January 1925 PD ended up split in two, because I'm trying to be somewhat more consistent in chapter lengths for this story than I was with "Bridge Building" (though this is still the longest chapter I've posted). If you've made it this far, you're probably anticipating both of the big events of January 1925 PD, and they bother needed more than 1500 words on their own. On the plus side, I should get part II of January 1925 PD out fairly soon after part I. Really. I mean it.

Early January, 1925 PD

Sol System, Solarian League Navy HQ

Fleet Admiral Winston Kingsford closed the last personal file on his workstation, and left his office for good. He'd spent most of his life climbing Battle Fleet's bureaucracy to get to the position he held… and after less than three years on the job, he'd submitted his resignation.

"You're sure we can't talk you out of it?" Rear Admiral Gweon asked.

"I don't think the commanding officer of the SLN should be a citizen of a world that formally seceded from the League." He said. It was more of an excuse than a real reason. He supposed an officer with more dedication to the navy in which he served would have stuck it out. The SLN had plenty of officers and enlisted from protectorates that were not formally part of the SLN. Almost none of them rose above the rank of Commander, and almost all of them served in Frontier Fleet or the Marines rather than Battle Fleet, but it provided plenty of precedent. But Kingsford was from Ontario, and his homeworld had not only seceded, their government was now led – like Sol's and six more systems – by signatories to the Solarian Union declaration of independence.

"Rumor has it that if the Solarian Union does get off the ground, they'll be tapping Aravind Thenuwara for your job." Gweon mentioned. Fleet Admiral Thenuwara's father may have been a civilian for twenty years, but he was certainly capable. In a great many ways, Gweon's capability had impressed Kingsford over his time commanding the SLN, but he had been insinuating the Thenuwara family was less than completely loyal to the League for well over a year now. Of course, they were almost all Sol System citizens, and as of two weeks ago, that meant they were not League citizens anymore, and entering the service of their home world could hardly be considered disloyalty. And he had signed off on a proposal to sell the Sol System Navy some warships a few weeks ago… purely to help the SLN deal with its financial crisis, of course.

"He's welcome to it." Kingsford said. In fact, as near as Kingsford could tell, the still-nascent Solarian Union would be tapping the elder Thenuwara for the actual equivalent of his job if possible. The only person arguably more qualified to be the political head of the Solarian Union Navy was Kingsford himself, and there was no chance anyone that had been so closely involved with the SLN's recent fiascoes as he would be nominated to high office by a government as fundamentally opposed to the League's inherent cronyism as the Solarian Union's was likely to be. No, he was going to lie low for a few years, then take a job as lobbyist for a defense contractor. Which paid far better than even the top job in the SLN, and was considerably lower risk. Aravind could have the 'interesting' job of putting the Solarian Union Navy together. And he found that he did not care at all who was left holding the pieces of the SLN.

Osgiliath orbit, Rivendell System, General Dynamics of Rivendell shipyard complex

The engineering teams attached to project Parker were working as quickly as they could to turn Dr. Fey's spider-detecting drone from a hand-built prototype to something that could be mass produced and interface directly with fire control. Knowing a spider drive ship was in the area was enormously helpful, if it could be learned soon enough to bring impeller wedges and sidewalls up and bring active defenses online. But if the Yawata Strike had been typical of how the Mesans would be using craft with the spider drive to attack, they had no intention of firing offensive weapons directly from those ships and giving their precise location away. Every missile that had attacked Manticore and Grayson's shipyards had been fired from pods; and the grasers had been fired from some sort of remote platform that almost certainly had a spider drive itself.

"That was well done." Dr. Fey said as her latest test concluded. Her latest spider test platforms, which had 'attacked' the station, had accelerated at 300 gravities. That was twice what the best grav plates available to the Alliance could compensate for and keep a human crew alive for any length of time. And those platforms had also incorporated the best stealth techniques available to hide the platforms from conventional sensors. To anything but the handful of hand-built 'spider sense' platforms deployed around the station, the test platforms were all but invisible. But the new platforms saw something different.

"I'd still like to improve the detection range, but I believe what we have is good enough to hand over to General Dynamics to use as a base for a series-produced drone. Any dissenting opinions?" She asked. Detecting the spider at all was a challenge. Detecting it soon enough that the Alliance could take advantage of the full range of its advantages in long-range missile combat seemed unlikely to be possible at all. Enough to be useful, especially if detected by drone with FTL communication capability, though, that seemed to have been achieved. No one seemed inclined to disagree.

