War Of Honor

demonstrated in the Melbourne System. You can make your own analysis of those events from them, and, frankly, you have better facilities for doing that than I do.

'But I suspect that what probably concerns you most are the reports I don't have any log recordings to back up. Especially the ones about the new Andy battlecruisers.'

'I will admit that that's one of the areas which causes me concerns,' Truman agreed, clearly relieved that Bachfisch understood her worries and chose not to take them as aspersions upon his veracity.

'I've already given Commander Reynolds here as detailed a written description as I could put together,' Bachfisch told her. 'You'll probably do better to get the details from him, because it's based on notes I jotted down immediately after I saw the ship, not on what I can recall from unaided memory right this moment. But the way I came to be in a position to observe it has a lot to do with the Q-ship operations we were just discussing. I had a fresh crop of pirates to turn over to the Silly authorities in Crawford, but an Andy battlecruiser squadron was passing through the system and shortstopped my delivery. Not,' he added wryly, 'that the Confederate governor was at all happy about it. He seemed to feel the Andy admiral was being just a bit high-handed about the whole thing.'

'Why am I not surprised?' McKeon murmured with a grimace. 'Lord knows the only people the Sillies think are more arrogant and high-handed than the Andies are Manticorans, after all!'

'With all due respect, Admiral,' Bachfisch told him, 'and speaking as someone who's seen it from both sides, the Sillies have a point. From their perspective, both the RMN and the IAN are high-handed as hell. The fact that they know perfectly well, whatever they may choose to pretend, that they don't have the capability to police their own space lanes without outside interference only makes it worse, but how would you feel if foreign navies came sweeping into the Star Kingdom at will to police our commerce? Or if they took custody of criminals captured in our space because they distrusted the integrity of our legal system . . . or the honesty of our government officials?' He shook his head. 'I know the situations are different, but the fact that our lack of confidence in them is justified so much of the time only makes them resent it even more. And too many Andy and Manty naval officers let their contempt for the locals show. For that matter, I probably did the same thing when I was on active duty!

'At any rate, I don't think the squadron CO realized I was a Manticoran myself when he ordered me to deliver my prisoners to him. He certainly didn't realize I was a half-pay Navy officer, anyway! I was just as happy to hand them over to the Andies, because I could be fairly confident they weren't going to simply be turned loose again that way, but I have to admit that I didn't much care for his attitude, myself. Interesting how it changed when he realized he wasn't talking to a Silesian after all.

'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