CHAPTER 6

Muller stuck his head out of the wheelhouse. “Dom? Old Misery Guts is on the blower. Talk to him, will you?”

Dom was leaning on the rail, keeping an eye on the trawlers following line astern in the patrol boat’s wake like ducklings. If there was anything in the water to hit, Amirale Enka would hit it first. There was a kind of logic to it.

“Okay. Is he mad?”

“Hard to tell. He always sounds pissed off.”

Baird was on the foredeck, squatting over a small pile of debris he’d spread on a piece of canvas. He really did look like he was doing a jigsaw puzzle. Sam, still manning the gun, glanced over her shoulder to watch. Dom stepped into the wheelhouse and took the mike from Muller. Yanik the Disemboweler still leaned on the wheel, silent and unconcerned.

“Santiago here, sir.”

“Can we rule out a Stranded attack yet?” Hoffman asked. “Folks believe what they want to believe, but it might calm things down here if I could look them in the eye and say it wasn’t.”

“What, civilian trouble?”

“Yes. What’s your ETA?”

“About half an hour. Sorry, sir, the best we can do is guess. Baird says he can’t see how the Stranded could pull off an attack like that, no matter how much hardware they’ve collected. Sam—well, she knows her ordnance, and she says it must have been huge. Mines are a really long shot, but the least unlikely.”

Hoffman went quiet for a moment. “It wouldn’t convince me. Sure as hell won’t convince anyone else.”

“Sir, it’d be better if we could prove it was Stranded,” Dom said. “Because if it’s not, it’s something we don’t know how to deal with.”

“We’re going to have to limit where these people fish.” Hoffman had heard him, all right. He just didn’t want to talk about it on an open channel. “Give them some reassurance. Okay, get your ass back here and brace for diplomacy.”

Yanik stirred. “This is what happened to our frigate. Collision—torpedo—grounding—pah. Whatever. Ships are not so unlucky all at once, eh?”

Muller rolled the stub of his cigar between thumb and forefinger. He seemed to use it as worry beads more often than he smoked it. “We could always rig a couple of vessels to do a wire sweep,” he said. “But yeah, I’d rather find out what we’re dealing with first.”

Baird got up from his jigsaw of destruction and swaggered into the wheelhouse.

“I found a tooth,” he said. “Human molar.”

Dom waited for him to make some crack about putting it under his pillow. He didn’t. He seemed really puzzled, and that rare condition shut him up in a way nothing else could. It was as if he just couldn’t believe that he didn’t have an answer.

“No similarity between the two attacks, then.” Dom kept thinking about the families who would be back in Pelruan now, numb with shock, sobbing their hearts out or refusing to believe their men had gone. He remembered every time he’d felt that way, but he couldn’t re-create the sensation, and he wasn’t sure if that troubled him or relieved him. “We found big chunks of hull and other debris where Harvest went down.”

“Did we keep all that?”

Muller nodded. “It’s on a trailer in one of the boat sheds.”

“Okay, I’m going to take another look at it. The answer’s staring us in the face.”

Whatever that answer turned out to be, it wasn’t going to be good news. Dom could see that even before Amirale Enka passed the channel marker buoy. When he checked out the jetty through his binoculars, he could see a mob of civilians milling around Michaelson, and at least two squads of Gears who looked like they’d formed a cordon. He expected to see Marcus, too, but he didn’t. As the vessel slowed to enter the small ships’ basin, Dom picked out Cole in the growing crowd. Cole—good-humored, funny, but very, very big—was good at calming folks down just by standing there.

“Shit, I hope they don’t think we’re landing bodies,” Dom said.

Baird shrugged. “Soup, more like.”

“Ever consider social work as a career?”

“Yeah, it was that or the diplomatic service.” Baird gave Dom one of his wary looks. “You got to stop imagining how bad other people feel, Dom. Look after Santiago, Private D. You’ve got enough shit on your plate.”

Okay, that’s the Baird version of sympathy. He does try. He fails, but he tries.

The crowd stayed on the other side of a chain safety barrier as Amirale Enka came alongside and Gorasni seamen jumped onto the quay to secure her lines. Michaelson stood by one of the bollards with his arms folded, looking up at the boat. He was waiting for Muller to report, Dom realized. He didn’t address the Gears at all.

“Well, this is all going swimmingly,” Michaelson said, watching the crew drop the brow onto the quay. “But at least we didn’t misplace a frigate.”

“Damned if I can tell you what happened, sir.” Muller cocked his head in Baird’s direction. “But maybe he can.”

