kzt wrote:Like the part of the text that says the ship works up at bolthole and then the ship and crew get assigned to the field forces.
It implied that a lot of the training facilities for the RHN are located there too, as she gets crudités for greatly improving the standard of training.
Quite a few of the first tranche of modern Havenite SDs actually worked up at Bolthole, and that was where Shannon developed the training syllabus which substantially improved enlisted crew capabilities (remember; they used to rely on plug-and-replace even for minor faults and had significant maintenance issues) as well as improved tactical skills.
Very few ships have worked up at Bolthole since. Even for those that did, the crews arrived aboard ships who were assigned solely to the run to Bolthole from Haven itself. They worked up aboard ship without worrying about celestial fixes or anything of the sort, because those aren't needed for training maneuvers. The ships' computers are then scrubbed of all astro data they
might have recorded at Bolthole and a "passage astrogation crew" takes over the navigation home (just like "passage pilots" take ships through the Panama Canal today). They arrive at Haven having made the voyage through hyper. No one on board (aside from the passage crew) knows how high in the bands they've gone or whether they made a straight line flight or one with multiple dog legs, and no two passage flights are the same duration (understanding, of course, that each "passage flight" could consist of scores of ships), so it's impossible to calculate a distance factor even to and from the Havenite end of the warp bridge. The passage crew then scrubs all record of its astrogation from the ship's computers, hands astro back to the regular crew, and boards the next shuttle back to Bolthole.
You cannot prevent the embarked crews from knowing the trip required a wormhole transit, but aside from the personnel actively involved in the astrogation, that's all anyone really knows.
Now, there were bunches of people involved in the original survey, and there are bunches of people who have been involved in the shuttle flights. Most of the folks who were involved are safely deceased, thanks to Cordelia Ransom, if they were Legislaturalist officers, and courtesy of "Dead-Men-Tell-No-Tales" Saint-Just, after he and Pierre took over management of Bolthole, if they
weren't Legislaturalists. Some of them are still left, however, and the passage crew represent a very sizable slice of personnel, so
eventually the exact location is likely to leak one way or another, but it will definitely be a nontrivial exercise to break the security wall to make that happen. It's not quite as difficult as it would be to steal the football codes from SAC. but it's a real toughie.
The folks on the Manticoran side who actually know Bolthole's location are
very limited in number. Recall that the only internal PoV on this that you saw was in the mind of one of Honor's most trusted staff officers, who is "treecat-vetted" and cleared for "Cut-Throat-Before-Reading" security classifications.
Can the secret be kept forever? Of course not, and I never suggested that it could. Can it be kept A Really, Really Long Time? Sure it can!
Darius is more vulnerable in some ways and even less so in others. It lies at the other end of a known but (so far as the rest of the galaxy knows) unsurveyed warp bridge. Even ships using other termini of the same wormhole won't have a clue that there
is a Darius Terminus unless they use really sophisticated instrumentation on their way through, which would be kinda hard to hide . . . and would have Serious Consequences if the MA spotted them doing it. It is, however, the working up point for the Alignment's entire naval force, and that force has been dispatched
through hyper-space on operations, including Oyster Bay, which means a much greater slice of its personnel know its location completely irrespective of the wormhole terminus. The Alignment, however, has an additional ace in the hole in that its astrogation personnel are even better protected against interrogation drugs than anyone else's; they just drop dead if they're captured or deliberately reveal that classified information. As soon as one of their ships is captured and, for some reason, the fail safes fail (not real likely with Honorverse tech, but not completely impossible by any means), there will be oodles of astro data leading back to Darius.
So the two sides have differing levels of exposure and differing scales/means of protection, but both of them are still pretty secure at this moment.
Note that I said "at this moment."
