Kill Before Dying (Tau Ceti Agenda Book 5)

by Travis S. Taylor

  “Well, sir, uh, I’m building, well, uh, designing actually right now, a new projector system that won’t blow out like this again and we’ll never have to do a Buckley Maneuver ever. Ever Goddamned fucking ever a-damned-gain, uh, sorry, sir,” the CHENG answered.

  “I see. Maybe on the next ship we’ll implement it.” Alexander understood. Buckley had damned near been killed twice because of the ship’s engine design. That was certainly enough motivation to warrant a redesign as well as colorful expletives. But he wanted the CHENG focused on getting the ship up and running and getting to medical. “But we need to take care of you first, Joe. The team can finish up the repairs. I think you need to see a doctor.”

  “You don’t understand, sir.” Buckley turned toward Alexander and finally stopped playing around in his virtual world briefly. “I plan to fix the ship now using the bots. We will, rather the bots will, build the system and then we’ll drop out of hyperspace for a brief moment and switch it over. We could be back to the AO in a couple hours rather than several hours to a day.”

  “Wait, you mean you are fixing the ship now?”

  “Well, I’m figuring out how to fix it using parts and materials we have. We’ll build the secondary system and just turn it on. It should actually work better and be a much quicker plan. See, look.” With that Joe shared his blueprints DTM to the engineering team and the General.

  Abby?

  Yes, sir. It is brilliant actually, sir, and would have multiple redundancies. The AIC ran billions of simulations and analyses almost instantly. I believe it will work. Otherwise, I agree with the CHENG that we might be at least a day from repairing the system.

  Keep checking it. The CHENG is, well, quite distressed.

  Yes, sir.

  Any change in his condition and we need to get him to medical, understood?

  Of course, sir. I’ll keep a watch on his suit’s monitoring systems.

  Good girl.

  “Joe. Why didn’t you tell us? We can help with this,” Amari said after viewing the DTM blueprints. “The bots will have no trouble building this. But, where are you going to get the extra SIF generators needed for the secondary conduits?”

  “For now we build those conduits into the armored hull and use the structural integrity fields there. Eventually, I’d like to add more field generators though.”

  “Very well, CHENG. I see you have work to do.” Moore nodded to the Chief Engineer and to the rest of the team that had filtered about him. There was nothing more he could do there. Besides, he had to figure out their next move against the Chiata and to get his people back—to get Dee back. “Keep me posted.”

  “Yes, sir. The cable is going to fail in about an hour anyway. We’ll have to come out of hyperspace then no matter what. I was never sure we were going to make it to the rendezvous to start with,” Buckley said while nodding toward the buzzing and humming cable that was carrying the power of thousands of lightning bolts through it continuously. “Without the SIFs that Amari put on it, the thing would have exploded in milliseconds.”

  “Keep us in hyperspace as long as you can while building the replacement system,” Alexander said. “I don’t want us to be sitting ducks any longer than we have to be.”

  “Understood, General.” Joe replied.

  “Joe. Any changes in your condition, I’m issuing a direct standing order to have you immediately removed and taken to medical.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  “Stop squirming, Jack!” Sehera Moore told DeathRay, but he either didn’t listen or simply couldn’t hold still. She had the pilot lying flat on an aft hangar emergency triage table with a brace around his neck and chest. According to the log he’d gone into cardiac arrest three times in the last thirty or so minutes. Fortunately, Jack’s suit had kept his heart beating and his body in stable condition, but his wounds were so severe that he was going to need extensive body part replacement. They just weren’t severe enough to warrant the ship’s surgical staff at the moment. There were much worse-off soldiers taking their attention. That fact alone gave Sehera a bad feeling in the bottom of her gut. Jack wasn’t even ranked in the top hundred on the casualty priority list. But that was why Sehera was there. She had been a field rated emergency medical technician for almost a century and she was picking candidates from the list that she could heal without the need of the surgical staff.

