The Tau Ceti Agenda

October 31, 2388 AD

Sol System

Oort Cloud

Saturday, 6:00 AM, Earth Eastern Standard Time

"Quartermaster of the Watch!" Captain Jefferson called through the urgent sounds of the background bridge conversations and the din of the continuous buzzing from the tac-net DTM mindvoices.

"Aye sir!" Quartermaster Senior Chief Patea Vanu snapped away from his viewscreen and looked at the CO sitting in his command chair.

"Chief, I want an eyeballs report every minute to corroborate the sensors. I don't want us getting caught with our pants down like we did during the Exodus." The captain rocked the seat from left to right nervously and looked through the QMSC like he wasn't there. His stare looked right through the main viewport of the bridge and over the deck of the supercarrier out into the deep black space of the Oort Cloud some ten thousand astronomical units from Sol. The Sienna Madira was battened down and preparing for a hyperspace jaunt into a battle plan, the likes of which hadn't been seen since the Martian Exodus. Jefferson assimilated data as fast as he could in an attempt to make some sense out of the mountains of premission analyses piling up in the virtual sphere around him.

"Aye, Captain! I've got eyeballs posted about the ship feeding me continuously. I'll let you know if anything sounds out of the ordinary."

"Good." Jefferson turned to his XO. "Larry, are there any last- minute operations lagging?"

"No sir. A group of AEMs decided to ride down the tubes with the Warlords, and they are strapping the last of them in as we speak. We're good to go." XO staffers passed in and out of the bridge carrying out background orders from Colonel Chekov and making certain that the thousands of operational needs of the supercarrier were met. Every department of the ship had issues for the XO, and each of those departments had to function smoothly for an operation. It literally took a massive organization structure and hundreds of assistants to keep the ship functioning properly at all levels. The added layer of the AICs spread about the ship made it even more complicated, while at the same time adding to the capabilities of the mammoth war machine. Besides, it was Uncle Timmy's job to command the AICs.

"AEMs volunteered to ride in the drop tank tubes with the tankheads?" the CO grinned wryly. "Let me guess, Ramy Roberts' Robots?"

"Yes, sir."

"Goddamned Ramy, you tough SOB." The captain shook his head and continued to smile. "You wonder why his marines love him so much."

"Guess who's riding the first tube out?" the XO remarked. He didn't have to say anything more, as Captain Jefferson knew good and well that the first drop tube out would have Army Colonel Mason "Warlord One" Warboys driving his M3A17-T, and USMC Major Ramy Roberts would be right on top of Warboys' tank in his armored e-suit hanging on for dear life, God, and probably singing the country hymn of the USMC all the way down.

"COB, anything I need to know about my ship and her complement?"

"Well, sir, this reminds me a bit of the Triton mission a few years back."

"I know I'm gonna regret asking this, but how so, Charlie?" the CO asked reluctantly. The COB was renowned for his long-winded tall tales that eventually got around to him being a superhero, along with there being some lesson to be learned or a nugget of wisdom that would be useful in some way or the other.

"The ship is in great shape, the crew is ready to go, and the mission seems all too easy, sir." Chief of the Boat Command Master Chief Charlie Green smirked and sipped at his coffee. "Remember how that turned out, sir?"

"That's it, COB? 'It seems too easy, sir'? Where the hell is the amusing anecdote about some damned space mermaid or a UFO or some such damned thing? That's just no good at all, COB. We need to check with Ensign Rivers about what they're putting in your coffee." Captain Jefferson laughed almost disappointedly.

"That damned Rivers won't make anything but decaf, sir. I've had to hide those colored water packets three times this week," the XO added. "If he does it again, I'm going to put his decaffeinated ass on report."

"At ease, EndRun," the CO replied, using the XO's mecha callsign, which he seldom used unless he was trying to keep the mood light.

"Well, now that you mention it, there was this one time," the COB started, but thought better of it when the captain waved him off with a grin. He paused, almost sulked, and then sipped his real coffee that he had made himself. Captain Jefferson, of course, realized all of that. Everybody on the bridge drank the COB's coffee, as nobody could stand that weak-ass stuff that they kept down at the mess hall. And the stuff that Ensign Rivers had insisted on, well, it didn't even qualify as Navy coffee, and an old marine mechajock like the XO sure as Hell couldn't take it. Captain Jefferson had been very pleased once the COB had decided it was his personal duty to make certain that the bridge crew members were supplied with appropriate, thick-as-mud, vile, and extremely stout-beyond-stout java with real caffeine in it.

