The Tau Ceti Agenda

incinerated. I tried to capture the feel of what he had done in the letter, but I can let you hear the final report from his AIC if you would like.'

'Yes, sir. That would be nice.' Buckley thought it would be nice for his grandma to hear, but more than five years had gone by, and he wasn't sure that it would really do anybody any good to bring up those memories.

'I'll have my AIC, Uncle Timmy, pass it along to your AIC. And I hope to see you do your father's memory proud.'

'Thank you, sir. I'm proud to serve under your command, and I will do my best, sir.'

'Well, I'm afraid there's little time to get acquainted. We're about to start an operation in a little more than an hour from now, and I'm sure we'll need you down in the Engine Room. Good luck, Lieutenant.'

'Aye, sir.' Joe saluted the CO and thought of his father for the next several minutes as he wandered around the ship—absently trying to find his duty post.

'So the Madira will drop out of hyperspace just Solward of the Seppy outpost. We think there are frigates and battle cruisers in the area with the possibility of a hauler. Intelligence does show the area very active with Gomers. The last count showed more than a hundred Gnats and probably as many Stingers.' Commander Jack 'DeathRay' Boland continued with the recon portion of his premission brief to the pilots. As commander of the air group, or CAG, the pilots, all thirteen hundred or so of them, were his responsibility.

'There we will do rapid deploy and cover. I'll take the Gods of War out first in the initial ingress to the Seppy target and fly support to the Madira. Following the deploy phase, we will take this base. Poser and the rest of the Demon Dawgs will fly cover for the ground forces on the first pass deployment. I want you Dawgs sticking to your wingmen but nobody else. No, and I mean no, groups. The sky should be full of VTF-32s in random two-by-two locations covering the drop tubes so the tankheads make it down safe. There shouldn't be an arcminute of angle that I can't see an Ares-T fighter in.' DeathRay paused and scanned the ready room to make certain that his orders were sinking in.

For the last four days he had wargamed this attack over and over in the advanced virtual Battle Operations and Scenarios Simulation Room at the center of the ship, which was officially known as the BOSS but more affectionately called the 'Looney Bin.' He had every intention that the mission should go off flawlessly. 'Any enemy Gnats or Stingers you see out there, bring them down. If any other ships pop out of hyperspace on you, keep them busy. We must take this base at all costs.'

'At the same time as the Dawgs are getting spaceborne, Colonel Warboys and the Warlords M3A17 drop tanks—'

'Hooah!' was interjected by one of the tank drivers. Bolan ignored it.

'—along with fifty armored environment-suit marines will be deployed on the enemy facility. The AEMs —'

'Oorah!'

'—and the tankheads will set up lines and hold them here and here. Note for you groundpounders and tankheads: space-time fluctuations around the facility show artificial gravity on the surface of about one-half Earth gravity, and there is no detectable atmosphere.' At that point, two locations on the map of the Oort Cloud Separatist facility lit up in the three-dimensional display at the podium as Jack tapped them with the laser pointer.

'At the same time the lines are being formed, Deuce will have the Utopian Saviors in the FM-12 strike mecha crawling around that facility like stink on shit. Remember, we are not to destroy this construct here.' Boland shined the green laser beam on a very large octagon shape with multiple towers at the limb of the planetoid facility.

The entire facility consisted of four irregular shaped Oort Cloud objects, each roughly twenty kilometers in diameter. The four icy objects were moored in the center via a large Seppy hauler starship that was about three kilometers long and one kilometer wide. The misshapen objects were stuck together with massive grids and metallic structures. The ships were moored between the four planetoids, and there were metal and composite structures crossing and zigzagging the base in a very makeshift and almost random fashion. Looking at the facility images conjured up thoughts of spliced wiring and miles of duct tape, all of it having gone horribly wrong.

Like an afterthought, or perhaps because the base was unfinished, there was a fifth, much larger, asteroid- sized planetoid about one hundred and fifty kilometers across, looming over the base on the same thousand-year orbit track around Sol. The object was only ten thousand kilometers or so from the main facility. From the surface of the facility, the asteroid would appear twice the size as the Moon does from the Earth.

It would have taken the Seppies generations to tug the asteroids together and build such a construct. Jack couldn't imagine how they had managed to conduct such a massive construction effort right under the noses of the American people. The combining structures and catwalks looked as if they were converted from Separatist battle cruisers and cargo ships.

A large octagonal structure more than ten kilometers in diameter stretched across the entire surface of the icy facility. Jack had his AIC highlight the odd construction in bright red on the image and then zoom in on it. At each vertex of the octagon, there was a tower. There were concentric octagons within it that diminished to a solid tower structure in the middle. The central tower stood more than three times taller than the ones at the periphery and stood from the middle of the hauler, extending in both directions into and out of the surface plane by about a kilometer in height.

'We believe this is the facility that enabled the Seppies to teleport from the system following the Martian Exodus. Also, recall that the existence of this facility is Top Secret and compartmentalized to this operation only. We must capture this facility intact because we need it to determine where the Seppies went and how they did it. And, since they are still guarding it, find out what they plan to do with it.'

'DeathRay, you gonna give us some more substantial info on this thing, or do we just assume that it was based on Stonehenge and tinfoil hats?' one of the Army tankheads asked.

'The intel we have on this facility is that it is some sort of teleportation facility. How and why it works is above the classification of this briefing. We were cleared to show the following video.' Jack gave a thought command to his AIC and a new three-dimensional movie started playing. The narration of the video first warned of the classified nature of the movie and then filled in some historical background on the Exodus.

'During the Separatist Exodus of 2383, more than thirty million people from the Sol System literally vanished into hyperspace. The majority of them left from the Separatist Reservation in the Martian desert of the Elysium Planitia and the Phlegra Montes and other less- populated regions of Mars. Some Separatist vessels that were equipped for hyperspace travel also left from Earth, the Belt mines, Kuiper Station, Triton, and Luna City. Intelligence reports from a deep-cover CIA operative, which were delivered to the Reservation in the Top Secret project code-named Bachelor Party, uncovered the only information available about the Exodus. The operative has since disappeared.'