it by eye. A touch to a pressure plate, however, switched on a targeting reticule in his IHD, a small red circle marking what the weapon’s muzzle was pointed at. A second touch brought up the power, and a reedy tone in his earphone told him the weapon was ready to fire.
But there were so many of the things! They moved a few at a time, giving the impression of a huge, flat, glowing amoeba creeping over the ground by extending pseudopods ahead of the main body.
He moved the weapon awkwardly until the targeting reticule was centered on the central mass of creatures, and fired. Infrared vision picked up the flash of the beam as it heated air molecules along its path, though it was invisible at optical wavelengths. The glowing mob of organisms shifted and parted, momentarily becoming two smaller masses with a hot spot between them … but they kept flowing forward, merging and blending until they were a single mass once more.
He fired again … and then again.
“I’m not on the fucking menu!” he screamed, and then he was triggering burst after burst of laser fire, the shots becoming wilder and wilder as the gliders started flowing up the sides of the outcrop. …
CIC, TC/USNA CVS America
Approaching Eta Boötis IV
2347 hours, TFT
“Time to normal space transition,” America’s AI said, “in twenty-five seconds.”
Koenig leaned back in his couch on its raised platform in the middle of CIC, letting his gaze shift from station to station. The men and women in the pit all leaned back, their virtual instrumentation hovering in front of them, glowing in the muted lighting of the compartment. The tac display showed America’s calculated position relative to both Ea Boötis and Eta Boötis IV; they would be emerging above Eta Boötis’s night side, between twenty and fifty thousand kilometers out.
But calculating precisely where a starship would emerge from the bubble of the Alcubierre Drive always entailed far more guesswork than navigators or ship captains generally cared to think about. There was even a chance—an infinitesimally small one—that one of the battlegroup’s ships would slam into the planet while still moving faster than light. The ship itself, of course, cocooned in its bubble of spacetime, wouldn’t be involved in the collision directly. Only the leading edge of warped space enclosing it would actually intersect with the planet. But that intersection could disrupt the planetary crust, and the ship would be dumped into the middle of the chaos that ensued.
The ship would almost certainly be destroyed, and the disruption to the planet’s crust might finish off the Marines where the Turusch bombardment had failed.
Koenig wondered if the Turusch ever used the Alcubierre Effect to destroy planets … and if the battlegroup would find Eta Boötis IV still intact when they broke out of warp.
They would know in another few seconds. …
Those seconds dwindled away, and precisely on schedule America’s AI triggered a warpfield collapse.
Light, twisted into a circular rainbow by spacetime shear effect, exploded outward as the field evaporated. America’s true velocity relative to the space around it was only a few meters per second, and as the spacetime bubble opened, her effective velocity dropped from just over c to almost nothing in a literal flash of tortured photons. To an observer outside, space seemed to open, a circular starbow unfolded from within, and the ship emerged with stately grace into normal space.
From inside the ship, the stars, for just an instant, assumed the characteristic starbow encircling the vessel forward, then shifted back into more familiar patterns.
Eta Boötis glowed hot and yellow orange almost directly ahead, with its fourth planet a slender, silver-yellow crescent bowed away from the star just beside the glare. A readout on his virtual display showed they’d emerged 38,000 kilometers out from the planet’s night side—bang on-target. On the tactical display above the pit, red points of light began winking on in rapid-fire succession, starting close to the green-lit globe marking the planet and extending farther and farther out as America’s sensor suites picked up EM returns and emissions from other ships near the planet. The ship’s AI identified the signals as quickly as they came in, then plotted positions and vectors on the display.
A solitary blue light winked on against the planet’s night side. The Marine perimeter, at least, was still intact.
Koenig breathed a sigh of relief when he saw that. The mission had not been launched in vain after all.
All of the lights marking spacecraft, however, were red—enemy ships. None were blue. Either the fighter strike had been wiped out in the attack hours before, they’d been disabled and drifted clear of battlespace, or they were down on the planet’s surface.
Other lights were coming on now—yellow ones—indicating unidentified targets. Most of those would be disabled ships—hulks, critically damaged vessels, or even large chunks of debris. The Dragonfires, Koenig noted, had made a definite impression on the Turusch; there could be no doubt about that.
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