Baird was already halfway down the brow in his rush to get on with solving the problem. For a moment, Dom envied him; he was totally self-contained, immune to grief, and satisfied by making broken things work. He was perfectly evolved for this bleak postwar world. Now that Dom thought about it, he could never recall Baird having a nightmare. Most guys had them, some frequently, some not, and in crowded barracks it wasn’t something you could hide; but Baird always seemed to sleep soundly.

“Let me take a look at what’s left of Harvest,” he said. “In case we’re blaming our nice Stranded neighbors unfairly.”

Michaelson watched him go. “He doesn’t think it’s Locust, does he?”

Dom shrugged. “I don’t want to say it. But the grubs had barges, remember. And that leviathan thing. We found them in the underground rivers.”

Sam walked up to Dom. “You can’t cross an ocean in a barge. And from what you told me, you’d see them coming anyway.”

“Excellent point, Private Byrne.” Michaelson was quite the charmer. Even Sam didn’t take offense when he checked her out. “But I’m not ruling out anything. If you’ll excuse me, I’d better go and see just how far out of favor the navy is with the Chairman now.”

Lewis Gavriel pushed through the line of Gears and caught Dom’s arm. The poor bastard was mayor of Pelruan, a COG civil servant marooned here since the Hammer strike fourteen years ago, and he’d never even seen a grub. Now he was watching his quiet island bombed, colonized, and generally fucked up by his own species. Irony probably didn’t cover it.

“Dom, can you tell me anything?” He was a nice guy. Dom wanted to help. “Casualties in double figures probably doesn’t look as bad to you, but we’re a small town. A few thousand people. We all knew those men well. Folks are angry.”

Dom wasn’t sure that he would have given Lewis someone to blame even if he’d known the answer, much as he wanted to. It would just cause too much trouble.

“I saw it,” he said, “and I still don’t know what happened. I’m really sorry.”

Fate saved him, or so he thought. Marcus’s voice interrupted over the radio.

“Dom, Sam—on me. Get over to the main gate for some assertive community mediation.”

Sam swiped Dom’s shoulder as she passed him. “Come on, Dom, it’s kicking off.”

He shrugged helplessly at Gavriel. “Got to go.” As he turned, he caught sight of Marcus at the far end of the jetty. That explained his great timing. “If I hear anything, I’ll tell you. I swear.”

The collective mood of a mass of human beings was a weird thing. It made Dom edgy. On their own, people were generally reasonable, open to suggestions to move along or calm down. But in groups, they seemed to forget they ever evolved speech or opposable thumbs, and turned into one single dumb, bad-tempered, irrational animal. By the time Dom caught up with Marcus and Sam, the number of civilians milling around seemed to be growing, and there was a real smell of aggression.

Dom had policed food riots in Jacinto. He knew that smell of mob. And he never wanted to face down civvies again. Almost all the folks here were from Jacinto, though, the old Jacinto, so why the trawler incident had riled them was anyone’s guess.

“Not a good day to be Stranded,” Marcus said. “And they’re not too crazy about us, either, thanks to Trescu.”

“Why?”

“He shot a prisoner.”

“Dead?”

“That’s the usual outcome.”

It was going to turn into a cage fight. Two tribes of people with grievances against each other, crammed into the same space; Dom’s stomach knotted. The grubs had always been outside the gates. There’d always been a line between sanctuary and battlefield before.

By the time they reached the main gates, Dom could already tell that things were getting out of control. The line of trucks, junkers, and farm vehicles stretched far enough up the approach road for him to see it even over the sea of heads and helmets. At the front, behind the ironwork gates, Hoffman and Prescott were talking to the civilians outside. They were from Pelruan. Dom recognized them.

“Shit,” Marcus muttered.

Dom’s autopilot sent him hurrying to back up his old CO. It was a reflex now. “Blockade or lynch mob?”

“Shit either way.” He checked his Lancer. “Dom, you sure that boat didn’t get blown up by Stranded?”

“Sure as I can be. How the hell would they manage it? Even we can’t mince a vessel into small pieces like that.”

“Just checking.”

They got to within a few meters of the gates. Hoffman had never been to charm school, but that probably worked better with the locals than Prescott’s silky line of patter. At least the colonel sounded like he meant every word. And he did.

“You’re not coming in,” he said to the farmer at the front of the angry crowd. “And you’re not going to block this access. Goddamn it, I’d put a round through any of those bastards as soon as look at them, but that’s not how we do things. Wait for one of our route-proving APCs to deploy, then turn your vehicles around and follow the ’Dill back home. You hear me? Go home.”

