Kill Before Dying (Tau Ceti Agenda Book 5) Read online

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Communications officer disseminate that tactic as a standing order to all remaining Fleet ships.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  The vortex spun up in front of the ship again, and they were in hyperspace almost immediately. Seconds later they were in a completely different part of the battle in slightly deeper space. The planet now only filled ten degrees of the horizon, as they were over seventy thousand kilometers from the planet’s surface in a non-Keplerian orbit. Almost immediately, Chiata battleships converged on their position with hyperspace jaunts and maximum standard propulsion. Nancy needed to think. It was all happening so fast she had merely been able to react rather than plan.

  “Captain! We just lost recon teams three and five!” Rackman announced. “Teams two, four, and six are taking on extreme resistance. Team one is on the ground.”

  Then UM61 Beta 23 and UM61 Beta 29 vanished from her battlescape view. More than ten thousand souls or AICs, or whatever the clones were considered, per supercarrier had just been taken out. Then the blue beams zigged and zagged out before the bridge viewport and made contact at the forward shield generators.

  “Shields at seventeen percent, ma’am,” the STO reported so stoically that it was almost unnerving to Nancy. She could barely hang onto her chair and keep up with the excitement and stressful details of the engagement, while her clone crew seemed unfettered.

  “Nav, time to jump!” Rackman ordered. “We lost Team six. Teams two and four are still fighting their way down.”

  Nancy, UM61 Beta 4 and Beta 12 can either fire DEGs a few times or jaunt. They’ve taken on heavy fire and are damaged considerably.

  Are they through loading troops?

  At ninety percent, Allison replied.

  Have them jaunt out and we’ll jaunt there next. Transfer coordinates to the Nav. Also have five other ships jaunt there. We have to hold long enough to load troops.

  Yes, ma’am, the AIC said. Also note that from battle analysis it is clear that the equatorial continents and the southernmost continent are heavily populated by the Chiata and where the most casualties have occurred. The northern continent where the Slayers, Maniacs, and Juggernauts are seems to be much less protected. Also, nearest the northern pole, where Dee is, seems practically uninhabited.

  That means something.

  But what?

  “XO, we just lost two more ships. We’re jaunting in to those locations and loading. We need to start cycling into AOs and loading with a plan of getting the hell out of this system before we all get killed in it,” Nancy said to the Navy SEAL turned XO.

  “We need to do something to slow them down,” Rackman thought out loud. Nancy could see him waving his hands about his head as if he were moving icons around in his DTM mindview.

  “I’m open to suggestions, XO. But make them fast.”

  “Well, ma’am, we have no killbox set up, but there is an asteroid field seventeen light minutes from here. That’s a thirteen or fourteen-second jump at standard jaunt speed. It’d sure give us something to use for cover and it’d beat the hell out of this fighting out here in wide-open space.” As Rackman explained his idea, Nancy could tell he was looking to her for some sort of reassurance that she knew what was going on and what to do. Nancy had been in a lot of sticky situations in her long career as a spy, but her short career as a ship’s captain hadn’t come close to preparing her for this. But she was a quick study. She knew she’d have to be if they planned to survive for much longer. And now there were over a hundred thousand troops looking to her for answers.

  “Yes. But it would leave our troops in need of extraction in the lurch.” Nancy thought for a second. Rackman was right though. What they were doing wasn’t working worth a damn, and it was getting a lot of people killed very quickly. They needed a new play. Hell, anything would be better than what they were presently doing. She thought of the Navy saying that Admiral Walker had once told her at the battle of Alpha Lyncis. “Alright. We’re going to do something different even if it turns out to be the wrong thing. We jaunt in waves to the asteroid belt and send four ships at a time back and forth for pickups. Also, let’s release some damned bots on that asteroid field when we get there. They might come in handy when we come back for the recon teams.”

  “Yes, ma’am. But we are getting no response from any of the recon teams. They’re all gone, Captain,” Rackman said.

  “CO. CDC.”

  “Go, CDC.”

  “Seventeen Chiata megaships just materialized from hyperspace over the equatorial continents.”

  “Understood, CDC.”

