“Where’s Card?” he asked.

  The Badger was in rest position at the back of the group. The carcass of the alien creature was a hundred meters behind it, closer to the island. The people were staying well clear of it, and he didn’t blame them. The acrid smell of it was intense enough at this distance.

  “I don’t see him,” Pyro replied. “He has to be here somewhere.”

  The cheering began to die down. One of the survivors came forward. “General, what are we going to do now?”

  “We need to re-organize,” he replied. “Re-establish chain-of-command. Put the word out. I want all surviving USSF members here on deck in one hour.” He looked at Pyro. “Head to the ship’s bridge and make sure the Truxton gets the message as well.”

  “Yes, General,” she replied, immediately breaking away.

  “I’m here, General,” Hotch said, appearing from out of the crowd. “What can I do?”

  “I need a team to begin taking care of the dead. Gather the bodies, see if you can get them identified, and prepare them for burial at sea.”

  Hotch’s face paled. It wasn’t the task he was hoping for, but he recovered quickly, recognizing the severity of the situation. “Yes, General,” he said, snapping off a smart salute. Then he turned to the people closest to him in the crowd and began recruiting them.

  Nathan continued forward. The survivors were beginning to thin out, some going with Hotch, others dispersing to deliver Nathan’s message. He still didn’t see Caleb Card anywhere.

  “Where did you go, Caleb?” he whispered.

  He scanned the deck, wondering if he had gone back down below. It didn’t make sense for the Marine to avoid him.

  His eyes landed on the alien, the sight of it turning his stomach. It was a monstrous thing, like something from the darkest nightmare. Made for destruction.

  There. He found Caleb on top of its central mass, behind its many eyes, a number of which had been shot out while it approached the ship. He was cutting into the thing’s head with a knife, digging into it like he knew exactly what he was looking for.

  Caleb already knew so much more about the creatures than Nathan could believe. Where had the man come from? And how did he know so much? And what the hell was he doing now?

  Nathan crossed the deck, climbing over the alien’s thick tentacles and wrinkling his nose at the smell. He also had no idea how Caleb could stand the odor.

  “Card!” he shouted, trying to get Caleb’s attention. If the Marine heard him, he didn’t react. “Card!”

  Caleb still didn’t pay him any mind. He put down the knife and laid flat against the creature’s head, reaching into the central mass, confusing Nathan even more.

  He stopped moving, watching in grotesque fascination as Caleb’s eyes closed and he remained pressed against the dead creature, his arm inside it to the shoulder, his posture as if he were falling asleep against a lover.

  “Attention all hands.” Pyro’s voice sounded through the ship’s loudspeaker. “Attention all hands. General Stacker requires all USSF on the aft hangar deck immediately. I repeat. General Stacker requires all USSF soldiers on the aft hangar deck immediately.”

  Nathan smiled, looking past the alien to the carrier’s island. Pyro must have sprinted full-speed across the deck to get to the bridge that quickly. He appreciated the effort.

  “Stacker.”

  Nathan turned back toward Caleb. The Marine was on his feet on top of the creature, a tense look on his face. His arm was dripping with blood and guts, but he didn’t seem to notice or care. He slid down the side of the corpse, walking over to where Nathan was standing.

  “What were you doing?” Nathan asked.

  “Gathering intel,” Caleb replied. “We need to talk.”

  “Agreed. I’m organizing the survivors. I’ll have logistics straightened out within the hour. In the meantime, I can bring you down to the showers and find you a change of clothes.”

  “No. An hour is too long. We need to talk now, General. What happened to your city was only the beginning. It’s going to get worse. A lot worse.”

  Caleb’s conviction sent a chill running down Nathan’s spine. “How do you know?”

  “The enemy told me.”

  38

  Nathan

  “The enemy told you what?” Nathan asked. “And how?”

  “It’s a long story,” Caleb replied. “Too long to go into detail now. How much do you know about the Hunger?”

  “The Hunger? I’ve never heard of it.”

  “What about the Relyeh? The Axon?”

  “No,” Nathan replied. “I know the trife. I know the Others. Are you naming other aliens?”

  “Others? Describe them to me.”

  “That armor you’re wearing. The Others wear the same thing. Faceless humanoids, who use holograms and hallucinations to manipulate people.”

  “That’s the Axon,” Caleb said. “Intellects. Artificial intelligences. The trife are foot soldiers of the Relyeh, who also call themselves the Hunger. They’re an ancient race that believes it’s their destiny to conquer the entire universe.”

  “The whole universe?” Nathan replied. “That’s crazy.”

  “Not to them. They’ve been at it for hundreds of thousands of years.”

  Nathan’s heart started pounding. “I can’t even wrap my head around that.” He paused. “Maybe we can talk somewhere else? The smell here is overwhelming.”

  Caleb nodded. “Right. I forgot about that.”

  “How do you forget a smell like this?”

  Caleb opened his mouth, closed it again. He started walking away from the dead alien, leading Nathan back toward the dropship. “Your craft has a head on board, doesn’t it?”

  “It does.”

  “I’ll clean up while we talk.” He glanced at Nathan. “General James Stacker would be over two-hundred-fifty years old. You aren’t him.”

