cockpit of the ship and wondered what he was doing there, what in the world he was doing in a starship two centuries away from his home on Capitol and why hadn't he stayed there and kept his damned gift a secret and not joined the Service at all, where they could teach him to enhance his gift, teach him to be a pilot, teach him to win victories for the empire, and then, when suddenly it became an embarrassment to be breaking the Convention by using telepaths, cast him off, execute him as they had done the first dozen telepathic pilots who had home to port, declare him a traitor for having served them so well. In his mind he undid it and lived a complete life as the scientist he had thought he wanted to be back home, with several children and much honor and many friends but then he looked at the console and the computer told him he had a minute to go and the alarms rang loudly and his ears insisting that he DO SOMETHING NOW but there was nothing that he could do because he couldn't even turn the ship.
During the fourth minute, at the beginning of it, he cast his attention randomly toward Harper, the nearest of the three planets, randomly sorted a mind, randomly listened, randomly sought for what the common man on Harper was thinking of all this and hoping that in the man's mind there was some thought that would make the battle and the death stand for something, be worthwhile somehow.
The mind he found was that of an engineer who was leaning back in his chair wondering what in the world he could do about his mistress, who was also the boss's secretary, and who was now threatening to get revenge for his infidelity to her by telling the boss who it was who really designed the Hadgate bridge. Can I, wondered the engineer, soothe this over by getting her to bed again? She has no self-control in bed. And the engineer reached for a book.
Homer could not bear it. Bad enough to know that the military was gloating. Bad enough to hear the death agonies of his friends. But to know that an intelligent, responsible human being did not give a damn that not far above his head twenty good men had died for daring to want to resist the empire's attempt to murder them, that was unbearable. That was tho ultimate wound that they could cause Homer Worthing, and he screamed, "You're killing me, you bastard!" and his fingers launched the fusion devices. A moment later he changed his mind. A moment later his reason returned and he knew he could never commit such murder. But as his fingers reached for the controls that would abort the fusion devices, the first enemy projectile reached his ship, and he died in fire.
The three fusion devices went their way.
The imperial fleet was not prepared for this. It was so unthinkable, to use those weapons against a planet when their purpose was merely to destroy a ship without hitting it directly-- so unthinkable to commit such an atrocity, that they were utterly unprepared and even though they fired the intercepting projectiles, they were not quick enough. One of them intercepted the device heading for Harper Moon. But that was not enough.
Stoddard went first, the planet visibly rocking under the shock of having a tenth of its surface instantly converted into an inferno of corrupting atoms breaking down into their constituent parts. After a moment, the reaction spread throughout the planet's core, and it simultaneously exploded and collapsed in a reaction not particularly different from a star, though there was not enough matter to provide enough energy to sustain the reaction, and after only a few seconds of being a star the matter collapsed into a hot, glowing ball of fairly well-mixed elements.
The Stoddard reaction was over before the projectile reached Harper. The performance was repeated, with the addition of a tongue of fire reaching out to lick all the way around Harper Moon. Harper Moon did not explode. But every living thing on its surface died, and the ocean leaped into the atmosphere and then collapsed again, washing away all soil, all hints that anything other than water and rock had ever existed on the surface of the world.
And then all was still.
The captain of tht imperial fleet looked at the starfinder's graphic portrayal of what the ship's instruments had