Prescott opened his mouth to speak but he was drowned out by the shouting from the convoy.

“We didn’t invite you here,” someone yelled. “And we didn’t invite the scum you’ve given houseroom to.”

Other voices joined in. “We don’t give a shit who you are. You’ve screwed this place in a matter of months. Months.”

The Vectes locals had never encountered a grub, and that gave them a different take on threats. Dom just prayed that nobody started shooting. The press of bodies on both sides of the gates was increasing and if things got uglier, people would get hurt. Sam was maneuvering herself into a position where she could get a clear shot. He didn’t know whether to block her or not.

“Don’t start that shit again,” Hoffman snarled. “The whole world’s screwed, and a lot worse than this. Go home. I know you’re mad. I’m mad. But leave it to us to deal with it.”

Marcus sighed and shouldered his way through the other Gears to step in front of Hoffman. Dom saw them exchange a glance. For a moment Dom thought Marcus had just decided to shield Prescott or something, but then Marcus hauled himself up and stood on one of the buttresses to get his head above the crowd. He held up his hand. He didn’t do that very often.

“Hey!” he called. “Just listen. You know me. I’m telling you that trawler wasn’t sunk by Stranded. We don’t know what the hell did it. That’s a good reason for going home and locking your doors right now.”

There was a silence that lasted maybe five seconds, an eternity in this situation, broken only by muffled barking from inside the vehicles. They’d brought their dogs along too. Dom saw Prescott twitch as if he was going to dive in and fill the gap with some bullshit. Marcus just looked at him, that look, the one that shut anyone up, and Prescott seemed to change his mind.

Nobody moved. But somebody in the line of vehicles spoke.

“You wouldn’t lie to us, Fenix?”

Marcus had a way of getting everyone to listen. They probably had to strain to hear him. He just dropped his voice way down.

“No,” he said. “You need to know the truth. We might have bigger problems than just a few assholes. Go home, and let us do our jobs.”

It took a few more seconds, but the silence became more ragged, and people started shuffling and generally calming down. There were no more shouts. Dom heard engines starting somewhere down the line.

“Wait for the Armadillo escort,” Hoffman called. “I don’t want any more casualties, you hear me?”

Everyone started moving away from the gates. Prescott caught Marcus by the arm, and for a moment Dom thought Marcus was going to deck him. Prescott, as cocksure of himself as any man could be, stopped in his tracks.

“Are you insane?” he demanded. “You could have started a panic. Why tell them there’s an unknown threat out there?”

Marcus gave him the slow stare. Prescott let go of his arm.

“Dynamic risk assessment, Chairman. Better than having a riot.”

Dom hung back with Sam for a few seconds, ready to wade in, but Prescott said nothing and walked off. Hoffman confronted Marcus.

“Think I couldn’t handle it, Fenix?”

“Don’t carry the can for Prescott,” Marcus said quietly. “Makes it harder to get civvies to listen to you next time. Let them focus on the Chairman. It’s his job to be disliked.”

The set of Hoffman’s jaw softened. Dom knew the old man well enough to know when he was taken by surprise.

“Okay, carry on saving my ass,” he said at last. “Three times, and you get to keep the trophy.”

“Nice job,” Sam said as Hoffman walked off. “He respects that.”

“Terrific.” Marcus’s attention was already on something else. “Ahh, shit. What is this, fight night?”

There were still a lot of people hanging about, some of them Stranded women and kids who’d accepted the amnesty. A gaggle of them had blocked the path of a bunch of Gorasni troops. Dom didn’t know what the uniform was—militia, maybe—but it didn’t seem to matter to the Stranded. They were spitting mad, and Dizzy Wallin was standing between the two factions making take-it-easy gestures.

“You murdering assholes!” one of the women yelled at the Gorasni. “Why don’t you fuck off back to your own country?”

“Ladies, let’s remember we got young ’uns around,” Dizzy said. “And you fellas—you wanna be seen fightin’ with girls? Everyone just relax.”

“Shut up, garayaz,” one militiaman snapped. It was one of few Gorasni words Dom had picked up: heap of shit. “You’re one of them.”

Dizzy took a step back. “That ain’t nice.”

“Here we go,” Marcus said.

