Honorverse favorite passages

"For that matter, they've got another option, Hamish," Honor pointed out. "One that actually worries me more, in some ways."

"What option?" Elizabeth asked.

"They could just refuse to declare war at all," Honor said bleakly. Elizabeth looked confused, and Honor shrugged.

"If we get into a shooting war with the League and we're going to have any chance of achieving a military victory—or, for that matter, of inflicting the kind of casualty totals Hamish was just talking about, so that they settle for a negotiated peace—we're going to have to take the war to them. We're going to have to demonstrate everything we've learned about deep-area raids instead of system-by-system advances. We're going to have to go after their military infrastructure. Take out their more modern and larger system defense force components. Rip up their rear areas, wipe out their existing, obsolete fleet and its trained personnel, take out the shipyards they'd use to build new ships. In other words, we're going to have to go after them with everything we have, using every trick we've learned fighting Haven, and demonstrate that we can hurt them so badly that they have no choice but to sue for peace."

Elizabeth's face had hardened with understanding, and her brown eyes were grim as they met Honor's.

"But even that won't be enough," Honor continued. "We can blow up Solarian fleets every Tuesday for the next twenty years without delivering a genuine knockout blow to something the size of the League. The only way to actually defeat it—and to make sure that we've put a stake through its heart and it doesn't just go away, build a new fleet, and then come back for vengeance a few years down the road—is to destroy it."

Elizabeth's hard eyes widened in surprise, and Sir Anthony Langtry stiffened in his chair. Even White Haven looked shocked, and Honor shrugged again.

"Let's not fool ourselves here," she said flatly. "Destroying the League would be the only way for the Star Empire to survive in the long haul. And frankly, I, for one, think that might actually be a practical objective, under the right circumstances."

"Honor, with all due respect," Langtry said, "we're talking about the Solarian League."

"A point of which I'm well aware, Tony." Her smile was as bleak as her tone. "And I realize we're all accustomed to thinking of the League as the biggest, wealthiest, most powerful, most advanced, most anything-you-want-to-mention political unit in the history of humanity. Which means that right along with that, we think of it as some sort of indestructible juggernaut. But nothing is truly indestructible. Crack any history book, if you don't believe me. And I'm seeing quite a few signs that the League is at or very near—if, in fact, it isn't already past—the tipping point. It's too decadent, too corrupt, too totally assured of its invincibility and supremacy. Its internal decision-making is too unaccountable, too divorced from what the League's citizens really want—or, for that matter, think they're actually getting! We were just talking about Governor Barregos and Admiral Roszak. Hasn't it occurred to any of you that what's really happening in the Maya Sector is only the first leaf of autumn? That there are other sectors—not only in the Verge, but in the Shell, and even in the Old League itself—that are likely to entertain thoughts of breaking away if the League's veneer of inevitability ever cracks?"

They were all looking at her now, most of them with less shock and more speculation, and she shook her head.

"So if we get into an all-out war with the League, our strategy is going to have to have a very definite political element. We'll have to make it clear that the war wasn't our idea. We'll have to drive home the notion that we're not after any sort of punitive peace, that we're not trying to annex any additional territory, that we have no desire to conduct reprisals against people who don't want to fight us. We need to tell them, every step of the way, that what we really want is a negotiated settlement . . . and at the same time, we have to hit the League as a whole so hard that the fracture lines already there under the surface open right up. We have to split the League into separate sectors, into successor states, none of which have the sheer size and concentrated industrial power and manpower of the present league. Successor states that are our own size, or smaller. And we have to negotiate bilateral peace treaties with each of those successor states as they declare their willingness to opt out of the general conflict to get us to stop beating on their heads. And once we have those peace treaties, we have to not only honor them, but step beyond them. We need to use trade incentives, mutual defense pacts, educational assistance, every single thing we can think of to show them that we are—and to really be, not just pretend to be—the sort of neighbor and ally they'll want around. In other words, once we break the League militarily, once we splinter it into multiple, mutually independent star nations, we have to see to it that none of those star nations have any motive to fuse themselves back together and gang up on us all over again."

She paused, and there was a new and different silence in the conference room. All of them, with the probable exception of Hamish Alexander-Harrington, were gazing at her in astonishment. Elizabeth looked less surprised than most of the others, but there was an edge almost of wonder in her expression.

