by David Weber
The catastrophic defeat Countess Gold Peak’s command had handed Sandra Crandall in Spindle—some of the newsies had taken to using the term “battle of annihilation,” which was probably fair enough, although more of her ships had been captured than destroyed outright—was still reverberating through the Navy. God only knew what would happen on the Solly side of the fence once word got back to Old Terra. No wonder all the Nasty Kitties wished they’d been along!
She sat back in the comfortable seat, listening to the classical music offering, and gazed at the forward bulkhead display, which was centered on the slowly, steadily growing HMSS Hephaestus. Sinead Terekhov literally couldn’t have counted the number of times she’d been to that huge, sprawling hive of activity, but it never lost its fascination for her. When she’d been a girl, visiting her naval-officer father’s workplace, it had been far smaller than it had become as a result of King Roger’s buildup, but even then, daytrips to Hephaestus had been one of her favorite treats. The later, massive military construction requirements of the war against the People’s Republic of Haven had driven that growth even farther and harder, yet that only made it still more fascinating to an older and wiser Sinead who truly understood what it meant and represented.
Today, the station was no longer simply huge…it was stupendous. Its central spine was over a hundred and ten kilometers long, and branches and lobes reached out in every direction. The longest of the secondary arms was sixty kilometers in length, and it wouldn’t be the longest for long. The entire, enormous, perpetually expanding agglomeration of industrial modules, habitats, shipyards, hospitals, communications and banking offices, and freight terminals stretched out with the total lack of grace possible only in microgravity, yet Hephaestus had its own beauty. Flanks gleaming in Manticore-A’s reflected light were separated by chasms of total blackness where that sunlight couldn’t reach, and constellations of warning lights, navigation beacons, and docking stations blazed like their own galaxies along the space station’s skirts. It was hard to believe, looking at that child’s model on the bulkhead display, that there were two million human beings bustling about inside the station, and Sinead found herself wondering—again—how many of those two million ever stopped, stepped outside the lack of wonder of their familiar daily routines, to consider just how marvelous Hephaestus was.
Well, maybe they don’t, she thought. But gawking, awestruck visitors like me can always make up for them!
* * *
“What the fuck?”
Jansen Mandrapilias, third officer of the liquid gas tanker Bernike, looked up sharply from the shipping manifest he’d been updating for their arrival at the Draco Seven orbital refinery. At the moment, Bernike was accelerating steadily away from Hephaestus, fourteen minutes and 691,000,000 kilometers out from the station on her regular bi-monthly round-trip to Draco, the central of the Manticore-A’s system’s three gas giants. Trundling back and forth between the refinery and Hephaestus’ enormous tank farm wasn’t the most exciting occupation in the world, but there was a certain solid satisfaction to the job.
Besides, Jansen had earned his watch-standing ticket just last December, barely two T-months ago, so it was all still brand, shiny new for him. Especially when the Skipper had seen fit to hand over to “Mister Mandrapilias” after clearing the Hephaestus departure perimeter. Zinaida Merkulov, who had the sensor watch, on the other hand, was at least two and a half times Mandrapilias’ age and made it a point of pride never to be surprised by anything. In fact, Jansen rather suspected the Skipper had left her unofficial instructions to keep an eye on the newbie, given that she was something of a legend in the Hauptman Cartel’s service who probably should have retired at least a T-decade or so ago. Unfortunately for those who felt she’d earned a vine-covered cottage somewhere, she routinely maxed the cartel-wide proficiency tests every year. In fact, she’d been seriously pissed this year when she came in third, instead of first.
She’d also been known to refer to one Jansen Mandrapilias as “Sonny” on certain off-duty occasions.
Under some circumstances, that could have led to a discipline problem, but not aboard Bernike, and not with Zinaida Merkulov, who was always professional on duty. Which made the totally unexpected outburst even more shocking than it might have been out of someone else.
“What?” Jansen demanded now, but she ignored him. She was punching numbers into her console at lightning speed, and then she whipped around to Cathal Viñas, the helmsman of the watch.
