Trail of Evil

by Travis S. Taylor

  “You just said that,” he said hesitantly, trying not to come across as annoyed.

  “Yes, but that is just the max jaunt speed of the hyperdrive projector. This ship is a traveling QMT pad.” Nancy smiled triumphantly.

  “No shit?” Jack asked.

  “No shit.” Nancy replied. “And it looks like it has all the addresses in it that were in the shuttle that Buckley reverse engineered for us. Plus there are a few more locations to boot. Moore is going to just love that.”

  “Now we’re talking. And you’re right. The general is going to love this.”

  “There’s more,” Nancy interrupted his train of thought.

  “How could there be more?”

  “It looks like the ships were designed to be slaved from this bridge,” Nancy explained. Jack didn’t quite get it.

  “So, what? We can remote fly them?”

  “More. We can turn on the QMT pad and fly them through the event horizon and then we can follow them through. And if Allison is understanding this right, the QMT pad can actually go through the gate too, like a sling-forward wristband does,” she said.

  Jack was doing his best to work that out in his head. “You mean the fleet was designed to be able to QMT anywhere it went?”

  “Precisely!” Nancy tapped a few further commands into the console. “We’ll need to have the STO and the CHENG go through it all, but I believe there is a sling-forward capability of a few light years on this pad. I don’t think that type of technology exists yet.”

  “Damn, it must have existed two decades ago when they were built. Let’s go make sure the Marines took the shuttle back and then let’s get back ourselves. We’ve got to get some bigger brains on this. No offense.” Jack nodded at his wife. He hoped that what he’d just said didn’t come across as an insult, but Nancy didn’t seem to pay it any attention. She had a thick skin. Being a spy all those years had taken the sentimental aspects right out of her personality. She was very matter-of-fact, which was one of the things Jack loved most about her. He settled into the captain’s chair a bit. “I could get used to this.”

  “Well, don’t get too used to it.” Nancy said with a smile. “I found them first, so I claim first salvage rights. These ships are mine! But you go ahead and captain for a while if you want.”

  “It would be a whole lot easier if our suits had thrusters or momentum field generators on them,” Amari said to nobody in particular. Rondi did her best to look in the tech’s general direction, but she was spinning too randomly to look at anything or anyone that close to her. The spin wasn’t that fast but it was continuous, and very damned annoying.

  “I’d throw up again if I had anything left,” Rondi added as the QMT orbital facility rolled back into her view. Her back was now to the planet below. “L.T.? Any ideas?”

  “I’ve got nothing, First Sergeant,” the lieutenant replied. “Nothing on coms. Nothing on sensors of any use. And I have no idea what to do when the snap-back bands don’t work. Amari, you’re the tech. What have you got?”

  “Sorry, sir. I’m as much at a loss as you are. If we were still on the planet I’d suggest we try broadcasting the signal and see if we ended up with DeathRay and Mrs. Penzington, but as it is, sir, I’m just doing my best not to be sick.”

  “Won’t they come looking for us?” Corporal Simms asked. Rondi could tell by his voice that he was straining not to be sick. The shootout in microgravity had left them all with wild spins induced on their positions. Rondi had managed to slow herself slightly by firing her HVAR and jumpboots, but AEM suits were not spacesuits designed for spacewalks. They were designed for armored combat on a surface with gravity. She made herself a mental note that she was going to mention that to Buckley when she got back. She bet that Joe could rig up some sort of spacewalk module in case they needed one ever again in the future. She’d have to get back first.

  “Take it easy, Corporal,” Rondi replied.

  “Of course they will,” Lieutenant Franks added. “Just stay frosty.”

  Rondi tried closing her eyes but that didn’t help. And hoping that help would come didn’t help either. She fully understood that the only way the Madira had in or out of this star system was on the shuttle that Joe Buckley had reverse engineered for them. And that shuttle was in millions of tiny pieces drifting about them in space. In her mind she couldn’t figure out how they would get out of this situation, but Marines didn’t give up—they kept moving forward.

  “Lieutenant, I have an idea,” Amari announced.

  “Go on,” the lieutenant replied.

