Theirs Not to Reason Why 5: Damnation (36 page)

“Aye, sir.” “Sir, yes, sir.” They murmured among themselves, until Shim nodded at C’ulosc, who announced, “. . . Broadcasting now, sir.”

Ia’s primary screen remained focused on the surface of Sallha, but that screen-filling image of the predominantly watery world shifted to the left secondary for every other station watching the dead-ahead view. On the nonoperational workstations, every screen filled with a different view, some from space, some from ground level. There were dead bodies in view, exploded from the force of the gasses stirred by the bacterial colonies multiplying inside, decomposing slowly as lowly insects and various fungi devoured the rotting remains of the Salik who had been trying to move across plazas and streets when the last of their strength, their willpower, had given out.

Most of the remains were covered in a faint, fuzzy white sheen. That was the mark of the plague in its dormant state, now that there weren’t any creatures with sufficiently electrically active neurological systems left to feed the artificial, virus-like prions. Trillions of prionic filaments crammed into a single square centimeter of sagging, dried-out flesh.

“I am deeply sorry that I had to step aside and allow the Salik to destroy themselves.” She lifted the final cover standing between her conscience and her duty. “Giorgi Mishka knew that testifying would permit a terrible tragedy to occur . . . but he did not know the wonderful things that followed in the wake of that tragedy—the formation of the Terran United Planets government, so on and so forth.

“I, on the other hand, know exactly what I do, in all of its permutations and possible consequences. And while I am very sorry for the death of the Salik race . . .” She paused long enough to press the button with her littlest finger, while sliding her thumb, index, and middle fingers across the controls to lock the weapon on, not an original part of the ship’s design but rather a specification of her own, “. . . I am not sorry for all the other lives being saved.

“‘Thus the Ever-Light of the God-Being smote through their enemy, piercing the Room . . . the
World
,’” Ia amended, altering the original line from the famous poem as she spoke up over the encroaching
thrum
and
whoosh
of the Sterling engines, “‘. . . for the Dead.’” Bright crimson leaped forward on her final words. It did not stop pouring out of the bow of the
Damnation
, either. Around the red-bathed bridge, the forward-facing scanners quickly blacked out the majority of the beam, and kept it blacked out. Over at Private Nelson’s station, what had once been a series of elegant green and yellow lines immediately shrank to tiny pinpricks as the rest of the overall chart followed the spike of power being produced and used by the main gun.

Ia’s main screen shifted to an extrapolated third-person view of the
Damnation
’s position over the planet, allowing her to check that the ship was still firmly on its preprogrammed course. Three of her five top tertiary screens had shifted to views from the drones on the ground, as had the left secondary.

The initial view was awe-striking; a great, rich red lance of focused light struck the ground near the heart of one of the lifeless Salik cities. Instantly, the ground flashed double-bright, for the impact was as powerful as some of the hydrobombs the
Damnation
had recently carried. Clouds billowed outward from the impact zone, white-hot, mushroom orange, boiling red as bodies and buildings and other objects vaporized, charred, and burned.

The ship continued on its path, settling into a stable midaltitude orbit. That single mushroom cloud rapidly turned into a line of mushrooms. A wall of flaring light, billowing heat, and roiling clouds of ash.

The first shockwave caught up to the nearest drone recording all of this in the distance. It slammed into the camera, shaking the view with streaked and flickering images for a second, before that firewall caught up with the machine. The camera’s new view of the sky, peaceful with scudding wisps of clouds, vanished as the second, stronger shockwave reached the drone and obliterated it. Static filled that screen, until C’ulosc switched broadcasts.

One by one, other images from other drones near the blast zone were also hit, and destroyed. Only those who were high in the sky from hundreds of kilometers away survived; as the last of the close-range cameras vanished within ten seconds, all they were left with was a distant, haze-blurred view of a great, bright, thin beam of bloodred light slicing down through the atmosphere, at the forefront of a wall-shaped inferno that spewed smoke, ash, fire, and darkness into the sky, all trailing in the Godstrike’s wake.

