Earth had ripped them apart.

  Steven was gone, killed by a madman who wanted the aliens to win. He had been dead for months now.

  Rico still felt the loss. Every damn day.

  She sighed heavily, refocusing her thoughts. As the liaison between Earth and Proxima, it was her responsibility to make sure whatever happened down there didn’t affect anything that happened up here. Humankind’s newer and better world had a tenuous relationship with their origins, and the latest developments had left her wondering where it was all going to lead.

  As far as the population of Proxima was concerned, as far as the elected government was concerned, Earth was as it had always been. A civilized society of humankind that their ancestors had fled centuries earlier to escape oppression and form their independent society.

  Rico shook her head. It was such bullshit, but after so many years the civilians bought it without question. So did the Centurion Spacers who didn’t know any better. Who had never gained the clearance to be deployed there. It was Proxima’s best kept secret and anyone who even hinted they might try to reveal it was dealt with quickly and violently.

  She wasn’t about to say anything to anyone who didn’t already know. Rocking the ship wouldn’t help Proxima, and it wouldn’t help Earth. No, the only thing that could help them all was to keep the tenuous relationship going and try to navigate the dark water between fiction and reality where the Council, the military and the Trust—the planet’s organized crime syndicate—operated.

  The job to act as fulcrum had fallen to her when Steven died. She could only hope she was making him proud.

  Rico turned away from the window, crossing her cube to the small countertop that served as a kitchen. There was no livestock on Proxima. The meats they had were all preserved in Petri dishes and grown in vats, processed and packaged to look like the real thing when it never could. Very few people even knew what the real thing looked like, but she did. There were cows and pigs and chickens on Earth, along with all kinds of other wildlife. The trife didn’t kill them. They only killed humans.

  She opened a small drawer and pulled out a package marked as turkey. She tore the wrapper off and threw it into the oven. She wasn’t all that hungry, but she figured she should eat.

  Her mind wandered to Sergeant Isaac Pine. She had brought him back from Earth with her under the protection of centuries-old settlement laws. Laws that allowed anyone born during the original trife invasion to become instant citizens of Proxima. Time should have made the laws irrelevant. Even today, regular humans didn’t live much past a hundred years. But the original Council hadn’t banked too hard on stasis, which was a new technology for them at the time. They had no way of knowing anyone on Earth had been asleep for all of those years.

  But Isaac had.

  Rico’s finger hovered over the start button. Thinking of Isaac brought an empty feeling to her gut. He had come to Proxima because he was dying and their medicine was the only thing that could save him. And they had saved him. The tumor was gone. Isaac was healthy again. The last time she had seen him, he was still in the hospital while arrangements were being made to provide him with a permanent home and a new life.

  And then he had disappeared.

  She had gone to see him again, only to find his room at the hospital empty. She had recovered his discharge file, which claimed he had checked himself out. That was his right as a Proxima citizen, but why the hell would he do that?

  She didn’t think he had.

  Her gut reaction was to confront General Haeri. She knew the general was a multi-headed snake. The commanding officer of the Centurion Space Force, and close to the top of the Trust’s chain of command, if not its head. It meant he knew the truth about everything...and then some. He had access to secrets nobody else in the universe knew. Secrets one faction or another had been keeping for centuries.

  It also meant he was dangerous.

  Rico opened the oven door, considered repackaging the meal, and then slammed the door closed again.

  “Damn it,” she hissed under her breath.

  Isaac vanished two days ago. She had searched for him through above-board channels, unsurprised to find he had fallen completely off the grid. He was a Proxima citizen, with all of the rights and privileges. But he was also a newcomer. A stranger. Someone nobody would miss except for her. He was easy to make disappear. She wanted to go to Haeri, but her mistrust gave her pause. She didn’t ultimately know which side he was playing for, or what his end goals were. Did he want to sever all ties to Earth or improve relations? Was he for or against an alliance with the Axon? Or was he already under Relyeh control? It was impossible to guess. She imagined if Haeri wanted her to know where Isaac was, he would have already told her.

  And that was enough to keep her in line.

  Or it had been.

  Two days had given her a lot of time to think. About the past, present and future. Hers, Proxima’s and Earth’s. Once, not that long ago, she was loyal to Proxima and only Proxima. But ignorance wasn’t bliss. In the end, it hadn’t saved Steven and it hadn’t spared her any pain. The enemy was out there, and it wasn’t only an enemy to Earth. It was an enemy to all of humankind.

  She couldn’t stand by while the Hunger prepared for their next invasion and General Haeri continued to play games. She couldn’t afford to keep trying to balance one planet with another. They were all humans after all.

  They all deserved to live free.

  Rico turned on her heel, crossing the space to the comm terminal near her front door. She tapped on the screen to activate it. “General Haeri,” she said. Her heart started pounding in anticipation.

  “Special Officer Rodriguez,” Haeri said a moment later. “It’s about time you called.”

  Rico opened her mouth, but the words didn’t come. Haeri’s greeting took her completely off-guard. “You…you were waiting for me?”

