“None, ma’am. Not a one.”
“All his men are likely on the Lightbringer,” 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 the Lightbringer. 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. “The Lightbringer is 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 the Lightbringer. 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.”
“How many seconds till we can get them back up?” he asks.
“Seconds? It’ll be a quarter hour, at least. If we don’t wait that long, the radiation levels will kill anyone who goes in there. Even in a rad suit.”
“Tell your shield teams that I need the main shield back up over Sector One in five minutes, or we lose Phobos,” I say.
The engineer blinks at me, then Kavax. “I know those men—”
“Good. So, they will know the importance of their sacrifice,” I say.
“Do it, Officer,” Kavax says. “Do it now!”
Oro’s second watches the exchange looking like he is about to strike me, which for a Blue is saying something. He’s not the only one.
“We have visual of the surface!” a Blue calls.
“Main screen,” Kavax orders.
Faces fall as their worst fears are realized. Images from the surface crackle above us. Maybe they thought I had a magic trick up my sleeve. Something that would make my order less monstrous. They are sorely disappointed. It’s not that kind of day.
The devastation from the destroyer’s impact is incredible. It sheared off the tops of a hundred spires and made an impact crater with a radius of more than two kilometers wide. I’ve never seen so much debris in zero-G. Entire starscrapers and monuments to heroes float like motes of dust up from a punched sofa cushion.
Beyond the moon, the shattered city, and the impact crater, neither our shield nor the stars can be seen any longer. The war-battered belly of the Lightbringer has become the sky, and it creeps closer as the great ship hard brakes to hover barely a kilometer over the tallest starscraper. Then the Lightbringer fires on Phobos with whatever guns it has left. Oro trains the guns of Phobos and fires back.
It becomes a slugging match. My moon and Lune’s moonBreaker go at it like two bare-knuckle brawlers tied together, punching and obliterating each other’s delicate features at close range.
Oro glares at me. His sync connection must have been broken by damage to subterranean hardlines. He discards his useless circlet. The guns are now under the control of their on-site manual redundancy teams. He strides over and says in a quiet voice: “My Sovereign, the shield could have withstood that impact…”
“Maybe but the kinetic whiplash would have overloaded the entire system. It would be down for a day or more. Now Lune’s landing zone has so much debris that his Praetorians will shoot him if he orders them to make landfall in it. He’ll have to adjust. Shift north, toward Bastion One. Sector One. Where he’ll be in range.”
“Of what?”
“Retaliation,” Kavax says. He’s already set Sophocles down and begun field-checking his armor. Sure enough, the Lightbringer recognizes the impossibility of the crater, and the ship sacrifices its surprise to begin a slow shift north.
Lune’s captain is good, and rotates the ship to hide its cratered belly and present fresh guns. The ship completes a full turn so that when it reaches its new landing zone, its original side is facing down toward the moon. Then all its fighters and bombers, held back for the assault, flow out its hangars like a plague of locusts. I send ours from Bastion One and its adjacent fortresses Bastions Two and Eight.
Then Holiday curses in disgust. Familiar silhouettes fall from the Lightbringer toward the surface of Phobos’s cityscape. Lune didn’t just bring battering rams. He brought clawDrills too. Hundreds of them.
“He’s aping Darrow,” Kavax says and kneels to stroke Sophocles’s head. The fox has started to whine with anxiety. He can always tell when Kavax is about to leave.
I patch into the squadron commanders. “Ignore enemy fighters. Fire on those clawDrills. Bring them down before they hit the surface.”
Holiday motions forward the commander of the Bastion One’s legion—Red Legion I. The stocky Red thumps forward, fists balled, one hateful eye on me, the other still on the crater the destroyer made in Phobos’s cityscape.