But however careful they'd been to avoid direct attacks on the planets, none of them had lost any sleep over the possibility of indirect damage from the bits and pieces of wreckage raining down into the planets' gravity wells. That was something totally beyond any attacker's ability to control, and no one could possibly question the fact that the space stations had been legitimate military targets. Under those circumstances, the Eridani Edict's prohibition against deliberate attacks on planetary populations had no bearing. So if a few thousand—or a few hundred thousand—Manties were unfortunate enough to get vaporized when a fifty-thousand-ton chunk of wreckage landed on top of their town, well, making omelettes was always hard on a few eggs.
* * *
"What?"
Andrew LaFollet snapped upright in his seat, one hand pressed to his earbug. Allison Harrington had been concentrating on her grandson and the bottle he was industriously draining, but the sharp incredulity of the colonel's tone whipped her head around towards him.
He was listening intently, and she thought she could actually see the color draining out of his face. Then he stabbed the button that connected him to the pilot's position.
"Get us on the ground, Jeremiah—now!" He listened for a moment, then nodded. "All right. If we're that close to town. But get us there fast!"
He let go of the button, and as he turned to face Allison, she felt the limo's sudden acceleration pushing her back in her seat.
"What is it, Andrew?" she asked, arms tightening instinctively around Raoul.
"I'm not sure, My Lady—not yet. There's a lot of confusion on the emergency channels. But—" He paused, visibly gathering himself. "But it sounds like the system is under attack."
"What?" Allison looked at him blankly, which, as anyone who knew her could have attested, was not her customary response.
"Someone's attacked Hephaestus and Vulcan, My Lady," he said flatly. "I don't know how, but it sounds like the damage is going to be heavy, and I want you out of the air and on the ground somewhere safe."
"Alfred and the kids!" she said suddenly, her face tightening, but he shook his head quickly.
"They ought to be almost exactly half way between Manticore and Sphinx, My Lady, and it sounds like this has to be an attack on our orbital infrastructure. It's not another fleet battle, anyway. and I don't think anyone's going to be wasting firepower on a local puddle jumper that isn't even particularly close to either planet."
Allison stared at him, then swallowed harshly as she realized he was almost certainly correct.
"Thank you," she said quietly.
* * *
Quay hurtled across the wreckage stream spilling down from orbit. Her sensors' view was restricted, but she had more than enough coverage out the sides of her wedge for Truida Verstappen to know the belly band wasn't getting it all. She'd set up her computers to tag everything that crossed the sensors' field of view, and Quay's cybernetic brain began plotting descent curves. They could only be approximate until the tug turned and brought her powerful forward radar and lidar into action, but at least Lieutenant Verstappen would know where to start looking.
Had anyone been in a position to actually watch, they would have seen HMS Quay slash into the heart of the wreckage. Despite the impenetrability of the wedge itself, it was still a high risk move. Sugimatsu had to get deep enough into the stream to intercept the most dangerous chunks of it, and that meant intersecting its path late enough that quite a few major pieces of debris were actually swept into the open throat of Quay's wedge. He'd counted on that, since he couldn't avoid it anyway. And it didn't matter whether a piece of wreckage hit an impeller wedge on its way in or on its way out. What did matter was the distinct possibility that Quay might strike one of those pieces on its way through. The odds were against it—on the scale of the tug's overpowered wedge, both she and even a very large piece of wreckage were actually rather small objects in a relatively large volume—but the odds weren't as much against it as he could have wished, and he realized he was holding his breath.
Something large, jagged, and broken—it looked, in the fleeting glimpse he had, as if it were probably at least half of a heavy fabrication module, which must have massed the better part of thirty-five thousand tons—went screaming past Quay's prow and impacted on the inner surface of her wedge's roof. Or, rather, was ripped into very, very, very tiny bits and pieces in the instant it entered the zone in which local gravity went from effectively zero to several hundred thousand gravities in a space of barely five meters.
