Mission of Honor

to them, it's mostly a question of when and where we want the spares delivered. So I told them t—'

Truman's display went abruptly blank.

Her eyebrows were still only beginning to rise in surprise when another torpedo's graser sawed directly through her quarters . . . and her.

* * *

'Look, Daddy! What's that?'

John Cabeзadas was struggling with his carry-on bag. The damned thing's strap insisted on twisting, especially when he was carrying Serafina. The sixteen-month-old was usually as good as gold, but, of course, whenever he was having trouble with the carry-on bag, she was inevitably fretful. He'd just decided he was going to have to hand her to his wife, Laura, when his older daughter Jennifer asked the question.

'I don't know,' he told her, unable to entirely keep the irritation out of his voice. The girl was incredibly bright and even more curious than most nine-year-olds, and she'd been one question after another ever since their shuttle delivered them to Hephaestus . To be honest, much as he loved her and as happy as her keen wittedness normally made him, John was looking forward to getting her settled aboard the ship to Beowulf, where there'd be no convenient windows and she could ask her questions of the ship's library.

'What are you talking a-' he began, turning and looking through the transparent wall of the personnel tube which had been provided to give tourists a panoramic view of the station's huge bulk.

He never finished the question. There wasn't time. There was barely enough time for him to begin to reach for Jennifer, to feel Laura and twelve-year-old Miguel at his back, to experience the first terrible flicker of a father's utter helplessness, and then the explosion tore the tube apart around them.

* * *

'I am so frigging tired of worrying about the Manties' tender damned sensibilities!' Jacqueline Rivera groused.

Rivera had never been a great admirer of the 'Star Empire of Manticore's' pretensions to grandeur even before this latest crisis had blown up, and she'd deeply resented the front office's insistence that she tone down her usual commentary. It wasn't simply that she'd disagreed with Corporate editorial policy—she had, in this case, but that hadn't been the real cause of her current ire. No, what she'd resented was being reminded of editorial policy by some executive assistant producer (who probably owed her position solely to the fact that she was someone's cousin in-law or current live-in lover) as if Jacqueline were some unknown newbie and not one of Solarian News Services' senior reporters.

So, all right, she might have been hitting just a little harder at questions about the credibility of the Manty version of events in Talbott than Corporate might have preferred once the great Audrey O'Hanrahan herself backed off. Sure, it was true 'Saint Audrey' had urged everyone to 'reserve judgment,especially now that the authenticity of the 'official New Tuscany' report to which she'd gained access had been called into question by Solarian reporters actually in Talbott. And of course she might have a point when she'd argued that the Manties' enemies might have fed it to her as part of a clever, deliberate disinformation campaign. It was even possible the Mesan System authorities claims about the Green Pines terrorist attack were fabrications, althought Rivera damned well knew better than that. She'd filed three good 'casts on that very point, as a matter of fact, which was why Corporate had sent her out to Manticore . . . and told her to make nice while she was here, the stinking bastards. 'More flies with honey,' indeed! The damned Manties had finally come out into the open, proving they'd always funded and supported those murdering Ballroom bastards—just as Rivers had always known they were doing—and this was the time to go for the jugular, not 'demonstrate journalistic impartiality and detachment'!

'Calm down, Jenny,' Manfred O'Neill, her longtime recording tech, said pacifically. 'It's hardly the end of the world. After all, this is the story at the moment.'

'Oh, yeah?' Rivera glared at him. 'Look, you may think they sent us out here to do us some kind of favor, but I know better! We could've been covering Green :Pines instead, damn it!'

'Never said anyone did it to do us a favor,' O'Neill replied cheerfully. 'I only said it's going to turn out to be the hot corner, and it is. Hotter'n Green Pines, for that matter, especially if there's anything to these new rumors from Spindle. Everybody's already pretty much mined Green Pines out, and it's not like the system authorities're handing out any fresh info, abyway. But there's going to be lots of stuff coming through here if things really are going to hell for the Manties in Talbott, and when it does, I don't think anyone back home is going to be worrying a lot about reminding us to watch our P's and Q's when we report it.'

Rivera looked at him for a moment, then felt at least a little of her resentment easing away. Manny had a way of cutting to the heart of things, and maybe he had a point. Not that it changed the fact that—

The Mesan graser which incinerated Passenger Concourse Green-317 terminated Jennifer Rivera's reflections upon her career prospects along with her, Manfred O'Neill, and four hundred and nineteen other arriving passengers from the Hauptman Lines starship Starlight .

Approximately three-hundredths of a second later, Starlight, her crew of twenty- eight, and the two hundred through-passengers to Sphinx who hadn't disembarked, followed them into destruction.

* * *

'Is Aikawa back aboard yet, Ben?' Ansten FitzGerald asked as his steward poured him a second cup of coffee.

'No, sir,' Steward 1/c Benjamin Frankel replied with a smile. 'He's not due back until this afternoon, I believe.'

'Um.' FitzGerald frowned thoughtfully. Hexapuma would be in the yard dogs' hands for at least another three or four weeks, but she'd just been assigned a trio of bright, shiny new midshipmen. Frightening as the concept seemed in some ways, he'd decided to ask Aikawa Kagiyama to take them under his wing. He was confident Aikawa would rise to his responsibilities and set them a good example.

Of course he was.

He snorted in amusement at his own thoughts, but he couldn't really deny that a part of him was actually a little relieved at having at least another few hours before he found out whether or not his 'confidence' was justified.

'Well, in that case—'

HMS Hexapuma blew up with all hands as the Mesan graser ripped across her fusion plant.

* * *

The destruction of HMSS Hephaestus was for all intents and purposes total in the first three seconds of the Mesan attack.

Some of the surviving fragments of the station were large enough and sufficiently intact to hold pressure, and a handful of the ships which had been docked survived more or less in one piece. Three of them—the destroyer Horatius , the Grayson freighter Foxglove , and the tug Bollard— actually came through the holocaust virtually undamaged.Horatius ' paint wasn't even scratched.

But they were the exception to the rule, tiny pockets of survival in a hurricane of devastation . . . and the attack on HMSS Vulcan was equally successful.

The MAN's Sierra Attack wasn't quite perfectly synchronized with the Mike Attack's assault onHephaestus , but the delay was less than four seconds. By the time visual evidence of what had happened to Hephaestus could have reached Vulcan moving at the limited velocity of light, Sphinx's space station had been just as completely demolished.

Between the two space stations, alone, the first ten seconds of Oyster Bay had already cost the Old Star Kingdom over four million dead.

* * *

Allen Higgins' face was parchment-pale as he stared at the FTL platform-driven flag bridge master plot. It was only chance he'd been on flag bridge at all, but that coincidence wasn't much help as CIC's computers emotionlessly updated the plot. Home Fleet was much too far away from either space station to have offered any