Earth Strike: Star Carrier: Book One

“Blue Six. Got a little crisp there for a sec, but okay.”

“Blue Three. Rog.”

The black bulk of Eta Bootis’s night side dropped away as the five Blue Omegas streaked out of the turbulent atmosphere.

“Okay, children,” Allyn told the others. “Let’s put them where they count!”

“Surprise, you freaking Tush bastards!” Lieutenant Tucker called over the tac channel. “Omega Eight, target lock! And Fox One!”

Allyn was already targeting a Sierra-class cruiser, eight thousand kilometers ahead. “Omega One! Target lock! Fox One!”

The Krait slid off the rail and through the momentary puckered opening in the Starhawk’s smoothly shifting surface and vanished into the distance. Seconds later, it detonated against the Sierra’s screens with a swelling, nuclear fireball…but Allyn was already breaking right and high, targeting another enemy vessel.

Then the Tush fighters were closing on them from three directions, swinging around and back to engage the sudden pop-up strike from the planet’s surface. The five Confederation fighters went into the merge accelerating hard, engaging the fighters with particle beams and KK cannon, saving the heavy-hitting Kraits for capital ship targets.

For the next several seconds, the combat was a confused blur of fast-moving ships, black space, and fireballs. Twice, Allyn’s Starhawk AI intervened to throw the ship one way or the other to avoid hurtling pieces of white-hot debris. She saw her CPG beam spear through an oncoming Toad just ahead, and then the sky lit up with an eye-searing explosion, pelting her outer hull with high-velocity bits of shrapnel. Warning tones sounded in her ear as gravitic missiles locked on and accelerated toward her. Sand canisters thumped into the void, blocking the enemy thrusts.

Ahead, two massive battlefleets engaged…

CIC, TC/USNA CVS America

Battlespace Eta Bootis IV

2354 hours, TFT

“Main spinal mount!” Captain Buchanan called from the bridge, “Fire!”

On the tactical display, a beam of white light snapped out from the icon of the America, connecting the carrier momentarily with an Alpha-class Turusch line battleship-a small asteroid ten times the length of the carrier and bristling with weapon mounts. Its pitted outer surface was pocked and splotched in places by white-hot craters where Confederation weapons had already and repeatedly struck home.

Screens and displays within CIC showed the unfolding fleet action from dozens of different perspectives, the scenes relayed to the battlegroup flag by sensor drones scattered across the battlespace. America’s spinal mount PBP fired a proton beam invisible to the eye or to drone cameras, but it impacted the Turusch shields at energies of up to 1.15 TeV.

Most of that kinetic energy was splashed aside by bent-space shields or electromagnetic screens, but enough leaked through to melt shield projectors set into the asteroid warship’s surface.

And when enough shield projectors were knocked out, the target became vulnerable….

At this point, Koenig’s role was more that of observer than of military commander. He could suggest strategy and coordination with the other ships of the battlegroup, but Buchanan was captain of the America, the one fighting the ship.

In fact, he thought with a touch of bemusement, the engagement already had become far too big, too fast, and too spread out for any human mind to grasp it, much less control what was happening. America’s AI was running tracking and targeting, firing the weapons, maintaining screens and shields.

All twenty-six of the other Confederation ships in the battlegroup had emerged from Alcubierre Drive and were accelerating now, swiftly building up to combat velocities. The railgun cruiser Kinkaid had fallen into position one hundred kilometers abeam of the America, and was joining her considerable firepower to that of America’s main gun. The Kinky pounded at the asteroid warship, now just eighteen thousand kilometers ahead, with kinetic-kill slugs accelerated at five hundred gravities down its kilometer-long superconductor rail.

“Admiral!” Hughes, the CIC tac evaluator, called out, excited. “We’re picking up fighters. Our fighters, coming up from the planet behind the Trash fleet!”

“How many?” he snapped.

There was an agonizing pause. “Five. Just five. But…”

“Synch their data inks with ours,” Koenig said, interrupting. “Coordinate their attacks with ours.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

There’d be time to count the losses later…and to mourn them. Right now, the god of battles had offered the Confederation fleet a singular opportunity, and he was going to take the fullest possible advantage of it.

Chapter Seven

26 September 2404

Tactician Emphatic Blossom at Dawn

Enforcer Radiant Severing

0004 hours, TFT

Emphatic Blossom at Dawn, like all of the Turusch, was of three minds.

Literally. The Mind Above, as the Turusch thought of it, was the more primitive, the more atavistic, the original consciousness set that had arisen on the Turusch homeworld perhaps three million of their orbital periods in the past. The Mind Here was thought of as a cascade of higher-level consciousness from the Mind Above, more refined, sharper, faster, and more concerned with the song of intellect.

And the Mind Below was more recent still, an artifact of both Turusch and Sh’daar technology, a merging of Minds Here into a single, more-or-less unified instrumentality.

For Emphatic Blossom, the Mind Above, a shrill demand almost beyond reason, screamed, “Kill! ” The Mind Here, analyzing the data coming through the artificial awareness of the Enforcer Radiant Severing, echoed the demand to kill, modifying it with sensory data and intelligence flowing through its linkages with the ship. “Kill,” yes, but with an awareness that the Turusch fleet was now caught between two separate and rapidly closing tentacles of enemy force, that the fleet was caught in a crossfire that seriously hampered its maneuverability and limited its tactical options. There was a distinct possibility of gaining an important advantage if the enemy carrier vessel could be crippled or destroyed.

But the Mind Below carried a different message entirely.

“There are strategic considerations that take precedence beyond the tactical,” Blossom’s Mind Below was saying. “The Sh’daar Seed requires that we withdraw.”

“Threat!” cried the Mind Above. “Kill!”

“The prime orders have not yet been fulfilled,” replied the Mind Here. “Enemy ground forces remain on the objective world, as do the nonmilitary components. These should be eliminated before we withdraw.”

“The ground forces will soon be withdrawn. This is the judgment of the Sh’daar Seed. The prime orders will be fulfilled.”

“Threat!” cried the Mind Above. “Kill!”

“But we can yet inflict severe damage on the enemy,” the Mind Here insisted.