Deception

by M. R. Forbes

  Caleb’s body tensed at the sound of her voice. He spoke softly into the comm. “Guardians, we don’t know what happened to David. Understood?”

  “Affirmative,” Flores replied.

  He activated the SOS’s external speaker. “This is Sergeant Card. We’re here, Riley. Where are you?”

  “I’m glad to hear your voice, Sergeant,” Riley said. She sounded genuinely relieved. “I’m on the bridge.”

  “How did you end up on the bridge? Is David with you?”

  “Negative. After you made the trade, during the fighting, David made a run for the bridge. I grabbed Washington’s plasma rifle and chased him.” She paused. “I burned him to ash. I didn’t have a choice. He was working with the enemy, Sergeant. Whatever he told you to convince you to help him, he was lying.”

  Caleb bit his tongue to keep from responding to the statement. Did she really believe he would buy that story?

  It didn’t matter right now. He could tell the air was too thin. His combat armor’s sensors confirmed it. “We can worry about all that later. I had to open the blast doors, and we vented too much air. We have to kick the filters back on and get what’s left redistributed.”

  “So that’s why the sensors were complaining? It’s already done, Sergeant. You should start noticing a difference soon. Try to avoid anything strenuous until then.”

  “Roger that. I’d like to avoid anything strenuous for a few years.”

  “I knew I could count on you to come up with a plan. I trust all of our people are safe?”

  “Not all. Sho didn’t make it. She restrained the Cerebus while it was pulled out into space.”

  “Like in Aliens,” Flores said sadly. “Except if Ripley had died too.”

  “I’m sorry, Sergeant. I know she was an important member of the Guardians.”

  She even sounded as if she meant it. Caleb restrained himself, jaw quivering as he replied. “Thank you.”

  “What about the energy unit?”

  “We saved it,” Caleb said. “But without David, I don’t know if we can integrate it into the ship’s power supply.”

  “We need to do something, Sergeant. Power levels are at three percent, and turning both the air filters and Metro’s subsystems back on didn’t help. We’ve got days at best.”

  Caleb was silent for a moment while he considered their options. The energy unit seemed relatively simple to hook up. All they had to do was introduce a conductive material into the casing. That part was easy. Knowing what part of the ship’s power system would be safe to stick into the box? That wasn’t.

  “How are you with electrical engineering?” he asked.

  “I’m a doctor, Sergeant,” Riley replied. “Not an engineer.”

  “Flores, Wash, either of you feel comfortable with the job?”

  “Negative, Alpha,” Flores replied.

  “You know who would have been great for this?” Caleb said, unable to restrain himself. “David.”

  He waited a few seconds for Riley to react. She managed to keep herself steady. “David was a traitor, Sergeant. He would have been more likely to blow the Deliverance than save it.”

  Caleb doubted that. “Well, we need someone who can connect this thing to the interchange without destroying it or us. If none of us can do it, I can only – ”

  “Sergeant,” Riley snapped, interrupting him. “We may have another problem.”

  “What is it now?”

  “I’m at the primary terminal. Power levels are spiking. The main thrusters are engaging. Shit. Oh no.”

  The sudden inertia forced the three of them back a few steps. Caleb lowered his body to regain his balance, as did Flores and Washington. At the same time, the loaders and movers clanked against their restraints, and loose debris began tumbling across the hangar.

  Red warning klaxons began flashing throughout the hangar, synchronized with an ugly whine through the ship’s PA.

  “Valentine!” Caleb shouted, trying to be heard over the sudden din. “What the hell is going on?”

  “That son of a bitch,” she shouted back.

  “What is it?” he demanded.

  “It didn’t have access to the landing code to bring the ship in. But it still had access to thrust control. I didn’t know what it was doing. Why it wasn’t moving.”

  “Don’t keep it a secret, Doc!”

  “We’re on a collision course for this system’s star.”

