She was on the starboard side of the small craft, seated just forward of the variable geometry wings, and she peered still further forward as the sleek, white spindle of a starship came into view.
A missile barge hung close beside it in orbit, which gave her a sense of perspective, something to relate the new ship's size to, and that perspective made her look just a bit odd to experienced eyes. She was obviously a battlecruiser, yet she was larger than any battlecruiser Honor had ever seen. The Agamemnons, like Michelle Henke's Achilles, massed almost 1.75 million tons, but this ship was more than a quarter-million tons heavier still. And where the Agamemnons were a pod-laying design, this one most definitely was not.
She stepped up the magnification of her artificial eye, zooming in on the hull number just aft of the forward impeller ring. BC-562, it said, and under that, the name: Nike.
She tasted the name in the depths of her mind, and her feelings were mixed as she gazed at the splendid new ship. This Nike's predecessor had been listed for disposal by the Janacek Admiralty in order to free the name for this new class's lead ship. The sudden eruption of renewed hostilities had saved BC-413 from the breakers, but the name had already been reassigned, so 413 had been renamed Hancock Station. If they'd had to rename her, Honor couldn't really fault the choice, but as that Nike's first captain, she would always think of the older ship as the rightful holder of that name.
And yet, despite her manifold disagreements with the late Edward Janacek and her bitter opposition to so many of his disastrous policies at Admiralty House, she had to admit that this time he might have gotten it right. Nike was the proudest ship name in the Royal Manticoran Navy. There was always a Nike, and she was always a battlecruiser. And when she was commissioned, she was always the newest, most powerful battlecruiser in the fleet.
Yet the old Nike-Hancock Station-was at best obsolescent, despite the fact that she was barely sixteen T- years old. She'd been worked hard during those sixteen years, but it was the changes in weapons and tactics, especially in missile warfare, not senility, which had relegated her to the second rank of effectiveness. In an age of multi-drive missiles, the traditional battlecruiser's niche had altered dramatically, and BC-413 was simply out of date.
Battlecruisers were designed to run down and destroy enemy cruisers, or to raid and run. The ideal commerce protectors, and, conversely, the ideal commerce destroyers. Traditionally, especially in Manticoran service, they weren't intended to stand in the wall of battle, because their relatively light armor and 'cruiser style' construction could never stand the pounding superdreadnoughts were expected to endure. They were intended to run away from wallers-to be able to destroy anything lighter than them, and to outrun anything heavier.
Yet the sheer range of the MDM made staying out of effective range far more difficult than it had ever been before, and the emphasis on long-range missile combat required denser salvos and greater magazine space. For a time, it had seemed the battlecruiser had simply become obsolete, as the battleship had before it, and that it would vanish just as completely from the order of battle of first-class navies. But the type-or, at least, the role it filled-was just too valuable to be allowed to disappear, and improvements in compensator efficiency and other aspects of military technology had allowed a transformation.
The Graysons had led the way toward one possible iteration of the type, with their Courvoisier II-class of pod- layers. The RMN's Agamemnons were the Manticoran version of the same design concept, as the Blcher- class was for the Andermani, and that approach clearly offered significant advantages over the older designs.
But the BC(P) wasn't really completely satisfactory. Although it could produce a very heavy volume of fire, its endurance at maximum-rate fire was limited, and the type's hollow core design came at a greater cost in structural integrity than the same concept did in a bigger, far more strongly built superdreadnought. So Vice Admiral Toscarelli's BuShips had sought another approach at the same time it was designing the new Edward Saganami-C- class heavy cruisers.
Nike was the result: a 2.5 million-ton 'battlecruiser,' almost three times the size of Honor's old ship, but with an acceleration rate thirty percent greater. The old Nike had mounted eighteen lasers, sixteen grasers, fifty-two missile tubes, and thirty-two counter-missile tubes and point defense clusters. The new Nike mounted no lasers, thirty-two grasers-eight of them as chase weapons, fifty missile tubes (none of them chasers), and thirty counter- missile tubes and laser clusters. The old Nike had carried a ship's company of over two thousand; the new Nike's complement was only seven hundred and fifty. And the new Nike was armed with the Mark 16 dual-drive missile. With the 'off-bore' launch capability the RMN had developed, she could bring both broadsides' missile tubes to bear on the same target, giving her fifty birds per salvo, as opposed to the older ship's twenty-two. And whereas the old Nike's maximum powered missile range from rest had been just over six million kilometers, the new Nike's had a maximum powered endurance of over twenty-nine million.
