A Rising Thunder

Chapter Sixteen

“Incoming message from Admiral Truman, Your Grace!” Lieutenant Commander Harper Brantley announced.

“Throw it on Display Two,” Honor said without ever taking her eyes from the main plot.

Nimitz pressed his nose against her cheek with a confident, buzzing purr, but the icons on that plot were getting decidedly complicated. Her Ghost Rider platforms updated the data on the intruding Solarian fleet, and she frowned at the hurricane of MDMs which had erupted from Eighth Fleet’s missile pods eighteen seconds ago. The massive salvo streaked towards the glaring red codes of the enemy, and her frown deepened as Admiral Filareta’s ships spawned an answering cloud of tiny ruby chips.

“Yes, Alice?” she said as Truman’s larger-than-life, golden-haired image appeared on the display which had just opened in the plot’s upper quadrant.

“My advanced LACs and the recon platforms all confirm the bastards are towing pods, Honor,” she said without preamble, her expression somewhere between irritated, exasperated, and just plain pissed off.

“Yes, CIC just put them up on the plot.” Honor’s tone was considerably calmer than Truman’s. “And they just launched from them,” she continued. “Which I doubt they’d be doing at twenty million kilometers if they didn’t have the range for it.

“Enemy launch at one-point-three light-minutes!” Captain Andrea Jaruwalski, Honor’s operations officer, reported crisply, as if to confirm Honor’s statement. Jaruwalski was looking at her own displays. “Acceleration approximately forty-eight thousand KPS, Your Grace. Assuming constant acceleration, time of flight is five-point-two minutes. CIC makes their closing velocity at the inner defense perimeter approximately point-four-niner cee!”

That was actually a bit better — about 2,000 KPS better, in fact — than the RMN’s own Mark 23 could do, Honor reflected. Obviously, the same thought had occurred to Truman, as well.

“Damn it, that’s ridiculous!” the other admiral snapped.

“Which doesn’t mean it isn’t happening,” Honor pointed out.

“But—” Truman stopped herself, then gave her head a shake.

“Point taken,” she conceded more calmly.

Honor smiled, but it was a thin smile, and her eyes had already moved back to the plot. Five minutes wasn’t much time to be making changes, yet if the Sollies’ missile acceleration exceeded projections by this much, there was no telling how much better their targeting systems and penaids might be, as well.

I think “a lot” is probably a pretty fair estimate, she thought tartly. Which suggests—

“It looks like we’re going to have leakers, Andrea. Get the Loreleis deployed. It seems we’re going to find out how well they work, after all.”

“Deploying Lorelei, aye, Your Grace!”

“As soon as you’ve done that, go to Tango-Two.”

“Tango-Two, aye,” Jaruwalski acknowledged, and Honor turned back to Truman.

“Alice, push your perimeter squadrons out on the threat axis.”

“How far out do you want them?”

“As far as you can get them.” Honor smiled crookedly. “One way or the other, this isn’t going to last long, so you’re not going to get them as far out as either of us would like. Choose your own deployment package.”

“Consider it done.”

Truman disappeared from the display, and Honor turned to Commodore Mercedes Brigham.

“Alice’s LACs will give the defense zone a little depth, but there’s a pretty good chance we’re still going to get hammered. Get on the horn. Request release of the system-defense pods.” She showed her teeth. “We may just need a bigger hammer of our own.”

“Yes, Your Grace!” her chief of staff acknowledged, and Honor turned to the display tied permanently to HMS Imperator’s command deck.

“I assume you heard all that, Rafe?”

“Yes, Your Grace,” Captain Rafael Cardones replied.

“We can hope the Loreleis will take at least some of the sting out, but I’m afraid your damage control parties are about to get busy.” Cardones nodded quickly, and she shrugged. “Fight your ship, Rafe.”

“Yes, Your Grace.”

Honor returned her attention to the master plot.

