The Tau Ceti Agenda

October 31, 2388 AD

Sol System

Oort Cloud

Saturday, 7:39 AM, Earth Eastern Standard Time

"Come on Fish, we need to do what we can to stop this battle cruiser." DeathRay bobbed and weaved his fighter-mode Ares-T fighter at top speed across the surface of the enemy ship, firing missiles at anything that his QMs suggested might be a vital system. His only hopes were that they could hit a major power system that would cause secondary explosions, which in turn would hopefully debilitate the ship.

"Two fighters against a battle cruiser sounds a bit epic to me, DeathRay." Fish dropped to bot mode, clanking into the hull of the ship to avoid the AA fire stations on the aft section near the hangar bay. She ran up behind a cannon, tearing the barrel out of its mount, and then she kicked the power supply with her mechanized foot. When that didn't work, she went to her DEG. The box spewed vaporized hull plating and then burned through to the next layer of armor. "DeathRay! Our weapons are too small. We need a nuke."

"Fresh out," Jack replied. He decided that the best way to do damage would have to be from the inside and that they needed to change their approach.

Candis, can you find us a way in?

I'm scanning. Nothing is deploying from this ship, and it seems locked down tight.

Of course it is.

"We need to make a hole, Fish."

The ship shuddered, and out of the corner of his eye, Jack could see an eruption of orange and blue plasma spewing from the starboard side of the ship. Debris spun out from the opening into space, and then the plasma dissipated.

"What was that?" Fish asked.

"Boland, this is Penzington, copy?"

"Roger that, Penzington. What's up?"

"I just flew a Lorda through two bulkheads into the hyperdrive jaunt projector. Did you happen to notice an explosion out there?" Penzington asked.

"Uh, yeah. It blew out of the hull on the starboard side. I thought that might have been you. We're coming in. Where are you now?"

"I'm about four decks below the center of that blast trying to make my way to the aux prop control room."

"Understood. We'll make for the sublight prop power through the doorway you made for us." Jack banked his snub-nosed fighter over a communications dish and throttled toward the blast area.

"You with me, Fish?"

"Got your wing, DeathRay."

"What the hell was that!" Elle Ahmi stormed onto the bridge of the Phlegra up to the ship's captain.

"The jaunt drive power plant just blew out, General," the man replied reluctantly.

"Did we take a hit?"

"No, we didn't. We are protected fairly well." The captain seemed flummoxed.

"Captain, I've got a report from the maintence deck."

"Go, XO."

"Seems that one of the Lorda troop lifters went nuts and flew through several bulkheads at max thrust and crashed into the jaunt containment cylinder," the XO explained.

"No!" Ahmi screamed. Then she toggled her DTM communications channel open. "Doctor, this is Ahmi. Where is the prisoner?" There was no response.

"General?"

"I should have killed her myself!" Ahmi had her AIC open the ship's 1MC and then announced, "All hands, this is General Ahmi. There is an intruder aboard, a young-looking female with long, black hair. She is to be killed on sight! Find her, now!"

"Captain! Two marine FM-12s have penetrated into the hull breach."

"No! Goddamnit, no!" Ahmi pounded her leather-gloved fist into her hand.

"Normal space, Captain!" the Blair's navigator warned Captain Walker.

"Multiple targets, ma'am."

"Fire at will, Ensign Blake!" Fullback checked her DTM and mapped out a plan. First thing she had to do was to get the ship's mecha unloaded and into the fight. "Air Boss?"

"The Killers are out, Captain. Drop tubes are firing as we speak."

"That ought to help a little. Order the Killers to drop to the line and help out the tanks."

"Aye, ma'am."

"Okay, we need to draw some fire away from the Madira and give them time to catch their breath." Sharon studied the red force distribution for a brief moment and decided to go after the heavy hitter first. "All firing solutions focus on the hauler. All missiles, all DEGs, and all cannons fire at will at the hauler."

"Ares squadrons away, Captain!" the air boss notified her.

"Ground Boss?"

