Low power planet bust

The room shook, vibrating enough to rattle the chairs. She felt her viscera become momentarily buoyant, and realized that the ship's gravity field had flickered.

 "What is that?" Memah stood, fighting sudden, inexplicable panic. After all, what could possibly pose a danger to-Ratua held up a hand to quiet her. Those green eyes watched the 'proj. "Wait a second," he said.  "Something's wrong."

 The image of the planet Despayre seemed to shiver as a thin beam of emerald green-nearly the same color as Ratua's eyes, she thought-from off the edge of the 'proj lanced into the center of the single huge continent.

 They both watched disbelievingly as an orange spot blossomed on the image of the planet. It seemed no bigger than Memah's thumbnail at first, but it grew rapidly, spreading in an expanding circle. The center of the orange turned black.

 "Kark," Ratua said. He sounded stunned.

 "What? What is it?"

 "They-they're firing at the planet. With the superlaser."  The orange and black spread in irregular waves now, continuing outward from the center. The blue of the ocean didn't even slow it down.

“The atmosphere's on fire," Ratua said. Calmly, as if he were discussing the weather. Going to be a warm day today, temperature around five thousand degrees . . .

 She felt a horrifying urge to laugh. It didn't seem real-it couldn't be real. Ratua must've tuned in to some future-fic holo by mistake. It wasn't a real planet she was watching burn. No. Things like that just didn't happen.

 Memah stared at the image. She could not look away.

SUPERLASER FIRE CONTROL, THETA SECTOR, DEATH STAR

 Tenn looked at the images from the targeting cam. He still had his hand on the firing lever. He released it and stared, watching as the very air on the prison world caught fire in a runaway planetary holocaust. Seismographic sensors showed that massive groundquakes had begun, rumbling down into the bowels of the planet. Giant waves in the ocean, generated by the shifting of tectonic plates, rushed for the shores of the big continent. Volcanoes spewed lava. Clouds of steam and volcanic ash began to rapidly obscure the surface from view-but not fast enough.  He had just killed everything on the planet Despayre. If all life wasn't dead already, it would be soon.

 The CO moved to look over his shoulder. He didn't congratulate Tenn on the shot; he just stood there.

 "Stang," Tenn said.

 The CO nodded. "Yeah."

 COMMAND CENTER, OVERBRIDGE, DEATH STAR

 Motti said, "Engineering says the capacitors will be recharged in an hour and thirteen minutes."

 Tarkin watched the projection as the effects of the beam manifested on the planet. By the time the second pulse was ready for discharge, there wouldn't be anything alive on the world below them to care. The chain reaction was massive. And at only one-third of the power that would be available when it was fully operational.

 Amazing.

(...)

An hour and fifteen minutes after the first beam, Tenn fired the second one.

The planet Despayre, already scorched lifeless and beset with cataclysmic groundquakes and volcanism, began to shake like some tormented creature in its death throes. Massive cracks, thousands of kilometers long and tens of klicks wide, striated the world. Mountains collapsed in one hemisphere as they jutted up and rose in another. It was impossible to see all this directly, of course, because of the cloud cover that had blanketed the surface, but the IR and VSI scopes showed everything all too clearly. The molten core of the globe, already venting through innumerable new volcanoes, oozed to the surface and produced oceans of lava that spread across the land. This was how the planet had been born, and this was how it was dying.

An hour and nineteen minutes later, when Tenn fired the third beam that blew the charred and burned-out cinder apart, shattering it into billions of pieces, it seemed almost pointless. Everybody and everything on it had already been roasted, scalded, or drowned. The system's gravity twisted as the planetary well ceased to exist. Shield sensors quietly recorded the thousands of fragments, from the size of pebbles to that of mountains, deflected from the station.

Sweet Queen Quinella. A whole planet, destroyed. Just like that. No matter how tough you thought you were, that was hard to stomach.  Especially when you were the one who had pulled the lever.

***

Star Wars: Death Star Part 2 Chapter 55-56