The Good That Men Do - Andy Mangels [144]
He didn’t have to wait long.
The next instant, a klaxon blared at an earsplitting volume. Lekev recognized the sound from Captain Solnev’s security briefing. It meant that something unauthorized had just passed sunward through at least one of the Coridan system’s two outlying asteroid belts, and at multiwarp speed.
He couldn’t remember whether that meant that death would come to Coridan Prime in the space of heartbeats, or sooner still.
Centurion R’Kal’s heart raced as the S’Task’s computer read off the final countdown. Her mind cast back to memories of a man with hair and eyes as black as space, and the plump, laughing girlchild she had created with him, both of whom First Consul T’Leikha had promised lives of privilege and wealth for the rest of their days.
“Rhi.
“Mne.
“Sei.”
A quick glance at her flight console told R’Kal that S’Task was moving at its maximum possible speed- and confirmed that her target remained squarely centered in the little vessel’s flight path. She had deactivated her viewer as soon as her target had come into range. She had no need- or desire- to see the sapphire world that lay at the end of her trajectory.
“Kre.
“Hwi.
“Lliu.”
The impact came so quickly that R’Kal never even saw the flash.
Lekev watched from the sky in fascinated horror as everything he knew and loved instantly changed forever.
The first thing he noticed was the silent orange fireball, the signature of the impact, as it began spreading quickly across the darkened half of Coridan Prime, setting the equatorial continent known as Idanev awash in furious amber flame.
The next thing he noticed was that the starship construction facility was gone. Not drifted out of sight, not lost in the darkness that marked the nightside terminator, not orbited over the horizon, but gone.
The Krekolv shuddered and lurched. Alarms shrieked. The captain’s voice came over the shipwide comspeakers, warning everyone to get to the reinforced sections deeper inside the ship. Lekev saw gleaming metallic debris spinning crazily near the observation port, and knew at once that this was all that remained of Coridan’s proud shipyards; whatever had just passed through two asteroid belts on the way to its deadly collision with Coridan Prime had taken out the orbiting facility on its way in, narrowly missing destroying the Krekolv- as well as virtually the entire central government of Coridan Prime- in the process.
Lekev ignored the shrieking klaxons and the captain’s warning to withdraw to the better-protected sections of the ship. He stood transfixed at the observation port, watching the fireball on the planet’s surface spread, no doubt fueled both by the antimatter stocks on the ship that had struck the Idanev continent- what could the missile have been, other than a warp-driven ship?- and by the extensive subsurface deposits of dilithium and other such ores for which Idanev had long been famous. As he watched, even the waters of the vast Idanev Sea seemed to ignite like dry kindling, touching off a blaze that rivaled the brilliance of Coridan’s great red sun.
The ambassador didn’t want to think about the sheer enormity of this horror, the scale of this act of pure murder, while he hovered above it all, safe.
Safe ground.
Lekev began to sob, and then to weep. He knew that the government’s response teams were on the move now, preparing to deploy rather deadly fire-smothering chemicals- materials that would not have been usable if not for the mass evacuations he’d worked so hard to carry out. But he also knew that the death toll would have to be in the hundreds of millions already, in spite of the evacuation program. Additionally, much of Coridan’s volatile, energy-bearing mineral wealth would doubtless be consumed completely by subsurface thermal chain reactions long before the spiraling ecological disaster on the ground could be brought to heel- if such an outcome was even possible now.
Lekev watched his charred, wounded