  “Of course. You want to know what happened to Sergeant Pine.”

  “That’s right.”

  “I’m sending you a new file. Read it quickly.”

  The comm disconnected.

  7

  Rico

  Rico hurried away from the comm terminal and into Steven’s office. Her office, though she still struggled to think of it that way. There was another terminal inside connected to a secure military channel. She activated it, the interface projecting onto the top of the desk in three dimensions. She reached for her inbox, flipping it open. A new message appeared. She knew Haeri sent it, but his name wasn’t on it. There was no name on it. No subject. Only a file.

  She grabbed the file and opened it. She wasn’t sure what to expect. Her conversation with General Haeri had been short and one-sided. She had no idea what the hell was going on.

  The contents of the file spread out in front of her. A chart, two videos, a text document. She imagined they were listed in the order the general wanted her to consume them. She tapped on the map.

  It expanded in front of her, the projection increasing in size until it filled her whole field of view. Now that it was larger, she could see it was a star chart. Proxima was outlined and labeled in blue. A second planet was outlined in green and marked as ‘OBSERVATION ALPHA.’

  Rico stared at it. “Ray, what’s the distance between Proxima and Observation Alpha?” she asked, speaking to the terminal’s AI assistant.

  “Eight light years,” it replied in a calm, neutral voice.

  Eight? She studied the chart, rotating it with her hand. Proxima was the axis as it turned, showing her the mapped stars within a twenty light year radius of the planet. There were seven more of the green worlds marked as ‘Observation,’ each of them approximately eight light years distant.

  A third planet was outlined in red. Earth.

  Why had General Haeri sent her a map of explored space? And what were the Observation planets?

  “I don’t get it,” she said, trying to make sense of the map.

  “The chart contains an animation,” the AI replied. “Would you like to play it?”

  Rico sighed, feeling stupid. “Yes, please.”

  The chart rotated back to its original position. Then the first green planet, Observation Alpha pulsed a brighter green for a few seconds, attracting her attention. A moment later, a new mark appeared on the chart close to the observation planet, painted in yellow.

  A timer appeared to the right of the yellow mark, displaying its velocity and heading as the continuing animation dragged it across the star map.

  Rico stared at it, heart pounding more fiercely. She shifted her gaze to find Proxima and then drew an invisible line between the planet and the unidentified object.

  It was coming right toward them.

  She swallowed hard, her mouth suddenly dry. The animation ended with the yellow object already past Observation Alpha, the readings suggesting it was moving through the universe at over one hundred times the speed of light.

  How was that even possible?

  Centurion starships used folded space to travel the four light-years between Proxima and Earth, and even with that it took nearly two weeks to make the round trip. Real FTL travel like what she was watching couldn’t happen.

  At least that’s what human science had taught her to believe.

  She closed the chart and opened the first video. At first, she thought it was broken because it only displayed a blank, black screen. Then a single point of red appeared to the far left of the frame. By the next frame, it was a streak that crossed the entire screen. Then the display went black again. She was going to replay it when she noticed the video wasn’t over. It started with the empty display and continued until the red light appeared. Then the recording seemed to slow down, the camera capturing the event at the highest rate it could manage.

  It allowed her to see what was creating the light, which trailed out from the dark shape in a long line. It gave her a chance to be afraid.

  She knew it had to be an alien ship before she saw it. Nothing could move that fast naturally. Even so, the sight of the vessel sent a shiver down her spine and raised a chill across her body, and she shook in place as she stared. The video had been edited, the image manipulated to invert the light and pull out the features of the object creating it. It was four kilometers long at least, and nearly half as high. It appeared to be made of stone or other hardened, non-metallic material. It was smooth and rounded at the bow and stern, with a center composed of interconnected bulbs that spread out to nearly double the diameter. Smaller streaks of light surrounded it, emitted from transparencies in the outer shell or external lighting along the hull.

  To Rico, it looked less like a starship and more like a gigantic, barnacle-encrusted creature dredged up from the bottom of the sea and launched into space.

  But it was a starship.

  A Relyeh starship.

  The Hunger had started their invasion centuries earlier when they had dropped the trife on the planet to begin their conquest.

  It appeared they were coming to finish it.

  The video ended, leaving her staring at the last frame, which was the closest shot the camera got of the starship as it passed. It was amazing to her that they had managed to capture such a clear view of the craft on its way by. It was almost as if Observation Alpha had been placed there for that very purpose.

  Because it had, hadn’t it? Whatever Observation Alpha was, she knew what it wasn’t. It wasn’t a Centurion installation. The Council hadn't sanctioned it. But General Haeri knew it existed. He had sent her the file.

  To the regular civilian, the Trust was a whisper, a shadow organization that barely existed outside of vague conspiracy theories and unreported incidents. Rico had always known the Trust more for the problems they silenced than the problems they solved. A criminal organization that took advantage of the people of Proxima. But this was proof that maybe the Trust was something else. Something much more complex.

  The Hunger was coming.

  The Trust was waiting.

