“Aye Aye, Captain,” Oslo replied.

  “Sir, Hale won’t abandon the entrance. She and her Marines will die up there,” Siraj said.

  Tyson exhaled sharply. He hated that too, but it was also true. Damn Nash for complicating things with his bullshit. “I’m not having those Marines die for a lost cause. I need them on this ship. I need an idea that will convince Colonel Hale of that.”

  The bridge fell silent for a moment. Tyson watched the mobile CIC come to a stop between the trife and a half dozen retreating Marines. The guns were still firing, spraying the line of aliens and keeping them twenty meters down the center. The right flank was holding up better than the left, the squad of almost a dozen Marines defending it a stark contrast to the others. Their fire was calm and orderly, single rounds in most cases, well-aimed and effective. One of Echo’s fire squads. Who was their squad leader?

  The left flank was a problem. A leak in the defense, and the trife were close to filling the gap. Could the Marines make it to the smaller cavern entrance before the demons caught up to them? Tyson wasn’t sure. Hale was trying to buy time. He needed her to give up on the idea.

  “Sir,” Siraj said. “What if we tell her the trife found a way into the cavern? Through an air vent or something?”

  The facility did have air vents, but there was no indication the trife were even vaguely aware of them. Of course, Hale probably didn’t know that.

  “You want me to lie, Commander?” Tyson asked.

  “Yes, sir,” she replied flatly.

  The Marines were running to the smaller closed blast door embedded in the side of the mountain. The larger door was already sealed and welded shut, never to open again. The CIC’s guns spat out a few more seconds of rounds, and then the barrels spun without producing bullets, the feeds dry.

  The door to the vehicle opened and a team of Marines poured out, Colonel Hale among them. They joined the retreat, racing ahead of the trife, who spilled over the armored vehicle like a tsunami behind them.

  “Open the comm,” Tyson said. Siraj nodded.

  Tyson hesitated a moment, gathering himself. He needed to sell the non-existent emergency. “Colonel Hale,” he snapped, adding a slight tremor to his voice. “Our sensors picked up a breach in the eastern air ducts. One of my techs put a light down the vent.” He paused for dramatic effect. “The trife are coming in. They found a way into the facility. We need you down here now, Colonel!”

  “Damn it,” Hale cursed into the comm. She paused. “Copy that, Captain. How much time do we have?”

  “Minutes at best,” Tyson replied. “They’ve already breached the outer gates. They must have been working on them for days. Preparing for this attack. Pioneer is at risk, Colonel. There’s no more time. I’m preparing for an emergency launch. T-minus twenty-eight minutes.”

  “Understood,” Hale said. “I’ll have Marines down there ASAP.”

  “I expect all of your Marines, Colonel. Let the Butchers hold the entrance. We need you down here.”

  “I’ll decide how to apportion the defenses, Captain,” Hale countered. “The trife won’t get on board.”

  Tyson clenched his jaw. Damn, the woman was stubborn. But she might still do what he suggested. She just wouldn’t let him have ownership of the decision. Fair enough.

  “Please hurry, Colonel,” Tyson said.

  He looked at the display again. The Marines were at the door, one of them tapping in the control code to open it while the others fanned out to defend. One of them stood out among the others. A tall Marine carrying a long blade in one hand and a pistol in the other. That one was waving for the others.

  The different views on the display all started to flicker. Tyson shifted his gaze to one of the splits. The trife had reached the tower where the cameras were mounted. They swarmed around it like a flood, their claws scratching at the exposed cable that ran from the tower through a small hole in the side of the mountain.

  Then they severed it completely and the feed went dark.

  Tyson stared at the blank display for a few seconds. Then he turned back to Siraj. “Sound the alert through Pioneer, excluding Metro. I want everything strapped down and all hands secured within the next twenty minutes.”

  “Aye aye, sir,” Siraj replied. “You don’t want to warn Metro?”

  “I don’t want to panic Metro. Send the security detail to the seals. Nobody goes in or out. Not during launch.”

  “Aye aye, sir.”

  Tyson closed his eyes and lowered his head. “And see if you can get Nash on the comms.”

  8

  Cross

  Rocky Mountains. Marine Base. 11.11.2052. 1300 hours.

  “Hold the line!” Joseph shouted, across his squad’s comms. “Hold the line! Mother’s coming!”

  What was left of Echo Two Two fanned out ahead of the entrance to the compound, a long aluminum and tin structure that also served as a hastily assembled warehouse. Not installing harder defenses at the mouth of the facility had been a mistake, made because the trife weren’t supposed to like the cold. Nobody expected them to come up here, especially in the numbers they had. A scouting party here, a small raiding group there—that was normal.

  The ten thousand aliens converging on them now was anything but normal.

  Joseph didn’t know what was driving them, or why they seemed so intent on getting inside. Did they know how many humans were hiding down below? Could they smell them? Hear them? Did they have some kind of extra-sensory perception a human couldn’t understand? All of that was beyond Joseph. Above his pay grade. All he cared about right now was keeping them from catching Mother and the command team.

