“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 adjacent 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