The Tau Ceti Agenda

October 31, 2388 AD

Sol System

Oort Cloud

Saturday, 7:14 AM, Earth Eastern Standard Time

"What the hell was that!" Captain Jefferson shouted over the reverberating hull. The Madira lurched downward with the force of several gravities so abruptly that the captain's teeth rattled. The extreme noise propagating through the supercarrier's hull rapidly approached the danger zone. The CO was certain that standing with his head up the tailpipe of an FM-12 on full burn would be quieter. Jefferson also caught a glimpse of the COB losing his balance and tripping headfirst into the bulkhead. Had it not been so damned loud, he was certain that there would have been some colorful euphemisms to follow the COB's fall as he raised up, rubbing his forehead and sipping from the coffee mug from which he hadn't spilled a drop.

"Not sure, CO," Commander Monte Freeman, the ship's science and technology officer, replied. The STO tapped at his console and reached out for imaginary icons in his virtual mindview but found no answer. The impact or explosion or whatever the hell it was had just appeared to have come from out of nowhere. And whatever it had been had packed one hell of a wallop.

"Captain, we've got damage reports flooding in from everywhere." The XO shook his head to clear the ringing from his ears, just as the ship jerked and lurched a second time. "Fuck me!"

"Goddamnit, I want to know what that is!" Jefferson white- knuckled his chair until the ship stopped shaking. Yellow and red warning lights flashed, and klaxons blared across the bridge.

"I'm working on it, CO." The STO continued to work up simulations from the limited data that the ship's sensors had gathered on the impacts, but he was having little luck. The ship's self-diagnostic sensors, on the other hand, were going apeshit. The STO was certain that the CO could see all of this in his DTM, but he might not be paying attention to that particular detail at the moment since there was a battle raging outside and all. "The SIF generators were taxed to ninety percent of maximum and are running hotter than the coolant systems can overcome. From the usage of the SIFs, I should be able to back- calculate the energy of the impact."

"COB, you and Vanu see what you can find out!"

"Aye, sir." Command Master Chief Charlie Green and Senior Chief Patea Vanu started calling in to the watch posts and duty officers of all the decks for reports. All of them had been pounded to hell, but had no idea what had hit them. Nobody had seen a thing.

Uncle Timmy, you got anything? the CO asked his AIC.

Sorry, sir, I've played it back a hundred times already and can't seem to isolate it. Reflectance data from lidar sensors on the hull suggests there is a particulate cloud trailing from the impact region on the ship's hull. But I have yet to isolate what it was. Whatever it was gave us a thrust vector downward along these coordinates. The AIC flashed an image of the ship in the captain's mindview with arrows pointing out the change-in-thrust direction.

Keep at it, Timmy. Make sure the STO has this data.

Aye, sir.

"Nav, get ready for our turn for the second deployment run."

"Aye, sir."

"CO," Commander Michelle Wiggington said, looking up to the command chair.

"Go, Air Boss."

"We need to get the second wave out soon. The numbers game is catching up to us quicker than the sims said they would, sir. Radar and QM tracks are showing about thirty percent more enemy fighters than expected."

"Same on the ground, CO," the ground boss concurred.

"Goddamned intel pukes," the XO muttered under his breath. "They're always off twenty percent here, thirty percent there."

"Understood. Prepare for second run of sorties. XO?"

"Good to go, sir," the marine colonel replied. "The cats are all loaded and ready to fire on your command."

"STO, how about that impact?"

"Still working on it, sir. We need more data."

A few brief moments passed, and then the sound of a massive impact against the upper hull rang like a bell through the ship, again. Impact alerts and fire alarms continued sounding throughout the ship. The CO's DTM for the ship's health had a big bright red spot on the upper level near the aft section of the ship, and it was growing larger, like a viral infection spreading through a computer network. Secondary effects from the impacts were spreading with fires and hull breaches through the aft upper section of the ship. Again, Uncle Timmy flashed an updated vector model of the ship's thrust vector alterations. "Nav, rapid evasives!"

