Kill Before Dying (Tau Ceti Agenda Book 5)

by Travis S. Taylor

  “Hurry it up!” Dee could see the trajectory curves of her fighter and the aliens’ fighter twisting about each other with red and blue traces in her DTM battlescape view. DeathRay’s Navy Ares VTF 33-T fighter jinked and juked through the trajectory plots in an almost discontinuous motion. As far as Dee could tell, DeathRay must have been holding the trigger down continuously as racquetbal-sized fireballs pounded at her pursuer’s hull. The sharp gee loads DeathRay was enduring to clear her six had to be enormous on the pilot, but that was what wingmen were for. Dee continued to twist and roll her mecha like a giant mechanical Olympic gymnast squirming over a fire ant hill. She looked straight through the bottom of her fighter via her mindview and could see the porcupine’s forward spires glowing blue and firing.

  “Shit!” She grunted and squeezed her legs, buttocks, and abs as her neck muscles strained against the forces pulling her and pushing her apart. “Aaaaarrrr whooo uhnnn!”

  “Warning, enemy targeting lock eminent. Warning, targeting lock eminent!” Her Bitchin’ Betty sounded and warning lights filled her DTM display.

  “Now, Dee! Now!” DeathRay shouted. “Guns, guns, guns. Fox three! Fox three!”

  Dee didn’t hesitate or take time to watch whatever the hell magic flying shit Captain Jack “DeathRay” Boland did. If she’d waited that fraction of a second it would have killed her. Instead her training and proficiency as a mecha jock prevailed. Dee slammed the throttle forward with one hand and the stick forward and right with the other. With her index finger on her left hand she hit the transfigure toggle as she stomped both of the upper left pedals with a tad of lower right pedal.

  “Holy shit!” she shouted, and then grunted a guttural scream as the g-suit squeezed her legs, forcing the blood back into her torso. Dee flexed her core muscles and swallowed back bile as the negative nine gravities turned over and then threw her backwards with a positive twelve gravities for a brief instant as the nose of her fighter pointed straight at the alien ship. Her own nose had a slight red trickle of blood draining from it that the seal layer of her suit would quickly absorb.

  Just as the blue zig-zagging beams began to leap from the porcupine fighter, Jack’s guns tore into the shields. A swirl of blues and greens flashed as the fighter’s shields failed. The cannon fire continued pouring into the side plating, making a weak spot for the mecha-to-mecha missile to paint with high explosives. The blue beam seemed to backfire for a brief frozen instant and then the alien ship erupted into a blue and orange ball of shrapnel and plasma. Dee’s fighter, now reversing its velocity vector, shot through the fireball and debris cloud, rocking and pinging from small impacts against the Buckley-Freeman barrier shields.

  “On your six, DeathRay!” There was no time for Dee to catch her breath. She threw the HOTAS sideways and back and kicked in the throttle as she screamed past DeathRay’s fighter, only missing it by meters. The red and blue energy curves spiraled and corkscrewed in her mind but there were none that would converge in time for her to help Jack. Her energy vector was in the complete wrong direction and she’d have to make a hairpin turn as she just had. It was going to hurt but Dee was not going to allow Jack to have sacrificed himself to pull her ass out of the fire.

  “Hold on, Boss!” USN Commander Karen “Fish” Fisher shouted through the tac-net. Dee could see Jack’s old wingman’s energy curve making a U-turn around an enemy porcupine and twisting with her wingman USMC First Lieutenant Wiley “Bridge” Cruise in a ballet spiral with two other porcupines on his tail. The mish-mash of energy curves and possible combat tactical scenarios of more than forty fighting mechas and what was running at the current toll of ninety-seven enemy targets twisted into what looked like a horrific spaghetti nightmare pulsating and entangled about space in her mindview. To anyone else it would have been an incredible overload of data that could simply shut the mind down. For anyone else it would have been overwhelming. But USMC Major Deanna “Apple1” Moore wasn’t just anyone.

  Then, almost as soon as Dee’s mind acknowledged the mix of energy curves her training, instinct, and fighting brilliance converged on a solution almost at the same instant the super-quantum computing artificial intelligence in her head highlighted it. She pulled the throttle to a full stop and rolled and yawed her fighter mode mecha, then kicked in the burners. The two maneuvers slammed her forward with seven gees and then backward with nine gees and no telling how many somersaults her stomach took from the angular accelerations.

