Mission of Honor

Chapter Twenty-Nine

No one ever managed to accurately reconstruct exactly what happened during the first few seconds of the attack. There was simply too much mayhem, too much chaos, and despite the multitude of sensor systems—civilian, as well as military—operating throughout the inner system, no one was looking in the right direction when it all began.

Had anyone been in a position to chart the damage, however, they would have known that the very first hit—first by almost an entire tenth of a second—struck compartment HF/1-17-1336-T-1219 of HMSS Hephaestus . HF/1-17-1336-T-1219 was the control section of module GM-HF/1-17-13, a general manufacturing module attached to the Royal Manticoran Navy's Shipyard HF/1-16 and Shipyard HF/1-17, which were currently assigned to BuShips' Refit and Repair Command (Hephaestus ). HF/1-16 happened to be empty, awaiting the arrival of the brand new Nike -class battlecruiser HMSTruculent later that afternoon. HF/1-17, on the other hand, was occupied by the Roland -class destroyers HMS Barbarossa , HMS Saladin , and HMS Yamamoto Date , all three of which were completing their final fitting out, with almost their full complements embarked.

The thirty-two technicians manning HF/1-17-1336-T-1219 never even realized the station was under attack. Working in a shirtsleeve environment, concentrating on routine tasks and the hectic pace at which Hephaestus always operated, they were totally unprepared for the ravening blast of focused gamma radiation which killed them instantly, splintered the compartment around them, and ripped open one entire flank of GM-HF/1-17-13.

At the instant it fired, the torpedo which struck the control section was moving at the next best thing to 70,000 KPS and deliberately yawing on its axis, sweeping its graser in a spiraling cone to traverse the entire volume of the station. The beam itself moved away from GM-HF/1-17-13, but the lethal overpressure of the explosion's shock front—followed by equally explosive decompression—killed the sixteen techs working directly in the twenty thousand-ton fabrication module almost as quickly as the control room techs had died. Splinters of HF/1-17-1336-T-1219 blew into and through GM-HF/1-17-13, carried all the way across the module compartment, and opened the far bulkhead into the vacuum of HF/1-17.

The second breach of the fabrication module could scarcely have mattered less to the people who'd been working inside it, since they were all already dead or dying by the time it occurred. It mattered a great deal, however, to the forty-eight space station personnel moving through the outsized boarding tubes connecting the three destroyers' main airlocks to the space dock gallery and the station proper. None of them were in skinsuits when the flying battle axes which had once been part of GM-HF/1-17-13 shredded the tubes and spilled them into the enormous docking bay's merciless vacuum.

As the boarding tubes were torn apart, atmosphere vented from them in a hurricane. GM-HF/1-17-13 had already decompressed almost entirely, but the vacuum around the station sucked greedily at the wounds, and at least a quarter of the equally unprepared crewmen aboard the three destroyers found themselves in death pressure before emergency blast doors slammed shut under computer control.

As it happened, the blast doors made no difference at all, however. Even as the graser which had ripped HF/1-17-1336-T-1219 moved away, cutting deeper towards the station's central spine, another graser moved towards HF/1-17 and HF/1-16. It sliced across both shipyards in a searing eyeblink, and if it was less powerful than a Shrike 's weapon, its power was more than ample for the minor task of cutting an unarmored destroyer, unprotected by impeller wedge or sidewalls, cleanly in half.

It did precisely that to HMS Saladin . . . whose fusion plant abruptly lost containment with absolutely no warning to the engineering safety systems. Not even cybernetic reflexes were equal to that sort of cataclysmic failure, and the resulting fireball made whatever other damage the torpedoes might have done to that section of HMSS Hephaestus totally superfluous.

* * *

HMSLongshoreman , one of Hephaestus ' ready-duty tugs, was headed away from the station, towing the brand new Saganami-C -class cruiser Jessica Rice towards Traffic Control's impeller limit, when the attack came in. The two ships were accelerating at the piddling rate of barely ten gravities out of deference to the fact that Jessica Rice was on internal grav plates only, since her inertial compensator was inoperable without the impeller wedge traffic regulations forbade her in such close proximity to the station. They were well clear of the slip in which Jessica Rice had been berthed, but that didn't matter.

