Earth Strike: Star Carrier: Book One

invisible point against the sky in the direction of the constellation Libra. One by one, the other pilots chimed in.

All twenty-three would follow him out toward Point Libra. He checked the time-0738 hours. “Kick it,” he told his AI.

“Transit Squadron, this is the Jeanne d’Arc. Our CIC notes that you are leaving formation without proper authorization. Explain yourself.”

The French light carrier had assumed the responsibility for control of local space traffic. The Jeanne carried three fighter squadrons-Franco-German KRG-17 Raschadler fighters, according to the fleet Warbook-and all of her bays were full. Gray had requested permission to dock when he and the newbies had arrived, and had had his request denied.

“Jeanne d’Arc, this is Green Squadron,” he replied. “We have new orders.”

“Negative, Green Squadron,” came the reply. “Captain La-Salle says that you are under his jurisdiction now. We need confirmation before releasing you to another command.”

“Stuff it, Jeanne,” Gray replied. “We’re going where the action is.”

And, followed by the rest of the fighters, he accelerated to fifty thousand gravities.

Red Bravo Flight America Deep Recon

Inbound, Sol System

0814 hours, TFT

Marissa Allyn’s Starhawk was out of missiles, but she still had power for her PBP and rounds for the KK cannon. Pulling her fighter into a hard turn, feeling the heavy drag of tidal forces as she rounded the projected drive singularity, she brought her ship into line with another Turusch ship and fired, sending a particle beam slashing cross the vessel, knocking down defensive shields and boring into the hull metal beneath. White flame-metal flash- heated into vapor-exploded across her forward display, and in another instant she’d hurtled through the fireball, debris flaring off her own shields.

“Red Five!” Lieutenant Huerta called. “You have a Toad coming down on your six!”

“Thanks, Red Seven! I see him!”

No need to risk a turn. She spun her Starhawk end-for-end, the ship continuing in a straight online as she now faced back the way she’d come. A Toad, malevolent and chunky, burst though the expanding debris cloud of the destroyed Trash ship, and her AI immediately achieved a target lock, signaling her with a tone in her ear.

Switching to guns, she triggered a long burst of kinetic-kill projectiles, accelerating a stream of depleted uranium slugs toward the target at twelve per second. The Toad’s shields had been up at around 90 percent to bring it through the debris field unhurt, shrouding the craft in a hazy blur, but as soon as it was clear of the evaporating fireball, this forward shields dropped to allow it to fire…and in that instant Allyn’s volley struck home.

White flashes sparked and scintillated across the Toad’s prow. Allyn kept firing, kept hammering at the oncoming Toad, which suddenly ripped open under the punishment in a spray of fragments and molten metal.

She spun her fighter through a full one-eighty once more and kicked in the acceleration. The sky around her was filled with ships, with drifting fragments, with flaring, silent explosions of light.

The lopsided battle had been continuing for over an hour now. Allyn and the other three Starhawks in her flight had been harassing the Turusch fleet, making high-velocity passes through the enemy formation, creating as much damage and havoc on each pass as possible. There’d been two casualties. Lieutenant Cutler in the first run… and Lieutenant Friedman had been skimming low across the outer hull of a Turusch Echo-class battleship when a pair of homing Golf-Mikes had closed with his Starhawk and detonated. The blast had actually damaged the Echo; Nancy Friedman’s ship had been obliterated, half vaporized in the triggering detonation, half crumpled into the singularity in an instant.

As the minutes slipped past, however, other Confederation fighters had begun arriving. All of the other Black Lightnings were now in the fight, along with ten of the Impactors and four Nighthawks-a total of twenty Starhawks and four SG-55 War Eagles. Red Bravo had been constantly broadcasting a streaming update on the engagement; the CTT by now had reached every Confederation fighter within one light hour of the battle, and they were coming in now from farther and farther away.

A Turusch Sierra-class cruiser appeared on her combat display, five thousand kilometers ahead, and she adjusted her course to intercept, kicking in her grav drive to a full fifty thousand gravities, accelerating at 500 kilometers per second squared. She let her AI handle the weapons release. When she passed the enemy battleship four and a half seconds later, she was moving at over 2200 kilometers per second relative to the target; mere human reflexes were simply not quick enough to react at such velocities.

There was a flash of motion, a flicker of something huge as she hurtled past the target at a range of just over one hundred kilometers, and she felt her Starhawk pivot, felt its beam weapon trigger. Unfortunately, not even her AI could give her a damage assessment. The target was gone before whatever damage she’d inflicted could register on the fighter’s scanners.

But all she could do, all any of them could do, was continue buzzing the ponderous enemy fleet, hitting individual ships when they could, where they could, as hard as they could.

The blue icon representing one of the Nighthawks flared and winked out, and she winced. The Nighthawks’ older War Eagle fighters wouldn’t last long in this kind of knife fight. They just weren’t as maneuverable in a close-in fight as a Starhawk. Survival in this type of space combat depended on speed and maneuverability, on not being where the enemy expected you to be at any given instant.

And then another Black Lightning was hit-Hector Aguilera’s ship-and she heard him scream as his Starhawk spun out of control, whipping around its own drive singularity with impossible speed before it ripped itself into white-hot fragments.

Twenty-three fighters left, of those that had arrived so far.

She wondered how long any of them would be able to keep pressing the attack.

Green Squadron

Outbound, Sol System

0848 hours, TFT

“Green Leader, to all Greens. Anything yet?”

The answers came back, distorted by high velocity and the tightly curving geometry of spacetime at near- c…all negative.

“Keep listening. Trust me. It won’t be much longer.”

They’d accelerated for ten minutes at fifty thousand gravities, crossing six tenths of an AU and reaching a velocity of 299,000 kps-99.7 percent of the speed of light. For the next hour, then, they’d flashed out into emptiness under free fall, traveling another seven AUs, past the orbit of Mars, past the orbits of the Main Belt asteroids and the orbit of Jupiter, and into the Abyss beyond.

Green Squadron-Gray kept wondering if America’s CIC had given them that designation because the nugget pilots were green-would reach the thirty-AU shell, the orbit of Neptune, by 1148 hours Fleet Time-another three hours, or a bit less. The total near- c coast time for the squadron, though, would seem to be only seventeen and a half minutes, subjective time versus objective, thanks to the effects of relativistic time dilation. From Gray’s point of view, fewer than fifteen minutes had passed since he’d given the order to boost, including the acceleration period up to near-c.

To make matters really exciting, there was the distinct possibility-even the probability-that the Turusch fleet had begun accelerating for the Inner System at some point during the past four hours or so.

Gray stared at his navigational display, thinking about this.

He’d ordered the other fighters to deploy in a receiver rosette-a tactical flight formation designed to transform the entire fighter unit into a very large antenna array. Even at near- c, each fighter could receive incoming radio traffic, but unscrambling them could be a problem. Those messages tended to be garbled and static-blasted, as well as