Earth Strike (11 page)

But with the probable withdrawal of the Turusch fleet, the battlespace cleanup had begun.

SAR Recovery Craft Blue-Sierra boosted at a modest two thousand gravities, her forward singularity capturing the light of the system’s white dwarf just ahead and twisting it into billowing sheets and streamers of radiance. The ship was a four-thousand-ton converted tug, an ugly beetle shape with outsized grapplers trailing astern, like the legs and antennae of some highly improbable insect.

Search and Rescue operations had been an important part of the military procedure, all the way back to the pre spaceflight days of the twentieth century. In the days of wet-Navy aircraft catapulting from the decks of seagoing carriers, the destruction of a fighter meant either a dead aviator or one lost in an immensity of ocean or rugged terrain.

In space, though, the problem became a lot more complex. Countless things could go wrong with a gravfighter, through equipment failure or through enemy action, but the usual outcome saw the fighter with power off and drive singularities down, tumbling helplessly through space with the same vector it had been on when its systems shut down. If the pilot survived whatever had caused the situation failure in the first place, he or she was in for a long and uncomfortable ride…and an ultimately fatal one if somebody couldn’t come get them.

SAR Recovery Craft Blue-Sierra was an old in-orbit work-boat, originally a UTW-90 Brandt-class space-dock tug used for maneuvering large pieces of hull into position. Converted with the addition of singularity projectors fore and aft, it now had the acceleration necessary for locating a tumbling fighter, grappling with it, and bringing it back to the carrier or a repair/service vessel or facility. At the helm was Lieutenant Commander Jessica LeMay.

And she was worried.

“PriFly,” she called, addressing
America
’s Primary Flight Control, “this is SAR Blue-Sierra. I have a target at twelve hundred kay-em…closing…but I can’t get a visual. I’m losing signal in the dwarf.”

The dwarf was Eta Boötis B, the brighter star’s white-dwarf companion. A star with the mass of Sol, collapsed into a sphere the size of the Earth, a white dwarf this young—less than two billion years old—was still hot, with a surface temperature exceeding 20,000 degrees Celsius. A dim, faint point of light compared with the orange glare of the sub-giant Eta Boötis A, the dwarf gleamed with a harsh, arc-brilliant glare, still no bigger than a bright star, just ahead.

The white dwarf orbited Eta Boötis A at a distance of 1.4 astronomical units, with a period of about one and a third years. Eta Boötis IV was more than twice that distance out; the dwarf companion never came closer to Haris than one and a half AU. Apparently that wasn’t close enough to seriously disturb its orbit.

But LeMay had spotted a disabled gravfighter tumbling clear of battlespace at high velocity, moving along a vector that would take it quite close to Eta Boötis B, close enough that the dwarf’s gravitational pull would snag it within the next hour and pull it down. Radiation from the dwarf, however, was interfering with her optics, making the approach difficult.

At radar wavelengths, she still had a sharp return. Focusing on radar, she locked onto the target and followed. Slowly, LeMay’s tug closed with the disabled fighter, using the utility vehicle’s powerful singularity to match velocity, then flipping end-for-end to bring its array of mechanical grapplers around to face the target. Using small thrusters, the ungainly vessel nudged closer, arms unfolding, then closing over the Starhawk.

The fighter’s tumble slammed it against a grapple, threatening to put LeMay into a spin as well, but she jockeyed the maneuvering thrusters with an expert touch, countering the rotational energy and slowing the other vessel’s roll. Another touch on the thrusters, and pitch and yaw were corrected as well; the tug outmassed the fighter nearly five to one, and so could absorb some of the kinetic energy of the tumble without falling out of control.

Got it
. Grapples snapped home with a firm authority.

LeMay peered past the other ship on her main display. That damned white dwarf was close enough now to show a tiny disk, swiftly growing larger.

It was time to get the hell out of Dodge, as ancient tradition said.

With the prow of her vessel now aimed away from the dwarf and back toward distant Eta Boötis IV, she switched on the singularity projector, holding her breath as she did so because on a one-way work-boat like this one, there were no backups. The drive kicked in, however, and with a shuddering groan heard by conduction through the hull as the Starhawk’s mass stressed the grappling arms, she began decelerating at ten thousand gravities.

Anxious moments passed as the white dwarf glowing dead astern slowed in its apparent growth…then, blessedly, it began shrinking, dwindling to a bright star…and then to a dim one.

