The Tau Ceti Agenda

by Travis S. Taylor

"Good to go, ma'am. The boat is in top order, and there are no complaints from the crew other than the long hours, the shitty pay, and a goddamned slave-driving SOB of a CO." Command Master Chief Petty Officer William H. Edwards had been the COB of the Thatcher, serving under Captain Walker, and he had ridden the supercarrier all the way to the surface of Mars with her. His last-second heroic efforts to bring the power back online to several key systems of the crashing starship enabled them to save Mons City. The COB had gotten a medal for his actions: a metal crowbar that he had been attempting to use as a circuit fuse was explosively thrown through him, impaling his shoulder. After hearing of the story, several members of the bridge crew had found the same crowbar and had it bent into a heart shape and painted it purple. Captain Sharon Walker presented it to the command master chief at the decommissioning ceremony of the Thatcher. The two had a bond from that battle and were nearly inseparable. There were even rumors of a budding romance between the two of them, but nobody could substantiate them or really imagine it. The captain at just under two meters tall with her bodybuilder's frame— hence the callsign Fullback—towered over Edwards by a full head, and the COB looked like he could use some serious PT. Romance or not, that the two most certainly shared something was obvious. But the crew respected them and minded their own business.

  Besides, the CMC had earned the unique relationship with the captain in combat. Sharon would allow him to speak frankly to her on most issues at most times when she might be less approachable to other members of the command crew. This relationship had actually led other officers to approach the COB when they were unsure of approaching the captain with "touchy" situations. Edwards had become Sharon's buffer zone and moat dragon.

  "As it should be, Bill. Make a note to increase the beatings until morale improves. You should put yourself in for a few lashes as well." Fullback smiled, flashing her brilliant white teeth, which contrasted with her dark ebony skin.

  "Aye, ma'am." The COB nodded.

  Fullback took a deep breath and concentrated on the ship. Around her head was a virtual display of information about the flight and battle plans, the health of the supercarrier, and millions of other pieces of information continuously moving around her head in multicolored, three-dimensional overlays. The data came from the ship's diagnostics and battle management center and was transmitted to her by DTM link. The virtual information reached out in a sphere around her about a meter in diameter that only she could see.

  Marley? she thought to her AIC.

  Aye, Captain?

  Are the hyperspace calculations set and ready for jaunt?

  Aye, Captain.

  Okay then, make the announcement.

  Aye, Captain.

  "General quarters! General quarters. All hands, prepare for hyperspace jaunt in one minute. Prepare for battle stations call," Marley said over the 1MC intercom.

  "Boulder, you've got the second deployment group." Colonel John "Burner" Masterson, commander of the U.S. Marine Corps FM-12 strike mecha squadron Cardiff's Killers, went through last-minute strategies with his second-in-command, Marine Captain Jason "Boulder" Cordova. "Once you get thrown out of the cat field, I want you and the other twenty Killers in your group to go to bot mode and get on the ground to find cover. The rest of us will be mixing up to cover you from above and behind. Your only thoughts should be to move forward and take that damned teleporter facility as quickly as you can. Got it?"

  "Maximum velocity with maximum ferocity, Burner! Got it, sir."

  "Take the hill, marine. And happy Halloween," Burner added.

  "Oorah, sir."

  "We are gung-fucking-ho, Gunny!" Lance Corporal Tommy Suez shouted as he strapped on the shoulder harness for the ammo can on his armored e-suit. The AEMs of the Sienna Madira filled the deployment hangar and loaded the Starhawk SH-102s with gear. More than a dozen boxy armored troop carriers sat scattered about the hangar bay. Their pilots and gunners ran through systems checks and preflight planning. The marines scurried about the SH-102s with their personal armor, gear and mission-essential supplies. The gray deck plating was covered with armored crates and deployment tubes, which were filled with high-end explosives and ammo for the mission.

  Suez locked his jumper boots into safe mode and attached the tether to his helmet, letting it dangle on his back next to the hyper- velocity automatic railgun (HVAR) that was strapped on there. The Seppy teleporter facility was only a few minutes away on the other side of a hyperspace conduit.

