Kill Before Dying (Tau Ceti Agenda Book 5)

by Travis S. Taylor

  Okay. I think I get it. Nancy thought about it for a minute and double-checked the virtual conference conversation to keep up and make the appearance that she was paying attention. The big question is, how do we exploit this new information?

  That is the big question, Nancy. Allison agreed. And honestly, I have no idea for now.

  Okay, I think we need to disseminate this across the Fleet and hopefully somebody else will come up with more. But that isn’t my call. First, transmit all this information to Abigail and give her a crack at it and give her time to brief the General. Let him make the decision on where to go from here. And at the same time, you keep digging on this. Get anybody or anything involved that you need.

  Understood.

  Nancy relaxed her real body but maintained an attentive-looking avatar in the mindview conference room. She wasn’t exactly sure what else, if anything, she needed to say. One thing she knew was that she wanted to talk with Jack and get his feel for the day. She trusted his council, but mostly she just wanted to feel his arms around her and feel safe with him briefly. She also knew in no uncertain terms that she was going to volunteer to go back into the system and extract Dee and the rest, Chiata be damned. She just needed to think of a clever plan. Perhaps DeathRay could help her with that. She had also had time to assimilate the data that Allison had gathered on her husband’s mental, physical, and emotional status. He was Captain Jack “DeathRay” Boland, larger than life, full of piss and vinegar, and ate his own puke for breakfast more times than most would ever dare. What she had seen from a discussion with the General’s wife was that Jack was taking Dee’s being shot down as his fault. After all, she was his wingman and an integral part of his squadron, the Archangels. Jack had always taken it as his fault anytime one of his pilots was shot down. She’d have to deal with that.

  Nancy understood where he was coming from in that regard because, in fact, she felt guilty herself for not rescuing Deanna. It was painful for her to have to brief the General on the fact that she couldn’t retrieve her. She wasn’t looking forward to conversing with Mrs. Moore either. Sometimes Sehera was more frightening than the badass Marine. Jack had managed the conversation with Sehera and she seemed to forgive and actually not even lay blame. It didn’t matter, though, because Jack and Nancy were both going to feel the guilt whether the Moores wanted them to or not. The two of them would just have to come up with a plan to assuage that guilt and save her, and perhaps get a little payback on the Chiata bastards to boot. Nancy thought about how Jack was so famous for telling his pilots what the battle plan of the day would be. He always kept it simple.

  “We’re gonna go in there and we’re gonna kill those motherfuckers,” he would say. At the moment, Nancy couldn’t see much wrong with that plan. She just needed to figure out how to implement it.

  She wondered why he had hesitated to contact her. After all, she’d been in system for more than fifteen minutes and he hadn’t called. Perhaps he was still recovering from his injuries or he had been overwhelmed with duties, but neither of those would be so time consuming that he couldn’t have DTMed her. But she hadn’t DTMed him, either. Granted she had been busy running a supercarrier, but that was just an excuse and she knew it. She needed to get that ice broken between them quickly now, before whatever they were hesitating about grew into something bigger.

  Allison, get me a channel to Jack.

  Channel is open. Candis warns that his mood is a bit random, even for Captain Boland.

  Your avatar looks great, Boland, Nancy thought gruffly. But the images I’ve had Allison pull up of you from medical say otherwise. How are you?

  I am so glad you are okay! Jack’s mindvoice sounded sad yet relieved. As soon as you can, come see me. Medical has me grounded and won’t let me fly. I could do it anyway, but now’s not the time to be insubordinate to orders.

  It’s harder without the QMTs. The distance from ship to ship even seems like a lot, she said to her husband. I was scared when I saw your name on the recovery list. Don’t do that to me again.

  I know. It hurt. Bad. Worse pain than I’ve ever felt. Mrs. Moore had to put me in a stasis field to shunt the pain.

  Sorry.

  Over now. Have you got a plan to get to Dee yet?