  “No. It’s a long story of its own. I’m a clone, made from Stacker’s genetic code. My name isn’t James. It’s Nathan.”

  “Then why did you tell me it was James?”

  “We don’t have time for the minute details. The short version is that I took over Edenrise from another Stacker clone after he went insane.”

  “Define insane.”

  “He followed a man named Tinker, who wanted to bring the Others to Earth. He believed they could save us.”

  “They won’t.”

  “They couldn’t if they wanted to. Tinker managed to open a portal to one of their worlds. It was already destroyed.”

  “The Relyeh are at war with the Axon. They have been for thousands of years. Logistically, Earth is stuck in the middle of the two sides. Valuable to the Hunger because of the nature of humankind. Valuable to the Axon as a buffer planet.”

  “Then why aren’t the Axon doing more to stop the Hunger from taking it?”

  “You probably noticed they’re already losing the war. They’re on the defensive, fighting to keep what little they have left. They don’t have the resources to deal with the Relyeh here.”

  “Neither do we.”

  “I’ve come too far to give up, Nathan. I’ve been through too much.”

  “Where did you come from? And how do you know General Stacker?”

  They reached the dropship. Nathan followed Caleb back on board. The Sergeant had seized control of the situation, taking command of the conversation and delivering orders with practiced ease.

  “Is the reactor offline?” Caleb asked.

  “I didn’t think we’d need it again so soon,” Nathan replied. “I can restart it.”

  Caleb nodded. “To answer your question, I was here on Earth when the trife invasion started.”

  “You said you were a Marine Raider,” Nathan said, remembering Caleb’s statement. “Special Forces.”

  “That’s right. Here on Earth, before the invasion. Before the virus. Before the trife. Before everything fell apart. My unit was one of the first into the infested zones. Areas overrun with trife. We were purely offensive at first. Direct combat, until we realized it was impossible to defeat them head-on. Once the work got underway on the generation ships, my unit was converted to search and rescue. We went back into the cities to pull survivors out. What few there were to save.”

  Nathan paused at the bridge, entering and leaning over the pilot’s station to restart the reactor. “How many people did you rescue?”

  “I don’t know. I lost count. Hundreds. VIPs mostly. Scientists, engineers, people the USSF decided we needed on the new worlds we were supposed to inhabit. After my last mission, I was ordered to join one of the colony ships headed to space. The Deliverance. I volunteered as a Guardian.”

  “Guardian?”

  “My new job was to keep an eye on things during the trip across the stars, cycling in and out of stasis. It was supposed to be boring and tedious, but things didn’t go according to plan.”

  “I take it the Hunger had something to do with that?”

  “The Hunger, the Axon, and the USSF. Nathan, you have to idea how deep all this shit goes.”

  “I wouldn’t be too sure,” Nathan said, leading Caleb off the bridge and toward the stern. The ship was humming again, the reactor churning. “The head is this way.”

  “The layout’s pretty close to the old Wasps,” Caleb replied. “A little posher than we had it.” He smiled. “And probably a lot better in zero gravity.”

  They entered the bathroom. As a Centurion dropship, it was designed to support up to fifty people on the week-long journey between Proxima and Earth. There were multiple stalls, multiple sinks, and a larger common shower.

  “So you’re saying you were on the generation ship Deliverance?” Nathan asked.

  “That’s right.”

  “But now you’re back here.”

  “Also right.”

  “How?”

  “I came through an Axon portal.”

  “On purpose?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You had to be able to imagine the best case scenario for the planet, and know that it would still suck. If I were you, I would have assumed humankind was lost.”

  “Maybe, but I knew humankind wasn’t lost.”

  “How?”

  Caleb pulled at his body armor, separating the alien material at his chest and bringing it down to his waist. Nathan’s attention immediately went to a dark, worm-like growth around the Marine’s upper-right arm.

  “The Hunger communicates across the vast distance of their domain using an inter-dimensional quantum network called the Collective,” Caleb explained. He lifted and rotated his right arm.

  Nathan’s breath caught in his throat. The motion revealed that the growth wasn’t a growth at all. A pair of small, dark eyes looked out at him from the end of the creature’s body, regarding him with an intelligence that made his skin crawl.

  “This is Ishek. An Advocate.They’re Relyeh symbiotes. One of the races they conquered and further engineered, modified to both control and enhance a human counterpart. Typically, the Advocate takes what we humans refer to as the alpha position in the relationship, but I managed to get the better of this one.” He paused and smiled. “Though of course, he doesn’t agree with my assessment. His name is Ishek.”

  Nathan stared at the creature. It shifted slightly on Caleb’s arm, a soft chittering squeal escaping from somewhere.

  “I see,” Nathan replied, jaw clenching as he fought to control his sudden anger. “Tell me something, Sergeant. How the hell am I supposed to trust a damn thing you say when you have an enemy alien parasite sucking on your arm?”

  39

  Nathan

  “That’s a good question,” Caleb replied.

  There was no worry in his voice. No concern that Nathan might be able to hurt him if things went sour. That lack of nervousness gave Nathan pause.

