“I …AM…NOT…A …GODDAMN…GUNNY!” Yes, I kept hitting to make sure he got the message. His limp and bloodied body fell to the floor. Message received.

  CHAPTER

  FIFTY

  Hauk drifted behind Koog, who was towing the warhead. After hours of consideration, he’d concluded this was the stupidest thing he’d ever done. Surprisingly, it wasn’t the cold vacuum of space just outside his suit that bothered him as much as the prospect of failure. Koog, on the other hand, didn’t seem to consider danger or failure.

  “Hey, Captain Hauk, you ever wonder why there’s so much empty space out there?”

  “Hauk is fine, or Jordan.” He’d told the kid a dozen times, but the Marine was ignoring that. “To answer your question—no, not really. I haven’t had a lot of time to look out into space and ponder the big mysteries.”

  “Shit, I do.” Koog said. “All the time. I mean, we see shit sometimes, you know? Things we aren’t supposed to talk about. Not like aliens, but you know, lights, like the fast-movers. Crafts or ‘objects’ that travel, well above anything man has come up with, or even weirder objects tagged as asteroids that seem to change trajectories for no reason.”

  They had both taken the meds to sleep for a large part of the mission. They used less oxygen that way, and since there was virtually nothing for them to do until they closed on the target, it helped fight boredom. Now, though, they were both wide awake.

  “So, you believe in aliens?”

  Koog laughed. “I don’t think there’s any doubt, man. Too much out here for just us. Besides, we’ve already found signs of life here in our own solar system. If life is that common, intelligent life must be, too.”

  Hauk had to admit the oversized kid wasn’t stupid. “So, do you think we will find that aliens are the ones who’ve been shadowing us?”

  “Nah, Captain, sir. I mean, I guess it’s possible. I’ve heard some weird tales about what’s going on down there. Seems pretty freaky to me. But I imagine this is just some survivors, maybe from our side, maybe from our enemies, who would love to have the shelter and resources of a full-sized warship but wouldn’t stand a chance in a direct stand-up battle.”

  “Relatively sound battle tactics, Koog. I get the feeling you weren’t always a Space Marine; you guys don’t see that much action.”

  Koog didn’t respond immediately. He seemed to be considering how much he should say. “No, sir, I was MARSOC back, you know… before.”

  “Wow,” Hauk responded, duly impressed. Marine Special Operations. “Force Recon?”

  “I was a specialist attached to a blocking force for a Recon Team. Never quite got the pin. Once the Kaohsiung City fiasco went down… well, I had to make a move.”

  Hauk knew only a little of the Marines’ failure in helping the Taiwanese stand up to the second attempt by the Chinese invading force in the port city several years earlier. It was a doomed mission, too little planning, lousy intelligence, no clear objective, but some politician made the call, and it happened. Chinese state television showed the lines of dead Marines on the beach and paraded out the captured Tier-2 Recon troops like war trophies.

  Taiwan quietly slipped under full Chinese control, and the entire U.S. Marine Corps was deemed too archaic to continue in its current state. No one fought large-scale ground wars anymore, they said. Hauk’s own combat experience called bullshit on that. In his opinion, the Marine Recon and Force Recons would have been just as effective as the RDTs, but the failed mission had left a stink on them they hadn’t deserved. One that reduced the corps to a mere shadow if its former self.

  “But Corporal?”

  Koog understood the dig. “Lance corporal,” he corrected. “But yes, I know I should be further up the line, but I like this position. I enjoy the work, and we fall under Alliance ranks, so the paygrade in the Space Corps is pretty good.”

  “You don’t miss the action?”

  Koog turned until Hauk could see his face. “I’m all but riding an antimatter bomb to an enemy spaceship. Seriously, does it get any better?”

  It wasn’t an antimatter bomb, but Hauk got the point.

  “Changing O2 to final set,” Koog said minutes later before discarding an empty pack of air cylinders into deep space.

  They’d left the Stone Mountain loaded down with extra oxygen supply but had been depleting the cannister packs every few hours. Now, Koog was on his last set, which would give him just over three hours, assuming his respiration remained generally constant, which it probably would not. Hauk’s body mass was significantly less, and his suit still calculated an hour left on his current supply, so he would be out in four, give or take.

  “So, no one waiting for you down there?” Hauk asked, realizing now he was the one wanting to fill the empty space with words.

  “No, nothing serious. Have been getting close to someone onboard the ship, though,” the Marine said in a slightly embarrassed tone.

  Hauk doubted the big guy had any trouble getting ladies. He took a bearing on the Stone Mountain noting the position hadn’t changed. He wondered about the survivors aboard that ship. It was an interesting mix, and any mission from now on would likely be a joint operation involving different branches and specialties. Debra was a good person to handle it. She had command authority and a quick mind; he’d hated losing her out of his unit years earlier, but he understood. He’d made it difficult for her, and he also stood in her way. She would not have an easier career track under someone else. For, just like Koog, Jordan Hauk had turned down numerous promotions as well. He knew where he fit.

