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  VFA-44 Squadron Ready Room

  TC/USNA CVS America

  Haris Orbit, Eta Boötis System

  1825 hours, TFT

  Commander Allyn was still in debrief when the word came up from the planet that a riot had broken out, that at least a thousand Marines and several thousand civilians still waiting to be evacuated were being attacked by a rampaging mob.

  “Commander,” the voice of Admiral Koenig said inside her head, “are you and your people ready for another mission?”

  She started to say, “I don’t know,” which was the truth. After arriving at the debriefing, she’d learned that the four other members of her squadron all had recovered on board the America after the fight with the Turusch fleet, but she didn’t know if their Starhawks had been refitted and rearmed, didn’t know if they were flight ready, didn’t know if her squadron, what was left of it, was flight ready. They’d been through a hell of a lot, and they’d lost six people—she’d heard that Lieutenant Gray had crash-landed safely and been picked up by a Marine SAR. Suffering a casualty rate of 50 percent would definitely have a bad effect on the squadron’s combat efficiency.

  But Koenig would know all of that.

  “Just give us the word, sir,” she said. “I’ll need to check the readiness status on our Starhawks. And I need a new ship.” Her Starhawk had been pretty thoroughly savaged by that last detonation off the Turusch planetoid ship; that she had survived at all was nothing less than miraculous.

  “We have plenty in reserve,” Koenig told her. “What we need are pilots. The rest of the squadrons are either on deep patrol, on CAP, or they’ve been nursemaiding transports up and down from the planet for the past eight hours. Your people are as close to fresh as I’ve got.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I want you down on the deck, over the Marine perimeter,” Koenig told her. “See if you can discourage those rioters.”

  Allyn blinked. “You want us to strafe them, Admiral?” There were rules about things like that. Firing on civilians…and the people you were supposed to be protecting in the first place at that.

  “I’d rather you didn’t,” Koenig replied. “But do what looks best to you.”

  “Sir, why gravfighters? What about the Nightshades?”

  “Every one I have is busy escorting Choctaws right now, Commander. Besides, their railguns are not exactly surgical weapons. I want you in there, exercising a bit more in the way of finesse.”

  Allyn had never received a more unpleasant set of orders. “Aye, aye, sir.”

  “Are you ready for a mission, Commander?” Koenig asked. He sounded concerned. “What’s your med status?”

  “I’m good to go, Admiral.” Another small lie, a lie of omission. When she’d gone down to sick bay a few hours ago, they’d ended up putting her on light duty, with the promise of another checkup in twenty-four hours before she could be returned to flight-ready status. Koenig could have called up the records and seen that for himself, but hadn’t. Just maybe she’d slipped through an administrative crack.

  “Thank you, Commander,” Koenig said. “Take it easy down there.”

  Which left her wondering if he had read the sick bay report, and was letting her choose to lead her people down anyway. “Aye, aye, sir.”

  She opened her eyes and looked at the three officers who’d been taking her report. “I’ve just received new orders,” she told them. “I need to go.”

  “We heard, Commander Allyn,” Commander Costigan, head of the battlegroup’s intelligence department, said. “I think we’re finished here. Good luck!”

  “Finesse, sir,” Lieutenant Commander Hargrave, from America’s tactical department, added with a shake of the head. “I don’t envy you this one, Commander.”

  Twenty minutes later she was on the Number Three launch bay access. Tallman, her crew chief, handed her an e-suit helmet and grinned at her. “Brand new Starhawk for you, Commander,” he said. “Try to take better care of this one, okay? I have to sign for these things when you lose ’em!”

  “No promises, Chief,” she said, setting the helmet in place and letting the seal fuse with her suit.

  “Luck, Skipper.”

  “Thanks.”

  A vertical access shaft took her down one deck at a half-G acceleration, her impact at the bottom cushioned by a modified tangleweb field. Swiftly, she killed the TW-field and closed the hull over her cockpit, the nanomaterial turning liquid and flowing like black water to seal the outer hull shut.

  Finesse, the Admiral had told her. If Nightshade railguns were indiscriminate, what the hell did he think a ten-kiloton Krait was? Or a KK Gatling burst?

