Earth Strike. Ian Douglas

on the first six targets on your list. Request firing clearance.”

      “Blue Seven, hell yeah! Slam the bastards!”

      “Copy. Engaging.” He lifted his fighter slightly higher above the water, up to eighty meters, to give himself launch clearance. “Fox Three!”

      Six Krait missiles dropped clear of the Starhawk’s keel, emerging from exit ports melting open around them in the hull, then accelerated. Fox Three was the firing code for targets on the ground, or for extremely large ships or bases in orbit. Once, centuries before in the skies above Earth’s oceans, Fox One had designated the launch of a short-range heat seeker; Fox Two, a radar-guided missile; and Fox Three, a particular type of long-range missile called a Phoenix. The terminology had remained the same, though the meanings were different now, applied to much different technologies.

      Guided by their onboard AIs, the six Kraits streaked ahead of the Starhawk, their grav drives glowing brilliantly as they plowed through the dense atmosphere. Gray banked left and accelerated slightly; Turusch sensors in orbit would have spotted that launch even if they’d missed his fighter, and they would be trying to target him now.

      A blue-white detonation flared at his back, searing a tunnel down through the atmosphere and vaporizing a stadium-sized chunk of seawater. A second blast ignited the sky to his right. He was traveling too fast for the shock waves to catch him, but he cut right and slowed, riding the fast-expanding wave front of the second explosion in order to take advantage of the mushroom cap of superheated steam overhead. Those shots had been from a Turusch orbital particle cannon; each shot ionized air molecules and tended to momentarily block sensors trying to read through the muck.

      It might mask him for a precious couple of seconds more.

      “Target fifteen on the Red-Mike targeting list ahead, coming into range,” his AI announced. His IHD showed the target as a red triangle on the horizon—some kind of Turusch gun emplacement or surface battery. It was already too close for a Krait lock-on; he switched to his PBP, his particle beam projector, or “pee-beep,” as it was more popularly known.

      At his AI’s command, the nose of his fighter melted away half a meter, exposing the projector head. “Fire!”

      A beam of blue-white light stabbed ahead of his gravfighter, intolerably brilliant; a high-energy UV laser burned a vacuum tunnel through the air, followed a microsecond later by the proton beam, directed and focused by a powerful magnetic field. Twenty-some kilometers ahead, a surface crawler, a squat and massive floater nearly one hundred meters long, was struck by a devastating bolt of lightning before it could fire its next gravitic shell. Secondary explosions lit up the sky, visible from the Starhawk’s cockpit as Gray broke hard to the left.

      His AI began loosing Krait missiles, each locking onto a different target on the Marine list. More energy beams and high-velocity kinetic-kill slugs slammed into the sea a few kilometers astern. Gray increased his speed and began jinking, pulling irregular turns left and right to make it harder on the Turusch gunners some hundreds of kilometers above him. At a thought, a half dozen decoys snapped clear of the Starhawk and streaked in various directions, trailing electronic signatures like an SG-92.

      The burnt-orange and deep-red sea a hundred meters beneath him lightened suddenly to pale yellow-orange as he crossed over shallow water, then gave way to land—bare rock and a rolling carpet of orange. Gray was moving too low and too fast to see details, moving too fast to see anything beyond a vague brown-and-orange blur.

      A map display in his IHD showed blossoming white flashes in a ragged circle around the Marine position. His Kraits were slamming home in rapid succession now, loosing thermonuclear fury across the alien landscape. Turning sharply, the G-forces negated by his inertial compensators, he angled across a narrow arm of the sea toward the Marine position. His missiles were expended now, the last of them flashing off toward the gloom of the west.

      “Red-Mike, this is Blue Omega Seven. I’m Echo-Whiskey and coming in toward the perimeter.”

      “Copy, Blue Seven,” a Marine voice said. “We’re getting drone evals on the eggs you laid. Good shooting. Looks like you tore the bastards up pretty good. Nice shooting!”

      “Almost up to Marine standards,” Gray quipped.

      “I didn’t say you were that good, Navy. …”

      The Turusch particle beam stabbed down out of the cloud deck, a violet-and-blue bolt meters across, scarcely ten meters off Gray’s starboard wing. Static shrieked from the electronic interference and blanked out the displays in Gray’s head. The shock wave caught him from the side, tumbling him over wildly. His AI intervened with reflexes far faster than a human’s, engaging full thrust and pulling up hard before the blast could slam him into the sea.

      Then his power system shut down, and with it his weapons, his primary flight controls, and his life support. He had just enough juice in reserve to put full thrust into his secondaries before they, too, failed and he began dropping toward the alien sea. Slowed now, to less than a kilometer per second, he tried to pull his nose up for a wet landing, but then everything went dead, leaving him in darkness.

      “Eject, eject, eject!” his AI was shouting in his ear before its voice, too, failed. The Starhawk’s ejection system was self-contained and separate from other ship systems. He grabbed the D-ring handle on the deck, twisted it to arm the mechanism, and pulled.

      The cockpit melted away around him, the nanoflow so quick it was more like an explosion than an opening, the blast of wind shrieking around his helmet. Rocket motors in the base of his couch fired, kicking him clear of the falling spacecraft seconds before it slammed into the surging red waters of the sea.

      With his inertial compensators out, the jolt of acceleration rattled his bones and brought with it a stab of terror. Despite both his flight training and numerous experiential downloads, Gray didn’t share the seamless relationship with technology enjoyed by the others in his squadron. He couldn’t. For a long moment as the couch carried him in stomach-wrenching free fall, panic clawed at the back of his mind, and he struggled to control it.

      The eject sequence, fortunately, was entirely automated, a precaution in case the pilot was crippled or unconscious. Scant meters above the surface of the sea, braking rockets fired with another jolt, slowing him suddenly, and then Gray splashed down in the shallow, oily water.

      Smoke boiled from the sea a kilometer or two away as his Starhawk dissolved, its nano components turning suicidal and melting the rest of the ship so that it wouldn’t fall into Turusch hands … or whatever they had that passed for hands. Gray wasn’t sure. Overhead, orange-red clouds roiled and twisted, dragged along by high winds a few kilometers up.

      He struggled to free himself from the chair’s embrace. He felt heavy, dragged down by the planet’s gravity. The water, he was surprised to note, was only about a meter deep. He’d come down perhaps a kilometer from the shoreline—he could see an orange-cloaked land mass toward local north—but the seabed here was extremely shallow—a tidal flat, perhaps. Eta Boötis IV had no moon, but the large sun exerted tidal forces enough, he knew, to raise substantial tides.

      Gray tried standing up, leaning against the chair, and nearly fell again. The artificial spin gravity on board the carrier America was kept at around half a G—a reasonable compromise for crew members from Earth and those born and raised on Luna, Mars, or Ganymede. The surface gravity on Eta Boötis IV was 1.85 G, almost four times what he was used to. Another low swell passed, hitting him waist-high, and he did fall; the water was heavy, with a lot of momentum behind it. He landed on his hands and knees, struggling against the planet’s dragging pull.

      His e-suit would keep him alive for days. Skin-tight, pressure sealed, and with a plastic helmet almost invisible in its clarity at optical wavelengths, it was colored bright orange to help rescue craft spot him, though on this red-orange world, they would have to rely on other wavelengths to see him. A nanobreather pack was attached to his right hip, with its small bottle of oxygen beneath. The unit would recycle oxygen from CO₂ for days, and in an atmosphere, even a toxic one like this one,