  Not yet, but I’m thinking on it, Nancy replied. You?

  No.

  You think the General has one?

  If he does, he’s not sharing it yet. Jack hesitated for a moment. She better be fucking okay.

  It’s not your fault, Jack, Nancy coddled him a bit. But I agree. She better be fucking okay!

  Chapter 22

  February 19, 2407 AD

  U.S.S. Sienna Madira

  Rendezvous Point, 10.5 Light Days from Target Star System

  700 Light-years from the Sol System

  Monday, 7:04 P.M. Ship Standard Time

  Joe looked at the new arm and clutched his fingers around his favorite coffee mug. There was no pain, no discomfort, and there was no scar. He looked at himself in the mirror at where the new shoulder had been attached, and if he hadn’t seen the original wound himself, he’d have never been able to tell the arm from the shoulder down had just been printed and attached. He sat the mug down and slid the shirt of his UCU over his head.

  “Looks as good as new,” he mumbled as he finished dressing. “Debbie, give me a complete bow-to-stern repair status image of the ship.”

  “Okay, Joe. Here it is,” she said, over his audio speakers since he was speaking audibly. “The repairs are almost complete as far as functional systems are concerned. The repair bots are doing amazing jobs. The new hyperspace projection system is completely installed and ready for online testing. It would have been great to have the bots all along, wouldn’t it.”

  “I don’t know, kinda scares me of my job security.” He laughed and picked his coffee mug back up and finished it off. He turned and looked at his new suit sitting in the corner. One of his crew must have had it requisitioned and delivered already. It had both arms and no scratches or dings. “I’m not in the mood to get in that thing yet.”

  “You are not required to be on duty yet, Joe, but standing order from the General is, while we are in Chiata-occupied territory, everyone wears their suits. Helmets must be on during engagements. Other than showering, repairs, or medical, there are no exceptions without being in direct violation of that order,” Debbie again spoke through the audio system in his room.

  “I know, I know. Just, well, not just yet.” Joe sat down at his desk and looked out the little window at the stars. “Call it medical, then. I’m not ready to jump back in with both feet after such a traumatic injury. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it. Besides, the Chiata aren’t coming out here after two dozen ships that they could vaporize anytime they wanted to. And, none of their sensors are within ten light days of us. They have no clue where we are. We’re safe for now.”

  “Run down the details of the General’s meeting that I missed,” he said.

  “Missing. They are still in the virtual conference. Would you like to join in?”

  “No. Just, well, what is the status of the Juggernauts?” Joe was concerned about one of them in particular.

  “Master Gunnery Sergeant Rondi Howser is among the survivors stranded on the planet, Joe. She is fine for now. According to Captain Penzington, she is taking refuge in some sort of ruins where the Chiata will not engage them,” Debbie informed him.

  “What? I mean, I’m damned glad she’s okay, but ruins?” By missing out on the meeting while in medical, he was apparently missing out on a lot of information. Joe realized he needed to play catch-up for a bit.

  “Yes, it would appear that there are ruins in the Northern Region of the planet, scattered along the main river branches there. As far as the Beta attack wave could tell, the Chiata would only engage the ground teams on the surface but would not follow them into the canyon basin along the river.”

  “What do the ruins look like?” Joe asked. Instantly, imagery data fro
m the sensors of the Fleet ships started filing through his mindview. There were also mecha and suit-camera snapshots of the interior of one of the ruins. One of the snapshots was labeled “USMC Master Gunnery Sergeant Rondi Howser.” Joe stopped on one of Rondi’s and looked at it.

  “What the heck is that?” He stopped on an image of a large wall that had all sorts of curves, circles, and ellipses spread out across it, and at various points there were little indentations of what looked like a bug-shaped hole. The hole reminded Joe of an old-fashioned keyhole. Each one of the “keyholes,” as he thought of them now, corresponded with a curve that also had what looked like a star system on it.