  They had emerged from the mobile CIC a moment ago, and were running the ten meters from the armored vehicle to the door of the warehouse. Most of the remaining Marines, and there were far too few of them, were down to their sidearms or completely out of ammo. Yet, they waited at the open door for the colonel to arrive—knives and other assorted personal blades in hand—ready to face the trife hand-to-hand.

  Joseph’s squad still had plenty of bullets because he had trained discretion into them and proven the value of it on the battlefield more than once. They used those bullets on the trife as they began pouring over and around the mobile CIC, a living tsunami that swallowed up the vehicle. They fired controlled bursts, the combat system struggling to keep up with their efficiency. Yellow marks appeared on trife moments after they were already shot, the demons dying as fast as they could get close.

  One of them leaped toward Mother’s back, claws stretching out to rake the power supply off her armor. The right kind of penetration could blow the pack and kill her in the explosion. Joseph turned to fire, his rifle frozen when Corporal West moved in front of it, her blade coming down across the trife’s neck and severing its head. She pivoted in behind Mother, slicing her weapon across the next two demons to get too close before using her strong augmented legs to bound backward.

  “Echo, Fox, inside!” Mother snapped through the comms, reaching the open door. The other Marines filed in, Joseph’s team bringing up the rear. They planted another fifty rounds into the trife before getting through the doorway.

  “Morales!” Joseph said, rushing to the right side of the wide, roll-up door while Nori kept him clear. The other Marine took the left side, and they pulled the door down, managing to get it shut and locked just as the wave of trife reached it.

  The demons didn’t slow. They crashed into the corrugated metal, the first wave putting big dents in their only protection. Joseph heard their frantic hissing behind it, the aliens all crashing into one another, crushing the ones at the head of the assault. He heard them start climbing, clambering across the top of the warehouse looking for a way in.

  He backed up, still facing the doorway, rifle up and ready.

  A hand landed on his shoulder and squeezed. He turned his head to see Colonel Hale standing beside him, her pale eyes meeting his through their helmets.

  “Sergeant Cross,” she said, loud enough he could hear her without the comms. “Colonel Grant is requesting immediate assistance. The trife are breaking through the vents. I need your squad down there asap.”

  “What about you, Colonel?” Joseph asked.

  She lifted a small rectangular device from her armor and tapped on a button there. Immediately, a pair of lights activated in the two front corners of the warehouse, and two of the USSF’s Butchers began coming toward them.

  Nearly four meters tall, bulky and square, with small humanoid heads, arms and legs, the Butchers were the military’s solution to extended melee combat against the trife. The robots were big and heavy, able to stay on their feet even while nearly covered by the aliens, and the large double-headed blades they carried were perfect for mowing the trife down like blades of grass. Joseph had seen the Butchers in action before. One of the machines was as good as a hundred Marines, and could cut a swath through a thousand trife before its batteries died or the creatures managed to drag it to the ground.

  It was too bad they had only two to combat nearly ten thousand trife. They would slow the horde, but they couldn’t stop it.

  “I’m holding the line,” Mother replied. “Me and the rest of the Bastards. Pioneer’s executing an emergency launch. T-minus twenty-two minutes. You need to keep the trife off that ship, Sergeant. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Joseph replied.

  The Butchers stomped over to them while the trife began slashing and clawing at the doorway, deepening the dents, their sharp claws already beginning to shred through. The noise of them swarming over the building was deafening, a hailstorm of aliens pounding at the metal.

  “Get down there, Sergeant. Semper fi.”

  “Semper fi,” Joseph replied. “Echo Two Two, Pioneer’s under threat. We’re going to eliminate that threat. With me.” He glanced back at Mother. He had known Colonel Hale since the start of the war. There was nobody he respected more for their courage or bravery. And now she was prepared to sacrifice herself so Pioneer could escape.

  Given different orders, he would do the same.

  “Good luck, Sergeant,” Mother said.

  “Good hunting, Colonel,” he answered.

  Then he and the remaining eight members of his fire squad broke from the entrance, sprinting across the warehouse floor toward the two elevators that provided access to Pioneer’s hangar.

  9

  Cross

  Pioneer Launch Site. Interior. 11.11.2052. 1315 hours.

  Joseph barely noticed the interior of the warehouse as he ran. He had seen it all before. There wasn’t much left up here now save for the box trucks and eighteen-wheelers that had delivered the first few rounds of supplies, back when they could get up the mountain on the ground. Empty palettes and trailers and plenty of packaging material and other debris littered the floor. The rest of the equipment was already on board Pioneer, everything from massive city-building machinery to a squadron of multi-atmospheric strike fighters, all of it passed through the huge building and onto an even bigger freight elevator whose shaft had been bored through solid rock.

  The lift itself was a marvel of engineering, able to move over a thousand tons at one time. It was also slow as hell, the nature of the design causing it to crawl up and down at a speed that would see Pioneer about to take off by the time they reached the bottom.

  Fortunately, there was another elevator installed beside it. A service lift intended for personnel and lighter supplies. Joseph led his squad to it, urging them on ahead of him. He boarded the caged platform last, turning and slapping the red button to make it descend.

