Trail of Evil

by Travis S. Taylor

  “I am fine, Doctor. I trust everything is under control here?”

  “It is more amazing than we had ever believed, I think. But it will take months to understand all this data and even more time to repair all the damage.” The scientist sounded excited.

  “At this moment, Doctor, this project and all the results are classified above Top Secret. I want this put in a Special Access program with tight controls and I want to know the name of every person who knows what happened today,” Madira said sternly.

  “On whose authority?”

  “Mine. And I want continuous updates directly to the SSCI chair, me, from now on. I mean daily. If I don’t get them, I’ll be looking into your budgets very closely. Understand me?”

  “Uh, yes, Senator.” The scientist was shocked and a bit scared.

  “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to call a press conference and announce my candidacy for president.” Madira smiled at the man and then, just as though nothing had happened out of the ordinary, offered him her hand, turned and walked out.

  That was it. That was the moment in history. Alexander Moore had looked at every piece of data he could find on Madira and there was never any other footage, audio, or written documentation suggesting anything out of the ordinary with her. There was also very little information available on the events of the day. Even as president, Moore couldn’t find technical documentation for whatever happened after that experiment at the particle accelerator facility. It was his guess that it somehow led to the quantum-membrane technologies that Elle Ahmi used throughout the latter part of the Separatist War.

  One thing was for certain, something happened with her and her AIC that day that actually affected her physically enough to cause her to tremble and have a nosebleed. Something told her there was something interesting at thirty-one light-years away. Something else had made her angry and driven to become president and perhaps later to become Elle Ahmi. It was unclear when Copernicus began to take over her mind, and it was unclear what plans within plans had begun as hers and were later twisted into those of the AIC.

  The something that happened to her that day drove human history for the next one hundred and eighty years and was still driving it.

  One other thing bothered Moore. Madira and Copernicus had been so good at overcoming obstacles and covering their tracks. Why had they left any information in places to be found? Had Madira done that? Had Elle Ahmi? Or had it been Copernicus? There were breadcrumbs hidden across history for Moore to find. That led him to suspect that either some manifestation of Madira/Ahmi/Copernicus had gone back and put the data in places that she/it knew he would look.

  Okay, Abby, enough of that, he thought to his AIC. Bring up the data on the blood serum samples that Dr. Muniz wanted me to review.

  Yes, sir. I have gone through them and I understand why she thought they would be of interest to you, sir. The blood samples in the catalog each match precisely with DNA of the 91st Tharsis Recon Battalion Armored Environment Suit Marines.

  What? Moore wasn’t sure he heard that right. Are you sure?

  Yes, sir. It is your old AEM battalion, sir. Twenty-nine of the thirty members of your squad are there, sir. Your blood is the only one missing from the samples. Abigail seemed as perplexed as he was. She had been there with him on Mars all those years ago. She had been there with him through the torture, through his escape and evasion that lasted for over thirty days, and through his raging spasm where he killed everybody in the encampment but Ahmi herself. Ahmi had managed to get the drop on him and get away.

  There are blood samples from everybody?

  Everybody but you, sir.

  Why not me? Moore thought about that. Ahmi had him captured for more than a month. He had been beaten, cut, shot, burned, broken, and all other means of nasty torture he didn’t care to recall. If she’d wanted his DNA there had been plenty of it all over the floor and walls of his cell. The history of Mars was red with blood.

  Perhaps because you escaped, sir, Abigail suggested.

  Perhaps.

  Chapter 26

  November 10, 2406 AD

  27 Light-years from the Sol System

  Thursday, 9:15 PM, Expeditionary Mission Standard Time

  “But you don’t understand, Davy.” Deanna looked out the portal along the wall in her quarters. She’d found the most spacious pilot’s quarters for her rank she could. There were plenty of empty rooms. The new starship was slightly longer than the Madira had been, only a little bit narrower, and roughly the same height. There was roughly the same general supercarrier configuration and design inside and out. While it looked something like a Separatist battle hauler, at the same time it had a U.S. Navy Supercarrier feel to it. As with the Madira, the ship had been designed for over twenty thousand. There were only about five hundred aboard. Most of the officers were able to choose a room that was up a scale or two for their rank.

