Bit of Analysis: Honor Harrington II

[Simon_Jester]

Yes, but most animals won't attack a large party of humans. Also, humans aren't poisonous to terrestrial wildlife.

[Ahriman238]

Humans are poisonous to the mosquitoes, not necessarily the other wildlife. Generally indigestible, but how many dogs (and people) do you know who eat things even though it'll just give them tummy issues and pass right through them leaving no nutritional value?

[Simon_Jester]

Given the large number of 'wrong-handed' organic compounds in the human body, I doubt it. If it were just a case of eating left-handed sugars or something it'd probably be survivable, but there's a lot more than that in a living creature.

If our blood poisons their insects, it probably poisons their vertebrates, semi-realistically. So in my honest opinion there's no way we'd be safely edible to them, or vice versa.

[Ahriman238]

Peep installations tended to be bigger than Manticoran ones, largely because they used more plug-in/pull-out components. Peep techs weren't up to the sort of in-place maintenance Manticoran technicians routinely performed, so the practice, wherever possible, was to simply yank a malfunctioning component and send it to some central servicing depot where properly trained people could deal with it. Unhappily for the People's Navy, that assumed one had a replacement unit handy to plug into its place when you pulled it, and that had been a major reason for the soaring Peep unserviceability rates of the first two or three years of the war. The PN had been structured around short, intensive campaigns with plenty of time to refit between gobbling up each successive bite of someone else's real estate. Their logistics pipeline had been designed to meet those needs, and it simply hadn't been up to hauling the requisite number of replacement components back and forth between the front-line systems and the rear area service and maintenance depots over an extended period of active operations.

Right again, Simon, plug and play. And some implications on what that means. Normally the Peeps can seize a single-system polity in a few weeks and then service their ships as needed, but the long war is working against everyone, Manticore and Haven alike. There's too great a need for ships on the line to pull them back for regular service, and not enough time for everyone to get seen to as they should.

That, unfortunately, was one problem they seemed to be getting on top of, Tremaine reflected while he watched Harkness pull out a test kit and begin checking circuits. They were finally getting their logistics establishment up to something approaching Allied standards, and—

Though at the moment Haven is starting to cope better than Manticore.

None of the inmates of Inferno ever attached the "Citizen" to the front of Warner Caslet's rank title. None of them were particularly comfortable about having a Peep naval officer in their midst, but they weren't as uncomfortable about it as Honor had feared they would be, either. Apparently there were enough Legislaturalist ex-officers scattered among Hell's political prisoners for the regular POWs to have developed a live-and-let-live attitude. Indeed, Honor suspected that their term for StateSec personnel—"Black Leg"—had evolved as much as a way to differentiate between the real enemy and Peeps who were fellow inmates as from the black trousers of the SS uniform. Not that Inferno's inhabitants intended to take any chances with Caslet. Everyone had been quite polite to him, especially after Honor's people had had a chance to take them aside and explain how this particular Peep came to be on Hell, but they kept an eye on him. And there was a specific reason he'd been assigned to the hut Benson and Dessouix shared.

There are enough Havenite prisoners that no one really has a problem with Peeps per se.

Honor had been dumbfounded to discover that the Peeps really had planted an agent in Inferno, and the other inmates had been even more shocked than she. The man in question had been their resident expert on how to spin and weave the local equivalent of flax to provide the fabric Dessouix and his two assistants used to clothe the inmates. That had made him a vital cog in the camp's small, survival-oriented economy, and almost all of the other prisoners had regarded him as a personal friend, as well. The thought that he was actually a StateSec agent planted to betray their trust had been more than enough to produce a murderous fury in his fellow prisoners.

Only he hadn't actually been an "agent" at all; he was simply an informer. It was a subtle difference, but it had kept Ramirez from ordering (or allowing) his execution when, acting on Honor's suggestion, Benson and Dessouix found the short-range com set hidden in his mattress. Had they failed to find it before the next food drop brought a shuttle into his com range, a single short report from him would have killed them all, and they knew it. But they'd also discovered why he'd become a StateSec agent, and it was hard to fault a man for agreeing to do anything which might save his lover from execution.

So instead of killing him, they'd simply taken away his com set and detailed half a dozen others to keep an eye on him.

StateSec informer at Inferno, found and dealt with.

Fritz Montoya had already proved worth his weight in anything anyone would have cared to name to Camp Inferno. Relatively few medical officers got sent to Hell, and of those who had been sent there, none had been further exiled to Inferno. For the most part, the local germs tended to leave the indigestible human interlopers alone, but there were a few indigenous diseases which were as stubbornly persistent in attacking them as shuttlesquitos or bearcats. And, of course, there was always the potential for food poisoning, accidents, or some purely terrestrial bug to wreak havoc. More than one of Hell's camps had been completely depopulated between supply runs, and Montoya had found himself with a backlog of minor complaints and injuries to deal with.

Disease, food poisoning or simple accidents have wiped out entire camps before, as StateSec doesn't generally bother to provide medical care to prisoners.

I suppose I should be grateful they even bother to lace the inmates' rations with contraceptives, she thought grimly. Not that they do it to be nice. Kids would just be more mouths for them to feed, after all. And God only knows what the infant mortality rate would look like in a place like this without proper medical support!

Though it seems they do spike the food with contraceptives to dodge the whole problem of what to do with babies born in captivity.

Her analysts had been right about the schedule on which the Peeps operated; they made a whole clutch of supply runs in a relatively short period—usually about three days—once per month. Given Camp Inferno's "punishment" status, it was usually one of the last camps to be visited, which was another factor in Honor's plan.

They don't cover all the camps' food runs on one day of frantic flight ops but over the course of three days.

Between runs, the Black Legs stayed put on Styx, amusing themselves and leaving the prisoner population to its own devices, and despite the guard force's obvious laziness, she reflected, it really was an effective prison system. No doubt the absolute cost of the operation was impressive, but on a per-prisoner basis, it must be ludicrously low. All the Peeps did when they needed another camp was to pick a spot and dump the appropriate number of inmates on it, along with some unpowered hand tools and a minimal amount of building material. Their total investment was a couple of dozen each of axes, hammers, hand saws, picks, and shovels, enough wire to put up a perimeter against the local predators, a few kilos of nails, and—if they were feeling particularly generous—some extruded plastic panels with which to roof the inmates' huts. If a few hut-builders got munched on by the neighborhood's wildlife before they got their camp built, well, that was no skin off the Peeps' noses. There were always plenty more prisoners where they'd come from.

StateSec didn't even carry the expense of shipping in and issuing the sort of preserved emergency rations she and her people had been living on. They grew fresh food on Styx, which, unlike any of the rest of Hell, had been thoroughly terraformed when the original prison was built. To be more precise, their automated farming equipment and a handful of "trustees" did all the grunt work to raise the crops, and the Peeps simply distributed it.

She'd been surprised by that at first, but on second thought it had made a lot of sense. Fresh food was much bulkier, which made for more work on the distribution end of the system, but it didn't keep indefinitely the way e-rats did. That meant it would have been much harder for one of the camps to put itself on short rations and gradually build up a stash of provisions that might let its inmates get into some sort of mischief the garrison would not have approved of. And it made logistical sense, too. By growing their own food here on Hell, the Peeps could drastically reduce the number of supply runs they had to make to the planet. In fact, it looked like they only made one major supply delivery or so a year, now.

Camp set-up and the virtues of fresh-farmed food over emergency rations.

But there was more traffic to and from the Cerberus System, albeit on an extremely erratic schedule, than she'd assumed would be the case. For one thing, runs to deliver new prisoners had gone up dramatically after the Committee of Public Safety took over. One of the old Office of Internal Security's failings had been that it hadn't been repressive enough. A regime which relied on the iron fist to stay in power was asking for trouble if it relaxed its grip by even a millimeter, and the Legislaturalist leadership had made the mistake of clamping down hard enough to enrage its enemies, but not hard enough to eliminate them outright or terrify them into impotence. Worse, they'd ordered occasional amnesties under which political prisoners were released to placate the Mob, which put people who'd experienced InSec's brutality from the inside back outside to tell their tales of mistreatment—a heaven-sent propaganda opportunity for the agitators of the Citizens Rights Union and other dissident groups. Worse, perhaps, it had suggested a sense of weakness on InSec's part, for why would they have attempted to placate their enemies if they'd felt they were in a position of strength?

The Committee of Public Safety, having been the recipient of such assistance from its predecessors, had decided that it would err by going to the opposite extreme. Its determination not to extend the same encouragement to its own enemies went a long way towards explaining the brutal thoroughness which had made Oscar Saint-Just's security forces so widely and virulently hated.

Was this really what you meant by making the improvements Haven needs to survive, Rob?

In point of fact, StateSec seemed to regard Hell, and especially its political prisoners, as a sort of piggy bank for conscripted labor forces. Even the most modern of industrial bases (which the PRH's was not) had its share of jobs which ranged from the unpleasant to the acutely dangerous. More than that, StateSec had its own highly secret projects, which it preferred to keep as quiet as possible, and there were people among Hell's politicals who had skills those projects sometimes needed badly. For that matter, before the war with the Star Kingdom broke out, StateSec's predecessors in the Office of Internal Security had used Hell as a source of "colonists" (or at least construction crews) for some less than idyllic worlds where the People's Navy needed basing facilities and then returned the workers to Hell when the job was done.

So sometimes you can get out, for a bit, as slave labor or hazardous colonization duty somewhere, and if you do alright and don't die they ship you back? That's cold.

All of which meant that StateSec-crewed personnel transports arrived at Hell, invariably with a warship escort these days, at highly unpredictable but fairly frequent intervals. More rarely, one of StateSec's warships which found itself in the area or passing nearby on its own business might drop by for fresh food, to pick up reactor mass from the huge tank farm StateSec maintained in orbit around Hell, or for a little planetside R&R.

One might not normally think of a "prison planet" as a place where people would want to take liberty, but Camp Charon was actually quite luxurious (InSec had chosen to pamper the personnel who found themselves stuck out here, and StateSec had seen no reason to change that policy), and Styx's climate would have stood comparison with that of any resort world. Which made sense, Honor supposed. It was only reasonable to put your permanent base in the most pleasant spot you could find, and with an entire planet to choose from, you ought to be able to find at least a few spots that were very pleasant indeed.

Besides, she thought grimly, this is StateSec's planet. They own it, lock, stock, and barrel, and they feel safe here. I don't think ONI's ever realized just how important that is to them. It may be off the beaten track, and months may go by with no one at all dropping by, but they always know Hell is out here, like some sort of refuge. Or like some nasty little adolescent gang's "clubhouse."

Camp Charon often sees StateSec goons on leave.

So far, they'd been through three complete supply cycles without meeting the conditions they needed, and Honor was honest enough to admit that the strain of waiting was getting to her. At least the rations the Peeps were delivering were sufficient to feed all her people as well as Inferno's "legal" population. The garrison wasn't very careful about counting noses except for the twice-a-T-year prison census, and a dozen or so of Inferno's inmates had died of natural causes since the last headcount, so there was ample food to go around.

Actually, the Peeps were fairly generous in their food allocations . . . when they weren't cutting rations in punishment, at least. Probably because it didn't cost them anything to feed their prisoners a diet which would actually keep them healthy. Honor was almost back up to her proper weight now, and her hair had changed from a short fuzz to a curly, close-growing cap.

Good amount of food, since most of it will go bad and can't be stored well. There's a six-month census but otherwise they don't bother keeping track too closely. Living off the food dropped to Inferno for three months, after five months hiding in the jungle on stored rations, at least two months after originally being captured. Pretty close to a year.

Commodore Alistair McKeon pressed a button, and a strand of old-fashioned fiberoptic cable flashed the signal to the detonators on five hundred kilos of the very best chemical explosives State Security had once owned. Those five hundred kilos were buried directly under the center of the shuttle pad—beneath, in fact, the exact point on which Citizen Lieutenant Jardine's precise piloting had deposited his shuttle.

One way to kill a pinnace.

The shuttle was big enough to drop one of StateSec's outsized companies—two hundred and fifty troopers strong—in a single flight, and it had been one of Tepes' ready shuttles, with fully stocked small arms racks and a complete load of external ordnance. There was only enough unpowered body armor for a hundred and thirty people, but the small arms racks had been intended to provide every member of the company with side arms as well as pulse rifles, plasma rifles, or tribarrels. Transferring any of that hardware to Inferno and running even the tiniest risk of it being spotted by the Peeps before they got a chance to launch Lunch Basket had been out of the question, but Senior Chief O'Jorgenson and Senior Chief Harris stood at the heads of the ramps, handing out armor and weapons to the incoming stream of inmates. By cramming them in with standing room only, Honor could fit three hundred of Camp Inferno's people onboard, and every one of them would have something to shoot with at the other end.

Assault shuttle capacity and armory.

"There it is, Ma'am," Scotty Tremaine said very quietly, and Honor nodded. The island of Styx was a blur of green and brown on the wrinkled blue of the DuQuesne Ocean, named for the powerful Legislaturalist who had been the architect behind the PRH's original plan of conquest.

Funny thing to call an ocean on a planet StateSec owns, she reflected absently. Wonder why they didn't change its "elitist" name to something more proletarian when they took over the lease?

Decent question, probably couldn't be bothered. Several time Duquesne is mentioned as the great statesman who decided the Peeps had to start conquering their neighbors to prop up the system, actually seeing the guy in action is one reason I'm looking forward to House of Lies.

