Trail of Evil - eARC (8 page)

She could feel his hands inside her shorts grasping her buttocks firmly and pressing his stiffening crotch against her now very heated one. Dee wiggled forward slightly slipping out of the shorts. She fumbled with his shirt pulling it over his head and then forced her hands down to the waistband of his shorts. Dee lowered herself down Rackman’s chiseled body kissing him and slithering like a snake as she brought his shorts over his feet. Dee found herself on her hands and knees looking directly at his manhood standing erect only millimeters in front of her face. She took him into her mouth and caressed him with her tongue and lips and then grasped his shaft with her hand. She worked him gently but firmly for another moment and then pulled away kissing him there as she worked her way back up to look into his big brown Navy SEAL eyes. Never letting her grip go she writhed into position above him and directed him insider her. With the insertion she felt a release from the tension and fighting and all the endless missions and getting wounded and the hospital and the endless conflict plague of humanity that her grandmother had brought on them all. She didn’t think about that for the moment. So quickly she felt . . . a release and she realized she was already climaxing.

Davy rolled Dee over and slid deeper into her. Dee could feel him, strong but gently, pushing deeper and deeper with each stroke. She particularly liked the feel of his hands as they firmly grasped at her buttocks and his fingers tightened with each stroke.

“Oh my God, yes.” She pulled into him and wrapped her legs around his body interlocking her ankles behind his back.

“Dee you are so hot,” Davy whispered in her ear as he nibbled on the lobe. She was peaking again already. Using her legs to force him even harder and deeper into her brought her to the edge . . .

Chapter 11

November 7, 2406 AD

27 Light-years from the Sol System

Monday, 4:42 PM, Expeditionary Mission Standard Time

“The edge!”

General Mason Warboys sat on the front of his tank mode hovertank lecturing the Warlords tank squadron—
his
Warlords.

“The very goddamned edge! We are at the edge of where humanity has ventured into space and seem to find remnants of the Separatist faction automated threats everywhere we turn.” Warboys pounded a fist downward onto the hovertanks armored hull. “I don’t care if we do have some down time. Who knows, at any moment we might find ourselves in another shitstorm with these godforsaken soulless computer-driven attackers. So we’re gonna train. And train. And train. And when we finish we’re gonna train some fucking more. Is that a hoowah?”

“HOOWAH!” the Warlords answered.

“Great. Johnny, get us set up and we’re gonna run this sim again and again until we get through it with zero casualties,” Warboys ordered.

“Roger that, One,” Warlord Two Lieutenant Colonel Johnny Stacks responded. “All right, you heard the general—everyone load up and let’s get with it.”

Mason Warboys nodded. He understood that there was a lot of work to be done. His team was new, raw, and from disparate groups throughout the fleet. They were still learning to be a team. He had beaten them into a decent tank squadron over the last eighteen months or so but they weren’t there yet. At least they weren’t where he thought they should be.

Once the
Sienna Madira
had been decommissioned and then recommissioned, General Moore—or President Moore, it was confusing to everyone—asked Mason to bring his team along for this long-haul mission. Mason was thrilled by the prospect, but the problem was that the Warlords had already been disbanded and reassigned. Warboys had to start over and pick a new team. While there were plenty of tank drivers in the Army the Warlords were elite and Mason only chose the best. The problem was finding elite tank drivers who could and would volunteer for an open ended long duration assignment to unknown locations. In other words, he did the best he could in the picking process. What he couldn’t get in experience he was damn sure going to make up for it in training.

Mason slid the cockpit canopy closed and cycled the restraints into his E-suit. His AIC processed the start up sequence and completed the handshaking with the ship’s sim center computers. Warboys could see the battlescape pop into his direct-to-mind view in full detail. The ten Warlords stood still in a vee formation all in tank mode. The virtual landscape was very similar to the planetoid they had recently been on but was different in a random shuffle sort of way. Some of it actually reminded him of the Battle of the Oort years ago. But back then, his team was
the shit
. Every tank driver in the U.S. Army wanted to be a Warlord.

Sir, the scenario is loaded and ready to begin
, his AIC Major Brenda Bravo One One One Mike Hotel Hotel Two advised him in his mindvoice.

Roger that. Start it up Brenda.
He thought.