The ship shuddered and bucked as other multiton chunks of Vulcan's shattered bones slammed into her wedge. Not even her inertial compensator could completely damp the consequences of that much transferred momentum without shaking her crew like a terrier with a rat. But she'd been built with generous stress margins for a moment just like this one, and she came out the other side intact, already turning to bring tracking systems and tractors to bear on whatever had gotten past her.
Verstappen's hands flew over her console. If she'd only had more time, time to really evaluate the wreckage before they physically intercepted it, she would have been far better placed to prioritize threats. As it was, she had to do it on the fly, and perspiration beaded her forehead. At their velocity, even with the range of a tug's tractors, they had only seconds—no more than a minute or two, maximum—before their velocity would carry them too far from the debris to do any good.
"Take the queue, Harland!" she barked, pressing the key that locked in her best estimate of threat potentials, and down in Engineering, Harland Wingate and his two assistants went frantically to work.
Quay's tractors stabbed out, no longer powerful, carefully modulated hands making gentle contact with other ships but deliberately overpowered demons, ripping and rending, striking with so much transfer energy that even enormous pieces of debris shattered.
In the one hundred and three seconds they had to work, those tractors destroyed eighteen potentially deadly shards of Her Majesty's Space Station Vulcan. Four more looming projectiles were dragged bodily after Quay as she went streaking away from her intercept. There would have been more, but two of her tractors had burned out under the abuse.
* * *
Given how little time Quay had been given, she and her crew did a magnificent job. But magnificent isn't always enough.
Several large pieces got past her, including three at least the size of cruisers, accompanied by a trailing shower of smaller bits and pieces, trailing a de-orbiting arc across the daylight side of Sphinx.
Sphinx's gravity produced an atmosphere which was shallower—"flatter"—than that of most planets humanity had settled, and the wreckage of what had once been HMSS Vulcan, some with personnel still trapped aboard, hit the boundary of that atmosphere at an altitude of ninety-five kilometers.
The first impactor struck the planetary surface twenty seconds later. Even closing at a paltry eight kilometers per second—barely twenty-five times the speed of sound at local sealevel—the fragments were wrapped in a sheath of plasma as they shrieked downward. Not all the debris Quay had missed reached the surface, of course, but even those chunks that never struck the ground transferred their kinetic energy to the atmosphere, creating bow waves of plasma, and then a sequence of air bursts along the entire length of their descent paths, sparking forest fires and flattening anything beneath them.
Twenty seconds, it took. Twenty seconds of shrieking, incandescent fury. Of superheated air exploding outwards in demonic shockwaves. Twenty seconds of seething violence howling its way down the heavens.
There was no one to backstop Quay. The only armed aircraft which could possibly have reached any of those pieces in time were the sting ships flying escort on Allison Harrington's air limo, and there was too much confusion for anyone to get word to them quickly enough. Even if there hadn't been, they carried no weapons powerful enough to have destroyed such massive kinetic hammers.
Multiple fragments, two of them massing between two hundred and three h
undred thousand tons each, slammed into the icy waters of the Tannerman Ocean. The resulting impact surge would kill over ten thousand people in dozens of small coastal towns and inflict billions of dollars worth of damage.
But that was the good news.
Twenty seconds was far too little warning to do any good, too little time for anyone to react. Alarms were only beginning to sound in the city of Yawata Crossing, emergency messages only starting to hit the public information channels, when an even larger impactor—three hundred thousand tons of wreckage, the size of one of the old Star Knight-class heavy cruisers—struck approximately five and a half kilometers from the exact center of the city of one and a quarter million people . . . with an effective yield of better than two megatons.
The three follow-on strikes by fragments in the forty thousand-ton range were barely even noticeable.
* * *
Andrew LaFollet moved suddenly.
