“Still not too late to surrender,” he offered quickly, his advantage dwindling.

  With a roar, I swung him from his feet and into a steel pillar. Something clanged in his back. I swung him the other way. This time, the collision fractured his left arm at the elbow and wires sizzled in the exposed joint. Seizing the protective cup at his crotch, I brought him overhead and smashed him onto his back. I landed on top of him, my knees pinning his arms, and began driving my fists into his face.

  I didn’t just want to kill him. I wanted to beat him into his component parts.

  He shouted as the bits of his prosthetic eye fell away and the skin split open. Soon, I was pounding a metal skull with bloody scraps of blond hair on top. In my blind rage, I didn’t feel him work his right knee up to his chest. He shoved, sending me airborne. I landed in a backpedal. By the time I stopped, he was on his feet, a panel open at his chest. A glowing core of power pulsed below his heart.

  “A shame we couldn’t come to terms,” he garbled through his smashed jaw as he manipulated buttons on the panel.

  He was going to self-detonate.

  “Boss!” Rusty called.

  I turned to see he’d lifted my MP88 from the ground. For a moment, I thought he was going to attempt to fire it, but he heaved it toward me. I caught the strap and jerked the weapon into my grip.

  Before I could bring it into position, Blondie launched himself at me. I caught him with a boot to the gut. He slammed into the wall, and I swung the weapon around and opened fire. The barrage of rounds ripped away chunks of flesh, some human, some synthetic, and pitted his metallic skeleton. He staggered this way and that, then collapsed face down. Smoke drifted from his wasted cybernetic form.

  I stalked forward until I was standing over him. The fingers of his right hand clawed at the ground. I lifted a leg and drove the heel onto the back of his skull, stoving it in. His hand stopped moving.

  With the toe of my boot, I flipped him. Fluid oozed from the metallic orifices on his smashed face. The power source continued to pulse inside his chest.

  “Nuclear,” Rusty said, arriving beside me and kneeling to study the panel. He punched a key combination and squinted away. The source dimmed. Rusty sat back on his heels and exhaled.

  “Great job,” I said. “With everything.”

  “That’ll teach him to threaten my kids,” he muttered.

  The transmogrification spell was wearing off, and I could see hints of my teammate in his slimming face and the shadow of mutton chop sideburns. “Where are we with the shut-down?” I asked.

  “I think I figured out where the other power source is. I’m running a process to drain it off. That’ll get us back on track.” He looked from me to Blondie and swallowed. “Is it true? What he said about our team?”

  A sickness gripped my gut as I replayed the moment the radio on my teammates’ end had gone dead. “I’m going to check on them,” I managed through a dry mouth. “Will you be all right if I leave you?”

  “Sure thing, boss.”

  I secured my helmet back in place, inserted a fresh mag, and burst from the command and control room. At the end of the spur, a line of mining vehicles was trundling down the causeway from the project site. I raced alongside them, arriving at the blast door to Section 3 as it was opening. I made repeated attempts to radio my teammates, but got the same ominous wall of static as earlier.

  Emerging through the door, I took in the bodies of guards strewn throughout the space. My mind was already in triage mode as I searched for my teammates.

  “Mr. Wolfe!” someone called.

  Yoofi was rising from a corner where he and the entire unit had crouched. The bladed end of his staff shimmered with gold light as the shield he’d formed around them dispersed. Relief dumped through me. I ran over as Sarah, Takara, and Olaf rose behind him, along with the members from Magnum and Gaia.

  “Is everyone all right?” I shouted above the noise of the mining vehicles and klaxons.

  “Yes, Mr. Wolfe. She saw the detonation before it happened.” Yoofi turned to indicate the member from Gaia, Celeste. “She knew where it would come from. I had enough time to put the team under my protection.”

  That explained the commo cutting out—Yoofi’s magic had interfered with the signal. It was back now, but not so for the other units, the concussive blasts no doubt having blown their radios to shit.

  “I could not help everyone, though,” Yoofi said, tears standing in his eyes as he peered past me at the guards.