Dom, Sam, and Marcus started a slow jog across to the argument, but it all got out of hand in seconds. One of the women gave a Gorasni the finger. The Gorasni lunged at her and almost hit one of the kids, a girl about ten. Then Dizzy stepped in to defend the kid, a bunch of Jacinto civvies dived into the melee yelling abuse at Dizzy, and punches were being thrown, all in the five seconds it took for Marcus to cannon into the ruck and force everyone apart. Sam got a smack in the face as she pushed the Stranded women away.

Dom didn’t see if she threw a punch back. He was hit from behind—could have been accidental, but he didn’t care—and the next thing he knew he’d pinned one of the Jacinto contingent against the nearest wall. The yelling stopped.

Marcus had one of the Gorasni in a headlock.

“Don’t piss me off,” he said. “I missed my anger management class today.”

Dom let the civvie go and stood back. Dizzy still shielded the terrified kid, and this was the first time Dom had seen him lose that permanent patient good nature. Maybe the risk to the little girl had done it. Dizzy had two teenage daughters, and they were his life.

But he turned on the Jacinto civvies, not the Gorasni.

“We fought for you,” he said, like the idea appalled him now. “I abandoned my girls for you. Damn it, I busted my ass killin’ grubs, and I still ain’t human enough for you? You ain’t worth it. All you see’s this damn hat and a bit o’ dirt, and we’re all the same. All assholes. Vermin. Well, fuck you.”

Dizzy ran out of steam and let the kid rush back to her mother. It was so unlike him that even Dom was lost for words for a few moments. The man didn’t seem so much angry as hurt. But the outburst put a stop to the fight. Sam moved in.

“Come on, Diz.” She draped her arm around his shoulders. “Let’s go and have a glass of your vintage kidney-killer. I’m choosy who I drink with.”

Marcus stood glowering until the crowd slunk away. Dom sloped his Lancer on his shoulder, waiting for the next flashpoint.

“One big happy family.” Marcus’s shoulders sagged as if he’d taken a big, silent breath of despair. “Better check if Baird’s come up with the goods.”

There were bound to be tensions when you were rebuilding a whole planet, Dom thought. Relief at simply surviving didn’t last long. People only seemed to unite when there was a clear threat to rally against.

Maybe Baird could put a name to one for them.

Baird had never failed in his life. He aced every exam; he invented gadgets while waiting for the average kids to catch up with him on the page. He had never doubted his own abilities.

Until now. Now he was wondering if he was half as smart as he thought he was. The wreckage from Harvest was spread out on the floor, each section roughly where he thought it would have been before it blew up, the way accident investigators sometimes reconstructed Raven crashes.

Not that we didn’t know what caused them. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred—Reavers, Brumaks, and grubs that got lucky.

There was a lot of boat missing. All he had was a few sections of hull, splintered and peppered with bullet holes.

Something wet splatted on his head. He looked up; a couple of seabirds had taken to roosting in the rafters. He was too engrossed to bother shooting them, and just moved position to sit on a crate out of the birds’ range.

“Sit there long enough and you’re gonna be caked in bird shit,” said a voice behind him. It was Jace Stratton. “You think the Stranded got some tech we don’t know about?”

Baird didn’t turn around. He’d never been sure what to make of Jace. The kid was all right, a solid soldier, and maybe that was all he needed to know. Baird could also tell that Jace thought he was a dick, but then most people did, and Baird hadn’t given a fuck about anyone else’s opinion for a long time. Trying to please people never paid off.

“No, I don’t,” Baird said at last. “Because if they had, they’d have used it by now. And if they have fancy tech, they’d had to have stolen it from us. There’ll be a boring reason for all this.”

“What’s the connection, then?” Jace asked. He didn’t take the unspoken hint to get lost. “The two trawlers, or the latest trawler and the frigate, or all three?”

“Damn, I forgot to pack a forensic engineer.” Baird slid off the crate. It was giving him a cramp in the ass anyway. Jace was a useful sounding board if nothing else. “Got any ideas? Don’t think it makes you my boy detective sidekick or anything.”

Jace gave him a yeah-whatever look and stood studying the pieces. The biggest section of hull, about the size of a couple of lunch trays, was still attached to part of the keel. Jace lifted the chunk of white fiberglass composite and flipped it over in his hands.

“I know how to do this,” he said. His voice echoed in the cavernous space. “I’ve seen it on TV. They lay out the bits and try to reconstruct it.”

“Man, the benefits of education.”

