She left the coffee shop, crossing to the closest loop station. She boarded the next pod. It stopped twice before coming back to the surface near the Centauri river, the lifeblood of the city. The clear water flowed through a crevice in the surface rock that was nearly twenty meters deep and ten meters wide.

  The Dove had landed beside the river, and a short, transparent tunnel—offering access to both vehicles and pedestrians—had been built to connect the aged ship to the city. It was early morning now, and a flow of workers were already en route to their positions inside the vessel. Rico was careful to keep an eye out for other museum employees, certain they would know she was out of place. Able had already run the calculations and provided the excuse. The museum didn’t open until nine, and she was arriving early to get a head start on the day.

  Why not?

  A Centurion checkpoint waited at the end of the tunnel, a guardhouse positioned between the two-lane road and the sidewalk. A pair of Centurion Marines stood on either side of the guardhouse, keeping watch while the pedestrians swiped their identification chips over a scanner. A Sentry bot hunched a few meters further back, waiting for trouble. It had been waiting a long time. There was zero history of violence within the Proxima Commons, the show of force more show than force.

  That was possibly about to change.

  Rico grabbed at her hair, ensuring her wig was secure. She hoped the Marines wouldn’t recognize her as a Rodriguez. She had the facial features, but hopefully the wig, glasses and uniform would be enough to disguise her. Why wouldn’t it? She knew she was up to no good, but they had no reason to suspect her.

  She forced herself to remain calm as she made it to the scanner. She slid her wrist over it, her face appearing on a display beside the machine under a different name. She didn’t know how Able managed to create the false ID. Before today, she had thought the system was nearly unbeatable. Obviously, that wasn’t the case.

  She didn’t make eye contact with the Marines as she went past, keeping her head down and trying to look confident. She glanced at the Sentry as she drew even with it. The robot didn’t pay her any mind.

  She was in.

  A short walk brought her to an escalator, which carried her up from the ground level to the lowest airlock in the side of the starship. She went through the airlock and into an open corridor that arced gradually along the outer bulkhead. She turned left and continued walking.

  The museum was in a straight line down the corridor, nearly a kilometer away from the entrance. Bennett wouldn’t come this way. Instead, he would take another passage across the starship to the central bank of lifts. A small group was already waiting there for the lift to arrive, and she slipped into their midst when it did.

  The lift ascended half a dozen decks, stopping at sixteen. The doors opened and the passengers all filed out. Rico lingered in the back, letting them all get ahead.

  “Rico, do you copy?” Bennett said.

  “I copy,” Rico replied in a whisper. “What’s your position?”

  “Approaching the checkpoint.”

  “Roger. I’m on Deck Sixteen, headed for Metro. Ping me when you’re in position.”

  “Copy. Bennett out.”

  Rico followed the group from the lift and down a trio of interconnected corridors to an open, double-wide hatch. A brass plaque hung over the hatch commemorating the city’s establishment.

  She stayed behind the others as they made their way from the hatch down another corridor which sloped gently down to the city proper. This part of the ship had once been home to the engineers who had been responsible for keeping the life support systems running. Most of those systems were offline now. Unneeded. Only the air scrubbers and water filtration units were still in use.

  It was a long walk to get from the entrance of the ship to the city. There were shorter routes, but they were reserved for VIPs like politicians, high-ranking military and their entourages. In any case, the security through the express gate was even tighter than the civilian entrance.

  It didn’t matter.

  They wouldn’t be using either path to escape.

  There was another way out.

  A better way.

  11

  Isaac

  Isaac paced across the living area of the small apartment, walking from the door to the bedroom to the window and back again. He was restless and frustrated, tired of waiting for something to happen.

  When General Haeri had turned on him and summoned the guards, he thought he would wind up in a prison cell somewhere, in solitary confinement. And he did. For the first twenty-four hours, he’d been stuck in a cement box with nothing to do but stare at the ceiling. Haeri had come back after that and asked him a second time if he would join the Centurion Space Force as a spy.

  He said no a second time.

  He wasn’t going to turn on Hayden or Earth. Sheriff Duke had given him somewhere to belong, and Earth was his home. It would always be his home. His wife and children had lived there.

  And died there.

  The trife invasion had changed the entire planet so quickly. First, the virus wiped out billions, and then the aliens went to work on the rest. That was only the first part of the story because the real war didn’t start and end with the xenotrife.

  The invasion had yet to truly begin.

  The Relyeh had conquered hundreds of civilizations across thousands of light years. But they didn’t eliminate their enemies. They absorbed them, using a portion of the population as food, a portion as soldiers and a portion to enhance their genetic library. They were powerful, numerous and maybe most importantly—patient. They were willing to bide their time to finish capturing a world. They were willing to sit in wait while their first line of attack did ninety percent of the damage.

  Trife were the perfect weapon. They multiplied faster than the military could kill them, relying on radiation as their food. Most times, that meant power stations. Generators. The very thing advanced human civilization relied on to remain an advanced civilization. But it would never be enough to drop a massive EMP on the planet. The Earth’s core produced enough heat to fuel the aliens—all they had to do was dig deep enough.