  I squeezed his shoulder. “You did what you could, and that was exceptional.”

  “What about you?” Sarah asked, looking over the bloodied sleeve of my suit.

  “We hit some unexpected snags, but we’re back in the game. I’m going to check on the others. Sarah and Yoofi, I need you. The rest of you, hold the line. You’re the last defense between a force that’s poising to breach the Hangar and Rusty. Purdy’s team has air support incoming. They should be here in about ten.”

  Takara stepped up beside Olaf, who was working the charging handle on his MP88. “We’ve got it,” she said.

  “Damned glad you’re still with us,” I told everyone.

  I took lead down the causeway, paralleling the vehicles that were still evacuating. Yoofi and Sarah followed until we were entering Section 2, the workshop. The scatter of machines suggested the pattern of detonation. The death count was higher here, mechanics and machinists among the fallen.

  I found Jana and her unit off to one side, all of them down against a wall.

  “I tried to take the cloaking spell,” Yoofi panted as he ran behind me, “and turn it into protection. I see that it did not work.”

  We arrived over them. The men of Magnum had attempted to cover Gaia with their bulky armor, shielding them from the brunt of the concussive blast. I pulled teammates from atop one another, and laid them gently on their backs. One member of Magnum was dead, the force having driven him into the wall at an angle that snapped his neck. The others appeared stunned and concussed, but they were breathing.

  “They are alive?” Yoofi asked in amazement.

  “Thanks to a combo of your magic and their fast thinking,” I said.

  When Jana tried to sit up, a hand palming her head, I knelt beside her. “Everything’s all right. Let Sarah check you out.” Her bloodshot eyes sharpened with understanding as I helped her back down. Behind me, Sarah already had her medical kit out as she began triaging the wounded.

  “Stay and help her,” I told Yoofi. “I’m heading to Section 1.”

  Was it too much to hope that Dante and his team had fared as well? I was halfway to the causeway when Purdy’s man radioed. “The hostile unit is breaching the Hangar. Air is still five minutes out.”

  “Headed to Section 1 now,” I grunted, picking up speed. I needed to get to my teammates, presumably down, before the hostiles did. It was a question of how long it would take the hostiles to access and descend the ramp.

  Rusty’s voice broke in. “Uh, boss?”

  “What is it?”

  “I was able to drain off the competing power, but for those few minutes we were butting heads, it created a big honking wobble. And I mean big. I’m not sure I can put it down.”

  “What does that mean?”

  Loud knocks sounded from Engineering, and the entire Hangar shuddered.

  “A breach is opening in the danged wormhole!”

  32

  It was the human screams that stopped me in my tracks. They were coming from the project site, and their insanity told me everything. Not only was the wormhole breaching, something was coming through. My need to get to Dante and his unit in Section 1 collided with the urgency—the enormous urgency—of the new threat.

  “I’m pulling the plug!” Rusty shouted.

  The theory behind the gradual power-down had been to decrease the risk of destabilizing the system and opening a breach. With that out the window, Rusty wanted to go full bore and collapse the entire wormhole.

  “That’s a no go,” I said. “We need to clear the area first. I’m heading for the breach.”

  I looked over at where Sarah and Yoofi were treating the wounded, healing magic falling from Yoofi’s staff. They had heard the same communications as me, about the hostiles and the breached wormhole.

  “When enough of the injured are stable,” I radioed them, “I want you to split. One team to Section 1 to recover Dante’s unit and engage the hostiles. Another team to the wormhole. Make the call, Sarah.”

  “Copy that,” she replied.

  In Section 3, Takara and Olaf joined me. We ran past the open blast door and into Engineering. Beyond the spur to the command and control area, the exodus of mining vehicles were bunching into a growing pileup. Past them, through the far blast door, I got my first glimpse of the Crios moon. The section I could see was brown and gritty, as if a sand storm were blowing through.

  That was where the screams were coming from.

