“Thank you, Chief,” Tyson said. “Commander, open the comm.”

  “Aye aye, sir.” Siraj tapped on the control pad and motioned to him.

  “Unidentified vessel,” Tyson said. “This is Captain Tyson Grant of the starship Pioneer. I don’t know if you can hear me, and if so I don’t know if you understand me. Your current course appears to us as a sign of aggression. If you are not hostile, please adjust your course to put more distance between yourself and us. I repeat, please adjust your course.”

  Tyson watched the projection, hoping to see the red chevron change trajectory again. He waited while the seconds ticked away.

  It didn’t budge.

  “Unidentified vessel,” Tyson repeated. “This is Captain—”

  A sudden shrill and terrifying wail through the bridge speakers cut him off. Wincing, Tyson fell to his knees, covering his ears to drown out the sound. It didn’t help. A cacophony of piercing screams permeated his head, the crippling tone leaving him unable to move or think.

  And then, suddenly it was over. Joseph had managed to put on his helmet and use it to filter out some of the sound, allowing him the presence of mind to reach past a frozen Siraj and disconnect the comm. Tyson pulled himself back to his feet before noticing the blood on his hands. He reached up, touching a wet spot near his left ear. Both were still ringing, his head pounding like a bass drum.

  “Captain, if that’s not hostile,” Joseph said, “then I don’t know what hostile is.”

  22

  Grant

  Pioneer. Bridge. 11.11.2052. 1750 hours.

  Tyson stared at the hologram floating above the table. The red chevron was still on an intercept course with Pioneer, and thanks to his attempt to communicate he was reasonably certain it wasn’t benevolent.

  But then, who or what was it, and why did it want to do them harm?

  And, what the hell could he possibly do about it?

  There were no guns on Pioneer. No shields. No defenses at all. The hull was thick enough to take limited hits from small debris, but if the alien ship had any kind of weaponry they were as good as dead.

  Already.

  It seemed to Tyson that nothing had gone right since the launch, as smooth as the actual liftoff had been. First Nash, then Levi, now this. He was being tested beyond anything he had experienced in fifteen years as captain of an aircraft carrier.

  He turned away from the table, hurrying to the command station. “Commander Siraj, I have the conn.”

  “Yes, sir.” Still a bit shaky, Siraj got up and moved away from the command chair she had literally fallen into during the attack. She headed for the secondary station while Joseph remained standing behind the chair, helmet on, a blue light on his boots signalling he had the mag-locks on.

  Tyson sat down and strapped himself in, sliding the seat forward to the control surface. The only thing he could think to do was take evasive action and try to avoid the object. Pioneer was so big compared to the other craft. It couldn’t maneuver or accelerate nearly as well. But it was better to do something than to sit here and wait to be attacked.

  He opened shipwide comms, activating emergency alert status throughout the ship. The faint blare of klaxons in the corridors reached him through the blast doors onto the bridge and then quieted when he activated his microphone to speak.

  “Attention all hands. Attention all hands. Brace for maneuvers. I repeat, brace for maneuvers.”

  He didn’t have much time to give the rest of the ship’s occupants a chance to find somewhere to brace. He hoped the counter-inertial systems would help, picturing the vehicles in Metro tumbling out of control and smashing into the buildings or worse...into people.

  There was nothing he could do about that. A little damage was a fair trade for survival.

  He fired the vectoring thrusters, pushing the port side of the craft and turning Pioneer hard to starboard, watching the trajectories update on the hologram, the ship’s new trajectory updating to move away from the unidentified craft. There was a slight shift in the forces pulling him to the side, but it was lighter than he’d expected.

  He kept turning, watching as the red chevron updated its trajectory, matching Pioneer’s course change to regain its intercept course.

  Tyson stopped the port vectoring, bringing Pioneer up and back relative to port instead, triggering hull and starboard thrusters. He pushed the main thrusters back online, firing them at a heavy burn that shoved him back into his seat. Even Joseph stumbled behind him, grabbing onto Tyson’s chair as the sudden acceleration overpowered his maglocks.