Jace just gave him a look and carried on. Baird awarded him points for persistence. All that was left of Harvest was this glass fiber and plastic—no machinery, no bodies, no nets, no fabrics. If they’d recovered the engine or any of the fuel system, Baird might have been able to rule out a fuel explosion. You couldn’t smash a trawler to bits just by shooting it up. It would have taken more than that to sink Harvest.

He picked up one of the smaller pieces and examined the edges, and realized he couldn’t tell the difference between scorching caused by burning fuel or by the heat of an explosion. The ragged edges didn’t clue him in, either.

“Which way around does this go?” Jace said. He held up a chunk of flat glass fiber composite peppered with bullet holes, then flipped it over. “This way or that?”

And that was the best damn question anyone had asked in a long time.

“Good point.” Baird took the section out of his hands and tried to work out which side had been in contact with the water. There wasn’t enough curve in the sheet to work out which part of the hull it came from, and both sides looked pretty shitty with encrustation. “There’s more crap on this side, so I’m guessing this way up.”

The ragged bullet holes had to have a direction.

Baird took off his glove and eased a finger into one hole to see if splinters snagged his skin. Yeah, he could feel it. When he pulled back, his finger slipped out easily. He tried it a few more times with another hole. When he held the sheet under a light and tilted it carefully, he could see a slight bowing around the holes.

“Shit,” he said. “The shots came from inside the hull. Not from outside. It wasn’t shot up from the outside while it was capsized, then.”

“Is that a big deal?” Jace asked. “Doesn’t tell us much.”

“It tells me plenty.”

“Okay, pirates might have boarded the boat. And they might not. You know how everything goes to rat shit when the shooting starts in confined spaces. How many of our guys got killed by friendly fire? Do these fishermen generally go out armed?”

Yeah, Jace was right. It didn’t prove anything. But that was another good question nobody had asked before.

“Let’s ask them if they went out cannoned up. It’s not like they’ve got a lot of firearms washing around up there.”

Jace nodded. “They’re boarded, they squeeze off a few rounds, they hole their own vessel. Game over.”

“But what blew the shit out of it?” Baird examined the splintered edges of the sheet. It had the same feathery tear lines he would have made if he’d ripped up fiberboard. The splaying suggested the force of the blast went outward. “You got to do more than hit a fuel line. It’s not like the movies. You need a buildup of flammable vapor or something to ignite and explode.”

“Hey, is this going to be the multiple factor thing you go on about? You know—it’s never one thing that causes catastrophic failure. It’s a lot of them all at once.”

Jace was really getting into this. Baird felt chastened by the realization that Jace listened to him and learned. That didn’t happen too often.

“Could be,” Baird said. “Doesn’t explain the confetti today, though. Or a steel-hulled warship having a negative buoyancy moment.”

The doors creaked open. Marcus and Dom ambled in, followed by Trescu and Hoffman. The colonel was wearing his keep-this-asshole-away-from-me look.

“I’m charging admission,” Baird said.

Marcus contemplated the wreckage. “Got anything?”

“Something we should have checked earlier. Shots fired from inboard to outboard.”

“And?”

“Probably followed by an explosion inside the vessel. Can we skip all the movie scenarios? They didn’t just put a hole in their own fuel line. Something else went wrong.”

Trescu wandered around with his hands clasped behind his back as if he was doing an inspection.

“I’m a rational man,” he said. “Very big ocean, very few vessels. Three sink in the space of a few months. All very different. Random statistical clusters are for clerks. So I will assume a common element until proven otherwise. Yes?”

“I thought your frigate holed herself on an underwater obstruction,” Hoffman muttered.

“Indeed she did,” Trescu said mildly. “But how did the obstruction get there?”

“Where? You don’t have an accurate last position for her.”

“That,” Trescu said, “is why I am keeping an open mind about exonerating our garayazka neighbors too soon.”

“If they’d done it, Commander, they’d be ramming it down our goddamn throats,” Hoffman said. “It’s not them. That much I’m sure of. Maybe there’s another pirate contingent. They’re always having territorial disputes.”

Nobody said grubs. Nobody needed to. The new answers had just thrown up more questions.

“Screw this,” Baird said, embarrassed that he hadn’t solved the puzzle completely. He found himself checking Marcus’s expression for signs of lost faith. However much people disliked Baird, he knew that they trusted his expertise. “If there’s some shit out there, let’s go find it. I’ll volunteer. Got another tub you can do without?”

Trescu stared at Baird and Baird stared back.

“You Gears go out every day with the fishermen. Where is your new strategy here?”

