Earth Strike. Ian Douglas
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“Too little, too late, I fear. We have lost the planet, either way.”
He dipped his gravfighter’s nose and accelerated.
He wasn’t quite “down to the deck,” as he’d reported, but close enough. The Starhawk was dropping now past the twenty-kilometer mark. The sky above was still space-dark, the brightest stars—Arcturus, especially—still gleaming and brilliant, but the cloud decks below rose thick and towering, their tops sculpted by high-altitude winds and tinted red and gold by the rising sun. He’d crossed enough of the planet’s face that the local sun was well above the horizon now, casting long, blue-purple shadows and hazy shafts of golden light across the distinctly three-dimensional surface of the cloudscape below.
Gray adjusted his ship’s hull-form again, sculpting it for high-speed aerial flight, absorbing the deep entry keel and extending the wings farther and deeper into their forward-canted configuration. Behind him, a sudden burst of shooting stars marked another cloud of sand or debris entering atmosphere, a barrage of silent flick-flick-flicks of light.
He let his AI target on the Marine beacon, bringing the SG-92’s prow left across the horizon, then dipping down into a plunging dive. He opened his com suite to the Marine frequency and began sending out an approach vector clearance request.
He hadn’t crossed seventy-one AUs and survived a near-miss by a thermonuke to get shot down by the damned jarheads.
Copyright
HarperVoyager
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London SE1 9GF
First published in the US by EOS 2010
Copyright © William H. Keith, Jr 2010
William H. Keith, Jr asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
Cover art by Gregory Bridges
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
FIRST EDITION
This novel is entirely a work of fiction.
The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Source ISBN: 9780007482948
Ebook Edition © September 2012 ISBN: 9780007482955
Version 2019-01-09
For Brea, who has seen me through many, many light years
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