“Dante, head to my mark,” Caleb said, using his ATCS to mark the spot behind another chunk of debris.

  “Roger,” she replied. She and the others with her stood and began their retreat. Too late. The trife had noticed the weakness in their retreat and were still within themselves enough to take advantage. They started shifting the weight of their attack to that side, moving in for the kill.

  Caleb risked a quick look back toward the quantum teleporter. Hal was locked in hand-to-hand combat with the BI, the trife form pressed tight against the humanoid form, which had lost its unsettling projection of him during the fight. Hal had what appeared to be a long blade sticking out through its back, the trife impaled but not struggling to get free. In fact, it looked like the intelligence was using its opponent’s grip on it to stay close.

  He looked away, back to the position he had marked for Dante. The trife were rushing her, Paisley, and Kiaan—about to overwhelm the trio.

  “I’m out,” Dante announced, her plasma rifle going dead at the worst possible time. Immediately, half a dozen trife burst forward, right on her heels.

  Caleb acted without thinking, sprinting across the floor. He grabbed a piece of debris on the way past, a shard of some kind of stone, holding it like a club as he dove into the back of the first line of trife. He hit them from the rear, using his weight to pull them down and smashing the one closest to the sheriff in the back of the head. Its armor prevented the blow from cracking its skull, but it still crumpled to the ground with the others, giving the group a few seconds of breathing room.

  And taking it all away from Caleb.

  He rolled to his feet, the entire right flank of demons rushing him. Paige fired single shots from her MK-12, her impeccable aim taking out one creature after another, buying him a few more precious seconds before he was overcome.

  “Sarge!” Flores shouted, noticing he was in trouble. She was too far away, and she was about to have trouble of her own. If Dante were dry, she would be too within the next few seconds.

  It was a futile effort. An impossible defense. They had never stood a chance against so many of the demons. Caleb stood in the center of them, hands up and ready to fight. The trife crowded around him, prepared to finish him. He had lived a good life. Too short maybe, but it was an effort he would die proud of. His only regret was that his final mission was a failure.

  The Guardians were going to die, and then the people of Metro were going to die. It was as simple as that.

  “Come on!” he shouted at the trife. They remained standing around him, hissing and clawing at the air. Why hadn’t they attacked? “If you want to kill me, come and kill me!”

  A few of the trife took a step forward, but they quickly backed up. Then they did the last thing he expected.

  Almost in unison, every last one of them collapsed to the floor and died.

  Chapter 55

  “What the hell just happened?” Flores asked, completely baffled by what she’d just seen.

  Caleb whirled around, looking for Hal, his heart still pulsing hard from his near-death. He found the BI near the quantum teleporter, arms at its sides. Hal was on the floor, body sliced entirely in half.

  Only there was no sign of the AI’s gel matter leaking from the corpse, and Caleb remembered what David had said about the Axon artificial intelligence. Every node was a copy, which meant the only way to destroy Hal was to destroy every last one. The capsule could be dead, but the nodes that were still in close enough proximity to remain connected would allow it to move unhindered. As much as being torn in half could be considered unhindered, anyway.

  His eyes flicked back to the BI. “Hal?” he said.

  “This capsule is more suitable,” Hal replied through the comm. “Your distraction was invaluable. I was not wrong to require you.”

  “What did you do?” Dante asked.

  “I attacked the intellect’s systems. It was basic and easily overcome. The only requirement was time. It did not guess what I was doing until it was too late. These trife were under its control. Drones, in your terms. That’s why they are embedded with alloy. The alloy is protecting control nodes. Each node can be operated individually, or as a whole.”

  “What exactly does that mean?” Caleb asked.

  “They’re puppets,” Dante said. “And the Basic Intellect was pulling the strings.”

  “Essentially,” Hal agreed.

  “And you cut them,” Flores remarked.

  “Essentially.”

  “And you’re still blocking the neural disruption?” Caleb asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “I do not understand.”

  “You don’t require us anymore. We got you here. Why not let us kill one another?”

  “Have you forgotten our discussion in the wilderness? The gravity of this situation outweighs all other considerations.”

  “The enemy of my enemy is my friend?” Flores said.

  “Not quite an apt description. We are not enemies. I care not for you one way or the other, save how you can be of use to me, and I to you.”

  “Fair enough,” Caleb said. “So if you could have gained control of the trife, why did you kill them?”

  “The uluth are disgusting. They have no place in this universe, and I would not diminish myself in such a way. It is abhorrent that the creators have put them to such use. Their desperation must have been great.”

  Caleb smiled inside his helmet. Hal hated the trife more than he did, and that was a hard thing to do. Given control of an army of them, he wasn’t sure he would react the same way.

  “Is anyone hurt?” Caleb asked.

  “Negative,” Dante said. “You saved our asses, Sergeant. Thank you.”

  “Sarge,” Flores said. “It’s Liam.”

  Caleb looked to his left, to where Flores was standing near the overturned block of alloy. Liam was sitting against it. His shirt was soaked with blood.

