The Tau Ceti Agenda: Chapter Nine

October 31, 2388 A.D.
Sol System
Oort Cloud
Saturday, 6:05 AM, Earth Eastern Standard Time

    You frosty up there, gyrene?"

    "Roger that, Warlord One." Major Roberts dug his jumpboots into the harness and rolled his armored hands around the saddle handles for a tighter grip. The M3A17-Ts were designed with several ports for armored infantry to attach to during drop or maneuvers. Each hovertank could carry at least four AEMs if needed. But that would be risky. If a tank bought it on the way down, there went four ground pounders with it. If the numbers were sufficient, it was always better to risk the minimum number of lives with each drop.

    Since there would be ten Warlords deploying in their mecha, Roberts and Gunnery Sergeant McCandless had decided that they should use a ten AEM recon group – one AEM per dropped tank. Roberts and McCandless had checked on all the marines to make certain that they were saddled in and locked onto the mecha, and then the Major had insisted that the gunnery sergeant get locked on. A short discussion followed about how gunny saw it as her job to make certain that her CO was taken care of. Then Roberts countered with a statement about being the superior officer and that he reserved the right to . . . and so on. The discussion ended with a quick round of Rock, Paper, Scissors, where Major Roberts picked scissors. Gunnery Sergeant Tamara held her tongue, mostly, as she folded her paper and stomped away to her tank.

    Roberts had then clanked his jumpboots against the deck and landed straddle just behind the tank’s main turret cockpit. The oversized armored suit atop the mechanized hovertank looked like a maniacally twisted combination of knight in shining – camouflage actually – armor upon his trusty, oversized noble steed. Roberts squirmed his way into the drop position on the tank. The hardpoint connectors of the tank met the suit with superconductor magnetic field coils pulling them into place. The only way the suit would let go of that tank would be to give the software command to shut the coils off or to vaporize either the tank or the suit. After a few systems checks and DTM conversations with his AIC, the launch authority announced that the Gods of War were away and heavily engaged with the enemy. From the pounding the Madira was taking, Roberts surmised that "engaged with the enemy" meant fighting tooth and nail for their fucking lives in a very nasty knife fight.

    "Hold on, marine here we go," Warboys warned him as the tank hovered off the deck and approached the drop-tube shroud. The mecha moved almost silently as the quantum vacuum fluctuation power supply fed the repulsor motivator’s thirst for power without batting a capacitor.

    Warboys piloted the tank into the cylindrical tube and dropped it into place in the adaptor farings with a metal-to-metal scraping kreeechunk. The tube sealed behind them, leaving the mecha and the AEM in complete darkness. There were various vibrations and impulses that rang through the tube and then translated through the mecha to Ramy’s suit. Again, it was quite clear that they were "engaged with the enemy."

    "Warlord One in the tube and ready for drop!" Colonel Warboys announced.

    The composite armored tube jettisoned out the underbelly catapult field like a missile. Roberts could feel AA fire slapping against the exterior armored hull of the thing and hoped like hell its SIFs would hold. Simultaneously, all ten of the drop tank tubes were thrown from the Sienna Madira into the battle at over four thousand kilometers per hour towards the surface of the Separatist teleportation facility. The flight of the drop tubes cut a ballistic trajectory through the AA fire and surrounding dogfights and would take several minutes. Needless to say, those several minutes were dangerous as hell and absolutely hair-raising. The drop was one of the things that made or broke the tankheads. The good tankheads just trusted the tubes and focused on their mission. The really good ones took those last few minutes to nap.

    There was nothing they could do, so there was no need to fret about the harrowing environment outside their drop tubes. Hopefully, all the electronic, optical, and quantum membrane countermeasures would mask them. If those active countermeasures didn’t help, there were three times as many drop tubes launched as there were tanks. The tubes were simply decoys and sensor confusing chaff. On top of the CMs and the decoys and the chaff, perhaps the supercarrier blasting the hell out of the surface would help too.

    "Okay marines, sound off with harmony!" Roberts clicked over to the AEM tac-net and could detect all ten blue dots in his DTM. He started the AEMs off, almost on key. "From the halls of Montezuma!"

    "To the shores of Tripoli," Lieutenant Johnny Noonez continued.

