Earth Strike: Star Carrier: Book One sc-1, page 12
part #1 of Star Carrier Series
“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.
Chapter Nine
26 September 2404
MEF HQ
Mike-Red Perimeter
Eta Boötis System
1612 hours, TFT
Major General Gorman stood on the HQ elevated walk and looked up. For the first time in weeks, the shields were fully down and he could see the landscape directly, with his own eyes, rather than through electronic feeds. With a scream, four Marine Rattlesnake fighters passed nearby, boosting clear from the landing field and accelerating hard, their passage drawing thin lines of vapor in their wakes as their drive singularities shocked the thick air.
The Rattlesnakes were distinctly old tech-distinctive and non-variable delta shapes that seemed downright primitive in comparison to the more modern Navy Starhawks and Nightmare strike fighters. A single squadron of Marine Rattlesnakes was attached to I MEF for close air support, but sending them out during the siege would have been tantamount to murder. Rattlesnakes simply couldn’t stand up to Turusch military technology in an open fight. Their Marine pilots called them rattletraps, a reflection of their technological inadequacy.
But they served now to help secure the perimeter against infiltrators and small enemy ground units that might try to take advantage of the lowered shields as the Navy transports were coming down.
It was past the middle of the daylight hours at this latitude and time of year, the short day already half over. A low, churning overcast blocked the sky, moving swiftly with a stiff westerly wind.
Gorman was struck by the gray, bleak desolation surrounding the base, a plain stretching off to the horizon in every direction, scorched-bare rock intermingled with circular craters with black-glass bottoms. When the Marines had landed and set up Red Mike five weeks ago, the land surrounding the low plateau had been shrouded in orange growth, and there’d been a city-the largest Mufrid colony, right there…a few kilometers to the west.
Nothing remained now but rock and glass. From up here, he could even see places where the rock had run liquid, bubbled, then frozen in mid-boil. There was a high background rad count now, though the EM screens were keeping most of the hard stuff out. In the darkness, parts of that landscape now glowed with an eerie, pale blue light.
The capacity for technic intelligence to devastate a world was shocking, nightmarish.
Another flight of gravfighters howled through the thick air, following the Rattlers. These were Navy Starhawks, their black outer hulls shifting and morphing as they passed, preparing to transition from atmospheric flight to space. A kilometer from the Marine perimeter, they brought their noses up, then accelerated almost vertically, punching through the orange-red overcast. A moment later, four mingled sonic booms echoed and rumbled across the plain.
The Turusch did indeed appear to have given up the fight and fled with the arrival of the carrier battlegroup, but Gorman was under no illusions about their eventual, inevitable return.
The Confed force’s immediate problem was not the Turusch…but another problem somewhat closer to home.
A transport shuttle lifted from the landing area at the center of the Marine base, huge, its black skin shifting as it absorbed landing legs and other shore-side protuberances, streamlining itself for the flight to orbit. Navigation lights strobed at its blunt prow, its sides, top, and bottom. A Choctaw Type UC-154 shuttle, it carried nearly two hundred Marines on board. A second Choctaw remained on the landing field, cargo-bay ramps lowered at bow and sides as long columns of Marines, like black ants at this distance, filed on board.
The first Choctaw was accompanied by four Nightshade grav-assault gunships, reduced to black toy minnows dwarfed by the eighty-meter-long shuttle. There was no thunderclap this time; the shuttle and its escorts would reach orbit at a more sedate pace.
“General Gorman?”
He didn’t turn at the voice. “Yes, Mr. Hamid.”
Jamel Saeed Hamid joined him on the walkway. “You wanted to see me?”
“I wanted to discuss the…situation.”
“I don’t see that there is anything to discuss, General.”
“I’ve been going over the numbers with Admiral Koenig, the CO of the Confederation battlegroup. We estimate that we could take on board between six and seven thousand additional people. They would be packed in with our crews, stacked up like cordwood. Water and food will be rationed. The nanorecyclers will be pushed to their limits. But we can make room for them.”
