by M. R. Forbes
“You can’t be more than thirty years old,” Sho said.
“I’m thirty-seven,” Riley replied. “I finished my doctorate at twenty-one. I was a little ahead of my class.”
“No shit,” Flores said.
“And then you went into the service to run with the wolves?” Sho said. She pointed at Caleb. “You two never met?”
“I think Riley was already out of the Raiders by the time I went in,” Caleb said.
“You were a Raider too?” Riley asked.
Caleb nodded. “Only for a year. Then the trife came.”
“If I had known, I wouldn’t have been such a bitch to you.”
“It doesn’t matter now. All of that is gone.”
“Right. I joined the Marines because I was bored with science,” Riley said. “I wanted to test myself physically.”
“Is there anything you aren’t good at?” Flores asked.
“Two hundred years ago, I would have said no,” Riley replied. “Things change. Anyway, my people were all special forces, all elite level Marines at the top of their game, all with secondary skills suited for the specific task. We had two primary directives. One, find a way to even out the balance in the war between human and trife. Two, solve the mystery of their origins.”
“That’s a pretty tall order,” Sho said.
“It was, and I don’t know if Command ever expected we would fill it completely. It didn’t matter. We had every resource at our disposal. Transportation, equipment, intel, troops. We probably knew more about the hot spots around the globe than half the governments in the world.”
“So how did you wind up in the basement of the Department of Health and Human Services office in Atlanta?” Caleb asked.
“That’s a really long story,” Riley said. “Did you know General John Stacker?”
“I’ve heard the name. He refused to help defend the generation ships. He was convinced we could win the war on Earth.”
“He got wind of a discovery that was made about a year into the war. If you saw any news reports, what you always heard was that the trife came down as dust from a meteor storm, part of a two-pronged attack that included a virus which killed over half the human population within six months.
“The reports also called it an alien disease, like its existence was somehow coincidental. It was bullshit the government fed them to keep the remaining population calm. Or maybe I should say a little less panicked. You probably don’t know this, but every person who survived the virus, including all of you, are lacking a specific genome key that was traced back to a single dispersal out of Africa nearly fifty-thousand years ago. A hereditary trait that wasn’t always passed on, could skip generations, and was pretty much ignored until the trife arrived and we started looking for answers.”
“What does that mean?” Sho asked.
“We don’t know for sure. There are multiple hypotheses. One is that human life evolved from the same origins as the virus millions of years ago and essentially arrived from the same place in the universe to the planet Earth years apart. There was a time when I accepted that one. The one I subscribe to now is that our enemies first visited Earth fifty-thousand years ago in preparation of the day when they would attack. They keyed their disease to that genetic marker. Maybe they even took some of the people back with them. Then they waited.”
“Waited for what?” Caleb asked.
“For us to evolve. Advance. Become a threat. They left us alone as long as we stayed contained, looking up at the stars but not trying to touch them. Then we started sending people to the moon. Then we started sending probes out beyond our solar system. Then we invented inertial dampening, gravity generators, powerful fusion reactors, and ion thrusters. We attracted their attention with our technology and they decided it was time to put a stop to it.”
“Why not just give us a warning and let us get on with our lives?” Flores asked. “Or if the ultimate plan was to destroy us, why not do it fifty-thousand years ago before we ever had a chance to spread out and multiply?”
“I can’t speak for an intelligence I’ve never directly met,” Riley said. “I guess that not all life forms manage to stay on the positive logarithmic scale.”
“Meaning?” Flores said.
“If you look at human history, there are thousands of points in time where we could have fallen apart, broken down, or otherwise lost our technological advances. Look at the dark ages, for example. Or even the number of tribes sharing the planet, still surviving as hunters and gatherers, living in thatched huts and walking around in loincloths. If we hypothesize that Earth isn’t the only planet undergoing a similar evolution, then it stands to reason other intelligent life has failed to live up to even a portion of their capabilities. Just because a race has the potential to one day go beyond their world and to the stars doesn’t mean they ever will.”
“But we did,” Caleb said. “We’re out here right now. Their plan failed.”
Riley smiled. “It did worse than fail. It was one of the greatest motivators in our history. The impetus that sparked the cooperation of every government on the planet in designing, building, and launching the generation ships and carrying us to the stars.”
“Oops,” Sho said.
“Oops is right. Getting back to General Stacker, he was privy to intel suggesting the newly minted Space Force had found something strange in relation to the arrival of the trife. A piece of alien technology too advanced to be an accident. When we tried to get access to it, we were met with all kinds of blockers and denials, and finally told that what we were looking for didn’t exist. That the communications we had intercepted were fabrications.”
“You didn’t believe that?” Caleb said.
“No. I’ve run into walls before. The officers we interviewed were afraid. Whatever they found, it scared the shit out of them, and they wanted to make it go away...and fast. For the Reapers, it only made us more curious. We couldn’t make any headway with the officers in question, so we started running some searches of our own. We mapped the meteor storm in new ways and with new filters, trying to track down objects that didn’t fit the standard profile of the space rocks carrying the trife embryos and virus. We identified a suspicious site in Peru.”
