The Tau Ceti Agenda

October 31, 2388 AD

Sol System

Oort Cloud

Saturday, 7:35 AM, Earth Eastern Standard Time

"Let's go, Robots!" Major Roberts pounded through the hangar bay, laying down cover fire across the catapult deck. Several enemy Stingers rushed them in bot mode but apparently were reluctant to go to guns inside their own facility. PFC Kent ran up a wall and flipped over a troop lifter to the left of the major, firing into the back of the vehicle's engine cowl. The cowl blew free as he passed overhead. The PFC hit the ground rolling to cover on the far wall. PFC Gray was right behind him, firing into the open-engine port with a grenade launcher. The grenade detonated inside the skin of the lifter, blowing out the walls of it in all four directions.

"Watch your right flank, Major!" Gunnery Sergeant McCandless warned him, and she dove across the cat lane in front of a Lorda that was catting out.

She rolled aross the runway behind a pylon, and a stack of pallets raised up to fire her HVAR at the Stinger that was racing toward the major. Her HVAR rounds spitapped into the armor plating of the vehicle at the knee joint until fluid squirted freely in a shower of sparks. The mecha tumbled like an runner tripping on a shoe lace, face-forward onto the deck. The major bounced into a flip, landed on the mecha's back and fired several rounds into it, and then he bounced again, landing beside the sergeant.

"Good shooting, Gunny."

"Yes, sir." Tamara checked her ammo, and Major Roberts took the hint and did the same. "If you don't mind my asking, Major, what the fuck is it that we are doing in here again?"

"Gunny, we are here to make a general goddamned nuisance of ourselves and to gather intel." Roberts stood and let go with a quick burst of cover fire back toward the catapult control booth, where several drop-tank support troops had filed up to hold the marines at bay. There weren't that many of them, and the major was beginning to suspect that the Seppies hadn't planned for a ground assault by AEMs. And that was a bad mistake on their part.

"Johnny? Where the hell are you, Lieutenant?" Roberts asked over the tac-net.

"We are a story up and east of you, about a hundred meters on the far wall of the bay, sir." Roberts could see the blue dot in his DTM but had no visual.

"You got anything interesting over there?"

"Yes sir, I do. Suez has stumbled across what looks like blueprints to a mass driver, sir!"

"Yeah, there's one on the moon of this place, I've been told." Roberts checked his blue force tracker and mapped out where all of his robots were. Suez was deep inside, several stories in beyond the hangar. How the sneaky bastard had managed that, Roberts wasn't quite sure.

"Uh, no sir. This mass driver is here, sir. Only a few hundred meters in."

"What? Is it operational?" Roberts expanded his mindview and downloaded the blueprints and the map data that Lance Corporal Suez had uncovered.

"From what we can tell, it looks like it is, Major. Any orders, sir?"

"You're goddamned right. Robots! Converge on Suez and let's see if we can't commandeer us a big fucking gun!"

Tamara rolled out from behind the pallets and launched several grenades into the booth, sending it crashing down onto the support troops beneath it. The cat field generators must have been connected somehow because one of the boxes at the end of the runway blew out like a volcano. Secondary explosions followed along a conduit around the hangar wall. Several SIF generators blew as well. The deck shook so hard from the explosion that Tamara and Roberts were both tossed backward off their feet. Had there been an atmosphere in the hangar, the shock wave from the explosion would have probably killed them both. But they were in the vacuum of space, and the explosion did its job with no blast wave. It was a lucky-as-hell shot, but luck counted, as far as the marines were concerned.

"Scratch one hangar." The gunnery sergeant grinned a toothy smile that Roberts could see through her faceplate.

"Scratch it? Hell, I think you broke the piss out of it, Gunny."

"Look, Danny, this tunnel to our left is really a construction elevator shaft to the control room of the mass driver. It goes down probably a kilometer." Suez scanned the adit to the underground facility for any sign of enemy-troop movement but found no trace of it. The computer system at the entrance room had been left unmanned and operational. It didn't take long for his recon AIC to hack the login and to start pulling data. He looked back down the shaft of the elevator. There was only a safety bar at waist height across the opening and no lift in place. The readout to the right of the shaft was lit at the bottom, which suggested that the eleveator was all the way down. He pushed the top button and it lit up.

"Why don't they use the thing if it's operational?" PFC Bates asked.

"Maybe it was their day off? How the hell do I know?" Suez smirked. "You want to wait for the major or check it out?"

"I vote we wait."

"Suez, let us the fuck in!" There was a pounding at the air lock door.

"Did you hear that?" PFC Bates slipped his visor hissing back down into place and nervously turned with his HVAR to the ready.

"Take it easy, Danny." Suez checked the blue dots in his DTM and then cycled the lock on the exterior door. The overpressure air blew out into the hall chamber and then equalized. The lock opened, and the lieutenant, Sergeant Nicks, and Corporal Pagoolas clanked in. From trained reflex actions, each of them popped their visors to get a breath of real air. AEMs never knew when they'd get a chance to breathe real air, so they immediately did so every chance they got.

"Lieutenant." Suez nodded his armored head.

"That's the tunnel?" The lieutenant looked down the shaft and whistled.

