CHAPTER 2

The Gorasni refugee camp had sprung out of nowhere like some kids’ pop-up book, orderly rows of identical but threadbare tents hugging the outer wall of the naval base. Bernie had to give the Indies full marks for rolling up their sleeves and getting on with it.

“They’ve posted their own guards,” Anya said, elbow resting on the vehicle’s open window. “Look. Do you think that’s to keep something out, or something in?”

Bernie drove around the perimeter more to show the Gorasni that the COG was on the case than in any expectation of trouble. The security fence—erected by the refugees, no help requested and none given—was a mix of razor-wire and chain-link fencing. In a world of shortages and make-do, it was a weird thing to bring along for the trip.

But then fences were a fact of life now. They kept things out—and they kept things in.

A couple of men wandered along the other side of the Gorasni wire with rifles over their shoulders, passing a smoke back and forth. Bernie gave them a perfunctory wave and drove on. Everyone was used to patrolling to keep an eye out for grubs, so it wasn’t a habit anyone was going to abandon overnight—with or without Stranded gangs around.

“It might be for us, ma’am,” she said. “Maybe they think we had something to do with sinking their frigate.”

“That was weird. I hate mysteries.”

“Did we?”

“What, sink it? No, Michaelson wants every hull he can grab.” Anya made a little puffing noise as if something had occurred to her. “Prescott wouldn’t tell me anyway.”

“You wouldn’t think he still gave a damn about secrets, would you?”

“Do you think people change? The Gorasni, I mean.”

Or Prescott. Or Marcus. “No. We haven’t, have we?”

“Good point.”

Bernie wasn’t too worried about the Gorasni. If they’d been Indies from Pelles or Ostri, that would have been another matter. That had been her war, her mates killed, her knee-jerk hatred. But it was the Stranded who were uppermost in her mind now. Somehow the bastards just melted into the countryside.

We’ve forgotten how to fight our own kind. Gone soft. Out of practice.

A wet nose caught her ear from behind and smeared dog snot on her face. Mac, confined to the back seat, wanted to see what was going on. He thrust his head forward, tongue lolling. Anya leaned away a little.

“He won’t bite, ma’am.” Bernie revved the Packhorse to climb out of a shallow ditch and rejoin the paved road. “Not unless you ask him to. Mac? You want a nice juicy bad guy? Seek!”

Mac barked once. He didn’t bark much, and in the small cab it was loud enough to make Anya flinch. Bernie translated it as What the fuck? Here he was, being told to seek when he was stuck in this tin box with nothing to scent or see. She could see the disdain on his face. He thought humans were wasting his time.

Anya rubbed Mac’s head warily. He yawned, displaying an impressive set of teeth. “It just feels too much like sport.”

“Vermin control,” Bernie said. “Someone’s got to do it.”

People could be squeamish about strange things, Bernie decided. Anya slipped into a combat role pretty easily for an officer who’d spent her entire career in Ops, but using dogs to chase down other humans seemed a step too far for her. Hosing them with heavy-caliber rounds from an Armadillo’s gun turret obviously wasn’t. Anya had done that without blinking. She had a lot of her mother in her.

“I’m not criticizing,” Anya said at last. “They had the same offer of amnesty as their families.”

“Another brilliant Prescott idea. Every Stranded male we kill—one more woman inside our walls with a death to avenge. We can’t trust them.”

“Not really an amnesty, then, is it?”

“No, ma’am. It’s politics. Although it’s not like he needs their votes, is it?”

“So what would you do?”

Bernie tried to keep her mind on the route ahead. These Stranded bastards had already booby-trapped a construction site up by the reservoir, and raids were a constant threat. Either they had a huge arms cache or they were getting resupplied somehow. Either way they didn’t seem to be running out of ordnance.

“Ma’am,” Bernie said, “are you asking what I want to do, what I know I ought to do, or what the rules of engagement say we can do?”

“I’m just asking a friend who also happened to be my mom’s friend what she thinks is right.”

Bernie had never thought of herself as Helena Stroud’s friend. The major had been her commander. There’d been mutual respect and equally mutual loyalty, but friendship was for equals.

“There’s no right answer,” Bernie said.

“Any answer would do.”

Gears had this kind of conversation about grubs without batting an eye. In fact, it rarely even warranted discussion; every grub had to die. It was a fact of life. There was no truce to be had, no peace to negotiate. But there’d probably be no cease-fire with these gangs, either. The solution was inevitable, even though that didn’t make it any easier to say.

“You really want to put an end to it?” Bernie said. “Then wipe them all out. Leave nobody to bear a grudge. It only takes a few survivors to keep a blood feud going.” She realized how bad that sounded, but she meant it. “Give it a century or two, and we’ll evolve into two separate factions at war again. It’s our national sport.”

“But would you do it?”

Bernie didn’t know. She was sure she’d do it in the heat of the moment, provoked or under fire, because she’d already done a lot worse. Cold policy was another matter, though. She still wasn’t sure why. Maybe Anya was just testing to see how close she was to whipping out her knife again and settling scores the personal way.

“I’d probably need an excuse,” Bernie said. The countryside changed from scattered building sites to newly plowed fields awaiting sowing, furrows so straight and even that they looked like a landscape of brown corduroy. “Or a reason. Same thing.”

Anya didn’t sound shocked. “Prescott says pragmatic politics means accepting that the right outcome often comes from the wrong methods.”

