manty eyes. They figure the Manties are looking for targets they can anticipate will be fairly lightly defended, but which have enough population and representation to generate a lot of political pressure. They're also hitting systems with a civilian economy which may not be contributing very much to the war effort, but which is large enough to require the federal government to undertake a substantial diversion of emergency assistance when it's destroyed. And it's also pretty clear that they want to impress us with their aggressiveness. That's why they're operating so deep. Well, that and because the deeper they get, the further away from the 'frontline' systems, the less likely we are to have heavy defensive forces in position to intercept them. So that means we should be looking at deep penetration targets, not frontier raids."

"All of that sounds reasonable," Theisman said after considering it. "Logical, anyway. Of course, logic is only as good as its basic assumptions."

"Agreed. But it's worth noting that two of the systems they predicted might be hit were Des Moines and Fordyce."

"They were?" Theisman sat a bit straighter, and Marquette nodded.

"And Chantilly was on their secondary list of less likely targets."

"That is interesting. On the other hand, how many other systems were on their lists?"

"Ten on the primary list and fifteen on the secondary."

"So they hit three out of a total of twenty-five. Twelve percent."

-snip-

"You and I—and our analysts, for that matter—agree that these raids represent what's basically a strategy of weakness. They're trying to hurt us and throw us off balance for a minimal investment in forces and minimal losses of their own. So I would submit that we don't really have to stop them dead everywhere; we just have to hammer them really hard once or twice. Hurt them proportionately worse than they're hurting us."

So reinforce one or two systems enough to hammer any task force the size Honor's been splitting her Fleet into, and hope they show up there.

"I was figuring we'd use detachments working up a relatively smaller percentage of new units," Marquette replied. "And, while I'm thinking about it, I think it would be a very good idea to put Javier himself in position to cover the system we think is most likely to be hit."

"Now that is a very good notion." Theisman nodded enthusiastically. "He's still kicking himself over Trevor's Star, and pointing out to him that he's being wise with the benefit of hindsight doesn't seem to help much. It'd make a lot of sense for him to be involved in training his own squadrons, and if he just happened to kick the ass of a Manty raid . . ."

"That's what I was thinking," Marquette agreed. "It would do a world of good for his confidence, and the shot in the arm it would provide for public and fleet morale wouldn't be anything to sneer at, either."

"And if we get some of Shannon's new goodies deployed to help him out, things could get hot enough for even 'the Salamander' to think twice about climbing back into the oven again," Theisman said.

And put Javier Giscard in charge.

"We need to spend a little more time kicking around what happened at Chantilly, but we can do that later. I'd never heard of this Admiral Bellefeuille until she screened me after the shooting was over to thank us for arranging the full evacuation of the civilian platforms before we blew them. She was floating around in a pinnace—or maybe even a life pod—for most of that time, I understand. But I think we need to bring her name to ONI's attention. This woman is sneaky, Honor. She reminds me a lot of what you've said about Shannon Foraker, and if she'd had better information on our defensive capabilities, we'd have gotten hurt a lot worse."

"It was bad enough, anyway," McKeon growled, shaking his head. "Hector's going to be out of action for at least three months."

Bellefeuille and the damage she managed, crippling a BC(P) for several months, discounting her LAC kills.

He shrugged, and Honor chuckled. Then she stepped past him into the entrance hall, and paused in mid-stride. Emily, Hamish, and her parents were there. So was Reverend Sullivan, but Honor had expected that. What she hadn't expected was the distinguished, dark-haired man in the episcopal purple cassock and glittering pectoral cross. She recognized him almost instantly, although they'd never met, and she wondered what Archbishop Telmachi was doing at White Haven.

Reverend Sullivan is making a visit, not precisely pastoral, to Manticore and staying at Bay House with Honor's mom. He wanted to exchange ideas with the Archbishop of Honor's faith and help out the current PR crisis because he's the only one who can see the obvious solution.

"The thing is, Honor," Emily continued, reclaiming her attention, "the Reverend's come up with a solution for all our problems. Every one of them."

"He's what?" Both of Honor's eyebrows rose, and she looked back and forth between Sullivan, Hamish and Emily, and her parents. "That's . . . hard to believe."

"Not really," Emily said, with a sudden, huge smile and a matching internal swell of delight. "You see, Honor, all you have to do is answer one question."

"One question?"

Honor blinked as her eyes prickled suddenly and unexpectedly. She didn't even know why—just that the joy inside Emily had reached out and blended with a matching tide of joyous anticipation from Hamish into something so strong, so exuberant and yet so intensely focused on her, that her own emotions literally couldn't help responding to it.

"Yes," Emily said softly. "Honor, will you marry Hamish and me?"

For an instant that seemed an eternity Honor simply stared at her. Then it penetrated, and she jerked upright in her comfortable chair.

"Marry you?" Her voice trembled. "Marry both of you? Are . . . are you serious?"

