Aivars Terekhov
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Captain Aivars Aleksovitch Terekhov is a fictional character in the Honorverse, a series of military science-fiction novels written by David Weber. He first appeared in the Honorverse spin-off novel The Shadow of Saganami.
A distant relative of some members of the Manticoran aristocracy, Terekhov is an officer in the Royal Manticoran Navy who left the service to pursue a career in Manticore's diplomatic service. He worked for twenty-eight years in the Foreign Office while holding a reserve commission in the Navy. When the war with the People's Republic of Haven broke out, Terekhov reported to active duty with the rank of lieutenant commander. Because of his long period spent in the Naval Reserve, his advancement through the ranks was slow, but by the end of the war he had achieved command of the light cruiser HMS Defiant.
During the final stages of the war, Terekhov and Defiant led a light cruiser division in an escort mission to the Hyacinth System. Unknown to the Manticorans, a Havenite raiding force had taken control of Hyacinth and ambushed the convoy with far superior forces. Terekhov ordered his cruisers to engage the Havenites to cover the retreat of the merchant ships. Two of Terekhov's three cruisers and six merchant ships were destroyed, but he managed to buy time for two of the merchantmen to escape, after which he surrendered what was left of Defiant.
He and the survivors of his crew spent the rest of the war in a State Security prisoner camp, enduring many atrocities until the end of the war and the fall of the Saint-Just regime. The People's Navy apologized to Terekhov for his mistreatment and he remained in a Navy-run camp until a general prisoner exchange was agreed between the Manticoran Prime Minister Baron High Ridge and the Havenite President Eloise Pritchart.
For his actions in Hyacinth, Terekhov was awarded the Manticore Cross (the Star Kingdom's second highest military award) and spent a few years in medical and psychatric treatment. When war broke out again with Haven, he was recalled back to active duty and given command of HMS Hexapuma, a brand-new Edward Saganami-C class heavy cruiser, when her original captain was reassigned to command a battlecruiser.
Hexapuma was then assigned to the Manticoran naval station in the Talbott Cluster, an impoverished region of space that had requested annexation within Manticore, in what was considered a backwater assignment. In Talbott, Terekhov and Hexapuma uncovered a plot by bureaucrats of the Solarian League's Office of Frontier Security and the corporate businessmen of the slaver planet Mesa to incite unrest and violence in the Cluster as a pretext for military intervention by the League, thus driving Manticore away.
Terekhov organized an ad-hoc naval "Squadron" with Manticoran fleet units and proceeded independently to the Monica system, where a fleet of warships was being secretly assembled for an attack against the Manticoran presence in the Cluster. Following a grueling naval battle, Terekhov and his Squadron succeeded in staving off the threat and held the system until Manticoran reinforcements arrived. After provisional repairs, he and Hexapuma returned to Manticore, where the men and women of the Squadron were hailed as heroes.