  “We’re closest to the QMT pad facility. My sensors suggest we are about one hundred kilometers away and in a slightly higher orbit. It is possible that we could calculate the thrust vector needed and do bursts with our weapons and jumpboots to push our orbit down and phase us so we could crash into the pad.”

  “Uh, I’m no rocket scientist,” Rondi said, “but that is a long way off and seems like it would need a bunch of thrusting for that and I’m almost out of ammo. And, uh, I don’t like the idea of crashing into anything.”

  “I was just saying that if there is no other way then we should at least try something.” Amari didn’t sound too sure of herself. “And crashing was probably the wrong word to use.”

  “How do we make these calculations?” Lieutenant Franks asked. “And how likely is it that we’ll go flinging off into space?”

  “What the hell, L.T., we’re already in space, sir. I say we go for it.” Rondi preferred doing something rather than nothing. Floating around in space forever until they starved. Rondi had heard the stories of how Alexander Moore had lived in a suit on Mars for over a month and somehow managed to stay alive and even fight a contingent of Separatists hand-to-hand before he was rescued. Hell, every Marine had heard that story. Few really believed it, especially knowing how primitive the suits had been at the time. But Rondi Howser was part of Moore’s crew. She had seen the man in action several times. She had no doubt it could be done and that he had done it. With modern suits, she believed she could survive forever. It wouldn’t be fun and she wouldn’t like it, but she knew she could do it.

  “I agree, First Sergeant,” Lieutenant Franks replied. “We’ve got nothing else to do.”

  “What if more bots show up, sir?” Corporal Simms asked. Rondi could hear the fear in his voice.

  “Then, corporal, we’ll kill them,” the lieutenant answered. Rondi liked his answer.

  “Oorah, sir,” the corporal responded.

  “Okay, Amari, your show?” Franks said.

  “Uh, yes, sir. Been simming it with my AIC. The best thing we can do is point ourselves at the facility and fire our boots. Only fire them when we are pointed in that direction. I suspect it will take some time to figure it out completely. This is a hell of an orbital optimization problem that’ll impress the CHENG,” Amari explained. “If it works, that is.”

  “I say we give control over to our AICs. It worked for my puking deathblossom,” Rondi said. “How long is this going to take, Amari?”

  “At my best guess right now, I’d say a couple of weeks.”

  “Shit. I was guessing that.” Rondi braced herself for a long, painful couple of weeks. “We’re gonna get real hungry.”

  “Well, then, let’s get started,” Franks ordered. “Hand suit control over to your AICs and start thrusting toward the orbital facility.”

  “Yes, sir,” Simms said.

  Rondi begrudgingly handed over control of her suit again. She hoped that this time there wouldn’t be as much wild spinning and out-of-control vomiting. She hoped even harder that somehow DeathRay would find them before they starved to death.

  Chapter 18

  November 7, 2406 AD

  27 Light-years from the Sol System

  Monday, 6:37 PM, Expeditionary Mission Standard Time

  “XO to Captain!”

  “Go, XO!” Moore answered. He was stuck on the aft end of the ship and needed to get to the bridge. He had taken
a corner of the aft hangar bay and made a makeshift war room out of it. He didn’t want to stray too far from the med bay while Deanna was still in surgery. But the ship was under attack and he was the captain. His DTM shipwide view mostly still functioned, but there were large swaths of the ship that were being jammed by the bots.

  “If you can tell from the mindview of the ship, sir, the blackout areas are getting larger, and damned quickly too,” executive officer USMC Brigadier General Sally “Firestorm” Rheims responded. “And the Blue force tracker casualties are starting to rack up.”

  “I see it, Firestorm.” Moore wasn’t exactly sure what to do but he knew he had to do something. The battle hadn’t gone well so far. His AIC kept running battle simulations and displaying them in his head and at the same time kept him updated on her attempts at hacking into sensors in the jammed portions of the ship. His head was full of data.

  Alexander had done his best to keep soldiers around the bot-controlled areas to have them fighting the metal bastards back, but the damned bots reproduced too fast to be held at bay by AEMs and ground pounders alone. They needed mass kill weapons.

