New Carthage

They came into New Carthage through the dome's maintenance access, a crawl tube in the permafrost that Mace's briefing package had listed as a maintenance access point, the kind of detail that looked clean on a briefing slide and in practice meant forty meters of tunnel on your hands and knees while the Keth Warforms that had been pursuing them swept the perimeter forty meters above.

Wire had taken the second one. He'd done it at six hundred meters with a crosswind that Mace, doing the mental math afterward, should not have been survivable. Wire had done it without comment, which was the other thing about him — he treated improbable accuracy the way other people treated routine tasks. Like something that simply needed doing.

New Carthage was wrong in the way that abandoned human spaces are always wrong, but worse — because it wasn't abandoned. It was occupied. The city's original grid was still legible if you knew what to look for: the hexagonal layout of the old residential sectors, the access roads that ran in spokes from the central processing hub, the transit line that had moved two hundred thousand people through the dome before evacuation. All of it still there. All of it lit now in the shifting blue-green of Keth inhabitation, the walls of the original human buildings coated in the thick organic material the Keth secreted when they settled a structure, building over the human architecture like a second skin.

Mace had seen Keth occupation before. He'd cleared Keth-held positions on Ganymede and two of the Jovian platforms. It never stopped being disorienting — not the combat, not the strangeness of the biology, but the specific uncanniness of human spaces made alien. A street sign, three years of exposure and half-dissolved under Keth resin, with a street name still legible underneath. A child's handprint on a wall, preserved by accident under a layer of organic material, visible when the Keth coating cracked. The Keth didn't destroy the human city. They just kept living in it.

"Transit hub, two hundred meters," Mace said, keeping his voice sub-vocal, vibration mic only. "The relay access is below the old processing plant. We follow the transit line east."

"This city had four hundred restaurants," Okafor said, same sub-vocal level. "Pre-war. I looked it up on the transport. One of them had a tasting menu that was apparently worth the price of a round-trip ticket from Earth. Forty-seven courses. I want you all to think about forty-seven courses while we walk through what this city currently is."

"That's not helping," Frost said. The rookie was moving well — scared but functional, which was the acceptable version. He'd stopped favoring his shoulder after Okafor's intervention.

"I find it helps," Okafor said. "Thinking about food is a well-documented psychological anchoring technique for high-stress environments. Keeps you in your body. I have a paper on it."

"You don't have a paper on it."

"I paraphrase papers. It's the same thing."

Wire moved ahead of them by fifty meters, unhurried, weapon up, reading the terrain in the specific way he read everything — without apparent effort, processing and filing, a continuous low-level analysis that he never narrated. Mace had come to trust Wire's silence the way you trusted a gauge: if Wire said something, pay attention. If Wire moved differently, something had changed. The silence was the baseline.

They reached the transit line. The original rail was still intact — Keth occupation left infrastructure alone unless they needed the materials — but the line had been repurposed: the organic coating ran along it like a vine, routing bioluminescent signaling through the original rail path. In the low light of the dome's interior, the line glowed, pulsing in a slow pattern that Mace's visor flagged as unidentified signal activity and offered no further analysis.

"They're communicating," Frost said.

"They're always communicating," Mena said. She was two steps behind Mace, demo pack balanced, moving with the contained efficiency of someone who had done this particular kind of walking — the slow urban movement that was not quite sneaking and not quite patrol — enough times to make it habitual. "The whole city is. The buildings. The roads. Everything they touch."

"We've had xenolinguists working on the communication patterns for nine years," Okafor said. "Fleet's best people. And what we've got is basically 'it's complex and it seems intentional.' Which is the most expensive not-knowing in human history."

"Keep it down," Wire said. Not sharply. Just informational.

They went quiet.

The Keth were visible at the edges of the transit corridor — three of them, forty meters east, moving in the slow deliberate way of the Keth patrol form. They were larger than humans, asymmetrically so, the forward limbs longer than the rear pair, their surface skin running in continuous shifting bioluminescent pattern. No weapons that Mace could identify in the way humans carried weapons. The Keth weaponry was organic — grown, not manufactured — and integrated into their bodies in ways that only became apparent when they used it.

Mace had lost people to Keth weapons. He tried not to think about the specific mechanics.

The patrol moved east and away from them. The transit line glowed.

"Clear," Wire said.

They moved.

The processing plant was identifiable by its scale — even under Keth coating, the industrial architecture was distinct, the large-bore intake pipes that had fed the atmospheric processor still visible as abstract shapes under three years of organic material. The Keth had settled it heavily. The bioluminescent activity here was dense, complex, the light patterns moving in overlapping sequences that Mace's visor ran against its inadequate database and returned multiple unidentified tags.

Below it was the relay. The Keth signal relay that was blinding the fleet, jamming communications across the inner system, leaving seven hundred ships in the dark.

The access point was a maintenance shaft, original human construction, unmarked on Keth maps because it predated Keth occupation by eight years and the Keth, apparently, had never updated their survey of what was underneath them.

Mace pulled the access cover. It came free with a sound that was too loud in the quiet of the dome and he held still for three seconds, checking Wire's position. Wire didn't signal threat.

The shaft dropped into darkness. Mace's visor switched to low-light and picked up the geometric regularity of human construction below — clean lines, access ladder, the bottom of the shaft ten meters down. And below that, on the packed mineral floor of the maintenance level, something that had not been in the briefing, that hadn't been in any briefing, that his visor was resolving into shape with the patient indifference of an optical system doing its job.

Boot prints. Human. Fresh enough that the edges hadn't settled.

Someone had been here. Recently.

He looked at Mena. She'd seen them too.

"Sergeant," she said quietly.

"I see it," Mace said.

He looked down the shaft at the boot prints that should not have been there, on an airless moon eleven years into an alien occupation, in a city that had been evacuated when Frost was eight years old.

"Change of plans," he said. "We go careful."