The Churchill veered starboard, then spun hard to port, amassing intense acceleration as she followed a path that led above and around the enemy ships. Traveling in a vacuum, devoid of gravity, fighter carriers turned wide along imprecise arcs that spanned thousands of miles. The U.A. battleship did not respond quickly.

The Unified Authority ships continued to travel in a straight line as the EMN carrier dashed around them. Dragged by their inertia, the battleships flew straight ahead as the Churchill completed a thirty-thousand-mile loop in less than two seconds. Cutter watched the whole thing in holographic miniature.

He'd seen Nike-class ships in battle. Broken or not, they posed a threat. The glowing orange shields did not buckle. In a fair fight, those shields presented a nearly impervious barrier to torpedoes, particle beams, and EMN lasers.

But these battleships were different. They'd been injured. Cutter hoped their shields would fail.

"We're coming up behind the lead ship," said Hauser.

Cutter didn't need the update. He'd watched every instant of the maneuver on the holographic display, taken in every nuance of it. "Violate her," he whispered. "Particle beams, torpedoes, missiles, everything but our fighters."

"Aye, sir," said Hauser. He relayed the order.

The U.A. ship was long and narrow, shaped like a knife, like a badly dented dagger. Looking at the holographic display, Cutter saw two of her main engines sputter. The readouts suggested problems with her guidance systems. She handled like a barge, almost like a bullet. Her turns would be wide, slow, and shallow, if she could turn at all. Her engines showed no ability for sudden acceleration.

In pristine condition, the U.A. ship would have had faster acceleration and more maneuverability than the Churchill; but this ship was far from pristine. In an act of desperation, her captain launched his fighters. They showed on the display as tiny white dots, like sparks rising from a burning log.

The Churchill opened fire.

The particle-beam cannon fired first, thick webs of sparkling green light. The torpedoes and missiles launched from tubes above and below the cannon, flying along a line that would not intersect with the disruptive beams until the moment of impact.

The Churchill launched torpedoes, then missiles. The missiles homed in on the disrupted area of the quickly recycling shields. The particle beams stopped, and in that same moment, the missiles struck. A split second later, the torpedoes slammed home, lighting the stern of the U.A. ship.

"She's hitting back!" Nolan shouted. "Lasers and torpedoes!"

"Get us out of here!" Hauser shouted. "Fire decoys! Defensive bursts! Defensive bursts!"

Cutter felt the yaw and pull from the rapid changes in acceleration and direction. He watched the holographic display, saw the icon representing the Churchill turn and speed in one direction as the model of the U.A. battleship became blurred by particle beams. A moment later, the torpedoes struck. The ship was undamaged, her shields remained.

"Damn," Cutter muttered to himself.

Hauser yelled, "I need a report!"

"We're out of danger, sir," said Nolan. Some of the officers on the bridge applauded, some merely sighed. Cutter, who had paid no attention to the counterattack, said, "We didn't even nick her." During the entire time, he had never taken his eyes off the 3-D tactical display.

Lieutenant Nolan pressed a forefinger to his earpiece, then said, "Yes, sir. You're right, sir, but I bet her crew is puking."

"What do you mean?" asked Hauser.

"Look at her course. She's flying sideways."

"Gawddamn," said Hauser. "No wonder she's so damned slow. She's doesn't have any thrusters. They might as well be flying a specking zeppelin."

"A zeppelin with shield-busters," Cutter reminded him.

Hauser did not need a second reminder. He said, "Good point, Admiral." Then he told navigation to put some distance between them and the battleships.

CHAPTER.

SIXTY-THREE.

Location: Mars

Date: May 2, 2519

"Cutter, are you there?" I asked. He did not answer. We'd entered the atmosphere and lost communications with the Churchill.

"Pilots, call out," I said over a communications panel.

One pilot answered, my pilot. Since we were in the same ship, our panels were wired together. He said, "Here, sir." Cutter had called it right-someone had sludged the airwaves; but that blade cut both ways. I could not contact my men, and he could not reach his.

A window on my comms panel identified my pilot as Major Anthony Hines, EMAF. I said, "Major, the enemy is sludging our communications."

"Yes, sir," he said.

I looked out one of the windows, hoping to count other ships, but was distracted by what I saw on the ground. The planet looked like a museum display in miniatures. I saw little models of the Air Force base and Mars Spaceport, tiny toy train tracks spanning the gap between them, and an army of figurines about three-quarters of the way to the base.

I generally entered battles riding in the kettle of a transport, the windowless, comfortless cast-iron belly of the most spartan bird that ever flew. Riding in a kettle, I never saw the field until the ramp opened at the rear of the ship. The explorer had observation ports and portholes everywhere. She was designed for scientific exploration, viewing nebulas and counting stars.

As I studied the scene, I decided to play a hunch. Instead of landing by the air base to defend allies, we would set down by the spaceport to draw the enemy away.

I told the pilot, "Put us down on the spaceport runway."

"What about our other explorers?" he asked.

"They'll follow your lead."

"Yes, sir."

"Once we're clear, fly to the Mars base and start charging your broadcast engines. I want you to broadcast out as soon as your engines are charged."

"How do we tell the other ships?" asked Hines.

"I don't think that is going to be a problem," I said. "Unless I miss my guess, they will clear the airwaves the moment we touch down."

"Yes, sir."

