Eighth Fleet would be the first Allied fleet which was actually composed of more non-Manticoran than RMN units. Given the "seniority" of the Manticoran Navy, there'd never been much question that the RMN would provide the fleet commander, but a good two-thirds of its starships would be drawn from the explosively expanding GSN and the far smaller Erewhon Navy. As such, White Haven, as CO 8 FLT (Designate), really had no choice but to build his staff around a Grayson core, and he'd spent the last month and a half doing just that.
White Haven has come to Grayson to set up the new Eighth Fleet, a major offensive force that will be made up mostly of Grayson ships and personnel, with serious contributions from Manticore and Erewhon.
Ah. It's probably high time we talked about Erewhon. The Republic of Erewhon is the third largest member of the Manticoran Alliance, and essentially the only member besides Grayson to add serious economic and military value, instead of being a weight of obligations the Manties accepted in exchange for a strategic position and some depth. Erewhon is also a Wormhole Junction, with two wormholes, one ending inside the Solarian League, and one far from large powers, but maybe a day's flight from one of Manticore's wormholes. Having a Junction brings them incredible wealth for a single system, even if they're not playing in Manticore's league. And if their Navy is a distant second to
Glorious Kerbal Grayson's energetic efforts, they can protect their own system just fine and still contribute ships to the war effort.
Erewhon was originally settled by organized crime cartels, who fronted through the government and a variety of shell companies before finally going (mostly) legit. Eventually they stabilized at five families that wield near-absolute power, though one or two are often kicked out for a few years, the pendulum always swings the other way in time. Actually, the remaining families are all those who could cooperate and function as a society, and they (and, it seems, most Erewhonese) have a Mafia Don's concept of the importance of honor. Which is at least a welcome change from Klingons.
Yeah, they are developed some beyond "planet of the goodfellas" but not that much. So far. Which is why I imagine all Erewhon officers speaking with Frank Sinatra's voice. Government officials naturally sound like Marlon Brando in the dentist's chair.
All in all, he'd been impressed by what he'd discovered in the process. The GSN's expansion had spread its officer corps thin—indeed, something like twelve percent of all "Grayson" officers were actually Manticorans on loan from the Star Kingdom—and its institutional inexperience showed, but it was almost aggressively competent. Grayson squadron and task force commanders seemed to take nothing at all for granted, for they knew how quickly most of their officers had been pushed up to their present ranks. They drilled their subordinates mercilessly, and their tactical and maneuvering orders spelled out their intentions with a degree of precision which sometimes produced results that were a little too mechanical for White Haven's taste. He was more accustomed to the Manticoran tradition in which officers of a certain rank were supposed to handle the details themselves, without specific direction from higher authority. Yet he was willing to admit that a navy as "young" as the GSN probably required more detailed orders . . . and if Grayson fleet maneuvers were sometimes mechanical, he'd never seen the kind of raggedness which could creep in when a flag officer assumed—incorrectly—that his subordinates understood what he had in mind.
But if the earl sometimes wished Grayson admirals would grant their subordinates a little more initiative, he'd been both astounded and delighted by the GSN's relentless emphasis on actual shipboard drills, not just computer simulations, and their willingness to expend munitions in live-fire exercises. RMN tradition favored the same approach, but the Manticoran Admiralty had always been forced to fight Parliament tooth and nail for the funding it required. High Admiral Matthews, the GSN's military commander-in-chief, on the other hand, had the enthusiastic support of Protector Benjamin and a solid majority of the Planetary Chamber, Steadholder and Steader alike. Perhaps that support owed something to the fact that the current war with Haven had brought deep-space combat to Yeltsin's Star four times in less than eight T-years, whereas no one had dared attack the Manticore Binary System directly in almost three centuries, but White Haven suspected that it owed an equal debt to the woman he and his companions had gathered to welcome home.
Grayson has some problems, including that the whole navy was destroyed and resurrected from the ground up less than a decade ago. But they understand their problems and work diligently to correct them.
White Haven himself was deeply respected by the Grayson Navy and people, for he was the officer who'd overseen the conquest of their fratricidal sister world of Masada and won the Third Battle of Grayson to open the war with Haven, but he remained a "foreigner." Honor Harrington didn't. She had become one of their own, and in the process, whether she knew it or not, she'd also become the patron saint of their fleet.
She probably didn't know it, White Haven reflected. It wasn't the sort of thing which would occur to her . . . which no doubt helped explain why it was true. But White Haven and every other Manticoran working with the GSN certainly knew. How could they not? The ultimate touchstone for every Grayson training concept or tactical innovation could be contained in the three words "Lady Harrington says" or their companion "Lady Harrington would." The near idolatry with which the GSN had adopted the precepts and example of a single individual, however competent, would have been terrifying if that individual's fundamental philosophy had not included the need to continuously question her own concepts. Somehow, and White Haven wasn't certain precisely how, Honor Harrington had also managed to transmit that portion of her personality to the navy so enthusiastically forming itself in her image, and he was profoundly grateful that she had.