One of the Mesan torpedoes scored a direct hit on the station's spine, slashing outward and across successive secondary axes in a horrendous bow wave of secondary blasts and explosive decompressions. It reached the outer edge of the station and kept right on going until it ripped lengthwise across Jessica Rice 's unarmored topsides, shattering the big, powerful ship. And then she, like Saladin , blew up. The explosion disabled Longshoreman 's after impeller ring, sending her wedge into automatic shutdown . . . and leaving her unprotected as a chunk of what had once been HMSS Hephaestus which out-massed the tug by at least fifty percent slammed into her and destroyed her completely.

* * *

"Jesus Christ! "

Lieutenant Йdouard Boisvin, executive officer of HMS Stevedore , looked up in surprise at Senior Chief Petty Officer Oxana Karpova's exclamation. The senior chief had primary helm control for the powerful tug's approach to Hephaestus , and that sort of outburst from her was unheard of.

Boisvin opened his mouth to demand an explanation, but nothing came out. As he looked up, he saw the same visual display Karpova and her backup helmsman had been watching, and his vocal cords froze.

He felt himself sitting there, unable to look away, unable even to speak, as the entire space station blew apart before him. It was impossible for his stunned brain to pick individual explosions out of the chaos of devastation ripping across the station. Bits and pieces of it registered with horrifying clarity—not then, but for later replay in the nightmares which would plague him for years. Individual modules, blown loose from their moorings, spraying across the backdrop of incandescent explosions like fragile, backlit beads before the wavefront of destruction reached out and engulfed them, as well. The pieces of a heavy cruiser, her spine broken, spinning end-over-end and breaking up into smaller bits as they spun. A construction ship, underway on reaction thrusters, vanishing into the fiery vortex's maw.

Those tiny vignettes, snapshot images of catastrophe's outriders, would come back to him in those nightmares. But all that registered at the moment was the sheer impossibility of what he was seeing. There wasn't even room for horror—not in those first, fleeting seconds. The unbelievability of it would be the first and forever most overwhelming impression of any of the surviving witnesses. Their sheer incredulity.

Yet even though Йdouard Boisvin couldn't look away, the ingrained, acquired reflexes of relentless training moved the thumb of his right hand to a button on his command chair's armrest and Stevedore 's emergency signal blared from speakers throughout the ship.

* * *

"—not really a problem, Admiral. Oh, it sounded like it was going to be a bear, but once I started looking into it, it was only a scheduling snafu," Captain Karaamat Fonzarelli, Refit & Repair's senior officer aboard Hephaestus said.

Rear Admiral Margaret Truman, Hephaestus ' CO, nodded. She'd suspected it was something like that, but it was a relief to hear she'd been right.

"I've been on the screen to Logistics about it," Fonzarelli continued from his end of the com link. "According to them, it's mostly a question of when and where we want the spares delivered. So I told them t—"

Truman's display went abruptly blank.

Her eyebrows were still only beginning to rise in surprise when another torpedo's graser sawed directly through her quarters . . . and her.

* * *

"Look, Daddy! What's that?"

John Cabeзadas was struggling with his carry-on bag. The damned thing's strap insisted on twisting, especially when he was carrying Serafina. The sixteen-month-old was usually as good as gold, but, of course, whenever he was having trouble with the carry-on bag, she was inevitably fretful. He'd just decided he was going to have to hand her to his wife, Laura, when his older daughter Jennifer asked the question.

"I don't know," he told her, unable to entirely keep the irritation out of his voice. The girl was incredibly bright and even more curious than most nine-year-olds, and she'd been one question after another ever since their shuttle delivered them to Hephaestus . To be honest, much as he loved her and as happy as her keen wittedness normally made him, John was looking forward to getting her settled aboard the ship to Beowulf, where there'd be no convenient windows and she could ask her questions of the ship's library.

"What are you talking a-" he began, turning and looking through the transparent wall of the personnel tube which had been provided to give tourists a panoramic view of the station's huge bulk.

He never finished the question. There wasn't time. There was barely enough time for him to begin to reach for Jennifer, to feel Laura and twelve-year-old Miguel at his back, to experience the first terrible flicker of a father's utter helplessness, and then the explosion tore the tube apart around them.

* * *

"I am so frigging tired of worrying about the Manties' tender damned sensibilities!" Jacqueline Rivera groused.

