by David Weber
"'Conjectural'!" White Haven snorted harshly. "That's going to be a lot of help when they stick their damned 'conjectural' pods up some poor damned commanders..." He broke off suddenly and cleared his throat. "I mean, the first time one of our fleet commanders encounters them. I can't believe Pat Givens is being this coy about a threat like that!"
"I know exactly what you mean, My Lord," Honor said with a lurking smile for the word he hadn't let himself use in her presence. Was it possible Grayson mores were contaminating the Manticorans assigned here? And if they were, was that such a bad thing? Then she turned more serious and leaned slightly towards him.
"As for Admiral Givens, I don't know why she's failed to make the warning official. One possibility, and I offer it only as pure conjecture on my part, from some of the things I observed while at the WDB, is that she's less of a technician than a strategist. It seems to me that she's a bit more hesitant to commit herself on hardware issues than on operational or diplomatic ones." She shrugged apologetically. "I may be out of line on that, but it seemed that way to me." She saw no reason to add that what she and Nimitz had read of Givens' emotions was a major factor in her "conjecture."
"You may well be right," White Haven said. In fact, he was certain she was, and it was another sign of her own intelligence that she'd reached that conclusion from such a relatively junior position in the RMN.
"At any rate," Honor went on, "whether they're developing pods or not, general increases in their systems efficiency are turning up in almost every area. Fortunately, our latest estimates indicate that we have a certain margin of superiority even over the more recently introduced League hardware, but it's far thinner than the one we enjoy over the Peeps. It may be enough if we continue to exploit it aggressively, especially in view of the long turnaround time on any data or equipment flow between the League and the Peeps, and BuWeaps and the WDB hope to do just that. There's also been quite a bit of discussion with BuShips about ways we might be able to shoehorn more EW capability into our hulls without cutting into weapons volume, but it looks like we're beginning to reach a point of diminishing returns in that regard. That's one reason BuWeaps has been pushing the Ghost Rider Project so hard for the last T-year."
She glanced at the earl, who nodded in understanding. "Ghost Rider" was the code name assigned to what would hopefully turn out to be a whole new generation of electronic warfare. If things worked out as planned, the needed capabilities would be built into drone bodies, providing an EW capability which could be deployed in multiple, independent platforms. Ideally, a ship would be able to put out shells of drones, relatively simple-minded and limited compared to shipboard systems, but with each operating in a different mode to give much greater overall capability than onboard systems which might be more powerful but could operate in only a single mode at any one time.
"While I was with the Board, I saw some encouraging long-range reports on Ghost Rider," Honor went on after a moment. "The only hardware actually in the production pipeline are the new decoy missiles and the stealthed missile pods, and it'll be some time before any of the other goodies reach deployment status. I think Vice Admiral Adcock is right about how much the project will enhance our capabilities, eventually, but for now, the PN has definitely cut into our advantage."
"And their building rates are going up," White Haven muttered, and she nodded once more, her eyes very serious.
"That they are, My Lord. The total number of new hulls per month has continued to decline, but that's only because we've taken so many yards away from them. The yards they have left are showing a marked increase in output. They're turning out individual new ships much more quickly, even though their overall loss of yard space means they can build fewer of them simultaneously. Again, part of that increase could result from technology transfers, but it's more likely that it stems from more effective personnel management. Their building rates went into the toilet when they started drafting Dolists into the yards, but that trend has reversed in the past year or so. I think ONI is right that the reversal indicates both that their original, effectively unskilled labor force is learning to do its job more efficiently and that popular support for the war remains high, which produces a motivated work force. Without really substantial technology imports from the League, the limitations of their physical plant should keep them from matching our construction rates, but they're going to come a lot closer than they used to be able to."
"So Admiral Givens stands by the notion that Pierre and his crowd enjoy 'popular support,' does she?" White Haven cocked his head. "That business in Nouveau Paris didn't change her mind?"
"No, My Lord. Reports about exactly what happened are mixed, but since both ONI and the Special Intelligence Service agree that it's actually strengthened the Committee of Public Safety's position, I don't think we dare disagree."
