Earth Strike (14 page)

The other four Starhawks fell with her, in picture-perfect formation.

In moments, they were slicing through the tenuous upper levels of the planet’s atmosphere.

MEF HQ
Main Mess Hall
Eta Boötis IV
1852 hours, TFT

For the past forty minutes, Gray, Corporal Anderson, and Mohammed Baqr had been squeezed back into one of the buildings that encircled the base landing pad, filling the base mess hall and several adjacent compartments. The high steel double door leading out onto the landing strip had been sealed shut.

They could see outside on the deck-to-overhead viewall, however. The short local day had just ended, and beneath the sullen and overcast sky, the Marine base had been swiftly plunged into darkness relieved only by the glare from external spotlights on the buildings and from a few glowglobes adrift in the still air. The mob had surged out onto the landing field and was out there still, packed in shoulder to shoulder, some with laser weapons seized from a militia arms locker. During the retreat into the mess hall, shots fired by several of the Marines had kept them back, kept them cautious, but their chants and shouts, muffled at first by their suits, were growing louder, more agitated.

They’d been chanting
Allahu akbar
more or less nonstop since the riot had begun. Now, though, they’d taken up a new cry. “
Death! Death to the great
Shaitan!
Death!”

Gray couldn’t tell if by
Shaitan
they meant the Turusch, the Confed military personnel remaining in the base, or the Confederation itself.

Baqr shrugged when Gray asked him about it. “I doubt that
they
know.”

“Why aren’t you out there with them?” Gray asked.

Baqr made a sour face. “Not all Muslims are fanatics, Lieutenant,” he said. He sounded offended. “Not all are jihadists…or terrorists…or suicide bombers. And not all try to get their own way through juvenile demonstrations like this one.”

“My apologies,” Gray said. “They seem to be putting up a pretty solid front now, though.”

Baqr sighed. “They’re scared. And for most of them, the only comfort they have when they’re afraid is their religion, submission to God, and knowing where you fit into God’s plan. If they think you’re trying to take that away from them, that you’re threatening their belief, somehow, they can get…agitated.”

“Are
you
afraid?” Corporal Anderson asked.

“Hell, yeah! Right now I don’t know what scares me most…the Turusch, the thought of being left behind on this toxic rock, or
them
.” He jerked a thumb at the rioters outside. “But damn it, I swore an oath before God to serve with the colonial militia and to support the Confederation. So…here I am.”

Gray clapped him on his shoulder. “And we’re glad you are.” He caught movement in the sky and leaned forward, peering up at the viewall. “Shit. What’s that?”

It was only a shadow for a moment, but then it broke through the overcast, another Choctaw shuttle slowly drifting out of the sky, its belly gleaming in the lights from the base.

The mob had seen the shuttle as well. Several lasers fired, the beams invisible, but the flash where they hit brilliant in the darkness.

And then the Starhawks appeared, dropping down out of the clouds. And Gray and several hundred Marines nearby started cheering.

Dragon One
Above MEF Perimeter
Eta Boötis IV
1855 hours, TFT

Commander Allyn glanced down, her gravfighter’s optics projecting a view of the Marine base into her in-head display that shifted as she moved her head. She could see the lights, could see the crowd filling the landing field two hundred meters below her keel, thousands of upturned and angry faces.

Starhawks could hover on gravs, but they were awkward at it. She’d been considering at first bringing her craft all the way down to just above the landing field, using the Starhawk itself as an intimidating show of force to force the crowd to disperse.

But the gravitational singularities her Starhawk used to maneuver were dangerous in close proximity to unshielded humans. They would be radiating X-rays and soft gamma as they sucked down molecules of this thick atmosphere, and a careless move at too close a distance might suck down a few dozen rioters as well. She might as well open up on the crowd with her Gatling cannon.

“Hey, Skipper,” Spaas called. “I’ve got a bead on the guy stirring up the crowd down there. How’s about we pop him?”

Her tracking system highlighted the target as Spaas pointed him out electronically. She engaged the optical zoom for a closer look, saw a bearded man in a gold-colored e-suit standing on a balcony overlooking the landing field. He had a couple of assistants or bodyguards in black suits behind him, and he was gesticulating angrily, screaming something at the mob.

It
was
tempting…but she wasn’t going to open fire on the crowd unless she absolutely saw no other way.

And there might be another option. “Negative, Dragon Two,” she said. She shifted to the general combat frequency. “Choctaw One-two-five,” she called, addressing the shuttle hovering overhead. “This is Dragon One, do you copy?”