Hoffman seemed to have had enough. “The trawlers can fish closer to the island until we get a handle on this, with a couple of Gears embarked on security detail,” he said. “Inside the maritime exclusion zone. I think we can trust En-COG to maintain that. And if you happen to remember any little details about your frigate’s demise, Commander, don’t forget to tell us, will you?”

Hoffman turned and strode for the doors. It was a pretty eloquent command to follow him and get on with something useful. Baird piled the pieces of hull back on the nearest pallet and left with the rest of the squad. Trescu headed off on his own toward the Indie submarine Zephyr, probably to polish his jackboots or something.

“If they had a submarine, we’d have detected it by now,” Dom said. “I mean, that’s the only thing that could take out Levanto without being seen, right?”

“Don’t believe all that submariner bullshit.” Baird liked tinkering with the systems in Clement, but he had no illusions. “They can’t find half as much as they let you think they can.”

“Yeah,” Dom said, “but they can blow stuff up okay. That’s how this crap started, remember. If Zephyr hadn’t torpedoed Darrel Jacques, we’d have a treaty with the gangs now and he’d be keeping them in order.”

Baird decided that Dom had spent too much time wandering around Stranded camps looking for Maria. He’d picked up a bad dose of tolerance for them. Jacques would have turned out like all the rest, and nobody really knew how many Stranded were still scattered around Sera.

The COG was just a small city now. The last thing it needed was to make concessions to criminals.

“That’s our job,” said Baird.

Bernie’s heart sank as she picked her way down the slippery steps of the pier wall and looked at the trawlers bobbing beneath her on the swell.

She really didn’t feel up to being bounced around in a noisy tin box that stank of fish and fuel oil. She wished she’d let Hoffman reassign her. But that was more than an admission of defeat. It was a surrender to old age. The moment she accepted lighter duties, she would begin that slow—or not so slow—decline into frail senility. She didn’t want to hang around and fade.

“Where’s the puppy, Boomer Lady?” Cole leaned on Montagnon’s rail. “Thought you two was inseparable now.”

“Whining his head off in one of the old fuel compounds with half a sheep carcass until I get back.”

“You sure that ain’t Baird?”

“No, Mac’s the one with worms.” She saw Baird tinkering with the trawler’s winch mechanism. “A mother always knows.”

Baird straightened up and fixed her with his blank look. “Talking of parasites, has Trescu the Terrible beaten anything useful out of that Stranded brat yet?”

“Why ask me?”

“Hoffman tells you everything, Granny. I mean, I used to think it was your joints creaking when I passed your quarters, until I realized it was mattress springs …”

There’s a lot Vic doesn’t tell me. She let the jibe pass. “I suppose we’ll know when we stop finding bloody big craters in the roads.”

Bernie jumped down onto the concrete platform that ran just above the low watermark. Marcus stood with one boot on a bollard, looking like he was getting ready to slip the lines on Coral Star. Dom and Sam were rostered to go with the smallest boat, just known as M70. It needed a quainter name, Bernie decided.

Marcus gave her a glance, made no comment about being last to muster, and waited for her to negotiate the shifting gap between the boat’s ladder and the pier wall. She pulled herself up through the gap in the side rail and stepped straight into the wheelhouse.

Aylmer Gullie, the elderly skipper, sat in the cockpit seat with a mug of something steaming in his hand.

“Okay, Sergeant Fenix, slip the lines.” There was a loud thud as Marcus jumped across from the quay. Gullie pulled back the throttle. “You really think this is going to be any safer?”

“Maybe not,” Marcus said. “But at least we’ll know more if we’re here instead of watching you detonate from two klicks away.”

“Optimist.” Gullie winked. “Don’t worry, we’re staying inshore.”

Inshore for Vectes meant twenty kilometers, the limit of the island’s volcanic shelf. The three trawlers chugged out at near their top speed, a modest eighteen kph, and there wasn’t a lot for Bernie to do except walk around the limited deck space and keep a lookout. The four crewmen were busy below. She sat forward of the brightly painted derrick that made the trawler look like it would capsize at any time, and regretted having so much time to think.

What the hell is so bad that Vic’s taking this long to tell me about Anvil Gate?

The worst thing was that she’d started imagining just what he’d have to do to make her despise him. She’d killed two men the hard way in absolute cold blood. Her threshold of unforgivable was set generously high.

Not violence, then. Something small. Something cowardly. No, that’s not Vic. Foul temper. Thoughtless, sometimes. But cowardly? No.

