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26 September 2404

Tactician Emphatic Blossom at Dawn

Enforcer Radiant Severing

0032 hours, TFT

Tactician Blossom felt the rumble of successive nuclear strikes pulsing against the rock shell of the Radiant Severing. Turusch physiology was extremely sensitive to both air- and ground-borne vibrations and the shudders were painful—the equivalent of blasting a shrill noise into a human’s ear.

The gravitic shields were failing, the enemy’s nuclear munitions getting through.

In point of fact, the Radiant Severing’s command centers were buried deep within the mass of nickel-iron that formed the huge vessel’s body. The enemy fleet could pound them for g’nyuu’m on end and not reach the ship’s deepest recesses.

But the shields would begin to fall one after another now, as each failure uncovered another line of shield wave guides exposed on the planetoid’s surface. Eventually, all surface structures would be reduced to radioactive debris; the Severing would be blind and deaf with its sensor arrays vaporized, helpless with its weapons destroyed, trapped immobile with its drive projectors inoperative.

“Kill!” its higher self screamed, but the middle self overrode the instinct-laden surge of raw emotion.

“Swing to new heading,” it ordered the Severing’s helm control, adding a string of coordinates. “Accelerate to deepest reach. Pass orders for the rest of the fleet to fall back and cover.”

“The enemy may pursue,” Blossom’s tactical coordinator, its second-in-command, told it. “Our power reserves are low, the damage to our shields severe.”

“They will not pursue,” Blossom replied, the statement arising jointly from both its low and middle minds. “The enemy is focused on protecting, perhaps recovering its colony on the planet surface. When we return with reinforcements, we will find the enemy long gone.”

The system would soon be within Turusch tentacle-grasp, of that Emphatic Blossom was certain. The tragedy was that they’d not been able to cripple the enemy fleet as planned … most particularly that their fighters had not been able to win through to the enemy fighter carrier and destroy it. Such a blow might well have wrecked the enemy’s offensive capabilities in this sector for g’nyi’nyeh to come.

But if the enemy force was still more or less intact, so too was the Turusch battlefleet. The Radiant Severing was not in contact with the other ships. One of the shields had collapsed. The nuclear fury unleashed within the next few seconds against the planetoid’s surface had vaporized lasercom projectors and radio antennae. But as the command vessel withdrew, the other Turusch ships would fall back to protect it.

“Accelerating,” the tactical coordinator announced.

Blossom’s higher self writhed in an agony of angry frustration.

Marine Sick Bay

Eta Boötis IV

0056 hours, TFT

Gray came fully awake with a rush of panic. Get them off me!…

But the “they” were gone. He was floating in air, face up, staring up at the glow panels overhead, heart pounding as fragments of memory clawed at his mind. The scream rising in his throat choked off short. He tried to sit up, and failed.

His eyes opened and he looked up into a metallic nightmare. A robot had emerged from a cabinet in the wall and was hovering above him, all metal and plastic and huge, cold lenses for eyes. The remaining panic induced by the local fauna transferred itself to something more immediate—the looming presence of the medical robot. He screamed, tried to lash out against the thing, but his hands were trapped.

“Whoa. Take it easy there, zorchie,” a voice said.

Blinking, he tried to focus on his surroundings. He was in a small, metal-walled compartment, floating above some sort of grav bed. An older man in Marine combat utilities stood nearby, watching, his arms folded. A younger man, also in utilities, sat at a nearby workstation.

Abruptly, the robot folded itself back into its cabinet.

“What … happened? …”

“You got picked up in the desert by a SAR,” the standing man told him. “You remember anything, son?”

There were memories, yes, but they were broken and chaotic. He remembered running through a barren, night-cloaked landscape, remembered the flickering movements at the corners of his eyes, the gathering shadows following his trail.

He remembered sensations of drowning as the shadows covered him, gnawing at his environmental suit, the terror, the rising panic. He remembered peeling them away by the handful, as more attached themselves to him … and more … and more…

“Those … things …”

“Shadow swarmers. The SAR crew said if they’d been ten minutes later, they’d have breached your suit.”

Gray allowed himself a long, shuddering breath. Safe …

“Thank you,” he said.

“Hey, don’t mention it, zorchie.” The man grinned. “You people have been up there saving our sorry asses. It’s the least we could do in return!”