Rivera had never been a great admirer of the "Star Empire of Manticore's" pretensions to grandeur even before this latest crisis had blown up, and she'd deeply resented the front office's insistence that she tone down her usual commentary. It wasn't simply that she'd disagreed with Corporate editorial policy—she had, in this case, but that hadn't been the real cause of her current ire. No, what she'd resented was being reminded of editorial policy by some executive assistant producer (who probably owed her position solely to the fact that she was someone's cousin in-law or current live-in lover) as if Jacqueline were some unknown newbie and not one of Solarian News Services' senior reporters.

So, all right, she might have been hitting just a little harder at questions about the credibility of the Manty version of events in Talbott than Corporate might have preferred once the great Audrey O'Hanrahan herself backed off. Sure, it was true "Saint Audrey" had urged everyone to "reserve judgment,especially now that the authenticity of the "official New Tuscany" report to which she'd gained access had been called into question by Solarian reporters actually in Talbott. And of course she might have a point when she'd argued that the Manties' enemies might have fed it to her as part of a clever, deliberate disinformation campaign. It was even possible the Mesan System authorities claims about the Green Pines terrorist attack were fabrications, althought Rivera damned well knew better than that. She'd filed three good 'casts on that very point, as a matter of fact, which was why Corporate had sent her out to Manticore . . . and told her to make nice while she was here, the stinking bastards. "More flies with honey," indeed! The damned Manties had finally come out into the open, proving they'd always funded and supported those murdering Ballroom bastards—just as Rivers had always known they were doing—and this was the time to go for the jugular, not "demonstrate journalistic impartiality and detachment"!

"Calm down, Jenny," Manfred O'Neill, her longtime recording tech, said pacifically. "It's hardly the end of the world. After all, this is the story at the moment."

"Oh, yeah?" Rivera glared at him. "Look, you may think they sent us out here to do us some kind of favor, but I know better! We could've been covering Green :Pines instead, damn it!"

"Never said anyone did it to do us a favor," O'Neill replied cheerfully. "I only said it's going to turn out to be the hot corner, and it is. Hotter'n Green Pines, for that matter, especially if there's anything to these new rumors from Spindle. Everybody's already pretty much mined Green Pines out, and it's not like the system authorities're handing out any fresh info, abyway. But there's going to be lots of stuff coming through here if things really are going to hell for the Manties in Talbott, and when it does, I don't think anyone back home is going to be worrying a lot about reminding us to watch our P's and Q's when we report it."

Rivera looked at him for a moment, then felt at least a little of her resentment easing away. Manny had a way of cutting to the heart of things, and maybe he had a point. Not that it changed the fact that—

The Mesan graser which incinerated Passenger Concourse Green-317 terminated Jennifer Rivera's reflections upon her career prospects along with her, Manfred O'Neill, and four hundred and nineteen other arriving passengers from the Hauptman Lines starship Starlight .

Approximately three-hundredths of a second later, Starlight, her crew of twenty-eight, and the two hundred through-passengers to Sphinx who hadn't disembarked, followed them into destruction.

* * *

"Is Aikawa back aboard yet, Ben?" Ansten FitzGerald asked as his steward poured him a second cup of coffee.

"No, sir," Steward 1/c Benjamin Frankel replied with a smile. "He's not due back until this afternoon, I believe."

"Um." FitzGerald frowned thoughtfully. Hexapuma would be in the yard dogs' hands for at least another three or four weeks, but she'd just been assigned a trio of bright, shiny new midshipmen. Frightening as the concept seemed in some ways, he'd decided to ask Aikawa Kagiyama to take them under his wing. He was confident Aikawa would rise to his responsibilities and set them a good example.

Of course he was.

He snorted in amusement at his own thoughts, but he couldn't really deny that a part of him was actually a little relieved at having at least another few hours before he found out whether or not his "confidence" was justified.

"Well, in that case—"

HMS Hexapuma blew up with all hands as the Mesan graser ripped across her fusion plant.

* * *

The destruction of HMSS Hephaestus was for all intents and purposes total in the first three seconds of the Mesan attack.

Some of the surviving fragments of the station were large enough and sufficiently intact to hold pressure, and a handful of the ships which had been docked survived more or less in one piece. Three of them—the destroyer Horatius , the Grayson freighter Foxglove , and the tug Bollard— actually came through the holocaust virtually undamaged.Horatius ' paint wasn't even scratched.

But they were the exception to the rule, tiny pockets of survival in a hurricane of devastation . . . and the attack on HMSS Vulcan was equally successful.