“Yeah, he’d slot every last one of them if he thought he’d get away with it.” Bernie cut Prescott some slack for being willing to get his hands dirty. “At least he’s not some fancy academic moralist.”

Maybe we’d all do it. Maybe even the best of us would do one shitty thing if we thought it would do some good. Nobody knows for sure until they have to make the choice.

“Okay,” Anya said, “At least I’m not missing an easy answer.”

Bernie changed gear as the Packhorse groaned its way up the hill. She made sure the subject was closed by giving Anya something more immediate to worry about. “Keep your eyes open, ma’am. Remember how different things look from ground level.”

Anya was used to seeing the battlefield through an airborne bot’s camera. But bots like Jack were in short supply now, and that meant keeping them in reserve for critical jobs. Patrolling the thousands of square kilometers between the naval base and New Jacinto in the south and Pelruan on the north coast had to be done by Gears. Anyone who didn’t have authority to be off-camp—everyone except farmers, work parties, and their protection squads—was a legitimate target. The exclusion zone meant what it said.

We didn’t protect Jonty, though, did we? Poor bastard.

She still didn’t know which of the Stranded had murdered the old farmer. That was a pretty good reason for slotting all of them as far as she was concerned, just to make sure.

The dash-mounted radio crackled. “Byrne to P-Twelve, over.”

Anya took the mike one-handed, still cradling her Lancer. “Stroud here. Go ahead, Sam.”

“I’m ten klicks south of the hydro plant. Recent enemy activity—I’m looking at a lot of disturbed soil on the main road. Grid six-echo, five-nine-zero by two-eight-eight.”

“Explosives?”

“A remote device,” Sam said. “I can’t see if there’s a wire. But it’s too far off the track to drive over it, so it’s not a mine. Someone’s got to be watching the road with a trigger in their hand.”

Anya hesitated for a moment. Bernie didn’t see her reaction because Mac shoved his head forward again.

Come on. You could do it in Ops. You can do it now.

Bernie waited agonizingly long seconds, giving Anya a chance to make the decision before she intervened. She had to learn to make the call herself.

“You can’t deal with this on your own,” Anya said. “Stand by for backup.”

That probably sounded like fighting talk to Sam. “Look, I can work out where they are, okay?” Her accent made her sound even more aggressive than she was. “They need line of sight. They need to bury the det wire. So the only vantage point is a wood five hundred meters from the road. The rest of this place is open fields.”

Bernie checked the terrain on the map. It was open country, the road overlooked by a tree-covered hill, the kind of location you could slip into at night but couldn’t approach unseen by day. If there was a Stranded unit there, the best option was an air strike, but they’d hear the Raven coming half an island away.

And here I am, calling them units like they’re real troops …

Anya flicked the mute button on the mike. “You think we could ambush them instead, Sergeant?”

“Overland?” Bernie visualized the location as best she could and began estimating where they’d have to leave the Packhorse to make an approach on foot. “It’ll take an hour or so to get in position, if we’re the closest unit.”

“Okay.” Anya frowned to herself, then opened the mike again. “Sam? Sit tight … Control, this is P-Twelve. Contact in grid six-echo, five-nine-zero by two-eight-eight—Byrne’s located a roadside device and thinks enemy personnel are still in the area. We’re going in. Any other units nearby?”

“Control to P-Twelve,” said Mathieson. “Are you asking for air support?”

“Negative.”

“Wait one.”

Bernie kept a wary eye on the countryside as the Packhorse idled in the middle of the road. Eventually Mathieson came back on the radio.

“P-Twelve, Rossi’s unit is ten klicks north of Byrne’s position,” he said. “He’s moving in. Control out.”

Sergeant Rossi was an old hand; he’d expect a lot from Anya as the senior officer, and it looked like she was all too aware of that. She slapped her palm on the dashboard.

“Let’s do it.”

Bernie refolded the map with the six-echo grid uppermost and handed it to Anya. “Okay, we’ll go off-road at the stream and come around the back of that incline. It’s on foot from there. Where are you going to put Rossi?”

Anya pored over the map. “Here …”

“How about a little further over here?” Bernie pointed. “Then he can cut them off to the north or the east.”

“Good call, Sergeant.” Anya nodded. “Thanks.”

It was a sergeant’s job to nursemaid the junior officers until they were safe to be let loose on their own. Bernie was all too aware that this would be Anya’s first real firefight. She wouldn’t have the armored protection of a ’Dill and a bloody big gun this time. Mac could probably smell the sudden tension, because he started making little whining noises in the back of his throat and squeezed his head past Bernie’s shoulder to poke his nose out of the open window.

“Good boy,” Bernie said. “Quiet, now. Okay?”

Mac was only thirty kilos of vulnerable, unarmed meat, but somehow having a dog alongside made Bernie feel a lot safer. It was primal. A dog said weapon to any human.

“Byrne, Rossi—Stroud here,” Anya said. “Anything moving?”

“Byrne here. Nothing, ma’am.”

“Rossi here. Where do you want us?”

“Five-eight-zero by three-eight-zero, close to the stream.”

“Roger that.”

He didn’t sound worried. Bernie glanced at Anya as she released the switch on the mike. She’d definitely honed that reassuring voice to perfection over the years, but she kept licking her lips in a way that said she was scared shitless. Bernie was, too—sensibly afraid, the way any sane soldier should have been—and almost hoping the Stranded would make a run for it before they showed. But they were scumbags, and they had to be put down. She felt ashamed of herself.

I really am getting too old for this shit. Baird’s right.