She grinned, despite the gravity of the conversation, and White Haven smiled back. The Office of Naval Intelligence and the Special Intelligence Service, the umbrella agency coordinating its civilian counterparts, enjoyed a tradition of lively competition... and resentment. As was probably to be expected, ONI tended to be right more often on military matters, while SIS had a vastly better record on diplomatic and economic matters. Where their areas of expertise collided, however, disputes were both common and passionate. Having both of them actually agree on something was almost unheard of.
But then he remembered what they were talking about, and his smile faded.
"I don't think I do disagree," he said after a moment, "but I'm curious as to whether their reasoning coincides with my own. Did they share it with you?"
"In general terms," Honor replied. "I think their first point would be that the fighting took place in Nouveau Paris, nowhere else in the Haven System or, for that matter, anywhere else in the Republic. Since that business at Malagasy and the mutiny in the Lannes System, we've had no reports of open resistance to the central government in any other system. That's not to say that there may not have been some, but if there were, they must have been on a small enough scale for their Office of Public Information to hush them up. That means that whoever controls the capital controls the provinces."
She paused, curving an eyebrow at him, and he nodded for her to go on.
"Their second point is that whoever was behind the coup attempt failed pretty spectacularly," she said. "Whether we take the official Public Information version of what happened or the less coherent, but probably more accurate, versions from other sources, it seems pretty clear that the bulk of their supporters were caught in the open. We've got reports that they used snowflake clusters on street mobs, My Lord." Her eyes were briefly haunted, as she remembered a time when pinnaces under her command had used similar weapons on unprotected targets. "They may have managed to get several million other people killed with them, but after that sort of... treatment, the 'Levelers' can't have a lot of manpower left. Not only have they been crushed themselves, but the example of what happened to them should make anyone else think twice about launching a similar attempt.
"Finally, all the available evidence suggests that it was the Navy which actually stopped them. Public Information insists it was State Security, Committee Security, the Public Order Police, and the Chairman's Guard, supported by the Navy, but all of our other sources suggest it was the other way around. The security forces certainly didn't just lie down and play dead, but their responses weren't coherent. ONI suggests that someone must have managed to compromise their command and control net, though we haven't been able to confirm that. But whatever happened, it was Navy kinetic strikes and air strikes and battle-armored Marines acting under Admiral McQueen's orders that broke the uprising's back, and McQueen didn't go on to take out the Committee herself.
"That indicates a higher degree of military backing for the Pierre regime than we'd earlier estimated, and the reports that McQueen's been offered a seat on the Committee should only make that backing even stronger."
"So what you're saying," White Haven su
mmarized when she paused once more, "is that the provinces have been brought into line, civilian resistance in the capital has been crushed, and the military has signed on?"
"Pretty much," Honor agreed, "though I don't think I'd put it precisely that way. I'd say that a particular segment of the civilian population of the capital was crushed. Given the amount of carnage and collateral casualties inflicted in the process, I suspect the bulk of the Dolists have decided to support the Committee as a source of stability which may be able to keep similar things from happening again. That goes quite a bit beyond the notion of civilians simply cowed into obedience by an iron fist, My Lord."
"Hm." White Haven tilted his chair back once more, propping his elbows on its arms and lacing his fingers together in front of him, and frowned. Once again, he couldn't fault her analysis... or, perhaps more to the point, ONI's and BuShips' estimates of what stability within the People's Republic meant for the building race. The Peeps had definitely turned up the heat under their construction programs. Where it had once taken them very nearly twice as long to build a superdreadnought, they'd cut their disadvantage in half, and if there were no fresh domestic upheavals to disrupt their efforts....
"However you look at it," he said slowly, "we're losing our margin of superiority. Not just in numbers, I saw the building rate increase coming months ago, but in quality, as well." He shook his head. "We can't afford that, Milady."
"I know," she replied quietly, and watched his eyes narrow as he turned his full attention upon her.
