“I don’t need your permission,” she replied.

  The displays showed the Centurion starfighters achieving lock. They loosed their payloads, sending four missiles arcing toward the Capricorn.

  Rico didn’t flinch. She stayed on target, firing the plasma cannons directly ahead of the Bus. The steady stream captured three of the missiles on their way in, detonating them just ahead. The fourth made it through, angling for their bow.

  She snapped the ship sideways, the projectile flashing past as she continued the roll, coming out level and rapidly closing on the fighters. Her finger rested on the trigger, the reticle slipping over one of the Centurions. If she squeezed the trigger, odds were good she would make the kill.

  But she didn’t want to kill. They were on the same side, even if they didn’t all know it.

  She opened the throttle instead, cutting the ship between the starfighters and launching toward space. The Centurions blurred past and tried to turn around while the ground-based rockets continued to track. The edges of the display turned red again, but this time the screen didn’t split. The warnings vanished instead, the defense system suddenly giving up on their escape.

  “Haeri shut them down,” Able said before Rico had a chance to ask. “We’re free and clear.”

  “Roger that,” Rico replied. “Shall we set a course for Earth?”

  17

  Hayden

  It took almost two hours for Hayden to get everything organized. There was a lot to do, starting with removing the bodies of Cortez and Nan from the warehouse. It was a somber affair, one he always oversaw personally whenever he could. He hated losing people. Even after two years and hundreds of casualties, he still felt it when someone died. He still took it personally.

  It was his failure that had led to their deaths. Whether it was in the planning or execution, he always believed there was something he could have done differently or better. He should have sounded the retreat as soon as the first trife appeared. His assumption that it was a scout group had cost his deputies their lives.

  Some people wallowed in the blame. Hayden wasn’t one of them. Self-pity didn’t work. It might soothe his guilt, but it would also leave him a weak mess, and the world already had enough of those. Too many people counted on him to be strong, to stand up for justice and keep the peace. The best way to honor the lives that were lost was to do the best job he could do...every single day.

  Without fail.

  Without complaint.

  Without hesitation.

  He helped carry Cortez out on a stretcher, holding up the front end while Solino and Kevitz took the rear. Hayden wasn’t a muscled behemoth, but his augments did offer him more strength and stamina than an average human possessed. But he did feel the strain in his legs, especially in his knees. And he felt it in his right arm where the augment’s control ring connected to the organic tissue, muscles and nerves. His career was a dangerous one and had led him to replace that arm multiple times. Too many times. The entire system was damaged, leaving him in near-constant pain. He lived with it, again without complaint. It was a reminder of his mission.

  And what he had lost.

  They brought Cortez to a helicopter—a Bell Iroquois his wife Natalia and her team of mechanics and engineers had brought back to life with the help of a network of scavengers. The chopper was rusty and dirty, but it was functional and valuable, carrying personnel and supplies across the the United Western Territories, connecting the cities of Sanisco, Sanose, Tijuana, Lavega, Haven and Dego.

  Except the last three weren’t really cities anymore. A run-in with the Hunger had cost him almost half the population of the UWT and left those areas in ruin. They would rebuild in time, but for now the survivors had been coming north to Sanisco, the capital, huddling up for safety in the wake of the destruction.

  That was only part of the fallout. The reduced control of the cities had brought the rats out of hiding with the belief there was an opening to seize back some of what Hayden had taken. Would-be warlords and gangs had moved into the abandoned areas, along with scavengers, thieves and traffickers—all looking for whatever scraps they could find. The warehouse had been home to one of those gangs, the intervention here intended to be a signal to the others that law still existed in the UWT, and nobody could ignore it without bringing the Sheriff down on them. Maybe the message was still intact, but at what cost?

  Two deputies. Killed by trife that didn’t belong.

  “I’ll make sure you didn’t die for nothing,” Hayden said as he helped place the stretcher inside the helicopter. The pilot, Bronson, strapped it in.