Uncle Timmy? He sipped from his coffee mug and then snapped the magnetic base back onto his command chair's arm.

Yes, sir. We are packed, stacked, and ready to go, sir.

Hyperspace?

All systems are go and ready for the engagement.

Sound it off, Timmy.

Aye, sir. The ship's head AIC, actually Lieutenant Commander Timmy Uniform November Kilo Lima Three Seven Seven or UNKL377, the AIC officer of the U.S.S. Sienna Madira, keyed the 1MC intercom and announced the call to start the mission. There were a few short bursts of the bosun's pipe and then Timmy's voice.

"All hands. All hands. Battle stations. All hands prepare for immediate hyperspace transfer to hostile engagement zone and battle deployment. Stand by for hyperspace countdown."

"Well, that's that. Comm, verify that the relay of engagement command to the Blair was successful and that mission clock has started," the CO ordered.

"Aye, sir! Message is relayed, and the clock is going. Captain Walker says, 'break a leg' sir," the communications officer Lieutenant Keith Aldridge replied. The young lieutenant held a finger down on his right ear as if he were drowning out ambient noise to listen more closely to his DTM mindvoice.

"Of course she did." Jefferson grinned briefly, recalling that Sharon had indeed broken her leg while commanding the Thatcher during the Exodus and practically saving his ass, the Madira, and the entire Mons City main dome. It had been a running joke between them since. "Take us in, XO."

"Aye, sir." Colonel Larry "EndRun" Chekov turned to face the viewport and looked sternly over the bow of the Madira. "Helm!"

"Roger, XO."

"Commence hyperspace jaunt to predetermined coordinates at your discretion."

"Aye, sir," the helm replied, and turned from the XO to the navigator's station. "Navigation Officer, confirm that hyperspace jaunt coordinates are correct, ma'am?"

"Jaunt coordinates comply, Helm!" Lieutenant Commander Penny Swain verified the jaunt tensors in her DTM and again with her AIC. "We're good to go, Captain Jefferson," Penny added with a nod to the captain. Most officers of the bridge crew historically answered to the CO through the XO, but it was common practice since wooden ships with sails that the navigation officer replied directly to the captain on major course changes.

"Hyperspace is a go, sir. Handing off to Uncle Timmy in five, four, three, two, one, mark," helmsman Lieutenant Junior Grade Macy Marks counted down.

General quarters! General quarters! All hands, all hands man your battle stations immediately! Prepare for short hyperspace jaunt in fifteen seconds. Expect multiple ground targets with incoming surface-to- air defenses and multiple unknown airborne targets. Prepare for evasive! Nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one. Hyperspace.

"If you don't mind my saying so sir, you sure picked a hell of a day to join the crew." Engineer's mate Petty Officer First Class Vineet Shah made idle conversation as he led Lieutenant Joseph Buckley to the Chief Engineer's staion. The CHENG's station was on the aft side of the hyperspace propulsion unit in the engine room.

"Well, I'd guess today is as good as any," Lieutenant Buckley replied. Joe looked the engine room over as they walked. He was most intrigued by the dancing of the light-pink fluorescence, swirling around the zero point, energy-field-shielding projector. Joe had studied the ship's systems ad nauseam and was knew that the pink light was caused by gamma rays at extremely high energies being generated at the event horizon of the space-time expansion, which was created by the projector. As the extremely high energy gamma rays were ripped right out of space and time itself, they traveled radially— aside from a slight rotation due to the frame dragging of the projector's vortex-like motion—away from the section of space and time that was stretched beyond normal space but were then severely red- shifted all the way to the far visible and near infrared. The red- shifting was an effect of Einstein's General Relativity, and the extreme gravitational difference at the boundary between the projector and normal space was like trying to escape the pull of a neutron star.

As a main propulsion assistant it would be his job to make certain that the projector functioned properly and continued to generate a focused swirl of expanded space-time in front of the supercarrier. Joe and EM1 Shah walked underneath the giant, swirling tube of pink light. The conduit projector hung just above head height and was more than four meters in diameter. It ran the length of three decks of the ship in both directions.

"Commander Harrison, sir, this is Lieutenant Buckley." EM1 Shah nodded back and forth between the two senior engineering officers.