At such ranges, even MDMs seemed to crawl, but the Solarian fire swept remorselessly towards Eighth Fleet, and there was a lot of it — at least three times ONI’s estimate of Filareta’s firepower. The LACs assigned to the fleet’s perimeter accelerated to meet that incoming tide, adjusting their own formation as they went, and the Grayson-designed Katanas, with their potent missile armaments and heavy loads of Viper missiles, led.

Manticoran doctrine had hardened in favor of using LACs as the wall of battle’s primary screen. They were strictly sublight, but that wasn’t a significant factor inside a star’s hyper limit, and very few engagements took place outside a hyper limit. And while even a Manticoran LAC had far less long-range offensive firepower than, say, a Roland, the Katanas, especially, had nearly as much anti-missile capability. They couldn’t take as much damage, but the laser heads carried by multidrive missiles made that pretty much a moot point. Destroyers couldn’t survive more than a hit or two from weapons that powerful, either, and they were far easier to hit in the first place than something as agile as a LAC.

While Truman’s bantamweights headed out, the rest of Eighth Fleet turned away and began to shift into Formation Tango-Two. No one on Honor’s staff had really anticipated Solarian MDMs or such a heavy weight of fire, but the RMN believed in being prepared. That was why she and her task force and task group commanders had brainstormed situations very like this one in their planning sessions. And, after analyzing the tactical data from every engagement against the Republic of Haven and interpolating the data from Michelle Henke’s engagements in the Talbott Quadrant, Honor and her staff had evolved a new defensive doctrine.

Traditional missile defense wove every platform into a single, tightknit pattern designed to bring every defensive system to bear on the threat axis. In order to focus that concentration of defensive fire, the units of a task force or fleet maintained a close, unflinching formation with every squadron meticulously slotted into the most advantageous position. That sort of precision maneuvering even in the heart of furious combat required highly experienced, steel-nerved personnel, and it had been a hallmark of the Royal Manticoran Navy for generations.

But the massive weight of pod-launched MDM salvos placed unprecedented strains on that doctrine. When the threat was measured in tens of thousands of laser heads, instead of scores or hundreds, not even the most precise stationkeeping was enough to stave off disaster. As the threat grew progressively worse, Manticore had countered by increasing the density, power, and accuracy of its anti-missile armaments, yet many of the RMN’s tacticians had come to the conclusion that, absent some significant improvement in the available defensive systems, simply packing in more point defense clusters and counter-missile tubes had reached a point of diminishing returns.

Honor was one of the tacticians who suspected that was the case. She had cautiously optimistic hopes for the new Lorelei platforms, which represented an entirely new generation of highly capable decoys, and she’d strongly supported the decision to massively upgrade the Keyhole platforms’ defensive armament. Despite that, she’d been forced to the conclusion that the Navy owed its survival to date at least as much to the inherent inaccuracy of extremely long-range missile fire as to any improvements in its defenses. Worse, it had never been anything more than a matter of time before someone as inventive as the Republic of Haven’s navy had become under Thomas Theisman and Shannon Foraker managed to duplicate — or at least approximate — Apollo’s long-range accuracy. At which point, things were going to get ugly.

Ultimately, if ships of the wall weren’t going to become simply very expensive target drones, they needed to begin intercepting missiles farther out, expand the fleet’s active interception envelope beyond the roughly 3.6 million-kilometer reach of the current Mark 31 counter-missile. The problem was how to accomplish that. Pushing the perimeter LACS further out, getting those screening platforms deeper into the threat zone was one approach, but what Honor really wanted was an organic capability for the wallers to extend their own intercept range. She and her staff had a few thoughts on how that might be accomplished, and she knew Sonja Hemphill was looking at the question as well, but for now, she had to fight with what she had, not what she’d like to have, which was why Eighth Fleet’s formation wasn’t quite what The Book envisioned.