Some time has gone by, but saving a planet twice still brings serious kudos. As has the considerable hand Honor had in shaping their tactical doctrine as the number two woman in their navy.
The RMN had been forced long ago to evolve special rules for the rare instances in which it had to deal with a pregnant treecat who'd bonded to one of its personnel. That was why Honor had been reassigned to the Manticore Binary System eight months ago on her return from the Silesian Confederacy. It both got Samantha away from radiation hazards and other risks associated with service in space and put her within easy reach of Sphinx and her own or Nimitz's clan. Of course, the fact that Samantha had never adopted Honor in the usual sense had put her case outside normal parameters to begin with, but the death of the person she had adopted had left Nimitz and Honor as her sole family. In the wake of that devastating loss, the Admiralty had decided, Honor qualified for the maternity leave normally granted to both halves of an adoption bond. Besides, it had given them a chance to assign her to the Weapons Development Board for the duration of said leave. She'd been an obvious choice to give the Board feedback on how well its latest brainchildren had worked in the field, since she was the only person who'd ever commanded a squadron—albeit only one of armed merchant cruisers—equipped with them, and to her own surprise, she'd actually enjoyed the duty.
Honor's maternity leave for Nimitz's mate. Mostly though, I wanted to establish that it's been eight months since the last book and that Honor's spent the time working for the WDB refining the weapons and toys
Wayfarer had. Making this 1911, eleven years since Honor first took command of Fearless, six years since the war started.
Since even a small, unarmed, bare-bones civilian starship cost about seventy million dollars, the idea of purchasing one had seemed extravagant, to say the least. But as Willard had pointed out, she was worth over three and a half billion by now, and if she bought the ship as a corporate asset of her Grayson-headquartered Sky Domes, Ltd., she would owe no licensing fees (in light of her steadholder's status), while the purchase would provide a substantial tax write-off in the Star Kingdom. Not only that, he'd been able to negotiate a very attractive price with the Hauptman Cartel for an only slightly used vessel much larger and more capable than she'd thought possible. And, he'd argued persuasively, her growing financial empire required more and more trips back and forth between Yeltsin's Star and Manticore by her various managers and factors. The flexibility and independence from passenger liner schedules which a privately owned vessel would provide would grow only more useful as time passed.
And so, to her considerable bemusement, she'd returned to Grayson not aboard an RMN or GSN cruiser or destroyer and not accompanied by a single treecat. Instead, she'd returned in state aboard the fifty-k-ton, private registry Star Falcon-class yacht RMS Paul Tankersley accompanied by fourteen treecats, and somewhere in the course of the voyage, she'd realized what she was really doing.
-snip-
Honor smiled wryly as Katherine Mayhew broke off in midsentence. She'd considered sending word ahead, but Tankersley was a fast ship. The Star Falcons were a civilian version of what had been a military/diplomatic courier vessel used to transport dispatches or relatively small groups of passengers when speed was of the essence. Tankersley would never make an efficient freight carrier, but her speed meant that even the fastest mail ship would only have provided the Graysons with a day or two of warning of the 'cat invasion.
Honor buys a fast space yacht so she can fly between Manticore and Grayson at will, and thumb her nose at the RMN's insistence she not take a dozen treecats aboard one of their ships. Apparently it's nearly as fast as a dispatch boat. Oh, and Nimitz told the other treecats of his clan all about the war, and they voted to colonize space to increase survivability, hence why Honor is taking fourteen treecats to Grayson.
Unfortunately, these days Grayson's social elite were as confused about what constituted proper behavior as any outsider. They were trying. White Haven had to give them that, and he rather admired how much they'd achieved in such a short period, but there was an underlying air of uncertainty. Some of society's grande dames resented the changes in the rules they'd learned as girls even more than the unreconstructed male conservatives resented their loss of privilege. Those groups formed a sort of natural alliance that clustered somewhere just beyond the reception line and radiated a prickly intensity as they clung grimly to the old rules and forms . . . which, of course, brought them into direct collision with their (mainly) younger counterparts who had embraced the notion of female equality with militant fervor.
Personally, White Haven found the more enthusiastic reformers more wearing than the reactionaries. He couldn't fault their motives, but the fact was that Benjamin IX had imposed a top-down revolution on his home world. He was remaking what had been, whatever its faults, a stable social order which had changed only slowly and incrementally over the last six or seven hundred years. With a very few exceptions, that social order's current members had only the vaguest notion of where they were headed, and many of the reformers seemed to believe stridency could substitute for direction. The earl was confident that most of them would get over it—they'd only been at it for a few years, and they were bound to figure some of it out with time—but at the moment, their main function at social gatherings seemed to be to make everyone else uncomfortable by aggressively demonstrating their rejection of the old order.