  “Fish! Stay on your target!” Dee told her. “You and Bridge dance the dance. I need the diversion, and don’t worry, I’ve got your backside curves. DeathRay, you’re gonna have to feint as soon as Fish goes hot!”

  “Guns, guns, guns!” DeathRay shouted. “I got you, Apple1. But I see what you’re planning and I don’t like it! The only way out of what you’re planning is to start pukin’! Your body is gonna be fried and out for precious seconds and we’re overwhelmed!”

  “If I don’t, you and Bridge are toast! Just cover my ass on the back end!” Dee said. “Fox three!”

  Dee loosed a mecha-to-mecha missile as she tore through the middle of Fish and Bridge’s energy curves, hoping to draw off at least one of the porcupines from Bridge’s tail. The enemy fighter that Fish had made the U-turn about had spun facing her and was firing the blue beams in her direction. Or at least that was the way it seemed. Those fucking zig-zagging death beams could turn on a dime so it was never clear where they were targeted. The missile spun about, juking and jinking through the enemy countermeasures until it hit home on the nearest porcupine on Bridge’s six. An energy curve from the edge of the ball cut across in front of DeathRay’s nose and a blue curve from one of the Utopian Saviors plowed the road behind it, zipping off her three-nine line at many kilometers per second of relative velocity. The mind-numbing data overload of the alien-paced space combat only exacerbated the physical pounding it was giving the pilots. There literally was no amount of push-ups or weight training that could prepare the human body for the toll mecha combat took. There was no more grueling a fitness program in existence, and that was why mecha jocks looked like they were chiseled from stone and harder than carbon neutronium.

  As Dee rolled right, forcing the propellantless engines to the redline, she could feel a bit of tunnel vision fighting in at the corners of her field of view. But the violent rocking of her mecha as one of the blue beams rocked her forward shield snapped her out of it.

  Hold on, Dee. Her AIC counted down her maneuver. Hold. Hold. Now!

  Damn right! she thought.

  “Now, DeathRay!” she shouted.

  “Fox three!” Boland rolled over into the well-known Fokker’s feint as his fighter transfigured into bot mode. Simultaneously, he fired missiles and guns at the porcupine on his ass. The rapid ass-over-heels maneuver distracted the enemy on Jack’s six enough that Fish and Bridge spiraled about it, finishing it off and leading the enemy fighters closing on them into the perfect kill box.

  “Fox three, fox three, fox three!” Dee loosed three mecha-to-mecha missiles as she twisted through the red and orange fireball that had been an enemy porcupine, keeping her fighter mode mecha pushing at top speed on the same vector, but yawing and pitching the nose of her mecha at targets that were closing on her teammates and opening up their blue beams of death. “Guns, guns, guns!”

  Bree, tighten up my energy spiral on the second enemy fighter!

  I’ve got it, Dee, her AIC replied. Sure you want to do this?

  We’re committed at this point.

  “Cover my ass, DeathRay!” she shouted as she toggled her fighter over to eagle-mode, took a huge gulp of air, and then she hit the DeathBlossom algorithm. “I’m pukin’!”

  DeathBlossom clock spinning. One second and counting, her AIC informed her.

  Instantly, the attitude control system accelerated her eagle-mode FM-12. The mecha looked like a sleek fighter plane with two giant cannon-wielding arms underneath and two clawed feet that housed propellantless engines in each. Th
e mecha began to spin in random directions with wings, nose, tail, arms, and feet engines akimbo. Each handheld cannon fired a stream of well-targeted, racquetball-sized, armor-piercing gluonium-tipped exploding rounds, and the directed energy weapons burst precision pointed beams in every direction. The rotational accelerations and decelerations were far too great to fire missiles.

  Dee was thrown into her couch with the gee forces of the whirling madhouse. Her stomach tossed and lurched as she clenched her teeth down hard on her temporal-mandibular joint bite block, releasing stimulants and anti-nausea drugs into her system. Dee tracked the energy spirals and red and blue targets in her mind as the universe whirled around her at such a maddening pace that it was all her mind could do to track what was happening. The star field, the ball, the Madira, the planet below all blurred into a mosaic of red and blue traces and the targeting solutions pinged in her mind faster than the eyes could follow. The only way to keep up with the data was direct-to-mind.

  Five seconds, Dee.

