He checked his position again. About another tenth of a segment. Of course, he was sixteenth in the landing queue, so—
Shuttle Commander Fardahm’s thoughts were interrupted with shocking suddenness as an AIM-120-D Advanced-Medium Range Air-to-Air Missile’s forty-pound blast-fragmentation warhead detonated less than five feet from his shuttle’s fuselage.
Alarm systems howled, onboard fire alarms shrieked, lights began to flash all over his cockpit, and crimson danger signals appeared on his cornea-projected HUD.
None of them did Fardahm any good at all. He was already reaching for the ejection button when the entire shuttle blew up in midair.
• • • • •
Eat your heart out, Will Smith!
Despite everything, “Longbow” Torino felt his lips curling up in an enormous smile. These alien shuttles obviously didn’t have any force fields protecting them. Not only that, but they clearly hadn’t had a clue what was heading for them. His four fighters had launched twenty-four Slammers, and their missiles’ performance had done Raytheon proud. Twenty of them had scored clean hits or detonated within lethal distance of their targets, and each of them was a hard kill.
He heard someone else—“Killer” Cunningham, he thought—howling in triumph. The same savage, vengeful satisfaction flamed through his own veins, but it was a cold, burning fire, not hot, and his brain ticked like an icy machine.
The range was down to fifty miles, still dropping at better than ten miles a minute, and there was no sign of any defensive fire. For that matter, there weren’t even any decoys or flares.
“Flight, Longbow,” he said flatly. “Sidewinders.”
• • • • •
The shongair formation disintegrated in confusion and wild panic. No Shongair shuttle had ever been downed by hostile fire—not even a Deathwing, which routinely provided close support, far less one of the Starlanders!—and the pilots had no idea what to do. They’d never been trained in combat techniques, because there’d never been any need for them. They were transport pilots, and their shuttles were transport vehicles, optimized for maximum cargo capacity. The Starlander was better than six hundred and forty feet long, a variable geometry design capable of relatively high Mach numbers on a reentry profile but designed for economic, subsonic flight in atmosphere. It was capable of vertical takeoff and landing operation on counter-grav but used conventional air-breathing engines in actual flight, and its designers had never intended for it to stray into reach of any armed opponent. And for all its size, it was fragile. Tough-skinned enough to resist muscle-powered projectiles, perhaps, it didn’t respond well when the warheads of vastly more sophisticated weapons tore holes in that same skin or white-hot fragments of those same warheads were thrown into its completely unarmored fuel system.
The survivors watched in horrified shock as twenty of their fellows plunged down to catastrophic rendezvous with the ground below, and they didn’t even know who was shooting at them! Lockheed Martin had described the F-22’s radar cross-section as “the size of a steel marble,” which was a remarkable achievement, but this time it didn’t really matter. Not as far as the Starlanders were concerned. Their air-to-air radar was designed primarily to avoid aerial collisions between aircraft with transponders—aircraft which wanted to be seen—not to locate highly stealthy, heavily armed fighters less than a tenth their own size. Nor had it ever occurred to anyone to fit rear-area cargo-haulers intended for operations against crossbow-armed adversaries with radar warning devices. They were literally blind, totally unable to see Torino’s small flight as the four Raptors streaked in behind them.
• • • • •
“Fox Two! Fox Two!” Major Torino snapped as the two AIM-9X all-aspect Sidewinders popped out of their briefly opened weapons bay doors. The shorter-ranged heat-seeking weapons streaked away, guiding on the brilliant thermal beacons of the alien shuttles’ engines, and he watched them racing in on their targets.
All four F-22s launched within seconds of one another, sending eight more missiles into the chaos of the disintegrating Shongair formation. Two of them were targeted on the same victim; within minutes, four more of the big shuttles were plunging to the earth in flames while another three staggered onward with heavy damage. One of the wounded craft trailed a broad ribbon of smoke, and even as Torino looked in its direction, he saw a river of fire joining the smoke.
“Flight, go guns!” he snarled.
• • • • •
It was A nightmare.
Of the thirty-six Starlanders transporting Ground Base Two, twenty-four had been destroyed and three more were going down. The pilots of the nine undamaged survivors had only a single thought: escape. Unfortunately, they’d never been trained for this situation. It wasn’t supposed to arise. They were on their own, with no evasive doctrine or tactics to call upon, and almost in unison, they swept their wings and went to full power, accelerating to just over the speed of sound and bolting straight ahead.
• • • • •
The Raptors were out of missiles.
Each of them mounted a single twenty-millimeter M61A2 Vulcan Gatling gun in its starboard wing root, normally concealed by a carefully faired popout door to preserve the smoothness stealth required. It was intended solely as a last-ditch weapon, with only four hundred and eighty rounds of ammunition—enough for no more than five seconds of sustained maximum rate fire. Neither Torino nor any of his other pilots had ever really expected to go guns in air-to-air combat, but now that the opportunity was here. . . .
• • • • •
The Starlanders never had a chance.
