Trail of Evil

by Travis S. Taylor

  “Sure you don’t want me to come with you, sir?” Warboys asked.

  “No, go back and get my wife and keep her safe.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Outside, sir! We could get a tank to Dee from the outside, Abigail said in his mindvoice.

  How long would it take to get a tank out there? Moore turned down a dark hallway that was man-sized and looked for a down ladder to get to the next level below.

  Too long, Abigail replied. Too bad we don’t have tank patrols on the outside of the ship.

  That’s it! We do have mecha out there! Moore recalled seeing the FM-12s from his viewport only moments earlier.

  Of course, sir! I have a channel open now. For whatever reason the bots aren’t jamming the exterior.

  Because we killed all the ones outside the ship!

  “Lieutenant Colonel Strong! Jawbone! Jawbone! This is General Moore, do you copy?”

  “Sir? Jawbone here. I copy.”

  “Col, Dee is being overrun by enemy bots at the location my AIC is transferring to you now. She and another soldier are not in E-suits and I’m not sure I will make it to them in time.” Moore rushed through a tactic in his head. “Get there now! Bust through the hull and into the outer pressure corridor. As it depressurizes you will have seconds to grab her and Lieutenant Rackman before the vacuum gets them. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, sir! The Maniacs are on it,” Jawbone replied.

  Joe Buckley, Jr. had no idea how the bots were jamming the sensors from the front end of the ship, but what he did know was that the air handlers, power conduits, and cooling tubes were all functioning the way they should. What he also knew was that there were power fluctuations in the hyperdrive core that were emanating from somewhere outside the control systems in engineering. The damned bots were fucking with his engine and he didn’t like it.

  “Benjamin! Did you see the fluctuations in the subspace field generators?” Buckley asked his second-in-command. His mind was swimming with charts, graphs, and hyper-relativistic quantum membrane calculations. Commander Keri Benjamin had been with his crew for over a decade and she understood the Madira about as well as Joe did. She’d probably say even better.

  “Roger that, Joe. Whatever the bots are doing to us in the forward end of the ship is creating the standing wave in the power conduits. It looks like it is coming from near the forward and starboard DEG batteries.” Benjamin tapped away at her control panel made several blank facial expressions, and stared off into space as if she were conversing with her AIC.

  “Get me a damned fire crew up there and a tech!” Joe ordered. If that standing wave continued to build up there was no telling what type of damage that would do to the hyperdrive conduit projector. If that thing went out the ship would be stuck in deep space for a very long time. They could always just snap back individually to Earth but Joe didn’t like the idea of leaving his first love abandoned in space.

  “Roger that, Joe. Got a team on the way. Be advised that there is heavy fighting between here and there and it looks like the General is in the middle of it,” Benjamin replied.

  Debbie, he thought to his AIC. See if you can get in touch with the General’s AIC and see what is going on.

  She’s already in contact with me, Joe.

  And? Joe asked in his mindvoice.

  It looks like the bots have overrun the outer hull corridor nearest the vacuum bulkhead under the DEGs. And, his daughter is stuck there unarmored. He is attempting to rescue her and others.

  How?

  He has ordered the Maniacs to attack that area of the ship and break her out from the outside in.

  Shit! Cut the SIFs! If they start pounding on the hull there with the structural integrity field generators running they’ll start pulling power on the conduit. And that could drive up the rogue standing wave! Joe thought for a moment. If that standing wave drew more power to that end of the ship it could create a positive feedback loop that would go unchecked. It would be like throwing a chain across the leads of a high-voltage transformer. An infinite current draw would be created and since the power supply couldn’t supply an infinite amount of current something would give, explosively!

  “Keri, we’re shutting down the SIFs throughout the ship!” Joe ordered. “Find the spot where that damned power fluctuation is coming from!”

  “Joe, with the SIFs down, the Madira will be vulnerable,” Benjamin replied.

  “Vulnerable to what? The damned bots are inside of the ship!”

