“And you’re supposed to go outside the ship to confront him?”

  “My thought exactly. I’d rather not. Try not to step on any of the blood or leave any tracks.”

  “Easier said than done.”

  “Do your best.”

  They navigated around the carcasses, past the corner and down the long corridor. Sam could hear Bashir breathing behind her, shallow and short. He was nervous about being here with her and even more nervous about the trife.

  “Bashir, relax,” Sam said. “There’s nothing dangerous down here.”

  “How can you be sure?” Bashir replied.

  “We would have found it already. The mainframe is just down there.” She pointed to the door in question and picked up her pace.

  They reached the door to the ship’s mainframe. Sam glanced back at Bashir before opening it. “See? Nothing to worry about.”

  She tapped on the door control.

  The door slid open.

  A trife stood up in front of her, hissing softly before backing away.

  “Oh, shit,” Bashir cried out, trying to reverse course. His shout frightened the trife even more, and it leaped over one of the racks and ducked behind it, hiding.

  Ali’s heart pounded with surprise, but she stayed calm, her eyes sweeping the room and crossing over the other docile trife. They huddled near one another, shrinking back from her.

  “Bashir, it’s okay,” she said, laughing softly. “They’re harmless.”

  “You just said they were the enemy.”

  “I meant the other ones. This group is harmless.”

  “What the hell?”

  “I don’t exactly know, but I do know they won’t hurt you.” She entered the room, heading for the terminal. The trife watched her but didn’t move.

  Bashir entered behind her, staying close. He stared at the trife, uncertain she was right about their aggressiveness. They didn’t make any moves toward him or Sam, ducking further back the closer the two of them came.

  Sam activated the terminal. It was in the same state she had left it, responding to the search for recordings from Research. She was going to clear it when the still thumbnail of one of the clips caught her eye. She tapped on it with her finger, and it expanded and started to play.

  “Test subject Theta Three,” Riley Valentine said. “Mature trife, post-CN140 editing.”

  Valentine and the trife were standing across from one another. The creature was unrestrained and unblocked from attacking her, but it held its ground and stared at her in indifference.

  “Subject is awake and alert. No sign of eye dilation or aggressive posture. Subject appears to be calm.”

  She walked up to the trife, putting her hand on the front of its face. It still didn’t move.

  “Physical interaction triggers no response.” She moved her hand, sliding it down the demon’s chest. It was amazing to Sam to watch the creature remain still and accept the touch with little regard. “Note. Capture a CT scan of Theta Three’s brain activity during the next response test.”

  Riley backed away from the creature, looking off-camera.

  “Programmed response test sixteen,” she said. “David, open it.”

  Sam heard a soft click in the direction of Riley’s look. A moment later the camera shifted to focus on a small rodent scurrying across the floor.

  The trife noticed it too, its head tilting down. It let out a sharp hiss and lunged at the rat, claws scraped past as it narrowly avoided being impaled.

  The trife screeched louder and chased it toward a desk. The rat stopped underneath it, and the trife grabbed the desk and threw it aside, trying to step on the rat. It broke away again while the trife tried to give pursuit.

  “Subject is responding aggressively to the introduction of predation trigger,” Riley said. “Genetic alteration of the activity index is a success.”

  The trife continued to hiss as it leaped around the room, trying to catch up to the rat. It showed no regard for Riley, remaining singularly focused on the rodent.

  “David, bring it in,” she said. “It works.”

  “It does,” Sam heard someone say off-camera. “I told you it would. There’s more than one way to skin a cat.”

  The rat reacted to something, straightening out and sprinting across the floor. The trife pounced one last time, its shoulder hitting the wall as the rat escaped through a much smaller door. The trife returned to its static, calm position the moment the rat was out of sight.

  “This doesn’t change our other plans,” Riley said.

  “I was hoping we could talk about that,” David replied.

  “Not if you want to continue sleeping with me.”