It would take fifteen minutes at this acceleration to make it back to the fleet.

Meanwhile, she engaged another grapple, an arm that unfolded, then extended a meter-long sliver, like a bright needle.

The needle was sheathed in programmed nanoceramic identical to the active nano that made up the Starhawk’s outer hull. As the needle touched the hull, it merged, passing smoothly through the gravfighter’s outer shell with seamless precision and without releasing internal atmosphere to the vacuum of space. Guided by the tug’s AI, which had an expert knowledge of a Starhawk’s internal layout, the probe slipped in deeper until it emerged within the pilot’s cockpit. Threads laced out, searching…connecting…joining. Several merged with the pilot’s e-suit, linking in with the medical and life support monitoring functions. Energy flowed through power connectors, as banks of lights switched on.

“Okay, PriFly,” LeMay said. “Pilot is alive but unconscious. Life support was down but has been reinstated. I’m transmitting telemetry from the Starhawk to sick bay now.”

“Blue-Sierra,” a new voice said in LeMay’s head, “this is
America
sick bay comm center. We have your telemetry. We’re taking over teleoperational control of the patient.”

“Copy, sick bay.”

Each gravfighter possessed an onboard suite of medical support systems and robotics, but when the Starhawk’s power had been knocked out, the med systems had gone down as well. At this moment, on board the crippled fighter, medical robots would be probing the pilot, checking for injury, begin to take steps to stabilize his or her condition.

Idly, LeMay checked the pilot’s id, coming through now on her own display. Well, well. Commander Marissa Allyn—CO of the Dragonfires. And it looked like she was going to be okay.

That was good. A
lot
of Dragonfires had been killed in the action a few hours ago. They were still assembling the butcher’s bill, still looking for dead gravfighters with live pilots adrift in battlespace or beyond. But it didn’t look good; the squadron had almost certainly suffered over 50 percent casualties in the action.

And some of the survivors would be in a bad way.

She boosted her gravitational acceleration just a tad, pushing to get her recovery back to the ship just a few minutes sooner than otherwise.

CIC, TC/USNA CVS
America
Haris Orbit, Eta Boötis System
0125 hours, TFT

“Holo transmission coming through,” the CIC comm officer reported. “It’s General Gorman, sir.”

“Patch him through.”

The Marine general faded into solidity on the CIC deck, a few meters in front of Koenig’s couch. Koenig rose to greet him. The gesture was unnecessary. A Marine major general was exactly equivalent to a Navy rear admiral, and neither had precedence of rank. But formal protocol required a polite reception even of a holographic transmission, and, besides that, Koenig wanted to acknowledge the heroism of the Marines’ stand here over the past weeks.

“Admiral Koenig?” the image said. “I’m Eunan Gorman.”

“Welcome aboard, General,” Koenig replied.

“And welcome to Ate a Boot. I’ve been briefed. Sounds like you went through a meat grinder up there.”

“Four ships destroyed, General, seven seriously damaged. But the battlegroup is intact and ready for action if the Tush come back. We can begin the evacuation at once.”

“How many transports do you have? What capacity?”

“Eight troopships, General. Converted Conestoga-class. Enough for your Marines, General. Not for the colony.”

“We have just under five thousand Marines here, Admiral. We’re willing to double up to get the civilians out.”

Koenig sighed. He’d been dreading this. “How many civilians?”

“Approximately fifteen thousand here inside this perimeter, General. Another twenty, maybe twenty-two thousand at three other settlements on the planet.”

“I’m afraid they’ll have to take their chances, General. We have enough room for your people…maybe a few thousand locals if we really pack them in. But not
all
of them.”

Gorman’s image seemed to sag a bit. “I expected that, of course.”

Koenig pulled down a window in his head, linking through to a calculation function and spreadsheets listing the ships and compliments within the battlegroup.

“Hang on…okay. The Conestogas are rated at eight hundred men each. That gives us a surplus of fourteen hundred, more or less. If we ditch all of your heavy equipment—”

“That was already a given, Admiral.”

“If we ditch the heavy equipment and your Marines don’t mind being
real
friendly, we can pack in another four or five thousand people. We can also double up on the other ships as well…pack civilians into crew’s quarters, mattresses in passageways, on the mess decks, inside pressurized cargo bays…call it another thousand…
maybe
two.