And, of course, the conflict between the old guard and the new put White Haven and other Manticorans squarely in a crossfire. The reactionaries regarded the foreigners as the sources of the infection which had attacked all they knew and held dear, while the reformers took it for granted that the Manticorans must agree with them . . . even though it was painfully obvious that all the reformers didn't agree with one another! Walking that sort of tightrope without giving offense—or, at least, further offense—to someone was almost as exhausting as it was irritating, and White Haven was heartily tired of it.
The complexities of Grayson high society.
Ron Bergren, the Havenite foreign secretary under the old Legislaturalist government, had been the only member of Sidney Harris' cabinet to escape the massacre of the PRH's so-called military coup attempt. He'd survived for the simple reason that, at the time, he'd been in transit to Old Earth to explain to the Solarian League that the war with Manticore hadn't really been started by the Peeps, however things might look. Upon learning of the coup, he'd declared his enthusiastic loyalty to the Committee of Public Safety . . . and found as many reasons as possible why neither he, his wife, nor their three children should return to the People's Republic. That was probably wise of him, given the fact that over ninety percent of the members of the great Legislaturalist families had been executed or exiled to prison planets by the People's Courts, and he'd been helped by the fact that Old Earth was over eighteen hundred light-years from the Haven System.
The Manticore Wormhole Junction was closed to Peep traffic for obvious reasons, and the Cromarty Government had scored an enormous diplomatic triumph when it added the Erewhon Republic to the Manticoran Alliance seven years ago. Erewhon was only a single-system polity, but like the Star Kingdom itself, though on a lesser scale, it was far wealthier than any single system could normally expect to be, for it just happened to control the only other wormhole terminus connecting to League space from within twelve hundred light-years of the Peeps' capital. There'd been a degree of economic rivalry between Erewhon and Manticore in the past, but both of them had recognized the threat Haven posed to them, and Erewhon's admission to the Alliance had closed the Erewhon Wormhole to the Peeps. That meant even Peep courier boats, which routinely rode the upper edge of hyper-space's theta bands, required well over six months for the trip to Old Earth, whereas a courier from Manticore could reach the mother world in barely a week.
The diplomatic advantages for the Star Kingdom were obvious, but those for Ron Bergren personally were almost as great. He was well beyond the Committee's reach but already in place in Old Earth's diplomatic structure, where he'd represented the interests of his new masters with diligence and industry (after all, he still had relatives back home), and any attempt to recall him against his will could only result in his requesting political asylum from the League . . . or defecting to Manticore.
Bergen, I'd forgotten all about that guy. Some more stellar distances, Haven to the League Border, the nearest Erewhonese and Manticoran wormhole mouths. You can think of shutting the wormholes as the equivalent of cutting the transatlantic cable, but it doesn't seem to be quite enough edge for Manticore to overcome the average Sollies' kneejerk "Republics are good. Kingdoms are bad." reflex.
And for all its undeniable size and power, the League was a rather ramshackle proposition in many ways. It might be called the Solarian League, but in actual fact Old Earth was simply first among equals, for every member world held a seat on the Executive Council . . . and each Council delegate held the right of veto. By long tradition, that veto right was used only rarely on domestic issues for two reasons. First, the League ministers' awareness that their policies could be vetoed by a single objector had for generations inspired them to recommend only center of the road domestic policies they could be fairly certain would command a broad consensus. And, second, any member world which used its veto right frivolously soon discovered that its fellows had any number of means of unilateral retaliation.
But if the League's domestic policies were coherent, its military and foreign policies were another matter, for it was far harder to forge a consensus on the diplomatic front. Much of that stemmed from the League's sheer size and power. Even the vast military machine the People's Republic had forged was less than a fourth the size of the League Navy, and the League's industrial base probably equaled that of all the rest of humanity combined. As a consequence, it was very difficult for anyone to convince the League's member worlds that anyone or anything represented a credible threat to them, and that sublime confidence was disastrous when it came to creating a harmonious foreign policy. The consequences of domestic policy decisions had a direct, perceptible impact upon the standard of living League citizens enjoyed; the absence of a rational foreign policy did not, and so each member world felt free to press for its own idiosyncratic ideal of "proper" policy . . . or simply to ignore the entire matter. And delegates to the Executive Council were far more likely to use their veto power to prevent "dangerous foreign adventures" than to cross their fellows on domestic matters.