Given the nature of the threat and the expansion of each ship’s defensive field of fire courtesy of Keyhole, she’d decided to loosen Eighth Fleet’s formation rather than seeking to tighten it still further. Since her Keyhole-equipped units had more “reach” than they’d ever had before, she’d reasoned, they could target threats across a greater volume, provide mutual support without maintaining such close, rigid station on one another. There were trade-offs, of course — there always were — and the greater distance between subunits inevitably decreased the accuracy of the support they could offer one another. But what they lost in pinpoint precision they got back (hopefully) by broadening and deepening the total defensive basket. Each defensive shot had an individually lower probability of a kill, but there were more of them, and allowing squadrons to maneuver more independently also permitted their individual units to interpose their impeller wedges against incoming fire most effectively and with far less risk of the accidental wedge-on-wedge fratricide that would destroy the most powerful superdreadnought.

Andrea Jaruwalski and the rest of Eighth Fleet’s operations and tactical officers had spent hours tweaking both software and doctrine to put it all together. Honor was delighted by how well they’d run with her concepts, and they’d come up with a few wrinkles all their own. At Jaruwalski’s suggestion, for example, they’d detached half of Eighth Fleet’s total LAC strength from the perimeter force and tasked the reassigned groups to operate not between the wall and the threat but inside the wall, maneuvering in close coordination with individually assigned squadrons of capital ships to cover the expanded gaps between those squadrons.

Well, that’s the theory, anyway, Honor thought now, reaching up to stroke Nimitz’s ears while she watched the plot.

“Lorelei platforms active, Your Grace,” Jaruwalski reported.

“Thank you,” Honor replied as scores of small blue starbursts suddenly spangled the plot. Lorelei was the latest addition to the Ghost Rider stable…the last one the R&D staff on HMSS Weyland had produced before the space station’s destruction. Given how recently it had gone into production (and how quickly destruction of the production lines had followed), the RMN had a lot fewer of the new platforms than anyone would have liked, and she hated the thought of expending so many of them.

You’d hate expending your wallers even worse, Honor, she told herself tartly. Of course, if they don’t work the way we expect them to, you may just have expended both of them. Wouldn’t that be fun?

Her lips twitched ever so slightly, but her eyes were intent. She’d launched her own shipkillers first. That meant her massive attack was going to reach its target fifteen seconds before Filareta’s reached her, despite the Solarian missiles’ unanticipated performance. Unfortunately, the Solarians, without Apollo, would have cut their telemetry links long before that, and their missiles would follow their seekers into the targets they’d been ordered to attack, whatever had happened to the humans who’d given those orders. If they lost lock on those targets, they’d be forced to quest around for replacements on their own, strictly limited initiative, but either way, they’d already have switched to autonomous mode, and not even the total destruction of the ships which had launched them would make any difference at all.

Which wasn’t the case for her missiles.

“Enemy ECM is within projections, Your Grace,” Jaruwalski reported, monitoring the FTL telemetry coming back from the Mark 23-E control missiles which were the heart of the Apollo system. “Halo platforms are active, and from the density of their counter-missile targeting systems, CIC estimates they may have fewer Aegis upgrades than we’d anticipated.”

“Nice to find out we got something right, Your Grace,” Brigham muttered, and Honor snorted.

“Now, Mercedes! You don’t really think this is ONI’s fault, do you?”

Brigham’s answering snort was considerably more sour than Honor’s had been, but she nodded.

“Looks like they’ve done some Halo tweaking,” Jaruwalski continued, “but the filter upgrades seem to be coping.”

Honor nodded. Michelle Henke had sent back working examples of Halo EW platforms from Sandra Crandall’s surrendered ships, and Solarian security protocols left a bit to be desired. BuWeaps had been able to analyze them literally down to the molecular level, and Sonja Hemphill’s people had not been impressed.

