Earth Strike (16 page)

Spaas’ Starhawk appeared, but too far to the left, much too far to the left, and coming in too fast. His ship was dead; he
couldn’t
abort, couldn’t fire a ventral singularity to warp his course into a vector that would miss the rotating landing bay and the underside of
America
’s huge cap beyond.

The incoming fighter
almost
made it….

Spaas’ gravfighter clipped the trailing edge of the entranceway. Sparks erupted, and then the Starhawk’s starboard side disintegrated in peeling, fragmenting metal. The port side flipped into an out-of-control tumble, vanishing off the right side of the screen. The light above the bay flashed red.

Allyn could feel the ship crews around her sag as Spaas died—no one could have survived such a crash. They sagged, they turned away. She heard someone nearby mutter, “
Shit
…”

Allyn said nothing. Gripping her helmet tightly, she turned away and started walking toward the recovery deck elevators.

She had a report to file, a debriefing to endure.

She felt exhausted and bruised, and every step dragged at her like death.

Squadron Ready Room
TC/USNA CVS
America
Outbound, Eta Boötis System
2022 hours, TFT

Gray stared at the ready room repeater screen, unable to tear his eyes away. It was one thing when a squadron mate bought it in a clean, silent flash of light out in space, quite another when you watched them zorch in for a trap and miss the sweet spot by a matter of scant meters.

He didn’t like Spaas. In fact, he’d detested the guy—an arrogant bully, a womanizer, as much the elitist hypocrite as his partner, Collins.

He’d still been family.

Numb, Gray ran through the members of the Dragonfires, startled to realize that where twelve had launched from the
America
out in the local Kuiper Belt early yesterday morning, only four, counting himself, were left. Sixty-six percent casualties was devastating for any military unit; when the unit was as small as a squadron to begin with, with members practically living in one another’s pockets, the sense of family was keener still…even when you couldn’t stand the bastards.

He wondered if the Dragonfires would be disbanded, the survivors sent as replacements to other squadrons.

The hell with it, He found he didn’t care right now one way or another, didn’t care about
anything
.

But an audio alarm caught his attention, and he switched the display screen to tactical.

God.
That
was all they needed now. The Turusch battle-fleet was emerging from behind Eta Boötis, swinging past the planet and accelerating toward the retreating carrier battlegroup. The rest of the Black Lightnings were still trapping in Bays One and Three, and it would be several more minutes before
America
could resume acceleration.

Things were about to get damned tight.

CIC, TC/USNA CVS
America
Outbound, Eta Boötis System
2023 hours, TFT

“Lead elements of the enemy fleet now at eighty-two thousand kilometers, Admiral,” Hughes reported, her voice as matter-of-fact, as coldly professional as any AI’s.

“How long until the last of the fighters gets aboard?” Koenig demanded.

“Two more coming in at Bay One, three at Bay Two. Make it one minute twenty.”

Koening considered this. Over a minute until the
America
could accelerate. How close would the enemy fleet get?

Given their known acceleration capabilities, it looked like the battlegroup would be able to escape…just. The enemy might pursue them out of the system, but a running stern chase was pretty futile, especially when the fleeing vessels would be jigging and changing acceleration routes from moment to moment in order to throw off the enemy’s targeting computers.

“Comm! Make to
Spirit of Confederation
,” he said. “Have them lay down a barrage astern. See if they can discourage those Trash jokers.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

The view of the stars projected on the CIC viewalls darkened, returned, darkened again.

“Enemy has opened fire, Admiral,” Hughes pointed out. “KK projectiles and particle beams.”

“Right. Any damage?”

“Shields are holding, Admiral.” A pause. “Cruiser
Montreal
reports damage to targeting sensors and primary fire control.”

In the tactical display, the green icon representing the
Spirit of Confederation
was slowly turning, rotating ninety degrees until she was traveling sideways, her port broadside facing the enemy.

As on board the
America
,
Confederation
’s primary weapon ran along much of her kilometer-length and pierced her broad shield cap forward, a large-bore railgun that could accelerate one-ton kinetic-kill rounds to speeds of hundreds of kilometers per second. That was not her only weapon, however. Like an eighteenth-century ship of the line, she possessed an impressive broadside, turret-mounted weapons that could fire in every direction except directly forward, where they were effectively blocked by the shield cap. By rotating ninety degrees along her line of flight, the
Spirit of Confederation
brought about two thirds of her broadside weapons to bear. With the enemy now just half a light second astern, the battleship began hammering away, pouring immense volumes of fire into the narrow corridor just ahead of the Turusch vessels.

Koenig turned his attention back to the last of the fighters still coming aboard.

“
Come on, people
,” he murmured, half aloud. “
Come on!
…”

Tactician Emphatic Blossom at Dawn
Enforcer
Radiant Severing
2023 hours, TFT

Tactician Emphatic Blossom watched the combat display, an emotion roughly equivalent to human anger beating behind its optical organs. A tentacle tip coiled and uncoiled reflexively, nervously. If it didn’t know better, if it had not felt the reassurance and calm emanating from the Mind Below, it would have had to assume that the Sh’daar didn’t trust it, didn’t trust the Turusch.

Abyssal whirlwinds!
Emphatic Blossom at Dawn was a trained and experienced master tactician! It knew combat, knew how to lead an enemy into a trap, knew how to spring an ambush, knew how to hammer at the foe until nothing in the kill zone was left alive! The Sh’daar Seed’s orders of the past
g’nyuu’m
simply made no tactical sense whatsoever.

The Turusch fleet had been badly mangled by the enemy fighter attack, true…and there’d been a very real possibility that the
Radiant Severing
itself would be destroyed. That, however, was a part of combat, a part of war. Emphatic Blossom and every Turusch warrior on board the
Severing
was ready to sacrifice its life if that sacrifice would bring a decisive victory.

