“Everyone’s dead,” said Hennessey.

  “I’m sure you’re right, Corporal,” said Gabriel. “But we can’t afford to let down our guard.”

  Heading for the northern exit, he made another check of the base map on his HUD. Should Sagh’eld reinforcements be on their way, Gabriel and his squad could easily become trapped. He felt the pressure of the situation building, but his instinct was telling him that he’d made the right decision in coming this way.

  “I’m ready to blow the door open on your order, Sergeant,” said Private Galvan.

  “Hold,” said Gabriel.

  Having arrived at the entrance to the north passage, he looked towards the door, with his eyes narrowed. The access panel was on the right-hand wall, and the light on it was showing green.

  “The door isn’t security locked,” said Gabriel. “Let’s get this done.”

  Despite his growing confidence that the Sagh’eld were all dead, he wasn’t about to throw caution to the wind. Having ordered Ziegler to follow, and having instructed Galvan and Davison to provide cover from the corridor’s end, Gabriel walked carefully towards the door.

  Stopping at the access panel, he gave Ziegler a nod. Ziegler nodded in return and hefted his RAHD gun.

  Gabriel stretched out a hand and touched it onto the access panel. The door slid open silently, to reveal the room beyond.

  What the hell?

  The Infinity Lens control area was a large space, with a six-metre ceiling. Most of the floorspace was empty, except for a dozen or so dead Sagh’eld and a single circular console with a diameter of fifteen metres. A pillar made from a pure black material, and with a diameter of eight metres, rose from the middle of the console and disappeared into the ceiling.

  In front of the pillar, with their backs to Gabriel, were three figures. These figures were about seven feet tall, and with broad shoulders and thick limbs which identified them as being something other than Sagh’eld. The aliens were dressed in combat armour as dark as the pillar, with angular helmets and shoulder plates. Each was armed with what Gabriel believed to be a gauss rifle, fastened to their backs by magnetic clips, or something similar.

  The three aliens were focused on an area of the console which was topped by a large screen, and they were either entering commands, or trying to figure out how to make the hardware work.

  Here on Scalos, the mysteries kept on piling up.

  SIXTEEN

  “What are they?” asked Corporal Ziegler from the opposite side of the doorway.

  “Bad guys,” said Gabriel. Pieces began falling into place. “They killed us and now they’re here to steal the good stuff.”

  Although the aliens were currently unaware of the squad’s presence – doubtless believing that everything in the underground facility was dead – Gabriel doubted they’d remain ignorant for long.

  For a split second, he wavered. The aliens looked mean and it was possible there might be hundreds of others within the underground facility. Killing these ones here would raise an alarm, and that would make it tough to reach what Gabriel hoped was the exit on Level 6.

  On the other hand, these assholes had successfully killed him and his squad – something the Sagh’eld had never accomplished – and now they were stealing intel. Gabriel felt his anger level jump all the way to a ten.

  “We’re going to kill them,” he said, taking aim at the leftmost alien.

  “What if there are others behind the pillar, Sergeant?” asked Ziegler.

  “Then we’ll kill them too,” said Gabriel.

  Davison and Galvan moved up and crouched nearby, where they had a good view into the room.

  “Fire,” said Gabriel calmly.

  He pulled the trigger on his gauss rifle, and the gun spat out three projectiles in rapid succession. His aim was true, but his target didn’t go down. Where Gabriel’s bullets hit, fist-sized patches of dirty red light appeared and faded almost at once.

  The shots from Davison and Wolf produced similar results, though the discharge from Ziegler’s RAHD produced a much larger and brighter patch of red.

  With surprisingly fast reactions, the three aliens split. Two accelerated clockwise around the console, hunting cover, while the third went counter-clockwise. As they ran, the aliens reached for their guns.

  Despite their speed, the creatures could not outrun gauss bullets or RAHD shells. Although Gabriel had been momentarily taken aback to see his on-target shots fail to produce a kill, it didn’t stop him putting slug after slug into the lead alien. Three additional shots wasn’t enough to put the creature down, but when the fourth bullet – the seventh in total – struck, it punched through the enemy’s combat armour, entering its back. One more shot and the job was done.