Allison had been staring out the limo's window, her brain whirling as she tried to process the impossible information. She wasn't even looking in LaFollet's direction—in fact, her attention had been drawn by a brilliant flash to the east, somewhere out to sea, ahead of the limo—and so she was taken completely by surprise when he snatched Raoul out of her arms.
She started to turn her head, but LaFollet hadn't even paused. Raoul began a howl of protest, but it was cut off abruptly as LaFollet shoved the baby into the special carrier affixed to the mounting pedestal of Allison's chair—the one which would normally have been Honor's, if Honor had been present. The internal tractor net locked down around the infant instantly, gentle and yet implacably powerful, and LaFollet slammed the lid.
That carrier had been designed and built by the same firm that built and designed life support modules for treecats, and every safety feature human ingenuity could come up with had been designed into it. Allison was just starting to come upright in her own chair, her eyes wide, when LaFollet stepped back and hit a button.
Allison's shoulder harness yanked tight with brutal, bruising force, and battle steel panels snapped out of the limo's bulkheads and overhead, sealing her and the baby in a heavily armored shell. A fraction of a second later, the blast panel blew out, and the shell went spinning away from the limo under its built-in emergency counter-grav.
LaFollet hit a second button, and Lindsey Phillips' chair followed Allison's. Then he jumped for his own chair and reached for the third emergency ejection button.
* * *
Black Rock Clan was one of the older treecat clans. Not so old as Bright Water Clan from whence it had originally sprung, perhaps, but certainly of respectable antiquity. It was a large clan, too—one which had been growing steadily over the last double-hand of turnings. The hunting was good, here in the western picket-wood of the mountains the two-legs called the Copper Walls. The "gardening" tricks the two-legs had taught the People helped, as well, and Black Rock had learned to look forward to the regular visits of the Forestry Service's doctors, which had kept so many of their young from dying in kittenhood.
But for all that, Black Rock Clan, like most treecat clans, kept largely to itself. There were no two-legs living in Black Rock's immediate vicinity, and so there was no one to tell the People what had happened in the black emptiness so far beyond their sky.
And perhaps that was just as well. At least none of the People realized what was about to happen.
Chapter Thirty
The men and women in the conference room rose in a spontaneous gesture of respect as Queen Elizabeth III came through the door.
The queen normally had little use for such formalities. In fact, they usually irritated her, since it was her opinion that all of them—including her—had better things to be doing with their time. But today she simply nodded back to them and crossed without speaking to her own chair. She carried Ariel in her arms, and Prince Consort Justin walked at her side. Justin's own treecat, Monroe, rode on his shoulder, and the 'cats' flattened ears, the way Monroe's tail wrapped around his person's throat, reflected the dark emotional aura of the room entirely too well.
Justin pulled back the queen's chair and seated her before he sat at his own place. Their treecats arranged themselves along the backs of their chairs, settling with tightly-coiled tension, and then the standing officers and civilians followed the prince consort's example.
For a small eternity the silence was total, and Elizabeth surveyed the faces of her most senior advisers and ministers. She didn't need Honor's empathic sense to know what all those people were feeling. None were the sort to panic, yet in many ways, the horrifying impact of what happened had hit them even harder than the general public. For the public as a whole, the shocked disbelief, the stunned incomprehension, was its own anesthesia . . . for now, at least. That was going to change, and, given human nature, all too many of the Old Star Kingdom's subjects were going to blame her and, even more, the men and women sitting around this conference table with her. Rational or not, it was going to happen. Elizabeth knew that . . . just as she knew that entirely too many of those advisers and ministers already blamed themselves.
And just as she knew the shock of the totally unanticipated cataclysm which had descended upon them had been made incomparably worse by coming so closely on the heels of the news from Spindle. In her worst nightmares, she would never have believed Manticore's prospects could be so catastrophically shifted in barely three T-days. She knew how mentally and emotionally paralyzing that body blow had been for her; she suspected that even she couldn't imagine how stunning and traumatizing it had been for the men and women directly responsible for the Star Empire's defense.
