Ducking low, Hayden pushed the door open. There was no barrage of firepower. No ambush. No attack at all to greet him. The open door revealed a room shrouded in gloom, limited illumination coming from a series of active computer monitors spaced around the room. Each screen showed the same message.

  Network data wipe complete.

  Not unexpected but still disappointing.

  He scanned the space, his eyes landing on a bank of large towers sitting against the back wall, red and green lights flashing across the top of each one. A computer mainframe.

  Silhouetted in the flickering lights, a man hunched over the only terminal near the towers.

  “Rasha,” Hayden said, straightening to his full height and moving into the room, still wary of an attack coming from the shadows.

  “You were supposed to be dead, Sheriff Duke,” Rasha said without turning away from the computer. “And that was before I sent nearly every Centurion at my disposal out there to kill you.”

  “Step away from the terminal.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  Hayden could hear him tapping on keys, probably working to delete whatever was on the mainframe. It had to be a separate system from the one the tech had wiped. Larger, more complex, and not nearly as quick to wipe clean.

  “Turn around, Colonel,” Hayden snapped.

  “Or what? I’ve heard the stories, Sheriff. The legends. I know most of them are bullshit, but they all have a ring of truth. Like that you’re too damn honorable to shoot a man in the back. Isn’t that right?” Rasha continued typing.

  Even though it would be a trivial matter to shoot Rasha in the back, the Custodian was right. It wasn’t in his nature to kill someone when he couldn’t see their face. Besides, you couldn’t get information out of a dead man.

  Hayden broke from the doorway, charging across the room to get to the Custodian. The layout forced him to go around a bank of terminals, slowing him down and putting him on Rasha’s right flank.

  Rasha heard him coming. He picked up a sidearm laying on the terminal and turned it on Hayden. Expecting the move, Hayden ran toward the man, dropping into a slide across the slick tile, three rounds from Rasha’s gun zipping over his head.

  Popping up at the end of the slide, Hayden grabbed the Custodian’s gun hand at the wrist, his momentum driving Rasha backward into one of the terminals. He pinned Rasha’s gun hand against the machine and shoved the Axon gun into the man’s side.

  “Predictable,” Hayden said, holding the Custodian in place. His eyes narrowed when he noticed the label on the computer next to Rasha’s head.

  GRIMMEL CORPORATION

  Rasha took advantage of Hayden’s distraction, driving his knee up into Hayden’s groin and shoving him off-balance. The Custodian broke free and threw a hard cross into Hayden’s jaw. Still recovering from the low blow, he absorbed the punch, regaining his focus in time to smack the gun out of Rasha’s hand. Hayden backed away, bringing the Axon weapon back in line with the Custodian.

  “Don’t,” Hayden said.

  Rasha froze again, putting up his hands.

  “What do you know about Grimmel?” Hayden asked.

  “More than you ever will,” Rasha replied, suddenly pulling a knife from his belt and lunging at Hayden.

  Hayden fired, the Axon round sinking into Rasha’s chest. Hayden turned his face away as it exploded, but gore still doused his cheek and chest. He caught the Custodian before he hit the floor.

  Rasha was already dead.

  “Son of a bitch.” Hayden lowered his body to the floor.

  Wiping his cheek on his upper arm, he turned to the terminal and tapped on the keyboard, using a command Natalia had taught him to freeze the progress of the wipe Rasha had initiated. A box popped up on the screen, asking if he wanted to cancel the erase. He confirmed the cancellation, the machine prompting him for a password. Hayden entered the master code and the progress bar vanished.

  He hadn’t gotten anything from Rasha. Maybe there was something on the mainframe that would offer clues to both Grimmel and the Custodians’ interest in the alien rock.

  The machine reminded him of a similar mainframe he had found when he confronted Wyatt in the old hospital. His first encounter with Grimmel Corp. That computer had provided information long classified by the USSF regarding the colony ships that had left Earth, including some he hadn’t heard of before. What secrets did this one have to share? He would take whatever he could get.

