Earth Strike (27 page)

Green Squadron—Gray kept wondering if
America
’s CIC had given them that designation because the nugget pilots were
green
—would reach the thirty-AU shell, the orbit of Neptune, by 1148 hours Fleet Time—another three hours, or a bit less. The total near-
c
coast time for the squadron, though, would
seem
to be only seventeen and a half minutes, subjective time versus objective, thanks to the effects of relativistic time dilation. From Gray’s point of view, fewer than fifteen minutes had passed since he’d given the order to boost, including the acceleration period up to near-
c
.

To make matters
really
exciting, there was the distinct possibility—even the
probability
—that the Turusch fleet had begun accelerating for the Inner System at some point during the past four hours or so.

Gray stared at his navigational display, thinking about this.

He’d ordered the other fighters to deploy in a receiver rosette—a tactical flight formation designed to transform the entire fighter unit into a
very
large antenna array. Even at near-
c
, each fighter
could
receive incoming radio traffic, but unscrambling them could be a problem. Those messages tended to be garbled and static-blasted, as well as strongly blue-shifted from ahead, red-shifted from astern.

To counter this, ships traveling in formation sometimes assumed the rosette pattern while maintaining laser taclinks, allowing them to use wide-baseline interferometry to pick up and process weak or garbled signals. In effect, Green Squadron was now a single antenna over ten thousand kilometers across—the largest separation between any two of the twenty-four fighters in the formation.

He knew that when
America
’s squadrons engaged the Turusch out at thirty-AU, they would have begun transmitting combat report updates back to the Inner System. Green Squadron was now a quarter of the way out-system between the
America
and the thirty-AU shell, and in the perfect position to pick up a transmission from
America
’s fighters first, well before they reached the
America
.

If that transmission came,
when
it came, Gray and the rest of Green Squadron would know exactly where the enemy fleet was, and be able to make the necessary course corrections that would let them meet the enemy, somewhere out there beyond the dark orbit of Saturn. Depending on what that transmission told him about the enemy’s position and vector, he thought he might be able to make a solid tactical contribution to the battle. It was a long shot, certainly, but one of the time-hallowed bits of advice to anyone in combat had been playing through his brain for hours now.

Do
something! It may be wrong, but do
something!

Gray intended to do exactly that.

Red Bravo Flight
America
Deep Recon
Inbound, Sol System
0930 hours, TFT

They were losing.

The enemy was becoming quicker, more adept, was learning how to anticipate the quick-pass maneuvers of the fighters and lay down heavy fields of fire—particle beams, clouds of kinetic impactors, gravitic missiles, blossoming thermonuclear warheads. During the past two hours, thirteen Confederation fighters had been destroyed and five incapacitated, their systems down as they hurtled on blind and unpowered trajectories into darkness.

The fighters were also having to route more and more of their power to their drives. The enemy had been accelerating now at about five hundred gravities for two hours, fifteen minutes, and were now traveling at 40,500 kps, after having crossed just over one AU. With their higher accelerations, the fighters could match that speed easily enough, but every kilometer per second per second applied toward matching the enemy’s course toward the Inner System made that much less power available for maneuvering.

And maybe
, Allyn thought to herself,
maybe we’re just getting too damned tired to think straight.

Lieutenant Theod Young’s War Eagle tumbled helplessly out of control, impacting against the shields of a Turusch behemoth, a small and heavily armed powered planetoid.

We’re losing,
she thought again,
and there’s nothing we can do to stop them.

Green Squadron
Outbound, Sol System
1002 hours, TFT

A window opened in his mind, and Gray felt the inrushing cascade of raw data.

The antenna rosette maneuver had worked, plucking the speed-blasted signal from space as it passed the hurtling formation of Starhawks. The fighter AIs, working together across the laser taclink, had processed and enhanced the data, transforming it into something intelligible.

They wouldn’t know about it for hours, yet, on the
America
or back on Earth and Mars, but
America
’s five squadrons had engaged the enemy fleet Bravo some three hours ago, at 0712 hours. Gray saw the attack led by his former squadron leader, Marissa Allyn, saw the destruction of the Turusch mobile dwarf planet, saw the death of Lieutenant Cutler.

Perhaps most important of all, thanks to Commander Allyn, he now had precise coordinates for the Turusch fleet. As minute followed objective minute, he saw more and more Turusch warships being plotted on Allyn’s tactical display, saw them accelerating, ponderously, toward the Inner System.

Green Squadron had been traveling outbound on a heading toward 15 hours right ascension, declination minus 10 degrees, in the northern reaches of the constellation Libra, the “Point Libra” designated as a nav point for ships trying to intercept the alien fleet. Allyn had intercepted the Turusch ships at a different nav point, however…Right Ascension 15 hours, 34 minutes; Declination plus 26 degrees, 43 minutes.

This second point was located some 37 degrees across the sky from Point Libra—meaning that Green Squadron was 37 degrees off the proper heading. This was what Gray had been waiting for…an
exact
navigational heading. The new nav point was located, he noticed, within the constellation Corona Borealis—close beside the bright star Alphekka, in fact.

He wondered if there was any significance in that. His onboard sky charts listed Alphekka as an A0V/G5V double star seventy-two light years from Sol. The system was only about 300 million years old, though, and thick with proto-planetary dust and gas—too young for a planetary system to have fully formed.

Perhaps it was only coincidence that a bright, relatively nearby star lay close to that point. But possibly not….

“Green Squadron, all ships,” he called. “Set your nav beacons for Right Ascension fifteen hours, thirty-four minutes; Declination plus twenty-six degrees, forty-three minutes. On my mark, execute a thirty-seven-degree course change to the new heading. In three…two…one…
mark
!”

