Wrath of the Witch Maiden

Captain Rebecca Duvalier sat patiently in the office of the Fifth Space Lord, awaiting, as her older brother, a Chief Warrant officer still stationed in Silesia would call it, her 'turn in the barrel'. Tommy hated the patronage system so much that when he joined the navy he'd done so as an enlisted man, not the eldest son of the 3rd Baron Duvalier of Oak Glen of Gryphon. Their father had been as fiercely against Aristocratic privilege as the people of his small Barony, and they loved him for it.

But Rebecca had always dreamed of command, and when it came her turn, she applied and was accepted at Saganami Island. Her proudest moment was when she had been shuffled off of the armed Merchant Raider Genji, then on the Sidemore station to attend the Advanced Tactical course, the infamous Crusher even before she assumed command, even if it was due to officers trying to grease her way to higher command. She had met Admiral Dame Honor Harrington then.

She considered the standard line everyone seemed to use when they met a larger than life hero; 'I expected you to be taller'. The woman stood 20 centimeters taller than Rebecca did, and that real height was more than enough. The admiral during her time in charge of the Crusher had graced Rebecca with three invitations to her 'working dinners', and she had learned more at those impromptu exercises, in her own opinion, than half of the faculty of the Academy itself had taught her all of those years ago.

She had been honored when Harrington herself had asked for a green captain to command a light cruiser in Eighth fleet.

She idly rubbed the second star on her breast, sign of commanding a second hyperspace vessel of her Majesty. Her first command, a destroyer had spent years swanning about Manticore wit home fleet. Protecting a vital point true, but hardly what she had signed up for. Her second, the light cruiser Loki had been shot up pretty badly at Chantilly when Admiral Bellefeuille had pounded HMS Hector and HMS Nike. In fact the missile that had destroyed her command and almost 90% of her crew of her crew hadn't even been aimed at them. No one was wasting missiles on something as small as a light cruiser; it had been an 'under' that had missed targeting Hector and shattered the small ship like a toy instead.

She and her surviving crew had spent hours drifting in the single pinnace that had escaped the ship, along with a few dozen life pods until Hector returned to pick them up. The last thing she remembered of that deployment was a capital ship missile arcing toward her command before they could redirect their own point defense, then the impact, bulkheads shattering, then she awoke with almost five months of her life amputated without anesthetic. She had wanted to take every wound of those other survivors upon herself. Of the 800 men and women of her crew, only a bare 95 had survived, and fifteen of them had died before they were picked up. Thirty were still in hospital as the woman that had gotten them killed sat here in this plush office. She had gone through almost four moths of rehabilitation, and been witness to the epic Battle of Manticore, five hundred Superdreadnought fighting the battle that could have determined the fate of the entire war.

She remembered the first of those dinners when she had been handed a Cruiser squadron command, and made a simple error that cost her half of them. Dame Honor had seen her sitting gloomily in the corner of the of the room when she had been asked back the second time. While everyone else had almost run like children at recess to get their favorite places, she had asked the Admiral, politely, to allow her to sit this one out.

・Commander, mistakes happen in war. As Wellington said, the winner in a battle is the officer that makes the fewest mistakes. If you think people like me merely leap from the head of a god into full capability, you are wrong. I made mistakes when I was in your shoes, I have made mistakes where my crew died because of them. But what you do, if you survive, is go on, and make sure never to make that mistake again. Either that or get a desk job. Now assume your station.・ It had not been a senior officer raking the junior over the coals, it had been almost... almost like an elder sister chiding you to do better. Or, she suddenly grinned at the image, a senior officer recognizing a scintilla of something she had in abundance, and trying to nurture it in her junior.

・Captain?・ She looked up at the Yeoman. ・The Admiral will see you now.・ She stood to open the door.

・Thank you, Yeoman Patterson.・ She replied. She marched into the office, snapping a salute worthy of Saganami Island. Admiral of the Green Sir Lucien Cortez, Fifth Space Lord of the Manticoran Navy returned it idly.

・Have a seat, Captain.・ He looked at the fresh faced young woman before him. ・We have a delicate situation here, that needs someone who is willing to take some risks, but isn't foolhardy. After the Battle of Manticore, we face two enemies, and one of them is the Solarian League.・

Rebecca felt a chill. The Solarian league was in it's own way, the proverbial 400 kilo Gorilla. Considered the preeminent naval power in human space, they had never lost a war, never had a ship captured. Anyone facing them in battle might as well have their Navy commit old fashioned 4thcentury pre-Diaspora ritual Seppeku.