“Dragon One. Choctaw One-two-five. I copy.”

“Recommend you go plus-zee at least three thousand meters, over.”

“God, Dragon One. What are you going to do?”

“It’s called finesse, One-two-five. Just stay out of our way for a moment.” Shifting frequencies again, she called to the other Dragonfires. “Okay, Dragons. Stay on me!”

She nudged the virtual controls, sending her Starhawk forward, flattening the ship out into a knife-edged and elongated disc, extending back-swept wings, reshaping her airfoils to bank steeply to the left. One by one, the other four Starhawks dropped into her wake and followed. The Choctaw shuttle, after a moment’s hesitation, began gaining altitude once more, slipping back up into the sheltering murk of the cloud deck.

Accelerating quickly now, Allyn swung wide out across the barren desert surrounding the Marine base, hurtling through the night. Her forward singularity glowed white-hot just ahead, an intense, arc-brilliant pinpoint radiating furiously as it chewed through atmosphere, dragging the Starhawk along in its wake.

As she turned, she showed her Starhawk’s AI what she had in mind, felt the shifting, inner harmonics as her brain and the computer running the Starhawk worked together, crunching equations and unfolding an optimal flight path in her mind. She studied a computer-generated model of the Marine base, rotating it, judging the clifflike loom of the taller buildings, the openings in between. It was going to be tight….

The Choctaw was hovering well out of the way now, three kilometers above the base. She leveled off into straight flight, hurtling across the invisible surface of the desert at an altitude of scarcely eighty meters, accelerating
hard
.

She went hypersonic.

How fast sound travels depends on the density of the medium through which it is moving. On Earth, at sea level and at a temperature of 20 degrees Celsius, sound travels at 343 meters per second; in water, a much denser medium than air, the speed of sound is around 1500 meters per second.

The gas mix that constituted the atmosphere of Eta Boötis IV was 1.7 times denser than air at Earth’s surface, and the molecules of that atmosphere—predominantly carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide, sulfur trioxide, ammonia, and carbonyl sulfide—all were larger, heavier molecules than the primary constituents of Earth’s atmosphere, O
₂
and N
₂
.

At the surface of Eta Boötis, the speed of sound was very nearly 700 meters per second—about 2500 kilometers per hour. As Allyn boosted her Starhawk’s acceleration, she was flashing across the desert at nearly 4 kilometers per second, better than Mach 5 for these conditions. Her Starhawk’s computer gently increased her altitude slightly, compensating for the height of the ridgetop on which the Marine base was situated.

Twenty kilometers out—five seconds’ flight time—she fired her PBP-2.

MEF HQ
Main Mess Hall
Eta Boötis IV
1854 hours, TFT

Gray and the others had felt a sudden letdown, a surge of disappointment and even anger as first the Choctaw had lifted itself back up into the clouds, and then as the five Starhawk fighters had streaked off into the night. “The bastards are
leaving
us!” one Marine had screamed. “The fucking Navy zorchie bastards are
leaving
us!”

Outside, the crowd was jubilant, shouting and laughing and jumping up and down. Some were firing their lasers uselessly into the sky, in celebration or in an empty gesture of defiance, or both.

Gray had spotted something, though. As the line of black Starhawks had begun slipping away out of the glare of the lights below, he’d noticed that they were flattening out, and that they were growing black, swept-back wings. If those fighters had given up, if they were boosting for space and a return to the carrier, they would have adopted a more rounded, teardrop shape. Wings, however, meant they were planning on maneuvering in the atmosphere, probably at low altitude.

And he thought he knew what they were going to do.

“They’re not leaving, everybody!” he yelled, boosting the volume on his e-suit speakers to make sure he got everyone’s attention. “Everyone get down! Marines…stand ready to move out and secure the landing field!”

He bellowed the orders, putting all of the authority and power he could into the words. Across the room, he caught a Marine major staring at him. A major outranked a Navy lieutenant by one pay grade, the equivalent of a Navy lieutenant commander, and, in any case, a stranded Navy pilot normally had no business giving orders to Marines.

“
Do
it!” the major barked. “You! You! You! And you! Over by this door!”

And then the sky outside lit up with lightning.

Gray recognized the signature flash of a heavy particle beam. Navy Starhawks mounted StellarDyne Blue Lightning PBP-2 particle beam projectors which could project a bolt of protons with a yield of around a gigajoule in one tenth of a second. The total energy was about one thousandth that of a typical natural lightning bolt, but at close range, the pulse lit up the sky as the air ionized along a straight-line path.

