A Rising Thunder [EPUB]

377 Pages·2.17 MB·English

by  David Weber

A Rising Thunder
Honor Harrington, Book Thirteen

David Weber
David Weber, 2012
Advance Reader Copy
Unproofed
Cover art by David Mattingly

“I’d rather not go there, but if we have to, we might as well go all the way.”
—Queen Elizabeth III of Manticore
Chapter One
“Get your goddamned ships the hell out of my space!”
The burly, dark-haired man on Commander Pang Yau-pau’s com was red-
faced and snarling, and Pang took a firm a grip on his own temper.
“I’m afraid that’s not possible, Commodore Chalker,”
he replied as courteously as the circumstances permitted.
“My orders are to protect Manticoran vessels passing through this terminus
on their way home to Manticoran space.”
“I don’t give a damn about your ‘orders,’
Commander!” Commodore Jeremy Chalker spat back. His six destroyers
were 2.4 million kilometers—eight light-seconds—from Pang’s cruiser, and one
might have thought it would be difficult to maintain a properly infuriated
conversation over such a distance, especially with the delays light-speed
transmissions built into its exchanges.
Chalker seemed able to manage it quite handily, however.
“You’re in violation of my star system’s sovereignty, you’ve evicted
Solarian Astro Control personnel from their duty stations, and I want your ass
gone! ”

“Sir, it’s not my intention to violate anyone’s sovereignty,” Pang replied,
choosing to let the rather thornier question of the Solly traffic controllers lie.
“My sole interest at this time is the protection of the Star Empire’s merchant
vessels.”
Sixteen more seconds ticked past, and then—
“Shut your mouth, return control of this terminus to the personnel whose
control stations you’ve illegally seized, and turn your ass around now, or I will
by God open fire on the next fucking Manty freighter I see!”
Pang Yau-pau’s normally mild brown eyes hardened, and he inhaled deeply.
“Skipper,” a quiet voice said.
The single word couldn’t have been more respectful, yet it was edged with
warning, and Pang hit the mute button and glanced at the smaller screen
deployed from the base of his command chair. Lieutenant Commander Myra
Sadowski, his executive officer looked back at him from it.
“I know he’s a pain in the ass,” she continued in that same quiet voice, “but
we’re supposed to do this without making any more waves than we have to. If
you hand this guy his head the way you want to—the way he deserves, for that
matter—I think it would probably come under the heading of at least a ripple or
two.”
Myra, Pang reflected, had a point. There was, however, a time and a place
for everything. For that matter, the Admiralty hadn’t sent Pang and HMS Onyx
to the Nolan Terminus to let someone like Jeremy Chalker make that sort of
threat.
No, they didn’t, another corner of the commander’s brain told him. At the
same time, I don’t suppose it’s too hard to understand why he’s so pissed off. Not
that it makes me like him any better.

At the moment, Onyx, her sister ship Smilodon, the Roland-class destroyer
Tornado and the much older destroyer Othello were over six hundred and fifty
light-years from the Manticore Binary System and barely two hundred light-
years from the Sol System. It was not a particularly huge force to have
wandering around so deep in increasingly hostile territory, as Pang was only too
well aware. In fact, Nolan was a protectorate system of the Solarian League, and
Chalker was an SLN officer, the senior Frontier Fleet officer present. He looked
old for his rank, which suggested a certain lack of familial connections within
the SLN, although he must have at least some influence to have ended up with
the Nolan command. The system’s proximity to the Nolan Terminus of the
Nolan-Katharina Hyper Bridge was what had brought it to the Office of Frontier
Security’s attention a hundred-odd T-years ago, and the local OFS and Frontier
Fleet officers had been raking off a comfortable percentage of the terminus user
fees ever since. Judging from the reaction of the SLN captain who’d commanded
the OFS-installed terminus traffic control staff when Pang ordered him to turn
his control stations over to Manticoran personnel, another chunk of those fees
had probably been finding its way into his pockets, as well. Precious little of that
revenue had ended up in Nolan itself, at any rate.
Well, at least this time we can be pretty confident we’re not hurting some
innocent third-party star system’s revenue stream, he thought . And it’s not like
we’re planning to keep the terminus…just now, anyway. We’ll give it back to
them when I’m sure we’ve gotten all our ships safely through it. And if someone
like Chalker takes one in the bank account in the meantime, I’m sure I’ll be able
to live with my regret somehow.
Of course, Pang never doubted that the rest of theSolarian League Navy
was going to be just as infuriated as Chalker by Manticore’s “arrogance” in
seizing control of Solarian-claimed termini even temporarily. What was going to
happen when Lacoön Two kicked in hardly bore thinking upon, although anyone
who really thought not executing Lacoön Two was going to make one bit of
difference to the Sollies was probably smoking things he shouldn’t.
“I’m not the one making the waves,” he told Sadowski out loud, then
glanced across Onyx’s command deck at Lieutenant Commander Jack Frazier,
his tactical officer.
“I hope we’re not going to have any business for you, Guns,” he said. “If
we do, I want to hold the damage to a minimum.”
“You’re thinking in terms of something more like what Admiral Gold Peak
did at New Tuscany than what she did at Spindle, Sir?”
“Exactly.” Pang smiled thinly. “Do you have Chalker’s flagship IDed?”
“Yes, Sir.” Frazier nodded with an answering smile. “I do. By the strangest
coincidence, I’ve just this minute discovered that I’ve got her IDed, dialed in,
and locked up, as a matter of fact.”
“Good.”
Pang paused a moment longer, taking an additional few seconds to make
sure he had his own temper under control, then un-muted his audio pickup.
“Commodore Chalker,” he said in a hard, flat voice quite different from the
courteous one he’d employed so far, “allow me to point out two things to you.
First, this terminus is, in fact, not in Nolan’s territorial space. Unless my
astrogation is badly off, it’s five light-hours from Nolan, which puts it just a bit
outside the twelve-minute limit.
The Solarian League’s claim to its possession rests solely on the SLN’s
supposed power to control the space about it.

