Quoted By:
The NOVEMBER RAIN has drawn blood. It is a moment I have anticipated and dreaded in equal measure. With her arsenal, there are no half measures; the first step she takes towards violence is also her last and only step.
I recall the click I heard when I inserted my launch-key into the central control panel. The soft whirring of a sample-centrifuge as the ship processed blood from a finger-prick to verify my biometric information. Finally, I remember the gentle change in the RAIN’s velocity vector as the cold-launch system pushed a pair of missiles out from their narrow launch tubes
The RAIN does not operate on half measures. The missiles we fired had little in common with the lithe anti-shipping missiles typically mounted on patrolling warships. There are no sensible yield-restrictions here. Our fusion warheads sat comfortably within the ten-gigaton range, mated to a heavily-armored chassis capable of providing continuous acceleration from launch until impact. It was a delivery system designed to mitigate the possibility of mid-course interception – to push each warhead fast and far enough to break an unprepared fleet or shatter an unlucky colony.
And shatter the colony did. With the docked capitals destroyed, the possibility of a successful intercept was remote. The RAIN’s missile-pair streaked towards the moon with no resistance, hugging its airless surface to avoid detection until the last possible moment.
To the Mizarian’s credit, their station did manage to detect one of the missiles before impact, releasing a chain of guided interceptors that surged forward on an aggressive intercept trajectory. But basic kinematics tend to be non-negotiable. A quick glance at their acceleration vectors told me that they were hounding a target that they simple could not reach in time.
And so, I watched the first missile impact just north of the equatorial line, vaporizing the purification facility instantly before sublimating several thousand square kilometers of surface-ice into vapor. Light from the detonation seeped through the moon’s subsurface ocean, briefly outlining cracks and trenches engraved in brilliant turquoise.
The second missile performed similarly, destroying the last purification node a few seconds. Here, the crust was thinner. Instead of vaporizing, the ice sheet cracked and melted, creating a large – but temporary – ocean visible from orbit...."
