“On the other hand, I don’t think he was especially pleased to realize he’d allowed anyone who might be connected with the Star Kingdom close enough to get a good look at the after hammerhead of his flagship. Under the circumstances, I didn’t think it would be especially wise of me to pull out a pocket camera and snap a few shots, and the Andies were pretty careful to keep their bow towards the Bane after I got back aboard her, so I couldn’t get any good visuals from her, either. But there were definitely some major differences between her construction and a regular battlecruiser’s. My personnel shuttle crossed her stern at less than half a klick on the run to deliver our ‘guests,’ and it was obvious that she didn’t have much in the way of conventional stern chasers. But what she did have was a great big cargo hatch.”

“I don’t much like the sound of that,” McKeon observed unhappily.

“Well, I can see where a battlecruiser built on the pod format would have a lot of short term firepower,” Wraith Goodrick replied. “But how sustainable would that firepower be? And how long could any battlecruiser’s defenses stand up to a real ship of the wall, especially a pod design, if it came down to that?” He shook his head. “I don’t know. It just doesn’t sound like a really practical concept to me.”

Honor and Brigham glanced at one another, and Honor gave her chief of staff a very small nod.

“Actually,” Mercedes said then, turning to the rest of the table, “the Andies weren’t the first ones to come up with the idea. Or, at least, if they’ve had it, the Graysons have, too, completely independently.”

“Really?” McKeon looked at her sharply. “Why haven’t I heard anything about it, then?”

“You’d have to take that up with High Admiral Matthews, Sir,” Brigham told him calmly. “If I had to guess, though, I’d say it was probably a bit of tit for tat. First Lord Janacek and Admiral Chakrabarti decided to shut down the joint Grayson-Manticoran R&D teams shortly after they took over at the Admiralty. Officially, it was another economy measure, but I’m afraid there were persistent rumors in the GSN that the new management wanted to close down the information flow to Grayson.”

“Why in the world would anyone think that?” Truman demanded in disbelief. “We’re allies, for God’s sake!”

“I’m only telling you what the rumors said, Ma’am,” Brigham replied in a very carefully neutral voice. “No one ever said rumors have to make sense.”

“But—”

Truman started to reply hotly, then closed her mouth with an almost audible click, and Honor hid a bitter little smile as she tasted her friend’s sudden understanding of just how much damage Janacek and High Ridge truly had managed to do to the bonds Grayson and the Queen’s Navy had forged out of so much shed blood.

“At any rate,” Brigham went on, returning her attention to McKeon, “the new Courvoisier II-class battlecruisers are a pod design. The Office of Shipbuilding reduced their conventional missile broadsides by over eighty percent, which let them build in superdreadnought-sized energy weapons.” McKeon’s eyes widened and turned suddenly thoughtful, and the chief of staff shrugged. “I think there was some pressure to go to something more on the lines of the Invictuses and suppress the broadside tubes entirely, but Shipbuilding decided against it. Still, Wraith is right that they can’t sustain their maximum rate of missile fire for anything like as long as a pod superdreadnought. But then, a conventional battlecruiser design couldn’t sustain the missile fire of a pre-pod ship of the wall, either. And the exercises we’ve conducted in Grayson certainly seem to suggest that the new design has a much better chance of surviving against ships of the wall.”