The Tau Ceti Agenda

by Travis S. Taylor

  "The commanding officer wants to talk with you." Chekov led Joe from the hangar deck up to the captain's office.

  "Any reason why, sir?" Joe hesitated. "I mean, we just off-loaded fifty new sailors and marines. Why me, uh, sir?"

  "Son, that is for the Old Man to tell you, not me." The XO nodded in the direction of the elevator and waited for the new crewman to join him. He tapped thirty-six, the doors closed, and it felt to Joe like they began moving backward. Finally, the backward motion stopped and the elevator moved upward for a few seconds.

  "Have you managed to acquaint yourself with the blueprints of the ship yet?" the XO said, making small talk with the young officer.

  "Yes, sir, Colonel," Joe replied nervously. Buckley wasn't sure, but he didn't think that he had done anything to warrant the CO's attention in a bad way. Hell, he had been on board the transport, cramped in with fifty other sailors so close that he could smell what kind of toothpaste they each used—and when they didn't. Those damned marines could learn a thing or two about hygiene. There was one Army tankhead that was kind of easy on the eyes, and Buckley had tried on more than one occasion to make time with her only to be shot down.

  Since he hadn't been able to implement his favorite pastime with the hot tankhead, he spent his time with his other love—supercarrier propulsion. He had been able to read and reread the Naval Ship's Technical Manual and the Ship Information Book several times. He even used his direct-to-mind (DTM) link with the transport's database to do some further reading on the Sienna Madira's history and design. Occasionally he would eat and sometimes sleep, and never did he get into any mischief or even slack any duties. So he was certain that he was clean. But being singled out by the CO on the first day of duty couldn't be good. He decided that the best approach would be to just keep his mouth shut and listen.

  The two men exited the elevator and then wound through the large corridors of the supercarrier's upper decks. The dull gray metal bulkheads were lit by dim red exit signs and white fluorescent lighting overhead. Several times they would go up a ladder, walk a few meters across another corridor, and then go back down a ladder, only to travel a few meters more to go back up another ladder. Eventually they reached the elevator for the command tower and made it to the CO's office.

  The XO tapped on the office door and waited for the captain to look up from his papers. "Captain, Lieutenant Joseph Buckley, sir."

  "Yes. Come in, Lieutenant. Thank you, Larry. The rest of the crew is being taken care of, I take it?" Captain Wallace Jefferson asked his trusted XO.

  "Yes, sir. Looks like a good bunch, sir."

  "Good, Larry. Carry on." Jefferson nodded at his XO and longtime friend.

  "Aye, sir," Chekov answered. He nodded and winked at the captain and left Buckley standing at full attention. "Good luck, Lieutenant," he whispered with a chuckle on his way out of the CO's office.

  "At ease, son." Jefferson grinned and stood from his desk, offering Joe his hand. "I just wanted to shake your hand."

  "Sir?" Joe took the captain's hand and shook it firmly, more confused than anything. The captain seemed sincere, and when he began speaking, Joe immediately understood what this was all about.

  "Your father was a hull tech under my command on the day the damned Seppies did their mass exodus," the captain said.

  "Yes, sir. You wrote his letter, sir. I've read it many times, sir." Joe choked down a lump that was starting to well up in his throat.

  "If it hadn't been for Hull Technician Third Class Joe Buckley, we might have lost the ship and the fight. He gave the ultimate sacrifice so that we could stop those bloodthirsty heathens from destroying an entire city and the millions of people in it. Your father was a hero, and I'm proud to have had him serve under my command. We would have never known of his sacrifice had his AIC not downloaded a record of his actions just before they were both incinerated. I tried to capture the feel of what he had done in the letter, but I can let you hear the final report from his AIC if you would like."

  "Yes, sir. That would be nice." Buckley thought it would be nice for his grandma to hear, but more than five years had gone by, and he wasn't sure that it would really do anybody any good to bring up those memories.

  "I'll have my AIC, Uncle Timmy, pass it along to your AIC. And I hope to see you do your father's memory proud."