“All right Warlords, stay sharp we have an overwhelming hostile force over the ridge and our AEM brothers are pinned down. Those crazy bastards are outgunned, outnumbered, and outmatched and if I know Marines that is a perfect situation for them to attack! They’re going to need our help!”

Armored Environment Suit U.S. Marine Corp Master Gunnery Sergeant Tommy Suez had always had a talent for driving an armored e-suit. Even as a private he could unwrap a piece of candy while wearing the suit. The armored heavy gauntlets of the suits typically made that level of control and precision extremely difficult if not impossible, but not for Tommy. Since he’d seen pictures of the suits when he was a child he had studied everything about them. He had always wanted to be an AEM. He ate, slept, and breathed the function of his suit. The more he understood it the better he could use it. But it was more than just suit function, it was also suit use. He had studied tactics and strategy and performance protocols. He’d read history books on the suits and how they had changed over the years. He had studied the Martian Desert Campaigns and the famous exploits of Major Alexander Moore. As a kid, he had idolized the Marine turned president. He wanted to know how Moore had managed to set the all time still standing record for living in an armored suit for more than a month way back then when the technology was not supportive of such a feat. There had been many of his superiors and friends alike who had suggested he go to Officer Candidate School but Tommy didn’t want to take the time out of being in the suit and being an AEM. Tommy was most at home in the suit. One day he hoped to test Moore’s record.

Today, Tommy had the day off due to regulation. In order to protect their leader, Lieutenant Colonel Francis Jones, he’d taken a metal claw in his chest. It had punctured one of his lungs, but his suit had sealed it off before he had any issue with it and he’d ripped the metal buzzsaw bot bastard to hell and gone. The doctors in the medbay had fixed him up without any problem but rules were rules. He was sidelined for several days, but Tommy liked staying fit and sharp. And really, did any E9 master gunnery sergeant ever have the day off? Being “Top Sergeant” kept him busy, always.

He clanked down one of the long abandoned corridors of the
Madira
in his suit. Tommy fired his jumpboots launching him headfirst into a rolling front flip. As his body and suit twisted through the flip he had his DTM targeting system track protrusions, bolt heads, and rivets in the bulkheads. Red targeting reticles zipped across his mindview in three dimensions all around him. He locked one onto a bolt head on the ceiling a bit aft of his position and fired a simulated shoulder mounted rocket at it. He did all this in less than the second it took to complete the maneuver. He stoped on one knee with his weapon drawn and targeting objects in front of him. He scanned for movement and mentally took note of the sensor views in his mind. It was really dark in the long corridor especially with his suit lights off. He pressed on deeper into the ship.

Occasionally he’d pass a portal that let some light from the planetoid’s star in but only a little. The blue grey metal bulkheads did little to brighten up the place. The corridors on this part of the ship were mostly abandoned and lights were only turned on when engineering crews needed them.

Tommy visually scanned but decided he was going to bump into something if he didn’t switch over to a different view or bring up his suit’s lights. He didn’t want to use the harshness of the lights. There was something sort of serene about working out in the near darkness that he liked. He didn’t want to disturb the darkness.

Then he checked his AIC for any other sensor movement. The area battlescape came online and switched to full DTM mindview. On full mindview the data was so overwhelming that one couldn’t follow it and visual view at the same time. Typically on full mindview the visors went dark to help remove the distraction. Tommy didn’t really need that aid. He’d learned years before to focus his mind just on the sensor view he needed at the moment. Others could do it, but most simply allowed the suit or their AIC chose the best view for the moment. Tommy had programmed his suit and told his AIC not to black out his visor unless ordered to or emergency protocols required it.

Nothing on QMs or IR?
He asked his AIC.

Nothing
. As it should be. They were in an abandoned area of the ship almost all the way to the bow on the starboard side.

Okay then, let’s switch to pure mindview and I’ll practice maneuvers blind.

Switching off visible and going to mindview sensor data only.

Good girl, Jackie.
Tommy thought. He looked for the layout of the ship around him in his mindview, but nothing was there. That wasn’t right. The computer always generated a layout map of the ship. There were no actual images from the sensors overlaid on the map.
Jackie? DTM the sensors for me.

The mindview is fully functional
, Tommy, his AIC replied. Tommy’s stomach turned over.
What you see is what I’ve got.

