Stargods by Ian Douglas (best summer books TXT) 📕

America at close to the speed of light. If there was a cloud of fragments, the stuff would be spreading out. It was entirely possiblethat the enemy ship could wipe out America and her consorts even after its own disintegration.

Gray studied the CGI image of the target, still light-minutes away. The side facing them was a glowing mass of hot, moltenmaterial. A couple of good hits might well cause enough damage to pierce that monster through to its heart.

“You may commence firing, Captain Mackey.”

He felt the jolt as America loosed a pair of massive projectiles.

 

Nungiirtok Fleet

Sol System

1725 hours, FST

Xavix studied his screens as the Ashtongtok Tah began to turn. Rotating the massive planetoid took considerable power, power that was in desperately short supply at the moment,and the change in attitude would take precious time. The enemy’s fighters, their first wave coming up astern, descended. . . .

But as moments dragged past, the Nungiirtok ship turned, swinging its vulnerable undamaged half around, bringing the moltenside into line with the enemy attack. The enemy’s major vessels were still light-minutes ahead and should not be an issue.Their fighters, however, were becoming a serious nuisance. Thermonuclear warheads were impacting on both sides of the planetoid.When they hit a sea of molten rock, there was little additional damage. When they hit Ashtongtok Tah’s undamaged hemisphere, however, they created huge craters filled with liquid rock, shattered surface installations, knockedout weapons emplacements, and further reduced the ship’s ability to see and anticipate the attacks.

The Ashtongtok Tah fought back as she continued to decelerate, lashing out with gravitic weaponry that caught enemy fighters one or two or sometimesthree at a time and crushed them down in an eye-blink to sand-sized flecks of ultra-dense matter.

Xavix tried to keep track of the remaining planetoids in his squadron but was having trouble tracking them. The smallest ofthem, the Vedvivgarotok Keh appeared to be still accelerating and was not badly damaged, but it was not responding to calls from the command ship. Theother two, Daledvekatok Tah and Kelobdratevtok Tah, were seriously damaged but decelerating in concert with Ashtongtok Tah, slowing to a fraction of light speed.

As the huge vessel continued its deceleration, more and more of the enemy fighters were catching up with the Nungiirtok warship,swarming around the vessel like tegut flying biters back home. The ship’s gravitic weapons were exacting a toll, but the targets were widely spaced and careful not to group too closely. It made fighting them unbearably frustrating.

Xavix considered whether or not to surrender—an unbearable, almost unthinkable decision. Clearly, the human defenses werestronger, more coherent, and more tactically competent than he’d imagined, especially with the unexpected appearance of thesquadron from out-system. The fact that he’d played into their hands by boosting to near-c, resulting in savage damage from the clouds of high-velocity particles, ached in the back of his mind.

But surrender was decidedly not a Nungiirtok option. The Tok would continue fighting if he so ordered, and there was stilla chance if he could swing the ship around in time.

It would be far, far worse if he surrendered, only to learn that the enemy had already done its worst, that the Nungiirtokwere in fact close to a final victory.

No, there would be no surrender.

Slowly . . . slowly . . . the Ashtongtok Tah continued its ponderous rotation. More and more of the enemy fire fell uselessly into the magma sea.

They would win this thing yet.

First, though, they would have to survive.

 

VFA-96, Black Demons

Sol System

1732 hours, EST

Yes! The enemy planetoid ships were slowing . . . three of them, at any rate—targets designated by the Yorktown CIC as Alfa, Bravo, and Delta. The fourth, Gamma, was dwindling into darkness at almost the speed of light, but the threelarger Nungie ships were right there, swelling from pinpoints to enormous, three-dimensional shapes hanging in space just ahead. They appeared to be slowly rotating on their axes, bringing their molten hemispheres around into view. Large swaths of their surfaces were cooling to black now, but broken by angry red-orange cracks and pools of boiling liquid rock.

We did that to them, Gregory thought, but with awe rather than triumph. He had just two nuclear warheads left in his bay. Targeting a structureon the surface of the nearest planetoid, he triggered the launch sequence.

Lieutenant Vandley, four kilometers to his right, vanished as her fighter was crushed. That damned rock still had some fightleft.

“Stay spread out!” he ordered his squadron. “Keep your intervals! One crunch could get us all!”

His Starblade flashed across the target planetoid’s rocky surface as his missiles struck home, twin flaring blossoms of white,impossibly bright light ripping into the surface. The bastards nailed Costner and Simmons as he boosted clear.

His weapons bays were empty now. He still had his Gatling cannon, but at these speeds even streams of high-velocity depleteduranium were ineffective. His AI was advising him to get clear.

But he overrode the suggestion and flipped his Starblade around the fast-flickering mote of his grav drive field, boostinghard to kill his forward velocity . . . then accelerating back toward the target. He couldn’t hurt the enemy mountain now,but he damn well could give other Black Demons a chance by drawing the enemy’s attention . . . drawing their fire.

The asteroid designated Target Alfa loomed in front of him.

 

Nungiirtok Fleet

Sol System

1735 hours, FST

4236 Xavix realized the magnitude of his mistake as the surviving sensors on one side of the Ashtongtok Tah picked up the two high-mass kinetic-kill projectiles hurtling in from dead ahead. The Nungiirtok ship was no longer moving at relativistic speeds and the impact was far less than it might otherwise have been, but they fell into the relatively undamaged hemisphere of the planetoid warship and released their destructive fury in a pair of blasts that shook the Ashtongtok Tah to its very core.

Xavix was flung to one side, his mental linkage with the sensory input and control systems broken, the web of cartilage thatgave his body form and strength brutally torn along his left side. He was having trouble breathing, his breath coming in short,agonizing gasps. Pain shrieked through him.

The Tok in the command center with