Mission of Honor

None of which mattered at all to the weapons in question themselves.

The eighteen torpedoes heading the Mike Attack wave bound for the planet Manticore, simply adjusted their courses very slightly, while those leading the Sierra Attack, bound for the planet Sphinx, didn't even have to do that. Onboard passive sensors located the unmistakable emission signatures of their targets and pre-attack testing signals began cascading through their systems.

* * *

"No, Sir," Lieutenant Commander Neukirch said. "I don't have any more idea what this could be or who it could have come from than Lieutenant Dombroski has. But I think she did exactly the right thing by reporting it up the line."

"I agree entirely," Commodore Ta

The silence, Ta

Fair's fair, Jim , he admonished himself. You know just as much as they do, and you don't have any brilliant analysis to offer, either. Except for the blindingly obvious point Neukirch already made, of course. So don't go taking your grumpy out on them .

"All right," he said out loudt. "A few things we can do on our own while we wait for Perimeter Security to get back to us. Commander Neukirch, your request to deploy additional Ghost Rider platforms is approved. Use however many you think you need, but try to find me whoever sent that transmission."

Neukirch started to open his mouth, but Ta

"I know I'm asking you to find a very small needle in a very large haystack, Commander. But we've got at least an approximate bearing, and I don't want that datum getting any older before we start trying to chase it down. Do your best. No one expects miracles."

"Yes, Sir."

"Alexandros," the commodore turned to his chief of staff, "I think it's time we woke up the division's other skippers and tac officers. The more people we have looking for this, the better. And while I'm thinking about it, get a flash directly off to Home Fleet, as well. I'm sure Perimeter Security will be keeping Admiral Higgins in the loop, but let's see if we can't cut the transmission time as much as possible."

"Yes, Sir."

"In the meantime," Ta

"Excuse me, Sir!"

Ta

"I think I know what it was about, Sir," he said in a voice like crushed gravel.

* * *

The Mike Attack torpedoes reached the proper point in space. They aligned themselves with finicky precision, doublechecked and triple-checked their targeting, then fired.

Every one of them activated in the space of a single second, and three seconds later, not one of them still existed. But their closing speed on their target well over seventy thousand kilometers per second; the target in question was completely unprotected by impeller wedge or side wall, which increased their standoff range to the next best thing to a half-million kilometers; and their approach vectors had been carefully calculated.

One moment, the Manticore Binary System was going about its routine business, peacefully and calmly. The next moment, eighteen powerful grasers ripped through Her Majesty's Space Station Hephaestus like demons. There was absolutely no warning. No time to bring up the station's spherical sidewall, or to evacuate, or don skinsuits, or set internal pressure security. There was no time at all as that devastating wave of destruction struck like a chainsaw hitting an egg.

Despite the provision of her sidewall generators, Hephaestus had never truly been intended or designed to survive that sort of attack. Even if its builders had ever dreamed in their worst nightmares that something like it was a real possibility, it would have been physically impossible to structure and armor the station to face it. But none of those builders had ever really imagined something like this getting past Perimeter Security and Home Fleet, actually reaching attack range of the Star Empire's capital planet without so much as being challenged, and so no one had even tried. For that matter, there'd never been a single, comprehensive construction or expansion plan of any sort for Hephaestus . The station had simply grown, steadily and inevitably, adding additional lobes and habitats—cargo platforms, perso

Yet for all its sheer size, all the industrial processes churning away in and about it, Hephaestus was a fragile structure—a fairy tale construct which could never have survived its own weight inside a planetary gravity field.

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 i

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.