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  “I guess I’ll have to work with what I’ve got,” Beretta said as he continued to corral the horde and send them against the squad moving through the lower decks of the ship.

  8

  Captain Pretorius leaned on the holostage on the Scorpio’s command deck and looked at the incoming signals approaching the fleet’s rear. The stellar void had been dark for weeks. Watch after watch of no contact and emptiness. Now this.

  But he was ready for anything.

  Pretorius had been a destroyer captain for too long to let a period of inactivity dull his senses. He knew, like all good fleet officers did, that the moment one let their guard down was the very moment an attack would come.

  “Send the signal to the flagship,” Pretorius called to his communications officer. “Inform Group Captain Tanaka that the Scorpio will drop back and investigate the signal.”

  The hazy blur on the holostage showed a signal at the very edge of the fleet’s sensor range. All fleet ships were accounted for, but it could be a civilian ship or a fleet support vessel that had been deemed lost or destroyed, attempting to catch the fleet and join the exodus across the stellar void to the new region on the far side, a new and hopefully peaceful region where the fleet could find a new home.

  Pretorius walked over to his command chair and climbed up. He sat down gently and began plotting a course. He sent his instructions to the drive and navigation officers, then opened a ship-wide channel.

  “This is the captain. We are bringing the Scorpio about to check on a signal at the fleet’s rear. All hands to standby, all active crew to stations. Let’s not get caught unawares. Pretorius out.”

  With the channel closed and the crew informed, Pretorius activated the maneuver.

  The Scorpio began to slow and pivot on its vertical axis around the central point. The forward section of the ship turned to face aft, and when the ship had come fully about, its drive systems flared and slowed its movement before pressing it away from the fleet and toward the signal.

  In the time it took for the ship to come about, the fleet had moved off several astro units, and the signal on the rear had closed in.

  Although still too far out to be clearly identified, Pretorius began to see some resolution on the main holostage. It was not one ship but several, maybe a dozen, maybe a hundred. Still unclear.

  After only a few more minutes, the sensor net detected a single individual ship at the head of the group. It was clear to Pretorius now.

  It was Skalidion.

  “Combat turn,” Pretorius said. “Set to reverse and turn the ship at full speed.” Pretorius activated a combat turn alarm, the harsh tone sounding once across the ship. The well trained, experienced Scorpio crew knew what that meant.

  “Activate turn,” Pretorius said.

  The Scorpio drive assembly went dark and cold as the massive destroyer turned in space. Flipping about its midpoint, the Scorpio was pointing back the way it had come in only a few seconds. The hull stability field and grav field held the crew and ship together in the rapid about-face. And when the ship was set on a heading back to the fleet with the Skalidion on its tail, Pretorius activated the main drive and initiated a full burn.

  The Scorpio was flung forward back to the fleet. Pretorius opened a channel to the group.

  “Tanaka. Signal confirmed. It’s Skalidion. A hundred fighters, just a scout group. They are coming in fast and will reach my position before I can make it back to the fleet. Permission to engage.”

  Tanaka appeared, her image fuzzy as the Scorpio transferred power to the drive and hull stability field.

  “Maintain heading back to the fleet. Our calculations show the Skalidion will reach you before you get back to the fleet. A group of corvettes will rendezvous with you at that point and assist you. Try and destroy all fighters, Captain, but do not pursue them. We need the Scorpio back with the fleet. Tanaka out.”

  Watching through the large black eyes of the single observer drone in the mini swarm of fighters, Skoldra saw the human craft. She had found them. Deep in the stellar void, on the edge of her vast territory, she had discovered a human craft. Now it was just a matter of time before she would have them.

  The signal rushed out through the pheromone field to the fighter swarm.

  “Attack.”

  The central chamber of her new nest asteroid was still unfamiliar, and she still detected slight hints of the pheromone signal from the former swarm queen whose bones now lay at Skoldra’s feet.