They'd been able to generate fairly detailed topographical imagery from the data Harkness had stolen from Tepes, and the shuttle's passive sensors had been updating the HUD by adding specific targeting codes to the display for the last five minutes. Now half a dozen numbered locations were centered in bright red sighting rings, and she smiled.

Tepes had a detailed topographical math of StateSec's stronghold. I think that safely rules out excluding Inferno from simple paranoia, though the other explanations remain valid.

"Launch One!"

Honor Harrington's soprano voice was colder than space as she announced the shot and squeezed the trigger on the control stick. A single laser-guided missile dropped from the racks and accelerated at four thousand gravities.

-snip-

Given more launch range to work with, the missiles would have made respectable kinetic energy weapons, but the attackers had had to get in too close for that. Not that it mattered. State Security had very kindly armed those missiles with massive warheads designed to take out hardened targets, and the first missile slammed straight into the primary fire control radar for Camp Charon's air defenses.

A huge ball of fire bloomed against the ground, boiling up into the heavens, breaking windows and sending shockwaves through every structure within a thousand meters. And then the second missile slammed into Radar Two, and the third ripped Number One Missile Battery itself to bits, and the fourth exploded in the exact center of Missile Two. And even as Cleilia Steiner jerked to her feet, staring in numb horror at the destruction marching across the base towards her, missiles five through ten were in the air and streaking for their targets.

Assault shuttle missiles versus Camp Charon's paranoid and excessive, yet at the moment totally unprepared, air defenses.

"Acquired," Honor replied as the targeting lasers picked out the ready section of pinnaces. The magnified image in the HUD showed her the missiles tucked under their fuselages, but they were the only armed craft on the entire field, and they'd never been intended for a combat scramble against one of their own shuttles. They were meant as a fire brigade in case some camp full of prisoners went berserk and mobbed a supply shuttle or some equally bizarre occurrence. Yet nothing like that had ever happened . . . and the planners had never even contemplated anything as bizarre as what was happening. But for all that, someone down there obviously had her head together, because Honor actually saw a pilot running madly towards one of the ready birds. But whoever she was, she was too late, and Honor thumbed the toggle to select bombs.

They actually have ready-alert aircraft, but Honor blasts them to bits on the ground.

The cluster munitions spewed bomblets across the parked pinnaces. They weren't the snowflake clusters designed for anti-personnel use. These were dragon's teeth, designed to cripple or destroy heavy ground combat equipment. Each bomblet was the size of a Grayson baseball, and hundreds of them rained down across the neatly parked pinnaces.

Honorverse cluster bombs, AP snowflakes versus dragon's teeth (which are also space EW missiles).

Not that any of those bright and sunshiny thoughts helped a great deal. His forty thousand-ton courier boat was one of the fastest vessels in space, but she was also little more than a pair of Warshawski sails and a set of impellers, with strictly limited living space for her thirty-man crew. That was why half his people were usually down on Styx, rotating through enough liberty to keep bulkhead fever from driving them crazy and simultaneously giving the people still stuck upstairs aboard ship enough extra living space to stay sane. It was strictly against The Book, of course, but no base commander had ever objected. After all, there would be plenty of time to get the rest of Proxmire's crew back upstairs before sending his ship off with a message. Besides, no CO on Hades had ever actually needed to use his communications ship, anyway.

Proxmire scrubbed harder, cursing his own complacency. Yet even as he cursed himself, he realized his error had been all but inevitable. No one had ever threatened Hades. Hell, no one but StateSec even knew where it was! And there had been no point in putting his people to any more hardship than they had to endure simply to satisfy the letter of the Regs. But now this—whatever this was!—was happening down there, and he had only half his crew on board and no orders from Citizen Brigadier Tresca. But—

-snip-

Proxmire nodded, then jerked his attention back to the display. It would take his ship almost forty minutes to bring her nodes up, and he hoped to hell that by the time they were on-line, the situation would have clarified enough down there that he wouldn't need them after all.

Courier boat, the smallest hyper-capable craft. 40 K-tons with a 30 man crew, pretty much all engine with some living space. 40 minutes to cold-start impellers is consistent with previous work. Oh, and Hades keeps a dispatch boat on hand in case there are emergency messages that Tresca needs to send.

Scotty Tremaine put the shuttle down, and the twin dorsal turrets whined as their heavy pulsers tracked across the base. The single ventral turret joined in, and hangers and parked ground vehicles blew apart under their ravening fire as the troop hatches sprang open.

Three hundred men and women streamed down the ramps, armed to the teeth and carefully briefed on their objectives. They split up into three groups as officers' shouted orders, and then they were gone, flowing away into the chaos and flame like vengeful ghosts.

Assault shuttle has a twin pulse cannon, like a pinnace, and a dorsal turret besides.

. The outer crystoplast wall of the control tower had been reduced to splinters and driven across her work area like shrapnel, cutting down and killing every other member of her crew, and she staggered towards the door. She had to get out of here, she thought dazedly. Had to find a weapon. There was only the one shuttle. There couldn't be more than a couple of hundred people aboard it, and the defenders had them outnumbered ten-to-one, with armored vehicles and battle armor to support them.

A 'couple thousand' on Camp Charon, with power armor and vehicles to support them if only they weren't so caught off guard.

A handful of SS types had gotten themselves back together, and a light tribarrel opened fire from somewhere in the enlisted housing blocks facing the main vehicle building. Two of McKeon's people went down, killed instantly, but the others cleared its field of fire before it could engage them.

The gunner would have been better advised to shoot at the hovering shuttle, instead, McKeon reflected grimly. Light as his weapon was, he was unlikely to have brought down the heavily armored assault craft, but he might have gotten lucky. Instead, all he'd managed to do was kill two people and attract the shuttle's attention. It twisted around in midair, the nose dropped slightly, and the building from which the fire had come vomited flame and smoke as Honor put a missile into it and followed up with a half-second burst from her heavy bow-mounted tribarrels.

Tribarrels on the shuttle too. A normal tribarrel is unlikely to down an armored assault shuttle.

. A dozen or so technicians had been working on vehicles or tinkering with the powered armor stored in the base "Morgue," but only about half of them were armed, and those only with side arms. Some of them did their best, with far more guts than McKeon would have expected from SS thugs, and he lost eleven more men and women before he could secure the park. But then he had control of it, and he posted fifteen people to hold the Morgue and keep the garrison from getting to the powered battle armor stored there while the rest of his people began firing up the power plants on armored personnel carriers and light tanks.

Correction: the prisoners have armored vehicles and powered armor.

"Commodore Ramirez has the control site, Commodore!" Senior Chief Barstow announced, and Honor felt the fierce flare of triumph rip through the skeleton crew still aboard the shuttle. It had taken almost twenty minutes longer than the ops plan had hoped for, because Ramirez's group had gotten bogged down in half a dozen tiny, vicious firefights on its way in. But what mattered now was that the commodore had done it! He now controlled the ground base to which all of the planet's orbital defenses were slaved. He couldn't use them yet—even if he'd captured the control site completely undamaged, which was unlikely—because none of them knew the security codes. But they would have time to figure the codes out later, especially with Horace Harkness to tickle the StateSec computers, and what mattered for right now was that the Peeps couldn't use them, either.

And they have the orbital defenses, freeing up Shuttle Two to go after the courier.

The courier boat didn't carry a true tactical section, for she was completely unarmed. But she had a fairly respectable sensor suite, and the sky over Styx was cloudless and clear. That was enough to let them generate a needle-sharp view of events there, and his stomach knotted at what he saw. The fire, smoke, and chaos was even more widespread, but the display projected the icons of armored vehicles moving out of the vehicle park. Unfortunately, they seemed to be firing on SS positions, not the attackers. And if anything had been needed to confirm who was in control of them, that damned assault shuttle wasn't firing at them. In fact, it was providing them with fire support!

He shook his head numbly. Surely this was impossible. It had to be impossible! He still had no idea at all who those people were or where they had come from, but they'd taken barely forty minutes to overrun the most critical sectors of the base. The garrison was cut off from its heavy weapons—for that matter, the attackers were using its own weapons against it!—and simple numbers meant very little against someone who controlled the air and had all the heavy firepower.

Courier sensors, birds-eye-view of the action.

"We've got the velocity advantage now, but she's got a deeper compensator sump and a hell of a lot more brute power than us, Ma'am. She can pull about five hundred and thirty gees to our four hundred, but our present velocity is about four thousand KPH—make it sixty-seven KPS—and hers is only about twenty-seven KPS. Current range is one-three-point-three-five k-klicks, and she'll match our velocity in a little over thirty-one seconds, so we'll equalize at range one-two-point-seven-two k-klicks. After that, she'll pull away from us at one and a quarter KPS-squared."

Relative accel of couriers vs. assault shuttles, both enjoying the benefits of low mass and high-powered impellers for their size. 400 Gs for the shuttle, 530 for the courier, or equivalent to a heavy cruiser.

We don't get the rest or what sort of weapon was used, but yeah, the courier is taken out, and so word of the uprising isn't spread.

[Batman]

No way is 4,000KPH equal to 67KPS and we absolutely do get the word on what sort of weapon was used?

"Sarah?" Metcalf looked back at DuChene, and the lieutenant commander chewed her lip for a moment, then sighed unhappily.
"These birds weren't designed to kill starships—not even small ones," she said, and Metcalf nodded impatiently. She was a tactical officer herself. But she was also a better pilot than DuChene, and the missiles were DuChene's responsibility. "I can take her out, but it'll be an awful long-range shot for our weapons at this range, especially if she knows they're coming and takes evasive action. But if we're only going to close the range by six hundred klicks . . ."
She paused, and Metcalf nodded in grim understanding while her thoughts flickered like lightning, considering options and outcomes, weighing and discarding alternatives.
Courier boats didn't mount point defense, and they weren't equipped with the sophisticated electronic warfare suites of warships. But the shuttle didn't carry the nuclear and laser warheads which warships normally fired at one another, either. Even its limited number of impeller-head missiles, designed for combat with other small craft, had been expended during the breakout from Tepes. Those which remained were intended primarily for short-range work against planetary targets, and they all carried chemical warheads, and that was the problem. Although those warheads were many times as efficient as any chemical explosives from pre-Diaspora history, they still required direct hits, and at this range, scoring a direct hit against a nonevading target would be hard enough with ground attack missiles. Worse, stopping anything the size of that courier boat would require multiple hits, not just one. All of which meant that at this range, they would have to fire without warning to prevent the target from taking evasive action or rolling to interpose its impeller wedge . . . and they couldn't reduce the range enough to change that.

[Terralthra]

No way is 4,000KPH equal to 67KPS

Indeed not. 4,000 km/hr is, however, 67 km/min. Unit conversion fuckup, dividing by 60 once instead of twice.

and we absolutely do get the word on what sort of weapon was used?

"Sarah?" Metcalf looked back at DuChene, and the lieutenant commander chewed her lip for a moment, then sighed unhappily.
"These birds weren't designed to kill starships—not even small ones," she said, and Metcalf nodded impatiently. She was a tactical officer herself. But she was also a better pilot than DuChene, and the missiles were DuChene's responsibility. "I can take her out, but it'll be an awful long-range shot for our weapons at this range, especially if she knows they're coming and takes evasive action. But if we're only going to close the range by six hundred klicks . . ."
She paused, and Metcalf nodded in grim understanding while her thoughts flickered like lightning, considering options and outcomes, weighing and discarding alternatives.
Courier boats didn't mount point defense, and they weren't equipped with the sophisticated electronic warfare suites of warships. But the shuttle didn't carry the nuclear and laser warheads which warships normally fired at one another, either. Even its limited number of impeller-head missiles, designed for combat with other small craft, had been expended during the breakout from Tepes. Those which remained were intended primarily for short-range work against planetary targets, and they all carried chemical warheads, and that was the problem. Although those warheads were many times as efficient as any chemical explosives from pre-Diaspora history, they still required direct hits, and at this range, scoring a direct hit against a nonevading target would be hard enough with ground attack missiles. Worse, stopping anything the size of that courier boat would require multiple hits, not just one. All of which meant that at this range, they would have to fire without warning to prevent the target from taking evasive action or rolling to interpose its impeller wedge . . . and they couldn't reduce the range enough to change that.

Chem-powered missiles, rockets essentially, with chemical explosive warheads.

[Esquire]

Do we ever see chemical warheads used in a situation we could use to figure out their yields?

[Simon_Jester]

I don't think so. I'd guesstimate no more than an order of magnitude improvement over real life, but that's fairly informal, and I'm not sure I can find evidence for it.

They don't cover all the camps' food runs on one day of frantic flight ops but over the course of three days.

Though with 200 camps, geographically scattered across much of the planet, this still involves a lot of individual shuttle flights- so those three days of flight operations are still ten times as frantic as would be the case if they worked steadily.

The main difference is that you would only need a few shuttles constantly in operation for continuous runs, a huge number of shuttles for doing all the supply runs in one day... and a lesser number for three days. As in, if you want to do all the supply runs in one 12-hour day, and the average shuttle flight round trip takes, say, four hours... to supply 200 camps you need roughly seventy shuttles. And seventy flight crews- more if you don't want those crews working a 12-hour day. And a base maintenance establishment capable of making sure that all or nearly all of them are operational on that day.