  He leaned over the keyboard, entering commands to bring up the file system and begin navigating through it. He wasn’t sure what to look for, so he entered a search query based on the data he had recovered from the earlier location.

  FORESIGHT

  A blank screen with a cursor appeared. It began filling in a moment later, offering scrambled names of files in a multi-columned list. The data was mangled by the wipe, partially erased and mostly useless. Only one file, named Specs.pdf offered some hope.

  Hayden opened the file, standing up straight as a three-dimensional blueprint of a starship appeared on the screen. The label in the corner designated it as the USSF Foresight.

  It was nothing like the other generation ships that had carried the original settlers from Earth to Proxima. While they were colony ships, the Foresight appeared to be something else. Long and sleek like a needle, covered in something the document called Axonium that Hayden figured must be the same black Axon alloy the microspear was made of.

  But if the Foresight had launched around the same time as the generation ships, well before the Space Force had supposedly known anything about the Axon material let alone acquired any of it, how the hell had they gotten hold of enough of it to manufacture the Foresight? The craft was nearly half a kilometer long but most of it seemed to be occupied by the engines, only a small segment near the center reserved for occupants. It held berthing for six in shared racks, a small mess and head, a bridge, an armory. And something called a prep room. There were no external weapons on the craft.

  It was curious, but nothing groundbreaking. Judging by the engines, the Foresight was fast. Maybe even faster-than-light fast. Hayden guessed it was probably a scout ship of some kind. Maybe it had reached Proxima before any of the generation ships had reached their destinations. Maybe it was the reason they had been redirected to the same planet instead of going their separate ways.

  It didn’t matter anymore. It was ancient history.

  Almost.

  The one thing that stuck out to Hayden was its origin. Unlike the other starships that had fled Earth, the Foresight was designed and built by the Grimmel Corporation, not directly manufactured through USSF channels. He knew a lot of the history of the arrival of the trife, the war that followed, and the fate of humankind up till now. He had never heard of any of this before. It piqued his curiosity, but left him wondering what any of it had to do with the Custodians.

  Hayden closed the document and entered another query, this time for the Grand Custodian. Nothing came back. He tried Jade. Again, nothing. Ruger, Marcus, Houston. No data. Those details had probably been on the network the other Custodian had erased.

  Searching for info on the trife brought back plenty of results, most of them garbled by the delete and the few that weren’t not overly useful, especially with them gone from the planet. Aware of the minutes ticking past and the others waiting outside, he stepped back, trying to reason out what to search for. Then he leaned back in to type in another entry.

  RELYEH

  The screen filled with mangled filenames and folders, along with a few that were intact. One of the files was named ImpactLog.csv. Hayden opened it. A comma-separated list of dates, times, coordinates, short notes and reference names appeared on the screen. It wasn’t the list itself that caught his attention. It was the entry dates. Nearly all of them had occurred more than ten years after the arrival of the trife. After Earth was supposed to have been nothing more than a post-apocalyptic wasteland. But somebody had been here, logging something. Not the Custodians. It was too early in the timeline for them.

  It had to have been the Grimmel Corporation. Kyle Grimmel.

  But the Custodians had access to this mainframe. And they had captured some amount of the data from it. They likely knew about this list, and even more likely had already investigated the locations. Was the alien rock on this list? Hayden was willing to bet it was. And if it was, that meant his fear that they had recovered a Relyeh asteroid, a transport vessel for the trife, was founded in reality. Knowing what Grimmel had done to Wyatt in trying to turn him into an Earthborn Relyeh, the growing connections left a yawning pit in his stomach.

  What if the Custodians had picked up where Grimmel left off? What if they were trying to succeed where Kyle, or maybe his AI creation, had failed? Had they scuttled the bunker outside Natch City to keep him from making the connection? Or had there been something even more sinister hiding at the bottom of that elevator shaft?

  He would probably never know.

