Earth Strike (29 page)

Perhaps the Turusch had been hurt more badly than Allyn’s wing had realized. Perhaps they were sick of the blood-letting as well.

Or perhaps the handful of remaining Confederation fighters simply didn’t matter any longer.

“My God!” Collins said over the tac channel as the light flash grew brighter, grew larger. “What the hell is
that
?”

“At a guess…it’s sandcaster rounds hitting the Trash impactors. Hivel kinetic release.” Allyn didn’t trust herself to even guess at how much energy was represented by that brilliant star. It had appeared on their inbound flight path, and was shining within a few degrees of the distant sun. It wasn’t more than a star, a pinpoint of light, but it hurt to look at it with unshielded optics, and for a moment or two, Sol was blotted out by its glare.

Together, the fighters began accelerating away from the Turusch fleet. Gray’s warning had been specific; near-
c
sand clouds were coming in close behind the warning itself, and any fighters close to the enemy fleet might be hit. Maybe none of the outbound AMSO rounds had made it past that first, far-off detonation. But if any
had
—

A Turusch Juliet-class cruiser near the enemy’s van began
sparkling
…or the forward gravitic shields of the vessel did, at any rate. Each flash was dazzlingly bright but very tiny, a single flash by itself too small to cause major damage…but as flash followed flash the enemy’s gravitic shields collapsed, and then a storm of strobing detonations began eating through the enemy warship’s bow cap.

Allyn watched, transfixed, as the Turusch cruiser began coming apart, shields smashed down, hull devoured bite by bite, as internal structure began showing through the missing gaps in hullo plate and armor, as the ship’s interior began glowing white-hot.

The same was happening to other ships in the Turusch fleet as well.

“I’m being hit!” Lieutenant Wellesly cried. His was one of the last of the Star Tigers’ War Eagles, and he was struggling to bring up the rear of the retreating Confederation fighters. His grav shields were sparkling and flashing like those of the Turusch warships.

Then Lieutenant Cavanaugh’s Starhawk was being hit…and Lieutenant Dolermann’s ship, one by one, working from the back of the flight toward the front. Allyn was registering impacts on her fighter’s shielding now, isolated, individual hits by pellets each massing less than a tenth of a gram, but traveling at a fraction less than the speed of light. Her shields shrugged off one hit…a second…a third…but the rate of impacts was increasing, and her shields threatened to fall.

More and more of the Turusch vessels were being hit. Five had been destroyed outright, beginning with the Juliet. Eight more…ten more…
fifteen
more were badly damaged, their shields down, gaping, white-hot craters glowing against their outer hulls. Many of the enemy warships vanished as their gravitic shields went up full…but the impacts continued until the shields failed, exposing the naked hulls of the huge vessels within.

Numerous projectiles were striking the tight-wrapped knots of folded spacetime ahead of each Turusch vessel, the drive singularities pulling them onward at five hundred gravities. Since those singularities, by definition, had escape velocities greater than the speed of light, the incoming sand grains couldn’t pass through, but were trapped…and by becoming trapped, they each yielded
very
large amounts of energy.

Some of the enemy vessels began releasing their dust balls, switching off their forward drives. Some switched off the forward drives and flipped them astern, decelerating. Others threw out drive singularities to port or starboard, up or down, attempting to turn, to get out of the way of that incoming shotgun cloud of destruction.

Like a shotgun blast, the individual grains had been scattered across a very large area of sky, but the cloud was still thickest in the vicinity of the Turusch fleet, while Allyn and her fighters were accelerating out and away through the cloud’s ragged, outer fringes. Wellesly’s War Eagle suddenly exploded as his shields fell, and the fighter’s hull succumbed to that thin, deadly sleet of sand. Cavanaugh’s shields were down…and Collins’ shields as well…and Raynell’s and Donovan’s and Tucker’s as well.

Without orders, several of the Confederation pilots began cutting their acceleration somewhat, dropping back in the pack to put their fighters between those pilots whose shields had failed, and the incoming sleet.

And then, hurtling outward at half the speed of light, the surviving fighters cleared the vast, cone-shaped cloud of high-velocity sand.

Or, perhaps, the storm of sand had simply passed. Once she was sure the impacts had stopped, Allyn ordered the remaining fighters to decelerate, to turn, to again close with the enemy fleet.

Half of the enemy fighters that had been pacing them had been destroyed. Most of the rest were drifting, battered hulks, their shields down, their armor all but stripped away. The Confederation pilots burned past the enemy craft, hitting them with PBPs and a few remaining KK rounds. Those Turusch fighters that could scattered, some engaging, some fleeing. The battle broke up after a few seconds; both sides appeared shocked into a kind of fugue by the devastation. It was hard to think, hard to act.

