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 Spaas pointed him out electronically. She engaged the optical zoom for a closer look, saw a bearded man in a gold-colored e-suit standing on a balcony overlooking the landing field. He had a couple of assistants or bodyguards in black suits behind him, and he was gesticulating angrily, screaming something at the mob.
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,