"On the other hand," he said, "I think this adds extra point to my concerns about the Weapons Development Boards recommendations."
"Concerns, My Lord?" she asked calmly.
"Fairly serious ones, as a matter of fact," he said. "Given that we're already looking at steepening numerical odds and improvements in the enemy's technology, this is no time to be tinkering with our own weapons mix by backing blue-sky projects." He snorted derisively, curling a mental lip at the preposterous proposals, and claims, put forth by the WDB white paper Harrington had delivered. He'd only skimmed the document, but that had been enough to show him it was more of the jeune ecole's nonsense. "The last thing we can afford to do is split our efforts between too many projects, most of which are probably useless anyway. What we need to do is rationalize production plans to turn out the maximum number of weapons we know work rather than fritter away resources pursuing crackpot 'breakthroughs.' Surely the need to concentrate on realizable technologies rather than harebrained, pie-in-the-sky, panacea boondoggles is one lesson people should have learned by now, if only from Old Earth’s history!"
"The Board isn't precisely calling for 'boondoggles,' My Lord," Honor said in a slightly frosty tone, but he shook his head.
"I'm sure your aware of my, um, differences of opinion with Lady Hemphill and the jeune ecole," he said. "I've never denied that there's room for new technology, Ghost Rider is a prime example of a new system with real and immediate value, but there has to be a balance. We can't just throw a new weapon into service because it's new. It has to have a functional slot, and the Fleet requires a rigorous analysis of its advantages, and disadvantages, before it's deployed. The mere existence of a weapon, however potent, doesn't guarantee proper doctrine will be formulated for it, either. A system we haven't figured out how to employ properly could turn out to be more dangerous to us than to the enemy, especially if we commit so heavily to it that we skimp on other, battle-proven weapons."
Honor felt his disgust through her link to Nimitz, and it surprised her. She knew White Haven was the acknowledged leader of the so-called "historical school" which believed that the fundamental strategic truths didn't change, that new weapon systems and technology simply offered new and better ways to apply those truths, not that they could create new ones, and his clashes with the jeune ecole were legendary. But the depth and bitterness of the weariness coloring his emotions startled her. It was almost like combat fatigue, she realized, as if he'd fought so many battles against the jeune ecole that he could no longer summon the detachment to consider the WDB proposals dispassionately.
She started to speak, but he held up a hand and went on before she could.
"I realize that your stint on the Board was brief, Milady, but just look at some of its proposals." He ticked the points off on the fingers of his raised hand. "First, it wants us to radically redesign our ships of the wall to produce a totally untested class. Next, it wants us to accelerate the construction of light attack craft, when we've demonstrated just about conclusively that even modern LAC’s are no match, ton-for-ton, for properly designed starships, even in a defensive role. Then it wants us to divert something like ten percent of our building capacity from super-dreadnoughts and dreadnoughts, and this, mind you, at a time when the Peeps' building rates in those same classes are going up, to build these so-called 'LAC-carriers' in order to transport light attack craft across interstellar distances as offensive units, not defensive ones. Not content with that, it wants to strip the missile tubes out of our existing ships of the wall and replace them with launchers which will use up twelve percent more weapons volume and fire missiles whose size effectively reduces magazine capacity by eighteen percent?" He shook his head.
"No, Milady. This isn't just changing horses in midstream; this is jumping off your horse without making sure you have another one to land on, and you don't do that in the middle of a war. Not if you want to win that war. This sounds too much like a Sonja Hemphill wish list for me to endorse it."
"Then you're wrong, My Lord," Honor said, "and perhaps you should have read that white paper rather than just venting your spleen on it."
Her soprano's flat, biting indecisiveness twitched White Haven upright in his chair, and she felt his astonishment through Nimitz. He was unused to hearing anyone speak to him like that, she realized, but she refused to retreat and held his eyes unflinchingly.