Marcus wandered out and looped an arm around one of the derrick supports. He stood there for a full fifteen minutes, staring out across the waves in total silence.

Eventually he murmured, “Shit.” But he said it to himself, not as a cue for her to ask what was bothering him. There were moments when she wanted to ask him how he handled what Hoffman had done to him—utterly out of character, unthinkably callous—but she knew Marcus too well to have any hope of an answer.

He stood there for another fifteen minutes, still silent, then turned and went aft.

What the hell do he and Anya say to each other?

Bernie forced herself to change the subject. It was nearly two hours into the trip before she heard enthusiastic chatter behind her and saw one of the crew training his field glasses on a flock of seabirds diving and dipping into a patch of water.

“More oilfish, I’ll bet,” he called to her. “Look out for bubbles over the side.”

The hunt for the shoals did a good job of distracting her. Ten minutes later, Montagnon shot her nets and dropped to a sedate trawling speed. They were in business. Coral Star’s crew came up on deck and Bernie had to move back to the wheelhouse.

Cole flashed her on the radio. He didn’t travel well. “Can I throw up now, please, Momma?”

“Try to miss the fish,” Bernie said.

There was still no sign of trouble. There hadn’t been any signs that Levanto was heading into danger, either, but the trawlers were inside the MEZ and that meant they had the comfort of a Raven patrol with a working sonar buoy, and CNV Falconer doing the rounds. This was as safe as it got in a job that was risky at the best of times.

At least Gullie was good company for a man who really did know far too much about fish.

“You any good at salting fish?” he asked her.

“Not two tonnes of it.”

“I think it’s going to be more like twenty. I can feel it in my water.”

He probably could. When Coral Star drew her nets an hour later, Bernie went outside to see how good his guess was. A straining net emerged on the end of the cables as the winch whined, a bulging ball of glittering scales and draining foam.

For once, no gulls hovered around shrieking and trying to grab their share. They’d shifted their attention to the other trawlers.

Odd. Really odd.

“See?” Gullie said. “Chock full.”

“The birds don’t seem impressed.”

“Ingrates.”

The catch was mostly small, iridescent oilfish. Bernie wasn’t squeamish about killing what she ate, but watching the squirming mass of fish, eels, and slimy things she didn’t even have a name for suddenly made her feel sick. They were struggling to breathe, suffocating in air, flapping around in their death throes. When she killed an animal, she made sure it was fast. It was the only decent thing to do. Marcus watched, frowning, but that was no guide to what he was thinking.

“You okay, Bernie?” Marcus asked.

“I’ll have the beef today,” she said, turning to the rail to look away at the horizon. There wasn’t a lot of room to avoid the bloodless carnage. “Really well done.”

It was just as well Dom wasn’t standing next to her. She’d showed him how to wring a chicken’s neck when he’d been in her survival class during commando training. God, he was a kid then. Seventeen. The poor little sod had looked at that chicken with such horror that she’d been sure he’d pass out. He carried that big fuck-off commando knife that he didn’t think twice about using in combat, but there he was feeling guilty about a chicken. He did it, though, and he ate it. He did it because he had to.

Poor old Dom. We never know what’s going to be one step too far for us. We balk at the damndest things.

Maybe Hoffman’s memory of Anvil Gate was something small but unerasable like the damn chicken, a substitute for something far darker.

He’ll tell me. Got to be patient.

Bernie wasn’t paying much attention to what was happening behind her. She could hear the trawler crew chatting, and the wet slapping noises as they sorted the catch into different buckets. Five or six hundred meters to starboard, she could see Cole leaning over the rail of Montagnon as if he was going to throw up again. Baird was scanning the sea through binoculars.

Well, back to canine patrol tomorrow …

“Hey,” said one of the fishermen, the kid they called Crabfat. “You think this is what Cole got excited about when we caught that shale eel? Remember how he told us not to touch it?”

“Shit,” Marcus said. “Shit.”

The hair on Bernie’s nape rose instantly.

“Not you as well.” Gullie laughed. “Plenty of sea life glows. It’s dark down there, and they—”

“Get clear. I said get clear.”

“God … what the hell’s that?”

Bernie swung around and saw what Marcus and Gullie were looking at. In the mound of fish, she could see a misshapen coil of scaly flesh that she would have taken for some kind of eel if it hadn’t been rippling with blue light.

It wasn’t the lights that scared the living shit out of her. It was the fact that the thing was changing shape as she watched it.

It sprouted a distorted limb, then another. Her eyes met Marcus’s for an awful second.

