Deception

by M. R. Forbes

  Riley moved ahead of them, and they fell into a wedge formation, with Caleb taking the rear. He was more nervous than he should be. More nervous than he would usually be. He was waiting to start seeing things again, expecting it to happen with each step they took. Would he wind up as the reason their efforts failed? Was he going to cost everyone in Metro their lives?

  He hoped not.

  They reached the edge of a t-junction. Riley raised her hand, bringing them to a stop. She leaned out past it, aiming the laser pistol. Caleb didn’t see it fire until she turned back to the other side of the junction and used it a second time. The laser itself was invisible, but the weapon put out a tight red beam of light to indicate where it was going. It would be impossible to aim otherwise.

  Satisfied, she signaled the Guardians forward into the intersection. The area on both sides of them remained dark, a light scent of burned electronics lingering in the unfiltered air.

  They moved ahead in near-silence, careful to step as lightly as they could. The soles of the SOS were medium-soft, designed to comfortably traverse all kinds of terrain, not sneak up on sleeping demons. They would only be able to get so close before the creature might hear them and become alert. It had to be close enough.

  Their progress was slow. It took thirty minutes to cross three sections of corridor, with Riley stopping to shoot the sensors along the passage each time. The area behind them was pitch black. The area ahead featured a dim red light from above the sealed hatch leading into Metro. They were closing in on the Reaper’s position.

  When they arrived, the Reaper wasn’t there.

  “Stay on target,” Riley whispered to them. “This isn’t an exact science.”

  They didn’t respond, maintaining the silence. They followed her to the sealed hatch, coming to a stop in front of it. Caleb glanced over at the door. The frame around it was scraped and scratched and scuffed, the Reaper having spent a decent amount of time trying to get through. Maybe it had heard the people on the other side when they had welded it shut? Its efforts appeared to have failed. It was trapped out of the city with them.

  “Change in plans,” Riley said softly. “I’m going ahead. I’ll locate the Reaper and lead it back here. Take position near the door and be ready to blast it.”

  “You’re going to make yourself bait?” Sho asked, a measure of respect in her voice.

  “Yes. It may be awake as a result of our activity, which means it may be on the move. We won’t be able to sneak up on it that way. I’ll track it down.”

  “How?”

  “The lights, for one. It probably won’t roam far from here.”

  “You shouldn’t go alone,” Caleb said.

  “I don’t want to risk more than one of us for this. It should be me. Wait for me here. Be ready.”

  Caleb could tell the other Guardians didn’t like the idea. He didn’t like it either. He had seen what happened when they split up. Someone usually died. There was no point arguing. He had put her in charge. It was her decision to make.

  He signaled his acknowledgment. The other Guardians followed suit. They moved into the short corridor ahead of the hatch, the same one where Sheriff Aveline had helped fight off the trife while the Marines delivered the civilians to the city. It felt like yesterday to Caleb. It was yesterday to Caleb, even though it had happened over two hundred years ago.

  “I’m going down the port side corridor, around the outside of Metro,” Riley said. “If I’m not back in twenty minutes, it’s probably better if you don’t come looking for me.”

  The Guardians signaled acknowledgment and Riley vanished down the passageway.

  “I give her credit for having the guts to go out there alone,” Sho whispered.

  “She’s going to get herself killed,” Flores said.

  “I don’t think so,” Caleb said. “She survived out here in the beginning. Stay quiet and be ready. For all we know, the Reaper might come back before she does.”

  “Roger that, Sarge.”

  Caleb checked his P-50 and then crouched behind Flores and Sho, aiming over their shoulders.

  Whatever happened next, he was ready for it.

  Chapter 18

  Caleb thought he was ready. He was expecting either the Reaper to come around the corner alone or for Riley to come through first, signaling them that it was time to shoot.

  The minutes passed in silence. The tension increased with each tick, ratcheting up as they waited for Riley to return. Five minutes. Ten. Fifteen. She had asked for twenty minutes to find the Reaper. It seemed she was going to use every last one of them.

