Kill Before Dying (Tau Ceti Agenda Book 5)

by Travis S. Taylor

Roger that, Joe, his AIC replied in his mind. I’ve checked Chief Petty Officer Amari’s calculations for reinforcing the cable with a SIF and it should work well. However, I will need to continuously update the field tensor calculations based on variations in the power flow and the ambient electromagnetic fields within the room. I should be able to squeeze the cable with enough pressure from the SIFs to keep it from liquefying and vaporizing for at least several hours, maybe more.

  That was my plan all along, Debbie, Joe agreed. Stand by.

  All at once there were three loud, thunderous booms from the other side of the bulkhead. Alerts and power system failure notices popped up in Joe’s mindview on the ship’s status page. Instantaneously, the pink and purple whirling within the vortex tube stopped and it grew dark. It had worked. The plasma jet had burned through the bulkhead and incinerated the three main conduit breakers on the other side.

  The plasma jets spraying across the engine room like a solar flare didn’t fade the way Joe had expected. He’d sort of thought they’d act like a water hose once it is turned off. Instead, the streamers burned out like a combustion rocket engine running out of propellant, coughing and burping. As the plasma vented from the conduit, the spraying jets made a final puffing and chugging sound and blew out.

  “It worked, Joe!” Amari cheered. “Now what?”

  “Alright, everyone evacuate the engine room. But I do need one volunteer to stay behind and help if I need it. And it can’t be Amari.” Joe ordered. If things went bad, he at least wanted somebody that knew engineering to survive. He’d already lost Commander Benjamin and he didn’t want to lose Amari too. “Amari, I want you to report immediately to the alternate engineering section of the ship and monitor from there. Double time. Go!”

  “Aye aye, Joe.”

  “I’ll stay with you, CHENG!” Rogers said. “I know all about the Buckley Maneuver, and I ain’t afraid of it, especially in a suit with shields.”

  “Thanks, Rogers. We’ll make an engineer out of you yet.” Joe turned to the control panel along the wall where Amari had been as she shagged tail across the wet floor and out of the room. Rogers followed and stood a few steps behind Joe. “CHENG to CO!”

  “Hope you’re ready, Buckley!” General Moore’s voice replied.

  “Ready to engage when you are, General!” Buckley replied as he toggled the vortex power grid.

  Alright, Debbie, start the show, he thought.

  “Nav has already set the coordinates, Joe. Get us the hell out of here!” Moore ordered.

  “Aye, sir.” Joe nodded at Rogers. “Fireman’s Apprentice, we’re about to do some serious cooking down here. Hold on to your ass.”

  The cable that had been stretched from the vortex input coupler across the room to the conduit flange at the bulkhead appeared to get even stiffer than it already was as the structural integrity fields engaged around it. There was an eerie sizzling and crackling noise coming from it, and Joe noticed the occasional flicker of light from ionization of air molecules at the surface of the fields around the cable.

  SIF is in place, Joe. Vortex tube restart initiated. His AIC stated as the blues, purples, and pinks of Cerenkov radiation began to flash about within it. The lights inside the vortex grew brighter and swirled faster and faster.

  “Hyperspace vortex is spinning.” Joe said to nobody in particular. “Alright, now for some power to the projector.” Krasnikov hyperspace tube calculations appeared in his mindview along with power graphs, bar charts, and curves.

  A bolt of electricity stronger than any lightning crackled and arced in multiple directions out from the busted valve stem of the coolant flow loop and across the room to ground through Fireman’s Apprentice Roger’s armored suit. His shields flashed green as he was slammed backwards against the deckplate underneath the broken conduit that ran across the engine room overhead.

  “Rogers, get out of there!” Joe turned and kicked his jumpboots toward him landing beside him in a sloshing clank against the deck. He knelt to get a handhold on Rogers and used all the strength in his suit to throw the sailor out from underneath the conduit. He then set his kickboots, about to bounce out from underneath the power cable, but he hadn’t been fast or lucky enough.

