The Tau Ceti Agenda

'COB, you and Vanu see what you can find out!'

'Aye, sir.' Command Master Chief Charlie Green and Senior Chief Patea Vanu started calling in to the watch posts and duty officers of all the decks for reports. All of them had been pounded to hell, but had no idea what had hit them. Nobody had seen a thing.

Uncle Timmy, you got anything? the CO asked his AIC.

Sorry, sir, I've played it back a hundred times already and can't seem to isolate it. Reflectance data from lidar sensors on the hull suggests there is a particulate cloud trailing from the impact region on the ship's hull. But I have yet to isolate what it was. Whatever it was gave us a thrust vector downward along these coordinates. The AIC flashed an image of the ship in the captain's mindview with arrows pointing out the change-in-thrust direction.

Keep at it, Timmy. Make sure the STO has this data.

Aye, sir.

'Nav, get ready for our turn for the second deployment run.'

'Aye, sir.'

'CO,' Commander Michelle Wiggington said, looking up to the command chair.

'Go, Air Boss.'

'We need to get the second wave out soon. The numbers game is catching up to us quicker than the sims said they would, sir. Radar and QM tracks are showing about thirty percent more enemy fighters than expected.'

'Same on the ground, CO,' the ground boss concurred.

'Goddamned intel pukes,' the XO muttered under his breath. 'They're always off twenty percent here, thirty percent there.'

'Understood. Prepare for second run of sorties. XO?'

'Good to go, sir,' the marine colonel replied. 'The cats are all loaded and ready to fire on your command.'

'STO, how about that impact?'

'Still working on it, sir. We need more data.'

A few brief moments passed, and then the sound of a massive impact against the upper hull rang like a bell through the ship, again. Impact alerts and fire alarms continued sounding throughout the ship. The CO's DTM for the ship's health had a big bright red spot on the upper level near the aft section of the ship, and it was growing larger, like a viral infection spreading through a computer network. Secondary effects from the impacts were spreading with fires and hull breaches through the aft upper section of the ship. Again, Uncle Timmy flashed an updated vector model of the ship's thrust vector alterations. 'Nav, rapid evasives!'

'Aye sir!' Lieutenant Commander Swain punched in an AA evasive-maneuvering algorithm and added a high- speed missile evasion routine on top of it. The ship started to move sluggishly with short jumps and drops, and then it was pounded again.

'I hope that is enough data for you, Mr. Freeman,' the XO told the STO with a hint of sarcasm. The third-ranking bridge crewman paid the XO little attention. Everyone who was a member of the senior staff was used to, and for the most part fond of, the former marine fighter jock's sardonic wit. 'I'm not sure we can survive much more of a study phase.'

'I've got it, Captain! It's a mass driver. A big f'n mass driver. From my calculations, we're getting pounded with rounds the size of a fighter plane at a quarter the speed of light. There is a faint debris trail, very faint, from the projectile's path.' The STO didn't look up from his screens and continued tapping frantically at his controls. His AIC was running mass driver sims in his head, giving him three- dimensional simulations to base his hypothesis against. He compared the thrust vector models of the ship that Uncle Timmy had generated with the dust particle tracks and was working on a launch point of origin.

'Mass driver! Shit. I want all available power converted to the upper level SIFs now!' the CO shouted. 'Engine room!'

The goddamned Seppy bastards are adept; I'll say that about them.

Yes sir. Teleporters, mass drivers. What next? Timmy replied.

'Eng here, sir.'

'Get me more power to the upper-level SIFs, now!'

'Working it, sir. We've got some loose nuts and bolts rattling around down here. Whatever hit us seems to have been aimed at Engineering. Fireman's Apprentice Ranes, lock that shit down there now! Sorry, sir. We're working it as fast as—'

'Just get me that power to the SIFs.' Captain Jefferson cut the channel before the Eng could respond.

'CO, CDC!'

'Go, CDC.'

'Sir, we've got a track on the impact. It's coming from the moon planetoid, sir.'

'STO concurs with that track, CO!' Freeman agreed. His calculations had just completed and were telling him the same thing. A petty man might have been upset that the CDC had beaten him to the discovery by a millisecond, but Freeman was more concerned with not getting killed. Besides, it was always better to have two separate studies lead to the same conclusion.

'Roger that, CDC.' Jefferson expanded his battleview out to the little planetoid above the facility and overlaid the track data sent up from the Combat Direction Center. The bright red line track went in a straight path from the hull of the ship right into the side of a jagged crater in the upper right-hand quadrant of the face of the pale gray planetoid.