“Yes, but this time it’s different. Axel knows he’s out of excuses. He even admitted to abducting us.”

  “It’s worth a shot,” Tom whispered, crowding in behind them to fill his own canteen. Apparently he’d been listening to the entire conversation.

  Bruce shrugged. “What do we have to lose?” He reached for his canteen from Sean and tried to take a sip, only to find that it was bone dry.

  “Sorry!” Sean giggled, and ducked out of sight.

  Bruce glared at him.

  “Take it you never had kids,” Liam said, coming over to fill his own canteen. “Morning, sweetheart,” he said, and kissed Alice on the cheek.

  She smiled tightly back.

  A soft thunk shivered through the deck.

  “Sounds like we’ve landed,” Tom said.

  Bruce pulled Alice aside, drawing a confused look from her husband.

  “There’s just one problem with your plan. We don’t all have suits, so we definitely won’t all be going in. By that reckoning, your family and Jess are definitely staying here, and I don’t see how we’re going to coerce Axel in the heat of the moment, and then still run back here and fetch them.”

  Alice’s spirits crashed. He was right.

  “Well ... maybe ...”

  “It’s a good plan,” Bruce insisted. “But you need to be prepared for the outcome. Either you’ll have to stay, or you’re leaving them behind.”

  Alice hesitated. “I ... I can’t leave them.”

  Axel strode purposefully from the cockpit, looking grim and determined.

  “Time to go. Bruce, Tom, you’re with me. Suit up. Everyone else can go back to sleep.”

  Alice’s guts clenched up in an angry knot of frustration. Bruce was right, but Axel was being more selective than even he’d anticipated.

  “Where are you going?” Neil asked, not having been privy to any of their conversations.

  Preston sat up now, too, looking bewildered. He scratched absently at the blond beard growing in on his face. All of the men were getting beards now, with the exception of Liam who’d only arrived a few hours ago.

  “We’re going to stop Fango before he can help the Russians break the cardinal rule of Novus.”

  “What rule?” Liam asked.

  “No one is allowed to leave.”

  “Haven’t you already broken that rule?” Bruce quipped. “You know, when you left to abduct us?”

  “That’s different. They know my intentions weren’t to leave for good.” He tapped his head, reminding them of the implants they all supposedly had in their heads.

  But Alice believed it. How else could they have gone to sleep and then woken up suddenly fluent in the Jakar’s language?

  “Once you stop trying to escape, maybe you’ll get to use the Gateway as it was intended,” Axel added.

  Alice glared at him as he lined himself up inside the hollow shell of his mech suit. A moment later it sealed him inside with a flurry of whirring clicks.

  He retrieved his helmet from one of the jump seats in the side of the ship, then stopped to stare at Bruce and Tom. “Well?” he prompted. “Hurry up! We need to take advantage of the Jakar’s attack. The Russians are probably all on the upper level guarding the entrance.”

  Tom and Bruce snapped out of their torpid state, each going to their mech suits and putting them back on. Their rifles were still clipped to their armor, so they didn’t have to go hunting around for them.

  Alice watched in dismay as the three of them stalked to the airlock at the back of the ship. This had been her idea, and now she wasn’t even going to be a part of it.

  But maybe there would still be a chance. The Gateway was on the bottom level of the facility. Sub-level nine. If Axel was right and the Russians were all up top to deal with the Jakar, there might be a window of opportunity for her to lead the others in and take them back through the Gateway.

  But in order to coordinate that, she needed to be in comms contact with Bruce. But not even that would be good enough. She needed to know exactly what the situation was on the inside, the location of any possible threats, and how to navigate the facility from the lower entrance. Any mistakes could cost them dearly.

  Liam strolled over to her, sipping his canteen of water. “I don’t suppose there’s a coffee maker around here somewhere?” he asked.

  Not bothering to answer him, Alice ran over to where she’d left her own suit before going to bed. She lined herself up inside of it and triggered it shut with a mental command.