But for the moment, the Confederation pilots held the advantage.

The Turusch battlefleet was in complete disarray. A cruiser turning one way had collided with a battleship turning another, filling the sky with broken fragments. Some of those fragments, tumbling outward at high speed, had struck other enemy warships, adding to the devastation.

The Confederation fighters made one high-speed run through the Turusch fleet, burning and killing wherever they could find targets of opportunity. Clouds of white-hot plasma and jagged, tumbling fragments of wreckage continued to drift with the fleet, however, and Allyn ordered the attack to break off before she lost any more pilots.

Some of the Turusch vessels
were
firing back, were still deadly adversaries.

“All fighters,” she called over the tactical channel. “Regroup and reform on my position. We’re going to stay clear of the battlespace for a while.”

There might be further sandcaster volleys on the way out from Green Squadron. At this point, it was more important to track the enemy, to see what he intended to do….

…and to await reinforcements. Green Squadron would be here soon.

“I’m not sure, people,” Allyn transmitted to the others, “but I
think
we may have just won the battle.”

Tactician Emphatic Blossom at Dawn
Enforcer
Radiant Severing
1117 hours, TFT

Emphatic Blossom at Dawn knew the Turusch warfleet had lost.

It had begun having doubts about the practicality of this operation some
g’nya
before, as the ferocity, the sheer determination, the astonishing dedication of the defenders’ attacks had become apparent. The humans had continued to assault a vastly superior Turusch battlefleet, arriving in twos and threes from all over the sky, hurling themselves at warships like tiny
d’cha
swarming around a behemoth
grolludh
. Even a
grolludh
’s massive gasbag could be punctured if enough of the mites attacked for long enough, if they wanted nothing other than the
grolludh
floater’s death, if they didn’t care how many of their number died.

“We must withdraw,” Blossom’s twin said, “while yet we can.”

“This defeat will be…difficult to explain to the Sh’daar Seed.”

The two voices speaking together said something quite different: “The Masters will not be pleased.”

But orders were given and, one by one, the remaining Turusch warships began turning away, a ponderous change of course through 180 degrees.

It was an extremely risky maneuver, especially carried out by a closely formed fleet comprised of numerous damaged ships, some with sensors scoured away from ravaged hulls, some with faltering drive projectors or failing power plants. It would have been safer by far to flip end-for-end and decelerate at five hundred gravities, then accelerate back out-system, but that maneuver would have carried the battered fleet many light-
g’nyuu’m
deeper into the enemy’s star system. The hunterfleet’s deep-range scanners were already picking up returns of what likely were more enemy fighters outbound. If the Turusch hunterfleet came under heavy and sustained attacks by human capital vessels, few, if any, Turusch warships would escape at all.

One vessel, the
Scintillating Gleam
, began turning. A second, larger, ship, the
Devious Observer
, was supposed to turn, but its grav drive failed and it continued drifting straight ahead, directly into the
Gleam
’s path.

The
Scintillating Gleam
exploded as her power plant ran out of control. The
Devious Observer
took more damage to her flank, but the larger vessel continued ahead, a drifting hulk.

The enemy fighters watched the maneuver from a safe distance.

“You have won this time,” Blossom said. “We don’t know how.”

“Enjoy the victory,” the twin said. “Hard fought, bitterly won.”

Together, the harmonics spoke a third time. “We shall grasp the final sharp reckoning, a new hunt…and soon.”

Green Squadron
Outbound, Sol System
1120 hours, TFT

“Right, people,” Gray called. “Stay tight! Keep jinking!
Hit ’em!
”

In close formation, the twenty-four Starhawks flashed in from astern of the Turusch fleet, a fleet now in full and tumultuous retreat. Gray locked on to an immense Alpha-class battleship, a ten-kilometer-long asteroid, potato-shaped and crater-pocked. Its shields were down, the weapons turrets and domes scattered across its surface nakedly exposed.

Gray locked on at ten thousand kilometers and fired a pair of Krait missiles, and a thousand megatons flared against the night. His Starhawk angled in close behind the missiles, pivoting as it zorched across half-molten craters seething into hard vacuum and lancing the stricken giant with its particle weapon.

Elsewhere, a Kilo-class light cruiser exploded…a brightly painted Toad fighter tumbled out of control, slamming into a mobile planetoid…a Gamma-class battle-cruiser began coming apart under the relentless pounding of four Confederation fighters, hull plates spinning into space, weapons housings collapsing into white-hot, molten metal, atmosphere spewing into emptiness like random rocket exhausts.

