Kill Before Dying (Tau Ceti Agenda Book 5)

by Travis S. Taylor

  “You mean the Fleet has come back?”

  “Yes. But before you go I will do this one more thing for you.”

  “What?” Dee was puzzled at first, but then the beetle scurried over her shoulder and buried its nose into the armor in her mid-back. The mandibles moved as fast as the buzz saw on the killer bots her grandmother had invented.

  The beetle clawed through the armor and bit a long gash across Deanna’s side and lower back large enough for it to crawl through before the armor sealed itself. Dee could feel the bug crawl underneath her skin and dig into the muscle tissue all the way to her spine. It hurt. Bad. Very. Bad.

  “Oh, Jesus!” she screamed in pain and the feeling of the ping-pong-ball-sized beetle digging into her back near her spine where there was already a piece of alien metal lodged was enough to make her faint. But the beetle kept on digging. Dee came to with a jolt from the stims being administered to her by the suit and could feel the metal in her spine being moved against the bone. The pain was worse than any pain she’d ever felt in her life. It was so overwhelmingly painful that even the medication administered to her via the suit couldn’t numb it. She felt a tug and then felt the metal pull free from the bone. Dee passed out.

  Deanna! Can you hear me? Deana Moore?! her AIC shouted into her mind.

  Chapter 35

  February 19, 2407 AD

  Alien Megaship

  Target Star System

  700 Light-years from the Sol System

  Tuesday, 1:06 A.M. Ship Standard Time

  Lieutenant Colonel Jessica894120 and the rest of her clone AEM squad were completely pinned down. There were still twenty-seven of the AEMs fighting alongside the battlebots, but Chiata reinforcements had strengthened the line and stopped the progression of the power conduit construction butt-cold. Alexander knew that once lines got settled in a conflict it was difficult to breach them and even harder to move them. He couldn’t let the Chiata make their foothold stick.

  “Chuck, if my AIC’s calculations are right, and they usually are, we should be right under the Chiata barricades by two floors,” he told his COB. The Chief of the Boat had fought alongside him all the way across the line and down through heavy Chiata ground troop resistance like a sailor possessed. The COB wasn’t bad for a Navy squid.

  “Aye, sir! What are your plans?” Sowles asked.

  “Well, you see that power conduit right there that is running across the ceiling and through that bulkhead?” Alexander pointed it out with the laser sight from his rifle.

  “Yes, sir, I do.” Chuck smiled, and the grenade tube extended from his right shoulder armor.

  “My sentiments exactly, COB.” Alexander extended his launcher as well. “Listen, Chuck, as soon as that bulkhead goes, the Chiata are likely to fall right in our laps. It’s probably going to get shit thick in here very quickly.”

  “Wouldn’t have it any other way, Captain,” Chuck replied as the targeting system blinked. Alexander could see the Xs forming through the man’s visor. He turned and switched his system back up as well and targeted the conduit.

  “Alright, Chuck, let’em have it!” Alexander ordered.

  “Aye, Captain!”

  Thwoomp! Thwoomp! Thwoomp!

  The grenade tubes fired, releasing balls of energy into the conduit. On impact they exploded with orange and white fireballs, and then the conduit breached and the explosion was about five times larger than Alexander had expected. The thunderous boom filled the corridors of the alien ship and shook metal bulkheads free from their moorings. The blast wave knocked both Alexander and the COB backwards against the hatch they’d just bounced through. The two men in the armored suits clanked against the wall and rolled to a stop, sounding like a hubcap banging around in a clothes dryer. Metal from the ceiling bulkhead creaked as a white-hot jet of plasma screamed from the busted conduit like gamma ray bursters from a black hole’s accretion disk. The metal glowed red then white and then collapsed completely, dropping several tons of structure two full floors. The crash was so large that the falling material burst through the floor that Alexander and Chuck were on. The two of them barely had time to scramble into the hatchway of the ladderwell for cover.

  Alexander could hear the COB laughing almost uncontrollably as the floor and ceiling of the alien vessel continued to collapse. Then two porcupines and several Chiata ground troops fell as well. They fell past them to the floor beneath.

