Trail of Evil - eARC

by Travis S. Taylor

  “Affirmative!”

  “Hooyay!”

  “Oo-fuckin’-rah.”

  Jack peeled his mecha to the left and took up the lookout position in the ball looking directly back at the star. Dee was just to the right on his three-nine line, upside down relative to him and pitching and yawing her mecha such that the little snub nose of the vehicle moved slowly about a large circular path. The rest of the squadron took up similar positions in a sphere about the shuttle carrying the rest of the team. The various pilots had their own individual techniques of scanning space. Some of the mecha moved up then down then left then right. Some of them moved about at random. Some of them sat still. DeathRay tracked his team in his DTM battlescape view. He preferred to sit still and move his head around. He’d use the three-dimensional mindview simultaneously. They were in a very tight defensive ball and ready for anything. And there was no telling what “anything” might be.

  “Jack, we are getting signals from all over the inner part of the system. There is also some type of very large transmitting structure in the Kuiper belt area about sixty Sol astronautical units from the star. As far as we can tell there is nothing out here near us,” Nancy reported.

  “Signals we understand or something, uh, alien?” Jack asked over their private line.

  “Same type of bot stuff we’re used at the inner part of the system. The thing out in the Kuiper belt is a little different, but not too different. Could just be some new trick Copernicus is working on,” Nancy said.

  “Anything else?” DeathRay asked as he continued to scan the space in front of him from left to right and then up and down.

  “Well, maybe,” Nancy replied. “There are an unusually small number of comets in this system’s Oort cloud. We have also detected at least three inhabited worlds within the Goldilocks zone. That is highly improbable. But with the missing comets, I’d say whoever lives here has terraformed one or two of the planets.”

  “I see, very advanced tech is what you are warning me about?” DeathRay asked his wife.

  “Yes. If they can terraform two planets, that is more than humanity has been able to accomplish. We’ve been working on Mars for nearly three hundred years and you still can’t go outside without an e-suit there.”

  “Right, get me more. How do we know which of the three planets to recon?”

  “How about the one with the biggest city?”

  “Okay by me.” Jack wasn’t sure what investigating the biggest city in the system would do for. He thought about that for a bit.

  What would coming to Earth and performing recon missions on Paris or New York or London or Tokyo or Dubai tell you? he thought to his AIC.

  You could get a cross section, of the races in the population and a good idea of the types of unclassified personal technologies of the culture. That might allow for assessing other government processes, civil, and military functions. Candis replied.

  Okay then.

  “First thing, I say we pop to the facility in the Kuiper belt and check it out,” DeathRay said. “We need to know if it is a QMT facility or something else.”

  “Makes sense to me.” Nancy replied. “Once we check that out then we’ll move inward. That should give the AICs time to pinpoint the best locations to recon in the inner system.”

  “Alright then, it’s settled. Send us the coordinates to this Kuiper belt signal.” DeathRay waited for the coordinates to come through and then he set the QMT sling-forward algorithm. “Okay, team, let’s sling to it!”

  The team vanished in a flash of lightning around him and Jack could feel his skin crawl slightly as the quantum membrane teleportation processed. There was as always, that sound of sizzling bacon in his ears and then there was another burst of white light and he was staring at a different location in space.

  “Holy shit!” one of the pilots said over the tac-net.

  “Would you look at that?” Dee said. “That thing has got to be a thousand kilometers long. What is it?”

  DeathRay looked out in front of him at a very long cigar-shaped planetoid. The planetoid looked like someone had taken five Kuiper belt objects and stuck them together in a long chain. There was gridwork along the surface and there were huge dish antennas all over the thing. There literally wasn’t a spot on the facility that didn’t have some piece of technology jutting out from it. Around the periphery of the cigar shape running from end-to-end of the long axis was a very large cylinder that looked like a giant hula hoop that had been stretched in one axis and squished in the other so it would fit around the cigar shaped structure. There were several other hula-hoop-shaped rings that were perfect circles suspended about the structure. One ring per planetoid piece. The structure looked random, complex, and menacing all at the same time.

