The Tau Ceti Agenda

by Travis S. Taylor

  "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!"

  Chapter 20

  October 31, 2388 AD

  Sol System

  Oort Cloud

  Saturday, 7:43 AM, Earth Eastern Standard Time

  Second Lieutenant Michael "HoundDog" Samuels squinted his eyes hard and controlled his breathing. The ejection seat thrusters righted its flight path, removing the spin, and HoundDog opened his eyes and wished that he hadn't. The Warlords and the Saviors were bouncing around the cover of their makeshift redoubt, barely keeping ahead of the flood of enemy Orcus tanks, Stinger mecha, and Gnat straffing runs. The Gods of War were slugging it out above them at about two to five hundred meters off the deck and were overwhelmed by an order of magnitude. And where in the goddamned hell was that backup from the Blair?

  HoundDog tracked out a long, slow arc from the weak gravity of the planetoid and started running scenarios in his head as to where he might land. His AIC, Second Lieutenant Bambi Mike One Niner Alpha November Zulu, had calculated the precise landing spot for him and had highlighted it white in his mindview three-dimensional terrain map. Unfortunately for him, he was going to land right in the middle of what looked like a line of AEMs fighting it out hand-to-hand with drop tank armored support squads and other Seppy infantry. In other words, he was about to land in a whole world of shit. Not that he hadn't just come from such a place, but then he had a state-of-the-art fighting mecha around him. Now all he had was his armored g-suit and the railgun and survival kit mounted in the back of the ejection chair.

  Forty-five seconds to impact, HoundDog. Bambi started a countdown clock along with his trajectory path in his mindview.

  Shit.

  Semper fi.

  At least we'll be landing by marines instead of Army Armored Infantry pukes.

  "All right, Killers, hard to the deck! The Madira's flight wing and ground contingent are getting chewed to hell and gone down there. Let's show what a group of real Killers can do to help." Colonel John "Burner" Masterson ordered over the tac-net. The squadron of FM- 12s flew formation at maximum acceleration in fighter mode toward the planetoid. Burner checked the whereabouts of the tank squads across the line and found the weakest point. He was making a habit of coming to the rescue of Warboys' Warlords.

  "Burner, we've got three Gnats pulling in on pursuit vectors, angels fifteen at seven o'clock," Captain Cordova warned his flight commander.

  "Roger that, Boulder. I see 'em. Let's make it too fast for them to keep up. We need to land on the deck and help out those tankheads."

  Burner held the HOTAS full-forward, ramming blatantly through AA fire and the continuos hell of the dogfight that was all around them. By maximizing their speed, the Marine mecha squadron plowed away from any of the other fighters trying to engage them. That didn't mean that they were immune to lucky shots, AA from the ground, SAMs, or just the random chance of colliding with a passing fighter.

  The deck approached rapidly, and Burner was beginning to get a visual on what had happened there. The tankheads were surrounded in a full three-hundred-and-sixty-degree attack. The only thing saving them was that they had managed to take refuge in a man-made crater about fifty meters in diameter and maybe five meters deep at the center. The M3A17-Ts were spread out around the rim of the crater, holding off any ground advances while several Ares-Ts of the Demon Dawgs and FM-12s from the Utopian Saviors were trying to cover their airspace. Several of the FM-12s were bouncing around the enemy Orcus drop tanks in bot mode and were doing what they could to push the flood back to give the Warlords some breathing room.

  The problem with the scenario was that the enemy had deployed over a hundred fighters into the airspace, and the Dawgs and Saviors had started out with less than ten each. The Dawgs had been attritted to only four planes, and the Saviors had fared a bit better, with six remaining. The Gods of War had entered the mix and were fighting fiercely, but the numbers game still weighed extremely in the favor of the Seppies. And to top that off, there was an ocean of enemy tanks on either side of the crater, rushing the Warlords at an almost continuous pace. Burner hoped to change that with the Killers. Another twelve FM-12s in the fight would go a long way. Another dozen FM-12s in the hands of marines went further.

  "Burner, I've got a lidar glint off several Gnats straight down," Boulder called him.

  "Roger, I see them. Let's lock on their six and start attritting them."

  "Oorah."

