She started to turn her head, but LaFollet hadn't even paused. Raoul began a howl of protest, but it was cut off abruptly as LaFollet shoved the baby into the special carrier affixed to the mounting pedestal of Allison's chair—the one which would normally have been Honor's, if Honor had been present. The internal tractor net locked down around the infant instantly, gentle and yet implacably powerful, and LaFollet slammed the lid.
That carrier had been designed and built by the same firm that built and designed life support modules for treecats, and every safety feature human ingenuity could come up with had been designed into it. Allison was just starting to come upright in her own chair, her eyes wide, when LaFollet stepped back and hit a button.
Allison's shoulder harness yanked tight with brutal, bruising force, and battle steel panels snapped out of the limo's bulkheads and overhead, sealing her and the baby in a heavily armored shell. A fraction of a second later, the blast panel blew out, and the shell went spinning away from the limo under its built-in emergency counter-grav.
LaFollet hit a second button, and Lindsey Phillips' chair followed Allison's. Then he jumped for his own chair and reached for the third emergency ejection button.
* * *
Black Rock Clan was one of the older treecat clans. Not so old as Bright Water Clan from whence it had originally sprung, perhaps, but certainly of respectable antiquity. It was a large clan, too—one which had been growing steadily over the last double-hand of turnings. The hunting was good, here in the western picket-wood of the mountains the two-legs called the Copper Walls. The "gardening" tricks the two-legs had taught the People helped, as well, and Black Rock had learned to look forward to the regular visits of the Forestry Service's doctors, which had kept so many of their young from dying in kittenhood.
But for all that, Black Rock Clan, like most treecat clans, kept largely to itself. There were no two-legs living in Black Rock's immediate vicinity, and so there was no one to tell the People what had happened in the black emptiness so far beyond their sky.
And perhaps that was just as well. At least none of the People realized what was about to happen.
Chapter Thirty
The men and women in the conference room rose in a spontaneous gesture of respect as Queen Elizabeth III came through the door.
The queen normally had little use for such formalities. In fact, they usually irritated her, since it was her opinion that all of them—including her—had better things to be doing with their time. But today she simply nodded back to them and crossed without speaking to her own chair. She carried Ariel in her arms, and Prince Consort Justin walked at her side. Justin's own treecat, Monroe, rode on his shoulder, and the 'cats' flattened ears, the way Monroe's tail wrapped around his person's throat, reflected the dark emotional aura of the room entirely too well.
Justin pulled back the queen's chair and seated her before he sat at his own place. Their treecats arranged themselves along the backs of their chairs, settling with tightly-coiled tension, and then the standing officers and civilians followed the prince consort's example.
For a small eternity the silence was total, and Elizabeth surveyed the faces of her most senior advisers and ministers. She didn't need Honor's empathic sense to know what all those people were feeling. None were the sort to panic, yet in many ways, the horrifying impact of what happened had hit them even harder than the general public. For the public as a whole, the shocked disbelief, the stunned incomprehension, was its own anesthesia . . . for now, at least. That was going to change, and, given human nature, all too many of the Old Star Kingdom's subjects were going to blame her and, even more, the men and women sitting around this conference table with her. Rational or not, it was going to happen. Elizabeth knew that . . . just as she knew that entirely too many of those advisers and ministers already blamed themselves .
And just as she knew the shock of the totally unanticipated cataclysm which had descended upon them had been made incomparably worse by coming so closely on the heels of the news from Spindle. In her worst nightmares, she would never have believed Manticore's prospects could be so catastrophically shifted in barely three T-days. She knew how mentally and emotionally paralyzing that body blow had been for her; she suspected that even she couldn't imagine how stunning and traumatizing it had been for the men and women directly responsible for the Star Empire's defense.
"All right," she said finally, her voice level. "I already know it's bad. Tell me how bad." She looked around the circle of faces, and her brown eyes settled inevitably upon one of them. "Hamish," she said quietly.
"Your Majesty," Hamish Alexander-Harrington said in a flat, unflinching, yet curiously deadened voice, "I think the short answer is very bad. I'm not qualified to speak to the civilian aspects. I'm sure Tyler"—he nodded across the table to Sir Tyler Abercrombie, the Home Secretary "—has better information on the civilian casualty toll than I do. But from the purely military perspective, it would be extraordinarily difficult, if not outright impossible, to exaggerate the damage this has done to us."
The Earl of White Haven looked away from Abercrombie, sitting very upright in his chair and turning it slightly to face the queen directly.
"Hephaestus, Vulcan , and Weyland are gone, Your Majesty. There's been some talk about recovering some of the modules and repairing them, but my staff's current estimate, based on input from both BuShips and BuWeaps, as well as from Construction and Repair, is that it would be faster and more efficient to start over from scratch.
"That means we've just lost every 'hard yard' we had. I don't as yet have a complete count of the numbers and classes of ships lost with them, but I already know it represents a significant loss of combat power. In addition, we've lost better than ninety-nine percent of the labor force of all three stations. For all intents and purposes, the only real survivors we have are people who, for one reason or another, were off-station when the attack hit. Most of them ," he added heavily, "also lived aboard the stations, which means virtually all of them have lost their entire immediate families. That means it's going to be quite some time—and rightly so—before their morale recovers to a point at which they can really be considered part of the labor force again."
His face showed his distaste at having to make that observation. Grief and bereavement, especially on such a horrific scale, weren't supposed to be reduced to mere production factors, but whether they were supposed to be or not, they were something which had to be taken into consideration this time, and he continued unflinchingly.
"The damage to the dispersed orbital yards is almost as bad. At this moment, my best figures are that fifteen of them—none of which had units under construction—are undamaged, and another eight are probably repairable, although the ships under construction have been so badly damaged we're probably going to have to break them up and start over rather than trying to repair and complete them.
"In effect, we've lost every ship under construction, the labor force which was building them, and the physical plant in which they were being built—and which was fabricating almost all the components the dispersed yards were assembling. That means that what we have in commission and working up at Trevor's Star now is all we're going to have for at least two T-years. For any capital ships, the delay will be more like four T-years. Minimum."
Despite all the disastrous reports the other people in that conference room had already received, people winced all around the table and one or two faces turned perceptibly paler at the First Space Lord's flat, unvarnished admission.