Then the Campanile reaches the main shipyard.
The Calth Yards are orbiting islands, the fledgling beginnings of the planet’s first proper superorbital plate. There are a dozen of them orbiting Calth. This is Calth Veridian Anchor, the largest and oldest of them. It is a massive edifice of jetties and slips, ship cradles and docks, suspension manufactories, habitats, depots and docking platforms. It is a little over three hundred kilometres across, a raft of metal and activity and life.
The Campanile hits it, creating light. Void shields moving at high sub-light velocities strike physical matter, and mutually annihilate. The tender simply vaporises the Ultramar Azimuth Graving Dock, shredding the superstructure of the giant berth cradle, and the cruiser Antipathy docked inside it. Cut in half, the nine kilometre-long Antipathy vanishes in a ripple of rapidly expanding heat and light as its drives detonate, and six thousand lives disappear with it. The blast incinerates the two manufactory modules adjoining the graving dock, instantly killing another thirty thousand artificers and engineers, and shears the superstructure away from arrestor silos A112 and A114, both of which collapse sideways, spilling the escort Burnabus into the fast escort Jeriko Rex. Both vessels suffer catastrophic hull damage. The Burnabus crushes and deforms like a spent shell case.
The Campanile is still moving. As the Ultramar Azimuth Graving Dock disintegrates behind it, it punches on through Assembly 919, a hollow spheroid currently housing the Menace of Fortis, the Deliverance of Terra and the Mechanicum fabrication ship Phobos Encoder. All three ships are obliterated. The assembly spheroid ruptures like a glass ball. Propelled debris rips into attached habitat modules, voiding them to space. Part of the Phobos Encoder is flung out of the explosion and spins into the yard’s principal cargo facility, which buckles laterally. This secondary impact destroys forty-nine lift ships and one hundred and sixty-eight small lighters and ferries. Cargo pods and transportation containers spew out like beads from a snapped necklace, like grains of rice from a ripped sack. They spill, tumbling. Some start to glow blowtorch blue as they plunge into the high atmosphere.
Calth Veridian Anchor shudders. Internal explosions propagate through it, driven along by the devastating trajectory of the Campanile. Habitats and depots blow out. Jetties collapse. Manipulator cranes buckle and fold like wading birds struck by a hunter’s buckshot. The Aegis of Occluda catches fire, all seven kilometres of it, in its ship cradle. The Triumph of Iax, secured in an arrestor slip, is crippled as a storm of debris penetrates it. Its secondary drives implode, ripping the massive ship through ninety degrees like a man being swung by his ankles. The bow, still encased in its slip housing framework, encounters the Tarmus Usurper, which is being fitted out in the adjacent slip. The collision mangles them, tears them, lacerates their hulls. Atmospherics void explosively from rent hull plates, aerosol jets filled with particles that are tiny, tumbling bodies.
Light blossoms. The annihilation of matter is vast, and light is the only form in which it can escape. The battleship Spirit of Konor, seventeen kilometres long and one of the most powerful warships in the fleet of the Five Hundred Worlds, ignites, and then vanishes as critical damage compromises its power plants and vast munitions stockpiles. Huge, burning sections of the yard structure are ejected upwards, whirling, into space, or are spat down at the world beneath. The Ultramar Zenith Graving Dock suffers integral gravimetric failure and drops out, breaking and twisting towards the planet below. The grand cruiser Antrodamicus, supported by that dock, rips free of its moorings and begins to slide backwards out of the collapsing cradle, in some ghastly parody of a ship launch. Its drives are off-line. It has no power to prevent its slide or stabilise its position, at least nothing that can be lit or brought to bear fast enough. It is a huge ship, twelve kilometres long. It simply slips away backwards, like a vast promontory of ice calving from a glacier into the sea.
The Campanile is still moving. Its shields finally fail and it is just a solid projectile, a mass of metal. It annihilates two more slipways, and the ships within them, cripples the anchored carrier Johanipus Artemisia, and then rams through the data-engine hub in the centre of the yard structure. All the data-engines are destroyed instantly. The automatics fail. The noosphere experiences a critical and fatal interrupt. Another thirty-five thousand individuals perish as the yard’s core is obliterated.
Impact has virtually erased the unshielded mass of the Campanile. Its structure is atomised, except for the largest chunks of it, which punch onwards as the ship breaks up, still travelling at immensely high realspace velocities, communicating billions of tonnes of force. The largest surviving piece, a part of the Campanile’s solid-core drive section, spins out like a ricochet and kills the battleship Remonstrance of Narthan Dume like a slingshot pellet to the brainpan.
The final pieces of the Campanile clear the far side of Calth Veridian Anchor and spray on out across the planet, scattering, dipping and burning like meteorites.
This entire catastrophe has taken less than a second to occur. It has been entirely silent, a light-blink in the soundless void.
All that any observers – either on nearby vessels or the surface of the planet – would have seen was a blinding flash, like a star going nova, that was instantly replaced by a propagating series of overlapping, expanding fireballs that consume the entire sky.
The lightshock overloads the resolution of the bridge screens aboard the Macragge’s Honour. They brown out, fizzling. Plugged servitors squeal and chatter. Automatic systems slam the blast shutters on every bridge window port, shutting them in a ruddy, armoured gloom.
Marius Gage rises from his seat.
‘What the hell was that?’ he demands.
No one answers.
‘Find out!’ he roars.
The shockwave hits.
There is a blink. Ventanus knows what it is. Instinct identifies it in a fraction of the time it would take his conscious mind to explain it. It’s the electromagnetic pulse that precedes a major explosion.
He has time to see that Selaton has sensed it. The seneschal has not. Her human senses are too modest to register the blink. She’s saying something.
Ventanus grabs her and pulls her down. Arbute cries out, not understanding at all. He knows his armoured fingers are breaking some of her ribs. There is still a chance he can shield her with his body.
A brand-new sun fills the heavens above Numinus starport.
Light sears, then fire fills the sky over the fields and the estuary at Neride like a roasting surge from god’s own flamer.
Oll Persson flinches, though the heat and wind are still half a minute away. He’s seen ships explode in orbit. He’s never seen anything this big.
The twilight flushes orange. Evening shadows stretch behind them. The crop workers look up, baffled, horrified.
‘Trooper Persson?’ Graft asks, unable to frame a more complex question.
‘God save us all,’ Oll says.
The swartgrass stirs, swishes.
The wind hits, hot, as though a furnace door has opened nearby.