  All nurse drones had been destroyed by her fighters. The builders had moved in and devoured them, spreading their matter across the asteroid’s outer edge. New spawn pods were being laid down every minute as Skoldra consolidated her position in the center of her new nest. The drones of the previous queen were responding to her pheromones signal. With a new generation of fighters already being laid, Skoldra knew she would soon have a swarm of over a million. She had drones to spare.

  Studying the human craft, Skoldra concluded that one hundred drones in her advanced fighter swarm would be far too few to overwhelm it. She analyzed the memories from the former swarm queen who had engaged the humans in battle. The single ship was heavily armed and heavily armored. But swelled with the victory over Phisrid’s swarm, Skoldra felt bold, and she welcomed a battle with this destroyer-class vessel.

  Releasing pheromone instruction to her swarm, she dispatched another thousand fighters to race into the void and join the mini swarm to press the attack. And if a thousand fighters could not take down this destroyer, she would send a hundred thousand, and then a hundred thousand more. Skoldra knew that beyond this ship lay a huge number of vast human craft packed with thousands of helpless humans. A million drones would be more than enough to utterly conquer the human fleet.

  Driven mad with power and the hunger for human flesh, Skoldra determined she would have them all.

  9

  Moving through the corridors of the civilian transport, Jack encountered increasing numbers of sleeping, unconscious civilians. The lower decks were a makeshift collection of tents and temporary structures that provided some level of accommodation.

  All were asleep.

  “Looks like the effects of the Dox vapor,” Jack said, checking the pulse of one small girl. “They are all asleep. They’ll be out for hours.”

  “What happened to the others? The ones running around?” Sam said quietly.

  “This is not Devex Dox vapor. Someone tried to create their own version,” Jack said. He knew who would try such a thing.

  “Beretta?” Sam said

  “Beretta,” Jack agreed. He pulled a small blanket over the sleeping child and walked on.

  The two enforcers on point came to a halt at the base of a stairway. Special Agent Kitt walked back toward Jack at the rear.

  “We’ll go up,” she said quietly. “Command deck is thirty decks above us, so we have a bit of a climb.”

  “Can’t we use a transport loop?” Sam said. “We can mask the signal. Beretta will never know we are coming.”

  Kitt shook her head. “If he did discover us, he could reroute the transport pod and drop us at the rear of the transport. It would take us hours to get to him. We are pretty close, and we have no reason to believe he has detected us.”

  Jack pointed to the ship surveillance node at the bottom of the stairway.

  “I know,” Kitt said. “Let’s hope he is not aware of our presence. Either way, we move on. Agreed?”

  Jack and Sam both nodded.

  Then came a sound behind them, a rumbling noise, and one they knew now to be a horde moving through the corridors.

  Special Agent Kitt instructed her enforcers to proceed and climb the stairs. Jack looked at the girl lying in the small alcove.

  “Do you want to bring her?” Sam said.

  Jack shook his head. It was a heavy decision. “There are thousands of girls just like her throughout the ship. We can’t save them all until we take Beretta. We can vent the Dox vapor once we have control o
f the command deck. We move.”

  Jack shoved the sleeping child further into the alcove and hoped the horde would ignore her. He turned his back on the child and the dozens of other civilians sleeping under the influence of the Dox vapor, following the rest of the squad already climbing the stairs.

  Beretta watched the horde on the lower level crash through the shanty town that had been Beretta’s vice town. The curtains fell and the horde pressed forward. Beretta zoomed in to watch it.

  He knew they could fall on the sleeping civilians and tear them apart the way they had the two scientists and his thug. If they tore into the sleeping civilians, they would never reach the Marines and the agent that were here to arrest him.

  He zoomed in on the horde and watched as they stepped on the sleeping who had fallen where they stood. They tripped over the unconscious but did not attack.