  A roar of tiny mechanisms whirred to life, and the padded armor pressed around her limbs. She found her helmet on the deck by her feet, and put it on.

  “Alice?” Liam asked, sounding worried now.

  “Mom?” Sean asked.

  “I’ll be back,” she said, waving over her shoulder at them as she ran with heavy thunking steps for the airlock.

  “Wait for me,” she said to the others over the comms, and thrust a hand into the inner set of doors to stop them from closing.

  “I didn’t ask you to come,” Axel growled at her as she forced her way into the airlock.

  “Do we give a shit?” Bruce countered.

  “She’s coming,” Tom added.

  Axel’s expression was unreadable behind the glossy visor of his helmet, but his silence thickened the air.

  “Fine,” he said. “Just don’t get yourself killed. You’ve got a family to think about.”

  Alice nodded.

  That’s exactly who she was thinking about.

  4:37 PM, February 7th, 2070

  Major Ethan White sat in the darkened briefing room with General Peterson, watching a holo recording of a woman with haunted blue eyes and short golden brown hair. She had a square jaw and a chin dimple, and she was wearing a checkered flannel shirt with a completely white wall behind her. No way of telling from that where she was.

  The woman had recorded herself giving a testimony of her disappearance, where she had gone, and what she had encountered. She was the one who’d returned from Planet B, and here she was, handing them all of the intel they needed—probably hoping to end the manhunt for her. Well, Ethan doubted that would happen. But maybe this would end the delays for his mission.

  The recording was only five minutes long, but it ended in an ominous warning. If the man who’d abducted her could be trusted, the Watchers, or as she called them, the Architects, were on their way to Earth. And when they arrived, all hell was going to break loose.

  “Can we trust it?” Ethan asked as the recording ended.

  General Peterson looked to him in the quasi-darkness, dark eyes and skin gleaming with reflected light from the holo projector. “Impossible to say, but Operation Deliverance is back on. This was the intel we needed, and she gave it voluntarily.”

  “With self-interested motives,” Ethan pointed out.

  “Granted, but Layla Bester has no reason to lie. The truth will be corroborated by your mission, and she’ll only get herself into more trouble later on. If she told the truth, there’s a chance that people might just leave her alone and she can go back to her life.”

  Ethan inclined his head to that logic. “When do we launch?”

  “Two days. Oh six hundred, February 9th.”

  Ethan blew out a shaky breath. “Understood.” After twelve days stuck in a holding pattern with no idea about when that would end, this came as a big relief. “What do you make of the invasion she warned about?”

  “We’re taking that threat very seriously. Our forces and those of our allies are mobilizing, and a first contact team is being assembled as we speak.”

  “What about us, sir?”

  “We have no reason to believe that you will meet any actual aliens on Planet B, but several of the scientists attached to your mission are working on a way to communicate with them if you do. Protocol is the same as it was for the Emissary: do not engage unless you have no other option, and let the ambassador handle any communications from our side.”

  “Yes, sir,” Ethan replied.

  “Good.” General Peterson rose from his seat and used his AR glasses to raise the lights.

  Ethan stood up with him, and they stepped out into the aisle.

  “You have a busy couple of days ahead of you, Major.”

  The general wasn’t kidding. He had two days to mobilize Destiny Company, drill his troops out of their standby-induced stupor, and get those three Voyager starships loaded up with supplies again. Unless—

  “One last thing, sir,” Ethan said as they reached the door at the top of the briefing room.

  “Yes?”

  “If you capture Miss Bester before the launch, will it be postponed again?”

  “Negative. We cannot afford to waste any more time. Especially not with the prospect of the Russians finding a way to activate the gateway Bester mentioned. If they can establish fast two-way travel between Earth and Planet B, they’ll become the defacto rulers of Planet B. No buts about it, we need to be the gatekeepers, not the Russians.”

  “It’s a twenty-one day trip to Planet B,” Ethan pointed out. “Odds are they will find a way to activate it before we get there.”