"All right," she said finally, her voice level. "I already know it's bad. Tell me how bad." She looked around the circle of faces, and her brown eyes settled inevitably upon one of them. "Hamish," she said quietly.
"Your Majesty," Hamish Alexander-Harrington said in a flat, unflinching, yet curiously deadened voice, "I think the short answer is very bad. I'm not qualified to speak to the civilian aspects. I'm sure Tyler"—he nodded across the table to Sir Tyler Abercrombie, the Home Secretary "—has better information on the civilian casualty toll than I do. But from the purely military perspective, it would be extraordinarily difficult, if not outright impossible, to exaggerate the damage this has done to us."
The Earl of White Haven looked away from Abercrombie, sitting very upright in his chair and turning it slightly to face the queen directly.
"Hephaestus, Vulcan, and Weyland are gone, Your Majesty. There's been some talk about recovering some of the modules and repairing them, but my staff's current estimate, based on input from both BuShips and BuWeaps, as well as from Construction and Repair, is that it would be faster and more efficient to start over from scratch.
"That means we've just lost every 'hard yard' we had. I don't as yet have a complete count of the numbers and classes of ships lost with them, but I already know it represents a significant loss of combat power. In addition, we've lost better than ninety-nine percent of the labor force of all three stations. For all intents and purposes, the only real survivors we have are people who, for one reason or another, were off-station when the attack hit. Most of them," he added heavily, "also lived aboard the stations, which means virtually all of them have lost their entire immediate families. That means it's going to be quite some time—and rightly so—before their morale recovers to a point at which they can really be considered part of the labor force again."
His face showed his distaste at having to make that observation. Grief and bereavement, especially on such a horrific scale, weren't supposed to be reduced to mere production factors, but whether they were supposed to be or not, they were something which had to be taken into consideration this time, and he continued unflinchingly.
"The damage to the dispersed orbital yards is almost as bad. At this moment, my best figures are that fifteen of them—none of which had units under construction—are undamaged, and another eight are probably repairable, although the
ships under construction have been so badly damaged we're probably going to have to break them up and start over rather than trying to repair and complete them.
"In effect, we've lost every ship under construction, the labor force which was building them, and the physical plant in which they were being built—and which was fabricating almost all the components the dispersed yards were assembling. That means that what we have in commission and working up at Trevor's Star now is all we're going to have for at least two T-years. For any capital ships, the delay will be more like four T-years. Minimum."
Despite all the disastrous reports the other people in that conference room had already received, people winced all around the table and one or two faces turned perceptibly paler at the First Space Lord's flat, unvarnished admission.
"What about the repair facilities in Trevor's Star, Ham?" Prime Minister Grantville asked quietly, and White Haven looked at his brother.
"That's still intact," he admitted, "and it's going to play a huge part in regenerating yard capacity within the timeframe I just mentioned, Willie. But it's primarily repair capacity. It was never intended for sustained, high-volume component production, so it's going to require a lot of modification before it can really make its presence felt. And, more inportantly, we're going to have to divert a hell of a lot of its potential capacity to something we're going to need even worse."
William Alexander's face tightened at his brother's last sentence. He started to open his mouth, then shook his head and waved his right hand in a small arc, inviting White Haven to continue with his report. No doubt there'd be time for even more bad news soon enough.
"Before we can begin any new construction projects, we're going to have to replace our yard capacity, Your Majesty," the first lord went on, turning back to the queen. "We're fortunate in that our extraction and refining platforms are untouched—probably because they're so dispersed and they were too far from the building platforms for convenient targeting—but raw materials have never been a significant bottleneck for us. Fabrication has been, however, and any of our previous problems pale beside what we're looking at now. Before we can replace our yard capacity, we have to replace the core industrial capacity the space stations represented. BuShips is working on a complete listing of our repair and fabrication ships. Obviously, we'll be recalling them from most of our foreign stations—we're going to need them here, at home, too badly to leave them anywhere else.