  The trife penetrated the front of the warehouse at the same time, punching through the door and bending it out of shape as they began leaking through. The Butchers were there to meet them, up ahead of the Marines who waited behind the robots with blades drawn and ready. A single massive swing from the first Butcher cut the first three demons into two, the backhand killing two more.

  The elevator started to move, carrying Joseph and his squad away from this fight and toward another. It was hard for him to watch, hard for him to leave behind. He knew his squad felt the same way. He had to remind himself they weren’t abandoning their brothers and sisters. They were moving to another position to stop another part of the assault.

  The comms were silent. Too silent. He was so accustomed to the chatter he only really noticed it when someone called out his team or addressed the whole battalion. But the absence of it threatened to unnerve him. There were so few of them left.

  Twenty more minutes. That’s how long they needed to hold the trife back. Keep them off the ship. Prevent them from tagging along. The civilians in Metro would be locked behind heavy blast doors, to keep them in and to keep anything dangerous out. The ship’s designers had guessed they might have to fight all the way into orbit and beyond. They had learned from multiple failures.

  It took four minutes for the elevator to reach the bottom of the tunnel. It felt slow, but the cavern was nearly two kilometers deep, allowing room for the massive starship to berth beneath the mountainside. Joseph had heard the excavation of the tons and tons of rock was the real marvel of the job. The amount of stone that had to be removed to make way for the facility was immense. It had taken thousands of directed detonations, numerous boring machines and a pipeline built to funnel the rubble out and down the slope into a nearby chasm to accomplish. And they had done it in only a month, while keeping the trife at bay down below, far enough away from the site they had hoped the demons would never know what they were doing.

  Even today it sounded impossible. But with all the world’s resources turned to the goal, and with no regard for the effects to the environment and no permits, red tape or other bureaucracy getting in the way…it was amazing what they had accomplished.

  It was a shame it had taken the end of the world to accomplish it.

  The elevator hit the bottom with a loud clang. Joseph grabbed the cage and pushed it aside, running out into the cavern. He nearly stopped moving when his eyes landed on the tail end of Pioneer, his breath catching in his throat.

  He had been at the site for three months, but he had never had reason to come down from the surface. This was his first time seeing the actual starship. The Colonel had told him when he saw it he wouldn’t believe it. She was right. From this close, his view of the entire craft was limited. But he could have stood there for hours, staring at the four humongous thrusters jutting out the back of the ship and the scaffold-like launch sled beneath it.

  That is, if he had the time.

  He didn’t.

  He looked ahead, finding the cavern in a state of organized chaos. Dozens of floor-standing spotlights revealed workers scurrying around on the cavern floor. Large cranes lifted the last palettes of supplies up the side of the craft to the hangar door while red and white strobes flashed and a loudspeaker boomed out the countdown. T-minus fifteen minutes.

  He and his squad charged across the expanse, making their way around the scaffolding to the workers. None of them seemed concerned that the trife were about to break through into the cavern. Had no one told them?

  The techs noticed them coming and stopped what they were doing to look at them in confusion.“What’s going on?” one of them asked.

  “Captain Grant reported a potential breach through the air vents,” Joseph replied, activating his external speakers.

  The man’s face paled. “He didn’t say anything to us.”

  “Where are the vents?”

  “Over there.” The tech turned and pointed at the cavern wall. The lights were focused around the ship, leaving the walls bathed in darkness. “I don’t know how trife could get through though. The fans are powerful. They would cut them to shreds.”

  “Maybe the first few hundred,” Joseph replied. “Finish your work and get on board. We’ll take care of it.”

  “Yes, sir,” the tech replied, more nervous now than before.

  Activating the lamps on his helmet, Joseph led his squad to the side of the cavern. The cavern wall was sheer rock, the vents a tunnel bored out by one of the smaller machines. Like the tech had said, a huge fan was running right at the input, pushing old air out. The trife clearly hadn’t reached it yet, or there would be blood and ichor splattered everywhere.

  “Looks clean to me, Sarge,” Corporal West said.

  “It does,” Joseph agreed. “Form a line, keep me covered.”

  The Marines spread out behind him, aiming at the vent. He kept moving closer to it, until his helmet touched the protective cage ahead of the fan. He dialed up the strength of his lights, the beam piercing deep into the vent, reaching at least fifty meters.

  “Nothing,” he said, confused. “There’s nothing.” He turned around, looking at his squad, trying to make sense of things.

  “Launch in t-minus thirteen minutes,” the loudspeaker reported.

  “Mother, Mother, this is Echo Two Two, do you copy?” Joseph said. He turned to the vent again, peering through. No sign of trife. But he was in the right place.

  Mother didn’t answer.

  “Mother, Mother, this is Echo Two Two, do you copy?” he repeated.

  Still nothing. She was off his combat network, but that was expected. They were deep underground but their comms should still work.

  “Echo Two Two, this is Mother.” She came through a moment later, the comms fading in and out with interference. “I copy.”

  “Mother, the vents are clear. The vents are clear. No trife activity. Over.”

  The pause was long enough Joseph almost repeated the message.

  “That son of a bitch,” Mother said at last, a hint of laughter in her voice. “Sergeant, we’ve been had.”