  If we survive this I want those EMP grenades that Penzington came up with mass produced and scaled up, he thought.

  I agree, sir, Abigail said into his mind.

  “The biggest impact we made so far, sir, was when the Warlords blew out the hyperdrive conduit. Did a shitload of damage to the starboard side of the ship,” the XO explained. “Not sure we can survive that kind of success too many times.”

  “Yes, I saw that. We had no choice.” Moore was perplexed. The bot numbers continued to increase no matter what they did. “If this keeps up we’ll have to abandon ship. Send the general order that all crew must don their snap back emergency transport bands. On my order only are they to snap back home.” Alexander hoped that the bot-damping field wouldn’t prevent all the QMT jumps to safety. Maybe most of the crew could make it back to Earthspace.

  “Aye, sir!” the XO acknowledged. Almost instantly Moore saw on the command page in his DTM mindview a priority one order being sent out to every AIC onboard the ship and in vehicles flying about it.

  “Keep pushing them, Firestorm! We cannot lose the ship. I’m uploading to you a new battle strategy now. I want you to pick a team of AEMs and create a phalanx and drive through them just like the Warlords did. Then have them fight them outwards with as many EMP grenades as they can find.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Alexander?” Sehera’s voice pinged him.

  “Yes, dear?”

  “The surgery is over. Deanna is being moved into a recovery room.” Sehera’s update left Alexander with a huge sense of relief. His daughter was alive and would be okay. “And there are lots of casualties starting to come in.”

  “Is she awake?” he responded while choking back tears. He looked around the aft hangar bay that he had turned into a makeshift battle HQ. He was only a few hundred feet from the aft medbay where Dee was. There was constant movement of gurneys and troops and rescue workers running in and out of that end of the bay. QMT flashes popped every now and then as the more critical patients would snap back to the med bay once the rescuers got them free of the jamming zones. “Do I need to get there?”

  “Not yet. The doctor says she won’t wake for at least an hour or so,” Sehera said. “Alexander, save the ship.”

  “Understood. Tell me the minute she wakes up. And if the bots start to overrun us, or her position, you snap back to Earthspace, you hear me, Sehera?” he told his wife. He hoped she’d listen.

  “Understood,” Sehera replied. “Take care of things. Talk soon.”

  “CHENG to CO!” Moore’s attention was snapped back to the battle but his heart was still wrenching in pain over his little princess being wounded so seriously. Sure she’d been shot and cut up and even lost a hand before but none of that was really serious. This time Dee had actually died. Her heart had been damaged so badly that it had to be replaced and even with modern technology there was little way to prevent the ischemic cascade of the brain once the heart stopped. Ten minutes or less was the absolute maximum time to save somebody once their heart had stopped without a stasis field or other medical life-support for the brain. Moore shook himself free of the thought.

  Move forward, Marine! Abigail said into his mindvoice. Dee is in good hands. The CHENG needs you, sir.

  Right. Any luck hacking the bots yet?

  No, sir.

  Keep trying, Abby. Shit, we need Penzington’s AIC on this.

  Yes, sir.

  “Go, CHENG, Moore here.”

  “General, we are dead in the water and the bots are beginning to dig into the SIF generators,” Buckley explained. Moore didn’t quite understand the seemingly overemphatic tone in the CHENG’s voice.

  “More detail, Joe. Why is that so bad?” Moore asked the chief engineer.

  “Sir, it looks like the bots decided that if they couldn’t commandeer the ship that they are going to blow it up.”

  “Okay, Joe, I get it.” Moore thought for a second. “How are they planning to do it?”

  “They are connecting all the SIF generators and power systems that they can into a positive-feedback loop. As soon as they plug them together the power conduits throughout the ship will be drawing more power than they are rated to. When that happens, well, sir, this won’t be a good place to be.”

  “How long until they can do that?” Moore didn’t like where this was headed. Somehow they had to stop the damned bots. He certainly didn’t want the entire crew snapping back to Earth with their tails between their legs after fighting the damned bots for over eighteen months. And he could feel that they were getting closer to the truth to what Copernicus was up to. They were too damned close to give up now.

