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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.

      For Brea, who has seen me through many, many light years

      Table of Contents

       Too little, too late, I fear

       Title Page

       Dedication

       Author’s Note

       Prologue

       Chapter One

       Chapter Two

       Chapter Three

       Chapter Four

       Chapter Five

       Chapter Six

       Chapter Seven

       Chapter Eight

       Chapter Nine

       Chapter Ten

       Chapter Eleven

       Chapter Twelve

       Chapter Thirteen

       Chapter Fourteen

       Chapter Fifteen

       Chapter Sixteen

       Chapter Seventeen

       Chapter Eighteen

       Chapter Nineteen

       Chapter Twenty

       Chapter Twenty-One

       Chapter Twenty-Two

       Chapter Twenty-Three

       Chapter Twenty-Four

       Chapter Twenty-Five

       Epilogue

       By Ian Douglas

       Copyright

       About the Publisher

      Author’s Note

      Readers of the Galactic Marines series may wonder at first why the background for Earth Strike seems so different from the universe of Heritage, Legacy, and Inheritance. Where are the Xul, the Builders, the Marine Corps families and traditions extending across two millennia?

      There’s a simple explanation. Earth Strike is the opening volley of a completely new military-SF series, Star Carrier, which explores the lives of Navy combat fighter pilots of the far future. Welcome aboard the Star Carrier America as she faces a new and deadly threat to Earth and all of humankind.

      I hope you enjoy the cruise!

      Ian Douglas

      December 2009

      Prologue

       25 September 2404

      TC/USNA CVS America

       Emergence, Eta Boötean Kuiper Belt

       32 light years from Earth

       0310 hours, TFT

       The sky twisted open in a storm of tortured photons, and the Star Carrier America dropped through into open space.

      She was … enormous, by far the largest mobile construct ever built by humankind, a titanic mushroom shape, the kilometer-long stem shadowed behind the immense, hemispherical cap that was both reaction mass and radiation shielding. Her twin counter-rotating hab rings turned slowly in the shadows. Swarms of probes and recon ships emerged from her launch tubes, minnows streaking out into wan sunlight from the bulk of a whale.

      Around her, the other vessels of the America Battlegroup emerged from the enforced isolation of metaspace as well, some having bled down to sublight velocities minutes before,

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