White Haven looked at his hostess, and it was as if he were truly seeing her for the first time. Very few officers below three-star rank dared cross swords with him, and even those who did seldom had the nerve to address him in such a cool, clipped tone. But Honor Harrington had the nerve, and her chocolate-brown eyes were very level, and hard. He blinked as he digested her demeanor, for it was painfully clear that all his undeniable experience, achievements, and seniority failed to overwhelm her. There was no hint of apology or hesitance in her manner, and her treecat raised his head to glance at White Haven from his perch above her.
"I beg your pardon?" The question came out more harshly than he'd intended, but she'd hit a raw nerve. He'd spent the better part of thirty T-years fighting "Horrible Hemphills" mania for new toys. If not for him, the entire Navy might have found itself lumbered with the same weapons mix which had almost gotten Harrington’s own ship killed on Basilisk Station ten years ago!
"I said you're wrong," Honor repeated, not yielding a millimeter before the cold anger in his voice. "I've had my own differences with Lady Hemphill, but the WDB recommendations are not her 'wish list.' Certainly she had a lot to do with pushing most of the new concepts into deployment. Be honest, My Lord, has there been a new tech development in the last thirty years that she hasn't been involved with? Whatever else she may be, she's imaginative and technically brilliant, and while it's true a lot of her ideas have proven operationally unsound, assuming all of them will always fail is as foolish as rejecting them out of hand simply because she proposed them. No one whose imagination is as fertile as hers can be wrong all the time, My Lord!"
"I'm not rejecting them simply because she proposed them," White Haven returned sharply. "I'm rejecting them because this package she rammed through the Board will disorder our production schedules and require us to develop whole new tactical doctrines, for weapons which probably won't work as well as she and her supporters think, in the middle of a damned war!"
"Before we continue this discussion, My Lord," Honor said very calmly, "I think you should know that the person who wrote the Boa
rd's final recommendations was me."
White Haven closed his mouth with a snap and stared at her. She didn't really need Nimitz to feel his astonished disbelief, and she suppressed a sudden desire to snort in exasperation. She'd always respected White Haven, both as an officer and a man, and she knew he'd taken a personal interest in her career since Admiral Courvosier’s death. His guidance and advice had been invaluable to her on more than one occasion, but this time she felt a powerful sense of disappointment in him. She knew he was tired, one look at the deep lines etched around his ice-blue eyes and the thicker streaks of white in his black hair proved that, but he was better than this. He'd better be, anyway! The Navy, and the Alliance, needed him to throw his influence behind the right policies, not to retreat into dogmatic opposition of anything associated with Sonja Hemphill.
He started to say something more, but she beat him to it.
"Admiral, I'll be the first to acknowledge your successes, both before and since this war began. As a matter of fact, I've always been more comfortable with the historical school than the jeune ecole myself. But the Star Kingdom doesn't have the luxury of letting its senior officers battle one another to submission over this point. I assure you that I wasn't the only officer asked to comment on my personal experience with the hardware the Boards recommending. And if you'd checked the technical appendices rather than simply skimming the proposed changes in production priorities, you'd have seen that regardless of who first proposed them, every one of our recommendations has been modified to reflect actual combat experience.
"For example, the LAC’s to which you object are an entirely new model, with improvements even the ones I took to Silesia didn't have. The new compensators will make them much faster than anything else in space; BuShips has found a way to upgrade their beta nodes almost to alpha node strength, which will give them far stronger sidewalls than any previous LAC; and the new designs incorporate extremely powerful energy armaments, grasers, not lasers, in a spinal mount configuration. They won't be designed for broadside combat at all; their function will be to approach hostile starships obliquely, denying the enemy any down-the-throat shot until they close to decisive range, then turn simultaneously to attack single targets en masse. In many respects, it will be a reversion to the old wet-navy aircraft carrier... and with a lot of the same advantages for the LAC-carrier. It can deploy its assets from outside missile range, attack, and get out without ever coming under threat from a conventionally armed defender. And whether you and I like it or not, Lady Hemphill does have a point about LAC’s expendability. They're so small and carry such small crews that we can trade a dozen of them for a heavy cruiser and come out ahead, not just in tonnage terms, but in loss of life, as well.