  Beretta was relieved, but also a little disappointed. It had been strangely satisfying to watch them tear apart the scientists. He had hoped they could create more of the vapor and give him the chance to turn an entire shipload of people into a ravenous, crazed mass, so he regretted their deaths, but it had been interesting to watch.

  But the horde seemed to have no interest in the sleeping civilians. They had been interested in the squad sent against him when they arrived in the secondary supply dock, and the scientists in their laboratory.

  Beretta looked to his map of the ship. He identified the group of crazies closest to the squad moving up the stairs and began to direct them. He sealed a hatch here, opened one there, and channeled the them closer and closer.

  It would be wonderful to watch the horde tear this small squad apart, and if they were able to fight off the hundreds upon hundreds of crazed civilians, Beretta and his own men would kill them. Either way, this small group moving towards him would not take control of this ship from him. It was his.

  The stairs were hard going for Jack. The Marines and the enforcers moved easily with their grav fields and thrusters sets helping them. The sound of the horde fell away as Jack moved up another level, putting greater distance between him and the monsters below.

  Special Agent Kitt was sweating heavily. She called a halt. Jack sat down on the next step. A Marine offered Jack a hydration pack pulled from the tactical suit’s supply pack.

  Jack accepted it and slipped the drinking tube under his breathing mask. The cool liquid was refreshing and revitalized him instantly. He passed the pack to Sam.

  Taking the hydration pack, Sam held out his wrist and showed Jack the image on his wrist-stage. It showed the horde below as it reached the position where Jack had tried to hide the sleeping girl.

  “They ignored her,” Sam said as he played the sensor data back on his holostage. He took a sip from the hydration pack and then handed it back to Jack.

  “They ignore the sleeping,” Jack said and took another sip.

  The sound below grew louder briefly, rising and falling in a sudden wave. Then the same sound from above.

  Jack looked up, instantly recognizing the danger. He looked at Kitt, who was handing a hydration pack back to one of her enforcers and climbing to her feet.

  “We need to move. Looks like they are closing in on our position. Only a few more decks to go. Move.”

  Jack was on his feet in an instant. Sam gave him a wry smile.

  “She’s a tough little one,” Sam said. “The agency knows how to pick them. You ever thought about becoming an agent, Jack?”

  “Save your breath for the climb, Sam,” Jack said. He watched Special Agent Kitt march up the stairs just behind her enforcers on point. She was tough and fit, Jack was impressed, but nothing in him wanted to join her in the agency. He hadn’t even wanted to be a Marine, but he was a Marine now and he didn’t want to be anything else.

  Reaching another level, Jack heard a rumbling of movement along the adjacent corridor. The sound from below was coming on but not getting any closer. The rumbling from above was getting much closer as Jack climbed up to meet the horde moving down. And now a third group on this level was moving towards them.

  Kitt turned to Jack and showed him her wrist-mounted holostage. It showed sensor data from a series of micro-drones her enforcers had sent through the ship.

  “They are closing in. But look at this.” She pointed at the sealed hatchways her drones had encountered.

  Jack recognized immediately. “We are being boxed in. All the roaming civilians are being channeled to our position.”

  Kitt nodded.

  “We need to break communication silence and contact the Scepter,” Jack said.

  Kitt nodded once. She knew she was breaking protocol, but the situation with the wild civilians and the imminent failure of her mission left her little choice.

  “Agreed, Major,” she said. She tapped her holostage and opened her personal communicator.

  The communicator attempted to access the flagship and the agency offices, but no signal was detected.

  Kitt tried again. Jack tapped his own communicator, as did Sam. They all got the same result.

  Out of range.

  “He’s left the fleet,” Jack said with a slow shake of his head. “He’s stolen the entire civilian transport.”

  “Why doesn’t the fleet bring him back into formation?” Sam asked.

  “Maybe he’s just drifted from formation, faking some drive trouble. I’m sure he gave them some believable excuse, or maybe he has masked the transport’s signal and bolted. Either way, we can assume we are alone. It’s on us to get control of the ship and get back to the fleet, for the good of the civilians as much as to bring Beretta to justice.”