“Where’s Sam from?” Anya asked. “I can’t place her accent.”

“Tyran father, Kashkuri mother. She’s from Anvegad—Anvil Gate.”

Anya seemed genuinely distracted for a moment. “I didn’t realize.”

“I like to know what I’m taking on. It’s a habit to cultivate.” Bernie watched Anya doing the mental calculations. Everyone did, wondering if Sam was old enough to remember the siege. “No, ma’am, she was born a few months after it all ended.”

“Sergeant’s telepathy.” Anya looked embarrassed, too diplomatic to ask the obvious questions. Any mention of Anvegad and its COG garrison—its romantic Kashkuri name reduced to the prosaic Anvil Gate—inevitably led to Hoffman’s involvement there. “Handy.”

“Sam’s had a lot to live up to.” Bernie hesitated, because she’d never said aloud to Anya what everyone thought—that her war-hero mother was a tough act to follow. “Like you.”

But Anya didn’t say anything. She kept her eyes on the road. They were ten klicks from Sam’s position now, and Bernie started looking out for a break in the fields where she could drive across uncultivated land rather than churn up crops.

But she still had her personal radar tuned to anything that didn’t look right.

Gears didn’t see roads the same way civilians did. Civvies looked for oncoming traffic and hazards from side roads. Gears looked for choke points, kill zones, and ambushes. They were always on the alert for combat indicators. Bernie found herself checking for blind spots and cover to either side.

“Five hundred meters is a damn long wire,” Anya said. “Must have taken them some time to bury it.”

“They’re not in any hurry.” As she drove, Bernie was starting to get that feeling. The instinct was born of years moving through hostile places, rational clues that could be analyzed later—a weird stillness, things that should have been there and weren’t, a thousand subliminal details—but now it simply told her to get ready to fight. “It’s a war of attrition. We’re not used to that.”

“Why are you slowing down?”

“That bend ahead.” The angle was so tight that the road seemed to vanish into an isolated stand of trees. For once, she couldn’t see any birds around. “If I was going to jump someone—look, humor me, there’s something not quite right.”

Anya picked up the mike again. “P-Twelve to Byrne, P-Twelve to Rossi, stand by. Possible contact, grid six-delta … zero-one-three, two-five-four.”

But there was bugger all that the others could do for them if the worst happened. Anya checked her Lancer. Bernie prepared to pull off the road down a shallow slope fifty meters ahead. The road was in poor repair here, a mass of potholes and cracked concrete patches, and suddenly that surface became the only thing she could focus on.

Yeah, something’s wrong.

The Packhorse bounced as the nearside front tire hit a hole. The next thing she knew—something smashed down hard on her head, the Packhorse was going up and not along, and the road vanished. The dog fell on her, yelping. She had no idea how, but she was sure she was falling too. And then she hit bottom.

For a few moments, she couldn’t work out where the hell she was. Then she realized she was lying with her head under the steering column and the Packhorse was upside down, maps and water bottles and windshield fragments everywhere. The driver’s door was gone. She could taste smoke, cordite, and blood.

“Shit.” That was all she could manage. She fumbled for her Lancer—it had to be close by—but caught a handful of fur instead. Mac whimpered. At least he was still alive. “Anya? Hey, Anya!”

“Get clear. Come on.” There was a metallic sound and a loud grunt. Anya’s voice seemed to be coming from a distance. “Can you hear me, Bernie? Can you move?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I can. I can.” Bernie grabbed her Lancer automatically, struggling out of the crushed gap where the door had been, expecting to come under attack. It’s an ambush. What happened? Grenade round, bomb, or what? She went into the drill without thinking. Assess, cover, evacuate. Just because you were still alive, it didn’t mean the incident was over. “You hurt?”

Anya crouched beside her against the underside of the stricken Packhorse, Lancer raised. The vehicle had come to rest in a shallow roadside gully, stopped from settling completely on its roof by the slope. “Can’t tell,” she said, scanning 180 degrees. “You sure you’re okay?”

“I’ll wet my pants and cry later.” Bernie suspected she might well do at least one of those, but the operative word was later. Right now she took a strange comfort from the fact that she could still handle it. She was scared shitless and in shock, but the hardwiring created by years of drill pushed that aside and went straight into a defensive routine. “Let’s call a cab. If we start walking, we’ll get picked off or hit another mine.”

She had to assume that. The words were out of her mouth before she remembered that she had to leave more decisions to Anya. Never mind. Either way, she learns. Anya pressed her finger to her earpiece, her voice just a little shaky.

“Control, this is P-Twelve. Control, come in. This is P-Twelve. We’ve been hit, position grid six-delta, main road—”

“P-Twelve, we’ve got you,” Mathieson said. “We’re scrambling a bird.”

“No hostiles spotted, but we might be bait.”

“Understood. Injuries?”

“We’re both T-three.” Not in immediate danger—and if either of them was bleeding internally, they were too pumped on adrenaline and shock to feel it. “The Packhorse is wrecked.”

“P-Twelve, I’m diverting another squad to Byrne’s position. Wait one.”

Bernie edged around the rear of the vehicle, head level with the burst nearside tire. There was a ragged crater about thirty meters behind them. One side of the road had been ripped up, and lumps of concrete were scattered around. It was a smaller hole than she expected.

Shit, we drove over it. Or we hit it and it threw us forward. A few seconds—that’s all that saved us.

