The Tau Ceti Agenda

'Thomas, where the hell did that come from?' Moore scanned the map in his head for red dots, but all the red dots were in the air and not in the direction of the railgun fire.

Abigail, what the hell is going on?

One moment, sir. I didn't think about ground movement. Let me adjust the algorithm . . . there.

'Holy shit!' Moore gasped as the map flashed red dots all around them. Whatever was controlling the flying vehicles of Disney World had also commandeered the robot theme park creatures. Moore pushed Thomas up enough so that he could see over the pile of bodyguards. About one hundred meters across the river and farther down Main Street were railgun-toting cowboys and cowgirls, several aquatic creatures, and two aliens from Andromeda. 'Thomas, we're being flanked! Get the hell off of me.'

'Sir.' Thomas reluctantly rolled off the president and took a knee very close to him. If things got bad, Moore suspected that the marine would probably try to tackle him and forcefully cover him. The thought sort of tickled Alexander, since he was far bigger than the marine, and following that long, horrific day on Mars, the president had made it a point to keep in really good fighting shape. Of course, Thomas knew this since he had been the one the president had been sparring with on a regular basis.

'Look over there, toward Mickey's Toontown Fair and also back toward Tomorrowland. The robots are hemming us in here.' Moore crawled toward the wall of the amphitheater entrance to get a better vantage point. The theme park creatures were surrounding them. 'How the hell did they get armed?' the president pondered.

'This is like a nightmare gone nuts,' Sehera added as more railgun fire pitted the brick wall above them. 'At least they're not very good shots.'

'Good shots or not, it only takes one lucky one to ruin your day,' Clay warned—a lesson he'd learned several times over from his combat experience on Triton and Mars.

'Thomas, I don't know about you, but I don't like getting shot at, even if they can't seem to hit a bull in the butt with a base fiddle.' Moore raised his pistol and released several hypervelocity rounds over the wall at the robots to emphasize his Southern euphemism, which he topped off with a few choice nonpresidential phrases. One of the rounds separated a toy soldier's right arm from the torso with a shower of sparks, and the red and white robot subsequently shut down, standing in place. The other robot theme creatures continued their advance. An advancing line of Halloween monsters, godmothers, sprites, pixies, animals, aliens, cartoon characters, and even dead presidents pressed toward them, firing automated HVARs as they plodded along.

'Well, what are y'all waiting for?' Moore asked the agents. 'Shoot the damned things.'

'You heard the president, fire!' Thomas ordered.

The security detail spread out along the perimeter of the Storytime with Belle amphitheater and started to pick targets. As hypervelocity rounds penetrated the robots, they typically would shut down. The theme park robots had been designed for lifelike realism, not for combat, and so the redundancy systems were not designed to withstand having major parts of their circuitry gutted by railgun bullets.

What the robots lacked in toughness, they made up for in numbers. More than seventy strange Disney characters marched toward them from all different directions, one after the other, and there seemed to be no end to the supply of them. The president and his guards would take an advancing line of them down, only for it to be followed by several more. The scene was as abstract as anything out of the old zombie movies from centuries past where the undead just kept coming in wave after wave.

Abigail, where is the evac team?

Less than a minute away, sir.

Just in case, Abigail, you might alert our backup plan.

I've already done that, Mr. President.

'Thomas, I'm running low on ammo, and there has to be more than a thousand red dots on the map!' Alexander checked the clip readout. The little green light displayed the number seventeen. Judging by the many fairy-tale creatures directly in his line of fire and across the river in front of them, the president knew that there were many times that.

'Here, sir,' one of the other agents replied, handing him a clip.

'Thanks.' Moore nodded at the young woman and then went back to firing his weapon. With each shot, he carefully chose a target from the virtual projection in his mind, and then he raised and fired, more often than not dropping an attacker. So far there had been no casualties in their group, other than those at the Marine One site. The robots seemed to have a problem aiming their weapons at range, and Moore and the bodyguards were keeping them at bay for the time being.

Somehow, whoever was controlling the theme park rides and robots had good intel, because the red dots of the flying vehicles began shifting formations and scattering into less of a sentry pattern and more into an attack pattern. The red flying forces in the virtual map in Moore's head scattered across the Disney World footprint, and in every single case they stayed in groups of two.

They're flying with wingmen, Moore thought to his AIC.

Amazing. It does appear that way, sir.

They must have detected our evac team. Abigail relayed the information to the agents in order to protect them and then continued to monitor the local wireless traffic for further leads.

'Thomas,' Moore called to his bodyguard over the M-blaster and railgun noise.

'Yes, sir?'

'Do you have a plan if our backup can't stabilize the situation?'

'I'm working on it, Mr. President, but I don't think it will come to that.' Thomas looked upward and nodded toward a squadron of Marine FM-12 strike mecha zooming in from overhead. 'I doubt there are enough flying elephants in the world to overpower a squadron of marines in fighting mecha!'

'Semper fi, sir,' Clay added.