Deception

by M. R. Forbes

  The reality of their situation was only starting to sink in for him. It was one thing to listen to Doctor Valentine recount the story of how they had wound up on an occupied starship two hundred years in the future. It was another to really absorb it and become comfortable with it. Caleb had calmed considerably since waking, but he could also sense the edge of panic in his gut, the generalized nervousness and frustration of feeling out of his element and underprepared.

  But how could he have prepared to fight monsters, real monsters, that made the original trife seem like wind-up toys in comparison?

  Prepared or not, that was the job. It was nothing like he had expected. Nothing like he had planned or wanted. But it was reality, and as the head of the Guardians he had to see it through.

  The group slowed as they neared the next intersection. Caleb repeated the process, this time raising three fingers and sending Flores across the gap. She jumped across, using the strength of the SOS endo-musculature to carry her across in one hop. She cleared the other side and turned around, crouching and aiming her rifle.

  Her expression told Caleb the status of the passageway before he looked for himself. Her face froze and tightened, and she raised her hand, signaling they weren’t clear. Caleb rounded the edge of the corridor, crouching at the same level and spinning the muzzle of the P-50 around the wall, tilting his head to get a clear view.

  The Reaper was crouched against the wall, motionless. It seemed to be asleep, but it didn’t look asleep. It looked more like a Butcher when it was offline. Powered down. It was silent as it sat, eyes open but focused straight ahead, mouth hanging slightly agape, claws resting on the floor. It was terrifying even in its current state.

  Caleb raised his hand and signaled Riley over. She crouched behind him, her head next to his.

  “What do you think?” he asked, his voice barely loud enough to form the words.

  He didn’t need to explain what he meant. The door to the bridge was down that corridor. They could circumvent the Reaper by going the long way around, but it would add hours to their trip with no guarantee the thing wouldn’t move. At the same time, if they could take it by surprise here and now they could reduce the population to five with minimal effort.

  “We can close in on it from three sides,” she replied just as quietly. “Sho and Flores on the right flank. Washington and me on the left.”

  “Or go past it?”

  “You may not get another chance like this. It was far enough away from the module it didn’t notice the explosion.”

  Caleb nodded. He raised two fingers and then pointed across the corridor. Sho paused beside him before leaping across without catching the Reaper's attention.

  Caleb went through a series of hand gestures, silently signaling the Guardians on their plan of attack. Sho and Flores acknowledged the orders and began moving away, heading for the adjacent corridors that would re-intersect with the passageway further aft. He looked back at Washington and Riley, and they responded the same way but heading down the opposite side.

  Caleb remained static, ears open for the sound of gunfire in either of the alternate approaches as he prepared to launch his own assault. Just because there was a Reaper here didn’t mean there wasn’t a second nearby. That was the risk they had to take regardless of anything they did. There were no guarantees, and without access to sensor data they were running almost blind.

  He reached the four-minute mark of the five minutes he gave the others to get into position before he slowly rose from his crouch. The Reaper hadn’t moved a muscle the entire time he had been observing it. In fact, he was starting to wonder if it was even alive. Maybe things didn’t always have to be as hard or as cut and dried as they seemed.

  Something bumped into his foot.

  It took every ounce of Caleb’s control to keep from making a sound or any quick motion. Maybe whatever had touched his foot was still there. Maybe it wasn’t. He hadn’t heard anything approaching, and he would guess anything that meant him harm would have attacked, not nudged him for attention.

  He slowly started turning his head, eyes pressed into the corner of the socket to check on his foot without moving more than he had to.

  He looked down. There was a baseball laying right up against his heel. It was worn and weathered, the red stitching coming out slightly. Someone had written on it. A signature.

  What the hell?

  Caleb wanted to reach for it. He stopped himself. He didn’t know where the ball had come from. It looked so familiar to him. Regardless, it was harmless. The Reaper wasn’t. He turned his head back toward the creature.

  It was gone.