An instant later, the first Starhawk zorched overhead, traveling so low, so fast, that Gray was aware of a flicker of motion but nothing more.

The sonic boom that followed shook the walls of the mess hall, deafening and shrill. It was followed a moment later by a second…a third…a fourth…a fifth, the hyper sonic booms coming in a rapid succession of deafening, high-pitched thunderclaps. Outside, the rioters appeared to crumble in a mass, dropping to their knees or full-length on the ferocrete landing pad, bringing gloved hands up against their helmets as they instinctively tried to cover their ears.

When the Marines and the civilian women and children had fallen back to the mess hall, they’d come in through a large doorway blocked by a nanoseal, the same black, liquid substance used to prevent pressure loss on
America
’s hangar deck when spacecraft were brought in from the vacuum outside. As the mob had surged after them, a Marine had switched on the seal freeze, turning the suspended nanoparticles into a rigid structure, a barrier stronger than plasteel.

Now, the seal freeze was released, and the first four Marines charged outside, weapons at the ready, followed closer by more Marines, and a scattering of Mufrid militia.

“Come on,” Gray said to Corporal Anderson. “Let’s get out there!”

It took several minutes to elbow through the panicked, milling crowd, but Gray made it to the nanoseal lock and stepped through, pushing against the liquid’s yielding resistance and out onto the landing field. The rioting mob had been effectively neutralized, reduced to stunned and disoriented individuals as the Marines began to shove and push unresisting rioters back off the field. He looked up at the balcony overlooking the field nearby, and saw more Marines grabbing the agitator and hauling him back into the building.

All of the floating glowglobes had been swept away by the shock waves, and many of the remaining lights mounted on the buildings had been shattered. The few lighting panels that remained cast eerie, pitch-black shadows across the field, lending a nightmare aura to the scene.

“Get the field clear!” the Marine major was shouting. “Get it the hell
clear
!”

Overhead, the Choctaw had reappeared, running lights pulsing, the black, UC-154 shuttle slowly drifting down for a landing.

26 September 2404

CIC, TC/USNA CVS
America
Haris Orbit, Eta Boötis System
1945 hours, TFT

With the exception of the Dragonfires, the last of the fighters were recovering on board the carrier, drifting in toward the aft end of the landing deck stretched out along the ship’s spine, killing their grav singularities at the last moment possible, then hitting the tangleweb field to kill the last of their forward velocity. As each Starhawk came to a halt, robotic arms snagged the ship and dragged it forward, out of the way of the next incoming ship, then swung it up into nanosealed ports in the deck above, lifting it up into the hangar deck.

The battlegroup was preparing to accelerate, each individual ship slowly swinging around until its broad, hemispherical forward shield faced a nondescript patch of relatively empty sky midway between the beacons of Canopus and Rigel. Earth’s sun lay there, somewhere in the emptiness. At thirty-seven light years’ distance, Sol was just barely too dim to be seen with the naked eye. On every ship in the fleet, however, the sun’s location was marked by a bright green circle.

Home
…

Admiral Koenig sat at his CIC workstation, reports from all twenty-four ships of the carrier battlegroup flooding through the
America
’s communications suite.

All things considered, the battlegroup had come through in superb shape, much better than he’d hoped. The
Farragut
and the destroyer
Carter
both had been destroyed; three more ships had suffered serious damage in the battle, and one of those, the frigate
Abramson
, had been so badly shot up that her crew was now being transferred to other vessels, including the
America
. With Mufrid refugees already packed into every available ship, crammed onto mess decks and into passageways and storage bays, it was going to be a tight fit getting everyone on board.

It had been the fighters, Koenig knew, who’d tipped the balance, who’d made the lopsided victory possible. Turusch ships heavily outgunned and out-teched equivalent Confederation vessels, and tended to be much tougher, much more powerful than human ships…especially when you found yourself up against converted asteroids like that command ship.

“Admiral?” Commander Reigh called from the Controller’s workstation. “The Conestogas and their escorts report readiness for acceleration. They’re requesting clearance.”

“Very well. They are clear for boost.”

“Captain Vanderkamp has acknowledged.”

On the tac display, the eight converted Conestoga troopships and four escorting destroyers began to move, falling toward a distant, invisible Sol at one hundred gravities. Captain Vanderkamp, on the destroyer
Symmons
, would command the detachment, would get them safely back to Sol.

“Clear the auxiliaries for boost,” Koenig ordered.

“Order acknowledged, Admiral.”