  Delilah rolled the FM-12 over into a straight vector for the coordinates that Moore’s AIC had given her. She hated attacking her own ship but she also didn’t want to see anything happen to the general’s daughter. Jawbone had met the first daughter after the Disney World incident during the Separatist War. Dee was only a little girl then. Since then, Dee had become a good soldier and a good pilot, and over the years had become a good friend.

  James, she thought to her AIC. See if you can get in touch with Dee.

  No luck so far.

  Keep at it.

  “Alright, Maniacs, I want Popstar and Jango, Stick and Freebird in eagle-mode ready to catch the soldiers if they fly out. I want Backlash and Barron in fighter-mode to cover them on the top side of the bowl. We’ll only have seconds to get them inside a cockpit once they are blown out.” Jawbone thought through how she was going to handle this. “Coffee, Blue and PotRoast, you stay on my side and let’s go to bot-mode and rip and tear!”

  “Roger that, Jaw. Rip and tear!” Lieutenant Sara “Coffee” Ames replied.

  “Affirmative,” Captain Yariv “Blue” Sandeep replied.

  “Oorah!” Blue’s wingman Second Lieutenant Kathy “PotRoast” James added.

  Delilah could see the hull of the ship coming up fast. Very fast. She toggled the fighter into bot-mode and rolled over feet first, firing her thrusters at max. The mecha slammed into the hull plating of the ship, leaving mecha-sized footprint impressions in the metal and throwing up blue plasma venting from the foot thrusters.

  Jawbone made a quick mental check that her wingman was following suit in her DTM battlescape view. Coffee was on her wing and Blue and PotRoast were right behind her.

  With a large armored metal fist she pounded into the hull of the supercarrier until a seam at a hatchway begun to tear free. Delilah pulled her DEG up and blasted the remaining seam welds and fasteners free. Coffee did the same. After several seconds of pounding and blasting an outer hull plate started to give way.

  “Coffee, grab this side over here. Blue, get on the bottom side there.” Jawbone pointed a huge mecha finger at the plate. She then placed herself in position to get the best leverage she could on the multi-ton piece of metal plating and then gripped it with her mecha hands. Coffee and Blue did the same. “On three.”

  “Roger that, Jaw.”

  “One, two, three!” The three FM-12 bot-mode fighters heaved with all their mechanical might until the huge armor plating of the supercarrier screeched and groaned free. The mecha pilots continued to bend the plating upward and over until a large enough hole to pass through was created.

  “Alright, come on. Blue, stay out here with your wingman and see if you can’t make this hole a little bigger.” Jawbone and Coffee dropped into place in the large vacuum bulkhead. Dee would be just on the other side of the hull plating just beneath them.

  “You heard the boss, PotRoast,” Blue said over the net. “Let’s make this hole bigger.”

  “Davy! Your right!” Dee shouted over the M-blaster fire. Just in front of them the top sergeant was flailing madly at an onrushing flood of bots. The AEM had long since run out of ammo and was wielding his HVAR like a club. Dee did her best to help keep the bots off the Marine but it was only a matter of time. The blaster would knock the bots down but it took two and sometimes three shots to completely disable them.

  “There’s just too Goddamned many of them, Dee!” Rackman said. “We need a better plan—ahhhh, shit!”

  Rackman screamed as t
he spinning saw from one of the bots Dee blasted sliced across his left shoulder leaving a huge gash. Bright red blood immediately began to pour profusely from the wound.

  “Shit!” Dee fired nonstop, but the metal bastards were like violent cockroaches with saws buzzing and snapping from every direction. Dee ducked behind the power conduit they were using for cover just in time. Gunny Suez spun up from beneath a pile of bots and stomped feet first into a bot just to the side of where her head had been. For the first time she got a close enough look at the AEM’s suit. It was torn to pieces and there were shrapnel fragments from the bots sticking out of it everywhere. Suez was in really bad shape, and with a final bounce off the wall he went down. Dee didn’t see him get back up.

  “Keep fighting, Dee!” Rackman shouted. “Keep fucking fighting!”

  “There are too goddamned many of them. We need an EM grenade!” Dee said.

  “Yeah. Or a Goddamned miracle!” Davy grunted, obviously in pain. “Duck, Dee!”