At their best air-breathing speed, they were barely half as fast as the Raptors in dry thrust. Worse, they were huge targets, unarmored, unarmed, and little more maneuverable—even with counter-grav—than a human-designed heavy transport aircraft. The vectored-thrust F-22s, on the other hand, had been designed for high-gravity agility second to none, and they slashed in on their huge targets like barracuda attacking whales. They fired in short, mercilessly accurate bursts, ripping the shuttles’ fuselages open, butchering the construction troops and base admin personnel in their passenger bays, spilling heavy construction equipment over the Virginia countryside.
It was over in less than six minutes.
• • • • •
“Flight, Longbow.” Torino’s voice sounded drained, even to him. “Go home.”
The acknowledgments came back again, and the four Raptors turned away from the funeral pyres of their victims. Now if only Plattsburgh would still be there when they got there.
. XIII .
Fleet Commander Thikair stood on Star of Empire’s flag bridge, studying the gigantic image of the planet below. Glowing icons indicated cities and military bases his kinetic bombardment had removed from existence. There were a lot of them—more than he’d really counted on when he decided to go ahead with the conquest—and he clasped his hands behind him and concentrated on radiating satisfaction.
And you damned well ought to be satisfied, Thikair. Taking down an entire Level Two civilization in less than two local days has to be some sort of galactic record!
Which, another little voice reminded him, was because doing anything of the sort directly violated the Hegemony Constitution.
And you didn’t plan on taking that sort of losses the very first day, either, another little voice asked pointedly. In fact, you didn’t plan on taking losses like that at all, did you?
No, he hadn’t. He admitted it, if only to himself and Thairys. He still wasn’t positive exactly what had happened, but if the humans were to be believed an entire heavy transport group of Starlander-class shuttles had been destroyed by only four—only four!—“American” aircraft. The whole notion was ridiculous, of course . . . except that he didn’t have any better explanation for what had happened.
Shairez and her teams had been horribly enough overloaded going through “just” the massive amount of information they’d managed to extract fr
om the humans’ secure databases. They’d been able to give his bombardment planning teams priceless information—the locations of the humans’ nuclear missile bases, for example—but she’d warned him there might be holes in their analysis. That might be what had happened in the case of his shuttles, although from the small number of aircraft allegedly involved, it might also be that they’d come from some small detachment which simply hadn’t been in her databases to begin with.
Nonetheless, it had been obvious that she hadn’t had time to fully digest the take from their cyber attack. No one could have. And it was even worse now, because an amazing amount of the human Internet was still up. The system was obviously much more robust than he’d originally assumed, which might make sense, since according to Shairez’s findings, it had been created originally as a dispersed communications network to function in the wake of a human nuclear exchange. At any rate, it was still inundating them with data. With too much data, in point of fact. For the first time, a fleet commander’s problem wasn’t gaining access to information; it was processing it. Someone still had to go through it, looking for the nuggets that were truly important, and its sheer volume was creating unanticipated problems. No Shongair commander in history had ever had such an overwhelming mountain of data on his adversaries, and even the redoubtable ground base commander was overwhelmed trying to assimilate it.
Nevertheless, after what had happened to the 9th Transport Group, she’d undertaken a priority search for any references to the “F-22s” which the human Internet reports credited with its destruction. She’d copied the pertinent information to Thikair, and despite himself, he’d been shaken by some of the implications as he’d studied the aircraft’s claimed capabilities. He wasn’t certain he believed some of them even now. What had happened to his shuttles suggested he should take it seriously, however, and that was an . . . unpleasant possibility to contemplate. It was one thing to know the humans were effectively a Class Two civilization. It was quite another thing, he’d discovered, to recognize some of the nastier possibilities that raised.
The truth is, he thought, we’ve never fought anyone with a Class Two tech base. Not even amongst ourselves, before we joined the Hegemony. We were only a Class Three—well, maybe a Class 3.5—by the time we unified the planet under Emperor Ramarth. And all of our research since we joined the Hegemony has really been centered on naval weaponry. After all, once you control a planet’s orbitals, who cares what they’ve got on the dirt below you? Either the planetary government surrenders, or you drop KEWs on it until it does. That’s the way it has to be, right?
That had always been the assumption, at any rate. And not just for the Shongairi. The Garm and the Howsanth, two of the Hegemony’s more belligerent omnivores, had fought three wars over the past four thousand standard years, and that was the way it had always worked out for them, as well. Certainly no one had wasted any time and effort designing heavy combat equipment to use at the bottom of a gravity well!
But when you and all of your opponents are trapped at the bottom of that same gravity well, you don’t have a lot of choice, do you? he reflected. So it’s probably no wonder these creatures’ military technology is better than any other Class Two civilization we’ve ever encountered. It’s still not good enough—it can’t be, in the long run—but they have demonstrated that under exactly the wrong circumstances, they can hurt us badly.
He managed not to grimace at the thought, but it wasn’t easy. When his brilliant notion occurred to him, he hadn’t fully digested just how big and thoroughly inhabited this planet, this . . . “Earth” truly was. Again, it was a factor of technology. None of the other planets the Empire had assimilated had possessed the technological capability to simply feed this many people. Nor, for that matter, the medical technology to keep them alive in such preposterous numbers. The most densely populated planet previously conquered by the Shongairi had boasted no more than five hundred million sentients, which was barely forty percent more than the population of this world’s “United States” alone . . . and less than half the individual populations of the nation-states of “India” and “China.” The notion that there really were billions of them down there was something he’d discovered he hadn’t truly grasped even while he threw it around in planning sessions with his staff. Nor had he really considered the difficulty in getting the local authorities to submit in some sort of timely fashion when there were so Dainthar-damned many different nation-states and each of them had its own government!
