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26 September 2404

Tactician Emphatic Blossom at Dawn

Enforcer Radiant Severing

0004 hours, TFT

Emphatic Blossom at Dawn, like all of the Turusch, was of three minds.

Literally. The Mind Above, as the Turusch thought of it, was the more primitive, the more atavistic, the original consciousness set that had arisen on the Turusch homeworld perhaps three million of their orbital periods in the past. The Mind Here was thought of as a cascade of higher-level consciousness from the Mind Above, more refined, sharper, faster, and more concerned with the song of intellect.

And the Mind Below was more recent still, an artifact of both Turusch and Sh’daar technology, a merging of Minds Here into a single, more-or-less unified instrumentality.

For Emphatic Blossom, the Mind Above, a shrill demand almost beyond reason, screamed, “Kill!” The Mind Here, analyzing the data coming through the artificial awareness of the Enforcer Radiant Severing, echoed the demand to kill, modifying it with sensory data and intelligence flowing through its linkages with the ship. “Kill,” yes, but with an awareness that the Turusch fleet was now caught between two separate and rapidly closing tentacles of enemy force, that the fleet was caught in a crossfire that seriously hampered its maneuverability and limited its tactical options. There was a distinct possibility of gaining an important advantage if the enemy carrier vessel could be crippled or destroyed.

But the Mind Below carried a different message entirely.

“There are strategic considerations that take precedence beyond the tactical,” Blossom’s Mind Below was saying. “The Sh’daar Seed requires that we withdraw.”

“Threat!” cried the Mind Above. “Kill!”

“The prime orders have not yet been fulfilled,” replied the Mind Here. “Enemy ground forces remain on the objective world, as do the nonmilitary components. These should be eliminated before we withdraw.”

“The ground forces will soon be withdrawn. This is the judgment of the Sh’daar Seed. The prime orders will be fulfilled.”

“Threat!” cried the Mind Above. “Kill!”

“But we can yet inflict severe damage on the enemy,” the Mind Here insisted. “Our sensors have identified no fewer than twelve major vessels in the alien fleet massing greater than twenty-eight thousand g’ri, including their fighter carrier. Destruction of those vessels would seriously weaken the enemy’s ability to mount a counter-offensive against Turusch fleet elements and bases within the sector.

“And the Sh’daar Seed, as ever, circulates plans within plans. When the enemy reaches the Bright One, all of the enemy ships shall be destroyed, and their homeworld left defenseless.”

“Threat!” cried the Mind Above. “Kill!”

The Turusch tactician considered the matter further, then agreed, Mind Below and Mind Here slipping into harmony. It had to, since the Sh’daar Seed’s suggestions took precedence even over the judgment of a tactician.

Still, it would be extremely difficult for the Turusch fleet to extricate itself without suffering further significant damage. The enemy carrier and several other vessels were concentrating their fire on the Radiant Severing, and other vessels of the fleet were being pounded by enemy fighters.

Emphatic Blossom at Dawn could not directly refuse the Seed’s suggestion—such a choice was literally and physically impossible—but it did have a great deal of latitude in how it carried out the Seed’s suggestions.

The heart of the enemy’s offensive capability was their carrier. Destroying that vessel would be the key to extracting the Turusch battle fleet from this pocket.

CIC, TC/USNA CVS America

Eta Boötis IV

0007 hours, TFT

The last of the fighters—SG-92 Starhawks and the older SG-55 War Eagles—were away, VFA-36, the Death Rattlers, flying Combat Air Patrol around the America, the rest lancing at high-G into the Turusch battle fleet. Kiloton nuclear pulses flashed in the distance as warheads blossomed with white fury, reduced to twinkling pinpoints by the distance.

“Three Golf-Mikes inbound,” a CIC technician reported, her voice calm. “Intercept course, detonation in thirty seconds.”

“Countermeasures deployed,” another voice said.

“Escort Farragut moving to intercept,” Craig reported.

Koenig watched the battle developing. The enemy had more ships than the Confederation battlegroup, and a slight technological lead in such areas as gravitics, shields, and beam weaponry, but they’d been bloodied by the fighter strike earlier and were acting in an uncoordinated, almost sluggish manner.

