Chapter Six

       25 September 2404

      CIC, TC/USNA CVS America

       Eta Boötis IV

       2320 hours, TFT

      Rear Admiral Koenig walked through the hatch onto the Combat Information Center deck. He’d spent the last six hours trying to sleep, but not even the various electronic soporifics available through the ship’s medical resources had helped. He’d finally dozed off with a trickle charge to his sleep center, but he felt far from rested now.

      The battlegroup was now deep inside the Eta Boötean solar system, closing on Haris. He checked his internal time readout: twenty-seven minutes, fifteen seconds more.

      And then they would know.

      Traveling now at just over the speed of light, each ship of the battlegroup now effectively was locked up in its own tight little universe. They couldn’t see out, couldn’t see the starbow as they’d approached c, couldn’t even see the light of the local sun growing more brilliant ahead.

      “Captain Buchanan,” he said softly. The AI monitoring CIC picked up the words and linked him through to Buchanan, on the America’s bridge.”

      “Yes, Admiral.”

      “How’s she riding?”

      “Twenty-seven minutes, and we’ll know the worst.”

      “It’ll be fine, Rand. There won’t be much scattering, not after a short hop like this.”

      In fact, he’d been surprised at how closely in proximity to one another the ships of the battlegroup had emerged out in the Eta Boötean Kuiper Belt early that morning after the thirty-seven light year passage out from Sol.

      “I know, Admiral. I’ve brought America to general quarters. We have all five squadrons set to launch as soon as we bleed down to Drift, one on CAP, four on strike. The keel weapon is charged and ready to fire. Battlespace drones are prepped and programmed, ready for launch.”

      “Very good.”

      Cut off from all contact with the other ships of the battlegroup, Koenig had to assume the other ship captains were following the oplan, bringing their crew to quarters and preparing for the coming battle. For the past several months, the battlegroup had been training, shuttling between Sol’s Kuiper Belt and Mars. Practicing the maneuvers necessary to break out of Alcubierre Drive in the best possible formations, allowing for both flexibility and strength in combat.

      There was no way to anticipate what the tactical situation would be in the inner system, and no way to guess how successful the initial gravfighter strike had been. The battlegroup might emerge to find Blue Omega in command of the battlespace, the Turusch vessels destroyed or having fled.

      More likely by far, they would find the Turusch bloodied but fighting mad, ready and waiting for the new arrivals. They wouldn’t know until they actually dropped out of metaspace and saw the situation for themselves.

      At least that damned Senate liaison had finally taken the hint and was staying out of CIC. That was one particular aggravation he didn’t need at the moment.

      Koenig had already lied to the Senate Military Directorate about one key aspect of this operation, and he wasn’t eager to face Quintanilla’s questions.

      That particular problem could wait its turn.

       Blue Omega Seven

       Eta Boötis IV

       2335 hours, TFT

      Daylight had come and gone with astonishing swiftness, and it was dark now. The optics implanted in Gray’s eyes allowed him to see by infrared, but he wasn’t used to working in an environment where you saw things by the heat they radiated, smeared and fuzzy and out of focus.

      He was exhausted. He’d been running, it seemed, for hours before the weaving tendrils underfoot had thinned out and he’d entered a scorched-bare and rocky desert. Scattered patches of surviving tendrils on the ground glowed with radiant heat, their movements an eerie shifting difficult for the eye to follow. Here, too, patches of bare rock glowed yellow-hot under infrared; he suspected that he might have entered the barren kill zone surrounding the Marine base, where the ground cover had been burned off by the ongoing bombardment by Turusch heavy weapons.

      He felt more exposed now, to Turusch scanners and observation drones, which were certain to be lurking about. He would have to move more cautiously here. At least those damned leeches, the gray, swift-gliding leaf shapes, appeared to have vanished once the orange ground cover had given out.

      What the hell had those things been? His e-suit was still intact, but he’d had the distinct impression that those things had been scraping away at the outer carbon nanotube weave of the garment. That material was incredibly tough, but Gray wasn’t about to trust the integrity of his environmental suit with those things swarming over it, not when a single tear could leave him gasping in high-pressure poison.

      Gray staggered to the top of a low, bare-rock outcrop and studied his surroundings. Somewhere to the north, across that empty desert, was the Marine perimeter. He needed to decide now whether to keep walking, or if he should hole up here and start transmitting an emergency distress call.

      The only way he was going to get through the Marine shield would be if they sent a SAR—a Search and Rescue mission—out to get him. He had no way to get through the tightly folded space of the shield … and though his e-suit would protect him well enough from the radiation, it wouldn’t let him weather a nearby burst from a nuclear warhead, or a bolt of charged particles searing down from low orbit.

      On the other hand, the moment he started transmitting, he was likely to attract attention from Turusch battlespace probes, or even from enemy spacecraft in orbit.

      Shit. Damned if he did, damned if he didn’t.

      He wondered how long he had before daylight. His implant RAM had a brief listing of planetary stats for Eta Boötis IV—Haris, as the human colonists called it. He knew the planet’s rotational period was short—only about fourteen and a half hours. But the planet also had an extreme axial tilt, literally lying on its side as it circled its hot primary once each four years. At the equator, daylight lasted about seven hours throughout that long year, followed by a seven-hour night. At the poles, the sun would disappear for a year at a time, alternating with year-long periods of sunlight, and with everything in between.

      What a freaking weird world!

      He wasn’t sure what the length of the day or night was at this point on the surface. Mike-Red, he knew from his briefings, was at 22 degrees north. He knew that this was late fall or early winter in the northern hemisphere. That suggested that the nights in this region were longer than the days, but he didn’t know how long that actually might be.

      Not that it particularly mattered. Whether he attracted the attention of a Marine SAR aircraft—or of a Turusch battle-cruiser—they’d see him, no matter