Earth Strike (6 page)

There was no emergency survival radio in his survival kit, because, in fact, his e-suit had radio circuitry built into it, both for communication and for tracking. He needed line-of-sight to reach the Marine base directly, but his squadron and a large number of battlespace drones would be above the horizon now, somewhere above those blood-hued, low-hanging clouds.

A direct call to them, however, might generate way too much interest on the part of the Turusch, who would be closely monitoring the electronic environment around the planet, and a stray, coded signal might bring down anything from a KK projectile to a 100-megaton nuke.

His personal e-hancements, computer circuitry nanotechnically grown into the sulci of his brain, had downloaded both the ghost-shadow of his fighter’s AI and the position of the Marine base in those last seconds before he’d crashed. As he turned his head, his IHD hardware threw a green triangle up against his visual field, marking a spot on the horizon…in
that
direction, toward the beach.

That was where he had to go, then. Taking a last look around, he started wading toward the shore.

CIC, TC/USNA CVS
America
35.4 AUs from Eta Boötis
1330 hours, TFT

Admiral Koenig checked the time once again. The fleet had been traveling for 9.4 hours, accelerating constantly at 500 gravities. They were nearing the midpoint now, halfway between the Kuiper Belt space where they’d arrived in-system and their destination. Their speed at the moment was .77
c
, fast enough that for every three minutes passing in the universe outside, only two minutes passed within the
America
.

It had been an uneventful passage so far, thank God. He was all too aware, however, that by now the gravfighters of VF-44 had reached the planet and were engaging the Turusch fleet.

He checked the time again. The Dragonfires had been mixing it up with the bad guys for forty-five minutes already, an eternity in combat. It was entirely possible that the fighting was over.

If so, twelve brave men and women were dead now—dead, or trapped in crumpled hulks on high-speed, straight-line vectors out of battlespace.

Best not to think about that
….

“Admiral?” the voice of Commander Katryn Craig, the CIC Operations officer, said in Koenig’s head. “Mr. Quintanilla is requesting permission to enter the CIC.”

Koenig sighed. He would rather have given orders that the civilian be kept off the command deck entirely, but he was under orders from Fleet Mars to cooperate with the jackass, and playing the martinet would not smooth the bureaucratic pathway in the least.

Politics
. He made a sour face. Sometimes, it seemed as though his job was nothing else but.

“Let him in,” Koenig said, grudgingly.

Quintanilla entered from the aft passageway a moment later. “Admiral? I was wondering if you could give me an update.”

“We’re roughly halfway there,” Koenig told him. “Nine hours and some to go.”

Quintanilla pulled his way to the display projection at the center of CIC. There, small globes of light glowed in holographic projection, showing the positions of both Eta Boötis A and B, fourteen major planets, the task force’s current position just outside the orbit of one of the system’s gas giants, and a red haze around the objective. The carrier task force had no way of receiving telemetry from the fighters it had launched nine and a half hours earlier, of course, not while its ships were encased in their Alcubierre bubbles, but if everything had proceeded according to the oplan, the Dragonfires should have reached the vicinity of Eta Boötis IV some forty-five minutes earlier.

“Does that mean we’re going to do a skew-flip, Admiral? To start decelerating?”

“No, sir, it does not. You’re thinking of the gravitic drives on the fighters. The Alcubierre Drive works differently…an entirely different principle.”

“I don’t understand.”

Koenig wondered if that man had been briefed at all…or if he’d been given a technical download that he’d failed to review.

Quintanilla seemed to read Koenig’s expression. “Look, I’m here as a political liaison, Admiral. The technology of your space drive is hardly my area of expertise.”

Obviously
, Koenig thought. “The type of gravitational acceleration we use on the fighters won’t work on capital ships,” he said, “vessels over about eighty meters in length. With ships as large as the
America
, projecting an artificial singularity pulling fifty-kay gravs or so ahead of the vessel would cause problems—tidal effects would set up deadly shear forces within the ship’s hull that would tear her to bits.

“So for larger ships, we use the Alcubierre Drive. It manipulates the fabric of spacetime both forward and astern, essentially causing space to contract ahead and expand behind. The result is an enclosed bubble of spacetime with the ship imbedded inside. The ship is not accelerating relative to the space around it, but that space
is
sliding across the spacetime matrix at accelerations that can reach the speed of light, or better.”

“That makes no sense whatsoever.”

Koenig grinned. “Welcome to the wonderful world of zero-point field manipulation. It’s all pretty contra-intuitive. Free energy out of hard vacuum, artificial singularities, and we can reshape spacetime itself to suit ourselves. No wonder the Sh’daar are nervous about our technology curve.”

