Mission of Honor

sort of protection even if it had realized the attack was coming . . . or been able to see it when it did. Because it was, it was also too far away to be attacked , and in some ways, that made it far worse. The people who were supposed to protect the Star Empire—who were supposed to die to prevent something like this from ever happening —were perfectly placed to see exactly how totally they'd failed in that purpose, and the fact that it wasn't even remotely their fault meant nothing at all beside that terrible sense of failure.

And for Allen Higgins, their CO, it was even worse than it was for the rest of them.

For a moment, he was paralyzed, his mind replaying the memories of Grendelsbane with merciless clarity. Yet that lasted only for a moment. Only until he realized how infinitely much worse this disaster was.

And then the conventional Mesan missiles began their attack runs.

* * *

Daniel Detweiler's researchers hadn't yet figured out how to fit multiple full-size, sustainable drives into a single missile of manageable dimensions. They had, however, realized what the RMN must have done, and they were working industriously to duplicate the Manticoran advantage. In the meantime, they'd come up with Cataphract, a variant of their own based on taking the standard missile bodies for the SLN's new-generation anti- ship missiles and adding what amounted to a separate final stage carrying a standard laser head and a counter- missile 's drive system. For Oyster Bay, they'd brought out the longest-ranged, heaviest version of their new weapon, fitted the birds into out-sized pods, then launched them behind other, specialized pods which carried nothing but low-powered particle screens and the power supplies to maintain them for the ballistic run in-system to their targets. The missile-laden pods had followed in the zone swept by the shield-equipped platforms; now they completed their own system checks and began to launch.

A version of the new weapon had been used with lethal effectiveness against Luis Rozsak's ships at the Second Battle of Congo. Unfortunately, the full report on that wasn't available to the RMN. They knew something had improved the range of the missiles which had been provided to the 'People's Navy in Exile,' and they'd managed to deduce approximately how it had been done, but that was about it. And even if they'd had access to Rozsak's report, it wouldn't have fully prepared them for this. Rozsak had faced the Cataphract-A, based on the SLN's new cruiser/destroyer Spatha shipkiller; the pod-launched missiles of Oyster Bay were Cataphract-Cs , based on the capital-ship Trebucht, with much heavier and more powerful laserheads. The combined package had a powered range from rest of over sixteen million kilometers and a terminal velocity of better than .49 c . That attack envelope would have made it formidable enough by itself, but installing the high-speed drive as the last stage also gave it far more agility when it came to penetrating the target's defenses during its terminal maneuvers.

That agility, however, was scarcely required today. There were no active defenses, just as their targets made no attempt at evasive maneuvers, because no one knew they were coming in time to react.

There was time for their targets—or some of them, at least—to realize they were under attack. To see the impossible impeller signatures of missile drives swarming away from the pods' ballistic tracks. Some of those missiles were effectively wasted because of targeting decisions made by officers who hadn't felt justified in relying solely upon the efficacy of the as yet untested torpedoes. Those laser heads either never fired at all or else used themselves up picking off chunks of wreckage large enough to satisfy their targeting criteria.

But the vast majority of them had other concerns. There really weren't many of them, given the number of targets they had to cover, but it didn't take very many to kill targets as naked as these. They roared in on the carefully plotted positions of the totally unprotected orbital shipyards floating around Manticore and Sphinx with devastating effectiveness.

Bomb-pumped lasers ripped deep, mangling and shattering, spewing bits and pieces of the Star Empire of Manticore's industrial might across the heavens. And behind them came the old-fashioned nuclear warheads— warheads which detonated only if they were unable to obtain a hard kinetic kill. Fireballs glared like brief-lived, intolerably bright stars, flashing in stroboscopic spikes of devastation, and more thousands of highly skilled workers and highly trained naval personal died in those cataclysmic bubbles of plasma and radiation.

Within a total space of barely eleven minutes, both of the Star Empire's major orbital industrial nodes and well over ninety percent of its dispersed shipyards, along with the better part of five and a half million trained technicians and naval personnel—and, all too often, their families—had been wiped out of existence.

By any yardstick anyone cared to use, it was the most devastating surprise attack in the history of the human race, and it wasn't over yet.

* * *

'Bring her hard to port, Chief! Fifty degrees now! '

'Fifty degrees, aye, Sir!' Chief Petty Officer Manitoba Jackson acknowledged, and HMS Quay turned sharply.

'Bring her to'—Lieutenant Commander Andrew Sugimatsu,Quay 's CO, stabbed a look at his maneuvering plot—'five hundred and ten gravities and lay her on her side. Put our belly towards any wreckage with our name on it!'

'Rolling ship and coming to five-one-zero gravities, aye, Sir.' Jackson's voice wasn't so much calmer than it had been as it was flattened and stunned, as if actual awareness was seeping past the sheer shock effect of such unmitigated disaster.

Sugimatsu gave him a sharp look. The CPO had been in the Navy almost as long as Sugimatsu had been alive, but he'd spent his entire service as one of the highly skilled specialists assigned to the management of the home system's tugs. He'd never actually seen combat, unlike Sugimatsu, and what he was seeing at this moment was the massacre of people he'd known and worked with for decades. The lieutenant commander would have trusted Jackson's nerve and composure in the face of any conceivable natural disaster, but there was nothing 'natural' about this , and Sugimatsu spent a brief moment being grateful that CPO Leslie Myerson, Quay 's second helmswoman, was a combat vet.

'Sir,' another voice said from the other side of Quay 's small bridge, 'there's going to be a lot of wreckage coming this way pretty darn soon.'

'I'm well aware of that, Truida,' Sugimatsu said. He looked across at Lieutenant Truida Verstappen, his executive officer. Her comment had come out incredibly calmly under the circumstances, he thought, and it wasn't so much an objection as an observation.

'The problem,' he continued, 'is that anything coming our way is also coming the planet's way. And unless I'm really badly mistaken, we're all that's in a position to intercept it.'

Verstappen looked at him for a moment, then nodded as he confirmed what she'd already realized must be his intentions.

'Get ready with the tractors,' Sugimatsu told her. 'No way can we catch all this crap with the wedge, so we're going to have to roll back down and grab the bigger pieces that get past us before they hit atmosphere.'

'We've only got six tractors,' Verstappen pointed out quietly.

'Then we're just going to have to hope there are only six pieces big enough to survive reentry,' Sugimatsu said grimly.

Even as he said it, he knew they would never be that lucky. Not after something like this.

Quay drove sideways, accelerating hard to put herself directly between the wreckage of HMSS Vulcan and the planet Sphinx. As Sugimatsu had observed, she was the only ship in a position to intercept the avalanche about to come crashing down on the planet. Most of the station's wreckage might be small enough to be completely destroyed when it hit atmosphere, but some of it definitely wasn't going to be. In fact, some of it was going to be solid hunks of battle steel armor, specifically designed and manufactured to resist direct hits by capital ship- range energy weapons.

The good news—such as it was, and what there was of it—was that at least half the wreckage which had been blasted out ofVulcan' s orbit had been blown outward , not inward. There'd be plenty of time for someone to deal with it before it became a threat to anyone. And most of the planet-bound wreckage was clustered in a fairly tight pattern, which gave Sugimatsu the chance to put