“Hey, uglies!” he heard Gold shout, the older Marine’s voice echoing in the space. The queen’s head whipped around, looking for the source. The other consorts began to spread away from her, winding around the columns in the direction of the sound.

  Caleb saw Gold waving his arms as he backed up toward the closest doorway. He was trying to lead them back to use the hatch as a bottleneck and control the flow of demons if they tried to attack.

  Some of them did follow, nearly fifty in total. It was a ridiculous amount of trife for the two Marines to try to fight on their own, especially armed only with knives. There was a good chance they were sacrificing themselves to draw more of the creatures away.

  Caleb wasn’t about to let such a selfless sacrifice go to waste.

  He waited for a few more seconds, watching the queen. It had its eyes locked on Gold, but it wasn’t moving. Caleb circled the column he was behind, moving closer to the lead trife. He caught sight of Flores as he did. She was out of the hatch and approaching the queen from the back.

  The consorts moved into the room with Washington and Gold. He couldn’t see or hear them. He didn’t know how long they would last. There were still a couple of dozen consorts at the feet of the queen, but he had to make his move. He had to get her attention and draw it into position for Flores to make the killing strike.

  And he had to do it now.

  He broke from his cover, intending to position himself directly in front of the queen, to draw her attention and give Flores the chance she needed.

  Only it didn’t happen that way.

  The plan didn’t go according to plan.

  The trife queen spun back around before she saw him. Then she bolted away, leaving her nest behind to chase the human with the gun.

  Chapter 48

  “Shit!” Caleb shouted, loudly enough that some of the trife nearby turned their heads, noticing him for the first time.

  He couldn’t believe it. Why had the queen suddenly abandoned her nest to chase Sho? Why hadn’t she gone after her in the first place?

  Had the Guardian killed enough of its consorts that it was pissed at her? He almost smiled at the thought, but a hiss too close for comfort suddenly drew his attention. He turned and brought his knife up, holding it near his forearm. A trife he hadn’t noticed slashed at his face. He ducked under the demon’s claws, pivoting and slashing the blade across its chest, cutting it wide open. He shouldered it aside, shouting again as he changed his grip, stabbing a second trife in the stomach and falling to one knee to avoid its bite.

  He heard movement behind him and turned on his knee, swinging the blade. Flores barely jumped back in time to avoid the strike.

  “Damn, it’s me, Alpha!” she cried out.

  Caleb sprang up, pushing her aside as a trife came up behind her. He jammed his knife into its open mouth and up into its brain, yanking the blade away.

  “You’re welcome,” he said.

  She smiled and nodded, and they stood together. Flores had a blade in each hand, though her left-handed grip seemed awkward.

  “What do we do now?” she asked.

  Caleb looked back to where the queen had been. There was a hard, thick, semi-translucent gel where the serumen had mingled with the crap coming from between the queen’s legs. He could see something wriggling and squirming within it.

  Trife. Dozens of trife.

  “That thing is going to slaughter Sho and Shiro,” he replied.

  “Go,” Flores said. “We’ll take care of these.”

  “Three against one hundred?”

  She smiled. “They’re just bugs, Alpha. And we’ve got Washington.”

  Caleb looked back to the doorway. He could see the big Marine behind it, slashing out with his knife, cutting into the trife before they could get within arm’s reach of him. A pile of dead aliens already lay in front of him, and he was smiling like he was having the time of his life.

  “Go,” Flores repeated, shoving him on his way.

  Caleb sprinted across the interchange, winding around the columns to avoid the few consorts still in the room. One of them nearly tackled him as he closed on the exit. He dropped and rolled, catching the demon with his knife and almost cutting it in half. He got back up, sparing a momentary glance back at his other Guardians.

  Flores had closed on the trife from behind, catching them off-guard and using her twin blades to dig into their backs, stabbing two of them in the short time he watched them. The ranks were already thinning, the Marines getting the best of the consorts, who seemed sluggish from their reproductive efforts.