  At that instant the electric flow found the path it was looking for, or the SIFs forced it through and into the cable. Either way it was bad news for Joe. As the energy flowed into and through the large power cable and across the gap to the projector power coupling it danced around, at first wildly like a poorly thrown jump rope, as the SIFs strained against the millions of volts, billions of amps, and the ten times ten to the fifteen watts of power, the random motion from the crazy electromagnetic field variations whipped the cable about the room like an unstoppable force. Unfortunately for Joe, he wasn’t an immovable object.

  Joe’s armored suit and shields were no match for it. The SIF reinforced cable slammed into his torso with the force of a hovertank at full hover speed, and then somehow his barrier shield intertwined with the cable’s SIF, briefly wrapping his left arm around the cable as the field strained and flickered out. Then, just as quickly as he’d been hit and the cable’s mad dance had begun it, was over as the cable was locked still with a snap by the extreme electromagnetic bottle created from the field lines of the system. The cable jerked itself free from Joe in a microsecond with a whip-cracking sonic boom that made his ears ring. Joe was dazed, but he looked to make sure the SIF, on the cable was holding. The last time without the SIF, the cable sheathing had melted away, and the metal strands glowed bright like the filament of an incandescent light bulb. Then the cable had vaporized into a plasma of metal gases, and the electric arc lasted just long enough to give the ship a short jump in hyperspace. But this time the SIF was holding and the cable hadn’t vaporized. Instead it vibrated only millimeters against the SIF, causing it to shake the air like a speaker. The cable hummed and filled the gap between the conduit and the projector power coupler. Joe watched as the vortex tube whirled into the projector, which, in turn, 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 spacetime bubble created within the field projector.

  “Sir!”

  It’s working, Joe!

  Yeah, let’s hope and pray it holds! Joe felt elated but sick to his stomach at the same time. And for whatever reason his blue dot in his mindview turned casualty purple.

  You did well, Commander, his AIC reassured him. I’ve administered more stims and immunoboost.

  For what?

  “Sir,” Rogers repeated to him again. “Sir! We need to get you to sick bay.”

  “What are you talking about, Rogers?” Joe felt the queasiness in his stomach again. He hoped he hadn’t gotten fried again. The queasiness in his stomach was making him nervous that he had.

  “Sir, you shouldn’t have done that.” Rogers said. “But thank you, sir. Come on now, sir. We have to get you some help.”

  “I have to stay here and make sure the hyperspace system continues to function.” Joe said.

  “But sir, look!” Rogers pointed at Joe’s left side. Joe finally looked down at himself to where the fireman’s apprentice was pointing. Rogers looked quite pale. As he realized there were alarms going off in his DTM and his mindview for his suit diagnostics, the awareness to check himself finally set in. His suit diagnostic three-dimensional view in his mindview showed no communication with the left arm in his suit from the shoulder down. Joe turned his neck and looked down.

  “Shit!”

  His left arm was gone from the shoulder socket. The cable had yanked it clean out of his body armor and all. A large ball of organogel and seal layer had formed over the hole where his arm and shoulder had been. He didn’t feel like he was going to pass out. He just did.

  Chapter 10

  February 19, 2407 AD

  U.S.S. Roscoe Hillenkoetter

  Target Star System


  700 Light-years from the Sol System

  Monday, 2:07 P.M. Ship Standard Time

  “Air Boss, I want a full roster of pilots from the first wave who are still in system. And I want them transferred to the closest ship that can take them in. ASAP!” Captain Penzington ordered. “They’ve been through hell, let’s get them in.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” the clone Air Boss replied. “According to the blue force tracker there are still seventy-three fighter mecha strewn about the system from the previous attack wave.”

  “Ground Boss, how many tankheads, AEMs, or downed pilots?”

  “Ma’am, the casualties were severe. All ground contingents were lost except for the Slayers and the Juggernauts. And they are down to eight tanks and six AEMs. There is only one downed pilot presently still alive on the planet,” the Ground Boss said in a monotone voice. Nancy wasn’t sure if the clone/AIC was being somber or just emotionless. The AIC-driven clones either overexpressed their emotions or showed none at all. Nancy had been commanding the mixed human-and-clone crew for almost a year, but she was still not quite comfortable around the clones yet.