  "Marines," Gunnery Sergeant Tamara McCandless shouted over the noise of the bustle for their attention. "We've got less than a half hour to get this gear strapped on and good to go. When we get the signal from our goddamned heroic flying angels that we can board these

  Starhawks, I want to see it done in record fucking time! Is that understood?"

  "Oorah, Gunny!" The hangar echoed with excitement and anxiety that could only be generated by the knowledge that the 3rd Armored E-suit Marines were about to be dropped into a grinder. Intel had uncovered the base and that there was Seppy activity, but there was little more than that. Nobody was quite certain how many Separatist armored troops were actually manning the facility. Some imagery had shown some Seppy mecha—Stinger transfigurable mecha like the U.S. Marine's FM-102s—and Orcus drop tanks like the U.S. Army's M3A17-Ts. The reconnaissance had also shown several squadrons of Gnat fighters and a couple of battle cruisers. So, there was nobody doubting that the base was protected. The question remained, however, as to just how protected.

  Lance Corporal Suez had never seen battle before, and the pre- mission preparation was causing sweat to bead on his forehead. He didn't know if the sweat was from nerves or the fact that his e-suit temp was set too high, and he hadn't taken the premission meds. The marine ignored the salty streams for the most part unless they got in his eyes—but even then, he could only blink or shake his head. Rookie or no, the thousands of hours of training he had in the armored e-suits had removed the instinct of trying to wipe away the sweat with his hands. The armored gloves could rip his nose off if he was not careful. But Tommy was good. So good, in fact, that he'd demonstrated earlier to his fellow marines how, with the proper control of mind and body, you could unwrap a piece of Halloween candy and put it in your mouth without crushing the candy or ripping your lips off.

  Tommy squinted his eyes a few times and then shook his head, flinging sweat droplets asunder.

  "Goddamnit, Suez, watch where you're flinging your slimy funk!" PFC Sandy Cross cursed at him. A droplet of Suez's sweat slowly dribbled down her cheek. "That shit is just fucking nasty."

  "Sorry, Private," Suez smirked, emphasizing the word "Private" with disdain. Tapping a few keys on his forearm, he adjusted the temperature of the suit to cool him down. But that would only help a little. The intimate contacting membrane in the seal layer in the suits tended to make the human body's thermal regulation go nuts if the wearer didn't have a helmet on. In some of the earliest suits, perfectly healthy soldiers had actually had heat strokes, while others had developed hypothermia. The problem had been corrected several decades prior, but the effect of not wearing the helmet while wearing the rest of the armored e-suit was still noticeable. Medication had been developed to help the body adapt to the suit, but it was used by only about fifty percent of the marines. Some didn't like the side effects of the meds, while others just accepted the profuse sweating as a badge of honor of being an AEM.

  Besides, Suez knew that when he was ready to don his helmet, the suit would pressurize, and the closed thermal environment of the system would function flawlessly and quickly to correct the imbalance. The sweat would be evaporated almost instantly, but another facet of the culture for AEMs was to breathe "real" air until the last minute and then "twist your head on." Part of the reason was that when a marine was finally deployed, there was no certainty as to when they would be able to take the helmet off. Salty sweat in the eyes was a common hazard for AEMs and was a badge of honor that even rookies understood.

 
; "Hey, Suez, give me a hand with this." Sergeant Karen Nicks grabbed one end of a two-ton ammo crate with her armored hands and heaved it off the deck plating.

  "Oorah," Suez replied. He fumbled for a handhold on the crate for a second and then managed to get his gloves into the slots designed for the suits.

  "Take it easy, Tommy. You need a fucking chill pill?" They hefted the two-thousand-kilogram ammo box and walked it up the ramp of one of the SH-102s. The ramp resounded with a heavy clanking sound from each step of the heavy armored suits. The large troop- mover vehicle had racks on the floor that were designed for the deployment boxes. Tommy and Karen dropped the box into the tracks with a kachunk, and the rails clicked in place. Once they were in flight and ready to jump, a cat field would toss the box out at nearly one hundred kilometers per hour, careening to the surface below. The AEMs would be jumping out right beside the supplies, and hopefully AEMs and supplies would make it to ground unharmed.

  "I'm good, Sergeant. I don't like the way the meds make me have to pee."

  "They don't do that to me, but I've heard horror stories of marines pissing their suits full." Karen laughed, and then scanned her DTM virtual planning screen for the next box that needed to be loaded. The sergeant pointed at another set of crates and said, "Those two next."

