“I’ll take what I can get,” Caleb said. “Hawks.”

  “Yes, Alpha,” Corporal Johansen said, stepping forward.

  “I want you to make the first recon.” He looked at the map of the ship and pointed at the smallest group of trife. “Head toward this group here, but don’t engage unless they come after you. I want to see how close you can get before they notice you. If you make it to here.” He pointed at a spot a few hundred meters from the group. “Stick a Dragonfly in the vent and send it on its way. Use another one to try to reach the demons and see if they react to it.”

  “Roger that.”

  “Stay on the comm. We’ll keep you informed on trife activity from here. Also, designate someone as your main gunner. Gold, get the Hawks two Dragonflies and a P-50.”

  “On it, Alpha,” Master Sergeant Gold said, leaving the room.

  “Sho, Hafizi, you’ll assist the Raptors in completing the modifications to the module. Washington, stay on guard until that work is done and we can lock up tight. Then you’re all to hit the rack and get as much rest as you can until I need you.”

  “Yes, Alpha,” they replied.

  Caleb turned his attention to Private Shiro, whose push-ups had gotten labored while he was talking. He knelt down beside the man. “I trust you’ve gotten the message, Private?”

  “Yes, Alpha,” he replied breathlessly.

  “Get up and help the others.”

  Shiro hopped to his feet and joined his squad. Caleb stood up. “Let’s go, Guardians. We have a lot of work to do.”

  Chapter 29

  “Approaching corridor nine,” Corporal Johansen said, her voice crisp in Caleb’s ear.

  “I’ve got you, Hawk One,” he replied, splitting his attention between the sensor grid on the display ahead of him and the camera feed running from her helmet to his ATCS.

  He hadn’t been all that eager to put the SOS on again so soon, especially to stand around the CIC, but it was the best and most effective way to keep an eye on the squad, at least until they fell out of range.

  Which they were threatening to do. The network signal on his HUD was down to a single bar, suggesting he would be dropping from their network any moment now. He was thankful to at least have the sensor grid and the more powerful comm link through the ship’s network, which would allow him to stay in communication with the Hawks as they approached the first group of trife.

  He had ordered them not to engage the demons, but now that they were closing in it was tempting to change those orders. The group was the smallest of the three, and couldn’t be composed of more than twenty or thirty trife. It sounded like a lot, but against four well-trained Marines? It was nothing.

  Still, he had planned the recon to test the trife’s reactions and to sample the data the Dragonflies could provide. To change the parameters now would be risky, and he didn’t want to lose any more Marines.

  He didn’t really want to be in charge, either. Not like this, anyway. He wanted to be out in the field, standing alongside Corporal Johansen and the others. Sticking his neck out, not hiding in the safety of the module.

  “Alpha, I’m going to activate one of the Dragonflies in the port side vent,” Johansen said.

  “Confirmed,” he replied. He glanced at Master Sergeant Gold, who tapped on the main terminal’s control surface and brought up six individual feeds across the top of the primary display.

  He watched Johansen’s feed as two of her Marines kneeled next to the vent cover and quickly removed it. Then Johansen reached forward, a tiny robot with delicate wings cupped on the palm of her hand. She spread her fingers and gently tapped the top of the machine. Its eyes immediately started to glow in yellow light, and its tiny, gossamer wings began to flap too fast to be more than a blur.

  It slipped out of Johansen’s hand and dove into the vent. A moment later the feed from its camera activated in one of the black boxes on the main display, revealing a grayscale view of the shaft’s innards.

  There wasn’t much to see, but a lot of dark metal with solder lines where one piece joined another. Caleb could hear the Dragonfly’s wings humming through its audio feed as it skirted a straight line down the tunnel.

  “Alpha, we’re moving ahead,” Johansen announced.

  Caleb shifted his attention back to her feed, watching as she led the Hawks down the passageway. He glanced over at the sensor display every few seconds, monitoring the squad’s proximity to the trife.