What? That makes no sense,
he paused to think
. They were working fine a hundred meters or more aft when I did the targeting flip.

Sorry, Tommy, my diagnostics show the DTM is fully functional and operating normally.

That isn’t right. I should see bulkheads and heat flows and potential targets. But there is nothing DTM. Nothing.
Then something occurred to him and he didn’t like it.
Eyeballs and full floods! Sims off and weapons online! Get me coms to the bridge!

Chapter 12

November 7, 2406 AD

29 Light-years from the Sol System

Monday, 4:45 PM, Expeditionary Mission Standard Time

“Nancy!? Penzington, do you copy?” DeathRay couldn’t tell if his wife had vaporized on the other side of the energy field or not. As far as he, the engineer’s tech, and the three Marines could tell there was nothing there in front of them but the wall and the water passing through it.

Candis? What have you got?
Jack thought to his AIC.

Nothing on sensors or QM coms
. It’s like there is nothing beyond that wall.

Jammed?

I’d say so, Jack
.

Shit.

“Everybody stay alert. I don’t like this at all. Marines converge on me.” Jack scanned the wall with every sensor in his suit and got nothing in return other than the waterflow vectors. “Fuck it. We’re gonna blast it.”

Jack, wait. There was a last-minute transmission from Allison.

Huh?

“Sir, before you do that,” the engineering tech held up a hand. “I’ve got some readings on what happened when Nancy passed through the wall.”

I think Nancy had Allison send us instructions. I’m unfolding the message now. It is very, very complicated.
Candis added into Jack’s mindvoice.
The jamming obscured the signal in the noise field. Somehow, Allison managed to get it through.

“Well, don’t keep it to yourself, Petty Officer. That’s my wife on the other side of this thing.” DeathRay hated when Nancy put herself in these kinds of situations, but she always had managed to get out of them somehow so far.

“We couldn’t hear it or see it well in the suits and here underwater and all, but, all my data looks like there was an electromagnetic signature like that of a quantum membrane teleportation event horizon,” Amari explained.

“What? You mean she was teleported to somewhere?” Jack really didn’t like this.

“Yes sir,” the tech replied.

“Shit! Where?”

“No way to tell, sir. But she was definitely teleported. And just before she did her suit cycled a QM pulse.”

Candis?
he thought to his AIC.

I’m working it Jack, but it does appear that she teleported somewhere and Allison had hacked into some control system using the QM pulse the petty officer detected.

“Can my suit reproduce that pulse, Amari?” Jack asked.

“Uh, yes sir. It is a simple transmission for the QM transceiver. I’m sending it to your AIC now.” ET1 Amari tapped some keys on her forearm sensor panel.

Candis?

I have the signal ready for transmission, sir. How Nancy or Allison figured this out is beyond me though. They had to have had some a priori knowledge.

We’ll ask them when we find them.

“I’m going in. If you don’t hear from me in ten minutes I want you to snap back to the shuttle and then take it back to the
Madira
,” Jack ordered.

“We can’t leave the two of you here,” Amari said.

“Thanks for the sentiment, Engineer’s Technician First Class, but those are your orders. Franks, you got that? Besides, we can always snap back to the ship with our wristbands.”

“Roger that, sir. Ten minutes,” Lieutenant Franks replied over the tac-net but Jack could see them closing on his position. They were only a few tens of meters away he thought but with the lighting in the water it was very hard to judge distance without using QM sensors.

“Start your clocks now,” Jack nodded at the tech.

Candis, cycle the signal.

Aye sir.

Jack ran through the wall in a flash of dancing light and could hear one of the Marines on the tac-net at the very last second.

“Sir, incoming—”

But that was all Jack heard as he was instantly somewhere else.

“Get down, Boland!” Penzington’s voice rang in his helmet.

Jack simply dropped and didn’t take time to argue. When it came to his wife, if she said to get down, then she usually had damned good reason to say it. The room around them promptly exploded into flames with debris flying everywhere. Jack could see the remnants of what must have been a bot mecha flying past him in a red and orange exploding and swirling symphony. The only thing going through his mind at the moment was
just why in the hell were the enemy mecha here
.

“Behind you!” Penzington shouted.

