Free Earth Strike by Ian Douglas

environment around the planet, and a stray, coded signal might bring down anything from a KK projectile to a 100-megaton nuke.
    His personal e-hancements, computer circuitry nanotechnically grown into the sulci of his brain, had downloaded both the ghost-shadow of his fighter’s AI and the position of the Marine base in those last seconds before he’d crashed. As he turned his head, his IHD hardware threw a green triangle up against his visual field, marking a spot on the horizon…in that direction, toward the beach.
    That was where he had to go, then. Taking a last look around, he started wading toward the shore.
    CIC, TC/USNA CVS America
35.4 AUs from Eta Boötis
1330 hours, TFT

    Admiral Koenig checked the time once again. The fleet had been traveling for 9.4 hours, accelerating constantly at 500 gravities. They were nearing the midpoint now, halfway between the Kuiper Belt space where they’d arrived in-system and their destination. Their speed at the moment was .77 c , fast enough that for every three minutes passing in the universe outside, only two minutes passed within the America .
    It had been an uneventful passage so far, thank God. He was all too aware, however, that by now the gravfighters of VF-44 had reached the planet and were engaging the Turusch fleet.
    He checked the time again. The Dragonfires had been mixing it up with the bad guys for forty-five minutes already, an eternity in combat. It was entirely possible that the fighting was over.
    If so, twelve brave men and women were dead now—dead, or trapped in crumpled hulks on high-speed, straight-line vectors out of battlespace.
    Best not to think about that ….
    “Admiral?” the voice of Commander Katryn Craig, the CIC Operations officer, said in Koenig’s head. “Mr. Quintanilla is requesting permission to enter the CIC.”
    Koenig sighed. He would rather have given orders that the civilian be kept off the command deck entirely, but he was under orders from Fleet Mars to cooperate with the jackass, and playing the martinet would not smooth the bureaucratic pathway in the least.
    Politics . He made a sour face. Sometimes, it seemed as though his job was nothing else but.
    “Let him in,” Koenig said, grudgingly.
    Quintanilla entered from the aft passageway a moment later. “Admiral? I was wondering if you could give me an update.”
    “We’re roughly halfway there,” Koenig told him. “Nine hours and some to go.”
    Quintanilla pulled his way to the display projection at the center of CIC. There, small globes of light glowed in holographic projection, showing the positions of both Eta Boötis A and B, fourteen major planets, the task force’s current position just outside the orbit of one of the system’s gas giants, and a red haze around the objective. The carrier task force had no way of receiving telemetry from the fighters it had launched nine and a half hours earlier, of course, not while its ships were encased in their Alcubierre bubbles, but if everything had proceeded according to the oplan, the Dragonfires should have reached the vicinity of Eta Boötis IV some forty-five minutes earlier.
    “Does that mean we’re going to do a skew-flip, Admiral? To start decelerating?”
    “No, sir, it does not. You’re thinking of the gravitic drives on the fighters. The Alcubierre Drive works differently…an entirely different principle.”
    “I don’t understand.”
    Koenig wondered if that man had been briefed at all…or if he’d been given a technical download that he’d failed to review.
    Quintanilla seemed to read Koenig’s expression. “Look, I’m here as a political liaison, Admiral. The technology of your space drive is hardly my area of expertise.”
    Obviously , Koenig thought. “The type of gravitational acceleration we use on the fighters won’t work on capital ships,” he said, “vessels over about eighty meters in length. With ships as large as the America , projecting an artificial singularity pulling fifty-kay