Mission of Honor

by Дэвид Вебер

  "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, h
owever, 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.