Kill Before Dying (Tau Ceti Agenda Book 5)

by Travis S. Taylor

  “Yes, that is exactly what the model shows. As the blast wave pushes energy against spacetime faster than it can get out of the way, the spacetime itself reacts by releasing energy with it. In this case the shield looks like the bottom of the black hole at maximum allowed quantum loop pressure and so the quantum bounce is occurring all across the spherical shield’s surface. We have in essence the creation of a white hole radiating outward in all directions from the spherical surface of the shield.”

  “No shit?” Joe slumped and propped his chin in his new hand. Joe pulled up schematics of a supercarrier and of the megaships. He looked at the schematics energy transfer systems of the supercarrier and then back at the incomplete diagram of the alien megaship. They could only guess at what was inside the porcusnail things, but physics was physics and Joe had a good idea at least of where the energy plants were. “Debbie, run the sims again and make certain four times the generators is enough with ample margin for safety.”

  “Okay, Joe.” She reran the simulations, and again, just past the failure point of one supercarrier’s worth of shield generators the quantum bounce occurred, sending out the massive blast front with a total destruct spherical radius of over thirty thousand kilometers. The phenomenon was almost too much to believe, but the physics was what the physics was. It was just one of the first times that humanity had created a phenomenon that was almost stellar in scale even in simulation.

  “This could really happen? No shit?” Joe didn’t question the physics, it was just a whole new level of play.

  “No shit, Joe,” Debbie said. “Too bad we don’t have four times the shield generators on this ship.”

  “We have them, alright.” Joe was beginning to have one of his crazy ideas. “If people thought the Buckley maneuver was crazy, wait ’til they hear about this.”

  “Joe? What are you planning?”

  Chapter 23

  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, 7:44 P.M. Ship Standard Time

  “So, let me get this straight, Mr. Buckley.” General Moore looked at his chief engineer, not quite certain if the man was losing it or not. He understood that Joe had been through a very traumatic injury within the past few hours, and sometimes those things had some unusual and adverse side effects. The immunoboost and pain meds alone were enough to make a person hyper and bouncing off the walls. “You want to take one of the Fleet ships that we are already limited on and you want to let the repair bots strip it down?”

  “Uh, well, not exactly strip it down, General,” Joe replied. “What I want to do is use the Von Neumann probe self-replication code that President Madira implemented in her builder bots, inject those bots into the most damaged ship, and have them generate as many specifically programmed repair bots as we can in the next two hours.”

  “Okay, to what end exactly? I’m still not sure I’m following you.” Moore listened to the CHENG patiently. He had known the man for some time now and knew that if he was asking for something so wild that he had a crazy plan or maneuver up his sleeve that just might save the day or end up killing them all. Moore needed something Buckley-crazy. Hell, he’d just about settle for batshit crazy if it would help him save his daughter.

  “Uh, sorry sir. I haven’t explained myself well. Let me start over.” Buckley paused for a second and then looked to Alexander as if he were talking to his AIC. “Sir, let me DTM this to you.”

  “Okay. Go ahead.”

  Abby.

  Got it, sir.

  “As you can see from this image of the Chiata megaship, or uh, porcusnail, I think the CDC is calling them, there are four main shield generators, as far as we can tell anyway, here and here and here and over here.” Joe pointed at the virtual image, and the shield generators highlighted in Alexander’s mindview. “Two in the front and two in the back and each on opposite outer sides of the vessel. We need to hit the Chiata ships right there with a supercarrier per generator and release the repair bots into each of the four breaches created.”

  Alexander at first thought Joe was talking about firing the weapons at weak points on the enemy ship, until the simulation Joe was running showed four Fleet ships, aft hangar ends toward the Chiata ship, colliding with it at the generator locations.

  “Wait, you mean you want our ships to ram the Chiata ship?” Alexander was now seriously considering that Joe had lost his marbles. “What type of damage would we take on?”

  “Well, that is negligible considering the possible outcome, sir. Please stay with me on this for just a bit longer and you’ll see. The risk is high, but the rewards might be, well, unbelievable, sir.” Joe reached up and zoomed in on one of the impact points. “Now the shields will be reinforced on the aft hangar section to protect it as best we can but we want to penetrate into the megaship all the way into the interior hull. That will be the, well, hairiest part.”

  “No shit.” Alexander raised an eyebrow at Buckley’s description.

  Hairiest part, my ass, Moore thought. Can the ship take that kind of stress?

  I’ll start running numbers and discussing it with the other engineering AICs, sir, Abigail assured him while the CHENG continued explaining his plan.

  “Uh, yes sir, no shit.” Buckley paused to agree. “At that point we release ground teams, mecha teams, tank teams, buzz-saw bots, I dunno, whatever is the right way and we start tearing the place to hell and gone and killing every Chiata along the way. But before the attacking wave arrives, the repair bots flood into the ship in mass quantities with one mission: attach the alien power source to the aft barrier shield conduit of the supercarrier. Now these bots from all four ships are flooding the Chiata ship, which now has no shield generators, and they are connecting our shield generators to the alien’s unbelievably deep power well.”

