Earth Strike: Star Carrier: Book One

Inbound, Sol System

1012 hours, TFT

All of the fighters launched from America had joined the engagement, a rapidly moving fur ball hurtling toward the Inner System now at 58,500 kps. Assuming the enemy pulled a mid-course flip and decelerated the rest of the way in, the total voyage was going to be on the order of fifteen more hours.

The handful of America’s fighters simply weren’t going to last that much longer. Twenty fighters had been destroyed total so far…and seven sent spinning away into space, helplessly out of control. They’d started this op with fifty-six fighters. Thirty Confederation fighters were left…close to 50 percent casualties.

Not again! Allyn thought, desperate, stressed to the point of screaming. I can’t go through this again!

“CAG,” she called. “Lightning One-zero-one…this is Red Bravo Five. Private channel.”

“Go ahead, Red Five,” Captian Dixon’s voice replied.

“CAG, we’re down by half. We have to break off!”

“Commander, we are going to keep hammering at these bastards until they break and run, or until our expendables run dry and our PBPs are melted into slag. When that happens, we will begin ramming the sons of bitches if we have to! Is that understood?”

“Understood. Sir.”

Allyn’s mind was reeling. She was afraid…yes-it was impossible not to be afraid in such a position-but more pressing was the overwhelming feeling of frustration, of failure, of helplessness in the face of such an enemy. They’d been hammering at the Turusch fleet, to use Dixon’s word, for a full three hours now. They’d lost half of their own fighters…and managed to destroy or badly damage perhaps twelve enemy capital ships and twenty-two Toad fighters. An excellent tactical trade-off, perhaps…but essentially useless when you realized that there were still nearly ninety Turusch ships out here, not counting the swarms of fighters. The vessels had been appearing out of the Outer System night for three hours now, catching up, rendezvousing with the main fleet, joining them in their stately procession toward the Inner System.

Thirty fighters, almost all out of Krait missiles, most running low on KK rounds, with nothing but their Blue Lightning particle beams to use as weapons. PBPs were sometimes called “infinite repeaters” since they couldn’t run out of ammo so long as they were connected to a quantum power tap, but they did have a finite life. Allyn’s beam projector was already giving her trouble, cutting out now and again as the system overheated. If the circuitry got hot enough to melt, even her nanorepair systems wouldn’t be able to keep her in the fight.

And for all she knew, Dixon wasn’t kidding with his threat to start ramming the enemy.

The plan, of course, was to cause enough damage to the Turusch fleet that they’d be vulnerable to attack by the main fleet elements waiting back in the Inner System.

Swinging around for yet another pass, she lined up on a Turusch mobile planetoid, triggering her charged particle beam from fifty thousand kilometers out, continuing to fire as she flashed past at a relative speed of nearly five thousand kilometers per second. The planetoid’s surface was still partially shielded, though a number of shields had evidently collapsed. Neither she nor her AI could tell whether they’d managed to hit any of the exposed surface installations, or if her fire had been absorbed or deflected by the gravitic screens. The enemy’s particle beams reached out toward her; her jinking pattern, random course shifts implemented by her AI, avoided the incoming fire, but something struck her aft shields and jolted her hard. A quick check of her system diagnostics-no damage, thank God.

But her PBP was overheated, a red warning light showing on her panel and in her mind.

“My God!” Hennessy cried out. “Look at that!”

On her display, the asteroid ship she’d just attacked was firing.

Not at her. The projectile appeared to be a KK missile, accelerating at high-G and likely carrying simple mass as a warhead, a lot of it. It wasn’t aimed at any of the fighters attacking the Turusch fleet. Instead, it appeared to be accelerating hard for the Inner System, toward Earth or Mars or the Confederation warships waiting there.

“It’s the bombardment!” Lieutenant Malvar of the Rattlers called out. “They’ve started bombarding Earth and Mars!”

Other Turusch warships were firing as well, hurling warheads toward the tiny, shrunken sun in unending streams, some massing as much as a ton, some as little as a kilogram.

“That’s it,” Collins said. “I’m fucking out of here. We’ve lost….”

And the America deep-recon flight, what was left of it, began to fall apart.

Chapter Twenty-Four

18 October 2404

Green Squadron

Outbound, Sol System

1015 hours, TFT

“It ain’t gonna work, Lieutenant!” Lieutenant j.g. Mark Rafferty insisted. “Sand grains are tiny. They’ll hit hydrogen atoms on the way…protons in the solar wind, that sort of thing. They’ll all get zapped into plasma!”

“Sand grains are tiny,” Gray agreed, “but they’re a lot bigger than protons. Some might be ablated, turned to plasma…and so what? You can’t destroy mass, and it’s the mass traveling at near-c that does the damage. You ever hear of an A-7 strike package?”

“Yeah, but…that doesn’t make…sense.” It sounded as though he was thinking about it, trying to wrap his mind around the idea.

“First-year Academy physics, Rafferty. Matter and/or energy cannot be created or destroyed, except as allowed by the very special case of quantum power taps. Besides, even if all the sand at the leading edge of the cloud did get turned to plasma, it would just sweep out a tunnel for the rest of the sand following along behind. Like a lightning bolt burning a vacuum channel through the atmosphere. One way or the other, the sand will get there.”

“There’s another problem, sir,” McMasters pointed out. “At this range, it’ll be like firing a shotgun. We might hit the Turusch ships, but we’ll hit our own fighters as well.”

“There’s a chance of that, yes,” Gray conceded. “But we’re going to be broadcasting a warning ahead of our release. Our fighters are a lot more maneuverable than the Turusch, even their Toads. They’ll have time to sidestep the volley.”

“But if we did hit our own guys-”

“Enough, people. I’m in charge, the responsibility is mine.” He checked his display a final time, an abstract representation of the enemy fleet seen bow-on…or how the enemy fleet was probably laid out, now some sixteen AUs ahead.

McMasters was right. This was like firing a shotgun at long range. Precision of aim, thank God, wasn’t necessary.

“Okay,” he told his AI. “Transmit the warning.”

“Transmitting.”

“And transmit a complete log to America. They need to be in the loop.”

They may need it, he thought, with a sudden stab of gloom, for the court martial. Despite the transmitted warning, despite the maneuverability of Starhawk and War Eagle fighters, of course it was possible that some would be caught in the blast.

And the first rule of warfare was-friendly fire isn’t.