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25 September 2404

Blue Omega Seven

Eta Boötis IV

1353 hours, TFT

Trevor Gray slogged across wet, marshy ground, a soft and yielding surface smothered in a vibrantly red-orange tangle of vegetation. It was raining now, with big, heavy drops splattering across the ground cover, which appeared to be stretching and expanding under the pounding.

He’d heard and felt a savage boom behind him some minutes before—probably the Tushies dropping something nasty on the wreckage of his fighter or the abandoned acceleration couch, so he kept moving, trying to put as much distance as possible between himself and a possible area of Turusch interest. Moments before, he’d waded out of the shallow water, stumbling ashore on a beach covered by what looked like stubby, blunt-ended tentacles.

The thickness of the vegetation around him was surprising, though it had taken him a moment to realize that it was vegetation. In fact, he still wasn’t sure. The stuff was moving. Each tentacle was perhaps ten to fifteen centimeters long and as thick as his wrist; the tips were open, the weaving shapes hollow, and they appeared to be filled with small holes, like sponges. Though overall they were orange in color, each, in fact, shaded from deep red at the base to bright yellow at the rim of the opening. Their movements were slow and rhythmic, ripples spreading out from his feet with each step and traveling eight or ten meters in all directions, and quivering in response to the rain. He would have assumed they were animals, except for the fact that they were firmly rooted in the soft ground.

According to the readout from the circuitry woven into his e-suit, the atmosphere was a poisonous mix of carbon dioxide and gaseous sulfur compounds, with smaller amounts of ammonia, nitrogen, methane, and just a whiff of oxygen. The sea he’d just emerged from was water, but with a high percentage of sulfuric acid; the rain, he noted, was almost pure sulfuric acid—H₂SO₄—and it steamed as it splashed across the vegetation. The external temperature was up to 53 degrees Celsius, and climbing rapidly as the local morning grew more advanced.

Gray’s e-suit was composed of a finely woven carbon composite that, in theory, at least, would resist anything the local atmosphere could throw at him, including strong acids and high temperatures. He wondered, though, if any material substance could stand up to this kind of acidity for very long. There were, he noticed, quite a few rock outcroppings thrusting above the orange vegetation, all of them soft and rounded, as though smoothed by geological ages of acid rain. Some of the larger outcrops had holes eaten clear through them, and they stood above the quivering orange ground like alien gateways.

Gray’s internal circuitry had memory enough for some backup data, but had nowhere near the capacity of his wrecked fighter. There was nothing there, for instance, on the flora and fauna of Eta Boötis IV … and he wished now that he’d paid more attention when he’d been scanning through the data files on board the Starhawk.

What the hell was a chemoorganoheterotroph, anyway?

A ripple of motion caught his attention out of the corner of his eye, something dark, quick, and low to the ground. He turned … but saw nothing beyond the writhing of those damned orange plants.

The place, he decided, was starting to get on his nerves, and now his imagination was playing tricks on him …

Blue Omega One

VFA-44 Dragonfires

Eta Boötis IV

1412 hours, TFT

Commander Marissa Allyn brought her gravfighter into a steep climb as kinetic-kill projectiles, heated white-hot by atmospheric friction, stabbed down out of the sky and struck the sea in white bursts of vapor. Her ship vibrated alarmingly with the maneuver. Despite the advanced polymorphic hull, able to drastically reconfigure its shape according to mission or aerodynamic requirements from moment to moment, the SG-92 Starhawk had not been designed with atmospheric flight in mind. You could maneuver the thing with gravs, or you could use the change of airfoil shape and ailerons to maneuver against the airflow, but it was tough to do both.

Turusch fighters relied solely on gravitics for flight, whether in space or in atmosphere; those ugly, potato-shaped lumps were just about as aerodynamic as bricks.

There were three of the damned things on her tail at the moment. A particle beam seared past her head, the dazzling blue-white flash making her flinch. Lasers and charged particle beams normally were invisible in the vacuum of space; only in atmosphere did the beams draw sharp trails of ionization across the sky. In space, her IHD graphics showed the beams, but not with such eye-dazzling intensity.

Blinking, she told her AI to stop down the intensity of the light and kept hauling her Starhawk up and over in a hard, tight loop. The Toads tried to match her climb but were carrying too much velocity. She could see their hulls glow white-hot as they tried dumping excess speed. “Target lock!” she called. “Fox One!”

