Mission of Honor-ARC (57 page)

"Nope. And I imagine I may be hearing a little something from the bean-counters back at Admiralty House, too." Faraday sounded a bit more serious, but his air of contentment was unabated. "We've probably just written off—what? ten percent?—of the station's life pods, after all."

"Not to mention shutting down the entire R&D section until we get the pods recertified, Sir," Howell pointed out respectfully.

"Oh, thank you for recalling that little detail to my attention, Marcus!"

"One of the things chiefs of staff are for, Sir."

Faraday glowered at him, but the vice admiral didn't seem able to work up much wattage. Then he allowed his chair to come upright, planted his elbows on his desk, and leaned forward over his folded forearms.

"Actually," he said much more seriously, "the downtime bothers me most. But I don't expect Admiral Hemphill to kick up much dust over it. I know most people think of her as the tech weenies' tech weenie, but she's got a lot better understanding of the realities than some of her research people out here do." He shook his head. "Frankly, I think quite a few of
them
haven't figured out they're actually in the Navy and hence subject to the Service's little foibles, like making sure they're up to date on relevant emergency procedures. And even for most of the others, the thought that anyone might possibly want to hurt
them
never enters their minds! Which doesn't even consider the fact that genuine accidents can happen even aboard the most modern space station."

Howell nodded. He wasn't sure he agreed with Faraday's decision to actually evacuate the space station and send all but a tiny caretaker detachment down to the planet Gryphon. He was perfectly ready to admit that the readiness state of
Weyland
's disaster and evacuation planning had been, well, disastrous, though. And Faraday was certainly correct about the possibility of accidents. There hadn't been a major catastrophe aboard any of the Star Empire's main industrial platforms in decades, but there'd been several moderately severe accidents, and catastrophe was always possible, however improbable it might seem. If that had happened aboard
Weyland
a few weeks earlier, personnel losses might have been cataclysmic.

The series of of simulations Faraday had ordered had created a great deal of anger and frustration. At the same time, his grumpy subordinates had finally been forced to accept that he was serious about trying to get them off the station alive if something went wrong. They might not have been happy about it, but they'd at least started going through the motions with something resembling efficiency.

Of course, they'd known it was only going to be
simulations
, which would let them get back to work on more serious concerns after a half-hour or so of nonsense. Until this morning, that was, when the exercise had concluded with the words "this is no sim."

Which was basically all the warning they'd gotten before their life pods blasted out of the station and headed for Gryphon . . . whose authorities had had no more notion they might be coming than
they'd
had that they might be
going
. The planetary authorities' disaster and evacuation planning for
Weyland
had come up a little short, as well, with the station's personnel jammed into whatever improvised holding stations they could come up with while they tried to figure out what to do with them. Since they were
supposed
to already have detailed plans for doing just that, the current panetary FUBAR probably wasn't going to make Vice Admiral Faraday very popular with them when their efficiency reports—or their civilian equivalents—got written.

"All in all, a good day's work," Faraday concluded. "I figure we should be able to start re-docking the fabrication section's pods in a couple of days. I want to
start
there, at any rate."

"May I ask why, Sir?" Howell asked with a slight sense of trepidation.

"Indeed you may," Faraday replied with a sharklike smile. "While we're re-docking Fabrication's pods and recertifying Research's pods, you and I, and Admiral Yeager, and a security team from ONI which just
happens
to've been in-system when I called this little exercise, are going to do a walk-through. We'll be sending an updated backup down to Gryphon for storage just in case. And we're
also
going to see just how many of Yeager's worker bees remembered to secure their classified data properly before heading for their pods."

"Ouch!" Howell's wince wasn't entirely feigned, and Faraday chuckled nastily.

"I'm already unpopular with them, Marcus. I might as well go whole hog and kill as many birds as possible while I'm chucking stones. And I already warned Yaeger this was coming. I won't say she's looking forward to it, but she understands why I'm doing it and that I'm not going to deliberately collect any more heads than I have to.

"Which, unfortunately, doesn't mean some aren't going to roll anyway, of course."

Howell nodded again. Some people never seemed to understand that military efficiency demanded a certain degree of ruthlessness. Military commanders weren't—or shouldn't be, at any rate—in the business of winning popularity contests. They should be in the business of promoting the efficiency, which definitely included the survivability, of the units under their command. Not only was it a CO's duty to prune away deadwood, but it was also his responsibility to make all the personnel under his command aware of the fact that he'd
do
that pruning, with ruthless dispatch, whenever it was required. Punishing those who screwed up in order "to encourage the others" had been an axiom of military discipline for so many centuries because, whether it was nice or not, it worked.

Punishment may not be the best possible motivator, but it's one that works
, Howell thought.
And it's one any effective officer has to have in his toolbox for the times when it's the only one that
will.
And at least Claudio understands the nuts and bolts of positive motivation, as well. Now that he's got their attention, at least
.

The chief of staff's lips twitched on the brink of a smile, but he suppressed it and paged to the next item on his electronic notepad.

"All right, Sir. I'm going to assume from what you've just said that you want us to give the immediate priority to getting the fabrication section's life pods back aboard. Having said that, though, there's the question of Engineering. In particular—"

* * *

Millions upon millions of kilometers from Vice Admiral Claudio's day cabin, shoals of missile pods continued to bore through space at twenty percent of the speed of light, and the visible disks of the star called Manticore-A and Manticore-B grew steadily larger before them.

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.