Seeing as both Grayson and Manticore allow for polygamy, they can simply have a shotgun wedding before Honor's child is born and he's totally legitimate. Plus, Reverend Sullivan can satisfy himself than Honor isn't living in sin anymore.

"Good," Reverend Sullivan said, and smiled when Honor turned to look at him. "It just happens that Robert, here," he waved one hand at Telmachi, "has already granted the necessary dispensation, contingent upon your acceptance of the idea. And it also just happens that Father O'Donnell, here, has brought along his prayerbook and a special license, and that I happen to know the Alexander family chapel just happens to have been given a most thorough cleaning this morning. And it just so happens that at this particular moment there's a representative of Father Church here on Manticore to serve as the temporal witness required for any steadholder's marriage. So since the bride's family," he bowed to include Nimitz and Samantha in that family, "are present, I don't really see any reason why we couldn't get this little formality out of the way tonight."

"Tonight?" Honor stared at him.

"Indeed," he replied calmly. "Unless, of course, you had other plans?"

I bet you thought I was kidding when I said there'd be a shotgun wedding. Which also happens entirely off-camera.

Being married was going to take some getting used to. This floating feeling of joy and relaxation—the knowledge that she'd truly come home at last—was worth any price, yet she already foresaw all sorts of problems on Grayson, once news of the marriage became public. Grayson conventions denoting marital status all assumed the husband's surname would be adopted by all of his wives. But those same conventions had also always assumed any steadholder would be male, and she had a pretty shrewd notion the Conclave of Steadholders wouldn't take kindly to the notion of changing the Harrington Dynasty to the Alexander Dynasty in the very first generation of the Steading. Plus, of course, the fact that they were going to have to deal with the fact that the Steadholder was the junior wife of a man who stood completely outside the succession.

Personally, she was rather looking forward to watching her fellow steadholders work their way through the problems. It would do their residually patriarchal little hearts good, she thought as she counted noses in her travel party. Then she frowned, as she came up a nose short.

Heh. They can learn to deal, I trust. But I think in this case he takes your name. At least on Grayson.

"You did what?" Michelle Henke asked, staring at Honor.

"I said that while I was back on Manticore and didn't have anything better to do, I went ahead and got married," Honor repeated with a huge smile. "It . . . seemed like the thing to do."

She shrugged, and Nimitz bleeked with laughter on her shoulder as the two of them enjoyed Henke's poleaxed mind-glow.

The simple, subtle joys of empathic powers.

"But the main thing is that, aside from Mac and my armsmen, you're the only one in the Fleet who knows. I'm going to tell Alice and Alistair, as well, but no one else. Not for a while."

"Marriage licenses and wedding certificates are public records, Honor," Henke pointed out. "You can't keep this one quiet for long."

"Longer than you might think," Honor replied with an urchin-like grin. "Since I'm Steadholder Harrington, and a steadholder outranks a duchess or an earl, the license and certificate are both being filed on Steadholder Harrington's planet of residence. In the Public Records Office of Harrington Steading, as a matter of fact. Reverend Sullivan offered to take care of it for me."

"Well, wasn't that nice of him," Henke said with a matching grin. "I don't suppose they're likely to get temporarily misfiled, are they?"

"No, they aren't," Honor said, more seriously. "They're important official documents, so we're not going to be playing any games with them. But we're also not going to mention to anyone that they're there, and while the records are public, they have to be requested, so we'll know if anyone accesses them." She shrugged. "We couldn't keep it secret forever, even if we wanted to, which we don't. This will just buy a little more time."

"But why buy it in the first place?" Henke frowned. "Like Emily said, this solves all your problems. Except, of course, for the people who're going to suggest that the fact that you're marrying them now probably proves Hayes was right with his original rumors about you and Hamish."

"The main reason is my command and Hamish's position at the Admiralty," Honor admitted. "Hamish's theory is that since the First Lord, unlike the First Space Lord, is a civilian without any authority to issue orders to uniformed personnel, he's not in my direct chain of command, and so there's been no official prohibition against our . . . involvement from the start. Unfortunately, that's currently just his opinion. Before we go public, we want to be certain the courts are going to agree with him."

"And if they don't?" Henke frowned again. Rules-lawyering was very unlike the Honor Harrington she'd always known.

"And if they don't, the solution's relatively simple. I resign my Manticoran commission, and High Admiral Matthews makes Admiral Steadholder Harrington available to the Alliance to command Eighth Fleet. That we know would be legal, since there's no similar prohibition in Grayson service. But it would be complicated and an obvious case of finding a way to technically comply with the law, and we'd all prefer to simply find out that what we're doing is legal in the first place under the Star Kingdom's Articles of War."

Honor really has grown, she never used to be able to dance around the rules like that. Or capable of wanting to, really.

"I wish we were getting a few reinforcements, Ma'am," Rafael Cardones said as he, Simon Mattingly, and Honor and Nimitz walked down the passage away from the flag briefing room where the first preliminary meeting for Cutworm III had just broken up.

