Today, she was a stranger. A terrifying stranger.
“Shall I challenge them, Ma’am?” Lieutenant Commander Brantley asked from Communications.
“No,” she said flatly, and looked up from the plot at last. Eyes like frozen brown flint met Cardones’s on the display.
“Take them out,” she said.
* * *
Commander Gregoire Koenig exploded from the lift car onto Andromeda’s command deck. He hadn’t bothered with a skinsuit. In fact, he was shoeless and wore only trousers and a T-shirt, but Daiichi Rangwala leapt out of the command chair at the center of the bridge with enormous relief.
“Captain on the bridge!” the quartermaster of the watch barked.
“As you were—everyone!” Koenig snapped. He flung himself into the vacated command chair and spun it to face his tactical officer. “Status?”
“Still more of them coming over the wall, Sir.” Lieutenant Commander Paulson’s voice quavered. “We’re up to almost five hundred now.”
Koenig blanched. CruRon 572 was supposed to be conducting a simple training maneuver in the safest star system in the entire League. None of its units had ever imagined anything like this in their worst dreams!
“The Admiral’s on the way to flag bridge, Sir,” Rangwala told him. “Should be there by now.”
Koenig jerked a choppy nod. As soon as Ning-ju reached her station, they’d have to—
“Missile launch!” Yvonne Paulson said suddenly. “Multiple missile launches!”
An icy fist punched Gregoire Koenig in the center of his chest. His eyes sped to the master plot and every drop of blood drained out of his face as dozens of missile icons blazed suddenly upon it. The time-of-flight number flashed its crimson warning, and there was no time to even think about escaping them. Andromeda’s hyper generator was completely powered down, and at those missiles’ acceleration they would reach his ship in barely ninety seconds.
“Launching counter-missiles!” Paulson said, and Andromeda quivered as her launchers spat a pitiful salvo of CMs at that torrent of destruction.
“Get them on the com!” Koenig said. “Tell them we surrender!”
“We’re trying to raise them, Sir!” his com officer said. “We haven’t gotten through yet!”
* * *
“Ma’am,” Mercedes Brigham said very quietly in Honor’s ear, “they can’t hurt us.”
Honor said nothing. She simply watched the missiles track across the plot, and Nimitz flattened his ears and bared his fangs from the back of her command chair.
* * *
“Strike the wedge!” Bethany Ning-ju barked from Andromeda’s flag bridge. “All units—strike your wedges now!”
* * *
Rafe Cardones drew a deep breath of relief as the Solly cruisers’ wedges disappeared in the universal FTL signal of surrender. His eyes darted back to his com.
And Honor Alexander-Harrington didn’t say a word.
* * *
“They’re still coming, Sir!” Lieutenant Commander Paulson said.
“I see it, Yvonne,” Commander Koenig replied, and a strange sense of something very like calm seemed to flow through him. Not relief, just…acceptance. The knowledge that every man and woman of his crew was about to die and there was absolutely nothing he could do about it.
They must be even more pissed off by Fabius than we’d thought, a corner of his mind reflected. But why? We only hit military targets. Sure, nobody on the ones we hit had time to evacuate, but it’s not like we violated the Eridani Edict the way they did in Mesa!
* * *
“Your Grace, they’ve surrendered,” Mercedes Brigham said, and Honor looked at her. Her expression never changed, but there was something almost like…puzzlement in those flinty eyes, as if she wondered what that had to do with anything.
“Your Grace, they’ve struck their wedges!”
She said nothing, only looked at her chief of staff with those puzzled eyes, and Brigham reached out. She gripped her admiral’s shoulders, actually shook her in her command chair.”
“Ma’am—Honor—they’ve surrendered! ”
Their eyes locked, and then, suddenly, Honor shivered. She closed her eyes, her nostrils flared, and her hands tightened like talons on the armrests of her command chair.
“Yes, they have, damn them.” The knife-edged words were so soft only Brigham could possibly have heard them. Then her eyes opened again.