  “The star?” Caleb said at normal volume, glancing at Washington and Flores. He remembered the sight of it, large off the starboard side of the Deliverance. “How long?”

  “Four hours,” Riley replied. “If we don’t run out of power first. This acceleration is draining the reactors in a hurry.”

  “You can’t override it?”

  “It encrypted the control system to keep us locked out. A hedge against its ability to get the codes. It knew it was walking into a trap, and it was ready to screw us if we won. I’m not a computer specialist either, Sergeant. I relied on Harry for that.”

  Caleb closed his eyes, trying to drown out the chaos of the situation. The klaxons, the harsh warning buzz, the mess throughout the hangar, the loss of Sho. He could feel the tension in his body. The anger, the frustration, the sadness. He had to push it aside. Block it out. He had to think. David probably could have broken the encryption, but that wasn’t a possibility now. Riley had decided murdering him and letting him get sucked out into space was better than coming clean with what she had done. He had to focus. Take one thing at a time. What were their objectives?

  One: Get the energy unit connected to the interchange to prevent the ship from running out of power.

  Two: Break the encryption and unlock the control system.

  Three: Bring the ship to a stop or change its course before momentum carried it into the star.

  How were four people going to manage that? None of them were computer programmers or electrical engineers. Or even pilots.

  “Alpha, what do we do?” Flores asked.

  Caleb’s eyes snapped open. He realized he was thinking about it all wrong. There weren’t four people to get them out of this situation.

  There were forty-thousand.

  “Climb into that loader and grab some more of the T-9,” he said, pointing to it. “Valentine, meet us at the aft seal into Metro.”

  “Metro?” Riley replied.

  “It’s time to ask the colonists for help.”

  Chapter 40

  Riley was waiting for the Guardians at the aft seal. It took all of Caleb’s will to stay calm and level when he saw her. He wanted nothing more than to confront her with the truth, to tell her what he had seen and what he knew and watch her try to squirm her way out of it. They couldn’t do that yet. The Deliverance was in dire trouble, and like it or not her experience could still be of some value.

  “Doctor Valentine,” he said, forcing a smile so his tone would sound less angry.

  “Sergeant Card.” She looked at him suspiciously, her eyes stopping on his blood-stained armor. “Are you hurt?”

  “I took a few hits in the side and the back, but most of it is Reaper blood.” The wounds the Reaper had delivered to his back were burning and itching like crazy, but they weren’t severe enough to slow him down. Not now.

  “Are you sure you want to do this?” she asked. “We’ve been out of contact with Metro for over two hundred years. And once we open the seal, we can’t close it again.”

  “I know. I’d rather not expose the colonists to any of this mess, but we don’t have a choice. We need engineers, programmers, and pilots. If they’ve been following protocol, they should have all three. It’s the only chance any of us have of making it to Essex.”

  Of course, he had no intention of having the Deliverance land on the planet Riley had tried to convince them was Earth-6. Once they solved their immediate problems, they could figure out where to go next. The good news was that if they could get the energy unit connected, it would provide an apparently ne
ar-infinite power supply.

  “Wash, Flores, get the explosives placed. We have two-hundred and twenty minutes until we either run out of air, gravity, and heat, or we crash into a star.”

  “Roger that, Alpha,” Flores replied.

  Washington carried the bag of T-9 to the seal and unzipped it, taking out one of the brown bars and tossing it to Flores. She shoved it into the corner and stuck one of the detonators in it, while he took one of the bars and placed it in the top left corner.

  “How did you know David was a traitor?” Caleb asked Riley while they worked, placing eight blocks of T-9 around the seal. It was enough explosive to level a small building. There were no guarantees the detonation wouldn’t damage anything important, but it was a risk they had to take.

  Riley didn’t miss a beat. “He was the one who set the enemy AI loose in the first place. I didn’t know it at the time. When I thought I saw David kill Shiro and Ning, it was the alien. It told me it communicated with him when it grabbed him the first time. It made a deal with him to get free, but David reneged on the deal.”

