escorts, would be passing almost directly above the five hard-boosting Dragonfires. Better yet, the planet’s surface directly astern, directly below them, was a flaring, savage glare of white in the middle of a broader swath of red-orange light. Above the light, a fast-swelling, red-lit mushroom cloud was spreading out rapidly above the apocalypse of lava and erupting volcanoes marking the vast, molten crater vaporized by the near-c impactor.
There was enough heat and light glaring from that scar, she thought, to mask the fighters from enemy sensors, from some of them, at least. The Starhawks might be tagged by radar—though their hull configuration was already shifting to stealth mode to hide them. And the Toad pilots wouldn’t be watching the eruptions on the planet. They would be focused on America and the other capital ships ahead.
The Choctaw shuttle and the four gunships were already angling off in another direction, racing for the distant star carrier.
“Dragonfires!” she called. “Stick close! We’re going to give those bastards one hell of a surprise!”
CIC, TC/USNA CVS America
Haris Space, Eta Boötis System
1948 hours, TFT
“Dragonfires have acknowledged, sir,” the comm officer announced.
“Then what the hell are they doing?” Koenig asked. The shuttle and its Nightshade escort was breaking for the carrier, but the five fighters were maintaining their course, straight-line from the planet’s surface into space.
“Analyses of their vector suggests they’re performing a pop-up, sir,” Hughes told him.
A pop-up—an ambush by fighters lurking within the atmosphere of a planet, then “popping up” out of the atmosphere to attack. Usually, the relative positions within a local gravity well dictated that the force farther from the planet held the gravitational advantage. Even with drive singularities, it took a lot of energy to fight up out of the bottom of a planetary well. But in some cases, surprise could outweigh the disadvantages, especially if the enemy wasn’t paying attention.
And this time, the enemy appeared to be completely focused on the carrier battlegroup. The question was whether five gravfighters could make any difference at all in a scrap against ten times their number.
“God help them,” he murmured.
Dragon One
Haris Space, Eta Boötis System
1949 hours, TFT
Allyn cut her drive singularity as she flashed into the path of the oncoming Turusch fighter swarm, targeting the nearest Toad and cutting loose with her RFK-90 KK Gatling at a range of less than ten thousand kilometers. Her AI pivoted her ship as she moved, twisting it to keep the Gatling aligned with the enemy fighter. A stream of magnetic-ceramic-jacketed slugs of depleted uranium, each massing half a kilo, snapped out with a cyclic rate of twelve per second.
With a launch tube five meters long and an acceleration of three hundred gravities, those slugs were traveling at 175 meters per second when they left the Starhawk’s prow. The impact of that stream carried the punch of a fair-sized tactical nuke; the Toad’s shields went down as the hull opened up with a zipper effect, ripping out its guts and sending molten chunks of debris tumbling through space.
“Dragon One, scratch one!” she cried over the com link.
The other Dragonfires were scoring as well. Lieutenant Tucker was using her PBP-2 in short, controlled bursts, flipping her Starhawk this way and that, acquiring targets, locking on, firing. Collins and Spaas were tucked in close together with a separation of only a few hundred kilometers, their battle AIs linked as they concentrated their fire, one using KK slugs, the other particle-beam bursts to maximize their combined effect. Sandoval was firing his Kraits … serious overkill for a Toad, but the results were dramatic enough as white nuclear blossoms swelled and faded against black space, silent and devastating.
“Sandoval!” Allyn called. “Save the Kraits for the big boys! You’ll need ’em later!”
“Is there gonna be a later?” he shot back, but he switched to his KK Gatling.
The sudden appearance of the five new Starhawks appeared to have thrown the Toad formation off balance. Intertwined with the Black Lightnings, they’d been focusing their attention, it had seemed, on closing with the remnant of the carrier battlegroup. Now, however, they were faltering, breaking sharply, accelerating in different directions, trying to put distance between themselves and their tormentors.
Turusch fighters were designed to put down heavy fire on capital ships, and they tended to work best at distances of from five to fifty thousand kilometers from their targets—medium range in space combat. They were not as maneuverable as Starhawks, and weren’t good dogfighters.
Starhawks, on the other hand, were designed for close-in knife fights, getting in to within a thousand kilometers or less of the target, outmaneuvering it, and taking it down with concentrated KK and PBP fire. If they could get close enough to a Toad, they enjoyed a considerable advantage ship-to-ship … but at medium range the Toads’ advantage in heavy weaponry could be devastating.
Sandoval twisted in toward a Toad already exchanging fire with one of the Black Lightnings. The Lightning was pacing the Turusch fighter, working to drop squarely onto its tail at a range of less than a hundred kilometers.
At the last moment, the Toad spun end-for-end, hammering at the Black Lightning, which rolled to port, using its drive singularity to jink randomly back and forth, making itself a difficult target. Sandoval was farther out, almost three thousand kilometers, and at that range the Turusch particle beams had bloomed, becoming far wider, far more likely to hit, than when they were fired close-in.
The beam caught his Starhawk aft, slashing through shields, vaporizing critical portions of the gravfighter’s projection bootstrappers.
Fighters under drive fell toward an artificial gravitational singularity projected in the desired direction of acceleration; bootstrapper was the slang term for the electronics that continually refocused the singularity ahead of the ship from picosecond to picosecond. With the bootstrapper disabled and the singularity still powered, Sandoval’s Starhawk fell into its own drive field, its nose crumpling as the fighter began whipping around the pinpoint singularity in a high-velocity blur. In another instant, about a quarter of the fighter was consumed, smashed down into subatomic debris at the singularity’s event horizon. The rest sprayed into surrounding space, most of the mass transformed into a blinding flash of energy.
The remaining four members of the Dragonfires continued the attack.
Squadron Ready Room
TC/USNA CVS America
Haris Space, Eta Boötis System
1950 hours, TFT
To the uninitiated, the squadron ready room looked like a place for Dragonfire personnel on board the carrier to relax between missions, a lounge with comfortable recliners, indirect lighting, and soft-padded decks. In fact, it was the nerve center for the pilots of VFA-44, the place where they were briefed before each mission, where they debriefed with the carrier’s combat intelligence officer afterward, and where they waited out the hours of a ready alert, waiting for the order to strap