  “Flight designation Dragon,” the voice of Primary Flight Control said in her head. “Dragon One, comm check. Do you copy?”

  “Dragon One, I copy. Systems on line. Ready to boost.”

  “Dragon Two,” Lieutenant Howard Spaas said. “Ready.”

  “Dragon Three,” Lieutenant Jen Collins added. “Let’s go!”

  “Dragon Four,” Lieutenant Katie Tucker said. “Ready for launch!”

  “Dragon Five,” Lieutenant Gene Sandoval said. “Good to go.”

  Five Starhawks…with the exception of Prim, down on the planet somewhere, all that was left of the Dragonfires.

  “We show all Dragons on-line, at full power, boards green and ready for launch,” PriFly said. “Droplaunch coming up in twenty-seven seconds.”

  There were three ways to get fighters off of a modern star carrier. Most dramatic, of course, was to fire them out at high-G boost along one of the long twin launch tubes extending up the carrier’s spine and all the way through the huge, water-filled shield cap forward. They could also be simply flown off the launch deck like a Choctaw or any of the other auxiliary spacecraft carried on board the America.

  But the third method—the primary means of launching fighters until the development of high-G boost tubes forty years earlier—took advantage of the fact that the carrier’s hab modules were rotating about the ship’s long axis, completing one circuit every twenty-eight seconds to create an artificial, out-is-down spin gravity of half a G—about five meters per second per second.

  With a jolt, Allyn’s Starhawk dropped through a sudden, yawning hatch beneath its keel in the launch deck, coming to rest in a small, steel-walled compartment. The hatch overhead slid shut, and she could hear the air in the small chamber bleeding off as the seconds ticked away. The actual launch had to wait until the drop chamber’s outer hatch was properly aligned, to give the fighters the correct vector.

  With the compartment in hard vacuum, the lower hatch, the hatch in the launch deck’s outer shell, slid silently open. The fighter rotated in its hanger, facing nose down and out. On Allyn’s in-head display, from her forward optics, she could see stars drifting across the narrow rectangle of her view ahead…a bright orange star—Arcturus, she thought—and a thick scattering of other, less brilliant but diamond-hard pinpoints of light.

  And then a piece of the slender orange-and-white crescent of Haris swept into view, as the last few seconds trickled away.

  “…and four,” the launch control officer in PriFly announced. “And three…and two…and one…and launch!”

  And abruptly, Allyn was in free fall, her fighter sliding off the magnetic grapples and falling out through the open hatch below. As soon as she was clear of the carrier, she switched on her forward singularity, spooling it up to five hundred gravities as she fell away from the America, moving more and more swiftly.

  The other four Starhawks fell with her, in picture-perfect formation.

  In moments, they were slicing through the tenuous upper levels of the planet’s atmosphere.

  MEF HQ

  Main Mess Hall

  Eta Boötis IV

  1852 hours, TFT

  For the past forty minutes, Gray, Corporal Anderson, and Mohammed Baqr had been squeezed back into one of the buildings that encircled the base landing pad, filling the base mess hall and several adja
cent compartments. The high steel double door leading out onto the landing strip had been sealed shut.

  They could see outside on the deck-to-overhead viewall, however. The short local day had just ended, and beneath the sullen and overcast sky, the Marine base had been swiftly plunged into darkness relieved only by the glare from external spotlights on the buildings and from a few glowglobes adrift in the still air. The mob had surged out onto the landing field and was out there still, packed in shoulder to shoulder, some with laser weapons seized from a militia arms locker. During the retreat into the mess hall, shots fired by several of the Marines had kept them back, kept them cautious, but their chants and shouts, muffled at first by their suits, were growing louder, more agitated.

  They’d been chanting Allahu akbar more or less nonstop since the riot had begun. Now, though, they’d taken up a new cry. “Death! Death to the great Shaitan! Death!”

  Gray couldn’t tell if by Shaitan they meant the Turusch, the Confed military personnel remaining in the base, or the Confederation itself.

  Baqr shrugged when Gray asked him about it. “I doubt that they know.”