  Isaac was there in the beginning, when the unexpected asteroid storm rained down on the planet and left a powder of debris across so much of the surface. The scientists called it a one-in-a-trillion event. A lot of them believed it was accidental. A random act of space. Even as the virus started killing millions and the world began to panic, nobody thought it was an act of aggression. Even when the first trife emerged from the dust and began their killing, only the conspiracy theorists thought of it as an act of war.

  His survival was a matter of circumstance. Of luck, though he wasn’t sure if it was good or bad. The brain tumor had made him accidentally valuable to the Relyeh because it also made him resistant to the best defense of the only race that had so far maintained a resistance against the Hunger. Solve the riddle of his resistance, break the stalemate. At least, that was the plan. Only the Relyeh never found out his protection was based on a fatal flaw, one that couldn’t be reproduced without also being fatal. He was an anomaly. A disease. But he had been preserved because of it. Thrown in stasis to wait until the Hunger was ready to use him. Because they were patient above all.

  That patience seemed to be at an end, and Isaac could guess why. The Axon were thousands of years more advanced than humankind. They had technology he could barely believe. And they were holding the Hunger back. Slowing their advance across the galaxy and fighting their domination. They were the fly in the ointment, the wrench in the gears of conquest. Their soldiers were machines. Self-replicating, artificially intelligent machines with a host of offensive and defensive tactics that made a single one of them more powerful than a million trife.

  They shared a common enemy and should have been the perfect allies. But humans were like mice to the Axon. Primitive creatures that scurried back and forth with no real purpose save to reproduce. There was no benefit for them to align themselves with a race on the brink of destruction. There was nothing for them to gain. Earth sat in the middle of two warring factions, left to fend for itself and somehow find a way to keep going against impossible odds.

  Odds that were going to get worse. It was only a matter of time.

  Every resource counted. Every asset helped. Sheriff Duke had managed to convince a single Axon Intellect that maybe the two races could help one another. It was the best chance humankind would ever have to avoid the fate that had befallen hundreds of other intelligences.

  And General Haeri had rejected it as bullshit.

  Isaac threw a fist into the padded back of his couch in frustration. When Sheriff Duke had sent him to Proxima with Rico, it was with a mind that the general would be willing to listen to reason. It was with the understanding that Haeri was also part of the Trust and the belief that the Trust wasn’t merely a crime syndicate but a secret line of defense against whichever enemy posed the most significant threat.

  It turned out Hayden was wrong. Proxima’s ongoing belief that Earth wasn’t worth saving permeated deeper into their psyche than he’d expected. While Rico—a clone of all things—was on board with the notion that the survivors back home were worth saving, the general had made it clear he didn’t agree.

  And now Isaac was stuck here. Waiting…

  For what?

  He didn’t know why Haeri hadn’t left him in the brig in solitary confinement. Why had he been transferred here? He was still a prisoner. There were armed guards outside his door around the clock. So what was the point? To give him a soft couch to sit on? A comfortable bed to sleep in?

  To what end?

  He didn’t need any of that. He was a Marine. Comfort was nice, but it was ultimately bullshit. He wanted action. Direction. If Haeri wouldn’t accept the truth, if he wanted Sheriff Duke dead, then he didn’t need Isaac. Why not just kill him already?

  There had to be more to the story. Something happening in the background. A reason he was still alive. Did they want more information from him?

  If that were true, why hadn’t anyone come to question him? Why was he stuck here, endlessly pacing?

  He couldn’t believe they had saved his life for this.

  Isaac gave up the line of thinking, moving to the front of the couch and collapsing on it. Maybe this was some kind of modern day torture.

  He closed his eyes and thought of Amanda, piecing together his memories of the simple things that had made him love her. The way she laughed at his jokes. Her devotion to the kids. How beautiful she looked in sweatpants with her hair wildly bound up on top of her head. Her kindness and compassion for others.

  He missed her.

  He missed them all.

  He started to doze off.

  A loud thump against the door and his eyes snapped open. He heard another thump, and then a third, making the wall of his apartment shake.

  What the hell?

  He quickly scanned the room, looking for something to use as a weapon. There was nothing. He gave up the idea, crossing the room to the front door, which was kept locked from the outside.

  “Myles?” he shouted. He had spent some time chatting with the guards through the door, because what else was there to do? “Paula?”

  Something hit the door hard, causing him to jump back into a defensive crouch. Isaac moved laterally, getting in position to attack whoever came through.

  Someone broke the door in, hitting it so hard it collapsed back onto the apartment floor. A woman in a black bodysuit rushed in, leading with some kind of pistol with a thick barrel. Isaac spotted three more similarly armed people behind her.

  He lunged at her, slamming his hand down on her extended gun hand, trying to knock the weapon from her grip. She absorbed the blow, pivoting gracefully and grabbing his arm as he threw his weight against her. She kept turning with it, lifting him and throwing him over her shoulder, onto the floor.

  The landing knocked the air out of him. How was she so strong? He didn’t hesitate, rolling over to get back up. She kicked him in the stomach, straining his ribs and knocking him onto his side.