  “Stay alert,” he whispered to Sho and Flores, making sure they weren’t getting distracted by the wait.

  Flores shifted her plasma rifle, getting the muzzle aimed out into the corridor again instead of drooping toward her feet. Sho smiled in response to the movement. Caleb was sure Washington was doing the same behind him.

  Seventeen minutes passed. Eighteen. The only sound was a soft hum from beyond the hatch. No scratching or clawing, and no sense of imminent danger. Caleb was grateful his hallucinations seemed to have subsided, at least for now. But he wondered...when the action started again, would he relapse?

  Nineteen minutes went by. Caleb tracked each second in his head, keeping an accurate count gained by years of experience. Riley had told them if she wasn’t back in time to assume she wasn’t coming back at all. He couldn’t help but wonder if she had used the opportunity to abandon them. To leave them behind while she did…what, exactly? Where was she going to go? There was no scenario he could think of where leaving them where she had made any sense.

  After the twenty-minute mark came and went without her return, he started to fear the worst. She knew hunting the Reaper alone was a risk, but it was a risk she wanted to take. Had her gamble failed to pay off?

  He knew the other Guardians were thinking the same thing. Sho glanced back at him, taking her eye off the corridor to express the question.

  “Eye ahead,” Caleb said, getting her to refocus her attention. “We’ll give her another minute.”

  “What if she doesn’t come back?” Flores asked.

  “We go find her.”

  “Sarge, she said to—“

  “I know what she said. I’m saying we go find her. I’m still Guardian Beta.”

  “There is no Guardian Beta. Only Alpha.”

  “There is now. Give her another minute.”

  “Roger that.”

  Caleb ticked off the seconds, counting down from sixty. He was sure the others were doing the same. He started getting worried again when he reached twenty. They were going to have to look for her.

  He started to shift, to stand upright but paused, hearing a light tapping in the distance. It grew quickly in volume, revealing itself as the rapid cadence of someone running fast and hard.

  “Get ready,” Caleb said. “Here she comes.”

  They brought their plasma rifles up, leaving a decent space between each of them so they could fire safely in stream mode. Caleb shifted his finger to the trigger, preparing to squeeze it.

  The footsteps grew in volume and intensity, and Caleb nearly lost his focus when he thought he heard four taps instead of two. He leaned over Sho and Flores, turning his head to the side to better hear Riley’s approach.

  Clomp. Tap. Clomp. Tap. Tap. Tap, Tap. Clomp. Clomp. Clomp.

  What the hell?

  Trife didn’t make a sound like that when they ran.

  He recognized the clomp as that of Guardian armored boots. Riley’s boots. But the tap, tap, tap, tap that came along behind was unidentifiable.

  The cadence was growing closer. Caleb was tempted to go out into the corridor to see what was chasing Riley, but he stayed where he was. “Here we go,” he said softly as he began putting pressure on the trigger of his plasma rifle, ready to unleash its fury.

  The footsteps reached the corner. Then Riley burst past them at an all-out sprint, arms pumping, mouth open to breathe. She whipped past
the corridor in less than a second, running faster than Caleb would have given her credit for and offering them little time to shoot.

  He began pulling his trigger, freezing in place when he saw what came next. He was expecting a Reaper, large and black and demonic. That wasn’t what ran past.

  He should have started shooting. He didn’t. He watched the thing go by in a blur, turning his head to follow it back out of view.

  “Was that?” Sho started to ask.

  “I think so,” Caleb replied, moving past her and into the corridor. He chased the thing chasing Riley with his eyes, trying to make sense of it.

  It wasn’t a Reaper running behind her.

  It was the Cerebus armor.

  “Come on!” Caleb said, jumping over Flores and Sho and taking the lead position in the chase. The other Guardians rose behind him, rushing out into the corridor at his back.

  The Cerebus was already dozens of meters ahead, nearing the next intersection. Riley had already gone around it, vanishing from sight.

  “They’re too fast,” Flores complained as they began their sprint.

  “You can do it, Flo,” Caleb said. “Let’s go Marines!”

