Free Exodus: Empires at War: Book 2 by Doug Dandridge Page A

seconds.
    The second missile,
targeted on the heavy cruiser, sped on a trajectory that would intersect the
warship in twenty-nine seconds.  The cruiser was not at alert status, her Captain
and crew believing that they would not be called on to fight any threat to
their charge on this day.  To their credit they had targeting systems and laser
rings up and running within ten seconds of one of their fighters exploding in
space.  Within fifteen seconds both forward laser rings were pouring full power
into the antiship missile.  At sixteen seconds the missile detonated in a
bright point of light.
    Missile three was on
course for the closest destroyer, arrival time just under thirty-five seconds. 
That ship was even faster on the draw than the cruiser, taking the missile out
over twenty seconds from impact.  Both missiles targeting warships had failed
to reach their targets.  They had accomplished their secondary mission as
distracters, taking the ships’ attentions off of missile four which was on a
heading toward the surface of the ring.
    Viper oriented the
fighter toward the ring as she came underneath.  Locking onto the region where
he knew the target to be, he triggered the nose and wing lasers at full power
into that section.  Made up of superconducting alloys just like Imperial
warships, the laser energy was transferred quickly out from the point of
impact, not allowing the heat to burn through.  The point of impact was still
much hotter than the surrounding absorbing area.  And it formed the target
point for the incoming missile.
    The missile struck the
station at over four hundred kilometers per second, imparting a considerable
amount of kinetic energy into the impact point.  The warhead went off on
impact, dwarfing the kinetic energy as a hundred megatons of explosive power
ripped into the station.  The tough skin was penetrated, vaporized, allowing
the flood of heat and other radiation to enter the interior of the station.  On
such an enormous object this was a pinprick.  In the couple of square
kilometers of surface nearest the blast it was Armageddon.
    The observation room
was near the edge of the Armageddon, as the hotspot generated by the fighter
was not precisely on target, so the missile was not precisely on either.  The
rooms under Armageddon were scoured clean of anything they contained.  The
observation room was merely broken open to space and flooded with radiation. 
The occupants were probably dead from radiation poisoning eventually.  They
were surely dead from being sucked out into space.
    The Emperor and his
family might have survived the exposure to space for several minutes, while
they were pushed toward the black hole by the explosive force of atmosphere
leaving the observation deck.  They didn’t survive the gigawatts of laser
energy the fighter played over the opening once the assassin picked up his
target’s tracker leaving the station.
    Seconds after the
explosion that killed the Emperor, Empress, Heir and Spare, the Heraklion opened up on its detached fighter with its A and B rings.  The fighter
shimmered for a brief second as terawatts of heat transferred into her.  Then
she went up in a bright flash as her fusion bottle ruptured.  A fraction of a
second later the lasers from the destroyer reached the spreading plasma cloud,
stirring up the mess.  Within an hour all of the debris would fall into the
black hole, unrecoverable by man.  The only thing that remained was the mystery
of why a crew sworn to protect the Emperor had murdered him and his family.
    *     *     *
    The call went out to
the Central Naval Base through the wormhole.  Within minutes naval personnel
were coming through the gate to investigate what had happened.  Within an hour
another wave of investigators, this from the Imperial Secret Service and the
Imperial Investigation  Bureau, were roaming the station.  There was not much
to investigate with the bodies of victims and perpetrator gone.