    "We fight our country's battles," Gunnery Sergeant Tamara McCandless belted with vocal affluence as well as volume.

    "In the air, land, space, and sea." Sergeant Nicks’s blue dot blinked from com input in Roberts DTM. Roberts continued to feel the drop tube being rattled with cannon fire and forced himself to pay it no attention.

    "First to fight for right and freedom," sang Corporal Vinnie Pagoolas.

    "And to keep our honor clean." Lance Corporal Tommy Suez’s and Privates First Class Danny Bates’s and Felicia Kent’s blue dots blinked.

    "We are proud to claim the title," Privates First Class Sandy Cross and Makera Gray chimed in.

    Roberts gritted his teeth against the jar of the tube retrofields firing and the demo blowing apart the tube, leaving them in open space with the ground rushing up at them extremely fast and enemy DEG bolts and railgun rounds zipping about. Roberts gave the command to pop the superconductor magnet free, and he pounded his jumpboots against the hull of the tank, launching him wide and clear of the mecha. He rolled in a forward flip, and then he finished the verse in tempo with the rest of Roberts’ Robots, as they all slammed into the ground with their HVARs at ready and spreading out to cover the landing zone.

    "Of United States Marines!"

    Warboys checked his status as his mecha pounded into the surface of the Oort planetoid, scattering icy dust about as he did. He could see Roberts bounding away in the low gravity through his QMs in the DTM virtual battlesphere. The hoverfield of the tank activated, lifting it upward with a jolt, and the main cannon swiveled forward looking for ground targets. The DTM filled with red and blue dots way overhead, and there was a scattered group of blue dots rapidly approaching the Warlords from space. The navy VTF-32s, he thought.

    Roger that, Warlord One. The Demon Dawgs have deployed and are on approach to give us aerial cover, his AIC, Major Brenda Bravo One One One Mike Hotel Hotel Two, responded.

    "Roberts, what’s your status?"

    "We’re free and looking for cover."

    "Roger that. Take the predesignated vectors to cover behind the ridge to the south of the teleport pad, and we’ll try to poke a hole in the defenses there for you jarheads to push through," Warboys ordered.

    "Got it, Warlord One. Thanks for the ride and good hunting, tankheads."

    "Warlord One, we’ve got movement in the forward grid, and I’m getting ATR readings of Orcus! The landing zone is hot! I repeat the LZ is hot!" Major Glenda "Warlord Two" Freeman said over the net.

    I’ve got it, colonel. Looks like a squad of Orcus, and I’ve got several Stinger pings!

    Roger that, Brenda!

    "Warlords, AEMs, and Demon Dawgs on approach, be advised that we’ve got active sensor hits on Orcus tanks and Stingers. I repeat Orcuses and Stingers!"

    "Roger that Warlord One! We’ll do what we can to help out with those Stingers!" Lieutenant Commander Wendy "Poser" Hill replied. Her callsign and rank popped up on Warlord One’s blue force tracker display in the DTM as she spoke. He had met the pilot a few times on the ship, but he didn’t really know her. All he really knew was that she had posed for some men’s magazine. That didn’t mean a damn thing to his present situation. On the other hand, he did know from general talk around the ship that other pilots trusted her and liked her and that the CAG had given her nothing but walk-on-water reports. If DeathRay liked her – even though he was a flying squid – it was good enough for Warboys.

    "Welcome to the neighborhood, Poser," Warboys added. "Let’s go to work, Warlords."

    The Warlords spread out across the surface of the planetoid in tank mode going to active ping on the QMs and looking diligently for any sign of a target that they could smash the hell out of. The sensors generated a resonant signal across the local quantum surface and watched for precisely timed and gated return oscillations. Each ping from each tank was then extrapolated back, as so-called "multi-path" data. The AICs in return built up a three-dimensional map of the battlescape from the data.

    The battlescape was full of red dots that were rapidly closing the gap to the M3A17-Ts. Separatist Orcus drop tanks were crawling and spreading across the surface of the Oort facility like ants after someone had kicked over the ant hill. Warlord One forced the tank at maximum velocity, which was well over three hundred kilometers per hour in that gravity, with every intention of stomping over any ant or hill of them he came across.