"So do I," Honor replied. "But realistically, it's only been three months since we activated Eighth Fleet. It's going to be at least a few more months before we start seeing anything else, I'm afraid."

Timeline, and really they've had two major operations within three months, even the old Eighth Fleet had to spend it's first few years sitting on it's hands.

It wasn't Mattingly's fault. Timothy Meares was part of his Steadholder's official family. He was her aide, her student, almost an adoptive son. He'd been alone in her company literally thousands of times, and Mattingly knew he was no threat. And so, he was totally unprepared when Meares' right hand reached out casually—so casually—in passing . . . and snaked Mattingly's pulser out of his holster.

The armsman reacted almost instantly. Despite the totality of his surprise, his own arm lashed out, seeking to recapture the weapon, or at least immobilize it. But "almost instantly" wasn't quite good enough, and the pulser snarled.

"Simon!"

This time it was no shout. Honor screamed her armsman's name in useless protest as the burst of heavy-caliber darts ripped into his abdomen and tracked upward into his chest. His uniform tunic, like Honor's, which had been modified to resist Nimitz's claws, was made of antiballistic fabric, but it wasn't designed to resist military-grade pulser fire at point-blank range, and Mattingly went down in an explosion of blood.

Honor felt the agony of his death, but there was no time to grieve. And agonizing as what had just happened to Mattingly was, it was actually less agonizing than what she tasted from Timothy Meares. His horror, shock, disbelief and guilt as his hand killed a man who'd been his friend was like some horrifying shroud. She could feel him screaming in protest, fighting with desperate futility, as his arm came up, sweeping around the bridge, holding down the stud on the stolen pulser.

A hurricane of darts shrieked across Flag Bridge. Two Plotting ratings went down, one of them screaming horribly. The Communications section exploded as the darts chewed their way through displays, consoles, chair backs. The deadly muzzle tracked onward, slicing the bandsaw of hyper-velocity darts across Andrea Jaruwalski's unmanned station and killing the Tactical quartermaster of the watch. And yet, even as the carnage mounted, Honor knew it was all incidental. She knew her horrified flag lieutenant's actual target.

Nimitz hit the back of a command chair, bounding towards Meares, but the cyclone of darts slammed into the chair. They missed the 'cat, but the chair literally exploded under him, and not even his reflexes could keep him from falling to the deck. He landed with his feet under him, already prepared to bound upward once again, but he'd lost too much time. He couldn't possibly reach the flag lieutenant before the pulser in Meares' hand found Honor.

Honor felt it coming. Felt the useless denial screaming in Timothy Meares' mind. Knew the flag lieutenant literally could not resist whatever hideous compulsion had seized him. Knew he would rather have died himself than do what he'd just done. What he was about to do.

She didn't think about it, not consciously. She simply reacted, just as she'd reacted by throwing Rafael Cardones out of the line of fire. Reacted with the trained instincts of over forty years of practice in the martial arts, and with the muscle memory she'd drilled into herself on the firing range under her Jason Bay mansion.

Her artificial left hand flexed oddly. It rose before her, forefinger rigid, and in the instant before Timothy Meares' fire reached her, the tip of that forefinger exploded as a five-dart burst of pulser fire ripped across the flag bridge and the flag lieutenant's head erupted in a ghastly spray of gray, red, and pulverized white bone.

Honor's flag lieutenant, Tim Meares is turned into a lone gunman by Mesan nanites and tries to kill Honor. Succeeds in killing her armsman, Simon Mattingly, and two ratings before Honor gives him the finger. This is the 'October Surprise' later called back to, Mesa's first serious attempt on Honor's life.

"Captain Mandel," she said even more quietly, "did you or did you not read my own report about what happened here?"

"Of course, Your Grace. I have a copy of it here." He tapped the microcomputer cased at his belt.

"In that case, you ought to be aware that Lieutenant Meares was not responsible for his actions," she said flatly. "He wasn't the 'perpetrator' of this crime, Captain; he was its first victim."

"Your Grace," Mandel said in patient tones, "I did, indeed, read your report. It was well written, concise, and to the point. However, you're a combat officer. You command ships and lead fleets in battle, and the entire Star Kingdom knows how well you do it. But you aren't a criminal investigator. I am, and while I don't doubt a single factual observation from your report, I'm afraid your conclusion that Lieutenant Meares was under some form of compulsion simply doesn't make sense. It's just not supported by the evidence."

Captain Mandel, the lead investigator into the shooting incident, doesn't believe Honor or Nimitz that there was any form of compulsion. In fact, his leading theory is that Meares was an agent of Haven who suddenly decided he'd be more use killing Honor than reporting on her.

"Your Grace," Mandel probably wasn't even aware of his own sense of patient, confident superiority in his area of expertise, but Honor certainly was, "you stated in your report that Lieutenant Meares was attempting to resist some sort of compulsion the entire time he was killing people, including your own armsman. But I'm afraid that statement is in error—a conclusion I base on two main points of observation and logic.