But that was her last Krait. “This is Blue One!” she called. “I’m dry on VG-10s! Three on my tail! Switching to beams and guns!”

“Copy that, Blue Leader! This is Blue Five! Got you covered!”

Blue Five—Lieutenant Spaas—dropped out of empty sky, trying to get on the one of the Toads’ six, the sweet spot directly behind its tail. The Turusch fighter broke left and Spaas followed, trying to get a clear shot.

Allyn’s missile twisted around, then arrowed almost straight down, striking the lead Toad and detonating with a savage, eight-kiloton blast that sent a visible shock wave racing out through the air. The outer skin of the Turusch spacecraft peeled away from the tiny, sudden sun … and then the entire craft disintegrated in a spray of metallic shreds and tatters as the fireball swelled and engulfed them.

The last Toad boomed through the fireball. Allyn completed her loop, rolling out at the top and entering a vertical dive. Her IHD slid a targeting reticule across the Toad, which was coming up at her from below, head-on. She triggered her particle beam an instant before the enemy could fire, sending a blue-white lance of energy stabbing into and through the Toad’s hull. The fighter came apart in glowing fragments; a half second later she plunged through the debris cloud, feeling the tick and rattle of fragments impacting across her fuselage.

“Scratch two Tangos!” Allyn yelled, adrenaline surging through her. Damn, she never felt this alive, save when she was turning and burning in combat. She hated that about herself.

“And scratch one!” Spaas added, as another nuclear sun blossomed in the fire-ravaged sky over Haris.

Allyn looked around, orienting herself. The dogfight, or part of it, had drifted down out of space and into Eta Boot’s atmosphere. They were over the day side of the planet, perhaps a thousand kilometers north and east of the Marine perimeter. “All Blue Omegas!” she called. “We need to work in closer to Mike-Red!”

Turusch fleet elements were attempting to keep the Dragonfires from engaging enemy positions around the Marine perimeter. The squadron actually had two mission elements—crippling the Turusch fleet as completely as possible before the Confederation carrier task force arrived, and taking some of the pressure off of the Marines. Of the two, the first, arguably, was the most important … at least that was what they’d told her in the pre-mission briefing.

Even so, the mission was pointless if the Marine perimeter collapsed before the America arrived. The Turusch were doing their best to keep the Dragonfires away from Red-Mike, and the volume of fire directed against the Mariners appeared to be growing more intense.

Fifteen kilometers away, a nuclear fireball consumed Blue Twelve.

If the surviving fighters could tuck in close to the Marines, perhaps the two might be able to support each other.

Blue Omega Seven

Eta Boötis IV

1415 hours, TFT

Gray had to rest.

The spider strapped to his back continued responding perfectly to his movements, adding its considerable strength to his own as he staggered across the alien landscape. The planet’s gravity continued dragging at him, however, until his heart was pounding so hard inside his chest he began to fear the possibility of a heart attack.

Theoretically, the med circuitry woven into his e-suit was supposed to monitor his health, and would inform him if he was in any real danger of hurting himself, but he wasn’t sure he trusted that technology yet. He stopped and leaned against a smoothly sculpted rock outcropping, breathing hard.

Again, something moved, half glimpsed out of the corner of his eye.

His rapid breathing was fogging the inside of his helmet, and he wasn’t sure he’d seen anything at all. Turning, he stared at the patch that had snagged his attention. What the hell was he seeing? …

They looked like shadows, each leaf shaped and paper thin, gray in color, each the size of his hand or a little bigger. They flitted across the orange vegetation as though gliding over it, traveling a meter or two before vanishing again among the weaving tendrils.

Again, Gray wished he’d understood—or paid more attention to—the briefings on the biology of Eta Boötis IV. Even if he’d ignored the canned downloads, Commander Allyn had gone over it lightly in the permission briefing. What he best remembered, however, was her stressing that the star Eta Boötis was only 2.7 billion years old … far too young to have planets with anything more highly evolved than primitive bacteria. Gray was no xenobiologist, but those … those things slipping and gliding over the orange plants, or whatever they were, looked a hell of a lot more advanced than any bacteria he’d ever heard about.

Were they dangerous? He couldn’t tell, but it did appear that more and more of them were visible from moment to moment, as though they were following him.