  “I don’t understand what, Dee?” Rackman looked at her, perplexed. Dee was sure she wouldn’t be able to make anybody understand what she was feeling. And she couldn’t tell Rackman the entire story anyway. She couldn’t tell him who Elle Alhmi really was. Even the President of the United States of the Sol System didn’t know that part.

  “It wasn’t a dream. It was more, well, uh, real.” Dee hesitated. She knew it sounded crazy, but she had decided years before that where her grandmother was concerned, anything was possible. “It was more like a message. Or, hell, I just don’t know.”

  “Tell me about it, Dee.” Rackman stood close to her and put his arm around her. The two of them stared out the portal for a long moment. Several Gnats and Stingers zipped by. One of the Gnats rolled over and transfigured into bot-mode, looking like it had passed out and fainted headfirst. Then it twisted to turn and face the three Stingers behind it. Dee knew the move. DeathRay had taught it to her. He said it was called a “Fokker’s Feint” from a long-past obscure pop-culture reference, like the deathblossom was. Most pilots thought it was named after a pilot who had first done it, but it wasn’t. She recalled DeathRay telling her something about life imitating art more often than the other way around. That thought made her wonder where the line of art and life was drawn with her grandmother.

  The feinting mecha continued to spin and track targets with its cannon held in the right hand. Several of the Stingers broke off and flew out of the engagement zone. The maneuver had been performed flawlessly because, clearly, the retreating mecha had just been killed in the war game.

  Bree, who is that? she thought.

  That is Commander Fisher, Bree replied.

  “Fish,” she said out loud. “DeathRay taught her everything she knows.”

  “You should be out there, Dee,” Rackman said dryly.

  “Well, the general has seen to that. No more ground-pounding Marine recon for me if he can do anything about it. I’m strictly a mecha jock from now on.”

  “It has to be tough to send your little girl into the shit.” Rackman raised an eyebrow at her. “And, mate, the two of us have seen some shit in the past eighteen months.”

  “How’d we get on the pointy end of the spear, anyway?” Dee asked rhetorically. Davy had no idea, but Dee knew that if anything about Copernicus and her grandmother were uncovered, she or DeathRay or Penzington or someone “in the know” had to be there to mop up the details and keep it under wraps. She had been the most likely soldier for the job.

  “Because we’re good at it,” he snorted. “Good, my aunt Shiela’s ass, we’re great at it.”

  “Yeah, I guess. If you can count losing limbs and nearly dying on multiple occasions as ‘good at it,’” she replied sourly.

  “Actually, I do. We got the mission done and we’re still alive to not talk about it. Goes with the job description, mate.”

  “Well, I’m really good at flying too.” Dee turned back and watched the mecha war-gaming a bit more, quietly staring out the portal.

  “Then you should be out there. All the more reason,” Rackman said.


  “You know as well as I do. We’re benched for another two days.” Dee turned from the portal and sat on the edge of her desk. Her quarters were clearly made for an O5 or above. She’d never had a room large enough to squeeze a desk in, even at her current O3 rank. “It’s okay. I need to sort through this stuff in my head anyway. You think this ship has a hidey-hole with a barbecue grill in it?”

  “You need to talk to somebody about it, Dee. Maybe it’s PTSD or something.” Rackman looked nervous even before he had all the words out of his mouth. She didn’t have Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Any other time she might have let him have it for bringing it up, but for now, she just needed some calm.

  “I don’t have PTSD, Davy,” she said calmly. “I’m not in denial either. It’s something else. Something different. I feel like there is something I’m supposed to be doing and I can’t get a grip on what it is.”

  “You mean that you think the dream—”

  “It wasn’t a dream!” Dee corrected him mid-sentence.

