Quoted By:
“The RAIN dampened her thrust, delaying our approach by a half-day. A trio of laser-linked sensor probes flew outwards in rapid succession, forming an artificial radio telescope large enough to intercept low-level EM radiation flitting between the defensive station and the departing garrison. Within two hours, freshly-written intrusion software bounced off a chain of navigation buoys before embedding itself into the station’s aging communications hardware.
Somewhere in the station, a cadre of aliens became cataleptic as their displays flickered with a pattern resembling a fractalized oil slick, recovering hours later with no meaningful recollections of the system anomaly they had neglected to pursue.
Data recovery was total. MERRYGATE returned with a list of confirmed targeted vectors.
There was no bluff. The targeting patterns we observed yesterday were accurate. The entire munition load of the defensive station – five dozen interceptor missiles and several kilotons of solid ammunition – would be expended against the Mizarian’s own orbital assets, allocated evenly across the two sister-moons.
The abandoned docking rings would shatter like tempered glass. Material from nearly a century of painstaking construction would smear widely across cobalt skies.
“And for what, companion?” asked MERRYGATE, frustrated that her exacting work had seemingly failed to uncover a deeper deception….
But I knew.
Collisional feedback. Ablative cascade. Kessler syndrome.
MERRYGATE confirmed my suspicions by running a modest kinematic simulation. The massive debris field liberated by the destruction of each ring would circumscribe the planet in less than an hour. As it traveled, the number of particles would rise exponentially as larger objects collided and disintegrated into smaller and smaller pieces.
Within days, the orbital space surrounding each moon would become impenetrable – a ceaseless storm of shrapnel traveling at tens of kilometers per second. Launch vehicles leaving the atmosphere would suffer tens of thousands of ablative impacts before breaching interplanetary space. Nothing would escape the surface of the moon unscathed.
But in exchange, few things could assail them either. Neither the RAIN nor her munitions had been built to resist such an extreme, indiscriminate degree of ablative damage. A scenario this desperate fell simply outside of her original design constraints.