Or might they be some sort of Turusch or Sh’daar biological weapon? Not much was known about their technology, or about whether or not they might utilize organic weapons or sensor probes.

A rumble drifted out of the sky. He looked up, trying to penetrate the low, reddish-gray overcast, and wondered if that was thunder, or if it was the battle somewhere overhead.

Blue Omega One

VFA-44 Dragonfires

Eta Boötis IV

1418 hours, TFT

Commander Marissa Allyn brought her gravfighter into a flat, high-speed trajectory, hurtling low above the surface. The orange ground cover gave way in a flash of speed-blurred motion to bare rock. The surface for fifty kilometers around the Marine perimeter was charred black or, in places, transformed into vast patches of fused glass. Over the past weeks, since the Turusch had brought the Marine base under attack, hundreds of nuclear warheads had detonated against the Marine shields, along with thousands of charged particle beams. The equivalent of miniature suns had burned against that landscape, charring it, in places turning sand to molten glass.

She checked the tactical display for the entire squadron. Three of her pilots were still in space, tangling with Turusch fighters and a Romeo-class cruiser in low orbit. Four were in-atmosphere with her, forming up with her as she arrowed low across fire-scorched desert toward the Marine defenses.

“Mike-Red!” she called over the assigned combat frequency. “This is Blue One! Five Blue Omegas are coming at you down on the deck, bearing three-five-five to zero-one-zero!”

“We’ve got you on-screen, Blue One,” a calm voice replied over her com. “Come on in!”

“Just so you don’t think we look like Trash,” Allyn replied.

“Or Tushies. I think we can tell the difference.”

“Copy! Here we come!”

“Watch out for slugs,” the voice told her. “If you can drop some salt on them on the way in, we’d appreciate it.”

“Copy, Red-Mike. Five loads of salt on the way.”

Ahead, the Marine perimeter screen rose above the horizon, a pale, scarcely visible dome-shaped field highlighted by the sparkle and flash of incoming particle beams and lasers. According to her tactical display, the perimeter was still under attack by Turusch ground crawlers—fifty-meter behemoths code-named “slugs” by Confederation intelligence. Each was similar in appearance to a Toad fighter, but squashed, with a flat bottom that seemed to conform to the ground as it crawled over it. Turrets and blisters on the upper surface housed weapons emplacements, which were keeping up a steady fire against the Marine position. There were a dozen enemy crawlers out there, scattered across the burnt area on all sides of the Marine base.

She extended the sensitivity of her scanners, searching for hot spots—slang for any sources of electromagnetic radiation, including heat and radar. Large patches of scoured-bare rock and glass were radiating fiercely, glowing white-hot and molten in some places, but her computer began cataloguing possible targets out beyond the dead zone, where individual Turusch soldiers or combat machines might be gathering.

One Turusch ship, the Romeo-class cruiser, was almost directly overhead, three hundred kilometers out from the planet. It had been slamming the Marine perimeter with particle beams, but now appeared to be occupied by an attack from two of the Dragonfire fighters.

The five gravfighters all were out of Krait missiles by now, but they still had plenty of KK rounds, as well as power for their particle beam weapons. KK rounds—the letters stood for “kinetic kill”—were lumps of partially compressed matter, each the size of a little finger massing four hundred grams, steel jacketed to give the magnetic fields something to which they could grab hold. Hurled down a gravfighter’s central railgun at twenty kps, they released the energy of a fair-sized bomb on impact; the weapon could cycle seven hundred rounds per minute, or nearly twelve per second.

She had to slow sharply, though, to see the targets. Swinging left slightly, she watched the red diamond of the targeting cursor slide over the icon marking a Turusch slug at the very limits of visibility and triggered her cannon. Rapid-fire rounds howled from her craft, as her gravs kicked in to compensate for the savage recoil of that barrage. Ahead, rounds slammed into the Turusch crawler, sending up immense plumes of dust and dirt, then a fireball erupting, then immediately snuffing out in the oxygen-poor atmosphere.

The explosion an instant later flared white almost directly in front of her. She punched through the fireball, the shock wave jolting her fighter. Dropping her right wing, she jinked back to the right, targeting a second crawler, with a third five kilometers further off, on the bleak and fire-scourged horizon. Again, a stream of compressed matter shrieked from her high-velocity railgun.

