The soldiers waved at the dropship as it passed over them. They landed on the tarmac near one of the large hangars where the Liberator vehicles and equipment were kept. A pair of armed and armored officers were already waiting for him there, along with a car to take him wherever he asked to go.

  Nathan stood as the ship touched down. Pyro started to stand too.

  “Stay here,” Nathan said. “I’m going to get those clusters loaded ASAP, and I want you airborne again. We might have enough time to do two runs if we can move fast enough.”

  “I can deliver them fast enough,” Pyro said, regaining her seat.

  “I know you can. You have the bridge.” Nathan squeezed her shoulder before hurrying from the bridge and down into the cargo hold. He stepped back into his powered armor, waiting while robotic arms closed it around him. He moved out to the back and opened the rear ramp.

  “General Stacker,” Major Bushi said. Short and thin, he didn’t have the look of a soldier, but he had the spirit of one. He was standing with Colonel Daw, an older, grizzled former scavenger with thin white hair and a stubbly, wrinkled face. and only half his original teeth.

  Nathan activated the suit’s external speakers. His voice came out deeper and more synthetic through them. “Bushi, find Captain Jonas. I want the dropship loaded with cluster rockets ten minutes ago.”

  “Yes, sir,” Major Bushi said, sprinting toward the hangar.

  “Colonel, I want you leading the defense of the wall.”

  “That’s why I’m here, sir,” Daw replied. “Burke says we’re looking at sixty-thousand of the bugs.”

  “We’re hoping to drop those numbers a bit, but yes. They’ll be at the wall within the hour.”

  “We’ll be at the wall within twenty minutes, General.”

  “Follow me.”

  Nathan headed away from the dropship. He could hear Captain Jonas’ harsh shouting behind him, screaming at her techs—“Get the damn cluster rockets loaded already! What the hell is taking so long?” He appreciated her enthusiasm.

  He made his way to the head of the assembled soldiers. An entire company was already assembled, another getting into position further afield. He increased the volume on his speakers as he came to a stop in front of them.

  “AT-TEHN-SHUN!” he snapped, the word reverberating through the speakers.

  A thunderclap sounded as a thousand men and women straightened and clicked their booted heels together.

  “Every last one of you came to Edenrise searching for the same things. Security, freedom, family, community,” Nathan said. “Every last one of you volunteered to become part of the USSF, and to carry on the traditions of our ancestors as defenders of our way of life, but here in the city and out there beyond the shield—you’re warriors. Fearless and brave.” He paused for a moment, walking down the front line. He could see the fear in some of the soldier’s eyes. He could see resolved fury in others. “I don’t know why the trife decided today was a good day to pick a fight. I don’t know why they’re teaming up against us. What I do know is that we’re the USSF, this is our home and shield or no, those bastards aren’t getting in!”

  “Hoorah!” the soldiers shouted in reply, their cry loud enough to echo across the entire city.

  Nathan couldn’t hear Colonel Daw’s orders as he passed them to each of the leaders through his comm, and a moment later the platoons began to move out. They would cut through the city along cordoned streets back to the wall, where they would ascend to the top and wait for the hell to come.

  The plans for defending the city had been drawn up a long time ago and practiced every year on John Stacker Day, in honor of the first General Stacker, who had kept the war against the trife on Earth going long after the generation ships had fled and who had founded the original Edenrise. Nathan was a clone of the general, a spitting image of the famous war hero.

  That practice was paying off now, keeping the troops organized as they deployed to their defensive positions. Nathan went across the field to Second Company and repeated his short speech, sending them out with boosted morale before crossing the fields to the Third. Edenrise had five companies in total, each boasting between one thousand and twelve hundred soldiers. Fifty-six hundred humans against sixty-thousand trife.

  He was glad they had the shield.

  He turned when he heard the dropship rising behind him, and he watched as it circled the spire, ascending away and past the shields. The trife were getting close, enough so that he was able to use the zoom on his armor’s visor to keep the ship in view as Pyro dropped the clusters across one of the slicks. He heard the explosions in the distance, though not as far in the distance as he would have liked. Then the ship circled back, re-entering the energy field within ten minutes from launch and repeating the process one more time.

  Nathan didn’t have time to linger and watch the second run. He joined the Fifth on their march west to the wall.

  “Major Bushi,” he said through his comm as he walked.

  “Yes, General,” Bushi replied.

  “Have a transport loaded with rounds for my rifle and have it positioned near the center of the wall.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Nathan checked his levels. The suit had recharged some while it was plugged into the dropship, returning the battery to ninety percent. Extended heavy use would drain the supply in about four hours, after which the powerful armor would become a useless iron prison.

  There was no way the battle was going to last four hours. He expected to either be celebrating or dead within two.

