by David Weber
"On the other hand, I don't think he was especially pleased to realize he'd allowed anyone who might be connected with the Star Kingdom close enough to get a good look at the after hammerhead of his flagship. Under the circumstances, I didn't think it would be especially wise of me to pull out a pocket camera and snap a few shots, and the Andies were pretty careful to keep their bow towards the Bane after I got back aboard her, so I couldn't get any good visuals from her, either. But there were definitely some major differences between her construction and a regular battlecruiser's. My personnel shuttle crossed her stern at less than half a klick on the run to deliver our 'guests,' and it was obvious that she didn't have much in the way of conventional stern chasers. But what she did have was a great big cargo hatch."
"I don't much like the sound of that," McKeon observed unhappily.
"Well, I can see where a battlecruiser built on the pod format would have a lot of short term firepower," Wraith Goodrick replied. "But how sustainable would that firepower be? And how long could any battlecruiser's defenses stand up to a real ship of the wall, especially a pod design, if it came down to that?" He shook his head. "I don't know. It just doesn't sound like a really practical concept to me."
Honor and Brigham glanced at one another, and Honor gave her chief of staff a very small nod.
"Actually," Mercedes said then, turning to the rest of the table, "the Andies weren't the first ones to come up with the idea. Or, at least, if they've had it, the Graysons have, too, completely independently."
"Really?" McKeon looked at her sharply. "Why haven't I heard anything about it, then?"
"You'd have to take that up with High Admiral Matthews, Sir," Brigham told him calmly. "If I had to guess, though, I'd say it was probably a bit of tit for tat. First Lord Janacek and Admiral Chakrabarti decided to shut down the joint Grayson-Manticoran R&D teams shortly after they took over at the Admiralty. Officially, it was another economy measure, but I'm afraid there were persistent rumors in the GSN that the new management wanted to close down the information flow to Grayson."
"Why in the world would anyone think that?" Truman demanded in disbelief. "We're allies, for God's sake!"
"I'm only telling you what the rumors said, Ma'am," Brigham replied in a very carefully neutral voice. "No one ever said rumors have to make sense."
"But—"
Truman started to reply hotly, then closed her mouth with an almost audible click, and Honor hid a bitter little smile as she tasted her friend's sudden understanding of just how much damage Janacek and High Ridge truly had managed to do to the bonds Grayson and the Queen's Navy had forged out of so much shed blood.
"At any rate," Brigham went on, returning her attention to McKeon, "the new Courvoisier II-class battlecruisers are a pod design. The Office of Shipbuilding reduced their conventional missile broadsides by over eighty percent, which let them build in superdreadnought-sized energy weapons." McKeon's eyes widened and turned suddenly thoughtful, and the chief of staff shrugged. "I think there was some pressure to go to something more on the lines of the Invictuses and suppress the broadside tubes entirely, but Shipbuilding decided against it. Still, Wraith is right that they can't sustain their maximum rate of missile fire for anything like as long as a pod superdreadnought. But then, a conventional battlecruiser design couldn't sustain the missile fire of a pre-pod ship of the wall, either. And the exercises we've conducted in Grayson certainly seem to suggest that the new design has a much better chance of surviving against ships of the wall."
"Not on any sort of one-to-one basis, though," Goodrick argued.
"Depends on how old the ship of the wall's design is," Brigham said. "Against a pre-pod ship, a Courvoisier has a damned good chance, actually. She can roll enough pods to throw salvos that can saturate even an SD's missile defenses. Not a lot of them, maybe, but enough to do the job against one, maybe even two, of the older classes. And once she's beaten down the SD's offensive fire, she's actually got the energy weapons to get through its defenses, as well. And if two or three Courvoisiers concentrate on a single target, even an SD(P) will find herself in trouble. She'd have to get through to them and start killing them really quickly if she didn't want them to do exactly the same thing to her."
Goodrick looked shocked by the very notion, and Brigham grinned at him.