“That won’t be enough.”

“Damn it, General, I doubt that our whole Navy has the transport capacity for almost forty thousand civilians, all in one go. We have room for seven thousand civilians. At that, feeding them and handling the sanitation requirements for that many people is going to be a nightmare.”

“You
know
what will happen if the Turusch return, once we’re gone.”

“No, General, I don’t. And I doubt that anyone else in the Confederation knows either. The Turusch and their Sh’daar overlords are still very much unknown quantities.”

“They killed the researchers at Arcturus. So far as we know, they murdered every last one.”

“Again, General, we don’t know. Not for sure.”

But Gorman was almost certainly right. The last transmission from Arcturus last year had been…chaos. Heavily armored Turusch soldiery breaking into the domes, burning down the civilian technicians and scientists…

“The perimeter is secure, Admiral,” Gorman said. “Start sending down the transports. The shields will be open for you.”

“The first shuttles will be down in thirty minutes, General. Uh…how about security?”

There was a good chance that there would be panic, once the Marines started leaving and the civilians saw that they were being left behind.

“We’ll take care of that,” Gorman snapped. “Gorman out.”

And the image winked off.

Koenig stared at the empty spot on the deck for another moment. This was
not
going to be easy.

26 September 2404

MEF HQ
Mike-Red Perimeter
Eta Boötis System
1612 hours, TFT

Major General Gorman stood on the HQ elevated walk and looked up. For the first time in weeks, the shields were fully down and he could see the landscape directly, with his own eyes, rather than through electronic feeds. With a scream, four Marine Rattlesnake fighters passed nearby, boosting clear from the landing field and accelerating hard, their passage drawing thin lines of vapor in their wakes as their drive singularities shocked the thick air.

The Rattlesnakes were distinctly old tech—distinctive and non-variable delta shapes that seemed downright primitive in comparison to the more modern Navy Starhawks and Nightmare strike fighters. A single squadron of Marine Rattlesnakes was attached to I MEF for close air support, but sending them out during the siege would have been tantamount to murder. Rattlesnakes simply couldn’t stand up to Turusch military technology in an open fight. Their Marine pilots called them rattletraps, a reflection of their technological inadequacy.

But they served now to help secure the perimeter against infiltrators and small enemy ground units that might try to take advantage of the lowered shields as the Navy transports were coming down.

It was past the middle of the daylight hours at this latitude and time of year, the short day already half over. A low, churning overcast blocked the sky, moving swiftly with a stiff westerly wind.

Gorman was struck by the gray, bleak desolation surrounding the base, a plain stretching off to the horizon in every direction, scorched-bare rock intermingled with circular craters with black-glass bottoms. When the Marines had landed and set up Red Mike five weeks ago, the land surrounding the low plateau had been shrouded in orange growth, and there’d been a city—the largest Mufrid colony, right
there
…a few kilometers to the west.

Nothing remained now but rock and glass. From up here, he could even see places where the rock had run liquid, bubbled, then frozen in mid-boil. There was a high background rad count now, though the EM screens were keeping most of the hard stuff out. In the darkness, parts of that landscape now glowed with an eerie, pale blue light.

The capacity for technic intelligence to devastate a world was shocking, nightmarish.

Another flight of gravfighters howled through the thick air, following the Rattlers. These were Navy Starhawks, their black outer hulls shifting and morphing as they passed, preparing to transition from atmospheric flight to space. A kilometer from the Marine perimeter, they brought their noses up, then accelerated almost vertically, punching through the orange-red overcast. A moment later, four mingled sonic booms echoed and rumbled across the plain.

The Turusch did indeed appear to have given up the fight and fled with the arrival of the carrier battlegroup, but Gorman was under no illusions about their eventual, inevitable return.

The Confed force’s immediate problem was not the Turusch…but another problem somewhat closer to home.

A transport shuttle lifted from the landing area at the center of the Marine base, huge, its black skin shifting as it absorbed landing legs and other shore-side protuberances, streamlining itself for the flight to orbit. Navigation lights strobed at its blunt prow, its sides, top, and bottom. A Choctaw Type UC-154 shuttle, it carried nearly two hundred Marines on board. A second Choctaw remained on the landing field, cargo-bay ramps lowered at bow and sides as long columns of Marines, like black ants at this distance, filed on board.

