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Blue Omega One

      VFA-44 Dragonfires

       Eta Boötis IV

       1418 hours, TFT

      Commander Marissa Allyn brought her gravfighter into a flat, high-speed trajectory, hurtling low above the surface. The orange ground cover gave way in a flash of speed-blurred motion to bare rock. The surface for fifty kilometers around the Marine perimeter was charred black or, in places, transformed into vast patches of fused glass. Over the past weeks, since the Turusch had brought the Marine base under attack, hundreds of nuclear warheads had detonated against the Marine shields, along with thousands of charged particle beams. The equivalent of miniature suns had burned against that landscape, charring it, in places turning sand to molten glass.

      She checked the tactical display for the entire squadron. Three of her pilots were still in space, tangling with Turusch fighters and a Romeo-class cruiser in low orbit. Four were in-atmosphere with her, forming up with her as she arrowed low across fire-scorched desert toward the Marine defenses.

      “Mike-Red!” she called over the assigned combat frequency. “This is Blue One! Five Blue Omegas are coming at you down on the deck, bearing three-five-five to zero-one-zero!”

      “We’ve got you on-screen, Blue One,” a calm voice replied over her com. “Come on in!”

      “Just so you don’t think we look like Trash,” Allyn replied.

      “Or Tushies. I think we can tell the difference.”

      “Copy! Here we come!”

      “Watch out for slugs,” the voice told her. “If you can drop some salt on them on the way in, we’d appreciate it.”

      “Copy, Red-Mike. Five loads of salt on the way.”

      Ahead, the Marine perimeter screen rose above the horizon, a pale, scarcely visible dome-shaped field highlighted by the sparkle and flash of incoming particle beams and lasers. According to her tactical display, the perimeter was still under attack by Turusch ground crawlers—fifty-meter behemoths code-named “slugs” by Confederation intelligence. Each was similar in appearance to a Toad fighter, but squashed, with a flat bottom that seemed to conform to the ground as it crawled over it. Turrets and blisters on the upper surface housed weapons emplacements, which were keeping up a steady fire against the Marine position. There were a dozen enemy crawlers out there, scattered across the burnt area on all sides of the Marine base.

      She extended the sensitivity of her scanners, searching for hot spots—slang for any sources of electromagnetic radiation, including heat and radar. Large patches of scoured-bare rock and glass were radiating fiercely, glowing white-hot and molten in some places, but her computer began cataloguing possible targets out beyond the dead zone, where individual Turusch soldiers or combat machines might be gathering.

      One Turusch ship, the Romeo-class cruiser, was almost directly overhead, three hundred kilometers out from the planet. It had been slamming the Marine perimeter with particle beams, but now appeared to be occupied by an attack from two of the Dragonfire fighters.

      The five gravfighters all were out of Krait missiles by now, but they still had plenty of KK rounds, as well as power for their particle beam weapons. KK rounds—the letters stood for “kinetic kill”—were lumps of partially compressed matter, each the size of a little finger massing four hundred grams, steel jacketed to give the magnetic fields something to which they could grab hold. Hurled down a gravfighter’s central railgun at twenty kps, they released the energy of a fair-sized bomb on impact; the weapon could cycle seven hundred rounds per minute, or nearly twelve per second.

      She had to slow sharply, though, to see the targets. Swinging left slightly, she watched the red diamond of the targeting cursor slide over the icon marking a Turusch slug at the very limits of visibility and triggered her cannon. Rapid-fire rounds howled from her craft, as her gravs kicked in to compensate for the savage recoil of that barrage. Ahead, rounds slammed into the Turusch crawler, sending up immense plumes of dust and dirt, then a fireball erupting, then immediately snuffing out in the oxygen-poor atmosphere.

      The explosion an instant later flared white almost directly in front of her. She punched through the fireball, the shock wave jolting her fighter. Dropping her right wing, she jinked back to the right, targeting a second crawler, with a third five kilometers further off, on the bleak and fire-scourged horizon. Again, a stream of compressed matter shrieked from her high-velocity railgun.

      High-energy particle beams probed and snapped past her head. The mobile fortresses were swinging their weapons to engage this new threat coming out of the north.

       Blue Omega Seven

       Eta Boötis IV

       1429 hours, TFT

      Gray felt something slap against the back of his left leg. He looked down, startled, and saw one of the dark gray leaf shapes clinging to his calf. He reached down and tore it off; it peeled away from his e-suit with a ripping sensation, like it had been clinging to him with suckers, and as he held it up, it twisted and writhed in his grasp. The underside of the creature was covered with tiny tube feet, like a starfish of Earth’s oceans, with a central opening like a sucker, ringed by rough-surfaced bony plates.

      He threw the squirming leaf away, shuddering with a wave of revulsion. The thing reminded him of a terrestrial leech, but much larger and more active. The tube feet put him in mind of the far larger tendrils covering the swampy ground.

      Three more of the things hit him in rapid succession, two on his lower right leg, one on his left hip. He could feel the rasp of those ventral plates, grinding against the carbon nanoweave of his suit.

      Revulsion turned to gibbering panic. The atmosphere was toxic, and would kill him in minutes if his suit was breached. He ripped the creatures off and hurled them away. One, he saw, landed on its back three meters away, twisted over until it was upright, and immediately started gliding toward him once again. Dozens of the creatures were visible now in all directions, moving toward him with a fascinating deliberation.

      He started to unsling his carbine, then thought better of it. There were too many of the things, and none was bigger than his open palm and fingers. Shooting them would be like solving a roach infestation one bug at a time. Five slapped against his legs and clung there, gnawing at his suit. With a scream, Gray peeled them off, terror yowling up from the depths of his mind. There were too many of them, coming too fast!

      He started running.

      His spider pumped and throbbed with his movements, giving him better speed than he could have managed on Earth, to say nothing of the Harisian high-grav environment. He stumbled, but he kept running, his boots splashing through shallow ponds and mudflats and the sea of soft-bodies, orange vegetation that weaved and twisted in front of him; and the shadow-creatures followed, hundreds of them now.

      He was screaming as he ran.

       MEF HQ

       Mike-Red Perimeter

       Eta Boötis System

       1445 hours, TFT

      “General?” Major Bradley said. “They’re ready to come through the screen.”

      “Do it,” General Gorman said. “Watch for leakers and pop-ups.”

      “Aye, aye, sir.”

      The gravfighters of VF-44 had completed three wide sweeps all the way around the Marine perimeter, smashing Turusch slugs and ground positions and even small groups of enemy soldiers wherever they could find them. Up in space, three hundred kilometers overhead, more fighters were slamming missiles against the defensive screens of a large Tush cruiser. For the first time in weeks, the Marine perimeter was not under direct fire, and the terrain surrounding the base was free of enemy forces.

      He watched the main tactical display with its glowing icons marking the defensive dome and

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