  “Well, I’m telling you it fucking hurts, uh, ma’am,” he told her as Sehera adjusted the three-dimensional printer over his open abdominal wound. The organogel from his suit had sealed it and stopped the bleeding and hemorrhaging long since and had already been dissolved away, but it was still a horrific wound even if it wasn’t a priority one wound. Those wounds were really horrific and life threatening and in many cases the suits were all that were holding the patients together and alive. Honestly, that’s the way it was with Jack too, but his suit could keep him alive for days, probably, without proper medical attention. The others were in the minutes to hours category.

  “If you don’t stop moving I’ll have to strap you down or put you in a stasis field, Jack. Besides, the vertebrae in your neck aren’t fully healed yet and you could rebreak them with sudden movements.” Sehera looked at the full body scan in her mindview and zoomed in on his neck. The vertebrae were still sticky and showed multiple fractures still healing. Two discs were bulging and had yet to reduce back to normal. The immunoboost was still working and would take a while for the nanomachines in the serum to completely repair the damage. “I could up the meds, but they won’t give you the complete pain shunt that the stasis field will.”

  “Shit. Just do that. It hurts too goddamned much to stand. The pain meds ain’t helping at all and I don’t see how more would make a difference,” Jack complained. Sehera knew the pilot and had known him for years now. He was as tough as they came. If he was hurting then he must really be hurting. The preprinting wound prep required that the organongel scab be removed by a solvent mix filled with nanorobots designed to eat dead organogel. The solvent cleansed and sterilized as it flushed into the open wound. Bright red blood covered the table but was almost immediately absorbed by the organogel layer of the tabletop. His wound was almost purely open and cleaned. Sehera could see completely through the pilot. It was a scene she’d seen many times over the last thirty or so minutes and expected she would see more wounds of similar nature throughout the rest of the day.

  “Okay then, hold on.” Sehera tapped the controls on the side of the medical bed and it started to whine softly in the background. Almost immediately the grimace on Jack’s face went away and he breathed a sigh of relief. The field paralyzed him for the rest of the procedure and would allow him to withstand it without any pain. “That better?”

  “Oh my God. Night and day. But, now I can’t move anything.” Jack let out another deep breath and coughed, this time gurgling up blood as he did so. The blood drooled down his cheek, leaving a red stream that stained his lips and then dripped to the table. The petroleum jelly-like organogel reached up off the table, sensing it, and schlurped against his face, removing the rest of the blood. “Don’t I need a doctor on this?”

  “The three-D bots will have this fixed in no time. I’ve been doing this procedure since before the stasis field was invented. You wouldn’t believe what I had to do to Alexander so many years ago in a survival tent in the Martian desert. Alexander never saw a doctor for it until after he’d gone in and killed about a hundred Separatist terrorists with his bare hands. I’ll never forget what he told me then.”

  “What was that?”

  “I’d never seen a man so driven and angry and certain of purpose all at once. He looked up at me as he grimaced in pain. Like I said, there were no stasis fields then. I told him not to die on me. He just grunted and between his screams of pain and anger he said that he had too many, and I quote, ‘evil motherfuckers to kill before dying.’ I’ll never forget the look on his face.”

  “I, uh, well, I don’t know what to say to that,” Jac
k said. “Though I wouldn’t mind killing a few million more of the Chiata.”

  “The point is, Mr. Boland, you will be fine even if you don’t see the doc. But don’t worry. I’ll finish you up here and when there is time, if you still feel you need it, the doctor will be by for rounds. Then she can to check you out. But obviously, she has other priority patients right now.” Sehera looked at the open wound. Seeing all the way through him continued to remind her of Alexander and how they had met. It also gave her worry about her daughter. From hyperspace they had no way of knowing how things were going and if Dee was alright or not. Even if they broke out of hyperspace, without the QMT communicators they were speed of light and hyperspace speeds limited. Communications would be nonexistent. She’d have no way of finding out about Dee from deep space. If she got a break from the wounded soon enough she’d make a point to talk with her husband about their plan to rescue her.

