nudged closer, arms unfolding, then closing over the Starhawk.
The fighter’s tumble slammed it against a grapple, threatening to put LeMay into a spin as well, but she jockeyed the maneuvering thrusters with an expert touch, countering the rotational energy and slowing the other vessel’s roll. Another touch on the thrusters, and pitch and yaw were corrected as well; the tug outmassed the fighter nearly five to one, and so could absorb some of the kinetic energy of the tumble without falling out of control.
Got it. Grapples snapped home with a firm authority.
LeMay peered past the other ship on her main display. That damned white dwarf was close enough now to show a tiny disk, swiftly growing larger.
It was time to get the hell out of Dodge, as ancient tradition said.
With the prow of her vessel now aimed away from the dwarf and back toward distant Eta Boötis IV, she switched on the singularity projector, holding her breath as she did so because on a one-way work-boat like this one, there were no backups. The drive kicked in, however, and with a shuddering groan heard by conduction through the hull as the Starhawk’s mass stressed the grappling arms, she began decelerating at ten thousand gravities.
Anxious moments passed as the white dwarf glowing dead astern slowed in its apparent growth … then, blessedly, it began shrinking, dwindling to a bright star … and then to a dim one.
It would take fifteen minutes at this acceleration to make it back to the fleet.
Meanwhile, she engaged another grapple, an arm that unfolded, then extended a meter-long sliver, like a bright needle.
The needle was sheathed in programmed nanoceramic identical to the active nano that made up the Starhawk’s outer hull. As the needle touched the hull, it merged, passing smoothly through the gravfighter’s outer shell with seamless precision and without releasing internal atmosphere to the vacuum of space. Guided by the tug’s AI, which had an expert knowledge of a Starhawk’s internal layout, the probe slipped in deeper until it emerged within the pilot’s cockpit. Threads laced out, searching … connecting … joining. Several merged with the pilot’s e-suit, linking in with the medical and life support monitoring functions. Energy flowed through power connectors, as banks of lights switched on.
“Okay, PriFly,” LeMay said. “Pilot is alive but unconscious. Life support was down but has been reinstated. I’m transmitting telemetry from the Starhawk to sick bay now.”
“Blue-Sierra,” a new voice said in LeMay’s head, “this is America sick bay comm center. We have your telemetry. We’re taking over teleoperational control of the patient.”
“Copy, sick bay.”
Each gravfighter possessed an onboard suite of medical support systems and robotics, but when the Starhawk’s power had been knocked out, the med systems had gone down as well. At this moment, on board the crippled fighter, medical robots would be probing the pilot, checking for injury, begin to take steps to stabilize his or her condition.
Idly, LeMay checked the pilot’s id, coming through now on her own display. Well, well. Commander Marissa Allyn—CO of the Dragonfires. And it looked like she was going to be okay.
That was good. A lot of Dragonfires had been killed in the action a few hours ago. They were still assembling the butcher’s bill, still looking for dead gravfighters with live pilots adrift in battlespace or beyond. But it didn’t look good; the squadron had almost certainly suffered over 50 percent casualties in the action.
And some of the survivors would be in a bad way.
She boosted her gravitational acceleration just a tad, pushing to get her recovery back to the ship just a few minutes sooner than otherwise.
CIC, TC/USNA CVS America
Haris Orbit, Eta Boötis System
0125 hours, TFT
“Holo transmission coming through,” the CIC comm officer reported. “It’s General Gorman, sir.”
“Patch him through.”
The Marine general faded into solidity on the CIC deck, a few meters in front of Koenig’s couch. Koenig rose to greet him. The gesture was unnecessary. A Marine major general was exactly equivalent to a Navy rear admiral, and neither had precedence of rank. But formal protocol required a polite reception even of a holographic transmission, and, besides that, Koenig wanted to acknowledge the heroism of the Marines’ stand here over the past weeks.
“Admiral Koenig?” the image said. “I’m Eunan Gorman.”
“Welcome aboard, General,” Koenig replied.
“And welcome to Ate a Boot. I’ve been briefed. Sounds like you went through a meat grinder up there.”
“Four ships destroyed, General, seven seriously damaged. But the battlegroup is intact and ready for action if the Tush come back. We can begin the evacuation at once.”
“How many transports do you have? What capacity?”
“Eight troopships, General. Converted Conestoga-class. Enough for your Marines, General. Not for the colony.”
“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