  A metal appendage flung like a spear from one of the bots, pierced Dee’s stomach all the way through, and clanked into the metal wall behind her. The rest of the appendage was attached to a bot, which just happened to have four other similar appendages that stabbed Dee through both shoulders and thighs. Dee screamed in pain and fired the M-blaster once more at a bot she could see from the corner of her eye. The bot was about to engulf Rackman’s head but Dee believed she got it in time.

  Snap to, Marine! Deanna Moore! Her AIC screamed in her mind. Dee!

  Dee wasn’t sure what happened next exactly, but she grunted as the bot that was stabbing her and about to bite her face off was pulled free by a large armored hand. Dee was certain she had seen Suez go down. Then there was the familiar spittapping of HVAR fire. The room lit up with hypervelocity rifle rounds and bots exploding. A single AEM was moving like a madman within the corridor, so fast that Dee wasn’t sure if she was hallucinating or not.

  “Daddy?” she managed to get out just as the world behind her seemed to fly apart.

  The wall behind her opened up and the rush of air and debris slammed into her like the shockwave from a bomb. Dee’s vision began to tunnel in and with her last struggle for air she saw Rackman’s body sucked out of the ship into space behind her. She got very cold almost immediately.

  “Davy . . .” The world went black and the voice of her AIC screaming at her inside her head trailed off into the distant void.

  Chapter 15

  November 7, 2406 AD

  27 Light-years from the Sol System

  Monday, 5:23 PM, Expeditionary Mission Standard Time

  Alexander grabbed the downed buddy handle on the back of Gunny Suez’s suit and tossed with all his suit’s strength. The AEM pulled free of the bots and banged into the edge of the hole that the mecha pilots had made. Then the AEM flung helplessly out into space. Moore popped several grenades from his shoulder launchers loose and dove through the opening himself. The corridor behind him erupted into white-orange plasma with scattered bits of metal bots being flung asunder. The force from the exploding grenades acted like a volcano, tossing him head over feet out into space. Moore did his best to fire his boots and his rifle to slow the tumbling down.

  Abby! Keep Dee in the tracker, DTM!

  I’ve got her. Abigail illuminated her trajectory in his mindview of the battlescape. She was just ahead of them, tumbling out of his reach.

  The blue arc of her path tracked right into the opening cockpit of an eagle-mode FM-12. The pilot inside scrambled at her to pull her arms and legs in as the cockpit canopy lowered. Moore breathed a sigh of relief. He turned as best he could to see a similar view of the SEAL. Moore could feel his trajectory reaching apogee above the ship and he started to fall back to the Madira’s artificial gravity well.

  “Jawbone! Get these three to the aft hangar medevac center!” he said over the tac-net.

  “Roger that, General. Why don’t you come with us?” Jawbone said as a matter of fact rather than asking. Moore watched as the Marine mecha rolled from bot to eagle and a big armored hand reached out and grabbed him. “Hang on. We’ll be there in a minute.”

  Captain Jacob “Freebird” Seely scrambled as best he could to grab Dee by the arms and legs and slow her tumble, but she slammed into the canopy transparasteel hard. Freebird had his AIC cycle the canopy down while he pulled her down on top of him. The FM-12 cockpit was big and roomy but it wasn’t designed for two people. Had Dee been wearing a flight suit she probably wouldn’t have fit. As it was, she was wearing very little clothing at all and her body was covered in blood pretty much from head to toe. The blood had congealed in some places on her T-shirt and frozen in others. Freebird figured that she would probably look even bloodier if some of it hadn’t immediately begun to boil off when she hit the vacuum of space.

  Freebird squirmed into his seat as best he could and gave the controls over to his AIC. He quickly assessed the soldier’s wounds and realized that she was in worse than critical shape. The atmosphere in the cockpit cycled on and Jacob popped his helmet visor.

  “Apple One! Apple One!” He called Dee’s mecha jock handle. Pilot habits died hard. “Come on, Apple! Stay with me.”

  Freebird worked his hand down to his thigh and popped out an immunoboost injector from his suit. He slapped the tube to Dee’s throat and triggered the release. The injection hissed and emptied into her.