  I have them tagged for you, Nancy. Her AIC highlighted their locations in the mindview battlescape. I’ll start a running tally counter on those we retrieve on your mindview.

  Good. Thanks, Allison, she thought. Nine of the ten ground teams dropped were lost. That’s ninety tankheads and over a hundred armored e-suit Marines. Clones or not, we didn’t need to lose them. If I didn’t know General Moore better, I’d start to think this mission wasn’t worth it.

  Hopefully, it will be worth it, Allison replied in her mind. And don’t forget the one downed pilot.

  We’re not leaving without her, Nancy reassured her AIC and longtime friend.

  “One downed pilot.” She whispered under her breath.

  “What’s that, ma’am?” her XO asked. Nancy looked at the Navy SEAL and knew it must be hard on him, knowing how close he was to Dee. “I want a running tally counter on the main screen for the first wave soldiers in need of rescue and one for all the second wave soldiers deployed. We’re not leaving them behind.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Rackman nodded his armored head.

  “Gunner, if we’re not shooting we’re not fighting. I want to see the DEGs, AA cannons, and missile tubes firing nonstop at targets of opportunity, do you understand?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” the clone weapons officer said.

  “Commander Rackman, it is your job to keep the mission clock in synchronicity with the jump clock.” Nancy looked at the battlescape in her DTM mindview and could see the thirty new expeditionary fleet ships in the system and that the entire first attack wave had managed to hyperspace jaunt out—all of them minus eighty eight soldiers, that was.

  There were twenty-two Chiata ships in local space engaging her attack wave. Long-range sensors were not detecting any other Chiata ships but that didn’t really mean anything. Space was big. They could be hiding on a planet, or in an asteroid field, or they might be using some sort of alien stealth technology that they hadn’t encountered yet. There was just no way to know how many Chiata were actually in the system.

  Allison, keep working on detecting the source of the QMT dampening field, she thought to her super AIC. We need to narrow down where to send the recon teams before we jaunt out of the system. And it would be damned nice to find a backdoor we could QMT through.

  I’m pinging away with every sensor we have. So far I’ve yet to find a transmitter or any backdoors. But that doesn’t mean they are not there, her AIC replied. By the way, I have Dee’s location correlated with enemy activity. It looks like a small team of Chiata vehicles are flying in her general direction. It looks like they are in search pattern mode, so I don’t believe they know exactly where she is.

  Can we get a SARs team to her? Nancy asked in her mindvoice.

  It would tip them off because there is no other fighting activity in the northern continent, so I would suggest heavy fighter support for it or get her to move to a different extraction point. It appears she crashed in an abandoned area of the planet. Her vitals show she is recovering from a broken ankle and two metatarsal bones in her left foot.

  Alright, update her, keep her safe, and keep me updated.

  Yes, Captain.

  “Fourteen seconds to alien targeting,” Commander Rackman said. “Nav, prepare jump coordinates.”

  “Hold out to the last second, Nav, and jump on two seconds remaining. We don’t want to get hit during spin up,” Nancy ordered. Her AIC and the General’s AIC had swapped notes as soon as they had entered the system and she had already learned the mistakes of the first attack wave. She didn’t want to make the same ones.

  “We have two megaships preparing to engage to starboard, Captain!” the STO noted.

  “Well, let’s engage them back. Gunner, let’s start burning some holes in these two ships. Nav, when we jump, let’s jump right between them and launch a couple gluonium-tipped surprises for them.” Nancy turned to the air boss. “Air Boss, I want SARs with fighter-squadron cover to the planet for rescue and extraction of our ground troops. I want them all onboard ships a minute ago. Understood?”

  “Aye, ma’am.”

  “Ground Boss, tell the tankheads if there isn’t time to lift out their mecha to leave it. We don’t plan to stay long,” Nancy said.

  “Roger that, ma’am. Not sure the tankheads are gonna like that a whole lot.”

