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Promptly after which, he had met with a fatal accident named Kyrillos Taliadoros and quietly and completely disappeared.
That meant there was no one who could possibly have tied Lieutenant Rochefort to Manpower or Mesa before he pressed that function key.
And no one could possibly tie the lieutenant to anyone after that, since the message he transmitted was actually the detonation command for the two-hundred-kiloton device hidden inside a cargo container a Jessyk Combine freighter had transshipped to Giselle a month before . . . and which was now stored in a cargo bay approximately one hundred and twelve meters forward and three hundred meters down from Lieutenant Rochefort's compartment.
Ray Chatterjee was sipping from a coffee mug when he heard an odd sound. It took him a moment to realize it was the sound of someone sucking in air for an explosive grunt of surprise, and he was turning towards the sound, his brain still trying to identify it, when he realized it had come from Lieutenant Commander Olson. Then her head came up, and she turned towards him.
"Sir! The space station—Giselle—it's just blown up!"
"What?"
Despite his own earlier thoughts, for just an instant, it completely failed to register and he simply stared at the ops officer. He'd been focused on the Solarian ships, worrying about the future, trying to figure out the past. . . . None of that had prepared his mind for the possibility that a space station the better part of ten kilometers in length should just suddenly blow up.
His eyes whipped around to the visual display, and he froze as he saw the awesome spectacle. Sheer shock and disbelief held him there, staring at it, trying to wrap his mind around the unexpected enormity of it all. It was more than he could do as the seconds dragged past, but then, suddenly—
"Communications!" he snapped. "Raise Admiral Byng immediately!"
"What the—!"
Josef Byng was watching the visual display, not the tactical plot, at the moment Giselle blew up. The sudden eruption of light and fury that wiped away the forty-two thousand men and women aboard the space station took him totally by surprise. The view screen polarized instantly, protecting his eyes from the blinding flash, but it was so close, so powerful that he flinched back from it involuntarily.
"Sir!" Captain Aberu half-shouted. "Sir! The New Tuscan space station's just blown up!"
"The Manties!" Byng snapped, and whipped around to punch a priority key on his com. Captain Warden Mizawa,Jean Bart's commanding officer, appeared on his display almost instantly.
"Case Yellow, Captain! The Manties have just—"
"Sir, I know the station's been destroyed," the captain said, speaking quickly and urgently, "but it was definitely a nuclear explosion—a contact explosion; CIC sets the yield at at least two hundred kilotons—and not an energy weapon. But we didn't pick up any missile trace, so—"
"Goddamn it, I just gave you a fucking order, Captain!" Byng snarled, absolutely infuriated that a mere Frontier Fleet captain would dare to interrupt him with arguments at a moment like this. "I don't care what you did or didn't pick up! We're sitting here bare-assed naked, without even sidewalls, and just who the hell else d'you think would have done something like this?"
"But, Sir, it couldn't've been a missile if we didn't detec—"
"Don't you fucking argue with me!" Byng bellowed while panic pulsed through him. However the Manties had done it, they couldn't afford any witnesses, and with their wedges down even friggng destroyers could—
"But, Sir, if they'd—"
"Shut the hell up and execute your goddamned orders, Captain, or I swear to God I'll have you shot this very afternoon!"
For one fleeting moment, Warden Mizawa hovered on the brink of defiance. But then the moment passed.
"Yes, Sir," he grated. "Case Yellow, you said." He gave Byng one last, searing look, then turned away from the com to his own tactical officer.
"Open fire," he told Commander Ursula Zeiss harshly.
Chapter Forty-Two
Helen Zilwicki was still getting accustomed to the notion that, as Commodore Terekhov's flag lieutenant, her duty station when the ship went to battle stations was no longer on the bridge or ma
At least they'd finally managed to fill the holes in the commodore's staff, so the flag bridge didn't seem quite so empty anymore. Helen suspected that the commodore had actually picked out the officers he pla
They were a good bunch, Helen thought, and they'd shaken down well with the commodore andQuentin Saint-James' officers. She particularly liked Commander Stillwell Lewis, the new ops officer, who rejoiced in the nickname of "Stilt," and Lieutenant Commander Mateuz Ødegaard, the staff intelligence officer. Commander Lewis was a tall, rangy redhead—from Gryphon, like Helen herself—who got along well with Commander Lynch, and Ødegaard reminded Helen in some ways of her father. Physically, the slightly built, fair-haired Ødegaard couldn't have been less like Anton Zilwicki, but both of them had the same implacably patient, unremitting, logical concentration on the task in hand. Both of them seemed to know that in the battle between stone and water, water always won.
The other newcomers were Lieutenant Commander Mazal Inbari, the astrogator, and Lieutenant Atalante Montella, the communications officer. Both of them were far more than merely competent, and Helen liked both of them, but she hadn't yet warmed to them the way she had to Stillwell and Ødegaard.
At the moment, however, that thought was far from foremost in her mind as she sat very quietly at her own terminal and watched the master plot at the forward end of the flag bridge. It wasn't configured for tactical or astrographic mode at the moment. Instead, it was configured as a view screen, and Vice Admiral Michelle Henke looked back out of it at Helen.
In point of fact, Helen knew, Admiral Gold Peak's image was on every view screen aboard every ship of Tenth Fleet as it swept through hyper-space towards the system of New Tuscany at an apparent velocity three thousand times that of light.
"Attention all hands," the voice of Lieutenant Commander Edwards, the admiral's staff com officer said quietly. It was probably the most u