"Drop tanks are going. We'll need a few more minutes. Then we can unload the AEMs and the AAIs." The ground combat commander continued tapping controls at his console.

"Okay. Nav, give me a run on the hauler at full forward."

"Aye, ma'am."

The ship screamed from a violent impact and jerked back and forth so fast the inertial fields couldn't dampen out the rapid change in acceleration. A second later, the ship righted itself, but there were warning bells and klaxons sounding.

"What the hell was that?" the XO exclaimed.

"I've got a debris field erupting from the moon planetoid at the railgun sight, Captain," the STO said. Sharon checked the countdown clock in her DTM, and it was right on schedule. She had just assumed that the nukes had done the job.

"What? The nukes didn't do it?" the COB asked.

"Apparently not. The thing was pretty deep. My guess is that we caved the top of the tunnel in and then melted it shut. The Seppies must have just fired the mass driver right through it, clearing out the hole," the STO replied.

"Shit! It's a double barrel! Nav, hyperspace jaunt, now!"

"No can do, ma'am. That hit got us on the aft section and blew out several power junctions. The SIFs were still full front for our attack on the hauler," the STO interrupted. "Sublight is still up."

"Evasive maneuvers! Now! Try to get that hauler between us and the moon."

"Madira, we're getting chewed to hell and gone down here!" Colonel Warboys yelled into the net at the ground boss up top. "The air support is so out numbered that they are getting picked off one by one, and the Warlords are completely fucking pinned down!"

Warboys' tank was in bot mode and leaning up against a crater rim, and his big cannon nose peeked over the edge, twisting back and forth looking for targets. There were plenty of them—on all sides. The Warlords had pushed hard through the line to make a hole for Major Roberts' AEM recon team to sneak into the facility. Once they had gotten through, the tankheads had found themselves behind enemy lines and seriously flanked.

The only cover that they had managed to find was what appeared to be a recycling dump, which was effectively a junkyard of scrap materials that the Seppies hadn't found a use for yet. The refuse was scattered about a man-made crater about fifty meters wide and about five meters deep at the bottom. The scattered debris had come in useful for cover. The tankheads had hefted onto the rim several girders, discarded catwalks, crunched-up metal containers, and anything else that they could dig up to give them a little more cover.

They had managed to construct four quick mecha-sized foxholes at the three, six, nine, and twelve o'clock positions around the crater rim.

"Warlord One, we understand your situation and will get help to you as soon as we can. Shit is thick all over, Mason. Do what you can and keep your fucking head down," the ground boss of the Madira replied to him.

"Fuck. Warlord Two, I'm getting way too many red dots on your side of the rim."

"There are too many targets, One. Prepare to be overrun! Guns, guns, guns!"

"Dawgs, Saviors, we sure could use a hand!"

"Roger that . . . fuck . . . Warlord One," Poser responded to the tankheads' leader over the tac-net. A blast from one of the three enemy Gnats on her tail pinged into her nose SIFs, but the armor held. "Saviors, Saviors, do you copy?"

"Go Poser, this is Skinny!" the leader of the marine FM-12 squadron replied.

"The Warlords need immediate assistance on the ground. The Dawgs are gonna go pukin' deathblossom. That should give you enough air cover to hit the surface and give them some relief." Poser had been contemplating ordering the Navy pilots into the maneuver for which their fighters were specifically designed. It was a deadly maneuver for the enemy, but it also rendered the Ares-T pilots spent for several seconds afterward, leaving them vulnerable.

"Shit! Fox three!" Poser cut the power to the engines on the HOTAS and then yanked the stick hard left to give her some space between herself and the Gnats on her tail.

"I got you, boss!" Her wingman, Skater, rolled in an energy- usurping maneuver to draw the fire, giving Wendy time to go to guns.

"Guns, guns, guns."

"Roger that, Poser. The Saviors will hit the deck in bot as soon as you start puking."

Wendy's fighter spun over from her maneuver, forcing blood to her extremities and out of her brain. The g-suit squeezed her, and she grunted and flexed against the crushing weight. It subsided as her trajectory leveled off.

