Death by Escaping

It was diagrams of the four chief runes of banishment. They wouldn’t banish Cherubael, because they hadn’t been properly invoked. But I was pretty sure just reading them would hurt.
Cherubael squealed and tumbled back. I stepped forward a pace, keeping the book raised and open.
Wracked with agony, the daemonhost soared back across the bridge, crashed through the main screen and shattered the hololithic plates in a shower of crystal and sparks. It bounced twice off the ceiling like a maddened hornet fighting a window pane, the colour of its flame-halo turning yellow and then furnace orange.
Cherubael dropped, hit the floor and burned through it leaving a circular, smouldering hole.
...They hurried towards the exit. Deep, bass detonations from somewhere deep in the Essene rocked the floor. Multiple alarms were sounding. Sparks cascaded from the buckled ceiling of the bridge.
...But the way was blocked. Cherubael had come back for me.
Its malicious rampage had crippled the Essene. It was still seething with the pain I had inflicted. It wasn’t even talking any more.
...
We managed to get about sixteen kilometres from the Essene when the first of the real spasms shook it. The majestic sprint-trader, Isolde-pattern, pride of its master, looked like a black shell to us, lit from within by raging atomic fires, spilling trails of debris behind it as it slowly tumbled into the embrace of the gas giant.
There was a small bright flash and then two more, almost simultaneous, like a flicker. Then a white dot appeared where the Essene had been, and grew bigger, and then became a white line that got brighter and longer and closer, until we could see it was the flaming edge of a huge expanding disk of nuclear energy.
The pinnace vibrated frantically like a bead rattle in the hand of an excited child as the shockwave seared past and around us.
Then it was quiet, and still again.
And the Essene was gone.



"Hereticus", Chapter Eighteen