Mission of Honor

Chapter Twenty-Eight

What happened wasn’t anyone’s fault.

Unlike the High Ridge Government’s abysmal intelligence failure (in more than one sense of the word) during the run-up to Operation Thunderbolt, no one had ignored any warning signs. Perimeter Security and Home Fleet had maintained their unceasing watch for any threat, despite the negotiations with Haven. Neither Admiral Givens’ ONI nor any other of the Star Empire’s intelligence services had misinterpreted, disregarded, or even overlooked a single scrap of relevant evidence that was hidden in their files. True, none of the analysts involved had been looking in the right direction, but they were scarcely alone in that, since no one outside the innermost core of the Mesan Alignment even knew the Mesan Alignment Navy existed. So it wasn’t surprising Manticoran intelligence’s attention had been focused elsewhere, given all the other ‘distractions’ the Alignment had arranged to keep the Star Empire occupied.

But because no one had been aware of the Alignment’s existence, or had even a clue as to its ultimate objectives, no one had ever heard of something called the spider drive, either. Or suspected for a single moment that it might actually be not only possible but practical to launch something like Oyster Bay without its intended victims’ elaborate, exquisitely sensitive, carefully maintained early warning systems detecting the attack with plenty of time to prepare for it.

Indeed, it might have been argued, although with debatable justice, that if there was a failure on the Manticorans’ part, it was one of hubris. After all, the Royal Manticoran Navy had just been given overwhelming proof of its technological superiority to the vaunted SLN. Coupled with Manticore’s persistent ability to stay ahead of Havenite R&D efforts, there was a certain confidence in the prowess of the RMN’s hardware. To their credit, the Admiralty’s strategists had conscientiously maintained their awareness that—as Thomas Theisman had demonstrated in Operation Thunderbolt—any technological advantage was transitory. Despite that, however, they were convinced that right now, at this particular moment, their overall advantage was overwhelming. And so, in most respects, it was.

The ships which had mounted Oyster Bay, however, represented a radical departure from anything the galaxy had previously seen which was just as impressive, in its own way, as anything Manticore had accomplished. They weren’t a particularly graceful departure, of course. In fact, compared to any impeller-drive ship, they were squat, stumpy, and downright peculiar looking because, unlike the gravitic drives everyone else used, the spider generated no impeller wedge. Instead of using two inclined planes of focused gravity to create bands of stressed space around the pocket of normal-space which surrounded a ship, the spider used literally dozens of nodes to project spurs or spikes of intensely focused gravity. For all intents and purposes, each of those spurs was almost like generating a tractor or a presser beam, except that no one in his right mind had ever imagined tractors or pressers that powerful. In fact, at a sufficiently short range, they would have made quite serviceable energy weapons, because these focused, directional beams were powerful enough to create their own tiny foci—effectively, holes in the “real” universe—in which space itself was so highly stressed that the beams punched clear through to the alpha wall, the interface between normal-space and hyper-space.

No single beam would have been of any particular use. Powerful as it might be, it was less than a shadow compared to the output of even a single one of any starship’s beta nodes, far less an alpha node. It wasn’t even enough to produce the “ripple” along the hyper-space wall which Manticore used for its FTL communications technology. But it did lock onto the wall, and that provided the ship which mounted it a purchase point in deep space—one which was always available, anywhere, in any direction. And when dozens of those beams were combined, reaching out, locking onto the alpha wall and pulling in micro-spaced bursts, they produced something that was very useful, indeed.

The maximum acceleration the new technology could theoretically have attained was vastly lower than the acceleration theoretically attainable under impeller drive. After all, in theory an impeller wedge could be accelerated instantaneously to the speed of light. There were, however, a few shortcomings to that sort of acceleration, which was why theoretical acceleration rates had always been of far less interest to practical ship designers than the maximum rates which could be compensated for with sufficient efficiency to allow mere humans to survive without being turned into extremely thin layers of paste on the bulkheads.

And in that respect, even the spider drive’s lower theoretical maximum acceleration presented a definite challenge, given the fact that it produced no impeller wedge. Without a wedge, it also produced no convenient “sump” for an inertial compensator, and that meant the maximum survivable normal-space acceleration for a spider drive-equipped ship was limited by the ability of currently available grav plate technology to offset the consequences of acceleration. Unfortunately, grav plates were far less capable in that respect than inertial compensators, which had an inevitable effect on the maximum accleration a spider-drive ship could attain. It also meant that unlike impeller-drive vessels, a spider-drive ship’s decks had to be aligned perpendicular to its axis of movement rather than parallel, which was a large part of what produced its shorter, “squatter” hull form, not to mention requiring some significant rethinks about the way spacecraft designers had been arranging ship interiors literally for centuries.