The fact that the man had called him zorchie—Marine slang for a gravfighter pilot—suggested that he was an officer. An enlisted Marine, Gray thought, would never have called a naval officer zorchie to his face.

He heard a subdued click, and his hands and arms were free. Gently, he drifted down until his back was against a firm, foam-padded surface.

“Doing our job … sir,” he said. “I’m Lieutenant Trevor Gray, VFA-44, the Dragonfires.”

“We know,” the man said, as Gray tried to sit up again and, this time, succeeded. “We downloaded your ID when you came in. I’m General Gorman. Welcome aboard.”

And the man was gone. He didn’t leave; his image flickered and winked out, and Gray realized that the base CO had just paid him a visit via holo projection.

“Does your general always holo-down to chitchat with Navy pilots in sick bay?” Gray asked, looking around.

The man at the console turned and grinned at him. “Not usually, sir. But we’ve all been praying so damned hard to the God of Battles to send us some help, maybe the old man just wanted to come down in person—or in holo, anyway—to see if you were for real.”

“Any word on what’s happening up there?”

“You think they tell us anything? Last I heard, the bombardment of the perimeter had stopped, and that’s about all I care about right now.” He extended a hand. “I’m Bob Richards, by the way. HM1.”

Gray touched palms with Richards, and the circuitry imbedded in the other man’s hand lit up Gray’s in-head display. According to the data cascade, HM1 Richards was a Navy hospital corpsman assigned to the FMF, 1^st Marine Expeditionary Force, as part of the attached medical unit. Interesting. He’d been born and raised in the Orlando Arcology, which meant he was from the Periphery back home. As always, Gray waited for the reaction—the faint frown, the loss of interest—as the other person saw his personal data.

For once, there was no visible negative reaction. “So you’re from the Periph!” Richards said, brightening. “Manhattan?”

“What’s left of it. You’re from Orlando, I see.”

“Yup. High above millions of hectares of prime sea-bottom real estate. Your handle, ‘Prim.’ What’s that?”

Gray made a face. “Short for Primitive.”

“Don’t like machines, huh?”

Gray glanced back at the sealed cabinet. “No.”

“You’ll get used to it. That was just Medro.”

“Medro?”

“Medical robot. He doesn’t talk much, but he’s great at taking vitals.”

“So long as he doesn’t indulge in taking vital organs.”

Richards laughed, then got a faraway look in his eyes for a moment. “You’re married? We can let your partner know you’re okay.”

“No,” Gray said. The memory burned, and he turned his head away. “Old, old data.”

“You need to update your ID, then.”

“Yeah. I suppose.”

If he could ever figure out how. He’d received the neural-net implants in his brain while he’d been in officer-recruit training, at the same time they’d grown the circuitry in the palms of his hands. Tam had been alive then, still, when he’d filled out the data that would be stored in his personal RAM, to be exchanged with others with the touching of the circuitry in the palms of their hands. He’d never figured out, though, how to change stored data—something the other men and women on board the America seemed to have known from childhood.

And he was too proud—and angry—to ask.

A chime sounded, and Richards said, “Come!”

Another man in combat utilities entered. The rank pips on his wear-stained jacket identified him as a Marine lieutenant. “How’s the patient?”

“Doing well, sir,” Richards replied.

“Outstanding.” The man offered his hand. Again, data flowed across linked circuitry, appearing in a window within Gray’s mind. Marine Lieutenant Charles Lawrence Ostend … “Ostie” … 4^th SAR/Recon Group … 1^st Marine Expeditionary Force…

“You’re the guy who pulled me out of … that place,” Gray said, his eyes widening.

“Guilty as charged.”

“Then I think I owe you a drink. Thank you.”

“Damned straight you do.” He grinned at Richards. “You get all the bugs off of this guy? I don’t like bugs. …”

“He’s clean.” Richards shrugged. “It’s not like it’s a problem. The local florauna can’t tolerate our atmosphere anyway.”

“?‘Florauna’?” Gray asked. He’d not heard the term before.

“Ate a Boot’s native biology. It has characteristics of both flora and fauna, but isn’t either one, really.”

Ostend made a face. “Damned cockroaches, if you ask me.”

“Not cockroaches,” Richards said patiently. “Not insects. Not even animals. Something different. Alien.”

“Yeah, yeah, whatever.” Ostend waved aside the distinction. He slapped Gray on the shoulder. “The important thing, zorchie, is that you’re okay. Right?”