  “Vision, out-of-body experience, whatever you want to call it, that you had when you flatlined was somehow a message from your dead grandmother to help you do something way the fuck out here twenty something light years or wherever from Earth?” Rackman had tried to remain calm, but Dee could tell it was too fantastic a tale for him. She couldn’t tell him who her grandmother was and how she had manipulated everything else in her life and her parents’ lives for decades, so there was no way he could understand. She needed to talk to somebody else.

  “You’re right, Davy.” She turned to him and put her arms on his large Navy SEAL’s shoulders. “I think I do need to talk to a professional about it.”

  “Sheila, you’ll be alright.” He looked into her eyes and told her. Dee looked up at him and smiled. Then she kissed him softly.

  “I told you not to call me that.”

  “Right, but you are gonna talk to the doc?”

  “I didn’t say that, but I’ll talk to a pro!” She slid her hands down slowly across his bulging pectorals and then behind his back and pulled him closer to her. “But I don’t have to do it now. We are on recovery leave, you know. What do you say we do some, uh, recovering?”

  “Now you’re talkin,’ sheila!” Rackman picked her up as she jumped and wrapped her legs around his waist, and turned and rolled her onto her bed all in one smooth motion.

  “I told you!” Dee kissed him hard and fast as the two of them fumbled at pulling her top over her head. “Don’t call me that.”

  “Don’t call me that,” Alexander told his wife. “You never call me ‘general,’ so when you do, it means you’re pissed about something. Well, or the other thing but I can tell it ain’t that right now.”

  “Well, Alexander,” Sehera said overemphasizing his name, “you’ve had years to keep your daughter out of harm’s way or to discourage her or even forbid her, but you wait until now to do it?”

  “Sehera, I’m not forbidding her from doing anything. I just told DeathRay that the mecha jocks needed to be doing more mecha-jock stuff and less forward recon.” Moore shrugged his shoulders.

  “You know good and damned well that Captain Jack Boland took that as a direct order to sideline your little girl!” Sehera almost screamed. She never cursed. Moore realized that he had stepped in it up to his eyeballs.

  “I don’t know any such thing. How the CAG decides to take general comments from a superior officer is up to him. I can’t read his mind.” Moore knew she wouldn’t buy that. Hell, he didn’t really buy it himself. DeathRay had done exactly what he had hoped he would following his discussion with him. Moore had told him that from now on, he was going to be sending in the AEMs first, and when things were clean, then the “family” could go in.

  “I never tell you how to run things. I’ve never second-guessed you in politics or in soldiering. I’ve never even second-guessed your fathering skills. But this time could be detrimental to Dee. Did you figure what it would do to her?”

  She doesn’t know about Rackman, Abigail said into his mindvoice.

  I guess she doesn’t. I thought I was always the last to know about those things.

  “And stop talking to Abigail! I’m talking to you right now.” Sehera sat on the edge of the bed and put her face in her hands. Alexander could see she was almost in tears. This wasn’t like her. It certainly wasn’t like the woman who helped him escape the torture camps and set up an attack to kill over seventy people, possibly including her own mother. There was more to this.

  “Sehera. You’re right. I do have to think about how this affects Dee. But there is more that you don’t know.” Moore looked at his wife as she looked up at him. There was clearly more he didn’t know. Sehera hadn’t cried ever that he knew of. The only time he could think of was before Dee was born. He wasn’t even sure what it was that caused it. That seemed years ago.

  “What don’t I know?” she asked.

  “The SEAL.” Moore paused. “Lieutenant Davy Rackman. He’s on the A-team recon squad. He’s been Dee’s right hand all this time.”

  “Yes, he was there with her and was hurt badly as well. What about him?” Sehera asked.

  “They are, uh, well,” Alexander hadn’t said it out loud yet. It was hard to say for whatever reason. After all, he was talking about his little girl. “They are an item.”

  “You mean they are having sex?” Sehera said matter of factly. “So what? She’s a grown woman now and has had many sex partners. I thought you knew that.”