  Meanwhile, Davison and Wolf had already killed the second alien, and Gabriel looked away from his own target just in time to see the second shot from Ziegler’s slower-firing RAHD blow a gaping hole in the spine of the final creature.

  “Hold!” snapped Gabriel. “There could be others.”

  For a time he watched, but no more of the aliens emerged into sight. If there were indeed others, Gabriel couldn’t blame them for keeping their heads down, so he ordered three soldiers to come with him as he headed clockwise around the pillar, while the rest of the squad waited in position to kill anything that was flushed out.

  A minute later, and having discovered no other aliens in hiding, Gabriel returned to the southern half of the room.

  “Let’s take a look at what we shot,” he said. Time was pressing, but these were new opponents, and he had to see what he was facing.

  “It’s an ugly bastard, Sergeant,” said Ziegler, crouching next to one of the three corpses. “Maybe even uglier than a Sagh’eld.”

  Gabriel hurried over. The alien had landed on its back and a thick blood so vivid red it was almost luminous oozed from the three gauss holes in its chest. Through the alien’s trapezoidal visor, Gabriel could see dark red skin, narrow grey eyes, and a proportional mouth, though one filled with pointed yellow teeth. Instead of a nose, the creature had two vertical nostrils.

  “Its combat armour absorbed six of my gauss shots, before the seventh got through,” said Gabriel. “They must have energy shields.”

  “Two RAHD shots did the job,” said Ziegler. “But that’s still one too many.”

  Gabriel studied the alien’s combat armour for a moment, but couldn’t see anything he thought resembled a shield generator. He was aware the Human Confederation had sunk a lot of money into the same technology, but so far hadn’t managed to make it work. For all Gabriel knew, the hardware for a personal shield generator might be decades away.

  “This armour feels like metal,” said Ziegler, tapping one of the alien shoulder plates with his knuckles. He did the same on the creature’s chest guard. “Doesn’t seem much different to ours.”

  “Except a GK-3 can take a bullet without needing a shield generator,” said Corporal Hennessey.

  “Not every time, Corporal,” said Gabriel. “And a GK-3 won’t soak a half-dozen gauss shots.” He rose to his feet. “Anyway, we can’t stand around gawping – we have to check out this Infinity Lens hardware before any more of these things come to find out what happened to their buddies.”

  Reminded of the urgency, Gabriel turned his attention to the central console. Private Wolf was already there, peering at the hardware, but not touching. Buttons, switches, screens and touchpads were arranged in a seemingly haphazard manner upon the angled top face of the console. In several places, Sagh’eld security breakers dangled from interface ports.

  Gabriel was most interested in the section of the console which the alien creatures had been operating and he stood in front of it. Here, a two-metre arc of the console was raised from the sections on either side, and a single, huge screen was mounted across its full width. Five Sagh’eld corpses lay nearby.

  Corporal Hennessey joined Gabriel and Wolf at the console.

  “I have no idea how any of this works,” said Hennessey.

  “That makes two of us,” said Gabriel. “I’m out of my depth here.”

  He turned his attention to the screen, the left-hand side of which was displaying a list of what he guessed were the most recent commands entered into the console, along with the output results. Most of what he read didn’t make any sense to Gabriel, but his gaze kept on heading down, as if weights were attached to his eyeballs.

  When he read the final entry, he stared for a moment, repeating the words in his head before he said them out loud.

  “Storage bays depleted. Sector Three Infinity Lens: Activated. Collapse in progress. Time to singularity formation: three hours.”

  Gabriel shook his head, convinced this was terrible news, even if he didn’t know why or how. He badly needed advice from someone on the New Beginning, but he wasn’t confident that advice was coming anytime soon.

  “Time to singularity formation: three hours,” said Private Wolf. “What the hell does that mean?”

