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 celebration 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 hypersonic 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.
When the Marines and the civilian women and children had fallen back to the mess hall, they’d come in through a large doorway blocked by a nanoseal, the same black, liquid substance used to prevent pressure loss on America’s hangar deck when spacecraft were brought in from the vacuum outside. As the mob had surged after them, a Marine had switched on the seal freeze, turning the suspended nanoparticles into a rigid structure, a barrier stronger than plasteel.
Now, the seal freeze was released, and the first four Marines charged outside, weapons at the ready, followed closer by more Marines, and a scattering of Mufrid militia.
“Come on,” Gray said to Corporal Anderson. “Let’s get out there!”
It took several minutes to elbow through the panicked, milling crowd, but Gray made it to the nanoseal lock and stepped through, pushing against the liquid’s yielding resistance and out onto the landing field. The rioting mob had been effectively neutralized, reduced to stunned and disoriented individuals as the Marines began to shove and push unresisting rioters back off the field. He looked up at the balcony overlooking the field nearby, and saw more Marines grabbing the agitator and hauling him back into the building.
All of the floating glowglobes had been swept away by the shock waves, and many of the remaining lights mounted on the buildings had been shattered. The few lighting panels that remained cast eerie, pitch-black shadows across the field, lending a nightmare aura to the scene.
“Get the field clear!” the Marine major was shouting. “Get it the hell clear!”
Overhead, the Choctaw had reappeared, running lights pulsing, the black, UC-154 shuttle slowly