House of Steel The Honorverse Companion - By David Weber Page 0,105

within reach of the PRH’s expanding military the Star Kingdom’s vulnerability was obvious to him, as was its need to build up its ability to protect not only its commerce and the Home System, but also to defend the Junction itself.

Roger, a gifted politician as well as an experienced naval officer, realized the Conservative Association and the alliance of the Liberals and Progressives in both houses of Parliament would oppose any rapid and massive expansion of the fleet. Queen Samantha had begun a gradual buildup, largely on Roger’s advice, despite that opposition, and following his own coronation, he immediately began building on that foundation. Aware that Manticore would never be able to match the sheer tonnage the far larger PRH could produce and unwilling to accept the plateaued, virtually stagnant state of galactic naval technology and doctrine, he adopted a two-pronged approach.

The first prong was an open, public increase in the Navy’s size, expanding the capacity of the major naval yards aboard the space stations Hephaestus, Vulcan and Weyland and slowly growing the number of ships available to it despite a number of often ugly confrontations with the Opposition. The second, highly secret prong was what became known as “Project Gram,” a highly covert R&D program designed to overcome the Star Kingdom’s quantitative disadvantage by providing it with a decisive qualitative superiority.

Thus began a fifty-year “cold war” between Manticore and the People’s Republic. Roger’s strategy for winning that cold war largely depended on three of the Star Kingdom’s greatest strengths: the quality of its educational system and the innovative R&D it supported; its enormous, far-reaching merchant marine (with ties to both the Navy and to various industrial cartels throughout the Star Kingdom); and the vast wealth generated by Manticoran economy and from the transit fees from the Junction. Despite those advantages and his own role as head of government, as well as head of state, Roger was never able to move as quickly and decisively as he would truly have preferred. He was a powerful and effective monarch, but it took him almost twenty T-years to build the decisive political majority he required in Parliament, and especially in the House of Lords. It is a testimonial to his abilities as statesman and politician that he did achieve it and that he passed it intact to his daughter upon his own untimely death.

Despite opposition from some members of the aristocracy, King Roger’s buildup increased the RMN from a mere twelve ships of the wall at the time of his coronation to nearly eighty ships of the wall by his death.

Queen Elizabeth III

1883–1905 PD

Roger III was killed in a grav ski accident on August 24, 1883 PD. His daughter was crowned Queen Elizabeth III, supported by a regency until she reached the majority age of twenty-one T-years in 1886. Contrary to the expectations of many members of Parliament, Queen Elizabeth not only continued but accelerated her father’s naval expansion programs.

Over the next twenty T-years, hostility between Manticore and Haven deepened, especially after the Havenite conquest of Trevor’s Star gave the PRH control of that system’s Junction terminus. During the same time period, as the stakes and the inevitability of an eventual military confrontation became ever clearer, the SKM’s internal political struggles intensified. The isolationism of the Conservative Association, which had initially generated at least grudging support for the Navy’s buildup, turned into a sense of profound alarm as the Conservatives recognized Elizabeth’s grim determination to continue her father’s work, further strengthen the Navy, and expand the anti-Haven Manticoran Alliance Roger had envisioned and begun. They came to view her efforts and her obvious readiness to confront the PRH openly as a dangerous and provocative eagerness to do so. Their alarm brought them into alliance with the Liberals and Progressives in their efforts to block or slow military appropriations. Fortunately, Elizabeth proved as skilled a politician as her father had been. She and her prime minister, the Duke of Cromarty, maintained and strengthened the partnership, based on Cromarty’s own Centrists and the Crown Loyalists, which Roger had forged and continued their war preparations despite the Opposition’s vociferous resistance.

The first shooting incident between Manticoran and Havenite forces occurred in the Basilisk System in 1900 PD with the destruction of the armed merchant ship PMSS Sirius by the light cruiser HMS Fearless (Commander Honor Harrington, commanding) following a failed attempt by Havenite operatives to incite a general native uprising on the planet of Medusa. A second incident occurred two T-years later in the Yeltsin’s Star