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The oncoming missile's seekers abruptly went active, and it swerved.
"Break, Grayson One! Break now!" she snapped, and the yacht wrenched around to starboard.
Jamie Candless rode the flank of Benjamin Mayhew's ship like a limpet. There'd been no time to precalculate or rehearse the maneuver. Honor did it by hand and eye, holding her position, watching the missile roar in, seeing it vanish from her sensors at last as the belly of her wedge swung up to cut it off. It disappeared, and she held her breath, waiting for it to pop up at the last instant, and then—
A twenty-megaton warhead detonated less than fifty kilometers from her ship. For one fleeting instant, Jamie Candless was trapped in the very heart of a star, and Honor's canopy went black as the armorplast polarized. But even through her own visceral stab of terror, a corner of her mind exulted, for it was a standard nuke, not a laser head. And that meant there was a chance, if only—
The plasma wave came on the heels of the flash, ripping out across Grayson One's course. But Honor had anticipated that. Her order to turn away had snatched the vulnerable open throat of the yacht's wedge — and her own — away from the center of detonation. The true fury of the explosion wasted itself against Candless' belly stress band. Only its fringes reached out past the wedge, and generators shrieked in torment as the particle and radiation shielding which protected the throat of any impeller wedge took the shock. Those generators were designed to protect the ships which mounted them against normal space particles and debris at velocities of up to eighty percent of light-speed. Grayson One and Candless were moving far slower than that, at barely nine thousand KPS, but their shielding had never been expected to face the holocaust which suddenly erupted across their base course, and the demon howl of the generators and the scream of audible warnings filled the universe. Honor yanked on the stick, jerking Candless away from what she hoped was still the bearing to Grayson One, and her darkened flight deck was a trapped, madly heaving pocket of hell as she shot the rapids of nuclear destruction.
They weren't going to make it. She knew they weren't.
And then, suddenly, the generators stopped shrieking.
Her eyes darted over her HUD, and she drew a deep, shuddery breath. One of her antiparticle generators was gone and the other was damaged — she'd be going back to Grayson at a very low velocity — but she was alive, and so was Grayson One! She stared at the icon of the Protector's yacht, watching as the bigger ship's wedge flickered and went down. Grayson One was hurt, but her com link to the yacht's flight deck was still open, and the bridge crew's harsh, staccato reports told her all she needed to know. Hurt the ship might be, but she was intact... and so were her passengers!
But then, on the heels of her elation, a fist of shock struck, for there was only one golden icon on her HUD.
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
"So as soon as the last missile pods go aboard Nicator and Nestor, we'll be ready to resume operations," Captain Granston-Henley told the assembled flag officers of Eighth Fleet. "Admiral White Haven—" she nodded to where Hamish Alexander sat at the head of the conference table "—has decided to proceed on the basis of Sheridan One. As you all know, this ops plan calls for—"
She broke off in midsentence as Commander McTierney, White Haven's com officer, suddenly jerked upright in her chair. The movement was so sudden, so unexpected, it drew all eyes, but McTierney didn't notice. She only cupped one hand over the earbug she kept tuned at all times to the Flag communications center, and her startled audience could actually see the color draining from her face.
She closed her eyes for a moment, then punched a stud on her panel.
"Repeat that — in full!" she barked, and the admirals and commodores watched her shoulders slump as she listened to the earbug once more. Then she shook her head, and when she looked up at White Haven, the earl was dumbfounded to see tears in her eyes.
"What is it, Cindy?" he asked quickly, and she licked her lips.
"It's a flash priority from the Admiralty via Trevor's Star, My Lord. The courier boat just arrived and squealed it to FlagCom. It says... Sir, it says the Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary are dead!"
"What?" Despite himself, Hamish Alexander came halfway out of his chair, and McTierney nodded miserably.
"They sent the message off before they had full information, Sir. But according to what they did know, it looks like it was Masadan Faithful. Somehow they got their hands on a couple of modern weapons — some sort of stealth missile or drone; BuWeaps is still trying to figure out which — and smuggled them into attack range of Grayson One and Queen Adrie
"Chancellor Prestwick and Councilor Hodges were aboard Queen Adrie
She broke off, and White Haven nodded grimly.
"And Duchess Harrington?" he asked, trying to make his voice come out normally, knowing he'd failed, and hoping no one else would notice in their shock.
"She took it on the belly of her wedge, Sir. She survived." A rustle and stir ran through the frozen compartment as more than one officer stifled a cheer. "Her runabout took some severe damage, but the Admiralty says she's fine."
"Thank the Tester for that," Judah Yanakov breathed, and White Haven gave another, choppy nod. Elation at Honor's survival surged up in him, warring with the icy shock of the totally unexpected news, and he closed his eyes while he made himself step back and consider it with a semblance of calm.
A muted mutter of conversation sprang up all about him, but no one spoke directly to him, and he wondered if he was glad. They're waiting, he thought. Waiting for me, as Eighth Fleet's commander, to tell them what it all means... and where we go from here. But, my God — what does it mean?
His brain began to work with something like its accustomed speed as the initial shock receded. Of all the officers in the compartment, he was undoubtedly the best informed on the strengths and weaknesses of the Cromarty Government, since his brother was Chancellor of the Exchequer. By longstanding tradition, the person who held that post was not only the second ranking member of the Cabinet but the individual who took over as Prime Minister if something happened to the incumbent.
But that was under normal circumstances, and these were anything but normal. And if what Willie had told him about the balance in the House of Lords was as accurate as his brother's analyses usually were, then—
Hamish Alexander looked squarely into the abyss of the future, and what he saw there frightened him.
"Your Majesty, Countess New Kiev, Lady Descroix, and Baron High Ridge are here."
Elizabeth III nodded to the footman who had showed the senior leaders of the Opposition into her study as if their visit to Mount Royal Palace were completely routine. But it wasn't, and the brown eyes which met her visitors were harder than steel. There were dark circles under those eyes, etched by personal grief for a beloved uncle and cousin and a Prime Minister who had become, in many ways, a second father. But there was more than grief in those circles. There was the knowledge of the chaos Allen Summervale's death had wreaked on domestic Manticoran politics... and the reason her "guests" were here.