ghosts coming and going inside the jamming all along, of course. Now more of them seem to be hardening up simultaneously, and there's something else going on. It's almost as if we were taking lidar and radar hits from a lot more units all of a sudden.'
'What?' Darlington spun to face the tactical section, but it was already too late.
'Sir, I've just picked up something I think you should hear,' Cynthia McTierney said.
'What?' White Haven looked at her irritably. 'Cindy, this is hardly the time—'
'It was an all-ships transmission from Admiral Yanakov to all Grayson units, Sir,' McTierney said with stubborn diffidence, and then, before White Haven could respond, she pressed a stud and Judah Yanakov's harsh recorded voice echoed in White Haven's earbug.
'Admiral Yanakov to all Grayson units,' it said, and White Haven could almost hear the clangor of clashing swords in its depths. 'The order is—Lady Harrington, and no mercy!'
'What?' White Haven spun towards his own com, but it was already too late.
Sixteen hundred and ninety-five missile pods fired as one, and broadside launchers fired with them. The next best thing to nineteen thousand missiles went howling towards the Peeps at 95,000 gravities, and the range was only five million kilometers and the Peeps were headed straight to meet them at over fourteen thousand kilometers per second.
'Take us into hyper!' Darlington shouted, but flight time was under ninety seconds, and he'd wasted four responding.
Counter-missiles launched desperately, and laser clusters trained onto the incoming fire, but there simply wasn't time. His engineers needed at least sixty seconds to bring their generators on-line, and by the time Darlington snapped the order to Citizen Commander Huff, and Huff relayed it to the captains of the other ships, and they relayed it to their engineers, time had run out.
Space itself seemed to vanish in the titanic violence as thousands upon thousands of laserheads exploded in a solid wall of fury. At least a thousand of the Allies' own warheads killed one another in old-fashioned nuclear fratricide, but it scarcely mattered. There were more than enough of them to deal with eight dreadnoughts, twelve battleships, and four battlecruisers. Amazingly, and against all apparent reason, two of Darlington's six destroyers actually escaped into hyper. Because no one was intentionally wasting missiles on such small fry, no doubt.
Alexander Hamish grabbed for his own com with frantic haste with Judah Yanakov's order still ringing in his ears. He was horrified by the implications, and his horror grew as the Graysons' fire control continued to sweep the tumbling wreckage and the handful of life pods which had escaped. But none of them fired, and as he slowly relaxed in his chair once more, his memory replayed the words once more. 'No mercy,' Yanakov had said, not 'No quarter,' and a long, quavering breath sighed out of him as he realized he was not about to see a vengeful atrocity by units under his command.
He inhaled slowly, then looked at Granston-Henley.
'Remind me to have a little discussion with Admiral Yanakov about communications discipline,' he said, and his mouth quirked in a wry, exhausted grin that might actually hold true humor again someday.
Book Six
Chapter Thirty-Nine
The conference room was silent as the four other members of the court filed into it behind Alistair McKeon. The door closed after them, shutting off the humming background murmur of the hearing room conversations, and McKeon led the way to the table at the center of the room. He and his fellows took their seats, and he tipped back in his chair with a weary sigh.
He was not the senior member of the court... but he was its president. That unusual arrangement had been adopted at the unanimous vote of the rest of the board, and he wished it hadn't been. Honor was right, of course, but however much he might agree with her, he didn't have to like the logic which had put him in charge.
If anything like justice was to be done where StateSec's atrocities on Hell were concerned, it would have to be done by a military court whose members, by definition, had been SS victims. That was the reason the other members had insisted that he, as not simply the sole Manticoran member of the court but also as the only one who had never been in SS custody here on Hell, must preside. They were as determined as he or Honor that their proceedings should be seen as those of a court, not a mob seeking vengeance, which was the main reason they had recorded every moment of the trials themselves. No one in the People's Republic or the Solarian League was likely to be convinced the difference was real, however careful they were or however many records they had, and they knew it, but that wasn't really the point. These people wanted posterity, and their own people, to know everything had been done legally, properly, as impartially as possible under the circumstances, and by The Book. That was important, for it would make the difference between them and their victimizers crystal clear for themselves, and at the moment, that was all they really cared about.
After all, McKeon thought mordantly, if we blow this thing, the Peeps will take this planet back over. In which case all of us will undoubtedly be dead... and the only chance we had to punish the guilty will have been lost forever. And bottom line, that's what really matters to these people.
He let his eyes slide over the other four members of the court. Harriet Benson and Jesus Ramirez had both turned down invitations to sit on it—wisely, in McKeon's opinion. Honor had had no choice but to extend the invitations, given the roles they had played in making the capture of Styx possible, but both of them knew they had too much hate inside to be anything like impartial, and so they had withdrawn themselves from the temptation. Instead, Commander Albert Hurst of the Helmsport Navy represented the inmates of Camp Inferno while Captain Cynthia Gonsalves of Alto Verde and Commodore Gaston Simmons of the Jameston System Navy represented the other military POWs on Hell. Simmons was senior to McKeon... and so was Admiral Sabrina Longmont, who undoubtedly had the hardest duty of all the members of the court.
Unlike any of the others, Longmont was—or had been, at least— a citizen of the People's Republic and a fervent supporter of the Committee of Public Safety from the earliest days of the New Order. She hadn't cared for its excesses and purges, but she'd been too intimately acquainted with the old regime to miss it, and at least the Committee had appeared to be open and above board about its objectives and tactics, which the Legislaturalists had not. Unfortunately, Longmont had been defeated in battle by the Alliance, which had given her a much closer view of the Committees 'excesses' than she'd ever wanted. Indeed, she was extremely fortunate that her previous exemplary political record had bought her a mere trip to Hell instead of a firing squad.
Unlike most of the other prisoners on the planet, she'd been housed in Camp Delta Forty, where conditions had been far better than anywhere else on the planet. Indeed, Longmont had had no idea what StateSec was doing to its other prisoners, because Delta Forty had been a sort of holding point for Peep officers who hadn't blotted their copybooks beyond all hope of redemption. Since it had always been possible the Committee would choose to reach out and pardon one or more of Delta Forty's inmates in order to make use of their skills once more, the SS had been careful not to permanently embitter them against the regime. As a result, Longmont, like most of her fellows, had come to the conclusion that the horror stories about Hell they'd heard before being sent here had been just that: stories. They certainly hadn't seen any sign of the abuse and casual cruelty rumor assigned to the planet... which meant that the discovery of what had been happening elsewhere shocked them deeply. The more so because they blamed themselves for being credulous enough to let StateSec deceive them so completely.
Not all of them saw it that way, of course. Some had been delighted at being granted even a slim chance to escape Hell and strike back at the New Order and all its minions. A surprisingly large majority of Delta Forty's inmates, however, had wanted no part of the escape effort. In some cases, that was because they expected the attempt to fail and preferred to survive, but most of them remained genuinely loyal to the Republic (if not
