Earth Strike: Star Carrier: Book One

been tantamount to murder. Rattlesnakes simply couldn’t stand up to Turusch military technology in an open fight. Their Marine pilots called them rattletraps, a reflection of their technological inadequacy.

But they served now to help secure the perimeter against infiltrators and small enemy ground units that might try to take advantage of the lowered shields as the Navy transports were coming down.

It was past the middle of the daylight hours at this latitude and time of year, the short day already half over. A low, churning overcast blocked the sky, moving swiftly with a stiff westerly wind.

Gorman was struck by the gray, bleak desolation surrounding the base, a plain stretching off to the horizon in every direction, scorched-bare rock intermingled with circular craters with black-glass bottoms. When the Marines had landed and set up Red Mike five weeks ago, the land surrounding the low plateau had been shrouded in orange growth, and there’d been a city-the largest Mufrid colony, right there…a few kilometers to the west.

Nothing remained now but rock and glass. From up here, he could even see places where the rock had run liquid, bubbled, then frozen in mid-boil. There was a high background rad count now, though the EM screens were keeping most of the hard stuff out. In the darkness, parts of that landscape now glowed with an eerie, pale blue light.

The capacity for technic intelligence to devastate a world was shocking, nightmarish.

Another flight of gravfighters howled through the thick air, following the Rattlers. These were Navy Starhawks, their black outer hulls shifting and morphing as they passed, preparing to transition from atmospheric flight to space. A kilometer from the Marine perimeter, they brought their noses up, then accelerated almost vertically, punching through the orange-red overcast. A moment later, four mingled sonic booms echoed and rumbled across the plain.

The Turusch did indeed appear to have given up the fight and fled with the arrival of the carrier battlegroup, but Gorman was under no illusions about their eventual, inevitable return.

The Confed force’s immediate problem was not the Turusch…but another problem somewhat closer to home.

A transport shuttle lifted from the landing area at the center of the Marine base, huge, its black skin shifting as it absorbed landing legs and other shore-side protuberances, streamlining itself for the flight to orbit. Navigation lights strobed at its blunt prow, its sides, top, and bottom. A Choctaw Type UC-154 shuttle, it carried nearly two hundred Marines on board. A second Choctaw remained on the landing field, cargo-bay ramps lowered at bow and sides as long columns of Marines, like black ants at this distance, filed on board.

The first Choctaw was accompanied by four Nightshade grav-assault gunships, reduced to black toy minnows dwarfed by the eighty-meter-long shuttle. There was no thunderclap this time; the shuttle and its escorts would reach orbit at a more sedate pace.

“General Gorman?”

He didn’t turn at the voice. “Yes, Mr. Hamid.”

Jamel Saeed Hamid joined him on the walkway. “You wanted to see me?”

“I wanted to discuss the…situation.”

“I don’t see that there is anything to discuss, General.”

“I’ve been going over the numbers with Admiral Koenig, the CO of the Confederation battlegroup. We estimate that we could take on board between six and seven thousand additional people. They would be packed in with our crews, stacked up like cordwood. Water and food will be rationed. The nanorecyclers will be pushed to their limits. But we can make room for them.”

“I suspect that most of us will choose to remain here, General.”

“God, why? The Turusch will be back. You know that.”

“And there is nothing for us back on Earth, or on any of the other colonies.”

“The Turusch will almost certainly kill you,” Gorman said, blunt, hard. “They are not known for their religious sensibilities.”

“Then, if it be God’s will, we will die. That has been our choice from the beginning, you understand.”

“No, sir. I do not understand.”

Hamid sighed. “The White Covenant? We will not sign that…that document. It is an affront against God.”

“Earthstar has said nothing about you signing the Covenant, Mr. Hamid. I’m sure there’s room for negotiation.”

“What you mean is that we will go back into the camps until we either sign or they find another…solution.” He sounded bitter.

On the landing field, the second Choctaw was buttoning up, the ramps pulling in, the openings slowly irising shut. Four more Nightshade gunships hovered overhead, waiting for the shuttle to lift off.

“There are…an infinity of worlds out here, Mr. Hamid,” Gorman said quietly. “You’ll be able to find another world, found a new colony.”

“Not an infinity. Many, perhaps. But still a finite number…and it’s a number made considerably more finite by the Shaitans.”

“You know what I mean, damn it. You may be back in the camps for a time, sure, but there’s plenty of new real estate available, and a lot of it is a damned sight better than this!” He waved his arm, taking in the desolate, flame-barren landscape, the poisonous and sulfur-laden cloud deck, the full orange light and heat.

“You do not understand.”

“Try me! Make me understand!”

“That is not easy.” Hamid thought for a moment. “We-the colonists of Haris-are called Mufrideen. Do you know why?”

“Of course. Mufrid is one of the names for this star, for Eta Bootis. Arabic, like the name for this planet, Al Haris al Sama. Your people were great astronomers back twelve, fifteen hundred years ago or so. Most named stars in Earth’s sky have Arabic names.”

“But we do not apply the name to our sun. Only to ourselves. The word mufrid means “alone.” Solitary. Within our religion, it has the special meaning of one who undertakes the hajj alone.”

“Hajj. That’s the Muslims’ pilgrimage to Mecca?”

Hamid nodded. “One of the five sacred pillars of Islam. And the one, of course, that we have been forbidden by your Confederation to observe.”

Your Confederation. Gorman started to respond, then thought better of it. Before 1 MEF’s deployment, representatives from the Confederation Bureau of Religious Affairs had briefed him on the Haris colonists, and he’d been warned that emotions among the colonists continued to be harsh and bitter.

The Eta Bootean colonists were the ragtag end of a longtime and seemingly unsolvable problem, one going back to the Islamic Wars of the twenty-first century and, arguably, even further back in history than that, to the Crusades and Jihads of the Middle Ages. With the end of the Islamic Wars, the newly formed Confederation had presented the world with the White Covenant, a document of basic human rights that included strong prohibitions of certain religious practices and activities. In short, all adherents of all religions had the right to believe what they wished so long as that belief did not harm others. Proselytizing, missionary work, and conversion by force or by threat all were proscribed as violations of basic human rights and dignity.

By the end of the twenty-first century, the Muslim nation-states of the world lay in ruins, their armies destroyed, their populations starving. Most Islamic leaders signed the White Covenant, if only to allow the beginning of relief efforts and food shipments.

Millions of Muslims, however, point-blank refused to accept the White Covenant’s terms, seeing them as a direct denial of God’s holy word. Numerous groups sprang up among the survivors, especially within the many relocation camps across Africa and the Middle East, calling themselves Rafaddeen, “Refusers,” because their leaders continued to refuse to sign the document.

That had been more than three centuries ago, and the Rafaddeen continued to be a thorn in the side of the Confederation. Most had chosen to remain in relocation camps that had eventually grown into small, self-contained and self-governing cities, each under the watchful eye of Confederation peaceforcers. Tens of thousands had moved