  26

  Nathan

  Nathan stood at the top of the outer wall along with every last one of the fifty-eight hundred soldiers in his military. They spread from one end of the curved barrier to the other—men and women in various degrees of protection and uniform, their equipment reflecting their rank and skill. The people waiting on either side of Nathan wore full Centurion combat armor, the rarest equipment they had on hand. Others wore lesser Edenrise-produced uniforms, reinforced across the arms, chest and legs, with simple steel helmets to protect their heads. Still others wore basic utilities—dark green, slightly faded and threadbare. The newest recruits on the wall didn’t have official uniforms, having to settle for their already worn clothes and a hand-me-down rifle from the general stores.

  The defensive plans called for spreading the capacity evenly across the wall, leaving the view across the barrier identical from either direction. The soldiers intermingled to provide maximum protection to all sections of the secondary defense.

  Nathan was at the center of the force, standing directly over the main gate into the city. Normally, a special hood was extended outward from the entrance into the energy field, creating a barrier so people could get past the shields without having to shut them down. But the hood had been retracted in preparation for the assault. Edenrise had been buttoned up to hopefully keep the enemy completely out.

  A series of explosions sounded in the distance, visible to Nathan from his position. The last of the cluster rockets sank into the ranks of trife, marked by fireballs close to the horizon.

  The head of the trife river wasn’t as far back as Pyro’s attack. Not anymore. The front line of demons had converged two klicks out. While Nathan had held out hope the trife from competing nests would attack one another on sight, he wasn’t surprised when they continued his way en masse.

  They were within a kilometer now, a group so large and dense it appeared as though a black sea spilled over the land, the flood headed right for them. He had never seen anything like it before, and judging by the looks on the faces of the soldiers around him, he wasn’t the only one who was afraid.

  He opened his comm to every soldier who had one.

  “Get ready,” he said.

  Rifles went up in a ragged line, every soldier leveling their weapon in the general direction of the incoming tide. The alien hissing was like the roar of an engine echoing across the landscape, the thousands of pounding clawed feet a backbeat from hell.

  Nathan could hear his heart thumping in his ears. He could almost feel the flow of his blood moving through his veins. Every emotion seemed to coalesce. Fear, anger, impatience. Excitement even. He was a clone of the greatest Space Force General who had ever lived. War was in his genes, and right now he had a choice to either shirk from the coming violence or embrace it.

  He decided he would embrace it.

  “Steady,” he said. “Hold your fire unless they breach the shields.”

  Nathan glanced up as the dropship shot overhead, banking to circle the field. By the time he looked down again the trife had broken into an all-out charge.

  “Here we go!”

  The creatures hissed even louder as they ran, rushing at the wall with reckless abandon, their vocalizations drowning out all other ambient noise. Steady on the wall, the USSF soldiers shifted their aim to follow the demons as they crossed the relatively open terrain, their feet kicking up clouds of dust and debris.

  Nathan grabbed the rifle from his back, checking the feed before hoisting it in one powerful hand. He had nearly twenty boxes of ammo waiting in the back of a truck directly behind him. All he had to do was jump down from the wall, reload and hop back up to resume shooting.

  He still hoped there wouldn’t be a need.

  The entirety of the USSF army held its collective breath as the first of the trife began to reach the shields. They watched as the demons hit the barrier, creating bright flashes as the shield blasted them with crackling energy.

  By the tens, then by the hundreds, they threw themselves into the barrier , causing the entire side of the shield to glow brightly.

  It didn’t matter to them how many of their number died. They continued to charge, pushing one another out of the way to be the next to burn alive.

  Ten seconds passed. Twenty. Nearly five thousand trife had already succumbed to the energy barrier, forcing those behind them to claw their way up the growing pile of corpses, only to die too when they reached the shield.

  Thirty seconds. Forty. More trife went up against the shield, joining the mass of corpses at the base. Some of them toppled and rolled back down while some stayed forward, splayed out against the barrier. Trapped in place.

  Nathan found his attention fixed on those trife. Glaring at the bodies at the bottom of the pile, he could see how the continued contact with the shield was cooking the dead, turning their flesh and bone into a charred mess. It shifted the smell in the area from bad to worse, the scent of the dying and the dead becoming nauseating

  Still, not a single trife had gotten through the shield. Not a single shot had been fired. There had to be more than ten-thousand dead along the wall.

  Maybe it could absorb the assault after all.

  “General, we have a problem,” Lieutenant Burke said as if sensing his growing hope and choosing that moment to crush it.

  “What is it?” Nathan replied without taking his eyes off the awful scene below him.

  “Goya in engineering says the spire convertor is overloading because of the constant, escalating drain on the system.”

  “They’re building up on the walls like water against a dam,” Nathan said. “How do I get them clear?”

  The reply wasn’t immediate. Burke relayed the question to Goya, who relayed his answer back.

  “Sir,” Burke said. “According to Goya, we can’t do a damn thing.”

  Nathan had expected the engineer to say that. He still didn’t like hearing it.

  “How long do we have?”

  “Three minutes. Maybe less.”

  Nathan looked out at the army of trife. They were still coming, still dying against the shield, with no end in sight.

