A Rising Thunder-ARC Read online

  A Rising Thunder-ARC

  David Weber

  Advance Reader Copy

  Unproofed

  Baen

  BAEN BOOKS by DAVID WEBER

  HONOR HARRINGTON:

  On Basilisk Station

  Honor Among Enemies

  The Honor of the Queen

  In Enemy Hands

  The Short Victorious War

  Echoes of Honor

  Field of Dishonor

  Ashes of Victory

  Flag in Exile

  War of Honor

  At All Costs

  Mission of Honor

  HONORVERSE:

  Crown of Slaves (with Eric Flint)

  Torch of Freedom (with Eric Flint)

  The Shadow of Saganami

  Storm from the Shadows

  EDITED BY DAVID WEBER:

  More than Honor

  Changer of Worlds

  Worlds of Honor

  The Service of the Sword

  Mutineers' Moon

  The Armageddon Inheritance

  Heirs of Empire

  Empire from the Ashes

  In Fury Born

  The Apocalypse Troll

  The Excalibur Alternative

  Bolos!

  Old Soldiers

  Oath of Swords

  The War God's Own

  Wind Rider's Oath

  WITH STEVE WHITE:

  Crusade

  The Shiva Option

  In Death Ground

  Insurrection

  The Stars At War

  The Stars At War II

  WITH ERIC FLINT:

  1633

  1634: The Baltic War

  Torch of Freedom

  WITH JOHN RINGO:

  March Upcountry

  March to the Sea

  March to the Stars

  We Few

  WITH LINDA EVANS:

  Hell's Gate

  Hell Hath No Fury

  A Rising Thunder

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2012 by David Weber

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.

  A Baen Books Original

  Baen Publishing Enterprises

  P.O. Box 1403

  Riverdale, NY 10471

  www.baen.com

  ISBN 13: 978-1-4516-3806-6

  Cover art by David Mattingly

  First printing, March 2012

  Distributed by Simon & Schuster

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  March 1922 Post Diaspora

  “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…