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  He felt the shudder as his craft sliced through thin atmosphere, and used the aft singularity to slow him further still.

  “Alert.” The ship’s computer voice somehow managed to convey the illusion of sharp emotion. “Shielded anti-ship missile closing from one-eight-zero, azimuth plus zero five! Impact in six…five…”

  The lost missile, coming in from dead astern. There was no time for maneuvering, and no way to outrun the thing with the bulk of Eta Boötis dead ahead. Gray flipped the fighter end-for-end, searching for the telltale red star of the incoming warhead.

  There! Twenty kilometers! Lock…and fire…

  The warhead detonated in the same instant that he gave the fire command.

  Seconds passed before Gray blinked back to full awareness. Motion-streaked stars alternated with blackness spinning past his field of view. “AI!” he cried out. “Situation!”

  There was no immediate response. Possibly, events had momentarily overloaded it. He didn’t need a ship AI to tell him the situation was bad. He was in a tumble, power and drives were out, and he was falling through thin air toward Eta Boötis’s night side at an unknown but fairly high velocity.

  Very soon, the Eta Boötean atmosphere would be getting thick enough that the friction would incinerate him.

  He was still getting sensor feeds, but life support and other ship’s systems were out. IC was down, com was down, attitude control was down.

  The SG-92 Starhawk had a robust and highly intelligent SRS, or self-repair system. Advanced nanotech modules allowed broken or burnt-out systems to literally regrow themselves, dissolving into the ship’s hull matrix, then reassembling. When he checked the details on the dead life-support system, it told him it was 75 percent repaired, and that number jumped to 80 as he watched it. Power and control systems, too, were moments from being back on-line.

  He directed the system to give priority to power and flight control; there was enough air in his personal life support to last for quite a while, and the temperature inside the cockpit was not uncomfortable yet.

  The operative word being yet. The external temperature was at five hundred Celsius, and rising quickly.

  “Blue Omega Flight, this is Blue Seven,” he called, not with any real hope of establishing contact. Communications, according to his IHD, were also down, though there was always the possibility that it was his display or even the ship’s AI that was faulty rather than his lasercom. There was a set list of things to try in the event of catastrophic multiple-system failure, and attempting to reach the other members of the flight was high among the priorities.

  As he expected, however, there was no response. He directed the repair systems to lower the priority of the com network in order to focus more of the available power to power and control.

  Abruptly, the dizzying alternation of star streaks with planet night halted, the shock of acceleration jolting him hard. He had partial attitude control now, though the main gravs were still out and only a trickle of power was coming through from the zero-point modules. The fighter shuddered as the keel cut thickening atmosphere, shedding more and more velocity.

  He searched the sky display for more missiles, but saw none. That didn’t mean they weren’t out there, closing on him. The warhead that had just blasted him into an uncontrolled planetary descent had been shielded and smart, using the sensor-blinding flash of a nuclear detonation to drop to a velocity just faster than the Starhawk without being seen. It had stalked him then, for long seconds, reappearing on his displays only when it began punching through atmosphere, growing hot and leaving a visible contrail.

  Turusch anti-fighter missiles, it seemed, were getting smarter and smarter.

  But he was deep in the planet’s atmosphere now, and if AFMs were tracking him in, he should be able to spot their ionization contrails. He decided to focus all of his attention on his fighter, and on surviving the next few minutes.

  He was close to the dawn terminator, 180 kilometers above the night-black surface of Eta Boötis IV. Daylight was a sharp-edged, red-orange sliver along the curve of the planet, with the intolerably brilliant orange dome of Eta Boötis just beginning to nudge above the horizon. The cloud tops far beneath the Starhawk’s keel were glowing a sullen red, casting long shadows across the deeper cloud decks.

  And then the ionization cloud enveloped the Starhawk with the roaring intensity of a blast furnace. The fighter shuddered and bucked as Gray took the manual controls, trying to keep the nose high and spreading the keel to better disperse the heat. He wondered how many Turusch ships might be targeting him right now on his heat signature alone…then decided that since there was nothing he could do about it, there was no sense in worrying. Plenty of debris, from anti-missile sand grains to the shattered hulks of Turusch warships, were falling across the night face of the planet, and his Starhawk was just one more chunk in the debris field.