“Yeah …”

Gray wasn’t sure he liked the man’s casual familiarity. Within the curious discrepancy among ranks that had evolved out of the long history of Earth’s various military services, a Navy lieutenant outranked a Marine lieutenant. Gray was actually the equivalent of a Marine captain, one grade above a Marine lieutenant. Richards should have been calling him sir.

On the other hand, Gray had never cared much for the stuffy, pseudo-aristocratic demeanor of the fraternity of naval officers—one of the oldest of the old-boy networks. It was that fraternity—and sorority—that had closed ranks against the poor kid from the Manhattan Ruins and made his life hell for the past three years. Officers and gentlemen was the phrase they used, but it included conceited clots like Lieutenant Howie Spaas and arrogant hypocrites like Lieutenant Jen Collins. So far as Gray was concerned, they could all go to hell, with their “sirs” and “ma’ams” and formal military etiquette and protocol.

Ostend’s informality, Gray decided, made him uncomfortable because it was so out of place, so unexpected. It certainly was better than the usual formality.

As unexpected as General Gorman’s holographic visit a few moments before.

“Any word on the battle yet?” he asked the other officer.

“Confused,” Ostend replied. “I’ve been hearing reports come down the line from CIC, but who’s winning is anybody’s guess. Want my best guess?”

“Sure.”

“We’re kicking their alien ass. The bombardment stopped about the time the carrier battlegroup arrived, and it hasn’t picked up again. That either means we have the bastards on the run, or …”

“Or?”

“Or the Tushies are mopping up what’s left, and don’t really care about us down here at the bottom of our gravity well anymore.”

“Cute, Lieutenant,” Richards said. “Real morale-building.”

“Hey! Any time! Catch you guys later.” Ostend left.

“So … can I go yet?” Gray asked the corpsman. “I kind of want to find out what’s happening with my unit, you know?”

“Mmm … not just yet, sir. We have you scheduled for a psych set.”

“Psych.” His eyes narrowed. “I’m not crazy, damn it.”

“No, but you’ve been through severe emotional trauma. Dr. Wilkinson wants to put you through a stress series … and he wants to link you in with Old Liss.”

“Old Liss? What the hell is an ‘Old Liss’?”

“Psy-Cee BA. Psychiatric computer, for battlefield application. We call her Liss for Lisa, the first of her kind.”

“A computer? I don’t want …”

“I’m afraid what you want, Lieutenant, isn’t a very high priority right now. Don’t worry, though. It won’t hurt a bit.”

But Gray had had run-ins with psych computers before.

And he was not at all eager to do it again.

Recovery Craft Blue-Sierra

SAR 161 Lifelines

Battlespace Eta Boötis IV

0104 hours, TFT

Although the news hadn’t yet reached all of the Marines and naval personnel on the surface of the planet, the Battle of Eta Boötis IV was, in fact, over.

Or, to be precise, the active part of the battle was over. The Turusch fleet, what was left of it, was under high acceleration, already close to light speed and still grav-boosting into the Void. The Confederation carrier group had entered planetary orbit, with fighter patrols orbiting in shells farther and farther out, ready in case the enemy tried to pull a reverse and launch a surprise counterstrike. There was also the possibility that not all of the Turusch warships had in fact left. A lurker or two might remain, powered down and apparently dead, waiting for an opportunity to draw easy blood.

But with the probable withdrawal of the Turusch fleet, the battlespace cleanup had begun.

SAR Recovery Craft Blue-Sierra boosted at a modest two thousand gravities, her forward singularity capturing the light of the system’s white dwarf just ahead and twisting it into billowing sheets and streamers of radiance. The ship was a four-thousand-ton converted tug, an ugly beetle shape with outsized grapplers trailing astern, like the legs and antennae of some highly improbable insect.

Search and Rescue operations had been an important part of the military procedure, all the way back to the pre-spaceflight days of the twentieth century. In the days of wet-Navy aircraft catapulting from the decks of seagoing carriers, the destruction of a fighter meant either a dead aviator or one lost in an immensity of ocean or rugged terrain.

In space, though, the problem became a lot more complex. Countless things could go wrong with a gravfighter, through equipment failure or through enemy action, but the usual outcome saw the fighter with power off and drive singularities down, tumbling helplessly through space with the same vector it had been on when its systems shut down. If the pilot survived whatever had caused the situation failure in the first place, he or she was in for a long and uncomfortable ride … and an ultimately fatal one if somebody couldn’t come get them.