The large vessel ahead—an asteroid, it appeared, partially hollowed out, given massive gravitic drives and mounted with weapons—was probably the enemy command ship. With more and more of the battlegroup’s weaponry concentrating on that one giant ship, it was possible that they were having trouble coordinating their fleet.

Gravitic shields blocked radio waves and lasercom beams. Typically, ships coordinated with one another in combat by flickering one section of their shields off and on while transmitting tightly packaged comm bursts precisely timed with the shield openings. Pile on enough firepower to keep the enemy’s shields up, and you kept him from communicating with other ships as well.

The Turusch fleet was attempting to rush the America … the largest vessel in the Confederation fleet. That’s what I would do, Koenig told himself. As more and more beams and missiles slammed against the Turusch command vessel’s shields, the enemy’s fleet organization became looser, less coherent.

But the enemy ships kept moving forward, sending waves of nuke-tipped missiles and Toad fighters out ahead of the lumbering capital ships.

Even disorganized, that swarm of Turusch ships would be able to overwhelm America’s defenses in fairly short order.

Koenig looked around, momentarily expecting Quintanilla to be there watching, criticizing. The operational orders issued by the Senate Military Directorate while the battlefleet was still gathering off Mars—several hundred megabytes’ worth of detailed instructions—had been very explicit. Koenig was not to risk the star carrier America. She was one of only six ships of her class, and the Military Directorate wanted to minimize the chances of her being lost or badly damaged. Those orders had directed Koenig, if the tactical situation warranted it, to take the America no closer than fifty AUs to Eta Boötis IV, and to direct the battle from there. At all costs, the America was to avoid direct ship-to-ship combat.

Sheer nonsense, of course, the appraisal of armchair admirals and politicians considering the possible course of a naval engagement from the comfort and security of their offices and conference rooms thirty-seven light years away. You could not direct a battle from four hundred light minutes away, not when the situation was over six and a half hours old by the time you received a status update transmission from the rest of the fleet, and with six and a half hours more before your orders crawled back to the fleet. Even worse, Koenig would actually have had to split his small fleet to ensure that America had combat support. If the Turusch detected America, caught her traveling alone, they could launch a long-range fighter strike or send a small detachment of warships to attack the lurking carrier.

Unsupported, the carrier wouldn’t have a chance in ten of survival.

And so Koenig had deliberately violated his orders. The phrase “if the tactical situation warranted” was his loophole, his way out. So far as Koenig was concerned, the tactical situation did not warrant either splitting his fleet or trying to run the show from over six light hours away. The phrase was, in fact, a cover-your-ass clause for the politicians; if America and her battlefleet were destroyed or suffered serious damage, the admirals and the Directorate senators could shrug and say, “Well, it wasn’t our fault. Koenig disobeyed orders.”

Pretty standard stuff. If the Confederation won and the Marines were successfully evacuated, the breach of orders would be quietly ignored. Otherwise …

Three hundred kilometers ahead, the escort Farragut had changed course, moving across America’s path to help shield the carrier from oncoming missile volleys. Two Turusch missiles struck the escort’s shields, the twin, silent flashes minute but dazzling on the CIC display screens.

But Confederation fire was hammering home among the Turusch ships as well. The Kinkaid continued to slam high-velocity kinetic-kill projectiles into the suspected enemy command-control ship. America was cycling her spinal mount weapon as quickly as possible—firing about once each fifteen seconds—targeting the same Turusch asteroid ship. If they could just keep up the pressure, if they could keep the enemy command ship’s shields up …

“Farragut reports heavy damage,” Hughes reported. “She’s falling out of the fight.”

Koenig turned in his seat to check one of the monitors relaying visuals from a battlespace drone out ahead of the carrier. Farragut was a missile escort, small and fast with a bundle of twenty-four mamba launch tubes tunneling through the center of her forward shield cap, massing 2200 tons and carrying a crew of 190 men and 15 officers. The ugly little missile boats were designed to dash in close, loose a swarm of high-yield smart missiles in the merge with the enemy formation, and accelerate clear under high-G boost. On the display, the Farragut was barely making way, her drive fields dead; he could actually see her on the screen, which meant her gravitic shields were down or intermittent only, and a portion of her aft drive structure was a tangled mass of wreckage, glowing white-hot and trailing a stream of half-molten debris like streaming sparks in the night. Another missile struck the craft, the flash lighting up the display, a dazzling, single pulse of light, and as the glare faded, the Farragut reappeared, her drive section gone, the forward stem and shield cap tumbling end-over-end. Radiation scanners aboard the drone were pegging the readouts in CIC off the scale.