    His mecha bounded over the edge of a steep escarpment and plunged down the side of the jagged surface about forty meters to the bottom of the cliff, tossing ice and rocky debris. Several of his tankheads followed suit. He toggled the bot-mode control, flipping the tank in a backwards roll into an upright bipedal position. The large forty millimeter cannon turret rested atop the torso of the bot where a head might be. The barrel of the large cannon looked as if it were an oversized, yet deadly, proboscis protruding from it. He ran the bot-mode tank fast, pounding the giant armored feet into the planetoid and flinging a rooster tail of ice and dust particles behind each step. Had there been enough sunlight, rainbows might have danced around the debris, but at about one light year from Sol, the only lighting was coming from artificial sources and weapons fire.

    Give me the full battlescape, Brenda.

    Yes, sir. The AIC expanded the colonel’s virtual sphere, giving him a complete view of the battlescape on the surface and above them in a hemisphere with a two-hundred-kilometer radius. The algorithms running against all of the sensor-system data identified more than two hundred red dots and a little less than half that in blue dots, all within the hemisphere. Of course Warboys knew the battleplan and realized that the number of blue dots was going to increase by nearly one hundred times that in the next pass that the supercarrier made over them. Until then, the tankheads had to move swiftly, knocking out every target it could find along the path to the interior of the teleporter pad.

    "Alright Warlords, as we move to the line, I want everybody holding off on any long-range shots. They know we’re here, but we don’t have to let them know how aggressive we are until the last minute." Warlord One continued in a hard run with giant bounds over crevasses, metal framework, rubble, and the general construction of the facility site. He had yet to need to fire but was beginning to warm up to the idea.

    "Alright Dawgs, just like in the playbook, nice and frosty. Let’s spread out and cover the ‘pounders and tankheads.’ Watch for those Stingers." Poser pushed her VTF-32 Ares-T fighter at top speed towards the incoming red dots. Her wingman Lieutenant junior grade Cory "Skater" Davis held tight to her starboard wing. The snub-nosed, fighter-mode navy mecha dropped to less than two hundred meters off the deck of the Separatist facility.

    "Poser, this is Punchout. My QMs are showing more than thirty Stingers! This is gonna royally suck!"

    "Roger that, Punchout." Poser paused and analyzed the DTM for the Warlords and for the AEMs. They were still ten or twenty seconds from engagement range. If the Dawgs timed it right, they could hit the line of the enemy a few seconds before and confuse the living shit out of the enemy ground forces with some well-placed air-to-surface ordnance. Then the Dawgs would be totally enveloped by the enemy air support. But, hell, that was all part of the plan.

    "Hooyah! Fox, Fox Three, Fox One," Poser announced, letting fly a free flyer, a QM locked, and a heat-seeker missile. The three missiles spread out in front of the Dawgs and split off in three different directions. The free flyer hit the deck into the line of Orcuses, while the other two detonated into chaff and countermeasures from the Gnats and Stingers approaching head-to-head. "Fire at will, fire at will, fire at will," she added.

    The navy and the Separatist mecha mixed up into a serious furball with the VTF-32s, yanking and banking through the enemy squadrons and going to guns and missiles. Several of the Dawgs released missiles or strafing fire into the Orcus line on the ground, giving the groundpounders and the tankheads cover.

    "JavaBean, JavaBean, watch your six!"

    "I’ve got it, Tarzan. Guns guns guns."

    "Alright, Skater, let’s take ‘em to the deck all the way!" Poser ordered her wingman.

    "Roger that!"

    Wendy nosed over into a dive into a trajectory that led through the southern boundary of the teleport towers, strafing continuously. Her wingman followed suit. The directed energy bolts and the railgun pellets chewed up the surface of the facility throwing ice, dust, and metal slag into ballistic trajectories along their path.

    "Okay Warlords, there’s your path. Good luck. We got you covered up here."

    "Hot fuckin’ damn, it’s thick out here!" First Lietenant Timothy "Goat" Crow shouted over the Saviors’s tac-net channel. The catapult field tossed the marine squadron’s fighter-mode mecha from the supercarrier right into a hornet’s den of Seppy Stingers and AA fire.

    "Roger that," Skinny replied checking her rearview to see that the last of her group had made it out of the ship in one piece. The six mecha, or her attack group, scattered around her randomly in a very, very, very loose definition of the word "formation."