"Aye sir!" Lieutenant Commander Swain punched in an AA evasive-maneuvering algorithm and added a high-speed missile evasion routine on top of it. The ship started to move sluggishly with short jumps and drops, and then it was pounded again.

"I hope that is enough data for you, Mr. Freeman," the XO told the STO with a hint of sarcasm. The third-ranking bridge crewman paid the XO little attention. Everyone who was a member of the senior staff was used to, and for the most part fond of, the former marine fighter jock's sardonic wit. "I'm not sure we can survive much more of a study phase."

"I've got it, Captain! It's a mass driver. A big f'n mass driver. From my calculations, we're getting pounded with rounds the size of a fighter plane at a quarter the speed of light. There is a faint debris trail, very faint, from the projectile's path." The STO didn't look up from his screens and continued tapping frantically at his controls. His AIC was running mass driver sims in his head, giving him three- dimensional simulations to base his hypothesis against. He compared the thrust vector models of the ship that Uncle Timmy had generated with the dust particle tracks and was working on a launch point of origin.

"Mass driver! Shit. I want all available power converted to the upper level SIFs now!" the CO shouted. "Engine room!"

The goddamned Seppy bastards are adept; I'll say that about them.

Yes sir. Teleporters, mass drivers. What next? Timmy replied.

"Eng here, sir."

"Get me more power to the upper-level SIFs, now!"

"Working it, sir. We've got some loose nuts and bolts rattling around down here. Whatever hit us seems to have been aimed at Engineering. Fireman's Apprentice Ranes, lock that shit down there now! Sorry, sir. We're working it as fast as—"

"Just get me that power to the SIFs." Captain Jefferson cut the channel before the Eng could respond.

"CO, CDC!"

"Go, CDC."

"Sir, we've got a track on the impact. It's coming from the moon planetoid, sir."

"STO concurs with that track, CO!" Freeman agreed. His calculations had just completed and were telling him the same thing. A petty man might have been upset that the CDC had beaten him to the discovery by a millisecond, but Freeman was more concerned with not getting killed. Besides, it was always better to have two separate studies lead to the same conclusion.

"Roger that, CDC." Jefferson expanded his battleview out to the little planetoid above the facility and overlaid the track data sent up from the Combat Direction Center. The bright red line track went in a straight path from the hull of the ship right into the side of a jagged crater in the upper right-hand quadrant of the face of the pale gray planetoid.

"Gunnery Officer Rice! Target that spot and start pouring the DEGs there!"

"Aye sir!"

"Why'd they stop firing again? Anyone?"

"They shot twice, then paused, and then shot twice again," the STO added. "Hmmm . . ."

"Got any other useful analysis there, STO?" the XO said gruffly. "They shot twice, then waited, how long? And then they shot twice again."

"Let's see, there was thirty-one seconds almost precisely between shots within each of the two volleys so far," the STO said, answering the XO's challenge.

"Maybe they only have a double barrel, sir," the COB said. "I mean it follows with the STO's assessment."

"If that's the case, let's hope it takes a lot longer goddamned time to reload this go around," the CO replied. "Start a clock, STO. When do we expect the next hit?"

"On it, sir." Commander Freeman tapped away at his console again and conferred with his AIC. "There have been three minutes and fifty-seven seconds between volleys. Precisely, each time, so that implies a recharging, not a reloading process. That is about forty-two seconds frommmmm, now. Mark ticker! Clock is now transmitting to all the senior staff DTMs." His AIC synchronized the clock to the data to within a millisecond.

"Like I didn't have enough in there already." The XO grinned at the STO. A countdown started in the upper right-hand quadrant of his DTM in bright red numbers. The clock overlaid the several layers of DTM data continuously streaming through EndRun's mind. He acknowledged the countdown and went back to his previous display.

"Our casualty rates are getting worse by the second, CO," the air boss said.