“Explain something to me, Admiral?” Quintanilla asked. He was floating near the system display, and had been studying it for several moments.

“If I can.”

“Why only one squadron? That’s…what? Twelve spacecraft? But you have six squadrons on board, right?”

Koenig blinked, surprised by the abrupt change of topic. He’d been expecting another physics question.

“Six strike fighter squadrons, yes,” Koenig replied, cautious. What was the civilian hammering at? “Plus one reconnaissance squadron, the Sneaky Peaks; an EW squadron; two SAR squadrons; and two utility/logistics squadrons.” EW was electronic warfare, specialists in long-range electronic intelligence, or ELINT, and in battlespace command and control. SAR was search and rescue, the tugs that went out after high-velocity hulks, attempting to recover the pilots.

“But you just sent one fighter squadron in, and they have, what? Another nine hours in there before we arrive?”

“Nine hours, twenty-one minutes,” Koenig said, checking his IHD time readout.

“So what are the chances for one lone squadron against…what? Fifty-five Turusch ships, you said?”

“More than that, Mr. Quintanilla. Fifty-five was just the number we could see from seventy AUs out. And even more might have arrived since.”

Quintanilla shrugged, the movement giving him a slight rotation in microgravity. He reached out awkwardly and grabbed the back of Koenig’s seat. “Okay, twelve fighters against
over
fifty-five capital ships, then. It seems…suicidal.”

“I agree.”

“Then why—”

“Every man and woman of VF-44 volunteered for this op,” Koenig told him. He could have added that Koenig’s own contribution to the plan hashed out by Ops had called for
three
squadrons, half of
America
’s strike-fighter compliment. Ultimately, that had been rejected by the Fleet Operations Review Board at Mars Synchorbital. His was still the final responsibility.

“It just seems to me that your plan should have allowed for more fighters in the initial strike.”

“It’s a little late to start second-guessing the oplan working group’s decisions now, isn’t it?”

“But you could launch the rest of your strike squadrons now, couldn’t you? We’re a lot closer to the target. It would take them—”

“No, Mr. Quintanilla. We could not.”

“Why not?”

Koenig sighed. Would it serve any purpose whatsoever to educate this…civilian? “I just told you how the Alcubierre Drive works, Mr. Quintanilla.”

“Eh? What does that have to do with it?”

“As I said, each ship in the fleet is imbedded inside a bubble of warped spacetime, contracting the space ahead, expanding behind. The bubble is moving. Right now
America
’s bubble is moving at about three quarters of the speed of light. But each ship in the task force is imbedded within the spacetime inside its bubble and is relatively motionless compared to its surroundings.”

“So? Why can’t you just drop out of this bubble and launch more fighters?”

“Because we would drop back into normal space with the velocity we had when we engaged the Alcubierre Drive, out in this system’s Kuiper Belt, something less than one kilometer per second. We would then have to begin accelerating all over again. If we started decelerating at the halfway point, our total trip would take twenty-five and a half hours. If we keep accelerating, we’ll reach Haris in a total of eighteen and some hours. At that point we’ll be zorching along at one-point-oh-eight
c
, just a hair faster than light, but we’ll cut the Alcubierre Drive and drop into normal space at a modest one kps.”

“I just hope when we do, we’ll find those fighter pilots alive.”

“War means death, Mr. Quintanilla, the deaths of brave men and women doing their duty. I don’t like it any more than you do, and if I could wave my hand and change the laws of physics, I would.”

“But another nine and a half hours…”

“Let my people do their jobs, Mr. Quintanilla. There’s nothing you can do to change things, one way or the other.”

Quintanilla thought about this a moment, then swam for the CIC exit.

The hell of it was, however, that Quintanilla was right about one thing. The oplan
should
have called for more fighters in the first strike. The mission planners on Mars, however, had feared the consequences if
America
didn’t have a sufficient defensive capability once she started mixing it up with the Turusch.

Had it been up to Koenig, he would have launched all six fighter squadrons from the Eta Boötis Kuiper Belt, and trusted the destroyer screen to keep the carrier safe.

But, as he’d told the damned civilian, it was too late for second-guessing the mission plan now.

Blue Omega One
VFA-44
Dragonfires
Eta Boötis System
1335 hours, TFT

A nuclear fireball blossomed a hundred kilometers ahead, and Commander Marissa Allyn twisted her gravfighter hard into a tight yaw. A trio of Turusch fighters flashed past her starboard side, bow to stern, particle beams stabbing at her Starhawk. She sent three Kraits after them, then followed that up with the last two Kraits in her armament racks, locking on to an immense Turusch battlespace monitor just emerging from behind the planet.

