Kill Before Dying (Tau Ceti Agenda Book 5)

by Travis S. Taylor

  “You’re not thinking of leaving them?” Nancy could almost see the SEAL’s dislike of the idea on what little facial expression she could see through his faceplate. “Uh, ma’am, with all due respect, we can’t just leave them there.”

  “I don’t like it any more than anybody else does. But there are seven Maniacs, eight Slayers, six AEMs, and Dee. Twenty-two people for thousands is not a good battle plan. The Chiata have responded with far more numbers here than we had anticipated. Our fleet is overwhelmed. We need to regroup and lick our wounds and come up with a better plan. At our current rate of loss, we’ll not survive much longer ourselves.” Nancy didn’t hesitate to look at Rackman further. He didn’t have to like her order. He just had to carry it out. “Comm! Send retreat order to all ships. Hyperspace immediately to rendezvous location.”

  “Aye, ma’am,” the clone communications officer, a Malcolm clone like the gunner, replied.

  “We have to tell them.” Rackman pleaded. Nancy turned to her XO and nodded her head subtly up and down. “Yes. I already have.”

  Chapter 16

  February 19, 2407 AD

  Northern Region

  Target Star System

  700 Light-years from the Sol System

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

  The river was much deeper than Dee had expected, which had been fortunate for her. The blue bolts from the alien rifles had pounded her armor during her mad leap over the cliff, causing her barrier shield generator to fizzle out. Her shields were gone. She fell in a gymnastic twirl, spinning wildly over the waterfall, doing her best to gain control of her body, but the angular momentum was too great. Dee hit hard against the water with a loud slapping sound that echoed about the jungle cavern. The noise scattered alien birds and other creatures scampering off in every direction.

  She pierced into the water, doing a backflop that jerked her so hard it made her see stars. The armor had protected her but the impact concussed her enough that she was knocked silly for several seconds. Still punch drunk, Dee finally came to being tossed about by tons of rushing water that pushed her deeper and deeper and further out into the rapidly flowing and churning river that was over thirty meters deep at her current location. The water flowed so swiftly that it swept her into the deepest and fastest currents. Dee had no choice but to simply let herself go limp and let the waters wash her away to wherever the river wanted to take her. At least, she hoped, it would take her away from her Chiata attackers.

  She had flowed with the water for some time, ten or so minutes maybe, with her suit banging against rocks and trees at the bottom. Dee was afraid to turn on her active sensors from fear of detection, and that made avoiding obstacles all the more difficult. There were a few times that she would have sworn she saw artificial structures under the water near her, and others she thought some type of creatures had swum by her on several occasions, but she was moving too swiftly and doing her best not get too beat up along the way to pay them much mind.

  Bree! Any idea where we are and where the Chiata are? she thought. A map of the river illuminated in her mindview almost instantly with her blue dot on it. The red dots of the Chiata search team were still moving about the waterfall region almost three kilometers behind her. They appeared to be searching the waterfall and the nearby area thinking Dee would have crawled out of the river nearby. As far as Dee could tell they had yet to push the search farther along the river. That suggested that they could no longer detect her trail.

  I recommend you stay in the currents and let them take you as far away from the alien search party as we can get, the AIC suggested.

  I’m with you on that. Any chance we can get my shield system working again? Dee was hopeful, but wasn’t betting on it.

  Unlikely, Bree told her, and then an image of her suit popped up in her mind, rotated, and then zoomed in on a spot on her back, lower left side. A small metallic box blinked and highlighted. Layers of the armor covering it peeled away and led to several circuit components and some sort of coil wound about a crystalline rod. The rod was fractured and chips of it were spread about and embedded in the circuit boards, giving the appearance that the rod had exploded. The generator was completely overloaded and we do not have replacement components. The field initiating substrate has been destroyed.

  Shit. I was afraid of that. What is it made of?

  Yes. Shit. I agree. The rod is made of degenerate matter and built by nanomachines from the atom up in such a way that it can trap strange matter in small pockets.

  What the hell is strange matter?

  Strange matter is a degenerate collection, cloud, or gas of quarks that usually contains strange quarks in addition to the usual up and down quarks. The only place in nature it is found to my knowledge is in quark stars or the core of neutron stars formed by the collapse of objects above the Tolman–Oppenheimer–Volkoff mass limit for neutron-degenerate objects. We actually don’t know how to acquire natural samples from within a star. The strange matter is generated inside an accelerator event, like inside a hyperspace projector during initiation of the Krasnikov tube. The rod itself is there to hold the very sparse distribution of this matter in place. The physics of the rod is what enables the quantum field fluctuations and probability bending that causes the barrier effect. It is known as a Buckley-Freeman Initiator.

  Okay, so you are telling me we can’t make one out of stuff we find lying about on this planet.

  Yes. That is exactly what I am telling you.

  You could have just said that and spared me the fucking physics class.

  Sorry.

  Any other good news? Dee asked sarcastically as she did her best to negotiate through the water. The river still moved swiftly but had spread out and the bottom felt more and more like stone and gravel. Objects in her path seemed to be fewer in number and the river’s depth seemed to be steady at twenty-six point four meters. It was a very big river. Dee thought inwardly that in Marine vernacular it was a BFR—big fucking river.

