Trail of Evil

by Travis S. Taylor

  “Lieutenant Commander Julie Turner,” he addressed his new XO. The female sailor was no more than five foot six, with brown hair and big brown eyes. She looked younger than Dee. From records Abby flashed into his DTM, he could see that she had been through a rejuv just before the expeditionary mission left the Sol System. She was really almost as old as DeathRay.

  “Executive Officer reporting for duty, sir!” she said, a bit overzealously.

  “At ease, XO.” Moore held his armored hand out to shake hers. “Thanks for stepping up, Julie.”

  “Hooyay, sir.” She gave the standard Navy response. Moore just nodded her to her post.

  “Communications Officer!” He turned to the comm console.

  “Aye, sir!” a young, dark-haired lieutenant junior grade Abby identified as Kellie Miltion replied. Moore would have to keep a running tab of the names in his DTM on the top layer until he learned them. For now, he’d likely just stick to the position titles.

  “Get me Vice Admiral Walker online.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  “Nav!” Again another new name popped up into his mindview. There were so many lives he had known that had just been extinguished on the last run. There was some payback coming.

  “Aye sir?”

  “Open battle plan package titled ‘Last Stand’ in your DTM and load the coordinates for QMT,” Moore ordered.

  “Aye, sir!” his new navigation officer replied eagerly.

  “Sir, Vice Admiral Walker is online,” the communications officer announced. “Main viewscreen, sir?”

  “Main screen.” Moore nodded. Walker’s face appeared on the main viewer. “Fullback, you ready to rock and roll?”

  “General, it would be my pleasure. I’m getting tired of all this sitting around anyway. I just spoke with Captain Seeley and the clone fleet is ready to go,” Walker replied.

  “Very well then, let’s go kick some Chiata ass!” Moore said. “I owe them some payback.”

  “Yes, sir, we all do. The Thatcher subfleet is ready when you are.”

  “See you at the rendezvous then, and good hunting. Moore out.”

  “All hands, all hands, battle stations. All hands, all hands, battle stations. QMT in ten seconds, nine . . .”

  Chapter 48

  June 16, 2407 AD

  Alpha Lyncis

  203 Light-years from the Sol System

  Friday, 7:39 AM, Expeditionary Mission Standard Time

  “The more you use the fewer you lose!” the lieutenant commander said eagerly to the bridge crew. The clones didn’t seem to care one way or the other about his enthusiasm. “Captain, the shields appear to be holding, but we do have fires in the forward hangar. Fire crews have been dispatched, ma’am.”

  The Hillenkoetter rang like a bell and the impact of cannon fire bounced the bridge crew around again. They were all in full armor, and at least they were far enough back in the mix that they were presently safe from the surface-to-space fire.

  Since all sixty-five or so of the remaining combined fleets QMTed directly into space around the third planetary system the numbers were a little more even. As it currently stood, Nancy’s DTM battleview showed only two hundred thirty-one red dots of battleship or carrier size in range. The blue dots all popped into reality, space-guns ablazing and missiles firing, and this time with a better understanding of where to hit.

  “Focus all DEG batteries on those tuning fork-shaped spires. Go for the blue beams first. Then we’ll worry about the cannons,” Nancy ordered the Weapons Deck Officer.

  “Ma’am, all the tanks and AEMs have been deployed,” the clone Ground Boss announced.

  “Fighters have been deployed and are in position,” the Air Boss added.

  “Well, let’s hope the plan works.” Nancy thought of Jack and Dee for a brief moment. “Alright, Nav, be ready to bounce us about randomly. I want a QMT every thirty seconds. We pop into a swarm and hit and then pop out of that one and into a different one. We don’t give them time to find us and target us with the blue beams. Got it?”

  “Aye, ma’am.” The navigation officer continued to tap furiously at the helm controls.

  “Captain, the Chiata fleet is split up into roughly seven swarms,” the STO said. “Each swarm has roughly thirty big ships in it. I’m tracking the centroid coordinates of them and passing them directly to the Nav.”

  “Good call, STO.” Nancy said. “Nav, how about that first jump?”

  “Aye, ma’am.”

