No matter, he told himself.
“Open fire,” he commanded. “And then order the troops to hit the camps.”
A rumble echoed through the mighty ship as it launched the first volley of KEWs. There was a limitless supply of kinetic energy projectiles—really nothing more than rocks dropped from high orbit—and while their targeting left something to be desired, he had no compunctions about dropping several more projectiles if the first missed. He had no particular qualms about destroying large chunks of the city too. The locals had sworn to follow the True Faith, but they’d lied. They’d ended their devotion as soon as their world had been liberated.
Of course they stopped, he thought, darkly. How could they follow a religion imposed upon them at gunpoint?
He shied away from that thought as enemy targets started to vanish. It was hard to remember, as whoops of joy and shouted prayers echoed around the compartment, that the lights on the display represented real people. People—unbelievers, to be sure, but people—were under those flashing lights, people who were dying as the KEWs hit their targets and destroyed them. He wondered just how many would perish in the months and years to come. The targeting matrix included just about every government building that had been in use during the occupation.
And many of the survivors headed into the hills, he thought. Judd was a heavily populated world, but the hills had never really been developed. The files had stated that the mountain people had never embraced the True Faith. Even now, we cannot find many of their hiding places.
He shook his head. Zaskar wanted to lay claim to Judd once again, to land in force and punish the unbelievers with whip and flail, but he knew better. He and his forces couldn’t allow themselves to be pinned down. It wouldn’t be long before the Commonwealth responded in strength to their move. If they were still at Judd when the enemy fleet arrived, they’d be wiped out within hours. He couldn’t take the risk.
“The troops are on the way,” the tactical officer reported. “They’ll hit the camps in twenty minutes.”
“Remind their commanders that they don’t have much time,” Admiral Zaskar said. He’d refrained from softening up the defenses around the camps, insofar as there were any fixed defenses. He didn’t want to kill his own people. “We have to be back in hyperspace as quickly as possible.”
“Aye, sir.”
“Run,” a voice shouted. “Get up and run!”
Millicent Barbara grabbed her coat and ran for her life, unsure of where she was going. The Commonwealth Refugee Commission HQ was supposed to be safe, certainly when compared to the bases on Ahura Mazda or a couple of other worlds that had been under Theocratic control long enough for the True Faith to sink deep roots into the population’s minds. She’d been reluctant to work on Judd, at first, but she’d come to believe that the locals were genuinely decent people, although they wanted to be rid of anyone who followed the True Faith or collaborated with the occupation. It wasn’t something Millicent particularly understood.
She ran out into the cold morning air, just in time to hear explosions echoing over the distant city. There hadn’t been any real trouble since the Theocrats had been rounded up, something Millicent found deplorable even though her superiors had told her not to make a fuss. The locals had endured a decade of oppression—a decade of watching their men be brainwashed, women brutalized, and children raised in the True Faith. She supposed she should be grateful that the vast majority of the converted hadn’t been killed out of hand. The blood had flowed for weeks on a dozen worlds.
An aircraft flew overhead, heading north. She looked up to follow it and saw a streak of light dropping down from low orbit to strike a target in the distance. There was a blinding flash when it touched the ground, followed by a billowing fireball and a rumble of thunder. She stopped and stared, her mind finally realizing what she was seeing. Judd was under attack, heavy attack. More projectiles followed, some falling within the city. She turned just in time to see a distant skyscraper topple and fall. She thought she heard people screaming as the remains hit the ground.
“Millie,” a voice called. She turned to see one of the military liaison officers. Dave or Charlie or . . . she couldn’t remember his name. They were all interchangeable, all in firm agreement that the refugees had to be relocated somewhere else as quickly as possible. “We have to move!”
Millicent found her voice. “What’s happening?”
“The planet is under attack,” Dave said. She was almost sure he was Dave. “The high orbitals have fallen, and the enemy is bombarding the surface.”
Another projectile landed within the city. Millicent looked away as she saw a towering fireball rising up and over the land. It was . . . Judd City wasn’t the largest city in the explored universe, not by a long chalk, but there were hundreds of thousands of people living in the skyscrapers or occupying the slums on the riverbank. They were being slaughtered, brutally slaughtered. She couldn’t imagine what sort of mind-set would do such a thing. The attackers weren’t firing at military targets. One of the projectiles looked to have come down in the slums.
Dave caught her arm. “We have to move!”
Millicent stared at him. “And go where?”
“We can’t stay here,” Dave said. “You know how close we are to the spaceport?”
Millicent nodded curtly. The spaceport had been taken over by the provisional government almost as soon as the planet had been liberated, then made over to the Commonwealth as a base of operations. Her superiors had insisted on placing the HQ right next to the spaceport, so refugees