  In three minutes, Edenrise’s shields would go down.

  In three minutes, forty thousand trife would have unfettered access to breach the walls.

  In three minutes, the world was going to end.

  If he was going to die, then he wanted to go down fighting.

  He was about to get his chance.

  27

  Nathan

  Nathan didn’t get three minutes.

  He barely got thirty seconds.

  The trife continued throwing themselves into the energy shield, the pile rising, the drain on the shield critical. The smell itself was almost intolerable. He could hear some of the soldiers on the line coughing and vomiting, sickened and weak from the odor and the sheer volume of death. The trife were taking his people out of the fight without doing anything more than sacrificing themselves on the shield.

  “Burke,” he said, contacting his Lieutenant in the control room.

  “Yes, General?”

  “Tell Goya to turn off the shield.”

  “What?”

  “You heard me, damn it! Turn it off.”

  He switched to the global comm. “Space Force, fire at will.”

  The order seemed to snap the soldiers out of their sickness, forcing them to focus on the defense or wind up in even worse shape. Nathan felt the shield begin to subside, a pressure he hadn’t realized was there, lifting away from him. The pile of dead trife tumbled inward, knocking the living front of the wave off-balance and throwing them forward into the base of the wall. The front line of soldiers aimed straight down off the edge, hundreds of guns firing into the masses.

  The wall shook from the sound and force, and thousands of trife died in the first few seconds, torn apart by the massive barrage. Nathan didn’t waste his rounds shooting into single trife below. Instead, he aimed further out, launching large rounds at the enemy powerful enough to rip through multiple targets before their kinetic energy was spent. He kept a steady stream going, adjusting his aim and killing hundreds on his own.

  It was impressive.

  It also wasn’t enough.

  The demons surged forward with renewed effort, hissing more loudly as they began latching into the crushed metal of the wall and began to climb. The soldiers executed well, the front line dropping back to reload as the back line came forward, rotating firepower so there was never a break. Thousands of trife died at the base of the wall, but thousands more were there to back them up.

  Nathan jumped down off the wall to reload from the truck, quickly changing out his ammo box for a fresh one. He leaped back up, making it just as the first of the trife came over the top, hissing and lunging at Colonel Daw. The Colonel barely flinched before shooting the first demon in the head.

  Nathan started shooting again, firing downward now to cut through the climbing trife. He took out entire rows at once, but the slick was like a rising tide against the bulwark, still pressing forward and threatening to overwhelm them.

  He heard his first human scream a moment later, as someone on the line was grabbed by a trife and thrown from the wall, down into the mix. The same thing happened again and again, —his people beginning to die.

  “Pyro,” Nathan said. “We need support.”

  “Already on it,” she replied.

  The dropship streaked toward the field. With its load of cluster rockets spent, Pyro fired the four plasma cannons, the large bolts shooting into the middle of the dark army, killing dozens.

  A trife climbed over the wall right in front of Nathan. It rushed him, mouth open to rip him to shreds. Nathan met it with a metal fist. He broke its neck and threw it back off the wall. A second appeared a moment later, killed by a bullet from Colonel Daw.

  “General,” Lieutenant Burke said. “The southern flank is strained. The enemy is about to break through.”

  “Daw!” Nathan snapped. “Move the platoons down to cover the flank. Thin out the center. I’ll hold it.”

  “Yes, General,” Daw replied, still shooting as he sent out new orders.

  “Burke, call up the reserves. They need to hit anything that gets over the wall.”

  “Yes General,” Burke said.

  Nathan’s heart started pumping harder. They were standing firm, but there was just too many of them.

  The soldiers began shifting on the wall, moving laterally to shore up the weakened flank. It left fewer fighters around him, putting pressure on him to hold the middle and keep the trife from breaching the gates.

  Nathan glanced at the status display inside his helmet, noticing he was nearly out of ammo...again. He fired one last barrage into the climbing trife before jumping backward, using his armor’s jets to land smoothly next to the truck. He dropped the used box and grabbed a new one, needing only a few seconds to reload. The dropship soared overhead, completing another strafing run along the line of aliens.

  Nathan heard a scream, and Colonel Daw’s body dropped from the back of the wall, three trife still biting and clawing at him. “Damn it!” Nathan cursed, more trife leaping down from the wall. Another group began hitting the gates, hissing and clawing at them to pierce the metal. “Burke, I need reinforcements on the gate!”

  “General, the reserve is en route, but you need to hold until they can get to you.”

  Nathan fired at the demons coming over the wall, killing a few. Another of his fighters was thrown to the ground beside him, dead.

  Had he made the right decision to relocate forces away from the center to shore up the flanks? Was it possible the trife had shifted the intensity of their attack from the outside to the middle with such precision?

  He knew it was possible. The creatures were smarter than they seemed. He had to do something, or it would be his fault when everyone in Edenrise died.

  His eyes landed on the ammo truck. It was a risk, but he had to take it.