That was why the Cromarty Government had been forced eventually to put the technology embargo in purely economic terms. The Star Kingdom had been less than subtle in the pressure applied, but nothing less than a threat to close the Manticore Junction to all League-registered shipping and to impose punishing duties on all League cargoes traveling in Manticoran bottoms had been sufficient to get the Council's attention. Cromarty had been perfectly well aware that such strong-arm tactics would generate resentment, but he'd also been convinced he had no other choice.
They'd worked . . . and they'd also produced even more resentment than he'd expected. Not only did many League leaders regard such a tough stance as a personal and diplomatic affront, but Cromarty's analysts had failed to appreciate quite how much money the Peeps would offer for League technology. Once combat made the Star Kingdom's edge obvious, even a financially strapped empire like the People's Republic had managed to come up with immense payments for anyone willing to sell them what they needed. For the League's arms merchants, being required to forgo that lucrative income was even more of an affront than Manticore's negotiating tactics, and from the evidence ONI had assembled, it seemed painfully apparent that someone in the League had decided to violate the embargo's restrictions after all.
The tech embargo and the League government. Well, it's more complicated than that. The League's foudners, for reasons unknown, were terrified of a "tyranny of the legislature" and so gave every member of the government the power to shut down anything. Of course, decisions still have to be made, so a dizzying number of beaurcracies and government agencies effectively rule, each with their own agenda. The League is quietly ruled by a commitee of five Permanent Senior Undersecretaries.
Equally apparently, the leak in the embargo spurted both ways, for a source within the League Navy reported that the League's R&D types were now experimenting with their own version of the short-range FTL com system which was one of the RMN's most valuable tactical advantages. Their success was extremely limited to date, but they were headed in the right direction, and the progress they'd made, not to mention the basic concepts upon which their efforts appeared to be based, suggested that someone had been sharing data with them.
With the benefit of hindsight, I know it will take the League over a decade to get just to the point of morse-like pulses as in Honor of the Queen.
"The seeking systems in Peep missiles have gotten much better in a very short period of time. We had a thirty to forty percent edge when the war began; BuWeaps estimates that our superiority's dropped to no more than ten percent at present. Fortunately, our countermeasures and general electronic warfare capability have continued to improve at a faster rate than theirs, so the effective relative increase in their missile accuracy is 'only' on the order of twenty percent, but that's still not good. Also," her eyes darkened, "we've had unconfirmed reports that the Peeps have begun deploying missile pods of their own."
Margin of Mantie missile seeker superiority a the start of the war. I suppose they measure that in hits out of birds fired? Anyways, with Sollie tech Manticore only has a 10% edge. They're still not taking hits on an equal basis, because Manticore is blazing new trails in ECM, but the margin of superiority is shrinking which is a problem because Haven is still vast.
Oh, and it took them six years, but Haven is using pods too now.
"whether they're developing pods or not, general increases in their systems efficiency are turning up in almost every area. Fortunately, our latest estimates indicate that we have a certain margin of superiority even over the more recently introduced League hardware, but it's far thinner than the one we enjoy over the Peeps. It may be enough if we continue to exploit it aggressively, especially in view of the long turnaround time on any data or equipment flow between the League and the Peeps, and BuWeaps and the WDB hope to do just that. There's also been quite a bit of discussion with BuShips about ways we might be able to shoehorn more EW capability into our hulls without cutting into weapons volume, but it looks like we're beginning to reach a point of diminishing returns in that regard. That's one reason BuWeaps has been pushing the Ghost Rider Project so hard for the last T-year."
She glanced at the earl, who nodded in understanding. "Ghost Rider" was the code name assigned to what would hopefully turn out to be a whole new generation of electronic warfare. If things worked out as planned, the needed capabilities would be built into drone bodies, providing an EW capability which could be deployed in multiple, independent platforms. Ideally, a ship would be able to put out shells of drones, relatively simple-minded and limited compared to shipboard systems, but with each operating in a different mode to give much greater overall capability than onboard systems which might be more powerful but could operate in only a single mode at any one time.
"While I was with the Board, I saw some encouraging long-range reports on Ghost Rider," Honor went on after a moment. "The only hardware actually in the production pipeline are the new decoy missiles and the stealthed missile pods, and it'll be some time before any of the other goodies reach deployment status. I think Vice Admiral Adcock is right about how much the project will enhance our capabilities—eventually—but for now, the PN has definitely cut into our advantage."
First mention of Project Ghost Rider, the next-gen sensor/EW project. Because they're hitting diminishing returns on miniaturizing their computer tech, they're going to develop revolutionary smart EW drones and platforms that they can delegate a lot of the number crunching to. And better stealthy recon drones to expand their sensor capabilities. And the stealthy missile pods, "Dragon's Teeth" EW missiles that look a lot like 10 missiles and can draw off point-defense... yeah, Ghost Rider has a lot on it's plate.