  With manual control restored, he could hold the Starhawk in an entry glide and adjust its attitude, but the gravs were still out, meaning he was falling like a somewhat aerodynamic brick. In any case, primary gravitics were worse than useless in a planetary atmosphere. A 50,000-G singularity would gulp down molecules of air so quickly it would become star-hot in the process, overload, and explode like a tiny supernova. There were weapons—so-called gravitic cannon—that used the effect, and no fighter pilot wanted one of those detonating right off the nose of his ship.

  What he did have were his secondary gravitics, drive units built into the structure of his spacecraft that could generate about ten to twelve gravities, and which allowed the Starhawk to hover. Carefully, Gray began feeding power to his secondaries, adding their drag to the already considerable drag of the atmosphere to further slow his descent.

  His power tap, fortunately, was feeding him enough power to drive the secondaries at full pull. Without that, he would have been thoroughly and completely screwed. He brought the nose of his ship higher, rotated his acceleration couch into the optimal position, then engaged the secondaries. Without his ICs, his inertial compensators, the shock slammed him down and back against his seat and would have broken bones had the deceleration not scaled up smoothly, if swiftly, from zero-G to ten. He felt the uncomfortable jab of medfeeds pressed against his neck beneath the angle of his jaw, at his back, and in his groin as they monitored and adjusted his blood pressure, keeping him from blacking out. Even so, his vision narrowed alarmingly, as though he were seeing his surroundings through a black tunnel. His IHD, painting images and words against his visual field, winked out momentarily, replaced by white static. For an age, it seemed, he lay there beneath a crushing weight, scarcely able to breathe, blind and deaf as the Starhawk shuddered and thumped and shook around him.

  Then, like a drowning man reaching the surface and gulping down fresh air, Gray struggled from the dark and the smothering pressure. The fireball surrounding him dissipated, and he emerged into open air.

  And his flight systems were coming back on-line. He had half power now, more than enough for anything short of generating a fifty-K boost. Weapons were on-line, full sensory input, IC, AI, it was all there. Relief burst through him like the golden morning light on the horizon ahead. Voices crackled and called over his audio circuit, the other members of his squadron.

  “Blue Ten! Blue Ten! I have Tango fighters inbound at five-zero, Azimuth minus four-one!…”

  “Copy, Ten! Breaking right-high!”

  “Here’s the merge! I’m on him, Snorky!”

  “Fox One! Fox One!” Static flared and crackled, and, with it, a brilliant flash from somewhere above and astern. “Jesus! Did you see that?…”

  “Flame one Bravo-Bravo!”

  “Blue Omega Leader, this is Blue Seven,” Gray called. “Do you copy?”

  “Copy, Seven!” The voice was tight and unemotional—probably Allyn’s AI avatar rather than the squadron CO herself.

  “I got toasted a bit and chewed air down to the deck. Systems are back on-line now, at eighty percent. Moving toward
the Mike perimeter.”

  “We copy that, Blue Seven.” That was the real Commander Allyn’s voice. “Excellent job, Prim. Get in and offer the Marines whatever help they need, channel four-niner-three Zulu. The rest of us will be in there as soon as we can work through.”

  Gray felt wildly contrasting emotions, a sharp thrill of pleasure at the atta-boy from his CO, and anger at her use of his detested ready-room handle.

  “Rog that,” he replied. He dipped his gravfighter’s nose and accelerated.

  He wasn’t quite “down to the deck,” as he’d reported, but close enough. The Starhawk was dropping now past the twenty-kilometer mark. The sky above was still space-dark, the brightest stars—Arcturus, especially—still gleaming and brilliant, but the cloud decks below rose thick and towering, their tops sculpted by high-altitude winds and tinted red and gold by the rising sun. He’d crossed enough of the planet’s face that the local sun was well above the horizon now, casting long, blue-purple shadows and hazy shafts of golden light across the distinctly three-dimensional surface of the cloudscape below.

