Kill Before Dying (Tau Ceti Agenda Book 5)

by Travis S. Taylor

  The manual circuit control room was the only way Joe could figure out how to shut off the plasma flow, and it was on the other side of a welded door and the white hot jet, and might as well have been on the other side of the galaxy. The clock was ticking fast and Joe knew he had to figure out how to get there from here, shut the breakers off, fix the energy conduit, and then recycle the hyperspace vortex projector. He thought about releasing the repair bots, but they wouldn’t make it through the plasma either, and he didn’t want to waste the bots. He was going to need them to fix all the broken shit on his boat once they got it somewhere safer.

  That’s too many things at once and no fucking time, he thought. There is just no way to fix that energy conduit in time, even with a swarm of bots.

  First things first, Joe. Just keep moving. We have to vent that plasma tube first, his AIC suggested.

  So, how do I cycle those breakers open? he thought.

  I’m not sure.

  We can’t do these one at a time. It is a bigger fix than that, and somehow it all has to get accomplished right now, he continued hopelessly.

  There is no time to replace the energy conduit even if you recycle the breakers and put the plasma fire out.

  Right, I know that. We’re going to have to find a way to do it all at once. He didn’t like where this line of reasoning was taking him.

  My thoughts exactly, Joe. You have to blow the breakers, vent the plasma, and power the vortex projector all at once. Only been done one other time that I know of, his AIC replied. So, we both know there’s only one thing to do.

  Shit. Shit. Shit. Joe knew exactly what his AIC was talking about. He’d been there and done that, bought the fucking tee-shirt, spent several weeks in the hospital, and swore he’d never ever do that again. Not ever again. Ever. And it looked like he was going to have to do it again.

  Yes, shit, his AIC agreed.

  Buckley maneuver.

  I cannot see any other solution, Joe. I’m sorry.

  Me either. Fuck me.

  “CHENG! Do you have anything that will redirect that plasma just long enough for one of us to get through that door?” Fireman’s Apprentice Clark Rogers looked as if he were looking for a piece of bulkhead to use.

  “That plasma would vaporize any material in nanoseconds. We’d need a damned barrier shield generator the size of a hovertank. Won’t work.” Joe would have scratched his head if he hadn’t been wearing an armored suit. Instead, he shrugged his armored shoulders.

  “Joe!” CPO Amari turned away from the gruesome sight that she’d been mesmerized by. “We don’t need the breakers!”

  “What are you talking about, Sarala? We have to throw those damned switches so the tube’s plasma will dump overboard through the aux prop vents.” Joe wasn’t sure if the Chief Petty Officer hadn’t been hit harder than it appeared. He knew that she completely understood that as the energy fields flowed through the ship’s various conduits they would vaporize air, metal, dust, you name it and would create dirty plasmas. So, to keep the plasmas from getting out of hand and actually eating away the insides of the conduits, a noble gas was flowed and cycled through them. The energy ionized the gas into a very hot plasma, which created a stable current flow path for the billions of amps of current flowing there. Amari knew that. Joe checked her vitals again in his DTM.

  “Yes, I know that, Commander. But all that means is that we have to open the switches!” she replied. Joe looked at her, puzzled for a brief second. Then he looked at the bewildered fireman’s apprentice. Then he looked back at the plasma venting at the bulkhead. Then he looked at the wall where the breakers were on the other side.

  “Son of a bitch, Amari! You’re right. We don’t need those fucking things.” Joe turned to the fireman’s apprentice. “Rogers, all we have to do is destroy those breaker boxes and the circuits will be thrown open. Somehow we’ve got to blast that wall. How quick can we get some dets and explosives down here?”

  “Minutes, probably, sir,” the young E2 replied. “Too bad that damned plasma just didn’t vent a meter and half to the right and it would’ve burned ’em out for us.”

  “Joe, we could weaken the structural integrity field around the holes in the conduit and let it get bigger,” Amari suggested. “The SIFs around that pipe are the only thing keeping that piece of conduit from splitting like a potato that’s been in the microwave too long anyway.”