"First, I've reviewed the flag bridge visual records of the incident, and there's absolutely no sign of hesitation on his part. Secondly, for him to have been operating under compulsion would have required major personality adjustment, were he, in fact, the person you believed him to be.

Reasonable given his observations, but how about testimony from the empath in the room? Nimitz that is, Honor's powers are still secret.

"And as far as personality adjustment is concerned, it's simply not possible. Lieutenant Meares, like all Queen's officers, had received the standard anti-drug and anti-conditioning protocols. It wouldn't have been flatly impossible for those safeguards to be broken or evaded, but it would have been difficult. And even without them, adjustment takes time, Your Grace. Quite a lot of it. And we can account for almost every instant of Lieutenant Meares' time over the past T-year. Certainly, there's no unaccounted for period long enough for him to have been involuntarily adjusted to carry out an action like this one."

Resistance to brainwashing can be overcome, but it takes a lot of time, at least more than a few weeks.

"And you're aware that treecats are empaths and telepaths?"

"I've read some articles to that effect," Mandel said, and Honor felt her own temper click a notch higher at the dismissiveness in his emotions. Clearly, the captain was one of those people who continued, despite the evidence, to reject the notion that 'cats were fully sentient beings.

"They are, in fact, telepathic and empathic, and also highly intelligent," she told him. "And because they are, Nimitz was able to sense what Lieutenant Meares was feeling in the last few moments of his life."

-snip-

"Your Grace," he said finally, "I'm attempting to make full allowance for your obvious close emotional attachment to Lieutenant Meares, but I must disagree with your conclusions. As far as his value as an intelligence asset is concerned, I will, of course, defer to the judgment of Commander Simon's people in counterintelligence. From my own perspective, however, and given how successful Eighth Fleet's operations have been, it seems obvious you'd make a perfect target for an assassination. We know the Peeps are fond of assassination as a technique, and your death would have been a major blow to the Star Kingdom's morale. In my own judgment, it seems likely Peep intelligence felt that killing you would be even more valuable than whatever sensitive data Lieutenant Meares might have been in position to give them.

"As far as your treecat's 'observations' are concerned, I'm afraid I can't allow them to overrule my own analysis of the visual records, which aren't subject to emotional overtones or subjectivity. And those records show absolutely no sign of hesitation on Lieutenant Meares' part from the instant he seized your armsman's weapon.

"And, finally, as I've already pointed out," he concluded with dangerous, pointed patience, "there simply hasn't been an unaccounted for block of the lieutenant's time long enough for him to have been adjusted."

"Captain," Honor said, "should I conclude, from what you've just said, that you don't believe a treecat's empathic sense is a valid guide to the emotional state of humans in his presence?"

"I'm not sufficiently versed in the literature on the subject to have an opinion, Your Grace," he said, but she tasted the truth behind the meaningless qualification.

"No, you don't believe it," she said flatly, and his eyes flickered. "Nor," Honor continued, "is your mind even remotely open to the possibility that Timothy Meares was acting against his will. Which means, Captain Mandel, that you're completely useless for this investigation."

Her people skills might use a little polish still. Then again, she was just forced to kill a friend who was trying, against his will, to kill her and did kill her bodyguard of the last fifteen years. Then this guy dismisses Nimitz.

"You're relieved of authority for this investigation, Captain," she told him softly.

"You can't do that, Your Grace!" he objected hotly. "This is an ONI investigation. It falls outside your chain of command!"

"Captain," Honor emphasized his rank coldly, "you do not want to get into a pissing contest with me. Trust me on that. I said you're relieved, and you are relieved. I will inform all Eighth Fleet personnel that you have no authority, and instruct them not to cooperate with your investigation in any way. And if you choose not to accept my decision, I will personally return to Manticore to discuss it with Admiral Givens, Admiral Caparelli, Earl White Haven, and—if necessary—with the Queen herself. Are you reading me clearly on this, Captain?"

-snip-

"On my authority, you'll assume lead responsibility for this investigation until and unless Admiral Givens assigns a replacement for Captain Mandel."

"Your Grace," Simon said carefully, "I'm not certain you have the authority in my chain of command to give that order."

"Then I suggest you accept it provisionally, under protest, if you must, until the situation is clarified by someone you know is in your chain of command," Honor said coldly. "Because unless you do, this investigation will go nowhere until such time as an entire new team is sent out from Manticore. I will not have Captain Mandel in charge of it. Is that clear?"

Yeesh. Okay, some polish is definitely in order. But I'm impressed she's learned to name-drop.

[Batman]

I dunno. Yes, people skills are important...but so is knowing when not to use them because it would be a waste of time (which, on hindsight, is probably a subset of people skills in and of itself.) That Mandel person is obviously going to ignore Nimitz' testimony because he thinks treecats are fluffy little pets (seriously, the guy ate half an assassin squad in book two but you still think he's a pet. The Cats have been able to sign since-how long has it been since 'Ashes of Victory'? but you still think they aren't intelligent).
That Simon fellow, while more amenable, still wanted to hide behind regulations. What's the advantage of trying to play nice with people like that?

