of the screen as a new warning appeared in yellow listing automated beacons found and recognized. The sensor operator transmitted before Claire could make sense of the gibberish from the located beacons.
“Captain, this is drone one.” The operator reported. “Blackbird orbital yards beacons have sustained major damage. Most navigational beacons not transmitting. Those still functional are reporting out of position errors. Some of them are way out of position with course momentums that make no sense. The not transmitting ones—I'm not sure there was even anything there.”
“Drone two, forty-eight minutes to sensor range.” The second operator tagged onto the end of the first spacer's initial report.
A slight pause, and then Commander Greentree answered, “Very well. Continue reporting.”
Too much darkness filled drone one's screen as the operator spent the three quarters of an hour detailing missing and misplaced pieces of the yard shown as streaking specks on his display with most of the detail coming from the automated collection.
The second drone, when it arrived, turned those pristine specks into horror. What should have been a precision clockwork of interweaving yard stations lapping the moon Blackbird roiled in a cloud of twisted alloy and fog-atomized debris tumbling in dirty orbits. Scans showed pieces escaping off towards Uriel or just away. Most was decaying, with moon impacts visible even to untrained eyes more used to repairing their own than assessing enemy combat damage.
Silence reigned for one long second. Then the operator for drone two began reporting in a flat, numb voice.
Claire let his damage descriptions flow through her right earbud and on her left flipped through the other channels. It couldn't have been an accident. The extreme destruction showed targeting of not just the shipyard facilities and military industry, but also habitat modules, navigation beacons, and the transit shuttles which might have collected survivors.
The external frequencies held a jumbled panic of emergency transponders and frantic transmissions between the civilian ships huddling around Grayson.
Manasseh's command net transformed into a mad hive of activity while Claire and her techs listened to the gory details spilling out of the speakers. This was a sneak attack with no hostiles left in the system. The yard's remains smeared the skies of Blackbird and Uriel.
With the attack more than six hours old and over before Manasseh had translated into the system, the ship had nothing to attack. If this were a battle, her engineering rating chief would send out repair teams with Claire leading the most critical ones. Manasseh didn't need that, but Blackbird Yard did.
Claire keyed in a message to Lieutenant Loyd tagged low priority. “Sir, Recommend manning shuttle one. My techs can do search and rescue.”
Her text reappeared on screen as highest priority with the lieutenant's response. “Concur. Make it happen. Take the medic.”
“Prepare the boat bay for launch.” The XO's voice hummed over the command net echoing slightly from the many speakers selected to the same channel. “Standby for immediate launch of shuttle one. Medic report to the boat bay for search and rescue.”
Claire hopped out of her chair, tearing off the earbuds. “That's us! I'm taking repair team one. Double check your oxygen, we'll be doing a lot of space walks. Bring lights and heavy-duty cutters. Chief, we need every emergency life support pack you can find. Let's go.”
* * *
Away from the Manasseh, the chaos of the disaster showed just bones of the many station segments jutting out of the misted life support gases and refrozen flowers of blasted alloys. Destruction like this would be unsurvivable on a ship. A station was no different.
The pilot shied away from screen and turned to Claire.
“There.” She jabbed a finger at the closet large piece of wreckage with an emergency beacon. “”Match rotations with that if you can. We'll use tethers from the shuttle, and see if we can find anyone. It looks big enough to have survivors.”
Her techs cycled out the airlock with life support packs flapping optimistically from their belts and clipped lines to the exterior of the shuttle. The piece of station proved to be completely depressurized. Claire directed them to cut through a wall she recognized from a station mural on the side of a popular restaurant. The diners and staff were slumped together penned by tables or against the wall that had become the floor with the acceleration the last of the nearby strikes had given this section.
The crumpled opposite side, which had once held a wide, welcoming entrance, pinched around the headwaiter's podium where the emergency transponder nestled discretely out the