"Ground boss still concurs, sir," Army Lieutenant Colonel James Brantley added.

"CO, we've got system failures across the boards." Colonel Chekov scanned through his DTM on the mission status to discern how this new threat was going to impact the second run of troop deployments. "And as the air boss and ground boss have mentioned, the clock says it's time for run two, sir. We better make it while the cats are still functioning."

"Hold a minute, XO. We need to take out that gun first. Gunnery Officer Rice, status?"

"We're pumping energy into the spot, sir, but the data is not that accurate. We might be hitting them, or we might just be hitting an empty crater hundreds of meters away from it," the lieutenant replied. "They're a long way off, sir."

"Keep firing on a standard dither pattern until you hit pay dirt. You see smoke; keep hitting that spot." He thought briefly about missiles, but at that distance, they would be sitting ducks for AA. The missiles only traveled about a tenth of light speed and would likely get shot down long before they got there. DEGs were the only choice for that range, even if they were too precise to take out such an ambiguously located target.

"Aye."

"Okay, XO. Let's set up for the second run. Nav, give me as random a damned path as you can. Let's all pray that goddamned mass drivers can't track on a rapidly moving target."

"All sorties and drop tubes, prepare for a second deployment run through the engagement zone," the air boss ordered over the air wing net.

"AEMs, AAI, and drop tank squads, prepare for ground deployment," the ground boss ordered.

The Sienna Madira had passed over the teleporter facility planetoids at a high rate of relative speed, deploying hovertanks, AEMs, and fighter support, while splattering the facility with directed energy blasts and cannon fire. In order for the ship not to be a sitting duck and to pull the AA fire and SAMs with it, the ship continued past the engagement zone and then out of range. Then, according to the battle plan, the supercarrier would make a second pass to deploy an overwhelming number of forces. The first deployment was a smaller portion of the overall blue force number. Using a small force at first was a standard tactic used when intelligence on an enemy force was sketchy at best. The first attack was used to draw out the enemy forces and get a better assessment of what they had. Then the supercarrier would make its second pass, dumping out the full contingent of its fighting force. The tactic had been used for centuries. The CO, being a student of twentieth-century ancient warfare, had taken this play from an ancient battle in the South Pacific over an island known as Iwo Jima.

The waiting was over, and it was time for the second pass. So far, the plans had been going mostly according to the simulations, except for the fact that there were about thirty percent more enemy fighters—and there was the other thing about the enemy's secret weapon. The sims had not accounted for their being a gigantic mass driver on the little moon.

Jesus Christ! A mass driver. How in hell did intel miss that? The clock in his head counted down to ten seconds.

Good question, sir, Uncle Timmy replied, just as perplexed as the CO was.

Sound the warning, Timmy.

Aye, sir.

"All hands, all hands! Brace for impact! Multiple hull breaches. Emergency crews standby! Expect two hits thirty-one seconds apart. Repeat, two hits in five, four, three, two, one."

The ship rang and screeched again and shook hard enough that the CO had internal bruising from his seat belt. The inertial dampening fields throughout the ship were taxed to the limit, and in several cases on the middle decks, the fields gave out, leaving hundreds of sailors suspended in microgravity for a few seconds. Jefferson's DTM buzzed massive damage and hull breaches. The Madira listed sideways, and the gravity generators wavered slightly, sending a wave of microgravity across the ship. A wave of nausea likely followed right behind the microgravity for most.

"Shit, they've most certainly reloaded. Right on schedule, STO."

"Captain, we've got SIF generator failures on multiple decks. Coolant system is overwhelmed and ruptured on multiple decks. Hull breaches reported," the XO exclaimed. "It must be a double barrel, sir! Good work, STO."

Timmy, sound a brace for impact! Captain Jefferson dug his fingernails into the armrests of his chair and watched the seconds tick down in his mindview.

Aye, sir.