"And their building rates are going up," White Haven muttered, and she nodded once more, her eyes very serious.
"That they are, My Lord. The total number of new hulls per month has continued to decline, but that's only because we've taken so many yards away from them. The yards they have left are showing a marked increase in output. They're turning out individual new ships much more quickly, even though their overall loss of yard space means they can build fewer of them simultaneously. Again, part of that increase could result from technology transfers, but it's more likely that it stems from more effective personnel management. Their building rates went into the toilet when they started drafting Dolists into the yards, but that trend has reversed in the past year or so. I think ONI is right that the reversal indicates both that their original, effectively unskilled labor force is learning to do its job more efficiently and that popular support for the war remains high, which produces a motivated work force. Without really substantial technology imports from the League, the limitations of their physical plant should keep them from matching our construction rates, but they're going to come a lot closer than they used to be able to."
Hmmm... five years ago Manticore and haven were neck and neck for production of wallers, with no sign that either side would improve soon. Now Haven is doing far better, but Manticore has a slight edge. I see in this the hands of Glorious Kerbal Graysons.
"Finally, all the available evidence suggests that it was the Navy which actually stopped them. Public Information insists it was State Security, Committee Security, the Public Order Police, and the Chairman's Guard, supported by the Navy, but all of our other sources suggest it was the other way around. The security forces certainly didn't just lie down and play dead, but their responses weren't coherent. ONI suggests that someone must have managed to compromise their command and control net, though we haven't been able to confirm that. But whatever happened, it was Navy kinetic strikes and air strikes and battle-armored Marines acting under Admiral McQueen's orders that broke the uprising's back, and McQueen didn't go on to take out the Committee herself. That indicates a higher degree of military backing for the Pierre regime than we'd earlier estimated, and the reports that McQueen's been offered a seat on the Committee should only make that backing even stronger."
"So what you're saying," White Haven summarized when she paused once more, "is that the provinces have been brought into line, civilian resistance in the capital has been crushed, and the military has signed on?"
"Pretty much," Honor agreed, "though I don't think I'd put it precisely that way. I'd say that a particular segment of the civilian population of the capital was crushed. Given the amount of carnage and collateral casualties inflicted in the process, I suspect the bulk of the Dolists have decided to support the Committee as a source of stability which may be able to keep similar things from happening again. That goes quite a bit beyond the notion of civilians simply cowed into obedience by an iron fist, My Lord."
ONIs thoughts on Haven's stability after the last coup attempt that nearly succeeded.
"I realize that your stint on the Board was brief, Milady, but just look at some of its proposals." He ticked the points off on the fingers of his raised hand. "First, it wants us to radically redesign our ships of the wall to produce a totally untested class. Next, it wants us to accelerate the construction of light attack craft, when we've demonstrated just about conclusively that even modern LACs are no match, ton-for-ton, for properly designed starships, even in a defensive role. Then it wants us to divert something like ten percent of our building capacity from superdreadnoughts and dreadnoughts—and this, mind you, at a time when the Peeps' building rates in those same classes are going up—to build these so-called 'LAC-carriers' in order to transport light attack craft across interstellar distances as offensive units, not defensive ones. Not content with that, it wants to strip the missile tubes out of our existing ships of the wall and replace them with launchers which will use up twelve percent more weapons volume and fire missiles whose size effectively reduces magazine capacity by eighteen percent?" He shook his head.
"No, Milady. This isn't just changing horses in midstream; this is jumping off your horse without making sure you have another one to land on, and you don't do that in the middle of a war. Not if you want to win that war. This sounds too much like a Sonja Hemphill wish list for me to endorse it."
White Haven is not well-pleased by the latest plans from the Weapons Development Board, after they finished digesting Honor's report and suggestions from her cruise. Alright, LAC carriers sound pretty silly if you haven't seen the latest LACs. Of course, this time Hamish barely skimmed the report before throwing it away in disgust at Hemphill's tinkering. The guy didn't even ask why the missile launchers and missiles needed to be so much bigger.
And now Honor takes him to task.
"For example, the LACs to which you object are an entirely new model, with improvements even the ones I took to Silesia didn't have. The new compensators will make them much faster than anything else in space; BuShips has found a way to upgrade their beta nodes almost to alpha node strength, which will give them far stronger sidewalls than any previous LAC; and the new designs incorporate extremely powerful energy armaments—grasers, not lasers—in a spinal mount configuration. They won't be designed for broadside combat at all; their function will be to approach hostile starships obliquely, denying the enemy any down-the-throat shot until they close to decisive range, then turn simultaneously to attack single targets en masse. In many respects, it will be a reversion to the old wet-navy aircraft carrier . . . and with a lot of the same advantages for the LAC-carrier. It can deploy its assets from outside missile range, attack, and get out without ever coming under threat from a conventionally armed defender. And whether you and I like it or not, Lady Hemphill does have a point about LAC's expendability. They're so small and carry such small crews that we can trade a dozen of them for a heavy cruiser and come out ahead—not just in tonnage terms, but in loss of life, as well.
