The Tau Ceti Agenda

'CO, I need Nav to put in a coordinate location for the jaunt drive now!'

'What's up, Mr. Buckley?'

'I think I can give us one short jaunt, sir.'

'Roger that, MPA.'

'Air Boss! Hold those fighters!'

'Uh, sir, they're out of the ship,' the air boss replied sheepishly.

'Damnit all to fucking hell, will nothing go right today?'

'Ground Boss, get ready for rapid drop.'

'Yes, sir.'

'Okay, Nav, set jaunt coordinates to . . .'

Ethylene glycol that was heated to about ninety degrees Celsius burst from the smashed valve across the engineering corridor and spewed hot coolant into the room like a rocket nozzle spraying propellant. The coolant spread out quickly and cooled to nearly safe temperatures. Boots, gloves, and coveralls would be enough to keep the engineering crew safe from the heated coolant leak. The system quickly drained and covered the floor on the port and aft side of Engineering about three centimeters deep.

Fifty-three, fifty-two, fifty-one . . .

'Goddamnit, Buckley. What the hell are you doing?' Commander Harrison screamed from two corridors down in the aux prop room. 'I just lost all the tertiary coolant pressure to aux power.'

'Saving our ass, Benny, uh, sir!' he replied to the CHENG.

'Cable is connected to the input coupler, Lieutenant!' EM1 Shah yelled over the noise to Buckley and shrugged. 'What next, sir?'

'Tie the other end of that thing around the pipe you just smashed with the BFW!'

'Huh, oh! I see, sir.' The engineer's mate first class tugged at the ten-centimeter-diameter power cable and dragged it across the deck, sloshing through the hot coolant pooled on the floor. The weight of the cable was too much for him to wrap around the conduit by himself, and two other firemen joined in his struggle with the thing.

'Pull, Fireman's Apprentice Cain! Pull, goddamnit!' Shah shouted as the three men struggled against the cable. Shah had both his feet against the pipe and was pulling with both hands at the cable, tug-of- war style.

'As tight as you can get it, Shah!' Buckley glanced over his shoulder at the EM1 and his team working at the cable. 'Weld that son of a bitch into place!'

'Yes, sir,' Shah held onto the cable with all his might. 'You heard the lieutenant, Fireman. Weld that son of a bitch down!'

Buckley frantically rerouted power couplings via the board and through various DTM connections. His AIC was always four or five switches ahead of him, but he had to authorize each throw, unless he were incapacitated for some reason.

Twenty-eight, twenty-seven . . .

'Engineering! Any time now.'

'Almost there, Captain!' Buckley replied.

'Lieutenant! Cable is in place, sir!'

'All right, clear out.'

The fire crew cleared out, and Shah took Buckley's left flank.

'I'm here if you need me, Lieutenant.'

Buckley was too busy to respond at that point. The clock was ticking down, and the board had to be reconfigured just right, or a power breaker could trip and the power would never make it to the jaunt drive. He reached up to the control board and tracked down the relay switch to set the power rerouting into motion. All of the system was going to dump a small star's worth of exotic energy through the various parts of the ship, and hopefully it would reach the projector. And, hopefully, it wasn't going to fry everybody along the way.

'Here goes nothing,' he said.

The clock in Joe's head ticked to seven seconds as he finally depressed the relay switch, and lights on the board all turned red in sequence, like a stack of falling dominoes. Several of them physically blew out. Sparks began flying across the switching system, and several fires broke out on the back side of the computer controller rack. Had every alarm and klaxon not already been sounding in the ship, they would've most certainly started blaring then.

'Uh, EM1 Shah, I suggest we get the fuck down!'

'All hands, all hands! Brace for impact! Multiple hull breaches. Emergency crews standby! Second hit imminent in five, four, three, two, one . . .'

'CO, CDC!'

'Go, CDC.'

'We've got massive electromagnetic signatures forming above the teleport facility!'

'I'll worry about that in a minute,' the CO muttered.

A bolt of electricity stronger than most bolts of lighting jetted out from the busted valve stem of the coolant flow loop through the large power cable and across the gap to the projector power coupling. The cable danced around, at first wildly like a poorly thrown jump rope, and then it was locked still with a snap by the extreme electromagnetic bottle created from the field lines of the system. The cable sheathing melted away, and the metal strands glowed bright like the filament of an incandescent light bulb. Then the cable vaporized into a plasma of metal gases, and the electric arc hummed and filled the gap between the conduit and the projector power coupler. The bolt grew white- hot with shades of violet pulsing through it. The projector began to whirl up. It whirled faster and faster as the gamma particles tried to breach the massive gravitational boundary of the event horizon within it. The exotic energy