the others through low-frequency sound waves transmitted through this dense atmosphere. And they begin to swarm. More and more of them, drawn from farther and farther away.”
“So we’re dealing with walking, meat-eating trees,” Ostend said.
“Ah … no. The swarmers are not plants, really.”
“Then they’re animals that act like plants … except they eat meat and move?”
“They are neither plants nor animals,” Baqr said, a touch of exasperation edging his voice, “not in the sense you mean.”
Ostend was about to reply to that, but he saw that the two corpsmen were approaching the hopper, carrying the stretcher between them. So far as he was concerned, the Marines would be getting off of this rock soon and he wouldn’t have to worry about swarmers, whatever the hell they truly were, ever again.
“How’s the patient?” he called over the comm net.
“Alive, Lieutenant,” was McMillan’s response. “But that’s about all. Cargo deck hatch is closed and sealed.”
“Here’s some fresh air, then,” Ostend said, passing his hand through a virtual control. “Don’t try breathing it yet, though.” Pure nitrogen began flowing into the pressure-tight cargo deck, forcing out the native atmosphere—nitrogen because the higher oxygen content of a terrestrial atmosphere might react unpleasantly with the methane and other compounds in the Haris gas mix. He brought the cargo deck pressure up to two and a half atmospheres, then began bleeding off the overpressure and adjusting the gas mix to Earth standard.
By that time, the hopper had lifted from that desolate, scorched-rock plain and was streaking north, back toward the Marine perimeter.
To Ostend’s way of thinking, in fact, they couldn’t leave Haris soon enough. The collie they’d assigned as his friendly native guide could have the place and its weird biology.
Blue Omega One
VFA-44 Dragonfires
Battlespace Eta Boötis IV
0022 hours, TFT
“Form on me, Blue Omegas,” Allyn called. “Staggered right echelon. Make it count!”
The Dragonfires, what was left of them, were well into the merge, hurtling through the rear zone of the Turusch fleet. Enemy vessels were pinging her Starhawk’s sensors from every side now. A brilliant flash close aboard marked the detonation of an enemy nuke striking a sandfield.
She knew she was rewriting the book on gravfighter tactics. The question was whether she’d be around later to autograph copies.
Five ships, the tattered remnant of Blue Omega, had continued to close with the Turusch battlefleet. Moments before, dozens of Starhawk fighters—the other strike squadrons off the America—had merged with the enemy ships dead ahead, then passed through, leaving a trail of silent, blossoming explosions in their wake. Decelerating swiftly, the other Starhawks had swarmed past the oncoming Blue Omega fighters, heading back toward the planet, slowed to a halt, then begun accelerating back the other way, slowly coming up behind the five Dragonfires.
Blue Omega continued to accelerate, approaching the enemy fleet from behind, well in the lead of the rest of America’s gravfighters.
She was angling toward one Turusch ship in particular, a gigantic target identifiable only by its enormous mass. The thing was almost certainly a PC—a planetoid converted to a command ship, with a mass registering in the billions of tons and a shield signature five kilometers long. Allyn couldn’t see the ship itself. It was still a long way off, almost two thousand kilometers, and its shields were so hard-driven by Confederation fire right now that they were almost constantly up, rendering the flying mountain all but invisible. As she neared it, though, she could see the strobing pulse and flash of Confederation warheads detonating against those shields, a steady, flickering, coruscating volley as incoming beams, nuclear warheads, and KK projectiles were twisted back by the Turusch gravitic shields in raw sprays of radiation.
And the Blue Omegas were dropping straight into the heart of that pyrotechnic hell.
Allyn checked course, velocity, and rate of closure once again. The idea was to skim past as close to the enemy shields as possible without becoming part of that ongoing cascade of radiation and debris. She also checked for incoming mail; occasional point-defense beams snapped out from enemy ships as they passed, probing, slashing, but most of the Turusch warships were fully occupied with the oncoming carrier battlegroup ahead and had no ordnance to spare for fighters. Enemy fighters, mercifully, were not much in evidence. They appeared to be deploying toward the Confederation battlegroup.
In any combat, there is one precious opportunity, one instant where a small bit of leverage can shift mountains and transform the shape of battle. Marissa Allyn believed she had her hand on that lever now, if the Dragonfires could slip in close.
Gravfighter tactical doctrine focused on combat at mid- to long range. Fighters approaching an enemy warship closer than about fifty kilometers were easy targets for point-defense beam weapons, high-velocity KK autocannon and railguns, even sandcasters. But Allyn thought she saw an opportunity here, an opportunity made possible by the fact that the Turusch command control vessel had its shields full up. There would be no point-defense weapons so long as that was true.
Minutes passed, as the five Starhawks moved into echelon formation, a staggered line with Allyn’s fighter in the lead. The last few hundred kilometers flashed past as the Turusch vessel loomed huge in her sensors, visible only as a black mass of grav-twisted space.
A Starhawk’s weaponry could not penetrate those shields … but there would be shield projectors along the vessel’s surface, a grid of wave guides and projectors that threw up the fields of sharply warped space. There were points, carefully screened and camouflaged, where those wave guides were exposed to space. Each would have multiple backups and overlapping defensive fields, but if the Dragonfires could smash through even one line of wave guides, one section, at least, of the enemy ship’s gravitic shields would fail.
And with that failure, the enemy would be open to the full and devastating power of the Confederation fleet.
Fifty kilometers … forty … thirty …
“Enemy vessel is within effective range of particle beams and Gatling weaponry,” her AI announced.
“Target wave guides amidships, lock, and fire,” she said, the verbal order backed by a mental command uplinked through to her fighter’s AI.
Particle beams, invisible in the vacuum of space, sparked and flared against the Turusch ship’s primary shields. All five Dragonfires were firing now, their AIs coordinating the attack to hammer at one slender join between two shield-plane segments. Incoming mail—fire from the Confederation battlegroup—continued to hammer at the asteroid ship’s shields, a glaring cascade of raw energy.
Ten kilometers. The black target and the flaring impacts together filled space ahead. The mass of both Gatling KK projectiles and the protons in her particle beam carried considerable thrust, and she felt the jolt of deceleration. No problem. She wanted to decelerate to give her weapons the maximum possible hang time above the target. A corrective boost … and then she switched off the forward-projected singularity to give her weapons a clear field of fire.
She