  "Thank you, sir. I'm proud to serve under your command, and I will do my best, sir."

  "Well, I'm afraid there's little time to get acquainted. We're about to start an operation in a little more than an hour from now, and I'm sure we'll need you down in the Engine Room. Good luck, Lieutenant."

  "Aye, sir." Joe saluted the CO and thought of his father for the next several minutes as he wandered around the ship—absently trying to find his duty post.

  "So the Madira will drop out of hyperspace just Solward of the Seppy outpost. We think there are frigates and battle cruisers in the area with the possibility of a hauler. Intelligence does show the area very active with Gomers. The last count showed more than a hundred Gnats and probably as many Stingers." Commander Jack "DeathRay" Boland continued with the recon portion of his premission brief to the pilots. As commander of the air group, or CAG, the pilots, all thirteen hundred or so of them, were his responsibility.

  "There we will do rapid deploy and cover. I'll take the Gods of War out first in the initial ingress to the Seppy target and fly support to the Madira. Following the deploy phase, we will take this base. Poser and the rest of the Demon Dawgs will fly cover for the ground forces on the first pass deployment. I want you Dawgs sticking to your wingmen but nobody else. No, and I mean no, groups. The sky should be full of VTF-32s in random two-by-two locations covering the drop tubes so the tankheads make it down safe. There shouldn't be an arcminute of angle that I can't see an Ares-T fighter in." DeathRay paused and scanned the ready room to make certain that his orders were sinking in.

  For the last four days he had wargamed this attack over and over in the advanced virtual Battle Operations and Scenarios Simulation Room at the center of the ship, which was officially known as the BOSS but more affectionately called the "Looney Bin." He had every intention that the mission should go off flawlessly. "Any enemy Gnats or Stingers you see out there, bring them down. If any other ships pop out of hyperspace on you, keep them busy. We must take this base at all costs."

  "At the same time as the Dawgs are getting spaceborne, Colonel Warboys and the Warlords M3A17 drop tanks—"

  "Hooah!" was interjected by one of the tank drivers. Bolan ignored it.

  "—along with fifty armored environment-suit marines will be deployed on the enemy facility. The AEMs —"

  "Oorah!"

  "—and the tankheads will set up lines and hold them here and here. Note for you groundpounders and tankheads: space-time fluctuations around the facility show artificial gravity on the surface of about one-half Earth gravity, and there is no detectable atmosphere." At that point, two locations on the map of the Oort Cloud Separatist facility lit up in the three-dimensional display at the podium as Jack tapped them with the laser pointer.

  "At the same time the lines are being formed, Deuce will have the Utopian Saviors in the FM-12 strike mecha crawling around that facility like stink on shit. Remember, we are not to destroy this construct here." Boland shined the green laser beam on a very large octagon shape with multiple towers at the limb of the planetoid facility.

  The entire facility consisted of four irregular shaped Oort Cloud objects, each roughly twenty kilometers in diameter. The four icy objects were moored in the center via a large Seppy hauler starship that was about three kilometers long and one kilometer wide. The misshapen objects were stuck together with massive grids and metallic structures. The ships were moored between the four planetoids, and there were metal and composite structures crossing and zigzagging the base in a very makeshift and almost random fashion. Looking at the facility images conjured up thoughts of spliced wiring and miles of duct tape, all of it having gone horribly
wrong.

  Like an afterthought, or perhaps because the base was unfinished, there was a fifth, much larger, asteroid-sized planetoid about one hundred and fifty kilometers across, looming over the base on the same thousand-year orbit track around Sol. The object was only ten thousand kilometers or so from the main facility. From the surface of the facility, the asteroid would appear twice the size as the Moon does from the Earth.

  It would have taken the Seppies generations to tug the asteroids together and build such a construct. Jack couldn't imagine how they had managed to conduct such a massive construction effort right under the noses of the American people. The combining structures and catwalks looked as if they were converted from Separatist battle cruisers and cargo ships.