The MAN's Sierra Attack wasn't quite perfectly synchronized with the Mike Attack's assault onHephaestus , but the delay was less than four seconds. By the time visual evidence of what had happened to Hephaestus could have reached Vulcan moving at the limited velocity of light, Sphinx's space station had been just as completely demolished.

Between the two space stations, alone, the first ten seconds of Oyster Bay had already cost the Old Star Kingdom over four million dead.

* * *

Allen Higgins' face was parchment-pale as he stared at the FTL platform-driven flag bridge master plot. It was only chance he'd been on flag bridge at all, but that coincidence wasn't much help as CIC's computers emotionlessly updated the plot. Home Fleet was much too far away from either space station to have offered any sort of protection even if it had realized the attack was coming . . . or been able to see it when it did. Because it was, it was also too far away to be attacked , and in some ways, that made it far worse. The people who were supposed to protect the Star Empire—who were supposed to die to prevent something like this from ever happening —were perfectly placed to see exactly how totally they'd failed in that purpose, and the fact that it wasn't even remotely their fault meant nothing at all beside that terrible sense of failure.

And for Allen Higgins, their CO, it was even worse than it was for the rest of them.

For a moment, he was paralyzed, his mind replaying the memories of Grendelsbane with merciless clarity. Yet that lasted only for a moment. Only until he realized how infinitely much worse this disaster was.

And then the conventional Mesan missiles began their attack runs.

* * *

Daniel Detweiler's researchers hadn't yet figured out how to fit multiple full-size, sustainable drives into a single missile of manageable dimensions. They had, however, realized what the RMN must have done, and they were working industriously to duplicate the Manticoran advantage. In the meantime, they'd come up with Cataphract, a variant of their own based on taking the standard missile bodies for the SLN's new-generation anti-ship missiles and adding what amounted to a separate final stage carrying a standard laser head and a counter-missile 's drive system. For Oyster Bay, they'd brought out the longest-ranged, heaviest version of their new weapon, fitted the birds into out-sized pods, then launched them behind other, specialized pods which carried nothing but low-powered particle screens and the power supplies to maintain them for the ballistic run in-system to their targets. The missile-laden pods had followed in the zone swept by the shield-equipped platforms; now they completed their own system checks and began to launch.

A version of the new weapon had been used with lethal effectiveness against Luis Rozsak's ships at the Second Battle of Congo. Unfortunately, the full report on that wasn't available to the RMN. They knew something had improved the range of the missiles which had been provided to the "People's Navy in Exile," and they'd managed to deduce approximately how it had been done, but that was about it. And even if they'd had access to Rozsak's report, it wouldn't have fully prepared them for this. Rozsak had faced the Cataphract-A, based on the SLN's new cruiser/destroyer Spatha shipkiller; the pod-launched missiles of Oyster Bay were Cataphract-Cs , based on the capital-ship Trebucht, with much heavier and more powerful laserheads. The combined package had a powered range from rest of over sixteen million kilometers and a terminal velocity of better than .49 c . That attack envelope would have made it formidable enough by itself, but installing the high-speed drive as the last stage also gave it far more agility when it came to penetrating the target's defenses during its terminal maneuvers.

That agility, however, was scarcely required today. There were no active defenses, just as their targets made no attempt at evasive maneuvers, because no one knew they were coming in time to react.

There was time for their targets—or some of them, at least—to realize they were under attack. To see the impossible impeller signatures of missile drives swarming away from the pods' ballistic tracks. Some of those missiles were effectively wasted because of targeting decisions made by officers who hadn't felt justified in relying solely upon the efficacy of the as yet untested torpedoes. Those laser heads either never fired at all or else used themselves up picking off chunks of wreckage large enough to satisfy their targeting criteria.

But the vast majority of them had other concerns. There really weren't many of them, given the number of targets they had to cover, but it didn't take very many to kill targets as naked as these. They roared in on the carefully plotted positions of the totally unprotected orbital shipyards floating around Manticore and Sphinx with devastating effectiveness.

Bomb-pumped lasers ripped deep, mangling and shattering, spewing bits and pieces of the Star Empire of Manticore's industrial might across the heavens. And behind them came the old-fashioned nuclear warheads—warheads which detonated only if they were unable to obtain a hard kinetic kill. Fireballs glared like brief-lived, intolerably bright stars, flashing in stroboscopic spikes of devastation, and more thousands of highly skilled workers and highly trained naval personal died in those cataclysmic bubbles of plasma and radiation.

