Trail of Evil - eARC (6 page)

“I’m fine. This doesn’t hurt at all.” She pointed at the now half-way printed hand.

“Looks like it hurts like hell.” Nancy cringed at the sight.

“I guess. But, you know, immunoboost and stims and painkillers have me so hyped up I’m ready to take on a hovertank barehanded.” Dee did feel hyper but at the same time tired. She had been on the Madira for more than a year now and in so many fights with bots that she would enjoy a week on a beach somewhere. Too bad there was no beach anywhere nearby. Hell, she’d settle for a night of drinking and sex. But she was a good Marine and there were things to be done. And she was her father’s daughter.

Chapter 7

November 5, 2406 AD

27 Light-years from the Sol System

Saturday, 11:17 PM, Expeditionary Mission Standard Time

“You gonna work on that all night long, Commander?” First Sergeant Rondi Howser stood straddle of a pair of boots sticking out from underneath the strange-looking bot-built shuttle in engineering. She didn’t really care so much for the shuttle as she did for the man working on it. Although she had drawn support for the upcoming mission in the shuttle, the Marine just saw it as a means to get her wherever it was that she needed to be in order to kick ass.

“Amari! Where the hell’ve you been? I need you under here right now to help align the snap-back to sling-forward conduit projector on this thing.” The man underneath the spaceship shouted.

“I am NOT Petty Officer Engineering Technician First Class Sarala Amari!” Rondi said sourly.

“Huh? Rondi, that you? Hold on a minute,” came from underneath the shuttle. There were a couple of clanging noises and then an, “Oh shit. Goddamnit. Where the hell are you, Amari?”

The boots were attached to a set of red engineer’s coveralls that were in turn on the
Madira’s
chief engineer, was lying on a hover creeper doing God knows what up underneath the thing. Rondi put her hands on her quite terrific hips, tapped her right toe against the deck plating, and raised an eyebrow as the creeper started to slide from underneath the ship.

“Firstly, I suspect PO1 Amari has sacked out, like most normal people. Secondly, what the hell, Joe?” Rondi said in her best hurt voice. “We were supposed to chow over two hours ago! I’ve been waiting and I’ll be damned if I’ll let you stand me up!”

The CHENG looked up at the sleek muscular Marine in her Universal Combat Uniform (UCU) and Rondi was certain that he was thinking several things all at once. The first thing she hoped was that the fireproof fabric conformed around her Marine hardened midsection and pushed up her more than ample breasts into a very nice supported position. The common description of the female UCU tops was that they always kept “things” at attention. The compression shirt had been designed to fit skintight as a lightly armored fireproof paper-thin layer. And it did. The shirt not only wicked away sweat and moisture, conformed to most environment color schemes, would repel low order shrapnel, resist fire, and compress the muscles improving the wearer’s performance, but it did it in a way that made the person wearing it look damned good. And Rondi knew she looked damned good in them.

The other thing that Buckley had better be thinking was that he was fucking sorry for standing her up and was in fear of getting a knot jerked in his ass.

“Uh, sorry about that, First Sergeant.” Joe stammered. “Somehow or other I promised the general I’d have this ship ready in two days and that was a day and a half ago.”

“How does that affect me?”

Rondi knew damned well how it did. There were at least five generals on board the ship, but when somebody said “the general” everybody knew they meant Alexander Moore. Everybody on board the ship also knew that when the general expected something from you that you’d better deliver it. Knowing all that didn’t mean she couldn’t have some fun with Buckley though.

“Well, Marine, you want to crawl down under here and give me a hand we could get to that chow sooner than later.” Joe smirked at Rondi. She could tell he was having a hard time looking her in the eye so she knelt down beside him.

“Is that an order, Commander?” Rondi raised an eyebrow flirtatiously.

“Negative.” Joe paused for a long moment and then sighed. “I’m brain dead right now anyway. I really should stop for a bit. Maybe some chow and then a nap in my quarters.”

“Is that an invitation?” Rondi almost laughed. “I’ve heard more enticing ones.”