"Not only that, and not only are the Courvoisiers a hell of a lot more dangerous in energy-range, but the designers used the new automation systems even more heavily than they did in the design of the Harrington class, as well. The crews are really, really small. As a matter of fact, you can run one of the new ships with a few as three hundred people if you really have to."
"Three hundred?" Goodrick repeated in something very like disbelief, and Brigham nodded.
"Three hundred," she confirmed. "That kind of reduction in life support requirements, coupled with the hollow core design, explains how they were able to pack an enormously powerful graser broadside into the new design. They only have about two-thirds as many mounts as their predecessors did, but the ones they have are just as powerful as those the Harrington-class mount."
"Which was the real point of the design, when you come right down to it, Wraith," Honor put in. "Oh, not the energy broadside, per se, and not the ability to go toe-to-toe with superdreadnoughts, either. What the Graysons have built is a battlecruiser to do to older battlecruiser designs what the SD(P) can do to older superdreadnoughts. So if the Andermani have been pursuing the same design philosophy, the ships Captain Bachfisch has just described to us are going to be even more dangerous than anything we've predicted this so far."
"That was my own thought," Bachfisch agreed.
"Have you seen—or heard anything about—proper pod-armed ships of the wall, Sir?" Lieutenant Commander Reynolds sounded more than a little anxious, and Bachfisch shook his head.
"No, I haven't, Commander. Unfortunately, that doesn't mean they don't have any; only that if they do, I haven't seen them. By the same token, though, it occurred to me the other day that you can build battlecruisers a hell of a lot faster than you can build ships of the wall. It may be that they have SD(P)s in the final design stage or even under construction but not yet in commission."
"Which could be why they're still ratcheting up the pressure but haven't actually made their move yet," Rafe Cardones thought aloud.
"I wouldn't rely too heavily on that possibility, Rafe," Honor cautioned. "Even if that's what's happening, we don't know how far along they are in their preparations. And if it isn't what's happening, and we assume that it is . . ."
"Understood, Your Grace," Cardones acknowledged. "Still, I think it's an interesting possibility."
"It is," Bachfisch agreed. "And to be honest, I wouldn't be too surprised if that consideration, or one very like it, didn't play a part in their calculations. But as Her Grace says, I wouldn't care to rely on it."
"No, I can see that," Truman agreed, and leaned back in her chair, her eyes intent as she considered what Bachfisch had told them. It was obvious from her expression, and even more from the taste of her emotions, that if she'd had reservations about their information source, those reservations were dissipating rapidly.
"Wraith and I are looking forward to examining those sensor recordings of yours, Captain," she said. "Especially the ones of the Andies' new LACs."
"I'm not surprised," Bachfisch told her with a small smile. "And, to be honest, I was very interested in the readings I got on your own LACs here in Marsh, Admiral. I haven't had the leisure to compare them exhaustively, but my initial impression is that your design is still faster and more powerful than anything of theirs I've seen."
"But you haven't seen any sign of Andy CLACs?" Truman asked.
"No, I haven't. But if I were the Andies, I'd probably be even more leery of showing off my CLACs than of letting out the fact that I had pod-battlecruisers. And it wouldn't be all that difficult to keep them a secret, either. You know how easy it would be to hide CLACs in some out-of-the-way st
ar system while they worked up."
"As a matter of fact, Captain, I know exactly how easy it would be," Truman told him with a small chuckle. Then she sobered, and looked at Honor.
"I agree with Alistair, Honor. I don't much like the sound of any of this. Not when you combine it with things like Zahn's analysis and Ferrero's reports. Especially not combined with what Ferrero's had to say. If the Andies are deliberately showing us the sort of technology advances she's reported, but at the same time they're busy concealing the existence of these new pod-battlecruisers—or trying to conceal it, at any rate . . ."