  It took a massive amount of energy to push a ship as heavy as Pioneer, especially to accelerate so quickly. He glanced at the display to the left of his main, watching the battery reserves begin to drop in response.

  Then he returned his attention to the projection above the holotable. Pioneer’s course was suddenly bringing them through ahead of the object and avoiding any potential collision. He held his breath while he waited for the interpolation to update, smiling when the red chevron didn’t adjust course to match. Was it going to let them get away?

  He maintained the acceleration, pushing the main thrusters to maximum even though it was draining the reserves. They could make it up later, once they were free from this threat. The alien object was lagging behind and he wasn’t going to give it a chance to catch up.

  Tyson’s gaze remained fixed on the projection, every second slowly passing. He didn’t blink. Didn’t breathe. He waited for the slightest change in the object’s trajectory, prepared to take more evasive maneuvers to avoid it. But the object continued to fall back and Tyson found himself breathing again.

  Less than a minute later, the object was thousands of kilometers behind them and falling away.

  Until suddenly it wasn’t.

  It had cut the distance nearly in half. The next, half of that. And the next, half again, until it had closed to within a few hundred kilometers, showing an ability to outrun them without difficulty. It was now directly behind Pioneer’s stern, in line with the conspicuously vulnerable thrusters and related assembly.

  “Damn it!” Tyson shouted, pounding the control surface with his fist. “What the hell do you want? Give me the stern feed.”

  “Aye aye, sir,” one of the ensigns said.

  The primary display shifted, showing the view out the back. There was no sign of anything behind them. No glow of thrusters besides their own, no interruption of the light behind them. It was as if the computer thought something was there, but it was wrong.

  The red chevron continued to close, needing only a few more seconds to overlap the green chevron. Even then, there was no sign of anything through the camera feed. Was it just moving too fast?

  And then, the red chevron disappeared.

  “What the—” Joseph said behind him, his voice soft but mechanical coming from behind his helmet.

  “Siraj,” Tyson said. “What just happened? Somebody find the target.”

  “Sir, it’s gone,” one of the bridge crew said.

  “What do you mean gone?”

  “Sensors lost it, sir.”

  “How can that happen? It was right on top of us. Give me a feed of every external camera on the primary display. Cycle through them, two seconds per feed.”

  “Aye aye, sir.”

  The display changed, flipping through the feeds. Meanwhile, the sensors remained blank. The object had literally vanished. Not into thin air. Into no air. A vacuum. It just couldn’t happen.

  Tyson opened a comm to engineering. “Chief Oslo, did something happen to the sensors?”

  “Captain, according to our monitors everything is normal,” Oslo replied.

  The feeds continued swapping every two seconds, showing different views of space from Pioneer’s hull. Nothing. There was nothing. But the cameras were meant to show the view of space around Pioneer, not Pioneer itself.

  He was sure he would know if the object had impacted them.

  What if it had landed instead?

  He looked back at Joseph. “Guardian Prime.”

  “Yes, Captain?” Joseph replied.

  “I need you and your Guardians to search the ship.”

  “Sir, do you think something got inside?”

  “No. Not inside, Prime. Out there.”

  Joseph’s face froze, clearly frightened by the prospect of going out into space. Then he nodded. “Aye aye, sir.”

  23

  Cross

  Pioneer. Airlock. 11.11.2052. 1830 hours.

  Joseph stood in one of Pioneer’s fourteen airlocks, facing the windowless outer seal while his eyes focused on the display inside the helmet of his space suit.

  It wasn’t the same helmet he used with his combat armor. It was larger and more square, and didn’t offer quite as much field of view as the more battle-oriented bucket. It did however share a similar networked interface, albeit a static connection that routed through Pioneer’s mainframes instead of creating an ad-hoc service with other nearby access points. It was a small but important difference, because it allowed him to connect with all of the other Guardians through the system, even though they were dispersed in other airlocks around the ship.

