Mission of Honor

And which was certainly far too frail to survive holocaust when it came.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

No one ever managed to accurately reconstruct exactly what happened during the first few seconds of the attack. There was simply too much mayhem, too much chaos, and despite the multitude of sensor systems— civilian, as well as military—operating throughout the inner system, no one was looking in the right direction when it all began.

Had anyone been in a position to chart the damage, however, they would have known that the very first hit— first by almost an entire tenth of a second—struck compartment HF/1-17-1336-T-1219 of HMSS Hephaestus . HF/1-17-1336-T-1219 was the control section of module GM-HF/1-17-13, a general manufacturing module attached to the Royal Manticoran Navy's Shipyard HF/1-16 and Shipyard HF/1-17, which were currently assigned to BuShips' Refit and Repair Command (Hephaestus ). HF/1-16 happened to be empty, awaiting the arrival of the brand new Nike -class battlecruiser HMSTruculent later that afternoon. HF/1-17, on the other hand, was occupied by the Roland -class destroyers HMS Barbarossa , HMS Saladin , and HMS Yamamoto Date , all three of which were completing their final fitting out, with almost their full complements embarked.

The thirty-two technicians manning HF/1-17-1336-T-1219 never even realized the station was under attack. Working in a shirtsleeve environment, concentrating on routine tasks and the hectic pace at which Hephaestus always operated, they were totally unprepared for the ravening blast of focused gamma radiation which killed them instantly, splintered the compartment around them, and ripped open one entire flank of GM-HF/1-17-13.

At the instant it fired, the torpedo which struck the control section was moving at the next best thing to 70,000 KPS and deliberately yawing on its axis, sweeping its graser in a spiraling cone to traverse the entire volume of the station. The beam itself moved away from GM-HF/1-17-13, but the lethal overpressure of the explosion's shock front—followed by equally explosive decompression—killed the sixteen techs working directly in the twenty thousand-ton fabrication module almost as quickly as the control room techs had died. Splinters of HF/1-17-1336-T-1219 blew into and through GM-HF/1-17-13, carried all the way across the module compartment, and opened the far bulkhead into the vacuum of HF/1-17.

The second breach of the fabrication module could scarcely have mattered less to the people who'd been working inside it, since they were all already dead or dying by the time it occurred. It mattered a great deal, however, to the forty-eight space station personnel moving through the outsized boarding tubes connecting the three destroyers' main airlocks to the space dock gallery and the station proper. None of them were in skinsuits when the flying battle axes which had once been part of GM-HF/1-17-13 shredded the tubes and spilled them into the enormous docking bay's merciless vacuum.

As the boarding tubes were torn apart, atmosphere vented from them in a hurricane. GM-HF/1-17-13 had already decompressed almost entirely, but the vacuum around the station sucked greedily at the wounds, and at least a quarter of the equally unprepared crewmen aboard the three destroyers found themselves in death pressure before emergency blast doors slammed shut under computer control.

As it happened, the blast doors made no difference at all, however. Even as the graser which had ripped HF/1-17-1336-T-1219 moved away, cutting deeper towards the station's central spine, another graser moved towards HF/1-17 and HF/1-16. It sliced across both shipyards in a searing eyeblink, and if it was less powerful than a Shrike 's weapon, its power was more than ample for the minor task of cutting an unarmored destroyer, unprotected by impeller wedge or sidewalls, cleanly in half.

It did precisely that to HMS Saladin . . . whose fusion plant abruptly lost containment with absolutely no warning to the engineering safety systems. Not even cybernetic reflexes were equal to that sort of cataclysmic failure, and the resulting fireball made whatever other damage the torpedoes might have done to that section of HMSS Hephaestus totally superfluous.

* * *

HMSLongshoreman , one of Hephaestus ' ready-duty tugs, was headed away from the station, towing the brand new Saganami-C -class cruiser Jessica Rice towards Traffic Control's impeller limit, when the attack came in. The two ships were accelerating at the piddling rate of barely ten gravities out of deference to the fact that Jessica Rice was on internal grav plates only, since her inertial compensator was inoperable without the impeller wedge traffic regulations forbade her in such close proximity to the station. They were well clear of the slip in which Jessica Rice had been berthed, but that didn't matter.

One of the Mesan torpedoes scored a direct hit on the station's spine, slashing outward and across successive secondary axes in a horrendous bow wave of secondary blasts and explosive decompressions. It reached the outer edge of the station and kept right on going until it ripped lengthwise across Jessica Rice 's unarmored topsides, shattering the big, powerful ship. And then she, like Saladin , blew up. The explosion disabled Longshoreman 's after impeller ring, sending her wedge into automatic shutdown . . . and leaving her unprotected as a chunk of what had once been HMSS Hephaestus which out-massed the tug by at least fifty percent slammed into her and destroyed her completely.

* * *

'Jesus Christ! '

Lieutenant Йdouard Boisvin, executive officer of HMS Stevedore , looked up in surprise at Senior Chief Petty Officer Oxana Karpova's exclamation. The senior chief had primary helm control for the powerful tug's approach to Hephaestus , and that sort of outburst from her was unheard of.

Boisvin opened his mouth to demand an explanation, but nothing came out. As he looked up, he saw the same visual display Karpova and her backup helmsman had been watching, and his vocal cords froze.

He felt himself sitting there, unable to look away, unable even to speak, as the entire space station blew apart before him. It was impossible for his stunned brain to pick individual explosions out of the chaos of devastation ripping across the station. Bits and pieces of it registered with horrifying clarity—not then, but for later replay in the nightmares which would plague him for years. Individual modules, blown loose from their moorings, spraying across the backdrop of incandescent explosions like fragile, backlit beads before the wavefront of destruction reached out and engulfed them, as well. The pieces of a heavy cruiser, her spine broken, spinning end- over-end and breaking up into smaller bits as they spun. A construction ship, underway on reaction thrusters, vanishing into the fiery vortex's maw.

Those tiny vignettes, snapshot images of catastrophe's outriders, would come back to him in those nightmares. But all that registered at the moment was the sheer impossibility of what he was seeing. There wasn't even room for horror—not in those first, fleeting seconds. The unbelievability of it would be the first and forever most overwhelming impression of any of the surviving witnesses. Their sheer incredulity.

Yet even though Йdouard Boisvin couldn't look away, the ingrained, acquired reflexes of relentless training moved the thumb of his right hand to a button on his command chair's armrest and Stevedore 's emergency signal blared from speakers throughout the ship.

* * *

'—not really a problem, Admiral. Oh, it sounded like it was going to be a bear, but once I started looking into it, it was only a scheduling snafu,' Captain Karaamat Fonzarelli, Refit & Repair's senior officer aboard Hephaestus said.

Rear Admiral Margaret Truman, Hephaestus ' CO, nodded. She'd suspected it was something like that, but it was a relief to hear she'd been right.

'I've been on the screen to Logistics about it,' Fonzarelli continued from his end of the com link. 'According