  “No movement yet,” he said. “Stay on course, take it slow.”

  “Roger.”

  Caleb leaned over the terminal, attention flickering from one data source to the next, trying to stay in sync across the views. His job got easier a moment later as the ATCS link went out of range.

  “Hawk One, you’re off tactical,” he said.

  “Roger, Alpha,” Johansen replied. “Not much to see down here anyway. All the damn corridors look the same.”

  “She was made to get us from Point A to Point B, not be pretty,” Caleb said.

  Johansen chuckled. “Copy that.”

  The new Point B was only twenty years away. He hadn’t told anyone else that truth yet. Like Lieutenant Jones, he didn’t want to get anyone’s hopes up, especially with no guarantee any of them would survive. Would Sheriff Aveline wait that long for their dinner together? He doubted it, but it was fun to think she might.

  Caleb glanced over at the Dragonfly’s feed. The small robot had shifted itself to the upper left corner of the shaft. It was an odd maneuver, and he couldn’t help but wonder why. It had also fallen behind Johansen and her team, its small size unable to carry it very quickly along the route.

  “Hawk One, slow down a little. The drone is having trouble keeping up.”

  “Roger.”

  “Master Sergeant Gold,” Caleb said, calling the older man over and pointing at the feed. “Why do you think it’s doing that?”

  “I’m not all that familiar with the drones,” Gold replied. “They came in late in the preparations, almost as an afterthought. I think they just made them and figured they would pawn them off on us.” He smiled. “I can check the diagnostics though, if you’ll excuse me.”

  Caleb moved aside, and Gold used the control surface to open a new screen beneath the Dragonfly’s feed. It showed some different graphs and numbers, but they didn’t mean anything to him.

  “There,” Master Sergeant Gold said. “It looks like its picking something up on one of its audio sensors.”

  “What kind of something?”

  “I don’t know. It must be coming from the corner of the vent.”

  “Inside the wall?”

  Gold shrugged. “I guess so.”

  Caleb stared at the drone’s view of the shaft for a moment and then switched the terminal’s comm channel.

  “Valentine, are you there?” he asked.

  “Guardian Alpha,” a male voice replied. “I’m Doctor Byrnes. Doctor Valentine is busy right now. She asked me to stay at the terminal in case you needed something.”

  “Can you see if you can find out if there’s anything behind the ventilation shafts on Deck Twenty-two near the bow. You can get the position from the sensor grid.”

  “Standby, Alpha.”

  Caleb kept his eyes shifting between the grid and the Dragonfly’s feed. They stopped moving when he saw a light up ahead in the shaft, coming from the left side.

  “Byrnes, scratch that request. I think I’ve got it.”

  “Sure thing, Alpha,” Byrnes replied. “Let me know if you need anything else.”

  The Dragonfly moved toward the light. It appeared to be another vent, with thin slits feeding out into some other open space. The drone rotated toward the space, its vision obscured by the metal dividers. It went ahead, ducking beneath the strips and flitting forward and into the room.

  It turned again, rotating back the way it had come.

  Caleb’s breath caught in his throat. His heart started pounding.

  Three trife were standing in what appeared to be an access corridor, tall but narrow. They were taking turns slashing at something on the wall.

  The Dragonfly was AI-powered, and it hummed its way toward the demons without concern, trying to get a closer look at the area and what they were doing. The trife ignored it until it was right on top of them and Caleb could see what it was they were attacking.

  One of four thick conduits running along the passage there.

  It was nearly worn away.

  The rear trife’s head snapped toward the Dragonfly, suddenly realizing the drone was there. The last thing Caleb saw was a set of claws whipping toward the machine, and then its feed went dark.

  A moment later the entire module went dark with it.

  Chapter 30

  “Shit,” Caleb said. It took a moment for the night vision sensors in his helmet to register the sudden darkness, and by the time they did the lights in the module were already coming back on. He blinked his eyes rapidly, the flash nearly blinding him. “What the hell was that?”