"All hands, all hands! Brace for impact! Multiple hull breaches. Emergency crews standby! Second hit imminent in five, four, three, two, one . . . ."

"Rice! Knock that goddamned thing out!"

"This is so gonna suck, sir," the COB slammed his magnetic coffee mug into its holder, gripped his chair, and then pushed his feet against the underside of the station for extra support.

The second shot of the mass driver pounded right on top of the previous spots. The severely sublight evasive maneuvers were of little effect to an object traveling twenty-five percent photon speed. The projectile poked through the nanocarbon composite metal hull, vaporizing two decks before it completely disintegrated with the violence of turning several tons of slag metal to vapor instantaneously. Four decks deeper, the rupture stopped. Unfortunately, that deck was where the all-important space-time dragging sublight propulsion system was.

The power system to the sublight engines exploded like a mini- nuke, destroying decks all around it in every direction for at least thirty meters. A violent orange fireball swept across the decks, hot enough to turn solid metal to molten lava. Hundreds of sailors were vaporized almost instantly, and hundreds more were dumped into space. Fortunately, the vacuum of space extinguished the fireball almost as rapidly as it formed, leaving a gaping hole in the back of the now listing and propulsionless supercarrier.

"Sublight propulsion system is gone, CO!" Larry shouted. "They knew right where to hit us too! Jaunt drive took serious damage."

"Auxiliary propulsion?" the CO asked.

"Not sure, sir. The flow loops for the power were so disrupted, who knows," the STO shrugged.

"Engine room! When will I get my propulsion back?"

"Working it, sir. We've got massive casualties down here. I need every fire crew you can get me to reroute the systems. The aux prop is out too, for at least thirty minutes, until I can get power to it."

"You have three minutes and fifty-two seconds, Eng!"

"Aye, sir!"

"What about the sorties, sir?" the ground boss asked. "My guys are getting chewed to all hell and gone down there."

"Comm! Get the Blair in here now!"

"Yes sir!"

"Air Boss, launch all the sorties now!"

"We're waaay out of range, CO." The air boss did some quick math in his head via the help of his AIC. The fighters were typically rated as having a top speed of two thousand kilometers per hour. That wasn't true, actually. In an appreciable atmosphere that was mostly true, but in space the fighters could accelerate as long as they wanted to and eventually reach an extremely fast velocity. The problem with that was slowing down. In order to slow down, the fighters had to decelerate just as long as they had initially accelerated. And, the inertial dampeners could only handle so many g-forces and the SIFs, and hull plating could only handle so much impact. A micrometeorite at speeds much faster than the max rated safe speed put the pilot and aircraft at much greater risk.

"CO."

"Go, Air Boss."

"The fighters at double the rated safe speed would still put them about ten minutes from the engagement zone. Engineering might have aux prop up by then."

"They might. Deploy all sorties now. Pilots have volunteer's discretion for approach speed." The CO suspected that allowing the jocks to volunteer to push their planes beyond the limits might encourage them to push the performance envelope of their systems. Hell, the air boss was all the time writing up the pilots for violating the speed protocols, and now he was giving them free reins. "Air Boss, make certain to reiterate the suggested safe speeds."

"Aye, sir."

"What about the ground, sir?" the ground boss asked.

"Sorry, James. Unless we get prop of some sort or the other, they're gonna have to do the best they can. Relay that message."

"Air Boss."

"Sir?"

"Pull the Gods of War from high-altitude engagement, and tell DeathRay to help out the ground troops."

"Aye, sir. That might prove difficult, as they are covered up more than three to one right now."

"Pull them down. It might force the Seppy bastards into a more confined engagement zone and shrink the bowl." The "bowl" was what fighter jocks had called the engagement zone for centuries. In space, the engagement zone was a full three-dimensional sphere, or "ball." But over a surface, it was a hemisphere or an upside-down bowl. By pulling the fighters in closer to the ground, the ball became a bowl, and the closer they could pull down, the smaller the bowl got. This made turns tighter and maneuvers harder, giving better pilots and more advanced technology the biggest advantage in the dogfight.

