sent the Black Lightnings out line along the same path to watch for just this eventuality. Eleven Starhawk gravfighters against fifty Toads. Not good odds. Not good at
But the real urgency of the situation lay in the fact that the enemy fighters were coming in just behind the lasercommed message warning of their approach. The battlegroup’s rear guard might have mere seconds before the Turusch were among them.
“Make to all ships,” Koenig said. “Maneuvering, Code One. Initiate hivel-A defenses
“Aye, aye, sir.”
“Copy the tacsit to everyone within range,” Koenig added. He was thinking of the last Choctaw shuttle coming up from the surface, and the gravfighters and Nightshades escorting it. They needed to know what they were boosting into.
Slowly, ponderously, the remaining seven ships of the carrier battlegroup began to move.
Her Starhawk punched through the last cloud deck and Commander Allyn emerged into the clear, vast emptiness of the planet’s upper atmosphere, with stars gleaming down at her with hard and untwinkling brilliance. A moment later, the local sun exploded into view on the horizon, wiping out the stars, illuminating a scimitar’s edge of cloud cover dividing planetary night from space.
As the atmosphere rapidly thinned, she reshaped her Starhawk into its needle configuration. The other four fighters of VFA-44 were already doing the same, dragging straight-line contrails behind them as their drive singularities chewed through what was left of the air. The Choctaw, fat and bulbous, didn’t have a variable geometry hull, and began lagging behind. Allyn ordered the squadron to slow their ascent, matching their velocity to the transport shuttle. The four Nightshade gunships followed close in the Choctaw’s wake, like angular black insects pursuing an ungainly blue-painted cow.
“We are receiving an urgent tactical update from the fleet,” her AI told her, the voice a whisper in her mind. “Details follow….”
She watched the incoming data scroll through an open window in her consciousness. “Toads!” Allyn snapped as the data flooding through from the
“Where?” Tucker demanded. “I don’t-”
White light blossomed on the night side of the planet directly astern, a searing illumination of the clouds that momentarily blocked out the glare of the bright-rising star. Her sensors picked up the wake of a high-G impactor that had just seared down out of the sky, passing the Confederation fighters and shuttle perhaps eighty kilometers abeam.
“What the-” Lieutenant Collins called over the squadron frequency.
Seconds later, two distinct shock waves struck, first from the ground thirty kilometers below, then a lesser one from the impactor’s more distant atmospheric wake, twin sledgehammer blows against her fighter’s hull. Had the air been any thicker, had they been any closer to the ground, any deeper inside Eta Bootis IV’s thick atmosphere, the shock waves, she knew, would have swatted them all from the sky.
The former Marine base had just been obliterated.
The knowledge stunned her. They’d lifted clear of the base landing pad scant minutes earlier as the rioting mobs had closed in on the loaded shuttle once again. There’d been no point in orchestrating another high-Mach passage over the base. The civilians who’d wanted to get out were getting out; the others had already made their choice.
But it was startling to see how swiftly the consequences of that choice had arrived-as a ten-kilo inert kinetic impactor traveling at just below the speed of light had slammed into the base and released thousands of megatons of energy in a single dazzling flash. As she scanned the planet, she saw a second flash, far up the curve of the northern horizon, and realized that a second impactor had just struck the Mufrid outpost at Kurban.
A third flash…that was probably Amal…and a fourth, more distant still, Lilistizkar.
The Marine base and the last three inhabited colony domes, all…all
The suddenness, the sheer savagery of the attack was almost too much to grasp.
She shifted her scan forward, to the carrier battlegroup. Only seven ships remained in planetary orbit; the others had boosted moments before, were already accelerating hard out-system. Those seven, she saw with considerable relief, all were accelerating, breaking orbit, turning in toward the planet to use Haris’s gravity to their advantage.
The Turusch, of course, would have had precise targeting information for the planet, could accurately strike the colony outposts from light seconds out. Ships, however, could leave their predictable orbits and not be there when the beams or hivel projectiles arrived.
Collins’ scanner picked up numerous faint straight-line trails of ionization ahead, the traces of near-
The Confederation had tried exactly the same tactics against the Turusch fleet earlier, with considerably greater success. It appeared that the enemy had missed all seven human warships.
But the thought of what was happening on the planet astern still burned.
It made no sense. The Turusch had bombarded the Marine perimeter for over a week; at any time they could have accelerated a rock big enough to vaporize a continent, but they hadn’t. They’d been trying to capture the place, not obliterate it.
That strategy, evidently, had changed. The Turusch had just annihilated all human outposts remaining on the planet, killing some tens of thousands of civilians.
Why?
She shook the thought aside. Strategists, xenopsychologists, and admirals could worry about that later. Her problem now was the knowledge that there would be high-G fighters coming in immediately behind the near-
The Toads were coming in hot, decelerating hard in order to engage ship-to-ship. Among them were Confederation Starhawks-the gravfighters of Sandy Jorgenson’s Black Lightnings, following the leading wave of Toads in, trying to burn them down.
The battleship
“Enemy fighters at two-three-zero plus five-one, engaging!” Johanna Hughes announced.
Koenig watched the unfolding action on the tactical display-green icons representing Confederation vessels, red the enemy, with a vast, ghosted gray sphere showing the position of Eta Bootis IV.
More hivel impactors, launched at closer ranges, might still be out there, coming fast. If the carrier squadron could maneuver around behind the planet, use the planet as a shield, they might be able to delay acceleration long enough to take the remaining fighters on board.