Five more vessels—fleet auxiliaries: three supply vessels and two repair tenders—began accelerating as well, falling away from the fast-dwindling battlegroup.

Koenig’s greatest concern at this point was that the Turusch would counterattack, would hit the battlegroup with its fighter screen on board the carrier. With that in mind, he was sending the troopship and unarmed auxilliaries on ahead, with the remaining seven ships—the
America
, the
Spirit of Confederation
, and five others—holding position as the last of the fighters and shuttles recovered on board.

At this moment, the last of the Marines on the surface of Eta Boötis IV were on their way up from the planet, escorted by the five remaining Dragonfires. The surviving gravfighters from VFA-44 had succeeded in scattering the rioters in the Marine compound down on the planet’s surface, had escorted several more shuttles back up to the fleet, and now were seeing to the last of the evacuees.

The eleven gravfighters of VFA-51, the Black Lightnings, were still out there as well. Hours before, he’d sent them out on deep perimeter patrol, following the retreating enemy ships a full thirty light minutes out. If the Turusch did turn around and launch a counterstrike, the Black Lightnings would be
America
’s early warning net. They were returning now, but would not be back on board the carrier for another forty minutes.

“Admiral!” It was Commander Johanna Hughes, the tac evaluator. “Urgent from VFA-51! Enemy fighters inbound at near-
c
!”

Shit.
The nightmare scenario.

“How many?”

“Unknown, sir. He says ‘a hell of a lot…at least fifty.’”

Koenig studied the tactical display. The enemy had retreated in
that
direction—roughly toward the star Epsilon Boötis…not that that star would necessarily have been their actual destination. He’d sent the Black Lightnings out line along the same path to watch for just this eventuality. Eleven Starhawk gravfighters against fifty Toads. Not good odds. Not good at
all
.

But the real urgency of the situation lay in the fact that the enemy fighters were coming in just behind the lasercommed message warning of their approach. The battlegroup’s rear guard might have mere seconds before the Turusch were among them.

“Make to all ships,” Koenig said. “Maneuvering, Code One. Initiate hivel-A defenses
now
!”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

Hivel-A
was milspeak for high-velocity assault. Defenses included launching clouds of sand, firming up defensive shields, but most of all,
moving
. If there were laser bolts coming in at the speed of light, or plasma beam or other weapons skimming in just behind the light barrier, the best defense of all was to not be there when they arrived.

“Copy the tacsit to everyone within range,” Koenig added. He was thinking of the last Choctaw shuttle coming up from the surface, and the gravfighters and Nightshades escorting it. They needed to know what they were boosting into.

Slowly, ponderously, the remaining seven ships of the carrier battlegroup began to move.

Dragon One
Above Eta Boötis IV
1945 hours, TFT

Her Starhawk punched through the last cloud deck and Commander Allyn emerged into the clear, vast emptiness of the planet’s upper atmosphere, with stars gleaming down at her with hard and untwinkling brilliance. A moment later, the local sun exploded into view on the horizon, wiping out the stars, illuminating a scimitar’s edge of cloud cover dividing planetary night from space.

As the atmosphere rapidly thinned, she reshaped her Starhawk into its needle configuration. The other four fighters of VFA-44 were already doing the same, dragging straight-line contrails behind them as their drive singularities chewed through what was left of the air. The Choctaw, fat and bulbous, didn’t have a variable geometry hull, and began lagging behind. Allyn ordered the squadron to slow their ascent, matching their velocity to the transport shuttle. The four Nightshade gunships followed close in the Choctaw’s wake, like angular black insects pursuing an ungainly blue-painted cow.

“We are receiving an urgent tactical update from the fleet,” her AI told her, the voice a whisper in her mind. “Details follow….”

She watched the incoming data scroll through an open window in her consciousness. “Toads!” Allyn snapped as the data flooding through from the
America
registered. “Hivel-A, fifty-plus Toads.”

“Where?” Tucker demanded. “I don’t—”

White light blossomed on the night side of the planet directly astern, a searing illumination of the clouds that momentarily blocked out the glare of the bright-rising star. Her sensors picked up the wake of a high-G impactor that had just seared down out of the sky, passing the Confederation fighters and shuttle perhaps eighty kilometers abeam.

“What the—” Lieutenant Collins called over the squadron frequency.

Seconds later, two distinct shock waves struck, first from the ground thirty kilometers below, then a lesser one from the impactor’s more distant atmospheric wake, twin sledgehammer blows against her fighter’s hull. Had the air been any thicker, had they been any closer to the ground, any deeper inside Eta Boötis IV’s thick atmosphere, the shock waves, she knew, would have swatted them all from the sky.