  His legs pumped beneath him, the artificial muscles in the SOS adding power to every step and driving him forward faster than he could run on his own. He barreled down the corridor, quickly breaking away from the other Guardians as he approached the junction. The Cerebus had turned right, which meant Riley had turned right. He slowed to follow, using the wall to redirect himself while making sure to keep the plasma rifle in firing position.

  The passage along the port side of Metro was as long as the city, nearly two kilometers from end-to-end. Caleb could see where Riley was in relation to them by the overhead lights that illuminated and dimmed as she and the Cerebus rushed past. Caleb switched his grip on the P-50 and swung it to his back, exchanging it with the MK-12 while still on the run. He found the trigger and aimed wildly, unleashing a half-dozen rounds toward the Cerebus’ back, hoping to get its attention.

  It didn’t pay him any mind, not even when a second volley threw up quick sparks as the bullets impacted its armored back. It would be easier to hurt the Reapers with conventional rounds than it would be to hurt the Cerebus. Short of using one of the grenades loaded in the MK-12’s secondary barrel, he had no idea how to damage the thing.

  He wasn’t even sure that would be enough.

  He stopped shooting but kept running, desperate to keep the armor in his sights. It had to be David Nash inside, chasing down the woman who had turned him into whatever he had become. The woman he had lusted after once the genetic alterations had made him whole. Riley hadn’t been completely clear about David’s intention. Was it to kill every other human outside Metro? To force her to let him into the city? To coerce her into having sex with him? The way she had described the man, he seemed relatively simple-minded and unintelligent. Could his motive really be as base as that?

  Either way, they had to stop him.

  He kept running, not gaining ground but not losing any either. However, the rest of the Guardians fell further behind.

  Caleb could barely see them as he reached the kilometer mark, the halfway point of the corridor. Broken on the right side by another hatch into Metro, it was sealed and scratched, with a solid red light illuminating the short corridor leading to it.

  It had a Reaper waiting at the door.

  It was probably hibernating when Riley ran by and before Caleb had opened fire. It was awake now, listening to his footsteps and waiting for him as he crossed the gap. It sprang at him, leaving its feet in a powerful lunge. It reached out and slashed at Caleb’s arm at the same time it tackled him, knocking the MK-12 from his grip.

  The SOS saved him from the claws, the armor plating catching the brunt of the assault and deflecting it. But it didn’t stop the momentum from carrying Caleb and the Reaper sideways into the bulkhead. Both of them slammed hard against the metal wall, causing them to ricochet off. The Reaper regained itself first, screaming as it grabbed Caleb’s artificial arm and yanked him in the opposite direction, throwing him against the sealed hatch.

  Caleb hit hard, sending waves of pain down his spine as he quickly regained himself, ducking beneath a heavy claw and coming up with a solid punch from his artificial hand. He hit the Reaper in the mouth, breaking its teeth and whipping its head sideways. Its body followed, and it rolled over and backed up, its screams muffled by the damage to its face.

  Caleb used the opportunity to grab his plasma rifle, swinging it back toward the Reaper. The demon hissed as it was hit from the side, a stream of superheated gas washing over it and burning into its shoulder.

  Sho led the Guardians forward in a walking crouch, leaving room overhead for Washington to fire on the Reaper. Caleb squeezed the trigger on his rifle, adding more fuel to the fire, melting the creature’s flesh and muscle and then bone. Its screams died as it died, dropping to the floor in a gooey heap.

  The Guardians stood over it, Flores joining the assault as they spread out around it, all firing into Reaper in the center until it was little more than a pile of ash on the floor.

  “Trifebusters!” Flores said, cutting off her stream and raising the P-50’s muzzle to her face. She blew on the end of it. “That is how it’s done!”

  Caleb smiled lightly, turning his attention back to the long corridor. The Cerebus was gone.

  So was Doctor Valentine.

  Chapter 19

  “I’m not sure whether I’m happy about this or not,” Sho said. “We killed another Reaper, and our new Alpha is gone.”

