The Tau Ceti Agenda

October 31, 2388 AD

Sol System

Oort Cloud

Saturday, 7:43 AM, Earth Eastern Standard Time

Second Lieutenant Michael "HoundDog" Samuels squinted his eyes hard and controlled his breathing. The ejection seat thrusters righted its flight path, removing the spin, and HoundDog opened his eyes and wished that he hadn't. The Warlords and the Saviors were bouncing around the cover of their makeshift redoubt, barely keeping ahead of the flood of enemy Orcus tanks, Stinger mecha, and Gnat straffing runs. The Gods of War were slugging it out above them at about two to five hundred meters off the deck and were overwhelmed by an order of magnitude. And where in the goddamned hell was that backup from the Blair?

HoundDog tracked out a long, slow arc from the weak gravity of the planetoid and started running scenarios in his head as to where he might land. His AIC, Second Lieutenant Bambi Mike One Niner Alpha November Zulu, had calculated the precise landing spot for him and had highlighted it white in his mindview three-dimensional terrain map. Unfortunately for him, he was going to land right in the middle of what looked like a line of AEMs fighting it out hand-to-hand with drop tank armored support squads and other Seppy infantry. In other words, he was about to land in a whole world of shit. Not that he hadn't just come from such a place, but then he had a state-of-the-art fighting mecha around him. Now all he had was his armored g-suit and the railgun and survival kit mounted in the back of the ejection chair.

Forty-five seconds to impact, HoundDog. Bambi started a countdown clock along with his trajectory path in his mindview.

Shit.

Semper fi.

At least we'll be landing by marines instead of Army Armored Infantry pukes.

"All right, Killers, hard to the deck! The Madira's flight wing and ground contingent are getting chewed to hell and gone down there. Let's show what a group of real Killers can do to help." Colonel John "Burner" Masterson ordered over the tac-net. The squadron of FM- 12s flew formation at maximum acceleration in fighter mode toward the planetoid. Burner checked the whereabouts of the tank squads across the line and found the weakest point. He was making a habit of coming to the rescue of Warboys' Warlords.

"Burner, we've got three Gnats pulling in on pursuit vectors, angels fifteen at seven o'clock," Captain Cordova warned his flight commander.

"Roger that, Boulder. I see 'em. Let's make it too fast for them to keep up. We need to land on the deck and help out those tankheads."

Burner held the HOTAS full-forward, ramming blatantly through AA fire and the continuos hell of the dogfight that was all around them. By maximizing their speed, the Marine mecha squadron plowed away from any of the other fighters trying to engage them. That didn't mean that they were immune to lucky shots, AA from the ground, SAMs, or just the random chance of colliding with a passing fighter.

The deck approached rapidly, and Burner was beginning to get a visual on what had happened there. The tankheads were surrounded in a full three-hundred-and-sixty-degree attack. The only thing saving them was that they had managed to take refuge in a man-made crater about fifty meters in diameter and maybe five meters deep at the center. The M3A17-Ts were spread out around the rim of the crater, holding off any ground advances while several Ares-Ts of the Demon Dawgs and FM-12s from the Utopian Saviors were trying to cover their airspace. Several of the FM-12s were bouncing around the enemy Orcus drop tanks in bot mode and were doing what they could to push the flood back to give the Warlords some breathing room.

The problem with the scenario was that the enemy had deployed over a hundred fighters into the airspace, and the Dawgs and Saviors had started out with less than ten each. The Dawgs had been attritted to only four planes, and the Saviors had fared a bit better, with six remaining. The Gods of War had entered the mix and were fighting fiercely, but the numbers game still weighed extremely in the favor of the Seppies. And to top that off, there was an ocean of enemy tanks on either side of the crater, rushing the Warlords at an almost continuous pace. Burner hoped to change that with the Killers. Another twelve FM-12s in the fight would go a long way. Another dozen FM-12s in the hands of marines went further.

"Burner, I've got a lidar glint off several Gnats straight down," Boulder called him.

"Roger, I see them. Let's lock on their six and start attritting them."

"Oorah."

"Okay, better bleed off the energy." Burner pulled full back on the HOTAS with his left hand and toggled his targeting system. Yellow Xs popped up all over the place. His compression layer squeezed in on his body as he started a tight pull up from the dive, and then one of the yellow targets turned red and dinged. "Fox three!"