She let her voice trail off, and Honor nodded. The same thought had already occurred to her. The actions of Hellbarde's captain looked more and more like deliberate provocations. If they were, then Gortz's revelation of the new weapons and sensor capabilities of the Andermani Navy took on the appearance of a deliberate attempt to intimidate, or at least to make Honor, as Sidemore Station's CO, worry about what else they might have in store for her. For that matter, they were busy doing exactly the same thing to the Sillies, according to all reports. Which suggested that they were busy attempting to intimidate the Confederacy's navy, as well. But the fact that they hadn't also flaunted their new warship types was an ominous suggestion that whatever new technology they were prepared to reveal, they were keeping some major surprises tucked away up their sleeves.
She drew a deep breath and looked around the table at the assembled officers . . . and at Thomas Bachfisch. His merchant service uniform looked totally out of place amid the black and gold of the RMN, and yet for all that, she felt a curious sense of completion at seeing him there. It was right that her first commanding officer should be here when she assumed her first station command, and as she looked at him, she felt the same awareness—or something very like it—radiating from him, as well.
"Very well, Ladies and Gentlemen," she told them all. "Thanks to Captain Bachfisch, we have significantly more information about possible threat levels than we had when we arrived. What I'd like to do now is to move down to the flag deck simulator and play with some of the new possibilities. And if you have the time, Captain," she said, gazing directly into his eyes, "I would be both pleased and honored if you'd join us there. I would value your input greatly."
"The honor would be mine, Your Grace," Bachfisch replied after a moment.
"Good!" Honor said with a huge smile, then stood and scooped Nimitz onto her shoulder.
"In that case, People," she told her officers with another smile for Bachfisch, "let's be about it."
Chapter Twenty-Nine
"Wayfarer, this is LaFroye. Our pinnace is closing from your six o'clock and low. ETA is now twelve minutes."
"Understood, LaFroye. Ah, may I ask just what it is you're concerned about?"
Jason Ackenheil sat back in his command chair, watching Lieutenant Gower, his com officer talking to one Captain Gabrijela Kanjcevic, mistress after God of the Solarian-flag merchant ship Wayfarer, and smiled thinly. It was safe enough, since he was far outside the range of Gower's visual pickup. Wayfarer wasn't that huge for a merchie—a fast freight hauler configured for relatively small cargos (by the standards of the leviathans which roamed the interstellar deeps) and limited passenger service—although she still dwarfed LaFroye to minnow-status. But the minnow had teeth and the whale didn't, so the whale had better be extremely polite to the minnow. On the other hand, some merchies were more equal than others, and Wayfarer undoubtedly felt reasonably secure in her League registry. After all, no Manticoran captain in his right mind wanted to provoke a career-ending incident with the League. Which explained why, so far at least, Kanjcevic sounded wary but not truly concerned.
But that was about to change . . . assuming, of course, that his information was accurate.
Which, all things being equal, it had damned well better be.
"It's only routine, Captain," Gower assured the face on his com screen. Then he glanced over his shoulder, as if checking to see if anyone were in proximity, and leaned turned back towards Kanjcevic's image.
"Just between you and me, Ma'am, it's pretty silly, actually. We've had reports of a rash of merchant losses in this sector over the last few months, and Intelligence has decided someone's using an armed merchant raider. So orders came down from Sidemore to make an eyeball check on every merchant ship we can." He shrugged. "So far, we've checked eleven without finding a thing." He did not quite, Ackenheil noticed, add "of course," but his tone made it superfluous, anyway. "Shouldn't take more than a few minutes for our pinnace to dock, come aboard, make sure you don't have any grasers hidden away, and let you go on about your business. But if we don't check it out, well . . ."
He shrugged again, and Kanjcevic smiled.
"Understood, Lieutenant," she said. "And I don't suppose I should complain about anything designed to make life harder on pirates. We'll give your people full cooperation."
"Thank you, Captain. We appreciate it. LaFroye, clear."
Gower cut the connection and turned to grin at his captain.
"How was that, Skip?"
"Perfect, Lou. Just perfect," Ackenheil assured him. Now let's just hope Reynolds knew what he was talking about in that intelligence brief, he added very quietly to himself.
* * *
Captain Denise Hammond, RMMC, stood and moved to the center of the pinnace troop compartment. Quarters were more than a little cramped, given that she had two entire platoons of battle armored troopers.