The gulls spotted it. They bloody well knew.

“Get off the damn boat.” Marcus grabbed Gullie by the collar and shoved him toward the stern. “All of you—get off the fucking boat—jump!” He opened the radio channel. “Dom, Baird—steer clear. We’ve trawled up a frigging Lambent.”

They were in the middle of the ocean. The only place to run was over the side. Gullie scrambled over the gunwale and his three crew didn’t even stop to argue. They dropped into the water. Bernie did what she was trained to do—she stayed put. How big was this bastard? Could they save the boat? Did it have a blast radius?

“Bernie—get out. Go on.” Marcus caught hold of one of the net lines and hitched it to the winch. “I’ll try to dump it overboard again.”

The Lambent eel was thrashing around now, shooting out tentacles and wrapping them around anything it could grab. One just missed her and whipped around one of the derrick’s stanchions.

“Yeah, I don’t think it’s going without a fight.” She revved her Lancer’s chainsaw. “Is it killable?”

“Don’t.” Marcus ducked as a tentacle lashed past his head. “They explode.”

“Shit. You’ll never dump it.”

“Just go.”

“Set the bloody throttle to full speed and jump. Sod the boat.”

Everyone came on the radio at once. The Lambent eel seemed to be growing by the second. It was thrashing so violently that it was scattering dead fish everywhere, carpeting the deck. Marcus vaulted over the tool locker and disappeared into the wheelhouse, and a few seconds later Coral Star’s engines roared into life. The boat shot forward, but trawlers weren’t built for fast getaways.

“Marcus?” He hadn’t come back out. She edged past the eel with her back to the rail, feeling her way along with both hands. “No heroics. I mean it.”

She got to the wheelhouse door just as Marcus burst out of it. He crashed into her like a thrashball player and sent them both over the port-side rail into the water. For a moment, she was floundering in the muffled green gloom, propeller noises burbling in her ears, and then something jerked her head above the water and she took a gasping breath. The explosion shook her right through to her gut.

“Shit—” Marcus said.

The last thing that crossed her mind before the sky fell on her was that the trawler wasn’t nearly as far away as she’d hoped it would be.

The column of water crashed down like a collapsing wall. She didn’t know if she went under for seconds or minutes, only that when she bobbed up again, Marcus still had a grip on her webbing. Her hand felt instinctively for her rifle. It was still on its sling. If she’d been wearing full armor and not just torso plates, she’d have gone down like a stone.

“Everyone okay?” Marcus yelled. “I said, is everyone okay?”

“We see you, baby,” Cole said. “Swinging by to pick up passengers.”

Bernie trod water, looking around for the trawler. She couldn’t see a damn thing except the bobbing heads of the trawler crew and Montagnon bearing down on her. Coral Star had vanished along with the Lambent eel.

Gullie swam over to Marcus. “Is that it? Is that a Locust?”

Marcus spat out some water. “I’ve never seen that before,” he said, “but it’s Lambent. Whatever Lambent are, the grubs were fighting them in their tunnels and losing.”

Gullie just tipped his head back, eyes shut, and floated. “And now they’re here. We were safe. The Locust couldn’t tunnel out here. But you never told us they could swim.”

“We didn’t know,” Marcus said sourly. “Now we do.”

Bernie’s stomach kept churning. The depth of the shit they were in suddenly hit her. The Stranded were the least of their problems now, and Vectes was no longer an ocean away from the horror of the mainland.

The nightmare had decided to follow them, except it was far worse. This was a life-form even the grubs were scared of.

“Yeah … shit,” Marcus said again, as if he’d heard her thoughts.

Montagnon came up on them and cut her engines. Bernie grabbed the scrambling net and got halfway up to the gunwale, but Cole had to reach over and haul her the rest of the way by her belt. She flopped onto the deck at Baird’s feet.

“Well, that fits my theory,” he said cheerfully. Bernie decided she’d kick the shit out of him when she stopped shaking. “Harvest hauls up a glowie in the nets, they try to shoot it, it blows up—mystery solved. Same for Levanto.”

“I’m so happy for you, Professor. Really.”

Baird held out his hand to pull her to her feet. “Could it sink a warship, though?”

Gullie, wringing wet and white with shock, stared at the position in the water where his livelihood had vanished in a ball of smoke and flame. “How big do those things get?”

Marcus took out his earpiece and shook the water from it.

“Brumak size,” he said. “At least. The size of a tank.”

It was the last time anyone was going trawling for a long while.