“Hard skew one-two-five, niner-seven-zero!” she barked. “Now!”
Jansen’s mouth dropped open, but Cathal had known Zinaida longer than Jansen Mandrapilias had been alive, and he recognized the hammered-battle steel urgency of her tone.
He snapped his joystick hard over, sending six million tons of tanker into a steeply climbing starboard turn. Warning hooters sounded as she departed radically from her filed course profile, and Jansen could already hear the reaming Management would give all of them when ATC levied the fines. If they docked his pay to cover it, he’d still be working it off when he was twice Zinaida’s age!
“Zinaida, what the hell do you think—?!”
Then another alarm sounded, and Jansen’s eyes jerked back to his own panel. He’d never heard that strident, two-toned, ear-piercing wail outside a training simulation, and he couldn’t really believe he was hearing it now.
But he was.
Something slammed into the interposed belly of Bernike’s impeller wedge and vanished with the instantaneous ferocity of a several hundred thousand-kilometers per second gravity gradient. But something else missed the wedge. It came sizzling through the tanker’s wide-open throat on a reciprocal course with a closing velocity of over 60,000 KPS, crossed the wedge’s interior at a sharp angle in approximately five-thousandths of a second, missed her enormous hull by no more than sixty or seventy kilometers, and went racing out the wedge’s kilt.
Then it was gone. The collision alert continued to sound, and Mandrapilias felt echoes of terror that hadn’t had nearly long enough to register at the time whiplash up and down his nervous system. His head jerked around to Zinaida.
“What the fuck was that?” he demanded.
He didn’t know—then—that he would never, ever forgive himself for not reporting the incident instantly to ACT. Not that three and a half minutes of warning would have done any good.
* * *
Even the inner reaches of a star system represent a vast volume, against which even the largest spacecraft is very, very tiny. On the face of things, collisions and near collisions between spacefaring vessels were low-probability events, even for those moving along well-traveled shipping lanes. They weren’t made any more likely by the fact that an active impeller wedge was among the galaxy’s most…energetic energy signatures, which made it very hard for even the least attentive sensor tech to not see one coming. And, of course, Astro Traffic Control kept a very close eye on the multi-billion tons of military and civilian shipping passing through the Manticore Binary System at any given moment.
But the interlopers slicing into the heart of the Manticore System at twenty percent of light-speed, cutting straight through the heart of the primary shipping lane from the Draco Seven gas facility, didn’t care about ATC, and their lead wave wasn’t using an impeller wedge to accelerate. It was using something the Royal Manticoran Navy had never heard of, and it was unlikely any other sensor tech—especially any civilian tech, with commercial-grade sensors—would ever have noticed the tiny gravitic anomaly which had drawn Zinaida Merkulov’s attention. She hadn’t felt any sense of alarm, really; only the inveterate curiosity which had led her to her career in the first place. It was an itch she lived to scratch, and she’d redirected the sensors Klaus Hauptman had been kind enough to provide for her personal use towards it.
She never actually “saw” the incoming graser torpedoes at all, but she’d tracked those gravitic anomalies coming straight at her ship and extrapolated their trajectory in the
nick of time.
The rest of the Manticore Binary System was less fortunate.
* * *
Sinead was watching the display when it happened.
The shuttle was the next best thing to a hundred thousand kilometers from Hephaestus, but its optical heads had zoomed in until the space station’s crazy quilt geometry completely filled the display. Even if they hadn’t been designed to be the stealthiest attack platforms yet built by human hands the graser torpedoes which had slashed past Bernike were far too distant and far too tiny to appear in any optical display. The missile pods following on their heels were somewhat less stealthy, but they were also coming in on a purely ballistic trajectory, far astern of Oyster Bay’s vanguard and falling steadily farther astern as the torpedoes’ spider drive accelerated them towards their targets.
Sinead wasn’t alone in not seeing them. No one saw them…until several million lifetimes too late.
