A Rising Thunder

neither did the fact that nobody in the Republic is especially fond of the League, for that matter.”

“Completely off the record — and I’ll deny it if you ever quote me — but I’d just as soon go pick on someone who isn’t as tough as you guys for a change, myself,” Elizabeth told her, marveling even now at how close she’d become to the president of the star nation she’d hated with every fiber of her being for four standard decades.

“There are still some questions at the Nouveau Paris end, of course,” Pritchart went on in a more sober tone. “As they say, the devil is always in the details. With your permission, now that the original treaty’s been approved at both ends, I’d like to go ahead and get Admiral Hemphill’s mission off to Bolthole as soon as possible. I think that would help put a lot of those questions to bed with a shovel.”

“Tom and Hamish are still having to knock a few heads together over at the Admiralty,” Elizabeth said with an off-center smile. “I don’t think there’ll be any major snafus, though.”

I hope to hell there won’t be, anyway, she added mentally. She truly didn’t expect any, but she’d been surprised upon occasion before. And she supposed it was inevitable that the more conservative members of the Royal Navy would be…uncomfortable about sending the entire surviving R&D staff of HMSS Weyland off deep into Havenite territory to share all of the RMN’s technical secrets with its traditional enemies. In fact, there were times Elizabeth expected to wake up with a terminal drug hangover any moment now.

But crazy as it sounds, it actually makes sense — a lot of sense, she thought. We’re pretty sure that if we couldn’t figure out where Bolthole was, the Sollies — and probably the Alignment — don’t know either. God knows we had a lot more incentive to find it than either of them did! So tucking our R&D projects away where no one with any invisible starships is likely to drop by to clean up what she missed the first time around strikes me as a very good idea. And from what Theisman and Eloise have shown us, Bolthole’s going to be a damned good place to start putting all that new hardware into production on a really large scale quickly, once we’ve made a few upgrades.

There’d been arguments in favor of using Beowulf, instead. For one thing, Beowulf’s basic technology was considerably in advance of the Republic’s as a whole — or even of Bolthole’s, for that matter. In theory, Beowulf would be better placed to hit the ground running and improve upon the existing research more rapidly than the Haven could. But there was a difference between basic technology and war-fighting technology, and an even bigger difference between the mindsets required to successfully push military and civilian R&D. There was no doubt in Elizabeth’s mind — or that of any serving Manticoran officer, for that matter — that Shannon Foraker fully deserved her reputation. The staff she’d put together had done miracles to close the gap between Manticore and the Republic. With the destruction of Weyland and its Grayson equivalent at Blackbird, there was no one in the galaxy better qualified to push the bleeding edge of hardware development.

Besides, Beowulf was already busy doing other things.

Horrific as the casualties of the Yawata Strike had been, it had actually killed only a relatively small percentage of the total Manticoran workforce. But it had killed a critical percentage — the technicians, the logisticians, the supervisors, and the managers responsible for building the Star Empire’s starships, military and civilian. The smelters and the resource extraction platforms were still there. Much of the system’s consumer manufacturing still existed, although a frightening percentage of it had been wiped away with the space stations, as well. The service personnel who’d manned the service and repair platforms associated with the Junction were still intact, still available. But the Yawata Strike had destroyed the workforce whose skill set had made it the most efficient shipbuilding powerhouse in the explored galaxy. It had destroyed the heavy fabrication units, the skilled personnel who oversaw final component manufacture and assembly, the shipfitters and the ordnance specialists, the nano-farms that produced the critical manufacturing nanotech, the armorers and life support technicians, the planners who kept at all moving smoothly. They were all gone, and their disappearance had eliminated the very skilled work force needed to rebuild the hardware, the infrastructure, they’d once manned, as well. It was a case of the chicken and the egg; to build the one, you needed the other.

As Baroness Morncreek and Countess Maiden Hill had pointed out at that first dreadful cabinet meeting after the strike, they could rebuild and retrain. They still had at least some of the people they needed, once they could be recalled or transferred from other critical sectors of the economy. And the repatriated work force from Grendelsbane had been a godsend. For the matter, there were plenty of Manticorans who could acquire the necessary skill sets. The problem was how to do all of that quickly enough…and how even the Star Empire of Manticore could afford the price tag.

It looked like the answer was going to be Beowulf and the Republic of Haven. The loss of revenues Operation Lacoon had inflicted on the Old Star Kingdom would have been close enough to catastrophic under normal circumstances. Under the post-Yawata Strike circumstances, it came one hell of a lot closer. But when Lacoon was first formulated, no one had anticipated having the Republic of Haven available to step in as a full trading partner. Nor had it counted on Beowulf’s becoming for all intents and purposes a full ally against the Solarian League.

Haven offered enormous business opportunities for the Star Empire. It wasn’t going to come remotely close to replacing everything Lacoon had shut down, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t going to help a lot. And with Beowulf’s open alignment with Manticore, its economy had become part of the Grand Alliance’s dynamo, as well. Beowulfers had always been heavily invested in the Old Star Kingdom; now they were actually lining up to buy Manticoran war bonds.

Nor was that all Beowulf was doing. Dozens of Beowulfan repair and service ships had already streamed through the Junction, and the nuclei of new space stations were already taking shape — two each, this time, around Manticore and Sphinx. They were going to be different this time, too; built to a carefully thought out plan that allowed for systematic expansion rather than simply growing as need required. And with powerful self- defense capability, as well. There really was truth to the old saw about the burned hand teaching best, Elizabeth reflected grimly.

The tectonic shift represented by the Grand Alliance’s unexpected formation had hugely reduced even the most optimistic Manticoran estimates of how long it was going to take to rebuild the Old Star Kingdom’s industrial muscle. Which wasn’t to say it was going to happen overnight, even now. The process was still going to take T- years, and everyone knew it.

That was why Beowulf was already establishing its first MDM production lines. It had no pod laying superdreadnoughts of its own, but it’s basic technological capabilities required far less tweaking than Haven’s would to begin producing the mini-fusion plants and the miniaturized gravitic components required to build something like the Mark 23-E. So for the foreseeable future, Beowulf would be the primary missile supplier for the Grand Alliance. For that matter, if things worked out the way the planners were anticipating, in the next several T-months Beowulf would begin building Keyhole-Two platforms to be installed in purpose-built Havenite SD(P)s constructed in Bolthole and sailed to Manticore for final installation of the Beowulf-built components.

Just thinking about it could make Elizabeth’s head swim, but Honor and Hamish promised her it would work. As long as Beowulf remained intact, at least, and the two hundred pod-laying superdreadnoughts stationed there to protect the system suggested it would.

“Well, anyway,” Pritchard said, “it looks like this is actually going to work. I have to admit, there’ve been times when I wasn’t is confident of that as I hope I looked.”

“Eloise, you and I have to be the two stubbornest, most bloody-minded females in the galaxy,” Elizabeth pointed out. “If the two of us can agree on anything, it’s going to happen.”

“I’m not going to argue with you,” Pritchard said with a smile. “But on that note, I’ll let you get back to your family and that wedding. It’s probably more fun than this anyway.”

“It is, in a lot of ways,” Elizabeth admitted. “And the notion of having the President of the Republic of Haven present as an invited guest isn’t something I’d’ve given a lot of thought to until the last month or so.”

“I guess not.” Pritchart chuckled and started to press the button to terminate the connection, then paused. “Oh! While I’m thinking about it. One other point Leslie raised in her message was to ask where we were on the possibility of getting treecats assigned to critical personnel in Nouveau Paris. She knows that’s really up to the