Echoes Of Honor

But what really caught the eye was the sheer number of men who wore military uniform of one sort or another... and how much smaller the percentage of women in uniform was. Environmental factors had frozen Grayson’s population for centuries, but it had been increasing steadily for the last fifty or sixty T-years, and the curve of population growth had shot up sharply in the last decade. By now, the planet’s total population was somewhere in the very near vicinity of three billion, which came close to matching that of all three of the Star Kingdom’s planets. But given the peculiarities of Grayson birthrates, only about seven hundred and fifty million of those people were male. Which, coupled with the social mores which had banned women from military service ever since the planet’s initial colonization, gave Grayson a military manpower pool barely a quarter as big as the Star Kingdom’s. Actually, given the impact of prolong on Manticoran society and the higher resulting percentage of its total population which were adults, the differential was almost certainly even higher than that. But it still meant that a far, far higher percentage of Grayson’s men were members of the ever-expanding Grayson military.

And at the moment, every one of them seemed to be sitting in the Great Hall for dinner.

It gave Grayson rather a different perspective on the Havenite Wars, Alexander reflected. High Admiral Matthews had touched on it several times during his guided tour of Blackbird, yet it was something else Alexander hadn’t adequately considered before this trip. He should have, for Hamish had certainly alluded to it frequently enough, but it was another of those things someone had to see and feel for himself before his mind made the leap to understanding.

The Star Kingdom had spent a half century prior to the outbreak of hostilities building up its navy and alliances against the day of reckoning which had to come. Manticore had approached the battle against the PRH with a long-term wariness, a sense of the inevitable (though some Manticorans—and Alexander could name a few from certain prominent political circles—had done their level best to hide from the truth), which was actually almost a disadvantage, in an odd sort of way, once the shooting started. It was as if certain chunks of the Manticoran public felt that all the time and effort and money they had invested in getting ready for the war should somehow have gone into a metaphysical savings account as a sort of down payment which would somehow excuse them from making still more investment in actually fighting the war now that it had begun. They weren’t tired, precisely. Not 'war weary'—not really, and not yet—but they seemed... disappointed. They’d spent all that time getting ready to resist the sort of lightning campaign Haven had used to smash all of its previous opponents, and they’d expected the same sort of quick decision, one way or the other, as in all those earlier campaigns.

But it hadn’t worked that way. Alexander and Allen Summervale had known it wouldn’t be a short, quick war—not if they were lucky enough to survive at all—as had their monarch and the military, and they’d done their best to prepare the public for the reality of an extended struggle. Yet they’d failed. Or perhaps it was more accurate to say that they hadn’t succeeded completely. There were people out there who understood, after all, and Alexander suspected the numbers were growing. But that sense that the war should have been over by now, especially with the Royal Navy and its allies smashing Peep fleet after Peep fleet, worried him. It was an unformed groundswell at this point, but William Alexander had been in politics for sixty T-years, and he had developed the discerning eye of a skilled navigator. There was a potential storm out there on the horizon, and he wondered just how well the ship he’d spent six decades helping to build would weather it if—or when—it broke.

But Graysons saw things differently. They’d come to the Havenite wars late... yet they’d spent the last six centuries preparing for—and fighting—another war. Looking back, one might call the crushing defeat Honor Harrington and Alexander’s older brother had handed the Masadan descendants of the Faithful the true first shot of the current war. But for Grayson, it had been only a transition, a turn from confronting one enemy to confronting another. They knew all about long wars, and they were no more concerned by the potential length of this one than they had been over the interminable duration of the last. It would take however long it took... and Grayson was grimly determined to be there until the very end.

And that determination was producing some changes in Grayson society which would have been flatly denounced even as little as five years earlier. There were still no Grayson women in uniform, but the military women 'on loan' to the GSN from the RMN and serving in other navies were steadily grinding away that particular prohibition. And Grayson women were beginning to enter the civilian labor force in unprecedented numbers. Alexander and Admiral Caparelli had been astonished to discover that over fifteen percent of Blackbird’s clerical and junior management staff were women, only a handful of them from out-system. Even more startling, there had been a few women—just a tiny percentage so far, but growing—on the engineering staff, as well. Some of them were actually on the construction gangs! Alexander had no idea who the 'Rosie the Riveter' his historian older brother had referred to might have been, but he’d been stunned to see Grayson women being allowed into such all-male roles.

Yet the fact was that Grayson had no choice. If it was going to man its military—and 'man' was precisely the right term, William thought with a wry, hidden grin—then it had to free up the required manpower somehow. And the only way to do that was to begin making rational use of the enormous potential its women represented. Before the Alliance, that would have been unthinkable; now it was only very difficult, and mere difficulty had never stopped a Grayson yet.

The manpower shortage also explained why Grayson had leapt joyfully at the potential for increased automation aboard warships which the RMN’s own Bureau of Ships had found it so monumentally difficult to force through its own ranks. (I suppose we’re just as 'traditional' as the Graysons, Alexander reflected. Our traditions are simply... different. They’re certainly not any less bullheaded—or stupid. ) The Royal Navy was still building experimental prototypes to test the new concept, but the GSN had already incorporated it into all their new construction... including the new ten-ship superdreadnought class under construction at Blackbird. High Admiral Matthews had been so busy rhapsodizing about how that would reduce the strain where his manning requirements were concerned that he’d completely missed the glance Alexander and Caparelli had exchanged.

Not enough that they’re going to have our new ship of the wall concept in commission at least a full T-year before we do, they had to go ahead and build the new automation into them, too! God, that’s embarrassing. Still, he felt his lips quirk, maybe if Sir Thomas and I go home and emphasize how 'primitive, backward' Grayson is racing ahead of us, we’ll be able to get some of our sticks-in-the-mud to get up off their collective asses and authorize us to build a few of them, too.

Unless, of course, they decide that it only makes sense to let the Graysons test the concept in action before we ante up the cash for such 'radical, untried, and ill-considered' innovations!

He snorted and reminded himself that he was only the Star Kingdom’s accountant, not a lord of admiralty. He was a civilian, and as such, he should be concentrating on other matters and leaving military concerns up to Hamish and Sir Thomas.

He took another sip of tea and let his eyes travel around the Great Hall again. As a male visitor unaccompanied by any wife, he had been seated at an exclusively male-occupied table just below the Protector’s raised dais. The elderly general (actually, he was probably younger than Alexander was, but without the benefits of prolong) seated beside him was more interested in his dinner than in making conversation with foreigners, and Alexander was just as happy. They’d exchanged the proper small talk before the meal began, and then the two of them had ignored one another—in a companionable sort of way—while they addressed the truly delicious dinner. Alexander made a mental note to see if he couldn’t extort the Protector’s chef’s recipe book out of Benjamin at their last formal meeting tomorrow. He was used to the way his older brother twitted him on his 'epicureanism,' and he couldn’t really complain. Hamish was right, after all... but just because he was an uncultured barbarian who considered anything more complex than a rare steak and a baked potato decadent was no reason for William to reject the finer things in life.

He chuckled to himself and glanced at his brother. White Haven was seated with High Admiral Matthews at the Protector’s own table—a mark of the high esteem in which the conqueror of Masada was held here in Grayson. At the moment, his head was turned as he addressed a remark to the exquisitely beautiful woman seated with her towering husband between himself and Katherine Mayhew. Alexander had been introduced to both Doctors