  “So, you want us to board the alien ship and hold it? For how long?” Alexander was beginning to see that the idea was possible, but he wasn’t sure to what end. “I guess if we could take one of the ships we could take over and use the blue beams ourselves. Now that would be an advantage. Not bad, Joe.”

  “Uh, well, no sir, that isn’t my plan, but yes, having our own blue beams would be useful.” Buckley hesitated. Moore hated when the CHENG did that.

  “Well then, what the hell is the plan, Joe? Come on, we haven’t got all day.” Moore was getting a bit frustrated. The clock continued to tick away and his daughter was stranded on an alien planet being pursued by aliens, and with every second that ticked by, her odds for survival diminished.

  “Yes, sir. This is better than the blue beams. Your Ghuthlaeer friend suggested we pump more power into the shields, and I’ve been racking my brain on how to do that. Now, sir, you won’t believe what happens when we put enough energy in.” Joe smiled. “Just watch the simulation.”

  Alexander watched as the image of the megaship zoomed way out. The four ships from the Fleet were now attached to the megaship, making the porcusnail look as if it had alligator-like legs protruding from it. As the simulation ticked at a time-lapse pace, the clock time showed thirteen minutes into the simulation when all of a sudden the barrier-shield generators extended the shields from each of the Fleet ship’s stern sections. The shields expanded until they met and rippled together, forming a complete oval around the entire combination of Fleet and Chiata ships. Ten seconds more and the oval spread to a spherical barrier, which then erupted like a gluonium bomb, sending out a blast wave that exploded at nearly eighty percent the speed of light. The wave continued to grow until it was finally spread too thin and it dissipated and vanished.

  “Holy . . .” Alexander backed up the sim and ran the last part again. “And this is real? I mean, it isn’t just some simulation that might work? This is real physics and will work?”

  “Yes, sir. This isn’t based on theory, this is a simulation based on absolute measurements and experimental
data and knowledge of the physical phenomena,” Joe replied, smiling almost maniacally. “This is what happens sometimes at the bottom of a black hole when it quantum bounces and becomes a white hole.”

  Abigail? What was that blast radius?

  If the CHENG’s calculations are correct, sir, the radius extended at least thirty thousand kilometers. Maybe more.

  Have you checked his numbers?

  Of course I have, sir.

  And?

  This is one hell of a Buckley Maneuver, sir. It will work if we can manage to hold the ship long enough for the repair bots to make the right connections.

  Son of a bitch! Alexander started to smile for the first time in days. Before this he’d only been hoping of a daring suicide attempt to get in and get his people out. But now. Now, there was a hope for more. Maybe a lot more.

  “You have my full approval, Joe. My AIC is now working with full attention with yours and the XO’s and anyone else you need. Make this happen faster than ASAP.”

  “Aye, sir.” Buckley turned enthusiastically and was out the Captain’s ready room door as fast as he’d come in.

  Alexander turned his chair to the window and looked out at the remainder of the Fleet and the star background. He thought about what would have to happen to prepare an attack to hold a damned Chiata ship. That would be no small task. And how the hell would he keep the other Chiata ships off their ass while they were making the attack? Would they turn on their own or come to their defense? Alexander suspected the former, but only time would tell. He had a lot to figure out in a very short time, and with a beat-up and battered Fleet.

  Abigail, get me the XO, CAG, and the Ground Boss in here five minutes ago. We have an attack to plan, Alexander thought. He leaned back in his chair, and violating his own rule, stowed his helmet to the shoulder containment location on his suit. He popped the gloves back and reached out for his coffee mug. The White House mug had been his favorite and had somehow managed to survive for decades of crazy events. The mug itself had led him to promoting at least three staffers and reprimanding one. He drank the nasty stuff the COB had made him in one final big gulp. It was so much better gulping it rather than drinking it from a spout through the open visor on a suit helmet.

  Abby, better get the COB to send me another pot of that stuff. We’ve got a lot to get done in the next two hours.

  Yes, sir.

  Chapter 24

  February 19, 2407 AD

  Northern Region

  Alien Planet, Target Star System

  700 Light-years from the Sol System

  Monday, 8:44 P.M. Ship Standard Time

  Dee used the zoom on her visor to get the lay of the land as best she could. The starlight sensor combined with infrared, ultraviolet, and microwave was enough on passive to give her almost a daytime-like view even though the star had been set for hours. Dee kept as sniper-quiet and still as she possibly could underneath one of the giant trees that was bent half over and cracked at the bottom. The crack was almost large enough she could have flown her mecha up in it. It was a big damned tree.

  Dee was doing her best to be patient, but knowing that there was another team of Chiata searching for her that several times over the last two hours had gotten danger-close to her, she was understandably on edge. The last shift change had just happened, and from the timing of the alien shuttles coming and going, it looked like they were on four-hour shifts. That seemed very short to Dee, but her grandmother had once warned her about trying to understand alien motivations.