"Sir." Buckley saluted the chief engineer and then shook his hand.

"You picked a hell of a day to join us, Lieutenant," chief engineer Commander Benson Harrison said with a raised eyebrow. The engineer watched the propulsion control systems closely. The instrument panels spread across the wall, and duty stations around him all were active with digital readouts blinking some piece of information in a myriad of thousands of brilliant flashes that gave Las Vegas a run for its money in artificial illumination.

The instrument panels were complicated enough, but there were also several other layers of information regarding the main propulsion system that could only be transferred DTM; otherwise, there just wouldn't be enough real estate within the ship to physically locate all the sensor readouts. The actual sensors and switches were the minimum systems required to manage an extremely rough jaunt through hyperspace with a several-AU destination-error budget per light-year. The DTM layers and AICs were required to keep the jaunts more accurate.

"That's what EM1 Shah said, sir," Buckley replied.

"Well, Vineet has a good head about him, and you'd be wise to keep him around. Look, we'll be dropping out of the hyperspace conduit in less than a minute. Are you up to speed on this ship's systems enough to take your duty station at Main Prop?" Benson asked.

"Aye, sir."

"Take it easy with that 'aye, sir' stuff, Joe, unless the command crew is around. You can call me Benny otherwise."

"Yes, sir, uh, Benny, sir." Joe just couldn't make himself break the protocols. His last command on board a frigate had a CHENG that was so by-the-book that he had even starched and pressed his coveralls. Buckley was going to have to get used to his new boss's more relaxed style.

"Right. Okay, time to get to work. Melissa, give Joe's AIC full access to all engine room protocols required for position of main propulsion assistant," the CHENG verbalized to his AIC and nodded to his new MPA.

"Yes, Benny," his AIC said over the room's coms.

"Okay, Buckley, she's all yours." The commander slapped him on the back and moved across the room to speak to a young female lieutenant at the damage control assistant's station.

"Yes, si— uh, Benny." Buckley sat down at the MPA's station and typed in his personal password data, then handed the wireless off to his AIC, Debbie.

Debbie, Three November One Uniform Zulu Juliet One logging into MPA station control protocols.

Welcome, Debbie, a subconscious or automated subroutine of Uncle Timmy's replied.

We're good to go, Joe.

Roger that, Debbie. Now DTM me the ZPE field projector status. Joe's mind filled with a virtual sphere of gravitometric tensor calculations and vacuum field probability equations. The intense whirl of space-time in front of the ship was decreasing and about to destabilize in less than a minute as matched perfectly to the flight plan of the ship. "Looks good," he mumbled to himself. However relaxed the CHENG might have been on formalities, his propulsion system control was dead on. Joe assured himself that the CHENG's ship was tight in the best way and was probably why he was the CHENG of the nation's fleet flagship.

Captain Jefferson ignored the DTM virtual sphere for a brief moment to look out the viewport of the bridge as the Sienna Madira lurched and then phased out of normal space with a reversed cascading shower of violet flashes of light.

"Hyperspace entry looks good, Captain," the ship's navigator said.

"Stay on it, nav."

"Aye, sir."

The Madira jaunted through her multidimensional vector and as far as the captain could tell would emerge into normal space just as the battle plan required. It was a short jaunt. The Madira and the Blair had been prepping for the attack on the Seppy Oort Cloud facility only a few light-minutes away, and so they would be snapping back into normal space very quickly into whatever mess the Seppies might have waiting for them. Of course, Captain Jefferson was fairly sure that the Seppy bastards weren't expecting them at all, but nothing was ever certain when it came to warfare. And the Separatists had proven to be nothing if not clever and full of misdirection and misconception. He tugged his seat belt a little tighter and gripped the arms of his chair nervously.

Uncle Timmy, how're we doing? Captain Jefferson asked his AIC.

All is well, Captain.

Good. Keep on top of it all.

Aye, sir.

"Everything looks right, Captain. Emerging from hyperspace in thirty seconds," the helmsman announced.

"Prepare for incoming. Air boss is a go for sorties," the CO ordered. Violet swirls of hyperspace spiraled rapidly around the supercarrier in a vortex of space-time fabric being warped into submission by the main propulsion system.

