Zach Hughes - Deep Freeze

No matter. The damage would be minimal, even if the invaders had armed their insignificant weapons with thermonuclear warheads. That, the Watcher reasoned, would be the limit of the technical ability of the trespassers.

But why wasn't the woman dead?

Sarah sat up. Her hand went to her forehead. Her head ached fiercely.

She looked up at the screen. She had not been unconscious long, for the busters were still driving down through atmosphere. She knew that on-board instruments were taking the measure of the planet. She knew, also, that she was in grave danger because she was too near. She was the last one left. Someone should go back to tell the story to X&A's scientists, but it was not duty to mankind that motivated her to live. Everyone was dead. Poor Vinn was dead. Only her children were left. That thing down there had taken from her everything but her children, and she was not going to let it take them from her through her death.

She was not sure that she was doing it right as she punched in a short blink. Even though she was in danger of dying with the Watcher's planet,she wanted to see that thing down there die, or, more properly, be silenced. She pushed the button and the Crimson Rose disappeared even as the onboard computers caused the diving missiles to vanish as well.

The Rose came back into normal space at a distance of two hundred thousand miles. It took Sarah a few seconds to activate the screens.

The ice planet swam serenely in the darkness of space, sun side reflecting light glaringly. Sarah adjusted the optics, compensating for the glare. She was able to see the first swelling of the icy crust. Not one but two weapons designed to destroy a world had blinked instantly to the planet's core.

The red of molten metal was seen briefly as the world shattered from the inside out. There was steam as ice melted and then the planet simply disintegrated into flying chunks of rock and cooling core material.

Sarah was breathing rapidly. Her head ached.

"You killed my mother, my father, my brothers and sisters," she whispered to the dying world. "You killed my husband and my friends."

She believed in a divinity, if not in the preachers who took it upon themselves to be spokesmen for God. She prayed, as she watched the particles of the deep freeze planet go their separate ways, that those who had made the Watcher were now burning in an old-fashioned Christian hell.

She buried Vinn and Kara in space, sending them off toward the sun with the words of the ancients. She spent a few hours making sure she understood the process of locking onto a distant blink beacon. The Crimson Rose's generator was fully charged when she punched a button and, with a sigh of relief, found that the ship lay quite near the first of the Rimfire beacons.

She was going home. It would be up to X&A to worry about whether or not there were other Watchers. She had things to do. She found it difficult to believe that she'd left her children in the care of others for so long, even if they were with her closest friends. She knew, rationally, that she had been influenced by the Watcher's spatial extensions, but that was no excuse. Her first duty was to her children.

And then there was the election that would be coming up in less thanfour years. If she started her campaign very soon after getting back home, she'd be in fine shape to be elected. She had three young ones in T-Town schools. They deserved the best education available and she intended to see that they got it. After all, they would need all the knowledge they could absorb to insure that the human race would survive if the U.P. worlds ever encountered the Sleepers who had long ago awakened and vanished.