The Star Carrier Series Books 1-3: Earth Strike, Centre of Gravity, Singularity

Hivel-A was milspeak for high-velocity assault. Defenses included launching clouds of sand, firming up defensive shields, but most of all, moving. If there were laser bolts coming in at the speed of light, or plasma beam or other weapons skimming in just behind the light barrier, the best defense of all was to not be there when they arrived.

“Copy the tacsit to everyone within range,” Koenig added. He was thinking of the last Choctaw shuttle coming up from the surface, and the gravfighters and Nightshades escorting it. They needed to know what they were boosting into.

Slowly, ponderously, the remaining seven ships of the carrier battlegroup began to move.

Dragon One

Above Eta Boötis IV

1945 hours, TFT

Her Starhawk punched through the last cloud deck and Commander Allyn emerged into the clear, vast emptiness of the planet’s upper atmosphere, with stars gleaming down at her with hard and untwinkling brilliance. A moment later, the local sun exploded into view on the horizon, wiping out the stars, illuminating a scimitar’s edge of cloud cover dividing planetary night from space.

As the atmosphere rapidly thinned, she reshaped her Starhawk into its needle configuration. The other four fighters of VFA-44 were already doing the same, dragging straight-line contrails behind them as their drive singularities chewed through what was left of the air. The Choctaw, fat and bulbous, didn’t have a variable geometry hull, and began lagging behind. Allyn ordered the squadron to slow their ascent, matching their velocity to the transport shuttle. The four Nightshade gunships followed close in the Choctaw’s wake, like angular black insects pursuing an ungainly blue-painted cow.

“We are receiving an urgent tactical update from the fleet,” her AI told her, the voice a whisper in her mind. “Details follow. …”

She watched the incoming data scroll through an open window in her consciousness. “Toads!” Allyn snapped as the data flooding through from the America registered. “Hivel-A, fifty-plus Toads.”

“Where?” Tucker demanded. “I don’t—”

White light blossomed on the night side of the planet directly astern, a searing illumination of the clouds that momentarily blocked out the glare of the bright-rising star. Her sensors picked up the wake of a high-G impactor that had just seared down out of the sky, passing the Confederation fighters and shuttle perhaps eighty kilometers abeam.

“What the—” Lieutenant Collins called over the squadron frequency.

Seconds later, two distinct shock waves struck, first from the ground thirty kilometers below, then a lesser one from the impactor’s more distant atmospheric wake, twin sledgehammer blows against her fighter’s hull. Had the air been any thicker, had they been any closer to the ground, any deeper inside Eta Boötis IV’s thick atmosphere, the shock waves, she knew, would have swatted them all from the sky.

The former Marine base had just been obliterated.

The knowledge stunned her. They’d lifted clear of the base landing pad scant minutes earlier as the rioting mobs had closed in on the loaded shuttle once again. There’d been no point in orchestrating another high-Mach passage over the base. The civilians who’d wanted to get out were getting out; the others had already made their choice.

But it was startling to see how swiftly the consequences of that choice had arrived—as a ten-kilo inert kinetic impactor traveling at just below the speed of light had slammed into the base and released thousands of megatons of energy in a single dazzling flash. As she scanned the planet, she saw a second flash, far up the curve of the northern horizon, and realized that a second impactor had just struck the Mufrid outpost at Kurban.

A third flash … that was probably Amal … and a fourth, more distant still, Lilistizkar.

The Marine base and the last three inhabited colony domes, all … all gone.

The suddenness, the sheer savagery of the attack was almost too much to grasp.

She shifted her scan forward, to the carrier battlegroup. Only seven ships remained in planetary orbit; the others had boosted moments before, were already accelerating hard out-system. Those seven, she saw with considerable relief, all were accelerating, breaking orbit, turning in toward the planet to use Haris’s gravity to their advantage.