  “Time to die,” the woman said, pointing her pistol at him.

  Isaac stared up at her. He had been waiting for something to happen.

  This wasn’t exactly what he’d had in mind.

  12

  Isaac

  Isaac’s eyes shifted to the barrel of the gun, waiting for the flash that would signal the end of his life.

  It didn’t come.

  Gunshots cracked from outside the room and the woman looked back toward the door. Isaac didn’t waste the opportunity. Pushing his attacker off him, he stumbled to his feet and dived behind the couch. Moments later, silent rounds tore through the couch stuffing millimeters above his head, burying themselves in the wall behind him.

  He heard a grunt and then a thump, and the woman was suddenly grappling with another woman in a brown skirt-suit. They hit the floor next to the couch, the skirted woman straddling his attacker and trying to get control of her gun.

  She looked over at Isaac. “A little help?”

  Isaac finally recognized her, and he scrambled over, grabbing the assassin’s arm and helping Rico pin it to the ground. The assist allowed Rico to throw a series of hard punches into the other woman’s temples, the force of the blows sufficient to overcome the protection of her helmet and knock her out.

  “Rico, what the…,” he started to say, going silent when he caught sight of another threat coming through the door. He grabbed the pistol from the unconscious woman’s hand, rose and took aim at the man pointing a gun at him.

  The man collapsed before he pulled the trigger, revealing a security guard behind him, gun pointed in his direction.

  Isaac shifted his aim to what he perceived to be a second new threat. This man however lowered his weapon.

  “He’s with me,” Rico said, getting to her feet.

  “With you?” Isaac parroted. “Rico, what the hell is going on? And who is he?” he asked, waving the pistol at the only other man still on his feet.

  “That’s Bennett. We’re getting you out of here,” she replied.

  “How did you know where to find me?” he asked.

  “I have my ways. Bennett, grab my bag. I dropped it in the hall.”

  She started to undress, quickly pulling off the brown jacket and going to work on her blouse buttons.

  Isaac turned back around to see her shimmy out of her skirt and kick off her shoes. She was down to her bra and panties when Bennett came back into the room holding a large purse.

  “These idiots screwed up the plan,” he said, kicking the dead man in his boot before tossing the bag onto the couch.

  “We’ll make a new plan,” Rico replied, unzipping the bag. She lifted a black bodysuit from it, quickly stepping into the light armor. “Who do you think sent them?”

  “Haeri?” Isaac offered.

  “No,” she said. “It wasn’t Haeri.”

  “How do you know?”

  Rico closed her bodysuit and reached into the bag again, removing a sidearm. She snapped it to the hip of her armor before glancing over at the downed soldier.

  “Isaac, his helmet’s got a hole in the back but the bodysuit will stretch to fit you. Hurry up and put it on.”

  Isaac rounded the couch, grabbing the dead man and turning him over. “How do I open the suit?”

  “I’ve got it,” Bennett said, crouching across from Isaac and grabbing at the straps across the front of the armor. He had the assassin stripped in seconds.

  “How do you know it wasn’t Haeri?” Isaac asked again. “That asshole didn’t listen to a word I had to say. He called me a liar and stuffed me in here.”

  “And then sent Dark Ops to kill you?” Rico asked. “What would be the point of that? If he wanted you dead he could have gotten rid of you three days ago.”

  “You’re saying someone put him up to it?”

  “I’m saying it isn’t that cut and dried. Suit up. Move it, Marine.”

  Isaac pulled on the bodysuit. Bennett helped him seal it and then handed him the dead woman’s gun.

  “That’s a CGS-20,” he said. “Coilgun. The sound suppressor is built into the design. Silent and deadly at close range.”

  “Tell me about it,” Isaac said, taking the weapon and attaching it to the magnetic mount on his hip. “Damn near killed me with it.”

  “Here,” Rico said, handing him a small earpiece.

  Isaac accepted it and slipped it into his ear.

  “Can you hear me?” she asked.

  “Pozz,” Isaac replied, her voice loud and clear over the comm. “I copy.”

  “Good. We were trying to get in and out of here without causing a scene, but since somebody sent this kill team in ahead of us, we’ll have to play things by ear. I’m not too happy about that, but it is what it is. We’ve got a ride waiting in the main hangar. We just need to get there. I imagine the alternate ops teams and your guards, once they wake up, will try to stop us. They’re just doing their jobs, so make sure you only kill the bad guys. ”

  “How do I make the distinction?”

  “Bad guys,” Bennett said, pointing at the two dead assassins. Then he pointed at himself. “Good guys.”

  “Roger that,” Isaac said. “Why are we still standing here?”

  Rico smiled. “Bennett, you have point.”

  “Roger,” Bennett replied, moving out into the corridor. He waved them ahead, and they stepped over the bodies of the dead assassins and ran for the end of the hallway.

  “Where are we?” Isaac asked as they reached a lift.

  “You don’t know?” Rico replied.

  “They blindfolded me on the way in.”

  “Try not to let the irony kill you on the way down. Bennett, we’ll take the stairs.”