“You know it is, gorgeous, but I really do have to get this thing flying in perfect order.” Joe rubbed at the stubble on his chin. Rondi wondered just how long he’d been at it. “I really should finish calibrating that QMT grid panel while it’s apart. Just not a good time to stop.”

“How long will that take?”

“An hour at best. By then I’ll be starving and cross-eyed from lack of sleep.” Joe frowned a bit. Rondi could tell he was pushing himself too hard. Having only a skeleton crew in engineering must have had him doing several jobs all at once.

“Tell you what. You crawl back in there and fix the QMT thingy and I’ll go get us some dinner. Meet you in your quarters with it in an hour. Sound good.” Rondi put her hand on his shoulder and smiled warmly at Joe as she stood up.

“Great. An hour. That’s just enough time.” Joe leaned back on the hover creeper and slid back up under the shuttle. “That’s enough time to straighten out the wavefunction correlator with the pattern buffers in the . . .”

Rondi turned and walked toward the chow deck doing her best not laugh out how big a geek the CHENG was. “Best one in the fleet,” she said to herself.

Dinner had gone well. Joe ate like he hadn’t eaten in two days. Come to think of it, he realized that he hadn’t. He then realized he hadn’t showered in as long either. He excused himself from Rondi to hit the shower. As one of the senior staff Joe managed one of the quarters with its own shower so there wasn’t too big a disruption to his date with Rondi.

The CHENG had been seeing the Marine for most of the expeditionary mission and every time she went out on a job he felt his heart in his throat until he saw her come back. He couldn’t imagine how the general handled seeing his daughter go out on dangerous missions day in and day out. And on this last one she lost a hand and was cut up pretty badly. Joe had hard enough time watching Rondi go out and they were just, well, mostly having a lot of sex together. But Joe liked the Marine a lot. The kind of like that is beyond “boat cute” it was the kind of like that you consider retiring and getting a house somewhere together—though they had never discussed it. Joe used the general as his rock. If Moore could send Dee out into the muck and still function, then he could watch as Rondi went out.

Joe turned his back to the falling water and let it wash away the stress and grime from keeping the ship together, repairing the shuttle, and a million other things. He looked up as the shower door slid open and Rondi slipped into the tight space with him. She reached her arms around his shoulders and kissed him softly. Joe stood back as far as he could get in the tiny shower and took in the view. The movement of Rondi’s arms resting on his shoulders and her slight wriggling movements as the water splashed against her body exaggerated the brilliant red, black, and blue cobra high resolution laser printed tattoo that curled around her left leg three times from the knee, up between her legs from behind and over her pubic area, across her rippled abdominal muscles, and around both breasts with its mouth open and fangs showing on the left side of her midsection. The red and blue were nanofluorescent and retroreflective causing them to glow brilliantly in the low lighting of the shower.

To Joe it was clear that she didn’t need the UCU top to keep her “at attention.” The muscular nature of her body and the firmness of her breasts did that all by themselves. Her arousal, or either the water was too cool for her, showed that she was as attentive as she could be.

Joe felt her hand grasp him and he realized that the Marine wasn’t the only one standing at attention. He pulled her to him and kissed her.

“You are beautiful,” he whispered.

“Shut up,” Rondi replied as she worked him into her and wrapped her left leg around him.

Joe shut up.

Rondi lay on her side looking across Joe out the small viewport to the outside of the ship. The stars were always breathtaking to her. Rondi was smart, but not smart enough to be a CHENG or a navigator or one of the bridge team she knew that. She was smart in a different way. She understood tactics and weapons and she understood how to stay alive when shit got bad. She really understood her physical limitations and how to push them beyond what most people knew how to do. To her, it was amazing that a smart guy, a senior officer, like Buckley liked her the way he seemed to. The way she hoped he did. She knew he worried about her when she was on maneuvers, but at the same time Rondi knew that Buckley had nearly been killed in engineering during space battles as well. Engineering wasn’t really all that safe what with all the radiation and high voltages and no telling what other things in there could kill you.

