A Rising Thunder

A Rising Thunder is a science fiction novel by the American writer David Weber, published in 2012 and the thirteenth novel in the main Honor Harrington series.

The book begins in March 1922 of the series' calendar, in the middle of the same crisis the previous volume had opened, and it spends much of its length on the consequences of a decision rather than the battle that follows it. Manticore recalls its merchant shipping from Solarian space and takes control of several wormhole junctions, cutting the League's commerce at the joints, and the war that the Star Empire has been trying to avoid starts to look unavoidable. Weber then moves into the League's own capital, where five unelected senior bureaucrats, known to their critics as the Mandarins, find themselves squeezed between the transstellar corporations that have lost money, a press that has noticed, and their own refusal to admit that the League Navy is not as advanced as they have always assumed. The novel was long enough that the author and his publisher split it into two books, which delayed its publication, and it is the point in the series where the two great powers stop manoeuvring and begin to fight.