  Several hundred miles beneath his feet, he recognized the west coast of Europe just breaking into the daylight. Somewhere down there, his brother was being held prisoner. How many mornings did he have left? This crazy mission was his ticket to get back down there and help find Logan and bring the pain to whoever had done this. In that regard, he wasn’t all that different from that crazy Kovach. In the total darkness, he almost missed Koog frantically signaling.

  On board the Stone Mountain, the military groups had been quietly mobilizing for possible action. No one was expecting a boarding party, but the military is the breeding grounds for rumors, and today, the hotline had been lighting up with one crazy theory after another.

  “It’s the Sixth Wave, man,” one of the engineering crew said to a table of shipmates eating lunch.

  “What in the natural fuck is that, Olsen?”

  The man in the white overalls had a puffy face and far too much time in front of a computer screen instead of the workout room. “A wave of mass extinction events, Shepard. You know, major fucking die-offs like the dinosaurs getting whacked. People have been predicting it for centuries, that we would do something stupid enough to end the human species.”

  “I heard there aren’t even any bodies in the infection zones. Those Army guys said nobody is left in the red zones,” a skinny guy with glasses said.

  Carol looked across the table at the only other occupant. The blonde-haired woman was eating now. It had been her only real concession to reality over the last week. “Don’t listen to their crap,” she told her.

  The blonde looked up briefly, then returned to staring at her tray where she was pushing the food around with a fork.

  “I know it’s not that good, mostly from the synthesizers, but I was thinking. We could organize a real galley crew. Use the food synths to turn out raw ingredients, then we could cook some proper meals. Doesn’t that sound good? “

  The woman said nothing.

  “I was never much of a cook. Heck, even Lux can do better in the kitchen than me, but I feel sure we have some people aboard that have that skill. I bet you can cook, can’t you?”

  The woman was making trails through the pudding-like sludge they were eating today. Several times Carol thought she recognized names before she swirled it back into paste. Carol had been patient with her; she’d studied human behavior at length and knew the signs of PTSD. Still, she needed to make more headway. In the absence of a real psychologist aboard or even a doctor, she might be the only help this woman was going to get. She reached across the table and lay her palm over the woman’s hand.

  “You had children, didn’t you?”

  Carol recognized the sudden flash of rage in the woman’s piercing blue eyes, but just as fast, the blank stare was back. She should let it go; she wasn’t getting anywhere, but no one got to just exist anymore. This girl was going to have to contribute and the sooner the better.

  “Are you sure they’re gone? Mine was missing for weeks before we found him.”

  Slowly, the other woman’s head tilted up, and she locked eyes with Carol. There was an icy hatred there that the older woman couldn’t fathom.

  “Yes. They are dead.” She then rose from the table and leaned in close. Her closeness and aggressive posture caught Carol off guard.

  “Maybe you should be worried about yours instead of mine.”

  A cold shiver ran through Carol. The woman’s bitter and undirected hatred was like an icy hand reaching out of the dark.

  CHAPTER

  FIFTY-ONE

  “Xero, let’s make the Stone Mountain a lot more interesting to our friends out there.”

  “You got it,” Xero called back from her workstation in engineering. She knew she probably should say ‘Roger’ or some other cool military response, but she was happily non-military. Still, she knew what the commander wanted. The floating bomb crew of Hauk and Koog had been out for three hours, and slowly, they had maneuvered from the far side of the ship in relation to the enemy, then dropped as far as possible. Now, they would take several more orbits to move on an intersecting tangent toward a cluster of small orbiting rocks or debris that were in essentially the same vectors.

  The spot had been carefully selected due to the fact that the debris piles were pretty consistent, as they came close to it on every third rotation. Two more hours before the two-man team reached it.

  “You have navigation and vector propulsion.” It wasn’t a lot, not like full control, but they could essentially change the attitude of the large ship. That should keep the ghost ship’s attention on them but not so much that they would reveal themselves.

  “Helm, let’s put on a show for our visitors,” Bayou ordered.

  The pilot smiled and engaged the maneuvering thrusters which caused a rumble through the giant warship but, other than changing the starfield image on the display, accomplished very little. Bayou had laid out this show and knew that was the point. Not to do enough to invite direct action but to keep their focus. All of this was based on a lot of very vaporous assumptions. Assumptions on the ship actually being out there. Of it being the primary cause of the ongoing control problems with the IAS Stone Mountain and of it being a tangible threat.

  She also knew she and the others aboard were essentially pirates. They had boarded the Stone Mountain out of desperation soon after the attacks down below. They had found it nearly abandoned other than a team of maintenance crews who were handling the refit in high-orbit space docks. So, while it was a Space Force asset, Space Force Lieutenant Debra Riggs had no authority to be in control other than what her people entrusted her with. That was enough, though. It was enough to fight for, and until she found a more capable officer to hand over the reins to, she was willing to be it. She’d tried doing that with Kovach, but she’d known his mission would always be back on Earth. Battling an enemy you couldn’t see was just not his style.

  “Ma’am, we have a problem.” It was the comms officer.

  “What do you have?” They were not receiving any comms from the two bombers, not even telemetry because Xero had clarified that the other ship might pick up even the line-of-sight communication signals. Bayou scanned all the external monitors, looking for trouble.