The former Marine base had just been obliterated.

The knowledge stunned her. They’d lifted clear of the base landing pad scant minutes earlier as the rioting mobs had closed in on the loaded shuttle once again. There’d been no point in orchestrating another high-Mach passage over the base. The civilians who’d wanted to get out were getting out; the others had already made their choice.

But it was startling to see how swiftly the consequences of that choice had arrived—as a ten-kilo inert kinetic impactor traveling at just below the speed of light had slammed into the base and released thousands of megatons of energy in a single dazzling flash. As she scanned the planet, she saw a second flash, far up the curve of the northern horizon, and realized that a second impactor had just struck the Mufrid outpost at Kurban.

A third flash…that was probably Amal…and a fourth, more distant still, Lilistizkar.

The Marine base and the last three inhabited colony domes, all…all
gone
.

The suddenness, the sheer savagery of the attack was almost too much to grasp.

She shifted her scan forward, to the carrier battlegroup. Only seven ships remained in planetary orbit; the others had boosted moments before, were already accelerating hard out-system. Those seven, she saw with considerable relief, all were accelerating, breaking orbit, turning in toward the planet to use Haris’s gravity to their advantage.

The Turusch, of course, would have had precise targeting information for the planet, could accurately strike the colony outposts from light seconds out. Ships, however, could leave their predictable orbits and not be there when the beams or hivel projectiles arrived.

Collins’ scanner picked up numerous faint straight-line trails of ionization ahead, the traces of near-
c
impactors flashing through dust and stray molecules of atmosphere just ahead of where the fleet had been orbiting scant moments before.

The Confederation had tried exactly the same tactics against the Turusch fleet earlier, with considerably greater success. It appeared that the enemy had missed all seven human warships.

But the thought of what was happening on the planet astern still burned.
Why?
…

It made no sense. The Turusch had bombarded the Marine perimeter for over a week; at any time they could have accelerated a rock big enough to vaporize a continent, but they hadn’t. They’d been trying to capture the place, not obliterate it.

That strategy, evidently, had changed. The Turusch had just annihilated all human outposts remaining on the planet, killing some tens of thousands of civilians.

Why?

She shook the thought aside. Strategists, xenopsychologists, and admirals could worry about that later. Her problem now was the knowledge that there would be high-G fighters coming in immediately behind the near-
c
kinetic impactors.

There!

The Toads were coming in hot, decelerating hard in order to engage ship-to-ship. Among them were Confederation Starhawks—the gravfighters of Sandy Jorgenson’s Black Lightnings, following the leading wave of Toads in, trying to burn them down.

The battleship
Spirit of Confederation
opened up with her long-range fusion cannon, and a constellation of oncoming Turusch fighters smeared into tiny, brilliant novae. And then the enemy fighters were sweeping into the battlegroup like avenging angels of death.

CIC, TC/USNA CVS
America
Haris Space, Eta Boötis System
1947 hours, TFT

“Enemy fighters at two-three-zero plus five-one, engaging!” Johanna Hughes announced.

Koenig watched the unfolding action on the tactical display—green icons representing Confederation vessels, red the enemy, with a vast, ghosted gray sphere showing the position of Eta Boötis IV.

More hivel impactors, launched at closer ranges, might still be out there, coming fast. If the carrier squadron could maneuver around behind the planet, use the planet as a shield, they might be able to delay acceleration long enough to take the remaining fighters on board.

That was the true hell of the tacsit. Right now, there were sixteen gravfighters out there, plus four Nightshade close-support gunships and one last, lumbering shuttle packed with civilians and Marines. If
America
boosted for
c
, the gravfighters, with their high accelerations, could catch up—assuming the Toads let them—but the shuttle and the gunships would be left behind.

And even the fighters were at risk. Trapping on board a carrier under acceleration was
not
for the fainthearted, nor was there a promise of success.

But the seven capital ships were vulnerable if they stayed put. They might hold the Toad fighters at bay for a time, but Koenig was willing to bet that Turusch capital ships were out there, lots of them, still undetected and burning in tight on the fighters’ wakes. If the squadron didn’t start boosting for
c
, they would be trapped here, pinned against the planet and annihilated one by one.

A gravfighter—one of the Lightnings—had burned out a Toad, but now two more Toads had dropped onto his tail. He listened to the voices of the cockpit chatter, relayed back to
America
’s CIC by the cloud of battlespace drones serving as comm relays and unmanned intel platforms.