  The one she called David didn’t answer again. Riley walked over to the camera, reaching past it. And then the screen went dark.

  Sam glanced at the trife in the back of the room. They were part of the outcome of Riley’s experiments, their original instinct to kill humans edited out of them. Were they reprogrammed to attack something else? If so, what?

  “We’re wasting time, Sheriff,” Bashir said. “What about the dirt on Governor Stone?”

  Riley glanced at him. There was so much she wanted to know. So much she might have access to from the terminal. So many answers that might help them survive in the coming weeks. She wasn’t sure she would ever have another chance. Damn it. Bashir was right. They couldn’t linger down here. They had an hour at most before she would need to be back in the office, ready to soldier up and ship out.

  She looked at the flashing red lights of the mainframe’s damaged datastores. What if the evidence she was after were on one of them? What if the evidence she was after didn’t exist? She needed to find something.

  She started working through the menus, digging into the mainframe’s filesystem. It was access she wouldn’t normally have, an inside look at the workings of the supercomputer. There were thousands of folders. Millions of files. The cameras were active and recording for over two hundred years, the size of her task immense.

  She couldn’t afford to fail. She needed to connect Governor Stone to the forgotten truth. She needed to prove he knew the Guardians weren’t responsible for their situation. Riley Valentine, in part. But not Caleb, Washington, or Flores.

  It was a needle in a haystack, but it was a needle she had to find.

  Minutes passed. Bashir began pacing behind her, sweeping back and forth and wiping at a line of sweat on his brow. She ran dozens of searches across the mainframe, half of which returned with errors related to the damaged servers. She got excited when she found an area of the system called sysLog, thinking it would show the deletion of records and the reset. It didn’t. She started getting more nervous and more desperate, her hope sinking with every lost second.

  Governor Stone had lied, and he was going to get away with it.

  She froze, shifting gears from desperation to embarrassment in the span of a few seconds. “I’m so stupid,” she announced.

  “What is it?” Bashir asked.

  “Idiot,” she added, tapping on the control surface and entering a new query, complete with location and timestamp. The results came back, and she smiled at the thumbnails that displayed.

  “Why didn’t I think of that?” Bashir asked.

  She had heard Governor Stone admit to hiding the truth. He had said it in the Law Office, right in front of her and Bashir, to Valentine and the Guardians. There was a camera in Law, always running. Always recording. It went to the city’s subnetwork first, but Caleb had told her every subsystem sent a copy here. It couldn’t have wound up on a damaged server because they were already damaged. And Stone probably had no idea because they were all so accustomed to the cameras they never gave them any thought.

  The recording was right there, at the top of the list for the data she had entered. All she needed was a means to make a copy. There wasn’t anything down here, but she was sure there was a blank data disc in her office. She tapped on the clip and instructed the computer to send a copy to her personal account.

  “Got you,” she said, smiling.

  “Sheriff,” someone said. She spun around, finding Caspar standing in the doorway. “Stone is on his way over. It’s time to go.”

  She turned back to the terminal, quickly clearing the query. With any luck, the Governor would never think to look for what she had found.

  “I got what I needed,” she said, drawing a smile from the deputy. “Let’s go.”

  Chapter 39

  It took some work to get the Daggers out of the way to allow one of the transports through. The engineers needed to bring a small electric mover up from the main hangar, through the ship’s corridors to the main lift, and then from the single functioning lift to the forward hangar. It was nearly thirteen-hundred by the time the transport was positioned right behind the hangar’s blast doors.

  Sam was armed and armored, geared up in the same SOS Caleb had fitted to her. The new members of the DDF were finding the ATCA challenging in terms of size and fit, and while there was equipment down below that could alter both, nobody had figured out how to use it yet.