  Then he was out of the interchange and running across the ship. Sho and Shiro were supposed to lead the trife back as far as they could get them, but how far would that be?

  He had only covered a dozen meters when he came across the first dead trife killed by a plasma bolt. He followed it to another and then another, and kept running, using the dead aliens as breadcrumbs to track both the queen and the two Marines.

  He ran as fast as he could, his heart pulsing, his breath heavy. He was exhausted before they started this mission, which had gone from perfectly executed to a potential disaster in seconds. At least they hadn’t punctured a circuit or damaged a thrust unit.

  He came to a stop when he reached a thick pile of dead trife close to the central lifts. Dozens of trife consorts had been burned by a plasma stream, leaving them looking like the smoldering remnants of a bone-filled bonfire. Was this what had caused the queen to leave the nest?

  He stepped carefully through the mess, still fresh enough to be giving off heat. Finding the P-50 that had done the damage on the deck a few meters further on, he picked it up and checked its cell charge. It was out of fuel.

  Caleb continued ahead, a little more cautious now. Sho and Shiro had made a beeline for the lifts. Did they know the queen was after them? Had she already caught up to them?

  He heard scratching and hissing a moment later and then the sound of claws on the metal floor coming back his way. He couldn’t face the queen head on alone. He scanned the corridor, running back to a nearby hatch. He hit the control panel and ducked inside, barely making it through before the queen turned the corner ahead. A moment later, her large, dark form scampered past.

  Where was she going?

  Caleb considered following her but decided against it. He didn’t think she was going back to the interchange. She had lost Sho at the lifts, and the nearest operational stairwell was back aft.

  He came out of hiding, running to the lifts. There were more dead trife there as well as a line of human blood. Was Sho hurt again? Or was it Shiro? He traced the blood to the lift and tapped the control panel. Deck Six. Was she headed for the bridge?

  Caleb went to the next lift over, tapping the controls to summon it. It was four decks up and only took a few seconds to arrive. He ducked inside, reaching for the controls.

  “Come on,” he said, ordering the lift to ascend. The ride felt like it took forever, even if it lasted only a dozen seconds.

  The lift doors slid aside, and Caleb nearly fell out the door, catching himself on the side of the cab. Regaining his balance, he sprinted away from the shaft, headed for the bridge.

  Why would Sho go up there?

  He had a feeling he knew why.

  He ran down the corridors, trying to remember the layout of the deck. He knew he was heading in the right direction when he passed Private Gurshaw, one of Pratt’s men who had died defending the area. He wasn’t surprised to notice that Gurshaw’s sidearm was missing.

  He jumped over the dead Marine’s drying blood, his padded feet slapping the metal floor in a rapid-fire cadence. There, at the intersection up ahead, he’d wait for the queen. He knew it led back to the stairwell he believed she was ascending. Had he gotten here ahead of her?

  His knife held at the ready, he crouched down and crossed the intersection, looking to the left to scan the long corridor. It was empty, dark and silent. No electronics, nothing to give his position away. The softer soles of the bodysuit didn’t make much noise either.

  The queen hadn’t made it up the steps yet. The bridge wasn’t that much further. He had to make it there.

  Something hit his feet, catching his ankle from behind and tripping him up. He sprawled face-first hard on the floor, sliding half a meter before flipping his legs over and gaining purchase. He awkwardly got back up and faced the way he had come.

  A trife’s tail vanished into an open compartment. A large head emerged to replace it.

  The head of the queen.

  Chapter 49

  Caleb stood motionless as the trife queen emerged from the small storage space. As quiet as he had tried to be, it was clear the creature had heard him and prepared accordingly.

  She was smart. Smarter than the other trife he had encountered on Earth. Was that a result of becoming the queen, or had she been selected because of her intelligence? Was this the trife that had coordinated all of the attacks against them?

  Was this the trife that had gotten so many of his fellow Marines killed?