  Gray adjusted his ship’s hull-form again, sculpting it for high-speed aerial flight, absorbing the deep entry keel and extending the wings farther and deeper into their forward-canted configuration. Behind him, a sudden burst of shooting stars marked another cloud of sand or debris entering atmosphere, a barrage of silent flick-flick-flicks of light.

  He let his AI target on the Marine beacon, bringing the SG-92’s prow left across the horizon, then dipping down into a plunging dive. He opened his com suite to the Marine frequency and began sending out an approach vector clearance request.

  He hadn’t crossed seventy-one AUs and survived a near-miss by a thermonuke to get shot down by the damned jarheads.

  MEF HQ

  Mike-Red Perimeter

  Eta Boötis System

  1259 hours, TFT

  Major General Eunan Charles Gorman looked up as another incoming gravitic round struck the perimeter shields with piercing thunder. The deck of the headquarters dome rocked with the impact, and both lights and display monitors dimmed and flickered as the screens strained to dissipate the surge of energy grounding out of the sky. It wouldn’t be long before the screens overloaded; when that happened, the defense of Mike-Red would come to an abrupt and pyrotechnic end.

  The large three-view in the center of the HQ dome currently showed the Marine beachhead—a slender oval five kilometers long and perhaps two wide, sheltered beneath the shimmering hemisphere of an energy shield array six kilometers across. They were well-situated on high, rocky ground, but the terrain offered few advantages at the moment. The enemy was attempting to burn them out, pounding at the shield with nukes and heavy artillery, some fired from space, some fired from emplacements surrounding the beachhead and as far as a hundred kilometers away. All of the ground immediately around the Marine position was charred and lifeless, the sand fused into black, steaming glass. Incoming fire was so heavy the Marines could not lower the screen even for the instant required for a counter-battery reply.

  That was the worst of it—having to sit here day after day taking this hammering, unable to shoot back.

  “General!” one of the technicians at a sensor console nearby called out. “We have friendlies inbound!”

  “Eh? How far? How long?”

  “Two thousand kilometers,” the tech replied. “At eleven kps, they should be at the perimeter within about three minutes.”

  “Thank God. It’s about time.”

  Another gravitic round struck, the thunder echoing through the protective shield with a hollow, rumbling boom. A thermonuke struck an instant later, white light enveloping the base, hard, harsh, and glaring.

  General Gorman looked at the small man in civilian dress standing beside him. “Well, Jamel. We may have help in time after all.”

  Jamel Saeed Hamid gave Gorman a sour look. “Too little, too late, I fear. We have lost the planet, either way.”

  “Maybe. But we’ll have our lives.”

  The Marines on Haris had become aware of the arrival of the Confederation fleet only nineteen minutes earlier, when a tightly beamed X-ray lasercom burst transmission had reached the planet. Minutes later, high-energy detonations in planetary orbit had marked the beginnings of a long-range fighter strike, first as sand clouds and dust balls had swept through local space at near-c, then as SG-92 fighters had entered the battlespace and begun engaging Turusch fleet units.

  The arrival was welcome, certainly, but what the Marines on the ground needed more than a fleet action right now was close support, fighters scraping off their bellies on the Haris swamp growth and putting force packages down on Marine-designated targets around the perimeter.

  “Bradley!” he snapped, naming his Combat Information officer. “Punch up a list of targets for the flyboys. Priority on grav cannon, nukes, and heavy PC emplacements.”

  “Aye, aye, sir!”

  Gorman was a Marine, and he would have preferred Marine aviators out there…but right now he would take any help he could get, even damned Navy zorchies. If they could take just a little of the pressure off, there was some hope that the Navy transports would make it through, and they could begin the evacuation.

  How many transports were there? Enough for everyone in his fast-attenuating command? And the Mufrids too?

  Don’t even think about that now….

  “Looks like a general engagement in local battlespace, sir,” Bradley added. The colonel was standing behind two scanner techs, watching a glowing sphere representing nearby space, highlighting planetary schematics and the slow-drifting red and green blips of spacecraft, Turusch and human.

  “Who’s winning?” Gorman asked.