  He rushed over to the man, kneeling beside him. “What happened?”

  “He put himself between me and a trife,” Flores said. “Idiot. He didn’t need to. I’m armored.”

  “You did the same for me,” Dante said. “It’s instinct.”

  Caleb was surprised. He didn’t think the guard had it in him. “Hal, can you do anything for him?”

  Hal walked over, his gait smooth and silent, the black material lighter than it looked. It knelt on the other side of Liam.

  “Get that thing away from me,” Liam coughed. He looked at Caleb. “You get the hell away from me too. You’re going to be the end of us, Card. You and your Marines. Screw the Space Force, and screw you.”

  Caleb took the vitriol without flinching. Liam was dying. He could say whatever he wanted.

  “Hal?” he asked instead.

  Hal reached out toward Liam, his fingers spreading into tendrils. “No! No damn it! Don’t touch me!” Liam looked horrified, and he struggled to get away.

  Hal withdrew his hand. “I care not if he lives or dies. He has decided.” The AI stood and moved back to the teleporter.

  “Liam, you’re going to die,” Caleb said.

  “At least it’ll get me away from you.” Liam looked at Dante. “I hope Governor Stone has you shot for what you’ve done. All of you.” He leaned his head back and closed his eyes. “I never expected...to die like this. I liked Metro the way it was.”

  Then he died.

  The others stood over him in silence for a few seconds. Caleb was the first to walk away, joining Hal near the teleporter. Flores and Washington joined him next, and then Kiaan and Paisley. Dante lingered for a moment, but only for a moment.

  “How does this thing work?” Flores asked. “Is it like Star Trek?”

  “I understand not,” Hal replied. “In terms a human can understand, the device takes an atomic level scan of whatever is on the platform, digitizes it and passes it to the receiver, which reassembles the atoms. To describe the process in algorithmic terms would take far too much time, and you would not understand.”

  “Oh,” Flores replied. Her head turned toward Caleb, and he could imagine the face she was making behind her faceplate.

  “Step onto the platform,” Hal said.

  Washington shook his head. He didn’t look at all comfortable with the idea of being scanned, broken apart, and put back together. Caleb didn’t blame him.

  “You can stay here,” he offered.

  Washington drooped his head. He disliked that idea more.

  Hal went to the platform first. Caleb and Kiaan joined him, followed by the others.

  “How does it know where to go?” Caleb asked.

  “I entered the correct level.”

  “How long does it take?”

  Before Hal could answer, a burst of light like the flash of a camera momentarily blinded him. When it faded, Caleb immediately realized he was somewhere else.

  “Not long,” Hal replied.

  Had the AI just made a joke?

  The platform was identical to the one they had stepped onto. The room beyond it was not. They were in a tall, wide room that branched off in four directions, leading to long, dark corridors. The largest passageway was directly ahead of them, and Caleb could see the light shining from the end of it. “That way, I assume?” he asked.

  “Assurance,” Hal replied.

  They stepped off the platform. Caleb let Hal take the lead, hanging back a few steps. “Knuckle-up, stay alert,” he said.

  “Roger,” Flores replied. “My knuckles are all I’ve got left.”

  The statement reminded Caleb that the group was extremely low on ammunition. He checked his HUD. Paisley's rifle had fourteen rounds remaining. Washington’s eight. That was all they had left, though Flores and Dante were still carrying their P-50s. They could always use them as clubs if it came to that.

  They followed Hal down the corridor. The artificial intelligence walked calmly, in no apparent hurry to get to the control center they had fought so hard to reach. Caleb and the others walked behind it like a ragged entourage, their faces a blend of fear and curiosity.

  The corridor opened up as they neared the end, spreading out in a sloping vector that merged directly with the walls of the control center, which Caleb quickly realized was a single, massive hologram. It threw illuminated scenes and alien scripture all around the room in multi-colored beams of red, green, blue, gold and silver. There was probably a meaning to the colors, but Caleb wasn’t able to even consider it. He was overcome by the sheer immensity and complexity of the system, and the complete lack of any other control surfaces anywhere in the room. The hologram was everything, the beams the source of the light they had spotted from kilometers away and tracked like the north star.

  Actually, it wasn’t everything. As his eyes crossed through the multi-faceted display of light they also crossed over a single form standing in the center of it. They passed it by for a moment before his brain caught up to his vision and his gaze returned to the interruption.The same artificial intelligence that had confronted them outside the Deliverance.

  “You should never have come here,” a voice said in crisp English, the sound assaulting them from everywhere at once. “We should never have come here. This planet is cursed.”

  Chapter 56

  A tense silence hung in the air in response to the statement. Then Hal took another step forward, a sound escaping him that reminded Caleb of a bow dragging across violin strings. The pitch altered slightly, creating a fluctuation that suggested speech, continuing for nearly a minute before trailing off.

  The silence returned. The AI in the center of the room didn’t move. The hologram around it began to vanish, the beams of light shutting down one by one. The AI emitted a similar sound to Hal’s, a short chirp that lasted only a couple of seconds.