  “Don’t ask me,” said Gabriel. “I’m going to set a timer for it anyway – just in case we find out later, and we can do something about it.” He re-read the text. “If those storage bays are depleted of all those cubes, that means they were used for something – probably to activate the Infinity Lens.”

  Possibilities swirled around in Gabriel’s head, but he couldn’t grasp the thread that would bring them all together. He suspected he was lacking a few key pieces of information.

  Before he could arrive at a decision about what he should do next, Gabriel felt the agony of death grip him once more. He clenched his teeth as hard as he could and tensed every muscle in his body. The pain rose higher and, just when Gabriel thought he was about to die for a second time, the feeling passed as quickly as it had arrived.

  “Shit and damn,” he panted.

  His heart rate was elevated and he felt shaky, but he was still on his feet. Nearby, Corporal Hennessey was leaning heavily on the edge of the console, while Private Wolf had dropped to her haunches.

  “Please report,” said Gabriel on the squad comms. “Do we have any casualties?”

  Soon, it was clear that none of the soldiers had died and they had all recovered quickly from the death weapon. Plenty of curses were directed at the unknown source of the attack, and Gabriel called for silence.

  “I’m going to look on the bright side,” he said. “The way I figure it, whoever’s firing that weapon, they wouldn’t be doing it if some of their own were inside this facility.”

  “The Sagh’eld are happy to kill their—” Castle started.

  “These aren’t the Sagh’eld,” Gabriel interrupted. “I reckon those three new aliens we shot earlier had finished what they came here to do, and that death attack was nothing more than punitive – to save having to track us down in this facility.”

  “If you’re right, then maybe we’re not about to be overrun by hundreds of aliens wearing energy shielded combat suits,” said Ziegler. “That should give us some time to find out more about this infinity lens.”

  “Are we really going to stick around, Sergeant?” asked Private Damico. “This could be our best chance to make a run for the Level 6 exit. Or maybe even back to our shuttle.”

  “If we leave now, we’ll have come here for nothing,” said Gabriel. “And I don’t like leaving empty-handed – particularly when I had to die in order to make it this far.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Damico. “Should I set up my Kahn-3 to cover the exits?”

  “Do it,” said Gabriel. “Corporal Ziegler – I’m going to see if there’s a way to extract data from this central console. You handle the defences.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Ziegler.

  “Corporal Hennessey, Private Wolf, you stay with me,” said Gabriel. “Three pairs of eyes are better than one.”

  “Sergeant, the data on this main screen has changed,” said Hennessey. “Now there’s a menu over here on the right.”

  “So there is,” said Gabriel, stepping closer so that he could read the text.

  “When that death ray hit us, I kind of leaned against the console for a moment,” said Hennessey. “It’s possible I might have accidentally pushed some of these buttons.”

  Gabriel smiled. “You should have more accidents like that, Corporal.”

  The menu had numerous options, and Gabriel read through each in turn. Not many of them made any sense – the software was clearly designed to be used by trained operators.

  “This option says Infinity Lens,” said Private Wolf, pointing halfway down the list. “Maybe you should press it, Sergeant.”

  “I might just do that,” said Gabriel. Even so, he hesitated, with his finger hovering over the menu option. “Screw it,” he said, and then tapped the screen.

  Straightaway, all the text disappeared, and Gabriel found himself staring at a dark screen, with only a few visual elements. He guessed the various purple symbols in the corners were prompts for the operator, but he didn’t understand what they meant.

  “It’s easy, Sergeant,” said Corporal Hennessey. “Pinch in and out to zoom – just like on the map we found earlier.”

  Gabriel gave it a try. After some experimentation, he discovered that the screen was showing him a star chart, centred on Scalos. When he zoomed out, the map populated with thousands, then millions, and then billions of different stars, each of which was labelled with text which Gabriel thought might be coordinates. He zoomed in again.

  “This doesn’t seem all that useful,” said Hennessey, with unmistakeable disappointment. “It’s just a big map.”

  Gabriel wasn’t so sure. He re-read the onscreen prompts. “LT: In,” he said. “LT: Out.”