That reality would sink in later. The tailgate of the Packhorse looked like someone had hosed it with random caliber rounds. The front end was just mangled by the hard landing, still hissing hot, rusty water from the broken radiator. The vehicle’s tail had taken the blast. Whatever the device had been, it had detonated late. And it had been planted since yesterday’s patrol. It was hard to spot disturbed soil out here because of the thick vegetation that flanked the roads.

Astonishingly, Mac was wandering about, sniffing the churned soil around the vehicle and looking none the worse for his experience.

A fresh trail for the dog. Shit, now would be the best time to track these bastards.

“You don’t look too good, Bernie,” Anya said. “You sure nothing’s broken?”

“I hit my head. I can use that as an excuse for being cranky for days.” Bernie had had more than a few close calls with ordnance over the years. Doc Hayman said an explosion didn’t have to kill you or even knock you out to do brain damage. “I really should get the dog on the trail. It’s less than a day old.”

“You’re going straight to triage,” Anya said firmly. “And that’s an order.”

Bernie suddenly felt that tracking these bastards was more important than anything. Mac seemed okay. And if she had any brain damage, there wasn’t much Doc Hayman could do about it. They had no state-of-the-art neurology unit. The COG had just lost a century in technology terms.

She could hear the clicking of cooling metal, so at least the blast hadn’t deafened her. Eventually it gave way to a distant droning sound overlaid with the chatter of rotor blades. The Raven was coming.

“Two explosive devices today,” Anya said, still scanning trees a couple of hundred meters away. “You think they’ve got a new strategy?”

“If they have,” Bernie said, “I’d love to know how they’re being resupplied.”

“P-Twelve, this is Byrne.” Sam’s voice buzzed in Bernie’s earpiece. “Rossi’s in position. You’re going to miss the party.”

Bernie supposed that was Sam’s way of checking they were still okay. “Sorry for the no-show. I’m sure we’ll get another chance to have a girls’ day out with extreme violence.”

Mac paused in his investigation of the soil and stared out across the grassland into the trees, trauma apparently forgotten. It might have been rabbits that got his attention.

Bernie found herself hoping it was bigger quarry.

The Packhorse lay belly-up like a dead animal. The dog was sniffing around in the grass at the side of the road, but Baird couldn’t see Bernie or Anya yet.

They were here, though. They were still in radio contact, but that didn’t seem to make Marcus any less agitated. The warning signs were no more than a fixed stare and a twitch of jaw muscles, but Baird knew him well enough by now to see when the guy was wound up. He really didn’t like Anya doing any hairy-assed stuff. Baird wondered if they argued about it in private.

They occasionally disappeared at the same time. Baird noted things like that.

“Well, at least I know where to set down safely,” Sorotki said. “Seeing as Mataki’s been kind enough to do the route-proving and trigger the device … I’ll land on the road.” The Raven banked in a loop, coming up on the other side of the overturned vehicle. Bernie and Anya were crouched in its cover with their rifles ready. Bernie shielded her eyes from the grit whipped up by the chopper’s downdraft. “Stick to the paved surface, boys and girls. No telling what those bastards have planted either side.”

Bernie’s voice came on the radio. “You can set off mines with downdraft, you know.”

“Stand by, kitten-killer …”

Baird leaned back into the crew bay to talk to the crew chief. Mitchell was huddled over the Raven’s door gun like he was trying to hatch it. “Hey, the Pack’s in one piece,” Baird said. “We can lift it underslung.”

Mitchell didn’t take his eyes off the ground below. “Has anyone ever told you that you’re just too caring?”

“I never leave a wounded machine behind.”

“Dizzy can swing by with the salvage rig later and haul it back. Casevac first.”

“It’ll be picked clean the minute we leave. You think these assholes don’t stake out their devices or know when they catch something?”

“Too bad.” Marcus did his slow head turn, the one that said he was seriously pissed off, and fixed Baird with a cold blue stare. “We’ll just have to reclaim the shit when we catch up with them.”

Baird wasn’t scared of Marcus, but he knew when to back off. The man wasn’t knowable. Although Baird knew what Marcus would do in a given situation, he didn’t know how his mind worked, and that bothered him. Any mechanism—human, animal, machine—could be analyzed, its component parts evaluated, and its workings and functions understood. Not understanding Marcus was the most unsettling thing about him.

Yeah, but you’re not immune to all this shit, are you, Marcus? Look at you sweating over Anya. Caring screws you up, man. Just switch it off. Life gets a lot easier then.

Sorotki set the Raven down on the road. Bernie and Anya emerged from behind the Packhorse, tottering under the weight of an ammo box and two fuel cans.

“Can’t leave it here,” Bernie said. She had maps stuffed under one arm. “Got to clear the vehicle.”

Baird blocked Bernie’s path and tried to take the crate from her. “Women drivers. You must have inherited extra lives from all those cats you ate, Granny.”

She hung on to the crate, but he could see she was struggling. “Thanks, I can manage this.”

“Sure you can.” He wrestled the box from her arms. He wasn’t sure if he was embarrassed for her, or just trying to avoid looking as if he gave a shit. “And then you’ll have a stroke, and I’ll have Hoffman on my back for letting you.”

Marcus relieved Anya of the fuel cans and steered her toward the Raven. Bernie shrugged wearily. “We’re going to need some mine-clearance kit, Blondie. Invent something.”

“Already got a plan for putting a mine flail on a grindlift rig. Now get your ass in that bird before you break anything else.”

