Which was basically all the warning they'd gotten before their life pods blasted out of the station and headed for Gryphon . . . whose authorities had had no more notion they might be coming than they'd had that they might be going . The planetary authorities' disaster and evacuation planning for Weyland had come up a little short, as well, with the station's personnel jammed into whatever improvised holding stations they could come up with while they tried to figure out what to do with them. Since they were supposed to already have detailed plans for doing just that, the current panetary FUBAR probably wasn't going to make Vice Admiral Faraday very popular with them when their efficiency reports—or their civilian equivalents—got written.
"All in all, a good day's work," Faraday concluded. "I figure we should be able to start re-docking the fabrication section's pods in a couple of days. I want to start there, at any rate."
"May I ask why, Sir?" Howell asked with a slight sense of trepidation.
"Indeed you may," Faraday replied with a sharklike smile. "While we're re-docking Fabrication's pods and recertifying Research's pods, you and I, and Admiral Yeager, and a security team from ONI which just happens to've been in-system when I called this little exercise, are going to do a walk-through. We'll be sending an updated backup down to Gryphon for storage just in case. And we're also going to see just how many of Yeager's worker bees remembered to secure their classified data properly before heading for their pods."
"Ouch!" Howell's wince wasn't entirely feigned, and Faraday chuckled nastily.
"I'm already unpopular with them, Marcus. I might as well go whole hog and kill as many birds as possible while I'm chucking stones. And I already warned Yaeger this was coming. I won't say she's looking forward to it, but she understands why I'm doing it and that I'm not going to deliberately collect any more heads than I have to.
"Which, unfortunately, doesn't mean some aren't going to roll anyway, of course."
Howell nodded again. Some people never seemed to understand that military efficiency demanded a certain degree of ruthlessness. Military commanders weren't—or shouldn't be, at any rate—in the business of winning popularity contests. They should be in the business of promoting the efficiency, which definitely included the survivability, of the units under their command. Not only was it a CO's duty to prune away deadwood, but it was also his responsibility to make all the personnel under his command aware of the fact that he'd do that pruning, with ruthless dispatch, whenever it was required. Punishing those who screwed up in order "to encourage the others" had been an axiom of military discipline for so many centuries because, whether it was nice or not, it worked.
Punishment may not be the best possible motivator, but it's one that works , Howell thought. And it's one any effective officer has to have in his toolbox for the times when it's the only one that will. And at least Claudio understands the nuts and bolts of positive motivation, as well. Now that he's got their attention, at least .
The chief of staff's lips twitched on the brink of a smile, but he suppressed it and paged to the next item on his electronic notepad.
"All right, Sir. I'm going to assume from what you've just said that you want us to give the immediate priority to getting the fabrication section's life pods back aboard. Having said that, though, there's the question of Engineering. In particular—"
* * *
Millions upon millions of kilometers from Vice Admiral Claudio's day cabin, shoals of missile pods continued to bore through space at twenty percent of the speed of light, and the visible disks of the star called Manticore-A and Manticore-B grew steadily larger before them.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
What happened wasn't anyone's fault.
Unlike the High Ridge Government's abysmal intelligence failure (in more than one sense of the word) during the run-up to Operation Thunderbolt, no one had ignored any warning signs. Perimeter Security and Home Fleet had maintained their unceasing watch for any threat, despite the negotiations with Haven. Neither Admiral Givens' ONI nor any other of the Star Empire's intelligence services had misinterpreted, disregarded, or even overlooked a single scrap of relevant evidence that was hidden in their files. True, none of the analysts involved had been looking in the right direction, but they were scarcely alone in that, since no one outside the innermost core of the Mesan Alignment even knew the Mesan Alignment Navy existed. So it wasn't surprising Manticoran intelligence's attention had been focused elsewhere, given all the other 'distractions' the Alignment had arranged to keep the Star Empire occupied.
But because no one had been aware of the Alignment's existence, or had even a clue as to its ultimate objectives, no one had ever heard of something called the spider drive, either. Or suspected for a single moment that it might actually be not only possible but practical to launch something like Oyster Bay without its intended victims' elaborate, exquisitely sensitive, carefully maintained early warning systems detecting the attack with plenty of time to prepare for it.
Indeed, it might have been argued, although with debatable justice, that if there was a failure on the Manticorans' part, it was one of hubris. After all, the Royal Manticoran Navy had just been given overwhelming proof of its technological superiority to the vaunted SLN. Coupled with Manticore's persistent ability to stay ahead of Havenite R&D efforts, there was a certain confidence in the prowess of the RMN's hardware. To their credit, the Admiralty's strategists had conscientiously maintained their awareness that—as Thomas Theisman had demonstrated in Operation Thunderbolt—any technological advantage was transitory. Despite that, however, they were convinced that right now, at this particular moment, their overall advantage was overwhelming. And so, in most respects, it was.
The ships which had mounted Oyster Bay, however, represented a radical departure from anything the galaxy had previously seen which was just as impressive, in its own way, as anything Manticore had accomplished. They weren't a particularly graceful departure, of course. In fact, compared to any impeller-drive ship, they were squat, stumpy, and downright peculiar looking because, unlike the gravitic drives everyone else used, the spider generated no impeller wedge. Instead of using two inclined planes of focused gravity to create bands of stressed space around the pocket of normal-space which surrounded a ship, the spider used literally dozens of nodes to project spurs or spikes of intensely focused gravity. For all intents and purposes, each of those spurs was almost like generating a tractor or a presser beam, except that no one in his right mind had ever imagined tractors or pressers that powerful. In fact, at a sufficiently short range, they would have made quite serviceable energy weapons, because these focused, directional beams were powerful enough to create their own tiny foci—effectively, holes in the "real" universe—in which space itself was so highly stressed that the beams punched clear through to the alpha wall, the interface between normal-space and hyper-space.
No single beam would have been of any particular use. Powerful as it might be, it was less than a shadow compared to the output of even a single one of any starship's beta nodes, far less an alpha node. It wasn't even enough to produce the "ripple" along the hyper-space wall which Manticore used for its FTL communications technology. But it did lock onto the wall, and that provided the ship which mounted it a purchase point in deep space—one which was always available, anywhere, in any direction. And when dozens of those beams were combined, reaching out, locking onto the alpha wall and pulling in micro-spaced bursts, they produced something that was very useful, indeed.