Her missiles roared into them and slammed home. Battlecruisers were tough, but they’d never been designed to stand up in the wall of battle, let alone stand off superdreadnaught-sized volleys of missiles. One by one, they exploded and died, barely having time to get even a handful of their crew off before they were destroyed. The cruisers and destroyers vanished just as quickly, their point defence trying desperately to save them from certain annihilation, only to fail. Explosions ripped through their formation and every successive death only made the next one more certain. Five minutes after they had opened fire, the last ship exploded and died.
“Opening hailing frequencies,” Katy ordered, her voice coldly furious. At least a hundred thousand people had just died at her command and, as far as she was concerned, their deaths had been completely unnecessary. They shouldn’t have had to die like that when they could have surrendered, rather than being committed to hopeless battle. She hoped, with a fury that surprised her, that their commanding officer was even now burning in hell. He had failed his crews spectacularly.
She waited for the communications officer’s nod. “This is Admiral Garland, commanding 2nd Fleet,” she said, coldly. She had considered embracing a different designation — Task Force Vengeance, perhaps — but it would only have confused people. That might not have been a bad thing, but they were close enough to the planet for the sensors to get an accurate read of each ship’s unique drive field. “I have just engaged and destroyed your defence fleet and I intend to destroy the planetary defences and supplies.
“I am hereby ordering you to evacuate your defence platforms and supply dumps now,” she continued. “I will open fire in precisely ten minutes. Any attempt to engage my fleet or to transport supplies down to the planet will result in the deadline being cancelled and destruction commencing at once. I repeat, you have ten minutes to abandon the facilities before I destroy them.”
She watched, coldly, as the fleet settled down into attack position. The arsenal ships with their long-range missiles could destroy the supply dumps without having to dive into the gravity shadow, making escape easy if the destroyers managed to summon reinforcements from another system. There was very little point in actually destroying the planetary defences — they were outdated and, these days, effectively useless — but she’d included them in her threat anyway. They could evacuate the entire orbit of the planet… if they started at once and used life pods. They shouldn’t have had time to think about trying to save anything from the supply dumps, although she doubted that they would have time to save anything. It would take more time than she intended to give them, by quite a large margin, to transport everything down to the surface.
The timer ticked slowly down as the asteroids came alive with shuttles and life pods, even primitive skydiving pods that would normally be held in reserve for the direst of emergences. She’d heard that some people liked riding the pods for fun, plunging down into a planet’s atmosphere in a fiery trail, but it seemed insane to her. There was quite enough risk in her life already.
“Zero,” the tactical officer said. The stream of life pods and shuttles was slowly drying up. “Admiral…?”
“Signal the arsenal ships,” Katy ordered. She didn’t recognise her own voice. “They may fire when ready.”
The arsenal ships had been running targeting scans all the time, locating the best places to target with minimal force. One of them belched a hail of missiles, firing down into the gravity shadow, right towards the asteroids. She had expected the defenders to leave their point defence on automatic and it wasn’t a surprise when the asteroids’ point defence started to engage the missiles, but there wasn’t enough fire to put more than a dent in the missile swarm. She’d wondered if they had gone to the expense of fitting the asteroids with force shields beyond the standard counter-radiation shields, but it seemed that they hadn’t. The sheer number of generators required to cover such large asteroids would have daunted almost anyone.
She smiled as the first missiles struck home and the asteroids started to disintegrate under the pounding. They might not have been spinning, which would have sped the entire process of disintegration up, but they hadn’t been designed to contain the effects of nuclear blasts, even without secondary explosions among the stores. One by one, they blew apart into a wave of rocky debris, most of it falling down towards the planet below. She keyed her console and checked, quickly, but allowed herself a sigh of relief when it became clear that there wasn’t going to be anything large enough to survive the passage through the atmosphere and wreck destruction on the surface.
“Mission accomplished,” the tactical officer said.
“Good,” Katy said. She smiled at the icons representing the useless orbital defences. Their crews, either down on the planet, floating in orbit, or even remaining at their posts, had to be going mad with frustration. “Helm, take us out of her.”
An alarm sounded as new icons flickered into existence. “Admiral, we have a single superdreadnaught squadron,” the tactical officer said, grimly. “Should we engage?”
Katy shook her head. It was tempting… and they should have had the advantage, but it was too risky. She had to keep her fleet intact. It was the only consideration she would allow herself.
“No,” she said, finally. If nothing else, they’d definitely burned Admiral Wilhelm’s beard. There was no point in risking heavy losses, not now. “Helm, take us out of here.”
The stars vanished as the fleet dropped back into flicker space, leaving the destroyed supply dump behind. She smiled as soon as the fleet stood down from battle stations. After that raid, morale would be going through the roof… and Admiral Wilhelm would have to reconsider his plans.
We might even have stopped him from advancing, she thought, and smiled again.
Chapter Thirty-One
Lieutenant Oliver Zulu looked down at his console and sighed. Another few million kilometres of nothing. Absolute nothing. Wakanda might have been one of the first-rank worlds, but it wasn’t a particularly important first-rank world. Indeed, it was whispered by the lower-ranking officers that the only reason the Empire hadn’t abandoned their normal procedure of quietly screwing as much as they could out of the first-rank worlds and just grabbing Wakanda was because they had plenty of corrupt officials of their own and didn’t need more. There were times when Zulu, who had risen as far as he ever would in the Wakanda Space Navy, would have liked to join the Shadow Fleet, just to escape the ever-present corruption that surrounded the Navy.
He scowled down at the display and scowled. It said something about the highly-dubious ‘success’ of Wakanda that the system had the lowest number of spacecraft of any first-rank world, let alone a tiny and largely primitive defence force, including ships that dated back to the days of the Dathi War. The planners kept telling everyone that fame, riches and successes were just around the corner, but hardly anyone believed them any more. If their plan had been to make Wakanda unattractive as a world to pillage, and therefore defend against the Empire, it had been a stunning success. It had also drained the spirit of Wakanda and ensured that it had the highest emigration rate of any first-rank world. They preferred to live under the Empire than their own people.
And some of them just couldn’t wait for Admiral Wilhelm. Only brutal repression and lack of forward planning had prevented a coup from carrying off the government and replacing it with something that would have been, by any standard, far better for the people. Some of the junior officers hoped that the Shadow Fleet would come and liberate Wakanda from its own government, others, older and wiser, knew that it wouldn’t happen. Wakanda, like all the other first-rank worlds, had autonomy. It was hard to think of a single world that had abused the status more than poor Wakanda, home of some of the poorest humans in the universe. It didn’t help that the government and its lackeys lived in a style that outshone even the vast depravities of the Thousand Families.