STORM FROM THE SHADOWS – snippet 47:
Chapter Thirteen
"We're cleared for station departure, Ma'am," Captain Lecter reported.
Michelle nodded as serenely as possible and wondered if she was doing a better job of hiding her relief than Cindy was.
Go ahead, admit it — to yourself, at least. You didn't think you were going to make it on deadline after all, did you?
Of course I did, she told herself astringently. Now shut up and go away!
"Very well," she said aloud, and touched a stud on the arm of her flag deck command chair. The small com display came to life almost instantly with Captain Armstrong's face.
"Hephaestus Control says we can leave now, Captain," she said.
"Did they happen to mention anything about missing personnel, Ma'am?" Armstrong inquired in an innocent tone.
"As a matter of fact, no. Why? Is there something I should know about?"
"Oh, no, Admiral. Nothing at all."
"I'm relieved to hear it. In that case, however, I believe Admiral Blaine is expecting us at the Lynx Terminus."
"Yes, Ma'am." Armstrong's expression turned much more serious, and she nodded. "I'll see to it."
"Good. I'll let you be about it, then. Henke, clear."
She touched the stud again, and the display blanked. Then she turned her command chair, once again admiring the magnificent spaciousness of Achilles' flag deck, and moved her attention to the huge tactical plot. Normally, that was configured into a schematic representation of the volume about the ship, spangled with the light codes of tactical icons, but at the moment, it was configured for direct visual from the optical heads spotted about the huge battlecruiser's hull, instead, and Michelle watched as Achilles' bow thrusters awoke. She felt the faint vibration transmitted through the ship's two and a half million tons of battle steel, armor, and weapons, and the big ship began to back slowly and smoothly out of the docking arms.
The moment when a starship actually began her very first deployment was always special. Michelle doubted she would ever truly be able to describe that specialness to someone who hadn't actually experienced it, but for someone who had, there was no other moment quite like it. That sense of newness, of being present at the birth of a living creature, of watching the Star Kingdom's newest warrior take her very first step. A keel-plate owner understood without any need of explanations, knew that whatever fate ultimately awaited the ship, he or she was a part of it. And knew that the reputation of that ship, for good or ill, would stem from the actions and attitudes of her very first crew.
And yet, this moment was different for Michelle Henke. Achilles was her flagship, but she wasn't her ship. She belonged to Victoria Armstrong and her crew, not to the admiral who simply happened to fly her flag aboard her.
She remembered something her mother had once said — "From those to whom much is given, much is taken, as well." It was odd how accurate that had proved since Michelle had attained flag rank herself. At the Academy, she'd known flag rank was what she wanted. That squadron, task force, or even fleet command was where she wanted to apply her talents, test herself. But she hadn't known then what she'd have to give up to get it. Not really. She'd never realized how much it would hurt to realize she would never again command a Queen's ship herself. Never again wear the white beret of a starship commander.
Oh, stop being maudlin! she told herself as the gap between Achilles's bow and the space station widened steadily. Next thing you know, you're going to be asking them to take the squadron back!
She snorted in amusement, and leaned back in her command chair as one of the waiting tugs moved in.
Achilles' thrusters shut down, and the ship quivered again — a subtly different quiver, this time — as the tug's tractors locked onto her. Nothing happened for a moment, and then she began to accelerate again, much more rapidly, although nowhere near so rapidly as she could have accelerated under her own power if she'd been permitted to use her impeller wedge this close to the station. Or, for that matter, as rapidly as the tug could have moved her, if not for niggling little considerations like, oh, keeping the crew alive. Without the wedge, there was no handy sump for the inertial compensator, which limited the ship's protoplasmic crew to an acceleration her internal grav plates could handle. If they'd really wanted to push the envelope, and if the squadron had been prepared to secure for heavy acceleration, they could have pulled at least a hundred gravities, but there wasn't really much point in that. No one was in that big a hurry, and modern starships weren't really designed to handle heavy accelerations for any extended period of time. The ships themselves might not have minded particularly, but their personnel was another matter entirely.
At least Achilles, Romulus, and Theseus were the only ones still docked at one of the stations, so you didn’t have to worry about tug availability, she reminded herself.
She tapped a control on her chair arm and her repeater plot deployed from the chair base. It configured itself into standard tactical format, and she watched the icons representing the three battlecruisers moving steadily away from the purple anchor which had been used for generations to represent space stations like Hephaestus. HMS Stevedore, the single tug towing each of them, showed as a purple arrowhead pointed directly at the five icons of the rest of the squadron, waiting under their own power for their last three consorts to make rendezvous.
