Quoted By:
“The RAIN averts her eyes in preparation for the killing below.
Armored blast shutters clamshell close. Sensor clusters duck inside radiation-hardened blisters. MERRYGATE’s avatar disappears in a wash of static as her electronic infrastructure engages tertiary radiation hardening protocols.
I swim in an ocean of red. Bright red. Rose red. The distinctive color of super-oxygenated blood supplemented with a half-fraction of recombinant fetal hemoglobin. I taste it as it leaks out from my pressure-ruptured lungs like salty, coppery smoke.
Sixty seconds. The hairpin turn continues. The RAIN rotates her prow towards the projected impact zone to minimize the cross-sectional area of her hull. In a few seconds, radiation flux would instantly strip several hundred kilograms of solid mass from her forward ablative plates.
Twenty seconds. I feel something give way inside my chest cavity. A sense of ripping or separation – like tearing away the last page of a well-worn book. A bad sign. Moments later, the red curtain streaming from my lungs begins to slow. A worse sign.
Five seconds. The hairpin turn finishes and I am barely conscious. The launch trigger no longer needs to prick my finger to initiate launch verification. It simply siphons away a tithe of the acceleration gel before retracting with a distinctive ping.”
Launch. Weightlessness reimposes itself, allowing me to perceive the two-second delay between launch and impact. The antimatter submunitions began separating as soon as the missile left its launch tube, catapulting themselves into a hemispheric spread pattern. Wide angle. Minimal fuse delay. Indiscriminate guidance. Everything occupying the RAIN’s forward angle became a valid target for their aggressive seekers – from the swarm of incoming missiles to the civilian vessels inching away from our current battlespace. Nothing would be spared.
Perhaps not even ourselves. The incoming missiles were two thousand kilometers too close. I set the minimum detonation threshold for our own missile even closer, relying on the engineering tolerances that had protected us so many times before. Even so, the radiation pressure alone could cause significant damage to our external structure. And I…….I….
Must not weep as I remember that first vow I made on the base of that great mountain, when the stars were still bright and young and my home was still cast in that lovely shade of blue-ochre:
“…I consecrate the blood of my planet with my own, and vow to…”
“…to be honored as one made from blood and acclaimed in starlight…”
“…”
>Roll 1d2, best of one, DC:1