With three days to work, you might only need, say, thirty shuttles, and still have more margin for error in case a few of them are out of commission, and for that matter be able to work shorter shifts. At some point, doing two flights for each of three days is less punishing than doing three or four flights in one day.

[snip description of StateSec evils] Was this really what you meant by making the improvements Haven needs to survive, Rob?

Probably part of the cost of relying on Saint-Just, who's exactly the kind of sociopathic fuck who will kill millions because "better safe than sorry." Without Saint-Just the revolution might never have had a real chance of success, but... well, basically he represents the very worst of the pre-coup government, and managed to survive the fall of that government by making himself invaluable to the new management.

The shuttle was big enough to drop one of StateSec's outsized companies—two hundred and fifty troopers strong—in a single flight, and it had been one of Tepes' ready shuttles, with fully stocked small arms racks and a complete load of external ordnance. There was only enough unpowered body armor for a hundred and thirty people, but the small arms racks had been intended to provide every member of the company with side arms as well as pulse rifles, plasma rifles, or tribarrels. Transferring any of that hardware to Inferno and running even the tiniest risk of it being spotted by the Peeps before they got a chance to launch Lunch Basket had been out of the question, but Senior Chief O'Jorgenson and Senior Chief Harris stood at the heads of the ramps, handing out armor and weapons to the incoming stream of inmates. By cramming them in with standing room only, Honor could fit three hundred of Camp Inferno's people onboard, and every one of them would have something to shoot with at the other end.

Assault shuttle capacity and armory.

This suggests a capacity for cargo or personnel comparable to, say, a large jumbo jet. Even if you pack the soldiers and gear pretty tightly, there has to be enough physical space for them to sit down, then stand up and march out of the shuttle without getting tangled up in each other's equipment and seating.

Decent question, probably couldn't be bothered. Several time Duquesne is mentioned as the great statesman who decided the Peeps had to start conquering their neighbors to prop up the system, actually seeing the guy in action is one reason I'm looking forward to House of Lies.

I sincerely doubt he'll be as shiveringly cold-blooded as Marc DuQuesne at his best, though. And I'm pretty sure that's where Weber cribbed the name from.

Tepes had a detailed topographical math of StateSec's stronghold. I think that safely rules out excluding Inferno from simple paranoia, though the other explanations remain valid.

Alternatively, Tepes's map was intended to allow shuttles to land at the base using terrain-matching radar to doublecheck their location, or something like that. And if you have radar imagery of the surrounding terrain for your own purposes, that radar imagery can be translated into a topo map.

"Acquired," Honor replied as the targeting lasers picked out the ready section of pinnaces. The magnified image in the HUD showed her the missiles tucked under their fuselages, but they were the only armed craft on the entire field, and they'd never been intended for a combat scramble against one of their own shuttles. They were meant as a fire brigade in case some camp full of prisoners went berserk and mobbed a supply shuttle or some equally bizarre occurrence. Yet nothing like that had ever happened . . . and the planners had never even contemplated anything as bizarre as what was happening. But for all that, someone down there obviously had her head together, because Honor actually saw a pilot running madly towards one of the ready birds. But whoever she was, she was too late, and Honor thumbed the toggle to select bombs.

They actually have ready-alert aircraft, but Honor blasts them to bits on the ground.

Amusingly, Weber contradicts himself- earlier he'd said that camp prisoners had stormed a supply shuttle on two separate occasions. Although here he may mean, say, having pinnaces in place in case the prisoners steal a supply shuttle and work out how to fly it.

Honorverse cluster bombs, AP snowflakes versus dragon's teeth (which are also space EW missiles).

Both would seem to evoke the Greek myths, of sowing the teeth of a dragon into a field and having deadly warriors spring up... warriors who could then easily be distracted into fighting and killing each other.

This is very appropriate for the decoy missiles of Project Ghost Rider, which appear to instantly multiply into a great host of missiles... but which are illusory threats and can easily provoke confusion among the defenders.

For antitank cluster bomblets (which are a real thing, though in real life we're trending toward dropping clouds of munitions that automatically detect armored vehicles and fire a slug of penetrator at them), not sure it fits quite so well.

Relative accel of couriers vs. assault shuttles, both enjoying the benefits of low mass and high-powered impellers for their size. 400 Gs for the shuttle, 530 for the courier, or equivalent to a heavy cruiser.

We don't get the rest or what sort of weapon was used, but yeah, the courier is taken out, and so word of the uprising isn't spread.

We also see it illustrated that shuttles are definitely on the wrong side of the "peak compensator efficiency" curve, much like prewar LACs that had lower acceleration than a destroyer with eight times the mass.

[VhenRa]

Relative accel of couriers vs. assault shuttles, both enjoying the benefits of low mass and high-powered impellers for their size. 400 Gs for the shuttle, 530 for the courier, or equivalent to a heavy cruiser.

We don't get the rest or what sort of weapon was used, but yeah, the courier is taken out, and so word of the uprising isn't spread.

We also see it illustrated that shuttles are definitely on the wrong side of the "peak compensator efficiency" curve, much like prewar LACs that had lower acceleration than a destroyer with eight times the mass.

One way I heard it described for LACs (I think it was his website) was Pre-Fission LACs... there is a hard limit to how small they could produce a Gravity Compressed Fusion Plant. The end result being LACs, Dispatch Boats, Frigates and Destroyers all used the same sized reactor. End result? LACs and Frigates were inefficient because they had a reactor with nowhere near the room to stuff anything else.

[Terralthra]

Decent question, probably couldn't be bothered. Several time Duquesne is mentioned as the great statesman who decided the Peeps had to start conquering their neighbors to prop up the system, actually seeing the guy in action is one reason I'm looking forward to House of Lies.

I sincerely doubt he'll be as shiveringly cold-blooded as Marc DuQuesne at his best, though. And I'm pretty sure that's where Weber cribbed the name from.

You don't think he possibly went for Marquis DuQuesne, French Governor-General of New France (Canadia), who figured the best way to achieve economic success in the French colonies was to just take over the British-claimed territories directly south, exacerbating the minor brush conflicts into the French & Indian War?

"Acquired," Honor replied as the targeting lasers picked out the ready section of pinnaces. The magnified image in the HUD showed her the missiles tucked under their fuselages, but they were the only armed craft on the entire field, and they'd never been intended for a combat scramble against one of their own shuttles. They were meant as a fire brigade in case some camp full of prisoners went berserk and mobbed a supply shuttle or some equally bizarre occurrence. Yet nothing like that had ever happened . . . and the planners had never even contemplated anything as bizarre as what was happening. But for all that, someone down there obviously had her head together, because Honor actually saw a pilot running madly towards one of the ready birds. But whoever she was, she was too late, and Honor thumbed the toggle to select bombs.

They actually have ready-alert aircraft, but Honor blasts them to bits on the ground.

Amusingly, Weber contradicts himself- earlier he'd said that camp prisoners had stormed a supply shuttle on two separate occasions. Although here he may mean, say, having pinnaces in place in case the prisoners steal a supply shuttle and work out how to fly it.

I think most likely, he means that the alert pinnaces had never been needed to be scrambled against a supply ship that'd been taken, yes.

[eyl]

One way I heard it described for LACs (I think it was his website) was Pre-Fission LACs... there is a hard limit to how small they could produce a Gravity Compressed Fusion Plant. The end result being LACs, Dispatch Boats, Frigates and Destroyers all used the same sized reactor. End result? LACs and Frigates were inefficient because they had a reactor with nowhere near the room to stuff anything else.

Tourville explains it to Honecker, I think in the next book.

I think most likely, he means that the alert pinnaces had never been needed to be scrambled against a supply ship that'd been taken, yes.

Most likely, although it's possible the policy of keeping pinnaces on alert was a response to those incidents.

[Simon_Jester]

You don't think he possibly went for Marquis DuQuesne, French Governor-General of New France (Canadia), who figured the best way to achieve economic success in the French colonies was to just take over the British-claimed territories directly south, exacerbating the minor brush conflicts into the French & Indian War?

Hm. That's actually possible, even likely, now that I remember the guy's name.

Although he's made enough Skylark references in writings on the side that I wouldn't be surprised either way.

[Ahriman238]

No way is 4,000KPH equal to 67KPS and we absolutely do get the word on what sort of weapon was used?

"Sarah?" Metcalf looked back at DuChene, and the lieutenant commander chewed her lip for a moment, then sighed unhappily.
"These birds weren't designed to kill starships—not even small ones," she said, and Metcalf nodded impatiently. She was a tactical officer herself. But she was also a better pilot than DuChene, and the missiles were DuChene's responsibility. "I can take her out, but it'll be an awful long-range shot for our weapons at this range, especially if she knows they're coming and takes evasive action. But if we're only going to close the range by six hundred klicks . . ."
She paused, and Metcalf nodded in grim understanding while her thoughts flickered like lightning, considering options and outcomes, weighing and discarding alternatives.
Courier boats didn't mount point defense, and they weren't equipped with the sophisticated electronic warfare suites of warships. But the shuttle didn't carry the nuclear and laser warheads which warships normally fired at one another, either. Even its limited number of impeller-head missiles, designed for combat with other small craft, had been expended during the breakout from Tepes. Those which remained were intended primarily for short-range work against planetary targets, and they all carried chemical warheads, and that was the problem. Although those warheads were many times as efficient as any chemical explosives from pre-Diaspora history, they still required direct hits, and at this range, scoring a direct hit against a nonevading target would be hard enough with ground attack missiles. Worse, stopping anything the size of that courier boat would require multiple hits, not just one. All of which meant that at this range, they would have to fire without warning to prevent the target from taking evasive action or rolling to interpose its impeller wedge . . . and they couldn't reduce the range enough to change that.

Completely my fault for posting when tired and in a hurry.

[Ahriman238]

As Harriet Benson had told her that first day, the SS garrison had regarded the prisoners in their charge as property. Worse than that: as toys. And too many of them had played with their "toys" like cruel, spiteful children twisting the heads off puppies to see what would happen. Most of the outright sex slaves they'd dragged back to Styx had been political prisoners—civilians from the PRH itself—which had probably indicated at least a modicum of caution on the garrison's part. Most military services gave their people at least rudimentary hand-to-hand training, after all.

But the wheel had turned full circle now. Two-thirds of the SS garrison had been killed, wounded, or captured, but at least six or seven hundred of them had so far escaped apprehension. And on Styx, unlike the rest of Hell, they could actually go bush and live off the land while they tried to keep on evading capture. Honor and her allies had far too little manpower to hunt them down on an island this huge, and Styx had been so completely terraformed that, except for the warmer temperature and lower gravity, it actually made Honor homesick for Sphinx. Fugitives wouldn't even need to know a thing about edible wild plants, for the planetary farms covered scores of square kilometers.

Unfortunately for the Peeps, however, their slaves knew the island even better than they did. There had been a clandestine communication net between the sex slaves and the farms' slave laborers—many of whom had been playthings themselves before their "owners" tired of them—for decades. In fact, over twenty escaped slaves had been in hiding when Honor attacked Styx. They'd contrived their escapes by faking their own deaths—suicide by drowning had been a favorite, given the currents and deep-water predators off Styx's southwestern coast—and the farm laborers had concealed and helped feed some of them for years. But escaping discovery had required them to find hiding places all over the island . . . which meant the liberated slaves were much better than Honor's people at deducing where their erstwhile masters might be hiding now. For that matter, they were better at it than the Peeps were at finding hiding places on the run, and some of them had no interest at all in waiting for the courts-martial Honor and Jesus Ramirez had promised them. Nor were they shy about dumping the results of their grisly handiwork where other fleeing Peeps might find it.

There are hundreds of StateSec goons running around the woods of Styx, and so far vengeful slaves are a lot better at finding them than Honor's more civilized forces.

"I want you, Jesus, and Harriet to try to work out some way to keep tabs on the slaves." Her expression was grim. "I'll speak to them again myself this afternoon, both to remind them that we've promised there will be trials . . . and to tell them that our people will be authorized to use deadly force, if necessary, to prevent this kind of vengeance killing. I hate to come the heavy, but they've been through so much I have to doubt that anything less drastic than that will get through to them. And if you and Jesus and Harriet think it's necessary, I'll be willing to proclaim an island-wide curfew, as well, in hopes of at least cutting down on this kind of thing."

"That may not be a bad idea," McKeon said thoughtfully. "There are almost five hundred of them, counting the farm workers. We've managed to keep any weapons out of their hands—aside from anything they may have 'liberated' from Black Legs they've already . . . dealt with, at least—but there are still as many of them as there are of us."

500 slaves on the island, easy enough to control for the garrison, Honor contemplating a curfew to stop all the violence.

"Harkness, Scotty, Anson, Jasper, and Ascher are having the time of their lives playing with the Peeps' secure data base, and these people were incredibly overconfident. The possibility of someone's taking the place over from the inside simply never occurred to them. It couldn't happen. And because it couldn't, the only people who could purge their files were Tresca or his exec . . . and they could only do it from the planetary defense command center." She shook her head. "I guess they figured that since the only real threat had to come from the outside, through the orbital defenses, whoever had the duty there would be in the best position to decide when to purge, so that was where they put their central data processing node, as well. But when Jesus took the command center out from the ground before either of the authorized COs could even get there—" She shrugged and held out her hand, palm uppermost.