  “My guess would be a power interruption,” Master Sergeant Gold said. “Based on what those bugs were doing.”

  “Why would it affect the module here from all the way up there?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe they’ve got some subsystems linked that shouldn’t be? The Deliverance was a rush job. Hell, all the generation ships were rush jobs.”

  Which is why so many parts of it were breaking, and at the worst times. The display was coming back to life, and while the terminal hadn’t shut down completely, it had gone into a hibernation state and was only now becoming active again. Caleb reached down and switched the comm channel.

  “Hawk One, do you copy?” he said. There was no response. “Hawk One, this is Guardian Alpha. Do you copy?” Still nothing. “Damn it.” He moved around the terminal, grabbing his carbine from its resting place against the front side of the station. “Washington, we’re going out there.”

  Washington flashed his thumb.

  “Alpha, I don’t think that’s the best idea,” Master Sergeant Gold said. “We don’t know what the trife are doing out there. The sensor grid in that area hasn’t come back online.”

  ‘Understood. I need to get back into ATCS range so I can at least see what’s going on down there. I’ll make a decision once I do.”

  Then he and Washington were through the module hatch and out into the passageway at a run, racing toward the bow of the starship. The area nearby was supposed to be clear, and he wasn’t all that concerned about running into any of the demons. Besides, he had Washington.

  They made their way forward and then took a stairwell from Deck Six to Deck Twelve, putting less metal between them and the Hawks. The ATCS operated on multiple frequencies and would keep trying them all until it gained a connection. It beeped a moment later, Caleb’s HUD showing it was networked with Hawk Four. Private Flores.

  “Hawk Four, this is Guardian Alpha,” he said. “What’s your status?”

  “Alpha,” Flores said. “Hawk One sent me back to bridge the link after the power went out. The trife attacked us when it did. Hawk Two is down.”

  Caleb watched his HUD as the rest of the Hawks connected, the mesh network hopping from the squad to Flores to Caleb and back.

  The tactical showed the area immediately surrounding the team. It was clear.

  “Hawk One, sitrep,” Caleb said, coming to a stop.

  “Alpha, the trife jumped us when the power went off. About a dozen. We took them out, but not before they snuck up on Corporal Seth. He’s dead. It happened so fast.”

  Caleb could see the red mark on the Corporal’s monitor in his HUD. Hawk Three was orange, the SOS indicating a wound to the shoulder.

  “Do you think they planned it, Alpha?” Johansen asked. “To turn the power off like that and hit us while our LLVS was adjusting?”

  “They aren’t that smart,” Caleb replied. “I think they went for the conduit to feed, and it just happened to knock out the sensors. And even if they did go for the sensors, they couldn’t have known about your helmet’s low light vision system. I think part of it was a coincidence.”

  But only part. And which part? The thought of the trife springing a trap was a scary one. That wasn’t how the demons were supposed to fight. Were they adjusting tactics because they didn’t have a queen? Or because their numbers were so much fewer than normal? Some people believed the trife had been sent to Earth, delivered by a more intelligent and malevolent alien race. Had the creatures been programmed to act differently in situations like this?

  Had they been used on starships before?

  Caleb could imagine alien ships being assaulted by trife. Maybe it was like the old days when pirates roamed Earth’s seas. Come broadside, gain a hold of the target vessel, and then board and overwhelm the defenses.

  Two years ago, he would have thought the idea of space aliens warring with one another was reserved for the science-fiction novels he liked to read and the movies he liked to watch.

  This shit wasn’t supposed to be real.

  “Hawk One, get your team back to base. I intended for your mission to be recon only. We’ll regroup and send out a larger hunting party later.”

  “Roger that.”

  At least he knew where the damaged conduit was. Would he be able to get Valentine’s engineer out there to fix it?

  “Alpha,” Master Sergeant Gold said, cutting through his comm from the module’s link. “Do you copy?”

  “I hear you, Sergeant,” Caleb replied.

