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of Boomslangs directlyat the orange-glowing crater punched into the crust. He felt the AI’s acknowledgement, felt the warheads being armed. He heldhis course, arrowing back in toward the target, then thoughtclicked missiles away. “And Fox One!”

White plasma blotted out the sky ahead, a continuous flaring of multiple warheads detonating in rapid succession. Some ofthe missiles, he saw, were being intercepted by the enemy’s gravitic defenses, but the majority were getting through and flaringinto searing balls of starcore-hot plasma, cratering the planetoid’s surface.

He repeated the maneuver one more time, unloading the last of his payload of Boomslangs dead-on the target. The pool of lavaon the planetoid’s surface was larger, now . . . but so far as Cordell could tell, they hadn’t even come close to crackingthat egg.

There was nothing for it, now, but to press the attack, using the smaller Kraits.

 

Nungiirtok Fleet

Mars Orbit

Sol System

1229 hours, FST

4236 Xavix sifted through the flood of data pouring through his link to the ship’s intelligence, searching for tactical patternswithin the human attacks. Their missiles were not particularly worrying; the rock of Ashtongtok Tah could stand up to their relatively small impacts for a long time without a problem. There seemed to be no solid rationale in their assaults. The Nungiirtok knocked down fighter after fighter, but the rest continued swarming in, loosing more missiles despite their losses. Xavix noted that the attackers had shifted to smaller, lower-yield weapons. Was it possible that they’d expended their supply of the larger warheads?

It was all so futile.

The point of this raid had been simply to punish the humans for their presumption in abducting Nungiirtok personnel. Ashtongtok Tah and her consorts possessed gravitic weapons that could scour the surface of the planet ahead down to the mantle, reducingthe world to a lifeless husk, but so far he’d been holding back. It had not been Xavix’s plan to destroy the human homeworld,but he was realizing now that that might be the only option left open to him.

Perhaps, though, there was one other option short of planetary genocide . . .

“Weapons!” he ordered. “We will use the relativistic cannon.”

“Yes, Lord!”

“Stand by to fire . . .”

 

Lieutenant Michael Cordell

VFA-427, The Renegades

Mars Orbit

1228 hours, FST

Cordell swung his fighter into an achingly close passage above the planetoid, flipping his ship around in a one-eighty so that he was flying backward as he began releasing a stream of Krait missiles. By flying in reverse, he wouldn’t fly into the fireballs, and he could fire volleys of them into targets selected by the Starblade’s AI as he passed over them. A blur of white to his left caught his attention: a patch of domes and low rectangles in the rock, some sort of city or defensive facility. Whatever it was vanished in a pulse of nuclear fire brighter than a sun, and he prayed that it had been important.

Below and behind him, something like a door or a hatch almost a hundred meters across yawned wide in the object’s face.

“What the hell is that?” he asked his ship, but the AI had no answer. He assumed it was some sort of launch bay hatch, thatthe enemy was about to release a swarm of fighters to engage the human squadrons beak-to-beak.

“Renegade Flight, this is Ren-Three!” he called over the tactical channel. “I see an opening in this thing—maybe into a flightdeck or fighter bay! Let’s get some warshots down that thing’s throat!”

“Copy, Ren Three!” Forsley replied. “You heard the man, Rennies! Pile on!”

But as Cordell approached the opening, something—something very big and very massive and very fast flashed out and into the void, too fast to register on merely human senses, but captured and enhanced by the Starblade’sinstruments.

“What was that?” he demanded.

His AI could only give him a stream of rough data, but whatever that flash had been had massed several tons and was travelingat close to seventy percent of the speed of light.

Cordell’s blood ran cold when the AI showed him the thing’s course.

It was headed directly toward Earth, now just some 90 million kilometers behind the fleet.

Its speed would bridge that gulf in just seven minutes.

 

Nungiirtok Fleet

Mars Orbit

Sol System

1229 hours, FST

Ashtongtok Tah’s Tok Lord regretted the necessity of opening fire on the human home planet, but told itself that it was not aiming at the world, but at the complex ring of structures in planetary synchronous orbit. It was quite likely that some of the projectiles would pass through the structure, shredding it, and impact on the planet’s surface, but the humans had to be properly chastised or they would forever be an impossible nuisance.

Tok Iad psychology had been deeply shaped over millions of years by their parasitism of the Nungiirtok. For a parasite, afterall, their host species—and by extension all other species—exist to be used, and if they can’t be used as food or as incubators, they can be ignored, discarded, or obliterated at the Iad’s whim. Xavixadmired the persistence of the humans even as he was amused by the futility of their swarm attack, but if they could not bebrought to heel swiftly and efficiently, they would be eliminated.

The first round from the gravitic cannon hurtled toward the alien world at seven-tenths the speed of light.

A pity, really.

 

Synchorbital Naval Command

SupraQuito Facility

Synchorbit

1232 hours, FST

“Sir! We have incoming!”

Admiral of the Fleet Jonathan Christie looked up from his workstation in the Naval Command C&C, angry. “What is it?” he demanded.“Give me some ID!”

“Unknown, sir,” the sensor watch officer replied, shaking his head. “It was just ejected from the largest alien craft. It’sbig, it’s massive, and Doppler shows it in approach at point seven-one c. It’ll reach us in four minutes!”

“All stations go to full alert, Mr. Buckley.”

“Aye, aye, sir!”

Christie could see the object highlighted by CGI on his monitor now, a single point of light still tens of millions of kilometers distant. Its course was bang-on target for the synchorbital ring, a fragile and intermittent string of factories, shipyards, storage facilities, and slowly turning hab modules hanging just under 36,000 kilometers above Earth’s equator. His gut told him it wasn’t a ship, but a