Until about eight months ago, when an entire Solarian League light task force with 17 battlecruisers had surrendered to five 10thfleet battlecruisers commanded by Michelle Henke.

While defeating the Sollies suddenly looked workable, realists pointed out that counting mothball fleets, the Sollies had more superdreadnoughtsin commission than the combined total of all the allies and Haven had destroyers, the crews to man them.

Sir Lucien smiled gently. ・I know where your thoughts are leading, Captain. But that is a problem above your pay grade. I am giving you Witch Maiden.・

She cocked her head. It was an odd name for a Manticoran vessel. ・I don't understand, sir.・

・You served aboard HMS Genji during Operation Trojan Horse, correct?・

・Yes sir, as Tactical officer.・

・When Dame Honor made the initial agreement that led to our alliance with the Andermani, she had suggested the last three of the Caravan armed merchant cruisers be transferred to Andermani control. After all, thanks to Admiral Janacek, they were redesignated as Large fleet colliers. Genji was one of them.・

That was where she had heard it before; She had left the ship not long before the assassination that had ended the Cromarty government. The Janacek government had recalled all of them as their service cycles called for them to be refitted. The refits had been like a brutal lobotomy; ripping out the broadside missile tubes, and replacing the original inertial dampener with a 3rdgeneration Grayson Mod, the redesign had made them at least 50% faster than they had been. The ships had been renamed by the Andermani for their brief time in their hands.

・I remember. They named them Witch Queen, Witch Bride, and Witch Maiden.・

・Correct. Per the agreement, they were returned three months ago. But the name Genji had been assigned to the seventeenth Roland Class destroyer in the interim. So we've recommissioned her as Witch Maiden.・ He handed her the order packet. ・Your sailing under special orders from ONI Admiral Givens will be briefing you before you take command. Good hunting.・ He stood, and she stood, shaking the offered hand.

Special Instructions

Admiral Patricia Givens motioned for Duvalier to enter her office. There was another woman of Oriental extraction in a white Andermani Dress uniform there, and she stood, heels clicking as they face each other. ・Captain Duvalier, may I introduce Commander Jinhua Kiel. Commander Kiel, Captain Rebecca Duvalier.・ They shook hands and took their seats. Givens touched a control, and a map of Solarian League space appeared. She highlighted one section in red with blue dots interspersed through it. ・This is the western edge of Solarian League space. Due to the volume of our carrying trade in the League, we were able to negotiates having small fleet stations seeded throughout the volume of their space.

・This is, of course, something their Battle Fleet on the interior, and Frontier Fleet in their outer rim protested; they didn't think we should have such access. We finally settled on a compromise; each station was to be no more than four light cruisers or no more than eight destroyers, with permission to have an on site light collier. In fact we purpose built the 1.5 megaton Giselle class ships just for these stations.

・The other part of the compromise, however is our problem here. The Sollies required that while our warshps can patrol, our courier boats have to stop at their main Battle Fleet nodal locations, so if we had a station at say Termagant, which is on your planned route, the nearest place we can transfer any signals would be Copperplate, fifty light years away, and no fleet signals were allowed to be sent on via the commercial couriers we had to hire. Any signals sent on to our ships had to be verified as personal only.・

They paused to consider this. In effect, the Sollies had demanded the right to read the mail for every crewman aboard those scattered ships. ・Instead of allowing this, we have merely been sending all signals to the local Legations; except for family emergencies, and the couriers we hire have been merely telling our units they have mail. A ship is dispatched, picks it up, and returns.

・We are also allowed to send a larger fleet collier to deliver supplies to the detached units, and that is where you come in. Ostensibly, you are merely delivering missile pods to the detachments, and collecting the old ones for modification or disposal. As far as the Sollies know, they are just upgrades from the normal missile pods that they already have, and that has been true before the present situation. But the first part of that mission is different because you are delivering pods with full up MDMs supplied by our Andermani allies. They aren't up to the full potential of our own, but they will clear the backlog of supply on their side, and still give our detachments there three times the range of the Solarian navy if it comes to a fight.・

Kiel snorted at that. While the Andermani, like the Republic of Haven, had been playing catch up after the carnage of Operation Buttercup, the Andermani had not been as well supplied with additional tech transfers from some of the Solarian Leagues less reputable businesses. So while the Republic had fielded a three drive MDM design, though a crude one, the Andermani had only deployed a two drive one initially, with performance characteristics closer to the Mark 16 pods used by Manticoran Alliance BC(P)s. They had gotten a leg up when they allied with Manticore, but still that left thousands of the old pods to either recycle, or expend.

