The Tau Ceti Agenda

October 31, 2388 AD

Sol System

Oort Cloud

Saturday, 7:17 AM, Earth Eastern Standard Time

"Splash another one." Jack stomped the left lower pedal to stop his bot-mode spin and then toggled back to fighter, yanking his HOTAS hard right to pull back into some sort of formation with Fish.

"Bank left, DeathRay! Hard left!" Fish exclaimed over the net. "Fox three!"

"Whoah!" he pulled back left on the stick, adding some throttle and slip and gritted his teeth into his mouthpiece as a mecha-to- mecha, QM-guided missile passed within a meter of his cockpit. "Fish, where the hell are you?" He could see her in his DTM but didn't have a visual on her.

"Splash four!"

"Holy goddamed hell, DeathRay, we're getting hammered!" Lieutenant Dave "Deadstick" Barber cried over the net.

"Just think of it as a target-rich environment, Deadstick," Fish replied.

"Roger that shit, Fish," Hula grunted, obviously working against a high g-load.

"Fish, you with me, girl?" Jack scanned his DTM for more Seppy Gomers and caught a formation of four directly above them, engaged with Demonchild and his wingman, Stinky. He finally caught a visual of his wingman in his rearview mirror, as he toggled over from bot mode into fighter mode and pulled in tight on his right wing.

"Roger that, DeathRay."

"Let's help out upstairs, angels twelve, two o'clock high." He gave Fish a moment to catch the bogies in her DTM and gave a shout-out to Demonchild and Stinky. "Demonchild, Stinky, you've got four Gomers taking up the angle on your seven o'clock trying to gain advantage on you."

"Roger that, DeathRay! Can't seem to shake these motherfuckers!"

"Just hold 'em off for a few more seconds. We're coming." Jack pulled the stick back to his stomach and slammed the throttle forward against the stop. The Ares-T fighter plane rocketed upward, farther away from the planetoid facility into the higher altitudes of the engagement zone and deeper into the blackness of space. The acceleration of the maneuver pushed him against his seat with a steady six gravities. His wingman held tight right beside him.

"What's the plan, DeathRay?" Fish said faintly against the added gravity.

"Okay, Fish, we fly in there, and we kill those motherfuckers," DeathRay grunted.

"Uh, great plan, boss."

Candis, give me some scenarios here, he thought to his AIC.

Roger that, DeathRay. Several flight vector lines started bouncing around in his virtual mindview, giving him flight paths of the Gomers and showing where he and Fish could converge on them. The red and blue lines twisted around each other like stripes on a candy cane— and showed that they could get the drop on the enemy fighters if they did it right.

Pass it along to Fish.

Done.

"Okay, Fish, follow my lead and take a shot if you can get it."

"Roger that, boss!"

Jack kept the hammer down with the throttle full-forward against the hard stop. He jinked and juked through the trajectory that Candis had calculated, adding a touch of his own to it here and there.

"Hurry up, DeathRay! I've been locked up!" Stinky said shakily.

"Pull into the tightest, hardest left bank you can stand, now, Stinky!"

"Roger that! Banking left!"

Stinky's mecha pulled tight into a very tight, counterclockwise turn, throwing g-forces on him that pushed him to the brink of blacking out. Demonchild pulled up and across a firing solution for one of the Gomers.

"Damnit, Demonchild, don't pull up! Flatten out!" Fish shouted.

The enemy Gomer fired a streak of cannon tracers into Demonchild's fighter, bouncing it into an uncontrolled roll. Another streak of cannon fire blasted the power plant in just the right spot, causing the fighter to explode violently and too quickly for Demonchild to pull the ejection handle. He was killed instantly in a raging space inferno.

"Fuck!" Jack screamed through his bite block. "Keep it tight, Stinky!"

The three remaining Gnats banked through the turn, with Stinky trying to get a firing solution on him. The enemy fighters appeared hell bent on not letting him get away. As the three Gomers all pulled in tight behind him, their trajectories led them right across Jack and Karen's line of sight. A firing solution tone sounded in Jack's head.