The quantum membrane of the universe was expanded beyond its normal flatness in the converging tunnel ahead of the supercarrier, violating the energy conditions of normal space. The exotic matter field generators in the giant field coils underneath the ship projected a focused beam in front of them that interacted with the vacuum energy fluctuations and through negative superposition canceled out a majority of normal space energy bands. This created the vortex region, where less energy existed than even in empty space-time itself. Navy propulsion engineers were often fond of explaining that they would create a region of nothingness that had even more nothing in it than normal.

The CO took one last, brief glance out the stern viewscreen at the twirling, blinking, and flashing light show of super-sized nothing and took a deep breath. He slowly pursed his lips and exhaled while closing his eyes. Taking one last quick assessment of the operations readiness data in his DTM, he tensed and readied himself for what waited on the other side of hyperspace.

"Aye, sir. Go for sorties!" the air boss acknowledged. Without looking up from his screen, he switched channels to the hangar bay. "All hangars, all cats, we are about to reenter normal space. Commence sortie deployment. I repeat, commence sortie deployment."

"XO, forward guns!" Jefferson ordered just as the hyperspace conduit swirled away to infinity and vanished. The Sienna Madira phased into normal space with full-forward velocity like the overarmored and overarmed menace from Earth she was.

"Gunnery Officer, begin sensor sweep and lock and commence firing of main DEG batteries at your discretion. Be advised to excise military targets only, and do not hit the teleportation facility as briefed and gamed!" Colonel Chekov tapped at his console, double checking the power levels of the guns.

"Roger that, XO! Multiple targets identified, locked, and firing solutions ready. Firing at will," Lieutenant Rice acknowledged.

"CO, CDC!" the commander of the Combat Direction Center a few decks below the bridge chimed.

"Go CDC."

"We've got multiple sensor pings and are actively jamming on all frequencies. Expect incoming fire, as we are getting lit up like a Christmas tree, sir!"

"Roger that, CDC. Is the jamming buying us anything?"

"It might be confusing their point and track, sir, but they know we're here."

The supercarrier pressed through the active wash of sensor energy from the Seppy facility at maximum normal space velocity. The computers of the ship picked out targets and blasted away at them with mammoth directed energy weapons. The intense blue-green bolts of energy tore through the surface of the Oort object beneath them, blasting away surface materials and manmade structures. Smaller anti-aircraft railguns came online automatically and started searching for enemy flying targets to shoot. Sensor domes and weapons batteries on the planetoid facility exploded into the quiet vacuum of space, scattering debris and chewing up the surface like a behemoth repulsor plow.

Red dots appeared in the captain's DTM sphere, moving toward the supercarrier at extreme velocities. The IFF algorithms not only identified them as foe but also as anti-carrier missiles, hundreds of them.

"CO, CDC! Incoming!"

"We've got it, CDC." The captain turned his chair toward the XO. "Forward SIFs at maximum! XO anti-missile batteries, fire!"

"DEG and railgun Phalanx systems are active, Captain," Chekov replied. "SIFs at maxi . . ." He was interrupted as the first missile detonated against the forward force fields and armored plating. The ship vibrated against the explosion as the debris from the missile washed over the bow and was absorbed by the supercarrier's hull.

"Keep firing. And get me a fix on those launch tubes and start battering the hell out of them!"

"Aye, sir!"

"Good hunting, DeathRay!" The deck chief snapped a salute from the top of the mecha support scaffold and grabbed at the handrail as the ship's inertial dampening systems compensated for a sudden impact against the exterior hull of the supercarrier.

"Roger that!" Jack saluted back, and the chief quickly climbed down and began unhooking the power and com umbilical. He finished by giving the VTF-32 Ares-T fighter one last affectionate pat on the empennage.

Jack pulled his helmet over his head and gave it a twist to lock it in place as he settled into the cockpit. Air rushed into his suit with a faint, hissing sound. He then pulled the hardwire connection from the universal docking port of his fighter and plugged it into the thin rugged composite box on the left side of his helmet, which made a direct electrical connection to his AIC implant via skin-contact sensors in his helmet. The direct connection wasn't necessary as the quantum membrane wireless connectivity was very strong that close to the fighter's computer systems. It had once been thought that enemy jamming of the wireless connection between the AIC and the fighter was almost impossible. The wireless connection was spread spectrum and highly encrypted. But the Seppy attack during the Exodus had shown quite the opposite. The entire fleet had been spoofed, and the wireless systems were told by a Seppy hacker—rumored to have been coded by Ahmi herself—not to see enemy targets with any sensors. Since then, the hardwire was promoted from backup to primary connection, and the wireless was only used in emergencies and in noncombat situations.

