Trail of Evil

by Travis S. Taylor

  The elevator dinged and the doors opened. The three of them stepped in, not sure what to say to each other. Alexander touched the button for the deck three levels down.

  “Hold on,” Moore held up a hand. “I honestly don’t care what you want to do with the ships. And I understand they are worth a fortune. I don’t believe I can convince anybody to pay you for an entire fleet.”

  “I don’t expect you to, General. I’m in this for the long haul and I promised you, your wife, Dee, and the flyboy here that. I’m just saying, whatever of the fleet is left once we’ve found what we came for, I own them. We could start a cargo business or something. Or, I might just want to go exploring.” Nancy was serious. And as far as Moore’s AIC could figure she was in the right legally.

  “Oh, I see. Thanks, Nancy, I mean that.” Moore held his hand out to hold the elevator door open for the two of them. “So, for now, can I assume we can use the fleet to whatever end is needed?”

  “What’s mine is yours, sir.” Nancy walked out of the elevator in front of him and Boland. Alexander could tell she was enjoying the situation and it relaxed him a bit to realize that she had a sense of humor about it.

  “Boland, that is an, uh, interesting woman you’ve got there.” He elbowed the pilot.

  “You don’t know the half of it, sir.”

  “The medical bay is fully stocked, sir, but we are still finding things and figuring out the logistics. And everything is at least twenty years old,” the Chief Medical Officer USN Commander Angela Muniz reported. “If we need a handful of items that we don’t have or can’t find, we can always do snap-backs and get them. I suspect we’ll have to do that for perishable medicines and foodstuffs very soon anyway, sir.”

  “Good, understood.” Moore nodded with a grunt. “Do we have a morale issue?”

  “Well, not really, sir. Perhaps a few days of snap-back furloughs would be in order. A lot of the crew would like to go home and see family for the upcoming holidays.” Dr. Muniz looked tired. According to the duty roster in his DTM she had been at the end of her regular duty shift before the fighting started. She had stayed and was now going on an eighteen-hour shift.

  “Thank you, doctor. What is the word on my daughter?”

  “She’s fine, sir. The surgery went well and her recovery is proceeding. A day or two on the immunoboost and she will be good as new.”

  “Can I see her now?”

  “Down the corridor on the left. Your wife is already there.” The doctor looked at him as if she was going to say more. Alexander turned and looked the doctor in the eye.

  “Is there something more, Doctor?”

  “Well, sir, yes, there is.” The doctor sighed and rubbed at her eyes. “My AIC has been cataloging all of the inventory here as best he can. There are some curious blood serums in the freezer.”

  “Curious how?” Moore was doing his best not to lose his temper. All of his years as a politician had trained him in patience, but he really wanted to see Dee. Then he needed to make rounds and talk to the wounded. And he also needed to make certain this ship was secured. And then the other ships had to be secured.

  “They are human, sir. According to the dates and logs they are exactly fifty-five years, nine months, and thirteen days old. The names are not familiar to me, but my AIC tells me that they will be very familiar to you, sir.” Muniz paused again. “I’m uploading the information to your AIC now, sir. She can explain it.”

  “I’ll go through the information and get back with you as soon as things settle down.” Moore nodded to the doctor. “As soon as you can, get some rest.”

  “Yes, General.”

  Dee didn’t seem any worse for the wear. Alexander looked her over from head to toe and glanced at his wife. Sehera had a stone-cold, emotionless expression on her face as she sat there wearing a pair of blue hospital scrubs. Her armored E-suit was propped in the corner of the room.

  There were no scars or stitches or marks. Immunoboost made those a thing of the past. Dee’s complexion was perfect and her breathing seemed normal for somebody taking a nap. Looking at her, nobody could guess that she had just had a heart replacement and several other minor surgeries atop that.

  “She looks good,” he said quietly, not sure if it would wake her up.

  “You don’t have to whisper,” Sehera said, looking up at him. “The doctor says she’ll be out for at least another hour.”

