"Some of our engineers aren't going to like this." Admiral Hemphill told the gathered Alliance representatives. "We've sent them off to Bolthole, and a few weeks later we're going to ship half of them on to Rivendell."
"Ours aren't going to feel much better." Thomas Theisman said. "But if Rivendell's yards can't put out anywhere near the volume ours can, they're still the closest thing to what you had at Hephaestus and Vulcan that we've got."
"I'd like to think our people will do a lot to make up for the loss of Manticoran personnel." Secretary Blanchet said. "You're trusting us a lot with this."
But retooling Rivendell's shipyards to produce the latest Manticoran missiles and drones and superdreadoughts would be a lot easier than anywhere else in the Alliance, even Beowulf. The Beowulfers had much of the technical know-how, but they were not in the middle of producing a run of podlaying wallers, and had elected to avoid deploying Manticoran or Manticoran-inspired advances lest they draw attention. Rivendell had felt it had no choice but to deploy radical new technology, and so had tried to divert attention from it, but the fact was Rivendell had a lot of near-equivalents of Manticore's latest in volume production before the first Manticoran advisor would arrive.
[break]
"We've received some disturbing, if unconfirmed reports, Princess." The Princedom of Sanderson's Royal Intelligence Officer told his sovereign.
"You thought they were urgent enough to come out here personally." She replied.
"Unquestionably." He said. When he outlined what his people had learned of Rivendell's actions, and of the League's response to both the Princedom's actions and Rivendell's, she understood his concern.
"I don't intend to concede the game." She said.
[break]
"You seem more disturbed by this news than we are." Hamish Alexander told Admiral Marrone.
"How much do you have on Indira Thenuwara?" He asked.
"Almost nothing. She hasn't crossed paths with us, which is hardly unusual for a Battle Fleet officer, particularly one from a Fleet family as old and well-connected as the Thenuwara clan."
"What did you think when your intelligence services learned Esther McQueen had been named Secretary of War?"
"Opinion was divided as to how much freedom of action she would have, but putting someone as skilled as she was in command of Haven's Navy could hardly be good for us."
"I don't think Admiral Thenuwara has ambitions of her own along the lines McQueen was rumored to, but I do think she's at least as dangerous. It might be time for my squadron to head home."
[break]
"Is there anyone who thinks we should follow standard doctrine for this operation and sail the whole fleet to Sanderson?" Indira asked. Her tone was light, but the question was serious, and a matter of regulation. Admiral Thenuwara tried to follow Battle Fleet regulations when practical. Even if she bent them into a pretzel at times.
Negative answers came from her squadron commanders and staff.
"It would probably work." Commodore Yao said, answering last. "The Princedom almost certainly doesn't know about the Cataphracts, and I doubt they have thirty of the wall, let alone fifty. But I agree; even if we accepted Battle Fleet intelligence's assessment of what they're likely to have, we need more information."
"And I can't believe Harriet II Sanderson would make a move like this without something like the Manticoran missiles or something else she believes will let her win at least one battle with Battle Fleet. She may not think we can fight hard to keep the Protectorates, but she has to anticipate at least an attempt."
"And the Republic?"
"I can't see Caitlin Michaels breaking her fleet into penny packets we can defeat in detail." Admiral Jared Richt, who commanded the Frontier Fleet forces attached to Thenuwara's task force, said. "And we have to treat the public specs of the Assassin class as a minimum baseline for the capabilities of their ships of the wall."
Yao and the rest of Thenuwara's staff did not argue. Which wasn't surprising; his Admiral had all of Frontier Fleet to pick a commander from for this operation, so she was certainly able to find one with what she considered to be the proper attitude.
Forty years ago, the Republic had begun building a class of dreadnoughts that were only smaller than the SLN's Scientist and Vega class SDs by the smallest of margins and included all sorts of bells and whistles and design elements 'to adapt to the forthcoming laser head era' that the SLN had rejected out of hand. And built them tubes noticeably larger than standard SLN capital missiles. General Dynamics of Rivendell may have been a smaller defense contractor for the SLN prior to Republic's secession, but they were a first-tier one; they were quite capable of producing every missile in the SLN's standard inventory, so there was no reason to suspect the Assassins could fire bigger missiles unless they also fired better ones. Despite that, the Rivendell Navy considered the design obsolete, which suggested that instead of being something akin to the marginal improvement over her Vegas that Thenuwara and her staff believed the Assassin to be, the Aes Sedai class was another matter entirely.
And what Thenuwara had was six battle squadrons and screen – not the twelve she had asked for, but two beyond the four she normally commanded as 34th Fleet. Her request for an oversized screen had been granted to some extent, which was why a full Admiral from Frontier Fleet was assigned to her command. And she did have full loads of the new missiles, and two ammunition ships loaded with the new pods. If her estimates were correct, her force could take the Princedom's navy, but not the elves.
"I intend to sail the fleet to an uninhabited system in the target sector, then dispatch some of Admiral Richt's force to scout the Princedom and its conquests, while I take a squadron and screen and pay a courtesy call on Rivendell."
[break]
There were, in fact, four practical routes to the Rivendell Sector from Sol. The oldest, nearly directly through hyperspace, was seldom used anymore, as six weeks of transit time was about as long as you could travel from Earth and stay within full members of the League. The newest, and fastest, route was unavailable to Thenuwara's fleet even if she had been aware of it; a few days to Beowulf, through the Manticoran wormhole Junction to Manticore and on to Lynx, a week to the Spindle terminus system, through the wormhole to the Rivendell terminus system, and then another day to Rivendell itself; somewhat more complicated, but a third of the time. And the fourth path was somewhat more roundabout than the one through Manticore, nearly a week longer, and even more secret. In fact, it was the main reason the Alignment had thought to involve itself in this sector to begin with, for a key connection on that path was through the Felix wormhole junction.
But the route most commonly traveled involved a single wormhole transit that was quite a ways from any connection to the main wormhole network that spread out from Manticore, but did cut almost two weeks off the trip. Thenuwara and her staff had agreed that the New Capetown – New Beijing Bridge ought to be safe, and certainly was unlikely to be held by anything that could resist her fleet.