  Rico closed the video. Her heart felt like it would explode from her chest, and she could barely breathe. So many blurry ideas had come into focus in the last few minutes, and Haeri wasn’t done with his big reveal just yet.

  She tapped on the next video in the file, finding herself looking down on Isaac from a camera mounted in the top corner of a what appeared to be a prison cell. She was right, Haeri had taken him. But why? And why show her this now?

  Isaac looked to be in good health if a bit bored. He was lying on the cell’s rack, staring up at the ceiling with a resigned expression on his face. At first, Rico thought she was watching a recording. Then she noticed the timestamp. Haeri had sent her a real-time feed.

  What was the general up to?

  Rico watched the feed for a few more seconds. She left it open, pushing it aside to view the text document. It was a simple note.

  Dome One, if you’re Able.

  That was it. It might have been cryptic to some.

  She knew exactly what it meant.

  8

  Rico

  Rico descended into the loop station closest to her apartment in Dome Three’s A-District, a section of Praeton reserved for the wealthy and important.

  Not that she was wealthy or important. But being the Special Officer responsible for relations between Proxima and Earth did afford her some small benefits, including the oversized cube in the fancy part of town. It didn’t mean all that much to her. It never had, especially not after Steven died. The way the other residents stared at her when she left her cube was always a powerful display of snobbery that would have unnerved anyone who hadn’t already stood toe-to-toe against a slick of xenotrife. It wasn’t her style. It never would be.

  She was glad to leave it behind.

  And she was leaving it behind. She didn’t need Haeri to spell it out for her. The clues were there, and she was smart enough to read them. The Relyeh were coming. Things were going to change. For her. For Proxima. For Earth. For better or for worse. At least she wouldn’t be standing idly by while it did.

  The loop station was quiet so late at night. Most of the residents were already in their home domes. When there were more people around, the advertisements that lined the walls and called out the products and services for sale faded easily into the background. Now they assaulted Rico’s senses, each one vying for her attention as she swiped her wrist over the scanner to gain access to the platform. Only a handful of other people waited there with her, each doing their best to keep to themselves.

  Rico patted her pants, feeling through them to the bodysuit she had put on beneath. It was light armor, a spider-steel weave that rested beneath the hardened plates of full combat armor. Tough enough to withstand a lighter caliber round or anything but a direct hit from a trife or knife. Light and thin enough to conceal. She knew she was going to need it.

  She reached into her pocket. A hole in the back allowed her to continue through to the sidearm strapped to her hip. It was the latest Centurion tech, a miniaturized railgun that fired three-centimeter smart-darts at nearly a thousand meters per second. A standard size magazine held almost a hundred rounds, and she had an extra magazine tucked into a pouch resting against the small of her back.

  The pod arrived within a minute, the bullet-shaped transport sliding to a stop on a soft hiss of air. The doors opened, the passengers making the exchange. Rico boarded near the rear, taking a seat by the doors and leaning back. The ride from Dome Three to Dome One would only take a minute, the pod rocketing just beneath the surface of the rocky planet. She felt the slight increase of momentum past the inertial dampening systems, and then again as the pod decelerated to a stop at Dome Two. The process repeated, and she was standing when the doors opened.

  She walked briskly through the station and up to the surface. The streets weren’t crowded, the motorized traffic limited to a few scattered scooters and smaller vehicles. Rico hurried across the street, following one of the many narrow side streets that split the taller buildings. She needed to get across town, out of the more wealthy neighborhoods and into the Dregs.

  That wasn’t the official name for the oldest slums in Dome One, but that’s what most of the residents called it. It was everything a slum was supposed to be. Dirty, crime-ridden,populated by addicts and thieves. The largest Reclamation Center in Praeton was located in the Dregs, offering temporary housing to nearly a thousand ex-convicts who had completed their sentences on off-world mining rigs and were hoping to make a new start.

  But new starts were hard to come by on Proxima. Honest businesses didn’t want to give cons another chance, and the Trust was ever-present, always on the lookout for the next desperate soul they could twist to their needs. A lot of the Center residents lost faith in the process and hope in their future, only adding to the already existing quality of life in their part of the dome.

  Rico was alone and on foot, but she didn’t hesitate to enter the Dregs, and she didn’t worry about running into trouble. She was a former Centurion Marine. A clone with enough resemblance to her source material that any sober thugs would recognize her as someone to steer clear of. Any non-sober thugs wouldn’t stand a chance anyway.

  She made her way down the street, checking the time in a translucent overlay embedded in her eye. It had taken twenty minutes to reach the Dregs from her apartment in Dome Three. Not bad. Even so, she was sure her contact was already waiting.

  She could smell the Reclamation Center before she saw it, the scent of sweat getting thicker as she neared the building. Passing through one of the splits, it moved into her line of sight—a tall, wide building that nearly touched the top of the dome. It didn’t look all that bad from the outside, save for the number of windows that had layers of gel patch over the cracks in them and the graffiti along the base. Then there were the ex-cons, sitting idly on the sidewalk outside the building in a group nearly one hundred strong.