While Dr. Fey's teams labored to protect the station (and any other Grand Alliance installation), other workers were adding still more building slips to the station proper. General Dynamics had wanted to avoid going to Grayson-style dispersed yards, even in the face of the need to expand as rapidly as possible. After what had happened to Manticore and Grayson's yards, they did not want any building slips that could not be covered with a bubble sidewall. If no method of detecting spider ships quickly enough were found, that precaution would be useless, but if one was, it could be enormously valuable.

In fact, the station's bubble sidewall generators and anti-missile defenses had been substantially upgraded over the last two years. The station was now capable of producing a sidewall even tougher than the forts Manticore had deployed to the Lynx terminus, and had as many counter-missile launchers and point defense laser clusters. And almost all of the conventionally-sized ships built for the Rivendell Navy were being constructed in the 'hard yard' slips attached to the station, which would be covered by that sidewall.

But in the end, General Dynamics had no choice but to build at least some dispersed slips. They might have been able to meet demands of the Rivendell Navy alone by expanding the station at a breakneck pace. Building all the other ships and missiles and Keyhole II modules and Mycroft platforms that they were building for Rivendell's allies was simply not possible without expanding faster than growing the station would allow.

No one in the Rivendell system had anticipated a need to build 2.5 megaton warships of any stripe until General Dynamics learned about the RMN's Nike class, but the alliance wanted more of them nearly as badly as Apollo-capable ships of the wall. The Dragons the Rivendell Navy was building for its own use were taking up old-style battle cruiser slips, but the other allied navies wanted some of them, too, and General Dynamics' yards had already begun production of them. In light of the way missile combat was trending, the Rivendell Navy had decided a Saganami-C equivalent would be a light cruiser in their service, but it still took a bigger slip than the heavy cruisers it had built or operated previously. And Rivendell had not built many light or heavy cruisers previously; their planners had not anticipated how out of date the ships they 'appropriated' from the SLN would be.

Rivendell System, aboard RNS Rand al'Thor

Vice-Admiral Carroll had moved his flag when the first Asha'man class SD(P) had completed its builders' trials two weeks ago. The Asha'man class had the latest Alliance FTL comm on-board, whereas his twelve early-flight Aes Sedai had 'merely' the best Rivendell had managed on its own (which is to say a fair bit better than anyone outside the Manticoran Alliance developed on their own), and so had the FTL bandwidth for even video transmission, whereas otherwise his on-board FTL would be limited to low bit-rate audio. And the Aes Sedai merely had last-generation Rivendell compensators, not last-generation allied compensators, which meant his SDs were faster than his DNs (and a lot of his smaller ships, too). He hadn't really wanted to move his flag despite the technological advantages, but they were too great to ignore.

"Flash priority message on the FTL from Osgiliath Station. They say the special detection net sees at least six incoming vessels that are at minimum ten megatons, and are relaying course and locus." Carroll had more than enough weight of metal to destroy sixty megatons of conventional ships of the wall. That had been true on the day he'd assumed command of Rivendell Home Fleet, and was even truer today.

Rivendell Home Fleet, at present, had a wall of battle of six brand-new (and Apollo-capable) Asha'man class SD(P)s, the surviving twelve of Rivendell's first 18 Aes Sedai class DN(P)s, and six of Rivendell's fifteen remaining Assassin class DNs (one of the Rivendell Navy's standard 3-ship divisions having been mothballed to provide the crews for the six Asha'man class SD(P)s). All four squadrons of wallers had their own powerful screens. And in addition, nearly five hundred Rivendell-flagged LACs – all of them built to the latest Manticoran designs, supported the fleet.

Beyond that, a Manticoran-designed (but Rivendell-built) 'Mycroft' system controlled the thousands of system defense pods dispersed around the system. And half of Wes Marrone's Grand Alliance task force – headlined by Haven and Beowulf-flagged squadrons of the wall – had been left back at Rivendell while Marrone had seized both ends of the New Capetown – New Beijing hyper bridge. For any conventional attacker (and anything short of four or five squadrons of Apollo-equipped SD(P)s), attacking the Rivendell system would be suicide. There might be two or three better-defended systems in human space. There certainly were not more than a handful.