"Hardwire UDP is connected and operational. Lieutenant Candis Three Zero Seven Two Four Niner Niner Niner Six ready for duty," Jack's AIC announced over the open com channel. Then directly to Jack, Let's go get 'em, Commander!

Roger that, Candis!

Jack saluted the flight deck officer and brought the canopy down. The harness holding the fighter lowered and dropped it the last twenty centimeters to the deck with that ever-so-familiar squishing feel from the landing gear suspension. The drop always used to leave him with a lump in his throat and butterflies in his stomach because it meant that he was about to go screaming out the ass end of the supercarrier into a storm of raining and streaking Hell from all directions. Or at least it had meant that up until the Exodus and the few cleanup actions afterward. There had been merely training exercises for the better part of four years now, and Jack preferred that to the horrific sights and sounds of war.

The aftermath of the Exodus was enough to leave serious scars in any soldier's psyche and, indeed, many had resigned from service after it. But Jack was made of sterner stuff, he had told himself. And somebody had to be prepared in the case that America, the Sol System, came under attack again. With the Exodus, he had hoped that war would be a thing he wouldn't have to deal with for a while. He had trained, nevertheless.

Once again, it looked like it was time for war, and all bravado aside, he was good at it. Jack swallowed the lump, calmed the butterflies, and followed the flight deck sequence. He moved his fighter first in line for takeoff. The tricycle wheels of the little fighter squeaked against the deck plate as it rolled into launch position. Jack could feel the supercarrier vibrating from anti-aircraft fire—a deadly feeling that he had almost forgotten.

"This is double zero," Jack called over the tac-net. "This is gonna get hairy, folks, and I want everyone covering their wings and following the plan. Good hunting and good luck." He thought his faceplate down and pulled his mouthpiece closer with his teeth.

"Fighter zero-zero callsign DeathRay, you are cleared for egress. Good hunting, Commander Boland!" the control tower officer radioed. "Handing off to cat control."

"Roger that, tower." Jack went through his ritual. "Y'all just keep the beer cold, and good ol' DeathRay will be back soon enough." Jack taxied to the "at bat" slot and braced himself for the "ball" and chewed at the bite block.

"Fighter double zero, you are at bat and go for cat! Call the ball."

"Roger cat, double zero has the ball," Boland responded as the little gold catapult field alignment sphere blinked on in his DTM view, overlaying the projected launch window circle.

"Good hunting, DeathRay!" the catapult field AI announced. Jack throttled the Ares-T forward and switched to hover as the landing gear cycled and extracted. He bit down harder on the temporomandibular joint mouthpiece and eased the throttle just a little more forward so that the fighter slipped into the catapult field. His tongue worked nervously against the bite block and the roof of his mouth and he began to salivate profusely. Sweat would soon start building, but his suit would evaporate that quickly.

Swallowing hard, Jack worked his hands against the HOTAS grip, feeling the controls. The new bot-mode toggle on his right stick control was beginning to feel completely at home, although this would be the first combat the new transfigurable Ares-T fighters had seen. Jack was and wasn't looking forward to the pending opportunity at the same time. He'd been training in the new mecha for more than two years, and now he'd find out the hard way how good it really was in combat.

"Roger that. Double zero has the cat! WHOOO! HOOO!" Jack screamed as usual through the mouthpiece. The support tube for the bite block started pumping oxygen and stimulants in his face and mouth. The catapult field flung the Ares-T out of the rear lower launch deck, and Jack was thrust hard into his seat at over nine Earth gravities, accelerating the little snub-nosed, fighter-mode mecha to over three hundred kilometers per hour.

The inertial dampening controls of the fighter kept DeathRay's body from being crushed against the pilot's seat and his brain from sloshing around inside his head to the point of fatal trauma. The sleek new fighter-mode Ares-T screamed out of the cat field from zero to four hundred kilometers per hour in one tenth of a second with an acceleration of about eighty-eight Earth gravities. The inertial dampening controls reduced the effect by generating a dampening field around the aircraft that served two purposes: 1) to add structural integrity to the fighter plane as it was thrown into a hail of anti- aircraft fire and 2) to reduce the effect of the g-forces to something that human pilots could possibly withstand—twelve gravities or so. Inertial dampening fields or not, Jack was on one hell of a ride.