  “Why aren’t you out there with them?” Gray asked.

  Baqr made a sour face. “Not all Muslims are fanatics, Lieutenant,” he said. He sounded offended. “Not all are jihadists…or terrorists…or suicide bombers. And not all try to get their own way through juvenile demonstrations like this one.”

  “My apologies,” Gray said. “They seem to be putting up a pretty solid front now, though.”

  Baqr sighed. “They’re scared. And for most of them, the only comfort they have when they’re afraid is their religion, submission to God, and knowing where you fit into God’s plan. If they think you’re trying to take that away from them, that you’re threatening their belief, somehow, they can get…agitated.”

  “Are you afraid?” Corporal Anderson asked.

  “Hell, yeah! Right now I don’t know what scares me most…the Turusch, the thought of being left behind on this toxic rock, or them.” He jerked a thumb at the rioters outside. “But damn it, I swore an oath before God to serve with the colonial militia and to support the Confederation. So…here I am.”

  Gray clapped him on his shoulder. “And we’re glad you are.” He caught movement in the sky and leaned forward, peering up at the viewall. “Shit. What’s that?”

  It was only a shadow for a moment, but then it broke through the overcast, another Choctaw shuttle slowly drifting out of the sky, its belly gleaming in the lights from the base.

  The mob had seen the shuttle as well. Several lasers fired, the beams invisible, but the flash where they hit brilliant in the darkness.

  And then the Starhawks appeared, dropping down out of the clouds. And Gray and several hundred Marines nearby started cheering.

  Dragon One

  Above MEF Perimeter

  Eta Boötis IV

  1855 hours, TFT

  Commander Allyn glanced down, her gravfighter’s optics projecting a view of the Marine base into her in-head display that shifted as she moved her head. She could see the lights, could see the crowd filling the landing field two hundred meters below her keel, thousands of upturned and angry faces.

  Starhawks could hover on gravs, but they were awkward at it. She’d been considering at first bringing her craft all the way down to just above the landing field, using the Starhawk itself as an intimidating show of force to force the crowd to disperse.

  But the gravitational singularities her Starhawk used to maneuver were dangerous in close proximity to unshielded humans. They would be radiating X-rays and soft gamma as they sucked down molecules of this thick atmosphere, and a careless move at too close a distance might suck down a few dozen rioters as well. She might as well open up on the crowd with her Gatling cannon.

  “Hey, Skipper,” Spaas called. “I’ve got a bead on the guy stirring up the crowd down there. How’s about we pop him?”

  Her tracking system highlighted the target as Spaas pointed him out electronically. She engaged the optical zoom for a closer look, saw a bearded man in a gold-colored e-suit standing on a balcony overlooking the landing field. He had a couple of assistants or bodyguards in black suits behind him, and he was gesticulating angrily, screaming something at the mob.

  It was tempting…but she wasn’t going to open fire on the crowd unless she absolutely saw no other way.

  And there might be another option. “Negative, Dragon Two,” she said. She shifted to the general combat frequency. “Choctaw One-two-five,” she called, addressing the shuttle hovering overhead. “This is Dragon One, do you copy?”

  “Dragon One. Choctaw One-two-five. I copy.”

  “Recommend you go plus-zee at least three thousand meters, over.”

  “God, Dragon One. What are you going to do?”

  “It’s called finesse, One-two-five. Just stay out of our way for a moment.” Shifting frequencies again, she called to the other Dragonfires. “Okay, Dragons. Stay on me!”

  She nudged the virtual controls, sending her Starhawk forward, flattening the ship out into a knife-edged and elongated disc, extending back-swept wings, reshaping her airfoils to bank steeply to the left. One by one, the other four Starhawks dropped into her wake and followed. The Choctaw shuttle, after a moment’s hesitation, began gaining altitude once more, slipping back up into the sheltering murk of the cloud deck.

  Accelerating quickly now, Allyn swung wide out across the barren desert surrounding the Marine base, hurtling through the night. Her forward singularity glowed white-hot just ahead, an intense, arc-brilliant pinpoint radiating furiously as it chewed through atmosphere, dragging the Starhawk along in its wake.