  “Internal sensors, ma’am. Someone on Deck G just triggered the distress alarm.”

  “Seal it off!” Bayou ordered unnecessarily. That was immediate when any alarm activated.

  “Nature of the threat?” She needed to know if it was a breech; did they need engineering? Was it environmental, perhaps the C02 scrubbers had malfunctioned, or God forbid, a fire. Fire aboard a ship was the constant fear.

  “Unknown, ma’am,” the ensign responded.

  The timing automatically made Riggs associate it with the mission on the hostile ship, but presuming connections could get you in trouble. G-deck was three floors below, or above depending on how you oriented yourself. She could see on the big display the signal was on the aft side near the center.

  “Security team Alpha, report in.” Alpha because they had no others. The hastily cobbled together group of soldiers had been organized in just the last few days mainly to help with the growing population. Bayou ordered them to investigate. Sergeant Gi was in charge of the small team mostly pulled from Hauk’s Red-7 with a few of the Marines added for good measure.

  The security team was always armed, but that seemed unnecessary. She’d done it in an abundance of caution just in case someone tried to board. That made her consider, what if someone from the other ship was attempting the same thing they were to the ghost ship? No time to dwell on it, and her gut said that wasn’t the case.

  Another alarm went off farther up G-deck.

  “What the fuck?” she whispered. “Do we have video surveillance in either of those locations?”

  The screen shifted to show split screens. The first showed just an empty corridor. The second clearly showed two dark irregular lines weaving up to and then out of range of the camera.

  “That was blood,” Packer said, momentarily forgetting about his own task.

  Bayou had to agree, it looked precisely like the blood trail a dragging body produced. One that she knew too damn well.

  “Red alert! Ladies and gentlemen, we have an intruder. Get to a secure room and seal it at once.”

  Bayou instantly transformed into combat mode. “Ensign, find the other end of that blood trail and let me know what we are up against.”

  “Gi, we have identified a threat, probably heading directly toward you.”

  “Yes, Boss, we have a casualty in sight,” Gi replied calmly.

  Bayou flipped to her command channel so she could monitor what her sergeant was seeing. A pile of bloody flesh poured out of scraps of a white coverall. Shit, had to be one of the SEs. The space engineers all wore white coveralls.

  “Ensign?”

  “Working on it, ma’am. The trail stopped at the body. The security system is motion activated, so screening back to last marker now.”

  Riggs knew to let her team do their job. While they might not all be her team, they were coming together out of necessity. Still, this crisis drew attention to the challenges of throwing together military from different branches, different specialties, and assuming you could function on a mission. Those were all details they could reevaluate later… if there was a later.

  Xero was busy at her station working to pinpoint the enemy ship’s exact location. They had the relative position of Koog and Hauk, and she had come up with a way of signaling a course correction without using their MilCrypt line of sight comms. As the ship’s position was changing somewhat randomly, she and Hauk had worked out a pattern that he could see from his position that would indicate if he needed to maneuver one way or the other. They were also able to signal by activating or disabling certain running lights for even finer course adjustments. The benefit of the enemy ship being that far away was they really shouldn’t be able to see much of this. The downside was the closer the TDF team got, the less of the signals they would be able to make out as well.

  “It’s doing it again.”

  Xero hadn’t noticed the boy moving up beside her. She held up a finger before relaying one set of corrections up to Packer. “Still picking up the phantom hits?”

  Lux nodded; he liked how Xero took whatever he was working on seriously. Most adults wouldn’t do that, but she was different.

  Xero glanced at the screen to make sure the flight adjustments had been passed correctly. Satisfied, she turned back and took the datapad from the boy. She went over all of his work, his refinement of the sensor array, his meticulous systems test, then dove into the code itself. He was correct, there was no reason for the thing to be picking up heat signatures.

  “Why’s it doing that, Zee?” he asked.

  Xero was still focused on the data and about to answer when she noticed he was looking up past her. She turned to her main screen and immediately saw the red flashing bar showing an alert. She drilled down into the security feeds and realized the threat was internal just before Riggs’ ship-wide announcement. In horror, Xero focused on the location. She and Lux were on G-deck.

  “Lux, where is your bot?” Something else occurred to her, something that in retrospect should have been obvious.

  Minutes later, they were in the outer corridor, the rebuilt service drone leading them both toward what she hoped was safety. Xero quickly used her own datapad to load in some classified combat simulation into the bot’s mainframe AI. She triggered it on to maintain a defensive posture.

  “That’s blood,” Lux said stepping past the streaks. They appeared more brown than red under the artificial lighting, but both knew instantly how dangerous the situation had suddenly become. Xero marveled again at how quickly the boy adapted, first upon hearing that they were in danger and secondly, that his bot was not broken and in fact might be their best bet on finding safety.

  “So, it’s been picking up something real all along?”

  Xero offered a grim smile. She was terrified, but the kid was simply happy his work on the drone hadn’t been flawed. They cautiously moved down the long hall knowing danger could hide behind any of the many hatches. Xero had no plan other than to get her and the child off this deck.