Not a man or woman at that table would have questioned Duchess Harrington's military insight, or tactical or strategic ability . . . in the purely military arena. Yet most of them still tended to think of her as a fleet commander. Manticore's best fleet commander, perhaps, but still a fleet commander. As they'd listened to her, they'd come to realize how silly that was—and how foolish they'd been not to recognize their own silliness much earlier. In their defense, most of the insight she'd previously shown in the field of political strategy and analysis had focused on domestic concerns, or on the internal workings of the Manticoran Alliance. It hadn't occurred to them that she might have already focused that formidable ability on the Solarian League as the Star Empire's next great challenge, and that had been remarkably blind of them.

"I think you're right," Elizabeth said finally, and managed a half-humorous grimace. "I suppose I've been so fixated on how much I don't want to fight the League, how terrifying an opponent it would be, that I've been much more aware of our own weaknesses and disadvantages than I have of any weaknesses it might suffer from."

"You're not the only one who's been guilty of that, Your Majesty," Sir Thomas Caparelli said. "Over at Admiralty House, the Strategy Board has been aware for quite some time of the need to launch all-out operations against the League in the event of open hostilities. But we'd never been able to take our planning beyond the point of somehow beating the League to its knees, taking out its military infrastructure, and then committing the Star Empire to a multigeneration occupation policy. There's no way we could possibly hope to garrison or physically occupy every system of the League, or even just the more important industrial nodes. But what we could do is to picket the major systems. To require the League to renounce a large, modern navy after defeating its existing navy militarily, and then to post observers in all of the systems where a navy like that could be rebuilt in order to keep an eye on the shipyards and call in our own heavy units at the first sign of treaty violations in the form of new warship construction.

"But the problem with that kind of strategy is that it virtually assures that at some point someone in the League is going to emerge with a revanchist policy and the muscle to back it up. They're going to figure out a way to do a Thomas Theisman on us, and they're going to be able to build a fleet big enough to at least force us to pull our pickets out of the occupied systems to deal with it. At which point other systems that won't like us very much will join the fray and then, as Hamish so succinctly put it, we're toast.

"But if Honor is right—and, actually, I think there's a very good chance she is—about the probability of the League's being much more fragile than anyone is accustomed to believing, then there's another option. Her option. Instead of occupying the League for generations, we accept that it's already moribund, break it up, and make its successors our allies and trade partners, not our enemies."

" 'I destroy my enemy when I make him my friend,' " White Haven quoted softly.

"What?" His brother blinked at him, and the earl smiled.

"A quote from an Old Earth politician Honor's gotten me interested in, Willie. I think it has to do with her views on genetic slavery."

"What politician?" Grantville still looked puzzled.

"A president of the ancient United States of America named Abraham Lincoln said that," White Haven said. "And if I'm remembering correctly, he also said 'If you would win a man to your cause, first convince him that you are his sincere friend.' " He smiled again, this time at his wife, much more broadly. "I can see I haven't read him as carefully as Honor has, but you ought to take a look at him, too, now that I think about it. He was in a pretty sticky military situation himself."

"Well, maybe I've got a point, and maybe I don't," Honor said a bit more briskly, and her expression had turned bleak once again. "But assuming I do, then the most dangerous thing I can see the League doing is simply refusing to declare war on us and conducting whatever operations are going on in and around the Talbott Quadrant as a 'police action.' If they refuse to extend their operations beyond that area, no matter how intensive their operations are within that area, and if they consistently take the position that they're reacting defensively, then we can't expand the fighting into the other areas where we would need to take the war to them before they manage to duplicate our hardware advantages without becoming the aggressor in the eyes of all the rest of the League. And if we do that, our chances of breaking the League and 'destroying our enemy by making him our friend' probably go right out the airlock. Which means they get the time they need to build the steamroller they need to roll right over us."

"Wonderful," Elizabeth sighed.