  “I’m not happy about it,” Caleb said. “That was the Cerebus armor chasing her. Most likely David Nash.”

  “At least we know he’s alive. Do you think he caught her?”

  Caleb shook his head. “I don’t know. He wasn’t far behind her. One slip and he would be all over her. We already know that armor is higher-end than the SOS. No matter what any of us think of Riley, she knows the Reapers and David better than any of us. We’d be operating blind without her.”

  “He won’t kill her though, will he?” Flores asked. “Why run her down like that if he could have just shot her?”

  “No, he probably won’t hurt her...badly, anyway,” Caleb agreed. “Odds are he’s going to bring her back to Research.”

  “I bet he’s happy as a pig in shit that he got her after all this time,” Sho said.

  “We don’t know yet if he got a hold of her. If he did, then our job is to ruin his day. We’ve got four Reapers left, plus Nash. I want this over ASAP so we can get on with our lives.”

  “Roger that, Sarge. What about your hallucinations?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t have any that time, and that Reaper got me good.” Caleb stretched his back. His body was sore from the blow he had taken, his muscles stiffening up. “Talk about stressed.”

  “Maybe it isn’t caused by stress after all?” Sho offered.

  “Maybe you’re right. Whatever it is, we have to shelve it for now. I appreciate Riley’s eagerness to do the right thing for once, but in this case it might have been a mistake to give her a chance. I wouldn’t have sent any of you off alone.”

  “She wanted to play the hero; she got what she had coming if you ask me,” Sho said. “You can’t blame yourself for every decision you make, especially after the fact. If things had gone the way we planned we’d all be hailing her as a genius. In any case, what’s our next move, Alpha?”

  “Riley didn’t think it would be a good idea to go down to Research with five Reapers still on the loose. But if David took her down there, he did it for a reason. We can’t let him have whatever it is he’s after.”

  “So we go to Research?” Flores asked.

  “Affirmative. But I don’t want to go charging down there in pursuit. We need to be smart about this. Smarter than we’ve been so far. We keep finding ourselves on the defensive, reacting instead of acting. Even when we think we have the drop on the enemy.”


  “How do you propose we change that?” Sho asked.

  “We need to be better prepared.”

  “How? We don’t know what we’ll be up against.”

  “Yes, we do. They’re still trife, and we’ve learned how to attract trife.”

  “They aren’t only trife,” Flores said. “They’re Shiro and Ning, Craft and Byrnes. This is sort of like the Island of Dr. Moreau.”

  “If that’s another movie, just shoot me now,” Sho said.

  Washington grinned.

  “Well, it is,” Flores said. “Violent half-human, half-animal creatures? Trapped on an island, or a starship. Crazy doctor.”

  “David Nash isn’t a doctor.”

  “I was talking about Riley. If it helps, it was a book before it was a movie.”

  “It doesn’t help.”

  Washington tapped on Caleb’s shoulder and then pointed to his head, spreading his hand away from it to ask what he was thinking.

  “Comm signals,” Caleb said. “We should be able to use them to draw the Reapers out to where we want them.”

  “We lost our comms in the armory,” Sho said.

  “Our ATCS, yes. They aren’t the only comms on board.”

  Sho smiled. “Oh. I think I get it. You’re talking about the hangar, right? The drones?”

  “Exactly. The drones are too big to fly around the ship, but if we relieve them of their wings, we can carry them to where we want them. Then we turn them on and activate their comm relays. The signal goes back to the armored drone carrier.”

  “Will the Reapers go for the transmitter or the receiver?” Flores asked. “Or both?”

  “Let’s assume both. The good news is the ADC is protected.”

  “Okay, so let’s say we do this,” Sho said. “We get the Reapers to follow the signal back to the drones. How do we make sure only one of them comes instead of all of them?”

  “The more, the merrier,” Caleb said. “Did you notice what else is in the hangar?”

  “I guess not.”

  “An entire unit of Stingers, complete with chest-mounted rocket launchers. We rig the drones with explosives, and when the Reapers show up to check them out…”