[Ahriman238]

Been five or six years since treecats went public as sentient beings able to communicate with us on our terms. I suppose it's possible if you aren't Sphinxian or into anthropology or xenobiology that you wouldn't follow much past that initial announcement. Anyways, Mandel decides immediately what happened based on the one testimony he considers impartial, the security footage.

"At this point," Jaruwalski continued, seeking her own escape from personal grief in brisk professionalism, "Commander Reynolds and I are in agreement with Her Grace. The Peeps have to have begun putting in place some response to Cutworm I and Cutworm II. What that response may be, we can't predict. Obviously, we all know what we'd like it to be. However, even if we've succeeded completely in convincing them to do what the Admiralty wants, it's still a situation with a definite downside for us here in Eighth Fleet. Specifically, the targets are going to get tougher. Whether it's simply improved doctrine—more of what we saw at Chantilly—or an actual redeployment of assets, they're going to do their best to ensure that we don't have any more cakewalks.

"Bearing that in mind, we're reducing our objectives list for Cutworm III to only two star systems: Lorn and Solon. Admiral Truman will command the attack on Lorn; Her Grace will command the attack on Solon. We'll be assigning one carrier squadron to each attack, and splitting the heavy cruisers and battlecruisers just about down the middle."

Cutworm III will be hitting just two systems, Lorn and Solon.

"Even without any precautionary redeployment on the Peeps' part, both these targets would almost certainly be more heavily defended then our previous objectives. Lorn, in particular, is a relatively important secondary naval shipyard. It's not a building yard, but a satellite yard that handles a lot of refit activity, although it's really geared to working on units below the wall. Also, we know from prior intelligence that Lorn is fairly heavily involved in construction of the Peeps' new LACs. Because of that, we anticipate that the likelihood of encountering at least light and medium combatants in some numbers is relatively high.

Lorn has a relatively important shipyard, not construction but for repair and refit, though they're building tons of LACs there. So both a good target and one that'll be better defended than previous outings.

"Solon is less directly involved in the construction or maintenance of Peep naval units. It is, however, substantially more heavily populated than any of the systems we've hit so far. According to the last census data available to us, the system population is over two billion, and its economy was one of the relatively few bright spots for the Peeps even before the Pierre Coup. This makes it particularly valuable from our perspective, since a successful attack on it is certain to generate powerful political pressure for Theisman and his staff to deploy additional heavy units for home defense. In addition, the severity of the economic damage inflicted by the destruction of this system's industrial infrastructure will be truly significant. All of which, again, suggests the system will be more heavily defended than the more lightly populated systems we've attacked so far."

Solon is rather prosperous economically, and has a population over 2 billion. More than any other system they've hit, so hopefully they'll have more representatives to scream bloody murder.

Simon Mattingly's funeral had helped . . . some. There'd been at least a little catharsis in it, but at the same time it had only made her more aware of how far he'd come from his native world to die. She'd borrowed Brother Hendricks, the chaplain attached to one of the Grayson LAC groups assigned to Alice Truman's carrier squadron, to perform the ceremony. She'd known from agonizing personal experience that the Grayson tradition was that an armsman was buried where he fell, and Andrew LaFollet and Spencer Hawke had stood ramrod straight at her back throughout the brief military funeral ceremony. And then they, Alistair McKeon, Michelle Henke, and James MacGuiness had carried the Harrington Steading flag-draped coffin to the waiting airlock.

Simon's body got launched at the sun, Eighth Fleet isn't precisely a joint force anymore, but enough Grayson Katanas are serving that it wasn't hard to find a chaplain.

"But the point I was going to make," he continued more normally after a couple of heartbeats, "was that watching what happened, I can see why someone who didn't realize how you can get inside somebody else's head would discount the possibility that Lieutenant Meares was trying to stop himself. He moved so fast, Honor. So smoothly. As if he'd not only planned out what he was going to do, but actually rehearsed it ahead of time. I don't know if you really realize sometimes just how fast your own reflexes are, but you killed him just fractions of a second before he would have killed you. And I don't think anyone else could have done it, trick finger or not."

A defense for Mandel.

"First, there's no way he was a Peep agent. He never could've concealed that from you—or Nimitz—for this long. Second, whatever happened to him, he hadn't been personality adjusted."

"Why not? I mean, why can you be so confident of that?"

"Partly because Mandel, however pigheaded you may've found him, was right. Adjustment takes time—lots of time, even without the safeguards built into our military security protocols. And partly because someone who's been adjusted knows he has. On some level, he's aware of the fact that he's not fully in control of his own actions. In fact, I made a quick flight out to your parent's house on Sphinx with Samantha and had her consult the Bright Water memory singers about the attempted assassination of Queen Adrienne."

"You know, I'd actually forgotten about that," Honor said in a chagrined voice.