  “Alright, let’s keep our heads,” DeathRay announced. “Nancy, get us some data on this thing right now.”

  Candis, keep a close eye on the sensors. If any energy levels start to increase anywhere send an instant snap-back command to the team. We’ll regroup back in the Oort if we have to.

  Roger that, keeping a close eye on everything. His AIC responded.

  “DeathRay, I’m getting nothing on any sensors that are out of the ordinary,” Amari said. “As best I can tell this thing looks like some sort of QMT detection and transmission station. It’s a listening post.”

  “I agree,” Nancy added. “We should take a closer look.”

  “Well, I guess now is as good a time as any to test out the Buckley-Freeman Switch,” he said. “Alright, the shuttle will hang out here and study from a distance. Archangels, let’s move down to surface level and survey this thing.”

  “DeathRay, this thing is big,” Fish interjected. “What if I take half the team around the other side and we meet you at the end?”

  “Roger that, Fish,” DeathRay replied. “But stay tight and frosty and keep me posted if anything happens.”

  “Affirmative,” Fish said. “Okay, B-wing form up on me and let’s move out.”

  “A-wing on me,” Jack said. “Eyeballs peeled.”

  Jack watched as the facility loomed closer and closer into his field of view. Before too much longer it was pretty much all he could see. The place was massive. As they got closer to the central long axis ring Jack could tell that the tube circumscribing the cigar-shaped structure was at least seventy-five meters in diameter. The thing reminded him of particle accelerators he had studied in basic physics back in college before flight school. The rest of the structure looked like somebody had gathered up every antenna, dish, and QMT spire they could find and connected them all together on the surface. While at first glance the mishmash of equipment looked like a random junkyard, it was clear upon further study that the structure was a very complicated piece of equipment and the entire planetoid facility was one device with likely a single very large purpose.

  Jack, Nancy’s AIC is sending me data to pass along. She says that most of the signals I’m getting are basic energy readings and standard transmissions. There does appear to be some sort of QMT background noise coming from that large pad structure near the end of the cigar shape. Candis relayed.

  Okay then, let’s check it out. He slightly nudged the HOTAS to the right and the throttle a bit forward.

  “Apple One, let’s check out that QMT pad looking structure just ahead and to my north.”

  “Roger that, DeathRay.”

  Jack kept a close eye on the pad structure as they swooped down to within a few meters of it. It was metallic and put together in sections not much larger than a hovertank. The pieces fit together making a large octagonal pad with a shiny disk in the exact center. The large octagon shape was more than a kilometer across the middle. At each point of the octagon were spires pointing upward into space. The place looked very similar to the first QMT pads they had found after the Exodus. But what was different about this thing was that the periphery was covered with antennas and dishes and melding into the structure on each side of the octagon along the long axis
of the cigar-shaped structure was the large cylindrical tube. Since the pad was raised out of the planetoid’s surface there was no way to know if the cylinder stopped at the edge of the octagonal structure or if it continued through or beneath it.

  “Looks like Frankenstein’s version of the Oort Facility,” Dee said.

  “Yeah, I’m not sure what all this is but it is definitely not just a QMT pad,” Jack agreed. “I don’t think we can do more than scan this thing and get data. Without landing on it and doing some recon there is no way we’ll figure this thing out today.”

  “I agree with that, DeathRay.” He could see Dee’s fighter about a half kilometer away at the edge of the pad. “It had to have taken decades to build this thing.”

  “DeathRay, Fish.”

  “Go, Fish.”

  “I don’t know what you are seeing on that side, but if it looks anything like what we’ve got on this side the tech analysts could spend years trying to figure out what this thing is.”

  “I agree with that assessment,” Nancy joined in the conversation. “Our sensors do tell us one thing though, the structural materials look like they’ve only been in space for a couple hundred years at best. It could fit within the timeframe of events we’ve been assuming.”

