“Mr. Hamid, I’ve had just about enough of your second-guessing and carping. Get off my quarterdeck!”
“I remind you, General, that
“And I am in command of the Marine Expeditionary Force. Bradley!”
“Sir!”
“Please escort this civilian off of Marine property. If he shows his face around here again, he is to be placed under guard and confined to his quarters.”
“Aye, aye, General!”
“General Gorman!” Hamid said, his face reddening. “I must protest!
“Protest all you damned well please,” Gorman replied, shrugging, “just as soon as we get back to Earth!”
“Your anti-Islamic stance has been noted, General! Sheer antitheophilia! This will all go onto my report to my government!”
“Get him out of here, Major Bradley.”
“With pleasure, General! C’mon, you.”
Hamid started to say something more, seemed to think better of it, then turned and strode toward the CIC command center door. Bradley grinned at Gorman, then followed the man out. Hamid, clearly, was furiously angry, and there would be repercussions later. If there
Gorman watched the civilian go, scowling. That crack about his being antitheophilic had been just plain nasty.
But, of course, the colonists on Haris were Refusers-the descendants of Muslims who’d refused to sign the Covenant of the Dignity of Humankind or accept the enforced rewrite of their Holy Qu’ran. Gorman, too, was a Refuser-at least in spirit. His church had accepted the Covenant, but many of its members had not.
The five Navy zorchies were settling in on the landing field now, the fighter icons gathering at the field’s north end.
“Carleton!” he growled.
“Yes, sir!”
“Get your ass down there and get Stores moving on those g-fighters,” he said. “I want their tubes reloaded and those ships ready to boost, absolutely minimum on the turnaround.”
“Aye, aye, sir,” his adjutant said, heading for the door.
Hamid had been right in principle, if not in execution. The faster they got those ships reloaded and out on patrol, the better.
Another nine hours before the naval battlegroup arrived.
It was going to be close.
Chapter Six
25 September 2404
Rear Admiral Koenig walked through the hatch onto the Combat Information Center deck. He’d spent the last six hours trying to sleep, but not even the various electronic soporifics available through the ship’s medical resources had helped. He’d finally dozed off with a trickle charge to his sleep center, but he felt far from rested now.
The battlegroup was now deep inside the Eta Bootean solar system, closing on Haris. He checked his internal time readout: twenty-seven minutes, fifteen seconds more.
And then they would know.
Traveling now at just over the speed of light, each ship of the battlegroup now effectively was locked up in its own tight little universe. They couldn’t see out, couldn’t see the starbow as they’d approached
“Captain Buchanan,” he said softly. The AI monitoring CIC picked up the words and linked him through to Buchanan, on the
“Yes, Admiral.”
“How’s she riding?”
“Twenty-seven minutes, and we’ll know the worst.”
“It’ll be fine, Rand. There won’t be much scattering, not after a short hop like this.”
In fact, he’d been surprised at how closely in proximity to one another the ships of the battlegroup had emerged out in the Eta Bootean Kuiper Belt early that morning after the thirty-seven light year passage out from Sol.
“I know, Admiral. I’ve brought
“Very good.”
Cut off from all contact with the other ships of the battle group, Koenig had to assume the other ship captains were following the oplan, bringing their crew to quarters and preparing for the coming battle. For the past several months, the battlegroup had been training, shuttling between Sol’s Kuiper Belt and Mars. Practicing the maneuvers necessary to break out of Alcubierre Drive in the best possible formations, allowing for both flexibility and strength in combat.
There was no way to anticipate what the tactical situation would be in the inner system, and no way to guess how successful the initial gravfighter strike had been. The battlegroup might emerge to find Blue Omega in command of the battlespace, the Turusch vessels destroyed or having fled.
More likely by far, they would find the Turusch bloodied but fighting mad, ready and waiting for the new arrivals. They wouldn’t know until they actually dropped out of metaspace and saw the situation for themselves.
At least that damned Senate liaison had finally taken the hint and was staying out of CIC. That was one particular aggravation he didn’t need at the moment.
Koenig had already lied to the Senate Military Directorate about one key aspect of this operation, and he wasn’t eager to face Quintanilla’s questions.
That particular problem could wait its turn.
Daylight had come and gone with astonishing swiftness, and it was dark now. The optics implanted in Gray’s eyes allowed him to see by infrared, but he wasn’t used to working in an environment where you saw things by the heat they radiated, smeared and fuzzy and out of focus.
He was exhausted. He’d been running, it seemed, for hours before the weaving tendrils underfoot had thinned out and he’d entered a scorched-bare and rocky desert. Scattered patches of surviving tendrils on the ground glowed with radiant heat, their movements an eerie shifting difficult for the eye to follow. Here, too, patches of bare rock glowed yellow-hot under infrared; he suspected that he might have entered the barren kill zone surrounding the Marine base, where the ground cover had been burned off by the ongoing bombardment by Turusch heavy weapons.
He felt more exposed now, to Turusch scanners and observation drones, which were certain to be lurking
