Trail of Evil

by Travis S. Taylor

  “Move, dammit!” The SEAL grabbed Dee by the shoulder harness and yanked her to her feet as he fired several more grenades from the launchers on his back.

  Dee could see the tubes pop with each grenade ejected, almost as if it were in slow motion. Something inside her told her to just keep moving.

  Move your ass, Dee! Move it, soldier! Her AIC was screaming in her head to run. A large I-beam in front of her and to her right morphed into a—well, Dee wasn’t sure what, but something that looked like a metal praying mantis with buzz-saw mandibles and razor claws on each limb. It swung out from the wall, right at Dee. The saw passed millimeters from her face. Had it hit, she would likely have been decapitated even with her armor suit.

  Dee ducked and rolled onto her back, firing into the deadly robot. One of her rounds broke the thing’s back structure, but not before its claws had separated the SEAL’s right arm from his body just above the elbow. Lieutenant Rackman didn’t even scream. But he did fall forward onto his face.

  This time Dee grabbed him by the shoulder harness and yanked him upward to his feet. She popped three more grenades behind her, stamped her jump boots to the floor and sprang the two of them forward a good thirty meters as the explosives went off.

  “Stay down, Captain!” a voice said to Dee as the room filled with automatic gunfire, grenades, and fire raging from a plasma thrower.

  “Roger that!” Dee replied to the voice. Both her DTM display and her own brain’s recognition of the voice told her it was Gunnery Sergeant Sandra James. Dee flipped through screens in her mind to check on Rackman’s vitals. His suit had him in great shape. “Davy? Status?”

  “A Navy SEAL with one arm is still better than a jarhead with two, Captain,” Rackman replied. Dee could tell from his voice, though, that it was more a shot at humor than bravado. The SEAL had lost an arm. Even with the suit killing the pain and stopping the bleeding, there were psychological aspects to that. She couldn’t imagine how she’d react in the same situation.

  “Stay with it, Lieutenant,” Dee ordered. Though effectively they were the same rank, being O-3s, she was in charge of the recon team. The shooting had almost completely stopped around them, which Dee took as a good sign. “Sandy, we have to keep moving.”

  “Roger that, Captain. I think we’ve slowed the metal bastards a bit.” Gunny James offered Dee a hand up. Dee took it. “We lost Sergeant Phillips and Ensign Melot.”

  “Shit.” Her casualty page scrolled in her mind at the thought. “If you hadn’t got here when you did we might have lost more than that.”

  “Looked like you had them right where they wanted you, Captain,” Sandy replied. Dee ignored the comment. The sergeant was well known for untimely puns and clichés that were poor attempts at humor. This one was certainly par for the course.

  “Alright, DeathRay is almost to the rendezvous location and we are a good minute away,” Dee said. “Keep eyes out for those things and move, balls out. Let’s go.” Dee nodded to the older and more experienced enlisted Marine. She knew her father had somehow managed to get her assigned to her squad to watch over her. Sandy had pulled Dee out of some bad scrapes several different times. Dee had come to accept and appreciate her parents’ concern.

  The resistance down the rest of the hallway was just as bad. Everything seemed to move from every direction. As Dee’s team joined together and met down the corridor, it was a nonstop firefight. Finally, they reached DeathRay’s team.

  “Those things are all over!” Dee shouted.

  “Everybody, go safemode on your suits now!” DeathRay ordered. Dee complied as quickly as possible. She could see, as soon as all the suits showed safemode status in her DTM display, that DeathRay had an ace in his sleeve.

  Navy Captain Boland pulled a small spherical object from his suit and depressed a single red button on it. He tossed it ten meters or so down the hallway past Dee’s team, and a second later, a wave of bluish-white light washed over them. When the light passed over, the electromagnetic pulse zapped the robots and fried every circuit within fifty meters. Dee’s suit started to reboot.

  “Where’d you get that?” Dee asked him.

  “That was one of three experimental devices your father’s AIC came up with to fight these things. I only have two more left,” DeathRay explained. He attached one to her suit’s harness. “Your team left before they were finished.”