"Holy fuck!" Jack breathed rapidly and spat out obscenities almost as proficiently as an enlisted sailor. He grunted as the overwhelming g-forces from the catapult acceleration subsided. He shook his head and squinted the flashing stars and blood from his eyes.

Jack focused on slowing his breathing and scanned the sky and the viewscreens displaying under and behind him. At the same time, his AIC DTMed a full-scale, three-dimensional, immersive, spherical view of the space around him. He could look in any direction and see space outside rather than the interior of the fighter. The view was partially transparent so that he could still monitor other instruments and controls inside the cockpit that were not virtual.

The space around him was littered with explosions and flashes of light above and behind him; beneath him were the icy, bungled- together planetoids and the mangled array of Seppy construction. The DEGs of the supercarrier were digging major gashes out of the facility and slinging debris across the planetoids.

In his virtual mindview, Jack could see the other planes from his squadron being flung from the Sienna Madira hangar bays. His young wingman, Lieutenant Karen "Fish" Howser, pulled in beside him on his right. Jack could see Fish scanning around her cockpit virtual view for bogies. Her head whipped around wildly looking for incoming threats. Karen had seen her first combat at the Seppy Exodus and had proven herself a true ace fighter pilot. Jack had originally chosen her for his wingman because she was truly young and raw, and he thought she needed to be looked after. But he kept her as his wing because they had worked very well together and what she lacked in experience, Jack had noted on that day, she more than made up for in guts, determination, and just plain raw talent. And she took to the new mecha like a duck to water. Karen was probably one of the best aviators he'd ever seen, besides himself, of course.

Jack could also see the main gun batteries of the Madira firing in rapid succession. Missiles began to spill away from the mammoth warship, along with the DEG bursts through the hail of anti-aircraft fire coming from the Seppy facility. Some of them impacted the Seppy base's exterior hull plating and boiled off large chunks of the armor in brilliant orange and white clouds. The debris spread out in long arcs across the surface of the low-gravity planetoid and spun madly with no atmosphere to drag down its motion.

Jack, I've got Gnats! Candis warned him. The DTM blinked full of red dots.

Roger that, time to go to work! He could tell by the blue dots that the Gods of War had made it out of the ship and through the first barrage of AA fire. Now it was time to face the Seppy fighters.

"Fish, we've got Gomers incoming off our three-nine at angels three." Jack tilted the stick left, diving and spiraling through the anti- aircraft fire into a head-to-head sprint toward the first Separatist Gnat. The two fighters closed on each other with a relative velocity of more than a thousand kilometers per hour. Jack toggled the DEG targeting X in his DTM view and set the missile lock sensors on search. A missile solution dinged in his mindview, and he let a mecha-to- mecha missile loose. "Fox three!" he shouted.

"Roger that, DeathRay! Gomers off our three-nine at angels three. I've got firing solutions. Guns, guns, guns!" Fish reported over the net. Jack only vaguely caught the motion of her fighter yawing and pitching madly into a sideways spin to target an enemy fighter passing beneath them.

Jack's missile twisted and countermaneuvered through DEG fire and hit home on the Seppy Gnat, immediately blasting the left wing from the incoming plane and spinning it catastrophically to pieces. Several of the larger pieces twanged against the hull of the VTF-32 as he passed through the spot where the two fighters would have collided. The SIFs and microfiber composite layered armor plating held. Jack tossed the fighter over, giving him a view of the planetoid facility beneath him as well as an eyeball's view of the approaching enemy fighters.

"DeathRay, this is some thick shit! I think we should double back and try to hold closer to the Madira," his second-in-command

Lieutenant Commander Damien "Demonchild" Harris said over the tac-net through grunts and bleats of breath.

"Roger that, Demonchild. Gods of War double back in the mix toward the Madira. If we can bring these in closer to the ship, it will clear out some of the path for the marines and tankheads. It might spread out the AA some as well." Jack doubled his fighter over one hundred and eighty degrees but left his vector in the same direction. The g-forces pulled roughly at his stomach. He grunted and reversed the propulsion system vector, pushing the left hand component of the HOTAS.

"DeathRay, you got a Gomer on your six firing! Get away, or he's gonna lock you up!" Fish warned him. "Fox three!" The Gnat dodged, while flooding the area in front of the missile with cannon fire, destroying it, and then rolling out of the way, still on Jack's tail.