  “Wait, let the plasma get bigger!?” the fireman’s apprentice was startled. Joe ignored him for the moment because he knew where Amari was going with her line of reasoning. She was a good engineer.

  “Yes! Great idea, Chief. But that’ll be a one-shot deal, so we better time it right with fixing the conduit,” Joe said. Joe turned to the fireman’s apprentice. “Rogers, get to the tool room and get me the biggest fucking wrench in the cabinet and twenty meters of number zero stranded power cable. That cable will be heavy. Take help. Move it now! You have twenty seconds.”

  “CPO Amari, get on those SIF calculations and be ready to toggle them on my command as fast as you can!” Joe ran through past events in his life to make certain he was going about this the right way. He’d better alert the General because they could go into hyperspace once, and then they’d be down for several hours. It was the best he could do under the circumstances. It’d better be enough.

  “One time!” General Alexander Moore shouted over the alarm klaxons and damage reports. He held tight and gritted his teeth each time the ship rocked from impacts with Chiata weapons fire. Things weren’t going great and he sure as hell didn’t need to lose hyperspace propulsion too. Needless to say, he didn’t like what he was hearing. “CHENG, that is unacceptable. We are outnumbered and have soldiers deployed everywhere. We can’t just leave them here. Fix the damned hyperdrive!”

  “I’m sorry, sir! That is the only solution we have. And worse, sir, when we come out of hyperspace there will be a five-hour fix at top repair pace before we’ll be able to jaunt FTL again,” Buckley assured him. “And to top it off, it is one of those fixes we can’t start on until we turn the thing off. So I recommend we stay in hyperspace as long as we can, sir.”

  “Alright then, Joe. Get to work on it, but do not engage it until I give the word,” Moore ordered the engineer.

  “Aye, sir. We will be ready in less than five minutes. I’ll notify you when we are ready here. CHENG out!”

  “Nav! Take us right up belly to belly with that ship to starboard!” Moore shouted. “Keep it between us and the rest of the alien fleet. I don’t care if we swap paint colors. I mean close!”

  “Aye, sir!” The navigation officer replied without looking up from his station.

  “Seven seconds to next enemy firing solution!” the XO said. “Get us there fucking quick, Nav!”

  “Air Boss! Recall every pilot now!” Moore ordered.

  “Yes, sir!”

  “Ground Boss! Tell the tankheads and AEMs to dig in and hold on.”

  “Yes, General.”

  “Sir, the Maniacs have been pushed into the planet’s atmosphere covering the Slayers. There is no way they can pull out now. It would leave the tankheads and AEMs vulnerable from the top,” the Air Boss reported.

  “Tell them to dig in with the Slayers and Juggernauts then.” Moore replied.

  Sir, search and rescue reports that the starlifter sent to evac Deanna was destroyed, Abigail said in his mind. There were no survivors.

  Damnit! Deploy another one. He slammed his right armored fist into his chair arm. The metal creaked against the impact.

  Sorry, sir, they are either all loaded and bringing in downed crew or have been destroyed.

  Show me where she is, he thought. As soon as he did so the planet view popped up in his mindview and zoomed into the continent below, very close to to the north pole, more than eight hundred kilometers from other members of the fleet. That part of the planet was almost completely tilted toward the sun and looked like lush jungle, probably not all that different from the Congo on
Earth or the southern equatorial regions south of New Tharsis on Ares. It would be thick, uncomfortable wilderness, with no telling what type of wild creatures inhabiting it. At least there weren’t any red forces in that region that sensors could detect. Dee was either lucky or she had managed her crash smartly. How did she get so far away?

  Her mecha engines failed on reentry and she had one drive stuck on full throttle. She performed a miracle being able to crash-land and survive with the engine stuck the way it was. She managed to navigate to that low probability of engagement region as well. The apple didn’t fall far from the tree, sir. She knew what she was doing and managed it under extreme duress. Her sensors show she had a broken ankle but has injected immunoboost and will be fine very soon.

  We’ve got to get to her somehow. I can’t just leave her there.

  “Blue beams, General!” the XO alerted him.

