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"Well, if that's what they're thinking, Sir," Commander Le
"I agree that it's unfortunate, Commodore," Amandine Corvisart said. "And I won't pretend I'm happy about it, either—for a lot of reasons. But I don't see how we can allow it to interfere with our mission. We certainly can't just turn around and go home as if the mere presence of Solarian warships scared us off!"
"I think the Ambassador's right, Sir," Commander John DesMoines,Roland's CO and Chatterjee's flag captain, said somberly, and Chatterjee snorted.
"Of course she is, Jack! First, because she's the Ambassador and we're the people who are supposed to be supporting her mission, which makes it her call. And, second, because I happen to agree with her. What I'm trying to do is to get a feel for how we want to handle it. Do we just ignore the Sollies? Pretend they aren't even here unless they decide to talk to us? Or do we treat this as a normal port call and follow the protocols for exchanges between friendly powers meeting in a neutral port?"
"I don't think there's any point being too disingenuous about it," Corvisart said after a moment. Chatterjee waggled one hand in a gesture which invited her to continue, and she shrugged. "There's no way this many Solarian warships would just happen to be parked in an out-of-the-way star system like New Tuscany unless they'd been invited. And the only thing that could have gotten them all the way here from the Madras Sector would have been a fairly urgent invitation. Something accompanied by a note about all of those nasty Manticoran depredations against i
"Well, at least that won't be anything we don't have experience with!" Lori Olson's muttered comment was just low-voiced enough for Chatterjee to pretend he hadn't heard it. Not that he didn't agree with it wholeheartedly.
"On the other hand," Corvisart continued, "they're still at least technically neutral and impartial bystanders. Our business is with the New Tuscan government, not with the Solarian League Navy, and that's the way we ought to approach it. If the senior Solarian officer chooses to insert himself into the process, I'll have to deal with it as it occurs. But until and unless that happens, I'm going to ignore them completely—after all, I'm a civilian here to deal with other civilians—while you and your staff make the normal courtesies of one navy to another."
"My," Chatterjee said dryly. "Won't that be fun."
Several hours later, Commodore Chatterjee found himself still on Roland's flag bridge.
There were really two reasons for the Rolands' huge size compared to other destroyers. One was the fact that they were the only destroyers in the galaxy equipped to fire the Mark 16 dual-drive missile. Squeezing in that capability—and giving them twelve tubes—had required a substantial modification to the Mod 9-c launcher mounted in the Saganami-C class. The Rolands' Mod 9-e was essentially the tube from the 9-c, but stripped of the support equipment normally associated with a standalone missile tube. Instead, a sextet of the new launchers were shoehorned together, combining the necessary supports for all six tubes in the cluster. Roland mounted one cluster each in her fore and aft hammerheads, the traditional locations for a ship's chase energy weapons. Given the Manticoran ability to fire off-bore, all twelve tubes could be brought to bear on any target, but it did make the class's weapons more vulnerable. A single hit could take out half of her total missile armament, which was scarcely something Chatterjee liked to think about. But destroyers had never been intended to take the kind of hammering wallers could take, anyway, and he was willing to accept Roland's vulnerabilities in return for her overwhelming advantage in missile combat.
The other reason for her size (aside from the need to squeeze in magazine space for her launchers) was that every member of the class had been fitted with flagship capability. The Royal Manticoran Navy had been caught short of suitable flagships for cruiser and destroyer service during the First Havenite War, and the Rolands were also an attempt to address that shortage. Big enough and tough enough to serve with light cruisers, and with a substantial long-range punch of their own, they were also supposed to be produced in sufficient numbers to provide plenty of flag decks this time around. They weren't anywhere near as big or opulently equipped as those of a battlecruiser or a waller, but they were big enough for the job and, even more important, they'd be there when they were needed.
Which was why Ray Chatterjee came to have such spacious comfort in which to sit while he stewed.
I didn't really expect this to go smoothly, he thought. I didn't expect it to be quite this complicated, either, though.
He could hardly say he was surprised the New Tuscans were stonewalling to avoid making any sort of meaningful response to the note Ambassador Corvisart had delivered. They could scarcely acknowledge the note's accuracy, after all, so he supposed simply refusing to accept it was their best move at the moment, although he was a little surprised they hadn't already appealed to the Sollies to intervene on their side, at least as a friendly neutral.
Probably means they don't have all of their falsified data in place yet, the commodore reflected. Even a prick like this Byng probably wouldn't be very amused if they handed him something too crude. I wonder if they even knew he was coming this soon?
Whatever the New Tuscans' attitude towards Amandine Corvisart might be, though, there was no question about Admiral Josef Byng's attitude towards the Star Empire of Manticore. The New Tuscans' senior traffic control officer had looked and sounded as if someone had inserted a broom handle into a certain orifice, in Chatterjee's opinion. He'd been just barely on the stiffly correct side of outright incivility, although Chatterjee hadn't been able to decide whether that was because he knew exactly what was going on and was part of it, or whether it was because he didn't know what was going on and genuinely believed his own government's horror stories about vicious Manticoran harassment. There hadn't been much doubt about what Byng believed, though.
"So long as the New Tuscan system government is prepared to tolerate your presence, 'Commodore,' " Byng had said, biting off each word is if it had been a shard of ice, "then so shall I. I will also do you the courtesy—for now, at least—of assuming that you, personally, have not been party to the gross abuse of New Tuscan neutral rights here in the Cluster. The Solarian League, however, does not look kindly upon the infringement of those neutral rights, and especially not upon the destruction of unarmed merchant vessels and their entire crews. I have no doubt you are under orders not to discuss these matters with me, 'Commodore,' and I will not press you on them at this time. Eventually, however, what's been happening out here will be . . . sufficiently clarified, shall we say, for my government to take an official position on it. I look forward to that day, at which time, perhaps, we will have that discussion after all. Good day, 'Commodore.' "
It had not been an exchange—if the icy, one-way tirade could be called an "exchange"—designed to set Chatterjee's mind at ease. Nor was his mind particularly comforted by the Solarian battlecruisers' actions. None of them had their wedges or sidewalls up, but close visual observation—and at a range of under five thousand kilometers it was possible to make a very close visual inspection, even without resorting to deployable reco