“Arse.” She ignored him and snapped her fingers at the dog. Mac trotted to her side and sat to attention like he was waiting for orders. “Mac? Want to find bad guys? Seek.”

“You got perforated eardrums, or just going senile? Time to go.”

“It wasn’t much of a bomb. I’m fine.” Mac was already rooting around and making a line for the trees. “The trail’s less than a day old, though. Best time to follow it.”

“Head injuries. Subdural hematomas.” Baird wondered if he was going to have to haul her on board. He found himself worrying inexplicably about how to grab her. “Delayed onset of cerebral swelling. Coma.”

“Thanks. You’re such a cheery little bastard.”

But she gave him a motherly pat on the back, just like she did with Cole, and went after the dog. Marcus was still examining the crater. He looked up.

“Where the hell’s she going?” he asked.

“Asshole hunting. It’s an Islander thing.”

“And you let her.”

“Hey, I’m not a geriatrics nurse.”

Marcus sighed and pressed his earpiece. “Mataki? Get back here.”

There was a pause before she came back on the radio. She must have been in a dip, because Baird could only see gray hair and the top of her backpack bobbing above the grass as she walked.

“Mac’s picked up a trail,” she said. “You want to pass this up?”

“How hard did you hit your head, Mataki?”

“Not hard enough to forget I owe these tossers a really bad time.”

Marcus didn’t bother to argue. He gestured at Baird to follow her and pressed his earpiece again. “Sorotki? We’re going after them. Get Lieutenant Stroud back to base.”

“Roger that,” Sorotki said. “Call us when you need us.”

Anya’s voice interrupted. “Look, I’m fine. I should be out there with—”

But she was cut short by the whine of the engines as the Raven lifted clear. Baird didn’t approve of women in combat roles, but it was asking for trouble to override her like that—and not just because she outranked Marcus. She wouldn’t take that dismissal lightly, whatever the motive.

“Wow, harsh,” Baird said. “You won’t be getting any for a long time.”

“Shut it, Baird,” Marcus muttered.

Baird never had much control over his mouth, and he knew it. Something smart-ass always emerged unbidden; he couldn’t even blame it on stupidity. Sometimes it was fear, sometimes frustration, but mostly it was habit, and he wished he could just keep it zipped. He realized that all the people closest to him—this squad—were those who seemed to understand that and knew when to ignore him.

It was kind of comforting. For once in his life, he felt easy with a group of people.

His earpiece radio clicked. “They’ll hang around, won’t they?” Bernie said. “They’ll be somewhere relatively close.”

“They’ll want to know if they hit their target,” Baird said. “They’d have to be deaf not to hear the explosion.”

“Are we checking the farms for missing chemicals? They make their own sodium chlorate and nitrate fertilizer here.”

“Oh, great.”

“You can kill someone with most anything if you want to. Farms need agricultural chemicals, Blondie.”

“Spoken like a farmer, Granny.”

She had a point, though. The Stranded would use whatever they could find to make explosives, whether that was weed-killer, fertilizer, or even old and unstable TNT. And when they ran out of the chemical stuff, and then ran out of bullets, it would be pit traps with shit-smeared wooden stakes at the bottom. Whatever they used, however low-tech the guerilla war became, people would still end up dead or injured.

We’ll end up chasing them forever. Too many places to hide. Not so many places for them to target, though. They’ve got to come to the settlements or ambush vehicles in transit. Time we lured these assholes into our own ambushes.

Marcus grunted, finger pressed to his ear. He was listening to the comms between Rossi and Control. “They’ve lost them,” he said. “Sam’s gone back to dismantle the device. She says she needs the materials.”

“Crazy bitch. Good luck civilizing her, Granny.”

“Waste not, want not, Blondie.”

“We beat grubs, man. We should have done the same with these assholes and bombed the shit out of them when they were all still in one place.”

“Amen,” Bernie murmured.

Marcus cut in. “I think we should all shut the fuck up.”

The dog led them along a zigzag path toward a patch of woodland. Baird caught up with Bernie as she came to a halt at the edge of a steep bank. A couple of meters below them, a stream glittered through a mesh of thin tree trunks jutting out from the slope, and Mac trotted back and forth along the edge, sniffing the air.

Bernie snapped her fingers to get his attention. “Seek, Mac. Did they cross here? Did they? Go on. Find ’em.”

The dog picked his way down the bank and paddled a few meters along the shallow bed, looking lost. Baird didn’t trust all this wilderness shit.

“You sure that mutt can hunt?” he said. “If all it takes to throw him off the scent is some water, he’s not a lot of use.”

“Blondie, who’s the survival expert around here?”

“Here we go again. The wild woman of the frigging woods.”

Marcus squatted on his heels to watch Mac casting around but said nothing. After a few moments, the dog paused, showed a lot of interest in a mud scrape on the opposite bank, and went charging up the slope.

“Game on,” Bernie said.

She set off after the dog, probably still buoyed up on the adrenaline of the explosion. Baird wondered how long she’d last.

“If he finds a Stranded camp, does he have the sense not to go charging in?”

“Probably not. Better keep up with him.”

It was hard going over ground knotted with tree roots and blocked by undergrowth, but the dog seemed to know where he was heading, and Bernie looked like she believed him. She kept pausing to check broken branches and other signs of recent foot traffic. Baird, radio tuned to the squad frequency, overtook her.

“Wait up,” Marcus said suddenly. “Listen.”