The sky around her was filled with fire and destruction, with twisting fighters, lumbering capital-ship giants, and tumbling chunks of wreckage. “
Mayday! Mayday!
” sounded over her com link. “This is Blue Eleven…two golf-mikes on my tail…”

“Blue Eleven! Blue Three! I’m on them!…”

Golf-mikes—gravitic missiles—were looping through battlespace, their sensors locking on to any powered target not transmitting a Turusch IFF code. The damned things were next to impossible to shake, and there were so many of them in the battle now that the Confederation pilots were having to concentrate on evading them more and more.

“This is Blue Eleven! Breaking right! Breaking—”

The voice cut off with a raw burst of static. The icon representing Oz Tombaugh, Blue Eleven, on Allyn’s tactical display flared and winked out.

Damn…

“Omega Strike, this is Blue Omega One!” she called. The squadron’s expendables were almost gone, and there was little more serious damage they could do to the Turusch fleet with what was left. “Let’s get down on the deck! Make for the planet and home on Mike-Red!”

Eight members of the squadron remained in action, including Allyn.

And they still had more than nine hours to go before the relief forces arrived.

25 September 2404

Blue Omega Seven
Eta Boötis IV
1353 hours, TFT

Trevor Gray slogged across wet, marshy ground, a soft and yielding surface smothered in a vibrantly red-orange tangle of vegetation. It was raining now, with big, heavy drops splattering across the ground cover, which appeared to be stretching and expanding under the pounding.

He’d heard and felt a savage boom behind him some minutes before—probably the Tushies dropping something nasty on the wreckage of his fighter or the abandoned acceleration couch, so he kept moving, trying to put as much distance as possible between himself and a possible area of Turusch interest. Moments before, he’d waded out of the shallow water, stumbling ashore on a beach covered by what looked like stubby, blunt-ended tentacles.

The thickness of the vegetation around him was surprising, though it had taken him a moment to realize that it
was
vegetation. In fact, he still wasn’t sure. The stuff was
moving
. Each tentacle was perhaps ten to fifteen centimeters long and as thick as his wrist; the tips were open, the weaving shapes hollow, and they appeared to be filled with small holes, like sponges. Though overall they were orange in color, each, in fact, shaded from deep red at the base to bright yellow at the rim of the opening. Their movements were slow and rhythmic, ripples spreading out from his feet with each step and traveling eight or ten meters in all directions, and quivering in response to the rain. He would have assumed they were animals, except for the fact that they were firmly rooted in the soft ground.

According to the readout from the circuitry woven into his e-suit, the atmosphere was a poisonous mix of carbon dioxide and gaseous sulfur compounds, with smaller amounts of ammonia, nitrogen, methane, and just a whiff of oxygen. The sea he’d just emerged from was water, but with a high percentage of sulfuric acid; the rain, he noted, was almost pure sulfuric acid—H
₂
SO
₄
—and it steamed as it splashed across the vegetation. The external temperature was up to 53 degrees Celsius, and climbing rapidly as the local morning grew more advanced.

Gray’s e-suit was composed of a finely woven carbon composite that, in theory, at least, would resist anything the local atmosphere could throw at him, including strong acids and high temperatures. He wondered, though, if any material substance could stand up to this kind of acidity for very long. There were, he noticed, quite a few rock outcroppings thrusting above the orange vegetation, all of them soft and rounded, as though smoothed by geological ages of acid rain. Some of the larger outcrops had holes eaten clear through them, and they stood above the quivering orange ground like alien gateways.

Gray’s internal circuitry had memory enough for some backup data, but had nowhere near the capacity of his wrecked fighter. There was nothing there, for instance, on the flora and fauna of Eta Boötis IV…and he wished now that he’d paid more attention when he’d been scanning through the data files on board the Starhawk.

What the hell was a chemoorganoheterotroph, anyway?

A ripple of motion caught his attention out of the corner of his eye, something dark, quick, and low to the ground. He turned…but saw nothing beyond the writhing of those damned orange plants.

The place, he decided, was starting to get on his nerves, and now his imagination was playing tricks on him…

Blue Omega One
VFA-44
Dragonfires
Eta Boötis IV
1412 hours, TFT

Commander Marissa Allyn brought her gravfighter into a steep climb as kinetic-kill projectiles, heated white-hot by atmospheric friction, stabbed down out of the sky and struck the sea in white bursts of vapor. Her ship vibrated alarmingly with the maneuver. Despite the advanced polymorphic hull, able to drastically reconfigure its shape according to mission or aerodynamic requirements from moment to moment, the SG-92 Starhawk had not been designed with atmospheric flight in mind. You could maneuver the thing with gravs, or you could use the change of airfoil shape and ailerons to maneuver against the airflow, but it was tough to do
both
.