From a manufacturing standard, the decoys were as good as anything Manticore could have produced, but they’d never been designed to confront this sort of threat environment. They’d been designed to face a Solarian-style missile threat — one with single-drive missiles, less capable sensors, and enormously less capable fire control, and one without the massive density of pod-launched salvos. They were also range-limited, because they had to stay close enough to their motherships to receive broadcast power. And the same restriction also meant they could operate only in the plane of those ships’ own fields of fire, since no broadcast power transmission could be driven through an impeller wedge.

Within those limitations, they were actually a well thought out, workmanlike proposition. Which, unfortunately for the Solarian League Navy, was nowhere near good enough.

The same thing was true of the Aegis program, the SLN’s effort to thicken its counter-missile launchers. Within the limitations of the missile threat its designers had visualized, Aegis represented a significant upgrade by increasing the number of CMs its wall could control. In an MDM-dominated environment, however, all Aegis actually accomplished was to increase the density of its defensive fire from total futility to something which was merely hopelessly inadequate.

And then there were Ghost Rider and Apollo.

“Estimate twenty seconds to their missile defense perimeter, Your Grace,” Jaruwalski said. “Attack profile EW coming up in fifteen seconds. Ten. Five…four…three…two…one…now.”

Eighth Fleet’s missiles—13.2 million kilometers downrange and traveling at.36 c—were still 9.8 million kilometers short of their targets, but the maximum powered endurance of Solarian counter-missiles was just under 1.8 million kilometers before their overpowered drives burned out and the impeller wedges they used to “sweep up” incoming missiles disappeared. Given the attack’s geometry, that worked out to a range at launch of 9.2 million kilometers…which the still-accelerating Manticoran MDM would reach in approximately another five seconds.

Which was why the electronic warfare platforms seeded thoughtout that massive salvo had come online now.

The Solarian missile defense officers had been tracking the incoming tide of destruction, allocating their counter-missiles, refining their tracking data, for the better part of four full minutes. At their velocity, the MDMs would cross the entire counter-missile engagement zone in barely twelve seconds, which meant there would be no time for a second wave of CMs. Aware that one launch was all they were going to get, the SLN officers were totally focused on making it as effective as possible.

Then the Dazzler platforms suddenly activated, radiating huge, blinding spikes of jamming. Tracking systems shuddered in electronic shock under the brutal assault, and the humans and computers behind those tracking systems were just as shocked. They did their best, but they had only sixty seconds in which to react, and at the same moment, the Dragon’s Teeth came online, as well, radiating hundreds—thousands—of false targets.

Given more time, the defenders might have differentiated between the true threats and the counterfeits. Or if their targeting systems hadn’t been driven back in confusion by the Dazzlers, they might have been able to keep track of the genuine shipkillers they’d already identified, ignore the masqueraders. But they had no more time, and their targeting systems had been driven back in confusion.

A defense which would have been grossly inadequate under the best of circumstances had just become irrelevant, instead.

Eighth Fleet’s MDMs ripped through the pathetic scatter of counter-missiles and smashed into the final, desperate inner perimeter of laser clusters at forty-nine percent of the speed of light, and those laser clusters’ fire control was just as confused, just as befuddled, as the CMs had been. The Solarians managed to stop perhaps two percent of the incoming fire; all the rest of the shipkillers reached attack range, under the direction of Mark 23-Es’ AIs with complete updates from the ships which had launched them which were barely five seconds old.

The crimson icons didn’t vanish from Honor’s plot with anything so gentle as “metronome precision.” No, they disappeared — completely blotted away as the ships they represented were ripped to pieces, or transformed into the purple icons of broken, technically still intact wrecks — in one cataclysmic instant. Their killers were upon them, then through them, in less time than it would have taken to cough twice. The Ghost Rider recon platforms brought the hideous wash of detonating laser heads, the seemingly solid carpet of nuclear fire, to HMS Imperator’s visual displays with dreadful clarity and at faster than light speeds, but no merely human brain could possibly have sorted out the details.