She couldn't fire the all-up, three-stage MDMs the Courvoisiers and Agamemnons could handle, so her tactical flexibility was marginally less, and her warheads were slightly lighter, but an Agamemnon rolling pods at her maximum rate would shoot herself dry in just over fourteen minutes, whereas Nike carried sufficient ammunition for almost forty minutes, and she carried fifty percent more counter-missiles, as well. For that matter, although the Courvosiers did, in fact, carry the three-stage weapons, the RMN had chosen to load the Agamemnons' pods with Mark 16s. BuWeaps had gone ahead and produced the standard pods, as well, but Admiralty House had decided the salvo density the Mark 16 permitted was more important that the bigger missiles' greater powered envelope.
Personally, Honor was convinced that this Nike represented the pattern for true battlecruisers of the future, and she deeply regretted the fact that although the Janacek Admiralty had authorized her construction, they had seen her as a single-ship testbed. The Navy desperately needed as many Nikes as it could get, and what it had was exactly one. Which was all it would have for at least another full T-year.
But at least Honor had the only one of her there was, and-she smiled at her reflection in the armorplast-she'd convinced Admiral Cortez to give her to a captain who was almost as competent as he was... irritating.
'Do you want another pass on her, Your Grace?' the pilot inquired, and Honor pressed the intercom key on the arm of her chair.
'No, thank you, Chief. I've seen enough. Head straight on to the flagship; Captain Cardones is expecting me in time for lunch.'
'Aye, aye, Ma'am.'
The pinnace turned away, and Honor leaned back in her seat as her mind reached out to the future.
'Dr. Illescue! Dr. Illescue, would you care to comment on the press accounts of Duches Harrington's pregnancy?'
Franz Illescue walked stolidly across the Briarwood lobby, ignoring the shouted questions.
'Dr. Illescue, are you prepared to confirm that Earl White Haven is the father of Duchess Harrington's child?'
'Dr. Illescue! Isn't it true Prince Michael is the child's father?'
'Are you prepared to categorically deny that the father is Baron Grantville or Benjamin Mayhew?'
'Dr. Illescue-!'
The lift doors cut off the hullabaloo, and Illescue keyed his personal com with an almost savage thumb jab.
'Security, Meyers,' a voice responded instantly.
'Tajman, this is Dr. Illescue.' The fury seething in Illescue's normally controlled baritone was almost palpable. 'Will you please explain to me what the hell that... that three-ring circus in our lobby is about?'
'I'm sorry, Sir,' Meyers said. 'I wasn't aware you were coming in through the public entrance, or I would have at least warned your driver. They descended on us right after lunch, and so far, they haven't committed any privacy violations. According to SOP, I can't bar them from the public area of the facility until they do.'
'Well, as it happens, I wrote the damned SOP,' Illescue half-snarled, 'and as of now, you can bar those jackals from any part of this facility until Hell's a hockey rink! Is that perfectly clear?!'
'Uh, yes, Sir. I'll get on it right away, Sir.'
'Thank you.' Illescue's voice was marginally closer to normal as he broke the circuit and inhaled deeply.
He leaned back against the wall of the lift car and rubbed his face wearily.
He and Meyers were no closer to finding the leak than they'd been when they began, and the story was ballooning totally out of control. Not that he'd ever had much hope of controlling it in the first place. The press was working itself up to a feeding frenzy, and the most preposterous speculation imaginable-as the shouted question in the lobby indicated-had become rampant. At least he'd spoken to both Doctors Harrington, unpleasant though it had been, and he felt reasonably confident neither of them thought it had been his doing, but that didn't make him feel