  What he did know was that the Grimmel AI believed it could protect Earth by creating an entity that would become part of the Relyeh hierarchy. It would mean sacrificing a portion of humankind to keep that entity fed. To the AI, some slaves were better than no humans at all. In this way, humankind as a whole survived. And if the entity needed humans, was it better to lay claim to Proxima too by joining them in on the fun? Is that why the Custodians wanted ships? Was the promise of war a distraction from their true purpose?

  Hayden stared at the list. He was sure some of his questions, hunches and suppositions were wrong. But he was also sure there were nuggets of truth buried in all of them. He had confidence he was at least at the edge of what the Custodians were doing and possibly even why. But that still left where.

  And that was the most important question of all.

  It was also the question none of what he had found could answer. The main reason he had come to Fort Hood in the first place. He didn’t want to leave empty-handed.

  He wouldn’t. He would leave more concerned about the future of humankind than he had been when he arrived.

  It looked like he had to go to Haven after all.

  20

  Marcus

  “King? Is that how you refer to your old man? Like we’re friends?”

  Marcus continued staring at the man. He looked almost the same as the day he had left Sanisco. Dark hair with thick mutton chops, a large square jaw, beady eyes and a huge frame that looked more portly than muscular, though Marcus knew the look was deceiving. Unlike Bauer, King’s uniform was slightly stained and disheveled, and fit poorly across his broad chest.

  “Well?” King said. “Answer me, boy.”

  “Father,” Marcus managed to squeeze out, fighting the fear still holding onto his inner child. Why should he be afraid of his father? He had been eager for a chance to return to Sansico to kill him. Now that opportunity was staring him in the face, a twisted smile on fat lips. “I thought you were dead.”

  King stormed toward him, each step like an earthquake in Marcus’ gut. “And I thought Sheriff Duke was dead. But it seems we’ve both been misinformed.”

  “What?” Marcus said. “The Sheriff is dead. I killed him.” He put his hand to his chest. “Got him right here, just like you taught me. There’s no way he survived that hit.”

  King stopped close enough Marcus could smell the man’s last meal on his breath. “Then why the hell did I get an emergency message not five minutes ago that Fort Hood was under attack, and the grepping Sheriff is responsible?” He screamed the question so loudly that spittle and offal smacked into Marcus’ face. “Why are they unresponsive now?”

  Marcus retreated a step, still fighting his instinct to cower in front of his father. “He was a goner,” he insisted. “Nobody survives that shot.”

  “The grepping Sheriff does,” King growled. “You always were a grepping failure, Marcus. The biggest mistake I ever made.”

  Marcus took another step back away from his father. The statement dug deep, wounding the child and angering the adult. His hand dropped to his sidearm.

  King laughed again. “What are you going to do, shoot me? You don’t have the balls.”

  Marcus flicked the gun from his armor, swinging it up and pulling the trigger in one quick motion, the round destined for King’s chest.

  A flash of blue light flared in front of the impact point, the bullet vaporized before it made contact.

  King laughed even harder.

  “You have no grepping idea what you’re dealing with,” King said. “No idea at all. The Custodians have tech you wouldn’t believe.”

  Marcus’ jaw clenched, his anger turning to fury. He couldn’t believe his father was the Colonel. Why hadn’t Jade told him? Didn’t she know?

  “Why don’t you try again?” King offered, still mocking him.

  Marcus emptied the magazine of the gun at his father’s chest. Each time, a blue flash caught the slug, reducing it to nothing while King kept laughing.

  Then his father rushed him, moving so quickly Marcus barely had time to react. King’s fist connected with his jaw, the powerful blow knocking him to the floor, waves of pain shooting down his spine.

  “That’s for trying to kill me,” King said, standing over him.

  Marcus looked at the floor, doing his best not to cry. He had spent six years dreaming about the next time he saw his father. Picturing himself in the same position King was in now. He never imagined it would turn out this way. He never imagined he would be back under his father’s boot, and so decisively.

