There was time for their targets—or some of them, at least—to realize they were under attack. To see the impossible impeller signatures of missile drives swarming away from the pods' ballistic tracks. Some of those missiles were effectively wasted because of targeting decisions made by officers who hadn't felt justified in relying solely upon the efficacy of the as yet untested torpedoes. Those laser heads either never fired at all or else used themselves up picking off chunks of wreckage large enough to satisfy their targeting criteria.
But the vast majority of them had other concerns. There really weren't many of them, given the number of targets they had to cover, but it didn't take very many to kill targets as naked as these. They roared in on the carefully plotted positions of the totally unprotected orbital shipyards floating around Manticore and Sphinx with devastating effectiveness.
Bomb-pumped lasers ripped deep, mangling and shattering, spewing bits and pieces of the Star Empire of Manticore's industrial might across the heavens. And behind them came the old-fashioned nuclear warheads—warheads which detonated only if they were unable to obtain a hard kinetic kill. Fireballs glared like brief-lived, intolerably bright stars, flashing in stroboscopic spikes of devastation, and more thousands of highly skilled workers and highly trained naval personal died in those cataclysmic bubbles of plasma and radiation.
Within a total space of barely eleven minutes, both of the Star Empire's major orbital industrial nodes and well over ninety percent of its dispersed shipyards, along with the better part of five and a half million trained technicians and naval personnel—and, all too often, their families—had been wiped out of existence.
By any yardstick anyone cared to use, it was the most devastating surprise attack in the history of the human race, and it wasn't over yet.
* * *
"Bring her hard to port, Chief! Fifty degrees now! "
"Fifty degrees, aye, Sir!" Chief Petty Officer Manitoba Jackson acknowledged, and HMS Quay turned sharply.
"Bring her to"—Lieutenant Commander Andrew Sugimatsu,Quay 's CO, stabbed a look at his maneuvering plot—"five hundred and ten gravities and lay her on her side. Put our belly towards any wreckage with our name on it!"
"Rolling ship and coming to five-one-zero gravities, aye, Sir." Jackson's voice wasn't so much calmer than it had been as it was flattened and stunned, as if actual awareness was seeping past the sheer shock effect of such unmitigated disaster.
Sugimatsu gave him a sharp look. The CPO had been in the Navy almost as long as Sugimatsu had been alive, but he'd spent his entire service as one of the highly skilled specialists assigned to the management of the home system's tugs. He'd never actually seen combat, unlike Sugimatsu, and what he was seeing at this moment was the massacre of people he'd known and worked with for decades. The lieutenant commander would have trusted Jackson's nerve and composure in the face of any conceivable natural disaster, but there was nothing "natural" about this , and Sugimatsu spent a brief moment being grateful that CPO Leslie Myerson, Quay 's second helmswoman, was a combat vet.
"Sir," another voice said from the other side of Quay 's small bridge, "there's going to be a lot of wreckage coming this way pretty darn soon."
"I'm well aware of that, Truida," Sugimatsu said. He looked across at Lieutenant Truida Verstappen, his executive officer. Her comment had come out incredibly calmly under the circumstances, he thought, and it wasn't so much an objection as an observation.
"The problem," he continued, "is that anything coming our way is also coming the planet's way. And unless I'm really badly mistaken, we're all that's in a position to intercept it."
Verstappen looked at him for a moment, then nodded as he confirmed what she'd already realized must be his intentions.
"Get ready with the tractors," Sugimatsu told her. "No way can we catch all this crap with the wedge, so we're going to have to roll back down and grab the bigger pieces that get past us before they hit atmosphere."
"We've only got six tractors," Verstappen pointed out quietly.
"Then we're just going to have to hope there are only six pieces big enough to survive reentry," Sugimatsu said grimly.
Even as he said it, he knew they would never be that lucky. Not after something like this.
Quay drove sideways, accelerating hard to put herself directly between the wreckage of HMSS Vulcan and the planet Sphinx. As Sugimatsu had observed, she was the only ship in a position to intercept the avalanche about to come crashing down on the planet. Most of the station's wreckage might be small enough to be completely destroyed when it hit atmosphere, but some of it definitely wasn't going to be. In fact, some of it was going to be solid hunks of battle steel armor, specifically designed and manufactured to resist direct hits by capital ship-range energy weapons.
The good news—such as it was, and what there was of it—was that at least half the wreckage which had been blasted out ofVulcan' s orbit had been blown outward , not inward. There'd be plenty of time for someone to deal with it before it became a threat to anyone. And most of the planet-bound wreckage was clustered in a fairly tight pattern, which gave Sugimatsu the chance to put Quay directly in the center of the debris' track, using the tug's impeller wedge as a huge broom, or shield. Anything that hit the wedge would no longer be a problem. That, in fact, had been one of the unspoken reasons there were always ready-duty tugs on call at each of the space stations. If necessary, they were supposed to interpose their wedges to protect the stations against collision or attack.
Well, that part of the plan didn't work out so well, did it? Sugimatsu thought grimly. But maybe we can still do a little something for the planet.
The problem was that the wedge wasn't big enough. "Fairly tight pattern" was a purely relative term, unfortunately, especially when one used it in relation to something the size of HMSS Vulcan and a planet, and while his present course would take Quay directly through the central, densest portion of the wreckage stream, he couldn't possibly intercept all of it. Nor could he come around in time for a second pass, even with the tug's enormous acceleration rate. He simply couldn't kill speed fast enough. So one pass was all he got—that and his ship's half-dozen powerful tractors—and a lot of those chunks of debris were bigger—much bigger, in some cases—than Quay herself.
He punched a button on his command chair's arm.
"Engineering," a voice rasped in his earbug.
"It's going to be ugly, Harland," he told his engineer quietly. "No way in hell are we going to be able to catch all of it on the wedge. So make damned sure the tractors are up and ready."
"Understood," Lieutenant Harland Wingate acknowledged. As Quay 's engineer, he was also the tug's tow master. "You do realize, though," he continued, "that my instrumentation down here isn't designed to grab ships that aren't trying to help me grab them."
"I understand," Sugimatsu told him. "We're just going to have to do our best. I'm putting Truida in charge of tracking and evaluation. She'll tell you which ones to grab and where they are."
"I can use all the help I can get,," Wingate said grimly. Then he paused for a moment. "Should I try emergency overpower?" he asked.