And, second, in regard to that supposed power, I respectfully suggest you
consider the actual balance of force which obtains at this moment. Based on that
balance, I submit that it would be unwise to issue such threats against
Manticoran shipping…and even less wise to carry them out.”
“Well piss on you, Commander! You and the rest of your ‘Star Empire’ may
think you can throw your weight around any way you like, but there’s a cold
dawn coming, and it’s going to get here sooner than you think!”
“I have my orders, Commodore,” Pang responded in that same flat voice,
“and I don’t intend to debate the question of who’s responsible for the current
state of tension between the Star Empire and the Solarian League.
I fully intend to return control of this terminus to the League—and,
obviously, to restore your personnel to their stations—as soon as I’ve satisfied
myself, as my orders require, that all Manticoran merchant vessels in this
vicinity have been given the opportunity to return to Manticoran space through
it. I regret”—neither his tone nor his expression was, in fact, particularly
regretful—“any inconvenience this may cause for you or any other Solarian
personnel or citizens. I do, however, intend to carry out all of my orders, and one
of those orders is to use whatever level of force is necessary to protect
Manticoran merchant shipping anywhere. And ‘anywhere,’ Commodore Chalker,
includes Solarian space. So if you intend to fire on Manticoran freighters, why
don’t you just start with the ones right here under my protection? Go ahead—be
my guest. But before you do, Admiral, I suggest you recall the Royal Navy’s
position where the protection of merchant shipping is concerned.”
He sat waiting, watching his com for the sixteen seconds his words took to
reach Chalker and for the signal to come back. Precisely on schedule, Chalker’s
face turned even darker.
“And what the fuck does that mean?” the Solarian snarled.
“It means my tactical officer has your flagship identified,” Pang said, and
his smile was a razor.
For another sixteen seconds, Chalker glared out of Pang’s display. Then,
abruptly, his facial muscles went absolutely rigid, as if some magic wand had
turned his face to stone. He stayed that way for several seconds, then shook
himself.
“Are you
threatening
me?” he demanded
incredulously.
“Yes,” Pang said simply. “I am.”
Chalker stared at him, and Pang wondered what else the other man could
have expected to happen.
“You think you can come waltzing into Solarian space and threaten
Solarian citizens? Tell a Solarian warship you’ll open fire on it?” Chalker said
sixteen seconds later.
“It’s not my wish to threaten anyone, Admiral. It is my intention to carry
out my orders and to deal with any threat to the merchant shipping for which I’m
responsible, and you’ve just announced your intention to fire on unarmed
merchant vessels. Should you do so, I will fire on you, and I suggest you recall
what happened to Admiral Byng at New Tuscany. If you actually intend to attack
after doing that, go ahead and let’s get it over with. Otherwise, Sir, I have rather
more important matters which require my attention. Good day.”
He punched the stud that cut the connection and sat back in his command
chair, wondering if Chalker was furious enough—or stupid enough—to accept
his challenge.
If the Solly officer did anything of the sort, it would be the last mistake he
ever made. There was no question about that in Pang’s mind, although he was a
bit less certain about the potential consequences for the future career of one Pang
Yau-pau.
Better to be hung for a hexapuma than a housecat, he thought. And it’s not
like I could’ve found some kind of magic formula to keep the jerk happy, no
matter what I did! At least this way if he’s stupid enough to pull the trigger, it
won’t be because he didn’t know exactly how I’d respond.
He watched his tactical repeater, waiting to see what Chalker would do.
Onyx and Smilodon were both Saganami-Cs, armed with Mark 16 multidrive
missiles and mounting eight grasers in each broadside. At the moment, SLNS
Lancelot, Chalker’s antiquated Rampart-class destroyer flagship and her
consorts were far outside the effective range of their own pathetic energy
armament, and the situation was almost worse when it came to missiles. The
Sollies were within their missiles’ powered engagement range of Pang’s
command, but Lancelot was barely twenty percent Onyx’s size, with
proportionately weaker sidewalls and a broadside of only five lasers and a
matching number of missile tubes. If Chalker was foolish enough to carry out his
threat, he could undoubtedly kill any merchant ship he fired upon. Lancelot’s
chance of getting a laser head through Onyx’s antimissile defenses, on the other