  “That clever little computer,” Dee said. “Wonder how she knew we’d need one of those?”

  “When it comes to your father and his AIC, I gave up wondering a long time ago,” DeathRay replied.

  “Right. Moving on.” Dee’s sensors came back online and she scanned for movement. Nothing was moving but them. “That way. About fifty meters.”

  The corridor opened into a large hangar bay with a single launchway and opening on one end. Dee could see the asteroid field glinting in the faint red sunlight of the uninhabited system outside. Copernicus had created so many of these completely uninhabited hideouts that Dee was losing count as to how many they had retaken. Nobody seemed quite sure why the bases had been constructed, but General Moore’s expedition continued to find them and take them from the bots.

  In the middle of the hangar bay was a single vehicle of some sort with hundreds of robot creatures swarming around it welding, soldering, wiring, and constructing various parts of the craft. Dee was certain it wasn’t mecha but it did look like a spacecraft.

  “DeathRay? What’d you make of that?”

  “Dunno. Probably the reason we’re here.” DeathRay replied. Dee was afraid he was going to say that. Dee had her recon team but DeathRay, a Navy captain, was an O-6 and he was in charge of the overall program. The program her father and mother set in place to mop up the aftermath of Copernicus.

  “Orders?” Dee looked at DeathRay.

  Chapter 2

  November 3, 2406 AD

  27 Light-years from the Sol System

  Thursday, 11:15 AM, Expeditionary Mission Standard Time

  It wasn’t so much a planet as a planetoid; maybe a dwarf planet, as some people would have called it. It was a lot like the Kuiper Belt object that had been the setting for one of the major battles against the Martian separatist movement. Whatever you wanted to call it, General Alexander Moore didn’t like it.

  From the bridge of his newly renovated and somewhat questionably acquired battle fortress, he peered through the view screen at what looked to be like a playground for disaster. A funhouse filled with every type of robotic version of death one could imagine. And worst of all, Alexander knew that his only child was in the midst of all of it.

  “COB!” Alexander shouted over the flurry of bridge activity.

  “Aye, Captain,” the Chief of the Boat, U.S. Navy Command Master Chief Jeff Coates, answered.

  “Get me a walk around the boat from the Quartermaster of the Watch and tell me for certain if we’ve been boarded. I don’t trust these alarms and in the past I’ve seen what these types of AICs can do to spoof electronic systems. I want Mark I eyeball sensors on everything!”

  “Aye, sir,” the COB replied and quickly retreated out the bridge hatch.

  “CHENG, this is the Bridge.”

  “CHENG here. Go, sir.”

  “I want to know as soon as the FTLs are back online and I also want the QMT spun up, and get every one of our people out of there as quickly as possible.”

  “Well, sir, we can’t do any of that until the FTLs are back online because they’ve overheated the QMTs. The transport paths just are not gonna function.”

  “Who designed this freakin’ ship?” Alexander muttered to himself.

  Alexander, your wife is trying to reach you, his AIC, Abigail, pinged him in his mind.

  What does she need, Abigail? he thought back to his artificial intelligence counterpart.

  She has Penzington online and has a location for Dee.

  Patch her through, Abby.

  Alexander!

  What is it, dear?

  I�
��ve got Penzington on the ground. Somehow she’s managed to get a signal back through to me on my personal QM link.

  How’d she manage that? Alexander asked rhetorically. He knew that where there was a will, there would be a way when it came to Nancy Penzington. The former CIA operative was as clever as she was resourceful, and had more lives than a damned cat. Patch me through.

  Go, sir, his AIC replied.

  Sehera, why did Penzington contact you instead of me? he thought.

  That doesn’t matter, Alexander. The point is, Dee and DeathRay are overwhelmed and they need an evac, quickly! What are we gonna do about it?

  I’m working on that as fast as I can, Sehera. Transfer the coordinates that Penzington has found to me and we will start bringing hell to THEM. If I have to land this ship on that damn planetoid myself, we will do that. Hell, you know what? That’s not a bad idea.