"Hold on, Stinky! Almost . . . Guns, guns, guns!" Jack's railgun cannon tracers cut in across space in front of the lead Seppy Gnat and tracked its trajectory until it flew right through the forty-millimeter cannon rounds. Several of the baseball-sized, high-incendiary, armor-piercing tracer rounds ripped through the empennage of the enemy fighter, scattering debris and gas vapors from it. "Guns, guns, guns!" He continued to fire until the lead Gnat broke up. Its pilot punched out at the last second.

"I've got two. Watch number three!" Fish shouted. "Guns, guns, guns!"

A blue-green DEG beam pulsed across the wing of the second Gnat, vaporizing important structural members there. Welds and composite-to-metal junctions delaminated from the blast. The high-g turn pulled the wing the rest of the way off, spinning it madly out of control. The fighter exploded with no sign of an ejecting pilot.

The third Gnat pulled off of Stinky's tail and banked hard upward, but by that time DeathRay had managed a barrel roll over Fish putting him in behind the third Gomer. Jack brought the Separatist Gnat fighter through a firing solution that blinked on and off between yellow and red.

"Guns, guns, guns," he said, and strafed through with his DEG missing. "Fox three!" He loosed a mecha-to-mecha missile that twisted and spiraled around until it hit home with a white ball of flame engulfing the enemy plane.

"Hot damn! Take that, you Seppy Gomer son of a bitch!" Stinky cheered.

"DeathRay, DeathRay, Madira!"

"Go, Madira!" DeathRay replied.

"Pull high altitude plan and go for the deck, ASAP. I repeat, all Gods of War are to give coverage on the deck!" the air boss ordered.

"Roger that, Madira. Gods of War are hitting the deck!" Jack checked his DTM and visuals and didn't see an immediate threat. That only meant that nothing was shooting at him right that second, but his DTM was still filled with more red dots than blue. But their maneuvering upward had pulled them to the top of the "ball." He looked down toward the planetoid more than ten kilometers away. There was a buzz of air-to-air and surface-to-air combat going on between them and the deck.

I guess we just plow through it, he thought.

Only way to get there without getting your ass shot off, Candis replied.

Right.

"Okay, Gods of War, we are taking this fight to the deck. The groundpounders and the Demon Dawgs need some more backup down there. And maybe we can force this ball into a small bowl, if we're lucky." Jack pitched the nose over, pushing the HOTAS forward on both sides. The sleek fighter fell downward like a missile at maximum velocity through the spherical combat zone. As his speed picked up, the planetoid continued to fill more of his field of view until there was nothing left in it but the surface. Flashes of explosions danced around the cockpit as he pushed harder and faster to the surface.

He and Fish tore rapidly by several close calls as enemy and friendly fighters both zoomed past with relative velocity of well over three thousand kilometers per hour. Then several glints strafing a blue line on the ground caught Jack's attention. His DTM quickly identified them and turned them red. Five Seppy Stingers were giving the tankheads a seriously bad day.

"Fish, I've got five Stingers at about cherubs two off to the right. See them?"

"Roger that, DeathRay. Want to teach them not to mess with our guys?"

"Exactly what I was thinking."

"Watch for AA coming off the ridge to the east," Lieutenant Commander Penikea "Hula" Moses warned. "Looks like it's coming just north of the line near the tankheads."

"Roger that, Hula," Fish replied.

"Okay, Fish, get ready to start bleeding off speed!"

The plunge to the deck had accelerated their fighters to nearly twenty-seven-hundred kilometers per hour. There was no way that they could pull out of the dive at that velocity. Jack pulled the throttle all the way back and kicked in reverse thrust. He tracked the Stingers, formed in a V-shaped formation low on the deck, and gently added right slip and stick to veer his trajectory across the Gomer's flight path.

"All right, Fish, let's pull in behind them and start picking them off."

"Roger that, DeathRay."

"Pull out of the dive in four, three, two, one, now!" Jack pulled out of the dive, slamming his body into the couch at over ten and a half gravities. The force load on his body grew from the standard eight hundred and eighty-two newtons to well over nine thousand. In old body weight standards, he would have grown from a hundred and ninety pounds to over nineteen hundred pounds. The plane was actually pulling much heavier g-loading, but the structural integrity and inertial dampening fields protected it and the pilot from them. But maneuvers like this one taxed the living hell out of those systems.