  “You’re forgetting about the time dilation, Major. Twenty-one days for us is approximately eight hours and change for them.”

  “Huh. It’s going to take a minute to wrap my brain around that.”

  General Peterson smirked. “You’re not the only one. Communications between here and there are expected to be delayed significantly. Once you’re on the ground, it will only take about thirteen minutes for your messages to reach us, and another thirteen to get a reply. That’s twenty six minutes to you, but for us it will be twenty-seven hours.”

  Ethan rocked back on his heels. “Wow. That’s ...”

  “Needless to say, even twenty-six minutes is a long time, so the majority of command decisions will rest with you, but we still expect regular reports.”

  “Understood, sir.”

  General Peterson nodded and waved the door open, revealing a bustle of activity in the corridor on the other side. “Now, let’s go break the good news to your troops, shall we?”

  Ethan grinned. “Yes, sir.”

  Chapter 14

  9:23 AM, September 28th, 2069

  The dam lay dead ahead, a sheer, curving concrete wall, hedged by leafy green trees on both sides, and shimmering with a smooth curtain of water from the overflow of the reservoir above. Bruce crept along behind Axel and Tom. Alice to his left. Each of them was a green-shaded silhouette on his HUD. With their cloaking shields engaged they were invisible to both the Russians and the Jakar.

  But not to Fango.

  If he’d already made it to the dam, which was almost a certainty, then he could put a serious snag in their plans to hijack the Gateway. Bruce just hoped that Fango’s plan to join the Russians had backfired and that the escaped convict had been disarmed and captured as their prisoner. It might not last long if his intel about the Gateway could be verified and used to the Russians’ benefit.

  But they still had one advantage: Axel was the only one who knew how to open the seemingly impenetrable door to the Gateway, and maybe with the Jakar to worry about the Russians hadn’t found a way to blast through yet.

  Axel led them up a metal staircase to a walkway built into the cliffs. They crossed over a section of the river below to a reinforced door near the base of the dam.

  Their footsteps clanging softly as they hurried across.

  “Quiet,” Axel whispered over the comms.

  Bruce managed to silence his steps, as did Tom, but Alice couldn’t seem to figure it out. It didn’t matter.

  A pop, pop, pop of rifle fire echoed out from above. Followed by shouts of alarm, and a collective roar from the Jakar.

  “The battle’s started,” Axel breathed over the comms. “Everybody ready? Safeties off and set to stun, but don’t shoot anyone unless you have to.”

  Bruce detached his rifle from his armor, flicked the fire mode selector to the wavy lines of stun, and nodded, keeping the barrel aimed at the floor.

  “Open the door,” Tom said, raising his own rifle.

  Axel turned to the door, and it opened with a rusty shriek. They followed him into a darkened room full of machinery that rumbled and roared on all sides of them. Bruce quickly swept the room and checked the little circular map for blips. He still had only four green dots, and no sign of any hostiles on his HUD.

  “Where is this?” Alice asked.

  “The generator room,” Axel explained. He wove a path between the humming machines, up another metal stairway and across a catwalk to what looked like the facility’s main elevator.

  “Almost there,” Axel whispered. “So far so good.”

  Bruce’s heart was pounding with the anticipation of trouble. His footsteps were still a whisper, Alice’s still too loud, but the noise of the generator room covered the sound. They might be invisible, but they weren’t ghosts.

  Not yet, anyway, Bruce through grimly.

  The elevator doors parted as Axel approached, and they crammed in behind him. Axel’s helmet turned to Alice. “Either you figure out how to be quiet, or you can go back and guard the exit. We don’t need you getting us caught.”

  The elevator jerked into motion, dropping steadily.

  “I’ll tip-toe,” Alice replied, but there was a tightness in her voice that suggested she was running out of patience with Axel. They all were, but in this particular instance, he wasn’t wrong. Any good hunter knew, you have to stay quiet if you want to avoid scaring off your prey.