  “Doctor or not, I’ve been in good hands. I’m sure I’ll live.” DeathRay said quietly and sighed. “Mrs. Moore, I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t worry about it, Jack. I’d be complaining to see the doctor if I was in your situation too. When Alexander was in the White House I’d see a world-class doctor for a hangnail. There is nothing to apologize for. Besides, what would the Fleet do without the CAG in top working order?” Sehera did her best to offer a bedside manner smile, but her mind was elsewhere at the moment and she was sure Jack’s was too. After all, his wife was still back there fighting the horde the same way her daughter was.

  “I don’t mean that, ma’am. Uh, I know I’ll be fine. I mean . . .” Jack hesitated. “I’m sorry I couldn’t save Dee.”

  “Dee will be fine. That is the only way I can see it in my head. And from what I understand she didn’t need saving at all. We just need to get back to her and get her to safety.” Sehera could see that DeathRay felt guilty about her daughter getting shot down. “It wasn’t your fault, Jack. You damned near got yourself killed trying to save your entire squadron. You can’t fight the Chiata all by yourself. Dee is a mecha pilot and a Marine. She knew what she was getting herself into. Alexander and I have been dealing with this for some time now. We can’t protect her forever, but at the same time we hate seeing her in harm’s way. No. For now, we just pray that Nancy can get to her.”

  “Yeah, well, she is my wingman. It was my job to watch her. And she ended up having to save my ass because I got in too deep.” Jack’s eyes glazed over briefly as if he were talking to his AIC. Sehera figured he was checking on the battle statistics and survivors. She decided it wasn’t her business and let him be to his thoughts.

  “Stop thinking on it. You need a couple hours to heal. Would you like me to turn on the sleep field or do you want to stay awake?”

  “All the same to you, I’ll sleep.” Jack replied.

  “Very well. Sleep well then, Jack. When you wake you’ll feel brand new,” she told him and tapped the sleep control. Boland immediately was out like a light after flipping the switch off.

  Sehera watched as the printer began laying down the first layer of internal organ material to replace what was missing. The system didn’t miss a cell or vein or tissue as it matched what was already there exactly. She noted to herself how much more advanced it was from what she’d used on Mars so long ago. Had Sehera not been watching it closely to make sure nothing went wrong, there would have been no way she could tell the difference from where the old organ material ended and where the new material began. After a few seconds of blood flowing through the new tissues she couldn’t tell the difference anyway. She set the system to perform the operation and repair as well as perform as much rejuvenation as the portable machine could offer. It wouldn’t completely reverse Jack back to a twenty-five-year old’s body, but it would make him feel like he was in perfect health and peaking physically and mentally once he was fully healed. The partial rejuv was always standard procedure because it aided in recovery from post-traumatic stress syndrome.

  She looked about triage at more than seventy tables set up and the bloody and sometimes screaming soldiers waiting for help. She had spent too much time on DeathRay already, but he was family. She knew she had to move on to the next patient.

  “Sweet dreams, Jack.” She patted his head lightly. “You’ll be fine.”

  Chapter 15

  February 19, 2407 AD

  U.S.S. Roscoe Hillenkoetter

  Asteroid Belt, Target Star System

  700 Light-years from the Sol System

  Monday, 2:45 P.M. Ship Standard Time

  USN Captain Nancy Penzington looked out of the forward viewport from the main bridge at the now nineteen ships the second wave of the Expeditionary Fleet attack force had remaining. They were scattered about and hugging rocks or alien ships as closely as they could. There just was no tactic that seemed to be of much use against the alien bastards.

  They had lost eleven ships already. As best they could manage, the clone-commanded ships were using the asteroid field for cover, but the damned alien blue beams could zig around obstacles and zag around corners and bring death from an alien Hell. Nancy was glad she had decided to keep all the pilots in the supercarriers because they would have just been thrown out into the grinder and the ships wouldn’t have time to pull them back in before the Chiata were on top of them blasting them to oblivion.

