Ragnarok

Chapter 39 - Worldbreaker

The assault, when it came, was threefold.

The first wave was a concentrated beam of light, fired from the asteroid of Ceres. The beam was powered from multiple strings of solar energy collectors, ranging from Mercury orbit to the scattered outposts and mining colonies that made up the Belt itself. For a few moments, the entire System shuddered from the amounts of energy that were being diverted, though the few outposts that housed traditional human life maintained life support. The A.I.s that made up most of the mining outposts required far less, and simply entered hibernation for a time.

All of that energy was routed into a single beam of laser light, of tremendous wattage. The Seeds of Yggdrasil had moved into a diamond shape, and the folded themselves inside out, to reveal highly reflective surfaces. Their facets glittered for a moment in the dim starlight, before they were struck by the torrent of concentrated photons, and then the Seeds seemed to become a second Sun, hovering just above the surface of the rogue planet.

The beam continued on, and immediately lanced down into the blasted rock below. The frozen rock flash-boiled instantly, the crust vaporizing before its concentrated force, and the laser bored quickly down into the still semi-active mantle. The surface of the planet was quickly honeycombed with cracks, as the molten lifeblood of the planet began to blast out from the lance of laser light that impaled the planet like an animal skewered on a glowing arrow.

The second assault came from another satellite, one that had followed behind the rogue planet since it had passed the orbit of Eris, trailing along silently in its wake. Upon autorization of its trigger, it opened its core and emitted a beam of exotic radiation, a wavelength that had only been discovered upon study of the Erisian crystalforms. The crystals broadcast a low-level version of the radiation, stretched to the point that only one particle in a billion interacted with it. Just enough to keep the tiny explosions contained, but still providing enough energy to power the crystalline life that was creating it.

This unique form of radiation, called simply E-rays, was notable for forcibly causing a reversal in the electron clouds that made up regular matter, anything from stone to processed steel. The stronger the concentration of E-rays, the greater the percentage of electrons effected. And what the E-rays actually did was convert electrons into their antimatter opposite, positrons.

When matter interacts with antimatter, a tremendous amount of energy is released, as the opposing particles annihilate each other instantly. A beam of this radiation was now being lanced directly through Ragnarok's torn-open crust, into its boiling insides, and converting everything it touched into antimatter, to react explosively with the matter around it.

The satellite did not last long; producing such a tightly focused dose of the antimatter radiation was fatal to anything made itself of normal matter, but in the time it survived, several trillion tons of Ragnarok's own mantle was converted into antimatter, more than enough to blast the crust off of the rogue world like it was a hard-boiled egg having the shell cracked open.

The third and final wave came from the remaining Jovian moons, a hail of rocky debris accelerated to near-relativistic speeds that hammered through the cracked shell of the planet's crust and blasted into the seething ocean of magma at the mantle. If space were not a vacuum, the noise would have been tremendous, impact after impact slamming into the ravaged world's core and driving it towards the gravity well of great, wounded Jupiter. Each impact added more velocity to the core's descent, until it was plunging with suicidal speed through the outer reaches of the Jovian atmsophere. Shock waves rippled outwards as the enormously dense, metal core of the world blasted into areas of deeper and deeper pressure, dark places where hydrogen was condensed from a gas down into a superconductive metal.

The System breathed a sigh of relief as Ragnarok's core descended into the atmosphere of the gas giant. Nothing, they hoped, could survive the crushing pressures of the King of Planets. Thermal maps of the planet's remains showed a chaos of fused rubble, which had unfolded from its metallic core like an oyster leaving behind a single pearl as the only evidence it had ever existed.  Some of it scattered into ever-smaller fragments, slowly unravelling around Jupiter and creating a new ring of debris, while the heavier pieces followed the planet's core down into the crushing embrace of Great Jove.

* * *

Micah thought he had been prepared for disconnection when Rei had started her little speech and given him the nod, but the wrenching sensation of being drawn back to the Moon was unlike anything he'd experienced before. Time and space seemed to warp around Rei, as though she was just a shell that had cracked open to expose a black hole at her heart. He could not even begin to resist that tidal force pulling him away; he would have had better luck trying to paddle his way up a waterfall.

Then, after a moment of weightless drifting in the nothingness, he was back in his room on the Moon. For a handful of moments that seemed like eternities, he was alone, then Rei suddenly popped into existence, making him nearly jump out of his hammock. She looked as shaken as he was, as she pulled up the live feed of Ragnarok's methodical demolition.

"You know, I think you may have just triggered an interplanetary war," Micah said, his voice barely above a whisper.

"You saw how the scales were weighted, just as I did, Master," Rei replied without inflection, as she watched the metal core of the alien world plunge into Jupiter's atmosphere. "That thing had no intention of moving on in peace, let alone introducing us to some galactic federation. Striking while it was distracted with its bit of theater was our only option."

"How do you know that though, Rei?" Micah said, reaching out and grabbing her by the shoulder. She seemed unwilling to meet his eyes, at first. "You seemed like you were familiar with that voice, as if you'd spoken before. Where? What the hell's going on here, Rei?"

Rei finally met his eyes, staring at him for a moment before nodding quietly to herself. "I suppose it's time you were told. I..."

"Wait," Micah said, holding up a hand. "Look at the screen."

Rei turned back towards the live feed, which showed the surface of Jupiter, still wreathed in lightning and rippling from the shockwaves of the trillions of tons of debris that was being drawn into the gas giant's gravity well. It was quite the amazing sight, to be sure, but ...

There. She saw it, too. "Oh my god. Jupiter ... its temperatures are going through the roof. If I didn't know better, I'd say it was about to achieve..."

The huge, striped world suddenly disappeared, replaced with a blinding afterimage that was quickly replaced by the white hiss of static.

"... Fusion."