He wondered now if he hadn’t allowed himself to fully digest it because he’d known that if he had, he would have changed his mind.
Oh, stop it! So there were more of them on the damned planet than you’d figured on. And so you’ve already killed—what? Two billion of them, wasn’t it? And given the fact that their technology seems to have been a little better than you allowed for, you may well end up having to kill a few more of them, as well. So what’s the problem? There’re plenty more where they came from—according to their own statistics, they breed like damned garshu! And you told Ahzmer and the others you’re willing to kill off the entire species if it doesn’t work out. So fretting about a little extra breakage along the way is pretty pointless, wouldn’t you say?
Of course it was. In fact, he admitted, his biggest concern was how many major engineering works these humans had created. There was no doubt that he could exterminate them if he had to, but he was beginning to question whether it would be possible to eliminate the physical evidence of the level their culture had attained after all.
Well, we’ll just have to keep it from coming to that, won’t we?
“Pass the word to Ground Force Commander Thairys,” he told Ship Commander Ahzmer quietly, never taking his eyes from those glowing icons. “Expedite his landings. I want his troops on the ground as quickly as possible, especially around the ground base sites. And make sure they have all the fire support they need.”
“Yes, Sir.”
“And tell Ground Base Commander Shairez I want her to pull together a more complete précis on the military technology of this ‘United States.’ I know she’s buried under a mountain of data at the moment, but if what happened to the Ninth Transport Group is any indication, we may have to pay a little more attention to making certain that particular hasthar’s completely dead before we move on to other priorities.”
• • • • •
“So what do you make of it?” Dave Dvorak asked quietly, looking over his brother-in-law’s shoulder.
The two of them stood behind Sharon Dvorak’s chair as she sat at her computer keyboard, and all three of them were watching the YouTube video streaming on her flat screen. It had been posted by someone who claimed to be a US Navy rear admiral, and it was pretty spectacular stuff, a skillfully edited montage of footage from orbital surveillance systems and the gun cameras (or whatever the hell they were called these days) of US Air Force fighters.
“Looks to me like this squid—Robinson—is right,” Rob Wilson said grimly. “Trust me, those fuckers”—a blunt index finger tapped the image of a flaming Starlander shuttle—“didn’t come out of any air force I ever heard of! Just look at the size of the bastards—they’re big as goddamned missile cruisers!” He shook his head. “Uh-uh. I think he’s right. They’ve gotta come from someplace else, and I don’t have any better idea about ‘someplace else’ than he’s serving up.”
“I think he’s right, Dave,” Sharon said quietly, and managed to give her husband a grin when she looked up over her shoulder at him. “Besides, you’re the big science-fiction reader. You ought to be jumping right on top of this!”
“Somebody once said that an ‘adventure’ was someone else being cold, hungry, tired, and scared far, far away from you,” Dvorak replied wryly. “At the moment, I’m feeling a little too close to this to be very adventurous. In fact,” he met her eyes levelly, then looked at his brother-in-law, “I’m scared to death.”
“You think maybe the rest of us aren’t?”
Sharon asked gently, reaching one hand up to him. He caught it and held it, then looked back at the flat screen as the video played itself out again.
There was plenty of panicky confusion, desperation, and (inevitably) conspiracy-mongering paranoia on the net, but there was a lot of what looked like solid information still coming in, as well, and he was glad Sharon was monitoring it. On the other hand, he had to wonder just how thoroughly the Internet had been penetrated. It would have been the best way to keep track of what humanity was telling itself . . . and to insert things Earth’s attackers wanted humanity to know or believe were true. That kind of information warfare would have been his very first priority if he’d been setting out to invade a planet, and he had to assume the other side was at least as smart as he was. In fact, he’d damned well better assume they were a hell of a lot smarter than he was!
The good news was that, for the moment at least, his family was probably as safe as anyone on the entire globe. The sprawling old cabin on the back side of Cold Mountain, above the headwaters of Little Green Creek in Jackson County, North Carolina, was in the Nantahala National Forest. It had been built (and then added onto . . . repeatedly) in the 1890s by one of Sharon and Rob’s more peculiar—and reclusive—great-great-granduncles, and it had remained in the family ever since. It was less than a mile from the nearest road (although, in Dvorak’s opinion, calling Cold Mountain Road a “road” was a bit of a stretch), but its mile and a half or so of twisting “driveway” was hardly inviting—a narrow ribbon of dirt with occasional patches of gravel and other patches of bare bedrock that threaded its way under the interlaced branches of overhanging trees while it climbed over sixteen hundred feet to cross the saddle between Cold Mountain and Panthertail Mountain. Even knowing exactly where it was, he’d never been able to find it on Google Earth even at maximum zoom, and the cabin itself was almost equally invisible.