Honor had almost ten seconds to absorb the destruction of the Solarian fleet…and then those slaughtered superdreadnoughts’ fire crashed into her own command.

There were almost as many missiles in the Solarian launch as there’d been in Eighth Fleet’s, and their closing velocity was actually a bit higher. Yet there was no comparison between the outcomes of the two attacks.

Alice Truman’s perimeter LACs met the incoming salvo first. The Katanas’ rotary launchers punched out Viper missiles at maximum-rate fire, and the Vipers (with exactly the same drive and oversized wedge as the Mark 31) ripped holes in the wave of Solarian shipkillers.

Some of those shipkillers locked onto LACs (or tried to, at any rate) when the LACs’ impeller signatures blocked their lines of sight to their original targets. At their enormous velocity, their new victims had only seconds to defend themselves, and point defense clusters spat coherent light with frantic speed. Fortunately for the Katanas and Shrikes, current-generation Manticoran and Grayson LACs were extraordinarily difficult targets, and “only” sixty-three were destroyed. Their surviving consorts spun, yawing through a hundred and eighty degrees to bring their laser clusters and the Shrikes’ energy armaments to bear. Anti-ship missiles’ terminal attack maneuvers were designed to use their wedges to protect them from their targets’ energy weapons as they scorched in on their final attack runs. The SLN had given virtually no thought to evading fire coming from astern, however, and in the handful of seconds before they swept out of the LACs’ range, another thousand shipkillers were blown out of space.

The survivors burst past the light attack craft, roaring down on the ships-of-the-wall they’d come to kill, but the majority had lost sight — briefly, at least — of Eighth Fleet’s wallers. They still knew where to look to reacquire their targets, of course. Unfortunately, when they did, there were far too many of those targets.

Conceptually, Lorelei was light-years beyond Halo. Powered with the same onboard fusion technology the RMN had developed for Ghost Rider, the Mark 23, and the Mark 16, the Lorelei platforms had independent energy budgets beyond the dreams of any Solarian designer. They needed no line of sight for broadcast power to drive their powerful EW systems, and their onboard AI was even better than the Mark 23-E’s.

Halo provided false targets to confuse an incoming missile, but those lures had to be relatively close to the missile’s actual target, and even with broadcast power available, Halo’s false targets were significantly weaker — dimmer — than a ship-of-the-wall’s actual emissions.

Lorelei didn’t need to be in close proximity to anyone, and its emitters were much more powerful than Halo’s. The false targets Lorelei generated were still far weaker than those of genuine superdreadnoughts, but they could be interposed between those superdreadnoughts and the threat. More, they could be physically separated from the ships they were trying to protect…and the signatures they generated had been artfully camouflaged. Yes, they were weaker and dimmer than a true starship might have produced, but what they looked like was an all-up starship using its own EW systems to make its signature as weak and dim as possible.

And, as a final touch, over a third of Andrea Jaruwalski’s Loreleis had been deployed to keep formation on one another as complete, false squadrons of ships-of-the-wall. Squadrons which maneuvered in perfect synchronization with Eighth Fleet’s real squadrons but lay on the threat axis, deliberately exposed to the incoming tsunami of Solarian missiles.

Those missiles took the targets they’d been offered.

Not all of them were spoofed. Not even Lorelei was that good. But where multiple thousands of Manticoran laser heads had ravaged Filareta’s fleet, no more than seven hundred actually reached Honor’s, and they were no match for the defensive fire of her dispersed squadrons and their attached close-defense LACs. Seventeen of her superdreadnoughts took hits; only two took significant damage.

Honor looked at the main plot’s damage sidebar and felt her eyebrows rise. When she’d seen the initial acceleration rates on the Solarian missiles, she’d anticipated severe losses of her own. Instead—

“Simulation concluded,” a voice announced, and the displays froze. “I can see we’re going to have to go back to the drawing board to make you people work for it, Your Grace.”