  Fortunately, there was still enough of the combat armor to give the seven soldiers—five men and two women—that Governor Stone had selected for her squad were equally equipped with a helmet, combat armor, an MK-12, a VP-5 semi-automatic sidearm and a hunting knife. Owing to the fact that there was only time to train on one kind of weapon—and the standard rifles were more plentiful—the Governor hadn’t chosen to allow them access to the plasma rifles or railguns they had also found below.

  At least, that was his excuse. As far as Sam was concerned, the bigger reason was that he didn’t want them to lose the more powerful weapons if or when they died.

  The squad was assembled in two neat columns of four, standing on the left side of the transport. Governor Stone, Beth Stone, and their newly trained pilot stood opposite them.

  “It looks like everything is ready,” Governor Stone said.

  “Finally,” Beth Stone added.

  “Sir, are you still sure this is a good idea?” Sam asked. “We haven’t had a lot of training on any of this equipment yet, and it might be better served if—”

  Governor Stone put his hand up to silence her. “Lasandra, you outnumber them nearly three to one, and one of them is already dying. Find the Guardians and bring me back their heads.” He paused. “Or you can spend the rest of your life locked in a cell if that’s what you prefer.”

  “Understood,” Sam replied, bristling beneath her helmet.

  “I imagine so, Colonel. The mission is yours. Come back with Card or don’t come back at all.”

  Stone flashed a condescending smile, moving away from the squad. His wife followed behind him, wearing a satisfied smirk of her own.

  “He acts like we’re expendable,” one of her new squad mates said, a former militia member named Steven. He was the tallest of the group, though he was also rail thin beneath the SOS.

  “You worked for him,” another squad member, Jia, said. “You didn’t know that already?”

  “I guess there was never cause to put it to the test,” Steven replied.

  “All right,” Sam said, stepping out of the column and turning to face them. “That’s enough. We have our orders.” She glanced at the pilot beside her. He was young. Maybe a year or two older than Orla. His face was beet red, and he looked like he was ready to wet himself. “What’s your name, pilot?”

  “Kiaan, ma’am,” he replied. “Kiaan Habib.”

  “Kiaan. Are you part of the DDF?”

  “The what?”

  “Deliverance Defense Force.”

  “I don’t know. I think so. Governor Stone was looking for people interested in trying out a new simulator. I’ve played some of the vids before, so I thought it would be fun.” He smiled sheepishly. “I’m pretty good at it.”

  “How old are you?” a third squad member, Liam, asked.

  “Seventeen.”

  “You’re too small to be seventeen. You look like a twelve-year-old girl.”

  Kiaan froze, unable to react to the statement. Sam spun around, finding Liam in the group. “You’re out of line soldier,” she barked. “I want an apology, right now.”

  “Or what?” Liam asked. “I never had to take orders from a sheriff before, and I’m not starting now. I don’t know how I got picked for this shit gig anyway.”

  Sam stormed over to him. “Did you volunteer for the DDF?”

  “Yeah. I told Governor Stone I wanted to be a commander, and he put me here instead.”

  “Lucky us,” Jia said.

  “What does that mean?” Liam asked.

  “Man, shut the hell up and do what Sheriff Dante says,” Steven said.

  “Colonel Dante,” Sam said. “We’re all on the same team, and we need to rely on one another if we’re going to survive. Our orders are to find Sergeant Card and his Guardians and take them out. If you think any part of that will be easy, you’re out of your damn mind.”

  “So what are you saying, this is a suicide mission?” Liam asked.

  “Not if you shut up and follow my lead,” Sam replied.

  “And apologize to Kiaan,” Jia said. “Your bullshit comment was completely unnecessary.”

  “Fine. Sorry, kid,” Liam said.

  “It’s okay,” Kiaan said.

  “Our squad designation is going to be Marshal,” Sam said. She pointed to herself. “Marshal Leader.” Then she picked each one of them out. “Marshal Two, Marshal Three, Marshal Four…” giving each of them a numerical designation.

  “Does Marshal mean anything?” Kiaan asked.

  “Back on Earth, the Marshals were responsible for catching fugitives,” Sam said.

