Polity Agent

‘Coloron keeps destroying Jain tech on the surface, but it continues burrowing into the ground. It may be doing so slowly at present, but that’s only because the arcology was necessarily built on solid granite. Once it reaches the softer strata, it’ll speed up. So if we don’t take it out before then, we may lose the planet.’

The arcology was now a silvery line on the horizon from which fires sprouted. Poised like stormclouds over it, atmosphere ships, having hurled down their lightnings, now departed to make way for what was to come. The tank commander tossed her a set of goggles.

‘I thought the hardfields will block the flash?’ she said.

‘They will, but there’s no guarantee they’ll be there all the time.’

Aphran grunted her thanks and pocketed the goggles.

Ground armour, autoguns, tanks like the commander’s, and AG platforms retreated to the shield line, many of them burdened with troops. Behind these, firing continued as more dehumanized residents tried to come out in the wake of Coloron’s forces, only to be taken down by the scanning drones. Then the drones abruptly retreated, like flies shooed away from a corpse. A turquoise bar sliced down from the sky, turning the intervening ground to magma, working rhythmically back and forth before the arcology. Distantly, the cloud-locked sky, generated by massive evaporation of sea water, reflected similar fires around the other perimeters. Columns of smoke cut the sky in between like black tornados. Occasional sheets of flame groped upwards, and explosions constantly shook the ground. It seemed as if the troops had fled the Pit. Five dreadnoughts now occupied space above MA, to add their firepower to Coloron’s own. One of those ships, even now, was probably selecting sources of appalling destruction from its weapons carousel.

‘Do you know yet what we intend to use?’ Aphran paused, considering how easily that ‘we’ came to her lips. ‘Straight nukes or something a bit more exotic?’

‘If I told you, I’d have to shoot you,’ said the commander laconically, grinding out his cigarette butt.

‘You’re a laugh a minute,’ Aphran muttered.

He grinned. ‘Slow burn CTDs, which spread microspheres of antimatter over a wide area. The effective result is an atomic fire. Nothing survives above the atomic level at the hypocentre, while the EM pulse disrupts molecular bonds for a lot further.’

‘Nice,’ said Aphran, wondering again how Separatists had ever come to believe they could triumph against the Polity. Yes, they could detonate bombs, murder citizens, cause major disruption, but in the end, like some angry amateur going up against an experienced fighter, they would inevitably get slapped down. But that was ever the case with terrorist organizations: their doomed-to-failure efforts against superior forces littered historical records. Perhaps that very futility was the attraction.

‘Interesting description,’ said the commander. He paused to take out another cigarette, and watched it self-ignite. ‘We use gravity imploders for a similar purpose in space warfare. They were invented to completely vaporize their target without spreading large fast-moving chunks of it all around a planetary system. On a planet that won’t work, of course, because there’s always a big air-transmitted shockwave. The whole idea of using slow-burn CTDs is to not chuck around Jain-infected debris.’

‘But we have hardfields here to protect us from a shockwave,’ Aphran observed.

‘A breeze,’ he said, still studying the end of his cigarette. ‘To achieve an equivalent level of destruction here, using straight CTDs or imploders, would result in there being nothing but bedrock left for a hundred miles all around. The shockwave would travel around the planet a few times, killing millions in the process. There’d be a tsunami spreading out simultaneously from the seaward side, probably a mile high and travelling at twice the speed of sound.’

Aphran returned her attention to the battle line and those retreating beyond it. It would be a while before the hardfield generators came on, but soon after that the bombardment would commence. She nodded to the commander and made her way over towards a refectory vehicle, then while waiting in the queue, she gazed at the scene on this side of the line—away from the arcology.