  "No shit. It pretty much happened to me at the suit quals. I mean, hell, I know the suit can handle it, but I had to keep drinking nonstop to keep from getting dehydrated. I've never pissed so much in my life. I thought it was gonna make my equipment raw on the inside. I'd rather just sweat." Suez grinned at the sergeant, showing his white, perfect smile. Tommy's smile and stocky build could have opened doors for him as a model if he were a few inches taller, but he was a second-generation AEM. His mother had been an AEM at the end of the Desert Campaigns on Mars and was one of the few survivors. Tommy was her fourth and youngest child, but he was the only one who had followed his mother's footsteps and become a marine.

  "You ever do a complete vac drop before, Nicks?" Suez inquired.

  "Yeah. I was with the recon team that dropped on Kuiper Station back before the Exodus. Vacuum or not, low atmosphere is low atmosphere, and it will kill you just as quick. You did training drops on Luna, didn't you?" Staff Sergeant Nicks asked, though Suez was certain that she knew what the answer would be. No AEMs were combat- qualified without doing four full vac drops, and the training grounds were just outside the Navy base near Luna City.

  "Affirmative," Suez said.

  "Then you got nothing to worry about, marine, except for maybe getting your ass shot off." Nicks gave the lance corporal a quick smile. "Come on, we better get the rest of this shit loaded and battened down before Gunny rips us a new one."

  Gunnery Sergeant Tamara McCandless filed her way through the sea of helmetless AEMs, Navy aviators, and gunners, and mountains of mission-essential equipment. She nodded at the smooth efficiency and preparedness of her marines. Major Roberts had a good team in the 3rd Armored E-suit Marines Forward Recon Unit, and Tamara was proud to be a part of it. She had been with Roberts' Robots since before Triton when the major was just a lieutenant. She was with him at Mons City during the Seppy Exodus, when he was a captain, and had fought hard beside him on the northwest exterior wall of the main dome against an overwhelming force of Seppy drop tanks and support troops.

  She and Roberts were the first soldiers to push past the enemy and into the dome, where they found the mass murder of the civilians taking place by the few Seppy motherfuckers that had stayed behind to fight to the death. The Separatists had gone through the Martian city, herding all of the civilians into central open court locations using force fields. There had been many tens of thousands crowded into the main dome Central Park. Once it was clear to the Seppies that the Exodus was over and that they were the only ones from the Reservation left behind, they started executing the civilians with automatic railgun fire. Men, women, and children were slaughtered. Tamara saw firsthand how horrendously bloodthirsty the Seppy fuckers were, and she had every intent to stay in the AEMs and do as much to stop them as she could. She knew that the major felt the same. That one day on Mars had molded them into hardcore, Seppy-hating, life-taking, motherfucking U.S. Armored ESMs. And Tamara was proud of it.

  Tamara, the major wants to see you, her AIC informed the gunnery sergeant.

  Where is he, Jolly?

  He's in the aft section of the hangar nearest the launch line, AI Sergeant Juliet Oscar One One Yankee Seven Mike, or Jolly, replied.

  Roger that. Tamara picked up her pace and turned aft toward the end of the hangar. The red and yellow stripes painted on the deck of the catapult field launch line led her to the end of the Starhawk hangar into the launch bay. Just around the corner was a line of M3A17-T tanks in drop tubes, lined up and ready to be jettisoned. Major Ramy Roberts stood beside the lead tank, talking to a tankhead. Emblazoned on the side of the mecha was "Warlord One," and a full-bird colonel tankhead dressed in his mecha hardpoint armored g-suit leaned against it. The colonel's helmet rested on top of the tank that he was leaning against.

  Who's the full bull? she asked Jolly.

  That is Colonel Mason Warboys of the tank squadron known as Warboys' Warlords.

  Yeah, I figured that's who it was. Heard of him. Tamara thought about it.

  Hell, everybody had heard of Warboys' stand against the Seppy line outside Mons City during the Exodus. He alone had been credited with over thirty kills that day! When the tankheads and AEMs had been overrun in the desert outside Mons City, instead of running, Warboys led the charge of his Warlords headfirst into the Seppy line, where he fought them almost to a standstill, until the numbers game finally had caught up with the tankheads. Then, as any good marine knew the story, a group of FM-12 Marines—Cardiff's Killers—had to come in and save their Army asses in the nick of time.