“Thank you, Captain Emerson,” she said to the smiling senior grade captain whose image had just replaced her “tactical plot.” She nodded to him, then looked at her staff.

“Good work, People,” she told them. “That was solid. Dinner at Harrington House tonight, down on the beach. The beer’s on me; the surf forecast looks good; my dad’s already basting the barbecue; and Mac’s got something special planned for desert. So don’t be late — and bring friends, if you’ve got them!”

“All right!” Brigham responded, and Honor smiled as the others whistled and applauded enthusiastically.

“I hope it doesn’t take you very long to touch up those scuff marks on your paintwork,” another, closer voice said dryly under cover of the staffers’ obvious pleasure.

“Oh, I think we can probably manage our repairs fairly promptly,” she replied, still smiling as she turned to face Thomas Theisman.

The two of them stood in the Advanced Tactical Course Center’s main tactical simulator. It was far from Honor’s first visit — she’d commanded ATC after her return from Cerberus — but Theisman had been obviously impressed by the facility even before the simulation had begun. Now he looked around the enormous room and shook his head.

“That was scary,” he admitted frankly, turning back to Honor. “I knew we were screwed as soon as you people got Apollo deployed, but I genuinely hadn’t realized how badly screwed we’d have been if you hadn’t convinced the Empress to negotiate with us.”

“I was scarcely the only one who ‘convinced’ Elizabeth, Tom. And by now you realize as well as I do that however good she may be at holding grudges, she really doesn’t like killing people.”

“Neither do I.” Theisman’s tone was light, and he grinned, but Honor tasted the emotions behind his words and realized yet again why Nimitz had assigned Thomas Theisman the name “Dreams of Peace.”

“Neither do I,” he repeated, “and I especially don’t like killing my own people by sending them out to face that kind of combat differential. So if it’s all the same to you, I’m just delighted I’m not going to be doing that again anytime soon.”

She nodded, and the two of them started across the huge room towards the exit while Brigham oversaw the simulation’s formal shutdown.

“Did you know they were going to throw MDMs at you?” Theisman asked, and she shook her head.

“No, somehow that managed to slip Captain Emerson’s mind when he was describing the mission parameters,” she said dryly.

“I suspected that might’ve been the case, given Admiral Truman’s reaction,” Theisman said, and she chuckled.

“I’m not certain, but I suspect that that particular wrinkle may have come from a suggestion on the part of my beloved husband.”

“Having faced your ‘beloved husband,’ I can believe that.” Theisman’s voice was equally dry. “Both of you always did have that nasty tendency to think outside the box.”

“We weren’t the only ones.” Honor gave him a level look. “Once you got rid of Saint-Just and State Security, you turned up a bunch of capable COs. In some ways, though, I’d really never realized just how good you were until we finally got a look at just how bad the Sollies are!”

“Please!” Theisman grimaced in mock pain. “I’d like to think you could find someone better than that to compare us to!”

Honor chuckled again and Nimitz bleeked a laugh as they stepped through the exit. Spencer Hawke, Clifford McGraw, and Joshua Atkins fell in behind them, and Waldemar Tümmel, who’d been promoted to lieutenant commander following their return from Nouveau Paris, had been waiting with her personal armsmen. She smiled at him, and he smiled back, although the dark memory of the parents, brother, and sister he’d lost with Hephaestus was still there, behind the smile.

“How far ahead of schedule are we, Waldemar?” she asked.

“Almost an hour, Your Grace,” the flag lieutenant who was no longer a lieutenant replied, and his smile got a bit broader. “I don’t think the umpires expected you to polish them off quite that quickly.”

“Well, let’s not get too carried away patting ourselves on the back,” she said. She was speaking to Tümmel, but she met Theisman’s eyes as she spoke. “All something like this can really tell us is how well we’re likely to perform against the threats we think we know about, and Filareta seems to be several cuts above the Sollies we’ve seen in Talbott. If it turns out someone with a working brain has something we didn’t know about…”

The Havenite nodded soberly. They’d both had enough unpleasant experience with that sort of discovery.