  Caleb’s heart began racing the moment his eyes fell on the empty passageway. Where the hell had the Reaper gone? In which direction? Had it heard Sho and Flores or Washington and Riley? Had it left to chase them, while he was staring at a damn baseball?

  He moved out into the corridor, raising the P-50 and walking quickly down the passage. He listened for an indication of the Reaper’s direction. It was too big to move silently. But he didn’t hear the tapping of claws or the pounding of feet. He didn’t hear hissing or screaming. The thing was too big to hide on the ceiling or in the shadows. It was too bulky to move without a sound. It didn’t make any sense.

  Unless it was still there.

  He stopped moving, staring at the spot where the Reaper had been. Could the creatures make themselves invisible? Or was there something else going on? Something potentially worse.

  Caleb aimed his weapon at the spot. He was still ticking the seconds off in the back of his mind, the practice so ingrained he didn’t lose count even with the strange occurrences. He checked the plasma rifle, making sure it was set to stream.

  The clock in his mind touched five minutes. He squeezed the trigger.

  Superheated gas poured out of the muzzle, launching into the bare wall in a ball of red and orange and blue fire. Caleb still didn’t see anything, but he heard the ear-splitting, pained scream of the Reaper as it began to burn.

  He kept his finger depressed on the trigger, continuing to blast the Reaper with plasma. Its screams lessened a moment later, the sound shifting position as the demon tried to run.

  It didn’t get very far. Four Guardians revealed themselves at the intersection behind it, four plasma rifles catching it in a deadly crossfire. Their plasma rifles exploded out toward the hybrid, causing it to hiss and howl in pain.

  Caleb adjusted his aim, targeting the same empty space where the others were shooting. He still couldn’t see the Reaper. He only knew where it was because of them. He had no idea what kind of damage it was taking, or if it would recover from the barrage. He kept firing, watching the charge counter in his rifle drop.

  He noticed Riley signal the others to stop shooting, so he stopped too, releasing the trigger and lowering the rifle to his side.

  “Cal?”

  He heard the voice behind him. He recognized it immediately.

  “Dad?” he said, spinning around.

  The corridor was clear. What the hell was happening to him? He turned back. The Reaper was suddenly visible to him, lying in a smoldering heap on the floor. Its head had been completely burned away, its entire right side reduced to ash and dust. The smell of cooked meat and fresh excrement filled the air.

  The Guardians stood around the corpse with him, watching it with intensity, waiting to see if it would recover from the damage. Caleb could see part of it changing, the cells regrowing, the demon beginning to knit back together.

  “Screw this,” Sho said. She snapped her plasma rifle to her back and pulled her MK-12, resting it on the floor and unloading one of the explosive rounds from the secondary magazine. “Alpha, permission to blow this thing to hell?”

  “Granted,” Caleb replied.

  She manually triggered the activation switch on the small silver ball. Then she reached into the Reaper, shoving her hand through its destroyed chest and placing the explosive deep inside. She pulled her empty hand back out, a
nd they all scattered back to the aft intersection, getting clear of the creature before the round went off, muffled inside the Reaper’s chest cavity. The force tore the carcass apart, sending bits of flesh, blood, and bone to splatter against the passage. It was disgusting but efficient.

  “And then there were five,” Caleb said softly. “Nice work, Guardians.”

  “Alpha, what happened?” Sho said. “You look like you saw a ghost.”

  Caleb looked past the remains of the Reaper, down the corridor to where his dead father had been standing. What had caused his hallucination? A weird side-effect of stasis or was he starting to crack?

  “It’s nothing,” he replied. “I’m fine. Let’s get to the bridge, and hope none of the other ones heard us.”

  “Roger that.”

  The other Guardians turned back toward the aft end of the passage. Caleb’s gaze lingered for a moment longer. He hadn’t just seen a ghost.

  He had heard it too.

  Chapter 12

  The door to the bridge slid open. Caleb paused at the threshold. The last time he had been up here, it was to say goodbye to Sheriff Aveline.