Back near the beginning point, not only was there the distinctive, ringed remnants of a mushroom cloud, but there were now great fiery columns rising and twisting. Firestorm tornadoes, whipping the winds inward to fuel the conflagration that had begun. The base of the boiling clouds still rising in the wake of the laser’s path glowed white-gold, and the ground rippled in a queasy pattern. Not just in a concentric circle running outward from the strike zone, but in several arcs that overlapped. Buildings toppled, destroyed by the ground-quakes.

“Fuel at ninety-six percent, sir,” Nelson stated, her voice steady despite the awe-striking images. She had to raise it slightly over the
thump
-and-
whoosh
of the Sterling engines trying to convert the excess heat of the ongoing strike.

“Commodore Baltrush, begin refueling procedures now,”
C’ulosc ordered over his headset. The bridge was starting to feel warm; the Sterling engines did their best to reconvert what little waste heat was being produced by the main cannon, but it was not originally designed to keep running so long.

“Ah . . . How deep is that laser going?” Premiere Mandella asked. He turned his head slightly from his screen, but could not pull his gaze away long enough to actually look at Ia. In the wake of the laser fire, ash and fury were now lined by dozens of twisting, dancing, spiraling infernos, like a line of living, flame-made columns decorating a grim and gritty, billowing wall.

“At this location, where the surface rock is slightly less dense than in others . . . this ship’s main cannon is vaporizing the crust to a depth of just over five kilometers, Terran Standard,” Ia explained grimly. “The beam is traveling at a rate of roughly 6.8 kilometers per second across the surface, and the local crustal depth is seven to eight kilometers. The density of the crust of Sallha ranges from five kilometers to one hundred and fifty . . . but we’re not going through the mountains on this pass.”

“You never said anything about this in any of the briefings,” he accused her.

“I did tell you that this ship’s main cannon could vaporize Grey ships, Premiere, sir. A planet’s crust is considerably less tough,” she replied calmly.

“Ambient temperature 25C and rising,” Nelson announced.

“Thank you, Private.”

Several improvements had been made to the efficiency of the Godstrike Mark II. Thermal retention had been one of them, but there was still some bleed-through. As the seconds and minutes stretched on, as the
Damnation
swung through its ninety-minute arc, the Godstrike continued to fire, and the ship continued to heat up.

At the edge of her vision, Ia could see the Admiral-General shifting restlessly in her seat. One of the Agents, the one code-named Tango, pulled out a kerchief and wiped his freckled brow when Nelson announced, “Ambient temperature 30C and rising.”

Elsewhere on the ship, out by the water tanks that shielded the inner cabins from the hull, Ia’s crew were overseeing the automatic shunting of purified water from the tankers to the ship, and from the ship’s tanks to its hardworking main engines. In the vast majority of probabilities, everything worked fine, but Ia didn’t want to take any chances. Along the entire length of the main cannon, running at full power, only a maximum of four hydroengines out of the hundreds spanning the length of the kilometer-plus-long ship could be safely shut down before it destabilized the beam.

Those engines were in top shape, barely used for more than fractions of a second until now. Not even during the testing phases had the Terran engineers who created it used the Godstrike Mark II for so long. This, however, was the ultimate stress test.

On her lower fifth tertiary screen, the one showing a view from orbit at an angle to the
Damnation
’s path, the tranquil blue-and-white swirl of Sallha was now marred by a horrid dark line, as well as that bright spear lancing down from her ship. While the upper winds were still doing their best to carry the clouds off to the right along the local jet-stream direction, the lower winds were marring those streaks with the slowly forming swirls of massive vortices. Lightning flared in the roiling clouds, stirred up by the polarity differences churning between scarred surface and superheated air.

The Godstrike reached the edge of the largest landmass and dipped into the semishallow seas of Sallha. The ship slowed fractionally, thrusters correcting automatically to keep their orbit at a steady distance rather than dipping closer to the surface. Water distorted the beam; by slowing down, the same depth could be scored in the rocks at a speed of 6.2 kilometers per second instead of 6.8.

The bridge continued to heat up. Sweat now sheened Ia’s skin, making the headband necessary to keep the salty stuff out of her eyes. Nelson cleared her throat. “Ambient temperature is now 35C, sir.”