The attack continued with relentless purpose for twenty minutes, the fresh Starhawks of Green Squadron supported by the handful of exhausted survivors of Star Carrier
America
’s squadrons.

“About time someone else got out here,” Commander Allyn quipped over the tactical channel.

“We weren’t going to let you have all the fun to yourselves,” Gray shot back. “Looks like you guys have been busy.”

“Busy,” Allyn replied. “Is
that
what you call it….”

Green Squadron broke off the attack at last, however. The Turusch warfleet was scattering, and the pursuing fighters were being drawn further and further into the Abyss. Two of his nugget pilots were killed in the fight, burned out of the sky when they got a little too eager in their close pursuit.

The Turusch fleet had been badly mauled in the engagement—at least forty capital ships destroyed, and most of the rest had at least some damage from the sandblasting attack. The survivors were in full retreat, streaming out-system in the general direction of the star Alphekka. Those with disabled gravitic shields might not be able to jump to FTL. Unable to travel faster than light, their crews exposed to the harsh radiation cascade of near-
c
travel without screens, they would count as kills as well. Lifeless hulks doomed to fall endlessly through the gulfs between the cold and unwinking stars.

Confederation losses had been astonishingly light, with only fighters engaged, and no losses among the defending capital ship fleet. Allyn’s ragged command had lost thirty-eight ships…and if SAR teams and tugs got out here in time, some of the missing pilots might yet be saved. Green Squadron had lost two. A stunning, lopsided, upset victory for the Confederation—forty fighters lost in exchange for forty or more capital ships, perhaps a hundred enemy fighters destroyed, and the salvation of the solar system as the enemy’s attack fleet was turned back.

Or it
would
have been a lopsided victory…if not for one of the bitter ironies of modern space combat.

Some of the rounds fired by the enemy fleet had not, in fact, yet reached their targets….

18 October 2404

Inner System, Sol System
1430 hours, TFT

The remainder of the battle was anticlimax…but as Deep Tactician Emphatic Blossom had suggested, it was
bitter
anticlimax.

Most of the impactors fired by the Turusch hunterfleet were caught in the sandblast, but not all. Hurtling across the Abyss between the thirty-AU shell and the Inner planets, the impactors, each with a warhead massing slightly less than one kilogram, had been aimed with considerable precision; the plasma shock wave of the hivel explosion midway between Green Squadron and the Turusch fleet had deflected most of them ever so slightly…a minute course change that was magnified into a miss by hundreds, even thousands of kilometers twenty-five AUs away.

Most of those impactors that survived the explosion missed their targets on Earth, Mars, and in the spaces in between, but there
were
exceptions.

A Turusch impactor, a twelve-kilogram projectile traveling at near-
c
, struck the Martian desert 2200 kilometers north of Aethiopis. Plunging through the atmosphere within a fraction of a second, the mass detonated within the Apsus Valley, liberating an immense flood of melted permafrost surging toward Elysium. The shock wave rippled through the planet’s crust, encountered the deeply anchored cable of the Aethiopian space elevator, and sent a crack-the-whip surge of energy up the ribbon.

Not even the super-tough nanocarbon buckyweave of the elevator’s ground-to-space tether was strong enough to contain and carry that much energy. The cable parted some six thousand kilometers above the surface. The upper part of the cable, anchored in space by a small asteroid, was suddenly released from the planet’s hold. With the anchor moving much faster than the velocity required to keep it in orbit at that altitude, when the tether snapped it took a tangential path outbound, dragging with it some millions of tons of interconnected factories, habs, and shipyards located at the cable’s 17,000-kilometer level. More than eight thousand people lived and worked in those facilities, mostly naval personnel or technicians with the Mars terraforming project.

A few were still alive when SAR craft caught up with the free-flying space elevator fragment days later.

The six thousand kilometers of buckyweave tether still connected to the Martian surface began to fall. Most burned up in the planet’s atmosphere, which fortunately was much thicker now than it had been at the beginning of the terraforming project. What got through, however, added to the destruction on the surface, where some hundreds of domes had cracked or been smashed by the initial shock wave, where tens of thousands of workers were killed when their pressurized habs vented to space, where entire colony domes were overwhelmed by planetquake, by shock wave, by flood, and erased from the Martian surface.

The entire planet would shudder, quake, and in one scientist’s description “ring like a bell” for years after the impact.

