Earth Strike. Ian Douglas

within the control field. On the mirrored black surface of his Starhawk, three sensor masts detached from the hull and swung out and forward, each two meters long at the start, but unfolding, stretching, and growing to reach a full ten meters from the ship. The receivers at the ends of the masts, spaced equidistant around the fighter, extended far enough out to let them look past the nebulous haze of the dustcatcher. As Gray watched, the inner circle of light on the cockpit display grew sharper and brighter. Incoming radiation was still being distorted by the Starhawk’s velocity, of course, but now he could see past the distortion of the singularity, and even take advantage of the dustcatcher’s gravitational lensing effect.

      Bright flashes silently popped and flared across the display now, however. Extended, the sensor masts were striking random bits of debris—hydrogen atoms, mostly, adrift in the not-quite-perfect vacuum of space and made deadly by the gravfighter’s speed. Impact at this speed with something as massive as a meteoric grain of sand could destroy the mast; his AI had to work quickly.

      The data came up less than five seconds later, and with a feeling of relief Gray retracted the sensor masts back into the hull, safe behind the blurring distortion of the dustcatcher. The fighter’s artificial intelligence had sampled the incoming radiation, sorting through high-energy photons to build a coherent picture of what lay ahead.

      Resolution was poor. Only a few ship-sized targets—the most massive—could be separated from the distortion-induced static. The AI did its best to match up the handful of targets it could see now with those that had been visible to America’s sensors hours earlier. By combining the America data with this fresh, if limited, glimpse, the AI could make a close guess at the orbits of a few of the enemy vessels, and predict where they would be—assuming no changes in orbit—in another 136-plus minutes, objective.

      Fifteen targets. Gray had hoped there would be more, but it was something with which to work. Fifteen large starships appeared to be in stable, predictable orbits around the target world, their orbital data precise enough to allow a clear c-shot at them. Of those fifteen, six, the data predicted, would be on the far side of the target planet 136 objective minutes from now, so they were off the targeting list. The remaining nine, however, were fair game.

      The actual targeting and munitions launch were handled automatically by the AI-net, requiring only Gray’s confirmation for launch. So long as there was no override from Commander Allyn, all eleven Starhawks would be contributing to the PcB, the Pre-engagement c Bombardment.

      Release would be at a precisely calculated instant just before deceleration. He checked the time readouts again. Five minutes, twelve seconds subjective to go.

      He worked for a time trying to get a clearer look at the objective. The visual image was blurred, grainy, and heavily pixilated, but he could make out the planet, Eta Boötis IV, sectioned off by green lines of longitude and latitude, the shapes of continents roughed in. Fifteen red blips hung in space about the globe, most so close they appeared to be just skimming the globe’s surface, and he could see their motions, second to second, as the AI updated their locations. A white blip on the surface marked the objective—General Gorman’s slender beachhead. It was on the side of the planet facing Gray at the moment, the planet’s night side, away from the local sun, but in another two hours objective, it would be right on the planet’s limb—local dawn.

      Additional red blips flicked on, a cloud of them, indistinct and uncertain, centered around and over Gorman’s position. Those marked enemy targets for which there was no orbital data and that most likely were actively attacking the Marine perimeter. Or rather, they had been 136 minutes ago, when the photons revealing their positions had left Eta Boötis IV. For all Gray knew, the perimeter had collapsed hours ago, and the squadron was about to make a useless demonstration at best, fly into a trap at worst. He shoved the thought aside. They were committed, had been committed since boosting clear of the America. They would know the worst in another few subjective minutes.

      He opened his fighter’s library, calling up the ephemeris for Eta Boötis and its planets. He scrolled quickly through the star data, then slowed when he reached the entry for the fourth planet.

      PLANET: Eta Boötis IV

      NAME: Al Haris al Sama, (Arabic) “Guardian of Heaven”; Haris; Mufrid.

      TYPE: Terrestrial/rocky; sulfur/reducing

      MEAN ORBITAL RADIUS: 2.95 AU; Orbital period: 4y 2d 1h

      INCLINATION: 85.3 ; ROTATIONAL PERIOD: 14h 34m 22s

      MASS: 1.8 Earth; EQUATORIAL DIAMETER: 24,236 km = 1.9 Earth

      MEAN PLANETARY DENSITY: 5.372 g/cc = .973 Earth

      SURFACE GRAVITY: 1.85 G

      SURFACE TEMPERATURE RANGE: ~30ºC – 60ºC.

      SURFACE ATMOSPHERIC PRESSURE: ~1300 mmHg

      PERCENTAGE COMPOSITION: CO₂ 30.74; SO₂ 16.02; SO₃ 14.11; NH₄ 13.63; OCS 12.19; N₂ 5.55; O₂ 3.85; CH3 2.7; Ar 0.2; CS₂ variable; others <800 ppm

      AGE: 2.7 billion years

      BIOLOGY: C, N, H, S₈, O, Se, H₂O, CS₂, OCN; SESSILE PHOTOLITHOAUTOTROPHS IN REDUCING ATMOSPHERE SYMBIOTIC WITH VARIOUS MOBILE CHEMOORGANOHETEROTROPHS AND CHEMOSYNTHETIC LITHOVORES …

      Gray broke off reading at that point, shaking his head. The squadron had been briefed on the native life forms on Haris, but he’d bleeped past the recorded lectures. He wouldn’t be on the planet long enough to worry about any native life forms.

      Hell, from what he had picked up at the briefing, it was mildly bizarre that there was any life on the rock at all. One point seven billion years ago, the stellar companion of Eta Boötis had burned up its hydrogen fuel stores and entered a red giant phase before collapsing to its current white dwarf state. Planet IV had probably formed farther out than its current orbit within the star’s habitable zone, but migrated in closer as friction with the outer layers of the red giant’s atmosphere both baked it dry and slowed it down. The current ecosystem could not have even begun evolving until about a billion years ago … an impossibly short time by cosmological standards.

      Whatever was growing on Haris’s surface wasn’t going to be very bright. In fact, the chances that it would find humans tasty, or even interesting, were vanishingly remote.

      Gray shrugged the news off. He was a fighter pilot, not a ground-pounding grunt. His only view of Harisian biology would be from space, which was perfect, so far as he was concerned.

      The subjective minutes ground slowly along, as objective minutes and kilometers streamed past at a breakneck gallop.

      “Deceleration in one minute, subjective,” the AI’s voice announced in Gray’s head. “Confirm A-7 strike package release command at deceleration.” It was a woman’s voice, sultry, attention-commanding.

      “Strike package release order confirmed,” Gray replied.

      Another minute crawled past. Then, “Deceleration with strike package release in five … four … three … two … one … release. Commence deceleration.”

      At the precisely calculated release point, a portion of the Starhawk’s outer hull turned liquid, flowed open, and exposed a teardrop-shaped missile nestled within. The fighter’s AI fired the missile, then triggered the spacetime-twisting immensity of the drive singularity, this time astern, off the Starhawk’s spiked tail. At fifty thousand gravities, the Starhawk began slowing; the strike package pod kept accelerating and, from the gravfighter’s perspective, flashed forward at five hundred kilometers per second squared, the dustcatcher winking out just long enough for the teardrop to flash past unimpeded, before switching on once more.

      Ten seconds later, the gravfighter’s velocity had slowed by five thousand kilometers per second. After a minute,