(
Group One,
) Ia projected carefully, telepathically. (
Dinnertime.
)

Their escort group of five hundred Feyori swerved abruptly from their broad, ring-shaped formation into a much narrower, straw-like stream aimed straight at the
Damnation
’s bow. They swooped in through the hull, some peeling off before they reached the first section; others delved deeper, each one’s path designed to cover a different strip of the ship.

Carefully, they avoided the actual core of the main laser and its engines. The Godstrike was too strong for any one single Feyori to withstand. Just as carefully, they avoided the multitudes of small but still-nasty-flavored crysium nodes Harper had buried just beneath the skin of her ship. Crysium was what they preferred to leave behind in the way of matter-based residue after returning to their natural energy-based state. It was refuse, excrement,
v’shova v’shakk
to them, so they avoided it.

Within seconds, three dark pewter spheres streaked through the bridge, enlarged to cover as much area as they could. There was no actual, physical sensation to their swift passage, though the Premiere yelped in startlement and the two Agents groped reflexively for their guns. Myang, Sofrens, and Talpur flinched, while Denora flung up her arms. The Meddlers passed without harming anyone; indeed, they left in their wake a refreshing, even somewhat shocking level of coolness.

Nelson eyed her monitors. “Ambient temperature on the bridge is . . . 19C . . . overall ambient temperature of the ship . . . is an average of 20C, sir,” she reported as the last of the Feyori exited the stern. They swirled out to join the others around the planet, while a new group, Group Two, swerved in to form the escort ring not far from the bow of the ship. “We are back to normal temperatures.”

“Keep counting it off on the fives,” Ia said, repeating her order. “We have a long way to go.”

“Aye, sir.”

Silence filled the bridge, which slowly began heating up again. Finally, Admiral-General Myang spoke. “I owe you an apology, General Ia. You are right. This technology should not be replicated.”

“Apology accepted, sir. For those of you still watching,” Ia stated, mindful of the broadcast still being sent out of everything happening on the bridge, “you are now seeing the full might of the TUPSF
Damnation
’s main cannon. It is capable of piercing enemy ships at a fraction of a second . . . and it is capable of carving up a world. However,
I
am at the helm of this planet-killer. It is by my hand, and mine alone, that I destroy this planet. By my own hand, the other geothermically active colonies of the Salik race will also be destroyed in the next few days, eradicating the last traces of the plague.

“I will
never
allow this ship to be turned on any of you, by my hand or any other. It will be used to destroy the plague, and it will be used to halt the Greys, nothing more. You have my Prophetic Stamp on that.”

Silence filled the bridge, until Nelson reported, “Ambient temperature 25C, sir.”

“Fuel?” Ia asked her.

“Fuel reserves have stabilized at an average of eighty-seven percent, General.”

“Private C’ulosc, send my compliments to the 7th Battalion, 5th Division, 1st Cordon Navy,” Ia directed.

“Aye, sir,” he agreed. He murmured into his headset, then hesitated. “General, sir . . . we are being pinged by several of the, ah, civilian ships in this system. They are demanding to speak with you. They’ve opened so many channels, they’re starting to interfere.”

Admiral-General Myang fielded that one. “Private. Kindly inform them that they are in gross violation of Martial Law and the rules of Quarantine Extreme by having invaded a severely restricted and quarantined system, and that if they do not remove themselves immediately, I will give the order to have them blown out of the night.”

“Admiral-General,” Premiere Mandella corrected her, “it is by
my
order that they are
not
being blown out of the night.”

“They are in violation of—”

“Sirs,”
C’ulosc asserted, cutting through their argument. “One of the vessels, the Tlassian Civilian Cruiser
Ssu-Sienth Tlakk
, is claiming it is being pinged by survivors on the planet. Salik, Choya,
and
other race members. They’re apparently in a sealed bunker on the major southern isle, and are demanding to know what you are going to do about rescuing them.”

“There are no survivors,” Ia asserted flatly. “That entire atmosphere is contaminated. Only the Feyori can fly in and out of it, and even they have to be cautious. There will
be
no survivors.” She could feel the tears welling in her eyes and tried her best to ignore them. “We tried for over two hundred years to get the Salik to cooperate and play nice with the rest of the known galaxy, and for
two hundred years
, they lied to us, laying plans and building up massive forces in the hopes that they could overwhelm, crush, and devour us.