hand, much less burning through the cruiser’s sidewalls, ranged from precious
little to nonexistent.
Good thing Chalker wasn’t on station when we arrived, though, I suppose,
Pang thought. God knows what he’d’ve done if he’d been inside energy range
when we transited the terminus! And when you come right down to it, it’s a good
thing he’s such a loudmouthed idiot, too. It was only a matter of time until one of
the incoming Solly merchies diverted to Nolan to let someone know what was
going on out here. If the jackass had been willing to keep his mouth shut until he
managed to get into energy range, this situation could’ve turned even stickier. In
fact, it could have gone straight to hell in a handbasket if someone stupid
enough to pull the trigger had managed to get that close before he did it.
Without a clear demonstration of hostile intent, it would have been
extraordinarily difficult for Pang to justify actually opening fire on units of the
SLN. He would have had little choice—legally, at least—but to allow Chalker to
approach all the way to the terminus threshold, and that could have turned really
nasty. Fortunately, Chalker had been unable to keep his mouth shut, and his open
threat to fire on Manticoran merchant ships constituted plenty of justification for
Pang to give him the Josef Byng treatment if he kept on closing.
Thank you, Commodore Chalker, he thought sardonically.
As a matter of fact, although Pang Yau-pau wasn’t prepared to admit it to
anyone, even Sadowski, he was only too aware of his own crushing
responsibilities and the sheer vastness of the Solarian League. Nor was he going
to admit how welcome he’d actually found Chalker’s bellicosity under the
circumstances. Any officer who commanded a Queen’s starship knew sooner or
later he was going to find himself out on a limb somewhere where he’d have to
put his own judgment on the line, yet at this particular moment Commander
Pang and his small command had crawled out to the end of a very, very long
limb, indeed.
They were a mere three wormhole transits away from the Manticore Binary
System, but it certainly didn’t feel that way. The Dionigi System was only
ninety-six light years from Manticore, but it was connected to the Katharina
System, over seven hundred and thirty light-years away, by the Dionigi-
Katharina Hyper Bridge. And the Nolan-Katharina Bridge, in turn, was one of
the longest ever surveyed, at nine hundred and fifteen light-years. Even allowing
for the normal hyper-space leg between Manticore and Dionigi, he could be
home in less than two weeks, instead of the eighty days or so it would have
taken his warships to get there on a direct voyage.
It would have taken a ship with a commercial-grade hyper generator and
particle screening better than seven months to make the same trip through hyper,
however, as opposed to only thirty days via Dionigi, which rather graphically
demonstrated the time savings the wormhole networks made possible for
interstellar commerce. And that, in turn, explained the sheer economic value of
that same network…and Manticore’s commanding position within it.
Which explains why the Sollies back in Old Chicago are going to be at least
as pissed off as Chalker, Pang reflected grimly. They’ve been mad enough for
years about the size of our merchant marine, the way we dominate their carrying
trade. Now they’re about to find out just how bad it really is. Once we get all of
our shipping out of Solly space, they’re really going to be hurting, and we’ll
have done it by simply calling our own freighters home, without using a single
commerce-raider or privateer. But when Lacoön Two activates and we start
closing down as much as we can of the entire network, it’s going to get even
worse. They don’t begin to have the hulls to take up the slack even if all the
termini stayed open; with the termini closed, with every ton of cargo having to
spend four or five times as long in transit, to boot…
On the face of it, it was ridiculous, and Pang would be surprised if as much
as five percent of the total Solarian population had a clue—yet—about just how
vulnerable the League really was or how bad it was actually going to get.
Something the size of the Solarian League’s internal economy? With
literally hundreds of star systems, system populations running into the tens of
billions, and the mightiest industrial capacity in the history of mankind?
That sort of Titan couldn’t possibly be brought to its knees by a “Star
Empire” which consisted of no more than a couple of dozen inhabited planets!
But it could, if its pigmy opponent happened to control the bulk of the
shipping which carried that economy’s lifeblood. And especially if the pigmy in
question was also in a position to shut down its arterial system, force its