  “It’s more than that, Sehera. DeathRay has affirmed it too. I’m afraid they both have such deep affection for the other that they could be dangerously close.” Moore knelt down in front of his wife and took her hands in his.

  “You mean they’re in love?”

  “Yes, I do, or at least that is the way it looks. And I’m afraid it could cause them to make decisions that could end up getting them killed. So, I’m separating them for now.”

  “I, uh, that makes sense, Alexander. I’m sorry for second-guessing you. I know better.” Sehera said. “I’m just so emotional right now. I can’t stand this anymore. Almost losing Dee was . . .”

  “I know. I don’t know how we’ve gotten ourselves into this kind of, well, shit again.” Moore was silent for a second or two. “But we have to finish this. We don’t know what this is all about. We don’t know what kind of doom your mother had waiting for us out there. And sticking our heads in the sand and waiting for it to come to us just ain’t my style. It ain’t yours either if I recall.”

  “I love you.” Sehera looked up at him, doe-eyed. The tears slowly rolled down her cheeks. Alexander wiped them gently with his thumbs as he cupped her face and then kissed his wife deeply, long, and slow.

  “I love you, too, with all my heart and soul.” Moore held her gaze and looked into her eyes, her big, sad brown eyes. “I wish we could just teleport back to Mississippi and live a few decades on the farm without any of this other stuff to deal with. But there is something to all of this that has had me rattled. Your mother’s plans must be revealed and derailed.”

  “I know. I know. I want to stop this continuous fighting and these secret agendas and feel safe once and for all—for Dee’s sake, too. And maybe someday we might even be doing it for her little brother or sister,” Sehera said. Moore’s eyebrows raised.

  “Something you’re not telling me?”

  “Relax, General,” Sehera laughed. “I think that is almost the most scared I’ve ever seen the big Marine. No, there is nothing I’m not telling you. I’m just thinking, when things settle down some, so should we.”

  Alexander breathed a sigh of relief. Not that he didn’t want another child someday, perhaps, but as long as Copernicus was still out there he couldn’t stop what he was doing long enough to devote the time a new baby would need.

  He hugged his wife and then stood up, pulling down on the damned Seppy uniform top. His UCUs had just come through the QMT supply runs and he couldn’t wait to get into
clothes fit for a Marine.

  “Where you going, General?” Sehera looked up at him and grabbed his hand. “If we’re considering settling down someday we need to stay in practice.”

  Alexander looked down at his wife. She used to call him “Mr. President” when she was feeling amorous. For the past year or so it had been “General.” It was so weird how she could call him “general” in one way and he hated it. She could call him “general” in another and it fired him up, in a good way.

  “General Alexander Moore reporting for duty, ma’am.” He showed her his toothy politician’s grin. “I wanted to get out of this damned Seppy uniform anyway.”

  “Hey, watch how you talk about them. My mother was a Separatist, you know.” Sehera smiled and pulled Moore down to her.

  “I know. If it weren’t for her, I’d have never met you.”

  Chapter 27

  November 11, 2406 AD

  27 Light-years from the Sol System

  Friday, 6:15 PM, Expeditionary Mission Standard Time

  “So what is this all about, Dee?” Nancy looked at Dee and then turned to the captain’s quarters of the ship she had decided to make her home. The hatch cycled open and she led Dee in. She could tell by the look on the Marine’s face that she was surprised by the lavishness of it. “As you can see I’ve snapped home a few times and brought some stuff in.”

  The room had been an observation lounge on the spire of the command tower. The bridge was on the same deck and that would make it easy for her to get there quickly if she needed to.

  She had installed maroon curtains that could be pulled over the long full, wall-length window that looked out over the bow of the ship. The smaller two-meter-diameter portal across the room gave a great view of the aft hangar decks. It would be a great spot to watch mecha fly in and out if she ever had a flight crew on board. There was a four-place table-and-chair dining set just in front of the portal. There were several pieces of modern art that Nancy had acquired over the years from her various missions placed strategically about the room. And the furnishings were far more upscale than most folks would suspect of Nancy’s style.