"Whoah, shit!" She shook her head to clear her mind. "That was nothing compared to this," she said to no one in particular. "All Demon Dawgs, listen up. Give yourself space and go to pukin' deathblossom as soon as you can on my mark! Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one, go!"

Lieutenant Commander Wendy "Poser" Hill stomped on her left pedal and yanked the stick, rolling her Ares-T fighter over nose-first toward the surrounded Warlords below. Slamming the HOTAS throttle forward, she initiated a vector correction that pushed her at max velocity and minimum transit time to give them cover. At the same time that her acceleration line pushed her toward the Warlords, she pivoted the little snub-nosed mecha about its center point, scanning and firing on targets to give the Saviors cover.

The maneuver had been referred to as a "pukin' deathblossom" from some ancient pop-culture reference and because the wild spin put constantly changing g-loading on the pilot. The mad, three- dimensional spin would cause the pilot's inner ear to go apeshit crazy, and at the same time, the ship would spin like a whirling dervish, spewing death and hellfire from cannons and DEGs in all directions. The AICs and the direct-mind linkages were required for such a maneuver to prevent blue-on-blue casualties, but it was effective.

The spinning was usually more than the pilots could take and would force them to vomit violently from the inner-ear confusion. But most good Navy pilots could take a little vomit in their e-suit helmet, and the inner recycle layer of the suits usually absorbed the vomit in seconds. It was the retching being followed by the pressure suit squeezes and the high g-loading that took real presence of mind, fresh air, and vapor stims to overcome. It would take them a few seconds on the other side of the maneuver to be worth a damn. But there was usually very little in the way of targets left following the eighteen- second maneuver.

"I'm with you, Poser!" Skater replied, following suit and throwing his mecha at max acceleration past the cover of Wendy's pukin' deathblossom, and then initiated his own spherical cyclone of mad destruction.

"Roger that," came the reply from the six surviving Demon Dawgs, all rolling into the wild, deadly spin maneuver.

The stars spun wildly around Poser as she tried to stay focused on the targets and threats, but at the moment, vomiting was about all she could manage. "Ugh." She licked at her lips and accepted her bite block back in her mouth. She toggled the water icon, and a small cool squirt filled her mouth. She sloshed it for a second and swallowed it down. Her scratched throat burned from it.

"Hope that helped, Warlords."

The eight deathblossoms from the Dawgs spun out, leaving exploding and scattering enemy formations everywhere. The maneuver spread the bowl out and gave the Utopian Saviors time to focus on ground work. But the sky was filled with Seppy Gomers. Even though more than ten enemy planes had just been destroyed and another twenty were hit or at least scared, another forty dropped in from the outer edges of the bowl to support them. The Gods of War were up above and mixed in with the Dawgs, but there were too many holes in the dike and not enough fingers to plug them.

"Warning, radar lock. Warning, enemy targeting engaged." Wendy's Bitchin' Betty startled her, bringing some coherence back into her mind.

"Fuck!" She shook her head while throwing the HOTAS full-throttle and yanking the stick to her stomach. The fighter slammed her into her seat as it climbed at maximum acceleration. Orange tracer fire swarmed past her left wing but missed by mere centimeters.

"Poser! Bank hard right!" a voice warned her over the tac-net. Wendy didn't care who it was. It was a friendly who was covering her ass. She banked hard right.

Her fighter cut into the steepest turn she could manage and she was thrown into near blackout conditions. The suit and the stims were doing all they could do to keep her conscious. But the deathblossom had taken a serious physical toll on her body that she had yet to recover from.

Stay alert, Poser! Wendy! Wen . . . her AIC screamed in her mind, but it didn't help.

The stars stopped spinning, and they tunneled in around her into a distant, single point of light way out in front of her. Wendy's mind felt peaceful for a split second, and the distant point of light started to fade out.