  “It’s hard to say because the sensors are down throughout most of the ship, but from what I can figure out, we have less than an hour, sir.” Joe didn’t sound too sure of that.

  “Hell and two hundred, by Gods! Will there be a sign big enough and with enough warning that the crew can snap back just before it happens?”

  “Uh, yes, sir, that sort of power buildup will run the EM fields through the roof. I’ll know a good five minutes or so before it could go.” Joe hesitated briefly and stuttered a bit. “Uh, uh, sir, if the bots take over that much of the ship, the teleport-jamming field might encompass the majority of the crew.”

  “Understood, Joe. Find a work-around. We have to stop these bastards. Moore out.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “That should do it, Jack.” Nancy winked at her husband sitting in the captain’s chair of her newly-acquired fleet of ships. “Or is that, uh, Captain?”

  “Well, that is my Navy rank anyway.” Jack laughed. “Let’s go.”

  “Initiating quantum membrane teleportation in three, two, one, now,” Nancy said. She kept one eye on the viewport and one on the controls.

  The energy levels on the ships hull spiked across the spectrum and a blinding white-and-purple light sprayed out in front of them, creating a large, seemingly two-dimensional expanding circle of rippling and glimmering spacetime several kilometers across. The event horizon of the connected quantum membranes stabilized with shimmering lightning flashing across the surface.

  “Beautiful,” Jack said with a whistle. “Send in the fleet.”

  “Already on it,” she paused for a second to reveal her sarcasm and then said, “Captain.”

  Nancy cycled on the propulsion system for forty-seven ships and every one of them came to life. The builders of the fleet had installed an automated gating algorithm so it wasn’t difficult to tell them to go through the spacetime teleportation portal. She simply instigated a command that was already in place.

  “You know, one day we’ll have to thank whoever designed these ships.” Nancy watched as the blue ship icons representing each vessel in the fleet approached the portal and then vanished out of existence. “That was the last one, Jack. Here we go.”

&
nbsp; “I hope this thing is working right.” Jack sounded a bit nervous.

  “Worst case, we’ll end up on the other side of the universe or maybe just disintegrated.” Nancy wasn’t worried at all. As far as she and Allison could tell the ships were in top shape and had technology onboard that seemed even more advanced than the Madira. That seemed impossible yet somehow it was the case.

  The nose of the large ship peeked through the event horizon, then it appeared as though the ship were sucked into it rapidly. Nancy could feel her hair standing on end and her skin crawled slightly, and then there was that buzzing in her ears that many described as the sound of bacon frying in a pan. Then, almost as quickly, they were thrown out of the portal on the other side staring out the viewport at an orbiting QMT pad and the planet beneath it that they had left the Marines on. Nancy’s Blue force tracker started pinging at her.

  “Jack, I’m getting location hits for our crew. I’m not seeing the shuttle anywhere.” Nancy scanned the area and found no shuttle. She did find a debris cloud not far from where they had left the shuttle. There were also dead bot parts everywhere.

  “Looks like a fight,” Jack noted. “I’ve got a fix on our people and I don’t have any casualties. Why the hell didn’t they snap back like I told them to?”

  “Hold on a minute.” Nancy held up a hand then went back to running sensor sweeps on the star system. “The sensors on this thing are way more advanced than on the shuttle. I’m getting zero life signs on the planet below. All those dwellings are abandoned. We were spoofed. Nobody is currently living down there. And Jack, something turned on a QMT dampening field that is originating close to the orbital facility. Maybe a booby trap.”

  “A booby trap, sir?” Nancy called Jack “sir” just to tease him, he was sure. It wasn’t her nature to call people “sir.” She wasn’t military.

  “Looks like nobody is QMTing out of here.” Nancy thought about that for a minute. “I bet it was turned on as soon as we got here. It looks like these ships can QMT within a few million kilometers of the pad. That would get us around in this system. The problem is, we couldn’t get outside the dampening field that appears to stretch all the way to the outer reach of this solar system. You can bounce around inside the field all you want to, but no QMTing out of it. We could maybe jaunt with the hyperdrive out and then QMT from out there. That could take weeks.”