Baird stopped and Bernie passed him again. Someone had to keep an eye on the dog. Marcus gestured to Baird to listen in, and that meant switching to Control. Marcus was rarely without that damn earpiece, even off duty. Baird was pretty sure he slept with it in place most nights.

“Well, shit.” Marcus stared into the trees with that defocused look that said he was listening rather than looking. “It’s showtime.”

Baird switched channels. His ear was filled instantly with a welter of voice traffic straight out of the nightmare they thought they’d finally left behind on the mainland. Squads out on the roads were calling in explosions and ambushes. It was hard to pick out the detail. He found himself listening intently for Cole’s name in case he’d decided to help someone out and been caught up in this shit.

Mathieson’s voice was deceptively calm. “Say again, Ten-Kilo. How many down? Is Andresen T-one? How bad is he?” Then a more familiar voice cut in—Anya. She was back in Ops by the sound of it. “Ten-Kilo, KR unit Three-Three is inbound for casevac, estimate ten minutes. Stand by.”

Andresen. Baird didn’t hear what had warranted his T1 triage rating—serious abdominal wound, traumatic limb amputation, whatever—but he knew the sergeant well, and that somehow shocked him more than the whole Locust war. Baird had lost comrades every day to grub attacks and dealt with it. But this wasn’t the war, and they weren’t up against grubs who didn’t know how to be anything else but murdering assholes, and that made Baird spitting mad. They hadn’t survived years of grub attacks to get picked off by human vermin. He’d never felt this angry in his life. The urge to hit back almost choked him. But he was stuck in the middle of nowhere with nothing to kill.

Marcus just looked through him, unblinking. “Fenix to Control. Checking in. Need us to do anything?”

That gave CIC a breathing space to respond in their own time. Anya came on the link. “Marcus, we’ve got ten incidents ongoing, including one involving Gorasni troops. It looks like a coordinated campaign. If you need air support, you might have a wait on your hands.”

“No problem, Control. No contact here so far.”

“Hoffman says to remember to bring back some live prisoners.”

Marcus suddenly focused on Baird. “I’ll make sure we don’t forget that.” He paused. “Keep us posted on Andresen. Fenix out.”

Marcus liked Andresen. Bernie did, too. They both drank with him in the sergeants’ mess. Baird suddenly didn’t feel he was wasting time tracking a few assholes through the mud.

“Shit, I heard.” Bernie walked back toward them. She had Mac on a leash now, straining to hold him. “And that’s how a handful of arse-wipes can screw up a trained army. Come on. Mac’s busting to kill something.”

“I bet the Gorasni are just ecstatic to find their new home’s a battlefield,” Baird said. “That’ll take their mind off their missing frigate.”

“Cheapest form of warfare.” Marcus shook his head, that slow side-to-side gesture that was more disgust than anything. “Not a battlefield yet.”

“Yeah, tell that to Rory,” Bernie said, leaning back on the leash to slow the dog down. “If he survives.”

They resumed the trail in silence. Baird’s pulse was still thudding in his neck. It didn’t slow down to normal until Mac came to a sudden halt and stood with his ears pricked, staring intently past the trees at the slope of a rocky hillside. He never made a sound. Baird was expecting him to bark like a guard dog, but he just stared, and not even movement around him broke his concentration. The mutt was definitely trained to hunt with a handler.

Bernie crouched next to him. “What is it, fella? You got something?”

Marcus gave the dog a wide berth and stood on the other side of Baird with his binoculars in one hand. He didn’t seem comfortable around the animal. Baird squinted at the hillside and tried to imagine what the dog would see from here. Maybe he could smell something, or even hear it. The dog’s senses were much more acute than his own.

Then he saw it. It was just a fleeting moment, but he was certain; a wisp of smoke or a fragment of ash from the rocks, gone in a couple of seconds on the breeze. Mac’s nostrils twitched.

“Camp, maybe,” said Baird. He directed Marcus, trying not to blink and lose the point he’d focused on. “Elevation forty degrees, left of the bushes. See the deep shadow?”

Marcus panned with his field glasses. Bernie cradled her Lancer, catching her breath, and Baird had an unwanted thought about whether he’d have softened toward his mother if she’d lived to be old and gray.

No, she’d still be a bitch. And this isn’t guilt.

“Shit.” Marcus lowered his binoculars. “Caves. Just like old times.”

Caves were meant for entering. Baird wasn’t afraid of what he’d find inside. He’d already found real monsters under his bed way too many times to fear his own kind.

“Hey, flea-bag,” he said to Mac, looking for the best route up the hill. “That better not be rabbits in there.”

Dom had always wondered if Cole had what it took to shoot another human being, but the last few months on Vectes had cleared up that question pretty fast.

Yeah, he could pull that trigger, all right.

They were officially off duty, but that didn’t mean a thing now. Medics moved in as KR-33 touched down on the parade ground, and all they carried out of the crew bay was an occupied body bag. Two of Rory Andresen’s squad walked to the infirmary under their own steam, faces covered with blast wounds. It had been an everyday scene in Jacinto, but it sure as shit shouldn’t have been one here, not now. They’d left all that behind.

Cole walked up and stood beside him, a half-cleaned section of Lancer chain in one hand and a time-frayed wire brush in the other. Dom didn’t meet his eyes.

“It’s Andresen,” Dom said. Just saying his name made it real. Up to that point, it had somehow been optional whether to believe the guy was really dead. “I just heard from Anya.”

“Aww, shit, man.” Cole shut his eyes tight for a moment. “Where’s his old lady?”