Although the Alignment’s physicists had been inspired to push grav plate technology harder than anyone else, there were still limits. Up to an actual acceleration of one hundred and fifty gravities, it could achieve an efficiency of over ninety-nine percent, producing a “felt” acceleration of only one gravity. Above that level, however, the plates’ efficiency fell off dramatically. The physical plant itself grew larger and more massive on a steeply climbing curve, which cut into internal volume, and even then, each additional gravity of actual acceleration produced a “felt” increase of approximately.05 g. That didn’t sound too terrible, but what it meant was that fifty additional gravities produced an apparent increase of two and a half gravities, which raised the ship’s internal gravity to 3.5 g, at which point the crew’s ability to move about and perform even routine duties began to become… impaired. And it also meant that grav plates powerful enough to produce that effect required almost twice the volume required to produce the 150:1 ratio.

After considering the situation carefully, the architects had designed and stressed the ship structures and control stations to permit effective maneuvering and combat at up to four gravities, but combat efficiency began to decline noticeably at that rate of acceleration due to the physiological limitations of the crew. Moreover, that still equated to an actual acceleration of only two hundred and ten gravities, which was pathetic by the standards of any impeller-drive warship. Actual acceleration could be pushed—in emergencies, and briefly, at least—to almost three hundred and ten gravities, but that produced a “felt” gravity of 9 g. Crew acceleration couches were provided for just that contingency, yet three hundred and ten gravities was still barely half of the acceleration which the RMN’s biggest superdreadnought could currently attain, and even with the best acceleration couches in the universe, no one could stand nine gravities for long. Worse, smaller spider-drive ships had no acceleration advantage over larger ones. And the need to stabilize the ship relative to the hyper wall required at least three sets of “spider legs,” which led directly to the “triple skeg” hull form which had been adopted. Which, in turn, meant that instead of two broadsides, a spider-drive ship had three… none of which could be protected by the impenetrable barrier of an impeller wedge. That meant both that areas no impeller-drive ship had to armor did require massive armor protection aboard a spider-drive warship and that there was no wedge floor and roof for a side wall to stitch together. And just to make matters even more interesting, the spider drive could not be used through a spherical sidewall like the ones fortresses generated.

All of that was true,and all of it constituted indisputably significant disadvantages. But the spider also had one overwhelming advantage: it was effectively undetectable by any sensor system deployed by any navy (including the MAN itself) at any range much beyond a single light-second. Even for the MAN, it was damnably hard to detect; for someone who didn’t even know what to look for, the task was about as close to outright impossible as challenges came. For all intents and purposes, a spider-drive ship’s drive field was invisible, and it was actually the drive signature of a ship for which virtually all long-range passive sensors searched.

Which explained how Admiral Frederick Topolev’s and Rear Admiral Lydia Papnikitas’ strike forces had been able to deploy their missile pods without anyone’s ever noticing they were there. And it also explained how Commodore Karol Østby’s and Commodore Milena Omelchenko’s scouting forces had been able to prowl undetected about both components of the Manticore Binary System for over two months, while Commodore Roderick Sung’s scouts and Admiral Jennifer Colenso’s strike ships had done exactly the same things at Yeltsin’s Star.

And no one knew a thing about it or even suspected what was about to happen.

Now the Mesan attack came sweeping in out of the darkness. The incoming weapons had extraordinarily low radar signatures, and they were coming in at barely 60,000 KPS. Even if some of them had been detected, their velocity was so low it was unlikely to pop through the defenders’ threat filters. As it happened, however, none of them were picked up as they sliced deeper and deeper in-system, unseen and undetected, like the talons of some huge, lethal, invisible bird of prey.

There were actually six separate attacks on the Manticore Binary System itself, one for each inhabited planet’s infrastructure and each divided into two separate waves, although they’d been carefully synchronized to form a single, devastating sledgehammer of a blow.