The concept that will ultimately be the
Shrike-class LAC. It's built around a BC graser, so it closes wedge side towards the enemy, then swings in and delivers a BC graser and a handful of light missiles. A few dozen are a serious threat even to a waller.
"Next, the new ships of the wall you object to are a logical extrapolation of the armament I had in Silesia. Where, I might remind you, Sir, my squadron, operating as single units outside any mutual support range, captured or destroyed an entire pirate squadron—plus a Peep light cruiser, two heavy cruisers, and a pair of battlecruisers—for the loss of a single armed merchant cruiser. Certainly building a superdreadnought around a hollow core would be a radical departure, and BuShips agrees that the new design will result in some reduction in structural strength. But it will also allow each SD to carry just over five hundred ten-missile pods and fire a salvo of six of them every twelve seconds. That's over five thousand missiles, at the rate of three hundred per minute, from a single ship which will sacrifice about thirty percent of its conventional armament to fit them in. I might also point out that the Ghost Rider remote platforms will make their pods even more useful, since it will allow the new design to deploy a complete, multilayered shell in a single salvo. Moreover, the new missile ships and the LAC-carriers between them will divert only twenty-five percent of the yard capacity currently devoted to conventional ships of the wall, assuming the recommended WDB ship mix is adopted.
Podnoughts! Also, 5,000 pods in the back of a podnought.
"And as far as the new missiles are concerned, My Lord, did you even look at the performance parameters before you decided they were more of 'Horrible Hemphill's wish list'?" Honor demanded, unable to hide her exasperation.
"Certainly she came up with the concept, but R&D took it and ran with it. We're talking about a 'multistage' missile—one with three separate drives, which will give us a degree of tactical flexibility no previous navy could even dream of! We can preprogram the drives to come on-line with any timing and at any power setting we wish! Simply programming them to activate in immediate succession at maximum power would give us a hundred and eighty seconds of powered flight . . . and a powered attack range from rest of over fourteen and a half million kilometers with a terminal velocity of point-five-four cee. Or we can drop the drives' power settings to forty-six thousand gees and get five times the endurance—and a maximum powered missile envelope of over sixty-five million klicks with a terminal velocity of point-eight-one light-speed. That's a range of three-point-six light-minutes, and we can get even more than that if we use one or two 'stages' to accelerate the weapon, let it ride a ballistic course to a preprogrammed attack range, and then bring up the final 'stage' for terminal attack maneuvers at a full ninety-two thousand gravities. I don't know about you, My Lord, but I'll sacrifice eighteen percent of my total missile load for that performance envelope!"
Multi-drive missiles (MDMs) make missile ranges theoretically unlimited, and in practice still many time the other sides. Combine with the ability for a single podnought to launch a 300 or 600 bird salvo and...
Oh, and Mantie minaturaization is so good now, they can shoehorn three drives into a missile and increase it's size only about 20%.
There was no question in his mind that he'd been right to fight Hemphill's efforts to introduce things like the grav lance or the pure energy torpedo armament into general service, and God only knew where things might have ended if she'd been allowed to implement her "spinal mount" main armament concept for ships of the wall! The idea of a capital ship which had no choice but to cross its own "T" for an enemy in order to engage it still made him cringe, and, he was certain, it would have the same effect on his hostess.
But that didn't alter the accuracy of her indictment. What would be madness in a ship of the wall might make perfectly good sense in something as small, agile—and (however little he might like it) expendable—as a LAC, and he hadn't even considered it. Nor had he made sufficient allowance for what the new central-core missile pod systems had allowed Harrington to accomplish in Silesia when he dismissed the concept's applicability to "real" warships. And, worst of all, he hadn't even bothered to look at the drive numbers on the new missiles or recognize their implications. And all of it, he admitted with still deeper chagrin, had stemmed from his instinctive, unreasoning, gut-level rejection of any project with which Sonja Hemphill was connected. Which meant he'd just exercised exactly the same knee-jerk reaction to technological change, albeit in the opposite direction, for which he'd always lambasted the jeune école.
Hamish (White Haven) realizes he's been hasty. I'm trying to imagine Hemphill pitching spinal mounts of wallers.
