“You had best, Tirdal,” she said with an earflick. “You will reflect on my training. And our Line will note how you do, youngling.”
The destroyer flickered into existence barely a diameter from the planet. Such a jump had been risky, but it was not as dangerous as a long approach to such a target. For long milliseconds, nothing happened as factors and preset calculations were compared. Then a swarm of angry dots erupted forth, flying straight as the meteoroids they would imitate. The kinetic weapons entered the atmosphere in a reticulan spread as ground-based missiles and beams blazed to intercept. Some were destroyed by counterfire. The lone Tslek desperately launched message drones, but the remaining weapons tracked in on the facility and adjusted their perfect courses into erratic terminal maneuvers. They hammered the ground, flashing into multikiloton incandescence and lifting the decoy base, now rubble, to the stratosphere and beyond. The bright spheres of the detonations subsided into mushroom clouds that would take days to dissipate, drifting around the globe in long, glowing streaks. Beams and more missiles fired space-to-space, destroying most of the few drones that had launched. The Tslek would find out what had happened sooner or later, but any delay was of tactical use.
Three of the planetary weapons, perhaps decoyed by the systems of the base, fell just to the south and west of the target area. The white flashes of the immolations were noted only by rough beasts.