  “Blue beams!” Rackman shouted just as several of the beams from the new ships started tearing through the fleet. Then a giant porcupine snail materialized just off the port bow of the Hillenkoetter and fired the blue beams almost as soon as it appeared in reality space. “Nav! Get us out of here now! Send the order to all ships to jaunt to the asteroid field!”

  Chapter 11

  February 19, 2407 AD

  Alien Planet, North Pole Region

  Target Star System

  700 Light-years from the Sol System

  Monday, 2:05 P.M. Ship Standard Time

  There was a small clearing ahead in the mostly green canopy of large trees, but Dee couldn’t manage to get the controls of her fighter mode FM-12 to react more than about half of the time, and they did react, they were sluggish. One of the thrusters was stuck wide open, and the roll control was malfunctioning so badly that she would see sky one second and trees the next. She was screaming across the sky, spinning wildly like a missile and streaming smoke and plasma and debris on a dangerous path about to auger into the surface of the planet.

  Following the puking DeathBlossom up with a random rolling semi-controlled crash was a living hell on her inner ears and stomach. Every muscle in her body ached, and Dee was on the verge of total-body exhaustion. She did everything she could to focus her mind off of how bad her body felt and on the job of flying the plane. Since her very first day in flight school the instructors had drilled into her that the number one job of any mecha pilot is to fly the plane. Everything else in the cockpit came second. When all else failed, a pilot was supposed to just fly the plane.

  Fly the plane! she thought.

  The trees rushed up at her quicker than she wanted as she did her best to stall the forward vector and time it so that the cockpit would at least be pointed up when the mecha hit the ground. She was rolling too wildly to eject, so there was only one thing to do, and that was ride it out. She had no choice but to stay in the cockpit and fly the plane.

  You’ve got to level out the vector as best you can, Dee!

  If I can yaw at just the right time, I might be able to use the stuck drive to stall out. She thought. Give me some vectors on that!

  That might work!

  “Mayday! Mayday! Apple1 going down!” Dianna repeated into the tac-net but that wouldn’t do much good, she was pretty certain. As bad as things were up top, she didn’t expect help anytime soon. She was hoping there’d still be a supercarrier to get back to once all was said and done and she had figured a way out of her current predicament.

  “Crash warning! Pull up! Crash warning! Pull up!” the Bitchin’ Betty chimed, as if Dee didn’t already know she was about to crash.

  Bree! I can’t get the landing cycle to start. See if you can do anything with it.

  I’m sorry, Dee. The power couplers to the servos are completely blown out. That last blue beam we took fried or overloaded every system on the plane. Stay with your current energy curve. I think it will work.

  Shit. Hold on!

  “Oh God. Oh shit. Oh God! Oh ssshhhiiiitttt!” she shouted as the mecha rolled and snapped through the canopy, shaking violently as it tore through giant tree limbs. A large thwack sounded against the cockpit and rang throughout the fighter as a large tree trunk snapped against it, causing spiderweb cracks to form. “Shiiittt! This is so going to fucking hurt!”

&
nbsp; Pitch and yaw now, Dee! Now!

  The mecha pounded through one last tree as Dee stomped the left upper and lower pedals and yanked the HOTAS full back to the stop. The plane rolled and almost somersaulted nose over tail, and the thruster that was stuck on flashed against the ground for fractions of a second. That fractional thrust was just enough to push the vector of the mecha closer to parallel with the ground.

  Hold on! she thought. Her teeth clenched against her mouthpiece so tightly she couldn’t have spoken at this point if she had to. Sparks and smoke started to spray about the inside of the cockpit. Bree! Fire protocols!

  Fire protocols initiated! her AIC responded. The cabin was quickly evacuated and flooded with an inert gas that extinguished any possible fires. With no oxygen or other “oxidizer,” a fire couldn’t burn. Any sparks that flew about made strange neon-blue hues in the noble gas environment.

  The fighter hit the ground tail first and skipped, almost like a flat rock on a pond, then bounced over, rolling with the cockpit down against the surface for another bounce. The second time it rolled over nose first as one of the wings of the fighter dug into dirt and tore through the trunk of a tree. The drag and sudden impact on that side sent the fighter spinning like a discus, making it bounce off the ground with the underside of the empennage facing down, and then the beat-up fighter plane dug deeper into the surface nose first.