  “Like or leave it, Ground Boss,” Nancy grunted in response. There was nothing she could do about it, and the plan was never to hold the system anyway. The plan was to hold the system long enough to insert recon teams to search for whatever was doing the QMT dampening and either turn it off, steal it, or destroy it. The Chiata could not get their grubby glowing amorphous tendrils on a technology that would mitigate the only advantage the human forces had over them. She was pretty sure the Ghuthlaeers felt the same way about it.

  “CO! CDC!”

  “Go, CDC!” Nancy replied, but even before the CDC could respond, her super AIC had already alerted her to the bad news in her DTM battlescape. Several blobs of red dots suddenly appeared from hyperspace and were painted about the planet in various orbits.

  “Ma’am, we’ve just detected more than thirty new enemy ships dropping into local space about the planet,” the AIC-controlled clone down in CDC said almost deadpan. “The numbers just shifted in the enemy’s favor.”

  “Understood, CDC. Get better resolution on the actual number of ships.” Nancy never liked uncertainties. A number of “more than” anything didn’t really mean much to her. She needed better detail. She turned to the clone science and technology officer. “STO, what are you reading on the new threats?”

  “Ma’am, using multiple sensor suits and various refinement algorithms an estimate with a mean of thirty-four ships with an error bar of six is the best I can do,” the STO replied.

  “That’ll have to do, STO.” Nancy would have smiled if she weren’t in the middle of a large space naval battle where her troops were now vastly outnumbered and outgunned.

  “Time to jump, Nav!” Commander Rackman ordered. “Now!”

  “Aye, sir.” The Nav replied emotionlessly. “Engaging hyperspace jaunt.”

  The swirling hyperspace vortex spun out in front of the ship and pulled them through the event horizon into FTL travel. The crew didn’t have time to breathe or relax because almost as soon as the jump started it was over, and they were smack dab between two very large alien warships. The two giant, menacing hybrid porcupine-like snails were faced in opposite directions and on opposite sides of the Hillenkoetter. Nancy was hopeful that this would put the Hillenkoetter too close for the zig zagging blue beams of death from Hell to be targeted.

  “Twenty-nine seconds on the jump clock!” Rackman announced.

  “Gunner, start hitting some targets. Missiles and DEGs! Now!” Nancy was barely able to get the command out before the ship to the starboard vanished into hyperspace. Sim
ultaneously, a blue beam zigged parallel to where it had been, and then zagged ninety degrees to hit home on the starboard and aft exterior of the Hillenkoetter.

  The blue beam pounded the shields and rocked the ship with the force of a several hundred megaton nuclear blast. Alarms started to sound, both audibly throughout the ship and DTM to almost all the crewmembers. Nancy blinked hard to quiet the stars zooming about in front of her eyes, caused by the abrupt sideways rocking from the jackhammer pounding the ship had just taken.

  “Shit! That wasn’t thirty seconds. They’re changing tactics on us! Alert the fleet!” Nancy shouted, just as a second blue beam zig-zagged into the same spot. The ship felt as if it had run into an asteroid. “Random hyperspace jaunt now!”

  Nancy gripped the arms of the Captain’s chair, anticipating a third hit. The vortex spun up out in front of the ship and the Hillenkoetter managed to slip through before being targeted by another beam.

  They changed their tactics on us. We need a new plan, she thought. Any suggestions, Allison?

  Nonstop random jumps from all the fleet might work. It took only nine seconds after the last jump, so I would theorize it is possible that they are predicting where we are jumping.

  Or, maybe they are targeting us before they jaunt into engagement range? Nancy suggested.

  That is an interesting thought. It might be a bit of both. Let me work on that one, the AIC replied.

  “XO, are the recon teams deployed yet?”

  “All six teams are currently inbound, ma’am. ETA ranges from two to six minutes,” Rackman replied.

  “CO! CDC!”

  “Go, CDC!”

  “We just lost three of the Fleet, ma’am.” Nancy could have sworn she had heard some sort of emotion from the clone that time. “Understood, CDC!”

  “Ma’am, we don’t need to take another direct hit like that,” the STO informed her. “The barrier shields are down to forty-seven percent.”

  “Keep us jumping into and out of engagements with other ships, Nav. Coordinates are at your discretion unless I tell you otherwise. Jumps on a ten-second clock now!”