Within a total space of barely eleven minutes, both of the Star Empire's major orbital industrial nodes and well over ninety percent of its dispersed shipyards, along with the better part of five and a half million trained technicians and naval personnel—and, all too often, their families—had been wiped out of existence.

By any yardstick anyone cared to use, it was the most devastating surprise attack in the history of the human race, and it wasn't over yet.

* * *

"Bring her hard to port, Chief! Fifty degrees now! "

"Fifty degrees, aye, Sir!" Chief Petty Officer Manitoba Jackson acknowledged, and HMS Quay turned sharply.

"Bring her to"—Lieutenant Commander Andrew Sugimatsu,Quay 's CO, stabbed a look at his maneuvering plot—"five hundred and ten gravities and lay her on her side. Put our belly towards any wreckage with our name on it!"

"Rolling ship and coming to five-one-zero gravities, aye, Sir." Jackson's voice wasn't so much calmer than it had been as it was flattened and stunned, as if actual awareness was seeping past the sheer shock effect of such unmitigated disaster.

Sugimatsu gave him a sharp look. The CPO had been in the Navy almost as long as Sugimatsu had been alive, but he'd spent his entire service as one of the highly skilled specialists assigned to the management of the home system's tugs. He'd never actually seen combat, unlike Sugimatsu, and what he was seeing at this moment was the massacre of people he'd known and worked with for decades. The lieutenant commander would have trusted Jackson's nerve and composure in the face of any conceivable natural disaster, but there was nothing "natural" about this , and Sugimatsu spent a brief moment being grateful that CPO Leslie Myerson, Quay 's second helmswoman, was a combat vet.

"Sir," another voice said from the other side of Quay 's small bridge, "there's going to be a lot of wreckage coming this way pretty darn soon."

"I'm well aware of that, Truida," Sugimatsu said. He looked across at Lieutenant Truida Verstappen, his executive officer. Her comment had come out incredibly calmly under the circumstances, he thought, and it wasn't so much an objection as an observation.

"The problem," he continued, "is that anything coming our way is also coming the planet's way. And unless I'm really badly mistaken, we're all that's in a position to intercept it."

Verstappen looked at him for a moment, then nodded as he confirmed what she'd already realized must be his intentions.

"Get ready with the tractors," Sugimatsu told her. "No way can we catch all this crap with the wedge, so we're going to have to roll back down and grab the bigger pieces that get past us before they hit atmosphere."

"We've only got six tractors," Verstappen pointed out quietly.

"Then we're just going to have to hope there are only six pieces big enough to survive reentry," Sugimatsu said grimly.

Even as he said it, he knew they would never be that lucky. Not after something like this.

Quay drove sideways, accelerating hard to put herself directly between the wreckage of HMSS Vulcan and the planet Sphinx. As Sugimatsu had observed, she was the only ship in a position to intercept the avalanche about to come crashing down on the planet. Most of the station's wreckage might be small enough to be completely destroyed when it hit atmosphere, but some of it definitely wasn't going to be. In fact, some of it was going to be solid hunks of battle steel armor, specifically designed and manufactured to resist direct hits by capital ship-range energy weapons.

The good news—such as it was, and what there was of it—was that at least half the wreckage which had been blasted out ofVulcan' s orbit had been blown outward , not inward. There'd be plenty of time for someone to deal with it before it became a threat to anyone. And most of the planet-bound wreckage was clustered in a fairly tight pattern, which gave Sugimatsu the chance to put Quay directly in the center of the debris' track, using the tug's impeller wedge as a huge broom, or shield. Anything that hit the wedge would no longer be a problem. That, in fact, had been one of the unspoken reasons there were always ready-duty tugs on call at each of the space stations. If necessary, they were supposed to interpose their wedges to protect the stations against collision or attack.

Well, that part of the plan didn't work out so well, did it? Sugimatsu thought grimly. But maybe we can still do a little something for the planet.

The problem was that the wedge wasn't big enough. "Fairly tight pattern" was a purely relative term, unfortunately, especially when one used it in relation to something the size of HMSS Vulcan and a planet, and while his present course would take Quay directly through the central, densest portion of the wreckage stream, he couldn't possibly intercept all of it. Nor could he come around in time for a second pass, even with the tug's enormous acceleration rate. He simply couldn't kill speed fast enough. So one pass was all he got—that and his ship's half-dozen powerful tractors—and a lot of those chunks of debris were bigger—much bigger, in some cases—than Quay herself.

