Mission of Honor

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.'

He shook his head slowly, and his eyes, darker than ever, flicked briefly to an iron-faced Hamish Alexander- Harrington before they returned to his memo pad.

'There was only a single tug in position to intervene. My impression is that its crew performed far better than anyone could possibly have expected. Nonetheless, the city of Yawata Crossing was effectively destroyed by a major debris strike. The city of Tanners Port wasn't directly impacted, but there was a major ocean strike. It would almost certainly have destroyed Yawata Crossing even without the direct hit on that city, and it did destroy at least three-quarters of Tanners Port, and three other, smaller cities, were very severely damaged. There was too little time for significant evacuation before the first impact waves came ashore, and loss of life was heavy, especially in Tanners Port. Local authorities had more warning, further away from the actual strikes, and emergency evacuation efforts thankfully reduced human losses, although property damage is certainly going to run into the high billions of dollars. The town of Evans Mountain was also badly damaged—by a cascade of smaller pieces of debris in its case —although the casualty count there seems to have been much lighter. And according to the Sphinx Forestry Service'—Abercrombie's eyes flitted to the treecats on the backs of Elizabeth and Justin's chairs—'it would appear at least one treecat clan was completely destroyed.'

A soft sound came from all three of the treecats in the room. White Haven opened his arms as Samantha flowed down from his chair back and buried her muzzle against him, and Ariel and Monroe joined their voices to her own soft lament.

'Counting the known casualties on the planetary surfaces,' Abercrombie concluded softly, 'the civilian human death toll so far is approximately seven million, four hundred and forty-eight thousand. I've asked the Forestry Service to give us a definitive figure for treecat fatalities as soon as possible.' The home secretary met Ariel's eyes, not the queen's. 'They're working on that. At the moment, the best estimate from their search and rescue teams is approximately eighty-five hundred.'

White Haven winced. Seven and a half million human dead was even worse than he'd anticipated. True, it