Daily crimes were committed on Hades, even by the StateSec codebook, but only two people had the authority to delete their files? And only from one location? That's either brilliant or moronic security, and I'm not entirely sure which. Well, it might be brilliant if the aim were to keep everyone honest with only the base commander able to vanish records of wrongdoing. As it is, Honor and co. have the complete records of the island, down to security camera footage once Harkness has a few days to break their computer security.

In the meantime, however, they'd picked up seven members of the boat's crew who'd been dirtside when it all hit the fan. Some of them had stubbornly refused to give more than name, rank, service branch, and serial number, but others had been so stunned by the cataclysmic upheaval in their fortunes that they'd started talking as soon as someone asked them a question. Unfortunately, none of the talkative ones were officers, and they didn't really know all that much beyond what their own duties had been. From what they'd told him, he knew there had been eight more crew members on Hell, and he still hoped to pick them up—or identify them from among the mass of other prisoners—but it was entirely possible that all eight were dead. Honor's assault force had taken over a hundred casualties, fifty-two of them fatal, including two of the escapees from Tepes. He knew Honor had been privately devastated by the deaths of Senior Chief Halburton and Senior Chief Harris. She'd fought not to show it, yet losing them after they'd come through so much together had struck all of them as bitterly unfair. But StateSec's losses had been at least three times as high as the attackers'. Or, at least, their known losses so far had been, he corrected himself. They were still finding bodies and pieces of bodies in the wreckage.

Casualties of the assault on Camp Charon.

The possibility that they would have to destroy Hell's courier boat had always existed, but he knew how hard Honor had hoped to take it intact. It couldn't have carried a fraction of their people—which now included everyone from Inferno as surely as it did his own survivors from Prince Adrian—away from Hell, but it could have been dispatched to the nearest Alliance-held system. The Cerberus System lay deep inside the PRH, but if the Allies knew its coordinates, a convoy of fast transports with a military escort could be in and out again before the Peeps knew a thing about it. The operation would have had to accept a fair degree of risk, but it would have been practical, especially with the People's Navy on the defensive. And the psychological impact of a mass prisoner rescue, both for the Alliance and against the Peeps, would have been enormous.

The best case scenario that rather drastically failed to materialize.

That was the real problem, he thought moodily. Massive as the orbital defenses' firepower was, they had serious weaknesses. The biggest was that all of them were fixed, unable to maneuver or dodge, which meant most of them could be killed with long-range, cee-fractional missile strikes by any competent fleet commander who knew what he was up against. McKeon had been enormously relieved—and he knew Honor had been, too—when they discovered that the Peeps had, in fact, at least taken the precaution of putting hardened missile launchers on each of Hell's three moons. It would have made even more sense to put weapons crews up there to operate them under local control if something happened to the central command site here on Styx, but he wasn't about to complain about that. The remotely controlled launchers didn't have much magazine capacity, and light-speed transmission limits meant their fire control was a tad arthritic, given their distances from Styx. Niflheim, the largest and furthest out moon, for example, had an orbital radius of over a light-second and a half, and even Tartarus, the closest, was almost a hundred and fifty-six thousand kilometers out at perigee. But there also hadn't been any Peep gun crews up there to open fire on Styx, and they provided at least some long-range defensive firepower which would be extremely difficult for an attacker to neutralize.

Yet most of Honor's defenses were hideously vulnerable ... if the bad guys knew to attack them in the first place. But that was the up side of the destruction of Proxmire's courier boat. Its failure to escape meant it hadn't been able to tell anyone what had happened, so at least the first few StateSec ships to happen along would have no idea that anyone besides their fellow SS personnel now controlled Hell's orbital weapons. As long as nothing happened to make them suspicious, they ought to make their normal approaches to the planet while Honor and her people waited like the spider at the heart of the web. And once they came in close enough and slow enough for the defenses to engage them, the advantage would swing decisively to Honor's side, leaving them no option but to surrender or die.

The new plan, similar to the old plan, Sucker any ships that come through in and force them to surrender at gunpoint from the orbital defenses. Then use that ship to get as many peopleas she can out and get the coordinates to Manticore for a Dunkirk-esque rescue mission.

"The SS doesn't have all that many warships, Alistair. It can't. Which means that those it does have are part of a relatively small force. Their com people may very well know the Camp Charon com people by name, face, and voice, and if they don't see anyone they know on screen when they come in, they may get just a little suspicious."

Good to see she's thinking ahead. Incidentally, instead of risking someone warning incoming ships she wants to record enough footage of their com people so Harkness can program a convincing talking head.

"All right," she said crisply. "It sounds like we're as on top of things as we can be with so few people, so our priorities are, first, to get the StateSec stragglers to surrender so we can protect them." She shook her own head wryly at that one, but continued without pausing. "Second, to convince their ex-slaves to stop massacring them and accept our promise that they'll stand their trials. Third, to get into the personnel records and find out where we can scare up some reinforcements—preferably," she nodded to McKeon, "Manticoran, or at least Allied personnel. Fourth, to locate any additional survivors from Proxmire's crew and try to find out when or if he was due to be relieved. And, fifth, to identify and segregate all of the communications staff we can find. Is that about all?"

Almost, Honor.

"The second thing that occurred to me is that, under normal circumstances, even the escapees would have as much reason as we do to keep the farms intact—more, actually, since we have control of all the storage facilities. But for all of us, these farms are the only source of food on the planet."

He paused, and Honor nodded to show she was following him.

"Well, if they know someone will be along within, say, three to five T-months, they might just decide to take a stab at destroying the crops anyway. Think about it. If they took out all of the food supplies, we'd almost have to surrender ourselves to the first Peep ship to come along or starve right along with them."

So those will need security. I once heard that guarding farmland against someone out to intentionally destroy the crop is a fool's game, there's just too much land area to be effectively patrolled and any one area is too vulnerable to fire.

"You will shut your mouth now, Admiral Styles," she said very softly, leaning forward over the desk in the echoing silence which followed, "or I will have you placed under close arrest, to remain there until such time as we leave this planet and return to Manticoran jurisdiction. Where," she went on even more icily, "I will have you charged with and court-martialed for insubordination, willful disregard of a superior's orders, conduct detrimental to the chain of command, and incitement to mutiny in time of war."

Styles stared at her, and his mouth worked soundlessly, as if he simply could not believe his ears. Two of those charges carried the death penalty if they were sustained, and Honor felt the sudden chill of terror that ran beneath the surface of his fiery bluster as he recognized the uncompromising sincerity of her threat at last. She glared at him for a brief, shivering eternity, then drew a deep breath and straightened her spine.

Incitement to mutiny I get. What's the other death penalty, do you think? Willful disobedience?

She hadn't really considered the possibility before Harkness' team of moles managed to nibble their way through the last Peep security fences, but she wasn't the senior RMN officer on Hell after all. Harry Styles was, and that could have created all sorts of problems. The Inferno inmates had given their trust and loyalty to her, not to some officer they didn't even know, but if Styles had the seniority, then, logically—or, at least, legally—the command was his.

-snip-

But at McKeon's very strong urging, Honor had not redonned Manticoran uniform. Instead, she wore the blue-on-blue of Grayson, with the five six-pointed stars of her current Grayson rank. Jesus Ramirez's eyes had widened when he first saw it, but he'd been less surprised than he might have been, for there had been more than enough time for Honor's people to fill him and the rest of the Infernoites in on her Grayson career. And then, as quickly as his eyes had widened, they'd sharpened in approval, for McKeon had been right. There could be more than one Allied flag officer on Hell, but there was no way there would be more than one fleet admiral.

Honor had felt ridiculous flaunting her GSN rank that way, however legal it might be and however thoroughly she'd earned it, but only until she met Styles for herself. After no more than five minutes, she'd decided that the People's Navy had done the Alliance an immense favor by capturing Harry Styles and putting him safely on Hell where he couldn't do the war effort any more damage. She had no idea what he was doing here instead of a regular navy-run POW camp somewhere, unless, perhaps, his rank had led StateSec to see him as some sort of prize catch to be kept in its personal trophy case. He was, after all, not merely the highest-ranking Manticoran officer yet captured by the People's Republic but also the only flag officer they'd captured in the entire first six and a half years of the war. They'd had him for over eight T-years, since the day they'd destroyed his entire picket squadron in the Yalta System in one of the probing attacks with which they had opened the present war. They'd actually caught him with cold impellers— which said a great deal about his competence right there—and his subsequent attempt to defend himself had been nothing to write home about.

Not that he saw it that way, of course. As far as he was concerned, he'd simply been the unfortunate victim of Peep treachery, attacked in time of peace and without a formal declaration of war. Apparently he had failed, in those long ago days of peace, to note the minor fact that the Legislaturalists who had run the People's Republic had never once bothered to alert a potential victim by declaring war before they hit it. He didn't seem to have learned much since, either. Added to which, he was arrogant, opinionated, full of his own importance, conceited, and stupid. And those were his good points, she thought acidly.

-snip-

She knew he hadn't really given up. The fact that he'd been captured so early meant he'd been on Hell since before even the Battle of Hancock or her duel with Pavel Young. More recently captured personnel could have brought him up to date—in fact, for all Honor knew some of them had tried to do just that—but it hadn't taken. In his mind, the Grayson Space Navy was still some sort of comic opera, local-defense fleet and Honor was a mere commodore with delusions of grandeur. He didn't appear to believe that the Fourth Battle of Yeltsin—or, for that matter, the Battle of Hancock—had ever even happened, and he regarded her claim to admiral's rank as an outright lie. As far as he was concerned, it was nothing more than a ploy to allow her to retain the command which should rightfully have been his, and her senior subordinates were all in cahoots with her to make it stand up.

Admiral Harry Styles, to whom I keep giving the face and voice of Captain Styles, USS Excelsior STIII. He'll be the obstructionist idiot in this book, convinced that Honor has usurped his rightful command of the prisoners of Hades.

"And the point is, Admiral Harrington, that if you go around convening kangaroo courts in the name of the Manticoran Alliance for the sole purpose of shooting Peep personnel as some sort of vengeance play, it won't matter whether you call it a 'court-martial' or simple murder. The propaganda consequences of such an action alone scarcely bear thinking about, and that leaves aside the whole question of its legality! I believe you're exceeding your authority, regardless of your rank, and I seriously question whether or not you can legally apply our Articles of War to the conduct, however reprehensible, of foreign nationals!"

"I don't doubt that you do," Honor said. Nor, though she forbore mentioning it, did she doubt that the true reason he'd objected in the first place was because he saw the supposed illegality of her intentions as a way to undercut the legitimacy of her authority in her subordinates' eyes. Just as he had now convinced himself that the only reason she had promised the courts-martial to the Infernoites and Styx's slaves was as a way to buy their support for her continued usurpation of his authority.

"If, however," she continued, "you had bothered to read my memo, or to listen to what I've already said, or, for that matter, even to ask, you would know that I have no intention of applying the Articles of War to them." His face flushed with fresh, wine-dark rage as her cold words bit home, and the living side of her mouth smiled frostily.

"I intend to try them under their own laws, Admiral," she told him.

"You—?" He gaped at her, and she nodded curtly.

"Their own regulations and the People's Uniform Code of Conduct are on file in the Styx data base, Admiral Styles. I will concede that the people who filed those documents there never regarded them as anything other than a propaganda ploy—window dressing to prove how 'enlightened' the current regime is. But they exist, they've never been changed, and they are just as legally binding on StateSec personnel as upon anyone else. Those are the laws under which they will be tried, Admiral, and the sentences any convicted parties receive will be strictly in accord with them."

This is apparently true and correct under the Deneb Accords, with the proviso that war crimes court martials are expected to take place after the cessation of hostilities.

"I called you here to inform you of my decision, Admiral; not to debate it," she told him flatly. "As the senior Manticoran officer on Hell, you were the proper representative for Her Majesty's Navy on the court-martial board, and I intended to name you to that position accordingly. Since you have so cogently and forcefully stated your objections to the entire proceeding, however, I no longer feel that I can properly ask you to participate in a process to which you are so deeply, morally opposed. Because of that, you are excused from court duty. Commodore McKeon will take your place."

"But if you're going to use their own laws—" Styles began again, almost desperately, and Honor curled a contemptuous mental lip as she felt the chaotic shifting of his emotions. They were too confused and changed too quickly for her to sort them out with any clarity, but she didn't really need to. He'd been prepared to bluster and bully her—and to make his high-minded opposition crystal clear in case higher authority later decided to come down on her over this. But violently as he'd protested, he couldn't stand being shunted aside, either. She'd affronted his dignity yet again, and she felt the hatred welling up inside him afresh.

"No, Admiral," she said firmly. "I will not ask you to compromise your principles in this matter."

How to make friends and influence people. Harrington style.

"What we found was a top secret list of Legislaturalist politicals, all of whom were considered to possess such important and sensitive information or to have sufficiently great potential for future usefulness that executing them was out of the question. So instead of being shot, they were declared officially dead and shipped out here under falsified names and prisoner manifests."

"Ah?" Honor tipped back her chair and cocked her head at him.

"Ah, indeed, My Lady. Most of them were high-ranking InSec officials or permanent departmental undersecretaries under the Harris Government—people like that. But a couple of them were military . . . including Admiral Amos Parnell."

StateSec has 'killed' a number of people they meant to vanish to Hades forever. This is really going to be awkward for them.