  The ship was surrounded by white rippling spacetime and the interior buzzed and crackled. Then they were slightly farther from the Jovian planet’s inhabited moon, but were smack in the middle of a Chiata swarm.

  “Weapons Deck Officer, hit the tuning forks of the nearest-in-line ship with the DEGs and missiles.” Nancy gripped the armrest of the chair a little too hard with her armored hand and could feel it start to give a bit. She eased her grip prematurely as cannon fire from the nearest porcupine started pounding them immediately.

  “Seventeen seconds until they lock us up, Captain,” Rackman alerted her.

  “Keep firing on that ship!” Nancy shouted over the violent ringing and thudding of the cannon fire against the barrier shield.

  “Stay on that lead ship’s tuning fork!” she shouted.

  “Ten seconds,” Rackman warned.

  “Don’t let up, gunner! Nav, be ready on my command.” Nancy held the chair arm tightly and did her best not to bite her lip. “Wait! Wait!”

  An orange crack formed across the base of the tuning fork and began to vent debris and plasma. Arcs began to form across the tines of the fork and it looked as if it were about to fire.

  “Five seconds!”

  “Keep firing!”

  “Three seconds, Captain!”

  “Go, Nav!” Nancy shouted. The ship popped and crackled and vanished from reality space and then popped right back into a different swarm. “Pass along the previous target coordinates to the fleet and start hitting the lead ship!”

  “Twenty-seven seconds, Captain!” Rackman started his countdown.

  “We have got to take out some of these blue beams!” Nancy slammed her fist down. “Hit it faster, Gunner!”

  “Aye, ma’am.”

  “Air Boss, tell me that the mecha jocks are doing better than we are!”

  Chapter 49

  June 16, 2407 AD

  Alpha Lyncis

  203 Light-years from the Sol System

  Friday, 7:49 AM, Expeditionary Mission Standard Time

  “Oh shit!” Dee shouted to DeathRay over the tac-net. “I hope the fleet is doing better than we are!”

  “Stay frosty, Apple One,” DeathRay ordered. “Keep cover fire going for the Maniacs while they’re puking. We’re up in a few minutes following the Hillenkoetter’s Gnat squads, then the Dawgs.”

  “Roger that!” Apple One replied.

  Jack was going at it all guns blazing. He’d never fought anything like this before. Usually humans in a fight tend to want to survive. But these things, these creatures, they didn’t seem to care if they died or not, as long as they took out one of the pilots when they did—as long as they took out one of the members of his fighter squadron. And that just pissed DeathRay off.

  “Guns, guns, guns!” DeathRay shouted as he rolled over his Gnat-T fighter end over end and toggled the switch to transform into bot mode. As he stood on his head looking backwards at the oncoming barrage of blue shimmering cannon fire, he lowered his weapons in the front to full blast from the DEGs. The enemy rounds hit the new Buckley-Freeman barrier shields and then disappeared off into some other spacetime coordinates. The shield generators were holding strong.

  DeathRay stomped hard on the right outside pedal, yawing the bot about its center torso in order to track the alien fighter. The damned thing looked like smaller version of the porcupine-shaped supercarriers. His shoulder cannons fired behind him in a wide spread and he loosed missiles.

  “Fox Three! Fox Three! Fox Three!” All in
QM sensor mode and quantum mechanically locked onto targets. Without some sort of miracle or alien magic the laws of physics had the alien Gomer motherfuckers dead to rights.

  Although DeathRay was seemingly surrounded by four different porcupines, they now had hell raining on them as best he could manage. Jack shot his leg thrusters at full speed, forcing him straight downward into the bowl at top speed.

  “Archangels! This is DeathRay! Take the fight to the bottom of the bowl! Take the fight to the bottom of the bowl! We’ve gotta get these things close to the surface and see if we can’t make them spread out!” DeathRay shouted.

  Jack, Gomers 2 and 3 are breaking off. They’re going after Dee.

  Roger that, Candis. Jack rolled over and toggled his bot back to fighter mode as he nosed closer and closer to the surface of the inhabited Jovian moon. He tore through the atmosphere as it thickened around him and created hot, glowing red plasma contrails about his wingtips. The alien cityscape spires below were approaching fast. He could see the tankheads, AEMs, and the bots bouncing around like mad fleas on a dog.