  “Debbie, can you take all the imagery data of this location and make a composite virtual model of it?” Joe asked.

  “Yes, Joe, in fact, Captain Penzington’s AIC has already done so. Would you like to see it?”

  “By all means!” Joe continued to sit in the chair and finger the handle of the coffee mug, but his interest was now beginning to be teased away from the morbidity and potential mortality of injury, trauma, and recovery. He did like the sensation of the cup against his new finger though.

  Joe immersed himself in the virtual world of the ruins and looked carefully at each curve as they traced along walls and ceilings from one curve to another, oftentimes passing through several of the little bug-like marks.

  “Has anybody deciphered these things yet?” He asked. “I mean, we need to take these seriously if the Chiata will not go in there.”

  “Nobody has figured them out just yet,” Debbie told him.

  “I’ve seen something like this before,” he said. “Bring up the diagram for all the QMT jumps we’ve made over the last two decades for me.”

  “Joe?”

  “Just humor me,” he said.

  A virtual diagram of locations across the local part of the galaxy showing where large ships had jumped from QMT gate-to-gate, snap-back, and sling-forward jumps were also shown. To start with, it was just a map with a bunch of dots on it. Joe thought about it for a few long seconds as he stroked his chin with his new hand. The stubble there gave his new fingers an even more interesting sensation than the cup handle that was, to Joe, both something he’d felt a million times and something he’d never felt at the same time.

  “Okay, let’s see here. Draw a line for each gate’s spacetime position over a complete orbital period of all in-system motions as well as their relative galactic positions,” Joe told his AIC. To make certain it looked like he thought it would, Joe picked out the QMT facility in the Kuiper Belt around Sol and watched it. The facility’s position was a slightly eccentric orbit about Sol, and it had a bit of wobble to it due to other Oort Cloud and Kuiper Belt objects tugging on it with their low gravity. There were also the occasional times when the orbit took it close enough to Neptune and Uranus to see a gravitational tug from them. The resultant graphic was an ellipse about the star, but the line drawn corkscrewed about the main elliptical path because of that slight position wobble.

  Joe watched as all of the lines filled in and the local region of spacetime started looking like a spirograph gone mad. With the galactic motion added in, the curves drifted about an even larger curve set that made the graphic that much more convoluted.

  “Now, where there are QMT facilities, place a supercarrier icon there. Where we engaged buzz-saw bots, put an enemy bot icon there.” Joe looked at his handiwork. The graph looked perfectly confusing and not unlike the virtual one of the ruins. “You see where I’m going with this, Debbie?”

  “Yes Joe, I do,” his AIC replied. “What would you like me to do with it?”

  “I don’t have time to spend on this and keep the ship running too. Pass this to the STO, Captain Penzington’s AIC, and the General’s AIC. They should be able to extrapolate this and figure it out. But I’m pretty certain this is a map of gate traffic or jumps, or maybe whoever left it behind left it to show us their evacuation route. I don’t know.”

  “The data has been passed along with a brief description of your hypothesis as ordered, Joe. The STO has sent you a priority file. Would you like to open it now?”

  “Sure.” Joe stood up and stretched his legs, all the while looking out the window at the stars and thinking how quiet his place was when Howser wasn’t there. And how dark it was without her glowing tattoos. He brought the lights up just a bit and quit staring out at the stars. He hoped she was alright. Then the file that Commander Snow had sent him during his medical procedure opened and he was consumed by it. It was an analysis of data taken by the STO of the Hillenkoetter on the blue beams. Almost instantly, as Buckley assimilated the data into his mind, the wheels started turning.

  “This is amazing data,” Joe muttered. “There are these gravimetric spikes with each turn of the beams. These little virtual quantum black holes, if that’s what she wants to call them, are being projected from somewhere that can manipulate an immense amount of energy.”

  “Yes, perhaps they are being projected from the spires about the megaship’s surface?” Debbie pondered with Joe.

