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Clearly pleased with how things had progressed, MERRYGATE finished the job with a flourish. Pushing propellent into the thrusters scattered around the docking ring, she began rotating the station when the relief flotilla was only a few million kilometers away, ramping spin-gravity beyond its usual limits. Then she sheared the ring - alternating thrust to buckle the internal structure. At first, the effect was subtle. Thousands of containers and docking spurs broke off, creating a shimmering outline around the station that grew by the minute. But within moments, the damage became critical. Massive chunks of hull cladding flew into the main superstructure, spawning chains of explosions that severed arresting cables and tore open habitation modules. By the time the relief fleet reached the station, none of it would be salvagable. If we were particularly lucky, the wreckage wouldn't be informative either; the deaths on the station would be attributed to simple decompression rather than more insidious means.
In either case, the RAIN would be long gone by the time they picked through the wreckage. Given the grossly inefficient burn-rate that MERRYGATE had cajoled them into, I doubted that they even had the capacity to return to the inner system even if they wanted to chase us.
There was only one more task to do before the RAIN's departure. While most of the drones have meandering aimlessly after the loss of their parent-station, we retain a small flotilla of mining drones that will remain operational for some time yet. They are too slow - and too detectable - to accompany the RAIN as she moves into the inner system, but there might be a way for them to do some good here:
>REDIRECT-SMALL. With some very simple programming, we can order our mining drones to slowly deorbit a cloud of small asteroids into a collision courses with the inner-system planets. A direct hit is unlikely, but the threat of asteroid attacks - even small ones - could tie up critical assets assets at a critical moment. [Low DC, dice-roll for success]
>REDIRECT-SMALL. With some very simple programming, we can order our mining drones to slowly deorbit one or two large asteroids into collision courses with the inner-system planets. The chances of de-orbiting a large asteroid without detection and interception is quite low, but the impact of such an object could be devastating... [High DC, dice-roll for success]
>LURE. The drones will slowly spread throughout the inner system, comm-buffers loaded with transmissions derived from the RAIN's own sensor signature. If we're lucky, this may solidify the idea that the RAIN is still lurking in the outer system and lend confusion to our initial attack.
>RELAY. The drones will spread throughout the belt, hide, and act as transmitters, in the event that MERRYGATE wishes to launch transmissions or intrusion attacks at more distant targets. This may grant increased anonymity if we wish to communicate with the Mizarians at any point.
