Ian Douglas - Earth Strike

“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 2SO 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!”