"What's she doing?" Poe asked, looking back at the Raddus.
Holdo had fallen back a little, once the rest of the crew were away, and now the cruiser was swinging around. Banking, engines flaring back to full power, and Poe frowned as he did a mental calculation.
She couldn't have the fuel to last more than five or ten minutes like that. Maybe less, as the engine glow went from steady to a brighter stuttering.
"She's going to burn out the engine liners if she keeps that up for long," C'ai Threnalli muttered.
"I don't think she's got much reason to care about the liners," Nien Nunb said, as the Raddus finished her turn and began plunging straight towards the First Order fleet.
Turbolaser fire lashed out at the Resistance ship, scoring first one hit and then another as it continued on a doomed voyage, and Poe frowned.
"Something's not right," he said.
"We know that much," Goode said. "What's going on?"
"I thought Holdo was-" Poe began, then chopped off the words; they all knew what he thought. "But why is she doing this? She can't achieve-"
Another blast hit the shields, and in reply they flared up – not the pale white from before, but a brilliant blue.
"The hypercharge coils," Nunb explained.
"What are hypercharge coils?" Poe asked, glancing back at the long-time Resistance member.
"It's the augmented shield system," Threnalli said, the abednedo pointing. "You remember?"
"Yeah, I know, I was wondering why she refused to turn the shields to full power," Poe agreed. "There's a whole shield bank she didn't turn on, that's how Leia got so badly hurt – that's part of why-"
He bit the words off.
"I didn't understand, and she didn't explain," he said.
"She's turned them on now," Threnalli told him, as sparks flashed from the shields of the cruiser.
It was plunging in closer and closer, now, on a direct reciprocal of the First Order fleet's course, and the guns were giving it a fearsome battering – but the shields repulsed every shot, and by now they were glowing a continuous blue like a sapphire.
"-wait," Poe said, softly. "There's no way – that ship's taking an impossible amount of punishment."
He looked at Nunb and Threnalli. "What's going on?" he said. "There's no way – something like that, there has to be a price!"
"There is," Nunb said, nodding. "The hypercharge coils don't last long before they burn out yet. A minute, maximum – then they explode."
It looked like whoever was commanding the Supremacy had realized what was going on, now, and that they weren't going to be able to stop the Raddus. But their turn was late, and the Supremacy was a giant and sluggish ship, and Holdo rode her Star Cruiser like a snubfighter.
It hit the shields of the massive capital ship with a white flash of lightning, one that made Poe flinch away from the viewport, and violent backlash energy crackled over the whole of the Supremacy's hull. Several towers and systems on the surface of the capital ship blew up, and it shuddered in space.
Then, now invisible inside, the Raddus reached the heart of her prey.
Whether the hypercharge coils failed at that point, or seconds later, was academic. The power system for hundreds of cubic kilometres of Star Destroyer had a cruiser-sized hole in it, and the hypermatter reactor ruptured cataclysmically.
The hull rippled, gouts of flame and smoke issuing forth, and hundred-metre long sections of superstructure flew through space like shrapnel. Secondary explosions lit the entire craft from wing to wing, fragments caught at least three of the escorting Star Destroyers with enough force to wreck them as well, and when the explosions faded it was clear that the Supremacy had been outright split in half by the explosion.
Poe's mouth worked soundlessly for a moment.
"May the Force be with her," Nunb said, bowing his head.
"Yeah," Poe agreed. "And – yeah."
AN:
An attempt to have the ramming attack while using a different bit of supertech from the X-Wing games, and without snapping space tactics in half.