“SPITFIRE: TEN MINUTES!”
23
VIRGINIA
Grim Glory
In its initial moments,Lysander’s charge is the picture of glory. His new destroyers—not lemons after all—surge out in front of theLightbringeras soon as Phobos’s orbit brings the moon into alignment with his fleet.Haughty and shining, Lysander’s destroyers race into range of our guns. Oro begins to fire and the darkness of no-man’s-land turns to light. First, the light of particle beams, lancing and primordial. Second, the light of rail slugs, blurred and dull. Third, the light of drones and missiles, glinting and canny. Fourth, the light of the enemy’s flak, dusty and meager. Then all the light all at once as the enemy replies in kind.
Lune’s fleet disappears from the sensors in the energy wash of the conflagration. The first minute claims two destroyers. Overloaded by the volume of fire, the destroyers’ shields turn opaque before the ships collapse inward. Their hulls peel open like burning paper, shredding away to reveal their twisted skeletons as they hurtle forward, their momentum unchecked. Imagining the hell on those destroyers, the screaming of shield sirens, the buckling bulkheads, the fire, and the vacuum, I pity the crews for having to suffer the cost of a boy’s highborn ambition.
Glorious in its early thrust, Lysander’s initial charge veers toward disaster as another destroyer is knocked out of formation and nearly collides with theLightbringerbehind it.
Yet even as the Blues report damage to the enemy, I see Lune’s gruesome logic at work.
He gambled he could lose destroyers to gain kilometers, and despitethe best efforts of my Blues, his gamble is…working. Not one destroyer is spared a shield failure or damage to its hull, but Lune’s charge has soon passed the halfway mark to Phobos. The closer his ships come to Phobos, the less able the OBC guns are to hit them. Fewer guns by the second have a clear line of barrage, and we begin to feel the absence of Char’s fleet. Another destroyer falls out of formation, slit down the center like firewood by the combined fire of Phobos’s three space-facing citadels, including Bastion One. I shout for my Blues to analyze the debris for bodies. There should be armored infantry spilling out across space.
“None, ma’am. Not a one.”
“All his men are likely on theLightbringer,” I say to Oro. “The destroyers are empty. Maybe piloted remotely or by a suicide crew.”
Playing on a hunch, I order the Blues to concentrate their guns on theLightbringer.Even the great ship is not unfazed by our deluge of fire. Soon its hull is cratered in two dozen places and its shield must cycle on and off to prevent itself from overloading. Then I glimpse the danger, the true danger, and correct my orders. “Fire back to the destroyers.”
Oro protests. “TheLightbringeris the threat. The destroyers are empty.”
“Then why would they need to veer off their current trajectory, which is at present this moon?” I snap. “He’s using the destroyers as battering rams, dammit! He’s letting us shoot them down so they’ll crash into our shields and bring them down for theLightbringer. And then he’s going to dump men down our throats.”
Oro is appalled. “Nine destroyers. But the waste…”
“What’s all that to a Lune?” I snarl.
Of the nine destroyers Lune started the charge with, four are already ruined and knocked off course. Five are horrifically damaged, but unless we smash them off course, they will collide with Phobos’s defensive shield. And when they do, the kinetic energy from their impact will be in the gigatons, at least.
Minutes tick past. Oro’s guns knock another destroyer off its crash course. With four more inbound, I call my Legates forward. “Goodmen, it looks like this is going to come down to infantry. Lune wants Phobos. The fleet is busy. They cannot help us. You will soon be all that stands in his way.”
Then the first destroyer hits the moon’s main shield.
Inside the Nucleus, we feel and hear nothing. Then two more destroyers hit almost at once, and the Nucleus trembles. Outside, above Phobos’s starlit cityscape, the shield shivers and turns crimson. I make a quick calculation, weighing the force of the destroyer yet to hit and the strength remaining in the weakened shield. My math is sloppy, but there’s no time to balk.
“Lower the shield,” I order.
Oro’s second-in-command turns, aghast. His accent is Phobosian. “That destroyer will impact the Hive. It’s not fully evacuated—”
“Lower the shield!” I order directly to the shield officers. They stare wide-eyed at me. I jerk my head at Holiday and she bursts up on her gravBoots and puts a rifle to the Blue operator’s temple. Finally, he lowers the shield.
The last the cameras report is a metal blur before perfect white. The Nucleus falls silent. The moon itself groans. Whole columns of sensors die. Alarm lights glow. Officers turn to stare at me, jaws on the floor. Even Holiday looks startled, as if she’s only just realized what she’s done on my orders. She removes her rifle from the Blue’s head, and returns to me with a blank expression.
“Sovereign…what have you done?” Oro whispers from his sync.
“Triage,” Kavax replies for me.
“Damage report when you have one,” I say. “I want a visual of the surface. Engineering: what’s the damage to the shields?”
The Orange engineering officer looks like he’s seen a ghost. “Engineers report four nexuses have melted through their inhibitor-shells.”
“But we’re spared a general overload?” Kavax asks for me, again.
“Yes, sir.”