Turusch fighters relied solely on gravitics for flight, whether in space or in atmosphere; those ugly, potato-shaped lumps were just about as aerodynamic as bricks.

There were three of the damned things on her tail at the moment. A particle beam seared past her head, the dazzling blue-white flash making her flinch. Lasers and charged particle beams normally were invisible in the vacuum of space; only in atmosphere did the beams draw sharp trails of ionization across the sky. In space, her IHD graphics showed the beams, but not with such eye-dazzling intensity.

Blinking, she told her AI to stop down the intensity of the light and kept hauling her Starhawk up and over in a hard, tight loop. The Toads tried to match her climb but were carrying too much velocity. She could see their hulls glow white-hot as they tried dumping excess speed. “Target lock!” she called. “Fox One!”

But that was her last Krait. “This is Blue One!” she called. “I’m dry on VG-10s! Three on my tail! Switching to beams and guns!”

“Copy that, Blue Leader! This is Blue Five! Got you covered!”

Blue Five—Lieutenant Spaas—dropped out of empty sky, trying to get on the one of the Toads’ six, the sweet spot directly behind its tail. The Turusch fighter broke left and Spaas followed, trying to get a clear shot.

Allyn’s missile twisted around, then arrowed almost straight down, striking the lead Toad and detonating with a savage, eight-kiloton blast that sent a visible shock wave racing out through the air. The outer skin of the Turusch spacecraft peeled away from the tiny, sudden sun…and then the entire craft disintegrated in a spray of metallic shreds and tatters as the fireball swelled and engulfed them.

The last Toad boomed through the fireball. Allyn completed her loop, rolling out at the top and entering a vertical dive. Her IHD slid a targeting reticule across the Toad, which was coming up at her from below, head-on. She triggered her particle beam an instant before the enemy could fire, sending a blue-white lance of energy stabbing into and through the Toad’s hull. The fighter came apart in glowing fragments; a half second later she plunged through the debris cloud, feeling the tick and rattle of fragments impacting across her fuselage.

“Scratch two Tangos!” Allyn yelled, adrenaline surging through her. Damn, she
never
felt this alive, save when she was turning and burning in combat. She hated that about herself.

“And scratch one!” Spaas added, as another nuclear sun blossomed in the fire-ravaged sky over Haris.

Allyn looked around, orienting herself. The dogfight, or part of it, had drifted down out of space and into Eta Boot’s atmosphere. They were over the day side of the planet, perhaps a thousand kilometers north and east of the Marine perimeter. “All Blue Omegas!” she called. “We need to work in closer to Mike-Red!”

Turusch fleet elements were attempting to keep the Dragonfires from engaging enemy positions around the Marine perimeter. The squadron actually had two mission elements—crippling the Turusch fleet as completely as possible before the Confederation carrier task force arrived, and taking some of the pressure off of the Marines. Of the two, the first, arguably, was the most important…at least that was what they’d told her in the pre-mission briefing.

Even so, the mission was pointless if the Marine perimeter collapsed before the
America
arrived. The Turusch were doing their best to keep the Dragonfires away from Red-Mike, and the volume of fire directed against the Mariners appeared to be growing more intense.

Fifteen kilometers away, a nuclear fireball consumed Blue Twelve.

If the surviving fighters could tuck in close to the Marines, perhaps the two might be able to support each other.

Blue Omega Seven
Eta Boötis IV
1415 hours, TFT

Gray had to rest.

The spider strapped to his back continued responding perfectly to his movements, adding its considerable strength to his own as he staggered across the alien landscape. The planet’s gravity continued dragging at him, however, until his heart was pounding so hard inside his chest he began to fear the possibility of a heart attack.

Theoretically, the med circuitry woven into his e-suit was supposed to monitor his health, and would inform him if he was in any real danger of hurting himself, but he wasn’t sure he trusted that technology yet. He stopped and leaned against a smoothly sculpted rock outcropping, breathing hard.

Again, something moved, half glimpsed out of the corner of his eye.

His rapid breathing was fogging the inside of his helmet, and he wasn’t sure he’d seen anything at all. Turning, he stared at the patch that had snagged his attention. What the hell was he seeing?…

They looked like shadows, each leaf shaped and paper thin, gray in color, each the size of his hand or a little bigger. They flitted across the orange vegetation as though gliding over it, traveling a meter or two before vanishing again among the weaving tendrils.