A severe pain in her side burned through the blackness like a torch. Stimulants and a short defibrillator shock from her suit restarted her heartbeat. Wendy's mind was sluggish at first, but soon the tunnel opened back up, and the world around came back into view. Her DTM kicked in, spinning madly around her head. Then the spin dampeners in her ejection seat kicked in too, steadying her and leaving her floating freely, facing the planetoid below. The fireball several hundred meters below her quickly dissapaited to nothing, and a few seconds later she realized that that fireball must have been her fighter.

Antonio?

I've notified SARs. They will get to us when they can.

Be positive. They should get to the wounded first.

Yes, ma'am. You should rest and remain calm.

"Oh my God," Wendy cried. The painkillers were working enough now that she finally had the presence of mind to look herself over. There was a large portion of her left side, the size of an e-suit helmet, that was missing, along with her left arm from the shoulder. Her right leg was gone from the knee down. Her suit had sealed off around the wounds and had stopped the massive hemorrhaging that was taking place there. Immunoboost coursed through her, but so much damage had been done to her body that the wonder drug might not be enough. Immunoboost only stopped the bleading and allowed damaged tissue to heal. It hadn't been designed to regrow missing organs—in fact, it couldn't. She needed serious medical attention soon, very soon. As she looked across the battlescape, the Madira and the Blair were both venting and rupturing all across their hulls. That was where her medical attention would come from, if it ever did. Tears formed into balls on Wendy's cheeks and floated around her face in the microgravity. As the balls of salty tears drifted around inside her helmet they were trapped and absorbed by the organogel. Wendy stared aimlessly off into space, praying that she would survive long enough for help to arrive. Another one of the Dawgs' blue dots blinked out of her DTM. The link said that it was Lieutenant Junior Grade Barbara "Farmer" Jordan, BreakNeck's wingman.

"Hang in there, Dawgs. . ."

"On the deck, Saviors!" Major Caroline "Deuce" Leeland grunted over the tac-net. "The Dawgs are making an umbrella for us, so let's take advantage of it!"

Deuce had been evading three Separatist Gnats that had formed up on her and her wingman, Second Lieutenant Nathan "Hawk" Ford. The two marines had maneuvered their mecha over and around each other, cutting into extremely hard corkscrewing turns toward the deck. The two FM-12s in fighter mode corkscrewed around each other, trying to confuse the enemy planes' targeting solutions. Deuce would have instinctively jerked her head from the orange tracers the size of baseballs screaming past her, but the g-load was so heavy that she could barely move her head at all, much less flinch.

A wild shot from one of the Demon Dawgs VFT-32 Ares-T's pukin' deathblossoms cut through the wing of the lead Gnat. The Seppy Gomer reacted abruptly, slinging his fighter into a deadly spin colliding with his right wingman. The impact ripped his wing the rest of the way clean and sent his wingman reeling. The third enemy fighter banked left to avoid getting caught up in the deadly mélange of entangled fighter plane components. Deuce took that gift from above as the opportune moment she needed.

"Break left, Hawk! Dive, dive, dive!" She yanked the HOTAS left and forward and clamped her teeth down on her mouthpiece. The compression layer of her suit crushed against her as her body weight increased by a factor of nine. She spun her mech around with a one- hundred-and-sixty-degree yaw that let her track across the sky at the remaining Gnat. She toggled to her DEGs and shouted, "Guns, guns, guns!"

Her DEGs locked on, and a wash of blue-green directed energy engulfed the tail section of the enemy fighter, ablating away its hull armor until it burned through to the power system. The enemy plane burst open like piñata scattering in pieces along its trajectory. The pilot never had a chance to eject.

"Warning, collision approaching. Warning, collision approaching," her Bitchin' Betty rang through the cockpit.

"Deuce, your dive's getting too hot! Bleed off and pull out!" Hawk warned her.

Deuce's vision spun as she yawed back around into her dive, and then she killed the throttle and yanked the HOTAS to her stomach. That wasn't going to be enough to keep her completely off the deck. She toggled the mecha over to bot mode with her right pinky and gritted her teeth against the mouthpiece, hoping that the stims and fresh oxygen would be enough to keep her from passing out.