The first wave of each attack consisted of a weapon which was as much a fundamental breakthrough, in its own way, as the Manticoran introduction of the multidrive missile: a graser torpedo which used its own variant of the spider drive. It was a large and cumbersome weapon, with the same trilateral symmetry as the Shark-class ships which had launched it, and for the same reasons.

The torpedo’s size made fitting it into magazines and actually firing it awkward, to say the least, and the Sharks had never been intended to deploy it operationally. For that matter, the Sharks themselves had never been supposed to be deployed “operationally.” The Leonard Detweiler class, which had been intended to carry out this operation, had been designed with magazines and launch tubes which would make it possible to stow and fire torpedoes internally, but none of the Detweilers were even close to completion, and it had required the development of an ingenious external rack system to allow the Sharks to use it for Oyster Bay.

For all its size, it was also a slow weapon. It was simply impossible to fit a spider drive capable of more than a few hundred gravities’ acceleration into something small enough to make a practical weapon. As compensation, however, its drive had almost as much endurance as most of the galaxy’s recon drones, which gave it an impressive absolute range. And a large percentage of the torpedo’s volume had been reserved for systems which had nothing at all to do with propulsion. Whereas the Royal Manticoran Navy had concentrated on improving the efficiency of its standard laser heads, Daniel Detweiler’s R&D staff had taken another approach. They’d figured out how to squeeze what amounted to a cruiser-grade graser projector into something small enough to deploy independently.

The power of the torpedo’s graser wasn’t remotely comparable to that of the weapon mounted by current-generation Shrikes, yet it was more powerful than any single bomb-pumped laser head. Of course, there was only one of it in each torpedo, but R&D had decided the new weapon could sacrifice the laser head’s multi-shot capability, because it offered three highly significant advantages of its own. First, it was just as hard to pick up as a spider-drive ship, and the best anti-missile defense in the universe couldn’t hit something it didn’t know was coming. Second, the torpedo carried extraordinarily capable sensors and targeting systems and an AI which approached the capability of the one Sonja Hemphill’s people had fitted into the Apollo control missile. As a consequence, its long-range hit probability was significantly higher on a per-beam basis than anything short of Apollo itself. And, third, a bomb-pulsed laser had a burst endurance of barely five thousandths of a second; a laser torpedo’s graser’s endurance was a full three seconds … and it had a burn-through range against most sidewalls of over fifty thousand kilometers.

Fitting all that into something the size of a torpedo had required some drastic engineering compromises, and there’d never been any possibility of squeezing in the power supply for more than a single shot. Even if there had been, no one could build a graser that small and that powerful which could survive the power bleed and waste heat of actually firing. But that was fine with the MAN’s designers and tacticians. In fact, they were just as happy every graser torpedo would irrevocably and totally destroy itself in the moment it fired, since they weren’t looking forward to the day one of their enemies finally captured one intact and figured out how to duplicate it.

Now the time had come to find out just how profitably they’d invested their R&D time.

The torpedoes had begun accelerating well before they or any of the missile pods accompanying them reached the range at which any transmission from the communications platforms the Ghost-class scout ships had emplaced could have reached them. On the other hand, they had less need for any additional information than the missiles did. They already knew where to find their targets, and they pulled steadily away from their purely ballistic pod companions.

“That’s funny,” Sensor Tech 1/c Franklin Sands murmured. He reached out and tapped a command into his display, then frowned as the more detailed readout appeared.

“Ma’am,” he said, looking over his shoulder, “I’m picking up something funny over here.”

Lieutenant (JG) Tabatha Dombroski, HMS Star Witch’s junior tactical officer, had the heavy cruiser’s combat information center watch, and she quirked one eyebrow as she looked in Sands direction. “Something funny” wasn’t how the competent and experienced tech normally reported his findings.

“What is it?” Dombroski asked, walking across CIC’s relatively spacious compartment towards him. Then she snorted. “Forget I asked that. I imagine that if you already knew what it was, you’d have told me, wouldn’t you?”

“I believe the Lieutenant might reasonably assume that, Ma’am,” Sands replied gravely, but his eyes twinkled. Lieutenant Dombroski had made fewer mistakes than quite a few JGs he’d known over the years, and she was more than willing to admit that even her enlisted personnel could probably teach her a thing or two.

“All right, I will,” she told him as she reached his command station and looked over his shoulder. “So what is it we haven’t been able to ID?”