High-energy particle beams probed and snapped past her head. The mobile fortresses were swinging their weapons to engage this new threat coming out of the north.

Blue Omega Seven

Eta Boötis IV

1429 hours, TFT

Gray felt something slap against the back of his left leg. He looked down, startled, and saw one of the dark gray leaf shapes clinging to his calf. He reached down and tore it off; it peeled away from his e-suit with a ripping sensation, like it had been clinging to him with suckers, and as he held it up, it twisted and writhed in his grasp. The underside of the creature was covered with tiny tube feet, like a starfish of Earth’s oceans, with a central opening like a sucker, ringed by rough-surfaced bony plates.

He threw the squirming leaf away, shuddering with a wave of revulsion. The thing reminded him of a terrestrial leech, but much larger and more active. The tube feet put him in mind of the far larger tendrils covering the swampy ground.

Three more of the things hit him in rapid succession, two on his lower right leg, one on his left hip. He could feel the rasp of those ventral plates, grinding against the carbon nanoweave of his suit.

Revulsion turned to gibbering panic. The atmosphere was toxic, and would kill him in minutes if his suit was breached. He ripped the creatures off and hurled them away. One, he saw, landed on its back three meters away, twisted over until it was upright, and immediately started gliding toward him once again. Dozens of the creatures were visible now in all directions, moving toward him with a fascinating deliberation.

He started to unsling his carbine, then thought better of it. There were too many of the things, and none was bigger than his open palm and fingers. Shooting them would be like solving a roach infestation one bug at a time. Five slapped against his legs and clung there, gnawing at his suit. With a scream, Gray peeled them off, terror yowling up from the depths of his mind. There were too many of them, coming too fast!

He started running.

His spider pumped and throbbed with his movements, giving him better speed than he could have managed on Earth, to say nothing of the Harisian high-grav environment. He stumbled, but he kept running, his boots splashing through shallow ponds and mudflats and the sea of soft-bodies, orange vegetation that weaved and twisted in front of him; and the shadow-creatures followed, hundreds of them now.

He was screaming as he ran.

MEF HQ

Mike-Red Perimeter

Eta Boötis System

1445 hours, TFT

“General?” Major Bradley said. “They’re ready to come through the screen.”

“Do it,” General Gorman said. “Watch for leakers and pop-ups.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

The gravfighters of VF-44 had completed three wide sweeps all the way around the Marine perimeter, smashing Turusch slugs and ground positions and even small groups of enemy soldiers wherever they could find them. Up in space, three hundred kilometers overhead, more fighters were slamming missiles against the defensive screens of a large Tush cruiser. For the first time in weeks, the Marine perimeter was not under direct fire, and the terrain surrounding the base was free of enemy forces.

He watched the main tactical display with its glowing icons marking the defensive dome and five incoming fighters. At a prearranged instant, one segment of the defensive screen wavered and vanished.

Energy screens and shields were three-dimensional projections of spacial distortion, an effect based on the projection of gravitational distortion used in space drives. Shields reflected incoming traffic, while screens absorbed and stored the released energy.

While screens were useful in relatively low-energy combat zones, they could be overloaded by nukes, and they weren’t good at stopping solid projectiles like missiles or high-energy KK rounds. With shields, incoming beams, missiles, and radiation were twisted through 180 degrees by the sharp and extremely tight curvature of space. Warheads and incoming projectiles were vaporized when they folded back into themselves, beams redirected outward in a spray of defocused energy. Warheads detonating just outside the area of warped space had both radiation and shock wave redirected outward.

As the ground around the outside of the perimeter became molten, however, some heat began leaking through at the shield’s base faster than heat-sink dissipaters could cool the ground. When the projectors laid out on the ground along the perimeter began sinking into patches of liquid rock, they failed. The enemy’s strategy in a bombardment like the one hammering Mike-Red was to overload the dissipaters and destroy the projectors.

The Marines were using shields and screens in an attempt to stay ahead of the bombardment, with banks of portable dissipater units running nonstop in the ongoing fight to keep the ground solid.

It was a fight they were losing.

“Perhaps it would be best to have these spacecraft remain outside the energy barriers,” Jamel Hamid said. “The Turusch could use this opportunity to—”

“I know what the enemy is capable of,” Gorman snapped. “Get the hell out of my way.”