“And that’s where you found whatever it was you were hiding beneath the tarp,” Caleb said. “The package that got Banks and Habib killed.”
Riley nodded. “Not exactly.”
“What was it?” Sho asked. “And what does it have to do with the trife? Or with the mutant trife that just attacked us? Or with going to sleep for two hundred years?”
“I’m getting to it. The backstory is important because I believe it has a direct correlation to everything that happened leading up to my hibernation, including my culpability in this disaster. Where was I?”
“Suspicious site in Peru,” Caleb said.
“Right. We didn’t normally run ground operations ourselves. We had all of Space Force at our disposal. We made an exception and took a hopper to Peru. We spent two weeks in the Peruvian Amazon, scouring the area for clues. And then we found it.”
“Found what?”
“A shard of foreign alloy about the size of his fist.” She pointed to Washington. “It was alien, made of materials we had never encountered before, and definitely not naturally occurring. It was our first physical evidence of a life form more intelligent than the trife, which we also directly connected to the trife.
“In any case, we ran every analysis in the book against the material. The elements it was composed of were about forty-percent identical with elements available on Earth. The rest of it was undiscovered, unique material. More than that, we discovered that at a microscopic level, the piece was layered with tracks and pads resembling the composition of a circuit board. What we had found was at least a part of an alien computer, or more likely a piece of an alien satellite or probe. We postulated its intent to be some sort of a guidance system or sensor array monitoring the initial invasion.”
&n
bsp; “Damn,” Flores said in disbelief.
“Riley, this is all captivating,” Caleb said. “It honestly is. But we have current problems we need to deal with. Can you skip ahead a little?”
“Bottom line, we used the composition of the probe to build a sensor to detect like materials. The result of our scan is what brought us to Georgia, and the basement of the Department of Health and Human Services.”
“What was it?” Caleb asked.
“That’s what I said,” Sho said.
Riley paused, still hesitant to reveal the nature of her top-secret package. She stiffened, seeming to remind herself that her secrecy was part of what had gotten them into this situation.
“A spacecraft. A piloted spacecraft.”
Chapter 6
“Piloted?” Flores said. “As in, something was behind the stick, controlling it?”
“At some point in time, yes. But we found the craft buried under six feet of dirt. It had been on the planet for at least a thousand years, and it was empty when we discovered it.”
“You’re saying there was an alien walking around on Earth a thousand years ago?” Caleb said.
“It was on the planet. It probably died almost as long ago. We never found a body, assuming there was a body to be found.”
“So the thing under the tarp was an alien spacecraft?” Caleb asked.
“Yes.”
“It wasn’t very big,” Caleb said.
“No. The cockpit would have been a tight fit for the occupant, but we think it also served as a stasis pod for its passenger. The material inside shared properties with our cryogel.”
“So it could have come from anywhere,” Caleb said. “What kind of engines does it have?”
“The thrusters are small. We don’t think the aliens use them to travel over distances. It was probably just a single-occupant landing craft. Anyway, we only discovered it about a month ago. Or maybe I should say, a month before we boarded the Deliverance. We were only starting to really dig into the craft itself. Do you remember the Reapers’ other directive?”
“Balance the war between human and trife,” Flores said.
“That was our priority, considering the imminent launch of the Deliverance. We were working with multiple teams across the globe to find ways to even out the balance of power. The main advantage the trife have is their ability to reproduce quickly. They can replenish an army in a week where it would take humans years.
“We took a number of approaches, from robots like the Butchers to improved weaponry like the plasma rifles we’re carrying, to the combat armor we’re wearing, to the artificial limbs we gave the Marines to get them back out into the field.
“As a geneticist on a diverse team of special operations veterans, our approach was twofold. One, improve Marine longevity. Two, undermine the enemy’s position. When you picked us up, we were in the middle of launching a fresh round of trials on the first branch.”
“Let me guess,” Caleb said. “Regeneration?”
Riley nodded. “The combat armor is effective where the plates sit on the underlying spider-steel bodysuit. But as you know, the trife claws have evolved to be able to pierce the bodysuit, and they learned where to attack to get the best results. We can pretty much assure that a trife will try to slice your neck and cut a vital artery to kill you or go for the joints in an effort to disable. If we could negate that damage by enhancing a human’s healing factor, we would have nearly unkillable Marines.”
“But you tried robots,” Caleb said. “How is that different?”
“The problem with robots isn’t their overall effectiveness. One Butcher can stand up to hundreds of trife. But robots require manufacturing. They require reliable supply chains. They’re made up of multiple components that come from different places. They also require a power supply. Thirty percent of our Butchers were lost not to irrevocable damage, but to power loss. They simply ran out of juice to keep fighting. A human? All we need is a man, a woman, and time.”
“Proxima,” Caleb said. “If you perfected the science--”
“Given enough time we would have an unstoppable army. But we had to get the science right first. We wanted to have it done before we left Earth. If we could have proven the alterations worked, we never would have left.”