"The goddamned bowl is too big for certain," the XO added. Being a marine mecha jock in his earlier career, EndRun understood the tactics of dogfighting firsthand. The captain was glad that his XO agreed with him.

"Roger that, sir."

"XO, make certain that all power is put on the SIFs. We're sitting ducks out here." The clock had reset after the last mass driver round hit the ship and started counting down again. Two minutes thirty- eight seconds to go. "Rice! Tell me you are going to hit that thing before it hits us again!"

"Firing, sir. The DEGs are dithering the target area, but spectral analysis doesn't show anything other than ice or rock being hit yet, sir. They may be too deep in the ground."

"Keep firing, son."

God help us now.

Agreed, sir.

"Engineer's Mate Shah, hit that motherfucker right there with this BFW until I tell you to stop!" Main Propulsion Assistant Lieutenant Joe Buckley II shouted over the whistling and crackling of the raging fires and hissing flow system leaks as he hefted a really big fucking wrench toward the EM1. The meter-long tool clanked against the deck near Shah's feet, and the EM1 grunted as he picked the heavy thing up.

A crackle of electricity broke free from the hyperspace-lensing system and reached out across the gas vapors in the air, finding a path to electrical ground through the lieutenant's coveralls. The high-voltage shock knocked him a good six meters through the foul, vapor-filled air into the bulkhead on the aft side of the Engine Room. The lieutenant landed back first against the metal plating with his arms and legs akimbo. His head hit with a crack, sending a wave of stars across his vision to go along with the white lightning arc still there from his saturated retina.

"Lieutenant!"

"Keep fucking hammering on that stress valve, Shah!" Buckley blinked hard and pulled himself up to his feet, shaking his head. More arcs were jumping free of the projector power grid and had to be brought under control. Buckley ran to the control board for the power system, looking for any visual clues as to which systems could still be used, for anything, anything useful and which ones absolutely had to be turned the fuck off.

The power conduits had been fried all over the goddamned ship, and the board was lit up like a Christmas tree. The sublight prop was completely gone. It had been literally smashed to hell and vaporized with several decks of the ship above them. The aux prop was out, too. But the CHENG thought that he could get it back online in a few minutes.

According to the clock that the CO had just put into the entire engineering crew's head, Joe could tell that he had about two minutes and thirty seconds to figure something out. Sitting around and waiting for the Eng to get the aux prop online didn't seem like a good idea to him.

The power couplings between the vacuum fluctuation energy collectors and storage system and the hyperspace projector and fluctuation field shields were intact, and the tube was swirling a perfect pink and purple hue. The problem was that there was no way to get the energy from the storage units to the projector so that it could generate the hyperspace vortex in front of the ship. That took a lot of energy. There was energy stored away in the collector and storage capacitors and there was a hyperspace projector, but there was a gulf between them that might as well have been light-years. Another finger of high voltage leaped across the room into the bulkhead grounding out, and a relay on the board went red as the arc died. There was a faint puff of smoke and some foul, burned-plastic smell coming from within the power-grid couplings.

"Well, that solves the random arcing problem," he said to nobody in particular.

Buckley ran through the standard training for such a situation. The supercarriers were designed so that all the plumbing and power conduits could be interspersed in "worst-case scenarios" according to the training manuals, but there was always a mess to clean up afterward, so the manuals emphasized the worst-case-scenario bit. Buckley considered his situation and decided that imminent death from a relativistic mass driver round qualified as a worst-case scenario, and he also recalled the way his father had rerouted coolant systems for the DEGs on the Madira during the battle at the Martian Exodus. He hoped like hell that this wasn't "déjà vu all over again."

"Sir! The valve broke off, and this thing is getting goddamned heavy," EM1 Shah shouted.

"It broke?"

"Yes, sir! Broke off! What do I do now?"

