After supper at Fletcher’s table, Martinez felt heavy-lidded and drowsy in the warmth of his vac suit, and he adjusted the internal atmosphere to a more bracing temperature. The two signals lieutenants murmured in soft voices as the pinnaces, on their approach, began feedingIllustrious packets of intelligence from their communications lasers. Idly, Martinez moved the pinnaces’ feed onto his displays, and only then noticed the flashes in the corner of his tactical display.
“Missile flares!” Martinez said in perfect astonishment. “Missile flares from the station!”
His drowsiness was inundated by a wave of adrenaline that slammed into his bloodstream with the force of a tsunami engulfing a coral atoll. Martinez banished the pinnace feeds from his display and enlarged the tactical array. The accelerator ring had fired a pair of missiles, each clearly aimed at one of the approaching pinnaces.
“All ships!” Martinez said. “Defensive weaponry to target those missiles!”
It was an order he felt he could safely give without Michi’s approval. Michi herself was shouting to her signals officers.
“Message to Ring Command! You will disable those missilesimmediately …”
Too late, Martinez thought. The display showed an event that had happened twenty-three minutes ago. By the time Michi’s message flashed the twenty-three light-minutes back to the ring station, the missiles and the two defenseless boats would have had their rendezvous.
It was barely possible that the squadron’s defensive lasers might knock down one or another of the missiles, but guessing where a jinking missile would be in twenty-three minutes was a task better suited for a fortune-teller than a weapons officer…
The voices of the Terran pinnace pilots crackled into life in Martinez’s headset, announcing in voices of surprising tranquillity the appearance of the missiles. They would attempt evasive accelerations, all the while continuing their automatic scan of the Bai-do ring with their sensor arrays.
Any evasion was pointless. In order to avoid the streaking missiles, the pinnaces would have to accelerate so heavily as to crush their passengers. The only hope for the pilots was that the missiles weren’t actually trying to kill them, but to create a screen between the pinnaces and the ring station in order to prevent observation.
After Michi’s message was sent to Ring Command, there was a sudden cold silence in the Flag Officer Station.
“…Failure to obey orders will mean the destruction of the ring…”
The remembered words burned through Martinez’s mind like fire.
The threat had been made. But a threat meant nothing unless there was the will to carry it out.
“Captain Martinez,” Michi said in a new, cold, inflectionless tone, “please plan an attack on the Bai-do ring.”
“Very good, my lady.”
The plan had been made ages ago when Chenforce was still circling Seizho’s sun, and Martinez needed only to update the tactical situation before presenting it to the squadron commander. Michi glanced at her tactical display only briefly. There was a new hardness in the set of her mouth.
“Convey the plan to the squadron, captain,” she said. “Prepare to execute on my command.”
“At once, my lady.” He could not make himself reply with the words, “very good.”
Martinez passed orders to each ship in the squadron. Michi leaned her head back on her couch support and closed her eyes. “The bastards are testing us,” she said in a nearly inaudible voice. “After Koel, the Naxid command has had time to issue orders to the Bai-do ring, and to others as well. They want to find out if we’ll actually carry out our threats.”
“After we destroyed the Zanshaa ring,” Martinez said, “why would they think we’d stick at Bai-do?”
Michi had no answer. Martinez, a sickness chewing at his belly, watched his display, saw the pinnaces standing on tails of flame in mad frenzies of acceleration as they tried to escape the fate that pursued them.
The heavy acceleration was a mercy in a way, because the pilots were almost certainly unconscious when the missiles found them.
Martinez looked for a long, terrible moment at the silent expanding plasma spheres at his display, and then raised his eyes to Michi. There was black anger in her eyes, as well as a horror at the order she was about to give.
“Captain Martinez,” she said. “Destroy the Bai-do ring.”
Martinez found that his lips formed an answer. “Yes, my lady.” He touched the transmit pad and gave the orders.
Missiles lanced out from the squadron. The ring was a big target and so the salvo did not need to be large. There were laser defenses on the station, not intended so much for military purposes as for destroying meteors or small out-of-control spacecraft that might threaten the ring, but these were not capable of coordinating the same sort of defense as a squadron flying in formation, and the ring’s destruction was assured.
Martinez was surprised to see more missile flares from the target, a salvo of a dozen aimed at the squadron. Another dozen followed a few minutes later, and then a third. All were destroyed en route, and he received a message of explanation from Lieutenant Kazakov, who had been analyzing the data sent by the pinnaces before they were destroyed.
“There are partly completed warships on the ring, lord captain,” she told him. “Three heavy cruisers and three frigates or light cruisers. Apparently one of the big cruisers has got a working missile battery.”
The Naxids were going to let the Bai-do ring die in order to defend half a squadron of half-built warships that were lost anyway. Martinez clenched his teeth in frustration and anger.
The enemy frigate fired several more salvos before the end. None of the Naxid missiles proved a threat to Chenforce, and all were destroyed without undue effort. Two-thirds of the loyalists’ missiles were also destroyed, but the plan allowed for that.
Illustriouswas at its closest approach to Bai-do, three light-seconds, when the first missile impacted the ring. There were several more strikes after that, and each vaporized a section of the bright wheel that circled the planet.
A thing as huge as a planetary ring takes a long time to die. The upper level was still moving much faster than the lower, geostationary level, and each upper fragment separated from the lower ring and shot off on its own trajectory, each a curved airless sickle filled with corpses, brilliant in the sun, carried by its greater momentum into a higher orbit.
More horrifying, however, was the larger piece of the ring on the far side of the planet from Chenforce. This piece, nearly half of the ring, was still intact, and its upper ring never had time to completely separate from its lower before the whole mass began to oscillate and fall into the atmosphere. The cables were designed to burn up on reentry, but Bai-do was not so lucky as far as the rest of the structure was concerned. The upper ring contained hundreds of millions of tons of asteroid and lunar material used as radiation shielding. When the colossal structure broke up on contact with the atmosphere, all its great mass came raining down on Bai-do’s blue and green equator.
Martinez watched as Bai-do’s land mass flared from the impacts, as great shimmering golden waves rose from impact sites on the blue ocean. Smoke and dust and water vapor rose high into the atmosphere. Here and there were the distinctive sparkle of antimatter. Enough dust might be blasted into the upper atmosphere to shroud the planet in cold and darkness for years. There would be massive crop failure, and with the ring gone there would be no way to import food.
The ones who died now might well be the lucky ones.
“How many people are living down there?” The question, half-whispered, came from Lady Ida Lee.
Four point six billion. Martinez happened to know. He’d absorbed the fact when he’d planned the raid. And the population of the ring itself was in the tens of millions.
“Tell the crew to secure from action stations,” Michi said. She looked ten years older.
Martinez locked his displays above his head and rose from his couch. The scent of sour sweat and adrenaline rose from his suit. He felt older than Michi looked.
As he followed his commander from the room he felt a spasm of dread.
How many more times are we going to have to do this?
Sula took the train back to Riverside, carrying a bundle of clothing from the Grandview apartment, where she