  A large octagonal structure more than ten kilometers in diameter stretched across the entire surface of the icy facility. Jack had his AIC highlight the odd construction in bright red on the image and then zoom in on it. At each vertex of the octagon, there was a tower. There were concentric octagons within it that diminished to a solid tower structure in the middle. The central tower stood more than three times taller than the ones at the periphery and stood from the middle of the hauler, extending in both directions into and out of the surface plane by about a kilometer in height.

  "We believe this is the facility that enabled the Seppies to teleport from the system following the Martian Exodus. Also, recall that the existence of this facility is Top Secret and compartmentalized to this operation only. We must capture this facility intact because we need it to determine where the Seppies went and how they did it. And, since they are still guarding it, find out what they plan to do with it."

  "DeathRay, you gonna give us some more substantial info on this thing, or do we just assume that it was based on Stonehenge and tinfoil hats?" one of the Army tankheads asked.

  "The intel we have on this facility is that it is some sort of teleportation facility. How and why it works is above the classification of this briefing. We were cleared to show the following video." Jack gave a thought command to his AIC and a new three-dimensional movie started playing. The narration of the video first warned of the classified nature of the movie and then filled in some historical background on the Exodus.

  "During the Separatist Exodus of 2383, more than thirty million people from the Sol System literally vanished into hyperspace. The majority of them left from the Separatist Reservation in the Martian desert of the Elysium Planitia and the Phlegra Montes and other less- populated regions of Mars. Some Separatist vessels that were equipped for hyperspace travel also left from Earth, the Belt mines, Kuiper Station, Triton, and Luna City. Intelligence reports from a deep-cover CIA operative, which were delivered to the Reservation in the Top Secret project code-named Bachelor Party, uncovered the only information available about the Exodus. The operative has since disappeared."

  Jack thought about the last statement. He had delivered that agent himself deep into the Martian Reservation just as the Exodus was beginning. He liked what little he knew about the agent and hoped that she was still alive and well. The acknowledgment that she hadn't been heard from since the Exodus wasn't a particularly good sign.

  "The information relayed to the CIA via this operative has led the Joint Chiefs, the secretary of defense, and the director of National Intelligence to the conclusion that the Separatists teleported from the Sol System to Tau Ceti nearly twelve light-years away, which is a capability that nobody had thought possible for mankind. Further analysis of the hyperspace capabilities of the Exodus fleet led to the theory that the Separatists must have escaped by known means of transport to somewhere no farther than the Oort Cloud and from there made their miraculous teleportation. Interrogations of the Separatist terrorists captured from the battles on Mars that day have corroborated the Oort Cloud theory," the narrator explained.

  "After four years of searching in the deep space of the Oort Cloud nearly a light-year from Earth, reconnaissance teams have finally found a base that was heavily guarded. On several occasions, the recon teams have even monitored space traffic that literally appeared and disappeared out of nowhere over the large octagonal platform, which was built into the facility's surface structure. The vessel appearances are similar to a vessel entering through a hyperspace conduit, but there are far more gravitational and electromagnetic distortions created. This is not a typical hyperspace activity. Observe."

  The video image of the facility zoomed in on the octagonal structure, and a large green and blue sphere of light began to grow, centered directly over the central tower. The sphere grew to several kilometers in diameter and looked like a giant plasma ball resting atop the tallest spire. Then the giant ball of plasma instantaneously collapsed to a flat disk of light with blue and white lightning shooting across the surface. A ripple, like waves on a pond, traveled in a circular wavefront from the center of the disk, and then a Separatist hauler and two support frigates emerged from the event horizon of the disk. As soon as the ships appeared in local space, the disk collapsed inward on itself and vanished with a final flash of white light from the center. The scene almost appeared to be a ship jaunting out of a normal hyperspace conduit—almost. Jack noticed that there were a few oohs and ahs and nodding heads around the room. He saw this as an opportunity to start back into the battle plan.

