"What are they."
"They're disruptors. Look at the array pattern on the forward sections — those are interference matrices. They're not going to attack the amplifier. They're going to scramble it."
The two ships reached their position above the amplifier at almost the exact moment the column finished its rotation cycle and the topmost ring began to brighten in preparation for discharge.
The disruptors fired simultaneously.
Two cones of dense, pale-violet interference energy descended onto the amplifier from above. They did not strike the structure. They struck the energy flow within the structure. The streaming light that had been concentrating upward through the rings suddenly lost coherence at the seventh ring from the top, then the sixth, then the fifth. The concentration cascade reversed direction. The amplifier's output collapsed in on itself.
The discharge that was supposed to vaporize a city block instead detonated within the amplifier's own column.
