Hundreds of starships were caught by the micro-nova burst. Adamist vessels were luckier, in that their bulky structure shielded the crews from the worst of the radiation. Their mechanical systems underwent catastrophic failure as the X-rays penetrated them, instantly turning them into flying wrecks, coughing out vapour like the Villeneuve’s Revenge . Scores of life support capsules hurtled clear of the dangerously radioactive hulks.
Exposed voidhawks suffered badly. The ships themselves died wretchedly as their cells’ integrity was decimated. The further they were from the detonation, the longer their misery was dragged out. Their crews in the thin-walled, exposed toroids were killed almost instantly.
Trafalgar’s spherical counter-rotating spaceport buckled like a beachside shack in a hurricane. The nulltherm foam coating its girders and tanks crisped to black and moulted away. Air in the pressurized sections was superheated by the radiation, expanding with explosive force, ripping every habitable section to shreds. Tanks ruptured. Fusion generators destabilised and flash vaporised.
The concussion was totally outside the load capacity of the spindle. With fusion generator plasma roaring out of the collapsing sphere, the slender gridwork started to bend. It snapped off just above the bearing and took flight, deflating into a flaccid carcass beneath the short-lived fireballs puffing open across its superficies.
A dozen datavised emergency situation alerts vibrated urgently inside Samual Aleksandrovich’s skull. He looked up at the staff officers conducting the daily strategy review. More worrying than the initial crop of alerts was three of them immediately failing as their processors crashed. Then the lights flickered.
Samual stared at the ceiling. “Bloody hell.” Information pouring into his mind confirmed there’d been an explosion outside the asteroid. But big enough to affect internal systems? Outside his panoramic window, the central biosphere’s axial light gantry was darkening as the civil generators powered down in response to losing their cooling conduits. Whole sections of the asteroid’s ultra-hardened communications net had gone off-line. Not a single external sensor remained active.
The office lighting and environmental systems switched to their back-up power cells. High-pitched whines, the daily background sound pervading the entire asteroid, began to deepen as pumps and fans shut down.
Seven marines in full body armour rushed into the office, a detachment of the First Admiral’s bodyguard. The captain in charge didn’t even bother to salute. “Sir, we are now in a C10 situation, please egress your secure command facility.”
A circular section of floor beside the desk was sinking down to reveal a chute that curved away out of sight. Flashing lights and sirens had begun to echo the datavised alarms. Thick metal shields were closing across the window. More marines were running along the corridor just outside the office, shouting instructions. Samual almost laughed at how close such dramatics came to being counter-productive. People needed to remain calm in such events, not have their fears accentuated. He considered refusing the earnest young captain’s directive; gut instinct, acting out the role of gruff lead-from-the-front commander. Trouble was, that kind of gesture was so totally impractical at his level. Preserving the authority of the command structure was essential in a crisis of this magnitude. Threats had to be countered swiftly, which only an uninterrupted chain of command could achieve.
Even as he hesitated, the floor trembled. They really were under attack! The concept was incredible. He stared at the cups on the table in astonishment as they started to jitter about, spilling tea.
“Of course,” he told the equally apprehensive marine captain.
Two of the marines jumped down the chute first, their magpulse rifles drawn ready. Samual followed them. As he skidded his way down along the broad spiral an assessment and correlation program went primary in his neural nanonics, sorting through the incoming datastreams to discover exactly what had happened. SD Command confirmed the Villeneuve’s Revenge had detonated a quantity of antimatter. The damage to Trafalgar was considerable. But it was the thought of what had happened to the ships of the 1st Fleet which chilled him. Twenty had been docked at the time of the explosion, three further squadrons had been holding station a hundred kilometres away. Two dozen voidhawks were on their docking ledge pedestals. Over fifty civil utility and government craft were in close proximity.
The secure command facility was a series of chambers dug deep into Trafalgar’s rock. Self sufficient and self-powered, they were designed to hold the First Admiral’s staff officers during an attack. Any weapon powerful enough to damage them would split the asteroid into fragments.
In view of what had just happened, it wasn’t the most comforting thought Samual had with him as he came off the end of the chute. He strode into the coordination centre, drawing nervous glances from the skeleton crew on duty. The long rectangular room with its complex curving consoles and inset holographic windows always put him in mind of a warship’s bridge; with the one advantage that he’d never have to endure high-gee manoeuvres in here.
“Status please,” he asked the lieutenant commander in charge.
“Only one explosion so far, sir,” she reported. “SD command is trying to re-establish contact with its sensor satellites. But there were no other unauthorised ships within the planetary defence perimeter when we lost contact.”
“Don’t we have any linkages?”
“There are some sensors functional on the remaining spaceport, sir. But they’re not showing us much. The antimatter’s EM pulse crashed a lot of our electronics, even the hardened processors are susceptible to that power level. None of the working antennas can acquire an SD platform signal. It could be processor failure, or actual physical destruction. We don’t know which yet.”
“Get me a GDOS satellite, then. Link us to a starship. I want to talk to somebody who can see what’s going on outside.”
“Yes sir. Combat back-up systems are deploying now.”
More of the coordination centre crew were hurrying in and taking their places. His own staff officers were coming in to stand behind him. He caught sight of Lalwani and beckoned urgently.
“Can you talk to any voidhawks?” he asked in a low voice when she reached him.
“Several.” Deep pain was woven across her face. “I feel them dying still. We’ve lost over fifty already.”
“Jesus Christ,” he hissed. “I’m sorry. What the hell’s happening out there?”
“Nothing else. There are no Organization ships emerging as far as the survivors are aware.”
“Sir!” the lieutenant commander called. “We’re reestablishing communications with the SD network. Three GDOS satellites are out, they must have been irradiated by the explosion. Five are still functional.”
One of the holographic windows flickered with orange and green streaks, then stabilized. The image was coming from an SD sensor satellite; it was positioned on the perimeter of Trafalgar’s defence network, ten thousand kilometres away. None of the inner cordon of satellites had survived.
“Hell,” the First Admiral muttered. The rest of the coordination centre was silent.
Half of Trafalgar’s lengthy peanut-shape glimmered a deep claret against the starscape. They could see sluggish waves of rock crawling across the ridges, boulder-sized globules sprinkling from the crests, cast away by the asteroid’s rotation. The ruined spaceport was retreating from its fractured spindle, turning slowly and scattering blistered fragments in its wake. Igneous spheres drifted without purpose around the stricken rock, squirting out sooty vapour like cold comets: the ships too close to the antimatter blast for their crews to survive the radiation blaze.