  “Freebird, what’s the status on your patient?” Jawbone’s voice asked over the tac-net speakers.

  “She’s in bad shape, Jaw. Multiple severe wounds and she’s not breathing. I administered immunoboost.” Freebird thought for a second about what to do next. “If she had a suit we could defib her.” The fighter pilot E-suits and AEMs and tank driver suits all had basic med systems that could shock a stopped heart, among many other things. But Dee was not in her suit and Freebird wasn’t sure what to do to get her heart beating again.

  “Captain Seely,” a new voice joined the conversation.

  “Seely here.”

  “Seely, this is medical officer Taggart. Your AIC is bringing you in fine and has relayed Miss Moore’s vitals to us. You need to trigger her heartbeat. Without a pulse the immunoboost is not going to get anywhere in her system.”

  “Roger that. What do I do?” Freebird asked. He could see the hangar bay landing lights cycling. He was only a minute or so out from landing and cycling open the cockpit.

  “Every second counts here. You need to begin CPR now.”

  “Roger that.” Freebird found the base of Dee’s sternum and started pushing her chest as best he could from the position he was in. There was no way he could bend down to breathe for her but he had an idea. He pulled the temporomandibular joint bite block mouthpiece from his helmet and slid it into Dee’s mouth. He held it in place with his left hand while he pumped her chest with his right.

  Start cycling air and stems on the TMJ mouthpiece in time with me, he thought to his AIC.

  Understood.

  The mouthpiece hissed, then Freebird pumped Dee’s chest several times. The mouthpiece hissed again. This continued for what Freebird felt was hours, but he knew it was no more than thirty or forty seconds before he felt the landing gear hit the deck of the Sienna Madira’s aft starboard hangar bay. The mecha was still rolling into its parking lane as the cockpit slid up and med techs were climbing on the moving plane.

  “We’ve got her now, sir. Good job. We’ll take it from here,” one of the techs told him. The fighter rolled to a complete stop, and two of the men lifted Dee’s body off of his lap and were racing her off on a gurney before he had time to catch his breath. Freebird looked down at his lap and gasped. It was covered in bright red blood.

  Two other mecha fighters were rolling in behind him. One was in eagle mode and had an AEM in its clutches. A med team rushed up underneath the hand of the mecha with a gurney. The AEM was released onto the hover gurney and whisked away. The other mecha rolling in was in fighter mode and enacted an almost identical sce
ne to the one he’d just gone through. The med team crawled up on the mecha and pulled a man out of it. Freebird knew him. It was the SEAL who Apple One had been spending a lot of time with. He looked to be in pretty bad shape, but he was screaming in pain which meant he was breathing and conscious.

  Finally, Jawbone’s mecha screeched into the hangar in eagle mode. As soon as she hit the ground an AEM bounced from the right hand of the mecha and thudded across the hangar deck. Freebird could see the four stars on the helmet as the AEM ran by. There was no doubt in his mind who that had been.

  “Sehera, can you get to the aft medbay?” Moore called to his wife. He hoped that she had had enough sense not to follow him into the corridor with all the damned bots. Or at least he hoped that the Warlords were able to stop her from following him.

  “I’m already on my way, Alexander. How is she?”

  “Don’t know yet, but it doesn’t sound good.” Moore rounded the corner and slid to a stop just before the hatchway into the main medbay triage area. Wounded were already being brought in. Occasionally, a snap-back emergency teleport worked and a wounded soldier would appear there. But for some reason it wasn’t happening often. Alexander figured the dammed bots were jamming QMT operation as well.

  Shit. I need to get on top of this.

  Yes, sir.

  Get me a full status report. And, Abby, find out who’s running the bridge.

  “Sir, they just rolled her into surgery.” One of the nurses stood at the entrway, undaunted by the large, armored Marine general. “You can’t go in now.”

  “Patch me into her vitals and give me the coms of the O.R.,” Moore ordered the nurse. He understood that the doctors didn’t need an AEM lumbering around the operating room in their way.

  “Sir, I am not sure how to do that. But I will check on her for you.”

  “Never mind,” Moore waved off the nurse.

  Abby, patch us in.