Mission of Honor-ARC (59 page)

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.

No one ever managed to accurately reconstruct exactly what happened during the first few seconds of the attack. There was simply too much mayhem, too much chaos, and despite the multitude of sensor systems—civilian, as well as military—operating throughout the inner system, no one was looking in the right direction when it all began.

Had anyone been in a position to chart the damage, however, they would have known that the very first hit—first by almost an entire tenth of a second—struck compartment HF/1-17-1336-T-1219 of HMSS
Hephaestus
. HF/1-17-1336-T-1219 was the control section of module GM-HF/1-17-13, a general manufacturing module attached to the Royal Manticoran Navy's Shipyard HF/1-16 and Shipyard HF/1-17, which were currently assigned to BuShips' Refit and Repair Command (
Hephaestus
). HF/1-16 happened to be empty, awaiting the arrival of the brand new
Nike
-class battlecruiser HMS
Truculent
later that afternoon. HF/1-17, on the other hand, was occupied by the
Roland
-class destroyers HMS
Barbarossa
, HMS
Saladin
, and HMS
Yamamoto Date
, all three of which were completing their final fitting out, with almost their full complements embarked.