  "Once we've all been deployed and are making our way toward taking this facility," Boland continued as the simulation holo started up again, "the Madira will make a second pass, deploying in mass all active battle-shift pilots. And the entire complement of Army Armored Infantry and the rest of the AEMs will be deployed. We will be putting thousands of troops on the ground. The Looney Bin sims show that at this point of the battle, we would likely be grinding down into a stalemate with the enemy force protecting the facility by digging in deep and holding a line."

  "This is when Captain Walker will jaunt from hyperspace on the deep space side of the battle with the brand-new U.S.S. Anthony Blair.

  They are already moving into prehyperspace position, and if how Captain Walker performed at the Exodus with the Thatcher is any sign of how her new ship and crew will function, we can expect her to bring all kinds of hell out of hyperspace with her. That hell will include Colonel Masterson's Cardiff's Killers in their FM-12s, along with two full squadrons of VTF-32s. There will also be a drop contingent of seventy-five AEMs from the Blair. If we need more, they will be in reserve on the Blair. Your AICs have further details and blue force tracking codes. There will be a shitload of mecha in the air, so watch the blue-on-blue.

  "And one final thing," Jack started. He paused briefly, not certain of how he wanted to handle this next piece of business. "It has been nearly four years since there has been any real combat in this system. I know most of you are hardened with combat from before the Exodus and from that day itself, but we have all had a long time to soften up. Wargames are good but nothing like the real thing. For you rookies, pay attention to your seniors because that's why they are here. Let's keep our heads and kick some Seppy ass!"

  Jack told his AIC to stop the virtual display, and the room lights illuminated to an almost annoyingly bright level. He squinted and then asked, "Army, any questions?"

  "Hooah!" resounded through the room. Boland nodded in affirmation.

  "Marines?"

  "Oorah!"

  "Navy?"

  "Hooyah!"

  "All right! Let's mount up then."

  "All right, XO, let's mount up," Captain Sharon "Fullback" Walker ordered. She settled into her command chair and scanned the bridge crew for last-minute questions. There were none. It was a good crew. It was a good ship.

  Her ship, the U.S.S. Anthony Blair, was the newest supercarrier in the U.S. space fleet and was given to the South England contingent of the Navy to replace the loss of the U.S.S. Margaret Thatcher. Captain Walker had been sitting in the command seat of the Thatcher during the Separatists' Exodus and used the ship as a battering ram to stop an enemy hauler from plummeting into the cent
ral part of Mons City on Mars. She managed to break the enemy hauler's structural integrity, causing it to fall apart on reentry into the atmosphere, while at the same time crash-landing her supercarrier onto the side of Olympus Mons. The Thatcher was rendered irreparable, but the city and its millions of occupants were saved. That was how the state of South England had lost one of its two supercarriers.

  It lost the other the same day. The start of the attack on Mons City had begun by the U.S.S. Winston Churchill being sabotaged and subsequently crashing into one of the outer domes of Mons City. The Churchill had been totally destroyed with all hands, and to the present date, nobody had been able to figure out how it had been sabotaged.

  The politicians in Washington, D.C., had decided that since there was little threat from the Separatist terrorists (now that they had left the system), there was no need to spend the money on new battleships. President Moore had literally threatened Congress with an executive order of police action if they didn't at least approve the appropriations to add one starship to each state that had lost one or more during the Exodus. Nobody was one hundred percent certain where the Separatists had gone, and most certainly nobody knew if they were planning to come back to the Sol System with force. President Moore had warned the public that there could be a war coming and that America had better not be caught with her pants down. In the end, he had convinced the public to put enough pressure on Congress to approve over twelve new supercarriers. Captain Walker was glad that he had because the Blair was an awesome ship and a great command.

  "Flight crews and sorties are packed in and stacked up for deployment, ma'am," the XO reported to the captain. Commander Auburn Brasher tapped a few keys on her console and relayed several command thoughts to her AIC and then looked back up and nodded to Fullback. "The AEMs are sardines waiting for the drop."

  "COB, how's my boat?" Fullback asked her chief of the boat.