"Yes, Sir."
"In the meantime," Tanner continued, turning his attention to Marcos and McMahon, "I think we shou—"
"Excuse me, Sir!"
Tanner's eyes darted to Neukirch's image as the tactical officer's suddenly hoarse voice cut him off in mid-syllable. Neukirch looked as if he'd just been punched in the belly. The lieutenant commander was staring at something outside his com pickup's field of view, and Tanner could actually see the color draining out of the younger man's face. Then Neukirch inhaled deeply and looked back at the commodore.
"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, personnel sections, heavy fabrication modules, shipyards—as they were required. Taking advantage of the flexibility microgravity made possible. Expanding into a huge, lumpy agglomeration of raw industrial power which had its own peculiar beauty as it floated in orbit, by far the brightest single object in the planet Manticore's night skies. It stretched over a hundred and ten kilometers along its central spine, and tentacles reached out in every direction, some of them the better part of forty or even fifty kilometers long in their own right. It boasted a permanent population of over nine hundred and fifty thousand. By the time transients, ship crews, field trips by visiting school children, and other visitors were added, the station's total population on any given day was certainly upward of a million, and probably close to twice that on most days.
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 inner system, no one was looking in the right direction when it all began.
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.
The thirty-two technicians manning HF/1-17-1336-T-1219 never even realized the station was under attack. Working in a shirtsleeve environment, concentrating on routine tasks and the hectic pace at which Hephaestus always operated, they were totally unprepared for the ravening blast of focused gamma radiation which killed them instantly, splintered the compartment around them, and ripped open one entire flank of GM-HF/1-17-13.
At the instant it fired, the torpedo which struck the control section was moving at the next best thing to 70,000 KPS and deliberately yawing on its axis, sweeping its graser in a spiraling cone to traverse the entire volume of the station. The beam itself moved away from GM-HF/1-17-13, but the lethal overpressure of the explosion's shock front—followed by equally explosive decompression—killed the sixteen techs working directly in the twenty thousand-ton fabrication module almost as quickly as the control room techs had died. Splinters of HF/1-17-1336-T-1219 blew into and through GM-HF/1-17-13, carried all the way across the module compartment, and opened the far bulkhead into the vacuum of HF/1-17.
The second breach of the fabrication module could scarcely have mattered less to the people who'd been working inside it, since they were all already dead or dying by the time it occurred. It mattered a great deal, however, to the forty-eight space station personnel moving through the outsized boarding tubes connecting the three destroyers' main airlocks to the space dock gallery and the station proper. None of them were in skinsuits when the flying battle axes which had once been part of GM-HF/1-17-13 shredded the tubes and spilled them into the enormous docking bay's merciless vacuum.
As the boarding tubes were torn apart, atmosphere vented from them in a hurricane. GM-HF/1-17-13 had already decompressed almost entirely, but the vacuum around the station sucked greedily at the wounds, and at least a quarter of the equally unprepared crewmen aboard the three destroyers found themselves in death pressure before emergency blast doors slammed shut under computer control.
As it happened, the blast doors made no difference at all, however. Even as the graser which had ripped HF/1-17-1336-T-1219 moved away, cutting deeper towards the station's central spine, another graser moved towards HF/1-17 and HF/1-16. It sliced across both shipyards in a searing eyeblink, and if it was less powerful than a Shrike 's weapon, its power was more than ample for the minor task of cutting an unarmored destroyer, unprotected by impeller wedge or sidewalls, cleanly in half.
It did precisely that to HMS Saladin . . . whose fusion plant abruptly lost containment with absolutely no warning to the engineering safety systems. Not even cybernetic reflexes were equal to that sort of cataclysmic failure, and the resulting fireball made whatever other damage the torpedoes might have done to that section of HMSS Hephaestus totally superfluous.