Sugimatsu started to reply, then paused. He knew what Wingate was asking. The tug's tractors were powerful enough that they had to be handled with great care under normal circumstances. Too much power, too much torque, and they could rip chunks right out of the ship they were supposed to be towing. In fact, under the wrong circumstances, they could destroy a ship outright. So what Wingate was really asking was whether or not he should deliberately red-line the tractors and try to shred the wreckage into pieces too small to survive atmospheric entry. He might or might not succeed in any given case—a lot depended on the exact composition and structural strength of any piece of debris. But if he did succeed, that would be one more piece of wreckage, one more kinetic projectile, Quay could try to stop.
And if he pushes the tractors that hard, there's a damn good chance he'll burn them out and we'll lose something we might have stopped.
Andrew Sugimatsu's jaw muscles clenched. He'd seen combat. He'd expected to see it again. But he'd never expected to find himself having to make this kind of call in the very skies of one of his star nation's inhabited planets.
He thought for an eternity all of three or four seconds long. Then—
"Crank the bastards to max," he said harshly.
* * *
The people who'd planned Oyster Bay had carefully arranged their attack to avoid anything that could be construed as a direct attack on the planetary populations of Manticore or Sphinx. Given the nature of the war they were planning to fight, it wasn't because the MAN had any particular objection to killing as many Manticorans as possible. But there was that bothersome little matter of the Eridani Edict, and while it was probably going to take a while for anyone to figure out who'd carried out the attack, and how, that anonymity wasn't going to last forever. Eventually, the fact that the MAN and its allies were the only people who'd had the technical capability to do it was going to become obvious. There were plans in place to prevent the Manticorans from returning the compliment once they figured out who was to blame, but the Mesan Alignment's diplomatic strategies could be very seriously damaged if anyone figured out too soon how little the Eridani Edict truly meant to it.
That was the real reason the primary destruction of the space stations had been left to the torpedoes, which had overflown the planets, well clear of them. The follow up laser heads had come in on a similar trajectory, but some of the planners had argued against using any of them. Despite all the safeguards built into their guidance systems, there was always the chance, however remote, that one of them was going to ram into the planet at relativistic speeds. And, the critics had pointed out, if that happened, the Alignment's opponents would inevitably claim it had been deliberate.
The final distribution of fire had been a compromise between those who distrusted the torpedoes' ability to do the job and those who wanted no missiles anywhere near either of the inhabited planets. And as was the definition of any compromise, neither side had been completely satisfied.
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.