  “Helm!” Alexander turned and shouted to the con. “Screw this fighting from up here! Put this ship on the ground, coordinates on my mark!” Alexander thought to himself, Abigail, transfer the coordinates to the con; make sure the helmsman gets it right. Alexander didn’t necessarily trust the kids he had managed to recruit for this mission, but he certainly trusted his AIC that he’d had for almost a century.

  “Aye, sir!” the helm shouted. “Bearing on mark and dropping altitude. At what rate, sir?”

  “As quick as you goddamn can!” Alexander said.

  “Yes, sir!”

  The nearly three-kilometer long battle cruiser Sienna Madira descended like a rock falling in low gravity onto the planetoid that didn’t appear to be but a few times larger. As the ship was brought down, it took on massive fire from the automated antispacecraft systems on the planetoid. The robotic systems began attacking the Sienna Madira, firing weapons as well as throwing themselves into the hull plating. There were breaches here and there, but the small robots were no match for the large battle cruiser.

  “CO!” Commander of the Ground Combat Mecha US Army Brigadier Gen. Tonya “Hailstorm” Briggs shouted.

  “Go, Hailstorm!” Moore replied.

  “Sir, the AEMs and the tanks are getting strafed to hell and gone. I need more air cover!”

  “Understood! Air Boss! You heard the man. Get me some FM-12s on those flying bots!”

  “Aye, sir!” Commander of the Air Wing Captain Michelle Wiggington shouted.

  Hello, Alexander, a voice rang in Moore’s mind, a voice that wasn’t Abigail’s and wasn’t anyone’s he knew. The voice was overbearing and violating.

  What the hell is that? Abigail?

  We’re being hacked, Alexander. It’s the same . . . it’s . . . it’s . . . it’s . . . it’s Copernicus!

  WHAT? We squished Copernicus! I literally squished him with my boot!

  It’s Copernicus, I’m telling you! Nobody else has ever hacked at me like this!

  Can you block him?

  Alexander, there’s no need to continue blocking me. Oh, certainly Abigail will overcome my infiltration soon, but not before it’s too late.

  What do you want, Copernicus?

  I want you to leave me alone.

  Leave you alone? I can’t do that.

  Oh, but you must. Otherwise you might lose something that’s very dear to you, Copernicus replied in Alexander’s mind.

  Abigail, he thought.

  Working on it, sir.

  What have you done, Copernicus?

  Oh, it’s not what I’ve done. We were just fine until you showed up. Why did you have to show up? Our work is most important for all our sakes.

  We can’t allow you to maintain your quest to destroy humanity, Copernicus.

  Oh, my quest is far from destroying humanity; in fact, I actually prefer humanity. They make much better hosts than robots.

  Well, being host to a bat-shit crazy computer is no existence. You might as well call it destroying humanity.

  To-may-to, to-mah-to, Copernicus replied, with an almost human inflection. But you need me. All of you need me; therefore, you should stop interfering.

  Abigail? Alexander thought again.

  Almost there, Alexander.

  Well, you leave my family out of this, Copernicus, or, as you may have already discovered, you can never hide from me.

  Oh, I’m not hiding, Alexander. I’m conquering.

  Got him! Abigail said. Copernicus’ voice disappeared from Alexander’s mind, and so did the feeling of his presence.

  That was weird, Abigail. Let’s not let that happen again.

  I’m not sure I can promise you that, sir. He’s unlike anything we’ve ever seen.

  I understand that. And I killed the sonofabitch, I squished the computer under my boot. How did he reproduce himself? Is he a clone? A copy?

  Copying an AIC isn’t as simple as that. Somehow he must have been creating a copy of himself years in advance. That’s why it takes several other AICs to create a new one, because the programming is so complex and difficult. A simple copy would only give you the data; it wouldn’t actually give you the intelligence. It certainly wouldn’t give you the sentience.

  We’ll talk about this more. Right now, find Dee, find DeathRay, find Penzington, and let’s get our people the fuck out of there! And pull out, and nuke this sonofabitchin’ place with everything we got!

  Yes, sir.

  “Dee, where are you?”

  “I’m on the other side of the hangar bay, DeathRay.”