  “Now, COB!” Alexander jumped to the edge of the hatch and thwoomped two grenades into the hole with the aliens. The grenades exploded, scattering and confusing the alien mecha and knocking two of the troopers off their amorphous feet.

  Alexander went to his standard two-gun mojo with his HVAR in his right hand and his M-blaster in his left, firing at any targeting X that dared to blink red. One of the mechas hovered upwards right in front of them and fired a tendril into the door. The amorphous glowing green snakelike appendage darted just between Alexander and the COB. The two of them would have been speared had they not reacted as quickly as they did. Alexander fell back to the left side and Chuck to the right. Immediately, both men extended their forearm blades and sliced at the tendril. The mecha appendages were stronger than the troop ones and the blades wouldn’t cut through.

  “Screw that!” Alexander turned and dove through the hatch onto the top of the porcupine. “Cover my ass, COB!”

  “Damned right, sir!” Chuck shouted, all the while firing with both weapons at the mecha and the other troops that continued to rain downward through the hole the two men had created.

  Alexander bounced onto the top of the porcupine and grabbed a handhold on one of the spiny protrusions with his left gauntlet. With his right he stuck the barrel of his rifle into an open vent, at least he thought it was a vent, and fired it at full auto. Several rounds spittapped into the alien mecha and flames began to shoot out of the vent like a kiln being hit with the bellows. Alexander ducked back just in time, because another amorphous snakelike appendage darted out from the mecha just beneath his jumpboot. The mecha jerked and rolled, throwing him onto his back, but Alexander managed to grab a handhold and was flung over face-first into the canopy of the porcupine.

  Alexander held on and was staring face to face with the Chiata pilot. He pulled up his rifle and fired nonstop into the canopy until the integrity field gave and the transparent material started to crack. The alien inside worked controls with amorphous tendrils feverishly, shaking the mecha wildly, trying to shake him free. One of the movements slung Alexander outward away from the ship, but he held on and used the strength of the suit to pull his jumpboots down against the structure and then reverse his momentum by kicking the thrusters. He flipped back around and brought his boots crashing through the canopy and into the alien’s torso. Alexander let go of his handhold and jammed his rifle barrel into the alien’s face, pulling the trigger. Green and red viscous goo exploded against the interior of the cockpit as Alexander bounced himself outward. The mecha fell uncontrollably through the hole it had come up through.

  “Hot damn, sir! We’re all of a sudden blessed with plenty of targets!” Chuck told him as he bounced back to the cover of the hatchway. Alexander skittered backwards through the hatch and banged to a stop against the bulkhead underneath the ladderwell. “You all right, sir?”

  “Fine, Chuck! Plenty of targets, huh? Blessed, are we?” Alexander collected himself and crawled to cover position at the edge of the hatch, firing his weapons.

  “Yes, sir! Can’t think of a better blessing than to have plenty of these alien bastards to shoot at! We won’t have to fight over who gets to shoot at what. I’m just glad you left some for me to kill!” Chuck was almost laughing as he fired both weapons into the room at the blurs and the mechas as they poured through.

  “Lieutenant Colonel Jessica894120, now is the time if there ever was one,” he called over the tac-net to the clone AEM commander.

  “Yes, General Moore!” the Jessica clone replied.

  AEM clones and battlebo
ts dropped in from all directions on top of the alien troops. The abrupt change in the battlescape confused the Chiata’s defensive posture, and now the AEMs were on the attack. Alexander and the COB most certainly weren’t going to let the AEMs have all the fun. The two men bounced into the fray from the side and mixed it up with the blurs. Then two hovertanks fell in from above as well. The bot-mode mechas banged through the remaining alien mechas like they weren’t even there. The General’s actions had been the snowflake needed to trigger an avalanche.

  The line is crushed, sir! Abigail told him and illuminated the path to the power source in his mindview. We can push through on this floor.

  Understood!

  “Keep moving along the following path!” He sent the map to all the ground team. “We’ve shifted the momentum, so we cannot let up!”

  “If I were a jarhead, sir, I’d yell ooh-fuckin’-rah or some such nonsense!” Sowles interjected between volleys from his grenade launcher.