"Set a course for the incoming vessels, at our max acceleration. Anyone who can't keep up stays behind." Carroll ordered. The Asha'man class SD(P)s had the latest version of the Grayson inertial compensator, and massed only slightly less than the RMN's Invictus class. Which meant that the rest of his wall of battle, all of his battle cruisers except his one squadron of Sorceress-class ships (the Rivendell Navy's name for the Manticoran Nike class), every heavy cruiser built before the end of the first Havenite War, and every single ship in his inventory that had been built for the Solarian League Navy, would be trailing behind him.

"And get to work on figuring out how feed Osgiliath Station's sensor take into our targeting computers." No one mentioned that taking output designed for scientific study and using it for real-time telemetry in combat was not something Dr. Fey's engineering support team was even going to attempt. When the combat version of the Spider-Sense drone rolled out, it would be designed to produce data in the same format as any other alliance recon drone. But no one had even started to design the production combat version of the Spider-Sense drone yet. And Steve Carroll needed that capability in less than half an hour.

Rivendell System, aboard MANSTranscendant

The best detector the Mesan Alignment had developed for its spider drive ships had a range of only 1.5 light-seconds. Colin Detweiler's most pessimistic estimate had been that Rivendell had been able to match the performance of their best efforts. After all, the spider drive had been invented by the Alignment, and they knew exactly what to look for. And the best sensors they had developed that scanned normal space for the minute clues spider drive ships with the Alignment's stealth systems left behind would only 'find' a spider ship nearly within energy range, rendering the Manticoran (and allied) advantages in missile combat somewhat irrelevant.

But the system devised by Kara Fey and her team was different. Without the extraordinarily sensitive gravitic sensors Manticore had developed for high-bandwidth FTL communication and its 'Ghost Rider' recon drones, it would have been impossible. It was true that the spider drive did not produce the powerful, unmistakable signature of an impeller wedge, or even the much smaller 'ripples' that FTL communications relied on. But when Dr. Simões had outlined the basic principles by which the spider drive worked, she had been absolutely certain it would produce a gravitic signature of some sort, even if it was faint and easily lost in 'background noise'. And she had been correct.

The sensors in the handful of hand-built 'spider-sense' recon drones watching the approaches to Osgiliath were designed to watch for the tell-tale signature of spider drive. And they could make out that signature from a full light-minute away. That wasn't close to the full powered range of a three-stage MDM, much less the astounding ranges that could be achieved effectively with Apollo fire control and a ballistic phase. But it was longer than the maximum powered range of any conventional missile.

Vice-Admiral Lydia Papnikitas, her junior officers, and her staff, had done this once before. True, they had not had time for anywhere near the intense scouting of the Rivendell system that they had for the attack on Manticore-B that she had commanded. And the reason this attack was being mounted at all was because the too-clever-by-half elves might very well have developed a means of detecting the spider. Because she was by nature a very cautious woman, Papnikitas ordered her fleet to stay at least five light-seconds from any of the recon drones swarming around Osgiliath Station if at all possible. It might not be; any recon drone had far more acceleration than a spider-drive recon drone, let alone a vessel that had to keep humans alive. But she surely had a lot of error margin. Or at least had thought so when Steve Carroll's fleet – or at least the elements that could keep pace with an SD(P) with a Manty compensator at maximum military power – changed course to head directly at her.

"We must have stumbled into an exercise." She said aloud. "But in case we did not, I want all the active defenses ready to activate on my command." The Leonard Detweiler class spider-drive SD(P)s had heavier armor than any other warship known to man, and by a rather greater ratio than the simple tonnage advantage would indicate. And they had very impressive point defense and counter-missile systems as well. But using any of the active defenses would give away their position even to someone who had nothing designed to see spider drive ships. And they did not have sidewalls or an impeller wedge. Which meant that even a conventional battle cruiser could likely do a lot of damage if it could somehow maintain a targeting fix.

They were coming up on release range, though.

"Prepare to fire on my mark." She said.