  As she turned, she showed her Starhawk’s AI what she had in mind, felt the shifting, inner harmonics as her brain and the computer running the Starhawk worked together, crunching equations and unfolding an optimal flight path in her mind. She studied a computer-generated model of the Marine base, rotating it, judging the clifflike loom of the taller buildings, the openings in between. It was going to be tight….

  The Choctaw was hovering well out of the way now, three kilometers above the base. She leveled off into straight flight, hurtling across the invisible surface of the desert at an altitude of scarcely eighty meters, accelerating hard.

  She went hypersonic.

  How fast sound travels depends on the density of the medium through which it is moving. On Earth, at sea level and at a temperature of 20 degrees Celsius, sound travels at 343 meters per second; in water, a much denser medium than air, the speed of sound is around 1500 meters per second.

  The gas mix that constituted the atmosphere of Eta Boötis IV was 1.7 times denser than air at Earth’s surface, and the molecules of that atmosphere—predominantly carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide, sulfur trioxide, ammonia, and carbonyl sulfide—all were larger, heavier molecules than the primary constituents of Earth’s atmosphere, O2 and N2.

  At the surface of Eta Boötis, the speed of sound was very nearly 700 meters per second—about 2500 kilometers per hour. As Allyn boosted her Starhawk’s acceleration, she was flashing across the desert at nearly 4 kilometers per second, better than Mach 5 for these conditions. Her Starhawk’s computer gently increased her altitude slightly, compensating for the height of the ridgetop on which the Marine base was situated.

  Twenty kilometers out—five seconds’ flight time—she fired her PBP-2.

  MEF HQ

  Main Mess Hall

  Eta Boötis IV

  1854 hours, TFT

  Gray and the others had felt a sudden letdown, a surge of disappointment and even anger as first the Choctaw had lifted itself back up into the clouds, and then as the five Starhawk fighters had streaked off into the night. “The bastards are leaving us!” one Marine had screamed. “The fucking Navy zorchie bastards are leaving us!”

  Outside, the crowd was jubilant, shouting and laughing and jumping up and down. Some were firing their lasers uselessly into the sky, in celebratio
n or in an empty gesture of defiance, or both.

  Gray had spotted something, though. As the line of black Starhawks had begun slipping away out of the glare of the lights below, he’d noticed that they were flattening out, and that they were growing black, swept-back wings. If those fighters had given up, if they were boosting for space and a return to the carrier, they would have adopted a more rounded, teardrop shape. Wings, however, meant they were planning on maneuvering in the atmosphere, probably at low altitude.

  And he thought he knew what they were going to do.

  “They’re not leaving, everybody!” he yelled, boosting the volume on his e-suit speakers to make sure he got everyone’s attention. “Everyone get down! Marines…stand ready to move out and secure the landing field!”

  He bellowed the orders, putting all of the authority and power he could into the words. Across the room, he caught a Marine major staring at him. A major outranked a Navy lieutenant by one pay grade, the equivalent of a Navy lieutenant commander, and, in any case, a stranded Navy pilot normally had no business giving orders to Marines.

  “Do it!” the major barked. “You! You! You! And you! Over by this door!”

  And then the sky outside lit up with lightning.

  Gray recognized the signature flash of a heavy particle beam. Navy Starhawks mounted StellarDyne Blue Lightning PBP-2 particle beam projectors which could project a bolt of protons with a yield of around a gigajoule in one tenth of a second. The total energy was about one thousandth that of a typical natural lightning bolt, but at close range, the pulse lit up the sky as the air ionized along a straight-line path.

  An instant later, the first Starhawk zorched overhead, traveling so low, so fast, that Gray was aware of a flicker of motion but nothing more.

  The sonic boom that followed shook the walls of the mess hall, deafening and shrill. It was followed a moment later by a second…a third…a fourth…a fifth, the hyper sonic booms coming in a rapid succession of deafening, high-pitched thunderclaps. Outside, the rioters appeared to crumble in a mass, dropping to their knees or full-length on the ferocrete landing pad, bringing gloved hands up against their helmets as they instinctively tried to cover their ears.