  “Well, let’s leave the analysis for later. Nancy, have you found us a location to recon in the inner system yet?” Jack asked.

  “Allison has pinpointed our target, Jack.” Nancy said on the open tac-net. “Fourth planet in the system is the middle of the three habitable ones. Looks like it is lit up far more than the others, which suggests that it is the older one.”

  “Okay, we sling-forward to it. Send everyone the coordinates. Everyone, form back up on the shuttle.” DeathRay could see the imagery data loading into his DTM. The planet was five percent larger than Earth so the slightly heavier gravity could be a factor if they had to go to foot without armored suits. After a moment or two for the mecha pilots to pull away from the facility and then back into formation around the shuttle, Jack gave the order. “Alright everyone, stay sharp and prepare to QMT in five, four, three, two, one . . .”

  Chapter 31

  December 2, 2406 AD

  61 Ursae Majoris

  31 Light-years from the Sol System

  Friday, 11:25 AM, Expeditionary Mission Standard Time

  The inner solar system was not all that unlike Sol’s. The moon of the fourth planet was covered with domes and lights the same way Luna was. The planet below didn’t appear much different from Earth, only more developed. There was little in the way of what looked like uninhabited real estate. After several orbits around the planet Nancy had assured them that they had taken enough data from optical images, ambient radio and data transmissions, vibrational surface waves, and quantum membrane sensors to create a good high resolution map of the planet. There was also an ample amount of data floating around the system that was unencrypted on open system-wide networks. Jack spent a few minutes looking at it, but soon realized it would take a significant amount of his time to figure out the relevant information for his team. One of the weirdest aspects of the network was that there were no entertainment sites or links. The thing was one hundred percent down to business. There were no ads, movies, songs, no politics, and no porn. This was certainly not a network created by and for humanity in the typical sense. Jack decided it would be best to let Nancy handle this part of the recon, or in actuality let her AIC do it.

  Nancy’s AIC had developed a data-mining agent that was crawling around the open network gathering pertinent information while at the same time logging ambient signals and imagery from the Archangels. The hopes were for the team to create a complete map of the system, find the highest priority targets, and spy on them. The AICs were working on compiling the map and determining the most highly valued targets.

  Nancy and Amari pinpointed the largest city on the planet, it was about the size of Arizona. It stretched across a complete land mass that was surrounded by oceans on all sides. It was right above the equator of the planet. There were spaceports located all across the city with air traffic moving continuously. A few more spacecraft coming in shouldn’t draw any suspicion as long as nobody realized they weren’t being picked up on other sensors at the same time.

  The team sat down at the outermost edge of one of the smaller spaceports. It looked nearly abandoned compared to the buildings around it. It was likely that this was an older port that had lost traffic to a newer, more updated one further inward.

  Jack cycled the canopy of his mecha and leapt to the ground. The canopy closed itself. He hated leaving the safety of his mecha and he wasn’t sure what the general would have to say about it, but they were there and somebody needed to gather intel. He certainly wasn’t going to sit put in his fighter while the AEMs had all the fun.

  “Okay, here’s the plan.” He gathered the team around him. “Fish, you take the rest of the Archangels and see if you can blend in with the local air traffic. Get as much data as you can at all wavelengths. Dee and I will join the ground team from here.”

  “Jack, I think we should leave Amari in the shuttle running the sigint package until we get back.” Nancy suggested.

  “Okay, Amari, you stay here. Any sign of trouble snap-back to the Oort rendezvous point. Corporal Simms, stay here with Amari and keep an eye out.” DeathRay paused and did a quick headcount. “We keep the jammers going and maybe nobody will notice our suits with Mark I Eyeballs. The only way they’ll see us is if they actually see us. These new jammers Buckley and the STO have been reverse engineering from the ships we found are getting their first real test. Hopefully, we’ll be invisible to everything but an actual eyeball. And hopefully, those eyeballs will be too busy going about their daily business to catch us doing our thing. We’ll stay either on rooftops or in the sewers if they have them or in alleyways. In other words, we stay the fuck out of sight. Out of sight and we will be able to get this job done. Everybody got it?”