"Nothing, Shah! That's exactly what I wanted. Now get the fuck away from that thing. It's gonna blow ethylene glycol all over the fucking place in about five seconds."

"Shit, sir!" EM1 Shah shagged his ass across the engineering section over debris and to the propulsion station with Buckley.

"Let me see . . ." Buckley rubbed at his chin, smearing soot across it as he did. "Shah, get the biggest fucking power cable you can find and tie it off to the coupler box on the projector power intake."

"You're the boss!"

Debbie, find me an alternate route for the power between the collector bank and here. I'm gonna plug into this tertiary cooling loop.

I'm looking, Joe. That flow goes down two decks, then over seven. There is a DEG system across the hallway there. Then there is a . . . His

AIC explained the route as highlights along the ship's engineering schematic appeared. At each new highlight, Joe authorized a valve, a switch, a relay, or even a door in a few cases to be opened, closed, thrown, or cracked as needs be. In another instance, he sent a fire crew down a deck with a laserwelder to weld a hatch door across a hallway, connecting two separate flow loop conduits. He had emphasized that they needed to fucking hurry.

"Lieutenant Buckley, we've got the hatch door welded across the conduits, sir," the chief of the fire crew reported.

"Good, now get the hell out of there."

"Roger that, sir."

"CO, MPA Buckley!

"What is it, Mr. Buckley!"

"CO, I need Nav to put in a coordinate location for the jaunt drive now!"

"What's up, Mr. Buckley?"

"I think I can give us one short jaunt, sir."

"Roger that, MPA."

"Air Boss! Hold those fighters!"

"Uh, sir, they're out of the ship," the air boss replied sheepishly.

"Damnit all to fucking hell, will nothing go right today?"

"Ground Boss, get ready for rapid drop."

"Yes, sir."

"Okay, Nav, set jaunt coordinates to . . ."

Ethylene glycol that was heated to about ninety degrees Celsius burst from the smashed valve across the engineering corridor and spewed hot coolant into the room like a rocket nozzle spraying propellant. The coolant spread out quickly and cooled to nearly safe temperatures. Boots, gloves, and coveralls would be enough to keep the engineering crew safe from the heated coolant leak. The system quickly drained and covered the floor on the port and aft side of Engineering about three centimeters deep.

Fifty-three, fifty-two, fifty-one . . .

"Goddamnit, Buckley. What the hell are you doing?" Commander Harrison screamed from two corridors down in the aux prop room. "I just lost all the tertiary coolant pressure to aux power."

"Saving our ass, Benny, uh, sir!" he replied to the CHENG.

"Cable is connected to the input coupler, Lieutenant!" EM1 Shah yelled over the noise to Buckley and shrugged. "What next, sir?"

"Tie the other end of that thing around the pipe you just smashed with the BFW!"

"Huh, oh! I see, sir." The engineer's mate first class tugged at the ten-centimeter-diameter power cable and dragged it across the deck, sloshing through the hot coolant pooled on the floor. The weight of the cable was too much for him to wrap around the conduit by himself, and two other firemen joined in his struggle with the thing.

"Pull, Fireman's Apprentice Cain! Pull, goddamnit!" Shah shouted as the three men struggled against the cable. Shah had both his feet against the pipe and was pulling with both hands at the cable, tug-of- war style.

"As tight as you can get it, Shah!" Buckley glanced over his shoulder at the EM1 and his team working at the cable. "Weld that son of a bitch into place!"

"Yes, sir," Shah held onto the cable with all his might. "You heard the lieutenant, Fireman. Weld that son of a bitch down!"

Buckley frantically rerouted power couplings via the board and through various DTM connections. His AIC was always four or five switches ahead of him, but he had to authorize each throw, unless he were incapacitated for some reason.

Twenty-eight, twenty-seven . . .

"Engineering! Any time now."

"Almost there, Captain!" Buckley replied.

"Lieutenant! Cable is in place, sir!"

"All right, clear out."

