Mission of Honor

"We were less fortunate on Sphinx."

He shook his head slowly, and his eyes, darker than ever, flicked briefly to an iron-faced Hamish Alexander-Harrington before they returned to his memo pad.

"There was only a single tug in position to intervene. My impression is that its crew performed far better than anyone could possibly have expected. Nonetheless, the city of Yawata Crossing was effectively destroyed by a major debris strike. The city of Ta

A soft sound came from all three of the treecats in the room. White Haven opened his arms as Samantha flowed down from his chair back and buried her muzzle against him, and Ariel and Monroe joined their voices to her own soft lament.

"Counting the known casualties on the planetary surfaces," Abercrombie concluded softly, "the civilian human death toll so far is approximately seven million, four hundred and forty-eight thousand. I've asked the Forestry Service to give us a definitive figure for treecat fatalities as soon as possible." The home secretary met Ariel's eyes, not the queen's. "They're working on that. At the moment, the best estimate from their search and rescue teams is approximately eighty-five hundred."

White Haven winced. Seven and a half million human dead was even worse than he'd anticipated. True, it was less than a third of the population of the city of Nouveau Paris. For that matter, it was about a million and a half less than the population of the city of Landing. And the permanent population of the Manticore Binary System had grown to just over 3.6 billion, an increase of almost twenty percent in just the past thirty T-years or so, so the percentage of deaths was still barely more than two-tenths of a percent of the total. But the people who'd been killed represented a horrendous percentage of the labor force which had been the backbone and the sinews of the Star Empire's industrial might. And from his own service's perspective, the naval perso

Against all that, less than nine thousand treecats might not seem so terrible. But there were many planets occupied by human beings, while by the Sphinx Forestry Service's best estimate, the total treecat population was probably less than twelve million, which meant those nine thousand lives represented almost a full percent of them. Not one percent of the treecats living on the planet Sphinx; one percent—one out of every hundred—of every treecat in the entire universe.

And the 'cats were telempaths.

Elizabeth had reached up to gather Ariel back into her arms, and Munro had leaned forward, pressing his wedge-shaped chin into the top of Justin's shoulder while the prince consort caressed his ears. They sat that way for several seconds, then Elizabeth bent and kissed the top of Ariel's head gently, straightened once more, and cleared her throat.

"Thank you, Tyler," she said quietly, then looked around the table again.

"I'm sure it's going to take a while for Tyler's numbers to soak in, for all of us. In the meantime, however, and however painful we may find it, it's our responsibility to look beyond the immediacy of the human—and treecat—cost and consider the future. Specifically, the extent—and speed—with which we can recover from the damage to our military, industrial, and economic power. We've already heard from the Navy. So I suppose it's your turn, Charlotte."

"Of course, Your Majesty," Dame Charlotte FitzCummings, Countess Maiden Hill, replied. Maiden Hill was the Star Empire's Minister of Industry, and her expression was every bit as grim as White Haven's or Abercrombie's.

"Basically, all I can do is confirm Hamish's summation." The dark-haired countess' normally pleasant voice was harsh, hard-edged. "We've already begun an emergency mobilization of all civilian repair and service ships assigned to both the Junction's central nexus and Basilisk. We're also making plans to tow the Junction industrial platforms back into the i

"To be honest, what's going to hurt at least as badly as the hit our physical plant's taken is the workforce we've lost." She nodded her head slightly in Abercrombie's direction. "No one ever contemplated the catastrophic destruction of an entire space station without any opportunity to evacuate perso

She shook her head heavily.

"Our three biggest advantages, the ones that have kept us intact for the last twenty or thirty T-years, have been our R&D, the quality of our educational system and workforce, and the strength of our economy. As Hamish just pointed out, we still have the research capability, and we still have the educational system. But we no longer have the workforce, and with our industrial capacity this brutally cut back, the strength of our economy has to be doubtful, at best."

"Bruce?" Elizabeth said quietly, looking at the elegantly groomed, slightly portly man sitting between Maiden Hill and Frances Maurier, Baroness Morncreek, the Chancellor of the Exchequer.

Bruce Wijenberg was one of the minority of the Cabinet's members without even a simple "Sir" in front of his name. Which wasn't because titles hadn't been offered, however. Like Klaus Hauptman, Wijenberg was aggressively proud of his yeoman ancestry. Besides, he was from Gryphon. Despite his sophistication and polish, he retained at least a trace of the traditional Gryphon antipathy towards the aristocracy. He much preferred the House of Commons, and he'd been the Centrist Party's leader there before he'd accepted his Cabinet appointment. He'd really been happier in that role and he hoped to return to it sometime in the next few years, which would become impossible if he accepted a patent of nobility.