"Uh, uh, whoo," Jack grunted and squeezed his abdomen and leg muscles to fight the gravity and keep the blood in his head. The g-suit constricted on him like a giant anaconda crushing its prey and forcing blood back into his brain. Jack bit down on the bite block, holding on to the edge of consciousness and struggling to breathe as he pulled through the dive. The engines of the little snub-nosed mecha screamed against the turn and then settled back down as it leveled off at over eight hundred kilometers per hour, just two hundred meters off the deck. He looked over his right shoulder, and Fish was right on his wing.

"Whooo! That was a fuckin' thrill a minute," she said.

"Uh huh." Jack was still swallowing his stomach and barely managed the response. Stars raced across his vision as the blackness that was threatening to engulf him faded out of view.

"Gomers in sight just below us, cherubs one."

"Got them on eyeball. Going to missiles. Fox three!" Jack fired. A missile leaped from underneath the fighter and silently zipped across the sky, locking QM sensors onto the tail of the Stinger. The Seppy Gomer would never know what hit him. Jack and Fish had dropped in on them so fast that there was no way they would have time to react.

"Fox three!" Fish shouted. Her missile twisted in only milliseconds behind Jack's at the next-to-last enemy fighter in the formation.

Jack's missile hit home, totally destroying the Stinger. The plane tumbled and spread out, leaving a field of debris along its trajectory that finally crashed into the surface several kilometers away. The fighter's wingman burst into a fireball almost as quickly as Karen's missile tore through it.

"Splash six! Ace plus one for the day," Fish said.

"It could still be a long day, Fish," Jack replied.

"It's already been pretty goddamned long," she added.

The lead two Stingers pulled up from the deck and to the left. Jack and Fish quickly overtook them since they were still flying at a much faster relative speed. The enemy fighter's bank slowed them enough that the two Gods of War flew right by them—almost an amateur mistake. Almost.

The two enemy planes barrel-rolled over each other and banked behind them, accelerating and going to guns. Jack toggled his mecha into bot mode, and the snub-nosed Ares-T fighter pitched over and transfigured quickly. The mechanized bot stood upside down on its head and spun around, facing the enemy Stingers on his tail. With no atmosphere, his bot continued along the same vector at eight hundred kilometers per hour.

Two yellow Xs appeared in DeathRay's mindview, tracking the paths of the Seppy fighters that were bouncing and bobbing in and out of his line of sight. The yellow X on his left attacker blinked red, then back to yellow, then back to red, and finally locked on red.

"Guns, guns, guns," Jack said, firing the forty-millimeter railgun cannon now on his right arm. The tracers tracked into the incoming enemy mecha, blasting it to bits. The second yellow X blinked red and locked on, and he fired the cannon on his left arm. The cannonfire ripped through the Stingers right tail but didn't do enough damage. It kept coming and firing at him.

"Shit," Jack muttered as he kept aiming with the cannons trying to close a firing solution on the enemy plane. It fired at him again, and the tracer rounds zipped past his cockpit. Jack kicked the HOTAS and spun clockwise and head-over-feet into a full flip, trying to evade the enemy.

"Warning. Enemy targeting system has lock. Warning. Enemy targeting system has lock," Jack's Bitchin' Betty repeated.

"Fox three!" Fish said, loosing a missile that blasted out in front of the enemy fighter and exploded just as it was starting to go to guns again. The fighter flew into millions of pieces with a bright orange fireball.

Jack looked over his right shoulder to see Fish's mecha in fighter mode, flying backwards and upside down. Her fighter yawed back and forth as if she were looking for something else behind them, and then it pitched back over to normal flight. He heard her groan and curse from the g-loading.

"Good shot, Fish." Jack toggled back to fighter mode and fell back into lockstep formation with her.

"You owe me one, partner!"

"DeathRay, this is Poser. Glad y'all decided to come down from on high and join the party."

"Roger that, Poser. Looked like there was more action going on down here."

"You got that . . . shit . . . fox three!"