The first Choctaw was accompanied by four Nightshade grav-assault gunships, reduced to black toy minnows dwarfed by the eighty-meter-long shuttle. There was no thunderclap this time; the shuttle and its escorts would reach orbit at a more sedate pace.

“General Gorman?”

He didn’t turn at the voice. “Yes, Mr. Hamid.”

Jamel Saeed Hamid joined him on the walkway. “You wanted to see me?”

“I wanted to discuss the…situation.”

“I don’t see that there is anything to discuss, General.”

“I’ve been going over the numbers with Admiral Koenig, the CO of the Confederation battlegroup. We estimate that we could take on board between six and seven thousand additional people. They would be packed in with our crews, stacked up like cordwood. Water and food will be rationed. The nanorecyclers will be pushed to their limits. But we
can
make room for them.”

“I suspect that most of us will choose to remain here, General.”

“God, why? The Turusch will be back. You know that.”

“And there is nothing for us back on Earth, or on any of the other colonies.”

“The Turusch will almost certainly kill you,” Gorman said, blunt, hard. “They are not known for their religious sensibilities.”

“Then, if it be God’s will, we will die. That has been our choice from the beginning, you understand.”

“No, sir. I do
not
understand.”

Hamid sighed. “The White Covenant? We will not sign that…that document. It is an affront against God.”

“Earthstar has said nothing about you signing the Covenant, Mr. Hamid. I’m sure there’s room for negotiation.”

“What you
mean
is that we will go back into the camps until we either sign or they find another…solution.” He sounded bitter.

On the landing field, the second Choctaw was buttoning up, the ramps pulling in, the openings slowly irising shut. Four more Nightshade gunships hovered overhead, waiting for the shuttle to lift off.

“There are…an infinity of worlds out here, Mr. Hamid,” Gorman said quietly. “You’ll be able to find another world, found a new colony.”

“
Not
an infinity. Many, perhaps. But still a finite number…and it’s a number made considerably more finite by the
Shaitans
.”

“You know what I mean, damn it. You may be back in the camps for a time, sure, but there’s plenty of new real estate available, and a lot of it is a damned sight better than
this
!” He waved his arm, taking in the desolate, flame-barren landscape, the poisonous and sulfur-laden cloud deck, the full orange light and heat.

“You do not understand.”

“Try me!
Make
me understand!”

“That is not easy.” Hamid thought for a moment. “We—the colonists of Haris—are called
Mufrideen
. Do you know why?”

“Of course. Mufrid is one of the names for this star, for Eta Boötis. Arabic, like the name for this planet, Al Haris al Sama. Your people were great astronomers back twelve, fifteen hundred years ago or so. Most named stars in Earth’s sky have Arabic names.”

“But we do not apply the name to our sun. Only to ourselves. The word
mufrid
means “alone.” Solitary. Within our religion, it has the special meaning of one who undertakes the
hajj
alone.”

“Hajj. That’s the Muslims’ pilgrimage to Mecca?”

Hamid nodded. “One of the five sacred pillars of Islam. And the one, of course, that we have been forbidden by your Confederation to observe.”

Your
Confederation. Gorman started to respond, then thought better of it. Before 1 MEF’s deployment, representatives from the Confederation Bureau of Religious Affairs had briefed him on the Haris colonists, and he’d been warned that emotions among the colonists continued to be harsh and bitter.

The Eta Boötean colonists were the ragtag end of a longtime and seemingly unsolvable problem, one going back to the Islamic Wars of the twenty-first century and, arguably, even further back in history than that, to the Crusades and Jihads of the Middle Ages. With the end of the Islamic Wars, the newly formed Confederation had presented the world with the White Covenant, a document of basic human rights that included strong prohibitions of certain religious practices and activities. In short,
all
adherents of
all
religions had the right to believe what they wished so long as that belief did not harm others. Proselytizing, missionary work, and conversion by force or by threat all were proscribed as violations of basic human rights and dignity.

By the end of the twenty-first century, the Muslim nation-states of the world lay in ruins, their armies destroyed, their populations starving. Most Islamic leaders signed the White Covenant, if only to allow the beginning of relief efforts and food shipments.

Millions of Muslims, however, point-blank refused to accept the White Covenant’s terms, seeing them as a direct denial of God’s holy word. Numerous groups sprang up among the survivors, especially within the many relocation camps across Africa and the Middle East, calling themselves
Rafaddeen
, “Refusers,” because their leaders continued to refuse to sign the document.