SAR Recovery Craft Blue-Sierra was an old in-orbit work-boat, originally a UTW-90 Brandt-class space-dock tug used for maneuvering large pieces of hull into position. Converted with the addition of singularity projectors fore and aft, it now had the acceleration necessary for locating a tumbling fighter, grappling with it, and bringing it back to the carrier or a repair/service vessel or facility. At the helm was Lieutenant Commander Jessica LeMay.

And she was worried.

“PriFly,” she called, addressing America’s Primary Flight Control, “this is SAR Blue-Sierra. I have a target at twelve hundred kay-em … closing … but I can’t get a visual. I’m losing signal in the dwarf.”

The dwarf was Eta Boötis B, the brighter star’s white-dwarf companion. A star with the mass of Sol, collapsed into a sphere the size of the Earth, a white dwarf this young—less than two billion years old—was still hot, with a surface temperature exceeding 20,000 degrees Celsius. A dim, faint point of light compared with the orange glare of the sub-giant Eta Boötis A, the dwarf gleamed with a harsh, arc-brilliant glare, still no bigger than a bright star, just ahead.

The white dwarf orbited Eta Boötis A at a distance of 1.4 astronomical units, with a period of about one and a third years. Eta Boötis IV was more than twice that distance out; the dwarf companion never came closer to Haris than one and a half AU. Apparently that wasn’t close enough to seriously disturb its orbit.

But LeMay had spotted a disabled gravfighter tumbling clear of battlespace at high velocity, moving along a vector that would take it quite close to Eta Boötis B, close enough that the dwarf’s gravitational pull would snag it within the next hour and pull it down. Radiation from the dwarf, however, was interfering with her optics, making the approach difficult.

At radar wavelengths, she still had a sharp return. Focusing on radar, she locked onto the target and followed. Slowly, LeMay’s tug closed with the disabled fighter, using the utility vehicle’s powerful singularity to match velocity, then flipping end-for-end to bring its array of mechanical grapplers around to face the target. Using small thrusters, the ungainly vessel nudged closer, arms unfolding, then closing over the Starhawk.

The fighter’s tumble slammed it against a grapple, threatening to put LeMay into a spin as well, but she jockeyed the maneuvering thrusters with an expert touch, countering the rotational energy and slowing the other vessel’s roll. Another touch on the thrusters, and pitch and yaw were corrected as well; the tug outmassed the fighter nearly five to one, and so could absorb some of the kinetic energy of the tumble without falling out of control.

Got it. Grapples snapped home with a firm authority.

LeMay peered past the other ship on her main display. That damned white dwarf was close enough now to show a tiny disk, swiftly growing larger.

It was time to get the hell out of Dodge, as ancient tradition said.

With the prow of her vessel now aimed away from the dwarf and back toward distant Eta Boötis IV, she switched on the singularity projector, holding her breath as she did so because on a one-way work-boat like this one, there were no backups. The drive kicked in, however, and with a shuddering groan heard by conduction through the hull as the Starhawk’s mass stressed the grappling arms, she began decelerating at ten thousand gravities.

Anxious moments passed as the white dwarf glowing dead astern slowed in its apparent growth … then, blessedly, it began shrinking, dwindling to a bright star … and then to a dim one.

It would take fifteen minutes at this acceleration to make it back to the fleet.

Meanwhile, she engaged another grapple, an arm that unfolded, then extended a meter-long sliver, like a bright needle.

The needle was sheathed in programmed nanoceramic identical to the active nano that made up the Starhawk’s outer hull. As the needle touched the hull, it merged, passing smoothly through the gravfighter’s outer shell with seamless precision and without releasing internal atmosphere to the vacuum of space. Guided by the tug’s AI, which had an expert knowledge of a Starhawk’s internal layout, the probe slipped in deeper until it emerged within the pilot’s cockpit. Threads laced out, searching … connecting … joining. Several merged with the pilot’s e-suit, linking in with the medical and life support monitoring functions. Energy flowed through power connectors, as banks of lights switched on.

“Okay, PriFly,” LeMay said. “Pilot is alive but unconscious. Life support was down but has been reinstated. I’m transmitting telemetry from the Starhawk to sick bay now.”

“Blue-Sierra,” a new voice said in LeMay’s head, “this is America sick bay comm center. We have your telemetry. We’re taking over teleoperational control of the patient.”