  “Nobody’s perfect, COB. Were I a squidboy, I’d say it was a perfect Navy day!”

  “Hooyah, Captain. Hooyah.”

  “General Moore! This is DeathRay, copy?”

  “Copy, DeathRay, Moore here. Go.” Alexander didn’t pause to listen to Jack; instead, he pushed forward with the rest of the AEMs and battlebots and the COB. They were seconds from their objective and he wasn’t going to let up. He could see the builder-bot icons in his mindview closing in on their position. He realized he needed to check on the Hillenkoetter insertion team’s status.

  “Sir, we have the bridge and are in control of the main gun. It works damned good, sir. But something just lit up all the lights up here, and we believe the alien chicken shits have triggered a countdown to self-destruct the ship. Check your red force tracker on full ship zoom, sir,” Jack told him. Alexander did. He panned out and could see the red dots jumping ship as fast as they could reach the outer hull. They were so close, they couldn’t lose this engagement to a damned self-destruct sequence.

  “Shit! How much time, Jack?” Alexander asked, and then pinged his AIC.

  Abby, get on this!

  Yes, sir.

  “If I am reading these damned alien clocks right sir, we’ve got seven minutes and forty-seven seconds left. My AIC is pinging clock to all the Fleet AICs,” Jack said.

  “Then you have seven minutes to stop that clock, Jack! Do not let those bastards destroy this ship!” Alexander ordered. They could not lose now, as far as they had come.

  “Uh, yes, sir. We’re working it.”

  “Keep me posted, but get it done, Jack.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Sir! Deanna’s blue force tracker just came online!

  Where?!

  Chapter 36

  February 19, 2407 AD

  Northern Region

  Alien Planet, Target Star System

  700 Light-years from the Sol System

  Tuesday, 1:08 A.M. Ship Standard Time

  Colonel Delilah “Jawbone” Strong was at a full sprint in her bot-mode mecha bouncing across the top of the canyon basin cliffs. The search and rescue teams had dropped down in three starlifters, enough to carry the tankheads and AEMs out with the Maniacs flying support, but as soon as the starlifters breached the bottom of the ball, the Chiata dropped porcupines on them and brought them crashing down into the forest several klicks from the canyon. Delilah wasn’t about to just let the Chiata take the SARs down and then finish them off, and neither were the rest of the Maniacs, the Slayers, or the Juggernauts. She scrambled what was left of the Maniacs, and the seven FM-12s were fighting in the thickest upside-down bowl they’d ever been in with hopes of rescuing the would-be rescuers.

  “Stick, you and PotRoast watch the southern flank! We don’t want those bastards cutting us off from the canyon,” Jawbone grunted over the tac-net. She bounced her mecha at full thrust upward through the tree canopy head first into an energy line with two porcupines firing blue beams at her as they approached on her three-nine line. She juked and jinked and dropped over into a feint, going to her guns. “Guns, guns, guns! Coffee! Where the fuck are you!?”

  Orange tracers filled the sky upward through the tree canopy, burning holes in the atmosphere as they tracked into one of the porcupines. The shields flickered and the cannon rounds kept coming.

  “Guns, guns, guns!” First Lieutenant Sara “Coffee” Ames, Jawbone’s wingman, shouted in guttural grunts as her fighter-mode mecha ripped through the top of the trees, throwing a rooster tail of greenery behind her. “Fox Three!”

  The mecha-to-mecha missile twisted and turned and slammed into the porcupine just as the guns finished off its shields. The missile exploded, separating the outer hull armor from the interior of the alien fighter in a fireball, and the amorphous creature inside ejected just as the fighter disintegrated. Coffee blasted through the fireball, yawing her fighter around, firing guns just across Delilah’s nose.

  “Great flying, Coffee!” Jawbone toggled her bot over to fighter, did a corkscrew spiraling roll across the other alien’s energy line, and reversed her energy vector, putting her on its six o’clock and choking back bile from the extreme forces on her stomach. “Fox Three!”

  Jawbone didn’t take the time to watch the missile drive home. She cut her upward momentum into a free-falling stall and nosed over into a dive straight at the ground. She looked through her mindview at the battlescape and could see the red dots closing in on the downed starlifters. The tankheads were almost on top of them, but they were going to need some cover.

