“We have just under five thousand Marines here, Admiral. We’re willing to double up to get the civilians out.”
Koenig sighed. He’d been dreading this. “How many civilians?”
“Approximately fifteen thousand here inside this perimeter, General. Another twenty, maybe twenty-two thousand at three other settlements on the planet.”
“I’m afraid they’ll have to take their chances, General. We have enough room for your people … maybe a few thousand locals if we really pack them in. But not all of them.”
Gorman’s image seemed to sag a bit. “I expected that, of course.”
Koenig pulled down a window in his head, linking through to a calculation function and spreadsheets listing the ships and compliments within the battlegroup.
“Hang on … okay. The Conestogas are rated at eight hundred men each. That gives us a surplus of fourteen hundred, more or less. If we ditch all of your heavy equipment—”
“That was already a given, Admiral.”
“If we ditch the heavy equipment and your Marines don’t mind being real friendly, we can pack in another four or five thousand people. We can also double up on the other ships as well … pack civilians into crew’s quarters, mattresses in passageways, on the mess decks, inside pressurized cargo bays … call it another thousand … maybe two.
“That won’t be enough.”
“Damn it, General, I doubt that our whole Navy has the transport capacity for almost forty thousand civilians, all in one go. We have room for seven thousand civilians. At that, feeding them and handling the sanitation requirements for that many people is going to be a nightmare.”
“You know what will happen if the Turusch return, once we’re gone.”
“No, General, I don’t. And I doubt that anyone else in the Confederation knows either. The Turusch and their Sh’daar overlords are still very much unknown quantities.”
“They killed the researchers at Arcturus. So far as we know, they murdered every last one.”
“Again, General, we don’t know. Not for sure.”
But Gorman was almost certainly right. The last transmission from Arcturus last year had been … chaos. Heavily armored Turusch soldiery breaking into the domes, burning down the civilian technicians and scientists …
“The perimeter is secure, Admiral,” Gorman said. “Start sending down the transports. The shields will be open for you.”
“The first shuttles will be down in thirty minutes, General. Uh … how about security?”
There was a good chance that there would be panic, once the Marines started leaving and the civilians saw that they were being left behind.
“We’ll take care of that,” Gorman snapped. “Gorman out.”
And the image winked off.
Koenig stared at the empty spot on the deck for another moment. This was not going to be easy.
Chapter Nine
26 September 2404
MEF HQ
Mike-Red Perimeter
Eta Boötis System
1612 hours, TFT
Major General Gorman stood on the HQ elevated walk and looked up. For the first time in weeks, the shields were fully down and he could see the landscape directly, with his own eyes, rather than through electronic feeds. With a scream, four Marine Rattlesnake fighters passed nearby, boosting clear from the landing field and accelerating hard, their passage drawing thin lines of vapor in their wakes as their drive singularities shocked the thick air.
The Rattlesnakes were distinctly old tech—distinctive and non-variable delta shapes that seemed downright primitive in comparison to the more modern Navy Starhawks and Nightmare strike fighters. A single squadron of Marine Rattlesnakes was attached to I MEF for close air support, but sending them out during the siege would have been tantamount to murder. Rattlesnakes simply couldn’t stand up to Turusch military technology in an open fight. Their Marine pilots called them rattletraps, a reflection of their technological inadequacy.
But they served now to help secure the perimeter against infiltrators and small enemy ground units that might try to take advantage of the lowered shields as the Navy transports were coming down.
It was past the middle of the daylight hours at this latitude and time of year, the short day already half over. A low, churning overcast blocked the sky, moving swiftly with a stiff westerly wind.
Gorman was struck by the gray, bleak desolation surrounding the base, a plain stretching off to the horizon in every direction, scorched-bare rock intermingled with circular craters with black-glass bottoms. When the Marines had landed and set up Red Mike five weeks ago, the land surrounding the low plateau had been shrouded in orange growth, and there’d been a city—the largest Mufrid colony, right there … a few kilometers to the west.
Nothing remained now but rock and glass. From up here, he could even see places where the rock had run liquid, bubbled, then frozen in mid-boil. There was a high background rad count now, though the EM screens were keeping most of the hard stuff out. In the darkness, parts of that landscape now glowed with an eerie, pale blue light.
The capacity for technic intelligence to devastate a world was shocking, nightmarish.
Another flight of gravfighters howled through the thick air, following the Rattlers. These were Navy Starhawks, their black outer hulls shifting and morphing as they passed, preparing to transition from atmospheric flight to space. A kilometer from the Marine perimeter, they brought their noses up, then accelerated almost vertically, punching through the orange-red overcast. A moment later, four mingled sonic booms echoed and rumbled across the plain.
The Turusch did indeed appear to have given up the fight and fled with the arrival of the carrier battlegroup, but Gorman was under no illusions about their eventual, inevitable return.
The Confed force’s immediate problem was not the Turusch … but another problem somewhat closer to home.
A transport shuttle lifted from the landing area at the center of the Marine base, huge, its black skin shifting as it absorbed landing legs and other shore-side protuberances, streamlining itself for the flight to orbit. Navigation lights strobed at its blunt prow, its sides, top, and bottom. A Choctaw Type UC-154 shuttle, it carried nearly two hundred Marines on board. A second Choctaw remained on the landing field, cargo-bay ramps lowered at bow and sides as long columns of Marines, like black ants at this distance, filed on board.
The first Choctaw was accompanied by four Nightshade grav-assault gunships, reduced to black toy minnows dwarfed by the eighty-meter-long shuttle. There was no thunderclap this time; the shuttle and its escorts would reach orbit at a more sedate pace.
“General Gorman?”
He didn’t turn at the voice. “Yes, Mr. Hamid.”
Jamel Saeed Hamid joined him on the walkway. “You wanted to see me?”
“I wanted to discuss the … situation.”
“I don’t see that there is anything to discuss, General.”
“I’ve been going over the numbers with Admiral Koenig, the CO of the Confederation battlegroup. We estimate that we could take on board between six and seven thousand additional people. They would be packed in with our crews, stacked up like cordwood. Water and food will be rationed. The nanorecyclers will be pushed to their limits. But we can make room for