"Uh! God-fuckin'-damnit!" she grunted rapidly as her mecha spun upside down into an armored bot. Bile rushed up her esophagus, and she choked at it, trying to force it down. With right pedal and manipulation of the armature controls, she rolled the bot through a handspring against the planetoid and then absorbed more of the shock with her feet as she rolled over. Then she tucked into a judo roll, putting the elbow of the forearm of the mecha down first and then the back, buttocks, legs, forearm, back, buttocks, legs until she had rolled four times, trading most of the fall's energy with the ground. The jerk—standard rate of change of acceleration as a function of change in time—from the rolling impact was so large that the inside of the mecha rumbled like a thunderstorm on Earth and flung dirt up along with it. Deuce held tight on the HOTAS and then kicked the throttle forward with the last roll as her feet hit, springing her upward.

"Warning, enemy targeting system is acquiring lock. Warning . . ."

Still dizzy from her rolls, Deuce inhaled sharply and closed her eyes. Using just the DTM targeting system, she focused on the vehicle that was targeting her. It was an Orcus drop tank on the surface of the planetoid. She kicked at two of the pedals on her left side and yanked the stick, sending the bot spinning like a figure skater doing a triple axel with the axis of it precessing in a full circle along the axis of travel.

"Come on!" The yellow targeting X of her cannons or her DEGs in her mindview wouldn't lock, and she was way too close for missiles. The cannons might not hit the enemy mecha, but it was close. "Guns, guns, guns!"

Cannon tracers tracked across her empennage just as her tracers threw dust up around the enemy drop tank. The scattered dust and explosions from the high-explosive armor-piercing railgun rounds created enough of a distraction that the tank driver flinched. The enemy targeting system lost lock, and Deuce killed her throttle, bouncing to the surface and running and twisting like a mad ballerina.

"Hold on, Deuce, I'm with you," Hawk shouted over the net, and Deuce caught a faint glimpse of him to her left as she opened her eyes. The world spun around her, but she kept her mind on that damned tank. She slammed forward, holding her left arm out and hooking it around the upper torso of the bot-mode tank like a professional wrestler performing a crooked arm lariat or a clothesline. The two mecha clanged together briefly, but Deuce's forward momentum sent the enemy tank flailing over backward against the surface. In a wall of flying dust, Deuce continued forward and out of the way as Hawk pounced in behind her, tag-teaming on the downed tank.

Hawk's bot-mode feet tore through the torso of the tank as he stomped down on it with full throttle, and then he flipped forward over Deuce's head, firing his cannons into the tank's wingman before it even realized what had happened.

"Now that's how we do it off the top ropes!" he said through the grunts and growls that the g-load had forced him into.

"Great work, Hawk. Now stay frosty!" Deuce shook her head to clear the spins. More radar warnings pinged at her, and she dove for cover behind the edge of a crater rim. She slid facedown as cannon tracers passed over head. She started to rise up, but something held her in place.

"Don't move, marine! I've got your back." Warlord Three knelt beside her mecha, firing its main gun over the ridgeback at the tank line and giving Deuce her much-needed cover and a few seconds' break.

"Thanks, tankhead." Deuce rolled over when the pressure backed off her mecha from the big M3A17-T's hold and searched for her wingman in her DTM. Then she settled down and located the rest of the Saviors as they scattered around the Warlords.

"Anytime, jarhead."

"Saviors, fan out and let's take it to the tanks. Warlords, give us what cover you can!"

"Roger that, Saviors," Warlord One responded over the net. "Get down! Guns, guns, guns."

Three enemy Stingers transfigured from fighter mode to bot mode and came careening over the edge of the crater on the west side. Deuce hit her thrusters, launching upward and into a backflip. As her bot twisted over the other three enemy bots and over the scrambling Warlords, she pointed her DEG from the hip in the general direction of the Stingers. She fired like a trick-shooting cowboy and scorched across the rear torso of one of the enemy mecha but didn't do enough damage to stop it. Hawk streaked in from the east, tackling one of the bots just as Deuce came down behind them.