  “If he reneged, why would he have made a run for the bridge to help it, especially after he tried to help me stun it?”

  “Oh please, Sergeant. Did you really think he was helping you? From what you said before, it seems like his help didn’t help all that much. I knew David. Before the alterations and after. He changed. He evolved. But he was always more concerned with his own welfare than anything else. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe he wasn’t going to the bridge to help the enemy. If that’s the case, then I’m certain he was going there to help himself, and that still makes him a traitor. That’s just who he was.”

  Caleb stared at her. He was struggling to believe she could say some of the things she was saying with a straight face. Was David more concerned with his own welfare? Was David only interested in helping himself?

  “We’re ready, Alpha,” Flores said, retreating to where he was standing with Riley. Washington reached into the bag and pulled out the remote, handing it to Caleb, who looked down at the small box, flipping open the red safety.

  “I think we should move back a little more,” Riley said.

  Caleb nodded, and the Guardians backed around the corner, getting farther away from the hatch. Then he shifted his thumb back to the remote trigger. “Here we go,” he said, pressing it down.

  The explosion happened in stages, a quick series of deep thumps preceding the louder follow-up blasts. The deck and bulkheads shook, the sound of rending metal overpowering the constant whine from the PA system. The lights went out completely, save for the flashing red klaxons. And then those went out too, leaving Caleb and the others bathed in darkness and smoke.

  The fire suppression system activated, sending gouts of white foam through nozzles in the ceiling, quickly bathing them in it and controlling the flames. A few seconds after, the emergency lighting came back online.

  Caleb turned back to the others. “Headgear off. Weapons stowed. We don’t want to appear threatening.” Flores and Washington already had their rifles secured to the back of their SOS, but he wanted to make sure it stayed that way. They had no idea how the colonists would react to their arrival, and he didn’t want innocent people getting hurt.

  The Guardians removed their helmets, tucking them under their arms. Then Caleb led them around the corner. The hatch was a twisted, slagged mess of metal, the detonation having ripped away the entire mechanism, the force blowing it back and into the corridor within the city’s limits. The larger slabs of thick metal were resting awkwardly on the floor, their surfaces wavering from the residual heat. The corridor ended at a t-junction twenty meters ahead, and Caleb recalled how the connecting passages looped around the city’s engineering section to another limited-access hatch that went out into the city itself.

  To him, it had only been a few weeks since he had delivered Lieutenant Jones and the other non-combatants to safety within Metro. It felt strange knowing that on the other side of the now defunct hatch, the cycle of life had continued unabated for over two hundred years.

  They approached the new opening, moving carefully around the exposed wiring and jagged metal sticking out in the damaged section. The blast had made it through the deck in a few small sections, leaving the hallway beneath it visible through twisted metal.

  They cleared the blast zone, reaching the junction at the end.

  “Which way?” Flores asked.

  “Both corridors lead to the same place,” Caleb replied. “Let’s go right.”

  They took the right fork, following it as it began to dip and turn. They had gone about two hundred meters when Caleb heard footsteps ahead. Judging by the cadence, several people were coming at a run.

  Caleb came to a stop. The others stopped with him. “Keep your hands out where they can see them. Let me do the talking.”

  They waited in the corridor, hands out and palms up. The footsteps grew louder, echoing in the passage ahead. The people finally came into view a few seconds later.

  There were six of them in all. Four were wearing the law uniforms that instantly reminded Caleb of Sheriff Aveline. Two were dressed in dark overalls, each of them carrying the end of a large metal crate. They came to a sudden stop at the sight of the Guardians, the two in the overalls dropping the crate to the floor with a loud clang.

  The four law officers reached for their sidearms, four revolvers rising from four holsters and pointing at the Marines. Caleb raised his hands, and the others did the same. He didn’t speak or introduce himself. It was better to give the colonists control of their first interaction.