“Spacetime motivator equations my ass.” Joe mumbled in his sleep. Rondi sighed slightly through her pursed lips as Joe continued. “The Ricci tensor doesn’t . . . no sir . . . yes sir . . . football?”

Rondi laughed out loud and then covered her mouth hoping she didn’t wake him up. “I don’t know what you’re dreaming about but it sounds like a whopper.” Rondi looked at the clock on the nightstand. For whatever reason, she never could sleep before a mission, not even after sex.

Rondi leaned over and kissed Joe lightly on the head and then eased her naked body out from under the covers. She quietly made it into Joe’s bathroom and started pulling on her UCU thinking to herself that she hadn’t had the heart to tell him that she was on the mission on the shuttle. She’d leave him a note through his AIC.

Rondi brushed her teeth and then spit the little disposable robot out into the sink and rinsed her mouth out. She only half smiled at herself in the mirror thinking that she didn’t look near as old or tired as she was feeling. The UCU sucked to her body as she tapped the membrane panel under the neckline to display bulkhead blue-gray which was the standard uniform color for onboard a ship. She slapped the 1st AEM Recon patch onto her left shoulder then twisted her torso to pop her back and force the air bubbles out of the shirt. The patch and shirt fabrics meshed together and hardened into a seamless decoration. She then slapped her nametag atop her right breast with similar results and then decided she needed to pee before she donned her digicam pants. She had a few minutes before she really needed to be in the AEM corridor for mission prebrief. She hoped the toilet rinse cycle wasn’t loud enough to wake up Joe. Rondi pulled up her padded and armored pants and melded the fasteners. The pants quickly shimmered and then tracked the color scheme of the top and changed to the same blue-gray base colors. Marines always wore base color camo that matched their environment.

Rondi picked up her socks and boots and slid out the door before putting them on. She stood and ran her fingers through her close cropped blond hair and then tucked her cover in her pocket.

“See ya later, Joe.” She kissed her hand and then touched his door.

“Quantum membrane panel adjustment!” Joe jumped straight up out of the bed and ran to the door and almost opened it before he was awake enough to realize he was naked. “Shit. I need some coffee.”

Joe,
his AIC said into his mind.
Good morning. You have a message from First Sergeant Rondi Howser.

Play it,
he thought.

Chapter 8

November 7, 2406 AD

27 Light-years from the Sol System

Monday, 6:35 AM, Expeditionary Mission Standard Time

The shuttle had been retrofitted as best Buckley could manage. DeathRay certainly hoped that the CHENG had done a good job. He had no reason to believe he hadn’t. The CHENG had been through a lot with the crew of the
Madira
, and DeathRay had confidence in him. The mission was simple: use the QMT system to teleport into an unknown system and gather intel as to where in the galaxy the other side of the quantum membrane teleportation was. With only the address, all they knew was that they would teleport to another pad somewhere. The pad could be four kilometers away or a trillion kilometers away. According to the eggheads, there was just no way of knowing without going there.

Once there, the first order of business would be to analyze the local stars with hopes of determining its celestial location. The second order of business, was to gather recon on the system. It always helped if you knew how many uglies there were before you came in with all guns a-blazin’.

Buckley had given the ship a once-over, looking for transmitters and automated systems, but you never knew when it came to Artificial Intelligence Counterparts. Those things could be hidden almost anywhere. In fact, the more modern ones that humans used were about the size of a sunflower seed without the shell and were implanted just behind the ear canal inside the skull.

DeathRay turned to his copilot and wife, and gave her a wink. “
Madira
, this is Recon One.”

“Recon One, go ahead.”

“All systems are go, and we are ready for teleportation.”

“Understood, DeathRay,” General Moore’s voice responded. “You are go for teleportation. Godspeed. And Boland, be careful.”

“Understood sir.” DeathRay flipped off the comm and turned to Nancy.

“Well, it’s now or never. We can always decide to do it later if you want to go home.”

“Hmpph.” Nancy gave a wry smile. “Shut up and push the button.”