  “Keep your eyes peeled. You wandered into a dead zone. I can’t cover you from here.”

  Caleb hadn’t realized they had gone into one of the dark spots on the ship. He raised his carbine and scanned the corridor around him, quickly locating the vents.

  “Washington, we’re in a dead zone,” he relayed to the big man.

  Washington exaggerated his nod so Caleb would see it. Then he brought his carbine up and turned slowly, scanning the opposite side of the corridor.

  “We’re clear for now,” Caleb said. “Let’s get ourselves back under coverage. Gold, what’s the shortest route?”

  “Take the stairwell,” Gold replied. “It looks like the sensors there are on a different conduit. I’ve got eyes on the whole thing from top to bottom.”

  “Roger that.”

  Caleb and Washington started for the stairs. They were only a hundred meters away, with a single intersection between it and them. It was as straight a shot as they came.

  They jogged down the corridor toward the stairs. They had gone twenty meters when a mark appeared behind them, caught by the sensors on Caleb’s ATCS. He and Washington spun to face it in unison.

  A blurry shape crossed the corridor ahead of them, too small and too pale to be a trife.

  “Was that a person?” Caleb said, glancing at Washington.

  The other Marine spread his hand in question. He wasn’t sure either.

  The ATCS became active with two more marks, and a pair of dark shapes crossed the corridor a moment later, chasing after the first.

  “I don’t believe this,” Caleb said. “We have to help him. Or her. Come on.” Washington joined him, reversing course and running down the corridor. “Master Sergeant Gold, we have visual on what may be a lost civilian. We’re in pursuit. Wake Raptor One and have him assemble his team in case we need backup.”

  “Confirmed, Alpha,” Gold replied.

  They reached the intersection, turning right. Caleb had visual on the tailing trife, but the person had already turned the next corner.

  A sharp crack echoed in the corridor from beside him. One of the trife stumbled and fell, its head snapping forward. A second crack sounded less than a second later, and the other one collapsed.

  “Nice shooting, Wash,” Caleb said. “We’re--”

  Something hit him from behind, knocking him forward. He felt heat at the base of his neck, followed by wetness. He landed on his knees, the weight vanishing from his body as he eyed his HUD. There were more trife behind them. They had come out of nowhere. Or at least, that’s how it seemed.

  Washington’s carbine fired a third time, followed by a spray of rounds that left discarded shells clinking on the floor beside Caleb. They seemed to move so slowly, and he watched how they struck the metal floor and bounced up, turning over in the air and catching the light.

  He reached back, putting a gloved hand to the hot spot on his neck. When he pulled his hand away, it was covered in blood.

  He felt sick. Was this how it was going to end? Caught off-guard by a trife, just like that? After two years of hell?

  He was getting dizzy as Washington’s hand wrapped around him, scooping him up in a fireman’s carry. He was vaguely aware of the big Marine’s feet pumping below him, the echo of the boots on the floor, and the rocking motion as he was carried back to the stairs.

  Then the world faded away.

  Chapter 31

  David flinched at the sound of the gunshots, turning his head back to see the two trife behind him slide across the floor of the corridor into the corner, spilling their dark blood. He pulled to a stop, looking at them for a moment and trying to decide if he should go back. Someone had shot the creatures. He couldn’t imagine they would shoot him. When the trife were involved, every human was on the same side.

  He started walking back, toward the dead trife.

  More gunshots rang out, and he flinched a second time. More bullets meant more trife. He turned a second time and continued running.

  He should have never left the safety of the storage closet he had found. He had ridden it from Earth to space, safe from the trife that had gotten onto the starship behind him before the airlock had automatically sealed. They would never have found him in there.

  But then he had heard the fighting. The gunfire and the hissing of the creatures in the distance. He was afraid of having Marines find him hiding out alone in the middle of the ship. He was worried they would blame him for the trife getting in. They would have been right to blame him. It was his fault. He had left the airlock open. He had let them sneak through. The starship had left Earth, but the demons had come with it.