remaining shipping to rely solely on capillary action to keep itself fed. Even if
Solarian shipyards got themselves fully mobilized and built enough ships to
replace every single Manticoran hull pulled out of the League’s trade, it still
wouldn’t be enough to maintain the shipping routes without the termini.
Of course, it’s not going to do our economy any favors, either, Pang told
himself. Not an insignificant point, especially after the Yawata Strike.
He wondered if the Star Empire’s continued possession of the termini
would be a big enough economic crowbar to pry a few Solarian star systems free
of the League’s control. If the bait of access was trolled in front of system
economies crippled or severely damaged by the termination of cargo service,
would those systems switch allegiance—openly or unofficially—to Manticore
instead of the League? He could think of quite a few in the Verge who’d do it in
a second if they thought they could get away with it. For that matter, he could
think of at least a handful of Shell systems that would probably jump at the
chance.
Well, I guess time will tell on that one. And there’s another good reason for
us to make sure we’re the ones who control the hyper bridges, isn’t there? As
long as we do, no one can launch naval strikes through them at us…
and we can launch naval strikes through them at the League.
Attacking well defended wormhole termini along the bridges between them
was a losing proposition, but the tactical flexibility the network as a whole
would confer upon light, fast Manticoran commerce-raiders would be
devastating. For all intents and purposes, the Star Empire, for all its physical
distance from the Sol System and the League’s other core systems, would
actually be inside the Sollies’ communications loop. The League’s limited
domestic merchant marine would find itself under attack almost everywhere,
whereas the Manticoran merchant marine would continue to travel via the
termini, completely immune to attack between the star systems they linked.
No wonder Chalker was so livid. He might be so stupid he couldn’t
visualize the next step, couldn’t see Lacoön Two coming, but he obviously did
grasp the Manticoran mobility advantage which had brought Pang’s squadron to
Nolan. He might not have reasoned it out yet. Solarian arrogance might have
blinded him to the possibility that Manticore might actually conduct offensive
operations against the omnipotent League instead of huddling defensively in a
frightened corner somewhere. But the mere presence of Pang’s ships this deep
into the Solarian space would have been enough to push his blood pressure
dangerously high, and Pang suspected that deep down inside, whether Chalker
consciously realized it or not, the Solarian officer probably was aware of the
implications of Manticoran mobility.
He glanced at the date-time display in the corner of the master plot. Over
ten minutes since he’d bidden Chalker good day, he noticed. If the Solly had
been infuriated—and stupid—enough to do anything hasty, he’d probably have
already done it. The fact that he hadn’t (yet) didn’t mean stupidity and arrogance
wouldn’t eventually overpower common sense and self-preservation, but it
seemed unlikely.
“Unlikely” wasn’t exactly the same as “no way in hell,” Pang reminded
himself. All the same, it was time to let his people get a little rest…and it
probably wouldn’t hurt for him to display his own imperturbability, either.
Confidence started at the top, after all, and he looked back down at his link
to AuxCon.
“I think Commodore Chalker may have seen the error of his ways, Myra,”
he told Lieutenant Commander Sadowski. “We’ll stand the squadron down to
Readiness Two.”
“Aye, aye, Sir,” she acknowledged.
Readiness State Two, also known as “General Quarters,” was one step short
of Battle Stations.
Engineering and life-support systems would be fully manned, as would
CIC, although Auxiliary Control would be reduced to a skeleton watch. The ship
would maintain a full passive sensor watch, augmented by the remote FTL
platforms they’d deployed as soon as they arrived, and the tactical
department would be fully manned. Passive defenses would be active and
enabled under computer control; electronic warfare systems and active sensors
would be manned and available, although not emitting; and Onyx’s offensive
weapons would be partially manned by their on-mount crews. Readiness Two
was intended to be maintained for lengthy periods of time, so it included
provision for rotating personnel in order to maintain sufficient crew at their duty
stations while allowing the members of the ship’s company to rest in turn. Which
still wouldn’t prevent it from exhausting Pang’s people if they had to keep it up
indefinitely.