The Tau Ceti Agenda

'Good hunting, DeathRay!' the catapult field AI announced. Jack throttled the Ares-T forward and switched to hover as the landing gear cycled and extracted. He bit down harder on the temporomandibular joint mouthpiece and eased the throttle just a little more forward so that the fighter slipped into the catapult field. His tongue worked nervously against the bite block and the roof of his mouth and he began to salivate profusely. Sweat would soon start building, but his suit would evaporate that quickly.

Swallowing hard, Jack worked his hands against the HOTAS grip, feeling the controls. The new bot-mode toggle on his right stick control was beginning to feel completely at home, although this would be the first combat the new transfigurable Ares-T fighters had seen. Jack was and wasn't looking forward to the pending opportunity at the same time. He'd been training in the new mecha for more than two years, and now he'd find out the hard way how good it really was in combat.

'Roger that. Double zero has the cat! WHOOO! HOOO!' Jack screamed as usual through the mouthpiece. The support tube for the bite block started pumping oxygen and stimulants in his face and mouth. The catapult field flung the Ares-T out of the rear lower launch deck, and Jack was thrust hard into his seat at over nine Earth gravities, accelerating the little snub-nosed, fighter-mode mecha to over three hundred kilometers per hour.

The inertial dampening controls of the fighter kept DeathRay's body from being crushed against the pilot's seat and his brain from sloshing around inside his head to the point of fatal trauma. The sleek new fighter-mode Ares-T screamed out of the cat field from zero to four hundred kilometers per hour in one tenth of a second with an acceleration of about eighty-eight Earth gravities. The inertial dampening controls reduced the effect by generating a dampening field around the aircraft that served two purposes: 1) to add structural integrity to the fighter plane as it was thrown into a hail of anti- aircraft fire and 2) to reduce the effect of the g-forces to something that human pilots could possibly withstand—twelve gravities or so. Inertial dampening fields or not, Jack was on one hell of a ride.

'Holy fuck!' Jack breathed rapidly and spat out obscenities almost as proficiently as an enlisted sailor. He grunted as the overwhelming g-forces from the catapult acceleration subsided. He shook his head and squinted the flashing stars and blood from his eyes.

Jack focused on slowing his breathing and scanned the sky and the viewscreens displaying under and behind him. At the same time, his AIC DTMed a full-scale, three-dimensional, immersive, spherical view of the space around him. He could look in any direction and see space outside rather than the interior of the fighter. The view was partially transparent so that he could still monitor other instruments and controls inside the cockpit that were not virtual.

The space around him was littered with explosions and flashes of light above and behind him; beneath him were the icy, bungled- together planetoids and the mangled array of Seppy construction. The DEGs of the supercarrier were digging major gashes out of the facility and slinging debris across the planetoids.

In his virtual mindview, Jack could see the other planes from his squadron being flung from the Sienna Madira hangar bays. His young wingman, Lieutenant Karen 'Fish' Howser, pulled in beside him on his right. Jack could see Fish scanning around her cockpit virtual view for bogies. Her head whipped around wildly looking for incoming threats. Karen had seen her first combat at the Seppy Exodus and had proven herself a true ace fighter pilot. Jack had originally chosen her for his wingman because she was truly young and raw, and he thought she needed to be looked after. But he kept her as his wing because they had worked very well together and what she lacked in experience, Jack had noted on that day, she more than made up for in guts, determination, and just plain raw talent. And she took to the new mecha like a duck to water. Karen was probably one of the best aviators he'd ever seen, besides himself, of course.

Jack could also see the main gun batteries of the Madira firing in rapid succession. Missiles began to spill away from the mammoth warship, along with the DEG bursts through the hail of anti-aircraft fire coming from the Seppy facility. Some of them impacted the Seppy base's exterior hull plating and boiled off large chunks of the armor in brilliant orange and white clouds. The debris spread out in long arcs across the surface of the low-gravity planetoid and spun madly with no atmosphere to drag down its motion.

Jack, I've got Gnats! Candis warned him. The DTM blinked full of red dots.

Roger that, time to go to work! He could tell by the blue dots that the Gods of War had made it out of the ship and through the first barrage of AA fire. Now it was time to face the Seppy fighters.

'Fish, we've got Gomers incoming off our three-nine at angels three.' Jack tilted the stick left, diving and spiraling through the anti- aircraft fire into a head-to-head sprint toward the first Separatist Gnat. The two fighters closed on each other with a relative velocity of more than a thousand kilometers per hour. Jack toggled the DEG targeting X in his DTM view and set the missile lock sensors on search. A missile solution dinged in his mindview, and he let a mecha-to- mecha missile loose. 'Fox three!' he shouted.

'Roger that, DeathRay! Gomers off our three-nine at angels three. I've got firing solutions. Guns, guns, guns!' Fish reported over the net. Jack only vaguely caught the motion of her fighter yawing and pitching madly into a sideways spin to target an enemy fighter passing beneath them.

Jack's missile twisted and countermaneuvered through DEG fire and hit home on the Seppy Gnat, immediately blasting the left wing from the incoming plane and spinning it catastrophically to pieces. Several of the larger pieces twanged against the hull of the VTF-32 as he passed through the spot where the two fighters would have collided. The SIFs and microfiber composite layered armor plating held. Jack tossed the fighter over, giving him a view of the planetoid facility beneath him as well as an eyeball's view of the approaching enemy fighters.

'DeathRay, this is some thick shit! I think we should double back and try to hold closer to the Madira,' his second-in-command

Lieutenant Commander Damien 'Demonchild' Harris said over the tac-net through grunts and bleats of breath.

'Roger that, Demonchild. Gods of War double back in the mix toward the Madira. If we can bring these in closer to the ship, it will clear out some of the path for the marines and tankheads. It might spread out the AA some as well.' Jack doubled his fighter over one hundred and eighty degrees but left his vector in the same direction. The g-forces pulled roughly at his stomach. He grunted and reversed the propulsion system vector, pushing the left hand component of the HOTAS.

'DeathRay, you got a Gomer on your six firing! Get away, or he's gonna lock you up!' Fish warned him. 'Fox three!' The Gnat dodged, while flooding the area in front of the missile with cannon fire, destroying it, and then rolling out of the way, still on Jack's tail.

'Shit! You missed him, Fish.' DeathRay spun his head around, trying to get an eyeball on the Gomer that was barreling down on him. He could see it in the DTM but not with visual. 'Where the fuck are you?' The range was too close to go to missiles.