  It was weird to think that Lily had been dead for close to two centuries. He couldn’t help but wonder how her life had progressed. Had she met a man who treated her well? Had she become a mother like she had hoped? Would he ever meet her offspring?

  It was a bittersweet line of thought. He hoped Lily had been happy. He hoped everyone in Metro was still happy. It was better they were beyond welded doors, sealed in from the violence and chaos out here under the threat of attack by the Reapers.

  “Well, this is going to complicate things,” Riley said.

  Caleb snapped out of his head, finding her standing a few steps ahead of him. He looked past her, trying to discern the source of her statement.

  It wasn’t hard to figure out. The stations on the bridge had been ransacked. The terminals were torn from their wires, the displays smashed and shattered. The holotable had been lifted from its moorings and cast upside down. From his location, only the central command station appeared intact, and it was stained with old blood as though someone had died in the chair and someone else, or something else, had dragged him or her out of it.

  He was staring at it when he heard a pair of gasps ahead of him, and then the sound of Washington snapping his fingers, which he did to register surprise. Caleb’s head snapped up, searching for the source of their astoundment. It didn’t take long to figure it out.

  The large displays that hung over the bridge were all intact, and all currently active. They revealed a high definition view of the universe outside the ship, a one-hundred-eighty-degree field of view of the stars ahead of the bow. The left screen showed what appeared to be the light of a thousand stars. The right screen wasn’t empty either, revealing a light source that filled the entirety of the view, the cameras outside the hull filtering it down to a manageable level. Caleb recognized it immediately as a star, a sun, and for a moment he started to worry that it was the same Sun that had once warmed him on the beaches in California and toasted him on the sands in the Middle East.

  That was because the center display wasn’t empty either.

  “Please tell me that isn’t Earth,” Flores said. “Because I don’t know about you, but it sure as hell looks like Earth to me.”

  Caleb couldn’t argue. He was thinking the same thing. He was looking at Earth. Their Earth. Wasn’t he?

  “It isn’t Earth,” Riley said, matter of factly. “For one, it’s too large by at least thirty percent. For another, the continents are all wrong. Third, I see two moons.”

  “How can you see two moons from here?” Caleb asked. “Or judge the size? We look like we’re close to an AU out.”

  “Don’t you see two spots orbiting it?”

  “No. You do?”

  “I have twenty-five vision,” she replied. “Two moons are orbiting the planet.”

  “How do you know one of them isn’t a space station?” Flores asked. “Maybe we’re in a galaxy far, far away.”

  “You’ve watched way too many movies in your lifetime,” Sho said.

  “You have no idea,” Flores replied. “I had a pretty lame childhood.”

  “Riley, you’re confident that isn’t Earth?” Caleb asked, skeptically.

  “Yes. Completely.”

  “Whew,” Flores said. “In all seriousness, that makes me feel better. I mean, how lousy would that be if we slept all that time to wake up back where we started?”

  “You said Proxima B is a rocky planet with a thin atmosphere,” Caleb said.

  “It is.”

  “So that isn’t Proxima B.”

  “It isn’t.”

  “Earth-6?”

  “It might be.”

  “What happened to Proxima?”

  “I was asleep too, Alpha. Before I went under, we were headed for Proxima B.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Again, completely.”

  “You’re suggesting something happened to the ship’s computer while we were in stasis? Because if you are, I can’t even begin to consider what that might mean for us, and for Metro.”

  “Metro should be fine. If they sealed the doors the way I told Governor Lyle to do, there’s no reason for them not to be safe and sound. I had a feeling we might not be in the Proxima Centauri system.”

  “You did? Why?”

  “The majority of the ship’s power goes to the engines. If we had been floating close to Proxima, we should have had enough energy for at least another century.”

  Washington tapped on one of the broken terminals, getting Caleb’s attention. He turned his hands over and shrugged, and then pointed to the central display and the Earth-like planet floating in the center of it.