"Yes, sir."

"Fucker's deep," Corporal Pagoolas added from beside the lieutenant as he leaned over the safety bar, looking down the shaft.

"The major has ordered us to go down the tube and take the control room to this thing. He and the others will hold this position. Let's find out if we can put this thing to some good use."

"Uh, Lieutenant," Danny stuttered. "I was wondering . . ."

"Spit it out, Bates."

"If this thing is operational, why ain't they using it?"

"Maybe it's their day off." Lieutenant Noonez shrugged.

"Why don't we go ask them ourselves, Private?" Sergeant Nicks added.

The elevator was nothing more than a lifter platform that was the exact shape of and slightly smaller than the shaft itself. The safety rail was about waist high around the periphery of the platform, and on opposite sides of the rail, there were two caution lights and one control box with several buttons and a videophone. The elevator descended the kilometer drop in less than a minute with little acceleration noticeable on the platform. Inertial dampening fields regulated the acceleration of the lift to match that of the facility.

"Okay, on the perimeters. We don't know what's waiting at the bottom," Noonez warned. "Nicks, take point."

"Yes, sir. Pagoolas, you and Bates on my left. Tommy, you have my right."

The four of them lined up and knelt in position with their railgun rifles drawn and ready to fire. They held quietly in place as the lift dropped to the bottom. The lights on the control box dinged as each floor passed until it reached the last one, coming to a stop in a room almost identical to the one they had been in up top. It was empty otherwise.

"Go, Sergeant," Noonez ordered.

Karen slowly removed the safety bar over the opening and stepped into the room. She scanned her weapon left and right and then motioned that the room was clear. Pagoolas and Suez filed in on her flanks, and then Bates and Noonez pulled in behind them. There was nobody around.

"Well, that was anticlimactic," Pagoolas said.

"Just the way I like," Bates replied.

The room was no more than seven meters across with a double door on the other side. There was a yellow dotted line leading to doors, suggesting a pallet-lifter vehicle track. Lance Corporal Suez eased around the periphery of the room to a control panel like the one he had seen upstairs, and he let his AIC handshake with it.

The crew has been put on duty at the other driver. I guess that means the one on the moon. This one's abandoned, according to the records.

Right. Good work.

"LT, it's been abandoned for now. The crew has been restationed to the other mass driver, according to the records here." Suez continued to listen to his AIC for another brief moment. "My AIC says that they went there today, but we're not sure when exactly or how."

"Good work, Tommy." The lieutenant thought about what to do for a brief moment. "Okay, then. If there's nobody here, let's make ourselves at home. Nicks, take point again."

"Yes, sir."

Sergeant Nicks slid the double doors open and led the team into a larger room. There was a construct of electronics, power plants, and a very large two-beam track running upward through a hole in the ceiling of the room. A large conveyor with several solid black cubes on it led to the center of the two-beam metal track. The cubes were about two meters on a side and were the texture of crushed metal like that from a recycling plant.

"Those must be the bullets for this thing," Nicks said, pointing an armored hand at the cubes. "They must weight a fuckin' ton."

"LT! Look at this. I think I found the targeting system." Tommy was looking at a station with multiple flat screens and a universal data port hardwire connector for DTM. There was a joystick system and several buttons on the control board. The viewport had yellow crosshairs in it, and the view was from above, on the surface looking upward. The moon facility above could be seen, and only parts of the battlespace were in view.

"Aha," Noonez nodded. "The battlespace is out of the field of view of this gun. That's why they left and went up there. This gun must be to protect that moon, and the moon is there to protect this base."

"Why build a gun all the way up there to protect us down here?" Pagoolas asked.

"These things can only aim over a very small angle," Tommy explained, moving his HVAR barrel back and forth to illustrate. "The farther away your target is, the more likey it will be in your line of fire. Makes sense to have two of them."

"But that's bad for us. It means we can't use this gun to our advantage," Sergeant Nicks said.

"Shit. I'd better call the major."

"Hey Tommy, check this thing out." Bates was staring down at the floor in the corner of the room.

"Now what do you suppose that is?" Pagoolas patted an armored hand on the PFC's shoulder. "Looks like a drawing of this place."

"What d'you mean?" Bates asked.

"Well, look. The outline here is an octagon, and there are several more octagons inside it, but smaller," Tommy noted. "And look here— there are big circles at the corners where the towers are on the big thing up top."

"I see, and here's a big circle in the middle like the biggest tower in the middle." Bates nodded that he understood.

"But what the hell is it used for?" Nicks turned a full circle, looking at the construction on the ground and kneeling to feel it. The drawing was more than just a drawing. "Looks like circuitry."

"Maybe." Tommy knelt beside the sergeant and looked at it also. He had always been infatuated with the engineering of his armored suits, so he had read a lot of technical literature on them and had taught himself a good bit about modern circuitry. But this was different. "LT, you ought to see this."

"What have you got?" Noonez clanked over to them.

"Hey, look here." Pagoolas was studying a control box with two buttons in the middle of it. One button was directly above the other. The bottom one was lit. "Looks like elevator controls." He reached out and depressed the top one.

"No wait!"