There was no sign of escape pods evacuating the hulk. Two hundred five men and women …

The missile boat’s skipper, Maria Hernandez, had been America’s Operations officer until she’d been promoted to captain and given command of the Farragut.

She’d also been a friend.

“Controller,” Koenig said.

“Yes, sir.” The controller was Commander Vincent Reigh, and he was responsible for directing all fighters and other secondary spacecraft operating in America’s battlespace—the voice who directed the fighters to their targets and who passed new orders to the fighter squadrons as the combat situation changed.

“Have all fighters concentrate on target …” He paused to read the code group off the tac display. “Target Charlie-Papa One.” Charlie because it was the probable enemy command ship, Papa for a planetoid converted into a warship, and One because it was the most massive vessel so far spotted within the enemy fleet.

“All fighters to target Charlie-Papa One, aye, aye, Admiral.”

Right now, most of America’s fighters had merged with the enemy fleet and passed through to the other side. There, they would decelerate, reform, and begin accelerating back through the enemy fleet, joining the five fighters coming out from Eta Boötis’s night side.

Silent detonations continued to pulse and strobe throughout the Turusch fleet, but more and more were concentrating on the enemy command vessel. So damned little was known about Turisch combat psychology, even after the disasters at Arcturus Station and Everdawn. If the carrier group could decapitate the enemy by taking out that Charlie-Papa … would that be enough to send the rest of them running?

White light filled heaven outside America’s shields, and the combat display broke up momentarily in static. “What’s our Trapper?”

“Transmission percentage at sixty-one percent, Admiral.”

As the Confederation fleet attempted to interfere with the enemy command vessel’s ability to transmit orders to other Turusch vessels, the Turusch were attempting to do the same, blasting away at America’s shields to force them to stay up, blocking radio and lasercom signals to the other battlegroup ships. Transmission percentage—“Trapper”—was a measure of the clarity of ship-to-ship communications during combat. The harder the enemy hammered at America’s shields, the harder it would be to transmit orders to the rest of the battlegroup, or receive tactical updates and requests. Sixty-one percent was actually pretty good. It meant America’s shields were open and signals were getting through almost two thirds of the time.

But that was changing quickly as the two fleets moved toward the merge. …

SAR Red-Delta

90 km south of Red-Mike HQ

Eta Boötis IV

0015 hours, TFT

“There! To the left!”

“God be praised! I see him.”

The UT-84 battlefield hopper, a stubby, blunt-nosed tri-wing, canted sharply to port and descended. Its outer hull nanoflage shifted to reflect the murky night, the utility craft’s gravs howling as they bit through the thick atmosphere. Powerful spotlights stabbed down through the gloom, centering on a lone figure struggling atop a low rock outcropping. The guy appeared to be nearly smothered beneath a shifting, oozing mass of darkness.

“Shit! What are those things?”

“We call them shadow swarmers. His e-suit should protect him, God willing, if they’ve not been swarming him for too long. …”

Lieutenant Charles Ostend gave his passenger a sidelong glance, then shook his head. God willing? Muhammad Baqr was okay as collies went, but he shared the religious passion of all of the other Mufrids. The God-shouting fundy colonists on this miserable rock were utterly beyond his comprehension with their conviction that everything, including their very survival, depended solely upon God’s will.

Hell, why anyone would voluntarily choose to live in such a place in the first place was a question Ostend and his buddies in the 4^th SAR/Recon Group had discussed endlessly in after-hours bull sessions ever since the Marines had landed and set up the perimeter. That had been … what? Five weeks ago? He checked his internal calendar. Yeah. Thirty-seven days. Earth days, not the crazy-short daylight cycles they had here.

Shadow swarmers? He’d not heard the term before, but it made as much sense as anything else on Ate a Boot. They’d homed in on a military distress transmission—a rescue beacon in a downed flier’s e-suit. They’d found him … but the guy was almost smothered by a mass of dark gray, leaf-shaped things. Ostend had the impression of millions of cockroaches, each bigger than a man’s outstretched hand and fingers.