  “Take it to the deck, Maniacs!” Jawbone ordered her squadron. The canopy of trees screamed past her in a wild flurry of greens, browns, and yellows. She flared her approach into a strafing run across the line of blurs, bouncing it at the SARs teams. There were several of them manning plasma cannons and HVARs, and they were holding their own for the time being.

  Delilah weaved in and out of the trees and threw her mecha over, toggling back to bot, hitting the ground running and bouncing on her boot thrusters, firing from the hip at the blurs and porcupines, giving the downed crews a much needed break with the cover fire. The rest of the Maniacs followed suit, mixing it up on the ground and in the trees as the tankheads rolled in, firing their giant cannons and blasting holes through the forest.

  “Colonel Slayer, we’ve got you clear up top. Push quickly and let’s get the SARs over the cliff back to the ruins,” Jawbone told the leader of the hovertank squadron.

  “Roger that, Jaw! We see ’em. Damn blurry bastards got ’em pinned down!” Colonel Slayer replied. “Nothing a few tanks can’t jar loose. But the numbers game is still against us. We need to move it to cover fast.”

  “Roger that!” Jawbone looked at her force tracker and watched as the AEMs moved in with the tanks in perfect cover formation. It didn’t take them seconds to take up the flanks on the downed planes and then pull them out with them. The hovertanks weren’t still for more than thirty seconds before the SARs and the AEMs loaded their wounded and they were on the bounce.

  “Maniacs, keep them covered over the cliff wall. Drop to cover after the tanks go over.” Jawbone watched in her force tracker as she bounced about the trees and then twisted over to fighter, pulling up above the canopy briefly, looking for targets of opportunity. There were too many and she was afraid if she engaged one she’d bring ten on her ass. “Coffee, stay below and low.”

  The mindview of the battlescape flashed and then a new blue dot dropped into the canyon basin. Jawbone zoomed in on it just to make sure she read it right.

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” she said.

  Deanna Moore, are you with me? Bree shouted in her mindvoice. Major Deanna Moore!

  “I’m here, Bree,” Dee whispered faintly. “Where is that damn bug?”

  Dee breathed in deeply, and as her abdomen expanded with the breath, she felt pain against her sciatic nerve that shot all the way down her left leg to her toes. The pain was excruciating, but she could feel her toes. The diagnostic of her sui
t and body showed the gash at her back, and the beetle crawled out and up to her shoulder and over to her hand. She looked at it and then placed it in her chest ammo pocket.

  The immunoboost is now responding to your back injury. You should regain use of your legs very soon, Bree told her. I’m giving you pain meds in the meantime.

  Thanks. Now, where are we? She toggled over to her battlescape view. She was hundreds of kilometers from where she’d started and was much farther south. She was only a few kilometers from the rest of the ground teams according to her blue force tracker. Dee scanned her whereabouts and realized she was in a cavernous room not unlike the room in the ruins she had been in before. There were glyphs on the walls and she could see a river outside the opening of the structure. There were also several of the beetle mounds along the river banks.

  “Major Moore, glad you could join us,” a familiar voice sounded over her speakers. The blue force tracker icon for Colonel Delilah “Jawbone” Strong popped up.

  “Yes, ma’am. I have useful intel and I am relaying to all of the blue force dots here a key code to trigger our QMTs!” Deanna replied.

  “If you can do that, do it now! We need to evac to the Madira ASAP!” Jawbone ordered.

  “Roger that, ma’am!”

  You heard her, Bree. Do it.

  Dee looked at her surroundings as they changed once again. There was a flash of light and the long-missing familiar sound of bacon frying. Then Dee was looking about the aft hangar QMT pad on the U.S.S. Sienna Madira II. There was a staging area with weapons tables set up, a triage filled with incoming wounded, and AEMs and tankheads standing guard at the open hangar doors. Engineering teams were running about like worker ants, and builder and repair bots scurried in all directions. Several other QMT flashes popped around her and AEMs, tanks, and FM-12s appeared on the pad.