Mission of Honor

by David Weber

  "Given our situation where the League is concerned, the fact that we're going to be unable to increase the size of our wall of battle is obviously a huge problem. However, we actually have one that's worse."

  He inhaled deeply, like a man steeling himself for the first touch of a surgeon's scalpel.

  "Whoever planned this operation, obviously knew exactly how to hurt us. Not only did they take out our building capacity, but when they destroyed Hephaestus and Vulcan, they also destroyed our missile production lines. I remain confident that the missiles we have deployed are superior to those of any probable enemy, but the ones we already have aboard ship, or aboard ammunition ships assigned to our fleet formations, are all the missiles we have. All we're going to have until we can rebuild our production facilities . . . which is why I said we'd need the Trevor's Star facilities for something else even more than for rebuilding our Manticoran yards. At this time, I have no firm estimate for how long it's going to take to get Trevor's Star up for missile production—we're still inventorying our mobile repair and construction capabilities, and I'm sure some of them will help—but I'll be extraordinarily surprised if we can get new missile lines into production in less than ten T-months. And even then, it's going to take us a long time to ramp back up to anywhere near the production levels we had yesterday. Given the fact that our tactical advantages are so hugely bound up with our missile superiority, and given the numbers of missiles required to destroy or mission-kill even a Solarian ship-of-the-wall, that means our ability to take the war to the League has just evaporated. In fact, while it's likely we have enough Apollos already in inventory to finish off the Republic if it comes to that, doing so would leave us with essentially none for use against the League for almost an entire T-year."

  The silence in the conference room was even deeper and darker, and White Haven seemed to give himself a little shake.

  "The solitary bright spot I've so far been able to find—aside from the fact that Trevor's Star is still intact—is that Weyland was virtually empty when the attack went in." Several people blinked in surprise, and White Haven's lips twitched in something which might one day become a smile once more. "Vice Admiral Faraday had scheduled a surprise emergency evacuation exercise. Given the interruption in the station's operations—not to mention the expense and the disruption of government services on Gryphon when all those life pods dropped in so unexpectedly—I imagine Faraday probably anticipated taking more than a little flak over his exercise." The ghost of a smile disappeared. "As it happens, he doesn't have to worry about that anymore. He and his staff were aboard when the station was destroyed. All of them were lost, as was almost all of the station's senior command crew and a quarter of its engineering staff. But because of his exercise, the entire R&D staff and over ninety-five percent of the station's manufacturing workforce—and, thank God, their families—were on the planet and survived. That workforce will be literally invaluable when we start trying to rebuild."

  "And how much research did we lose with the station, Hamish?" Prince Consort Justin asked quietly.

  "None, Your Highness," White Haven replied, and gave Justin a hint of a nod. The prince consort, the earl knew, had already known the answer to his question. He'd asked it to make certain everyone else in the conference room knew.

  "All research notes and reports were automatically backed up at a secure location on Gryphon every twelve hours," White Haven continued, still addressing the prince consort even though he was actually talking to the entire conference room. "They were downloaded by the ground station and backed up after the evacuation, so they're literally up-to-the-minute. We've lost some experimental hardware and prototypes, but we have all the data and all the minds which created the hardware in the first place."

  "Which is, unfortunately, of limited utility for the immediate future," Minister Grantville observed. He smiled sadly. "Until we've got someplace to build things again, it doesn't really matter how many more wonder weapons they might be able to come up with, does it, Ham?"

  "No, I don't suppose it does," White Haven agreed.

  "All right," Elizabeth said again. "I'm sure none of us enjoyed hearing any of that—except the bit about Weyland, of course. But I imagine we're going to hear still more things we don't really want to know about. So let's start with you, Tyler." The queen visibly steeled herself. "What are the latest casualty figures?"

  Sir Tyler Abercrombie was tall, broad shouldered, and distinguished looking. He was only a T-year younger than White Haven, and his dark hair had silvered at the temples, adding to his air of distinction. The aura he usually projected was one of calm, competent, confidence; today, his brown eyes were haunted, and his hands trembled visibly as he adjusted his memo pad's display.

  "First, Your Majesty," he said, in a voice that was steadier than his hands, as he looked up from the pad at her, "I'm sure everyone present will understand that any numbers I offer at this point have to be considered purely preliminary. And I'm sure everyone else hopes as much as I do that we're going to find our initial projections are wrong—that a lot of the people who are currently missing are simply that—missing in the confusion, not dead—and that they'll turn up later. Unfortunately, I don't expect that to happen. In fact, I believe the current figures are probably going to climb at least somewhat."

  Several sets of shoulders seemed to tighten, and expressions which had already been grim became set in stone.

  "The loss of life aboard the space stations themselves is currently estimated at five-point-four million," the home secretary said levelly, looking back down at the pad. "That number includes only those we know were onboard at the time. It does not include arriving transients who hadn't yet passed through immigration or those who were still in the concourses waiting to transship without ever entering customs in the first place because they weren't entering Manticoran sovereignty. We don't think that latter number's going to be very high, since most interstellar through passengers make—made—their connections at the Junction, not Hephaestus or Vulcan. It also doesn't include military personnel aboard the vessels docked at the stations at the time of the attack.