He shuddered as he brought the SAR hopper’s nose high and gentled toward bare rock. He hated roaches, had an almost phobic fear of the things, and he didn’t want to think about what was going through that downed pilot’s mind right now.

The guy was alive, at least. Ostend could see arms and legs weakly thrashing about as he tried to pull, scrape, or kick the verminous creatures off of him.

“Okay,” Ostend said, uncertain. “How do we get to him?”

“We pull him inside,” Baqr told him. “The local life forms cannot tolerate high concentrations of oxygen.”

“Hey, Doc!” he called over the craft’s intercom. “We’ve got him in sight! But there’s a bit of a complication!”

“Doc” was a Navy corpsman, HMC Anthony McMillan, riding on the hopper’s cargo deck aft.

“What complication, Lieutenant?” McMillan replied.

“He’s covered with local crawlies. We need to pull him out of there. Mohammed says the oxygen in our air mix’ll kill them.”

“We’ll get him,” McMillan said. “Just get us there.”

The hopper’s two angled ventral wings folded up and rotated back out of the way as landing skids extended, and the craft gentled down ten meters from the writhing mass of swarmers. The port-side cargo-bay door irised open, and two men in Marine utility e-suits and armor jumped out, jogging toward the downed man, the spiders strapped to their backs flexing and working against the planet’s gravity. As they moved through the spotlight beams ahead of the hopper, exaggerated shadows shifted and flickered through dust-illumined shafts of light.

Ostend and Baqr watched from the hopper’s cockpit, keeping the external lights centered on the writhing figure atop the low rock outcrop. One of the corpsmen began pulling swarmers off the man’s suit, peeling them off by the fistful and flinging them away into the darkness. The other was plugging something into the pilot’s helmet.

“What are those swarmer things doing to him, anyway?” Ostend asked.

“Trying to eat him, of course,” Baqr said with a shrug. “Or, rather, trying to eat his e-suit. They must have become sensitized to the carbon in his e-suit.”

“They eat carbon?”

Baqr gave him a mild look. “So do you and I. The life on Eta Boötis is carbon-based, as is the life on Earth. And carbon-based life requires sources of carbon for growth and metabolism. Most of the mobile life forms here get the carbon from carbonaceous mineral deposits—they are lithovores. The sessile forms get it from the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere—lithoautotrophs.”

“So, just like plants and animals on Earth.”

“Only by very rough analogy. The mobile forms, the swarmers, are more like Earth’s plants, actually, getting what they need from the soil. Very active plants. They can be so here, with the abundance of energy available on this world.”

Mohammed Baqr, Ostend knew, was a xenobiologist, one of the senior scientists in the Mufrid colony on Haris, so he must know what he was talking about. It sounded crazy, though—plants moving and swarming like hungry piranhas.

“Can they get through his suit?”

“Eventually. Swarmers possess grinding plates within their ventral orifices, very hard, like organic diamond. The carbon nanoweave fiber of our e-suits is extremely tough, but eventually the grinding will wear through, yes. We’ve lost several of our people to the swarms.”

The two corpsmen were unfolding a collapsible stretcher and were strapping the pilot onto it. Swarmers continued to flit through the shadows, circling, moving closer.

“Those things can’t be plants.”

“The analogy is inexact,” Baqr told him. “Remember, this is an alien world, with an alien biosphere. We use words like “plant” and “animal” because these are the only words we have, and they come with meanings shaped by our experiences on Earth. The reality is … different. Much different.”

“Yeah, but look at them! Those things are tracking our people!”

“Technically, the individual swarmers all are part of a single organism. It … disperses itself across hundreds of square kilometers in order to locate widely scattered deposits of accessible minerals. When one … leaf finds a source of easily ingested carbon, we believe it communicates with the others through low-frequency sound waves transmitted through this dense atmosphere. And they begin to swarm. More and more of them, drawn from farther and farther away.”

“So we’re dealing with walking, meat-eating trees,” Ostend said.

“Ah … no. The swarmers are not plants, really.”

“Then they’re animals that act like plants … except they eat meat and move?”

“They are neither plants nor animals,” Baqr said, a touch of exasperation edging his voice, “not in the sense you mean.”

Ostend was about to reply to that, but he saw that the two corpsmen were approaching the hopper, carrying the stretcher between them. So far as he was concerned, the Marines would be getting off of this rock soon and he wouldn’t have to worry about swarmers, whatever the hell they truly were, ever again.

