Mission of Honor-ARC (60 page)

The thirty-two technicians manning HF/1-17-1336-T-1219 never even realized the station was under attack. Working in a shirtsleeve environment, concentrating on routine tasks and the hectic pace at which
Hephaestus
always operated, they were totally unprepared for the ravening blast of focused gamma radiation which killed them instantly, splintered the compartment around them, and ripped open one entire flank of GM-HF/1-17-13.

At the instant it fired, the torpedo which struck the control section was moving at the next best thing to 70,000 KPS and deliberately yawing on its axis, sweeping its graser in a spiraling cone to traverse the entire volume of the station. The beam itself moved
away
from GM-HF/1-17-13, but the lethal overpressure of the explosion's shock front—followed by equally explosive decompression—killed the sixteen techs working directly in the twenty thousand-ton fabrication module almost as quickly as the control room techs had died. Splinters of HF/1-17-1336-T-1219 blew into and through GM-HF/1-17-13, carried all the way across the module compartment, and opened the far bulkhead into the vacuum of HF/1-17.

The second breach of the fabrication module could scarcely have mattered less to the people who'd been working inside it, since they were all already dead or dying by the time it occurred. It mattered a great deal, however, to the forty-eight space station personnel moving through the outsized boarding tubes connecting the three destroyers' main airlocks to the space dock gallery and the station proper. None of them were in skinsuits when the flying battle axes which had once been part of GM-HF/1-17-13 shredded the tubes and spilled them into the enormous docking bay's merciless vacuum.

As the boarding tubes were torn apart, atmosphere vented from them in a hurricane. GM-HF/1-17-13 had already decompressed almost entirely, but the vacuum around the station sucked greedily at the wounds, and at least a quarter of the equally unprepared crewmen aboard the three destroyers found themselves in death pressure before emergency blast doors slammed shut under computer control.

As it happened, the blast doors made no difference at all, however. Even as the graser which had ripped HF/1-17-1336-T-1219 moved away, cutting deeper towards the station's central spine, another graser moved
towards
HF/1-17 and HF/1-16. It sliced across both shipyards in a searing eyeblink, and if it was less powerful than a
Shrike
's weapon, its power was more than ample for the minor task of cutting an unarmored destroyer, unprotected by impeller wedge or sidewalls, cleanly in half.

It did precisely that to HMS
Saladin . . .
whose fusion plant abruptly lost containment with absolutely no warning to the engineering safety systems. Not even cybernetic reflexes were equal to that sort of cataclysmic failure, and the resulting fireball made whatever other damage the torpedoes might have done to that section of HMSS
Hephaestus
totally superfluous.

* * *

HMS
Longshoreman
, one of
Hephaestus
' ready-duty tugs, was headed away from the station, towing the brand new
Saganami-C
-class cruiser
Jessica Rice
towards Traffic Control's impeller limit, when the attack came in. The two ships were accelerating at the piddling rate of barely ten gravities out of deference to the fact that
Jessica Rice
was on internal grav plates only, since her inertial compensator was inoperable without the impeller wedge traffic regulations forbade her in such close proximity to the station. They were well clear of the slip in which
Jessica Rice
had been berthed, but that didn't matter.

One of the Mesan torpedoes scored a direct hit on the station's spine, slashing outward and across successive secondary axes in a horrendous bow wave of secondary blasts and explosive decompressions. It reached the outer edge of the station and kept right on going until it ripped lengthwise across
Jessica Rice
's unarmored topsides, shattering the big, powerful ship. And then she, like
Saladin
, blew up. The explosion disabled
Longshoreman
's after impeller ring, sending her wedge into automatic shutdown . . . and leaving her unprotected as a chunk of what had once been HMSS
Hephaestus
which out-massed the tug by at least fifty percent slammed into her and destroyed her completely.

* * *

"
Jesus Christ!
"

Lieutenant Édouard Boisvin, executive officer of HMS
Stevedore
, looked up in surprise at Senior Chief Petty Officer Oxana Karpova's exclamation. The senior chief had primary helm control for the powerful tug's
approach to
Hephaestus
, and that sort of outburst from her was unheard of.

Boisvin opened his mouth to demand an explanation, but nothing came out. As he looked up, he saw the same visual display Karpova and her backup helmsman had been watching, and his vocal cords froze.

He felt himself sitting there, unable to look away, unable even to speak, as the entire space station blew apart before him. It was impossible for his stunned brain to pick individual explosions out of the chaos of devastation ripping across the station. Bits and pieces of it registered with horrifying clarity—not then, but for later replay in the nightmares which would plague him for years. Individual modules, blown loose from their moorings, spraying across the backdrop of incandescent explosions like fragile, backlit beads before the wavefront of destruction reached out and engulfed them, as well. The pieces of a heavy cruiser, her spine broken, spinning end-over-end and breaking up into smaller bits as they spun. A construction ship, underway on reaction thrusters, vanishing into the fiery vortex's maw.

Those tiny vignettes, snapshot images of catastrophe's outriders, would come back to him in those nightmares. But all that registered at the moment was the sheer impossibility of what he was seeing. There wasn't even room for horror—not in those first, fleeting seconds. The
unbelievability
of it would be the first and forever most overwhelming impression of any of the surviving witnesses. Their sheer incredulity.

Yet even though Édouard Boisvin couldn't look away, the ingrained, acquired reflexes of relentless training moved the thumb of his right hand to a button on his command chair's armrest and
Stevedore
's emergency signal blared from speakers throughout the ship.

* * *

"—not really a problem, Admiral. Oh, it sounded like it was going to be a bear, but once I started looking into it, it was only a scheduling snafu," Captain Karaamat Fonzarelli, Refit & Repair's senior officer aboard
Hephaestus
said.

Rear Admiral Margaret Truman,
Hephaestus
' CO, nodded. She'd suspected it was something like that, but it was a relief to hear she'd been right.

"I've been on the screen to Logistics about it," Fonzarelli continued from his end of the com link. "According to them, it's mostly a question of when and where we want the spares delivered. So I told them t—"

Truman's display went abruptly blank.

Her eyebrows were still only beginning to rise in surprise when another torpedo's graser sawed directly through her quarters . . . and her.

* * *

"Look, Daddy! What's that?"

John Cabeçadas was struggling with his carry-on bag. The damned thing's strap
insisted
on twisting, especially when he was carrying Serafina. The sixteen-month-old was usually as good as gold, but, of course, whenever he was having trouble with the carry-on bag, she was inevitably fretful. He'd just decided he was going to have to hand her to his wife, Laura, when his older daughter Jennifer asked the question.

"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.