“But it’s been over two hundred years,” Flores said. “Why haven’t we touched down on Proxima?”
“Too dangerous. Harry altered the programming for me before he died. The ship isn’t capable of sending or receiving communications without my direct authorization. We can’t land without my say-so either, assuming we’re close to being somewhere we can land.”
“Which is why you were in stasis?” Caleb said.
“Yes.”
“So we kill the remaining uber-trife and we’re home free, right?” Flores said.
“Not quite,” Riley said. “You’re missing a lot of the story.”
“Yeah, like what the hell did you do to Pratt?” Sho said.
“And what happened to Shiro and Ning,” Caleb added. “Not to mention, how were you planning on testing your genetic alterations without any…” Caleb trailed off as the truth made itself apparent to him. His eyes narrowed as he stared at Doctor Valentine, a new sense of disgust clouding his vision. “Son of a bitch.”
“No, just the bitch,” Riley said.
“What?” Flores said. “Did I miss something?”
Washington was nodding. He looked horrified.
“I had full authorization from Command,” Riley said. “They approved the whole thing, top to bottom. Sacrifice the few for the sake of the many.”
Flores put up her hand. “Wait. I’m still not following.”
“The breach into Metro wasn’t a total accident, was it?” Sho asked, catching on. “The trife didn’t get through that seal on their own.”
Riley’s eyes dropped to the floor. “No. They didn’t. We placed what we called a blocker under the door. It was basically a small circuit that overrode the lock on the blast door and kept it from freezing closed. Somehow the trife knew there was a flaw in the door and they took advantage of it.”
“Whoa. Wait a second,” Flores said, her voice raising. “Are you telling me Command authorized you to experiment on the civilians in Metro?”
“Flores, keep it down,” Caleb snapped. “We aren’t alone in here.”
“Yes, Alpha,” Flores replied tensely.
“Our orders were to find a way to change the balance of the war,” Riley said. “We knew if we didn’t solve the equation before we had to evacuate we would have to solve it after we launched. It wasn’t ideal, but what choice did we have?”
“Choice? You could have chosen not to go after innocent civilians.”
“At what cost, Private Flores?” Riley said. “We were trying to save everyone on the planet. We had to do something.”
“You did something all right,” Sho said. “You did something to Pratt and Ning, and then you lied to us about it.”
“You were getting slaughtered. It made the decision an easy one. I gave Pratt and Ning two of the samples with the hope they could help you kill the trife. Pratt’s was the more promising approach, the best we had at the time. It did improve his healing factor. Unfortunately, it also made him paranoid.”
“And Ning?” Caleb asked.
“We gave him an alternate sample that caused fewer alterations to the genes. It seems all it accomplished was to make him sick.”
“And half-paralyzed,” Sho said. “Don’t forget that.”
“What happened to them?” Caleb asked. “What happened to Shiro and Ning?”
“Dead,” Riley said. “Killed by David Nash.”
“Who the hell is David Nash?”
Chapter 7
Years earlier…
David’s body quaked. He didn’t want it to, but he was afraid. More than afraid. Terrified beyond anything he had ever felt before. His bladder had already emptied, leaving a damp spot on his pants and a puddle on the seat of t
he chair.
He didn’t want to be here. He wished he had never joined up with Espinoza. He wished he had never followed him to the mountainside where the starship Deliverance was hiding.
And he absolutely, positively wished he had never stepped foot on this starship from hell, where the trife weren’t even the most dangerous and frightening monsters on board.
Wishes weren’t worth a damn thing. Desire and hope had no place here either. He knew how things were going to end. The same way they would have back on Earth. With him dead, killed by his nightmares.
Why couldn’t he have just succumbed to the virus like his parents? He wasn’t strong. He wasn’t healthy. He wasn’t smart or talented or anything else that had value in this new life. He was next to nothing. A speck of dust on the ass of the universe. He wasn’t good for anything.
Well, he was good for one thing. He was a human and had a heartbeat. That was all Doctor Riley Valentine needed him to be.
He had tried to keep track of how long he had been here, tucked away in a cell in the back of the place they called Research. He had scratched marks into his sheets, creating runs in the cotton for each day he believed had passed. It was hard to be confident in the crawl of time without any identifying information. He had settled for basing it on his scheduled escorted trips to the bathroom. Every day included four excursions. They would feed him after every third journey to the head, and on the fourth he would defecate. They were always polite but stern, letting him talk but refusing to talk back.
He did everything he could think of in an effort to form a rapport with at least one of them. He told jokes. He talked sports and movies. He tried to get the men in the group to admit that Doctor Valentine was gorgeous. Every word he spoke fell on disinterested ears. He was a prisoner, useful for only one thing, and they made sure he knew it.
It had been over a year. His twenty-second birthday had come and gone. He didn’t know exactly which day it had been, not that the team in Research would have given him a cake or anything. He hadn’t gotten a birthday cake in nearly six years, even before the trife had ruined everything. His mother told him he was too old to care so much about his birthday.