  Caleb gripped his knife. The queen was at least two full heads taller than he was, forcing her to crouch in the human-sized corridor. Her long arms were thicker than a normal trife’s, her claws longer, her legs more muscled. Her leathery black flesh glistened from the dried black ichor that had run between them. Her head was wider than an ordinary trife’s, her mouth and teeth larger. He would have preferred to stay away from her, to shoot her from a distance.

  But it wasn’t one of his options.

  He could turn and run, or he could stand and fight. He wasn’t sure running was one of his options, either. The smaller corridors might slow the queen. But would it be enough to keep her from catching him?

  The trife queen opened her mouth even wider. Caleb expected a hiss. Instead, he got a loud, ear-piercing scream that sent a shiver down his spine. The queen lowered herself, following up the cry with shorter bursts of sound that echoed in the passageway.

  The challenge made up his mind for him. He wasn’t going to run. He owed it to his dead brothers and sisters to accept the fight and prove their worth as much as his own.

  “You want it?” he said, stepping toward the queen. “You got it.”

  The queen screamed again and then burst toward him, faster than he could believe. Still, he was able to duck beneath a giant claw, its tips so close to slicing his face open he could feel the displaced air against his cheek. Throwing himself sideways, he barely avoided her snapping teeth. He bounced off the side of the corridor and took a backhanded swing at her head with his knife.

  The queen’s tail whipped around and hit him in the chest, throwing him into the corridor again. He rolled up on his feet, bringing his forearm up in defense as the queen’s mouth came at him a second time. Two dozen teeth pressed into the bodysuit and then through, biting deep into Caleb’s arm. He held back his scream, refusing to show her his pain as she refused to let him go. He used her head as leverage, pulling himself sideways and driving his knife toward the queen’s eye.

  She saw the knife coming at her in time to let go of his arm and back up to avoid it. She was on him again in an instant. Caleb barely twisted away from her claws, taking a glancing blow that nearly knocked him down. He swung his damaged arm in response, hitting the queen in the face and leaving a trail of both his and her blood across her snout.

  She screamed again, this time right in his ear, the noise so forceful he could feel the moisture of her breath on his eardrum as it succumbed to the screech. He threw himself to the floor, bringing his knife up over his chest in a desperate effort to defend himself.

  The queen stomped up and leaned over him, her head swaying back and forth in an effort to escape the stabs of Caleb’s knife.

  Caleb couldn’t feel his left arm. He was losing too much blood from it, and he wasn’t carrying a patch. Not that it mattered. He figured he was about to get his face bitten off.

  “Just do it,” he screamed, his eyes filled with the fire of his anger as he glared up at the queen. He had tried, and he had failed. He was resigned to paying the price for his failure.

  “Get the hell away from him!” Sho shouted.

  Caleb heard the report of the rifle Sho had taken from Gurshaw an instant before the queen’s head snapped back. She screamed and turned toward Sho. Caleb tilted his head to look over at Sho a dozen meters away, still shooting at the queen. The creature took three rounds to her torso and then turned and ran.

  Not away from the gunfire.

  Toward it.

  Sho continued to shoot, sending four more rounds into the queen before her rifle was empty. She dropped it and grabbed for her knife, but the queen was almost on her.

  Shiro let loose a guttural cry as he jumped out of the adjacent corridor and plowed into the queen, stabbing her in the shoulder. The queen screamed, throwing her arm out and batting Shiro away.

  Caleb forced himself to his feet. His left arm was limp at his side, his vision blurry. It didn’t matter. He had lost Banks, Habib, Rodriguez, Hafizi. He wasn’t losing Sho too.

  He sprinted at the queen, who slashed at Sho, driving the other Vulture back. Caleb and Sho made eye contact as she saw him coming up behind the demon.

  “Come on you bitch!” Sho shouted, lunging forward and stabbing at her.

  The queen caught the blade between her teeth, yanking it from Sho’s hand. Long claws raked the Marine’s chest.

  Caleb leaped toward the queen, his knife gripped in his good hand. The queen started to turn to defend against Caleb’s attack, but she was too big and too slow. She struggled to maneuver, and that struggle cost her.