Another impactor skimmed past the sun, striking Earth on her morning side, coming down in the Atlantic Ocean thirty-five hundred kilometers off the coast of North America. The effects were less severe than on Mars, for the projectile’s passage within a few million kilometers of the sun had tunneled through the star’s photosphere, slowing it somewhat, vaporizing much of the in-falling one-kilo mass, heating the remnant to molten and deformed plasticity. Ten minutes later, the mass struck Earth’s atmosphere and exploded.

The shock wave and the fragments that made it all the way through the atmosphere generated a savage tsunami, a wall of water rippling out across the ocean. Minutes later, the tidal wave surged into shallow water, rearing to a hundred meters in height as it was funneled up the narrow bottleneck of old New York Harbor.

Old Manhattan was all but demolished, the crumbling ruins of buildings smashed and battered, like sandcastles caught by an incoming surge across a beach. Only slightly weakened, the wave slammed north into the New City, toppling the kilometer-high tower of the Columbia Arcology. The strike killed perhaps seventy thousand people for whom, until that instant, the war with the Turusch had been a dim and far-off affair, something mentioned in news downloads and special reports from the Authority…reports that most citizens ignored or shrugged off as of no consequence.

Elsewhere, the wave caused unimaginable devastation all along the continent’s eastern shoreline.

Exact casualty figures were never compiled, but the number of dead was certainly in the tens of millions. The same out-rushing ripple struck the coast of Africa, the Atlantic shore of Europe, the nearly submerged islands of the Caribbean, and the coastline of South America, and millions more perished.

Bad as the catastrophe was, casualties and damage might have been much worse. With exceptions such as new New York, most of the urban centers that had been built during the exodus from the world’s ocean shorelines over the past few centuries had been well inland. Rising sea levels had created a kind of buffer zone around the perimeter of each continent, largely uninhabited stretches of marsh and swamp, of shallow water and estuary.

Even so, millions died.

Potentially worse than the tidal waves were the storms that followed the impactor’s wake, as super-heated air in Earth’s upper atmosphere blasted out in all directions at supersonic speed, triggering a vast swirl of low pressure that swiftly collapsed into a super-hurricane. Storm winds of hundreds of kilometers per hour whipped seas already set in motion by tidal waves into white froth; the storm approached the mainland over the shallows that once had been Florida and blasted its way inland, moving first north, then curving with the mountains and the planet’s coriolis forces to the northeast, pounding and booming up the already battered coast. After inundating Maine and Nova Scotia, it curved back out to sea…but by that time had taken on a life of its own, a hurricane swirl of clouds as large as the North Atlantic, a semi-permanent storm like Jupiter’s centuries-old Red Spot slowly circling from North America to western Europe to Western Africa to the Caribbean and back to North America once more.

The storm would persist for months, until lasers fired from orbit were used to heat the stratosphere and create high-pressure systems that contained, then gradually dissipated the storm.

News downloads referred to the hurricane as the Starstorm, and predicted that the cloud disk would reflect so much of the sun’s infalling light and warmth that it would trigger a new ice age. Winters were cooler for the next five years, but with the Starstorm’s end, the climate returned to what
currently
was normal for the planet.

Other strikes across the Inner System were smaller in scale, less devastating. An impactor massing several hundred kilograms struck a cluster of manufactories anchored at SupraKenya. Thousands were killed, and other structures anchored nearby suffered significant damage, but the elevator, as some feared, did not fall, and the calamity of Aethiopis was not repeated on Earth. The bulk of the impactor, fortunately, missed the Earth.

At Phobia, the Confederation destroyer
Emmons
had been in spacedock, preparing for boost to join the rest of the fleet, when an impactor struck the dock facility. The
Emmons
, the facility gantry, and perhaps eight hundred naval and civilian personnel were instantly vaporized, and thousands more were killed as fragments from the disaster slashed through the delicate web of habs and crew modules in Mars synchorbit…including Mars Fleet CIC.

Among the dead were Admiral Henderson and one of his senior aides, Rear Admiral Karyn Mendelson, killed when the base command hub was torn open and its atmosphere vented into space.

The near-
c
impactors flashed across the Inner System over the course of some minutes, and then were gone, vanished into the outer depths. Hours and even days later, however, the Inner System was bombarded again by the in-falling debris of blasted and shattered spacecraft, both Turusch and human.

A robotic nitrogen freighter, on the long, curved, infalling trajectory from Triton to Mars, was struck by what was probably a large piece of a Confederation fighter—ironically, later identified as Lieutenant Robert Hauser’s ship from VFA-31, the Impactors. The fragment struck with a relative velocity of nearly 90 kilometers per second. The freighter and its cargo were a total loss.