  “What’s he asking?” Riley said.

  “He doesn’t think it’s a big deal. The ship delivered us to an E-type planet. Is that right, Wash?”

  Washington nodded.

  “I agree,” Riley said. “It isn’t worst case, which in this case might make it best case.” She smirked at her sentence. “It’s possible someone did a hard reset on the ship’s computer, forcing a reboot. Since the Proxima coordinates were manually entered, they might have been lost on restart, causing the ship to revert to its original target.”

  “Earth-6?” Caleb said.

  “Yes.”

  “How do we verify?”

  Riley walked over to the command station. She made a face at the blood stains on and around it, but she sat in the chair and activated the terminal. “I’m not that familiar with these systems, but if you give me a little time I think I can get you an answer. I can’t promise you’ll like it.”

  “I haven’t liked anything that’s happened since I woke up,” Caleb said. “Washington, Flores, keep watch outside. If you see anything, holler.”

  Washington flashed his thumb and headed off the bridge with Flores.

  Caleb turned back to Riley. “See what you can find out. We need any and all intel you can collect, both with regards to our position in space and the Reapers’ positions on board. Everything is important, no matter how trivial it might seem.”

  “Agreed, Alpha,” Riley replied.

  Caleb moved away from the command station, heading forward toward the pilot’s station to check on its condition. Would they be able to bring the massive starship to the surface without it? He was pretty sure the automated systems could manage the landing, but he would feel better to have backup.

  Assuming they ever had the chance to land. It was too dangerous to bring the Deliverance to the surface as long as the people of Metro were prisoners to the city, locked in by David Nash and his roaming hybrid trife.

  The whole thing seemed surreal. Caleb and his fellow Marines had fought so hard – and so many had died – in the battle to clear the trife from the ship. To have them back stronger than before because Doctor Valentine had continued her work and she had screwed it all up? It burned his innards to dus
t. It was almost more than he could handle. She should have told him she had found the man he had seen being chased by the trife. He had spent hours searching for him when he was already in her custody the whole time. She should have told him she was going to use him in her continuing experiments.

  Damn it. She should have told him how she was planning to use the people of Metro.

  He wanted to say he couldn’t believe Command would approve something like that, but he knew how desperate they had become by the time Deliverance launched. As much as he hated himself for it, he could understand their motives and their decision. He couldn’t say he wouldn’t have done the same thing himself.

  Caleb reached the pilot station and looked down at it. The controls appeared to be intact, spared from the ransacking of the rest of the bridge. If David Nash was responsible for all the damage on the bridge, he had apparently known or guessed they might need this particular station to get onto the planet. It’s role was pretty obvious, so it made complete sense he’d wanted to keep it intact.

  “Sarge, you should talk about it,” Sho said, coming up behind him and taking him by surprise. He shook slightly, a shiver running down his spine.

  “Talk about what?” he asked.

  “Sorry Sarge. I didn’t mean to scare you. I was just thinking you should talk about whatever it is you’re still thinking about. We’re a team, remember? Closer than family. What happened to you out there? If we hadn’t popped out of hiding when we did, that Reaper would have torn you apart before you even noticed it. You seemed distracted by something behind you, but there was nothing there.”

  “There was something there, Yen. Or at least, my mind was convinced there was. First, I felt something hit my foot, and when I looked down there was an old autographed baseball there. My father gave it to me when I was twelve years old. A family heirloom. Priceless.” Caleb smiled. He couldn’t stop himself when he remembered the rest of the story. “Of course, I didn’t understand what that meant, so one day I took the ball out and just started bouncing it off the brick wall of my house and fielding it when it came back. My dad came home while I was still playing. He stopped me, grabbed the ball, and stood there staring at it. I thought he was going to ground me. I was sure I did something horrible. But then his face broke, and he started laughing, harder than I had ever heard him laugh in his life. He tossed the ball back to me and he said, hold on, Cal, I’m going to grab my glove.”