  “Maybe, but to precisely place these virtual gravity lenses about space randomly and ahead of a beam means they are transmitting it using quantum entanglement. Nothing else other than membrane tech does that instantaneously in violation of Einstein.” Joe thought about what he’d just said.

  Somehow the Chiata ships were transmitting enormous amounts of energy into regions of spacetime instantaneously and precisely. Possibly the blue beam itself could be the source for the quantum connection with the black hole projector, and then a device back onboard the alien megaship would still be in connection through entanglement of quantum wavefunctions with the end of the blue beam. Simply decohering information from the shipboard end would allow the cohering of information at the blue beam end. In this case, that information was enough energy to create a miniature gravitational lens in spacetime with the precise spacetime structure that would gravitationally steer the beam in the direction it needed to go.

  To Joe, this meant many things. The first thing was that the aliens had one helluva power source somewhere in the belly of their ships. One hell of a power source. Joe knew immediately that he needed to pin down where that was. Secondly, Joe realized that there was an amazing sensor system that, in turn, was driving a control algorithm that could follow the beam and targets, update the beam’s targeting path, calculate the energy projection required for placement of the black holes, and then somehow place those black holes. The latency factor here was less than the order of femtoseconds. To do all that in such a small amount of time meant the Chiata had computational powers far superior to anything Joe knew about.

  Then something that the Ghuthlaeer had told them popped into his mind. The Ghuthlaeer’s chief engineer had sent word to him that the barrier shields could use more power. Joe had managed to siphon off as much power from every other system on the ship to max them out, but they still couldn’t hold off the Chiata blue beams for long. And Joe now realized that the small black hole was simply sucking off all the power of the shields down through the event horizon. As far as energy was concerned, the little black holes were essentially a bottomless pit into which the entire store of a ship’s energy could be drained. The amount of energy required to make those things go supernova had to be outrageous.

  “Debbie, calculate the energy required to fill up one of these black holes for me. How can we make them go supernova? Or would we want too?” Joe asked his AIC.

  “If a quantum black hole went supernova, it would likely produce so much energy as to sterilize a complete star system of any life. The explosion would be too much for the shields to withstand, for certain. I wouldn’t recommend it, Joe,” Debbie replied.

  “What if we pumped more energy through the shield generators?”

  “We’d need all the energy from one of those megaships to drive them. We do not have anything that can produce that kind of power,” Debbie explained.

  “Run a simulation and
show me what happens if we pumped that much energy through the Madira’s shields.” Joe sat back in his desk chair and waited for a second for the simulation to be complete.

  The supercarrier’s shields flickered as the graph of energy input rose. The shield bubble expanded from the ship and looked as if they would continue to expand in a blast wave, but then the generators exploded and the ship flew apart.

  “What happened?”

  “The energy transfer was too much for the shield generators to handle. We’d need at least four times as many shield generators to run that much energy through them.”

  “Hmmm. Okay, assume we have that many shield generators, then what? Rerun the sim that way.”

  “Okay, Joe. Hold on one minute.”

  This time the simulation was much more interesting. As the energy curve increased, the shield strength increased nonlinearly, and therefore it had to expand in a spherical wavefront with the ship at the origin. Once the energy input reached a certain level, where the Madira had exploded in the previous one, all of the energy immediately dumped through the system like a capacitor discharging through a short circuit. The spherical wavefront exploded like a supernova from the ship and tore away anything in its path. The blast radius covered a sphere over thirty thousand kilometers in radius.

  “What the?!” Joe looked startled. “What happened there?”

  “I’m not certain, Joe, but there would appear to have been some sort of quantum bounce phenomenon predicted by the simulation. I wouldn’t have expected that,” Debbie said.

  “Quantum bounce? You mean like at the bottom of a black hole where quantum gravity prevents further compaction of spacetime quantum loops and then quantum loop compaction itself forces the black hole to reverse and explode?” Joe remembered the concept vaguely from his undergraduate spacetime engineering classes.