  But then, they had yet to establish who was the hunter and who was the prey in this scenario.

  The elevator stopped, and Bruce snapped his rifle up to aim at the doors as they parted.

  He needn’t have bothered. The chamber beyond was empty, but it looked highly familiar. Bruce’s mind itched at the sight of it, giving him an intense feeling of deja vu. It wasn’t a vivid recollection, like an actual memory, just a powerful feeling that he’d been here before.

  “I recognize this room ...” Tom said.

  “That’s because you followed me into it a few hours ago,” Axel said. He turned and glanced back at Bruce. “So did you. You went through the Gateway with me, but they sent you back and wiped your memory.”

  “They?” Alice asked.

  Axel walked straight to the center of the room and then kneeled on the glossy black floor and began feeling around for something.

  “What are you doing?” Alice asked.

  “Disabling the Gateway,” Axel explained.

  Bruce hurried over to Axel just as a panel popped open, revealing a recessed compartment with blinking lights and a metal handle.

  “Got it,” Axel said, reaching in for the handle.

  “That’s far enough,” Bruce said and planted the barrel of his rifle against the back of Axel’s head. The boy froze and slowly raised his hands.

  Tom rushed in and took his ARC rifle.

  “What are you doing?” Axel asked as he rose to his feet.

  “What does it look like?” Bruce snapped. “We’re going home. Alice—you’d better run back and get the others.”

  Her helmet bobbed and she ran for the elevator.

  “You can’t use it without me,” Axel said.

  “The Gateway?”

  “Or the elevator,” Axel confirmed.

  “Yeah, well why do you think you’re still conscious?” Bruce said, and thrust his rifle up under Axel’s chin. “I suggest you send it back up to the generator room, and back down when Alice returns.”

  “And if I refuse?”

  “Then maybe we’ll slice off your other pinky finger,” Bruce suggested.

  Axel went suddenly very still, and slowly shook his head. “You always were an asshole, Vic, but there’s one little problem with your plan. The Gateway isn’t finished charging after I used it the last time.”

  “What do you mean it isn’t finished charging?”

  “Am I speaking Chinese?” Axel snapped. “I already told you, it takes a long time to recharge between uses. It’s only at fifty-two percent right now.”

  “How long ago was that?” Bruce asked without looking away from Axel.

  “It was about 1:30 AM when you left to follow Axel,” Alice said. “That’s about eight hours ago.”

  Bruce felt his temper rising. “You’re telling me that it takes almost sixteen hours to charge this thing?”

  Axel shrugged. “Sounds about right. I’ve lost track of time down here, but I know that it takes around four local days. That’s four sunrises and four sunsets to me.”

  “The days here are four hours long, so that tracks,” Tom said.

  Bruce pressed his rifle deeper into Axel’s throat, tiling the boy’s head up. “And how the hell do we know that you’re not lying?”

  “Check for yourself!” Axel erupted.

  “How?” Tom asked.

  “Look up at the projector and think about activating it.”

  Bruce took a few steps back to get out of Axel’s reach, and then he did as Axel had instructed.

  The projector dish became shaded red on his HUD, and a line of text began flashing beneath it.

  52% Charged ...

  Bruce frowned. He was still suspicious that Axel was somehow manipulating or supplying that data, but there was a chance—just a chance—that this time he was telling the truth.

  “He’s right,” Tom said slowly.

  “Now what?” Alice demanded. “We can’t just wait here until it’s charged!”

  “No,” Bruce agreed. “We’ll have to sneak back in eight hours from now. And when we do, you’re going to help us use the Gateway to go home.”

  Axel hesitated. “Fine.”

  “Let’s get out of here.”

  “Not yet,” Axel said, turning and bending down beside the panel he’d opened in the floor.

  “Hey, back off!” Bruce snapped.

  “Do you want the Russians to open the Gateway before you do?”

  It was Bruce’s turn to hesitate.

 

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