Jack rolled over with his HVAR at the ready and immediately let loose several rounds into the buzzsaw bot slashing for him. The bot dropped beside him just as Nancy’s armored foot came pounding down on top of it. She then bounced up firing her weapon in a wide area burst. Jack followed suit.

“What’s going on?” Jack yelled over the weapon fire. Several rounds from an automated defense weapon cut into the wall plating near him spraying red-hot glowing metal in all directions. Some of it splattered against his suit, but the exterior armor layers were barely even scratched and protected him with no problems.

“I think we were teleported into a hangar bay and those are the security guards.” Nancy replied. “But I managed to make a hole two meters behind us where that hovertank used to be. Move!”

Candis, DTM battleview! Hovertanks?

Got it, Captain. Egress two point two meters on your five o’clock. Several hovertanks of modified Seppy design and two or three modified Gnats are within sensor view.

Go full scans. They know we’re here now. Are they attacking us en masse?
For a brief instant Jack considered commandeering one of the Seppy Gnat fighters but wasn’t sure he’d have time to fire it up and hack into it while being shot at.

Aye sir. Scanning. Insufficient data to determine attack scenarios as of yet.

“You coming?” Jack motioned to Nancy as he fired several bursts from the hyper velocity automatic rifle. The HVAR rounds spitapped and exploded a multilegged bot that was skittering toward them. The spiderlike bot appeared to have been caught unaware of their presence right up until it exploded.

“Go!” Nancy bounced her boots against the floor doing a backflip into a kneeling stance just beside the opening in the wall of the hangar bay. “I got you covered.”

Reluctantly Jack ran through the opening, hoping his wife would be right behind him. He pumped a few rounds through the opening as he burst through. The opening emptied into a hallway that appeared to have mecha hangar bays on each side. Nancy followed.

“What is the plan?” he asked his wife.

“You’re in charge. And by the way, what took you so long?”

“You know, we stopped for coffee, and then considered just snapping back home, but in the end, I knew I couldn’t leave you alone to have all the fun.” Jack turned and pumped a grenade through the hole in the wall they had just escaped through. “That should buy us some time.”

“Snapping back might be smart, but I’d sure like to know where we are.” Nancy replied.

“Well, then, we keep fighting until it is too much. Then we snap back. Agreed?” Jack looked at her.

“Good plan. They’re not following us.” Nancy checked behind them.

Jack stopped running and motioned her to do the same. The long corridor had taken a turn to the right and felt as if it was leading upward. The hangar bay doors were getting fewer and farther between. And for whatever reason the bots had stopped following them. That made Jack nervous.

“Okay, since we have a second to breathe, how did you know to transmit a QM signal back there?” Jack asked. He kept his eyes and sensors scanning the corridor hoping for some idea of where to go and what to do. The place looked very familiar but he couldn’t quite put his finger on it.

“I recognized it. This is technology that the Tangiers used on Ares during the Separatist war. Ellise Tangiers had a room with a fake wall like that in her mansion. It led to her QMT pad. Allison hacked the security code. I wasn’t expecting it to trigger a teleport, though.” Nancy explained. “This place look familiar to you?”

“Yeah, it looks a lot like the inside of a Seppy hauler.” Jack replied. “If we triggered the teleport then why were they hostile toward us?”

“Well, actually, I sort of caused that snooping around in that hangar room while I was waiting on you.” Nancy shrugged her armored shoulders. “You shouldn’t have taken so long. You gave me just enough time to piss one of the bots off.”

“So they’re not chasing us?” DeathRay looked over his shoulder half expecting to see an overwhelming number of bots chasing them. There were none.

“I sure thought they would have. Don’t understand that.” Nancy shrugged her shoulders and frowned a bit.

Jack thought for a second. There was nothing on sensors. They really just needed more information.

“Okay, let’s try and get to the surface and figure out where we are. As far as we know we’re not even still on the same planet.” It was times like this when Jack really wished he was just in a dogfight in his mecha.

“You’d think there’d be alarms and such going off.” Nancy pondered. “I don’t think there is anybody here other than automated AI sentries.”

“That’s perfectly fine with me.” Jack could see a faint blue light just around the corner that didn’t look like interior cabin lighting. He cautiously moved in that direction with his HVAR at the ready. “This looks like the main troop corridor leading to the elevator on the
Madira
.”