"You've been under a lot of stress," Hamish told her. "But Samantha got the memory song of the entire episode. She says the assassin knew what was happening to him from the moment he came into Dianchect's mental reach. It wasn't like . . . turning on a switch. Dianchect picked him up before he ever got into visual range of the Princess, and he knew there was something badly wrong the instant he tasted the assassin's mind-glow. That wasn't the case here."

Convenient that treecats have racial memories perfectly preserved that way. Personality adjustment and what it feels like to a treecat.

"But why should the Havenites have tried to kill the Andermani Crown Prince?" Honor asked in puzzlement.

Hamish mentions what this does sound like; the Hofschulte Affair. And naturally, since they're at war with Haven, Haven is the only immediate and logical suspect.

"What? Oh!" Honor gave herself a shake. "I was just wondering if there's someone else out there, someone who's developed a technique that would let them do something like this, and made it available on a hire basis?"

"Possible." Hamish considered. "Quite possible, really. Because I can't think of anyone besides the Peeps who'd have both the motive and the resources to pull something like this off."

"I can't either," Honor agreed, but her expression was troubled.

I can. At least the possibility is acknowledged.

"It's just that if there is some new assassination technology out there, something they used to get to Tim without his disappearing long enough to be adjusted, then they could do it to anyone. Which means literally anybody could be a programmed assassin, without even realizing it."

"Talk about your security nightmares," Hamish muttered, and she nodded grimly.

"But at the moment whatever the programming is kicks in, they do know someone or something else is controlling them," she said, "and no treecat could miss something like that."

"Like food tasters," Hamish said slowly. "Or canaries in coal mines back on Old Earth."

"More or less," she agreed. "It wouldn't be much warning, but at least it would be some. And if the security types guarding the intended target knew to take their cue from the 'cat, it might be enough."

"Palace Security and the Queen's Own have been paying attention to treecats for centuries now," Hamish said. "They, at least, won't have any problems with the idea."

So the plan is to use treecats as detectors against future lone gunmen. At least, they can post volunteer cats on the most key government and military personnel.

When Harrington sprang her trap, he hadn't expected to get anything out. As it was, he'd somehow managed to extract almost a third of his total fleet. Which, of course, was another way of saying he'd lost over two-thirds of it. And he would have lost it all, if Shannon Foraker's defensive doctrine hadn't worked so well. Most of the ships he'd gotten out had been badly battered, and although he'd managed to evade any pursuit in the depths of hyper-space, the voyage home had been a nightmare all its own. Restricted by damage to the Delta bands, his maximum apparent velocity had been only 1,300 c, which meant the trip had taken over three months. Three months of dealing with damage out of limited onboard resources. Three months of watching his wounded recover—or not—when even his surviving units had lost thirty percent of their medical personnel. And three months without any idea at all how the rest of Operation Thunderbolt had gone.

What happened to Tourville after Sidemore.

"It ought to be interesting, anyway," he said after a few moments. "I wasn't there when Icarus smashed Zanzibar last time, but somehow I don't think the Zanzibarans are going to be especially happy about getting run over by an air lorry a second time. And Zanzibar is at least as important to the Alliance's war effort as all of the systems Harrington has hit so far, combined, were to ours."

Operation Gobi, a raid on Zanzibar to destroy all their defenders and dismantle their orbital industry. Nobody seems much interested in taking and holding territory in this new war.

"What?" Tourville asked with a small smile. "No last-minute delays? No liberty parties still adrift?"

"None, Sir," Houellebecq replied deadpan. "I informed the shore patrol that anyone who reported in late was to be shot beside the shuttle pad as an object lesson to others."

"There's the spirit I like to see!" Tourville said, although, truth be told, he found the joke just a bit too pointed, given the previous régime's history. "Always find a positive way to motivate your personnel."

Though I'm mildly impressed you can joke about it.

The slowly moving light codes wouldn't have meant much to a civilian, but they were an impressive sight to the trained eye. He picked out the ponderous might of his four battle squadrons, shaking down into cruising formation as they accelerated slowly. Ahead of them were the icons of a pair of battlecruiser squadrons, and six Aviary-class CLACs followed in their wake. A sprinkling of lighter units spread out in a necklace of jewels ahead of the main formation, watching alertly for any hint of an unidentified starship, and a trio of fast replenishment ships loaded with additional missile pods trailed along behind the carriers.

The new Second Fleet under Tourville's command, or at least the part going on Gobi. 4 squadrons (32?) of podnoughts backed by 6 carriers, 16 BCs and screen.

"So the foxes are scouting the hen house," Durand murmured.

The Plotting officer looked up at him a bit strangely; Charles Bibeau was from the slums of Nouveau Paris, whereas Durand came from the farming planet of Rochelle, and the Skipper kept coming up with oddball metaphors and similes. But the lieutenant caught his drift just fine, and nodded in agreement.

