"Next, the new ships of the wall you object to are a logical extrapolation of the armament I had in Silesia. Where, I might remind you, Sir, my squadron, operating as single units outside any mutual support range, captured or destroyed an entire pirate squadron—plus a Peep light cruiser, two heavy cruisers, and a pair of battlecruisers—for the loss of a single armed merchant cruiser. Certainly building a superdreadnought around a hollow core would be a radical departure, and BuShips agrees that the new design will result in some reduction in structural strength. But it will also allow each SD to carry just over five hundred ten-missile pods and fire a salvo of six of them every twelve seconds. That's over five thousand missiles, at the rate of three hundred per minute, from a single ship which will sacrifice about thirty percent of its conventional armament to fit them in. I might also point out that the Ghost Rider remote platforms will make their pods even more useful, since it will allow the new design to deploy a complete, multilayered shell in a single salvo. Moreover, the new missile ships and the LAC-carriers between them will divert only twenty-five percent of the yard capacity currently devoted to conventional ships of the wall, assuming the recommended WDB ship mix is adopted.
"And as far as the new missiles are concerned, My Lord, did you even look at the performance parameters before you decided they were more of 'Horrible Hemphill's wish list'?" Honor demanded, unable to hide her exasperation.
"Certainly she came up with the concept, but R&D took it and ran with it. We're talking about a 'multistage' missile—one with three separate drives, which will give us a degree of tactical flexibility no previous navy could even dream of! We can preprogram the drives to come on-line with any timing and at any power setting we wish! Simply programming them to activate in immediate succession at maximum power would give us a hundred and eighty seconds of powered flight... and a powered attack range from rest of over fourteen and a half million kilometers with a terminal velocity of point-five-four cee. Or we can drop the drives' power settings to forty-six thousand gees and get five times the endurance—and a maximum powered missile envelope of over sixty-five million klicks with a terminal velocity of point-eight-one light-speed. That's a range of three-point-six light-minutes, and we can get even more than that if we use one or two 'stages' to accelerate the weapon, let it ride a ballistic course to a preprogrammed attack range, and then bring up the final 'stage' for terminal attack maneuvers at a full ninety-two thousand gravities. I don't know about you, My Lord, but I'll sacrifice eighteen percent of my total missile load for that performance envelope!"
White Haven tried to say something, but she rolled right on over him, and her flashing eyes were no longer cold.
"And finally, Sir, I submit to you that the fact that the Peeps are beginning to cut into our technology advantage is the strongest possible argument for these new systems. Of course we can't afford to dissipate our resources chasing after unworkable concepts just because they're exotic or fascinating! But the only thing that's let us maintain the upper hand, however narrowly, so far has been the fact that both our hardware and our tactics have been better than theirs. If you want to cite examples from Old Earth, let me paraphrase Admiral Saint-Vincent for you. 'Happen what will, the Star Kingdom must lead,' My Lord, because our survival depends even more heavily on our fleet's superiority now than Great Britain's did then!"
She stopped speaking abruptly, and White Haven shook himself. He felt dull spots of color burning on either cheek, but they weren't born of anger. They burned because he'd let himself be caught short this way, for however much he might wish differently, he couldn't deny her charge that he hadn't read the appendices. Nor could he deny that it was his own prejudice which had kept him from doing so. There was no question in his mind that he'd been right to fight Hemphill's efforts to introduce things like the grav lance or the pure energy torpedo armament into general service, and God only knew where things might have ended if she'd been allowed to implement her "spinal mount" main armament concept for ships of the wall! The idea of a capital ship which had no choice but to cross its own "T" for an enemy in order to engage it still made him cringe, and, he was certain, it would have the same effect on his hostess.
But that didn't alter the accuracy of her indictment. What would be madness in a ship of the wall might make perfectly good sense in something as small, agile—and (however little he might like it) expendable—as a LAC, and he hadn't even considered it. Nor had he made sufficient allowance for what the new central-core missile pod systems had allowed Harrington to accomplish in Silesia when he dismissed the concept's applicability to "real" warships. And, worst of all, he hadn't even bothered to look at the drive numbers on the new missiles or recognize their implications. And all of it, he admitted with still deeper chagrin, had stemmed from his instinctive, unreasoning, gut-level rejection of any project with which Sonja Hemphill was connected. Which meant he'd just exercised exactly the same knee-jerk reaction to technological change, albeit in the opposite direction, for which he'd always lambasted the jeune école.
And Honor Harrington had called him on it.
He blinked again and sat back in his chair, noting the slight flush in her cheeks, the light of battle in her eyes, the refusal to back down simply because the most successful fleet commander the RMN had produced in two centuries disagreed with her. And as he gazed at her, he realized something else, as well. He'd always been aware of her physical attractiveness. Her triangular, sharply-carved face, dominated by her strong nose and the huge, almond eyes she'd inherited from her mother, would never be conventionally beautiful. Indeed, in repose, it was too harsh, its features too strong, for that. But the personality behind it—the intelligence and character and strength of will—gave it the life and energy to make one forget that. Or perhaps she was beautiful, he thought. Beautiful as a hawk or falcon was, with a dangerous vitality that warned anyone who saw her that this woman was a force to be reckoned with. The slim, sinewy grace with which she moved only added to that image, and his mind had always recognized it.
But her attractiveness had simply been one more facet of an outstanding junior officer who'd somehow become his protégé, and his cerebral awareness that so much competence was wrapped in such a fascinating package had never moved beyond his forebrain. Perhaps that was because he'd never really seen her as anything except a naval officer, or perhaps it was because he'd always been attracted to women who were shorter than he... and who didn't have the hand-to-hand training to tie him into a pretzel. And, he admitted, whose ages were closer to his own. Perhaps there'd even been a sort of subconscious awareness on his part that it would be far better for both of them if he never did "see" just how attractive—to him—she had the potential to become.