Michelle didn't know whether or not the Admiralty intended to completely scrap the squadron reorganization plan the Janacek Admiralty had put into place. There were some advantages to the six-ship squadron format Janacek had adopted, much though it galled Michelle to admit that anything that ham-fisted idiot had done could possibly have any beneficial consequences. Fortunately for her blood pressure, if not for the Star Kingdom's wellbeing, there weren't very many instances in which she had to. But even though the smaller-sized squadrons offered at least some additional tactical flexibility, they also required twenty-five percent more admirals — and admirals' staffs — for the same number of ships. Personally, Michelle suspected that had been part of the attraction for Janacek and his partisans. After all, it had provided so many more flag slots into which he could plug sycophants, despite the way he'd downsized the fleet. Those of his cronies who hadn't been removed by the Havenites in the course of Operation Thunderbolt (she supposed any cloud had to have at least some silver lining) had been ruthlessly purged by the White Haven Admiralty, yet that had left a tiny problem. Finding that many competent admirals was a not so minor concern in a navy expanding as rapidly and hugely as the present Royal Manticoran Navy. Just as even the new, highly automated designs still needed complete bridge crews, complete engineering officer complements, admirals still needed staffs, and there simply weren't that many experienced staff officers to go around. For example, Michelle herself still didn't have a staff intelligence officer. At the moment, Cynthia Lecter was wearing that hat as well as holding down the chief of staff's slot, which was rather unfair to her. On the other hand, at least she'd spent a tour with ONI two deployments ago, so she knew what she was doing in both slots. And it didn’t hurt that Gervais Archer was turning out to be a surprisingly competent assistant intelligence officer.
There were undoubtedly other reasons for the White Haven Admiralty's new thinking, as well, but in combination, they explained why the 106th Battlecruiser Squadron consisted of eight units, not six. And, to be perfectly frank, Michelle didn't really care what other reasons there might have been. She was too busy gloating over the possession of those two additional battlecruisers.
Not that most other navies would consider them "battlecruisers," I suppose, she told herself. At two and a half million tons, the new Nike-class ships were closing in on the size of the old battleships no one had built for the last fifty or sixty T-years, and some navies — like the Sollies, she thought sourly — still defined ship types by tonnage brackets which had become obsolete even before the First Havenite War . But even though the Nikes were the next best thing to half again the size of her dead Ajax, Achilles was capable of almost seven hundred gravities' acceleration at maximum military power. And her magazines were crammed with over six thousand Mark 16 dual-drive missiles.
I don't care how big she is, she's still a battlecruiser, though, Michelle thought. It's the function, the doctrine, that counts, not just tonnage. And by that meter stick, she's a battlecruiser, all right. One from the dark side of Hell, maybe, but still a battlecruiser. And I've got eight of her.
It was possible, she admitted to herself, watching the plot as the tugs moved her new command steadily away from Hephaestus, that flag rank did have its own compensations.
All this discussion of how deadly these battlecruisers are can have only one end…I predict a desperate battle against overwhelming odds…say an entire fleet?
Sounds like. A major battles involving guile and a nearly mind-numbing degree of firepower. I suspect that in the Honorverse they achieve fusion explosions with little or no fissiles, because that’d be a lot of plutonium. Perhaps shaped gravity fields to get supercriticality at a lower mass? Fusion bottle self-destruct?
She’s is a big mean girl. Whats so disturbing to me is that HH’s Nike if I remember correctly was the biggest BC in space at that time and she was 890K IIRC.
One thing I’ve always wondered was… Whatever happened to Honor’s old ships.
Hawkwing was destroyed
Fearless I was scrapped
Fearless II ???
Nike was renamed to give the Nike name over to the new class but what about after that?
Terrible ???
Wayfarer ???
Jason Alvarez ???
Farnese ???
Werewolf ???
Thats it isn’t it?
A Big all out battle between the manicores’s Nike’s and Mesa’s Sharks ??
@iggy
You are right about the Reliant-class. But that was over 20 years ago. We know the Warlords are a bit bigger, and we can asume that the Nevadas too are in the range of 900-950k.
About the ships:
Hawkwing=destroyed
Fearless=scrapped
Fearless=?
Nike=renamed Hancock Station
Terrible= ? but most propably scrapped (she was an prewar-havenite tube-waller from Grayson. Or in other words the most obsolete waller the GSN had).
Wayfarer=Destroyed
Jason Alvarez=?
Farnese=? propably scrapped (an Warlord – wich means obsolete – without the correspondending parts in the GSN).
Werewolf=? propably destroyed or scrapped after the Battle of Manticore (IIRC she was part of Alice Trumans squadron and as such with the 3rd fleet).
From what she’s saying, I would say that when a Sollie stumbles upon them, that Sollie will claim that Manticore has deployed battleships to the Cluster.
IMO, this is a legacy of the original concept of the story. What class a ship was made a big difference in the Napoleonic era, because they all used the same basic technology. Bigger ships had more and bigger guns, while smaller ships were faster.
Contrast that to today’s navy, where the fastest ships are submarines and aircraft carriers and the occasional hydrofoil patrol boat, and the biggest ships (aircraft carriers) don’t carry any guns at all. In other words, today’s navy is much more specialized than the Napoleonic navies.