  “Oh, okay then.” Moore reached over and pulled the gauntlet off his right hand. The armored glove made a whizzing sound as the metal unzipped itself at the wrist seam. It popped and slurped as his hand pulled free from the organogel. He reached down and took his daughter’s hand in his and had to choke back tears.

  “She’s okay, Alexander.” Sehera put her hands on top of his and her daughter’s. She looked up at him. “Why don’t you take that suit off and stay here with us for a bit. Sally can handle things on the bridge for a little while.”

  “I need some clothes.” Moore thought about the fact that all his clothes were on the Madira when it blew and he was naked in the suit.

  “Already thought of that.” Sehera pointed to a set of scrubs on a shelf by her suit.

  “Okay.”

  Abby, send a message to Firestorm that I want this ship searched from bow to stern, bottom to top, and everywhere in between for bot threats of any kind. And tell her to start immediate snap-back supply runs to Earthspace.

  Roger that, sir, Abigail said into his mind. After a brief pause, the AIC continued. I’m glad Dee is going to be fine.

  Me too, he thought as his eyes watered from the lump in his throat.

  Alexander clanked as softly as he could to the corner of the room and cycled the suit seals. The cycling process took a couple of seconds and ended with a pressure-releasing hiss. He slurped out of the back of the suit, stood naked behind it, and did the post-suit neck stretches as the organogel numbing agents evaporated from his skin. He counted to ten slowly and worked every muscle he could cautiously to realign his brain to the normal strength he had without the suit. It was the standard AEM procedure that he had been doing for over sixty years.

  Alexander then reached up and grabbed the blue scrubs from the shelf and slid them on quietly. He wasn’t worried about waking Dee up. He was so struck with emotion that he had little to say. He could smell himself. He really needed a shower. He wasn’t even certain that there was water enough for the crew aboard the ship. There were so many things they had taken for granted on the Madira for so long. Now he wasn’t sure what they did or didn’t have. He’d have to put Abigail on the logistics calculations and figure all that out ASAP. But none of that mattered just yet. For now, Moore needed a break. He needed to breathe. He needed to hold his little girl and tell her that everything would be all right.

  One thing was certain, he thought as he pulled his pants up. He still had his family with him. He knelt beside Dee on the opposite side of the bed from his wife. He looked up as Jawbone, DeathRay, and Penzington politely tapped at the door.

  “It’s okay. You can come in,” Sehera told them. Nancy stepped in behind Sehera and put a hand on her shoulder. DeathRay and Jawbone stood near the entrance.

  Alexander nodded gratefully to them and held her other hand. He lowered his forehead against his baby girl’s hand and closed his eyes.

  “Thank you,” he whispered. “Thank you, God.”

  Chapter 22

  November 7, 2406 AD

  27 Light-years from the Sol System

  Monday, 6:23 PM, Expeditionary Mission Standard Time

  “What the . . .” Dee wavered in front of the dining chair. Light tunneled in around her and there were sounds of mecha pilots, com chatter, doctors. Dee wasn’t sure if those sounds were the real ones or the ones she was presently feeling and experiencing. Something from eight years ago was happening again—or was it a memory, or was it the pain? Dee couldn’t understand what was happening to her. And then there were the bots. The bots were everywhere. They were always
everywhere they went. Copernicus had left them to haunt her family forever, it seemed. The bots were nothing more than the batshit crazy AIC’s trail of evil. Even her grandmother hadn’t been able to escape the crazy computer.

  But daddy said he killed the bastard? she thought.

  The lady in the red, white and blue ski mask looked menacing to her.

  “Oh, I figured you didn’t know,” Elle Ahmi said to her after taking off the red white and blue ski mask. Dee couldn’t believe her eyes. The most wanted murdering bitch in the galaxy, in human history, looked just like her mother. “Sit down, child, before you fall down and hurt yourself. I just can’t understand why they wouldn’t tell you at your age.”

  Dee was twenty-six, or was she eighteen again? She couldn’t recall.