  As the mecha bored into the surface, an overbearing metal scraping sound mixed with the sound of a stampede of bulls shook Dee to the bone. Her teeth rattled against the TMJ bite block. With one final jerk forward, the propellantless thruster that was stuck in the on position at full throttle pushed the nose through the dirt like a plow, throwing debris, vegetation, and dirt over the empennage and onto the fractured cockpit. Something finally ruptured in the thruster system and there was a very loud bang bang bang, and then the tail of the fighter fell against the surface with a metallic thud as the harrowing crash finally came to an end.

  “Holy shit! We did it! We’re still alive, Bree!” she shouted as the plane creaked, groaned, hissed, and popped. “I don’t like all those noises.”

  Diagnostics show the plane is completely destroyed with no systems functional. You are hearing leaks and fires. Fire protocols are offline and the cabin is flooding with atmosphere. It is mostly oxygen and carbon dioxide. We should evacuate the mecha, Dee, Bree warned her.

  Roger that, Dee replied and immediately started the egress checklist.

  “Fire warning! Evacuate craft! Fire warning! Evacuate craft!” The Bitchin’ Betty sounded muffled and like her audio was dragging.

  “Oh. Shut. Up! Like I don’t already fucking know that!” Dee shouted angrily. “It’s fucked up that you’re the only thing that still works in this plane.”

  Deanna, your father is calling you DTM, Bree informed her.

  Okay, patch him through, she thought. Daddy? I’m okay.

  Princess, we’re getting the shit kicked out of us up here. Her father’s mindvoice filled her head. He sounded more worried than she could remember him ever sounding. Dee knew he didn’t need the extra stress of worrying about her. But, she also knew that it came with the job. She pulled up the wide field of view in her virtual battlescape. Things didn’t look good.

  You have to get out of here, Daddy! Dee could see the blue dots in the battlescape mindview turning purple or black faster than she could count. The ball was flooded with porcupines, and the supercarriers were no match for the alien porcu-snail megaships. It was an all-around shit sandwich.

  But, princess, I can’t just leave you stranded on an alien planet. Dee hated putting her father in a situation where he had to choose her or do the right thing, because there was no winning scenario to it. If he lost more lives to save her she’d feel guilty, and if he saved those lives and sacrificed her he’d feel guilty. Again, it came with the job, but that didn’t mean it still didn’t suck.

  “This is just a hell of an all-around shit sandwich,” she muttered to herself, but she knew she had to paint a better picture for her father and do her best to make it easier for him to do the right thing. She could take care of herself. After all, she was Alexander Moore’s daughter. He’d taught her well.

  I’m a by-God-Marine! I’ll take care of myself and continue the mission, Dee said with her mindvoice defiantly as she toggled switches and depressed activators, hoping to get some system to function on the mecha, but it wasn’t happening. The mecha was dead and she was stranded on an alien planet seven hundred light years from home that was eaten up with Chiata. Dee was sure she’d been in worse situations, but she couldn’t think of when. I’ll be fine.

  I know you will. Her father sounded as if he wasn’t exactly sure what to say and Dee was pretty certain he didn’t believe her when she’d said she’d be fine.

  Don’t worry about me. It’s a great day to be a fucking Marine, Deanna replied with as much false bravado as she could muster. “I’ll survive. It’ll be fun,” she whispered to herself.

  You lay low and escape and evade until Nancy can get you out of there. That’s an order, young lady, Alexander told her boomingly with his mindvoice. It was clear that he was giving her an order as General Moore, not as her father. Or was he? Dee could never really tell the difference between the two.

  Yes, General! she mindvoice-replied, hoping to give her father the image of her snapping a salute at him.

  And princess, her father hesitated. I love you. You be safe.

  I love you too, Daddy! And then he was gone that quickly. The USS Sienna Madira II vanished from her battlescape blue force tracker. She was okay. Her parents were safe and Nancy was coming to get her. She’d be okay.