  As we passed the vehicles, I took in the panicked faces of drivers. Signaling for Takara and Olaf to keep going, I stopped at the beginning of the pileup, where a thickly bearded man was grinding his gears. He didn’t seem to notice that the front end of his truck was flush against the next vehicle.

  “What’s going on?” I shouted, stepping onto the running board.

  The man was dressed in what looked like a space suit, a helmet on the seat beside him. He stared back at me through the window in utter incomprehension, the blanched skin pulled taught around his eyes. At last he lowered the window. “M-monsters,” he babbled. “And ships. Huge eating ships.”

  Eating ships?

  “What’s your name?”

  “Harvey.”

  “All right, Harvey, listen to me. We’re going to cover your evacuation, but I need you to organize this mess. You’re in charge of getting this line moving again, making sure everyone gets out. Do you understand?”

  He blinked twice, as if snapping to, and nodded. He let the vehicle ahead of him separate and began barking commands into his headset. I dropped back to the causeway and caught up to Olaf and Takara. Together, we raced past the stalled exodus, arriving at the second blast door. Ahead, an airlock-like conduit led onto a dirt road. I passed through first and took in the incredible scene.

  We were in an enclosure as large as Dallas Stadium. The walls and domed ceiling were made of riveted steel that hummed with power. Various outbuildings stood around valved pipes and a dizzying array of catwalks. The far end was open, some sort of field separating the space from the Crios moon beyond. The dirt road we stood on was the sand tracks left by the fleeing vehicles.

  The final vehicle roared from the field, the bug-eyed driver repeating, “Oh my God oh my God,” in a staccato shout.

  I squinted past him and into the storm ravaging the moon’s surface. The Project had walled off an area the size of a county in a clear plastic enclosure—the mining site. Through the haze, a massive complex of towers and steel latticework stood to one side of a vast pit. According to Beam, the enclosure was pumped full of Nitrogen and Oxygen to mimic the Earth’s atmosphere and enable the workers to operate without sophisticated equipment. But the sand storm blowing in indicated the enclosure had been compromised.

  In the middle distance, several vehicles had toppled. I picked out the figures of miners who had tried and failed to flee. Massive silhouettes moved among them, gas spewing from their cannon-like arms, reducing the miners to liquid.

  “Defilers!” I shouted.

  I raised the MP88 to my shoulder, but there were hundreds of them—no, thousands—and our store of lumina was low. Purdy had given us all that remained. That wasn’t the worst of it. I signaled a hold fire to Takara and Olaf and stared.

  Something was taking form through the storm. Something massive. Armor plated, the size of an aircraft carrier, and gliding a quarter mile above the surface of the Crios moon, it was almost beyond comprehension. Tentacle-like appendages writhed from its underside as jets of toxic gasses spewed down over the mining complex. Half of the complex sagged and collapsed. Workers plummeted. New appendages appeared from the creature and probed among the wreckage. Through the appendages’ translucence, I could see materials being siphoned up into the body of the thing.

  Huge eating ships, the fleeing driver had called them.

  The invading beings might have carried a deadly pathogen, but the point wasn’t to spread plague. In its concentrated form, the pathogen broke down organic forms. The ultimate purpose was liquification and consumption.

  Two more of the ship creatures appeared behind the first. During a brief lull in the storm, I could see even more. We were witnessing the front end of a massive armada. Gas continued to jet down, the appendages siphoning up anything with organic value. I pictured it going into roiling digestive pools somewhere in the being’s core. The Defilers marched from the destruction en masse. Giant slug creatures, like the one we’d faced in Amazonas, slithered among them, ready to manufacture more weaponized lifeforms.

  And they were all converging toward the field.

  In a flash, I saw them pouring over the surface of the Earth, immune to conventional weapons, breaking down and consuming everything in sight. Houston would be gone by morning. The rest of the world would follow quickly. Words like doomsday and apocalypse fell short of the kind of devastation they would wreak.

  Waving Olaf and Takara back, I radioed Rusty. “Pull the plug.”

  “It’s all clear?”

  Though I’d looked for ways we might recover any workers who hadn’t made it out, the tragic fact was that the ones who hadn’t made it out were gone now. “Pull it,” I repeated. “Invaders incoming.”