“Abort the engagement, Captain Cardones,” she said clearly, coldly, while Nimitz snarled protest behind her.
* * *
The time-to-attack range readout flashed downward and every eye on Andromeda’s bridge was glued to it. Forty seconds. Thirty-five. Thirty…
No one spoke. There was nothing to say, no further orders to give. The tide of destruction came in ludicrously slowly for a missile engagement, because the range was too short for it to reach anything like maximum velocity. Individual missiles—even Manticoran missiles—would be easy meat for the point defense clusters when they came into range. But there were over five hundred missiles and that salvo. If every single cluster CruRon 572 could bring to bear stopped two of them, four hundred would still get through. And without even sidewalls to protect them…
Twenty seconds. Fifteen. Ten.
Gregoire Koenig drew a deep breath—the last he would ever draw—and held it as his ship’s death roared down upon him.
And then, suddenly, every single one of those missiles swerved away from its target, arced wide of the squadron, and vanished in a holocaust of self-destruct commands.
Koenig wouldn’t have believed the silence on his bridge could grow even more intense.
He would have been wrong.
That silence lingered for ten crackling seconds. Then his com officer cleared his throat.
“Sir, we have an incoming transmission.”
“Put it up,” Koenig said.
“Yes, Sir.”
The commander leaned back in his chair, vaguely aware his hands were trembling, and a woman in the black-and-gold of the Royal Manticoran Navy appeared on the master com display.
“I am Admiral Harrington, Royal Manticoran Navy,” she said, and something deep inside Gregoire Koenig shrank from that soprano scalpel. “I accept your surrender in the name of the Grand Alliance. Be aware that any resistance to my boarding parties will be met with instant lethal force and that my acceptance of your surrender is contingent upon the surrender of your intact databases. If those databases are not intact, or if any resistance is offered to my boarding parties by any individual, I will regard all of your personnel as having violated the terms of your surrender and act accordingly.”
She smiled, and somehow it was the most frightening smile Koenig had ever seen.
“You won’t like it if that happens,” she said very, very softly, “but I will.”
Naval Station Ganymede
Sol System
Solarian League
“This is confirmed?” Admiral Maridors Haeckle asked.
“Yes, Sir.” Rear Admiral Léonard Pataloeshti, Haeckle’s chief of staff, shook his head, his expression pale. “Captain Tsukatani’s the duty officer. He says System Watch Command picked up the initial hyper footprints sixteen minutes ago. They were right on top—I mean, right on top—of Admiral Ning-ju’s squadron, and the sensor platforms detected a massive missile launch. We don’t see any of the cruisers’ impeller signatures anymore. They’re just…gone.”
“Shit,” Haeckle said flatly, then shook himself. “Well, I suppose that clears up any little ambiguity about whether or not they’re hostile.”
Pataloeshti only nodded, and Haeckle sighed.
“All right, Léonard, I guess we’d better get down to the command center. How many of them did you say we’re talking about?”
“Tsukatani makes it a minimum of three hundred and fifty superdreadnought-range signatures, Sir, but he’s pretty sure that’s low. Total count for all types is about six hundred, plus fifty-fiv
e of what have to be freighters or transports in a separate echelon. Tsukatani estimates the transport group’s escort at another sixteen battlecruisers and a pair of superdreadnoughts.” It was his turn to sigh. “I don’t think this is just a raid, Sir.”
“No,” Haeckle agreed softly. “No, I suppose not.”
HMS Imperator
Sol System
“Ghost Rider’s giving us good numbers, Your Grace.”
Andrea Jaruwalski crossed to stand beside Honor as she gazed into the master plot. A steady stream of additional icons appeared in it as she watched.
“CIC makes it a total of sixty-two superdreadnoughts and two hundred and six battlecruisers in Ganymede orbit,” the ops officer continued, consulting her memo board. “Sixty-one cruisers, one hundred and seventeen destroyers and other light craft, and at least fifty-two tankers, colliers, and major service craft—a million tons or more each—of one sort or another. Might be a couple more of those on the far side of Ganymede, and we don’t have a hard count on deployed missile pods yet. We won’t have one until the platforms get a lot closer, but we’ve already confirmed over four thousand.”