Just a reminder that Haven is a large and diverse sphere. Not everyone comes out of the Nouveau Paris slums with the same sob story.

Somewhere out there, he knew, Manty reconnaissance arrays were creeping stealthily inward, spying out the details of the Solon System's defenses. He knew what they were going to see, and it wasn't all that impressive: a single division of old-style superdreadnoughts, a slightly understrength battlecruiser squadron, and a couple of hundred LACs. Hardly enough to cause a Manty raiding force to break a sweat.

Which was fine with Captain Alexis Durand. Just fine.

Apparent defenders of Solon, where they've laid their trap for Eighth Fleet. Actual operations of Cutworm III shortly.

[Simon_Jester]

I dunno. Yes, people skills are important...but so is knowing when not to use them because it would be a waste of time (which, on hindsight, is probably a subset of people skills in and of itself.) That Mandel person is obviously going to ignore Nimitz' testimony because he thinks treecats are fluffy little pets (seriously, the guy ate half an assassin squad in book two but you still think he's a pet. The Cats have been able to sign since-how long has it been since 'Ashes of Victory'? but you still think they aren't intelligent).

A tame gorilla can use sign language (a bit), and in close quarters could probably rip apart several assassins (with luck)... but their testimony wouldn't stand up in court.

That Simon fellow, while more amenable, still wanted to hide behind regulations. What's the advantage of trying to play nice with people like that?

Maybe he's acting out of loyalty to his boss?

Or maybe he doesn't like the idea that the victim of the high-profile attack he's here to investigate is suddenly throwing her weight around, but hiding behind regulations is the only way he can secure some cover behind which to try and get her to come to her senses.

Been five or six years since treecats went public as sentient beings able to communicate with us on our terms. I suppose it's possible if you aren't Sphinxian or into anthropology or xenobiology that you wouldn't follow much past that initial announcement. Anyways, Mandel decides immediately what happened based on the one testimony he considers impartial, the security footage.

Also worth pointing out that even if you acknowledge that treecats are sentient, they're still living in the stone age. And the idea that they're telepaths who can observe the state of a man's mind as easily as you can observe the color of his shirt may sound too woo-woo to believe.

Solon is rather prosperous economically, and has a population over 2 billion. More than any other system they've hit, so hopefully they'll have more representatives to scream bloody murder.

On the other hand, this suggests that there are a lot of systems in Havenite space that don't have populations of two billion, or even close to it.

When Harrington sprang her trap, he hadn't expected to get anything out. As it was, he'd somehow managed to extract almost a third of his total fleet. Which, of course, was another way of saying he'd lost over two-thirds of it. And he would have lost it all, if Shannon Foraker's defensive doctrine hadn't worked so well. Most of the ships he'd gotten out had been badly battered, and although he'd managed to evade any pursuit in the depths of hyper-space, the voyage home had been a nightmare all its own. Restricted by damage to the Delta bands, his maximum apparent velocity had been only 1,300 c, which meant the trip had taken over three months. Three months of dealing with damage out of limited onboard resources. Three months of watching his wounded recover—or not—when even his surviving units had lost thirty percent of their medical personnel. And three months without any idea at all how the rest of Operation Thunderbolt had gone.

What happened to Tourville after Sidemore.

And a poignant illustration of why it's dangerous for a fleet to operate a long way from the nearest secure support base.

Operation Gobi, a raid on Zanzibar to destroy all their defenders and dismantle their orbital industry. Nobody seems much interested in taking and holding territory in this new war.

Manticore doesn't have the mobilized military capacity to do more than raid, after they subtract the fleet they need to protect their own territory. Haven gets no benefit from taking and holding Zanzibar because it has nothing they need for their own war effort.

Also, a scorched-earth raid against enemy infrastructure, named after a desert... get it? Heh.

"What?" Tourville asked with a small smile. "No last-minute delays? No liberty parties still adrift?"

"None, Sir," Houellebecq replied deadpan. "I informed the shore patrol that anyone who reported in late was to be shot beside the shuttle pad as an object lesson to others."

"There's the spirit I like to see!" Tourville said, although, truth be told, he found the joke just a bit too pointed, given the previous régime's history. "Always find a positive way to motivate your personnel."

Though I'm mildly impressed you can joke about it.

Well, Tourville has great big granite balls, and I suspect he passes that on to some of his staffers... or recruits staffers who already have the trait. A trait that makes it easier to make (in this case literal) gallows humor.

Certain historical admirals were like that- Halsey, for instance.

[Terralthra]

Mandel may also be the flip side of the benefits of prolong: he's not described as particularly old-looking OR young-looking, meaning he's well-into the extended late-twenties/early-thirties of second- or third-gen prolong, given his rank, and that he was assigned to such a high-profile case, he's probably (based on other Captains we know) spent the better part of 4-6 decades doing his current job. If he had an impression of treecats as cute pets for what is a modern-day lifetime, 5-6 years of sign language is not really going to make much of a dent.

