None of those things had been here when she’d first visited Marsh almost ten T-years ago. Then, Sidemore had been a backwater, a place merchant ships visited only by mistake, and thus the perfect hideout base for the brutal “privateers” who had taken it over. Thirty-one thousand of Sidemore’s citizens had died during that occupation, over a third of them in a single, horrific instant when Andre Warnecke detonated his demonstration nuke as a mere bargaining ploy. But that wasn’t going to happen again, she thought with deep satisfaction. Even if the RMN pulled out tomorrow, the Sidemore Navy would make mincemeat out of any privateer or pirate stupid enough to poke his nose into this system again.

Sidemore wasn’t in the same league as Grayson, but Honor was honest enough to admit that that was at least partly because Sidemore had never been as important to Manticore as Grayson was. The Star Kingdom had pulled out all the stops to build Grayson into the industrial powerhouse it had become, and for all the crudity of its pre-Alliance tech base, Grayson had been aggressively dragging itself up by its own bootstraps for well over sixty years before Manticore ever arrived in its neighborhood. And much as Honor loved her adopted planet and respected the industry and determination of its people, she was also honest enough to admit that it had been only Grayson’s astrographic position which had attracted the Star Kingdom’s notice in the first place.

Which was also true for Sidemore. But Grayson had been seen as essential to Manticoran security; Sidemore had simply been a convenience. And so Sidemore hadn’t received the same loan guarantees, or been the subject of the same investment incentives and tax breaks, or been the site of major shipyards, as Grayson had been. Which, in its way, made what the Sidemorians had achieved even more impressive, despite how modest it appeared in the shadow of Grayson’s accomplishments.

Honor was delighted to see the unmistakable signs of a planet whose industrialization process had taken on a self-sustaining life of its own. There were freighters building in Sidemore orbit these days, not just the light warships of the Sidemore Navy, and the planetary president had already conducted Honor on a proud tour of the planet’s new orbital resource extraction facilities and smelters. Those facilities had grown almost entirely out of the RMN’s need for them to support the orbital repair yard it had built here to service its ships on Sidemore Station, but they’d become self-perpetuating since then. The Marsh System wasn’t going to be posing any threats to the Manticoran balance of payments with Silesia any time soon, but Honor was delighted to see how shrewdly and successfully the planet was exploiting its new industrial power by expanding into the Silesian trade. Unless something very unfortunate happened—like a war which brought the Andermani navy rampaging through the system—Sidemore would be able to sustain its new prosperity and expand upon it even if Manticore withdrew from the region.