Walter Williams - The Sundering

“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 had emptied her closet and made certain other arrangements as well. She found Spence drowsing with the med injector in her hand. The video wall was repeating the same announcement over and over, and the announcer was a Naxid.

Lady Kushdai, the new governor, had taken up residence in the High City, and Zanshaa would now begin a new reign of peace and prosperity under the Committee to Save the Praxis. A group of anarchists and saboteurs had made an unsuccessful attack on the government’s forces that morning, but all had been killed or captured. Many civilian casualties had occurred as a result of the attackers’ vicious and unreasoned assault.

The next news item was a shock: five hundred and five hostages had been taken, a hundred and one from each species under the Naxid administration, any or all of whom might suffer death if incidents of anarchy and sabotage did not cease.

Sula stared at the video in thoughtful surprise.Five hundred and five. And from five species, when only Terrans had been involved in the ambush.

Peace. Prosperity. Hostages.She wondered if the Naxids realized the message they were sending.

The news hummed in her thoughts as Sula went out onto the street to purchase food from vendors. The people had got the news before she had, and they were furious. Everyone seemed to know that the hostages had been pulled in off the street, at random, and that none of them were anarchists or saboteurs.

The Naxids were not making friends.

For the next three days Macnamara arrived every morning after his rounds to report that no messages were found at either the primary or backup locations. Sula burned off nervous energy by tidying relentlessly and bathing frequently. She looked after Spence, watched the news, and spent a lot of time connected to the Records Office computer. She created new identities for everyone that she knew or suspected had survived the Axtattle Parkway ambush. She didn’t have their pictures, but used images taken from other IDs already in the system, images that resembled the people she had trained with.