This beam caused relatively little secondary damage; its energies were tuned specifically to stay contained within its circumference and to bore deep into the Eneshan ground. The resulting hole was more than eighty yards deep before some of the debris thrown up from the beam’s work (and some of the debris from the six levels of palace) filled the bottom of the hole to a depth of several meters.
The second beam pierced the palace’s administrative wing. Unlike the first beam, this beam was tuned wide and designed to throw off a massive amount of waste heat. The administrative wing of the palace buckled and sweated where the beam struck. Superheated air tore through the offices, blasting wide doors and windows and igniting everything inside with a combustion point below 932 degrees centigrade. More than three dozen Eneshan night-shift government workers, military guards and janitors immolated, broiling instantly within their carapaces. The hierarch’s private office and everything in it, directly in the focused center of the beam, turned to ash only fractions of a second before the firestorm the beam’s heat and energy created blew those ashes to all corners of the rapidly deconstructing wing.
The second beam was by far the most destructive but the least critical of the three beams. The Special Forces certainly didn’t intend or expect to assassinate the heirarch in her private office; she was rarely in it on any evening and would absolutely not have been in it on this night, when she was attending to public functions as part of the Chafalan celebrations. She was on the other side of Dirluew entirely. It would have been a clumsy attempt at best. But the Special Forces wanted it to look like a clumsy attempt on the heirarch’s life, so the heirarch—and her immense and formidable personal security detail—would be kept far from the palace while the 2nd Platoon accomplished its actual goal.
The third beam had the lowest power of any of them and flickered as it surgically battered away at the roof of the palace, like a surgeon cauterizing and removing skin one layer at a time. The goal of this beam was not terror or wholesale destruction but to cut a direct pathway to a palace chamber, in which resided the 2nd Platoon’s goal, and the lever that, it was hoped, would serve to pry the Eneshans out of their tripartite plan to attack humanity.
::We’re going to kidnap what now?:: asked Daniel Harvey.
::We’re going to kidnap Vyut Ser,:: Jane Sagan said. ::Heir to the Eneshan throne.::
Daniel Harvey gave a look of sheer incredulousness, and Jared was reminded why Special Forces soldiers, despite their integration, actually bothered to meet physically for briefings: In the end, nothing could really top body language.
Sagan forwarded the intelligence report on the mission and the mission specs, but Harvey piped up again before the information could unpack completely. ::Since when have we gotten into the kidnapping business?:: Harvey asked. ::That’s a new wrinkle.::
::We’ve done abductions before,:: Sagan said. ::This is nothing new.::
::We’ve abducted adults,:: Harvey said. ::And generally speaking they’ve been people who mean us harm. This kidnapping actually involves a kid.::
::It’s more like a grub,:: said Alex Roentgen, who by now had unpacked the mission briefing and had begun to go through it.
::Whatever,:: Harvey said. ::Grub, kid, child. The point is, we’re going to use a young innocent as a bargaining chip. Am I right? And that’s the first time we’ve done that. It’s scummy.::
::This from the guy who usually has to be told not to blow shit up,:: Roentgen said.
Harvey glanced over to Roentgen. ::That’s right,:: he said. ::I usually am the guy you have to tell not to blow shit up. And I’m telling you that this mission stinks. What the fuck is wrong with the rest of you?::
::Our enemies don’t have the same high standards as you, Harvey,:: Julie Einstein said, and forwarded a picture of the pile of children’s corpses at Gettysburg. Jared shivered again.
::Does that mean we have to have the same low standards as they do?:: Harvey said.
::Look,:: Sagan said. ::This isn’t up to a vote. Our intelligence people tell me the Rraey, the Eneshans and the Obin are getting close to a big push into our space. We’ve been harassing the Rraey and the Obin on the margins but we haven’t been able to move against the Eneshans because we’re still working under the polite fiction that they’re our allies. This has given them the time to prepare, and despite all the disinformation we’ve been feeding them they still know too much about where our weak points are. We’ve got solid intelligence that says the Eneshans are right up front on any plan of attack. If we move against the Eneshans openly, all three of them will be at our necks, and we don’t have the resources to fight them all. Harvey’s right: This mission takes us into new territory. But none of our alternative plans have the same impact this one does. We can’t break the Eneshans militarily. But we can break them psychologically.::
By this time Jared had absorbed the entire report. ::We’re not stopping with kidnapping,:: he said to Sagan.
::No,:: Sagan said. ::Kidnapping alone won’t be enough to make the hierarch agree to our terms.::