The panic and rage were getting control now. In any battlefield the death of a soldier's comrades is agonizing, terrifying. The wounded scream, and the music of their dying is madness to all who hear. But fingers can be put in ears, minds can be closed, eyes can focus on the enemy ahead and the battle can go on.
But what if the screams are silent? What if all the fear is played in every soldier's mind, and then the pain, and then the terror of staring into blackness and seeing all too well what waits there?
There is no hiding from the madness then.
Homer Worthing sat before the clean, shining console that commanded the stars and told a great ship how to hurtle through space. But now the ship was helpless, alive but unable to move. And because he had come to think of the ship as an extension of himself, Homer felt that arms and legs had been amputated, that his eyes had been cut out. He tried to close his mind to his own terror and the terror of his friends. His own he could control; his friends were less cooperative.
They've killed us, he kept thinking. They've killed us, and they sit safely on their planets gloating. They have murdered us and we have the power to destroy them, but we've withheld that power and for our mercy we are dying and we will get no thanks for it at all, no honor, no gratitude. In their inhumanity they take advantage of our humanity and because weare decent and cannot murder innocent people in cold blood we can be murdered in our innoceacce.
For a moment he wanted to press the three simple buttons that would release the mammoth fusion devices that would turn the three planets of Harper system into little suns. It would take five minutes, eight, and eleven for the three missiles to get within striking range of the three targets. Then, long before they were in any danger from planet-launched weapons, they would detonate, and the planets would be ended.
But he made the mistake of picturing the ending in his mind. He thought of the woman baking bread for her husband coming home from the field, and how the bread would indeed bake, but would never be tasted. He thought of children in a schoolroom wrestling with a problem that, perhaps, one of them would suddenly understand, and that one would leap to his feet, would say, "I've got it," and in that moment the understanding would be gone, and the grasping of the idea would have meant nothing.
They knew he could not do it.
He heard one of the others reach his own decision, saw the fusion devices launched. But he fired his own projectiles, which could do what planet-based weapons could not. He stopped the fusion devices in their flight, deflected them, cast them into the sun where their action would cause, perhaps, a solar flare and little more.
His friend wept in rage and frustration and then the next attack came, and there was no meeting it, and Homer's friends were both snuffed out almost instantly, and Homer knew a terrible moment as he saw the projectiles homing in on his own craft, projectiles he could not dodge. It would take four minutes for the first to arrive.
During the first minute he thought frantically of his wife, who would be wakened from her somec and informed. He could hear her cry out with grief, and in his mind he reached out and held her and comforted her hut he knew, in fact, that there would be no comfort for her then.
During the second minute he listened to the minds of the nearest imperial captains. Their thoughts were simple. Victory. Reward. Fame. I made it. That over and over again: I made it. I did it. I did it. Let it be my missile that strikes first. And Homer longed to shout (but they would never hear) are you heroes? What kind of heroes are you who can't kill unless someone ties down the prey and disarms it and stretches out its neck for the knife?
During the third minute he looked around the cockpit of the ship and wondered what he was doing there, what in the world he was doing in a starship two centuries away from his home on Capitol and why hadn't he stayed there and kept his damned gift a secret and not joined the Service at all, where they could teach him to enhance his gift, teach him to be a pilot, teach him to win victories for the empire, and then, when suddenly it became an embarrassment to be breaking the Convention by using telepaths, cast him off, execute him as they had done the first dozen telepathic pilots who had home to port, declare him a traitor for having served them so well. In his mind he undid it and lived a complete life as the scientist he had thought he wanted to be back home, with several children and much honor and many friends but then he looked at the console and the computer told him he had a minute to go and the alarms rang loudly and his ears insisting that he DO SOMETHING NOW but there was nothing that he could do because he couldn't even turn the ship.
During the fourth minute, at the beginning of it, he cast his attention randomly toward Harper, the nearest of the three planets, randomly sorted a mind, randomly listened, randomly sought for what the common man on Harper was thinking of all this and hoping that in the man's mind there was some thought that would make the battle and the death stand for something, be worthwhile somehow.
The mind he found was that of an engineer who was leaning back in his chair wondering what in the world he could do about his mistress, who was also the boss's secretary, and who was now threatening to get revenge for his infidelity to her by telling the boss who it was who really designed the Hadgate bridge. Can I, wondered the engineer, soothe this over by getting her to bed again? She has no self-control in bed. And the engineer reached for a book.
Homer could not bear it. Bad enough to know that the military was gloating. Bad enough to hear the death agonies of his friends. But to know that an intelligent, responsible human being did not give a damn that not far above his head twenty good men had died for daring to want to resist the empire's attempt to murder them, that was unbearable. That was tho ultimate wound that they could cause Homer Worthing, and he screamed, "You're killing me, you bastard!" and his fingers launched the fusion devices. A moment later he changed his mind. A moment later his reason returned and he knew he could never commit such murder. But as his fingers reached for the controls that would abort the fusion devices, the first enemy projectile reached his ship, and he died in fire.
The three fusion devices went their way.
The imperial fleet was not prepared for this. It was so unthinkable, to use those weapons against a planet when their purpose was merely to destroy a ship without hitting it directly-- so unthinkable to commit such an atrocity, that they were utterly unprepared and even though they fired the intercepting projectiles, they were not quick enough. One of them intercepted the device heading for Harper Moon. But that was not enough.
Stoddard went first, the planet visibly rocking under the shock of having a tenth of its surface instantly converted into an inferno of corrupting atoms breaking down into their constituent parts. After a moment, the reaction spread throughout the planet's core, and it simultaneously exploded and collapsed in a reaction not particularly different from a star, though there was not enough matter to provide enough energy to sustain the reaction, and after only a few seconds of being a star the matter collapsed into a hot, glowing ball of fairly well-mixed elements.
The Stoddard reaction was over before the projectile reached Harper. The performance was repeated, with the addition of a tongue of fire reaching out to lick all the way around Harper Moon. Harper Moon did not explode. But every living thing on its surface died, and the ocean leaped into the atmosphere and then collapsed again, washing away all soil, all hints that anything other than water and rock had ever existed on the surface of the world.
And then all was still.
The captain of tht imperial fleet looked at the starfinder's graphic portrayal of what the ship's instruments had seen. In dozens of other ships, other captains were doing the same: they knew the horror felt by those who, millennia before, had walked into death camps and seen stacks of corpses and soldiers casually murdering civilians and piles of gold teeth and false teeth and a lampshade made of human skin. Only in this case eight billion people had died.