  Jack waited for a nod of affirmation from the team and then started looking around for a route to take. The imagery they had taken on the way in had enabled them to build up a three-dimensional topographical map of the city to pretty good resolution. As they explored and improved the map they would be able to generate very detailed maps for later use.

  Candis?

  Due North there are plenty of high-rise buildings, Jack. His AIC said. We could bounce from those.

  Good.

  “Everybody spread out with at least a half klick between you. Find some vantage points to look and listen and start doing it. Move out.”

  The city was unlike anything that Jack had ever seen before. It was larger than any human-made city that had ever existed, and it was populated with humans everywhere he looked. Or at least to the best he could tell, they all looked human. The problem was that there were only about a hundred different faces. In fact, after about sixteen hours of moving from ground level to skyscraper level and back down again, he had seen the same set of faces more times than he could count. Candis had counted and said that it was one hundred three different faces so far. Everyone else was exact duplicates of one of the other hundred and three faces. She had yet to find a single face that hadn’t had a duplicate somewhere along the way.

  Clones? Jack thought. But, I thought clones were just empty bodies with no mind? Spare parts. Nobody has grown a real clone with a sentient brain in centuries other than pets and farm animals. How are they sentient?

  Either they are clones or a shitload of multituplets, his AIC replied. A clone grown from birth and released at birth into the world would grow and develop like a normal human.

  Yeah, but, none of these look to be different ages. They all look like they are thirty years old and there is no variation.

  Perhaps whoever created them has figured out a way to upload a mind into them? His AIC suggested.

  Do they have AICs?

  Unclear at this point, Jack. We’d have to take one and make a much more detailed medica
l examination.

  Maybe later. Jack replied. Have you noticed any of the thousand-yard AIC conversational stares?

  I have been looking for that. And no, I haven’t seen it. Candis added.

  Private channel to Penzington.

  Channel is open, Jack.

  “Hey sweetness. Miss me?” He laughed.

  “Not really,” Nancy replied nonchalantly. “Is this a business or pleasure call?”

  “Well, if you put it that way, I haven’t noticed any AIC conversational stares. Have you?”

  “No. And that is wierding me out,” Nancy said over the com. “Allison doesn’t quite know what to make of it either.”

  “Any news on your end?”

  “I have a little.” She said. “Allison has pinpointed, through several different ways and means that we don’t have to go into, what she thinks is a capitol city district just a bit south of here. I’m going to take Rackman and move into that area.”

  Jack noticed that she didn’t ask permission to take the SEAL she just said she was going to do it. But Nancy always did was she wanted to do. That was what Jack loved about her. The greatest thing about it was that somehow what Nancy wanted to do was always what needed to get done.

  “Okay, keep me in the loop.” Jack thought about his wife for a brief second and didn’t like her being in harm’s way. And then he remembered who his wife was and how they had met and all the things they had been through together and the feeling slipped away. Neither he nor a freight train could keep her from doing what she wanted to do and he wasn’t about to start trying now. He half suspected that was the same way General Moore must feel about his wife and daughter. “Nancy, one more thing.”

  “What’s that, flyboy?”

  “Be careful.”

  “You too.”

  The city, state, country, continent, was vast, much larger than Washington D.C. and New York City combined, much larger than the expanse of Los Angeles, California, and much larger than Moscow, or Paris, all combined and on a land mass the size of Olympus Mons. It was clear that the entire continent was one large city. How had anybody managed to do this without humanity knowing about it? Or at least without the rest of humanity knowing about it. As far as his AIC could estimate there were nearly one hundred million inhabitants on the island continent alone. From space, the rest of the planet had appeared as heavily populated. Best estimates by Nancy and Allison had been over ten billion people—if they were people.