Mission of Honor-ARC (63 page)

And just as she knew the shock of the totally unanticipated cataclysm which had descended upon them had been made incomparably worse by coming so closely on the heels of the news from Spindle. In her worst nightmares, she would never have believed Manticore's prospects could be so catastrophically shifted in barely three T-days. She knew how mentally and emotionally paralyzing that body blow had been for her; she suspected that even she couldn't imagine how stunning and traumatizing it had been for the men and women directly responsible for the Star Empire's defense.

"All right," she said finally, her voice level. "I already know it's bad. Tell me
how
bad." She looked around the circle of faces, and her brown eyes settled inevitably upon one of them. "Hamish," she said quietly.

"Your Majesty," Hamish Alexander-Harrington said in a flat, unflinching, yet curiously deadened voice, "I think the short answer is
very
bad. I'm not qualified to speak to the civilian aspects. I'm sure Tyler"—he nodded across the table to Sir Tyler Abercrombie, the Home Secretary "—has better information on the civilian casualty toll than I do. But from the purely military perspective, it would be extraordinarily difficult, if not outright impossible, to exaggerate the damage this has done to us."

The Earl of White Haven looked away from Abercrombie, sitting very upright in his chair and turning it slightly to face the queen directly.

"
Hephaestus
,
Vulcan
, and
Weyland
are gone, Your Majesty. There's been some talk about recovering some of the modules and repairing them, but my staff's current estimate, based on input from both BuShips and BuWeaps, as well as from Construction and Repair, is that it would be faster and more efficient to start over from scratch.

"That means we've just lost every 'hard yard' we had. I don't as yet have a complete count of the numbers and classes of ships lost with them, but I already know it represents a significant loss of combat power. In addition, we've lost better than ninety-nine percent of the labor force of all three stations. For all intents and purposes, the only real survivors we have are people who, for one reason or another, were off-station when the attack hit. Most of
them
," he added heavily, "also lived aboard the stations, which means virtually all of them have lost their entire immediate families. That means it's going to be quite some time—and rightly so—before their morale recovers to a point at which they can really be considered part of the labor force again."

His face showed his distaste at having to make that observation. Grief and bereavement, especially on such a horrific scale, weren't supposed to be reduced to mere production factors, but whether they were supposed to be or not, they were something which had to be taken into consideration this time, and he continued unflinchingly.

"The damage to the dispersed orbital yards is almost as bad. At this moment, my best figures are that fifteen of them—none of which had units under construction—are undamaged, and another eight are probably repairable, although the ships under construction have been so badly damaged we're probably going to have to break them up and start over rather than trying to repair and complete them.

"In effect, we've lost every ship under construction, the labor force which was building them, and the physical plant in which they were being built—and which was fabricating almost all the components the dispersed yards were assembling. That means that what we have in commission and working up at Trevor's Star now is all we're going to have for at least two T-years. For any capital ships, the delay will be more like four T-years. Minimum."

Despite all the disastrous reports the other people in that conference room had already received, people winced all around the table and one or two faces turned perceptibly paler at the First Space Lord's flat, unvarnished admission.

"What about the repair facilities in Trevor's Star, Ham?" Prime Minister Grantville asked quietly, and White Haven looked at his brother.

"That's still intact," he admitted, "and it's going to play a huge part in regenerating yard capacity within the timeframe I just mentioned, Willie. But it's primarily
repair
capacity. It was never intended for sustained, high-volume component
production
, so it's going to require a lot of modification before it can really make its presence felt. And, more inportantly, we're going to have to divert a hell of a lot of its potential capacity to something we're going to need even worse."

William Alexander's face tightened at his brother's last sentence. He started to open his mouth, then shook his head and waved his right hand in a small arc, inviting White Haven to continue with his report. No doubt there'd be time for even more bad news soon enough.

"Before we can begin any new construction projects, we're going to have to replace our yard capacity, Your Majesty," the first lord went on, turning back to the queen. "We're fortunate in that our extraction and refining platforms are untouched—probably because they're so dispersed and they were too far from the building platforms for convenient targeting—but raw materials have never been a significant bottleneck for us.
Fabrication
has been, however, and any of our previous problems pale beside what we're looking at now. Before we can replace our yard capacity, we have to replace the core industrial capacity the space stations represented. BuShips is working on a complete listing of our repair and fabrication ships. Obviously, we'll be recalling them from most of our foreign stations—we're going to need them here, at home, too badly to leave them anywhere else.

"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."