But no! The Seed had ordered, had
demanded
that the Turusch battle fleet abandon its prey, break orbit and withdraw toward deep space. And Emphatic Blossom had obeyed…as it must. The orders were from its own Mind Below, as inescapable, as relentless as Blossom’s own decisions.

And so the Turusch battle fleet had withdrawn, accelerating close to the speed of light, fleeing the battle.

And then the Sh’daar Seed had spoken again, giving new, and contradictory, orders. The Turusch fleet would turn around and return to the embattled planet, would launch fighters to go in ahead of the fleet and cause as much damage as possible, with the main body of the fleet arriving soon after.

Projectiles and particle beams would be fired into the region, timed to arrive just before the fighters appeared. And every enemy outpost on the target world would be deliberately obliterated, targeted by high-velocity masses aimed with mathematical precision at the locations of the alien surface outposts.

And that didn’t make sense to the Turusch tactician either. The Turusch had spent twelves of
g’nyuu’m
bombarding the principle enemy base and two others…but the intent had been to capture the humans, not kill them. Why change the point of the battle
now
?

The Sh’daar Seed, of course, knew what it was doing. Emphatic Blossom
had
to believe that, or its very existence, its role as master tactician, its very understanding of the cosmos all would be called into question.

But Blossom could not guess what their purpose was now, nor could it understand its role in the battle in these circumstances. As
Radiant Severing
and the other Turusch ships decelerated into the volume of space surrounding the target planet, sensors showed that the enemy fleet had already withdrawn, as Emphatic Blossom had more than half expected. On the planetary surface, seething, yellow seas of molten rock steamed beneath continent-sized hurricanes where the alien colonies had been.

An entire world rendered lifeless, useless to anyone.
Why?
…

Radiant Severing
shuddered, the rock hull ringing with an impact against the defensive shields. One of the two largest of the enemy vessels had positioned itself at the rear of the human fleet, and was bombarding the Turusch battle fleet as it retreated.

“
Threat!
” Blossom’s Mind Above could be unpleasantly predictable. “
Kill!
”

“We can destroy that human vessel,” the Mind Here added. “We should…
remind
the humans of the risk they take in defying the Seed.”

The Mind Below seemed to consider this, weighing the options with a computer’s calculating efficiency. “Agreed. But do not pursue the enemy. The survivors should take the report of their defeat back to their homeworld.”

“
Deploy all fighter fists!
” The Mind Here commanded, its emotion as raw and as primitive as that of Mind Above. “Concentrate the full offensive fire of all vessels on
that
target!

Some thirty capital ships of the Turusch fleet adjusted their positions, then began firing at the distant enemy. Particle beams, fusion bolts, high-energy lasers, and kinetic-kill projectiles sleeted through emptiness.

And they began to find their target.

CIC, TC/USNA CVS
America
Outbound, Eta Boötis System
2025 hours, TFT

“The
Spirit of Confederation
reports she is taking very heavy fire, Admiral,” Hughes told him. “Damage to aft shields, damage to primary broadside weapons, damage to two of the three hab modules. Fire control is down.”

Koenig was watching the
Confederation
’s struggle on a secondary tactical display, which was relaying the camera view from a battle drone pacing the retreating ships. Straight-edged patches of blackness kept popping on and off along the battleship’s length, responding to incoming fire. One set of aft shields was flickering on and off alarmingly, threatening complete failure. Several sections of her long, thin hull had been wrecked by energies leaking through the shields. The damage was severe, but she continued to fire back.

White light pulsed, dazzlingly bright, as an incoming Turusch missile detonated in a sand cloud a hundred kilometers away.

“Comm,” Koenig ordered. “Patch me through to the
Confederation
’s CO.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

A moment later, the image of Captain Paul Radniak appeared within the holodisplay field beside Koenig’s workstation. His face was worn, his uniform disheveled. Smoke wreathed through the image, which kept flickering on and off with sharp bursts of static as the battleship’s shields rose and fell, and as electromagnetic pulses from particle-beam hits and detonating nukes interfered with the signal.

“Yes, Admiral?”

“You’ve done what you can, Paul,” Koenig told him. “It looks like the bastards aren’t going to follow us.”

Radniak’s eyes flicked away as he checked a readout outside the range of the holo’s pick-up. “It looks like they’re sending fighters after us, Admiral.”

“Fighters we can handle. I recommend you ass-end it out of there.”

The
Spirit of Confederation
was taking a hellacious pounding. Koenig was suggesting that Radniak rotate his ship another ninety degrees, so that the vessel’s stern was pointing in the direction she was moving, and her broad, water-filled forward shield cap was pointed at the enemy. By “ass-ending it out of there,” Radniak would be able to protect his ship from further incoming fire as the
Confederation
continued to accelerate out-system. Without the water shield, the crew might be subjected to dangerous doses of radiation as the
Confederation
approached
c
, but that was preferable to losing the entire vessel when her quantum power tap lost balance and detonated.

Radniak’s image shuddered, winked off, then came back up, rippling with static. “I think you’re right, Ad—” And Radniak was gone.

In the drone-relayed image nearby, white eruptions of light ate their way up the
Spirit of Confederation
’s spine, ripping out massive chunks of debris. One of her hab modules detached and flung itself outward, tumbling end over end as centripetal force sent it hurtling into space. The aft end appeared to be crumpling, folding in on itself. The black holes in the power center were loose, devouring the ship’s aft quarter in multi-ton bites.

The final explosion sent large chunks spraying along the ship’s direction of travel. The largest was the shield cap, tumbling end over end, leaving glittering and intertwining trails of ice crystals from a dozen ruptures in its wake. The intolerably brilliant core of the final explosion faded slowly in a flare of cooling plasma.