Three Gnats were in the middle of a straffing run over the Warlords' position. From the blue dots in the bowl, Burner could tell that the ten remaining fighters were all engaged or being engaged at the moment, and the tankheads were just having to hunker down and take it. Burner pulled completely out of his dive while his mecha-to- mecha missile exploded into the wing of an unsuspecting Gnat. The poor Gomer never knew what hit him.

"Splash one." He looked in his rearview and made certain that Boulder was on his wing. The two Marine mecha screamed in behind the three-Gnat formation going for QM lock. The firing solution algorithms tracked vectors in each of their DTMs for them to follow for best possible chance of a kill.

The enemy planes pulled into a tight bank to the right and upward. Burner barrel-rolled to the right, pulling him over Boulder and meeting the lead Gnat as it pulled through its hard bank. Burner climbed toward it, only meters from the enemy plane, and had to back off on the throttle or he would have overshot it. The enemy pilot was skilled, and he backed off on his power at the same time. The two planes were canopy-to-canopy only a few meters apart, barrel-rolling over each other in hopes that one would gain an energy advantage over the other.

The aerial ballet was a mix of throttle and stick with roll and pedal in a continuous fight not to overtake the other plane. The pilot that made the mistake of overshooting the other would be the one that flew through a targeting solution and would be dead. Burner grunted and squinted his eyes against the g-load.

"Burner! The other two are on us pretty hot!" Boulder shouted.

"Bot mode, Boulder! Kill your throttle and cover my ass! Don't let 'em take your six!" Burner replied, still grunting from his constricting g-suit. "Gigi! You and Dundee get down here and watch Boulder's six!"

"Roger that, Boulder, but we're sort of tied up right now!"

"Goddamnit!" he grunted, and ground his molars against the bite block and took fast breaths from the fresh shots of cool air in his face. The vapor stims gave him just the edge he needed to accept even more g-load and widen his roll, giving him room to go to eagle mode. Burner grunted through the maneuver while the arms and feet of the bird of prey spread underneath the vehicle. Burner reached out and punched the cockpit of the Gnat with his right mecha hand. His mechanized armature cracked against the bubble of the enemy plane, startling the pilot for a fraction of a second. That would be the Gomer's last mistake. Burner dropped his throttle, kicked his pedal, slipped in behind the enemy fighter, and went to guns. The tracers tore through the empanage and across the canopy of the plane, shattering pieces of the fighter along its trajectory. Several of the rounds hit home on the pilot, killing him quickly.

"Scratch two. Hold on, Boulder, I'm coming!"

Boulder toggled to bot mode, spinning left then right to avoid the cannon fire from behind him. Burner had pushed on ahead after the lead Gnat, leaving him for the two on their six. Going to bot and then kicking the HOTAS in reverse was enough of a wild negative g-load that Jason regurgitated bile into his helmet. The organogel quickly started absorbing it, and the suit started pumping adrenaline and other stims into his system to compensate.

One of the Gnats passed by his mecha and clipped Boulder's arm with its tail fin. The impact sent the bot-mode mecha spinning even wilder. His already-spinning head and churning stomach were aggravated by the blow. Jason stomped hard on his left upper pedal to slow the spin, and then he jammed the HOTAS against the forward stop, thrusting the mecha in a vector along an axis from toe to head, which happened to be horizontal with the planetoid's surface. He pulled the DEG sights into his mindview and shot from the hip at the two Gnats as they took positions on Burner's tail. The QMs locked on to the fighter that had clipped him, and Boulder squeezed the trigger.

"Guns, guns, guns," he said. The sensors pinged a missile lock on the other, and Boulder was preparing to fire fox three when his Bitchin' Betty started bitching.

"Warning, weapons lock. Warning, radar lock from enemy targeting system."

"Fox three!" He fired only milliseconds before tracer rounds from a formation of Stingers that had been stalking him ripped through the torso of his mecha. "Oh, fuck!"

The rounds continued to cut into his mecha, sending a leg of the bot exploding off into space. Then secondaries exploded from power systems being ruptured. Boulder quickly assessed his plane's health and realized it was a goner.

Eject, eject, Jason! his AIC warned him.