  "Okay, better bleed off the energy." Burner pulled full back on the HOTAS with his left hand and toggled his targeting system. Yellow Xs popped up all over the place. His compression layer squeezed in on his body as he started a tight pull up from the dive, and then one of the yellow targets turned red and dinged. "Fox three!"

  Three Gnats were in the middle of a straffing run over the Warlords' position. From the blue dots in the bowl, Burner could tell that the ten remaining fighters were all engaged or being engaged at the moment, and the tankheads were just having to hunker down and take it. Burner pulled completely out of his dive while his mecha-to- mecha missile exploded into the wing of an unsuspecting Gnat. The poor Gomer never knew what hit him.

  "Splash one." He looked in his rearview and made certain that Boulder was on his wing. The two Marine mecha screamed in behind the three-Gnat formation going for QM lock. The firing solution algorithms tracked vectors in each of their DTMs for them to follow for best possible chance of a kill.

  The enemy planes pulled into a tight bank to the right and upward. Burner barrel-rolled to the right, pulling him over Boulder and meeting the lead Gnat as it pulled through its hard bank. Burner climbed toward it, only meters from the enemy plane, and had to back off on the throttle or he would have overshot it. The enemy pilot was skilled, and he backed off on his power at the same time. The two planes were canopy-to-canopy only a few meters apart, barrel-rolling over each other in hopes that one would gain an energy advantage over the other.

  The aerial ballet was a mix of throttle and stick with roll and pedal in a continuous fight not to overtake the other plane. The pilot that made the mistake of overshooting the other would be the one that flew through a targeting solution and would be dead. Burner grunted and squinted his eyes against the g-load.

  "Burner! The other two are on us pretty hot!" Boulder shouted.

  "Bot mode, Boulder! Kill your throttle and cover my ass! Don't let 'em take your six!" Burner replied, still grunting from his constricting g-suit. "Gigi! You and Dundee get down here and watch Boulder's six!"

  "Roger that, Boulder, but we're sort of tied up right now!"

  "Goddamnit!" he grunted, and ground his molars against the bite block and took fast breaths from the fresh shots of cool air in his face. The vapor stims gave him just the edge he needed to accept even more g-load and widen his roll, giving him room to go to eagle mode. Burner grunted through the maneuver while the arms and feet of the bird of prey spread underneath the vehicle. Burner reached out and punched the cockpit of the Gnat with his right mecha hand. His mechanized armature cracked against the bubble of the enemy plane, startling the pilot for a fraction of a second. That would be the Gomer's last mistake. Burner
dropped his throttle, kicked his pedal, slipped in behind the enemy fighter, and went to guns. The tracers tore through the empanage and across the canopy of the plane, shattering pieces of the fighter along its trajectory. Several of the rounds hit home on the pilot, killing him quickly.

  "Scratch two. Hold on, Boulder, I'm coming!"

  Boulder toggled to bot mode, spinning left then right to avoid the cannon fire from behind him. Burner had pushed on ahead after the lead Gnat, leaving him for the two on their six. Going to bot and then kicking the HOTAS in reverse was enough of a wild negative g-load that Jason regurgitated bile into his helmet. The organogel quickly started absorbing it, and the suit started pumping adrenaline and other stims into his system to compensate.

  One of the Gnats passed by his mecha and clipped Boulder's arm with its tail fin. The impact sent the bot-mode mecha spinning even wilder. His already-spinning head and churning stomach were aggravated by the blow. Jason stomped hard on his left upper pedal to slow the spin, and then he jammed the HOTAS against the forward stop, thrusting the mecha in a vector along an axis from toe to head, which happened to be horizontal with the planetoid's surface. He pulled the DEG sights into his mindview and shot from the hip at the two Gnats as they took positions on Burner's tail. The QMs locked on to the fighter that had clipped him, and Boulder squeezed the trigger.

  "Guns, guns, guns," he said. The sensors pinged a missile lock on the other, and Boulder was preparing to fire fox three when his Bitchin' Betty started bitching.

  "Warning, weapons lock. Warning, radar lock from enemy targeting system."

  "Fox three!" He fired only milliseconds before tracer rounds from a formation of Stingers that had been stalking him ripped through the torso of his mecha. "Oh, fuck!"

  The rounds continued to cut into his mecha, sending a leg of the bot exploding off into space. Then secondaries exploded from power systems being ruptured. Boulder quickly assessed his plane's health and realized it was a goner.