  “Brace!” Moore grabbed the edge of his chair and held on for dear life as the beams stretched out in front of them then turned straight down and to the right twice. The Madira was close enough to the enemy ship that Alexander hoped the beams couldn’t successfully target them. But he had hoped wrong.

  “Jesus H. F’n Christ!” Joe fell backwards onto the deck, flailing like a turtle that had been flipped upside down. “Amari, I want every bit of excess energy we’re not gonna need for this jump put into the barrier shields! I mean every last microjoule!”

  “I’m on it, CHENG!” Joe could see her location behind the Engine Room control board in his DTM, but he couldn’t turn his body that way in his current position and actually see her. He finally managed to roll himself up and over into plank position, then crawled to his feet.

  “Joe! The SIFs are down to twenty-one percent and the barrier field generators are single digit!” Amari told him. “One more hit like that and we’re done for.”

  “Then we better get us the hell out of here fast. All of you start antiradiation drugs and immunoboost now. And for God’s sake everybody pay attention because it’s gonna start getting hairy in here!” Joe shouted. “Faceplates down. And watch out for random high voltage jumping about.”

  Just as Joe finished his warning, a high voltage crackle of electricity broke free from the hyperspace-lensing system and reached out across the gas vapors in the air, arcing through the streaming plasma fire and throwing dendritic fractal tendrils of electricity in several directions. One of the tendrils found a path to electrical ground through the outer layer of Buckley’s armored suit. The Buckley barrier flickered and dumped the energy in a flash of green. The last time Joe had been in his present situation he wasn’t wearing a suit and the high-voltage shock knocked him a good six meters into the bulkhead on the aft side of the engine room. As far as he was concerned he wasn’t much for déjà vu. But here he was again and it couldn’t be anymore déjà vu-esque if he’d planned it. At least this time he was wearing an armored suit.

  Debbie, start cycling stims, immunoboost, and anti-radiation drugs into my system.

  Roger that, Joe, the AIC replied. The suit and barrier shield should mostly protect you this time around.

  God, I hope so. Thoughts of the pain he’d gone through the last time he had to do a Buckley maneuver sent chills down his spine.

  “Fireman’s Apprentice Rogers.”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “You see this coolant flow valve right here?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Alright then, I want you to hit that motherfucker right there with that BFW until I tell you to stop!” Buckley shouted over the whistling and crackling of the raging fires, electric arcs, and hissing flow-system leaks as the sailor hefted the big fucking wrench. Joe thought about it and had the brief notion of a Buckley Maneuver Manual starting with hitting the valve with a BFW.

  Rogers didn’t hesitate or ask questions. There was nobody in the entire fleet who hadn’t read about the Buckley maneuver. Rogers took the meter-long tool and clanked the thing against the valve assembly. Being in an armored suit certainly made the task easier than it looked. The wrench itself massed at over forty kilograms but Rogers managed it one-handed with ease.

  “Amari! Have you got that SIF generator calculation done yet?”

  “Completed, Joe! We’re ready when you are,” the Chief Petty Officer replied.

  Joe understood the hyperspace propulsion system probably better than anyone alive. He was the man for this job. Hell, he’d done it before. But this time around it was a little different. There was an advanced alien horde outside with super crazy weapons that couldn’t be explained, and they were hell bent on using them to kill all of humanity. Joe had to get it right this time, and do it without putting himself and the engineering crew out of commission. Last time he’d done the Buckley maneuver, he had fried himself with high-energy X-rays and put himself in the hospital for weeks. This time around he needed to be there to fix the damage he was about to do, and the only other engineer on the ship he would have trusted with the job was now dead.

  The power couplings between the vacuum fluctuation energy collectors and storage system and the hyperspace projector and fluctuation field shields were intact, but the lensing tube was not swirling a perfect pink and purple hue as it normally did. The power conduit that immediately fed into the projector was barely holding together and venting two large jets of plasma that was hotter than Sol, and those leaks were acting as a switch that was keeping the energy from flowing into the projector. Without that energy the vortex projector couldn’t manipulate the fabric of spacetime creating the Krasnikov Tube’s event horizon, and therefore no hyperspace jaunt.