  “That’s why we’re here,” Calab continued. “I don’t need a shower, but I wanted to show you Ishek in confidence. The other survivors, they’d see an alien wrapped around my arm and lynch me before I could say a word, especially after what just happened with the xaxkluth. I didn’t need to show him to you, but I want to earn your trust. I know we can help one another.”

  Nathan continued to stare at Ishek. The sight of the thing made him nauseous. He shifted his eyes, meeting Caleb’s. “Okay. I’m listening.”

  “I came back here for a reason. To deliver a message.”

  “What kind of message?”

  “A solution to the trife problem. A means to wipe them out.”

  “We already tried that,” Nathan said. “The poison killed people too.”

  “What?”

  “Sorry to disappoint you, Card. But you're not the first person to come up with that idea. We’ve had over two hundred years to work on it, and we couldn’t get a solution that didn’t also kill humans.”

  “This one might be different.”

  “It might. It might not. Have you tested it?”

  “The trife are specifically engineered for each planet and species they’re deployed against. The only way to test it was to bring it here. I can’t believe my source would send me back with a solution that would kill both human and trife.”

  “You said it, but you don’t sound convinced.”

  Caleb paused, jaw flexing, eyes dropping. “Damn you, Valentine,” he whispered, shaking his head. He looked up at Nathan again. “Fine. In all honesty, I’m not one hundred percent sure it isn’t the same solution. All I have is a datafile jammed into my brain. I’m not even sure how it’s supposed to be extracted.”

  “Where did you get it?”

  “Doctor Riley Valentine. Class A Bitch. But she sacrificed herself to get her research back to Earth, so there’s that. I’m supposed to deliver it to Proxima.”

  Nathan’s eyes narrowed. He didn’t trust anything having to do with Proxima. “Anyone in particular?”

  “I don’t think she knew anyone specific who lived over two hundred years,” Caleb replied flatly.

  “So how do you know who to give it to? How do you know you can trust them?”

  “I always assumed I would hand it over to whoever’s in charge of the planet, or whoever’s in charge of their military.”

  Nathan shook his head. “Not a good idea.”

  “Why not?”

  “Let me tell you something about Proxima. The Proxima government decided Earth is a shithole converted into what they consider an alien ant farm and populated by ignorant savages. They see this place as a testing ground for their experiments, not their home away from home if you know what I mean.”

  “They gave up on Earth?”

  “That’s right. Big time. Except where it suits them. Edenrise, for instance. We’ve been trading with them for over half a century, even though their own laws make the trades illegal.”

  “Trading what?”

  “They bring us raw materials, and we turn them into weapons. High-end, high tech weapons. We keep some of them for ourselves and pass the rest back.”

  Caleb’s eyebrows lowered. “Wait a second. I was just out in the field with you. Other than your powered armor, I didn’t see any firepower we didn’t have two hundred years ago. Your plasma cannons carry a bit more punch, but it’s not an innovation.”

  “We never kept our cache inside the city. Too risky if our contacts ever decided to renege on our agreement and found a way to get past the shield.”

  “You could have used those weapons today.”

  Nathan sighed. “Tell me about it. Nobody figured on some giant tentacled monsters showing up behind every damn trife this side of the Mississippi. Maybe we should have.”

  “You couldn’t have known. Your shield took a hell of a beating.”

  “I’m glad we got some people out in time. With your help. You saved a lot of lives today.”

  “Good. I hope that helps you trust me. who reprogrammed the shield to kill the xaxkluth. Not me.”

  “I knew you seemed different. Now I guess I know why. I’m going to trust you, Caleb. I don’t have much left to lose, and I’m desperate for someone who knows what the hell is going on out there.”

  “Thank you. I—”

  “I wasn’t done,” Nathan interrupted. “You need to trust me too. Whatever’s happening out there, whatever your mission is, you can’t just go running to Proxima with everything you know. Like I told you, the government doesn’t care about Earth, and any problems we cause down here and bring to them are usually met with stiff reprisal. Do you understand?”

  Caleb nodded.

  “Good. There’s another faction on Proxima called the Trust. They’re a crime syndicate. Bad news. They’re the group we’ve been trading with all these years. Like I said, illegal. But it gets better than that. The Centurion Space Force and the Trust are both headed up by the same man. General Aeron Haeri. I don’t quite have that bastard figured out yet, but he’s the reason I’m down here instead of up there.”

  “You’re originally from Proxima?”

  “Affirmative. I was a Centurion Space Force pilot until I got too close to something the Trust didn’t want me to see. They tried to kill me. Fortunately, I’m a hard man to kill.”

  “I get that feeling. My orders were to deliver the data to a military dark ops group that was dealing with the Relyeh and Axon invasions before the trife ever came to Earth. Does that mean anything to you?”

  “Are you suggesting there were aliens on Earth before the trife arrived?”

  “That one threw me for a loop too, but yes. That’s what I was told.”

  Nathan stared at Caleb in silence. He could hardly believe it. “If there’s a dark ops branch on Proxima, they never made themselves known to me.”

  “That’s who I want to talk to, but we don’t have time right now.”

  “You said things were going to get worse. Worse how?”