  Even mentally, all Dee could manage was a grunt. But she did feel elation as explosions began to fill her blurred, whirling view and red targets blinked out of the battlescape. The DeathBlossom timer seemed to take forever to count down in her mindview. The longest any pilot, DeathRay of course, had ever managed to stay in the maneuver and come out on the other side of it still coherent was thirty-three and a half seconds, and that record was five seconds longer than any other challenger.

  Thirteen seconds in! her AIC shouted in her mind as the guns and DEGs continued to fire at targets.

  Keep firing until DeathRay, Fish, and Bridge are clear! Dee ordered her AIC.

  Several times the cannons or DEGs hit targets but didn’t knock out the shields. But the DeathBlossom weakened the enemy in the ball enough so that one of the Archangels or Utopian Saviors could add insult to injury and finish them off. Dee’s fighting fury was helping. Whether it was working or not was unclear, but it was at least helping in the short term.

  The maneuver continued to take an extreme toll on Dee as the average random gee forces topped as much as twelve gravities with occasional instantaneous spikes as high as fifteen. Dee calmed herself as best she could and held her abdominal muscles as rigid as hull plating with the structural integrity fields at max. Her core was strong but it was already beginning to ache as it was being expected to support more than twelve thousand kilonewtons of force on her body. Dee grunted and growled, forcing and willing herself to remain conscious and alert through the maneuver. Bile began to trickle upwards into her mouth and her nose continued to bleed.

  Dee focused on the red dots in the battlescape DTM and watched as her maneuver continued to pound at them. She had managed to hit more than ten of them and personally take two of them out as the timer clicked over to twenty-one seconds into the DeathBlossom.

  Dee was losing her ability to focus. The energy lines of the porcupines and the mecha started to blur and her mind was beginning to lose the ability to track. The laws of general relativity and universal gravitation weighed in on her as the high-gee maneuvers caused her perception of time to slow down. There was little she could do at this point other than ride out the maneuver as each of her arms was so heavy that moving them was almost impossible even in the pilot’s armored suit.

  Then her ship bounced even harder than she’d ever felt in a DeathBlossom before, and her energy vector radically shifted off her planned course. The tell-tale signs of a zig-zagging beam passed in front of her maddening spin and several new red dots filed into her local battlescape view. The number of enemy fighters in the ball grew as the ball shrunk into a bowl. And the hell of it was that every one of those red dots was firing blue beams and missiles at her and her colleagues. Dee could see the rest of the Archangels scattering and doing their best to lay down cover for her as she approached the end of the maneuver. But she’d never been shot while in a DeathBlossom. Had it not been for her suit and the new Buckley-Freeman shields, she’d have been dead already.

  Twenty-six seconds! Bridge is locked up, Dee and Fish can’t help him! her AIC warned.

  Can we get him?

  You can’t hold it that long!

  I’ll hold it! Save Bridge! That’s an order.

  “Dee, drop out!” DeathRay’s voice sounded in slow motion and Doppler-shifted toward bass tones over the gravity-shifted tac-net. “Drop out!”

  Stay on it, Bree!

  Thirty point seven seconds!

  Dee’s abdominal muscles felt like they were on fire, exploding, and about to rip from her body from her breasts all the way to her groin, but she continued to squeeze them as best she could. Sweat, blood, and now bile poured from her. She clenched as best she could to keep from vomiting and heaving. The high-gee forces were the only thing keeping that from happening now. But Dee held on as she watched the energy curves of the enemy fighter on Bridge’s tail converge.

  Thirty four point three.

  Dee’s vision tunneled in around her and she could no longer hold her abdominal muscles tight. They felt as if they gave way. The red dot on Bridge’s blue dot faded out as Dee could feel the weight of the world lift from her body and time rushed in on her as rapidly as her stomach turned upside down and she heaved vomit into her faceplate. She wished she hadn’t eaten all day.

  Dee choked and held her breath between heaves as best she could to keep the vomit and bile from getting sucked backwards up her nose and down her windpipe. She heaved again and was out of air. She fought back the urge to breathe. She fought hard as she lurched and heaved again. This time, nothing came out. Her stomach was empty. The organogel from the interior of her helmet filled in around her face and quickly absorbed the horrid-smelling bits. A fresh burst of oxygen and stimulants overpressured her helmet to the point that her ears popped.

  Two seconds out, Dee! Major Moore! Major Moore, snap to! You’ve got to move, Dee!