"I'll admit it's worrisome." Despite his words, White Haven sounded quite a bit more cheerful than his wife had, "but I'm also inclined to think it's very unlikely the League's real leadership in the bureaucracies is truly going to recognize its danger soon enough to adopt a sensible policy like that. I realize that predicting what your enemy will do and then betting everything you have on the probability that your prediction is accurate is a really, really stupid thing to do. I'm not suggesting we do anything of the sort, either. But at the same time, I think there's a very real probability, not just a possibility, that as soon as OFS and the SLN realize just what sort of sausage machine they've shoved their fingers into, they're going to start screaming for all the help they can get. Whether they paint us as savage aggressors or themselves as liberators, they're going to take this a lot further than any mere 'police action.' "

"And they wouldn't be the only decision-makers involved in the process, either." Sir Anthony Langtry sounded much more thoughtful than he had a few moments before. "Whatever position they take, we'll always be able to edge at least a little further around their flank, push them a little more in the direction we want to go, without turning ourselves into Attila the Hun in starships in the eyes of the rest of the League. We'll have to be careful, but we've had plenty of experience dancing around the League in the past. As long as we coordinate our PR and diplomatic and military efforts carefully, I think we'll be able to shape the political and diplomatic side of the battleground much more effectively than you may have been allowing for, Honor. And it's not like we're not going to have allies inside the League, either—especially if Manpower's role in all of this becomes public knowledge. Beowulf carries a hell of a lot of prestige, and every one of her daughter colonies is going to follow her lead where anything having to do with genetic slavery is involved. I think we can count—no, I know we can count—on a powerful Solarian lobby on our side in any Mesa-engineered confrontation."

"And there's still another side to all of this, Your Majesty," Patricia Givens pointed out. "Thanks to the wormhole network, we have an enormous degree of penetration into the League. If they try to shut the network down to cut off our trade, they'll cripple themselves just as badly—possibly even worse—by effectively destroying the carrying trade they rely on. For that matter, until they do manage to overcome the advantages of our hardware—for the foreseeable future, in other words—we should be able to keep all of the critical termini open with fairly light forces. All of which means we'll continue to have a lot of contact with the League and that we're actually likely to have considerably more economic clout with quite a few of the League's sectors than the League bureaucracy itself does. Which would mean one hell of a lot more clout than anything as ephemeral as an elected League politician could hope for. If we use that clout while bearing in mind the need to make our enemies into friends, rather than letting ourselves turn predatory in the short-term interests of survival, I think we could probably pry quite a few of the League's citizens loose from it."

There was silence again, and then Elizabeth inhaled deeply.

"Honor, I have to say you've pointed my mind in a direction that makes me feel much less pessimistic about the future. Mind you, there's still a huge difference between 'less pessimistic' and anything I'd call remotely 'optimistic,' but I think you've got me headed in the right direction."

npadln wrote:Favorite passages? How about favorite one word sentences?
"Fire." Echoes of Honor.

ksandgren wrote:

npadln wrote:Favorite passages? How about favorite one word sentences?
"Fire." Echoes of Honor.

There is a favorite one liner thread. It WAS much larger than this one, but after we filled it, these larger passages remained to be discussed and appreciated.

"Oops."

"No!" ... Elizabeth's emphatic response to Pierre's offer of peace.

"Bleek!"

“I don’t know how much longer, Captain,” Frinkelo Osborne replied as calmly and reasonably as he could. “I wish I did. And, while we’re being so frank with each other, I wish you weren’t here doing this, either.” He shook his head, his expression even more disgusted than Venelli’s. “It’s like using a hammer to crack an egg. Or maybe more like spanking a baby with an ax!”

Venelli’s blue eyes narrowed and she sat back in her chair. She’d dealt with more Office of Frontier Security personnel in her career than she could have counted—certainly a lot more of them than she could have wished! Too many of them, in her experience, were entirely in favor of using hammers on eggs, if only to discourage the next chicken from getting out of line.

At the moment, however, she was concentrating fairly hard on not looking at that chart, since she found herself rather in the position of someone with insufficient icing to cover the birthday cake she’d just been given.

Well, I’ve made up for it since, haven’t I, Honor? Forty-one years from the Academy to vice admiral, then only eleven T-months to full admiral! Talk about a career catching fire. Of course, her amusement faded, it would have been nice if the rest of the galaxy hadn’t decided to catch fire right along with it.

cthia wrote:The lovely sense of humor that is Michelle Henke's amusement.

Shadow of Freedom

Well, I’ve made up for it since, haven’t I, Honor? Forty-one years from the Academy to vice admiral, then only eleven T-months to full admiral! Talk about a career catching fire. Of course, her amusement faded, it would have been nice if the rest of the galaxy hadn’t decided to catch fire right along with it.

