“They were family,” Sho said.

  “To family,” Caleb said, pretending he had a drink to toast with.

  “To family,” Sho replied, raising a mock glass of her own. She paused, staring at him. “Permission to speak freely?”

  “You don’t have to ask.”

  “Just following protocol.” She paused again, hesitant. Then she stood up and approached him. “I know we were joking around before, on the hopper. I really would be your wife if you were interested. I have a lot of respect for you, and we already make a good team.” She smiled. “I don’t mean to be too forward, but the trife beat all the submissiveness out of me.”

  Caleb stared at her. He had been hoping she would drop that particular line of thought once they got back to base. No such luck.

  “Yen, you’re a damn good Marine. And a good friend. And like I said before, I’m flattered that you would even consider me. You’re a good looking woman, you’re intelligent, and you can kick pretty much anybody’s ass in a fight. What’s not to be attracted to?”

  “I can feel the but coming up from a mile away.”

  He held his breath for a second. If not now, then when?

  “I’m not going to Metro. I’m staying outside the city as a Guardian.”

  She froze for a moment, unsure what to say. She pursed her lips. “I should have guessed that, huh? That’s the only reason you wouldn’t want to be with me, right?”

  “Of course.”

  It didn’t matter if he was honest about that or not. She knew what his decision meant. “I’m surprised you volunteered for that. Don’t you want a family? Don’t you want to continue your line?”

  “I want to make sure the people in Metro like you get there safe. That’s more important to me.”

  “There are other volunteers.”

  “I don’t want to sound arrogant, but they aren’t me.”

  “You sound arrogant.”

  “I do.” He smiled. “Washington already knows. He volunteered too. But don’t tell Rodriguez, okay? I’ll tell him before we leave.”

  “You should have told him already.”

  “Not until after the mission. No distractions, right?”

  “We did good today, didn’t we, Sarge?”

  “We did. If you’ll excuse me.” He held up his arm, showing off the patch on his wrist. “I have to get this thing checked out.”

  “One more scar for the collection.”

  Caleb absently touched his side. He had a fourteen-incher that ran across his abdomen. That one was the closest he had come to dying. “I’ve heard women think scars are sexy.”

  “Some of us,” she replied. She returned to her rack and picked up her tablet. “See you later, Sarge.”

  Caleb turned and headed out of the barracks, still thinking about scars. He had seven physical ones across his body. But the deepest, most painful ones were all emotional.

  Screw the Xenotrife.

  Chapter 10

  Lieutenant Jones’ office was in the heart of the command center, a short walk from the enlisted barracks. That wasn’t saying much. Everything was a short walk away, the living area inside the Deliverance hangar intended only for short-term use.

  A term that was almost up.

  Caleb reached the lieutenant’s office at precisely thirteen hundred hours. He hung back near the mess for a few minutes making small-talk with Sergeant Pratt ahead of his meeting. He had asked Pratt if he knew anything about the equipment his people had brought off the hopper. The only thing the sergeant had to say about it was that it was too light for something of its size, and he had no idea what could be under the tarp — unless it was a hardened aluminum frame filled with air.

  Lieutenant Jones’ door was closed when he arrived. He raised his fist, but didn’t knock as he heard a voice on the other side. Doctor Valentine. Caleb cringed slightly, wondering if he was wrong about not being in trouble. Valentine didn’t sound happy.

  “There’s more at stake here than a few jarheads, Adam,” he heard Valentine say. “And you damn well know it.”

  “I used what Command gave me, Riley. And by the way, you and your team were picked up by the best search and rescue squad I have. If you don’t like how the situation was handled, you need to talk to General Watkins.”

  “I’ve already put in the request.”

  “By the way, you could be a little more respectful of the Marines that saved your life, and your precious cargo.”

  Caleb heard her literally growl, and then the door to the lieutenant’s office was swung open violently. Doctor Valentine glared at him as she stormed past.

  “Hi, Doctor Valentine,” he said, smirking. He expected an epithet in response, but she just kept heading away without reacting visibly.

  He turned back to the doorway and entered Lieutenant Jones’ office, coming to attention. The room was small and spartan, a simple metal desk with a tablet on the left side and a display on the right, with Lieutenant Jones sitting in between on a simple steel stool. It hardly looked like an office at all.

  “At ease, Sergeant.”

  “Woman trouble, sir?” Caleb said.

  Jones shook his head. “I wouldn’t classify it as a problem specific to any single gender. Doctor Valentine is upset that six members of her science team didn’t survive the extraction.”

  Caleb looked back at the open door, tempted to go back out and tell her what he thought of that sentiment.

  “I know,” Jones said before he had a chance to comment. “I agree with you.”

  “Sir, she was a Marine. She ought to know better.”

  “She’s been a scientist longer than she was an officer. She cared about those people.”

  “I cared about Banks and Habib, sir.”

  “No argument from me. She’s hurting. You know how that is.”

  “Sir, I don’t take that hurt all the way to Watkins.”

  “It’ll blow over by the time we’re all on the Deliverance and all systems are go. I’m not concerned. Anyway, that’s not why I asked you to come over.”

