Although as it turned out, the very first thing that particular perk had been useful for had been for giving me an existential crisis. Because "Honor Harrington" was a name I'd recognized.
One of the unanticipated effects of actually discovering intelligent life in the universe had been the withering away of the science fiction genre in both literature and popular entertainment. Before we'd begun to really see the galaxy, we could dream that potentially anything was out there and that the galaxy was ours to explore. But after we'd met the Vilani, we knew what was out there - and that the galaxy was already theirs, and they didn't want us out and about in it except on their terms.
We'd dreamed that the stars were ours, or at the very least that we'd be able to meet any 'friendly visitors' out and about in it on at least roughly equal terms - but the reality was that the Vilani had been an interstellar civilization since at least the Bronze Age, the current Vilani Imperium had codified in its final form at the same time as the Fall of Rome (or at least if you believed Vilani primary-ed textbooks, which he had no real reason not to at least for information that basic), and that the Imperium had over two thousand inhabited planets, several thousand more outposts and small settlements, and literal trillions of population. There were even actual alien aliens in it, and not just human variants like the Vilani that had evolved in parallel to us out of the proto-hominids that some hypothetical 'Ancient' species had apparently seeded all over the spiral arm.
And we couldn't even realistically dream of expanding in the direction away from the Vilani imperium we bordered, because Earth was caught in a pocket. At the maximum possible range of a jump-2 drive, only seventeen star systems were reachable from Terra at all without having to pass through Nusku or Procyon. And that was every star system possible to reach, including oxygen-less (for now) rocks like Peraspera or systems without anything even that barely inhabitable which were only useful because of their positions in space and could otherwise be settled only with asteroid or deep-space habitats, like Agidda. There were five more non-Vilani star systems you could reach after transiting Nusku, arranged in a little dead-end string of 1-parsec and 2-parsec jumps, but aside from that and the jump-route back to Terra, the only way on from Nusku involved entering the Vilani Imperium proper. And since we'd only taken Nusku away from the Vilani at the end of the Third Interstellar War...?
The other way out of the Terran pocket, through Procyon, at least had the potential to lead to an entire uncharted subsector - the Capella subsector, which lay just beyond the Vilani imperium's rimward border - that we were expanding into as judiciously and yet as rapidly as we dared, but any route to the Capella subsector would be cut off if we lost the Procyon junction. And the other jump-2 from Procyon led to Sirius - which although an uninhabited star system with no useful planets was still of critical importance to Confederation naval strategists, because there were two jump-1 routes leading from Sirius to Vilani space.
And that was all there was. Although the Vilani were coreward and spinward of us, Terra essentially being on one 'corner' of their space, all of the potential infinite and uncharted expanse of the galaxy that lay to trailward and rimward of us might as well not be there at all - because we couldn't get to it. Even the nearest stars in that direction were jump-3 away from Terra or farther. And outside of the core Terran pocket itself, even what stars we could reach beyond the seventeen I'd just mentioned would almost certainly all be cut off from us in the opening phase of any interstellar war. If we lost safe transit through Nusku - we wouldn't even have to lose the planet - then everything on the 'Nusku arm' beyond it would be cut off, and if we lost Procyon then we'd lose contact with the entire Capella subsector. Which didn't change that subsector from still being dotted with almost a dozen settlements and long-range outposts, but you had to have some serious testicles to volunteer for those expeditions. Of course, Terrans being Terrans, they'd gotten some volunteers anyway.
The practical upshot of all these hard realities of astrogration was that mankind had at one time dreamed of the wide open frontier of space... and then reality had shown up and slammed the cattle gate shut right in our faces. So it wasn't surprising that the more recent generations' had chosen to focus their taste for entertainment in other directions than the sci-fi genre. After all, the entire point of escapism was to not think about how unsatisfying your current reality was. And that's why although the sci-fi genre still existed, it was nowhere near mainstream anymore. Nowadays if you wanted to get your SF fan on then your only two real choices were either 'niche' or 'vintage'.
And my parents, and me along with them, had been devoted fans of the vintage stuff. Now admittedly massive cultural milestones like Star Trek were still in general knowledge (although sometimes I cynically suspected that that was largely because Loretta Strider, the captain of StarLeaper One, had actually written her frustration that her attempt to name it the Enterprise had been shut down into her official autobiography), but the other classics of the 20th and 21st centuries were ofte more obscure. Heck, less than half the kids at school had even understood what my Star Wars jokes were referring to.
And Honor Harrington had been the titular protagonist of David Weber and Eric Flint's long-running space opera series of the early 21st century. I'd wondered all along what the heck those names in the parantheses at the ends of perk names in the Forge's purchase menu had referred to, but since I hadn't had any way to figure it out at the time I'd just noted them and moved on. But with the Harrington revelation I was now quite certain that I knew what those parenthetical additions meant. And if further corroboration were needed then "Bolthole" was a name I had also recognized - in the Honor Harrington series it had been the code-name for the Republic of Haven's super-classified project to reverse-engineer and then mass-produce the superior technology of their enemies, the Star Kingdom of Manticore.
So either Robert A. Heinlein's "World As Myth" hypothesis that he'd used as a framing device to retcon several of his own sci-fi novel series as actually existing in the same multiverse all along was more real than he'd dreamed and fictional things actually were true somewhere and speculative-fiction authors were actually just transcribing events from elsewhere without knowing that they did so (or perhaps just by mind boggling coincidence, who knew)... or the Celestial Forge was some kind of massive reality-warping force that could selectively breach the boundary between reality and fantasy, even to the point of creating material objects in the real world. Or it was actually some nigh-omnipotent entity having the world's biggest practical joke on me, a la that 5th-dimensional imp from an old 20th-century comic book I'd seen once, but that would just be a subcase of door number one up there. Or none of the above.