Michelle put down her book viewer as the admittance chime on her hospital door sounded quietly.

"Yes?" she said, depressing the key on her bedside com.

"Secretary of War Theisman is here, Admiral," the voice of Lieutenant Jasmine Coatsworth, the senior floor nurse said, just a little bit nervously. "He'd like a few minutes of your time, if that would be convenient."

Both of Michelle's eyebrows rose. Just over a week had passed since her unexpected encounter with Eloise Pritchart. She'd had a handful of other visitors during that time, but most of them had been relatively junior officers, there to report to her in her role as the senior Manticoran POW about the status of her people and the other prisoners in Havenite hands. All of them had been professional and courteous, although she'd sensed a certain inevitable restraint which went beyond the normal restraint of a junior officer in the presence of a flag officer. No one had mentioned the possibility of a visit from Thomas Theisman himself, however.

"Well, Jasmine," she replied after a moment, with a smile she couldn't quite suppress (not that she tried all that hard, to be fair), "let me check my calendar." She paused for a single breath, eyes dancing with amusement, then cleared her throat. "By the strangest coincidence, I happen to be free this afternoon," she said. "Please, ask the Secretary to come in."

There was a moment of intense silence. Then the door slid open, and Lieutenant Coatsworth looked in. The expression on her face almost broke Michelle's self-control and sent her off in peals of laughter, but she managed to restrain herself. Then her eyes went past the nurse to the stocky, brown-haired man in civilian dress, accompanied by a dark-haired Navy captain with the shoulder rope which denoted her status as a senior officer's personal aide.

"I'm glad you were able to find time in your schedule for me, Admiral," the brown-haired man said dryly. His own lips appeared to hover on the edge of smiling, and Michelle shook her head.

Which was precisely the reason Sandra Crandall had waited a carefully considered three-quarters of an hour before deigning to respond to the Manticorans' challenges, Commander Shavarshyan reflected. Not to mention the reason she'd decided to conduct her first contact with them from such an extended range. She could say all she wanted in her official report about remaining far enough out to respect the Spindle hyper limit in order to preclude any avoidable incidents, but the real reason was to make the Manties sweat during the nine-minute transmission lag each way. Conducting any sort of official conversation with that kind of delay built in between exchanges came under the heading of calculated insult—additional calculated insult, given her refusal even to identify herself as legally required—and she hadn't bothered to hide her enjoyment of the thought, at least in her private meetings with her senior staffers.

After all, he thought, it would never do to have these neobarbs thinking we take them seriously, would it? He shook his head mentally. I think she'll take it as a personal failure if she misses a single opportunity to piss one of them off. And if she finds out she has missed one, I'm sure she'll go back and—

His thoughts broke off rather abruptly, and his lips twitched with a sudden and utterly inappropriate desire to grin as a shortish, slender man with thinning gray hair appeared on the master com display. Instead of the cringing, perspiring poor devil Crandall had expected to discover bending anxiously over his com, imploring her to respond to his terrified communications pleas while he waited for the looming Solarian juggernaut to take note of his wretched existence, the man on the display wasn't even looking into his own pickup. Instead, he was angled two-thirds of the way away from his terminal, tipped back in his chair, heels propped on the seat of another chair which had been turned to face him, while he gazed calmly at the book reader in his lap. A book reader which was aligned—not, Shavarshyan suspected, just coincidentally—so that a sharp eyed observer could look over his shoulder and recognize a novel about the psychically gifted detective Garrett Randall by the highly popular Darcy Lord.

The man on the display went right on looking at his book reader, hit the page advance, then twitched as somebody outside the field of his own pickup hissed something in what had to be a carefully audible stage whisper. He glanced over his shoulder at his own display, then straightened, bookmarked his place, turned to face the com, pressed a button to terminate what had obviously been a purely automated repeating challenge, and smiled brightly.

"Well, there you are!" he said cheerfully.

For a moment, Shavarshyan cherished the hope apoplexy might carry Crandall off. Her demise would have to improve the situation. Although, he reminded himself conscientiously, that might be wishful thinking on his part. Admiral Dunichi Lazlo, BatRon 196's CO, her second-in-command, was no great prize . . . and no mental giant, either. Still, watching Crandall froth at the mouth and collapse in convulsions would have afforded the Frontier Fleet commander no end of personal satisfaction.