  First things first, she had to get out of the damned plane. Dee toggled the cockpit release but the damned thing didn’t rise as it was supposed to. She depressed the toggle again and heard an actuator click but nothing moved. She raised her arms up and disconnected the safety harnesses from her armored suit, and then she placed her hands against the top of the cracked cockpit. With all the might of her suit she pushed upward until the cockpit started to creak at the hinges and then something popped like a piano string that had been wound too tight. Then the cockpit rose with ease.

  Dee dragged herself upwards so she could stand on the seat with her left foot as she had done thousands of times. But this time when she put pressure on her left side to stand up, pain rushed over almost to the point of making her sick.

  “Ouch, fuck, shit. That hurt.” Deanna quickly took the pressure off her left foot and reoriented herself on the seat. After a few seconds of shifting her weight onto her right leg she managed to pull herself from the pilot’s couch and over the edge of the control panel of her downed mecha. She sat on the edge of the hatch and threw her right leg over to the outside of the plane, then went to sling her left leg out, but one of the safety harness straps hung on her left jumpboot. The sudden stopping of her left leg caused her to lose balance and fall backwards over the edge of the plane. She was stuck momentarily upside down and hanging from the boot. Pain coursed through her like fire burning through her bones and muscles. Her stomach turned and Dee had to fight hard not to throw up in her helmet.

  “Son of a fucking bitch!” She bit at the bite block in her helmet to help her cope with the pain. With the bite, a shot of stimulants and oxygen was flushed into her face. That helped her gain her composure and start to figure out how to get out of her predicament. She looked around at the world from an upside-down viewpoint and let the beautiful greens and blues of the alien world mesmerize her briefly. The giant red and brown tree trunks were larger than any trees she’d seen on any planet before, even the giant redwoods she’d seen on Earth as a kid. Several trees were splintered and laying about her path and Dee could see a rip in the green canopy that led back upwards to the sky. Dee thought to herself that she’d made quite an impact on the planet already. The bad pun entangled in that thought snapped her wandering mind back, and the pain in her left leg brought reality crashin
g back to her quickly. She realized that first things were first. She had to get herself upright to remove whatever it was that had her entangled.

  “Here we go. Uhhnnn!” She grunted as she used her core muscles and the suit’s power to pull herself back up sit-up style, enabling her to see what had her caught. As she’d guessed, it was the damned safety harness wrapped up in the fasteners of her jumpboots. She began to tug at the safety harness while twisting her boot as best she could. Dee tugged and yanked, and with each pull, pain shot upward through her left leg almost all the way to the knee and downward across the top of her foot all the way to her toes, causing her to have to swallow back the pain and bile that was creeping upward and threatening to escape. She swallowed it back again.

  Dee instinctively reached for the blade in the right chest compartment of her suit but quickly thought better of it. The safety harnesses of the mecha were made of a hybrid composite metal matrix fabric that could damn near take on a plasma cannon round. With the mass of an armored suit and pilot, and the ridiculous gee forces the straps had to maintain to hold the pilot in place, the things were damned near indestructible. The mecha pilots had often joked that they should make the mecha out of whatever those straps were made of. There was no way she would cut the straps loose. Because the material was so strong, there were several redundant failsafe release mechanisms. There were electromagnetic releases at the top and bottom and at the center hasp of each strap. Dee reached for the release nearest to her but it was just beyond her fingertips. She stretched with all her might and pulled herself closer and closer, grunting through the pain that caused in her leg.

  “Goddamnit! Come. The. Fuck. Loose!” She grunted again and lunged her upper body a millimeter more forward and was able to wrap her fingers about the release, snapping the mechanism free. Instantly the straps popped loose and recoiled away back into the seat. As the safety harness gave way Dee toppled backwards off the plane, doing a complete backflip and then some, bouncing off the wing of her fighter, and then landing face down in the grass and dirt beneath the crashed FM-12 mecha fighter. FM-12s had been the love of her life since she’d been a little girl. There was never any situation in which she could perceive them as anything other than pure art, a thing of beauty, a masterpiece of firepower, might, and strength. But as it was at the moment, her FM-12 was nothing more than a pile of banged-up metal. In other words, it looked like shit.