“I see.”
Honor heard the distant note in her own voice and tasted the burning concern in Jaruwalski’s mind-glow. She knew what caused it. She could taste the same worry in Mercedes Brigham, in George Reynolds, in Harper Brantley and Theophile Kgari. She didn’t have to taste Rafe Cardones’s mind-glow to know it would have been the same.
They were afraid of her, especially after the near destruction of Bethany Ning-ju’s squadron. They were frightened of what she’d become. Even worse, they were frightened for her, and that was the truly terrible thing. Because she wasn’t frightened of who and what she was…and a part of her knew she should be.
Too bad Scotty’s not here, a voice said in the back of her brain, remembering another day on a moon called Blackbird. But then she brushed that memory aside. This was a different time and a different place, and she wanted no reminder of that day staying her hand when the moment came.
She turned her head to look at her communications officer.
“How long till the Hermes buoy is in position, Harper?” that distant soprano asked.
“Another twenty-nine minutes, Your Grace,” Commander Brantley replied. He paused a moment, then added, “They’re trying to contact us by com laser, Ma’am.”
“Are they?” Honor smiled thinly. “I think we’ll just wait till we’ve delivered our other message and don’t have any irritating delays. Besides,” that smile turned even thinner and colder, “it won’t hurt a thing to let them sweat a little before we talk to them, now will it?”
“No, Your Grace. Not one bit,” Brantley said, and an edge of satisfaction glittered in his mind-glow, clear and sharp enough to cut even through his concern for her.
Central Command
NSG Able-One
Naval Station Ganymede
Sol System
Solarian League
“Still nothing, Ermolai?” Admiral Haeckle asked quietly, and Captain Volodimerov shook his head.
“No, Sir.” Volodimerov had been the Communications watch officer when the intruders translated into n-space. “Lieutenant Watson’s initial challenge went out five minutes after they completed their alpha translations. That’s—” he checked the time “—forty-one minutes. So they could have contacted us twenty-seven minutes ago, and by now they’ve known we’re trying to talk to them for at least twenty-two minutes. Either way, they’ve had time to reply to us if they wanted to.”
Haeckle nodded.
The strangers—they had to be Manties, although they had yet to activate any transponders or identify themselves—were almost exactly nineteen light-minutes from NSG. That was twice the Improved Cataphract’s maximum powered range, and he doubted that that spacing was a coincidence. The Manties must have acquired enough Cataphracts to have an excellent grasp of their maximum accelerations and burn times by now. For that matter, they had to be aware that Cataphract accuracy at that sort of distance ranged from “not-a-chance-in-hell” to simply “really-piss-poor,” which made it an ideal range from which to open some sort of conversation with no one getting shot on either side.
But if they’d wanted to talk to him, they could have been doing that for almost half an hour now. Of course, there’d be a nineteen-minute transmission delay built into any conversation, but sooner or later they had to say something.
He wished he was going to be happy when they did.
Once upon a time—and not so very long ago, actually—he would have been confident of Naval Station Ganymede’s ability to stand off any attack. Enough superdreadnoughts could undoubtedly have taken or destroyed the station and all its platforms even then, but no one—except the Solarian League Navy—had possessed that many superdreadnoughts. And so, in those innocent days of yore, he would have been much more confident of a happy outcome. Under current circumstances…
He glanced at the time display again. His initial report to Old Earth had gone out even before Volodimerov had challenged the Manties, and System Watch Command’s sensor reports and analyses were automatically relayed to both Naval Station Mars and Old Terra. But, Old Chicago was just over forty-six light-minutes distant at the moment, so Admiral Kingsford would only now be finding out the capital system had been invaded. It would be at least three quarters of an hour before any response from him could get back to Haeckle, and he wondered what that response would be.
Or if there’d be anyone here to receive it.
“What’s our readiness state now, Captain Tsukatani?” he asked.