  “Sorry about Cortez and Nan, Sheriff,” he said. “They were good people.”

  “Pozz,” Hayden agreed. “Bring them home and then circle back.”

  “Roger,” Bronson replied. “Try not to die in the meantime.”

  “You know me.”

  Bronson nodded and moved to the cockpit of the chopper. Hayden, Solino and Kevitz backed away, joining the deputies the pilot had delivered earlier.

  The Rangers were Hayden’s most skilled team of deputies, Special Forces who had gone through Centurion Space Force training with Rico, and with Bennett before her. Except most of Bennett’s trainees were gone now too. More fallout from his fight against the Hunger.

  The Rangers standing in front of him were a mostly-new group and weren’t as experienced as he would have liked. Hicks was the squad leader and the longest-tenured deputy on Hayden’s staff. The man was his former Chief Deputy who had begged to be part of the Rangers to help get them back into fighting shape following their losses. While there had been a time when Hayden and Hicks were enemies, but that time was long past.

  “Rangers,” Hayden said, acknowledging them.

  They snapped to attention, arms down at their sides. “Sheriff Duke, sir!”

  “Chief Ranger Hicks, are we ready to go?” Hayden asked. The helicopter’s engines raised in pitch behind him as Bronson prepared for takeoff.

  “Yes, Sheriff,” Hicks replied. “Ready and eager.”

  “Then let’s do this. Solino, Kevitz, you have the door.”

  “Roger, Sheriff,” the two deputies replied.

  Hayden knew they both wanted to go back into the warehouse to make amends for the deaths of Cortez and Nan. But the Rangers were better trained and better armed, and they needed someone outside the building, keeping watch for both returning trife scouts and possible human intervention.

  “Solino,” Hayden said. “Helmet, please.”

  He handed Solino his hat and glasses, accepting a helmet in return. He pulled it over his head, the base clicking when it latched to the connector in the combat armor. A HUD popped up in his visor, and then the armor indicated it was networked with the rest of the Rangers. Five designations appeared across the top of the visor, each outlined in green to show they were healthy.

  “This is Sheriff Duke. Comm check.”

  “Ranger One online,” Hicks said.

  “Ranger Two online,” a woman’s voice announced. Hayden glanced at her designation on the HUD. Her surname was Jackson.

  “Ranger Three online,” another man said. Bahk.

  “Ranger Four online,” a third man announced. Rollins.

  “Ranger Five online,” a second woman said. Ivanov.

  “All units online,” Hicks said. “We’re ready to roll, Sheriff.”

  “Pozz that,” Hayden replied, leading the group back into the warehouse.

  He grabbed his plasma rifle from his back and turned it on, keeping it level in front of him. With the queen dead, the trife would be less inclined to fight until they were threatened.

  He had every intention of threatening them.

  He crossed the warehouse to the corner, the night vision in the helmet keeping the quality of his vision stable even as the amount of light decreased. He came to a stop in front of the hole the trife had climbed from. Their claw marks were easily visible in the rock beneath the building’s floor, which had cracked, crumbled and collapsed into an underground excavation. There was no obvious sign of trife below, either visually or on the Advanced Tactical Combat System’s sensors, meaning the hole continued beyond the immediate area.

  “Do trife dig tunnels?” Hicks asked, coming up beside Hayden and looking into the hole.

  “Not that I’ve ever heard of or seen,” Hayden replied. “But they evolve quickly.”

  “Do you think it’s a response to the goliaths?”

  Hayden glanced at the Ranger Chief. The goliaths were the only reason the UWT was able to remain as trife-free as it did. “We can’t rule it out.”

  He looked back at the hole. If the trife were tunneling below the surface to get around the goliaths, the people of the UWT might be in for a new deadly threat before they recovered from the last one.

  But not if he could help it.

  18

  Hayden

  Hayden and his Rangers descended into the hole on a pair of ropes, landing on hard earth nearly ten meters below the warehouse floor.

