Earth Strike

Daylight had come and gone with astonishing swiftness, and it was dark now. The optics implanted in Gray’s eyes allowed him to see by infrared, but he wasn’t used to working in an environment where you saw things by the heat they radiated, smeared and fuzzy and out of focus.

He was exhausted. He’d been running, it seemed, for hours before the weaving tendrils underfoot had thinned out and he’d entered a scorched-bare and rocky desert. Scattered patches of surviving tendrils on the ground glowed with radiant heat, their movements an eerie shifting difficult for the eye to follow. Here, too, patches of bare rock glowed yellow-hot under infrared; he suspected that he might have entered the barren kill zone surrounding the Marine base, where the ground cover had been burned off by the ongoing bombardment by Turusch heavy weapons.

He felt more exposed now, to Turusch scanners and observation drones, which were certain to be lurking about. He would have to move more cautiously here. At least those damned leeches, the gray, swift-gliding leaf shapes, appeared to have vanished once the orange ground cover had given out.

What the hell had those things been? His e-suit was still intact, but he’d had the distinct impression that those things had been scraping away at the outer carbon nanotube weave of the garment. That material was incredibly tough, but Gray wasn’t about to trust the integrity of his environmental suit with those things swarming over it, not when a single tear could leave him gasping in high-pressure poison.

Gray staggered to the top of a low, bare-rock outcrop and studied his surroundings. Somewhere to the north, across that empty desert, was the Marine perimeter. He needed to decide now whether to keep walking, or if he should hole up here and start transmitting an emergency distress call.

The only way he was going to get through the Marine shield would be if they sent a SAR—a Search and Rescue mission—out to get him. He had no way to get through the tightly folded space of the shield … and though his e-suit would protect him well enough from the radiation, it wouldn’t let him weather a nearby burst from a nuclear warhead, or a bolt of charged particles searing down from low orbit.

On the other hand, the moment he started transmitting, he was likely to attract attention from Turusch battlespace probes, or even from enemy spacecraft in orbit.

Shit. Damned if he did, damned if he didn’t.

He wondered how long he had before daylight. His implant RAM had a brief listing of planetary stats for Eta Boötis IV—Haris, as the human colonists called it. He knew the planet’s rotational period was short—only about fourteen and a half hours. But the planet also had an extreme axial tilt, literally lying on its side as it circled its hot primary once each four years. At the equator, daylight lasted about seven hours throughout that long year, followed by a seven-hour night. At the poles, the sun would disappear for a year at a time, alternating with year-long periods of sunlight, and with everything in between.

What a freaking weird world!

He wasn’t sure what the length of the day or night was at this point on the surface. Mike-Red, he knew from his briefings, was at 22 degrees north. He knew that this was late fall or early winter in the northern hemisphere. That suggested that the nights in this region were longer than the days, but he didn’t know how long that actually might be.

Not that it particularly mattered. Whether he attracted the attention of a Marine SAR aircraft—or of a Turusch battle-cruiser—they’d see him, no matter how dark it was.

The distant thunder of battle had faded away a long time ago. He wasn’t quite sure when the landscape had become eerily silent, but it had been before it had gotten dark. Did that mean the battle was over, or merely that there was a temporary lull in the fighting?

If the battle was over, who had won?

He looked up at the darkness overhead—a solid cloud deck masked by darkness. Cloud cover over Haris ran around ninety percent. The skies cleared occasionally, but most of the time they were clouded over. He wished he could see the stars.

Gray sagged to the ground, his shoulder propping him up against a small boulder. God, he was exhausted! His legs, his whole body ached, and the high gravity had his heart pounding, his breath coming in shallow gasps.

How long could he survive out here? Theoretically, the e-suit would keep providing him with air, water, and a nanotech-assembled paste that passed more or less plausibly for food, all cycled from the local atmosphere, handfuls of dirt or organic material poured into a hip pocket, and his own wastes. But even the best machines, he knew all too well, had their limits.

In any case, sooner or later someone would detect him and track him down. The question was whether that someone would be human or … or whatever the Turusch were.

He shuddered at the thought. Very little was known about the Turusch, about their culture, their biology, their psychology, even their true shape. They were part of the galaxy-spanning empire of the Sh’daar, and they had a military technology equivalent to—or perhaps a little better than—that of the Confederation of Humankind. The scuttlebutt was that the Marines at Mike-Red had managed to capture a few of the bastards, which was why this mission was supposed to be so damned important.

If the Turusch picked up his come-get-me call, he might be about to see them firsthand.

Not a pleasant thought. But there was nothing else he could do. If he didn’t start transmitting, he would either die out here or the Turusch would get him, sooner or later. At least if he was broadcasting on the emergency band, there was a chance the Marines would get to him first. Closing his eyes, he focused his thoughts on three discreet mental code groups, then clicked “transmit” on his IHD. The signal was coded, designed to attract the attention of human equipment and to look like noise to the enemy … but no one counted on the Turusch not being able to recognize the signal as artificial, at least.