He punched a button on his command chair's arm.

"Engineering," a voice rasped in his earbug.

"It's going to be ugly, Harland," he told his engineer quietly. "No way in hell are we going to be able to catch all of it on the wedge. So make damned sure the tractors are up and ready."

"Understood," Lieutenant Harland Wingate acknowledged. As Quay 's engineer, he was also the tug's tow master. "You do realize, though," he continued, "that my instrumentation down here isn't designed to grab ships that aren't trying to help me grab them."

"I understand," Sugimatsu told him. "We're just going to have to do our best. I'm putting Truida in charge of tracking and evaluation. She'll tell you which ones to grab and where they are."

"I can use all the help I can get,," Wingate said grimly. Then he paused for a moment. "Should I try emergency overpower?" he asked.

Sugimatsu started to reply, then paused. He knew what Wingate was asking. The tug's tractors were powerful enough that they had to be handled with great care under normal circumstances. Too much power, too much torque, and they could rip chunks right out of the ship they were supposed to be towing. In fact, under the wrong circumstances, they could destroy a ship outright. So what Wingate was really asking was whether or not he should deliberately red-line the tractors and try to shred the wreckage into pieces too small to survive atmospheric entry. He might or might not succeed in any given case—a lot depended on the exact composition and structural strength of any piece of debris. But if he did succeed, that would be one more piece of wreckage, one more kinetic projectile, Quay could try to stop.

And if he pushes the tractors that hard, there's a damn good chance he'll burn them out and we'll lose something we might have stopped.

Andrew Sugimatsu's jaw muscles clenched. He'd seen combat. He'd expected to see it again. But he'd never expected to find himself having to make this kind of call in the very skies of one of his star nation's inhabited planets.

He thought for an eternity all of three or four seconds long. Then—

"Crank the bastards to max," he said harshly.

* * *

The people who'd planned Oyster Bay had carefully arranged their attack to avoid anything that could be construed as a direct attack on the planetary populations of Manticore or Sphinx. Given the nature of the war they were planning to fight, it wasn't because the MAN had any particular objection to killing as many Manticorans as possible. But there was that bothersome little matter of the Eridani Edict, and while it was probably going to take a while for anyone to figure out who'd carried out the attack, and how, that anonymity wasn't going to last forever. Eventually, the fact that the MAN and its allies were the only people who'd had the technical capability to do it was going to become obvious. There were plans in place to prevent the Manticorans from returning the compliment once they figured out who was to blame, but the Mesan Alignment's diplomatic strategies could be very seriously damaged if anyone figured out too soon how little the Eridani Edict truly meant to it.

That was the real reason the primary destruction of the space stations had been left to the torpedoes, which had overflown the planets, well clear of them. The follow up laser heads had come in on a similar trajectory, but some of the planners had argued against using any of them. Despite all the safeguards built into their guidance systems, there was always the chance, however remote, that one of them was going to ram into the planet at relativistic speeds. And, the critics had pointed out, if that happened, the Alignment's opponents would inevitably claim it had been deliberate.

The final distribution of fire had been a compromise between those who distrusted the torpedoes' ability to do the job and those who wanted no missiles anywhere near either of the inhabited planets. And as was the definition of any compromise, neither side had been completely satisfied.

But however careful they'd been to avoid direct attacks on the planets, none of them had lost any sleep over the possibility of indirect damage from the bits and pieces of wreckage raining down into the planets' gravity wells. That was something totally beyond any attacker's ability to control, and no one could possibly question the fact that the space stations had been legitimate military targets. Under those circumstances, the Eridani Edict's prohibition against deliberate attacks on planetary populations had no bearing. So if a few thousand—or a few hundred thousand—Manties were unfortunate enough to get vaporized when a fifty-thousand-ton chunk of wreckage landed on top of their town, well, making omelettes was always hard on a few eggs.

* * *

"What? "

Andrew LaFollet snapped upright in his seat, one hand pressed to his earbug. Allison Harrington had been concentrating on her grandson and the bottle he was industriously draining, but the sharp incredulity of the colonel's tone whipped her head around towards him.

He was listening intently, and she thought she could actually see the color draining out of his face. Then he stabbed the button that connected him to the pilot's position.

"Get us on the ground, Jeremiah—now! " He listened for a moment, then nodded. "All right. If we're that close to town. But get us there fast!"