    Alan, calculate me some options for getting to the deck as close to the southwest apex of the facility as you can, she told her AIC.

    Yes, ma’am, Lieutenant Alan Five Five Foxtrot Echo Echo Alpha One Seven replied. He set about wargaming from the QM and lidar sensor data and from the red and blue dots transmitted from the Madira’s CDC. In a few milliseconds, Alan had calculated several trajectories for the Saviors, and in a millisecond more, he had picked the optimal one and displayed the "ball" in Connie’s DTM mindview.

    Great. Connie thought. "Alright, Saviors, follow me, and let’s hit the fuckin’ deck. Maximum velocity . . ." she paused for a response.

    ". . . with maximum ferocity!" the Saviors replied.

    Skinny pitched her fighter-mode mecha downward until the Oort object filled her forward field of view and slammed the HOTAS against the forward stop with her left hand. The engines of the mecha whined lightly and spun up to full acceleration. AA tracers passed by her canopy several times, and then tracers from the right side on her three-nine line ripped across the space just in front of her nose.

    "Warning, radar lock is being acquired. Warning . . ." her Bitchin’ Betty chimed.

    "Skinny, we’ve got three Stingers trying to pounce on us from our three o’clock angels ten!" her wingman Second Lieutenant "HoundDog" Samuels warned.

    "Shit! Bank left, HoundDog!" She pushed the stick hard left into a tight turn, instantly creating an increase in the gravity upon her body and mecha by a factor of nine. The compression layer in her suit tightened around her body, squeezing her like a giant boa constrictor. Skinny grunted and flexed her abdominal muscles, and she bit down hard against her mouthpiece. The pressure from the bites flooded her helmet with fresh oxygen and stimulants to keep her from blacking out from the tight, high-g maneuver.

    Tracer fire tracked behind the two mecha but couldn’t lock them up. Their turn was tighter than the Seppy Stinger pilots seemed to want to manage. The three enemy planes pulled into a slightly wider bank but were still close enough to make very near misses from their guns. Skinny checked her rearview mirror as well as her DTM, and her wingman was right with her. The two of them had trained formation combat tactics for years and were about to put their expertise to the test.

    "Ugghh, HoundDog, let’s show these Seppy bastards whose boss," Skinny grunted at the top of her voice. She yanked the stick as far left as it would go for a split second and pulled the throttle back a bit. Then she kicked her right lower pedal and slammed the HOTAS back to the right side. The mecha made an even tighter left bank and slowed slightly as it bled off energy. Then it rolled over in a split-S into a tight, right turn as the enemy Stingers overshot them. The maneuver put more than eleven times the force of gravity on her, due to the extreme acceleration, but at the same time, it put her staring up the tailpipes of the three enemy planes.

    "Guns, guns, guns!" Skinny shouted. Tracers tracked across space into the rear of the enemy fighter formation, hitting home on the rearward Stinger. She held the trigger a second longer, and the mecha exploded.

    The fighter on the right wing of the exploding fireball pitched forward and began transfiguring. It was flying backwards and sideways in bot-mode, going to guns at Skinny. She slammed the left top pedal and killed the throttle, spinning her fighter-mode mecha into a rapid, clockwise yaw. The maneuver changed her flight vector just enough so that the enemy cannon fire missed her. Barely.

    "I’ve got ‘im, Skinny!" HoundDog’s voice resounded in her helmet. Skinny could see her wingman barrel rolling over her and kicking his burners, pulling into firing position on the enemy bot. "Guns, guns, guns!"

    The bot-mode mecha’s left arm exploded free from the torso of the craft as HoundDog’s tracers tracked across its flight path. The pilot punched out just in time as the mecha exploded. Skinny and HoundDog were moving too fast to do anything but plow right through it and hope that their SIFs and armor plating held. Debris pinged and rattled against their mecha, but they zoomed through the fireball to the other side, taking up the tail of the third enemy fighter. A blue-green DEG blast off of the nine o’clock of the enemy mecha ripped through it, blasting it to pieces.

    "Splash one for me," First Lietenant Dana "Popstar" Miller confirmed her kill over the net.

    "Good shooting, Popstar. Let’s keep pushing downward, Saviors." Skinny pitched back over and continued her acceleration to the deck.