“This, Ma’am,” Sands said more seriously. He indicated his readouts, and Dombroski gazed thoughtfully at them.

There wasn’t much to see. Star Witch’s division of obsolescent Star Knight-class heavy cruisers were conducting routine training exercises in preparation for deployment to Silesia. They’d been listed for disposal when the Battle of Manticore burst upon the RMN, at which point they’d been pulled back out of reserve and refitted for service, so they had more training to worry about than most. It might be argued that, since they were headed for what had become an admittedly important but still strategically secondary assignment—and weren’t even scheduled to leave for another two and a half weeks—there was no tearing urgency to the process, but Commodore James Tanner, CruDiv 114.1’s commanding officer, didn’t believe in letting last-minute details pile up. He’d gotten permission for conduct formation exercises in a conveniently empty area well inside the hyper limit but above the ecliptic, which was what it had been doing for the last three days. Between maneuvering and tactical exercises, each ship had been tasked with completing her own system tests while there would still be time for the techs aboard Hephaestus to correct any faults before their scheduled departure, as well. As part of her own tests, Star Witch had deployed half a dozen Ghost Rider recon platforms, and Sands was currently in charge of monitoring their telemetry, not that he’d really expected to find anything. All he was doing was to make certain CIC’s computers and the drones were talking to each other properly, and a less experienced or conscientious rating probably would never have noticed the tiny scrap of transmission he’d picked up.

“Any idea who it’s from?” Dombroski asked after a moment. “I mean, who’s out there on that bearing?”

“That’s what’s funny about it, Ma’am.” Sands shrugged. “It’s directional as hell, and it originated from even further above the ecliptic than we are. As far as I can tell, there’s nobody out there. No one according to any of our shipping logs, anyway.”

“What do the computers make of it?” Dombroski’s frown deepened.

“That’s just coming up,” Sands said as another display blinked. They both looked at it, and he pursed his lips in a silent whistle.

“That’s one damned big burst packet, Ma’am,” he said.

“Yeah,” Dombroski agreed. “More to the point, though, we don’t even recognize the encryption.”

“Internal Andermani or something, Ma’am?” Sands sounded puzzled, but not yet really concerned, and Dombroski shook her head grimly.

“Even if it’s Andermani, whoever sent it wouldn’t have used that encryption unless they wanted to keep anyone who happened to detect it from understanding it. And like you say, it’s a big packet. And one coming from somewhere none of our people are supposed to be.”

“But—” Sands began, then shut his mouth rather firmly.

“I know what you’re thinking,” the lieutenant told him, “and you’ve got a point. I don’t know how anyone who’s not supposed to be here could have gotten in, either. Not how she could’ve gotten past Perimeter Security without being detected on the way in, anyway. And I may be jumping at shadows. All the same, though, this is something to be passed on to older and wiser heads, I think.”

She rested one approving hand lightly on Sands’ shoulder for a moment, then keyed her headset.

“Commander Neukirch,” she requested.

“Neukirch,” a deep, slightly sleepy voice responded after a brief pause.

“Drombroski, Sir, in CIC. I’m sorry to disturb you, but we’ve just picked up something down here that makes me a little nervous.”

“Nervous?” Lieutenant Commander Gilderoy Neukirch’s voice sharpened. As Star Witch’s tactical officer, he was Dombroski’s immediate superior. She hadn’t been aboard all that long, but he’d formed a positive opinion of her judgment.

“Yes, Sir. It’s a burst transmission. It’s a big one—it looks like our platform crossed its path before we caught all of it, despite its compression. According to our shipping logs, there shouldn’t be anyone at its apparent origination point, either. And, Sir, it’s encrypted, and we don’t even recognize the encryption.”

Neukirch sat abruptly upright in bed.

“Inform the bridge immediately,” he said sharply. “Then screen Captain McMahon. Tell him I suggest he get up, get dressed, and meet me in CIC as soon as possible.”

“Ah, excuse me, My Lady,” Andrew LaFollet said with infinite politeness, “but unless I’m mistaken, isn’t Lady Claire’s birthday today ?”

Doctor Allison Chou Harrington, one of the Star Empire of Manticore’s premier geneticists, looked up from the unhappy youngster on the changing table and gave Lord Raoul Alexander-Harrington’s personal armsman the sort of look which had been known to level tall mountains and reduce glaciers to steaming swamps.