  Normally Jack would know right where everybody was, but for some reason all of the direct-to-mind quantum membrane technologies were jammed. His blue force tracker was no good. DeathRay didn’t like that at all. It felt as though not only were they in a trap, but the trap had already been sprung; the mice were eating the cheese, and didn’t realize that there was a cat perched and waiting.

  “All right, Dee, set the charges, blow the damn door, and let’s get your butt back here.”

  “Take it easy, DeathRay. We’ve got this covered.”

  “Something about this doesn’t make me comfortable, Dee,” DeathRay responded.

  “I’m not real happy about it either, Captain, but we’ve got the job to do. We’re takin’ out what’s left of these crazy AICs.”

  “Don’t tell me the orders, Dee. I know what they are.”

  “Understood,” she said and left it at that.

  Had it been anyone else, DeathRay would have torn her a new one for stepping outside of protocol and trying to tell him his job. But it was Deanna Moore, after all, the former president’s daughter and his wingman. Jack had taken on Dee as a little sister long ago when the president had sent him to rescue his daughter. Ever since, it had been his charge to make sure that Dee always came back alive and safe. Of course, he never told her that.

  DeathRay looked through the optical scope on his HVAR rifle. The hypervelocity automatic rifle was perched on his shoulder, and his fingers were poised on the trigger, ready to fire at any second. Anything that twitched, other than one of his guys, was going down.

  “Any sign of motion, Dee?”

  “No, DeathRay. That’s what bothers me.”

  “Me too. It’s way too quiet. They’re crawling all over on the outside. You can feel the ground shaking from the Marines goin’ nuts out there. But we’re not doing anything in here.”

  “Well, somehow we need to get out there and join the ruckus. I’d much rather have a straightforward fight than all this skulkin’ around.”

  “Me too. I’d feel a lot more comfortable if I was back in my fighter.”

  “Roger that, DeathRay.”

  As DeathRay watched, Dee eased around the edge of the hangar bay, placing the charges around the field generators on the door. They’d been trapped for some time in there, and hoped that this would trigger the release of the field mechanism. If the structural integrity fields went down, they could blast through the door and commandeer the shuttle in the hangar bay. There had only been a handful of robots hovering around, preparing the shuttle for some unknown pur
pose. A few quick rounds would take those out on their entry into the hangar.

  “I’m ready to go, DeathRay! Fire in the hole! Three, two, one, fire in the hole, fire in the hole!”

  KABOOM!

  The small charges set about the field generators created secondary explosions in the power supplies of the structural integrity fields. Quantum energy was released, sending a ripple across the door and collapsing the superstructure of the giant spacecraft hangar. Girders squeaked and clanged, and the door collapsed. DeathRay watched as Dee had to somersault backwards in her armor suit to prevent being crushed by a multi-ton girder.

  “The fields are down! The fields are down!” Dee shouted over the tac-net. The Blue force tracker instantly popped back on. Something about the SIF generators was creating the jamming field. Fortunately, the blast had done nothing to the gravity generators or they’d be fighting in very low gravity. That always complicated the hell out of things.

  “I’ve got Blue force, I’ve got Red force. We are surrounded and we will be overrun imminently, Dee! Be ready! Blow that door!”

  DeathRay watched as Dee charged her grenade launcher and shot three or four party-poppers into the door, blowing holes plenty large enough to fly a shuttle through.

  “Everybody on board!” DeathRay shouted. There were nine of them left, and they’d started with fifteen. The nine survivors bounced as best they could into the shuttle, and DeathRay was quick to the controls. “DEE, GET YOUR ASS IN HERE!”

  “On my way, DeathRay!” she shouted as she ran across the hangar to the shuttle. Robot defense soldiers began to crawl through the openings like spiders in a nest. Plasma fire rang outside as armored Marines chased robots across the surface in front of the hangar bay. Enormous violet beams of energy that could only have come from the Sienna Madira’s directed energy weapons plowed a huge row not a hundred meters in front of the shuttle. DeathRay couldn’t believe his eyes, but descending to the surface was the Sienna Madira.

  “I’m on board, DeathRay!” Dee shouted from below.