The Turusch, of course, would have had precise targeting information for the planet, could accurately strike the colony outposts from light seconds out. Ships, however, could leave their predictable orbits and not be there when the beams or hivel projectiles arrived.

Collins’ scanner picked up numerous faint straight-line trails of ionization ahead, the traces of near-c impactors flashing through dust and stray molecules of atmosphere just ahead of where the fleet had been orbiting scant moments before.

The Confederation had tried exactly the same tactics against the Turusch fleet earlier, with considerably greater success. It appeared that the enemy had missed all seven human warships.

But the thought of what was happening on the planet astern still burned. Why?…

It made no sense. The Turusch had bombarded the Marine perimeter for over a week; at any time they could have accelerated a rock big enough to vaporize a continent, but they hadn’t. They’d been trying to capture the place, not obliterate it.

That strategy, evidently, had changed. The Turusch had just annihilated all human outposts remaining on the planet, killing some tens of thousands of civilians.

Why?

She shook the thought aside. Strategists, xenopsychologists, and admirals could worry about that later. Her problem now was the knowledge that there would be high-G fighters coming in immediately behind the near-c kinetic impactors.

There!

The Toads were coming in hot, decelerating hard in order to engage ship-to-ship. Among them were Confederation Starhawks—the gravfighters of Sandy Jorgenson’s Black Lightnings, following the leading wave of Toads in, trying to burn them down.

The battleship Spirit of Confederation opened up with her long-range fusion cannon, and a constellation of oncoming Turusch fighters smeared into tiny, brilliant novae. And then the enemy fighters were sweeping into the battlegroup like avenging angels of death.

CIC, TC/USNA CVS America

Haris Space, Eta Boötis System

1947 hours, TFT

“Enemy fighters at two-three-zero plus five-one, engaging!” Johanna Hughes announced.

Koenig watched the unfolding action on the tactical display—green icons representing Confederation vessels, red the enemy, with a vast, ghosted gray sphere showing the position of Eta Boötis IV.

More hivel impactors, launched at closer ranges, might still be out there, coming fast. If the carrier squadron could maneuver around behind the planet, use the planet as a shield, they might be able to delay acceleration long enough to take the remaining fighters on board.

That was the true hell of the tacsit. Right now, there were sixteen gravfighters out there, plus four Nightshade close-support gunships and one last, lumbering shuttle packed with civilians and Marines. If America boosted for c, the gravfighters, with their high accelerations, could catch up—assuming the Toads let them—but the shuttle and the gunships would be left behind.

And even the fighters were at risk. Trapping on board a carrier under acceleration was not for the fainthearted, nor was there a promise of success.

But the seven capital ships were vulnerable if they stayed put. They might hold the Toad fighters at bay for a time, but Koenig was willing to bet that Turusch capital ships were out there, lots of them, still undetected and burning in tight on the fighters’ wakes. If the squadron didn’t start boosting for c, they would be trapped here, pinned against the planet and annihilated one by one.

A gravfighter—one of the Lightnings—had burned out a Toad, but now two more Toads had dropped onto his tail. He listened to the voices of the cockpit chatter, relayed back to America’s CIC by the cloud of battlespace drones serving as comm relays and unmanned intel platforms.

“Lightning, Lightning Five! I got two on my tail!”

“Five, One! Break left, break left!”

“Copy One, breaking left! … they’re still—”

One of the green pinpoints in the tac display winked out. A tight formation of Turusch fighters were closing on the knot of Starhawks, slashing at them with beam weapons.

“Comm! Make to the Spirit,” Koenig ordered. “Break up those Toad clusters! Get them off our people!”

“Aye, sir.”

The Spirit of Confederation had the most accurate of long-range weapons in the formation, with railguns and fusion beams that could pop something as small as a fighter at a range of over one light second.

Of course, she still needed a good idea of where the target would be one second after firing—that was the single major limiting factor in space combat. But so long as the target held course and speed—or a constant rate of acceleration—for more than a second, her targeting computers gave her uncanny accuracy.