Mission of Honor

their merely human masters which had gotten the transmitting platforms into position to send it to them without any Manticoran ever spotting the MAN at it. They simply receipted the portion of it which was addressed to them and ignored the rest.

Special caps fitted to protect their sensors from particle erosion and micrometeorites during their long ballistic run in to attack range were blown free while onboard artificial intelligences considered the updated targeting information and concluded that none of it required significant modification of their pre-launch instructions. Their targets were rather large, after all, and they'd already known exactly where to find them.

The tricky part had been synchronizing the attack waves. Manticore-A and Manticore-B were far enough apart that even if the Manticorans' FTL station's range was great enough for transmissions between them (which seemed, to say the least, unlikely), it would take the better part of thirteen minutes for word of what happened around one component of the binary system to reach the other. Because of that, Oyster Bay's planners had been willing to settle for only approximate coordination between those separate parts of the operation.

Within the Manticore-A subsystem, however, timing was far more critical. Although the planets Manticore and Sphinx were well over twenty-five light-minutes apart at the moment, it was imperative that all the attacks be executed in a time window too narrow to allow for any effective reaction by the system's defenders. And unlike certain members of the Solarian League Navy, the MAN had a very powerful respect for the Royal Manticoran Navy. Not only that, but as they'd studied and updated Oyster Bay's planning requirements, they'd become painfully aware that the Manticorans' reaction was going to be even faster and better coordinated than they'd originally allowed for, given the existence of their grav-pulse communicators and how they'd undoubtedly upgraded their routine readiness postures in the wake of the Battle of Manticore. No doubt they'd based any changes on the need to defeat a repeat of any attack using known weapon systems, since one didn't normally make plans on the basis of threats one didn't know about, but the MAN had found that reflection less than completely reassuring. In the Alignment strategists' opinion, it was generally a good idea to proceed with caution when one decided to march into a napping tigress' cave to steal her young, and so the initial deployment of Oyster Bay's weapons had been painstakingly planned and calculated, then carried out with meticulously rehearsed precision.

None of which mattered at all to the weapons in question themselves.

The eighteen torpedoes heading the Mike Attack wave bound for the planet Manticore, simply adjusted their courses very slightly, while those leading the Sierra Attack, bound for the planet Sphinx, didn't even have to do that. Onboard passive sensors located the unmistakable emission signatures of their targets and pre-attack testing signals began cascading through their systems.

* * *

'No, Sir,' Lieutenant Commander Neukirch said. 'I don't have any more idea what this could be or who it could have come from than Lieutenant Dombroski has. But I think she did exactly the right thing by reporting it up the line.'

'I agree entirely,' Commodore Tanner replied. 'And I've already kicked a flash report up to Perimeter Security, but even with the grav com it's going to be another couple of minutes before we hear anything back. If anyone has any powerful insights, I want to hear them now.'

The silence, Tanner reflected, was deafening. His com display was divided into four quadrants which were occupied, respectively, by the faces of Captain Madison Marcos, the commanding officer of HMS Star Dance (which also made him Tanner's flag captain); Captain Vince McMahon, Star Witch 's CO; and both cruisers' senior tactical officers. Commander Alexandros Adriopoulos, Tanner's chief of staff, was physically present, still holding the mug of coffee he'd been sipping when Star Witch 's emergency transmission came in three hundred and seventy seconds previously. And none of them, obviously, had any insights at all, powerful or not.

Fair's fair, Jim , he admonished himself. You know just as much as they do, and you don't have any brilliant analysis to offer, either. Except for the blindingly obvious point Neukirch already made, of course. So don't go taking your grumpy out on them .

'All right,' he said out loudt. 'A few things we can do on our own while we wait for Perimeter Security to get back to us. Commander Neukirch, your request to deploy additional Ghost Rider platforms is approved. Use however many you think you need, but try to find me whoever sent that transmission.'

Neukirch started to open his mouth, but Tanner's raised hand preempted anything the lieutenant commander had been about to say.

'I know I'm asking you to find a very small needle in a very large haystack, Commander. But we've got at least an approximate bearing, and I don't want that datum getting any older before we start trying to chase it down. Do your best. No one expects miracles.'

'Yes, Sir.'

'Alexandros,' the commodore turned to his chief of staff, 'I think it's time we woke up the division's other skippers and tac officers. The more people we have looking for this, the better. And while I'm thinking about it, get a flash directly off to Home Fleet, as well. I'm sure Perimeter Security will be keeping Admiral Higgins in the loop, but let's see if we can't cut the transmission time as much as possible.'

'Yes, Sir.'

'In the meantime,' Tanner continued, turning his attention to Marcos and McMahon, 'I think we shou—'

'Excuse me, Sir!'

Tanner's eyes darted to Neukirch's image as the tactical officer's suddenly hoarse voice cut him off in mid- syllable. Neukirch looked as if he'd just been punched in the belly. The lieutenant commander was staring at something outside his com pickup's field of view, and Tanner could actually see the color draining out of the younger man's face. Then Neukirch inhaled deeply and looked back at the commodore.

'I think I know what it was about, Sir,' he said in a voice like crushed gravel.

* * *

The Mike Attack torpedoes reached the proper point in space. They aligned themselves with finicky precision, doublechecked and triple-checked their targeting, then fired.

Every one of them activated in the space of a single second, and three seconds later, not one of them still existed. But their closing speed on their target well over seventy thousand kilometers per second; the target in question was completely unprotected by impeller wedge or side wall, which increased their standoff range to the next best thing to a half-million kilometers; and their approach vectors had been carefully calculated.

One moment, the Manticore Binary System was going about its routine business, peacefully and calmly. The next moment, eighteen powerful grasers ripped through Her Majesty's Space Station Hephaestus like demons. There was absolutely no warning. No time to bring up the station's spherical sidewall, or to evacuate, or don skinsuits, or set internal pressure security. There was no time at all as that devastating wave of destruction struck like a chainsaw hitting an egg.

Despite the provision of her sidewall generators, Hephaestus had never truly been intended or designed to survive that sort of attack. Even if its builders had ever dreamed in their worst nightmares that something like it was a real possibility, it would have been physically impossible to structure and armor the station to face it. But none of those builders had ever really imagined something like this getting past Perimeter Security and Home Fleet, actually reaching attack range of the Star Empire's capital planet without so much as being challenged, and so no one had even tried. For that matter, there'd never been a single, comprehensive construction or expansion plan of any sort for Hephaestus . The station had simply grown, steadily and inevitably, adding additional lobes and habitats—cargo platforms, personnel sections, heavy fabrication modules, shipyards—as they were required. Taking advantage of the flexibility microgravity made possible. Expanding into a huge, lumpy agglomeration of raw industrial power which had its own peculiar beauty as it floated in orbit, by far the brightest single object in the planet Manticore's night skies. It stretched over a hundred and ten kilometers along its central spine, and tentacles reached out in every direction, some of them the better part of forty or even fifty kilometers long in their own right. It boasted a permanent population of over nine hundred and fifty thousand. By the time transients, ship crews, field trips by visiting school children, and other visitors were added, the station's total population on any given day was certainly upward of a million, and probably close to twice that on most days.

Yet for all its sheer size, all the industrial processes churning away in and about it, Hephaestus was a fragile structure—a fairy tale construct which could never have survived its own weight inside a planetary gravity field.