[Simon_Jester]

It also means that he's been doing this same job successfully for something like fifty years... which means he may have fairly locked-in methods of investigating a case. They may be good methods, mind you, methods that regularly get him results in a clean, efficient manner with no loose ends.

But one of those methods is almost certainly "recordings trump eyewitness testimony," because if you investigate serious crimes, and you're any good at it whatsoever, you know eyewitnesses can be totally, totally wrong..

So of course Mandel starts this investigation the same way he's worked on every investigation for the past 50-80 years: "just the facts, ma'am." Which means looking at the tapes, not listening to the intended victim of a murder attempt by a trusted subordinate.

[Ahriman238]

Well, the computer gods have eaten my three-chapter coverage of the Battle of Solon. Again. I promise, I'll get back to it, but right now I have too much going on in real life to devote that much time to it for the next couple days. By way of apology, please accept a brief look at some of the light ship designs to come out of the Janacek Admiralty. I'm sure we've kept you relatively posted on the podnoughts, BC(P)s etc.



Wolfhound-class Destroyer

Mass: 123,500 tons
Dimensions: 428x51x29 meters
Max Acceleration: 784.7 G
Normal Acceleration: 627.7 G
Broadside: 6 missile tubes, 3 grasers, 6 counter missile tubes, 5 point defense
Chase: 2 grasers, 4 point defense
Number Built: 19

A destroyer the size and match of a pre-war light cruiser. Envisioned by the Janacek Admiralty as a general upgrade/replacement of existing destroyers. Has the latest compensators, bow and stern walls, off-bore launchers, and heavy automation. In fact, they got the crew size down to 87.

Half of the first flight was destroyed at Grendelsbane. It looks like it'll be a class of 19, as the Alexander Admiralty has discontinued construction in favor of the MDM-capable Rolands.


Avalon-class Light Cruiser

Mass: 146,740 tons
Dimensions: 461x48x37 meters
Max Acceleration: 749.9 G
Normal Acceleration: 599.9 G
Broadside: 10 missile tubes, 4 grasers, 8 counter missile tubes, 8 point defense
Chase: 2 grasers, 4 point defense
Number Built: unknown (at least two)


Avalons are the new light cruisers with the recent bells and whistles, including off-bore missile launchers, bow and stern walls, the same compensators that give all recent Manty ships half-again or so the accel of a pre-war design. Compared to the original Fearless and her classmates, the ship is a bit shy of twice the tonnage, with 3 more missile tubes to a side. Also, more than double the missile defense (8 CM and laser clusters compared to 3 to a side). It also uses extensive automation to keep crew sizes down, and gives space saving to greater computer support for EW and fire-control links allowing the class to handle a good number of missile-pods. Finally it keeps to the Grayson ideal of just a few, but very heavy grasers.

So far, almost all the Avalons have been in Silesia keeping the peace.



Roland-class Destroyer

Mass: 188,560 tons
Dimensions: unknown
Max Acceleration: 780 G
Normal Acceleration: 590 G
Broadside: 5 lasers, 10 counter missile tubes, 13 point defense
Chase: 6 missile tubes, 2 grasers, 2 point defense
Number Built: unknown (at least 12)

The littlest MDM-hurler. Technically a cruiser, called a destroyer to get approval under the Janacek Admiralty. Has a radical departure in forgoing broadside missile armament in favor of shoehorning six launchers into each hammerhead. These fire Mk 16 dual-drive MDMs, with 18 seconds between shots, and they have room for 250 missiles in their magazines. On the plus, the lack of broadside armament let them cram in more missile defense than any similar-sized ship has in the vein of an Invictus, including counter missile tubes that fire off-bore and can help cover the front and rear arcs. And they actually shrank the crew size even further from the Wolfhounds to 62 officers and ratings. The energy armament is largely an afterthought, the idea being that it should be able to outrun anything but an MDM barrage (which they've prepared it for as best as possible) or another destroyer which it can hopefully engage competitively at beam ranges. The shallow magazines are an ongoing source of concern, but with so few MDM capable ships, the Rolands have easily taken the lion's share of small-unit production in the new war.

About half the Rolands are named for Arthurian knights, though there's also a Saladin and Barbarossa (both previous names of Peep battlecruisers) an Ivanhoe and Roland itself still keeping to an overall knightly theme, and two standouts; Tornado and Yamamoto Date.

The problem with Rolands is, naturally, that they are designed purely as fleet escorts and heavy combatants, able to handle intense short-duration missile combat, and contribute meaningfully to a fleet-scale MDM fight both offensively and defensively, but not so much the long cruises, escort missions and bush-beating of traditional light units.

[Mr Bean]

The Roland is an excellent example of building not to meet the role but the strategy. It's a shitty destroyer even if yes the manning numbers are amazing. These things are more like destroyer sized LACs than proper destroyers. I wonder how a hypothetical 20 rolands vs 100 Shrike matchup would go? Since the Shrike has roughly a ten person crew to the Rolands 62?