There were some mild chuckles over the channel at the idea of mistaking a human, even in full armor, for one of those things, but the undercurrent was as serious as he could hope for.

Eric was feeling the strain on his body. Enhancing armor was designed to take up a lot of the stresses and energy requirements of combat, but only if you knew it well enough not to fight it. Eric knew that he was, indeed, fighting his armor on some levels. The strain in his legs and arms was enough evidence of that.

More to the point, however, he’d never actually led men into combat on this level. It was—it felt—so very different than taking the Double A squadron into a furball, and his guts were clenching almost like the first time he’d been given command of a fighter group.

Then the time for worries, stresses, and any thoughts but those of survival and comrades was over. Eric, leading his five-man team, dropped from the rooftops right on top of the beleaguered Guardsmen’s tanks and leveled their own weapons at the snarling and hissing alien drones.

He stroked the firing stud on the Priminae gravity weapon, and with a sharp crack of depleted uranium destroying the sound barrier, the fight was on.

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER NINE

Under 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue

“MR. PRESIDENT, I’M not sure that you understand the ramifications of what you’re asking.”

Mitchell Conner was normally a patient man. You didn’t get to his position in the Confederation without being exactly that after all. That said, he was running well past his last nerve and the obstructionism he was used to in his everyday life had no place on a world under siege.

“Stop,” he said flatly, one hand up to the screen that the speaker was looking down from. “Unless the ramifications are somehow worse than giant alien insects eating our entire planet out from under us, I’m far from certain that I care what they are. What I need to know is simple. Can you fire a transitional weapon from inside an atmosphere?”

“In theory . . . yes,” the man admitted finally. “However, this deep in a gravity well, I can’t say how we can possibly target . . .”

“Then shoot from the hip, by God!” Conner snarled. “I don’t care if you have to build the mother of all shotguns to make this happen, just make it happen!”

He took a deep breath in the stunned silence that followed his explosion and sighed.

“Doctor . . . we are besieged. Unless we clear our skies of these things, all the fighting in the universe won’t save us here on the ground. Just build the weapon. Build as many of them as you can. I have factories turning out shells at an obscene rate already . . . give me something to shoot them out of.”

The man swallowed, but nodded jerkily. “Yes Mr. President.”