・Commander Kiel is the expert the Andermani are sending along with you.・

・Expert in what, Admiral?・

Givens blinked. ・I beg your pardon, captain?・

・Is she an intelligence officer? Or a weapons technician?・ When the Admiral didn't reply, Duvalier steepled her fingers. ・The insignia on her left collar point, for her branch of service is not the crossed missiles of the Andermani weapons design bureau. Instead it is the crossed

lightning bolts with hourglass of Imperial Intelligence.・ She smiled. ・My thesis in my senior was Comparative Intelligence Gathering among the Star Nations around us. That symbol is for the Andermani Imperiales Generalstab-Intelligenz-Büro, the Imperial General Staff Intelligence Bureau.・

・You were right, Admiral. She is good.・ Kiel commented.

・Captain, what I about to tell you is classified Alliance Top Secret, Code name Tannenbaum. The Andermani have penetrated Sollie Internal Security and Naval intelligence in more depth than we have. They have agents in every legation throughout Sollie space right down to Earth herself. Your mission is three fold, delivering the missiles is only part of it.

・You're going to be passing through the stations two tiers back from the frontier facing Manticore and all of our stations in that tier are in systems where Battle Fleet has mothball fleets. We need to know if those mothball fleets are being reactivated. If they have begun, we need estimates of when they will be operational again.

・Last, you are delivering a war warning to those units. They are going to be cut off, and all we can hope is that they will rip the Sollies up behind the lines as they run for home. For that matter, Battle fleet might have gotten off the ball and decided to smash us while they have the chance, and that means you might also be cut off.・

Givens looked at her for a long moment. ・That is why we're sending this specific ship. She's slow, but her design is the first one to use the pod laying technology. We are announcing she's a new modification, so Janes merely has her listed as a fleet collier based on the Caravan. There's no way they'd let one of our pod laying superdreadnoughts near one of their mothball fleets, but you can lay down as much fire as one, with all of the fire control of a Medusa class. You'll have your core load of pods, and any you've picked up on the way. But your core load are going to be full up Mk 23s which are not to be dispersed to those units. We cannot afford to have them fall into Sollie hands. If it hits the fan, you are to break off, and proceed to Spindle in the Talbot Quadrant.

・Andermani intelligence,・ she nodded to Kiel, ・believes that while the Sollies will attack our shipping

if the baloon goes up, the Andermani will still betreated as just our neighbors, though they expect that to change. With this in mind the Andermani have sent transponder codes for ten of their 7.5 megaton Dragon class merchant vessels that will be no where near you operational area. So you can use their IDs as needed.

・Any questions?・

Duvalier shook her head.

・Then you had best be about it. Good luck and good hunting.・

Rebecca was surprised that Kiel walked out with her. ・I will report aboard in less than 2 hours, Captain. My team is already aboard, I need to report to the Embassy before I go back up.・

・Understood, Commander.・ Duvalier stopped, and turned to the other woman. ・I have heard my own rumors, have you heard any from your end?・

・Yes, I have, Captain. The Sollies have a serious blind spot where Manpower and Mesa are concerned. It is in fact worse than the one they have in regard to the Manticoran Alliance and Republic of Haven. Before the Empire joined in, you both had fought a war for the better part of 20 years, with innovation following innovation that has made your weapons from what they uderstand to something out of a science fiction epic in comparison, but they still think of you as neo-barbs beating each other over the heads with sticks and stone clubs

・Until we joined the Alliance they thought of us as the 'peaceful' neo-barbs. Now we are just another group of immature beings who want to get into the game, and pouting because it took so long.・

・You're joking about that part.・ Duvalier challenged.

・I am doing no such thing. My uncle is in my same branch. He came home from work right after the alliance, and what I said is an exact quote from the Solarian League reply to a report that our navy has joined yours.・

・Secret sources?・

・So secret that I could tell you where we got it, but I would be forced to kill you.・

They looked at each other for a long moment before Rebecca smiled. ・I return the complement, commander, you're good.・

・Thank you, Captain.・ The woman watched the Manticoran walk away down the hall, and only then did she giggle.