“How’s the patient?” he called over the comm net.

“Alive, Lieutenant,” was McMillan’s response. “But that’s about all. Cargo deck hatch is closed and sealed.”

“Here’s some fresh air, then,” Ostend said, passing his hand through a virtual control. “Don’t try breathing it yet, though.” Pure nitrogen began flowing into the pressure-tight cargo deck, forcing out the native atmosphere—nitrogen because the higher oxygen content of a terrestrial atmosphere might react unpleasantly with the methane and other compounds in the Haris gas mix. He brought the cargo deck pressure up to two and a half atmospheres, then began bleeding off the overpressure and adjusting the gas mix to Earth standard.

By that time, the hopper had lifted from that desolate, scorched-rock plain and was streaking north, back toward the Marine perimeter.

To Ostend’s way of thinking, in fact, they couldn’t leave Haris soon enough. The collie they’d assigned as his friendly native guide could have the place and its weird biology.

Blue Omega One

VFA-44 Dragonfires

Battlespace Eta Boötis IV

0022 hours, TFT

“Form on me, Blue Omegas,” Allyn called. “Staggered right echelon. Make it count!”

The Dragonfires, what was left of them, were well into the merge, hurtling through the rear zone of the Turusch fleet. Enemy vessels were pinging her Starhawk’s sensors from every side now. A brilliant flash close aboard marked the detonation of an enemy nuke striking a sandfield.

She knew she was rewriting the book on gravfighter tactics. The question was whether she’d be around later to autograph copies.

Five ships, the tattered remnant of Blue Omega, had continued to close with the Turusch battlefleet. Moments before, dozens of Starhawk fighters—the other strike squadrons off the America—had merged with the enemy ships dead ahead, then passed through, leaving a trail of silent, blossoming explosions in their wake. Decelerating swiftly, the other Starhawks had swarmed past the oncoming Blue Omega fighters, heading back toward the planet, slowed to a halt, then begun accelerating back the other way, slowly coming up behind the five Dragonfires.

Blue Omega continued to accelerate, approaching the enemy fleet from behind, well in the lead of the rest of America’s gravfighters.

She was angling toward one Turusch ship in particular, a gigantic target identifiable only by its enormous mass. The thing was almost certainly a PC—a planetoid converted to a command ship, with a mass registering in the billions of tons and a shield signature five kilometers long. Allyn couldn’t see the ship itself. It was still a long way off, almost two thousand kilometers, and its shields were so hard-driven by Confederation fire right now that they were almost constantly up, rendering the flying mountain all but invisible. As she neared it, though, she could see the strobing pulse and flash of Confederation warheads detonating against those shields, a steady, flickering, coruscating volley as incoming beams, nuclear warheads, and KK projectiles were twisted back by the Turusch gravitic shields in raw sprays of radiation.

And the Blue Omegas were dropping straight into the heart of that pyrotechnic hell.

Allyn checked course, velocity, and rate of closure once again. The idea was to skim past as close to the enemy shields as possible without becoming part of that ongoing cascade of radiation and debris. She also checked for incoming mail; occasional point-defense beams snapped out from enemy ships as they passed, probing, slashing, but most of the Turusch warships were fully occupied with the oncoming carrier battlegroup ahead and had no ordnance to spare for fighters. Enemy fighters, mercifully, were not much in evidence. They appeared to be deploying toward the Confederation battlegroup.

In any combat, there is one precious opportunity, one instant where a small bit of leverage can shift mountains and transform the shape of battle. Marissa Allyn believed she had her hand on that lever now, if the Dragonfires could slip in close.

Gravfighter tactical doctrine focused on combat at mid- to long range. Fighters approaching an enemy warship closer than about fifty kilometers were easy targets for point-defense beam weapons, high-velocity KK autocannon and railguns, even sandcasters. But Allyn thought she saw an opportunity here, an opportunity made possible by the fact that the Turusch command control vessel had its shields full up. There would be no point-defense weapons so long as that was true.

Minutes passed, as the five Starhawks moved into echelon formation, a staggered line with Allyn’s fighter in the lead. The last few hundred kilometers flashed past as the Turusch vessel loomed huge in her sensors, visible only as a black mass of grav-twisted space.