The third enemy mecha grabbed one of the Warlords and suplexed it backward into the ground, finishing it off by ramming its armored elbow through the cockpit and crushing the Army tankhead.

Autocannons, Bobby! she orderd her AIC.

Got it! The AIC tracked across the enemy bot with the QM sensors and fired two fraction-of-a-second bursts through the leg of the vehicle before it maneuvered away, wounded.

The bot, with which she had managed a strafe with the DEGs, had turned on her and one of the Warlords. The two bounced and juked and leaped over one another in a flurry of mechanized acrobatics, trying to gain the upper hand on the other. The Stinger tried to go to its DEG and shoot from the hip, but the tankhead kicked it away, only to take a knee to the back inturn. The enemy-targeting system pinged onto Deuce, but she moved in too close for it to fire.

I've got a QM lock on a Gnat straffing from above! Bobby alerted her.

Great. Fox three!

"Watch your backside, Deuce," Skinny's voice buzzed.

"Hawk, where in the hell are you!" Deuce spun and ducked and punched and kicked at the enemy Stinger. The Gomer was good and kept her completely occupied. He'd already stomped through the Warlord that had been helping her.

"I'm pinned down, Deuce!" Hawk replied. "Shit, I'm locked up! Goddami—" He never finished the expletive. Hawk's mecha burst at the torso and spewed red and white sparks from the power system. It fell over limp and exploded. There was no way he could have ejected. The enemy mecha that crunched him into the ground then turned toward Deuce. The two of them had her flanked, and the tankheads around her seemed to have their hands full at the moment.

"Get out of there, Deuce!" Goat shouted at her.

Deuce couldn't seem to evade the two Stingers' flurry of punches and kicks, so rather than trying to fight them both, she decided to focus on one of them and take the hits from the other. She rushed toward the bot that had taken out Hawk, swinging her DEG like a war club. The bot ducked her swing but not her right foot. In a capoeira handspring, Deuce put her left hand down and spun her feet around, catching the enemy mecha on the side with a right-spinning kick. This threw the enemy off-balance, giving her a fraction of a second to spin up backward onto her feet. She now faced the other bot, and with her DEG in her right hand, she fired at point blank against the rushing mecha's body. The blue-green plasma vaporized the armor plating and also the pilot within and ruptured out the back of the Stinger with an explosion of its power core. The blast threw Deuce backward to the ground, off-balance. That was enough time for the other enemy bot to get its balance and to come down on her with its feet.

"Oh, fuck!" Deuce could see the mechanical feet slamming down toward her, and time seemed to stop for a brief flash as Warlord One tackled the enemy mecha like a star linebacker sacking a rookie quarterback.

"Get up, Deuce!" Colonel Warboys buzzed at her as he slammed his fist through the cockpit of the enemy bot, crushing the pilot.

"Shit! Thanks, Warlord One." There was no time to relax. Enemy DEGs burned at them from the south across the crater rim, and Deuce could see Skinny running for her life and diving over the rim as a drop tank took up station on her six. Her wingman, HoundDog, bounced right behind her. Fluid was squirting out from under the right arm socket of his mecha. He never made it to the ground, as the enemy DEG caught him across the lower part of the mecha torso. The legs of the bot blew off, and HoundDog crashed to the surface beside Skinny, cockpit up. The cockpit popped free, and the ejection chair spun upward into space, carrying HoundDog away from his mecha. Warboys and Deuce both pulled their DEGs from the hip and blazed away at the Orcus drop tank. Warboys' autocannons went off at the same time, firing at unknown targets behind them.

Skinny rose up into a prone firing position, firing her DEG over Deuce's shoulder, while Warlord One and Deuce continued to fire over Skinny's head. Enemy mecha exploded all around them.

"Goat, Popstar, Volleyball, Romeo, where the hell are you?"

"In the shit, Deuce, in the shit!"