The Tau Ceti Agenda

The bot, with which she had managed a strafe with the DEGs, had turned on her and one of the Warlords. The two bounced and juked and leaped over one another in a flurry of mechanized acrobatics, trying to gain the upper hand on the other. The Stinger tried to go to its DEG and shoot from the hip, but the tankhead kicked it away, only to take a knee to the back inturn. The enemy-targeting system pinged onto Deuce, but she moved in too close for it to fire.

I've got a QM lock on a Gnat straffing from above! Bobby alerted her.

Great. Fox three!

'Watch your backside, Deuce,' Skinny's voice buzzed.

'Hawk, where in the hell are you!' Deuce spun and ducked and punched and kicked at the enemy Stinger. The Gomer was good and kept her completely occupied. He'd already stomped through the Warlord that had been helping her.

'I'm pinned down, Deuce!' Hawk replied. 'Shit, I'm locked up! Goddami—' He never finished the expletive. Hawk's mecha burst at the torso and spewed red and white sparks from the power system. It fell over limp and exploded. There was no way he could have ejected. The enemy mecha that crunched him into the ground then turned toward Deuce. The two of them had her flanked, and the tankheads around her seemed to have their hands full at the moment.

'Get out of there, Deuce!' Goat shouted at her.

Deuce couldn't seem to evade the two Stingers' flurry of punches and kicks, so rather than trying to fight them both, she decided to focus on one of them and take the hits from the other. She rushed toward the bot that had taken out Hawk, swinging her DEG like a war club. The bot ducked her swing but not her right foot. In a capoeira handspring, Deuce put her left hand down and spun her feet around, catching the enemy mecha on the side with a right-spinning kick. This threw the enemy off-balance, giving her a fraction of a second to spin up backward onto her feet. She now faced the other bot, and with her DEG in her right hand, she fired at point blank against the rushing mecha's body. The blue-green plasma vaporized the armor plating and also the pilot within and ruptured out the back of the Stinger with an explosion of its power core. The blast threw Deuce backward to the ground, off-balance. That was enough time for the other enemy bot to get its balance and to come down on her with its feet.

'Oh, fuck!' Deuce could see the mechanical feet slamming down toward her, and time seemed to stop for a brief flash as Warlord One tackled the enemy mecha like a star linebacker sacking a rookie quarterback.

'Get up, Deuce!' Colonel Warboys buzzed at her as he slammed his fist through the cockpit of the enemy bot, crushing the pilot.

'Shit! Thanks, Warlord One.' There was no time to relax. Enemy DEGs burned at them from the south across the crater rim, and Deuce could see Skinny running for her life and diving over the rim as a drop tank took up station on her six. Her wingman, HoundDog, bounced right behind her. Fluid was squirting out from under the right arm socket of his mecha. He never made it to the ground, as the enemy DEG caught him across the lower part of the mecha torso. The legs of the bot blew off, and HoundDog crashed to the surface beside Skinny, cockpit up. The cockpit popped free, and the ejection chair spun upward into space, carrying HoundDog away from his mecha. Warboys and Deuce both pulled their DEGs from the hip and blazed away at the Orcus drop tank. Warboys' autocannons went off at the same time, firing at unknown targets behind them.

Skinny rose up into a prone firing position, firing her DEG over Deuce's shoulder, while Warlord One and Deuce continued to fire over Skinny's head. Enemy mecha exploded all around them.

'Goat, Popstar, Volleyball, Romeo, where the hell are you?'

'In the shit, Deuce, in the shit!'

Chapter 20

October 31, 2388 AD

Sol System

Oort Cloud

Saturday, 7:43 AM, Earth Eastern Standard Time

Second Lieutenant Michael 'HoundDog' Samuels squinted his eyes hard and controlled his breathing. The ejection seat thrusters righted its flight path, removing the spin, and HoundDog opened his eyes and wished that he hadn't. The Warlords and the Saviors were bouncing around the cover of their makeshift redoubt, barely keeping ahead of the flood of enemy Orcus tanks, Stinger mecha, and Gnat straffing runs. The Gods of War were slugging it out above them at about two to five hundred meters off the deck and were overwhelmed by an order of magnitude. And where in the goddamned hell was that backup from the Blair?

HoundDog tracked out a long, slow arc from the weak gravity of the planetoid and started running scenarios in his head as to where he might land. His AIC, Second Lieutenant Bambi Mike One Niner Alpha November Zulu, had calculated the precise landing spot for him and had highlighted it white in his mindview three-dimensional terrain map. Unfortunately for him, he was going to land right in the middle of what looked like a line of AEMs fighting it out hand-to-hand with drop tank armored support squads and other Seppy infantry. In other words, he was about to land in a whole world of shit. Not that he hadn't just come from such a place, but then he had a state-of-the-art fighting mecha around him. Now all he had was his armored g-suit and the railgun and survival kit mounted in the back of the ejection chair.

Forty-five seconds to impact, HoundDog. Bambi started a countdown clock along with his trajectory path in his mindview.

Shit.

Semper fi.

At least we'll be landing by marines instead of Army Armored Infantry pukes.

'All right, Killers, hard to the deck! The Madira's flight wing and ground contingent are getting chewed to hell and gone down there. Let's show what a group of real Killers can do to help.' Colonel John 'Burner' Masterson ordered over the tac-net. The squadron of FM- 12s flew formation at maximum acceleration in fighter mode toward the planetoid. Burner checked the whereabouts of the tank squads across the line and found the weakest point. He was making a habit of coming to the rescue of Warboys' Warlords.

'Burner, we've got three Gnats pulling in on pursuit vectors, angels fifteen at seven o'clock,' Captain Cordova