“Reid’s gone to find her. They come through fifteen years of grubs and he dies here. He dies now. I tell you, there’s no frigging sense in it.”

Sense. Yeah, that was it. There really had been some sense to fighting grubs, even though nobody knew what the hell the assholes had really wanted to achieve other than wipe out every human on Sera. Now Dom was back to the gray areas of the Pendulum Wars, where his enemy was someone whose motives he knew and shared. Humans should have known better. It was harder to take.

He checked his Lancer. “Should have gone with Marcus …”

“Yeah, maybe, but—”

Whoomp.

Cole’s voice was drowned out by a blast that made Dom drop instinctively. There was a split second of silence before the ball of smoke and flame shot up above the level of the naval base walls, and he found himself running toward the explosion. Everyone who didn’t have their hands full right then did the same thing. He couldn’t pick out the exact location, but it looked like the Gorasni camp beyond the perimeter walls.

If it was inside the walls, then the COG’s problems were a lot worse than anyone thought.

But it wasn’t. Cole and Dom reached the northwest gate in time to see a couple of open trucks heading up the main access path into the mass of Gorasni tents beyond the perimeter. The smoke was spiraling up from the far side of the camp. Even CIC seemed to be having trouble working out what had happened and who’d been hit. The Gorasni were chattering away in whatever they spoke, and CIC was trying to get sense out of them in Tyran. It wasn’t working out too well.

Dom’s instinct was the same as every Gear’s in that base—to deal with the situation, whether by helping the injured or securing the site. They strode into the camp, but two Gorasni guards moved in on them right away.

“We have everything under control,” one of them said in Tyran. He sounded as if he’d been trained to repeat the phrase but didn’t actually understand it. “Thank you.”

“That’s a bomb, baby.” Cole always wanted to help. He really did. “That don’t look like under control to me.”

“You want to do something?” the guard said. He understood Tyran just fine, then. “You do your job, Gear. Keep the roads free of bombs. You don’t know how? We show you. But later.”

“You’re not in Gorasnaya anymore,” Dom snapped. “There’s no goddamn border here.”

“We have people trained. Too many of you run around here—you just get in their way.” The guy’s tone wasn’t aggressive now. But he didn’t move, either. “Thank you.”

Cole caught Dom’s shoulders and turned him around to steer him back to the base. “Other things we can do. You heard the man.”

“Ungrateful assholes.” The guy was right in a way, but Dom wasn’t used to being told to run along. The frustration—shit, he wasn’t sure what it was, whether it was a reaction to Andresen or Maria or any one of a hundred other shitty things. He just knew he didn’t want to stand around and think. He pressed his earpiece. “Santiago to Control, you need me and Cole to do anything?”

Control was going to be overwhelmed right now and the last thing they’d need would be Gears asking for work to do. But there was a plan for emergencies, and bypassing that made more work for Ops. There was a long pause before Mathieson responded.

“You could give us a hand up here, Dom. Drive a radio for me.”

“On our way,” Dom said.

The main naval base building was part of a terrace of red-brick barracks four or five stories high, all winding stairs, varnished floorboards, and dark green paint. Dom and Cole struggled against a tide of Gears and emergency volunteers coming out of the main doors. Dom took the stairs to CIC two at a time, tidying his fatigues as he went, although nobody had given a shit about uniform standards for a damn long time. As soon as he walked into the room, the wall of sound hit him—radio chatter on the loudspeakers, Ops staff with phones to one ear and radio headsets held to the other. A group of the Vectes locals was maintaining a tote board on the wall to keep track of the various incidents and plotting them on a hand-drawn map. Mathieson swiveled in his chair and pointed Dom and Cole at a comms desk near Anya without breaking his conversation.

“Just as well Marcus kicked me off the hunting party,” she said, not making any sense. “It’s gone crazy out there. Dom—get on the radio and find Sigma Two. They haven’t called in. Cole—keep a line open to Pelruan. They haven’t had any incidents yet, but I need a rolling sitrep from them.”

Anya had a few scratches on her chin. She’d rolled up her sleeves, and when she reached out to pick up the phone, Dom could see a big bruise ripening just above her elbow.

“You okay?” he said.

“Yes, it went off some distance behind us.” She glanced past him at the tote board. “Only one of fifteen so far, though. Two Gorasni dead, four Gears, and some nasty injuries. I’m lucky.”

Ops was a lot harder than Dom expected. It was the waiting, the inability to grab a rifle and use all that spare adrenaline the way that nature intended. He found himself following a dozen one-sided conversations while he cycled through the frequencies trying to raise Sigma. The transport squadron was trying to rig a mine-clearance vehicle, construction workers up at the new housing site had found a suspicious patch of freshly dug soil, and the operating theater needed an electrician to fix some lights. The words serious abdominal wound leapt out at him and he made a conscious effort to ignore it.

Carlos.

Sometimes Dom didn’t think about his brother for days at a time, and then he’d be all he could think about, even seventeen years later. Time definitely didn’t heal. It just left longer gaps between the hurt. All you could do was fill your mind with the here and now, and not give the past a space to squeeze into until you felt up to dealing with it again.

Hoffman strode into CIC with Michaelson. Dom had his back to the door and was trying to read what one of the civvies was chalking on the tote board, but Hoffman’s voice, even at a whisper, always got his attention. The colonel was his old CO. Part of Dom’s brain was still tuned to him even now.