  “I don’t get the impression that hole was supposed to be there,” Hicks said, looking up at the breach.

  “It probably collapsed during the fighting,” Hayden replied, referring to the Relyeh attack on the city.

  He turned in a circle. The bad news was that the excavation was a tunnel after all, and it stretched into the darkness headed both north and south. The good news was that it appeared to be human-made, not trife-made. There was no evidence of claw marks on any of the walls, though there were more than a few scrapes and scratches in the floor and leading up to the warehouse.

  “Wrong place, wrong time?” Hicks asked.

  “It seems that way. The trife were probably passing through and saw the hole. We just happened to be there when they did. The thing about that is, queens don’t normally migrate.”

  “You think something stole her food source?”

  “Or it died. Some of the reactors are nearing their end of life.”

  “That makes more sense. What do you think, Sheriff? Do we split up?”

  “No. Strength in numbers.” Hayden followed the marks on the floor. “It looks like they’re heading north.”

  “Then I take it we’re heading north?”

  “Pozz. Standby.” Hayden switched channels on the comm. “Solino, do you copy?”

  “I copy, Sheriff,” Solino replied. “What’s up?”

  “We found a tunnel beneath the warehouse. We’re going to follow it north. Do you have my comm position?”

  “How do I get your position, Sheriff?”

  “The glasses. Put them on and tap the side to activate the ATCS. It’ll link to the nearest sister signal if it finds one.”

  “Roger.”

  Hayden waited for Solino to do as he instructed. The glasses were a scaled-back version of the same combination of system-on-a-chip computer brain and visor-mounted heads-up-display in the combat armor. It would allow the deputy to link into their network. He would have had Solino do it earlier, but the battery in the glasses wouldn’t last nearly as long as the power supply embedded in the back of Hayden’s armor.

  Hayden knew when Solino had joined because the designation came up in the HUD. He switched back to the team comm channel. “Welcome to the party, Solino.”

  “Thank you, Sheriff,” Solino replied.

  Hayden glanced at Hicks. “You and I have point. Vee formation.”

  “Roger.”

  “Solino, follow us from above.”

  “Roger, Sheriff.”

  Hayden moved out ahead of the other Rangers with Hicks, and they started walking along the tunnel.

  “How far do we take it?” Hicks asked.

  “Until we find the trife or lose contact with Solino,” Hayden replied. “We can’t let them make another queen, especially this deep inside UWT territory.”

  “Roger that.”

  They kept walking. The tunnel started to curve after a while, the heading changing from north to northeast, and then to the east as they reached the one hour mark. The depth remained the same, the passage sitting a short distance beneath the ground, passing uninterrupted beneath the city and past its outer perimeter. Deputy Solino remained dutifully above, following the signal as best he could. Hayden lost contact with him a few times as they passed beneath the wreckage of a building or through a particularly dense portion of rock, but they always reconnected before they had to turn back.

  Another hour went by. Hayden passed a message to Bronson through Solino to ground the helicopter somewhere safe and wait for instruction. There was no sense burning limited fuel for no reason. The tunnel continued, straightening out on an eastern route and spreading far enough ahead to vanish into darkness.

  Hayden and the Rangers spent two more hours traveling the tunnel, at which point Hayden started to become concerned. He had thought there might be another exit somewhere along the route. A sealed hatch or something. That didn’t seem to be the case. They were four hours deep into the passage with no clear way back to the surface and no idea how much further they would have to go. Did it make sense to follow the trife if the tunnel didn’t end anytime soon?

  Hayden decided he would give it another hour. If they didn’t discover anything worthwhile by then, they could mark the spot and head back to the warehouse. With the right equipment, they could make a new hole and rejoin the search from there.

  “Is Hallia talking yet?” Hicks asked, trying to make conversation to help pass the time.

  “A little,” Hayden replied. “She’s got momma down cold.”

  Hicks laughed. “What about da-da?”