He brushed past the civilian for a closer look at the 3-D display. One of the energy-shield facets—number three—winked off just ahead of the oncoming formation of fliers. The Starhawks glided across the perimeter, and the shield came up again behind them, flickered uncertainly, then stabilized. An instant later, a particle beam stabbed down from space. The Romeo had spotted the momentary breach and tried to take advantage of it with a snap shot, but the beam struck the shield and scattered harmlessly outward.

“Shit, that was close,” a Marine shield tech at one of the boards said.

“Cut the chatter,” Gorman said. “Watch those projectors.”

“Aye, aye, sir. Sorry, sir.”

One reason the beachhead had been set up on a rocky ridgetop was that molten rock tended to flow downhill, not up into the perimeter and the shield projectors. Repeated shocks against the lower slopes of the ridge, however, were threatening to undermine the perimeter. Gorman had already given orders to set out two replacement projectors, for number five and number six, placing them back a hundred meters as the ground sagged and crumbled beneath the originals.

Eventually, enemy fire would eat away the entire hill.

“Number four is failing,” the shield tech reported. “I recommend a reset.”

“How long do we have?” Gorman asked.

“Hard to estimate, General. An hour. Maybe two. Depends on how soon they resume the bombardment.”

Of course. Everything depended on the enemy. That was the hell of it. Gorman hated being trapped like this, stuck in a hole, forced to react to the enemy’s initiative, unable even to shoot back, since to do so the Marines had to drop one of the shields, which would mean a torrent of Turusch fire and warheads pouring through the gap.

The respite the Navy zorchies had brought the defenders was the first breather they’d had in weeks, but it wouldn’t be long before more Tushie ground units moved into the area and took the perimeter under fire … or until more capital ships moved overhead and started pounding the beachhead again with nukes and HE-beams.

“I still don’t see why you’re letting those fighters come inside the shields,” Hamid said. “They can’t do any good in here.”

“In case you weren’t paying attention, Mister Hamid,” Gorman said, choosing his words carefully, “those pilots have been giving the Turusch one hell of a fight. They’re out of missiles, and either out of or running damned thin on other expendables. They need to touch down and get their craft serviced. I imagine the pilots need servicing as well.”

“Perhaps they should land in shifts, then. …”

“Mr. Hamid, I’ve had just about enough of your second-guessing and carping. Get off my quarterdeck!”

“I remind you, General, that I am in command of this colony!”

“And I am in command of the Marine Expeditionary Force. Bradley!”

“Sir!”

“Please escort this civilian off of Marine property. If he shows his face around here again, he is to be placed under guard and confined to his quarters.”

“Aye, aye, General!”

“General Gorman!” Hamid said, his face reddening. “I must protest!

“Protest all you damned well please,” Gorman replied, shrugging, “just as soon as we get back to Earth!”

“Your anti-Islamic stance has been noted, General! Sheer antitheophilia! This will all go onto my report to my government!”

“Get him out of here, Major Bradley.”

“With pleasure, General! C’mon, you.”

Hamid started to say something more, seemed to think better of it, then turned and strode toward the CIC command center door. Bradley grinned at Gorman, then followed the man out. Hamid, clearly, was furiously angry, and there would be repercussions later. If there was a later. Gorman was willing to face the political fallout if they could just hang on long enough to get his people off this toxic hell-hole.

Gorman watched the civilian go, scowling. That crack about his being antitheophilic had been just plain nasty.

But, of course, the colonists on Haris were Refusers—the descendants of Muslims who’d refused to sign the Covenant of the Dignity of Humankind or accept the enforced rewrite of their Holy Qu’ran. Gorman, too, was a Refuser—at least in spirit. His church had accepted the Covenant, but many of its members had not.

Bastards …

The five Navy zorchies were settling in on the landing field now, the fighter icons gathering at the field’s north end.

“Carleton!” he growled.

“Yes, sir!”

“Get your ass down there and get Stores moving on those g-fighters,” he said. “I want their tubes reloaded and those ships ready to boost, absolutely minimum on the turnaround.”

“Aye, aye, sir,” his adjutant said, heading for the door.

Hamid had been right in principle, if not in execution. The faster they got those ships reloaded and out on patrol, the better.

Another nine hours before the naval battlegroup arrived.

It was going to be close.