Two emergency-rescue team members were killed at Schiaparelli, on Mars, when a five-kilogram fragment that might have been from a Turusch warship struck their crawler on the south rim of the crater. They’d been trying to get to a terraforming team trapped when the Aethiopis impactor strike had overturned their pressure dome.

The Tsiolkovsky Observatory was damaged and three astronomers killed when fragments scattered across the far side of Earth’s moon. Three of the ships waiting at the muster point between Earth and Mars took damage from high-velocity meteors—likely fragments from the battle.

The dazed human defenders began taking stock. On the one side, the invaders had lost forty ships, a hundred fighters, perhaps several tens of thousands of their military personnel. On the other, the humans had lost a handful of fighters…and perhaps sixty million people—most killed by the tidal waves on Earth.

The defense of Earth, it seemed, had not been so one-sided after all.

Landing Bay One
TC/USNA CVS
America
Outer System, Sol System
2105 hours, TFT

“Lieutenant Gray! Lieutenant Gray! Over here! Look over here, please!”

Gray stepped onto the deck, startled by the crowd. Close by were his squadron mates, pounding him and one another on the back, cheering, even singing. Farther out, though, there were civilians…news media personnel wearing the high-tech headgear that turned their heads into living high-definition cameras and recorders.

Where the hell had they come from? They must have been on the
America
when she boosted clear of Mars early that morning, before her seventeen-hour run to the edge of the system.

“Lieutenant Gray!” one of the reporters yelled, her voice shrill above the mob noise. “Your CO says you’re a hero! What do you have to say about that?”

He turned his head slightly and caught the eye of Marissa Allyn. Presumably she was the “CO” in question. She just grinned at him, then gave him a jaunty thumbs-up.

Gray shrugged, and shook his head. “I’m not a hero,” he said. “The heroes are the ones that fought it out toe to toe with the Turusch.”

“The Turusch don’t
have
toes, idiot,” Lieutenant Tucker said, nudging him in the side.

“Lieutenant Gray!” another called. “Your records say you’re from Old Manhattan. Are you aware Old Manhattan got washed away by a tidal wave?”

The news had only just reached the
America
. News reports were still filtering in. Apparently, things were pretty bad back on Earth, in the Inner System.

“Lieutenant Gray! What do you think about the news that the Confederation Senate is going to talk to the Turusch about peace?…

“Lieutenant Gray!…”

He was too tired to answer, too tired to care. The next thing he knew, though, was that a dozen of his squadron mates—the kids of Green Squadron—had scooped him up and hoisted him to their shoulders, were chanting as they carried him toward the elevator down to the crew hab.

“
Lieutenant Gray!
…”

Good. If he didn’t have to listen to any more nonsense questions,
good
.

Manhattan washed away? There was a pang there…a lingering grief.

But it didn’t seem to matter any longer.

Koenig’s Office
TC/USNA CVS
America
Outer System, Sol System
2150 hours, TFT

“Admiral? The last of the fighters are being brought on board.”

“Thank you. Tell Intel to stay off their backs for a little while, will you? The debriefs can wait until tomorrow. Our people deserve some downtime.”

After what they’ve been through
…

“Aye, aye, Admiral.”

“What’s our SAR status?”

“Both SAR squadrons are still on deep-search patrol. We’ve recovered and towed in five Starhawks. The pilots of two of them were picked up alive, will probably be okay.”

“Good.”

Two out of…how many? It wasn’t enough.

“We’ve also recovered three Trash fighters with their crews alive…and are trying to communicate with the crew of one of their battleship asteroids. We may have as many as several thousand prisoners after this.”

“Keep me informed.”

“Yes, sir.”

Koenig looked again at his desk display screen as he cut the mental connection. He wasn’t particularly interested in Turusch prisoners at the moment. He’d just learned that one of their hivel rounds had hit Phobia CIC, or a dockyard facility right next door. Reports filtering out from the Inner System were still fragmentary and maddeningly vague…but it sounded like much of the Phobos command staff had been killed.

Karyn
…

He felt so damned fucking
helpless
out here, four light hours from Karyn, from the chaos rippling across the Inner System. The awful, sick irony was that he’d expected the
America
battlegroup to engage the enemy after the fighter strike softened it up but, in fact, and except for the launch of the carrier’s fighter squadrons, they hadn’t fired a shot. Lieutenant Gray’s rather unorthodox use of sandcaster AMSOs had proven to be the tactical innovation that had changed near-certain defeat into victory.

But it has turned out to be a terribly, terribly
expensive
victory. The Navy, the Confederation, hell, all of humankind, would be recovering from the effects of that victory for a long time to come.