Still moving at close to light speed, the fighters threw out drive singularities, putting a steep gradient into space ahead, their straight-line courses bending through curved space and onto the new heading. Gray was holding his breath, waiting as fighter after fighter called in, acknowledging completion of the maneuver. At these speeds, the
slightest
miscalculation would mean disaster, a fighter literally vaporized by impossible tidal forces, or devoured by its own drive singularity.

Fortunately, the pilots might be green, but the AIs handling the details of the maneuver were, if not experienced,
very
highly skilled. Every ship came through perfectly, dropping onto the new outbound heading.

All of the stars of the surrounding sky were crowded by the effects of relativistic travel into a narrow band of light now, some 30 degrees off his bow. The stars of Corona Borealis were among them, of course, but quite unrecognizable in the photic distortion. Gray told the AI to transmit the course change to Earth. They would learn of it shortly after they got the signal from Allyn’s fighters.

“AI,” he said. “I need a theoretical plot. Take the positions, course, and velocities of all of the Turusch ships in Allyn’s transmission, and work up an extended targeting estimate.”

“That estimate will, necessarily, be inaccurate,” the ship’s AI told him. “The enemy will be changing acceleration, if nothing else, while fighting Allyn’s wing.”

“Best guess,” he told the system. “We’re not God.”

“This will take several minutes.”

“Fast as you can.” Several minutes subjective could be an hour objective, and they didn’t have much more time than that.

Sooner than he’d feared, the AI announced, “Calculations complete.”

“Transmit it to the other ships in the squadron,” Gray said, “as targeting data.”

“Which weapons?” the AI asked.

“Something that will make a mark at ten or fifteen AUs,” Gray replied. “AMSOs.”

They were going to throw sand at the oncoming Turusch ships.

Red Bravo Flight
America
Deep Recon
Inbound, Sol System
1012 hours, TFT

All of the fighters launched from
America
had joined the engagement, a rapidly moving fur ball hurtling toward the Inner System now at 58,500 kps. Assuming the enemy pulled a mid-course flip and decelerated the rest of the way in, the total voyage was going to be on the order of fifteen more hours.

The handful of
America
’s fighters simply weren’t going to last that much longer. Twenty fighters had been destroyed total so far…and seven sent spinning away into space, helplessly out of control. They’d started this op with fifty-six fighters. Thirty Confederation fighters were left…close to 50 percent casualties.

Not again!
Allyn thought, desperate, stressed to the point of screaming.
I can’t go through this again!

“CAG,” she called. “Lightning One-zero-one…this is Red Bravo Five. Private channel.”

“Go ahead, Red Five,” Captian Dixon’s voice replied.

“CAG, we’re down by half. We have to break off!”

“Commander, we are going to keep hammering at these bastards until they break and run, or until our expendables run dry and our PBPs are melted into slag. When that happens, we will begin
ramming
the sons of bitches if we have to! Is that understood?”

“Understood. Sir.”

Allyn’s mind was reeling. She was afraid…yes—it was impossible
not
to be afraid in such a position—but more pressing was the overwhelming feeling of frustration, of failure, of
helplessness
in the face of such an enemy. They’d been hammering at the Turusch fleet, to use Dixon’s word, for a full three hours now. They’d lost half of their own fighters…and managed to destroy or badly damage perhaps twelve enemy capital ships and twenty-two Toad fighters. An excellent tactical trade-off, perhaps…but essentially useless when you realized that there were still nearly ninety Turusch ships out here,
not
counting the swarms of fighters. The vessels had been appearing out of the Outer System night for three hours now, catching up, rendezvousing with the main fleet, joining them in their stately procession toward the Inner System.

Thirty fighters, almost all out of Krait missiles, most running low on KK rounds, with nothing but their Blue Lightning particle beams to use as weapons. PBPs were sometimes called “infinite repeaters” since they couldn’t run out of ammo so long as they were connected to a quantum power tap, but they did have a finite life. Allyn’s beam projector was already giving her trouble, cutting out now and again as the system overheated. If the circuitry got hot enough to melt, even her nanorepair systems wouldn’t be able to keep her in the fight.

And for all she knew, Dixon wasn’t kidding with his threat to start ramming the enemy.

The plan, of course, was to cause enough damage to the Turusch fleet that they’d be vulnerable to attack by the main fleet elements waiting back in the Inner System.

Swinging around for yet another pass, she lined up on a Turusch mobile planetoid, triggering her charged particle beam from fifty thousand kilometers out, continuing to fire as she flashed past at a relative speed of nearly five thousand kilometers per second. The planetoid’s surface was still partially shielded, though a number of shields had evidently collapsed. Neither she nor her AI could tell whether they’d managed to hit any of the exposed surface installations, or if her fire had been absorbed or deflected by the gravitic screens. The enemy’s particle beams reached out toward her; her jinking pattern, random course shifts implemented by her AI, avoided the incoming fire, but something struck her aft shields and jolted her hard. A quick check of her system diagnostics—no damage, thank God.

But her PBP was overheated, a red warning light showing on her panel and in her mind.

“My God!” Hennessy cried out. “Look at that!”

On her display, the asteroid ship she’d just attacked was firing.

Not at her. The projectile appeared to be a KK missile, accelerating at high-G and likely carrying simple mass as a warhead, a
lot
of it. It wasn’t aimed at any of the fighters attacking the Turusch fleet. Instead, it appeared to be accelerating hard for the Inner System, toward Earth or Mars or the Confederation warships waiting there.

“It’s the bombardment!” Lieutenant Malvar of the Rattlers called out. “They’ve started bombarding Earth and Mars!”

Other Turusch warships were firing as well, hurling warheads toward the tiny, shrunken sun in unending streams, some massing as much as a ton, some as little as a kilogram.