  “Am I in a different kind of trouble, sir?”

  “Not exactly.” Lieutenant Jones stood up and circled the desk. “You said on the hopper you hadn’t seen Metro yet.”

  “That’s right, sir.”

  “Come with me.”

  “Where are we going, sir?”

  “To see Metro.”

  “Sir, I don’t understand?”

  Lieutenant Jones stood in front of him. “Caleb, you’re a good Marine. A great leader. You’ve been in the Marines for six years. Do you know how many of your fellow Marines have seen as much combat as you and haven’t died?”

  “No, sir.”

  “I can show you the whole list on my tablet without scrolling.”

  “What’s your point, sir?”

  “I know you volunteered to become a Guardian. I want you to see Metro. I’m hoping I can change your mind.”

  “You want me to stop being a Marine, sir?”

  “Confirmed. The Guardians aren’t going to have anything to do. There’s no threat out there, and if there is it’s going to hit us from outside the ship where there isn’t a damn thing we can do about it. You’ll be spending the next two centuries cycling through years of stasis and active duty, and when we get where we’re going you’re going to be an old man with no war to fight. Everyone you knew will be long gone.”

  “Washington won’t be gone, and everyone else I cared about is already dead. I’m a Marine, Lieutenant. That’s all I know how to be anymore. Even if I do have nothing to fight.”

  “Then humor an old man who thinks of you like a son,” Lieutenant Jones said.

  “You’re only eight years older than me, sir.”

  “So I’m a young father. I want you to see Metro. If it doesn’t change your mind, then I’ll let it go.”

  Caleb didn’t have the will to fight Jones on his request. “Okay, sir. Lead the way.”

  Jones headed out the door with Caleb beside him. They started walking. “What do you know about the generation ships, Sergeant?”

  “Sir, I know the components were in development before the war started,” Caleb replied. “I know the Department of Defense was paying Lockheed a shit-ton of money to develop the thrusters and…” he paused. “I can’t remember who was contracted to do the fusion reactors or the gravity generators. The tech was certified six months before the trife showed up.”

  “Originally designed to be used for crewed space stations and high-altitude space fighters, part of the new Space Force. Nobody was thinking about combining the two technologies to launch starships that could travel up to point five cees with enough fuel to last two centuries.”

  “Sir, I thought there was one group pushing for access to purchase all of the associated components? They wanted to develop a long-range exploration vessel.”

  “That’s right. You know more than I thought.”

  “I hit the news feeds when I can, sir. I was interested in space before I became a Marine.”

  “Some people think an extraterrestrial intelligence sent the trife to stop us from leaving our solar system. As if they knew we had advanced enough to build the vessels to do it. Other people think it was just a crazy, cosmic coincidence. What do you think?”

  “I haven’t given that much thought, sir. The trife are here. Who cares why? If their goal was to keep us from leaving the planet, they failed, right? If that was the case, the joke’s on them.”

  “No winners,” Lieutenant Jones said. “Not them. Not us. Just a lot of suffering for nothing.” They turned the corner. The wide twin blast doors out to the main part of the hangar were ahead of them. “Once we saw we were losing the war, every government came together to work on the designs and to plan a way to build the generation ships, as many as they could with the resources they had. It’s sad it took an apocalypse to get us to realize what was important and stop the petty attacks against one another. Unity in agony. But here we are.”

  They reached the end of the corridor, and the twin doors slid open ahead of them. They stepped out into the hangar and Caleb looked up. He had seen the Deliverance plenty of times before, but he had never stopped being amazed.

  “A lot of suffering,” Lieutenant Jones repeated. “It’s our job to make sure it wasn’t for nothing. Starting right there.”

  Chapter 11

  Caleb continued to stare up at the starship. He could only see a small portion of it from his position near the hull, but even what little he could see was impressive, if only because of the scale.

  There was a printed model of the ship against the south wall of the mess, right next to the chow line. It had been put there to remind the Marines what they were fighting for as if the real deal in the hangar wasn’t enough of a reminder. Maybe Command didn’t think it was because only a chunk of it was visible at any given time -- a dull metal monolith hidden inside one of the largest human-made caverns in the world.

  He knew from the model that the Deliverance was almost four kilometers long, two kilometers high, and had over thirty decks from top to bottom in both the fore and aft. The center of the ship was different in that it was practically hollow, containing only six decks. The center of the ship had been hastily designed as a massive hold, which had been further engineered into the outer shell of the city they called Metro.

  On the whole, the Deliverance was blocky and ugly, the outside mostly just metal plates lined with all kinds of sensors and more than five thousand mounted cameras to provide a view of the black beyond the hull. He had only been inside the ship once before, and he had declined to go anywhere near Metro. He had been more concerned with his role as a Guardian, which was limited to the outer portions of the ship beyond the city. He knew they had loaded a lot of equipment into the secondary hold and the vessel’s main hangar. Special modules had been designed to be easily transported to the site, carried down the huge industrial elevators, and pieced back together inside the superstructure. There was an entire module dedicated for the Guardians, containing weapons and equipment, a mess, a workout area, clothing, and everything else they would need to fulfill their end of the mission.