But if Nimitz couldn't see the potential disaster looming ahead, Honor certainly could. White Haven wasn't simply her superior officer; he was also Eighth Fleet's designated CO, while she was slated to command one of his squadrons. That put them in the same chain of command, which meant anything at all between them would be a violation of Article 119, and that was a court-martial offense for officers. Even worse, he was married—and not to just anyone. Lady Emily Alexander had been the Star Kingdom's most beloved HD actress before the terrible freak air car accident which had turned her into a permanent invalid. Even today, locked forever into a life-support chair and reduced essentially to the use of one hand and arm, she remained one of Manticore's foremost writer-producers . . . and one of its leading poets, as well.
Ham is impressed by Honor's standing up to him, and has a sudden realization that she's a formidable and pretty young woman (well, young to him, but Hamish is over 90) which Honor and Nimitz can't help but notice.
Odd that she'd think about his wife, as we establish later that Manticore is totally fine with polygamy as long as it's between aware and consenting adults.
The inhabitants of Grayson were nothing if not determined. Among other things, theirs was the only planet in the explored galaxy which had retained the ancient Gregorian calendar, despite the fact that it was totally unsuited to their planetary day or year. If anyone was likely to have preserved a traditional breakfast food in the midst of colonizing a disastrously hostile planet with a pathetically crippled tech base, they were certainly the people to do it.
Grayson, one of only three planets in the known universe to play baseball, the only to keep the old Earth calendar, has also preserved waffles. Purely because they're traditional.
"You're wondering why I don't look like a pre-space blimp, aren't you, My Lord?" she teased gently.
"I— That is—" White Haven blushed. Her direct, smiling question had caught him without a graceful response, and his blush deepened at her soft laugh.
"Don't worry, My Lord. Mike Henke teases me about it all the time, and the explanation's simple enough. I'm a genie."
The earl blinked briefly, his expression totally blank, then nodded in sudden understanding. It was considered extremely impolite to use the term "genie" to describe someone, but given Harrington's neurosurgeon father and—especially—geneticist mother, she was probably more comfortable with the label than many. For that matter, the prejudice against genetically engineered humans was slowly dying out as the last memories of Old Earth's Final War faded from the racial forebrain. But there had been no such prejudice in the early days of the Diaspora, and quite a few colonies had been established by genies specifically designed for their new environments.
"I wasn't aware of that, Milady," he said after a moment.
"We don't talk about it much, but I'd guess the majority of Sphinxians are genies by now," she replied. He raised a polite eyebrow, and she shrugged. "Think about it," she suggested. "Heavy-grav planets are one of the most common 'hostile' environments. You know that even today most heavy-worlders have shorter than average life expectancies?" She looked at White Haven again, and he nodded. "That's because even with modern medicine you can't put a body designed for a single gravity onto a one-point-three or one-point-five-gravity planet and expect it to function properly. I, on the other hand—"
She made a graceful gesture with one hand, and he nodded slowly. "I knew about the modifications for Quelhollow, but those are much more readily apparent than what you seem to be talking about," he observed.
"Well, Quelhollow had some other environmental concerns, whereas my ancestors were more of a . . . generic design, I suppose. Basically, my muscle tissue is about twenty-five percent more efficient than a 'pure human's,' and there are a few changes to my respiratory and circulatory systems, plus some skeletal reinforcement. The idea was to fit us for heavy-grav planets generally, not one in particular, and the geneticists made the changes dominant, so that every parent would pass them on to every child."
The secret revealed, Honor comes from a long line of genetically-tweaked Harringtons. Specifically a generic heavy-grav world template (the Meyerdahl First Wave, Beta variant) with skeletal reinforcement, significantly increased muscle efficiency and tweaked respiration and circulation. Though not mentioned here, the Beta variant included attempts to increase intelligence, which has a spotty track record in the honorverse. First, because half the time they caused increased aggression too (notably, the Scrags) and second because (and I'm paraphrasing here) what we think of as intellect covers a vast variety of traits. Do you want more spatial awareness? Emotional intelligence? Math? Problem-solving?
The Meyerdahl 1B mod was less obvious or intrusive than most, but quietly successful in that those who have it frequently score in the 99th percentile on IQ tests.
Funny that she's never mentioned this before, but she's so casual with White Haven about it.
"And your diet?"
"I don't get more efficient muscles and a stronger heart for free, My Lord," Honor said wryly. "My metabolism runs about twenty percent faster—a little more than that actually, but not much—to fuel the differences. Which is why I can afford to eat like this," she finished, grinning as MacGuiness put a third plate of waffles in front of her.
"Actually," she added, cutting into the stack, "I tend to stuff myself at breakfast, then have a relatively light—well, light for me, anyway—lunch. The overnight 'down time' leaves me needing more reactor mass in the morning."
