Slowly, the crippled cruiser rotated in space.  The bold, white printed letters had been sheared in half with the rest of the starship, and what remained where stretched and distorted from the intense heat that has washed over the entire skin of the ship.<br/><br/>The cruiser, a colonial-military warship, was a long cylinder with a bulge in the center, stretching for almost two and a half kilometers.  It weighed more than most cities, and could demolish one with a single salvo from its 550 millimeter cannons.  Along the bottom of the ship ran its primary weapon: a massive railgun two kilometers long that fired ferromagnetic slugs encased in a thick layer of depleted uranium at speeds over 40 kilometers a second.  It came equipped with twenty hangars, fifteen of which could hold twenty superiority fighters.  It's armor was three meter thick Comp-A plating that made up 75% of its total weight.  Most ammunition would simply shatter on impact.<br/><br/>It was the ultimate behemoth in capital ship engagements, cutting through other ships like a scythe through wheat.  It's massive armor shrugged off bombs as if they were no more than firecrackers.<br/><br/>It was too bad the designers had never considered a detonation<em>inside</em>the cruiser.<br/><br/>Since the spacecraft was a sealed environment, the bomb was that much more devastating.  All of the energy, heat, and pressure was trapped, turning the compartments around the explosion into another, less obvious bomb.<br/><br/>The shockwave ballooned out from the detonation site, crushing four decks and breaching the axis corridor in three hundredths of a second.  Being a vortex bomb, the explosion quickly collapsed in on itself, bringing everything with it.  This exerted tremendous force on the outer hull, forcing it to buckle and split.  The crack exponentially grew, ripping through the thick Comp-A like tissue paper as the titanic mass of the ship pulled at it.<br/><br/>Half a second after detonation, the<em>Traveler</em>was split into two parts: the bow, a kilometer remaining, and the stern, a mere four hundred meters.  The rest of the ship had been vaporized or shattered.<br/><br/>Within minutes, sensors picked up dozens of small craft fleeing the two halves, both of which twisted and turned erratically in their own debris field.  One lifepod smashed into a twenty meter wide chunk of deck plate and disappeared in a puff of white atmosphere and flash-freezing fuel.<br/><br/>The rest dove and spun, struggling to escape the treacherous debris field.<br/><br/>In the distance, tens of thousands of kilometers away was Novus.  Right now, it was about the size of an one's outstretched palm: a sphere of blue, green, and white.  The hemispheral storm was still present, although the planet's rotation was quickly carrying it over the horizon.  Behind Novus, two moons hung in space; a pair of silvery orbs suspended over Novus, so close that it appeared they were kissing.<br/><br/>One by one, the lifepods reoriented themselves, their tiny engines burning bright blue as they fled to their new home.