"They know four merchies are coming."
"Their navy's always been a bit on the proddy side about Gregor, Milady," MacGuire observed, "and we're going to have to cross a lot of their sphere, as well."
"I understand your point, Allen," Honor said, "but it shouldn't be a problem. The Empire recognized our preexisting treaty with the Gregor Republic when it, ah, acquired Gregor-B forty years ago. They may not exactly be delighted about it, but for all intents and purposes, Gregor-A belongs to us, and they've always acknowledged our legitimate concern over the security of the Junction terminus there. They also know what kind of trouble we've been having in Silesia. I don't say they're shedding any tears over it, since anything that decreases our presence there increases theirs, but they've been generous about granting our convoy escorts free passage. As far as they'll know, we'll just be one more convoy, and since we won't be landing cargo on any imperial worlds along the way, customs inspection will be a moot point. They should never realize we're armed at all."
"Until we start killing pirates, Milady," Truman pointed out. "They'll know then, and they'll know where we came from and how we got to Breslau. I'd think there could be repercussions about that after the fact."
"If there are, they'll be the Foreign Secretary's concern. I suspect the Andermani will let it pass. There won't be anything they can do about it, after all, without risking an incident with us, and they won't want that."
Heads nodded soberly. All of them knew the Anderman Empire had cast covetous eyes on the Silesian Confederacy for over seventy years. It was hard to blame the Empire, really. The chronic weakness of the Silesian government and the chaotic conditions it spawned were bad for business. They also tended to be more than a little hard on Silesian citizens, who found themselves in the way of one armed faction or another with dreary regularity, and the Andermani had been faced with several incidents alone their northern frontier. Some of those incidents had been ugly, and one or two had resulted in punitive expeditions by the Imperial Andermani Navy. But the IAN had always walked carefully in Silesia, and that was the RMNs fault.
More than one Manticoran prime minister had looked as longingly at Silesia as his or her imperial counterparts. Economically, Silesia was second only to the Empire itself as a market for the Star Kingdom, and chaos there could have painful repercussions on the Landing Stock Exchange. That was an important consideration for Her Majesty's Government, and so, though only, Honor was prepared to admit, in a lesser way, was the continual loss of life in Silesia. Eventually, unless there was a major change in the Confederacy's central governments ability to govern, something was going to have to be done, and Honor suspected Duke Cromarty would have preferred to take care of the problem years ago. That, unfortunately, would have involved one of those "aggressive, imperialist adventures" which all the current Opposition parties decried for one reason or another. So instead of cleaning up the snakes' nest once and for all, the RMN had spent over a century policing the Silesian trade lanes and letting the Confederacy's citizens slaughter one another to their homicidal hearts' content.
That same fleet presence was all that had deterred the last five Andermani Emperors from grabbing off large chunks of Silesian territory. At first, the deterrence had stemmed solely from the fact that the RMN was a third again the size of the IAN, but since the Peeps had turned expansionist, the Empire had discovered an additional reason to exercise restraint. The Emperor must be tempted to try a little smash and grab while Manticore was distracted, but he couldn't be certain what would happen if he did. The Star Kingdom might let it pass, under the circumstances, but he could also find himself in a shooting war with the RMN, and he didn't want that. For sixty years, the Star Kingdom had been the roadblock between his own empire and Peep conquistadors, and he wasn't about to weaken that barricade now that the shooting had started.
Or that, at least, was the Foreign Ministry's analysis, Honor reminded herself. The Office of Naval Intelligence shared it, and she tended to agree herself. Yet Alice and MacGuire had a point, and given the independent nature of the squadron's operations, it was going to be up to Honor to handle any diplomatic tiffs that arose. It wasn't a thought calculated to make her sleep well, but it came with the territory.
"At any rate," she went on, "the real job starts once we get to Breslau. The Admiralty's agreed to leave our operational patterns up to us, and I haven't decided yet whether I want to operate completely solo or in pairs. There are arguments both ways, of course, and we'll run some sims to see how it looks. I hope we'll have time for some actual maneuvers once we've completed our trials, as well, but I don't advise anyone to hold her breath. As I see it now, however, the strongest point in favor of splitting up is the greater volume it would let us cover, and as long as we're dealing only with the normal, run-of-the-mill scum, we should have the individual firepower to deal with anything we're likely to meet."
Head nodded once more. Aside from Webster, all of Honors captains had personal command experience in Silesia. Policing Silesian space had been the main shooting occupation of the RMN for a hundred T-years, and the Admiralty had developed the habit of blooding its more promising officers there. Rafe Cardones had amassed two years' experience in the Confederacy as Honor's tactical officer aboard the heavy cruiser Fearless, and Webster, DeWitt, and Stillman had all served there in subordinate capacities, as well. Between them, Honors senior officers, despite their relatively junior ranks, had spent almost twenty years on the station... which no doubt had something to do with their selection for their current mission.
"All right," she said more briskly. "None of us has ever commanded a Q-ship before, nor has any Navy officer ever commanded a vessel with the armament mix we'll have. We're going to be learning as we go, and our operations will form the basis the Admiralty uses to formulate doctrine for the rest of the Trojans. In view of that, I'd like to begin our skull sessions right now, and I thought we'd start by considering how best to employ the LACs."
Most of her subordinates produced memo pads and plugged them into the terminals at their places, and she tipped her chair further back.
"It seems to me that the biggest concern is going to be getting them into space soon enough without doing it too soon," she went on. "We'll need to get some idea of how fast we can manage a crash launch, and I'm going to try to get us enough time to practice it against some of our own warships. That should give us a meterstick for how easy our parasites are to detect and whether or not we can conceal them by deploying them on the far side of our own impeller wedges. After that, we need to take a good look at tying them into our main fire control, and given our own lack of proper sidewall or armor, our point defense net.
"Alice, I'd like you to take charge of setting up a series of sims to..."
Fingers tapped notes into memo pads as Captain Lady Dame Honor Harrington marshaled her thoughts, and she felt her mind reaching out to the challenge to come.
Chapter EIGHT
Electronics Technician First Class Aubrey Wanderman was almost as young as prolong made him look. He was brown-haired and slim, with the wiry, half-finished look of his youth, and he'd dropped out of Mannheim University's physics program half-way through his freshman form to enlist. His engineer father had opposed the decision, but he'd been unable to change Aubrey's mind. And though James Wanderman still bemoaned his son's "excessive burst of patriotic fervor," Aubrey knew he'd developed a hidden pride in him. And, he thought sardonically, not even his father could complain about the schooling the Navy had subjected him to. Any major university would grant him a minimum of three years' credit for the intensive courses, and the fact that he'd completed them with a 3.93 rating explained the first-class stripe on his sleeve.