  He’d hoped the thicker atmosphere would bleed off his speed better, but he realized he was going to have to kick in some extra propulsion. He pulled back on the HOTAS hard and pulled up just in time to miss one of the-law-of-physics-breaking skyscraper spires just beneath him. He was so close that when he veered up, he had to scream, with a guttural, jaw-clenching, stomach-compressing roar, to force the blood from his thighs back into his head. He rolled upside-down slightly and toggled the fighter mode switch. The rapid shift made blood jump to his head almost instantly.

  “Whooooo, shit!” he grunted. “Stay fast, Apple One. These goddamned porcupines can corner hard!”

  Jack rolled the fighter mode Gnat over so he could see how close he was to the surface, and he could see glass and debris flying from the skyscraper. His shockwave had likely burst some of the structure. The Chiata were at least going to need a shitload of screen doors for that building.

  Cannon fire pinged the shields all around him and in front of him as his speed continued to take him toward the surface. He could see that the Marines on the surface were having just as tough a time as his squadron. Jack pulled the throttle back, did a complete one-hundred-eighty-degree yaw, flipping his nose into the rearward direction and going to guns.

  “Guns, guns, guns!” he shouted. “Scratch one more porcupine!” Jack said as he yawed his fighter back over and back into bot mode—just as his mecha nearly scraped the ground. It looked as though he was running across the surface at over two thousand meters per second, jumping alien structures and the occasional AEM or hovertank. He fired the leg thrusters, pushing him upward, away from the surface, and then back into fighter mode, screaming upward enough to clear the oncoming buildings that were covered with the red and green glowing ground-combat creatures.

  What are these things? he thought.

  They’re certainly not easy to kill, Candis responded in his mind.

  Where’s Dee, Candis?

  Jack threw the ball up into his DTM and he zoomed around looking for Blue forces. His wingman popped up off his four o’clock just where she was supposed to be. Dee was covering his ass but she was taking on heavy fire. She had managed to bleed off her speed on a higher arc than he had, unfortunately placing too much distance between them. Jack went full throttle toward his wingman. How had he gotten separated after all these years when he’d beat into all of his squadron to never get separated from your wingman? But these alien things understood that. These things knew somehow how to drive a wedge, just like a maul through a stump, to split their wingmen apart and then pick them off. Jack had to rethink his way of fighting because this was an enemy he’d never thought of before. As Jack closed in on Dee, she shouted over the QMs and the tac-net.

  “DeathRay, DeathRay, where the hell are you?! These motherfuckers are all over me and I can’t shake ’em!”

  “Hang in there, Apple One! I’m coming as fast as I can! Keep switching modes on ’em! That seems to create some amount of confusion! And take it to the ground, Dee, take it to the ground!”

  Jack watched as Dee pulled off a perfect Fokker’s feint, rolling over onto her head just as he had done, and firing her thrusters right through the ball that her assailants had her trapped in. At least it wasn’t a death wheel she was trapped in. She poked through the bottom of the ball, reached out with a hand and literally smashed through a spire cannon of one of the enemy fighters, at the same time firing her shoulder cannons at the enemy fighter behind her.

  “Take that, you fucking Gomers!” she screamed.

  As soon as she passed through the small ball that she was trapped in, she toggled over into fighter mode at full throttle toward the surface. Jack swiftly calculated in his direct mind link several plots that would get him there through the enemy fire, and quickly. He watched the lines veer together, and he found the one that he liked, took it, and improvised along the way.

  “Fox Three!” He fired a missile into the mix. The missile shot out, leaving a slight purple ion glow behind it as it left, trailing into the rear section of one of her pursuers. “Scratch three,” Jack said.

  About that time, his ship rocked, the armor plating of the hull shook and his sif generator warning light came on. The barrier shield was weakened by the impact.

  Barrier shield at seventy-three percent, Candis warned him.

  “Ding! Ding! Ding!” the Bitchin’ Betty chimed. “Warning! Radar lock detected. Warning! Radar lock detected.”

  Jack looked at the bowl in his mind and zoomed out. He noticed there was a Gomer on his tail and it was closing in fast.