  Caleb sank his blade into her back, right below her thick neck, burying the metal up to the handle. The queen screamed, flailing from the wound and knocking Caleb off her back. He tumbled to the floor, leaving him to scramble away from the queen’s wildly swinging tail as she took a step toward Sho. Sho rose up in front of the queen and stabbed her in the eye.

  She screamed again and fell at Sho’s feet.

  Dead.

  Chapter 50

  Caleb rested his head against the wall of the passageway, doing his best to stay conscious. His eyes shifted as Shiro vaulted the dead trife and rushed to his side, taking account of his wounds.

  “Sho,” Caleb said. “Take care of Sho.”

  “I’m okay, Sarge,” Sho said, getting past the queen. She was bleeding from her chest, but the bodysuit had managed to absorb at least some of the damage. “It isn’t deep.”

  “That needs treatment,” Shiro told Caleb, looking at his arm. “I don’t know if we’re going to be able to save it.”

  “Figures,” Caleb said. “My kingdom for a patch. I’m going to bleed to death out here.”

  “Ask and you shall receive, Alpha,” Shiro said, producing a patch.

  “Gurshaw?” Caleb asked.

  Sho nodded. “He didn’t need it.”

  Shiro retreated to the queen, pulling his knife from her shoulder and wiping it as clean as he could on his bodysuit. Then he used it to cut away Caleb’s sleeve.

  “That was some battle cry,” Caleb said. “Aaahhhhh.” He mimicked it softly, smiling when he was done. “You could have been a Vulture if you didn’t scream like a cat in heat.”

  Shiro and Sho both laughed. “Good to see you have your sense of humor, Sarge,” Sho said.

  “We need to check on the interchange.” Caleb responded. “Gold, Washington, and Flores are still down there.”

  “You’re in no shape to help them,” Shiro said, opening the patch and placing it at the top of his wound. He wrapped it tight around the arm to stop the blood loss.

  “We can check on them from the bridge,” Sho said. “It isn’t far.”

  “Help me up,” Caleb said, holding out his good arm. Shiro helped him to his feet, and they made their way past the queen. Caleb stopped in front of it, staring into its open-eyed death gaze. This thing had nearly cost them the entire ship, and maybe all of Metro with it.

  “She’s dead, Sarge,” Sho said. “Come on.”

  He followed them, down the corridor to the end and then to the right. Another short passage and they were back at the bridge. The hatch was sitting open. The smell was horrible. There hadn’t been any time to clear out the dead, human or otherwise.

  “How are we going to see them here?” Caleb asked. “There are no sensors in the interchange.”

  “Right,” Sho said. “But also wrong. The terminal in the Marine module is subnetworked into the main ship’s computer. The bridge has access to the full network, which includes hundreds of internally mounted cameras in sensitive areas of the ship, all hardwired into the system. No wireless comm needed.”

  “But the subnetwork doesn’t have access?”

  “The module networks don’t.”

  “How do you know about this?”

  “We got up here ahead of Miss Bitch back there. The terminal was already active, and set to one of the feeds.”

  “What do you mean it was already active? Who activated it?”

  “I don’t know. The ghost you and Wash saw, maybe?”

  Caleb didn’t like the answer. He didn’t like any answer. Someone had been on the bridge, possibly watching them. Could it be the man he had seen being chased by the trife? Who was he?

  They entered the bridge. The terminal was still on, a smaller display in front of it showing a camera feed from what looked like the top of Metro. The angle gave them a wide view of the city, which seemed downright peaceful. The atmospherics were in full daylight mode, and there were people out in the park, others walking the streets, and still more visible through open windows into their cubes. Caleb had been concerned about any trife hiding in the ductwork and getting into Metro, but it seemed law had everything under control.

  Sho tapped on the control surface, and a list of cameras streamed across the display. She tapped on the one that said INTERCHANGE-PA.

  The display changed, showing the interchange. There were plenty of trife still on the floor inside, but none of them were moving. There was no sign of the Guardians.