The Tau Ceti Agenda

'XO, make certain that all power is put on the SIFs. We're sitting ducks out here.' The clock had reset after the last mass driver round hit the ship and started counting down again. Two minutes thirty- eight seconds to go. 'Rice! Tell me you are going to hit that thing before it hits us again!'

'Firing, sir. The DEGs are dithering the target area, but spectral analysis doesn't show anything other than ice or rock being hit yet, sir. They may be too deep in the ground.'

'Keep firing, son.'

God help us now.

Agreed, sir.

'Engineer's Mate Shah, hit that motherfucker right there with this BFW until I tell you to stop!' Main Propulsion Assistant Lieutenant Joe Buckley II shouted over the whistling and crackling of the raging fires and hissing flow system leaks as he hefted a really big fucking wrench toward the EM1. The meter-long tool clanked against the deck near Shah's feet, and the EM1 grunted as he picked the heavy thing up.

A crackle of electricity broke free from the hyperspace-lensing system and reached out across the gas vapors in the air, finding a path to electrical ground through the lieutenant's coveralls. The high-voltage shock knocked him a good six meters through the foul, vapor-filled air into the bulkhead on the aft side of the Engine Room. The lieutenant landed back first against the metal plating with his arms and legs akimbo. His head hit with a crack, sending a wave of stars across his vision to go along with the white lightning arc still there from his saturated retina.

'Lieutenant!'

'Keep fucking hammering on that stress valve, Shah!' Buckley blinked hard and pulled himself up to his feet, shaking his head. More arcs were jumping free of the projector power grid and had to be brought under control. Buckley ran to the control board for the power system, looking for any visual clues as to which systems could still be used, for anything, anything useful and which ones absolutely had to be turned the fuck off.

The power conduits had been fried all over the goddamned ship, and the board was lit up like a Christmas tree. The sublight prop was completely gone. It had been literally smashed to hell and vaporized with several decks of the ship above them. The aux prop was out, too. But the CHENG thought that he could get it back online in a few minutes.

According to the clock that the CO had just put into the entire engineering crew's head, Joe could tell that he had about two minutes and thirty seconds to figure something out. Sitting around and waiting for the Eng to get the aux prop online didn't seem like a good idea to him.

The power couplings between the vacuum fluctuation energy collectors and storage system and the hyperspace projector and fluctuation field shields were intact, and the tube was swirling a perfect pink and purple hue. The problem was that there was no way to get the energy from the storage units to the projector so that it could generate the hyperspace vortex in front of the ship. That took a lot of energy. There was energy stored away in the collector and storage capacitors and there was a hyperspace projector, but there was a gulf between them that might as well have been light-years. Another finger of high voltage leaped across the room into the bulkhead grounding out, and a relay on the board went red as the arc died. There was a faint puff of smoke and some foul, burned-plastic smell coming from within the power-grid couplings.

'Well, that solves the random arcing problem,' he said to nobody in particular.

Buckley ran through the standard training for such a situation. The supercarriers were designed so that all the plumbing and power conduits could be interspersed in 'worst-case scenarios' according to the training manuals, but there was always a mess to clean up afterward, so the manuals emphasized the worst-case-scenario bit. Buckley considered his situation and decided that imminent death from a relativistic mass driver round qualified as a worst- case scenario, and he also recalled the way his father had rerouted coolant systems for the DEGs on the Madira during the battle at the Martian Exodus. He hoped like hell that this wasn't 'deja vu all over again.'

'Sir! The valve broke off, and this thing is getting goddamned heavy,' EM1 Shah shouted.

'It broke?'

'Yes, sir! Broke off! What do I do now?'

'Nothing, Shah! That's exactly what I wanted. Now get the fuck away from that thing. It's gonna blow ethylene glycol all over the fucking place in about five seconds.'

'Shit, sir!' EM1 Shah shagged his ass across the engineering section over debris and to the propulsion station with Buckley.

'Let me see . . .' Buckley rubbed at his chin, smearing soot across it as he did. 'Shah, get the biggest fucking power cable you can find and tie it off to the coupler box on the projector power intake.'

'You're the boss!'

Debbie, find me an alternate route for the power between the collector bank and here. I'm gonna plug into this tertiary cooling loop.

I'm looking, Joe. That flow goes down two decks, then over seven. There is a DEG system across the hallway there. Then there is a . . . His

AIC explained the route as highlights along the ship's engineering schematic appeared. At each new highlight, Joe authorized a valve, a switch, a relay, or even a door in a few cases to be opened, closed, thrown, or cracked as needs be. In another instance, he sent a fire crew down a deck with a laserwelder to weld a hatch door across a hallway, connecting two separate flow loop conduits. He had emphasized that they needed to fucking hurry.

'Lieutenant Buckley, we've got the hatch door welded across the conduits, sir,' the chief of the fire crew reported.

'Good, now get the hell out of there.'

'Roger that, sir.'

'CO, MPA Buckley!

'What is it, Mr. Buckley!'