  “Beretta is my primary concern, Major,” Kitt said. “All other considerations are secondary.”

  “The command deck must be our objective,” Jack said.

  The sound of the hordes grew closer, the rumbling putting the hair on Jack’s neck on end.

  “And we need to avoid these people,” he added.

  Kitt showed the surrounding areas from her micro-drone data. A single corridor showed no sign of crazed civilian activity.

  “But that’s still several decks below Beretta,” Sam said.

  “We’ll deal with that once we have got around these mobs,” Jack said and directed his squad long the corridor, heading toward the forward section of the ship.

  The squad ran and left behind the sound of the groups converging on where they’d been. Ahead lay a smaller secondary stairway that would take them up two more decks, but between the squad and that stairway was a sealed hatch.

  “He’s got us trapped,” Sam said. “With your permission?” He looked to Jack.

  Jack nodded, knowing what he had in mind.

  Sam pulled the glove off his right hand and pressed it to the side of the doorway. Kitt looked on with a slight moment of incomprehension, then she saw Sam’s hand begin to unravel.

  “You are the Marine with the Mech arm,” she said.

  “Yes, sir,” Sam acknowledged. His hand became a mass of fine black strands. The Mech tissue slipped in between the edge of the hatch and the bulkhead. Sam pressed his unraveled hand deeper inside and then began to pull.

  The Mech arm above the wrist swelled and pulsed with a deep purple glow as Sam pulled at the door. At first, it only slipped open a fraction, but then with a final great effort, the door slid open.

  And on the other side of the open door stood another horde of crazed civilians. They turned and looked at the sudden movement and the squad standing there, stunned.

  “Low pulse fire,” Jack called out. “Present and give fire.” Jack pulled Kitt back from the open doorway as a hand grabbed for her.

  The Marines came forward, all six filling the corridor. They stood shoulder to shoulder and gave fire. The pulse rounds lit up the corridor.

  Staggering back behind the wall of Marines, Jack, Sam, and Kitt regathered their composure.

  “A trap,” Sam said. “I’m going to kill Beretta.”

  The wall of Mari
nes fell back a step, and then another as the civilians pressed into them. They crawled and bit at the Marines, but their tactical suits could take any amount of punishment from their barehanded civilians, no matter how crazed they were.

  But Jack, Sam, and Kitt—dressed in their uniforms—were in danger, and so was the mission.

  A civilian reached past a Marine and grabbed Kitt by her short, blonde hair. Jack grabbed the civilian by the wrist and pulled Kitt free.

  Then the sound of pulse fire from the enforcers on the other end of the corridor caught Jack's attention. A horde was swarming forward, filling the corridor. They fell as the low pulse rounds sent them quivering to the deck, but they came on too fast and in too great a number.

  “We need to get out of here!” Kitt said.

  Jack checked his holostage and called up a schematic of the transport. A small storage locker lay on the far side of the hatch Sam had just opened.

  “Move there,” Jack said. “Marines, advance. Push those people back! Go!”

  And as the horde closed in on their rear and they pressed their way into the one before them, Jack wondered if Beretta had got the better of him this time.

  “Move, Marines! Move!”

  10

  Hanging in the stellar void with the Skalidion swarm catching up, Pretorius could do little but wait. Two corvettes were racing across the void to rendezvous with the Scorpio. Behind it, and already snapping at his heels, came the hundred-strong swarm of Skalidion fighters.

  With only moments to go before the swarm fell on his ship, and before the corvettes brought their weapons into range of the Skalidion, Pretorius put his battle plan into effect.

  “Bring us about, ninety degrees to port. Port-side hail cannon batteries, high-density hail. Upper and lower laser assemblies present to port and stand by high-energy laser discharge. Fire on my command. Stand by fire control.”