  “Hal, what’s happening?” Caleb asked.

  “I will reduce to your language,” the other AI replied instead. “And to your level of intellect. This chain of events was unforeseen in any of the simulations. But we have continually found certain species to be harder to predict than others. How else do you explain a partnership between human and Axon? You even accepted a name.” The AI spoke to Hal like he was a child. “Yes, we are aware of the Relyeh threat to Earth. We received a transmission through a portal not long ago. It was generated from Lilo, which was also unexpected. The Relyeh destroyed Lilo almost one en ago.”

  “What was the transmission?” Hal asked.

  “Relyeh have invaded the human homeworld. Humans have not yet fallen. Our preparations, our learning must be accelerated. That is why we are here.”

  “Ens?” Caleb said.

  “An en is comparable to a human century,” Hal replied.

  “So Lilo was an Axon planet, and it was destroyed by the Relyeh a hundred years ago?”

  “Very astute,” the other AI said. “The speed and nature of your response suggest you are at the higher end of your species’ mental limits. The portal was activated on Lilo. The intellect was fortunate to get a message through. It remained open for only a glimpse.”

  “You already know about Earth and the approach of the Relyeh,” Hal said. “My mission was not required.”

  “You knew not. You have completed your mission.”

  “No. I require information. Where are the creators?”

  “They are gone. They fled this planet five ens ago.”

  “Why?”

  “This place is cursed. We accelerated the research, but our haste to solve the impossible algorithm only caused to hasten our failure. Do you know this world?”

  “I do not,” Hal said. “The humans brought their ship here. They brought me with them. There was division among them. One in particular wished to attack the Axon. The rest want to settle peacefully.”

  The other AI made a deep, rumbling noise. Laughter. “The first came to the right place. The rest did not.”

  Caleb’s heart was already pounding. It found a new level. What did it mean?

  “The first believed the uruth who attacked Earth originated from this world,” Hal said.

  “That is true.”

  “But this is not the Relyeh pattern. It is counter to their algorithm.”

  “It was not the Relyeh. They have not yet arrived. Only through the warning on Lilo have we been alerted to this threat.”

  “I understand not.”

  The high-pitched whine resumed around them. Hal shouted over it. “In human language, Guardian.”

  The whining stopped. Guardian, Caleb wondered? Was the advanced AI there solely to defend the city? From what? The Axon were gone. There was nothing here to protect except itself.

  Or was there?

  Pieces of the AI launched out from it, dozens of small components aligning themselves around Hal. They began flashing like a hundred tiny strobes, and Hal fell to its knees, frozen beneath the lights.

  “I am far superior to you, Watcher,” Guardian said. “Do not think to instruct me.” Guardian held off the attack for a moment, and then the lights stopped and the components retreated to it. “You are insignificant. You deserve nothing. But you can do no harm with the knowledge. Perhaps there is a small chance you can be of further service. You are as cursed to be here as the creators were. As I continue to be.”

  The beams that formed the holograms began to light up again, creating a multi-colored grid that filled the room, broken only by the position of the intelligences and people in it. The grid started to alter its shape, the light spreading, the colors colliding and reflecting.

  The floor vanished beneath Caleb’s feet, leaving him standing on empty space. It seemed so real he momentarily panicked, afraid the AI had somehow cast them off the planet and into the middle of nowhere, before realizing he could still feel the floor on his boots, and his ATCS wasn’t complaining. The floor was still there. He just couldn’t see it. Judging from the gasps around him, the others were having similar experiences.

  What he could see was more space ahead of and all around them. It was interrupted by six dark shapes, each of them identical to the other and incredibly familiar.

  He was standing in one of them now.

  The Deliverance was a starship with a city inside.

  These were cities that were also starships.

  “This is our arrival on this world,” Guardian said. “As I recorded it ten ens ago. I was activated by an Axon scientist I will reduce to Rex, for the sake of the humans. Rex was in charge of the expedition to this planet, and of the research to be done here. This world was selected because of its similarity to the planet Earth.”

  “What was the research?” Hal asked.

  They began moving forward through space, the realism giving Caleb the sense that they were really flying out there, headed for the solid walls of one of the spacecraft. He turned his head away right before they collided, looking back when they passed through the alloy and into the corridors.

  Two figures walked along it side-by-side, their speed and gait suggesting they had somewhere they were supposed to be.

  “What the hell?” Flores remarked softly over the comm.

  Caleb’s heart felt like it stopped. His breath escaped him, and he didn’t immediately draw another.

  The view of the scene zoomed past the figures, but their appearance was already burned into his mind. He struggled to make sense of it.

  The figures in the corridor were human.

  Chapter 57

  “This isn’t possible,” Dante said, the fear and tension obvious in her voice. “How can this be possible?”

  She wasn’t there when Hal explained how the Axon had taken humans from Earth and brought them back to their part of the galaxy, with the hope that they would find a species capable of matching the Relyeh in war. She didn’t know there were other Homo sapiens out there, starting new lives on new worlds, evolving and learning and growing.