He let go of the button, and as he turned to face Allison, she felt the limo's sudden acceleration pushing her back in her seat.

"What is it, Andrew?" she asked, arms tightening instinctively around Raoul.

"I'm not sure, My Lady—not yet. There's a lot of confusion on the emergency channels. But—" He paused, visibly gathering himself. "But it sounds like the system is under attack."

"What?" Allison looked at him blankly, which, as anyone who knew her could have attested, was not her customary response.

"Someone's attacked Hephaestus and Vulcan , My Lady," he said flatly. "I don't know how, but it sounds like the damage is going to be heavy, and I want you out of the air and on the ground somewhere safe."

"Alfred and the kids!" she said suddenly, her face tightening, but he shook his head quickly.

"They ought to be almost exactly half way between Manticore and Sphinx, My Lady, and it sounds like this has to be an attack on our orbital infrastructure. It's not another fleet battle, anyway. and I don't think anyone's going to be wasting firepower on a local puddle jumper that isn't even particularly close to either planet."

Allison stared at him, then swallowed harshly as she realized he was almost certainly correct.

"Thank you," she said quietly.

* * *

Quay hurtled across the wreckage stream spilling down from orbit. Her sensors' view was restricted, but she had more than enough coverage out the sides of her wedge for Truida Verstappen to know the belly band wasn't getting it all. She'd set up her computers to tag everything that crossed the sensors' field of view, and Quay 's cybernetic brain began plotting descent curves. They could only be approximate until the tug turned and brought her powerful forward radar and lidar into action, but at least Lieutenant Verstappen would know where to start looking.

Had anyone been in a position to actually watch, they would have seen HMS Quay slash into the heart of the wreckage. Despite the impenetrability of the wedge itself, it was still a high risk move. Sugimatsu had to get deep enough into the stream to intercept the most dangerous chunks of it, and that meant intersecting its path late enough that quite a few major pieces of debris were actually swept into the open throat of Quay 's wedge. He'd counted on that, since he couldn't avoid it anyway. And it didn't matter whether a piece of wreckage hit an impeller wedge on its way in or on its way out. What did matter was the distinct possibility that Quay might strike one of those pieces on its way through . The odds were against it—on the scale of the tug's overpowered wedge, both she and even a very large piece of wreckage were actually rather small objects in a relatively large volume—but the odds weren't as much against it as he could have wished, and he realized he was holding his breath.

Something large, jagged, and broken—it looked, in the fleeting glimpse he had, as if it were probably at least half of a heavy fabrication module, which must have massed the better part of thirty-five thousand tons—went screaming past Quay 's prow and impacted on the inner surface of her wedge's roof. Or, rather, was ripped into very, very, very tiny bits and pieces in the instant it entered the zone in which local gravity went from effectively zero to several hundred thousand gravities in a space of barely five meters.

The ship shuddered and bucked as other multiton chunks of Vulcan 's shattered bones slammed into her wedge. Not even her inertial compensator could completely damp the consequences of that much transferred momentum without shaking her crew like a terrier with a rat. But she'd been built with generous stress margins for a moment just like this one, and she came out the other side intact, already turning to bring tracking systems and tractors to bear on whatever had gotten past her.

Verstappen's hands flew over her console. If she'd only had more time, time to really evaluate the wreckage before they physically intercepted it, she would have been far better placed to prioritize threats. As it was, she had to do it on the fly, and perspiration beaded her forehead. At their velocity, even with the range of a tug's tractors, they had only seconds—no more than a minute or two, maximum—before their velocity would carry them too far from the debris to do any good.

"Take the queue, Harland!" she barked, pressing the key that locked in her best estimate of threat potentials, and down in Engineering, Harland Wingate and his two assistants went frantically to work.

Quay 's tractors stabbed out, no longer powerful, carefully modulated hands making gentle contact with other ships but deliberately overpowered demons, ripping and rending, striking with so much transfer energy that even enormous pieces of debris shattered.

In the one hundred and three seconds they had to work, those tractors destroyed eighteen potentially deadly shards of Her Majesty's Space Station Vulcan . Four more looming projectiles were dragged bodily after Quay as she went streaking away from her intercept. There would have been more, but two of her tractors had burned out under the abuse.

* * *

Given how little time Quay had been given, she and her crew did a magnificent job. But magnificent isn't always enough.