"Admiral Parnell," she said quietly.

"I'm afraid you have the advantage of me," he replied, examining her carefully. His mouth quirked as he took in the dead side of her face and her missing arm, and he gave a small snort which might have been either amusement or an acknowledgment that State Security had initiated both of them into the same club. "Grayson uniform, I believe," he murmured. "But a woman?" He cocked his head and looked back at the dead side of her face, and something changed in his eyes with an almost audible click.

"Harrington," he said softly, and she nodded, surprised by his recognition.

Even Parnell... well, no. I quoted this to show the man has a brain, his next lines make it clear he never heard of her exile or Grayson service, he just reasoned that straight from 'woman in a Grayson uniform."

"Oh, yes, Admiral. 'Citizen Brigadier' Tresca was an InSec corporal before the coup—didn't you know that?"

"According to his personnel file, he was a Marine captain," Honor replied.

"Ah." Parnell nodded. "I don't suppose I should be surprised. He had the access codes to the personnel files, I'm sure, and he was always rather fond of fulfilling his fantasies."

That's a bit of a jump in rank.

"That was the identity of the three people who were really the brains behind the Harris Assassination," Parnell said flatly, "because it wasn't the Navy at all." Caslet inhaled sharply, and the ex-CNO glanced at him. "Surely you must have suspected that, Commander. Did you really think we'd do something like that, especially when we'd just gone to war?"

"Not at first," Caslet said in a low voice. "But then all the confessions and all the evidence came out, Sir. It seemed impossible . . . and yet—"

"I know." Parnell sighed. "For that matter, I believed it for a while myself, so I suppose I shouldn't blame you. But it wasn't us, Commander—not the Navy and not the Legislaturalists. It was Pierre himself. He and Saint-Just and Cordelia Ransom set the entire thing up as a means to simultaneously decapitate the government and paralyze the only force that could have stopped them: the Navy."

"Dios," Ramirez said softly, but Parnell was looking at Honor, and he cocked his head.

"You don't seem surprised to hear that, Admiral," he observed.

"ONI and SIS have suspected it for quite some time, Sir," she replied levelly. "We had no proof, however, and I believe the decision not to make allegations we couldn't prove was made at the highest levels." She shrugged. "Under the circumstances, I think it was the proper one. Without corroborating evidence, it could only have been viewed as self-serving propaganda and hurt our credibility."

"I see. But you know, don't you, that there are at least a dozen people here on Hell, myself among them, who can 'corroborate' it in considerable detail? For that matter, somewhere in the data base there should be a recording of the interrogation session in which Tresca himself told me."

Not that anyone in the room is terribly surprised, but having evidence to back this up will let Manticore say this openly.

"No, I can't do that. I won't," he told her. "But that doesn't mean that I can't hurt Pierre, because that I can do, and with a clear conscience. I'm afraid your military intelligence people won't get much out of me, Admiral Harrington—even assuming that anything I once knew is still current—but if you can get me into the Solarian League, I think you'll find it worth your while."

"The League?" Honor's surprise showed in her voice, and he chuckled.

"There are quite a few other people here on Hell who'd be delighted to go with me, I'm sure," he said. "For that matter, there are probably some who can and will offer their direct services to your Alliance. I'd be a bit cautious about accepting them, if I were you—it's never an easy thing to change allegiances. Not for the ones you want on your side in the first place, at least! But those of us who can't do that can still seek asylum in the League. They've got all those wonderful laws covering displaced persons and political refugees, and I rather suspect the newsies will swarm all over us when we 'come back from the dead.'"

Parnell is good at looking to the future as well, he already has a plan for what he's going to do after he leaves Hades far behind.

"There are three kinds of people who support the Committee now, Sir: those who truly believe in its official platform; those who want to prop it up just long enough to replace it with their own idea of the 'right' system . . . and those too terrified to do anything else. The only ones who would even care about something that happened eight T-years ago are the first group, and not even they are likely to do anything about it, I'm afraid. They can't—not without throwing away the very reforms they want, and certainly not in the middle of a war like this one's become."

There is that, the Committee as now had almost a decade to establish itself and can likely survive this revelation.

[Simon_Jester]

So those will need security. I once heard that guarding farmland against someone out to intentionally destroy the crop is a fool's game, there's just too much land area to be effectively patrolled and any one area is too vulnerable to fire.

It depends on the crop and the time of year, probably.

It also helps if you can keep a continuous airborne watch, although frankly in that case they should be having relatively little trouble chasing down random individuals skulking in the undergrowth.

Incitement to mutiny I get. What's the other death penalty, do you think? Willful disobedience?

My guess is "conduct detrimental to the chain of command," which is sort of like mutiny-lite.

Even Parnell... well, no. I quoted this to show the man has a brain, his next lines make it clear he never heard of her exile or Grayson service, he just reasoned that straight from 'woman in a Grayson uniform."

Also her facial injuries, which she incurred on Grayson- it may be that he studied the events of Honor of the Queen closely; I certainly would have, after watching a client state get eaten by the RMN, a prospective strategic launching pad against Manticore become a firm ally of Manticore, and one of my most senior captains defecting to the enemy.

[Nephtys]

You don't think he possibly went for Marquis DuQuesne, French Governor-General of New France (Canadia), who figured the best way to achieve economic success in the French colonies was to just take over the British-claimed territories directly south, exacerbating the minor brush conflicts into the French & Indian War?

Hm. That's actually possible, even likely, now that I remember the guy's name.

Although he's made enough Skylark references in writings on the side that I wouldn't be surprised either way.

We /are/ talking about the guy who decided to make the head of the revolution 'Rob S. Pierre' after all... I didn't notice the DuQuesne reference, but it makes a lot of sense now.

[Terralthra]

You don't think he possibly went for Marquis DuQuesne, French Governor-General of New France (Canadia), who figured the best way to achieve economic success in the French colonies was to just take over the British-claimed territories directly south, exacerbating the minor brush conflicts into the French & Indian War?

Hm. That's actually possible, even likely, now that I remember the guy's name.

Although he's made enough Skylark references in writings on the side that I wouldn't be surprised either way.

We /are/ talking about the guy who decided to make the head of the revolution 'Rob S. Pierre' after all... I didn't notice the DuQuesne reference, but it makes a lot of sense now.

Saint-Just, as well, nicknamed "Angel of Death" during the French Revolution.

[Ahriman238]

He was not the senior member of the court . . . but he was its president. That unusual arrangement had been adopted at the unanimous vote of the rest of the board, and he wished it hadn't been. Honor was right, of course, but however much he might agree with her, he didn't have to like the logic which had put him in charge.

If anything like justice was to be done where StateSec's atrocities on Hell were concerned, it would have to be done by a military court whose members, by definition, had been SS victims. That was the reason the other members had insisted that he, as not simply the sole Manticoran member of the court but also as the only one who had never been in SS custody here on Hell, must preside. They were as determined as he or Honor that their proceedings should be seen as those of a court, not a mob seeking vengeance, which was the main reason they had recorded every moment of the trials themselves. No one in the People's Republic or the Solarian League was likely to be convinced the difference was real, however careful they were or however many records they had, and they knew it, but that wasn't really the point. These people wanted posterity, and their own people, to know everything had been done legally, properly, as impartially as possible under the circumstances, and by The Book. That was important, for it would make the difference between them and their victimizers crystal clear for themselves, and at the moment, that was all they really cared about.

As the only member of the court who wasn't a long-term resident of Hades, McKeon naturally gets to sit center-seat and exercise authority over the other judges. Despite his lack of seniority.

He let his eyes slide over the other four members of the court. Harriet Benson and Jesus Ramirez had both turned down invitations to sit on it—wisely, in McKeon's opinion. Honor had had no choice but to extend the invitations, given the roles they had played in making the capture of Styx possible, but both of them knew they had too much hate inside to be anything like impartial, and so they had withdrawn themselves from the temptation. Instead, Commander Albert Hurst of the Helmsport Navy represented the inmates of Camp Inferno while Captain Cynthia Gonsalves of Alto Verde and Commodore Gaston Simmons of the Jameston System Navy represented the other military POWs on Hell. Simmons was senior to McKeon . . . and so was Admiral Sabrina Longmont, who undoubtedly had the hardest duty of all the members of the court.

The other judges, including a Peep Admiral, representatives of Camp Inferno and the other military POWs.

Unlike most of the other prisoners on the planet, she'd been housed in Camp Delta Forty, where conditions had been far better than anywhere else on the planet. Indeed, Longmont had had no idea what StateSec was doing to its other prisoners, because Delta Forty had been a sort of holding point for Peep officers who hadn't blotted their copybooks beyond all hope of redemption. Since it had always been possible the Committee would choose to reach out and pardon one or more of Delta Forty's inmates in order to make use of their skills once more, the SS had been careful not to permanently embitter them against the regime. As a result, Longmont, like most of her fellows, had come to the conclusion that the horror stories about Hell they'd heard before being sent here had been just that: stories. They certainly hadn't seen any sign of the abuse and casual cruelty rumor assigned to the planet . . . which meant that the discovery of what had been happening elsewhere shocked them deeply. The more so because they blamed themselves for being credulous enough to let StateSec deceive them so completely.

Not all of them saw it that way, of course. Some had been delighted at being granted even a slim chance to escape Hell and strike back at the New Order and all its minions. A surprisingly large majority of Delta Forty's inmates, however, had wanted no part of the escape effort. In some cases, that was because they expected the attempt to fail and preferred to survive, but most of them remained genuinely loyal to the Republic (if not necessarily to the Committee of Public Safety) despite all that had happened to them. By refusing to cooperate with Honor's efforts, they demonstrated that loyalty with the clear hope that if and when the PRH retook Hell, they would be given a chance for rehabilitation among their own people, not foreigners.

Camp D-40, a nicer one for officers and political prisoners who may yet be rehabilitated. Many prisoners are staying to demonstrate their loyalty, or simply not be in the firing line when StateSec takes back the planet.

"What's happened here on Hades have been atrocities, and the guilty parties must be punished," she'd told Honor frankly, brown eyes bleak in a face of stone, when she accepted a position on the court. "But that doesn't mean you and your people have carte blanche to convict and hang everyone who comes before your tribunal, Admiral Harrington. I will serve on your court, but on only one condition: any guilty vote on a capital offense must be sustained by a unanimous vote, not a simple majority."

Longmont's condition to helping, no witch-hunts.

"I agree that the rape charge has been clearly demonstrated, Commander. But rape isn't a capital crime under the Havenite Uniform Code of Conduct unless accompanied by actual violence, not simply the threat of it. Murder is a capital crime, but we have no physical or documentary evidence to support that charge. For that matter, not even the slaves who claim he killed her agree on whether or not he committed forcible rape as defined under the UCC. The woman—Hedges—says Weiller had bruises on her face and that—" the captain tapped a command into her memo pad to refresh her memory, then read aloud "— 'She limped pretty bad the next day.' But even Hedges goes on to say that 'She wouldn't talk about what the bastard did to her.'"

Gonsalves shrugged unhappily, and McKeon concealed a mental grimace. The fact that Gonsalves was right about the terms of the Uniform Code of Conduct didn't make him like it. Under the Manticoran Articles of War, forcible rape was a capital offense whether force was actually used or simply threatened, and given the situation here on Hell, any demand a Black Leg made had to be considered to be backed by the threat of force. Given his druthers, McKeon would hang Citizen Lieutenant Mangrum in a heartbeat and then go back to piss on his grave, but Honor had been right. They had to proceed under the basis of the Peeps' own rules. Otherwise Section Twenty-Seven of the Deneb Accords—which neither he nor Honor had any intention of infringing in any way, given their own experiences—would have prohibited any trial of enemy personnel in time or war. Subsection Forty-Two specifically provided for wartime trials of individuals for alleged violation of local laws (in this case the Peeps' own UCC, since Hell had been sovereign territory of the People's Republic of Haven at the time) predating their capture, but prohibited ex post facto trials under the municipal law of whoever captured them.

The relevant sections of the Deneb Accords, how the Manticoran Articles of War and the StateSec UCC differ on the topic of rape.

None of the escaped prisoners had expected to discover that the SS's security systems here on Styx had actually kept tabs on their own personnel round the clock. Not that they should have been surprised by the discovery, McKeon thought. The surveillance systems appeared to have been installed to keep track of the sex slaves and farm "trustees" for their masters, but anything with that sort of coverage was bound to catch most of the Black Legs' day-to-day activities, as well. When Harkness and his team of moles broke into those files, they'd found themselves with a huge treasure trove of evidence. Not only did they have audio recordings of people casually discussing things they had done to the prisoners under their control, but they had actual imagery of many of the guards in the very act of committing the crimes of which they stood accused. And the Republic's UCC included none of the Star Kingdom's prohibitions against admitting electronic evidence gathered without benefit of a court order.

Unfortunately, the very wealth of those records worked against a sense of sureness in the instances in which there was no recorded evidence.

Almost everything on Styx gets recorded, particularly the crimes.

"It is now the responsibility of this court to recommend a sentence to Admiral Harrington, however. The UCC provides for up to twenty-five years in prison for second-degree rape, fifty years for kidnapping, and two for abuse of official authority for personal advantage. By my math, that means Citizen Lieutenant Mangrum is theoretically subject to seventy-seven T-years at hard labor. To impose such a sentence, however, will require his return to Alliance space with us at such time as we leave the planet."