“If you would like to shoulder your responsibilities as this young monster’s guardian and change his diaper yourself, Colonel Andrew LaFollet, I’m sure we could facilitate things,” she told him.

“Assassins, blades, bullets, and bombs come with the job, My Lady,” he replied solemnly. “Diapers—and the surprises they so often contain—weren’t listed anywhere when I signed up.”

“Well, they should have been,” she said, reaching for the cleansing tissue he extended to her.

In fact, as both of them knew perfectly well, Allison had volunteered to change Raoul. It was, she said, a grandmother’s duty. Besides, she liked babies, especially her own personal grandbabies. Of which, as she had pointed out to her daughter upon occasion, she still had only one. Well, two counting Katherine, of course.

“There, baby!” she said, sealing the clean diaper in place and scooping him up for tickling and an enthusiastic hug before she tucked him back into his onesie. “All clean and fresh smelling… for now, at least.”

He gurgled happily, and she laughed. Despite the volume of which he was capable, he was actually an extraordinarily even-tempered baby. He took particularly vocal exception to having his diapers changed, for some reason, yet other than that he spent a lot more time being delighted with the universe than he did complaining about it. It had been sixty-two T-years and some change since Raoul’s mother had been his age, but Allison didn’t remember young Honor Harrington being quite as cheerful as he was. Then again, Honor hadn’t met Nimitz until she was twelve, and Raoul was for all intents and purposes being raised by treecats, as well as humans. God only knew where that was going to end up!

“I’ll go give Jeremiah the heads up,” LaFollet told her, and she nodded. Sergeant Jeremiah Tennard was actually her daughter Faith’s personal armsman, but the twins’ armsmen frequently doubled up watching the kids so that one of them could keep an eye on her or Alfred. Which was how he’d come to be assigned to Allison when she came ahead to Sphinx to reopen the Copper Walls house. And how he’d become her limo pilot for this little junket, as well.

And they’re so damned well meaning and eager about it I can’t even work up a good mad, she thought. Even if it does sometimes make me feel like they think I’m another nine-year-old they have to keep track of!

“Lindsey!” she called.

“Yes, Milady?” Lindsey Phillips, Raoul’s nanny, poked her head into the nursery.

“I think we’re ready,” Allison told her. “He smells better, anyway.”

“Milady, I could have done that, you know,” Lindsey told her. “Unless I’m mistaken, it’s listed somewhere in my job description.”

“No, is it?” Allison smiled at the young woman who was also Katherine Alexander-Harrington’s nanny, as she’d been for Faith and James Harrington, as well. “You mean that, all these years, I could actually have had you changing diapers?”

“As a matter of fact, you could have,” Lindsey told her gravely.

“Ah, if only I’d known!”

Lindsey chuckled and took Raoul, balancing him against her shoulder, and the two women walked out the nursery door and down the short hallway in the comfortable, centuries-old house high in the Copper Wall Mountains. They paused on the veranda, gazing out across the dense green trees of Sphinx and the just visible blue flashes of the Tannerman Ocean far beyond and below them.

A customized armored air limousine in the green livery of Harrington Steading sat on the parking circle, with LaFollet and Sergeant Tennard talking beside it. Overhead, a pair of heavily armed sting ships circled patiently, and Allison shook her head. It was at moments like this, especially when all the security was focused here, on the Harrington freehold which had been in her husband’s family since the Plague Years and which had been her own home since she returned with him to Manticore from Beowulf so many decades before, that the absurdity of the changes in her life snapped into crisp, unambiguous clarity. And it was also at moments like this that she found herself most wistfully wishing things hadn’t gotten quite so complicated.

But there’s no point wishing, she reminded herself once again. And however ‘complicated’ things may seem sometimes, you couldn’t change any of it without changing all of it, and then where would you be? Somehow I don’t see you giving up Raoul or Katherine just to avoid having to put up with other people’s schedules!

“Here we are, Andrew,” she said, and Raoul’s armsman turned and smiled at her. “I hope we haven’t really made you late,” she said.

“Actually, we are running a little late, My Lady,” he said, “but that’s all right. Miranda just screened. It seems Faith had a little accident when they were leaving the Landing House. Something to do with sliding down the grand staircase banister again.”