Honor nodded back. She’d always liked Theisman, and the better she got to know him, the more strongly he reminded her of Alistair McKeon. Although — her lips twitched in a faint, fond smile of memory — he was definitely less inclined than Alistair had been to simply head for the nearest enemy and start slugging.

Ever since Beowulf’s initial warning, however, Honor had studied everything Pat Givens’ ONI had on Massimo Filareta, and Theisman had joined the effort from the moment Pritchart and her delegation arrived. Admittedly, Haven hadn’t had a lot to add to ONI’s meager bio on Filareta, but there’d been enough for her to be cautiously confident that she and Theisman had a feel for his basic personality. He was clearly very different from the late Sandra Crandall, and he had her horrible example to make him even less like her. Whatever the rest of the Solarian League Navy might think, Filareta was unlikely to reject reports of Manticoran technological superiority out of hand. Perhaps he might have, once, but despite some hints in ONI’s dossier about objectionable personal habits, he was obviously too smart to do that after the Battle of Spindle.

“I take your point,” Theisman said out loud now. “That’s one reason I’m so happy — now, at any rate — to see you people base your training on the assumption that the other side’s better than it really is.”

“If you don’t push your own systems and doctrine to the max, all you’re doing is practicing things you already know how to do.” Honor shrugged. “And that’s the best-case scenario. The worst-case scenario is that you get fat, happy, and dumb. If I had a dollar for every spacer some stupid, overconfident flag officer’s gotten killed—”

She cut herself short, and Theisman nodded again.

“Been there, seen that,” he agreed.

They were silent for a moment as they continued down a hallway towards the lifts. Then Theisman gave himself a little shake.

“I have to say the look inside your hardware’s been even more fascinating than watching the way you set up simulations,” he said. “We’ve never had the opportunity to examine Apollo, of course, and I’m afraid your security arrangements have worked a lot better in general than we really would’ve preferred. Shannon’s been especially frustrated. We’ve managed to recover enough to give us a leg up in quite a few areas, but they’ve mainly been matters of gross engineering.”

Honor nodded. Like every other navy, the Royal Manticoran Navy routinely incorporated security protocols into its sensitive technology. There wasn’t a lot they could do to disguise things like mini-fusion plants or improvements in laser head grav lenses, but computers and molecular circuitry were another matter. Without the proper authorization codes, efforts to access, study, or analyze those triggered nanotech security protocols that reconfigured them into so much useless, inert junk. Trying to find ways to crack, spoof, acquire, or otherwise evade those codes was part of the never-ending cycle of cyber warfare, and she’d been pleased by the confirmation that Manticore had stayed in front of Haven in that contest.

“To be honest,” Theisman continued, “the most useful things we recovered right after Thunderbolt were some of your tech manuals.” He did not, Honor noted, mention the fact that far more tech manuals had come into Havenite hands from their Erewhonese allies before Thunderbolt. Tactful of him. “But those weren’t much help when your new-generation technology started coming online, and by then, you were the ones capturing most of the tech that got captured, anyway. All of which”—he turned his head to look at her sharply—“is my way of segueing tactfully into the question of shared hardware.”

“You know my position, Tom,” Honor replied. “That’s Elizabeth’s and Hamish’s position, too, and as nearly as I can tell, Sonja Hemphill’s firmly on board, as well. So there’s no doubt in my mind that it’s going to happen. The question is how soon, and I think that’s going to depend on how soon we get formal ratification of the treaties.”

She looked at him as sharply as he’d looked at her, and he shrugged.