UCC penalties.

Commander Susan Phillips had been a computer specialist in the Sarawak System Navy. But she had also been on Hell for over forty T-years, and her training had been sadly out of date, even for Peep equipment, when her camp was liberated and she reached Styx. She'd done extremely well in the quickie refresher courses Honor had organized, but she was still rusty compared to Honor's people from Prince Adrian and Jason Alvarez—or, for that matter, most of the other Allied POWs from the current war.

Phillips knew that, and for the most part, she accepted it with a good grace. But a part of her couldn't help resenting the fact that Tremaine, who was both junior to her and young enough to be her son, had been assigned to her watch specifically to handle any creative communication or electronic warfare requirements which might arise. Honor suspected she would have minded it less if Scotty had been even a little older, although the fact that he was third-generation prolong while Phillips was only second-generation must make it seem even worse to her.

The command structure isn't quite perfect yet. A lot of older prisoners are well-preserved for their age, thank you prolong, but are seriously behind the hardware curve and may resent younger people being more capable or the moment.

Well, Honor sympathized in many ways, although she considered the commander's belief that officers could always do things better than senior noncoms foolish. Of course, Phillips came from a very different naval tradition—that of the Sarawak Republic, one of the liberal-thinking targets the Peeps had gobbled up in the early days of the DuQuesne Plan. The SSN had relied upon a professional officer corps, but Sarawak's advanced, egalitarian social theories had inspired it (unlike the dangerous, elitist plutocracy of Manticore) to use short-service conscripts to fill its enlisted and noncommissioned ranks. The result had produced something very like the present-day People's Navy, in which the service simply hadn't had its enlisted draftees long enough to train them up to Manticoran standards. Which meant that Phillips' ingrained belief that officers ought to be better at their jobs than petty officers represented her own experience, not blind prejudice. And to be fair, she was less resentful of Harkness' status than many of Honor's other non-Manticoran officers. Not to mention the fact that she was working diligently at getting rid of the resentment she still harbored. It just seemed to come a bit hard for her.

As the man who took down Tepes from within, Horace has become Honor's go-to IT guy, to the resentment of some prisoners. Some of the models that led to the present day People's Navy.

She knew LaFollet, for one, thought she was foolish not to have selected another steward from among the prisoners her people had liberated, and she more than suspected that several of her senior officers agreed with him. McKeon certainly did, although Honor regarded Alistair's judgment as just a little suspect where the concept of her "pushing herself too hard" was involved. More than that, however, she knew most—not all certainly, but most—of the enlisted or noncommissioned personnel she might have chosen would have been delighted to fill the role for her.

Yet despite her frustration with things like fastening the waist of her trousers one-handed, or sealing the old-fashioned buttons the GSN had insisted on using for its uniform blouses—and which Henri Dessouix, after discussions with LaFollet, had insisted with equal stubbornness upon using in the name of "authenticity"—she simply couldn't bring herself to do it. It was foolish, and she knew it, which only made her even more stubborn about refusing. But she simply couldn't.

Honor's refusal to replace Mac, no matter how much she needs help getting dressed if she's going to do it quickly.

Rear Admiral Styles was one reason, and she grimaced even now as the thought of him flickered across her brain. He continued to feel she had improperly usurped the authority which was rightfully his. And however inept he might be as a tactician or strategist (and she was coming to suspect that her original caustic estimate of his probable capabilities in those areas had been entirely too generous), he was obviously a genius at bureaucratic infighting. He reminded her irresistibly of a plant Grayson's original colonists had, for reasons none of their descendants could imagine, brought with them from old Earth. The vine, called kudzu, made an excellent ground cover, but it was almost impossible to get rid of, grew with ferocious energy, and choked out all competing flora with ruthless arrogance. Which was a pretty fair metaphor for Styles.

She found herself compelled to cut the Admiral back to size at least once per local week or so. The fact that he possessed far more bluster than backbone helped on those occasions, and he never persisted in attempting to undercut her authority twice in the same fashion once he'd pushed her to the point of bringing the hammer down on him for it the first time. Unfortunately, he'd played what McKeon scathingly called "pissing contests" for much too long to stay crushed. He either didn't believe she really would squash him once and for all, or else he was so stupid he genuinely didn't realize how much grief he was storing up for himself. Whatever his problem, he seemed capable of learning only one lesson at a time, and he was endlessly inventive when it came to finding new ways to goad her into the sort of temper explosions she hated.

She disliked admitting it even to herself, but that was one of the more ignoble reasons she refused to select a steward. Styles obviously wished to return to the lifestyle to which he had become accustomed as an RMN flag officer, with all the perks and privileges attached thereunto. The fact that he had done absolutely nothing to earn those perks or privileges was beside the point; he had the rank for them and so he was entitled to them. Except that if Honor chose not to claim them when her missing arm gave her such a good pretext for doing so, then he could hardly insist upon them without looking utterly ridiculous, and she took a spiteful pleasure she knew was petty in denying them to him.

Styles' trolling, and Honor's petty rebuttal. Oh, and among other things Grayson saved from Old Earth, there's kudzu vines.

Nimitz yawned, baring sharp, white canines in a lazy grin while he radiated approval of that thought. Then he concentrated hard, and Honor smothered a sudden, sharp bark of laughter as he radiated the image of a Sphinx chipmunk with an unmistakable, if very chipmunkish, caricature of Styles' face, fleeing for its wretched life. She looked down at the 'cat in astonishment, for this was the first time he'd ever attempted to send her an image which obviously was not something he'd actually seen and simply stored in memory. But her astonishment turned into a helpless, fiendish giggle as the chipmunk vanished out one "side" of his projected image . . . and a brown-eyed treecat with bared claws, an eye patch, an RMN beret, and the red-and-gold shoulder boards of a commodore went bounding past in hot pursuit.

Honor and Nimitz's telepathy.

She supposed there was no real reason she had to be properly uniformed in the middle of the night, but she refused to come running in half-dressed and out of breath. She'd always felt that taking the time to present the proper appearance was an important leadership function, however trivial it might seem to others. It was one way of demonstrating one's composure, a sort of subliminal statement of an officer's ability to exert control over the situation around her which her subordinates absorbed through their mental pores without really thinking about it. Or even if they did think about it and recognized it as a bit of subtle psychological warfare on their CO's part.

Honor's thoughts on taking the time to get dressed properly, even in a potential crisis.

The doctor had run an entire battery of tests on her and Henri Dessouix—and the others from their original camp who had been affected by eating "false-potatoes"—and managed to isolate the neurotoxin which had affected their speech centers. He'd found it in several other places in their nervous system, as well, and some of its other potential effects concerned him far more than slurred speech did. He was still figuring out exactly what it was, but he'd been able to use the SS hospital's facilities to design a special nanny to go in after it. The molycirc machines had been scavenging it out of Benson's brain for a full month now, and her speech was far clearer than it had been.

With modern medical facilities, Fritz is slowly fixing the false-potatoes damage.

"Commander Phillips, has Krashnark ever visited Hell before?" she asked.

"No, Ma'am," Phillips answered promptly. "I ran a data search as soon as we had the name. Neither she, nor her captain—a Citizen Captain Pangborn—nor her com officer have ever been to Cerberus before this visit. I can't vouch for her other officers, but everyone who's been identified in their com traffic is a first-timer."

Simplifies things. And Caslet agrees to talk to the incoming cruiser and lure her in.

[Ahriman238]

Caslet did his job to perfection. The incoming cruiser never suspected a thing, and there was no reason she should have. After all, what could possibly go wrong on StateSec's most secure prison and private base? The orbital defenses were intact, so clearly no outside enemy had attacked the system. Every com procedure was perfect, for it was carried out in accordance with the instructions logged in the SS's own computers and every message carried all the proper security codes. And the wreckage of Citizen Lieutenant Commander Proxmire's courier boat had long since dispersed.

And so PNS Krashnark followed Caslet's instructions without question, for they, too, were precisely what they should have been. The cruiser passed through the safe lane Honor's people cleared through the mines for her and assumed the parking orbit Honor's people assigned her. And then Krashnark stood by to receive the three shuttles Camp Charon sent up to take off the Alliance POWs she'd come to deliver.

Well this'll be fun.

Citizen Sergeant Maxwell Riogetti, State Security Ground Forces, stood in the boat bay gallery with his back to the personnel tubes, cradling his flechette gun in his arms and watching the Manty prisoners narrowly. They weren't really all Manticorans, of course. There were Zanzibarans, and some Alizonians—even twenty or thirty Graysons and a handful of Erewhonese who'd been unfortunate enough to be serving aboard picket ships assigned to Zanzibar— but Riogetti thought of them all as Manties. And he heartily hoped that every single one of them was sweating bullets at the thought of being sent to Hell.

The mixing of Alliance personnel.

Why, the bastards weren't even grateful to Citizen Vice Admiral Tourville and Citizen Admiral Giscard for picking up their life pods! They seemed to think that had been no more than their due, the very minimum the Navy could have done for them, despite the way their kind had callously abandoned Republican life pods in battle after battle—when they weren't using the pods for point defense practice!

-snip-

Oh, sure. Some people—even some of his fellows in StateSec—actually believed the Manty propaganda claims that they always picked up Republican survivors. But Riogetti knew better than to be fooled by such clumsy lies. He'd heard the truth from Public Information often enough. Hell, PubIn had even broadcast actual Navy sensor recordings that showed the Manties shooting up life pods! It was going to take more than plutocratic lies to explain away that kind of hard evidence, and—

Citizen Sergeant Riogetti has clearly drained the cup of propaganda, I'm unaware of any such Manticoran atrocities, and only a couple incidents of Peeps not rescuing life-pods. Shooting down life-pods? A Peep cruiser did that once, in one of the short stories while operating illegally in Sollie space, it was destroyed in retaliation mere days later. Still, at least some Peeps sincerely believe this to be the case.

He didn't feel alarmed, precisely, despite the new arrivals' abrupt appearance, for their armor carried standard StateSec rank emblems and unit flashes and they'd arrived aboard StateSec shuttles cleared by Charon Central and Krashnark's own CIC. That meant there had to be a reasonable explanation, but hard as Riogetti might think, he could come up with no reason for prison guards to strap on the equivalent of old prespace main battle tanks just to go up and fetch a bunch of unarmed, handcuffed POWs!

Power armor equivalent to a modern MBT.

"In answer to your question," he told Ericson flatly, "my name is Clinkscales. Carson Clinkscales, Ensign, Grayson Space Navy, and this ship is no longer under StateSec command."

The citizen lieutenant gaped at him, and so did Riogetti and every other guard in the boat bay. The words were clear enough, but they made no sense. They couldn't make sense, because they were manifestly impossible. But then, suddenly, one of the guards shook herself and reacted. She wheeled with her flechette gun, reacting out of pure instinct, not reason, and hosed a vicious stream of flechettes at the nearest boarder.

The razor-edged projectiles whined uselessly off her target's armor, ricocheting wildly, and another SS guard screamed as three of them chewed into his back. One of the boarders jerked up his own weapon and triggered a single shot back at the guard who'd opened fire, killing her instantly, and a StateSec officer shouted something frantically. Perhaps it was an offer to surrender, or an order for the boat bay guards to lay down their weapons. But whatever it was, it came too late. Other guards were following the dead woman's example while prisoners flung themselves desperately to the deck to get out of the line of fire, and the rest of the borders responded with lethal efficiency.

Power armor is immune to flechette guns, which makes sense since flechette guns are designed for minimum penetration.

Marchant was safely in command of the ship, and there had been remarkably little fighting after the initial outbreak in the boat bay. Or perhaps not so remarkably, given that Krashnark's skipper had been given his options by Charon Central just about the time that idiot guard opened fire. With the equivalent firepower of three or four squadrons of the wall locked onto his ship, Citizen Captain Pangborn had recognized the better part of valor when he saw it.

Unfortunately, twenty-nine members of his crew—and eight POWs—had been killed in the boat bay bloodbath first.

Hades missiles equivalent to a reasonable-sized fleet of wallers. The surrender of Krashnark and the butcher's bill.

"Zanzibaran?" Honor's eyebrows furrowed. The Caliphate's navy didn't have anything bigger than a heavy cruiser, and its units were assigned almost exclusively to the defense of their own home system, so how—

"Zanzibaran," Metcalf confirmed harshly, and her nostrils flared. "Milady, according to the prisoners, the Peeps hit Zanzibar hard two T-months ago." Alistair McKeon muttered a disbelieving imprecation behind Honor, but she couldn't look away from Metcalf's face. "They rolled right over it—sucked the picket into a head-on pass, blew it out with missile pods, and then went on and took out every industrial platform in the system."

State of the Zanzibaran Caliphate's Navy as of Honor's capture. Honor and the Hades crew first hear of Icarus. Also about her broadcast execution, after a little "Who's on First?" regarding dates and a person or ship named Tepes. Incidentally that conversation, snipped for length, says they've been on Hades eighteen months by this point.

"I don't have anything like official numbers, Milady," he went on, turning back to Honor, "but I know we got hurt and hurt bad. According to the Peeps, we've lost sixty-one of the wall, plus most of their screening units. I think that has to be an exaggeration, but I've personally met prisoners who can confirm the attacks on Zanzibar, Alizon, and Seaford Nine. I think—" He drew another deep breath. "I think this time they're actually telling the truth, Milady—at least about the systems they hit."