“Oh, Lord!” Allison rolled her eyes, and Lindsey chuckled. Honor’s younger sister was almost nine T-years old, and she’d developed a veritable obsession for banisters after watching half a dozen treecats go tobogganing gleefully down them. Thankfully, her twin brother James seemed to have avoided that particular mental aberration.

“It’s all right, My Lady,” Andrew assured her. “At least she didn’t break anything, this time.”

“Would that be that she didn’t break any portion of her own person, or that she didn’t break anything else ?” Allison inquired, and the armsman chuckled.

“Neither, in this case,” he said. “But she did manage to bloody her nose, with predictable consequences for her clothes. So what with picking her up, stopping the nosebleed, her father’s discussion of questionable decisions, and then getting her changed, they missed their flight out of Landing and had to re-book. They’re in transit now, but Miranda says Lady Claire’s pushed her party back an hour to give them time.”

“I see.” Allison shook her head. “Well, by the time they get here, I’m sure Raoul will have come up with another delay of his own. But until then, let’s get your show on the road.”

“Of course, My Lady.”

The torpedoes were unaware that anyone had overheard their e-mail. Not that they would have cared if they had known, of course. Nor were they particularly impressed by the meticulous precision, planning, and execution by their merely human masters which had gotten the transmitting platforms into position to send it to them without any Manticoran ever spotting the MAN at it. They simply receipted the portion of it which was addressed to them and ignored the rest.

Special caps fitted to protect their sensors from particle erosion and micrometeorites during their long ballistic run in to attack range were blown free while onboard artificial intelligences considered the updated targeting information and concluded that none of it required significant modification of their pre-launch instructions. Their targets were rather large, after all, and they’d already known exactly where to find them.

The tricky part had been synchronizing the attack waves. Manticore-A and Manticore-B were far enough apart that even if the Manticorans’ FTL station’s range was great enough for transmissions between them (which seemed, to say the least, unlikely), it would take the better part of thirteen minutes for word of what happened around one component of the binary system to reach the other. Because of that, Oyster Bay’s planners had been willing to settle for only approximate coordination between those separate parts of the operation.

Within the Manticore-A subsystem, however, timing was far more critical. Although the planets Manticore and Sphinx were well over twenty-five light-minutes apart at the moment, it was imperative that all the attacks be executed in a time window too narrow to allow for any effective reaction by the system’s defenders. And unlike certain members of the Solarian League Navy, the MAN had a very powerful respect for the Royal Manticoran Navy. Not only that, but as they’d studied and updated Oyster Bay’s planning requirements, they’d become painfully aware that the Manticorans’ reaction was going to be even faster and better coordinated than they’d originally allowed for, given the existence of their grav-pulse communicators and how they’d undoubtedly upgraded their routine readiness postures in the wake of the Battle of Manticore. No doubt they’d based any changes on the need to defeat a repeat of any attack using known weapon systems, since one didn’t normally make plans on the basis of threats one didn’t know about, but the MAN had found that reflection less than completely reassuring. In the Alignment strategists’ opinion, it was generally a good idea to proceed with caution when one decided to march into a napping tigress’ cave to steal her young, and so the initial deployment of Oyster Bay’s weapons had been painstakingly planned and calculated, then carried out with meticulously rehearsed precision.

None of which mattered at all to the weapons in question themselves.

The eighteen torpedoes heading the Mike Attack wave bound for the planet Manticore, simply adjusted their courses very slightly, while those leading the Sierra Attack, bound for the planet Sphinx, didn’t even have to do that. Onboard passive sensors located the unmistakable emission signatures of their targets and pre-attack testing signals began cascading through their systems.

“No, Sir,” Lieutenant Commander Neukirch said. “I don’t have any more idea what this could be or who it could have come from than Lieutenant Dombroski has. But I think she did exactly the right thing by reporting it up the line.”

“I agree entirely,” Commodore Tanner replied. “And I’ve already kicked a flash report up to Perimeter Security, but even with the grav com it’s going to be another couple of minutes before we hear anything back. If anyone has any powerful insights, I want to hear them now.”

The silence, Tanner reflected, was deafening. His com display was divided into four quadrants which were occupied, respectively, by the faces of Captain Madison Marcos, the commanding officer of HMS Star Dance (which also made him Tanner’s flag captain); Captain Vince McMahon, Star Witch’s CO; and both cruisers’ senior tactical officers. Commander Alexandros Adriopoulos, Tanner’s chief of staff, was physically present, still holding the mug of coffee he’d been sipping when Star Witch’s emergency transmission came in three hundred and seventy seconds previously. And none of them, obviously, had any insights at all, powerful or not.

