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.
It might mask him for a precious couple of seconds more.
“Target fifteen on the Red-Mike targeting list ahead, coming into range,” his AI announced. His IHD showed the target as a red triangle on the horizon—some kind of Turusch gun emplacement or surface battery. It was already too close for a Krait lock-on; he switched to his PBP, his particle beam projector, or “pee-beep,” as it was more popularly known.
At his AI’s command, the nose of his fighter melted away half a meter, exposing the projector head. “Fire!”
A beam of blue-white light stabbed ahead of his gravfighter, intolerably brilliant; a high-energy UV laser burned a vacuum tunnel through the air, followed a microsecond later by the proton beam, directed and focused by a powerful magnetic field. Twenty-some kilometers