“I thought so too.” Nancy agreed with him. “Reminds me of a Seppy ship I stowed away on once.”

“I seem to recall something about that.” Jack smirked at his wife as the memory of her talking to him on coms as she rode a Seppy ship on a collision course for Luna City. Nancy, as far as anybody had known at the time, had blown up with the ship. Somehow she’d managed to escape at the last second.

“Wasn’t my favorite day.”

“Let’s stay frosty.” He quickly leaned around the corner then back behind the wall for cover just in case something was on the other side ready to shoot at him. There was nothing. “Shit! Look at that.”

“What is it?”

“Come on. It’s clear.” Jack said as he stepped all the way into the corridor and around the corner out of Nancy’s view and into the blue lighting. “Son of a—”

“What Jack?” He heard Nancy say as she stealthily slid in behind him.

“That.” Jack pointed outward at the view beyond the large window.

“Woah.”

“Yeah. We’re on a ship, alright, and that is definitely a different star.” Jack looked out the window at a distant blue star and the surrounding preplanetary debris disc stretching out in a plane. The ship was embedded in the planar debris field near a large object that in a few billion years would probably be a planet, but for now was a swirling dustball. In each direction toward what Jack guessed were the bow and stern of the ship there were several other ships spread about.

“What is that, like thirty ships?”

Forty seven as best I can tell, sir.
Candis replied.
But, without a full QM sweep I’d be hesitant to say that is all of them.

“Allison confirms forty-seven nearby and QM anomalies that suggest many more throughout this system,” Nancy said. “It’s a fleet, Jack.”

“That or a graveyard.” Jack thought for moment. “Can Allison get a fix on our location at all? Candis says there isn’t enough information.”

“No, we need a better look at the star field,” Nancy replied.

“Okay. We’re on a ship. It might be abandoned in place. Let’s find the bridge.” Jack said. The first order of business was to gather info and on a starship the bridge was the place to do that.

“Good plan. If we are on a ship like those then we can extrapolate about where that should be,” Nancy started but Jack interrupted her.

“Or, we could just look at the map.” Jack pressed a button on a display panel beside the window and the corridor lights came on. There was a flatscreen display to the right of the button with a “you are here” interactive map. “Just like on any other big ship.”

“Yeah, but you just turned on a system. If there are watchdogs they would have certainly detected that.” Nancy smiled. “But, I guess they would have heard all the shooting and other ruckus too.”

“Right. I think we’re alone, but let’s not get complacent. Besides, I’d prefer a straight-up fight over all this skulking around.” DeathRay kept one hand on his weapon and used the other to trace directions on the map.

“I don’t know. I kind of like it. You, me, a fleet of unknown enemy ships all to ourselves. Kind of romantic.”

“You and I have completely different ideas about what romantic means.” Jack shook his head back and forth slowly and raised an eyebrow at his wife.

“Don’t knock it flyboy. Me turned on in any situation is still
me
turned on.”

“Good point. I’ll remember that.” Jack smiled at his wife and thought briefly how hot she looked in an armored suit, but then the professional soldier in him kicked back in.

“Damn right it is.” Nancy laughed. “You should be so lucky.”

“We need to go there,” he said and pointed and tapped a spot on the map.

“We’ve got to get the fuck out of here, sir!” First Sergeant Rondi Howser did as best a diving for cover maneuver as she could while under water and moving against a flowing current. With every release of HVAR rounds the hypervelocity bullets tore a bow wave through the water that flung the weapon radically in all directions from the recoil. “I’m seeing nothing on QMs and can’t hit shit underwater!”

“Understood, First Sergeant, but we literally have our backs up against a goddamned wall.” The lieutenant sounded more perplexed than Rondi had heard him since they had begun fighting the bots over eighteen months prior. Rondi didn’t like their situation and she was certain the lieutenant understood just how screwed they were.

“Orders, L.T.?” Rondi hoped to press him for something, anything.

“If I may, Lieutenant,” ET1 Amari interjected while doing her best to keep her head buried in the river bottom muck. “I say we follow DeathRay and Mrs. Penzington.”

“Thanks for the input, tech, but our orders were to snap back to the shuttle and get it back to the
Madira
,” Lieutenant Franks said.