Mission of Honor

* * *

Now the Mesan attack came sweeping in out of the darkness. The incoming weapons had extraordinarily low radar signatures, and they were coming in at barely 60,000 KPS. Even if some of them had been detected, their velocity was so low it was unlikely to pop through the defenders' threat filters. As it happened, however, none of them were picked up as they sliced deeper and deeper in-system, unseen and undetected, like the talons of some huge, lethal, invisible bird of prey.

There were actually six separate attacks on the Manticore Binary System itself, one for each inhabited planet's infrastructure and each divided into two separate waves, although they'd been carefully synchronized to form a single, devastating sledgehammer of a blow.

The first wave of each attack consisted of a weapon which was as much a fundamental breakthrough, in its own way, as the Manticoran introduction of the multidrive missile: a graser torpedo which used its own variant of the spider drive. It was a large and cumbersome weapon, with the same trilateral symmetry as the Shark -class ships which had launched it, and for the same reasons.

The torpedo's size made fitting it into magazines and actually firing it awkward, to say the least, and the Sharks had never been intended to deploy it operationally. For that matter, the Sharks themselves had never been supposed to be deployed 'operationally.' The Leonard Detweiler class, which had been intended to carry out this operation, had been designed with magazines and launch tubes which would make it possible to stow and fire torpedoes internally, but none of the Detweilers were even close to completion, and it had required the development of an ingenious external rack system to allow the Sharks to use it for Oyster Bay.

For all its size, it was also a slow weapon. It was simply impossible to fit a spider drive capable of more than a few hundred gravities' acceleration into something small enough to make a practical weapon. As compensation, however, its drive had almost as much endurance as most of the galaxy's recon drones, which gave it an impressive absolute range. And a large percentage of the torpedo's volume had been reserved for systems which had nothing at all to do with propulsion. Whereas the Royal Manticoran Navy had concentrated on improving the efficiency of its standard laser heads, Daniel Detweiler's R&D staff had taken another approach. They'd figured out how to squeeze what amounted to a cruiser-grade graser projector into something small enough to deploy independently.

The power of the torpedo's graser wasn't remotely comparable to that of the weapon mounted by current- generation Shrikes , yet it was more powerful than any single bomb-pumped laser head. Of course, there was only one of it in each torpedo, but R&D had decided the new weapon could sacrifice the laser head's multi-shot capability, because it offered three highly significant advantages of its own. First, it was just as hard to pick up as a spider-drive ship , and the best anti-missile defense in the universe couldn't hit something it didn't know was coming. Second, the torpedo carried extraordinarily capable sensors and targeting systems and an AI which approached the capability of the one Sonja Hemphill's people had fitted into the Apollo control missile. As a consequence, its long-range hit probability was significantly higher on a per-beam basis than anything short of Apollo itself. And, third, a bomb-pulsed laser had a burst endurance of barely five thousandths of a second; a laser torpedo's graser's endurance was a full three seconds  . . . and it had a burn-through range against most sidewalls of over fifty thousand kilometers.

Fitting all that into something the size of a torpedo had required some drastic engineering compromises, and there'd never been any possibility of squeezing in the power supply for more than a single shot. Even if there had been, no one could build a graser that small and that powerful which could survive the power bleed and waste heat of actually firing. But that was fine with the MAN's designers and tacticians. In fact, they were just as happy every graser torpedo would irrevocably and totally destroy itself in the moment it fired, since they weren't looking forward to the day one of their enemies finally captured one intact and figured out how to duplicate it.

Now the the time had come to find out just how profitably they'd invested their R&D time.

The torpedoes had begun accelerating well before they or any of the missile pods accompanying them reached the range at which any transmission from the communications platforms the Ghost -class scout ships had emplaced could have reached them. On the other hand, they had less need for any additional information than the missiles did. They already knew where to find their targets, and they pulled steadily away from their purely ballistic pod companions.

* * *

'That's funny,' Sensor Tech 1/c Franklin Sands murmured. He reached out and tapped a command into his display, then frowned as the more detailed readout appeared.

'Ma'am,' he said, looking over his shoulder, 'I'm picking up something funny over here.'

Lieutenant (JG) Tabatha Dombroski, HMS Star Witch 's junior tactical officer, had the heavy cruiser's combat information center watch, and she quirked one eyebrow as she looked in Sands direction. 'Something funny' wasn't how the competent and experienced tech normally reported his findings.

'What is it?' Dombroski asked, walking across CIC's relatively spacious compartment towards him. Then she snorted. 'Forget I asked that. I imagine that if you already knew what it was, you'd have told me, wouldn't you?'

'I believe the Lieutenant might reasonably assume that, Ma'am,' Sands replied gravely, but his eyes twinkled. Lieutenant Dombroski had made fewer mistakes than quite a few JGs he'd known over the years, and she was more than willing to admit that even her enlisted personnel could probably teach her a thing or two.

'All right, I will,' she told him as she reached his command station and looked over his shoulder. 'So what is it we haven't been able to ID?'

'This, Ma'am,' Sands said more seriously. He indicated his readouts, and Dombroski gazed thoughtfully at them.

There wasn't much to see. Star Witch 's division of obsolescent Star Knight -class heavy cruisers were conducting routine training exercises in preparation for deployment to Silesia. They'd been listed for disposal when the Battle of Manticore burst upon the RMN, at which point they'd been pulled back out of reserve and refitted for service, so they had more training to worry about than most. It might be argued that, since they were headed for what had become an admittedly important but still strategically secondary assignment—and weren't even scheduled to leave for another two and a half weeks—there was no tearing urgency to the process, but Commodore James Tanner, CruDiv 114.1's commanding officer, didn't believe in letting last-minute details pile up. He'd gotten permission fto conduct formation exercises in a conveniently empty area well inside the hyper limit but above the ecliptic, which was what it had been doing for the last three days. Between maneuvering and tactical exercises, each ship had been tasked with completing her own system tests while there would still be time for the techs aboard Hephaestus to correct any faults before their scheduled departure, as well. As part of her own tests, Star Witch had deployed half a dozen Ghost Rider recon platforms, and Sands was currently in charge of monitoring their telemetry, not that he'd really expected to find anything. All he was doing was to make certain CIC's computers and the drones were talking to each other properly, and a less experienced or conscientious rating probably would never have noticed the tiny scrap of transmission he'd picked up.

'Any idea who it's from?' Dombroski asked after a moment. 'I mean, who's out there on that bearing?'

'That's what's funny about it, Ma'am.' Sands shrugged. 'It's directional as hell, and it originated from even further above the ecliptic than we are. As far as I can tell, there's nobody out there. No one according to any of our shipping logs, anyway.'

'What do the computers make of it?' Dombroski's frown deepened.

'That's just coming up,' Sands said as another display blinked. They both looked at it, and he pursed his lips in a silent whistle.

'That's one damned big burst packet, Ma'am,' he said.

'Yeah,' Dombroski agreed. 'More to the point, though, we don't even recognize the encryption.'

'Internal Andermani or something, Ma'am?' Sands sounded puzzled, but not yet really concerned, and Dombroski shook her head grimly.

'Even if it's Andermani, whoever sent it wouldn't have used that encryption unless they wanted to keep anyone who happened to detect it from understanding it. And like you say, it's a big