“Affirmative,” DeathRay laughed. “Everybody buckled in back there?” he conned to the rear of the shuttle. His crew consisted of: three 1st Recon Marines in armored environment suits (Lieutenant Jason Franks, First Sergeant Rondi Howser, and Corporal Samuel Simms), and the CHENG’s assistant, Petty Officer Engineering Technician First Class Sarala Amari. Just in case they came across technical glitches, it was always good to have a technician on board.

“Yes sir!” was the response from the crew cabin. DeathRay flipped the internal conn off and looked at Nancy.

“I hate doin’ this without Dee.”

“Me too.” Nancy frowned. “Doc said it would take her another couple of days for the hand graft to take hold with no residual pain.”

“I know. But I hate doin’ it without Dee. You ready?” DeathRay said.

“I’m ready,” Nancy responded.

Okay, Candis,
DeathRay thought.
Here we go. Initiate auto-sequences and be ready for whatever might happen.

Roger that, boss,
Candis replied.

DeathRay reached forward and pressed the QMT controls. There was the eerie sense of his hair standing on end and his skin crawling, and a faint hiss and crackle as if someone were frying bacon in a skillet. For a second, DeathRay saw stars, and then the stars he had been seeing were changed, and he was looking at a large moon covered with blue and green, near a gas giant orbiting a red giant star.

Whoa, that didn’t take long,
he thought.
Candis, are you scanning? Figure out where the hell we are.

Scanning, Jack,
she replied.

“So whaddaya say, Penzington?” he said to his wife. “Any ideas where we are?”

“Not yet. Any threats?”

“None to speak of, but I’ll betcha a dime to a doughnut they’re on that planet.”

“Why would the AIs need a blue-green planet?”

“You got me. That would suggest that there are biologicals involved.”

“Maybe they found something there that they can host in.”

“Maybe,” DeathRay replied. “Well, I don’t like just sitting out here in open space. I’m gonna go dormant. Let’s cut off everything but the passive sensors. No comms, nothing.”

“Hell, we shoulda done that before we teleported in.”

“We’ll remember that next time,” he said.

The little shuttle sat, floating adrift in space near the gas giant, for several minutes. Mostly nobody said a word. There was the occasional direct-to-mind communication between AICs and hosts, but there was very little verbal communication. Then Nancy broke the silence.

“Allison has a fix on where we are, Boland.”

“Yeah? Do tell.”

“I’m transferring the coordinates to DTM now, but it looks like we’re a good twenty-eight light-years from Sol.”

“
Twenty eight light-years
?! Jesus! How did they get here? No humans have
ever
traveled this far from Sol, to my knowledge.”

“Yeah. There is only one colony that has made it to twenty light-years and that is Gliese 581c, there may be an outpost slightly beyond that by a light year or two. Tau Ceti is one of the outermost densely-populated settlements at twelve light years, and Gliese 876d at fifteen has maybe a quarter million people. It took years to get there and get gates set up. At top speeds, it would take
years
to get here, especially decades ago when hyperspace travel was much slower.”

“Well, Copernicus was a century and a half old, at least.”

“Good point. And if that signal came along during the Sienna Madira Presidential timeframe, then that’s over a hundred and fifty years ago.”

“Jesus. But with the technology they had then,” DeathRay said, “it would have taken . . . thirty years, or more, to get from Sol to here.”

“How fast could the
Madira
get here?”

“. . . Eighteen months?”

“That’s what I thought. Whew. We’re gonna have to rethink this. We’re gonna have to bring a gate and snap back.”

“Yeah. Well, the
Madira
has one end of that, but we certainly couldn’t use the shuttle. Somehow we’d have to tie into the gate here. And I don’t think that’s ever been done.”

“That’s beyond my pay grade, Boland. I think that’s a question for Buckley, or somebody smarter than him like the STO.”

“Yeah, I don’t think that’s the CHENG’s job. It’s probably the science officer’s job.” Jack agreed.

“Well, let’s figure that out when we get back,” Nancy looked over the readouts from the passive sensors.