Fair’s fair, Jim, he admonished himself. You know just as much as they do, and you don’t have any brilliant analysis to offer, either. Except for the blindingly obvious point Neukirch already made, of course. So don’t go taking your grumpy out on them.

“All right,” he said out loudt. “A few things we can do on our own while we wait for Perimeter Security to get back to us. Commander Neukirch, your request to deploy additional Ghost Rider platforms is approved. Use however many you think you need, but try to find me whoever sent that transmission.”

Neukirch started to open his mouth, but Tanner’s raised hand preempted anything the lieutenant commander had been about to say.

“I know I’m asking you to find a very small needle in a very large haystack, Commander. But we’ve got at least an approximate bearing, and I don’t want that datum getting any older before we start trying to chase it down. Do your best. No one expects miracles.”

“Yes, Sir.”

“Alexandros,” the commodore turned to his chief of staff, “I think it’s time we woke up the division’s other skippers and tac officers. The more people we have looking for this, the better. And while I’m thinking about it, get a flash directly off to Home Fleet, as well. I’m sure Perimeter Security will be keeping Admiral Higgins in the loop, but let’s see if we can’t cut the transmission time as much as possible.”

“Yes, Sir.”

“In the meantime,” Tanner continued, turning his attention to Marcos and McMahon, “I think we shou—”

“Excuse me, Sir!”

Tanner’s eyes darted to Neukirch’s image as the tactical officer’s suddenly hoarse voice cut him off in mid-syllable. Neukirch looked as if he’d just been punched in the belly. The lieutenant commander was staring at something outside his com pickup’s field of view, and Tanner could actually see the color draining out of the younger man’s face. Then Neukirch inhaled deeply and looked back at the commodore.

“I think I know what it was about, Sir,” he said in a voice like crushed gravel.

The Mike Attack torpedoes reached the proper point in space. They aligned themselves with finicky precision, doublechecked and triple-checked their targeting, then fired.

Every one of them activated in the space of a single second, and three seconds later, not one of them still existed. But their closing speed on their target well over seventy thousand kilometers per second; the target in question was completely unprotected by impeller wedge or side wall, which increased their standoff range to the next best thing to a half-million kilometers; and their approach vectors had been carefully calculated.

One moment, the Manticore Binary System was going about its routine business, peacefully and calmly. The next moment, eighteen powerful grasers ripped through Her Majesty’s Space Station Hephaestus like demons. There was absolutely no warning. No time to bring up the station’s spherical sidewall, or to evacuate, or don skinsuits, or set internal pressure security. There was no time at all as that devastating wave of destruction struck like a chainsaw hitting an egg.

Despite the provision of her sidewall generators, Hephaestus had never truly been intended or designed to survive that sort of attack. Even if its builders had ever dreamed in their worst nightmares that something like it was a real possibility, it would have been physically impossible to structure and armor the station to face it. But none of those builders had ever really imagined something like this getting past Perimeter Security and Home Fleet, actually reaching attack range of the Star Empire’s capital planet without so much as being challenged, and so no one had even tried. For that matter, there’d never been a single, comprehensive construction or expansion plan of any sort for Hephaestus. The station had simply grown, steadily and inevitably, adding additional lobes and habitats—cargo platforms, personnel sections, heavy fabrication modules, shipyards—as they were required. Taking advantage of the flexibility microgravity made possible. Expanding into a huge, lumpy agglomeration of raw industrial power which had its own peculiar beauty as it floated in orbit, by far the brightest single object in the planet Manticore’s night skies. It stretched over a hundred and ten kilometers along its central spine, and tentacles reached out in every direction, some of them the better part of forty or even fifty kilometers long in their own right. It boasted a permanent population of over nine hundred and fifty thousand. By the time transients, ship crews, field trips by visiting school children, and other visitors were added, the station’s total population on any given day was certainly upward of a million, and probably close to twice that on most days.

Yet for all its sheer size, all the industrial processes churning away in and about it, Hephaestus was a fragile structure—a fairy tale construct which could never have survived its own weight inside a planetary gravity field.

And which was certainly far too frail to survive holocaust when it came.