  Joe was pretty damned certain that if they attempted to pull power through that damaged conduit on the order needed to create a hyperspace vortex while it was venting plasma, the thing would go off like a bomb that would ripple all the way down the energy conduits throughout the ship and would take out almost every system while igniting plasma fires along the way. In order to minimize the damage from going into hyperspace, Joe had to first put out the plasma fire, reboot the projector, and give the energy flow a temporary pathway that would last long enough to jaunt them to a safe distance from the Chiata.

  “The valve is crushed to hell, CHENG!” Fireman’s Apprentice Rogers said, dropping the BFW to the floor. Just as he did, the crushed and mangled valve atop the coolant flow tube popped, spewing superheated ethylene glycol. The liquid cooled almost immediately from rapid expansion as it sprayed about. The system quickly drained and covered the floor on the port and aft side of the Engine Room about three centimeters deep. The smell of the coolant brought memories to the forefront of his mind—bad memories.

  “Okay. Grab that power cable and wrap it at least twice around the power input to the vortex projector here and weld it to that thing there. Quickly!” Joe traced the power flow loop in his mindview backwards from the power input of the projector through the damaged tube and to where he hoped the plasma was burning normally, not superheated, and was well maintained by the conduit and the structural integrity fields. “There. Right there.”

  Joe bounced across the floor, slopping in the coolant with each armored step. He stopped on the far side of the engine room where the power conduit protruded through the bulkhead. The quantum fluctuation energy collectors would be on the other side of that wall. That was where he needed to tie off the other end of the cable.

  “Tie this end off right here and weld it down!” he shouted. “Amari, thirty seconds.”

  Joe grabbed hold of the cable and helped Rogers and two other firemen drag the heavy ten-centimeter-diameter cable across the room. They threw it over the conduit and then pulled it tight. The plasma welder made short work of the insulation layer on the outside of the cable and melded the stranded steel wire right to the metal conduit.

  “Now we have to time this just right.” Joe transmitted his mindview display to all of the team so they could see what was about to happen. “Amari, when you throw the SIFs, hopefully the tube will fail at the right place, bu
rn through the wall, and take out those circuit breakers. When that happens the plasma flow will shut off at the junction on either end of the damaged tube, the vortex will spin down, and the plasma fire will burn out. Then everyone immediately evacuates the Engine Room! I’ll throw the restart sequence on the vortex, cycle a SIF around this cable, and then open the energy flow. The combination of the cable and the SIFs should allow us to spin the vortex projector for several hours before it burns out. It’ll be a hell of a mess and a radiation funhouse in here while that thing is going. Everyone understand their tasks?”

  “Aye, sir!”

  Debbie, you got the software patch for the cable’s SIF ready?

  I’ll watchdog it myself, Joe.

  Good. Then I guess we’re good to go.

  I think so.

  “Everyone take their places and stand by.” Joe looked around the Engine Room once more to make sure he wasn’t forgetting anything. “CHENG to CO!”

  Chapter 6

  February 19, 2407 AD

  Alien Planet

  Target Star System

  700 Light-years from the Sol System

  Monday, 2:03 P.M. Ship Standard Time

  “Roger that, Dragon,” USMC Colonel Delilah “Jawbone” Strong replied to the tankhead’s leader as she weaved her FM-12 about the mix of horrifically blinding blue beams from the porcupines mixing up with her and the rest of the Maniacs, the even more horrific and larger blue beams coming from the dropships above, and the alien AA fire coming from the surface of the planet. And at the same time she was doing her level best to cover her wingman’s ass and give top cover to the ground pounders below. She had high expectations, very high expectations, that her squadron, her wingman, and the groundpounders were likewise covering her ass in return.

  “We can’t last like this, Jawbone!” Colonel Jones, the AEM leader, added to the conversation. Delilah could see in her DTM battlescape view that the ground teams were getting the shit kicked out of them. Casualties were racking up quickly. “We have to make it to cover!”