The fire crew cleared out, and Shah took Buckley's left flank.

"I'm here if you need me, Lieutenant."

Buckley was too busy to respond at that point. The clock was ticking down, and the board had to be reconfigured just right, or a power breaker could trip and the power would never make it to the jaunt drive. He reached up to the control board and tracked down the relay switch to set the power rerouting into motion. All of the system was going to dump a small star's worth of exotic energy through the various parts of the ship, and hopefully it would reach the projector. And, hopefully, it wasn't going to fry everybody along the way.

"Here goes nothing," he said.

The clock in Joe's head ticked to seven seconds as he finally depressed the relay switch, and lights on the board all turned red in sequence, like a stack of falling dominoes. Several of them physically blew out. Sparks began flying across the switching system, and several fires broke out on the back side of the computer controller rack. Had every alarm and klaxon not already been sounding in the ship, they would've most certainly started blaring then.

"Uh, EM1 Shah, I suggest we get the fuck down!"

"All hands, all hands! Brace for impact! Multiple hull breaches. Emergency crews standby! Second hit imminent in five, four, three, two, one . . ."

"CO, CDC!"

"Go, CDC."

"We've got massive electromagnetic signatures forming above the teleport facility!"

"I'll worry about that in a minute," the CO muttered.

A bolt of electricity stronger than most bolts of lighting jetted out from the busted valve stem of the coolant flow loop through the large power cable and across the gap to the projector power coupling. The cable danced around, at first wildly like a poorly thrown jump rope, and then it was locked still with a snap by the extreme electromagnetic bottle created from the field lines of the system. The cable sheathing melted away, and the metal strands glowed bright like the filament of an incandescent light bulb. Then the cable vaporized into a plasma of metal gases, and the electric arc hummed and filled the gap between the conduit and the projector power coupler. The bolt grew white-hot with shades of violet pulsing through it. The projector began to whirl up. It whirled faster and faster as the gamma particles tried to breach the massive gravitational boundary of the event horizon within it. The exotic energy flow pulsed through the space-time bubble created within the field projector.

It's working, Joe!

Yeah, let's hope and pray it does quickly!

Sparks exploded off of several systems as smaller fingers of the electric bolt tried to dance free of the electromagnetic bottle. Each time a bolt would strike a bulkhead, part of the metal would be vaporized, and more nasty gaseous fumes would be added to the room's already nauseous atmosphere. Joe's DTM still displayed the engineering drawing of the makeshift power conduit path that he had created, and along the path, he could see emergency systems being activated. There were fire alarms, secondary explosion alerts, loss of atmosphere, overpressure, and any other type of alert that was in the safety protocols of the ship's systems. Then there was a rupture along a maintenance corridor six decks down, and the power drained off to ground in the deck plating of the floor for a microsecond before the power supply ground-fault circuit interrupters kicked the breakers. The lightning bolt across Engineering vanished, and the whirling of the projector slowed to idle.

"Maybe that worked." Buckley crawled up to his feet giving the engineer's mate first class a hand.

"We're gonna need a shit load of mops, sir." Shah shook his head at the mess in the Engine Room.

"Actually, Vineet, we need to run as fast as we can to sickbay."

"Why, sir? I feel fine."

"Yep, so do I. But in about five minutes, our bodies are going to realize that we've just been hard-boiled by all the extremely high energy x-rays that we were just exposed to, and we're gonna start dying of extreme radiation dosage." Buckley looked at his hands to see if they were swelling yet. He felt the need to grunt and clear his throat, which was definitely a bad sign.

Start a clock, Debbie.

Already did, Joe. In three minutes, it will be hard for you to keep walking. Now, get moving. Joe?

Yes, Debbie?

The ship is still here. Your father would be proud. Joe noticed that the clock for the mass driver impact was now at plus twenty-eight seconds.

"Let's move it, EM1."

"Jesus, sir. I don't wanna die!"

"Well then, you'd better fucking hurry to sickbay."