The fleet ought to be overhead within another few minutes. That, more than anything else, had decided him on whether or not to trigger the distress beacon. If the Turusch were still up there, they shortly would be too busy to notice a single pilot on the ground.

Gray wondered if the Dragonfires were still up, still fighting. Hours ago they must have run dry on expendables, but they would be able to restock at the Marine base. Boss Al would be sending them out on CAP over the base, until the battlegroup arrived. And if one of them happened to swing out this way …

He caught movement, a flash of short infrared sliding across his peripheral vision. Whirling and dropping flat on the ground, he stared into the darkness. Had a Turusch probe, or even a ground patrol, found him already?

There it was again … another flash of movement. With a miserable sinking feeling at the pit of his stomach, he realized he was seeing a mass of those leaf-shaped gliders, hundreds of them radiating in the infrared and moving straight toward him through the night.

Gray jerked his laser carbine off his shoulder. The weapon had no stock and, in any case, his helmet would keep him from aiming it by eye. A touch to a pressure plate, however, switched on a targeting reticule in his IHD, a small red circle marking what the weapon’s muzzle was pointed at. A second touch brought up the power, and a reedy tone in his earphone told him the weapon was ready to fire.

But there were so many of the things! They moved a few at a time, giving the impression of a huge, flat, glowing amoeba creeping over the ground by extending pseudopods ahead of the main body.

He moved the weapon awkwardly until the targeting reticule was centered on the central mass of creatures, and fired. Infrared vision picked up the flash of the beam as it heated air molecules along its path, though it was invisible at optical wavelengths. The glowing mob of organisms shifted and parted, momentarily becoming two smaller masses with a hot spot between them … but they kept flowing forward, merging and blending until they were a single mass once more.

He fired again … and then again.

“I’m not on the fucking menu!” he screamed, and then he was triggering burst after burst of laser fire, the shots becoming wilder and wilder as the gliders started flowing up the sides of the outcrop. …

CIC, TC/USNA CVS America

Approaching Eta Boötis IV

2347 hours, TFT

“Time to normal space transition,” America’s AI said, “in twenty-five seconds.”

Koenig leaned back in his couch on its raised platform in the middle of CIC, letting his gaze shift from station to station. The men and women in the pit all leaned back, their virtual instrumentation hovering in front of them, glowing in the muted lighting of the compartment. The tac display showed America’s calculated position relative to both Ea Boötis and Eta Boötis IV; they would be emerging above Eta Boötis’s night side, between twenty and fifty thousand kilometers out.

But calculating precisely where a starship would emerge from the bubble of the Alcubierre Drive always entailed far more guesswork than navigators or ship captains generally cared to think about. There was even a chance—an infinitesimally small one—that one of the battlegroup’s ships would slam into the planet while still moving faster than light. The ship itself, of course, cocooned in its bubble of spacetime, wouldn’t be involved in the collision directly. Only the leading edge of warped space enclosing it would actually intersect with the planet. But that intersection could disrupt the planetary crust, and the ship would be dumped into the middle of the chaos that ensued.

The ship would almost certainly be destroyed, and the disruption to the planet’s crust might finish off the Marines where the Turusch bombardment had failed.

Koenig wondered if the Turusch ever used the Alcubierre Effect to destroy planets … and if the battlegroup would find Eta Boötis IV still intact when they broke out of warp.

They would know in another few seconds. …

Those seconds dwindled away, and precisely on schedule America’s AI triggered a warpfield collapse.

Light, twisted into a circular rainbow by spacetime shear effect, exploded outward as the field evaporated. America’s true velocity relative to the space around it was only a few meters per second, and as the spacetime bubble opened, her effective velocity dropped from just over c to almost nothing in a literal flash of tortured photons. To an observer outside, space seemed to open, a circular starbow unfolded from within, and the ship emerged with stately grace into normal space.

From inside the ship, the stars, for just an instant, assumed the characteristic starbow encircling the vessel forward, then shifted back into more familiar patterns.

Eta Boötis glowed hot and yellow orange almost directly ahead, with its fourth planet a slender, silver-yellow crescent bowed away from the star just beside the glare. A readout on his virtual display showed they’d emerged 38,000 kilometers out from the planet’s night side—bang on-target. On the tactical display above the pit, red points of light began winking on in rapid-fire succession, starting close to the green-lit globe marking the planet and extending farther and farther out as America’s sensor suites picked up EM returns and emissions from other ships near the planet. The ship’s AI identified the signals as quickly as they came in, then plotted positions and vectors on the display.

A solitary blue light winked on against the planet’s night side. The Marine perimeter, at least, was still intact.

Koenig breathed a sigh of relief when he saw that. The mission had not been launched in vain after all.

All of the lights marking spacecraft, however, were red—enemy ships. None were blue. Either the fighter strike had been wiped out in the attack hours before, they’d been disabled and drifted clear of battlespace, or they were down on the planet’s surface.

Other lights were coming on now—yellow ones—indicating unidentified targets. Most of those would be disabled ships—hulks, critically damaged vessels, or even large chunks of debris. The Dragonfires, Koenig noted, had made a definite impression on the Turusch; there could be no doubt about that.