Two small downsides to the Meyerdahl line, the first is all that strength needs significantly more food, this will be important later. Actually, I've been looking and both Honor's considerable sweet tooth and that she never gains weight from it is already well-established. We just thought previously it was all her exercise and martial arts.
"You say more than half of Sphinx has the same modification?"
"That's only an estimate, and it's not one modification. The Harringtons are descended from the Meyerdahl First Wave, which was one of the first—in fact, I think it was the first—heavy-grav modification, and folks like us probably make up about twenty or twenty-five percent of the population. But there are several variations on the same theme, and worlds tend to attract colonists who can live there comfortably. When you add the free passages the government offered to recruit fresh colonists after the Plague of Twenty-Two AL, Sphinx wound up attracting an even bigger chunk of us than most, including a lot from the core worlds who wouldn't even have considered emigration otherwise. In many respects, the Meyerdahl genies are the most successful, in my modest opinion, though. Our musculature enhancement is certainly the most efficient, at any rate. But we do have one problem most of the others don't."
"Which is?"
"Most of us don't regenerate," she told him, touching the left side of her face. "Over eighty percent of us have a built-in genetic conflict with the regen therapies, and not even Beowulf has been able to figure out how to get around it yet. I'm pretty sure they will eventually, but for now—"
Meyerdahl genies are relatively common, particularly on Sphinx. The second downside is that most of the line can't use regen therapy. Also, we establish that a 25% increase in efficiency is the most anyone in the honorverse been able to improve on nature, at least in the category of superstrength.
She shrugged, mildly surprised at herself for offering the explanation in the first place, and even more for giving so many details. It wasn't something she thought much about herself, and some people still had funny reactions to the entire notion of "genies."
Odd little disconnect. Honor's pretty casual about it here, and apparently doesn't think about it much. Yet the Honorverse does practice chattel slavery with rights-less test-tube babies. Alright, slavery is officially banned but unofficially widely practiced. There's some lingering distrust and prejudice because Earth's Final War involved GEd super-soldiers (Scrags again) but, the ruling dynasty of Manticore are also genies, even though the precise details of their mods are secret, Honor is later told in confidence that they are "very similar" to the Meyedahl line.
In the long run, Honor expected Sullivan to be good for Grayson. He would accomplish whatever he did in ways which would never have occurred to Hanks, but his devotion to his God, his flock, his church, and his Protector—in that order—were beyond question.
Unfortunately, however, he was also rather more of a social conservative than Hanks had been. Or, rather, than Hanks had become following Grayson's alliance with Manticore. The new Reverend had been zealous in proclaiming the Church's continued backing for the Protector's reforms, and his attitude towards Steadholder Harrington could hardly have been more supportive, yet Honor knew the concept of a female steadholder didn't come naturally to him. In a very real sense, Sullivan was forcing himself to do what his intellect and his understanding of his faith required of him despite a lingering, deep-seated emotional distaste for the changes in his world—and his own world view—that required.
The new Reverend and spiritual leader of Grayson.
"we tend to try things out here, and what we're trying out this time is Grayson's first modern genetic clinic."
"Ah?" White Haven raised his eyebrows attentively, and Honor felt his fresh flicker of interest. Most of it was simply that—interest in the project she was describing—but there was more to it, as well. A dancing fire around the edges of his emotions. It was . . . admiration, she realized, and felt her cheeks heat. Darn it! Whatever White Haven—or Miranda, or Lord Prestwick, or even Benjamin Mayhew—might think, there was nothing extraordinary about her decision to bankroll the clinic. The entire initial endowment came to barely forty million, and Graysons suffered from an appalling number of genetic defects—many, if not most, of them correctable by modern medicine—after a millennium's exposure to their planet's heavy metal concentrations. It would have been criminal for her not to get someone from the Star Kingdom out here to do something about that, so where did White Haven get off admiring her for it? What gave him the right to sit there and—
-snip-
"Yes, My Lord," she heard herself say tranquilly. "The strides Grayson has made in industrial capacity and the ability to feed its people are remarkable, but I think, in the long run, that modern medicine is what's really going to have the greatest impact here. No doubt the fact that both of my own parents are physicians tends to prejudice my thinking in that regard—in fact, I've asked my mother to take a leave from her practice on Sphinx to set up our clinic here—but I don't really believe anyone who truly thinks things through could argue the point. After all, simply introducing prolong will bring about enormous changes, and when you add things like genetic repair and research, or—"
Honor pays out of pocket for a free Grayson genetics clinic, and convinces here mom to come and set it up. After several books of teasing, worlds will collide as Honor's incredibly sexually liberated mom is turned loose on Grayson society. Oh, I'm sure the clinic will make a huge difference too, Grayson still has an uncomfortably high infant mortality rate, curable genetic defects etc.