Rivendell System, aboard RNS Rand al'Thor

Commander Arlie Bowman had been Steve Carroll's staff electronics warfare officer since the admiral had returned to active duty. Breaking the position away from Ops had happened after the Rivendell Navy had learned its new allies had done so; after some careful investigation, they had decided to follow suit. And Arlie had, rather unexpectedly, been shifted to that side of things twenty-seven years into his naval career. Of course, changing his job was a minor thing compared the other radical changes that had happened over the last three years; twenty-four years ago, he'd been a lieutenant commander in the Solarian League Navy and ops officer on one of the Rivendell detachment's battle cruisers. He'd been in some harry situations since then, most notably the Battle of Sanderson, but he'd never been asked to do the impossible before.

Fortunately, he'd managed to get Chief Jessica Falk assigned the senior enlisted in his department. For all its flaws, the SLN had been built for centuries on long-service volunteers, both in the officer and enlisted corps. That was inevitable given how few people served in the SLN relative to the enormous population of the League. But what it meant was that the institutional contempt for enlisted that often developed in military forces that were less than first-rate – and Commander Bowman was forced to admit that outside of certain exceptional units, the SLN was that – had never truly been part of the SLN's culture. Which was why Bowman had no trouble at all acknowledging Falk was – at least in a narrow area that was rather important right now – certainly the best programmer he knew, and probably one of the best in any Grand Alliance navy. And it was why he was concentrating on the regular duties of the staff EWO officer, and leaving it to Falk to work miracles.

"Loading the bridging software now, sir." She said. What Falk had cobbled together was nowhere near as optimized as what the engineers attached to Dr. Fey's team would have put together eventually. And quite possibly had side effects she didn't want to think about just now. But since being able to target what was out there might well prevent Osgiliath Station from joining Hephaestus, Vulcan, Weyland, and Blackbird Yard, she didn't worry about it very much.

Besides, it was just then that the Osgiliath Station's bubble sidewall snapped up.

Rivendell System, aboard MANSTranscendant

"Fire Plan Cascade." Papnikitas ordered. Over the last twenty minutes, she'd rapidly lost any illusions that the activity around her ships was a coincidence. How well they could see them, or target them, was another matter entirely. She hadn't expected to be discovered at all, but she had prepared for this contingency.

Thirty graser torpedoes shot away from the ten SD(P)s of her task force, all intending to close to nearly conventional missile range before firing a cruiser-grade laser for a solid three seconds. Even SD-grade sidewalls would have trouble standing up to that. What Papnikitas did not know – and could not – was how tough Osgiliath Station's bubble sidewall was. Or what level of anti-missile defenses the station had been equipped with.

The impeller drive missiles in her pods were spread among softer targets. The scores of dispersed building slips clustered around the space station certainly had no sidewalls, no counter-missiles, and no point defenses. Perhaps some of their crews managed to evacuate in time. But none of the dispersed slips would.

And so two CLACs, six Allomancer-class SD(P)s, twenty Nike-class battle cruisers, sixteen Dragon-class heavy cruisers, thirty-six Saganami-C class light cruisers, and the slips they were built in were destroyed in less than a second. And three-quarters of the workers building them went with them.

Osgiliath Station

There had not been anything close to enough time to evacuate the station. In fact, any personnel from the dispersed yards that could make it to the station in time had been hastily shuffled aboard. The station's defenses might not hold. But they were certainly better than any place they could reach it the few minutes available.

Dr. Fey and her team tried to concentrate on providing updated data to Admiral Carroll's fleet. They'd missed four of the giant spider-drive ships in their first pass, but they knew all ten were there now. And they had fired some sort of spider-drive weapon at the station.

The Mesan Alignment had never contemplated trying to burn through sidewalls as heavy as the ones that covered the station. The engineers who upgraded the station's defenses, on the other hand, had the Yawata Strike very much on their minds when they did so. So even though they had underestimated the strength of the attack, both in terms of the power of each individual beam and the number that could be brought to bear on a single target, they had come much closer to reality than the Alignment's estimates had. And more importantly, the damage surveys from the Yawata Strike had made it clear many of the targets had been targeted by a high-powered graser for up to three seconds.

Normally, when a missile fired it was too late to do anything effective to stop it; the bomb-pumped lasers destroyed themselves in firing. And few humans could have reacted fast enough to bring point defense lasers to bear before the graser torpedoes burned themselves out. However, Osgiliath Station's point defense computers were programmed to fire at the source of any beam that persisted more than the tiny fraction of a second of a bomb-pumped laser. Less than half a second after thirty graser torpedoes fired on the station, twenty-seven were blasted out of space by point defense lasers. The remaining three were taken out by the second round of fire.

