The Tau Ceti Agenda

flames pouring from the eye sockets of the dinosaur. It rose blindly and on fire with a monstrous roar and then fell over sideways, its internal circuitry fried and dead.

BIL managed to right his hoverfield system through internal diagnostic and self-repairing systems and hovered underneath the gigantosaurus and around several of the stegosauruses to the redoubt at Storytime with Belle. He hovered in front of the Secret Service's line and landed on his legs.

BIL then pitched his rearward section like a dump truck about to dump its load. The rear iris door opened like a dilating pupil.

'Move, move, move!' Alexander grabbed his daughter in a bear hug and made for the rear of the presidential ride. Sehera flanked their daughter while various members of the security detail filled in around them.

They raced into position underneath the open iris, and then BIL dropped the compartment as close to the ground as he could get it, allowing the president and the First Family to scramble up into the seats of the vehicle. Alexander took Deanna by the hand and slung her upward toward a seat to his right, and she caught it with her other hand and dragged herself over the back of the chair and strapped herself in.

By the time he was sure that Dee was belted in, Sehera scrambled up the aisle between the seats beside them and started double- checking the restraints on her daughter.

'I'm in, Mom!'

'Just hold on, baby.' Sehera patted her on the head and then plopped into the cushioned synthleather seat beside her, snapping the three-point harness system around her.

'Thomas, are we all in?' Moore scrambled to the seat in front of his daughter that faced a control console and screen. He sat back into the chair and snapped in, while illuminating the screen with sensor data.

'We're in, sir! Go, go!'

'BIL! Close us up!' Moore shouted.

The iris door spun shut, and armor slammed into place around it. The passenger compartment tilted back up and over and locked into its normal position with a loud metal-to-metal reverberation that Alexander felt deep in his bones.

Abigail, expand the DTM for me. I want to see out past the parking lots and all the way to the interstate, Moore thought to his AIC.

Yes, sir. The virtual view in Moore's mind expanded out more than ten kilometers farther than where it had been. He could see the marine mecha overhead, careening about in combat with the flying robots of the park, and could tell that the combat zone ended somewhere just south of the Animal Kingdom and east of Typhoon Lagoon, near Interstate 4.

The Magic Kingdom appeared to be the northern border of the conflict zone. There were red dots on the ground marching north on World Drive by the hundreds. Epcot was one big red blob. Epcot Center Drive, East Buena Vista Drive, and the Osceola Parkway were all solid red. There were blips of red scattered throughout the park's property between the actual theme parks and hotels. In short, they were surrounded and outnumbered and in the middle of some bad karma.

'BIL, go north!'

'Yes, Mr. President.' The AI turned toward the castle and began skittering in that direction on eight legs for a few seconds, and then the hoverfield generators kicked in.

The mechanical spider's legs retracted just as the heel of the gigantosaurus crashed down nearly on top of them. BIL barely managed to evade the crushing reptilian foot by turning the vehicle up sideways and banking in a hard turn to the left. Although BIL had missed being crushed underfoot by a mechanical replica of the largest creature that ever walked the Earth, his maneuver flew him directly into the path of a similarly faux, twenty-meter- long, rapidly swinging reptilian tail of an apatosaurus.

'Holy shit! Look out, BIL!' Clay shouted.

The tail of the beast smashed into the armored limousine, rupturing and tearing bioplastic, metal, and synthskin from the AI dinosaur with a shower of sparks and fiber-optic cabling. The tail of the apatosaurus massed over two tons, and the impulse of the impact transferred energy into the mechanical spider like a baseball bat does to a baseball in a grand-slam swing. The limo massed several tons and held a lot of inertia itself to be overcome, but the hoverfields reduced the mass, and the hit sent BIL and his occupants careening across the amusement park, crashing right through the main spire of Cinderella's castle.

The heavily armored presidential limo passed through the facade like a laser scalpel through hot butter, at first leaving an almost cartoon-like hole in the shape of a spider behind. But the castle spire could not withstand the loss of structural integrity. Euler buckling under its own weight began, and the tower collapsed down upon itself into its very own footprint. The failing of the structure generated integrity loss in the rest of the castle facade, and the surrounding spires crashed and toppled like dominoes one after the other around the center. When the dust cleared, the icon of family entertainment that had stood for centuries was nothing more than a pile of rubble.

'Oh my God, BIL!' Dee cried out as the vehicle tumbled through the air out of control. 'We're gonna die!'

'Not to worry, Miss Dee. Just hold on.'

'You heard him, sweetheart. Hold on!' Alexander reiterated to his daughter, and white-knuckled the armrests of his own seat.

BIL, give me a status DTM, Moore thought to the AI.

Little if no damage, sir. BIL extended his legs to stabilize their trajectory and add lift to the vehicle. The extending legs absorbed some of the angular momentum of the wild spin, the way an ice skater slows down by extending their arms. The hoverfields kicked in at maximum, and he propelled himself as fast horizontally to the ground as he could. As they approached the ground, BIL used his legs as shock absorbers to supplement the hoverfield generators. Their inertia was greater than both combined could overcome, but the impact with the pavement just outside the north wall of the Magic Kingdom was far less than the armor and the SIFs could handle. Though I cannot fly, sir, I can indeed hover and bounce.

Good job, BIL. Now get us the hell out of here!

Yes, sir.

'Jawbone, Jawbone! Did you see that! We've got to stay on top of that vehicle and give him cover!' Heehaw ordered. He had just gone to eagle mode and was darting