Tara resisted the urge.

“Have we confirmed their targets yet?” she asked the officer on vector mechanics.

Possessed of sallow skin and bloodshot eyes, Leutnant Nicole Barringer obviously spent too much time in dimly lit rooms, staring at computer monitors. But she was the best Skye had, which was why Tara had pulled her for duty. She performed only half of the mathematics by computer, the other half in her head.

“Twelve of the seventeen DropShips have reduced their deceleration burn and are pulling ahead of the pack.” She used a stylus to draw a lopsided diamond around their icons, then sketched a golden arc up off the screen, approximating their average insertion angle. Another arc trailed from the bottom tip of the diamond down through the amber band and into one of the color-coded boxes that sat at the lower edge of the screen. Each box represented an insertion path for one of ten high-priority targets.

“It’s not safe money, Countess, not yet, but these at least are holding to a tight course. Textbook vectors from their orbiting WarShip, falling straight down at New London.”

Nodding, Tara tapped the screen over each of the other five red icons. “And these?”

“No aspect change in bearing or velocity, but… I don’t know. It looks like New London, but I think they are saving delta-V to make low-atmospheric changes.”

Going just as the defenders had predicted. Which bothered Tara a great deal.

“Keep our aerospace fighters well away from their insertion path. Seventeen DropShips and a heavy fighter escort is more than we can bite off.” And even if they could, there was the WarShip to consider. Malvina Hazen had already shown her willingness to use it.

Murdering bitch.

Forcing herself to continue a slow pace along the row of workstations, Tara confirmed every detail at least twice and stopped at ground-monitoring stations to check on New London itself. Her skin prickled with gooseflesh despite the warmth of the room, tiny bumps standing out on her bare arms and legs. She was dressed for combat, already in cooling vest and padded shorts. When the time came for action, she didn’t want anything to slow her down.

“Have the sirens done their work?” she asked another tech.

“Working, ma’am.” He leaned aside to give her a better view of the screens he watched. Prefect Della Brown joined Tara at the bank of small monitors, crowding in at the man’s other shoulder.

Silent camera views switched along the many arterials of New London, the green-budding parks, the commercial and industrial centers. For midday, traffic was light and thinning out every minute. No one picnicked to celebrate spring’s early arrival. Shopping was limited mostly to frantic purchases of canned goods and urban survival gear: flashlights and bottled water, sweets and cigarettes. Restaurants were closing and nonessential services were suspended for the duration. Sanglamore had been emptied and Prefect Brown’s New London Tower operated on a skeleton staff.

After the high cost Skye paid during the last assault by Clan Jade Falcon, with her Himmelsfahrtkommando sacrificing hundreds of lives to keep their world free, Tara Campbell wanted no repeat of such a massacre. At least, not when it would not do any good.

The Falcons were back for blood.

“We’re not going to make it easy for them,” she promised, speaking to herself in a soft whisper.

Della Brown straightened. “In fact,” she said, not bothering to hide her unease with the plan, “we are.”

Prefect Brown was a tall, svelte woman who had put herself through college by working as a runway model. She had dark hair and stormy gray eyes, and had held her figure well, even if she dressed down with her gray field uniform. She wore little makeup these days, and didn’t need to. Her austere beauty and her extra fifteen centimeters of height were just a bit intimidating, though Tara fought back with a mixed package of popularity and vivacity.

“What would you have us do, Prefect?” Tara asked simply.

“Open resistance. BattleMechs and tank columns along the main arterials. VTOLs to skirt the edge of the city, and infantry dug in at all the hardened buildings we have.”

“Blood in the streets,” Tara said. “We saw enough of that along Sutton Road and across Seminary Hill the last time. You don’t think the Jade Falcons came ready for that? We need to stay one step—”

“Countess!” The woman on vector mechanics was first with an alert. “We have… I’ve lost signal. We have no—that’s zero–confidence. Some kind of interference pattern I don’t recognize.”

“Same here.” She may have been first, but now other voices around the room called out with frantic need for attention. A major on tactical shouted down some nearby techs. “I have negative feedback on every channel. High electromagnetic interference.”

“No feed,” someone else complained.

“Wild power fluctuations on—”

“—dead sensors.”

Tara and Della Brown had watched as all of the New London cameras blacked out simultaneously. The tech didn’t bother with complaints or guesses, but set about working his emergency procedures to acquire data. He toggled for power, ran checks on the local electronics. Everything seemed to be in order.

But there was something coldly familiar about this. A report Tara remembered reading from… from… a hollow pit opened up inside her.

“Nicole!” Tara jogged back up the line of workstations to the woman on vector mechanics. “What was the last thing you saw?”

“Possible bearing changes across the board. And the lead DropShips, I think they had all poured on harder decel burns, slowing their fall. I was working on confirmation when it all went dark.”

“I want a direct camera view over New London.” Tara shoved herself away from vector mechanics, trying to remember which station had auxiliary taps into meteorological data. Those were local systems and might be safe from what she feared was happening. “Weather feeds,” she called out. Was that on tactical?

No. Aerospace control. A bright-eyed young ensign waved for her attention, frowning at his monitor. “Whatever this is…,” he began.

But Tara knew. So did Prefect Della Brown, apparently, who was at the workstation a step ahead of Tara. The blacked-out sensors and interference patterns. It read too similar to reports from Glengarry, when Malvina Hazen had brought down one of the Stormhammer DropShips. The kind of disaster that Tara had hoped to avoid.

The two women stared at the bright, glowing streaks that smeared the daytime sky like a high-strength aurora borealis.

“That,” Tara said with false calm, “is a nuclear detonation.”

There was no way to estimate the height, but it had to be a high-atmosphere detonation to get that kind of wide-coverage effect. Ionization covering thousands of square kilometers was reflected back down at Skye and New London by the planet’s own magnetic field.

“What’s this going to mean?” Della asked, voice low and shaking with barely controlled fury.

Tara held herself up against the edge of the workstation. The cold metal edge cut into her fingers like a dull knife. “Severe ionization and intense magnetic fields which will induce high voltages in power lines, communication towers, and other long-range conductors.” Bad. Very bad. “We’ll get feeds back slowly, except where electronics might be completely fried from power surges. Fortunately, our most valuable equipment should be in hardened facilities.”

“What about our fighter craft?”

She considered. “They should be okay. But we’ll keep them grounded or on patrol out of the area regardless. We keep to the plan, and when the Falcons try to move their DropShips after grounding, that’s when we hit them.”

Della Brown nodded. “I suppose we should feel fortunate that Malvina Hazen didn’t take New London right off the map.”

“Fortunate?” Tara shook her head. “If the Jade Falcons are willing to spend from their nuclear arsenal and did not want New London erased, it’s because they have something far worse in mind.”