  He had seen the stasis pods where they would be put into what was almost literally cold storage, their bodies frozen in state for years at a time. The volunteers would cycle through the journey so that they would all make it to the other end of the line still young enough to help found the colony, but too old to ever start a family or be more than an advisor to the effort. There were a hundred Marines who had been accepted into the program, plus two hundred more who had applied but had been turned down for various reasons. Other than a few of the high-ranking officials like General Watkins and the ship’s engineers, they would be the only ones who would ever have lived on both Earth and their new home almost a hundred light years away, a planet the scientists were calling New Earth.

  Scientists weren’t known for their creativity in naming conventions, but he supposed it was better than referring to it by its star coordinates.

  In any case, it promised to be a lonely and dull existence. Like Lieutenant Jones had said, there was no reason to think the Guardians would have much to do. Only ten of them would be awake at a given time, on a one-year duty cycle that would mainly consist of making sure everything stayed the same. They weren’t there solely as peacekeepers, because only a limited number of the civilian population would even have access to the areas beyond the city. There was just no reason for most people to wander out into the less refined portions of the ship. But if anything broke, they were authorized to contact Metro’s engineering department to send a unit out to work on the fix.

  A lonely and dull existence, but an important one. That’s why there had been so many volunteers. Getting the civilians from Earth to New Earth successfully was for men like Caleb the reason they had joined the military to begin with. Protect the innocent. Secure their freedom. For the love of country. It sounded hokey or idealistic, and maybe it was. It was a motivation that worked for him. He really believed in it, from soul to skin.

  Men like him. Women were excluded as Guardians, both to limit any unforeseen complications outside of the city, and to ensure the city had as many potential mating pairs as possible. The scientists weren’t sure how space travel was going to affect virility, and they had protocols that went in either direction, either to boost or limit reproduction rates. But every woman was more valuable than any man. A man could impregnate multiple women if it came down to that. The same process didn’t work in reverse.

  “Let’s go up to the civilian entrance,” Lieutenant Jones said, breaking Caleb out of his thoughts.

  “Yes, sir,” Caleb said.

  There were a number of electric carts parked near the entrance to the living area, and Lieutenant Jones and Caleb claimed one of them, using it to drive the two klicks across the massive hangar to the other side. There were two elevators located there, a few hundred meters apart from one another. One was smaller, intended to ferry people up and down inside the complex. The other was gigantic; a huge industrial elevator used to transport the heavy equipment being loaded into the starship. Everything from the prefabricated modules, to heavy machinery intended to help tear down and rebuild Metro on the surface of New Earth, to drones and armored personnel vehicles and other military equipment they were all hoping they would never need for anything beyond exploration. The science teams had made educated guesses about New Earth, but until they got there it was impossible to know if the indigenous life was dangerous or not.

  They stopped with a few other carts near the personnel elevator. It was already at the ground level, and they boarded it and Lieutenant Jones called for it to rise to the only other stop before the surface. They stepped out a moment later, walking from the lift past a small operations building manned by a pair of Marines. The Marines came to attention as Lieutenant Jones and Caleb went past.

  They stepped out onto a metal bridge that crossed the gap between the excavated side of the cavern and one of the higher decks of the Deliverance. More of the ship was visible from this perspective, the port side stretching off into the distance to their left, disappearing into darkness before it reached the bow.

  Caleb looked up at the layer of stone over their heads. When the Deliverance was ready to launch, the entire top portion of the underground cavern would be removed with a series of perfectly calculated blasts that would cause a controlled collapse of the rock above, bringing the rubble down around the sides of the ship or blasting it out beside the resulting hole. It was a one-time action, but they had no intention of keeping the ship underground forever.

  They walked across the bridge and into the side of the ship. Another Marine was standing guard in the airlock, and he came to attention as Lieutenant Jones entered.

  “Corporal Styles,” Jones said. “Is General Watkins on board?”

  “Yes, sir,” the corporal replied.

  “Good. Thank you, Corporal.”

  “Of course, sir.”

  They moved beyond the airlock and into one of the corridors. There was a smell to the place that was familiar to Caleb and always reminded him of a new car. Everything was so fresh and new and clean.

  “Are you taking me to General Watkins, sir?” Caleb asked.

  “What?” Jones glanced over at him. “Oh. No. I have an appointment to meet with the general. I told you, I’m taking you to Metro. I’m going to leave you there for a while.”

  “I didn’t volunteer for that, sir.”

  “I’ll order you to stay put if I have to.”

  “Sir, I don’t understand why you’re taking such a personal interest in my decision?”

  “I told you, you’re like a son to me.”

  “It has to be more than that, sir.”

  “Caleb, I’ve read your file. Before you joined the Marines, you were a student at Stanford, completing an engineering degree on a football scholarship. You set a couple of rushing records in your freshman year.”

  “I’m not the first person to leave school to become a Marine, sir.”