  “Apple1! Apple1! Dee!” DeathRay’s voice pierced the fog in her mind.

  Dee had held her breath as long as she could, and let in a huge gasp. The rush of air and stims into her mouth and nose burned her blood-raw throat like acid.

  “Dee! Feint! You have to feint now!”

  “Warning! Enemy targeting lock. Warning, enemy targeting lock!” the Bitchin’ Betty chimed.

  “Dee!”

  Blue beams tore into her aft shields, tossing her spinning on a trajectory deeper into the upper atmosphere of the planet. The force of the atmosphere hitting her mecha at a relative velocity of over seven kilometers per second caused the superalloys to groan and creak from the strain. The transparent hull plating of her cockpit deformed in the middle, and spiderweb cracks scattered across it. Dee shook herself as the stims started kicking in. She toggled the bot mode switch, but nothing happened.

  “Warning. Port engine failure. Warning. Port engine failure.”

  Bree! Keep power to the shield generators and give me full throttle on the starboard drive! she thought.

  With one engine firing, the mecha was extremely sluggish, but she managed to pull the spin from the blue-beam impact to something manageable. Manageable, yes. Controllable, no.

  She hit the transfigure toggle again and still didn’t change to bot. Then she attempted to go to fighter mode, but she was stuck in eagle mode.

  “Warning! Structural integrity fields at thirty-three percent. Propulsion system failure is imminent. Structural failure imminent. Warning reentry angle off nominal.”

  “DeathRay! I’m hit bad. Lost an engine and scraping the atmosphere. I’ve got no trajectory solutions that get me out of the gravity well. I’m going down!” she explained. “Repeat. This is Apple1. I’m going down.”

  “Eject, Dee!” Fish shouted. Dee thought of that for a brief instant, and just for sake of trying, hit the emergency snap-back button on her QMT wristband. Nothing happened. The quantum membrane teleportation system was nonfunctional in this system. “Eject, Apple1!”

  “No good! I’m already venting plasma from reentry. I’m fa
lling too fast at this point. I’m just gonna have to ride it out.”

  Bree, get me some reentry solutions now! she thought.

  Roger that, her AIC replied, as multiple landing solutions started plotting in her mindview. Few of them looked good to her.

  That one! It is farthest from any population centers. Might be less uglies there. She highlighted one of the curves in her mind. Now, just keep us together long enough to crash!

  “Sienna Madira, Sienna Madira, Apple1.” Dee called in her distress and activated her purple signal for the blue force tracker. “I’m hit and on a collision course with the planet. Projected coordinates being transmitted. I’m going down. Hope you can send an evac soon.”

  “Roger that, Apple1. Search and rescue will be activated as soon as possible. It’s thick out there, Apple1. Lay low and we’ll get to you. Good luck.”

  Chapter 4

  February 19, 2407 AD

  Alien Planet

  Target Star System

  700 Light-years from the Sol System

  Monday, 1:55 P.M. Ship Standard Time

  The drop had been no more difficult than expected. In fact it seemed all too easy. Once the Expeditionary Fleet dropped out of QMT, the ships had immediately started popping out the drop tanks. The Sienna Madira II was no exception there. Within seconds of rematerializing in reality space, the M3A18-T army hovertanks were shot out of their drop tubes at the blue and green world below.

  Colonel Maximillian “Dragon” Slayer was first out with his squad of “Dragon Slayers.” Riding atop of each of the Slayers’ ten drop tanks there was at least one AEM. USMC Colonel Francis Jones and Jones’ Juggernauts in their armored environment suits held onto the exterior of the hovertanks as they dropped from low orbit all the way through the atmosphere to the surface of the alien planet. For the Marines it was one hell of a ride, but that was how they liked it.

  The tankheads and the AEMs dropped at full stealth and didn’t engage targets as they fell through the mecha- and porcupine-filled ball. The mecha jocks covered them and engaged the enemy with full ferocity to distract the Chiata as best they could from the drop teams. Strangely enough, the Chiata didn’t seem all too interested in the teams once they had penetrated through the upper atmosphere. The drop teams made it to the surface of the planet with zero casualties. But as reports came through the ground team tac-net, it became evident that geography was extremely important in their mortality rates. The Thatcher’s teams were getting chewed up near the planet’s equatorial plane on one of the central more inhabited continents. The Madira’s ground teams saw little if no engagement—at first.