A Starhawk’s weaponry could not penetrate those shields … but there would be shield projectors along the vessel’s surface, a grid of wave guides and projectors that threw up the fields of sharply warped space. There were points, carefully screened and camouflaged, where those wave guides were exposed to space. Each would have multiple backups and overlapping defensive fields, but if the Dragonfires could smash through even one line of wave guides, one section, at least, of the enemy ship’s gravitic shields would fail.

And with that failure, the enemy would be open to the full and devastating power of the Confederation fleet.

Fifty kilometers … forty … thirty …

“Enemy vessel is within effective range of particle beams and Gatling weaponry,” her AI announced.

“Target wave guides amidships, lock, and fire,” she said, the verbal order backed by a mental command uplinked through to her fighter’s AI.

Particle beams, invisible in the vacuum of space, sparked and flared against the Turusch ship’s primary shields. All five Dragonfires were firing now, their AIs coordinating the attack to hammer at one slender join between two shield-plane segments. Incoming mail—fire from the Confederation battlegroup—continued to hammer at the asteroid ship’s shields, a glaring cascade of raw energy.

Ten kilometers. The black target and the flaring impacts together filled space ahead. The mass of both Gatling KK projectiles and the protons in her particle beam carried considerable thrust, and she felt the jolt of deceleration. No problem. She wanted to decelerate to give her weapons the maximum possible hang time above the target. A corrective boost … and then she switched off the forward-projected singularity to give her weapons a clear field of fire.

She moved her hands through the virtual control field, and the SG-92 and the Starhawk braked, then pivoted sharply, its nose swinging to align with the swift-growing mass of the Turusch asteroid command vessel. Moving sideways now, continuing to pivot to keep the enemy ship directly off the fighter’s nose and continuing to fire, the Starhawk slid past the Turusch monster’s shields scarcely a kilometer away, passing the target with a relative velocity of less than two kilometers per second.

The close passage was far too fast-moving for merely human reflexes. Allyn’s fighter AI controlled the target acquisition, lock, and firing, but she was riding the software through her internal link, providing a measure of human control behind the lightning-swift reflexes of the AI computer. Through that link, she could feel the flow of quantum-based fuzzy logic, the sparkle of equations and angle-of-attack, the bright clarity of computer-enhanced sensory input.

For a brief instant, the asteroid filled her forward field of view, a vast, dark blur rendered almost invisible by its tightly closed gravitic shielding. Her AI continued, with superhuman speed, to focus on a single, thread-thin line of a target. Gatling projectiles slammed across the enemy’s shields to either side … and then, with startling suddenness, the shield collapsed, revealing a backup shield just beyond. The AI shifted aim slightly and began hammering at a second, reserve wave guide … and then at a third when the second shield collapsed as well.

How many reserves were there? Something the size of an asteroid could carry a lot of layered wave guides, with only the outer two functioning at any given instant. So little was known about Turusch combat doctrine and the engineering details of their warships. All the Dragonfires could do was continue to hammer at any targets that presented themselves to the fast-shifting perspective of the passing fighters.

The actual close passage lasted perhaps two and a half seconds; it felt like much longer. Subjective time slowed for a pilot linked in with her tactical computer in a way that had nothing to do with the time dilation of relativistic travel, and everything to do with the sheer volume of information flooding through her neural pathways.

Her Starhawk had just passed the Turusch ship, was traveling tail-forward now as its nose continued to pivot on the enemy, when a final wave guide vaporized and a last-rank gravitic shield failed.

“Soft target!” she yelled over the comm link, as she triggered the last two of her Krait missiles. For the briefest of instants, she could see a gray and powdery landscape pocked by immense craters, the towers of communications and sensor arrays, the dull-silver domes of weapons turrets and gun positions.

Blue Five was too close to the enemy shields.

“Blue Five!” she yelled over the comm. “Change vector!”

Then white light engulfed her forward sensory inputs, filling her universe with raw, star-hot fury. The blast wave—a shell of hot plasma racing out from the surface of the Turusch asteroid ship at tens of kilometers per second—struck her vessel hard, smashing her to one side and putting her into a helplessly out-of-control tumble.

More blast waves followed, a succession of them as the other Dragonfires hammered at the opening with nuke-tipped missiles, and then as incoming warheads from the fleet found the suddenly revealed weakness.

But Allyn had lost consciousness with the first savage impact.