Again, Gray wished he’d understood—or paid more attention to—the briefings on the biology of Eta Boötis IV. Even if he’d ignored the canned downloads, Commander Allyn had gone over it lightly in the permission briefing. What he best remembered, however, was her stressing that the star Eta Boötis was only 2.7 billion years old…far too young to have planets with anything more highly evolved than primitive bacteria. Gray was no xenobiologist, but those…those
things
slipping and gliding over the orange plants, or whatever they were, looked a hell of a lot more advanced than any bacteria he’d ever heard about.

Were they dangerous? He couldn’t tell, but it did appear that more and more of them were visible from moment to moment, as though they were following him.

Or might they be some sort of Turusch or Sh’daar biological weapon? Not much was known about their technology, or about whether or not they might utilize organic weapons or sensor probes.

A rumble drifted out of the sky. He looked up, trying to penetrate the low, reddish-gray overcast, and wondered if that was thunder, or if it was the battle somewhere overhead.

Blue Omega One
VFA-44
Dragonfires
Eta Boötis IV
1418 hours, TFT

Commander Marissa Allyn brought her gravfighter into a flat, high-speed trajectory, hurtling low above the surface. The orange ground cover gave way in a flash of speed-blurred motion to bare rock. The surface for fifty kilometers around the Marine perimeter was charred black or, in places, transformed into vast patches of fused glass. Over the past weeks, since the Turusch had brought the Marine base under attack, hundreds of nuclear warheads had detonated against the Marine shields, along with thousands of charged particle beams. The equivalent of miniature suns had burned against that landscape, charring it, in places turning sand to molten glass.

She checked the tactical display for the entire squadron. Three of her pilots were still in space, tangling with Turusch fighters and a Romeo-class cruiser in low orbit. Four were in-atmosphere with her, forming up with her as she arrowed low across fire-scorched desert toward the Marine defenses.

“Mike-Red!” she called over the assigned combat frequency. “This is Blue One! Five Blue Omegas are coming at you down on the deck, bearing three-five-five to zero-one-zero!”

“We’ve got you on-screen, Blue One,” a calm voice replied over her com. “Come on in!”

“Just so you don’t think we look like Trash,” Allyn replied.

“Or Tushies. I think we can tell the difference.”

“Copy! Here we come!”

“Watch out for slugs,” the voice told her. “If you can drop some salt on them on the way in, we’d appreciate it.”

“Copy, Red-Mike. Five loads of salt on the way.”

Ahead, the Marine perimeter screen rose above the horizon, a pale, scarcely visible dome-shaped field highlighted by the sparkle and flash of incoming particle beams and lasers. According to her tactical display, the perimeter was still under attack by Turusch ground crawlers—fifty-meter behemoths code-named “slugs” by Confederation intelligence. Each was similar in appearance to a Toad fighter, but squashed, with a flat bottom that seemed to conform to the ground as it crawled over it. Turrets and blisters on the upper surface housed weapons emplacements, which were keeping up a steady fire against the Marine position. There were a dozen enemy crawlers out there, scattered across the burnt area on all sides of the Marine base.

She extended the sensitivity of her scanners, searching for hot spots—slang for any sources of electromagnetic radiation, including heat and radar. Large patches of scoured-bare rock and glass were radiating fiercely, glowing white-hot and molten in some places, but her computer began cataloguing possible targets out beyond the dead zone, where individual Turusch soldiers or combat machines might be gathering.

One Turusch ship, the Romeo-class cruiser, was almost directly overhead, three hundred kilometers out from the planet. It had been slamming the Marine perimeter with particle beams, but now appeared to be occupied by an attack from two of the Dragonfire fighters.

The five gravfighters all were out of Krait missiles by now, but they still had plenty of KK rounds, as well as power for their particle beam weapons. KK rounds—the letters stood for “kinetic kill”—were lumps of partially compressed matter, each the size of a little finger massing four hundred grams, steel jacketed to give the magnetic fields something to which they could grab hold. Hurled down a gravfighter’s central railgun at twenty kps, they released the energy of a fair-sized bomb on impact; the weapon could cycle seven hundred rounds per minute, or nearly twelve per second.

She had to slow sharply, though, to see the targets. Swinging left slightly, she watched the red diamond of the targeting cursor slide over the icon marking a Turusch slug at the very limits of visibility and triggered her cannon. Rapid-fire rounds howled from her craft, as her gravs kicked in to compensate for the savage recoil of that barrage. Ahead, rounds slammed into the Turusch crawler, sending up immense plumes of dust and dirt, then a fireball erupting, then immediately snuffing out in the oxygen-poor atmosphere.