Admiral Topolev’s task group had continued in-system for just over a month after its stealthy arrival, until it reached its deployment point, one light-week from Manticore, with a velocity of twenty percent of light-speed relative to Manticore-A. That was when it deployed its missiles and its torpedoes and then disappeared tracelessly back into hyper. The weapons it had left behind had continued coasting through space at their initial launch velocity, their sensor heads protected against particle erosion by special nose caps, until they reached their pre-programmed attack locus. Then they blew the protective caps, receipted the tactical updates from the incredibly stealthy scout ships which had been sent ahead to gather that data for them, and updated their targeting queues.
At five hundred thousand kilometers, the graser torpedoes fired, and Sinead Terekhov cried out in horror as HMSS Hephaestus disintegrated.
It was nowhere near as sanitary as “disintegrated” might imply, of course. It couldn’t be, when scores of grasers, each more powerful than most heavy cruisers’ main battery weapons, ripped into a totally unarmored civilian target the size of Hephaestus. The torpedoes were deliberately yawing on their axis as they fired, sweeping their beams across the greatest possible volume of the station, and their projectors lasted three full seconds before they burned out.
Three seconds while they closed at 60,000 KPS.
Those grasers smashed into Hephaestus like a chainsaw into warm butter. And, like the butter, Hephaestus simply splattered across space. Chunks of wreckage—some big as battlecruisers—arced outward from the center of destruction like obscene meteors. Secondary explosions vaporized entire sections of the station as fusion plants—not just those of Hephaestus’ internal power net, but of the dozens of merchant vessels and warships docked to load or unload cargo or for repairs—lost containment in sun-bright boils of plasma.
The explosions spread from the graser impact points, racing outward, like flame along a dry tree branch. They grew, reached out to one another, embraced, merged, until they became a single terrible vortex of destruction that rivaled the power of Manticore-A itself.
Sinead’s shuttle spun madly, swinging to interpose its own impeller wedge between itself and the wreckage belching out of that hellish maw of devastation, but the optical heads, obedient to their uncaring computer’s programmed imperatives, swiveled to keep the station—or what had been the station—centered on the screen. It glared there, like some prevision of the lava fields of hell, and Sinead O’Daley Terekhov pressed both hands to her mouth, her vision streaked by blinding tears, sobbing uncontrollably as she watched the nightmare which had come for HMSS Hephaestus consume the Star Kingdom of Manticore’s primary industrial platform and more than two million human beings…including the entire crew of HMS Hexapuma.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
“So, is that everything?” Adam Šiml asked, tipped back in his comfortable chair.
There was a certain overly patient edge to the question, and Marián Sulák snorted. He’d known Šiml for well over forty T-years, and he recognized testiness when he heard it.
“Adam, you could easily have gotten out of here on schedule if you’d really wanted to. It’s not like this couldn’t have been settled over the com! Not that a confirmed autocrat like yourself would have considered that for a moment, of course. How did you survive all those years in academia?”
Šiml glowered at him, but his eyes twinkled as he shook his head.
“You know, Marián, I haven’t spent all this time sitting here in Zelený Kopec because of how much I admire your handsome face. I’m a very busy man these days, and I was supposed to be in the air to Velehrad thirty minutes ago!”
“Yes, you were. Now look at Hana and tell her, with a straight face, that the little boy in you who likes playing with models isn’t absolutely content to be sitting here right now!”
Šiml looked across the conference table at Hana Káňová, the solidly muscled director for construction on Sokol’s regional Zelený Kopec board. Káňová, a past planetary champion fencer, had known him for a much shorter time than Sulák—a mere twenty T-years, in her case—but from her expression, she didn’t expect him to be able to take up Marián’s challenge. He had the impression—no, he was certain—she was less than delighted with the origin of the funds flowing into Sokol’s infrastructure accounts, but she was delighted by the way they let her catch up with long-deferred construction and, especially, repairs. Although, in this case, as it happened, she was doing both.