"Once communications go up, I need you to keep your ear to your box. If you hear anything, anything, you send this antiques society back to Earth. You got that? You tell them to rendezvous at Smithsonian Field."

"Yes, sir."

"Everyone but you. You evacuate that air base. You find out who is in that base and deliver them to Smithsonian Field."

"Yes, sir," the pilot said. He tried to mask his nervousness, but I heard it in his voice. Piloting this relic over a battlefield would be like flying a paper kite in a hailstorm, and he knew it. If he moved quickly enough, he might survive it.

"And Hines, broadcast in the atmosphere if the space lanes look clogged. Just make sure you deliver those people back to Earth," I said.

In theory, the atmosphere would absorb the electricity from a small broadcast the same way it absorbed the energy from a lightning storm. The shared anomaly of two hundred ships broadcasting in a relatively tight area, however, could create all kinds of damage. Who knew what kind of a chain reaction that much energy could set off?

My pilot said, "Yes, sir." He was an Air Force cargo pilot. He accepted his orders with the stoicism of a man who flies supplies over battlefields.

The area around the spaceport was flat and rocky with rust-colored soil, a flat plain ringed by distant mountains. From the ground, it would look like a nearly endless plain; but from the explorer, I could see the mountain range. I could see the three sets of raised rails that ran from the spaceport to the Air Force base and the remains of a train, but we were dropping quickly, and I soon lost that bird's-eye perspective.

We touched down.

The explorer landed delicately, like it was made of tissue paper and glass.

As I had suspected, the enemy had tracked our descent. When I opened my commandLink, and yelled, "Hit the tar! Now! Now! Now!" I reached all three thousand of my Marines.

They had expected us to fly to the Air Force base, which was the logical move, to retrieve Tasman and Watson. But we had chosen a more aggressive route, and the people in charge now needed to call their forces back or face us alone.

As I said before, sludging was a blade that cut both ways. They could not call their men back without opening the airwaves for me as well.

The company commanders on the other explorers heard my orders and off-loaded their Marines in record fashion.

Had guards been waiting at the spaceport doors, they could have picked us off as we disembarked; but the people running the show had not counted on my having a fleet of self-broadcasting antiques. They had sent their men to attack the Air Force base and left their base of operations unguarded.

I had never seen the spaceport from the outside, at least not from ground level. It was a civilian structure, built during an era of peace, at a time in which the Unified Authority knew no neighbors and faced no threats. Hundreds of doorways dotted the lower walls of the building, hatchways through which mechanics and luggage handlers could pass.

The architects who created this building had designed it without any defenses. Any hostiles already in place would have no fortifications as they tried to stop my Marines from capturing the building. Assuming we captured the spaceport, we would have no fortifications when Martin Riley and his security force returned.

Assuming we survived Riley and his five thousand men, we would have the same problem all over again when Second Division arrived with twenty thousand reprogrammed Marines. When my ships arrived with twice that many troops, Tarawa would face that problem all over again. By that time, though, there would be very little left of the spaceport to defend.

Colonel Ritz orchestrated the invasion while I carried out my own personal mission.

We approached the building from the west, the side facing the Air Force base, expecting no more than token resistance. More by the book than he liked to let on, Ritz still assembled his men into fire teams and sent them in by the numbers. Grenadiers carrying flash grenades and low-yield pills opened hatches, automatic riflemen took point position, riflemen and team leaders followed.

When push comes to shove, the Marines fall back on the same strategy almost every time-the main force attacks the enemy straight on and pins him down while a secondary force flanks and destroys. It's a strategy that has worked for a thousand years.

The outer hatches led into air locks, thirty-foot-long atmospheric antechambers in which Mars's native carbon dioxide was pumped out and replaced with oxygen.

I entered an air lock with one of Ritz's fire teams. It was a long, dark tube with circular walls and a floor wide enough for an automobile or one of those trailer-pulling buggies the spaceport used for hauling luggage.

A few recessed lights shone down from the low ceiling, air poured in through vents along the top, forcing a convection that expelled the indigenous carbon dioxide through openings along the base. It was a quick process, lasting less time than it took us to cross from the outer hatch to the door leading into the building.

The automatic inner doors opened, revealing an empty maintenance floor.

"General, we are leaving for the Mars base." It was Hines, my pilot. He said, "Good luck, sir."

I said, "Good luck, Major."

The next person to speak was Colonel Hunter Ritz, who asked, "General, are we going to tangle with Spaceport Security?"

I said, "I expect so, Colonel."

I'd known Ritz a while, and he'd never struck me as the most well-informed officer. Now, all of a sudden, he spouted all kinds of data. He said, "There are five thousand of them and three thousand of us, wouldn't it be easier to let them through the outer hatches and shoot them as they file through the door?"

Neutralize their numerical advantage by creating a bottleneck, good thought. I said, "We need to keep the damage to the building at a minimum. We're here to protect a civilian population."

Ritz asked, "Do you have an ETA on Second Division?"

"They're already up there, but they won't launch with the Churchill harassing them," I said. "Admiral Cutter's got his hands full dealing with the de Gaulle and two U.A. battleships."

"U.A. ships? The Unifieds are in this?"

"What's left of them," I said.

I could imagine Ritz nodding and bracing himself for the fight, as he said, "We'll keep the specking trash outside as long as we can."

I said, "Do what you have to do. Semper fi, Marine."

CHAPTER.

SIXTY-FOUR.

This was my day for taking risks.