Chapter Five

       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.