“We’re closed up at battle stations, Sir,” Franklin Tsukatani, the Central Command duty officer, replied. “All mobile units report Readiness One on weapons and defenses, and most of the destroyers and cruisers have their impellers online and wedges and sidewalls engaged. The superdreadnoughts will be a while yet, on that. All platforms’ Missile Defense is also at Readiness One, and all missile pods have been prepped and brought online.” He shrugged ever so slightly. “We’re as ready as we’re going to be, Sir.”
And you’re no more confident we’re “ready” enough than I am, Haeckle thought. Not that either of them could say any such thing.
“Someone get me a cup of coffee, please,” he said instead, and forced a smile that looked almost—almost—natural. “Looks like we may be waiting for a while.”
HMS Imperator
Sol System
“The Hermes buoy’s in position, Your Grace,” Andrea Jaruwalski said, and Honor glanced at the operations officer.
She’d often wondered what Hamish—a stab of exquisite pain went through her with that name—had felt during his attack on DuQuesne Base in Operation Buttercup. This wasn’t the same, of course, and in more than one way. She doubted he’d ever truly hated even the Peeps—or any other enemy of the Star Kingdom, for that matter. Not with a deep, visceral, ravening need to wreak death and destruction that burned like liquid oxygen. Not him.
But she wasn’t him.
“Launch,” she said softly, and turned back to the plot.
Central Command
NSG Able-One
Naval Station Ganymede
Sol System
Solarian League
“Missile launch! Multiple missile launches!” Lieutenant Enwright McGill announced sharply.
Commodore Benjamin Schalken turned quickly toward the announcement. He and his System Watch Command personnel had been watching the Manties for over an hour now. The tension of that long wait had been more excruciating than anything he’d ever endured. The passing seconds had become a long, drawn out water torture that he’d known had to be the worst thing that could ever happen to him.
Now, as he crossed to McGill’s shoulder, looked down at the lieutenant’s display, he discovered he’d been wrong.
“Two thousand-plus incoming!” McGill announced. “Initial velocity twelve hundred KPS, accelerating at four-five-one KPS squared!”
>
Schalken put a hand on his shoulder and watched the vectors reach out across the display for Ganymede.
* * *
“Return fire, Sir?” Captain Tsukatani asked, and Haeckle nodded.
“You may engage, Captain,” he said formally. “Fire Plan Agincourt.”
Tsukatani looked at him for a moment. Then his mouth tightened and he nodded.
“Yes, Sir. Fire Plan Agincourt.”
He turned away, giving orders, and fifteen seconds later 120,000 Improved Cataphract pods belched 720,000 missiles at the Manties.
Haeckle watched their icons streak across the plot and looked at Pataloeshti.
The chief of staff looked back, then gave him a small shrug.
Most of their fire plans had envisioned using their pods in much smaller numbers, in carefully planned and metered salvos. Agincourt did not. Agincourt was an all-or-nothing throw of the dice designed to put the maximum possible weight of fire—all the Cataphracts Ganymede possessed—into space in a single enormous wave. They couldn’t possibly manage all the birds of an Agincourt launch, even with all of NSG’s enormous telemetry capability, and he wasn’t surprised Tsukatani wasn’t happy to burn them all in a single spasm. But the Cataphracts were all they had, and they had to get them off before the incoming fire ripped them to pieces still in their pods.
Seven hundred and twenty thousand missiles—the next best thing to three-quarters of a million of them, over seven thousand per target—represented a terrifying weight of metal. Yet the truth was that neither he nor Pataloeshti truly expected them to accomplish much. Targeting would have been…questionable at nineteen light-minutes under any circumstances, the range was far too great for any control link, and given the reported efficacy of Manty EW and missile-defense systems, “questionable” was probably about to become “futile.” Which didn’t even consider the fact that the Manties were outside even Jupiter’s hyper-limit.
But it wasn’t like he had a choice. Their own launch had made that much abundantly clear. And so did the com link’s total, icy silence.