  “I think she’ll get Ginny before she gets da-da. Her big sister spends more time with her than Nat and me combined.”

  “How is that going? Ginny, I mean?”

  Hayden smiled behind his helmet. Ginny was a stray, an orphan who had latched onto Hayden after he saved her life in Dego. She was a good kid, a strong kid. She had become part of the family almost by default.

  “It’s a shame her parents didn’t live to see what she’s growing into,” he replied. “She’s going to have an impact somewhere.”

  “Sheriff or engineer?”

  “Maybe both. She’s fearless and curious. And I think that’s rubbing off on Hal a little bit too.”

  “You’re a lucky man, Sheriff. I don’t know how you do it.”

  “I sure am. What about you?”

  “What about me? I don’t get enough time off to get into any relationships.”

  “That’s not what I heard.”

  “What did you hear?”

  Hayden laughed again. “That a certain Chief Ranger has been seen spending a lot of time hovering around Medical. But that has nothing to do with Nurse Tia.”

  “I will neither confirm or deny that statement. In fact, I—”

  Hick’s voice cut off as he identified the sudden appearance of a red mark on his HUD. Hayden saw it too, and he immediately brought the squad to a stop, aiming his rifle forward.

  It appeared a moment later. A single trife bounding toward them through the passage.

  “I’ve got this one,” Hicks said, taking aim.

  “Hicks, wait,” Hayden said.

  The trife kept coming, in long strides on all fours, racing at them like they weren’t even there. Hayden moved aside to let it pass, and it continued through the Rangers without slowing, vanishing a few seconds later.

  “What the hell?” Jackson said.

  A tense silence enveloped them. Hayden turned back to the passage, sharing the Ranger’s sentiment. The behavior was strange. Trife always traveled in groups. This one seemed like it was running away.

  But from what?

  Hayden looked forward again. He started walking cautiously ahead, a single step at a time, rifle raised and ready to fire. The Rangers did the same.

  Another red mark appeared on the HUD. Hayden didn’t stop moving this time. The trife ran between him and Hicks, ignoring them in its desperate effort to escape.

  “Are you sure we should be going forward?” Bahk asked.

  Another red mark appeared, and then two more. The trife raced past them.

  “Solino,” Hayden said. “What’s the situation topside?”

  “Sheriff,” Solino replied. “Everything’s clear up here.”

  “What’s my relative position?”

  “You’re under the street. There’s a building straight ahead. A big one. It’s got some lettering still on it, hold on. Dep. Department. Department of H-E-A and U-M-A-N Services. I don’t know, Sheriff. Some of the letters are missing.”

  Hayden wished Isaac was with him. The Marine would probably know what the building was. Not that it mattered. Whatever was sending the trife running, it was down here, not up there.

  “Sheriff,” Hicks said, getting Hayden’s attention. The Chief Ranger was pointing his rifle toward the side of the tunnel.

  A dead trife was there, it’s arm missing. The wound to the shoulder was jagged and deep.

  “It looks like something took a bite out of it,” Jackson said.

  “Sure does,” Hayden agreed. That would explain why so few of the trife were returning. “And I want to know what.”

  He broke into a run. The other Rangers howled and followed behind him, encouraged by his lack of fear.

  The sound of hissing and groaning became increasingly loud as Hayden charged, along with a noise like a wet towel slapping the ground. A few more trife ran the other direction as he approached, his HUD lighting up with a few more red marks, and then finally a larger one.

  The tunnel was dark, and the edge of the night vision’s range left everything shrouded in silhouette and shadow. Even with his limited sight, Hayden could make out the scene of chaos and violence approaching. There were already dozens of dead trife on the ground, their blood making the floor of the tunnel slick, their smell making Hayden nauseous. They littered the area, each of them with a bite taken from somewhere on their bodies.In some cases multiple bites. Movement in the shadows, combined with the ATCS sensors, revealed about twenty trife still fighting back against a much larger target. One with multiple limbs, each of them independently trying to grab a trife.