“Until we know what they’re using for explosives, we can’t break the supply chain.” That was Michaelson. “Are they stealing agricultural chemicals? Are they making them? Damn, Vic, they might even be shipping them in. Even with radar pickets, I can’t make the coast watertight.”

Hoffman grunted irritably. “Well, if Trescu’s so sure he can instruct us in the finer points of sucking goddamn eggs, let him run the patrols.”

“Well, if we’re talking about resupply from the sea—I’ll be damned if I’m going to waste time and fuel on rummage crews,” Michaelson said. “I’m not doing customs interdiction for contraband. Any vessel that isn’t one of ours—we sink it. They’ll get the message fast.”

“Here he comes,” Hoffman said. “Put on your grateful face, Quentin.”

Prescott walked in with Trescu. Dom watched discreetly. Trescu was used to being a head of state and being treated like one, even if that state was a few thousand people. He had that I-make-the-decisions-around-here air about him. Prescott seemed to find that funny. If Dom could see that, then Trescu sure as shit could too. The two men were having one of those icy arguments that were all clenched teeth and no raised voices, but that didn’t mean they cared about the grunts listening in. Dom felt like a kid, or the hired help, expected not to notice what his elders and betters were saying. Prescott parked his ass on a vacant desk and sat gazing intently at the Gorasni leader with a concerned frown.

“My decision was not popular,” Trescu said. “Many of my people wanted to stay on the mainland and take their chances. I promised them they would be safer in your shadow, and now you make a liar of me. A hundred or so starving vermin, and you can’t get rid of them? So much for the mighty Coalition that brought the Independent Republics to their knees.”

“Because this isn’t a damn war,” Hoffman growled. “It’s terrorism in our front yard. We can’t burn them out or bomb them out because this is the only place we’ve got left. So we pick them off. You got a better idea? Last time I looked, you’d lost a whole frigate and didn’t know how it happened.”

Trescu—late thirties maybe, a real hard case with buzz-cut dark hair and a neat beard streaked with early gray—leaned close to Hoffman, not buddy-buddy but right in his face. Dom waited for the colonel to lose his shit with the guy. But all Hoffman did was clench his jaw as if Prescott had told him to keep it zipped no matter what happened.

“Colonel, you COG are soft. You are tolerant. You give amnesties.” Trescu somehow made it all sound like some kind of perversion. “And so you have a Stranded problem, despite holding several hundred potential hostages and informers within your very walls. But we are not soft. We solved our Stranded problem.” He paused a beat. “And our frigate—I shall find out what happened.”

Prescott joined in. “They aren’t hostages, Commander,” he said. “They accepted an amnesty. Mostly women, children, and older men.”

“Like I said. Soft.”

Hoffman was almost shaking. The old bastard had a temper, and Dom always expected him to have a stroke when he blew a gasket. Trescu pulled back slowly.

“Feel free to teach us how it’s done anytime,” Hoffman said. “Pull out a few fingernails. We’re not good at that.”

Trescu was talking a tough game for a man who had just a few ships and an imulsion rig. “Bring me some Stranded and I will,” he said. “You need intelligence from them—I’ll get it.”

For a moment, Dom thought Trescu was asking them to round up the Stranded who’d been given amnesty and beat some information out of them. He could see some logic in that—the folks in New Jacinto couldn’t have forgotten everything about their buddies on the other side of the fence—but it made him uneasy.

“We have a squad in pursuit right now, Commander,” Prescott said, glancing at Mathieson. “They’ll detain live prisoners.”

“Then I want them.” Trescu picked up a folded map from the table. “And you can wash your hands of it all to keep up your pretense of being civilized. Now, I have to go and calm my people down.”

Trescu stalked out. Prescott looked at Hoffman and raised his eyebrows.

“Excitable fellow, isn’t he?” Michaelson studied the chart on the wall, arms folded. “But with only three or four thousand people, the scale of the threat looks very different to him.”

“We lost good men today too, Quentin,” Hoffman said. “I feel pretty threatened myself.”

Prescott was obviously back in his own world of power games again. “We need to wean him off the idea of his people and his territory. Let’s watch our semantics in front of him, shall we? Us, us, us.”

“So I can’t call him a pissant who’d be scrubbing latrines if he didn’t have a lot of imulsion.” Hoffman ran both hands over his bald scalp, eyes on the tote board. “But we can’t shit ourselves and hide every time a bomb goes off. We can’t let this turn into a siege.”

“Bring a few of these animals back alive for Trescu, then,” Prescott said. “Give him a sense of ownership of the problems. If we don’t, he’ll take prisoners himself and sit on the intel. He has to accept he’s part of the COG now.”

“I’ve never been squeamish about civilians, Chairman,” Hoffman said. “But if you’re going to play really rough with the Stranded outside the walls, you better start worrying what the ones inside will do about that. Regardless of whether Trescu’s the one wiring them up to the power supply, or us.”

Dom must have forgotten to maintain his I’m-not-listening look. Hoffman turned suddenly and stared right at him. “Santiago, you taken up knitting or something?”

“Helping out, sir. Off duty.”

“I can find a non-com to do that. You and Cole go back up Fenix. Sorotki’s standing by. Don’t come back until you find me a live one.”

Dom had his orders. He also had a pretty good idea what was going to happen to any asshole he caught and handed over to Trescu. For a moment, he struggled with the idea and wondered how different that was from his urge to take a few of them down for Andresen. Maybe it was no different at all. But the fact that he stopped to think about it told him that—for him, at least—it was.

“You got it, sir,” Dom said.