  “What do you want from me?” he asked, looking up at King. “Is this why you called me here? Just to berate me?” It was something his father had done plenty of times in the past.

  “Not this time, pansy,” King replied. “I had Rogers bring you here because whether the Sheriff is dead or not, putting a bullet in him still goes a long way with me, and you can make yourself useful for once. Get up.”

  Marcus pulled himself to his feet, ignoring the pain and swelling in his jaw. It hurt like hell just to speak. “You say the Sheriff attacked Fort Hood?”

  “Are you dumb and deaf? That’s what I said.”

  “Why would he do that?”

  “He’s still looking for us. But he doesn’t know where to look. It’s kind of funny, if you think about it.” He laughed again. “He’ll learn we’re in his old stomping grounds sooner or later, but I expect we’ll be done by then.”

  “Done with what?”

  “I’m going to show you, dumbass. That’s the whole reason I brought you here. It damn well wasn’t for this sad family reunion.”

  Marcus did his best to keep his emotions in check, both the rejection and the anger. He put his empty sidearm back against his hip, making eye contact with King and forcing himself to hold it. “What about my arm?”

  “What about my arm?” King mocked in a singsong voice. “What about my jaw? Waaah! Grepping baby. You shouldn’t have lost your damn arm. We don’t have any way to replace it right now. It’ll have to wait. Follow me.”

  King walked past Marcus, headed for the elevator. Marcus spun around behind him, tempted to reload and try shooting his old man in the back, just to see if he was equally protected all around.

  Not that he could reload easily with one hand.

  “Let’s go, dipshit,” King said, glaring back at him over his shoulder.

  Marcus started moving, catching up to King as he entered the elevator. His father tapped the controls to bring them back to the lobby before leaning casually against the side of the cab without speaking.

  “Why did Jade tell me you were dead?” Marcus asked after a few seconds of silence.

  “I’m just the Colonel to the Custodians,” King replied. “They don’t know much about my past life, except for the Grand Custodian. It’ll be more fun that way if Duke ever catches up to me.”

  “But she must have had some cause to think Sheriff Duke had killed you?”

  “Oh yeah. He did a number on me. I’ve got the scars to prove it. But I’m a grepping god, Marcus. You can’t kill a god. You can’t kill the son of a god either. That’s probably why you’re still alive, as weak as you are. That was Ghost’s problem. He wasn’t the real deal.”

  Marcus remembered his father’s favorite Courier. Ghost had always been kinder and more understanding than most of the people who orbited King. They had never been that close, but he had at least tried to act like a brother from time to time. “He’s dead, then? For real?”

  “Unfortunately. If I had a choice, I would have picked him over you any day. But I’ll take what I can get, I suppose.” He laughed.

  “It’s not like you to take orders from anyone else,” Marcus said. “But you’re working for the Custodians. You’re under their thumb. Some god you are.”

  King’s fist hit Marcus’ stomach before he knew what had happened, leaving him doubled over on the floor of the cab, coughing and trying to catch his breath.

  “You watch your mouth, boy,” King said. “I can find someone else to do this. I don’t need you to tell me what I can or can’t, will or won’t do. I have my reasons. I’m biding my time. It’s called a plan. It’s called patience. It’s called intelligence. You lack all three.”

  Marcus forced himself back up. He needed to be more careful with his words, at least until he could get into a better situation. He couldn’t do anything against his father right now. Not when bullets didn’t work. And he only had one arm.

  The cab reached the lobby, the doors sliding open ahead of them. King stepped out ahead of Marcus, met there by Major Bauer.

  “Colonel,” Bauer said, coming to attention.

  “At ease, Major,” King replied. “I’m taking Marcus to see it.”

  “Yes, sir,” Bauer said, smiling. “Do you want me to accompany you?”

  “Sure, why not?”

  Bauer fell in with Marcus as King led them, not to the front of the lobby, but through a door off to the side that led into a long corridor away from the main part of the tower. A faded sign still clinging to the wall offered directions to the loading dock, the same direction King started walking.