  Well, I believe we are in an artificial channel within this river now. Perhaps it will be easier to negotiate, Bree said. That is, perhaps, good news.

  Hmm. Artificial? A barge channel like on the Mississippi? Dee thought of home briefly.

  Probably. Or at least it would appear so, although this channel itself is as big as the Mississippi at its largest point. There was a pause and then the AIC changed the subject. Dee. Captain Penzington is making an announcement.

  Put it through in audio.

  Roger that.

  “This is Captain Penzington of the U.S.S. Roscoe Hillenkoetter. I am sounding the systemwide retreat order. The Chiata have overwhelmed us at the current time. We have already lost eleven supercarriers with hopes of retrieving all of our downed soldiers and ground teams. For the moment that appears to be an impossible task, which we cannot afford more losses against. We are currently evacuating this system to our predetermined rendezvous coordinates at which point we will, and I emphasize the word WILL, make plans to return for you. Find a place to dig in or a way to avoid engagement with the enemy if possible. Stay alive. We will return for you as soon as we can.” There was a brief pause and Dee could almost see Nancy swallowing and gulping down her loathing of this situation. Dee knew that there was no way that Nancy would leave her if she didn’t have to.

  “To all of you, good luck. God bless. And we will see you soon.”

  She is requesting a channel with you, Dee.

  Open it.

  “Dee, are you okay?” Nancy sounded both nervous and sad at the same time. She had always been like a big sister to Dee. And now, her big sister couldn’t come to her rescue. DeathRay hadn’t been able to help her, her father hadn’t been able to get to her, and now Nancy couldn’t get to her. Dee had a feeling of being on her own.

  “Yes. For now. I’m playing cat and mouse with some pretty big fucking cats,” Dee grunted. “I’ll be fine, but who knows for how long.”

  “I’m so sorry I can’t get to you. The C
hiata have blockaded the planet from us completely. See if you can make it toward the Maniacs and the groundpounders.”

  “That would take days, Nancy. They are over six hundred kilometers away and I’m on foot.”

  “I can’t tell you honestly that we will be back before then. We’ve been hit very hard and we have to go now,” Nancy told her. “I’m sorry. Stay alive.”

  “I will. You too.”

  Jarhead? Davy Rackman’s mindvoice sounded in her head.

  Squid boy? Are you okay?

  Just banged up all to hell. We’re jaunting in ten seconds. I just had to tell you . . . I love you.

  You too. Davy, I love you too. Dee finally said it or at least thought it to the SEAL, but she hoped it wasn’t too little too late.

  You stay alive. Come Hell or high waters we’ll get back here and rescue you. Rackman’s mindvoice sounded ready to leap from space down to the planet to fight off the Chiata barehanded. Dee loved him even more for that.

  I will be here when you get back. And with that, the channel was dead and the dots for the Fleet ships above the planet vanished from the battlescape.

  * * *

  Dee used the flow of the river for another twenty minutes until the currents died down to the point that the water was no longer enough to move her in her suit by itself. She took long bouncing strides off the bottom like she would if she were on a low-gravity planetoid. The water made her movements easier to control than if she were on an airless rock in space with little to no gravity to speak of. This was easy stuff for a Marine in an e-suit.

  Dee studied the map of the region and of the river while she bounced, and at the same time realized that without the fleet there she no longer had access to the system-wide red force tracker. That made her life much harder. She had no idea where her pursuers were. They might be kilometers away or they might be right on top of her. She’d just have to play this game alert and ready for anything. She considered releasing a couple of nanodroid skyball cameras but wasn’t sure if it would tip off her location when the cameras came back to her or when they uploaded the video to her over the spread spectrum communications tac-net. Once she was certain she had lost the Chiata search party she might reconsider the skyballs.

  The tac-net was the one thing she did have access to. The spread spectrum communications network with the other teams on planet was still available with all other tanks, mecha, suits, and AIC-to-AIC. Dee could barely fathom that of all the droptanks and mecha and AEMs that hit the planet, all of them but twenty-two were dead. Why the others were still alive was a complete mystery, but at least they were alive. She needed to keep in contact with them but was a bit apprehensive to transmit. As far as she knew the spread spectrum below the noise floor algorithms the communications devices used were untrackable. But that was as far as she knew. She had no idea if the Chiata had technology that could track a signal below the noise floor and spread across the entire electromagnetic spectrum on randomly encrypted frequency hopping patterns. There was also the quantum entangled network that didn’t function the same as the quantum membrane teleportation technologies. The entanglement based systems were functioning but the QMT based systems were not.

  Dee studied where the rest of the Madira’s forces were in relation to herself and realized that they were in a tributary of the river she was currently in, but the river looked much smaller there.

  Bree, show me the complete path from me to them, she thought to her AIC.

  Roger that. The path twists and turns a bit and covers a distance of seven hundred and six kilometers, give or take.

