Mission of Honor

Lieutenant Verstappen would know where to start looking.

Had anyone been in a position to actually watch, they would have seen HMS Quay slash into the heart of the wreckage. Despite the impenetrability of the wedge itself, it was still a high risk move. Sugimatsu had to get deep enough into the stream to intercept the most dangerous chunks of it, and that meant intersecting its path late enough that quite a few major pieces of debris were actually swept into the open throat of Quay 's wedge. He'd counted on that, since he couldn't avoid it anyway. And it didn't matter whether a piece of wreckage hit an impeller wedge on its way in or on its way out. What did matter was the distinct possibility that Quay might strike one of those pieces on its way through . The odds were against it—on the scale of the tug's overpowered wedge, both she and even a very large piece of wreckage were actually rather small objects in a relatively large volume—but the odds weren't as much against it as he could have wished, and he realized he was holding his breath.

Something large, jagged, and broken—it looked, in the fleeting glimpse he had, as if it were probably at least half of a heavy fabrication module, which must have massed the better part of thirty-five thousand tons—went screaming past Quay 's prow and impacted on the inner surface of her wedge's roof. Or, rather, was ripped into very, very, very tiny bits and pieces in the instant it entered the zone in which local gravity went from effectively zero to several hundred thousand gravities in a space of barely five meters.

The ship shuddered and bucked as other multiton chunks of Vulcan 's shattered bones slammed into her wedge. Not even her inertial compensator could completely damp the consequences of that much transferred momentum without shaking her crew like a terrier with a rat. But she'd been built with generous stress margins for a moment just like this one, and she came out the other side intact, already turning to bring tracking systems and tractors to bear on whatever had gotten past her.

Verstappen's hands flew over her console. If she'd only had more time, time to really evaluate the wreckage before they physically intercepted it, she would have been far better placed to prioritize threats. As it was, she had to do it on the fly, and perspiration beaded her forehead. At their velocity, even with the range of a tug's tractors, they had only seconds—no more than a minute or two, maximum—before their velocity would carry them too far from the debris to do any good.

'Take the queue, Harland!' she barked, pressing the key that locked in her best estimate of threat potentials, and down in Engineering, Harland Wingate and his two assistants went frantically to work.

Quay 's tractors stabbed out, no longer powerful, carefully modulated hands making gentle contact with other ships but deliberately overpowered demons, ripping and rending, striking with so much transfer energy that even enormous pieces of debris shattered.

In the one hundred and three seconds they had to work, those tractors destroyed eighteen potentially deadly shards of Her Majesty's Space Station Vulcan . Four more looming projectiles were dragged bodily after Quay as she went streaking away from her intercept. There would have been more, but two of her tractors had burned out under the abuse.

* * *

Given how little time Quay had been given, she and her crew did a magnificent job. But magnificent isn't always enough.

Several large pieces got past her, including three at least the size of cruisers, accompanied by a trailing shower of smaller bits and pieces, trailing a de-orbiting arc across the daylight side of Sphinx.

Sphinx's gravity produced an atmosphere which was shallower—'flatter'—than that of most planets humanity had settled, and the wreckage of what had once been HMSS Vulcan , some with personnel still trapped aboard, hit the boundary of that atmosphere at an altitude of ninety-five kilometers.

The first impactor struck the planetary surface twenty seconds later. Even closing at a paltry eight kilometers per second—barely twenty-five times the speed of sound at local sealevel—the fragments were wrapped in a sheath of plasma as they shrieked downward. Not all the debris Quay had missed reached the surface, of course, but even those chunks that never struck the ground transferred their kinetic energy to the atmosphere, creating bow waves of plasma, and then a sequence of air bursts along the entire length of their descent paths, sparking forest fires and flattening anything beneath them.

Twenty seconds, it took. Twenty seconds of shrieking, incandescent fury. Of superheated air exploding outwards in demonic shockwaves. Twenty seconds of seething violence howling its way down the heavens.

There was no one to backstop Quay . The only armed aircraft which could possibly have reached any of those pieces in time were the sting ships flying escort on Allison Harrington's air limo, and there was too much confusion for anyone to get word to them quickly enough. Even if there hadn't been, they carried no weapons powerful enough to have destroyed such massive kinetic hammers.

Multiple fragments, two of them massing between two hundred and three hundred thousand tons each, slammed into the icy waters of the Tannerman Ocean. The resulting impact surge would kill over ten thousand people in dozens of small coastal towns and inflict billions of dollars worth of damage.

But that was the good news.

Twenty seconds was far too little warning to do any good, too little time for anyone to react. Alarms were only beginning to sound in the city of Yawata Crossing, emergency messages only starting to hit the public information channels, when an even larger impactor—three hundred thousand tons of wreckage, the size of one of the old Star Knight -class heavy cruisers—struck approximately five and a half kilometers from the exact center of the city of one and a quarter million people . . . with an effective yield of better than two megatons.

The three follow-on strikes by fragments in the forty thousand-ton range were barely even noticeable.

* * *

Andrew LaFollet moved suddenly.

Allison had been staring out the limo's window, her brain whirling as she tried to process the impossible information. She wasn't even looking in LaFollet's direction—in fact, her attention had been drawn by a brilliant flash to the east, somewhere out to sea, ahead of the limo—and so she was taken completely by surprise when he snatched Raoul out of her arms.

She started to turn her head, but LaFollet hadn't even paused. Raoul began a howl of protest, but it was cut off abruptly as LaFollet shoved the baby into the special carrier affixed to the mounting pedestal of Allison's chair— the one which would normally have been Honor's, if Honor had been present. The internal tractor net locked down around the infant instantly, gentle and yet implacably powerful, and LaFollet slammed the lid.

That carrier had been designed and built by the same firm that built and designed life support modules for treecats, and every safety feature human ingenuity could come up with had been designed into it. Allison was just starting to come upright in her own chair, her eyes wide, when LaFollet stepped back and hit a button.

Allison's shoulder harness yanked tight with brutal, bruising force, and battle steel panels snapped out of the limo's bulkheads and overhead, sealing her and the baby in a heavily armored shell. A fraction of a second later, the blast panel blew out, and the shell went spinning away from the limo under its built-in emergency counter- grav.

LaFollet hit a second button, and Lindsey Phillips' chair followed Allison's. Then he jumped for his own chair and reached for the third emergency ejection button.

* * *

Black Rock Clan was one of the older treecat clans. Not so old as Bright Water Clan from whence it had originally sprung, perhaps, but certainly of respectable antiquity. It was a large clan, too—one which had been growing steadily over the last double-hand of turnings. The hunting was good, here in the western picket-wood of the mountains the two-legs called the Copper Walls. The 'gardening' tricks the two-legs had taught the People helped, as well, and Black Rock had learned to look forward to the regular visits of the Forestry Service's doctors, which had kept so many of their young from dying in kittenhood.

But for all that, Black Rock Clan, like most treecat clans, kept largely to itself. There were no two-legs living in Black Rock's immediate vicinity, and so there was no one to tell the People what had happened in the black emptiness so far beyond their sky.

And perhaps that was just as well. At least none of the People realized what was about to happen.