“Copy, sick bay.”

Each gravfighter possessed an onboard suite of medical support systems and robotics, but when the Starhawk’s power had been knocked out, the med systems had gone down as well. At this moment, on board the crippled fighter, medical robots would be probing the pilot, checking for injury, begin to take steps to stabilize his or her condition.

Idly, LeMay checked the pilot’s id, coming through now on her own display. Well, well. Commander Marissa Allyn—CO of the Dragonfires. And it looked like she was going to be okay.

That was good. A lot of Dragonfires had been killed in the action a few hours ago. They were still assembling the butcher’s bill, still looking for dead gravfighters with live pilots adrift in battlespace or beyond. But it didn’t look good; the squadron had almost certainly suffered over 50 percent casualties in the action.

And some of the survivors would be in a bad way.

She boosted her gravitational acceleration just a tad, pushing to get her recovery back to the ship just a few minutes sooner than otherwise.

CIC, TC/USNA CVS America

Haris Orbit, Eta Boötis System

0125 hours, TFT

“Holo transmission coming through,” the CIC comm officer reported. “It’s General Gorman, sir.”

“Patch him through.”

The Marine general faded into solidity on the CIC deck, a few meters in front of Koenig’s couch. Koenig rose to greet him. The gesture was unnecessary. A Marine major general was exactly equivalent to a Navy rear admiral, and neither had precedence of rank. But formal protocol required a polite reception even of a holographic transmission, and, besides that, Koenig wanted to acknowledge the heroism of the Marines’ stand here over the past weeks.

“Admiral Koenig?” the image said. “I’m Eunan Gorman.”

“Welcome aboard, General,” Koenig replied.

“And welcome to Ate a Boot. I’ve been briefed. Sounds like you went through a meat grinder up there.”

“Four ships destroyed, General, seven seriously damaged. But the battlegroup is intact and ready for action if the Tush come back. We can begin the evacuation at once.”

“How many transports do you have? What capacity?”

“Eight troopships, General. Converted Conestoga-class. Enough for your Marines, General. Not for the colony.”

“We have just under five thousand Marines here, Admiral. We’re willing to double up to get the civilians out.”

Koenig sighed. He’d been dreading this. “How many civilians?”

“Approximately fifteen thousand here inside this perimeter, General. Another twenty, maybe twenty-two thousand at three other settlements on the planet.”

“I’m afraid they’ll have to take their chances, General. We have enough room for your people … maybe a few thousand locals if we really pack them in. But not all of them.”

Gorman’s image seemed to sag a bit. “I expected that, of course.”

Koenig pulled down a window in his head, linking through to a calculation function and spreadsheets listing the ships and compliments within the battlegroup.

“Hang on … okay. The Conestogas are rated at eight hundred men each. That gives us a surplus of fourteen hundred, more or less. If we ditch all of your heavy equipment—”

“That was already a given, Admiral.”

“If we ditch the heavy equipment and your Marines don’t mind being real friendly, we can pack in another four or five thousand people. We can also double up on the other ships as well … pack civilians into crew’s quarters, mattresses in passageways, on the mess decks, inside pressurized cargo bays … call it another thousand … maybe two.

“That won’t be enough.”

“Damn it, General, I doubt that our whole Navy has the transport capacity for almost forty thousand civilians, all in one go. We have room for seven thousand civilians. At that, feeding them and handling the sanitation requirements for that many people is going to be a nightmare.”

“You know what will happen if the Turusch return, once we’re gone.”

“No, General, I don’t. And I doubt that anyone else in the Confederation knows either. The Turusch and their Sh’daar overlords are still very much unknown quantities.”

“They killed the researchers at Arcturus. So far as we know, they murdered every last one.”

“Again, General, we don’t know. Not for sure.”

But Gorman was almost certainly right. The last transmission from Arcturus last year had been … chaos. Heavily armored Turusch soldiery breaking into the domes, burning down the civilian technicians and scientists …

“The perimeter is secure, Admiral,” Gorman said. “Start sending down the transports. The shields will be open for you.”

“The first shuttles will be down in thirty minutes, General. Uh … how about security?”

There was a good chance that there would be panic, once the Marines started leaving and the civilians saw that they were being left behind.

“We’ll take care of that,” Gorman snapped. “Gorman out.”

And the image winked off.

Koenig stared at the empty spot on the deck for another moment. This was not going to be easy.