“You’ve seen the political calculus back in Nouveau Paris, Honor,” he said. “I don’t even want to think about how Younger and McGwire must’ve reacted when the draft terms got home and they found out where their President and two thirds of Capital Fleet had wandered off to!” He shook his head. “I’m sure a lot of Eloise’s political opponents must be screaming bloody murder about now, and I imagine Tullingham and Younger are making all kinds of veiled — or not so veiled — comments about people exceeding their constitutional authority. But the truth is that she isn’t exceeding her authority, and your own diplomatic mission had significantly changed public opinion even before the Yawata Strike and Simões.”

“Really?” she raised an eyebrow as they reached the lifts, and Theisman chuckled.

“Most Havenites, whether they’d admit it or not, have always felt a sneaking admiration for you. Even when that pyschopath Ransom was in charge of Pierre’s propaganda. Of course, there was a lot of ‘bogeyman’ about it, too. You had this really irritating habit of kicking the shit out of us.”

“I never—”

Honor broke off, unsure how to respond, and he laughed out loud.

“I didn’t say you were the only Manty who managed that. You were just the most…noticeable. Let’s face it, even the Sollies’ figured you made good copy, and it didn’t hurt that you were reasonably photogenic, unlike your humble servant.”

“Yeah, sure!” She rolled her eyes.

“I did compare you to me,” he pointed out. Then his smile faded.

“But all joking aside, you had a pretty damned towering reputation in the Republic, and a big part of that was the fact that you were an honorable enemy. That’s the real reason StateSec and Public Information went to such lengths to blacken your name when they decided to hang you.”

His smile vanished, and she tasted the bleakness of remembered shame as he relived his own helplessness in the face of Cordelia Ransom’s determination to have Honor judicially murdered.

“Anyway,” he twitched his shoulders, “you were already pretty visible, let’s say, in the Republic even before they gave you Eighth Fleet and turned you loose on our rear areas. And then there was that little business of the Battle of Manticore. For better or worse, you’d become the personification of the Star Kingdom as far as our public opinion was concerned.

“Then you turned up in Haven itself. Not to attack the system when everyone knew you could’ve trashed it. No, you were there to negotiate a peace settlement…and since we got rid of Saint-Just, we’ve never tried to deny our people access to the Star Empire’s news services. It didn’t take long for most people to figure out you were there to do the negotiating because you wanted to be there. It was your own idea.”

The two of them stepped into the lift, followed by Tümmel and Honor’s armsmen, and the door closed behind them.

“I doubt you have any idea, even now, how much goodwill you’ve built up for yourself,” Theisman said very seriously. “Trust me, though: there’s a lot of it. And, frankly, Eloise’s notion of proposing an actual military alliance, not just a peace treaty, was a stroke of genius.” He shook his head. “Talk about resolving the ‘reparations issue’! And it gets her — and all of us — out from under the stigma of caving in. Even under the most magnanimous terms you could’ve offered before the Yawata Strike, we’d still have been surrendering. On far better terms than we could ever have demanded, given the balance of power, maybe, but still surrendering. Now we’re not. I doubt anyone like Younger or McGwire’s going to be able to get much traction against that!”

Honor nodded slowly. Theisman’s analysis matched her own, although she was inclined to think he was probably overestimating her stature among his fellow Havenites.

“I don’t much like politics,” he continued as the lift car moved upward, “but I’ve seen enough of it to figure out how it works. I’m not saying there won’t be some people screaming not just ‘No,’ but ‘Hell, no!’ I’m just saying there won’t be nearly enough of them to slow ratification up appreciably. Especially not if Filareta’s smart enough to back down. Manticore and Haven, standing shoulder-to-shoulder to face down the Solarian League? Talk about your public relations bonanzas!”

He shook his head, and Honor nodded again.

“Well,” she said, “assuming this masterly summation of yours bears some nodding acquaintance to reality, I imagine the first technical mission to Bolthole — and I do hope you intend to tell us just where that is—” she gave him a speaking look “is going to be heading your way sometime very soon now. And I don’t think Mesa’s going to be a bit happy about that!”