âToo little, too late, I fear. We have lost the planet, either way.â
He dipped his gravfighterâs nose and accelerated.
He wasnât quite âdown to the deck,â as heâd reported, but close enough. The Starhawk was dropping now past the twenty-kilometer mark. The sky above was still space-dark, the brightest starsâArcturus, especiallyâstill 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. Heâd crossed enough of the planetâs 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 shipâs 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-92âs 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 hadnât crossed seventy-one AUs and survived a near-miss by a thermonuke to get shot down by the damned jarheads.
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?
Thereâs 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
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, others appearing moment by moment as their emitted and reflected light reached Americaâs sensors. Some members of the battlegroup had scattered as far as five AUs from the star carrier in realspace, and would not again rejoin her communications net for as much as forty more minutes.
The shipâs pitted and sandblasted forward shield caught the wan glow of a particularly brilliant starâthe sun of this system nearly seventy-one astronomical units distant. The data now flooding Americaâs sensors were almost nine and a half hours old.
Within his electronic cocoon on the Americaâs Combat Information Center, the Battlegroup Commander linked in through the shipâs neural net, watching the data scroll past his in-head display.
STAR: Eta Boötis
COORDINATES: RA: 13h 54m 41.09s Dec: +18? 23â 52.5â D 11.349p
ALTERNATE NAMES:Mufrid, Muphrid, Muphride, Saak, Boötis 8 (Flamsteed)
TYPE: GO IV
MASS: 1.6 Sol; RADIUS: 2.7 Sol; LUMINOSITY: 9 Sol
SURFACE TEMPERATURE: ~6100>oK
AGE: 2.7 billion years
APPARENT MAGNITUDE (SOL): 2.69; Absolute magnitude: 2.38
DISTANCE FROM SOL: 37 ly
BINARY COMPANION: White dwarf, mean orbit: 1.4 AU; period: 494 d
PLANETARY SYSTEM: 14 planets, including 9 Jovian and sub-Jovian bodies, 5 rocky/terrestrial planets, plus 35 dwarf planets and 183 known satellites, plus numerous planetoids and cometary bodies â¦
Rear Admiral Alexander Koenig was, in particular, interested in the planetary data for just one of the worlds circling that distant gold-hued star: Eta Boötis IV, known formally as Al Haris al Sama, informally as Haris, and more often and disparagingly within the fleet as âAte a Boot.â