That had been more than three centuries ago, and the Rafaddeen continued to be a thorn in the side of the Confederation. Most had chosen to remain in relocation camps that had eventually grown into small, self-contained and self-governing cities, each under the watchful eye of Confederation peaceforcers. Tens of thousands had moved off-world, to orbital cities and to extrasolar colonies, where they would not be a threat to the
Pax Confoederata
.

Another Choctaw drifted down out of the orange overcast, accompanied by its gunship escort. Landing legs grew from its flat belly, splaying wide as it settled onto the landing field, cargo doors dilating, ramps extending. The next load of Marines was already lined up in ranks at the edge of the field, ready to embark. At this rate, the evacuation would be complete well within the eight hours allotted for the operation.

“Muslims weren’t the only ones who didn’t like the Covenant,” Gorman said at last. “Most of my family were Baptists.” He didn’t add that he, personally, was a Covenant Reformed Baptist, and would no more preach the Gospel to someone who didn’t want to hear it than he would denounce the Corps.

“The Covenant was a gun aimed at Islam!” Hamid snapped back. “Not at American evangelicals! Not at Zionists!”

“It applied to
all
religions. All cultures. All belief systems. It had to, to be fair.”

“It denied the commandments of Allah to bring light to the unenlightened! It was not
fair
. It was blasphemy!”

“I am not going to stand here and argue bad theology with you, Mr. Hamid,” Gorman said. The capacity for members of various fundamentalist and extremist sects for clinging to battles, grudges, and wrongs done hundreds, even thousands of years ago was astonishing to him. “Seven thousand of your people can get off this rock
if
they want to.”

“I will…make the announcement,” Hamid said, his words and his manner stiff. “I imagine, though, that most of us will stay.”

“That’s your call. I recommend that that you let women and children have what space on the transports we can find.”

“The male children, certainly,” Hamid said. He sounded thoughtful.

The statement chilled Gorman. Traditional Islam—in particular the extremist sects, the Rafaddeen who’d rejected the White Covenant—still often valued men more than women, boys more than girls, an artifact of certain ancient tribal cultures more than of the Qu’ran itself. That, as much as the suicide bombers and the tactical nukes, had been a major part of the extremist Muslim doctrine that had led to so much bloodshed in the mid- and late twenty-first century. Most modern Islamic states back on Earth had embraced full equality of the sexes, but out here…

“
All
of your children,” Gorman said, putting iron into his voice. “Girls too. And the women as well. To care for them.”

To the Rafadeen, childcare was women’s work. Perhaps he could use that bit of sixth-century logic to force the issue.

Hamid gave Gorman a hard look. “You needn’t moralize at us. Our faith has served us well for over seventeen centuries, despite your Western preaching and your Crusades.”

Gorman took a step closer, towering above the smaller man. “
All
of the children,
and
the women,” he said. “As well as any men who want to go. My Marines
will
enforce this, Mr. Hamid. At gunpoint, if they have to.”

Hamid’s expression clouded, as though he was going to argue. Then he shrugged, backed down. “It scarcely matters. Allah has judged, and found us lacking.”

On the landing field, more columns of Marines were filing on board the open shuttle. He would need to talk with Simmons, the MEF’s executive officer, to make sure he stayed on top of a phased and orderly withdrawal. The trick, Gorman thought, was going to be keeping enough Marines behind, on the ground, to oversee the evacuation of six or seven thousand colonists, to make sure that the women and children were evacuated first, to prevent the men, however dedicated they might be to staying now, from panicking and attempting to rush the shuttles…then pull those last Marines out without triggering a deadly riot.

And all of that was assuming the Turusch stayed out of the picture.

Gorman watched the shuttle lift off, to be replaced by another dropping from the orange-yellow sky.

He saw a group of locals gathered off to one side, near the enlisted mess hall. They weren’t doing anything in particular; they were simply…watching, silent, anonymous in their e-suits.

If Gorman remembered accurately, fifteen thousand locals had made it inside the Marine perimeter from the nearby colonial capital of Jahuar when the Turusch first appeared overhead weeks ago, roughly a third of them women and children. The refugees had been crowded in with the Marines ever since, occupying supply warehouses turned into huge open dormitories. There’d been no incidents, fortunately. The biggest problem the Marines had faced had been simply getting their work done with so many civilians in the way.