  I’m not leaving my wingman, he thought. I’ve gotta get to Dee.

  She’s breaking through, Jack, Candis said. She’s getting close to the surface with only two pursuers now. She can handle ’em. You’re going to have to take evasives.

  Jack thought about that for a second.

  That’s exactly how they want us to play this game. I’m not leaving my wingman. We’re going to stick to the tactics that work. And maybe add some new ones.

  Jack rolled his fighter onto the track that he’d planned to meet Dee. He was constantly changing as she was juking and jinking and weaving in and out of the enemy fire. He could see gusts of debris flying up as she approached the surface of the alien city. He went to full throttle and afterburners, with the g-load throwing him into the back of the seat as hard as it could. He went into a corkscrew to hopefully throw off the radar track. His pursuer came in even closer.

  “Apple One, DeathRay.”

  “Go, DeathRay.”

  “I’ve got one locked. I’m trying to shake him. But I’m not coming off your tail. Gimme five seconds. When I get on your tail we’re gonna do a little shake an’ bake on this guy.”

  “Roger that, DeathRay. Fox Three! Fox Three!” he heard Dee shout as he approached.

  But this guy was serious. He stayed on DeathRay’s six in the same deadly dance, corkscrew spirals, and jukes and jinks, all the way to the surface. Going into bot mode would slow him down too much at this point, and this guy was stuck on his tail. He could now see Dee’s pursuer hot on her tail and firing, lighting her up—but he was in range.

  Candis, feed Apple One’s AIC jump coordinates and time both jumps simultaneously now!

  Got it, Jack! QMT in three, two, one!

  Jack could see the fighter on Dee’s tail letting loose blue fireballs that were tracking dead on, but then there was a white flash and the crackling sound and both of them were behind the Gomer on Jack’s six o’clock and still carrying their momentum.

  “Guns, guns, guns!” He plowed through the tailpipe of the porcupine in front of him and it exploded in a ball of orange-red flames, throwing pieces of the alien craft everywhere. There was nothing left of whatever the pilot was.

  This startled the second pursuer that had been on Dee’s tail. Jack could just imagine what the thing must have thought having her dead in its sights one instant a
nd then her vanishing and reappearing on its six the next. Dee was still in bot mode and pointed in the wrong direction to fire, but the startled and confused alien fighter was giving her plenty of time to correct that issue. Dee did a feint and loaded the alien’s ass end full of cannon fire from her guns, taking it out.

  Jack winced as some of Dee’s plasma rounds, glowing the size of grapefruits and traveling at near the speed of light, zipped past several tankheads below, but fortunately they missed.

  As for the third Gomer that had been on them, Dee was still tracking it. She pitched over again, going back to fighter mode, and let loose another volley of cannon fire. Jack followed it up with his rear DEGs.

  An array of flaming balls zipped out across the sky into the nose shields of his pursuer. The QMT tactic worked like a charm. They had managed to catch the aliens unaware and took them out.

  DeathRay flew through the fiery ball of the fighter Dee had just taken out in front of them and closed in on Dee’s wing.

  “Jesus, DeathRay, I’ve got seven more porcupines DTM inbound fast.”

  “Roger that,” he said. “We’ve got to do something to bring these things down. It’s time to surprise these bastards continuously.”

  “I agree!” Apple One replied.

  “Get ready for another QMT bait and switch!” he told her.

  “Ooh-fuckin’-rah!” Dee replied. DeathRay knew that Marines just couldn’t help themselves sometimes.

  Chapter 50

  June 16, 2407 AD

  Alpha Lyncis

  203 Light-years from the Sol System

  Friday, 8:19 AM, Expeditionary Mission Standard Time

  “Look out, Warlord One, you’ve got two of those blurs up your ass!” Warlord Three shouted over the tankhead’s tac-net.

  “I’ve got him, Three!” General Mason Warboys pulled his hovertank from tank mode into to bot mode and flipped over head first, bringing the cannon up like a club and swatting at one of the red and green blurs that was bouncing around him. The cannon caught the blur midsection and sent it careening in the opposite direction. The second blur was too fast for him and it was pounding away at the bot mode tank’s armored torso.