"All right, People," she told them. "We're docking in five mikes. You know the drill. No nonsense off anyone, but no bloodshed if we can help it either. Copy?"
A chorus of assents came back over her helmet com, and she nodded in satisfaction. Then she turned back to the hatch and waited with a hungry grin of anticipation. If the Skipper was right about what they were about to find, then this would be one of the best days she'd had in months, possibly years. And if he was wrong . . . Well, she was only a Marine. None of the crap was going to splash on her for following orders, and she'd never much liked Sollies, anyway.
* * *
The pinnace settled into the docking arms, the personnel tube mated with the lock, and the Solarian merchant marine lieutenant Kanjcevic had sent down to greet their visitors straightened into what might charitably have been called a posture of attention. He didn't much care for Manties—damned arrogant upstarts; that's what they were, crowding Solarian shipping lines all the time—but he'd been ordered to make nice this time. Given the circumstances, he thought that was an excellent idea, however much it might gripe him to do anything of the sort, and he pasted a smile on his face as the green light of a good seal showed above the tube hatch.
The smile disappeared into sickly shock as that same hatch slid open and he suddenly found himself looking down the business end of a stun rifle. One held in the powered gauntlets of a Royal Manticoran Marine in the menacing bulk of battle armor. A Marine, a corner of the lieutenant's stunned brain noted with something almost like detachment, who appeared to be followed by dozens of other Marines . . . most of whom appeared to be armed with things considerably more lethal than stunners.
"My name is Hammond, Lieutenant," the Marine behind the stun rifle said over her armor's external speakers in a soprano which would probably have been pleasantly melodious under other circumstances. "Captain Hammond, Royal Manticoran Marines. I suggest you take me to your captain."
"I—I—" The lieutenant swallowed hard. "Uh, what's the meaning of this?" he demanded. Or tried to demand, anyway; it came out sounding more like a bleat of terrified confusion.
"This vessel is suspected of violating the provisions of the Cherwell Convention," Hammond told him, and felt a profound sense of internal satisfaction at the way his face went suddenly bone-white. "So I suggest," she went on as the rest of her boarding party swiftly and competently secured the boat bay, "that you see about getting me to your captain. Now."
* * *
"It's confirmed, Skipper," Denise Hammond t
old Captain Ackenheil. There was no visual, because she was speaking to him over her helmet com, but he didn't need a visual from her. He'd already seen the imagery from the external cameras of the Marines who'd forced the hatches into Wayfarer's "passenger cabins." Even in Silesia and even aboard freighters with strictly limited personnel space, passengers were seldom packed in twelve to the cabin.
Of course, Wayfarer's crew had managed to save a little space for them in their quarters. After all, they didn't need much space to store their personal belongings when they didn't have any . . . including clothing of any sort.
The expressions of abject terror on the faces of those naked, hopeless "passengers" had been enough to turn a man's stomach. But the moment when they realized they were looking at Royal Marines, not the bully boy guards of the owners to whom they had been consigned, had been something else again. Indeed, seeing it had given him almost as much pleasure as the sick, stunned expression on Kanjcevic's face when she realized what had happened. And when she remembered that under the terms of solemn interstellar treaties, the Star Kingdom of Manticore equated violation of the Cherwell Convention's prohibitions on trafficking in human beings with piracy.
Which was punishable by death.
"Good work, Denise," he said sincerely. "Very good work. Keep an eye on things over there for another twenty minutes, and I'll have the prize crew across to you."
"Aye, aye, Sir. We'll be here."
* * *
"Do you know what I hate most about our political lords and masters?" Dr. Wix demanded.
Jordin Kare tipped back his chair and cocked his head with a quizzical expression as he regarded the astrophysicist who'd just burst unceremoniously through his office door. It was very early in the day—which was the only reason Wix had gotten past the secretary who would have intercepted him during regular working hours—and Kare's coffee cup sat steaming on the corner of his blotter beside a half-eaten croissant.
