Congratulations on Oblierating the City from Orbit!

The ship will ease into orbit silently, a city unto itself, towering mire of steel set in the sky, immobile by the merit of the application of constant force, constant effort against the laws of physics preventing it from descending into the well of the planet’s gravity, from whence escape would be all but impossible.

The helmsman will sip his coffee nervously as the captain makes his rounds. The captain will be frowning the way he always does when you have this sort of job, but he won’t say anything. He’ll just nod at you, at the gunnery console, and you’ll nod back.

The calculations will be set, trajectories double checked. There will be no room for error here, which will seem a little ironic to you, but you won’t say anything. You’ll just sit there silently while the captain paces, the helmsman sips his coffee and the rest of the bridge does everything they can to avoid looking at you.

It’ll take the magistrate five minutes to arrive from his quarters, but it will feel like an eternity. When he steps on the bridge, sash barely buckled, belly bulging from his waistband, he’ll be sucking his breath like he just sprinted up a staircase, a fact made all the more puzzling by the absence of stairs on the ship. He’ll barely seem aware of where he is, and the odor of liquor will emenate from his body, permeating the entire bridge.

His assistant will trail him, a thin lipped man whose face will have long since forgotten how to smile. He’ll carry paperwork with him, paperwork he’ll hand to the magistrate, who will flip through it briefly before he mumbles, more to himself than to the captain:

“Guilty. Carry it out.”

The captain will sigh and nod in response.

“Gunnery officer,” he’ll shout tonelessly. “Ready firing solution.”

“Ready,” you’ll respond, the tension you feel somehow absent from your voice.

“City guilty of crimes against space,” the captain will say. “Execute sentence.”

“Aye,” you’ll shout before pressing the big red button on your console. It’ll have fire stenciled on it in giant white letters, and it’ll load a giant chunk of rock into the magnetic accelerator that runs along the spine of the ship. The accelerator will charge the rock up to sub-luminal but not inconsiderable speeds. The rock will then enter the upper atmosphere and descend along the trajectory you calculated. It will press past whipping winds and split clouds before it finds its mark, striking the city with a ballistic force equivalent to a nuclear bomb. The force of the impact, the shockwave, will crush buildings and force a ring of debris outward and upward in a plume of dust and smoke visible from space. In an instant the city, twelve miles edge to edge to edge, will be gone, replaced by a hole in the ground.

The magistrate will leave before the dust has begun to settle, his assistant trailing. When the two depart it’ll feel as if the bridge took a collective sigh of relief, though no one will make a sound.

“Helmsman,” the captain will shout. “Plot a course away.”

“Aye,” the helmsman will respond, relief palpable in his voice.

You’ll be left to sit at your station and calculate theoretical vectors for theoretical asteroids that might one day strike theoretical targets, a peaceful activity when compared to devising and reviewing the math required to destroy a city of fourteen million people in an instant. You’ll know how to do both things, but you’ll prefer the former.

You’ll have a moment of epiphany, during a particularly interesting calculation, that although you know many things about the math associated with resolving them, you won’t actually be entirely sure what “space crimes” are. You’ll ponder asking the captain for a moment, but given the gravity of the situation you just resolved, that’ll seem like a bad idea. The question will stick in your mind, however, and calculations will become, for a time, much more difficult than they need to be.

Congratulations on Obliterating the City from Orbit!