  “Incoming? Oh, shit. Shutting down.”

  My teammates and I backed from the field, weapons raised. The banks of industrial lights overhead flickered, then went out. Emergency lights replaced them. The humming in the walls wound down.

  “Power’s off,” Rusty radioed. “There might be a delay, but the wormhole should close any second.”

  The three of us watched the field and the approaching army beyond. We were waiting for the nightmare image to disappear, for the hole that joined our world with the moon to close, sealing Earth from the breach to the invaders’ realm. In the silence, Olaf’s harsh breaths sounded like a bellows.

  “It’s not closing,” I radioed Rusty.

  “Oh, man,” he replied in a panic. “I’m staring at a monitor for the wormhole, and the danged thing looks like it’s self-sustaining.”

  My heart rate picked up. “What do you mean?”

  “Just that,” he said. “The wormhole took a crap-ton of power to create, but maybe from being open for so long it thinks it’s a part of the universe now. It doesn’t need the power. It just—hell, I don’t know—it just exists.”

  “Then how do we close it?”

  “That’s what I’m trying to tell you, boss. We can’t!”

  “No,” I said, my voice strangely calm. “Wrong answer.” I owed Rusty my life from earlier, but I wasn’t going to accept that from him or anyone else. “We can’t” meant surrendering and dying. “We can’t” meant letting these disease-ridden mofos eradicate seven billion people and the most beautiful planet I knew. And selfishly, maybe, “we can’t” meant not returning home to my wife.

  When Rusty began to babble, I cut him off.

  “Forget the power source,” I said. “Forget the tech. Tell me about the wormhole. You say it’s self-sustaining, but what sustains it?”

  “E-electromagnetic forces.”

  “Is there a way to disrupt them?”

  “With a massive detonation at the interface, maybe.” Rusty’s voice steadied as he began problem solving. “If that overcame the forces, the whole thing would collapse. But we don’t have that kind of ordnance.”

  “We have lumina,” I said.

  “Lumina?”

  “Part of Purdy’s premonition was that the lumina would play a role.”

  And Purdy had been right a lot lately. I took aim at the base of the field and released a burst of lumina-laced grenade rounds. They detonated in a string of thuds, sending up ripples like pebbles hitting a pond.

  “That did something!” Rusty said excitedly.

  “Yeah, but not enough.” And the alien army was coming closer.

  “What about Yoofi?” Takara said. “He’s still endowed with the power of the lumina, right?”

  Splats landed ahead of us. The lead Defilers were close enough to the field that we were almost in range of their cannons. Olaf and I returned volleys of automatic fire as we retreated behind a bulldozer. Takara contributed with sniper shots. Though sand from the storm wasn’t blowing past the field, our shots were getting out. Defilers collapsed beneath exploding heads. But there were a lot more to replace them.

  “Yoofi, do you copy?” I radioed.

  “Yes, Mr. Wolfe,” he replied in a roar of static. “But we are taking fire at the moment.”

  “Welcome to the club. Where are you?”

  “Section 1.”

  Beyond him, I could hear the bursts and chattering of gunfire. Fein’s forces had accessed the underground.

  “Pull everyone back to Engineering,” I ordered. “Close the blast door behind you. Rusty will lock it. I need you at the wormhole.”

  “Yes, Mr. Wolfe.”

  I radioed Purdy’s man next. “Where’s our air?”

  “Arriving now,” he replied. “What are your orders?”

  “Light up any hostiles still outside,” I said. “Then send in the backup force. Have them clear the Hangar all the way to Engineering. We need hostiles neutralized and friendlies evacuated. Alien invaders are poised to breach.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  I turned to Takara and Olaf, who were shooting around our vehicle’s massive wheels. “I’ll hold them off,” I shouted. “I need you to help out the others. If you can, bring a couple of these big guys back with you,” I said, cocking my head at our protection. The biological attack would eat through them eventually, but at eight tons of carbon steel they would provide good cover in the meantime.