  It also allowed Captain Grant, Commander Siraj and the rest of the bridge crew to stay in communication. They could see what the Guardians saw through their camera feeds, projecting their outside views onto the bridge’s huge primary display.

  “Pioneer Actual, this is Guardian Team Alpha,” he said, pausing. Heart racing, breathing shallow, he was excited, nervous and terrified of what would come next. “We’re in position.”

  He glanced at Nori, who was standing beside him. The other man looked downright serene. Of course he always looked serene. His complaints about Metro and his family were the most excited Joseph had ever seen Niko, and that included on multiple battlefields and in some pretty hairy situations. There was a reason his callsign was Zen.

  “Copy that, Prime,” Siraj said. “We’re waiting on Queen to finish moving into position.”

  “Roger, Actual. Queen, what’s your ETA?”

  “Three minutes, Prime,” West replied.

  “At least I didn’t send you to the furthest airlock on Pioneer,” Joseph replied, smirking slightly. West and Hoffman had spent the last ten minutes riding one of the small palette haulers from the main hanger back toward the thrusters, with Lieutenant Wall at the controls.

  “I’m quite enjoying the ride,” she said.

  Joseph exhaled nervously, shaking his arms a couple of times to ease his tension. He wouldn’t be able to do that once Siraj signaled for the airlocks to open. He would need to activate the magboots before the gravity coils shut down and the air was pulled out, leaving him weightless and reliant on his suit’s oxygen supply.

  He was three minutes from stepping out into space. From walking along the exterior hull of a starship while trying to make visual contact with a potential alien stowaway. If someone had told him a year ago that this would be in his future, he would have laughed in their face.

  Hell, if someone told him three years ago he would live to see aliens conquer Earth, he would have laughed in their face.

  The thought sent a cold shiver down his spine. It was all real. It was all happening.

  And it wasn’t funny.

  “Prime, your heart rate is increasing,” Siraj said.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Joseph replied. “No offense intended, Actual, but I’m pretty sure yours would be too if you were about to go someplace where one bad step can send you tumbling out into infinity.”

  “Copy that,” Siraj replied. “Be advised, your bpms are twenty percent higher than anyone else on your team.”

  “What?” Joseph hissed, hearing the stifled laughter in the background of the comm. He looked at the personnel monitors on his helmet overlay, surprised to find she was right. How could he be more nervous than any of the others? Nori he understood. But Hoffman? Sykes? Morales? Not possible. He took in a few long, slow breaths, forcing himself to calm. He had magboots. He had vectoring jets. He would be okay.

  He checked his heart rate again, smiling to see it had dropped to eighty beats per minute. Nobody was touching Nori at fifty-one, but it put him in the middle of the pack.

  “Prime, we’ve reached the airlock,” West said. “We’re entering now.”

  Joseph’s beats spiked back up toward one hundred. Damn it. The rest of the Guardians would never let him live this down.

  “Guardians, this is Pioneer Actual,” Siraj said, regaining some of the comms formality. “Preparing to open airlock seals in ten…nine…”

  A loud thudding followed as a compressor began sucking all of the air from the space, trying to conserve as much of it as possible. Joseph activated his magboots at regular power. Immediately, his left heel sucked all the way down to the floor, then his right. He practiced raising and lowering his feet for the next few seconds, until Siraj reached one in her countdown, the thudding ceasing as the airlock cleared of atmosphere.

  “Airlock seals opening now,” Siraj said.

  Without air to carry sound, the thick outer hatch parted silently, slowly revealing the vast black of space beyond. Joseph stepped forward ahead of Nori, his nerves calming instantly as the sight of the universe drew him in. Words like incredible and amazing didn’t do it justice. Where a moment ago his disbelief in the situation was fueled by fear, it was now replaced with sheer wonder.