  "Additional loss of life from the attacks on the orbital shipyards amounts so far to three hundred and ninety-six thousand. We estimate that another thousand or so were probably killed aboard small craft and private vessels that found themselves caught in the crossfire."

  He paused again, then cleared his throat.

  "In the case of Gryphon, we were extraordinarily lucky. Weyland was less than half the size of Vulcan, so there was less debris to begin with. In addition, Gryphon's population is still much sparser than that of our other planets, and it's concentrated closer to the equatorial zone. There were several major debris strikes on the planetary surface, but they were concentrated in the high northern latitudes. The most serious consequences would appear to be the damage to the local ecosystems and the consequences of one major ocean strike. Human casualties, however, were nil, so far as we now know, and the estimates from my biosciences people are that the ecological damage is all well within recoverable ranges.

  "In the case of Manticore itself, we were once again fortunate—in this case, in that there were a larger than usual number of tugs moving vessels and freight in and around the volume of Hephaestus. Two of them were destroyed along with the station, but the others survived, and we were also fortunate that Lieutenant Commander Strickland, the captain of one of those surviving tugs—Stevedore, I believe—reacted quickly enough to organize her fellow skippers. Between them, they managed to intercept all but a half dozen significant pieces of wreckage. The Mount Royal Palace defenses destroyed the two of those pieces which might have threatened Landing, and the other four struck either uninhabited or only sparsely inhabited areas of the planet. None struck water, either. We don't have anything like definitive numbers yet, but I doubt the total casualty count from debris strikes on the planet will exceed two hundred.

  "We were less fortunate on Sphinx."

  He
shook his head slowly, and his eyes, darker than ever, flicked briefly to an iron-faced Hamish Alexander-Harrington before they returned to his memo pad.

  "There was only a single tug in position to intervene. My impression is that its crew performed far better than anyone could possibly have expected. Nonetheless, the city of Yawata Crossing was effectively destroyed by a major debris strike. The city of Tanners Port wasn't directly impacted, but there was a major ocean strike. It would almost certainly have destroyed Yawata Crossing even without the direct hit on that city, and it did destroy at least three-quarters of Tanners Port, and three other, smaller cities, were very severely damaged. There was too little time for significant evacuation before the first impact waves came ashore, and loss of life was heavy, especially in Tanners Port. Local authorities had more warning, further away from the actual strikes, and emergency evacuation efforts thankfully reduced human losses, although property damage is certainly going to run into the high billions of dollars. The town of Evans Mountain was also badly damaged—by a cascade of smaller pieces of debris in its case—although the casualty count there seems to have been much lighter. And according to the Sphinx Forestry Service"—Abercrombie's eyes flitted to the treecats on the backs of Elizabeth and Justin's chairs—"it would appear at least one treecat clan was completely destroyed."

  A soft sound came from all three of the treecats in the room. White Haven opened his arms as Samantha flowed down from his chair back and buried her muzzle against him, and Ariel and Monroe joined their voices to her own soft lament.

  "Counting the known casualties on the planetary surfaces," Abercrombie concluded softly, "the civilian human death toll so far is approximately seven million, four hundred and forty-eight thousand. I've asked the Forestry Service to give us a definitive figure for treecat fatalities as soon as possible." The home secretary met Ariel's eyes, not the queen's. "They're working on that. At the moment, the best estimate from their search and rescue teams is approximately eighty-five hundred."

  White Haven winced. Seven and a half million human dead was even worse than he'd anticipated. True, it was less than a third of the population of the city of Nouveau Paris. For that matter, it was about a million and a half less than the population of the city of Landing. And the permanent population of the Manticore Binary System had grown to just over 3.6 billion, an increase of almost twenty percent in just the past thirty T-years or so, so the percentage of deaths was still barely more than two-tenths of a percent of the total. But the people who'd been killed represented a horrendous percentage of the labor force which had been the backbone and the sinews of the Star Empire's industrial might. And from his own service's perspective, the naval personnel lost, combined with the casualties already suffered during the Battle of Manticore, came close to equaling the total manpower of the entire Royal Manticoran Navy at the beginning of the First Havenite War. The consequences for fleet experience, training, and morale were going to be bad enough—especially given the whipsaw effect on the heels of the surge in confidence which had followed the Battle of Spindle—but working around the casualty total might very well be enough to bring Lucian Cortez's BuPers to the breaking point this time, after all.

  Against all that, less than nine thousand treecats might not seem so terrible. But there were many planets occupied by human beings, while by the Sphinx Forestry Service's best estimate, the total treecat population was probably less than twelve million, which meant those nine thousand lives represented almost a full percent of them. Not one percent of the treecats living on the planet Sphinx; one percent—one out of every hundred—of every treecat in the entire universe.

  And the 'cats were telempaths.

  Elizabeth had reached up to gather Ariel back into her arms, and Munro had leaned forward, pressing his wedge-shaped chin into the top of Justin's shoulder while the prince consort caressed his ears. They sat that way for several seconds, then Elizabeth bent and kissed the top of Ariel's head gently, straightened once more, and cleared her throat.