"Eject, eject, eject!" he shouted while pulling the handle. The mecha twisted against the exploding components, giving it a roll. The cockpit shot free from the upper torso of the mecha, and his couch was launched into space, groundward. Boulder grunted against the g- load of the ejection seat and tried to catch his breath. He managed to force his eyes to focus just in time to see the ground rush up at him at over a hundred meters per minute. He hit head first, snapping his spine and crushing his head almost instantly. The numbers game had beaten him. He had beaten the two Gnats that were on his tail, but three Stingers from out of the blue got to him before Burner could get back to help.

HoundDog, prepare for impact in five, four, three, two, one.

"Fuck!" HoundDog tensed his body as the ejection chair slammed across the ice-hard surface of the planetoid. He could feel the chair creaking as it rolled and tumbled to a stop, throwing up dust and ice particles behind him and leaving a wake floating gently in the light gravity, casting odd rainbows with each flash of light coming from the myriad violent blasts all around him.

He quickly began unstrapping himself from his seat and pulling himself out of the multimillion-dollar g-seat. Several rounds of enemy fire stirred up dust and flung showers of splintered rock and metal around him. The splintered debris zinged against his armored g-suit. The g-suits were nowhere near as bulky and protective as an AEM's suit, but they did offer a downed marine some protection from the environment and minimal protection against shrapnel.

"You'd better move your ass, marine!" a voice buzzed in his helmet as his AIC tuned him to the AEM tac-net. The blue dot that was associated with the voice popped in place about ten meters behind him, near a pile of girders and other metallic refuse from the facility's construction. The name with the blue dot said Second Lieutenant Paul James.

HoundDog crawled behind his chair, keeping his body as low to the ground as he could, and then started digging out the HVAR and survival gear. There was an extra ammo case in the kit as well, and he snapped it to his waist harness and turned toward the blue dots nearest him. Out of the corner of his right eye, he caught a glimpse rushing toward him, and his mindview painted several red dots basically on top of him.

Four enemy infantrymen pounced all around him, firing at the AEMs on the other side of the rubble pile. Only one of them was paying him any attention, and the type of attention he was paying, HoundDog didn't really enjoy. Railgun rounds splashed all around him and were tracking right for him. HoundDog rolled to his left over onto his back and then kicked his heels against the surface, tossing him upward into a backward handspring. As he rolled through the handspring, he gripped the HVAR in his left hand, firing freestyle into the enemy soldier. The low-gravity acrobatics had imparted a considerable amount of angular momentum to HoundDog, but he was a mecha pilot and understood the physics of his situation quite easily.

HoundDog rolled himself into a tight ball to increase his spin rate which enabled him to hit the ground on the other side of his handspring, rolling like a ball. He tumbled through a couple of front rolls until he managed to turn upright and spring forward, using his momentum to slam into the back of one of the enemy troops charging the other marines. HoundDog was first to his feet, firing his rifle full- auto into the back of the soldier's head, and then he bounced with all his strength for the cover of the rubble pile.

"Semper fi, marine!" Sergeant Flick Aldridge grabbed the downed pilot by the arm and dragged him over the pile of junk they were using for cover. "You injured, sir?"

"No. I'm good." HoundDog rested with his back against the wall of the foxhole, holding on to his rifle with a deathgrip.

"Samuels. Welcome to our little hellhole." Second Lieutenant James offered the pilot his right hand while firing his rifle over the edge of the redoubt with his left. Several other AEMs lined up along the edge of the refuse materials and nodded at HoundDog, but none of the marines took their eyes off the advancing line of enemy troops or their fingers off their triggers.

An RPG hammered against the rim of the foxhole about twenty- five meters down the line, sending two AEMs flying backward across the planetoid's surface in a white and orange ball of expanding vapor. The explosion spread out in a sphere of hot gas but was mostly dissipated by the time it reached HoundDog.

"We can't hold this position for long if we don't get backup," the sergeant shouted. Another wave of enemy troops bounced into the open toward them.

"I'm not armored up like you guys, but I'm an extra gun," HoundDog offered. He rose up over the edge and fired several rounds. The targeting system in his rifle transmitted a yellow X in his DTM mindview that overlaid his vision. The X crossed the armored enemy troop several times, and each time, HoundDog let a burst of automatic railgun fire loose at him. After a few tries, the rounds tore through the armor of the soldier's chest plate, ripping out through his back. "Seein's how my mecha was blown all to hell, I've got nothing else to do, Sarge."

"Oorah, sir," Aldridge replied.