  He couldn’t wait to get out there.

  “Actual, this is Alpha. We’re exiting the airlock now.”

  “Copy that, Alpha.”

  The other teams, Bravo through Foxtrot, repeated a similar message, all of them emerging from their airlocks at nearly the same time.

  The first step was the hardest because they had to shift to a ninety-degree angle. Fortunately, the fingertips of the gloves were magnetic too, and activating them allowed Joseph to swing out from the airlock and plant his right hand on the hull. He used the connection to pull himself upwards and stick his left hand on the exterior. It allowed him to climb easily until he was completely above the airlock. There he planted the toes of his boots flat against the hull, letting the magnetization pull the bottoms of his boots down tight. Then, slowly removing his palms from the surface, he stood up.

  A smile spread across his face beneath his helmet. “This is unbelievable,” he said, forgetting himself. Nori moved up beside him, mimicking his maneuver. He flashed Joseph a thumbs-up as he straightened onto his feet.

  “Actual, this is Delta,” West announced. “We’re beginning our sweep.”

  “Copy that, Delta,” Siraj replied.

  Joseph checked his overlay, bringing up twelve tiny feeds to monitor the rest of the Guardians. West was unsurprisingly already walking along the ship’s hull with Hoffman, while Turani and Alesso were lagging slightly behind, a little more awkward in their exit. As long as nobody fell off, he didn’t care if they went a little slower.

  “Actual, this is Alpha. We’re beginning our sweep,” he said.

  “Copy that, Alpha,” Siraj replied.

  Joseph looked across the expanse of Pioneer’s hull. The ship wasn’t completely flat. Ridges and valleys added terrain to the outer hull, especially along the sides where the craft narrowed slightly as it moved from top to bottom. And while they were small compared to the size of the craft, they were large compared to the size of a human.

  Large enough that something could tuck into one and hide.

  It was Captain Grant’s fear, and the reason they were out here. Joseph had seen it too. The red chevron had completely overlapped the green of the generation ship and then disappeared like it had never existed at all, leaving only two possibilities. Either the ship had made some kind of sci-fi hyperspace wormhole or space-fold jump at the exact moment it might have impacted Pioneer or it had dropped onto her surface with such precision the sensors hadn’t registered a thing.

  Both options seemed unbelievable, but so did the existence of the object in the first place. The trife had crashed on Earth inside a meteor shower. And while some of the scientists posited that the appearance of the shower itself was an attack, it was a largely discredited theory. After all, what reason would any intelligent race have to throw something like the trife at an unsuspecting civilization? At least not without making themselves known.

  Then again, those same scientists argued that humans were thinking too much like humans, and that was half the problem. Just because it didn’t make sense to us didn’t mean it wouldn’t make sense to another species. And now, to witness an object that clearly wasn’t human-made do something that was only possible with technology beyond humanity’s reach? It sent a fresh chill coursing down Joseph’s spine, and he reached for the rifle locked against the back of his suit.

  The object was an alien ship. There was nothing else it could be. And if it had anything to do with the trife and it had landed on Pioneer, the only logical conclusion Joseph could come to was that it was hostile. In fact, if it was an advanced alien vessel and it had landed instead of simply attacking them from a distance, it meant it didn’t just want to kill them.

  It wanted something from them. Something that required keeping Pioneer intact.

  The other teams all announced they were clear of the airlock and beginning their sweeps. Joseph started walking along the port side of the ship, rifle in hand and Nori right beside him. He didn’t see anything ahead. No sign of an alien object making itself obvious along the surface.

  Walking along the hull wasn’t anywhere near as easy as moving on Earth. Each step meant pulling the leg hard enough to defeat the magnetism, stepping forward and making sure the foot had total contact with the surface before bringing the other one into play. The effort used more energy, and even though the launch already felt like it had happened years ago, it was recent enough to fatigue his body. He began tiring within twenty minutes. So did the rest of the Marines.