  “They are alien, sweetheart, and so their motivations will be just that, alien,” Sienna Madira had told her. Dee had long since come to grips with the fact that she likely would never understand the motivations of her twisted grandmother either, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t very smart and very right. So, rather than apply meaning to what the Chiata were doing and why they were doing it, Dee just decided to accept the observation and expect another shift change in about three and a half hours from her present time.

  The trees were spread farther apart in this area and the undergrowth was more like the high grass of a hay field. There were various flowering plants in reds and blues scattered about on some all-encompassing and landscape-smothering vines that reminded Dee of kudzu. As she scanned about she could see that the kudzu-like vine spanned across the ground almost as far as she could see to the west and north as if it were chasing the star. There were several of the termite-like mounds that spired upwards out of the undergrowth by as much as three meters. The mounds seemed to be lining a pathway toward where the shuttles had been landing right next to an opening in an artificial granite structure that looked more like a cross between the Capitol Building architecture on Earth and ancient Roman constructions with columns, arches and large blocks of granite. There might even have been a hint of Egyptian architecture, but Dee wasn’t sure, she wasn’t an exo-archaeologist. Again, she was putting human extrapolations onto alien artifices.

  It was a large granite structure with glyphs and symbols cut in it and there was, as far as she could surmise, one very large entryway, large enough that three hovertanks standing fingertips apart couldn’t touch the sides of it. There was a pounded-out path in the alien kudzu that led straight toward the middle tributary of the river system. The path was pounded out from where the Chiata had been landing shuttles on it. But a few tens of meters away the kudzu was unbothered. The path was lined on either side with the strange termite-like mounds that gave it the appearance of a very large road with huge traffic cones on either side. The infrared view from her visor showed a different heat signature for the pathway leading from the entrance to the river. Dee realized that there was a stone or paved road underneath the vines.

  Two of the Chiata ground troops stood sentry at the passageway, and that led her to believe the third was inside, because as far as her sensors could tell there were no heat signatures in the shuttle. She had been just moments behind the shift change or she’d have been able to know for certain where the third Chiata was. At least she knew there was not a third heat signature within range of her suit’s sensors.

  Dee also was pretty certain that she needed to know what was inside the building, and if these things were always on guard, well, that meant there was only one way she was going to get to look. They had to be taken out. But that led her to a conundrum. There were six Chiata ground troops that had been on her tail for the past couple of hours, and those bastards had a flying vehicle that was fast. She’d managed to avoid them for a couple hours now and hated the prospect of having to grapple with them up close and personal. While there had been a couple of close calls along the way, she had given them the slip and managed to keep several kilometers between herself and them. Dee knew that as soon as she engaged the Chiata standing sentry, it would only be a matter of minutes before the search party would be on top of her. That was just something she’d have to be prepared for. How she was going to prepare for it was another question entirely.

  After thinking on a plan for a couple seconds longer, she decided it was time to make her move. She armed the grenade launcher just in case, but she hoped to be as quiet as she possibly could. Dee rested her left thumb against the safety on her HVAR, and her right pointer finger played at the trigger guard of her M-blaster. There was little left to do, but do something and to do it quietly and deadly.

  What are your plans, Dee? Bree asked her in her mindview.

  Open for suggestions, but we need to be quick and quiet, she thought. What about if I work around the path behind the ruins and see if I can get the drop on them from over the top and behind them? Thoughts?

  I don’t know if that’ll work, Dee. I’m sure they have motion trackers. We are at the edge of estimated sensor range now. Not sure there is a quiet assault path, Bree told her. The direct approach might be better.

  Yeah, I was afraid of that. Okay, then, let me see if I can reach out and touch one of them. Dee holstered the M-blaster and brought the HVAR up to her right side. She thu
mbed the targeting system and her DTM mindview became her rifle bore’s sight. She waited for the yellow targeting X to turn red on the Chiata standing guard on the left of the doorway. She zoomed in and placed the X right between the alien’s eye holes and then released the trigger. There was the familiar spittapp sound and the hypervelocity round burst out across the two hundred meters between herself and the alien, leaving a pale blue and violet trail of ions as it tore through the atmosphere. The round hit the alien’s head at a velocity of over Mach seven. The alien’s personal body-armor shields flickered as Dee pumped two more rounds right at the same point microseconds behind the first one. The impact of the rounds knocked the alien off its feet and backwards. The creature’s shields must have burned out because Dee could see a green liquid spurt out of his forehead as he fell.

  “That’s one,” she whispered to herself with a smile.

  Great shot, Dee, now don’t get cocky, and keep moving! Bree warned.

  She quickly turned to the other alien, who was reacting by dropping to the ground in prone position and firing back in her general direction. Dee ducked down behind the tree roots and rolled to one of the termite mounds nearest her, closing the distance to the alien by a few meters. She then bear-crawled another twenty or so meters to a smaller mangrove tree about a meter in diameter. Dee leaned out from behind the tree and let go of a handful of HVAR rounds. The rounds pitted up earth in front of the alien and a couple of them skittered off the creature’s shielded armor. As dust, ion trails, and enemy fire flashed about Dee, she took only brief pauses to breathe and to assess her situation.

  Well, hell, that didn’t work so well, she thought. We can’t get pinned down.