Damage from Icarus.

Even the total destruction of all industry in Zanzibar and Alizon would be a relatively minor blow to the industrial base of the Alliance as a whole, and the civilian loss of life wouldn't have been too bad—not if Ainspan was right about who'd commanded the raids. Lester Tourville would have done everything humanly possible to hold down the noncombatant death count. And from an industrial viewpoint, the RMN satellite yard at Grendelsbane Station alone had more capacity than Zanzibar and Alizon combined. All of which meant the Alliance could take up the slack without dangerously overstraining itself.

But that hardly mattered, for the political and diplomatic consequences of a successful strike of this magnitude upon two allies of the Star Kingdom must have been devastating. And the destruction of the Basilisk support structure must have been even worse. Basilisk was Manticoran territory, and no one had dared to attack the Star Kingdom's home space in three hundred and seventy years. The economic cost alone had to have been catastrophic, at least as bad as the Zanzibaran and Alizonian losses combined, but the other consequences of such an attack must have cut deeper than any financial loss. And—

"We're on our own," she said softly, not even aware she'd spoken aloud.

Political effects of the attack, as understood by Honor. I'd forgotten Grendelsbane, the other major shipyard.

And, naturally, Honor's hopes for a Miracle at Dunkirk rescue have crashed and burned, no way the Navy can spare enough ships to lift everyone off Hades, and she refuses to take the core staff from Prince Adrian and run home on the one ship they have.

"Risky? That plan isn't 'risky'—it's insane!" Rear Admiral Styles' voice was flat and hard. No doubt he meant for it to sound firm, decisive and determined, but she heard the naked terror behind it only too clearly. And when she glanced around the conference table at the expressions of her other senior officers, she knew that impression was neither her imagination nor solely due to her link to Nimitz.

"Keeping Krashnark here in the Cerberus System is the worst thing we could possibly do," he went on, turning slightly away from her to address her other officers as if lecturing a crowd of school children. "I've never heard a senior officer suggest anything so reckless and ill-considered! I remind you all that she is the only means of communication with the Alliance we have! If we don't use her to send for help, no one can have the least possible idea that we're even here awaiting rescue!"

It's a not unreasonable point, in their position I'd be strongly tempted to send word, and coordinates to Hades, to the Alliance as soon as possible even if they may not be able to do anything about it for some time. Hells, I'd be damn tempted to get a few hundred people out now just in case the next visitors to Hades manage to notice and crush the uprising. Of course, this is not the way to disagree with your superior officer in a crowded room, and everyone who opposes Honor is in the natural course of time outed as a coward.

"I beg your pardon, Admiral Harrington, but it is not enough!" the Manticoran said sharply, and satisfaction widened LaFollet's smile. The idiot had misread her voice. He actually thought her apparent calmness was a good sign. Or perhaps he simply thought it indicated that she was uncertain and trying to hide it, or that he finally had a pretext he could use to undercut her authority in the eyes of her subordinates for his own gain.

"I have questioned the wisdom of many of your decisions here on Hades," he went on, "but this one goes beyond unwise to insane! I have accepted your command authority despite the . . . irregularity of your claimed seniority in a non-Manticoran navy, but your current course of conduct leads me to seriously question my own wisdom in doing so. Whatever the actual status of your commission—or even the legality of your holding commissions in two different navies simultaneously—this decision absolutely proves you lack the experience for your supposed rank!"

Alistair McKeon had started to lunge furiously up out of his chair when Styles began. Now he sat back instead, regarding the Rear Admiral with the same sort of fascination with which people watched two ground cars slide inexorably towards one another on icy pavement.

-snip-

McKeon looked away from Honor long enough to glance at the others around the table and felt reassured by what he saw. None of them really understood why Honor hadn't already crushed Styles, and while none of them wanted to get involved in a fight between her and an officer of her own navy—or one of her own navies, at least—they were entirely prepared to support her against him now. McKeon happened to agree with them that Honor should have stepped on the loathsome bastard the first time he got out of line, but he also knew (far better than they) that she didn't do things that way. Sometimes—as in McKeon's own case, once upon a time—that could be a good thing. This time, as far as he was concerned, she'd waited far too long, and he felt an anticipation very much like Andrew LaFollet's as Styles went right on running his mouth.

"I'll accept that you believe you're doing the right thing and performing to the very best of your ability," the Manticoran went on, his voice oozing damning-with-faint-praise scorn, "but one of the things experience teaches is the ability to recognize the limitations of reality. Yes, and the true nature of responsibility, as well! Your primary duty as a Queen's officer is—"

"I don't believe you heard me, Admiral Styles," Honor said, still in that conversational tone, her body language completely relaxed. "I said I had heard enough, and I remind you—for the final time— of the penalties laid down by the Articles of War for insubordination."

"Insubordination?" Styles glared at her, apparently oblivious to the dangerous glitter in her single working eye. "It's not 'insubordination' to point out to a manifestly inexperienced officer that her conception of her own duty and importance is obviously and completely divorced from reality and—

-snip Honor's ordering his arrest-

"I have tolerated your gross insubordination, incompetence, cowardice, defiance, and disrespect for as long as I intend to, Admiral Styles," Honor told him coldly. "You have been warned dozens of times, and you have steadfastly declined to amend your behavior, despite repeated warnings that my patience was not without limit. Very well. I will not warn you again. You will now accompany Major LaFollet to the brig, where you will be held in close confinement until such time as formal charges are preferred against you before a court-martial board of Her Majesty's Navy. I have no doubt that those charges will be sustained . . . and you know as well as I what the penalty attached to them will be."

Honor finally publicly steps on Styles. That was really the wrong way, time, place and forum to challenge a superior officer.

Whatever Ramirez might say, she knew she could have handled things better than this. At the very least, she could have ordered Styles to place himself under quarters-arrest after any of a dozen earlier, less virulent confrontations. She hadn't had to let it get to this stage, or to humiliate him so utterly in front of others, and she wondered if she'd let it go so far deliberately. She knew how badly a part of her had wanted to crush him like a worm. Had her subconscious always hoped the opportunity to act as she just had would eventually present itself if she just gave him enough rope?

Self-doubt, the one thing realy keeping her from slipping into Mary Sue-dom. Unlike, say, Eragon.

"you say we could get two or three thousand people off Hell." He glanced at Cynthia Gonsalves. "Could you tell us what the current total number of evacuees is, Captain Gonsalves?"

"Three hundred ninety-two thousand, six hundred and fifty-one," Gonsalves replied with prompt precision. Since the courts-martial had wound down, she had taken over as Styles' second-in-command . . . which meant she'd actually been doing virtually all of the work in coordinating the prisoner contact and census project. "To date, two hundred seventeen thousand, three hundred and fifty-four have formally declined to collaborate with us. Most of those are Peep politicals, of course, but some of them are military or ex-military POWs."

Total number that could fit on Krashnark versus total prisoners leaving Hades, and a surprising number that want nothing to do with the jailbreak.

Officially (and it might even be true) the problem was shortage of time and resources in the wake of the Navy's achievements at the front. Heathrow was too junior an officer to have access to any of the classified briefings, but even peasants like him knew Citizen Secretary McQueen's enormously successful offensives had thrown the Republic's naval forces into utter confusion. In some ways, following up success had wreaked more havoc with their deployments than years of slow, steady retreat had, and Heathrow supposed StateSec might be experiencing echoes of that same mad scramble to reorganize on the fly.

After so long losing a defensive war, the PN is having trouble dealing with their first major offensive victory in years.

I just hope that the fact that they had to tell me the systems coordinates so I could get here in the first place doesn't come back to haunt me, Heathrow thought mordantly. I can see it now: "We can tell you how to get there, but then we'll have to kill you. Here, take Citizen Warden Tresca this message, then report back for . . . um, debriefing. Thank you very much, and remember—StateSec is your friend!"

Good for Citizen Lt. Cmndr Heathrow that he can have a sense of humor about these things.

Heathrow watched the plot as the courier boat's icon drifted ever so slowly towards precisely the proper spot. They'd been on reaction thrusters with their wedge down for the last hour, as per instructions from Camp Charon. His mission brief had warned him that would be SOP once he arrived; apparently StateSec imposed it on everyone who came to Cerberus, though for the life of him Heathrow couldn't understand the reasoning behind that particular bit of idiocy. But as with all the other foolishness which had come his way, he'd known better than to argue.

All orbital approaches made on thrusters only, as one more bit of nonsensically paranoid security.

One of the few things that made the cramped confines of a courier boat endurable was that such vessels were considered too small and unimportant to require their own people's commissioners. Which meant there was still one place in the Navy where officers could be naval officers.

Couriers aren't large or important enough to assign a StateSec watchdog to.

"Transmitting now," Howard said, and punched a key at her console. She watched her display, listening to her earbug carefully, then grunted in satisfaction. "Receipt code validation confirmed, Sir," she said. "The crypto files are unlocking now." She sat for several more seconds, watching the display flicker and dance as her onboard computers communed with those on the planet below in a cyber-speed game of challenge and response. Then a bright green code flashed, and she looked over her shoulder at Heathrow.

"Master encryption unlock confirmed, Sir. The message queue is uploading now. Time for full data dump nine minutes, ten seconds."

Whole process of courier data-dump. Which takes almost ten minutes, are they delivering the mail or downloading games?

"We've got a 'response required' message," he replied.

"What about?" she asked.

"They've missed Proxmire's courier boat," he said grimly, and she felt her face lose all expression.

"And?" Her voice was flat, impersonal, and Lethridge looked up at her quickly. He opened his mouth, then closed it again, discarding whatever he'd been about to say as he recognized the grimness in her dark eyes.

"And it's just about what the Admiral figured it would be," he said after a moment instead. "His next duty station's sent a routine missing ship inquiry up the line."

"Is this one his replacement?" Metcalf asked. It was unlikely, of course. If the new boat was carrying a shipping inquiry, then obviously someone expected it to report back instead of settling into orbit here.

"No." Lethridge shook his head. "There's an attachment to the inquiry, though—something about another message that explains why Proxmire's replacement has been delayed. It's listed as ... Alpha-Seven-Seven-Ten."

Time to see how fast they think of their feet.

"It says here," he resumed with a slightly lower volume, "that Proxmire failed to check in with Shilo Sector SS for his next assignment. They sound concerned, but not terribly so; this is just a request that Camp Charon confirm that he hypered out on time. But it also says his replacement won't be here for another two T-months—which means he'll be almost four months late by the time he actually gets here." The Erewhonese officer smiled wryly. "Whoever drafted this message seems to've figured Tresca would be bouncing off the walls by now over the delay. He went to some lengths to explain the courier net's been all screwed up lately. Apparently StateSec doesn't have as many boats of its own as we'd thought. They seem to rely on Navy couriers a lot, but the Navy's been whipping their own boats all over the PRH to coordinate all the ship movements Citizen Secretary McQueen's been ordering."

Alright, that's not so bad. Just say that they absolutely left on time, or were only slightly delayed and you have no idea why the courier boat may not have arrived. Which is actually the canned response Honor had Harkness record weeks ago, at least.

Ramirez and Benson were off reacquiring their command skills aboard Krashnark in company with the ex-StateSec light cruiser Bacchante, and Admiral Harrington had gone along to observe and possibly throw a few unplanned tactical problems at them. That was one reason Metcalf had designed the courier boat's inbound routing so carefully—to keep her well clear of the exercise area—and she hoped the CIC crews she and Senior Chief Ascher had been training aboard Krashnark had made use of the opportunity to run a passive plot on a live target. And that they weren't embarrassing their teachers.

Her mouth moved again, this time in a grimace. They were making enormous progress, but aside from about four thousand Manticoran and Grayson POWs, none of whom had been dirtside on Hell for more than five T-years, the best of their personnel were at least a decade out of date. Some of them, like Benson, were more like half a century out of date, and blowing that kind of rust off their skills required something on the order of an old-fashioned nuke.

The Elysian Space Navy is now up to two cruisers, a light and a heavy, and starting to hurt for personnel with recent experience.

"And according to this, we can even use impellers, Skipper," Bouret told him.

"Oh frabjous day!" Heathrow muttered under his breath, and pressed a com stud on his chair arm.

No way is Lewis Carrol still pop culture after two millennia.

Still, she admitted, if it hadn't been for that inquiry about Proxmire's boat, she might have been more inclined to argue for hanging onto this courier, regular Navy or no. Deciding to send an unarmed courier with neither the firepower for combat nor the life support for large loads of passengers to the Alliance would have been an easy call ... if they hadn't known someone was anticipating that courier's immediate arrival with the reply to that inquiry. The nearest piece of real estate they could be certain the Alliance would have held onto in the face of the Peeps new, aggressive stance was Trevor's Star, which happened to be a hundred and thirty-five-plus light-years from Cerberus. Even a courier would take over two weeks to make a voyage that long—more like twenty days, unless it wanted to play some really dangerous games with the iota wall in h-space— and that was for a one-way trip. If somebody who was closer than that—say a half-dozen or so light-years—was expecting the courier to come tell it about Citizen Lieutenant Commander Proxmire and it didn't turn up, then that somebody might just decide to come see what it was about the Cerberus System that was being so hard on the SS's mailmen. In which case they would almost certainly get here well before anything from Trevor's Star could.