  One of them broke off from the rest. She had brown hair, blue eyes, and a heart-shaped face that was beginning to wrinkle. Her uniform was faded and slightly stained, the threads getting thin, the elbows patched multiple times. The only thing about her that looked new was the gold star on the collar of her shirt. Seeing their hands up without prompting, she put her gun away.

  “There’s been a lot of strange shit happening in the city these last few days,” she said. She had an accent Caleb didn’t recognize and couldn’t place. It was like a strange concoction of American south, British, and Chinese. “Are you the ones responsible?”

  “My name is Sergeant Caleb Card,” Caleb said. “United States Space Force Marines, and Guardian Alpha of the Deliverance. And you are?”

  “Sheriff Lasandra Dante,” she replied. “Those are my deputies back there, and the two behind them are Joe King, our lead engineer, and his assistant slash wife, Carol.”

  “It’s good to meet you, Sheriff,” Caleb said. “This is Doctor Riley Valentine. Private Mariana Flores, and Private John Washington.”

  Sheriff Dante’s eyes flicked to Riley, Flores, and Washington. Flores gave her a curt wave. Washington nodded.

  “Did you say doctor? What kind of doc are you?”

  “I’m a geneticist,” Riley replied. “More of a scientist than a practitioner.”

  “I see.” Sheriff Dante eyed them silently for a few seconds. “You look like Marines, and we were responding to a possible code blue. That means life or death. A breach in the seals. You aren’t trife though, which is the best news I’ve had all day. Well, that and the power coming back online. It was starting to get right cold, and the whole damn commune was panicking that somebody forgot to pay the electric bill.” She smiled wide, getting more comfortable with them by the second. “Anyways, I’ll give you every chit I have if you tell me you’re here because the war is over and we can come out now.”

  “Come out?” Riley said. “Sheriff, where do you think you are?”

  “Are you joking? Everybody knows we’re in an underground bunker outside Atlanta, Georgia. We’ve been here for what, over two hundred years now? We’ve been waiting for word from outside the war is over, and the trife are gone. We’ve been waiting a long time. Isn’t that why you’re here? To tell us it’s safe?”

  Caleb swallowed hard, glancing over at Riley. Her face had paled too. The colonists had
no idea they weren’t on Earth? How the hell had that happened? How the hell could they not know?

  “Who’s in charge of Metro?” Caleb asked. “We need to speak with him right away.”

  “Governor Stone,” Sheriff Dante replied. “Why?”

  “Because we aren’t safe, Sheriff,” Caleb said. “We aren’t safe at all.”

  Chapter 41

  The news hit Sheriff Dante hard.

  Her face fell, the smile wiped off it almost instantly. Her eyes landed on Caleb’s armor, and she shook her head.

  “I should’ve guessed. You’re covered in dried blood. You look like hell. You smell even worse. And you haven’t got a hair on your body.” She glanced at the other Guardians. “None of you do. Is it bad out there, then? Is there a reason you’re all bald as a newborn baby’s ass?”

  “Sheriff,” Caleb said. “I think we should meet with Governor Stone.”

  “What about the breach? Do I need to leave a guard?”

  “No. The area is secure, but we don’t have a lot of time. We’re here because we need your help.”

  She laughed. “We’ve been hiding in here for two hundred plus years, and now you need our help? It really is bad out there, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, but not in the way you’re thinking. I’ll explain everything—“

  “When you talk to the Governor. Right?” Sheriff Dante paused, staring at him for too long. “You know Sergeant, now that I’m thinking about it, how do I know you’re a Marine at all? We’ve been in here for a long time. If the war is over, who knows what kind of people are alive out there? Who knows what their motives are? Again, you’re covered in dried blood, and you look like hell. That could just as easily make you some kind of looter or thief as it makes you a Marine. And, oh yeah, you did just breach our outer seals by force.”

  Caleb noticed Sheriff Dante’s hand drifting toward her sidearm. He had thought the interaction was going smoothly, but it seemed Dante wasn’t reacting well to the bad news.