The Solarian League Navy had been the premier navy of the explored galaxy for centuries. Indeed, no one could remember a time when it hadn't been acknowledged as the most powerful fleet in existence. But that very preeminence had worked to undermine its efficiency. There was, quite simply, no enemy for it to take seriously, no peer against which to measure itself, no Darwinian incentive to identify weaknesses and correct them.

The nature of the Solarian League itself, dominated by the permanent bureaucrats who actually ran it rather than the political leadership which had long since lost any power to rein in those bureaucrats, was another factor. As with the civilian bureaucracies, the naval bureaucracy had become immovably entrenched, and the internecine warfare between competing departments for limited funding had been both intense and brutal. Funding decisions were fought out on the basis of who had the most clout, not the greatest need, and owed very little indeed to any impartial analysis of actual operational requirements. So it probably wasn't very surprising that the fundamental assumption of Solarian technological supremacy in all things meant R&D's budget was the smallest of all. After all, since the SLN's technology was already better than anyone else's, why waste money on that when it could more profitably be spent on prestigious things like additional superdreadnoughts . . . or quietly eased into the private banking accounts of Navy procurement officials?

All of which helped to explain why the SLN had also been one of the galaxy's most conservative navies. With thousands of ships in commission, and more thousands mothballed in reserve, its margin of superiority over any conceivable opponent had been utterly decisive. Which meant getting money even to build new ships, or to radically overhaul and modernize existing ones, had always been a difficult exercise. As one consequence, the SLN had been slow to recognize the potential of the laser head, and even slower to adopt it. And because no one had ever used similar weapons against it, its evaluation of the threat the new weapon presented—and of the doctrinal changes necessary to defeat it—had lagged behind even its own hardware.

That lag was about to have serious repercussions for SLNS Jean Bart.

"Launching counter-missiles," Ursula Zeiss announced tersely, and Mizawa gave a jerky nod of acknowledgment.

He wasn't certain how much good the counter-missiles were going to do. The LIM-16F was a third again as capable as its predecessor, but even so, there wouldn't be time for a proper, layered defense. By the time they reached Jean Bart, the Manticoran missiles' closing velocity would be up to seventy-nine percent of the speed of light. The LIM-16's drive simply didn't have the endurance to hit the monsters the Manties had launched far enough out for an effective second launch at the same targets before they zipped right through the entire defensive envelope.

That's going to be a bitch for the laser clusters, too, he thought harshly. And they obviously know where that asshole Byng's been talking to them from. I can hardly fault them for wanting to kill his worthless ass, but I'd just as soon they hadn't decided to kill mine at the same time!

Despite everything—despite his own fear, despite his desperate concern for his ship and his crew, despite even his incandescent fury at Josef Byng—he actually smiled as the last sentence ran through his brain.

Aboard the attacking MDMs, computers consulted their pre-launch instructions, and suddenly jammers and decoys began to blossom. The Solarian counter-missiles were basically sound pieces of technology, but despite the SLN's belated awareness that something peculiar had happened to missile combat out in the Haven Sector, it was only beginning any sort of serious attempt to upgrade its active anti-missile defenses. Worse, neither the hardware nor the officers groping towards some new defense doctrine had profited from the last two decades of savage combat which had refined their Manticoran and Havenite counterparts. Their counter-missiles' software wasn't as good, the doctrine for their use was purely theoretical, without the harsh Darwinian input of survival, and the officers doing their best—not just aboard Jean Bart, but aboard all of Byng's battlecruisers—had no true concept of the threat environment into which they had intruded.

For all of its towering reputation, all of its size, all of the wealth and industrial power which stood behind it, the Solarian League Navy was simply outclassed. Even Frontier Fleet was accustomed only to dealing with pirates, the occasional slaver, or the privateer gone rogue. No one had destroyed a Solarian warship in combat in almost three centuries, and the complacency that had engendered had produced fatal consequences. Despite its preeminent position, the SLN was a second-rate power, inferior even to many of the Solarian system-defense forces it had derided as "amateurs" for so many decades. Far, far worse, the men and women of its officer corps didn't even recognize their own inferiority . . . and Josef Byng's ships found themselves matched against what was by almost any measure the most experienced, battle hardened, and technologically advanced fleet in space.