  "Tamara, are we clicking along all right?" Major Roberts asked her as she approached them. She half saluted the major who, likewise, half returned it.

  "The Robots are a well-oiled, heart-breaking, life-taking machine, sir. They are gung-ho and good to fucking go," Tamara replied with a salute.

  "Just what I wanted to hear, Gunny." The major turned and motioned his armored hand toward Warboys. "Gunnery Sergeant Tamara McCandless, I'd like you to meet Colonel Mason Warboys. Mason and I played football at Ohio State together." Major Roberts grinned at Tamara, and she was sure that he knew what her response would be.

  "Well, sir, I'll try not to hold that against either of you." Tamara grinned and saluted Warboys, saying, "It is an honor to meet you, Colonel Warboys. You know what the only sign of near sentient life in Columbus is, uh, sir?"

  "What's that, Gunny?" Warboys returned her salute and asked with a raised left eyebrow.

  "It's just off Highway 33. There's a sign that says Ann Arbor three hundred kilometers."

  "You got something against my Buckeyes, Gunny?"

  "You see, Mason," Major Roberts interjected, "Tamara here played basketball in college."

  "Is that right? Let me guess . . . ."

  "Wolverine, sir!" Tamara stuck out her armored chest rigidly and laughed proudly, as any self-respecting student from Michigan would have at least some loathing and seething hatred for Ohio State grads. The two senior officers chuckled for a moment, and then Tamara quickly realized they were ready to talk business. "What can I do for you two, sirs?"

  "Well, Tamara, as you know, we are to disperse on the ground with the tank squadron. What I'd like to do is for you to pick a team of recon AEMs to ride down with them." The major had a blank stare for a second as if he were reading something DTM, and then he continued. "The Warlords are likely to burst through to the target first, but they probably will not be able to sustain the location. But a small recon team could get past the enemy lines of defense and wreak havoc from the other side."

  "I see, sir," she replied. "Do you have any particular team in mind to do this recon?"

  "Your discretion, Sergeant, minus one. I'm going with
you. But coordinate with the colonel here and get it done."

  "Yes, sir." Tamara had gone to ground in a drop tube before but never one filled with a tank. Her thoughts were that it was going to be a hell of a ride. "Colonel Warboys, I hope your tankheads don't mind getting awfully cozy with a bunch of marines, sir."

  "They shouldn't, Gunny, as long as you don't put anybody from Auburn in the tube with Warlord Four. We'd likely not be able to put up with the continuous shouts of 'War Eagle' and 'Roll Tide'!"

  "Damn, sir, I don't think we've got anybody in the whole company from the SEC," Tamara responded with disappointment in her voice. "That might've been fun."

  "Skinny, once we drop through, you six of the Saviors shag ass to the southwest apex of the octagon," Major Caroline "Deuce" Leeland explained to her second-in-command while she slipped into the organogel layer of her armored g-suit. She slid the cool pseudo-liquid garment up over her naked body, causing her to shiver slightly. But just as soon as the gel layer schurrped into place, the topical drugs and chemicals embedded in it immediately adjusted to Deuce's body temperature. A faint fluorescent hue shimmered down the length of the bodysuit. "I'll take Hawk, Beanhead, and PayDirt through the middle, and then let's work toward each other."

  "Roger that, Major," Captain Connie "Skinny" Munk acknowledged, likewise pulling up her organogel bodysuit. Connie and Deuce were veterans of the Exodus and had fought hard along side their previous top pilot, "Bigguns," who had given her life in the battle to save Mons City. Skinny had actually been holding her commander and best friend in her mecha's hand when she had died. Something like that stuck in a pilot's craw, and it didn't increase her love for the Seppies.

  Over the years, Deuce had moved into that top spot with the Saviors, and Skinny had moved into the number two. Both of them were very accomplished mecha pilots.

  "That suit you, Captain?"

  "Yes, ma'am. HoundDog, Goat and Volleyball, and Popstar and Romeo are on me. Since we ain't supposed to damage the target, I guess we just recon for things to kill?"