Earth Strike by Ian Douglas Page A

allowed him to see by infrared, but he wasn’t used to working in an environment where you saw things by the heat they radiated, smeared and fuzzy and out of focus.
    He was exhausted. He’d been running, it seemed, for hours before the weaving tendrils underfoot had thinned out and he’d entered a scorched-bare and rocky desert. Scattered patches of surviving tendrils on the ground glowed with radiant heat, their movements an eerie shifting difficult for the eye to follow. Here, too, patches of bare rock glowed yellow-hot under infrared; he suspected that he might have entered the barren kill zone surrounding the Marine base, where the ground cover had been burned off by the ongoing bombardment by Turusch heavy weapons.
    He felt more exposed now, to Turusch scanners and observation drones, which were certain to be lurking about. He would have to move more cautiously here. At least those damned leeches, the gray, swift-gliding leaf shapes, appeared to have vanished once the orange ground cover had given out.
    What the hell had those things been? His e-suit was still intact, but he’d had the distinct impression that those things had been scraping away at the outer carbon nanotube weave of the garment. That material was incredibly tough, but Gray wasn’t about to trust the integrity of his environmental suit with those things swarming over it, not when a single tear could leave him gasping in high-pressure poison.
    Gray staggered to the top of a low, bare-rock outcrop and studied his surroundings. Somewhere to the north, across that empty desert, was the Marine perimeter. He needed to decide now whether to keep walking, or if he should hole up here and start transmitting an emergency distress call.
    The only way he was going to get through the Marine shield would be if they sent a SAR—a Search and Rescue mission—out to get him. He had no way to get through the tightly folded space of the shield…and though his e-suit would protect him well enough from the radiation, it wouldn’t let him weather a nearby burst from a nuclear warhead, or a bolt of charged particles searing down from low orbit.
    On the other hand, the moment he started transmitting, he was likely to attract attention from Turusch battlespace probes, or even from enemy spacecraft in orbit.
    Shit. Damned if he did, damned if he didn’t.
    He wondered how long he had before daylight. His implant RAM had a brief listing of planetary stats for Eta Boötis IV—Haris, as the human colonists called it. He knew the planet’s rotational period was short—only about fourteen and a half hours. But the planet also had an extreme axial tilt, literally lying on its side as it circled its hot primary once each four years. At the equator, daylight lasted about seven hours throughout that long year, followed by a seven-hour night. At the poles, the sun would disappear for a year at a time, alternating with year-long periods of sunlight, and with everything in between.
    What a freaking weird world!
    He wasn’t sure what the length of the day or night was at this point on the surface. Mike-Red, he knew from his briefings, was at 22 degrees north. He knew that this was late fall or early winter in the northern hemisphere. That suggested that the nights in this region were longer than the days, but he didn’t know how long that actually might be.
    Not that it particularly mattered. Whether he attracted the attention of a Marine SAR aircraft—or of a Turusch battle-cruiser—they’d see him, no matter how dark it was.
    The distant thunder of battle had faded away a long time ago. He wasn’t quite sure when the landscape had become eerily silent, but it had been before it had gotten dark. Did that mean the battle was over, or merely that there was a temporary lull in the fighting?
    If the battle was over, who had won?
    He looked up at the darkness overhead—a solid cloud deck masked by darkness. Cloud cover over Haris ran around ninety percent. The skies cleared