  "Thank you, Tyler," she said quietly, then looked around the table again.

  "I'm sure it's going to take a while for Tyler's numbers to soak in, for all of us. In the meantime, however, and however painful we may find it, it's our responsibility to look beyond the immediacy of the human—and treecat—cost and consider the future. Specifically, the extent—and speed—with which we can recover from the damage to our military, industrial, and economic power. We've already heard from the Navy. So I suppose it's your turn, Charlotte."

  "Of course, Your Majesty," Dame Charlotte FitzCummings, Countess Maiden Hill, replied. Maiden Hill was the Star Empire's Minister of Industry, and her expression was every bit as grim as White Haven's or Abercrombie's.

  "Basically, all I can do is confirm Hamish's summation." The dark-haired countess' normally pleasant voice was harsh, hard-edged. "We've already begun an emergency mobilization of all civilian repair and service ships assigned to both the Junction's central nexus and Basilisk. We're also making plans to tow the Junction industrial platforms back into the inner system, but, to be honest, like the Trevor's Star platforms, they're really designed for repair and routine service work, not heavy fabrication. We can increase their construction capacity, but what they have now is too small to have any immediate effect. My people are working on their own inventories of capabilities, and we've already arranged to coordinate as closely as possible with the Navy. Personally, I suspect we're going to find we have more capacity than we believe we do right this minute. The natural reaction to something like this has to be pessimism. But even if that's true, I very much doubt we're going to be able to significantly reduce the time constraints Hamish described.

  "To be honest, what's going to hurt at least as badly as the hit our physical plant's taken is the workforce we've lost." She nodded her head slightly in Abercrombie's direction. "No one ever contemplated the catastrophic destruction of an entire space station without any opportunity to evacuate personnel. Even if Haven's attack had succeeded, there would've been time to evacuate, but this . . . bolt from the blue didn't give us any warning at all. For all intents and purposes, we've just lost our orbital infrastructure's entire skilled labor force—aside from the Weyland survivors—which completely disrupts our existing emergency plans. Not that any of those plans ever contemplated an emergency on this scale, anyway. Somehow we're going to have to prioritize the workers we have left between essential construction tasks and training an entirely new workforce."

  She shook her head heavily.

  "Our three biggest advantages, the ones that have kept us intact for the last twenty or thirty T-years, have been our R&D, the quality of our educational system and workforce, and the strength of our economy. As Hamish just pointed out, we still have the research capability, and we still have the educational system. But we no longer have the workforce, and with our industrial capacity this brutally cut back, the strength of our economy has to be doubtful, at best."

  "Bruce?" Elizabeth said quietly, looking at the elegantly groomed, slightly portly man sitting between Maiden Hill and Frances Maurier, Baroness Morncreek, the Chancellor of the Exchequer.

  Bruce Wijenberg was one of the minority of the Cabinet's members without even a simple "Sir" in front of his name. Which wasn't because titles hadn't been offered, however. Like Klaus Hauptman, Wijenberg was aggressively proud of his yeoman ancestry. Besides, he was from Gryphon. Despite his sophistication and polish, he retained at least a trace of the traditional Gryphon antipathy towards the aristocracy. He much preferred the House of Commons, and he'd been the Centrist Party's leader there before he'd accepted his Cabinet appointment. He'd really been happier in that role and he hoped to return to it sometime in the next few years, which would become impossible if he accepted a patent of nobility.

  He was also the Star Empire's Minister of Trade.

  "There's no point pretending we haven't just taken an enormous hit, Your Majesty," he said now, meeting her eyes squarely, his Gryphon burr mor
e pronounced than usual. "Our carrying trade isn't going to be directly affected, and our Junction fees probably aren't going to fall too significantly—not immediately, at least. The indirect effect on our carrying trade is going to make itself felt pretty quickly, though. As Charlotte's just pointed out, for all intents and purposes we've lost our industrial sector completely. That means an awful lot of manufactured goods we used to be exporting aren't going to be available now. That accounts for a significant percentage of our total carrying trade—not to mention an enormous chunk of the Old Star Kingdom's Gross System Product. And as our industrial exports drop, the resultant drop in shipping's also going to have at least some effect on our Junction fees.

  "Most of the rest of our GSP comes out of the financial sector, and I can't even begin to predict how the markets are going to react. There hasn't been an example of something like this happening to a major economic power since Old Earth's Final War, and even that's not really comparable, given how interstellar trade's increased since then. On the one hand, a huge percentage of our financial transactions have always consisted of servicing and brokering interstellar transactions between other parties, and the wormholes and shipping routes which made that possible are still there. What isn't there, and won't be for quite some time, is the dynamo of our own economy. People who were invested in the Star Kingdom—foreigners, as well as our own people—have just taken a devastating hit. How well anyone's going to recover from it, how quickly that's going to happen, and what's going to happen to investor confidence in the meanwhile is more than anyone except Nostradamus would even try to predict."