Weber jumped through a number of hoops in order to deliberately set up his stories like the Napleonic navies, but now he is making his ships more like a modern navy.
I’m not sure why he feels the need to go into great detail about how these ships have this tonnage and those ships have that tonnage, etc. However, judging by the comments on this site it does seem as though many of his fans do care.
Why would it matter whether these ships are “battlecruisers” or “battleships”? Unless there is some external restriction (like the Washington Naval Treaty that restricted the number and size of capital ships between the World Wars), who cares?
@Mike
As Admiral Henke said, it’s a matter of tactical doctrine. Battleships are technically wallers, battlecruisers aren’t.
They’ve got two very different strategic roles.
The idea is that Frontier Fleet may look at the tonnage and go “Holy Klono, the SEM is shipping Wallers out here? Get me out of here!” and expect to be able to outrun them. I expect they’ve got better intel, but then they might not.
John Roth
@MadMcAl
I forgot the Wayfarer was essentially destroyed. I should know better becuase one of my favorite line’s in that book came at the end when Honor tells the helm to “stand her on her toes!” to take the after aspect of her wedge away from the Haven BC. It paints pretty vivid picture of the battle IMO. IIRC that was also a fight fought in Hyper.
I bet the second Fearless either got popped in one of the innumerable little battles of the first or second war or its with Sarnow in Silesia. Choosing to rehab Warlock in SOS was a nice touch, but I would have liked it better if DW had chosen Fearless instead.
IIRC Jason Alvarez was a pretty nasty CA comparable to a SAG-A or close, she didn’t have a bow wall but she was heavily armed with an all big gun armament and given Grayson’s style I’m willing to bet she’s still active as a screen or in Silesia if she didn’t get popped as well.
I thought it was bad luck to rename a ship? How much do you wanna bet that the took all the BC43 china out of her and put it on Oversteegen’s boat when she was finished. That is one of those things that to me set DW and the Honorverse apart from a lot of Sci Fi. Little touches like that!
Do you think Werewolf would have been reassigned to third fleet or would they have sent her back to Silesia as flagship for the next Station CO?
I would agree on Terrible (maybe mothballs) but do you think the Grayson’s would scrap Farnese. She was a battered hulk but she was a piece of history. One of those ships like Unconquered that you think someone would try to salvage and make a museum out of her. Leave her as is in a parking orbit around Grayson.
Someone should E-mail DW and ask him what ever happened to Fearless, Jason Alvarez, Farnese and Werewolf and the others.
@iggy
About the last fight of the Wayfarer you are right. And there is no essentially in the destruction. She was blown up by Honor after leaving.
Between an Jason Alvarez and an Sag-A lay around 10 years. The JA is an rather an more modern Star Knight than an less modern Sag-A. But if she isn’t lost in battle then she sould cruise arround just fine.
Why should they mothball the Terrible? Remember, she was an older havenite waller. She was small, obsolete, non standard and an tube waller. And if Grayson consideres scrapping the Benjamin the Great, there is no reason to let the Terrible hunker arround.
Same with the Farnese. Yes, she has history. Yes she carried the national saint of Grayson from Hell (literally and figuratively) but that is all. If Grayson would ever make one ship of Honor an museum I would think that they buy Fearless outright from the RMN. That would an very poetic end for her.
About Werewolf, yes I am sure. AAC, chapter 10, where Honor explains that 8th fleet will have 2 full squadrons of CLAC’s to her staff and flag-captain. There she mentions Werewolf explicitely, to Rafe.
@John Roth – Or absent good intel, the “arrogant Sollies” in their essentially obsolete SDs may go something like “Piffle! A battleship?!?!? That class is utterly obsolete and useless! What were those stupid neobarbs thinking? Idiots!” and then hopefully proceed to slip their head into the grinder…
@mike – And as far as who cares about ship types/tonnages, accelerations, etc.. Well, judging from traffic here and conversations with other Honorverse fans, there are a lot of us techno-alpha-geeks, and/or military history nuts who enjoy the Napoleonic parallels, and/or folks who want a detailed framework for the story even if they don’t necessarily ‘get’ all the historical references and so on…
The characteristic definition of a battlecruiser (which is a class that was only built from about 1900-1940) is “a ship that has the offense of a capital ship but not the armor”. In other words, it’s a ship that would not be able to stand up to its own weaponry.
They never turned out to be as successful as naval planners had hoped.
The U.S. built wonderful battlecruisers during WWII, we called them Iowa class battleships. But we cheated, they had the speed of a cruiser, the armor and weaponry of a BB.
Well yes, it was the “fast battleships” that drove out the “battlecruisers”. The difference being, as I said, that the battleships had armor intended to stand up to guns of the same caliber that the battleship carried, while the battlecruisers did not.