Earth Strike by Ian Douglas

if swiftly, from zero-G to ten. He felt the uncomfortable jab of medfeeds pressed against his neck beneath the angle of his jaw, at his back, and in his groin as they monitored and adjusted his blood pressure, keeping him from blacking out. Even so, his vision narrowed alarmingly, as though he were seeing his surroundings through a black tunnel. His IHD, painting images and words against his visual field, winked out momentarily, replaced by white static. For an age, it seemed, he lay there beneath a crushing weight, scarcely able to breathe, blind and deaf as the Starhawk shuddered and thumped and shook around him.
    Then, like a drowning man reaching the surface and gulping down fresh air, Gray struggled from the dark and the smothering pressure. The fireball surrounding him dissipated, and he emerged into open air.
    And his flight systems were coming back on-line. He had half power now, more than enough for anything short of generating a fifty-K boost. Weapons were on-line, full sensory input, IC, AI, it was all there. Relief burst through him like the golden morning light on the horizon ahead. Voices crackled and called over his audio circuit, the other members of his squadron.
    “Blue Ten! Blue Ten! I have Tango fighters inbound at five-zero, Azimuth minus four-one!…”
    “Copy, Ten! Breaking right-high!”
    “Here’s the merge! I’m on him, Snorky!”
    “Fox One! Fox One!” Static flared and crackled, and, with it, a brilliant flash from somewhere above and astern. “ Jesus ! Did you see that?…”
    “Flame one Bravo-Bravo!”
    “Blue Omega Leader, this is Blue Seven,” Gray called. “Do you copy?”
    “Copy, Seven!” The voice was tight and unemotional—probably Allyn’s AI avatar rather than the squadron CO herself.
    “I got toasted a bit and chewed air down to the deck. Systems are back on-line now, at eighty percent. Moving toward the Mike perimeter.”
    “We copy that, Blue Seven.” That was the real Commander Allyn’s voice. “Excellent job, Prim. Get in and offer the Marines whatever help they need, channel four-niner-three Zulu. The rest of us will be in there as soon as we can work through.”
    Gray felt wildly contrasting emotions, a sharp thrill of pleasure at the atta-boy from his CO, and anger at her use of his detested ready-room handle.
    “Rog that,” he replied. He dipped his gravfighter’s nose and accelerated.
    He wasn’t quite “down to the deck,” as he’d reported, but close enough. The Starhawk was dropping now past the twenty-kilometer mark. The sky above was still space-dark, the brightest stars—Arcturus, especially—still gleaming and brilliant, but the cloud decks below rose thick and towering, their tops sculpted by high-altitude winds and tinted red and gold by the rising sun. He’d crossed enough of the planet’s face that the local sun was well above the horizon now, casting long, blue-purple shadows and hazy shafts of golden light across the distinctly three-dimensional surface of the cloudscape below.
    Gray adjusted his ship’s hull-form again, sculpting it for high-speed aerial flight, absorbing the deep entry keel and extending the wings farther and deeper into their forward-canted configuration. Behind him, a sudden burst of shooting stars marked another cloud of sand or debris entering atmosphere, a barrage of silent flick-flick-flicks of light.
    He let his AI target on the Marine beacon, bringing the SG-92’s prow left across the horizon, then dipping down into a plunging dive. He opened his com suite to the Marine frequency and began sending out an approach vector clearance request.
    He hadn’t crossed seventy-one AUs and survived a near-miss by a thermonuke to get shot down by the damned jarheads.
    MEF HQ
Mike-Red Perimeter
Eta Boötis System
1259 hours, TFT

    Major General Eunan Charles Gorman looked up as another incoming gravitic round struck the perimeter shields with piercing thunder. The deck of the headquarters dome rocked with the impact,