  “Who, who, are you?” Dee didn’t understand at all what was going on. Her mind spun wildly trying to grasp at an explanation that made sense, but there wasn’t one that she could wrap her mind around. Why did Elle Ahmi look just like her mother, Sehera Moore?

  “Why, I’m your grandmother, of course.”

  “You have to perform cardiopulmonary resuscitation . . .”

  Dee fought to make some sort of sense out of what she was feeling and seeing and experiencing. And she was confused. She’d lived this before. For whatever reason, she was living it again but in scrambled order and with a mishmash of events all at once. And there were bots every fucking where. Dee felt as if the world was playing back to her and at the same time slipping away.

  Time bounced all around her. She was twelve again and her mommy apparently didn’t enjoy the adrenaline-filled amusement park ride. But Deanna and President Moore were at the central controls of the multicolored three-car spaceship, and they continuously piloted the cars around and over each other like fighter planes in combat formations.

  “Shoot the alien, Daddy!” Deanna cried with joy.

  “I got him!” Her daddy fired the plastic multicolored cannon with emblems of various Disney characters splayed about it, sending blue and red bolts of lightning across the virtual asteroid field and destroying the alien spacecraft with a mixture of computer-generated holography and real-life pyrotechnics. It was a good coaster. She was on the ride of her life and she was twelve and life was fantastic until the robots in the park stopped smiling. The robots came from everywhere. Flying carpets, dinosaurs, presidents, dwarves, elves, bears, mice, ducks, racecars and trucks, even spacemen and aliens came at them with deadpan, evil, emotionless relentlessness.

  “Shoot the alien, Daddy!”

  The bots were everywhere and she wasn’t sure how old she was again, twelve or eighteen. One thing she did know was that she was terrified.

  “Oh hell, I forgot all about this thing.” Elle Ahmi reached up behind her head and fed her ponytail down through her mask, then pulled it the rest of the way off and tossed it on the loveseat nearest the dinner table. She shook her head and ran her fingers through her hair, letting it fall on her shoulders. “I’ve worn that thing for so damned long, sometimes I forget I’m wearing it.”

  What the hell? Dee thought to her AIC. Bree? Bree?

  “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. In the nick of time Dee believed she got it and saved Davy. She had resolved that she couldn’t save herself any longer. And then out of the corner of her field of view there came a Marine in armor, parting the sea of bots like a prophet and stomping those bastards to oblivion. In Dee’s mind she could hear the Marine fight song.

  “Hold on, Princess, I’m coming!”

  “Daddy, help me!”

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

  Dee remembered feeling cold and seeing the supercarrier hull rush past her and then beneath her. And she was six again.

  “Don’t encourage her, Alexander.” Her mother grunted at her father. “It is a carrier, honey, because it carries other ships and people inside it. It is a supercarrier because it is superdy-duperdy big.”

  “I understand, Mommy.” Deanna smiled and went back to swinging between her parents. “I’m so hungry I could eat one of Davy’s burnt hot dogs.” Dee was confused again as to where she was and what version of herself she was experiencing. It all seemed to be happening at once, like watching twenty movies DTM at the same time.

  Dee, the first rule of being a captive is to eat and drink if you get the chance, her AIC told her. You never know when you’ll get that chance again.

  Okay.

  Dee felt the food in her mouth, or was it her TMJ bite block? She chewed at it reflexively. She could see somewhere beneath her a bloody body stuffed limply into a cockpit and on the lap of a mecha pilot. There were stars all around and the Sienna Madira on her right.

  Also, at the same time, the view she currently had of the multicolored brilliance of the rings of the fourth planet of the Tau Ceti system filled the horizon. Two other moons were visible on the horizon as well. They were fairly bright. The penthouse she seemed to be in was atop the highest peak of a mountain, looking down over the alien planet. It reminded her of Mons City and New Tharsis and Megalopolis and Washington D.C. and Luna City all at the same time. But somehow, it was completely unique.

