"Calm down, Jenny," Manfred O'Neill, her longtime recording tech, said pacifically. "It's hardly the end of the world. After all, this is the story at the moment."
"Oh, yeah?" Rivera glared at him. "Look, you may think they sent us out here to do us some kind of favor, but I know better! We could've been covering Green :Pines instead, damn it!"
"Never said anyone did it to do us a favor," O'Neill replied cheerfully. "I only said it's going to turn out to be the hot corner, and it is. Hotter'n Green Pines, for that matter, especially if there's anything to these new rumors from Spindle. Everybody's already pretty much mined Green Pines out, and it's not like the system authorities're handing out any fresh info, abyway. But there's going to be lots of stuff coming through here if things really are going to hell for the Manties in Talbott, and when it does, I don't think anyone back home is going to be worrying a lot about reminding us to watch our P's and Q's when we report it."
Rivera looked at him for a moment, then felt at least a little of her resentment easing away. Manny had a way of cutting to the heart of things, and maybe he had a point. Not that it changed the fact that—
The Mesan graser which incinerated Passenger Concourse Green-317 terminated Jennifer Rivera's reflections upon her career prospects along with her, Manfred O'Neill, and four hundred and nineteen other arriving passengers from the Hauptman Lines starship Starlight .
Approximately three-hundredths of a second later, Starlight, her crew of twenty-eight, and the two hundred through-passengers to Sphinx who hadn't disembarked, followed them into destruction.
* * *
"Is Aikawa back aboard yet, Ben?" Ansten FitzGerald asked as his steward poured him a second cup of coffee.
"No, sir," Steward 1/c Benjamin Frankel replied with a smile. "He's not due back until this afternoon, I believe."
"Um." FitzGerald frowned thoughtfully. Hexapuma would be in the yard dogs' hands for at least another three or four weeks, but she'd just been assigned a trio of bright, shiny new midshipmen. Frightening as the concept seemed in some ways, he'd decided to ask Aikawa Kagiyama to take them under his wing. He was confident Aikawa would rise to his responsibilities and set them a good example.
Of course he was.
He snorted in amusement at his own thoughts, but he couldn't really deny that a part of him was actually a little relieved at having at least another few hours before he found out whether or not his "confidence" was justified.
"Well, in that case—"
HMS Hexapuma blew up with all hands as the Mesan graser ripped across her fusion plant.
* * *
The destruction of HMSS Hephaestus was for all intents and purposes total in the first three seconds of the Mesan attack.
Some of the surviving fragments of the station were large enough and sufficiently intact to hold pressure, and a handful of the ships which had been docked survived more or less in one piece. Three of them—the destroyer Horatius , the Grayson freighter Foxglove , and the tug Bollard— actually came through the holocaust virtually undamaged.Horatius ' paint wasn't even scratched.
But they were the exception to the rule, tiny pockets of survival in a hurricane of devastation . . . and the attack on HMSS Vulcan was equally successful.
The MAN's Sierra Attack wasn't quite perfectly synchronized with the Mike Attack's assault onHephaestus , but the delay was less than four seconds. By the time visual evidence of what had happened to Hephaestus could have reached Vulcan moving at the limited velocity of light, Sphinx's space station had been just as completely demolished.
Between the two space stations, alone, the first ten seconds of Oyster Bay had already cost the Old Star Kingdom over four million dead.
* * *
Allen Higgins' face was parchment-pale as he stared at the FTL platform-driven flag bridge master plot. It was only chance he'd been on flag bridge at all, but that coincidence wasn't much help as CIC's computers emotionlessly updated the plot. Home Fleet was much too far away from either space station to have offered any sort of protection even if it had realized the attack was coming . . . or been able to see it when it did. Because it was, it was also too far away to be attacked , and in some ways, that made it far worse. The people who were supposed to protect the Star Empire—who were supposed to die to prevent something like this from ever happening —were perfectly placed to see exactly how totally they'd failed in that purpose, and the fact that it wasn't even remotely their fault meant nothing at all beside that terrible sense of failure.
And for Allen Higgins, their CO, it was even worse than it was for the rest of them.
For a moment, he was paralyzed, his mind replaying the memories of Grendelsbane with merciless clarity. Yet that lasted only for a moment. Only until he realized how infinitely much worse this disaster was.
And then the conventional Mesan missiles began their attack runs.
* * *
Daniel Detweiler's researchers hadn't yet figured out how to fit multiple full-size, sustainable drives into a single missile of manageable dimensions. They had, however, realized what the RMN must have done, and they were working industriously to duplicate the Manticoran advantage. In the meantime, they'd come up with Cataphract, a variant of their own based on taking the standard missile bodies for the SLN's new-generation anti-ship missiles and adding what amounted to a separate final stage carrying a standard laser head and a counter-missile 's drive system. For Oyster Bay, they'd brought out the longest-ranged, heaviest version of their new weapon, fitted the birds into out-sized pods, then launched them behind other, specialized pods which carried nothing but low-powered particle screens and the power supplies to maintain them for the ballistic run in-system to their targets. The missile-laden pods had followed in the zone swept by the shield-equipped platforms; now they completed their own system checks and began to launch.
A version of the new weapon had been used with lethal effectiveness against Luis Rozsak's ships at the Second Battle of Congo. Unfortunately, the full report on that wasn't available to the RMN. They knew something had improved the range of the missiles which had been provided to the "People's Navy in Exile," and they'd managed to deduce approximately how it had been done, but that was about it. And even if they'd had access to Rozsak's report, it wouldn't have fully prepared them for this. Rozsak had faced the Cataphract-A, based on the SLN's new cruiser/destroyer Spatha shipkiller; the pod-launched missiles of Oyster Bay were Cataphract-Cs , based on the capital-ship Trebucht, with much heavier and more powerful laserheads. The combined package had a powered range from rest of over sixteen million kilometers and a terminal velocity of better than .49 c . That attack envelope would have made it formidable enough by itself, but installing the high-speed drive as the last stage also gave it far more agility when it came to penetrating the target's defenses during its terminal maneuvers.
That agility, however, was scarcely required today. There were no active defenses, just as their targets made no attempt at evasive maneuvers, because no one knew they were coming in time to react.