Part of the case for letting the courier go to spread that things are perfectly normal, nothing suspicious whatsoever. 135 light years, or two week's flight from Hades to Trevor's Star.

"The computers just finished decoding the next message in the queue," he told her, "and it looks like we're about to have company."

"Company?" her voice was sharper, and he gave her a tight smile.

"Company," he confirmed. "The Peeps have hit the Alliance again. This time they took back Seabring, and it looks like they're going to try to hold it. They're planning to ship in a shit pot full of mines and energy platforms to thicken the defenses, anyway, and they need a lot of workers to put them on-line."

"And?" Metcalf encouraged when he paused.

"And StateSec has decided to temporarily 'rehabilitate' some of the politicals here on Hell. They're planning to stop by with a flotilla of transports and collect seventy thousand or so of them as a deep-space work force to emplace all that hardware for them."

"Transports?" Metcalf straightened, eyes bright. "Hey, that's great! Exactly what we need!"

"Sure," Eethridge agreed grimly. "Except that they're not coming alone."

"What do you mean?" Metcalf's brows furrowed as his tone registered.

"I said they were planning on holding the place, Gerry," he reminded her. "And one of the things they seem to be worried about is that the locals apparently preferred our occupation to the old management. So StateSec is sending in one of its major generals with the equivalent of two divisions worth of intervention battalions supported by full combat equipment, including battle armor, assault boats, and heavy tanks, to 'repacify' them if necessary. And since the entire force is being dispatched under StateSec control from their sector HQ at Shilo, they figured they might as well keep everything together so they could send it with a single escort force."

In three weeks they can expect a load of transports, and two divisions of StateSec goons.

[Simon_Jester]

Marchant was safely in command of the ship, and there had been remarkably little fighting after the initial outbreak in the boat bay. Or perhaps not so remarkably, given that Krashnark's skipper had been given his options by Charon Central just about the time that idiot guard opened fire. With the equivalent firepower of three or four squadrons of the wall locked onto his ship, Citizen Captain Pangborn had recognized the better part of valor when he saw it.

Unfortunately, twenty-nine members of his crew—and eight POWs—had been killed in the boat bay bloodbath first.

Hades missiles equivalent to a reasonable-sized fleet of wallers. The surrender of Krashnark and the butcher's bill.

Is that missile firepower, beam firepower, or both?

State of the Zanzibaran Caliphate's Navy as of Honor's capture.

The relatively tiny state of the Zanzibaran fleet suggests that they were not a very impressive ally to take on. They may have been valued more for their strategic position. Another idea I think I suggested earlier is that Zanzibar could help supply ground troops to occupy captured Havenite subject worlds, reducing the manpower pressure on Manticore.

Manticore would be doing the bulk of the naval operations... sort of reminiscent of Athens' position in the Delian League. Well, more like the Second Athenian League, which wasn't so blatantly imperialistic and Athens-dominated.

Political effects of the attack, as understood by Honor. I'd forgotten Grendelsbane, the other major shipyard.

Based on random forum posts by Weber, Grendelsbane began as a refitting and support facility for ships on the periphery of Alliance space (including both RMN ships needing service, and presumably minor allied power ships that were being refitted with Manticore-supplied weapons systems).

It then evolved into a facility first capable of fabricating components (so certain things wouldn't have to be shipped hundreds of light-years from home every time someone needed a new spark plug)... and then into a facility capable of constructing warships, which it's obviously been doing for some time as of Echoes of Honor.

And, naturally, Honor's hopes for a Miracle at Dunkirk rescue have crashed and burned, no way the Navy can spare enough ships to lift everyone off Hades, and she refuses to take the core staff from Prince Adrian and run home on the one ship they have.

I'm honestly not sure how accurate this judgment is.

Given the huge size of Honorverse ships, it wouldn't take that many vessels to transport half a million prisoners. While it'd be risky and difficult to send, say, a battlecruiser force escorting a force of fast troopships... still possible, with a major potential payoff. And frankly, the fast troop transports would be among those assets least desirable for purposes of reinforcing the defenses of Alliance rear areas against Havenite raids, so they're going to be more available.

"Risky? That plan isn't 'risky'—it's insane!" Rear Admiral Styles' voice was flat and hard. No doubt he meant for it to sound firm, decisive and determined, but she heard the naked terror behind it only too clearly. And when she glanced around the conference table at the expressions of her other senior officers, she knew that impression was neither her imagination nor solely due to her link to Nimitz.

"Keeping Krashnark here in the Cerberus System is the worst thing we could possibly do," he went on, turning slightly away from her to address her other officers as if lecturing a crowd of school children. "I've never heard a senior officer suggest anything so reckless and ill-considered! I remind you all that she is the only means of communication with the Alliance we have! If we don't use her to send for help, no one can have the least possible idea that we're even here awaiting rescue!"

It's a not unreasonable point, in their position I'd be strongly tempted to send word, and coordinates to Hades, to the Alliance as soon as possible even if they may not be able to do anything about it for some time. Hells, I'd be damn tempted to get a few hundred people out now just in case the next visitors to Hades manage to notice and crush the uprising. Of course, this is not the way to disagree with your superior officer in a crowded room, and everyone who opposes Honor is in the natural course of time outed as a coward.

Sigh, yes.

That's one of the things I criticize Weber for. He's very bad at constructing good guys who openly disagree with each other about how to proceed. Usually it's all "we are the Buddy Bears, we always get along!" and stuff.

I agree with Styles, though the logical people to send off on Krashnark would be anyone infirm, plus certain high-value individuals like Amos Parnell. Possibly people with families back in Alliance space, if that can be determined in a way that prevents self-serving lies. Not people with the ability to contribute to the defense.

I just hope that the fact that they had to tell me the systems coordinates so I could get here in the first place doesn't come back to haunt me, Heathrow thought mordantly. I can see it now: "We can tell you how to get there, but then we'll have to kill you. Here, take Citizen Warden Tresca this message, then report back for . . . um, debriefing. Thank you very much, and remember—StateSec is your friend!"

Good for Citizen Lt. Cmndr Heathrow that he can have a sense of humor about these things.

I always liked Citizen Lieutenant Commander Heathrow; he's a decent guy who's clearly trying to do his job, while at the same time having actual motives and feelings rather than just being a one-dimensional duty-robot.

Whole process of courier data-dump. Which takes almost ten minutes, are they delivering the mail or downloading games?

Several points:

Weber may be underestimating the speed of download possible in his own setting in light of how much technology has advanced since the late '90s.

The files in question actually might include games, videos, and other electronic entertainment products. There's very little incremental cost to StateSec in having the courier carry such things, and it's good for morale to make sure that isolated outposts like Hades get reasonably timely access to them.

The files in question probably also include a lot of bureaucratic clutter that's being sent to all and sundry even if it isn't strictly necessary.

Ramirez and Benson were off reacquiring their command skills aboard Krashnark in company with the ex-StateSec light cruiser Bacchante, and Admiral Harrington had gone along to observe and possibly throw a few unplanned tactical problems at them. That was one reason Metcalf had designed the courier boat's inbound routing so carefully—to keep her well clear of the exercise area—and she hoped the CIC crews she and Senior Chief Ascher had been training aboard Krashnark had made use of the opportunity to run a passive plot on a live target. And that they weren't embarrassing their teachers.

Her mouth moved again, this time in a grimace. They were making enormous progress, but aside from about four thousand Manticoran and Grayson POWs, none of whom had been dirtside on Hell for more than five T-years, the best of their personnel were at least a decade out of date. Some of them, like Benson, were more like half a century out of date, and blowing that kind of rust off their skills required something on the order of an old-fashioned nuke.

The Elysian Space Navy is now up to two cruisers, a light and a heavy, and starting to hurt for personnel with recent experience.

Wait, they have TWO ships and they're not sending either of them back home? Especially since Bacchante is so much the weaker of the two ships. Krashnark is, I gather, supposed to be Mars-class... amusingly, the only deity named Krashnark I can find is a fictional one, from one of Weber's other settings.

[Ahriman238]

Wait, they have TWO ships and they're not sending either of them back home? Especially since Bacchante is so much the weaker of the two ships. Krashnark is, I gather, supposed to be Mars-class... amusingly, the only deity named Krashnark I can find is a fictional one, from one of Weber's other settings.

Yes all around. Krashnark is both a Mars and a shout out. They captured Bacchante a couple months later and nearly sent her home, but honor decided having two ships, duplicate stations for examples and the ability to wargame against each other was worth more to her training program than telling the Alliance where the super-secret StateSec prison seized by the inmates is.

I suspect there is a selfish-ish motive here, it's described briefly but not linked to this one act. Honor has a pretty good idea that Grayson at least can shake loose a ship to extract a major Steadholder and their second-ranking flag officer, and Manticore could probably spare a cruiser or two for all the Alliance personnel on Hades. If the Alliance sends a single ship with orders for her to board and leave most of the prisoners of Hades behind, she won't have a lot of choice in the matter.

[Mr Bean]

I just hope that the fact that they had to tell me the systems coordinates so I could get here in the first place doesn't come back to haunt me,[/i] Heathrow thought mordantly. I can see it now: "We can tell you how to get there, but then we'll have to kill you. Here, take Citizen Warden Tresca this message, then report back for . . . um, debriefing. Thank you very much, and remember—StateSec is your friend!"

Good for Citizen Lt. Cmndr Heathrow that he can have a sense of humor about these things.

I always liked Citizen Lieutenant Commander Heathrow; he's a decent guy who's clearly trying to do his job, while at the same time having actual motives and feelings rather than just being a one-dimensional duty-robot.

I like Heathrow, he shows up a few times after this but this little postage stamp sized introduction made me like him immediately. Plus what comes later made me look back on this as the kind of easy going LT I ran into the Navy who's far more liked and effective than a dozen screamers.

[Batman]

A lot of Honorverse mail (especially personal letters and messages) are usually video so the'll be a lot bigger than pure text messages would be.
Also, they only get a mail dump every few months if that often, so the mail is going to pile up.

On top of what Ahriman said about Honor being afraid of a limited rescue effort that forces her to either leave hundreds of thousands of prisoners behind or disobey direct orders, she may be quite correct of that being all they can expect-while the troop transport capacity is likely to be available, what about escorts? It's going to be several months (I'd say at least three) before any rescue mission can get to Hades from the moment they send 'Bacchante'. For all the Alliance knows, the Peeps have retaken the system by then and amped up security with something that isn't pathetically easy to kill, like actually permanently parking a sizable warship force there.
So either they scrounge together a reasonable escort force-in an environment where pretty much every Alliance member other than Erewhon and Grayson is screaming for reinforcements, they send only the transports or the transports and an escorting force that can't hope to stand up to any reasonable opposition on what may very well be a suicide mission, or they never send the mission.

And the size (even after the Great Resizing) of Honorverse ships may lead us to believe they can carry a lot more people than is actually feasible for anything but the shortest trips, because (as is pointed out in the book itself later on) the limiting factor isn't physical crowding, it's life support. You don't have to just park them somewhere, they need to breathe, eat (though that should actually be moderately trivial, even with modern day technology, if you're prepared for it-everybody's going to hate the food, but there should easily be enough of it), they need to drink and perform certain bodily functions we never see dealt with on Star Trek, and while warships are certainly built with a lot of redundancy I doubt they are designed with that redundancy being sufficient to handle as many people as could be physically crammed into the hull (something I think is also touched upon in the novel).

I know life support problems are often overplayed especially in filmed SciFi (the 'three minutes of air left' from 'Insurrection' comes to mind) but we're talking about spacelifting half a million people on a trip that's going to take a while when their biggest ships are designed for a crew of a few thousand.

[eyl]

And the size (even after the Great Resizing) of Honorverse ships may lead us to believe they can carry a lot more people than is actually feasible for anything but the shortest trips, because (as is pointed out in the book itself later on) the limiting factor isn't physical crowding, it's life support. You don't have to just park them somewhere, they need to breathe, eat (though that should actually be moderately trivial, even with modern day technology, if you're prepared for it-everybody's going to hate the food, but there should easily be enough of it), they need to drink and perform certain bodily functions we never see dealt with on Star Trek, and while warships are certainly built with a lot of redundancy I doubt they are designed with that redundancy being sufficient to handle as many people as could be physically crammed into the hull (something I think is also touched upon in the novel).

I know life support problems are often overplayed especially in filmed SciFi (the 'three minutes of air left' from 'Insurrection' comes to mind) but we're talking about spacelifting half a million people on a trip that's going to take a while when their biggest ships are designed for a crew of a few thousand.

That's true for warships. Dedicated transports, however, can take a lot more people (the transports they capture later on have a capacity of 40,000 passengers each, IIRC).

The canon "real" reason is apaprently Honor's inability to leave people behind - it's pointed out by one of her more insightful enemies in the next book (who proceeds to take advantage of said characteristic).

[Terralthra]

That's true for warships. Dedicated transports, however, can take a lot more people (the transports they capture later on have a capacity of 40,000 passengers each, IIRC).

Warships, actually, can go far over the rated capacity, because they have more environmental plants in reserve so they have redundancy in the face of battle damage. Transports, maybe maybe not, but the ones they capture are military transports.

The canon "real" reason is apaprently Honor's inability to leave people behind - it's pointed out by one of her more insightful enemies in the next book (who proceeds to take advantage of said characteristic).

Well, that, and it cost her her arm in the last book.