For the most part, the station's sidewall had held. There had been some isolated burn-through, especially from the three torpedoes that survived nearly a full second. And while the station had extremely powerful sidewalls and point defense, it was still a construction and research station, not an orbital fortress. Any burn through did what in other circumstances would have been considered extreme amounts of damage. Indeed, thousands of workers were killed, and millions of Manticoran dollars worth of equipment were destroyed. But Dr. Fey's team and the 'hard' building slips inside the station escaped serious direct damage.

Rivendell System, aboard RNS Rand al'Thor

Missiles had streaked out from Steve Carroll's fleet the second Chief Falk's improvised program had allowed data from the Spider-sense drones to be passed to targeting. He had his six SD(P)s roll pods for minutes now, and each fired a quad pattern.

The pod rails in RMN and Grayson SD(P)s had been designed for pods filled with triple-drive, capacitor-powered missiles. Although the missiles and pods had changed considerably since then, those basic dimensions were intact. On the other hand, the Rivendell Navy's first pods had been designed for dual-drive, fusion-powered missiles. Which meant that despite all the variants in size and shapes of pods the RMN had used since deploying its first pod-laying ships of the wall, every one of those pods was too large for the rails of the Rivendell Navy's Aes Sedai class DN(P)s and Asha'man class SD(P)s.

General Dynamics had solved the problem in two ways. The first was a pod that had all the features of the standard RMN 'flat-pack' pod but contained only seven Mark 23 shipkiller missiles instead of eight. Five of the six rails of an Asha'man, and four of the five on a late-flight Aes Sedai, were filled with those. The second dispensed with the onboard tractor beam and the Apollo control missile – and utilized some space reclaimed from less than perfect alignment of missile dimensions to pod dimensions – to fit in three more shipkillers. The Rivendell Navy's Apollo-capable ships filled a single rail with those pods; its older early-flight Aes Sedai carried them exclusively. But only the Asha'man were in a position to fire. So a thousand and eighty shipkillers and a hundred twenty control missiles raced out at the ten Mesan Alignment Navy ships than no longer had any illusions that they were invisible.

And those missiles were not alone. His six Sorceress-class BCs added another 300 Mark 16-Gs to the fray. Twelve Dragon-class heavy cruisers added another five hundred and fifty-two. Eighteen Ranger-class light cruisers (which the RMN called a Saganami-C class heavy cruiser) added another 720.

A Haven sector SD(P) squadron might well have been able to take the fire of 2652 missiles – the lightest of which had heavier warheads than SLN Trebuchet capital missiles – and suffer little damage, though likely not if a little over a thousand of those missiles had Apollo fire control (which the Mark 23s fired from Steve Carroll's Asha'man did). But those SD(P)s would have had sidewalls, impeller wedges, and a LAC screen providing additional missile defense. And while the Leonard Detweilers had a truly astounding level of armor and on-board missile defense, and the targeting solutions through improvised fire control were far worse than they would have been on an impeller drive target at five times the range, what they had was nowhere near good enough.

Eight of the Mesan warships were completely obliterated. The remaining two were not far from the same.

Rivendell System, aboard MANSCasper

The Ghost-class frigate had been detailed to remain well behind the attack fleet, and if only by virtue of its much smaller size and lack of offensive weapons to betray itself, it was harder to see. But in truth none of Dr. Fey's Spider-sense drones had passed within their detection range while its spider was in use, and it had been cruising ballistic and minding its sensor drone take. And ready to hyper out and send the self-destruct command to its drones on the first hint that it had been detected.

Still, Commander Martin had been shocked. Intellectually, he had known what was going to happen if somehow a Rivendell SD(P) spotted a Leonard Detweiler outside of energy range. Admiral Papnikitas had no choice but to try to continue to fight with her two crippled ships; allowing her crew or her ships to be captured would remove any pretense that the Alignment was merely a creation of Haven and Manticore's more delusional intelligence officers. He didn't know what Benjamin Detweiler was going to make of this. He suspected he wouldn't like it.

But he hypered out, and ordered a return to Darius as quickly as possible.