Several large pieces got past her, including three at least the size of cruisers, accompanied by a trailing shower of smaller bits and pieces, trailing a de-orbiting arc across the daylight side of Sphinx.

Sphinx's gravity produced an atmosphere which was shallower—"flatter"—than that of most planets humanity had settled, and the wreckage of what had once been HMSS Vulcan , some with personnel still trapped aboard, hit the boundary of that atmosphere at an altitude of ninety-five kilometers.

The first impactor struck the planetary surface twenty seconds later. Even closing at a paltry eight kilometers per second—barely twenty-five times the speed of sound at local sealevel—the fragments were wrapped in a sheath of plasma as they shrieked downward. Not all the debris Quay had missed reached the surface, of course, but even those chunks that never struck the ground transferred their kinetic energy to the atmosphere, creating bow waves of plasma, and then a sequence of air bursts along the entire length of their descent paths, sparking forest fires and flattening anything beneath them.

Twenty seconds, it took. Twenty seconds of shrieking, incandescent fury. Of superheated air exploding outwards in demonic shockwaves. Twenty seconds of seething violence howling its way down the heavens.

There was no one to backstop Quay . The only armed aircraft which could possibly have reached any of those pieces in time were the sting ships flying escort on Allison Harrington's air limo, and there was too much confusion for anyone to get word to them quickly enough. Even if there hadn't been, they carried no weapons powerful enough to have destroyed such massive kinetic hammers.

Multiple fragments, two of them massing between two hundred and three hundred thousand tons each, slammed into the icy waters of the Tannerman Ocean. The resulting impact surge would kill over ten thousand people in dozens of small coastal towns and inflict billions of dollars worth of damage.

But that was the good news.

Twenty seconds was far too little warning to do any good, too little time for anyone to react. Alarms were only beginning to sound in the city of Yawata Crossing, emergency messages only starting to hit the public information channels, when an even larger impactor—three hundred thousand tons of wreckage, the size of one of the old Star Knight -class heavy cruisers—struck approximately five and a half kilometers from the exact center of the city of one and a quarter million people . . . with an effective yield of better than two megatons.

The three follow-on strikes by fragments in the forty thousand-ton range were barely even noticeable.

* * *

Andrew LaFollet moved suddenly.

Allison had been staring out the limo's window, her brain whirling as she tried to process the impossible information. She wasn't even looking in LaFollet's direction—in fact, her attention had been drawn by a brilliant flash to the east, somewhere out to sea, ahead of the limo—and so she was taken completely by surprise when he snatched Raoul out of her arms.

She started to turn her head, but LaFollet hadn't even paused. Raoul began a howl of protest, but it was cut off abruptly as LaFollet shoved the baby into the special carrier affixed to the mounting pedestal of Allison's chair—the one which would normally have been Honor's, if Honor had been present. The internal tractor net locked down around the infant instantly, gentle and yet implacably powerful, and LaFollet slammed the lid.

That carrier had been designed and built by the same firm that built and designed life support modules for treecats, and every safety feature human ingenuity could come up with had been designed into it. Allison was just starting to come upright in her own chair, her eyes wide, when LaFollet stepped back and hit a button.

Allison's shoulder harness yanked tight with brutal, bruising force, and battle steel panels snapped out of the limo's bulkheads and overhead, sealing her and the baby in a heavily armored shell. A fraction of a second later, the blast panel blew out, and the shell went spinning away from the limo under its built-in emergency counter-grav.

LaFollet hit a second button, and Lindsey Phillips' chair followed Allison's. Then he jumped for his own chair and reached for the third emergency ejection button.

* * *

Black Rock Clan was one of the older treecat clans. Not so old as Bright Water Clan from whence it had originally sprung, perhaps, but certainly of respectable antiquity. It was a large clan, too—one which had been growing steadily over the last double-hand of turnings. The hunting was good, here in the western picket-wood of the mountains the two-legs called the Copper Walls. The "gardening" tricks the two-legs had taught the People helped, as well, and Black Rock had learned to look forward to the regular visits of the Forestry Service's doctors, which had kept so many of their young from dying in kittenhood.

But for all that, Black Rock Clan, like most treecat clans, kept largely to itself. There were no two-legs living in Black Rock's immediate vicinity, and so there was no one to tell the People what had happened in the black emptiness so far beyond their sky.

And perhaps that was just as well. At least none of the People realized what was about to happen.