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close to the stricken Monongahela, trying to take on board several lifepods ejected within a few moments of the ship’s encounter with the alien fist. Battlespacedrones transmitted constant visual feeds back to the other ships in the fleet, and Taggart could see the Bartold’s small SAR tugs grappling with the drifting pods.

She felt a chill at that. The Bartie was clearly within range of the alien weapon, and there was a good chance that the enemy would not distinguish between a humanitarian mission and a combat maneuver. Her breath caught in her throat . . .

. . . and then the invisible hand closed around the Bartold and squeezed, crumpling her forward section, including her huge, egg-shaped water reservoir, into twisted wreckage. Watersprayed into space as an expanding cloud of glittering ice crystals . . . an interesting bit of data, Taggart thought. Ifthe fist literally collapsed space, what happened to water, which conventionally was not compressible? That might be a clueto how the weapon functioned, there.

“All capital units.” Rasmussen’s orders came through her cerebral link. “Decelerate, then fall back slowly and do not engage! Fighters, continue your attack. Focus on Target Alfa.”

Taggart passed the command on to Yorktown’s helm. She approved of the admiral’s order and felt considerable relief that he wasn’t ordering the capital ships in close.If those alien asteroids could crush a target vessel at long range, the human fleet was going to need to tiptoe into thisengagement or risk being annihilated.

That made it damned hard on the fighter squadrons, though. They had no defense whatsoever save for speed and dispersal, andthe enemy wasn’t going to simply sit still while an angry swarm of hornets buzzed into killing range.

She wondered if any of the fighters would survive.

 

Lieutenant Michael Cordell

VFA-427, The Renegades

Mars Orbit

1228 hours, FST

Cordell accelerated his Starblade to relativistic speeds, watching space around him grow strange as his velocity warped the incoming light of stars and other ships and compressed them into a hazy ring of starlight directly ahead. He was relying on his fighter’s onboard AI to time his acceleration; he could no longer see the alien planetoids, radar and lidar were useless at these speeds. The only good thing about it was that the enemy would have trouble tracking him as well. Radar would reflect from his fighter without a problem, but he would literally be on top of the enemy before they realized he was approaching.

He felt the AI apply deceleration, and the ring of light ahead dissolved, the stars that had created it returning to morereasonable positions. And the alien planetoids were . . . there!

He’d targeted the largest one, and it loomed ahead of him now, over two hundred kilometers across and gleaming in the distantsun. Something like a city embraced a patch on the surface; thousands of pinpoint lights shone from isolated patches acrossthe dark gray surface of the rock, like stars somehow arrayed in geometric patterns—lines and triangles and concentric circles.

Reflex took over. He thoughtclicked a command, and a pair of VG-120 Boomslang missiles slid from his Starblade’s belly, thewarheads already set to maximum yield—something just in excess of 600 megatons. “Fox One!” he announced over the tactical channel, the warning that he’d just loosed smart-AI missiles.

Each Starblade carried thirty-two VG-92 Krait space-to-space missiles, plus six of the massive Boomslangs, known as “planetbusters”to the fighter crews. The twelve Starblades of the Renegades alone carried twenty-four of those monsters, but as Cordell staredinto the fast-growing face of the planetoid, he realized with sick certainty that it would take more to stop that thing.

A lot more.

But their orders were to press home the attack. Besides—who could guess what might happen? Enough VG-120s detonating in thesame spot might crack the planetoid wide open or send destructive shock waves through that mountain’s internal structure.It was certainly worth a try.

Cordell juggled his grav drive and his ship’s attitude, decelerating sharply and swinging wide. A skilled pilot with a high-grade AI could nudge and twist a Starblade through maneuvers that made it seem that the fighter was in atmosphere . . . and some, like stopping in a deceleration-less instant or pulling a right-angle turn, would have appeared starkly impossible to the fighter pilots of an earlier age. By jinking back and forth in what Cordell hoped was an unpredictable manner, he hoped to confuse the enemy’s fire control programs.

In his mind, his fighter counted off the seconds until his missiles detonated. Three . . . two . . . one . . .

A single white flash, far brighter than a sun, blotted out the sky to Cordell’s left. Had one of his missiles failed to reachthe target? Or had both gone off so close together that two nuclear fireballs blended into one?

It scarcely mattered. The target planetoid now had a new crater—glowing bright orange, its interior filled with molten rock.

“Fox One!” Jerry Bannerman called over the tactical channel. “Missiles away!”

His AI tracked the incoming missiles, and he checked to make sure he was going to be clear of the blast. He was; Bannerman’smissiles struck the asteroid right next to the glowing patch of lava.

Two by two, Boomslang missiles continued falling in from space, and the area around the planetoid was filled with Starbladefighters flashing past the enemy’s close-in defenses. Lieutenant Frank Taylor’s fighter crumpled into a small, extremely denseblock of twisted metal and plastic, hurtling in to impact on the drifting mountain’s surface. All of local space was filledwith fast-maneuvering fighters and the flash of incoming missiles.

Lieutenant Howard Ortega’s fighter crumpled as an invisible fist of gravitational distortion surrounded it and squeezed. Theenemy was fighting back, was getting too many hits. It looked as though dispersing the Starblades was working to hold downcasualties, but the butcher’s bill, he thought, was still going to be too damned high.

“C’mon, people!” Captain Palmer called from Yorktown’s PriFly. “Swing around and hit ’em again! Target that same spot!”

“You got it, CAG,” Commander Forsley called back. “You heard the man, Renegades! Line ’em up and knock ’em down!”

Cordell circled back and around, lining up on the planetoid ship and telling his AI to home the next salvo