  “All the buzzsaw bots have been deployed, ma’am,” the Air Boss stated. “But it will be some time before they can self-replicate to any critical mass that would help our effectiveness against the Chiata.”

  “Understood, Zander.” Nancy had to keep their names on a pull-down list in her mindview. The clones only had a few hundred names because the names represented their host. The Commander of the Air Wing for the Hillenkoetter was actually Zander4364. His number having four digits meant he was from the fourth generation of clones generated from the original source material. More detail than that, Nancy didn’t really care. In cases where she had multiple clones of the same source material she called them by title or had thought of nicknames. She had three Teena clones. Her CHENG was Teena597431, a sixth generation clone, while her STO and Nav were eighth generation Teenas. Dealing with all the similar faces hurt her head. At least her Chief of the Boat was the only Franklin clone and her Ground Boss was the only Alexia clone she had on the bridge crew. She wished there had been more humans available trained for bridge duty. She hoped she lived to remedy that situation.

  As it stood presently, the bridge was a chaos of fire and sparks erupting from panels, the smells of burned plastic and metal, and the constant communication of yet more losses from the alien armada within the system and communications from engineering about yet another system that was failing. Nancy turned up her nose as the searing hot plastic smell burned at her nostrils. She could easily activate the faceplate of her suit but she liked having the actual sensory data of her environment. It kept her more alert and attuned to just how bad things might have gotten. Besides, Allison would activate the suit functions instantly if there were any imminent threat.

  “CHENG to CO.”

  “Go, CHENG.” Nancy used her mind to click the engineering channel open.

  “Ma’am, there is no way to get the forward DEGs back up without an extensive EVA. The conduits are blown and I have no way to reroute the coolant. And the SIFs are going to fail on the starboard hull in minutes. Sooner if we take on another blue beam hit,” the CHENG explained.

  “Understood, CHENG. Keep the ship flying and keep the shields and drive up,” Nancy ordered.

  “Working it, ma’am.”

  “Work harder.”

  Nancy pulled up the ship’s engineering diagnostic diagram in her mindview. The forward DEGs were down and the SIF generators were overloading the power conduits on the starboard false hull. There were multiple breaches in the armor plating of the upper decks of the ship, and several of the secondary ship’s systems were offline. Main propulsion was still functional, but only barely. One or two more hits from one of
the blue beams and the Hillenkoetter would be stuck dead in space and surrounded by the Chiata horde.

  Nancy held the complete battlescape virtual view about her head and played with probabilities and possible outcomes, but between her and the super AIC living within her skull, neither of them could develop any strategy that was going to see them hold in orbit long enough to extract the Maniacs, Slayers, and Juggernauts. And she could find no way to move further northward to extract Dee without major losses. Her first attempt at dropping a ship in on top of the ground team’s location planetside had resulted in the complete loss of the supercarrier UM61 Beta Seven. As far as she could tell there were no survivors.

  It was possible she could throw several of the supercarriers at the problem of extracting the downed teams. That would mean risking the lives of thousands of clones, but Nancy wasn’t certain if it was moral to sacrifice so many clones and AICs, or were they one and the same, for a much smaller number of normally born humans. Nancy wasn’t really certain that there was any difference other than the fact they were born in a different process. They were lives nonetheless and Nancy couldn’t justify the meat grinder. Clones or not. Dee or not. It was time to make the tough decision.

  “Rackman!”

  “Aye, ma’am?” her XO responded over the klaxons and din of activity as a mix of clone and human firemen and techs rushed about the bridge tending to fires and repairs. Nancy turned and focused on Rackman for a moment. She preferred hearing his voice over the clones. At least Rackman’s carried the vocal inflections of emotions that matched the present situation. The clones of the crew sounded too deadpan, or when they did display emotional inflections, they always seemed to be the wrong one for the moment or way too much or too little to be situation-appropriate.

  “I can’t find any way that we can extract those on the planet without losing most of the fleet.” Nancy hesitated for a second. “All recon teams are KIA. The ground teams and pilots seem to be safe for the moment. They’ll have to stay put. This party is a bust.”