Mission of Honor

The incredible horde of false signatures guaranteed the limited number of counter-missiles the Solarians could bring to bear would be effectively useless, but Michelle Henke and her officers had been unwilling to settle for that. Even as the Dragon's Teeth spawned, the Dazzler platforms spread across the front of the attack salvo activated in a carefully sequenced chain, ripping huge, blinding holes in Task Force 496's sensor coverage. The Dazzlers' exquisitely choreographed chaos reduced even the last ditch laser clusters of their targets' point defense systems to impotence.

Of the ninety-two hundred Mark 23 attack birds in Aivars Terekhov's Alpha launch, Sandra Crandall's task force managed to stop exactly one thousand and seven. The other 8,209 got through.

* * *

SLNS Joseph Buckley lurched indescribably as the Manticoran missiles detonated and x-ray lasers ripped at her massive armor.

Thick as that armor was, it was no match for the stilettos of focused radiation punching into it like brimstone awls. It shattered under the transfer energy as the lasers ripped deeper and deeper, and the huge ship bucked in agony.

Jacomina van Heutz clung to the arms of her command chair as her shock frame hammered her. The fleeting instant in which the Manticoran missiles could bring their lasers to bear against her ship's sidewalls as they penetrated the Solarian formation with a closing velocity which had climbed to seventy-three percent of light-speed was far too brief for any of Joseph Buckley 's damage to register on merely human senses as individual hits. It was all delivered in one stroboscopic lightning bolt of devastation, too sudden and intense for even the ship's computers to register or sort out.

Those missile-born talons gouged and tore. Energy mounts and missile tubes, counter-missile launchers, radar arrays, point defense clusters, boat bays, gravitic sensors, impeller nodes—all of them shattered, exploding into tattered ruin in a single catastrophic moment, faster than a man could have blinked. In less time than it would have taken to cough, Sandra Crandall's flagship was transformed into a broken wreck, a splintered hulk, coasting onward under momentum alone, with three quarters of her crew wiped out of existence.

Nor did van Heutz' ship die alone. Her squadron mates Joseph Lister, Max Planck , and Joseph Hutton died with her. Like Buckley, Hutton at least avoided immediate and total destruction, but Lister and Planck were less fortunate. Lister shattered, breaking into three distinct pieces; Planck simply disappeared in a flash of white-hot fury.

Archimedes, Andreas Vesalius, Hipparchus ,Leonardo da Vinci, Gregor Mendel, Marie Curie, Wilhelm Roлntgen, Alfred Wegener, Avicenna, al-Kawarizmi  . . . every one of the Alpha launch's twenty-three targets—thirty-two percent of Crandall's total wall of battle—was reduced to splinters and wreckage in that single inconceivable, exquisitely synchronized explosion.

* * *

Sir Aivars Terekhov watched a third of the superdreadnought icons on his plot blink virtually simultaneously from the glaring crimson of hostile units into the purple crosses of dead ships . . . or into nothing at all. His arctic blue eyes didn't even flicker at the proof of how utterly outclassed the Solarian League Navy truly was, but his nostrils flared. He gazed at the display for almost a full minute, absorbing the results, watching the sudden disintegration of the Solarian wall's formation as individual captains tried to avoid the debris of slaughtered consorts or swerved in frantic, independent evasion patterns as the Bravo launch swept towards them. Then he turned to look at Stillwell Lewis.

'Execute Exclamation Point,' he said.

'Executing Exclamation Point, aye, Sir!'

Lewis' finger stabbed a key at his console, and twenty seconds later, every one of the Bravo launch missiles detonated as one, millions of kilometers short of their targets.

'Spot the Charlie pods but hold launch,' Terekhov said.

'Holding Charlie launch, aye, Sir,' Lewis replied, and Terekhov sat back in his chair, waiting.

* * *

Forty-five more seconds ticked past. A minute. Ninety seconds. Then, abruptly, every surviving Solarian starship's wedge went down simultaneously.

Another two and a half minutes oozed into eternity while light-speed limited transmissions sped towards HMS Hercules and Quentin Saint-James . Then—

'Sir,' Captain Loretta Shoupe told Augustus Khumalo quietly, 'Communications is picking up an all-ships transmission from an Admiral Keeley O'Cleary. She wants to surrender, Sir.'

Chapter Twenty-Three

And now , Michelle Henke thought dryly as she stood on Artemis ' flag bridge, hands clasped behind her, and watched the icons of Admiral Enderby's LACs move steadily towards their destinations, for the fun part. I know I shouldn't, but I can't help thinking everything would've been a bunch simpler if O'Cleary just hadn't surrendered for another salvo or two. As it is, we've got a hell of an interesting little problem here .

She snorted, grimacing at her own thoughts, but it was true. And, ironically, the direct consequence of one of the Royal Manticoran Navy's greater advantages.

The one huge problem with the RMN's decision to adopt increased automation in order to reduce its warships' manpower requirements was that it worked even better than anyone had expected. There were very few warm bodies aboard modern Manticoran or Grayson cruisers or destroyers, and even superdreadnoughts had crews smaller than prewar battlecruisers. That was an enormous advantage in Fifth Space Lord Cortez's Sisyphean task of manning the navy's ships, but it also meant the smaller companies of the ships in question found it much more difficult to generate detachments for little things like, oh, boarding parties, for example.

Solarian ships' companies, conversely, were even larger and more manpower-intensive than prewar Manticoran designs had been, and Sandra Crandall had entered the Spindle System with seventy-one superdreadnoughts, each with a ship's company of over six thousand. Even completely ignoring the rest of her task force, that had amounted to the next best thing to a half-million personnel. Tenth Fleet, on the other hand, had nowhere near that many people. A Roland -class destroyer like Naomi Kaplan's Tristram had a total company of less than seventy, and not a single one of them was a Marine. A Saganami-C , like Aivars Terekhov's Quentin Saint- James , was somewhat better off—at least each of them had a hundred and forty Marines available, but that was out of a total crew of only three hundred and fifty-five. For that matter, even one of the lordly Nikes , like her own Artemis , had a company of barely seven hundred and fifty. Which meant the total personnel of all Michelle's warships—including Khumalo's superdreadnought flagship and the four carriers of Stephen Enderby's CLAC squadron and their LAC groups—amounted to barely thirty-two thousand. Crandall's surviving forty-eight superdreadnoughts, alone, carried ten times that many men and women, and that didn't even consider the fifty thousand or so aboard her battlecruisers and destroyers.

Nor did it consider the need to provide search and rescue parties for the nine crippled superdreadnoughts which had not been totally destroyed.

All of which meant she was incredibly shorthanded for dealing with such a stupendous haul of POWs, and she frankly didn't know what she was going to do with all of them. She had nowhere near the hyper-capable personnel lift to transfer them back to the prison camps in the Star Empire currently populated by the personnel of Lester Tourville's Second Fleet. For that matter, she wasn't at all certain those camps, despite their frenetic expansion following the Battle of Manticore, would have had sufficient space for her current catch even if she'd been able to