"Shit! You missed him, Fish." DeathRay spun his head around, trying to get an eyeball on the Gomer that was barreling down on him. He could see it in the DTM but not with visual. "Where the fuck are you?" The range was too close to go to missiles.

"Watch out, DeathRay! Guns, guns, guns." Lieutenant Denise "Crash" Fourier streaked past him, only meters away, firing the cannons as she passed by DeathRay's tail. "Goddamn it, that one is quick."

"Crash missed him, DeathRay. I'm coming."

"I see him, Fish! Just keep your shirt on." The enemy Gnat had slipped in under him and then behind him somehow and had evaded both Fish and Crash so far. For the longest time, he could only find it in his DTM. But he finally managed to yaw his fighter and spin it wildly in order to find the damned thing visually. If he didn't act fast, his situation would deteriorate to shit in a hurry. And Jack didn't like the ramifications of that.

Jack toggled the mode control of his fighter, flipping him upside down and making him gasp and grunt for air; all the while, the g-suit continued to squeeze the devil out his lower extremities. Jack's fighter converted from a fighter plane into an upside-down, armored bipedal robot, wielding a DEG for a head with two forty-millimeter cannons mounted on each forearm. The DEG could swivel more freely in bot mode, and Jack immediately set it to auto-fire mode controlled by his AIC. Candis went about finding targets and blasting the hell out of them. Jack used the cannons on his forearms for spread effect and cover.

His AIC swiveled the DEG around, tracking the Seppy Gnat with green beams dancing all around the enemy fighter. The energy bolts tracked across the plane's trajectory, but it was moving in too close and too fast for the DEGs. Jack rammed the throttle against the stop, accelerating the bot mode Ares-T downward at over a thousand meters per second, nearly causing him to lose his breakfast again. Were it not for the advanced dampeners of the new fighters, that type of maneuver would have killed him, but Jack gave that no thought at the moment.

He choked the bile down and grunted against the nearly overwhelming g-forces and aimed both arm cannons through the DTM virtual sphere. The two yellow targeting Xs in his mind danced around the sphere, trying to lock onto targets as he fired. The railgun rounds hammered out of the guns at the Gnat as it darted in and out of his line of fire. The Gnat loosed two missiles, both of which were radar- and QM-locked on to Jack's plane. It had been on his tail far too long. Far. Too. Long.

Shit, DeathRay, he's locked on! Candis shouted into his mind.

Goddamn, Seppy motherfucker, he thought, stomping the left pedal and throwing a hard spiral into the mecha. Then he slammed the stick backward against the rear joystick stop. He held the HOTAS with a deathgrip that turned his knuckles almost white enough to see through his e-suit gloves.

"Uuuggghh! Fuck you! Fox three!" he screamed against the wild spin. His missile launched from the back of the bot, not locked on to any particular target but flying in the general direction of the incoming missiles. Jack tracked both cannons on the tail of his own mecha- to-mecha missile and fired. The forty-millimeter railgun rounds filled the space, tracking and bouncing around the purple glow from the tail of the missile until several of the rounds hit home. The missile exploded into a flaming debris field just as the two locked-on missiles passed through it, ripping them to shreds from fratricide. The additive effect of the other two missiles exploding slammed Jack's mecha with shrapnel and superheated plasma. The SIFs and armor of his fighter were stressed to the maximum, but they held.

Almost instantaneously, the Seppy Gnat passed through a firing solution of the DEG, and Candis burned him down. Jack followed up on him with a couple rounds from the cannons for good measure, and the enemy fighter burst apart. Jack's mecha still spun wildly with extreme angular acceleration. So, he spread the mecha's arms and legs like a figure skater to reduce the rotation, and then the retro fields kicked in, dampening out the rest. He heaved twice, losing some bile into his helmet, but he managed to keep most of his stomach; then he toggled the fighter-mode control. The bot pulled its arms and legs in and pitched over into a fighter plane again. His suit quickly absorbed the bile on his viewplate.

"Goddamn! What a maneuver, DeathRay!" Fish shouted. "Great fuckin' flying, sir!"

"Right," DeathRay said sluggishly, and swallowed hard at the lump in his throat. He chewed down lightly on the bite block and felt a fresh blast of oxygen and vapor stimulants rush over him. "Stay frosty, Gods of War. What we did three seconds ago won't keep us alive the next ten."