  Then the map zoomed out with a light blue line tracing a path downriver, through what looked like more jungle and marshlands, and then down one more set of rolling older mountains and into a much more arid region that looked sort of like New Mexico or Arizona. Currently, Dee was on the largest part of the river chain and it branched in three directions a few klicks ahead. She had to take the easternmost branch to stay on a path leading to the others. And from the looks of it, that would be the most jungle-like region of the planet. Deepest and darkest African Congo sprang to mind. At her current pace she’d reach the three-way split in the river in less than a half hour and then she’d have to negotiate a couple more waterfalls into the jungle swamps region. At least she was wearing her e-suit and wouldn’t have to worry about snakes and bugs. Tough as hell Marine or not, Dee hated spiders and snakes.

  As she approached the triple branch in the river the currents picked up and were becoming unmanageable. For more than a kilometer she had no longer needed to bounce off the bottom to continue to move forward and she had to force herself downward to control her direction. While the suits were designed for almost any environment they had not been designed for swimming. Dee decided it best to bounce to the banks and take to dry land. Her plan was to follow the river for a while, and then she came to the waterfalls.

  She was fortunate that the waterfalls were a shorter drop and had multiple ledges that she could use for landing points with her jumpboots, and there were several of the giant mangrove trees towering nearby and overhanging the falls. As it turned out for Dee, negotiating the two waterfalls hadn’t proven as difficult as the previous one since they weren’t as high and she managed to make covert leaps to the rocks, through the trees, and along indigent animal paths to the bottom of each. Dee noted to her AIC as she dropped through the trees and down the rocky moss-covered slopes without incident how much like any jungle on Earth the place seemed to be. She also noted that there was something unexpected and beautiful about it.

  You have to admit, the place is a pretty green, she thought. Given other circumstances Dee would have thought the place to be absolutely beautiful, but those circumstances would certainly not include any scenario where the Chiata were involved.

  And from appearances must be untouched by the Chiata. There must be a reason for that, Bree added to the sentiment.

  Maybe there’s nothing here that interests them? It made zero sense to Dee why other parts of the planet were fairly densely populated by the Chiata and had become alien construction and manufacturing and dwelling sites, but the Northern continent along the river was deserted.

  From all we’ve seen the Chiata horde devours and uses everything in their path. There must be an important reason as to why they are not here, Bree said. Maybe there is something here they are afraid of.

  That is a chilling thought. Something that scares the Chiata. The thought frightened Dee.

  Nevertheless, they are not here. There is something important here.

  I agree. I’m not sure how but perhaps we need to think on investigating this a little deeper. It could be why we’re here in the first place. Dee began to roll recon procedures in her mind. If she was going to do more than escape and evade then she needed to have a plan.

  Agreed.

  After passing the second waterfall the terrain became mostly flat along the river. The ground was covered with greener than green vegetation and the riverbank was covered with thick vines and mangrove-like trees. The canopy was thicker and the sounds and heat signatures of creatures scurrying about became more and more prevalent. Dee had been on the bounce and slinking through water and jungle alike for the better part of three hours. As far as the sensors and the maps in her suit and that her AIC had access to, she had traveled almost fifty kilometers, evaded the Chiata search party, not to mention killed three or four of them, dropped down three waterfalls, and more recently been pushing though some pretty nasty vegetation and underbrush. It was likely that the Chiata would have found her by then if they were tracking her. At least that was Dee’s hope at the moment.

  “Screw it,” she said quietly to herself. “I’m taking a break.”

  Dee surveyed the riverbank and the canopy for a well-covered spot and found just the place underneath a giant tree several meters from where the river appeared to have receded, leaving the large root system of the tree exposed. The trunk of the tree was at least two meters in diameter
as it spread at the base, leading into hundreds of smaller roots that reached into the soft, moist soil. The base of the circle where the roots met the ground was more than four meters in diameter. The roots kept the large tree elevated above the ground by about three meters or so, leaving Dee to the conclusion that in the rainy season the water was much higher and covered the roots. She looked about and could see trees with similar root systems as far as she could see. Various types of foliage of bright greens and yellows that matched the star’s light yellow-green spectrum covered the jungle floor. Vines appeared as fibrous sinewy tissues that spiraled upward and twisted about the trees in slightly darker greens and browns. Dee noted that she saw almost no reds or blues in the jungle fauna. She also noticed several more cone-shaped mounds that she had seen along the way for the past couple of hours. The mounds were almost two meters tall from the ground to the tip and were a beige, almost concrete color.

  What are these things? Anthills?

  Something similar most likely, Dee. They could also be like the termite mounds in Africa.

  Well, they seem to be everywhere along the river basin. Are they active? she thought as she tapped her knuckles against one. It was hard as granite. There is something almost artificial about them.

  They were built by some sort of creature, that is for certain. Perhaps like the bullet ants in Central America.

  Let’s not find out. Dee backed away from the mound and returned to the base of her giant tree. She began kicking at the roots on one side. The extremely dense wood made cracking and clanging sounds against her jumpboots.

  Dee managed to kick away enough of the vines to make an opening large enough for her to crawl through. She scanned the small cavern underneath the tree and found nothing fearsome, so she sat down opposite the opening and rested the back of her suit against the roots.