  He pressed his finger first on the LT: In button and then on LT: Out. He had the chart zoomed out only a little way, and suddenly, thin lines in all different colours appeared on the screen. Each line had its own information overlay and, as Gabriel watched, more lines appeared, and more overlays.

  “There must be a filter,” he muttered.

  “What is it we’re filtering anyway?” asked Hennessey.

  The answer jumped into Gabriel’s head. “Lightspeed tunnel in and out,” he said. “The Infinity Lens must be able to detect the transit of spaceships within its focus area. This is Sector 3,” he said, remembering the words he’d read earlier.

  “If this station can detect a lightspeed tunnel, isn’t that an absolute game changer for whoever controls the hardware?” asked Hennessey.

  Gabriel nodded. “I wonder if the Sagh’eld knew what it was, or if they stumbled upon it by accident.”

  “Those other aliens knew all about it,” said Wolf. “If this station is so important, I wonder why they only sent three of their personnel to activate it.”

  “There must be other locations and other Infinity Lenses,” said Gabriel. “What if they’re all linked together, and you only need to control one in order to—” He cursed. “We need backup – I’m done with guessing.”

  “Try zooming in on Scalos again, Sergeant,” said Hennessey. “Maybe we’ll be able to see what happened to the New Beginning.”

  “Good idea,” said Gabriel. He paused. “But the Infinity Lens was only activated a short time ago – so maybe it won’t have—”

  “There’s only one way to find out, sir.”

  “True.”

  Gabriel zoomed the screen all the way in so that Scalos – represented by a solid green circle – was centre on the screen. The LT: In and LT: Out toggles were both switched on, but there were no lightspeed tunnels visible.

  “So the New Beginning is either still here, or it was destroyed after the Sagh’eld began jamming this facility.”

  “Or the destroyer entered lightspeed just before the Infinity Lens was activated,” said Hennessey.

  Gabriel swore in disgust. “So all-in-all, we’re no closer to knowing what’s happening on the surface.”

  “This place will have sensor arrays, Sergeant,” said Wolf. “The only difficulty is in finding where to access them and how to operate them.”

  “I’m sick of hearing about problems with no solutions, Private,” snarled Gabriel.

  “Sorry, Sergeant,” said Wolf. “I always find that talking is better than not saying anything at all.”

  Gabriel felt his anger subside. “Let’s spend another few minutes at this console,” he said. “After that, I’ll consider the options.”

  As he was speaking, Private Wolf jerked up straight, and put her hand against the side of her helmet, in a familiar – though unnecessary – gesture to indicate she was listening on the comms.

  There was only one likely source for the transmission, and Gabriel hoped he might be about to receive some good news. His eyes went to the singularity timer on his HUD.

  00d:02h:51m

  Suddenly, his hopes faded that even the best of news would be good enough.

  SEVENTEEN

  Sitting on the bridge of the New Beginning, Captain Lanson was feeling like a shit of the highest order. Although he’d been left with no choice, he’d still abandoned the soldiers in the underground facility, and he hadn’t yet come up with a plan that would not only rescue the squad, but also advance the mission from its current state of semi-failure.

  “We’ll be directly over the crater in ten minutes, Captain,” said Lieutenant Turner.

  “Acknowledged,” said Lanson.

  For just under fifty minutes, he’d kept the New Beginning out of sight, within the wreck of the Sagh’eld superheavy. During that time, Lanson had used the thrust of the destroyer’s engines to re-orient the lifter, so that its nose was pointing diagonally away from Scalos, and its stern was aimed towards the planet. This allowed the New Beginning’s sensor arrays to obtain a far better view of the surface, and Lanson hoped he’d judged it correctly so that he’d be able to see the crater as the wreckage drifted by overhead.

  At first, he’d been concerned at the risks of making such an obvious repositioning of the superheavy, but he doubted the forces engaged near the crater had been paying too much attention to the spin on the wreckage. With any luck, they wouldn’t notice when the lifter appeared once more over the horizon.