“Any word on the battle yet?” he asked the other officer.
“Confused,” Ostend replied. “I’ve been hearing reports come down the line from CIC, but who’s winning is anybody’s guess. Want my best guess?”
“Sure.”
“We’re kicking their alien ass. The bombardment stopped about the time the carrier battlegroup arrived, and it hasn’t picked up again. That either means we have the bastards on the run, or…”
“Or?”
“Or the Tushies are mopping up what’s left, and don’t really care about us down here at the bottom of our gravity well anymore.”
“Cute, Lieutenant,” Richards said. “Real morale-building.”
“Hey! Any time! Catch you guys later.” Ostend left.
“So…can I go yet?” Gray asked the corpsman. “I kind of want to find out what’s happening with my unit, you know?”
“Mmm…not just yet, sir. We have you scheduled for a psych set.”
“Psych.” His eyes narrowed. “I’m not crazy, damn it.”
“No, but you’ve been through severe emotional trauma. Dr. Wilkinson wants to put you through a stress series…and he wants to link you in with Old Liss.”
“Old Liss? What the hell is an ‘Old Liss’?”
“Psy-Cee BA. Psychiatric computer, for battlefield application. We call her Liss for Lisa, the first of her kind.”
“A computer? I don’t want…”
“I’m afraid what you want, Lieutenant, isn’t a very high priority right now. Don’t worry, though. It won’t hurt a bit.”
But Gray had had run-ins with psych computers before.
And he was not at all eager to do it again.
Although the news hadn’t yet reached all of the Marines and naval personnel on the surface of the planet, the Battle of Eta Bootis IV was, in fact, over.
Or, to be precise, the
But with the probable withdrawal of the Turusch fleet, the battlespace cleanup had begun.
SAR Recovery Craft Blue-Sierra boosted at a modest two thousand gravities, her forward singularity capturing the light of the system’s white dwarf just ahead and twisting it into billowing sheets and streamers of radiance. The ship was a four-thousand-ton converted tug, an ugly beetle shape with outsized grapplers trailing astern, like the legs and antennae of some highly improbable insect.
Search and Rescue operations had been an important part of the military procedure, all the way back to the pre spaceflight days of the twentieth century. In the days of wet-Navy aircraft catapulting from the decks of seagoing carriers, the destruction of a fighter meant either a dead aviator or one lost in an immensity of ocean or rugged terrain.
In space, though, the problem became a lot more complex. Countless things could go wrong with a gravfighter, through equipment failure or through enemy action, but the usual outcome saw the fighter with power off and drive singularities down, tumbling helplessly through space with the same vector it had been on when its systems shut down. If the pilot survived whatever had caused the situation failure in the first place, he or she was in for a long and uncomfortable ride…and an ultimately fatal one if somebody couldn’t come get them.
SAR Recovery Craft Blue-Sierra was an old in-orbit work-boat, originally a UTW-90 Brandt-class space-dock tug used for maneuvering large pieces of hull into position. Converted with the addition of singularity projectors fore and aft, it now had the acceleration necessary for locating a tumbling fighter, grappling with it, and bringing it back to the carrier or a repair/service vessel or facility. At the helm was Lieutenant Commander Jessica LeMay.
And she was worried.
“PriFly,” she called, addressing
The dwarf was Eta Bootis B, the brighter star’s white-dwarf companion. A star with the mass of Sol, collapsed into a sphere the size of the Earth, a white dwarf this young-less than two billion years old-was still hot, with a surface temperature exceeding 20,000 degrees Celsius. A dim, faint point of light compared with the orange glare of the sub-giant Eta Bootis A, the dwarf gleamed with a harsh, arc-brilliant glare, still no bigger than a bright star, just ahead.
The white dwarf orbited Eta Bootis A at a distance of 1.4 astronomical units, with a period of about one and a third years. Eta Bootis IV was more than twice that distance out; the dwarf companion never came closer to Haris than one and a half AU. Apparently that wasn’t close enough to seriously disturb its orbit.
But LeMay had spotted a disabled gravfighter tumbling clear of battlespace at high velocity, moving along a vector that would take it quite close to Eta Bootis B, close enough that the dwarf’s gravitational pull would snag it within the next hour and pull it down. Radiation from the dwarf, however, was interfering with her optics, making the approach difficult.
At radar wavelengths, she still had a sharp return. Focusing on radar, she locked onto the target and followed. Slowly, LeMay’s tug closed with the disabled fighter, using the utility vehicle’s powerful singularity to match velocity, then flipping end-for-end to bring its array of mechanical grapplers around to face the target. Using small thrusters, the ungainly vessel nudged closer, arms unfolding, then closing over the Starhawk.
The fighter’s tumble slammed it against a grapple, threatening to put LeMay into a spin as well, but she jockeyed the maneuvering thrusters with an expert touch, countering the rotational energy and slowing the other vessel’s roll. Another touch on the thrusters, and pitch and yaw were corrected as well; the tug outmassed the fighter nearly five to one, and so could absorb some of the kinetic energy of the tumble without falling out of control.
LeMay peered past the other ship on her main display. That damned white dwarf was close enough now to show a tiny disk, swiftly growing larger.
It was time to get the hell out of Dodge, as ancient tradition said.
With the prow of her vessel now aimed away from the dwarf and back toward distant Eta Bootis IV, she switched on the singularity projector, holding her breath as she did so because on a one-way work-boat like this one, there were no backups. The drive kicked in, however, and with a shuddering groan heard by conduction through the hull as the Starhawk’s mass stressed the grappling arms, she began decelerating at ten thousand gravities.
Anxious moments passed as the white dwarf glowing dead astern slowed in its apparent growth…then, blessedly, it began shrinking, dwindling to a bright star…and then to a dim one.
It would take fifteen minutes at this acceleration to make it back to the fleet.
Meanwhile, she engaged another grapple, an arm that unfolded, then extended a meter-long sliver, like a bright needle.
The needle was sheathed in programmed nanoceramic identical to the active nano that made up the Starhawk’s outer hull. As the needle touched the hull, it merged, passing smoothly through the gravfighter’s outer shell with seamless precision and without releasing internal atmosphere to the vacuum of space. Guided by the