“Actually,” Šiml pointed an accusatory index finger at the youngish man sitting at her elbow, “it’s Ondřej’s fault. He should never have brought those plans to the conference.”
“I believe it was your suggestion that I bring them…Sir,” Káňová’s executive assistant replied. In fact, in addition to being her assistant, he was also her nephew, and he’d known Šiml since the day he’d turned fifteen. As a rule, Sokol tried to restrict nepotism in its paid staff, but that was hard on a planet like Chotěboř, where nepotism and cronyism had become the order of the day. In Ondřej Bilej’s case, however, Šiml had no problem with the system, since Bilej also happened to be one of the best three or four architects Šiml knew, with a special gift for sports complexes.
Even if he was a wiseass.
“That has nothing to do with the case, you young klouček,” Šiml shot back now “You know my weaknesses! As such, as a dutiful employee of Sokol, you should’ve taken steps to protect my schedule rather than supinely acquiescing in something you damned well knew would seduce me into breaking it!”
He pointed the same finger at the holographic model of the new multi-sport complex glowing between them. It was spectacular, with no fewer than four football pitches, each with its own bleacher seating, plus a pair of gymnasiums, six tennis courts, and a pair of what were still called Olympic-sized indoor swimming pools. It was going to replace no less than three existing facilities here in Zelený Kopec, all of which dated from well before the komár plague and had begun falling apart T-years ago. It was also going to cost several million credits, which would actually be considerably cheaper than trying to properly refurbish the present facilities. Under the old scheme of things, they’d have had no choice but to refurbish anyway, in the tiny dribs and drabs they could squeeze out of the budget, which would probably have taken at least ten or fifteen T-years. Under the new scheme of things, his new best friend Sabatino had agreed to cough up complete funding for the project.
“To be perfectly honest,” Bilej admitted with a smile, “it did cross my mind that you were likely to have a lot of questions, Mr. Šiml. And I should probably admit I always enjoy taking you inside the nuts and bolts. Still, I think it’s just a little unfair to put all the blame on my plate.”
“Surely you don’t expect him to admit that?” Marián chuckled. “Adam’s life is totally untrammeled by anything as limiting as the schedule constraints we mere mortals put up with. If it weren’t for Květa, he’d never get anywhere on time!”
“Now that is not true!” Šiml protested. “Why, I was actually early onc
e—about three years ago, it was, for a faculty meeting, I think—and Květa didn’t have anything to do with—”
The ear-shattering explosion shook the office, rattled the windows violently, and completely demolished the executive parking area outside Sokol’s Zelený Kopec offices.
* * *
“Adam!” Karl-Heinz Sabatino held out his hand with a concerned expression as Adam Šiml walked down the shallow steps into the outsized sunken living room. “My God! You could’ve been killed!”
“I know.” Šiml gripped his hand and shook it firmly. “And I have to admit, I never saw it coming. Nobody did.”
He grimaced as Sabatino released his hand and pointed him into one of the huge armchairs by the picture window overlooking the capital’s skyline from atop Zlatobýl Tower. Zlatobýl, at the very heart of Velehrad, was the tallest tower in the capital, and the yearly rent on Sabatino’s penthouse—which occupied its entire top floor—would have built two sports complexes the size of the one in Zelený Kopec.
The spectacular view was a bit limited today, unfortunately. The skies over Velehrad were dark, heavy with black-bellied clouds despite the early afternoon hour, and raindrops battered the crystoplast window. Lightning flickered behind the towers on the far side of Náměstí Žlutých Růží, pulsing in the belly of those clouds, and the rumble of thunder was loud enough to be heard despite the penthouse’s soundproofing. Sabatino glanced out into the thunderstorm’s violence and shook his head.
“Maybe we should have—seen it coming, I mean,” he said. He turned back to Šiml, and his eyes had turned hard. “Politics can be a much more dangerous game than anything Sokol sponsors, Adam. I’ll admit it never occurred to me that something like this might happen, but maybe I should’ve remembered some of the players don’t worry a lot about the rules.”