"We're coming up on the day side now, sir."

The captain sat in the chair overlooking the bridge. Other men and women worked on various consoles and controls, overseeing the various functions of the gigantic warship. The craft was never built to hunt other warships, it's function laid in bombardment. Hunting other craft in orbit around a planet was a difficult, and imprecise affair that requires much, much more engine power than any ship that exists to be useful. Defense would usually be carried out by defensive emplacements on the ground.

Yet here they were.

Humanity's desire for war apparently exceeds it's capabilities.

The ship shook as the main cannon fired and coolants were ejected from the heat sinks. The RCS engines fired to compensate, and the ship jolted again.

"Are they on sensors yet?"

"Not on ours sir. Command reckons we'll pick 'em up not long before we hit them. They won't even come close to visual though, and even if they did..."

"We'd only be able to see them for a second"

"That's right, sir"

"Are the gunners sure they've got this? This is over a very long range - something I'm sure I don't need to remind them - and we've only got one shot at this."

"They're sure sir, their aim's spot on, and they'll never pick them up until it's too late."

Just as the Officer said, the sun began to shine over the planet below, light dancing off the atmosphere, coloring the sky a light blue.

"Sir!" A gunner cried from the other side of the bridge "We're picking up something on LADAR matching the profiles and expected trajectory of the enemy craft."

"It's where we expected it to be then?"

"Yes sir, the rounds should hit in a few seconds"

And so they waited those few, tense seconds, waiting for the small blip on the sensors to fly at orbital velocity into the slugs that the ship had been firing for the past half hour.

The blip fragmented into thousands of tiny blips, and for a second, you could almost see a little light, thousands of kilometers away, suddenly flash into existence, as the ship was torn apart, before slowly fading away.