  “It fits,” Jia said.

  “Ma’am,” Kiaan said. “All I have to do is fly the FCT, right? I don’t have to fight?”

  “No, you don’t have to fight,” Sam said. “Just get us there in one piece.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Marshals, load up,” Sam said, pointing to the open side of the transport. The soldiers moved to it in a slightly disorganized column, boarding the craft and filling in the sparse seats from back to front. “Come on, Kiaan.”

  The pilot entered the transport ahead of her. She stopped at the threshold, her eyes passing over the transport’s interior. It was as basic as they came, the seats almost bare metal with minimal padding, secured with bolts in the metal flooring. There were no windows in the back, and the hatch made a loud grinding noise as it slid closed behind her.

  “Are you sure this thing can fly, ma’am?” Jia asked.

  Sam realized she wasn’t sure. Liam laughed at her hesitation. “This may be a short trip.”

  She ignored him, moving to the center and looking into the cockpit. The pilot’s seat was positioned in the center, with a display on either side and a small window in front. The blast doors were already open, and she could see through it to the dense green of the jungle directly ahead of them, a row of mountains beyond the jungle. Her heart began thumping harder, a mixture of nerves and excitement building.

  She was terrified of the unknown. Even the simple act of flying in a transport was a new experience for all of them, and everything on this world was equally new. She had never seen so much color. So many trees. Hell, she had never seen a real sky. It was all so big, and she struggled against the overwhelming scale of it all.

  “Kiaan, power us up,” she said.

  The young pilot was staring out the window too. If the other Marshals could see outside, they would be doing the same thing. She gave him a little longer before moving up behind him and putting her hand on his shoulder.

  “Kiaan, let’s go,” she repeated.

  “Uh, yes ma’am,” he replied, shaking under her grip as he reached toward the dashboard, flipping the two manual switches. The two displays turned on, as well as a control surface on his left where his hand was resting. He took the transport’s control stick in his right and tapped the control surface. The carrier shuddered slightly as the superconducting ceramic discs inside the anti-gravity pods began spinning, the electromagnets beneath them drawing in power. The transport emitted a low-pitched whine, and within a few seconds began to slowly rise off the surface of the hangar.

  “What direction are we going?” Kiaan asked.

  They had used the time while the engineers were moving Daggers out of the way to send a few drones out to explore. According to Governor Stone, they had found tracks from a vehicle heading into the jungle.

  “Straight ahead,” Sam replied. “Take it slow and easy.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  She remained standing while Kiaan shifted the control stick. She had to grab onto the back of his chair as the craft lurched forward, bucked back, slipped sideways and then jumped ahead again.

  “Sorry,” Kiaan said. “It’s a little more touchy than the simulator.”

  “Slow and easy,” she repeated.

  He nodded, taking a deep breath to calm down. This was all new to him too, and he had the added responsibility of flying a real aircraft for the first time.

  The transport eased forward, out over the edge of the hangar. Sam’s stomach dropped with the craft as it fell a few meters before the pods adjusted, catching and keeping them level. The two displays showed a fisheye view from both sides that offered full coverage of the transport. She could see the port extensions reaching out beneath them, as well as the scarring from the alien drone’s attack.

  It was a wonder they had made it to the surface at all.

  She could see the river stretching out on either side of them and vanishing into the distance. She had a sudden yearning to be down there beside it, to touch the water and feel real earth beneath her feet. This whole mission was stupid. Governor Stone had lost Orla, and then he had lost his mind.

  She had what she needed to prove the Marines were innocent. All she had to do was keep the other Marshals from shooting the Guardians and keep the Guardians from shooting at them. All she had to do was discover the answer to why Caleb had left with the alien, seemingly helping it escape.

  All she had to do was survive.

  The transport starting moving forward, slightly unsteady as Kiaan worked to balance the power output. The craft shook, dipping to the left and then leveling as he apologized again.