  “Hard to say, sir. The Navy boys hit ’em pretty hard with that first pass, but they’re starting to lose people now. Two…maybe three fighters have been knocked out.”

  “Understood.”

  A handful of gravfighters had no chance at all against a major Turusch battle fleet. The hope was that they would be able to maul that fleet badly enough that the capital ships could take them out when they arrived in another nine or ten hours. Better yet, if the fighters hurt the Tushies badly enough, they might withdraw before the Confederation fleet arrived.

  Gorman had been in combat often enough to know that you never counted on things breaking your way like that. If the bad guys cut and run, fantastic.

  But the Marines would plan for something less optimistic. They had to.

  Their survival depended on it.

  Chapter Four

  25 September 2404

  Blue Omega Seven

  Approaching Mike-Red

  Eta Boötis System

  1301 hours, TFT

  Trevor Gray held his gravfighter snug against the deck, streaking across open water a scant twenty meters up. His velocity now down to eight kps, he was still throwing out a hypersonic shock wave that dragged across the surface of the shallow sea, sending up a vast, white wall of spray stretching out in a knife-straight line for over a hundred kilometers behind him.

  The Marine perimeter was five hundred kilometers ahead.

  He’d dropped down through the clouds and hugged the deck to avoid Turusch tracking systems, though it was likely they could still see him from orbit. Nothing was dropping on him out of the sky at the moment, however, so just maybe he’d slipped in unnoticed.

  The surface was gloomy after the brilliant sunlight above the cloud deck. Haris—Eta Boötis IV—was shrouded in thick clouds, a solid blanket tinted red, orange, and yellow by various sulfur compounds in the atmosphere, and those colors were echoed by the oily sea below. The surface temperature was hot—hotter than the world’s distance from its sun would suggest. The cloud deck and airborne sulfur compounds created a greenhouse effect that substantially warmed the planet—not nearly to the extent of Venus back in the Sol system, perhaps, but hot enough to render the place less than desirable as real estate, even if humans could breathe the air. What the
hell had the Mufrids seen in the place, anyway?

  The temperature outside his hurtling Starhawk, he noted, was 48 degrees Celsius—a swelteringly hot day in the tropics back on Earth, and it was only a short time past local dawn.

  Targeting data flowed through his IHD, appearing in windows opening against the periphery of his visual field. God…the Marines had listed hundreds of targets out there, far too many for one lone gravfighter.

  But he began dragging down targets with his eyes and locking on. He heard the tone indicating a solid lock. “Mike-Red, Blue Omega Seven. I have tone on the first six targets on your list. Request firing clearance.”

  “Blue Seven, hell yeah! Slam the bastards!”

  “Copy. Engaging.” He lifted his fighter slightly higher above the water, up to eighty meters, to give himself launch clearance. “Fox Three!”

  Six Krait missiles dropped clear of the Starhawk’s keel, emerging from exit ports melting open around them in the hull, then accelerated. Fox Three was the firing code for targets on the ground, or for extremely large ships or bases in orbit. Once, centuries before in the skies above Earth’s oceans, Fox One had designated the launch of a short-range heat seeker; Fox Two, a radar-guided missile; and Fox Three, a particular type of long-range missile called a Phoenix. The terminology had remained the same, though the meanings were different now, applied to much different technologies.

  Guided by their onboard AIs, the six Kraits streaked ahead of the Starhawk, their grav drives glowing brilliantly as they plowed through the dense atmosphere. Gray banked left and accelerated slightly; Turusch sensors in orbit would have spotted that launch even if they’d missed his fighter, and they would be trying to target him now.

  A blue-white detonation flared at his back, searing a tunnel down through the atmosphere and vaporizing a stadium-sized chunk of seawater. A second blast ignited the sky to his right. He was traveling too fast for the shock waves to catch him, but he cut right and slowed, riding the fast-expanding wave front of the second explosion in order to take advantage of the mushroom cap of superheated steam overhead. Those shots had been from a Turusch orbital particle cannon; each shot ionized air molecules and tended to momentarily block sensors trying to read through the muck.