  “Why am I here?” Dee blurted at the woman in the ski mask. She sat on her hands so they wouldn’t shake. Dee was now sitting on a loveseat in the penthouse with a view. She was still terrified but briefly felt more anger and confidence. The confusion of her multiple experiences at once was overwhelming.

  “Well, you are straight to the point, aren’t you? Good. Don’t ever change that,” Elle Ahmi told her. Dee wasn’t sure, but she thought the Separatist terrorist leader just gave her advice. “You are here because I wanted to see you again. Your parents and I have been at odds for so long it is time we brought it all to a, well, a climax if you will.”

  That wasn’t a memory. Dee thought it felt, looked different, it was different than before. She’d lived through this when she was eighteen. But she didn’t remember the conversation being quite like this.

  “Apple One! Apple One!” She heard her mecha jock handle. She wished it was something more awesome sounding, like DeathRay. “Come on, Apple! Stay with me.”

  DeathRay gave her that handle the first day he visited her at the academy. He flew a training mission with the cadets, and at some point Dee ran headlong into a field of enemy mecha in her FM-12 in bot mode. She was out of ammo and overwhelmed but that hadn’t stopped her from charging in, using her cannon like a warclub.

  “The apple didn’t fall far from the tree,” Boland said. “But your daddy would have killed those motherfuckers and he would have lived to fight again. What you did was reckless, Apple One.” DeathRay said it in front of the rest of the cadets and her instructors. The handle stuck from then on.

  Dee could feel the landing gear of the mecha hit the hangar deck and the cockpit canopy began to cycle open. Before they came to a stop there were crew members pulling at the bloody body beneath her. Dee felt pride in how swiftly the crew of her daddy’s ship moved.

  “Good work, we’ll take her from here.”

  “What climax?” Dee asked her grandmother back at the penthouse.

  “Careful, Apple One, when you tug at the HOTAS like that you can spin head over feet and auger in,” DeathRay warned her. She leaned back in the mecha trainer and could see Jack’s face in the rearview mirror as he c
oached her. He’d been more like family to her than a superior officer. He was her big brother.

  “Please, have a seat.” Elle Ahmi, Sienna Madira, her grandmother pointed her to the couch in her seating area. The rings of the jovianesque planet played amazing light tricks against the wall. The brilliant reds from the cooling grate on the power conduit added to the color, and the smell of freshly burned protein dogs was in the air. Davy Rackman’s hard, chiseled body atop her nakedness filled her to climax. She wrapped her legs around him and felt more alive than she had felt in a while. She felt him in her. It was a feeling she wanted to feel forever.

  The purples and reds swirled around her as all the light tunneled off further from her. She could still feel Rackman inside her and his hands against her buttocks tugging and pulling. She felt loved—superdy duperdy loved.

  “Princess, stay with us!” She could see the tears in her daddy’s eyes.

  From the look of it, the crazy terrorist didn’t entertain much. “Would you like some food or something to drink?”

  Dee, the first rule of being a captive is to eat and drink if you get the chance, her AIC told her. You never know when you’ll get that chance again.

  Okay.

  “Why am I here?” Dee asked again. More and more people swarmed around the bloody body now in an operating room. Dee watched with casual interest.

  “Lights please, Copernicus. Make them sixty percent. And make all the windows transparent. Our guest has never seen the rings rise over New Tharsis. And please tell the buzzsaw bots to stand down,” Ahmi said out loud. Dee assumed that she was talking to her crazy AIC.

  As soon as the soldiers were out of sight Dee caught some motion from her peripheral vision. Davy Rackman’s gurney was rushed past the window of the OR to the one adjacent to hers and then a holowall turned off across the room. What had looked like a normal wall with a bust of some old bald guy in front of it wasn’t. The wall and bust vanished. Five men in black armored uniforms stood with their weapons drawn. Clearly, they had been there all along behind that imaginary wall. Dee realized that Elle Ahmi kept her bases covered and for some reason wanted her to know that.