“You’re right, Nancy,” Jack thought for a moment. Right now they needed more information about what was going on in this system. “Okay, first, calibrate the navigation system, and let’s see if we can’t find a way to do some recon on that planet.”

“Roger that,” Penzington replied

Penzington worked the optical controls and pointed the telescope system the CHENG had installed at the planet. Several times she had to use ET1 Amari’s expertise. But after a few minutes of tinkering with the telescope, they managed to get some optical imagery that showed dwellings. As best they could tell, they looked like humanoid-sized dwellings.

“What do you reckon lives here?” Boland asked. “If they’re human-sized, could there have been colonists?”

“A hundred and fifty years ago? On a thirty-year flight? That’s unlikely. Unless . . . they had help.” Nancy replied.

“What do you mean, help?” Boland turned and looked at her, puzzled.

“Well, you know the story as good as I do, according to Moore. He claims that there was some kind of alien signal that Madira had received, and it was about that time that Copernicus began to take over her personality.”

“I still don’t put much stock into the alien conspiracy theory, Nancy. How could Madira or Copernicus cover up an alien signal? Wouldn’t other scientists have seen it? And, why did Madira find it? And for that matter, how did Moore?”

“If it looks like a duck . . .” Penzington smiled. “Who knows, maybe they were supposed to be the only ones to find it. Or maybe Copernicus had any others all killed.”

“Well, let’s do this the right way. It is too risky to fire up the QMTs just to send back a drone with info. It would give us away for sure. Everybody gear up. We’re gonna drop down to the planet and do some recon. We’re gonna leave the shuttle here and use our own QMT pad and snap-back bracelets. If things go awry, we’ll snap back, then reactivate the teleporter back to Madira. Understood?”

“Roger that,” resounded from the back.

“All right. We’re go. We’re gonna be teleporting planetside in five minutes. I want everybody ready to go. “

The surface of the planet was not unlike Earth. As far as they could tell, the air was not that much different, if maybe slightly thinner, like the higher altitudes in the Alps or the Rocky Mountains of Earth, but it was perfectly breathable and no biotoxins were detectable. The gravity was about 0.9 Earth gravities. It pretty much felt like home, Boland thought. That is, if home had a big gas giant looming overhead. Might have felt like like home to the colonists from Tau Ceti but not to Jack. He was from Earth.

The AEMs held point while Boland, Penzington and Amari took up the rear in standard Navy Armored Environment suits, not quite like the powered armor that the AEMs wore. Penzington’s, of course, had her own special attachments and adjustments that she had used and modified over the past couple of years. None of it was standard issue for any branch of the military, but Penzington didn’t belong to any branch of the military. Being an operative of the intelligence community, and retired on top of that, she was merely an “onboard advisor.”

Many of the senior officers Earthside had originally balked at the idea of taking civilians and non-military advisors aboard on such long-term missions with important military goals, but Alexander Moore wanted her along, so by God, she had come along. Although he was only a general, he
was
a former president, and he was most certainly a hero to humanity. So the Joint Chiefs rarely said no to the newest captain of the
Madira
.

And Boland liked that fact. He knew that if they needed something, Moore would get it for them and that Moore, being a Marine himself who had lived through some of the bloodiest battles in history, wouldn’t just throw his troops haphazardly to the grinder.

The coordinates they had pinpointed to drop down to the surface were just outside where they had noticed the settlements. The settlements appeared to be largely of concrete and alloy materials in nature, with some composite materials. They were high tech. There were modern power technologies and grids scattered about, and from Allison’s best guess, there was enough infrastructure to support something along the lines of one hundred thousand to a million occupants on the surface. The AIC claimed there wasn’t enough data to narrow it down better than that. The odd thing was that there were no signs of any occupants.

With mainly passive sensors, and QM sensors that, hopefully, could not be spoofed or detected, the recon team moved quietly through the forest, approaching the outskirts of the urban area. There was a high fence that seemed to surround a major portion of the dwellings. What bothered DeathRay was that he had no way of knowing if that fence was for keeping something out, or for keeping something in. So one way or the other, at some point they would be on the wrong side of that wall.
That
made him uneasy.